I guess I'm not as original as I thought
Twenty three pages of PDF…100% Quote Of Note. In ways, harsher than I'd phrase it myself. In ways.
Tiffany, friend of people of color: White investments in antiracism."
Qualitative Studies in Education,16(1), 7-29.Books with “friend of the white man” in the title are no longer embraced with quite the same open enthusiasm as they once were. You can still find Squanto: Friend of the white men in school libraries, but it is gradually being replaced with Squanto: Friend of the pilgrims. At one time it seemed obvious to whites that anyone who was a friend of the white man was somebody who ought to go down in history, presumably because whites have had so few friends; now, however, we understand that it is arrogant to organize history around whites and people who have been friendly to them. Although the category of cross-race friendship seems to be embedded more firmly than ever in the white imagination, colorblind protocols require that whiteness be played down as the explicit reference point for friendship. Thus, Squanto becomes the “friend of the pilgrims” and Pocahontas the “friend of the colonists.” Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and Squanto – not to mention Tonto – still figure as significant insofar as they are friends to the white man, but the coded language makes the friendship sound more individual, more local, less a matter of race.
Yet even as whites have begun to back away from explicit assessments of people of color as “friends of white men,” we have embraced the idea that whites can be “friends of people of color.” It is not a new idea; Custer himself declared that the white man was “the Indian’s best friend.” But we mean it differently, not that way. We mean that we are supporters of people of color, that we understand about white racism and that we are against it. We are not that sort of white; we are good whites. Antiracist whites know not to talk about “good Negroes,” “friendly Indians,” or “good Mexicans,” but somehow it seems different to talk about “good whites” – about “Tiffany, friend of people of color.”
It is because whites are uncomfortable with the implications of acknowledging white racism that (whether or not we use the term) we are tempted to position ourselves as “good whites.” Although we can acknowledge white racism as a generic fact, it is hard to acknowledge as a fact about ourselves. We want to feel like, and to be, good people. And we want to be seen as good people. This need is often more apparent among white college students who are first beginning to struggle with the implications of racism than among advanced white graduate students and white professors who have spent years studying racism and antiracism. For the white student who is new to colored epistemologies, whiteness theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial critiques of white racism, it can be devastating to realize that people of color – people who, not by coincidence, do not really even know you – can make judgments about you and just assume that you are racist without giving you the chance to prove otherwise. In some cases, white students will ask students of color, “How can I prove to you that I am trustworthy?” Other white students want to start from the presumption that they are nonracist, insisting that “If I can’t be part of your black feminist study group, you’re being a racist.” Still other white students may recount personal histories testifying to their colorblindness, their near-color experiences, and their distinctive status as friends of people of color. The self-centeredness of these stories, questions, and objections can be frustrating to students and faculty of color and their naïveté is frustrating to progressive white teachers who want the white students to hurry along, to get it faster than they seem to be doing. Sometimes white professors just tell their Tiffanies outright, “We don’t get to be blameless. Get used to being uncomfortable about being white.” Yet the assumptions that progressive white teachers – call us Dr. Lincolns – make about correct antiracism smack of much the same idealism as does the Tiffanies’ insistence on being acknowledged as good whites. To the extent that Dr. Lincolns become complacent that we, at least, are doing it right – that we really do get it – we buy into the notion that, secretly, we are “the friends of people of color.” Regarding ourselves as authoritatively antiracist, we keep whiteness at the center of antiracism.In the struggle to keep whiteness off-center in this essay, I violate several scholarly practices. Not only have I not framed the issues in terms of a review of the literature, but I have specifically avoided offering implications for practice. I have also troubled the scholarly preference for linearity and foundationalism. Educational journals generally look for a seamless text in which each paragraph either builds on a previous paragraph or follows a predictable path (as in the APA introduction–method–results–discussion format). Because I want to underscore the whiteness of our desire for safety, blamelessness, and certainty, I have avoided laying a foundation and building on it. Instead, I have organized the paper in terms of the constellation of places to which we as white teachers and students continually retreat; in effect, I have tried to follow the white reader and myself to those places of retreat.
