To be woke, you must be awake: a critical response to white liberals

Great white hopes: the paradox of white liberals and critical whiteness studies

My interaction with Critical Whiteness/Whiteness Scholars is usually someone who expects their good White people medal even though they repeatedly invoke and use whiteness to recreate and maintain their own position of superiority and White power (Hayes & Juárez, 2009). My response to the articles in this special issue will show how Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Whiteness Scholars do not get a pass, and often, their whiteness is showing, thus creating an illusion of being a good White person.

Through their actions and interactions, a "Friend of the Race" (Harris, 1992; Woodson, 1933/2000), a good White liberal who advocates for "diversity." As Lerone Bennett (1964) explains,

The White liberal is a person who defines themselves as White, as an oppressor, in short, and retreats in horror from that designation. However, they only retreat halfway, disavowing the title without giving up the privileges or tearing out, as it were. The fundamental trait of the White liberal is their desire to differentiate themselves psychologically from White Americans on the issue of race. The White liberal wants to think and wants others, namely people of color, to embrace brotherhood. White liberals have two basic aims: to prevent polarization and prevent racial conflict (Bennett, 1964).

In short, the White liberal is the Great White Hope (Bennett, 1972). According to Caditz (1977), White liberals have a solid and longstanding commitment to ethnic integration. They believe in the general ideas of civil rights and justice for minorities. Many believe in general anti-discriminatory principles, that "color makes no difference," "people are people," and "there should be one human race" (Caditz, 1977). However, in the case of teacher education, the contradiction arises when a White teacher begins expressing racist thinking and acting in racist ways while extolling her own "helpfulness" and role as a Friend of Race. Significantly, White liberal forms of helping have historically helped the helper more than those being helped (Duncan, 2000).

These white liberals, as Friends of the Race, have learned words and concepts like Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies and may even attend the Critical Race Studies in Education (CRSEA) Conference, which they often interpret and use to project their whiteness at the expense of BIPOC. Their new diversity vocabulary words validate Friends and give them a patronizing sense of superiority when it comes to experiential knowledge that BIPOC scholars bring. The constructed superiority of CWS Scholars often silences BIPOC scholars.

The desire to be and to be known as a good White person, according to Thompson (2003), stems from the recognition of White people that whiteness is problematic. Some Whites try to escape their whiteness by being demonstrably different from those other racists, bad Whites. These are the good Whites. White liberals may try to defend their status as being non-racist; they may attempt to prove how they are connected to people of color by describing their "best" Black friend, a former intimate relationship with a person of color, or constantly remind people of color in their immediate presences that they do not see color (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). White liberals in academia may even finger through and quote materials by Scholars of Color to support an already conceived idea (Lorde, 1984).

Many White liberals believe in colorblindness and apparently neutral principles of universalism. Critical Race Theory Scholars (CRiTS) argue that holding onto a colorblind framework only allows these Friends to address the egregious forms of racism, the ones everyone would notice and condemn, such as a White person calling an African American the "N" word in public. However, because racism is embedded in our thought processes and social structures, the ordinary business in our society keeps people of color in subordinate positions through daily interactions and practices, and it is only aggressive, color conscious efforts to change the way things are done will do much to ameliorate misery inflicted on people of color by white racism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Tate, 1997).

The willfulness of white ignorance: a letter to white liberals

The thesis of the response is grounded in the following statement, "in order to be woke, you must be awake." I believe part of why ya’ll are still metaphorically speaking “not woke” get it is rooted in what Charles Mills (2015) calls global White ignorance. He argues that global White ignorance is an absence of belief, a false belief, and I think this is what we see with the interactions between myself and those who consider themselves “woke.” In this section, following Camper’s (1994) format, I explain why you all do not get it. In my experience with some CWS scholars, they are still too grounded in whiteness.

While the articles in the special issue begin to challenge some of these notions, however, this response and this response applies to any White person who thinks because they are doing what is fundamentally right, but later lets their Whiteness show when people of color do not conform to set White standards. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1958), among others, we have found that the problem of whiteness is not a problem of evil, but a problem of good!

Ya’ll not woke when you render Black members of the community invisible, an afterthought solicited to integrate your organizations and be the face of your diversity in order to get and maintain national accreditation, and once the organization gets accreditation, it is back to business as usual.

Ya’ll not woke when you indignantly protest, saying we have made so much progress, just look at the city’s Black and Latino leaders, charging us with reverse racism, when we tell you that we deliberately and explicitly put the perspectives and experiences of minoritized peoples at the center of everything else we do in the university, in the community, and at home. Indeed, it is not progress until you admit that it was you who stabbed me in the first place (Hayes & Juárez, 2009).

Ya’ll not woke when you are astonished, even indignant, and outraged that we had the audacity to question and criticize your many efforts and awards for helping the Other. Why should you have to keep proving that you are one of the [good] Whites who get it? So long, then, as humble Black folk, voluble with thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous Whites, there is mental peace and moral satisfaction. However, when the Black man begins to dispute the White man's title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste – then the spell is suddenly broken, and the philanthropist is ready to believe that "Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America" (DuBois, 1920, cited in Lewis, 1995, p. 455).

Ya’ll not woke when you are afraid your feelings will be hurt if we keep talking about the pernicious and pervasive educational and other social inequities still running along U.S. society's enduring color line. You do not like being continually beat over the head with White racism and feeling guilty about being White (Camper, 1994).

Ya’ll not woke when you insist on defining our reality. You do not live in Black or Brown skin, so do not tell us how to perceive this world. We exist, and so does our reality (Camper, 1994).

Ya’ll not woke when you cowardly fear us; when you send someone else to talk to us on our behalf when you ignore what the police do Black and Brown people and call them anyway (Camper, 1994).

Lastly, Ya’ll not woke when you set the agenda and then expect everyone else to follow, but then you sit by and watch the Supreme Court gut the Voting Rights Act, and you sit around and watch countless numbers of Black men murdered in the streets by the police.

Getting it by unhooking from white ignorance: a critical race understanding

The framework of liberalism privileges the historical dominance of Whites and Whiteness. The performance also illustrates that individuals and groups, either knowingly or unknowingly, matters not because the damage is still done, do willfully and with alternative choices available enter into interactions and make decisions that draw on and help to defend, sustain, and further perpetuate liberalism with its historical privileging of whiteness. Specifically, when individuals and groups, and institutions deploy notions of colorblindness, meritocracy, and a context- and history-free focus on the individual, a choice for whiteness and its continued role in racial domination is made. Accordingly, individuals, groups, and institutions must unhook themselves from whiteness and its conveyor of liberalism if they are indeed at all serious about realizing the democratic ideals of freedom and equality for all. Whiteness and human freedom can never be simultaneously affirmed, as history has repeatedly shown us.

This tough conversation about “getting it” begins by challenging whiteness and ridding yourself from dependency on interpreting the world around you through the White gaze. In this last section, I will use the tenets of CRT to provide ways for critical Whiteness scholars and others to “wake up.”

First, push us as individuals, groups, and institutions toward unhooking for whiteness and liberalism; what has to be understood is that racism is an endemic part of American society. However, the problem with whiteness is the continued refusal of White liberalism, and its good for white liberals to consider the everyday realities of race and racism. To recognize racism’s pervasiveness requires Whites to face their own racist behavior and to name the contours of racism as well as the ways that people of color may or may not play into supporting White racial domination and the supremacy of Whites (Bergerson, 2003; Dei et al., 2007; Gilborn, 2005). Whiteness enacted by White liberals’ refuses, and indeed, is shocked to talk about racism let alone acknowledge it. Indeed, whiteness silences any discussion of race outside of niceties of liking people who look like the Racial Other.

Second, whiteness must understand that it cannot practice true colorblindness; in fact, colorblindness is not an appropriate ideal for social justice. According to Bergerson (2003) Whites attribute negative stereotypes of people of color while at the same time espousing their opposition to blatant racism. When White liberals fail to understand how they can and/or do embody White supremacist values, even though they themselves may not embrace racism through this lack of awareness they support the racist domination they wish to eradicate (Gilborn, 2005; Hooks, 1989).

Third, whiteness needs to understand that merit is problematic in the United States. It is not enough to say that anyone who works hard can achieve success. Students of color are systematically excluded from education and educational opportunities despite their hard work. Merit operates under the burden of racism; racism thus limits the applicability of merit to people of color (Bergerson, 2003). The hard work of some pays off much more than the hard work of Racial Others. We both remained invisible within their work contexts until they began disrupting whiteness when they became targets of whiteness. Our hard work was not valued by the official discourses of the institutions they worked in.

Next, whiteness needs to understand the role experiential knowledge plays in the discourses of people of color. Those who employ whiteness are usually unwilling to recognize the knowledge of those who are victims of the brutality of whiteness as legitimate, appropriate, and critical to him as he navigates in a society grounded in racial subordination. Whiteness is usually postured toward faculty members of color who refuse to remain silence and serve as the token well-scrubbed, articulate racial minority who is just like us [White folks] apart from skin color (Hooks, 1989). This is what Hytten and Warren (2003) call appeals to authenticity. In their model, when whiteness cited their experiences to counter or contradict non-White voices, their experiences are usually a means to undermine others experiences.

I do not apologize for our blunt indictment of Whiteness and White “wokeness.” After all, racism is a correlate of democracy (Cone, 2004; Delgado, 1999). When the immensity and depth of the physical and psychological violence continually committed against minoritized peoples is considered, the majority of it by nice people, we realize that the cost in suffering and lost lives is too high to keep tiptoeing around whiteness and trying to appease and placate White people with velvet gloves. I also realize that "[w]hat societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of [herself or] himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk and this is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change" (Baldwin, 1963, cited in Wise, 2005, p. 61). Therefore, for democratic education to be realized, we must work together to abolish, rather than ignore, whiteness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).