How Whiteness Works: Why White Murderers Get to Have a Bad Day and Victims of Color are Villainized
Taharee A. Jackson, Ph.D.
DrTaharee Consulting
March 24, 2021
I am Asian, Black, and a woman.
And I am in exhausted.
As a diversity consultant, a year ago I began addressing anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) racism during a pandemic that teased out centuries of “yellow” hate. As a Black woman, I then started speaking time and time again about the virulent (videorecorded) spate of anti-Black racism, police brutality, murder by law enforcement, and the mistreatment of African Americans for the remainder of the 2020.
Now we are a fresh three months into 2021 and here I am, looping right back to anti-Asian violence and race-based murder.
Anti-Asian racism never went away, but we like to humor ourselves and think that it never existed.
I am reaching my limit, and my racial battle fatigue is at its zenith, but I am NOT going to murder 8 innocent White men who tickle my proclivity for outrage over racism.
I am an Asian woman, but you don’t have to be Asian to be outraged by the brutal killing of 8 innocent women — 6 of whom were Asian — at the hands of a White man with a gun who, as former Cherokee County, Georgia spokesperson Captain Jay Baker explained, “had a really bad day.”
In fact, you should feel outraged not only by the murders themselves, but the empathy of Captain Baker and the subsequent humanization of a “faithful” man with a sex addiction. All of that is fair fodder for ire.
A solution seeker, I am not here to stoke the fire of ire — neither yours nor mine. After all, anger is often referred to as a secondary emotion and always underpinned by other emotions such as pain, frustration, hurt, and sadness.
I am experiencing all of those.
As the daughter of an Asian woman who bears absolute resemblance to the innocent souls taken in Atlanta, and as the target of everyday anti-Asian AND anti-Black racism, I am hurt. After more than a year of incident after incident, having to juxtapose the treatment of antiracism protestors of color versus White insurrectionists at the United States Capitol, and now witnessing the sympathetic treatment of, and perverse excuse-making for White male murderers versus the veritable victims of racial violence, I am ready to move forward. To move productively through my pain.
In previous pieces I have written about hypothetical racism, or the trauma we feel when we as People of Color (POC), or even critically conscious White people, have to witness gross disparities in the curated narrative, consequence, and conviction of perpetrators based on race. Here I will undergird that phenomenon by discussing the true heart of the matter — how whiteness works, and what helps to explain the soft treatment of White murderers and the villainization of victims of color.
You cannot change that which you do not understand, and you will not fix that which you refuse to name.
For anyone who feels the sting of the Summer of George Floyd, the unspeakable disgust of Breonna Taylor’s slaying in her sleep, the heartache of grieving these Atlanta-based women whose only crime is their Asianness and their femaleness, and the outrage of witnessing yet ANOTHER White male get away with murder, this is for you.
This is for all of us who are tired of viewing the same film over and over with the same predictable ending.
Maya Angelou implores us to learn more because when you know better you do better.
America, please take copious notes on the features and functionality of whiteness because it undergirds everything we do here. From the outrageous mass murders in Atlanta and now Colorado…to the villainization of Botham Jean, who was murdered in his own apartment by a White police officer while minding his own business…to the everyday disparities we witness wherever we live and breathe…White racial dominance must be stopped. Or at least interrupted. The murderous behavior of unchecked, angry White males must be brought to justice. And the treatment of Asian women and Asian Americans in every part of this country must be upgraded to the same levels of dignity and respect we afford to White shooters instinctively, inevitably, and with no issue whatsoever.
Do better, America.
Here’s How.
Here’s how whiteness works.
- Whiteness Equals the Benefit of Benevolence. Color Equals Suspicion, Criminality, and Guilt.
I have spent the majority of my double-decade career as a diversity consultant explaining implicit bias, cultural racism, and the deeply-rooted, largely subconscious rationales we use to explain human behavior based on race.
Implicit bias is strong. Sociocultural racism, which teaches us what to believe about various groups over time, is downright pernicious. When we first see a person, we make instant assessments of their character, intentions, and aptitude based almost exclusively on what we have learned about their group.
When many see an African American man, they become tense, raise their awareness, guard their purses, move farther away in the elevator, clutch their children, and cross the street.
Why?
They are associating Black skin and Blackness with danger, a threat, criminal intent, and harm.
When we see Asian American women, many will instantly conjure images of an exotic, subservient, recently-immigrated, non-English accent-speaking siren whose sole purpose is to please you sexually. Many may assume that if her husband is an American military veteran, their love is in part rooted in sexual exploits that took place in some lascivious Red Light District in a faraway Asian city. The stereotypes about hypersexualized, morally bereft, “easy” Asian women allows us to dehumanize them to the point that we might learn about the Atlanta shooter’s rampage and say, “But what do they actually do at that spa? Is it really a “spa,” or might it be a den of prostitution?” In other words, were these primarily Asian women in some way GUILTY, or dare I say “responsible” for their own deaths? Were they really just masseuses or were they up to no good?
In the same way that we can watch a police officer quite literally murder George Floyd in the street and face questions like, “But what happened before the video started rolling?” one can see how the assumption of moral bereftness, promiscuity, and possible prostitution might lead one to ask, “But what role did these Asian women play in their own demise?”
“Were they even here legally? I hear they smuggle Asian women here all the time for sex work…”
In the same way that we can learn of a jogging Ahmaud Arbery’s murder in broad daylight and hear questions like, “But WAS he out jogging in his own area or was he a possible… suspicious…guilty-of-something outsider?” we can understand how, when the veritable victims of crimes are Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), we have no problem whatsoever imagining what they may have done to deserve their fate.
Not so for whiteness.
Whiteness equals the benefit of the doubt and the assumption of benevolence. Mass murderers and violent shootings are disproportionately carried out by White men. Each time they occur, we actually get to see how the legal proceedings play out because we tend to ARREST these violent murderers rather than killing them instantly. (See, for example, White supremacist and “wayward boy” Dylann Roof, “don’t kill our son” Aurora shooter James Holmes, and eventually, N-word shouting Travis and Gregory McMichael.)
Once we have them safely in custody, we begin to curate careful narratives about their upbringing and what may have gone awry for them. We begin with the assumption of a well-meaning White man who was DRIVEN to violence, and is otherwise a peace-loving, benevolent human being. We incite national dialogue about mental health, bullying, and the gross neglect of White male emotional fragility. We gather testimony from their White neighbors about their character, and how he was a quiet neighbor who never bothered a soul, and how outrageous and shocking it is that he would do such a thing. He would NEVER behave in a manner so unbecoming a White man.
This narrative is followed sequentially by a trial, oftentimes during which the vast majority of judges, attorneys, jurors, and law enforcement offers are also White. And in disproportionately many cases, White men as well. The same “White male-gone-astray who had a bad day” sympathy we culled from Captain Jay Baker is inevitably invoked, and this is how we end up with lighter sentences for White murderers, almost no criminal convictions for murderous White police officers, and what I predict will be a lighter consequence for the most recent Atlanta shooter based on the extraordinary burden of evidence currently required to prosecute hate crimes.
The same reasons that I, as a highly educated, Christian woman, am almost ALWAYS followed in stores as a suspicious, pre-guilty shoplifter, guide our decisions to pre-criminalize victims of racial violence in ways that point to their own doing. Their own fault.
Black people and People of Color are the only people who are blamed for their own deaths.
The same reasons that I, as a monogamous, faithful partner, unmarried, childless woman get summoned at a casino by a gambler who says, “Hey honey, can you bring me a drink? Where do you stay? I’ve never had Asian before,” guide our decisions to implicate these Asian women in their own demise. They had to have done something wrong. Perhaps they were a temptation for the shooter?
What is terribly wrong here is that no matter who I am or what I do as an Asian and Black woman, I will NEVER be presumed as innocent as a guilty-as-sin White man. That’s how implicit bias works.
That is how stereotyping works.
That is how racial profiling works.
Most importantly, that is how whiteness works.
2. Whiteness Equals Rightness, Authority, and Credibility. Color Equals Inferiority and Out-of-Placeness.
As a Woman of Color, my presence is always a little “suspicious.” Not just in my shopping habits, but in my right to exist in spaces without question.
If I am in charge, I seem out of place. When most people ask for a manager, or the leader, or “the person in charge in this room” (I was a professor for 17 years and routinely ignored as such), they are NOT expecting to see me. The glaring lack of diversity in leadership primes them not to expect me, and race and gender-based low expectations leave them surprised by me.
In other words, they don’t see me or my credentials coming.
If I were a White man, EVERY space would belong to me. If I were White, it would be understood that I worked hard, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, and achieved everything I accomplished by way of merit.
An infuriating feature of whiteness is that we assume that whoever is in charge, on top, in control, and at the helm is and SHOULD BE White, and that they got there fairly. This is why 45 of 46 presidents have been White men. This is why most members of Congress are White men. Most CEOs are White men. Most university presidents are White men.
And if they are anything else, we cry foul and are instantly suspicious of “how they got the position.”
The most empowered leaders in this country are White, and that is their assumed, rightful place.
Me on the other hand? No.
I have traveled a long and windy path to become the Founder and Tonesetter-In-Chief of my own diversity consultancy. I have sat next to a disproportionate number of White people at Harvard; when I was earning my Ph.D.; and even now as I work with the world’s best and brightest scientists. At every turn, whether I was in college, or in my doctoral program, or leading a training for senior officers in the military, someone inevitably asked if I was truly supposed to be there.
Did you get into Harvard by way of affirmative action?
No. And even if they made a mistake, no one did my homework and earned these magna cum laude double degrees.
Did you get the doctoral fellowship because you’re the diversity candidate?
No. And even if they made a mistake, no one earned my 4.0 GPA while holding multiple full-time jobs.
Are you speaking to all the highest-ranked military officers because you are the daughter of a Black Army Sergeant and a Bangkok whore?
No. My parents loved one another deeply and I am the proud product of their 30-year union. But even if they made a mistake, I have the most innovative ideas about how to move the military forward given my expertise in White antiracism and combating racial extremism in the ranks. How has centuries of allowing White men and their “matching” White partners to lead your antiracism efforts worked out for you thus far?
What demoralizes Asian and Black women like me every day is the assumption of authority, credibility, and BELONGING — or always being in the right place, having rightfully gotten there — that we so easily afford to White men who may not be exceptional or even qualified. In fact, they may even be mediocre.
I will no longer refer to “diversity” hires. Rather, I will refer to them as “homogeneity” hires.
They were not hired because they were exceptional, but because they were White and maintained the organization’s comfortable, homogeneous, mostly White workforce.
I will no longer refer to “diversity” interns. Rather, I will refer to them as “status quo” interns.
They were not the most qualified, forward-thinking, or promising innovators, but they reminded you of YOU, and they did not disrupt your comfortable White workplace status quo. You can mentor and mold them into the same White leaders you are, and you need not change a single thing about your intentional succession planning to keep reproducing the same organization you have right now.
Whiteness works by positioning ME as somehow in the wrong position, inferior, non-credible, an outsider, and perpetually out of place while positioning whiteness and White people as natural leaders, meritorious achievers, and those who “truly” belong.
That I can earn two degrees from Harvard and a Ph.D. and still be questioned about my acceptance to an institution, my position in a workplace, and my intellectual prowess in White male-dominated spaces is NOT the result of my lack of effort or erudition.
That is the result of my lack of whiteness.
That is how whiteness works.
3. Whiteness Equals Normativity and Invisibility. Color Equals “Otherness” and Un-Americanness.
A key feature of whiteness, which Toni Morrison gorgeously explicates in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, is the notion that to be White is normal, invisible, and standard. The American story is one of whiteness and White people, carefully dotted by People of Color just to keep the exclusion police at bay.
Whiteness is so heavily normalized in literature, Morrison explains, that unless the characters are anything BUT White, authors simply do not name their race. The assumption is that EVERY character is White unless explicitly stated, and that can easily lead one to believe that People of Color either do not exist, or that they are simply unimportant.
We are learning how whiteness works based on the outrage caused by castings of characters who are not White. From Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play, where the role of Hermione Granger was cast as a Black woman, we learned that even the fictitious literary imagination will NOT tolerate aberrations in an assumed all-White cast of (fictitious!) characters. We learn from films such as The Great Wall, rooted in China but starring Matt Damon, and Ghost in the Shell, based on Japanese manga characters but starring Scarlett Johansson, are completely acceptable, whereas the hiring of a Black Santa Claus at a mall is beyond disgust.
When Ronald Takaki penned A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, his epic contribution to American history was his inclusion of every manner of human being — proudly among them Asian Americans — who literally built, supported, and even saved this country at multiple turns. To refocus immigration stories not just from Ellis Island, but Angel Island in Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, was nothing short of a vital turn in the American dialogue regarding who belongs, who built this great nation, and who is truly American.
Mia Tuan challenged us over two decades ago to consider what it means to be a “forever foreigner,” or someone to whom you can always yell, “Go home!” or “Go back to wherever you came from!” As Asian Americans, African Americans, and all other hyphenated Americans, we are far enough removed from whiteness that we can never simply be “American” unless we are strictly referring to our nationality. In other words, we are perpetual foreigners, or someone considered outside the realm of true Americans, outside the purview of what it truly means to “be from this country,” and forever immigrants. We are merely guests in a country that is quick to remind us that we are not from here, we don’t belong here, and we should leave here lest we wear out our welcome with the audacity of equality.
As an Asian and Black woman, with a phenotype that immediately indicates that I am both, each time I show my face to someone I don’t know, the inevitable question is, “Where are you from?” And because I am visually multiracial, an equally popular question is, more crudely, “What are you?”
How being a Woman of Color works is that as long as I do not look White, someone is always going to approach me and essentially demand that I disclose just how NOT American I am. Where is your mother from? Where is your father from? Where are their parents from? Where are you from originally? Where are your ancestors from?
And my favorite…
“What are your fractions? How much of each thing are you?”
How whiteness works is that you can simply answer the question, “What are you?” with White. Or American. Or my favorite…
I’m a blue-blooded American.
The truth of the matter is that even if someone asks you what you are (which, they likely won’t), no one is ever going to ask you what kind of White you are. Or at least not at the same rate as they ask me what kind of Person of Color I am.
And the best part?
As a White person — as a White American — someone actually could ask you what kind of White you are, and you are FREE NOT TO KNOW. During my years as a professor, many students would simply say, “I’m just a mutt! Some Irish…maybe German…I don’t know! I’m just American!”
We don’t get to stay that.
We don’t get to stop at “American” without stopping at a hyphen first.
Whiteness has a history of being the normal, invisible standard. Whiteness has the luxury of being equated to Americanness. A White person actually CAN say they are American with no further questions asked. No additional qualifiers, no interrogation, and no further demands for your ethnic breakdown.
When you can represent yourself fully and completely based solely on your historically amalgamated whiteness, you are not an “Other.” You are not a forever foreigner or perpetual immigrant because this is your home and you belong here. You are American. You are the standard. You are so omnipresent that the whiteness of everyone is assumed until there is a phenotypical reason to ask about “heritage” and ethnicity.
That is what it means to be White and American.
To be White, for so many, automatically means TO BE American.
That is how whiteness works.
4. Whiteness Equals Individuality. Color Equals Representation.
My hometown is not too far from Virginia Tech. When the gruesome campus shootings occurred in 2007 at the hands of a South Korean student, there was an immediate response from the Asian American community. They quickly reassured the public that this person was aberrant, not like the rest of us Asians, and most certainly didn’t typify our good Asian intentions in this country.
Why is it that when a Person of Color, a person who happens to be Muslim, or anyone other than a White person commits a crime, it is incumbent upon an entire group of people to: 1) apologize on behalf of all people who look like that, 2) reassure the public that we are not all dangerous and do not fit the stereotype, and 3) distance ourselves from the criminal in a show of “we are not all like them” solidarity?
Why is that even necessary?
When a deranged White male, or angry White male, or White male who “had a really bad day” commits a crime, why does he represent himself and himself ALONE, and not an entire race of people?
At the very least, where is the devout Christian community to say, “He does not represent all Christians?”
The bedrock of racism and all isms is low expectations of an entire people based on race. People of Color serve as “racial representatives” of every other person who looks like them. In the film Skin Deep, a Black male eloquently explains that when one Black person steals, it affects every other Black person not only in the store, but in this country. Stereotypes are unfairly, universally applied assumptions about an entire people, and racism is the most pernicious of the lot.
When ONE Asian American shooter gunned down several students at Virginia Tech, in that moment he represented ALL Asian people. That is racism. That is how racism works.
White people get to be individuals, lone wolves, and act on their own behalves. Most importantly, their individual actions do NOT translate into the wrong assumptions, unfair treatment, and suspicion of ALL White people.
When the Coronavirus was found to have origins in China, it affected ALL Asian people irrespective of ethnicity. Vietnamese, Thai, Hmong, Laotian, Japanese, Filipino, and ALL manner of Asian Americans and Asian American Pacific Islanders have been implicated in violent, race-based attacks and hate crimes. As someone who is Thai and South Asian Indian, I am no more Chinese that someone who is White or European American.
What endangers my 72 year-old Asian mother and me, however, is that we LOOK Asian, and that is quite enough to be targeted for hate. Asian Americans have literally been assaulted in the street, pepper sprayed, spat upon, and even killed during the pandemic. We are NOT Chinese, and even if we were, we are not responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Neither individually nor collectively.
We have seen “Bat Fried Rice” t-shirts, and the very same Captain Jay Baker who now famously empathized with the White killer in Atlanta who “had a bad day” posted to his social media account an urgent call (“Love my shirt! Get yours while they last!”) to purchase t-shirts that read, “COVID-19: Imported from Chy-na.”
Throughout the pandemic, we have seen EVERY Asian American grow increasingly subject to hate, violence, and even fatal attacks based solely on their Asianness. Their “Chineseness” is irrelevant because our Chinese community members are NOT the scapegoat of a global health emergency either. Irrespective of how this started, we are all in this together.
White men get to have a bad day because whiteness and White individuality heavily works in their favor. When a White man commits a crime, it is seen as aberrant, surprising, and totally out of keeping from an otherwise peaceful existence.
White men represent themselves, so no one is more afraid of a White Christian man in the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings in the same way that they have ALWAYS been afraid of my Black brother.
When your skin color is a weapon, you are never unarmed.
How Whiteness Works: An Honest Dialogue Leads to Honest Change
When a White person is in a position of power and is overrepresented in almost every seat of power in the United States, that is somehow seen as unproblematic and largely unworthy of interrogation. What is suspicious and outrageous, however, is when a Black and Asian woman ascends to the second highest seat of American political power and shakes our very notion of what leaders and Vice Presidents look like.
When a White person is asked “what they are,” or “where they are from,” they are free to just say…whatever they like. There are no hyphens — physically or philosophically — separating them from their Americanness because in this country, whiteness and Americanness are one in the same.
When a White man commits a crime, he acts on his own behalf. He is a lone wolf. A bullied boy. A troubled teen. A White man who just really “had a bad day” but is otherwise assumed to be nonviolent, innocent, upstanding, law-abiding, and “naturally” devoid of criminal tendencies. There will be no Counsel of American White Men called upon to defend his actions, separate themselves from his behavior, apologize for his violence, or reassure the public of their benevolent intentions toward this country.
There will be no such representative meeting because White people represent themselves. They do not represent every other White person because White people are viewed as individuals and not lumped together as a racialized group.
Understanding the Atlanta shootings in the context of whiteness, white racial dominance, and white normalcy in the American imagination is a far more honest way of moving forward than excusing, exculpating, and infantilizing every White murderer who victimizes People of Color. I have written about how outraged people of all ilk can stand in solidarity with us — Blacks, Asians, women — so I dare not repeat myself here.
What I also wish NOT to see repeated is this cycle of wayward White shooter, subsequent sob story, “I can’t believe it!” character-building testimonies, lone gunman, calls for mental health reform, villainize the victims of color in the media…
With your well-warranted outrage and a a brief glimpse of how whiteness works, please do better, America.
We are exhausted.
Dr. Taharee Jackson is Founder and Tonesetter-In-Chief of DrTaharee Consulting. She is the daughter of an Asian American mother and African American father and carries the proud legacy of both identities in her body. Dr. Jackson is a former professor whose research on antiracism, anti-oppression, and the development of racial and social justice commitments in leaders has been used in P-12 education, academia, private corporations, non-profit organizations, and across federal agencies. Dr. Jackson’s expertise is in motivating members of empowered groups to serve as allies and accomplices for those who have been historically excluded and contemporarily marginalized. Dr. Jackson is currently polishing her website [drtaharee.com] to provide resources, literature, and thought leadership for her readers; executive leaders; and diversity, equity, and belonging partners.