Race does not exist for white people. Not really, not as a daily reality. They’re the majority, their values predominate and as a result, they don’t have to think about the subject very much.
If they’re liberal, a white person will engage in 5 minutes of conversation on the subject at a cocktail party and that’s it. Many of us people of color can talk about race for hours on end and still not be done with the subject.
White people are almost always behind the ball when it comes to knowledge about race matters. Many still conceive of race and racism in terms of the most obvious and overt examples of racism like racial slurs and open expressions of racial hostility.
The phenomenon of race today is a lot more subtle and ambiguous. We people of color still notice when all the faces on a magazine rack are caucasian. We notice when there’s only one minority face among 20 on some reality show. We sit there deconstructing what all this means and doesn’t mean consciously and subconsciously.
I still have to think about whether I’m going to be dinged for being Asian when I go out on a date. A white person might have one, maybe two experiences in their entire lives where they might have to think about whether they are being penalized for being white. People of color, especially Black people, have to think about this a LOT more.
Talking to most white people about race is like talking to a kindergartener about Calculus. Except for the exceptional white person, most of them just don’t “get it”.
Aware people of color, on the other hand, are subject matter experts on race and are always gleaning some new insight on the subject. We create entire departments of academic study and write lengthy tomes on the subject.
I suppose it makes a lot of sense that white people don’t have huge insights on race. Why would they? It’s not in their experience.
I remember watching a documentary a couple of years ago on the experiences of little people aka dwarves. I remember thinking, gosh, I never think about the world in terms of height. Why would I? I’m not short and it’s just not a daily issue for me.
That’s not to say I can’t learn something from a short person’s experience. The same is true for a white person learning from the experiences of people of color or anyone who is part of some majority learning something from some minority.
