Wypipo, what are they good for, anyway?
When we speak of whitewashing, we usually mean it in the metaphorical sense of covering up or glossing over embarrassing or incriminating facts, but in the classic American novel, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“, the eponymous protagonist encounters a type that is more literal but no less undesirable.
As the story goes, Tom is punished by being forced to spend his Saturday morning covering a fence with whitewash, a type of cheap, thin paint made from lime. He tries to avoid the hard, messy work by getting some of the other boys in town to help him, but cannot initially persuade any because he has nothing to offer that they desire.
Tom first tries to swap chores, then talks up the benefits of having a painted fence, and finally even shows off his sore toe. He would bribe them with knickknacks if only he had enough, but he doesn’t. And he certainly can’t bully them all into compliance, so he’s out of options.
It is at this low point that inspiration strikes the clever young man with a cunning strategy that would impress even fellow fictional tricksters like Loki, Anansi, and Bugs Bunny. Instead of looking at the problem in terms of his own needs and then trying to compel others to do his bidding, he reframes his goal in terms of what’s good for them.
Tom convinces them that he’s having fun painting the fence and that his punishment is actually an honor. This gets the boys to bribe him with knickknacks for the privilege of taking a turn at whitewashing.
It’s an amusing trick, but not an entirely mean one. The boys actually do have fun and feel good about themselves, each proudly working hard until they tire out, only to be replaced by the next expectant customer. And the fence does get whitewashed in short order.
Clemens calls the insight behind this approach a “great law of human action”: that you must convince a person to want to do a thing, rather than try to push them to do what they don’t. We are more authentically and thoroughly motivated by internal influences such as pride and personal enjoyment than by outside incentives such as money or threats. The corollary is that these intrinsic motivations, despite seeming soft, can overcome the power of extrinsic ones. Eager volunteers work with more enthusiasm and contentment than paid, much less forced, labor.
That is particularly relevant because the hardest thing in the world to do is to convince a person to act against what they see as their own interests. No payment is high enough, no punishment severe enough; they will work grudgingly and resentfully at best, and then only so long as they are watched. They will do the work as shoddily as they can get away with, and will themselves try to get away at the first opportunity, using any method or excuse available.
Tom avoided this trap by instead framing the goal in terms of them helping themselves, not him. In doing so, he aligned their interests with his own, leaving them enthusiastic about helping. So clever was Tom that he metaphorically whitewashed literal whitewashing.
There is a lesson in this, but it’s not about literally painting fences so much as metaphorically mending them. Consider that the success of anti-bigotry depends upon getting members of the dominant group to champion, or at least acquiesce to, the wholesale destruction of their own systemic superiority through the removal of their unfair advantages over subordinate groups, and even the application of restorative justice.
This is, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. To quote Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The key to our advances has been in reframing the issue so that anti-bigotry cannot be misunderstood as the dominant group perversely working against its own interests.
Instead of making this about white vs. Black or men vs. women or straights vs. gays, we focus on justice vs. injustice. We link the individual battles for the equality of each group into the fronts of a single war for the equality of all people. And, by envisioning the conflict at its full scope, we rise above partisanship and make room for them to join us. Here is our invitation:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
These words are as powerful as they are beautiful; they are deeply persuasive. So long as the dominant group evaluates policies against bigotry in terms of fighting injustice, they will put aside their narrow interests to make room for their broader ones. They will find common cause with those they once oppressed, abandoning non-bigotry, or even bigotry, to embrace anti-bigotry.
This works. The greatest accomplishments we’ve made against bigotry have come from sensitizing straight, white men into instinctively recoiling at even the hint of discrimination by making equality a public virtue, prejudice a public vice. Bigotry must be socially unacceptable before it can become politically, and therefore legally, unacceptable.
Yet this tentative success is neither universal nor particularly resilient. Plenty of people refuse to let go of the us vs. them framing of partisanship, and thus remain bigots. Plenty more are reluctantly on board, for now, but shockingly susceptible to falling right back into white supremacy if they can be given any reason to believe that the fight against injustice was never real and they are simply being taken advantage of.
Plenty of the former are eager to convince the latter to rejoin them, and are picking through our missteps for opportunities. Sometimes, we make it easy for them. The bigots look for cases where our efforts at anti-bigotry trigger the same sensitive sensibilities that we’ve worked so hard to instill, twisting their sense of fairness against fairness.
When they see their opening, they pounce, working to whitewash white supremacy by using junk science and false meritocracy to poke at their sense of pride and prop up white-grievance politics. Even when the bigots fail to fully convert them back to bigotry, they are often able to diminish the extent of their support for anti-bigotry, and to mingle among them for protective coloration.
From what I’ve seen, for every anti-bigot who expresses genuine concerns about our efforts going too far and crossing the line into its own form of discrimination, there are two shameless bigots making similar-sounding arguments entirely in bad faith and using them to excuse continued discrimination. This muddies the waters and gives white supremacy a place to hide in plain sight as concern trolls, while acting as a wedge.
These educated pseudo-intellectual white supremacists can lay in wait, picking off ideologically vulnerable people with plausible-seeming, idealistic arguments couched in terms of individualism, colorblindness, and equality of opportunity (but not outcome). Of course, these abstractions only “work” when isolated from historical context, maintained in a fact-free vacuum, but they are rhetorically effective because they offer permission for narrowly self-interested behavior.
To this we add motivation when we are baited into reacting to earnest objections as though they were coming from a camouflaged bigot, thus insulting these supporters and lending credence to their suspicion that it was all just partisanship all along. Their concealment helps the white supremacists turn us against each other, cracking our already-brittle unity at its edges.
At this point, you might be tempted to object that these bigots are wrong and MLK was right: anti-bigotry is not partisan. You would be correct, of course, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, to the extent that we provide fodder for the partisan narrative, we reject our partners, turning them into opponents. In doing so, we increase the amount of bigotry in society instead of decreasing it, effectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
You might also harshly judge and disparage anyone who has to be coddled into supporting anti-bigotry, considering them morally weak. Once again, you would be correct, but it doesn’t matter. Our goal is not ideological purity, it is political victory; we seek supporters, not saints.
Better to have two people as lukewarm supporters than just one who backs us wholeheartedly while the other opposes us bitterly. Democracy favors broad coalitions. We need to warm a bathtub, not boil a tea kettle, lest each supporter we burn becomes an enemy we must then overcome. Overheating a few fanatics does our cause little good, because it leaves the persuadable middle cold.
You might even insist that actions taken in the name of anti-bigotry, by definition, can never be bigoted, due to such things as “historical contingencies” and “institutional power”. Putting aside, for the moment, whether that is correct, it doesn’t matter. It hurts us regardless because optics count.
Even the appearance of impropriety is harmful to our cause because it breeds resentment and feeds bigotry. Even if activists like Wise are right and minorities, lacking power, are capable only of insult but not injury, it is self-injurious to needlessly insult those who would otherwise be on our side.
Even if all that’s being hurt is their pride—and it’s not—we’re attacking one of the most powerful intrinsic motivators, which is currently protecting them from falling for the ongoing efforts of white supremacists to expand their base at our expense. We do not have the luxury of spurning members of the dominant group who are willing to join our side by treating these volunteers as servants. Moreover, Wise is wrong.
You might argue that all this shouldn’t be the case, that their commitment to anti-bigotry should be principled and unconditional, and you would be correct, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how you think things should be, only how they are. And only by recognizing how they are can we begin to change them to be how they should. To mold reality, we must acknowledge—but never accept—it and we must plan accordingly.
This starts with reading the room and being pragmatic, not idealistic. This results in choosing defensible policies that are moderate, not extremist; eschewing what avoidably alienates our own supporters. We have to go to war with the soldiers we have, not the ones we want, so blunders here lead to unforced errors that only benefit white supremacy.
Case in point, what initially motivated this rant was an insightful but tone-deaf essay openly arguing in favor of reverse discrimination under the medical-sounding euphemism of “evidence-based”. What it gets right is that truly colorblind policies perpetuate inequality and are therefore insufficient for anti-bigotry. What it gets wrong is that its solution demands a double standard, where discrimination is seen as acceptable so long as it counts as “punching up” against white supremacy.
They justify this by saying that “we are always discriminating”, so why not do it in our favor? In fact, they explain this at conspicuous length, complete with hiring matrix charts and two kinds of bullet lists, while excusing the decision to overlook more-qualified candidates by putting the blame on the preferences and comfort of the community, and parents, and students, as well as by invoking economic and public relations interests.
These are literally the same arguments long used by white supremacists to justify segregation. The bigots say that their customers or clients would prefer to do business with a straight white man. They talk of how it would look if they had “those people” living next to them or working alongside them. They insist that students or employees would be more comfortable, and therefore productive, around their own kind. They describe their actions in terms of following the will of the shareholders or families.
There is an endless litany of mealy-mouthed excuses for discrimination based on satisfying the unanalyzed, bigoted preferences of stakeholders. “I’m not bigoted”, they protest, “I’m just trying to give these people what they want, which just so happens to be bigoted. Don’t look at me!”
Even if you overlook these fatal problems and conclude that their argument is intellectually valid, it is not politically compelling. It’s a rhetorical failure because “when you’re explaining, you’re losing” and this tries too hard to explain away what would otherwise be summarily rejected.
It seems that the old “trust me, I’m a doctor” line doesn’t work so well when your doctorate is in sociology, because the field is seen as politicized. As a result, if they have to explicate the many, subtle, nuance-tinged reasons why, in context, it’s ok for us to do something indistinguishable from what we’ve been arguing against all along, they have already lost. It wouldn’t matter even if they were right (and they’re not).
That essay, however well-thought-out, well-written, and well-meaning, is part of a cottage industry of professional apologetics, defending bigotry committed in the name of anti-bigotry, and I’ve argued against this many times before. I will continue to argue against it, and I insist that I am correct in doing so, but it doesn’t matter. The harsh lesson history beats into us is that being right is not enough; it is never enough. It is necessary, but insufficient.
This is a practical matter, not a merely academic one. We must put aside the temptation to treat bigotry as a philosophical issue for abstract debate and instead apply Realpolitik because the stakes are too high to do otherwise. Gone are the days when straight, white men could think themselves safe, up in their ivory tower, exercising the unearned luxury of contemplating bigotry on a wholly theoretical basis because it doesn’t affect them.
MLK was prescient back when he referred to it as “a threat to justice everywhere“. An interminable term of Trump, blighted by detention camps for children and hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, and punctuated by an attempted coup, has made it painfully clear that white supremacy is not just a threat to Black folks and other minorities, but to democracy itself. While Trump is gone, Trumpism remains and the RNC is now the party of QAnon.
Anything that aids and enables Trumpism, no matter how high-minded and pure its motivations or abstract its ideals, is unacceptable. This is not a battle between white bigots and the minorities they hate, with everyone else watching from the sidelines. It never was, but it’s especially not anymore. We who oppose bigotry are in this together and we are under fire.
Just because some of us would be lined up against the wall a bit sooner than others doesn’t mean that this is their battle alone. We are in a war defending liberalism from fascism, defending ourselves from ruin and death. While it was never right to demand that sympathetic members of the dominant group play a subservient role and dutifully accept verbal abuse and more, now what was morally wrong is revealed to be strategically suicidal, fomenting the very bigotry it seeks to defeat. It’s not complicated:
Bigotry is wrong.
That is the simple, self-evident truth that we must center on. We must never deviate from this, our moral high ground, no matter the temptation, no matter the reasoning, no matter the explanations. As much as our enemies have shown that they have no principles, we must stick to ours, not just because it’s right, but because it is necessary; because it is our shield and our sword. Without it, this becomes a battle of naked self-interest, leading to a purely partisan fight of force against force, which we lose. The bigots have already hit rock bottom, so if we go low when they go low, we wind up six feet under.
Am I practicing respectability politics by holding us to a higher standard than our opponents hold themselves? I will respond to this criticism with the same words I used on the most recent occasion during which I was accused of this: fuck you. Do you want to win or lose? Do you want a QAnon presidency in 2024? Do you want democracy in America to end? Do you want an American Holocaust? That’s what’s at stake. If suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be our own worst enemy is “respectability politics”, then so be it and fuck you.
White supremacy has been entrenched in America since before there was an America; the very notion of whiteness was invented to unite European colonialists—invaders, really—against the natives and the enslaved, and to justify atrocities. It became a form of false consciousness, useful for its ability to get white people to stick together, with their economic oppressors, against their natural allies. They were recompensed for their genteel white-trash poverty with the cheap coin of white pride.
White supremacy succeeded, and continues to, because it plays the long game. Our progress against it has likewise come from playing the long game. We are taught the story of Rosa Parks, an unassuming, middle-aged Black woman who simply had enough one day and refused to move to the back of the bus. This would be inspirational on its own, but the truth is even more inspirational, and more educational. Her brave action—at the time, bus drivers could carry guns—was the intentional first step in a boycott.
It was planned, organized, considered. It was not a reflexive, kneejerk reaction. It went past immediate effects and took into account the eventual ones. Even so, she wound up being hounded with death threats until she was forced to move out of the region, yet she never gave up, she never stopped being an activist. We have to do what Parks and the rest of the Alabama NAACP did: work together and anticipate the consequences of our choices. We have to act with forethought.
There are tempting shortcuts in redressing social inequalities, direct actions such as using ostensibly temporary discrimination to compensate for historical discrimination and its ongoing consequences. But these actions have inevitable consequences of their own, and the long-term costs outweigh the short-term benefits. We lose the moral high ground, we lose our support, we lose the war.
There are better ways to get much the same result without paying that price, without helping our oppressors oppress us. If we are to win—and we must—then we have to outthink our enemy, not stumble blindly into their traps. It is not enough to be righteous, we must be right. Our goal is correct; our path also must be.
The path that leads to equality is paved with equality. Any pleasure derived from getting revenge by (supposedly) punching up is ephemeral compared to the pain of undermining our own cause. And undermining our cause has consequences that we will not, all of us, survive.
For every action we consider, we must anticipate the reactions, and then the reactions to those reactions. We have to play the long game and we have to play to win. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.