Uncle Norman (Symbolically) Killed MLK

And other comments on the challenge of accurately characterizing the souls of white Americans.

This is a follow-up essay to my most recent episode of the podcast, on which I talk to Timothy Lensmire about whiteness, white identity, and the problem (from the perspective of the anti-racist left) with the concept of "white privilege."

Photo by Gianfranco Grenar on Unsplash

If you go out looking for unapologetic critiques of Peggy McIntosh’s landmark essay on white privilege, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” you immediately face a fork in the road.

Go one way and you’ll encounter a host of conservative critiques of the concept of white privilege and its underlying premises. A few of these are thoughtful, but even the most thoughtful ones refuse to grant what seems to me inarguable, which is that something like white privilege as McIntosh evokes it exists. Her central metaphor, of “an invisible weightless knapsack” of relative advantages that white people carry around with them, vis a vis their brothers and sisters of color, seems in its broadest sense correct.  

Take the other route, in search of left-wing critiques of “The Invisible Knapsack” (as her essay is often called), and as far as I can tell you’ll find just one thing, “McIntosh as Synecdoche: How Teacher Education’s Focus on White Privilege Undermines Antiracism,” a 2013 article in the Harvard Educational Review by the delightfully named Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective. 

I came across this essay about a decade ago, when I was working for the diversity and inclusion unit at a big public university. I’d read the invisible knapsack essay in the course of my work, and it both impressed and frustrated me. Impressed me in a gut way, with the force of the central idea, and frustrated me in a bunch of other ways that I couldn’t quite articulate to myself. I was vexed, so I did what I often do when I have a strong intuition about something but lack the words and concepts to explain it to myself. I went searching for someone else who’d already done the work. And I found the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective and their “McIntosh as Synecdoche.” 

The article is brilliant in an almost confoundingly straightforward way. It’s just the reporting back, in wholly unassuming language, of a group of highly earnest midwestern white folks—teachers, school administrators, and education scholars—who really care about anti-racist activism and pedagogy but keep finding themselves tripped up when called upon to teach and learn from McIntosh’s essay, which in their world is seen as the essay when it comes to illuminating the idea of white privilege. As they write: 

Most teacher educators in the United States are white. The primary answer proposed by white teacher educators to questions of how to combat institutional racism, how to eliminate educational disparities, and how to educate white teachers to work effectively in diverse classrooms is to have future and practicing teachers read Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay on white privilege and the “invisible knapsack.” … to an amazing degree, the antiracist aspirations and responsibilities of white teacher educators have been concentrated in McIntosh’s discussion of white privilege. [emphasis theirs]

This was causing problems for them as teachers, when they assigned the essay to their students, and it was causing problems for them as anti-racist activists, when they engaged in the activity—confession—toward which the essay seemed to be pointing them. At the most basic level McIntosh’s essay didn’t seem to be doing what it was supposed to be doing, which was helping the anti-racist cause.

I found their critique of McIntosh so persuasive, and their way of approaching the issue so fresh, that I ended up reaching out to Tim Lensmire, a professor of education at the University of Minnesota and one of the founders of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective. I wanted to find out from him more about who they were and what they were doing. 

Tim, it turned out, was just finishing up a book, White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America, which proved to be its own fresh and brilliant thing, both a straightforward in-the-field ethnography of rural white Wisconsins and a deep exploration of whiteness and white identity. The best I can come up with, in trying to describe Tim’s style in White Folks, is that he reminds me of the father in A River Runs Through It (played by Tom Skerritt in the movie version of the book), a well-educated rural minister with a poetic sensibility, someone who labors late into the night over his sermons, drawing on a small but deeply read and re-read corpus of texts, in order to render complex ideas into the kind of lucid and evocative parables and language that his flock will best be able to absorb. 

He tells stories about his own upbringing in that same town in Wisconsin, and the ways—invisible to him at the time, blindingly clear in retrospect—that race played into it. He talks about the various thinkers on race who’ve had the most influence on his own thinking, some of them the obvious ones and others not at all obvious. And he reports back on the individual rural white people he interviews, all of whom are both utterly normal and, upon close and sensitive inspection, wholly fascinating. To a one they’re riddled with ambivalence and incoherence when it comes to race.

There’s a crazy moment, for instance, when one of his subjects, a middle aged white guy, tells Tim about the tortured feelings he has about his uncle “Norman.” Norman is a Vietnam vet and fairly bitter racist who, when really staggeringly drunk, will occasionally confess to his nephew that he fears (implausibly) that he was the guy who assassinated Martin Luther King. In a 2018 essay about White Folks I wrote for The Point, I said:

This scene, Lensmire suggests, points to a kind of whiteness that arises not only from its hate or fear of blackness—a fear that has all too often been tied, in American history, to fantasies of revenge and violence—but also from the tension between those malignant emotions and an acute awareness of black humanity. “What white people cannot live with,” writes Lensmire, “is their social role as white people in the American drama given that playing this role demands the betrayal of the sacred principle of equality. Wanting to believe in America, freedom, and equality, but confronted with the hard work and uncertainty of democracy as well as with massive inequality all around us, we scapegoat and stereotype people of color.”

At the heart of White Folk is a powerful case that we err whenever we try to characterize whiteness, or white identity, as too “smooth” and static a phenomenon, that white folks, like all folks, are rarely or never just one thing, motivated by one undiluted vein of malice or benevolence or resentment or altruism. This seems obvious when stated that way, of course, but as is evident from the overwhelming evidence of, well, everything, we all too easily slip into not seeing the obvious when we’re in the grips of accepted narratives of how things and people are. White Folks ends up being so powerful a book not because its insights are so radically novel but because it’s so good at rendering visible the should-be obvious truths, right in front of our noses, that elude our sight.

All of which is to say you should read the book, and the McIntosh critique, and you should listen to my interview with Tim, which is (if I do say so) really quite excellent.