Submission: Students’ silence on racist language enables bigotry and disrespect

Macklemore, also known as Ben Haggerty, is coming to campus Wednesday. Haggerty will participate in a panel titled Courage Against Racism: The Role of Music in Social Movements with racial justice activists. This conversation is timely given the publication of Pi Kappa Phi’s meeting minutes containing racist and sexist jokes, as well as the troubling racial dynamics that arise yearly during USAC elections, when undergraduates divide largely along racial and class lines.

Haggerty’s “White Privilege II,” the song that inspired this panel, is a valuable tool to address racism in predominantly white spaces because it calls for greater vulnerability around issues of racial justice. White UCLA students in particular must practice this vulnerability if we want to contribute to actively improving campus racial climate.

“White Privilege II” helped me articulate my white identity in multiracial Los Angeles. I grew up in an LA suburb where Blacks and Latinos were 3 percent of my graduating class and my closest friends were white. Looking back, I grew up ignorant of people with different racial, cultural or class backgrounds. I also never discussed the implications of living in my segregated neighborhood with my family or schoolmates.

Rather, during my undergrad years and onward, I had to make intentional decisions to learn how to engage across racial, class and cultural differences. My ignorance through this process forced people of color, such as my supportive partner, to unfairly shoulder work in teaching me the ways I benefit from whiteness.

This truth became apparent when my partner experienced exclusion, marginalization and disrespect from my high school friends. My privilege let me ignore the problem without being affected. In fact, as a white person, I was blind to the slights she experienced. I dismissed my partner’s discomfort and rationalized my friends’ behavior. My inaction almost cost me our relationship.

At a Memorial Day party last year, a long-time friend said the N-word in front of us as a “joke,” trying to bait my partner because he thought she was “too sensitive.” She was rightfully outraged. My friends insisted there was no racist intent; rather, white people could say the N-word in certain circumstances. Our taking offense was really a “philosophical difference of opinion” and “hypersensitivity.” The problem was twofold. First, they believed that racial jokes are permissible when said with the “right” intent. Second, my silence enabled bigotry and disrespect.

As white people, interpersonal politics must become the source of our engagement with racism. We cannot continue to engage in an abstract way, treating race as an argument. Rather, race is fundamental to our lives and relationships.

Holding spaces where racialized language is normalized promotes an exclusionary dynamic. By casually using racialized jokes, my friends coded the space as unfriendly to those with every right to be offended by that language. Consciously or unconsciously, my friends were actively creating barriers that fostered racial exclusivity. Relatedly, the problem with the Pi Kappa Phi incident is its effect – whether intentional or not – of reinforcing the coding of fraternity spaces as anti-Black, anti-woman and anti-immigrant.

White Bruins in fraternity spaces and beyond must question how our ignorance, silence or inaction enables the profound discomfort, exclusion and violence experienced by our friends, family and people we don’t even know. We have a responsibility to be vulnerable and admit when we make mistakes. We have a responsibility to actively disrupt silence and inaction, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

The culture we build at places like UCLA matters because our alumni enter positions of power, recreating the same dynamics witnessed on campus. Consider that 94 percent of the Senate is white, 87.7 percent of Fortune 500 boards are white, 95 percent of elected prosecutors are white and 100 percent of University of California presidents are white. Racial inequity at the highest levels, as on this campus, is often less a product of explicit racism, and more of collective practices of bias and exclusion.

In order to address these systemic issues, we must learn how to reshape our immediate spaces and personal and professional relationships. Effectively doing so requires commitment to lifelong learning processes, personal accountability and decisive action. On behalf of the organizers of the panel, I welcome the campus community to join us and continue this conversation on Wednesday.