Why white guys hate to be called racists

Why shouldn’t you call us white guys racist? Because that’s name-calling and in “post-racial” America we should be neo-mature.

Besides, we white males don’t have to be racists to help perpetuate inequality. We can do that by being unaware and/or uncaring about what it’s like to live in the U.S. when you are not white and male.

I recently had an out-of-white-male-body experience when I saw a guy loading a flat-panel computer monitor into a car parked outside one of our classroom buildings. Why was I NOT suspicious, given that my department had recently lost $14,000 in videoconferencing equipment to thieves? Well, the guy was older, white, and wore a tweed jacket. It was broad daylight, so I assumed a professor was appropriately moving equipment.

Good call, I think. My assumptions make sense in a society where professors are usually white, male and wear a distinctive style of clothing.

A mirror image of that set of assumptions made sense to the white cop who became suspicious of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black Harvard professor who was locked out of his house in a white Cambridge neighborhood.

Swap the players in these scenarios. Good chance I would have been suspicious of Professor Gates if he were loading a computer into a car or fumbling with a locked door in a white neighborhood. Good chance my presumed white professor would have been as indignant as was Professor Gates if he had been questioned by a cop while moving a computer across campus.

If you call Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley a racist for questioning Professor Gates, then I guess I was a “reverse racist.” My white guy assumptions prevented an embarassing scene while Sgt. Crowley’s created one.

Sgt. Crowley and I aren’t individually responsible for establishing white maleness as “normal.” But if each white guy doesn’t try to stretch his definition of normal and doesn’t try to appreciate the feelings of those treated as abnormal, he isn’t being neo-mature.