Proximity to Whiteness: Anti-Blackness, People of Color, and the Struggle for Solidarity
Seven years ago, I interviewed for a faculty position at a small Northeastern school. After a long day of one-on-one meetings, I endured the final dreaded ritual: a dinner with half a dozen faculty members. Towards the end, the conversation drifted from real estate and property taxes to stories of white faculty members’ various encounters with nonwhite folks, specifically with Black women and Latino men. These stories conveyed the fears that nonwhite people inspired in these white individuals, and they followed a pattern: when their cars had broken down unexpectedly or when they found themselves in some unfamiliar town or another, crisis was averted when, in fact, threatening nonwhite Others declined to take advantage of white innocents. Indeed, in story after story, nonwhite folks helped our white protagonists, much to the latter’s surprise and relief.
It was a jarring experience. Why did they think they could share racist tales so freely in front of me – a dark-skinned South Asian American woman? Was I not a person of color in their eyes? What about my self-performance, self-presentation, self-hood had given them license to speak this way in front of me? Would they have shared these stories if I were Black or Latina? It was the first time I realized that, as a woman of South Asian descent who completed my graduate studies at an elite institution, people would make assumptions about me that allowed me to occasionally experience proximity to whiteness. Here, I define proximity to whiteness as access to certain forms of power, resources, as well as social, economic, and cultural capital that have been historically constructed to advantage white people in this country at the expense of people of color, generally, and Black and Indigenous Americans, in particular. The experience also helped me see how much elite educational institutions are invested in a particular version of whiteness that can be fundamentally classist, racist, and sexist.
In her best-selling book, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor (2020), anti-racist writer and educator Layla Saad defines a person of color like myself as “white passing” or “white adjacent,” meaning “a person who holds white privilege” but is not white. According to Saad, this designation “includes persons who may be biracial, multiracial, or white-passing people of colour who benefit under systems of white supremacy from having lighter skin colour than visibly Brown, Black or Indigenous people” (15). Given the deep history of anti-Blackness embedded in this country’s DNA as well as the historic uprisings against anti-Black racial injustice that unfolded throughout the US in summer 2020, Saad’s point about the role of anti-Blackness in cementing white supremacist solidarities cannot and should not be glossed over. Anti-Blackness is at the heart of our white supremacist culture. It infiltrates our schools. Though less often discussed, it plays a key role for both white-passing and white adjacent people of color, too.
In this piece, I offer a framework for understanding the lived experience of non-Black people of color by further refining Saad’s distinction between white passing and white adjacent POC. To do so, I draw on my own personal experiences as a dark-skinned South Asian woman who rather bewilderingly experiences occasional access to whiteness in spite of being quite visibly nonwhite. I also draw on nearly a decade of experience as an equity practitioner and scholar-activist in predominantly white higher education and secondary education settings. The distinction I draw between white-passing and white-adjacent people of color as well as their investments in whiteness and anti-Blackness furthers our collective understanding of how proximity to whiteness surfaces for some people of color in varied and nuanced ways. It allows us to consider how we might inadvertently uphold white supremacy in our schools as a result. Once aware of these dynamics, we can better equip ourselves with the tools necessary to disrupt these moments, strengthening solidarities among the full coalition of people of color and anti-racist white colleagues struggling for social justice in our schools.
Passing White
Certainly, as Saad writes, white-passing people of color may visibly “pass” as white. They thus experience entry into the white world on account of certain phenotypical characteristics, and skin color above all. But white-adjacent people of color like myself, though quite visibly nonwhite, may nevertheless occasionally become insiders in the white world as a result of two separate but related factors: first, our real or assumed proximity to markers of whiteness such as wealth, education, and professional status; and second, given that this country was socially constructed along a racial spectrum wherein whiteness and Blackness stand at polar opposites, our real or assumed anti-Black beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.
As Brit Bennett’s fiction bestseller The Vanishing Half reminded so many of us last year, there is a long history of people of color, including light-skinned Black folks, passing in this country. Some, like Bennet’s protagonist Stella Vignes, may do so willingly in order to access forms of white privilege and live in the white world. As diversity specialist Dr. Asare writes in a recent Forbes article, these individuals “actively seek these benefits through changing their appearance, their mannerisms, their behaviors and even the way that they speak.” I would simply add that this can be considered a perfectly rational choice in the interest of self-preservation and survival in our white supremacist society.
Others, however, will have certain assumptions made about their racial belonging based on phenotypical expression and skin color. The phenomenon of being white passing, therefore, can have little to do with whether a person of color themselves identifies as such or not, as white-passing Latinx and mixed-race Indigenous folks have often pointed out. Nevertheless, depending on the specific context, colorism – or discrimination against darker-skinned peoples -- will occasionally bestow access to white privilege upon white-passing POCs, whether they want it or not.
White Adjacency
While a broad swath of light-skinned people of color may fall straightforwardly into the white-passing people of color category, Asian Americans – even dark-skinned South- and Southeast Asian Americans like myself – most clearly fall into the category of white-adjacent people of color. Often, we frame the unique racial experience of Asian Americans through the prism of the model minority myth. In a nutshell, the model minority myth claims that, though many Asian Americans have suffered a unique history of violence, exclusion, and disenfranchisement in this country, we have also benefitted from positive stereotypes about our minority group – namely, that we are intelligent, hard-working, well-behaved, and successful.
As many have pointed out, stereotypes about Asian Americans were often constructed in our white supremacist society in direct and knowing contrast to the very negative stereotypes which attached to other minority groups, and Black, Indigenous, and Latinx folks, in particular. According to this line of thinking, the model minority myth was designed to drive a wedge between Asian Americans, on the one hand, and other marginalized people of color, on the other. Consider it a sort of white supremacist divide-and-conquer strategy. And, while even positive stereotypes can still hurt Asian Americans in myriad ways, ultimately, the model minority myth furnished us with a fragile adjacency to whiteness, conditional upon, as Saad puts it, “the extent that you are able to present or pass as white, and be anti-Black,” as well as the degree to which we are able to “conform to the rules of whiteness” (16). For my own part, I’ve seen, time and again how white-adjacent people of color conform to whiteness in education settings primarily by engaging in and legitimating anti-Blackness, both implicitly and explicitly, among white administrative leaders. Often, they do so because they imagine themselves incapable of holding racist beliefs by virtue of the fact that they are technically people of color.
On other occasions, the anti-Blackness of some white adjacent POCs may even remain unchecked because, like many white folks, they do not consider themselves as raced and racialized beings. Given that we often operate in predominantly white schools and universities, white adjacent POCs may thus unconsciously lend credence to anti-Black policies, procedures, and messaging of predominantly white educational institutions whenever white administrative leaders defer to them as the “resident POC.” Importantly, white folks who have not begun their anti-racist work will, as do we all, seek out those who think like them, hence ensuring that the vicious cycle repeats itself. Like all tokenization, POC white adjacency ultimately operates in the service of legitimizing white supremacy, hurting our students, colleagues of color, and ourselves in the process.
Anti-Blackness Among People of Color
While this country has a long and painful history of anti-Blackness stretching over four centuries, as white-passing and white-adjacent people of color, we must reckon with the specific strains of anti-Blackness in our own cultures that have taken root over the years, often as a result of Euro-American imperialism and colonial domination. Since many of us are diasporic peoples, part of our communities’ assimilation into this country came at the cost of Black and Indigenous Americans. Upon arrival, many of our ancestors learned to consciously align themselves with white folks by distancing themselves from Black folks in order to access the privileges of whiteness, including citizenship and other rights. In other words, anti-Blackness has long functioned as an effective means of entry for white-passing and white-adjacent POCs seeking to assimilate and succeed in predominantly white settings. It continues to work that way today. And it is high time that we acknowledge and reconsider how we as white-passing and white adjacent people of color participate in the project of white supremacy in our workplaces.
To be clear, all this is not to suggest that white-passing and white-adjacent people of color do not experience our own distressing varieties of discrimination in the workplace. We absolutely do, which makes it even harder to imagine that in some cases we also benefit from white privilege. But as the above has described, white-passing and white-adjacent POCs regularly receive invitations into whiteness that shape how we move in the world and how the world lets us move through it. And though perhaps painful to hear -- especially if being a person of color is central to our identity – we need to have this conversation if we hope to build a more honest, robust, and focused coalition of POCs and anti-racist white folks working towards social justice in our educational institutions.
What You Can Do.
1) Acknowledge that you are a raced being.
I often hear white-passing and white-adjacent people of color say that their racial identity simply hasn’t shaped their lives or worldview. If that sounds like you, the first step is to recognize that never or even just rarely being made aware of your racial identity is, in and of itself, a sign of just how white passing and/or white adjacent you are. Indeed, based on what I’ve written above, your experience strongly suggests the likelihood of your white proximity and the privilege that comes along with it. The longer you go without understanding yourself as a raced and racialized being, the more likely you are to do harm to the people of color around you, especially Black folks given the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in our society.
2) Develop a nuanced awareness of your racialized identity.
Seek out media – books, articles, podcasts, lectures, workshops, and documentaries – that document the history of your ethnic or racial group in this country. Inevitably, you will learn that, while your group faced different forms of discrimination from the start, over time, they also benefitted from certain advantages traditionally accorded only to white Americans, moving them along the American racial spectrum defined above from Blackness (fewer rights and privileges) to whiteness (more rights and privileges).
Please note that it is critical to find educational materials that attend to how your ethnic or racial group was instrumentalized in the service of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. But it is equally important that you do not neglect the parts of your group’s history that furnishes models of folks within your communities who always resisted the siren song of white supremacy. This latter injunction is important because it reminds us that we all have access to a progressive anti-racist history and legacy that is ours to carry forward if we so choose.
3) Learn the unique history of anti-Blackness in this country, and the history of anti-Blackness specific to your community.
While steps 1 and 2 will help you unearth your past, we must also surface the ways that anti-Blackness functions in our day-to-day lives in the present. In summer 2020, most folks opted to educate themselves in this subject by reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, and Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi’s Stamped.
Given the unique history of anti-Blackness in our respective communities of color, however, many scholars and activists also produced helpful guides to anti-Blackness over the summer in the hopes of spurring frank conversations within our communities. Here is one anti-racism guide for Asian-Americans and a guide to anti-Blackness for Latinx folks, in English and in Spanish.
Additionally, I strongly encourage all to purchase Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy workbook. Read it, respond to her journaling prompts, and discuss your responses within facilitated racial affinity groups where you can be supported and held compassionately accountable.
4) Attend to the ways in which your white privilege surfaces day-to-day.
Once you have begun the above process, consider the ways that you, as a white-passing or white-adjacent person of color, may hold white privilege in your life and consider the consequences. Given my experience in education settings as a white-adjacent woman of color and diversity practitioner, I can say that one thing I’ve had to learn is that trust-building vis-à-vis my students and colleagues of color may not come immediately because I may not look like someone who has traditionally been worthy of trust, given their experiences with folks who present the way I do.
I’ve come to recognize that this is a savvy survival tool that many of our students and colleagues of color might have developed to help them move through the world. I have learned to be respectful of their boundaries; to proceed with warmth, compassion, and empathy; to let my actions speak louder than my words; and to be mindful about how much emotional space I take up, especially in big-tent racial affinity spaces bringing folks together under the umbrella of “people of color.” As this article has hopefully suggested, this may be a too-big-tent for all of us given that the liberation of some of us has thus far come at the expense of others of us.