And what do we get in return for those high dues? What W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wages” of Whiteness aren’t just earned by ugly and shameful behavior; they are paid in the coin of massive self-deception. The carefully cultivated naïveté that allows White people to think of ourselves as totally innocent is enough by itself to dull the intellect.
White people (“not all White people,” of course, which means “not me,” except yes, me too) are made to know from babyhood that even if we run screaming from membership in good standing in the Tribe of White, it still owns us, and we must never, ever, ever relinquish the core belief that White people are inherently superior to all other people, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever—the very best evidence, because who can refute nonexistent evidence?—and we must therefore keep the goalposts moving for everyone else. When Malcolm X spoke of “brainwashed Negroes,” he meant Black people who had internalized White racism, but if he had spoken of “brainwashed White people,” he could have gone on all day and all night long. James Baldwin put it succinctly, if tactfully, when he described White people as “the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
Most of us will say that we just want to be accepted for who we are, when what we more often want is to be accepted at the face value of our self-image, whether it’s one we’ve passively accepted or one we’ve carefully crafted. Once White people have been sufficiently brainwashed, of course we want to be accepted for what we’ve been conditioned to believe we are: inherently superior. Thus we may expect to be looked upon with gratitude for deigning to descend a millimeter from our exalted state to offer our inherently superior help, and it can be hurtful to the point of enraging to be reminded that we’re not in point of actual fact in any way superior and that maybe, just maybe, what looks like nobility to us is really just arrogance.
The fantasy of inherent superiority is what allows White people to believe sincerely that the best of everything is supposed to be reserved for us, because we deserve it, because we’re the best. A White friend of mine who spent a good part of her childhood in a Black neighborhood in Maryland was surprised to learn that Black people she met in North Carolina, where she lived for some years, didn’t invite White people to their homes. She believed that it was because they never knew when White people might go off on them, and they didn’t want their homes to be the scene of that kind of insanity. But then a Black friend told me she’d always been instructed never to invite White people into her family’s house because if it was nicer than the White people’s house, bad things could ensue. This was not based on conjecture.
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