“I Didn’t Choose to Be White”: A Case Study in White Supremacy at Work
It wasn’t technically a hiring committee for a nonprofit CEO because the founder had unofficially offered him the position beforehand (you should be nervous already). Doling out jobs with no application process seldom constitutes an inclusive HR strategy, especially for executive roles, so a few of us insisted on a conversation at least. Patrick (not his real name) was a white man in his late 50s by appearances. A virtual interview during pandemic lockdown, he emerged on screen in a faded T-shirt with an unmade bed visible over his shoulder, his demeanor matching his casual apparel. I reject notions of professionalism and ordinarily wouldn’t care what adorns his torso nor his mattress, but the detail stands out in connection to his overall attitude: that this was merely a formality.
Our list of questions included a boilerplate DEI prompt. In addition, we asked him to reflect on his own positionality as the prospective leader of an organization predominantly serving people of color. And I requested his opinion about the overall process that led to this non-interview.
With a background in HIV/AIDS advocacy and medicine, he pointed to the trend in the field of assuring that patients can be treated by providers who share their race. He said “that’s all fine and good,” he gets it, but he should be able to provide services as a white man, too, and that his is equally excellent care. Then he added:
“I didn’t choose to be white.”
A few seconds of silence followed, the kind that feels like eternity. Another interviewer, the only Black man on the panel, off camera but on mic, reacted: “wow.” Wow indeed.
This article explores five red flags from the story, lingering on a reflection on whiteness as a choice. I hope to demonstrate that valid responses to Patrick include both “of course you didn’t” and “yes, you did: you’re doing it right now.”
I don’t mean to chastise the central character: what he uttered actually reflects the widespread sentiments characterizing many white people’s inner worlds, including my own, that usually go unspoken. And that confession offers us a case study that may be instructive for all of us in the nonprofit industrial complex in which I am just as entangled.
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The principal red flag of “I didn’t choose to be white” is the defensiveness. In a certain sense, the statement is a truism. We could tell he was white and knew him already, so the assertion served to deflect any responsibility for how his race affected his access to resources and power. This was a job interview for the chief executive officer (of a small and new organization, but still). He stood to gain authority of the entire agency, with the potential for region-wide notoriety, influence, and connections, in addition to CEO decorating his resume for future opportunities. We had invited him to identify the extent to which he was aware that his race affected his journey to this point and how it would show up in his assumption of the role. His response demonstrated that he had indeed contemplated the role of his race at work, but that his conclusion was that it didn’t matter.
We do not choose our race. We don’t choose our biological parents as they didn’t choose theirs. It’s that simple, which makes Patrick’s defense absurd. And that he weaponized it to reject a nonexistent accusation makes it dangerous. The second red flag, then, is that his statement constituted a refusal to acknowledge the power and privilege his identity affords him, including the very context of this interaction.
But it’s also not that simple. Whiteness is a social construction, as has been explained by countless others. To say that it is an invention, of course, is not to argue it isn’t real - race is a political and economic truth (a selection of boxes to physically mark on the census) with life-and-death consequences depending on how you’re racialized. This depends, in part, on legibility.
The purpose of the terms “white-passing” and “white-presenting” is to describe mixed-race people or light-skinned people of color whom others may read as white. Legibility differs according to those with whom one’s body shares space in any given moment, in addition to, yes, certain choices. Whether or not a white-presenting Ainu person, for example, chooses to undergo the Indigenous group’s traditional face-tattooing ritual affects their legibility as white. Because Islam is racialized, despite being a religion, one’s choice to wear a hijab affects one’s presentation, as another example. “Passing” is fraught, and certainly most people I know whose identity skirts the fluid boundaries of whiteness usually opt not to care about how people perceive them. Good. And, it’s not so lighthearted as that: if Ahmaud Arbery had been white-passing, he might not have been hunted. All of this points to the central tenet of US structural racism: anti-Blackness.
In these examples, whiteness entails some decisions, but this is not the choice Patrick deployed; he was neither Indigenous nor Muslim and certainly not Black. His was to do with the “moral choice” James Baldwin described, buying into the lie of whiteness for the purposes of perpetuating a hierarchy ascribing him power, which relies on the oppression of others. His choice was to misconstrue the truism of biology to launch himself into a position of authority.
So, the third red flag of “I didn’t choose to be white” is the incomplete and insufficient analysis of race and racism in the United States and the intentional use of race to absolve him from complicity. Such ignorance is dangerous for nonprofit leadership not least because most people whom social-justice nonprofits mean to serve are the targets of structural racism. The danger the nonprofit sector faces is not just that white people still overwhelmingly occupy CEO and Board chair positions, it’s that these people reinforce their whiteness in their everyday choices. This choice “has brought humanity to the edge of oblivion,” as Baldwin concluded.
The most consequential function of whiteness that Patrick’s defense failed to acknowledge (red flag #4) is how whiteness is inextricable from domination; there is no neutral, much less positive interpretation of whiteness. The invention of it, recent in the scope of history, served a specific purpose: to justify the transatlantic slave trade and social hierarchy that upheld economic exploitation and violence. Through whiteness, its inventors capitalized on the color’s connotations to characterize European Christians as clean, pure, and superior, therefore inherently deserving of wealth and authority. In a sense, then, whiteness and white supremacy are synonymous.
Robin DiAngelo’s work is of mixed value and I usually squirm listening to her interviews. But I agree with one recommendation in the conclusion of the book for which you recognize her: “be less white.” She surely does not suggest we emulate Rachel Dolezal in donning a different race as a costume. Rather, she acknowledges that whiteness operates on multiple levels, one of which is synonymous with domination and violence. To be less white, in Patrick’s case, might mean to resist the cultural norms and choices that perpetuate exploitation and catapulted him to a CEO job interview.
The final red flag in this story is mine: Patrick still got the job and I did nothing to stop it. Sure, I named my serious concerns and took the side of my Black colleague who was more vocal in his criticism, but I allowed the process to unfold. I failed to use my power and privilege to prevent more harm via another white CEO with little consciousness of racism to take leadership of an organization with influence over Black and Brown people’s survival. I chose whiteness.
White nonprofit CEOs, even the “woke” ones, can be so dangerous because they are the most prone to cause harm yet ironically sit at the helm of the sector to which we have relegated responsibility to mend said harm. The inherent violence of whiteness can scarcely reverse the violence of poverty and oppression.
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In his 2017 Atlantic piece Donald Trump is the First White President, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that “the point of white supremacy… [is] to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.” Patrick’s CV justified his candidacy, but his sense of entitlement and weaponization of whiteness should have disqualified him. In making the claim Coates does via the title of the piece, he understands that all presidents prior to Obama were white men, but argues that Trump’s is the first presidency predicated on the idea of a Black president. Whiteness itself delivered Trump’s ascendency in that the purpose of his rise was the rejection of Black power. And this whiteness damages all. While “whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense,” Coates continues, “the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world.” So long as whiteness means domination for which it was designed, literally everyone and everything suffers.
The aforementioned Black panelist left the Board weeks later, citing the need to focus his energy at organizations that value his perspective. Patrick himself resigned after only a few months due to conflict with the founder. And the organization has struggled throughout. I can’t help but wonder how this story is not so different from Coates’ articulation of Trump’s rise, if on a smaller scale - how white male leadership so easily turns to domination because whiteness and patriarchy were invented for it.
If you are white and your only takeaway from this essay is “well, I’ll never say that I didn’t choose to be white in a job interview,” then I’ve failed. An unintended consequence of the 2020 uprisings, DEI has largely produced a culture of nonprofit professionals who care more about saying the right thing for the sake of avoiding detention rather than reducing and healing the harms of structural racism. If I must specify a key takeaway, it’s to remember your whiteness is about power, resources, and domination. To be sure, racism is best understood as a system inextricable from capitalism and colonization. A focus on interpersonal racism and conscious or unconscious biases can distract from the most pressing need, which is to dismantle racist institutions and systems. But structural change coexists and may actually begin with inner, personal change, and you are ultimately accountable only to yourself. May we rescue our choices from whiteness.
