Whiteness as Race Adjudicator

“People look at us without really seeing us. Instead, they simply see our race… the onus isn’t just on us inching past our fear of embarrassing a white person. It’s on white people to learn to make distinguishing faces a priority. Whether they realise it or not, the repeated misidentification broadcasts its own message: I’m Asian, indistinct and not worth remembering.”

Iris Kuo, journalist

“Mistaking” people of colour because “you all look alike” is not just a faux pax. It is racism at work.

In her opinion article for the Washington Post, Kuo recounts examples of herself, friends, and colleagues being mistaken for other Asian people who look nothing alike. It happens at work, and in other social interactions with white people.

“All my life I’ve been mistaken for other people of my race. It’s a degrading and thoughtless error that boils away my identity and simplifies me as one thing: ‘that Asian.'”

She notes she is expected to laugh this off, but it happens so frequently that it has a negative impact. Kuo recognises this happens to other people of colour, who are expected to let the moment pass, so as not to “embarrass” white people. She notes that when people of colour do speak up, the interaction is minimised or ignored. For example, when she complained about multiple incidents of a colleague mistaking her for other Asian people, the manager excused the problem, by saying: “I don’t think anyone here’s got a mean bone in their body.”

When white people get called out for racism, they usually moralise the issue, deflecting to a question of manners, naiveté, or an innocent mistake. They refuse to recognise this as racism, because white people think racism in terms of:

• Extreme bigotry: racial slurs, yelling, violence
• Conscious hatred: a personal flaw of an isolated individual
• Moral failing: being called a racist is seen as a personal character flaw, and a label that is more hurtful than racism itself
• Adjudicated through whiteness: white ideology defines what is, and is not, racism, according to the values, experiences, and discretion of individual white people, rather than a structural system of inequality

These examples are known as microaggressions – the brief and subtle daily insults that denigrate people of colour. It occurs because whiteness allows white people to take their own race for granted as a universal experience, without acknowledging their biases and prejudice. Microaggressions happen because white people reinforce racial categories, reducing other groups to a monolith “other,” while seeing themselves and other white people as individuals worthy of special attention, decency and respect.

Microaggressions reinforce racial power, because they are a routine reminder to people of colour that they are being racialised (reduced to their racial difference, and therefore lesser than white people).

This also shows how while people “do” race – by categorising “others” into racial categories, and reinforcing the racial hierarchy, that some groups have more power than others to define social reality. If they didn’t “mean to offend” or “didn’t mean any harm” then racial harm is nullified. Race becomes a problem for people of colour to manage, in ways that do not disrupt white people’s dominance.

Read Kuo’s article.