The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/15/whiteness-project-privilege-documentary

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White and black Americans see race from radically different perspectives, to the point that the white, world-saving New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has rung the alarm that “whites just don’t get it”. As someone who is half black and half white, I can certainly attest to the truth of that.

So I had misgivings about director Whitney Dow’s the Whiteness Project, the new interactive documentary launched over the weekend by POV. “I made this project for white people, not for people of color,” Dow told me on Tuesday, because “if white people are going to participate in changing the racial dynamic, we need to deal with our own shit first.”

Dow, who is white, has been making smart films about race with his black filmmaking partner Marco Williams since 2002’s Two Towns of Jasper. But it was still hard to believe that white people talking about whiteness could do anything more than produce the gazing of blue eyes at pale navels.

After all, Dow’s project sounds a lot like “whiteness studies”, which is an actual field of academia I’ve recently encountered. The field is often credited with having its intellectual origins in a WEB Du Bois meditation, but more recently evolved to the point that it simply allowed white scholars to talk more about ... well, white people. The “danger of whiteness studies” is, as settler colonialism scholar Sam Markwell recently said:

[It] emerged alongside the fields of critical race and ethnic studies. On the one hand, it can allow scholars – often self-identified white scholars – to do useful anti-racist work critiquing how whiteness works in white supremacist societies such as the US. On the other hand, the danger is always that it re-centers whites, who have long been at the center of social research in the US.

So does the Whiteness Project re-center white people? Yes, but that’s part of the point: Dow wants his subjects to be the center of attention, and the reason for their viewers’ discomfort about white people’s views on race. And it works. Not only do the white folks say things to Dow that are rarely spoken to people like me, but his use of the Interrotron camera technique keeps them making eye contact with viewers as they speak freely about race.

Of 1,000 people Dow hopes to eventually interview as the project rolls out, his multimedia subjects uploaded so far are from Buffalo, New York – one of the most depressing and segregated cities in America. And the videos reflect both the ongoing segregation, as well as a general dismissal of white privilege by most (though not all) of Dow’s subjects.

There’s Ronald, who says “the white guys will never have a chance to be a fireman” and “minorities should understand that a lot of white boys aren’t going to be pushed around”. There’s Claudia, who doesn’t “have a lot of black friends” yet laments that “you can’t even talk about fried chicken or Kool-Aid without wondering if someone’s going to get offended”. There’s Jason, who asks, “Do I think it’s beneficial for me being white? Have I gotten any privileges like that? I would say no” and wonders why, “for some reason, some black people kind of hold onto the back in the day, the slave thing, or they feel they’re not being treated right.” And there’s Deanna who, “as a voluptuous woman,” is clearly afraid of black men.

Dow conceived the Whiteness Project when a little girl asked him what his racial identity was. He thought he didn’t have one. Then he realized that he has “the most powerful racial identity in America” – being white. Dow told me that he wanted to “create something that could help white people have the experience I had” to reflect upon white identity and privilege.

Whiteness, like all racial identities, is a relatively recent historical concept, conceived during European colonialism and American slavery as a way to empower poor whites with “whiteness” and divide them politically and economically from other disenfranchised people. Asked about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ thesis of “white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life”, Dow agreed:

Look at the fucking founding documents! White supremacy is codified in them ... and it’s not unrealistic to think some of that still exists.

If the continued existence of white supremacy was the only thing Dow wanted to prove, he could’ve easily done so in his interviews. But he’s more interested in confronting the ways in which that supremacy plays out, even – or perhaps especially – in an economically decimated place in which segregation is both officially frowned upon and unofficially practiced. From the subject who proclaims “the white race is the one that is discriminated against anymore” to the woman who admits that “this country has been dominated by white male indoctrination”, Dow makes it hard to paint whiteness in broad strokes, and hard to dismiss racism as the anecdotal actions of a beleaguered few in the American south. He listens.

Once you start clicking through the interviews, it’s hard for viewers to stop listening – and it’s harder to dismiss what the Whiteness Project has to say.