A response to Jalynn Harris’ ‘White people, this ain’t for you’

Jalynn Harris,

Let it be known that I can only write of your column and of a terribly incomplete model of you constructed on the basis of your writing. I also can’t write on behalf of white people, as, though I am one, I am not all of them, and this is a distinction all-too-often overlooked.

I do read your comments and have followed your writing on social media for a while, generally because yours is a set of views I don’t often hear. I’d disagree, though, that the academic way you write is too difficult for readers to understand. Rather, it seems to be a bit above your own understanding, as it displays a resounding lack of comprehension of race, identity and logical consequence. I will, for parallels’ sake, lay out these misunderstandings.

You can only write a column to white people without the white people themselves in mind if you address the words of the white people without addressing the people themselves. “You are boring” transgresses this condition. You then address the “you” of “white people” through the entire column.

And there is no discussion of exactly who “white people” are, though this is not a well-defined category. Do mixed races exist? How does one classify darker Eastern Europeans or light-skinned Near Easterers and Latino/as in your starkly categorical conception of racial identity?

On this note, what is the basis of your system of racial categorization that the race is all its individual constituents and that each constituent is the race to such a degree that you can address “white people” on the basis of interacting with not even 0.01% of them? What is race that people can inaccurately tell your story as they tell the story of your race? I assume this is what you mean, and that there are not multitudes of white people continually trying to convince you of your own autobiography.

If you do mean to claim the story of the race you claim, which story? That of black people in the States, or in Europe, or in Africa, or those who live in poverty or in affluence, or those of mixed race? It seems the notion of your story as the story of your race is at best ahistorical and at worst erases and silences the stories of all those members of that race who live different stories.

The nature of institutional oppression is that it’s created and maintained by institutions, like the state-run libraries your article recommends. That people ask you to explain the traumas you fight against indicates that they care about the things you do or that they at least care to learn about those things.

It is not necessarily for their benefit. It’s for yours. Answering their questions, while not obligatory of course, isn’t simply a matter of providing slave labor, which I assume you refer to by quoting the term “reparations.” It’s a matter of furthering your cause.

Bodies do not have intergenerational memory and can’t remember past exploitation, co-optation, or violence. Bodies remember, yes, but they remember in chains of nucleic acids, which cannot explicitly know exploitation as such. Brains do not have intergenerational memory. Your concept of holding future generations responsible for their forbears’ transgressions is outdated, and for good reason: that the future generations cannot have performed their forbears’ transgressions. This isn’t the book of Genesis, this is 21st century North Carolina.

Some opinions are racist. We can all agree. But that “yours” are, i.e. those of all white people, is quite bluntly absurd. You seem to suggest that an opinion being expressed by a white person makes it racist – your “99.9 percent” figure places “being white” and “expressing only racist opinions” infinitesimally close to conditional implication.

You give no basis or rationale for this, but it’s easily seen through as silencing and illogical: I am white. I believe clouds make interesting shapes. This is not a racist thing. I’ve provided one counterexample: Please provide a counterbalance of 999 racist opinions of mine, while disproving that I have any more non-racist opinions, and your figure stands. If it’s hyperbole, it still needs some rationale.

So I’ve made fairly clear that I think your column patently ridiculous, but a question remains: What is your point? Do you mean to ameliorate relations between ambiguously defined races by more starkly defining them and then inserting illogical hostility between them? Or is this simply a venting platform with no goal but catharsis?

You seem intelligent, so I assume the latter, but either way, your arguments need heavy revision to become actionable or even valid. To the DTH, thank you for publishing Harris’ column, as you must’ve realized its vast array of problems but chosen to act to uphold freedom of expression.