Isn’t This Why White Folks Can’t Be Trusted?

(Via, most recently, Subrealism.) From The Matrix *

(I’m just pushing the same old puzzle pieces around again. I hope it’s clear from all the links that I’m not trying to say anything new.)

White people are plugged in. I think, as Kai says, the ability to plug into an overarching structure, maybe  what Thinking Girl has called a power grid,** I think that “plugging in” fundamentally disrupts relationships between people. The power to trample over people is kind of mind-altering in itself. Then there is the bizarre way white folks are trained to see the world, what Nezua calls the White Lens. I don’t even know to what extent these two ways of being “plugged in” can be separated.

This doesn’t only happen with skin color, of course. Personally I also think about corporate executives, and whether I could trust them when I was a middle manager. Not really. They were plugged in. (I did tend to make the mistake of trusting them, and even of idealizing some of them.) Can women in the workplace trust the men they work with? Not really, from what I’ve seen. Sometimes, which isn’t the same thing at all. A few you can probably trust all the time. Which ones? Who knows?

Brooklynite has given a very humane picture of one thing that might be meant when folks say they can’t trust a group. Via Theriomorph.

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Probably I’m kind of trying to answer the question asked in this post at Resist Racism. A lot of folks have asked similar questions, and I’ve been trying to put my best guess into words. It’s not a pretty answer: basically I think people who really opposed colonialism would have had a problem with these images right away. White liberals pretty much support colonialism, though, as far as I can see. They complain if it’s not done competently enough. That’s very far from opposing it.

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*Not to endorse whacked-out elements in the movie The Matrix, for example Keanu Reeves going from “Duh?” to Messiah in about two weeks flat.

**Thinking Girl had a post at Slant Truth in mid 2007 that used the metaphor of the electrical power grid to talk about things like unexamined privilege. So a person might say “I turned the light on” when all they really did was throw a switch. There are these mammoth generators somewhere that turn the light on. People who are off the grid tend to have a much clearer picture of what’s really involved in turning a light on. But so that was at the old Slant Truth, though, and I can’t find the post anywhere.