When Conformity Becomes Culture

White people often insist that they don't have a culture, even while acting in highly prescribed ways

How does it feel to be a problem? W.E.B. DuBois asked this question of Black Americans in The Souls of Black Folk a few decades after the end of the Civil War, as the United States grappled with the problem of what to do with Black Americans, whose liberation continued to threatened the unity of White Americans. The irony of this question is that is Whiteness, and not Blackness, that is at the heart of racism.

Racism is about maintaining and enforcing White supremacy, the belief that White people are superior to all other peoples in the world. This includes everything about White people – their aesthetics, customs, values, beliefs, and ways of communicating. White supremacy maintains that White people are uniquely suited for citizenship and self-governance, that they should wield dominion and authority over all of creation, and, most importantly, that this is the way that God wills it.

The cleverness of White supremacy is that it makes us view the victims of racism as the problem when really the problem lies in the hearts, minds, bodies, and souls of the oppressors. If anything has become clear in the years since the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, it is that America has a problem and its name is Whiteness. So White people, how does it feel to be a problem?

Another irony is that while many White people claim to have no cultural identity, they often act react in very culturally prescribed ways. This is especially true when the topic of racism comes up. No matter what your racial identity is, if you engage in racial justice activism and advocacy long enough, you begin to recognize a set of highly programmatic responses from White people, no matter how liberal or antiracist they claimed to be. In fact, you can predict these responses with startling accuracy. Robin DiAngelo has named one of these sets of responses, white fragility. It’s as if an invisible force field connects White people across space and time, directing and governing their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive responses in ways that they cannot see. In family therapy, we call that a system.

Whiteness is not just a system; it is a pathological one. In other words, it is a pattern of dysfunctional behavior that White people seemed to compelled to act out, even though it causes distress to them and it poses a danger to Black people and other people of color. As a clinical psychologist, I have a peculiar relationship with pathology. Other people want to turn away from pathology, to hide, deny, or ignore it. But psychologists tend to walk right up to it and say, “You mind if I take a closer look?”

I have taken a closer look at the hidden wound of pathological whiteness to identify its symptoms (because every pathology has its symptoms). I have identified a few: conformity, trust in authority, egoethnocentrism, and selective sight. Today I just want to discuss conformity. You can read about the rest in I Bring the Voices of My People.

Whiteness is like the old American Express slogan: membership has its privileges. From the colonial period until today, Whiteness has been the key criteria for US citizenship. During slavery, your racial identity was the sole determinant of your rights. If you were White, you were free; if you were Black, you were enslaveable; and if you were Indigenous, you were exterminable. A particular cruelty of US slavery was that bondage was the default status of anyone perceived as having even one drop of Black ancestry. Free Black people had to keep their free papers on them at all times, in much the same way that many African, Asian, and Latiné people carry their passports today in the event that they are stopped by immigration agents.

New European immigrants to the Americas had to conform to this racial contract. They had to prove themselves White daily by adhering to White cultural norms. This meant giving up their ethnic heritage, including their ways of eating, dressing, and talking; their holidays, customs, and traditions. It also meant adhering to White middle-class propriety: avoiding conflict; valuing emotional restraint; being status oriented; valuing formal education over life experience; and having a perceived right to comfort or entitlement. In exchange for their conformity, they received access to the privileges and bounty of Whiteness: freedom; land ownership; the right to the wages of one’s labor; the right to vote and have their vote counted fairly; even the right to be angry and armed in public space.

But these were tenuous privileges. People striving for Whiteness had to be constantly vigilant about how they were perceived by other people and to make sure that everyone knew that they were in line with the program. They learned to police other people to make sure that they conformed to the system, too. Because the system punished people who fell on the wrong side of the racial contract. It branded them as race traitors or poor White trash. This is how you keep a system like slavery in place. You teach people to stay in their place, to conform. And White people have become very good at conforming, even as they claim to just be individuals.

Take the White people dress code, for example. As I write this, I am sitting in a beautifully decorated coffee shop in Memphis with a predominantly White clientele. During my hour here, at least twenty White men have passed through. All but two have been wearing some variation of the same thing: khaki-colored pants or blue jeans, and a polo, oxford shirt, or a t-shirt bearing the name of a favorite school, musical group, or company. Colors are restricted to blue, black, gray, and khaki. Even the White women in this space are dressed alike: shorts or jeans, tees or sweatshirts, all in muted tones.

That’s what conformity culture does to White people: it renders them mute. The fear of standing out is not limited to fashion. Many White people are afraid to stand out ideologically. This is why they are so reluctant to speak up against dysfunctional systems, whether that system is a family, a workplace, or a country. They are scared to rock the boat, to be seen as an outlier, to go against the grain. They are afraid to be seen as different because they know that their culture - the one they claim not to have - does not tolerate different. Because conformity has a vicious shadow: surveillance and punishment. But that’s a topic for another day.

How have you experienced the pressure to conform to White culture? Keep in mind that you don’t have to be White racially to experience that pressure.

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