Racial Myopia: Whiteness, White Ignorance, and Their Impact on American Minorities

A. L. Ma
Professor Tania Friedel
Writing the Essay (Section 27)
3 April, 2024

Ignorance is bliss. My white friend used this phrase in her English poetry and literature essay. Her school assignment, a few pages long and filled with quotes from mid-19th century English to contemporary American poetry—all written by white men—cast a shadow over my head as I tried to ignore the whiteness I saw as I proofread her paper. She then asked why I had mentioned this limitation of her essay topic, comparing past and present literature. As I reread her essay, I felt like I was opening a window into an empty page, a blank white canvas without any substance or color.

The same whiteness I felt reading this essay is what Cathy Hong references in her piece “The End of White Innocence,” a personal reflection and essay on her childhood experience growing up in America. As an Asian American, she reflects on how whiteness has impacted her life through detailed and personal storytelling of multiple childhood and adulthood experiences that have shaped her perspective on racism in American society. In one instance, Hong visits an art installation by artist Carmen Winant depicting the experience of giving birth, in which she precipitates that although multiple art critics exclaimed and praised the installation for its profound imagery and meaning, she was unable to see past the whiteness on the wall– the absence of women of color giving birth. Hong writes, “When I look at the photos individually, I’m moved by the mothers’ exhaustion and joy, but when I step back, I can’t unsee the wall of whiteness…In Winant’s obsessive efforts to evoke the ‘all,’ I feel walled off” (Hong 16). She perceives this whiteness to have stained her life with the constant reminder of the white privilege and white innocence that continue to separate or “wall off” power, privilege, and representation to people of color in American society.

In her essay, Hong illustrates the impact of “white innocence” as the effect of the systemic racism in America that has existed for centuries and continues to persist today. She posits that innocence is “both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement” (Hong 8). In the same way the phrase “Ignorance is bliss” can be used to describe the naivety of a child visiting Disneyland without understanding the expense involved, white innocence is the ignorance of white people in recognizing and acknowledging their role in racial inequality and systemic racism in America.

Citing the widely known story of Adam and Eve, Hong posits that the “flip side” of an individual’s white innocence is the shame that minorities endure because of white innocence. She creates colorful imagery of how shame has eaten up her life: “It’s not about losing face. Shame squats over my face and sits” (Hong 8). Hong continues this bold personification by recalling an informal piece of evidence pointing back to her childhood, evoking an instance when she had worn a Playboy t-shirt to school. Here, her writing style is direct and informal, and there is an inexplicable change in tone compared to the empirical claims she makes earlier. Hong describes the feeling of shame as a “simmering somatic reaction” (9) on account of feeling disconnected and separated from her white counterparts at school. In the intersection of childhood and the feelings of shame, she recognizes the comedy of the stories she mentions, citing French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre’s philosophical work Being and Nothingness as being able to see her naivety “as the Other sees me” (10). In essence, her misfortune at school speaks more than just a child’s perception of themself– her story transcends a persistent feeling of shame that a majority of minorities consistently experience in American society.

In an informal tone, Hong mentions three specific experiences that significantly influenced her childhood and adulthood as an Asian American. She says that rather than looking back at her childhood, she looked at childhood “sideways” (Hong 2), presenting her perspective of the shame she feels that has shaped her due to her being both the “afflicter” and the “afflicted” by racism (8). She brings up an account of her experience on the subway with her white friend, in which she engages in a heated standoff with a white man who uses a racial expletive at her; afterwards, her friend exclaims, “That’s never happened to me before” (14), implying that her emotional reaction to the incident is a direct result of the white innocence in the country. It's not just the racist encounter itself that Hong feels ashamed to have to encounter; it's also the realization of her friend's white innocence, the privilege of not having to experience racism—a privilege Hong does not have.

Hong continues her essay by reinforcing her argument that white innocence has affected her life in many ways, adding crumbs of her first-hand experience with racism in various points of her essay. She posits that the shame she feels is reminiscent of the shame— the “oily flame” (Hong 17)— all Asian Americans have felt to varying degrees. However, what can be said about how other minorities feel when they experience racism in America? How can we combat racism in the country if the discrimination experienced by minority groups is so different? With this in consideration, exactly how can racism be tackled if it has taken shape and is rooted in so many different ways? Although Hong presents a compelling argument for the racism experienced by minorities in America, she fails to realize how different racism, particularly the effect of white innocence, can be for various minorities.

As a person of color growing up in Western society, I ask the question, “How has white innocence affected my life?” This question prompted me to look back at past academic writings in which I explored my identity further, one of which was my college admissions essay. In this short 800-word essay, I attempt to capture myself as the perfect candidate for universities, as if I were pitching myself as a brand on Shark Tank. I remember the struggles of fabricating a compelling work that might convince the admissions officers reading my essay to understand my Asian identity, experiences, and perspectives. My inability to create a “perfect” essay, alongside numerous retakings of standardized tests, resulted from a self-inflicted expectancy to defy the ‘standards’ of the typical American college applicant.

Expectations and standards have supported one of the crucial principles of racism to exist in the first place – stereotypes. Stereotypes, particularly those aimed at marginalized communities, govern American society– like counselors guiding students on what colleges to apply to– and define your status on the socioeconomic ladder, acting as bridges for people to understand your identity. Moreover, racial stereotypes exacerbate the perception of minorities’ identities and diminish their social status as another opportunity for racism and discrimination to occur in America.

The college admissions process has been shaped by years of what one can call an embarrassing example of how America has failed to diversify its academia, a groundbreaking attempt to challenge systemic discrimination and, in particular, racist stereotypes. In her essay “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans,” Iris Kuo highlights the role of college admissions in categorizing Asians with white people, perpetuating the model minority myth, and obscuring the realities of racial discrimination and prejudice that Asian Americans face. She argues that because of the misguided and often poorly executed efforts to combat discrimination and racism, Asian American experiences are frequently overlooked. Instead, they are seen as a minority that has reached the same status and privilege as white people.

Kuo articulates that the grouping of white people with Asian Americans is an example of the process of expanding the “white race” to include more ethnic groups– what sociologists call “whitening” (Kuo 2). Kuo claims that although she feels she has gained many white privileges that other Asian individuals and minorities have not received, she still thinks that it is “disconcerting to be put in a separate category from other people of color” (4). That is to say, Kuo feels that Asian experiences should not be compared to the experiences of white people, as if the comparison were an attempt to diminish the racism that Asian Americans experience in society. Hong articulates a similar idea that some believe Asians “have it good,” as if racial trauma and experiences of discrimination were part of a “competitive sport” (Hong 10). If an Asian person had the same social status and privilege as a white person, what can be said about their difference in identity to that of other minorities? How about those in their community but without those privileges?

Hong tells a story about a five-year-old Iranian boy who, in 2017, was handcuffed and detained “at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C, for five hours because he was ‘identified as a possible threat’” (Hong 17). She brings up this story only to later suggest that the experiences that minorities face are all too similar and that they share the notion that America has exploited the home countries of minorities in the country in different ways for the goal of maintaining white supremacy. In other words, she argues that prejudice and discrimination exist for all minorities in various shapes and forms regardless of identity, such as the commonly held stereotypes Kuo mentions in her essay about the “model math student” and the “immigration menace” (Kuo 3).

Yet, what can be said about the experiences of other minorities living in America? Although Hong speaks on the overall presence of whiteness in America and its impact on minorities, attempting to reach minorities in general through the inclusion of some reference to other marginalized communities, she is primarily focused on the Asian American experience of whiteness, as her experiences are based on her own identity and not that of others. Because our encounters with racism and whiteness vastly differ, our emotions and responses to racism greatly vary from person to person. With that being said, how do the feelings of minorities become overlooked in the battle against racism?

A perpetuated belief that persists among white people is the misconception that minorities' lives are persistently guided or reinforced by grief and loss as a result of the violence in America. Our feelings are seen as spectacles or the ‘end result’ of the racism that envelops itself in the daily lives of American citizens as if our identities were associated with an inhumane or criminal-like demeanor. Claudia Rankine articulates this sentiment in her essay “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” a testament to the idea that minority communities– like the Black community she iterates in her article– are more complex in their multifaceted social and cultural dynamics than they are perceived to be in the media. She posits that “the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility” (Rankine 6), arguing that the assumption that minorities are lesser human or more immoral than the white population affects our social perception, experiences, and interactions with marginalized individuals. Rankine wrestles with the idea that the Black Lives Matter movement is “an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic” (7) and “encourage[s] the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical” (7), a person with the ability to recognize the complexity of minority communities and the power that perception has to diminish their value as being less human. Rankine argues that white people need also be in a state of grief for what is happening in minority groups like the Black community– akin to Hong’s idea of losing one’s innocence and gaining the ”white double-consciousness” (Hong 18). Rankine quotes from scholar Linda Martín Alcoff, writing, “A sustained state of national mourning for black lives is called for in order to point to the undeniability of their devaluation” (Rankine 8), emphasizing the need for mourning by all American citizens, particularly white people, to forego racist perception and realize what has happened to their fellow Black citizens.

While recalling the violent shooting of Michael Brown in 2017, Rankine iterates that minorities continue to be reminded that “black bodies don’t matter to law-enforcement officers” (Rankine 9) and, in a larger sense, society as a whole. Hong’s account of her encounter with a racist white man with her white friend only further exemplifies this idea– that white individuals will take a person of color’s feelings and make a situation unrelated to them about themselves instead. Rankine asks us to consider the sharing of our feelings with other identities through her call for “national mourning” (8), creating bridges to our individual experiences and benefiting from intertwining them.

It has been three years since I read my white friend’s essay, and although much in my own life has changed since then, the encounters I have with white people today are much the same as before. Just days ago, I witnessed a white man use the “chink” slur against an older Asian woman on the street, a vile act too reminiscent of that of Hong’s encounter with a white man on the subway. Even now, I see the “wall of whiteness” she mentions in corners of my life as if it’s been shelved away tightly from my sight. As I’m writing this, I still can’t bring myself to answer how white innocence has affected my life. Although I have only recently begun living in America, I continue to face myself looking out at a diverse and enriching Western world blanketed with whiteness, an exploration for a confrontation with the racial dynamics that dictate the parameters of visibility for people of color.

It is the account of stories and experiences that Hong, Kuo, and Rankine recall that preface a need for the recognition of how racism affects minorities' lives, a nod to American society’s social structure and governing system that only continues to benefit the lives of white people and ignore people of color. We are constantly reminded of our inferiority, denied the same status, power, and privilege that white people hold, and the methods that white people use to weaponize our inferiority create even more division in our respective communities. Yet, individual minority experiences differ significantly, even between individuals of the same group, and no instance of racism is the same as another. Perhaps, through the persuasion towards white people for greater recognition of our differences and our complexities as the same type of species, they may understand a semblance of the unconscious racism that continues to persist in America.

Works Cited