Not Oppressed for Being White
From a letter written by Harvey Jackins, in 1997
The central fact in the situation in which white people have been placed—in the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia—is that they are the agents of a vicious form of oppression which has generally been agreed to be called “white racism” and which has been responsible for very cruel and deep oppression of people of color, who are the majority of the world’s population.
To clarify for RCers and other progressives what we propose to do about this, we created the term “eliminating white racism,” making it perfectly clear that the principal “agents of oppression” are the people with white skins. We have outlined strategies and roads to discharge that will free white people from the compulsions of the patterns that have been imposed upon them so that they will work to eliminate these patterns rather than rehearse them.
What you and at least some of the people associated with you are proposing in your term “white liberation” tends to imply that “white people suffer from some kind of oppression from being white,” which is neither historically nor currently true. One can understand confused people who have never done much about the racism that dominates their environments being eager to use the term you propose, being eager to use a term which implies one can be sorry for oneself as a victim instead of facing up to one’s responsibility for ending an oppression that is very real and grievous.
To center attention on an invented term such as “white liberation,” and thereby imply that white people being oppressed is a central issue, in effect assumes that white people are oppressed for being white, and this is not true. Of course white people are oppressed in dozens of other ways, but not for being white.
Reprinted from pages 107 to 108 of “Staying Clear about Racism,” in An Unbounded Future
(Present Time 210, January 2023)