In what sense could racialized folks "know" white people so well?
-
Yancy’s text “Flipping the Script” explains how racialized individuals know white people so well. People of colour confront whiteness in their everyday lives all the time. Yancy highlights the presence of white people engaging in racist practices impacting their lives. It made me think of “the outsider within” perspective. Black feminist thinkers have theorized the idea of Black women living on the edge, looking in from the outside and out from the inside. Black women’s ideas have been at the intersection of anti-racism movements and feminist movements, placing them on the edge. It allows them to have a different perspective and see what’s real.
Yancy and Ahmed’s ideas are similar. Black people can see the reality of whiteness because they have a “raced positional knowledge” (8). Their experience of racism in their everyday lives allows them to see whiteness and how race works. In contrast, white people are too much in the system and cannot see it: they live in an alternate, fantasy world of colourblindness. Baldwin’s idea of innocence in his letter might be related to this. White people are “innocent” because they do not see the world as it is (20). “They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” encompasses how white people cannot and do not want to understand by themselves how races work and the horrors resulting from it (19). This idea, however, is not an excuse for white people to be racist because they don’t know about racialization or to expect people of colour to teach them.