Now that I live in a more diverse region of the country, I’ve developed relationships with people outside of my racial ethnicity. One thing that I’ve come to realize as a result is, even among non-black people of color, the ‘white is right’ mentality is the common way of thinking, especially in Western culture. The white is right mentality associates whiteness with positive attributes such as beautiful, generous, intelligent. Of course, there may be whites that have these traits but the ‘white is right mentality’ does this in conjunction with labeling non-whites with negative attributes like lazy, cheap or dirty. No generalized goodness should be associated with whiteness, for the simple fact of its lack of color. This mentality is an operative force within the media and because black people aren’t the only ones forced to consume media images that reinforce the negative stereotypes that the ‘white is right’ mentality creates, we also aren’t the only ones that, as a result, who develop negative ideas about ourselves.
I have a close Mexican friend who told me about his mother who is looking to move into a new home. She went to an open house yesterday and commented about the house’s cleanliness, “It must have been owned by white people” she told her son. He told me that the comment rubbed him the wrong way. Although he didn’t say anything to his mother about it, he did notice her comment’s lack of awareness and felt the need to discuss it with me.
We can see here how the white is right mentality sneaks into our minds like a tiny insect. Sometimes we barely notice it, yet it has lasting effects. Let’s think critically about the idea that a clean house “must have been owned by white people”. This implies that whites must be clean, while all others must be dirty. How could this be true? How could we assume the race of a family based upon the way that their house was maintained? Based off of this my friend’s mother probably would not have assumed that the house was owned by whites if it wasn’t well kept, we could go as far as saying she may have assumed that a dirty home must have owned by Blacks or even Mexicans. Certainly this is an unsubstantiated idea, but then why does it continue to be a part of our thinking and conversations?
As a real estate broker myself I can erase the idea that the well maintained home “must have been owned by white people” by sharing the fact that before an open house agents hire cleaning companies, painters, and even warehouses to furnish vacant homes in order to make them more appealing to potential buyers.
Everything we do is intentional.
The story above is a small example of how the ‘white is right’ mentality operates in our day to day lives. We all make assumptions based on our perspectives, but because of the fact that we have been living within a white supremacist culture, our perspectives are highly skewed. It is up to us to critically analyze our language and conversations in order to dismantle this ‘Western’ way of thinking, that criminalizes, degrades and demonizes the majority of the world’s population, people of color.
Human thinking is binary, therefore we cannot help but try to understand the world by splitting everything into right and wrong or good and bad. As a result, if we attach positive characteristics to one group, we cannot help but assign its negatives those who don’t fit into the positively labeled group. The more the media circulates images of white ‘beauty’ on television without attaching them to positive images of black beauty, the more that we attribute its opposite, unattractiveness, to blackness. How often are we shown black doctors, lawyers and CEOs in comparison to black criminals, thugs and gangbangers? How often are we shown impoverished white children in comparison to children of color in poverty? The choice of how often we see these images are intentional, we need to think about these networks’ intentions.
Why would they want to make sure that their audience sees certain images more often than others? To be naive enough to think that the types of images we see in film and television are a coincidence is plain ignorance. There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of television programing, commercial advertising and in film production, therefore the task of managing the images that raise this revenue is taken very seriously. There are teams of people analyzing the effects of each decision they make in order to optimize their profits. Our enemy is intentional; therefore, we cannot be mindless in our language or decisions.
