In Baynard Woods’ new memoir, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, Woods reflects on how growing up white in South Carolina impacted his life. He argues that it is crucial for white people in the U.S. to reckon with their personal histories.
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Quotes by Baynard Woods from the Code Switch podcast episode What does it mean to “inherit whiteness”?
- The logic of whiteness is that we are supposed to be protected by the law without being bound by the law, and the people of color are supposed to be bound by the law and not protected by the law.
- But we didn’t talk about race really at all. And so we saw ourselves as people. Other people are the Jones family, but they’re the Black Jones family, and we’re just the Woods family. We just are people. And I think that’s how so many white people see race. Whiteness is the freedom not to see race most of the time. And it’s why when white people are asked to see it, we get so uncomfortable.
- Whiteness is not only a lie that is told to us, it’s a lie that we tell to ourselves about the world. And it keeps us from seeing the world, but it actually shapes the way we live in the world. And whiteness is where our subjective experience of that world intersects with power and all of these power relations. And so part of what I was trying to do is figure out what it looked like, how I had been able to not see the way my whiteness was working so heavily through much of my life. And I just was unaware of it. But then I realized that it only worked because I was unaware of it. Had I become aware of it, then the way that whiteness is now, post-civil rights would have fallen apart because it works by our silence. And it doesn’t say we don’t suffer as white people, we don’t overcome odds, we don’t – but we don’t see the structure of power that we’re utilizing when we’re doing that. And it’s because it’s within our interest not to see it.
- So I think about the young people and how we might be able to by teaching a more clear view of history, really address what it is, what we have inherited from the past of whiteness, because we haven’t looked at it at all yet. The thing we still don’t ask at all as white people – how was it that our ancestors were able to live in this luxury in the midst of a concentration camp economy, in the midst of this totalitarian system? And how has that infected and affected us and the kind of horror that was experienced on a daily basis?