Angry: The Assumption of White Competence

Themes in Racism: White is Right

A Good School? (Photo from Humanizing the Vacuum)*

It's long been an article of faith among many African-Americans that to be accepted as merely competent you have to be twice as good.  It's been said of President Obama that if he'd fathered children by three different women, made crude comments, and had questionable financial dealings he would have been pilloried by the Right and probably been un-electable.  (He did none of those things and was pilloried by the Right anyway, but I digress.)  Not least because, these characteristics are often assumed to be synonymous with dysfunctional black culture when a black person has them. Black people are placed under a microscope that just isn't deemed necessary for white people. When the white guy starts talking at the board meeting, we assume he knows what he's talking about--especially if he's surrounded by black people (or women). 

White competence is a theme that I hear voiced in black circles almost as much as I do in white. We can be quite hard on ourselves.  Poor service, low quality, lack of professionalism or timeliness are all chalked up, with a shake of the head, to black folks being well, black folks.  Most of the time it's implied but I've even heard it voiced aloud. If you want it done right, get a white. It's even come up in recent weeks with the push to support black-owned businesses--if the price is too high or the service isn't right we gripe about our fellow black business owners needing to get it together if they want our business. We ourselves contribute to the expectation that nothing less than excellence is the standard for competency if you're black.

A poorly run business is a poorly run business, regardless of the skin color of the business owner.  If you don't like your experience at a black-owned business, I don't recommend you keep going back. I do recommend that you find a different black owned business if possible. That is, of course, if supporting black owned businesses is really important to you. And when you give that harsh review, how about omitting the part about it being a black-owned business?  Food sucked, overpriced, customer service was poor is more than sufficient.  There's no need to associate blackness with those negatives. When we get bad service or poor products from a white business we don't attribute it to the whiteness of the owner--nor should we. We give them a one star rating on Yelp and move on to a different business.  It's not that our society says that white people are always competent.  But when black and white businesses are held side by side the assumption is that the white business will be competent.  The black business has to prove it.

I remember very well the first time, many years ago, I realized that a majority white-run business could actually be run worse than a majority black-run one. I'm ashamed to admit that I'd always just assumed that the white-run organization was firing on all four cylinders, making wise decisions, or at the very least had to be doing better than similar black companies. I was shocked to find that wasn't the case. And I realized that the mismanagement I saw happening I would have unconsciously attributed to their race if the organization had been black-run.

Schools are one area where this assumption of white competence really comes in to play.  I remember a white friend sharing with me some years ago that she would love for me to be her son's teacher.  I appreciated her belief in my teaching talents, but I also doubted she'd consider sending her son to my school because it's predominantly black. "Oh come on, that's not fair," you might say."She might have had a lot of reasons not to send her child to your school." True. But, I never heard that my school was even up for consideration.  And the reasons one hears are things like: "Well, I just want a really strong academic environment for my child" or "You know I just worry about the values being brought in by these EdChoice kids" or "I just want more diversity on campus, you know?"   All of these are euphemisms for the assumption that a white-dominant school is just better quality.  Alfred Soto, a blogger, eloquently explains the euphemism of the "good school" in a post on his Humanizing the Vacuum blog (Soto is not well-known, or at least I've never heard of him. I found his blog while looking for a lead photo for this post. But I thought he made some cogent points.)

This is one thing I saw, even when living in the Marianas Islands. There weren't many black people on the island, but there were a lot of brown, and I saw how if a school got too dark the white people just stopped coming.  There are two schools on Saipan that immediately come to mind where it seemed all the American kids went. You'd visit those campuses and it felt like you'd just been dropped back into the suburban Mainland. And I'm sure if you asked the parents they'd say a lot of the same things I mentioned in the paragraph above.

 I'll never forget this one lovely family that seemed to have missed the memo about where they were supposed to go. When Barbara and I arrived at our school in 1998, it had a mix of American (read: white), local, and Asian kids but over the years we got a little two brown and our white students all but evaporated.  Then came this family who toured our little campus, talked to the teachers and principal and decided we were a good school.  Those two little boys stood out like little blond marshmallows in a sea of chocolate and caramel and they fit right in.  The family was with us until they relocated to Kazakhstan (they were the kind of family that relocated to Kazakhstan. I love it!). I've never forgotten them and I'm still amazed by their seeming unawareness of the assumption of white competence.

Competence doesn't come in a color. Neither does incompetence.  Any person, business, school, organization should be judged. It should never be automatically given credit for a certain level of quality in comparison to another.  Black excellence is often lauded as a "credit to their race." The problem with being a credit to ones race is the assumption that one race needs credit. And the other race doesn't.

*So one of my struggles with these posts is finding a good picture to lead into the blog.  I couldn't figure out what to do for this post for the longest time. I wanted the meme that compared Obama impeccable personal life with Trump's considerably troubled one but couldn't find it.  Finally, I thought What if I just do an image search of the phrase "good schools."  Given the post I just completed I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by what I found. Good schools, are apparently synonymous with a majority white student body (having some black students or a black teacher isn't necessarily an impediment; and there was one photo of what appeared to be an all Asian school.) Finding evidence of the assumption of white competence is easy as a Google image search, apparently.