Apples and Oranges

White folks have the privilege of being merely "interested" in a subject, while POC are inextricably "invested".

We see this concept in issues of climate change & environmental racism, for example. Marginalized communities have had to be invested in addressing climate change for quite some time now, because they're already tangibly affected & always had major epistemological differences.

Since white folks are merely interested, they can ignore what's happening in front of them. And when they see the responses of invested individuals, they label it an overreaction. They are bystanders while POC are intertwined with issues of inequity, apparently unable to politely "see past" the differences that are as vines wrapped around their necks.

I've been thinking about this privilege differential, in addition to cultural incommensurability (incomparability), & how this foils any chance we have at true communication. We need to go one step beyond cultural competence & look at cultural commensurability.

Because no amount of cultural competence, allyship training or trauma porn presented to a white person will render them able to relate to specific non-white struggles. Until differences of worldview are at the core of these discussions, it's like trying to explain apples to oranges. The absence of a foundation to host these conversations nullifies an alarming portion of the rhetoric we have about equity within systems.

I would gamble that many POC's unease in public is less about difference of appearance & more about knowing that the surrounding white people have no basis for understanding them. No acknowledged context for how our history shapes behaviors today, & no regard for our humanhood, let alone our well-being.

The same colonizer who saw Black & Indigenous peoples as necessitating white guidance, management, control & punishment is BBQ Becky. The same Europeans who stole land & committed genocide are now damning us through pipelines, unsustainable energy & climate denial. The same white people who drank from racialized water fountains & thought Black folks were a different species or a subspecies- won’t date a Black person today because they "aren’t attracted to them" & don’t see non-white people, at a subconscious level, as biologically viable partners.

We don’t have any semblance of a shared sense of well-being. Add to that the fact that white folks are out here specifically attacking our well-being, as remnants of the logistical need to manage, control & punish us. We are communal beings, so we obviously sense this dangerous incongruity. And we literally pay the price for this lack of shared sense of well-being via the elected agents of white well-being — police & law enforcement. If we had the vital shared sense of well-being that is necessary for our society to socially progress, then white folks would address police brutality tomorrow. There would be no protests & counter-protests. Another level up would be a shared sense of well-being that includes our environment as well.

It is this shared sense of well-being that I wager a lot of “well meaning” white folks are alluding to when they talk about peace & post-racial utopia. But without cultural commensurability- a true understanding of worldview differences- we won’t get there with apathetic prescriptions to “get over it” or nuanced toxic positivity.

I am constantly amazed with how many individuals aren’t aware of the tenets of their respective philosophies. In order to be effective in communicating, let alone educating, we must address & understand our own philosophy, & ideally be able to relay our information across philosophies. If we were computers, our philosophy would be our operating system. We are Apple & PC products — apples & oranges — & we must acknowledge the fundamental differences in worldviews we have. We need to understand this basic recognition isn’t discriminatory. It isn’t automatically bad to perceive differences & it isn’t synonymous with racism itself. Without intentional labor to connect at the level of worldview differences— or to return to the analogy, without programming translation from Apple to PC language— we can’t even begin to work together.

Discourse without an understanding of the opposing worldview has proven pointless. Any progress we’ve made heretofore has depended on savior complexes & detached empathy from white people, along with the ever-backbreaking labor on the part of everyone else.

Consider this, with the advent of colorblindness everything on our outsides and insides was overlooked. Our respective philosophies weren’t accounted for. It’s as though we deliberately pursued the opposite of that which would foster an understanding: cultural commensurability. No matter how keenly a white person tolerates another skin tone, that does nothing to prepare them for accepting other ways of knowing & the arguably larger scope for violence that entails.

Cultural commensurability also addresses the differences in contextual experience. It’s not the same if someone touches a white person’s hair versus a Black person’s hair, or whenever someone is given the compliment of being well-spoken. If a white person & their ancestors never went through institutionalized dehumanization then they have no basis with which to relate to the Black man being profiled.

Often, white folks will tell me reactive arguments of false equivalence such as, “If we can’t understand or speak to the experiences of POC then why do you get to speak on ours?” To which I will first say I am part white. Secondly, POC are inundated in Western philosophy to the point of fully or partially adopting it at times. We’re required to formally learn within its confines for 12–13 years in school before getting the option to pay for several more years of this assimilation at a college or university. Not to mention the lifetime of informal education gained through every aspect of our lives in this society. It is safe to assume POC definitely have a working understanding of whiteness & the corresponding Western philosophy inasmuch as we’ve been forced to master it in order to survive.

As my original assertion states- POC are invested in these issues while white folks have the option of being simply interested- or uninterested. White folks make the mistake of minimizing what’s happening as long as it’s not happening to them & as long as whoever or whatever it’s happening to possesses a lesser degree of humanhood than themselves. And POC make the mistake of appealing to white feelings as though they were ever on our level of investment.

Related posts:

Renub Research has recently released a report named “Olive Oil Market, Size, Global Forecast 2023–2028, Industry Trends, Growth, Share, Outlook, Impact of Inflation, Opportunity Company Analysis”…