Appreciated Shift in Understanding Difference

Dear Elsa Barkley Brown,

First of all, I want to thank you for writing so clearly on such an interesting and novel topic for me. As a white male, it is very easy for me to bucket the concept of the black experience as separate from the concept of the female experience.  While I had previously thought about the existence of difference in experiencing blackness as a female or in experiencing femaleness as an African-American, the concept of relational difference is entirely new to me. I had my aha moment, realizing just how unfamiliar this concept was to me, when I read: “Until women’s historians adequately address difference and the causes for it, they have not and can not adequately tell the history of even white middle-class women.”

My understanding of marginalization and therefore of privilege was, without ever explicating it to myself, more or less that white males had the privilege of living in the unrestricted norm of society and that people of other races and genders had obstacles that formed restrictions to their experiencing the norm of society.  Therefore the goal of a racially just society would be to remove the restrictions faced by people of marginalized identities. Your introduction of the concept of relational differences helped enlighten some of the problems with this way of thinking.

You illustrated this concept with the example of women’s changing relation to the workplace. You argued that white women’s transition to more elite positions in the workplace was enabled by the transition by women of color into service roles. Perhaps this is included in what you meant by service roles, but I also think of the role of nannies in changing women’s role in the workplace. If a woman is to hold a high-demand position in the workplace, chances are a great deal of childcare is done by some kind of nanny. In my experience growing up in California, many of my friends who had nannies had Mexican or Central American nannies. This, to me, also illustrates the concept that a white woman’s ability to enter elite status in the workplace is enabled not only by more open doors in the workplace but also by releasing responsibility in the home, which inherently depends on the experience of whomever took on those responsibilities, which often brings race into the discourse.

In a previous class, we talked about identity and the concept of passing, bringing up the idea that one’s identity is an interactive exchange. In the case of intersecting identities, the multiplicity of one’s identity is realized only insofar as a receiver is able to comprehend the multiplicity of identity. With this in mind, I feel far more able to receive someone’s intersecting identity given the framework of relational differences.

I also have a couple of questions for you. The first is simply what to make of your use of African American culture as a means to learning to think differently. Does the use of your analogy end with the article, or do you intend to use African American culture as a more lasting tool to continue to learn to think differently. If that is the intention, I don’t have a clear enough sense of how I might do that.

The second is what do we do with the understanding of relational difference in action? The fundamental shift in my thinking was as I mentioned above changing my concept of inequality. Whereas I conceived of an unbounded norm and boundaries faced, now I have reshaped my concept of racial differences to include that there are advantages specifically born of the disadvantages of others. This shift gives me more insight into the true difficulty of progress towards a racially just country. It would be easy for a white man to think, “There are no more obstacles for people of color”--even to say, “I acknowledge that I have advantages being a white man.” But it would be very hard to potentially acknowledge that the advantages of being white come from the disadvantages of people of color. This becomes increasingly complicated when you extend the boundaries of the society to be global. I am very curious how you would begin to build a larger structure out of this initial understanding of relational differences and extend it to include not only our country but also others and also to include some kind of framework for action and political ethics.

Many thanks.

Charlie