THE HEARTS AND GUTS OF WHITE PEOPLE Ethics, Ignorance, and the Physiology of White Racism Shannon Sullivan ABSTRACT Beginning with the experience of a white woman’s stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people’s stomachs and hearts. I argue for a nonideal medical theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations. KEY WORDS: race, racism, white privilege, ignorance, physiology, nonideal theory Whites . . . experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing. —Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1998, 93) I recently taught an introductory feminist philosophy class in which I was critically discussing stereotypes of African American women and the virtually all-white class was somewhat grudgingly going along. In the course of the analysis, I mentioned racist stereotypes of African American men as frightening sexual predators and the tense, purse-clutching stride Shannon Sullivan is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism (Indiana University Press, 2001), Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Indiana University Press, 2006), and Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism (SUNY, 2014). Shannon Sullivan, Department of Philosophy, Winningham 103, UNC Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, shannon.w.sullivan@gmail.com. JRE 42.4:591–611. © 2014 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc. 592 Journal of Religious Ethics that white women sometimes adopt when walking alone at night (Staples 1986, 54). As I returned to the main topic for the day, a white female student named Brittney (a pseudonym) quickly raised her hand, stood up, and insisted somewhat confrontationally, “But I am scared of black men! If I pass one on the street at night, I can’t help it. I tense up and get knots in my stomach.” Before I could respond, a perturbed white female teaching assistant (TA) for the course leapt up and, in front of the other one hundred students in the class, severely chastised Brittney for being racist. Brittney then sarcastically retorted, “Oh, so only PC things can be said in this class; I can’t say how I really feel!” Silenced but unconvinced, Brittney then angrily sat down. I will set aside the pedagogical question of how an instructor should best handle classroom situations like the one created by both Brittney’s comment and my TA’s response to it. What I want to focus on here are some of the ethical and epistemological issues surrounding Brittney’s belief that the image of black men as threatening and frightening is real—that is, more than a cultural stereotype—and she “knows” this because of her physiological, affective response to them. She really is scared when she encounters black men, as she might have said. She was not just making it up to try to discriminate against them, and her body proved it. Since nothing is more real or irrefutable than felt physiological responses—unchosen and unwilled, after all—then her body’s alarmed response to black men means that they are frightening. Philosophy has to reckon with that reality, Brittney might have continued, and if it cannot, then it is a load of politically correct crap that is not worth the bother. How should critical philosophers of race respond to claims such as these? More specifically, how might their responses help transform white people’s racist behavior and embodied beliefs, rather than encourage them to cling defensively to the felt certainty of their white privileged experience (as I believe my TA’s response to Brittney did)? This is a difficult task since, as Charles Mills states in the epigraph, white people often are incapable of understanding their behavior as racist due to the white ignorance required by the racial contract. I believe that Brittney genuinely did not see what was morally objectionable about her fear of black men. This is not solely, or perhaps even primarily a cognitive difficulty, however, as I will argue. Like most contemporary white ignorance/ knowledge, her affective “knowledge” that black men are threatening operated primarily on a non-cognitive, bodily level.1 1 In this essay, I will use “cognitive” and “cognition” as they typically are used in mainstream philosophy and in the psychological and cognitive sciences, to mean mental processing, which can be either conscious or non-conscious but which nevertheless concerns mental functioning as distinct from bodily processes and functions (except perhaps for those of the brain). The concept of “cognition” thus tends to operate with a mind-body dualism, The Hearts and Guts of White People 593 While I do not agree with most of what Brittney said or implied, I think she is right that philosophy (and critical race theory more broadly) must reckon with the lived reality of human physiology and affects. And this is so even—or maybe especially?—in the case of politically charged subjects such as white racism. To be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and critical race theory need to examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of white racism, but also its physiological operations. In societies in which de jure Jim Crow has been eliminated, white privilege continues to operate as much, if not more through human biology than through mental beliefs, hidden and “invisible” because it is a product of gut reactions rather than conscious decision or choice.2 In dialogue with Mills, I will argue that white ignorance is more physiological than cognitive and that philosophical appeals to human physiology and biology need not be reductive, as they often historically have been. Critically examining the physiology of white racism can help remove a weapon from the arsenal of white domination by invalidating commonplace and simplistic appeals to biology to justify white supremacy and white privilege. I realize that combining the topics of physiology and biology with those of race and white domination is dangerous. The Western world has a long, destructive history of using biology reductively to justify white supremacy and related forms of oppression. Nazi Germany often is a prime example, but it is important to remember that the United States and many other countries were engaged in eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century (McWhorter 2009). And nineteenth-century scientific practices such as craniology were created precisely for the purpose of proving the inferiority of non-white races (Gould 1981). For these reasons, positive explorations of biology and physiology have tended to be out of the question for contemporary critical philosophy of race and critical race theory. Even if we utilize contemporary medical knowledge of human physiology, we cannot be certain that we are not replicating racist and sexist biases embedded in our time and place. As valid as all these concerns are, however, it would be even more dangerous for critical philosophers of race and critical race theorists to refuse to engage with the disciplines of human physiology and biology.3 To begin, it is not the case that the medical and biological sciences necessarily produce reductive understandings of human existence. The which the account of embodied social processes of knowing presented here attempts to undercut. Rather than give over the term “cognitive” to the dichotomous realm of the mental, it ultimately would be better to transform it so that it did not involve a mind-body split. At this point in history, however, the term “cognitive” tends to be read as referencing the mental divorced from the bodily, and so I avoid it. For more related to this concern, see note 8 below. 2 In contrast with de jure Jim Crow, de facto Jim Crow is alive and well, as Michelle Alexander (2012) demonstrates. 3 See a related argument by Hatemi and McDermott 2011. 594 Journal of Religious Ethics sciences increasingly are operating with sophisticated biopsychosocial understandings of how psyche, body, and environments transact to produce human health and disease (more sophisticated understandings than many philosophers work with, in fact).4 It is also not the case that systems of white supremacy have always heavily relied on biological arguments. Formal apartheid in South Africa (1948–1994), for example, was far more dependent on manufactured beliefs about cultural differences between whites and blacks than on alleged biological hierarchies (Dubow 2010). While it is undeniable that the discipline of biology, along with related fields such as anthropology and evolutionary theory, have a nasty history of promoting white supremacy and white privilege, it can be and sometimes has been untangled from them. In cases where white supremacy relies on alleged cultural or environmental differences, proceeding as if white supremacy and biology are inseparable means that we might be waging the wrong fight.5 And in cases where biology can help us uncover some of the hidden operations of white privilege, dismissing biology as reductively racist means that we might be overlooking a powerful ally in the struggle against white domination. The result of refusing to engage the biological and medical sciences is to concede the domain of human physiology to white racism, and this is a problematic concession to make. It is to give up on any sort of critical understanding of how a person’s physiological responses to the world are constituted, and thus also might be reconstituted for the better. It is, for example, to allow a white woman’s tensed, knotted stomach at the sight of a black man to stand as an allegedly apolitical and “natural” event. Brittney’s affective and physiological responses to black men were indeed real: she felt them, and they should not be dismissed as if they did not occur. She was right about that. But they are not any kind of proof of a supposedly inherent threat posed by black men. Critical philosophy of race needs to be able to explain how both of these claims are true, and doing so requires critically approaching rather than eschewing physiology and biology. When trying to change white people’s racist attitudes and comportments, critical philosophers and other theorists of race often start in the wrong place by focusing on conscious beliefs. We might think, as the early W. E. B. Du Bois did, that if we could just provide accurate information that would eliminate white people’s misconceptions about African Americans, then their mistaken belief in white supremacy would dissolve. And if more information alone is not enough to do the trick, then it can be supplemented with moral injunctions that use guilt and shame to get 4 See, for example, Devroede 2000; Naliboff, Change, Munakata, and Mayer 2000; and Read 2000. 5 Thanks to Robert Bernasconi for helping me think about this point. The Hearts and Guts of White People 595 white people to change their minds about people of color. In either case, faulty beliefs about people of color are the supposed culprits. But as Du Bois himself later realized, white misunderstandings and ignorance of people of color are not accidental, and they are not likely to be changed by moral exhortations. A kind of racial occlusion, they are a product of white people’s unconscious racial habits, which have deep roots and are strongly invested—albeit not consciously—in maintaining the economic, psychological, and global domination of people of color (Du Bois 1984, 296). White occlusions regarding people of color, and of race more broadly, are part of what Mills has called an epistemology of ignorance that enables and even requires white people to know the world in systematically distorted ways (Mills 1998, 18, 93).6 White ignorance is not an accidental feature of the world—although it likes to be understood in this way. If white people’s (mis)understandings of the world seem like a product of happenstance, then they can appear relatively harmless and easy to correct. Sure, one might say, white people might have gaps in their knowledge about people of color, but their ignorance is not significant and does not have any major impact on the world. White ignorance is much more devious and malign than this peaceful description depicts, however. “Imagine,” as Mills urges, “an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge” (Mills 2007, 13). Because white ignorance functions as official knowledge of “invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were—Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos,” it tends to be extremely powerful and effective (Mills 1998, 18–19). It helps produce and secure a white-dominated world that is comfortable for, and flattering to, white people. The epistemic distortions generated by white ignorance thus do not hinder white people. In fact, they are incredibly functional: they allow white people to socially, psychologically, and financially thrive at the expense of people of color (Mills 1998, 18). Yet at the same time, as Mills argues, the distortions of white ignorance morally handicap white people. They produce tremendous obstacles for the ethical behavior of white people, toward people of color in particular but also toward other white 6 See also Sullivan and Tuana 2007. The empirical research on the psychological depths of racial bias provided by the Implicit Association Test (2011) supports Mills’s claims about white ignorance. 596 Journal of Religious Ethics people at times.7 It is not just that the racial contract contains rigorous epistemological clauses, in other words. Its twisted epistemological requirements also entail a particular moral relationship to the world that is highly unethical. The resulting handicap is twofold. Even as they might thrive in other respects, white people are largely incapable of behaving ethically especially with regard to racial matters, and they generally cannot see or understand themselves as unethical and thus they have little chance of changing their behavior for the better. According to Mills, white ignorance is primarily a cognitive dysfunction.8 Even as he insightfully examines the “microspace of the [raced] body” and the perception of black bodies in particular as “moving bubble[s] of wilderness,” white people’s distorted understandings of nonwhite bodies (and the world more generally) are never themselves described as embodied (1998, 51, 53). They are mental. As in the epigraph, Mills invokes the cognitive in claiming that “white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement” (Mills 1998, 19; I italicized “mental” and “cognitive,” all other italics are Mills’s). The inverted epistemology of the racial contract is “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions” requiring “a certain set of structured blindnesses and opacities” (Mills 1998, 18, 19). Those blindnesses are “not, of course, due to biology, the intrinsic properties of [a white person’s] epidermis, or physical deficiencies in the white eye,” but to a pattern of white cognitive (mis)perception that systematically distorts the world for the ends of white domination (Mills 2007, 18). In contrast with Mills, I want to invoke biology—not in the sense that white people have deficiencies in their retinas or optical cones, but in the sense that their racialized blindness can be located in their opacities of their physiology—to understand the operations of white ignorance. This claim appreciates Du Bois’s shift to understanding white domination as unconscious, which in turn resonates strongly with Mills’s vibrant description of white ignorance as aggressive, active, and dynamic. But it pushes further to posit that contemporary white people’s supremacist 7 See Thandeka 2000 on white parents’ “child abuse” of withdrawing love from a white child who does not conform to white supremacy. 8 The same could be said for the Implicit Association Test (2011), which provides empirical data on a number of implicit biases, including racial bias. The IAT’s “effectiveness relies on . . . stored mental content” that enables a process of “mental association” to be made between two things based on their “shared goodness or badness” (Banaji and Greewald, 2013, 39, 37). While the IAT is a valuable tool for investigating cognitive biases, I am concerned that it makes it appear as if all bias is mental (even if non-conscious) and thus that it eclipses the bodily operations of racial bias. The Hearts and Guts of White People 597 understandings of race are located not just in their unconscious habits, but also in their bodily constitution (which of course is related to unconscious habits). Human physiology is where a great deal of supposed non-bodily aspects of human existence is located. Philosophers (and perhaps also others) tend to be ignorant of the physiology of phenomena such as white racism, however, because of their general dismissal of the body. Critical philosophers of race will make better headway against white racism if they acknowledge that it can function physiologically. By “physiologically” I mean something stronger or more specific than the phenomenological claim that white racism is embodied. White racism certainly is manifest in the embodied habits of white (and sometimes also non-white) people, and the phenomenological analysis of racial embodiment has developed helpful understandings of the operations of white privilege and white supremacy.9 As in the case of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, however, phenomenology’s approach to embodiment often is set in opposition to the biological, psychological, and medical sciences, arguing for “a foreswearing of science” because “scientific points of view . . . are always naïve and at the same time dishonest” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, vii, ix). This dismissal is problematic given that white racism is bodily constitutive of more than just white people’s physical comportment, gestures, and styles of interaction with others. White racism also can help shape white people’s biochemical make-up and activities: for example, their serotonin and other neurotransmitter levels, the activity patterns of their autonomic nervous system, their predisposition for gastric tachyarrhythmia, their levels of hormone production, and so on. We might say that the tenets of the racial contract need to be examined not just morally and epistemologically, but also biologically. To be fully effective, critical philosophy of race needs to be in conversation with the medical sciences: neurobiologists, gastroenterologists, psychoneuroimmunologists, and other medical and health professionals who understand human biology and physiology well. What then do we learn from these conversations? The main focus of the medical sciences when they study race and racism tends to be on the detrimental health effects of racial discrimination and oppression for people of color. For example, hypertension, high blood pressure, poor cardiovascular activity, and other physiological conditions associated with increased mortality rates have been linked with incidents of racial hostility and socioeconomic stress experienced by African Americans and other racial minorities in the United States (Ryff and Singer 2003; see also Williams 1999). Interestingly, what is never discussed to my knowledge is the flipside of this research’s conclusions, namely that the relatively good health of many white Americans—lower incidence of hypertension, high 9 See for example, Alcoff 1998 and 2006; Sullivan 2006; and Yancy 2008. 598 Journal of Religious Ethics blood pressure, and so on—can be considered a product of white privilege rather than a neutral or “normal” physiological condition. (I will return to this flipside shortly.) While white people sometimes are mentioned as a racial group in medical studies, they virtually never are discussed as a group of people who systematically benefit, medically and otherwise, from their race. Categories of race sometimes are used in the medical and life sciences, in other words, and occasionally even racism is acknowledged as a problem that people of color confront,10 but the topic of white domination’s effect on white people is largely absent. And yet it hovers in the margins of at least some scientific studies, which makes it possible to hypothesize about the operations of white privilege and domination in the physiology of white people.11 Take the example of nausea, a queasy or tense feeling in the stomach that is a control mechanism inhibiting food intake and sometimes producing vomiting. What is interesting about this control mechanism is that it is not merely physiological. It also is psychological and, as psychologist R. M. Stern explains, “it [sometimes] occurs in threatening situations that have little to do with eating” (2002, 590). While perhaps initially puzzling, this characteristic of nausea turns out to make sense: when threatened, the body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity changes in ways that decrease or even stop gastric motor activity (Stern 2002, 590). The stomach and intestines stop digesting their contents, in other words, and so it is not a good idea to keep putting food into them. In the face of a threat—which can be a toxic piece of food, or it can be a threat having nothing to do with food whatsoever—the body has a control mechanism to keep the stomach and intestines empty while they are not functioning. While the different nausea thresholds of white, Chinese, and African American people are briefly discussed in Stern’s study, topics of racism and white domination are never explicitly broached. The non-food-related “threats” that are mentioned in the study are public speaking and acting in a play. But the specific phenomenon of threat is used to explain the psychophysiology of nausea, and I suggest that racial threats, both real and perceived, fall into the category of menacing situations that can contribute to nausea. When a person feels threatened because of a racial situation, her physiology can be altered: chemical levels can change, 10 See, for example, two neonatologists’ 1991 call for “a shift of focus from ‘race’ to ‘racism’” in studies of racial health differences (David and Collins, Jr., 1991, 240), and the 2007 claim that recent studies on race and health disparities increasingly are “unmask[ing] racism as a bona fide public health problem” (Drexler 2007). 11 It also makes it important to call for more explicit scientific research on the biopsychosocial dimensions of white domination, just as scientists in the past fifteen years have very productively examined the role of gender, male privilege, and sexual assault in functional gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome. On the latter topic, see Devroede 2000 and Naliboff, Change, Munakata, and Mayer 2000. The Hearts and Guts of White People 599 gastromotor activity can cease impacting the absorption of nutrients that help constitute her flesh, bones and blood, etc. This is true for anyone in a threatening racial situation, whatever his or her race. Although I am focusing here on white people, such as Brittney, who experience themselves as racially threatened, I must underscore that historically and presently white people themselves are the primary group that poses a threat to other people. White people almost exclusively are the terrorizing force that uses race to menace people of color, not the other way around. I am not, in other words, flattening the racial terrain with a turn to white people’s physiology, nor am I equating a perceived threat (for example, of black men experienced by Brittney) with a real threat (for example, of white lynchers). What I am claiming is that white domination has different but nonetheless constitutive effects on the biology of white people and people of color and that the end of white domination will require not just significant financial, legal, educational, and political changes, but also psychophysiological transformations. White people’s mistreatment of people of color as inherently inferior is found in all kinds of registers, not just the physiological, but it manifests itself in the latter domain too. As long as white women’s stomachs seize up in fear of black men, we know that white privilege and white supremacy continue to “invisibly” thrive. The hidden physiological dimensions of white privilege—in this case, specifically white class privilege—also can be found in recent neurocardiological research on the heart. This claim may seem puzzling since, as mentioned above, the benefits of white privilege to white health are never discussed to my knowledge in any current neurocardiological studies. To see white privilege at work in them, one must read with an eye for something that, in a significant respect, is not there. This does not mean, however, that white privilege is a foreign topic being artificially inserted into the research. It is not the case, as the familiar accusation goes, that white racism never would have been an issue if the critical philosopher of race (or person of color) had not introduced it.12 Something like a gestalt shift is necessary; we need to change what we are looking for when we read. As we will see, while the study examined below says nothing about the health effects of white privilege for middle and upper class white people, the topic simultaneously is included, written with the very same words that do not speak of it. Dubbed the “heart brain” because of its sophisticated intrinsic nervous system, which “enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain,” the heart affects not just the body’s autonomic regulation, but also its emotional processing (McCraty 12 Many nonwhite people and probably every critical philosopher of race have been accused of this at least once. For an example in print, see Yancy 2012, 138. 600 Journal of Religious Ethics and Childre 2004, 232). Afferent neuronal signals travel from the heart to the brain, affecting the central nucleus of the amygdala, which is a key emotional center (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233, 235). This means that folk associations of the heart with love, compassion, and spirituality can be understood as more than metaphorical or figurative (McCraty and Childre 2004, 230). These other-directed emotions and states of being are associated with both an appreciative openness to the world and a complementary sense that the world is open to you. Both experiences of openness, moreover, are correlated with a physically healthy heart brain. A heart brain that is functioning optimally is the physical manifestation of an open relationship to the world. Evidence of the heart brain’s optimal functioning can be found in the rhythms and patterns of a person’s heart rate, as indicated by its tachograms (indicating heartbeats per minute) and its power spectral density (indicating the frequency, or the specific electric current, of the beating heart) (McCraty and Childre 2004, 237). Consider three different cases: one of negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, or anger; a more neutral case of relaxation; and finally a case of positive emotions such as appreciation. As we will see, the terms “negative” and “positive” here correspond with the harmful or beneficial physiological effects of various emotional states. For example, when a person is angry, her heart rate tends to be fast, erratic, and characterized by rhythms in the low frequency band of the power spectrum (0.0033–0.04 hertz). This type of heart rate decreases parasympathetic activity in the ANS (autonomic nervous system), which is significant because the parasympathetic branch of the ANS regulates sleeping, digesting, and other bodily activities associated with rest and relaxation (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233). If the balance in the ANS tips too often away from the parasympathetic and toward the sympathetic branch, the latter of which stimulates “fight or flight” responses to danger, the body does not have enough time or energy to renew and repair itself. The result of this imbalance tends to be health problems associated with chronic anxiety and stress, such as cardiovascular disease and antecedent conditions such as hypertension (Malpas 2010). In contrast, when a person is relaxed and not angry, her heart rate pattern tends to be relatively slow, less erratic, and marked by increased power in the high frequency band (0.15–0.4 hertz). Correspondingly, parasympathetic activity in the brain also increases (McCraty and Childre 2004, 237). The sympathetic branch of the ANS should not be thought of as simply opposed to the parasympathetic branch, however. The relationship between the two branches actually is one of complementarity since the constant, basic activity of the sympathetic branch is crucial to the body’s ability to maintain its internal stability (homeostasis). Thus, the ideal physiological situation is for the two branches to be synchronized, and this The Hearts and Guts of White People 601 takes place when the heart rate is highly ordered and smooth. This type of heart rate tends to occur when a person feels positive emotions such as appreciation. When a person experiences the emotion of appreciation or gratitude, her parasympathetic activity increases and coordinates with the activities of the sympathetic branch. The rhythms of the appreciative heart are not identical to those of the relaxed heart, however. While both are marked by increased parasympathetic activity in comparison to the angry heart, the appreciative heart oscillates at a different frequency (0.04–0.14 hertz, centering around 0.1), one that allows better resonance and coherence across different physiological systems. When a person feels grateful or appreciative, her entire biological system tends to pulse in smooth coordination with itself. The result of such synchronization is health benefits such as “increased efficiency in fluid exchange, filtration and absorption between the capillaries and tissues” and other physiological changes that increase “systemwide energy efficiency and metabolic energy savings” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 238). Sometimes this event is described subjectively as an experience of increased “flow,” of clarity, creativity and invigoration in which blockages and barriers in one’s life have (at least temporarily) dissolved (McCraty and Childre 2004, 231–32). The feeling is one of possibilities opening up, along with the physical and emotional energy to pursue them. As a corresponding study argues, while negative emotions “narrow people’s ideas about possible actions,” positive emotions “widen the scope of attention, broaden repertoires of desired actions, . . . and increase openness to new experiences” (Fredrickson 2008, 450). This can be a spiritual experience for some, in which one feels an increased connection with other people and the world at large. Whether spiritual or not, however, positive emotions such as appreciation have been linked scientifically to increased physiological efficiency, “substantiat[ing] what many people have long intuitively known: positive emotions bolster one’s ability to meet life’s challenges with grace and ease, optimize cognitive capacities, sustain constructive and meaningful relationships with others, and foster good health” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 249). So, the primary study’s authors ask, why are not more people doing something to pursue positive emotions on a day-to-day basis? Their answer provides a trigger for the gestalt shift needed to reveal white class privilege: Why do genuine positive emotional experiences remain transient and unpredictable occurrences for most people? We propose that a main factor underlying this discrepancy is a fundamental lack of mental and emotional self-management skills. In other words, people generally do not make efforts to actively infuse their daily experiences with greater emotional quality because they sincerely do not know how. (McCraty and Childre 2004, 241) 602 Journal of Religious Ethics The authors proceed to offer a number of feedback techniques, or “interventions,” that can improve emotional experience by increasing awareness of and altering heart rates and frequencies. These can be sophisticated “heart math” techniques or as simple as deep breathing exercises, which modulate the heart’s rhythm and thus can change one’s emotionalneurological state (McCraty and Childre 2004, 243–46, 236). The authors’ suggestions are intriguing, and in many respects their overall research program integrating emotions, cardio-physiology, and neurology is both medically and philosophically important. It provides a concrete example of how to non-reductively appreciate the medicalphysiological aspects of human emotional life. But it is woefully focused on the individual isolated from the social-political world, which enables the authors to offer extremely whitewashed guidance for improving human emotional-cardio health. By “whitewashed,” I mean saturated with white class privilege. Whether or not the authors are white or come from class privileged backgrounds (I do not know, nor is it necessarily important to know), their interventions implicitly address only the emotional-cardio difficulties of middle- and upper-class white human beings, and exclude those of non-white people. They focus on people who are not regular targets of white racism and who do not daily benefit from the “invisible” ease and comfort in life provided by white class privilege. In that way, the authors’ suggestions suffer from white solipsism, erasing or ignoring the lives and health of those who are not white. To better see the white class privilege at work in this study, let us consider an all-too-common experience for African Americans of being presumed to be criminal. George Yancy powerfully describes the phenomenon of hearing the click of a car door being locked by a white person inside when he or she sees a black person on the street. Much more than just a simple sound, the click is “part of a racial and racist web of significance” that constructs “the occupants’ sense of themselves as ‘safe’ (and white) [which] is purchased at the expense of denigrating the black body as unsafe” (Yancy 2012, 31). If the clicks could speak, we could hear them establish the ontological stability and epistemological credibility of white identity: “Click (innocent) . . . Click (reliable). Click (our white space) . . . Click (civilized). Click (law abiding)” (Yancy 2012, 31). White people’s security and comfort is established in opposition to the dangerous black person, “fragment[ing] my existence and cut[ting] away at my integrity,” as Yancy explains (Yancy 2012, 33). The same clicks proclaiming white goodness simultaneously tell him and all black people—for they too can hear the clicks outside the car—that they are subpersons: “Click (thug), click (criminal), click (thief)” and, ultimately, “Click, click, click, click, click (nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger)” (Yancy 2012, 33). This is not an isolated or atypical experience for black people in the United States. In addition to the clicking experience, there is the elevator The Hearts and Guts of White People 603 effect—again powerfully described by Yancy—in which white women alone on an elevator visibly tense up when a black man gets on board (Yancy 2008, 5). As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay, Brent Staples also writes of the handbag-clutching march white women assume when they see him on the street (Staples 1986, 54). Cornel West documented his experience with the police when he was Driving While Black, that is, stopped three times in ten days for driving too slowly in an upscale residential area (Yancy 2012, 44–45; see also West 1993, x–xi). And on the flipside, Tim Wise, a white man, describes the surprise on a white police officer’s face when Wise rolled down the darkened window of his beat-up, anti-David-Dukebumper-stickered car when he was stopped for no apparent reason (discussed in Yancy 2012, 45–46; see also Wise 2005, 39). As the shocked officer fumbled to find an explanation for pulling Wise over, it was clear to Wise that he was targeted because his car marked him as black. Finally, there is the corresponding, ubiquitous experience of black people’s being tailed by store clerks or plainclothes officers when they do their shopping. As Yancy explains, the “presumptive innocence” granted to white people spares them this unnerving and infuriating experience. A white person “can walk into stores [or drive down the street] without anyone doubting the integrity of his [or her] character and intentions” (Yancy 2012, 164). These incidents might seem (to white people) minor, even trivial—after all, there are no physical or legal obstacles to a black person’s entering an elevator or a store, for example, and traveling to the desired floor or making the needed purchases. What is the big deal about an unfriendly clerk or an uptight elevator companion? The answer is that in the cumulative effect of seemingly small details such as these lies a particular world that black people are forced to inhabit, one that is substantially different than the world inhabited by white people. The worlds of white and black people are not always, or perhaps ever the same, even though black and white people might inhabit (sometimes, anyway) the same physical space. “To be white in a white world,” as Yancy reveals, “is to be extended by that world’s contours. The world opens up, reveals itself as a place called home, a place of privileges and immunities, a space for achievement, success, freedom of movement” (Yancy 2012, 45). The world generally is not open to black people in this way. Even when they are not, for example, tailed by a clerk or stopped by a cop on a given day, the possibility that they could be is ever present, adding to every excursion into the public sphere an element of anxiety. As Yancy explains, black people are “exposed to a daily enactment of white racialized drama” that undercuts their efforts to “secur[e] existential and psychological safety in a white racist world” (Yancy 2012, 156). Whether in a store, at work or school, or merely walking down the street, they do not get to arrive on the scene as white people do, “with socially fortified . . . identities that are certain of who they are” and whose “psychic integrity” is not 604 Journal of Religious Ethics at risk (Yancy 2012, 131). As a result, even though explicit Jim Crow laws have long been removed from the books in the United States, the American world is not a smooth space of easy passage for black people in the way that it generally is for white people. The world presents obstacles to black people at just about every turn. Even though the obstacles are not physical, their effects can be. Kim Anderson, an African American lawyer, captures this point well as she explains her experience being tailed: So nobody, when I walk in a store, nobody says, “Oh, that’s Kim Anderson, African-American, female lawyer, went to Columbia,” they just see a black woman. I was in a store once, just walking around thinking I was going to buy a pair of jeans. This clerk’s following me around. So I said, “Why are you following me around? I’m not going to steal anything. Leave me alone. I’m not going to take something.” When you’re confronted with racism, that covert racism, your stomach just gets so tight. You can feel it almost moving through your body; almost you can feel it going into your bloodstream. (Quoted in California Newsreel 2008, 7) We should understand Anderson’s last point literally. When she describes white racism coursing through the veins and tissues of her body, she is right. It is highly likely that the emotional tension she felt in the store was simultaneously a physiological event in which cortisol and other stress-related hormones elevated her heart rate and stimulated the sympathetic branch of her ANS (Boyles 2010). The “outside” of the social world cannot be sharply divided from the “inside” her body. The racism “outside” Anderson’s body simultaneously was “inside,” altering her heart brain (for the worse in this case). So, giving a twist to the study’s central question, why do not (black) people more often cultivate positive emotions and better heart health? The answer that critical philosophers of race can provide is not that black people do not have sufficient emotional self-management skills. That answer, frankly, is both mind-boggling in its obtuseness and insulting to people of color. It is that black people are constantly battling white racism. The primary “intervention” needed to improve African American’s affective-cardio health thus is not heart rhythm feedback training, but interrupting white domination. This is not to deny that stressmanagement techniques might be helpful to black people, but they only treat the symptom, not the real problem—which is white people and their institutional and interpersonal habits of white supremacy and white privilege. Once one acknowledges the ongoing existence of white racism, the “invisible” theme of white class privilege in this study becomes apparent: the affective-physiological body addressed in it is a body that does not have to worry about the daily stresses, hassles, and microaggressions of post-civil-rights white racism. It is a middle-to-upper-class The Hearts and Guts of White People 605 white body with the affective-cardio problems typical of middle- and upper-class white people. Of course, white people of all classes can suffer from chronic stress and associated negative emotions, and it is important to mark differences in white health across class and wealth lines. Poor and lower-class white people generally do not experience the same existential and financial comfort that middle- and upper-class white people do. But as Kim Anderson’s comments in particular illustrate, the class-race privilege in question here cannot be reduced to class. Across a number of health problems, racial differences between black and white Americans in particular persist even after adjusting for differences in socioeconomic status (Williams, Yu, Jackson, and Anderson 1997; Lu and Halfon 2003, 14). Both educationally and financially, as lawyers and university professors, Anderson, West, and Yancy all have the cultural and economic capital to count as middle-class (or perhaps higher). Nevertheless, their class status is not enough to protect them from racial harassment or to provide them with socially fortified and respected identities. In contrast, the health problems of poor and lower-class white people occur against a backdrop of relative existential and psychological security provided by their whiteness, even if their level of security is significantly lower than that of middle- and upper-class white people.13 Poor and lower-class white people might be anxious, frustrated, or angry because of, for example, their job or their life prospects, but their status as a full person is not subtly and constantly put into question solely because of their race.14 Is that not a good thing, however? Is it not an important ideal of racial justice struggles that no one should be oppressed because of his or her race? One might object that the body in this study is not a specifically raced or classed body, but a general body relevant to the ideal health of all people. In a world free of race and class oppression—a world to be embraced by critical philosophers of race, after all—questions of affective-cardio health will still arise and need to be addressed. Especially given medicine’s racist past (and present), should we not welcome a medical perspective that treats all people as equal, demonstrating how everyone can benefit from heart rhythm feedback and other heart brain health techniques? The answer is no—not because black people should be treated as subpersons, but because this objection does not give sufficient weight to the current reality that they often are treated as such. To consider the body in this study as a non-raced, general body is to operate with something like ideal theory, when what is needed instead is nonideal 13 See Du Bois’s classic analysis of the social and psychological wages of whiteness for poor and working class white people in Du Bois 1995, especially 700–1. 14 For more on class, race, and the white middle class use of “white trash” to perpetuate white domination of people of color, see Sullivan 2014, especially 23–58. 606 Journal of Religious Ethics theory. As Mills explains, in the realm of political philosophy “ideal theory asks what justice demands in a perfectly just society while nonideal theory asks what justice demands in a society with a history of injustice” (Mills 2008, 1384–85). Both theories hold that justice is important, but ideal political theory explores its requirements and limitations in a society in which racism somehow is not at issue or in which adequate mechanisms to deal with racism are assumed to already be in place. Nonideal political theory, in contrast, acknowledges that society is not (yet) just and then, from that starting point, analyzes what would be needed to bring about greater justice. The difference between the two theories is profound. By dismissing existing injustices as theoretically unimportant, ideal political theory tends to perpetuate them, undercutting its own (alleged) goal of understanding and promoting a more just world. While “nonideal theory is concerned with corrective measures, with remedial or rectificatory justice,” the misnamed ideal theory “is in crucial respects obfuscatory, and can indeed be thought of as in part ideological, in the pejorative sense of a set of group ideas that reflect, and contribute to perpetuating, illicit group privilege” (Mills 2008, 1385; 2005, 166). Likewise we could say that ideal medical theory asks what good health demands in a perfectly healthy society. Nonideal medical theory, in contrast, asks what good health demands in a society with a substantial past and present of systematically damaging the health of some of its members. Both theories have healthiness as their goal, but the difference in their starting points is radical. It is the difference between recognizing or ignoring that systematic health inequalities exist and often impede medical efforts to augment good health. The ignorance of ideal medical theory is not benign, nor is it accidental even though it might not have been consciously constructed. It interferes with remedial or rectificatory health measures, and in that way it is ideological, perpetuating the ongoing health problems of people of color by neglecting corrective measures—racial justice—that would do the most to improve nonwhite health. The upshot here is that just as white racism often courses through the bodies of people of color, damaging their health, white privilege courses through the bodies of white people, furnishing a baseline of security and comfort that subtends their good health. This baseline furthermore contributes to a false universalization of white health as human health, as if white people’s psychophysiological experience in the (white) world were “neutral” and available to all people. Their lower rates of cardiovascular disease, for example, tend to be seen as normal, and the higher rates of cardiovascular disease for African Americans as deviations from the norm. In contrast, I am arguing that neither rate is normal or neutral. This means not just the relatively easy acknowledgement that African American heart health is the specific product of white racism—as, slowly, the medical sciences are beginning to admit—but also the more difficult The Hearts and Guts of White People 607 acknowledgment (for white people) that white heart health is the specific product of white domination. Eliminating white racism and white domination would impact not just nonwhite, but also white health. More specifically, nonwhite health would improve and—here will be the difficult medicine for many white people to swallow—white health might deteriorate in comparison to its current state. While this might sound alarming (to white people), one must remember that the current state of white health is the product of unjust privilege. In other words, the term “deteriorate” is accurate here only when measuring the change against the norm of white domination. When that norm is removed—that is, when white people cannot use white privilege to bolster their health—then the nature of any comparison necessarily will change. Perhaps a new norm for health will be needed and created, and the health of all people can be measured against it. I am not sure if that would be necessary or desirable. But in any case, white people’s specific existential experience should no longer be able to establish the physiological, medical standard for others.15 The whiteness of this standard tends to be invisible to white people, and thus it contributes to white people’s ignorance of the very world that they built, as Mills has argued (Mills 1998, 18–19). White people tend to be incapable of recognizing the injustice that lies at the heart of their physiology (pun intended), and this ignorance is crucial to the ongoing operation of white domination. White people can believe that they are good people and take for granted their relative good health, all the while enjoying the unjust physiological and other benefits of their racial privilege. When they have difficulty giving up these assumptions and habits— which they almost always do—we need to query not just their cognitive beliefs but also their hearts and guts (pun intended once again). Because white ignorance operates courtesy of the hormones, tissues, and fibers of white people’s bodies, eliminating white domination necessarily will alter their physiological functioning. In closing, let me underscore that last point: a turn to physiology and biology by critical philosophers of race and critical race theorists does not entail fatalism. Bluntly put, white people are not necessarily doomed to repeating patterns of white domination even though their bodies are suffused with it. Sometimes it is assumed that human culture and habits are easy to change while human biology and physiology are not. I think that both aspects of this assumption are significantly mistaken. In addition to implying that culture and biology are entirely separate domains, this assumption is far too sanguine about the prospects for cultural change. On the one hand, both individual and institutional habits, whether raced or not, can be extremely durable, stubborn, and difficult to 15 As, of course, it long has. See, once again, Gould 1981. 608 Journal of Religious Ethics alter (see, for example, Sullivan 2006). On the other hand, it is not the case that human beings of any race are determined by their physiology, for example, due to the “programming” provided by their genes.16 Human being’s bodily states and conditions, including their psychophysiological health, are somewhat malleable rather than fixed. Human physiology admittedly might be as difficult to transform and improve as human culture, but neither aspect of human existence is completely rigid or frozen. This is why we can respond to my student Brittney with a kind of affirmation, rather than merely hostile attack. Yes, your frightened gut response to the black man on the street is real, you really felt that, but your stomach’s reaction is the beginning of the story, not the end. It is the psychophysiological symptom of a socio-political problem, not irrefutable evidence of a racially hierarchical reality. Likewise, white people’s relatively low rates of stress-related diseases are also a sign of white domination, not a “neutral” medical condition to which all people should aspire. This does not mean that we should not try to improve the health of people of color or, alternatively, that we should neglect the health of white people. (It also does not mean that white people will happily or easily give up their gut belief in white superiority. Even when care is taken not to trigger white people’s defense mechanisms, their grip on white privilege tends to be tenacious.) What it means is recognizing that our current understanding of what constitutes good health is fundamentally shaped by white supremacy and white privilege. As a whitedominated society, we have not yet thought through the former apart from the latter. To undertake that process, we need to explore further: how did a white woman’s physiology come to be in a state such that her stomach seized up when she saw a black man, and how might her reaction to this and similar situations be changed? More broadly, how can our ideas about optimal human health be rethought critically, free of the dictates of white domination? The answer to these questions cannot be one that reductively appeals to physiology—there is no anti-racism pill being suggested here as a solution, nor is the solution to try to isolate the medical and biological sciences from socio-political matters. But the answer also should not ignore physiology. 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