Like the robot in a movie slowly discovering that it is, indeed, a robot, it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware. It’s one of the strange byproducts of the Obama era that many white people have begun to understand themselves in the explicit terms of identity politics, long the province of those on the margins. The nature of whiteness isn’t a new discussion, by any means, but it has never seemed quite so animated. There are the honest accounts of privilege and pride, shame and tears, what it means to be an ally or aggressor, the newly casual way that “white supremacy” gets dropped into everyday conversation. But there are also the online manifestos, the anxieties over census figures, and the controversies over the Confederate flag and the defensively prideful who refuse to feel badly about their white skin.
In this peculiar context, MTV recently premièred a short documentary titled “White People.” It follows the journalist and immigration-rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas as he meets a series of good-natured white people in fish-out-of-water racial tableaus. There are conversations at the dinner table and in school cafeterias, conversations that look more like interventions. It’s an eclectic bunch: the chummy Southerner from an all-white town who inexplicably attends a historically black college; the white teachers at an Indian reservation who had never before experienced the feeling of being outnumbered; the white girl who blames her failure to nab a college scholarship on affirmative action; the open-minded son of Italian immigrants skeptical about all the strange new Chinese immigrants. Throughout it all, Vargas is our able guide, part inquisitor and part instigator, prodding these white people and their wondrous presuppositions, arching his brow whenever someone says something “problematic.”
“White People” now lives online, part of the network’s broader “Look Different” campaign to spark an ongoing conversation about diversity and tolerance among its viewers. It’s easy to dismiss “White People” as superficial or, worse yet, naïve; all of its epiphanies feel safe and stage-managed, largely because each of the set pieces is presented as a problem to be solved. And, save for a stubborn old man who attends but can’t quite wrap his head around his stepson’s white-privilege workshop, Vargas always finds a way to persuade his white people to see things differently. Sometimes it’s with the assistance of a quick history lesson or a handy statistic about who really benefits from college scholarships; other times, it’s just an invitation to reckon with the person sitting across the table. Time and again, the answer involves consciousness, that internal switch that gets flipped, changing one’s perspective forever. But what if awareness isn’t enough?
Now more than ever, we are skeptical about progress on so micro a level: the promise of friendship, the idea that mere exposure to difference is enough. This isn’t to dismiss the life-changing effect these interactions might have on our lives or the baseline of dignity demanded by movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s just to say that interracial good vibes alone probably aren’t the basis for visionary social policy. It’s barely the premise for compelling television.
One of the notable things about “White People,” then, is the mere fact that it exists. Of course, there are larger philosophical questions lingering beneath such a show—for example, should it bother us that the corporate embrace of diversity is often driven by risk analysis and public relations rather than a desire for true social change? I kept wondering what it would have been like if these kids had turned their attention toward the camera itself, not necessarily to point out the artifice for what it was but to muse about the role that MTV or the Internet played in shaping their views. After all, for a few generations, in the eighties and nineties, MTV was where one turned to access difference. Typical viewers may not be rushing in large numbers to have serious discussions about race, but race is on the edges of all our conversations about culture. How do they feel, say, about Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj’s recent flare-up about the V.M.A.s?
As I watched “White People,” I fantasized about all the other, far more oblivious-seeming white people I would rather hear from than these fairly bright young kids, who had, after all, agreed to appear in a film called “White People.” A pleasant dinner shared by a young man’s home-town friends (white) and school chums (black) is set ablaze when a white girl utters the term “ghetto” as a gesture of solidarity. It is roundly rejected. So much of the show, a microcosm of the world it seeks to represent, rests on elements like these: tone, enunciation, or a miscast glance held a second too long. I found myself wondering where Vargas, a Filipino-American famous for disclosing his status as an undocumented immigrant, saw himself in these discussions. It’s strange, for instance, that the film's participants never confide in or confess to him, the way they might try to relate to him if he were black or white.
To say “White People” doesn’t go far enough, though, seems like a way of saying that it doesn’t make its subjects feel bad enough for being white. But the returns on this investment ultimately do seem pretty limited. During one of the town-hall scenes, a young Asian-American guy remarks that not a day passes when he doesn’t think about his identity. It is part of a larger point he’s moving toward, but a white guy sitting across the room can’t fathom the premise: “Do you actually wake up … and that’s in the front of your mind?” This white guy comes across as the producers’ handpicked “proud Southerner,” and his disbelief—or maybe it’s disdain—could not have been more earnest.
It is, as they say, a teachable moment. Yet it’s hard to imagine where this conversation—where the promise of empathy or the silver lining of shame—could possibly go. This isn’t to fault an hour-long MTV documentary for failing to heal America’s racial divide. But the show, emblematic of one version of our "conversation on race," presumes that the solution is conversational. The problem with dwelling on the sullen vibes or narcissistic guilt spirals of white people is that feelings can change with relative ease. The scenes of American injustice that we see on a regular basis are not failures of people being insufficiently nice to one another. They are about the legacies and structures that hem in our choices, that define the circumference of our imaginations, that trigger our personal gut reaction to the very word “dream.” They are about those whom the truth cannot set free. We can control and harness our feelings. I have no idea how to destroy and rebuild our institutions.
