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How White People Process Being Called Out
Why is it so hard for white folks to be wrong?
If there’s one thing white people have (hopefully) come to understand over the last month, it’s that we have a lot to learn about anti-Black racism and a long way to go to achieve racial equity in this country.
White folks are also discovering how uncomfortable it is to be called out as wrong — whether we’re being told that a comment we made was racist or that we shouldn’t center ourselves in the conversations around #BlackLivesMatter on social media.
All of this begs the questions: Why is it so hard for white folks to be wrong? And how can we learn to be receptive to ideas that are new (to us at least)? To answer these, it helps to understand why we feel the need to be right all the time, and how that righteousness can hold us back from being white anti-racists.
Why we feel the need to be right
No matter the subject, no one likes being wrong — whether you’re white or BIPOC. Perhaps this is because it goes against our hardwiring as humans. “Our need to feel like we’re right can be traced to prehistoric times,” explains psychologist Mark Leary, PhD, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “In order to survive, we had to think we knew what was going on and what the right thing to do was (i.e., which trail to follow for food). If we thought everything we believed was wrong, we’d be paralyzed by indecision and doubt.” That indecision could translate to an inability to act, which means you starve to death or get eaten by a bear.
We’ve been taught to think of racism as “individual acts of meanness” rather than an invisible system that confers dominance to one group.
In modern times, we all still have this inclination to think we’re right and latch on to our beliefs — even when they don’t serve us or anyone else. Leary suggests that this may be because we’re uncomfortable with uncertainty. “We don’t like wondering: What should I do? What should I believe? Who should I trust?” he explains. “It gives us an uneasy feeling that we want to get rid of so we can make a decision and move on.”
