Whitesplain It To Me

Dear Curious Minds,

I am trying to become familiar with not working for someone else. I knew I’d have way less time as a writer, finding my feet in the media industry, trying to figure things out. But it’s really the household chores that take up more of my brain space and physical energy. I forget (and I think my family also forgets) that my energy suddenly drops out of nowhere, post-cancer. My family joked that robots might replace a lot of human work in a few years, but I know better; it’s going to be cheaper to use humans (cough, women as unpaid labour, cough) for these household chores for a very long time. To find my safe den, I left the cluttered rooms behind and drove to my writing studio. This is my feminist win for the day. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.

I went to see H.R. The Musical for the second time last week, this time as a fundraiser show. If you haven’t seen it: Amy Mansfield has written and produced a sketch musical about corporate life that is funnier than corporate life has any right to be. I had the privilege of working with her earlier this year with other writers, and gosh, her comic timing is incisive. I wish the H.R the Musical team every success at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this year.

There’s a number in the show called ‘Mansplain It to Me’. The first time I saw it, I laughed with the whole room. The room definitely recognised the black comedy of the Disney-princessesque distress; the one that comes out slightly louder than intended because it’s carrying twenty years of meetings with it.

Last week, though, I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because I was doing the maths on my recent months and adapting the song in my head to the version I needed. Mine would be called ‘Whitesplain It to Me’.

Mansplaining, as a genre, is condescension about competence. A man explains your own job to you, your own research, the thing you have extensive qualifications in, and he has decided to record a podcast about. We laugh because it is so insulting, but the insult has a floor: he thinks you don’t know something.

Whitesplaining is condescension about existence. The subject matter being explained back to you is you. Your history. Your culture. Your experience of racism, delivered with patronising corrections with a smile, by someone whose entire evidentiary base is confidence. The mansplainer thinks you can’t possibly have read the academic reports. The whitesplainer thinks you haven’t read your own life living in your own skin.

And the tell is always the same: the explanation arrives pre-forgiven. It comes wrapped in reasonableness, in devil’s advocacy, in ‘I just think we need to consider all perspectives, I’m sure it’s different for everyone’ — as though my perspective were the one that had been over-represented in the room for the last hundred and eighty years and could stand to budge up a bit.

I could give you specific incidents, but the pattern is more honest than any single scene, so here is the supercut instead.

A white person (let’s keep them composite, they’d only be flattered by individuation) is explaining racism to me. Not defending it, exactly. Explaining it. The register is patient, faintly pedagogical, the tone of someone walking a first-year through supply and demand. The behaviours I’ve named, they tell me, have rational drivers. It’s just how they are, and them not wanting to mix with those people has nothing to do with race. It’s more complicated than it looks, they say, and what they mean is: more complicated than you’ve understood it to be.

At no point has this person asked what I do. This is the structural feature of the genre: the explanation never runs a background check. So they don’t know that social psychology and behavioural science are, literally, my academic training to postgraduate level. They don’t know I then spent fifteen-plus years inside organisations working on exactly these behaviours, professionally, with outcomes attached. And underneath all of that, apparently inadmissible: thirty years of living as a visibly Asian migrant in a Pākehā-dominant society, which is thirty years of longitudinal data collection I never got to opt out of.

I am, in other words, being given the involuntary tutorial by someone who doesn’t know I wrote the course. The wild part isn’t the ignorance. It’s that my expertise never occurred to them as a possibility, because in these conversations, expertise on racism defaults to whoever is most comfortable discussing it.

What I was actually chewing on, second time around: H.R. The Musical works because HR the department doesn’t. That’s the whole engine of the satire. The show can name, in song, with jazz hands, patterns that would get you labelled ‘difficult’ if you named them in an actual meeting, in prose, without accompaniment. Comedy is the last remaining venue where the pattern is admissible as evidence.

There’s another number in the show, the CEO song ‘Okay So I’m White,’ and watching an audience laugh at that one would be its own field study. Everybody laughs. But there are two laughs in the room, and they are not the same laugh. One is: ha, I have met this man. The other is: ha, thank God this man is fictional and definitely not me. In the dimly lit theatre, it’s hard to discern the difference. But I bet it’s there, the same way you can’t see which audience members will go back to work on Monday and explain to a colleague of colour why the thing that happened to her wasn’t what she thinks it was.

This is the genre’s signature question, and it’s doing far more work than its innocent little face suggests.

On the surface, it’s an appeal to rigour. Careful now. Let’s not generalise. Correlation, causation, sample sizes, the whole epistemics cosplay. And I’d respect it as rigour if the standard were applied symmetrically but it is not.

When a white individual behaves badly towards me, I’m invited, well required, really, to consider that they were an exception. One bad apple, one bad day, one misread tone. Their behaviour is quarantined from any pattern before I’ve finished describing it. The quarantine is automatic. It ships with the conversation. Because I know I need to survive this experience in this ecosystem, and this is how we learn to survive this repetitive experience.

Now run the tape the other direction. When a person of colour is alleged to have done the same thing (gosh, often considerably less) nobody rushes in with ‘are you sure it wasn’t just one individual?’ The individual becomes the pattern, instantly, promoted without interview to ambassador for an entire community. One driver, one shopkeeper, one teenager on a bus, and suddenly we’re discussing culture, values, integration, ‘these people’. The benefit of the doubt turns out to be means-tested, and the means being tested is whiteness.

So no, I’m not sure it wasn’t just one bad individual. I’m sure of something better: that after three decades, the individuals have achieved what researchers call inter-rater reliability. At some point, a sufficiently consistent collection of exceptions is called a rule.

The easy version of this essay is a grievance list, and grievance lists are boring and strategically useless.

The uncomfortable part is that I know the choreography of these conversations so well because I have spent two decades learning to survive them profitably. I have nodded through whitesplanations because the partnership on which my paycheck depended mattered more than the correction. I have translated my own expertise into more palatable registers so that it can be received without triggering an immune response. There is a version of professional competence, for women of colour in this country, that is mostly fluency in de-escalation. I am extremely qualified. I have a long list of women who would be given instant honorary PhDs if that was a thing.

But that’s the shallow end of the implication. Here’s the deep end.

There’s a thing that happens when you write and produce for a living: your past selves become objective strangers. Or maybe you end up going down the road of writing and producing because you tend to do this; I don’t know what comes first. I find myself reviewing past me the way I’d review anyone’s work; this structure doesn’t hold, this argument is dishonest, who let this person publish? I genuinely can’t decide whether that detachment is a writer’s necessary discipline or narcissism with better lighting. Possibly the distinction matters less than what you do with the review.

I don’t believe art is separate from the artist. I think that separation is a cowardly lie we pump out to excuse our discomfort with imperfection. It is no more than a laundering service for people whose work we want without the inconvenience of their records. And if I hold that line for other artists, it holds for me. The stranger with my name is not a character I once played. Her work is mine. Her views were mine.

I have researched, written and advocated for things where the past version of myself sits in the archive as the counter-example. She held regrettable views. She made remarks about race, gender and religion that I would today call abhorrent, because they were.

This is normally where the strings come in: the backstory, the formative wounds, the melodrama swelling under the villain’s origin story. I’ve spent years arguing we need to stop scoring villains this generously, because the cinematic sympathy budget runs out long before we get to the people the villain actually harmed, who are lucky to get a line of dialogue. So I don’t want to exempt myself from my own editorial policy today. No context. No score. The remarks were abhorrent. The person who made them was me. The people on the receiving end deserved better than they got and certainly better than watching me narrate my growth arc over their harm.

The disclosure isn’t for absolution but methodology. Because this is the part the whitesplainers rarely account for: hatred-filled fragility is a very thin veil, and I can see through it from both sides. I know it from the inside: the defensiveness dressed as reason and logic, the grievance dressed as analysis, the desperate rationality of a position that cannot survive contact with the people it describes. I’ve worn it, studied it, treated it professionally, and had it aimed at me. I can smell it the way a former smoker can detect a whiff of smoke in a stairwell.

So no, I’m not reading too much into it. I’m reading it fluently.

Those who are newer to Entangled Curiosities, you might find it unnerving that I rarely end with the hopeful bit (I might as well really play into the Korean literary stereotype). You know the hopeful bit. The hopeful bit is where I say that naming the pattern is the first step, that change is coming, that we’re all learning together. The hopeful bit is, structurally, another form of whitesplaining, an explanation of racism engineered to be comfortable for the people it describes.

I’m also not accepting the counter-offer, which by now you could sing along to: that I’ve mistaken one bad actor for a pattern, that I’ve assembled a conspiracy from coincidence. I’ve just shown you I refuse the quarantine, even when I’d be its beneficiary; I won’t cordon off my past self from my present one, won’t separate the art from the artist when the artist is me. Extending that quarantine to every white person who behaves badly, one exception at a time, forever, isn’t rigour I’ve failed to achieve. It’s rigour I’ve declined. Thank you for the peer review; the finding stands.

What I’ll offer instead is the thing Amy understood when she put mansplaining to music: the pattern is already visible to everyone it lands on. We have been able to see it the whole time.

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