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The Unspoken Evils of “Whiteness”
There are a lot of “white” things to keep track of lately.
White supremacy. White power. White privilege. White rage. There’s white silence and white tears and white fragility (this last coined by a white woman to help white people process their white guilt).
So I guess it was only a matter of time before someone bundled them all together as white-ness.
“Whiteness” has become an inescapable feature of racial discourse in 2021. Particularly among academics. Yet nobody seems to agree on what it is.
Whiteness is “the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination,” according to Cristina Beltran, an associate professor at New York University. Whiteness is “a public health crisis,” claims Damon Young, in The Root. Whiteness is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition,” says Donald Moss, a faculty member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
But while they fall over themselves to enumerate the evils of whiteness, there are others that these scholars seem less eager to talk about. So in the interests of comprehensiveness, I thought I’d present them here.
After all, we wouldn’t want to be accused of a whitewash.
1. “Whiteness” is (not-so) covert racism.
This first and most obvious evil of “whiteness” is ably demonstrated by Elie Mystal in his post-lockdown article, I’m Not Ready To Reenter White Society. For reference, here’s how it starts:
“I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life. Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to.”
We’re supposed to say that “whiteness” isn’t a synonym for “white people”. That anybody who makes the obvious connection between the two is being “fragile”. But Mystal only manages 44 words before he says the quiet…
