Whiteness
Whiteness as a term gets thrown around regularly almost as an insult. Random people are told that they have a “whiteness problem” and it’s seen as the source of racial oppression. But, what is it? Is it an identity? Is it a culture? A social position? It seems that according to antiracists, who variously argue that white people have no culture and identity, it is none of these. Plus, if it is the source of racial oppression, who would want to identify as an oppressor? Very few I would imagine.
Likely, white people can’t even be identified as a coherent group at all. Is a rancher in Billings, Montana the same as a Wall Street hedge fund manager? Is a Santa Cruz surfer the same as an Alabama automotive technician. To group all these diverse people together under one group strains credibility. So what is whiteness?
Most social theories are simple or at least can be crystallized into simple terms. For Marx, it’s labor, Foucault, power, Octavia Butler, agency, and so on. Yet, whiteness defies simple definition at least in modern racial discourse. I’m going to attempt to define it simply.
Whiteness (n): the implicit or explicit belief in racial hierarchies and the power to enforce them.
I don’t want to go into the argument about whether or not all white people hold some belief in racial hierarchies because, while I do think there’s evidence that they do, I think the argument borders on racial essentialism. So, for the sake of argument, I’ll assume that all white people do hold these beliefs. However, whiteness is also about the power to enforce such beliefs and anyone can plainly see that all white people do not have the power to do so.
Even the assumption that all white people share some belief in racial hierarchies is not that remarkable. Anthropology 101 teaches us that all groups share some internal belief that their group is superior to others, or ethnocentrism. It is in fact normal for human groups to share some sense of superiority over other groups and has been this way since the beginning of organized humanity. I’m not arguing that this is a good thing. It’s sort of a glitch in the Matrix that has been exploited by powerful people and institutions all over the world for a very long time. There is a difference, though, in a belief in group superiority and the power to do something about it.
The question, then, is who has the power to enforce such racial hierarchies? Did a pig farmer in Ider, Alabama in 1859 have that power or did the power lie in Selma with the Bourbon planters? Does a roofer in Sevierville, TN have the power to enforce hierarchy or the governor or large corporations? Even if we assume that all these people hold the exact same racial beliefs, a) only one group has the power to enforce them and b) as Marx argued, “the ruling ideas of each age are ever the ideas of the ruling class.”
It defies logic to argue that a pig farmer or a roofer are the core problem of white supremacy and that converting them to antiracism is the primary task to end racial oppression. Whiteness as a concept is aimed at the wrong target.
The overwhelming feeling that I get from all the discourse on antiracism and white supremacy is that antiracist activists really just don’t want to deal with assholes. The absurd conversation about micro-aggressions is case-in-point. Are micro-aggressions real and can they be explained systemically? Probably, but some things simply don’t need to be theorized. Sometimes people are just assholes for any number of complex human reasons and the fact of the matter is that no one gets to live in a world without assholes.
And it doesn’t do anything but turn the asshole into a bigger asshole.
I do believe that white supremacy is a huge barrier to the development of the productive and creative capacities of life on this planet, but I believe the conceptual tools we’re using to fight white supremacy are fundamentally if not fatally flawed. We need to find tools that aim at the powerful and not zero power assholes because even if we convert that one asshole, there’s still millions more. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. No, we need to go directly at institutions that enforce hierarchies of any kind and either reform or deconstruct them, and instead of smashing zero power assholes in the face with moralizing rhetoric, maybe we could try giving them a positive reason to join us.