On Whiteness

ecdanc

Since this came up recently, and I believe some things are being pretty widely misunderstood, I thought I'd open a thread to talk about "whiteness" as a concept. To get us started, here are a couple of (lengthy) quotes about what it means to treat "whiteness" as something different than (or a least not coextensive with) white people:

From When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, Noel Ignatiev looking back at his time with Race Traitor, a magazine whose slogan was "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.":

"The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being ‘racists,’ just like the KKK, and have even been called a ‘hate group.’ ...

Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc....”

And from George Yancey's Look, a White!:

“The fact of the matter is that, for white people, whiteness is the transcendental norm in terms of which they live their lives as persons, individuals. People of color, however, confront whiteness in their everyday lives, not as an abstract concept but in the form of embodied whites who engage in racist practices that negatively affect their lives. Black people and people of color thus strive to disarticulate the link between whiteness and the assumption of just being human, to create a critical slippage. By marking whiteness, black people can locate whiteness as a specific historical and ideological configuration, revealing it as ‘an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.’ The act of marking whiteness, then, is itself an act of historicizing whiteness, an act of situating whiteness within the context of material forces and raced interest-laden values that reinforce whiteness as a site of privilege and hegemony. Marking whiteness is about exposing the ways in which whites have created a form of ‘humanism’ that obfuscates their hegemonic efforts to treat their experiences as universal and representative.”