Too many people assume that my sentiments against “whiteness” mean that I don’t like white people. Far from it. I like and love all sorts of people, and I’ve had wonderful relationships both platonic and intimate with people who are white. My problem is that whiteness is a whole other thing from being white. Whiteness and “white culture” are tied up with white supremacy and my problem with white people is with those who embrace whiteness as a culture and white supremacy as the status quo—and both as something superior to other racial cultures or as the normal standard to which all other races and cultures should be compared and should aspire to embrace.
Well, you might ask: “Why do I identify as Black and why do I celebrate Black culture and other non-white cultures if I think whiteness is so problematic? Why don’t I reject racial culture across the board?”
Simple. I need to identify as Black because race based largely on skin color is a creation of white people—a creation born of white supremacist ideology. There is a constant pressure to assimilate into white culture and/or see non-white culture as the inferior way. So, yes, I celebrate my blackness and Black culture as a way of not being erased and not having the accomplishments of Black people diminished.
And, in the end, there is no “white culture” to speak of, which is why I scoff at people who insist we should have a White History Month (even though whiteness dominates everyday life and the history books already) since various other races have their month in the sun. Don’t get me wrong, there are ethnic white cultures, yes, with their own unique flavors. But whiteness as a monolith has almost no inherent culture or uniqueness—and white people rarely embrace their ethnic heritages; they tend to embrace whiteness instead.
If that sounds harsh that I think there is little or no true white culture, let’s get to how and when “race” was created by white people who decided to define themselves as white and everyone else as an “other.” The modern concept of race was established in the 1700s as European nations solidified and expanded their conquering and colonization of other nations around the globe. This also corresponds to the tail end of the Renaissance, which started in the 14th century and ended in the 17th century.
The Renaissance was, I would argue, the last time that “white people” as a whole truly had an explosion of cultural development that was their own. But from shortly after the point that white people “defined” race by physical differences and skin color until today, “white culture” has largely consisted of looting the cultures of others—you know, cultural appropriation.
The United States might be one of the most glaring examples of this. So much of Southern culture and cooking derived from enslaved Africans—my Black ancestors. Most musical genres that are considered white and dominated by white people (rock and roll and country being two huge examples) were pioneered by Black people who were excluded from the genres as much as possible as soon as white people “discovered” them and often given little or no credit for creating those genres. Terms like “spirit animal” that have been embraced by white people are appropriation of Indigenous People’s culture. And so on and so forth. Whiteness is largely defined by what it has borrowed or stolen and then claimed as its own while pushing people of color to the side—all while gobbling up their cultural contributions to the country and then claiming these groups were inferior or contributed little to culture.
And that’s not even getting into how many scientific achievements were the result of largely unsung people of color, Black people very significant among those ranks.
So, yes, I dislike whiteness because it celebrates something artificial and cobbled together from other cultures rather than being an organic thing like so many achievements of the Renaissance. That’s a lot of centuries to not be producing your own cultural work and stealing from others while erasing their legacies. Whiteness is tied up in white supremacy, colonialism, and institutional racism. White people who refuse to acknowledge that are slaves to whiteness and tools of white supremacy. Those are the people I don’t like. So, yes, I can like many white people and also hate whiteness itself—and I and other people of color have every right to do so. After all, it was whiteness—itself an artificial racial construct—that defined me as Black. And so I will defiantly celebrate my blackness even as I criticize whiteness for its dishonesty and cruelty.
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