Draft:Whiteness

Whiteness is a socio-cultural construct created to grant normative privileges to individuals and groups. Its primary functions are to enforce the unequal distribution of power, and to justify violence against people of color. Whiteness is closely related to While white privilege refers to a set of social benefits, whiteness describes the broader set of behaviors, attitudes, and positionality that are inherent to white racial identity.

The nature of whiteness
The Human Genome Project found that racial categories are biologically meaningless, and determined by social conventions. The social meaning of being "white" is explained by race scholars John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev: The white race is a club that enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part, its members go through life accepting the privileges of membership but without reflecting on the costs. … The white club does not require that all members be strong advocates of white supremacy, merely that they defer to the prejudices of others. It is based on the assumption that all those who look white are, whatever their reservations, fundamentally loyal to it. This assumption is kept in place by a pervasive system of race privileges, so embedded in the social structure that they are reproduced daily — but without reflection — by most of the actors.

Whiteness contains a heavy performative element. In other words, it is constructed not only through identity, but also through the behavioral enactment of race. In a New York Times article about an assault on four African-American students, Nell Irvin Painter elaborates on the performative aspect of being white: Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin. … One potent way of being American, no matter where you or your parents are from, is enacting anti-blackness. And traditionally, acting out anti-blackness has meant acting white.

The Pyramid of White Supremacy, shown above, demonstrates how seemingly innocuous actions by whites justify and propagate these assaults upon people of color. Each level of the pyramid depends on by the one below it, so that statements such as "Not all white people" or "There are two sides to every story" in the bottom level of the pyramid ultimately support actions such as hate crimes and genocide in the top level. As Kathleen Neal Cleaver notes, "A widespread failure to acknowledge that whiteness conveys internal meanings at the same time it fulfills anti-black functions helps frustrate programs that seek to eliminate racism's pernicious legacy."

Academic views on whiteness
It is the consensus of several areas of social science, including Black studies, communication studies, and psychoanalytic theory, that whiteness is form of parasitism, psychosis, or pathological narcissism. , professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, summarizes academic consensus on whiteness in the Journal of Black Studies: Whiteness as a psychosis goes beyond critiquing the irrationality of Whiteness. Rather, Whiteness is defined in itself and at its root as irrational, a discursive psychosis that cannot be tamed through reason. … There is no rational argument to those trapped in a psychosis, as there is no reasoning with Whiteness. Until the conditions that create Whiteness are destroyed, the psychosis will govern the thoughts and actions of Western society.

A growing movement among antiracist scholars calls for the abolition of whiteness. Noel Ignatiev, co-founder of the journal Race Traitor, explained how abolition of whiteness is not the same as killing white people: "It's like royalty. If you abolish it, you don't kill the king and queen, you get rid of the crowns, thrones, and titles. Whiteness functions much like royalty, since it is upheld by social practice."