Draft talk:Whiteness

Is this article a parody?

The sources it uses are mostly dubious and cranks including: Noel Ignatiev (Garvey, John and Ignatiev, Noel. "Toward a New Abolitionism: A Race Traitor Manifesto. In: Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill. New York University Press, 1997, pp. 346-349.)

From the Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white page:

People who make this argument often cite anti-white comments made by certain alleged anti-racists. Among their favorite targets (in an example of nutpicking) are the former crank Harvard professor Noel Ignatiev (1940–2019) and his colleagues at Race Traitor. This obscure journal (whose correspondents denied the existence of white anti-racists, a denial with which Ignatiev, who is white, fully agreed[13]) called for the concept of a white race to be abolished, and printed statements that when taken out of context (of course), appear to be calling for the literal extermination of white people (e.g. "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race"), but in reality it is simply referring to the concept of whiteness being abolished, not whites themselves.

216.238.112.192 (talk) 21:25, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

The article also relies on a widely suspected hoax and crank article: "Moss, Donald (2021). "On Having Whiteness". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 69 (2): 355-371." --> criticism of this paper can be read here.

Dr. Donald Moss published an article entitled “On Having Whiteness” in the May issue of the Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). His article caused a considerable stir both in and outside of psychoanalytic circles (Moss, 2021). Much of the controversy surrounded the circumstances of its publication, since the paper was perceived by many readers as a hoax designed to discredit psychoanalysis, although its author is a respected training psychoanalyst, who taught for many years at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

Even if this is disputed and it is taken to be a serious paper and not a hoax it is clear the creator of this page is lying about this article being "consensus of several areas of social science."216.238.112.192 (talk) 21:37, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Zero academic sources for the 'white supremacy pyramid' which looks like another parody. Read the stupid things on this pyramid: Being apolitical/not interested in politics is white supremacy? "Not believing in experiences of a POC"? In other words if someone fabricates or lies about their experiences it is white supremacy to question them? The sources for this nonsense are some crank groups. 216.238.112.192 (talk) 21:55, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

A) Re: the image. I see no evidence that the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence is "crank" per se at this time, however, they are an advocacy group so like all of them they may "overstate their case" sometimes. Some, of course, do it so much that they get a Rationalwiki page. :)

What I *am* seeing is that the image also has been altered over time. It looks like the original document was in 2005 a pyramid (page 5) that merely separated "passive racism" (which was socially acceptable) and "overt racism" (which was seen as socially unacceptable). There are probably some controversial assertions even in that document (what the fuck does "expecting POC to teach white people" as an example of "passive racism" mean?), but much less so than the others. Also, the focus is not "this is white supremacy", the focus is more identifying examples of "socially acceptable passive racism" vs. "overt racism".

In 2016, purportedly an Ellen Tuzzolo (who per the Google seems to be a minor social activist) expanded the graphic, however I can't find the original source because no one can cite anything worth a shit these days. By now, the graphic is "white supremacy", not "racism", but again, it's covert vs. overt.

And then there's the graphic in the article. Frankly, I have no idea where in the world this "pyramid of white supremacy" actually came from. Other sites have embedded the graphic, but again, no one can cite shit these days, so it's basically a floating meme now.

Meh... due to the above, I lean towards delete the image. I actually kind of think I know where they are going with one of the things you are citing (it's probably referencing that a dominant racial class will never experience what life is like as a minority, and cannot use his or her experience as a baseline for the minority experience) and it's not all terrible, but I think we need something with a little less "telephone game".

B) This article really looks like it is trying to orbit the field of whiteness studies. Which is fine... but the problem is that it's a pretty unbalanced look. Like critical race theory (pre GOP meme), it's an academic deep dive topic related to racial study type topics, and like critical race theory, the topic has been criticized in academia as well; this article is severely missing the criticisms.

Now, I would not call Noel Ignatiev a crank, personally... controversial, sure, with some out-there moments, but his studies of Irish assimilation in America seem well received.

OTOH I don't know what to think about this Donald Moss as whatever this paper is about (the abstract is weird and hardly scientific) seems poorly cited except by some right-wing populist outlets like the New York Post and Daily Mail using it to fuel their "woke academia" style memes. The little I get seems to suggest that the article is a poor merging of psychotherapy and whiteness studies, which further underscores the imbalance in the article. However, there wasn't much "unlocked" in my searches of Google Scholar, so I unfortunately couldn't determine the full deal quickly. BobJohnson (talk) 23:02, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

The pyramid is not entirely off-base, as it parallels the ADL pyramid that is cited on the page. Some of the sources are peer-reviewed (e.g., Communication Education). Citing Noel Ignatiev as a primary authority is bad, and I think wrecks the whole page. It probably should be deleted for that reason unless someone thinks they can do a rewrite. The page creator had another instance of bad-faith editing and losing autopatrolled (User talk:CBH). Bongolian (talk) 00:14, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Only two of the article's 16 sources are written by Ignatiev. It is easy to remove those two if they're a problem, but removing them seems unnecessary to me. Ignatiev is considered a reputable scholar now; he has been covered positively in The New Yorker, [1] The Los Angeles Times, [2] The New York Times, [3] Boston Review [4], The Washington Post, [5] Slate, [6] and the Los Angeles Review of Books. [7] Are we seriously going to pretend that an academic with this degree of positive media coverage is anything besides mainstream? CBH (talk) 00:31, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I have a pretty good book about whiteness by Martin Lund that was published by MIT press that I think handles the subject better and with greater seriousness then our current article. The idea of calling whiteness a form of psychosis is medically inaccurate, and kind of perpetuates myths about what experiencing psychosis entails (as someone who had to be hospitalized for a psychotic episode I take offence, and see that as deeply ableist). Psychoanalysis is also just straight up pseudopsychology with next to no empirical backing. This also gets into the weeds of conflating white supremacy with mental illness which makes me squicky. Whiteness is a socially constructed political/cultural norm created by the very people who have historically labeled themselves as white; it's a widespread normalized sociological phenomena not a product of individual psychopathology. Treating it as a kind of mental illness de-emphasizes the culpability of white people in perpetuating whiteness; because then, it's not something that white people are responsible for but rather a simple unfortunate product of insanity. This is not how you combat whiteness by labeling white people as mentally ill. It's a systematic problem built into existing social systems that treats "being white" as a cultural default. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:51, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Please pay attention to where this article's sources were published. The sources describing whiteness as a form of psychosis were published in Communication Studies and the Journal of Black Studies, not in psychoanalysis journals. Kehinde Andrews is a high-class scholar. Also see Kehinde Andrews' article "Journeys Into the Psychosis of Whiteness". These are prominently published sources by reputable authors, and I can provide more like these if needed. CBH (talk) 01:11, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

You should be able to recognise institutional racism without calling whiteness psychosis or a "parasitism". My view is this article was written to damage RationalWiki's reputation and open it up to ridicule. The article falsely claims it is scholarly "consensus" whiteness is a "form of parasitism, psychosis, or pathological narcissism", yet this is not the consensus or even a mainstream view contra the misinformation by CBH. The only paper calling whiteness a "parasitism" is suspected by many to be a hoax and sparked a controversy a few years back. There's a video criticising this ridiculous paper here.216.238.113.206 (talk) 02:19, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

IP, I notice you're editing through a VPN service [8] that conceals your real IP address. Why are you trying to hide your identity and location? Who are you? CBH (talk) 02:34, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't think Ignatiev is entirely considered a reputable scholar, or that the obituaries were entirely glowing. The Washington Post's obit said:

“”He welcomed controversy and was eager to engage in intellectual combat with critics who cited Dr. Ignatiev as a prime example of academic liberalism crossing the line of absurdity. Critics in the academic world, including African American social psychologist Kelly Ervin of Washington State University, found fault with his observations.

Bongolian (talk) 03:44, 6 July 2023 (UTC)