These three things and about three million others have been accused of
suffering from a plague of whiteness. The colonists of Salem saw
witches everywhere and the modern racist witch hunters see ‘whiteness’
everywhere they look. Whitenessphobia may be the great mental illness of
our time.
To Whitenessphobes, everything has a “whiteness” problem.
Headlines like, "Climate Activists Confront the Movement's Whiteness
Problem," "The Enduring Whiteness of the Fed", and "Commercial Real
Estate has a Whiteness Problem" show the sheer scale of Whitenessphobia
which is triggered by everything from the Federal Reserve to Greta
Thunberg
But you don’t have to actually be white to fall victim to “Whitenessphobia”.
In Africa, people with albinism are being blamed for the coronavirus pandemic.
"It is the perceived whiteness of people with albinism. It is being
interpreted that they are carriers of what is seen as a white man's
disease. It comes from China where people have fair skin in the African
mindset," Dr. Charlotte Baker, the head of the Albinism in Africa
Network, explained.
Whiteness can mean Africans being blamed for a Chinese disease because pigmentation is relative.
Harvard's Graduate School of Design was accused of "institutionalized
whiteness" because Mark Lee, the chair of the Architecture Department,
had stirred outrage by saying, said, “I see the GSD as the most
Eurocentric school in America, and that is really our strength."
Lee is Chinese. GSD’s previous dean was Persian. But you can be Chinese
or Persian and still spread “institutionalized whiteness”. Or you can be
a Hindu deity and be accused of excessive whiteness.
After Shaun King, who really is too white, accused depictions of Jesus
of being too white, the Hindu gods also came under fire for their
whiteness. "We must also ask why Hindu deities are so light skinned,"
Rupa Subramanya, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, demanded.
And, in the era of Black Lives Matter, it doesn’t matter how black you
are, you can still be accused of whiteness. Terry Crews, who grew up in
Flint, Michigan, and made it big in the NFL, is being accused of
centering and upholding "whiteness". A Los Angeles Times column claims
that Aunt Jemima was "selling whiteness". The brand can be accused of
many things, but selling “whiteness” isn’t one of them.
A Psychology Today article claims, “the concept of Whiteness was imported from Spain and Portugal.”
White people, it seems, didn’t exist until they were invented in the
16th century by Latinos, who are considered a minority. And if Latinos
are the original white people, then aren’t white people minorities?
The Atlantic even worries that, “Asians and Latinos could begin to vanish into whiteness.”
And then we’ll never get them back.
But if it can happen to Terry Crews and Hindu deities, it can happen to
anyone. Whitenessphobia has become an extended Eddie Murphy routine, but
there’s no joke and no one is laughing.
Any random thing can be accused of whiteness at any given time for not being diverse enough.
The
London Olympics have been accused of a “velodrome of whiteness” for not
attracting black cyclists and Harper’s Wine and Spirit was indicted for
its “silence on race and diversity in the UK wine industry in light of
the global Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George
Floyd.”
After all, if there’s anything that George Floyd’s death ought to wake
us up to, it’s the lack of diversity in the UK wine industry. And in the
London Olympics. Not to mention commercial real estate and curling.
Curling, a sport that even most sports fans can’t grasp, and which seems
to exists just to punish casual viewers of the Winter Olympics, is
fighting to eliminate its “whiteness” problem. The problem, lies with
bagpipes and "Scottish paraphernalia hanging in curling clubs"
reinforcing the "dominant whiteness.”
But having a diverse organization or even being a minority is no defense against Whitenessphobia.
What is "whiteness". A better question is what isn't whiteness. Like a
Rorschach inkblot, it’s anything and everything because Whitenessphobia
is about the mental state of the ‘phobe’, not his target.
"Whiteness is severely under theorized," an NBC News Big Think piece
worried, "leaving millions unaware of a history whose constant
characteristic is change."
Believing that the thing you hate is constantly changing, that it is
both evil and amorphous, pervading everything and yet almost impossible
to pin down, is a core element of conspiratorial bigotry.
Whiteness is white people even if they “think of themselves as
individuals without a meaningful racial identity”. It’s also Chinese
architects, Hindu gods, and black people who don’t want to hate white
people. It’s Japanese consumers who purchase skin whitening products and
African-American intellectuals who believe in free speech. Whiteness
can sneak up on you when you aren’t hating.
Or at least hating enough.
To be free of whiteness, if you’re a minority means hating white people.
And if you’re white, you can only hope to escape whiteness by hating
yourself. Like all conspiratorial bigotries, Whitenessphobia demands a
constant vigil against the evil influence of that intangible thing which
is always changing.
Sometimes it’s Eurocentric architecture, other times Freedom of Speech, or Canadian curling.
The victims of Whitenessphobia aren’t just white people. Learning to
hate is bad for the bigots and the culture of Whitenessphobia embodied
in racist texts like Between the World and Me or White Fragility, the
endless hysterical invocations of resentment, victimhood and guilt, is
poisoning a generation’s soul.
But conspiratorial bigotry is also bad for everyone else.
If Whitenessphobes limited their hatred to white people, based on a
genetic test or some other racialist nonsense, their racism could at
least be contained. Instead, Whitenessphobia can lash out at anyone.
By transforming their idea of whiteness from a race to a set of
attitudes, Whitenessphobes have created a racist ideology that also
ideologizes racism, attacking people of any race, including black
people, for ideological offenses in racist terms. Ideological racism
uses the familiar tropes of racial hatred, but its targets are chosen
ideologically, rather than racially, even as it harnesses racial
resentments.
"Parents have to parent, that children have to achieve unless we raise
their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth
with a book is acting white," Barack Obama declared at the 2004
Democratic National Convention. A few years later, Jesse Jackson would
accuse Obama of acting white.
As John McWhorter noted, "black nerds get called 'white' when white kids
are around to furnish a basis for the comparison; the problem arises
amidst integration."
Whiteness Studies is ultimately an academic way of accusing minorities of acting white.
Whitenessphobia deconstructs the original charge of acting white and
rebuilds it as a massive conspiracy by 16th century Latinos, then by
America’s Founding Fathers, Canadian curling and the British wine world
to keep black people out, but also as a conspiracy to get minorities
involved in their whiteness.
While Black Lives Matter and its allies put their Whitenessphobia
forward as a desegregating impulse, its real purpose is segregation,
refusing to take part in anything, including America and its anthem,
until they are torn down and rebuilt absent of what the conspiratorial
bigots deem to be its whiteness.
Whitenessphobia punishes any impulse toward unification. Colorblindness
is one of its greatest sins, integration is a conspiracy to bring
minorities into whiteness, and those minorities who don’t hate are
accused of centering whiteness, institutionalizing whiteness, or other
synonyms for acting white
