On the Legacy of “Whiteness,” Transcending Regressive Identity Politics and the Myth that “Blacks” Can’t Be Racist
First, the reason I am harping on the fact that you erroneously tried to call me out for not using my name in my articles — and then, when shown you were incorrect, stuck by your insulting tone and tried to make it look like I’m the one who did something wrong — is that it reveals your character. A real man, shown that he made an error, would have the integrity and confidence to say, “Sorry about that one. My bad,” and then it’s done because, of course, it’s not a big deal to either of us. An angry, brittle little man with a chip on his shoulder, on the other hand, digs in and keeps swinging away. Guess which path you chose.
Next, you claim the reason you use the word “whyte” rather than “white” is “to challenge the idea of whyteness and whyte people” … a laudable goal that I wish you would apply to ALL racial categories. The funny thing is that your alleged “challenging” of “whitness,” whatever that is, is skin-deep, since you also say things like this:
But you’re whyte and any identity evaluation causes you to look at your own life and that obviously scares whyte people who are used to being the default, as is evidenced by any and all pushback against anything that calls whyteness into question.
You see, I don’t think of myself as “white”(or “whyte”), nor do I think of you as “black.” I think of us as human beings that have been unfortunately subdivided into scientifically unsound categories that have been used, historically speaking, primarily to assert claims of superiority and inferiority. As a result, we’ve reified those categories and created stark divisions in cultures, social statuses, lifestyles, dialects and attitudes where none naturally need to exist. And I don’t see why I need to perpetuate such regressive nonsense by continuing to employ those categories.
So, while I agree that the whole category of white (and black as well) is “unnatural,” to quote your word, from my perspective, your challenging of whiteness doesn’t go nearly far enough. If you were truly interested in challenging it, you’d join me in fighting the entire racial paradigm that got us to this ridiculous point in our society when racial classifications and judgments are ubiquitous. The kind of identity politics you practice is making the problem worse, not better. It’s digging us deeper into the hole. It’s a point I’ve made empirically here.
My issue with your approach is that despite your claims of wanting to challenge it, you’re still so deeply trapped in the very racial paradigm that you claim you’re trying to examine. You just want to invert the polarity. Before white was good and black was bad, and now you want to flip the poles. To quote Satan’s weak rebellion against God’s order from Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Evil, be thou my good.” This is like a child who struggles against his parents by doing the opposite of what they say. Of course, doing the opposite is just another way of imitating. You still haven’t grown up, haven’t transcended the order you’re struggling against.
For instance, you write things like this: “Why is the idea of wh[i]teness so unexamined in this world, when it’s the source of most of the world’s ills?” Of course, that’s such a gross and ludicrous exaggeration that it leaves you completely vulnerable, historically speaking. I mean, yeah, sure, the people of Europe (who then colonized many other lands, including America) probably did the most harm of any peoples on Earth (if you think of the harms to our environment, the cost in lives of European aggression, the two world wars, the nuclear bombs, the worldwide reign of corporate cronyism that is still largely lorded over by “white” interests, though China and India are rapidly getting in on the fun), but then you have to dig a bit deeper and ask why it is that the people of Europe did so much harm. And when you do that, you realize, with a moment’s thought, that the reason is that they achieved scientific and technological superiority, and it’s only a result of that progress in science, technology, literacy and numeracy that they were ABLE to colonize and prey upon others, and then you also quickly realize that the flipside of the coin is that they did far more GOOD than anyone else in the world. Think of all the incredible literature, art and music that came out of Europe. Think of the marvelous scientific advances that led to our no longer living in societies ever subject to the whims of the climate and on the brink of starvation. Europe figured out how to feed the world, how to cure epidemic diseases and vaccinate kids throughout the third world, how to create sanitary, clean drinking water and systems of sewage and waste disposal. Europe created mass literacy and public education. And Europe (and its colonies) also created the principles of democracy, pluralism and tolerance of difference, principles that allow you and me to express our views freely and openly. Such principles and societies still don’t exist in most parts of the third world. So you take the good with the bad. If you’re going to go out of your way to curse the wretched idol of “whiteness,” you’re still praying to it.
If you want to move past that whole paradigm, then what you need to do is stop BOTH the praying AND the cursing. Come back to reality. In reality, we deal with the present, not the past. We respect the great achievements of the past and view them as our collective legacy as human beings, and we abhor the great horrors of the past and do our best to avoid a repeat. In reality, it should make not a jot of difference to you or to me whether the guy who wrote the plays of Shakespeare was white or black, or whether my ancestors from hundreds of years ago were historical heroes or historical villains. I happen to be an immigrant from the former Soviet Union whose grandparents struggled under one of the most repressive, pervasive and dehumanizing totalitarian regimes in human history and, going back more years, who’d lived under the yoke of Tsarism and serfdom — the serfs having been emancipated but left to poverty by virtue of not being given any land after they were set free in 1861. I could regale you with so many stories of my ancestors’ oppression that they would make you wonder whether, maybe, American slavery wasn’t so bad, but you see, I don’t want to play a stupid game of who’s-more-historically-oppressed because having our ancestors historically oppressed doesn’t confer one bit of virtue on you or me. And if my ancestors had been oppressive American slaveholders, so what? Would I be somehow responsible for their sins? I live in a world where we are each responsible for the choices we make as individuals. Did we take the opportunities we were given? Did we do the best with what we had? Did we rise above and try to better ourselves and be good to others, or did we sink into the general mire of bitterness and anger and self-pity and hatred of others and make the world a nastier, dumber, more small-minded and depraved place to live?
Turning to the sad case of Tenaja Jordan, she’s a prime example of what I’m talking about, a person who spends her time and wastes her considerable talents sowing bigotry, hatred, self-pity, self-absorption and contempt for others and does her part to make the world nastier. You can sugar-coat that under labels of a black woman “exercising self-care,” but self-care is focused on self, whereas her rant that I responded to was focused on demonizing someone else and then demonizing a group of people for nothing other than the color of their skin in passages such as the one I’d quoted before. My response was saying, look, we don’t need people like Tenaja Jordan in our midst, and we should reject the hatred, bigotry and racism they’re trying to spread.
Finally, let me turn to your attempt to perpetuate this myth:
[Tenaja Jordan] is not racist. She can’t be[,] as racism requires a level of agency which only wh[i]te folk possess in this country. You really need to be clear on language. And if you need help, you can just do a Google search on “can Black people be racist” and educate yourself as opposed to the sleight of word you’re relying on.
Believe me, I don’t need to do any Google searches to “educate” myself on that. I’m very familiar with the arguments. I’m so familiar with them, in fact, and have heard them so often that in order to avoid responding to them anew each time an identitarian ideologue like you repeats them, I wrote an article on here awhile ago to deal with this very issue:
I explain there why the attempt to say that racism requires power runs afoul of both the philosophy of language and of common sense. It’s a political gesture that you’re erroneously trying to pass off as a fact. Of course, the reality is that racism is racism, and racism is nothing more and nothing less than prejudice on the basis of race, and no, “black” people don’t get to give themselves a free pass by saying nasty racist things and then, when called on it, pointing to their skin color as an excuse. Last time I checked, the skin of “black” people, like the skin of “white” people, was still made of carbon, not teflon. And what that means is that when you try to raise a sh-tstorm, some of that sh-t is going to land right back on you and stick.
