Whiteness

Description

Helen Pluckrose, summarizing the theory developed by DiAngelo:

"According to DiAngelo,

We might think of whiteness as all the aspects of being white—aspects that go beyond mere physical differences and are related to the meaning and resultant material advantage of being defined as white in society: what is granted and how it is granted based on that meaning.

• Whiteness is structural:

To say that whiteness is a location of structural advantage is to recognize that to be white is to be in a privileged position within society and its institutions—to be seen as an insider and to be granted the benefits of belonging. This position automatically bestows unearned advantages.

• Whiteness is a particularly privileged perspective:

To say that whiteness is a standpoint is to say that a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race—“just human.” This standpoint views white people and their interests as central to, and representative of, humanity. Whites also produce and reinforce the dominant narratives of society—such as individualism and meritocracy—and use these narratives to explain the positions of other racial groups.

• Whiteness is culture:

To say that whiteness includes a set of cultural practices that are not recognized by white people is to understand racism as a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color. These norms and actions include basic rights and benefits of the doubt, purportedly granted to all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

So whiteness is to be understood as this all-pervasive but invisible system of racism that white people perpetuate without even knowing they are doing it. This is a radically different understanding of racism from the commonly accepted one, which holds that racism is prejudice on the grounds of race, usually accompanied by an acknowledgment that, in modern western history, it has overwhelmingly been perpetrated by white people against non-white people. Nevertheless, in the common understanding of racism, white individuals can choose whether to uphold or reject racist ideas, and moral progress, particularly over the last sixty years, has resulted in a consensus that it is morally wrong to hold racist ideas and morally good to reject them. This is a very positive development, which DiAngelo herself acknowledges when she says:

The final challenge we need to address is our definition of “racist.” In the post-civil rights era, we have been taught that racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral. Therefore, if I am saying that my readers are racist or, even worse, that all white people are racist, I am saying something deeply offensive; I am questioning my readers’ very moral character.

She goes on to argue for the Critical Social Justice concept of racism as a power system that results in white privilege, which she defines as “a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context,” but she is never very clear about what these advantages are. In particular, very little attention is paid to class or individual advantages and disadvantages.

Unsurprisingly, many white people are not delighted to be told that they are inherently racist and maintaining a racist system simply by existing and interacting with others. They may not respond well to the mind-reading approach taken by DiAngelo and her ilk, which insists that the whiteness scholars know the white mind better than the individual owners of those minds. Those who have been through particular hardship might become quite annoyed to be told that they are more privileged than someone who has never been through any such hardship, but has darker skin, and to be also told that they are actively oppressing that person. This leads many white people to disagree with or refuse to engage with DiAngelo. This led her to produce her theory of white fragility which explains away all the people who disagree with her:

Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, [white people] become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility." (https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/26/is-white-fragility-training-ethical/?)