I've been thinking about the line "you're lucky Black people want equality and not revenge," in this video. (1/n)

In a white supremacist context, where whiteness is taken as central to the organization of all of our institutions, where the white person is taken as the default and everyone else has to provide an adjective, any move to decenter whiteness is felt as an imposition. (2/n)

We have a lot of ways of talking about the why of this: inheritance, property, ontological expansiveness. All of these are concepts which serve to make clear the structuring of the world around whiteness as a kind of foregone conclusion, a right. (3/n)

To this end, when these attempts at diversity and inclusion result in the decentering of whiteness, it is felt as an infringement upon the "rights" or "entitlements" due to whiteness. This prompts a range of defensive responses that DiAngelo describes in "White Fragility." (4/n)

(I don't think "fragility" is a valuable description for whiteness or the range of defensive responses. As Tressie McMillam Cottom points out in her book "Thick And other Essays," "naming white innocence "fragile" belies its fundamental nature, which is domination.")

(Also, I am positing that institutions "feel" things. Insofar as an institution coheres around the people that make it up (via Sara Ahmed), the institution adopts the habitual responses of those people. If white people engage in defensive moves, so do white institutions.)

In the above, I've been speaking purely in the abstract, describing general structures of whiteness as they translate into institutional actions and the like, which decontextualizes how these changes are made and under what conditions they're made. (5/n)

Here we need a detour: Douglass said "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." So, as centering is a form of power, and whiteness is at the center of the organization of the colonial world, whiteness concedes nothing without a demand. (6/n)

(centering oneself might be the ultimate form of power, tbh.)

Thus, in order to decenter whiteness, to open up institutions and spaces, demands must be articulated. They must be made. Here, I'll appeal to King and X and Davis who recognize that demands can be articulated in protest, in letters, or in riots, if necessary. (7/n)

But there's a wrinkle here: given the historico-racial schema (Fanon) which constructs Black people as inherently violent, inherently angry, inherently more aggressive than whites, how demands for inclusion by Black people are "heard" must be understood through this schema. (8/n)

Which gets me to my point: whiteness cannot hear Black demands for equality in any other way except as violence, as an imposition on spaces that are already "open" or "already" equal. (9/n)

Any request we make, no matter how well articulated, how in line with the stated goals of white institutions, will be framed in the white imagination as an imposition on the institution itself BECAUSE the institution takes itself as "fair" and "good" and "open." (10/n)

And institutions take themselves as these things BECAUSE they are considered essential qualities of whiteness, because whiteness is taken as both center and background, and if whiteness functions unimpeded in these spaces, so should everyone else. Which is bullshit. (11/n)

It's bullshit because the construction of white neutrality as an inheritance (Sara Ahmed) of whiteness is only possible in a world made white by colonialism, which is a world predicated on the oppression of anyone who is not white, which is a white supremacist world. (12/n)

Thus, as I said above: any attempt to articulate demands for equity and equality will be heard by whiteness and the institutions that center it as an imposition, an act of violence, and will be responded to accordingly.

This is something we should keep in mind. (13/n)

We should keep it in mind because whiteness will view any attempt to redress centuries of violence in a way that decenters whiteness as an act of revenge.

For whiteness, equity, equality, and inclusion as a means to right a history of wrongs -is- a form of revenge. (fin)

Sources
Thick - @tressiemcphd
On Being Included, Phenomenology of Whiteness - @SaraNAhmed
Kimberly Latrice Jones.
Shannon Sullivan - Revealing Whiteness
Cheryl I. Harris - Whiteness as Property
Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed