Read on Twitter
This is really, really dangerous. https://twitter.com/karenattiah/status/1288464078671949825
This push for a strong “white racial identity” comes from a really unfortunate misreading of the “I don’t see color, we’re all the same!” argument. So-called “colorblindness” was never about “refusing to see race.” It was about refusing to acknowledge racism.
If we accept “colorblindness” on its own terms, then the best response is, “yes, you do see color! Look at you! You’re white! Own it! Say you’re white!” That’s how we get to the argument that white people need to own their whiteness; they need to identify strongly as white.
But there is no reason for us to believe that a strong white racial ID is a precondition to working to dismantle white supremacy. If anything, white racial ID should make us all extremely, extremely nervous. Identities are something to be respected. Whiteness isn’t.
This whole debate over capitalizing the W is a perfect example of what Fields & Fields call “racecraft”: a rhetorical device that shifts focus away from racism and towards “race.”
White racial identity is not neutral and it is certainly not good. If our goal is to dismantle white supremacy, focusing on building up a white racial identity will get us farther from our goal, not closer.
For a similar journey that reaches the opposite conclusion, I couldn’t recommend Eve Ewing’s piece on this enough. As usual, Eve’s prose here highlights the stakes underlying this discussion: racism quite literally is a question of life or death. https://zora.medium.com/im-a-black-scholar-who-studies-race-here-s-why-i-capitalize-white-f94883aa2dd3
I think the people who are adamantly arguing either side of this debate share the same disdain for racism. The difference in conclusion, I think, comes from the role we think ‘identity’ plays in all this.
My position is that calling for whites to own their ‘white racial identity’ has the unintended consequence of reifying race. The stronger our notion of ‘race’ is, the harder it is for us to see how racism operates, and the harder it is for us to fight against racism.
‘Racecraft’ by Fields & Fields makes this case more eloquently than I ever will. But I’ll keep trying.
I just realized I hadn’t made this point yet in this thread: white people *do* need to understand how racism benefits them at the expense of Black people. That is key to dismantling white supremacy. But “white racial identity” is a separate thing, and, IMO, a distraction.
