No, it’s not “okay” to be white.
It’s the latest canard from white supremacists mewling their cultivated victimhood: “It’s okay to be white.” Michael Harriot writes for the root explaining: “ There is actually a movement dedicated to telling white people that it’s OK to be white.”
White people, for lack of having anything better to do with their time have taken on the role of cultivated victim now since apparently any critique of racism is apparently oppressive in its own right: which, naturally, is bullshit. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if the worst oppressions faced by the world were being critiqued. People of colour face violence, political, economic, and social oppression, and outright hatred the likes of which white people could never imagine, but apparently calling out Chad’s racism these days is equal to years of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism.
But before I explain why it’s not “okay” to be white we have to talk about the history of whiteness, how whiteness came about. Whiteness came about as an exclusionary tool to segregate and stratify human beings. Human beings were put into the ingroup of whiteness or the outgroup of ‘colour’, or ‘blackness’, or ‘foreignness’, based on the perceived colour of their skin, a benchmark that has historically been as mobile as it was arbitrary.
One of the more profound shifts in white inclusion involves direct relation. In the 1800s if a person had even one white relative they were said to be white. However in the 1900s this, with increasing focus on ‘white purity’, ‘aryanness’, etc. and in the US, the legalized notion of ‘one drop of blood’ in your family that isn’t white meant that you were no longer white (cf. the 1924 Racial Integrity Act). Oliver Thorn in his video Do Racists Just Love Their Country says:
“They want all others to be like themselves. They do not want to be like the other, or to realise that the other is perhaps not so different after all. They view that is a form of pollution, actually sometimes literally pollution of the blood.”
Whiteness was also something that could be purchased into. The Irish in America are a fantastic example, as they were not always considered white. Noel Ignatiev in their book How the Irish became White writes:
“While the white skin made the Irish eligible for membership in the white race, it did not guarantee their admission; they had to earn it.”
Also see the Root article discussing this.
The Irish had to engage in specifically anti-black behaviour in order to earn their whiteness. Fighting against abolition, starting riots, sabotage, and other violence. They purchased their whiteness in the US at a terrible cost, not to themselves, but to people of colour, specifically black people.
Whiteness exists, not merely as a skin colour, but as the accumulation of all the terrible things that white people did to belong to our shitty little club. And the things that makes whiteness toxic didn’t end. There is no point in history when white people as a whole even tried to reverse or ameliorate the harm done in the name of whiteness, and white people’s pearl clutching, cultivated victimhood speaks volumes to the overall white understanding of the way the world works. This is echoed in the way white people think being racist is perfectly fine, just don’t call a white person a racist or they’ll piss themselves.
Whiteness and white supremacy are intimately linked to one another. People who have grounded their identities in whiteness are axiomatically always also sexist, queerphobic, anti-science, anti-education, xenophobic, etc… Organised hate groups like the KKK are a good example of this, given that their hatred of everything from feminism to gay people is not even so much subtext as on their websites and brochures.
And this is dangerous to everyone. To be clear. What white supremacists want is a total eradication of all human beings. Because it starts with killing people of colour, then it progresses to killing people who aren’t cisgender or heterosexual, then to killing people who aren’t Christian, then killing people who aren’t this or that or whatever arbitrary notion you can dream up until the elite ingroup consists of the last surviving Chad who bemoans the fact that there is nobody left to sleep with him, so fuck feminism amirite?
What white people’s reactions to being called out on systemic racism tells us is this: white people’s identities are rooted in racism. Whiteness is by it’s very nature rooted in racism. To be white is to be racist. This isn’t what people of colour are saying, this is what white people are saying. White people say this every time they get called out for their racism and they respond with: “you just hate me because I’m white.” “It’s okay to be white.” “You just think I’m racist because I’m white.” White people are so invested in racism that to critique racism makes us feel like you’re critiquing us. To tell a white person not to be racist has become tantamount to telling white people to not be white anymore. And that is very telling. That is very alarming.
So no. It’s not “okay” to be white. Fuck whiteness. Fuck white people. Fuck this ingroup mentality that is built on the death and oppression of people we othered.
If you really want to improve the world, disinvest from whiteness, as a concept, as an identity, as a thing. Whiteness does you no good. Whiteness does literally nobody any good.
