WHO YOU ARE

Our evolving identity defines our thinking and action to the world around us.

This article will explain how Positive Whiteness builds a Positive White culture. Read this first before you read the rest to understand what Positive Whiteness is trying to accomplish.

Identity is an evolving science, one that defines the very nature of who you are. For what Identity is, there are two major elements. The Identity you’re born with that you have no choice in, and the one that you choose through your actions.

As for both, they have a close relationship with each other.

Positive Whiteness brings in several areas of focus to build a positive White identity. The first is the relationship between perception and identity. Your identity is shaped based on how you perceive the world around you, how you perceive yourself and how the world perceives you. Secondly, the sciences of philosophy, psychology, and sociology are marshaled to try to understand the individual, society, and our actions. Thirdly mass media and social media are then utilized as powerful forces in shaping how you and others see all aspects of the world.

The core part of Positive Whiteness’s work is seeing how our identity can define our actions. Then from that identity, be a friend, neighbor or ally to support everyone.

As the American Psychological Association states, “The way we perceive ourselves in relation to the rest of the world influences our behaviors and our beliefs.”

Our understanding of who we are as a global White Community is extremely important in helping us know the right actions in the globalizing, diverse, and dynamic world that we live in. For White people in America and around the world, they are seeing themselves as a race for the first time and developing a racial identity because of it. This means our self-perception, perception of others, and thus are actions are in the process of going through great transformational change.

Currently, the only ‘White’ organizations that exist to address this identity and what it means are the destructive White Supremacist groups that seek to destroy those around them. From the KKK, Neo-Nazis, and such, these groups seek to martial Whiteness and White people together to engage in racist or destructive behavior. For them, being White means to be under siege, that you are hated and your identity is based on how you can conquer and defeat those who are not White. All modern Whites organizations exist from the framework that White people are seen by society as negative and they have an opponent they view in a negative light. Thus these non-White targets must be defeated, damaged, or destroyed in some way. White Supremacists hold the belief that they are viewed negatively, and viewing non-Whites negatively, is the foundation for their relationship with the world which defines their actions. Currently, they are the only organizations that represent Whiteness and White people.

People become the identity they see themselves as, which is shown by Social Identity Theory. Social Identity Theory in short “refers to the ways that people’s self-concepts are based on their membership in social groups. Examples include sports teams, religions, nationalities, occupations, sexual orientation, ethnic groups, and gender.” You become what you see yourself as.

People act based on the way they see themselves. We know that from Social Identity Theory yet even further, Self-Perception Theory comes into play. “Self-perception theory posits that people determine their attitudes and preferences by interpreting the meaning of their own behavior.” Essentially that means that your behavior changes your attitude, not the other way around. One test was run that had its subjects forced to smile or frown when they see pictures of Black or White people. They then took a test after and they scored the pictures higher when they were smiling and lower when they were frowning. This was even tested on terrorists where the authors looked at how “the new converts may form increasingly radical attitudes to be consistent with their increasingly radical behavior. Self-perception theory, then, has strong ties to social identity and social influence in this scenario.”

When someone of your own identity group, your own thinking engages in a certain behavior, you mirror that. For many White people in America, The UK, France, Australia, and around the globe, they see what Whiteness means and are drawn to that attitude and behavior. Because of our human nature, they want to conform to it and be perceived as normal by the group.

In today’s climate, this conforming isn’t just happening on a local level anymore but on a global scale. Bias research shows that media shapes how we perceive people of different races and thus our actions toward them. Yet media in the present day includes mass media, the internet, and social media showing us that there is a radical dynamic change in the global ways that shape and define our identity.

In the materials that you engage with at Positive Whiteness, the approach is to build that positive identity for the global White community based on the good things they have done individually, nationally, and as a whole and then create media to edify society. The reason is as we can see from above, we become what we see ourselves as and our media and societal work will transform our identity and thus our actions.

For the Global White Community, Whiteness is an old identity historically attached to malicious Whites organizations yet being White is a new identity for many around the globe. With the internet, modern media, and social media laying the foundation for a modern Whiteness, our work in building a Positive White Identity is of great importance.

For the Global White Community, as we can see by the Culture articles in Build Positive Identity, we’re a community of Democracy & Republicanism, Human Rights, Global Charity, Minority Rights, Education & Science, and World Peace. It’s imperative that we define ourselves by these laudable ideals, and propagate them even further.

In forthcoming articles, we will explore the creation of a modern positive White Identity and Culture. Through this we will continue to have conversations and test out systems to further develop a positive identity. From there this will combine with Positive Whiteness initiatives to create ways to take action from that constructive place.