The following piece briefly examining the application of that mechanism by which the institutions of the United States strip human beings of context, and thus identity, is intended as a companion to this piece, exploring said mechanism.
"white people" don't exist
“white” is a social kind, not a natural kind
it has no biological referent, no cultural content, no historical continuity as a people
it is a purely political category, the only substance of which is exclusion
the term is a category error, a ghost that gains solidity only through collective belief and institutional reinforcement
"whiteness" as a political construct was invented to manage labour and justify dispossession
it is what happens when humans are stripped of the conditions for culture and history and given a credit score instead
a specific condition of emptiness, then racialised
that this condition became coded in the USAmerican context is a historical accident that then became a self-perpetuating trap
the risk of such an assertion is that people will misread it as a racial polemic rather than an ontological one
it is a legal taxonomy invented in the Virginia colony in the late 17th century to solve a specific political problem: the alliance of indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans in Bacon's Rebellion
before 1676, the distinction that mattered was Christian vs. heathen, free vs. bonded
after Bacon's Rebellion, the planter class needed to split the labouring class permanently
the category was refined through the Naturalisation Act of 1790, which limited citizenship to "free white persons"
it was not a description of a people, simply a gate, membership in a property club
this is the critical distinction: an ethnicity is a set of affirmative content
language, food, kinship, obligation, story, land
a racial category is a border, telling only who is excluded
it cannot tell people who they are
"white" has never had affirmative content, it has only ever been a list of who is not
the problem is that people born inside a border with no interior will confuse the border for a home
treating it as a material identity with essential characteristics, whether to celebrate or condemn it, serves only to reinforce the original sleight of hand
the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Poles, these were not "white" when they arrived
they were racialised as something else, somewhere between white and Black in the American taxonomy
they became white through a process of negation: by not being Black
by moving out of ethnic neighborhoods, by abandoning language, by joining unions that excluded non-whites, buying houses in suburbs with racial covenants
becoming white was a promotion
but the price of the promotion was the loss of whatever they were before
one can be Irish and be a people, or one can be white and be a category
one cannot be both, because whiteness requires the evacuation of the particular
the "white ethnic" nostalgia that emerged in the late 20th century is not a recovery of culture
only a commodified simulacra of heritage
the nostalgia is the ache of the hollow knowing it was once full
Every engagement with "whiteness" as a real category reinforces it as a real category.
the white supremacist who says "I am proud to be white" and the anti-racist educator who says "check your white privilege" are, at the level of ontology, in perfect agreement
they both believe the ghost is a body
they are handing a receipt to each other and arguing about whether the receipt is good or bad, neither noticing that a receipt is not a meal
we cannot fight whiteness without strengthening it, because fighting it requires us to name it, and naming it makes it real in the mind of everyone who hears the name
we cannot celebrate it because there is nothing to celebrate
we cannot be "post-racial" because that is just ignoring the institutional weight of the category while it continues to operate
the only intellectually honest position is to insist, again and again, that the category has no referent
this is different from saying "race is a social construct"
everyone says that now, to the point that it is a cliché that changes nothing
because people still act as if the construct is a fact
the harder move is to treat the construct as a collective hallucination
a construct which requires constant maintenance
and to withdraw our participation in the maintenance
not by declaring oneself "not white" in a way that creates a new identity
that's just another move inside the game
but to become uninteresting to the category, to give it nothing to work with
to answer the question "what are you?" with something the census has no box for
an alternative through which may be recovered the particular, creating forms of mutual obligation that aren’t state-recognised
building real relations to place that aren’t mediated by property deeds
learning the language and cultures our great-grandparents abandoned
The objection is obvious, "But the category has real effects. People are discriminated against because of it. Institutions distribute harm along its lines. You can't just pretend it away."
acknowledging the institutional reality of the category does not require believing the category is ontologically valid
a bank can deny a loan because of the fiction we call money, but that fiction still operates with the force of law
the response to a fiction with institutional power is not to treat the fiction as true
rather, it is to dismantle the institutions that enforce it while refusing the identity it offers
this is the difference between Blackness and whiteness
a structural distinction between forms of imposed identity that cannot be mistaken for a hierarchy of suffering
Blackness in the Americas was also a category imposed by violence, on people who were prevented from being a people
whose languages, kinship systems and cultures were systematically destroyed and then reconstituted under conditions of extreme duress
Black culture is a creative act of survival against the category
whiteness is a category that rewarded people for destroying their own culture voluntarily
this is why "Black pride" and "white pride" are not symmetrical
one is the reclamation of a fullness that was attacked
the other is the celebration of an emptiness that was offered as a bribe
one is a people forged in resistance to a box
the other is a prize for climbing into the box and pulling the lid shut
a coffin, one that is empty but still needs burying
let us carry it to an unmarked grave
it is lighter than anyone in the procession expects
empty, yes, but full of ghosts
ghosts are harder to bury than bodies
The question is whether we can learn to stop feeding them.
