Module 3: Whiteness

Dr. Christopher Stuart Taylor:

White’ and ‘Whiteness’ are social, political, and historical constructs designed to consolidate power (i.e. politically, institutionally, and justified through such mechanisms as religion and ideology) of those with ‘white’ skin colour (lighter-skinned) and European phenotype.

‘Whiteness’ (positive/good) was created in opposition to ‘Blackness’ (negative/bad) as reified means to justify the perpetual oppression of darker-skinned peoples.

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo:

• "White Supremacy is, and has always been, a pyramid scheme" - p. 131
• "25% of Southern white households owned enslaved peoples. 7% owned the majority of enslaved peoples."
• "Term 'White Trash' may have come from Black enslaved people to describe 'poor whites doing the dirty work of wealthy slave owners'' - p. 132

“By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

- Frances Lee Ansley

“…white privilege remains an important analytic frame to analyze the taken-for-granted benefits and protections afforded to whites based upon skin color, the concept of privilege emphasizes the social condition of whiteness, rather than the institutions, practices, and processes that produce this condition in the first place (Leonardo, 2004; Smith, 2012; Pulido, 2015).”

“The concept of white supremacy forcefully calls attention to the brutality and dehumanization of racial exploitation and domination that emerges from settler colonial societies.” 

“If privilege and racism are the symptoms, white supremacy is the disease. Theorized this way, white supremacy is the defining logic of both racism and privilege as they are culturally and materially produced.”

- Bonds and Inwood

The individual or collective guilt felt by some White people for harm resulting from racist treatment of racialized groups by other White people both historically and currently.

“White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”

- White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

The act of ‘weaponizing’ white fragility through words and/or actions

Koritha Mitchell:

• “The only way to avoid noticing white mediocrity is to operate as if whiteness is neutral, and doing so both allows white mediocrity to go unmarked, even while it is handsomely rewarded, and ensures that know-your-place aggression will achieve its goals. Pretending that whiteness has nothing to do with how institutions function maintains the unjust status quo. When institutional leaders boast that they have hired five people of color, they typically fail to mention that they hired, say, twenty-three white people during that same period.”​

 Ta-Nehisi Coates:

• “But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.”

White women (Karens)

• “…the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak [w]hite woman.” 
• White women and enslavement
• White women and equity
• ‘White feminism’
• White Moderates

Dr. King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963

• “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’”

Know-Your-Place-Aggression

Koritha Mitchell:

• “The flexible, dynamic array of forces that answer the achievements of marginalized groups such that their success brings aggression as often as praise. Any progress by those who are not straight, white, and male is answered by a backlash of violence—both literal and symbolic, both physical and discursive—that essentially says, know your place (author’s emphasis)!”