Meet the multiracial whiteness
Why was NPR talking about “multiracial whiteness”? Because of a Washington Post think piece by Cristina Beltrán, who is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.
The Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American.
So! Rather than try to figure out how brown people manage to be fans of murderous bullies who despise brown people, we have to decide that that’s “whiteness.”
Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino voters voted to reelect Trump.
Ever heard of Cuba? Miami? Florida? It’s not news that there are a lot of very conservative Cubans or descendants of Cubans in Florida and that they are why Florida is all but impossible for Democrats to win. Latino doesn’t mean automatically on the left, to put it mildly.
The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio, a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban; when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church the month before.
What are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.
Why? Why do you call it that? You might as well call it rice pudding, or Vladivostok.
Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.
Of course, there are existing words that actually mean that, but no, let’s call it whiteness, because it sounds so insidery.
Multiracial whiteness offers citizens of every background the freedom to call Muslims terrorists, demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals, and accuse Democrats of being blood-drinking pedophiles.
…
America’s racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites. Thinking in terms of multiracial whiteness helps us recognize that much of today’s political rift is a division between those who are drawn to and remain invested in a politics of whiteness and those who seek something better.
What? If the racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites then why say it’s between whiteness and something better? Why not use a different word, that would make that paragraph less startlingly incoherent?
We witnessed this very divide in Georgia, when a significant segment of White voters broke with Georgia’s White majority, joining a multiracial coalition that sent Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate, following the leadership of Black women whose organizing made that electoral victory possible.
And that’s because…whiteness.
No wonder Alison Phipps is on board.
Why do we assume that non-white people cannot behave like this unless they crave “white power”? Violence and bigotry exist throughout the world. They are not a product of being “white”. In much of the world today, white people do have power, yes, and that can lead people to think this is somehow “whiteness”. But that is just pathetically limited thinking.
White voters all over the country voted for Democrats, including other black people and other Jewish people. White voters all over the country followed their own instincts, they didn’t break from ‘white’ voting. White voters have been voting for black candidates for a long time. Anyone remember Barack Obama? He was elected because he could appeal to both black and white voters; it’s likely neither group could have elected him without the other. White voters are divided between conservatives, right wing nut jobs, centrist moderates, progressives, and radicals. This is nothing new, and does not require analysis.
Things like this just boggle my mind. These are supposed to be smart people.
Would that make those White voters who “broke with Georgia’s White majority” “multiracially Black”? Are they “honourary Brown people”? Is this something that can only be conferred, not claimed for oneself, as Dolezal and Krug attempted to do?
I could see the concept of “multiracial Whiteness” having some practical utility if slapping a MAGA bumper sticker on a car or home is all one needs to do to keep cops from murdering Black people.
Ugh, this whole ideology of “multiracial whiteness” is so white. By which I mean bad.
Multiracial whiteness (???) is a completely undefinable in-group, which makes it a shit concept. Calling these people Uncle Toms doesn’t describe the cultural phenomenon of Donnie Dipshitism very well, because race isn’t the central issue, whether Alison wants it to be or not. It looks like neolefty hogwash to me.
Well, fuck! Honorary whiteness rears its ugly head again.
Try New Improved APARTHEID. Now With Added Wokeness To Make Your Coloureds Whiter Than White.
And, unlike South Africa under that system, the woke don’t even have the excuse that the new honorary whiteness is intended as a good thing to be granted.
Credit where it’s due, I suppose: the woke have managed to create guilt-free racism to compliment their guilt-free misogyny. Really starting to show their true colour (no pun intended) now, aren’t they?
Are these people aware, even if only dimly, that other countries and cultures exist? How would they try to understand Nigeria, for example, where 99.9% of the population is black, but there are 250+ ethnic groups, and Black Lives emphatically Don’t Matter, to the point where it’s not at all unusual to see dead bodies lying in the road? Would they try and impose their template of whiteness on that? (Rhetorical question, obviously – and obviously they would, because it’s the only tool in their box.)
Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Woke-ism is so goddamn parochial… whiteness doesn’t mean much in Japan unless you happen to be a white foreigner and the Japanese can manage being racist just fine without it.
What’s really happening is these woke Mighty Whiteys are mad that BIPOC (ug) are not a monolithic Minori-Team of Super Friends that lines up behind them to create the great Woke-topia.
The Geek Social Fallacies are on full blast.
Sorry if none of that is particularly clever, but it’s true.
Both of which also happen to be very White.
No what is amazing? The Google Streetview cars have actually BEEN TO VLADIVOSTOK. My mind boggles!
Come on, Ophelia. You know how deeply Theory depends on incoherence and ambiguity. If they were intelligible and unambiguous, then they wouldn’t be able to pull a quick motte & bailey when challenged. They wouldn’t be able to deride the immoral, ignorant masses for not understanding the proper meanings of words like racism, gender, and whiteness.
That’s what they tell other people. In reality, they’re the people who couldn’t hack it in the real departments.
Yes, I think the departments that foster this kind of crap are pretty much not supposed (by anyone else) to be full of smart people.Glib people, yes, but smart, no.
@Coppola #8
According to this, Vladivostok is becoming more ethnically diverse.
They got through all that verbiage without even mentioning right-wing Christianity? The crushing weight of Catholic and evangelical lunacy pressed down on Black and Latin people?
JtD, the problem is, Christianity has been so dominated by males! Whiteness is now a trait that relates only to females, and in general, only to females who don’t think TWAW. Whiteness doesn’t even appear to relate to racism anymore; everything centers on trans. Don’t buy trans ideology? Sexist. Don’t buy trans-ideology? Racist. Don’t buy trans ideology? Ableist. Don’t buy trans ideology? Western imperialist capitalist colonialist pig.
So far I haven’t seen them claiming ageism on people who don’t buy their ideology…
Well that’s just because ageism is against “olds” and the “olds” are the barrier to all progress and are thus the Enemy that must die off to make way for the future! /s
And they probably think that they’ll still be comfortably on top, because defined themselves Beyond White (Ultra White, spectrally speaking) , they will no longer actually have any White privilege. Cool trick, eh?
Re #16
Off topic, but: this is, I think, the second time I’ve encountered the term “olds” as meaning “old people”. The first time was earlier today, when a friend referred to “an old”.
In the UK people are referred to as “over 65s” and “under 40s” and the like. I hate it, it makes me cringe every time.