X means X and not-X
It’s not just Alison Phipps – it’s a whole new item. “Whiteness” now means…you know…everything. All the bad things.
Oh yes, “multiracial whiteness.” That’s kind of like multisex karenness.
Tip Jar
It’s not just Alison Phipps – it’s a whole new item. “Whiteness” now means…you know…everything. All the bad things.
Oh yes, “multiracial whiteness.” That’s kind of like multisex karenness.
The Creeping Whiteness expands and devours everything in its path, soon encompassing all the evil in the world…
I have been noticing the increased use of “white” as a pejorative. “Multiracial whiteness” is a new one on me, but I suppose it was inevitable.
Well, white supremacy isn’t just for white people. Just ask Uncle Ruckus.
Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
I wonder how many of these brave, bold theorists of the new “whiteness” are themselves white, but redefining “whiteness” in such a way as to not include themselves. There are plenty of white women desperately defining themselves outside of “white womanhood” so they can join in (rather than be subjected to) the pointing, shunning, and burning of gender critical women, knowing that at any time, should they make the smallest mistake, they themselves will be discovered to be, and denounced as, “white women.”
Exactly. That’s certainly what Alison Phipps is doing. It’s absurd that anyone thinks this is “progressive.”
Yeah, defining it not to include themselves. White does not mean rich; it does not mean capitalist. It means…white. I am not rich (though I’m sure these people would gladly include those of us who live in middle-class lives) and I am not particularly a capitalist, but I am still white. It isn’t something to explain or be ashamed of, it just is.
What I would need to explain and be ashamed of is if I use my whiteness as a weapon, or as a wedge to get something in preference to someone else, someone not white. That’s white privilege, the fact that we can walk down the street without being shot by cops. The fact that we are not automatically suspect when we apply for a job. The fact that our lives are taken for granted as just being, so that when we walk in a store, we are not paid undue attention to until it’s time to check out. So that when my husband kept setting off alarms at stores because a clerk forgot to take the sensor out of his new wallet, he could walk on past and the security stopped the black guy going out behind him. That’s white privilege, and black people do not, cannot have that.
We have a perfectly good term for what they’re talking about: class privilege. That’s what rich people have, and it accrues no matter what the skin color, though white people still have an advantage there. Rich white people don’t have to face the questioning that rich black people must face. That’s white privilege. Rich black people get opportunities poor people of any color don’t have. That’s not whiteness, that’s class privilege.
Words. How do they work?
I’m white. I had no choice in that.
I am also not wealthy and the older I get the more I think that Karl Marx was right about Capitalism.
So what colour does that make me? Red, I guess…
Meanwhile shit like this radicalizes right-wingers (though that’s chicken and egg as much as anything else). If white == bad, then why the fuck wouldn’t white people GTFO of liberal politics?
It’s similar to the desire to have “LGBTQ+” include “allies,” (or alternatively, to just loosen the definition of “queer” until anyone can claim it), so that everyone can claim it and avoid being one of the evil “cishets.”
I guess that’s what non-binary is for, since otherwise you’re just a person who happens to be cishet but doesn’t adhere strictly to any single set of gender stereotypes. So you get to be special, even though you are still just you.
I can’t even get my cat to adhere strictly to cat stereotypes – she insists on acting dog-like on certain occasions. (Oh, did I just do her violence by assuming she identifies as “she”? (S)he hasn’t told me what her(is) pronouns are).
Not super new. Critical race theorists have been pulling this move for some time now. The twitterati mob tried to cancel Terry Crews last year for tweeting some really anodyne shit about being careful not to let the impetus toward equality take a malevolent turn.
Why didn’t you just ask her?
GW, I did ask her. Can you tell me what meow means? I’m not sure if that is she, he, or they.
I was under the impression that ‘whiteness’ was a stand-in for class, used where the writer wanted to seem hip and totes intellectual at the same time.
Iknklast, your cat’s pronoun is “meow”. You asked, and meow told you. Cat voices must be heard!
https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Nounself_pronouns
“meow laughs I hugged mew mews heart warmed that is mews meow loves meowself Created by Tumblr user huntersgotellis in 2014.[5] An animal (cat) themed variation.”
Let’s not laugh; studies show that between 0.5% and 2.0% of people use meowself pronouns (and probably an even larger percentage of cats). And in order to take this stuff seriously, I’m sure meow does love meowself very much….
Black cats matter.
Hence the Dolezal/Ward Churchill assumption of bogus ethnicity. It isn’t just petty ambition, its a kind of destructive self-erasure.
My black cat agrees with you. She’s still working on the t-shirt. It’s difficult with paws.
Thanks for the link, GW. Now I know our species is doomed.
GW, after reading your link, I think if someone requires me to list my pronouns (work comes to mind as a possibility), I will list quark and charmed quark. I could live with those pronouns.
Wait what? It should be pretty easy to understand that “Whiteness” as a concept has a whole complicated history, and because racism is irrational and anti-scientific, of course people of different “racial groups” have been subsumed into white supremacy. Historically, the Irish, Italians, various Central and Eastern European slavs. Colorism is a thing, with “white-passing” African and Asian Americans, and there’s a complex interplay between antisemitism and the lower visibility/claiming of Jewish ethnicity within white supremacist culture.
The world is complicated, if a term like “Multiracial Whiteness” sounds a bit clumsy, that’s because the underlying issues are messy and complicated.
No, that’s not why.