- Mar 11, 2015
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“Whiteness is what I call the “transcendental norm,” which means that whiteness goes unmarked. As unmarked, white people are able to live their identities as unraced, as simply human, as persons. And this obfuscates the ways in which their lives depend upon various affordances that black people and people of color don’t possess.”23
George Yancey puts the finger on the cause of the amnesia that seems to exist in parts of the white community. When this subculture sees a mental picture of an American, they see a white person.Part of the white community has conflated the word American to mean white and claim they do not see race when that is all they see. They do not think twice about how white is a race. Right-wing whites are angry, blaming the left for paying identty poitics because we menton race, or whine about DEI because non whites are included with whites who aready have the jobs because of their race.
White is a race, therefore DEI includes whites. Affirmative Action included whites, and when whites talk about non whtes they are playing the race card. America has been a society based upon identity and identity politics begain on July 4, 1776.
In other words, you really have to understand the idea of whiteness to even begin to talk about race in America. As Columbia University historian Barbara J. Fields told the producers of PBS's series Race: The Power of An Illusion, it was self-identified white Americans of European descent who "invented race during the era of the American Revolution as a way of resolving the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery." Slavery is over, but whiteness remains the identity against which ethnic groups are compared and the identity that racism protects.
One white teenager profiled in the new MTV documentary White People put it in plain language: "White is the default. It's the default race."
www.vox.com
George Yancey puts the finger on the cause of the amnesia that seems to exist in parts of the white community. When this subculture sees a mental picture of an American, they see a white person.Part of the white community has conflated the word American to mean white and claim they do not see race when that is all they see. They do not think twice about how white is a race. Right-wing whites are angry, blaming the left for paying identty poitics because we menton race, or whine about DEI because non whites are included with whites who aready have the jobs because of their race.
White is a race, therefore DEI includes whites. Affirmative Action included whites, and when whites talk about non whtes they are playing the race card. America has been a society based upon identity and identity politics begain on July 4, 1776.
White people have a race — but everyone flips out when we talk about it
In other words, you really have to understand the idea of whiteness to even begin to talk about race in America. As Columbia University historian Barbara J. Fields told the producers of PBS's series Race: The Power of An Illusion, it was self-identified white Americans of European descent who "invented race during the era of the American Revolution as a way of resolving the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery." Slavery is over, but whiteness remains the identity against which ethnic groups are compared and the identity that racism protects.
One white teenager profiled in the new MTV documentary White People put it in plain language: "White is the default. It's the default race."
White people have a race — but everyone flips out when we talk about it
How the idea that white is something other than neutral is finally gaining a cultural foothold.
www.vox.com
