Some alumnae of Trinity College went bonkers when the author tweeted that “Whiteness is Terrorism.”
“Critical systemic white racism scholars recognize the centrality of ‘race’ as myth and whiteness as an ideological component in facilitating racial capitalism.”
Examining whiteness is of utmost importance if Americans truly wish to live in a just and peaceful society. To realize this possibility,self-identified ‘whites’ – and their collaborators from among the racially oppressed – must reckon with their attachment to whiteness. Whiteness was the central concern of sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in his book Black Reconstruction in Americapublished in 1935. Du Bois argued that whiteness serves as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor self-identified ‘whites’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries higher social status than people socially defined as black. He further claimed that: 1) the whiteness idea provided meaningful “compensation” for economically oppressed ‘whites’ who were otherwise subjected to the ravages of capitalism; 2) the value of their whiteness was dependent on the devaluation of black existence; and 3) the benefits of their mythical status as ‘whites’ were not strictly monetary – rather whiteness engendered in them a sense of superiority. The academic field of Whiteness Studies is built on the foundation of Du Bois’s thesis. Whiteness Studies is concerned with how one can self-identify as ‘white’ and not be complicit in white supremacy? How can one accept the ideologies of ‘race’ and whiteness as ordinary, and notbe racial oppressors or systemic white racism collaborators? My much-maligned tweet, “Whiteness is Terrorism,” emerges from this scholarly interrogation of whiteness as an idea, not as a person.
