April 8, 2010

The visibility of Whiteness

When it comes to race, a lot of people (including people of color) assume - if not outright state - that White is a lack of race, an empty ethnicity, the default, normal, invisible. As a result, when it comes to matters of race, Whiteness becomes impartial, objective, unbiased, rational, common sense.

I'm sure you can imagine how this plays out in racial discourse. Whiteness is positioned as true and therefore right.

Of course, no one thinks that consciously (duh!), but it often comes out in how, in a weird sort of way, White people seem to act like they're only White when the topic of discussion is racism and not every waking moment of their lives. And this confuses the shit out of me because that's like a straight person acting like they're only heterosexual when the issue of gay marriage crops up. Or a man acting like the only time he notices gender is when people bring up sexism. To which the only prudent response is to disengage before the intensity of delusion makes your head explode.

4 comments:

  1. In the novel I'm currently writing, it features and showcases a large and diverse cast of black women. It wasn't anything planned, it just naturally happened that way. Many of the characters in the novel are based on people in my life. Coincidentally, many are based on phenomenal black women with various backgrounds, looks, personalities, etc. Actually the cast itself is immensely diverse with compelling three-dimensional characters and I have no doubt that this story will appeal to a wide demographic.

    However one of the biggest challenges is that I constantly have to qualify this character is black, this character is black, this character is Asian, because of society's fucked up view that white is the default race.

    Because when I didn't do that in previous stories and folks found out that a character was a POC, they about flipped their shit.

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  2. well as Stephen Colbert said, he is default America. by the way neo-prodigy, people don't want diverse black women. you're better off just going along with the flow. you'll never make any money that way. believe me. i know.

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  3. And this confuses the shit out of me because that's like a straight person acting like they're only heterosexual when the issue of gay marriage crops up. Or a man acting like the only time he notices gender is when people bring up sexism.

    This confuses me too. I don't understand why the category of "white" is less visible to most of those in it than such categories as "male" or "heterosexual" are for those people. What exactly is it that's different this way about whiteness?

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  4. this also blows my mind

    similarly they have no problem expressing how unsafe they feel in non white neighborhoods but the fact that I feel unsafe in majority white areas completely goes over their heads

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