Great; now I can stop worrying, and go retrieve my bullwhip from the closet
/
releasing my true, inner self — who knew?
Whites can’t be anti-racist, because they’re white — and there’s nothing to be done about it.
According to antiracism, whiteness is inherently oppressive and, by definition, thoroughly embedded in society in the form of structural racism or “anti-blackness.” White people have intrinsic privileges within this structural racism simply for having been born white. Therefore, “whiteness” is more than just white people existing. Rather, “whiteness” is the very oppression itself that is baked into every aspect of our society.
Antiracism also preaches that race is a social construct rather than a biogenetic reality, but that the impact of centuries of people prejudging other people by appearance or ancestry has made race “real” in terms of how people treat other people within our structurally racist society. In other words, race isn’t defined by how someone looks, but by the reactions elicited by others based upon how someone looks, and those reactions create and maintain structural racism.
Under this paradigm, the professor argued, white women’s “lived experiences” are seen as invalid by antiracism because everything they experience is colored by their privilege. As such, they are intellectually incapable of objectivity when analyzing their own experiences, and they are therefore emotionally incapable of feeling genuine sympathy for anyone who isn’t also white.
Further, since they cannot use their “lived experiences” to truly be conscious of their own privilege and the racism inherent in the system, they cannot really do anything to fix the problem. In short, a white woman who wants to be an ally in antiracism must constantly work to dismantle her own whiteness, but she cannot escape her whiteness altogether because the racism that gives her whiteness “privilege” is baked into the system, Wiegman wrote.
Therefore, the only way for white people to participate in antiracism is for them to agree with it utterly and feel neverending shame for having been born white. They have to accept that they are a symbol of the oppressive system, a symbol of “whiteness,” and are thus inherent supporters of the structurally racist status quo.
They have to suffer, and there is no way out of the suffering because there is no way to fully escape their whiteness. This entire situation is what Wiegman called “the impasse of whiteness,” a trap created by antiracism in which white people – and, for feminism, white women – are not allowed to “fix” the problem of their own whiteness. They simply must live in it and stew in their own guilt over being born the wrong race.
Hey, it works for me. Now that the currency has been debased, now that literally every thought, every action is "racist”, the term itself has lost all meaning, so … who cares?
