My sociology textbook covers a touchy subject, maybe the touchiest yet for social beings: the question of what whiteness is, and the emergence of white-as-race. We are beginning to get a grip.
It really bothers me that we continue to blame the “white” man for rampaging his way across the globe. I had hoped when we painted my sixth-grade teacher’s Volkswagen bug in psychedelic flower-power colours and dreamed of a better world that we’d be past using colour as a scapegoat.
I’m not talking politically correct whitewashing, but real change.
There’s a song my Australian friend sings that contains these words: “White man, white sail, white gun.” Sometimes, behind his back, I play with it; I sing: “Bad man, blank sail, big gun.”
I’m not saying there aren’t people in my ancestral background that didn’t deserve some kind of punishment for racist and abusive behaviour. I’m just saying it wasn’t because they were white that they did those things. That culture got the upper hand at one point and hung on. They had the guns. Domination came first. White was coincidental.
My ethnic background is half British, a quarter French, and a quarter Moor. But I look white, whatever that means. My whiteness, rather than anything I say or do, raises a frustrating barrier of distrust.
It’s great that white is finally being talked about in terms of racial identity. As my textbook puts it, white has been used for far too long as a default position instead of as a description of race: “If you’re not white, you must be X, Y or Z.” Just because you see the same shade of pink in your skin in the faces around you doesn’t mean that pink is the cornerstone colour of the human race.
Let’s shine some white on this subject. Maybe we are what our behaviour and our social privilege make us, and colour has little to do with anything.