Why We Need To Know The Story Of Whiteness |
Why We Need To Know The Story Of Whiteness
Blavity
2017-10-31
Photo: Shutterstock
Every year around our birthdays, our mom tells my brother and me the story of our births. This is the gift I look forward to most. Origin stories are important. They literally root us. Not everyone has full access to their origin story, however. Perhaps the most tragic end result of enslavement in the Americas is that many of our origin stories have been lost, manipulated and erased. Yet, we insist on learning about and from our past to direct our own futures, as seen by the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.
One origin story we have access to — but that has not been fully told — is the story of Whiteness. How did White people become White?
When I say the story of Whiteness, I do not mean a story about a person, hero or villain who happens to be White. We have plenty of those. I’m talking about the period between 1619 — with the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia — and some 60 years later when laws created hierarchies based on an invented concept called ‘White.’ There are a lot of enslavement narratives, but why don’t we have films and TV shows about who counted as White at the time, and, most importantly: why?…
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Tags: Blavity, Fanshen Cox, Fanshen Cox Digiovanni, Whiteness, Whiteness Studies