{"id":43445,"date":"2015-10-24T21:49:55","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T21:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43445"},"modified":"2017-03-05T22:30:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T22:30:00","slug":"what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43445","title":{"rendered":"what we talk about when we talk about whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"

what we talk about when we talk about whiteness<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker<\/a>
\n2015-10-22<\/p>\n

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

(This is part one of a three part series on \u201cwhat we talk about when we talk about whiteness.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes I engage in conversations about whiteness that make people bristle. Questions are often raised like: so is \u201cwhite\u201d automatically wrong? Why is \u201cwhiteness\u201d evil? Are you saying \u201cwhite people\u201d are inherently bad? My impression is that there is a bit of talking past one another that happens in these discussions, so it is my hope to define terms and better flesh out my perspective here.<\/p>\n

First, it may be helpful to recognize that \u201cwhiteness<\/a>\u201d can be understood as a synonym for white supremacy: the pervasive belief that people can be hierarchically sorted into separate \u201craces\u201d based on what regions of the world their ancestors came from, and that \u201cthe white race\u201d is the best of these groups. This is an ideology that is actively enforced through bodily and psychic violence directed towards the groups of people who are assigned immutable \u201cracial\u201d traits and deemed undesirable.<\/p>\n

Secondly, we might note that \u201cwhiteness\u201d as a social and historical trend has relatively little to do with skin color. Indeed, what constitutes \u201cbeing white\u201d today is not the same thing as fifty, much less two hundred and fifty years ago. German, Greek, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, and Italian immigrants to the United States are all examples of ethnic groups once rejected for their racial inferiority, considered subordinate, but who are today viewed as an allied coalition of groups under the banner of being fully and simply white…<\/p>\n

…To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.<\/p>\n

For example, when my father, a Japanese man from the big island of Hawai\u2019i<\/a>, was told to check \u201cWhite Other\u201d on his census form when entering the police academy, he was being invited to erase our culture under the guise of a benign, gift-wrapped welcome into social privilege, instructed to do so by defining himself primarily against blackness…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I engage in conversations about whiteness that make people bristle. Questions are often raised like: so is \u201cwhite\u201d automatically wrong? Why is \u201cwhiteness\u201d evil? Are you saying \u201cwhite people\u201d are inherently bad? My impression is that there is a bit of talking past one another that happens in these discussions, so it is my hope to define terms and better flesh out my perspective here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[21626,21624,21625],"class_list":["post-43445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-a-real-rattlesnake-meets-his-maker","tag-ryan-kenjii-kuramitsu","tag-ryan-kuramitsu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52054,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43445\/revisions\/52054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}