19 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. Black and trans users, and those from other marginalized communities, often use algospeak to discuss the oppression they face, swapping out words for “white” or “racist.” Some are too nervous to utter the word “white” at all and simply hold their palm toward the camera to signify White people.
  2. Aug 2022
    1. She talks about the need white people sometimes have to make their non-racism visible, giving the example of someone who takes a “selfie” at a protest to post on Facebook. 

      Non-racism is not the same as fighting racism.

    2. Whiteness—like all racial categories—is a social construct: Its meaning is culturally and historically contextual. The physical characteristics we now associate with whiteness have been artificially linked to power and privilege for the purpose of maintaining an unjust social hierarchy.

      Whiteness has history and this history is not know to many white people., never mind people of colour.

    3. while it’s true whiteness is seen as a social default, it is not true that whiteness is the absence of race or culture. As one male participant in The Whiteness Project puts it, “As a white person, I wish I had that feeling of being a part of something for being white, but I don’t.”

      This is such a bullshit explanation and I have heard it too many times from all sort of people who are White. White people's culture is made of the Eurocentric Western cultural elements that inform life in North America, to say the least. There is a culture, but this culture is not identified as such. We cannot say that we have a Black culture or indigenous culture. Whiteness is not a culture in a sense of knowledge about one's environment, socially, culturally, economically. There is not real connection between White people and their Whiteness fades away in the context tof Whiteness. .

    4. It’s impossible to see the privilege and dominance associated with white racial identity without acknowledging that whiteness is a racial identity

      Whiteness as both identity and power.

  3. Jun 2022
  4. Nov 2021
    1. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Her thesis is that American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.

      I can see this certainly, and there's something about the origins of those in Appalachia (cross reference Colin Woodard's thesis in American Nations) which also seems to be at play.

  5. Jul 2021
    1. The overwhelmingly white crowds that lined up to hear Palin speak were nothing new. Real America has always been a country of white people. Jackson himself was a slaver and an Indian-killer, and his “farmers, mechanics, and laborers” were the all-white forebears of William Jennings Bryan’s “producing masses,” Huey Long’s “little man,” George Wallace’s “rednecks,” Patrick Buchanan’s “pitchfork brigade,” and Palin’s “hardworking patriots.”

      An interesting way of tying together some groups of voters over time here. They do have a very common thread in their whiteness.

      What other things do they have in common?

  6. Dec 2020
    1. And it was just really unbelievable she thought she would get away with that with witnesses.”

      I had to read this a third time before I saw the word witnesses and not whiteness.

      I kept reading "And it was just really unbelievable she thought she would get away with that whiteness."

  7. Nov 2020
    1. 1) To history we owe our frames of reference, our identities and our aspirations...battle with historical creation attempts to re-create oneself according to principle more humane and more liberating 2) To wrestle with it and finally accept it to bring myself out of it 3) Personal incoherence from unable to release themselves from history 4) Do not blame me, I was not there. I did not do it. 5) in private chamber of his hear...he does not wish to pay..has profited so much 6) Deserving of our fate..fear black people long to do to others what has been done to them 7) Color Curtain 8) "trust life and it will teach you in joy and sorrow, all you need to know" 9) White man barricaded behind guilt...junkies on hundred dollar a day habits

  8. Oct 2020
    1. The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
  9. Dec 2019
    1. Her hair was the brightest living gold, and, despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness, that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features. 22The peasant woman, perceiving that my mother fixed eyes of wonder and admiration on this lovely girl, eagerly communicated her history. She was not her child, but the daughter of a Milanese nobleman. Her mother was a German, and had died on giving her birth. The infant had been placed with these good people to nurse: they were better off then

      In 1831, the foundling Elizabeth's nobility appears to be recognizable in her physiognomy. Her features are described in terms that might be read as typical markers of whiteness: “thin of frame, fair of skin, and possessed of golden hair and blue eyes.”

      During the early 19th century the field of “race science” was already established and growing. For instance, Linnaeus’ Systema naturae (1758) infamously contains a hierarchy of homo sapiens based on skin color.

      In discussions of these contextual sources in the “race science,” scholars have often focused on the Creature as a symbol of the racialized other. This alteration to Elizabeth’s description in 1831 lends further credence to these readings by positioning Elizabeth, the spiritually and racially pure female, as has his ultimate victim.

      See, for instance: Mellor, Anne K. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril” in Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 481-489.

  10. Jul 2019
    1. “Aren’t you a white man?” I then asked. “Can’t you see that? Because if you can’t see race, you can’t see racism.” I repeated that sentence, which I read not long before in Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.”
    2. I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in “Whiteness of a Different Color,” describes “the 20th century’s reconsolidating of the 19th century’s ‘Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.’ ” By the 1940s, according to David Roediger, “given patterns of intermarriage across ethnicity and Cold War imperatives,” whites stopped dividing hierarchically within whiteness and begin identifying as socially constructed Caucasians.

      I wonder if it's possible to continue this trend to everyone else? Did the effect stop somewhere? What caused it to? What might help it continue?

    3. Did he understand that today, 65 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population?
    4. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from “white male privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.)

      Seriously?!

    5. I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as “whiteness studies,” the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,” David Roediger’s “The Wages of Whiteness,” Matthew Frye Jacobson’s “Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,” Richard Dyer’s “White” and more recently Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People.”

      Want to read

  11. May 2019
  12. Jul 2015
    1. or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white,

      This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.