I like whiteness as a term because it distills down that the concept is not “real”, but rather a manufactured characteristic and phenomenon that was deliberately invented and used to divide people that otherwise would have little reason to feel apart from each other, for the benefit of the rich and powerful. At least to me. Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it. But so far I don’t find those complaints very convincing. Maybe because I feel as a white person able to judge whether it’s necessarily offensive or dehumanizing to white people, and I find that it isn’t. Others might disagree, of course. I’m not going to chide or criticize anyone for choosing different terms to describe the same phenomena, or even for quibbling with me about my use of it. But so far I don’t plan to change my usage.
No, that’s a different term for a different concept.
I don’t know about that, but I’m getting the sense that you’re okay with putting words in other people’s mouths.
Obvious bullshit is obvious.
Disingenuous.
Your entire response to my post was: “If you have better ideas for these terms, feel free to offer them. Maybe they’ll catch on.” My post was about the extremely poor term “black criminality”. But suddenly you’re talking about “a different term”. Well, I wasn’t. That’s what my whole post was about. Here’s my own issue, which you are free to ignore a second time: I don’t particularly care if Jason Riley at the WSJ does not have a better term for his idea. He should ideally avoid his current term, regardless of whether you or anybody else have offered a better term for him to use.
But by the standard you’ve just offered – if you were honest enough to apply it fairly – then he has no compelling reason to change how he expresses his ideas. Because no one has offered him a better term. Because no better term has caught on. I don’t hold with that. I maintain that the term is appalling.
Yet that’s the standard you’re offering here. “If you have better ideas for these terms, feel free to offer them. Maybe they’ll catch on.” That is the only standard you offered in your post. So are now you retracting that standard? Is Jason Riley free and clear with his term, because no one has offered a better? Or does your arbitrary standard somehow only apply to one group of people, but not to another group of people?
It’s rough to use the same standard for other people that you allow for yourself. I know, I know. But it’s also the only fair way to go about this business of communication.
Sorry, I was talking about the term whiteness. If I miscommunicated, I deeply apologize.
A few things:
The idea that the term was manufactured to divide people is not useful. People have been using terms to divide people since terms were being used. The practice doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
I assume by your continued usage you feel it’s accomplishing some goal. Do you know what it is, and is that measurable in some way? I’m curious what would persuade you that usage of the term is not accomplishing what you think it is.
When another poster used the term “wetback” and insisted that the usage wasn’t racist, that he was defining it in a different way, was that a valid defense against the charge of racism/bigotry? I seem to recall it wasn’t. The only difference I see between the two examples is that one term has a longer history of racism attached to it. But given enough usage in the way it’s being used here, “whiteness” may catch up.
As a thought exercise, for every use of “whiteness”, substitute “blackness” with the same definition. Or “redness”. Or “purple chaired-ness”. Because if you’re redefining standard terms, might as well go all in.
The concept was manufactured - the term just labels it. Feel free to advocate for another label if you want.
“Blackness” could well be used to describe the concept - that these particular racial categories, black and white and how they’re used in America, were invented in order to divide and conquer, so to speak. As I understand it, anyway. “Whiteness” has caught on as a label, perhaps because so many PoC are tired of “white” as the “default” category, with every other category as somehow unusual. Or some other reason.
I mean, it really hasn’t. It’s used in some leftist circles, particularly ones where there are lots of people of color, but my whole beef with “whiteness” is that it has not caught on, and that therefore it makes perfect sense for people to be confused. When I hear “whiteness” I don’t think someone’s talking socioeconomics, I’m thinking they’re talking about my pathetic lack of a tan.
And sure, that can be remedied. But by the time you’ve taken time to explain the concept, a whole sector of people has jumped to conclusions, because the way “whiteness” is most typically used makes those confusions very personal and very threatening and very easy to make. For example, from earlier in the thread:
The struggle you may (or may not) be experiencing is idea that whiteness itself has become an existential threat to the country.
If I’m not already cottoned on to the fact that “whiteness” means something entirely different from the color of my skin, I’m going to read that as a call for a race war; my existence as a white person is apparently seen as some as an existential threat to the country.
And Ditka doesn’t get it, because of course he doesn’t, who can blame him? When most people read “whiteness”, their thought is not “a social construct with qualities X, Y, and Z”, they think “hey I’m white, what’s wrong with me being white”. It’s like how some people use “privilege” in really dumb ways - yeah, you and I know what you mean when you talk about white privilege, but my friend Nahum who’s been living off disabilities and medicaid since his lobsterboat burned down? He ain’t feelin’ too privileged!
And hey, basically the whole thread since then has been a back and forth mostly between people saying, “wow, that sounds horribly racist” and others saying “no no no, you just misunderstand it”. The problem is that if people hear something you say and think, “wow, that sounds horribly racist”, a large portion of them aren’t going to hang around to see what you mean. And BigT is right - the more we talk about “whiteness” in this bizarre, non-standard way, the easier it is for the alt-right to paint a picture of the democrats as a party that is not just pro-minority, but anti-white. And that’s shite.
It’s not even jumping to conclusions, in my opinion. The term “whiteness” inherently means the concept of being white. It’s just white and the prefix -ness. It is normal conversation to turn an adjective into a noun by using that prefix. “The whiteness of the staff was noticeable: it did not contain a single black person.” The historical meaning in the context of race is “the concept of being white.”
To take a term that has a preexisting racial meaning and redefine it to cover a negative concept is racist. It doesn’t matter if it was created by some misguided POCs on the left. While I’m all about defending SJWs, it doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong–even dangerously so.
If anyone with any inclination to think white people face racism hears someone say that “whiteness is the problem” or whatever, they will inherently interpret that as “Being white is the problem.” It will validate everything they say.
I can’t even come up with why anyone would have thought redefining that word was a good idea other than some really bad ones. Racists try to redefined the n-word, a word with a preexisting racial meaning, to mean “horrible person, regardless of race.” Why do they do that? So that, when you call them on it, they can say “Actua-LEE [n-word] isn’t racist. It means […]”
I sincerely hope these were just some misguided people on the left inside an echo chamber without a white person willing to stand up and say “Uh, this will come off as racist. We should use a different term.” But I suspect it came from a few actual racists, or possibly some trolls who were trying to create strife.
And, no, I do not think it is my job to come up with another term, any more than it was my job to come up with another term that means “horrible person.” It’s up to you to stop using a term you know will be perceived as attacking a particular race. You know what it means, so make a new term.
That said, I will try based on what I read in the few posts above, because I’m nice. Why not “defaultness”? That seems to describe the concept. In contexts where you need to be more specific, call it “white defaultness.” The latter I’d know exactly what it meant.
Frankly, all these complaints sound like tone policing to me. IMO, every approach can be valid, including the approach of using rhetorically sharp lessons to essentially shock the world view of the complacent. Others use different approaches, including friendlier and less harsh language, to sort of ease some of these harsh facts into their understanding, and that can also be effective. I’m not going to say to them that they must use the same terms and rhetoric that I do. Further, I use different rhetoric in different circumstances. I don’t talk about whiteness with the Trump supporters at my office (in the rare instances politics comes up). But here? You folks can handle it.
This is why I dropped the subject. I think it’s a stupid argument, but I perceive some potential advantage in having the iiiandyiii’s and Huey Freeman’s of the world out there “using rhetorically sharp lessons to essentially shock the world view of the complacent”. I’ve come to the conclusion that I hope they continue, right up through the midterm elections.
I understand your usage. I simply reject it as valid. That you change your approach among less receptive folks but don’t feel the need to here reinforces the idea that contrary to what you suggest, the label hasn’t really caught on in a meaningful sense.
Yes, “whiteness” has a well-established meaning. But it’s not the meaning you claim that it has. By using it the way you are, you are doing the opposite of communicating. If you want a term for the system of entrenched socioeconomic privilege for whites, males, and other “have” groups, then make up a new term, one that doesn’t already have a completely different well-established meaning.
Yes, some folks are in favor of the continued toleration of sexual assault and abuse (among other things). I still have hope that one day you won’t want to continue to be one of those folks.
Words often have multiple meanings.
I love how you rather inappropriately use a different lefty buzz phrase to defend your use of another lefty buzz phrase. Most amusing.
Maybe not (depending on what you mean by “meaningful”). That doesn’t really change anything, IMO. It’s caught on among journalists and historians who have studied the history of white supremacy and related concepts in America history, in my understanding.
Hold on, let me look in my lefty buzz phrase dictionary for a retort. Any minute now…
Y’know, there are good ways to move people. Making a statement which the vast majority of white people will naturally interpret as meaning “The struggle you may (or may not) be experiencing is idea that your race has become an existential threat to the country” is not one of them. Yeah, it’s tone policing. I’m on your side, and I’m saying that this is an excellent way to lose allies and alienate people, and throws a gigantic bone to the alt-right.
Imagine, for a moment, that some political group decided to lump a bunch of negative, criminal behaviors together under the heading of “blackness”. Then members of that group spoke about how “blackness is the cause of all the world’s suffering” or “We must eradicate blackness”. Imagine you weren’t aware of their jargon. Would you be worried? Would that kind of call to arms concern you? Would you be perfectly willing to join the party despite that? Huey Freeman, would you see this as at all problematic?
Would either of you even stick around to hear them explain that, “No really, it’s not racist at all, blackness means things like gang violence and breakdown in local trust in law enforcement, and those are all obviously bad things we want to get rid of, it has nothing to do with being black”? And even if you stuck around to listen to that explanation, wouldn’t you pause for a moment to wonder why the hell they chose that term (and not literally anything else) to begin with?
I probably wouldn’t stick around, and if I did I’d still wonder why the hell they used that term.
And hey, we even have a few working test cases. How’s “whiteness” gone over here? Like a lead balloon. How about “toxic masculinity”? That one has actually caught on in most liberal circles. It’s even a more precise term that limits the statement from “all masculinity” to “toxic masculinity”. It’s a very useful concept in a lot of ways. That said, you’ll still find plenty of people, even well-informed people, who think that it’s about masculinity itself being toxic, rather than about toxic behaviors that people conflate with masculinity, and about ways to be masculine without being toxic.
Don’t invent terminology designed to attack negative traits that can easily be conflated with a person’s identity. It does not go well. Whiteness means smething. Adding an additional meaning that makes it super easy for people to paint you as anti-white racists is stupid.
This isn’t tone policing. You’re just doing something really dumb that reflects poorly on me and my side and hands a big fat fucking weapon to our most dangerous enemies. Stop it. You’re better than this.
Yeah, this is the shit I took Biffster to task about in that thread God and Life. For example:
If someone comes up to you and says, “Do you believe in God”, what do you think they mean? Is it likely they mean “do you believe in Life”? Or “Do you believe in the universe”? Or do you think they mean “Do you believe in an anthropomorphic supernatural entity that can intercede on the behalf of humans who may or may not have any number of important supernatural qualities, depending on which religion we ascribe to”? Because you wouldn’t ask someone if they believe in life. Or if they believe in the universe.
You can define “god” any way you want. Just like I can define “chair” as “a sharp knife propped up vertically”. Or “dog” as “large, aggressive apex predator with stripes who has been starved for three days”. It’s just that when I sit you down in a chair and let my dog into the room, you’re going to end up very, very confused. Because while it’s true that words have usages, not meanings, and while it’s true that you can use words any way you like, if you want to communicate with other people, they’d better understand those usages.
And some words contain baggage. For example, if I say “chair”, I usually mean something comfortable to sit on. And if I say “god”, I usually mean some form of supernatural, intelligent deity. Because that’s how damn near everyone ever has always used the word! And when I say “god is life”, I’m taking a word that has a ton of baggage and using it in a completely weird way. There’s just no reason for it, unless you’re desperate to believe in something you can call “god”, but extremely uninterested in maintaining a coherent definition of said thing.
When I say “Whiteness is the cause of most of America’s problems right now”, you know how most people will parse that? “White people are the cause of most of America’s problems right now”. That’s not what you mean, but that’s what they understand. Because that’s what most people understand “whiteness” to mean. You want to have it mean something totally different? Why? Why not just use a new term? Until you have most everyone on board with your new usage, all you’re going to accomplish is confusing people. And you’re confusing them in a way that leaves them feeling attacked on the basis of their race, and less likely to listen to anything else you have to say.
You are on my side. Stop making me regret that.
Thanks for the input, but you haven’t changed my mind. I’ll use the term in venues in which I think it’s appropriate and folks can handle it. In other venues I’ll use different terms.
I think you can handle it. That doesn’t require you to like the term. Being bothered can be a good thing. These are concepts that should bother the hell out of people.