I have observed with a sort of low-grade alarm the evolution of the woke usages of the word “white.” Notable notches on the timeline include the old, semi-ironic use of “that’s so white” to mean so square, which at some point melted into constant acknowledgments and only-sometimes-instructive invocations of “white privilege.” And then “white” accrued a suffix, leading to the abstract noun “whiteness.” A little while back, if you hung around a certain class of overeducated people, some instances of white privilege might be held up along with the instruction to “watch whiteness work.”
So, casual anti-white racism is a core part of the radical chic verbal fashion sense. Fine. As far as it goes, this is not some horrible racial injustice against whites. White Americans are not in any serious danger of being laid low by organized prejudice. I’m white, and I’m certainly not put out by it. My only practical concern here is that if the culture emphasizes white identity it might cause certain kinds of bitter and vulnerable white people to emphasize their white identity with tattoos and torches and such. Really not a fan of that.
The latest evolution in wording whiteness, however, alarmed me more seriously. In a New York Times article titled “A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves,” Dr. Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People, has turned “white” into what my second-grade teacher used to call verbs, an “action word.” Painter describes a racist attack in New Jersey in which two boys of Indian descent allegedly attacked four African American girls while using racial slurs.
This is horrible, but it does not really raise any scholarly questions. Painter disagrees. She finds in it an opportunity for some racial theorizing about the essence of what race, and specifically whiteness, is: “Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin.”
The verb-phrase “enacting whiteness” is such an academic syntactical abomination that I struggle to type it. I suppose she couldn’t have gone with “whitening” because of the dental meaning, but really. Painter, scamming at the level of Tom Sawyer doing some whitewashing, is trying to argue that to be white is to be racist, and that to be racist is to be white. Is a white person who is not presently in the middle of being racist against black people not, in that moment, white, since said honky is not “enacting whiteness” just then? Seems questionable. But, invoking a “traditional black/white binary” that we have to find a way to fit everyone into, Painter suggests “we should observe their actions. Or how they perform race.”
Well, somebody here is performing. All I can reply is that if your idea of whiteness includes nonwhite people, you’ve thought about this a creepy amount, and it has broken your common sense. Take a step back. Don’t watch whiteness work. Watch TV or something.
