Link back to comment

I am interested in this term whiteness and the propensity of those promoting this term to classify people of privilege by this skin colour. It seems simplistic to classify peoples into groups and criticise them on masse because one sees fault in some of them or the behaviours of their ancestors. In times past terms such as black, Jew, infidel, native, slave were used to belittle. Most of these terms are clearly racist.

So why use the term white I ask? It is absolutely true that European trading nations spread across the world and through more powerful military means subjugated native populations. However that is not all there is to consider.

In Japan if I was born privileged or poor I wouldn’t be white. If I was born white I would have been discriminated against.
In pre-revolutionary Russia if I was born privileged or a serf I’d be white.
In post-revolutionary Russia or China for that matter, if I was born of Communist parents I’d be privileged. If not I could be an enemy of the people unless I recanted and became a communist.
In Roman times slaves and their children were discriminated against. Colour was irrelevant.
In Islamic countries if I was born privileged I’d be Moslem and if I was born Christian, Jew or Yazidi, or a slave I’d be discriminated against. Not much whiteness going on there.
If I was born into the Brahman sect in India I’d be privileged. Not much whiteness there either.

Now if one wants to rail against the selfishness of inherited privileged elites and the damage they have done over time to the subjugated, then I’d probably agree with that premise. To call them all whites and that by definition being white means one is born privileged is racism.

So I am surprised that academics are promoting a means of classifying groups of people by skin colour. It’s not much more than 100 years since the bosses and capitalists in many countries were overthrown violently as a way to remove privilege of the elite (colour wasn’t an issue) to transfer power to the workers i.e. away from the privileged bosses.

This communist message was promoted not by the workers but those of the educated elite who wanted to change the world to a socialist nirvana led by them. Replace the words bosses with whites and workers with non-whites and we have the same argument. In essence it’s an argument about changing the perceived power structure.