The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world

By Robert P Baird

Tue 20 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT

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In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who’d been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there’s little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab on to,” Lander said in 2009. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”

The Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre

Whiteness

What is whiteness?

White vs. whiteness

• White, as a term describing people, refers to light-skinned people of European descent.

• Whiteness refers to the construction of the white race, white culture, and the system of privileges and advantages afforded to white people in the U.S. (and across the globe) through government policies, media portrayal, decision-making power within our corporations, schools, judicial systems, etc.

What is whiteness?

A socially and politically constructed behavior.

Whiteness has a long history in European imperialism and epistemologies. It does not simply refer to skin color but an ideology based on beliefs, values, behaviors, habits, and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color. Whiteness represents a position of power where the power holder defines social categories and reality—the master narrator. (Adapted from STAND Framing and Learning Anti-Racism. Understanding Whiteness, Alberta Civil Liberties Research Center)

Critical White Studies defines “whiteness” as a broad social construction that embraces white culture (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Wise, 2011), history (Roediger, 2005), ideology (Leonardo, 2009), racialization (Helms, 1990), expressions and economic experiences (Lipsitz, 1998; Oliver & Shapiro, 1997), epistemology (Mills, 2007), and emotions and behaviors (Thandeka, 1999), and nonetheless reaps material, political, economic, and structural benefits for those socially deemed white. These material benefits are accrued at the expense of people of color, namely in how people of color are systemically and prejudicially denied equal access to those material benefits. (Matias (2014:142). “And Our Feelings Just Don’t Feel It Anymore”: Re-Feeling Whiteness, Resistance, and Emotionality. Understanding & Dismantling Privilege, (4)2:134-153.)

“Whiteness” as an ideology derives from the historical practice of institutionalizing “white supremacy.” Beginning in at least the seventeenth century, “white” appeared as a legal term and social designator determining social and political rights. Eventually, it was used widely to decide who could vote or be enslaved or be a citizen, who could attend which schools and churches, who could marry whom, and who could drink from which water fountain. These and thousands of other legal and social regulations were built upon the fiction of a superior “white” race deserving special privileges and protections. (Jay (2005:100-101). Whiteness Studies and the Multicultural Literature Classroom. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Becoming white meant gaining access to a whole set of public and private privileges that materially and permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs and, therefore, survival. Becoming white increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s life rather than being the object of others’ domination…implemented by force and ratified by law. (Cheryl I. Harris (1993:1716). Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8):1707-1791.)

Toni Morrison has used the following metaphor to describe the invisibility of whiteness:

“It is like the fishbowl that contains both fish and water. Whiteness, in other words, provides the very context for meaning-making. It supplies the norms and categories against which all groups are measured. But the categories of whiteness are invisible as a constraint because we keep focusing on what is inside them – the water and the fish, rather than the fishbowl itself.” (Thompson (2001). Summary of Whiteness Theory.)