Can It Be Insincere for White People to Focus on Race and Racism?

While one finger points at race and racism, the others point back at you

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels

Though some white people have grown interested in racial issues, especially after 2020, whiteness continues to be omnipresent within our personal lives and all our institutions, including the media, government, education, etc. Whiteness continues to normalize its relationship to white supremacy, and it continues to influence the emotions of white people, particularly exacerbating shame and guilt. W.E.B Du Bois once said, "no analysis of racism is complete without studying the social dynamics surrounding whiteness." Though it's essential to look at race and racism, I firmly believe white people must be perpetually vigilant in examining and disrupting whiteness.

Have you ever heard the saying, "When pointing a finger, three fingers are pointing back at you"? A decade ago, white people were reticent in acknowledging it; however, today, we've become slightly more comfortable pointing the finger at racism. We’ve also grown comfortable pointing at the most obvious forms of racism, like prejudiced thoughts, micro aggressions, and police violence. And we certainly love pointing out racism when it’s abstract: as something that lives outside of ourselves and doesn’t implicate us personally. Still, as we point our index finger outward and at racism, three fingers remain pointing back at us.

W.E.B Du Bois once said, "no analysis of racism is complete without studying the social dynamics surrounding whiteness."

The Middle Finger: Whiteness

The first finger that points in the direction of self-reflection is the finger directed at our internalized whiteness. However, before we acknowledge this finger, I think having a shared definition of whiteness is important. Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) scholars define whiteness as the following:  

Whiteness is the structure and ideology that works to promote and normalize white supremacy. Whiteness can be understood as the result of social and cultural processes rooted in a global history of European colonialism, imperialism, and transatlantic slavery and maintained today through various institutions, ideologies, and everyday social practices. Whiteness embodies both a material reality—connected to the disproportionate economic and political power wielded by those racialized as white, as well as a symbolic reality—shaped by the cultural meanings attached to whiteness as a form of inflated value, morality, aesthetics, and civilization.

Whiteness is not about the superficial surface of white skin. It’s about a political, social, and cultural structure that reinforces white supremacist ideology. Think and notice it as the constant marketing and advertising of everything white: white phenotype, white ethnic cultures, white interests, white beauty standards, etc. This disproportionate and perpetual white advertisement inherently carries a false sense of superiority, contempt for everything non-white, and a disdain for Blackness in particular. I recently shared an Instagram post where I analyzed the socialization of whiteness within the context of cartoons I watched as a child. In that post, I demonstrated whiteness as a ubiquitous force that continually reinforces the idea that white is right and, by inference, Black is wrong. As white people, we must look beyond the disingenuous argument of white skin being problematic and racism being an abstract perpetual issue experienced by "them." We must look at how the weighted blanket of whiteness has socialized us.

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