Trend these days is to encourage openly being a bigot, just as long as it’s against certain people.
Replace the word white with any other social group and perhaps you’ll see the problem.
"White" as what you call a "social group" was created in service of this power dynamic. Before, say, about 400 years ago, whiteness was not an idea used to identify a "race" of people.
So yeah, I'm all for being less white. I'm fine with just being like ... Irish.
You can research the history on this pretty easily, but a good place to start is a podcast series from Scene On Radio called Seeing White. My memory is a little fuzzy but I think the broad outline is correct.
I understand the academic underpinnings of that idea, but that's not how normal people understand the term "white." The Bureau of the Census, for example, certainly appears the believe that "white" reflects a racial category: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.
Yes it is.
> "White" as an idea to describe a group of (roughly) light skinned European people, came about in order to justify enslaving and subjugating other groups.
That's where the entire idea of distinct human “races" came about, and “white” was a pretty constant part of such taxonomies.
> Before, say, about 400 years ago, whiteness was not an idea used to identify a "race" of people.
Human “race" as a coherent, formalized idea is less than 400 years old.
Note that I'm not disagreeing at all with your idea of the role of whiteness, only with the idea that this somehow divorces it from, rather than grounds it firmly in, the idea of human “races”.
All modern concepts of race are artifacts of attempts to justify racial, and specifically almost entirely white, supremacy. The difference between them is that that basis has led to them becoming also groups of shared experience: largely, except for the white group, this is about the shared experience of being subjected to white supremacy, but for the white group it is the shared experience of benefitting from it.
We rarely get the chance to see that the idea of whiteness comes from a need of protecting an in-group from exploitation, while excusing and justifying the exploitation of outsiders to that group.
The census is an interesting example because for the first 70 years or so, starting in 1790 the US census had just 3 "race/ethnicity" categories. You could be "Free white male/Free white female", "All other free person" or "Slave". Which is part of the reason for creating the category of whiteness. There's also some really gross stuff right through the 1800s where the census was tracking people with various percentages of "black blood".
https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-u...
I suppose I'm just saying that the census, as part of the machinery used to implement and maintain white supremacy, is not necessarily the best authority on race.
This is flat wrong. For better or for worse, the modern "White" identity in the U.S. was heavily promoted by late-19th-c. and early 20th-c. Progressives so that light-skinned Europeans would stop trying to oppress and subjugate one another over their national identity. (To be sure, back in the day, these folks did not care all that much about whether other racialized groups got oppressed; they were quite big on "eugenics" for these groups, for example.)
I'm quite ready to admit that this was probably not an altogether foolproof idea, but now we get to live with the results - millions of people in the U.S. treat "white" as a deep part of their identity, no different than being, e.g, "Irish" for others. Many of them would likely take some offense at being told that they should "be less white", or that they need to denounce their white identity in order to "be less arrogant" and the like. Being in denial about how divisive these racially-connoted messages are is just not productive.
> Being in denial about how divisive these racially-connoted messages are is just not productive.
I don't think it's denial, I think it's strategic choice made in the full knowledge of the offense and discomfort it might provoke. There's definitely part of messages like "whiteness is racist" or "be less white" that ii ... intended to generate offense & reflection and is a valid way of getting the work done. Being polite and working within the status quo can be seen to upload the status quo, and hasn't seemed to work at actually making chaneg. Sometimes to cut through people choose to say very challenging things. I'm personally fine with that, and even if I'm not I don't think it's up to me to tell the people affected by white supremacist ideas how to go about their business.
For every Bill Gates/Bezos/Musk there are tens of millions of "white" people with below average income living check-to-check, yet many media outlets treat them all in the same entitled bucket.
As someone who remembers being told, as a child, their father was stupid because 'Irish people are stupid', DiAngelo's work makes me feel exactly the same way.
If you're interested in doing some more research of your own I can recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynical_Theories
While it’s true that people don’t understand what “white” is, that’s no reason not to do the right thing. Be less white.
It doesn’t mean any of us as white individuals have to feel bad.