Is it OK To be White?

Possibly – but not too white

moral condemnation. Recently Adjoa Andoh, the star of Netflix’s soap opera, Bridgerton, called the British Royal Family’s balcony appearance on the day of King Charles’ Coronation ‘terribly white’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word terribly means ‘very severely or painfully’ or very ‘awfully’. It can also mean something that can ‘cause terror or dread’.

It is unlikely that this actress actually felt terror or dread at seeing so much white skin. Nevertheless, the implication of Andoh’s statement was absolutely clear. Her reference to a ‘terribly white balcony’ communicated a sense of moral revulsion at the sight of a family whose defining character was the colour of their skin. It appears that, at least in this case, ‘skin-deep’ does not refer to something superficial but a profound signifier of an undesirable identity.

The only thing that surprised me about the balcony incident was the reaction it provoked. Normally the casual disparagement of whiteness, such as the numerous negative media references to it, goes unremarked. Even in this instance, a BBC broadcaster, Paddy O’Connell, stated there is no need to apologise for the remark. He added that ‘you haven’t upset anyone’. It turned out that she did. Yet, in this instance, many people were outraged by Andoh’s moral condemnation of a terribly white Royal Family. This feeling of outrage was likely partly due to people’s identification with a family that is regarded by many as the symbol of Britain.

Normally references to ‘too white’ or ‘terribly white’ rarely raise an eyebrow. Commentators on the BBC, CNN, and other mainstream media adopt a knowing dismissive tone when referring to dead white men. Viewers are left in no doubt that they hold these people in contempt and regard them as morally inferior to other dead people. Amongst celebrities sneering at the very mention of white serves as a mandatory expression of awareness.

The corporate world has internalised the negative framing of whiteness. Companies, such as Coca Cola offer training courses that can instruct their staff to ‘try to be less white’ in the full knowledge that there will be little pushback against it.

The expression ‘too white’ has also become a normal idiom that belittles its target. In the jargon of the Western elites, ‘too white’ serves as a synonym for words like ‘unpleasant’, ‘problematic’ or ‘toxic’. Just listen to Tom Perez, the American Democratic Party’s National Chairman. He claimed that New Hampshire is ‘too white’ to have the first primary for the election of a president. He also thinks Iowa is ‘too white’ to have the first caucus during the election campaign.

According to The New Republic, the American Department of Justice is ‘too white’.[iii] A survey of minority businesses in the US concludes that local chambers of commerce are ‘too white’. Apparently, American TV is also ‘too white’ Television in the UK does not get a free pass; the comedian Lenny Henry insists it is ‘too white’. A former head of comedy at the BBC agrees with this assessment and suggests that this broadcast company would not commission Monty Python today because it is ‘too white’.

It appears that the UK’s green sector is also ‘too white’.[viii] A former head of Friends of the Earth, Craig Bennett, insisted that his sector is ‘too white’ and must leave behind its ‘white middle-class ghetto’. Even poor old Extinction Rebellion is indicted for being ‘too white, too middle-class and lacking in empathy’.

The sense of outrage conveyed by the term ‘too white’ can attach itself to the most unexpected targets. It appears that ‘dyslexia heroes are too white’!

Numerous sources insist that classical music is ‘too white’.[xii] Time and again, I hear the claim that philosophy is too white. Some would even want to cancel the most important philosophers that ever lived, like Plato, Aristotle and Kant, because they are too white. In fact, virtually every university discipline – from classical music to mathematics through to history – has been condemned for being ‘too white’.

In a defensive tone, Leicester University denied that it was dropping Chaucer for being ‘too white’ after it proposed to replace him with modules on race and sexuality.

That the contested moral status of the state of being white is widely recognised is illustrated by the fact that Rasmussen Reports felt it useful to organise a public opinion survey that asked Americans the question, ‘Is it OK To Be White’. That such a question had to be even asked is a sign of our morally disoriented times. The very posing of this question suggests that there could be something inherently flawed with people whose skin colour is white.

Even more worrying is that many commentators were pleasantly surprised by the fact that 72 per cent of the respondents stated that it was ok to be white. They were particularly delighted that among black respondents, even a majority, 53 per cent, thought it was OK to be white.Polls are always a dubious instrument for uncovering what people really think. However, rather than rejoice, we should be seriously worried if this poll captured people's real opinions. If more than a quarter of Americans – and nearly a half of black folk – believe it is not OK to be white, then the United States is in big trouble. It indicates that primitive racial obsessions have acquired a powerful hold over the outlook of the American people.

Too White??

The demonisation of whiteness

There was a time when white referred to a colour or a group of people with relatively light skin. But now, it has come to be associated with malevolent qualities. ‘White man’ or ‘white people’ are no longer descriptive words but rather speak to some kind of transcendental evil force. ‘This is about whiteness’, said Berkeley students during a protest recently, confirming how ‘whiteness’ has become a way of saying ‘wicked’.

The word white is now used by commentators in a similar way to show how racial thinkers used other race-related categories in the past. And the evilness of ‘white’ continues to intensify, it seems. Since the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency in 2016, it is no longer sufficient to attribute to light-skinned people an all-embracing sense of ‘white privilege’. Criticism of white privilege has mutated into the widespread condemnation of so-called ‘white supremacy’. Suddenly people with dissident views opposed by the American Cultural Establishment were not simply denounced as right-wing; many were also called white supremacists.

This redefinition of the word white projects onto others a pathologised identity. The very term whiteness is frequently used as a synonym for inherently flawed and negative qualities. Advocates of the concept of whiteness claim white people must be reminded that their identity depends for its existence on the ‘othering’ of non-whites. This construction of a white identity based on negative qualities has been assisted by sections of the media that now use the word white with a sneer. In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, ‘white woman’ came to mean betrayal and moral turpitude because many white women voted for Trump over Hillary.

The new rhetoric of whiteness has little to do with confronting the problem of racial injustice. Rather, it is part of a war of words designed to diminish the moral status of those who dare to challenge elite values. The image of an army of elderly, white people voting for the wrong candidates who must be countered and kept in check flatters the self-image of an otherwise unconfident and disoriented elite which increasingly relies on the policing of language over winning arguments.

Refuse To Be Racialised

Despite listening to many lectures about my numerous racial privileges, I still don’t feel particularly white. Even in 1971, when I spent a year conducting fieldwork in a small African town in Kenya, I perceived myself as a researcher rather than a white man. There have been times when I felt a little bit Hungarian, sometimes a tiny bit Canadian, but never white. Advocates of whiteness argue that I have not perceived my skin colour as a big deal because of my unconscious racist assumption that being white is the universal norm. The reality is a little bit different. The reason why I think of myself as a man and not as a white man is because of my experience of life. Those wishing to endow me with a white template identity know nothing of my life. They are indifferent to the fact that an externally imposed identity always represents a violation of individual personhood. At least in this sense, the imposition of white identity serves as the moral equivalent of endowing people in the old colonies with the status of racial inferiority.

There are three possible ways of reacting to the demonisation of whiteness. One way is to play the role of a very ‘aware’, woke white person who fully understands his bias or her privilege. This is the dominant ideal promoted in American, and increasingly in European institutions, devoted to socialising young people.

Another response is to react defensively to the cultural critique of whiteness and adopt an exaggerated version of white identity. White nationalism expresses a hopeless attempt to give meaning to a meaningless identity intentionally constructed to devalue whiteness.

It is also possible to respond to the myth of whiteness in an intelligent and enlightened manner. That requires a refusal to abase oneself to identity politics and its relentless racialisation of human experience. Of course, racial thinking exists, and the politicisation of racial identity is flourishing, particularly in the Anglo-American setting. But we need not accept this impoverished and dehumanising outlook on the world of men and women. And every time we hear a caustic use of the W-word, we should react to it in the same way as we respond to those who use the N-word.

---

---