You Don’t Have To Apologize For Being White
People sometimes apologize to me for being white. I’m a white guy, but… I get it and I appreciate it, but I also don’t know what to say. I have no natal indulgences to give.
What can I say? It’s fine? You’re one of the good ones? To me the answer is relatively simple. Don’t be white.
As (the fictional) Al Capone said, “I don’t know no Italians. Napolitans, Calabrese, what are you again?” In the same way, I don’t know any white people. Swedish, American, Jewish, what are you again?
The fact is that whiteness, like Lucky Luciano’s mafia, is an identity created explicitly for power. Whiteness is white supremacy, it has no other real content, no food, no language, no unifying culture.
Nobody else identifies like this, not brown people, not ‘yellow’ people (not a thing), only black people, out of pure necessity in the heart of whiteness. As Noel Ignaetiv said, “The white race is a historically constructed social formation.” If you told the many warring tribes of Europe they were one people they’d laugh, until colonialism made the idea very profitable.
Since colonialism spread across the world, however, this is now the polarity around which the world spins. White on top, black on the bottom. Global North and Global…
