Roots Deeper than Whiteness
I lead an eliminating-white-racism support group in our Area and have often struggled to describe what it means to be white or what is good about it.
I recently read an article that described the creation of whiteness in seventeenth century Virginia (USA) and what the white people had been forced to give up.
European peoples who came to the Americas in the seventeenth century, and later, were usually economic migrants. In Europe they’d been forced off their land and into cities by the “enclosure of the commons” (the taking of shared land into private ownership). They came here as indentured servants. And they came with their own cultures—cultures that were indigenous to them.
Whiteness was invented to separate these people from their natural allies—the enslaved African people and the Indigenous people of the Americas. The three groups had been coming together and threatening the systems that restricted power and wealth to a small group of landowners.
Those in power eased the conditions for European migrants because they were “white” and made conditions more difficult for Africans because they were “black.” This was to divide the working class. But it was also to displace the original cultures of the Europeans and replace them with one more in tune with a capitalist work ethic. The creation of whiteness was linked with the suppression of the European migrants’ more relaxed, cooperative, and environmentally attuned ways of life.
We know about the lack of connection that has come with our white privilege. We are disconnected from Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI) people and from each other as white people. But in addition, we consented to a capitalist class system that required us to disavow our own original cultures in which we were better connected and less work oriented. As we struggle to remember our goodness as white people, we may find more to celebrate in the cultures of our ancestors than in the forced identity of whiteness.
After we discussed this in our support group, people had good sessions reclaiming their original cultures and working on their connections.
Willimantic, Connecticut, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for white allies ending racism
(Present Time 208, July 2022)