Whiteness Wants to Eat You Too
by Raquel Rocha Turner
Light-skinned Arabs. Thin-lipped Latinos. Mixed Black women with small button noses. According to Internet users, a new realm of individuals have joined the White umbrella that have never been seen there before. These apparent newcomers are frequently hounded on social media by complete strangers, pressured to accept the identity they have been newly prescribed. They are coerced into calling themselves "White”.
These strangers — often well-meaningly — defend their unwelcome recategorizations by suggesting that these individuals’ faces are close enough to the image of a typically White person to allow them to receive privileges associated with Whiteness. Their lightness or perceived Europeanness grants them a certain type of status that guarantees their safety and success in areas like the job market and the dating world that have been historically inaccessible to darker-skinned members of their community. So while at home, these individuals may be immersed in a cultural reality entirely unlike that of the typical White world, in public, claim the Internet users, these individuals are White.
The history of passing is long and complex. The term refers to one’s ability to operate as White in society even one does not possess pure White heritage. Passing used to be a way that certain individuals, particularly mixed race and Black people in the days of slavery and racial segregation, were able to conceal their Blackness and integrate into the White world. This ability granted them safety from violence and allowed them to move up financially. Some White-passing people would even conceal their real race for their entire lives. They lived in fear of being discovered, separating them from their communities.
In one example, historian Allyson Hobbs recalls a story of a Black cousin who had distanced themselves from the rest of the family to pass as White at the insistence of her mother. She married a White man, and had White children. One day, she received a phone call that her father was dying and she needed to return home to say her last goodbyes.
The cousin responded, “I can’t. I’m a White woman now.”1
In those days, the lines of Whiteness were hard-drawn. Those with one “drop” of Blackness of any kind were considered Black. One mixed-race grandparent could already bar you from drawing upon the privileges of your light skin if the fact were discovered. There was greater incentive to hide your race if you could, knowing that living life as a non-White person would mean exposing yourself to immense violence and suffocating oppression.
In most ways, the phenomenon of passing as we know it historically is a relic of the past. With the advancement of Civil Rights and greater acceptance of people of colour in the labour market, the incentive to pass has been significantly diminished. Landmark cases like Loving v. Virginia diminished stigma towards interracial marriage, and mixed race children of every combination now roam freely.2
But the phrase “white passing” persists — with a new connotation. The essence of passing, or receiving the privileges of Whiteness through an ability to mask one’s “otherness”, is alive and well. Except this time, it seems to no longer be a product of intentionality but the decision of a court of distant strangers who determine whether or not they believe that you would receive the privileges of Whiteness, if they were to see you in person. Passing is no longer a wilful act. It is an accident, a side effect of a genetic lottery. Depending on who you ask, it could even be seen as a blessing.
Clearly, Whiteness seems to have opened itself to new rules that are distinct from any rules it has had before. This shift has occurred seemingly organically, without any type of announcement, and yet all of us are in on it.
In fact, even those most attached to Whiteness seem to be struggling to grasp what it means in the wake of a changing social context.
A video I made on White, Jewish abolitionist Noel Ignatiev’s essay “The Point of Whiteness Is Not to Interpret It But To Abolish It” recently drew in the interest of a commenter who was not particularly taken by the author’s exploration of systemic racial privilege. He determined that Ignatiev was a “professional anti-White”, which he attributed to his Jewishness. In fact, he even went so far as to claim that Ignatiev was not White — but Jewish.
I was puzzled and amused by this assertion. I thought a light-skinned European man would be the most obvious candidate for Whiteness. This man also knew, as I had mentioned in the video, that I had a mixed race mother and a White father. I was surprised that he was perfectly willing to accept my mixedness as appropriate to what Whiteness meant, but not a fellow White European. I asked him to define what Whiteness was, as by this point as I was legitimately a touch confused as to how he had ascertained this distinction.
But he was insistent that lightskinned, European Noel Ignatiev was not White. He said that Whiteness referred to “an American Christian of European descent”. What I found interesting was that though from a logical perspective, this definition would technically exclude Europeans, he maintained that Europeans would not call themselves “White” technically, but they simply know that they are White.
When pressed further, he was willing to allow some other groups to be considered White — Atheists, Latin-Americans, Australians — but not Ignatiev. Even I, with a mixed race, South American mother, he was willing to accept but he drew the line at a light skinned, European, Jewish man. I told him then that it seems Whiteness is not about skin color but about something entirely different. He was frustrated, saying that it is about skin colour but also “some other factors” which could not be entirely identified but were implied.
What he said may seem comically unscientific. But he’s right. That is what Whiteness is. This is the exact formlessness it has meant to hold, evading definition by its very nature to take on the place it needs to in every age. If it needs to exclude Jewish people, it can. If it needs to include mestizo Latinos, so be it. It can be exactly what it needs to be to build the oppression the dominant population requires at the time.
In fact, there is another light skinned European group that went through this very journey — the Irish.
In Ignatiev’s book, “How the Irish Became White”, he explores the absurdities of race through the path light-skinned, European, Irish immigrants took to being integrated into the White race in America. In the 1800s to 1900s, flocks of Irish immigrants fled to the United States to escape the caste oppression they were facing in their own country. Upon entering the United States, they were tossed into the lower ranks of the labor system, at times even completing jobs that were too dangerous to lose a slave to. They intermingled with African-American communities, living in proximity and even intermarrying. While African-Americans were collectively humiliated through the image of Jim Crow and Dandy Jim, the Irish were mocked with caricatures of Brigid and Pat, distorted versions of St. Patrick and St. Brigid.
Irish labourers, joined in community through their shared experiences within the labour market, struggled in competition with free Black workers. In order to secure their own economic advancement, the Irish began to engage in discriminatory practices that positioned themselves above Black labourers. They supported policies that would continue to disenfranchise their Black community members. They began to dominate certain labor markets, like construction and policing, which gave them increased leverage. They also built up a foundation of power in local government, becoming heavily involved with the Democratic Party.
Ignatiev states that developing anti-Black attitudes was a critical strategy for the formation of a White identity for the Irish, allowing them to align more closely with the dominant population. Their prejudice was not simply a byproduct of a political belief. It was a calculated manoeuvre allowing them to shift their own status away from their marginalized community members. Over time, this alignment allowed them to move away from being in a class with Black Americans, and towards a White identity instead that granted them upward mobility. The Irish proved that they could be White too. They “earned it”. 3
In his essay “The Point of Whiteness is Not to Interpret It But to Abolish It”, Ignatiev makes a claim for the idea that Whiteness is not a culture or an inherent feature, but a system. He states that without the privileges attached to it, “white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.” There are many cultures with body and substance, he claims — Italian culture, youth culture, drug culture. These cultures are rich with imagery, history, and personality. But, says Ignatiev, “there is no such thing as White culture”. 4
Of everyone I have spoken to since reading Ignatiev’s text to investigate the truth behind this sentiment, not one person has yet to come up with a titular white food spread across a shared history. Not one person has shown me what the central White imagery is (unless, of course, you’d like to bring up the imagery of White nationalism and Nazism). What is the dance that all European, Latin American, Australian, and North American Whites have in common? What is the music that culturally unites us? What are our cultural elements? I have yet to receive one satisfactory answer to these question. So it seems to me that Ignatiev may have had a point.
Whiteness seems to be the only box to take on this formless, sourceless identity. It is not tied to place, nor to shared history. It has no particular qualities. On the surface, this may seem like an accidental blip, something somebody forgot to do along the way. On the contrary, I believe that this is an intentional feature. Whiteness was made to survive. It is a carrier of privilege that is made to have its rules rewritten and redefined to include and exclude as required. It was made to last forever in whatever way it needed to. To do that, it made sure to keep the rules loose and always allow the “…and some additional elements” part to be controlled by someone who we cannot actually see — but you just have know that that person is probably not you.
We can see this formlessness at work in the “White-passing” culture-eating of the Internet. But there is also an opposite example.
I used to watch a boy from Portugal — tan, blue eyed, White. At times, I would interact with his cousin. The entire period within which I had interacted with her from afar, I had assumed this boy’s cousin to be mixed race. She had an extremely tan complexion, plump lips, brown eyes, and lightly coily hair. I went to visit this family in Portugal and met them in person, only to find out that both of her parents were entirely White. If you have not been to Portugal yet, you might not know how much the Whiteness there can deviate from the Protestant European Whiteness in the United States. Portuguese people have some of the darkest complexions of any White people I’ve ever seen, with plump lips and thick, often course hair. You can often tell immediately that they’re from somewhere a bit different when you run into them in the wild.
But this was the first time I had been so completely thrown off by a completely White little girl to think she must be mixed race. I thought of the concept of passing in the way we use it now and how the pushiness never goes both ways. And that is obviously because nobody benefits from passing as mixed or Black or Asian, unless they are trying to co-opt something or sell you an aesthetic. And even then, you are never meant to lost sight of the privileges these individuals are entitled to. You are never meant to forget entirely that they are White. I reflected often since this revelation in Portugal on how nobody was going to go into this little girl’s comments one day pressuring her into accepting that she was mixed because society would see her as mixed unless they knew she had White parents. They would not do what they were doing in the comments section of Black and Brown Internet users.
And why? Because Whiteness is just rootless and elementless enough for us to accept a touch of nonsensicality without question, keeping everyone that “should” be there no matter how the rules are bent. This system makes sure that no one’s White feathers are ruffled by being kicked out of the box. We will just adjust our perception around their unique existence. And it is just blank enough for us to pressure marginalized groups and go around robbing people of natural born identities, even if we meet them in person and say, “Wow, these people’s parents are Brown” or “Wow their mother is extremely dark skinned.”
Letting some people bend the rules and keeping some people in that really “shouldn’t” be in from a looks perspective, because of the details of their heritage, allows Whiteness to maintain this inherent “nothingness” that keeps it alive.
In fact, in alignment with the robbery we allow of it, Whiteness has been rooted in theft from the beginning. It was an invention of land-theft, slavery, and genocide, created to cement in labor structures that supported the power of European colonizers.
In the United States, the first true racial system was reflected in the 1790 census. It included “Slaves”, “Free white males and females”, and “Other free people”. The existence of Whiteness preceded even the creation of Blackness. Shifts in the 1820s saw the beginnings of the word “colored”, with free colored persons and slaves within one racial category, and “Free White Males and Females” within another. “Colored free people” were distinctly different and lower from a more general “Other free people” as they remained in a class with slaves. In 1850, these categories became “Black/Mulatto” and “White”. Over time, Black became Negro, or African American. Mexican became Hispanic became Latino. Chinese became Chinese;Japanese became Asian and Pacific Islander.
But “White” remained “White” across centuries. It was never “European”. It never made reference to labor status or enslavement. It never included the kinds of specificities the other boxes formed themselves around.5
That does not mean that Whiteness has not shifted over time. In the early days of race formation, Whiteness had an insatiable appetite for purity. It went eating away at European cultures, creating a mythology of delicateness and fragility. It wanted power and wealth, a special type of status. It wanted silver spoons, cotillions and country dances, petticoats and delicate hats with feathers. It wanted sturgeons and pheasants. These it devoured with wild gluttony, spitting out a new people devoid of history and origin, and full of societal privilege. It was happy to exclude anybody with a drop of difference to keep its box clean, regardless of color. There was enough people of power in a sparse colonial world to give the box the meat it needed. Whiteness was more than happy to stay picky.
Then came the poor European immigrants — Irish, Italian, Polish, German. As the gap between lower class Whites and the wealthy grew increasingly distant, and as light-skinned individuals had more proximity to Black and Asian people, Whiteness grew hungry. Its supply grew limited. It made concessions, eating the Catholic Irish and Jewish Germans and the incoming Scandinavians. This was not without pushback, but better to increase the pool than to go hungry. It could make the potato famine part of its story. Hamburgers? Why not. Smørrebrød? Schuhplattler? Alright. Not its favourite, but not half bad. Soon, these people forgot their homes and their struggles and became White too. Placeless but safe.
And then came the end of segregation. People went mixing. Immigrants from Latin America and Asia proliferated. The wealthy and middle class grew even smaller and people of color started slipping through the cracks to the higher ranks. The stomach really started rumbling then. Whiteness was starving. Purity was hard to come across in an evolving world. So it made more concessions. It could eat some Kabuli palaw. It could slurp up some hijabs. It could stomach a bit of birria here and there. It could suck away at some more “exotic” cultures, if that’s what it took to stay alive. It sputtered on spices and eyed up the prayer mats, wondering if this is what it had come down to.
“I could do this, I think.” Its prideful stance became awkward and uncertain. Whiteness does not wear foreignness well, but it has tried its best to keep up the charade. “If that’s what it takes.”
And here we are now. A starving, strange, and awkward Whiteness. Desperate for food. Confused of its next step. Ready and willing to take on any form necessary to keep itself alive. And it is hangry and bitter and fighting. At the same time that it has gone on a quest to devour some new cuisines and leave more people empty, it has also also been desperate to recreate the food source that it killed itself through the exclusionary nature of those most aligned with it. The upper class grows smaller and more reckless, and the lower class are slowly catching on to the futility of the theft that has occurred. They were eaten alive in exchange for nothing. What was devoured did not spare them the pain of a culture in crisis or an economy in shambles. In essence, they were victims of a scam.
In their confusion, many people have turned to cling to the only mythologies they have left. The legends of conquers, the stories of our superiority, they are really all that we have. Robbed of everything else, that is our only collective artifact. It does not matter that the average Mississipi Joe has never colonized a single thing but his recliner seat. That is all he has. Whiteness robbed him of everything. Gone are the memories of the square dances, the sauerkraut, the laughing and the music. The tragedy is that Whiteness came and left us with empty homes. Just like those that have the most stake in the maintenance of Whiteness, it manipulated us and stole from us, convinced us it was for our benefit, and left laughing before we could see its trick.
So we fight anxiously and viciously for the only story we have left. It does not matter if it leaves us emptier than we started. We are terrified to lose our sole surviving relic of shared identity. Because then we will truly have nothing.
Those spared of Whiteness’ insatiable appetite may have been barred from societal privilege, but at the very least, they have maintained something crucial, which is spiritual and cultural substance. They are tapped into histories, cuisines, community, dances, art styles. Where are ours? Was the exchange worthwhile?
Reclaiming our right to something more soul-filling comes with hangups and limitations that encourage the procrastination to dismantle. Our incentive to pass down our lineages was disrupted and now we are not quite sure where to pick up the story. Are we American? What does that mean? Are we European? How many of us really know where we came from? French? Scandinavian?
So we continue delineating Whiteness like a bunch of amnesiacs without the information required to remember what came before.
Whiteness profits from our forgetfulness by making employees of each of us. In his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Paulo Freire details how during the initial stages of a struggle for liberation, even the oppressed tend to become “sub-oppressors” rather than fighting for genuine freedom.
He states that “this does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression.” In other words, even the oppressed class within a system of oppression will internalize the rules and guidelines of the oppressor and impose those guidelines upon each other.
Similarly, in each of our heads lies a White police officer that is in charge of maintaining this structure. Yes, inside all of us regardless of our attachment to the system. Its job is to look around and decide who is part of the system and who is not. It is the voice that looks to mixed people with hesitance and discomfort because of the structure they disrupt — because this police officer wants in, or it wants out. Things are cleaner that way and easier to oversee. And it is the voice that looks to people on the internet and eats their culture without thought and without their consent. Because Whiteness would rather eat somebody new than to have you look inwards at its own failures. It is always surveilling and drawing delineations, evading true consciousness of its position.
Does that White police officer voice ever step back and go, “Wait a minute… none of this mess makes any sense”? Does it ever question how on Earth disenfranchised people who had never before been part of an umbrella could suddenly start to shapeshift into such an identity without having changed a single element of themselves? No, because that voice inside each of us is assuming the foreverness of Whiteness and redefining it with the assumption of its permanence at the center. It would never dare deconstruct. That would be blasphemous. It would rather find a new culture to consume.
These comments also assume that these people would rather be White than part of their own culture, antagonising Black and Brown individuals into relinquishing their connection to their own real, hearty, and wholesome communities. It assumes Whiteness as the ultimate desire.
It says, “Who wouldn’t want to be something so great? Accept that this is the ultimate position. You know you want it too, deep down. You should be happy. Don’t fight it; just take the gift without complaint or question.”
Maybe these harassed individuals see their relationship to the people they love and the stories that made them to be more precious than accepting an identity that turns them against their own families. Have we ever stopped to think about that? Maybe if the Irish and the German had complained too, we would have a different world right now.
Why pressure these people into releasing an actual soul privilege? What is the point of making more White people out of people who never asked to be? I think there are already enough of us. I also think that robbing more people of their cultures and creating reductionist understandings of their complex existence within a racial hierarchy does not solve a problem. It reduces more people to an empty, featureless existence that benefits no one but those most intentionally attached to protecting the oppression. It maintains the original strategy of Whiteness, and inspires us to keep delineating it endlessly. It supports the foreverness.
Look what reducing a few groups of people to cultureless blobs has done. Look at the suffering and confusion it has caused. Is there a point to inducting more people into the mess? Or should we be turning around and trying to give people back what they have been robbed of? Should we subvert the narrative and stop assuming the ubiquitousness of a White identity? Should we do the unthinkable, lean into exactly what we are not meant to do, and imagine a world where Whiteness is a 250 year relic — a cultural phenomenon of the past? A reflection of a society with a deep colonial wound in the midst of transition, one which may already be on its way to healing?
The irony is that while us wishy-washy Whites are arguing about who is what, the certain ones are busy excluding their own people just for being Jewish. Us gray-area individuals are stealing from each other our most valuable asset and a seed of resistance and doing the capital W white man’s work for him - and he doesn’t even want these people at all. How convenient, no? The lower case w, light skinned people, the half-chewed ones with a little slobber on it, those of us who are half in half out, taking up uncomfortable positions, creating difficult questions, and disrupting definitions — we should be the ones deconstructing for the rest of us. We are the lucky ones. We have not forgotten what many others have with time. We know how good we could have it. The substance we have is important and we should do anything to keep it. If not, Whiteness will come back around for its leftovers and grab it — because it is getting very, very hungry.
Yes, clearly we have a lot of privilege still. Colourism still runs rampant in all of our communities. Our proximity to the structure of Whiteness gives us the option to give up what we have. We could forget ourselves entirely and let ourselves be chewed into the great blob of nothingness in the belly of Whiteness. But we could also push back and fight for what we love, and who we love. We have the gift of seeing that none of this makes much sense at all — and maybe the promise of the sacrifice we make with our cultures isn’t really the gift we once thought it would be. Maybe we could have something a little bit better.
Resistance does not mean continuing the theft. It means letting Whiteness starve. It means rejecting its attempts to create emergency food supply. It means not letting it consume us, not giving into the scam. It means giving people space to own the cultures that are rightfully theirs without being possessed by the Culture Eating Monster. It means finding new identities and reclaiming what was once ours — no, not the privileges or the cultural superiority. The beautiful things. The things that make our bellies feel warm and our hearts full. The stories. The clothes. The long nights drinking with our families and reminiscing about the epic voyages they have taken. These are what is real. That is real wealth. That is real privilege.
Bates, K. (2014, October 7). “A Chosen Exile”: Black People Passing In White America. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/10/07/354310370/a-chosen-exile-black-people-passing-in-white-america
Fikes, R., & Fikes, R. (2014, December 31). The Passing of Passing: A Peculiarly American Racial Tradition Approaches Irrelevance. BlackPast.org. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/passing-passing-peculiarly-american-racial-tradition-approaches-irrelevance/
Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. Routledge.
Ignatiev, N. (2021). The Point Is Not To Interpret Whitness But To Abolish It. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noel-ignatiev-the-point-is-not-to-interpret-whitness-but-to-abolish-it
Pratt, B. M., Hixon, L., Jones, N. A., & Population Division | U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across The Decades: 1790—2010 - U.S. Census Bureau. Www.census.gov. https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html