The big take away from last year isn’t the fleeting support by the average white American for the idea that Black lives should matter but the idea that whiteness is a thing. Too often in mainstream thought there was “ethnic” and there was normal. Whiteness was the neutral* (#notall). The default American race. A film that viscerally illustrates this is My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The movie about a white woman trying to be whiter.
One of the things that got me about My Big Fat Greek Wedding is you could have replaced the Greek family with almost any family “of color” and not had to change anything, thematically. The immigrant/outsider tropes, the cultural tropes, the family tropes, even the language tropes could have stayed basically the same.
For those not in the know My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a cute and entertaining 2002 indy film about a middle class Greek-American woman, Fotoula “Toula” Portokalos, who always longed to belong. Instead of eating smelly and weird Greek food (note: I LOVE Greek food.) in her school cafeteria she wanted to have a nice, bland, white bread sandwich like the other girls. Instead of going to Greek school she wanted to be a Brownie. Basically, she longed to be the All American Girl. Instead, she settles for having an All American Boy.
She has multiple siblings and countless cousins. He’s an only child and his few cousins are far away. He is upper middle class. Her family owns a restaurant. His family is liberal, in an isolated never interacts outside of their race and class kind of way. Hers is traditional. Her family is boisterous and emotional. His family is calm bordering on cold. Her family is religious. His is church going. All of the white Anglo Saxon protestant stereotypes wrapped up in one, tall, character.
We still see these “outsider” whites reflected in mainstream media. Gangster Italians or working class, hard drinking Irish. Although we occasionally get gangster Irish. Jewish mothers. Melancholy Russians. Etcetera, so on, ad nauseum. Even though they’ve been accepted as Americans for generations there is an asterisk by their whiteness. I think this is the reason that so many of them will claim the identity of an ancestral land their family has not been to in generations. America doesn’t let them forget that they will always be just a little bit other. They hate that.
This isn’t the first time whiteness has been acknowledged. It’s just in previous generations white supremacy was the core of the whiteness. In this modern era when people advocate for white supremacy, they avoid using white. In fact, they double down on the concept of whiteness being the American normal by using terms like “heritage” and “culture” and wanting “their” country back. But now the media is talking about white people being, well, white. And white people don’t like it at all.
Back in 2018 a public opinion survey by the Public Religion Research Institute included the question: Does increased racial diversity have a positive or negative impact on America? For this blog how the question was answered does not really matter but feel free to click on the survey. The point is that the question was asked in the first place, implying two things. 1) That white people are not part of diversity. 2) That white people get to dictate whether or not “diversity” is a good thing. Now, I know that the poll did not only ask white people. But the question, itself, is a white question.
Vox journalist David Roberts tweeted in response that, “One thing white people have never experienced is a poll on whether their presence in their own country is intrinsically detrimental.” He then created such a poll in reaction to which white* people did, indeed, freak out. In the process completely missing the irony.
I talk about being a hyphenated American but that also comes down to our personhood as well. White people are people. Everyone else in America comes with an asterisk. There is a common meme out there about human rights: “Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It’s not pie.” This is disingenuous and the upper castes know it. Extending equal rights to the lower castes may not cost the upper castes in rights but it will cost them in access and privileges. They recognize this, they feel this, and it feels bad. It feels like persecution, especially to those who have white privilege and little else.
This is why, as heard in journalist Ezra Klein’s podcast interview of Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson, simply acknowledging the fact that white people in the US will soon lose their numerical majority, (though not their power majority) affects white “…people’s political opinions, voting behavior, and ideas about themselves.” In response white people not only become more outwardly antagonistic towards nonwhite people they become more conservative in almost every category. Every time white people are reminded that they are white they are forced to recognize that they are part of a group and that that group has limitations. They aren’t just people. White folks become hyphenated Americans like the Greek-American Toula. White people hate that.
Sources
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/26/17613844/racial-diversity-poll-twitter-white-people
https://gal-dem.com/jon-snow-white-people-being-called-white/
https://time.com/5846072/black-people-protesting-white-people-responsible-what-happens-next/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danabrownlee/2020/06/16/dear-white-people-here-are-5-uncomfortable-truths-black-colleagues-need-you-to-know/?sh=4834f5624e55
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/problems-white-people-america-society-class-race-214227
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/pov-racism-white-fragility-1.5619647
https://time.com/4584161/white-supremacy/
*Obviously not everywhere for every white person.