A note on usage:
As you’ve seen, I’ve uppercased “White” when referring to the arbitrarily defined group of people arbitrarily defined as “White,” except when quoting other people. This is because lower-casing “white” when everyone else is upper-cased or vice versa makes White people seem special, the very thing White people have been told from babyhood we are, with notoriously bad results. From one point of view, we might say that White people have a difficulty with understanding that any other arbitrarily defined group of people is just another bunch of people; from another point of view, it may be even harder for White people to see ourselves as just another bunch of people. White people are neither anywhere near as especially good and deserving as White supremacy claims, nor are White people especially bad—and if we were especially bad, hey, we’d still be special. In fact, labeling White people especially bad has the same effect on a group level that it has on an individual level: it feeds the ego, because it’s just the flip side of thinking ourselves exceptionally good.
In any case, skin color clearly isn’t a strong enough marker by itself, or there wouldn’t be so many White people going around saying, “As a White person…” Really? Gee, thought I might’ve noticed that. Also it’s annoying when White people claim exemption from dealing with White racism on the grounds that their skin isn’t exactly the color white, as in, have you ever actually seen anyone with exactly white skin, or for that matter exactly black skin either? Hahaha, gotcha—and now let us have no more of this silly talk about racism and colorism. Color is not descriptive of either Black or White people, or Brown people for that matter. There is, in fact, a difference between having whitish skin as an accident of birth and being White with a capital “W.” It’s defining: these are the labels used to identify us within a color-coded caste system and assign us our places in the kyriarchy of abuse.
“Kyriarchy” is a great word. It was invented by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to cover the whole interlocking, intersectional, complicated structure of a plethora of hierarchies of abuse, including hierarchies around color, creed, country of national origin, sex, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, and every other arbitrarily defined characteristic for slicing and dicing the human race, summed up by Sian Ferguson as “the social system that keeps all intersecting oppressions in place.” As Emily Dickinson might have said, “kyriarchy” is a word you could take your hat off to.
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