Whiteness

A Set of systems held together by certain beliefs which gives benefits to those people who may be considered white.
A definition that changes overtime in order to facilitate the maintenance of the system - systems which were born from, and continue to rely on, White Supremacy.

The Rich Soil Down There, Kara Walker

“You don’t get whiteness from your genes. It is social inheritance that is passed on to you as a member of a particular group”

“Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive. It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.”

- Michael Eric Dyson on Inventing Whiteness,
Tears We Cannot Stop

“It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity”

- Toni Morrison,
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

"America became white-the people who, as they claim, "settled" the country became white-because of the necessity of denying the black presence, and justifying the black subjugation."

"And in this debasement and definition of black people, debased and defined themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history."

"It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define black people divested them selves of the power to control and define themselves."

- James Baldwin,
"On Being White... and Other Lies"

“Whiteness, I will argue in the pages that follow, has a set of linked dimensions. First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a 'standpoint,' a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, 'whiteness' refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and un- named.”

- Ruth Frankenberg,
White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness