‘‘'Tell me again about the liar who lied about a lie,’' my son said recently. It took me a moment to register that he meant #RachelDolezal. He had heard me talking about her with Noel Ignatiev, author of 'How the Irish Became White.' I had said: ‘'She might be a liar, but she’s a liar who lied about a lie. The original fraud was not hers.' Because I was talking to Noel, who sent me to James Baldwin’s essay ‘'On Being White ... and Other Lies’' when I was in college, I didn’t have to clarify that the lie I was referring to was the idea that there is any such thing as a Caucasian race. Dolezal’s parents had insisted to reporters that she was 'Caucasian' by birth, though she is not from the Caucasus region, which includes contemporary Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Outside that context, the word 'Caucasian' is a flimsy and fairly meaningless product of the 18th-century pseudoscience that helped invent a white race.

Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. 'There is, in fact, no white community,' as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself."

- Eula Bliss, "White Debt"

[Photo description: A drawing. On a black background, an arm is raised with the palm of the hand facing upward. On the palm sits a tiny house with smoke coming out of the chimney.]

(H/T @NameIsQ)

#Whiteness #Race #WhiteSupremacy