The insane logic of "whiteness"

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Depending on the scholar, the phenomenon of “whiteness” can be attributed to anyone with an ideological affinity for “racial capitalism.” The word whiteness, the theory’s proponents explain, doesn’t describe racial characteristics but ideological proclivities. If expositors of the whiteness theory of social dysfunction were interested in academic rigor, they might seek out a more accurate way to describe the conditions they find so intolerable. That they don’t, however, is a tell—some misconceptions about their philosophy are more preferable than others.

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Cristina Beltrán, the author of a book on the civic threats posed by “white democracy,” has ascribed the antisocial actions of non-white rioters to “multiracial whiteness.” That oxymoronic proposition, as she defines it, describes non-whites acting against their own interests with the flawed expectation that they can also claim the spoils of white privilege—“aggression, exclusion, and domination.” The assumptions at the root of this philosophy are unfalsifiable, which explains why its conclusions are being applied in increasingly nonsensical ways.

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The Americans of Latino heritage who voted Republican in numbers sufficient to shock poll-watchers last November had supposedly succumbed to the temptations of “white supremacy.” Asian-American students have outperformed their peers and are now overrepresented in institutions of higher learning only because they “push black and brown bodies down,” rendering Asians “white supremacy’s one success.” A 2015 sociological study aptly titled “expanding the boundaries of whiteness” posited that the frequency with which Indian-Americans, Asian-Americans, and even black Americans are marrying interracially suggests that “most members in these groups are on the path to whiteness.”

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We must conclude from this discipline’s malleability that it is not a duplicable hypothesis designed to be independently verified by scholarly peers. It is not a circumspect supposition designed to identify discrete social phenomena. It is just racial intolerance masquerading as anthropology–the pseudo-academic phrenology of antiracism in which the “ghost variable” of ethnocentrism is assumed into existence and applied with reckless abandon. Those who are attracted to this all-encompassing belief system likely came to the same conclusions that Rep. Cohen drew from recent events: Americans of a particular complexion cannot be trusted, in large part, because of that complexion and all that it conveys.

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