Thread by @bernybelvedere

Oh, white people "don't want to" lend the term denoting their racial identity to a concept designed to pick out "group entitlement," with no ameliorating qualification like "nationalism" or "supremacy" to signal that *being white* isn't the problem? The absolute nerve.

I should note that @deonteleologist is a good dude and I only screenshotted so that I could get both tweets in view, not because I'm going for a stealth dunk.

Imagine grammatically structuring a concept denoting entrenched power, unearned advantage, and group entitlement around a single group's race, with no alleviating qualifier signaling that only *some* are the baddies, and being miffed when they're less than enthusiastic about it.

lmao

There's a sense in which some of us (myself, @rasmansa, @roderickgraham, etc.) are talking past each other.

Mansa is invoking historical usage against my concerns about folk semantic alienation. Rod is stressing the term's usefulness in an academic context.

What has precipitated our talking past each other is that ours is an age in which the barriers between academic constructs and the broader discourse are more porous. So you have the phenomenon of reality TV presidents invoking the specter of deconstructionism.

Mansa says that my tweet "misunderstands the history of the term." But my tweet doesn't *misunderstand* it so much as sidestep the history as entirely irrelevant.

Just as the semantic history of other racialized terms doesn't entail all that much about their reception today, "whiteness" as a linguistic option for current discourse can't be assessed by how Du Bois used it way back when.

Graham's point that an academic context is the term's only safe space is instructive, but not for the reasons he thinks. Academia is far more hospitable to reifying historic racial sin into labels and terms designating permanent disrepute than broader society is.

Graham's video, which I think says some very helpful things, discusses the importance of reserving a term that captures something we might describe as white normativity.

https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1364213310502170627?s=20

The problem is taking a contingent fact about historic white supremacy and reifying it into a conceptual proxy for social privilege and racial normativity.

Mark Lilla and the reception his book got anticipated some of this, but part of what it means to build out a better future is pushing our in the direction of a universalist bent. This does the opposite.

Permanently stamping white racial identity with an ignoble linguistic role, i.e., to function as a conceptual analog for a number of attributes having to do with illicit social domination, is actually harmful. We can talk about the various problems of social privilege without it.

This does *not* mean whitewashing the contingent historical fact of white domination. The point is far more narrow than that: it's about not taking that historic fact and using it to build out terminology suggestive of white racial identity being *essentially* problematic.