I always think the best conversations are the ones where you have to stop often to digest. Which is to say, it might be a bit before I can respond to your response…

Now, obviously, I know that daily practice at every level in U.S. society privileges European-Americans as “White” with or without their conscious awareness, admission, or acknowledgment, let alone any embarrassment or guilt. And yes, the first step is an ever-increasing awareness of this functional reality.

But this functional reality is based on (according to the UNESCO study) a “social myth.” The realization of “race” as a myth in no way mitigates the damage done by its perpetuation as a concept. It just makes it that much more unconscionable or even heinous, while being totally ridiculous. How can a person think they deserve privilege because of their skin tone? If there was any sense to this, I would lose privilege in direct proportion to the sun tan I’ve been getting.

I don’t tell people “I’m not White.” For exactly the reason you’ve brought up. It’s not immediately understandable as a statement given where most people in the U.S. (on all sides of the issue) reside. What I do is tell people that “Whiteness” is a meaningless social construction devised for the purpose of exploiting people of color for the enrichment of people that look like me. (Again, I might have and probably do have African heritage–as many people who look like me do–but I still get the benefit of “White” privilege, as long as I don’t tell people “I’m Black.”)

There is no need to abandon group identity. Each of us belong to many groups and group identity is short hand (a code) for understanding another individual’s experience/reality/self-perception. The difficulty has never been “difference” per se. It is the fact that we declare difference and then socially impose an entirely arbitrary hierarchy on it (men over women, “White” people over people of color, etc.). Then, those who find themselves privileged by this hierarchy imagine that they are indeed better than those “beneath” them on the ladder and therein lies the problem.

When I use the term “people that look like me,” I am challenging listeners to remember that they can’t make simple sense of “racial” difference without my complicity. So I don’t say “I’m not White.” I just choose not to identify myself using that term, but rather create a series of teachable moments related to “race.”

I know that most European-Americans are not prepared to do this at this time. Nevertheless, what I was nudging them towards in my post was the possibility of considering that their “race” is a “social myth” deserving no privilege and that keeping that idea foremost in their minds at all times will move mountains in their lives.

Because its usurptation by political propagandists and marketers makes no concession to the individual?

Because, in my experience, people who consern themselves with the attributes of a group have trouble not forming preconceptions about people whom they associate with said group.

Is it any worse than the alternatives?

Every attempt I know of to dehumanize people for the cause of good has been co-opted by the forces of evil, profit, or laziness.

The immediate question is whether I am capable of abandoning group identity, given that I have at best limited control over how I am pigeonholed by others, or whether it’s a sort of shadow that I’m just stuck with.

The broader question is how best to deal with social constructs that hamper one’s ability to treat others as individuals. “Let’s just treat everyone as individuals, la la la!” has a shitty track record.

Anyway. The trick of affirming one’s European-American ethnic identity while refusing any racial identity might help some people tone down or erase their practice of Whiteness; I’m not sure it would for me, or at least, not now. I think I’m at a place where I need to spend more energy noticing and acknowledging the ways in which I practice Whiteness, before I can successfully strip them away.

Later in the evening, I told this story to a Creole neighbor. Yes, I know, he said. They could not figure out which race to classify you as, because you do not seem to have a race. If you want to maintain any particular racial classification, you must also maintain the behavior and attitude the people who see you believe correspond to that classification. You look white, and you appear to have descended from a mixture of ethnicities. But race is not just a visual marker of difference, it is a practice.