So I was listening to a discussion between Benjamin Boyce and Jonathan Church on Youtube the other day. It was called Robin DiAngelo: False Prophet or Faulty Philosopher? It brought up some points that I hadn’t understood well, but that I wanted to understand. So I’ve read one of Church’s papers and have tried to follow along as best I could.

Church sees the central flaw of whiteness as reification- a logical fallacy asserting concreteness to abstract concepts. There are several varieties of this, but I’ll leave the enumeration of them alone for now.

I admit I have a hard time making any sense of what the concept of whiteness really is. There are lots of assertions about what it does, how bad it is, and how it sucks everything into itself. But for all the words, and how bad it sounds, I can’t quite wrap my mind around what it actually IS.

Whiteness is 1) a location of structural advantage, or race privilege, 2) a standpoint, a place from which white people look at themselves, others, and society, and 3) a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.

Di Angelo describes whiteness as a constellation of processes and practices, rather than a discrete entity like skin color. Whiteness studies begin with the premise that racism and white privilege exist and rather than work to prove its existence, work to reveal it. But that is assuming the existence of the thing argued for, which is the definition of circular logic. 

Even with all the words I’ve read defining whiteness, I’m having a hard time what exactly it means. She says to be white is to embody the ideology of whiteness, not necessarily one’s skin color. Presumably, it isn’t necessary to be white to ascribe to whiteness. (This is something I have seen in recent attacks against Asian-Americans perpetrated by non-whites. These non-whites are said to be acting in a white-supremacist way) Which leads me to conclude she is just relabeling the dominant cultural practices as whiteness. Every culture will have dominant practices. Our culture is predominately white, so relabeling it “whiteness” doesn’t feel inaccurate in one sense, but with Whiteness studies scholars, the point is to pin all racism on a particular color- white. In another sense though, there is something amiss with the entire effort, and it all stems from the overwhelming desire to pin all evils on one group. In fact, this was the definition of racism until recently- to refuse to see individuals and instead pin group identity on them.

Now, the whole point is to classify people into identity groups. So racism needed to be redefined, and it had to be redefined as to arrive at the proper conclusion- it’s all white. Hence, whiteness. 

It took me a while to get what Church was really trying to say about whiteness being a reification. A simple example of a reification fallacy is saying something like White culture says X. Well, white culture isn’t a person that can say a specific thing, so putting words in its mouth is a logical fallacy. What, of course, is meant when someone says something like: ‘White culture says X’ is something along the lines of- white people ‘in general’ think something along the lines of X.

To arrive at this, and because white people aren’t in general saying the things we’re supposed to say in order to pin the racism on the white donkey, whiteness is defined as pervasive, underlying, implicit, subconscious bias. Maybe we aren’t saying racist stuff, but we are for sure thinking it… at least subconsciously. That is the only possible explanation for inequalities… but only when the inequality favors white people. I think Church is right to see this as a reification fallacy. The entire idea is basically putting words into the mouth, or subconscious thoughts, of the abstract idea of “whiteness”.   

One form of the fallacy of reification is called vicious abstractionism. If I’ve understood this correctly, it is to single out one feature of a thing, then strip away the positive aspects it may hold. It feels like the blame of the dominant culture for all the evils of society is guilty of this. We have our failings, just like every other society in the history of the world. Those failings have been brought to the forefront, the good is ignored, and the dominant culture, now renamed ‘whiteness’ is held accountable for all the evil, while any good that may be destroyed as that culture is expunged is considered of no consequence. 

This is a common complaint I, and probably most conservatives, have regarding the progressive desire to ‘disrupt and dismantle’ problematics they see in culture. What exactly do they want to introduce in its place? Do they understand anything about how to build a complex system? I don’t think they do, because NO ONE can. Complex systems are too complex for any one to fully grasp. Just as life evolves through small changes, and then certain mutations are selected for fitness, so does society. I can appreciate the progressives’ desire to see evils rooted out. But tearing things down in the naïve assumption that something better will arise is a fool’s errand. 

As I look at these clever, but ultimately wrong ideas, I can understand the desire to want to make things better, and the sense of urgency that causes people to want to act NOW. But Whiteness studies are a destructive response to an issue that has gotten measurably better over time. It’s the impatient impulse of fools who would rush in. I already know they’d accuse me of being the guy that would have opposed progress at every level. Fair enough, but if you’ve really got an answer to these problems, then do better than logical fallacies as explanations and childish, knee-jerk kafka-traps as a response to anyone questioning the validity of the assertions.