The Problem with White People......
In this article, I make race figural to heighten (white) awareness, while recognising of course that each human individual is a complex and shifting, context-specific amalgam of intersecting personal and social group identities. My intention is to support myself and other white people to recognise the inner work we need to do around race to equip ourselves to join with people of colour to fight racism. This inner work starts, I posit, with examining our white privilege and white fragility, to equip us to face the underlying problem: the ideology/worldview of white supremacy, or just whiteness (since whiteness, as it is socially constructed, implies white superiority and centrality).
In Part 2, I offer a model of whiteness that maintains and reproduces material power and emotional comfort for white people at the expense of people-of-colour by means of erroneous beliefs that exist at the individual and group levels of system, which I identify as Ahistorical, Asymmetrical and Narcissistic.
In Part 3, I use this model to elucidate racialised patterns of behaviour I have experienced in T-Groups and other learning contexts in a way that seeks to remove blame from white individuals but squarely places with us a responsibility to acknowledge and interrogate our whiteness.
I conclude by asking what it looks like for white people to give up power over, and instead exercise power with, BIPOC to undo racism.
