There was a time when neither the Irish, nor the Italian, nor the German were considered white. They were simply the Irish, Italian and German. And yet, I, the descendent of these peoples, am white. This is equally problematic for anyone with Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Persian, Armenian, Russian, Polish, or Jewish ancestry, etc. When I was at university, I loosely participated in the Arab culture club (which is where I met my girlfriend), and an important issue for them and other Middle-Eastern and North-African student groups was getting people from these regions a separate demographic on survey material because the majority of current surveys categorize such people as “white” or “Caucasian”. When a friend of mine from Tunisia came to visit me at university and I told her about the culture club’s petition and she was surprised that American Arab’s did not consider themselves white. She considered herself white, and while in America most people assumed she was white as well, albeit they thought she was Russian. But I digress.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding criticism of white privilege operates with an indefinite understanding of what white even means, and thus any such critiques are questionable. This allows liberal activists to construct narratives of oppression from white privilege and attach them to individuals and institutions freely without investigating if such things are indeed “white.” This I believe is ironically, itself a predominantly white liberal privilege, which I have discussed in greater detail in previous essays. It is the privilege to co-opt the critical rhetoric of people of color to establish one’s status in a hierarchy against other white people, be they fellow liberals or conservatives. White liberals may appear to be advocating in the interests of people of color but their activism doesn’t extend beyond mere rhetorical maneuvers to shame other white people for their supposed privileges. When these privileges are not recognized, it is alleged that this is just further indication of the absolute extent of white privilege. And when white identity itself cannot be identified, this confusion is also reflected as further proof of its absolute ideological influence. The indefinite understanding of what white privilege is allows those participating in its discourse to utilize its rhetoric to perpetuate their own white privilege while appearing to be opposed to it. Just as I have criticized privilege discourse in previous essays in order to produce a more coherent critique of white privilege, here too I will attempt a deconstruction of white identity in order to more clearly identify white privilege and power so to better undermine it.
White identity is a relatively recent historical construction, emerging out of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America. Initially, only Anglo-Saxon colonists considered themselves to be white. Before the colonization of America, the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, the English had succeeded in the colonization, enslavement and eventual genocide of a significant portion of the native Irish population. The English saw the Irish as simple savages in need of colonization to deliver culture to them. Without it, they remained idle, violent, and stupid, rooted in their primitive customs and superstitious religion. Ireland was turned into English farmland which eventually contributed to the wretched Potato Famine, killing millions of Irish natives and causing millions more to flee elsewhere, mostly to America. When the Irish arrived in North America, they were seen as little better than pale-skinned Negroes to other European colonists. The Irish were dehumanized by being depicted as inherently criminal, drunk, and superstitious to the comic amusement of American society. Irish immigrants and freed African Americans slaved lived and labored together in the slums of northern American colonies competing for the same low-wage, low-status jobs.
Though the Irish were certainly discriminated against the most, the European servant class in general was economically and politically on par with imported African slaves; this was especially so if the condition of their servitude was indentured. Concern that lower-class Europeans would unite with African slaves in rebellion, motivated upper-class European landowners to expand the white racial identity, providing political privileges with it. If the economic oppression of lower-class Europeans was obscured by membership in a pan-European identity, then they would be less inclined to betray those within white fraternity and more likely to politically support the economic interests of the upper-class. Starting in the Jacksonian Era of the early half of 19th century, citizenship criteria changed from being distinguished by wealth to being identified as white, uniting Northern Europeans together. Adult males, regardless of wealth, could vote and own land, so long as they were considered white. By the early 20th century this identity included the Irish; Irish immigrants were gradually incorporated into white identity as they occupied positions of power over African American slaves and laborers and supported the racist politics that kept racially discriminatory laws in place. In the mid-20th century white identity had expanded again through the New Deal struggle against the Great Depression and the conflict of World War II. With such expansion, diverse peoples such as Italians, Germans, Polish, Jewish, and Russian would be considered white. White identification afforded one access to land through land grant acts, better education through GI bills, and better employment outside the confines of Jim Crow laws.
Inclusion into the white race was only made possible by minorities abandoning historical identification with signifiers of their cultural heritage. Minorities who maintained the clothing, customs, rituals and languages of their native cultures were more resistant to being accepted into white identity. They were seen as foreign, and in the case of Catholic minorities such as the Irish and Italian, subject to the conspirational influence of the Catholic Church of Rome. Only by abandoning overt displays of their cultural heritage and representing the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of American society were minorities able to become white, and made them gradually forget the history that there was a time when they were not white. Although the ideology of white identity may have entailed a substitution of, for example, native Irish culture with colonial English culture, it is no longer that simple. The average American understanding of Irish or Italian culture, even for those within the communities themselves, is an impoverished parody of itself. Irish culture has been bastardized into neo-pagan pseudo-Celtic mysticism, and representations of alcoholism and domestic violence. Italian culture is synonymous with the mafia, or more recently, and arguably more embarrassingly, Jersey Shore. These are inarguably racist stereotypes, and there are equally demeaning caricatures of Jewish, German, Russian, Greek, and, now especially, Arab Americans as well. What is remarkable is that although these people may variously benefit from white privilege, the racist caricatures of them emerge out of white supremacy themselves. This makes sense if a person is only capable of being white to the extent to which they suppress the stereotypical cultural elements of their heritage that may mark them as a member of a specifically unique culture with its own history.
If white people are to effectively confront their white privilege in order to combat white supremacy, they need to understand that white privilege harms white people themselves, and not only people of color. What this requires is a rehabilitation of white identity before it was understood through the cultural appropriation of colonialism and capitalism. Before white people were white, they were a variety of other peoples with unique cultures, such Irish, Italian, or German, who themselves were assimilated through cultural appropriation into colonial capitalist interests of European elites. White culture was previously defined in opposition to non-white cultures, to justify the colonization and exploitation of the latter by the former; might made right and non-white made white. But concerns over the stability of such colonial exploits necessitated that minorities be incorporated into the identity of the European capitalist upper-class through the mutual appropriation and suppression of their unique cultures. Only to the extent that white Americans maintain a detachment from their original cultures are they capable of maintaining the collective delusion that they are members of a white culture and not subject to an oppressive ideology of whiteness.
Ironically, white Americans lament the supposed genocide of their white culture and have pride in an indefinitely defined forgotten white heritage but it is the ideology of white identity itself which has resulted in ignorance and supposedly impending extinction of particular white cultural identities for Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish Americans, etc. This is dangerous because the lamentable desire to reconnect with one’s lost cultural heritage can lead one to ignorantly defend white supremacy politics that only perpetuate the oppression of the very cultural narrative one desires to recover. Thus the tragic loss of culture made to white supremacy is appropriated to perpetuate support for the continuation of white hegemony itself, reproducing the tragedy again in a vicious cycle. This reflexive displacement of victimization is an essential quality of white privilege and capitalism; when counter-cultural criticisms are leveled against either, their rhetoric and aesthetics are appropriated into white identity and capitalism and commodities, thus perpetuating while one is deluded into thinking one is opposing it. Capitalism consumed communism to only regurgitate it in order to sell t-shirts of Chef and books on Marx to white liberals. So too has white supremacy collapsed Irish identity into Celtic symbols, appropriated by conservative white supremacists, to defend their lost culture without realizing that the history of white supremacy is itself to blame.
Despite the power of white privilege, such privilege is predominately legitimated through narratives of victimization, both from white conservatives and white liberals. The former takes the form of a defensive white pride described above which appropriates items of culture long-since dead to commodification by the interests of white colonialism and capitalism to ignorantly support those very forces. The latter takes the form of a self-deprecating white guilt and suppression of minority cultural expression subsumed into white identity. Believing that any celebration of “white” culture is a celebration of its oppressive legacy, white liberals ironically perpetuate the legacy of white hegemony by paralyzing white people against recovering their heritage. Thus they are forced to appropriate symbols of other cultures for their resistance against capitalism and colonialism, which of course, mirror capitalist and colonialist appropriations of those cultures. Thus white conservatives and liberals alike are ironically united in their belief in the inferiority of their white identity; liberals just believe that this is deserved because it is inherent and inevitable while conservatives believe that it is due to non-white people of color seeking revenge for past atrocities committed in the name of the white race. Either way, white privilege is maintained by identifying cultures appropriated into white identity as white and allowing no resistance to reverse this trend of appropriation and oppression.
White identity was once understood positively through opposition to and exclusion of non-white peoples supposedly lacking in culture, it is not predominately interpreted negatively by the appropriation and inclusion of non-white cultures into itself. The commodification of non-white cultures maintains the illusion of a stable white identity by investing it with new material devoid of more particular cultural significance which can be reconstituted as universally white and only nominally representative of a minority culture. Anyone can enjoy white culture by buying Irish beer on Saint Patrick’s Day, while remaining ignorant of how Irish culture has been simultaneously oppressed and commodified; the appeal of the product is its supposedly Irish identity, but it is an identity devoid of any historical attachment to the struggles of the Irish people. Having no exposure to their native cultures beyond these commodity parodies, white people come to invest in the exploitation inherent in capitalist appropriation of other cultures: the cultural appropriation of capitalism becomes to only appropriate culture to them. There is no white culture beyond this celebration of cultural appropriation, exploitation and oppression; any traces of particular “white” culture such as the Irish, Italian, or German, only persist as commodities in its service or as authentic symbols of resistance to it. The form of racism that white supremacy takes is more absolute that any specific cultural imperialism that seeks to supplant a native culture with its own; white supremacy even negates the culture of those in power, rendering it just another commodity to be exchanged for another representation of power. Thus, even while the ideology of the white race emerged out of Anglo-Saxon colonialism, even a specifically English culture has been appropriated into another caricature of itself.
White conservatives claim to be color-blind, to see individuals, not racial communities, but whenever there is any mention of white privilege or cultural appropriation, they organize around their white racial identity to oppose their supposed victimization. When white privilege is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become anxious and claim reverse racism against affirmative action programs. When the appropriation of the cultures of people of color is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become frustrated and claim reverse cultural appropriation when people of color participate in white culture. But they mistake the ideology of a white race for the cultures that have been suppressed and erased by it. One cannot be racist against an ideology that professes to ignore ethnic or racial distinction, and one cannot appropriate a culture that is nothing but a culture of appropriation. This is why white people so often deny the very existence of white identity, not out of opposition to it, but precisely because identifying would allow it to be opposed and criticized. Because white identity is defined by its privileges, the elimination of those privileges would eliminate white culture, and hence white people are pressured to justify or ignore oppression in order to preserve their nominal cultural identification. Having already distanced themselves from or forgotten their unique cultural heritages, the dissolution of their white identity would leave them with apparently leave them with nothing to identify with. Hence the anxiety of white people to honestly confront white privilege without being compelled to appropriate forms of cultural resistance from people of color.
When white privilege is typically critiqued, it is framed as the privilege inherent to being white. But whiteness itself is not an inherent identity, but is an ideology of historical contingency, emerging in the interest of colonization and persisting and expanding through the cultural appropriation of capitalism. This deconstruction of privileged white identity should not be construed as suggesting that white privilege itself doesn’t exist, simply because white people do not exist. White people do not exist, but white privilege does, insofar as one is labeled as white. Not all “white” people receive the supposed benefits of white privilege, and this is not simply due to the fact that privilege is intersectional with other dimensions of advantage or disadvantage such as class or sex. It is because those with power do not accept them as truly white, while people of color without power are anxious to ally with them because they appear to be white. The identification of whiteness has never simply been about skin-tone but has predominantly focused on one’s proximity to those already in power, measured against one’s suppression of any cultural heritage and opposition to those identified as non-white. Thus those who would otherwise be considered non-white, but who suppress any overt cultural identification as a non-white stereotype are able to benefit from white privilege, but it must be maintained that such privilege has its costs to one’s cultural identity. This is why the Arab students at my university did not want to be identified statistically as white: it suppressed their unique cultural identity even if it may have afforded them some associative benefits.
Privileges do not emerge out of one’s white identity spontaneously but the label of whiteness creates relative institutional advantages. I say relative, because to be labeled as white can indeed be a disadvantage in those contexts where one is most likely attempt to resist white power: liberal activist and academic communities. Being labeled with white privilege by such activists and academics can be alienating and oppressive, especially when one does not identify with the privileges of white identity purchased at the expense of the suppression of one’s cultural heritage. I am reluctant to call myself a white American because my Irish, Italian and German heritage has suffered under white racism. I am aware that my Irish, Italian and German heritage is haunted by its share in the horrors of racism against people of color and I cannot compare the suffering of these cultures to what they have contributed to against the communities stolen out of African for capitalism or the native cultures of America massacred through colonialism. If I am to now be called white, it is only because my forebears had to suppress their culture in order to escape their oppression from white people. This is the struggle of white liberals like me who are self-conscious of how white identity has been constructed over history, but find themselves mutually ostracized from both white conservatives who oppress culture in the name of an empty white identity and white liberals who suppress culture against oppressive white power. Against these two fundamental misunderstandings of white identity and privilege, I recognize my white privilege and deny my white identity: I am not a white person, I am a person of white privilege, and I am proud, not in white power, but in the power of cultural resistance possible only if people of white privilege remember back to a time of before they were merely white.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding criticism of white privilege operates with an indefinite understanding of what white even means, and thus any such critiques are questionable. This allows liberal activists to construct narratives of oppression from white privilege and attach them to individuals and institutions freely without investigating if such things are indeed “white.” This I believe is ironically, itself a predominantly white liberal privilege, which I have discussed in greater detail in previous essays. It is the privilege to co-opt the critical rhetoric of people of color to establish one’s status in a hierarchy against other white people, be they fellow liberals or conservatives. White liberals may appear to be advocating in the interests of people of color but their activism doesn’t extend beyond mere rhetorical maneuvers to shame other white people for their supposed privileges. When these privileges are not recognized, it is alleged that this is just further indication of the absolute extent of white privilege. And when white identity itself cannot be identified, this confusion is also reflected as further proof of its absolute ideological influence. The indefinite understanding of what white privilege is allows those participating in its discourse to utilize its rhetoric to perpetuate their own white privilege while appearing to be opposed to it. Just as I have criticized privilege discourse in previous essays in order to produce a more coherent critique of white privilege, here too I will attempt a deconstruction of white identity in order to more clearly identify white privilege and power so to better undermine it.
White identity is a relatively recent historical construction, emerging out of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America. Initially, only Anglo-Saxon colonists considered themselves to be white. Before the colonization of America, the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, the English had succeeded in the colonization, enslavement and eventual genocide of a significant portion of the native Irish population. The English saw the Irish as simple savages in need of colonization to deliver culture to them. Without it, they remained idle, violent, and stupid, rooted in their primitive customs and superstitious religion. Ireland was turned into English farmland which eventually contributed to the wretched Potato Famine, killing millions of Irish natives and causing millions more to flee elsewhere, mostly to America. When the Irish arrived in North America, they were seen as little better than pale-skinned Negroes to other European colonists. The Irish were dehumanized by being depicted as inherently criminal, drunk, and superstitious to the comic amusement of American society. Irish immigrants and freed African Americans slaved lived and labored together in the slums of northern American colonies competing for the same low-wage, low-status jobs.
Though the Irish were certainly discriminated against the most, the European servant class in general was economically and politically on par with imported African slaves; this was especially so if the condition of their servitude was indentured. Concern that lower-class Europeans would unite with African slaves in rebellion, motivated upper-class European landowners to expand the white racial identity, providing political privileges with it. If the economic oppression of lower-class Europeans was obscured by membership in a pan-European identity, then they would be less inclined to betray those within white fraternity and more likely to politically support the economic interests of the upper-class. Starting in the Jacksonian Era of the early half of 19th century, citizenship criteria changed from being distinguished by wealth to being identified as white, uniting Northern Europeans together. Adult males, regardless of wealth, could vote and own land, so long as they were considered white. By the early 20th century this identity included the Irish; Irish immigrants were gradually incorporated into white identity as they occupied positions of power over African American slaves and laborers and supported the racist politics that kept racially discriminatory laws in place. In the mid-20th century white identity had expanded again through the New Deal struggle against the Great Depression and the conflict of World War II. With such expansion, diverse peoples such as Italians, Germans, Polish, Jewish, and Russian would be considered white. White identification afforded one access to land through land grant acts, better education through GI bills, and better employment outside the confines of Jim Crow laws.
Inclusion into the white race was only made possible by minorities abandoning historical identification with signifiers of their cultural heritage. Minorities who maintained the clothing, customs, rituals and languages of their native cultures were more resistant to being accepted into white identity. They were seen as foreign, and in the case of Catholic minorities such as the Irish and Italian, subject to the conspirational influence of the Catholic Church of Rome. Only by abandoning overt displays of their cultural heritage and representing the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of American society were minorities able to become white, and made them gradually forget the history that there was a time when they were not white. Although the ideology of white identity may have entailed a substitution of, for example, native Irish culture with colonial English culture, it is no longer that simple. The average American understanding of Irish or Italian culture, even for those within the communities themselves, is an impoverished parody of itself. Irish culture has been bastardized into neo-pagan pseudo-Celtic mysticism, and representations of alcoholism and domestic violence. Italian culture is synonymous with the mafia, or more recently, and arguably more embarrassingly, Jersey Shore. These are inarguably racist stereotypes, and there are equally demeaning caricatures of Jewish, German, Russian, Greek, and, now especially, Arab Americans as well. What is remarkable is that although these people may variously benefit from white privilege, the racist caricatures of them emerge out of white supremacy themselves. This makes sense if a person is only capable of being white to the extent to which they suppress the stereotypical cultural elements of their heritage that may mark them as a member of a specifically unique culture with its own history.
If white people are to effectively confront their white privilege in order to combat white supremacy, they need to understand that white privilege harms white people themselves, and not only people of color. What this requires is a rehabilitation of white identity before it was understood through the cultural appropriation of colonialism and capitalism. Before white people were white, they were a variety of other peoples with unique cultures, such Irish, Italian, or German, who themselves were assimilated through cultural appropriation into colonial capitalist interests of European elites. White culture was previously defined in opposition to non-white cultures, to justify the colonization and exploitation of the latter by the former; might made right and non-white made white. But concerns over the stability of such colonial exploits necessitated that minorities be incorporated into the identity of the European capitalist upper-class through the mutual appropriation and suppression of their unique cultures. Only to the extent that white Americans maintain a detachment from their original cultures are they capable of maintaining the collective delusion that they are members of a white culture and not subject to an oppressive ideology of whiteness.
Ironically, white Americans lament the supposed genocide of their white culture and have pride in an indefinitely defined forgotten white heritage but it is the ideology of white identity itself which has resulted in ignorance and supposedly impending extinction of particular white cultural identities for Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish Americans, etc. This is dangerous because the lamentable desire to reconnect with one’s lost cultural heritage can lead one to ignorantly defend white supremacy politics that only perpetuate the oppression of the very cultural narrative one desires to recover. Thus the tragic loss of culture made to white supremacy is appropriated to perpetuate support for the continuation of white hegemony itself, reproducing the tragedy again in a vicious cycle. This reflexive displacement of victimization is an essential quality of white privilege and capitalism; when counter-cultural criticisms are leveled against either, their rhetoric and aesthetics are appropriated into white identity and capitalism and commodities, thus perpetuating while one is deluded into thinking one is opposing it. Capitalism consumed communism to only regurgitate it in order to sell t-shirts of Chef and books on Marx to white liberals. So too has white supremacy collapsed Irish identity into Celtic symbols, appropriated by conservative white supremacists, to defend their lost culture without realizing that the history of white supremacy is itself to blame.
Despite the power of white privilege, such privilege is predominately legitimated through narratives of victimization, both from white conservatives and white liberals. The former takes the form of a defensive white pride described above which appropriates items of culture long-since dead to commodification by the interests of white colonialism and capitalism to ignorantly support those very forces. The latter takes the form of a self-deprecating white guilt and suppression of minority cultural expression subsumed into white identity. Believing that any celebration of “white” culture is a celebration of its oppressive legacy, white liberals ironically perpetuate the legacy of white hegemony by paralyzing white people against recovering their heritage. Thus they are forced to appropriate symbols of other cultures for their resistance against capitalism and colonialism, which of course, mirror capitalist and colonialist appropriations of those cultures. Thus white conservatives and liberals alike are ironically united in their belief in the inferiority of their white identity; liberals just believe that this is deserved because it is inherent and inevitable while conservatives believe that it is due to non-white people of color seeking revenge for past atrocities committed in the name of the white race. Either way, white privilege is maintained by identifying cultures appropriated into white identity as white and allowing no resistance to reverse this trend of appropriation and oppression.
White identity was once understood positively through opposition to and exclusion of non-white peoples supposedly lacking in culture, it is not predominately interpreted negatively by the appropriation and inclusion of non-white cultures into itself. The commodification of non-white cultures maintains the illusion of a stable white identity by investing it with new material devoid of more particular cultural significance which can be reconstituted as universally white and only nominally representative of a minority culture. Anyone can enjoy white culture by buying Irish beer on Saint Patrick’s Day, while remaining ignorant of how Irish culture has been simultaneously oppressed and commodified; the appeal of the product is its supposedly Irish identity, but it is an identity devoid of any historical attachment to the struggles of the Irish people. Having no exposure to their native cultures beyond these commodity parodies, white people come to invest in the exploitation inherent in capitalist appropriation of other cultures: the cultural appropriation of capitalism becomes to only appropriate culture to them. There is no white culture beyond this celebration of cultural appropriation, exploitation and oppression; any traces of particular “white” culture such as the Irish, Italian, or German, only persist as commodities in its service or as authentic symbols of resistance to it. The form of racism that white supremacy takes is more absolute that any specific cultural imperialism that seeks to supplant a native culture with its own; white supremacy even negates the culture of those in power, rendering it just another commodity to be exchanged for another representation of power. Thus, even while the ideology of the white race emerged out of Anglo-Saxon colonialism, even a specifically English culture has been appropriated into another caricature of itself.
White conservatives claim to be color-blind, to see individuals, not racial communities, but whenever there is any mention of white privilege or cultural appropriation, they organize around their white racial identity to oppose their supposed victimization. When white privilege is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become anxious and claim reverse racism against affirmative action programs. When the appropriation of the cultures of people of color is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become frustrated and claim reverse cultural appropriation when people of color participate in white culture. But they mistake the ideology of a white race for the cultures that have been suppressed and erased by it. One cannot be racist against an ideology that professes to ignore ethnic or racial distinction, and one cannot appropriate a culture that is nothing but a culture of appropriation. This is why white people so often deny the very existence of white identity, not out of opposition to it, but precisely because identifying would allow it to be opposed and criticized. Because white identity is defined by its privileges, the elimination of those privileges would eliminate white culture, and hence white people are pressured to justify or ignore oppression in order to preserve their nominal cultural identification. Having already distanced themselves from or forgotten their unique cultural heritages, the dissolution of their white identity would leave them with apparently leave them with nothing to identify with. Hence the anxiety of white people to honestly confront white privilege without being compelled to appropriate forms of cultural resistance from people of color.
When white privilege is typically critiqued, it is framed as the privilege inherent to being white. But whiteness itself is not an inherent identity, but is an ideology of historical contingency, emerging in the interest of colonization and persisting and expanding through the cultural appropriation of capitalism. This deconstruction of privileged white identity should not be construed as suggesting that white privilege itself doesn’t exist, simply because white people do not exist. White people do not exist, but white privilege does, insofar as one is labeled as white. Not all “white” people receive the supposed benefits of white privilege, and this is not simply due to the fact that privilege is intersectional with other dimensions of advantage or disadvantage such as class or sex. It is because those with power do not accept them as truly white, while people of color without power are anxious to ally with them because they appear to be white. The identification of whiteness has never simply been about skin-tone but has predominantly focused on one’s proximity to those already in power, measured against one’s suppression of any cultural heritage and opposition to those identified as non-white. Thus those who would otherwise be considered non-white, but who suppress any overt cultural identification as a non-white stereotype are able to benefit from white privilege, but it must be maintained that such privilege has its costs to one’s cultural identity. This is why the Arab students at my university did not want to be identified statistically as white: it suppressed their unique cultural identity even if it may have afforded them some associative benefits.
Privileges do not emerge out of one’s white identity spontaneously but the label of whiteness creates relative institutional advantages. I say relative, because to be labeled as white can indeed be a disadvantage in those contexts where one is most likely attempt to resist white power: liberal activist and academic communities. Being labeled with white privilege by such activists and academics can be alienating and oppressive, especially when one does not identify with the privileges of white identity purchased at the expense of the suppression of one’s cultural heritage. I am reluctant to call myself a white American because my Irish, Italian and German heritage has suffered under white racism. I am aware that my Irish, Italian and German heritage is haunted by its share in the horrors of racism against people of color and I cannot compare the suffering of these cultures to what they have contributed to against the communities stolen out of African for capitalism or the native cultures of America massacred through colonialism. If I am to now be called white, it is only because my forebears had to suppress their culture in order to escape their oppression from white people. This is the struggle of white liberals like me who are self-conscious of how white identity has been constructed over history, but find themselves mutually ostracized from both white conservatives who oppress culture in the name of an empty white identity and white liberals who suppress culture against oppressive white power. Against these two fundamental misunderstandings of white identity and privilege, I recognize my white privilege and deny my white identity: I am not a white person, I am a person of white privilege, and I am proud, not in white power, but in the power of cultural resistance possible only if people of white privilege remember back to a time of before they were merely white.
