White People Do Not Exist

       People call me white. But if I compare my skin color to that of a white shirt or white copy paper, I’m not in the same ballpark. To resolve the issue, I went to two paint stores, got color charts,and discovered that, according to the staff at Home Depot and Lowe’s, I am actually beige, a ringer for light brown.

      A cynic might argue, who cares? You’re white because American culture says so. I agree. Yet why are we so willing to utterly ignore reality when the issue is skin color? If a short person said he was tall, a fat person said he was skinny, or a senior citizen said he was an adolescent we would be surprised and even confrontational. What are you talking about? Do you have a problem? Or, do I have one because a short person claiming to be tall is not in touch with the world that is.

            We ignore the obvious truth when the issue is white skin color and that brings to mind a famous play by Luigi Pirandello, “It Is True If You Say So”. So called white skin color is an ugly manifestation of our inalienable right to engage in the social construction of reality. Roughly five hundred years ago English people began to call themselves white; like baggage in the ship’s hold, the Puritans brought that label with them on the Mayflower, and white became a still unquestioned axis for a hierarchical categorization of everyone on the face of the earth.

       White never appears alone. To do its work of denigrating more than five billion people white needs a series of inextricably linked opposites. In the United States, we have black people, people of color, nonwhites, and none of the aboves. Especially in states like California and New York, the last category is rapidly increasing because our color chart creates challenges when we encounter, for example, a South Asian who is darker than an African American. So called “multiracial” Americans also present a problem; typically a youngster who is Korean and European American never gets a color. “Racial” mixing trumps everything so the child is colorless –but not white- in a world of colorful people.

    White is the linchpin that holds this insanity together. Blacks, nonwhites and people of color only exist in relation to white as the designer original; the bizarre thing is that while white is a color at the paint store, it is not a color when it comes to classifying people. Only people of color get a color. White people never get a color because they are white and white is not a color when white people use color to teach everyone in America that only colored people are colored.

     It is funny; and it is also a venomous way to describe one another.

   Ultimately, we are confronted with two conundrums.One is that we call people white even though they are beige. Second, the colorful words we use to describe six billion people are at best arbitrary but,even when more than fifty million immigrants (e.g., Arabs, South Asian,Latinos) crash our operating system of skin color beliefs, we do nothing to bring our beliefs into line with the world that is actually there.

       Pirandello is correct: It is true if you say so. But, to more accurately understand our willingness to ignore what two eyes see, the problem boils down to a never ending battle between rationality and rationalizations. In heaven the truth will set you free; on earth it challenges taken for granted assumptions. Paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset, people will put up with many things, with the best and the worst. The only thing people will not put up with is being unsure what they believe about the nature of things.

     The truth –white people do not exist-confronts a set of beliefs that order the world on an axis of white supremacy.So, when it comes to a choice between fact and fiction, we rationalize. We anxiously embrace the fiction because the ripple effects of affirming reality are endless.

      Knock out white folks, and, like a house ofcards, the whole structure collapses. Six billion people suddenly need to invent new ways to see one another; and, especially when it comes to whites in the United States, that means we would be one small part of humanity rather than its hallmark. After five hundred years on the throne, that’s hard to take but there is no choice if we are to create –for our children and grandchildren- a world where skin color is as unimportant as the size of your feet or your hands.

    Here is what I suggest. Remember another admonition from Ortega y Gasset. Our destiny is “action. We do not live in order to think, but the other way around; we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”

   When it comes to skin color we have done a miserable job. We can easily think of better ways to survive. So, those of us who seek revolutionary social change need to deliberately create worldwide cognitive dissonance. It is our obligation to spread the news to every web site on earth. White people do not exist. They are a social fiction that deserves to be deleted as fast as an unwanted email. And, since we know that whites and many people of color may be reluctant to admit the truth, let’s remember to take it easy, but take it.         

             We must deliberately create tension and anxiety in billions of everyday interactions. For example,if someone calls me white, I no longer accept this designation. I try to empathetically understand their point of view but I will no longer confirm their provably false definition of who I am. More important, imagine the dilemmas and possibilities that would ensue if Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis also put us in our place. “You people need to look in the mirror; you’re a mirage and I refuse to endorse your colored people version of the world.”

     This will be anything but easy. But if we think in order to live, let’s think differently. And that will never happen until white people get the message. They do not exist; and, however unsettling, that’s the future –ready or not.