Whiteness
What you hear
Skin color. Being a white person.
The common meaning. This is the cover the redefinition travels under.
What they mean by it
In this literature whiteness names a position, not a skin tone, and the claims move from definition to abolition in five steps.
Whiteness is property: a holding with privileges attached.
elevated whiteness from a passive attribute to an object of law and a resource deployable at the social, political, and institutional level to maintain control
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, The New Press, 1995, Harris, "Whiteness as Property", p. 282, on the state elevating whiteness
The argument is built with Marxist tools, by its own footnote.
The law constructed “whiteness” as an objective fact, although in reality it is an ideological proposition imposed through subordination. This move is the central feature of “reification”
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, The New Press, 1995, Harris, "Whiteness as Property", p. 281 and n. 13
In the classroom it is the top position in racism.
Whiteness refers to the specific dimensions of racism that elevates White people over all peoples of Color.
Özlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Teachers College Press, 2nd edition, 2017, Chapter 9, "What Is Whiteness?"
Nobody can opt out: claiming to be "just human" proves you hold it.
To claim to be “just human” and thus outside of race is one of the most powerful and pervasive manifestations of Whiteness.
Özlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Teachers College Press, 2nd edition, 2017, Chapter 9, "What Is Whiteness?", on claiming to be outside race
The conclusion taught from it: abolish the white race.
The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.
Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, Paradigm Publishers, 6th edition, 2015, Part V, p. 216, quoting the Race Traitor editorial
The plain lines are the archive’s. The words under each are theirs, read in the edition named.
Documented
In plain English
A holding rather than a color: a bundle of advantages the law is said to protect the way it protects property. You cannot resign from it, because it attaches to position, not belief. And what the law built, the law can tear down. That is the point: if whiteness is property, the law can abolish it the way it abolishes property.
The archive’s reading. The definition above is the citable one.
Assessed
Why it works
The word sounds like it describes people. Object to the project and you sound like you are defending a skin color, and nobody wants that. The new meaning makes the charge impossible to answer: deny it, and the denial is evidence, because you hold the property whether or not you believe in it. And the property framing ties race to capitalism, because abolishing property is what the tradition was already for.
Assessed
The claims ledger
The citable statements behind this term, each tied to the movement source filed in the Vault.
In "Whiteness as Property", reprinted in the movement's own founding anthology, Cheryl Harris defines whiteness as usable property: the embodiment of white privilege, protected by law.
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the MovementThe New Press, New York
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Harris holds that the state elevated whiteness from a passive attribute to an object of law and a deployable resource.
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the MovementThe New Press, New York
Harris, "Whiteness as Property", p. 282, on the state elevating whiteness
Harris grounds the whiteness-as-property argument in reification, citing Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, in her note 13.
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the MovementThe New Press, New York
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Sensoy and DiAngelo define Whiteness as the specific dimensions of racism that elevate White people over all peoples of Color.
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
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Sensoy and DiAngelo hold that claiming to be "just human" and outside race is itself one of the most powerful manifestations of Whiteness.
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
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The 2015 sixth edition of McLaren's critical-pedagogy textbook Life in Schools teaches the Race Traitor editorial holding that the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.
- Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (sixth edition, 2015)The 2015 Paradigm Publishers sixth edition. A separate work from the first edition of 1989, which is source 65.Paradigm Publishers, Boulder
Part V, p. 216, quoting the Race Traitor editorial
Plain English for “Whiteness”: A holding rather than a color: a bundle of advantages the law is said to protect the way i...
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the MovementThe New Press, New York
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The Communist Manifesto sums up the theory of the Communists in the single sentence: abolition of private property.
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The evidence file
Corroboration beyond the ledger. Each passage was read in the edition named, not in a search result.
The property chain
the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property
Source: Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848; English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, Section II, "Proletarians and Communists"
Close the chain yourself. If whiteness is property, and the program is the abolition of property, then abolishing whiteness and abolishing capitalism are one project wearing two words.