Hey there, I was wondering if I’m the only one who feels like this or not.
So I grew up thinking that we people all look different and never had a concept of something such as “white” and “black” people.
But especially in the last years I noticed more and more that a lot of people make such a big thing out of whether someone is “black” or “white” and what their ethnicity is.
It feels like it’s to the point where they make this define their core identity as if it’s very relevant how people look and how bright/dark their skin is as if this changes their personality.
It’s like so many of these people constantly bring this up to the point where it’s brainwashing and they literally even use racial slur as slang that was used in the past to devalue and enslave people based on their skin tone.
Since I experienced this it made me very uncomfortable since I never had this concept before and now I constantly have to obsessively think about it and feel like it’s manipulating me and these people still bring it up all the time.
I think this is driving me insane cause I never would think about humans so strongly because of their skin or something since it simply isn’t relevant and it just feels wrong but I can’t escape it since so many people continue to make such a big deal out of it.
Edit: To the people saying people have different advantages because of their skin, I’m fully aware of that and I wasn’t intending to debate that. My question was primarily about if other people have the same uncomfortable feeling that many people differentiate between people based on their skin and make such a big deal out of it (so more a personal feelings question than a generale debate about why it exists) because imo in a healthy society this shouldn’t be the case. But in my opinion the fact that we continue this behaviour instead of changing it is the exact reason we have racism and the issues of inequality based on someone’s skin in the first place. We need to start to change at some place and not just give up on it. If we continue to see people as “black” or “white” instead of just seeing them as “people” and only look at the past we will never end this issue. Ignorance is certainly not the solution. I found these videos where I think Elon Musk and Morgan Freeman are pretty much hitting the nail on the head.
Whiteness is an exclusionary concept used to create an ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’. Hasan Piker gives a great breakdown of it here.
Historically, it comes from a justification of chattel slavery. Painting ‘whiteness’ as purity and superior and ‘blackness’ as inferior and subservient. Leeja Miller gives a great analysis about how this has influenced Eugenics in American history (which inspired the ideology of the Nazis) which is still practiced to this day in certain circumstances.
It’s long, but Knowing Better gives an extremely detailed history of neoslavery in American history. To understand why ‘whiteness’ is still so prevalent in America in modern day, it’s important to understand the history of systemic racism and how it persists to this day.
Edit: We can expand on this concept of Identity Politics from just America to the lens of Colonialist Race Relations through the works of Franz Fanon who explored and wrote about this in detail. While Fanon wrote about this in the 1960s, his works are just as if not more relevant today. Adi Callai does a fantastic analysis of Fanon’s works about Identity Politics, how to overcome it, and the realities of Race Abolition. If you’re interested in how to overcome and move past the identity politics of Whiteness and Blackness, check out Adi Callai’s video here.