Everyone needs to stop talking about "white people"

‘White people’, in its political rather than descriptive sense, is such a perverse phrase. As if the white man who owns a bank is indistinguishable from the Rust Belt white guy who works on a production line. As if the white man who runs the European Commission is the same as the white men who must trek from the east of the EU to the west just to find some (hard) work. Radicals’ obsession with whiteness speaks to their utter abandonment of the idea of class, and of any attempt to analyse and rethink social relations. They now prefer to mystify power, to turn it from a real, lived, analysable thing into a kind of magic that is passed between white-skinned people through history and through culture and the internet. In the process they utterly demean working-class whites in particular. They airbrush their experience from the record (and I thought erasing people’s lives was the worst thing you could do) through suggesting they are part of some strange, free-standing system of magically gifted privilege; that their struggles and sense of identity count for nothing in the broader scheme of their skin colour.

Then there’s the way ‘white people’ talk racialises politics, and public life, and everyday life. It lures us into the racial imagination; it positively encourages racialised thinking. It replaces the foul biological determinism of the old racism, which suggested blacks were governed more by instinct than mental faculty, with a new historical determinism that says blacks have been permanently wounded by historical experience while whites have been made arrogant by it. Terms like ‘stay in your lane’, used by supporters of Black Lives Matter to chastise whites who want to help lead the fight for black equality, confirm how divisive the new racialism is, and the impossibility of solidarity in an era of skin-colour determinism and politics-by-identity.

The white-people obsession turns whiteness into a kind of original sin, a marker for wickedness. To be white is to be corrupted — from the moment of birth — and so one must spend one’s time atoning and apologising. This is why we have the cult of white privilege-checking, where well-educated, racially minded ‘progressive’ whites will ostentatiously watch what they say around blacks, take a back seat in debates about race and power, and preface their every utterance with the words ‘I know I’m white, so this might be invalid, but…’.