For minority members, whiteness has become an accusation of acting white.
African albinos, Hindu gods, and Chinese architects.
These three things and about three million others have been accused of suffering from a plague of whiteness. The colonists of Salem saw witches everywhere and the modern racist witch hunters see ‘whiteness’ everywhere they look. Whitenessphobia may be the great mental illness of our time.
To Whitenessphobes, everything has a “whiteness” problem.
Headlines like, "Climate Activists Confront the Movement's Whiteness Problem," "The Enduring Whiteness of the Fed", and "Commercial Real Estate has a Whiteness Problem" show the sheer scale of Whitenessphobia which is triggered by everything from the Federal Reserve to Greta Thunberg
But you don’t have to actually be white to fall victim to “Whitenessphobia”.
In Africa, people with albinism are being blamed for the coronavirus pandemic.
"It is the perceived whiteness of people with albinism. It is being interpreted that they are carriers of what is seen as a white man's disease. It comes from China where people have fair skin in the African mindset," Dr. Charlotte Baker, the head of the Albinism in Africa Network, explained.
Whiteness can mean Africans being blamed for a Chinese disease because pigmentation is relative.
Harvard's Graduate School of Design was accused of "institutionalized whiteness" because Mark Lee, the chair of the Architecture Department, had stirred outrage by saying, said, “I see the GSD as the most Eurocentric school in America, and that is really our strength."
Lee is Chinese. GSD’s previous dean was Persian. But you can be Chinese or Persian and still spread “institutionalized whiteness”. Or you can be a Hindu deity and be accused of excessive whiteness.
After Shaun King, who really is too white, accused depictions of Jesus of being too white, the Hindu gods also came under fire for their whiteness. "We must also ask why Hindu deities are so light skinned," Rupa Subramanya, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, demanded.
And, in the era of Black Lives Matter, it doesn’t matter how black you are, you can still be accused of whiteness. Terry Crews, who grew up in Flint, Michigan, and made it big in the NFL, is being accused of centering and upholding "whiteness". A Los Angeles Times column claims that Aunt Jemima was "selling whiteness". The brand can be accused of many things, but selling “whiteness” isn’t one of them.
A Psychology Today article claims, “the concept of Whiteness was imported from Spain and Portugal.”
White people, it seems, didn’t exist until they were invented in the 16th century by Latinos, who are considered a...
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