{"id":4256,"date":"2012-10-03T08:19:49","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T15:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=4256"},"modified":"2012-10-03T13:13:54","modified_gmt":"2012-10-03T20:13:54","slug":"white-washed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2012\/10\/03\/white-washed\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Space<\/em>: White washed"},"content":{"rendered":"

My sociology textbook covers a touchy subject, maybe the touchiest yet for social beings: the question of what whiteness is, and the emergence of white-as-race. We are beginning to get a grip.<\/p>\n

It really bothers me that we continue to blame the \u201cwhite\u201d man for rampaging his way across the globe. I had hoped when we painted my sixth-grade teacher\u2019s Volkswagen bug in psychedelic flower-power colours and dreamed of a better world that we\u2019d be past using colour as a scapegoat.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not talking politically correct whitewashing, but real change.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a song my Australian friend sings that contains these words: \u201cWhite man, white sail, white gun.\u201d Sometimes, behind his back, I play with it; I sing: \u201cBad man, blank sail, big gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying there aren\u2019t people in my ancestral background that didn\u2019t deserve some kind of punishment for racist and abusive behaviour. I\u2019m just saying it wasn\u2019t because they were white that they did those things. That culture got the upper hand at one point and hung on. They had the guns. Domination came first. White was coincidental.<\/p>\n

My ethnic background is half British, a quarter French, and a quarter Moor. But I look white, whatever that means. My whiteness, rather than anything I say or do, raises a frustrating barrier of distrust.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great that white is finally being talked about in terms of racial identity. As my textbook puts it, white has been used for far too long as a default position instead of as a description of race: \u201cIf you\u2019re not white, you must be X, Y or Z.\u201d Just because you see the same shade of pink in your skin in the faces around you doesn\u2019t mean that pink is the cornerstone colour of the human race.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s shine some white on this subject. Maybe we are what our behaviour and our social privilege <\/strong>make us, and colour has little to do with anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My sociology textbook covers a touchy subject, maybe the touchiest yet for social beings: the question of what whiteness is, and the emergence of white-as-race. We are beginning to get a grip. It really bothers me that we continue to blame the \u201cwhite\u201d man for rampaging his way across the globe. I had hoped when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issue","category-views","category-october-3-2012"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4256"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4337,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4256\/revisions\/4337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}