Whyte folk, the original material gworls

 I am in love with this pieceeee... in this blog I'll be answering some of the questions posed by Zac in pers post using examples from "The Vanishing Half" by Britt Bennett (199.9999% recommend reading) 

Zac's Questions: 

- What does it mean to be recognized as white? 

- What does it mean to be white? 

"But when Stella based her decision on an obligation to family? That was heart space. And maybe it had always been her head guiding her. She had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn't you be white if you could be?... She had just made the rational decision" (The Vanishing Half pg. 168) 

This excerpt is from the inner dialogue of Stella, one of the main characters in the Vanishing Half. Stella was raised in a town where everyone was Black (very light skinned Black) but as she grew older and moved away, she chose to use her light skin to pass as white. Stella was forced to dropout of school early to start working at a job where she would often face sexual harassment as a child. This early realization that as a Black woman she would stripped of her ability to pursue her desires and of her personhood made passing such an obvious and "rational decision" for her because whiteness would protect the expectations she had for her life. 

"She felt almost angry at her parents for denying it to her. If they'd passed over, if they'd raised her white, everything would have been different. No white man dragging her daddy from the porch. No laundry baskets filling the living room. She could have finished school, graduated top of her class... she could have had everything in her life now, but her father and mother and Desiree too" (Vanishing Half pg. 128) 

I think Stella as a character is the physical manifestation of this idea of whiteness as property and expectation presented by Harris. She states ""Property is nothing but the basis of expectation," according to Bentham, consist[ing] in an established exception, in the persuasion of being able to draw such and such advantage from the thing possessed" (1729.) Like Harris says, it's easy to consider how property can be constructed as an expectation protected by the law. Think of a plot of land that you've settled on... sure you can try to claim ownership by virtue of your settlement but what's to stop me from denying you that ownership and trying to take it? In the state of nature, why should you expect that this land won't be trespassed? This land only becomes your property when there is an authority that is able to defend you claim and protect this expectation. As such if we consider that the privileges granted to whiteness because of white supremacy are in essence expectation (however illegitimate) that have proven time and time again to be protected by the law, then we can conceive of whiteness as property. The law protected the expectation of personhood given to whiteness just as it protected the expectation that the European conception of land ownership would be implemented to colonize Indigenous land. 

So briefly to answer Zac's question, to be white is to hold illegitimate expectation granted to you and protected by the state. To be recognized as white is to continue to reap the advantages of this protection without reproof. 

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