Fictitious Identities are Inevitable Failures
Whiteness incorporates and internalizes bias in its foundational attempt to realize a fictitious identity — an identity whose very purpose and attraction lies int eh fact that it is fictitious, theoretical, mythic. For an individual to be ‘white’ and to think of themselves as ‘white’ is itself an act of discernment and discrimination, a calculated act which gives a pre-calculated value to the fiction of identity.
Whiteness binds the individual to a calculation that must be performed in order to establish and maintain the value attributed to particular identities. Whiteness asks the human being to perceive whiteness as a value and as a valuable quality that can be reliably and definitely perceived. The basic calculation of ‘white’ or not-‘white’ is a binary to which ‘white’ identity is attached — the perception of whiteness interprets the world according to a basic hierarchy of value from which subsequent claims and decisions can be made. Whiteness establishes a binary standard of what is appropriate to and for human being — the me and the not-me, the us and them — according to which whiteness simplifies the world and its activity. In its attachment to perceiving one or two things, whiteness, in its attachment to its virtual standard, ignores the actual complexity of the human world and human life. To limit oneself and others in this way is to reproduce the pain and alienation that come from being unconnected from one’s actual surroundings and circumstances, and to be plugged instead into a simplifying myth about human experience. In its struggle to wrangle the world into its system of binary distinction, whiteness perpetuates a lie, and strives to bind human beings to the lie as well as the conditions that reproduce it. Whiteness tries to control the world by lying about what it is, and the bad faith required to support the false calculation leaves us bereft of meaningful, tangible, concrete, actual connection to the world around us. We are lost because we try to insert our bodies into the myth that not only gives them a particular value, but justifies the values that have heretofore been expressed. Whiteness is also an explanation of the world, and why it is structured and organized in the particular way that it is.
Whiteness strives to restrict human being and human life to a series of calculations of human value. Whiteness organizes a market of human being, assigning differential value to visible bodies according to a mythic standard. In this, whiteness is the language of money, particularly when it is applied to the human being to whom it is impossible to assign a price. Whiteness insists on this system of differential value, but its prices can only be applied through Machiavellian insensitivity and violence, with all the attendant lies, obfuscations, and mental backflips required to turn the world into a myth.
