What is “Whiteness?” (#001)

Whiteness is like a language insofar as the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world (Wittgenstein).

Whiteness is like money, and operates as the subterranean, barely concealed language of finance, of a speculation and abstract wealth that realize themselves as material impoverishment.

Whiteness is a concept, a paradigm according to which the world is ordered. Whiteness is a gestalt that alters and organizes perception around a superstition branded as ‘racial’ fact. Whiteness is not biological, but must present itself as such in order to reliably function. It is a pretense that strives to order a reality that is retroactively named “racial.”

Whiteness cannot be experienced, but only perceived, and only insofar as that perception does not reveal its foundation as a choice. Whiteness is a virtuality that strives to become actuality, an abstraction that strives to become concrete — and it is precisely in its failure to become what it already claims to be that the activity of whiteness manifests itself. Whiteness is an activity that consists of the failure of its own realization as an actually experienced human quality — it exists in giving oneself over to a fiction, and then claiming that fiction as ‘reality.’