Whiteness Conditions Perception

Whiteness conditions perception around a myth of human being that cannot be realized in human experience, and specifically ‘white’ activity exists in resolving the gap between the myth of whiteness and the idea of a ‘white’ human being on one hand, and a concrete experience of human embodiment that lacks a final, knowable, internal ‘racial’ designator.

No one is ‘white’ because no one is ‘raced,’ but whiteness strives to achieve an imaginary status that it is not possible for a human being to have in any tangible, concrete way. Whiteness must compensate for the fact that the supposedly ‘white’ individual can provide no evidence of their own difference, but must still believe in it in order to have their particular value in a ‘white’-centered world. Whiteness must prove that ‘race’ exists, while already living as though ‘race’ has been proven.

The breach or division that whiteness claims is natural, inherent, or given is only a breach in its own self-apprehension. Because whiteness strives to see that others are not both merely and fully human, it cannot perceive itself as merely or fully human. It tries to launch itself into a beyond that it cannot reach because it is imaginary, a fantasy, and so it must subject others to the imaginary rules to justify this breach that cannot be located. The infinite quest for what does not exist leaves the ‘white’ (who is always bereft of their whiteness) in a state of anxiety, hostility, and resentment, as the promise of a specifically ‘white’ being goes eternally unfulfilled — and the ‘other’ becomes the cause of discomfort.

But the ‘other’ is only a reminder of the failure and false promise of the ‘white’ imagination, the ‘other’ is the reflection in the broken mirror that reveals whiteness as unfulfilled, and therefore lacking. Believing in whiteness is to believe in one’s own incompleteness — it is a symbolic excess that compensates for what is not there, an excess that must repeat itself as it shouts into a void that has no echo. Whiteness believes that there is more to be gained from a world which supplies an impossible need, and fails to find what it seeks because nothing is missing. But the covert, never-admitted belief in its own lack is what gives whiteness its particular value and allows it to enter guiltlessly into a state of exception.