Whiteness is an excessive performance…

Whiteness performs a belief in its own difference, and this performance is necessarily excessive. It overcompensates simply because it seeks compensation for something that is not actually missing. Or, it overdetermines belonging according to an imagined identity to cover up the fact of that identity’s failure to become concrete, and the correlated failure to belong in a tangible, concrete way. ‘White’ activity posits belonging, but demonstrates non-belonging insofar as identity can have no concrete object and actual embodiment. Whiteness strives to make concrete the myth of its own belonging, a myth that relies on the presence and the perception of that which does not belong. Therefore, whiteness needs the one that does not belong in order to lend solidity to itself, but cannot extend its sense of belonging to precisely the one it depends on to recognize itself as distinct.