What comes after Whiteness?

Re-imagining identity beyond race... for a world where everyone belongs

wild and wonderful rainbow sunset in my hometown of Ashland, Oregon

To learn about Whiteness as a White person is to confront two significant challenges. The first is the psychic pain of reckoning with what it means to be White. As Garrett Bucks puts it in his vulnerable and refreshingly candid new memoir:

Noticing your Whiteness requires wrestling, even for just a second, with our place in a caste system, our place in a hierarchy of domination. And that’s uncomfortable! 

If you make it through this difficult place—and many do not—a second and more difficult dilemma awaits. As Noel Ignatiev put it:

Imagine the loneliness of those who, born to a group they regard as unjust and oppressive and not wanting to be part of that group, are left on their own to figure their way out.

I don’t have to imagine: that’s me. This is the problem: there is at present no exit from Whiteness, no offramp to liberation. In grappling with this dilemma, I experience a tension between two truths:

1. Race is a social construct which we made up…

2. And race is a very real social phenomenon that structures and permeates our lives on a daily basis.

So I feel/felt torn: to identify as “White” feels to me like accepting a logic that I reject; it is to accept the lie that is race. But to deny my Whiteness is to put on blinders and to ignore the harsh realities of a society structured around that lie.

To be clear: race is with us for the foreseeable future; any path forward must reckon with that reality. And: a future without white supremacy must be a future without whiteness… and therefore without race. I’ve come to believe that one of the biggest barriers to dismantling white supremacy is our inability to imagine what replaces it. More specifically: it is our inability to imagine post-racial identities. What comes after Whiteness?

Today I want to explore this question, and some of the deeply fraught and fundamental tensions that sit at the heart of it.

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Reconstruction or abolition?

Let me start with a core distinction: when I am talking about “Whiteness” I am not talking about White people. Whiteness is the ideology, born out of white supremacy; that logic is then applied to people… without our consent. Noel Ignatiev, in many ways the godfather of the movement to abolish whiteness, explains:

The white race is a club. Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought up according to its rules.

I want to be free. I want to reclaim agency in how I self-define… and that means divesting from Whiteness. And more: it means creating something new, something that doesn’t yet exist.

Here’s how I understand the logic flow:

1. Race is a social construct which we made up… as a way of understanding/ordering social relations, it is only a few hundred years old.

2. Whiteness was established in order to create Blackness, as a way to justify and enable domination.

3. Thus Whiteness is inseparable from domination: the category only has meaning as a tool for domination.

4. Because we made it up—the concept of race in general, and the category of “Whiteness” in particular—therefore we can unmake it.

5. Our goal is to get rid of supremacy in all its forms: belonging is incompatible with domination.

6. We can’t move from domination to belonging while maintaining a concept that only exists based on domination. Therefore, we have to rid Whiteness of supremacy. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do this:

   1. Evacuate Whiteness of its association with domination.

   2. Abolish Whiteness.

I’m framing this choice as reconstruction vs abolition. Reconstruction begs two questions: is it possible, and is it desirable? The answer to both of these questions for me is an emphatic no: why would we want to preserve race (a made up and utterly incoherent phenomenon) as a category of social distinction? In this I’m with Haile Selassie, who famously observed:

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned…

Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes…

Until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

I also don’t think it’s possible: it is impossible to understand Whiteness without domination, so to remove domination is to destroy the identity. In this I’m with Mark LeVine, who observed:

One would have better luck taking wetness away from water… than to rip the racism out of whiteness.

Which means our goal must be abolition. As Viewpoint Magazine wrote in 2020 in a compilation of essays exploring this topic:

To abolish white domination means, in fact, to abolish whiteness itself.

What does it mean to abolish Whiteness?

Here’s Ignatiev again:

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.

I want to emphasize again, because this is where so many people get hung up: I am interested in eradicating Whiteness, not White people.

In the field of racial studies, various scholars have articulated theories of racial identity formation. My favorite is this integrated model, which traces the process for White people and people of color alike (remember: we are all conscripted into this system and its (il)logic, without our consent).

More recently a model has been circulating adapted from Barnor Hesse’s scholarship (in dialogue with the above) focused specifically on the process of racial awareness among White people:

Image from Slow Factory, building on work by Barnor Hesse

I think both of these models are helpful, and resonate with me personally in different ways. But I have the same problem with each of them: they stop too soon. I’m interested in what comes next: what comes after abolition? If we’re successful in abolishing Whiteness (and if we are to have any chance of building a world where everyone belongs, we must)… what then is my identity? I will be neither “White” nor “abolitionist”… what am I?

I am one of those people who doesn’t get very motivated in opposition. I’m not particularly interested in fighting something; sure I will resist, but it’s not sustainable: ultimately I want to build, not just tear down. Indeed, this is the definition of abolition that I am drawn to, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who writes:

Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life affirming institutions.

Right. So… what are we building?

Beyond abolition: barriers to belonging

Of the many obstacles to finally dismantling white supremacy, I think there are three that feel primary for the purposes of abolishing Whiteness.

1. The reluctance and resistance of White people to do the difficult work of confronting Whiteness, our own relationship to it, and to move through the stages of racial identity development to become White abolitionists.

This is where most discourse focuses, and it’s essential: the only way out is through. If White people do not do this work, we will never abolish Whiteness. And: that work is necessary but insufficient… and I fear our inattention to these next two components actually makes the work in #1 more difficult.

2. We haven’t yet imagined what comes after Whiteness. If we White people do the difficult work and join the ranks of White abolitionists… what does victory look like? As we withdraw consent from Whiteness and renounce domination… what is the positive aspirational identity that we are embracing?

This is the question I am most interested in, and which I fear is under-resourced in this moment. Without a positive identity to aspire to, without the invitation of a promised land… I fear too many will continue to avoid the difficult work of racial reckoning. I am very much an “if you build it, they will come” kind of person… and the literature supports this as a theory of behavior change.

As I discussed here, one key to durable social change (cultural transformation, as opposed to fragile reforms that can be undone in the next election cycle), is supporting people in cultivating new aspirational identities. Patrik Edblad summarizes this model of behavior change as: Identity > Goal > Habit. The first question is: who do I want to be? Without something to aspire to, it can be very difficult to motivate behavior change.

But there is a third question that I actually feel fear to even enumerate here, conscious of how fraught this terrain is… and aware of my own racialized identity.

3. Can we abolish Whiteness… while we retain Blackness?

Here is the problem. We created Whiteness in order to create Blackness: they exist as binaries, each defining the other. More to the point: we created Whiteness and therefore defined everything else as “non-white”… the latter always understood as contingent, evolving, and provisional (my favorite treatment of this was the excellent podcast miniseries Seeing White, and in particular this episode). Here’s john a. powell, who is consistently among my favorite thinkers/practitioners in this space:

Blackness is bound up with whiteness—it is already and always present in the white self. It is because whiteness is empty and derivative that it needs the constitutive other for the grounding of its being.

But unlike Whiteness, Blackness as an identity was forged out of pride, out of resistance, out of a refusal both to dominate and to be dominated. Blackness is capacious, abundant, joyful, liberatory: it is the antithesis of Whiteness. Blackness was born out of indigeneity, nurtured and protected in defiance of the colonizing force of Whiteness. john powell again:

The history of blackness has been a cry for freedom.

But this is the rub: if our goal is abolish Whiteness, and with it to relegate to the dustbin of history the concept of race… don’t we also have to let go of Blackness? Isn’t our work mutually reinforcing? If in the world I long for, I will no longer be identifying as White… does that mean you can no longer identify as Black?

The opposite of Whiteness… is Blackness

Whiteness is an exclusionary identity created to implement white supremacy: it is an ideology of domination, constructing an “other” in order to elevate a narrow “we.” The antidote, therefore, must be an inclusive identity predicated on partnership and solidarity.

Last weekend I toured the new Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Met in NYC, and found myself reflecting. We do actually have a historical precedent for creating a new identity and culture that transcends borders, declines the invitation to domination, and builds solidarity: Blackness.

from The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibit currently at the Met

Blackness didn’t exist until the creation of Whiteness, and the White creators of this noxious ideology endowed Blackness with all of their fears, projections, and hatreds. More: Whiteness made claim to being the only reality, a totalizing framework for understanding life. As Dominique Morrisseau notes:

What’s fundamentally inside of white patriarchal supremacy is the authority to define reality.

People who had never thought of themselves as Black did not have the option to decline the label: they didn’t have the option to consent to conscription into the domination hierarchy of white supremacy. Instead they did something White people could not: they created a new culture inside of Blackness, rejecting the oppressive vision given to them by Whiteness.

The creation of Blackness by Black people was a radical act: the creation of new culture and identity “with cultural values established by the Black community itself.” This global project was unprecedented, linking Black communities around the world: creating a sense of common identity and culture where none had previously existed.

More than that: it seems to me that Afro-descendant people in the Americas are the first non-indigenous culture to construct a culture and identity that explicitly breaks with colonial logic and supremacist paradigms. They were uprooted from land and brought to a place where they were not indigenous. But unlike White settlers, they did not adopt and spread a domination paradigm: unlike White people fleeing Europe, they created a culture in resistance to settler colonialism and the mandates of white supremacy. At some level, Black people retained their indigeneity in creating a new culture, despite being uprooted.

The only way out is through… together

One of the core features of trauma is that it robs us of agency: it denies us choice. This is one of the many traumas of white supremacy: without our consent, it casts White people as oppressors, and people of color as victims.

The ability to self-author our own identities is fundamental to the process of healing from racial trauma: not by denying the past, but by reckoning with it. Just as Black people need to go through a process of understanding how they became Black, so too do White people need to understand how they became White.

Here Black people (and people of color more broadly) have an advantage: they can reclaim Blackness or an identity outside of Whiteness, and construct a proud racial identity: this was the successful project of the Harlem Renaissance—and an ongoing necessity in the face of white supremacy, echoing in contemporary celebrations of Black joy.

White people have no such option: there is no “White pride,” because to take pride in Whiteness is to misunderstand it (or, worse, to understand it and embrace it!) This leaves White people stuck: we are trapped in a racialized identity with no way out. And there is no way for White people to create a new identity alone: it must be a collective effort. Not to save White people from racial reckoning… but to invite us to step toward the liberation on the other side of that reckoning. As john powell puts it:

Whiteness and race must be deconstructed together.

There is a sequencing here… and I think the two goals must proceed in tandem. James Baldwin, perhaps our most trenchant observer of Whiteness as a phenomenon, declares:

As long as you think you’re White, there’s no hope for you. As long as you think you’re White, I’m going to be forced to think I’m Black.

It’s better to watch him say it:

Afro-futurism is an invitation to us all

What if we saw Wakanda as an invitation not only to Black people, but to everyone? To imagine what life might be like if we were never colonized? I tasted a glimpse of this shortly after Black Panther was released back in 2018, at a multiracial movement strategy session I attended at a house in Oakland. Someone made a comment about Wakanda, and without thinking I mimicked the Wakanda salute: the crossed arms of solidarity. I immediately felt self-conscious: uh oh, cultural appropriation! And looked across the room, where at the exact same moment a Black man was doing the same salute: we made eye contact, and he laughed. In that gesture of shared humanity he let me in: expanding the imaginative vision of Blackness—of Wakanda—to include me.

I felt this again in Harlem over the weekend. At multiple times—on the bus, in bars and restaurants, in a jazz club—I found myself the only White person in an entirely Black space. And I felt very viscerally: Blackness is capacious enough to accommodate me. All that is required for me to belong is to check Whiteness at the door: there is no room for domination inside of Blackness (properly understood: of course people of every color are capable of enacting supremacy). Unlike with Whiteness, I wasn’t required to become Black to be accepted by Blackness. This is its transformative power. As Willie James Jennings put it:

We need an assimilation that does not harm but heals.

In my visit to the Met, I also explored the new Afrofuturism exhibit. I deeply appreciated the metaphor of a threshold, a portal into a different type of space: it seems to me this is the doorway we all must step through. A willingness to shed our old identities in order to forge new ones together. To repair: to make reparations for the tremendous harms wrought (and ongoing) by white supremacy. And to grieve: to acknowledge what we all have lost, oppressor and oppressed alike. In that shared grief and commitment to repair lies solidarity… if we are courageous enough to embrace it.

From Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room exhibit currently at the NYC Met

The future belongs to us all

I think there is potential for huge solidarity here: a multiracial project of building belonging… by imagining and co-creating a future that must be post-racial. Sheena Mason puts it simply:

To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.

Writing in his provocative 2020 book After Whiteness, Willie James Jennings declares:

We live in a defeated conceptual moment when so many have surrendered their imaginations to working inside the ideas of race, religion, and nation as the most rational way to think collective existence and for peoples to know and announce themselves. It may be impossible to escape these ideas for thinking collective existence given how they are embedded in the world order formed through modern colonialism and enacted through education, but the more urgent question is whether we should continue to surrender our imaginations to them.

I’ll answer the rhetorical question: we must not surrender our imaginations to these tired ideologies. We must free our imaginations in order to free ourselves.

This is the task we now face as a species, and the one I described in launching this newsletter almost five years ago. Our goal is not “multiracial democracy”: that vision is too limited (I love this idea which I encountered via Connie Razza and Angela Peoples in their work on a constructing a belonging narrative for America). Our goal is more capacious: how can we build a world where everyone belongs?

What if we could see Blackness as an invitation to answer that question? The answer is not Blackness itself… or at least, not as conceptualized in reference to race. As Eula Biss notes:

Becoming black is not the answer to the problem of whiteness.

Rather, I see Blackness as pointing the direction to a new creation story, one that honors our differences without reifying them in the illusion of race. Indeed, if we understand the positive articulation of decolonization as a process of re-indigenization… then at some level we all need to aspire to the invitation inherent in Blackness. Recognizing that for the vast majority of us—with the exception of indigenous people still living in their native ancestral land—we must create new culture in a new place. Derek Rasmussen calls this one of the defining tasks of the era: to “build embodied and authentic cultures.”

This to me is the most compelling basis for solidarity: we all have a longing to belong. White people—ourselves told that we didn’t belong in our native lands—made the catastrophic choice to try to purchase belonging for themselves by creating an Other… and we all continue to suffer from that founding sin. As Pat McCabe beautifully said: “Anything taken by force must be remade.”

We now have a choice to follow a different path: one offered by indigenous cultures since time immemorial, and one offered by the reclamation of Blackness. As Bridgit Antoinette Evans says:

The project of our society is to constantly re-imagine how we belong together.

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I will leave it here for today. This post is intended to call attention to what I see as a major barrier in our work for racial justice: the need for new identities on the other side of Whiteness. And to underscore the collective multiracial nature of this work: White people cannot do it alone.

Beyond the scope of this post—though worthy of inquiry and perhaps future posts—are several questions:

1. What becomes the basis of identity after race? (Gestured at here; I think like all acts of culture creation, it has to go back to our relationship to land and place)

2. How do we get there from here? How do we hold the tension between trying to transcend race even as it structures our lives? (I think there’s inspiration to be taken from similar efforts in the gender space; some concrete ideas are gestured at here).

3. How do we collectively honor the work Black people—and people of color more broadly—have done and are doing to create culture? How do we build upon their foundations without appropriating it or insisting we have to start anew?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time… the process of writing has been helpful for me in clarifying my own perspective, even as many questions remain unanswered. I’m curious what resonates, what doesn’t, and if you are aware of promising initiatives doing the work for post-racial world-building.

In community,

Brian