This is an essay written for white people, because people of color already know everything written here, and then some.
What is whiteness? Whiteness was invented in the late 17th Century to justify the existence of the African slave trade. According to historian Theodore W. Allen, “the ‘white race’ was invented as a ruling class social control formation in the late 17th-/early-18th century Anglo-American plantation colonies.” Yes, whiteness was invented. It is an extension representative of European Colonialist identities that only found itself when it came face-to-face with “the Other” and needed a justification to destroy it.
An easy example of the invention of whiteness is the degree to which certain groups of people, including the Irish and the Polish, which are now considered to be white, were at various times — when it served the needs of the white ruling class — considered not to be white. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter.” Whiteness is something that can be and has been ascribed to certain groups, and always at the intentional exclusion of other groups. Whiteness is not a shared ethnic identity. If it were, it would not be something open to social or political classification. Whiteness is instead a reactionary invention used to justify colonialist and imperial expansion of European powers. That’s it. That’s what whiteness is. Our current systems have grown and evolved from those dark beginnings, of course, but they still show their roots. Roots that have grown into a political state that has only ever made flaccid gestures toward actual democracy.