The Whiteness Standard
We are approaching the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, when a mob of white supremacists were unleashed and aimed by a lame-duck President at the Congress of the United States, to try and overturn the results of a legitimate election. The purpose, you will recall, was to install a white supremacist as a plutocratic, fascist ruler of America.
It came dangerously close to working, and people around the world were shocked by how easy it was in the United States for a charismatic, narcissistic, con-man to weaponize a white supremacist mob to try and overthrow American Democracy.
As we watched the videos from the Capitol insurrection, millions of white Americans seemed to wake up for a moment to the danger that weaponized white supremacy poses to our way of life here in America.
Shortly thereafter, we went back to sleep… surprising nobody.
White people sleepwalking, forgetting, finding ourselves confused by racism whiteness is not a bug. It’s a design feature of racism/whiteness.
Avoidance and bad faith are part of the deal racism/whiteness made with us before we were old enough to consent? How else could we participate in the system of racism/white supremacy and feel okay — or even superior — about it?
This blog post delves into the relationship, and the distinction between the technology of racism, and the standard of white supremacy.
I don’t have any easy answers to the ongoing assault on American Democracy by the forces of white supremacy, fascism, militarism, and greed. I do believe however, that white folks figuring out how to resist the pull to be complicit in the racism/whiteness is the only real place for us to start.
For those of us who’ve ever experienced being woke, it’s imperative we learn to stay awake.
Nobody wants to go on a journey with a driver who’s asleep at the wheel. How do we minimize the harm we cause to Black and Brown collaborators? How do we unlearn a lifetime of the habit of thrusting our way to the center of conversations? How do we catch it when we cast ourselves as the hero or the villain of the narrative; or when we blithely co-opt the work of Black and Brown folks by talking about it like we made everything up?
We need to do what we’ve been acculturated never to do as white people.
We need to delve deep into the relationship between white supremacy and the technology of racism, and pull whiteness into the open where we’ll never be able to unsee it, together.
White supremacy is the dominant standard of racism
White people frequently ask me why I write and talk so much about whiteness. It’s weird, and off-putting, and uncomfortable to many white folks, me included.
The answer is pretty simple though really.
The technology of racism is built on the standard of white supremacy (or whiteness, for short). Today, in the United States, whiteness and what I’ll call its reference implementations (anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity being the main ones in America), are the dominant standards for the technology of racism.
Whiteness is how the technology of racism orchestrates the behaviors of hundreds millions of people to create racist outcomes, policies, and problems. Taken to its (il)logical end, white supremacy is perhaps the primary fulcrum (at least in America) used by narcissists, sociopaths, and by the interests of empire and capital to tip the world into continuous war, rapacious predatory capitalism, fascism, genocide, and eventually species death.
If we’re against those things, (we are against these things, right?) we need to stand up against racism and white supremacy (and the standards of patriarchy, heteronormativity, ablism and all the others: tangled up together, seemingly hopelessly, like a tangled pile of old phone chargers).
The standard of white supremacy and the weaponization of white people kills and injures Black people, Indigenous people, and other People of Color every day, and every day it brainwashes, weaponizes and dehumanizes all people (but especially white people like me… and like you, if you’re a white person reading this).
What are standards and how do they work?
Systems of knowledge become technologies when they become standardized: reproducible, person-to-person, consistently through language. Technologies can be formal or informal in their adoption of standards, but there is a seeming inevitability to standardization. Technologies that leverage standards seem to inevitably dominate and replace less-standardized systems of knowledge.
The technology of racism/whiteness dominates our culture at least in part because the standard of whiteness is ubiquitous and widely promulgated.
So how do standards work?
Technology architects, like me, are always trying to figure out how to align technologies with standards, or to create new standards with other technologists. Standards allow technologists to aim their technologies in the the direction the river is flowing. Ignore the undertow of standards, and you risk your systems getting nowhere, being swamped, or being sunsetted.
VHS dominated Betamax, not because it was better quality, but because it had a bigger standards-driven ecosystem ready to receive it. The web killed walled-garden services like AOL, not because it had more features, but because it had a harnessed standards-driven development to swamp dial-in services with inexpensive, bottom-up content. Android phones took over half the world almost overnight because they both built on, and created, an open, standards-driven ecosystem to thrive in.
Standards frequently survive the implementations of the technologies they nurture. HTTP survived Netscape, when it failed, just as the standard of white supremacy survived the sunsetting of earlier implementations of racism (e.g. chattel slavery and Jim Crow).
We need to sunset systematic racism permanently. To achieve that, as a culture, I believe we will need to deconstruct, replace, and deprecate the standard of whiteness.
We need a global, antiracist, standards-driven ecosystem which will swamp, replace, and eventually make irrelevant the standard of white supremacy.
Standards govern technologies. White supremacy governs racism.
Standards, in practice, are a meta-technology, whose purpose is to govern other technologies. Standards and measures are codified systems of knowledge that allow humans to agree on how to measure (and communicate about) things and concepts that are important to them. There are tens of thousands of systems of standards and measures and they shape the way human beings experience and interpret life. The metric system allows you to measure space. ISO standards allow companies to measure the quality of manufacturing. The prime meridian allows us to measure time and your position on the earth. Everything we do, every day, is shaped by these standards, which — at least once they’ve been firmly established — become invisible to us in our daily lives.
Compare this to how everything we do every day is shaped by the mostly invisible standard of whiteness.
Practically all technologies are built on and shaped by standards and measures. The Internet is carried by TCP/IP (and many other) standards. Accounting is built on the standards of double-entry book keeping. Disk media is currently built to the Blue-ray standard. The Bitcoin blockchain is built on the standard of “proof of work”.
In the United States, at least, the technology of racism is governed, built on and dominated by the whiteness (or white supremacy) standard.
What then, does the standard of whiteness measure?
Whiteness allows people (all people, once acculturated) to know (measure) how “white” somebody is, or how far from white they are, if they are not. This is to say, that the whiteness standard, like the length of a meter, and in fact any standard, is arbitrary.
In the case of whiteness, it’s also important to acknowledge it’s nonsensical and ridiculous. The length a meter measures may be arbitrary, but the dimension of length itself is real. It exists in time and space. “How white” someone is, is not a question with any biological reality behind it. What whiteness measures is pure fiction, a construct created to justify and govern the technology of racism.
Dig a little deeper, and you find that the purpose of whiteness is not to actually measure anything, but rather to dictate to people in our culture who is presumed to be fully human, and therefore who is not. Who has a voice, and therefore who does not. Who has certain rights and privileges, and therefore who does not. The standard is secretly absurd, because it purports to measure, when in fact it merely enforces.
Historically in America, these standards were documented and codified in laws (both nationally and locally ) as well as in court decisions. Famous examples include:
The Three-fifths Compromise counted black lives towards increasing white representation in Congress and the electoral college.
The Dred Scott Decision governed the rights of Black people vs. white people as citizens (Spoiler alert: Black people had no rights as citizens).
The “One-drop rule” in many states governed the standard of whether a person was white or Black.
These laws were standards-setting. They codified, and fortified the emerging, but already dominant, standards of white supremacy. Put another way, the standard of Black lives NOT mattering, was backed by the force of law.
A less famous example, is what many historians believe was the first time the concept of white people was written into law in the United States. The following is from Scene On Radio, Made in America, (Seeing White, Part 3) exploring work from Suzanne Plihcik from the Racial Equity Institute
The Virginia House of Burgesses was the first legislative body in colonial America. In 1682, the Burgesses passed a law limiting citizenship to Europeans. It made all non-Europeans – “Negroes, Moors, Mollatoes, and Indians,” as the law put it – quote, “slaves to all intents and purposes.” Virginia was giving away land at the time, in 50-acre allotments, but only to Europeans.
Nine years later, in 1691, the Burgesses passed another law. According to historian Terrance MacMullan, this law included the first documented use in the English-speaking colonies of the word “white” – as opposed to English, European, or Christian – to describe the people considered full citizens. That is, the people who got to remain citizens so long as they didn’t marry outside of their so-called race. The law read, quote: “Whatsoever English or other white man or woman, being free, shall intermarry with a negro, mullato, or Indian man or woman, bond or free, shall within three months after marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever.”
While some of these laws were later repealed, the standards remained. Structural advantages from these laws designed for white people (e.g. the advantaging of votes of white people as a result of the Three-fifths Compromise) still not only shape our politics, but reinforce the consensus reality of white supremacy. These advantages persist long after the Three-fifths Compromise was repealed in 1868, as well as after Black people won the right to vote. White people don’t notice these standards anymore. It’s just how things are, and how we are taught (and how our teachers were taught) they’ve always been.
That’s the pernicious thing about standards. Once established, standards continue to operate even when they are no longer held in force by laws, regulations, or standards bodies. Standards have tremendous inertia.
I’m personally old enough to remember in the 70’s when Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act. As children, we were taught, by the National Institute of Standards no less, that America was converting to the metric system because it was better. The metric system was superior; easier to use; more elegant; more scientific; less old fashioned than “Imperial Units or the “English System". Not even England used the English system anymore, having changed to metric in 1968.
None of that mattered. Americans (and just as importantly, American industry) ignored the metric system and just kept on doing what they always did. While the metric system saw broad adoption by the US scientific community, other than that, it had little impact on the dominance of Imperial Units. The English system — despite being heavily contested, despite legal mandates with NIST support, despite being 100% contrary to international practices — persists. America to this day builds our buildings in 2’x4’s, measures our fevers in fahrenheit, and compares our children’s growth spurts on what, at least apocryphally, was the length of some white dude’s feet.
Laws can change, but standards persist in human culture just as the standard of white supremacy continues to devalue Black Lives (and the lives of all non-white people) everywhere, long after these particular laws were rescinded. Whiteness continuously shapes the thinking of people writing new laws; shapes the behavior of everybody who operates inside of it; and shapes how people, especially white people, vote.
How does the standard of white supremacy function?
The standard of white supremacy promises and provides protection (from itself) to people it says are white, and punishment and violence to people that it says are Black or Indigenous. Everybody else is forced to negotiate with white people, inside this rigged system, about what kinds of outcomes they receive because they are not promised the same protection, or at least not all of the time. If the standard of whiteness codifies you as not-white, but also not Black or Indigenous (e.g. LatinX, or Asian, or Middle Eastern) you may sometimes be treated as human, but are constantly under the threat of being treated as less than human.
This considerable threat always hangs over the lives of all people of color, and is used as a lever get them to accede to the wishes of white people.
The standard of whiteness changes over time to the arbitrary convenience of white people. Need to appear to be doing something about immigration? Strip LatinX refugees of their human rights. Need to appear to be tough on terrorism? Create a Muslim ban. Need someone to blame for a botched pandemic response? Call it the Kung-flu.
Instead of Software-as-a-Service, whiteness powers Scapegoat-as-a-Service. This service is a feature of the technology of racism, provided for white people, at the expense of BIPOC folks.
Whiteness is backwards compatible with the historically older standard of Christendom, which is still around like an MS-DOS layer lingering under Windows, and is used to justify making Jewish people available as scapegoats “on demand”, (#jewishspacelasers anyone?) even if some of them may “count” as white in a given historical moment or context.
The standard of white supremacy (and the standard of Chistendom) are shortcuts to get large groups of people to concede to the inevitability of, and even approve of, terrible crimes, up to and including genocide. They function as designed, to line up these crimes perfectly with the big lie we’ve been acculturated to: that it is natural, good, normal, or unavoidable somehow, for the world to treat non-white (or non Christian) people as less than human, whenever it’s convenient, or profitable, or politically expedient.
The protection whiteness promises is like a mob protection racket. Whiteness protects us from White Supremacy, the same way paying off a gangster promises to protect you from the mob. Violent, murderous, and public displays of aggression against Black and Brown children are obviously meant to intimidate other BIPOC people, but they also serve to keep white folks in complicit with and paying into the system.
Let’s be clear the protection whiteness promises middle class, working class and poor folks are not broad. There’s no promise of healthcare, food, shelter, work, satisfaction, safety from global warming, or protection from the interests of capital for anybody but the super rich . No, white folks sell out our Black and Brown brothers and sisters every day for much grubbier stakes: assurance that white supremacist police won’t beat our children to death in the street unless they do something really outrageous; the availability (whether we use it or not) to tap into Scapegoat as a Service; access to better financing and real estate opportunities; the right to have as many guns as we can afford and to be as educated or uneducated or as employed or unemployed as we want with less risk of incarceration or state violence.
In point of fact, very few white people can even fully enjoy those benefits. The system of systems has other ways to oppress and control other than white supremacy: white women aren’t protected from patriarchy ; LGBQTIA+ white folks aren’t protected from heteronormativity; disabled white folks aren’t protected from Ablism; poor white folks aren’t protected from rich white folks. (Queer, black and brown women and trans folk aren’t protected from any of these, which is probably why so many of them are so many light years ahead of the rest of us thinking about this, and also why they are at such a high risk of death from violence everywhere.)
I assert white supremacy, in point of fact, actually costs almost all white folks much more than we actually get out of it, but we’re stuck, and most of the time it just seems like an impossible maze to escape.
Why is this topic so confusing for white folks?
If you are white, according to the whiteness standard, you will likely expect to be treated as fully human by practically everybody, all the time (or at least everybody who counts as a full person according to the whiteness standard). The “less white” you are (measured against always changing, and arbitrary standard of whiteness) the less human you are considered by the “logic” of the technology of racism/white supremacy. The outcome is that people of color (and black and indigenous people in particular) are afforded less regard as human and thus are afforded more abuse and less of everything else, by default, in practically every context where they come in contact with not only white people, but any person operating in the context of racism/whiteness (which is to say, everybody who’s not actively pushing against it).
Perhaps, you can see me struggling here. I’m trying to make something explicit that I appear to be programmed NEVER to say, and preferably never to see or understand: the arbitrariness and the illogic of white supremacy.
By the logic of whiteness, People of Color are (seemingly inevitably) subject to more abuse, oppression, distress and threats (economic, physical, and mental) than people who are white, in perfect alignment with the so-called logic of the whiteness standard.
Whiteness is characterized (and accepted by almost all white people and some BIPOC people) as “normal” and thus like almost all standards, becomes invisible, at least to white people, almost all of the time. This is reinforced because the technology of Racism/white supremacy also requires (pressures, threatens, bullies, or otherwise incentivizes) people of color to pretend or act as if white supremacy doesn’t exist, at least or especially when interacting with white people.
So, whiteness is obscure and hidden for (and by) white folks by design. It’s confusing to try to talk about and understand a phenomenon that originates with us, but to which we largely are oblivious. A topic that everybody we might naturally interact with, agrees not to acknowledge, and which all white people experience as tremendously dangerous when it slips into view.
These automatic mechanisms, enable the standard of whiteness to sometimes hide plain sight and to hide behind the corresponding language and expression of anti-blackness. The two phenomena are two sides of the same coin.
Whiteness, being “normal,” doesn’t need to be commented on or talked about, (according to the standard of whiteness - which is almost never named as whiteness, but is instead framed as “politeness” or “being nice” by white society.)
When folks try to bring up the topic or shine a light on the topic of whiteness, the “coin” will quickly and almost inevitably turn to the topic of Blackness or Black people. Usually to either talk about what’s wrong with Black people (“… but what about Black-on-Black crime?”) or to talk about how terrible it is to be Black (“… Oh, it’s so terrible. I feel so bad. I can’t imagine what it’s like! I wish I could help.”) all of which lead us right back down the rabbit hole of white supremacy because these thoughts (which we all have) are grounded in an implicit assumption that there is something wrong with Black people.
There’s a name for that implicit assumption: white supremacy. It’s designed to stay invisible in the background, hidden behind the “problems of blackness”, which are treated by white people, non-Black people, and sure, probably some black folks as if any those problems exist independently from the mostly invisible standard of whiteness.
The effective invisibility of whiteness as a standard makes it perniciously difficult to address, talk about, change, or dismantle. People attempting to address the standard of whiteness with white people in any meaningful way are often met with disbelief, skepticism, anger or simply confusion.
These days, trying to talk to people about whiteness, can feel like you’re trying to talk someone who has been conned into thinking Covid 19 is a hoax. For them, the conversation isn’t really about whether they’re going to wear a mask because of an invisible virus (or forgo scapegoating somebody, in the case of the invisible standard), the conversation is really about whether a whether the person’s worldview is a fraud and an illusion.
Like the virus, the standard of whiteness is largely invisible, and the people who spread it don’t experience the impacts of their communication.
Whiteness hides in plain sight and recedes into our blindspots. Without effort, we can’t see it and we can’t touch it. Attempts to measure or document it, are rejected as invalid, denied, obfuscated and gaslighted. This is further complicated because in our current (hopefully death throes) stage version of whiteness the standard has been made aggressively unclear, intentionally unmoored from truth, science, and objectivity in order to manufacture consensus through the intentional propagation of crowdsourced propaganda and fiction.
Living inside the standard of whiteness, people in general, and white people in particular, see the world through white supremacy glasses, manufactured out of nonsense. We’ve worn them so long, we think that’s the way the world is. Whiteness is the filter we live our lives through, and for the most part (even if we know better, or should know better) we live our day-to-day lives as if it doesn’t exist.
So, how do we know what’s real?
White folks, we need to anchor ourselves, and each other, in objective reality.
The outcomes and privileges of whiteness are clearly visible and measurable. White people die at half the rate of Black people at every age. White people are disproportionately under-incarcerated as compared to Black people everywhere in America. The median white family has accumulated seven times the wealth of the median Black family, (without producing seven times the economic value for society, capital, or America).
The promulgation of smartphone video has made the tip of the iceberg visible of how white supremacist terrorists are coddled, encouraged and colluded with by police, while Black and Indigenous people minding their own business are mistreated every day, up to and including murder. This is the reality of America, and it always has been. It just used to be easier for us to hide it from ourselves.
I’m inviting you to consider that the entire phenomenon of racism and white supremacy in America aligns itself perfectly with the standard of whiteness; the hypothesis, that in all its different forms, the standard of whiteness is the heartbeat and the organizing principle used to orchestrate the weaponization of white people in America not only against People of Color, but against Democracy itself.
What do we do about it?
If you (like me) can’t easily see how whiteness shapes the way the world appears to you and how the world is set up to perpetuate systems of whiteness, then you (like me) may need to do some work to keep it in view.
Notice, intentionally, how whiteness and white supremacy shape the world around you, our culture, and our internal conversations and thoughts. Write it down as you see it. Jot down your observations and the questions it raises for you.
Here are questions that helped me.
What things in life are set up, seemingly naturally, seemingly accidentally, but end up working better for white people?
What ideas have we accepted or absorbed which are rooted in the presumption of white supremacy?
Can we observe ourselves speaking as if whiteness is normal and Blackness (or anything non-white) is not? It’s easy to see it in other people. Can we catch ourselves, as we do it?
Trust me, I’m not claiming to have licked this problem. I’ve noticed myself normalizing whiteness, dozens if not hundreds of times, while writing this post. I edit them out, not because I want to hide them, but because I’m trying to train my mind to fight against the machine. (And I doubt I caught them all.)
Try and notice when you, or other people, pivot the conversation away from the problems of whiteness, to talk about the problems of Blackness or Black people.
We see this a lot regarding the white supremacist mob that stormed the Capitol two years ago. Social media was full of white people changing the topic from the violent, murderous, insurrection, to property damage during peaceful #blacklivesmatter protests. It’s a mechanical, almost automatic response from people who you would think would know better.
Take a few minutes to think about where you, yourself fit into the ecosystem of racism and white supremacy? What are you doing to perpetuate the system? What are you doing to dismantle the system? Where are you complicit? Where are you not? How is that working for you? Are you doing or saying racist things in your life, or repeating racist ideas or supporting racist policies? What do you get out of it? Can you stop? Why or why not?
You may find that its useful to apply these questions to other oppressions such as misogyny, homophobia, ablism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, classism, and transphobia. What standards drive those technologies, and how do they intersect with racism/whiteness?
I can speak from my personal experience, trying to be antiracist without intersectional work is a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I’ve found it tremendously helpful to enlist the help of other antiracist white people to confront me with these and other questions, and to point out to each other when we’re falling into the traps of whiteness. Having even one explicitly anti-racist relationship with another person, while in this inquiry, can lead to incredible breakthroughs in my experience. Having a group of them you trust, and creating a space where white people hold each other to account for our antiracist commitments is truly life changing.
To play our part in sunsetting racism, we need to free ourselves as best we can, from the already installed, always running standard of whiteness living between our ears. Then we need to stop it from spreading person-to-person, in our families, communities, media, politics, storytelling and mythology.
It starts with one conversation with another white person where we acknowledge the truth: the system of racism/white supremacy has gotten into our minds and shapes our thoughts. That we have it, and it has us. We inhabit it, and it inhabits us.
Can we help each other do the basic work to overcome our programming? Because if we can’t, we’re never going to be able to join our voices to a new standard like #blacklivesmatter without ruining it with our carefully concealed white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative baggage.
We’re responsible for our part in this sick, twisted, unjust and genocidal machine, but we are not alone.
Here’s the question I’m going to think about between now and my next post.
How can we, as white folks, get ourselves out of the way so that BIPOC people can create a new, global, antiracist, ecosystem to swamp, replace, and make irrelevant the standard of white supremacy? What are we willing to give up to make that happen?
If you have any thoughts about that I’d love to hear them in the comments. Thanks for being in this inquiry with me.
For those of you who have been following along for awhile, you’ll know that I archived a lot of the content on the site when it was brought to my attention (rightly) that concept of Race and Racism as Technology had been developed decades before I started writing about it and that I hadn’t properly acknowledged the Black and Brown women who had originated the idea. This is one of the posts that was archived, and it like the rest of the blog it owes a debt of gratitude to the thinkers I acknowledge in the acknowledgements.
I’m pleased to announce, that with the republishing of this piece we have now re-published all of the original content that was archived, and the plan to make amends is now complete. Thanks to everybody for your support and patience through this process.
Warm regards,
Jamey