Is there a reason why White people ought to be sensitive to Race? Yes, but probably not for the reasons some would think. For the most part I don’t believe White people in general feel any way about Race whatsoever. That is to say in the everyday living of their lives. Why would they? They’re not faced with everyday Racial discrimination; they don’t have to concern themselves wondering whether or not they’re going to be judged for being White when applying for a job, purchasing something on the high street, buying a new home, walking, driving, or loitering in the presence of police etc. Piquing a latent hatred in people by the colour of their skin is not something they need to bother themselves about considering they’re not bound by an instinctual alertness (a self-consciousness) that’s evolved from the historical dangers of being a particular Race in Racist society. They are no strangers to prejudice of course, so this isn’t to say that White people don’t understand how it feels to be discriminated against. You’ve only got to enquire into the histories of the Irish, of (White) women, of (White) homosexuals, the (White) poor, and of course (White) Jews to know that, but where Race is concerned the state of being White has never been subjected to anything the like of these discriminations.

Race isn’t something that is considered by White people unless it is brought before them by circumstances exterior to the White experience. This is of course to the exclusion of those minorities who explicitly express their Racial prejudice through bigotry due to the presence of an inferiority complex. The problem of Racism comes to their attention in general only when other Races respond to it (or when expressed explicitly by the bigoted), White people therefore finding their Whiteself targeted only in the context of reactions against the White biases of society, or White Supremacy. That’s because Whiteness can only ever be framed in this context. There is no other reason as to why the idea of Whiteness came about, or why it is sustained, than to be contrasted with an antipodal Blackness or any of the gradients in between. In other words, we are White only as opposed to being Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red; the foremost colour designations that represent the Racial classifications Racism is founded upon. This may sound innocuous from a superficial point of view, after all they’re just colours, but Racist society attributes certain value concepts to these individual colours which ultimately fuel our prejudicial tendencies, and therefore give substance to Racism. But where does Whiteness fit in Racist context? Well, history dictates to us that Whiteness is the dictator. It is a dictatorship that will have us believing that Whiteness is our only witness to the human past; itself the most advanced and most enterprising in the history of the Races. Whiteness, however, is for all intents and purposes invisible to itself. It is White because it is not Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red, but these ‘others’ have to be apparent in order for Whiteness to recognise itself. When the ‘others’ are absent it no longer has a frame of reference and so disappears into anonymity. It no longer recognises itself and takes itself to be the standard of normality. This is the default status of Whiteness in the context of Racism. It is simply ordinary, and it doesn’t require to be explicitly asserted (unless accompanied by an inferiority complex) so long as it maintains itself the accepted norm.

Now this all sounds a little contradictory. How can one who is ordinary at the same time claim itself the exceptional and most extraordinary of the Races? Well, that depends on the proximity of other Races to Whiteness in any given circumstance, and the vantage point of Whiteness in relation to that proximity.

Without any self-reflection whatsoever human beings can achieve a sense of who they are simply by observing who they are not. The state of being ‘I Am’ can be established by saying no more than ‘You Are’, thereby drawing a line between a self and another self without having to consciously acknowledge the own-self. White history therefore doesn’t have to explicitly acknowledge its Racial-self so long as it depicts Racial-others opposite to what is the established norm of implicit Whiteness. By excluding others from the norm it automatically and unconsciously places itself into a state of ordinariness; an ordinariness established upon ideas of civilisation and a specific criteria that relies on the exclusion of others. A criteria rooted in concepts of good versus evil which is derived from the evolutionary human experience of the day versus the night, ultimately translated as light versus dark.

Ordinariness and normalcy are states of an achieved self-unconsciousness. Not being, or rather not having to be aware of oneself by choice is freedom of mind. Being restricted without choice, therefore, by having to acknowledge self (as opposed to acknowledging others) in a solitary Racial identity (Whiteself) within a rigid context is alien to White people. They’re not used to the focus being them. We are used to viewing the Racial world through the lens of an invisible Whiteness which focuses on other Racial-selves in order to define itself, and not vice-versa. This is enough to establish a sense of self without actually acknowledging a Racial self, but these inversions of self-acknowledgement are somewhat disorientating when White people find themselves the focus of Racial attention. It is a reversal that brings on a sense of Racial vertigo where the idea of being White is denied its ordinary stability and sense of normality. All of a sudden Whiteness finds itself excluded and deemed strange, an oddity unto itself. That is why White people in general shun Racial discourse when the focus is Whiteness in discussing Racism. Racism is not ordinarily about them after all, it is about ‘others’. It is about other people feeling offended.

What this means is that White people are highly sensitive to their Racial identity being the focus of any Racial critique, especially in regards to Racism (the typical response to targeted Whiteness is to deny the mark and defer to some other prejudice, reducing a concentrated focus on Whiteself). To simply address White people as White people is enough to expose that self-conscious nerve, because we are not used to viewing ourselves from without. We don’t open a White history book at school, for instance, we just open a history book. Ordinarily Racism itself will be discussed in terms of Black victimhood etc., without explicitly acknowledging the culpability of Whiteness (the definition of ‘racism’ therefore used as a universal term for prejudice is very popular as it affords White people cover from such accusing gazes). Of course individual Whites or groups of White people will be made the exception, but they are not the ‘normal’ ones. They will find themselves completely extracted from the normal (unconscious White Racial) experience and made out to be an anomaly, as if their ‘normal’ White upbringing (via White identity instruction) had no bearing whatsoever on their behaviour and state of mind. This of course distracts any potential constructive dialogue between the White and other Races (People of Colour amongst themselves obviously don’t have this problem of distraction when bringing attention to White cultural bias and its impact upon them; establishing thesis and consensus in the absence of Whiteness is easy), where we find White people naturally going on the defence. The question therefore is how do we desensitise White people to the probing of Whiteness and prevent against such Racial protectionism? After all, what is at stake? What are we protecting? We are not in danger, we are not Racially oppressed, suppressed, or denied by Race the Privileges of Opportunity, Immunity, Security and Empowerment (POISE). Black protectionism for instance is highly understandable when considering the social context of White Supremacist oppression in which they’re subjected and often brutalised while attempting to acquire Racial POISE, but this is a context where White protectionism has no moral standing and is nothing more than the conservatism of Racial conceit in an attempt to maintain the supremacist status quo. At the same time, however, White people need to learn how to empathise with and be sensitive to the Racial experiences of those who have to endure the Racial biases of a predominantly White society. This is the psychological aspect of what is called Working Against Racism, and it is a process of sensitisation and desensitisation; a giving without a taking in fact, and White people should be expected to take the initiative when dealing with Racism from a personal point of view by acknowledging Whiteself objectively and selflessly to these ends. This of course sounds unfair, but this is Racism we’re dealing with here. Fairness has no place in its design.