Using Integration as a shield
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I think that the term "Integration" allows white people to reassure themselves. As black people gain rights, it frightens a large part of the white population, who see people appearing around them who previously escaped their gaze. As Baldwin says: "Imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame". That's the state of mind in which members of the white community find themselves. Everything has always revolved around them.
They've put themselves on such a pedestal that when black people ask for the bare minimum, it turns their world upside down. They've never truly considered this possibility because, in their eyes, black people are far too different, almost inhuman.
With the growth of the civil rights movement and the fact that racialized people began to make their voices heard, it was no longer possible to ignore this reality. So, I think the term "Integration" serves to reassure white people so that they don't feel that their identity is under threat. By integrating and assimilating black people to white standards, white identity can continue.
However, Baldwin's definition differs. He sees integration not as a means of conforming populations, but rather as an opportunity for white people to realize that they are not special and that the reality in which they live can no longer be sustained. Things must change. Baldwin also points out that "we cannot be free until they are free", calling for white people to recognize that their freedom is tied to the liberation of others.
"One might say that the n-word is that which whites create as the spectre/phantom of their own fear" (Yancy, p.5). This idea resonates with Said's analysis in Orientalism, where he shows how the West constructs the 'Orient' as a projection of its fears and desires, to preserve its own identity. In the same way, racism becomes a means of displacing insecurities onto another identity, thus enabling self-reflection. Racism is a systemic projection of one's insecurities onto a vast group of people, allowing white people to distance themselves from their fears by embodying them in Black bodies.
This projection is not merely a belief as it is lived and performed, as Yancy illustrates through his example of a child pointing to a black person in the street and calling him the n-word. Whiteness is also a performance - a way of living embedded in everyday life. Because racism is so deeply ingrained, whiteness becomes the norm, invisible to those who benefit from it. As George Lipsitz states, "Whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but is very hard to see." This invisibility perpetuates the systemic power of whiteness because it functions without being challenged or fully acknowledged.