The Other, Whiteness, and Innocence
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Baldwin, Yancy, and Said all speak to the idea of “othering” that is so integral to the white identity. According to Baldwin, this is why it is so difficult for white people to escape this nature in which they are trapped; because without the racism that their history is built on, there would essentially be no history to exist for them. He explains that they are trapped because “people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.” This loss of their identity is directly based on the fear of the Black identity. Baldwin explains it is hard to escape because to escape is to take oneself out of the safety blanket of whiteness. The safety blanket of “ignorance is bliss.” Escaping means confronting the fact that their entire basis on identity was built on putting people of color below. Yancy also speaks to this when referencing bell hooks who explains that “many [whites] are shocked that black people think critically about whiteness because racist thinking perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful.” I thought it was very interesting that this “other” is also mentioned here as Said does in Orientalism. The “Other” is the subhuman people of color just as the Orient is the subhuman area of the world, while the white and Occident nature is built on and stems from this power. Ahmed discusses how whiteness is framed in opposition to blackness and to me this connected back to the Orient as well. Whiteness must be looked at through “the effects of that privilege on the bodies of those who are recognized as black.” These observations lead to another question about “white innocence” and complacency. Are the countrymen that Baldwin writes of or the white child that Yancy writes of innocent of racial prejudice? Baldwin answers “it is innocence which constitutes the crime.” This innocence connects directly with this history and nature as their entire being is intertwined with the dehumanization of the Other to make them the most human appearing. That goodness and humanness is only there as a medicine to the white people to deter them from confronting the fact that they are at the core not innocent as long as they continue to benefit from the systems that they created.