Dysphemic Shibboleths

This Week’s Term: White People

by Micah E. Weiss

At first glance, proposing the discarding of the category of white people may appear to be shooting fish in a barrel.  There are several tacks I might take to convince people to stop using this term.  Let’s get the easy argument out of the way.  Referring to ~230 million people in our country as if they have essential traits all in common with each other is just bigotry.  It’s plain, simple, hateful, racist bigotry.  The fact that we have let casual bigotry permeate our discourse is already a sign of gross collective irresponsibility.  I was a part of it.  Starting about 20 years ago, I would refer to “white people” and “white people problems” as if they were distinct and powerful enough of a category to deride.  It was fun and easy, and a way to distance myself from the clear outward appearance of my being a person with fair skin, light brown hair, and hazel eyes.  

About that time, once, when I was on the phone with my maternal grandmother, we were discussing how to prepare lamb for Easter, and I asked her: “Why do white people put mint on lamb?  That’s insane.”  The comment took her by surprise, but it made her laugh and she replied she just didn’t know why those “white people” did that.  Let’s put a pin in that story for a moment.

The plain, unadulterated bigotry of the term should be enough to call it quits except in what I call the “police report” usage, e.g. “He was a white male, perhaps in his thirties, driving a tank through that Walmart.”  Various paradigms that have come to be known as Critical Race Theory, all spawns of Foucault’s simple-minded power-obsessed Manichean philosophy world-view, may posit that  because white people are empowered in this country, that makes “them” fair game for ridicule.  I had to make a choice about including links in this essay proving the ill-use of the term white people, or whiteness, in the public sphere, but I don't think I need to.  Such artifacts are plentiful.  From articles, to videos, to student protests, signs at marches, left-wing anything, MSNBC, CNN, Jon Stewart (who, in his dotage, has lost his soul pandering to his millennial writing staff); the list could go on, and I might spend hours finding and hyperlinking all of these examples.  So I decided against doing all that, as it really isn’t my argument anyway.  Even if one holds to the view that it’s okay to use the term as a pejorative, I don’t feel I need to prove to you that such usage is already permeating the zeitgeist.  You are, after all, the smartest readership on the internets, and you no doubt know that white people is not just a pejorative, but that it is now the pejorative.  It is the new acceptable bigotry in polite society.  

Don’t panic, I am not making a “reverse racism” argument here, though I could, and I might, and man, am I tempted.  But I don’t see white people facing bigotry in all walks of life, as black Americans have for centuries.  I am not making an equivalency, I’m trying to prevent one.  So, breathe.

However, as I pointed out some weeks ago, there are ~24 million impoverished white people in this country, struggling mostly in a rural America with a decreasing number of jobs and opportunities in almost an inverse relationship to the increasing number of fentanyl deaths.  To use the term white people as a pejorative is to ignore and deny the suffering of one of the most ignored demographics in our society.  Just a small example, if we still want to ascribe to the “education is opportunity” mindset, a young white man from rural poverty who enters a university to better himself and his future prospects will find it very confusing to learn how much white privilege he benefits from.  Considering the preponderance of left-wing DEI ideological presence on campuses, one could frame a question thus: “Is it better to be poor and black or poor and white, when entering a university to get on the upward mobility ladder?” and not have an easy time answering.  This is progress?  

But, I am not approaching the term white people that way either, interesting though that may be.  No.  For me, this is rather personal.  I am the product of a “mixed marriage,” of sorts.  My father is a Brooklyn Jew, and my mother is a first generation Greek/Cypriot American.  The photo above is of my maternal grandparents—you should take a moment to admire how glamorous and beautiful they are!  You may also notice that my grandmother is bleached out, her features nearly invisible, which is a shame because she had lovely features.  The reason you can’t see her features is that the photographer overexposed the image because my grandfather–though as handsome as the day is long–was very dark skinned.  He immigrated from Cyprus, an island nation in the Mediterranean somewhere between Turkey, Israel, and Egypt, that, at the time, was part of the British Empire.  

In case you were wondering, no, I am not bringing this photographic chicanery up to claim victimhood.  This isn’t a whiney, whinging, pity piece about the micro-aggressions he suffered from because he was dark skinned.  My Papou—Greek for grandfather—never complained about anything like that, though I’m sure he experienced it. He was a patriot who loved this country.  He started from almost nothing, worked hard, raised a family, and was always appreciative of the opportunities his adopted nation afforded him.

So, back to my conversation with my maternal grandmother where we both had a chuckle at the expense of white people for being fool enough to add mint to lamb (still a point of ridicule as far as Greeks are concerned).  Perhaps I can contextualize this point by saying that I never referred to my maternal grandmother by anything but the Greek word for grandmother: Yiayia.  And that the dish in question, lamb, wasn’t to be served on Easter, but on Pascha, what Greeks called Easter for a thousand years before English crawled out from under a Germanic rock.  Like many “white people,” I have an ethnic experience that is related to my family’s cultural heritage.  I may look “white,” so to speak, but I’m not sure I’m what the term is supposed to mean.  I’m certain my Papou isn’t what it’s supposed to mean, though he’d have been the first to say he was white.  But, what was it about my heritage that allowed my Yiayia and I to share that moment?  What was it exactly that we were laughing at and what did we mean by “white people”? 

We find ourselves in one of these definitional pickles, when there is so much social agreement that something exists, it ends up moving into fact simply by prevalence. This is a textbook social construct like all racial categories (though not at all like the only two sex categories).  Our culture really wants there to be a white people category even though no one outside of white nationalist circles wants to be a part of it.  For those of us over forty, the term WASP comes to mind.  The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, of which there appear to be ~120 million Americans, started coming here with the Jamestown debacle of 1609.  That’s over four centuries of WASPs settling in and defining “whiteness” and “white people,” right?   So, all we have to do is examine that massive number of people from all fifty states, and determine their shared traits, and we’ll have a working definition.  That way we don’t have to worry about the other white people like the ~32 million Irish Americans, the ~18 million Italian Americans, the ~13 million French Americans, and don’t even bring up the approximately half of the ~62 million Hispanic Americans who identify as white, or the 11% that don’t identify as Hispanic at all.  Just a nice tidy ~120 million WASPs we can all kick around at our leisure.  

I might have bought into that plan at one time, but then I married a WASP and spent over a decade teaching American history.  My wife is dyed in the wool Yankee, Mayflower stock, deep roots in Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont going back to 1620.  Someone distantly related to her once wrote the word “Yankee” for ethnicity on a census form.  Her family, her history, her ancestors were quite different from the Jamestown WASPs.  Or WASPs in Oklahoma, or the deep south, or central California, or Portland, Oregon.  My wife’s uncle, an Historian, still identifies as a Yankee, and feels it as a distinct category from his neighbors in Ohio.  Ohio!  (I was once served baked ziti by a WASP man from Ohio who used sour cream and cheddar cheese where Ricotta and Mozzarella should have been.  That place is like another planet.)  Despite this “white as the driven snow” background of my wife’s, she’s part Irish-American anyway.   And, in one of my favorite moments of just-deserts in recent times, it turns out that the black-power communist Angela Davis is related to the same Mayflower passenger as my wife!  William Brewster.  Lovely!  My children are Angela Davis’ long lost cousins: Ms. Davis, you are officially invited to Thanksgiving at our house.   

I can relate, Angela.  It’s weird growing up halvsies, I gotta say.  Because my father was Jewish, but my mother wasn’t, technically I’m not Jewish.  My mother raising us without Greek spoken in the home out of deference to my father means I’m not all that Greek.  Greeks outside my family have a range of responses to my half-Greekness, some positive, most not.  In many ways, in modern American terms, I am half not much, and half nothing at all.  I live in rural New Hampshire, have a closet of flannel shirts, and drive a truck.  So what am I?  

My children are in even more of an identity conundrum: quarter this, an eighth that, they are generally fair, light eyed, and to be real, they are awfully white looking.  My brother’s children are similarly diverse, their mother is half Filipino and half Dutch, so what does that make my blond haired, blue eyed nephew?  Asian American?  

All of these racial and ethnic categories are temporary in this country, this America, and most are cultural categories, social constructs, as it were; few denote something scientific, quantifiable, or real enough to last past a single generational “mixed” marriage.  Of the twelve grandchildren those paragons of Greek beauty in that photo helped produce, only two are full Greek.  Only a few of those grandchildren speak much Greek.  We’re white, I suppose, New Yorkers, maybe, though no one is left in New York.  We are Americans surely, and we all look pretty white.  

My children are going out into a world where they will be increasingly judged by the color of their skin and essentialized as privileged white people, a pejorative fast becoming a racial slur, despite the diversity they carry in their genes, their ancestry, and their life experience.  It has been pointed out to me by my colleague that some will insist that my children will have the “invisible backpack” of white privilege because they are white looking, and that may be true (it isn’t, but it may be, see this column in two weeks for my take on “privilege” used in that context).  However, using that (unquantifiable, unprovable, despicable, disgusting, zero-sum) assertion as a pretext to smear 230 million so-called “white people” with the new pejorative is unacceptable.  

It hasn’t reached full-on racism yet, and we can stop it from becoming a problem, before the bigotry becomes so much a part of our culture that we’ll need another hundred years to walk it back.  But now is the time.  

White people are not a thing.