Why Whiteness Is Not About Skin Color
It's about capitalism.
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The idea that, on the left, terms like “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” and “racism” aren’t actually about skin color might sound absurd to most people at first. But once you get it, everything about their agenda suddenly starts making sense.
In this article, I’m going to show you that when the left talks about “whiteness,” they’re really talking about capitalism, which they define as private property ownership.
Remember, the left speaks a different language than you do. It may sound like English, but it’s really a parallel language I call Socialist.
We’ll go through this step by step, using real-world evidence. Keep an open mind—you’re learning their definitions, even if they don’t match yours. And just because you understand their perspective doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. We must understand our enemy in order to defeat them.
In 1993, a woman named Cheryl Harris wrote a paper for the Harvard Law Review called Whiteness as Property. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to read the whole thing (though the link’s there if you’re feeling adventurous). Essentially, she argued that whiteness doesn’t just refer to race in the biological sense but also to the way society allocates resources, rights, and social capital. Thus, whiteness becomes intertwined with systems of power, like capitalism, which control who has access to wealth and opportunity.
We’re going to dive into some clips from a keynote Cheryl Harris gave at UCLA Law School in 2014, where she makes it crystal clear that these terms have absolutely nothing to do with skin color.
These clips from an episode of The Cult where we watched the full lecture from the Critical Race Studies Symposium. Watch the full stream here.
In this clip, she explicitly explains that whiteness is not a skin color:
“Whiteness is not a skin color, or even a racial type. It’s a social relations constructed on exclusion, structural privilege and its valorizaton.”
In this clip, she discusses post-racialism, which is a time period that started after Barack Obama was elected President. This marked the move into a post-racial world because a black man had achieved the highest office in the land.
She explicitly says that whiteness is available to any racial group, even if they have black skin.
“Post-racialism commitment to protect some value in whiteness, however relative, what Derek Bell called the promise not to be the face at the bottom of the well, it coexists with expanding whiteness to encompass nonwhites.
Postracial Whiteness is conditionally available to persons of any racial group, even some blacks.”
In this clip, she explicitly explains that whiteness is defined as private property.
That means it’s a reference to capitalism, because the definition of capitalism is private property.
“Post racialism privileges self designation. You are what you say you are, and post racialism conceptualized racial identity as private property on which the state cannot infringe.”
And to round it out, you hear Harris explicitly say that you cannot solve racism without solving capitalism:
“Rather than mobilizing a sense of linked fate that dismantling racial hierarchy is joined with addressing the problem of capitalism. These projects are placed in opposition, and the challenge to white entitlement or white privilege is then recast as an elitist, anti-populist project.”
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Here’s the TLDR on why “Whiteness” Means Capitalism:
Capitalism is defined as private property ownership.
Capitalism created slavery in the United States, where people were owned as private property. The owners (bourgeoisie) created the label “white” to separate themselves from the “black” property (proletariat) who owned nothing.
Thus, capitalism created a racial hierarchy between white and black. When the left talks about “whiteness,” they’re referencing that hierarchy.
Another term for this hierarchy is “systemic racism,” which means “the system that upholds racism.” And the system they’re talking about is capitalism.
They believe the only way to end racism is to dismantle the system that created it—capitalism.
Download this as a PDF if you find it helpful:
When you start looking for the words “racism” and “capitalism” used together, it’s not hard to spot. Here are just a few examples.
Check out this poster I picked up from a socialist magazine while I was undercover at the Socialism 2023 conference:
And here’s a book published by a socialist book publisher that says the quiet part explicitly in the title:
This can be difficult to wrap your head around at first, and it’s ok if it’s still unclear. If you have questions, come to my live streams and ask me directly:
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Great article, have read it 2x however Substack is not tracking that I have read more than 15% 🥸
I need to save this article so I can better explain to friends and family what whiteness really means.