In 1962, James Baldwin wrote “A Letter to My Nephew.” The letter communicates Baldwin’s anger, his frustration, his commitment to radical change, and his indefatigable love for his nephew. His critique of white people, who he refers to as his “countrymen,” is piercing and demanding. Indeed, at one point he writes, “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.”

I have read this passage many times to my students and to white audiences. I can only imagine what it is like to be white and to desire racial equity and justice without understanding Baldwin’s point about the loss of one’s white identity, which implies upending a set of white racial coordinates that sustain them materially, psychologically and ontologically. To lose one’s identity may be perceived as threatening, especially if one perceives that there is nothing about white identity that needs to be lost.

To think through some of these ideas, I decided to engage in dialogue with white anti-racist educator Tim Wise, who is the author of nine books, including Dispatches from the Race War, Under the Affluence, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority, Colorblind, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Speaking Treason Fluently and more. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

George Yancy: In Speaking Treason Fluently, when speaking to white people, you make an important distinction between “being in this skin and of this skin.” You write, “We are in it, to be sure, and over that we have never had control. But we are not of it. We are made of more, and better stuff, than that.” Your distinction, I think, speaks to Baldwin’s emphasis on loss. Not being of this (white) skin opens a potential space for the loss of white identity. What does the loss of white identity mean to you? What does it look like in terms of being committed and being in danger? This last point, by the way, recognizes the threats that you have personally received because of the work that you do.

Tim Wise: The loss of white identity means the loss of the glue that has held together the self-concept, material advantages and worldview of so-called white people. That’s a hard thing to let go of because it provides a kind of safety, just like fundamentalist religion can, because like fundamentalism, it rarely questions itself. Of course, that safety is the safety of the straitjacket. It only protects you to the extent it limits you and your ability to be truly free.

To work towards relinquishing it puts one in danger, sure: first, because it means risking, as Baldwin also put it, being turned away from the welcome table of white society, meaning friends, colleagues, even family. And second, because those who are committed to the overt maintenance of white dominance will view your efforts as literal warfare against them, since any diminution of white supremacy is, to them, tantamount to “white genocide.” When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism feels like oppression.

But what I’ve learned in challenging whiteness and speaking out for something more meaningful — a bigger, more concrete humanity — is that the dangers of relinquishment pale (pun intended) in comparison to the benefits. Working to make whiteness an anachronism opens us to new ways of learning and being and loving. It allows us to rediscover who our families were before they were white. What were their struggles? How did they survive before they were handed this coat of arms and armor known as whiteness? Because there’s a story there and it matters.

And finally, whatever dangers one faces by working to render whiteness meaningless are clearly outweighed by the dangers of clinging to it. We can see those dangers now — the opioid crisis, elevated suicide rates, and all these so-called deaths of despair, which are the logical fruits of the tree of whiteness: a system that makes promises it ultimately can’t keep even to those for whom the promise was invented.

So too, the rage of the Trumpists comes from a sense of betrayal. Of course, they think they’ve been betrayed by liberals or leftists and critical race theory (CRT) or feminism or whatever, rather than a capitalist order intended to immiserate the masses for the benefit of the few. But it was whiteness that betrayed them: a racial contract, in Charles Mills’s terms, whose fine print they should have read more carefully. Because the masters of the universe who crafted it never gave a damn about most of them either, and will let them suffer for their own profit, especially so long as they keep scapegoating Black and Brown people for their pain.

In........

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