Navigating Whiteness: Between White-Shaming and White Indigenous Rights

“White-shaming is a political tactic aimed at invalidating the opinions and experiences of people of European descent. Premised on a belief in collective guilt, it judges white folks not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin.”

Prior to the advent of modern identity politics, I had never really thought much about race. In fact, growing up, I was taught to ignore race: to look beyond a person’s skin color and to see the individual instead. But, as of late, I have repeatedly found myself in situations where my identity, being a white man, was held against me. Whether in my field of academia or in cultural spaces, policies to promote “diversity and inclusion”—and the fact that anti-white sentiments can now be expressed with impunity—have left me with the impression that there is something inherently wrong with being white. This has put me on the defensive and forced me to reassess my taken-for-granted “racial identity.”

Is race even real? While there is some merit to the claim that racial categories are, in part, socially constructed, there are undeniable morphological differences between people whose ancestries trace back to different world regions. It is usually rather easy to tell a black person from a white person, for instance. If this were not the case, race-based affirmative action and other such policies would be impossible to implement. Furthermore, it has been “discovered that human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity,” as the political scientist and sociologist Charles Murray writes in his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. In short, race is not an optical illusion; it is an immutable characteristic. And it is not just skin-deep.

If we treat people as individuals rather than as members of a group, race fades into the background.

None of this, however, suggests a racial hierarchy, nor does it have direct moral or political implications. Equal treatment does not require sameness. If we treat people as individuals rather than as members of a group, race fades into the background. In the words of the neuroscientist-cum-philosopher Sam Harris, “There is much more variance among individuals in any racial group than there is between groups.” Yet, the view that white people should be ashamed of their race, or should atone for past injustices committed by people with the same skin color, has become a common trope in our public discourse. A particularly cringeworthy display of that sentiment, known as “white guilt,” has recently been captured on video showing a group of white people kneeling before black people to ask forgiveness from the black community.