Three is two after one. And so on. Every child knows that one is the beginning from which all other numbers arise. In the beginning there was Whiteness. This is the glittering starting point. This is The Default. This is what we measure everything else against. Though laughable it sounds, white Americans, too, have suffered from this crime. As our country began and brown races were systematically denied the right to be human and so internalized the role of the savage, white consciousness bullied its way into objectivity.
The white mind became the unbiased mind that objectively observed all the rest. This is called The Default: The belief that the white experience is a neutral and objective experience and white consciousness is the standard consciousness unless otherwise specified. White culture, and American culture as a whole, suffers from the tragedy of whiteness as the default setting. Being The Default keeps white Americans from being liberated because it denies them a specific identity by absorbing them into neutral blankness.
This creates a lonely detachment from the rest of the world. Being The Default is the largest privilege granted to white Americans, yet it is so deeply entrenched it is the most invisible we cannot see the edges of the atmosphere, but it exists. Because The Default has so successfully dominated our subconscious, because our egos have been shaped by it from the moment of birth, we perpetuate it in micro ways while fighting inequality with more obvious actions.
The silent poison continues to poison. Whiteness as The Default keeps brown people in subjugation by convincing them that every part of their being, physical, spiritual and emotional, exists within a white narrative. When you are made to exist within something you are forced to be smaller than that which contains you. This is precisely the basis of racist thought. Brown existence, brown consciousness is smaller. Here is an example of how The Default works against people of color.
Which are the things that I like to read about. Would you say your characters live in a post-racial world? LIN: No. Or those other things mentioned earlier. To Lin, we brown people are lesser beings -- not inherently so, of course -- but because the burden of our struggle has exhausted its brave and noble warriors so fully, it prevents them from considering existential issues and experiencing the real, larger life that white people are living.
Lin wants to reach defaultness for himself while making sure we continue to think of other brown people as outside of objective consciousness and continue to see whites as the default authors of philosophical thought.
He is afraid of the power of The Default and so reinforces it lest it undermine the power of his own work. And his theory proves the existence of The Default. Even brown people have made their interior internal voice white in so many ways.
Our yearning for legitimacy is so deep, we erase ourselves from the inside. We assume that if race is not specified and a specific identity is not discussed, then the identity is white.
In some places, the white default is blindingly obvious, like newspapers. Even in California, where white people are not a majority of the population, the L. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle both continue to specify race almost exclusively when an individual is non-white. No race specified? Must be a regular person! A white person. This is the same thinking that white conservatives use when they feel like a "minority"group is just looking out for its own interests.
Another example: My black father, who has a Ph. To correct this tragic flaw in thinking, we must begin to see the white experience as specific. In order to have sympathy for this white spiritual crisis, we must first understand The Default and allow ourselves to be kind, because even Voldemort is just Tom Riddle. Having robbed a restaurant and its patrons in order to fund their vacation, the girls party hard before being arrested for cocaine possession.
White rapper Alien James Franco bails them out, and the girls loyally join his beef with drug rival and childhood best friend Archie Gucci Mane , who happens to be black. Brit and Candy, sitting through a PowerPoint presentation on Reconstruction and civil rights, feel they have no positive identity. I ask you not to laugh. Though history has in many ways cherished white women over all others, and despite the enormous privilege of being college educated, there is genuine and true pain here.
White liberal identity is all about NOT being something not racist, not homophobic, not sexist , and so white liberals inevitably become desperate to be something. The precariousness of Black life — and the exclusion of Black stories from American history — remains an unresolved issue today. Working alone and with white allies, Black activists and scholars continue using cartography to tell a fuller story about the United States , to challenge racial segregation and to combat violence.
For example, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based legal defense group run by Bryan Stevenson, has produced a modern map of historical lynching. It tracks police use of force using a time-series animated map. Deaths and injuries flash across the screen and accumulate on the map of the United States, visually communicating the national scale and urgency of this problem.
Counter-mapping operates on the theory that communities and governments cannot fix problems that they do not understand. When Black counter-mapping exposes the how-and-where of racism, in accessible visual form, that information gains new power to spur social change. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in.
Alderman , University of Tennessee , Joshua F. Inwood , Penn State. Authors Derek H. Alderman Derek H. Alderman is a Friend of The Conversation. If the issue is that flawed, it should be easy enough to pick it apart on the merits, right? This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 12, , am EST. Nov 11, , pm EST. Nov 11, , am EST. Edit Story.
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