-We've been talking
about "Black"
under whatever words
we use for like 300 years.
So we had a very
deep conversation around "Black"
that gives it a heft
and meanings and history.
Now, "White" has a lot of that,
but for most of the time
in classification terms,
"White" has meant
the leavings of "Black."
So it's kind of
what's left over.
People who have embraced it
as an identity
have been awful people.
They have been white
nationalists,
Ku Klux Klansmen,
and so forth.
So it's like White Americans
had this choice
of being either
the leavings of Blackness,
which they did not embrace,
or Klansmen,
which most of them
also did not embrace.
And I think the mass of White
people in the United States,
less now than before 2020,
thought of themselves
as individuals --
unraced individuals.
The short answer is
thanks to the Nazis.
The Nazis racialized Jews
and made the Holocaust.
Nazism was well known
in the United States,
and it was also well known
that a lot of Americans
like Henry Ford
and also many scholars believed
that Jews were a race,
a separate race.
And they didn't mean it
in a flattering way.
At that time, it was usually
thought that, say,
Irish people belonged
to the Celtic race,
Eastern European Hebrews,
these were all White races.
But this was a moment
in the very early '40s
as the United States
was getting into the war
that we were desperately
in need of national unity.
And the two enemies
were racial states.
-German conquest of Europe
and Africa,
Japanese conquest of the Orient.
-So one way of pulling
all Americans
into the fight
against totalitarianism
was to get rid of as many
racial categories as possible.
So the ideal was unity.
And the Boasian anthropologists
wrote all over the place
in newspapers and books
and so forth that
there are only three races --
the Caucasian, the Mongoloid,
and the Negroid.
Its motives are cultural,
but largely political.
Interestingly enough,
through somebody like Malcolm X
who talked about the White Man.
So he didn't talk about Polish
Americans or Jewish Americans.
-The charge of violence
against us
actually stems from the guilt
complex that exists
in the conscious
and subconscious minds
of most White people
in this country.
They know that they've
been violent
in their brutality
against Negroes.
-That carried a lot of heft,
and so there's this moment
in the '70s
where we have White Americans
standing up and saying,
"No, I'm not White.
I'm Polish.
I'm not White.
I'm Greek.
I'm not White.
I'm Italian.
Kiss me, I'm Irish."
And so forth.
And that's a response
to Malcolm X
and to the castigation of White
people as just one big mass.
Trump forced masses of Americans
to figure out where they belong.
He ran "Make America
Great Again,"
and everybody heard "White."
He didn't put thew word in,
but he put the word in.
And then Charlottesville in 2017
and his response there.
He has been pushing people
who might not even want to think
about it
or talk about it to figure out
where they are in this
national geography of race.
Part of the ideology of race
is that race is,
and in our lives, we act it out
on a day-to-day basis.
And what I've said over and over
and over again
is that we make race every day
and we can remake it
and even unmake it
by what we do.
We make and unmake behavior
not in words or capital letters,
but in behavior.
It sets up more of a symmetry
with Black and says,
"White is also a historical
cultural concept like Black."
It doesn't let White people
off the hook.
It reminds White people
that they, too,
have a racial identity.
