White Neutrality: Coloring in White Identities

Recently, video essayist F. D. Signifier released a short film on the paid streaming platform Nebula called Talking to "White" People which I highly recommend. In it, he interviews a variety of "white" mostly male mostly youtubers. Notably, he at no point actually tells us who anyone is beyond their racial identity, a cheeky parody of how often Black academics when interviewed about race are reduced to being nothing more than "A Black person."

Also notable is that all of the "white" people interviewed have some other identity other than "white" which they could take. They are Ashkenazi Jewish, Arab, Mixed-Thai, Italian, Polish, etc. and F. D. pushes each of them on their white identity, telling some of them explicitly "you are not white" which none of them are comfortable agreeing with. Regarding a man who identifies as a "European Mutt," F. D. Signifier is only willing to label the English contribution to his heritage "white" while declaring every other heritage "not white a hundred years ago."

The hesitancy to identify as something besides white comes with the fact that the alternative to white in our vernacular is "person of color" which certainly none of the interviewees are, except perhaps the olive-toned Italian, a darker shade within the bounds of what can be perceived as "white.' They all experience white privilege in most scenarios, and feel it would be unfair, stolen valor, or a lack of accountability to not own their whiteness as a major contributing factor to their life experiences.

Ask white people where they come from, and they will name a US state or city. Ask them for their ancestry, and they won't know, or will name multiple different ancestries. I am Ashkenazi-Irish, though genetically I doubt that's all of it. People intermixed in Europe too. We know that the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe definitely intermixed with Europeans more than we will acknowledge, otherwise we wouldn't be so light skinned.

Just as how most AfroAmericans cannot be traced directly to only being Yoruba, Akan, or Congolese, most EuroAmericans cannot be traced directly to only being English, German, or French. We associate the word Diaspora with people who have been scattered by circumstance, the African diaspora, the Asian diaspora, the Jewish diaspora—and so we don't usually speak of a European Diaspora. Yet when you look at the history of colonialism, not all the colonists were signing up to cross the ocean out of patriotic fervor for Mother England, many were poor, drafted by the military, or of an ethnic or religious minority. Especially in the 19th century, the European immigrants were not too dissimilar from the Chinese immigrants. It was American racism that privileged them over the Chinese, not socioeconomic class. It would be accurate to say that there is a European Diaspora, with diaspora cuisine and gestalt cultures. EuroAmericans are, arguably, a distinct cultural group, and they identify with "white."

But "white" is still not real. It's still a homogenizing social force, and not a singular culture. Perhaps European immigrants assimilate into EuroAmerican identity, but is that distinct from saying they assimilated into whiteness? Some calls for the dismantling of whiteness ask white people to instead identify with their specific national ancestries, but if you don't know your origin, or if you know it's eighty different places you know nothing about and don't identify with at all, then that's not a natural or easy thing for someone to do.