In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ was introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson. The motion called for the ok-ness of Whiteness while denouncing ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘attacks on Western civilization.’ Astonishingly, it was only narrowly defeated 31-28, with many members of the ruling conservative Liberal-National Party coalition supporting it. This short text was written in response to this vote.
In the text, I use white to mean a white-skinned person (which as many academic works have shown is a far less straight-forward description than it might first appear). On the other hand, I use White with a capital W to indicate a White who has a conscious or unconscious investment in a Whiteness that they think they possess. It is someone who mistakes, in a classically racist way, an identification with their skin colour, as they imagine it, for an identification with Western Civilisation, and, someone who derives as a result of their identification with White skin colour, as they imagine it, a national and colonial sense of supremacy, that is, someone who thinks that their skin colour, as they imagine it, entitles them to certain privileges over and above what other beings are entitled to. (For a more in depth discussion of this complicated process of identification see my book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society).~
Dear white, it’s ok,
It’s ok to be white.but it’s ok to be white and nice.
It’s not ok to be White and mean.It’s ok to be white and generous in spirit.
It’s not ok to be White, envious and stingy.It’s ok to be white and ill-informed, and try to know more.
It’s not ok to be White, ill-informed, ignorant and mediocre, and be proud of it.It’s even ok to be white and prejudiced, as long as you’re trying to work on yourself to be less prejudiced.
It’s not ok to be White and prejudiced and ignore and justify your bigotry.It’s ok to be white and demand and struggle for a better life because you deserve more as a human being.
It’s not ok to be White and demand a better life because you think you deserve more because you are White.It’s also ok to be a socially unrecognised and low-achieving white and still be proud of the many wonderful cultural and scientific successes, attainments and accomplishments that white people have achieved across history, but it’s not ok to think that just because you share the same skin colour with those high achievers that their achievements have something to do with skin colour and are yours only. Most of these great white achievers wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole, so stop acting as if you represent them.
It’s ok to be white and be the descendant of people who have plundered, exterminated, enslaved and subjugated other peoples and their lands across this planet, if you recognise it and deal with its consequences. It’s not ok to be a White who is aspiring to perpetuate what your ancestors have done in this regard.
If you don’t recognise any of this no amount of official and non-official declarations and proclamations will change the fact that you are a shitty White, a racist scum, and a scourge on all of us, white and non-white, who are struggling to make this already damaged planet as bearable to live in as possible.
On the other hand, you would be so great if you can recognise all this.
So why settle with being ok when you can be great?
Orignally published by Cordite: Poetry Review.
Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourn and the author of, amongst others, White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003).
What if you’re white and are not a ” descendant of people who have plundered, exterminated, enslaved and subjugated other peoples and their lands across this planet, if you recognize it and deal with its consequences. It’s not OK to be a White who is aspiring to perpetuate what your ancestors have done in this regard.”
My ancestors escaped Ireland to the USA from the brutal rule of their English oppressors who raped, murdered, molested and enslaved them for generations. Many of whom came to this country and gladly accepted a rifle to free African slaves and believed it to be true.
My grandparents came here with nothing and were greeted with employment signs that read ” Irish need not apply”. My ancestors were and integral of getting the women’s suffrage movement to win its long hard fight. Its no mistake that the first Irish American POTUS signed the civil rights bill or in fact that Barrack Hussein Obama was in fact half Irish.
This anti-white sentiment although in intellectual circles maybe be clear that its about systemic and institutionalized racism. The message on the streets of NYC, Boston and other major cities is “Kill Whitey” which of coarse if you run into an Irishman you’ll find out why we are”Fighting Irish”.
The only white privileged I received was the privilege of being chased on more than one occasion by Puerto Rican and Black street thugs because I was in the wrong neighborhood. Realizing that many white people have a different experience than mine I let a lot of things slide.
Not this! If you believe that me growing up having share a small room with three brothers is some how privileged you are a jackass. I owe you and society nothing and until you realize that not all white people are somehow responsible for your ancestors defeat. You can kiss my lily White Irish ass you bigoted fool.
Slanche mate!
All things you say that is not ok for Whites is not ok for anyone – not just for Whites. Stop making it a racial thing because Blacks can have bad manners too…
All the things that “whites” shouldn’t do list above are the very things that all people shouldn’t do. But sadly there is a proportion of all people that adopt a proprietorial attitude to achievements based on skin colour. To do this they imagine themselves to be solely one skin colour. an in particular the American style white-black binary – a binary founded in slavery.
Yawn.
This goes for ALL PEOPLE.
WHITE, BLACK, “lighter”, “beige”
Quit segregating yourselves according to an ever-changing scale of shades (you’re basic) and claim humanity as our singular race. Peace to all
You’re Maladapted ghassan. While in rome, the romans are always right.
“The term adaptation is used by Gudykunst and Kim to mean simple conformity to the coercive power (pp. 360, 371) of what they call a single form of “mainstream culture” with its “objective” “external” reality (p. 378) — “what is real, what is true, what is right, what is beautiful, and what is good” (p. 376). As they define reality, the newcomer’s perspective is false, a delusion or “self-deception” (p. 380) and any attempt to maintain one’s original false values, beliefs, ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving constitute the mental illness of “maladaptation” (p. 372). According to Gudykunst and Kim (2003) the way of “upward-forward” evolution toward functional fitness and psychological health is for the newcomer to willfully “unlearn” and “deculturize” (p. 380) herself. They propose psychotherapy as well as the abandonment of all ethnic relations and associations with ethnic ties as well as avoidance of “ethnic media” use (pp. 365–368) to help immigrants (p. 382) achieve “integrative” conformity. This is not ecological integration but simple disintegration of the newcomer until their identity is erased. According to Gudykunst and Kim (2003) the more the newcomer is disintegrated the better, even if it leads to extreme distress for the immigrant. As Gudykunst and Kim (2003) put it, “Even extreme mental illness [caused by “conformity pressure” p. 371] can be viewed as a process of a potentially positive disintegration that will be reintegrated with new material at a higher level” (p. 381).
No matter how unjust or cruel, Gudykunst and Kim (2003) argue that the host way of thinking, feeling, and behaving constitutes the “higher level” of psychic evolution and any resistance to pressure to conform, to disintegration on the part of a minority person indicates that the immigrant is communicatively incompetent, immature (p. 381), mentally ill (pp. 365, 372-373, 376), weak (p. 369), irrationally aggressive or hostile (pp. 371, 376), lacking in self-control (p. 369), cynical (p. 380), pessimistic (p. 369), closed-minded (p. 369), simple minded (pp. 382–383) and “ethnocentric” (pp. 376, 382). Evolutionary progress for the individual requires the individual to “abandon identification with the cultural patterns that have constituted who one is and what one is” (p. 377). These patterns are not just behavioral but “appropriate” ways of thinking as defined by the majority mainstream reality.”
I hope the Rasmussen poll is not true.