White is not a colour
July 26, 2021
“There is no such thing as race, none” – this is how master novelist Toni Morrison broke it down very simply in a famous interview. “It’s the human race, scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, and it has benefits, money can be made off of it, people who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it … so it has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being.”
Precisely in that sense, the word ‘white’ is a signifier of that racism, its ideological register, its coded symbol. That is all. No human being at birth is ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘brown’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’ or any other colour. They are all eventually coded with these colours to divide and rule them better. East Asians are called ‘yellow’, West Asians and Latinx ‘brown’, Native Americans ‘red’, Africans ‘Black’, all of them set against the fictive centrality of the Caucasian ‘white’, which Europeans have racialised and reserved for themselves and gave to their settler colonial extensions in North America or Australia as a signifier of superiority. The historical origin of all such racist designations come to full ‘scientific’ blooming during the period Europeans call – without the slightest sense of irony – their ‘Enlightenment’.