Equality With Whites Is Not the Goal
What equality must mean, and why you can’t substitute Black for white
Whatever equality means, it doesn’t mean equality with whites or whiteness because whiteness is an identity of oppression, it’s an ideology of oppression, and it’s a system of oppression. The history of European immigrants, who later became white, shows that the only way to be fully equal with whiteness is to be oppressive or to benefit from oppression. That’s why the goal isn’t to equal whiteness; the goal is to end whiteness.
People who see it otherwise may think they can solve the problem of white racism with inclusion, sharing, uplift, or by substitution. But race doesn’t work that way; race isn't fair; race is inherently, entirely, and always unequal. A misunderstanding or denial of that reality leads some people to say, “If I wrote or said this same thing about Blackness or Black people, everyone would say it’s racist.”
Substitutions and statements of that sort serve whiteness. White egalitarianism needs race to be a horizontal relation instead of a white hierarchy. On a lateral plane, that sideways view can prematurely wipe the white slate clean and sidestep justice.
But race remains a white hierarchy. In his book The Machinery of Whiteness, Steve Martinot warns against substituting “the horizontal for the vertical,” and he believes race is a “vertical hierarchy and a vertical system of domination.” According to Martinot, when people see race as a horizontal identity, they “decriminalize” the vertical hierarchy.
The equal sign comes when the problem of whiteness ends.
Joel Olson, in his book The Abolition of White Democracy, also wrote about “hierarchically ordered races,” and he called for the abolition of white democracy by ending white disparities. Olson believed ending white disparities would end whiteness. Olson’s theory matches what whites terrified by “mongrelization, miscegenation, and mixing” know— they know that whiteness and white disparities can’t exist and persist without separation and subjugation.
James Baldwin's words, from his essay On Being White and Other Lies, still apply here: "There are no white people." I think Baldwin was saying there are no pure, unmixed, blameless, and superior people, which means whites claim to be people who don't exist. No one should desire equality with a wrong and impossible identity like whiteness.
Whiteness is an active amalgamation of oppression; no one needs to catch up to oppression; the oppression just needs to end. For some, this may change how they see antiracism work. In some ways, whites will have less when gaps close because ill-gotten gains have to go, and the white ways of measuring achievement also have to go.
Humanity is inherently equal, and policies that subtract whiteness can only be a plus because the equal sign comes when the problem of whiteness ends. Whiteness can only be racist, and what seems to be racist against whites may just reflect whiteness. For those whites—what they say is racist, is what they have, and no one should want it.