The Opposite of Whiteness
On a visit to George Floyd Square last year, barely five minutes had passed before I was greeted by a neighbor whose lanyard described himself as a “tourism interrupter” with QR code to prove it. A Black man in his 60s or so, he invited us to consider whether any other murder site now serves as a travel-guide point of interest as this Minneapolis intersection now does. My company included locals who were active in the 2020 uprisings, which he welcomed as bonafides, but continued with critique of those events. “Abolish the police is idiotic,” he repeated, all while standing in front of a mural that said to.
No doubt Floyd’s murder changed the world. But to stand where his assassination took place only exacerbated my grief that the abolitionist outcry for which Minneapolitans spilled their blood has been bastardized to such an extent that even some of the original protesters no longer subscribe. Capitalists misappropriated the laser-focused demand to defund the police into setting Board diversity quotas and equipping white staff to avoid DEI detention. The co-optation and dilution of movement demands to maintain owner class power is commonplace and therefore predictable, to be sure, but as the world watched ICE-branded police forces terrorize the Twin Cities again this year, the relinquishment of abolitionism in service of protecting whiteness feels no less tragic.
Every morning, our phones alert us to our tax dollars’ investment in state violence. It is curious to observe the range of descriptors the so-called Left will select to describe this daily escalation. More cautious nonprofit leaders may opt for the safety of the vague: these times are divisive, uncertain, or chaotic. Bolder advocates prefer to emphasize how distinct these times compare to previous American epochs: authoritarianism, dictatorship, and fascism, they’ll choose. Others, who may validate the latter group’s sentiment of extremity, may point out that this violence-vocab always described the American empire, that life as a Black American has never not been the object of authoritarianism, for example. We reside within the dialectic in which, on the one hand, we must shake awake those who remain ignorant to the Administration’s devastation while, on the other hand, we must comprehend the normalcy of his tyranny under capitalism.
Of course, word-choice belongs at the bottom of our priorities in the face of polycrisis, itself a convenient shorthand to hold multiple, mutually reinforcing crises together. Our strategy to fight the enemy matters more than what we name it. But without sound analysis, without a shared vantage point of the target at which we aim, I fear our ranks will cannibalize each other instead. And I wonder if the phenomenon around which crises cohere is more mundane, if even more sinister.
In 1999, Tema Okun offered new nomenclature: white supremacy culture. If you worked at an organization that started paying attention to structural racism in 2020 like I did, you are familiar with this list of characteristics: perfectionism, defensiveness, worship of the written word, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, and right to comfort, among others. Notwithstanding the racist reversal of DEI in recent years, and even some criticism of Okun’s work from Black and brown organizers, one can only hope that this glossary and its corresponding antidotes reduced racist behavior and enhanced the consciousness of white employees. But for all the article’s merits, which do still benefit me, what we often omit is that white supremacy and whiteness are the same thing. There is no positive interpretation of what it can mean to be white as there is no positive characterization of state violence, domination, and incarceration.
Whiteness is about walls. The very definitions of racial categories constructed specifically to grow and guard capital through hierarchy manifest themselves in: borders that exclude migrants and the opportunity and autonomy that mobility represents; prison gates that mostly confine Black, brown, and Indigenous people, which the 13th Amendment quite explicitly acknowledges is enslavement; hospitals that mask psychiatric incarceration as civil commitment; the boundaries of draconian eligibility criteria for life-sustaining public benefits. Whiteness is the barricade between flourishing and suffering.
Indeed, the whiteness of borders shows up in our bodies and minds. It shields our hearts from accountability and trust. It inhibits our ability to nurture vulnerable and meaningful connections. It stifles community (the only people I have ever heard admit to not knowing their neighbors are white). Whiteness borders our emotions as much as our property.
Might we remind ourselves that whiteness was invented in the 17th century for the purposes of justifying the transatlantic slave trade and its broader context of colonial expansion. Its function was always to protect power through enclosure, defining what belongs and what doesn’t, as it remains to this day. Whiteness is what authorizes apartheid, sweeps encampments, evicts single mothers, steals children from families because they are impoverished, locks up Black fathers, raids immigration hearings, considers housing an asset rather than infrastructure, price-gouges insulin, jerrymanders neighborhoods, opens fire on people with mental illness, and bombs schools. For however else we may label the polycrisis of 2026, it is whiteness that describes this moment.
What, then, is the antidote? Where is the trailhead to our escape route from this tyranny? Enter abolition: the destruction of systems and institutions that border, enslave, incarcerate, exploit, and oppress; the dissolution of the conditions and logics that produce these systems such that none would ever contemplate cages as response to harm; the cultivation of ways of being that nurture our interdependence, safety, and healing. Abolition demolishes the walls of whiteness. Abolition leads to liberation of the oppressed, liberation of us all. Abolition is the opposite of whiteness.
