When white light is run through a prism, it's true nature is revealed. You know the rainbow? That thing that people associate with happy-happy, joy-joy and unicorn farts and Kermit the Frog singing on a log and Lucky Charms and Caitlin Jenner? Here's what it really is.
A rainbow is white light refracted, freed from the prison of pale invisibility and released into the fantastic splendor of the color spectrum. In many ways, white light is an illusion. It is only a medium that simply reveals the color of things.
White is not clean or pure as much is it is empty and without substance. White isn't cold or sterile as much as it is another form of water or air, a conduit through which expression travels, a palate upon which expression is splashed.
And so what?
White is a heavy, heavy color in the cultural context of America. When we think of "white" in the world of American society we often think of a type of people. Some of us think of hard earned privilege and wealth. Some of us think of a history of supremacist philosophy and the consequent exploitation and oppression of everyone not "white." We all think of white as the opposite of black, as somehow separate from the cultural bricolage some call "people of color."But if we use the analogy of white light through a prism, you can understand that white is not only a color, but that it reveals all color. In truth, what we know as American "white" culture is ultimately a merger of diverse European, Indigenous American, African, and Asian influence. White has simply been the palate upon which the American experiment has been painted. Calling American culture white culture is like calling the wall of the museum a work of art. I'm sure someone has tried to pull that off in a rash of post-modern silliness. But a white wall, art is not. And America has never, ever been a white nation.
If you dig into American democracy without the blinding white light of eurocentrism, you will find that our foundational political philosophy was heavily influenced by the Six Nations or the Iroquois Confederacy, the original republic of indigenous independent nation-states on American soil. If you dig into America's economy past the white fog of big "C" Capitalism, you will find that the among the first truly free markets were those created by escaped slaves like Louisiana's Jean St. Malo, who first stole his body back, then liberated other enslaved people, livestock, weapons, and more to promptly set up shop in the bayou to sell the goods to Native Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Haitians, and anyone with something to offer the diverse community burgeoning around his multi-layered emancipatory entrepreneurial enterprise.
If you dig into the work ethic and ingenuity responsible for America's expansion, and subsequent wealth and success, without the thin white veil of European cultural supremacy called Manifest Destiny, you realize that 4000 Chinese people (among others) built The Transcontinental Railroad that made westward expansion possible. And then contributed greatly, along with newly emancipated Black people, to the establishment of everything we know as the American West.
So if we are honest about what "white" means in the social context of America, it is much like the white light going through the prism. If you actually send the white light of hegemony through the prism of multi-culturalism, you find every color, every people has made America what it is.
And yes, it means that the illusion of whiteness has to disappear to see the true beauty of America. And no, this is not so that we can erase European contribution to America. To the contrary, we must erase the illusion of whiteness so that we can liberate the contributions of Irish, German, Italian, French, Spaniard, Danish, Scottish, Welsh, and other European cultures from of the alabaster prison of an impossible white illusion and welcome them back into the full spectrum of human contribution to the American experiment. We must do this so that white can no longer be a phantasm of superiority and once again be a color, an human diversity of no greater, or lesser value, than any other.
And so what?
So this...
And so what?
So we can show the world how humans can live together, in peace. It will take us all to do that. Pray for our success. The future depends on it.
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