-We've been talking about "Black"
under whatever words we use for like 300 years.
So we had a very deep conversation around "Black"
that gives it a heft and meanings and history.
Now, "White" has a lot of that,
but for most of the time in classification terms,
"White" has meant the leavings of "Black."
So it's kind of what's left over.
People who have embraced it
as an identity have been awful people.
They have been white nationalists,
Ku Klux Klansmen, and so forth.
So it's like White Americans had this choice
of being either the leavings of Blackness,
which they did not embrace, or Klansmen,
which most of them also did not embrace.
And I think the mass of White people in the United States,
less now than before 2020,
thought of themselves as individuals --
unraced individuals.
The short answer is thanks to the Nazis.
The Nazis racialized Jews and made the Holocaust.
Nazism was well known in the United States,
and it was also well known
that a lot of Americans like Henry Ford
and also many scholars believed that Jews were a race,
a separate race.
And they didn't mean it in a flattering way.
At that time, it was usually thought that, say,
Irish people belonged to the Celtic race,
Eastern European Hebrews, these were all White races.
But this was a moment in the very early '40s
as the United States was getting into the war
that we were desperately in need of national unity.
And the two enemies were racial states.
-German conquest of Europe and Africa,
Japanese conquest of the Orient.
-So one way of pulling all Americans
into the fight against totalitarianism
was to get rid of as many racial categories as possible.
So the ideal was unity.
And the Boasian anthropologists
wrote all over the place in newspapers and books
and so forth that there are only three races --
the Caucasian, the Mongoloid, and the Negroid.
Its motives are cultural, but largely political.
Interestingly enough, through somebody like Malcolm X
who talked about the White Man.
So he didn't talk about Polish Americans or Jewish Americans.
-The charge of violence against us
actually stems from the guilt complex that exists
in the conscious and subconscious minds
of most White people in this country.
They know that they've been violent
in their brutality against Negroes.
-That carried a lot of heft,
and so there's this moment in the '70s
where we have White Americans standing up and saying,
"No, I'm not White.
I'm Polish. I'm not White.
I'm Greek. I'm not White.
I'm Italian.
Kiss me, I'm Irish."
And so forth.
And that's a response to Malcolm X
and to the castigation of White people as just one big mass.
Trump forced masses of Americans to figure out where they belong.
He ran "Make America Great Again,"
and everybody heard "White."
He didn't put thew word in, but he put the word in.
And then Charlottesville in 2017 and his response there.
He has been pushing people who might not even want to think
about it or talk about it to figure out
where they are in this national geography of race.
Part of the ideology of race is that race is,
and in our lives, we act it out on a day-to-day basis.
And what I've said over and over and over again
is that we make race every day and we can remake it
and even unmake it by what we do.
We make and unmake behavior not in words or capital letters,
but in behavior.
It sets up more of a symmetry with Black and says,
"White is also a historical cultural concept like Black."
It doesn't let White people off the hook.
It reminds White people
that they, too, have a racial identity.