White people! Give up your whiteness. Join the strike against whiteness.
We have noticed a dominant tendency to ask you to affirm your white identity as something essential to you. And we have seen many of you, out of fear or otherwise, capitulate to this desire.* We understand that those of you who have become critical of the category of whiteness are nevertheless reluctant to identify yourselves as something other than white. This is compounded by the fact that there are many non-white people who have expressed a desire for you to own, take responsibility for, or otherwise affirm your whiteness.
We are here to meet that desire with our own desire. We are here to offer you an out. You do not have to be white. In fact, we want you to refuse to be white. We want you to recognize whiteness not as an essential component of your identity, but as a power differential that you can choose to uphold. We want you to choose not to uphold it, and in doing so, we want you to join us, in being brown, or at the very least, non-white.
We want you to reach a point where you can identify the various struggles of non-white people as your own struggle. We believe that if you make this identification, you will feel compelled to participate in the struggle for liberation, against whiteness. As it stands, we have no choice but to experience being brown. We are born into this world brown, and we are not afforded the privileges of being white. You are afforded these privileges, but you do not have to accept them. You can make a choice to start browning your experience.
You will meet non-white people who do not want you to brown your experience. They will insist that you affirm your identity as that of an oppressor. We want you to refuse! You do not have to identify yourself as an oppressor and we do not want you to. We want you to align your interests with the oppressed. We do not want you to do this from the perspective of an oppressor, but from the perspective of the oppressed.
We anticipate a critique that takes the following form. It is not enough for you to simply give up your whiteness as a matter of identity, because whiteness is not simply an identity; there is material and political power that comes with being white. To this we say, we agree! In giving up your whiteness, we also want you to give up this power. This is not to say, however, that we want for you to fall under the yoke of an oppressor. Rather, we wish to say that your privilege itself creates and is created by the de-privileging of others. With that being said, we want to be clear. We are not interested in simply a changing of hands. In fact, we are not interested in framing our movement in terms of the transfer of privilege at all. Rather, our interest lies in the building of communities who do the work of resource distribution. We want you to take up this work as your own work and we want to say that to give up your privilege is to do this work.
We often meet white people who feel guilty about being white. This type of “white guilt” is a common manifestation of a desire to resist whiteness, or a recognition of the violence of whiteness. However, on its own, this guilt does not challenge whiteness, but on the contrary, sustains it. We want you to give up whiteness, and so rather than feel guilty about being white, we want your guilt to transform into a rejection of being white. You don’t have to be guilty, because you don’t have to be white.
We do not want you to reject whiteness out of self hatred. We do not want your rejection of whiteness to end up centering whiteness. We want you to reject whiteness out of love for and solidarity with non-white people. We want you to reject whiteness out of self love. We want you to brown yourself. We want you to love being brown.
*We do not want you to agree with us because we are brown, we want you to understand what we are saying and come to your own conclusions. Neither us nor any brown person can do the work of making up your mind about these matters. It is your responsibility to come to a conclusion about your whiteness, and when you simply defer to us or other non-white people, you absolve yourself of this responsibility. We don’t just want you to stop being white, we want you to want to give up whiteness.