By Ruweyda Ahmed.
Awareness of the relationship between Gen-Z and white guilt is a good thing, a great thing in fact. We are seeing far more open and honest conversation about racism and systems of oppression. We are seeing White people take accountability for their ignorance and become aware of how white supremacy benefits them. Though with this accountability comes guilt and fragility. The way White people are navigating through this conversation can be redundant and counter-productive, with or without intention.
White people becoming educated about their own privileges have come with a lot of ignorance. A lot of Gen-Z liberals associate white supremacy with the extremism. Young White people who have liberal views enjoy separating themselves of whiteness and what is represents. Whiteness is dangerous and violent, it oppresses others to exist in the capacity we know it. Realising this can stir up guilt, this is expected, but trying hard to separate yourself from whiteness is just as dangerous.
White people are using different identities to ‘cancel out’ their whiteness and privilege. There’s a new comedy line of trying to appear ‘less white’ than the next white person. But it’s bizarre, you are white people. Clinging onto gender identity, sexuality and political opinions etc. do not make you more or less of a white person. White people apart of other marginalised groups are separating themselves from whiteness, by trying to criticize it from an outside perspective, as People of Color (POC) do. Trying to navigate your guilt by attempting to wipe out whiteness is...weird. This is not the white supremacy olympics, claiming a white man are worse or white straight people when only discussing race is frustrating. It ignores that all we and the system see is a white person so we all interact with you as a white person, just because you aren't a cishet white male doesn’t make you more or less white. You are trying to avoid accountability, trying to make yourself the exception.
The horrors of white supremacy does not fall on the individual, it benefits you and is okay to know you will always exist within it. You don’t have to wish to be a POC or try to prove you aren’t ‘that white’ because frankly, the reasons you find your whiteness redundant are always shallow. Saying you wish you were POC so you can be cultured is just inadvertently taking the good bits of POC and leaving out the bad.
It’s a privilege to be white, as well as straight, skinny, cis etc and is never an inconvenience to you. You just want to centre and include yourself in a conversation that POC have, but it’s not needed. Your fragility is counterproductive. You can just exist, you know? Do not interact with whiteness as a burden because it is wiping out all the hardships of being an ethnic minority.
All White people need to look at how they are complicit, regardless of other marginalised identities, because there is no sliding scale of racism. No spectrum. Just racism.