"The White Problem"

"The making of white children has to do with how adults behave towards you, and others around you, on the street, at the playground, and the books you read and the ads you see. The white race is reconstructed, millions and millions of times, in each person’s life, growing up in America. And a defining part of that construction is inevitably a denial that it is happening at all...

This communication about race to children fated to be white is consistently bizarre. Contemporary whiteness in schools and neighborhoods is a collection of incompatible messages. Don’t be prejudiced against black people, we are told, who are poor and criminal... Good black and latino people are in books, and usually dead. Good people of color are almost always in the past. Bad black and latino people are right now, and could be around any corner. A good child (of any color) doesn’t act like them. This haphazard taxonomy of race isn’t about color, except white and black. To call people yellow or red would be offensive. So it is about color, sometimes. Don’t get that wrong, and don’t ask questions, it’s rude...

The white race is reinvented again for every person born through a practice that is gaslighting children into a state of constant cognitive dissonance."
https://medium.com/message/whiteness-3ead03700322#.oeeonjjr4

Wowowow. Reading this, this is exactly the contradictions I grew up in and had to deal with AS one of very (very) few black children in a mostly-white school district. These are all my internalized hatreds and these were all of my guidelines for preventing others from labeling me a black person, for staying in the label of the "good black person who is basically white" and just trying to put off the identity crises long enough to take my AP tests.

FB: "Contemporary whiteness in schools and neighborhoods is a collection of incompatible messages. Don’t be prejudiced against black people, we are told, who are poor and criminal. Here is a month we will study black people, and write an essay. We cannot openly criticize black people, that would be racist, but we will violently protect you from them, even in your own schools. This is black music — jazz, maybe even some Motown — and we study and respect it (now that its popularity has passed). This is rap, and we ban it for being violent and about gangs."