The “Whiteness Project” is Real and Cringe-Worthy

If you haven’t heard of “The Whiteness Project”, then this explainer will enlighten you... and you won’t like it.

The Whitness Project, started by Whitney Dow. (Photo Courtesy: Facebook/TheWhitenessProject)

If you haven’t read something more ridiculous than Donald Trump’s Twitter gaffes, then here’s a ready reckoner. A PBS-funded ongoing documentary project called “The Whiteness Project” gives white American millennials a space to explore their race – an opportunity to explore the “burden” that their colour brings with it.

(Told you it will make your eyes pop.)

The project that hopes to give a voice to White Americans – the guys who have sonorously been talking for centuries – brings down the work of post-colonial activists and cultural ambassadors and robs the world of heterogeneity with one big sweep. This is the kind of narrative that the project is building:

Interestingly, the video ends with a startling PSA: “40% of white Americans say many or almost all blacks are violent”. And what exactly does this hope to achieve, one wonders.

“The Whiteness Project is an exploratory media project in which individuals who identify as white speak about their racial identity”: this is the Wikipedia definition of the project. What I learnt from the definition is that it is a racially superior, high brow work of a filmmaker who had PBS’ funding and lots of free time at hand. The brainchild of filmmaker Whitney Dow, The Whiteness Project sent social media into a whirlwind when the first round of interviews were released in October 2014.

I made this project for white people, not for people of colour because, if white people are going to participate in changing the racial dynamic, we need to deal with our own shit first.

Whitney Dow told <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/15/whiteness-project-privilege-documentary">The Guardian</a></i>

The race that has been instrumental in wiping out plurality and is still perpetrating appropriation of religions – a project on its self-exploration is plain cringe-worthy. It wishes to re-centralise the White Race, a race that has been at the centre for eons and is still at the centre of much upheaval.

Let’s explore the project a wee bit more; it claims that it’ll let White Americans explore their race. The characters, however, seem to defy the agenda. This Jewish-American fails to analyse the complexity of his identity. He slips in the context of “being a white Jew”, but never explores baggage of being a Jew and an immigrant.

I see the project as a vehicle to proffer ridiculous stereotypes about Black people and minorities. The participants all seem to embrace harmful stereotypes about minorities, while subjecting themselves to false victimhood. There are no racial epiphanies. There is no humility or remorse.

What’s particularly cringe-worthy is how white participants define themselves not by who they are, but what they are not. This dynamic of “othering” speaks to whiteness as a whole; the “otherness” of Black and Brown bodies makes it easier to hold and act on prejudicial and racist beliefs against those with dark skin.

With this project, the Whites are going further down the racism drain. (Photo Courtesy: Tumblr)

There’s Ronald, who says “the white guys will never have a chance to be a fireman” and “minorities should understand that a lot of white boys aren’t going to be pushed around”. There’s Claudia, who doesn’t “have a lot of black friends” yet laments that “you can’t even talk about fried chicken or Kool-Aid without wondering if someone’s going to get offended.”

Unfortunately, the videos seem amateurish, failing to establish theoretical underpinnings to the claims. The premise and the conclusions do not match in this social experiment. Dow claims that Whites need a space to explore their race, if that is the case then the “coloured” would need light years and ten times more space to explore theirs.

Dow’s project is thus plain miscalculated and misrepresented. Yet, it lays its finger on a poignant aspect. The project shamelessly showcases how ignorance is deeply entrenched in our collective societal outlook. It warns us that those many years spent developing and implementing critical race theory in our socio-political landscape still has not trickled into individual racial consciousness, nor penetrated the collective White identity.

Leaving you with some social media backlash: