Over the past few days, news of a "whiteness" chart has been circulating. The chart, apparently displayed at a branch of the Smithsonian in DC—the National Museum of African-American History and Culture—purports to show the salient traits of "white culture." An article on the scandalous and obviously racist chart is here. Below, Tim Pool gets his rant on and talks about how many of the traits that are supposedly "white" also belong to other cultures, especially East Asian (Tim Pool isn't shy about waving his one-fourth-Korean heritage around).
I'm scratching my head and trying to figure out what the chart's purpose is. Is the chart trying to frame a debate or discussion about whiteness by (1) "othering" white people in the context of an African-American museum and (2) slyly implying that, if the "white" traits are the traits of the nefarious Other, then virtuous traits are the opposite? If you follow the article link above, you'll see there's another link to the chart itself (no worries: I'll display the chart below), and among the "white" traits you'll see:
• rugged individualism: self-reliance, independence, autonomy
• (reliance on the) scientific method: objective/rational, linear thinking
• Protestant work ethic: hard work, work before play
• future-orientation: planning, delay of gratification
—and so much more!
If the implicit argument is that whites embody the above traits, and that non-whites should therefore espouse the opposite traits because whites are the nefarious Other, then we ought to see a chart for non-white minorities that embraces the following:
• utter dependency on the group and the state; sheer helplessness when alone
• the embrace of irrational, unscientific, non-linear thought and action
• laziness, indolence, shiftlessness, play before work
• present- or past-orientation; no planning for the future; the grasshopper, not the ant
I would love to see someone create such a poster and display it alongside the "whiteness" poster. Using the latest PC terminology, we'll title it something like "BIPOC Culture in the United States" and see how many microseconds it takes before someone calls it racist.
Here's the chart, in all its glory (split across the middle—sorry*):
Just wow.
*I apologize for the aesthetic inconvenience, but Blogger doesn't like it when you try to upload super-tall images. Blogger automatically shrinks such images, even if you don't ask it to do that. The images then become obnoxiously small, so to prevent shrinkage, you have to chop tall images into short segments. The segments, alas, have spaces between them. Can't be helped. (Actually, there are workarounds, but they take time.)
1 comment:
That's so sad, it's almost funny. And yeah, all those opposites of "whiteness" are the racist stereotypes I was hearing about blacks when I was growing up. Oddly enough, it turns out that people are people regardless of skin pigmentation. I've certainly encountered MANY white folk over the years that did not manifest the characteristics outlined in this poster.
By the way, the poster looks fine on my screen. Full size, easy to read, no visible breaks.
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