Among the Palefaces

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

* Yet another effort to start a conversation about race in America

MATT LABASH

Nov 3, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 08

 

As a lifelong white person​—​or Person Without Color, for the more sensitively inclined​—​I have nothing against white people. I mean, sure, at this late date in their history, I’m all too aware of the dubious and disheartening white-people statistics. Nearly all Prius owners, Vineyard Vines wearers, and girls named “Addison” are white. Almost 8 out of 10 Canadians are white. And the most reliably annoying person in the world, Gwyneth Paltrow? You guessed it: white.

 

(Snip)

 

And that’s where Whitney Dow and the Whiteness Project come in.

 

Even though its awkwardly constructed subtitle​—​Inside the White Caucasian Box​—​makes the Whiteness Project sound like a charity MMA match at an Aryan Nation picnic, make no mistake. This is a Serious Project, and Dow is a Serious Person. It might sound like self-parody, but it is not satire. This is Deadly Serious. Don’t take my word for it. Take Dow’s. “I am deadly serious about this,” he wrote on that most serious of platforms, Twitter.

 

In his lengthy “filmmaker’s statement,” Dow offered that “most whites see themselves as outside the American racial paradigm and their race as a passive attribute. Subsequently, they feel that they do not have the same right to speak about race as non-whites.” Therefore, this project “hopes to bring everyday white Americans, especially those who would not normally engage in a project about race, into the racial discussion​—​to help them understand the active role their race plays in every facet of their lives, to remove some of the confusion and guilt that many white people feel around the subject of race and to help white Americans learn to own their whiteness.”

 

(Snip)

 

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* Confess Yor Sins

 

I'll start it off. I bought a Bee Gee's album once.