Why is whiteness a ghost? why is whiteness half there, half not? A confusing mass of assumptions, implicit attitudes, and barely recognised beliefs? Because White European, specifically North-Western European, culture is one of individualism. Unlike most other cultures around the world, where your sense of worth and place in the world comes from your family ties, white people are more likely to view your sense of worth as coming from within you. In most Asian countries, living with your parents until you are married is sensible and moral, in the west, it is laziness, and you should leave as soon as possible to fulfil your destiny as an individual.
A white culture is less likely to view itself as being a nation of “white people”
It is a nation of individuals who happen to be white, who share a set of values, attitudes, and customs, and probably religious beliefs. In the years leading up to the 1924 immigration restriction laws, the traditional tide of German, Swedes, Dutch, and English immigrants, who all shared the American cultural beliefs of individualism, and integrated themselves into the existing culture with ease, a true melting pot, was being replaced by some years of increased Irish and Italian immigration, in which the catholic and more collectivist cultures tended to self segregate more, and have trouble integrating, which then caused a backlash which resulted in the restrictive quotas of the 1924 law. There was little talk of Nordic superiority, instead there was an emphasis on the fact that Anglo-Saxon people had been the ones to found the nation and establish its institutions, and they had a right to preserve their demographic claim on the continent they conquered. The 1965 law to open immigration was put forward as a token moral gesture, and not one that would drastically change the demographics of the country. Obviously that was not the case.
“You can choose not to put the silence of whiteness between your self and the world. You can be one of us.”
I don’t know exactly what you mean by that, but my natural assumption would be that you are advocating for white Americans to stop implicitly seeing themselves as different than other Americans, and to live instead as one race, the human race.
The problem with that is that non-white Americans explicitly view themselves as different. The Charlottesville demonstrations were simply the sputtering spark of white ethnic self interest, seen burning bright in the Mexican flag waving protestors of Donald Trump, and the fact-free riots and protests of BLM, suddenly blazing to fiery life.
It took an imminent communist takeover, mass unemployment, and proliferated hedonistic and debauched acts that would put Caligula to shame, to rouse the German people of the 1930’s to fight for their ethnic self interest. We are not there yet in America, but we are getting damn close.
