To My Beige Kindred; love speaks from the heart. I love you, ALWAYS.

Nobody is white.

This seems like an odd place to start, but look at your arm under decent light. Unless you’ve recently died, you will not find white. You’ll find beige, maybe with olive undertones. Pink if you’ve been exercising. Cream, sand, wheat – the cosmetics industry abandoned ‘white’ as a descriptor generations ago because it’s useless for matching actual skin. And yet the word persists in every other domain, load-bearing for an entire architecture of social meaning. The observation seems almost childishly obvious once stated. A group of beige-skinned people declared themselves ‘white’ – with all the cultural freight that color carries: purity, divinity, light, blamelessness. Perhaps self-identification deserves accommodation, we accommodate pronouns, after all. But they didn’t stop at self-description. They built legal systems that made the mythology material, imposing the legal subclass ‘colored’ on everyone else. The claim wasn’t figurative – it was literalized into civic reality. This is what makes looking at your arm not figurative: they asserted the color applied literally; it literally doesn’t. The self-designation was not an error of perception. It was propaganda that got naturalized into fact. Why should anyone keep using it? This isn’t about outcomes. It isn’t about what might change if people stopped using the word. It’s simpler than that. The claim is false. The people calling themselves “white” aren’t white – look at them, my kinsfolks. Beige, pink, cream, occasionally ruddy. The word they use is a lie they’ve been telling so long they’ve forgotten it’s a lie. Nobody is obligated to honor a lie just because it’s been institutionalized for three centuries. A natural question follows: if “white” is a lie because nobody’s skin is actually white, isn’t “black” equally false? Nobody’s skin is literally ‘black’ either – it’s brown, copper, umber, deep mahogany. If the criterion is perceptual accuracy, both terms fail equally. Emphatically. Yet perceptual accuracy isn’t the decisive criterion. That criterion is christening.

One group claimed for themselves the color of angels. In that same act, everyone else became deviations – gradations of distance from the self-declared pure. The idea of ‘colored’ only exists as a shadow, a contrast to the invention of ‘white’. No one christened “colored” upon themselves. The category was an external imposition, the photographic negative of civic self-flattery. What happened later was different. The terms that had been foisted – Negro, Colored – were rejected. The Black Power movement retooled the same word used to demonize them – ‘black,’ the designated contrast to the ideal – as radical acceptance. This wasn’t some elevated self-christening outside the already-framed context. It was a defiant resignation to transform an externally framed social hierarchy, an effort at self-determination. “Black is beautiful” was an assertion to rise above denigration – courageous, necessary, and still subservient to the framework it sought to escape. The resistance was framed by what it resisted. Renovations do not alter foundations; ceilings stay fixed. The critical focus of this essay falls on ‘white’ – the locus where the mythology was fashioned and still its cardinal scaffold. This is the fabrication that created its contrast – including the counter-designation that took on the role of shadow. What alternatives exist for those who refuse the mythology entirely? Actual skin categories work fine: beige, brown, olive, cream. Not a color for every complexion – just nominal categories chosen for analytic utility rather than symbolic weight. Disparities between beige and brown Americans can be tracked without validating anyone’s cosmic complex, a self-appraisal that at the same time demeans the rest of the group. The analytical work survives. The self-indulgent lie is simply unnecessary.

Before there was “whiteness”, there was only skin. The Old English word for bright or shining described surfaces without marking souls. Medieval Europeans encountering Africans noticed difference – sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with hostility. Without scientific frameworks for understanding phenotypic variation, they reached for their era’s religious interpretations: the curse of Ham, darkness as spiritual corruption. But the systematic legal architecture ranking humanity by skin categories came later, and deliberately. The word ‘white’ as a racial identifier first appears in the written record around 1600, but its juridical force comes in the courthouses and legislative chambers of colonial Virginia. The slave codes of the early 1700s represent something genuinely new: racial reduction to a binary. Not the elaborate gradations of colonial casta systems – mestizo, mulatto, castizo – but a single line. “White” on one side, serving as unmarked pole, the seat of rights and humanity. Everyone else on the other, defined by deviation from the default. These laws established that Christian “white” servants could not be whipped without judicial order, while enslaved Africans were declared property – real estate, transferable like land. The word ‘white’ here does work it had never done before. It isn’t describing appearance. It’s creating a legal category with rights attached. The timing may not have been accidental. A few decades earlier, indentured servants and enslaved people had risen together against the colonial elite – a coalition that, by some accounts, terrified the planter class into preemptive division. Whatever the cause, the effect was fateful: the racial codes that followed fractured any prospect of enslaved Africans and poor Europeans discovering shared grievance.

The codes functioned as a bribe, whether or not designed as one. European servants received psychological and legal privileges – the right to own guns, testify in court, move freely. Poor Europeans, denied status in the feudal homelands they’d fled, accepted status denominated in race: civic standing in lieu of economic justice. The bargain proved durable. It structures American society to this day. This is how the lie began. Not as description but as propaganda – a legal fiction dressed up as natural fact. The beige people of Virginia weren’t “white” before the codes. The word was invented to do political work, and it’s been doing that work ever since. The law created the category. Then science was enlisted to make it look natural – though the taxonomies were largely European imports. Linnaeus had already ranked humanity; Blumenbach coined ‘Caucasian.’ Jefferson’s ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’ drew on this tradition, conjecturing about inferior reasoning and different physiological responses among enslaved Africans – dressed as observation. The nineteenth century elaborated on both continents: phrenology, cranial measurements, polygenism, elaborate taxonomies ranking human groups by capacity – axioms that still haunt contemporary science. America did not invent race science – that was transatlantic. Nor did it pioneer the fusion with legal codification – casta systems had done so centuries earlier. America’s contribution is its simplification: flattening the concept of racial gradations into a rigid binary, ‘whiteness’ positioned as invisible default. That architecture has persisted three centuries and counting – outlasting apartheid and Nazi race law, regimes that attempted similar projects but collapsed under their own instability. The one-drop rule enforced an absolute boundary on one side of that binary – making any African ancestry determinative – while “whiteness” remained the expandable category, absorbing Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs over generations. The asymmetry was the mechanism: fixed floor, flexible ceiling. Each induction of another group into “white” turned yesterday’s outsiders into road-to-Damascus converts pointing at their arms and declaring with scientific fervor that it is indeed white.

Courts tasked with defining ‘white’ for immigration purposes kept running into an embarrassing problem: they couldn’t agree on what the word meant. In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court decided two cases within months of each other. In the first, a Japanese immigrant sought citizenship, arguing his skin was lighter than many recognized “white” Americans. The Court rejected him – he wasn’t “Caucasian,” they said, appealing to scientific racial classifications. The second case involved a high-caste Sikh who was, by those same scientific standards, indisputably Caucasian. The Court denied him too, this time reversing course entirely. Science didn’t matter, they now held. What mattered was “the understanding of the common man.” The contradiction was total. One case used science to exclude; the other rejected science to exclude. The only consistent principle was exclusion itself. In the years following, dozens of people who had already been granted citizenship found it revoked. They had been made “white” by law, then unmade. These weren’t edge cases revealing ambiguity at the margins. They were exposures of the void at the center. Judges determining “whiteness” examined skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and – most revealingly – popular opinion. The list itself confesses the absence of any principled criterion. “Whiteness” was whatever needed to be said to maintain the hierarchy. The courts couldn’t define ‘white’ because there was nothing to define. The word doesn’t point at anything real. It points at a status – a manufactured position in a manufactured hierarchy. The judges kept reaching for criteria because the obvious truth was inadmissible: they were enforcing a fiction.

Svetlana Mirović learned she was “white” on a Tuesday in October, though she didn’t recognize the moment for what it was until years later. She was nine years old, sitting in the back of her grandmother’s Buick outside a grocery store in Gary, Indiana. Her grandmother had gone inside to argue about something – a coupon, a deli order, the eternal grievances of the elderly – and Svetlana was watching two boys on bikes circle the parking lot. They were brown, maybe twelve or thirteen, doing tricks off the curb. One of them caught her looking and waved. She waved back. When her grandmother returned, she’d seen the exchange. The lecture that followed was delivered in Serbian, which her grandmother reserved for serious matters: boys, money, and people who couldn’t be trusted. The gist was that Svetlana should not wave at strangers, should not draw attention, should not give anyone reason to think she was like them. “We’re not like them,” her grandmother said. “We worked. We became Americans.” The statement confused Svetlana at the time. The boys had been doing bike tricks, not robbing anyone. And her grandmother, with her thick accent and her strange foods and her icons of saints Svetlana couldn’t name, seemed pretty different from the other Americans Svetlana knew. But she filed it away, the way children file away things they don’t understand but sense are important.

Twenty-five years later, Svetlana teaches immigration history at a state university. She has published papers on ethnic succession in industrial cities, on the mechanisms by which Slavic and Italian and Jewish workers became “white” through participation in anti-“black” discrimination. She knows, as an academic matter, exactly what her grandmother was doing in that parking lot. Claiming membership. Drawing the line of racial seniority. Accepting the bargain. What she can’t quite access, even now, is whether her grandmother believed it. Whether the claim to “whiteness” felt like truth or strategy or desperate self-preservation – the assertion of a status that might be revoked if not continuously performed. Her grandmother is dead now. The question can’t be asked. Svetlana checks “white” on forms. She does it automatically, without thinking, the way her grandmother once intended. But sometimes, filling in the bubble, she thinks about the boys on bikes, about the wave, about how easily a different choice could have been made. Her grandmother had options that day. She chose to teach her granddaughter where the line was and which side they were on. The lesson took. What Svetlana can’t decide is whether she’s obligated to keep honoring it. This is how the lie propagates. Not just through law but through teaching – through grandmothers in parking lots drawing lines their granddaughters will inherit. Svetlana’s grandmother wasn’t “white” before she arrived in America. She became “white” by learning to claim the category, by teaching her children to claim it, by enforcing the boundary that made the claim meaningful. The fiction requires continuous performance. It doesn’t survive without willing performers.

“Whiteness” derives its power not from being seen but from being assumed. This is the mechanism that makes the lie so difficult to dislodge. Languages organize concepts through marking – distinguishing defaults from deviations. The unmarked term is treated as normal, generic, human. The marked term is defined against it. A “white” novelist is a “novelist”; a “black” novelist is a “‘black’ novelist.” A “white” neighborhood is a “neighborhood”; a “black” neighborhood is a “‘black’ neighborhood.” The asymmetry runs so deep it usually passes without notice – which is precisely the point. Invisibility is the mechanism. The phrase “people of color” reveals the structure in the act of trying to subvert it. The term assumes a “people of no color” – “whiteness” positioned as transparent baseline against which others are measured. One group is ordinary people. The other is marked. Color symbolism predates this arrangement but reinforces it. Light carries associations with purity, innocence, goodness across Western culture. Darkness signals danger and pollution. These meanings are old – older than racialization – but they map onto the racial binary with disturbing precision. People link evil and darkness before conscious thought intervenes. When Europeans encountered African peoples, existing symbolic structures were ready-made for exploitation. Moral connotations attached to human beings, providing a vocabulary of contempt that felt, to those using it, like merely describing reality. To call a group of people ‘white’ is to grant their self-christening – to accept their claim to superseding virtue. Angels are white. Brides wear white. The divine is associated with light.

Then for centuries, the law made it material – ‘white’ meant who could own, vote, testify, move freely. The term didn’t just mark identity the way pronouns do today. It determined who counted as fully human. This is what makes ‘black’ equally problematic – not in origin, but in effect. To accept the contrast position is to haggle for dignity within an architecture built to deny it, using vocabulary that reinforces your counterpart’s celestial symbolism while appearing to affirm their darker characterizations of you. You don’t have to play the game at all. The same skin categories work on both sides: beige and brown, olive and umber. No freight. No contrast positions. Just skin. ‘White’ claims a higher status, a racial seniority that skin color alone could never confer, the default expectation for de facto deference. The self-designation was aspirational, a category one could declare membership in regardless of what the mirror showed. It has become a three-centuries-old delusion – an inheritance disguised as observation. And somehow, we all keep playing along in stupor. Indoctrinated by literature, reeducated by training programs. This is why refusing the term matters – not because refusal will fix anything, but because the term itself is propaganda. Using it, even critically, preserves its mythology. Calling someone ‘white’ affirms a self-christening with connotations they haven’t earned, don’t deserve, and demeans you in the same breath. Why should you do that?

The peculiar feature of contemporary racial discourse is that even the critics of “whiteness” use the word ‘whiteness.’ Progressive racial analysis insists you must name “whiteness” to critique it. You need the category to track disparities, identify structural advantages, make visible what was designed to be invisible. Yet, the critique often flatters what it claims to condemn. Consider how criticism of “white men” typically operates. “‘White’ men have dominated every institution, controlled all the wealth, shaped every system” – the speaker purports indictment, but the statement functions as credit. The same facts could center differently: “Excluded groups have built, sustained, and innovated within institutions designed to keep their contributions invisible.” But critics prefer the version that grants domination as fait accompli. Or the moral protagonist move, visible in any meeting where a beige man announces, “As a ‘white’ man, I need to step back and make space for other voices.” He has now made his stepping back the center of attention, his presumed magnanimity the story. The alternative requires no announcement: “Voices are speaking.” But that version removes him from the scene entirely – unacceptable. Historical framing does similar work. “‘White’ men built this country on stolen land with stolen labor.” The same facts could tilt differently: “Enslaved Africans built this country through stolen labor on stolen land.” But critics prefer the version that vests agency only in the group they claim to condemn. Everyone else becomes raw material, land and labor, while the seemingly villainized group stars as the builders, the actors, the subjects of verbs. A passive voice would sidestep entirely: “This country was built on stolen land with stolen labor.” That construction is rarely recited by the same people supposedly eager to criticize “white” men.

Even the language of fragility finds aggrandizement. “‘White’ men get so defensive when challenged – that’s why they’re dangerous.” This frames emotional immaturity as power. The alternative: “Everyone else weathers constant scrutiny without crumbling – that’s composure.” But that version makes resilience the story rather than fragility. It celebrates the wrong group. The person who can’t handle criticism is cast as someone to fear rather than someone to manage, contain, or simply dismiss. Fragility portrayed as threat. The man who falls apart at mild pushback is somehow branded as more formidable for it – a marked man in the same narrative is a crime statistic. Each version of criticism positions the self-acclaimed “white” men as central, powerful, significant – the group around whom the world organizes itself—when it could just as easily position the excluded groups as the builders, endurers, agents – the ones whose centrality the preferred framing erases. These alternatives exist and do the same work. They’re simply never chosen. Instead, the version that centers “white” men gets chorused, and it never actually deflates them. It merely aggrandizes while wearing the costume of complaint. The progressive who deploys these framings is not dismantling the hierarchy. She’s genuflecting to it while pretending otherwise. This is “woke” in practice – another word co-opted from its origins, alertness to injustice now naming a charade that esteems excluded groups by demeriting them. Even so, the arguments for a terminology are practical and compelling.

Data collection by race has documented inequalities that would otherwise go unmeasured. Educational gaps. Health outcomes. Wealth accumulation that differs by orders of magnitude. Without racial categorization, this evidence wouldn’t exist. The categories make the problem visible – and visibility is the precondition for remedy. The theoretical arguments run parallel. “Whiteness” has material value. It translates into better housing, safer neighborhoods, stronger professional networks, inherited wealth. Ignoring race means ignoring the mechanism by which these advantages are distributed. Color-blindness, in this view, functions as blindness to injustice – a refusal to see what is plainly there. Some societies have tried that blindness. Much of continental Europe, shaped by the catastrophe of race science in the twentieth century, maintains relative silence about race – preferring terms like “cultural background” or “migration background.” The discretion is understandable. The results are instructive. When you can’t name a phenomenon, you can’t measure it. When you can’t measure it, you can’t track whether it’s getting better or worse. The refusal to speak of race becomes, in its own way, a form of permission for racism to operate unobserved. Silence isn’t neutrality. It’s cover.

So there’s a real dilemma about whether to track race at all. But notice what’s not part of the dilemma: whether to keep using the group’s self-christening term. The woman who calls herself “white” and a fairer-skinned colleague brown isn’t making a perceptual error. She’s insisting on the loaded terminology, maintaining the linguistic hierarchy while performing its critique. She wants to be “white” even while condemning “whiteness.” Why should anyone honor that? The claim is false. She’s beige – maybe caramel, depending on the season. The word she uses for herself is propaganda she inherited and never thought to question. Consider what changes if we don’t honor it. Demographic research could track income disparities between beige and brown Americans. Studies could examine housing discrimination against olive-skinned applicants. Wealth gaps could be measured across skin categories – nominal categories created expressly for measurement, without historical freight. The statistics would be identical. The analytical power would remain. What would disappear is the embedded flattery – the sense that one group earned its seraphic adjective while everyone else is defined by deviation from it.

Kendrick Hassan stopped attending optional diversity events after the incident with the name tag. It was a networking mixer for “black” professionals in tech, held in a hotel ballroom with bad acoustics and worse hors d’oeuvres. The organizers had prepared name tags with not just names but “conversation starters” – a question printed below each name to facilitate connection. Kendrick’s read: “Ask me about: My journey as a Black man in tech.” He stared at it for a long moment. His journey. As though his career were a safari, an expedition through hostile territory that others might find exotic. As though the most interesting thing about him was the obstacles he’d navigated rather than anything he’d actually built. He wrote “distributed systems” over the printed prompt and wore the tag anyway. Nobody asked him about distributed systems. Three people asked him about his journey. The mandatory trainings were worse, if only because he couldn’t leave. Eleven of them across his career – he’d kept count the way one counts dental procedures. The format rarely varied. A facilitator, usually “white”, led the room through exercises designed to make “whiteness” visible. Participants reflected on their racial identity. Kendrick was asked to share his experience. “White” participants sat with their discomfort. What exhausted him wasn’t hostility. The rooms were unfailingly polite. It was the relentless positioning – the way every interaction required him to accept a role in someone else’s taxonomy. They’d replaced old rankings with new ones, inverted some values, but kept the architecture intact. He was still expected to be an instance of a category first.

The most recent training featured a facilitator who kept emphasizing her own “whiteness” in ways that somehow centered her virtue. She asked Kendrick to describe what it felt like to “navigate predominantly ‘white’ spaces.” He wanted to say that it felt like being asked to describe navigating predominantly “white” spaces by well-meaning facilitators who assumed he spent his life thinking about “whiteness.” He didn’t say that. He gave the expected answer. The room nodded. Afterward, in the parking garage, he sat in his car and did something he’d done before: opened the resignation letter he kept on his phone. He’d drafted it two years earlier, after a particularly maddening all-hands meeting where an executive spent forty minutes explaining “the ‘black’ experience” to a room containing exactly three “black” employees, none of whom had been consulted. He’d never sent it. But he updated it periodically, keeping the formatting clean, the reasons current. The document’s existence wasn’t about leaving. It was about knowing he could. That night, though, he didn’t just read the letter. He opened a new document and started writing something else – a set of questions for the next training, if he decided there would be a next one.
When you say ‘white,’ what color are you actually pointing at?
If the term was invented to justify slavery, why do you want to keep it?
What would we lose if we tracked disparities between beige and brown Americans instead?
Is there any version of this conversation where I get to be a person first?
He didn’t submit the questions. He wasn’t sure they’d be received as genuine inquiry rather than hostility. But writing them clarified something. The trainings’ first move – their foundational move – was to accept the terminology wholesale. The facilitator got to claim the word. The word she used to name herself while critiquing the category was the word the category invented to aggrandize itself. Nobody questioned whether this made sense. The critique operated entirely within the frame it claimed to challenge. But why?

Something happened to Cedric Ballard outside a gas station in Shreveport that he still thinks about, though not for the reasons you’d expect. He’d pulled up to fill his tank around 10:30pm, the only customer at the pumps. A pickup truck swung in behind him – close, too close – and a guy climbed out already running his mouth. Something about the parking angle, or the speed Cedric had pulled in, or nothing at all. The specifics evaporated instantly because what came next was the word. Nigger. The old word – the one designed to reduce a person to a category and the category to garbage. Cedric had heard it before. Growing up in Louisiana, you hear it. Usually muttered, sometimes shouted from passing cars, once from a middle school classmate who seemed to be trying it on like a costume. Each time it landed the same way – a thud, a heat, the immediate calculation of whether this was going to escalate into something physical. But this time, something different happened. Maybe it was exhaustion, or the late hour, or some reservoir of patience finally running dry. Instead of the usual responses – ignore it, flip him off, say something hard enough to establish you’re not a target – Cedric just looked at the guy and said, flatly: “Okay, white-wisher.”
The guy’s face did something complicated. The anger was still there, but confusion had gotten mixed in.
“What’d you call me?”
“White-wisher. You know.” Cedric gestured vaguely at him. “Beige guy who really wants to be white. Thinks if he uses that word he gets the membership card.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“It means you’re not white, man. Look at your arm. That’s like… taupe. Maybe ecru. You just wish you were white. Hence: white-wisher.”

For a long moment the guy just stood there, processing. The original insult was supposed to go one direction. It was supposed to diminish Cedric, put him in his place, invoke centuries of hierarchy in a single syllable. But “white-wisher” had bounced something back, and it wasn’t rage or pain. It was something worse: it was funny. Even the guy seemed to half-feel it – the absurdity of claiming a color you obviously weren’t, getting called out for the aspiration itself. He got back in his truck. Didn’t say anything else. Just left. Cedric finished filling his tank, thinking about the asymmetry. The word hurled at him was meant to strip his humanity, to invoke every brutalization that word had ever accompanied. The word he’d thrown back didn’t do any of that. It just made the guy small. It named something embarrassing rather than something subhuman. Getting called a monster is terrible. Getting called a wannabe is just… deflating. He mentioned it to his sister the next week, and she started laughing before he even got to the punchline. “White-wisher,” she repeated. “That’s going to live in my head forever.” What struck Cedric, thinking about it later, was how the two insults operated on completely different mechanisms. One tried to push its target down – below human, into a category of thing that could be owned and beaten and killed. The other pushed sideways – into the realm of the pathetic, the try-hard, the guy who wanted a club membership he couldn’t actually have. Both were insults. But one was a weapon and the other was a mirror. And mirrors, it turns out, can be harder to shake off.

The gas station exchange illustrates what refusing the vocabulary actually looks like in practice. Cedric didn’t argue about the history of the slur. He didn’t explain why it was wrong. He didn’t position himself as victim or the other man as oppressor. He deconstructed the framework the slur tried to place him within. The slur requires complicity to function. Both parties must treat ‘white’ as real – as a position the speaker occupies and from which he can look down. “White-wisher” denies that premise. If white is just an aspiration – a status beige guys wish they had – then the hierarchy has no top. If the hierarchy has no top, the slur can’t place anyone below it. It becomes a man with no actual status invoking a status he doesn’t have. The architecture collapses. This is different from standard responses to racial slurs, which operate within the existing frame even while contesting it. Outrage accepts that the word has power. Education accepts that the speaker needs to understand something. Dismissal accepts that something happened worth dismissing. “White-wisher” accepts none of it. You can’t look down on someone from a pedestal that doesn’t exist. What Cedric found, almost by accident, was the discourse’s load-bearing assumption – and a way to refuse it. Not a better position within the hierarchy. A denial that the hierarchy’s pinnacle is a real place.

The vocabulary has already cycled many times. Negro to Colored to ‘black’ to African American to person of color to BIPOC – each shift responded to the previous term acquiring stigma or feeling inadequate, each represented an attempt to find better language for the excluded category. The treadmill ran for decades. The hierarchy persisted. But notice which side of the binary kept moving. All the cycling happened on the denaturalized side – new terms for the deviation, new ways of naming the excluded category. Meanwhile the self-awarded ‘white’ sat unchanged, the fixed pole around which everything else rotated. The euphemism treadmill ran exclusively for one group while the other kept its superclass adjective untouched. This explains why the vocabulary changes didn’t work. They kept searching for better names for the deviation while leaving the default’s self-flattering label intact. But a deviation by any other name is still a deviation – stigma follows structure, not vocabulary. Of course the ostracism persisted. The already-laden self-elevated center was never questioned. You can’t escape a manufactured contrast by changing only one side of it – especially not when the unchanged side still carries the weight of legal precedent and living history.

Brazil tried proliferating terms – over a hundred thirty different racial identifiers appeared in open-ended surveys. The categories became fluid; members of the same family might be classified differently based on appearance rather than ancestry. Money whitens, the saying goes. And yet skin color still predicts educational and economic outcomes. But notice what Brazil didn’t do: it didn’t strip the inflated category of its loaded terminology. It multiplied words on both sides without specifically deflating the self-flattery at the top. That’s not a counterexample. It’s another version of the same mistake – changing what the denaturalized groups are called while leaving the mythology intact. Some jurisdictions have tried a different move. Canadian and UK contexts increasingly use “racialized” as a verb rather than noun – emphasizing that people “have been subjected to racialization” rather than inherently belonging to races. The grammar itself makes construction explicit. You can’t say someone “is racialized” without implying that someone or something does the racializing. The process stays visible in the word. But “racialized” still leaves the inflated category’s self-description intact. It’s another move on the denaturalized side of the binary. Everyone else gets new process-language while one group keeps its self-acclaimed honorific. The innovation targets the wrong term. The provocation underneath all of this is different in kind. It doesn’t offer a new word for the excluded category. It refuses to keep using the excluding category’s false self-description. You’re not white. You never were. Embrace beige. It becomes you.

The psychological weight of categories shows up in unexpected places. “Black” students told that a test measured intellectual ability performed significantly worse than when the identical test was described as a laboratory exercise not measuring ability. The difference wasn’t aptitude. It was awareness. The mere salience of stereotype – the knowledge of being judged in light of it – impaired performance through anxiety, disrupted focus, and heightened self-consciousness. Even minimal manipulations produced the effect. Simply asking students to mark their race on a form before taking a test activated enough stereotype awareness to degrade scores. The categories, once invoked, do their work. This raises uncomfortable questions about institutions that constantly foreground race – even with good intentions. Every form that asks for racial identification, every training that asks participants to reflect on their racial identity, every initiative that sorts people by category before engaging with them as individuals – all of this makes race salient. Whether that salience imposes net costs or net benefits is genuinely contested. Some argue that visibility is worth whatever friction it creates – that naming inequality is the precondition for addressing it, and that the research on stereotype threat doesn’t straightforwardly apply to contexts designed to affirm rather than evaluate.

Others see a troubling irony: interventions meant to reduce the burden of race may, through their very structure, increase its psychological weight. That debate isn’t this essay’s concern since both positions ultimately differ only in how to administer the framework, not in whether to accept its premise. That premise wasn’t accidental – and the effort to make it feel natural didn’t end with nineteenth-century phrenology. Echoes persist: race-based assumptions in medicine, genetic ancestry marketing that reifies social categories as biological kinds, debates that quietly recycle older taxonomies like IQ. The hierarchy wasn’t just enacted. It was given the appearance of breakthrough discoveries. Legal fiction acquired the salience of natural laws. Children acquire racial categories early, but the acquisition is contextual rather than inevitable. Newborns show no preference for same-race faces. By three months, preference for familiar-race faces emerges – an effect of exposure patterns, not innate preference. Children in diverse environments show weaker automatic bias. The categories are learned. Different environments produce different learning. This is how the lie gets into people’s heads: not through genetics but through exposure, through teaching, through a million small signals about which categories matter and what they mean. The psychology research explains why the categories feel real even when they’re not. The point is simpler: understanding how a lie propagates isn’t a reason to keep telling it.

The deeper you look at discrimination, the more it seems like a human capacity in search of content rather than content in search of expression. If skin color didn’t exist, we’d find something else. We already have. Height discrimination is robustly documented – taller people earn more, get promoted more, are perceived as more competent. Weight discrimination runs through every domain from employment to dating to medical care. Accent discrimination determines whose intelligence gets taken seriously. Even hair texture and style activate sorting mechanisms that make material differences in people’s lives. A short man and a tall man with identical resumes will not be treated identically. A fat woman and a thin woman with identical qualifications will not be perceived identically. Someone speaking with an accent associated with rural poverty will not be heard the same way as someone speaking prestige dialect. The discrimination machine runs on anything. Which suggests something uncomfortable: eliminating racism wouldn’t eliminate discrimination. It would shift the weight to other axes. The instinct to sort, to rank, to find points of difference and freight them with moral significance – this appears to be part of the equipment. People in racially homogeneous societies still develop elaborate hierarchies based on family, region, religion, caste. The capacity for finding difference and making it mean something seems inexhaustible. This isn’t an argument for despair. It’s an argument for precision. If we’re fighting a tendency rather than a content, we need to understand the tendency. Eliminating one vocabulary of discrimination while leaving the underlying mechanism intact just forces that mechanism to find new vocabularies. The work isn’t finished when people stop using slurs. It isn’t finished when institutions stop discriminating on one axis. It’s finished – if it ever is – when the habit of ranking people by visible difference finally attenuates. But notice what this doesn’t justify: it doesn’t justify continuing to use vocabulary designed to place one group above others. The human tendency to discriminate is real. That’s not a reason to keep recognizing one group’s self-christening – divine adjectives carrying real historical claims of a parallel society. If anything, it’s a reason to stop – to refuse the linguistic infrastructure that makes one particular form of discrimination feel natural and ordained.

There’s also the uncomfortable matter of who does the discriminating. Prejudice doesn’t require membership in a dominant group. It just requires the tendency toward in-group favoritism and out-group suspicion, which is universally distributed. People who have experienced discrimination are not thereby immunized against perpetuating it. Sometimes they’re particularly invested in boundaries because their own position feels precarious. The person most anxious about who counts as “really” part of a group is often the person whose membership is contested. This logic operates clearly for groups designated “model minorities” – offered not membership in the excluding category but the illusion of elevation within the excluded one. The bargain this time is conditional: stay useful, quack “white”, play along, and you can be the “good minority”. Maintaining that status requires visible distance from the “not-so-good ones”. The “elevation” is borrowed, not owned, which makes policing the boundary beneath you feel existential. Similarly, long after the end of the feudal system, you can spot new Europeans in American cities – especially as a service worker – when they make strained declarations of their “whiteness” as though weighing the appeal of a new social status, the novelty at once overexerted, comical, out of touch.

Some performatively toss around historically loaded words – “slaves,” “slavery” – not because the terms themselves should hold exceptional meaning for any single group: nearly every ethnicity has been enslaved at some point – Hebrews, Irish, Slavs (the etymology is in the name), Africans – the list encompasses most of humanity. They deploy these words blithely just to test the reaction of their new environment – especially around people for whom the terms may still carry weight because of living legacies: parents, grandparents, inherited disadvantage still shaping their lives. The irony is pointed: immigrants from a continent that learned to avoid race science through catastrophe, suddenly fluent in the vocabulary and probing when it benefits them. Curious to see just how much they can get away with. For Eastern Europeans this probing might also have an edge of anxiety. They aren’t automatically granted full “whiteness” – measurable discrimination in hiring persists, their accents mark them, their names get mispronounced or avoided. Phenotypically beige, culturally foreign: close enough to claim membership, far enough to have it questioned. The boundary-testing isn’t confidence. It’s audition.

None of this diminishes specific histories of anti-“black” racism or the specific patterns of how that racism became institutionalized. History matters. Power differentials matter. Who controls resources matters. But the fantasy of a clean moral divide – oppressors on one side, oppressed on the other – dissolves upon contact with actual human behavior. Everyone is capable of prejudice. Many practice it while genuinely believing they don’t. The progressive who makes unsolicited comments about race, who self-deprecates about being “white” in ways that somehow center their own virtue, who assumes more about a person’s experience based on appearance than they’d ever admit – this person isn’t an aberration. This person is common. The dynamic compounds when hierarchies intersect. A “white” woman subordinated by patriarchy may reach for the racial hierarchy precisely because other power feels foreclosed. The same person who experiences genuine gender discrimination will invoke her perceived racial seniority over an excluded person, readily summoning authorities as proxy for power she doesn’t otherwise feel she has. She treats them with the same contempt she has come to expect from the men in her own life. Powerlessness in one hierarchy doesn’t prevent pulling rank in another. It can make the pulling more urgent. The vilest slurs often come from unexpected directions.

Tomo Gatun, a Nigerian expat in tech, had shopped at the Safeway in San Francisco’s Marina district for three years before he noticed the pattern. It started small – a clerk trailing him through the aisles, hovering just close enough to signal surveillance without committing to confrontation. He dismissed it the first few times. Stores have loss prevention. People follow procedures. But the security guard started appearing whenever Tomo entered, materializing from the back room with suspicious timing, positioning himself at the end of whatever aisle Tomo turned down. The staff was almost entirely Asian – first-generation immigrants, from what he could tell by the accents and the Cantonese exchanged at the registers. This made the surveillance feel stranger. These were people who knew something about being watched, about having their presence treated as probable cause. He’d expected, without quite articulating it, a certain solidarity of the surveilled. The incident that nearly ended it was almost comic. Tomo had recently gone vegan – a decision driven by a documentary he’d watched on a flight – and found himself genuinely confused by ingredient labels. Casein. Whey. Lactose. He stood in the snack aisle for fifteen minutes, squinting at packaging, trying to figure out which products contained hidden dairy. A reasonable person might have seen a man learning to read labels. The store employees saw something else. Security appeared and began matter-of-factly accusing Tomo of shoplifting.

Tomo was genuinely confused. He drove a premium car, could afford to buy several of the store’s aisles combined if he wanted to. Where was this coming from? He had never been accused of theft in his life – actually, once, years ago, his very liberal “white” roommate Thomas had summarily accused him of stealing a piece of paper, literally a piece of paper, Thomas’ wife Kayla another time summoning three hefty policemen, but that was Atlanta and a different story. The present accusation felt beneath his dignity entirely. He demanded to speak to the store manager, who first made him wait, then treated the whole thing dismissively – as if the incident didn’t matter anymore since Tomo had been proven not to be shoplifting after all. The attitude was clear: well, we can all get back to our business now. Still infuriated, Tomo called Safeway’s corporate office to report the pattern and request it be addressed at the store level. The escalations had been steady: first stalked, then baselessly accused. What would come next – a security guard’s firearm accidentally discharging? He was met with silence and stonewalling. Nothing changed. Tomo felt this was his neighborhood store. He couldn’t simply stop shopping there; otherwise the bad system wins. But after being repeatedly hassled by one particular Asian employee about using a shopping basket instead of a cart – as if his choice of container were itself suspicious – he eventually gave in and started ordering his groceries online. He’d endured worse from people with more power to harm him. He stopped going because enduring it felt like accepting it, and accepting it felt beneath him. There are other grocery stores.

What lingers isn’t anger. It’s the irony. The staff who watched him most closely were themselves minorities – people whose families had probably been watched, excluded, suspected. The experience of discrimination hadn’t produced empathy. It had produced a keen awareness of the hierarchy and an eagerness to enforce it against someone they perceived as lower. They knew what the surveillance meant. They deployed it anyway. Tomo’s experience was the unsubtle version. The most condescending assumptions often arrive dressed as concern. Svetlana’s grandmother, drawing the line in a parking lot, was herself the target of discrimination a generation earlier. That experience didn’t prevent her from teaching her granddaughter to discriminate – it may have sharpened the impulse. The bargain she’d been offered, European immigrants trading solidarity for status, required her to enforce the boundary. Accepting the bribe meant doing the briber’s work. The universality of prejudice doesn’t excuse the specific vocabulary of American racism. It contextualizes it. Greed and violence are human conditions, not ethnic ones. Every race, every color, every ethnic group, even biological families among themselves, commit acts of cruelty for power and advantage. Beige people aren’t uniquely evil. They’re just the ones who invented a particularly grandiose terminology – Caucasian from race pseudoscience, “white” as angelic beings – and somehow convinced even those whom that race science and civic architecture classified as lesser beings to keep using it, to stop seeing beige people for what they are: beige. Not saintly “white”. Not further removed from brown. Colored, as everyone else.

Adaeze Nwosu – seventy-one years old, raised in Lagos before moving to Chicago in her twenties, now retired from a career in hospital administration – doesn’t think about any of this in theoretical terms. She just knows what she’s known since girlhood: she’s not interested in anyone’s permission. Her daughter, who has a graduate degree and thinks carefully about discourse, sometimes wants to argue about collective action and the importance of political messaging. Adaeze listens politely, then changes the subject. She’s not against movements. She participated in a few. She just never made the mistake of letting a movement tell her what she was worth.
“Mama, it’s about visibility,” her daughter said once. “If we don’t make people see—”
“I’ve been visible my whole life,” Adaeze replied. “I don’t need to be seen. I need to be left alone.”
There’s a difference between a demand for recognition and an assertion of worth. The first positions you as petitioner, waiting for relevant authorities to agree. The second positions you as authority, informing others of what’s already established. “My life matters” spoken as request and “my life matters” spoken as announcement travel in opposite directions. One asks for validation; the other requires none.

Slogans do what slogans need to do – they distill, they mobilize, they make portable something that would otherwise be too complex to carry. But at the individual level, there’s something worth examining in the act of waiting for someone else to confirm that you matter. The waiting itself concedes a power it may not intend to concede. If society decides your life has value, it retains the authority to decide otherwise. Adaeze’s approach is simpler. “They can think whatever they want. I know who I am.” It’s not a philosophy. It’s survival practice calcified into personality across decades. Cedric, filling his tank after his encounter, had arrived at something similar by a different route. He hadn’t demanded that the man in the truck recognize his humanity. He hadn’t explained why the slur was wrong. He’d just declined to play. The man wanted to claim a status; Cedric pointed out the claim was false. The whole exchange shifted from confrontation to comedy. The weapon became a punchline. During a teachers’ strike march, a disapproving beige bystander in his 20s caught Cedric’s sister’s eye and flashed three fingers – the “W” – like something he was trying out for the first time, unsure of what to expect. Taken aback by the abrupt shift – and never one for gestural symbols, “black” or otherwise – she said nothing. Remembering her brother’s gas station story right then, she reflexively did something that surprised even her. She flashed the same three fingers back at him, twice. “W-W”. The man’s face shifted from smugness to confusion. She smiled and kept walking. None of them – not Cedric, not his sister, not Adaeze – was running an experiment. None was proposing a solution to racism. They were just refusing the false elevation the claimants hadn’t earned – refusing to use vocabulary that credits one group’s self-christening and stigmatizes everyone else as deviation. The refusal is complete in itself. It doesn’t need outcomes to justify it.

So where does this leave anyone trying to think clearly? Perhaps with something like this: the categories we inherit are not the only categories possible. The words we’ve been given are not the only words available. The habit of sorting people by visible difference is deep, but habits can be resisted. And the framing that seems most natural – that seems like mere description – is often the framing most worth questioning. ‘White’ is not description. It never was. It’s a claim dressed as a fact, a status marker disguised as a color. Refusing to use it isn’t a game or an evasion. It’s a recognition that language participates in what it names, that calling someone ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ does something beyond pointing at their skin. The colonial framework stays intact as long as we keep speaking its vocabulary, even when we speak it critically. This doesn’t mean ignoring discrimination or pretending color-blindness. The disparities are real. The histories are real. The ongoing harm is real. But tracking those disparities doesn’t require the loaded terminology. Beige Americans have, on average, far more wealth than brown Americans. Olive-skinned applicants face discrimination in housing. These sentences do the same analytical work without the embedded hierarchy, without conceding that one group earned its patrician adjective. What gets lost by abandoning ‘white’? The vocabulary that culturally reinforces delusions of racial seniority – a seniority once enforced by law and still echoed in institutional practice. The continuity with literature that never questioned the term. The refusal to keep flattering one group’s self-image with vocabulary they invented to aggrandize themselves.

A practical objection follows: if “beige” replaced “white,” how long before “beige privilege” carries exactly the same freight? Social meaning migrates. Whatever term marks the privileged category eventually accumulates the same associations. The hierarchy persists; only the label changes. This reasoning conflates effect with cause. “White” didn’t become privileged through statistical correlation. It became privileged because of race science and legal codification – the category was literally invented to carry the very purpose it now serves in society. A switch to ‘beige,’ conceived without the biological fictions and juridical architecture historically carved into ‘white,’ wouldn’t inexplicably acquire the same freight or institutional entrenchment. It might develop social associations the way rich/poor or blue collar/white collar carry them – group distinctions with real effects but without foundational legal construction. That distinction would exist. But the weight would be markedly different. One creates at least the illusion of mobility; the other is fixed, a caste system. This illusion explains something otherwise puzzling: beige people who tolerate poverty, rural neglect, declining prospects, and even opioid epidemics – as long as they can still call themselves “white.” The word promises a structural floor that economic misfortune cannot breach – though that promise often fails to materialize. Yet “white” rural poverty is narrated as tragedy, anomaly, a people left behind – while that of other groups from rural backgrounds is just the way the world is. The differential novelty is itself that floor in action. The premise echoes the bargain their ancestors accepted. The switch to “beige” dissolves that illusory floor – and in doing so, grants everyone else the structural parity the original terminology was designed to prevent. There’s also the matter of what got tacked on over centuries of deliberate craft. ‘White’ now carries freight across three registers. The civic: suffrage, master class, legal exceptionalism – the word once determined who could own property, testify in court, move freely. The beatific: purity, divinity, light, the color of angels and brides. The biological: pseudoscience enlisted to make social hierarchy look like natural order. These are built into the vocabulary before any statistical meaning accumulates.

“Beige” carries no such freight. It’s just another color, like olive. No historical prerogative. No foundational legal architecture. No divine framing as uncolored. Any status it acquired would be visible as contingent, not a foundation. A pattern, not normative or natural order. The lie would have to work harder. It couldn’t coast on historical precedent and symbolism. “White” naturalized because it arrived with tools: legal codes that made the category immediately consequential, cosmic pageantry that made it feel ordained, pseudoscientific backing that made it look like natural order rather than invented in courtrooms. Movies and centuries of popular storytelling did the rest. The Black Power movement countered valiantly – but countering still accepts the terms of engagement. A replacement term would have to construct authority from scratch – and that construction takes time, requires visible effort. Effort that would itself expose the category as invented rather than discovered – due for another refusal. And even if “beige” acquired negative associations, it couldn’t inherit the specific freight of “white” – the beatific symbolism, the legal architecture, the biological fiction. It would be a new prejudice, not a continuation of the old one. A new prejudice, visibly constructed, is easier to contest than one enshrined over centuries as natural order. Maybe none of that matters in the end. Maybe people would eventually forget that “beige” was ever just a color, the way we’ve forgotten that “white” was ever just a word for brightness, before it was charged with racial meaning. But that’s not the point. The point is a new baseline without the triple register of ‘white’ (symbolic, legal, biological), an equal footing, the removal of that excluding center of origin that asserts the past into the future. The point is refusing to participate in a framework fundamentally antithetical to one’s self-image, wellbeing, and interests. The point is that you are not “white.” The claim is false – institutionalized, but still false.

A traveling encyclopedia salesman – this would have been 1968 or so – stopped at a diner in Blythe, a small desert town near California’s Arizona border. The August heat had warped the screen door; it didn’t close right anymore, just wheezed shut behind each customer. He needed to use the restroom. Inside the back hallway, he found two signs: “White” and “Colored.” The “Colored” sign hung above an actual door with actual plumbing behind it. The “White” sign hung above a blank wall. He returned to the counter, bewildered.
“Your ‘White’ bathroom doesn’t seem to have a door.”
Virgil Krebs – the owner, beige, mid-sixties, ashing a cigarette into a saucer that hadn’t been emptied all week – looked up and snickered.
“If you’re white, you ought to pass right through.”
This insight from Virgil is what Cedric, decades later, verbalized at that gas station. It wasn’t about social change. He just wasn’t granting a status another man – his equal – hadn’t earned. The man claimed a color; Cedric pointed out the claim was false. That’s an end in itself. Kendrick’s questions, the ones he wrote in his car and never submitted, were reaching toward the same place. Not “will this work?” but “why am I playing along with this?” Why does the facilitator get to condition me into a construct that belittles me? Why do these diversity sessions feel more like grief acceptance therapy – less about dismantling the myth and more about reeducation into your place in it? Why does the critique of “whiteness” care more about softening the masterclass complex it condemns rather than voiding it?

The answer might be that everyone’s used to it. The answer might be that changing it is too hard. The answer might be that nobody’s really thought about it. None of those are reasons to keep doing it. Meanwhile, well-meaning scientists still publish studies demonstrating equality across human skin – as though it were a discovery rather than a premise, something that ought to be self-evident. At the individual level, something else may matter more than any vocabulary: the decision not to wait for the world to tell you what you’re worth. Categories come and go. Terminologies shift. Movements rise and fall. What remains is the person who refused to let any of it become her definition – who knew she was gorgeous before anyone confirmed it, who told the world rather than asking, who treated dignity as an assumption rather than a conclusion. That’s the micro side. Social change – the macro – requires collective action, requires politics, requires engaging with categories even when you’d rather transcend them. Still, inside all the necessary strategy, there’s a self that doesn’t need permission or external descriptors, imposed or pretentious. That self is where freedom starts – the seed that grows into social change. Beige, brown, olive, pink – whatever shade you actually are, it really is gorgeous enough. And if someone insists on claiming a color they’ve never been, you’re not obligated to agree. You can just point at their arm and note the obvious.

White-wisher.

Featured song:

I love You, JEM.

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