When challenging whiteness as the foundation of racial categories, it is essential to understand the ideology of race. Racism bases its whiteness concepts, which is a fiction that constantly shifts boundaries separating the non-whites and the whites. Like color, blackness and whiteness are social constructs the human beings apply even though it has no universal validity. The power of whiteness manifest in different ways in which the white skin people have transformed their behavior in social, political, economic, and cultural aspects (McIntosh, 1988). The norms, values, and white culture have become normative natural, and this group becomes the reference point to other cultures and groups. If the individual fails to meet the standards of the white culture, they are often referred to as inferior.
Many believe that whites should not explain how their culture works because their culture is dominant and sets the norms for how other people live and interact. Whiteness is a complex, multidimensional, systematic, and systemic component that people construct socially and politically. Since people contract it over time, whiteness is, therefore, a learned behavior. The term whiteness does not technically mean or refer to skin color, but it is the ideology that bases its principles on the beliefs, values, habits, and attitudes. The ideology and its principles are unequal distribution of privileges and power, basing it on the skin color of the people.
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Whiteness also represents the power position where the powerful determines the categories and decides who is white and who is not in society. Whiteness shapes how white people view themselves and others and places them on structural advantage where their cultural norms and practices go unquestioned. The race is a category that people construct socially and has a powerful meaning to skin color perception.
Reference
McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.
