Peace Be unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.
Check out An Open Letter to "White Anti-Racists" by Tamara K. Nopper.
I found the following extracts made for interesting reading:
Whiteness is a social and political construct rooted in white supremacy. White supremacy is a structure and system of beliefs rooted in European and US imperialism in which certain racialized bodies (non-white) are selected for premature negation whether through cultural, physical, psychological genocide, containment or other forms of social death. White supremacy is at the heart of the US social system and civil society. In short, white supremacy is not just a series of practices or privilege, but a larger social structure and system of domination that overly-values and rewards those who are racialized as white. The rest of us are constructed as undeserving to be considered human, although there is significant variation within non-white populations of how our bodies are encoded, treated and (de)valued.
whiteness is a structure of domination embedded in our social relations, institutions, discourses, and practices. Don't tell me you're not white but then when we go out in the street and the police don't bother you or people don't ask you if you're a prostitute, or if people don't follow you and touch you at will, act like that does not make a difference in our lives. Basically, you can't talk, or merely "unlearn" whiteness, as all of these annoying trainings for white people to "unlearn" racism will have you think.
According to Nopper, militant white abolitionist, John Brown, came to realise that "moral persuasion alone would not solve racial problems." Thus, if people classified as 'white' are serious about replacing White Supremacy (racism) with justice then
[they] cannot talk or just think through whiteness and structures of white supremacy. They must be committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so), dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do [emphasis added].
However, from an Islamic counter-racist perspective, there is a problem with her position in that it involves the (standard) conflation of Racism (White Supremacism) with other alleged structures of domination - "classism, homophobia and heterosexism".
That said, it's an insightful piece which contributes to blowing the whistle on so-called "white anti-racism."
Peace
