Get specific. Jamelle Bouie explains, responding to Jim Antle:
Now, to be fair, Antle isn’t arguing that white male judges should be able to celebrate (I’ve probably used that word too much for one post) their whiteness and maleness. No, he’s arguing that multiculturalism is unfair insofar that it permits a hispanic woman or a black man to express pride in their “hispanicness” or “blackness,” but it expressly forbids a white person from expressing pride in their “whiteness.” What Antler – and conservatives more generally – miss is that there is a very good reason for this; namely, there is no such thing as whiteness. I don’t need to go into an in-depth discussion of whiteness as a social construct (I’m sure that most of you all are familiar enough with it), but it suffices to say that whiteness is a social construct and not an ethnic identity in the same way that being an Italian is. Which segues nicely into my second point: conservative’s complaints notwithstanding, it is perfectly acceptable for an Italian-American to celebrate her Italian heritage, a Russian-American to celebrate her Russian heritage, or an Irish/German/Anglo-American to make note of – and I guess “celebrate” – her mixed heritage. In fact, we already have a holiday devoted to (superficially) extolling the virtues of the Irish, who last I checked, were white people!
This point has been made before, but it bears repeating. The problem is some white people have come to think of themselves as simply “white” with all the potentially problematic tribalism that can come with that. We mostly focus on the effects of “whiteness” on non-whites, but it’s very clear that white people lose something very dear in the process of becoming simply “white.”
— A. Serwer
