Alittle more than a century ago, in hisessay
<https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Du_Bois_White_Folk.pdf>The
Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois
proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable
insights about the racial identity we call white: “The discovery of
personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a
nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”
Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called
the “new religion of whiteness” – a religion founded on the dogma that
“of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously
better than brownness and tan” – would have a profound effect on the way
historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity.
In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like
whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du
Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races
reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the
nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural
traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most
prized by modern societies.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
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