It has become common in Social Justice circles to talk about “decentring whiteness”, for example in this book or this article. I think decentring whiteness is a great idea – but too many interventions done in its name serve to do the exact opposite.

First consider the term “people of colour”. The most common argument made for using this term instead of “non-white” is that “non-white” defines that “non-white” “necessarily defines people by a negative”, as Rachelle Hampton proclaims in Slate – it defines people by what they are not. That’s true, of course. But so does “people of colour”! It just hides that negation behind a silly prettified euphemism. The category named by “people of colour” is exactly the same as that named by “non-white” – namely, of course, people who are not white. The only thing that makes “people of colour” “people of colour” is that negation, that fact of not being white. It defines people by a negative that it tries to hide. By hiding the way it centres, it makes it that much harder to actually decentre whiteness.

Just like “non-white”, the term “people of colour” makes everything about whiteness by presuming the most fundamental distinction is the one between white people and everybody else. But “people of colour” goes a step further toward centring whiteness, because it reifies non-whiteness: it pretends that non-whiteness is a thing, rather than the negation of a thing. By not admitting that it is a merely negative term, it makes the world’s seven billion non-white people appear to all have something in common more than that bare negative fact of not being among its one billion white people. In that assertion of commonness, it centres whiteness far more: it implies that the fact of being non-white is a something rather than a negation, even though a negation is all it actually is. It focuses our attention on non-whiteness more than it needs to be. It leads to situations like the colleague of mine who, ten years ago, asked me “Don’t you feel a special solidarity with black people?” and couldn’t accept it when I responded “No more than a white person would”: this white person just could not handle the idea that there were more important distinctions than the one between white-like-her and not-white-like-her.

It doesn’t have to be like that! If you really want to decentre whiteness, then do the opposite of what “people of colour” does. That is, stop acting like the primary marker dividing people up is whether they’re white or whether they’re not. Because most of the time it isn’t. A large number of conflicts in the world, and even the US, are among non-white groups, rather than between whites and non-whites. It has always been that way, and that shouldn’t be a surprise – not given the fact that white people are, and always have been, a small minority of the human species.

In a contemporary American context, if you’re serious about “decentring whiteness”, then you should pay full attention to the role of Asians in debates over affirmative action. The whole idea of racially based affirmative action is to benefit racial groups that would otherwise do badly at the expense of those that would otherwise do well. And Asians are among those who would otherwise do well. The Asians who oppose affirmative action know that white people also would otherwise do well, and they don’t care – because that’s what it means to actually decentre whiteness. White people don’t figure in their calculation! Those Asians correctly see that a necessarily limited pool of spoils is being divided in ways that give more to black people at the expense of giving less to Asians. Now there is a reasonable case to be made that that’s a good thing! You can quite reasonably say that black people need the help and Asians don’t, so that that redistribution from white and Asian to black is the kind of thing a good society needs to do. But you have to actually make that case, with open eyes. If you don’t, what you are doing is exactly to centre whiteness (alongside blackness): you pretend that this only hurts privileged white people, and when non-white people point out that they have that privilege and therefore that hurt as well, your response is “lalalalala I can’t hear you.”

Asians typically know well that they don’t have the same interests as black people, any more than they have the same interests as white people. Asian-Americans who were conscious in 1992 remember that, even though it was white cops’ actions that triggered the Los Angeles riots, the victims of those riots were Korean, because they were the ones living near the African-American rioters. Conversely, a black Caribbean-American friend tells me his father told him to watch out less for white people and more for Indians and Chinese – the main competitors in the father’s country. None of this is to say any of these behaviours are good – only to point out what should be obvious, that Asian and black people regularly look out for their own interests as they see them, just as white people do, and there are plenty of contexts where those interests are not defined against white people’s.

It is a good thing to decentre whiteness, because the very idea of whiteness is stupid, a fiction. But in the US context at least, what put whiteness in the centre was the white/black opposition on which American slavery and segregation were built for centuries. Those of us whose parents came in later are not tied to that opposition. Unlike monochrome Americans, we naturally decentre whiteness – as we also decentre blackness.

You want to decentre whiteness? Great! You can start with the history: recognize how for a century Japan engaged in colonialism just like Europe did. Before that, recognize how the Muslim Mughals and Turks conquered an India that itself contained a caste hierarchy at least as oppressive as American segregation. Recognize how indigenous American groups fought wars against each other. Recognize how the reason African slaves could be bought and taken by Europeans as slaves to the New World in the first place is that they were enslaved and sold by other Africans.

In short, recognize that there is nothing special about the way white people have treated other people in horrible and barbaric ways. Humans are shit to other humans, and they always have been. White people just did it more effectively, and therefore at larger scale, than the rest of us did – and that only in recent centuries. (Genghis Khan committed far more atrocities than any European of his era.) Once you do recognize that, that’s when white people stop being the stars of the story – which, in a world where they have always been a minority, is exactly as it should be.

The worst way of all to keep whiteness at the centre of everything is to use “whiteness” or “white supremacy” as shorthand for everything you don’t like, like Tema Okun’s infamous farcical article that includes perfectionism, objectivity and the “right to comfort” in that category. It’s more than a little insulting to my Indian family when a white person tells us that white people invented objectivity. I find it really hard to read that piece without getting the distinct impression that Tema Okun has never actually met a non-white person.

Such binaries of white villain/coloured victim – which would be well described as white exceptionalism – give white people a centrality that they do not deserve. The problem is not just that they treat white people as comic-book villains (though they do that); more insidiously, they treat the rest of us as noble savages. It makes us look like the poor innocent childlike victims who did everything in Eden-like sweetness and light until the mean old white people came along and ruined everything – a view whose patronizing quality is plenty insulting to us in its own right.

Indeed, it seems to me that the division of the world between white people and “people of colour” is itself an example of the phenomenon that Edward Said long ago called Orientalism. Orientalism, in Said’s sense, builds up a world where only whites/Europeans have agency; the fundamental distinction is between them and The Other. The Other, the “people of colour”, is a homogeneous mass among which the distinctions are not worthy of any serious consideration; more fundamentally, the we, the agent, is the white people. History, politics, life are all things that white people do to people of colour, things that the West does to the East. That White Man’s Burden has been alive and well in the Social Justice movement. While their view denigrates white people in moral terms, it is even more flattering to white people in practical terms: white people are stronger, more powerful, more capable than those sad, weak, stupid “people of colour”, who are all lumped together as the passive recipients of white agency. Freddie deBoer is quite right to say:

I am quite certain that almost anyone would rather be the empowered villain than the powerless, blameless nobody. And that’s the role that this narrative – which, like all liberal narratives, is primarily espoused by white people – casts us [white people] as.

deBoer just as rightly put it this way: “in the liberal mind of 2021, white people do, people of color are done to.” He noted how Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility became a bestseller after the George Floyd killing: even though an Asian cop abetted the black man’s slaying, white people’s response to the killing of a black person was to buy a book about whiteness by a white person. It’s not 2021 anymore, but five years later, racial activists still talk as if “people of colour” are all more or less the same.

Many years ago I attended a workshop on portrayals of Muslims in the media, and the one thing that has stuck with me from it is this claim: “We don’t want positive portrayals of Muslims! We want complex portrayals.” As far as I’m concerned, that claim is exactly right, and not just about Muslims. Human beings, white and black and everything else, are human beings – and that means we are all prone to all the horrible behaviours that human beings are prone to. Those behaviours are not about whiteness, they’re about being human. Recognizing that fact, and the way that it plays out in history and society and politics among people of all colours, is how you really decentre whiteness.