The white mask

The white thinking to justify an alleged hierarchy among men

The skin, a thin fabric, a few millimeters that mark a border, a periphery that you carry on you and marks lives and destinies. The former footballer Lilian Thuram is convinced of this, significantly titled his book Il Pensiero bianco. You are not born white, you become one.

According to Thuram there is a right skin and a wrong one, there is a normal color and there are all the others. “I discovered I was black when I was 9 when I arrived in France. White thinking is a concept, it's not reality, nobody is white. My son says I'm not black, I'm brown so I ask him what color are your classmates? He replies I'm pink. It is a hierarchy of the skin created «From thought. We think in a way that we are not aware of [...]».

«For too long - continues Thuram - when we talk about racism, we focus on discriminated people, while I argue that we should direct our interest to people who, sometimes without wanting or knowing it, benefit from these discriminations. Questioning a category that is never questioned: the white category. You are not born white, you make it. Isn't becoming white like becoming a man, growing up thinking of yourself as dominant? Who built a discourse putting white people at the top of the "human hierarchy"? Whoever is in a dominant position is so certain that he feels right, always at the center, always in his place, that he ends up perceiving himself and taking himself as the norm.

But be careful, white thinking is not exclusively the thinking of white people. Even non-whites have internalized it. The white mask, as explained by Frantz Fanon (editor's note 1925-1961, Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist, considered one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century on the issues of race and racism), can be worn by both whites and non-whites. White thinking is not a question of skin pigmentation, it is a way of being in the world [...].

White thinking is an economic construction of the world. We need - concludes Thuram - to make a considerable effort to get rid of all the masks that we have been forced to wear, and even when we succeed, we run the risk of not being understood, because society does not love free spirits. But it is free spirits who change societies. Indifference and neutrality are no longer possible, to defend the only identity that matters, the human one". There are always facts that we want not to see and not know: the skin that protects us has become a barrier with the world, but also the place that allows us to meet it».

Fabrizio Floris

NP Novembre 2022