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A brief history of whiteness

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This is a brief version of this history recounted in American Freedom, American Slavery by Edmund S. Morgan. He covers the origin of whiteness in the 1600's, the deal with the devil made by working class whites who chose whiteness over wage-worker solidarity, and then takes us through present day debates around immigration and New Orleans. This is anti-racist essayist and activist Tim Wise, leveraging his white privilege to directly assault the structure of racism in our society:



Here's the full version, which starts with this introduction (full PDF transcript):
I want to thank all of you for coming out. I want to start off by telling you that I think it is probably a good idea when somebody stands in front of you and is proclaimed by virtue of their bio and by virtue of their curriculum vitae, their resume, that part of which is read to you, by way of their nice comments made of them by others, proclaim to be an expert. Ask yourself why it is that you are listening to that person and not somebody else. In this culture, we are lead to believe that if someone stands before you, a proclaimed expert, that it must be that they are the brightest bulbs in the box – that they know something that the other people don’t know.

I am not standing in front of you, and you are not listening to me, because I am the most informed person in the country on racism or white privilege, not because I am the best speaker on the subject. I am fairly good, and I intend to demonstrate that to you amply in the next hour. It isn’t because I am the best writer on the subject, though I am ok with that as well. It is instead because I, and I know this, fit the aesthetic that is needed on too many campuses and too many communities around the country in order to come in and give this talk.
Nothing that I am going to say tonight, or at least very little, originated in my head. Nothing that I am going to say tonight, or at least very little, is in fact new. Almost every single thing that I am going to say this evening is wisdom that has been shared with me either patiently, or sometimes not so patiently, by people of color who have in almost every instance forgotten more about the subjects of racism and white privilege since breakfast yesterday than I will likely ever know, and yet they will not be asked to give eighty five engagements around the country this year or next on this subject. 

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