If you ask one of our country’s preeminent scholars on race, there’s a huge problem with how we think about whiteness. The issue? We don’t think about it. Not really.
“Whiteness is on a toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness’ and ‘racist hatred,’” historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote recently. Clearly, it’s more than that. So what is it, exactly?
In his new documentary for MTV’s Look Different initiative, which aims to tackle racial, gender and anti-LGBT bias, immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas travels around the country asking white millennials to do something. According to MTV’s own polling, that “something” doesn’t happen very often: thinking about race, and moreover, thinking about whiteness.
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