“In the United States, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” James Donald Vance, the current Vice President of the United States, offered this incredibly ahistorical and deceitful statement as part of his closing speech at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21. It was “racial gaslighting.”
White-body supremacy and gaslighting intertwine as white supremacy uses gaslighting—distorting reality (e.g., “post- racial”), denying experiences, and blaming victims—as a tool to maintain power by making marginalized people groups doubt their perceptions of systemic racism, while elevating whiteness as the norm, normalizing oppression, and silencing resistance through narrative control and epistemic violence. Racial gaslighting pathologizes resistance, labeling persons who speak out against racism as “crazy,” “playing the race card,” or “making everything about race,” which is an attempt to invalidate their lived experience. Instead, experiences of racism are treated as isolated incidents or worse still, exaggerations.
By obscuring reality, African Americans, while validly reacting to racial antagonism and abuse, which are a part of the tactics of white supremacist terrorism, are subjected to their knowledge and credibility being undermined. An epistemic injustice, these persons might begin to doubt their understanding of their world and what they know to be true, which leads to self-silencing.
But do you know what is true? History.
African Americans have endured 246 years of chattel slavery (1619-1865), 99 years of Jim Crow laws (1865-1964), 86 years of documented lynchings (1882-1986), and presently, mass incarceration and police brutality. Because America would rather we forget, it bears repeating.
America has a long and unashamed history of violence against African Americans, racialized as black by European Americans, proud to be white. “White pride” was coined in 1966 by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, in response to the slogan, “Black power,” a political and social movement meant to emphasize cultural pride, self-sufficiency and self-determination in persons of African descent. In response, the “Black is Beautiful” campaign, which evolved from the Negritude movement—which emphasized cultural pride and individuation in critique of colonialism—was birthed and expanded upon the idea, challenging Eurocentric beauty standards through Afrocentric aesthetics like natural hair and African fashion.
On the contrary, white pride is used by white nationalist, Neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations to express racist beliefs. The statement is directly linked to those who believe in the so-called superiority of those who re-created themselves as white people as detailed in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class and Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White by David Roediger. Because white is a color—not a country of origin.
Instead, Charles W. Mills teaches us in The Racial Contract: “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” He continues, “You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory.”
Yet, here is the Vice President of the United States, who many believe is testing the waters for a presidential run in 2028, saying, “In the United States, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
What an odd declaration when there are pictures of thousands of European Americans, men, women and children, standing beside the lynched, mutilated and oftentimes charred bodies of African Americans. They are smiling in those pictures, proud of their work and witness.
What an interesting statement considering the thousands of black and white photographs of European Americans, men, women and children, attacking African American boys and girls on their way to school. They did not hide their faces because they were proud of their actions.
What a manipulative maneuver since there is black and white video footage of African Americans being beaten by police officers on foot and horseback, bloodied, bitten by police dogs, knocked down the street due to the sheer force of water hoses turned on their bodies. Those officers aren’t wearing any masks or sheets.
What a disturbing thing to say when America watched an unarmed George Perry Floyd Jr. be choked to death on camera and an unarmed Ahmaud Arbery be stalked and shot to death in his own neighborhood. But this is “the myth of white victimhood,” the belief that they are under attack and being discriminated against, all while benefiting from white privilege.
This is how the story goes and the fight for white-body supremacy continues: outright lies and denial, minimizing and/ or trivializing, questioning memory, shifting blame, and feigning ignorance so as not to be held accountable. You’ve heard this story before, so interrupt Vance before he gets started.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
