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In “An Immigrant’s Plea: Don’t Convert to Whiteness,” Johann N. Neem, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, put his finger on why this bothers me so much. He wrote that, “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.” Neem says of his progressive white friends, “Sometimes they’ll attribute something to whiteness and I’ll think, I’m not white and I believe that or do that. That’s just American. I’ve noticed a lot of the things they now think of as ‘white’ are things we used to share.” And while those friends intend to be inclusive, their “minding of racial borders [makes] it more difficult for immigrants…to be part of the nation” and “essentializes people’s culture by their racial category.”Share
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