Whiteness is a moral choice, not a fixed identity.

Evidence

This was one of the lessons I learned digging through the rubble Baldwin left behind. We don’t have to save white people. We just have to keep working to build a better world where the color of one’s skin matters little in the quality of life one chooses to live. Baldwin’s words can sound harsh, as if he is throwing away millions of Americans and declaring them irrelevant to the life and future of our democracy. It’s easy to read him that way, and sometimes, when his rage boils, he might actually mean it. But, in the end, he wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on ugly things. People can, if they want to, choose to be better. We need only build a world where that choice can be made with relative ease. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 594

Categorization

• SEED: Directly serves the reader’s goal of defending late Balwin: reframes his apparent ‘throwing away white people’ as an invitation to moral choice, not dismissal.
• XREF: connects to: Irish ascension to whiteness resulted from strategic choice, not inevitability — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 35; Racial confrontation is necessary for white Christians’ own integrity, not altruism. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 79