Whiteness is structurally fragile, needing constant self-assertion to sustain its privilege

Evidence

Even as whiteness projects itself, and is projected and experienced, as powerful, as awe-inspiring and awesome, cracks cut to its foundations. Its insecurities speak to its unsurety about its sources and extensions of its power(s), about the easiness of its pollution (just a drop here and there of the oily or dark stuff and there it goes in flames), about its potential implosiveness. At once arrogant and aggressive, whiteness sees itself readily undercut and undermined by the force and fraud of its otherness, easily threatened by the guile of those out to get it but also by the mix of its own lack of agility and responsiveness in the face of challenges from else-where and other-wise. It requires self-proclaimed and -promoting privilege to sustain its privilege, self-declaration to convince itself and others of its elevation, self-assertion in the face of threats to its being and wellbeing, of pushing back from below. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1112

Even as whiteness projects itself, and is projected and experienced, as powerful, as awe-inspiring and awesome, cracks cut to its foundations. Its insecurities speak to its unsurety about its sources and extensions of its power(s), about the easiness of its pollution (just a drop here and there of the oily or dark stuff and there it goes in flames), about its potential implosiveness. At once arrogant and aggressive, whiteness sees itself readily undercut and undermined by the force and fraud of its otherness, easily threatened by the guile of those out to get it but also by the mix of its own lack of agility and responsiveness in the face of challenges from else-where and other-wise. It requires self-proclaimed and -promoting privilege to sustain its privilege, self-declaration to convince itself and others of its elevation, self-assertion in the face of threats to its being and wellbeing, of pushing back from below. Its belonging in any place is a mix of its claim to that place and its longing to sustain itself in and at the head of the place it claims. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1112

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-level treatment of whiteness as an insecure, performative structure rather than a settled dominance — resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Echoes the performative/insecure-dominance themes of Things Fall Apart and connects to racial-neoliberalism framing from earlier chapters of this same book. — connects to: Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 400; Whiteness operates through perceptual paradox, invisible and normative simultaneously — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 742; Whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked for non-Western groups — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 48 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1112