I feel like this statement is an outgrowth of privilege discourse.

A white-passing person benefits from white privilege, sure.

But structurally? They don’t have the same average generational wealth. The connections. The *accumulated* advantage of generations

There’s a ton of white-passing Natives who literally grew up on reservations. Who still live on reservations! You really gonna call them white? Whiteness is more than how you, personally, are visually perceived, in the present moment.

What about someone’s name? On their resume? A white-passing Black person named Deondra Jackson is still gonna face hiring discrimination before they even see her face.

They’re still more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods that are militantly policed, that are underserved. They’re more likely to face voting rights violations.

And whiteness, in America, isn’t just phenotype. A white stranger looks at you and thinks you’re white? Sure, that has benefits. When they get to know you and your background? The attitude can change real fast.

A white-passing person, unless they choose to *live as white* 24/7, erase any trace of non-whiteness, has the most tenuous and revocable type of whiteness that is the least valuable as well. It doesn’t erase generational trauma, accrued disadvantage, even present discrimination

Also like, when phenotypic white-passing is often the result of literal cultural genocide and campaigns of rape...why are you facilitating the exact narrative that is still used to this day to erase the existence of indigenous people? This is literally an ongoing problem

Indigenous people have talked about this. This isn’t new. This is a major rhetorical weapon against indigenous people all over the world, particularly in North America and Oceania.

Anyway. Colorism is real, a basis for material discrimination. White-passing does have advantages. But race isn’t and has never been about phenotype alone. That’s a myth.

If race were just about phenotype this country wouldn’t have had people who were 1/32 Black held in literal chattel slavery by their fathers who raped their mothers. Race was never founded on phenotype. That is a myth that minimizes and mystifies race-thinking and racism

It’s ahistorical and it isn’t accurate in the present either