"Introduction", "Possessive Investment"

By inverting the reporter's question, Wright called attention to its hidden assumptions-that racial polariza- tion comes from the existence of blacks rather than from the behavior of whites, that black people are a "problem" for whites rather than fellow citizens entitled to justice, and that unless otherwise specified, "Americans" means whites. In this passage from "Possessive Investment in whiteness" it shows the pre-civil rights movement mentality of blacks existance being the problem instead of equal citizens. this kind of thinking comes from the structures of inequality that stem from the idea of whiteness. in effect this kind of Idealism makes it impossible for a person to know the truth about systems of oppression because they are taught from a young age that people are to blame, not the invisible structure.4 To identify, analyze, and oppose the destructive consequences of whiteness, we need what Walter Benjamin called "presence of mind." Benjamin wrote that people visit fortune-tellers not so much out of a desire to know the future but rather out of a fear of not noticing some important aspect of the present. The aspect we have been missing for much to long is the seemingly unnamed "whiteness".