Skip to main content

Everyday Jealousy, People of Colour Excellence, and the Specter of White Mediocrity

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke delivering her powerful performance of haka

The radiant leadership of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a young Māori MP, exposes the fragility of whiteness in Aotearoa, as white supremacist frameworks respond with envy to her unapologetic advocacy for tino rangatiratanga. The response of the infrastructure of whiteness to her brilliance also exposes something else, the deep undercurrent of jealousy that forms the ecosystem of white fragility.

Jealousy, that visceral pang of resentment, is a quiet undercurrent in the everyday life of settler colonialism. 

It festers in mundane interactions, in workplaces, academic halls, and social media feeds, often cloaked in civility or passive aggression. Whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture, propped up as universal, continually deploys jealousy under the performance of civility.

Jealousy works as an everyday tool for the expression of white rage at the excellence of people of color. 

An excellent public speaker of color, just look at the white rage. 

An excellent artist of color, examine the white anger. 

An excellent poet of color, just look at the number of white supremacist responses on social media platforms that express outrage. The outrage is multiplied manifold if the person of color is authentic and confident in their excellence. The outrage is magnified exponentially if the person of color expresses pride in her culture through their performance.

When we peel back its layers, we find this culture of jealousy is entangled with power, privilege, and the unremarkable yet pervasive force of white mediocrity—a phenomenon that thrives not on excellence but on systemic advantage, stoking envy in its wake.

The rage and jealousy of whiteness targeting the excellence of people of color stem from a collision of systemic power dynamics and fragile privilege. Whiteness, as a structure, thrives on the myth of superiority, propped up by historical and institutional advantages that often reward mediocrity among white individuals while demanding exceptionalism from people of color. When people of color achieve excellence—through brilliance, resilience, or sheer defiance of systemic barriers—it disrupts this myth. Their success exposes the unearned nature of white privilege, revealing that the playing field was never level.

This disruption provokes rage because it threatens the status quo. Excellence from people of color challenges the narrative that whiteness inherently equates to merit. 

It forces a confrontation with the reality that many white individuals have coasted on systemic advantages—networks, access, or lowered expectations—rather than superior ability. Jealousy emerges as a defensive response, a way to deflect the discomfort of being outshone by those the system deems "lesser." Instead of introspection, this jealousy often manifests as hostility: microaggressions, gatekeeping, or outright sabotage. 

Particularly salient here is the response of whiteness, and its corollary, white mediocrity, to performance of excellence by people of color. The excellence of people of color challenges the carefully cultivated white networks that create, circulate, and protect white privilege. When people of color excel, the overarching supremacy of whiteness is both disrupted and challenged. When people of color excel, the hold of whiteness to pathways of reward through the everyday performance of mediocrity is challenged.

For example, in academia or workplaces, a person of color’s standout work might be scrutinized excessively or dismissed as "niche," while white mediocrity is normalized as "universal." As noted earlier, this rage is amplified when people of color refuse to assimilate into white norms, asserting their excellence on their own terms. It’s not just their success but their audacity to succeed authentically that stings.

The targeting is also strategic. 

By undermining or attacking the excellence of people of color, whiteness seeks to restore its dominance, to reassert control over who gets to be seen as "excellent." This is why the rage often feels personal yet is deeply structural—it's less about the individual and more about preserving a system that equates whiteness with worth.

At its core, this dynamic reflects a broader colonial logic: whiteness must diminish the Other to maintain its centrality. 

The antidote lies in dismantling these structures—calling out the mediocrity shielded by privilege and amplifying the brilliance of those who succeed despite it.


Popular posts from this blog

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more