But peel back the performative skin, and what do you find? A festering wound of whiteness – a structural hypocrisy that co-opts the language of the oppressed while systematically erasing the very voices it claims to amplify. The erasure is complete through the language games of civility and appeal to the white majority.
Bring up whiteness and risk becoming a pariah. Risk being lectured how you are going to lose out on the white mainstream of the Left, or worse, trigger a backlash from the center and center-right. The codes of whiteness are carefully crafted to silence any conversation on whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture--individualization, property ownership, extraction, competition--that shape the driving forces of settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism.
This isn't a bug in the system; it's the feature.
Let's call it out for what it is: the left's Achilles' heel, a racism so embedded it's invisible to those it shields. Let's start with the academy, that glittering ivory tower where the left fancies itself the vanguard of justice.
When we dissect these power games, we see a "culture of whiteness" masquerading as allyship. Picture this: a non-Western scholar – maybe from the Global South, carrying the scars of colonial histories – gets "invited" into the fold. The welcome mat reads "Decolonial Voices Wanted!" But the fine print? Conform or be crushed. Toe the line on the left's sanitized version of social justice, one that prioritizes white comfort and Eurocentric norms over raw, unfiltered truth.
Dare to challenge the gatekeepers?
Prepare for the backlash: tenure denials, slashed funding, whispered campaigns of professional sabotage. It's "erasure by invitation," It's a trap where inclusion demands assimilation, and authenticity is punished as disruption.
Scholars of color, indigenous thinkers, and Southern intellectuals who refuse to play the game face the full fury of this bankrupt left. They get bullied out of departments, ghosted from conferences, and branded as "problematic" for insisting on solidarity that actually decenters whiteness. It's not just petty interpersonal drama; it's systemic.
The left's equity rhetoric becomes a weapon, wielded to maintain the status quo. Why? Because true decolonization threatens the very foundations of power these structures were built on. This isn't allyship – it's a performance, a "woke" signaling that lets white liberals sleep at night while the real work of dismantling empire gathers dust.
But don't fool yourself into thinking this stops at the seminar room. It seeps into the streets, the movements, the global fights that define our era. Take Palestine: white leftist leaders dominate the mic, scripting narratives that sanitize the struggle and sideline Palestinian voices themselves. Or climate justice: indigenous knowledge from the Amazon or Pacific Islands gets footnoted as an afterthought, while Northern academics pat themselves on the back for "centering" it – from their air-conditioned offices in Cambridge or Berkeley.
This is the colonial inheritance the left refuses to interrogate. A whiteness that colonizes even the resistance, turning liberation into another exportable brand.
So, what's the way out? My scholarship has over the years explored the power of radical refusal. Walk away from the toxic departments, the performative networks, the liberal traps that demand your silence in exchange for scraps of legitimacy.
Build from the margins – resistive voices weaving alternative spaces, untainted by the academic-industrial complex. It's messy, it's exhausting, but it's the only path to a left worth salvaging. One that doesn't just talk decolonization but lives it, by ceding the center to those who've been erased from it.
The left's whiteness problem isn't a side quest; it's the main event. Until we face it – until we stop hiding behind hashtags and start handing over the reins to communities at the racialized, class margins – we'll remain a shadow of the revolution we claim to be.
The challenge for each of us in places of privilege is this: Are we ready to listen, or will we double down on the erasure? The margins are watching. And they're done waiting.