Abolishment Of Whiteness

“Whiteness refers to a multitude of individual, collective, intentional, unintentional, isolated, systemic, actions that synergistically work to sustain and constantly regenerate relationships of unequal power between whites and nonwhites.” Blackness does not directly correlate to the color of ones’ skin, but equates ones use in “civil society”. The abolishment of Sati, or ritual burning, was delegitimized by the British Empire. As the British Empire swept through India and predisposed what was acceptable and what was barbaric. Through a series of exploitative laws: the banning of domestic textiles, allowed Britain to import textiles in India forcing Indians to purchase clothes made from cotton they had produced. Additionally Even though
Similarly to the exploitative trade laws, the British saw themselves as superior, civilized, English; when they first encountered sati they were horrified. This horrification the British delegitimized native culture, not taking into consideration that these women saw sati as a part of their sanchita karma, or duty here on earth. The British masked this act of violent oppression; through the guise that because the English race was superior, non-English, non-white persons should strive to be more English, and consequently “whiter”. Women, particularly poor lower class women practiced sati because, they did not want to be an economic, or a political burden to their families. Due to fact that the British take over had solidified patriarchal underpinnings to the point where it was nearly impossible to do anything as a woman without a husband. Thus, “The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish.” Spivak cites, that the subaltern cannot speak because the west had already spoken for her. In accordance to Freud’s “a child is beaten”, the white man feels compelled to save the brown woman from the brown man disregarding her rights, to fulfill his superego. Even as the British began to realize that India was
The British defined what it meant to be civilized, what it meant to be human; “a central feature of colonialism is its ability to hide…because colonialism creates power for the colonizer, it allows the colonizer to create knowledge.” The British controlled access to western education and thus the status education brought with it, and bestowed upon the bhindus this great gift of knowledge, turning him into a noble savage. In exchange for education the cooli denounces his identity, making himself unknowable to his own people. Now the noble savage is confined only to interact with the western-educated minority and thus the death of Sanskrit and counter-western education began. The noble savage in return for their compliance had his societal status raised. In hopes of bettering their lives began to renounce Sanskrit as an educated language, and instead elevated English. “Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality--finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.” Once English was