What Was Lopez's Three Steps To Dismantling Of Whiteness?

According to López, to desconstruct white identity is to “get beyond racism” by “first tak[ing] account of race” (124). Lopez proposes three steps to dismantling whiteness. First, he argues, whites must “overcome ... the transparency” of whiteness by recognizing that not only people of colour are ‘raced.’ Second, whites must “recognize and accept the personal consequences of breaking out of a White identity.” This means rejecting white privilege in concrete ways, as suggested in Race Traitor. Third, whites must choose “against whiteness” on a daily basis (136-137). These steps are necessary because the continuation of whiteness “requires the preservation of the social inequalities that every day testify to White superiority” (132). If his assessment is correct, then the only way to achieve racial justice is to abolish those social inequalities by eliminating the racial hierarchy.
In other words, the only reason for whiteness to exist is the power that it endows—to subjugate and exploit people who do not map onto whiteness. Moreover, Coates notes, that which maps onto whiteness is mutable: “some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been ‘black’”