Rejecting Whiteness

The Center for Human Equality holds that Ethical Individualism, as articulated by McAlmond, faithfully embodies the founding principles of the United States and provides the only consistent framework for human equality. This philosophy insists that every person must be evaluated as a unique individual—by their character, choices, ideas, and actions—rather than by membership in any racial, ethnic, or ancestral collective.

It therefore demands the complete rejection of “whiteness” as a coherent or morally relevant category.

The American founding documents are explicit on this point. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all men “are created equal” and are endowed with unalienable rights. It does not speak of group entitlements or group guilt. The Constitution likewise protects individual rights to life, liberty, and property without reference to skin color.

These principles were imperfectly realized at the time, yet their logic was color-blind from the outset. Ethical Individualism simply completes that logic: no person inherits moral credit or moral debt from the pigmentation of their ancestors.

Martin Luther King Jr. captured the same truth in his most famous line: people should be judged by “the content of their character,” not “the color of their skin.” That admonition was not a call to replace one form of group judgment with another. It was a call to abandon group judgment altogether. Any doctrine that treats “whiteness” as an inherent system of values, interests, or culpability violates King’s standard as directly as the older doctrines it claims to oppose.

The contemporary concept of “whiteness” does precisely that.

It asserts that individuals who happen to have lighter skin share common values and collective goals—chief among them, supposedly, the limitation of opportunity for everyone else. This is not an empirical observation; it is a racial essentialism that collapses millions of distinct human beings into a single moral category. It ignores the historical reality that populations now labeled “white” arrived in America at different times, faced different prejudices (Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, and others were once excluded from full membership in the “white” category), and pursued wildly divergent beliefs and interests. It further ignores that human beings of every ancestry display the full range of virtues and vices.

Attributing collective traits on the basis of skin color is racism, whether the label is applied to “whiteness,” “Blackness,” or any other pigment-based abstraction.This form of judgmentalism is not confined to one political faction, though its institutional power is currently greatest on the political left. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks routinely treat racial groups as the primary units of moral and policy analysis.

They often assume that statistical disparities between groups are proof of systemic malice by one group against others, rather than the complex product of individual choices, family structure, culture, and cognitive distributions. When universities and corporations adopt training that teaches “all white people are racist” or frames “whiteness” as an oppressive essence to be deconstructed, they abandon the epistemic standards that once defined higher education.

Scholarship requires evidence and falsifiability; these claims rest on unfalsifiable assertions about invisible collective essences. Institutions that once aspired to truth-seeking now require participants to affirm group-based guilt or privilege as a condition of employment or enrollment. Such requirements are intellectually embarrassing and morally corrosive.

Group judgmentalism is not absent on the political right. Certain strains of antisemitism attribute collective malice or disloyalty to Jews as a people. Certain forms of religious or cultural exclusion similarly treat entire categories of non-Christians or immigrants as possessing uniform and threatening characteristics.

These positions are equally incompatible with Ethical Individualism.

They substitute one set of collective stereotypes for another and deserve the same rejection.The Center for Human Equality therefore calls on all American citizens, regardless of ancestry or political affiliation, to reject the concept of “whiteness” in its current ideological usage.

Reject the premise that skin color confers shared values, shared guilt, or shared destiny. Reject the notion that any individual can be held morally responsible for the actions or supposed interests of people who happen to resemble them in one superficial trait. Reject the demand, from any quarter, that citizens must view themselves or their neighbors primarily through the lens of racial collectives.

In its place, adopt Ethical Individualism. Treat every person as an end in themselves, possessed of their own mind, their own conscience, and their own capacity for moral agency. Measure fellow citizens by what they say, what they do, and what they build—not by the shade of their skin or the ancestry they cannot change.

This is not a partisan prescription. It is the consistent application of the principle that made the United States a proposition nation rather than a blood-and-soil nation.

When individuals are freed from the demand to represent or atone for their racial category, they become capable of genuine cooperation across every line of ancestry. They can compete on merit, cooperate on shared interests, and disagree on ideas without the constant, exhausting overlay of collective racial scorekeeping. That is the only path consistent with the founding creed, with King’s dream, and with the simple recognition that human beings are individuals first and members of statistical categories second.

The Center for Human Equality therefore urges every American to reject “whiteness”—not as a description of light skin, but as a theory that reduces unique human beings to instruments of group identity. In its place, affirm the radical and still-unfinished American idea: each person stands alone before the judgment of conscience, law, and their fellow citizens, accountable only for their own character and conduct.