week 10 response: lingering question(s)

We talk around it, even when we're talking explicitly about it: whiteness. What is it? How does it work? How is whiteness embodied in "non-white" people. How did whiteness come to be intertwined with European people? I think a lot about that evasiveness of whiteness in conversation, even in conversations specifically focused on interrogating it. Sadhana mentioned earlier in the course the real implications of the racial paradox, in reminding us that while race is a socio-political construct, it still has impacts on our lives. We can deconstruct all the fallacies that racism superimposes over our lives as invalid, creepily motivated, and not "technically" real, but yet we still live in a world defined by it?
The question of how to address/cope with/understand a concept that in itself is fictitious, man-made in every sense, but still real in the way that it moves and reproduces and consumes people. I feel that the prerequisite to diving into such a black-hole/catch 22/scary shit show of a dialectical problem is focusing in on some workable, more or less consistent definitions of the puzzle pieces that make up racist attitudes and structures. i.e. colors. "whiteness" "blackness" and the median categories created on the compartmentalized racial multiple choice plane. "Asian/Chinese/yellow," "Indian/Red," "Mexican/Brown" "misc." Complex human identities have been reduced and smooshed together essentially into color categories, and I feel that part of the effectiveness and persistence of racism, is an unbalanced relationship between that recognition of the fallacy of the racial constructs and their impacts. Talking so heavily about the impacts without circling back dialectically to an intention to deconstruct and re-articulate what the categories themselves even mean or are being forced to represent is a further victory for the suprmeacy of whiteness at the top of a color pyramid. 
Does yellow= East Asian?
Does red = Native American? 
Is the term black an equivalent to being African, or of African descent? 
This is where I find an entry way into interrogating what these colors are trying to mean. Interrogation of blackness then becomes interwoven with an interrogation of whiteness, since one cannot exist without the other. 
Whiteness has been defined to be separate from "the lesser" (read black// or proximate to black)
does black =African? African American? 
Africans generally do not refer to themselves as black when in Africa. They are African! 
So is the concept of blackness then wrapped up with the trans-atlantic slave trade and enslavement in the Americas?
Is whiteness then? 

I get stuck thinking if whiteness is an entity or an embodiment or a structure or an extremely interpersonal thing or all of it or none of it. 
I'm tired of the concept holding more weight than it does.
of white supremacy 
but also a lack of alternatives for articulation.
Could we shift the way race is conceived of by challenging the persistence as colors for stand-in terms that actually mean anything? 

White people are of European ancestry. Do Europeans become white in the Americas? And in this action does whiteness define blackness and vice versa?
So how then to talk about racism without being racist?