One is not born white, one becomes white: exploring White Thinking with Lilian Thuram

In his essay White Thinking, published in 2020, Guadeloupean essayist Lilian Thuram highlights a major blind spot of our contemporary societies: whiteness as an invisible norm, gradually erected throughout history as a universal standard.

Books That Matter

This article is part of our series Books That Matter, where experts from various fields unpack some of the most discussed works of popular science.

One is not born white, one becomes white: this formula neatly captures the central argument of Thuram’s book. Having had a career as a top-level footballer in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s, he now heads a foundation against racism. His reflections resonate with those of essayist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, himself of Caribbean origin, whose centenary is being celebrated, on the internalization of racial hierarchies.

Thuram’s essay can also be compared to that of Dene-Canadian scholar of Indigenous studies and professor at the University of British Columbia, Glen Sean Coulthard, in Red Skin, White Masks, published in 2014. There he shows how the colonial logic persists in relations with Indigenous peoples.
White Thinking, by Lilian Thuram, was published by Mémoire d’encrier.

As a specialist in postcolonial theories, I explore the ways colonial legacies continue to shape our institutions and imaginaries. I am also interested in how francophone writers and thinkers reinterpret these categories in order to expose their contradictions and propose alternative ways of narrating our societies.

The Origins of White Thinking: A Historical Construction

Exploring white thinking thus means questioning categories inherited from a colonial past and understanding how they continue to structure our lives, often without our realizing it.

The whiteness Thuram refers to is not a skin tone but an ideological construction that originally functioned to classify, hierarchize, and oppose. It designates a set of privileges, representations, and social positions rather than a biological characteristic. To think about whiteness is therefore to show that it has less to do with pigmentation than with a regime of visibility: what appears neutral or universal is in fact situated, inherited from a colonial history.

Whiteness has not always existed as a category. It was gradually constructed out of colonial expansion, slavery, and the pseudo-scientific theories of the nineteenth century. White Thinking, as Thuram describes it, is precisely this logic that naturalizes racial hierarchies by establishing “whiteness” as the neutral point of reference.

This perspective highlights how historical and religious narratives contributed to color hierarchies. As early as the Middle Ages, Christian theology associated whiteness with divine light, purity, and salvation, while darkness and blackness were linked with sin, danger, and death. These symbolic associations gradually fueled an imaginary in which whiteness was valued as a sign of moral superiority.

In the modern era, this symbolism was tied to colonial expansion: it provided a cultural framework that justified the enslavement and subjugation of populations perceived as “non-white.” White thinking was not built solely through material violence but also through a long symbolic tradition that presented whiteness as the sign of a natural and universal order. The “white norm” imposed itself not only through force but also through language, culture, and science.

Being White Without Seeing It: Invisible Privileges

One of Thuram’s major contributions is to show that whiteness functions as an invisible norm. Those who benefit from it do not notice, precisely because it is conflated with the universal.

Peggy McIntosh described it as an “invisible knapsack” of privileges, granting white people implicit advantages: being predominantly represented in the media, not being systematically suspected in public spaces, having one’s identity considered neutral.

These privileges are not individual but structural. They manifest in unequal access to housing, employment, or in daily interactions with the police. White thinking, as an implicit framework, conditions our perceptions and judgments, making it all the harder to challenge.

Whiteness Exists Only in Relation to Invented “Blackness”

Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), had already shown how the internalization of the white gaze could confine racialized people within imposed identities, at the cost of deep existential discomfort. Thuram continues this line of thought by reminding us that whiteness exists only in relation to the “blackness” it itself invented.

In turn, Glen Sean Coulthard updates this diagnosis in Red Skin, White Masks. Extending Fanon’s analysis to the context of North American Indigenous struggles, he demonstrates how recognition granted by the state remains conditioned by a colonial logic in which whiteness defines the very terms of equality. The critique of white thinking thus does not concern only European history: it runs through contemporary struggles against renewed forms of domination.

Deconstructing the Obvious: The Role of Education

Thuram insists on the necessity of educational work to denaturalize these representations. Deconstructing white thinking is not about blaming individuals, but about making visible what has been naturalized. The Lilian Thuram Foundation, in this regard, leads pedagogical initiatives aimed at fostering critical awareness of racial categories and their history.

Education is not confined to school: the media, culture, and collective memory also play crucial roles. The challenge is to learn to recognize invisible privileges and question them in order to create the conditions for genuine equality.

Deconstructing white thinking requires moving from individual awareness to collective responsibility. Political, educational, and cultural institutions must be examined for their role in reproducing inequalities. Thuram’s analysis converges here with struggles for racial justice and the decolonization of knowledge.

The goal is not to provoke guilt but to acknowledge the systemic dimension of the problem. Only by shifting our perspective—by ceasing to regard whiteness as universal—does it become possible to build a society where differences are no longer hierarchized.

Lilian Thuram’s White Thinking thus acts as an invitation to perceive what remains invisible: the white norm structuring our imaginaries, our institutions, and our daily practices. In dialogue with Fanon, the book reminds us that equality can only emerge through historical and critical deconstruction. One is not born white, one becomes white: it is therefore up to us collectively to undo this becoming, in order to open the way to new forms of coexistence, freed from hierarchies inherited from the colonial past.

Read the original article in French: On ne naît pas blanc, on le devient : explorer « La pensée blanche » avec Lilian Thuram

Related links:

Man föds inte vit, man blir vit: att utforska det vita tänkandet med Lilian Thuram

Lilian Thuram om Frantz Fanon och kampen mot rasism (intervju)