We have to talk about whiteness in relation to affect and feeling because how whiteness feels is how whiteness thinks. Agency and subjectivity form in how we feel and think as one single reality of personhood. So the questioning of whiteness feels terrible in two ways to many people. First, it feels as if we are abandoning the goal of progress, and, second, it feels as if we have become obsessed with matters of identity and have lost a sense of common purpose.
