On the White Man's Identity via Identity Erasure

Brief preface: apologies if this strays too far into the abstractness of identity and rhetoric; reading about the use of masculinity and the language surrounding that concept to further deny Black people's agency just happened to inspire these thoughts that have been rattling in my head for awhile, but which I've never had the platform to articulate. I'll try to connect the reading to this discourse, but am unsure how successfully this will be executed.

On developing the identity of the "white man" versus the "Black man," or more appropriately under the white gaze, the "other":

White folks have a tendency to cling to willful ignorance. To the "white man," no knowledge is extant outside of the white lens, because he has successfully set in place systems of affirmation in his likeness. As such, he is not considerate of the white gaze his very existence places upon the "other," as he so categorizes his Black brothers and sisters. When the Black individual is to boldly claim his agency, and by way of his agency his selfhood, the white individual finds this to be in contention with his own personhood. This personhood was, after all, founded upon the objectification of the "other." Thus, the white person wholeheartedly rejects the Black individual, whether through active intent or not, by rejecting the Black person's selfhood. This rejection can be described only as a form of hate, manifested in its many fashions: self-hate, racial hatred, gendered hate, etc. What is left if this hate were stripped from the white individual would be the pain of possessing no identity, as, paradoxically, the "white man" finds identity in identity erasure.

That is, the "white man" has found rhetorical, socioeconomic, political, physical, and geographical ways (to name just a few) by which he asserts his existence to be superior to the "other." Once this has been established, he puts his identity in relation to the question of the white-constructed Black identity (as oxymoronic as that sounds). For example, Manliness & Civilization points out that when white identity was to be critiqued in light of lynchings, "typically, [Northern editorials] would condemn white lynch mobs for being as despicably unmanly as primitive African or Indian savages."

This post has already been a lot longer than I was anticipating...I guess I was just thinking of the arguments made about hypermasculinity and gendered violence in the broader context of identity and needed to let off steam.