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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
White identity is in ferment. White, European Americans living in the United States will soon share an unprecedented experience of slipping below 50% of the population. The impending demographic shifts are already felt in most urban centers and the effect is a national backlash of hyper-mobilized political, and sometimes violent, activism with a stated aim that is simultaneously vague and deadly clear: 'to take our country back.' Meanwhile the spectre of 'minority status' draws closer, and the material advantages of being born white are eroding.
This is the political and cultural reality tackled by Linda Martín Alcoff in The Future of Whiteness. She argues that whiteness is here to stay, at least for a while, but that half of whites have given up on ideas of white supremacy, and the shared public, material culture is more integrated than ever. More and more, whites are becoming aware of how they appear to non-whites, both at home and abroad, and this is having profound effects on white identity in North America. The young generation of whites today, as well as all those who follow, will have never known a country in which they could take white identity as the unchallenged default that dominates the political, economic and cultural leadership. Change is on the horizon, and the most important battleground is among white people themselves.
The Future of Whiteness makes no predictions but astutely analyzes the present reaction and evaluates the current signs of turmoil. Beautifully written and cogently argued, the book looks set to spark debate in the field and to illuminate an important area of racial politics.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Introduction: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
Whiteness As Real, and Really Open-Ended
Whiteness from Below
“Race”
The Future is an Ought as well as an Is
A View from the Margins
1: An Analytic of Whiteness
Two Negative Examples
What Social Identities Are
The History of “Race”
Class
The Problem of the One and the Many
What Do We Mean When We Talk About “Whiteness?”
Empirical Whiteness
Imaginary Whiteness
Subjective Whiteness
Notes
2: White Exceptionalism
Newton Versus Goethe
Universalism Versus Purity
Antiracist White Exceptionalism
The Historicism of Concepts, Or the Meaning Question
The Instability of Racism
What To Do…
Small Revolutions
Notes
3: Double Consciousness
Avoidance, Denial, Shame
Ethnicity Instead of Race?
Left-Wing Post-Racialism
Aryan and Caucasian Myths
White Labor
Three Arguments Against Eliminativism
White Double Consciousness
Notes
Conclusion: A Place in the Rainbow
Unglorious Whiteness
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
For my family
Copyright page
Copyright © Linda Alcoff 2015
The right of Linda Alcoff to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8544-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8545-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alcoff, Linda.
The future of whiteness / Linda Alcoff.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-7456-8544-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8544-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8545-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8545-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Whites–United States. 2. United States–Race relations. I. Title.
E184.A1.A46 2015
305.800973–dc23
2015007622
Typeset in 11/13pt on Sabon
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Printed and bound in the United States by Courier Digital Solutions, North Chelmsford, MA
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Acknowledgments
I am very much indebted to all those friends and colleagues who gave me feedback, suggested sources, shared their views with frankness, and offered their encouragement: Bill Bywater, Omar Dahbour, Arlene Dávila, Cate Fosl, Peter Fosl, Kathryn Gines, Leigh Johnson, Chad Kautzer, David Kim, Frank Kirkland, Emily Lee, Donna Dale Marcano, Charles Mills, Michael Monahan, Darrell Moore, Mickaella Perina, Mariana Ortega, Lucius Outlaw, Falguni Sheth, Jaideep Singh, Ron Sundstrum, Paul Taylor, George Yancy, and the impressive activists from SURJ, Showing up for Racial Justice. I also want to note some of my own personal heroes who inspired this work from way back when: Mark Alfonso, Betty Bryant, Pat Bryant, Mary Joyce Carlson, Jehu Eaves, Chele Galloway, Joe Goodman, Charlie Orrock, Nan Orrock, Jim Skillman, David Simpson, Sandy Stimpson, Jan Tucker, Janet Wheat, and Marilyn Williams.
I especially want to acknowledge my family in writing such a book as this, including all parts of my transnational, cross-cultural family, far flung and close knit, left and right, atheist and devout, English only and Spanish dominant, spanning the North, the South, and the global South. As always, Larry Alcoff, Sam Alcoff, and José Alcoff provided steady encouragement, advice, research, and technical assistance, and showed up to deal with potentially hostile audiences. Most importantly, I want to express my loving gratitude to my parents, Ted and Laura Woodward. I could have emerged into adulthood a very different person if I had not had their love, support, and, most importantly, their moral guidance.
My thanks to Random House for permission to reproduce a quote from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier), published by Vintage. Portions of this book have been drawn from an earlier paper entitled “The Future of Whiteness” published in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, SUNY Press, 2014.
Epigraph
“… justice can never be done in the midst of injustice. A colonial administrator has no possibility of acting rightly toward the natives, nor a general toward his soldiers; the only solution is to be neither general nor military chief.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier), 2011
“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. To reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Lecture, 2004
Introduction: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
This is a book about a topic many would rather avoid. That topic is white identity, its difficult past, complicated present, and uncertain future. Before we can consider its future, or jump to the conclusion that whiteness is withering away, fragmenting beyond recognition, or massively expanding the kinds of persons it includes, we need to understand what whiteness is as a social and historical identity among other such identities, whether this single term can even make sense of a grouping so impossibly varied, and how its utility as a term can survive its constantly changing boundaries. We also have to understand how whiteness is lived, and not just how it is ideologically represented or manipulated. It is especially important to consider how it is lived today by those who are coming to repudiate the ideology of white supremacy. “Being white these days,” as Nell Painter (2012, 389) has so aptly remarked, “is not what it used to be.” In particular, the historical links between the formation of white identity and racism are becoming more difficult to dodge.
Michael Moore is one of those white folks who clearly figured out the wrongness of racism early on in his life. His first real political act was an intervention at the Elks Club, no less, when he entered a speech contest on the life of Abraham Lincoln. Moore had discovered in 1970 that segregation still held sway at the Elks golf course in Flint Michigan, where a sign announced “CAUCASIANS ONLY” in helpfully capitalized letters. Confused and incensed by discovering what he had thought was just a southern backwardness right in the midst of his northern hometown, Moore became truly livid when he found the same organization sponsoring a contest for the best speech honoring Lincoln. The Elks seemed to be totally oblivious to the contradiction, but Moore, at 16, was not. “They want a speech? I'll give them a speech,” he thought to himself. The resultant effort was an essay that sounds like the Moore we have come to know, not too terribly nuanced, but clear and to the point. He called for segregation, a segregation from the Elks Club.
Moore has been one of our bravest social and cultural critics and a role model as a white antiracist, touring college campuses with Cornel West and calling out racism in every movie he's made. For his efforts, he has received numerous and persistent death threats of the sort the authorities call “credible.” In his memoir, appropriately titled Here Comes Trouble, Moore sermonizes on the topic of bigotry in the first chapter:
Only cowards use violence. They are afraid that their ideas will not win out in the public arena. They are weak and worried that the people will see their weakness. They are threatened by women, gays, and minorities – minorities, for chrissakes! You know why they're called “minorities”? Because they don't have the power – YOU do! That's why you're called the “majority”! (2011, 29; emphasis in original)
Moore is beseeching whites to relax and reconsider their fears because, after all, they vastly outnumber minorities.
This form of argumentation will soon have to end. Most demographers are predicting that by 2050, though the US Census Bureau says 2042, white European Americans will slip below majority status in the United States. For the first time in its history, the US will be a majority nonwhite nation. Whites will have to jockey for position in a multipolar nation, just as, since the end of the Cold War, they have had to negotiate a decentered, multipolar world. White people all over the world are coming to experience in both their national and global communities what some inelegantly call minoritized status. This demographic phenomenon is by no means restricted to the US: lower birth rates in Europe constitute what has been described as a voluntary demographic suicide. There too, immigrant fertility outflanks that of white Christian Europeans, leading to the prediction that Europe itself will become a majority Muslim continent in the next century. Given these trends, it is understandable if whites are apprehensive about the future.
Reports from the 2010 Census chart the national changes in the United States quite clearly. Between 2000 and 2010, the US population increased by nearly 10 percent to 308 million souls. Latino and Asian numbers jumped the most, with each group growing by a remarkable 43 percent. But African American numbers also climbed 12 percent, and even the category “American Indian and Alaska Native” jumped 18 percent. In contrast, the white population lagged markedly behind, increasing only by 1 percent. Hence, whites lost five points of their market share in the overall population, dropping from 69 percent to 64 percent in just one decade. But even this number is misleading, since the category of “white” used by the 2010 Census included both North Africans and peoples of the Middle East, hardly groups associated with the heartland of America.
The demographers making these predictions are taking all the variables into account, including the fluctuations of the birth rate. The white population is older, other groups tend to be younger, and most of the increase in the numbers of nonwhites are children born in the United States. Nonwhite babies already outnumber white babies. So even if the birth rate were to change dramatically, and immigration was magically stopped, the deed is done.
I argue in this book that this impending change constitutes a specter haunting the United States as well as Europe, producing a white reaction that can take pretty hysterical forms, although it is often carefully cloaked to avoid the charge of racism. The demographic shift is obviously central to strategies of the right, such as the open fascists of Hungary and Greece, but also of centrists and moderates everywhere. It is not an overstatement to say that every major political issue debated in the public domain is affected by this specter, well beyond the immigration debates. In the United States, the changing demographics affects electoral politics at nearly every level, including general reactions to President Obama, as well as debates over tax policy, healthcare, and the purported problem of “voter fraud.” Local and global demographic issues entwine over the concern about becoming a debtor nation to China, a nonwhite country. Since whites will retain economic advantages even after they lose majority status, becoming a minority with a majority of the country's wealth, increased inheritance taxes, and redistributive proposals can incite racial animus (Glaser and Ryan 2013). This combination of racial and economic differences is central to the debate over limiting the sale of guns. During Obama's presidency, sales spiked so much that some firearms manufacturers have wittily named him “Gun Salesman of the Year.” But the truth is that Obama was a symbol for a larger issue: an impending white minority with a greater share of resources facing off groups whose long history of unfair treatment produced at least some of that collective wealth.
Beyond the economic issues involved in losing majority status, there is an important political one. Holding a significant majority within a nation had granted whites the ability to believe in the legitimacy of a white-dominated government. This apparent justification of white domination will soon disappear. For a long time the collective imaginary of race in the United States involved a black/white binary: the image of a securely massive white population facing off against mainly a black population, with negligible numbers of other others. African Americans, the largest minority until 2003, were never imagined to balloon in numbers sufficient to unseat the white majority. This black/white imaginary has stymied race analysis and the maturation of antiracist politics: it is one thing to feel benevolent toward a minority who will always be a minority, but quite another to negotiate on equal terms with powerful groups who together hold the majority.
While the impending demographic changes have unleashed a Sturm und Drang among the white right (including neo-conservatives, Tea Partyers, neo-Nazis, and everything in between), the white-dominated left, from liberal to progressive, including even the moderate wing of the Republican Party, has been mostly reticent to speculate publicly on what this future will mean for the United States. As Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith (2011) have noted, “on race, the silence is bipartisan.” Everything from the economic crisis to the political divide demands an analysis of race, as they point out, yet white liberals remain uncomfortable in broaching the topic, while conservatives generally try to disguise their racial references, though the disguise is often so ineffective as to be a joke.
Opportunities abound for a serious discussion of how the changing demographics may change this country, but are too often deftly sidestepped. Major left-wing public intellectuals, including Francis Fox Piven, analyzed Occupy Wall Street movements as transcending the era of identity politics to place class front and square, as if class could be understood separately from race. So the result is that the extreme unabashed right wing dominates race-talk, while all others, including the left, the liberals, and the moderates, largely maintain race avoidance.
This may be motivated by the idea, or the worry, that if we talk about demographic changes directly, we invite reprisal, feeding the flames of white reaction. We should not, some reason, portray these impending changes as important to discuss. Some whites may fear that a focus on demographic changes will appear to be intrinsically racist, since this would be to acknowledge the importance of a category – race – that we should, they think, be trying to overcome. Such avoidance strategies may also be motivated by white liberals who have become too accustomed to placating the racist in the family gathering, thinking that if they avoid the subject, he (or she) won't have an excuse to spout idiocies. And there is also a recurring concern that race-talk can be overplayed, that the mainstream's late acknowledgment of “dog-whistle politics,” or the fact that our public discourses are peppered with covert appeals to race, has lately become an overused explanation, a distortion of legitimate debates about fiscal policy, or a defensive maneuver of Obama defenders (Chait 2014).
Yet clearly, we cannot even engage in the debate about when race applies and when it doesn't while there is so much energy spent preempting the discussion. Unless we talk about these demographic changes up front, we cannot plausibly claim to know how they affect social trends and political debates.
Much of the mainstream left, which has long been white-dominated (simply because of demographics, but also because of its tendency to separate class from race), has made a frontal assault on identity politics for decades, making life uncomfortable for anyone daring to defend the relevance of identity to politics. This assault, together with the academy's skeptical disclaimers about the concept of race, has left many unable to analyze or even address the imminent demographic changes in the racial make-up of the country and how this is impacting our public culture. If race is basically an illusion – or a mere ideological overlay that mystifies reality, as it is on this mainstream left view – then the demographic changes make no real difference, only a difference at the level of ideology. Marx sarcastically accused Hegel of portraying social antagonisms as mere battles of ideas fighting it out in the air. If one thinks “race” is nothing but an illusion, one might well apply this charge to the fights over race.
For decades now, some of the most radical white theorists have been arguing for the abolition of whiteness, given the illusory nature of racial categories (see Livingstone 1962; Warnke 2007). If race is illusory, then the coming changes in population distributions should be treated as meaningless. If, as influential historian David Roediger puts it (1994), race concepts of all sorts are “ontologically empty,” then the task is not to take the coming changes seriously but to show why they make no difference.
The racial identity we call whiteness has been especially disavowed by some quarters of the white left on the grounds that it is a political construct that does nothing more than cloak the plutocracy. We should be tearing away the cloak, they argue, not giving into the idea that whiteness is real.
Yet this sort of approach simply bolsters the avoidance of race-talk or of engaging with the critical question of the demographic shifts. Further, as I will argue in this book, this repudiation of race-talk may in actuality be an indication of a basic discomfort with being white. Whiteness is not cool, it is not on the right side of history, and it is associated with many troubling dispositions, most importantly racism. If one doesn't want to take the chauvinist route of defending whiteness against these charges, then why would anyone in their right mind want to be associated with whiteness?
But we need to find out whether the actual politics of white identity and of white people fits the stereotype. Is it really the case that the main response of white people to a loss of majority status will be racism, fear, anger, and violence – in short, reaction? That economically struggling whites will forever identify more with the 1 percent than with the multiracial majority? Such fatalistic responses may seem to gain credence from new social histories tracing the lineage of the very concept of white identity to racism and white supremacy, portraying whiteness itself as a plot to demobilize class consciousness. If white identity cannot be separated from this foundation in white racial dominance – if to avow one's whiteness is to buy into the ideology – then whites who convert to an antiracist social view have no other option than to disavow their white identity.
Whiteness As Real, and Really Open-Ended
This makes no sense to me. Even in the far distant future, when we might imagine white supremacy as a material and ideological practice to have come to a long-deserved end, whites may well still exist, at least for a while. Whiteness is, after all, produced by a complex of historical events, rather than a single originary moment (see e.g. Cash 1941; Frye 1992; Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Domínguez 1997). And history has a long reach. Thus, whiteness is far from ontologically empty: it is a historically emergent lived experience, variegated, changing, and changeable. Being white is a powerfully important element in one's life, just as is not being white. But in the view I will develop in this book, whiteness as a term is not coterminous with dominance, but with a particular historical experience and relationship to certain historical events. Among other things, every white person in the Americas or Australia has some relationship to a family history of immigration, and the large majority of this immigration was economically motivated. This formative aspect of whiteness is hardly unique, and thus should raise questions about the boundaries as well as the content of whiteness, given the similarity whites have with most other immigrants (Jacobson 1998). Against Bonilla-Silva's (2006) influential claim about the expanded borders of whiteness today, however, I want to insist that whiteness has a very particular and unique relationship to historical atrocities such as slavery and the genocide of native peoples. Even though whites differ widely in their affective orientation to these events, there is a distinction between their likely assorted affective responses (such as shame, guilt, denial) and those whose families were indigenous and subject to genocide or to slavery or to imperial wars in which the US played a leading part. This produces a content to whiteness despite its immense variety and moveable boundaries.
But it is one thing to say that we need a radical re-understanding of what whiteness means, and what whites have in common with many nonwhites (such as immigration histories), and another altogether to say that whiteness has no meaning at all. If our image of an antiracist future is a future in which white identity no longer exists, this means that whites will no longer know who they are. And the claim that they have abolished their whiteness may well provide an alibi for the mistaken belief that the unearned social and economic advantages accrued by white skin are a thing of the past.
A more reasonable approach is to understand whiteness as an organically emergent phenomenon. Its economic and political power can be measured by social scientists, its arrival as a commonly used term can be dated by historians, and its characteristic subjective contours can be discerned through the experiments of social psychology. There is a facticity of whiteness, whether or not it factors into a person's self-ascription. Whiteness is lived, and not merely represented. It is a prominent feature of one's way of being in the world, of how one navigates that world, and of how one is navigated around by others.
Whiteness should not be reduced to racism or even racial privilege, even though these have been central aspects of what it means to be white. No social identity can be defined by a single vector across every possible context, and even white identity constitutes a social disadvantage in some situations. Moreover, today, perhaps more than ever, whiteness has a variegated relationship to avowed racism. About half of whites agree with most people of color on many issues related to race, including the claim that antiblack racism is still a large problem, that racism infects the criminal justice system, and that immigrants are treated unfairly. For example, according to Pew Research Center data from 2014, only 48 percent of whites believe that “a lot” of progress has been made on racism; that leaves 52 percent who believe that either little or no progress has been made. Only 35 percent of whites have “a great deal” of confidence in the police. Now this leaves a more than 20-point gap between how black Americans respond to this question, but the interesting point is that 65 percent of whites disagreed with this claim and, in fact, only 36 percent of whites say they have a great deal of confidence that police officers in their community will not use excessive force and will treat blacks and whites equally. We focus too often on the gap between white and black and brown, and miss the growing gap among whites. The nation is increasingly politically polarized on a number of critical issues, from guns to healthcare, and that polarization is mainly due to the polarization occurring among whites themselves.
The question is how to understand this phenomenon. Historical and sociological work in whiteness studies has built up a strong case for the constitutive relation between whiteness and racism. Besides Roediger, there is the work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1986), Langston Hughes (1933), George Lipsitz (1998), Joe Feagin and colleagues (2001); Feagin (2013), Bruce Baum (2006), Jessie Daniels (1997), and others who have persuasively traced the historical formation of white identity to the political ploys by elites to divide and conquer the working masses. More recently, social psychologists and sociologists such as Claude Steele (2010), Charles Gallagher (1994), Michael Tesler and David Sears (2010), and Jennifer Richeson and Sophie Trawalter (2008), as well as philosophers Shannon Sullivan (2005), Charles Mills (1997), and George Yancy (2008), among others, have begun to measure the legacy this long history has wrought in the unconscious habits as well as conscious attitudes and political beliefs of the people who came to see themselves as white. Persistent and unfair economic advantages generated an epistemology of ignorance, as Charles Mills has named it, among those who had little interest in questioning the irrational foundations of race-talk. Shannon Sullivan has explored the distinctive bodily comportment practices that whites exhibit, such as their assumptions about being entitled to all public spaces and to inhabit, and move into, any and every neighborhood. White political attitudes have been disposed toward a communitarianism based on race rather than a solidarity based on class. This translates into an assumption by poor whites that they are entitled to a share of the fat of the land in a way others are not.
In truth, the formation of white identity was not merely a ploy, but an identity category that helpfully filled a void created by the European diaspora and cross-ethnic amalgamations. The ability to sustain strong and substantive ethnic identifications and self-ascriptions – “German,” “Norwegian,” “Scottish” – across multiple generations of immigrants living in the new world was surely doomed by long geographical distance and interethnic mixing. Moreover, many European immigrants did not leave their home countries by choice: rather, they were summarily booted out by starvation wages, if not political, ethnic, or religious violence. To be tagged by identity terms like “Polish American” or “Lithuanian American” reminded such groups of histories many wanted to forget, especially if other Poles and Lithuanians had forced their families to leave. These groups wanted to transcend their old identities by coming to a place where they might achieve not only an economic livelihood, but an improved social status, perhaps even a social equality. The idea of whiteness ingeniously filled an identity gap produced by the distaste for and diffusion of ethnic and national European attachments, and filled it in a way that served the interests of elites; just think how different it might have been if this working mob had been interpellated simply by a national identity that would have united people across continents of origin, if they had maintained the bonds of workplace solidarity that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) show to have existed, at times, in the eighteenth century. Chattel slavery, and the development of inherited enslavement based on color, broke those bonds. Race, an idea already powerful in the West, moved to the fore, giving a name to the differential experiences people had upon their arrival in the Americas, while also, without a doubt, allowing the plutocrats to divide the servant class.
Still, the transformation into a self-ascribed whiteness was neither smooth nor uniform. Whiteness was an idea that was promoted, yes, but it had to be shaped by those who ascribed to it to fit their own experience and understanding. Whiteness has always had varied meanings and effects depending on time and place, from the Irish millworkers of the South to the Scandinavian farmers of the Midwest to the polyglot meatpackers of Chicago and the southern Europeans who flooded into Levittown. Whiteness was in every case a different ethnic mix, with sometimes quite different associated ways of life, from fighting and drinking to abstinence and asceticism to consumerism and conformity. But in all cases, being white was part of what these people became, part of how their characteristics were interpreted and judged, part of how their economic options were organized. Blackness was neither the only nor the most important contrast in every case. Sometimes the more relevant other was Indian, Mexican, or Chinese, and this too changed the particularities that whiteness came to manifest.
The ferment we are experiencing in white identity today is simply the most recent, but hardly the first. When southern Europeans, the Irish, and Jews “became” white in the early years of the twentieth century, there was similar ferment about what this meant for the peer-based ethics of racially segregated communities, in which intragroup ethics varied, sometimes quite drastically, from intergroup ethics, or how people were allowed, and even expected, to treat those outside their own racial group. As Russell Banks recounts, consolidated acceptance of this enlarged white identity was far from complete when he was growing up in the 1940s and 50s:
My father and other Anglo-American men of his generation used to refer to Italians as “Guineas.” I never knew what a Guinea was until I was an adult and saw that it was a nineteenth-century word for Africa, and thus for Africans. What that means is that as recently as the 1950s Italians and other Mediterraneans were seen as racially different from us white folks. (2008, 32)
Arguably, southern Europeans and Jews are even today only borderline whites, culturally marked as distinct and problematic, with less evidence of the mythical values of honesty, cool-headedness, and hard work associated with Protestants. The number of white supremacists who use the swastika as their favorite symbol indicates that not everyone with light skin tones gets to count. Today, we are all watching the huge influx of eastern Europeans to see whether they will be assimilated, whether they will want to assimilate, and how they will change what it means to be white.
Nonetheless, the ideology of whiteness urged Americans from the beginning of the twentieth century to understand race as more significant than ethnic differences, and to extend peer-based respect, including courtesy and at least formal equality, to Italians, Jews, Greeks, Poles, the Irish, and other heretofore derided European ethnic groups. This initiated decades of cultural contestations over inclusion policies and political constituencies, manifested not only in neighborhood relations such as those described by Banks, but also in the working coalitions of electoral politics, union locals, and hiring halls. Officially, the job listings changed from “No Irish Need Apply” to “White Men Wanted,” and fraternity and country club rules loosened around a multiplicity of ethnic whites. Nonwhites, and all women, could be excluded from job listings up through the 1960s, but the infamous ethnic-based exclusions common in the earlier part of the century were slowly diminished, at least in their overt forms.
To include such derided groups within one's own identity ascription meant changing the self-perceptions of British and other northern European whites and their long-held sense of cultural superiority over southern Europeans. Even today in Europe, it is common to hear the countries of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain collectively referred to by the insulting acronym “PIGS.” In the United States as well, the Irish and southern Europeans are still marked as different by the phrase “white ethnics,” a term never used for whites with an English, French, or German lineage. Racial interpellation may have subordinated ethnic chauvinism, but in no way was it erased.
Such contestations over white ethnic out-groups were still going on when the African American civil rights movement erupted in mid-century in towns across the country and on national television, creating a second major period of ferment over what it meant to be white. The new national television media revealed with visual intensity that the country's nonwhite others were mobilizing for a full and meaningful franchise, with demands backed by strong moral and religious arguments and a collective of youth willing to die for the cause. Some whites were genuinely convinced by these arguments and supported civil rights, though many were fearful about the emerging political power of the grandchildren of slaves. If any group had a moral claim on the nation, surely this group had one that could not be rationally denied. As Howard Winant has noted, civil rights “deeply affected whites as well as blacks, exposing and denouncing often unconscious beliefs in white supremacy, and demanding new and more respectful forms of behavior in relation to nonwhites” (1997, 41). Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's girlfriend in the 1960s, put it more bluntly: “Pure unadulterated white racism,” she recounts, was “splattered all over the media as the violence against the civil rights workers escalated. White people were looking at themselves and what their history had wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine” (2008, 87).
To retain its moral self-respect in the face of this moral movement, whiteness had to redeem itself by becoming liberal and inclusive. Predictably, this generally took a paternalistic form, retaining as much white supremacy as possible, while giving way, a bit. The southern white racists visible on television screens across the country throwing rocks at schoolchildren and bricks at ministers could not plausibly embody white moral and intellectual superiority, even for most white people. Many whites found themselves experiencing a disidentification with the Klan types who were claiming to represent and defend the rights and interests of white people, and some began to develop a dawning empathy for the Klan's targets. Marginal whites who had experienced their own share of ethnic chauvinism were no doubt especially ready to see the lies of white supremacy. For these disidentified whites, whiteness had to become something other than the violent maintenance of antiblack social codes.
Thus whiteness is, as I will outline in Chapter 1, a historical and social construct that has persistently undergone change. It is not a singular idea, but a fluid amalgam of sometimes contesting interpretations and practices. White supremacy is itself incoherent, and can manifest itself quite differently depending on historical periods and social groups: from Klan violence to law-backed disenfranchisement to paternal scolding that blames victims for their “culture of poverty” to entitled gentrifications of neighborhoods that force the nonwhite poor out of cities with an indifferent shrug.
Bruce Norris's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park (2011) exposes the racism of contemporary whites who assume they are entitled to the most desirable neighborhoods, and deftly, with the help of fellow playwright Lorraine Hansberry, skewers the older era's cross-burning racists. His play's cross-generational snapshots of whites ranging from the 1950s to the present reveal differences of tone and discourse, but also a similarity of effect: some are unwilling to live among black people no matter what the economic cost is to themselves, while others find integrated living perfectly agreeable as long as their presumptions of superiority are never called out. The moral of Norris's story is not, however, that whiteness and racism have remained exactly the same across the 50-year span the play covers. In 1959 African Americans were largely invisible servants, while in 2010 they are portrayed as neighbors whose reasoning is simply unintelligible to white gentrifiers. Whites then had no need for dialogue with or acceptance from African Americans: today this has changed. The fact that this story is told so well by a white playwright should suggest the dramatic political divergence among whites. The truth is that these divergences of knowledge as well as of values and political commitments have always existed within white communities, and exploring their implications is an important task of any analysis of whiteness. Norris is no less white for his perceptive analysis of racism; in fact, it is his very whiteness that most likely renders his portraits so recognizable.
Whiteness from Below
The historical narrative of whiteness as a form of false consciousness foisted from above with uniform results has been challenged by newer studies that highlight these internal divisions, mostly based on class, but also on ethnic, divisions. For example, Linebaugh and Rediker's (2000) award-winning study of early American cross-race class alliances helped seriously to upend the bleak characterization of white working-class identifications. The “many-headed hydra” of their book title was a term used in the 1700s to refer to rebelliousness that took multiple forms, from food-rioters, to heretics, to army-agitators, to pirates, to “rural barbarians of the commons” and “motley urban mobs” (2000, 329). This represents a lost history of class-based resistance, but, just as importantly, Linebaugh and Rediker also unearthed a complexity of identity configurations belied by our uniform categories. In other words, all “whites” did not either think or act alike, or have similar experiences. The fact that this history has been largely lost is no coincidence, they suggest, but an element of the orchestration of whiteness itself as an identity that is meant to organize society, explain history, and trump class. In an analysis compatible with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (1985) emphasis on the historical variability of political identity, Linebaugh and Rediker show that race-based groups and hierarchies trumped class less than we often suppose. Michael Monahan's account (2011) of racialization processes in the English Caribbean is similarly focused on the period when Irish indentured servants were bonded in service in conditions comparable to their African contemporaries. At least some such bonded servants managed to join together across their diverse identities of origin in mutual acts of support.
Though Monahan shies away from calling the bonded Irish laborers of the new world “slaves,” Nell Painter (2010) uses precisely this term to emphasize the common conditions of bonded labor before the development of race-based slavery took effect, driving a secure wedge between poor communities. Interestingly, whereas Linebaugh and Rediker, in their effort to complicate our picture of early American labor, want to downplay the whiteness, or white identities, of the early modern European immigrant workers they discuss, both Painter and Monahan make clear that the category of whiteness was operating even in these early days well before the American Revolution, even before the term itself was regularly used. They also show that, despite some significant commonalities across different racial groups, there were also significant differences in the experience of immigration for whites and nonwhites, and these differences were eventually used to sharply distinguish their options for escaping bondage. For example, English Members of Parliament were concerned that enslaving the Irish might produce a domino effect of brutality, a concern they did not voice about “Negroes.” For Painter and Monahan, whiteness was not determined by self-ascription. Rather, its existence can be discerned by sociological analysis: European bonded labor had a different trajectory because it was positioned differently vis-à-vis the propertied class.
In sum, these new histories trouble the idea both that whiteness was a moniker only emerging in the late nineteenth century with no critical purchase on social life before it was officially recognized by the state, and also that whiteness served to mandate a primary set of allegiances for all who came under its banner. Whiteness affected one's life options even before it became an official category, but it did not always determine allegiances. This is just to say that whiteness then was not too different from what whiteness is now.
Another book that complicates common generalizations about white workers comes from Amy Sonnie and James Tracy (2011), two contemporary activists determined to tell the untold story of white identified rebels in the 1960s. They recount a little-known history of white activists who found themselves in the midst of urban rebellions against white supremacy. These were not the middle-class white allies who supported civil rights, but poor whites who created their own self-described organizations in both the North and the South to join in a coalitional effort to “fight the power” on behalf of their own communities. Groups such as the Young Patriots, Rising Up Angry, the October 4th Organization, and White Lightening developed antiracist agendas that brought them into allegiance with the Panthers, the Young Lords, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and other black- and brown-led organizations. Sonnie and Tracy emphasize how much this history has been neglected:
Until recently, the narrative of the Sixties New Left largely excluded serious mention of poor and working class whites who formed or took over radical organizations. Instead, historians have tended to focus on the oppositional role of white workers – Teamsters, construction workers, carpenters – who violently confronted anti-war protesters, disregarded the plight of fellow Black and Brown workers, and cajoled labor's support for US military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia. (2011, 5)
The reactionary sector of the white workforce, sympathetically portrayed in the television hit All in the Family, with its “likable” bigot Archie Bunker, was in truth being contested by another sector of white workers who were organizing with explicitly antiracist, pro-working-class politics. Importantly, they were organized as identity-based groups – run by poor whites for poor whites – just as the nonwhite groups had come to be at this stage of the movement. But they maintained a determined allegiance with radical organizations of color, just as many of the latter groups, even many firmly nationalist ones, also held cross-race coalition to be a principled strategy despite favoring segregated political organizations. Most significantly, the white groups described by Sonnie and Tracy joined the radical movements of the 1960s as actors struggling for their own interests, and not merely as allies supporting social causes on behalf of others. They developed symbols and forms of discourse that drew on a specifically white semiotic toward revolutionary ends, with ducktail pomaded hairstyles, white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, even using the Confederate flag to signal a white aesthetic.
