Whiteness Studies

History

Cedric Johnson:

"Whiteness studies as an academic field of inquiry was born in the waning years of the Reagan-Bush era, and its creators’ motives were earnest and well intentioned. They were preoccupied with how to reverse the trend of neoconservativism and revitalize the American Left. The New Right was built in American suburbia, the southern states, and the shuttered manufacturing towns stretching from the eastern seaboard across the Midwest, and at the heart of the New Right’s campaign playbook and governing agenda was the assault on the egalitarian reforms of the civil rights and second wave feminism, such as affirmative action and reproductive rights, as well as those targeted programs of the welfare state, e.g. AFDC, public housing, which were portrayed as giveaways to the undeserving black and brown poor. The problem, many would argue, lay in whiteness, as a category of material advantage and political affinity, or put another way, the New Right had emerged through conspicuous appeals to whites as a group and against urban blacks and Latinos, who were portrayed through underclass narratives as an inferior caste, lacking a work ethic and delayed gratification, immoral, prone to criminality and self-sabotage, and in the most racist articulations, biologically inferior, lacking the intellectual and social capacity that might enable assimilation as citizens.

Whiteness studies had important precursors. In 1987 black political scientist Ronald W. Walters published a pamphlet titled, “White Racial Nationalism in the United States” as part of the Without Prejudice series of the United Nations’ International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Seeing a clear connection between Reagan’s conservative policies and the rising violence perpetrated by white supremacist organizations and vigilantes, Walters concluded that “the current wave of American nationalism is chauvinistic not only because it is American, but also because it is white.” In 1989 feminist educator Peggy McIntosh’s published “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” an abridged version of an article she penned a year prior. But it was Roediger’s 1991 book, The Wages of Whiteness, that quickly gained influence within academia and beyond, establishing the new beachhead of anti-racist thinking and activism. More than any other single figure, Roediger has helped to advance the study of whiteness as a central problem in American history and politics, having published and edited numerous books on the subject, including his Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005) and How Race Survived U.S. History (2010).

In the three decades since Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, dozens of books have explored the historical process of white identity formation, such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995), Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996), George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1998), Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness (1998), dozens of scholarly and popular articles, as well as the independent left journal Race Traitor. A one-man brand, Tim Wise has become a routine fixture on the college lecture circuit, national news and radio programs, and authored numerous best-selling books including, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (2008) and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority (2012). McIntosh and Wise represent a more therapeutic, consciousness-raising approach to whiteness that has spawned a cottage industry of professional trainings, national conferences, study guides, manuals, and curricula targeting white audiences and intended to spark dialogue, personal reevaluation and behavioral modification, all in the hopes of reducing racism in its various manifestations, i.e. micro-aggressions, institutional racism, and white privilege. Such projects include the United Church of Christ’s White Privilege: Let’s Talk—A Resource for Transformational Dialogue, the film, Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, produced by World Trust Educational Services, and the Whiteness Project, an on-line interactive platform built around interviews, among scores of similar initiatives.

As historian Eric Arnesen pointed out in a critical overview of the whiteness studies literature, “Whiteness is, variously, a metaphor for power, a proxy for racially distributed material benefits, a synonym for ‘white supremacy,’ an epistemological stance defined by power, a position of invisibility or ignorance, and a set of beliefs about racial ‘others’ and one-self that can be rejected through ’treason’ to a racial category.” The promiscuity of the concept of whiteness, and related notions of white privilege and white supremacy make it a difficult concept to criticize, as Arnesen adds, “it is nothing less than a moving target.”

Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness was unique in its focus on the complicity of white workers, and its rejection in part of earlier Marxist arguments that pinned the creation and circulation of racist ideology on ruling elites. Published a decade into Reagan-Bush’s neoconservative reign, Roediger’s opening salvo posed the question that many still asks about white workers’ commitments to the GOP— “why do white workers vote against their interests?”—with the speaker almost always assuming that working-class interests are already self-evident, unified and simply waiting to be advanced. “White labor does not just receive and resist racist ideas but embraces, adopts and, at times, murderously acts upon those ideas,” Roediger argues in that now classic book, “The problem is not just that the white working class is at critical junctures manipulated by racism, but that it comes to think of itself and its interests as white.”

This essay takes aim at this central premise regarding “white interests” running through Roediger’s oeuvre, from The Wages of Whiteness to his most recent book, and widely adopted by other academics, professional trainers, activists and citizens. The academic and popular discourse of whiteness is concerned with the “souls of white folks” if you will, their predilections, behaviors and reactionary tendencies, often relying on retrospective psychoanalysis to discern the interior lives and private motives of the antebellum crowd, the minstrel show audience, southern lynch mobs and middle class suburban strivers alike, even when evidence of those motives and interests is scant.

The historian Barbara Fields once remarked that “Whiteness is the shotgun marriage of two incoherent but well-loved concepts: identity and agency.” That said, this essay seeks to begin divorce proceedings because a keen sense of historical interests, the shifting, territorial demands and worlds people fight to realize in their times, is lost in the common inferences made through psychohistory and the false equation of identity and political interests, analytical moves which are central to whiteness studies, and for that matter, much contemporary thinking on blackness and race in the US. As Fields reminds us, whiteness acts as a thimblerig that “performs a series of deft displacements, first substituting race for racism, then postulating identity as the social substance of race, and finally attributing racial identity to persons of European descent.” And I would add, the same thimblerig enables attributing political interests to whites (and blacks) without the critical analysis and investigatory rigor that might sharpen our understanding of class and power in American history." (https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/)