Abstract
I begin this inquiry into the relationship of white people to racial justice and white supremacy with three vignettes that illuminate fault lines in white racial identity.
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Notes
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 275.
I purposely sidestep here a number of debates over “identity politics” and their utility and dangers, and refer to such movements in their best sense. For example, as Angela Davis says, “In my opinion, the most exciting potential of women of color formations resides in the possibility of politicizing this identity—basing the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.” Interview with Lisa Lowe, “Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class and Gender in the USA,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997), 318. For examples of movements in which complex coalitions are being attempted, even while identities of race and class are given significance, see John Anner, ed., Beyond Identity Politics: Emerging Social Justice Movements in Communities of Color (Boston: South End Press, 1996).
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York & London: Routledge, 1997), 23.
Tat-siong Benny Liew and Vincent L. Wimbush, “Contact Zones and Zoning Contexts: From the Los Angeles ‘Riot’ to a New York Symposium,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no. 1–2 (2002): 24.
She also points out that such so-called virtues are, in fact, behaviors compelled by capitalism. Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 2.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 5.
Consideration of difference is not sufficient in its own terms, e.g. Thus, Celina Romany writes that one of the failures of postmodernism is that while it allows for a meeting of discourses, it does not provide the means for an encounter at the concrete level of differential power and privilege. Celina Romany, “Ain’t I a Feminist?” in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York & London: New York University Press, 1997), 22. Philip J. Deloria, exploring historiographical issues, writes that postcolonial perspectives may be preferred in Native American scholarship over postmodernism. While both give attention to the ways particular individuals and communities constitute and identify themselves, postcolonial frameworks compel “a confrontation with history” that the postmodern embrace of the individual subject can too easily attenuate. Philip J. Deloria, “Historiography,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Maiden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 20.
W E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994), 9.
Ibid., 1.
I do not suggest this to be an original inversion. Indeed, in 1860, Brooklyn schoolteacher William J. Wilson wrote a piece entitled “What Shall We Do with the White People?” See David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2002), 21. Obviously, people of color have always known white people are the problem. Moreover, many intellectuals have made this presumption a specific lens for their work. Along with Du Bois, a select few include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Recently emergent “critical studies of whiteness” at their best are heir to this scholarship.
It may be ironic but this contention is grounded in my sense that an ongoing reckoning with what it means to be the problem can offer liberation options for moral and political agency, in contrast to the (privilege reifying) paralysis of guilt or the crippling cynicism of despair and resignation. This is not to reject completely the phenomenon of guilt. Indeed, guilt can signal being convicted of transgression. Mary Hobgood writes, helpfully, “White people are tempted to guilt and/or hopelessness when we learn about the enormity of the racialized system and how it privileges and disables us as it disadvantages and oppresses others. Being embarrassed and feeling shame may be good insofar as they maintain our moral bearings and prompt us to develop a positive agenda for change.” Mary Elizabeth Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000), 41.
The claim of part one could lead to a number of different foci for part two, as there are many imperatives in the project of disrupting whiteness. For example, one might focus on the role of the prison industrial complex as a necessary site for disruption of whiteness. I choose reparations because of the manner in which Native genocide and chattel slavery were both the context for the origins of race in what became the United States as well as United States’ “original sins.” See Larry L. Rasmussen, “Scrupulous Memory,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no. 1–2 (2002): 85. Moreover, one of the ways white supremacy is sustained is through a radical ahistoricity. Thus, to locate the present realities of racial injustice in some of their earliest historical emergences in what became the United States is important.
James Baldwin’s words echo here: “White man, hear me! History, … does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from that fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt,” in The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martm’s/Marek, 1985), 409.
Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8.
Beverly Wildung Harrison made this case throughout the corpus of her teaching and writing. For just one example, see Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The Role of Social Theory in Religious Social Ethics: Reconsidering the Case for Marxian Political Economy,” in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 54–80. Hobgood makes this claim explicit, as well, when she argues that the power relations that structure race, class, gender, “deeply condition the morality of our lives-in-relation.” Social analysis, therefore, is critical to making a moral evaluation of how power relations shape and misshape our lives and our relations with others. She argues further, that Christian liberationist perspectives “affirm that ethical questions deal centrally with power-in-relationship.” Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege, 9, 38.
See Ian Haney López, White by Law. The Legal Construction of Race (New York & London: New York University Press, 1996). These rulings were made especially in relation to Mexican and Asian peoples.
Robert S. Chang, Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State (New York & London: New York University Press, 1999), 20.
Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995), 47.
Theodore W. Allen notes that this is the case in terms of sheer demographics alone. In addition to the obvious centrality of Native peoples, given the land base upon which imperial Europe set up, he writes, “It is certain that more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas between 1500 and 1800.” Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Yol. 2 (London & New York: Verso, 1997), 9.
Francis Jennings writes, “The swift penetration of the North American continent profoundly modified the history of Europe and Euramericans as well as that of Indians. Europe sought trade with Indians because Europe needed what the Indians had to offer. Indian commodities became an important factor in the European commercial system, Indian demands stimulated particular European industries, and the meshing of the Indian trade into the world market modified to a degree the function of that market and the relationships of its national components.” Jennings continues by detailing a number of the specific ways in which European economies were impacted. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 97, 99, and 100.
Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 33.
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© 2007 Jennifer Harvey
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Harvey, J. (2007). Introduction Mapping the Fault Lines. In: Whiteness and Morality. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604940_1
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