Abstract
Race in U.S.-American life is at once so self-evident and so complex that it is important to be as clear as possible about what it is. In the United States, race is most often recognized (or presumed to be recognizable) by noticing skin “color.”1 We might notice other bodily features or personal characteristics—for example, a name or an accent—that seem to indicate race. From there, we might make assumptions about cultural traditions, geographical origins, economic status, or any number of things. Conversely, awareness of culture, geography, or economics might prompt our recognition of race.
Categories are constructed. Scars and bruises are felt with human bodies, some of which end up in coffins. Death is not a construct.
—Cornel West
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Notes
Though this is a deceptive and dangerous indicator, as shall be seen in the case of Native Americans, for whom one of white supremacy’s manifestations has been forced assimilation. And, when phenotypes do not signify what social meanings suggest they should—as in the case of light-skinned African Americans, e.g.—other dimensions of racial oppression are experienced. See Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).
“Common sense” is the language of Michael Omi and Howard Winant. They write, “In each epoch of U.S. history, a certain school of racial theory has been dominant, serving as the racial ‘common sense’ of its age.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4.
Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 7.
For examples from various fields, see the following: in legal theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, ed.. Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York & London: New York University, 2001), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ed.. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); in cultural studies, Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995), Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000); in history, sociology, and political science, Malik, The Meaning of Race, Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).
Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 38.
Some scholars, e.g., might begin with and ascribe to “culture,” what I begin with and here ascribe to “race,” namely, phenomena such as agency, economics, nationalism, and meaning making. Gilroy uses a cultural definition of race, which he sees as a “teleological hinge” on the door from agency to structures. Ibid., 17. Lisa Lowe writes of culture as “terrain in which politics, culture, and the economic form an inseparable dynamic,” and considers race and gender within this terrain. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 3.
Ibid., 4.
Winona La Duke, public lecture, “The Scholar & Feminist Conference,” Barnard College, New York, February 22, 2003.
Emphasis mine. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York & London: New York University Press, 1996), 132.
“The abjection is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order to become social; it is also a symptom of the failure of this ambition. As a compromise between ‘condemnation and yearning,’ abjection marks the borders of the self; at the same time, it threatens the self with perpetual danger” This notion of the abject, as used by Anne McClintock, is very useful for marking how deeply the racialization of a particular collectivity is bound up with intense repudiations and hyper-fixations upon “other” collectivities. This phenomenon will be particularly evident in chapter three of this book. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 71; also see George E. “Tink” Tinker, “Abjection, Violence, Missions, and American Indians,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no. i-A (2002): 106–20.
Berel Lang writes that racism functions through essentialism in three directions: “The first is that human identity and activity are the function first of a group and only then of an individual—that is, the group is prior to the individual… The second principle is that human group identities (and then the identities of individuals within the groups) vary not only accidentally (as in customs of dress), but essentially—in their access to or grasp of reality, moral and/or epistemic. In other words, group identities differ in respect to intrinsic moral and cognitive capacity, in their person-hood …. And finally, the third principle holds that the group identities so realized are ‘naturally ordered hierarchically and evaluatively—with the various capacities corresponding to differentiated and essential values.” Berel Lang, “Metaphysical Racism (or: Biological Warfare by Other Means),” in Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Routledge, 1997), 24.
See Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1999), for an example of this kind of rejection of the use of race in a work in theology.
In Michael Lind’s review of Randall Kennedy’s most recent book it is to precisely this conclusion that Kennedy is understood to arrive, and for which Lind commends him. Apparently, Kennedy goes so far as to claim that because race is a legal construction and not an essence, and because such legal categories came from notions of natural race, any governmental documentation of race is illegitimate. In response to government-supported programs that attempt to match adoptive children of a particular racial group with parents from that same group, Kennedy is quoted as writing, “If dismantling [racial] affirmative action must be part of the price of effectively doing away with race matching, it is no more than I, for one, am willing to pay.” I find this a distressing statement as it conflates the use of race for the purpose of oppression with the use of race for amelioration. While Kennedy’s concern (in which he is not alone) about the dangers of reifying race may be legitimate in an abstract sense, such conflation suggests that merely ceasing to recognize race formally in the political and legal spheres will somehow eradicate the problem of white supremacy. In a society where race has concrete material meanings (regardless of whether or not public officials invoke the category overtly) that deeply stratify the social order, it is naive at best to think that jumping to non-recognition will eradicate the effects of white supremacy. At worst, such claims are co-opted for social projects that conserve a white-dominated status quo. Michael Lind, review of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption by Randall Kennedy, The Nation, June 16, 2003, 14–18.
“The triumph of such ideas regarding race [namely, that it is not biological], although it has been achieved by starts and fits and continues to encounter resistance, is one grand achievement of twentieth-century science and of the century’s freedom movements. At the same time, however, that very triumph sets the stage for the conservative and neoliberal arguments … which miss the tragic gravity of [Frantz] Fanon’s remarks on the epidermalization of race and indeed seek to forget race by confusing its biological inconsequence and superficiality with the deep inequalities it structures.” David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2002), 16.
Janet R. Jakobsen, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 5.
David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London & New York: Verso Books, 1994), 3.
Ian Haney López, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 165.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Teminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York & London: Routledge, 1990), 23.
Effectively, we have returned to the dangers of essentialism here. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34, 35.
Michel Foucault, “Afterword,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics 2nd ed., ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 210.
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power (Interviewers: Alessandro Fontana, Pasquale Pasquino),” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 97.
See Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 6. Tatum has received national acclaim for a number of reasons. including her brilliant analysis of why cross-racial dialogue pursued for multicultural understanding so often breaks down. She articulates the various ways dialogue is difficult, depending on the different stages of racial identity development embodied by differently raced participants in such dialogue. She also gives attention to the different kinds of issues that attend racial identity development among various communities of color depending on the particular manifestations of white supremacy in relation to particular ethnic/racial/immigrant locations.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 106.
Tatum notes the incredible pressures to collude when one becomes more aware of racism, as such awareness makes other whites uncomfortable when one starts to point it out. She also is clear that, given the social location of white people in this racial hierarchy (insulated and privileged), silence tends to pervade white families on issues of race. This makes white racial identity development toward an antiracist identity anything but an automatic process. Ibid., 101, 94.
Janet E. Helms, A Race is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life (Topeka: Content Communications), i.
Mary Foulke, “White Racial Identity Development Chart,” based upon Janet E. Helms, ed.. Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research and Practice (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1994).
Ibid.
Thandeka, Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York & London: Continuum, 1999). These psychological works focus on issues of the psychological self as affected by social realities. This is why I have used the term “socialized” here rather than “racialized,” which is inherently political. Racialized would be, in fact, more in keeping with Thandeka’s notion of this process, as her sense of race as constructed is strongly articulated, in contrast to Tatum or Helms. However, I do not want socialized and racialized to become conflated, and thus have chosen to use the term socialized even for describing Thandeka’s project.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 4.
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6.
What I find fascinating is that despite the fact that this is psychological literature, this issue also comes up in critical theory, which suggests that there is a real chasm in critical studies of whiteness. Barbara Flagg, e.g., a legal scholar and critical race theorist, devotes a section of her book on white race consciousness and the law to problems with white racial identity and the need for a positive white identity. Barbara J. Flagg, Was Blind, but Now I See: White Race Consciousness and the Law (New York & London: New York University Press, 1998), 19–38. Haney López comments on this problem, rejecting Flagg’s conclusion in terms with which I agree: namely, that a positive white identity in the context of white supremacy is a dangerous prospect. In response he offers a theoretically sound, but excruciatingly abstract, alternative: the need for a “self-deconstructive White race-consciousness.” Haney López, White by Law, 31.
Thandeka’s work, I would argue, veers most closely to the danger signaled by Christine Sleeter when she writes, “What is troubling about the process of interrogating whiteness … or any position of strength and dominance, is how easy it is to subvert this process and create a new class of victims.” Christine E. Sleeter, “White Silence, White Solidarity,” in Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignative and John Garvey (New York & London: Routledge, 1996), 260. I do not doubt that many white people are shamed as part of their “learning to be white.” (Though, I suspect this was a more clearly articulated teaching/learning a few decades ago than it is among youth growing now in a “color blind” world and likely varies in geographic regions of the country.) However, to my mind, Thandeka mislocates from whence the shame or reticence in ascribing oneself as “white” comes. In coming into teenage and adulthood years, the awareness that to be white is to be unjustly advantaged, and experience of one’s overt and covert complicity with racism (an experience with which no white person in this society can be unfamiliar, even while we may deny it) is more likely the source of the shame. I believe, therefore, that when we have to call attention to our privilege in any sort of self-critical way, it is here that our reticence emerges. On the other hand, when it is time to cash in on that privilege, if there is little chance we might be called to account for so doing, few of us genuinely resist.
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.
James Baldwin, The Trice of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martm’s, 1985).
The image of “secreting” is taken from Cornel West, who writes: “I shall argue that the initial structure of modern discourse in the West ‘secretes’ the idea of white supremacy. I call this ‘secretion’ the underside of modern discourse—a particular logical consequence of the quest for truth and knowledge in the modern West.” Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville & London: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), 48.
Riggs crafts the mediating ethic out of her analysis of the Black women’s club movement. She addresses mediating tensions between separation and integration for Black communities, class stratification within Black communities, as well as interracial relationships in which boundaries of difference should not be dissolved and in which “we may cooperate in common endeavors toward racial justice, but without some ultimate reconciliation in view.” Marcia Y. Riggs, Awake, Arise, and Act: A Womanist Call for Black Liberation (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1994), 96.
Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
Ibid.
Ibid., 83, 84.
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© 2007 Jennifer Harvey
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Harvey, J. (2007). The Moral Crisis of “Being White”. In: Whiteness and Morality. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604940_2
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