Abstract
In the context of recognizing that race is a social construction, analyses of the formative years of U.S. nation building reveal multiple processes through which such construction took place. Whiteness emerged as a socially meaningful, significant, and recognizable racial category through the ideologies, practices, and material relations intrinsic to and inextricable from the genocide and colonization of Native peoples and the enslavement of African peoples.
As far as we could determine, white culture, if it existed, depended primarily upon the exploitation of land, people, and life itself.
—Vine Deloria, Jr.
I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.
—James Weldon Johnson
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Notes
Quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11.
Ibid., 17.
Toni Morrison, Flaying in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vmtage Books, 1992), 6.
Ibid., viii.
Ibid.
The Society of Indian Dead could be found at Grateful Dead concerts, where they marked their opposition to U.S. drug policy, e.g., by posing as Indian resisters who would rather “starve than submit.” See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998), 181, 182.
Such productions are not far removed—merely registered in a different key—than the obsessions with blackness that Winthrop Jordan documents in relation to the English, or the rhetorical fixations upon “savagery” found among colonial America. See Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Many analyses that engage similar concerns do slip into psychoanalysis. For example, Freud emerges regularly in the most unexpected places as scholars consider, e.g., why whites were so obsessed with Native peoples. The explanation becomes that European colonists were repressed and Native peoples represented a kind of freedom. See, e.g., Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). In relation to blackface, even a scholar as inclined to constructionism as a critical political intervention as David R. Roediger makes claims that the industrial workers of the mid–1800s were grieving the loss of their former lives as part of the industrial machine, and blackface became a way to vicariously remember those lives and reconnect themselves—by their grotesque portrayal of revelry—to reject those parts of themselves. See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). While I am not inclined to reject such argumentation out of hand, I am wary of such speculations, and deeply suspicious about the line of questioning that they assume. For example, implicit to a claim such as Drinnon’s is that Native peoples did represent such freedom. And, while it may be true that colonists recognized a way of life among Native peoples that they envied in comparison to that which they lived (thus the high rates of runaways noted in chapter two), I still want to exercise more caution than liberty to pursue such considerations. I remain focused on the effects and implications of human behaviors and activities, rather than inquiry into internal motivations that might have caused such activities.
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 457.
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892; reprint On Lynchings, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 13.
As early as 1892, Ida B. Wells was clear that the whites in the North were key players in lynching and developed a strategy for addressing this complicity. Describing Wells’ activities following the lynching of three men in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 9, 1982 (one of whom was a good friend of Wells), Emilie M. Townes writes, “Wells was aware that her message was not reaching the white newspapers. This was anathema for her. She believed that ruling class whites were the key to social change …. Wells’ appeals focused on the powerful groups outside of the South, which she believed had moral and economic authority, but who were not listening. Her dilemma was how to reach those key leaders. Non-southern whites, both in this country and in England, were the key Wells saw to halt lynching.” Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 142.
See Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: The Noonday Press, 1995).
Michael Newton and Judy Ann Newton, Racial and Religious Violence in America: A Chronology (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 391–92.
Emphasis mine. Michael Rogin, “Black Masks, White Skin: Consciousness of Class and American National Culture,” Radical History Review 54 (fall 1992): 142.
Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Civitas Counterpoint, 1998), 191.
Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (1894; reprint On Lynchings, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 8.
Richard M. Perloff, “The Press and Lynchings of African Americans,” Journal of Black Studies 30 (January 2000): 315. The population of the United States, in 1900, was approximately seventy-six million. In 1910, it was approximately ninety-two million. See online: http://www.bradley.edu .
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 133.
Arthur F. Raper, Mass Violence in America: The Tragedy of Lynching (1933; reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1968), 48.
See Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
Stewart E. Tolnay, Glenn Deane, and E. M. Beck, “Vicarious Violence: Spatial Effects on Southern Lynchings, 1890–1919,” American ]ournal of Sociology 102 (November 1996): 790.
Some argue, e.g., that “lynching increased when the economic conditions worsened,” while others claims that no study has confirmed “consistent or convincing explanation of lynching,” including the effects of economic downturn. See, respectively, Sarah A. Soule, “Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890–1900,” Social Forces 71 (December 1992): 435; and James W. Clarke, “Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South,” British Journal of Political Science 28 (April 1998): 272.
“They may have been called by various names, ‘cracker,’ ‘rednecks,’ ‘hillbillies,’ ‘po’ white trash,’ and ‘po’ buckra,’ but at least they were whites.” James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 4.
James Sellers, The South and Christian Ethics (New York: Association Press, 1962), 118–19, quoted in ibid., 207.
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southernerns in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 197–98, quoted in ibid., 214.
Edwin Forrest, in 1820, was the first actor on the U.S.-American stage to perform in blackface. He impersonated a plantation slave. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 28.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 28, 29.
Robert C. Toll examines the participation of African American performers in minstrelsy, including their formation of Black minstrel troupes in the mid-1850s (which were quite popular) and their struggles to sustain ownership over their companies when, in the early 1870s, white men began to take over ownership of Black minstrel companies. For example, in protest against Charles Callender, a white man who became one of the most prominent businessmen in Black minstrelsy, three minstrel stars—Billy Kersands, Bob Height, and Horace Weston—left their company and formed a rival one. They stated: “We are all men under no obligation to anyone, and looking for our best interest in the elevation and maintenance of ourselves and our families. We are not blind or insensible to our worth, and honorably proceeded to negotiate for better positions which we have accomplished from our present manager, Mr. Charles White.” While the participation in minstrelsy saw African American performers contending with white caricatures and stereotypes, Toll notes the extent to which Black minstrels modified their performances in various kinds of protest of white supremacy. In their portrayals of plantation life, e.g.. Black minstrels rarely included mention of white masters or mistresses. They focused attention on and portrayed relatives and memories of family. In addition, they expressed antislavery sentiments: “these black protests were only undercurrents in a broader stream of nostalgic plantation material. Some of them were ‘snuck’ into nonprotest songs. In an otherwise innocuous song about romance on the plantation, for example, Pete Devonear complained that there were ‘two overseers to one little nigger.’ Similarly, several of the religious songs looked forward to heaven as the place ‘where there is no overseer,’ where blacks would be free men, and from which some whites would be excluded.” Toll notes that such covert jibes were common in Black folk culture, so African American members of the audience would have been able to recognize and enjoy them, while whites would have been clueless and missed them altogether. See Robert C. Toll, Blacking up: The Minstrel Show in ÌÀineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 203, 245–47.
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Tart Which Black Tolk Tlayed in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 700, 701.
LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Quill, 1963), 84.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 3.
Priscilla Wald, “Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993), 60.
Noting that Cooper was criticized by some for his “romantic” portrayal of Native peoples, Berkhofer writes, “No one criticized his image of the frontier White, however, for all subscribed to the same larger pageant of White progress into the interior of the continent.” Ibid., 94. Bergland writes of Cooper that he “draws his readers into the fantastic world of American manliness, projecting Native American men and white women side by side as powerless objects of European American male desire.” Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 2000), 64; also see 63–107; and Drinnon, Facing West.
Ward Churchill calls these novels a kind of propaganda, used to condition the public. He places them in the same vein as the kind of propaganda used by the Nazis to condition the non-Jewish Germans to hatred of the Jews. See Ward Churchill, Indians Are Usi Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1994), 75, 76.
Philip Borden, “Found Cumbering the Soih Manifest Destiny and the Indian in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), 89.
Dion Dennis, “Washington’s Birthday on the Texas Border,” Theory, Technology and Culture 20, no. 1–2 (1997): http://www.collection.nlc-bnc.ca /100/201/300/ctheorty/eveents/1997/9702n36.txt.
It is not uncommon to attend non-traditional white Christian worship services and to experience presumedly Native rituals or drumming as part of the expression of reaching beyond traditional Christian forms of worship. It is also not unfamiliar to experience white congregations singing traditionally African American hymns—with no historical context provided—or in more non-traditional worship, “African” drumming. Laura Donaldson writes, “Indeed, NANA [New Age Native Americanism] has emerged as a powerful catalyst for feminist transformation as non-Native women increasingly employ Indian traditions to escape the patriarchal biases of monotheistic religions and to become empowered, as well as individuated. In many towns and cities across the United States, drumming circles, shield-making workshops, and ‘touch-the-earth’ ceremonies are common occurrences …” Laura E. Donaldson, “On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans: New Age Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 3 (1999): 678.
Linda Barrington, “Editor’s Introduction: Native Americans and U.S. Economic History,” in The Other Side of the Trontier: Economie Explorations Into Native American History, ed. Linda Barrington (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 13.
Quoted in ibid., 14.
John Mohawk (Seneca), “The Power of Seneca Women and the Legacy of Handsome Lake,” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, ed. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 22.
War inevitably led to removal as nations who were defeated were given “removal treaties.” See Donald Fixico, “Federal and State Policies and American Indians,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Maiden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 382.
Such ideologies were early manifestations of Manifest Destiny, which would be formalized in the 1840s. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1981).
A note on this citation: I find the title of and the inquiry pursued in this article disturbing. Inquiring into whether the “rationale” given for removal of the Cherokee people was “true” or not—namely, Jackson argued to Congress that the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek could not survive in the area because they were not acculturating to white agricultural methods— seems to me akin to exploring the “causes” of lynching. I find the title of the essay, moreover, disturbingly inattentive to the resonances and power of language. David M. Wishart, “Could the Cherokee Have Survived in the Southeast?” in The Other Side of the Frontier: Economic Explorations Into Native American History, ed. Linda Barrington (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 168.
M. Annette Jaimes, assisted by Theresa Halsey, “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America,” in State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 339.
Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in A Companion to American Indian History, 461.
Robert G. Hays, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem,” 1860–1900 (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1997), 51. The U.S. government had established an “Office of Indian Affairs” in 1832, and in 1849, had moved it to the Department of the Interior This shift itself provoked discussion and debate for a long time, as it signaled a shift in approaches to Native nations by the United States. At the same time, war between a number Native nations and the United States (and numerous massacres by the U.S. military) continued through the end of the nineteenth century. See Fixico, “Federal and State Policies and American Indians,” 383.
Fixico details the strategies of the Muscogee Creek, who managed to resist much of the internal chaos that the pressure for allotment created. The Muscogee Creek went to Congress in 1889 to remind President McKinley of the eighteen treaties the United States had signed with them; they wrote a constitution in order to cultivate the internal strength needed to stand as a nation against the United States, they engaged in armed resistance, and made an attempt to become their own state (to be called Sequoyah) in opposition to white attempts to create Oklahoma. The Muscogee Creek resisted allotment for fifteen years successfully, but, ultimately, the United States began to implement it on January 3, 1903. Fixico documents the incredible devastation that took place internal to the Muscogee Creek nation, as a result—a devastation augmented by the discovery of oil under lands that had been allotted. See Donald L. Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 4–12.
Ibid., 4.
Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act, ed. Ralph Ellison (New York: Random House, 1964), 28.
For an excellent resource, see Greg Tate, ed.. Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Some white U.S.-Americans still have ethnic cultural traditions and spiritual legacies on which to draw. Some have religious traditions as well. Jews, e.g., many of who are racialized as white (those practicing Judaism and not) have a strong history of representation in white antiracism activism. Some Christians similarly draw on the Christian tradition as a resource (though this is a much more problematic endeavor given the role of Christianity in both physical and cultural genocide, enslavement, and every other racial atrocity considered in these pages). In addition, some scholars have recently attempted to bring antiracist activity by white people into broader view, not in order to overstate its legacy, but in order to refuse the white supremacist blanket that would cover all signs of white resistance, making it more difficult for other white people to see options for disruption and refusal. See Becky Thompson, A Promise anda Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001); and Sally Noland MacNichol, “ ‘We Make the Road by Walking’: Reflections on the Legacy of White Antiracist Activism,” in Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need To Do, ed. Jennifer Harvey, Karin A. Case, and Robin Hawley Gorsline (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004).
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Harvey, J. (2007). Becoming Uniquely White “American”. In: Whiteness and Morality. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604940_4
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