Whiteness and the Future of Race Relations

Abstract

In the United States, there is certainly an ontological specificity to whiteness as “an unmarked category against which difference is constructed,”¹ that is indeed terrifying for blacks and other nonwhites. As I have already explained, whiteness is instrumental in the positioning of blacks and other nonwhites as the essential “other” of whites, appositely comparable to Jean-Paul Sartre’s insightful pronouncement that it was the anti-Semite that shaped and defined the Jews and Simone de Beauvoir’s conceptualization of white women as the indispensable “other” of white men. This is what is referred to as “the order of otherness,” to use Homi Bhabha’s evocative phrase,² or what Michel Foucault calls “the establishment of an order.”³ From the constitutive and hegemonic positioning of whiteness as historically and socially contextualized, seemingly, we cannot move beyond this dichotomy that separates the white self from the nonwhite “other.” As it happens, it is this very insidious dichotomy that is operationalized to determine and maintain the ultimate conditions of nonwhites as the antithesis of whites, inferior and lacking in the will to advance in societal life.