PART FIVE
WHITENESS STUDIES
Over the last decade, the recognition that white folk make up a racial group, much like black and red and brown folk, has spurred some powerful, progressive scholarship. Writers on whiteness have examined the very notion of what makes someone white, as well as how that identity is used to justify an alarming variety of destructive practices. Some of the best insight has come from folk who have been the victims of whiteness as it has metastasized across the globe. I hope that as the scholarship on whiteness grows, it will provide even greater inspiration to the nation to turn away from the road of white supremacy and to follow the path of racial justice.
Ten
THE LABOR OF WHITENESS, THE WHITENESS OF LABOR, AND THE PERILS OF WHITEWISHING
On October 3–4, 1996, at Columbia University, a historic gathering of labor activists and academics convened under the theme, The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-in with the Labor Movement. The two-day meeting included labor leaders like AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, philosopher Richard Rorty, and feminist Betty Friedan. I was privileged to speak on a panel entitled The Wages of Race: Unions and Racial Justice, moderated by University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue and featuring legal theorist Derrick Bell, labor historian and whiteness studies pioneer David Roediger, and activist Mae Ngai of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance of the AFL-CIO. The teach-in also highlighted thinkers with profound disagreements. For instance, there was also a panel on Culture, Identity, and Class Politics that featured, along with UNITE’S Jo-Ann Mort, a vigorous exchange between NYU professors Robin D.G. Kelley, a prominent historian, and Todd Gitlin, a noted cultural critic. My paper actually addresses a critical issue taken up by Kelley and Gitlin: the function of identity politics in the labor movement, and in progressive circles more broadly. Too many critiques of identity politics take minority communities to task for undermining a fictional national and ideological unity while reinforcing the invisibility of white identities, thus exempting them from close scrutiny. This chapter, which appeared in Audacious Democracy, a collection of presentations from the teach-in, briefly provides a historical framework to the debate over identity politics in the labor community.
BITTER CONFLICTS OVER THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY are at the heart of contemporary debates about the labor movement, the political left, and the American academy. Such debates are often burdened by a truncated historical perspective that overlooks crucial features of the story of how identity politics, and the alleged special interests upon which such politics is said to rest, have come to dominate our intellectual and cultural landscape. This essay, then, has a modest ambition: to provide a small corrective to such stories by emphasizing how whiteness—which has reflexively, if unconsciously, been defined in universal terms—is composed of particular identities. These particular white identities have, until recently, been spared the sort of aggressive criticism that minority identities routinely receive. I will also argue that some critics of identity politics ignore these facts, and this ignorance smoothes the path for false accusations against blacks, women, and other minorities as the source of strife and disunity in the labor movement. Finally, I will suggest that, based on the uses of whiteness in the labor movement, the politics of identity was a problem long before the fuller participation of blacks and other minorities. Indeed, identity politics is most vicious when it is invisible, when it is simply part of the given, when it is what we take for granted.
One of the unforeseen, and certainly unintended, consequences of recent discussions of race is that we have come to question the identities, ideologies, and institutional expressions of whiteness.1 For most of our national history, the term race has meant black. The collapse of the meanings of blackness into the term race has led to a myriad of intellectual blind spots, not only in the narrow conceptualization of black identity, but in the severe lack of attention paid to how whiteness serves as a source of racial identity. The result of this is a cruel irony: whiteness, the most dominant and visible of American racial identities, has been rendered intellectually invisible, an ideological black hole that negates its selfidentification as one among many other racial identities. In the absence of viewing themselves as having a race, many whites latched onto citizenship as a vital means of self-definition. Whites were individuals and Americans; blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities were collectively defined as members of racial and ethnic subgroups. Whiteness had a doubly negative effect: it denied its racial roots while denying racial minorities their American identities.
Prior to conceiving of whiteness as a social construct—as a historically mediated cultural value that challenges the biological basis of white identity—most blacks and whites viewed whiteness as a relatively fixed identity. For blacks, the meaning of whiteness was singularly oppressive. The varied expressions of whiteness were viewed as the elaboration of a single plot: to contain, control, and, at times, to destroy black identity. For whites, their racial identities were never as concretely evoked or sharply defined as when the meanings of blackness spilled beyond their assigned limitations to challenge white authority. In part, whiteness was called into existence by blackness; a particular variety of whiteness was marshaled as a defensive strategy against black transgression of sanctified racial borders. At the least, whiteness was tied to blackness, its hegemonic meanings symbolically linked to a culture it sought to dominate. As a result, blackness helped expose the dominant meanings of whiteness and helped reveal the meaning of whiteness as domination.
To be sure, whiteness as domination had many faces, though the body of belief they fronted shared profound similarities. White supremacist ideology united poor whites in the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and sophisticated scholars in robes in the halls of academe. Still, if domination was the hub of the meaning of whiteness, there were many spokes radiating from its center. First, there was whiteness as the positive universal versus blackness as the negative particular. On this view, the invisibility of whiteness preserved both its epistemic and ethical value as the embodiment of norms against which blackness was measured. White styles of speech, behavior, belief, and the like were defined as universal standards of human achievement; their origins in particular ethnic communities were successfully masked. Through this meaning of whiteness, whites were able to criticize blacks for their failure to be human, not explicitly for their failure to be white, although in principle the two were indistinguishable.
Then there was whiteness as ethnic cohesion and instrument of nation making. This meaning of whiteness consolidated the fragmented cultures of white European ethnics and gave social utility to the ethnic solidarity that the myth of whiteness provided. The genius of unarticulated, invisible whiteness is that it was able to impose its particularist perspective as normative. Thus, the resistance of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to absorption into the white mainstream was viewed by whites as viciously nationalistic, while white racial nationalism managed to remain virtuously opaque.
Next, there was whiteness as proxy for an absent blackness it helped to limit and distort. The accent in this mode of whiteness is on its power to represent the ideals, interests, and especially the images of a blackness it has frozen through stereotype, hearsay, and conspiracy. In important ways, this use of whiteness parallels Renato Rosaldo’s description of imperialist nostalgia, where a colonial power destroys a culture, only to lament its demise with colonialism’s victims.2 In the present case, whiteness claims the authority to represent what it has ruined. The exemplars of this function of whiteness voice, instead of nostalgia, a presumptive right to speak for a minority it has silenced. Thus, there is a coercive representation by whiteness of the blackness it has contained. Needless to say, coercive representation often presents images that are feeble, distorted, or the idealizations of domesticated, colonized views of black life.
Finally, there was whiteness as the false victim of black power. This mode of whiteness is the ultimate strategy of preserving power by
protesting its usurpation by the real victim. The process was driven as much by the psychic need of whites for unifying inclusion as it was by a need to find a force to combat the exaggerated threat of black power. Thus, whites were able to make themselves appear less powerful than they were by overstating the threat posed by blacks. D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation exaggerated black male threats to white womanhood to justify the lynching of black men and to increase membership in white hate groups like the White Knights of Columbus. And in our own day, widely voiced complaints by “angry white males” about unfair minority access to social goods like education and employment often misrepresent the actual degree of minority success in these areas.
These strategies of dominant whiteness, as well as the orthodox views of race on which they are premised, held sway until the recent rise of constructivist views of race. One fallout from such constructivist views—challenging the racial stereotyping of minorities by dominant communities, as well as criticizing the romantic representations of minorities within their own communities—has been the wide denunciation of identity politics. It is not, I believe, coincidental that identity politics, and its alleged ideological cousins, political correctness and multiculturalism, has come under attack precisely at the moment that racial, sexual, and gender minorities have gained more prominence in our culture.
Although I favor forceful criticism of vicious varieties of identity politics—the sort where one’s particular social identity is made a fetish, where one’s group identification becomes an emblem of fascist insularity—the rush to indiscriminately renounce group solidarity without fully investigating the historical contexts, ideological justifications, and intellectual reasons for identity politics is irresponsible and destructive. If the labor movement, the left, the academy, and communities of color are to enjoy a renewed alliance, such investigations are crucial.
Still, taking history into account is no guarantee that the outcome will be just, or that it will profit the sort of balanced perspective for which I have called. Many critics have launched sharp attacks on identity politics as, among other things, the source of sin and suffering within the academy, the left, and the labor movement.3 Many critics argue that the left—including civil rights groups, feminists, gays and lesbians, and elements of the labor movement—has, through its self-destructive identity politics, undermined the possibility of progressive consensus and community. The Hobbesian war of all against all—pitting minority groups against the majority, blacks against whites, gays against straights, and the handicapped against the able-bodied—results in each group talking (or, more likely, hollering) past the other, leading to a destructive politics of purity. Many critics suggest that the energy squandered on identity politics is nothing less than an American tragedy, because it negates a history of left universalism even as it supports a bitter battle over select identities. On this view, the larger tragedy is that the right, long identified with privileged interests, increases its appeal by claiming to defend the common good.
Like these critics, I am certainly worried about the plague of the politics of identity when it is unleashed without concern for the common good.4 I, too, lament the petty infighting and shameless competition for victim status among various groups. Still, such analyses inadequately explain how we got into the mess of identity politics to begin with. Such critics of identity politics fail to grapple with the historic meanings and functions of whiteness, especially the harsh stigma that whiteness brings to those identities and social ideals which fall outside its realm. Moreover, they do not account for the narrow definition of universality and commonality on which such a project of left solidarity often hinges. To paraphrase Alasdair MacIntyre, “Whose universality and which commonality?”
But if such critics’ efforts at explicating our national malaise fall short, Michael Tomasky’s similar story falls far shorter.5 In trying to figure out where the left has gone wrong, Tomasky is even more unrelenting in assailing the lefts “identity politics, and how those [intellectual] underpinnings fit and don’t fit the notions about a civil society that most Americans can support.” According to Tomasky, “the left has completely lost touch with the regular needs of regular Americans.” He contends that the left “is best described as tribal, and we’re engaged in what essentially has been reduced to a battle of interest-group tribalism.” Further, Tomasky claims that “solidarity based on race or ethnicity or any other such category always produces war, factionalism, fundamentalism.” He concludes that “particularist, interest-group politics—politics where we don’t show potential allies how they benefit from being on our side—is a sure loser.” Tomasky warns that “will never do the left any good, for example, to remonstrate against angry white men.” Tomasky says that this “is not to say angry white men don’t exist. But what’s the use in carrying on about them?”
Tomasky is certainly right to criticize the left for its failure to show possible fellow travelers how they might be helped by tossing in with our project. And he’s within reason to decry the destructive tribalism of the left. But he fails to comprehend that creating a civil society that has the support of most Americans cannot be the goal of any plausible left in America. The role of a marginalized but morally energized American left is to occupy an ethical register that counters injustice, especially when such injustice passes for common sense. The welfare debate is only the most recent example of how the left should gird its loins to defend those who are unjustly stigmatized against the advocates of universal values and common sense. But nowhere is Tomasky’s fatal lack of balanced historical judgment seen more clearly than in his dismissal of the political and social effect of “angry white men.” Tomasky fails to understand that such anger often grows from the historical amnesia encouraged by the ideology of white supremacy and by the politics of neoliberal race avoidance as well.
Tomasky, and other critics of his ilk, are, to varying degrees, victims of what I term whitewishing. In my theory, whitewishing is the interpretation of social history through an explanatory framework in which truth functions as an ideological projection of whiteness in the form of a universal identity. Whitewishing draws equally from Freud and Feuerbach: it is the fulfillment of a fantasy of whiteness as neutral and objective, the projection of a faith in whiteness as its own warrant against the error of anti-universalism because it denies its own particularity. Whitewishing is bathed, paradoxically enough, in a nostalgia for the future: too sophisticated simply to lament a past now gone (and in some ways that never was), it chides the present from an eschatological whiteness, the safest vantage point from which to preserve and promote its own “identityless” identity.
Tomasky’s and other critics’ whitewishing permits them to play down and, at times, erase three crucial facts when it comes to the labor movement. First, identity politics has always been at the heart of the labor movement, both to deny black workers, for instance, their rightful place in unions and as wage earners in the workplace, and to consolidate the class, racial, and gender interests of working elites against the masses of workers. The identity politics now allegedly ripping apart the labor movement—as well as Balkanizing the academy and the left in general—is a response to a predecessor politics of identity that was played out without being identified as such because of its power to rebuff challenges brought by racial, ethnic, and gender minorities. Even white proletarians enjoyed their secondhand brands of universalism. This shows how the move to decry “special interests”—that is, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans—within the labor movement denies a fundamental fact: all interests are special if they’re yours.
Second, as the work of David Roediger has shown,6 race and class were integrally related in shaping the (white) working class in America. The class interests of white workers were based on their developing a sense of whiteness to help alleviate their inferior social status: they derived benefits from not being black. This simple fact is a reminder that, from the very beginning in the labor movement and in working-class organizations
, race played a significant role in determining the distribution of social and economic goods. Such a fact flies in the face of arguments that the labor movement must reclaim its identity by retreating from identity politics to focus once again on class.
Finally, many debates about labor and identity politics are ahistorical in another way: they presume a functional equivalency between the experiences of all workers who are presently making claims about the weight certain features of identity should carry in a consideration of getting work, keeping work, and job advancement. The real history of racial and gender discrimination in the labor movement, and in the job sector, means that the affirmative action claims of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and women are not specialinterest pleadings, but a recognition of their just due in arenas that were segregated by race and gender. To think and behave as if these differences are equal to the forms of disadvantage that white workers face is to engage in another form of whitewishing.
The only way beyond vicious identity politics is to go through it. As with race, we can get beyond the nefarious meanings of racism only by taking race into account. We cannot pretend in the labor movement that significant barriers have not been erected to prevent coalition and cooperation between minorities and the mainstream. Many of those barriers remain. Only when we engage in honest conversation, accompanied by constructive changes in our social practices, will we be able to forge connections between labor, the left, the academy, and communities of color that have the ability to empower and transform each partner in the struggle.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 19
