The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Eleven

  GIVING WHITENESS A BLACK EYE

  This interview, conducted by gifted DePaul University educational scholar Ronald E. Chennault when he was a graduate student at Penn State, is my most in-depth exploration of white identities, institutions, and ideologies. It situates the rise of whiteness studies in America while exploring the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of white racial practices. The white scholars and activists associated with whiteness studies—especially David Roediger, Mab Segrest, Theodore Allen, and Peggy McIntosh—are among the most courageous American intellectuals who seek to challenge the unquestioned superiority that an investment in whiteness breeds. While I may have disagreements with some whiteness studies thinkers at points, they are minor, strategic differences. Whiteness studies present a unique opportunity for our nation to rethink the meanings of whiteness, and to resist easy reliance on the destructive implications of whiteness.

  Let me start by just talking a little bit about what other authors have done. Generally, they have tried to describe what they understand whiteness to be or what the content of whiteness is, identified some of the forms that whiteness takes in the multiple locations in which it manifests itself, and attempted either to redefine what whiteness should be or to spell out ways to combat the oppressiveness that is a part of whiteness, thus trying to rescue the productive content of whiteness. Based on that synopsis of the work of the others, why don’t we start, if it’s okay with you, with what you perceive whiteness to be or what you understand whiteness to mean.

  I think when we talk about whiteness in the context of race in America, we have to talk about whiteness as identity, whiteness as ideology, and whiteness as institution. These three elements are complex and impure; they bleed into one another. Still, as categories of analysis they can help us get a handle on the intensely variegated manifestations of whiteness.

  In speaking of whiteness as identity, I am referring to the self-understanding, social practices, and group beliefs that articulate whiteness in relationship to American race, especially in this case, to blackness. I think whiteness bears a particularly symbiotic relationship to redness and blackness; in one sense, whiteness is called into existence as a response to the presence of redness and blackness. Only when red and black bodies—from colonial conquest and slavery on to the present—have existed on American terrain has whiteness been constituted as an idea and an identity-based reality. White people’s sense of themselves as being white is contingent on a negation of a corollary redness and blackness, and, for my present purposes, the assertion of that blackness as the basis of a competing racial identity.

  White people who understand themselves through narratives of race often do so in response to the presence of African “others” on American terrain. As a result, I think that white identities have been developed unconsciously and hence, for the most part, invisibly, within the structures of domination in American society. For the most part, whiteness has been an invisible identity within American society, anal only recently—with the deconstruction and demythologization of race in attacks on biologistic conceptions of racial identity—has whiteness been constituted as a trisected terrain of contestation: over ethnicity, over ethnocentrism, and over the way groups manufacture and reproduce racial identity through individual self-understanding. I think whiteness in that sense has only recently been called into existence as a result of questions about the social construction of race, the social reconstruction of biology, and, in general, how we have come to talk about race in more complex terms.

  When I talk about whiteness as ideology, I’m referring to the systematic reproduction of conceptions of whiteness as domination. Whiteness as domination has been the most powerful, sustaining myth of American culture since its inception. In other words, the ideological contamination of American democracy by structures of white domination is indivisible from the invention of America. Another way of saying this is that the invention of America and the invention of whiteness are ideologically intertwined because the construction of narratives of domination are indissolubly linked to the expansion of the colonial empire: America as the new colony. America found its roots in response to an intraracial struggle with Europe over the power of representation (i.e., how citizens should be granted official voice and vote in the polls) and the representation of power (i.e., how cultural institutions like churches and schools should no longer be exclusively regulated by the state). The United States was brought into existence as a result of an intraethnic war between white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants and American colonists who rejected their political deference to Europe and defended their burgeoning sense of nationhood and personal identity.

  In that sense, there is a fissure in whiteness that is not articulated as such because it happens within the borders of ethnic similarity. This civil war of white ethnicity generated the fissuring of the state at the behest of procreative energies of emancipation. But that emancipation, at least in terms of its leaders’ selfunderstanding, was not ethnically or racially constituted; it was viewed as the ineluctable conclusion to a fatal disagreement over issues of primary political importance, like freedom, justice, and equality.

  At the same time, ironically enough, the expansion of American culture, especially the American state, was fostered primarily through the labor of black slaves and, to a lesser degree, the exploitation of white indentured servants and the oppression of white females. From the very beginning of our nation’s existence, the discursive defense and political logic of American democracy has spawned white dominance as the foundational myth of American society—a myth whose ideological strength was made all the more powerful because it was rendered invisible. After all, its defenders didn’t have to be conscious of how white dominance and later white supremacy shaped their worldviews, since there was little to challenge their beliefs. Their ideas defined the intellectual and cultural status quo. In that sense, the white race—its cultural habits, political practices, religious beliefs, and intellectual affinities—was socially constructed as the foundation of American democracy.

  In terms of the genealogy of American nationality, whiteness and democracy were coextensive because they were mutually reinforcing ideologies that undergirded the state. When we look at the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the implicit meanings of white domination were encoded in state discourse. State discourse was articulated in the intellectual architecture of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; it was also written into the laws of the land that eroded the social stability of African-American people, first as slaves and then as subjugated victims of the state through debt peonage, sharecropping, Jim Crow law, the assault on the welfare state, and so on.

  Also written into the laws of the land was the explicit articulation of black racial inferiority and the implicit assumption of white racial superiority. These two poles were reproduced ideologically to justify white supremacy; the mutually reinforcing structures of state-sponsored racial domination and the ideological expression of white racial superiority solidified the power of white people, white perspectives, and white practices. As a result, whiteness in its various expressions was made to appear normative and natural, while other racial identities and ideologies were viewed as deviant and unnatural.

  The final component of my triad is the institutional expression of whiteness. The institutions I have in mind—from the home to the school, from the government to the church—compose the intellectual and ideological tablet on which has been inscribed the meanings of American destiny. Let’s focus on one example of how whiteness has been institutionally expressed: the church. First, “manifest destiny” found an institutional articulation in the church, even though our country’s founders ingeniously disestablished state-sponsored religion and thereby encouraged radical heterogeneity within American religion. While ostensibly free from state rule, religious communities were not impervious to secular beliefs; the theological discourse of many faiths actively enunciated the ideology of w
hite domination.

  Not only did manifest destiny bleed through the theological articulations of the churches, but the belief in blackness as an innately inferior identity galvanized the missionary activities of most religious communities as they sought to contain and redeem the black slave’s transgressive body; many believed blacks didn’t have a soul. With the overlay of theological verity added to embellish the ideology of white supremacy, black identity became the ontological template for the reproduction of discourses of racial primitivism and savagery. The black body became a contested landscape on which the torturous intersections of theology and ideology were traced: it was at once the salvific focus of the white missionizing project and the foremost example of what unchecked transgression could lead to.

  These elements of whiteness—identity, ideology, and institution—are articulated and reinforced over space and time. They substantiate the argument that whites don’t understand themselves in abstraction from the cultural institutions and the critical mythologies that accrete around whiteness. What we’ve witnessed over the last decade is a crisis in the myth of whiteness; that is, it has been exposed as a visible and specific identity, not something that is invisible and universal. Whiteness has been “outed,” and as a consequence of its outing, it has to contend with its own genealogy as one race among other races. We are now seeing a proliferation of ideas, articles, books, plays, and conferences that question the meanings and significations of whiteness. As part of that process, we’ve got to understand what whiteness has meant and specify what it can or should mean in the coming century.

  Given this “outing” of whiteness, would it be your opinion that the concept of whiteness will continue to be studied, that it won’t be just a fleeting academic interest?

  That’s right. I think we can rest assured that the extraordinary interest in whiteness won’t taper off too much. First, there are masses of whites who are absorbed by the subject, a sure index of its staying power. There are also a great number of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians—as well as other subaltern, aboriginal, and colonized peoples—who are deeply invested in reversing the terror of ethnography: of being the disciplined subject of an often intellectually poisonous white anthropological scrutiny. Many minorities yearn to return the favor of interrogation, if you will, though not in nearly as punishing a manner as they’ve received. Many members of these groups simply seek to unveil the myths of universality and invisibility that have formed the ideological strata of white supremacy.

  They also seek to reveal a fundamental strategy of white supremacy: forging belief in the omnipotence of whiteness. This belief maintains that whiteness secretes a racial epistemology whose function is akin to omnipotent narration in fiction: it unifies the sprawling plot of white civilization; it articulates the hidden logic of mysterious white behavior; it codifies the linguistic currency through which the dramatis personae of white cultures detail their intellectual idiosyncrasies and emotional yearnings; and it projects an edifying white racial denouement to the apocalyptic conflict between whiteness and nonwhiteness. One consequence of an investment in the omnipotence of whiteness, and in the unitary racial sentiment that it enforces, is that many minorities have been ontologically estranged from what might be termed the Dasein of American race—the racial order of being that defines national and, more fundamentally, human identity.

  The great irony of American race—within the discursive frame of whiteness as an invisible entity—is that the condition for racial survival is racial concealment, a state of affairs that produces a surreal racelessness that stigmatizes all nonwhite identities. Thus racial and ethnic minorities face a triple challenge: they must overcome the history and ongoing forces of oppression; they must eradicate the demonization of racial identity-qua-identity that whiteness generates; and they must help excavate the historical and ideological character of whiteness in the sedimenting fields of cultural and social practice.

  Another reason I think that the examination of whiteness will not diminish quickly is the sheer variety of white identities, behaviors, texts, and practices that the current phase of whiteness studies has uncovered. Such variety gives the lie to whiteness as a singular and fixed phenomenon. Whiteness must be viewed as destabilized loci of contested meanings that depend on different articulatory possibilities to establish their identities and functions. Whiteness is now up for grabs; it is being deeply retheorized and profoundly rearticulated. Whiteness is no longer simply good or bad: either formulation is a reductio ad absurdum that underwrites a rigid, essentialist view of race.

  Contemporary studies of whiteness explore the complex character of white racial identity and practice. Such studies examine whiteness in multifarious modes: as domination and cooperation, as stability and instability, as hegemony and subordination, and as appropriation and co-optation. By no means am I suggesting that a narrow ideological binarism lies at the heart of whiteness; I simply mean to accent the interactive, intersectional, and multilectical features of whiteness with other racial and ethnic identities as they are elaborated in intellectual inquiry. Even if such studies are viewed as faddish, we must remember that many substantive intellectual engagements began as trends.

  One of the advantages of the subject(ed)s of whiteness now objecting it (constituting it as a legitimate object of discursive interrogation and thereby objecting to the power of whiteness to iterate domination by remaining amorphous and invisible) is that we demystify the mechanisms by which whiteness has reproduced its foundational myths. We also get a better sense of how whiteness has helped construct blackness, and how whiteness has helped to construct Latino/a, Native American, and Asian identities as well.

  We must recognize that current studies of whiteness—especially the groundbreaking writings of white scholars such as David Roediger, Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, and others—are building on the often unacknowledged tradition of black critical reflection on the ways and means of whiteness. To be sure, whiteness studies in its present modes—in terms of the scopes of interrogation, disciplinary methodologies, paradigms of knowledge, theoretical tools of analysis, historical conjunctions, and material supports that make this an ideal intellectual climate for scrutinizing white identities—unquestionably marks a significant scholarly, perhaps even disciplinary, departure in cultural studies of race and ethnicity. But such studies would be impossible, or at least highly unlikely, without the pioneering work of figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer, and on and on.

  To be fair, a number of the “new abolitionist” writers have scrupulously acknowledged their debt to this hidden black intellectual tradition. For instance, David Roediger acknowledges that Du Bois was the first to write, in his magisterial tome Black Reconstruction, about the “psychic wages of whiteness,” arguing that even poor workers derived a psychological benefit from their whiteness. Current whiteness studies will only be strengthened as they refer to those texts and figures in black life, and in other minority communities, which have aided in the demythologization of a homogeneous, uniform whiteness.

  I think that the study of whiteness will be around for some time because it can give us crucial historical insight into current cultural debates. For example, contentious discussions about the labor movement and its relationship to identity politics would be greatly benefited from a vigorous examination of the role white racial identity played in the formation of the American working class. Despite their economic disadvantage, poor white workers appealed to the surplus value that their whiteness allowed them to accumulate in the political economy of race. Many poor workers invested their surplus valued whiteness into a fund of psychic protection against the perverse, impure meanings of blackness. They drew from their value-added whiteness to not only boost their self-esteem but to assert their relative racial superiority by means of what may be termed a negative inculpability: poor whites derived pleasure and some cultural benefit by not being the nigger.

  Their negativ
e inculpability prevented poor whites from being viewed as the ultimate cause of harm to white civilization—despite the social problems to which their poverty and class oppression gave rise. Their negative inculpability redeemed poor whites, at least partially, by granting them powers to deflect their degraded status through a comparative racial taxonomy: poor whites could articulate the reasons for their superiority by naming all the ways they remained white despite their economic hardship. Negative inculpability and comparative racial taxonomy were racial strategies by which poor whites appropriated the dominant meanings of whiteness, and the ideology of white domination, while obscuring the intellectual and material roots of their own suffering. Of course, in objective, empirically verifiable ways, poor whites had much more in common with poor blacks: degraded social status, depressed wages, and stigmatization through social narratives of “the deserving poor” that blamed the poor for their plight. Such studies are of utmost importance in explicating the complex intersections of race, gender, and class in the labor movement, as well as in contemporary cultural politics.

  In order to solidify the intellectual foundation of whiteness studies, we should distinguish among at least three economies within whiteness: an economy of invention, an economy of representation, and an economy of articulation. Economies of invention explore how and when the multiple meanings of whiteness are fashioned. Economies of invention permit us to excavate, for instance, the construction of Irish as a white ethnicity, as Noel Ignatiev has done; the making of the white working class, as David Roediger has done; and the invention of the white race, about which Theodore Allen has written. Economies of invention address the foundational myths of white ethnicity as they are articulated through metaphysical claims of white superiority. Economies of invention help us narrate the means by which culture has colluded with ideology to reproduce whiteness. They help us understand how cultural privilege is assigned to an accidental racial feature like whiteness, and how such privilege gives credence to philosophical arguments about the inherent goodness and supremacy of white identity.