The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (22 page)

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.

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 white 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.