White like me

White Americans may think they lack ethnicity,
but some scholars say whiteness is a culture in itself.
But that idea may not be as innocuous as they hope

by Ellen Barry

ARE YOU WHITE?
If so, the first step is to admit that you are white.

This is not as simple as it may sound. When you arrange to meet a stranger over the phone, you probably do not say, "I am white," because the information seems gratuitous. But you are, in fact. You are a member of a large group that includes -- but is not defined by -- Spam eaters, Bermuda-shorts wearers, suburban "wiggers," Madeleine Albright, the male angry, the liberal guilty, and virtually every CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Whether or not you admit it, you occupy a place in our national race hierarchy. Every time you walk into a room, you bring your whiteness with you.

And once you do admit it, the difficult part is still coming. You're white: what are you going to do about it?

To blacks, talking about whiteness is hardly a bold postmodern gambit; they've been doing it for a while now. It was 75 years ago that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: "None there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them . . . I see the workings of their entrails."

And only five years ago, in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992), Toni Morrison eloquently called for mainstream scholars to perform the same exercise. "The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture," she acknowledged, but she urged liberals to abandon the illusion of colorblindness. "My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from racial object to racial subject; from described and imagined to describer and imaginer; from the server to the served."

What's changed now is that whites are beginning to pick up the gauntlet. In his June 14 speech calling for a national discussion on race issues, Bill Clinton -- slyly identifying himself as a "Scotch-Irish Southern Baptist" -- urged white Americans to jump into the fray: "I know that for many white Americans, this conversation may seem to exclude them or threaten them. This must not be so." Across the country, corporate diversity consultants are encouraging whites to examine their own place in the racial universe. Aiding in the effort is a panoply of new books with titles like A Race Is a Nice Thing To Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life (Content Communications, 1992), which delivers the good news that "while racism and racial privilege are bad, having a racial identity, even if it is a white one, can be a positive thing."

And it is, perhaps, no surprise that gun-show fliers and critiques of Roseanne are finding their way into seminars in universities all over the country. Newly-minted academics who cut their teeth on multicultural curricula and critical race theory have been only too eager to take on Toni Morrison's challenge, as was evident from this spring's UC Berkeley seminar on "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness." Suddenly, young white scholars have a genuine mandate to talk about race, and the results are rolling off the presses -- studies on white supremacists and white trash, white privilege, white customs, white psychology, and white visions of whiteness. Special editions of the Minnesota Review and the Harvard journal Transition were devoted to the topic this year.

But in the midst of all this lit-crit flag-planting are deep disagreements about where whiteness is headed, and whether an anatomy of the dominant culture is what we really need in the first place. Somerville historian Noel Ignatiev, a former Harvard lecturer whose book How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995) helped set off the whole whiteness craze, has publicly turned his back on the trend, charging that it runs the risk of degenerating into apolitical white narcissism or even -- what would be far worse -- inadvertently legitimizing white nationalism.

"One of the dangers is the transformation of [white studies] from a project that aims to expose injustice to a project that simply wants to talk about `what an interesting group of people,' " he says. "It's anthropological. Observing."

And Ignatiev is not the only one squirming in his seat. A good deal of the Minnesota Review issue was dedicated to speculation on how whiteness studies could go awry -- by anointing poor whites as the new Other, by displacing multicultural studies, by existing at all in a permanent form. And the editors of the new anthology Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (Routledge, 1997) -- a few short paragraphs after patting themselves on the back for being pioneers -- suggest querulously that "maybe this should be the last book on whiteness." Well, it hasn't been, and as the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in this country dwindles (by the year 2050, that group should drop from 83 percent of the population to 53 percent), the subject of whiteness is likely to come up more and more often. What will result from this discussion is uncertain. One thing is for sure, though. There is something very, very dangerous about admitting you are white.

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I am white. Hear me roar.

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The invention of whiteness.

A long, long time ago, when "queer" still meant "strange" and the canon could be invoked without invisible quotation marks, race was taught as a biological fact and slavery as a polyp on American history. It wasn't until the 1970s that revisionist historians got their hands on what Edmund Morgan dubbed the "American Paradox" -- that the American ideal of freedom could not have been extended to poor whites without the institution of slavery.

As radical as that seemed in the mid 1970s, Morgan and his peers were retreading ground covered long before by black writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. This time, though, the race-based reading of history was at the center of debate among white academics as well. Their fundamental assertion was that race itself was invented to justify slavery. Previous cultures certainly recognized ethnicity, but color was not always a dividing line; "whites" like the Greeks mixed freely with "blacks" like the Ethiopians. Ignatiev put it this way: "People from Africa were not enslaved because they were black; they were defined as black because they were enslaved."

Scholars then picked up the "invention of race" idea and applied it to the history of the American white working class, a group that had generally been regarded through the sympathetic lens of labor history. Here, too, Du Bois had laid the groundwork. In his 1935 book Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had written of white workers who "everywhere received a low wage [but were] compensated in part . . . by a public and psychological wage."

That wage was being white. David Roediger revived that theory in his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso), and then, in 1995, Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White picked up the same thread, telling the story of how Irish immigrants, "in becoming White, ceased to be Green."

In the country they left, Irish Catholics had been an underclass -- barred from voting, running for office, or going into the law or the military. Catholic taxes went to the Protestant church, and Catholic orphans were brought up Protestant. When the first wave of immigration began, America did not offer much immediate relief; in the South, Irish workers were sometimes hired for work so dangerous that it wasn't worth risking a slave's life. Blacks were sometimes referred to as "smoked Irish," and the Irish as "niggers turned inside out."

How the Irish Became White examined how white workers used race to put distance between themselves and the blacks they mingled with, thereby ensuring themselves a better spot in society. This, Ignatiev proposes, is why the Irish, who had a long tradition of opposing slavery at home, never rose to the abolitionist cause, and in fact became virulent racists. The sharper the distinction between whites and blacks, the safer they were.

According to this analysis, white identity means nothing but the privilege of not being black.

"Whiteness is not merely empty and false. It's pernicious," says Ignatiev. "It's a terrifying effort to build an identity based on what is not."

Roediger's and Ignatiev's work on whiteness began to percolate through history departments all over the country. But even as the pioneers of a new reading of history, they were teetering on an uncomfortable precipice -- their scholarship analyzed the evolution of a category that they felt should not exist. Having established that, these scholars were ready to leave "white culture" alone. It's not there. End of discussion.

"I don't want to give the slightest bit of validity to the idea that there is some kind of ethnic category as `white,' " says Ignatiev. "That comes very close to the concept of white supremacists and white nationalists and people like that. Now, I understand that most people in white studies are opposed to all that. Yet they are playing into their hands."

By the time the historians came to that conclusion, though, it was too late. The Great White Hype, as the Minnesota Review termed it, was off the ground.

White folks' ethnography.

Matt Wray dreams of a reading list that would start out with Forbes magazine's annual survey of the country's 400 richest people. "I would say the most important group of whites to understand are the ruling elites," says Wray, a doctoral student pioneering the study of whiteness at UC Berkeley. He thinks students should ask "who these people are, and what kind of cultural work do their images do? Where do they put their money?"

But it's tough for an ethnic-studies graduate student to get an interview with the ruling elites -- what's known as "studying up." To date, Wray's work has been oriented in a distinctly downward direction. He's taught Spam, he's taught Rush Limbaugh, and this year marks the publication of the book he edited, White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge).

Wray was one of the young scholars who soaked up the works of Roediger and Ignatiev and went into the field to fill in the gaps they left. So it's odd to find Wray doing exactly what his older colleagues most distrust: offering semester-long dissections of white culture.

The young critics say their work follows a predictable academic trend. The social movements of the '70s fostered the creation of academic departments whose mission was to tell the story of an oppressed class. By the end of the 1980s, the same departments had swung the spotlight around to study the oppressors. The feminist movement, for example, gave rise to women's studies, which eventually turned its attention to the mechanics of male supremacy.

But much of the prominent work in white studies has not examined dominance. On the contrary, perhaps because of the challenges of "studying up," the growing field of white ethnography tends to focus on the more grotesque stereotypes of lower-class whites -- the trailer parks, the promiscuity, the abuse. In effect, this branch of whiteness studies has simply discovered a new minority, as Wray puts it in the preface to White Trash -- "a form of white identity that is comfortable in multiculturalism, and with which multiculturalism is comfortable as well." In other words, white-trash identity can be approached comfortably as an ethnicity, because it is so marginalized itself that it challenges what Wray calls the " `vulgar multiculturalist' assumption that whiteness must always equal terror and racism."

In the process, poor whites become just another set of artifacts for a critical working-over. Here's Peter Chvany on the public's amusement with John Wayne Bobbitt, in the Minnesota Review:

We would suggest that part of this glee came -- perhaps unconsciously -- out of a sense that Lorena's blow was struck, not for women, but for the middle class, against lower-class men . . . As a manual laborer and a Marine, Bobbitt's masculine body was his source of work and income. Cutting off his penis, therefore, robbed him symbolically of his identity as a member of the (potential) working class.

And here he is on Roseanne:

Roseanne epitomizes the way white trash has come to be understood as a marginalized white identity which nevertheless peculiarly evades disclosure of its own class-based origins.

It is interesting to speculate on what Roseanne would have to say about that.

Racism 101.

It's clear, reading Wray's elaborate argument for the cultural significance of "white trash," that the white-culture business has a big problem: no one has provided a satisfying definition of what white culture is. And even some of its self-appointed describers have serious doubts about the whole enterprise -- namely, in an academic world that already revolves around white culture, why bother?

Jessie Daniels, whose book White Lies was published by Routledge this year, has her own answer: white studies should be the study of racist thought. Though that's not the only quality that whites have, she argues, it's the most important one, and one that influences the political mainstream more than many white people would like to admit. If you deny the biological fact of a white race, as most of the whiteness scholars do, there's not much to unite whites except for privilege. So whiteness studies, as practiced by scholars like Daniels, paints a grim and deterministic picture of what it means to be white: whites built a racist state and whites perpetuate it. In her view, white-trash deconstruction work is a mere distraction.

"I don't think there's any usefulness to studying gun shows and trailer parks when people are willing to kill or die for the cause of white power," says Daniels, who is an assistant professor of sociology at Hofstra University.

"If the raison d'être of white studies isn't about dismantling this form of apartheid we have inherited," she adds, "then it's not worth doing."

So White Lies is peppered with illustrations like one from the white supremacist publication WAR (White Aryan Resistance), which bears the heading "Let's Answer the Scientific Question . . . What's On A Nigger's Mind?" It divides a crudely-caricatured black man's brain into segments labeled "crave for watermelon, crave for drugs, alcohol, pussy, gold chains and drumbeats, and criminal behavior." In a minuscule corner of the brain are "responsibility, vocal skills, intelligence, hygiene, creative skills (must be viewed through microscope), logic, and proportion."

As Daniels stresses in her introduction, the point of reprinting this sort of literature is not to allow white readers to congratulate themselves on being less racist than WAR magazine, but to identify the racism inherent in mainstream society. That's not a common white activity; the day before Clinton announced his race initiative, a Gallup poll revealed that whites are far more cheerful than blacks about the state of race relations. Most whites consider themselves to be free of prejudice. In effect, most whites consider racism to be over.

It's not. A General Social Survey taken by the National Opinon Research Center in 1991 offered these statistics: 78 percent of whites thought blacks were more likely than whites to live on welfare; 62 percent of whites thought blacks were less likely to be hard-working; 53 percent of whites thought blacks were less intelligent; 51 percent thought blacks were less patriotic. The year the survey was taken, former KKK leader David Duke was elected governor of the state of Louisiana. The white-supremacist movement, which Daniels says has quadrupled its number of dues-paying members since 1978, has spawned dozens of new, violent groups such as the Neo-Nazi skinheads and White Aryan Resistance.

Still, it's wrong to equate the ethnography of whiteness with the study of racism. Werner Sollors, who teaches in Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, points out the danger of generalizing about whites just as we are veering away from "single definitions of blackness."

"Examining racist theory critically is a legitimate and important enterprise in a democracy, as racism poses one of the greatest threats to democracy," he said in an e-mail interview. "Yet believing that a given ethnic background makes an intellectual, or a Hollywood producer, automatically a racist may itself be the result of a vulgar form of biological determinism that was at the core of fascist racism."

The young scholars on the critical vanguard argue that their work -- as Eric Lott, of the University of Virginia, put it -- is "defining something in order to tear it down." But they don't sound much like people tearing something down; they sound like scholars who are busy defining a discrete white world. For a group of people united in the project of trying to destroy whiteness, no one seems to have much of a plan.

Redneck Trotsky

Or almost no one.

From his house in Somerville, among unsold stacks of his periodical Race Traitor, Noel Ignatiev is making tentative plans to overturn the race system. The plan goes this way: if enough white Americans reject the privileges they are given as whites, then the privileges will eventually cease to exist. The movement makes use of ringing slogans -- "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" -- and recommends such mild forms of anarchism as the "Copwatch," a Minneapolis youth movement in which groups of white kids follow police officers around with video cameras "to remind cops their actions are not going unnoticed" and "shift the repression by the police away from African-American kids and onto us." Other strategies seem to range from flouting of social norms (for instance, renting houses in white neighborhoods to black families) to organized mass disobedience (for instance, armed robbery).

Two years after publishing How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev has turned his back on the academic movement he helped create. His Harvard lecturing job has come to an end, and he plans to turn all his attention to the movement he hopes Race Traitor will foster: an army of "New Abolitionists," modeling themselves on John Brown, who will disrupt the social equilibrium enough to permit radical change.

Race Traitor's readership is made up of educators, members of the religious community, and people who academics tend to regard with some alarm -- prisoners and skinheads. The group that is not reading Race Traitor is what Ignatiev refers to, witheringly, as "the traditional left." It's no wonder. In reaching out to the groups they do appeal to, Ignatiev and company have run roughshod over liberal sensibilities. Race Traitor has printed value-neutral interviews with neo-Nazis, and Ignatiev himself, in one issue, inveighed against "the propensity of American Jews to whine about the sufferings of past Jews." Both Ignatiev and Roediger (a fellow New Abolitionist) say they hold out the hope that the most virulent racists are the most promising converts to an antiestablishment crusade. (One issue of Race Traitor urged people to take another look at white militias as potential allies in the fight against racism.)

"Among skinheads, there are people who might very easily move to other positions," says Roediger. "In the Twin Cities, the antiracist skinheads are very often carrying the day. These are young people who are very disaffected from the whole of society, and who are posing the question of whether it is worth it to identify as white. In this sense, they can be rather effective."

These days, the Race Traitor movement is getting approving attention from the general public -- a compilation of essays from the magazine won a 1997 American Book Award from Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation. But plenty of critics are asking what, exactly, whites will be

after they stop being white. There are no historical precedents for the kind of "post-white" lifestyle that Ignatiev proposes. The plan of action itself is pretty amorphous. And, as in most revolutionary agendas, the stakes are high: success will be measured in the breakdown of social systems.

The academics Ignatiev criticizes acknowledge his contributions to the field, but they are criticizing him right back. Younger whiteness scholars, like UVA's Lott, say Ignatiev is just another '60s Marxist railing at academia.

"It's frustrating, because the activist time frame moves quicker than the academic time frame," says Lott. "But I think that too broadly caricaturing [younger academics] is generational condescension. It comes close to nostalgicizing the civil-rights movement, which is a way to stall history."

And Jeff Ferguson, an old colleague of Ignatiev's who teaches a class in whiteness at Amherst College, explains that he's not in the politics business.

"As far as I'm concerned, there are such a thing as intellectuals, and intellectuals are people who think for a living," he says. Whiteness studies "is academically interesting and that's what we do. That's what we get paid for."

And what we're learning about whiteness doesn't necessarily make the course of social change clearer, he adds. It may make it more confusing. "I'm not the kind of person who wants to build up a lot of heat until there's some light around," says Ferguson, with a little laugh.

Race to the finish.

The whiteness scholars are, by and large, an anxious bunch. Their language is timorous. Their forewords are overwrought. They make much of their "uneasiness," and of the "sneakiness" of their subject matter, and of the fact that, as one professor told me, "it's not supposed to be a comfortable activity." For professors, they seem to get a lot of night sweats.

They are right to.

Multicultural education has painted whites into a corner: if, as current curricula suggest, there are discrete African-American and Asian-American racial identities in America, then of course white American exists as a racial identity too, and it was only a matter of time before it ended up under the critical microscope. To some extent, this is good. Many whites still think of themselves as ethnically neutral -- and thus shut out of the discussion of race, hovering somewhere above the fray. So it's about time for whites to admit they are white, and that they have garnered certain advantages from it.

But if whiteness studies is makes everyone so uncomfortable, maybe it's because the work really is dangerous. It's dangerous because it divides a racially mixed culture into white culture and nonwhite culture. It's dangerous because white studies -- and the white professors who, by and large, teach it -- could infringe on the small academic space now allotted to people of color.

And it's also dangerous because whiteness studies does not supply a usable past or a promising future. Scholars are "tearing down" whiteness without any reliable vision of what comes after. People Who Lack Color? Uncolored People? As Jeff Ferguson points out, this work is not clearing up anyone's ideas of what is to be done. Far from it.

Yet it's impossible to stop up the flow of discussion, and particularly in the area of race, it would be a terrible mistake to try. Talk -- so universally reviled as a strategy for social action -- is the only option for a first step in this particular area. The most well-meaning whites still experience a form of social apoplexy when race comes up in an unfriendly way; fairly ordinary remarks on the subject can still send a dinner-party conversation into sudden death. So if it takes a period of painful, and occasionally ridiculous, self-examination to bring whites into the dialogue, then it's probably worth it.

More worrisome than what whiteness studies reveals, though, is what it sometimes looks away from: namely, the absurd distribution of privilege in this country and the tortured, faltering attempt to fix it. It's a broad picture, and it involves all of us. Today, although most white Americans say they would be willing to live in the same neighborhood with blacks, the proportion of resident blacks needs to climb to only seven percent before the whites start moving out. The average weekly earnings of a white person ($506) are considerably higher than those of a black person ($387). In the first year of the bans on affirmative action at state universities in Texas and California, the incoming law-school classes at those schools contain a total of four black students in 770 slots.

And white Americans, by and large, think the race problem has been taken care of. As long as we're getting things off our chest, can we talk about that?

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I am white. Hear me roar.

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.