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WHITE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE ETHNIC

White Youth and the Construction of "Cultureless" Identities

PAMELA PERRY University of California, Santa Cruz

PAMELA PERRY is a sociologist and an assistant professor in the Department ofCommunity Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include racial and ethnic identity formation, youth and popular culture, sociology of education, and participatory action methods. She has written on Garifuna identities in Nicaragua and is publishing a book with Duke University Press on the role ofinterracial association in how white youth con­ struct racial identities.

Journal o/Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 30 No.1 February 2001 56·91 © 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.

56

Perry /"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 57

This article examines the processes by which white identities are con­ structed as "cultureless" among white youth in two high schools: one predominantly white, the other multiracial. The author proposes that whites assert racial superiority by claiming they have no culture because to be cultureless implies that one is either the "norm" (the standard by which others are judged) or "rational" (developmentally advanced). Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the author argues that in the majority-white school, processes of naturaliza­ tion-the embedding of historically constituted practices in what feels "normal" and natural-producedfeelings ofcultural lack among white students. Contrarily, at the multiracial school, tracking and add-on multiculturalism helped constitute cultureless identities through pro­ cesses of rationalization-the embedding of whiteness within a Western rational paradigm that subordinates all things cultural. The implica­ tions ofthese findings for critical white studies, sociology of education, and racial identity formation are discussed.

,'H ow would you describe white American culture?" I ask Laurie, a white, middle-class senior at Valley Groves High, I a predom­

inantly white, suburban public school near the Pacific Coast of northern California. She pauses, her face looking visibly perplexed as if she did not understand the question or her mind was drawing a blank. Won­ dering if she heard me over the roar of the cappuccino machine in the background, I awkwardly reiterate, "Like, you know, what would you say white American culture is like?"

"I wouldn't be able to tell you. I don't know." She pauses again and laughs nervously. "When you think about it, it's like-[a longer pause ]­ I don't know!"

About twenty miles away from Valley Groves is the postindustrial city of Clavey. Clavey High School is composed of a brilliant mosaic of students from different ethnic and racial groups, about 12 percent of whom are white. In an interview with Murray, a white, Jewish, middle­ class senior, he and I talked a great deal about the consequences of race in the United States and what privileges come with being a white person

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This study was supported in part by grants from lhe SOCiology department of lhe University ofCalifornia at Berkeley and Ihe Doreen B. Townsend Centerforthe Humanities. A grant from the Spencer Foundation supported the writing ofthis piece. I am solely responsible for all views and statements made. My deepest admiration and thanks go to all ofthe youth who partic­ ipated in this project.! also thank Rob Benson, Robert Bulman, Katherine Rosier; Michael Wilson, Malt Wray, Ana Yolanda Ramos Zayas, and the anonymous readersfor JCE/or their helpful com­ ments on this artic/e.

58 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY f FEBRUARY 2001

here. When I probed into his identification with being white or Jewish, he said,

[Cultural pride] doesn't make sense to me. To me it doesn't. I mean, what difference does it make what my great, great grandfather was or his whole generation. That's not affecting my life.... I'm still here now. I've got to make what's best for me in the future. I can't harp on what the past has brought.

Laurie and Murray express what the racial category "white" means to each of them. Although their responses differ markedly, they share something fundamental; they perceive white raciality as cultureless. For Laurie, whiteness is not culturally defined. She lives within it but cannot name it. It is taken for granted. For Murray, to be cultural means having emotional attachment to tradition and history. He eschews cul­ ture, in this regard, and lives in the present, looking forward.

I chose these two excerpts from qualitative research I carried out in 1994-97 at Valley Groves, a predominantly white, suburban high school, and Clavey, a multiracial, urban high school. The focus of this research was on what differences, if any, the two demographically dis­ tinct contexts made on the ways white youth reflected on and con­ structed white identities. I found that it made a large difference: white students at Valley Groves did not reflect on or define white identity as a culture and social location to the extent that the white youth at Clavey did. Moreover, white identities at Clavey tended to be altogether more variable and contradictory than at Valley Groves. Elsewhere, I argue that these differences in white identities were conditioned by different experiences and structures of interracial association (Perry 1998).

I make a similar argument in this article but with a focus on the only similarity between the ways whites at both schools defined white iden­ tity. They defined white as cultureless. By that, I mean that white iden­ tity was understood to have no ties or allegiances to European ancestry and culture, no "traditions." To the white youth, only "ethnic" people had such ties to the past. The students would agree with George DeVos (1975) that a "feeling of continuity with the past" distinguishes an "ethnic" group from peoples with more "present-oriented" or "future-oriented" identities (p. 17)-such as whites.

However, although white students at Valley Groves and Clavey shared this perception of white identity, they did not arrive at it by the same processes. In what follows, I present and interpret ethnographic

Perry ,"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 59

and interview data to argue that at Valley Groves, the tendency for youth to explicitly define themselves and other whites as people without cul­ ture came about through processes of naturalization-the embedding of historically constituted cultural practices in that which is taken for granted and seems "normal" and natural. At Clavey, culturelessness was achieved through processes of rationalization-the embedding of whiteness within a Western rational epistemology and value paradigm that marginalizes or subordinates all things "cultural."

Although there is some scholarly debate over whether there is such a thing as "white culture" (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996; Roediger 1994), my argument here is not so much about whether there is or is not a white culture but about the power whites exercise when claiming they have no culture. Culturelessness can serve, even if unintentionally, as a measure of white racial superiority. It suggests that one is either "normal" and "simply human" (therefore, the standard to which others should strive) or beyond culture or "postcultural" (therefore, developmentally advanced).

This work seeks to advance on theories and research in critical white studies, the sociology ofeducation, and racial-ethnic identity formation by vividly illustrating the social construction of white identities and culture in schooling and the ways that different social-structural con­ texts differently influence constructions of whiteness, including the construction of white as cultureless or the norm.

PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIP ON WHITE CULTURE

While I was conducting my research, the field of "critical white stud­ ies" was birthing with a dizzying amount of literature on whiteness. Widely interdisciplinary, whiteness scholarship cannot be reduced to any small set of theoretical currents, but it may be safe to say that it has been preeminently concerned with exposing the ways white domina­ tion is sustained and reproduced in invisible ways. Scholars within criti­ cal white studies have revealed the perniciousness of whiteness as it hides in literature, art, and popular culture (Dyer 1997; Giroux 1997; Hill 1997; hooks 1992; Morrison 1993; Pfeil 1995); work and educa­ tional institutional structures (Essed 1996; Fine et al. 1997); pedagogy (Giroux 1997; McCarthy and Crichlow 1993); the law and property

60 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

rights (Haney Lopez 1996; Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1995); the values and identities of whites in the historical past (Allen 1994; Almaguer 1994; Goldberg 1993; Ignatiev 1995; Jacobson 1998; Lott 1993; Roediger 1991, 1994; Saxton 1990; Ware 1992); and the historical present (Frankenberg 1993, 1997; Gallagher 1995,1997; Hartigan 1997, 1999; Kenny 2000b; Segrest 1994; Wellman 1977; Wray and Newitz 1997).

Among whiteness scholars, whiteness and white culture are fre­ quently conflated, especially when whiteness is understood as a whole symbolic system and way of life through which whites make sense of themselves and their social relations. Possibly because of this, few have directly addressed the invisibility of white culture as a set of "bounded"-that is, clearly named and defined-practices and values with historical antecedents. Among those who have, Ruth Frankenberg (1993) has best articulated a widespread understanding that white cul­ ture is "invisible" because it is constructed as "normal." The white women she interviewed felt that they were culturally empty. Frankenberg argues that the women's discourses suggest that their felt sense of cultural emptiness stems from a dualistic sense of unbounded white versus bounded (nonwhite) others. As the norm and standard, white culture has no definition, only those who deviate from the norm have "culture." And therein lies the toxici ty of the construction of white as the (cultureless) norm: it serves as a basis on which to measure the humanity and social standing of others.

Historian David Roediger (1994) has a slightly different critique of white culture. Like Frankenberg (1993), he observes that white culture is devoid of a kind of bounded quality. He asserts that whites lack any community or direct continuity with some past, unlike African Ameri­ cans or even white ethnics like Italian Americans. However, Roediger does not believe that culturelessness is merely a false consciousness but the truth about whiteness. For Roediger, there is no white culture, and white domination is exercised not from a racial norm-other dualism but through "an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back" (p. 13). I understand Roediger to be arguing that white culture is not merely absent, it is, in a sense, anticulture-predicated on subjugat­ ing those "with" culture.

I do not agree with Roediger (1994) that white culture is altogether nonexistent. It may be invisible and taken for granted for many whites, but it is "real," often oppressively SO.2 One objective of this and my wider work is precisely to make white culture visible and thus disarm its

Perry /"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 61

cloaked perniciousness. However, Roediger's implication that white culture is by definition anticulture is more descriptive of the power of whiteness than, merely, white as "norm," which can imply that it is "neutral" or passive in its effects. Two other scholars, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1989) and philosopher David Theo Goldberg (1993), have produced elaborated arguments on the theme of white anticulture. Rosaldo points out that everyone has culture; it fundamentally shapes all people's understanding of themselves and the world. But the visibil­ ity of one's culture differs according to social status. Drawing on obser­ vations in the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States, Rosaldo argues that cultural invisibility is a characteristic of all those who hold full citizenship and institutional power in the nation state. Cultural invisibility is a privileged status marking the most "rational" (and, hence, deserving of power and privilege) peoples against those who are not rational, those who are "cultural" (pp.198-99). He introduces the concept "postcultural" to define cultural invisibility and to codify how the denial of culture marks one's place on the high end of the social hierarchy. Rosaldo's argument suggests that, if at one time Western Europeans had to define themselves as cultural to set themselves apart and superior to "savages," today, with much of the world "civilized" under Western domination, whites must claim a new and higher rung-the postcultural-to maintain their privileged status.

Evident in the above arguments is the understanding that white cul­ ture has historically been molded by the values and sociodiscursive constructs of the European Enlightenment and, specifically, the rule of reason. Goldberg (1993) lays this out thoroughly in his book Racist Culture. He asserts that racial exclusions and inclusions have histori­ cally been made and authorized by Western rational authority. The grounds for exclusion of non-Westerners has been reason or, rather, the claimed absence of reason. However, the standards of "Reason in modernity arose against the backdrop of European domination and sub­ jugation of nature, especially human nature" (p. 119). Hence, Goldberg argues, irrationality does not refer to the inability to meet expectations of "logical noncontradiction or consistency" but rather the inability to "exhibit the values, metaphysical attitudes, epistemological principles, or cognitive styles of 'whitemales' " (ibid.). Those values, attitudes, prin­ ciples, and styles include individual responsibility and self-determination, a self-concept that is wedded to freedom from the past, and the prim­

62 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

acies of the mind over the body, the intellect over emotion, and order over chaos. 3

These scholars, to varying degrees and in divergent ways, point out that white culture is Western European rational culture and that whites (white, propertied males, especially) are the unconditional beneficia­ ries of rationalism in that they are constructed as the most rational and, therefore, the most superior of all peoples.4 Being rational, whiteness must deny culture to the extent that culture is understood as sets of prac­ tices that carry affective and valued continuities with the past. Rational whiteness is postcultural. It is anticulture.

This explains, in my view, the persistence of cultureless whiteness in the two different schools in this study; culture less whiteness is a form of hegemonic power and, therefore, widespread. However, my work sug­ gests that different contexts may require different strategies to maintain the illusion of cultureless whiteness. I propose that the naturalization of whiteness most easily occurs where white cultural practices are ubiqui­ tous and self-confirming, such as at Valley Groves High. In contexts in which naturalization processes are weak, such as Clavey High, where whites are a numerical and cultural minority, then rationalization pro­ cesses come into the foreground.

METHOD AND REFLECTIONS

The vast wealth of excellent scholarship on the social construction of identities in schooling fundamentally shaped my research focus and methodology (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Davidson 1996; Eckert 1989; Fordham 1996; Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Kinney 1993; MacLeod 1987; Thome 1993; Valenzuela 1999). The main focus of my work was what role, if any, close interracial association in school had on the racial consciousness and identities of white youth. Therefore, in choosing my research sites, I looked for two schools: one predomi­ nantly white and located in a predominantly white town or city; the other multiracial, minority white and located in a minority white town or city. It also concerned me that the schools be in the same geograph­ ical region, of similar size and academic standing, and with student bodies of similar socioeconomic backgrounds to keep those factors as "constant" as possible. I studied census data and school statistics for different towns and cities across the United States before I decided on

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 63

Valley Groves, which was 83 percent white, and Clayey, which was 12 percent white. Although Clavey was located in a city and Valley Groves a suburb, Clavey was very similar to Valley Groves in all respects besides racial composition, largely due to the fact that Clayey's catch­ ment area encircled a largely middle- to upper-middle-class population. Particularly important for my research was that white students at Clavey were primarily middle class, which allowed me to focus on mid­ dle-class whites in both schools.

I spent two and a half years in the schools doing participant observa­ tion and in-depth interviewing. Daily practices included sitting in on classrooms with students, hanging out with them during breaks and lunch, attending school club meetings, and participating in stu­ dent-administrator advisory committees, especially those concerned with race and cultural awareness on campus. I also observed or helped out with after-school programs and events, such as school plays, major rallies, games, and the junior and senior balls of each school. To famil­ iarize myself with the music and leisure activities the students were involved in, after hours I listened to the local rap, R & B, punk, alterna­ tive, and classic rock radio stations; bought CDs of the most popular musical artists; went to live underground punk and alternative concerts; read fanzines and other youth magazines; watched MTV; studied music that students dubbed for me; and attended a large rave produced by some Clavey students.

Although I looked somewhat younger than my age (thirty-eight when the research began), I made concerted efforts to minimize the effects of age difference on how students related to me. I did not associ­ ate with other adults on campus. I dressed casually in attire that I was comfortable in, which happened to be similar to the attire students were comfortable in: blue jeans, sandals or athletic shoes, T-shirt or sweat­ shirt, no jewelry except four tiny hoop earrings--one in one ear, three in the other. I had students call me by my first name, and I did not talk down to them, judge them, or otherwise present myself as an authority figure. To the contrary, I saw the students as the authorities, and they seemed to appreciate that regard. Those efforts, on top of having devel­ oped some popular-cultural frames of reference with the students, con­ tributed to my developing some very close relationships with several of the students and fairly wide access to different peer groups and cliques on campus. Having stood in the middle of secret hideouts, food fights,

64 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 200 I

fist fights, tongue lashings, and over-the-top fits of goofiness, I can say that in most cases, I seemed to have little impact on students' behaviors.

My other most apparent traits-race, gender, and middle-class/intel­ lectual appearance-had both positive and negative effects. I connected most readily and easily with girls. The results were that I have more nar­ rative data and in-depth material from girls than boys. At Clavey, how­ ever, I did make a few close relationships with boys that I believe helped balance my findings at that school. Similarly, my class background made crossing class differences awkward at times for me and for some participants, particularly working-class males. However, since I was focusing on middle-class white students, my own middle-class white­ ness seemed to work mostly on my behalf. With respect to students of color, of which I interviewed quite a few, my race limited my ability to hang out with them in groups at school. Because my focus was on white students, I do not feel this limitation seriously compromises my argu­ ment, but deeper perspectives from students of color would certainly have improved it

I formally interviewed more than sixty students at Valley Groves and Clavey. They included, at Valley Groves, fourteen white youth, one Fili­ pino female, and a group of ten African-American students. At Clavey, I interviewed twenty-two white youth, ten African American youth, two Chinese American, one Filipino, and two Latino youth. A little more than half of my interviewees were female and the rest male. Most were middle class, but six were working class. 5

I did not randomly sample interview participants because I had very specific desires regarding to whom I wanted to speak: liberals and con­ servatives; whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos; punks, hippies, homies, alternatives, rappers, and such; high achievers and low achievers; girls and boys; middle class and working class. So I sought out interviewees through multiple methods. Mostly, I directly approached students I observed in classrooms or in their cliques, but I also went to club meet­ ings and asked for volunteers and, for the hard to find students, sought recommendations or introductions from youth.

Interviews took place on campus, in coffee shops, and in students' homes and generally lasted two hours. Students and their parents signed consent forms that explained that I was examining racial identities and race relations in the two demographically distinct contexts. In the inter­ views, I explored youth's experiences at school, their experiences of racial difference, how they thought of themselves racially, how they

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 65

thought of racial-ethnic others, their cultural interests and other signifi­ cant identities, and what types of meanings they gave to their interests and identities. Interviews and informal discussions were also a time for me to discuss with youth my interpretations of school practices, youth cultures, and other events around campus. Students spoke candidly and openly; they seemed eager to talk to an adult who would listen to and treat them respectfully.

The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. They and my field notes were manually coded and analyzed along the way to illumi­ nate processes, practices, terms, and conceptions calling for deeper investigation or changes in focus. Along the way, also, I read widely, looking for existing studies and theories that might shed analytical light on my observations. My final coding and analysis were carried out with­ out the aid of software--only colored markers, a Xerox machine, and lots of post-its. '

IDENTITY NATURALIZATION AT VALLEY GROVES HIGH: PASSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITE

AS CULTURELESS

Valley Groves is a suburban city of roughly 115,000 people. Its residents are solidly white and middle to upper-middle class. In 1990, 83 percent of the population ofVaney Groves was white, and the median household income was $42,095. Inside Valley Groves High School's catchment area is Mapleton, a small suburb of about 7,500 people. Ninety percent of Mapleton residents are white, and their median household income in 1989 was $70,000.

The racial and class demographics of Valley Groves and Mapleton cities were reflected in the composition of the Valley Groves High stu­ dent body and staff. In the 1995-96 school year, white youth made up 83 percent of the school population, followed by Hispanics (7 percent), Asians (5 percent), Filipinos (2 percent), and African Americans (2 per­ cent). The fifty-three teachers, five administrators, three campus super­ visors, and fifty-odd service and administrative staff were 85 percent non-Hispanic white. There was only one African American among them.

Raymond Williams (1976) wrote,

...

66 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / FEBRUARY 2001

Hegemony supposes the existence of something that is truly total ... which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the limit of commonsense for most people under its sway. (Pp. 204-5)

At Valley Groves, whiteness "saturated" youth's lived experience. White youth and adults overwhelmed the demographic landscape. When I asked white students at Valley Groves how they would rate their experiences of people ofcolor, most said "very little" or "none at all." In the school yard during lunch or break, students sauntered into the "quad," a large patio area in the center of the campus, to meet with friends and grab a bite to eat. At these times, the most open and public spaces were a sea of blonde- and brown-haired white girls and boys in blue jeans and T-shirts sporting logos of their favorite rock band or skateboard company. The popular and nondescript kids (usually called "normal") occupied the main quad, and the counterculture white stu­ dents--druggies, skaters, hicks-claimed territory in outside areas adjoining the quad.

Some African American, Asian, or Latino students joined with white friends, and, when they did, they assumed the styles and demeanors of the crowd they were in, be it "popular," "skater," or merely "normal." Then, there were the students of color who clustered in groups of like-kind, racial ethnically. They wore their own styles; spoke in Taga­ log, Spanish, or black English; and usually hung out in the cafeteria, classrooms, or distant comers of the campus, locations that kept them virtually invisible to the majority of students in and around the quad.

Similar spatial demographics, in which racial-ethnic difference was placed where it did not challenge the white norm, existed in the class­ room structure (Fine 1989). The mainstream students-the popular kids, athletes, and college-bound youth-were in the honors and other high-tracked classes. The "regular" classes were made up of a hodge­ podge of different types of youth-middle-class mainstream, working class, counterculturaL With the exception of some of the high-tracked math classes, in which Asian American students were overrepresented, high and regular-tracked courses were disproportionately white, with small numbers of minority youth distributed equally among them. Just where the students of color were I am sorry to say I never learned the answer to, except that one day I saw a large (disproportionate) number of them in a remedial class.

Perry ,"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 67

Whiteness saturated Valley Groves school life not only demographi­ cally but culturally as well. The dominant culture at Valley Groves­ that which oriented the social organization of students, common styles and practices, and expected behaviors-was homologous with the dominant culture outside of the campus, namely, a white European American culture. By "white European American culture," I refer to two features of American culture, broadly. First, although the dominant culture in the United States is syncretic, that is, composed of the differ­ ent cultures of the peoples that populate the United States, several of its core characteristics are of European origin. These include, as I have already suggested, the values and practices derived from the European Enlightenment, Anglican Protestantism, and Western colonialism, such as rationalism, individualism, personal responsibility, a strong work ethnic, self-effacement, and mastery over nature. I include, also, carryover or "melted" material cultures ofWestern, Eastern, and South­ ern European peoples, such as hamburgers, spaghetti, cupcakes, parades, and line dancing. Second, by virtue of being numerically and politically dominant, whites tend to share certain dispositions, worldviews, and identities constituted by that, especially in predomi­ nantly white communities. Currently, a race-neutral or "color-blind" world view and sense of oneself as normal are examples of that.

At Valley Groves, student cliques and social categories revolved around a norm-other dichotomy in which normal meant that one con­ formed to the dominant culture and expectations placed on them, and other meant one did not. For example, when I asked Billy how he would describe his group of friends he said,

"Normal. We don't smoke or drink or anything and [we] wear clothes we would call normal."

"And what is that?" I asked. "Not oversized, baggy clothes like the skaters were, or, obviously, we don't

wear cowboy hats or boots."

The normal clothes Billy referred to were the styles one might find at mainstream department stores like The Gap: loose, not overly baggy blue jeans; cotton T-shirts and blouses; sundresses; khaki shorts. The kids who did not dress or act normal served to define the boundaries of what was and was not normal. For instance, skaters wore excessively baggy pants and overall filthy clothes; "hicks" wore ten-gallon cowboy

68 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 200 I

hats, tooled-leather boots, and tight jeans with big brassy pants buckles; and druggies flagrantly carried and consumed illicit drugs. (Flagrant is the key word here since, as a popular girl told me, "Popular kids do drugs. They just don't want anyone to know it.") Carli, a white girl who considered herself "hippie," referred to the nonmainstream kids as "rebels." She said, "I call them rebels 'cause they know the system sucks."

This norm-other dichotomy was race neutraL Maria, a popular senior of Mexican-American descent on her mother's side, told me that the "first cut of students starts with who is popular" and who fits in with the other cliques on campus. Anyone, regardless of racial-ethnic ascrip­ tion, could be popular, a skater, a druggie-even a "homie," which, as groups went at Valley Groves, was the most nonwhite. Price of admis­ sion was conformity to the styles and demeanor of the group. Hence, black kids who.were skaters were not "black skaters," nor were white kids who were homies "white homies"; they were simply "skaters" and "homies," respectively. A white skater I spoke to pointed to an African American boy in his crowd and said, "That doesn't matter. We all love to skate together, hang out together." And when I asked black students if the white kids who were homies were considered "wanna-be black," they looked flatly at me and said, "No." Ron, who was a homie himself, said, "One of the guys who hangs out with us is white. He's not a racist and we've known each other for years."

Students' measuring sticks for gauging normal styles, behaviors, and expectations were the common, everyday practices and the system of rewards at schooL On any given day at Valley Groves High, students attended classes and romped into the Quad at break and lunch to pur­ chase anything from fresh cinnamon roUs, cupcakes, rice crispy bars, and fudge for snacks to pizza, hamburgers, meat loaf, and spaghetti for something more substantial. On occasion, leadership students played rock music over the loudspeakers while students talked among them­ selves in their friendship groups. Circulating through the youth were members of the administrative staff, who would greet students by their first names and engage them in casual conversation, and the team of grounds supervisors, all of whom were greying, middle-aged women. One was affectionately referred to as "Grandma."

"These are all good kids," is what administrators, teachers, and ground supervisors would say to me nearly every time I spoke with them. As Bourdieu (1977) argues, the embodiment of practices and ideas into

Perry '''CULTURELESS''IDENTITIES 69

that which feels normal, natural, and "common sense" requires collec­ tive reinforcement and approval. Adult approval rating of the students was high, and they let students know that with their smiles and friendly banter. It was demonstrated also, I believe, through the grounds super­ visors, who, by virtue of their title (as opposed to "security") and appearance, demonstrated an implicit trust the adults had that students would, for the most part, comply with expected behaviors. (At least, adults trusted that the white students would comply. Students of color, especially black boys who wore hip-hop styles, told me that they expe­ rienced considerable racial profiling by school administrators and the grounds supervisors. This explicitly racial treatment of students of color was either not witnessed by whites or rubbed out of their minds, which I believe played a role in maintaining the pretense of race neutral­ ity on campus.)

At schoolwide rallies and events, collective consensus, reinforce­ ment, and approval of white American norms came from an even wider span of individuals: school adults, other students, and the outside com­ munity. Such events seemed to secure a broad consensus of what is true, right, and white but always through nondiscursive practice, never by saying and, thus, never sayable. For example, homecoming-a high school tradition that celebrates the school football team-was a time to raise school spirit and, thus, excite the interest and imagination of the most students possible. It was, for me, an excellent time to observe shared assumptions and normative expectations of students and observe the rewards and sanctions applied to different types of behaviors.

One day during homecoming week, students held rallies in the gym for the entire student body. To the thunder of heavy-metal music, rivers of white students flowed into the gym and took seats in different quad­ rants of the auditorium reserved for different grade levels. Just before the official ceremony began. two big, husky white males (appearing to be seniors) dragged into the center of the auditorium a small boy (appearing to be a freshman) whose feet and legs were bound with silver duct tape. The crowd laughed and applauded. The two husky guys pumped their fists in the air to encourage the crowd then dragged the boy off center stage. After a brief greeting, members of the student lead­ ership committee introduced the junior varsity and varsity football players. The players came out in succession and formed a line across

70 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 200 I

the middle of the gym floor. The boys were all white except for three black players on the junior varsity team and, on the varsity team, two boys with Hispanic surnames. As his name was called, each player stepped forward to acknowledge the applause. Most did so with an air of shyness or humility, their heads bowed, cheeks blushing, shoulders pulled up to their ears. Two boldly strutted out, trying to play up the roar of the crowd, but their efforts fell flat.

Then, the varsity cheerleaders bolted to center stage, leaping ener­ getically before getting into formation for their choreographed perfor­ mance. The girls were all thin, some overly so, and wore uniforms with close-fitted bodices that made them look all the smaller. But their body size betrayed their strength. Their routine, driven by the firm beat of a heavy-metal tune, was rigorously gymnastic, with lots of cartwheels, flips, and pyramid constructions that were punctuated by the top girls falling trustingly into the arms of their comrades. Long, silky blonde hair parachuted out with each acrobatic stunt. Through the perfor­ mance, the audience remained silent and attentive, with an occasional collective gasp at the girls' athleticism, until the show was over. At that time, the cheerleaders received roaring, vocal applause.

On the day after the rally was the homecoming parade. The parade took off from the basketball field and wound its way onto a residential side street. Four adult males, two of whom appeared to be Mexican American, led the parade mounted on prancing horses and wearing Mexican serapes and sombreros. The front two carried large replicas of the California and American flags. Following the horsemen were two convertibles, one of which was a white Corvette carrying the (white) city mayor, who waved ceremoniously to the onlookers on the sidewalks.

The music of the marching band, which followed closely behind the mayor, announced the arrival of the parade along its path. A group of eight white and one African American female dancers led the band, tossing and spinning colored flags in sync with the beat of the band's percussion section. The fifty musicians in the band, most of whom appeared white with five or six exceptions, marched militarily in tight formation and played their instruments with competence and finesse. Following the band was a procession of American-built pickup trucks carrying, first, the varsity and junior varsity football players, then the "royalty"-the senior "king" and "queen" and underclass "princes"

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 71

and "princesses"-and finally, an open-bed truck loaded with seniors, hooting and cheering as if their graduation day had already arrived.

The parade made its way through several blocks of residences before returning to the main street and slowly making its way back to the school. Proud parents were perched on the sidewalks with their thirty-five-millimeter and video cameras in hand. Community residents stepped onto their front landings to wave and cheer as the parade passed their homes. Others peered out through large pane windows with cats in arms and dogs at heel.

The homecoming rally and parade were, in my view,6 packed with assumptions, values, behaviors, and origin stories that privileged white European American perspectives as well as gender, sexuality, and class-based norms (all of which tend to coproduce one another). At the rally, for example, the display of the hog-tied freshman reinforced that white (male) dominance is sustained not only through the subordina­ tion of nonwhite others but of "other" whites as well (Hartigan 1997, 1999; Thandeka 1999; Wray and Newitz 1997). Second, the virtues of personal mastery and self-effacement were exemplified by the humble postures of the football players and reinforced by the slights the audi­ ence gave to those who presented themselves with more bravado. And, finally, the cheerleaders' thin, bounded physiques and gravity-defying athletic feats demonstrated that the girls had successfully learned to subjugate their bodies and overcome nature.

The homecoming parade, with its display of the national and state flags, American cars, marching band, and school royalty, was a stun­ ning way to observe the coproduction of whiteness, Americanness, citi­ zenship, and gendered codes of conduct. Included was even an origin story of white American colonial victory over Mexico. And, by virtue of who was there and who was not, the knitting together of the themes of mastery, domination, nationhood, and industry with whiteness was seamless. Other cultures in the school and community were not repre­ sented in the parade. There were no Filipino dancers, Asian martial art­ ists, or African-American rappers. The event was performed by whites and for whites and, thus, little contradicted the cultural and political assumptions at play.

In sum, at Valley Groves High, white people and white European American culture saturated school life. White youth had little to no association with people or cultures that would place whiteness in relief in such a way that students might reflect on it and consciously define it.

72 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / FEBRUARY 2001

NO TIES

Given this sociocultural milieu, white youth could say nothing when I asked them to describe white culture; they had no words to describe that which comes naturally. Laurie, whom 1 quoted at the beginning of this article, struggled to describe white culture and finally succumbed to "I don't know!" Billy, a popular white senior, had a similar response. I asked him what he thought was culturally specific about white Ameri­ can culture. After a long pause in which he said only, "hmmm," he asked, "Like. what's American culture?"

"Uh-huh," I replied. "Hmmm. [Another long pause]-I don't really know, 'cause it's like

[pause]-just [pause]-I'm not sure! I don't know!"

However, Valley Groves white students were not always speechless about white identity. When my questions probed into the youth· s social experiences and identities as whites and not their cultures, they could find something to say. Not too surprisingly, most told me that being white meant you had no cultural ties. Students I spoke to would explain that they had mixed European roots that held no significance to them; therefore they were "just white." For example. I asked Mara, a Valley Groves senior. what she would say if a census taker asked her, straight out without any prompting, "What are you?"

Mara: Like a race? POP: Could be a racial category. Mara: I'd have to answer "Very white." lam, yeah. lam 100 percent white. POP: I noticed on your [consent form] you said you had a mix of European

backgrounds. and you wrote, "Pretty much WHITE." Is that what "white" means to you, a European mix?

Mara: I just think that there's not much-I don't really think of myself as European. I think of myself as a white American girL ... I don't really go back to my roots. though I know I have family and where they come from but they're all white races.

POP: You don't have any heartfelt devotion to your European past? Mara: Not really. My family has lived here for generations, so I don't really

draw on that.

Laurie had a similar response:

Perry ,"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 73

We're a bunch of everything. My great, great Grandmother is Cherokee. Whenever I fill out [questionnaires] about what's my ethnic background I write "white" because everything is so random. We have German, some family from Wales-butthat means nothing to me .... I don't have ties to anything. I haven't heard about anything my parents have been through except for my grandparents in wars. It's all been about people, not culture.

Answers like Mara's and Laurie's, of which there were many, reflect that, although white youth at Valley Groves may not have thought about whiteness as a culture, they did think about it as a social category (Phoe­ nix 1997), as a "group position" (Blumer 1958) with respect to other racial-ethnic groups. To Valley Groves students, whites were a group because they did not have culture, and "minorities" did. Through mixed-European and other cultural amalgamation, whites were a new breed, a hybrid, removed from a past that was meaningless to them and for the loss of which they held no remorse.

Valley Groves whites were speaking from the "postcultural" per­ spective that Rosaldo (1989) asserts is the perspective of all who are members of the dominant group ofWestern-style nation states. Natural­ ized whiteness complements and helps constitute this kind of postcultural identity because of the stability garnered from the fit between societal norms and the constructed identity of whites (powell 1997). The us-them construction revolves around "majority" (those who all look and act normal to one another) and the "minority" (those who do not look or act like the majority). Naturalized whiteness is securely grounded in and validated by the normal way of things in the present and therefore does not seek meaning in a cultural or past orientation.

CLAVEY HIGH SCHOOL: WHEN WHITE IS NOT THE NORM

Once a port of entry for African American, Mexican, and Asian immigration into northern California, Clavey City today has one of the most racially/ethnically diverse populations for its size in the United States. Of its 372,000 residents, 33 percent are white, 44 percent are black, 19 percent are of Hispanic origin, and 15 percent are of Asian

74 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY ZOO)

origin. Median household income in 1989 was $27,095. More than 16 percent of families in Clavey City live below poverty.

Clavey High School stands like a fortress overlooking a dense urban landscape. The schools magnet academies draw in youth from allover the city, bringing in a mosaic ofstudents from different racial and ethnic groups. At the time of my research, whites comprised 12 percent of the two thousand students at Clavey. African Americans were the majori ty, making up 54 percent of the school. They were followed in numbers by Asian Americans (23 percent), then Hispanics (8 percent), Filipinos (2 percent), and a few Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. At any given moment during lunch break, one could tour the campus and hear students speaking in standard English, black English ("ebonies"), Eritrean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Spanglish, Tagalog, Samoan, Russian, and Vietnamese, among others.

The racial composition of the administrative and teaching staff at Clavey was also quite diverse. The principal of Clavey was a white male, but the other top administrators, two assistant principals and the dean, were African American. Of all the administrators and their staff, 50 percent were African American, 25 percent were Asian, and 25 per­ cent were white. Clavey teachers were 53 percent white, 30 percent African American, 8 percent Asian American, 6 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Pacific Islander.

Life at Clavey High was very different from that at Valley Groves. White youth at Clavey were in daily, up-close association with marked racial and cultural difference to whiteness, and race was the primary means of sorting out who was who and where one belonged in the social organization of the school. Clavey's tracking structure, which I say more about later, was racially segregated, with whites and Asians disproportionally represented in the high-tracked classes and African Americans and Latinos overrepresented in the low-tracked classes. As well, certain areas on the campus were "where the white kids hang out"; others were "where the black (or Asian American or Latino) kids hang out." And student cliques and subcultures were racially marked such that "straights" (who were like "normal" kids at Valley Groves), alter­ natives, hippies, and punks were all "white people's groups"; rappers, athletes, gangsters, and "fashion hounds" were "black people's groups"; housers, natives, newly arrived, and martial artists were "Asian people's groups"; and so forth. This meant that the styles, slangs, vernaculars, and demeanors that marked identification with a

Perry '''CULTURELESS'' IDENTITIES 75

certain clique or subculture simultaneously inferred racial identifica­ tion. In a word, peer group activities racialized youth.

Speaking to this fact and the sanctions that came with crossing racialized boundaries in styles or leisure activities, Gloria, an immi­ grant from El Salvador, said to me,

For my race, if you start wearing a lot of gold, you're trying to be black. If you're trying to braid your hair, you'll be accused of trying to be black. I'm scared to do things'cause they might say, "that's black!" Or if you're Latino and you listen to that, you know, Green Day-that [alternative rock] kinda thing. If you listen to that, then you wanna be white .... HOh my god, why you listening to that music?" they'd say, ... Aren't you proud of who you are?

Also different from Valley Groves was the dominant school culture. Overall at ClaYey, African American youth claimed the majority of open, public spaces, and black popular cultural forms and practices shaped the normative culture of the school. By "black popular culture," I refer to the music, styles, and other meaningful practices that have risen out of black communities; are linked, if remotely, to diasporic tra­ ditions; and, most significantly, mark black identity and peoplehood (Gilroy 1991, 1993; Rose 1994; Wallace 1992). Hall (1992) defines three things that are distinctive of black diasporic culture: (1) style as the "subject of what is going on," (2) music as the "deep structure of [black] cultural life," and (3) the body as "canvases of representation" (p. 27). Gilroy (1991) adds that the body in black culture carries "potent meanings" (p. 226) because it rests at the core of historical efforts of blacks to assert their humanity.

Unlike at Valley Groves, where the dress code did not diverge much from white adult mainstream style, at Clavey, basic elements of black hip-hop style were generalized into the normative styles for all youth. One informant called it the "leveler" style because it made all who wore it "the same." This basic style included clean, oversized, and sagging denim pants or sweatpants; large and long untucked T-shirts or hooded sweatshirts; large, bulky parkas; and sparkling-clean athletic shoes. The look was particularly common for boys, but girls' styles were also influenced by it. Only if and when students wanted to mark a distinctive style and/or racial identification did they embellish on this basic, baggy theme. Duncan, a middle-class, white male skater and "raver" (some­ one who frequents rave parties) told me,

76 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

We all wear baggy pants, right? So parents think! But you find thatravers have cut-off bottoms to their [sagging] jeans, they wear bigger t-shirts they have hanging out of their pants, they carry packs that's full of crap that they take everywhere.

What Duncan specified as "raver" style, other students specified as "white," particularly the cut-off bottoms to large pants. Other markers of white kids' styles were Van shoes, instead of Nike or Fila brands (which marked black style), and macrame or silver-chain neck chokers.

Informal and formal activities on campus were also shaped by black popular culture. During breaks or at lunchtime, the ambient din of casual conversation was composed of the sounds, words, and inflec­ tions of black English and the most recent innovation in "street" slang. Lunchtime events, school rallies, and dances were enlivened with rap and R & B music, predominantly, with an occasional reggae tune or specially requested techno or alternative song. Often, students per­ formed raps on the steps in front of the cafeteria or graced an audience with a spontaneous hip-hop dance performance.

Homecoming week at Clavey, like at Valley Groves, was a time to unite the school and raise the collective spirit. So, leadership students made attempts to appeal to the breadth of diverse interests and cultures of the school with "fashion shows" of traditional ornative garments and a variety of games designed to mix students up. At lunch, they played a range of music, from R & B to techno and alternative rock, but songs by African-American and Afro-Carribean artists were predominant. The main events-the rally and game-were attended by and played pre­ dominantly to a majority-black audience.

The rally took place during lunch on the day of the "big game." Stu­ dents, of which all but a few were black, crammed into the auditorium to the heartbeat pulse of a rap song. The rally opened with a greeting from the student body president and a soulful a cappella song performed by three African-American students. Then the cheerleaders, composed of one white and ten black girls, sprung out onto the gym floor. Their cho­ reographed routine was fluid, rhythmic, and dancelike, with move­ ments drawn from traditional and contemporary African and African­ American dance forms. To the infectious beat of an upbeat R & B song, the girls playfully flirted with their appreciative audience with beckon­ ing hand and eye gestures. Several boys succumbed to the urge to dance in dialogue with the girls and leapt down to the floor to join them, but they were met by the arresting hands of campus security. Others, boys

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 77

and girls alike, stood up and swayed or danced in place until the perfor­ mance was over. Then, the varsity football players were called to line up in the center of the auditorium. The players were African American with the exception of two white boys and one Latino. When each name was announced, the football player leapt forward a few steps and embraced the cheers from the crowd. Each took his moment in the lime­ light proudly, with his fist in the air or maybe a little dance to augment the roar of his audience.

At Clavey, there was no homecoming parade that extended into the community, like at Valley Groves. At the game, a small procession of vehicles featuring the elected school "emperor" and "empress" circled the football field during half time. There was no marching band, either, but the award-winning school gospel choir sang several lively songs at halftime.

In short, school life at Clavey was heavily infused with styles, music, and activities that marked the identities and cultures of the majority black students. This had a few important implications for the experi­ ences and identities of the white students. First, white was not the norm, either numerically or culturally. Barry, a middle-class, "straight" white male, told me, "School is like a foreign country to me. I come here to this foreign place, then go home where things are normal again." When I asked white students why they did not attend the rallies and dances, they said things like, "I don't enjoy the people," "They don't play my kind of music," and "I can't dance to that music." All in all, the message was that they could not relate to the dominant school culture.

Furthermore, whiteness was not entirely taken for granted. The racial organization of Clavey's social life, curricular structure, and school wide activities meant that white students were forced to grapple with their identities as whites and participate in active contestation over the meanings of white identity and culture. No white student I spoke to at Clavey was completely unable to describe something about white culture. All had reflected on it to some extent, even if only to ruminate on how difficult it was to define. And some youth could say a lot about white culture. One white, middle-class senior girl, Jessie, elaborated extensively on differences in attitudes toward food consumption that she noticed between her white, Filipino, and Chinese American friends, and she commented on how much more visible white culture is to her in places outside of California. She said, "Minnesota, Denver and . . .

78 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / FEBRUARY 200 I

places like that. It seems like ... you know, you've got the whole thing going on-beer bread, polka, parades, apple pie and things like that."

Most stunning to me about the white students at Clavey was not what they said explicitly about white culture but what they said implicitly. In our discussions about the types of music they liked and why, white stu­ dents would tell me that they liked rock or punk or alternative music and not rap or R & B because "their" music spoke more to their "interests" or experiences as whites. For example, Kirsten and Cindi were good friends. They both were from middle-class homes, were juniors at the time, and liked alternative rock. Kirsten was white, European Ameri­ can, and Cindi was part white and part Chinese, although she admit­ tedly "looked white" and hung out solely with other white youth. I asked them why they thought students tended to self-segregate on campus:

Cindi: I think there is ... the factor that some people feel like they may not have very much in common with someone from a different race, which in some ways is true. Because you have, like, different music tastes, differ­ ent styles of clothes. Also, like what your friends think.

Kirsten: Or like different things you do on weekends. Cindi: Yeah, so I think that's something that separates the races. Kirsten: It's kind of interesting because my musical interests have

changed.... It seems like [in junior high school] everyone, regardless of if they were black or white or Asian, ... listened to the [local rap and R & B station.] But then I think when you are little you don't really ... have too much of an identity of yourself. As you get older and mature more you, like, discover what your "true being" is. So then people's musical tastes change. [Later in the conversation.] I think punk is more of a "I don't get along with my parents" kind of music and rap is more of "lets go kill someone" music.

Cindi: Punk ... expresses a simpler anger. It'sjust kind of like "Oh, I broke up with my girlfriend" ... something like that. Usually rap has more to do with killing and gangs-stuff that doesn't really relate to me.

In this discussion, Kirsten and Cindi defined white identity and cul­ ture in terms of interests and tastes in leisure culture. This "discourse of taste" (Dolby 2000) was the language of choice among all groups of students for articulating racial-ethnic differences. Behind it was the belief that different life experiences accounted for different tastes. Sometimes, white youth named fairly explicit experiences they believed were most common to or defining of whites. Class experience,

Perry ,"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 79

expressed by Kirsten and Cindi in terms of the type of neighborhood one lived in, was often evoked by youth. Other times, white youth spoke in terms of intangible but presumably race-based, emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibilities they felt when they listened to, say, punk or alternative music but not when they listened to rap.

ACTIVE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITE AS POSTCULTURAL

Ironically, even as Clavey whites demarcated white culture and iden­ tity boundaries through their popular-cultural tastes and leisure activi­ ties, they also imagined whiteness as cultureless, as postcultural. This was not as explicit as it was at Valley Groves. It would show its face when white students referred to people of color as people with "race" or "ethnicity." as though whites had neither. Tina. a working-class junior who had always been a racial minority in school and had many close black and Latino friends, told me that she "had a lot of ethnicity in [her] family ... Hispanic, Korean. We all get along." By this she meant that white relatives had married "out" of whiteness and into culture. ethnicity.

Common also was the explicit and implicit definition of white as empty. meaningless, bland, and without tradition. This comment by Eric touches on all of those:

I think it' s more difficult [to define w hi te culture] for Americans because the culture of America is more just consumption. In America, we buy stuff, and that's the basis of our culture. If you talk to people who want to come to America?-They want things. TV is a very American thing. We don't have lengthy traditions .... A lot has been lost because of the good 01' melting pot. I heard a cool one about a salad bowl-that's what America is, and along comes the dressing and turns everything into dressing flavor. Vegetables all got that white American spin on it.

Note. too, that Eric equates "white" with "American" until his last line, when he specifies "white American." That is a faux pas that whites often fall into because of the dominant construction of white as the "unhyphenated" American standard.

Finally, several Clavey white students told me that they did not like to think about themselves as "white" but as "human." These students also

80 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

expressed a more explicitly rationalist construction of whiteness that denied the significance of a past orientation and exalted a more individ­ ualistic and present- or future-oriented construction of the self. White, middle-class boys expressed this most boldly, which might be expected given that they are triply constructed as the most rational by race, class, and gender.

Murray, whom I quoted at the beginning of this article, best exempli­ fies this latter perspective. In Murray's comments, we can read several tenets of Westem rational thought and a postcultural identity: the irra­ tionality of past-oriented values, the future orientation of the self, and individual responsibility. Daniel was a white, middle-class, "straight" male with some Portuguese ancestry. He made comments similar to Murray's:

People have suggested I am a person of color or mixed. Then I decided, no, I'm European American. Ancestry doesn't matter .... People look back in the past and judge you for it, and I don't think that's right. Sure. people enslaved people. At one time every race had slaves. I think you need to move on and see what's going on now. History is important but you have to work on getting together now and don't use that as a divide.

A few scholars have obserYed a propensity among whites to deny the significance of the past, slavery particularly, in affecting the life chances of African Americans today. Some argue that this denial is a kind of defensive mechanism whites adopt to exonerate themselves from taking responsibility for the legacies of slavery and past discrimi­ nation against African Americans and other minorities (Gallagher 1995). I take a slightly different position and suggest that white identity and culture is constructed in such a way that the values of individuality, personal responsibility, and a future-oriented self create a cognitive inability to see things any other way (see also Alba 1990; Blauner 1989). A past orientation simply does not make sense to many whites from their cultural perspective.

In sum, at Clavey, white culture was not entirely naturalized and taken for granted; it was reflected on and even defined somewhat, par­ ticularly through the language of tastes and popular culture. To an extent, however, white students also considered themselves unmarked American, nonethnic, unmarked human, andlor present oriented. In a word, they saw themselves as cultureless. I might add that several stu­ dents of color I spoke to also were quick to define white culture in terms

Perry '''CULTURELESS'' IDENTITIES 81

of styles and tastes but not in terms of tradition. Johnetta, an African American senior, said, "It's hard to generalize [about white culture] because there's no ready answer to what is white culture."

Whereas I have proposed that the naturalization of whiteness greatly facilitated the passive construction of postcultural whiteness at Valley Groves, I suggest that at Clavey, different and more active social pro­ cesses were in play. Namely, Western rational ways of knowing and making sense of social relations permeated Clavey school and social practices. As I have argued, Western rationalism exiles tradition and culture from the realms of truth and relevance and replaces them with reason. That which is reasonable or rational is separated from and raised above that which is not, like the elevation of mind over body, intellectual over emotional, and order above chaos. Whiteness benefits from those hierarchical dualities by being linked with the higher value of each-with orderliness. self-control. individualism. and rationality, which, not coincidentally, are recognized as standard or normal behav­ iors. Otherness is defined in terms of that which is passionate, chaotic, violent, lazy, irrational, and-since marginal to the norm--cultural.

rno school practices in particular stood out for me in terms of the ways they seemed to structure the meanings all youth gave to their experience through a Western rational value paradigm. The first and most obvious of those was the tracking structure. Scholars have long argued that racial segregation in tracking reproduces racial inequali­ ties in the wider society, largely by preparing high-tracked students, who tend to be middle-class white and Asian, better than low-tracked students, who tend to be black, Latino, and poor white and Asian (Gamoran et al. 1995; Oakes 1985, 1994; Oakes and Guiton 1995). Tracking also reproduces racial inequalities by reinforcing, if not con­ stituting, racial stereotypes. Jeannie Oakes (1994) has argued that "all but the most extraordinary schools have their stereotypes and preju­ dices reinforced by racially-identifiable high- and low-tracked classes" (pp. 86-87). She asserts that tracking "institutionalizes racist concep­ tions of intellectual capacity" (ibid.). I would add to her argument that tracking also institutionalizes the values of mind over body and self-control over lack of restraint and racializes those who are superior and inferior in those respects.

At Clavey, the high-tracked classes, those designed to prepare stu­ dents for high-ranking colleges and universities, were 80 percent white and Asian, according to a school survey. Conversely, "preparatory"

82 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 200 I

classes, which filled graduation requirements, were overwhelmingly black and Latino. Remedial classes were 100 percent black and Latino. Although, officially, youth were tracked according to their intellectual or achievement levels, the discourses that surrounded tracking at Clavey suggested that behavior (including expected behavior) was just as relevant.

Students in the high-tracked classes were generally understood to be "well-behaved," "good" students. In those classrooms, students acted in the utmost orderly fashion: always listening attentively and taking notes, speaking only when called on. They considered themselves hard working and sophisticated in their abilities to defer gratification, such as to study during lunch instead of hang out and have fun with their friends. They justified their privilege to be in the accelerated classes on these grounds and blamed underachievement on the behaviors of the underachieved. Linda, a white Jewish girl in accelerated classes, repre­ sented this viewpoint in the following comment:

It's so sad because these kids could be pushed so far beyond what they are [doing]. Like, it's unbelievable. When I see a twelfth grader holding a geometry book, I cringe inside me. Because, you can learn, you can do it! People are so lazy, they don't care. They have no goals, no ambitions. It's frustrating! I don't get it!

The "lazy" and unambitious kids Linda referred to were black and Latino students in the preparatory classes. Other commonly used terms to describe those classes and the students in them were "bonehead," "rowdy," and "out of controL" And, indeed, some of those classes had students who were inattentive or disruptive and who could, on occasion, set the whole class off into a blaze of rowdiness. But those students were aware that they had been assigned to the least valued and negatively stereotyped classes in the school. If they did not hear it through com­ mon discourse, they deduced it from the classes themselves. They were overcrowded and short of chairs, books, and other course materials. Sometimes, they did not even have full-time teachers. It is not a stretch to suggest that preparatory students behaved in "bonehead" ways that they thought were expected of them (Eder 1981; Baron, Tom, and Coo­ per 1985; Lightfoot 1978; Ferguson 1998; Steele and Aronson 1998).

In sum, tracking at Clavey asserted more than, simply, intellectual superiority but also the values of mind over body and self-control over

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 83

lack of restraint. Furthermore, it marked standard, acceptable forms of behavior-standards within which middle-class whites and Asians were squarely located practically and symbolically.

"Multicultural" programs and discourses were other school prac­ tices that positioned whites as the school's most rational and postcul­ tural. At Clavey, there were two main, formal multicultural events: the "cultural assemblies" and "multicultural week." Once every other month or so, an ethnic club--the African-American Student Union, the Asian Student Union, Latino Student Union, or the Inter-Tribal Student Union­ would put on a school wide assembly. A common assembly featured tra­ ditional ceremonial dances and rituals, music and song, poetry read­ ings, historically informative slide shows, and clothing displays, all arranged and performed by the students.

Lunchtime activities during multicultural week were another oppor­ tunity for students to publicly display elements of their cultural heri­ tage. Each day of the week was designed to feature a particular aspect of a culture-the music, dance, clothing, written texts, or narratives. For example, on a day featuring traditional or national clothing styles, youth held a fashion show in which African-American youth in dashikis, Chinese-American girls in brocade gowns, and Mexican-American youth in ceremonial dance costumes paraded before youth gathered outside the cafeteria.

These events had their merits. They gave voice and visibility to the cultures and perspectives of people historically silenced by white colo­ nialism. African-American and Asian youth told me that they enjoyed having the opportunity to present their culture as well as learn about others. I propose, however, that multicultural events at Clavey coterminously reproduced white supremacist, rationalist tenets of white colonialism by making whiteness culturally invisible.

Rosaldo (1989) argues that, "as the Other becomes more culturally visible, the self becomes correspondingly less so" (p. 202). I believe this was true for many Clavey whites. When white students spoke about the assemblies, they usually expressed enthusiastic appreciation for "the chance to learn about so many cultures." But learning about other cultures merely gave them more references by which to define what they were not. As well, when they spoke in this way, it was as if "cul­ tures" were like books-objective things that existed outside of the self but could be consumed to pleasure the self (Farley 1997). In a

84 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

conversation with four middle-class white girls at Clavey, I asked them how they thought their experience at Clavey would influence their adulthood.

Ann: I think it's going to be a very positive thing. (Melissa interjects: Yeah.] Because it teaches us how to deal with different kinds of people.

Sera: Yeah, you learn more about others .... It's a positive experience. Melissa: Yeah, you gain street smarts. You gain stuff.

Greater knowledge of other cultures was something Ann, Sera, and Melissa appreciated because it gave them tools to enhance their socia­ bility, but it did not make them reflect on their sociocultural location as whites. When other white students at Clavey spoke to me about the value of the multicultural events, they made very similar kinds of state­ ments and inferences. Overall, multicultural events, as "add-on" school practices in which white students could pleasurably gaze on racial-eth­ nic others without putting themselves on the line, reinforced a sense of whiteness as center and standard (cultureless) and racial-ethnic others (by virtue of having culture to display) as different and marginal to that.

Furthermore, no white students I spoke to questioned why there was not a white-American cultural assembly. Granted, to most this was untenable, largely because it might be taken as a white-supremacist act. I talked to students about school clubs for whites only, and they categor­ ically dismissed the idea. One said, "There'd be a riot!" Another said, "It wouldn't be right. It would be taken all wrong." But it was also untenable because, as another student put it, "White is all around. It doesn't need special attention." The idea that white culture does not need special attention (read: white is the norm and standard) seemed to be another message multicultural events gave to white students. As if for the eyes of whites only, multiculturalism at Clavey gave white stu­ dents new references to add to their mental cache of exotic others while further obscuring the invisible power of white culture.

CONCLUSION

For a while now, scholars of race and whiteness have understood that the construction of white culture as the invisible norm is one of the most, if not the most pernicious, constructions of whiteness in the post-civil rights era. However, very few have examined the everyday

Perry ,"CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 85

social processes by which white people come to think of themselves as normal and culturally empty (Frankenberg 1993; Kenny 2000a, 2000b; Twine 1997), and among those, no one has done a comparative study illuminating the ways that different social-structural institutional con­ texts influence different constructions of white identity as cultureless. My research suggests that, at Valley Groves, a predominantly white high school, white identity seemed cultureless because white cultural practices were taken for granted, naturalized, and, thus, not reflected on and defined. At Clavey, a multiracial school, white culture was not taken for granted-white youth thought about and defined it to an extent, particularly through their interests and tastes in popular culture. However, in part, whites also reflected on their sociocultural location through the lens of European American rational authority, which school structures and practices helped construct and reinforce. That lens refracted whiteness into all that was good, controlled, rational, and cultureless and otherness into all that was bad, out of control, irrational, and cultural. It may be that when naturalization processes are not possi­ ble because of close interracial association, then rationalization pro­ cesses must come into play to preserve white hegemony.

This argument has theoretical and practical implications for critical white studies, the sociology of education, and general theories and research in racial-ethnic identity formation. Within critical white stud­ ies, there are two prevalent sets of assumptions about white culture that this research advances. The first is that white people experience them­ selves as culturally empty because whiteness is hegemonic and, there­ fore, undefined. To disrupt the insidious power of white culture, then, we must expose and define it. My study suggests that this is true but not everywhere the truth. The multiracial experiences of white youth at Clavey suggest that making white culture visible is not sufficient for challenging the construction of white as norm. What is also necessary are efforts to expose, challenge, and transform the rule of reason that frames white culture as rational and, therefore, beyond culture, post­ cultural or even anticultural.

Another assumption among some scholars of critical white studies, particularly "New Abolitionists," is that white culture is experienced as empty because, simply, there is no white culture. I am less concerned with the question of whether there really is a white culture than with what is reproduced through denying there is a white culture. The argu­ ment I have presented here proposes that the concept of culture denotes

86 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY I FEBRUARY 2001

more than, simply, a way oflife organized around sets of symbolic prac­ tices. It connotes a relationship of power between those who "have" culture (and are, thus, irrational and inferior) and those who claim not to (and are, thus, rational and superior). More research and thought needs to go into examining the ways postcultural whiteness is inculcated in daily practice and into the profits whites gain by denying that they have a culture.

This research also contributes to the growing scholarship on social and cultural reproduction in education. Although considerable research has examined the reproduction and subversion of societal norms in schools, including racial norms (for example, Carter 1999; Conchas 2000; Davidson 1996; Fordham 1996; Fine et al. 1997; Kenny 2000a; McCarthy and Critchlow 1993; Valenzuela 1999), more is still needed that closely examines the symbolic impact of certain school practices on how white students make sense of their own identities and the identi­ ties of people of color. This research only touched the surface of that and came on some disturbing and unexpected findings, namely, the active construction of post cultural whiteness. Research and evaluations of multicultural and other programs designed to redress racial inequali­ ties have focused primarily on students of color. Important insights might be gained from more attention to white students and the mean­ ings they assign to their experiences of those same programs.

Finally, this research embellishes on theories of racial-ethnic iden­ tity formation by vividly illuminating the socially constructed and con­ tingent nature of race. Racial identities are made, not born, and they are made through the interaction of the specific social, structural, political, and cultural composition of a given context (Blumer 1958; Pinderhughes 1997). This means that racial identities are not fixed or uniform but vari­ able and multiple. They may even be contradictory. These observances are often lost among scholars of whiteness and white racism who tend to represent whites and white identities as everywhere and always the same and contradictions as a form of "contemporary race prejudice" (Williams et al. 1999). My research affirms that the hegemonic con­ struction of white as cultureless is stubbornly persistent but that even it is not the same across all contexts. To more effectively dismantle white domination, we need to be aware of and ready to work with its different manifestations and internal contradictions. Future research and anti­ racist scholarship may benefit from deeper exploration of the

Perry I "CULTURELESS" IDENTITIES 87

variability of white racial identities and the processes by which white racial domination is reproduced and subverted in distinct contexts.

NOTES

1. All names of cities, schools, and individuals in this article are pseudonyms. 2. Please do not interpret my assertion that culture is "real" to mean that I see it as a

fixed and immutable "thing" that is consistent with all members of a culturally defined group. Cultures are constituted by social, geographical, historical. and political pro­ cesses, which make them variable and always changing (see Rosaldo 1989). However, in a given time and place, a culture may appear fixed and stable, especially in conditions of domination and oppression (Hall 1996). The same argument applies to my use of the concept "race." However, I have yet to find a way to satisfactorily resolve the tension between, on one hand, analyzing and deconstructing racial categories and stereotypes to dismantle them and, on the other, reifying and reproducing those same categories and stereotypes in the process. I acknowledge that my assertions in this piece about white and black culture uncomfortably balance on that tension.

3. See also Ferguson (1997). 4. Ferguson (1997) argues that the property qualification in the U.S. Constitution for

the right to American citizenry was used to justify the exclusion of nonwhites, women, and unpropertied men on the grounds that land ownership "epitomizes a rational, virtu­ ous, masculine, and politically necessary control of the world" (my emphasis, p. 157). Only the most rational had the right to be citizens.

5. I judged socioeconomic class by considering both parent occupation and qual­ ity-of-Iife issues.

6. Although I tried throughout this research to reflect on and take into consideration the race, class, gender, and other biases I bring to my representations and interpretations of the students' practices and assumptions at both Valley Groves and Clavey, I cannot claim to have succeeded in that 100 percent.

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