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C O N C L U S I O N

Thirteen Ways of Lookmg at Whiteness

Scholars of African hmerican literature have done as much as anyone to

revitalize the study of the humanities in the late tsxentieth century, but

there remains important ground to be turned in the history, literature,

and rhetoric of American race relations. The relative absence of white

tests in the discussion of racial discourse has allowed scholar and

teacher alike to rely on black texts to shoulder the burden of race theory

and race history; if a twentieth-century Lvhite test makes it into a "liter-

ature of race" classroom, it is all too often a mere caricature, a Gone with the W%d or, worse, Thomas Dixon's Thr C / u m m n . T h s is both unfortu- nate and incomplete in much the same way that caricaturing black writ-

ing or thinking was incomplete two or three decades ago. African Xmer-

ican studies have long since destabilized notions of racial identity held

I?P/IEJ~P~ groups; this book hopes to challenge the stubborn idea of mono- lithic racial identity, in this case "whiteness," ~ . ' i f h i ~ z a particular group.

"We can agree that the notion of a unitary black man is as imaginary

(and as real) as Tallace Stevens's blackbirds are; and yet to be a black

man in twentieth-century America is to be heir to a set of anxieties: be- ginning with what it m a n s to be a black man," writes Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Thirteen Lf%.s oJ'Looki/g ut a BLuck i l h . "All of the protagonists of this book confront the 'burden of representation: the homely notion that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race

or honor it. . . . Each, in his own way, rages against the dread require- ment t o represent; against the demands of 'authenticity' " (xvii).

The same can be said of the white authors dmussed in this book. All

four were white, but all four shuddered under the burden of the corro-

sive racial and gender discourse of their day; their ambivalences prove

that this discourse also damaged members of the "majority" culture,

Co py ri gh t @ 19 99 . Th e Un iv er si ty o f No rt h Ca ro li na P re ss .

Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e co py ri gh t la w.

EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 9/16/2019 11:36 AM via INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AN: 137910 ; Jenkins, McKay.; The South in Black and White : Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s Account: s3915756.main.ehost

even, strangely enough, those who c o m p ~ l s i ~ e l r perpetuated it. "The

paradigm of racc is the antithesis of freedom," John Edgar \Tideman

writes.

It locks white people in a morally and ethically indefensible posi-

tion they must preserve by force. Fosters a myth of superiority

they must act out: dictates to them h o r n they should love and

hate. Since it sanctions and reinforces the idea that some people

are born better than others, deserve more than others, have an in-

nate right, even duty, to seize from others what they want, the par-

adigm of race is destructive to a n p n e not white, and ultimately

also self-destructive for whites. A racist disposition towards non- whites, because it hardens the heart and rationalizes extremes of

selfishness and brutality, inevitably reappears in the way whites re-

gard and treat other whites. The pervasive ~ i o l e n c e in our soci-

ety-from domestic abuse to economic exploitation to capital

punishment to punitive expeditionary wars-is rooted in the par-

adigm of race. (xxv)

Carefully scrutinizing these texts, we can also tear apart the notion

that even writers from the same race, time, and region necessarily con-

structed race-their own or that of others-the same way. Looking for

the contra&ctory, disjointed, even subversive shades u~zthh "whiteness"

-looking, for example, at the difference gender and sexuality make in

the way individual writers see race-also helps keep us vigilant about

psychological as well as historical and regional specificity Just as hfissis-

sippi has everything and nothing in common with South Carolina, just

as Richard Wright has everything and nothing in common with Zora

Neale Hurston, so does William Alexander Percy have everything and

nothing in common with Carson McCullers. As with black texts, once

white texts are relieved of the need to fall into line, to be conceived of as monochromatic and uniform, we can more easily understand the con-

tradictions and nuances of color that exist within them. It is interesting

to note, for example, that Smith and hlcCullers seemed so much more

willing to esplore the psychosexual fault lines in their own minds and

communities than Cash and Percy, who were otherwise so astute in their

observation and analysis. Perhaps the two men were no less aware of

these fault lines; perhaps they merely felt incapable of finding the

courage or the language to express them. The construction of Southern

masculinity has never allowed for frank discussion of emotion and sex- uality, and when that discussion involves sexual ambiguity or lifelong

I 86 C O N C L U S I O N C op yr ig ht @ 1 99 9. T he U ni ve rs it y of N or th C ar ol in a Pr es s.

impotence, it can only be forced underground. "'Vl'hite" texts-and the

authors who write them-are as idiosyncratic and rhetorically variable

one from the other as they are from "black texts; indeed, Smith has

more in common rhetorically with Richard Wright than she does with

McCullers, who was of the same race, class, home state, and (at least in

part) sexual preference.

Beyond dismantling the idea of a monolithic "white" voice, taldng

the next theoretical step-proving that "race" itself is merely a mirage

constructed idiosyncraticall!- in the minds of each thinker-is a rela-

tively easy mom. "Race only becomes 'real' as a social force when indi-

viduals or groups beha\-e toward each other in ways which cithcr rcflcct

or perpetuate the hegemonic ideology of subordination and the pat-

terns of inequality of daily lifc," writes the historian Manning Marable in Bqond Black and K'hite.

To move into the future will require that ve bury the racial barri-

ers of the past, for good. T h e essential point of departure is the

deconstruction of the idea of "whiteness," the ideology of white

power, privilege and elitism which remains heavily embedded

within the dominant culture, social institutions and economic

arrangements of the society. But we must d o more than critique

the white pillars of race, gender and class domination. We must re-

think and restructure the central social categories of collective

struggle by which we conceive and understand our own political

reality. We must redefine "blackness" and other traditional racial

categories to be more inclusive of contemporary ethnic realities.

To be truly liberating, a social theory must reflect the actual prob-

lems of a historical conjuncture with a cornmitmcnt to rigor and

scholastic truth. (199 -200)

Applying this thinking to "whiteness" helps move us in the same di-

rection. If African American literary, historical, and legal studies have

smashed the lens through which race has been viewed in this country

for centuries, the study of white texts using these new reading tech-

niques can help us take the nest step. We are now aware that there are

multiple voices in our communities; we must now acknowledge that

there are, as it were, multiple voices in our own heads. Shelley Fisher

Fishkin posits that Huck learned to speak from Jim; following Toni

Morrison, we now can begin to explore how all American literature, and

Southern literature in particular, has been raised by black surrogates as well as white parents. If Percy was brought up by a black nursemaid, so

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was his mind and the creative work that emanated from it. White sensi-

bilities depend o n black sensibilities; it is the relationship between the two, not so much the separate halves, that is interesting. Willie Morris, a con-

temporary white Rlississippi writer, reveals a moment in The Ghosts qf 1'1fed~arEven in which a white friend from the Delta refigured his family's

traditional feelings about race: "His mother died when he was little, and

his father was courting again, and for all purposes he was raised by an illiterate black muledriver named Shotgun, whom he loved. 'The black

people of the Delta didn't sail past the Statue of Liberty when they came to this country,' my friend once said to me. 'They made this place down

here. They workcd to dcath and got nothin', cxccpt just the ground it-

self and it wasn't theirs either. I'd look out from my porch at night when I was a boy and wonder what they were thinking that night with their lamps blinking in the shadows. Now I know they were thinking of the same things 1 was' " (I 3).

I think of this book, then, as standing not only between Faulkner and

Styion but between Charles Chesnutt and iZugust Kilson, between Du

Bois and Baldwin, between Hurston and Toni Morrison as well. Ideally

I consider all these writers' works as interworen and interdependent; a fully realized discussion of race in twentieth-century American literature

cannot stand without the consideration of all thrse texts bound to-

gether. Ideally, a deep understanding of race and human relations more

broadly conceived will incorporate allvoices, each validated, each distinct,

each acknowledged as contributing to the conversation, both scholarly

and pedagogical. "That both whites and blacks, or more broadly people

of all colrxs, cannot truly embrace the range of North American h u -

manity as their own, as their imagined community, is the collective cost,"

Grace Elizabeth Hale writes. "Mahng whiteness American culture, the

nation has foregone other possibilities. The hybridity that could have

been our greatest strength has been made into a means of playing across

the color line, with its rotting distance of voyeurism and partisanship, a

confirmation of social and psychological division" (10).

In my experience, using white texts in addition to black texts to es-

plore the roots of racial discourse forces students of all races to more

directly confront themselves. Once they are introduced to the rhetori-

cal miscegenation that exists in white as well as black texts, it quickly be-

comes evident that students (and the texts themselves) do not have a dif- ferent history from "the other" and never did. Black and white are and

always have been inextricably Linked, just as male and female have always

been inextricably linked. "One of the most important results of recon-

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ceptualizing from 'objective truth' to rhetorical event will be a more nu-

anced sense of legal and social responsibility," writes Patricia Williams,

whose L41chemj ofRace and R&bts incisively examines the racial thicket of

contemporary legal discourse.

This will be so because much of what is spoken in so-called objec-

tive, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities and

unexarnined claims that make property of others beyond the self,

all the while denying such connections. . . . In racial contexts, [this] is related to the familiar offensiveness of people who wiU say, "Our maid is black and she says that blacks want. . . I'; such statements both universalize the lone black voice and disguise, enhance, and

"objectify the authority of the individual white speaker. As a legal

tool, however, it is an extremely common device by which not just subject positioning is obscured, but by which agency and respon-

sibility are hopelessly befuddled. (11)

This is my impulse as well: to nudge scholarship and students alike to

examine and take responsibility for their 01urz language, their awn racial thinking, their own sense of personal and cultural histor!; rather than

treating race (and African American literature, through which race issues

are most frequently taught) as a kind of localized anthropology project.

" E w n among left-inclined students, the idea that race is natural is so in-

grained that there is an assumption that liberal and even radical educa-

tion must be trying to teach that race is not very important, but nonethe-

less a material realitj~," David Roediger writes in Toward the Abolition of Whitpne.rx "When students do 'get it,' they are often tremendolisly en- thusiastic. Seeing race as a category constantly being struggled over and

remade, they sense that the possibilities of political action in particular

and human agency in general are vastly larger than they had thought.

They reflect o n the manner in which structures of social oppression have

contributed to the tragic ways that race has been given meaning. They

often come to indict those structures" (2).

As uncomfortable as some white students might be to get "inside" a

black text and dscover a wound that "their" ancestors might have some-

how "caused," looking directly at white texts to discover the racial com-

plexity and pain there as well is an entirely different experience. Lillian

Smith offers a very different reading experience than reading &chard W i g h t o n the "same subject." White readers of Wight, for example,

might find easy access to his anger, but the? are still somehow capable of keeping it at arm's length; it is, after all, "his" (that is to say black) anger.

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By contrast, white readers of Smith, or any of the others in this study, will find an entirely dfferent entrance into the psychological experience

of race and racism. Examining the seeds of racism in fertile ground is

quite difierent from seeing them in full bloom.

Black readers should also find such an analytical tool useful, for it

shifts the weight, or the "problem," of race from the shoulders of hfri-

can American literature onto the shoulders of American literature writ

large. In my experience, African Xmerican students tire quickly of African Xmerican literature being used as the only vehicle through

which racial discourse can be examined; introducing white texts into this

mix would certainly balance the account. Reading white texts, of course,

would also force black students to complicate their own understanding

of race, to realize that white racial thinking is n o more simple or mono-

lithic than black racial thinking. Reading Cash the week after reading

Percy the week after reading Faulkner would certainly go some distance

to proving this. Now that we have made significant strides in adding

black texts to the American canon, we can encourage students to engage

d l / the myriad voices threadmg through ail their texts (and all their

heads), be they black or white. It is, of course, as useful for black read-

ers to understand the complexities and vagaries of the white mind as it

has been for white rcaders to understand the vagaries and complexities

of the black mind.

Historically speaking, of course, the late twentieth century offers a

fascinating coda to the mid-twentieth century who would have thought

that reverse migration, among Aifrican Americans in particular, would

have taken hold just a few decades after s o many people left? Willie hlorris discusses a 1997 ~Vew~week story in which it was reported that the reverse migration of middle-class blacks back to the South was up 92 percent over the 1980s and that "a net tide of 2.7 million-more than half of the post 1940s migration-will have headed South between

1975 and zoro." Earlier this year, black and white residents of two cen-

tral Georgia counties held an art exhibit memorializing two black cou-

ples lynched in broad daylight in 1946 One oil painting, according to the

A t h t a Constitzdon, portrayed two couples "first enjoying life and then

. . . after their bodes were riddled with bullets." Clearly, the South is no closer to finishing its struggle with questions of race than is the rest of

the country

Eventually, of course, we will begin to understand that all these voices

exist and always have existed together, as instruments in the same band.

"Our ability to transcend racial chauvinism and inter-ethnic hatred and

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the old definitions of 'race,' to recognize the class commonalities and

joint social-justice interests of all groups in the restructuring of this na-

tion's economy and social order, will be the key to constructing a non-

racist democracy, transcending ancient malls of white violence, corpo-

rate power and class privilege," Marable writes. "B!- dismantling the

narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going be- yond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions

and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression" (201 - 2).

In a similar vein, Wideman writes in Futhuruloig that "the implicit pres- ence of the paracbgm of race flickers just beneath the surface, offering

its quasi-religious authority to the notion that problem groups are some-

how fundamentally different from the rest of us, sanctioning the most

drastic solutions to maintain the world as it should be. T i t h the same

blind, rclcntlcss logic of the computer whirring through the billion on/

off choices of its circuitry, the \Yestern mindset seems disposed to con-

quer by dviding, apprehending the world in polarized terms of ei- ther/orn (67 - 68).

Fifty years before Kideman, Ralter White wrote of the dangers of

the dualistic thinhng he found so prevalent among his contemporary

white Southerners. "It ~ n a d r no cliiference how intelligent or rnlented my

millions of brothers and I were, or hen- virtuously u7e lived. X curse like that of Judas was upon us, a mark of degradation fashioned with heax=

enly authority" Vhite wrote in his 1948 autobiography. "There were

white men who said Negroes had no souls, and who proved it by the

Bible. . . . Theirs was a world of contrasts in x-alues: superior and infe- rior, profit and loss, cooperatix-e and noncooperative, civilized and abo-

riginal, white and black. If p u were o n the wrong end of the compari-

son, if you were inferior, if you were noncooperative, if you u w e

aboriginal, if you mere black, then you were marked for excision, espul-

sion, o r extinction. 1 was a Negro; I was therefore that part of history which opposed the good, the just, and the enlightened" ( I T - 12).

There is something of the !;in and yang in this. The cultural is not only made up of two complementary colors (in this case black and

white); each side also has the seed of its opposite growing within it. White is defined by the existence of black, not just opposite it but ~vithitz

it as well, and vice versa. This, to be sure, is a radically different notion

from the system of racial "opposites" we as a country (and as a Kestern

civilization) ha\-e been cultivating for centuries, a dualism that creates hi-

erarchies of separation flowing quickly from white/black and man/

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woman to rich/poor and good/evil. One way to tear down these duali-

ties is to reveal the complexities and "inner opposites" inherent within

each of us. As Faulkner explored so intricately inilbsalom, Absalom!, once

white is revealed to cofztaitz and dqend z@~n black, ancient myths of racial purity vanish like so much Appalachian mist. This, of course, is why the metaphor of miscegenation holds so much power in Southern litera-

ture; once black blood is found to be flowing in white veins, images of

unalloyed "whiteness" can n o longer be taken seriously Hallowed por-

traits of pure-blooded ancestors must be removed from the walls, and reframed.

Co py ri gh t @ 19 99 . Th e Un iv er si ty o f No rt h Ca ro li na P re ss .