3-4 page assignment

38 Introduction: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

In reality, whiteness is not simply an identity that emerged from racism and the repression of other groups. The actual complex historical experiences of those marked as white is tremendously varied, and many have kno.wn few real privileges. The doomsayers who see only r.acls~ in the history and future of whiteness are simply ahistori- cal essentialists. But there is a real question about what the meaning of whiteness can be outside of a hier~rchical framework. What is whiteness, if not supremacy, given t~e lack of a shared culture across the wide and diverse domain of white people? How can whiteness, in short, bec.ome a part of the rainbow of diverse peoples? How can whiteness become bearable?

1 - An Analytic of Whiteness

Social identities in general are a bit of a conundrum, resisted by many. Do we really have to accept these labels? Don't they do more harm than good? How can identity terms of any sort reflect the messy fluidities of human social reality? To get at whiteness, we need first to consider social identity categories in general, and then whiteness in particular. This chapter will try to make some headway in regard to these two tasks.

Whiteness is most obviously a concept, or social con- struct, and a relatively recent idea in the long expanse of human history. It is not a natural, found object. Differ- ences in skin shades can hardly be classified and neatly categorized with any obvious uniformity, when dark com- plexioned Greeks, olive-skinned Italians, and pale Scandi- navians are grouped together. We have created whiteness as a social category of identity. Or somebody has.

Importantly, because racial concepts are social, ideas about particular races can change pretty radically in dif- ferent social contexts, across time and space, both in terms of the content of the ideas and in terms of how this par- ticular content is valued. Nothing about our social identi- ties is absolutely fixed.

I 1 I

40 An Analytic of Whiteness

Our growing sophistication about the variable, context- dependent nature of social categories of identity, together with our growing awareness of the intense damage such divisions have wrought, incline many people today to view social categories as subject to choice. If these categories are socially constructed, it seems to follow that we can choose to un-construct them, so to speak. People around us certainly seem to make conscious choices about how much importance to attach to such categories, and the fact that their choices vary seems to show that this is an arena of free will. Further, it is clear that this process happens not only individually but collectively: by working collec- tively within communities and societies - using our legis- latures and other representative bodies - we can choose whether and how to count races, and how to name, define, and distinguish them, and we can choose whether to base public policy on them. We can enforce their segregation or encourage their integration. We can promote their impor- tance, or try to make it wither away. Or so it would seem.

Two Negative Examples

Societies across the globe are struggling especially with the categories of race and gender, debating whether it is a good idea to acknowledge them, to encourage them, or best to try and ignore them. Consider two stark examples that illustrate the conflicting approaches to identity recently taken in government policy. In the former Yugoslavia, three main ethnic groups - the Serbian, Croatian, and the Bosnian - coexisted relatively peacefully for generations (Glenny 1996,2012; Silber 1997). Although these groups are gener- ally understood to be ethnic rather than racial, when I visited Dubrovnik in 2012 I found many who claimed that there are discernible physical features that can allow one roughly to distinguish them. This means that, in some important respects, these group identities are operating in the way that racial identities do: through visible or

An Analytic of Whiteness 41

otherwise discernible features. "Slavic" identity in general, under which all of these groups are categorized, has a long history of being associated by western Europeans with negative and immutable attributes involving behavioral as well as intellectual capacities, much like racial concepts.

The socialist government in Yugoslavia fell shortly after Tito died in 1980. A tense coalition of communist groups maintained power for 10 years afterward, but when they lost power, several nationalist political parties were quickly formed, dividing the six federated states of the former Yugoslavia strictly along ethnic lines. Parties that used ethnic identity terms in their name - such as the Serbian Democra tic Party and the Croatian People's Party - effected a neat conflation of the targeted constituency's ethnic and political identities, as if one's ethnicity determined, and delimited, one's political agenda. Political parties exclusive to specific groups can divide a shared public political culture in a way that is difficult to moderate, replacing a general discussion of the public good with a competition between interest groups defined as oppositional. Such parties institutionalize, in effect, what Cornel West (1994) has called "racial reasoning," in which identity or authen- ticity checks replace reasoned argument.

In the postcommunist period, stark debates materialized over how this very multiethnic nation should be struc- tured: some 'supported federalism, others "unitarism," but the situation devolved all too quickly into violence. Adult men were rounded up, sequestered, tortured, and some- times killed, based only on their ethnic lineage. Women of certain groups were sexually tortured in institutionalized camps, with the conscious aim of demoralizing communi- ties and fracturing their identity alignments.

In the divided areas still today, there are segregated public schools that teach children different accounts of the recent debacle, just as generations of children in the United States learned different versions of the Civil War depend- ing on whether they happened to live north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Serbian children are taught that

, ~I

42 An Analytic of Whiteness

their country was engulfed in a civil war spurr~d on by other groups, Croatian children learn t~at their, peop,le were engaged in a war of self-defense, while Bosman c,htl- dren are taught that Bosnians suffered a ,wa~ of, genocidal aggression. The segregated educational msntunons make it almost impossible for students to develop a compreh~n- sive narrative that might adjudicate between competmg claims or develop an adequate explanation for either the development of the war or its legacy. And, this s~ems ,to be the direct result of treating social categories of ldent~ty as determinative and irreducible, with clear-cut definitions and boundaries enforceable by the state.

A second example comes from Rwanda where, by con- trast, political and national unity pre:ails today after the intense period of violence that began in 1994, around the same time as the Balkan War. Rwanda's current govern- ment is pursuing a quite different strategy, ho~e:e,r, to ameliorate the effects of the war and heal the divisions. Before the war, Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi identities were differentiated by distinctive class positions and ac~ompa- nying social status, a hierarchy that emerged during t~e colonial period. The Tutsi were relative newcon:ers to ~hls area of Africa, and, as Mahmood Mamda~l e,xplams: "Through this distinction between alien and indigenous, the Tutsi came to be defined as a race - the Hamiti~ r~ce - different from the Hutu, who were constructed as indig- enous Bantu" (2001, 99). Before independence from colo- nial rule was won, many Tutsi accepted comprador positions that buffered the white colonizers fron: the Hutu masses. For this, many were compensated With educa- tional opportunities and material privileges. ~t, is a~so important to note that Hutu and Tutsi ide~tl~les, like Yugoslavian ethnicities, are correlated to raClali~ed and generally visible phenotypic features that map ~helr status onto Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies: the TutSI are gener- ally taller and lighter skinned. ,,', ,

Given the central role of Hutu and Tutsi Identities m mobilizing political and military conflict in th~ region, and the longstanding class differences and antagomsms between

An Analytic of Whiteness 43

these groups, the current government of Rwanda has endeavored to render these identities politically null in the public domain. Government forms cannot mention them or measure them; official discourses refrain from even noting their exis~ence. In this way, the government hopes to create the nanon anew on unified ground. , I wa~t to suggest here that neither of these policies _ so

dla~etncally ~pposed - is plausibly workable. It is highly unlikely that either the segregationist strategy in the former Yugoslavs, or the official silence on identity in Rwanda will be effective in avoiding conflict, repairing national trauma, or enhancing solidarity. Schools in the divided nations of the former Yugoslavia are separated from the ve~y po~ulations who not only have a different political orrentanon, but important experiences necessary for a full und,erstanding of the actions taken by their Own leadership d~nn~ the war. ~airytales with comforting or exculpatory historical narratives will not be challenged. The Rwandan government is similarly attempting to transcend traumatic historical events by a kind of non-engagement. In truth Hutu and Tutsi identities continue to affect social interac- tions, whether recognized by the government or not. These identities with longstanding tensions now have the added i~tensity of traumatic memories of atrocity, of victimiza- ~l?n, and, no le~s traumatically, of the culpability for atroc- Itl~S. To amass them together asks people, as Sonia Sikka pomts, out, "to identify themselves with groups which ... committed wrongs against their proximate ancestors. For most p~ople, ,such s~lf-identification is, at a psychological level, slm~ly ImpOSSible" (2004, 348). Censoring identity talk only Impedes the project of reassessing identities and ~eimagining their possible interrelationships. The mean- l~gS of identities are fluid, but segregation and silence hinder the process in which the meanings of identities may be understood more comprehensively and accurately, and hence transformed.

Here, then, we have opposing strategies both of which offer negative case studies. In the former Yugoslavia, the push to separate ethnic identities continues, as new Serbian!

44 An Analytic of Whiteness

ethnic studies programs are developed replete with newly constructed literary canons and language instruction, even though most believe that Serbian and Croatia~ con~titu~e dialects not full languages. This cultural natlonahsm IS fueled by political mobilization. In Rwanda, Mamdani suggests that the "attainment of self-enlightenment by guilty majorities has been a painfully gra~ual ~~ocess" (2001, 279). Certainly, the effort to make identities less visible makes it difficult to assess the real effects of the past on the present.

People in the United States should in no way feel supe- rior to these beleaguered regions in terms of our ability to come to terms with social diversity or the traumas of history. Political discourse in the United States operates on the surface a bit like Rwanda even while constituencies pursue what they take to be their racial interests in a fashion closer to the former Yugolsavia. "Contemporary American race talk," as Jack Turner bluntly asserts, "is stagnant" (2012, x). It is overly simplistic and dominated by a policy of avoidance of the role that race has played in the nation's founding. In 2015, the first ever museum dedicated to slavery will be opened in the United States, a full century and a half after its abolition (Amsden 2015). Legally sanctioned Jim Crow has given way to an insidious social violence in which social welfare, union rights, wages, and even worker safety regulations are slashed for the lower stratum of the workforce, a stratum well known for its racial diversity. Race profoundly affects employment, imprisonment, and home ownership, and yet there contin- ues to be tension around causal attributions that name race as a factor in social inequity, and charges of discrimination are derided as a "politics of victimhood." Among whites of many political persuasions, talk of race generates awk- wardness, a discomfort perhaps motivated by the idea that if we talk about the race of others, they may talk, about our race as well.

So in the safe space of this book, let's talk about white- ness.' The first task is to talk about social identities in

An Analytic of Whiteness 45

general. Let's agree, at least for now, that neither the former Yugoslavia nor Rwanda has a plausible approach: identities are neither fixed and all-determining, nor are they eliminable by government policy. So if neither approach makes sense, what approach would?

Let's begin with a general account of social identity categories, and then move to the particularity of whiteness as a category today. The goal of improving on the accounts of identity playing out in Rwanda and the former Yugo- slavia may well seem like a low bar, but consideration of these examples may give us confidence to forge ahead.

A more realistic account of identity, I'll argue, would be a realist view that understands identities to be significant aspects of the social world and of our lived sense of who we are and how we are positioned in the immediate social environs in which we live and work. Government policies can playa large role, but not an absolutely determinative one. Part of this more realist view will involve an under- standing that the categories of race and ethnicity are not always easily separable, no matter how much academics or policymakers have wanted to parse the distinction. In the real. world, ethnic groups are often racialized, and racialized groups are clearly noticeable as we move through social spaces, whether they are allowed on government forms or not. The racial diversity, or lack thereof, of our immediate social space can profoundly affect how relaxed, or how fearful, we are. Even though races are not found objects, they cannot be so easily legislated away or wished out of existence.

What Social Identities Are

If we try a realistic approach to how social categories of identity operate in our lives, it is clear that we cannot always choose when our identities are politically salient, or how they are salient, or how much. This has often been recognized as true for those whose social identities are the

46 An Analytic of Whiteness

occasion for discrimination and violence, but it is equally true for those whose identities are not social liabilities, such as whites. There is a limit to how much individuals can control their social environment, and even groups cannot control how a given group identity will be seen in the larger society. I cannot decisively control th~ way others interpret my actions, nor can I always predict the effects of my actions.

Let us be clear on this point: the political salience of identities is dependent on their social salience. That i~, identities can be politically mobilized only when what IS being invoked has some connection to our social lives, th.at is our lives in society, however partial and perhaps dis- torted that invocation is. What does it mean for an identity to be socially salient? .

I will argue that, in reality, social identity. categ.anes such as race and ethnic identities retain the social salience that they do because they are (1) explanatory, (2) an ~spect of our material existence, (3) a feature of collective or group subjectivity, and (4) the necessary effect, at .Ieast.in some cases of historical experiences. When an identity term, such as whiteness, fulfills these four conditions, then the use of the identity term, and the belief in its existence, cannot be chalked up to an ideological obfuscation of reality. I will briefly describe each of these claims.

(1) Social identities are explanatory in the sense that .the?, help to explain the social world as well as our own indi- vidual experiences. They can explain, for example, s~me of the reactions we experience, both positive and negative, from the people around us. In this sense, we might think of social identity categories as "small theories" by which we navigate our social worlds, as Satya Mohanty ~as argued. Mohanty (1997) takes identity terms as p~ovld.mg narratives that explain the links between group historical memory and individual contemporary experience, creating unifying frames that provide a descriptive purchase on the patterns of social interaction and the hierarchies of stat~s and distribution that we see around us every day. In this

An Analytic of Whiteness 47

sense, identity terms are not mere historical holdovers of oppression, or ideological claims, but explanatory terms that help us to make sense of what we experience as well as to comprehend larger historical events.

.M~hanty holds that there is an important advantage to ~hmkmg of social identities as "small theories" in this way: It helps us more readily to understand them to be social constructions rather than natural phenomena. It is true that theories can be generated about natural as well as social phenomena, from the movements of planets to the mo~ement~ of capital. But theories are themselves always fallible SOCialconstructions generated out of specific aims and conditions. This is what philosophers of science mean when they say that theories are always situated: they are produced for certain purposes, for example, to provide an explanation that will establish blame, or, alternatively, help us control our environment. Thus, all theories have a limited explanatory reach or scope of application; no theory can explain everything.

Theories can play multiple roles, from generating pre- dicti~ns and causal laws based on natural processes, to charting correlations. But most generally, theories are attempts at explanation. Explanation itself can take various forms: not simply involving causal laws with predictive capacity, but also in terms of the historical formation of a phenomenon, its genealogy, how it is reproduced or rein- ~orced, w~at social effects it has, and thus, in general, how It fits relationally within a social context. The explanatory value anq predictive capacity of theories are often contex- ~ually dependent in regard to natural phenomena, but also m regard to social kinds of things. Our ability to explain the ways in which whiteness operates will certainly depend on the particularities o.f context. If we understand identity terms as theones III this way, we will take them to be fal- lible or revisable, and, most importantly, contextually dependent and limited in their explanatory reach.

Once we begin to understand identities as "small theo- ries," we can subject them to a kind of empirical test for

I

48 An Analytic of Whiteness

adequacy, asking whether in fact they explain what they purport to explain, or whether they conceal and distort more than they reveal. We might ask, does whiteness actu- ally explain cross-class allegiances among white people, or does it divert our attention from better explanations? Does the identity category of Latino have much explanatory value given the variety of ethnic, national, and racial groups it is meant to contain? By subjecting identity ca~- egories to empirical tests in this way, we can explore th~lr empirical adequacy and explanatory value. We can point out what the category "whiteness" does and does not explain, and in some cases we can begin to revise and reformulate identity concepts to develop more adequate terms. We can also resist the biological notions of race that racist essentialists use to explain economic success, even while retaining the historical and social notions of race that playa role in the persistence of inequality.

The important idea here is that the persistence and influ- ence of identity categories is related to their explanatory capacity. We hold onto them not because we are deluded (at least, not in every case) but because they are useful. Racial identity concepts help us to make sense of our world, but, like other theoretical constructs, they can also at times lead us astray, especially if we take them too liter- ally, or as infallible, absolute, and unalterable. The vali.d.ity of identity terms is an effect of their explanatory utility, and this means that if they become more hindrance than help, we can set them aside. But as long as they remain useful, they will be used. -

(2) Social identities are also material practices. The metaphor used above about how identity categories help us to "navigate our world" should signify quite literally the material practice in which we learn how to interact with others and interpret what people say and do. Related to the material practice of identity is the fact that identi- ties are often, though not always, visible features of our material social worlds, producing a kind of visual registry organizing the interactions in social spaces. Status

An Analytic of Whiteness 49

correlates to how much people smile, touch, pay attention to and look directly at one another, and follow one's con- versational cues, and social identities are generally status determinants. The idea of the visible here is an important one, but the idea of material, perceptible difference obvi- ously extends far beyond sight to every other perceptual sensibility, from hearing to touch.

In this way, identities should not be thought of merely as a discursive or linguistic overlay on top of materially instantiated differences, but as a meaningful (or meaning- laden) organization of the phenomenologically accessible material world. A simpler way of saying this is that identi- ties. are not mere talk but an aspect of our material environment.

The material or perceptible basis of identity categories does not in and of itself determine the meaning and signifi- cance we attach to any given features, no matter how pronounced. That is, extreme differences, such as height or size or powerful smells, do not automatically determine that we will respond with animosity or attraction, or that we will feel a comparative superiority or inferiority, or even that we will take the extreme difference to be germane to much of anything. Here, culturally specific meaning-sys- tems play the determining role in conferring status differ- ences on perceptible differences. By saying that identities are material, the point is not that their meaning or correlate status is entirely determined by their materiality, but to counsel against the idea that identities are illusions or mere figments qf our ideologically befuddled imagination.

Of course, the way in which we take note of differences can be learned; the "obviousness" of some differences is dependent on early training to pick out and focus on spe- cific kinds of attributes. Many of the perceptual practices by which we learn to tell the "difference" between for example, an Arab or an Italian are hardly natural or auto- matic; crossing contexts, one can find one's own identity perceived quite differently and entirely misperceived. This is what has given rise to jokes about how developed one's

50 An Analytic of Whiteness

"gay-dar" or "jew-dar" is. Clueless perceivers who have not been inculcated with local perceptual practices (or group-specific practices) are the stuff of comedy. But the fact that one must learn a set of skills to know which characteristics are relevant, as well as the important lines of demarcation between groups, does not mean that what we are perceiving is imaginary or reducible to ideology. Much has been made of the fact that eye color signifies less intensely in the United States than skin color, some- times to suggest that the material differences count for nothing and all that matters is the meanings we attach to them. The actor Michael Ealy's green eyes do little to change the fact that he is restricted to roles for African Americans. Yet, besides the fact that in some parts of the world eye color can actually count quite a lot (see, for example, Candelaria 2007), it is a mistake to treat th.e perceptible features of identity as if these were mere epr- phenomena of discourse that play no role in the fo~ma- tions of meaning. It is undoubtedly true that In a European-dominated aesthetic field we are trained to per- ceive and overemphasize small differences or physical aspects that should be trivial, but what we are perceiving is not an illusion in and of itself. Children may vary in which visible or otherwise perceptible cues they focus on, but from very early ages they learn to navigate their worlds by such differences. There is plenty of research to show how learned this process is: age and gender may trump race in small children's memories, thus indicating what categories have greater social importance in their given context. Lawrence Hirschfeld's work, for example, shows that the perception of racial differences may require more learning than the perception of age (Hirschfeld 1996). Yet the fact that we learn how to organize and interpret mate- rial differences, as well as which ones to pick out as the most socially relevant, does not prove that social relations could or should operate without taking note of differences, or that all such differences are only perceptible as the result of learned practice. As Patricia Williams (1997) argues,

An Analytic of Whiteness 51

promoting "colorblindness" or attempting to ignore entirely the distinctiveness of bodily types and appearances are simply unrealistic proposals that will mask, rather than overcome, the practices of racism. Even if we take as a goal diminishing the meaningfulness of racialized physical attributes, it is simply untrue that attempting to ignore such attributes today will realize the dream. In fact, spread- ing the lie that it is possible to ignore entirely such racial- ized differences helps to conceal racism.

A better approach is to learn to look at these visible differences differently, to see more comprehensively and more accurately. Learning to see more perceptively will undoubtedly break down the false binaries often drawn between identities, exposing the heterogeneity within every group and the commonalities across groups. But this will not eliminate the visible difference. As Pat Parker (1999) put it in her famous poem, "For the White Person Who Wants to Know How To Be My Friend":

The first thing you do is forget that I'm black. Second, you must never forget that I'm black.

Color-blindness counsels against the latter, while racism makes the former impossible. But Parker's dictum makes perfect sense: of course our identities are important fea- tures of who we are, not something to "overlook." Just as important, they are not all of who we are.

To say that identities are material is not only to mark the perceptible physical correlates of identity, but to draw attention to our lived environments, in which public culture continues to present a white dominant world. In private colleges, one often teaches or presents lectures in rooms full of richly painted portraits of past presidents or rich benefactors, all white. The various government offices, f~om police stat~ons to motor vehicle departments, hang pictures of presidents, governors, mayors, and commis- sioners, mostly a uniform set. From the statuary that fills our public parks to religious imagery, the shared material

52 An Analytic of Whiteness

environment of daily life portrays a white world. Embod- ied images are, of course, unnecessary to create this atmosphere: street and town names, from Harrisburg to Onondaga to Saint Augustine, can also signify identity, commemorating a European dominance and colonial past without critique. This is the backdrop of everyday life.

(3) Social identities are also correlated to existing organ- izations of social practices, including the ways we learn to perceive one another. Patterns of perceptual attunement - or what we are likely to notice, what we foreground, and what exists only in the background - are in some measure connected to our association with various groups (Monahan 2010). Our sensitivity to slight often varies by group iden- tity, leading to charges of "oversensitivity" by those who do not share the same perceptual attunements. Some whites see antiwhite prejudice looming whenever histories of racism come up for discussion; unable to focus on what is happening to the oppressed groups, they foreground every potential reference to whites or European Americans and display extreme sensitivity to slights, real or imagined (Smith 1994).

The perception of prejudice is in general a judgment call, requiring an interpretation of a particular interaction. And judgment is affected by our perceptual attunements as well as our baseline knowledge, or what we already know or believe. We use our baseline knowledge to try to make sense of new experiences - but this too is in some measure connected to our socialization as a member of various groups. The founder of social psychology, George Herbert Mead, pointed out that we are all born into an already existing and finely regulated system of shared meanings. This system organizes our self-consciousness, as he famously put it, "from the outside in" (see Alcoff 2006, 117ff). There is no fully formed self prior to our absorp- tion in a system of social meanings. Importantly, Mead's view is not that there is a Big Brother who forces us to perceive in a certain way, but that the individual gains an understanding of the meaningful world and his or her

An Analytic of Whiteness 53

place within it.in the same way that fans at a sports game c.ome to perceive the events on the field. Fans react not Simply to sheer athletic skill, but to the way that skill is deplo~ed, or not, in light of the rules of the game. A great run will get cheers or jeers depending entirely on whether the player is running in the right direction. We could no more understand the reactions of fans without reference to the rules of ~he.g~me than we can understand political act~rs as mere llldlvlduals operating independently of col- lectively shared meanings.

. When. I. attend baseball or football games with my partner, It ISalmost as if we are attending different events. J:Ie knows the histor~ ~f the teams, the stakes of this par- ticular game, the stansncs of every player, the dispositions of the coac~. He often chats away with people seated a.rou?d ~s usrng a shorthand I can only guess at. His atten- non IS f1veted; mine tends to wander. He knows where to look and whom to watch, while I routinely lose the train of event~. He has ~ skill born of a lifetime of sports, imbri- cated WIth affectIve components based on memories of going to ga~es with his grandfather and playing such games as a kid. My distraction and boredom are also born of a childhood in which sports knowledge was never shared. I also get aggravated by the cheerleaders' costumes and dance steps, by the macho fans screaming insults at young guys who make mistakes on the field, and by the fact that such huge quantities of people are focused on men a~ play in a way they never focus on women. We have dlffer.ent perceptual attunements, baseline knowledges, fo~eg~'ounds and backgrounds, and affective experiences. I bke ~t:,hen he provides color commentary for my benefit, ~xplalllmg. w~at he is seeing on the field, its layered mean- mgs and SIgnIficance. I enjoy entering into his world. But even so, my world never disappears from sight; I still get aggravated by the cheerleaders.

. Our social i~entities are related in obvious ways to the dIffe~ent .expefl~nces we have of sporting events, but the relation IS obviously complicated. Many women enjoy

54 An Analytic of Whiteness

sports; many men do not. I could no doubt school myself on the relevant system of meanings, though I could never replicate the rich trove of memories my partner has. My partner is also aggravated by the sexism on display in the cheerleaders' costumes and movements, though his aggra- vation takes the form of embarrassment since he knows it is intended for his benefit and he wants no part of it. He is also aggravated by macho fans and the general political problems with major league sports, but he has so many positive connections to the game that his enjoyment is not as diminished as mine. Some elements of these perceptual practices, then, can be the result of conscious choices and commitments, while others are arbitrary effects of our upbringing.

Social identities, then, are sometimes correlated to the systems of collective meaning we happen to be immersed within, in which emotion-laden memories, perceptual attunements, and intelligible reasons operate within a shared communal organization that affects our practices of interpretation and judgment, as well as our affective responses (Markus and Moya 2010). As I said, social identities do not by themselves determine such outcomes - women can be sports fans, men can become quite knowl- edgeable about social signs of sexism - but there are obvious connections at times between the way we perceive and judge and experience an event and who we are. In some cases this means we simply notice different elements, but in other cases this can mean that we might be seriously ignorant about the meaning and significance of events we witness. In some cases such differences produce innocuous differences of interpretation, while in others such differ- ences can impair our perception of the truth. Part of what it means to have a social identity, then, is to have one's self formed within a collective system of meanings that bears elements of that identity.

(4) As this last point reveals, ultimately, social categories of identity are the product of history. This is especially true of racial and ethnic identities, whose terms evolve from

An Analytic of Whiteness 55

group-related historical events. Another way to say this is that social identities are the residues of history that make up part of the context within which we must fashion ways of being in the world. The influential British cultural theo- rist Stuart Hall writes that "identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and posi- tion ourselves within the narratives of the past" (1990, 225). This formulation retains an individual agency within an account that gives history its due.

History organizes the present through its effects on our emotional responses and the traumatic or inspiring memo- ries of our ancestors' struggles. History also affects the norms that engender our habits of practice, the assump- tions we make, and the forms of interaction and behavior that we find natural or that we engage in automatically. And of course there is a powerful historical legacy from the ways in which resources were distributed in the past that continues to produce status differentiations today, as well as institutions and institutional practices that pre- scribe and proscribe our behavior.

Danielle Allen (2004) nicely characterizes these effects as "history's gravity." She vividly describes the "congealed distrust" and "deep rules" that organized the modes of interaction between whites and blacks during the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, a movement she calls a civil war. To say that a girl in a black and white dress attending her first day of school met a mob threaten- ing to kill her just for being there makes no sense until we know .it was Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, the girl was African American, and the mob white. Our ability for a free and engaged responsiveness to new events, such as the ability to respond to the profound event of widespread black resistance to Jim Crow, must work within and against the habits of identity-based interaction into which we are inculcated from birth.

As a child I listened to white family members describe black political resistance as dangerous and a form of crimi- nal activity, and as instigated by outsiders whose moral

56 An Analytic of Whiteness

language concealed other less-than-moral m.otives. This was an interpretation of events overdetermmed by my relatives' own histories and upbringing. History doesn't excuse us, but it explains the conditions in which the interpretive process is occurring: what concepts I have at my disposal, how I am positioned vis-a.-vis the "deep rules" of my milieu, and, most importantly, what of my own history is at stake as I try to make sense of new events. Today I watch the privileged white children of the upper East Side in New York City where I work verbally abuse their nonwhite nannies on the street - pre-school-age chil- dren! - and I wonder at the alarming persistence of these old modes of interaction, based all too obviously in the persistent patterns of service employme~t ,rooted i~ slavery and colonialism. The history of orgamzmg service work via racial difference reaches its noxious tentacles into the present. Clearly, such modes of dis~espectful i?teraction ,as I witness today will continue, while economic and socl,al roles provide a foundation for them. It is o~r shared hIS- tories, global and local, that have overdetermmed t~e ways in which the labor market continues to be organized by our identities and the ways in which we continue to per- ceive and judge each other. Thus are our identities, or aspects of them, a historical residue. , , '

Social identity categories that denote ethnicity, national- ity, race, and religion - such as Puerto Ric~n, ,o~ Jewish, or Italian American, or white - connect- individuals to group histories with which they, have son:e genealogical connection, however complex this connection may be. In most people's everyday understanding in the United S,tate~, what it means if I say that I am Irish or Panamaman IS simply that I have one or two parents who are Iris~ or Panamanian. This understanding mayor may not continue to hold if I was adopted, if it was not my parents but my great-grandparents who were Irish, if the f~mily c?ntinues many or few of the cultural practices associated WIth those ethnic identities, and so on.

, t

An Analytic of Whiteness 57

, But despite the complexities in any given individual's life, a genealogical connection often produces in those indi,:,iduals a set of affective and cognitive responses to specific events, stories, or narratives that are somewhat different from others - causing them to foreground what others may overlook, and to experience an emotional reac- tion in ,som,e cases that others may not share. I don't really appreciate Jokes about drunken uncouth Irishmen, but the stereotypes about the Irish disposition to brawl remind me ~f family stories about my uncles' violent fights that provide some discomfiting confirmation. Like a lot of people from small countries or minority ethnicities, J know the name of every Panamanian who plays on a major sports team in the US, and I flinch internally at the negative comment~ boxing fans typically make about the legendary P~namaman, fighter Roberto Duran for quitting in the middle of his 1981 bout with Sugar Ray Leonard. More significantly, every Panamanian I know (over the age of 30 or ,thereabouts), whether they are now living in Panama or m Brooklyn, has a strong opinion about, and emotional reactio? toward, the US invasion of their country in 1989. There IS a great deal of political disagreement, yet our s?ared national identity provides a lens through which we view US foreign policy and US government pronounce- ments about a variety of issues concerning Latin American countries.

Iden,tities al~o have obvious impact on the tenor of per- sonal mteraction, generating friendliness, trust, or the reverse J have discovered that the decal of a Panamanian fla~ on the back of my VW routinely generates friendly smiles from parking-lot attendants all over Manhattan. Upon seeing the decal, people have rolled down their windows at stoplights to chat with me about where in Panama th~y are from. One's social identities (for everyone has a multiple set, not just mixed folks such as myself) do not necessarily affect most of what we notice and fore- ground in normal everyday circumstances, but it may

58 An Analytic of Whiteness

nonetheless affect how we respond to others, as well as how we respond to a wide range of news stories, movies, and so on. In this way it affects who we are.

The genealogies of identity terms such as "black" and "white" and "mestizo" have all now been traced with some accuracy to complex colonial histories. The large events of modern, postconquest history - such as slavery, genocide, the annexation of massive amounts of land, the economically or politically motivated diasporas of numer- ous peoples, and of course numerous wars - played central roles in the formation and transformations of identity as well as the establishment of status and hierarchy, and they also played a role in the development of specific collective cultural traditions and rituals that people created in order to survive, remember, and make sense of such cataclysmic events.

Social categories of identity are not simply foisted on us from above, dependent on state recognition, but organi- cally produced out of such historical events.

Nonetheless, such macro events underdetermine our individual responses and political interpretations of their meaningfulness in our lives. It is obvious that different individuals will interpret and respond to the same event quite differently, and there will be contestation over the practices and official interpretations enshrined in group rituals that mark national and ethnic identities. The con- ceptual repertoire available for our interpretative and explanatory work is, in a sense, arbitrary, arising from what Michel Foucault wittily named our "historical a priori" that set the terms of intelligibility and coherence. Nonetheless, large events of history demand interpretation, and their erasure or minimizing requires quite a bit of work and regular vigilance. Those most adversely impacted by such events cannot so easily ignore them, but must either struggle to make sense of our histories or work vigilantly to cover over the evidence of their effects on our lives.

One way to understand this complex role of history in relation to identity is to make use of Hans-Georg

An Analytic of Whiteness 59 Gadamer's (1991/1960) concept of the hermeneutic horizon. This is the idea of an interpretive horizon that operates as a backdrop and orienting perspective from which individuals make sense of new events. Gadamer conceptualizes our horizon as a location from which we look out at the world, but it also has content. It is not simply a neutral place but a substantive outlook contain- ing a variety of elements very specific to us as individuals. Our horizon is also open and dynamic, constantly accu- mulating new elements, sometimes motivating the reinter- pretation of existing elements.

This concept of the horizon helps us to capture the background, framing assumptions we bring with us to perception and to the effort of understanding. Some of the content of our horizons will be group-related, and thus experienced by all those who share a social identity, such as the trauma of dislocation or slavery, the perpetual encounter with racist representations, or the memories of collective violence. The horizon does not determine how particular individuals will interpret such shared experi- ences. But we cannot control with simple volition our affective responses to events that affected our forebears, or the way in which such responses orient our perceptions, setting them in the foreground, mobilizing our sympathies, our fears, or our hatreds.

To argue for the importance of history in this way may seem to downplay the role of interpretation, or the fact that no historical event carries its determinate political meaning.on its back, as it were, but can be endlessly inter- preted and assessed anew. Group identity itself is the product of interpretive work. My feelings of connection to the history of a particular group is dependent on how the events are understood. I have two great-grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy: do I sympathize with the extreme difficulty of their experience as whites, as south- erners facing "northern aggression" and superior arms, as poor men forced or bamboozled by landowners to con- script, or do I condemn their armed defense of a slave

60 An Analytic of Whiteness

system? Differences of historical interpreta:ion will affect how far my expansive imaginative sympathies may be able to travel. But there is a kind of "raw material" in our histories and lineages that can operate in surprisingly pow- erful ways, as evidenced when one finds out later i~ life a lineage that causes new empathies, or angers, to ans.e, ?r when one revises one's interpretation so that a villain becomes a victim. Felt connections are the product of mediated processes of interpretation, and yet they are not simply ours to choose or to interpret out of exis.tence.

These four realist elements provide a way to think about the realistic dimensions of social identity categories that limit the elasticity of our individual power of choice as well as the effectiveness of political attempts to manipulate us or force changes, whether progressive or regressive. As long as identity terms offer explanations of our social world, they will continue to be useful, and used. The~ are ways of naming aspects of our interpretive h~rizons, hkel.y perceptual attunements, and connections to history, Identi- ties are the result of social rather than natural processes, and yet they emerge organically from the~e. r~alist e~e- ments. Thus, the efforts to eliminate or rmrurrnze SOCIal categories of identity may fail, or in fact undermine, our capacity to explain our surroundings, our experiences, and our own practices, as well as the practices of oth~rs. T.he attempt by states (or cultural theorists) to alter identity terms will need to take these desiderata into account.

This realist approach to social identity will be used throughout the following account of whiteness, a very particular form of identity. In the remainder of this chapter, I will address the key issues that may appear to preemp- tively disable an account of white identity: the issue of "race" itself as a specious category, the important issue of class, and the problem of, as one might say, the "one and the many," or the lack of a unifying essence that can provide unity across differenc~. After disc~ss~ng these issues I will turn to the question of what IS It we are talking about when we talk about whiteness? This is a

An Analytic of Whiteness 61

different question from the question of what grounds iden- tity claims, or what justifies our belief that they are real as I just discussed via the four points above. Rather, it is a question about the referent of the concept of "whiteness" or "white identity."

The History of "Race"

As.a category of social identity, race is a beleaguered term. The concept has only emerged in the modern period, and from the very beginning developed under a cloud of will- fully mistaken ideas about putative biological essences (Harding 1993). The variety within any given racialized group provided plenty of evidence, even before the genomic facts became known, that race is not a sufficient cause of anything important such as behavior or intelligence or moral dispositions. Yet scientists throughout the nine- teenth century, including the revered Louis Agassiz, as well as Darwin, Cuvier, Morton, and Buffon, overlooked countervailing evidence, shoddily produced classification tables of human types based on appearance, and mangled IQ tests to suggest that they reveal permanent capacities (Gould 1996).

Bythe 1990s, biologists and anthropologists _ the two disciplines that had played the most troubling role in the proliferation of ideas about race - reached a consensus that :he c?ncept did not refer to anything physiologically or biologically real. DNA testing showed that there is much more genetic variance within than across racial groups. We can statistically tabulate many patterns involv- ing group identities, but, given the newly reliable scientific evidence, we now understand that what we are tracking are not biologically caused phenomena, but socially caused factors. Some thought that even if we redefine race as a social kind rather than a biological kind, this would be problematic given the history of the concept. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992) argued that race continued to

62 An Analytic of Whiteness

imply biology, and a continued use of the term w?uld simply perpetuate the muddle. Others such as Paul GIlroy (2000) argued that the concept's continued use could only bode ill for efforts toward social justice.

Since that time, two interesting developments have emerged, one in regard to the science debates and another in regard to the social definitions of race. First, man,y biologists and philosophers of biology have changed their mind about the full-on speciousness of the category. Popu- lation geneticists have found a way to correlate socially recognized categories of race not to genes or genetically related dispositions, but to histories of population groups (Andreasen 1998; Kitcher 2007; Spencer 2012). In ~ther words, one can use's one racial identity to track the hkely continental home of one's ancestors, as one can on the TV show Finding Your Roots. Others use what is called "junk DNA" _ non-explanatory DNA - to fashion a biological category of race (Pierce 2014). Importantly, ~hese new methods of giving a biological content to the SOCialcatego- ries of race do not produce predictions or explanations as the old theories claimed to do, so debate continues over their scientific utility. Meanwhile, the medical sciences have begun to push race-specific pharmacological com- modities big time. Here, some excellent young philoso- phers of science are playing a useful role in debunking ,the complicated methodologies bolsteringL:hese claims, P?mt- ing out, for example, that the evidence nowhere estabhshes discreteness or uniqueness - that is, that all and only black males respond to a given heart medication (Maglo 2?10, 2011). Given this complexity, physicians need to connnue to fashion treatments based on individual history rather than jumping to group-based conclusions. "

While the science debate over race has been reinvigor- ated with these new developments, another development has emerged in the social theory literature since the 1990s. Denying that the category of race is a social c?nstruct is analogous to denying climate change, as David Theo Goldberg (2014) insists. But denying the reality of race

An Analytic of Whiteness 63

because it has a social and historical rather than a biologi- ca~ genealog~ is just as foolish, as Goldberg also argues. MlCh~el Orni and Ho:vard Winant (1994) have produced a particularly compelling concept of "racial formation" as a way to talk about racial identities that foregrounds their dynamic and flexible, socially embedded character. Using a broadly Foucauldian approach, like Goldberg, they explore the proce,sse~ of racial formation as a bottom-up/ top-down dialectic, in which social movements of resist- anc~, and not just state institutions, playa substantial role. Their con~ep~ of racial formation makes it possible to study the significance of race without further contributing to the specious assumptions about its naturalism. Critical race studies h~ve mostly followed this approach: to study ra~~ as a moving target. There are varied projects among cr~ttcal race theorists, with some aiming for a future Without race, and o.thers lea.ving that particular door open. Bu~ what ~mtes this trend IS the determination to critique racial projects and racial discourses even as race is at the same time, understood to be, at least for now, quite real. (See e.g. Carter 2000; Fine et al. 1997; Hartigan 1997; Ingram 2005.)

The use of race categories in this book follows this gen.era~ apP,r?ach of critical race theory. The theory of SOCIal identities I offer is meant to flesh out our under- standing of how social dynamics form races, racialized groups, and racial identities, and not just racial ideas. As far as the, sci~nce debates go, while a bit skeptical, I also follow with interest the ongoing discussions. The main question for this side of the scholarship is whether such a ~opulation-based definition of race adds anything substan- tlal,t? our unde:s,tanding of how race works in society and politics. The critical race approach that emphasizes race as fundamentally social has a more obvious and immediate pay-off.

Ethnicity cannot replace race, as I have argued else- where and will reiterate here in regard to whiteness (Alcoff 2006, 2009; see also Hattam 2007). Ostensibly, ethnic

64 An Analytic of Whiteness

categories denote chosen cultural groupings with shared lineage, but the focus is less on lineage and phenotype than on volitional commitments and practices. Hence, histori- cally, ethnicity is distinguished from race as culture is from biology. This historical demarcation does not reflect the real-world way of speaking, in which ethnic terms slide over into racial terms all the time. "African American" gets used interchangeably with "black" in many parts of the US, thus grouping together Caribbean and African immigrants and once again rendering what is an apparent ethnic term - "African American" - a racial term. The concept "Latino" likewise ostensibly denotes an uber-eth- nicity, and yet the racialization of Latinos is evident in every right-wing political discussion: we are all alike, and most of what we are is negative. If we understand the meaning of terms to track their actual use in living speech, as I will argue in Chapter 2, then the use of ethnic terms often reveals a synonymy with race. This complicates any strategy of replacing race with ethnicity.

I do not take whiteness to refer to a biological category, or a genetic grouping. Rather, whiteness is a social kind distinguishable from specific ethnic or national identities even if it is used to refer to an amalgam of specific ethnici- ties that share a lineage based in Europe. If we drop the term whiteness, we will miss the proverbial elephant, and one of the most important explanatory variables for social dynamics of labor and material distribution.

Beyond the developments in critical race theory, there has more recently emerged a constellation of social theory sometimes called "decolonial studies" (Quijano 2008; Grosfoguel et al. 2005). This work locates the develop- ment of racial formations within a modern colonial world framework dating from the conquest of the "new world," so-called. From Columbus's journals forward we can follow the history of a racialized representation of labor, or what Anibal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power," a phrase meant to signify the colonial history embedded in the way in which political, economic, and social power is

An Analytic of Whiteness 65

organized, and in which, for example, labor groups are divided up and organized, subjecting some to perpetual lawn service while others are given a computer and placed in a cubicle. The racialization of the labor market, which one can observe in any hospital, nursing home, factory, university, or corporation, developed prior to capitalism in colonial conquest. This is the system we are still living with today, in which black people from the Caribbean have better chances on the job market than African Americans, and lighter skinned Latinos fare better than those with more obvious indigenous features. The racial segmentation of labor has organized capital flows since the beginning of modernity in a way few leftists have come to terms with.

Class Which brings us to the topic of class. The idea that we should focus on class rather than race gains momentum from a consideration of how white workers have been misled to believe in an imagined race solidarity over the real prospects of class solidarity. Race and racism persist- ently obscure economic realities, such as when the 2008 real estate debacle and foreclosure epidemic was blamed on African Americans and Latinos for pursuing mortgages they could not afford, invoking racist stereotypes about their financial recklessness, rather than on the (largely white-owned) banks that profited enormously from such lending practices.

However, the concept of class itself needs some analysis. Both classical economics and Marxist concepts of class developed in and for a European context, with typically Eurocentric deficiencies given the theorist's ignorance about economic practices and political histories outside Europe. Marx defined class in terms of one's role in the production of capitalist commodities, or, in other words, one's relationship to capital. This is not easily transposable to other sorts of economic configurations, such as slavery

66 An Analytic of Whiteness

or conscripted labor, or roles defined in terms of caste or feudal relations or the latifundias and gamonales instituted in colonized countries. The native peoples owned land, even as recognized by the state, and yet could be forcibly conscripted into the mines because of their racial identity, a fate that Marx's analysis does not explain. To have one's labor role based on one's identity was a feudal practice by Marx's definition, and to explain the fact that this practice continues today even in late capitalism requires a theoreti- cal subterfuge if one wants to stay within Marxist termi- nology. It is understandable, then, that the gendered and racialized nature of labor has been consistently under- played in the Marxist tradition, since theorists have found it difficult to adapt Marxism to the realities of a labor market organized and segmented in terms of racial and gendered groups. To call for a focus on class, then, rather than race and gender, is to call for a diminution if not erasure of the latter's importance.

It is critical to refuse these either/or proposals and insist on developing integrated analyses. I would argue that race, in the sense just defined as an identity formation owing its emergence to new world colonialism, has carried since its inception an embedded economic meaning. The attributes used to define racial types were originally a set of criteria for exploitation: what kind of work could the Native peoples be made to do? What kind of skills might Africans bring? Under what conditions would Asian labor remain docile? These were the questions that started the ball rolling on racial concepts. Interestingly, labor resistance has been consistently intertwined with specific identity formations that either hindered organization or grounded it. The greatest revolutions in the western hemisphere - in Haiti and in Mexico - were formulated in racial terms, as African slaves against their white masters, and as an alli- ance of mestizos and Indians, rather than generic workers and peasants, against the criollos. Every liberatory theorist in Latin America, from Simon Bolivar to Jose Marti to Jose Carlos Mariategui, has had to make racial identities a

An Analytic of Whiteness 67

centerpiece of their analysis, not an afterthought. The complex economic developments of North America throughout the modern period, and the shifting racial and ethnic segmentations of labor, have much more in common with the rest of this hemisphere than they do with Europe. But these issues are as global as the reach of colonial and settler states (McCarthy 2009).

Racial formations have a materiality beyond volitional self-ascription, organizing labor resources and all but determining one's position as unskilled, semiskilled, manual laborer, service worker, craftsman, manager, and so on (Barrera 1979). As Omi and Winant's (1994) term "racial formation" is intended to signify, this materiality is always in transition. Throughout the United States today, the materiality of race is in major transition as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields make efforts to diversify and the possibility of a truly multiracial professional-managerial class comes into view (Alba 2009). And yet, the labor force remains obviously segmented around racial identities. Diversification in the upper-middle strata is not translating into an eradication of the racial configuration of the broad bottom. The back of the house is still most often black and brown.

When I was in my early twenties I worked for a time as a seamstress in a large shirt factory outside Atlanta, one of the largest unionized shirt factories in the world. I was given a sewing test and then assigned a position in the relatively easy collars department. The 1,500 workers in the plant, almost all women, were organized by race and gender to' an extent that one could not overlook: floor sweepers and cleaners were African American men, cutters were white men, the more taxing composition jobs (such as those that involved having a spray of steam in a work- er's face eight hours a day) were done entirely by African American women, and the seamstress jobs were primarily white women with a scattering of African American women, Filipinas, Native American women, and Latinas. Quality control personnel (the ones we really hated) were

68 An Analytic of Whiteness

all white women who had been upgraded from the seam- stress pool, the middle managers were white women, and the top managers were all white men. Nursing homes today are similarly organized, with race and ethnic correla- tions for food service, janitors, licensed practical nurses (LPNs), registered nurses (RNs), case workers, and nurse managers. In general, the higher up you go, the lighter it gets, but various ethnic and racial groups have secured a toehold in specific job categories.

This organization has its roots in the encomienda system of planters, overseers, cane cutters, farm laborers, domes- tic laborers, and so on that structured both slave, con- scripted, and "free" labor systems throughout the Americas (Mariategui 2011; Vallejo 1989). During the building of the Panama Canal, even the form of payment workers received was organized by race: black workers from the West Indies were paid in silver, white workers were paid in gold. Sociologists and labor studies scholars may debate the present trends and the likely future transformations for racial organizations of the workplace, but what is striking is that this long history of racially configured labor markets has barely penetrated either classical or neoclassical eco- nomics or Marxist formulations of capitalist societies. The creative twentieth-century analyses of shifting labor market dynamics by brilliant figures such as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy barely attended to race, and Marxists from the New Left continued the tradition. Even Thomas Piketty's new and improved theory barely mentions race and gender (see Eisenstein 2014). There is yet to be a fully articulated theory of capitalism that offers an integrated analysis.

Within whiteness studies, class differences, however, are seldom ignored. The increasingly dramatic class divide we see charted for us in the daily business reports shows reduced wages for whiteness, and even the white poor are denied a safety net of any kind. As the wages of whiteness fall, it may be tempting to see the major social divide as one of class, to argue that if white workers would simply vote like workers, we could have an effective progressive movement. It is their whiteness - that is, their belief that

An Analytic of Whiteness 69

whiteness matters - that gets in the way of such a generic social movement.

The counter argument I would make is simply that a political discourse not grounded in reality cannot be suc- cessful. The real world of union organizing and contract negotiations requires complex bargaining to create solidar- ity given the varied needs and interests of the different groups of workers (Alcoff 2007). Skilled white workers across gender differences can advance their own strength by making common cause with other sectors within the workforce, but this requires accommodation (and a cri- tique of craft unionism in which more professionalized sectors of workers, more often white, organize themselves separately). Work rules on the job can allow language discrimination, disempower immigrants, effectively keep the skilled trades white, or exacerbate divisive hierarchies if racial, national, religious, and gendered forms of identity are ignored. Our best labor leaders and analysts recognize these facts (Smith 2007; Hartigan 1999; Fletcher and Gapasin 2008).

If we cannot formulate the interests of workers by abstractions, then we cannot replace race with class. To seek out the minimum conditions or a lowest common denominator across widely variant sectors of the racialized labor markets will always endanger a fallback position that focuses on predictable subsets of workers. Racial progress cannot happen in the absence of an analysis of class structures and ideologies, but the same is true of progress for workers: no gains are possible with regard to the exploitati6n of labor without addressing race. As more and more white workers find themselves in an unprotected economic free fall, these are critical lessons to be learned in order to improve their own situation.

The Problem of the One and the Many

A third main challenge to developing a theoretical focus on whiteness is the problem of diversity within the

70 An Analytic of Whiteness

category. This is the same challenge faced by any account of identity: the ancient problem of the one and the many (Spelman 1988). White identities are not one kind of thing, but many kinds of things, given the ways that whiteness is always mediated by other factors such as class, geographical region, age, religion, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, able-bodiedness, sexuality, language, as well as quite specifically individual variables involving a person's particular kind of schooling an~ fa.mily.e.nviron- ment. The complex constellation of white Identities that results resists any unified description in regard to racism, racial consciousness, or political orientation. The question, then, is whether there is any legitimacy in our talk of a "one."

Because of these mediations of identity, some white people have experienced discriminati.on and stereoty~ing that are analagous to the racism expenenced by nonwhites, while other white identities have had little to no such experiences. Some can draw on experiences of homopho- bia, anti-Italian or anti-Polish stereotyping, or anti-rural prejudices, any of which could conceivably. hold usef~1 lessons about the harms of racism. Most whites work 10 fairly modest jobs, as do most people of color. Some whites are urban hipsters with trust funds, but plenty of others work at Walmart. Do these various differences suggest that the category of whiteness has decreasing explanatory utility, or none at all?

The importance of the ethnic differences among whites in the United States varies by region and sometimes even by neighborhood. In my experience, ethnicity is more important among whites in the north than it is in the south. The idea that whiteness was invisible to whites themselves - a widespread claim among the early sociolo- gists of whiteness - never made sense to me from the perspective of growing up in the south (see, e.g., Franken- berg 1993). In this sense, the subjective life of whiteness varies as a factor of context. Under Jim Crow, whiteness was no less visible for the fact that it did not require the

An Analytic of Whiteness 71

practices of marking or announcing used with nonwhites (as lampooned by the title "National Black Correspond- ent" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show) because whiteness was the no~mative identity - normative for "Americans," for professionals, for leaders in all fields. Whiteness went un~a~ed b~cause white presence required no explanation or justification, not because it was invisible. Whiteness was always ~ c.r~t~calelement of social situations, determining the possibilin-, for action and modes of interaction. The commonly us.ed phr~se, "That's mighty white of you," that ?ne can fi~d III movies as soon as talkies began, as well as III novels like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, reveals this aware- ness.' When Katherine Hepburn declares in the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, "I am free, white, and over 21 " she is saying she has three positive goods that enable her to do ~hat sh.e wants. One cannot navigate a segregated or ?Ierarchlca~ social landscape without becoming schooled 10 the specific practices accorded to one's identity, wher- ever one stands with respect to the divide.

'Yhiteness still carries some predictive capacity in stand- ardized test performances, treatments by police, wealth, home ownership and real estate values. Whiteness tracks electoral preferences at the national level when combined with ~ge~ gender, and having an urban or rural zip code. The IIkelJhood of unemployment still tracks race, as does the length of incarceration upon conviction, or being chosen for the school "gifted and talented program." Although we need more studies that disaggregate racial groups, racial identity still works as a predictor for a host of significanrsocial phenomena (Wise 2009, 2012).

The historic 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama altered our understanding of how whiteness operates as a predictor of voting patterns, since it lost some of its stand- alone predictive ability. Whiteness by itself was not a useful predictor of whether a voter would support Obama: 43

1 Lewis, of course, was making use of the phrase for social criticism See Lewis 1922. .

I

72 An Analytic of Whiteness

percent of whites voted for him, but this percentage was basically the same as that of whites who voted for the last two Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton (who, respectively, won 47 percent and 43 percent of the white vote). It is sometimes true that racial correlations are sought when other factors might be more predictive, such as economic success, union membership, or by checking the voter's opinions on various public policies, for example. The fact that we still reach for race as a stand-alone pre- dictor is based, no doubt, on the "historical gravity" of these identity categories, even as they morph into the present. But the fact that whiteness must today be com- bined with other correlations to produce reliable predic- tions indicates that it has not lost its relevance altogether (Frankenberg 1997).

The problem of the one and the many not only concerns the variations within white communities, but also the vari- ations among nonwhite groups, along with the muddy and moveable boundaries of whiteness. Economist William A. "Sandy" Darity has-overseen numerous studies that show surprisingly negligible differences between whites and light-skinned blacks in terms of job success, indicating the significant changes of the post-civil rights era (see, e.g., Darity et al. 1996). And yet, what Darity's work also shows is that, when those light-skinned black folks are disaggregated from the overall statistics on black unem- ployment, black poverty, and so on, the gap is even larger than we might have thought. The majority of African Americans, in other words, are even worse off vis-a-vis the majority of whites than overly generalized statistics can reveal. Darity's work shows that, while whiteness may not be necessary for job success, lightness still is, indicating a color hierarchy that extends beyond whites themselves.

The larger theoretical and methodological point we might conclude from these considerations of the complex- ity of whiteness is that the one, so to speak, will be found

An Analytic of Whiteness 73

through a careful attentiveness to the many. Attending to the variability within categories may cause us to redefine their borders and give more weight to certain mediating factors. For rural, non-union, white men, their whiteness may well loom larger in their identity configuration than it does for other whites. Thus do identities shift and transform.

It remains critical to acknowledge that whiteness remains importantly distinct from the experiences of light-skinned or culturally assimilated nonwhites. The lived experience of white privilege connects to a unique set of historical experiences and an ongoing cultural imaginary that affects subject-formation differently for white people than it does for others, as the trove of recently published, rich phenom- enologies and reflexive autobiographies is beginning to reveal (e.g. Cuomo and Hall 1999· Sullivan 2005., , MacMullan 2009; Senna 1998a, 1998b, 2011). Guilt over slavery and colonialism differentiates whites from others , and whites are positioned differently within both national- ist narratives and global ones regarding "civilization," affecting both perception and self-perception. Whiteness and lightness are not identical in the conceptual imaginary that informs these narratives about who is at the vanguard of the nation, or of the species. The problem of the one and the many should remind us of the variability and fluid- ity intrinsic to these large categories so that we deploy them with more care and rigor. It does not yet establish their disutility.

I have so far argued that categories of social identity are sometimes organic manifestations of historical processes that create subjects, form concepts, explain social dynarn- i~s, and track patterns of perceptual judgment. This pro- vides a general orientation to the way in which we might think about what identities are and how they arise. I have also argued that the problem of the "many" does not incapacitate our ability to speak of the "one." Let me turn now to this "one" in regard to whiteness itself.

74 An Analytic of Whiteness

What Do We Mean When We Talk About "Whiteness?"

Projects of inquiry that offer what seem to be con.flicting accounts are sometimes simply talking about different things, or different aspects of the same thing. I will argue that when we talk about identities of any sort, we may be talking about three related but distinct kinds of things: an empirically measurable social kind, an imagin~ry or rep- resentational kind, or a process for the formation of par- ticular kinds of selves. We can regard these as three distinctive aspects of a social identity: (1) its e~pi.rical status or the ways in which an identity can be objectively located measured and traced out historically in time and space; (2) its ima~inary status, or the ways in :-rhich it constitutes a shared social imaginary that orgaruzes and prescribes normative or acceptable lifestyle~, both. for the in-group as well as for outsiders; and (3) Its s~bJect-f?r- mation or the constitution of individual subjects with particular ways of experiencing and perceiv!ng as well as interacting with the social and natural environment. All three of these elements, to be adumbrated below, should be taken into account before we assess whether the "theory" of whiteness as a category serves an explan~tory function as well as what, precisely, it helps to explain.

In regard to whiteness, I will refer to these via shorthand as (1) empirical whiteness, (2) imaginary whiteness, and (3) subjective whiteness. At the beginning of this chapter I developed a four-part account of the grounds for thinking that a social identity is in fact real, involving explanat?ry capacity, materiality, relevance to subjectivity, and being an effect of history. The purpose of that schema was to show that the realism of identity claims is not simply about ideological effects but about the way the social world works to produce identities that can then be referred to as real. The three-part schema I will elaborate below has a different purpose: to separate out the three major aspects

An Analytic of Whiteness 75

of whlreness.' In this way we can avoid talking past one another when we talk about whiteness. I also hope this approach will help signal the transformative capacity of the category of whiteness, and its multiply mediated forms.

It will be helpful to distinguish these three aspects, although the very next question will be: how are they related, causally or otherwise? Does empirical whiteness cause imaginary whiteness and the process of white sub- ject-formation? Or vice versa? r will return to this question at the end of the chapter.

Social identities are not mainly forms of self-ascription that r~qUIr~ a conscious investment before they can be opera~,onaItzed. If this were so, then a social identity such as whiteness would be dependent upon how it is articu- lated and understood by the person who is said to have the identity. Yet social identities have an effect in a manner well. b~yond individual control, even independent of self- asCnptlOn, because they have an effect on Our immediate social and familial context and how we are treated by others throughout our lives. . St~ucturalists may be concerned that my talk of the Imagmary and of subjectivity is excessive, since so much ab~u.t social identities has to do with the economic oppor- tunrtres we are born into. Yet, as Du Bois instructed us, to talk ~bout white identities in any full and meaningful sense requires that we go beyond the structural correlations of power and resources that accrue differentially across ?ro.u1?sto consider as well the subtle and deep ways that indiViduals are formed. We need, then, to consider these three distinct. aspects of what it means to talk about "whiteness. "

1 I als.o like David Owen's tripartite division of whiteness as involving SOCIalidentity, cultural representation, and assets or properties (Owen 2007a). My account clearly overlaps with his, but also differs: the concept of the imaginary as I use it is not simply about representation but .about what fuels identity formation, and the concept of the ernpiri- cal ISmeant to be much broader than assets and property.

t

76 An Analytic of Whiteness

Empirical Whiteness

Whiteness can be studied empirically as an objective entity, with an approximate date of emergence, ~ set of e:~OIc correlations a history, and various economic and political correlations: Recent scholarship, some in interdisciplinary whiteness studies and some in traditional disciplines, is revealing a wealth of such empirical facts, despite the usual academic disagreements and debates over methodolog~.

This scholarship has revealed, for example, that w?lte- ness has a definite history, as already discussed (Painter 2012; Roediger 1991, 1994, 1998; ?uglielmo, 2003; Dominguez 1997). Whiteness as a conscIOusly ar:lculated category of identity emerged in the modern peno,d, included only certain European ethnic groups, and was linked t~ an overt ideology of racial biologism, cultural vanguardlsm, and the legitimation narratives of colonial conque~t. Some historical studies follow whiteness in general, while others consider the history of specific groups in relation to white identity, such as Italians or the Irish who were sl~w to "become white," or the complicated cases of Jewish identity or Latino identity, both of :-,hich, hav,e had an unstable relationship to whiteness. Besides historical work, there is also an economics of whiteness that measures persistent differentials of income and asse~s to quantify the effects of white skin privilege. Wealth IS a much more significant indicator than wages, given that wealth accu- mulates through a family's history and through home ownership, thus magnifying white advantage across the

generations. , Much of the empirical work on whiteness has recently

emerged because social scientists from a var!ety of disci- plines no longer define their object of study I,n unmarked or undifferentiated ways. Most scholars 10 sociology, polit- ical science, geography, women's studies, an~ other, disci- plines now routinely check to see whether th,elr studies are specific to certain groups or are truly generahzable (Ladner

An Analytic of Whiteness 77

1973). As "whiteness" has lost its unmarked default, status, we now have more scholarship on white women in the military, or white men's level of participation in sports or white family formation. '

One result of this is that it is now possible to put together what might be called a geography of whiteness, a spatial terrain subject to mapping that can tell us where most whites tend to live (in integrated but not white- minority neighborhoods), where they send their kids to schools (ditto), and where they retire (Arizona: no sur- prise). This white or white-dominant space can then be analyzed in relation to poverty, education, real estate values, political participation, and other factors. There is a sociology of whiteness that studies patterns of repro- duction, adoption, marriage, and cross-generational inter- ac~i~n, as well as particular practices of consumption, religious observance, leisure activities, attitudes toward health professionals and toward the police. And there is a political science of whiteness that establishes the statistical correlati~ns between white identity and voting patterns, as well as views about political policy issues not all of which are centrally about race. Protagonists in the electoral arena are ,particularly interested in these dynamics, using them at times to craft "dog-whistle" discursive methods that make thinly veiled appeals to what they think are typical of whites' point of view.

To repeat the point made earlier, we should remain wary of overgeneralizations in any empirical work on whiteness or any other identity category; we need to critically reflect on whether the chosen category of analysis is really the best way to cut the grain for explanatory or predictive results. Correlations do not by themselves establish causa- tion and can obscure as much as they reveal, and fore- grounding intergroup differences can obscure significant intragroup difference. This is a reminder to take identities as small theories, subject to ongoing tests for adequacy and explanatory utility. But much of the spate of new empirical work on whiteness is on the whole descriptive, rather than

78 An Analytic of Whiteness

explanatory. In other words, it is not offering whiteness as a sufficient cause of the phenomenon measured.

Despite these needed warnings, the recent empirical scholarship on whiteness is producing a rich trove of infor- mation on the history, the economics, the geography, the sociology, and the politics of white identity. Without a doubt, "whiteness" as a category has an empirical referent. But the imaginary representation of whiteness is just as important to study.

Imaginary Whiteness

By this, I mean to refer to the realm of mythic imagery and the relatively unconscious ways in which people have affective and dispositional attitudes about whiteness - that is what whiteness stands for, what it means, its imagined g~nealogy, and how it is qualitatively distinct f~om ?ther groups. In psychoanalysis, the concept of the unagmary has a very specific meaning within a theory of ego-forma- tion, involving a process of self-alienation as the subject tries to construct an imaginary self that is whole, coherent, and independent. Freudian theorists of identity tend to conclude from this that the process of forming a self- identity is necessarily problematic to the extent it seeks to construct a kind of false image by deemphasizing the frag- mented and fluid nature of human experience. I am skepti- cal, as I have argued elsewhere (Alcoff 2006), that such an account of subject-formation is truly universalizable across every historical context of identity formations. Thus, my use of the term "imaginary" should not signify allegiance to the Freudian tradition.

Although the white imaginary is no doubt motivated at least in part by the desire to construct a livable self, as Freud hypothesized, I want to use the concept in a less technical sense. I prefer the way that feminist philoso- phers Michele LeDoeuff (1990) and Moira ,Gatens (1995) have used the imaginary to denote a collective rather than

An Analytic of Whiteness 79

i~~ividual background layer of understandings and dispo- sitions that ~oth enables and constrains our ability to ~~odu~e ne~ I~eas and responses. In this sense, the concept

imagmary Signals something that is not so much based on actual historical experiences as on a shared orientation that may be quite at odds with any accurate version of real events. Consider as an example the imaginary that is prompted by the US flag. To understand the meanings and effects of the stars and stripes, it will never be sufficient merely to detail its history or its current institutional uses' we need also to consider the visual and ideational connota- ti?ns and affective elements that the flag engenders for dlve,rse g,roups and individuals. When we see the flag, do we Imagme George Washington, or Fort Sumter (the site of the start of the US Civil War), soldiers in World War II or in Iraq, or the flag that flies over various colonial sites from Guam to Panama to the Virgin Islands? ' , It .w0ul~ be a mistake to think that the sphere of the Im~glOary IScompletely distinct from the sphere of rational action. In fact, the imaginary of whiteness can drive the articulation of our rational interests, given our attachment to ~ certain self-understanding and what is required for SOCial respect or acknowledgment. Whites have demon- strably chosen race-based over economic interests when for example, they choose to work for less pay in a non- union hospital with a larger white workforce rather than in a unionized hospital with a diverse workforce, or when they vote for white candidates less likely to deliver services they need than for candidates associated with multiracial const~tuencies. Or just when they stop watching their favorite sports, whether it is baseball or basketball, because of the predominance of nonwhite players (even golf is now in jeopardy!).

As the economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2010) show, traditional and decontextualized notions of rational utility-maximizing self-interests, whether for mon- eta~y gain or personal pleasure, cannot explain the prefer- ential patterns we continue to witness. Akerlof and Kranton

\ L

80 An Analytic of Whiteness

develop the concept of "identity utility" to explain prefer- ences that make sense in the context of group-related norms but that look inexplicable - or simply irrational - outside this frame. A preference may have no economic value and yet have identity value. I am suggesting that the concept of the white imaginary can help us to understand these norms of behavior and assessments of our self-inter- est. It is the white imaginary that constructs our "identity utility," such as the desire to be in white dominant spaces. Such desires and needs then become part of a person's rational self-interest. We might attempt to charitably con- strue such preferences as being simply driven by a univer- sal experience of having a higher comfort level with people of our "own kind." But the white imaginary is determining who we can imagine our "own kind" to be.

As Alain Locke astutely observed in 1925:

For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. .. the fact [is] that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. (199711925, 15)

Even when there is no blood relation of a biological sort, there is a kinship of culture and experience born of centu- ries of syncretism and cultural amalgamations inevitable to sharing a land and generally living in close proximity.

The black bluegrass musical group, the Carolina Choco- late Drops, has bravely, brilliantly, and with great heart explored this syncretic history in their retrieval of two centuries of traditional folk tunes, ineluding those from the period of the minstrels along with the Sea Islands, the Delta blues, and the Scottish Gaelic-singing settlers of South Carolina. They demonstrate the borrowing of instru- ments, rhythms, cadence, and lyrical content, constructing utopian moments of folk music collaborations out of a

An Analytic of Whiteness 81

historical context of dystopian realities. The band insists that this reminder of the South's syncretism is not about redemption, and they never let their audiences forget the cruel terms by which cultural differences were forcibly fused. But revealing the actual syncretisms that emerged in such spaces advances our self-understanding. We need to come to an understanding of the multiple sources of what we think of as "southern," or "American."

Such efforts can help us assess more perceptively and more critically how the white imaginary, or the imaginary of whiteness, is being produced, and how xenophobia is ma?ufactu~ed thr,ough a falsification of reality. Imaginary whiteness IS particularly illustrative of Louis Althusser's (1971) definition of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the real. And, like other ideologies, imaginary whiteness has very real and material effects.

On the one hand, if one feels this strongly about one's connection to white people and to a white dominant com- munity or nation, then it is rational in some sense to make choices that manifest this preference. But, on the other hand, truly rational behavior should not simply pursue one's preferences but should consider how those prefer- ences are produced and whether they conflict with one's oth,er needs and commitments. The concept of imaginary whiteness can thus help to foreground not the empirical or ma~erial realities of whiteness, but the falsified grounds for white preferences, self-conceptions, and identifications.

It is not necessarily the case that every form of social identity is equally based on the sorts of "false origin" stories that theorist Max Weber argued was the founda- tion of ethnicity. Not every "imaginary" related to social identity is equally deceptive. But the white imaginary can also influence people who are not white.

The importance of addressing whiteness at the level of the imaginary is critical because it affects our ability to imagine a different future. The recent work in whiteness studies, however theoretically sophisticated, also provides a text for reading the cultural unconscious (mostly of

82 An Analytic of Whiteness

whites) about what whiteness has been and can become (see e.g. Yancy 2005). Even while this scholarship has helpfully showcased the heterogeneity within and among white people, it has also tended to tie the very idea of whiteness irrevocably to racism. This can make it rather difficult to engender a different imaginary in which white- ness becomes part of a diverse coalition for social change and social justice.

Whiteness figures in a distinct and unique way in the imaginary rendering of the history of the United States and of the West more generally. There are both falsehoods and truths that contribute to the mythic representations in this historical narrative. For example, it is notably false to say that Columbus discovered America because, let's be honest, he stumbled on it by mistake, and continued to believe until his death that his ships had reached some part of Asia. What actually occurred was less a discovery than an encounter between several cultures followed rather quickly by invasion, genocide, enslavement, and the annexation of lands. By continuing to use the term "discovery," such unpleasant facts are downplayed in the typical Columbus Day celebrations of exploratory adventurism, and agency is conferred on only one side of the confrontation. There are many other such falsehoods and half-truths still con- tributing to the currents of the white imaginary - concern- ing the genesis of science, literature, poetics, mathematics, philosophy, democracy, bicameral legislatures, and the existence of cannibalism. This last idea - that the indige- nous were cannibals - was actually based on a third-hand rumor that ship-hands taken in 1493 by the Carib Indians were never seen again. (Would you willingly leave a Carib- bean island to work in servitude below deck aboard a primitive, overcrowded schooner?)

But if the imaginary domain of whiteness is made up of these falsehoods and half-truths, there are also truths about white identity, such as a voluntary (relatively speak- ing) migration, widespread participation in land annexa- tion and racist terror, and, importantly, centuries of being

An Analytic of Whiteness 83

the psychic beneficiary of representations as the hard- working heart of America. Civil rights for African Ameri- cans was not won until African Americans collectively organized, and it is doubtful that the equal rights of undoc- umented workers will be won until they can somehow force the hand of the state. Whites as a group cannot take much if any credit for these movements to make the Con- stitution more than a hypocritical document riven by con- tradictions, and, to this extent, the history of white recalcitrance on social equality is glaring.

Imaginary whiteness is not simply the repository of unreason: some versions of it, at least, can be linked to real historical experiences that congeal into images inform- ing the interpretation and judgment of new events. In fact, the acknowledgment of racist injustice also informs many whites' own imaginary about white identity, I would suggest. This aspect of the white imaginary can explain the patterns of behavior - denial, avoidance, self-segregation - we might think of as resulting from a guilty conscience.

Projections of inferiority on the groups unjustly treated by whites then serves the helpful purpose of explaining away racist violence, softening the sense of guilt, and legiti- mating the legacies of unequal distributions that whites enjoy today. The persistent attachment to a racism increas- ingly disconfirmable by easily available evidence, then, might be explained precisely by this guilty conscience, this acknowledgment of past wrong. Paradoxically, this may give us some cause for hope.

Subjective Whiteness

The third aspect of whiteness that merits analysis is the relationship between whiteness and the self. The idea that there is a specifically white way of being in the world, initially inspired by the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, has been more recently explored in the work of philosophers Charles Mills, Shannon Sullivan, Terrance

84 An Analytic of Whiteness

MacMullan, and David Owen, as well as by an increasing number of sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural ana- lysts. The upshot of this work is to bring the substantive specificity of white subjective experience into relief. White- ness is not in fact a racially unmarked human experience, despite the fact that whiteness has been taken as the default position of the human. Hence, white subjectivity is not so different from other racialized groups.

Whites do tend to have, however, their own peculiar inclinations, affects, practices, and modes of perception. Mills has developed the influential idea that whites operate with what he calls an epistemology of ignorance: a set of substantive episternic practices designed to protect their belief that society is basically a meritocracy, people of color are responsible for their troubles, and racism is a thing of the past. Mills's persuasive point is that, in our shared world, with its recurrent headlines about police shootings and disparities in poverty and unemployment, it takes no small amount of work to interpret these facts as consistent with raceless meritocracies. "Part of what it means to be constructed as white," he reasons, is to operate with "a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities" (1997, 18). This means that white children are systematically taught to become delusional.

Sullivan (2005,2014) and MacMullan (2009) have each offered more phenomenological descriptions of what it is like to live on the inside of white identities developed in white supremacist societies. Sullivan explores in great detail what she calls the unconscious and seductive habits of white privilege that organize our patterns of social interaction. By calling these "habits," Sullivan seeks to turn our attention to bodily practices below the level of conscious intent that involve forms of attentiveness, assumptions of entitlement to space and to freedom of movement, and a routine disregard for nonwhite others. She draws from the psychoanalytic theories of Jean LaPlanche to explain how these habitual dispositions are

F

An Analytic of Whiteness 85

passed do~n through the generations, not through con- sciously articulated claims (at least, not all the time) but through more subtle bodily signs of aversion and distrust. She c~nclu~es, from this that present day whites are mis- take? In thinking they have nothing at all in common with previous generations in their families who were more ove~tly racist. MacMullan uses the phrase "vessel of racist habits" wit,h a similar, intent to get at the ways in which people are Inculcated into certain behaviors and attitudes bef~re they are aware of what is happening. More than Sulltva,n, ~acMullan argues that this way of being in the world I~ ultimately against white interests: in fact, he holds that w~ltes have ~ore to gain than lose in facing the reality of racist oppression. The white world as currently con- structed offers numbness,or disaffection, a sense of empti- ness and cultural vacuity, and unassuaged guilt. But Mac~ullan and Sull,ivan share the view that these prob- lem~t'c and, dysfunctional aspects of white subjectivity are not Irremediable. Rendering our habits visible makes them accessible for reflection and evaluation. This is a possible route for change.

To say, then, that whiteness is involved in the constitu- tion of the self means that our core set of routine percep- tual and epistemic practices and our everyday habits of social interaction, interpretation, and judgment need to be ~nalyz,ed in ~elation to a specific racialization process involving whiteness. Such phenomena are not universal: o~her g~oups may have less of an investment in epistemolo- gl~s of I?nora?ce and their very survival may require better eprsterrnc habits, such as the need to listen carefully to what others have to say. We need to recognize that whiteness is not simply about our conscious awareness, nor is it simply about structural patterns of social inequality or cultural representations that we can simply repudiate. We also need to av?id assuo:ing that everyone undergoes an essentially ?enenc and universal process of personality formation that IS only afterward connected to racialized differences. In sum, just as an earlier generation of feminists insisted that

86 An Analytic of Whiteness

gender patterns were distorting the normative ~rame of "personality tests," so we need to bring race into our account of the formation of subjectivity.

Although white subjectivity can have distinct elements, this work still raises a question about the racialization of other kinds of subjects. If whiteness is constitutive of the self, is latinidad? Or blackness? Or indigeneity? We should not jump to analogies that might universalize a process of subject-formation involving relational superiority and sharp differentiation, or an unreflective manner in which habits of perception and judgment develop. Whiteness (like maleness in this regard, and other normative identity categories) has been defined as having a selfhood distinct from others - smarter, more culturally advanced, more typically rational, and thus naturally on top of the social pyramid. No other group has enjoyed thi~ position withi~ mass, high, and popular culture. When this vanguard POSI- tion is threatened, we see whites lash out in ways that make it appear their very sense of self is at stake: merely implying that their lineage might be "polluted" by, "one drop" is sometimes denied beyond all reason. The pht!o~o- pherlartist Adrian Piper (1992-3) suggested the.t0llowmg as a test of antiracism: not whether one, as a white person, could commit oneself to ending racism, but whether one could imagine oneself as being black. Whiteness does not appear to be experienced as a peripheral or contingent characteristic, but as a feature of what the Greeks called haeceity or thisness, meaning that without which the thing no longer is what it is. Far from being invisible to whites themselves, whiteness appears to be the cornerstone of their sense of who they are. Hybridity is not as much as a threat to other racial identities, nor are there assumptions of global, comparative superiority in every group. All forms of subjectivity may not be equally vulnerable to the threatened loss of cultural dominance.

There are two senses, then, in which we might think of whiteness as constitutive of the self: (a) because whiteness plays a role in constituting relatively unconscious habits

An Analytic of Whiteness 87

and ~ractices, and (b) because whiteness is consciously expenenced as an essential property to the self. These work independently, meaning that even individuals who do not consciously experience whiteness as central to th~ir self ~ay still be profoundly affected by the uncon- SCIOUShabits and practices commonly associated with white identity.

Besides the philosophical accounts of white subject- formation, which rely mostly on phenomenology and history, there is a burgeoning body of empirical research different in kind from that discussed in the category I ~amed "empirical whiteness," since, rather than objec- tivelY,measunng racial inequities or unearthing the politi- cal history of the concept, this research reveals the subjective dimensions of whiteness. The field of social ps,ychology is the main player. Claude Steele (2010), former DIrector of the Center for Behavioral Sciences at Stanford developed numerous experiments to reveal unconsciou~ dispositions with respect to racial difference that affect test performance, confidence, social interaction, and conversa- tional approaches. As it turns out, racialized "priming" c~n increase whites' confidence and performance, while SImultaneously decreasing that of others, when the idea is conveyed before a test that whites tend to perform better. Steele's suggestion is that Our everyday cultural environ- ment provides such priming on a regular basis through the commumcatlOn of Identity stereotypes; no manipulating psychology experimenters need to be around. The priming phenomenon affects everybody's confidence and perform- ance; the only difference is that, for whites and males prevailing identity stereotypes almost always help rathe; than hurt.

Steele's research has documented the unconscious modes of interaction posited by philosophers such as Mills and Sullivan. In his most famous experiment two white male subjects (usually Stanford undergraduates) are told that the~ are going to participate in a conversation on the topic of either love or race, with a third person who has not yet

88 An Analytic of Whiteness

arrived. The psychologist then casually flips to a chart that reveals a picture of the third conversation partner; in some cases, the two white subjects can see that they will be conversing with a black man, in other cases with a white man. At that point the psychologist says he or she has to step out for a moment, and asks the two white male sub- jects if they wouldn't mind arranging the chairs in the room for the conversation. You can guess what happens next - the chair arranging is recorded through a two-way mirror and, with an alarmingly high rate of predictability, white males will arrange the chairs much closer together when they know that the third conversant is going to be white, or when the topic of the conversation is going to be love. When the third conversant is going to be black and the topic of conversation is going to be race, the chairs are set as far apart as the room will allow.

There are loads of such experiments that support the idea that our unconscious attitudes about other groups affect how we interact, whether we lean forward in con- versation or turn slightly away, whether we maintain eye contact, are expressive, smile, or are awkward and stumble over our words. (Gladwell 2005, 85-6). In another experi- ment, white anxiety about cross-racial encounters is tested in the following way (Richeson and Trawalter 2008). White subjects are asked to interact with a person they have never met, who is, in some cases, as in the chair- arranging experiment, white and in other cases black. After the interaction, the su bjects are given simple cogni- tive tests designed to reveal their mental acuity. The results are clear: the whites who had had to interact with a black person made numerous simple mistakes in comparison to the control group. They were mentally fatigued. The demands of interracial interaction even of this innocuous sort diminished their cognitive skills. There is more than one way to explain this result - the fatigue may be due to extreme discomfort caused by racism or it might be due to heightened vigilance motivated by an anxiety that they will appear racist (or actually make a racist comment). But

5 u~

An Analytic of Whiteness 89 any of these explanations wo id i di of racial difference affects ho: ~~ Ic~te that t,he existence cannot be easily con troll d w ites Interact In ways that

If these effects are not :nderst d b subjectivity, they may be blame~o to e featur~s of white who trigger discomfort on the nonwhIte people that the personality of ~huen~~~:,et,c. But the ~es,earch shows the results From thi b ",,:,hlteperson IS Irrelevant to

. 11S urgeonIng r helude that whiten ' esearc , we can con- modes of interact~~~ ~:\:~Ittfserceptual ~tt~nements and notations that affect ' d the aSSOCIatIOns and con-

JU gment. How hconelud th hi can we t en not Th e ~t, w It~ness IS constitutive of the self?

e empmcal, imagina; db" . white identity are not e ti ~,an su Jectlve aspects of white imaginar surel n Ire y sepa~'ate or separable. The tion, which in t~rn aff~c:sf~~:s, o~ ;~fects, s~bject-forma- ments that produce some of t~OC1a l~t,eractIO~ and judg- of race. But this wa f fIe ,empmcal SOCIal realities , y 0 ormu atmg the I' ,idealisr. the mat 'I re arion IS overly, ena COntext of r ' our judgment modes f' o~lr rves surely Impacts

, 0 InteractIon d 'about others Stupid 'd h ,an assumptIons, ' leas ang on b h In some way with Our m 'I ' ~cause t ey resonate men alike}' sometimes b ~~ena realItIes. We (women and creatures who prefer t e reve women are naturally vain their physical appeara~c:p~nd a gre:t ~eal of their time on women doin . ,ecause t at ISwhat we see most believe white~'a;ee s~~~::s ~nd nonwhites alike) sometimes the most intellectually dermecad~se ,:ebsee them dominating

an l11g)0 S. A better understanding f he relari

empirical, the imaginary aOnd t t~ re a~ons~ip bet:veen the

that they form a mut {I e ~u jective whIteness is than a linear line of ua y, suPP?rtmg holistic set, rather

causatIOn WIth a determining condition Th 'I ny one aspect as the challenged, fragmented, anedc~~ce can be bl~oken, dislod?ed, such as the policies of ffi on" at multiple entry POl11ts, changes in our lived m t a, lrmatlkve action that enforce

a erra wor spa ifyiguard narratives in ed 'I ce, recti l11gvan-uca trona cur' I d culture. Even the efforts to reveal' Ir,lc,u a

b ,an popular

Imp icrr lases and tacit

90 An Analytic of Whiteness

knowledge embedded in forms of subjectivity can produce a reflexive moment of self-alteration.

Yet, describing these three aspects of whiteness as they currently exist - the empirical, the imaginary, and the way in which whiteness is constitutive of the self - cannot help but foreground racism as a constitutive feature of our realities, making it truly seem as if whiteness is irretriev- ably tied to racism. Is it?

-2- White Exceptionalism

He could now see his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed now of ever again having to think or decide, the burden which he now assumed and carried as bright and weightless and martial as his insignatory brass: a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life.

William Faulkner, Light in August, 1932

William Faulkner, raised in Mississippi at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote a set of severe novels exposing the perverted logic of white supremacy and the high price extracted from everyone who succumbed to its claims, including whites. However, Faulkner not only critically exposed the illogic of white racism, he also exemplified it. He castigated segregation as "obsolete and unjust" yet boasted that he would go armed to the streets to meet federal troops sent to Mississippi to dismantle it. In this chapter, I want to consider the pessimism and fatalism