The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

Edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen,

Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray

duke university press

Durham & London 2001
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1 Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg,

Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray

Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to Be White 25

Dalton Conley

‘‘The Souls of White Folks’’ 43

Mab Segrest

The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness 72

Ruth Frankenberg

White Racial Projects 97

Howard Winant

The ‘‘Morphing’’ Properties of Whiteness 113

Troy Duster

‘‘White Devils’’ Talk Back: What Antiracists

Can Learn from Whites in Detroit 138
John Hartigan Jr.

Transnational Configurations of Desire:

The Nation and its White Closets 167
Jasbir Kaur Puar

Perfidious Albion: Whiteness and the

International Imagination 184
Vron Ware
The New Liberalism in America:
Identity Politics in the ‘‘Vital Center’’ 214
Eric Lott

How Gay Stays White and What Kind

of White It Stays 234
Allan Bérubé

(E)racism: Emerging Practices

of Antiracist Organizations 266
Michael Omi

Moving from Guilt to Action: Antiracist

Organizing and the Concept of ‘‘Whiteness’’
for Activism and the Academy 294
William Aal

Bibliography 311

Contributors 333

Index 337
Acknowledgments

First of all, the Editorial Collective would like to thank all those who
participated in and attended the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness
conference in April 1997. We also thank the many activists who con-
tacted us before and during the conference with helpful advice and
suggestions and who forwarded the conference announcement to so
many people outside academia. In addition, we would like to grate-
fully acknowledge the financial support of the University of California
Humanities Research Institute, the Department of Comparative Eth-
nic Studies, the UC Berkeley O≈ce of the Dean of Social Sciences, the
Graduate Assembly, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the
Department of African American Studies, and many other depart-
ments too numerous to list here. Special thanks go out to Pamela
Perry, Kellie Stoddart, members of the Critical Studies in Whiteness
Working Group and the many volunteers who helped us organize the
conference; Margo Adair for stepping in and facilitating the last day’s
session with little notice; and José David Saldívar and Michael Omi,
faculty sponsors for the conference.
Jillian Sandell played a key role in writing the introduction and
editing this book. She was unable to continue her participation in our
collective, but her influence on both the conference and this anthology
remains strong. We are grateful for her contributions.
Our collective thanks also go out to Monica McCormick, Abdul
JanMohamed, and Mike Davis for expressing early interest in this
book project and for providing sage advice on the route from con-
ference to anthology. And big thanks to Katie Courtland, Justin Faer-
ber, Nancy Zibman, and to our editor Ken Wissoker for his calm
patience and unflagging support of this project from the moment we
signed a contract with Duke University Press to the delivery of the
final manuscript.
viii acknowledgments

Birgit Brander Rasmussen: I am grateful to all those who teach me

in formal and informal ways. Michael Omi put the first book on white-
ness in my hands. I thank him and Jose Saldivar, Saidiya Hartman,
Michael Rogin, and Abdul JanMohamed for years of inspiration, en-
couragement, and mentorship. Ned Blackhawk has always been a
great friend, colleague, and mentor. My family is a never-ending
source of love and support—dette er til jeres aere. I would also like to
acknowledge the support of the Danish Research Academy. I dedicate
my e√orts on this project to those in Denmark who struggle against
racism in all its old and new forms.
Eric Klinenberg would like to thank Mike Rogin and Loïc Wacquant
for orienting him in the fields of research on race and Kate Zaloom,
Kimberly McClain DaCosta, and Rachael Stryker for encouraging him
to move beyond the obstacles in the terrain.
Irene J. Nexica thanks Naeema Fox, MJC, the Spice Girls, the Oak-
land YMCA, Elaine Manuele, friends far and near, and hip-hop for
helping maintain inspiration, integrity, balance, and good humor. Big-
time gratitude goes to Susana Loza, Justin Remais, Cici Ambrosio,
Priscilla Hung, Nicky Bird, and Justin Smith for their help in clarify-
ing theory and practices.
Matt Wray would like to thank José David Saldívar, Michael Rogin,
and Michael Omi for their intellectual guidance and support. He also
extends warm thanks to Jill Gurvey, Sean Heron, and Bill Mosca for
their friendship and a√ection over the years.
 Birgit Brander Rasmussen,
Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica,
and Matt Wray

Introduction

What is Whiteness?
This book comes at a moment when questions about the status and
project of whiteness studies need consideration. Is whiteness a useful
category of analysis? Does it help explain or illuminate ethnoracial
di√erentiation, division, and domination? Is whiteness a useful cate-
gory for political action? What, if any, significance does it have for
organizers and political o≈cials? How does whiteness figure into vari-
ous racial vocabularies? Does looking closely at whiteness help to
sharpen or does it obscure the analysis of race? Does studying white-
ness further marginalize the experiences of groups long left out of the
historical record? In other words, is ‘‘critical whiteness studies’’ the
Trojan horse through which the study and perspective of whites will be
recentered in studies of race and ethnicity?∞
In the last several years there has been a proliferation of thinking
and writing about whiteness.≤ A combination of factors has led to this
profusion of scholarly activity, and continued publishing in the field is
one sign that scholars have yet to resolve the many issues to which
they helped call attention. What roles do multiculturalism, the rise of
identity politics, and the ‘‘declining white majority’’ of certain key
states and urban areas play in this scenario? Equally important, what
does discomfort about the emergence of whiteness as a topic of debate
signal about the nature or limits of the inquiry as it currently exists?≥
One of the problems with studying whiteness is that no one who
does it has an easy time determining what authors and texts should be
included in the inquiry. Indeed, as an editorial collective we had many
contentious and lively debates about this and were not always able to
agree on what exactly constitutes an appropriate intellectual genealogy
for critical whiteness studies. Furthermore, what became clear from
2 introduction

our heated—and sometimes uncomfortable—discussions was that as a

group we did not necessarily share a unified political or intellectual
goal. Instead, as one might expect with a group of graduate students
with di√erent disciplinary backgrounds and viewpoints, we found that
these di√erences sometimes precluded consensus. While the irrecon-
cilable nature of our di√erences was often discouraging to us as a
collective, it also encouraged us to try to include in this book a range of
(sometimes conflicting) perspectives in order to register a sense of the
diversity of political and intellectual projects at work within the amor-
phous project we are referring to as critical whiteness studies.
Despite the recent spate of publications, it is worth reiterating that
the study of whiteness in the United States is not a new phenomenon.
Intellectuals, writers, and artists of color have long studied, in Lang-
ston Hughes’s memorable phrase, ‘‘the ways of White folks.’’ As Toni
Morrison noted in Playing in the Dark, for African Americans know-
ing and sensing the demands, needs, and (often unspoken) desires of
whites have been essential elements of physical and cultural survival
and success in a society dominated by white elites.∂ More recently,
David Roediger has published an anthology of essays and excerpts that
document the histories of African American perspectives on white-
ness;∑ similar anthologies could be collected to represent the perspec-
tives of other ethnoracial groups.
Recognizing this legacy contextualizes contemporary analyses of
whiteness.∏ As it emerges, critical whiteness studies owes an impor-
tant debt to earlier work on identity and domination by groups and
authors long marginalized in academic study. Increasing demands for
recognition have been accompanied by some degree of institutional-
ization of programs designed to create multicultural educational cur-
ricula. In the United States, for example, one achievement of institu-
tionalized academic programs such as ethnic studies or women’s
studies has been to challenge university communities to address the
histories of subjugated people, including accounts of struggle and
dissent.π
While the emergence of critical whiteness studies is probably a
historical e√ect of the complicated identity politics within and outside
the university, the e√ects it will have on social and cultural analysis
remain unclear. Perhaps one of the most familiar versions of critical
whiteness studies is the research into ‘‘white skin privilege’’—analyses
of the many ways in which whiteness both signifies and underwrites
 introduction 3

various kinds of social, political, and economic advantages in the

United States and elsewhere. An abundance of qualitative and quan-
titatively grounded research has documented the scope of white skin
privilege and explains the social and cultural mechanisms that pro-
duce and reproduce it. In the United States, there is considerable
evidence that to be white is to be the beneficiary of numerous advan-
tages in the process of finding and keeping a job, buying a house,
getting a first-rate education, staying healthy, and receiving more fa-
vorable treatment from the police and the courts.∫ For many, if not
all, scholars of critical whiteness studies, the social reality of white
skin privilege is now an underlying research assumption, a point of
departure for investigations into how it was established and how it is
maintained.
Even so, scholarship on whiteness has taken o√ on a number of
divergent and sometimes contradictory trajectories. Some scholars
seek to document and explain the historical and emergent forms of
racial stratification, making visible the relative positions and practices
of both the dominant and the dominated groups. Other scholars focus
on more ontological questions about being white in societies where
everyday experiences and conditions are lived through race. Yet an-
other group of analysts is interested in the symbolic meanings of
whiteness and questions about how those meanings shape relations of
power. Expanding their inquiries beyond a particular national setting,
many of these scholars have taken up questions about how whiteness
circulates as an axis of power and identity around the world. Finally,
another group of writers and activists, including those known as
the neo-abolitionists, argue for eliminating whiteness altogether. For
them, the ultimate goal of whiteness studies must be to eliminate the
conditions of its own existence. These various approaches to the study
of whiteness entail distinct and sometimes conflicting political and
disciplinary possibilities, some of which we will attempt to tease out in
the section on definitions. First, though, we want to discuss the intel-
lectual and political context out of which this anthology emerged.

Whiteness and the Politics of Race

Several productive tensions energized those of us involved in orga-
nizing the 1997 University of California at Berkeley conference called
the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, from which this anthology
4 introduction

emerged.Ω Although the conference, the first major academic forum

to assess the state of research on whiteness, quickly became a national
event, the gathering was born of two distinctly local factors. First, the
political and social climate in California regarding race and immigra-
tion took a reactionary and conservative turn in the early and middle
1990s. Second, an informal study group of Berkeley graduate stu-
dents began to review and assess the emergence of a wide variety of
writings on whiteness. To situate the articles collected here in the
context in which they were initially delivered, we want to briefly dis-
cuss the debates over the politics of race in California and explain why
we think such a public examination of whiteness could contribute new
perspectives.
In 1994 California voters passed Proposition 187, a particularly
punitive initiative aimed at ‘‘illegal immigrants.’’ This legislation,
which denied medical and educational benefits and services to un-
documented workers and their children and helped to make apparent
the ethnic and racial fault lines that were dividing the state, passed
by a wide margin at the ballot box. As our reading group began to
take shape in early 1996, Californians became embroiled in another
heated debate concerning matters of race, resources, and redistri-
bution—this time over Proposition 209, the so-called California Civil
Rights Initiative—which essentially sought to end a≈rmative action
programs throughout all state agencies. For us, as students and teach-
ers, the referendum hit close to home. It not only threatened to reduce
the work and educational opportunities for disadvantaged and dis-
proportionately poor African American and Latino residents; it also
threatened to undermine the diversity that had made the University of
California such a dynamic and exciting educational institution. As a
state-run entity, the entire public higher education system in Califor-
nia, including our own Berkeley campus, would be forced to disman-
tle many of the programs designed to promote the admission and
retention of qualified and historically underrepresented students if
the proposition passed.∞≠ Students from poor and largely black and
Latino neighborhoods disproportionately attend high schools without
the Advanced Placement (ap) classes that enable students to achieve a
grade point average (gpa) higher than 4.0 (ap grades are inflated by
one full grade point). Structurally unable to compete with students
from high schools where ap classes make it possible to attain gpas
above 4.0, students in these schools have little chance of gaining
 introduction 5

admission to UC campuses such as Berkeley and Los Angeles, where

the average gpa of admitted students has long been above 4.0. A≈r-
mative action helped to correct for this and other structural inequities
in the educational system.
As the participants in the Critical Studies in Whiteness reading
group looked closely at the debate in California surrounding Proposi-
tion 209, we noticed that there was little space in the political rhetoric
of the campaign for discussing the impact of white privileges and the
interests that George Lipsitz has called ‘‘the possessive investment in
whiteness.’’∞∞ Through its appropriation of the term ‘‘civil rights,’’
Proposition 209 deceptively drew upon the moral language of the
collectivism of the African American struggle for civil rights, even
though its actual content was one of stark individualism. The lan-
guage of the Proposition 209 campaign relied heavily on notions of
‘‘merit,’’ as advocates of the bill called for a ‘‘level playing field,’’ de-
manded ‘‘color-blindness’’ in admissions and hiring decisions, and
charged that ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ had narrowed the opportunity
structures available to whites while simultaneously degrading people
of color. This language is resonant with other strains in U.S. political
rhetoric used by pro–Proposition 209 forces to appeal to the white
males who had voted for Proposition 187 in such large numbers.∞≤
Proponents of Proposition 209 drew on the moral language of the
African American struggle for social justice even as they violated its
core principles concerning the promotion of equal opportunities. One
of the ironies of the political debate was that ultimately both sides of
the issue would quote the same passages from Martin Luther King’s ‘‘I
have a dream’’ speech as ideological support for their positions.
According to conservative leaders such as Ward Connerly, who be-
came the major spokesperson for the bill, white women and people of
color who stood to gain from a≈rmative action programs were actu-
ally victims of another kind. Connerly and his allies argued that a≈r-
mative action programs injured their intended beneficiaries because
the policies placed them in educational and vocational environments
for which they were not adequately prepared, thereby setting them up
for failure. Moreover, proponents of Proposition 209 argued that pol-
icies giving special preferences to white women and underrepre-
sented people of color made it impossible for members of these
groups to respect themselves or feel confident with their abilities and
accomplishments. The stigma of being an ‘‘a≈rmative action baby,’’
6 introduction

Connerly and his comrades claimed, overrode whatever benefits the

policy o√ered.
Focus-group testing revealed that although white voters generally
favored some form of ‘‘a≈rmative action,’’ they opposed ‘‘racial pref-
erences.’’ Pro–Proposition 209 campaigners promoted (and many
journalists quickly adopted) the latter term as a purportedly neutral,
shorthand term for the complexities of extant a≈rmative action pro-
grams. Without a coherent framework for establishing the conse-
quences of ethnoracially organized inequalities that created better life
chances for most of California’s white population, advocates for 209
could argue that working- and middle-class white men were in fact the
victims of an unfair system of preferences. As Cheryl Harris has ar-
gued, because of this skillful discursive legerdemain, public debate
over the proposition was framed as a question of whether or not
individual (code for white) rights should be subordinate to group
(code for people of color) rights.∞≥
Interestingly, given this ‘‘white-as victim’’ theme, the social and
political power of whiteness was repeatedly used as a threat in this
campaign. The image of ‘‘angry white men’’—the men supposedly left
behind as women and people of color advanced—was called upon in
many debates over a≈rmative action and made occasional appear-
ances in campaign advertisements and journalistic stories. This figure
was both a sign of the putative loser of a≈rmative action programs
and an implicit suggestion that white men around the state were
seething with outrage, perhaps even preparing to use violence to de-
fend their interests. Identifying men who were angry and increasingly
unhappy, the term signified and promoted a white backlash against
civil rights gains of the 1960s. It served as an e√ective means of
configuring people of color (and, to a lesser extent, white women) as
an oppressive group and angry white men as a group who could,
would, and should revolt.∞∂
In November of 1996 Californians voted in favor of Proposition
209 by a healthy margin, e√ectively abolishing a≈rmative action pro-
grams in state agencies and institutions. In the first years that it was in
e√ect the number of black and Latino students admitted and enrolled
in the flagship University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los
Angeles plummeted, particularly in the law and medical schools.
Since then, Connerly and other California leaders have moved their
campaign to end a≈rmative action programs to other states and have
 introduction 7

made plans to enter national politics. Furthermore, several states have

followed California’s lead and passed legislation similar to Proposition
209. A number of state university systems have dismantled their
a≈rmative action programs in favor of other admissions policies.∞∑
But at the time of this writing the capacity of these programs to main-
tain diverse campuses remains in question.
As in California, political debates about a≈rmative action in other
states have largely taken place without a language that juxtaposes
white skin privilege against the ‘‘white-as-victim’’ rhetoric. Public de-
bates rarely focused on the relationship between white ethnoracial
status and access to good neighborhoods, schools, health care, and
even to property and wealth. Despite the establishment in 1998 by
President Clinton of a ‘‘national conversation on race,’’ a public in-
quiry into the legal codes and social mechanisms that create and main-
tain racial inequality in the United States remains elusive, as does an
open conversation about the benefits that whiteness still a√ords. The
fundamental question of how educational institutions and employers
should measure merit in a racially stratified society remains at the
center of contemporary racial politics. Can research on whiteness help
to balance this debate? Or is accounting for the possessive investment
in whiteness and the consistent dividends it pays destined to be a
merely academic undertaking?

Defining Whiteness
As these recent debates over resources and opportunities in California
make clear, it is important to be critically attentive to the language
used to make claims about race and race-based privilege. The shift
from ‘‘a≈rmative action’’ to ‘‘racial preferences’’ was more than a
linguistic shift, it also reinforced a political consolidation of previously
disparate groups of white and conservative people of color voters. In
this campaign it became clear that monolithic notions of whiteness
not only oversimplified the issues and did a disservice to the ways in
which race intersected with other axes of social power and inequality—
they also hampered the ability of those struggling to maintain a≈rma-
tive action to mount an e√ective political countercampaign.
Definitions of whiteness, as many contributors to this book argue,
will always be dynamic and context-specific. This is why the work of
explaining what happened to the groups who ‘‘became white’’ but who
8 introduction

did not profit from it is becoming a more important part of the study
of whiteness. For example, the question of how whites themselves are
internally di√erentiated, how the same white skin that has facilitated
the integration, assimilation, and enrichment of some does not guar-
antee that others—such as poor whites and queer whites—might not
also experience deprivation, stigmatization, and subjugation.∞∏ Schol-
ars of ‘‘multiraciality’’ have helped to show how race is simultaneously
connected to and disconnected from bodies and narratives about
bodies, especially when those bodies can ‘‘pass’’ for white. Moreover,
scholars of sexuality and di√erence, such as Cherríe Moraga, have
argued that lesbian or gay whiteness does not guarantee, nor does it
entirely abrogate, access to white skin privilege.∞π
There is an inherent definitional slipperiness and instability to
whiteness, just as there is with all categories of race.∞∫ Like any other
racial label, whiteness does not exist as a credible biological property.
But it is a social construction with real e√ects that has become a
powerful organizing principle around the world. It is not always clear
what we mean when we refer to race or whiteness because both em-
pirical and theoretical accounts define them inconsistently or not at
all. In practice, this means that readers and audiences are left to apply
their own conceptions of race to every analysis they confront. But the
multiple definitions of race that people draw on—what we might iden-
tify as ‘‘folk,’’ ‘‘analytical,’’ and ‘‘bureaucratic’’ definitions—acquire dif-
ferent and sometimes contradictory meanings.∞Ω
Some popular discourses, for example, might conceive of race as a
set of physical or physiological traits, perhaps rooted in a collective
belief in a group-specific genetic structure. Whiteness, in this termi-
nology, might be partially or even primarily conceived of as pale skin.
In other popular discourses, race might be perceived as a set of be-
havioral characteristics: performing well in school or playing hockey
or golf could be considered ways of ‘‘acting white.’’≤≠ Acting white can
also correlate to a more general assumption of social power and a
sense of entitlement. Terms like ‘‘oreo,’’ ‘‘banana,’’ ‘‘apple,’’ and ‘‘co-
conut’’ are examples of what might be called ‘‘folk theories’’ of race
that borrow but also depart from purely biological notions of race and
attempt to name the disjunctions between skin color, lived experience,
desire, and social status.≤∞ To make matters even more complicated,
whiteness travels across national borders in contingent ways, and the
same white body can be lived di√erently in various locations as inter-
 introduction 9

sections of race and gender flux. In her work on Thailand’s sex trade,
Annette Hamilton suggests that farang (foreign white-skinned) men
in Thailand assume and enact those traits of masculinity that are
increasingly not ‘‘at home’’ in the West. Specifically, even if poor and
underprivileged by Western standards, farang men can go to Thai-
land and meet native women with whom they can participate in what
Hamilton refers to as ‘‘the conventional Western masculinist imagi-
nary,’’ living out sexist—and sometimes misogynistic—versions of
white masculinity in ways that make them feel paradoxically more ‘‘at
home’’ in the East.≤≤
What we are referring to as folk conceptions of race rarely cor-
respond with state-based, bureaucratic versions of race. The U.S.
Census, for example, defines whites and blacks as racial groups, but
American Indians and Hispanics as cultural groups. Bureaucratic ra-
cial categories constitute the legal bases for o≈cial counts and ac-
counts of particular populations, formally classifying and sorting
groups into political as well as social units. As scholars in critical race
studies have shown, bureaucratic and legal categories of race have
been central in organizing state policies concerning rights, resources,
and citizenship, particularly in the American context.
Analytic conceptions of race are likely to di√er from both bureau-
cratic and folk notions, even though they emerge in relation to them.
Most contemporary social scientists, for example, view race as a social
but not a scientific fact, a mark that is sometimes written on the body
but rooted in culture, not biology. Other scholars refuse to recognize
race altogether, claiming that if race is not a scientific fact then it
has no real meaning.≤≥ Definitions of whiteness, some of which are
discussed below, su√er from the tendency to slip between these vari-
ous conceptions of race or simply leave their theoretical foundations
unstated.
While the project of refining (or rejecting) a workable concept of
race is too broad and complicated to take up in this introduction,
advancing the debate over definitions of whiteness is an integral part
of the work that many authors in this volume do here. In the section
that follows, we chart some of the ways in which researchers in critical
whiteness studies have attempted to define whiteness as both a cate-
gory of analysis and a mode of lived experience. There are many
competing ways that whiteness can be viewed, analyzed, and cri-
tiqued, and the di√erent points of reference o√ered here may help the
10 introduction

reader create a fuller picture of the many configurations that white-

ness takes in the growing body of literature. Some of us think that the
conceptions of whiteness below are useful analytical and pedagogical
tools, while others find them insu≈cient. As an editorial collective, we
have argued among ourselves about how to theorize or define white-
ness and have reached no consensus on the matter. Clearly each of the
definitions that we discuss below, like all theoretical perspectives, has
its own intellectual and political stakes.

whiteness is invisible and unmarked.

The idea that whites do not recognize or acknowledge their unearned
racial privileges has become one of the most cited claims of critical
whiteness studies.≤∂ In this line of thinking, whiteness operates by
being ‘‘invisible,’’ so ubiquitous and entrenched as to appear natural
and normative. Here whiteness operates as the unmarked norm
against which other identities are marked and racialized, the seem-
ingly un-raced center of a racialized world. Therefore, while whiteness
is invisible to whites it is hypervisible to people of color.
This assumption rests on two presuppositions. First, the ‘‘invis-
ibility’’ of whiteness as a concept is predicated on an unknowing and
unseeing white racial subject. Second, it posits a clear distinction be-
tween a group of white insiders who cannot recognize themselves for
who they ‘‘really are’’ and nonwhite outsiders whose point of view
a√ords them authentic insight. Neither of these presuppositions al-
lows for the possibility that whites who are positioned di√erently in
society may actually view or live whiteness quite di√erently. The claim
also tends to privilege the viewpoint of whites, begging the important
questions of how, when, and to whom whiteness becomes visible.

whiteness is ‘‘empty’’ and white identity

is established through appropriation.
This is another prominent theme in recent research, one that insists
that whiteness as a category of identity has no ‘‘positive’’ content—that
it is constituted solely by absence and appropriation. This position,
which is perhaps most strongly associated with the work of the neo-
abolitionists,≤∑ maintains that whiteness is defined solely by what
it is not. Whiteness is then best understood as a lack of cultural dis-
tinctiveness and authenticity, one that leads to attempts by whites to
fill in the blanks through acts of cultural appropriation or what bell
 introduction 11

hooks has called ‘‘eating the other.’’≤∏ Similarly, Kobena Mercer has
identified the tendency among white youth to perceive whiteness as
empty, noting that by adopting markers of black self-empowerment
such as dreadlocks or hip-hop fashion, white youth simultaneously
displace whiteness and its historical connections to racial prejudice
and discrimination.≤π
There are several limitations to the claim that whiteness is empty.
First, the idea that whites have no culture suggests that the power of
whiteness is in no way cultural. This would seem to rule out ap-
proaches to understanding how white hegemony is built through cul-
tural praxis as well as inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of racial
domination. Second, the idea that whiteness is nothing more than
appropriation rests on the twin assumptions that cultures ‘‘belong’’ to
racial groups and that there are clear and identifiable lines that sepa-
rate and demarcate racialized peoples internally and externally. Recent
theories of hybridity and transculturation o√er a direct challenge to
these assumptions.≤∫ Finally, writings by neo-abolitionists rarely ven-
ture outside the familiar black/white dualism of U.S. racial relations,
obscuring other forms of racial interaction from view. The emphasis
in many of these writings on the inherently oppositional nature of
‘‘black culture’’ suggests an uncritical, romanticized view of black-
ness, one that privileges blackness as the authentically liberatory coun-
terpoint to whiteness.

whiteness is structural privilege.

This claim is synonymous with the notion of white skin privilege we
discuss above. Recent examples include one study that shows that
young whites are up to four times more likely than equally qualified
blacks to be given work in the service sector.≤Ω In the area of housing,
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have shown how whiteness opens
doors—quite literally—to homes in the most a∆uent neighborhoods
in the country. Not only do real estate agents routinely select for whites
when showing housing units in the best neighborhoods; banks also
favor white applicants when awarding loans. Several decades of these
now illegal (but still common) practices have helped to engineer pat-
terns of spatial segregation by race and class.≥≠ Related to this is the
fact that, because public schooling in the United States is funded
largely through property taxes, students from wealthier white districts
attend well-funded schools. Thus they are granted many more re-
12 introduction

sources in terms of teachers per student, books, computer access, and

educational counseling, factors that are predictive of increased success
in further education and greatly enhanced employment opportu-
nities.≥∞ In the health care system, benefits are also distributed un-
evenly among racial groups. White Americans have lower general
levels of morbidity and mortality than minoritized Americans.≥≤
Many of these analyses, however, often fail to address the many
social divisions within whiteness and among ethnoracial groups. In-
deed, one of the blind spots of such research is an analysis of how
class, race, and gender intersect to produce and mediate structural
privilege; some of the inequalities that we recognize in terms of race—
for example, levels of morbidity and mortality—are in fact better ex-
plained through di√erences in class and gender. Racial frames are
certain ways of seeing, but also of not seeing, the nature of social
division.
Claims about how whiteness functions in society sometimes ob-
scure equally important questions about how di√erent individuals
understand, relate to, and negotiate whiteness as an identity and social
position. In addition to studies of how whiteness enables forms of
social control, how it a√ects distribution of power and resources, or
how it generally operates to maintain the status quo, we must gain a
better understanding of the creative and varied responses of individ-
uals as they interact with each other and with social institutions.

whiteness is violence and terror.

Bell hooks argues that one way in which whiteness has been experi-
enced by those subordinated to its power is as an ever-present and
overbearing source of dread for people of color.≥≥ White supremacy
has been used to justify and rationalize the genocide, enslavement,
lynching, and public humiliation of people of color for centuries.≥∂
Understanding whiteness primarily as violence and terror is associ-
ated with the view, discussed below, that whiteness is properly under-
stood as the historical legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
The notion that whiteness is violence and terror challenges the idea
that whiteness is invisible and unmarked. Acts of white supremacist
violence stand out even to whites because they are often designed to
instill terror through their visibility. Indeed, one of the central uses of
white violence and terror is to make a display of white privilege and to
assert the power to subjugate others.
 introduction 13

whiteness is the institutionalization

of european colonialism.
Historians such as Edmund Morgan and Theodore Allen have argued
that contemporary conceptions of race and institutionalized racial in-
equality in the United States are rooted in histories of colonialism and
imperialism.≥∑ Notions of racial inferiority emerged to justify a social
structure organized around subjugation and exploitation and was
then elaborated by biologistic theories of inherent di√erences in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other scholars, informed by a
transnational and postcolonial perspective, have developed these ideas
to suggest that notions of race and class that informed each other as
social divisions inside Europe were transposed to and transformed by
colonialism.≥∏
Recent work by M. Jacqui Alexander, Chandra Mohanty, and Robert
Young, among others, has problematized this discussion further by
tracing the dynamic whereby scholarship itself reproduces the priv-
ileged status of whiteness instituted by colonialism. Some postcolo-
nial scholars have argued that Western theory and discourse itself has
been an example and instantiation of whiteness as colonialism.≥π Yet
others, such as Aijaz Ahmad, claim that this position reduces colonial-
ism to a metaphor and as a consequence empties the term of its
political significance and utility.≥∫

critical whiteness studies is an antiracist practice.

This theme dominates a great deal of the activist-oriented literature on
whiteness and runs through much of the academic scholarship as
well.≥Ω Whiteness, it is argued, serves as a foundation for racial domi-
nation and inequality. Through careful study of how white privilege
has been historically constructed, we may find ways to dismantle it or
abolish it altogether, thereby destroying the entire system of racial
stratification.
Much of this literature dodges, however, the questions of what
exactly constitutes antiracism. As William Aal and Allan Bérubé ar-
gue, antiracist practice is often undermined by the desire of white
people to remain comfortable. If the imperative in a process is comfort
rather than transformation, the process fails to address the question of
who has the power to decide just what comfort is and what assump-
tions and structures it rests on. As we organized our conference and
researched this book, it became clear to us that many people are pro-
14 introduction

foundly uncomfortable with whiteness studies—but that discomfort

stems from very di√erent reasons.∂≠

These themes at work in the research on whiteness—and there are

others we have not discussed—make for an often confusing mix of
theoretical starting points and research agendas. As we have said, the
confusion is compounded when writers fail to make clear their theo-
retical assumptions about race and their definitions of whiteness. As
new interest in researching white identity has grown, so have the
many di√erent ways of constructing whiteness as an object of knowl-
edge and analysis. These various constructions of whiteness are some-
times in conflict and, when they are uncritically conjoined, can pro-
duce theoretical tensions and undermine e√ective political action.

The Essays
In bringing together the essays for this anthology, we faced a number
of dilemmas. As a practical matter, we simply could not include all the
fine essays from the conference; with over thirty-five participants, the
resulting anthology would have been better suited as a doorstop than a
useful classroom text. Thus, we had to be selective. Also, there were
few activists and independent scholars at the conference. We first
became aware of this as a problem after sending out announcements
via email to a wide audience. Feedback from people doing critical
whiteness studies outside the academy made it clear that they were
excited to participate, and we were excited to have their participation.
In our view, if critical whiteness studies remains separate from antira-
cist practice, it will likely produce scholarship that is divorced from any
consideration of its political significance. While we had hoped to bring
academics and activists into dialogue about the ways that public si-
lences about white skin privilege and whiteness work to e√ectively
maintain the benefits of whiteness, we were unprepared to meet and
mediate the often divergent needs of activists, community leaders,
and organizers.∂∞ We have featured more activist voices in this vol-
ume and have tried to critically address more activist-oriented con-
cerns as well.
We begin with a personal narrative by sociologist Dalton Conley,
followed by essays from activist-writer Mab Segrest and cultural critic
 introduction 15

Ruth Frankenberg. All three essays explore how the idea of whiteness
as an invisible social norm negatively a√ects the lives of those who
inhabit places of racial privilege. In ‘‘Universal Freckle, or How I
Learned to Be White,’’ Conley describes the unusual education in race
he received growing up as a white minority in the projects on Manhat-
tan’s Lower East Side. Weaving insights gleaned from his childhood
experiences with those he has made in his analytical studies of race
and inequality, Conley narrates his own natural experiment to trace
the meanings and consequences of becoming white and middle-class.
In her essay, ‘‘ ‘The Souls of White Folks,’ ’’ Segrest suggests that
white people do pay a terrible spiritual price for living in a system of
white supremacy. Looking into her own and other southern family
histories, Segrest locates personal pain and addiction in a larger politi-
cal context of exploitation and suggests that, in order to be e√ective,
individual and collective therapy must be connected to activist prac-
tice. Finally, in ‘‘The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,’’ Franken-
berg departs from her earlier, influential argument that whiteness is
an unmarked category and instead claims that whiteness is by no
means invisible to everyone. Those who insist on not seeing white-
ness, Frankenberg argues, su√er from a kind of spiritual and social
blindness.
A second set of essays by social scientists interrogates whiteness as
a critical term for social analysis. In his essay, ‘‘White Racial Projects,’’
Howard Winant introduces the term ‘‘global racial projects’’ and dis-
cusses the historical transformations of white identity politics in the
latter half of the twentieth century. Winant deliberates on the status of
whiteness as both identity and analytical concept and argues that only
through a comparative sociological approach can we hope to under-
stand the nature of whiteness. In ‘‘The ‘Morphing’ Properties of
Whiteness,’’ Troy Duster explores the vicissitudes of shifting racial
and class identity, noting that whiteness can and often does exist in
multiple states. Employing the metaphor of H≤O, he explains how
whiteness can manifest itself as vapor, water, or ice, and he explores
the kinds of theoretical and methodological quandaries this can create
for researchers. Anthropologist John Hartigan Jr.’s essay draws on
ethnographic fieldwork in Detroit, Michigan, to challenge the idea of
whiteness as a monolithic or uniform site of social privilege. Har-
tigan’s essay, ‘‘Interrogating the Souls of White Folks in Detroit: Notes
16 introduction

from the Field on the Concept of Whiteness,’’ describes his research

among poor ‘‘hillbilly’’ whites in the urban core of a predominantly
African American city.
The idea that whiteness as an identity can function to emblematize
national belonging and help secure citizenship is central to the essays
by cultural theorists Jasbir Kaur Puar, Vron Ware, and Eric Lott. As
Puar argues in her essay, ‘‘Transnational Configurations of Desire,’’
for many women of color, especially immigrants, ‘‘coming out’’ as a
lesbian in the United States often means identifying with white cul-
ture and identifying with a certain identity of privilege. Puar unpacks
the processes of racial and sexual identification and disidentification
that accompany these crossings. In ‘‘Perfidious Albion,’’ Vron Ware
comments upon the e√orts by a newly centrist Labour Party to realign
‘‘Englishness’’ and ‘‘Britishness’’ with whiteness and analyzes their
mixed successes in this regard. Her critique of the racial politics of
‘‘Blairism’’ and her discussion of postwar immigration to the United
Kingdom reveal how whiteness plays a central role in binding white
subjects to the state. ‘‘The New Liberalism in America: Identity Poli-
tics in the ‘Vital Center,’ ’’ Eric Lott’s wide-ranging essay on cultural
politics, explores the new political center in the United States. Citing a
crisis in ‘‘white liberal boomer’’ masculinity, Lott takes to task many of
the most prominent advocates for the new politics, noting that their
rhetoric is designed to combat black nationalism through a renewed
emphasis on the necessity of foregrounding class analysis over race.
We close with a trio of essays that seek to situate and analyze vari-
ous e√orts at antiracist organizing. In ‘‘How Gay Stays White,’’ inde-
pendent community historian Allan Bérubé traces the di≈culties and
quandaries of being antiracist in a racist society. Bérubé explores the
convergence of racial and gender privilege with the identity politics of
sexual minorities and o√ers a detailed postmortem of the racial poli-
tics of gay opposition to the ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’ campaign against
gays in the military. In ‘‘(E)racism,’’ sociologist Michael Omi focuses
on antiracist coalition work among communities of color in U.S.
cities. Omi suggests that in the context of multicultural and multira-
cial urban settings, even where the population is primarily composed
of African Americans and whites, using a black/white model of rac-
ism can limit rather than enable the kind of activist work such groups
try to accomplish. This essay provides a model of the potentially syn-
ergistic conversation between critical whiteness studies and antiracist
 introduction 17

activism. Furthermore, Omi’s essay instantiates our belief that the

analysis of whiteness or of white privilege does not necessarily have to
recenter white people.
In ‘‘Moving from Guilt to Action: Antiracist Organizing and the
Concept of ‘Whiteness’ for Activism and the Academy,’’ William Aal
explains the places where critical studies in whiteness have been use-
ful or useless for his work as an antiracist organizer for the Seattle-
based organization Tools for Change. Drawing on interviews with
other antiracist activists, Aal discusses the limits and possibilities pre-
sented by the academic discourse on whiteness. This essay challenges
readers to imagine the potential of more cooperative e√orts between
scholars and activist communities.

Whether critical studies of whiteness will contribute to the project of

understanding or unmaking racial hierarchies ultimately depends on
how members of all communities interested in redrawing or erasing
the color lines—authors, readers, students, activists, and those who
are a little of each—learn to work with each other. The range of articles
in this anthology reflects our collective sense of how daunting it is to
consider ‘‘unmaking whiteness’’ and represents our conviction that a
diverse group of people, strategies, and actions are necessary for this
kind of work. At present, there are still far more questions than an-
swers. Our hope is that this transdisciplinary collection will move us
all a little closer to understanding what it is we talk about when we talk
about ‘‘whiteness.’’

Notes
1 We use the term ‘‘critical whiteness studies,’’ rather than the term ‘‘white-
ness studies,’’ to mark the explicitly analytical nature of this inquiry. This
book, as well as the intellectual project of which it is a part, does not in-
tend to celebrate or denigrate any particular group but rather aims to
analyze the processes and mechanisms that organize various forms of
racial stratification.
2 This anthology enters an increasingly crowded field of edited collections
on whiteness. Among them are Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds.,
Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1997); Michelle Fine et al., eds., O√ White: Readings on Race,
Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ruth Frankenberg, ed.,
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham:
18 introduction

Duke University Press, 1997); Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader
(New York: New York University Press, 1997); Joe L. Kinchloe et al., eds.,
White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (New York: St. Martin’s,
1998).
3 For a careful consideration of these and other questions, see Robyn Wieg-
man, ‘‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,’’ boundary 2 25,
no. 3 (fall 1999): 115–50.
4 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
5 David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
(New York: Schocken, 1998). For a provocative analysis of African Ameri-
can autobiography and its theorization of white identity, see Crispin Sart-
well, Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
6 Although the recent academic attention to whiteness has been sparked
mainly by books and articles with ‘‘whiteness’’ or ‘‘white’’ in their titles,
numerous other texts, from many generations of scholars and writers,
have looked closely at the subject and contributed to the study of how the
dominant group exerts, maintains, and reproduces its position in a society
organized around racial hierarchies and domination. When we limit the
inquiry to those texts that announce their focus as ‘‘whiteness,’’ we neglect
and render invisible relevant work by scholars who chose not to make
it the explicit center of their projects. For example, in the early 1970s
Adrienne Rich wrote important essays on the need for white Western
feminists to come to terms with their whiteness and to interrogate how
whiteness functions in the production of feminist theory, but she did so
without including the word ‘‘whiteness’’ in her title. See her collection of
essays On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose (New York: Norton, 1979).
See also Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1994); Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Bar-
bara Smith, eds., Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-
Semitism and Racism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1984); and Audre Lorde,
Sister/Outsider: Essay and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984),
for examples of works by some of the many women of color, feminist, and
lesbian activists and writers who were publishing critiques of whiteness
long before the term ‘‘critical whiteness studies’’ was in circulation.
7 On the other hand, Loïc Wacquant argues that a danger of ‘‘group-based’’
work that is generated in group-specific disciplinary structures is that it
tends to succumb to what he calls the logic of the trial, in which the
implicit or explicit goal of scholarly inquiry is to judge the merits of spe-
cific groups based on the normative standards of the inquirer. Wacquant
cautions that such projects often lack an analytic basis and therefore do not
 introduction 19

advance theories of racial di√erentiation and domination. See Loïc J. D.

Wacquant, ‘‘For an Analytics of Racial Domination,’’ Social Theory and
Political Power 11 (1997): 221–34.
8 While empirical findings of scientific studies about the historical evidence
for and contemporary manifestations of white privilege may not give us a
complete picture of white racial identity, they begin to indicate the extent
of social advantages for whites in the United States. Among the most
prominent of these studies from the 1990s are Tomás Almaguer, Racial
Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1994); Dalton Conley, Being Black,
Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women,
Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993); Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal
Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Doug-
las Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Mel Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New
Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R.
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York: Verso, 1990); and Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect:
Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
9 The organizers of the conference were seven graduate students: Birgit
Brander Rasmussen (Comparative Ethnic Studies), Eric Klinenberg (So-
ciology), Irene Nexica (Comparative Ethnic Studies), Pamela Perry (Sociol-
ogy), Jillian Sandell (English), Kellie Stoddart (Psychology), and Matt Wray
(Comparative Ethnic Studies). The conference was hosted by the Depart-
ment of Comparative Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley,
campus in April 1997 and received major funding from the University of
California Humanities Research Institute. Those who presented papers or
moderated at the conference were Norma Alarcón, Allan Bérubé, Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz, Troy Duster, Michelle Fine, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Ruth
Frankenberg, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Cheryl Harris, John Hartigan Jr.,
Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Penn Hilden, Mike Hill, Aida Hurtado, Noel
Ignatiev, Caren Kaplan, Josh Kun, Eric Lott, Steve Martinot, Cameron
McCarthy, Walter Benn Michaels, Annalee Newitz, Michael Omi, Sam
Otter, Fred Pfeil, john powell, Jasbir Kaur Puar, David Roediger, Michael
Rogin, José David Saldívar, Alexander Saxton, Nancy Scheper-Hughes,
Mab Segrest, Richard Walker, David Wellman, Lois Weis, and Yvonne
Yarbro-Bejarano.
10 Actually, within the University of California system (just one part of Cali-
20 introduction

fornia’s three-tiered system of higher education) this was already a fait

accompli. In the summer of 1995, the governing body of the University of
California system, the Board of Regents, led by then-governor Pete Wilson
in what was a transparent bid for Republican presidential candidacy, uni-
laterally eliminated a≈rmative action programs in hiring and admissions,
despite widespread opposition from administrators, faculty, and students.
Proposition 209 was designed to impact all state funded public agencies.
See Robert Post and Michael Rogin, eds., Race and Representation: A≈rma-
tive Action (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
11 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People
Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
12 White men voted 63 to 37 percent in favor of Proposition 187. For this
statistic and a thorough analysis of the Proposition 209 campaign, see
Linda Chavez, The Color Bind: California’s Battle over A≈rmative Action
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For an engaging critique
of the history of the state initiative process in California, see Peter Schrag,
Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (New York: New
Press, 1998).
13 See Cheryl Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property,’’ Harvard Law Review 106,
no. 8 (June 1993): 1709–91.
14 At least one group, Angry White Men for A≈rmative Action, led by Paul
Rockwell, an Oakland librarian, sought to insert into public debate con-
crete examples of some of the racial and gender advantages held by white
males and to expose the pro–Proposition 209 campaign’s deceptive tac-
tics. For essays on the political uses (and abuses) and social referents of
the term ‘‘angry white men,’’ see David Wellman, ‘‘Minstrel Shows, Af-
firmative Action Talk, and Angry White Men,’’ in Displacing Whiteness, ed.
Frankenberg, 211–22; and Matt Wray, ‘‘Angry White Men: Figuring White-
ness and Masculinity in A≈rmative Action Debates,’’ in What, Then, Is
White? ed. Noel Ignatiev and Jacqueline Mimms (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, forthcoming).
15 As of 1999, California guaranteed admission to one of the University of
California campuses to the top 4 percent of every graduating high school
class in the state; Texas admitted the top 10 percent; and Florida, the top 20
percent. There are other variations among these policies. Texas, for exam-
ple, allows all admitted students to choose the campus they will attend,
whereas California does not guarantee admission to the more selective
schools.
16 See Ross Chambers, ‘‘The Unexamined,’’ in Whiteness: A Critical Reader,
ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 187–203. For
analyses of how being poor can confound and complicate the benefits of
being white, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor
 introduction 21

Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1997); John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness
in Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Matt Wray
and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New
York: Routledge, 1996).
17 Cherríe Moraga, ‘‘La Güera,’’ in her book Loving in the War Years (Boston:
South End Press, 1983).
18 This is not because deploying whiteness as an analytic category is a recent
phenomenon. Eighty years ago W. E. B. Du Bois commented on the (then)
recent ‘‘discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples,’’
adding with sarcasm that at the same moment that white people notice
their whiteness they simultaneously celebrate it but do not really define it.
‘‘The Souls of White Folks,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from
Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 29–30.
19 For an explanation of the confusing barter between folk, bureaucratic, and
analytical conceptions of race, see Wacquant, ‘‘For an Analytics.’’
20 See Signathia Fordham, Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Suc-
cess at Capital High (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
21 These terms are used to refer to African Americans, Asian Americans,
Native Americans, and Latinos, who, because of their attitudes, practices,
and/or social position, are considered to be ‘‘colored’’ on the outside, but
‘‘white’’ on the inside.
22 Annette Hamilton, ‘‘Primal Dream: Masculinism, Sin, and Salvation in
Thailand’s Sex Trade,’’ in Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in
Asia and the Pacific, ed. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 145–65. In her work on China, Louisa
Schein argues that whiteness works di√erently for urban or coastal Chi-
nese than it does for inland and rural Chinese, with whiteness (associated
with cities) often signifying modernity and commodity culture and ‘‘color’’
(associated with rural China) signifying a lost or distant national identity.
See Louisa Schein, ‘‘The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White
Skin in Post-Mao China,’’ Social Text 41 (winter 1994): 141–64.
23 See, for example, Walter Benn Michaels, ‘‘Autobiography of an Ex-White
Man,’’ in ‘‘The White Issue,’’ Transition 73, 7, no. 1 (1998): 122–43.
24 Richard Dyer, ‘‘White,’’ Screen 29, no. 4 (autumn 1988): 44–64. See also
Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters, in which she explores how
whiteness was an invisible or unmarked category for her white female
interviewees.
25 See, for example, Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New
York: Routledge, 1996), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of
Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York:
Verso, 1994). For a modified neo-abolitionist argument, see Vron Ware
22 introduction

and Les Back, The Trouble with Whiteness (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming).
26 See bell hooks, ‘‘Eating the Other,’’ in her Black Looks: Race and Representa-
tion (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21–39. Roediger also argues along
these lines, stating that ‘‘whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is
nothing but oppressive and false.’’ Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 13.
See also Dyer, ‘‘White.’’
27 Kobena Mercer analyzes this facet of white signification when he describes
the ways that, for some whites, whiteness is both rendered transparent
and given meaning by appropriating significations that are considered
nonwhite. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), 339.
28 See, for example, Shelly Fisher Fishkin, ‘‘Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Com-
plicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture, American Quarterly
47, no. 3 (1995): 428–66; and José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remap-
ping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).
29 See Troy Duster, ‘‘Postindustrialism and Youth Unemployment: African
Americans as Harbingers,’’ in Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social
Policy, ed. Katherine McFate et al. (New York: Sage, 1995).
30 See Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. For articles by Massey and
Denton that go beyond black/white divides, see ‘‘Residential Segregation
of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians by Socio-Economic Status and Genera-
tion,’’ Social Science Quarterly 69 (1988): 797–817; and ‘‘Trends in the
Residential Segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians,’’ American So-
ciological Review 52 (1987): 802–25.
31 See Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New
York: Crown, 1991), and Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds.,
Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1993).
32 Nancy Krieger et al., ‘‘Racism, Sexism, and Social Class: Implications for
Studies of Health, Disease, and Well-being,’’ American Journal of Preventive
Medicine 9 no. 6-suppl. (1993): 82–122. See also Andrew Hacker, Two
Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribners,
1992).
33 In addition to bell hooks, ‘‘Representations of Whiteness’’ in Black Looks,
see Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997); Mab Segrest, Mem-
oir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994); and Michael Novick,
White Lies, White Power: The Fight against White Supremacy and Reactionary
Violence (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).
34 Because of this history, those who have important insights to o√er about
the nature of whiteness may be reluctant to speak on the issue or become
identified with critical whiteness studies. In Black Looks, bell hooks argues
that minority scholars in the United States have hesitated to describe their
 introduction 23

discomfort and reveal their negative associations with whiteness, partly

out of a fear of disquieting their readers and partly on account of the
historic ways in which people of color have learned to pretend to be com-
fortable and safe with encounters with whiteness. Nonetheless, she says,
there is a long-standing oral tradition among African Americans of study-
ing and theorizing about whiteness, a folk knowledge necessary to survive
in a white supremacist society.
35 See Edmund Morgan, Slavery and Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York: Norton, 1975), and Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the
White Race, 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 1994–97). Morgan is one of several
scholars who detail the ways European attitudes and language of class
characteristics were related to or transferred to race. See also Winthrop D.
Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1968). Other scholars have argued that concepts like
race existed in times and places prior to European colonialism and imperi-
alism. See, for example, Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern
China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992).
36 See, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995), and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge,
1995).
37 In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995), Robert Young argues that contemporary theory, often unwit-
tingly, repeats the patterns through which culture and race were defined in
the nineteenth century. See also M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures
(New York: Routledge, 1997); Hortense Spillers, ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s
Maybe: An American Grammar Book’’ Diacritics 15 (summer 1987): 65–
81; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘French Feminisms in an Interna-
tional Frame’’ and ‘‘French Feminisms Revisited,’’ in her In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995).
38 See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992).
39 For representative work, see Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White
People Can Work for Racial Justice (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,
1995); Judy Katz, White Awareness: A Handbook for Anti-Racism Training
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978); and Segrest, Memoir of a
Race Traitor.
40 See Alistair Bonnett, ‘‘Constructions of Whiteness in European and Amer-
ican Anti-Racism,’’ and Michel Wieviorka, ‘‘Is it so Di≈cult to be Anti-
Racist?’’ in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the
24 introduction

Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werber and Tariq Modood (London: Zed
Books, 1997).
41 For an attempt by the conference organizers at self-reflexive critique, see
‘‘Conference Report: The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness,’’ in Bad
Subjects 33 »http://eserver.org/bs/33/whiteness.html…. For a critique of
the conference based on activist concerns, see Cynthia Kaufman’s article
in the Socialist Review double issue ‘‘ ‘The Making and Unmaking of
Whiteness’: A Conference Report’’ (autumn 1997) [incorrectly published
as vol. 26, nos. 3 & 4, 1996].
 Dalton Conley

Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to Be White

I am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle-class,

despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am white, but I grew
up in an inner city housing project where most everyone was black or
Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of privileges that were denied my neigh-
bors but that most Americans take for granted. In fact, my childhood
was like a social science experiment: Find out what being middle-class
really means by raising a kid from a ‘‘good’’ family in a ‘‘bad’’ neigh-
borhood. Define whiteness by putting a light-skinned kid in the midst
of a community of color. If the exception proves the rule, I’m that
exception.
Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe him,
and he will most likely put black or African American at the top of the
list. Ask someone of European descent the same question, and white
will be far down on the list, if at all. Not so for me. I’ve studied white-
ness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar, its parts
of speech; I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and
phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought.
For example, I had to learn that I was supposed to look white people in
the eye when I spoke to them, that it didn’t mean that I wanted to
‘‘throw down’’—challenge them to a fight. I learned that snapping that
someone’s mother was so poor that she put a Big Mac on layaway was
not taken with good humor. There’s an old saying that you never really
know your own language until you learn another. It’s the same with
race. In fact, race is nothing more than a language, a set of stories we
tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality.
In learning this language of race, and thereby learning to be white,
I was no di√erent than European culture as a whole. Early modern
conceptions of the white race—in fact of all races—stemmed from
confrontation with and domination of peoples outside the European
26 dalton conley

sphere. As the story goes, scientific theories of race arose in tandem

with the ascent of colonialism. In 1684, François Bernier, a French
physician who had traveled widely, published an article in a Parisian
journal on the subject of human di√erences. ‘‘The geographers up
until this point,’’ he claimed, ‘‘have divided the world up only accord-
ing to the di√erent countries or regions.’’ He then suggested a novel
classification scheme based on the facial lineaments and bodily con-
formations of the peoples of the world. Bernier proceeded to divide
the world’s peoples into four categories: the Europeans, the Far East-
erners, the blacks, and the Lapps. Native Americans he did not classify
as a separate people or lump in any of his four groupings. Less than a
century later, another Frenchman, George-Louis LeClerc Bu√on, for-
mally categorized the ‘‘races’’ of the world as part of a larger project of
classifying all living species, published in the forty-four-volume His-
toire naturelle (1749–1804). With the publication of these and related
volumes, the modern European conception of race was born.
These early conceptions of race, however, were quite di√erent than
those commonly held today in the scientific community or by the
public at large. Back then, racial di√erences were seen as a result of
local climates and thus mutable—fluid both within and across genera-
tions. In fact, in 1787, the Reverend Mr. Samuel Stanhope Smith
(president of the College of New Jersey—now Princeton University)
wrote that dark skins could be considered a ‘‘universal freckle.’’ Early
modern racial theorists such as Smith believed that, over the course of
several generations in a di√erent climate, racial attributes would grad-
ually change to adapt to local conditions. That is, northern peoples
would get progressively darker, and darker peoples would loose their
pigmentation with migration.∞
Almost three centuries after Bernier carved up the world according
to his schema of physical attributes, my white parents crossed over the
contemporary equivalent of a racial border, moving into a nonprofit
housing project on the Lower East Side of New York City. Compressed
into the area of two city blocks, our housing complex had a popula-
tion comparable to the town of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, where my
mother had grown up before moving to New York. It was composed of
mostly African American and Puerto Rican families; we were one of
the few white households. What distinguished my family from our
neighbors was not so much the color of our skin per se as it was how
we had arrived at the buildings in which we lived out our lives. The
 universal freckle 27

essential di√erence was that we had some degree of choice about

whether to live there or not. Our black and Hispanic neighbors, for the
most part, did not. This di√erence was a whiteness lesson that I would
not learn until much later, when I was deciding as an adult where in
New York to live. As for my parents, my father was a painter, my
mother a writer; in short, they had no money. But still, white poor
people have choices in America that minorities do not enjoy. They
could have lived in a white, working-class neighborhood in the outer
boroughs or in New Jersey, for example. Our neighbors were not so
lucky, however, being largely unwelcome elsewhere on account of the
fact that they would probably lower property values because of the
linkage between race and economics in our society.
That is, white neighborhoods are consistently worth more than
black neighborhoods with similar housing stock. This pattern is main-
tained by the fact that when a white neighborhood just begins to
integrate (usually somewhere around the 10 to 20 percent minority
range) many of the white residents move out, fearing that the neigh-
borhood will ‘‘tip’’ from white to black, depressing their housing
values. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Property
values drop since whites, who make up most of the demand for hous-
ing, sell in droves and flood the market.
Likewise, when whites move into a minority neighborhood with
low housing values, prices start to climb, and these early, ‘‘pioneer’’
whites reap the profits. Through these waves of neighborhood succes-
sion, whites manage to squeeze dollars out of the symbolic advantage
of their race. Though they were ‘‘pioneers,’’ there was no such luck for
my parents since the projects were not part of the private market and
white ‘‘gentrification’’ would never take place there. That said, given
their ostensible other options, I have often wondered why my parents
made the choices they did in 1968. Whenever I ask them, they tell
stories about having to move quickly because of a vendetta against my
mother on the part of a burglar she had caught and prosecuted. But I
think the real answer is somewhat along the lines of the reason white
kids in the suburbs now buy more rap music than any other group:
the mystique of the ‘‘ghetto,’’≤ an attraction to the other that many
middle-class individuals experience today. Such is the strange political
economy of race in contemporary America. It is a political economy in
which whites like my sister’s husband, who grew up across the river in
northern New Jersey, memorize rap lyrics and pine to be darker or at
28 dalton conley

least to be called ‘‘white chocolate.’’ It is a political economy where rap

artists themselves brag at how ‘‘project’’ they are to sell records to
these white teenagers. The essential rule of this racial-cultural system
is that it is acceptable for whites to appropriate African American
culture, but it is considered ‘‘passing’’ or being an ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ when
blacks attempt to adopt white cultural practices in terms of modes of
speech, dress, and so on. Though this gravitation toward blackness
appears at first glance to be rooted in a romanticized kinship, its
appeal is, in a counterintuitive way, a mechanism by which whites
assert their cultural dominance, their right to tread on other people’s
cultural turf.
Back in 1968, long before the Sugar Hill Gang recorded the first,
mass-marketed rap lyrics, my parents answered an advertisement in
the tabloid Daily News soliciting applications for a newly minted hous-
ing complex not far from their tenement walk-up. An entire stretch of
Manhattan, almost a mile long, from Fourteenth Street to well below
Houston Street is lined with projects. As my parents strolled down
Avenue D, every few blocks the brown-bricked projects changed in
name and only slightly in style. The Jacob Riis houses melted into the
Lillian Wald projects and then the Bernard Baruch houses, names that
held little meaning for most of the residents who occupied them. Not
only did the buildings look like each other, they looked exactly the
same over the course of decades. Man landed on the moon; the Oil
Shock of 1973 came; business cycles rolled by; but nothing about the
projects gave any sign of societal change. There was never any new
construction or renovation. And since they were brick, there was
never even a new coat of paint. They constituted an unchanging
monument to the social policy of their time.
The social texture of the neighborhood stood in stark contrast to the
physical flavor. While the projects cast a stoic, oppressive shadow over
Avenue D, the real street life was on the other side of the road, which
was lined with dilapidated tenements. Many of the buildings were
condemned or boarded up, often burned out for insurance money by
the landlords themselves. However, almost every building that still
functioned as a residence (and even some that did not) enjoyed an
active storefront. Men sat in front of these bodegas and restaurants
playing dominoes while children ran to and fro in front of them, their
mothers sitting on the hoods of cars or standing, rocking infants on
their hips. When it was hot, fire hydrants were opened by residents
 universal freckle 29

and kids congregated around them, taking turns ducking into the
forceful stream. Back then, the fire department had not yet issued caps
with holes pricked into them to allow for moderate streams of water
flow. So, instead, the city fought a constant battle with overheated
residents. Every so often, a fireman showed up and turned o√ the
water. This would last for only about half an hour or so, before some-
one with the special wrench turned the flow back on. To an outsider,
the kids seemed to roam freely, but in reality everyone was watching
everyone else’s children; there was a degree of community-based so-
cial control that would not have been obvious to the casual observer.
The same can be said for the tra≈c. Cars seemed to disobey most
parking restrictions since tra≈c enforcement was a low priority in this
neighborhood. Despite this lack of state control, cars flowed slowly but
freely up and down the avenue, following their own logic much like
the children; tra≈c jams were hardly ever a problem. Men washed
their cars with soapy buckets of water that came from the same gush-
ing hydrants the kids played in. Others kept all four doors and the
trunk open to blast salsa music to the entire block. In short, during the
summer months the entire neighborhood seemed to be partying all
the time. During winter, the street life went a bit dormant, receding
into the apartments that served as spores to preserve social relations
until the next spring.
When my parents finally arrived to the advertised set of buildings,
they appeared di√erent from the other projects in the area. For one,
they were yellow-bricked. Masryk Towers, as the place was called, had
its own security force and its own grant from the government as part
of the latest social science initiative to integrate the working class with
the non–working class. Little did my mother know that the security
guards did little to stop the violence that would parallel our lives—cops
getting shot in the elevator, hostages being taken in the pharmacy, or
girls getting raped in the stairwell. These future tragedies my mother
could not foresee. At the time, she was impressed with the layout. Six
buildings surrounded a central courtyard area. The central area of the
project contained a series of three small playgrounds, roughly gra-
dated by age group, each hosting games of caps, ring-a-levio, Spalding
baseball, and manhunt. The complex had trees and grass and its own
ecosystem of wildlife that ranged from the tropical—huge cockroaches
and water bugs—to the temperate, in the form of thick-furred squir-
rels. It was springtime—the trees were lush with white blossoms, and
30 dalton conley

the grass was thick. To my mother, the grass seemed greener than any
she had ever seen, but maybe that was only in contrast to the hot,
glass-littered concrete that covered the rest of the neighborhood.
Despite the horrible reputation of the ‘‘inner city,’’ high crime rates,
pollution, and gra≈ti on every conceivable surface, my mother de-
scribed our neighborhood as an idyllic landscape to raise children. We
had the ‘‘ghetto penthouse’’—as my sister and I liked to call living on
the twenty-first, top floor, too young to realize the tastelessness of our
monicker. We could see the hills of New Jersey out of one window and
the farthest reaches of Queens from the other. If we didn’t look straight
down at all the burnt-out, boarded-up slums, we enjoyed a river-to-
river view of the Manhattan skyline. The irony was that we had immov-
able bars bolted into the window jambs, obscuring the view. There was
good reason for this. Once when we were away, my parents left a win-
dow open. A cat burglar tied the fire hose to the railing on the roof and
swung into the kitchen window, proceeding to liquidate the entire
house through the front door. Thinking we merely had to keep the win-
dows shut and locked, we did the best we could to replace our television
set and other semivaluable belongings. The next time we were gone he
crashed through the window feet first and emptied out our apartment
anew, leaving a trail of broken glass and blood to the front door. Finally,
my parents had to invest in bars. They could only a√ord the cheapest
kind. These least expensive window gates could not be opened or
unlocked, and a prison-like barrier marred our river-to-river view.
Maybe to assuage her own sense of guilt for having raised my sister
and me in a dangerous area (two of our close friends would be shot in
the fourteen years we lived there), my mother constantly reminded us
of how beautiful our surroundings were. ‘‘Look at the birds,’’ she
might say as she led us across the complex by a tightly gripped hand.
‘‘Ooh, there’s a robin.’’ I would refuse to look as she pointed out some
brightly colored bird that stood out from the gray pigeons. She stood
out as well, humming audibly as she strolled through the projects with
her flowing dresses and her mismatched, brightly colored socks. She
appreciated the colorful gra≈ti in the same way she liked the birds, for
their purely aesthetic value. She appeared oblivious to the power dy-
namics behind race and class that came to dominate my conscious
life. To her, race was about having Goya beans and exotic vegetables
like yucca stocked in our supermarket. In other words, it was more
like ethnicity in that it was about culture and lifestyle choices. Or
 universal freckle 31

maybe it was the case that she knew exactly what was going on in
terms of power dynamics under the surface and her way of subverting
this system was to ignore it, becoming a passive resister on the cul-
tural front. If you don’t pay attention to race, her logic might have
gone, it will lose its power; it is socially constructed, after all. I can only
speculate what my mother was thinking (or not thinking) back in the
1960s and 1970s; she herself does not give an account of her presenta-
tion of self to the neighborhood.
Like Bernier and (perhaps) my mother, I too, initially thought of my
race as mutable and adaptable to the local conditions of the neighbor-
hood. Actually, at first I was completely oblivious to the concept of race.
In my desire to have a baby sister, I ‘‘kidnapped’’ the infant daughter of
the leaders of a black separatist movement. How was I to know that the
rules of endogamy pretty much precluded a brown-skinned baby from
coming from my two white parents? To a toddler, size seems a lot more
important than skin color in how the population is organized. Kids on
big wheels were my peer group—regardless of complexion. Adults—
white, black, other—constituted the alien race, the other. Race as we
adults know it is something that has to be taught to us by parents,
teachers, and society more generally. It is not something innately pro-
grammed into our minds by evolutionary psychology.
My sister, Alexandra, endured similar developmental lessons about
the importance of race as a category. For Christmas one year at Alex-
andra’s head start program, the black Santa Claus gave all the kids
culturally appropriate GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As a result Alexandra
was the only one to get a white Barbie. As soon as the other kids saw
that Alexandra had a real Barbie, they stampeded her, begging, plead-
ing, and demanding her to trade with them. Her first reaction was
defensive, and she clutched the doll to her chest as girls and even boys
tried to pry it from her.
‘‘Black is beautiful!’’ the teachers screamed over the din of crying
and yelling.
‘‘We want Barbie!’’ the kids yelled back in unison, according to the
teachers’ explanation to my mother at the end of the day.
Finally, one kid pulled hard at her doll’s legs and the toy broke in
half. This girl was evidently satisfied that she had secured at least a
piece of the Barbie and scurried o√ to a corner to dress up the half-
doll. Eventually, my sister got the two halves back and willingly traded
the doll for one in the African American style. I wonder if the teachers
32 dalton conley

took away the same lesson from the incident that I did. Namely, that it
is not so easy to overcome the immense power of racial socialization.
Here were very young children—as young as could possibly be ‘‘reedu-
cated’’—and they had already internalized a robust rank ordering of
‘‘real’’ and ‘‘other’’ of white Barbie and fake Barbie. This is the cultural
power of whiteness writ large that never needs to speak its name
explicitly (and is more powerful in its silence). It is the power structure
that lurks beneath everything we do in our day-to-day lives, most often
unknown to us all except when it erupts in incidents like this one.
My sister’s next lesson about racial lines came when she was six
years old and wanted to cornrow her hair like her friend Adoonie did.
At first my mother resisted her demand, explaining that her hair
wouldn’t work in a cornrowed style but was beautiful in its own right.
After many tears, my sister gave up on the dream of cornrowed hair.
That is, until the next year when the movie 10 came out. At first all the
little girls thought that its star, Bo Derek, was black on account of her
tropical tan in the movie. Though everyone was too young to have
actually gone to the R-rated film, that didn’t stop all the girls with
cornrows from wanting to grow them longer so that they, like Bo
Derek, had the best of both worlds, long hair and tight braids along
their scalp. Then one of the older girls told the group that Bo Derek
was actually white.
The girls were confused, hurt, and betrayed by this revelation, as
they would later be on learning that Madonna was also white. My
sister, however, was joyous since this proved that she, too, could have
the cornrows she had been denied because of her race. When she
brought this piece of information to our mother, she had no choice but
to relinquish and braid her hair as best as she could, putting in black,
red, and orange African beads as my sister had requested. To no avail.
The braids frayed, and the beads didn’t stand out against her chestnut
hair; rather, they looked like colored gnats or lice that had infested her
scalp. My sister was not entirely satisfied with my mother’s e√ort, but
she wanted to show Adoonie, nonetheless, so she rushed out to the
playground to find her.
‘‘Yo, excuse me miss,’’ an older girl said and laughed, ‘‘someone left
some twine on your head.’’
‘‘Is that some cornrows?’’ another asked, stopping from her jump-
rope counting game. ‘‘Looks more like wheat to me.’’
‘‘Oh snap,’’ added a third girl, cracking up.
 universal freckle 33

Alexandra started crying and ran back into the pitted brick build-
ing. When Adoonie found her upstairs, she tried to console her. ‘‘My
mother will do your braids for you if you like,’’ she was petting my
sister’s head as she spoke softly to her. ‘‘Won’t that be nice, wouldn’t
you like that?’’
‘‘Forget it,’’ Alexandra said and started to unwind the cornrows that
had already begun to unbraid themselves as if they, too, didn’t like how
the experiment had turned out. ‘‘I don’t want the stupid cornrows.
They’re stupid.’’ This was the first time Alexandra remembered using
the value of her whiteness in the broader cultural marketplace—in this
case her hair type—to comfort herself. But, of course, it was by neces-
sity a put-down of color, and at this comment Adoonie cried and ran
o√. From then on, Alexandra only wanted long blond hair, straight as
could be. We were learning race, its uses and abuses. In this case, it
was the converse lesson of Barbie—namely, that it wasn’t so easy to
cross racial boundaries even when you are of the white, dominant
group.
These messages of whiteness had begun to seep into us, making us
realize that race was not a universal freckle, that we would never quite
fit into our local community. For each of us, this realization took a few
years. For European history, it took almost a century after Bernier’s
first article. In the nineteenth century, the idea that racial di√erences
were independent of climate and therefore immutable began to take
hold in the public and scientific imagination.
What paved the way for this new, evolutionary theory of race was
the downfall of Lamarckianism. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck thought that
adaptive or learned behaviors could be transmitted across genera-
tions. For example, if a generation of gira√es stretched its necks a little
further to reach the highest leaves, they would pass this advantage on
to the next generation, which could, in turn, build upon the longer
neck length as a base for further improvement. Darwin’s theory of
natural selection shot this concept down by suggesting that evolu-
tion resulted not from the e√orts of organisms to adapt and survive
but from random, beneficial mutations over a much longer time
frame. With the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the immediate
linkage of environment to racial di√erence had been severed, and
races could be seen as separate, immutably di√erent lines of human
development.
In light of these epistemological changes, the prime debate became
34 dalton conley

not whether nonwhite races were inferior or not, but rather whether
the di√erent races, in fact, constituted distinct species (monogenism
versus polygenism). The foundation of this debate was the aforemen-
tioned conception of the separate origins of the di√erent groups of
humans. The more traditional religious adherents sided, ironically,
with Charles Darwin, who e√ectively ended the debate, stating that
though there was some variation between peoples of the world, it was
on the whole small, and humans are, in fact, one species.≥
While these nineteenth-century theorists looked to the past to de-
fine race, for me it was really more about the future. My whiteness was
defined by my expectations, by the fact that I knew that being Euro-
pean American meant that my own personal life course would diverge
radically from that of the kids around me. Societal and state institu-
tions made sure this was so, and in this way reinforced these expecta-
tions. This is the essence of social structure: individual expectations
that both reflect and reinforce the patterns of inequality already gov-
erning society—‘‘expectations about expectations’’ in the words of sys-
tems theorist Niklas Luhmann.∂
Middle-class, white ‘‘expectations about expectations’’ had already
reared their head by first grade in the local public school. I was told
that I did not ‘‘fit’’ into any of the classes and must arbitrarily pick
between the Puerto Rican, black, or Chinese classrooms. While Brown
v. Board of Education may have eliminated school-based segregation,
evidently within-school segregation continued unabated, at least on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Faced with such racially structured
educational choices, my parents chose the African American class.
My first teacher, who was black herself, beat everyone except me.
The other kids seemed to think that this was quite normal—and, in
fact, their parents had requested the use of corporal punishment.
‘‘Yo, your momma been on welfare so long,’’ one of my fellow
students whispered to me one day early that year, ‘‘her face’s on food
stamps.’’ He gave a low five to the boy seated in front of him. When the
teacher saw him, she demanded him to come to the front of the room
immediately. He marched up slowly, staring at his sneakers, his face
down and afro up as if it o√ered protection. It did not. She took his
hands and whacked them three times with the thin edge of her ruler. I
felt my body leap from the seat with each whack, as if the ruler were a
lever, the end of which I was sitting on. My spine and head stayed still,
and the rest of me moved upward. Then I blinked and twitched my
 universal freckle 35

cheeks. The kid receiving the blows did not flinch, yelp, or move in
the least.
Each time a classmate would pass by my desk on the way back to his
seat after having been beaten with a ruler, I would stare down, unable
to look him in the eyes. At the same time, I would try to catch a
glimpse of his bloodied knuckles where his brown skin had opened up
through the white layer underneath to the scarlet flesh that I could
identify with. While I felt intense guilt over my position of being the
privileged other who wasn’t hit, I slowly realized that the other kids
didn’t resent this fact. To everyone involved, teachers and students, it
was quite ‘‘natural’’ that a black teacher would never cross the racial
border to strike a white child. The use of corporal punishment was a
cultural distinction, but the fact that an African American teacher
wouldn’t dare strike a white child while she would those of her own
race is about race. Specifically, it’s about fears of state retribution,
about a tacit respect for certain privileges that undergird whiteness.
Here was my first taste of white rights, the same dynamic at work
when, today, I confidently walk into a hospital without proper identi-
fication or into a private party uninvited or sit in a hotel lounge reading
the paper without being questioned. In first grade, however, I felt
guilty about it, so guilty that I developed a series of tics, blinks, and
twitches to the point of becoming dysfunctional in school. My guilt
was of a di√erent genre than the general white angst felt by many
liberals in America. It was in my face all the time, at school and at
home in the neighborhood. I experienced constantly what most ur-
ban, middle-class Americans feel when a street person asking for
change accosts them. I don’t mean to imply that my classroom dy-
namic was the same in terms of the charity aspect, for instance, but
rather just in the way it gets white people to become conscious of their
privileged position, even if just for a split second on their way to work.
Eventually my parents switched me into the Chinese class. It was in
this context that I began learning—albeit on an unconscious level—the
di√erence between race and ethnicity. On the first day of the spring
term, the teacher took roll, having each student stand up when his or
her name was called. She announced that if we had a Chinese name,
the next day she would tell us an equivalent in English. If we had an
American name, she would perform the reverse service. The next
morning she read o√ two names for each student.
‘‘John,’’ she said, ‘‘Jiang.’’
36 dalton conley

‘‘Jiali,’’ she read next, ‘‘Julie.’’

Then she got to me, ‘‘Dalton,’’ she said, ‘‘Dalton,’’ she repeated.
I was crushed. She announced that she could not find a translation
of my name. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that none of these
name pairs were actual translations, that there was no straightforward
way to convert names from a tonal, character-based language to our
own. Nonetheless, to make me feel better she said my name once
again in the second tone, so that it went up in pitch in the second syl-
lable. She made the entire class repeat it in her Cantonese accent. They
did. The kids chuckled to themselves, but their laughter did not have
the same sharp edge that wounded me like that of the black kids from
my previous class. It would have seemed absurd and impossible if the
African American teacher had tried to take steps to better integrate me
into that class. The jagged edge of race was about domination and
struggles for power. It was also taken as something insurmountable.
The di√erences I experienced in the Chinese class were ones that
seemed more tractable. Strange as it may seem given the vast cultural
and linguistic ocean that separated these recent immigrants of first-
generation Americans from me, fitting into the Chinese class ap-
peared possible, if still di≈cult. The di√erences were cultural, firstly.
The physical distinctions between us were not unnoticed, but they did
seem trivial or epiphenomenal. When such culturally loaded physical
di√erences verged into the realm of exploitation and exclusion, they
entered the territory of race as we know it today. Twentieth-century ra-
cial theories have alternated between seeing racial divisions as wholly
related to these cultural di√erences∑ (really more like ethnicity) or as
related to some larger economic or territorial dynamic of oppression.
These latter approaches are called class and nation paradigms of race,
respectively.∏ The class paradigm sees race as constructed either by the
elite to weaken the working class through cleavage or as a division
created by a portion of the working class (whites) to drive up their
wages by excluding many (black) workers from the labor market.π The
nation paradigm is one that sees the early conflict over imperialist
expansion and colonial domination as having continued into our
modern era. Race is the byproduct of struggles among exclusive
groups of peoples to dominate and exploit others. The same power
dynamics that (literally) colored the era of imperialism have now been
inculcated within the nation-state, developing into a dynamic of inter-
nal colonialism.∫ Regardless of which one (or more) of these accounts
 universal freckle 37

of race is correct, common to all of these theories is the rejection

of early conceptions of race as a fundamental biological category—
something that it took me quite a while to learn growing up (that is,
once I had learned about the di√erences to begin with).Ω
For me, choice is central to this di√erence between race and eth-
nicity. Within certain (racial) constraints an individual can choose her
ethnicity. The constraint that limits ‘‘ethnic options’’ is inequality.
When one group enjoys a status advantage over another, it is in their
interest to restrict membership, and the a≈liational quality disap-
pears—ethnicity becomes racialized. In other words, to the extent to
which Italian identity and Irish identity enjoy the same level of status
within American society, individuals of mixed national parentage can
a≈liate with one or both groups, even maintaining a fluid identity that
changes depending on the advantageous cultural circumstances of the
moment and the ability of the individual to subscribe to the cultural
practices of the group.∞≠ In other words, I decide my ethnicity, but you
decide my race.
For example, when I got older, I came to know a woman who was
born in Korea to what we would call Korean parents. However, she was
orphaned in the first month of her life. She was lucky enough to be
adopted almost immediately by a wealthy couple who raised her in
northern Italy. She never enjoyed the opportunity to learn the Korean
language, to practice the social norms and customs that govern most
social interactions in Korea or among Korean nationals living abroad,
to understand Korean history, or to develop a taste for what we would
call Korean cuisine. By contrast, having been raised in Italy, she speaks
the o≈cial language of the Repubblica Italiana as her maternal tongue;
she is quite proficient at cooking Italian cuisine and knows the wines
of the region in which she was raised. When she became an adult, she
moved to the United States. There she found that when she walked
into a greengrocer in New York City, she was spoken to in Korean by
the owners who, themselves, had migrated from that Pacific Rim
country. She also found that African Americans and whites treated her
di√erently, making assumptions about her based on her looks. In
short, she found herself to be racially Asian while remaining eth-
nically Italian.∞∞
The essential point of my friend’s story is that ethnicity, as Mary
Waters argues in her book Ethnic Options, is something about what we
do, whom we choose to identify with/as. Race is imposed on us from
38 dalton conley

the outside, based on how others choose to treat us within a power

hierarchy. In fact, ethnicity is a luxury enjoyed by only certain groups
of people. Many African Americans I knew growing up spoke of no
national ancestry the way white kids talked about being Irish or Ger-
man. They had race but no ethnicity. For most people of European
ancestry, the reverse is true: being part of the white race is a default
identity—one that does not play such a big role in their everyday lives.
In fact, when I ask my students to list four or five attributes that
describe them, Latinos and African Americans always put their race
near the top of the list. Only once among hundreds has a white stu-
dent listed his racial identity at all. Meanwhile, many of the whites I
know wear their ethnic identities very prominently.
However, my racial identity as a white person is probably stronger
than that of most people of European ancestry. In other words, I was
definitely reminded that I was a honky, and I didn’t forget it, either.
Even though I never faced the level of harassment and violence that an
African American might if he moved into a poor white neighborhood,
my white racial identity was always with me growing up, a master
status that defined who I was. That is, like being blind or having
cancer, it overwhelmed all other attributes in defining how I was
treated and marked in my day-to-day interactions. I imagine that this
is not the case for most white Americans, at least those not living
abroad.
But it is also true that in many ways I have felt little ethnic identity
compared to most white people I know. Being part Hungarian Jew,
part wasp, I probably should have been keenly aware of the important
role of ethnicity within the white race, but given my particular geo-
graphic circumstances, these distinctions did not register with me—
they were washed over and washed out by race.
I remember one particular time when I was oblivious to the mean-
ing of ethnic ties. I had stolen candy from the local luncheonette run
by a husband and a wife who were both Holocaust survivors. When I
confessed my crime to my mother, she dragged me down to the store
to pay, explain what I had done, and ask for their forgiveness. After I
confessed the lady with the blue numbers tattooed into her arm broke
out into a morality tale.
‘‘Let me tell you a story,’’ the woman said. I was praying that none of
my Las Piratas little league teammates would walk in and see me there
with my mother, see me actually talking to the luncheonette lady that
 universal freckle 39

everyone made fun of. ‘‘When I was a young girl in Germany in the
concentration camp my family and I were being marched o√ to the gas
chambers.’’ She paused. I had heard about the Nazis before in school
and from my mother.
‘‘I was only a young girl of twelve,’’ she recounted her time in
Dachau, ‘‘But we had all heard about the showers and ovens, so we
knew we were going to die. I had nothing to lose, so I ran up to one of
the guards,’’ she continued. ‘‘I looked him right in the eye and said,
‘We all have to die some time, and it may be sooner for me than for
you, but at least I’ll be able to face my Jewish God when that time
comes. What about you? Can you face your God?’ Do you know vat he
did?’’ she asked me. ‘‘Do you know vat this guard did?’’ She didn’t wait
for an answer. The Socratic part of this lesson was over. ‘‘He pulled me
out of the line and saved my life. Everyone else in my family was killed.
All my brothers and sisters and my parents, too.’’ Now she was crying,
as was I. ‘‘But I spoke up for my beliefs and God spared me.’’ Then she
turned to my mother. ‘‘It is because of this, I say, you have to raise
them Jewish. You’re raising him Jewish?’’
‘‘Why?’’ I interjected suddenly when I had worked through what I
thought were the logical implications of her yarn, namely, that being
Jewish generally led to execution. ‘‘Does she want us to all get killed?’’
My mother gasped behind me and grabbed me by the ear, twisting
the cartilage. She yanked on the ear and pulled me toward the door. ‘‘I
apologize,’’ she said to the woman as I wailed. ‘‘I’m so sorry. Please
forgive us.’’ Even through the visceral reality of my pain I thought it
strange that my mother had asked for her forgiveness of us, when she
had not done anything at all. This was the first time that it dawned on
me that my words and actions spoke for more than just myself, that I
was, in a sense, an ambassador for my family, for my ethnic group, in
fact, for any group to which I belonged by virtue of birth or a≈liation.
It was my first glimmer of ethnic consciousness. Only later did I fully
realize what lesson the woman was giving my mother and I with her
story. It was the message that as ethnic Jews we were all part of one
tribe (albeit tinted with religious overtones), that we were in some
distant way kin to her, and that by virtue of this fact we have to stick
together, that there would be strength and comfort in our numbers,
even if they have dwindled. Still, it took me a while and several more
ga√es like the one in the luncheonette to learn the culture of white-
ness—that is, to accept the group membership that the luncheonette
40 dalton conley

woman and others were o√ering me. Actually, I had to learn how to be
several types of white ethnic, since my father’s tribe (New England
wasp) had its own rituals and code of conduct.
Whether or not I knew how to behave ethnically ‘‘white’’ was really
immaterial to the more serious issue of race, however. I could never
even know what my ‘‘roots’’ were, and yet my racial identity would
(and did) provide me with a privileged position vis-à-vis the state and
society more generally. Whiteness had already given me choices for
my educational career. It also gave me choices about where to live,
since I now reside about a mile or so away from where I grew up, but
in an entirely di√erent world, one in which property values are soaring
along with the stock market. I choose to live in New York despite the
fact that I work in Connecticut at an elite, predominantly white institu-
tion: Yale University.
I cannot help but see my two-hour commute as a metaphor for the
dynamics of race and class in America. When I speed up the Merritt
Parkway and feel a surge of acceleration in my gut, I experience an
unparalleled rush of freedom. I could go anywhere, as long as I have
some gas left in the tank. But if one were to pull back and take an aerial
view of the ebbs and flows of tra≈c, something would change dramat-
ically. From a helicopter, tra≈c flows seems absurdly constrained and
rhythmically patterned. Masses of cars lunge and recoil according to
some not-so-complicated algorithm. Pulling back even farther, we
would notice that roads cover only a small portion of the earth’s sur-
face. From above, we don’t appear to have much choice in where we
are going or how fast we can get there, but that does not deny each
driver’s experience of freedom and agency. It’s the same with race and
class. When I look back on my life and that of my neighbors, I cannot
say that it was racism that got my best friend shot or that sent another
neighbor to prison for twenty-five years on a nonviolent drug charge.
Nor can I conclude definitively that it was class that propelled me to
the school district across town or got me o√ the hook when I burned
down a friend’s apartment. Rather, it could have been that I happened
to change lanes just in the nick of time to avoid an accident or that a
tra≈c cop happened not to see me when I pulled an illegal maneuver.
But when I add up all these particular experiences, the invisible con-
tours of inequality start to take form, like the clogged tra≈c arteries of
I-95. At the same time, my life, like anyone’s, is only a sample of one,
hardly statistically generalizable.
 universal freckle 41

When I arrive at Yale, I spend my nonteaching days running math-

ematical models on my laptop computer, in pursuit of that statistical
certainty—trying to understand in some scientific way the leitmotif of
race and class that has dominated my life. I have based the majority of
my work on one particular interview study. It is a survey given to more
or less the same set of 5,000 families each year for the last three
decades. In fact, this data set and I are almost exactly the same age. So,
when I develop a computer model to predict what conditions in 1969
led to educational success or economic security in the 1990s, I am
perhaps driven by the misguided—but comforting—feeling that the
answers to my own life and those of my neighbors are just one key
punch away. But, of course, they never are. What is gained from num-
bers is lost in story.

Notes
1 Such a conception was intertwined with the more general notions of the
Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers argued that all humans were cre-
ated equally by God; such optimism extended to theories of race in the
eighteenth century.
2 I use this term in quotes since, academically speaking, where we lived did
not constitute a ghetto. First of all, there was a mix of minority groups.
Many scholars think that the only type of ghetto in America is purely
African American. Also, a ghetto requires a better seal-o√ from the larger
society. Since we were there ourselves, the boundary was too porous to
meet the strict definition of a ghetto. Finally, a ghetto needs to contain
institutions that duplicate those in the mainstream society in order to
function autonomously. However, many of the residents in my neighbor-
hood worked in other areas of the city. Likewise, there was no informal
banking or medical system as far as I knew.
3 For a discussion of this, see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea
in America (New York: Schocken, 1963).
4 Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power: Two Works, trans. Gianfranco Poggi
(New York and Chichester: Wiley 1979).
5 This approach is best embodied by the work of early Chicago School
thinkers such as Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in America (New
York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), and Robert E. Park, The Collected Papers of
Robert E. Park, ed. Everett Hughes (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950).
6 For a formal review, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Forma-
tion in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994). Of course, there are
42 dalton conley

many other approaches as well, but a thorough discussion is well beyond

the scope of this chapter.
7 See, e.g., chapter 1 of William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of
Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
8 See, for example, Bob Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972).
9 For a formal review of all these theories, see Omi and Winant, Racial
Formation. There are many other approaches as well, but, again, a thor-
ough discussion is well beyond the scope of this chapter.
10 For this argument, see, for example, Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing
Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
11 In fact, I would later learn that physical distinctions may not even be
necessary for a racial division to occur. For example, Japan has a minority
group, called the Burakamin, that is physically indistinguishable from the
rest of the population, yet they constitute a separate race. In our own
society, molecular biology established DNA as the hereditary material and
the development of electrophoresis, which measured protein di√erentia-
tion, allowed scientists to measure and classify human genes. In tandem
with these new theories, racial theory adopted the evolutionary paradigms
of adaptation and genetic drift to legitimize population categories. As a
result of this ‘‘scientific’’ discourse, today we are witnessing in the United
States a cessation of the physical (phenotypic) basis for racial classification.
Increasingly, molecular genetics are serving the legitimating role that
physical appearance often did. Racial types are being classified on the basis
of allele frequencies; see, for example, Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics
(London: Routledge, 1991). I have come to the tentative, personal conclu-
sion that all that is necessary for a racial distinction is the perception of
unique bloodlines (resulting from actual or perceived endogamy) in tan-
dem with a power inequity. The ideal-type of ethnicity, then, is the percep-
tion of a common bloodline without the categorical power division.
 Mab Segrest

‘‘The Souls of White Folks’’

‘‘To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the

world and history is naive and simplistic. . . . Those who authentically commit
themselves to the people must examine themselves constantly.’’
—Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

‘‘What therapist would tell us to read history?’’ I asked at the beginning

of my last book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, my attempt to describe seven
years of anti-Klan and neo-Nazi organizing in North Carolina and to
come to terms with my own history as a white person. Part of my project
was to convey as compellingly and believably as possible the epidemic
of racist and homophobic violence we confronted in North Carolina in
the eighties. Another was to explore the conditions that created the vio-
lence and held it in place. If I wanted to lay out the economics of racism
and its expression in all the institutions of the culture, I was also inter-
ested in probing its psychology. I wanted to study, borrowing W. E. B.
Du Bois’s term, ‘‘the souls of white folks’’—assuming (as Malcolm X
had di≈culty doing for most of his life with regard to the ‘‘white devil’’)
that we have souls, and beginning, inevitably, with my own.∞
This part of the project was more than self-indulgence. Part of the
mythology around racism is that it only a√ects people of color. Be-
cause racism normalizes whiteness and problematizes ‘‘color,’’ we
whites as ‘‘generic humans’’ escape scrutiny for our accountability as a
group for creating racism and as individuals for challenging it. One re-
sponse is to begin to problematize whiteness and calculate its wages.
We can explain the advantages of being white in terms of not going to
prison, becoming coaches of major sports, obtaining home mort-
gages, buying cheaper cars, dying less often from cancer, obtaining
better jobs, and so forth. Such a calculus can almost be too convincing.
Why should anyone give up such privilege?
44 mab segrest

What we miss in such an accounting is insight into the profound

damage racism has done to us, as if we as a people could participate in
such an inhuman set of practices and beliefs over five centuries of
European hegemony and not be, in our own ways, devastated emo-
tionally and spiritually. The business of therapy, both professional and
self-help, has emerged in this century in the United States to deal with
the psychological damage, which in a culture structured around scar-
city and profit happens to people first in the context of our racist,
sexist, and homophobic families. But these therapies are highly de-
politicized. This failure of therapy to take into account the political
causes of personal and family distress is another factor that insulates
white people from realizing the damage we su√er from racism and
therefore from realizing our own stake in changing racist systems for
ourselves, as well as for people of color. We need to balance o√ calcula-
tions on the benefits of whiteness (and maleness and heterosexism
and the drive for profits) with calculations of pain and loss for all
people in this culture: for example, 60 million people su√ering from
alcoholism, the leading killer in the country; stress that contributes to
heart disease and cancer; 50 percent of the population with eating
disorders; 34 million adult women sexually abused.≤
I want to be clear that I am not equating the damage done by racism
to white people with the damage done to people of color: conflating
victim with perpetrator. Over the five-hundred-year history of colonial-
ism and imperialism, people of color have formed the superexploited
labor pool that has allowed capitalism to reap its profits. This money
has stayed, primarily, in the co√ers of Europeans and their white
descendants in the United States. White allies of people of color have
often been targets of racism—of physical attacks, social ostracism,
economic deprivation. But whites as whites have not been lynched,
enslaved, had lands stolen, su√ered forced relocation onto reserva-
tions, had reserved for us the most di≈cult labor at the lowest wage,
been bombarded by dehumanizing messages and ideologies, and so
on ad nauseam.
Bell hooks warns against the discussion I want to undertake about
the damage of racism to white people. She is leery of whites construct-
ing a ‘‘narrative of shared victimization’’ that ‘‘recenters whites’’ and
obscures the ‘‘particular way racist domination impacts on the lives of
marginalized [racial] groups.’’ She prefers a solidarity ‘‘based on one’s
political and ethical understanding of racism and one’s rejection of
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 45

domination.’’ But hooks allows that a white solidarity based on rejec-

tion of domination ‘‘does not have to negate collective awareness that a
culture of domination does seek to fundamentally distort and pervert
the psyches of all citizens or that this perversion is wounding.’’≥ It is
this wounding psychic perversion that I am trying to address, without
equating it with the e√ects of racist exploitation on people of color,
some new strain of emotional ‘‘reverse discrimination.’’ I can make
these distinctions, I find, as a lesbian. I can see how homophobia
and heterosexism distort heterosexual relationships in ways that are
wounding, while also insisting that this pain not be used to recenter
heterosexuality and obscure the fact that there is institutional power in
heterosexism that falls violently and painfully on lesbians and gay
men. The pain of dominance is always qualitatively di√erent from the
pain of subordination. But there is a pain, a psychic wound, to inhabit-
ing and maintaining domination. Our acknowledging that emotional
cost helps keep our white ethical/political solidarity from slipping
over into a new form of paternalism.
I should also make clear that I do not assume that whiteness is
monolithic. Its power as a constructed category has been its very his-
toric malleability, under the flag of biological determinism. If white-
ness is a signifier of power and condition of access in U.S. culture,
then women are less white than men, gay people less white than
straight people, poor people less white than rich people, Jews than
Christians, and so forth. Over the centuries, people of various Euro-
pean nationalities have climbed into and sometimes fallen out of
whiteness, the core of which has always been Anglo-Saxon, Protestant,
propertied, and male (and now straight).
W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the first to explore the economic cost to
white people of racism. In Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880,
originally published in 1935, he wrote:
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the
world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on
which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which
persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in
1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capital-
ism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and
resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the
world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insis-
46 mab segrest

tence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry

which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World
War and Depression.∂
For a modicum of economic privilege and a dollop of racial superi-
ority—what Du Bois called the ‘‘psychological wage’’ of being white—
white workers gave up class solidarity that could have created better
working conditions for all races. But Du Bois also recognizes that the
loss here is as much psychological, or spiritual, as it is material: ‘‘[The
white worker] began to want, not comfort for all men but power over
other men. . . . He did not love humanity and he hated niggers.’’∑ In
gaining power, whites lose ‘‘comfort’’ of the nonmaterial kind: ease,
well-being, consolation, help, solace, and relief. In acquiring hatred,
whites lose feelings and practices of love.
I am interested here, then, in exploring further what we whites give
up as human beings in ‘‘love of humanity’’ to a racist system. I am
interested in psyche as human soul, spirit, or mind. The subject here
is racist consciousness, which I want to theorize a bit via slave apolo-
gists, slave narratives, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, and my own
experiences as a white southerner, living my lifetime in a region still
shaped by slavery. I believe that in the United States we have not been
able to have a clear conversation about our emotional pain. Instead, we
have alternative discourses that get to part of the dynamic but obfus-
cate the sources of pain in historical imbalances of power. This essay is
an attempt to close the gap between the personal and the political,
between the intimate and the public, the emotional and the historical.

A Rock Feels No Pain

These considerations of the personal cost of exploitative systems are
not abstract questions for me. My search for answers began inevitably
in my own family’s pain. Before exploring the more theoretical im-
plications of the questions I am asking, I want to share with you how
these issues have arisen in my own life. For it is from my own life that
my questions, and my tentative answers, emerge. To talk about ‘‘the
souls of white people’’ without talking about myself as white, myself as
soul, would be more hypocritical than I could endure. I elaborated
much of this autobiographical material in Memoir of a Race Traitor, but
am seeking to explore and extend it here.
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 47

My mother was chronically ill and addicted to prescription drugs,

from which she died a slow and painful death; my father withdrew for
years into silence; my brother and sister and I were left to fend for
ourselves amid our mother’s periodic bouts of illness. During these
times my mother (who was lively and loving when she was feeling
good) withdrew almost completely from us physically and emotion-
ally, or left home indefinitely for the latest cure—which all that was left
of her grandfather’s capital allowed her to do. My legacy was a deep
sense of pessimism, a distrust for the world in which I found myself, a
chronic sense of guilt and responsibility for whatever I must have
done to make her sick, and a need to maintain semblances of control
amid the turmoil. One of my technologies of anesthesia was eating.
Food became both nurture and narcotic. After a heavy dinner of roast
beef and potatoes and vegetables laced with lard, I could sleep o√
‘‘family time’’ on Sunday afternoons up in my room or in front of the
tv. Or I would go on summer-long diets, starving myself.
Raised in a segregationist family in Alabama, I had an increasing
sense of alienation and di√erence throughout my adolescence: a
growing disquiet about my mother’s mental health, an increasing
dismay over white racism literally exploding all around me, and a fear
that I was somehow di√erent in a way that would keep me from ever
finding or giving love. I read voraciously, trying to understand what
was happening to my world and to find some larger version of it; but I
also intellectualized most of my feelings, which were increasingly
complicated by a lesbian adolescence for which I had no language. I
attended college at a small liberal arts school forty miles from home,
although I had longed to get out of the state. In Montgomery, where
the bus boycotts had launched the civil rights movement a decade
before, the black freedom and antiwar movements of the late sixties
passed me by. If I had joined the protest movements of the times, I
might have focused my anger and acquired more hope. Instead, in
1971 I headed o√ to graduate school in North Carolina, running as
much from the racism as the homophobia. I had a strong conviction
that if I stayed in Alabama, I could not live. But I came up to North
Carolina to graduate school with an incoherent rage—a rebel without
a cause.
In grad school, I experienced periodic bouts of depression; I felt as
if I were boxing blindfolded with a giant who would occasionally floor
me. Pat, my first woman lover, would sing Simon and Garfunkel,
48 mab segrest

saying that it described me: ‘‘I have my books and my poetry to protect
me; I am shielded in my armor. Safe within my room, silent in my
tomb, I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an
island. A rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.’’ Crises in my
closeted relationship with Pat took me to group therapy in my mid-
twenties. Two psychiatry residents introduced me to the concept that I
could think about my feelings in ways that made me less at the mercy
of my more destructive ones, to begin to align mind and heart. I went
back to therapy a couple more times—to couples counseling in that
first relationship and then in my second long-term relationship, with
Barbara, which has lasted now for eighteen years. One thing I came to
understand is how often I played out my relationship with my mother
in other relationships, holding my breath for disaster; or I became my
father, withdrawing into silence. This fear, this silence, this pain: in
their thickness they were surely more than one generation old?
In Memoir of a Race Traitor, I searched for the interfaces between
my (white) subjective life and history. I found them repeatedly. I had
known that part of my mother’s sadness came from having lost her
father, whom she idolized, when she was three. He died of influenza
in 1918, in part because he was in poor health from having caught
malaria when he went o√ as a young man to fight in the Spanish-
American War. He was an engineer, a traveler, an adventurer—and
caught his second case of malaria from an expedition up some Central
American river when he was in Panama working on the canal. I had
never considered his relationship to his own father, Judge James
Cobb, who came sharply into focus for me in the process of writing:
Confederate o≈cer; Democratic Judge, who threw Republican Recon-
struction o≈cials into the chain gang; then Congressman, until he
was kicked out of Congress for voter fraud against an insurgent inter-
racial Populist movement in 1894. Before he died, he helped to redraft
the Alabama constitution to bring in Jim Crow. And, I know from
my mother’s stories, he beat his children, including my grandfather
Ben—who perhaps left home for war and adventure to flee this rigid
father.
My father’s sister shared with me the story of their grandfather, also
a Civil War veteran, who had died in the public insane asylum about
the time Judge Cobb was reworking the state constitution. Charles
Segrest’s family had committed him when he began imagining that
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 49

men were shooting at him from trees and was inclined to return fire.
Charles had fought as a foot soldier in the Carolinas and Virginia, then
walked all the way to Alabama at the end of the war. His psychic break
seemed liked post-traumatic stress disorder, now more familiar to us
from Vietnam vets. My aunt explained the stigma under which she
and my father had grown up, having a certified crazy person in the
family. I began to understand my father’s silence more. What I saw
was at the root of both my parents’ pain: in a very real sense, it origi-
nated in my families’ involvements in racist wars and their aftermath,
racist peace.
Political struggle, like therapy, has been a source of healing in my
life. If I was using therapy to pursue more emotional balance, I was
also, on a parallel track, increasingly politicized. Coming out as a
lesbian in 1976–77 was the first step in my politicization, and it
opened me up creatively. I began writing seriously and joined a collec-
tive doing lesbian feminist cultural work. This soon led me to antira-
cist activism within the lesbian and gay community. In 1983 I left both
a closeted teaching job and what was beginning to feel like ghettoiza-
tion within the lesbian community. I began organizing against a grow-
ing neo-Nazi movement and climate in North Carolina with many
other people, a majority of them heterosexual African Americans. I
increasingly focused my anger outward in organizing for ‘‘social
change’’: change of the homophobic world that had so isolated me and
of the racism that had dismayed me with its violent fury as a child
and an adolescent. I had an instinctive sense that the forces of race and
class that white Alabamians had acted out so flagrantly were the same
forces that, interacting with a misogynist world, were still destroying
my mother’s health. Her body was in a process of slow deterioration,
an organ at a time, a process that left me anxious, fearful, and bereft.
Something was killing my mother. I would locate and slay that dragon:
revolution as both therapy and revenge.
Therapy also provided part of the framework by which I understood
my antifascist organizing. The acquittal of Klansmen and neo-Nazis
for the murders of anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro in 1979
had opened a floodgate of white supremacist organizing and racist
violence. The neo-Nazi White Patriot Party was organizing all over the
state, running candidates for public o≈ce (free publicity for the most
racist propaganda), and marching its battalion, first one hundred,
50 mab segrest

then three and four hundred strong, through little towns across the
state. We began to show links between members of the White Patriot
Party and The Order, a white terrorist organization in the West. We
were doing our best to sound the alarm, but the resistance was incred-
ible. The epidemic of cross burnings across the state were ‘‘pranks’’ or
‘‘isolated incidents,’’ according to reports in county newspapers. Pa-
triot leader Glenn Miller’s boasts of building up a white Christian
army to take back the South—a violation of the state’s paramilitary
laws—was merely ‘‘free speech,’’ although it was accompanied by in-
creasing acts of racist violence. I kept telling reporters: this man is
confessing to a crime (breaking the state’s paramilitary laws). What we
kept running into felt like the massive denial I had experienced in my
family as an adolescent, when most of the whites I knew had refused
to acknowledge the reality, much less the moral significance, of the
violent white resistance to black freedom movements. ‘‘Denial’’ was
also a concept popular in Twelve-Step programs, which for a while I
also attended: that is, people in denial about their addictions. I began
to formulate a metaphysics of genocide: people don’t need to respond
to what they can pretend they do not know, and they don’t know what
they can’t feel.
In 1985, I became coordinator of North Carolinians Against Racist
and Religious Violence, and I immersed myself in anti-Klan organiz-
ing in communities all across North Carolina. The work had its own
urgencies, to which I added my own. In a growing climate of violence, I
worked myself to exhaustion. I brought all my old anxiety of abandon-
ment by my mother into play with my new anxieties about Klan vio-
lence; all my old pessimism and fatalism into a new fear of growing
fascism; my old rage at my mother’s pain into my new anger at the pain
experienced by the people I was working with, many of whom had lost
loved ones in moments of searing violence. But putting these feelings
into an organizing context helped me to become more conscious of
them. It gave me a context to resolve old conflicts. In the short term, it
broke me down; I got sick for several months and couldn’t seem to get
well. We were working on multiple murders in two di√erent counties,
and in neither locale did justice prevail. In spite of early victories, the
depth of racism and homophobia in these environments was beyond
our capacity to change. But, di≈cult and messy as the process was, I
broke down in a way I needed. I studied the shards and began to
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 51

reassemble them. I saw that things would get even worse before they
would get better in my lifetime. But my reaction should not be one of
pessimism and despair, but of love and hope. From the shards, the
fragments, the pieces, this question of soul began to emerge. What
happens, in white supremacist culture, to the souls of white folks?

The Anesthesia of Power

My own experience of the e√ects of racism, then, begins inevitably in
the South. Our regional black-white experience of racism is not the
only racial experience in the United States, of course, but it is one
of the prototypical ones. ‘‘Next to the case of the black race within
our bosom, that of the red on our borders is the problem ba∆ing to
the policy of the country,’’ former President James Madison explained
in 1826. And, as Du Bois argued, ‘‘Negro slavery’’ formed the basis
for class relations in modern commerce and industry the world over.
The southern white plantation experience of the ‘‘black race in our
bosom’’ can give us language for the intimate experience of racism in
the United States, as captured both in ‘‘slave narratives’’ (the liberation
stories of slaves who escaped the South) and slave apologists (the
white southern writers who generated defenses of slavery in the thirty
years before the Civil War, when slavery as an institution was under
the complex set of challenges that eventually brought it down). The
apologists were much more frank about claiming racism than we are
today, when much of racial language is coded but racism is still en-
trenched. The ‘‘playing field’’ of five hundred years is supposedly
evened by two civil rights laws; U.S. culture is now ‘‘color blind’’; and
the primary form of discrimination is ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ experi-
enced by white men. Reading the unapologetic apologists for slavery
can give us insight into the enduring e√ects of racism on white con-
sciousness shaped within the family.
On southern plantations, this family was quite a mess. The white
father/master/owner was married to a white woman, who bore his
white children. But he also raped the African women who were his
slaves and who also bore his children. The white children inherited
their darker siblings, whom they never acknowledged as kin. (The
claim that Thomas Je√erson fathered children by Sally Hemings, an
African woman whom he owned as a slave, has been supported by
52 mab segrest

DNA analysis.) The white women got the rap for frigidity, the African
woman for promiscuity, a split that justified the white father’s rape.
When the white father wanted to, he could sell o√ the black portion of
his family and send them ‘‘down the river,’’ breaking the hearts of
African parents and children alike.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
plunges the reader immediately into the identity confusions inherent
in the plantation family:
The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be
true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my pur-
pose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that
slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the chil-
dren of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their
mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own
lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as
well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slave-
holder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation
of master and father . . .
The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his
slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel
as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own
children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of human-
ity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip
them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his
brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and
ply the gory lash to his naked back.∏
Remarkable in Douglass’s explanation of the e√ects of the ‘‘double
relation of master and father’’ is the mirror, the e√ect of the ‘‘double
relation of slave and son.’’ Douglass explains in the early section of his
narrative that ‘‘the whisper that my master was my father, may or may
not be true.’’π In the passage cited, responsibility for the beating is
displaced onto the white mistress, with the father ‘‘compelled’’ to sell
his slave children, or else the father as master who ‘‘must’’ whip them
or watch his sons do the same. Douglass must give the father/master
either no agency or no humanity, and it is the agency that goes. Doug-
lass describes his master’s beating of his aunt Hester—we assume his
mother’s sister—because she had been keeping company with an Afri-
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 53

can, Ned Roberts. Douglass makes clear the sadistic, sexualized nature
of the whipping:
Before he commenced whipping aunt Hester, he took her into the
kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck,
shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her
hands . . . ‘‘Now you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey
my orders!’’ . . . The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped;
and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He
would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her
hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing
the blood-clotted cowskin.∫
Douglass called this event ‘‘the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the
hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass’’—a vaginal passage
that inclined him to identify with the white manhood of his father
against his African mother, even as he challenged the institution of
slavery that held them both in thrall.
What happens to white emotional life in such an environment? Is
there anything left from all of this that white folks can call a ‘‘soul’’?
Douglass gives a terrifying description of the way that the near total
control over African bodies that white men had on southern planta-
tions created depraved white people capable of great atrocities. Henry
Hughes, a slave apologist writing in 1854, gave some insight into the
soul-destroying dynamic of the plantation. He wrote of what he called
the ‘‘Orderer’s esthetic’’ and its implications for human relationships:
‘‘But the esthetic system is both positive and negative. It is not for the
production of pleasure only. It is for the prevention of pain. It is both
eunesthetic and anesthetic. Warrenteeism [his euphemism for slav-
ery] as it is, is essentially anesthetic. It systematically eliminates bodily
pain. It actualizes comfort for all.’’Ω Such accounts as Douglass’s of his
master’s beating of Hester show how completely Hughes encodes the
masters’ point of view in his analysis of slavery as a system that ‘‘elimi-
nates bodily pain.’’ Clearly, it does not eliminate pain in bodies of
Africans, who are not considered fully human. Rather, it intensifies
pain beyond endurance. But what does it do to white bodies? What is
this ‘‘anesthetic esthetic’’ that Hughes articulates?
Although aesthetics is that branch of philosophy that deals with
judgments concerning beauty, it comes from aisthēsis, ‘‘to perceive.’’
54 mab segrest

Anesthesia adds the prefix a(n), signifying a blocked perception trans-

lated as ‘‘insensibility . . . the loss of sensation without a loss of con-
sciousness.’’ Sensation is ‘‘a perception associated with stimulation of
a sense organ or with a specific bodily condition’’ connected with ‘‘the
faculty to feel or perceive.’’∞≠ Sensation, then, begins in impulses from
eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, central nervous system—as the brain
‘‘perceives’’ or interprets them. These sensations also have associated
feelings—localized somatically in the chest and metaphorically in the
‘‘heart.’’ Consciousness, then, is an amalgam of sensation, perception
about those sensations that become thought and the emotions that
respond to them. The particular anesthesia of slavery seems to block
the feeling from consciousness, leaving a more abstracted ‘‘reason.’’∞∞
Necessary to the slave system was the masters’ blocked sensation of its
pain, an aesthetic that left him insensible not only to the fellow human
beings he enslaved but also to the testimony of his senses.
The Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut provide an addi-
tional gloss, from a white woman’s (slave mistress’s) point of view, on
Hughes’s notion of the soul-destroying anesthesia necessary for the
maintenance of power. The contradictory position of ‘‘woman’’ and
‘‘mistress’’ made Chesnut more vulnerable to feeling the pain of dom-
ination and gave her the space to articulate her contradictory status.
Mary Chesnut’s husband served in Confederate president Je√erson
Davis’s cabinet during the Civil War, and she enjoyed her status and
vehemently supported the Confederate cause. Yet her diary in places
makes analogies between the condition of women and of slaves. She
felt the schisms in her culture more than many white upper-class
women of her day, making her both observer and site of struggle for
the forces contending within southern slave society in its penultimate
moment. She describes a ‘‘tragedy’’ she observed on the auction block:
A mad woman taken from her husband and children. Of course
she was mad, or she would not have given her grief words in that
public place. Her keepers were along. What she said was rational
enough, pathetic, at times heart-rending. It excited me so I quietly
took opium. It enables me to retain every particle of mind or sense
or brains I have, and so quiets my nerves that I can calmly reason
and take rational views of things otherwise maddening.∞≤
In this remarkable passage, we arrive again at the anesthetic of
slavery. The African woman in her reasonable grief gives voice to
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 55

her pain, and Chesnut’s perception of her situation rends the white
woman’s heart, arousing dangerous sensation and feeling—‘‘excite-
ment’’—which she immediately blocks quite literally by opium in a
‘‘systematic elimination of bodily pain.’’ She loses ‘‘sensation without
the loss of consciousness,’’ and her quieted nerves leave her with a
distracted rationality—the ability to ‘‘take rational views of things oth-
erwise maddening.’’ This process also distorts the body’s feedback
system to let us know that something is dangerously awry. ‘‘Poor
women, poor slaves’’: Mary Chesnut only articulated what Hughes
and others explained more dispassionately: ‘‘All other people in the
State, who are not sovereign people, are subsovereign. To this class
belong women, minors, criminals, lunatics and idiots, aliens and all
others unqualified or disqualified’’∞≥ (not to mention how it might
make a person lunatic or criminal to be constantly ‘‘unqualified or
disqualified’’).
These passages, which describe and defend the institution of chat-
tel slavery around which much of what we call racism evolved on this
continent, suggest that there is not only a psychology but also a phys-
iology of racism: it encodes itself in our ‘‘consciousness’’ through our
central nervous system. Its energy enters our energy, which also is our
sexual energy. Its spirit enters our body. That thing that it partially
displaces when it does so is what I am calling ‘‘soul.’’
Is the blunted white consciousness described in Chesnut and
Hughes only a white upper-class southern phenomenon? (As Du Bois
points out, in the antebellum South there were five million white
people who held no slaves, and an oligarchy of 8,000 among the two
million slaveholders.)∞∂ I do not think so. Rather, in their frank chart-
ing of the psychology of mastery in the South in the mid-nineteenth
century, Douglass, Hughes and Chesnut articulate a process basic to
racist consciousness and to the generic consciousness of domination.
As Hughes explained, ‘‘In any order there are two classes. These are
the, (1) Ordered or Superordinates, and the, (2), Orderees or Subordi-
nates. This, of necessity.’’∞∑
I find it helpful to read southern accounts of slavery (theoretical and
personal, black and white) against a European equivalent: Hegel’s
analysis of ‘‘Lordship and Bondage’’ in The Phenomenology of Mind,
published in 1807. Hegel makes a chilling distinction between two
modes of consciousness, which are always in relationships of domi-
nance and subordination: ‘‘The one is independent, and its essential
56 mab segrest

nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is

life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the
latter the Bondsman.’’∞∏ However, the Master is dependent on his sub-
ordinate for his self-existence, giving the Bondsman more chance of
‘‘real and true independence’’—an independence that does not come,
in Hegel’s worldview, from insurrection but rather from continued
subordination.∞π
For Hegel, this is the essential nature of human consciousness, not
a result of colonialism (which in one hundred years would result in
Europe’s controlling 80 percent of the globe) or patriarchy. For my
purposes, Hegel’s passage is useful precisely as a description of what
happens to consciousness under systems of domination—of ‘‘Orderer
and Orderee,’’ in the words of my slave apologist. Hegel calls this
struggle a ‘‘trial by death,’’ a process by which the two selves ‘‘cancel
their consciousness which had its place in this alien element of natu-
ral existence . . . and are sublated as terms or extremes.’’∞∫ The Master
holds the Bondsman in thrall in obvious ways, as ‘‘the power control-
ling the state of existence. . . . In other words he gets the enjoyment.’’
(Just so for Hughes: southern slavery ‘‘eliminates bodily pain’’ and
‘‘maximizes pleasure for all.’’ Simone de Beauvoir attributes to this
passage in Hegel the origin of discourses on Otherness.∞Ω But if Hegel
(typically European and typically male, I am arguing) had not had the
sense of ‘‘natural existence’’ as an ‘‘alien element,’’ might he have been
able to imagine relationships of mutuality and reciprocity and com-
munities built not on exclusion but inclusion?

A Lost Sense of Eternity

Segue to Sigmund Freud, another cartographer of modern European
(male) consciousness. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud de-
scribed the emotional void about and from which he theorized. Freud
published Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) in the last stage of
his theorizing, when he was extending the insights of psychoanalysis
developed over four decades into other spheres of human endeavor—
at the end of his ‘‘long road from cerebral anatomy and cerebral physi-
ology, by way of psychopathology to his new form of psychology
(metapsychology).’’≤≠ He was expanding the theoretical core—on the
interpretation of dreams as access to the ‘‘unconscious’’ in On the Psy-
chopathology of Everyday Life (1904) and The Interpretation of Dreams
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 57

(1900) and the fuller evocation of sexuality as libido in Three Essays on

Sexuality (1905) and Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17).
He had first begun his critique of religion in Totem and Taboo (1913)
and would end it in Moses and Monotheism (1939).
Freud begins Civilization and Its Discontents by citing a poet friend
who had responded to Freud’s debunking of religion in Future of an
Illusion (1927). This friend explained what he saw as the ‘‘true source
of religion’’ as a ‘‘sensation of eternity, of something limitless, un-
bounded.’’ This ‘‘oceanic feeling’’ connected a person to the world in
an ‘‘indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a
whole.’’ Freud confesses, ‘‘I cannot discover this oceanic feeling in
myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can at-
tempt to describe their physiological signs. Where this is not pos-
sible—and I am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of
characterization—nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational
context which is most readily associated with the feeling. . . . From my
own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of
such feeling.’’≤∞ Where Mary Chesnut frankly resorts to opium to
contain her feelings, Freud (who had his own cocaine problem) re-
sorts to psychoanalysis to justify the absence of his, ‘‘attempting to
discover a psycho-analytic explanation of such a feeling.’’
I bring Freud perhaps simplistically into this discussion on the
souls of white folks because in 1930 he was a Jew who had been
charting the European psyche for three decades, as it edged toward
fascism (a particularly European form of virulent racism). I also bring
this particular passage in because in it his poet friend points us to how
this complex consciousness (sensation, emotion, and thought) has a
spiritual dimension, the point of psyche where mind becomes soul, or
animating spirit, within and beyond. Its emotional content leads us
beyond ourselves to ‘‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one
with the external world as a whole.’’ Remarkably in the opening to
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud reveals the stunted nature of his
own consciousness, from and with which he charts ‘‘human’’ con-
sciousness in his psychoanalytic narratives of id, ego, and superego,
oedipal development, and so forth. Freud’s lack of a sense of ‘indissol-
uble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,’’ leaves
him with what Hegel called an ‘‘alien existence’’ that underlies the will
to mastery.
What happens to lost sensations and feelings? Much of his life,
58 mab segrest

Freud worked at answering this question. His terms for what I have
called ‘‘sensation’’ are ‘‘sense,’’ ‘‘sensation,’’ ‘‘principle,’’ and ‘‘instinct,’’
the last of which he defines as ‘‘the source of a state of excitation within
the body.’’≤≤ He ultimately collapsed all instincts into two categories:
sexual instincts and death instincts. In Civilization and Its Discontents,
one of his last formulations, Freud described the dynamic whereby
sexual instinct, or desire, is antithetical to (Western) civilization. ‘‘It is
impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a
renunciation of instinct.’’ Isolated individuals enter community ‘‘by a
sacrifice of their instincts [to a rule of law] . . . which leaves no one . . .
at the mercy of brute force.’’ He variously classifies the processes of
renunciation or sacrifice, such as repression, suppression, sublima-
tion, and dissociation. By implication, this is a Western (European)
process. It is ‘‘white folks’’ who do it. He writes: ‘‘Civilization behaves
towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which
has subjected another to its exploitation. Fear of a revolt by the sup-
pressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures. A high-
water mark in such a development has been reached in our Western
European civilization.’’≤≥ Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization
paraphrases Freud:
Free gratification of man’s instinctual needs is incompatible with
civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the
prerequisites of progress. Happiness must be subordinated to the
discipline of work as full-time occupation, to the discipline of
monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and
order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced de-
flection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture.≤∂
By Freud’s formulation, instinctual gratification, revolt, and free-
dom lie outside European culture, which is constituted to repress
them. He observes that the human ‘‘desire for freedom may be their
revolt against some existing injustice’’ that springs ‘‘from the remains
of their original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and
may thus become the basis in them of hostility to civilization.’’ Here
Freud draws on Darwin to code civilization as European, with the
original ‘‘untamed’’ personality coming from the more ‘‘primitive’’
cultures that Europe subdued: civilization and its discontents, sub-
limation and prior instinct, recapitulate the relationship between colo-
nizer and colonized. Repression of instinctual feelings, like the con-
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 59

quest of ‘‘primitive’’ cultures, made inevitable what Freud called the

‘‘return of the repressed,’’ a kind of psychic revolution congruent with
national independence movements then active in Asia, Latin America,
and Africa.≤∑
Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization was the first to specify that
the European ‘‘civilization’’ that suppressed instinct is or was the civili-
zation of industrial capitalism. ‘‘Behind the reality principle lies the
fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot ), which means that
the struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for the satis-
faction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, de-
lay’’ by some for others. The ‘‘brute fact of scarcity’’ is a consequence
of a ‘‘specific organization of scarcity’’ under capitalism that makes
renunciation of instinct and desire necessary in order for workers to
be able to carry out all the alienated labor required of them.≤∏
The a√ective void from which feelings and perceptions have been
blocked in oneself and cast onto Others is the psychological space
from which whiteness and maleness have been mobilized throughout
their histories. What happens in the space between Hegel’s dominat-
ing self and dominated other, between Hughes’s Orderer and Or-
deree, was what Freud called ‘‘projection.’’ And the result of such
projection is a high state of unconsciousness: in Hughes’s terms,
anesthesia, a stripping away from fuller consciousness of strata of per-
ception.≤π This void both justifies racist exploitation (by projecting
onto the exploited all the cast-o√ fearsome and evil feelings of the ex-
ploiter—Freud’s projection) and holds it in place (the exploiter cannot
then feel the violence of his acts, because he cannot feel—Hughes’s
anesthesia).
Within U.S. culture, various therapeutic movements since Freud
have begun to reveal the extent to which exploitative relationships
have cost us personally, familially, and socially. They have elaborated
the cost of our anesthesia; of how the emotional void, once vacated, is
filled again and again with destructive and compulsive thoughts, feel-
ings, and habits. In the past twenty years, also, the Right has made
use of what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘‘a√ective epidemics’’—around
drugs, the family, nationalism, and so forth: ‘‘Questions of fact and
representation become secondary to the articulation of people’s emo-
tional fears and hopes. This partly explains the new conservatism’s
‘ideological’ successes: they have been able to control specific vectors
without having to confront the demands of policy and public action.
60 mab segrest

Similarly they have been able to construct issues with enormous pub-
lic passion . . . without leaving any space for public engagement.’’≤∫
Or, as Marcuse put it, ‘‘The era tends to be totalitarian even where it
has not produced totalitarian states.’’≤Ω Promisekeepers, the Christian
‘‘men’s movement,’’ mass in football stadiums, hold one another, and
weep—and make blood promises to regain dominion over the family
for the one race.

Toward the Thirteenth Step

What would it mean to open up therapeutic discourses and practices
more fully to their political implications? To begin to answer that
question, I want to look at two pervasive mental health movements
based in discourses on ‘‘addiction’’ and on ‘‘dysfunctional families.’’
The Twelve-Step Program, originating in the 1930s and 1940s
in response to an epidemic of alcoholism, has proliferated into a
variety of Twelve-Step programs, in which addiction has become a
characteristic of the central problems of the culture. The World Health
Organization defines addiction as ‘‘a pathological relationship to any
mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences.’’ Mary
Chesnut blocked painful feelings with opium. Freud describes a very
similar process:
The most interesting methods of averting su√ering are those
which seek to influence our own organism. In the last analysis, all
su√ering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as
we feel it, and we only feel it in consequence of certain ways in
which our organism is regulated. The crudest, but also the most
e√ective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—
intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands
its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances
which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us
pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions gov-
erning our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving un-
pleasurable impulses. The two e√ects not only occur simulta-
neously, but seem to be intimately bound up with each other.≥≠
‘‘Averting su√ering’’ by chemical means or compulsive processes is
the emotional basis of addiction. Within the ‘‘recovery movement,’’
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 61

problematic addictions range from heroin and alcohol to shopping

and too much of the wrong kinds of love.
Entering into a Twelve-Step program was inevitable for me, given
that my mother’s issue was addiction, and I had, still, an issue with
food, and given the growing presence of ‘‘recovery’’ programs in the
lesbian community. With the other folks in my Overeaters Anony-
mous group—95 percent women of various sizes, many of whom I
would consider downright skinny—I would close each meeting with
the Serenity Prayer: ‘‘God, give me the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wis-
dom to know the di√erence.’’ But I could never quite get it right: ‘‘God
give me the courage to change the things I cannot change’’ was my
shorthanded version. I got as far as the first nine steps. Through the
first three steps, I admitted that my problem with eating was out of
my control, that its solution was beyond me, and that I could turn to
a ‘‘higher power’’ for help (‘‘hp,’’ in the shorthand of many of the
women in the group, although that always made me think of ‘‘horse
power,’’ water-skiing behind an Evinrude motor).
Steps four through nine involved taking a fearless and searching
moral inventory, sharing it with God and another person, and making
amends. At first I resisted, since over-responsibility was one of my
patterns. But I came to see that this process helped to undercut my
sense of victimhood; there were aspects of the emotional and interper-
sonal conflicts in which I found myself to which I contributed. If I
could at least change my own part of the interaction, I could perhaps
shift the relationship in a more positive way. Practicing acknowledg-
ing the times when I made particular mistakes so I could move on
(rather than always being guilty for everything) was also helpful. I
taught in a minimum security prison for six months, and most of the
young black men who were my students went from my ged class to
Twelve-Step programs—both of which on hot days were preferable to
the road gang.
Twelve-step discussions rightly recognize, I think, that addictions
are behavior patterns used to control feelings of pain or depression or
hopelessness or rage. But why are we so miserable in the first place,
and where did we get the encouragement to deal with this unhappi-
ness and emotional disorder through substance abuse? Those ques-
tions lie beyond the scope of the Twelve Steps. They take us into a
62 mab segrest

history of racist, sexist capitalism.≥∞ As Elayne Rapping argues in The

Culture of Recovery: ‘‘That these [addictive] behaviors, in today’s world,
do indeed reflect the growing self-destructiveness of people trying
desperately to keep up and succeed in a competitive, market-driven
world is masked in public discourse by the idea that ‘addictive disor-
ders’ are genetically—not socially—engendered.’’≥≤
Attending Overeaters Anonymous and reading about racism, I
picked up the connection between addiction and capitalism first when
C. L. R. James explained how Europeans developing a taste for co√ee
and cocoa had finally made African slavery profitable. The sugar
that went into both drinks came from sugar plantations in the Carib-
bean, and the addictive qualities of sugar, cocoa, and ca√eine created
enough of a market that the huge losses in the slave trade (which is to
say, all the Africans who died in the Middle Passage) could be o√set by
the new, addictive demand for sugar. The ‘‘triangle trade’’ from Africa
to New England to the Caribbean also had at its center sugar and rum,
other addictive substances. The cash crop for slave plantations in
North Carolina was tobacco—which also fueled the growth of Dur-
ham, my hometown, by robber tobacco baron James B. Duke. Duke
liked to brag that he ‘‘taught the world to smoke.’’ One of the first
companies to use modern marketing techniques, American Tobacco
sent free cigarettes into the desert of North Africa, or gave them away
on the streets of Asian cities, or handed packs to immigrants coming
o√ the boats in the United States. Duke understood too that an addic-
tive demand would allow him to run up his supply. Expanding capital-
ism had built addiction into the whole culture, starting with slavery.
In the week that I finished this essay, the Raleigh News and Observer
carried a story originally run in the San Jose Mercury detailing the steps
by which the Central Intelligence Agency helped the Nicaraguan con-
tras sell crack cocaine very cheaply to gangs in Los Angeles to fund
their war against the Sandinistas, and how this diabolical scheme
introduced crack to this country, a substance so addictive that people
would murder for it, destroying untold lives and devastating Ameri-
can cities. There is only so much Twelve-Stepping can do in the face of
racist, genocidal government schemes that create addiction for profit
and control.
The Twelve Steps gave me a set of emotional guidelines that, when
I applied them, could indeed help, in the words of the program, re-
store my personal emotional life to sanity. But I felt some equally deep
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 63

need to help restore to sanity the life of my culture. As far as amends

go, how do humans ‘‘make amends’’ for slavery, or genocide—espe-
cially when the Eleventh Tradition taught us that the Twelve-Step Pro-
gram ‘‘has no opinion on outside issues; hence . . . ought never to be
drawn into controversy’’? Would folks in ‘‘the Program’’ have a dif-
ferent attitude toward a≈rmative action, say, if they thought politically
about amends and saw their own emotional investment in a restored
cultural sanity? Also, serenity was not an emotional state with which I
had much a≈nity, righteously pissed o√ as I felt at most forms of
authority. And why was this called the ‘‘Serenity Prayer,’’ anyway? Why
emphasize acceptance of what could not be changed? Why not the
‘‘Wisdom Prayer’’? Or even better, the ‘‘Courage Prayer?’’ What space
is there for divine discontent? What if my ‘‘spiritual awakening’’ in the
Twelfth Step included liberation theology? Might not there be some
Thirteenth Step, such as ‘‘eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, and
capitalism?’’

The ‘‘Dysfunctional Family’’ Becomes Redundant

Another therapeutic discourse that obfuscates the source of emotional
pain is the discourse on dysfunctional families, which emerged in part
from Twelve-Step programs and in part from the rediscovery of incest
in the evolution of both feminism and therapy (a discovery that Freud
soon suppressed with his oedipal theory and his theory of female
hysteria, his own most flagrant projection, according to Je√rey Mas-
son).≥≥ These therapies also elaborate on Freud. John Bradshaw is one
of the popularizers of this ‘‘family therapy’’ that addresses ‘‘dysfunc-
tion.’’ Bradshaw traces his psychotherapeutic lineage back to R. D.
Laing, the existentialist psychotherapist who suggested the theory of
family systems, elaborated on by Milton Erickson, Gregory Bateson,
Carl Whitaker, and Virginia Satif, among others. Freud observed that
su√ering ‘‘exists in so far as we feel it.’’ Both discussions of addiction
and of dysfunctional families acknowledge that su√ering exists in
relationships (or systems) and that one person’s denial augments an-
other person’s pain in a family (or, I would add, a social) system.
Feelings will out.
According to Bradshaw, a ‘‘functional family’’ is one in which each
person gets to have her own thoughts, feel her own feelings, express
her own ideas and creativity. The alternative—so common as to make
64 mab segrest

‘‘dysfunctional family’’ redundant—was ‘‘enmeshment’’: everybody

glommed on to each other, undi√erentiated, the kind of togetherness
that leaves us ultimately alone. According to Bradshaw, children in
dysfunctional families su√er from abuse, abandonment, or neglect,
and they learn behaviors in response to environments where to vari-
ous degrees alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, battering, and sexual
abuse are rampant: in other words, the typical American family of the
past several decades.≥∂
Bradshaw traces the ‘‘crisis in society’’ to a ‘‘crisis in the family,’’ and
he sees the family as that context that sets the rules about what it
means to be human. He argues that these rules (‘‘poisonous ped-
agogies’’) are abusive and shaming and that shame is soul-murdering.
Shame occurs primarily through parental abandonment of children,
triggered by behavior ranging from physically leaving a child, to not
providing for its needs, to sexual abuse, to enforced secret-keeping. In
this abandonment, the child is forced to take care of the parents, rather
than the reverse. The child cannot bear to admit how badly the parent
is doing, so he forms a ‘‘fantasy bond,’’ deifying the parent and taking
on the blame himself. ‘‘For a child at this stage to realize the inade-
quacies of parents would produce unbearable anxiety.’’ The ego de-
fends itself through a number of numbing processes: idealization,
denial, repression, and dissociation. The child projects her own split
and false self onto others and adopts a rigid mask. This shame is then
passed on to another generation when the former child has children.
Bradshaw traces the origins of ‘‘poisonous pedagogy’’ to the shift from
the agricultural to the factory system 150 years ago, when fathers
became absent and mothers bonded too closely with children.
What the dysfunctional family discourse does not do is point to
sexism, racism, classism, or homophobia as a source of the sadness or
anger that overwhelms people or as a source of the cultural system
that then gives them no expression for those feelings other than denial
or oblivion. To talk about a shift from the agricultural to the factory
system, which absented fathers, is to talk about industrial capitalism.
To talk about authoritarian systems by which fathers operate as gods is
to talk about sexism or patriarchy. What more dysfunctional family
might there be than the southern plantation family as described by
Frederick Douglass? What bigger ‘‘boundary violations’’ than slavery
or the genocide of indigenous people?
Bradshaw uses Hitler as the ultimate example of the destructive
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 65

e√ects of poisonous pedagogy, tracing Nazism to authoritarian and

abusive family systems in Germany and to Hitler’s emotional and
physical abuse as a child. That’s a good enough point—as far as it goes.
But what about centuries of racist practices and ideologies as they
landed on Jews in the form of anti-Semitism? What about the German
insistence on expansion and militarism consistent with imperialism?
It’s all right to psychologize history, as Bradshaw does, if we at the
same time historicize psychology.≥∑
What, then, is the cost to white people of racism? Perhaps now we
can more accurately make the assessment, recognizing that racism
implicates systems of oppression based on gender and class, on pa-
triarchy, capitalism, and heterosexism:
Racism costs us intimacy.
Racism costs us our a√ective lives.
Racism costs us authenticity.
Racism costs us our sense of connection to other humans and the
natural world.
Racism costs us our spiritual selves: ‘‘a feeling of an indissoluble
bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,’’ as Freud’s poet
friend tried to explain.

Out of Slavery
Of course, not only white people pay this cost. And not only Orderers
do. Frederick Douglass knew that he too paid the cost of his a√ective
life to slavery when he, like many other slave infants, was separated
from his mother, an abandonment over which she had absolutely no
control: ‘‘For what this separation has done, I do not know, unless it be
to hinder the development of the child’s a√ection toward its mother,
and to blunt and destroy the natural a√ection of the mother for the
child.’’≥∏ Douglass never saw his mother ‘‘by the light of day.’’ Four or
five times, she walked the twelve miles to see him after her day’s work.
‘‘Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing pres-
ence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death
with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death
of a stranger.’’
Douglass’s narrative tells the story of ‘‘how a man was made a slave
and how a slave was made a man’’ through a process of many years of
reclaiming the oceanic feeling of connection. Ironically, this life of
66 mab segrest

feeling was also all around him in his fellow slaves, singing their way
through the woods, their spirituals ‘‘revealing at once the highest joy
and the deepest sadness . . . a tale of woe . . . tones loud, long, and
deep.’’ Douglass learns ‘‘the pathway from slavery to freedom’’ when
his master forces his mistress to stop teaching him to read because ‘‘it
would forever unfit him to be a slave.’’ Poor white children in his
neighborhood teach him the alphabet, and they ‘‘express for [him] the
liveliest sympathy.’’ He begins to abhor slavery so much that he wishes
himself dead, until he learns the word ‘‘abolition,’’ the light ‘‘breaking
in on [him] by degrees.’’ He realizes his strong attachment to his
young white friends when he is sent back to the country from Bal-
timore. Back on the plantation, he falls under Covey, the slave breaker,
and is whipped severely over a period of months, broken in ‘‘body, soul
and spirit.’’ He runs away to ask his master for mercy and is refused.
On the way back, he is befriended by Sandy, a slave with a free wife.
Sandy gives him a magical root that ‘‘would render it impossible for
Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me.’’ Sandy’s solidarity
and his medicine prove powerful, and the next time Covey attacks,
Douglass fights back, beating the white man soundly. Covey never
beats him again. Defending himself gives Douglass self-confidence
and a determination to be free. By appropriating violence and the
ability to inflict pain, Douglass contradicts the anesthetic aesthetic that
slavery ‘‘actualizes comfort for all [white men].’’ By defending himself,
finally, when being beaten, perhaps he breaks his psychic identifica-
tion with the white master/father and reclaims some identification
with the black mother/slave, which augments his capacity for feeling.
Until this point, Douglass has carried the burden of a white mas-
culinity; by using the violence of slavery against itself, he claims a
revolutionary Black masculinity.≥π
He is sent back again to Baltimore, where he teaches other ‘‘dear
fellow slaves’’ to read in a Sabbath school at the house of a ‘‘free colored
man’’: ‘‘I loved them with a love stronger than anything I have experi-
enced since. . . . I believe we would have died for each other. We never
undertook to do anything, of any importance, without a mutual con-
sultation. We never moved separately. We were one; and as much so by
our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual hardship to which we
were necessarily subjected as slaves.’’≥∫ Paradoxically, the ‘‘number of
warm-hearted friends in Baltimore—‘‘friends that [he] loved more than
life’’—make his final escape both ‘‘painful beyond expression’’ and
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 67

finally possible. Douglass can escape the slave South when he has
completed the making of the slave into not so much a ‘‘man’’ as a
human, by reclaiming his capacity to feel and love (including to love his
African self enough to defend himself from white violence).
What does Frederick Douglass’s reclamation of his own humanity
and his ‘‘love of humanity’’ have to teach white people? Well, for one
thing, he responded to his ‘‘family dysfunction’’ first by escaping, then
by changing the structures that created the dysfunction. Douglass’s
narrative is part of his attack on the slave system that created his and
many others’ misery. And Frederick Douglass (with the help of a few
other people) abolished slavery by such e√orts. Perhaps if we are really
to ‘‘systematically eliminate bodily pain’’ of family dysfunction, as
Hughes would have us do, we should systematically eliminate racism,
homophobia, sexism, and capitalism. As Marcuse explained in the
preface to Eros and Civilization, ‘‘Private disorder reflects more directly
than before the disorder of the whole, and the cure of personal disor-
der depends more directly than before on the cure of the general
disorder.’’≥Ω
We can see in Douglass’s narratives the evolution of radical subjec-
tivity that Brazilian Paulo Freire called conscientizaçao, which involved
a praxis of action and reflection. This ‘‘critical thinking . . . perceives
reality as process, as transformation, rather than as static entity . . .
[and] does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses
itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved.’’ Thus Douglass
learns to act, and reflect, and act, and reflect, until he has gained a
fuller humanity for himself and his culture.
So I am not arguing for the elimination of therapeutic spaces such
as counseling or twelve-step programs. I am arguing for politicizing
them, using those reflective spaces to generate clearer actions, and
taking those actions back to absorb their full emotional and intellec-
tual and spiritual impact on our consciousness, and so on until we die.
Nor is this consciousness only critical thinking, as Freire terms it, but,
as we have seen, a thick soup of thought, feeling, and sensation, much
of which may not always be grounded in self-awareness. Such a di-
alogue requires an intense faith in humanity, in the ‘‘power to make
and remake, to create and re-create, faith in [the] vocation to be more
fully human.’’ It also requires some ability to negotiate this question of
white people’s souls.
Mary Chesnut’s pain, felt in response to the black woman on the
68 mab segrest

auction block, was her spontaneous biological and spiritual reaction to

another human’s exploitation and grief, the reassuring mark of her
humanity. Then she chose opium. The Grimké sisters, white southern
women of Chesnut’s generation, made another choice: abolitionism.
The active engagement with real structures, with (in Freire’s terms)
‘‘reality as transformation,’’ not only alleviates future su√ering; it is
itself therapeutic, because it brings us as humans back to our birth-
right of ‘‘love of humanity’’ and an ‘‘oceanic feeling’’ of connection,
with ourselves, with one another, and with the animate world. It
brings us to the moment when, or the place where, the fact of love
surpasses the fact of death, and we are restored our lost sense of
eternity.

Notes

1 My project in Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End, 1994) of break-

ing down the boundaries between the personal and the historical was
being pursued also by Catherine McClintock in Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, published a year later (New
York: Routledge, 1995). She wrote: ‘‘In the chapters that follow, I propose
the development of a situated psychoanalysis—a culturally contextualized
psychoanalysis that is simultaneously a psychoanalytically informed his-
tory. . . . In sum, Imperial Leather is written with the conviction that psy-
choanalysis and material history are mutually necessary for a strategic
engagement with unstable power’’ (72, 73).
2 John Bradshaw, Bradshaw on: The Family (Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health
Communications, 1988), 7–8.
3 bell hooks, Killing Rage/Ending Racism (New York: Holt, 1995), 152–53.
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York:
Atheneum, 1979), 30; see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race
and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), as
he presses ‘‘why the white working class settles for being white.’’
5 Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has
Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 18–21;
quoted in Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 6.
6 Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an Ameri-
can Slave, ed. Houston Baker Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1982), 49–50.
7 Ibid., 49.
8 Ibid., 52, 51.
9 Henry Hughes, ‘‘Treatise on Sociology,’’ in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslav-
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 69

ery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 256.
10 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.vv. ‘‘aesthetics,’’ ‘‘anes-
thesia.’’
11 Perhaps here we have the formula for fascist intelligence that justifies
genocidal practices in the name of the superior intelligence of a master
race, an intelligence seemingly devoid of human empathy or compassion.
See Richard J. Hernnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (New York:
Free Press, 1994), for its implications.
12 Mary Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 25–26.
13 Hughes, ‘‘Treatise,’’ 258.
14 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 26.
15 Hughes, ‘‘Treatise,’’ 243.
16 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York:
Harper and Row, 1967), 231, 234.
17 Ibid., 235–37.
18 Ibid., 233.
19 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York:
Vintage, 1953), xx. ‘‘Things become clear, on the contrary, if following
Hegel we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility toward every
other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed—he
sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential,
object.’’
20 Hans Kung, Freud and the Problem of God (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979), 27.
21 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 10–11.
22 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), chapter 4.
23 Freud, Discontents, 60.
24 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 3.
25 Marianna Torgovnick in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and McClintock in Imperial
Leather have a similar reading of this passage of Civilization and Its Dis-
contents. For Torgovnick, Freud’s ambivalence toward his position as a Jew
in Vienna as Europe edged toward fascism heightened his ambivalence
toward the primitive, a characteristic attributed to Jews by Nazi anti-
Semitism. But he was not able to reject his identification with power as
‘‘civilized’’: ‘‘Given the material he had to work with, Freud might have
arrived at a radical critique of the very idea of ‘hierarchy’ and ‘mastery’ in
70 mab segrest

the political contexts of the late twenties and thirties. . . . Instead, Freud
continued to lay siege to the top level of power’’ (201). She agrees that there
is much at stake in Freud’s rejection of the ‘‘oceanic’’ but focuses her
questions on a critique of gender, rather than on race and colonization, as I
am suggesting: ‘‘He never fully considers the questions invited by his
opening meditation on the oceanic. If there is a state of mind, and poten-
tially a state of culture, that could be derived from the original relationship
of our bodies to the bodies of our mothers, what di√erences in father-
centered psychoanalytic theories would follow? What di√erences in the
relation of men and women to the physical world would follow? What
political consequences would follow? Might these provide a form of ‘civili-
zation’ with fewer ‘discontents’?’’ (208). McClintock draws on Kristeva’s
explanation of abjection as a process by which ‘‘in order to become social
the self has to expunge certain elements that society deems impure. . . .
The abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order to
become social’’ (71). She continues in a vein similar to mine: ‘‘Abject
peoples are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do with-
out: slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the insane, the
unemployed, and so on’’ (72).
26 Marcuse, Eros 35–36.
27 Psychoanalysis was Freud’s brave attempt to heal the breach marked in
Hegel between dominating self and dominated other. With Freud this
dynamic had become in his later theory an internal drama: ego caught in
the middle between dominant superego and repressed id.
28 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism
and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 292.
29 Marcuse, Eros, xxvii.
30 Freud, Discontents, 27.
31 Elayne Rapping in The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help
Movement in Women’s Lives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) makes a more
extreme form of this argument:
Why are we in need of so many, more powerful crutches to get through
a day of life in America? I believe the reason is not ‘‘addictive personali-
ties’’ today any more than it was alcohol during the days of Prohibition.
But we can ‘‘come to believe’’ that addictive personalities do cause our
distress, personal and social. If we can further ‘‘come to believe’’ that
our compulsive attraction to food, shopping, or abusive mates is rooted
in diseases and allergies, which can be sometimes, partly, controlled by
a spiritual, confessional group process which can be extended and
enforced throughout society, we are on the road to a massive system of
social control—from church basements to prison wards—in which ac-
tual social problems are made invisible and things, somehow, keep
 ‘‘the souls of white folks’’ 71

getting worse. My long months of visiting and interviewing those who

maintain this now vast system of institutions and policies based upon
12-Step thinking and practice—an empire of medical/religious/health
professionals and entrepreneurs now so massive and influential as to
boggle the mind—convinced me we are well on our way down that
road. (80).
See also Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans.
Harriet de Onis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), originally pub-
lished in 1947.
32 Rapping, Culture of Recovery, 69.
33 Je√rey M. Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction
Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992).
34 Bradshaw, On the Family, 7–8.
35 McClintock and I are on the same track here. She calls for a ‘‘situated
psychoanalysis—a culturally contextualized psychoanalysis that is simulta-
neously a psychoanalytically informed history’’ (see note 1 above). I am
arguing not so much for a reform of psychoanalysis but for a way to
popularize the understanding of the emotional and spiritual cost of racism
to white people and more generally of oppressive systems to those who
perpetuate them.
36 Douglass, Narrative, 48.
37 Cynthia Willet, ‘‘The master-slave dialectic, Hegel versus Douglass,’’ in
Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy,
ed. Tommy L. Lott (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), 151–70.
38 Douglass, Narrative, 121–22.
39 Marcuse, Eros, xxvii.
 Ruth Frankenberg

The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness

Scholars of race, especially those of us who are poststructuralist and/

or social constructionist in orientation, frequently emphasize as a
ground rule of our discussions that race is a term that is in actuality by
no means self-evident, by no means ‘‘real’’ in the positivist sense of
that term. To draw on one example, Paul Gilroy, in his now classic
study of the history of racism in Britain, emphasizes that ‘‘ ‘Race’ has
to be socially and politically constructed and elaborate ideological
work is done to secure and maintain the di√erent forms of ‘racializa-
tion’ which have characterized capitalist development. Recognizing
this makes it all the more important to compare and evaluate the
di√erent historical situations in which ‘race’ has become politically
pertinent.’’∞
One should note that Gilroy consistently places ‘‘race’’ in quotation
marks, the better to remind his audience of its unreality, its instability.
This does not, however, mean that Gilroy disputes the potency of race
as an organizing framework in the relations of oppression and ex-
ploitation.≤ This emphasis on race as process rather than thing has
from the start been critical to my understanding of race and, within
that, of whiteness.≥ In a similar vein, Becky Thompson and Sangeeta
Tyagi begin their collection of essays engaging contemporary racism
through autobiography by emphasizing that ‘‘[r]ace is about every-
thing—historical, political, personal—and race is about nothing—a con-
struct, an invention that has changed dramatically over time and his-
torical circumstance.’’∂ Race, then, emerges as an awful—make that
awe-ful—fiction, arguably the most violent fiction in human history. I
say ‘‘arguably’’ because gender and enforced heterosexuality tie with
‘‘race’’ for first place. (Class and nation are two of the other key axes in
relation to which race, gender, and sexuality are organized.)
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 73

One challenge in the critical examination of whiteness is thus to

hold onto the unreality of race while adhering tenaciously to the recog-
nition of its all-too-real e√ects. The critical examination of race, rac-
ism, and whiteness requires a particular kind of vigilance, breadth of
vision, and refusal of ‘‘either-or’’ thinking. Like Gilroy, Thompson and
Tyagi, and others, I have also previously argued that race be analyzed
as a constellation of processes and practices rather than as a bounded
entity and have foregrounded the need for attention to history, pro-
cess, change.∑ Race, as a social construct, is transformable, malleable.
But also, given their foundation in historical process, racisms are
demonstrably firmly rooted in that process. Race is in fact anything
but presentist in its character. (By ‘‘presentist,’’ I mean focused in and
emergent from the present historical moment.) Indeed, racist dis-
courses have recourse all too often to that which is tried and (un)true—
or perhaps ‘‘tired and (un)true,’’ which turns out to be only one
letter di√erent. The terrorist Muslim; the asexual Asian man; his
always-sexually-available female counterpart; the inherently danger-
ous young African American man; the overly fertile African American
woman, Native American woman, Chicana or Mexicana, are all-too-
familiar tropes.∏ Stereotypes would be banal were they not so lethal, so
apt to wound physically, emotionally, spiritually. The di≈culty then
becomes how to notice change when it happens and how to recognize
stasis and continuity.
Meanwhile, where was whiteness in this mercifully brief list of sad
old stereotypes? An obvious, simple answer to this question would be
to propose that it is invisible, or unmarked, as usual. However, it is all
too easy to universalize the particular, to repeat the gestures of hege-
mony, when examining race. Hence the claim that ‘‘whiteness is invis-
ible’’ is often made as though representative of a timeless certitude.
For one of the truisms about whiteness with which scholarly critics of
whiteness frequently operate at the present time is the idea that white-
ness is an unmarked category.π It is indeed one with which I myself
worked for a number of years. The more one scrutinizes it, however,
the more the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm is revealed to be
a mirage or indeed, to put it even more strongly, a white delusion. The
next interesting question is, then, what is the nature, the character,
and the origin of this delusion, and when and how does its opposite,
the marking of whiteness come about? In fact, it seems to me that the
74 ruth frankenberg

making and marking of whiteness needs to be accounted for before

one can begin to understand its occasional, partial, and temporary
unmarking in the late twentieth century.
In fact, whiteness is in a continual state of being dressed and un-
dressed, of marking and cloaking. It has been so since the time when
the term was first used racially, partway through half a millennium of
European imperializing travel through, settlement in, and expropria-
tion from the Americas, Africa, parts of Asia, Australia, and the Pacific
region. I will not, here, detail the enormously various and complicated
processes by means of which colonization became a specifically racial
project.∫ Such work has been done elsewhere and deserves far more
space and attention than I can o√er it here.Ω I will, though, note several
of the results of that history especially pertinent to this discussion.
First, it is critical to remember in examining the term ‘‘whiteness’’
that in the context of colonization, the constructs identified as ‘‘peo-
ple(s),’’ ‘‘nations,’’ ‘‘cultures,’’ and ‘‘races’’ became complexly inter-
woven. This is why, in the present, they continue to bleed into one
another in racist terms, with ‘‘American’’ apt to be taken to mean
‘‘white,’’ for example. Second, we must remind ourselves that the term
‘‘race’’ was a relative latecomer on the linguistic scene,∞≠ as was the
name ‘‘white,’’ and that indeed both terms were birthed by imperial-
ism. It is not the case, then, that the previously neutral word ‘‘race’’
was ‘‘corrupted’’ by colonialism. Likewise, it is not true that a some-
how benign notion of ‘‘whiteness’’ was then made malignant by the
march of history. Neither construct existed prior to colonialism. This
makes utterly misplaced, entirely falsely premised, the idea of a ‘‘re-
turn’’ to racial innocence. Equally impractical is the attempt to carve
out spaces within the terrain of whiteness unspoiled by the relations of
colonialism. For that matter, the same is true of the terms blackness,
Asianness, Nativeness, Chicana/o-Latina/o-ness, and so on. In short,
we are all immersed in the waters of history, and those waters are
pretty murky.
Third, we must note that, like the word ‘‘race’’ and like ‘‘racial
names’’ (whiteness, blackness, and so on), the words ‘‘culture,’’ ‘‘na-
tion,’’ and ‘‘people(s)’’ continue to be organized by hierarchical rank-
ing systems dating back to the very beginning of the western Euro-
pean colonial project. In the colonial context, the naming of ‘‘cultures’’
and ‘‘peoples’’ was very much linked to naming and marking out a
host of Others as beings deemed lesser than the ‘‘national’’ Selves who
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 75

sought to dominate them. Further, those Others were named in terms

that justified, at least in the minds of marauding nations, the legit-
imacy of colonization. In this context it is hardly surprising that
‘‘white’’ emerges as barely marked, again if only from the standpoints
of white people themselves. And it is also not surprising that part of
the project of naming whiteness would result in a sequence some-
thing like the following: appear, self-name, violate, plunder, appropri-
ate, and become apparently invisible. Or was that invincible? Mer-
cifully, not so. This system of naming and evasion might even have
worked, but for the fact that the colonized were watching closely
throughout, but for the reality of di√erences within whiteness and
resultant boundary disputes for entry into the category, and but for the
existence of some people of all races with alert minds, hearts, and
spirits.
Fourth and linked to all of the above, ‘‘whiteness’’ is positioned
asymmetrically in relation to all other racial and cultural terms, again
for reasons whose origins are colonial. Whiteness, or white people, I
suggest, have through history mainly named themselves in order to
say ‘‘I am not that Other.’’ Whiteness is, while as relational as its others,
less clearly marked except, ironically in terms of its not-Otherness. As
I, and colleagues, have argued elsewhere, there are times when white-
ness seems to mean only a defiant shout of ‘‘I am not that Other!’’∞∞
This indeed is why, to the chagrin of some white people, it becomes
extraordinarily di≈cult for white people to name whiteness, and why
whiteness has a habit—annoying for those who are trying to name it—
of sliding into class and nationality all the time.∞≤ Indeed, it is for the
same reason that even words like ‘‘humanity’’ and ‘‘Man’’ (uppercase
‘‘M’’) are very easily elided into whiteness, thus giving it the appear-
ance of being unbounded.
Having sketched in some of the historical context for the concept of
whiteness, we may now move to a discussion of its meaning in the
contemporary United States.

I begin this part of the essay with one contribution to the marking of
whiteness. The following eight-point definition of whiteness is one
that, rather than seeking to name it in cultural terms, indicates its
location in societies that are (using Stuart Hall’s terminology) ‘‘struc-
tured in dominance.’’∞≥ This definition has been evolving over the last
decade of my work on the subject, and it will, I am sure, continue to
76 ruth frankenberg

alter, both as my own consciousness changes and as the conditions

and practice of whiteness are (no doubt for better and worse) also
transformed:
1. Whiteness is a location of structural advantage in societies struc-
tured in racial dominance.
2. Whiteness is a ‘‘standpoint,’’ a location from which to see selves,
others, and national and global orders.
3. Whiteness is a site of elaboration of a range of cultural practices
and identities, often unmarked and unnamed, or named as na-
tional or ‘‘normative’’ rather than specifiably racial.
4. Whiteness is often renamed or displaced within ethnic or class
namings.
5. Inclusion within the category ‘‘white’’ is often a matter of con-
testation, and in di√erent times and places some kinds of white-
ness are boundary markers of the category itself.
6. Whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather cross-
cut by a range of other axes of relative advantage or subordina-
tion; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but
rather inflect or modify it.
7. Whiteness is a product of history, and is a relational category.
Like other racial locations, it has no inherent but only socially
constructed meanings. As such, whiteness’s meanings are com-
plexly layered and variable locally and translocally; also, white-
ness’s meanings may appear simultaneously malleable and
intractable.
8. The relationality and socially constructed character of whiteness
does not, it must be emphasized, mean that this and other racial
locations are unreal in their material and discursive e√ects.
Suddenly, the notion that whiteness might be invisible seems bi-
zarre in the extreme. More shocking than the recognition of white-
ness’s existence is the idea that it is ever not seen. I suggest that it is
only to the extent that particular kinds of racially supremacist hege-
mony are ever achieved that whiteness can come anywhere near to
invisibility. And even here, a considerable number of qualifications
must be made. The canny critic will of course always qualify her use of
the term ‘‘hegemony’’ by noting the inevitable instability, the inherent
ine√ectuality, of any ideological system. But when one contemplates
the degree to which populations are ever fully compelled by argu-
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 77

ments for the normativity and neutrality of whiteness, one wonders

whether these particular strands within hegemony are less stable than
others. The question already posed in this essay—‘‘to whom is white-
ness invisible?’’—is germane here, and I will return to it. As noted, it
is safe to suggest that whiteness remains quite visible to men and
women of color even when ‘‘cultural micro-climates’’ make it possible
for the concept to disappear into false universality from the purview of
some white people.
Meanwhile, I am struck by the extraordinary ease with which (espe-
cially white) individuals can slide from awareness of whiteness to the
lack thereof and, related to that slippage, from race-consciousness to
unconsciousness and from antiracism to racism, whether from year to
year, situation to situation, or sentence to sentence. My own history,
for example, is marked by a shift from unconsciousness both of my
whiteness and of my own enmeshment in racism to an awakening to
them. This trajectory also shapes the life-paths of many comrades with
whom I share race, class, gender, and nationality.∞∂ But my awakening
is never complete. Although the initial transformation was one of
major earthquake proportions, there is always room for another after-
shock, always need for further awakening. White antiracism is, per-
haps, a stance requiring lifelong vigilance.
To work through an example of this phenomenon, I was intrigued
and ‘‘(after)shocked’’ once again in opening David Roediger’s intro-
duction to his collection Black on White: Black Writers on What It
Means to Be White.∞∑ In it, Roediger comes ironically close to replaying
the very erasure that his collection seeks to confront and challenge. (I
examine this text in detail, not because of any disrespect for the author
but rather for the opposite reason: one can learn most by looking at
the work of a master craftsperson and asking what still needs to be
improved. David Roediger is, to my mind, one of the finest contempo-
rary white critics of whiteness.∞∏ Roediger opens the book by inviting
his readers to ‘‘Consider a slave on the auction block, awaiting sale’’:
‘‘Imagine the slave being seen, indeed examined, by the potential
bidders. Imagine what she felt. Imagine her trembling and crying,
breaking down, even fighting back. Such attempts to imagine looking
in on the auction block and to empathize with those for sale have
found a hard-won place in the mainstream of American culture. But
little prepares us to see her as looking out, as studying the bidders.’’∞π
Roediger’s opening lines are chilling. His depiction of the enslaved
78 ruth frankenberg

woman generated the very horror in my white mind that, appropri-

ately, the author sought to achieve. Next, the reminder of the woman’s
own seeing eyes, her gaze on whiteness, pro√ered a very timely mo-
ment of jarring to my white consciousness. If one is white, one can-
not, it seems, be reminded too often that the person conceived as
Other in one’s own psyche is not only a su√ering being but also a
thinking subject. As Roediger points out, the latter move is crucial and
without it, he implies, empathy is partial at best.∞∫ Yet, as Roediger
continues, it is as though the blinders fall back over his own eyes. Who
is or are the group designated ‘‘us’’ in his next sentence when he notes
that ‘‘little prepares us to see her as looking out, as studying the
bidders’’? Here it seems that an all-white readership is envisaged for
Roediger’s text. Otherwise, one would not dare to generalize about the
unpreparedness of the audience for the intelligence, the conscious-
ness of the enslaved woman.
One must situate Roediger’s paragraph in a set of narrative conven-
tions whose long histories extend far beyond the United States.∞Ω The
depiction of the oppressed or wounded Other as su√ering body first
and seeing mind second is central to a history of the enlistment of
ostensibly wiser, more conscious, more civilized, whiter Selves. It
travels from records of colonial o≈cials and missionaries at the fu-
neral pyres of satis committed in India≤≠ all the way to advertisements
for Third World–focused charitable organizations in today’s Sunday
newspapers. In this schema, the injured Other is also wrested from
context, typified or genericized rather than enabled to retain her or his
particularity.≤∞ The enslaved woman of Roediger’s text did not, after all,
land on the auction block from Mars but rather after a horrendous
journey across the Atlantic or perhaps after birth and early years on one
or more plantations. She might indeed have been moved to tears and
have been shivering with cold, fear, or rage on a particular day. Or she
might have been in a state of near-catatonia. Or something else. I
cannot and should not, of course, speculate about the state of mind and
heart of any particular woman. But I do wish to note that Roediger’s
portrayal emerges from and contributes to a certain kind of ‘‘su√ering
female victim’’ genre that owes much to nineteenth-century European
e√orts toward a civilizing mission—of Indian women coerced into
committing sati, of enslaved Africans, of English prostitutes, and so
on. It should perhaps be emphasized that this is not, by any means, to
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 79

deny or dismiss the reality of the su√ering of a woman on the auction

block. Rather, I wish to point out the degree to which a white gaze is
reinstated even as e√orts are made to displace it.
The hierarchization of mind, emotion, and body derived from Pla-
tonic thought has marked the racialized rankings of peoples and cul-
tures from colonial times down to the present and has also been
closely associated with a hierarchical division of masculine and femi-
nine. Here, the di≈culty of asserting the status of the woman as
victim and simultaneously as thinking subject becomes comprehensi-
ble. It is in this context that recognition of the enslaved woman’s
intelligence and consciousness can only arrive in the text as a supple-
ment. The semantic range of the words ‘‘trembling,’’ ‘‘crying,’’ and
‘‘breaking down’’ are significant: while all three are likely responses
to finding oneself placed on the auction block, each connotes, par-
ticularly from a white (masculinist?) purview, an almost inescapable
frailty and/or fragility and possibly youthfulness as well. Likewise,
within this framework it is the case that crying and trembling in the
face of her fate could in no way be seen as ‘‘rational’’ but rather must
be conceived as entirely separate from her status as ‘‘one who looks.’’
There is more to be uncovered here about the text fragment, about
exactly how it is that ‘‘we,’’ white people, are made unready to recog-
nize that we are not the only ones who see. There are many ways in
which the terms of Roediger’s conjuring of the woman on the slave
auction block speaks to us about how, even in avowedly liberatory
voices, one may find a very complex interweaving of racism, colo-
nialism, patriarchy, and the history of European consciousness. Roe-
diger’s own discourse mirrors that of the slaveholder in repeated refer-
ence to the woman as a slave (an inherent quality) rather than, as for
example, a person who is enslaved (her situation in that moment). One
could go further in this regard and suggest that Roediger’s imagined
ordering of the woman’s priorities and conception of her situation
reflects that of the buyer and seller rather than that of the woman
herself. In her own terms, is she ‘‘awaiting sale,’’ or is she perhaps
awaiting another step in her enforced movement from one location to
the next?
One can, then, learn much about whiteness from asking how white
people depict people of color. None of this is to say that Roediger is
mistaken in summoning up this kind of description. However, it is to
80 ruth frankenberg

suggest that in doing so more self-consciously, in historicizing his

depiction, Roediger would have o√ered the reader deeper insight into
the context and form of whites’ interpellations by these modes of
description. For as Roediger says, enlistment into a liberal pity for the
su√ering Other is a paltry step forward. Moreover, it is one that keeps
intact the Self-Other binary and o√ers no insight into the Self ’s self-
designated authority and sanctity.
The same ‘‘now you see it, now you don’t’’ pattern continues on in
these early pages. For myself, even scanning the contents pages of
Roediger’s collection had the potency to disrupt and destabilize some
of the certitudes of white discourse with which I am all too familiar. To
take only three authors and titles—‘‘Ethiop’’ William J. Wilson, ‘‘What
shall we do with the white people?’’ (1860); George S. Schuyler, ‘‘Our
White Folks’’ (1927); and Cheryl Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property’’
(1993)—a reversal or inversion is clear in each instance. Wilson identi-
fies and marks whites as the problem that needs to be fixed. Schuyler
mocks the patronage of white southern middle-class pretensions to
‘‘own’’ and ‘‘know’’ African Americans. Finally, Harris’s title compli-
cates the term ‘‘property,’’ urging one to ask how and when blackness
and whiteness might be bought, sold, counted on, or cashed in. All of
this is made manifest, then, without even entering the book beyond
page three.
Yet, on page four, when Roediger writes, ‘‘few Americans have ever
considered the idea that African Americans are extremely knowledge-
able about whites and whiteness,’’≤≤ the structure of the sentence
seems to erase the presence of any U.S. residents who are not white.
In e√ect, I suggest, it once again normativizes whiteness. (There is
another occlusion here, that of conflating ‘‘United States,’’ the coun-
try, with ‘‘America,’’ the continent.) Which Americans would not have
considered this possibility? Chinese Americans perhaps? But think of
Maxine Hong Kingston’s depiction of white ghosts in The Woman
Warrior and China Men.≤≥ Native Americans? I will always remember
an incident in Louise Erdrich’s novel, Love Medicine. A young man
recalls that for unknown reasons a teacher had taught him Moby-Dick
for each of his four years in high school: ‘‘This led to another famous
misunderstanding. ‘You’re always reading that book,’ my mother said
once. ‘What’s in it?’ ‘The story of the great white whale’ [the narrator
explains]. She could not believe it. After a while she said, ‘What do they
got to wail about, those whites?’’≤∂ What is, I think, interesting here is
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 81

the simultaneity of whites’ visibility to some and the tenaciousness of

their capacity to disappear, discursively, for others.

Thus far, I have pointed to the entanglement of the notion of white-

ness in colonial history, and the enormous challenge one faces when
one tries to disentangle the white gaze from that history. As I have also
demonstrated, the e√orts of white people, even antiracist ones, are all
too easily entrapped within the webs of a gaze and consciousness one
might conveniently name, as a shorthand, white.
As I said earlier, one of the more frequently expressed ideas about
whiteness in recent times is its invisibility—an invisibility that, as I
have also stated above, must be immediately specified by the question
‘‘to whom?’’ But what else can be said here? How else might one
specify what lies beneath this façade? What are some of the means
by which the ‘‘invisibility of whiteness’’ is achieved? Here, I have
been discussing the phenomenon of unselfconscious performance of
whiteness, of whiteness not ‘‘seeing itself seeing,’’ whiteness falsely
claiming transparency.
The phrase ‘‘the invisibility of whiteness’’ refers in part to moments
when whiteness does not speak its own name. At those times, as
noted, whiteness may simply assume its own normativity. It may also
refer to those times when neutrality or normativity is claimed for
some kinds of whiteness, with whiteness frequently simultaneously
linked to nationality. Such claims often also demonstrate the possibil-
ity of fissuring within whiteness. Drawing on my own research inter-
views with white women, I find the following comment from Helen
Standish, born in 1950, illustrative here: ‘‘The way I was brought up
was to think that everyone who was the same as me were Americans
and the other people were of such-and-such descent.’’≤∑
It is also crucial to contemplate just how recently many explicit
namings of whiteness went underground in the United States. It was
only in 1967, for example, that the criminalization of marriage across
racial lines was successfully challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.≤∏
Just a few years before that, the notion of ‘‘separate but equal educa-
tion’’ (the ‘‘equal’’ part in any case a fiction) was declared unconstitu-
tional.≤π It was only around the same time that signs labeling the
entrances to public and commercial facilities ‘‘For Whites Only’’ were
made illegal. I need not, I think, belabor the point that in all three
cases means have been found to evade the banning of these practices.
82 ruth frankenberg

And when, in the 1980s, I was undertaking research with U.S. white
women, those above forty could remember the use of phrases such as
‘‘I can do what I want—I’m young, white and twenty-one’’ and ‘‘That’s
very white [civilized] of you.’’ All of this is only to remark on the
explicit uses of the term ‘‘white’’ in public culture. Of course the term
‘‘white’’ and the self-consciousness of self as white were and still are
very comfortably in use in private culture and in the public discourse
of white supremacists.
This, I think, implies several things. First, a certain naïveté, possi-
bly middle-class and definitely presentist, marks the assertion of the
invisibility of whiteness. Second, a kind of literalism (at times inten-
tionally obfuscatory) marks assertions that whiteness is invisible.
Thirdly, it is necessary to widen our interpretation of the word ‘‘white-
ness’’ to examine its coconstitution with nationality, class, ethnicity,
and culture. We must, for example, attend to the nation/class/eth-
nicity/race-based namings of people and groups that may turn out to
be about whiteness. Also, if we are to be adequate critics of whiteness,
we must become as educated about the history of colonialism, world-
wide, as we are trying to become about the history of racism in the
United States.

One irony of writing about whiteness’s invisibility is that the late

1990s have witnessed intense debate over whiteness in academia, in
the media, in classrooms, and in many private worlds. That debate
continues, of course. The challenge then becomes one of asking what
is being said about whiteness, whether what is being said has more
liberatory or more retrogressive implications, and from whence came
the present upsurge of discourse about it.
Let us take the last question first. Here, one can argue that through
most of this century within the United States and elsewhere, greater at-
tention to whiteness has correlated with, and in fact followed on from,
movements led by communities of color for the enhancement of civil,
economic, and political rights across race lines and/or movements for
the transformation of public culture to reflect recognitions, assertions,
reclamations, and critiques of cultural terrain. But in the United States,
at the start of the twenty-first century, things are slightly di√erent. For
we see whiteness reasserted by white people and also whiteness under
critical scrutiny by a range of people including whites. Both are taking
place in tandem with the reentrenchment of preexisting racisms. In-
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 83

creased pressures against legal and illegal immigrants, e√orts to abol-

ish bilingual education, and wide-ranging anti-a≈rmative legislation
are some examples here. It is also striking that whiteness is under
examination by white people from, as it were, all directions. Thus white
critics of whiteness are speaking forcefully, even as other white people
are trying to ‘‘hold the line’’ and refuse any criticism of, encroachments
on, or challenges to white turf or territory, whether cultural, economic,
or political.
We can further subdivide these issues. Easiest to name are the
‘‘roots’’ of progressive and/or critical engagements with whiteness.
They follow directly from the work of the last several decades to trans-
form public culture and to materially alter the racialized inequities
that mark U.S. society. It is thus no accident that, here, work by whites
against race dominance melds very easily into activity that is more
multiracial in scope. Activists have sought to alter the hierarchies of
leadership and rights in workplaces and political groups, as well as to
revise assumptions about ‘‘correct’’ dress, language, and style in such
places. These changes are frequently inseparable from e√orts to chal-
lenge sexism and also at times homophobia in the public sphere.
The now wide-ranging intellectual engagement with whiteness is
signaled in many recent collections and monographs on whiteness,≤∫
with these enabled by and adding to the earlier scholarship of sociolo-
gists, historians, legal theorists, film and literary critics, and inter-
disciplinarians of various stripes.≤Ω Foci have included some of those
already discussed in this essay and more: critiquing false universals in
the spheres of gender, class, nationality, and canon formation; remark-
ing on cultural practices previously labeled ‘‘national’’ rather than
‘‘white’’; naming and reclaiming from the shadows forms of white-
ness hitherto deemed unworthy of study because of their marginality,
low status, or even shamefulness.
If there are goals common to most critical work on whiteness, they
are, perhaps, the e√ort to find a way through and out of the historical
legacy of whiteness and the commitment to retaining a strong connec-
tion between attention to whiteness and a broader antiracism. And
there is also a struggle over hegemony: the quest for a means of
drawing a large enough proportion of white people into the making of
a new, more equitable multiracial common sense.
Throughout this work, a concern has dogged scholarship on white-
ness: fear that the very process of critical engagement will in fact serve
84 ruth frankenberg

to do the opposite of what is hoped, by recentering whiteness rather

than putting it in a new place in our (whose?) collective racial con-
sciousness. As Michael Apple puts it, ‘‘such a process can serve the
chilling function of simply saying, ‘but enough about you, let me
tell you about me.’ ’’≥≠ Involving as it does close and detailed atten-
tion to whiteness, this worry about scholarship on whiteness is very
reasonable.
A related concern is the tendency, especially in print media and
television, for the making of easy analogies between new curricular
and scholarly work on whiteness, on the one hand, and ethnic studies,
on the other. I and other critics of whiteness have found ourselves
trying to correct this false analogy on many occasions.≥∞ Another e√ect
of the slide from discussions of work on ‘‘the critical study of white-
ness’’ to ‘‘whiteness studies’’ is an erroneous interpretation of the
critical study of whiteness as linked to white supremacist activity. This
is something I myself experienced when undertaking research for my
first book, White Women, Race Matters.≥≤ The organizers of the first
national conference on critical whiteness studies, The Making and
Unmaking of Whiteness, in April 1997 also encountered this prob-
lem. After they released a brief announcement of the conference, they
were inundated by calls from the media; some who called expected to
hear about a white supremacist meeting of some kind.≥≥ As I have
argued elsewhere, there are many good reasons to engage critically in
the study of whiteness.≥∂ Still, an ambivalence about the goals of work
on whiteness and a hunger to redeem whiteness and to parallel it with
other racial/ethnic locations are at times evident even in context of
work by ‘‘diversity educators’’ ostensibly focused on progressive social
change.≥∑
Meanwhile, the e√orts of other white people are caught up in the
forging of an altogether more retrogressive interpretation of the his-
torical moment, one that mistakes several decades of talk about the
need for racial equity, with the actual achievement of that goal. Thus
whites (and a small minority of people of color, among them notably
Ward Connerly and Clarence Thomas) speak as though we now do live
in a meritocracy. It is claimed that we now do operate on an even
playing field—as opposed to some people simply having expressed
the belief that that would be a fine thing to achieve someday. As we
know, much political capital has been made out of this kind of ‘‘virtual
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 85

history-writing’’ by conservatives. It has indeed been successful to the

point of shaping the middle ground.
We witness, as a result, a new set of false presumptions about
whiteness and about race relations, including the following:
1. White people were once the oppressors but are no longer be-
cause of the economic and cultural transformations brought
about by the civil rights movement.
2. The gains of civil rights have now created the possibility, if not
yet the actuality, of racial equality, and there is now an ever-
present danger of ‘‘overcorrecting’’ past inequality and placing
whites in danger of victimization.
3. The government does not yet quite understand that white people
are now an oppressed group, so that government is increasingly
antiwhite.
4. White people can and should now benefit from civil rights
discourse, using concepts like ‘‘reverse racism,’’ ‘‘uneven
playing field,’’ and ‘‘race-blind’’ to help ameliorate their own
predicament.
5. Many people of color are still angry. This must be because:
(a) they have not yet woken up to the new reality but are stuck in
history, (b) they are simply inherently angry people, or (c) they
hate white people out of habit.
6. Many white people are angry. This is because things have gone
too far, and whites are now victims of a history not of their own
making.
Let me repeat, these are a set of false presumptions about whiteness
and race in the United States (and it may not be paranoid to state that I
will sue anyone who uses them out of context!)≥∏ They present a night-
marish picture—the ideas listed and the recognition that many people
believe them, if not in whole cloth, at least in some part. And if we
were to imagine for a moment that this is an exaggeration, we might
contemplate the context for the Oklahoma City Federal Government
Building bombing of April 1995. We might also think about the ‘‘an-
gry white men’’ so ably discussed by David Wellman among others,≥π
and the even more disturbing epidemic of angry white boys and
young men participating in the burning of black churches and the
murder of their schoolmates around the country.≥∫
86 ruth frankenberg

It is within the sheltering frames of this extremism that new norma-

tivities about race, racism, and whiteness are located. Whether this is a
new racist common (non)sense—or simply an old one having been re-
habilitated and brought from the right flank into the center of the
field—is arguable. As the saying goes, ‘‘The more things change, the
more they stay the same.’’ And yet if nothing else, we see whiteness
made visible once again to more white people. Further, as we witness
the presence of a new/old racist common (non)sense now in place, but
this time alongside a flourishing community of critics of whiteness, we
have the opportunity to plunder hegemony and seek to counter it. This
is therefore a very potent moment in the history of whiteness.

Dateline: Washington, D.C., August 2000. The next question is what

are we to do with this moment in the history of whiteness? What are
we already doing with it? Is there a singular we of white folks or of
whiteness? Is there a clear separation between those white people
‘‘for’’ and those white people against racism? More germane to the
topic of this paper, is there a distinct boundary between those who see
whiteness and those to whom it is invisible? Or rather, are the bound-
aries blurry? And lastly, when whiteness is seen, just what is it that
is seen?
I will not presume to answer these questions on a large scale.
Rather I will situate my concluding comments in relation to one site,
the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association,
which took place in Washington, D.C., 12–16 August 2000. At these
meetings I was intrigued by the reiteration of many of the themes
discussed in the earlier parts of this paper, as well as by the very new
and the very repetitive news about whiteness.
Things have moved. Whiteness was not discursively invisible at the
asa meetings, nor was it unmarked. It is a clear sign of the remaking
of racial formation in the United States that whiteness is now a topic
on the agenda at the asa. At this five-day gathering—one that like
other national (or in e√ect, transnational) meetings oriented around
particular fields and disciplines, was dizzying in the sheer quantitative
enormity of panels, sessions, and discussions that it incorporated—
there was, as the program demonstrated, a session on whiteness every
single day.≥Ω
Moreover, some of the key aspirations of many critics of whiteness
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 87

were being met, at least on this occasion. First, whiteness was not
named in ways that sought to reestablish its dominance nor its cen-
trality, but rather in ways that sought to problematize both. Second,
and related to the first point, whiteness was seen as a problem—as an
entity, an identity, and an identification still poorly understood and,
from the purview of some of those scholars whose presentations I
heard, one in urgent need of revision. Third, while I was not able to
attend all of the sessions engaging whiteness, on no occasion did I
encounter the kind of ‘‘paralleling’’ of the study of whiteness with that
of other racial-ethnic groups that some scholars have dreaded and that
much media coverage focused on in the mid-1990s. Rather, the e√ort
to examine whiteness was seen as inextricably a part of, but also not the
same as, the process of focusing on other namings and other group-
ings within contemporary United States racial formation. It is worth
noting that the asa Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Sociol-
ogy sponsored several of the sessions dealing with whiteness. But this
was not, presumably, because whites are viewed as a racial minority
nor as an ethnic one, but rather because it is clear that the study of
whiteness is pertinent to the study of racial formation.
Reviewing the conference program is interesting inasmuch as it
demonstrates how and where whiteness was situated in the eyes of
those commenting on it. A refereed roundtable discussion sponsored
by the asa Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Sociology, titled
simply ‘‘Whiteness,’’ underscores the actuality that whiteness now
does exist conceptually in the eyes of the scholarly world. (This is not
self-evident, by the way—as recently as 1998 I needed to debate and
explain at great length the meaning of that word while seeking univer-
sity approval for a graduate course, ‘‘Interdisciplinary Approaches to
the Critical Study of Whiteness.’’)
Session titles like ‘‘Talking with Whites about Race’’ and ‘‘Race
Relations and the Changing Meaning of Whiteness’’ make clear that
whiteness is seen to be about race. On one level this idea appears so
obvious as not to be worth mentioning. But let us remember the
starting point of this paper, an examination of how, when, and why
whiteness has disappeared from the racial radar screen, with whites
exempt (in the views of some people) from definition as a racial cate-
gory. Session titles such as ‘‘Racial Privilege: The View from Above,’’
‘‘Whiteness: Current Research and Activism on Racial Privilege,’’ and
88 ruth frankenberg

‘‘White Privilege in Democratic Society’’ push the envelope further:

whiteness exists, it has something to do with race, and it is in particu-
lar connected with racial privilege.∂≠
As noted, in this conference program whiteness is situated racially.
It is also linked to the democratic project with the session titled ‘‘White
Privilege in Democratic Society.’’ From a slightly di√erent angle, white
privilege was situated in relation to the notion of dominance via a
special session ‘‘The Sociology of the Superordinate: Masculinity, Het-
erosexuality, Whiteness.’’ Again, while it was not explicitly named, one
might assume that whiteness was in play in a session on ‘‘Social
Movements: Right-Wing Movements’’ that included the paper, ‘‘Ex-
plaining Variation in Levels of Patriot and Militia Mobilization.’’∂∞
In sum, we learn from the asa conference program that whiteness
exists, that it is a racial(ized) term, and that it must be examined in
relation to dominance. We learn from the titles of sessions that a
group called ‘‘white people’’ exists (here borrowing from Marx) not
just in itself but also for itself, hence the possibility of a session titled
‘‘Talking with Whites about Race.’’ Lastly we learn that whiteness is
not necessarily deemed static (as evident from a session called ‘‘The
Changing Meaning of Whiteness’’). One might even suggest, then,
that W. E. B. Du Bois would have been pleased to see whiteness con-
ceived conceptually as a ‘‘problem.’’ Indeed, as scholars detailed new
ethnographic and interview-based research, it became clear that not
only did sociologists view whiteness as a space riven with problems,
but so also did many white interviewees.
Needless to say, however, things were not simply an occasion for
celebration as the above might suggest. In the following pages I will
comment on just two sessions, ‘‘Race Relations and the Changing
Meaning of Whiteness,’’∂≤ and ‘‘Racial Privilege: The View from
Above.’’∂≥ It was clear that the statement, ‘‘whiteness is a problematic
space’’ had radically di√erent meanings for authors and white sub-
jects. The papers in these sessions detailed the results of very recent
data collection. (Two papers, that of Richard Zweigenhaft, discussing
research on African American professionals, and my own, which was
not directly based on new research, will not be discussed here.)
What I do here is to draw out the patterns and themes that struck
me as I listened, whether from platform or audience, to these five
papers. I must emphasize that I comment on these papers as an
outsider who has not had the opportunity to read the larger projects-
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 89

in-progress from which each was drawn. I must also clarify that while
I am in no way attempting a revisionist reading of these works, I am
aware that at times I commit the o√ense of reordering, and certainly
that of reducing the range of each author’s analysis. That being said, as
a listener I was struck by what they taught, individually and collec-
tively, about the current status of whiteness.
The first extraordinarily striking feature was the degree to which
the five papers on whiteness paralleled one another in terms of their
findings, in ways that did not seem to be disrupted by class, gender, or
region. Research from Detroit, Atlanta, Appalachia, New York State,
and elsewhere in the United States brought news of white inter-
viewees’ conviction that racial formation was, at this time in history,
unfair to people like themselves. If a≈rmative action was deemed
axiomatic of that injustice, African Americans and, on occasion, Lati-
nos were seen as the groups that received ill-gotten gains from that
system. In contrast, Asian Americans were seen to be like whites in
two ways—first as immigrants and second, as hard workers striving to
achieve in the United States of America.
Time and again papers detailed white interviewees’ sense that,
while ‘‘history’’ had perhaps dealt an unfair hand to racial and ethnic
‘‘minorities’’ (borrowing here the terminology favored by some inter-
viewees themselves), history was history, period. For many of these
white interviewees, that ‘‘history’’ was over, and if people of color
continued to fare badly, this was possibly thanks to their own lack of
e√ort. Here the term ‘‘history’’ is, of necessity, placed in quotation
marks. For as the authors of these papers made clear, that term stood
in for an amorphous ‘‘past’’ filled with some su√erers (who should
now learn to stand on their own feet), and a few beneficiaries (who had
in fact worked very hard to achieve their hard-won gains). As far as
these papers suggested, research subjects did not have a sense of the
structural forces and multiple processes in play throughout this space
that I am calling ‘‘history.’’ Rather, bad luck, and hard work to over-
come that bad luck, were the twin motors of human advancement that
seemed to rule the day in the minds of white interviewees. In this
context, Monica McDermott’s encounters with poor whites who were
ashamed of their current positionings in a working class, primarily
Black, Atlanta neighborhood made some kind of sense.∂∂ For when
these white research subjects felt ashamed of their failure to thrive
economically despite their whiteness, one sees their recognition that
90 ruth frankenberg

whiteness is somehow connected to power and privilege, albeit in a

way that cries out for rearticulation in relation to class, region, and
local economics.
This shame in fact speaks to a second theme that ran through the
papers: a kind of ‘‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’’ articulation of white-
ness and its relationships to power and privilege on the part of white
interviewees. These white folks knew they were white, at least enough
to be aware of themselves as non-beneficiaries of post-Civil Rights
gains like a≈rmative action, and as the kinds of Americans who had
arrived and thrived by means of hard work and no ‘‘handouts.’’ Yet am-
bivalence about that knowledge crosscut these five papers. Moreover,
white people’s equivocation about their whiteness was dramatized in
their discourse. Literal equivocation as stammering, hesitation, and
verbal backtracking in response to questions about interviewees’ rela-
tionships with people of color was present in so many papers that it can
only be read as a sign of the nature of whiteness at this moment in U.S.
history, and I suggest that this sign might be taken literally. We might
view it as signaling hegemony in crisis, the repressed returning. Fur-
ther, this kind of prevarication perhaps also indicates that at least some
white interviewees sensed a call (from whom is not clear) that they
should act, live, and behave in racial formation in ways di√erent from
those in which they were willing or able to do. (Instances of prevarica-
tion and hesitation arose in relation to questions about parental atti-
tudes to children’s interracial dating; parents’ desire to place children
in monoracial schools; and views on history, justice, and injustice.)
In 1993, in the context of my own research with white U.S. women,
I argued that many white U.S. citizens’ sense of race might be named
‘‘color- and power-evasive.’’∂∑ Refusing the naturalizing implications
of the more commonly used term, ‘‘colorblind,’’ I noted that many
white men and women are both aware and striving not to be aware of
the racialization of their daily lives and subjectivities. I contrasted
color- and power-evasiveness with a ‘‘race cognizance’’ that does name
the racialization of daily life and subjecthood. The latter, I empha-
sized, draws upon the ‘‘characterizations of race di√erence (including
awareness of structural and institutional inequity. . . . ) that emerged
out of civil rights and later movements for the cultural and economic
empowerment of people of color from the late 1950s to the present
day.’’∂∏ Finally, I argued that both modalities emerge from and must be
di√erentiated from the essentialist racism that was and is the discur-
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 91

sive bedrock of racialization in the United States.∂π I argued that all

three of these modes of seeing—essentialist racism, color- and power-
evasiveness, and race cognizance—circulated in the United States of
the 1980s and early 1990s, but that color- and power-evasiveness was
dominant at that time. Lastly, and perhaps too optimistically, I implied
that moves toward race cognizance on the part of white people could
only correlate with a move toward greater antiracist consciousness.
However, something a little di√erent seems to be present in the
United States at the start of the twenty-first century, if the papers just
discussed are to be interpreted in the way that I have just proposed. On
one level white people were more conscious of themselves as white
and more conscious of themselves as living and acting in a racialized
world. But in these interviews, race consciousness did not correlate
with antiracism. Rather, what I witnessed as I listened to these ac-
counts was neither race cognizance nor color- and power-evasiveness,
but rather a hybrid of the two, that which one might name ‘‘power-
evasive race cognizance.’’ As stated above, moves toward a progressive
race cognizance among white U.S. citizens may be explained by refer-
ence to the period of civil rights struggle. Likewise the emergence of
‘‘power-evasive race consciousness’’ can undoubtedly be understood
by reference to the e√orts to undo civil rights gains that gathered force
through the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s. And there is
an ironic way in which essentialism and non-essentialism coexist
here: No longer do white people have recourse only to claims about
the inherent inferiority of people of color in seeking to explain (away)
inequity. It is now possible to make two claims simultaneously. One is
that African Americans and Latinos do not need the ‘‘handouts’’ of
a≈rmative action because they are perfectly capable of achieving with-
out help. The second is that when African Americans and Latinos do
succeed alongside whites, this is not because of their own e√orts and
talents, but rather because of unfair assistance.
Thus all three discursive repertoires circulate in the United States,
in forms rearranged but hardly changed. It is also still the case that the
United States continues to grapple for better and worse, with its roots,
which is to say, with the racism upon which this nation was founded.
In this context white residents of the United States continue to move
in ever-decreasing circles around the notions of race, di√erence, jus-
tice, and entitlement, variously and simultaneously demonstrating
several things. The first of these is an increasing attention to white-
92 ruth frankenberg

ness as such, together with the recognition of the white self as a

racialized subject. The second is an attachment to a sense of white
entitlement and/or a struggle to comprehend and seek means of chal-
lenging this attachment. The third is a recognition of the continuing
presence of racial injustice, racial dystopia, and racial(ized) distress
and discomfort in a range of forms (however defined and diagnosed).
All of this was signaled by the considerable analysis of whiteness at
the asa (undertaken mainly although not only by white scholars); by
white interviewees’ depictions of self and other; and by the discursive
and semantic di≈culties interviewees faced as they tried to put for-
ward arguments about white entitlement. Lastly, lest it appear that a
distinction is being made here between progressive white scholars on
one hand and retrogressive white interviewees on the other, it should
not be forgotten that although not named in these two panels, whites’
e√orts to cultivate progressive race consciousness are still underway
in the United States.∂∫
Is the unmarkedness of whiteness a mirage? Certainly. Has white-
ness become more marked at the start of a new millennium? Yes, it
would seem to be the case. But what one learns forcefully here is that
the marking and unmarking of whiteness is not the only challenge
that faces those of us striving to achieve a race cognizance that will
correlate with antiracism.

Notes
I thank Lata Mani for her careful and astute commentary on this paper, as
well as members of the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness editorial
group for their careful reading and comments.
1 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson,
1987), 38.
2 Ibid.
3 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction
of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 11 and
elsewhere.
4 Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi, ‘‘Storytelling as Social Conscience:
The Power of Autobiography,’’ in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on
Racial Identity, ed. Thompson and Tyagi (New York: Routledge, 1996), ix.
5 Frankenberg, White Women, 11–18; 236–37.
6 Ruth Frankenberg, ‘‘Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing White-
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 93

ness,’’ in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism,

ed. Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 11–15; Ruth
Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘‘Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcolo-
niality’ and the Politics of Location,’’ Cultural Studies 7 no. 2 (May 1993):
292–310.
7 An early and influential articulation of this idea is to be found in Richard
Dyer’s article, ‘‘White,’’ Screen 29 no. 4 (autumn 1988): 44–64.
8 For the concept of ‘‘racial project,’’ see Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 55–56.
9 See, for example, Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1,
Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994); Tomás Al-
maguer, Racial Faultlines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); James Camp-
bell and James Oakes, ‘‘The Invention of Race: Rereading White over
Black,’’ in Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror, ed. Richard
Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997),
145–51; George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of
Meaning (Oxford, Eng., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993); Reginald
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Robert
Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989).
10 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, esp. 10–24, 98–115.
11 Ruth Frankenberg, ‘‘ ‘When We Are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to
See’: Being White, Seeing Whiteness,’’ in Names We Call Home, ed.
Thompson and Tyagi, 7; Phil Cohen, ‘‘Labouring Under Whiteness,’’ in
Displacing Whiteness, ed. Frankenberg, 244–82.
12 Frankenberg, ‘‘Whiteness and Americanness,’’ in Race, ed. Steven Greg-
ory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1994), 62–77.
13 Stuart Hall, ‘‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,’’
in unesco, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: unesco
Press, 1980), 305–45.
14 Ruth Frankenberg, ‘‘ ‘When We Are Capable of Stopping,’’ 3–17; Becky
Thompson, ‘‘Time-Traveling and Border-Crossing: Reflections on White
Identity,’’ in Names We Call Home, ed. Thompson and Tyagi, 93–110.
15 David R. Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be
White (New York: Schocken, 1998).
16 See also David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on
94 ruth frankenberg

Race, Politics and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994), and The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(London: Verso, 1991).
17 Roediger, Black on White, 3.
18 Ibid., 3–4.
19 I am indebted to Lata Mani for this insight, for our conversations about
this part of the paper, and for her analysis of the complex and ambivalent
discourses that framed colonial representations of sati (widow-burning) in
nineteenth-century India. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on
Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
20 Ibid., chap. 5.
21 Ibid.
22 Roediger, Black on White, 4.
23 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage, 1976),
and China Men (New York: Ballantine, 1981).
24 Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, new and expanded version (New York: Har-
perCollins, 1993), 124–25.
25 Frankenberg, White Women, 198.
26 Loving v Virginia, 338 US 1 (1967).
27 Brown v Board of Education, 347 US 483 (1954).
28 In addition to texts named in notes above, see among others, Michelle Fine
et al., eds., O√ White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race
and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); John Hartigan Jr.,
Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making White-
ness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pan-
theon, 1998).
29 In addition to texts named in notes above, see among others Bob Blauner,
Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1989); Toni Morrison, Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993);
David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
30 Michael Apple, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in White Reign: Learning and Deploying White-
ness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe et al. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999),
xi.
31 See, for example, remarks by Ruth Frankenberg and Matt Wray on the
kcsm-tv program A Higher Education, for the segment on ‘‘White Stud-
ies,’’ 6 May 1998.
32 Frankenberg, White Women, 33.
 mirage of an unmarked whiteness 95

33 Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray on A Higher Education, ‘‘White Studies,’’

kcsm-tv, 6 May 1998.
34 Frankenberg, ‘‘Introduction: Local Whitenesses,’’ 1–2; Frankenberg, ‘‘White-
ness and Americanness,’’ 62.
35 Frankenberg, ‘‘Introduction: Local Whitenesses,’’ 18–20.
36 ‘‘Anti-Gay Use of Research Angers Boston Doctor,’’ San Francisco Chroni-
cle, 4 August 1998, states, ‘‘Criticizing a national anti-gay advertising cam-
paign that draws on his research, a Boston doctor accused conservative
religious groups yesterday of distorting his work to support their own
theory: that homosexuality can be ‘healed.’ ’’
37 David Wellman, ‘‘Minstrel Shows, A≈rmative Action Talk and Angry
White Men: Making Racial Otherness in the 1990s,’’ in Displacing White-
ness, ed. Frankenberg, 311–32.
38 For an interview with Timothy Welch, one of two young white Klansmen
currently serving jail time for setting fire to an African American commu-
nity’s church in Manning, South Carolina, in June 1995, see the film
Forgotten Fires, directed by Michael Chandler (1998); Welch is no longer a
klan member. See also ‘‘Two Boys Found Guilty in Arkansas School Shoot-
ing,’’ Reuters Limited, 12 August 1998.
39 Program, 95th Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association,
Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association, 12–16 August
2000.
40 For the record, it should be noted that ‘‘Race Privilege: The View from
Above’’ also included a paper titled ‘‘Are There Blacks in the White Estab-
lishment? Another Look.’’
41 Nella K. Van Dyke and Sarah A. Soule, ‘‘Explaining Variation in Levels of
Patriot and Militia Mobilization,’’ 95th Annual Meetings of the American
Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., August 16, 2000.
42 ‘‘Race Relations and the Changing Meaning of Whiteness,’’ panel, 95th
Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Washington,
D.C., August 13, 2000; papers presented: Charles A. Gallagher, ‘‘White
Stories: Race Relations According to the Dominant Group,’’ Amanda E.
Lewis, ‘‘Some Are More Equal than Others: Whiteness and Colorblind
Ideology at the Dawn of the 21st Century,’’ Monica McDermott, ‘‘White-
ness as Perceived Stigma: Identity Construction among Disadvantaged
Whites.’’
43 ‘‘Racial Privilege: The View From Above,’’ panel, 95th Annual Meetings of
the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., August 14,
2000; papers presented: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘‘Poor Whites Are Not the
Only ‘Racists’ in America: An Analysis of the Racial Views of Upper Class
Whites in Detroit,’’ Ruth Frankenberg, ‘‘Contexts and Attachments: Re-
96 ruth frankenberg

flections on the Psyche of Whiteness,’’ Richard L. Zweigenhaft, ‘‘Are There

Blacks in the White Establishment? Another Look,’’ Rhonda F. Levine,
‘‘What White Men Think About Race.’’
44 Again, I am aware here that I am o√ering only a reduced rendition of
McDermott’s argument.
45 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14–15.
46 Frankenberg, 140.
47 Frankenberg, 138–140.
48 In this regard, see for example, Jennifer Eichstedt, ‘‘White Identities in
the Struggle for Racial Justice,’’ paper presented at the 95th American
Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., August 16,
2000; Ellen K. Scott, ‘‘Creating Partnerships for Change: Alliances and
Betrayals in the Racial Politics of Two Feminist Organizations’’ in Gender &
Society 12: 4, 400–423, 1998; ‘‘From Race Cognizance to Racism Cogni-
zance: Dilemmas in Anti-Racist Activism,’’ in Kathleen Blee and France
Winddance Twine, eds. Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Strug-
gles for Justice, New York: New York University Press, forthcoming; and
Ellen K. Scott, ‘‘Feminists Working Across Racial Divides: The Politics of
Race in a Battered Women’s Shelter and a Rape Crisis Center,’’ Disserta-
tion, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis. See also
Becky Thompson, A Promise and a Way of Life. White anti-racist activism,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
 Howard Winant

White Racial Projects

Uncertainty about whiteness, anxiety about the meaning of white

identity, is nothing new. As Toni Morrison has pointed out, this anx-
iety is central to American literature.∞ Racist thought, indeed, is laced
with fears about the integrity, the purity, and the putative ‘‘dangers’’
whiteness encounters in the modern world: think of the founding
documents of eugenics; think of the legislation required to institu-
tionalize slavery or to restrict citizenship rights along racial lines.
Indeed, U.S. racism can be understood as a continuing struggle to
allay fears about the instability of whiteness, as a number of creative
historians have begun to show in recent years.≤
Nothing new there. What is new is a di√erent kind of uncertainty
about whiteness, coming not from those who wish to preserve it, who
seek to defend racial hierarchy and inequality, but rather from those
who wish to overcome it, to transcend it, to forget it, or to abolish it.
The new uncertainty and anxiety about whiteness is very di√erent
from the old varieties that were visible in eugenics, that can still be
seen in The Bell Curve, and in a thousand other places. This is post–
World War II post–civil rights anxiety.
Our newfound attention to whiteness must be understood as a
product of both the accomplishments and the containment of the
postwar movements of racially defined minorities, especially the black
movement. It should be seen, too, in light of the partial, contradictory,
and inadequate racial reform policies enacted during the 1960s. It
consists of a series of uncertain and conflictual responses by move-
ment veterans—conservative, liberal, and radical—to present-day un-
certainties: about what race means, about what an egalitarian and
social justice–oriented racial politics would look like, and about the
continuing significance of race.
In what follows I first make some comments on the emerging
98 howard winant

‘‘new racial order,’’ to set anxieties about whiteness in a broader con-

text. Then I summarize the concept of racial projects developed by
Michael Omi and myself in our work on racial formation, for this
notion of ‘‘projects’’ is central to my purposes here.≥ Next, I critically
analyze what I take to be the three crucial white racial projects that
have developed in the post–civil rights era: the neoconservative, lib-
eral, and new abolitionist projects. Although I make no secret about
my sympathy with the radical side of that spectrum, I conclude with
some criticisms of all three of these reactions to the post–civil rights
contradictions of whiteness. My questions are inflected by Du Boisian
allegiances: they center on the hazards of calls for the abolition of
whiteness, no matter what political origins they may have. I suggest
that e√orts to deconstruct whiteness are more practical and more
promising than attempts to abolish it.

The New Racial Order

We are living through a profound upheaval in the meaning of race, the
emergence of perhaps the most contradictory and unsettling racial
formation that has ever existed. In a sentence: the past half century or
so has been the first time since the dawn of modernity, since the rise of
capitalism and the knitting together of the globe in one unified ‘‘sys-
tem,’’ that white supremacy has been called seriously into question on
a world-historical scale.∂
This profound transformation in the global logic of race began with
the end of World War II. After the war, a worldwide range of so-
ciopolitical mutations took place, many of which had tremendous
racial meaning. These included an acceleration of the U.S. black
movement, of course, but we should see the movement’s rise as part
of a global process that also involved many other insurgent phe-
nomena: an upsurge of anticolonial pressures springing from the
liberation of numerous countries from Axis occupation (and these
countries’ consequent reluctance to embrace anew the Allied colonial-
ists of the past); a massive need to reintegrate former soldiers who had
become used to bearing arms and who had been politically tempered
by wide-ranging international experience; a celebratory atmosphere
surrounding the global victory of democracy over the horrors and the
racisms of the Nazis and the Japanese; the onset of new global compe-
tition between the ‘‘free world’’ and the Soviet Union, that is, the Cold
 white racial projects 99

War. All these factors (and others too numerous to list) contributed to
the problematization of the traditional, racialized forms of rule which
had, mutatis mutandis, shaped the world order in crucial ways for half
a millennium or so.∑
These new, more progressive racial tendencies intensified from the
war’s end to about 1970. They resulted in the formal decolonization—
often only as the result of ferocious armed struggles—of the great
European imperial holdings in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the
Pacific. They challenged, sometimes successfully and sometimes not,
the neocolonial arrangements put into place by the new worldwide
hegemonic power, the United States, which had sought to impose a
new (let us call it ‘‘northern’’) order after the old European powers had
been compelled to lower their flags.
They set in motion other, deeply related tendencies as well, for
example enormous waves of migration. The old empires ‘‘struck
back’’ as former colonial subjects—East and West Indians, Caribeños,
Maghrebi and sub-Saharans, Filipinos and Moluccans, Koreans and
Chinese—set o√ in unprecedented numbers for the northern metrop-
olises, often locating themselves in the heart of their former ‘‘mother
countries,’’ indeed often recruited as gastarbeiter.∏ As a result, the face
of Europe was forever changed, Yamato supremacy in Japan was for
the first time challenged, and the United States became a far more
urbanized and multiracial country than it had ever been before.
So, since World War II, and particularly since the 1960s, the world
has undergone a profound shift in the global logic of race or, in Michael
Omi’s and my terms, in racial formation. This shift was the most sig-
nificant challenge to global white supremacy that had been mounted
since the rise of Europe half a millennium earlier. Yet, world-shaking
as it was, it could not dislodge, but only somewhat weaken, that fero-
cious tradition of white supremacist world rule.
During this postwar period, as had been foretold by many—W. E. B.
Du Bois and Gunnar Myrdal among others—there was widespread
U.S. mobilization against white supremacy. As a result, not only be-
cause of the rise of the black freedom movement, but also because of
these tremendous international shifts, there occurred a partial reform
of the racial state and of racial attitudes. Many types of discrimination
that had previously been virtually taken for granted were regulated, if
hardly entirely eliminated. Though obviously none of these changes
heralded the definitive end of white supremacy, they did portend the
100 howard winant

rise of a new U.S. racial order, consonant with the global changes I
have discussed. They signaled that from now on, what survived of the
legacy of centuries of relatively unquestioned herrenvolk democracy
would have to coexist with the partial and problematic antiracism
generated by the movement and its allies. This is the continuing situa-
tion in which we find ourselves today: a contradictory one in terms of
racial politics. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci: the old refuses to die,
and the new cannot be born. Hence many morbid symptoms appear.
So in what ways are these recent developments important in re-
shaping the meaning of whiteness? In lots of ways, actually.
This peculiar state of racial a√airs in the contemporary world is (to
use a Du Boisian concept) dualistic. The old white supremacy has been
challenged, wounded, and changed. A new, countervailing framework
has emerged, after centuries of lonely and isolated gestation in many
varied settings, and has gained considerable ground. Reforms have
occurred; massive populations have moved; democracy is at least
widely espoused in racial matters. Yet white supremacy, though per-
haps weakened, remains. It may even have gained some new strength,
paradoxically enough, from the very racial reforms that it was forced to
initiate. At a minimum, tremendous tensions have emerged between
the ‘‘new racial order’’ and the old one, whose white supremacy was
taken for granted.
One of these tensions concerns the contemporary significance of
whiteness. In such an unusual world-historical moment, it is not sur-
prising that whiteness and white identity have come in for some se-
rious scrutiny. A contentious batch of white racial projects has arisen;
the debate between them is about what white supremacy will mean in
the future.

Racial Projects
In racial formation theory, racial projects link significations or repre-
sentations of race, on the one hand, with social structural manifesta-
tions of racial hierarchy or dominance, on the other. Racial formation
is a permanent process in which historically situated projects interact.π
In the clash and conflict, as well as the accommodation and overlap of
these projects, human bodies and consciousness, as well as social in-
stitutions and structures, are represented and organized. Conversely,
when organizations, institutions, or state agencies advocate or resist a
 white racial projects 101

certain racial policy or practice, when they mobilize politically along

racial lines, they necessarily engage in racial signification, at least
implicitly and sometimes explicitly.
In any given historical context, racial signification and racial struc-
turation are ineluctably linked. To represent, interpret, or signify upon
race, then, to assign meaning to it, is to locate it in social structural
terms. It is the connection between culture and structure, which is at
the core of the racial formation process, that gives racial projects their
coherence and unity. In the process of developing and institutionaliz-
ing racial policies and practices, in the articulation and socialization of
racial meanings, various racial projects confront each other and un-
dergo conflict and synthesis. This is the way racial formation occurs.
Because racial formation is the articulation of culture and structure,
signification and social organization, it is necessarily a political pro-
cess. Without going into all the theoretical implications of this per-
spective here, it su≈ces to note that this perspective has connections
to Gramscian theory and some species of left ‘‘post-’’ perspectives
(notably that of Michel Foucault). It also draws on important sociologi-
cal sources, particularly the antiracist pragmatism of Herbert Blumer
and certain approaches to ‘‘micro-macro’’ linkage issues.∫

Rearticulating the Meaning and Politics of Whiteness

Using this approach, we can understand the various arguments about
whiteness; they are racial projects at play. We can distinguish, for
example, between white racial projects that represent race as an intrac-
table biological di√erence (certain neofascist positions, for example),
and those that understand it as a sociohistorical construct. For present
purposes, I want to focus on those projects that view race and white-
ness as social, not biological distinctions. In other work, I have consid-
ered the survival of traditional, explicit white supremacist projects,
which usually (though not always) invoke biologistic racial logic.Ω
Here, though, I am concerned with projects that have reinterpreted or
rearticulated the meaning of whiteness, and race in general, in the
post–civil rights era.
The very ‘‘success’’—partial and problematic, but nonetheless real—
of the antiracist movement in the postwar United States, raised thorny
political and intellectual problems for its sympathizers, who them-
selves occupied a range of positions on the ideological map. These
102 howard winant

problems were complicated by the fact that the movement’s ‘‘success’’

occurred in the context of the massive global reconfiguration I have
already mentioned. Thus one’s position vis-à-vis the movement and
vis-à-vis the reformist racial policies enacted in the 1960s had impor-
tant implications: on the left-right spectrum, in terms of U.S. interven-
tionism in the ‘‘Third World,’’ and in respect to dawning issues of
‘‘personal politics,’’ to name but a few themes. The anxieties caused by
the upsurge and containment of the struggle against racism, in short,
precipitated widespread political crises and realignments across much
of the political spectrum, for people of every ideological and racial
‘‘hue,’’ so to speak. A crisis over white identity, anxiety over the mean-
ing of whiteness, was widespread and much debated.∞≠ It is no sur-
prise, then, that a reevaluation of the meaning of whiteness emerged
as part of a fierce e√ort to come up with a post–civil rights era concept
of race.
I turn now to three such e√orts: the neoconservative, liberal, and
new abolitionist racial projects. All of these projects were developed by
movement sympathizers: moderates, centrists, and radicals. While
they overlap in some respects (and thus should be seen as only sche-
matically, ideal-typically distinct), each project o√ers an alternative
interpretation of the meaning of race, and thus of the post–civil rights
era significance of whiteness.

neoconservatism
Neoconservatism inherited the most ‘‘moderate’’ and incrementalist
tendencies that emerged from the civil rights movement. Already in
the mid-1960s academics were decrying the tendency toward ‘‘posi-
tive discrimination’’ as too extreme, too threatening to whites whose
favor, they thought, would be necessary for the success of racial re-
form.∞∞ By the mid-1970s, an influential work argued that e√orts to
overcome patterns of discrimination would generate a ‘‘white ethnic
political reaction.’’∞≤
Neoconservatism can thus be seen as an attempt to spell out the
limits of the black movement’s legitimacy. It attempted to frame the
new, post–civil rights meaning of race as a type of ethnicity, a largely
cultural di√erence. A series of assimilationist arguments directed at
blacks—for example, Irving Kristol’s ‘‘The Negro of Today Is Like the
Immigrant of Yesterday’’—sought to instruct both blacks and whites
on the changing dynamics of racial identity.
 white racial projects 103

The neoconservative project was not just an academic ideology but

also a nascent grassroots one. Ordinary whites adopted a more prosaic
version of the same ‘‘moderate’’ stance that Nathan Glazer, Kristol,
and fellow neoconservatives were at pains to theorize. Unable and
unwilling in the aftermath of the civil rights era to espouse white
supremacy, they simultaneously reacted to perceived threats to their
racially privileged status. Unable and unwilling to sympathize with the
more radical successors to the movement, which after the mid-1960s
had lost faith in the ideal of integration, many whites came to support
a conservative and individualistic form of egalitarianism, thus uphold-
ing a supposedly ‘‘colorblind’’ (but actually deeply race-conscious) po-
sition.∞≥
The neoconservative project eventually consolidated as a strategy
to conserve white advantages through denial of racial di√erence. It
opened up the political space that has by now become familiar in
terms of the critique of ‘‘reverse racism,’’ ‘‘race-thinking,’’ and ‘‘racial
preferences of any kind.’’ Neoconservatism thus sought to synthesize
the legacy of centuries of racial hierarchy with the egalitarian and
democratic norms of the black movement.
Although beset with contradictions and riddled with bad faith, the
neoconservative project was quite successful where it counted most:
in appealing to white voters. Obviously, a racial politics that could
present itself as consistent with Dr. King’s dream, ‘‘ . . . that my four
little children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the
content of their character,’’ was far more subtle, far more politically
e√ective, than open or coded appeals to white racial fears.

liberalism
The hallmark of the neoconservative project has been its insistence
that, beyond the proscription of explicit racial discrimination, every
invocation of ‘‘race-thinking’’ was suspect. It goes without saying that
in the absence of a serious movement for racial justice and equality, in
the current atmosphere of assaults on a≈rmative action and similar
programs of 1960s provenance, a great deal of political expedience
remains in this view today. But where does it leave our understanding
of the meaning of race? How does it handle the status of whiteness?
These are questions that partisans of the neoconservative project pre-
ferred to avoid.
Not so the advocates of the liberal project. Here the struggle is to
104 howard winant

develop an alternative approach, both to the neoconservative e√ort to

view race as a subset of ethnicity and to radical projects of various
kinds. From the liberal standpoint, the race concept is itself flawed
beyond repair, and the problematic nature of white identity is but an
extension of the incoherence of the race concept itself.
Probably the most vocal academic proponent of the view that the
idea of race itself must be discarded is literary critic Walter Benn
Michaels. In a recent series of articles, Michaels has questioned not
only biologistic concepts of race but also social constructionist ones.∞∂
If racial distinctions do not exist in nature, Michaels argues, then they
can only be hypothesized to be social. Yet if they are social, they would
have to do with certain practices, certain actions, that could be carried
out by anyone, regardless of their racial identity. In fact, if race is a
social construct, racial identity could be chosen or refused at will. But
this doesn’t work either, Michaels says. ‘‘Passing’’ for white, for exam-
ple, or refusing whiteness—to pick some of many possible examples—
is not possible: ‘‘[F]or a black person to pass for white is for that person
to conceal whatever it is in his or her body that identifies her (sic ) as
being black. But since it is possible to pass only because that thing is
already invisible, passing is therefore less a matter of hiding some-
thing than of refusing or failing to acknowledge something.’’∞∑ A tell-
tale essence remains—a biological residue that cannot be disavowed.
Hence Michaels’s dilemma: ‘‘Either race is the sort of thing that
makes rejecting your racial identity just a kind of passing; or passing
becomes impossible and there is no such thing as racial identity.’’∞∏
Since race cannot be understood as either biological or social, nature
or nurture, timeless essence or sociohistorical fact, it must be seen as
illusory, an epochal mistake(!). ‘‘We cannot think of race as a social
fact, like slavery or . . . class,’’ says Michaels.∞π
It is rather di≈cult to deal with this argument in a short space; in
other work I have tried to show why race should be seen neither as
‘‘objective’’ nor as ‘‘illusory.’’∞∫ Certainly Emile Durkheim or Herbert
Blumer, not to mention W. E. B. Du Bois, would have a field day
demolishing Michaels’s premises about what a ‘‘social fact’’ is and to
what extent race qualifies for this designation. Critical race theorists
such as Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, or Kimberlé Crenshaw, con-
sidering Michaels’s argument from a legal standpoint, would view
with puzzlement and dismay the idea that race is a ‘‘mistake.’’ It hardly
seems necessary to say the following, but one must: entrenched in the
 white racial projects 105

Constitution, elaborated through centuries of legislation and jurispru-

dence, embedded in economic life, language, art, taste, and mores, in
short, a ubiquitous dimension of U.S. society, race is obstinately resis-
tant to the sort of dismissal that Michaels proposes.
But I do not wish to cast any more aspersions on Michaels. Here I
shall focus on a more limited agenda, discussing the liberal racial
project of which Michaels’s confusion is but a part.
What is the relationship between the discovery that race is a ‘‘mis-
take’’ and the crisis of post–civil rights racial politics? Already in 1964,
Lyndon Johnson famously wondered whether in signing the Civil
Rights Act he was turning the South over to the Republicans. By the
late 1960s, with the ‘‘southern strategy’’ in place, Dr. King dead, and
‘‘black power’’ (brown power, red power, yellow power) seemingly
entrenched in the movement, liberals who had supported the move-
ment in its civil rights days found themselves excluded and lacking in
political alternatives. For some—black and white (and brown, yellow,
and red)—the answer was neoconservatism. Others turned to the left.
But for those who sought to follow a middle course, commitment to
an ‘‘equal opportunity’’ program seemed a feasible alternative. As
David Plotke has suggested, the ‘‘equal opportunity’’ strategy sought
to frame a limited commitment to the civil rights agenda, eschewing
both the abandonment of egalitarianism visible among the neoconser-
vatives (consider the popular joke of that time: ‘‘A neoconservative is a
liberal who has been mugged’’) and the ‘‘equality of result’’/group
rights position of the left. It seemed to give a progressive racial spin to
individualism.∞Ω
The liberal racial project flowed in general from this orientation.
While not denying the importance of race tout court, while not oppos-
ing ‘‘transitional measures’’ or ‘‘dialogues’’ aimed at undoing the
legacy of centuries of racial subordination, it also sought, for prag-
matic political reasons, to avoid commitment to racial redistribution.
Most significant for this essay’s concerns, it attempted to diminish,
and eventually to eliminate, the significance of race in a√ecting, and
especially in constraining, the ‘‘life-chances’’ of racially defined minor-
ity group members.
What did this mean for whites and whiteness? To an important
degree, as Plotke argues, this strategy resulted from liberal e√orts to
maintain white voters’ loyalties.≤≠ Such exertions became necessary in
the atmosphere of backlash that began with the ‘‘southern strategy’’—
106 howard winant

or with Johnson’s trepidations in 1964—and continues today through

anti–a≈rmative action initiatives.≤∞
Looked at negatively, this strategy amounts to a soft version of the
color-blindness position associated with neoconservatism. Seen more
positively, it is an e√ort to frame racial egalitarianism incrementally
enough that large numbers of whites will sign on to the e√ort to get
‘‘beyond race.’’ In order to do this, the liberal project must strenuously
resist any concept of whiteness that equates it with preservation of ‘‘a
sense of group position,’’ much less with the maintenance of racial
privilege.≤≤ Michaels’s idea that race is a ‘‘mistake’’ thus attempts to
provide a theoretical rationale for the liberal quest to reduce the signif-
icance of race, without embracing the ‘‘reverse racism’’ approach of
the neoconservatives. As such, it is but one of many attempts to pre-
serve the allegiance of whites to a centrist racial politics.≤≥

new abolitionism
Emphasis on white privilege is, of course, the central component of
the new abolitionist position, which derives from new left roots. The
argument here is that whiteness is a strictly negative category, empty
of all content save its distantiation from ‘‘color,’’ its refusal of ‘‘non-
whiteness’’: ‘‘It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it
is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false. . . . It is the
empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one
isn’t and on whom one can hold back.’’≤∂
As befits its birth in the new left, the core message of the new
abolitionist project is the imperative of repudiation of white identity
and white privilege, the requirement that ‘‘the lie of whiteness’’ be
exposed. This rejection of whiteness on the part of those who benefit
from it, this ‘‘new abolitionism,’’ it is argued, is a precondition for the
establishment of substantive racial equality and social justice—or,
more properly, socialism—in the United States. Whites must become
‘‘race traitors,’’ as the journal of the new abolitionist project calls itself.
Its motto: ‘‘Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.’’
It is easy to sympathize with this analysis, at least up to a point. It
too is a response to the black movement, which in the U.S. context at
least served as the point of origin for all the ‘‘new social movements’’
as well as for the much-reviled ‘‘politics of identity.’’ The movement
taught the valuable lesson that politics went ‘‘all the way down.’’ That
is, meaningful e√orts to achieve greater social justice could not toler-
 white racial projects 107

ate a public/private or a collective/individual distinction. Trying to

change society meant trying to change one’s own life. The formula
‘‘the personal is political,’’ commonly associated with feminism, had
its early origins among the militants of the civil rights movement.
Well and good. But is whiteness so flimsy that it can be repudiated
by a mere act of political will—or even by widespread and repeated acts
aimed at rejecting white privilege? I think not. Whites may not have a
discrete, ‘‘positive’’ content to their racial identities, but whiteness
certainly has meaning, an ‘‘overdetermined’’ political and cultural
meaning to be sure. Whiteness no doubt has much to do with priv-
ilege in the sense of socioeconomic status but it also involves religious
a≈liation, ideologies of individualism, opportunity, citizenship, na-
tionalism, and so forth. Like any other complex of beliefs and prac-
tices, ‘‘whiteness’’ is embedded in a highly articulated social structure
and system of significations; while it is valuable to deconstruct it, and
important to challenge the system of racial privilege that sustains it,
the idea that whiteness can be abolished seems quite utopian, almost
Sorelian.
Furthermore, whiteness is a relational concept, unintelligible with-
out reference to nonwhiteness—note how this is true even of Roe-
diger’s formulation about ‘‘build[ing] an identity based on what one
isn’t.’’ The abolition of whiteness is unthinkable without the eradica-
tion of the concept of race itself, an outcome as undesirable as it is
impossible.≤∑

Where This Critique Leads Us, and Leaves Us

Abolishing whiteness is one thing; deconstruction of whiteness is quite
another. Whiteness can be deconstructed; it can be reinterpreted. It
was never ‘‘pure,’’ never only the ‘‘absence of color.’’ Long before there
was whiteness, there was hybridization, with its contradictory mixture
of opprobrium and longing for ‘‘the other.’’≤∏ While there can be no
doubt about the underlying concepts of status and privilege that shape
whiteness, neither can it be understood as ‘‘merely’’ privilege.
But deconstruction di√ers from abolition. I take the deconstruction
of whiteness to be the practicable core of the new abolitionism. I
understand deconstructing whiteness to mean rethinking and chang-
ing ideas about white identity and reorienting the practices conse-
quent upon these ideas. Deconstructing whiteness can begin rela-
108 howard winant

tively easily, in the messy present, with the recognition that whiteness
already contains substantial nonwhite elements. Cannot antiracists
dispense with the ‘‘one-drop rule,’’ the defense of racial purity, the
abhorrence of hybridity? To be sure, these are not easy tasks, not
matters to be talked away in a few sophisticated (or sophistic) articles à
la Michaels. They suggest some of the strategies, the ideas and actions,
that can realistically be demanded of whites. Nor are all the practical
ideas of the ‘‘race traitor’’ school to be dismissed: without denying
one’s white identity, one can certainly oppose and interrupt racist
activity or speech, for example.≤π
Such activity and awareness demand thought and discipline. They
hark back to Du Boisian concepts: of the inevitable duality of racialized
experience, of the ‘‘conservation’’ of races, of the pitfalls and pities of
the ‘‘psychological wage’’ that racism o√ers to whites.≤∫ It demands
recognition of the centrality of the enormous contributions that ra-
cially defined minorities have made to U.S. society and culture. Think
of American music and dance and poetry, think of the very language
Americans speak. Think, too, of the oceans of labor sunk into this soil
by people of every color, whose origins span every continent, every
modern historical epoch. Think, finally, of what it means to acknowl-
edge that the half-millennium of domination of the globe by Europe
and its U.S. inheritors is the historical context in which racial concepts
of human di√erence have attained their present, and still relatively
unquestioned, foundational status.≤Ω
All this whites must come to know not only as ideas but also as
practical reason, as instrumental knowledge, whose yield is profound
social reorganization. Yet, compelling as such knowledge would be, it
does not entail the abolition of whiteness or the end of the race con-
cept. Instead it poses once more, as profoundly as ever before, the
possibilities of human variability, pluralism, self-determination, and
democracy.

Notes
1 See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina-
tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
2 For eugenics, see Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race, or The Racial
History of European History (New York: Scribners, 1916). On slavery and
citizenship, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:
 white racial projects 109

The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) and Rogers M.
Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For historical work on the instability
of whiteness, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Alex-
ander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass
Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990).
3 See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
4 I do not use the term ‘‘world-historical’’ casually: the crisis of racial mean-
ings, I suggest, is not confined within the United States, but a global
phenomenon. Although in this essay I confine myself to the United
States, in other comparative work I seek to place the contemporary racial
upheaval in a global context. See Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Poli-
tics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994).
5 Of course, opposition to racial hierarchy has always existed, for wher-
ever there is oppression there is resistance. There had even been some im-
portant ‘‘rehearsals’’ for the massive critique of white supremacy that
consolidated after World War II: notably the Haitian revolution and its
hemisphere-wide influences and the tide of abolitionism that engulfed
both sides of the Atlantic for most of the nineteenth century. But impor-
tant as these precedents were, they did not congeal as coherent, global
critiques of racism. On the Haitian revolution, see C. L. R. James, The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d
ed., rev. (New York: Vintage, 1989). On abolitionism, see Robin Blackburn,
The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988) and
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–
1800 (London, Verso, 1997).
6 See Aristide Zolberg, ‘‘The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing
World,’’ International Migration Review 23 no. 3 (1989): and John Solomos
and John Wrench, eds., Racism and Migration in Western Europe (Provi-
dence, R.I.: Berg, 1993), 403–30.
7 What is wrong with ‘‘solving’’ the race ‘‘problem’’? Why shouldn’t we try to
‘‘get beyond’’ race? While a full account of the complexities of race remains
far beyond our reach, such objectives are either foolish or dangerous or
both. Is it not rather disingenuous to contemplate ‘‘getting beyond’’ race
when in almost every corner of the globe, dark skin still correlates with
inequality? Since when has it been possible to make large-scale conflicts
‘‘go away’’? What other major forms of human di√erence have been tran-
scended recently? Class? Gender? Nationality? When we look with any
degree of seriousness at the ‘‘problem’’ of race, we must recognize that it is
110 howard winant

not about to go away, not about to be ‘‘solved.’’ See Winant, Racial Condi-
tions, xii.
8 Herbert Blumer, ‘‘Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,’’ Pacific
Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (spring 1958): 3–7, and Herbert Blumer and
Troy Duster, ‘‘Theories of Race and Social Action,’’ in unesco, Sociological
Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: unesco, 1980), 211–238. See also
Randall Collins, ‘‘Interaction Ritual Chains, Power, and Property: The
Micro-Macro Connection as an Empirically Based Sociological Problem,’’
in Je√rey Alexander et al., eds., The Micro-Macro Link (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), 193–206.
9 Howard Winant, ‘‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S.
Racial Politics,’’ New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 73–88.
10 For just a few manifestations of this crisis, see, among many others, such
iconic writings as James Baldwin, ‘‘White Man’s Guilt,’’ in The Price of the
Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985); Norman Mailer, The White Negro
(San Francisco: City Lights, 1957); and Norman Podhoretz, ‘‘My Negro
Problem-and Ours,’’ in Mark Gerson and James Q. Wilson, eds., The Essen-
tial Neoconservative Reader (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 5–22. For
sncc’s decision in May 1966 to expel its white participants, see Clayborne
Carson, In Struggle: sncc and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See also Bayard Rustin,
‘‘From Protest to Politics,’’ Commentary 39 (February 1964): 25–31; and
Roy Wilkins’s denunciation of black power as ‘‘the father of hatred and the
mother of violence’’ in Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist Amer-
ica: An Analytic History (New York: Anchor, 1970), 129√.
11 See Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race,
Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
12 Nathan Glazer, A≈rmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Pol-
icy, 2d ed. (New York: Basic, 1978).
13 Glazer has recently abandoned his racial neoconservatism for a more cen-
trist view, closer to what I call a liberal racial project (see below). Nathan
Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1998). See also James Traub, ‘‘Nathan Glazer Changes His
Mind, Again,’’ New York Times Magazine, 28 June 1998, 23–26.
14 See Walter Benn Michaels, ‘‘Race Into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of
Cultural Identity,’’ Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (summer 1992): 655–85;
‘‘Posthistoricism: The End of the End of History,’’ Transition 70, no. 6, 2
(1996): 4–19; and ‘‘Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race is Not a
Social Construction,’’ Transition 73, no. 7, 1 (1998): 122–43.
15 Michaels, ‘‘Autobiography,’’ 129.
16 Ibid., 125–28.
17 Ibid., 125.
 white racial projects 111

18 Winant, Racial Conditions.

19 David Plotke, ‘‘Democratic Breakup,’’ unpublished manuscript.
20 See Plotke. For a variety of expressions of this idea, see William Julius
Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American
Institutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Thomas
Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights,
and Taxes on American Politics, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1992); and
Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
21 See Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in
American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
22 See Blumer, ‘‘Race Prejudice.’’
23 Other toilers in this vineyard include William Julius Wilson, ‘‘The Right
Message,’’ New York Times, 17 March 1992; Michael Lind, The Next Ameri-
can Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New
York: Free Press, 1995); and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Holt, 1995).
24 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 13 (Roediger’s emphasis).
25 Why ‘‘impossible’’? First o√, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation. Then,
consider once more the social structural embeddedness of race: ‘‘[R]ace is
a condition of individual and collective identity, a permanent, though tre-
mendously flexible, element of social structure. Race is a means of know-
ing and organizing the social world; it is subject to continual contestation
and reinterpretation, but it is no more likely to disappear than other forms
of human inequality and di√erence. Of course, racial inequality can be
lessened, racial di√erence can be respected, but in no sense would such
changes, though obviously desirable, get us ‘beyond’ race.’’ See Winant,
Racial Conditions, xii.
Why ‘‘undesirable’’? Because race is not simply the product of racism, of
centuries of exploitation, exclusion, and domination, of the denial of free-
dom and even identity. No, it is also the product of centuries of resistance to
racism, of determined refusal to accept racial oppression, and of wildly
imaginative e√orts to create identity. Moreover, from these undertakings in
self-invention and resistance developed not only the peoples whom we
now designate by the term ‘‘of color,’’ but also in significant measure our
general concepts of freedom and democracy. So there is much to honor,
much to preserve, in the concept of race. Beyond that, to deny the signifi-
cance of race in the modern world must be seen as willful blindness: it
would be as absurd as repudiating, say, the importance of religion. Would
even an atheist question the significance of religion in shaping history and
society? Would she claim that since religious faith is ‘‘objectively’’ without
basis we should have done with it?
112 howard winant

These are, of course, questions far too big to be adequately addressed

here. I merely hope to suggest some general contours for a more sophisti-
cated understanding of the meaning of race than those we are often of-
fered in this day and age.
26 See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Roediger, The Wages
of Whiteness. ‘‘Hybridity’’ is itself a somewhat suspect term, also in need of
deconstruction, for it implies the melding of discrete and di√erentiated
variants. See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture,
and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995).
27 For a good primer on white antiracist practice, see Paul Kivel, Uprooting
Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Philadelphia: New
Society Publishers, 1996).
28 Du Bois’s concept of racial dualism has received extensive analysis. For
my views, see Howard Winant, ‘‘Racial Dualism at Century’s End,’’ in
Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built (New York: Random
House, 1996), 87–115. Du Bois’s concept of racial ‘‘conservation’’ merits
attention because it theorizes racial dualism in a world-historical sense:
equality and di√erence, as well as inclusion and particularity, Du Bois
argues, must be simultaneously pursued. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Conser-
vation of Races’’ in David Levering Lewis, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader
(New York: Holt, 1995). In disagreement with Appiah’s simplistic reading
of this essay, I suggest it retains great validity for today and successfully
preserves an emancipatory concept of race. See Kwame Anthony Appiah,
In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992). On Du Bois’s notion of the psychological wage,
see his Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part
Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America,
1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1977), originally published in 1935.
29 In this brief paragraph I can only hint at a few of the main themes of Du
Bois’s mighty analysis of race on the American and the world-historical
stage. While Du Bois has an unparalleled perception of the range of white
delusions and atrocities, even at the heights of his indictment he does not
propose the abolition of whiteness. See, for example, ‘‘The Souls of White
Folk,’’ originally published in 1920, in David Levering Lewis, ed., W. E. B.
Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
 Troy Duster

The ‘‘Morphing’’ Properties of Whiteness

In discussions of race and the recent rediscovery of the American pre-

occupation with whiteness, it is possible to isolate two overarching but
sharply conflicting frameworks that run at cross-purposes. On the one
hand, there are those who portray race and whiteness as fluid, con-
tinually reflecting emergent and contingent features of social life, em-
phasizing the relational and ever-changing character of race. On the
other hand, it is not di≈cult to identify historians, writers, and social
analysts who have emphasized the deeply embedded, structural, hard,
enduring, solid-state features of race and racism, sustained through-
out three centuries even as they have acknowledged the occasional
shifting boundaries of who gets included in the category ‘‘white.’’

Race as Arbitrary and Whimsical versus

Race as Structural and Enduring
If we take even a casual excursion through the last few centuries of ra-
cial classification, there is overwhelming evidence on the side of those
who have argued that race is arbitrary, shifting, and often biologically
and sociologically inconsistent, contradictory, and simple-minded. The
rule that one drop of black blood makes one black is the easy mark
along a full continuum of mind-boggling, ludicrous taxonomies.∞
‘‘Passing’’ and incoherent ‘‘miscegenation laws’’ and slave-owner/
slave o√spring do more than simply dot the landscape with the mine-
fields of this topic. This continuum extends well into the present
period, in which we find more and more people asserting a mixed-race
identity. Since the classification of race is arbitrary and often whimsi-
cal (for example, one drop of blood), accepting the idea that race is
something identifiable with fixed borders that could be crossed and
thus ‘‘mixed’’—while others are ‘‘not mixed’’—is supplanting one mul-
114 troy duster

titiered fiction with another. At the biochemical level of blood types

and hematology, at the neurological level of neurotransmission pat-
terns, at the level of cell function—at all these levels, we are all ‘‘mixed’’
by any taxonomy or measure of allele frequency of large population
groups.≤ It would seem that we must ‘‘score one’’ for the side that sees
the superficiality and artificiality of race.

Other Voices
Yet there is another set of very compelling voices (present in other
papers in this volume) emphasizing how race, or in this case white-
ness and its attendant privilege, is deeply embedded in the routine
structures of economic and political life. From ordinary service at
Denny’s Restaurants, to far greater access to bank loans to simple
peaceful, police-event–free driving—all these things have come unre-
flectively with the territory of being white.≥ One does not give up racial
privilege, neither in the United States nor in South Africa, by simply
denying that it exists. Whites who have come to a point where they
acknowledge their racial privilege are in a di≈cult circumstance mor-
ally because they cannot just shed that privilege with a simple asser-
tion of denial.
So who is right? One side sees race as ever-changing. The other side
sees enduring race privilege. Oddly, both sides are correct. Or, at least,
both sides have an important handle on an elementary truth about
race. But empirically, one could easily ask, if these two positions are
poles apart, how can both be correct about race? How can race be both
structural and embedded yet superficial, arbitrary, and whimsical—
shifting with times and circumstances?
The best way to communicate how this is possible is to employ an
analogy—to water or, more precisely, h ≤o. While water is a fluid state,
at certain contingent moments, under thirty-two degrees, it is trans-
formed into a solid state—ice. This is an easy binary formulation. But
things get more complicated, because when h ≤o, at still another con-
tingent moment boils, it begins to vaporize or evaporate. And now the
coup de grâce of the analogy of h ≤o to race: h ≤o in its vapor state can
condense, come back and transform into water, and then freeze and
hit you in its solid state as an ice block; what you thought had evapo-
rated into the thin air can return in a form that is decidedly and
consequentially real. In short, h ≤o is to serve now as more than just
 properties of whiteness 115

my analogy to race—and, in this context, whiteness. Race, like h ≤o,

can take many forms, but unlike h ≤o it can transform itself in a nano-
second. It takes time for ice to boil or for vapor to condense and freeze,
but race can be simultaneously Janus-faced and multifac(et)ed—and
also produce a singularly dominant social hierarchy. Indeed, if we
make the fundamental mistake of reifying any one of those states as
more real than another, we will lose basic insights into the nature and
character of racial stratification in America. So it depends on when a
picture is taken in this sequence and on who takes the picture as to
whether race is best understood as fluid or solid or vapor—or has
evaporated into a temporally locatable nonexistence, a color-blind
fragment in time and space.

If We Are All One Race, How Could There Be

‘‘Whiteness’’ in Its Solid State?
A consortium of leading scientists across the disciplines from biology
to physical anthropology issued a ‘‘Revised unesco Statement on
Race’’ in 1995. This is a definitive declaration that summarizes eleven
central issues and concludes that in terms of ‘‘scientific’’ discourse
there is no such thing as a ‘‘race’’ that has any scientific utility, at least
in the biological sciences: ‘‘[T]he same scientific groups that devel-
oped the biological concept over the last century have now concluded
that its use for characterizing human populations is so flawed that it is
no longer a scientifically valid concept. In fact, the statement makes
clear that the biological concept of race as applied to humans has no
legitimate place in biological science.’’∂ By the mid-1970s, it had be-
come abundantly clear that there is more genetic variation within the
most current common socially used categories of race than between
these categories.∑ The consensus is newly formed. For example, in the
early part of this century, scientists in several countries tried to link up
a study of the major blood groups in the abo system to racial and
ethnic groups.∏ Since researchers knew that blood type b was more
common in certain ethnic and racial groups—which they believed to
be more inclined to criminality and mental illness—this was often a
thinly disguised form of racism.π They kept running up against a
brick wall.
It is not di≈cult to understand why they persisted. Humans are
symbol-bearing creatures who give meaning to their experiences and
116 troy duster

to their symbolic worlds. The unesco statement of the 1990s is ul-

timately about the problem of the di√erence between first-order con-
structs in science and second-order constructs. Some fifty years ago,
Felix Kaufmann made a crucial distinction that throws some light on
the controversy.∫ Kaufmann was not addressing whether or not there
could be a science of race. Rather, he noted that there are di√erent
kinds of issues, methodologies, and theories that are generated by
what could be called first-order constructs in the physical and natural
sciences versus second-order constructs. For the physical and natural
sciences, the naming of objects for investigation and inquiry, for con-
ceptualizing and finding empirical regularities, is in the hands of the
scientists and their scientific peers. Thus, for example, the nomencla-
ture for quarks or neurons, genes or chromosomes, nitrogen or sul-
fides, and so on all reside with the scientist qua scientist in his/her
role as the creator of first-order constructs.
This is quite di√erent from the task of the observer, analyst, or
scientist of human social behavior. Humans live in a pre-interpreted
social world: they grow up, from infancy, in a world that has pre-
assigned categories and names for those categories, which were in
turn provided by fellow commonsense actors, not by ‘‘scientists.’’ Per-
sons live in the world that is pre-interpreted for them, and their con-
tinual task is to try to navigate, negotiate, and make sense of that
world. The task of the social scientist is therefore quite distinct from
that of the natural scientist. While the latter can rely on first-order con-
structs, the former must construct a set of categories based on the pre-
interpreted world of commonsense actors. The central problem is that
‘‘race’’ is now, and has been since 1735, both a first- and second-order
construct. This was the year that Linnaeus published Systema Naturae,
in which he revealed a four-part classification scheme of the human
races that has residues still today.
We now turn to the matter of whether race can be studied scien-
tifically. If we mean by that, is there a consensus among the natural
scientists about race as a first-order construct, then the answer since
about 1970 is categorically no. The unesco statement summarizes
why this is so at every level that is significant to the biological function-
ing of the organism, with two exceptions. We have already noted that
scientific research on first-order constructs about race as a biological
category in science in the last four decades has revealed over and over
 properties of whiteness 117

again that there is greater genetic heterogeneity within rather than

between major racial groupings. One of the two exceptions has to do
with the fact that the gene frequencies, as demonstrated in the use of
specific polymorphic markers, occur more frequently in certain popu-
lations than in others.Ω But this distribution of allele frequencies,
though occasionally overlapping with racial groupings, is definitely
not only a racially defined issue. For example, northern Europeans
have greater concentrations of cystic fibrosis than southern Euro-
peans, and both are categorized as ‘‘Caucasians.’’ Moreover, southern
Europeans have higher rates of beta-thalassemia than northern Euro-
peans—but, even more to the point, sickle-cell anemia is found in
greater concentration in Orchomenus, Greece, than among African
Americans.∞≠ While clinical geneticists are quite familiar with these
wide patterns of variations between and among persons who appear
phenotypically to be of a certain ‘‘race,’’ when an African American
with cystic fibrosis shows up at a cystic fibrosis clinic, there is as much
consternation about this person’s possibly being in the wrong place.
When a white person with sickle-cell anemia appears in a sickle-cell
clinic, there is often explicit speculation that this person is ‘‘passing’’
and is really black.∞∞
Thus, the ‘‘commonsense’’ question of whether someone is black
or white or Asian is frequently di≈cult to pin down at the margins—
but residents of the United States have been acting as if this were self-
evident. The allocation of such resources as loans to build houses has
been based on such casual visual cues as whether one ‘‘appears to be’’
white or black. Over time, with the patterned distribution of loans, the
racialized shape of suburbs and inner cities began to look ‘‘quite
real’’—solidifying into a solid state of racial boundary maintenance—
all the while a kind of second-order construct.

Race, Law, and Second-Order Constructs

Three acts were passed by the U.S. Congress in 1934–35 that would
seal the accumulation of wealth into white households for the next
half-century. There is some new scholarship emerging reexamining
the role of race in explaining U.S. domestic policy for the last half-
century.∞≤
The new work is fascinating in that it points out the systematic,
118 troy duster

integrated character of policies of the federal government that will

surprise most Americans who grew up reading high school civics
books that trumpeted the race-neutral character of Franklin Roose-
velt’s New Deal government policies. For example, Jill Quadagno
notes that while there is some truth to the claim that the New Deal was
designed to provide a ‘‘floor of protection for the industrial working
class,’’ it was the brokered compromises over the New Deal that simul-
taneously ‘‘reinforced racial segregation through social welfare pro-
grams, labor policy, and housing policy.’’ How, and why?
In 1935 Roosevelt had put together a fragile coalition of northern
industrial workers and southern whites still engaged in a primarily
agrarian economic order. Blacks were a vital part of that agrarian sys-
tem, but they could not vote in the South. Thus Roosevelt did not need
to even try to court what was not there: the black southern vote. Dur-
ing this period, more than three-quarters of the black population still
lived in the South. Most of them sharecropped and were tied to the
plantation economy at poverty-level wages. Those who were not share-
croppers were engaged in day labor—with most of these employed at
$2.00 per 100 pounds of cotton. This translated to $2.00 per day for a
strong worker.∞≥
Black women worked as maids, making $2.00 per week on aver-
age. White southerners in control of key positions in Congress ex-
plicitly voiced fears that any federal programs that would put money
directly into the pockets of blacks would undermine the very in-
frastructure of this plantation economy. As chairs of the powerful
committees of the House and Senate, they blocked any attempt to
change the agrarian system that indentured black sharecroppers. Be-
cause of this opposition, which is documented in memoranda be-
tween Congress and the White House, Roosevelt compromised, and
agricultural workers and servants were excluded from the Social Se-
curity Act of 1935. The exclusion of agricultural workers and house
servants appears in retrospect to have been race-neutral. At the time,
however, the key actors said they would block all Social Security legislation
if it included blacks.
Similarly, the Wagner Act of 1935, labeled in some circles as the
Magna Carta of labor, was on closer inspection the Magna Carta of
white labor.∞∂ The original version, which permitted the organization
of industrial labor and legalized collective bargaining, prohibited racial
discrimination. But the American Federation of Labor and the same
 properties of whiteness 119

constellation of white southerners who controlled the key committees

of Congress fought it, and the final version permitted racial exclusion.
Because the racial exclusion language was applied to closed shops,
blacks were blocked by law from challenging the barriers to entry into
the newly protected labor unions and securing the right to collective
bargaining.∞∑
Finally, in 1937 Congress passed the National Housing Act, which
sealed the fate of America’s cities, creating the social policy and eco-
nomic basis for sustained and exacerbated racial segregation. While
many commentators have blamed ‘‘white flight’’ for the creation of
ghettos and barrios, it was actually this heavily coded racial policy of
the federal government of the United States that created white en-
claves in the suburbs. In 1939 the Federal Housing Authority’s Under-
writing Manual guidelines for granting housing loans explicitly used
race as the single most important criterion. The following passage is
from Section 937 of the FHA manual that covered the period in ques-
tion: ‘‘If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that prop-
erties shall be continued to be occupied by the same social and racial
classes.’’∞∏
On this basis, for the next thirty years, whites were able to get
housing loans at 3 to 5 percent, while blacks were routinely denied
such loans. For example, of 350,000 new homes built in northern
California between 1946 and 1960 with FHA support, fewer than 100
went to blacks. That same pattern holds for the whole state, and for the
nation as well. Between 1935 and 1950, eleven million homes were
built in the United States with federal assistance, and Charles Abrams
has documented well his assertion that ‘‘discrimination against Ne-
groes was a condition of federal assistance.’’ The o≈cial code of ethics
of the National Association of Real Estate Boards not only barred its
members from selling houses across the racial divide but put teeth
behind its code. In a 1943 brochure titled Fundamentals of Real Estate
Practice, the association outlined grounds for expulsion of realtors
who violated race-based sales and then went on to state explicitly what
constituted problematic behavior:
The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause
considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madame who had a
number of Call Girls on her string, a gangster, who wants a screen
for his activities by living in a better neighborhood, a colored man
120 troy duster

of means who was giving his children a college education and

thought they were entitled to live among whites . . . No matter
what the motive or character of the would-be purchaser, if the deal
would instigate a form of blight, then certainly the well-meaning
broker must work against its consummation.
The urban redevelopment programs sponsored by the federal govern-
ment under the National Housing Act of 1949 also served to under-
mine the financial solidity of the black community. The alignment of
corridors in the major cities was chosen so that the freeways almost
universally cut through core areas of black settlements, while connect-
ing the white suburbs to the central business districts of the cities. As a
direct result of these programs, many urban black areas lost their
neighborhood shopping districts of successful small businesses. This
was soon followed by empirically demonstrable race-conscious sys-
tematic mortgage ‘‘redlining,’’ which had a downward-spiraling e√ect
on the economic vitality of scores of black communities.∞π
It should now be clear that the assertion of a fact—that median
family net worth of individuals in the United States who are socially
designed as ‘‘white’’ is $43,279, while the median family net worth of
individuals in the United States who are socially designated as ‘‘black’’
is $4,169—is a matter that can be determined to be true or false by the
systematic collection of empirical data, and either replicated or re-
futed. In other words, it can be investigated scientifically, without
reference to blood groups, the relationship between genotype and
phenotype, or the likelihood that one group is more at risk for cystic
fibrosis while the other is more at risk for sickle-cell anemia.
To definitively assert that at the blood group level, or at the level of
the modulatory environment for neurotransmission in the brain,
there are no real racial di√erences (read biological) is to reify a particu-
lar version of the biological sciences as science. This would ignore the
capacity of scientific inquiry to apprehend the social reality of the ten-
to-one economic advantage of coming from a white household in
America versus coming from a black household. Although loan al-
locations based on crude phenotypical versions of racial di√erences
are second-order constructs, the ten-to-one ratio by ‘‘race’’ noted above
is subject to scientific investigation as well. It can be challenged or
proven false or replicated over and over again. Nonetheless, patterned
social behavior associated with ‘‘race’’ leads to a confusion about the
 properties of whiteness 121

role of genetics and the way in which the analyst peers through the
prism of heritability at the direction of the causal arrow. Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray, James Wilson and Richard Herrn-
stein, Arthur Jensen, and a wide band of other claimants with no
training in genetics make the commonsense mistake of treating race
as a biological construct, then reading back through social patterns
(scoring on a test; rate of incarceration) to make inferences about the
biological underpinnings of social patterns.∞∫ For example, Herrn-
stein and Murray posit the dominance of genetics in explaining iq,
concluding that ‘‘the genetic component of iq’’ is 60 per cent. Then,
taking iq as the independent variable, the authors extend this analysis
to the genetic explanation of social achievement or failure, so that
unemployment, crime, and social standing are ‘‘explained’’ by iq. ∞Ω
Despite a heavy reliance on the genetic explanation of intelligence as
measured by test scores, the basic data from the molecular genetics
revolution of the last three decades are completely absent.
Herrnstein and Murray posit that genetics plays an important, even
dominant role in iq, proposing that it is a whopping 60 percent of g, a
statistical measure assumed to be related to ‘‘general intelligence.’’
Neither Herrnstein (a psychologist) nor Murray (a political scientist)
demonstrates su≈cient knowledge of contemporary developments in
the human biosciences to be aware of a fundamental problem in
attributing g to genetics. Even single-gene determined phenotypi-
cal expressions such as Huntington’s disease, beta-thalassemia, and
sickle-cell anemia exhibit a wide range of clinical manifestations. For
multifactorial conditions—of which, incontestably, we must include
the evolving thought processes of the brain—the interaction between
nutrition, cellular development, and neurological sequencing has
been firmly established. Developments of the last decade reveal a
remarkable feedback loop between the brain and the ‘‘experience’’ of
an environment. We now can demonstrate that a single neuron dis-
plays a variety of activity patterns and will switch between them, de-
pending on the modulatory environment.≤≠ Anyone aware of current
developments in cognitive science knows that a one-way deterministic
notion of the firing of the neurotransmitters and subsequent behavior
is a deeply reductionist fallacy. Thus to assign to ‘‘genetics’’ a ballpark
figure of any kind, without regard to these well-known interaction
e√ects, is to display a profound ignorance of the last three decades of
developments in molecular biology and the neurosciences, most espe-
122 troy duster

cially since Herrnstein and Murray posit genetics (60 percent) as the
most powerful explanatory variable.
The inverse of the attempt to get at a biological construct of race is
the assertion, by those committed to a class analysis, that class rather
than race is ultimately the master stratifying practice in technolog-
ically advanced industrial and postindustrial societies. But that is also
open to empirical investigation. Both the biological construct and the
class construct are attempts at first-order conceptions, and, as such,
they appear on the surface to be more scientific. Yet, there is a funda-
mental error in the logic of inquiry here. As we have seen, when those
who make bank loan decisions do so with their own sets of symbolic
strategies—and those practices are routinized—the stratified outcomes
are a compelling site for scientific investigation.
The debate about whether race or class is ‘‘more real’’ as a stratify-
ing practice can be better understood by reexamining how the issue is
framed. What is it about class that makes it more real than race—save
for the empirical fact that more people employ it (or do not) as a way of
sorting social, political, and economic relations? The power of apart-
heid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States demonstrates
that such facts are as much located in the practices of actors as in the
‘‘objective’’ relations of workers to capital. The answer is that, objec-
tively speaking, class relations are governed by just such an attempt at
a first-order construct: the connections to the workplace. But during
apartheid (and even after, there is evidence to believe), whites have had
greater access to scarce resources than blacks. This is an ‘‘objective’’
reality of a stratifying practice, no less because it is a second-order
construct employed by those acting in the world. Rather, during apart-
heid, it was even definitively a pattern with notable and obvious rep-
licability (i.e., as a stratifying practice).
The trouble with expertise about race is that once we write books
and articles about it, we capture some part of it for a particular under-
standing. We then become committed to that singular version of it,
and often become defensive and aggressive in our defense of our
‘‘turf ’’ of a particular rendering.≤∞ But if scholars and researchers have
trouble, lay persons have at least as hard a time holding simulta-
neously conflicting imagery about the multiple realities of race in
America. And so I am going to tell a story about my own youth, when I
came to understand the contingent character of race and whiteness
and how people can make strategic use of it.
 properties of whiteness 123

Race in its Fluid State: A Personal Tale

When I attended college many years ago at Northwestern University, I
was one of six black undergraduates on a campus of over seven thou-
sand students. Northwestern is just outside Chicago, something of the
midwestern equivalent of Stanford in that it draws heavily from the
upper middle-class of the Chicago region. And so it follows that it
would be very unlikely that my particular phenotype would be ex-
pressed at Northwestern.
While I was there, I came to know Jack Doyle, a fellow student who
was from an Irish working-class background. Gru√ in manner and
tough in appearance, Doyle was also something of a standout in that
world. He and I became close friends, and we have sustained that
friendship long beyond our collegiate careers. After our college days,
and over the years, we would often get together whenever I returned to
Chicago. A dozen or so years later, after I got my Ph.D. and was
teaching at Berkeley, I returned to Chicago, visiting my mother for a
week. One evening, I gave Jack a call, and he came over on this particu-
lar hot August night to join me for a beer. Around eleven o’clock at
night, my mother came home from a neighborhood meeting and said
she forgot to get food for the next day’s breakfast. She asked if I would
drive her around to the store on Sixty-third, just o√ Cottage Grove. So I
said, ‘‘Of course,’’ and we got in the car and drove around to the store.
Jack Doyle joined us, so there we were—the three of us. We parked on
Sixty-third Street, and, while Jack and I sat in the car, my mother went
in to the store to get the groceries. I noticed that police cars occasion-
ally would circle, but that was nothing new to me.
After about the third or fourth time around, however, three big,
tough-looking, white police o≈cers jumped out, one with gun drawn,
and said to us, ‘‘Get out of that car.’’ So we got out. They bent us over
the hood of the car and frisked us, and then they said to me, ‘‘What are
you doing here?’’ But before I could answer, they turned to my friend,
‘‘And what are you doing here?’’ Remember, this is an all-black area of
Chicago.
And he said, ‘‘I’ve come to visit my friend.’’ One of the police
o≈cers said, ‘‘Your friend from where?’’ ‘‘Northwestern,’’ I replied. He
said, ‘‘Northwestern? You’re college boys?’’ Then with sardonic dis-
belief dripping from the question, he asked, ‘‘Okay, college boys—
what did you study?’’ We told them. We were not very convincing
124 troy duster

because one of them said, quite agitatedly, ‘‘I asked you, ‘What are you
doing here on a Saturday night parked in front of a grocery store?’ ’’
Sometimes the truth will not set you free. I told the truth: ‘‘I’m waiting
for my mother.’’ That’s when I saw his billy club. He lifted it slowly,
deliberately, and I had the experience of all of this happening as if in
slow-motion—as in a baseball pitcher’s exaggerated wind-up before
the delivery. And all the while he was saying, ‘‘You’re a real wise ass—’’
Then, all of a sudden, the voice from the heavens parts the thick hot
August night air. It is my mother’s voice booming with authority:
‘‘O≈cer, what’s going on here?’’
In that one moment, perhaps even a nanosecond, I understood the
fluid and contingent and Janus-faced character of race. I saw it happen
with my own eyes. With his arm in midair, this tough white cop turned
o≈cer-of-the-law and literally turned and tipped his hat to my mother
and said, ‘‘Madam, we’re here to serve and protect you.’’ Yes. A re-
markable capacity for transmogrification or, perhaps better, morphing.
He went from solid state to fluid state. He transformed himself from
‘‘an occupying force of domination’’ into someone there ‘‘to protect a
woman citizen’’ from a suspicious character—from the sort of person
like me who waits out in front of grocery stores casing the joint
‘‘ ’round midnight.’’ Back in the 1960s there were two competing
versions of the police. One version said, ‘‘The police are a force to serve
and protect you.’’ Bumper stickers with that slogan were pasted on cars
all over the country. Contrarily, there was another set of bumper
stickers, disproportionately seen in the black communities of the na-
tion, which read, ‘‘The police are an occupation force.’’ In America,
depending more on your race than anything else, you will routinely
see this issue of police ‘‘occupation’’ or ‘‘service’’ through one lens or
the other.
The concept of race has that complexity. Writers Noel Ignatiev, John
Garvey, and David Roediger have discussed ‘‘the abolition of white-
ness.’’≤≤ That is not a bad idea, depending on context and historical
circumstances. However, it might not be a good idea either. That is,
what would you say if suddenly after forty-eight to fifty years of apart-
heid, in which whites had begun to collect and accumulate lots of
wealth—land—they suddenly turned around and said, ‘‘Let’s abolish
whiteness—now we’re all individuals. Apartheid is over, so we’ll all
start from scratch. Let’s have no group designation by color.’’
To many, this sounds like hollow rhetoric, more like the ideology of
 properties of whiteness 125

privilege in behalf of the accumulation of more privilege of those who

take the position that one cannot simply decontextualize or ahistori-
cize the notion of race.
As the extreme case, let us take the current situation in South
Africa. Whites spent the last half century (1947–93) creating and im-
plementing laws that permitted themselves, as whites, to accumulate
wealth and land and power, to have access to universities and corpo-
rate boardrooms, to have wages five to ten times that of black workers
doing the same labor. Blacks had to carry identification cards in order
to move out of legally enforced residences in squalid all-black town-
ships and villages, where there was no running water, no sewage
drainage, and underfunded and poor schools.≤≥ Then, in 1993, after
forty-five years of o≈cial apartheid, white monopoly on access to good
jobs and good education suddenly came to a legal end—but not before
whites had accumulated more than ten times the wealth of blacks.
The new president, a black man imprisoned for twenty-seven of
those years because of his opposition to apartheid, issued guidelines
for trying to redress some of those past grievances. He and his cabinet
would call for a plan of ‘‘a≈rmative action’’ to redress the following
situation: In 1992, when the writing was on the wall and apartheid’s
days were numbered, the corporate managers at Telkom, South Af-
rica’s national telephone company, did a quick review of the racial
composition of its corporate structure, an organization with more
than 58,000 employees. In late 1993, they found one more black
manager than many expected—that is, they found one. By the second
half of 1995, Telkom employed eighty-three black managers and since
then has embarked on an aggressive a≈rmative action program to
recruit and hire more.
Would it then be imaginable that some groups of whites would step
forward and cry foul? They already have. More than 5,000 white
workers threatened to strike to protest the new policy.≤∂ The rhetoric
regarding why a≈rmative action is morally wrong is rich in irony. ‘‘It’s
reverse discrimination,’’ complained A. C. van Wyk, spokesman for
the Mine Workers Union of South Africa, a union that still bars blacks
from membership!
To illustrate the further abuses of the extraordinary manipulation
of power through language, critics of a≈rmative action programs in
South Africa that would place blacks in positions held exclusively by
whites for the last half-century are now dubbing a≈rmative action
126 troy duster

‘‘neo-apartheid.’’ The banner under which this all flies is fairness to the
individual!
Now let us imagine an even more unlikely circumstance in which a
group with 2,000 years of historic privilege, that has accumulated
wealth and power as a consequence of havng been part of a group, then
suddenly turns around and says, ‘‘From now on, we are only individ-
uals.’’ This might be the caste system of India. For more than 2,000
years, certain groups had access to literacy—indeed, were required by
the caste system to be literate. And, by contrast, other groups were
channeled into occupations that required di√ering skills, training, and
education. Finally, some in this system were ‘‘outcastes’’—literally out-
side the system and therefore ‘‘untouchable.’’ If one inside the system
touched one from the wrong category, ritual cleansing had to occur in
order to rid oneself of the pollution created by this contact.
Ironically, the apartheid system in South Africa was o≈cially begin-
ning (1948) just one year after the caste system ended o≈cially, for-
mally and legally. But just because the laws ended the caste system,
2,000 years of habit, pattern, ideology, and privilege could not be
brought to a sudden halt. The caste system prohibited the lowest
castes from drawing water from the same wells or from walking down
the same paths; and, most relevant to today’s debates about individual
fairness, the children were forbidden to go to schools—any schools.≤∑
The government of India embarked on a program to redress these
past exclusionary policies, and much later that policy would be re-
named a≈rmative action. Scheduled castes were to be provided with
at least 12.5 percent of vacancies in government positions where there
was to be open recruitment across the nation.≤∏ Not only were places
in the workforce set aside for occupancy by members of the scheduled
castes; places in universities and in law schools were also set aside for
formerly disenfranchised groups. In 1961, after a review of the situa-
tion, the figure was raised from 12.5 to 15 percent set-asides.≤π By 1990
the government actually set aside more than twenty percent of jobs
that it controls for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. It would
be di≈cult to guess what the Brahmans argued. They called the plan
‘‘reverse discrimination’’ and said that it would hurt their chances of
finding work after graduation.≤∫ They argued that to use any group
criterion would not be fair to those individual Brahmans who had
studied hard and gotten better grades than students from the lower
castes. No matter that the Brahmans were the group required to be
 properties of whiteness 127

literate so that they could avail themselves of the sacred books. No

matter. After all those centuries of accumulation of cultural capital
that came directly from membership in a group category, many of
them took to the streets to demonstrate and riot, arguing that the caste
system was dead and gone . . . that from now on, they were only
individuals . . . that, in short, only individuals without any significant
remnants of caste privilege remained in India. Suddenly, after more
than 2,000 years of the caste system, and familial access routes to
privilege a√orded to individuals because of their membership in a
group, now nothing remained but objective grade-point averages.
Both the Brahmans and the white South Africans who oppose pol-
icies to partially redress gross injustices that favored their group can
retreat to a comfortable position of personal nonculpability: since ‘‘I
didn’t personally discriminate against anybody, I can’t be blamed for
apartheid (or caste stratification), and so I should not be penalized for
something I didn’t do.’’ And with that marvelously simple sleight-of-
hand, Brahmans in India and white South Africans can wash their
hands of any taint of privilege that they experience for having been
born to a position of enormous social and economic advantage. In-
deed, since there are only individuals, and individual responsibility
and individual entitlement are the only currency in the contemporary
discourse about race policies and a≈rmative action policies—not hav-
ing had a personal hand in the oppression of others makes one inno-
cent. The mere fact that one is from a group that has accumulated
wealth at a ratio of more than ten to one over the capital of another
group is rendered irrelevant by the legerdemain of invoking individ-
ual fairness. We are all individuals, but we are also simultaneously
members of families, nation-states, racial and/or ethnically desig-
nated groups, and sometimes religious groups. ‘‘Fairness to the indi-
vidual’’ must always have a social and historical context; when that
context is ignored, it is a cheap political trick in the service of the
ideology of those in power.
In the United States significant wage and salary di√erences be-
tween the races persist, with blacks earning anywhere from about two-
thirds to three-quarters of what whites obtain in wages and salaries.≤Ω
Since this gap has narrowed somewhat over the last three decades,
analysts who wish to portray the situation as one of a slow improve-
ment inevitably focus on these figures. However, focusing merely on
wages and salary di√erences obscures a critical measure of wealth: net
128 troy duster

worth. Wages and salaries are dependent on employment, and in the

current economic situation of the United States there is far less job
security than in previous periods. A combination of massive downsiz-
ing and layo√s, along with seasonal and part-time employment, char-
acterizes much of the contemporary work setting. Di√erent spheres of
work are more likely to employ whites than blacks. For example,
blacks are more likely to be employed in the public sector, the focus of
systemic and often e√ective attacks by conservatives for the last decade
and a half. All of this means that wages and salaries are not the most
secure measures by which to assess the likelihood of sustained so-
cioeconomic improvement and long-term wealth.
At the end of the more than 2,000 years of the o≈cial caste system
of India, caste law was struck down in the late 1940s, and ‘‘all of a
sudden’’ all Indians had equal ‘‘formal’’ legal status. And, of course,
what happened was predictable: those groups that had accumulated
privilege based on the accumulation of all those years would turn
around and say, ‘‘We’re only individuals.’’ Such a framing of the prob-
lem is transparently in the service of the perpetuation of privilege and
power. The deck, in short, is stacked when, after systematic accumula-
tion of wealth based on group membership, laws are suddenly passed
that have the surface appearance of applying to all. It brings to life
Anatole France’s famous line, ‘‘The law, in its majestic neutrality,
forbids both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges at night,
begging and stealing bread.’’
In a society that is racially stratified, the claim that individualistic
universalism is the best way to end race or racism—that we should all
become color-blind—is itself a not so subtle denial that race has pro-
duced deeply consequential structural privilege. But, of course, all
whites are not equally privileged. Many do not experience material
privilege, and they certainly do not feel it.

Race in its Solid State

Why study whiteness at this historical moment? What has happened in
the last twenty, thirty years in America to generate a remarkable surge
of interest in this topic? Several developments help explain it, but one
important element is a demographic shift in the urban landscape.
In the last twenty-five years, cities in the United States have under-
 properties of whiteness 129

gone the greatest racial transformation of their entire history. In

the 1970s almost every major metropolitan area—certainly the top
twelve—were primarily white (‘‘Anglo’’ by those classifications). By
1990, however, the census revealed that of those top twelve, ten now
had majority ‘‘minority’’ populations. Indeed, in some jurisdictions,
most notably Los Angeles, the ratio had gone from 75 percent white to
about 37 percent white. In New York City we witnessed a similar kind
of transformation, and that shift was occurring all over the country.
During this period, the white population—especially in urban
America—began to experience its ‘‘whiteness.’’ It began to feel marked
by ‘‘race,’’ and, once marked, there’s something to observe, to study,
and to account for. The need to deny ‘‘white flight to the suburbs’’ and
the need to simultaneously deny the accumulation of wealth are remi-
niscent of the way elites of India and whites in postapartheid South
Africa now face their worlds ‘‘as individuals.’’ Yet most white Ameri-
cans find it very hard to swallow that one should even mention these
three countries in the same breath. Indeed, they are often o√ended.
In Black Wealth, White Wealth, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M.
Shapiro show that net worth either entitles or precludes one from get-
ting a loan to buy a home. The median net worth across the racial di-
vides has been relatively stable over time. As noted earlier, the median
net worth of white families in America is $43,279. For African Ameri-
cans, median net worth is $4,169. To put it another way, whites in the
United States have ten times the median wealth of African Americans.
The metaphorical fluidness of race becomes a kind of frozen brick of
ice when we understand and acknowledge that net worth is the primary
measure of access to bank loans—whether for purchasing a house,
starting up a business, purchasing a car, or getting the means to go to
college or medical or law school. From this perspective, the bland figure
of ‘‘net worth’’ has deeply structural consequences.

Whiteness and the Black-White Model of Race Relations

Another theme in this volume is that the black-white dialogue or
paradigm dominates any discussion of race in America—to the near
exclusion of a more complex set of relationships that must develop
when there are a number of other racial and ethnic groups. We are
inclined to rehearse and replay the same old duet—or pas de deux, if
130 troy duster

one prefers the dance metaphor. But if it is the dance, then it has more
often than not been the danse macabre in white and black. But when
there are only two parties in a ‘‘race relationship,’’ then part of how one
of the parties knows its own racial identity and boundaries is by know-
ing that ‘‘it’’ is not ‘‘the other’’!
Especially in California there is certainly something deeply reso-
nant to the critique that the black-white dialogue misses much of what
is important about how ‘‘whiteness’’ plays itself out in di√erent situa-
tions. The institution of slavery, which was mainly about white-black
relations, frames much of the early part of the country’s understand-
ings of race. This occurred alongside the genocidal extermination of
Native Americans. Once that was settled (that is, the e√ective exter-
mination of Native Americans, their confinement to reservations, or
their ‘‘assimilation’’), slavery was the dominant institutional arrange-
ment that shaped our legal structures.
At the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness conference, one of the
audience participants said, ‘‘This is 1997. This is California. And Cal-
ifornia is clearly a place where one can be attentive to this multifaceted
feature of race in America. Why not more representation of these
issues on the various panels and in the many papers?’’ It is possible to
defend the organizers. It is certainly true that we would have had a
fuller portraiture of ‘‘whiteness’’ if we had talked more about the state
and federally mandated exclusion of the Chinese at the turn of the last
century. Or the discussions might well have incorporated a parallel
discussion of the Japanese Gentleman’s Agreement during this same
period. And finally, in the middle of this century, of course, Japa-
nese Americans were forced into concentration camps during World
War II. But whenever there is a decision to include a finite number of
topics in the short space of two or three days, there are always tough
choices of what to emphasize.
There are very strong empirical and theoretical reasons for bring-
ing into this black-white duet more the notion of the third party, the
trio, and then the quartet and whatever number there are on the dance
floor. Once we change the number, the dance has to change, too. And
California has seen a new political alignment based on its peculiar
configuration of ethnic and racial groups.≥≠
Once we take a closer look at how whiteness gets configured and
then reconfigured when there are more than two or three or four
groups, the theoretical insights of looking at ‘‘whiteness construction
 properties of whiteness 131

as a process’’ will be more fully illuminated. Remarking on the histor-

ically situated, contingent, fluid character of whiteness, Ron Takaki
has reported on how Armenians ‘‘became white’’ in the first part of
this century in California. This in turn helps explain why Armenians
could get housing loans—that is, build equity and gain later leverage to
positions of power (like governor of the state). Ian Haney Lopez
chronicles the same kind of emergent development of Armenian
transformation into whiteness—with case law.≥∞
Some of the students who organized this conference have been
involved directly in the study of whiteness as a relationship, and that is
where the most promising work is likely to develop. We cannot study
whiteness in any meaningful way unless or until one sees it as a
relational phenomenon. Pamela Perry has completed research in two
high schools, taking a look at how white students in a multiethnic
environment deal with issues of identity around their whiteness. Be-
cause it is California, she describes and analyzes how new Asian im-
migrants are having to deal creatively with a prefabricated and binary
world dominated by notions of whiteness and blackness. Perry chroni-
cles an emergent configuration at the ‘‘borderlands,’’ where many of
these students are making complex choices—but moving back and
forth, navigating ‘‘multiple identities,’’ and giving new meaning and
substance to the fluidity of ethnicity and race.≥≤
Perry reports that some of these Asian American high school stu-
dents (often second-generation immigrants), chose to adopt a version
of the dress style, the language style, and the consumer style of blacks.
Others choose the style of suburban whites. In the ‘‘borderlands’’
there will be other developments—not simply this notion that there is
a black or white style and the conflict that ensues.≥≥ Rather, there will
be emergent phenomena that will reshape how people think about
their whiteness, their Asian-ness, their Latino-ness, their blackness,
their American-ness.
Some of our best research is being done, I think, by writers atten-
tive to the borderlands, addressing and analyzing the contingent, fluid
character of whiteness: how the nature and shape of ‘‘whiteness’’ can
change nature and shape (morph!) and yet remain structurally privileged.
Here, the cultural studies critique is most powerful and most able to
inform us about what I call the ‘‘fluid and evaporating state’’ of race.≥∂
But we should not be fooled into the belief that fluidity substitutes for
structure. This is simply a matter of when you take the picture. Recall
132 troy duster

that vapor can condense; and once back in a fluid state, it can freeze.
So it is a fundamental mistake to think that, because we have seen this
evaporating condition with our own eyes, it is gone forever and that
the use of race will no longer be a powerful stratifying practice in
America.
For all the brimming insights of cultural studies around race, a
strong caveat is in order. There is a tendency to see only fluidity or at
least to so emphasize fluidity that one lacks the capacity to see endur-
ing structure. Well, my story about Jack Doyle and the Chicago police
says that under certain conditions, things can change dramatically, in
the moment, if only momentarily.
I want to end with another story. I was reminded of it by David
Roediger, who has written that blacks have been studying whites for a
long time and thus have a particular set of insights about ‘‘whiteness’’
that the current vogue of new studies would do well to mine. Indeed,
African Americans have been engaged in white studies for at least
three centuries. It is a necessity, if one is without formal power, to be
attentive and especially alert to power relationships.
I have been a member of the National Advisory Commission for
the Human Genome Project’s ethical-legal-social issues program.
Consequently, I had the occasion to attend meetings at Cold Springs
Harbor, New York. As at Northwestern University many years ago, I
am often one of a very few African Americans present in a scholarly
setting.
The site is in a somewhat remote location—a long distance from
New York City—and there is no easy public transportation. One de-
planes at JFK Airport, and typically one takes a waiting limousine. I
get o√ the plane, go out to the curb, and find this big, stylish limousine
indeed waiting for me. The driver is working-class white male by
appearance. He greets me with a kind of heartiness and takes my bags,
says, ‘‘Cold Spring Harbor, sir?’’ I say, ‘‘Yes,’’ and hop in.
But we can’t quite get out onto the main exit because of all the
tra≈c, and the person who is sort of directing tra≈c and guiding
things is not very o≈cial-looking. He is wearing street clothes and
about thirty-five-years-old. This is an African American male, and his
gestures and his movements are, to put it mildly, unorthodox. He
gives the strong impression that he is self-appointed to this task. The
driver of the limousine is waiting patiently to be told when it is okay to
move. (To give the story the proper frame, I would say that this particu-
 properties of whiteness 133

lar person directing tra≈c was being quite creative and sometimes not
very responsible.)
On two occasions, he appears to wave my driver on, then quickly
changes his mind and says, ‘‘Oops!’’ Finally, he definitively tells my
driver, ‘‘Pull out right now!’’ Then another car seems to come from out
of nowhere and nearly bends our fender, and my driver says, ‘‘Dumb
nigger!’’
There are about twelve seconds of silence. I do not break it. Finally,
he says, ‘‘I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry,’’ and begins to mumble some-
thing. I say, ‘‘I understand.’’ And for a moment his shoulders seem to
relax, and then I say, ‘‘I understand how you must feel in this situa-
tion.’’ The rest of the ride was in total silence. Ice. What had evapo-
rated and transformed into choreographed class relations had recon-
densed into race relations.

Notes
1 The pencil-test is only the latest methodology for precision that I dis-
covered recently on a trip to South Africa. During the apartheid era, only
‘‘coloureds’’ could work in Capetown. So whether one was classified as
black or coloured had important consequences for one’s livelihood. Thus,
some ‘‘blacks’’ would apply to have their status changed from black to
coloured. The apartheid regime devised a pencil test to make the classifica-
tion definitive. Applicants were told to place a pencil in their hair. If, when
they were told to ‘‘shake their head,’’ the pencil fell out, they were classified
as ‘‘coloured’’—but they remained black if the pencil was not easily dis-
lodged by a shaking motion.
2 Alleles are di√erent versions of one gene. For example, while the ‘‘generic
gene’’ will instruct the proteins and cells to make an eye, a particular allele
variation may produce a blue or brown or grayish-green eye. The same for
epicanthic fold (or lack of it) over the eye, hair texture, skin color, and a
wide band of human physiognomy. When researchers try to make guesses
about which group a person belongs to, they look at variation at several
di√erent spots, usually six or seven. What is being assessed is the fre-
quency of genetic variation at a particular spot in the dna in each popula-
tion. They are not necessarily looking at genes—they may instead be look-
ing at genetic variation in noncoding dna. Occasionally, these researchers
find a locus where one of the populations being observed and measured
has, let’s call them for example, alleles h, i, and j and another population
has alleles h, i, and k. We know that there are alleles that are found
134 troy duster

primarily among subpopulations of North American Indians. When com-

paring a group of North American Indians with a group of Finnish people,
one might find a single allele that was present in some Indians but in no
Finns (or it’s at such a low frequency in the Finns that it is rarely, if ever,
seen). However, it is important to note and reiterate again and again that
this does not mean that all North American Indians, even in this sub-
population, will have that allele. See Stephen Molnar, Human Variation:
Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups, 3d ed. (Englewood Cli√s, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1992).
3 The perils of ‘‘driving while black’’ have made it into the houses of several
state legislatures already. In California, the state assembly considered such
a bill in 1998. At the federal level, in March 1999 Attorney General Janet
Reno called for an investigation of ‘‘profiling’’ possible suspects by using
race.
4 See S. H. Katz, ‘‘Is Race a Legitimate Concept for Science?’’ in The AAPA
Revised Statement on Race: A Brief Analysis and Commentary (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1995).
5 In addition to Molnar, Human Variation, see Anthony P. Polednak, Racial
and Ethnic Di√erences in Disease (New York: Oxford University Press,
1969); A. H. Bittles and D. F. Roberts, eds., Minority Populations: Genetics,
Demography and Health (London: Macmillan, 1992); Malcolm Chapman,
ed., Social and Biological Aspects of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); and Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Di√erences
and the Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
6 For the discussion in this paragraph and for the references to the German
literature that are cited below, I am indebted to William H. Schneider, a
historian at the University of Indiana.
7 For examples, see Max Gundel, ‘‘Einige Beobachtungen bei der Rassen-
biologischen Durchforschung Schleswig-Holsteins,’’ Klinische Wochen-
schrift 5 (1926): 1186, and G. A. Schusterov, ‘‘Isohaemoagglutinierende
Eigenschaften des Menschlichen Blutes nach den Ergebnissen einer Unter-
suchung an Straflingen des Reformatoriums (Arbeitshauses) zu Omsk,’’
Moskovskii Meditsinksii Jurnal 1 (1927): 1–6.
8 First published in 1944, Felix Kaufmann’s Methodology of the Social Sci-
ences (New York: Humanities Press, 1958) was one of the key works that
was later developed into a more systematic rendition of the problem of
first and second order constructs by Alfred Schutz, ‘‘Common Sense and
Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,’’ in Maurice Natanson, ed.,
Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus
Nijho√, 1973), 3–47.
9 Molnar, Human Variation, 72–79.
 properties of whiteness 135

10 Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990), 89–92.

11 See Melbourne Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of
Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
12 I refer primarily to Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American
Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993); and Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano:
Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free
Press, 1995). There were, of course, earlier analysts who described parts of
the picture. For example, Charles Abrams, writing in the 1950s and 1960s,
had documented how the Federal Housing Authority’s policies were ex-
plicitly racist. See his essay ‘‘The Housing Problem and the Negro’’ in The
Negro American, ed. T. Parsons and K. Clark (Boston: Houghton Mi∆in,
1966), 512–24.
13 Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 21.
14 The cio was far more receptive to blacks than the afl, but complete racial
exclusionary practices in many cio locals continued well into the 1970s.
15 Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 23.
16 Quoted in Abrams, ‘‘The Housing Problem and the Negro,’’ 523.
17 Literally, those authorized to make loans at banks would draw on a map a
red line around a black community, and no one inside that red line could
get a loan. Until 1949 the fha also encouraged the use of restrictive
covenants banning African Americans from given neighborhoods and
refused to insure mortgages in integrated neighborhoods. Thanks to the
fha, no bank would insure loans in the ghetto, and few African Ameri-
cans could live outside it. See Quadagno, Color of Welfare 24–25, and
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.
18 See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence
and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); James Q.
Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985); and Arthur R. Jensen, ‘‘How Much Can We
Boost iq and Scholastic Achievement?’’ Harvard Educational Review (win-
ter 1969): 1–123.
19 Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 105.
20 Ronald M. Harris-Warrick and Eve Marder, ‘‘Modulation of Neural Net-
works for Behavior,’’ Annual Review of Neuroscience 14 (1991): 41.
21 Many of my colleagues will recognize the phenomenon that I am describ-
ing. Over co√ee, over dinner, we will hear a textured version of the com-
plexity of what we know about race. But the very next day, from the public
stage, we hear (and speak of ) a more singular and unidimensional charac-
terization of scholarly work and empirical results of research.
136 troy duster

22 Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge,
1996), and David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on
Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994).
23 In fact, black miners in South Africa, during apartheid, worked for one-
tenth the wage of white workers. For more on wage di√erentials, see
George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black
Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
24 Bob Drogin, ‘‘South Africa’s Hot Issue—A≈rmative Action,’’ San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, 22 August 1995.
25 Frederick G. Bailey, Tribe, Caste and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and
Political Change in Highland Orissa (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1960).
26 The term ‘‘scheduled caste’’ was first used by the Simon Commission and
then embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. Until this time, the
term ‘‘untouchables’’ was used. Gandhi renamed these groups ‘‘Harijans,’’
but many resented and rejected the name. After 1938, the word ‘‘Hari-
jan’’ was o≈cially replaced by the government with the term ‘‘scheduled
castes,’’ which has been in place as the formal term ever since. Of course,
in the population at large, the terms ‘‘Harijan’’ and ‘‘untouchables’’ are in
various locations still used. See B. D. Purohit and S. D. Purohit, Handbook
of Reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, on the Matters con-
cerning Employment, Education, and Election (New Delhi: Jainsons Publica-
tions, 1990).
27 There was an exemption for jobs classified as scientific and technical.
While this classification has been the source of some contention as to
which jobs apply, it is not a matter that bears substantially on the current
attack on a≈rmative action in India. See Purohit and Purohit, Handbook,
and Brochure on Reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and other
Categories of Backward Classes in Services and Posts (Bangalore, India: De-
partment of Personnel and Administrative Reforms, Government of Kar-
nataka, 1987).
28 ‘‘Students in India Riot over Favored-Job Plan for Backward Castes,’’ Oak-
land Tribune, 25 August 1990.
29 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A
New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995).
30 It has permitted, for example, the manipulation of sentiment around mat-
ters of ethnicity and race that one could not even have thought about forty
years ago. Asians, after all, are now 10 percent of the population in Califor-
nia; blacks are 7.5 percent; Latinos, upward of 27 or 28 percent. In that
kind of mix, where African Americans are number four among the four
‘‘groups,’’ the politics changes sharply. In my view, that is why California
 properties of whiteness 137

was selected as the major site of the attack on a≈rmative action. It was
seen by the Republican Party as a wonderfully propitious circumstance.
This is a position that is explored more extensively in my article ‘‘Individ-
ual Fairness, Group Preferences, and the California Strategy,’’ in Robert
Post and Michael Rogin, eds., Race and Representation: A≈rmative Action
(New York: Zone Books, 1998); originally published in Representations 55
(summer 1996): 41–58.
31 Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Di√erent Shore: A History of Asian Ameri-
cans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), and Ian F. Haney López, White by Law:
The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press,
1996).
32 Pamela Perry, ‘‘Beginning to See the White’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 1998).
33 Thomas Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981).
34 See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White Peo-
ple Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1998).
 John Hartigan Jr.

‘‘White Devils’’ Talk Back: What Antiracists

Can Learn from Whites in Detroit

The study of whiteness is developing a critical momentum both

within and outside academia; this is perhaps made clearest in the oft-
expressed anxiety that ‘‘white studies’’ will soon become ensconced as
something of a scholarly cottage industry. This ominous possibility
features a scenario of well-established (white) academics consuming
limited resources to maintain a circuit of self-aggrandizing confer-
ences and publications.∞ The specter of ‘‘white studies’’ frames sub-
stantive concerns about the co-opting of activist impulses and margin-
alized voices that have tenuously combined to make whiteness a
subject of serious analysis and deconstruction. But I think it also
unfortunately preempts a necessary assessment of various apparent
uncertainties over how whiteness can and should be studied. Ques-
tions about audience (academic or activist), subjects (what ethics
govern their treatment), methods (which disciplinary tactics are most
e√ective), theories (whose and how many), as well as an overdue ac-
counting of the class biases animating antiracist activists and theorists
(why are working-class and poor whites disproportionately subject to
analysis?), constitute an agenda so unwieldy that concerns over the
institutionalization of the various projects that fall under the cover of
‘‘studying whiteness’’ seem a bit overstated.
I am more concerned by a consensus emerging from the disparate
projects taking white people as their subject of study, one that ratifies
whiteness as a clearly delineated ideological object. That is, I think the
problem is more the developing sense of confidence that we know
what it is we are studying. This confidence masks a host of assump-
tions about ‘‘proper’’ (class) conduct in the public sphere, the opera-
tion of power in civic conflicts, and the absolute nature of the hege-
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 139

monic status of white people in this country. The political and ethical
imperatives that compelled us to objectify the cogent but occulted
forces shaping the terrain of racial inequality have been adequately
served to date; now some reflection is warranted on what has been
overlooked, distorted, and disregarded in the process.
I was provoked to engage in such reflections during the course of
conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Detroit, Michigan. The condi-
tions of whites in this city—a mere 22 percent of the population in a
city that is 77 percent black—are so diverse that I was unable to discern
a common unifying ideology among them, such as whiteness. Indeed,
the widely trumpeted assertion that whiteness is an unmarked and
normative identity often seemed laughable in Detroit. The lives of
white Detroiters disrupt as much as they confirm generalizations
about whiteness and its operation, maintenance, and reproduction.
Which is not to say that their distinct situations discount an over-
arching attention to whiteness as a position of power and privilege;
rather, the ludicrousness of rendering them as a homogeneous sub-
ject prompts a consideration of how the specificity of these whites’
lives can be accounted for in conjunction with an understanding of
why and how whiteness matters.
Rather than simply reiterating my findings, this essay pursues two
objectives in relation to my fieldwork in Detroit.≤ The first is to discuss
epistemological and methodological issues raised by applying an eth-
nographic perspective to the subject of whiteness; the second is to
relate particular insights I garnered from observing white Detroiters
grappling with the significance of race in their daily lives, within their
neighborhoods and the city at large. These two discussions derive
from a recognition that racial identities are locally constituted, follow-
ing place-specific dynamics that are informed by class positions.≥ And
they each are linked in a more general assertion that the racial think-
ing and actions of white people needs to be analyzed in relation to
generic conceptions of ‘‘race,’’ rather than via a studious delineation of
whiteness (as opposed to blackness) as a unique cultural construc-
tion.∂ In the course of providing a glimpse into the lives of white
Detroiters, this essay develops a rumination on how their situations
provide a basis for examining more abstract issues, such as the con-
tentious matter of the linkages between class and race.
My fieldwork in Detroit deployed a comparative class perspective
on whites in three neighborhoods. I based my study in an underclass
140 john hartigan jr.

neighborhood near the city’s downtown, where well over half of the
predominantly white residents lived below the poverty line. I contex-
tualized this setting by additionally studying an adjacent area neigh-
borhood that was debatably undergoing gentrification and a middle-
and working-class community bordering one of Detroit’s suburbs.
Both of these communities were also predominantly white. I was
interested in how class shapes the way whites identify racially. I found
whites’ perceptions and projections of racial identity and di√erence
contoured by the class-specific concerns active in each neighborhood
and that intraracial distinctions among whites, according to issues of
class belonging and status, informed their judgments of when situa-
tions, exchanges, or conflicts were ‘‘racial.’’ But I also observed that in
these settings whites are subject to the ambiguities, misperceptions,
and confusions that generally constitute ‘‘racial’’ conditions. This is
not to suggest that these whites endure the same kinds of inequality
and disadvantages as their black neighbors or African Americans gen-
erally. But this situation does neatly frame the way the significance of
race in this country is mutating rapidly, responding in divergent man-
ners to unique regional and local transformations. The terrain where
these transformations are most tangible—and where the political
perils of this tricky matter are most e√ectively rendered and negoti-
ated—is the realm of everyday life, a setting that the ethnographic
approach brings most sharply into view.
Ethnography privileges an attention to everyday life and to peoples’
e√orts—often inchoate, contradictory, and ambivalent—to interpret
the flux of experience and the stratifying social forms that constitute
their existence. In the form of means for generating ‘‘data’’ from sto-
ries, gossip, and conversations, as well as modes for observing the
interplay of spatial arrangements and social interactions, ritual cod-
ification or contestation of collective meanings and symbols, and the
implicit or unconscious forms for maintaining and naturalizing social
order, methods of ethnography have begun to migrate productively to
other academic disciplines. As well, some of these have been adopted
by antiracist activists as e√ective means of objectifying the occulted
operation of racist judgments and racialist thinking among whites.∑
But key presumptions guiding anthropologists’ uses of ethnography
have not accompanied these methods in their disparate migrations.
Most critical of these is the recognition that the specificity of people’s
lives exceeds what can be generally posited about their conditions;
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 141

indeed, the particulars of everyday life in locales are the basis for
revising and rethinking theoretical generalizations about society and
humanity. Culture is fashioned in response to local conditions; its
content often contested or debated, by heterogeneous collectives. This
view of culture quickly dissolves when academics wield such grand
abstractions as ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘class.’’
Over the course of my fieldwork in Detroit, I moved away from
regarding class in terms of abstract formulations—either as ‘‘relations
to the means of production’’ or status and stratification—and began to
recognize it as a pervading texture of daily life, patterning distinctions
that shape people’s thoughts, comments, and actions.∏ As well, in
analyzing these settings, I came to see class as a set of expectations
or assumptions, predetermined positions for explaining and under-
standing the actions of whites—indeed, delimiting in advance who
could properly be subjected to this form of social analysis. Given the
limits of this essay, I will only develop this point in relation to one of
the three sites: the middle- and working-class neighborhood, Warren-
dale. Emphasizing this site allows me to convey in detail the class
biases that inform the discussion of race and social commentary on
racial conflicts, as well as to depict how class textures the terrain that
whites inhabit, grounding their perceptions of how race matters, both
to themselves and to peoples of color. My purpose here is not to argue
that class is more fundamental than race; rather, I aim to convey the
classed assumptions that contour the recognition of what counts as
‘‘racial’’ in social discourse in the United States. These assumptions
are most evident in the economy of examples that brings images of
‘‘racists’’ to middle-class white Americans.
Why are the most familiar and oft-used images of white racists
drawn from the working class or the lives of poor whites? Is this
because these people are more racist than other whites, or is it, rather,
that most whites are comforted by the notion that racism is located in
the lower economic orders? Both possibilities highlight the near con-
stant linkage between ‘‘ignorance’’ and racism, an association that
continues to limit the recognition by middle-class whites—who regard
themselves as more sophisticated in their thoughts, deeds, and gen-
eral comportment—of the racism and privileges of race that animate
their daily lives. The most commonly circulated media representa-
tions of white racism are accompanied by a fairly invariable set of
adjectives (‘‘mean,’’ ‘‘brutal,’’ ‘‘ugly,’’ and ‘‘villainous acts’’)π that sug-
142 john hartigan jr.

gest a class sensibility or aesthetic at work in whites’ consciousness of

racism. Middle-class decorum is o√ended by racists perhaps as much
because their o√enses rupture social etiquette—being ‘‘angry’’ and
‘‘loud’’ (that is, vulgar)—as it is by the evidence of intolerance and
racial bias. Since racial inequality is perpetuated in this country pre-
cisely in the realms that poor and working-class whites have little
control over—housing, access to medical care and higher education,
and employment—it is necessary to question why the pool of collective
imagery of racists is disproportionately drawn from the lower white
social ranks. One way to begin is by listening closely to the comments
of working-class whites who have been caught up in such objectifica-
tion, as were whites in the Warrendale neighborhood of Detroit.
In addition to my interest in developing a comparative perspective
on class communities, I was drawn to interview residents in Warren-
dale because of a dispute that broke out there in the summer of 1992,
when the Detroit Board of Education decided to reopen a previously
closed school building (formerly Leslie Elementary) in this 80 percent
white community. The school was renamed the Malcolm X Academy
and featured an Afrocentric curriculum. Whites in this neighborhood
were furious over this move for a number of reasons: some had re-
peatedly inquired about getting the school reopened because of over-
crowding at George Washington Carver (the remaining area elemen-
tary school) and had been informed that the Detroit Public Schools did
not have available funds to reopen that school; many residents were
upset about the Academy’s name and were concerned that the curricu-
lum promoted race hatred; others were furious over the lack of input
asked of residents on the matter, or the fact that they had not been
informed regarding the school board’s plans; then there were people
who were deeply disturbed at the thought of black children being
bused into the neighborhood. Some white residents expressed a fear
that the Academy would lead to a rise in crime in the area. This cluster
of concerns, however, was easily reduced to sound bites and stock
footage of loud whites expressing fear or anger toward black children.
Media coverage transformed this array of concerns into a spectacle
of white racism, one that greatly shocked Detroiters. The formal ele-
ments of the controversy were simple and sparse: an informational
meeting hosted by the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools,
which turned rancorous; then a series of small demonstrations around
the Academy organized alternately by opponents or supporters of the
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 143

school. The Academy opened without incident and operated for two
years in Warrendale, eventually moving to another location, in part
because school o≈cials alleged that a pattern of vandalism against
the building was being perpetrated by unknown assailants. It never
amounted to a serious political battle, partly because there was never a
broad-based, unifying protest by Warrendale residents, but also be-
cause the board of education was in complete control of the process.
But journalists and editors remained interested because residents
were so animated in their objections to the school and its Afrocentric
curriculum. Talk show hosts Sally Jessie Raphael, Jerry Springer, and
Montel Williams were also drawn to this spectacle that briefly blipped
across the fleeting news consciousness of the nation.∫ White oppo-
nents of the Academy initially regarded the media as their only means
for articulating a position in this dispute, but they soon recognized that
their statements only amounted to evidence of white racism, edited to
fit the interests of this coverage.
The comments that were reported all revolved around a tight core
of racial concern and fear. White supporters and opponents of the
Academy alike grew increasingly frustrated at their inability to control
the mediums through which they were objectified and their interests
reduced to caricatures. Supporters unsuccessfully tried to draw media
coverage for their rallies against racism held outside of the school;
these events were apparently not considered as newsworthy as poten-
tially violent ‘‘racist’’ protests. While opponents of the school com-
plained to me about being portrayed as racists, they were more dis-
tressed that the array of issues generated in this controversy were so
incessantly distilled as being all and only about race. Whites in War-
rendale were upset not simply about how they were depicted or how
their neighborhood was portrayed, but because of the severely delim-
ited means by which complicated social and cultural issues involving
race were rendered through the media.
Their frustrations were as multilayered as the forms of mediation
delimiting the coverage of the controversy over the Malcolm X Acad-
emy to a simple narrative of white racism. The coverage of this conflict
deployed two interpretive frames: one editorial and the other explana-
tory. The first derived from a tendency by commentators to render
whites’ statements as ‘‘really’’ or entirely about race. This framing was
prompted, in part, by a series of signs that trigger such reductive
assessments, elements that seemed to be transparent indicators of
144 john hartigan jr.

‘‘racism,’’ such as the emotional intensity of residents and their ‘‘blue-

collar’’ trappings and mannerisms. However, this reductive process
also reflected the inevitable distortions of editing techniques required
to generate a highly time-sensitive commodity (news) for the widest
possible dissemination and consumption. I raise this matter, though,
because it bears an interesting correspondence with the way aca-
demics and antiracist activists generally regard or analyze the com-
ments of working-class whites—with a conviction that they conceal or
contain racists sentiments, which must be rendered or drawn out
clearly for all to see.
The second feature, the invocation of an explanatory frame, seemed
to stem from assumptions about the state of race relations in the
country at large. Much like academics who stress historical determina-
tion in explaining the operation of whiteness, commentators on the
Malcolm X Academy controversy emphasized the precedent of such
conflicts in other white working-class communities to make sense of
Warrendale. They decided that the points of resonance with historical
defenses of white neighborhoods were more telling than the novel
aspects of this dispute, such as the claim by white opponents that the
board of education was attempting to ‘‘resegregate’’ black children,
subjecting them to a ‘‘separatist’’ curriculum. White residents com-
monly criticized the incessant comparisons drawn in the media be-
tween Warrendale and Little Rock, Arkansas, or other ‘‘blue-collar’’
communities where fierce contests over race and schools exploded.
Generally, news commentary regarded this case as a primitive white
backlash to black incursions into a white neighborhood. The story of
the neighborhood’s ‘‘racism’’ was conveyed through a form of tem-
poral othering or distancing, similar to that described by Johannes
Fabian in Time and the Other—opponents of the school were regarded
as hold-outs from a time long past. This analysis, though, misses what
is undeniably contemporary about such protests and disruptions, par-
ticularly in Detroit. Most notably, this was not a contest over integra-
tion or desegregation; rather, it was a clash that revealed the drastic
disjuncture between two sets of assumptions: those held by black city
and school o≈cials in a system where 88 percent of the students are
black and those held by whites in a neighborhood precariously perched
between the city’s crumbling core and the wealthy white suburbs.
Whites in Warrendale maintained ambivalent and at times contradic-
tory understandings of race and racial matters; the ambiguity of their
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 145

positions, though, were usually e√aced by the interests of observers in

making this racial situation ‘‘fit’’ the historical precedent of radical
white defense of neighborhoods and schools.Ω
What opponents of the Academy could never quite manage to
speak about was the fact of their racialness, which formed a signifying
background that surmounted the nuances of their ‘‘personal opin-
ions’’ or ‘‘experiences.’’ As whites upset over a black school in their
predominantly white neighborhood, they found their actions, com-
ments, and emotions read immediately as racially significant. Their
class position encouraged this reading. In their talk, bodies, and per-
ceptions, these whites evidenced a fairly obvious class conditioning:
their articulations were not sophisticated, nor, largely, were they adept
at manipulating the supposedly neutral apparatuses of bureaucratic
power and political o≈ce.∞≠ They looked uncomfortable and spoke
awkwardly on television, and their comments resonated with a histor-
ical continuum of ‘‘blue-collar’’ racism.∞∞ It was hard for observers to
believe that the intense emotion generated by these frustrations was
not racial in nature, that it was not spawned by a seething core of racial
hatred and anxiety. Rather than serving as an index of their relative
lack of power in this situation, their emotions—distilled into ugly
images on the evening news—stigmatized these whites, both in the
city at large and within Warrendale.
These whites encountered an overdetermined discursive terrain
when they tried to speak about these matters; their concerns, already
emotionally laden and resonating with historical images of violent
defenses of white supremacy, were authoritatively rendered as ‘‘racist’’
by the calm, objective voices of black school o≈cials. Interestingly, the
comments by black representatives of the Academy or the board of
education achieved a racially unmarked status.∞≤ While opponents of
the Academy tried to turn reporters’ and residents’ attention to the
Afrocentric curriculum and the explicit stress it laid on racial identity,
the ‘‘blackness’’ of the school and those associated with it remained
literally unremarkable. More than just a reflection of the social and
political order in Detroit, this was also a reflection of the professional
status and authoritative positions of blacks involved with the Malcolm
X Academy. Just as important, too, was their ability to speak apart from
any attachment to place and maintain an air of cool bureaucratic au-
thority. It was this link with place—presented in the media by images
of aluminum-sided tract housing and fervent residents worried over
146 john hartigan jr.

‘‘crime’’ and ‘‘property values’’—that demonstrated and delimited the

significance of race; this link was carefully honed through editing and
citation techniques that disturbed local white supporters of the school
as much as its opponents.∞≥ When I talked with them about the Mal-
colm X Academy, they consistently turned to discussing the limits that
seemed to operate on what they could say and what people could hear
them saying.
These residents became astute readers of the mediated attention
that used their neighborhood to convey a traditional story about race to
an audience of metropolitan viewers. They particularly noticed how
the ‘‘obvious’’ significance of their racialness supported a truncated
attention to the way other predominantly white neighborhoods, either
in Detroit or its suburbs, managed to stay ‘‘white.’’ Warrendale was
characterized in some media accounts as a ‘‘white enclave.’’ Residents
were upset by this designation and regarded it as a charge that their
neighborhood was defensively segregated. In response, they pointed
to the fact that blacks had been moving into Warrendale over the last
decade and that the area was quietly but steadily integrating, despite
appearances linked to protests over the Academy. They also percep-
tively challenged the way the significance of whiteness only seemed ap-
parent in an interracial clash. They chastised editors over their inatten-
tion to the suburbs—areas that one resident characterized as ‘‘whiter
than we are’’—where residential segregation worked more subtly but
more emphatically, where schools could remain predominantly white
without drawing any attention to their maintenance of sharp racial
boundaries. Warrendale whites were as bitter about the ability of sub-
urban whites to elude such objectification as they were about the Acad-
emy. One white, who asserted that ‘‘the media is dominated by very
liberal whites who live in the suburbs,’’ articulately summarized this
sense of bitterness: ‘‘What I resent about them is their racial hypocrisy.
Here they are, living out in their lily-white suburbs, trying to find
racists in Detroit. What they love to see is a kind of confirmation of who
the white racists are. They love to expose their white racist brothers.
But they can’t find a racist person in their own neighborhood.’’
Opponents of the Academy were the keenest critics of the media;
some kept scrapbooks of news clippings or videotaped television news
stories that in the course of our interviews they used to criticize their
objectifications. As they talked with me about their engagement in this
controversy, they tried to discern how their multifaceted concerns and
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 147

nuanced sensibilities regarding race were washed out in the rendering

process that reduced them to brute ‘‘racists.’’ They disputed the open-
ing of the Malcolm X Academy for a variety of reasons, but they were
commonly linked by having children in the Detroit Public Schools
system. As well, many had attended Detroit schools in the late 1960s
or 1970s, a period of intense violence as the student population shifted
from majority-white to majority-black; they did not want their children
to be caught in a repetition of their racial ordeals.∞∂ This sensibility
placed them at a remove from older residents, many retired from jobs
in auto plants or with the city. They were even further distanced from
white neighbors by the circuits they traveled in as they challenged the
propriety of the Afrocentric curriculum the Detroit Public Schools
administration was planning to infuse on a system-wide basis. As they
attended school board meetings—hearing the hiss of ‘‘white devil’’
from the audience when they tried to raise issues about the curricu-
lum—listened to the ‘‘black talk shows’’ on the radio as guests and
experts explained theories linking concentrations of melanin to black
cultural and intellectual superiority, or read about plans for establish-
ing the separatist, black nation that at least one school board member
had openly advocated, they were left stammering, unable to convey to
whites or blacks their interests and concerns in this matter.∞∑ The
emotions generated by this predicament were intense and obvious,
even though the intriguing social features were not; indeed, the signif-
icance of their emotional state (as a sure indicator of racist motivation)
obliterated any attention to these particulars.
White opponents’ emotionality stemmed from frustrations over
the implicit class and racial contours to their discursive interpellation
in this controversy. While for most observers this emotionality read as
transparent signifiers of ‘‘white racism,’’ opponents contextualized
their emotional outbursts either as products of media manipulations
or as signifying a broader set of concerns than pure racial motivation,
such as their concerns over their children’s place in the city’s changing
institutions.
Diana—a white woman with two children and a husband who
worked as a machinist—pointed to an image of a Warrendale resident
that had become part of the opening sequence of a local television
news program. She was explaining how upset she and her neighbors
were when antiracists from across the city began demonstrating at the
school.
148 john hartigan jr.

Diana: Like Sue, when she went after that lady when the pick-
eting was going on. They keep showing her, Sue. She was
screaming at that woman. They were holding a rally, an
antiracism rally. And Sue, ‘‘It’s not about racism!’’ And
they, this woman kept baiting her and baiting her, until
Sue just went nuts and the cameras went on, and here’s
this screaming woman [rage in Diana’s own voice], you
know, and that keeps being shown.
JH: What was she saying?
Diana: ‘‘It’s not about race. It’s not about race.’’ ‘‘Yes it is or you
wouldn’t be so hostile! What are you getting so mad
about? What are you getting so mad about?’’ And there’s
Sue, just screaming, you know.
Another opponent of the school—Je√, who ran a lawn mowing ser-
vice—related how journalists and others drawn into the spectacle of
white racism were adept at manipulating residents’ expressions.
Je√: They’d just pull strings.
JH: How would they do that?
Je√: Well, like when you’re trying to make a point and every time
you make that point they twist what you say and say, ‘‘Well,
you mean this, this, this.’’ And they do that three or four
times and sure enough your blood pressure starts to rise.
And then sure enough, then you start going ‘‘Raaarrr!!!
Cannons! Get back.’’
In such instances, these whites felt themselves betrayed, on the one
hand, by what they assumed to be an objective media and, on the
other, by their own intense feelings of frustration, which held a singu-
lar significance for observers. They could not speak about charged
issues concerning their neighborhood without becoming loudly emo-
tional. Hence, their racialness betrayed them as well and signified in a
manner that proved to be beyond their control: if whites were this
upset, it must be the expression of a throbbing core of hatred rather
than an inability to express the complex stakes they perceived in this
conflict. Emotional discourse, though, is an index of social relations; it
reveals inequalities of status and power, usually cast in gendered
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 149

terms but also following the invocation of class distinctions as well.∞∏

Speaking with and against educated professionals who could calmly
manage their sentiments as well as the appearance of their racial
interests, these whites grew increasingly frustrated.∞π Dramatically
captured by television and sound crews, this emotionality seemed to
prove ‘‘racism’’ was at the core of their concerns. But considered in a
broader frame, as a function of a complexly coded struggle over lim-
ited resources, their emotions alternately convey the classed contours
of this contest.
Kevin, who managed an auto parts store, like other residents who
spoke with reporters, expressed frustration at how long, detailed dis-
cussions of residents’ concerns, sometimes lasting more than an
hour, were reduced to brief sound bites that, on reflection, seemed to
have been carefully manipulated to fit prefabricated story lines about
racism. He related the following in a group interview that also in-
cluded Diana and another opponent of the Academy, Karen.
Kevin: The first time I was on TV, when I told them that I’d tear
the Malcolm X sign down if they put it up there, they
interviewed me for fifteen minutes and talked to me
about schools, and where my kids go to school, and all of
this stu√. And the only thing they showed out of that
fifteen minute interview . . . I mean, by this time, the
guy’s got me going and then he says, ‘‘What do you think
of the name Malcolm X?’’ And I said, ‘‘I don’t like it.’’
Then he said, ‘‘Well what are you going to do about it?’’ I
said, ‘‘If they put it up there, I’ll tear it down!’’ That’s the
only thing they showed!
Diana: That’s what they showed.
Kevin: To me, they were looking for that racism, they were look-
ing for racism. On the Sally Jessie Raphael show, they
were looking for racism. And the Jerry Springer show,
they were looking for racism.
Karen: That’s why Montel Williams didn’t . . . They had Montel
Williams’s director out here; she flew out here to talk to
us when we were going around the school, and I guess
our issues were too . . .
150 john hartigan jr.

Diana: It wasn’t hot enough.

Karen: Yeah. It wasn’t hot enough. Wasn’t inflammatory enough.
Because we were really concerned about our kids. And
that’s what we’re talking about, 900 kids [and overcrowd-
ing] at Carver. Now you tell me why this school only needs
400 kids in it when Carver has 900? [Carver had only two
more classrooms than the Malcolm X Academy.]
Classroom sizes, requests to the school board, informational meet-
ings—none of these matters are very photogenic. Joni Hodder, the
producer of the Montel Williams show, frankly told the Warrendale
Press and Guide that, rather than arguments over enrollment limits,
‘‘they wanted more heat.’’∞∫ Not finding su≈cient ‘‘heat,’’ they lost all
interest in the dispute. Local reporters also found residents’ concerns
uninteresting when they were not explicitly focused on race. Nor did
they find whites’ assessments of black racial interests, as represented
by the curriculum, worthy of coverage. White residents were unable to
turn attention to what they felt was the main issue—the ‘‘separatist’’ or
‘‘racist’’ curriculum. As Karen put it, ‘‘The [black] children ain’t the
issue, it’s what they’re teaching in there. And the fact that they want it
done with taxpayer’s dollars. But, that issue has never been looked into
by the media. That part’s just glazed over and we’re just a bunch of
racists complaining about nothing.’’
But more than an inattentive or manipulative media bothered
white opponents of the Academy. They were also frustrated by the
dissembling on matters of race they observed among their white
neighbors. Opponents discerned an anxiety among residents about
discussing race at all. Kevin admitted to being emotional but also to
feeling compelled to rupture an oppressive sense of decorum that
gripped his white neighbors, whether or not they supported the Acad-
emy. ‘‘That’s probably why I was the one picked to go on the first tv
show, because I was the one standing out there, yelling and doing all
of the talking. And everybody else would talk, but when it came time
for them to talk to a producer of the show or a tv camera, people
weren’t saying . . . they were trying to say it too nice. And my opinion
was, I’m not running for political o≈ce. Somebody isn’t going to like
what I say no matter how nice I say it. So too bad. Maybe it’s because
my heart was involved in it. This is a community I’ve been involved in
all of my life.’’
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 151

Kevin’s sense that other whites ‘‘were trying to say it too nice’’
underscores the perception that a prevailing decorum determined
how racial matters could be articulated and addressed; he was pro-
voked by other whites who wouldn’t speak their mind, mumbling
private concerns or saying nothing rather than engaging in public
debate. But in breaking this decorum, ‘‘yelling and doing all the talk-
ing,’’ he was drawn into the media production of emotional state-
ments, demonstrating unalloyed ‘‘racism.’’
Opponents insisted that their white neighbors were fearful of being
labeled as ‘‘racists,’’ a term that they avidly tracked for the contours of
power its application revealed in this contest. ‘‘Racist’’ was singularly
fixed to those perceived to be defending a white working-class neigh-
borhood against black incursions; the ruptures of an idealized middle-
class decorum—a measured calmness or rational detachment (‘‘civil-
ity’’) in matters of public debate—were evident in the loud, emo-
tionally charged protests against the school.∞Ω ‘‘Racist’’ applied to any
white who either opposed the opening of the Malcolm X Academy in
the old Leslie Elementary building or raised contentious questions
about the school’s curriculum. The significance of race was so over-
determined in this spectacle that any white in Warrendale seemed
susceptible to being marked by this epithet.≤≠ What proved most frus-
trating for whites opposing the Academy was that an attention to race
was largely read as ‘‘racist.’’ There seemed to be no neutral language,
short of saying nothing at all, through which racial di√erences and
interests could be framed and discussed. In this contest, as in many
such public conflicts over limited civic resources, there was no more
sophisticated set of terms for evaluating nuances of these racial mat-
ters than the caustic, charged designation of ‘‘racist.’’
When whites countered public invocations of ‘‘racism’’ or their
designation as ‘‘racists,’’ they did so by challenging the terms’ policing
of what forms of race-talk were permissible. White supporters, school
o≈cials, or commentators rarely elaborated a criterion for designating
people as ‘‘racists,’’ o√ering little elaboration and letting the charged
accusation stand as self-evident. Virginia Dominguez describes a sim-
ilar discursive dynamic in accusations of ‘‘racism’’ between Jews and
non-Jews: ‘‘Accusers assume the transparency—the referential clar-
ity—of racism. Those implicated by the accusation typically regarded
it as political name calling—too vague to have semantic-referential
value, too emotionally charged not to serve as a ‘call to arms’ more
152 john hartigan jr.

than a valid description/interpretation. ‘Racism’ is o√ered as an ac-

cusation, and taken as one.’’≤∞ Indeed, whites opposed to the Academy
came to regard ‘‘racist’’ as a rhetorical matter, as a form of name-
calling that positioned them at a distinct disadvantage in these ex-
changes. They responded in a variety of ways.
The most typical response I heard was to accept the designation
rhetorically, admitting to being a racist but then further insisting that
was not all they were nor was it the sum of their concerns. This type of
response is best characterized in a comment by Je√: ‘‘If they want to
call me a racist because I say [the Academy is] separatist, or they want
to call me a bigot because I say, ‘Well doesn’t anyone else see what is
going on? They’re resegregating our children,’ and putting the facts
out there, let ’em. If that’s what they want to label me, if that’s what it
means to say these things, fine. Then I’m a racist bigot. But by my
definition, a racist bigot is someone who looks at somebody’s skin
color and deals with him accordingly. I don’t do that.’’ Such a gesture
acknowledges an inability to talk over the delimited frame of reference
most observers brought to this dispute, but Je√ ’s formulation also
attempts to di√use the emotional charge of the accusation by accept-
ing it as simply a form of name-calling.≤≤ Other whites made a similar
acknowledgment more reflectively, admitting to the possibility that
racism informed their thinking and actions—but with a key proviso:
that ‘‘racist’’ not inscribe an essentialist divide between whites and
blacks. As another Academy opponent, Joyce, admitted to me, ‘‘I think
we’re all racists, everybody. It’s like poor people display it more than
others, but everybody has a bit of racism in them. Everybody.’’ While
such an acknowledgment also works rhetorically to drain ‘‘racist’’ of its
emotional charge, Joyce’s gesture was aimed more precisely at the
assertion that blacks could not be racist.
From a number of sources—predominantly a two-day workshop on
racism sponsored by St. Thomas Aquinas, a local church that each of
the whites quoted here had attended—the Academy opponents had
been presented with the assertion that blacks, because of their gener-
ally disadvantaged and disempowered status nationally, could not be
racists. They easily spouted the definitional stance for me: racism is
equated with power; without power—institutional, political, or social—
a person, and blacks generally, could simply not be racists. They coun-
tered this claim by pointing to the local political dominance blacks had
achieved in the city but also to the characterizations of whites by
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 153

school o≈cials and promoters of Afrocentrism associated in some

manner with the Detroit Public School system. Rather than argue
categorically, they referred to specific statements made by blacks in the
course of this dispute. These statements ran a gamut from what might
be cast as ‘‘racial’’ to ‘‘racist.’’ The Academy opponents pointed to
comments by callers on the talk shows charging that ‘‘we have to keep
the [city] council black’’ or shouts at a school board meeting that ‘‘we’re
the majority now. We’ll do what we want,’’ each of which condensed
for them the impression that blacks would insist that power operate
along racial lines rather than in a ‘‘color-blind’’ manner. But, primarily,
they pointed to statements by advocates or promoters of the Afro-
centric curriculum, such as characterizations of whites as ‘‘killing
machines,’’ ‘‘devils,’’ and ‘‘ice people,’’ or claims that melanin actually
was a basis of black cultural and intellectual superiority. Such charac-
terizations struck these whites as ‘‘racist.’’
Abstractly treating the designation of people as ‘‘racist’’ distorts
rather than illuminates this controversy. Absolute definitions of rac-
ism, while useful and provocative, run up against the problem that the
significance of race is too disparate to be emphatically determined in
categorical judgments. While such judgments may be e√ective with
certain groups of whites, they undercut the basis for serious engage-
ments by antiracists who want to enlighten such whites as those in
Warrendale, a point I will elaborate on below. Alastair Bonnett crit-
icizes antiracists’ conceptualization of ‘‘white racism’’ for relying on ‘‘a
myth of Whiteness at the centre of their discourse. This myth views
‘being White’ as an immutable condition with clear and distinct moral
attributes. These attributes often include: being racist; not experienc-
ing racism; being an oppressor; not experiencing oppression; silenc-
ing; not being silenced.’’≤≥ It was exactly the projection of these at-
tributes that most frustrated the opponents of the Academy because
they ignored or dismissed their volatile, confusing experiences as
whites in the public schools, of being objectified as ‘‘whites’’ by blacks
and of having a precarious class position in the tumultuous setting of
Detroit. The essentialist assertion that blacks cannot be racist stresses
the institutional, financial, and political dominance of whites in this
country—a dominance that is mobilized to maintain racial inequality.
But this emphasis requires a leveling gaze and a uniform subject
position that precludes an attention to class and economic discrepan-
cies among whites, and it posits a simplistic view of ‘‘power’’ as being
154 john hartigan jr.

uniformly maintained and applied. This criticism is not a reassertion

of the argument that race is reducible to class; rather, it questions the
tendency to dismiss class altogether as the basis for the most powerful
application of antiracist discourse.
The antiracist workshop in Warrendale further strengthened the
convictions of opponents to the school, in part because the dogmatic
stance on racism seemed absurd to them, but also because it revealed
the broad gulf between antiracist whites and those who were engaged
in an emotional struggle over civic resources. The subject of antira-
cism came up in the course of one of several group interviews I
conducted with Warrendale residents who had initially opposed the
opening of the Malcolm X Academy.
Diana: It was a workshop on ‘‘What is racism’’? and how do you
deal with it.
JH: So what were they asking you to do?
Diana: Just to understand why racism exists.
Joyce: In the mission statement they came up with at the first
meeting, one of the statements was ‘‘to educate ourselves
on racism’’ so . . .
Je√: Well, they were trying to tell us that since we’re white,
we’re racist.
Diana: And black people are not racist, they’re . . .
Je√: And black people cannot be racist!
Their descriptions of exchanges in the workshop over readings
disseminated by the facilitators—two white women, each with lengthy
local histories of activism relating to racial conflicts—seemed obvi-
ously contoured by the contrast between people mired in a losing
battle and the detachment of others who are trying to enlighten them
with a broader view of their predicament. They complained that facili-
tators would not talk about the aspects of the controversy that mattered
keenly to them—such as the Afrocentric curriculum, refusing to ex-
amine its implications and ramifications, preferring instead to inclu-
sively treat it as an innocuous expression of multiculturalism. Indeed,
a more telling characterization is revealed in their divergent relations
to Afrocentric discourse, as is evident in the quote from Je√ below.
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 155

Long after the Academy’s opening drowned out the local issues, the
school’s Afrocentric curriculum remained an elusive, haunting con-
cern for these whites—elusive, because school o≈cials were reticent
on this question; haunting, because engaging this subject led them
into a disorienting, powerful assemblage of racial imagery and narra-
tives. Afrocentrism, a molten, formative array of assertions, claims,
facts, and theories, more evocative than established, confronted white
residents as a bewildering perspective, challenging, threatening, and
certainly racializing ‘‘whites,’’ whether or not they contested the Acad-
emy directly.≤∂ The dissonance generated between the antiracist per-
spective and the view of whites from Warrendale in the workshop
centered on how ‘‘seriously’’ each regarded Afrocentric discourse and
whether or not they were interpellated into its subject position for
‘‘whites.’’
Je√: ‘‘They gave this handout . . . They were quoting [Na’im]
Akbar, and they even had a section in there on melanin . . .
St. Thomas Aquinas is our own church now!
Joyce: And after the second meeting, Je√ brought her over some
stu√ to read to get her better informed about what’s going
on with these black people. You want to talk about them . . .
Je√: She [one of the facilitators] didn’t really want to hear any-
thing about it. I asked her, ‘‘What do you know about this
curriculum that you’re teaching us about, and the way
we’re reacting? Do you know what they’re preaching?’’
‘‘Yeah they’ve got Kwanzaa.’’ ‘‘Do you know what Kwanzaa
is?’’ ‘‘Yeah it’s a holiday. I’ve been to . . . [He mimics her
voice].’’ ‘‘DO you know what it is? It’s being taught in the
schools. Do you know the religious implications, and the
political implication behind it? Do you know anything
about Maulana Karenga, the man who invented it, Kwan-
zaa?’’ I mean I went right down the line with her. OK. Are
you familiar with the libation ceremony in Kwanzaa that’s
similar to partaking of communion in the Roman Catholic
church? And they’re doing this in our schools, except that
the children are drinking out of what they call a Timbiko
cup, with their dead ancestors. In school! Now that is a reli-
gious ceremony.
156 john hartigan jr.

When I o√ered that I could see the connection he was drawing, Je√
sarcastically challenged, ‘‘No. That’s your Eurocentric way of thinking.
That’s it.’’
As evidenced in this exchange, white opponents of the Academy
were avid consumers of Afrocentric writings and pronouncements.
Since they could not get their questions about the curriculum an-
swered by school o≈cials, they cast a broad net, which drew in a range
of claims, assertions, and charges that certainly far exceeded the tenets
of the curricular program being developed by the Detroit Public
Schools. From one perspective, certainly, the catholic version of Afro-
centrism they compiled was interested and perhaps naive. But I think
that more significantly it reflects the fact that they were susceptible to
interpellation into the ‘‘white devil’’ subject position in this discourse.
While antiracist whites can regard Afrocentric tenets as a benign,
balancing addition to multiculturalism, these whites found that the
discourse conveyed a deeper reality, reflecting their predicaments as
‘‘whites’’ in this Detroit neighborhood. Their political incapacitation
in this controversy seemed to herald an onrushing of the most racially
apocalyptic versions of the future preached by Afrocentrists.
Bonnett asserts that antiracists must ‘‘become aware of, and escape
from, the practice of treating Whiteness as a static, ahistorical, aspa-
tial, objective ‘thing’: something set outside social change, something
central and permanent, something that defines the ‘other’ but is not
itself subject to others’ definitions . . . a category which is not subject
to the constant process of challenge and change that have charac-
terised the history of other ‘racial’ names.’’≤∑ Both figuratively—in rela-
tion to Afrocentric discourse—and literally—via the establishment of
‘‘racist’’ as the definitive characterization of white opposition to the
Malcolm X Academy—whites in Warrendale were subject to black
objectifications of their interests and anxieties. Additionally, they were
subjected to antiracist discourse that also reduced their multifaceted
and emotional concerns to simple expressions of racism. Bonnett
charges that the ‘‘essentialising dynamic’’ at the heart of the antiracist
project, ‘‘lead[s] towards the positioning (or self-positioning) of White
people as fundamentally outside, and untouched by, the contempo-
rary controversies of ‘racial’ identity politics.’’≤∏ In Warrendale, and
in Detroit generally, antiracism, as a political position, seems pre-
disposed to disregard a dramatic shift in political power and in cultural
matters and would not recognize these whites as mired in fundamen-
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 157

tally ‘‘racial’’ predicaments—trying to regain control of their identify-

ing features, disoriented by the disjuncture between a projected social
identity (as whites) and personal experience, feeling the inadequate fit
of stereotyped depictions.
The model of whiteness most widely promoted by antiracists posits
a generic white subject, both privileged and unconscious of the extent
or operation of that privilege. This model perhaps pertains to the vast
majority of white Americans. But its explanatory power is diminished
for whites who are engaged in race-related disputes such as the con-
flict over the Malcolm X Academy, and its sweeping assertions are
seriously challenged by the process of racialization that whites are
subjected to in Detroit. Bonnett, drawing on the writings of Ali Rat-
tansi and Tariq Modood, asserts that ‘‘orthodox anti-racism appears ill-
equipped to engage creatively with the fluid and complex forces of the
racialisation process’’ because it is unprepared to acknowledge the
contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalences within white and
nonwhite identities.≤π Long before Afrocentric discourse was articu-
lated, many of these whites had endured the harsh confusion of racial
animosity and antagonism. An analysis of the dynamics of their pro-
cess of racialization requires a copious collection of biographical de-
tail, for which there is no room in this essay. But I will draw this
discussion to a close with a story told to me by Karen. She grew
up four houses away from the Herman Garden Apartments, a low-
income housing project that was overwhelmingly African American.
It is an account that does not easily fit the narratives about whiteness
spun by antiracists.
Karen: Well, for me, my problem started . . . Like I said, I went
to Herman and grew up with black people and had no
problem! Went to Ruddimen [Elementary], still mixed,
75/25, 75 black, no problem. Then busing started. Some-
how, they scooped me up, me and two of my girlfriends
and put us on a bus with all blacks and bused us to
Lessenger, all white. And . . . all of my friends, that had
been my friends since first grade . . . now I was ‘‘whitey.’’
’Cause they had such an attitude going to this new school.
All the whites in this school were afraid ’cause they had
never been around blacks. They didn’t bother me, because
I grew up with them. But then, now, see, I was in it. I’ve
158 john hartigan jr.

seen my friends change, my black friends change. It was

total aggression towards the white kids: Total!
JH: As soon as they got there?
Karen: It’s like ‘‘I’m superior, I’m gonna beat your ass!’’ and they
were going after whitey. And then, my girlfriends, and
people that I had known for years . . . I got lumped in
with the new white people even though I’m on the bus
everyday with the people I grew up with. I’m now white!
It’s like, all of the sudden they woke up: ‘‘Karen Soper’s
White! Beat her ass!’’ But I wasn’t a quiet person that was
going to let you beat my ass. So I fought right back with
them. And then they left me alone. But then, when I
started meeting white people, I started hanging around
with them. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the black friends
anymore. So black friends turned on me! I was now white.
I was one of them, I was the enemy. And I’d seen it; it
wasn’t all in my head. Y’know, you don’t go home, people
stomping on you for being in your head.
JH: Had you thought about being white before that?
Karen: Well, it’s like I said, we just all hung around together, and
it was a peaceful coexistence. I remember one fight with a
black girl in first grade. Now, a lot of the other white girls
were beat up daily because they would go home crying.
Well I stood up to her, and me and her had a fight, and
from that day on I never got bothered again. Now, I can’t
say that a lot of the other whites didn’t get picked on,
because a lot of ’em did, for their lunch money and stu√.
But for me, personally, since I stood up, I was cool. I got
along with them, so I didn’t get beat up. But uh . . . so I
never really noticed. I knew they were black. I’m not
stupid. I knew they were black. But it didn’t really seem to
matter; it didn’t really seem to matter. But somehow when
we got to the white school, all at once it mattered. I was
white and they didn’t want to have anything to do with me
after that. Everybody went [into] their own cliques then. It
wasn’t groups here and groups there. It was whites here
and blacks there.
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 159

Other accounts like this one, about the experiences of Warrendale

whites having been racialized in the shifting demographics of schools
and neighborhoods throughout Detroit, led me to consider that my
subject of study was the significance of white racialness, rather than
the delineation of whiteness as a generic cultural construction. By this
contrast I try to bring to light the gap between what can be abstractly
posited about whites in their relation to privilege and power in this
country and the divergent circumstances of whites in places like War-
rendale and Detroit. Karen’s story is not the account of someone who
was oblivious to her racial status until late in life; it is a narrative
of someone who very early on was subjected to the arbitrary e√ects
of institutional manipulations of racial di√erence and populations.
The story o√ers a notable complication of the notion of white skin
privilege.
Karen’s story also points to some of the contributions an ethno-
graphic perspective can bring to investigations of whiteness. As I
noted in opening this essay, such insights derive from particular
methods as well as the guiding assumptions about social reality that
inform their deployment. Ethnographers approach subjects in the
field with the presumption that there is a range of experience that
they know more about than we do. A simple point perhaps, but it
notably contrasts with objectifications of white subjects that oper-
ate on a strict economy of examples to demonstrate the pervasiveness
of white racism. As well, ethnographers focus on the interpretive
process that subjects engage in rather than on discerning a core
of personal beliefs. In this regard, I was able to approach the con-
troversy in Warrendale without being burdened by the necessity of
judging whether or not these whites were really racist. Instead, I could
focus on discursive terrain in which these whites were positioned,
gauging how this terrain was shaped through contrasts and corre-
spondences with racial discourse in other sites in Detroit and in the
nation at large.
This broader attention to the discursive terrain stems from the
conviction informing ethnographic practice that posits place-specific
dynamics as crucial to the articulation of cultural notions of identity
and di√erence. As Begona Aretxaga relates, ethnographers regard
place as ‘‘the product of relations of power and the material through
which such relations are culturally articulated, challenged and repro-
duced.’’≤∫ Whether or not antiracists would regard as valid these
160 john hartigan jr.

whites’ claim, based on their position in the power dynamics related to

the Malcolm X Academy, that black can also be ‘‘racists,’’ it is impor-
tant to recognize how this place illustrates the need to be specific,
rather than abstract, about how ‘‘power’’ actually operates. Then, too, a
goal of ethnography is to understand how people think through their
experiences and circumstances. Rather than attempting to help them
achieve ‘‘correct thinking’’ in their understandings of race, I was able to
observe how Academy opponents worked to synthesize a range of
information about Afrocentric studies and tenets, to reflect on both the
origins of their sentiments and their objectification in the local and
national media, and to strive to articulate a sense of their position on
these matters that responded to historical precedents as well as to the
novelty this setting presented. In this regard, I followed another con-
viction of ethnographic practice: that events, containing intertwined
and contradictory threads of social experience, are capable of changing
the way people think about their relationships and identity.≤Ω The sig-
nificance of white racialness is not strictly determined by an essential-
ist core of belief oriented toward blackness as a symbolic form of
otherness.
I do not want to convey the impression that ethnography, as a mode
of generating social knowledge, is limited only to making claims about
specific places and peoples. As I mentioned above, part of what I
tracked were the correspondences and distinctions between local and
national discourses on race. In this tracking I observed dynamics
shaping the way whites engage in public controversies over race that I
suspect are widespread, at least among whites in the economic range
of middle- to working-class. In interviews with local supporters of the
Academy in Warrendale, I heard numerous comments that reflect
what Ruth Frankenberg has characterized as color- and power-evasive
discourse.≥≠ Whites who championed the opening of the Academy in
their neighborhood would also complain that the school ‘‘overstressed
the black stu√ to the normal stu√ ’’ and that ‘‘those people’’ have ‘‘a real
bad attitude problem’’ or that ‘‘they’re real arrogant.’’ These whites
largely did not engage in reflections over whether or not their percep-
tions of the Academy might stem from racist thinking, as white oppo-
nents labeled ‘‘racist’’ were compelled to do. I observed that, in this
contest, initially whites energetically strove to determine who among
them were the ‘‘racists’’; once that designation had been established,
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 161

they paid little attention to how the significance of race operated in

their decisions and perceptions. I suggest this dynamic—of whites
limiting the contagion of accusations of racism to a ‘‘hostile few’’ real
‘‘racists’’—is active generally in public controversies over race, but I
leave that to other researchers to either confirm or refute.
Antiracist activists may view the detachment ethnographers main-
tain as an indulgent academic extravagance, but I think it can make
a contribution even to e√orts that involve directly challenging and
changing whites’ thinking and perceptions of racial matters. The pri-
mary ethnographic skill that I try to instill in students in my methods
course is the ability to simply listen well to what people are saying. That
means being able to hear discourses as multiply inflected, referring to
and projecting a host of competing interests and threats, audiences,
and objects—none of which are easily linked back to a core psychologi-
cal motivation, such as racism. Also, it is worth being able to under-
stand both the role of place in developing nuanced inflections of dis-
courses that seem ‘‘racial’’ in the abstract and the situated concerns of
subjects who are not singularly driven by core impulses but, rather, are
resonding to a complex, changing setting. It is also important to be able
to recognize the transformative potential of events in everyday life and
to be able to engage the way whites in various settings are perhaps
thinking through racial perceptions as well as responding to or regur-
gitating cultural beliefs about racial di√erence. Finally, I think e√ective
antiracist work requires an analytically sophisticated concept of class,
attentive both to the influence of place—particularly in shaping the
types of encounters that develop—and the role of etiquette and de-
corum. Whites in the upper and middle classes craft forms of decorum
that keep race from being raised in ‘‘polite’’ conversation. Whites living
closer to economic necessities not only are unable to maintain such
forms of decorum, they openly reject them and act out a ‘‘loud’’ refusal
to submit to that which they cannot fully attain. Their loudness and the
emotionality from which it stems are then read—by professionals
(white and black), journalists, antiracist activists, and more upscale
neighbors—as signs of racism operating behind ‘‘smokescreens,’’ as
the multiple concerns of Warrendale whites were characterized. It is
important to be able to ask whether or how some whites’ statements
are generated in a form of acting out classed assumptions about who is
really a ‘‘racist.’’
162 john hartigan jr.

Notes
1 As the contributors to O√ White put it:
We worry that in our desire to create spaces to speak, intellectually and
empirically, about whiteness, we may have reified whiteness as a fixed
category of experience and identity; that we have allowed it to be treated
as a monolith, in the singular, as an ‘‘essential something.’’ We despair
that a terrifying academic flight toward something called white studies
could eclipse the important work being done across the range of race,
postcolonialism, ethnicity, and ‘‘people of color’’; that research funds
could shift categories; the understanding of whiteness could surface as
the new intellectual fetish, leaving questions of power, privilege, and
race/ethnic political minorities behind as an intellectual ‘‘fad’’ of
the past.
Michelle Fine et al., O√ White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New
York: Routledge, 1997), xi–xii.
2 A fuller account of this study is provided in John Hartigan Jr., Racial
Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
3 This claim, in addition to my work in Detroit, is drawn from a great
number of studies on the spatial dynamics of racial identity. See Joel
Streicker, ‘‘Remaking Race, Class, and Region in a Tourist Town,’’ Identi-
ties 3, no. 4 (1997): 523–55; Helan Page and R. Brooke Thomas, ‘‘White
Public Space and the Construction of White Privilege in U.S. Health Care:
Fresh Concepts and a New Model of Analysis,’’ Medical Anthropology Quar-
terly 8, no. 1 (March 1994): 109–16; Roger Hewitt, White Talk Black
Talk: Inter-Racial Friendship and Communication amongst Adolescents (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Mark Allan Hughes, ‘‘Mis-
spoken Truth to Power: A Geographical Perspective on the Underclass
Fallacy,’’ Economic Geography 65, no. 6 (July 1989): 187–207; Peter Wade,
Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Kenneth Jackson,
‘‘The Spatial Dimensions of Social Control: Race, Ethnicity, and Govern-
ment Housing Policy in the United States, 1918–1968,’’ in Modern Indus-
trial Cities: History, Policy, and Survival, ed. Bruce Stave (Beverly Hills: Sage
Publications, 1982), 79–128; Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduc-
tion to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
4 I develop this argument in more detail in ‘‘Establishing the Fact of White-
ness,’’ American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (1997): 495–505.
5 See Mary Searle-Chatterjee, ‘‘The Anthropologist Exposed: Anthropolo-
gists in Multi-Cultural and Anti-Racist Work,’’ Anthropology Today 3, no. 4
(1987): 16–18; Catherine Martin, ‘‘Educating to Combat Racism: The Civic
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 163

Role of Anthropology,’’ Anthropology and Education Quarterly 27, no. 2

(1996): 253–69.
6 While there is widespread acceptance for the assertion that race is cultur-
ally constructed, there has been little acknowledgment that the same holds
true for class identity as well. As John Frow asserts, ‘‘There is no class
essence and there are no unified class actors founded in the objectivity of a
social interest; there are, however, processes of class formation, without
absolute origin or telos, with definite discursive conditions, and played out
through particular institutional forms and balances of power, through
calculations and miscalculations, through desires and fears and fantasies.’’
John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 111.
7 Pierre Bourdieu points to adjectives as one of the most revealing registers
for grasping the operation of class distinction; see his Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984). The etymologies of such terms also dem-
onstrate the enduring operation of class derogation: ‘‘mean’’ is related to
the German term gemein, for common and base; ‘‘villain’’ derives from the
Latin term for farmhands who served at a villa.
8 Stories about the controversy over the Malcolm X Academy appeared in
the New York Times and the San Francisco Examiner and on National Public
Radio.
9 The most consistent aspect of this controversy that linked it to other con-
flicts over schools was that the class dimension, while fundamental, re-
ceived little attention in the media. This dimension was particularly preva-
lent in the Boston disputes, as Brian Sheehan has observed: ‘‘A coalition of
blacks and young white professionals who favor reforms often seem to be
aligned with financial and real estate interests against the social and eco-
nomic displacement experienced by lower-income whites in the creation
of New Boston.’’ Sheehan, The Boston School Integration Dispute: Social
Change and Legal Maneuvers (New York: Columbia, 1984), 2. See also
Ronald Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the
1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);
Eleanor Wolf, Trial and Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1981); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews
and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
10 Edward Lipuma and Sarah Meltzo√ examine this type of figuring of class
conflict played out through the development of and contests over land-use
patterns in southern Florida, specifically how the crosscurrents of ethnicity
and class delineate their design and implementation. The important con-
nection that I see here is that Warrendale whites were enveloped in a
164 john hartigan jr.

discursive predicament where only their class-conditioning was marked;

this was accentuated by their racialness. Lipuma and Meltzo√ describe
second-home-owning retirees as follows: ‘‘Their style of dress (often casual
but tailored clothes of natural fibers), their assured delivery and choice of
words, their posture, and the respect they expect to command all indicate
that they are comfortable, confident, and poised. . . . In this way, the class
interests of second-home owners/retirees combine with their ideology to
generate practices that are both more restrained and more nuanced than
the unbridled pursuit of class-based interests, and, because they are re-
strained and nuanced, mask those interests.’’ Conversely: ‘‘If second-home
owners/retirees fit ‘naturally’ into the hearing process, fishermen could
not be more ill-adapted. They lack the rhetorical style, accent, posture, and
other indexes that would mark their words and views as important. The
hearings . . . are geared to those with a college education. . . . Fishermen
experience shame and frustration at the meetings because of their relative
lack of linguistic and educational capital.’’ Lipuma and Meltzo√ ‘‘The
Crosscurrents of Ethnicity and Class in the Construction of Public Policy,’’
American Ethnologist 24, no. 1 (1997): 114–31, 125–26.
11 See David Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
12 The use of the critical terms ‘‘marked’’ and ‘‘unmarked’’ becomes quite
tenuous in this ethnographic setting. To talk about race in Detroit is to
e√ect what Linda Waugh refers to as a ‘‘reversal,’’ such that blackness is
the assumed or unmarked category and whiteness is marked. The key
point—often neglected by theorists of whiteness—is that all of this is rela-
tional; you cannot just refer to a category as generically marked or un-
marked. White racialness can be unmarked in one domain and marked in
another. As Waugh asserts, ‘‘markedness relations are understood as
being relevant given particular contexts’’ (310). Linda Waugh, ‘‘Marked
and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure,’’
Semiotica 38, nos. 3–4 (1982): 299–318. See also David Schneider, who
first applied these designations in delineating the construction of kinship
in American culture, in his American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2d ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
13 Warrendale, like the pre–World War II subdivisions that David Halle stud-
ies, is ‘‘typical of areas that outsiders often think of as ‘working-class neigh-
borhoods.’ But those who live there are less certain. . . . Few [residents]
stress occupational segregation as a defining characteristic of these areas,
and they rarely refer to them as ‘working class’ or ‘working men’s’ dis-
tricts.’’ See America’s Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics among Blue-
Collar Property Owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.
 ‘‘white devils’’ talk back 165

14 Between 1969 and 1971 violent incidents in the schools were so numerous
they were recorded hourly by Deputy Superintendent Charles Wolfe.
Je√rey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–
1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 308.
15 The hosts of two shows, M’zee Nabowe’s ‘‘Word Up’’ on wdtr and Tahira
Ahmed’s ‘‘African World View’’ on both wdtr and wchb —participants in
a panel discussion, ‘‘The Importance of Black Talk Radio,’’ sponsored by
the Malcolm X Center in January 1993—stress that what makes these
shows ‘‘black’’ is that they present the views of ‘‘Africans in America.’’ See
also ‘‘Talking Issues in Detroit, City Tunes into Black Radio,’’ Detroit Free
Press, 15 February 1993.
16 Catherine Lutz, ‘‘Engendered Emotion: Gender, Power, and the Rhetoric
of Emotional Control in American Discourse,’’ in Language and the Politics
of Emotion, ed. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990), 69–91.
17 This perceptual formula, that extreme emotion equals racism, is wide-
spread. Alice McIntyre provides an example of this in her analysis of
‘‘white talk,’’ declaring certain whites’ ‘‘strong, a√ective responses’’ to be
‘‘tools for resisting critique.’’ She is frustrated by the way their ‘‘feelings of
powerlessness, fear, and defensiveness shielded many of the participants
from challenging the polemical nature of race talk.’’ I hope that the exam-
ple of whites in Warrendale, who also grew frustrated over their inability to
disrupt ‘‘the polemical nature of race talk,’’ conveys the possibility that
strong emotion is not merely a means designed to counter the insights of
those engaged in antiracist work. McIntyre, Making Meaning of Whiteness:
Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997), 77.
18 ‘‘Talk Show Canceled,’’ Warrendale Press and Guide, 3 September 1992.
19 There is a long tradition of this intraracial positioning of working-class
whites as the ‘‘real’’ bearers and promoters of racist sentiment. Arnold
Hirsch relates an excellent example of this dynamic in Chicago conflicts
over the residential color-line in the 1950s.
Nothing would have shocked Hyde Parkers more than the assertion
that they were part of a generalized ‘‘white’’ e√ort to control the process
of racial succession. The imputation of a brotherhood with the ethnic,
working-class rock throwers would have been more than they could
bear. Yet, there was such a consensus. . . . There was certainly a wide
divergence in the means deemed acceptable to manage succession, but
the Hyde Park proclivity for sending building inspectors rather than
debris into the homes of new black residents stemmed from the same
fears that called forth crowds elsewhere. . . . Although the rhetoric of
166 john hartigan jr.

integration was in sharp contrast to the virulent racist diatribes that

were o√ered in some quarters, the justifications given for actions taken
reveal the di√erences among the various white groups to be more in
the vehemence of language and the sophistication of the resistance
than in fundamental assumptions.
Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago,
1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 171–72.
20 Any discussion of charges of ‘‘racist’’ would be remiss without acknowl-
edging its certain status as an epithet with distinct classed inscriptions.
As Ronald Formisano relates, ‘‘[T]he epithet ‘racist’ springs easily to the
lips of middle-class persons who live in suburbs or college towns, or who
if they live in urban retreats possess the resources enabling them to
avoid sending their children to schools that are populated with the poor,
working-class, or black.’’ Formisano, Boston against Busing, xiv.
21 Virginia Dominguez, ‘‘Invoking Racism in the Public Sphere: Two Takes
on National Self-Criticism,’’ Identities 1, no. 4 (1995): 325–46.
22 This is hardly a trivial matter, given the great lengths whites will go to
claim or prove they are not prejudiced. As Michael Billig observes, even
fascists strive to avoid being depicted as racists; ‘‘The Notion of ‘Preju-
dice’: Some Rhetorical and Ideological Aspects,’’ Text 8, nos. 1–2 (1988):
91–110.
23 Alastair Bonnett, ‘‘Constructions of Whiteness in European and American
Anti-Racism,’’ in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and
the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London:
Zed Books, 1997), 179–80.
24 Afrocentrism was never a fixed and ratified object in this controversy.
When opponents made reference to it, and when they suggested readings
for me, they stressed a panoply of authors, including Maulana Karenga,
Asa Hilliard, Molief Asante, and Cheikh Diop.
25 Bonnett, ‘‘Constructions of Whiteness,’’ 177.
26 Ibid., 177.
27 Ibid., 174.
28 Begona Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political
Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997), 24.
29 Here I paraphrase comments by Aretxaga in Shattering Silence.
30 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 142–49.
 Jasbir Kaur Puar

Transnational Configurations of Desire:

The Nation and its White Closets

I begin this exploration of sexualities in a transnational context with a

story about ‘‘Sophia,’’ who recently returned to the Caribbean for her
Immigration and Naturalization Service interview at the American
Embassy in Barbados after being undocumented in the United States
since 1986. Knowing that lesbians were not allowed to have migrated
to the United States before 1990 and that her application betrayed her
prior so-called illegal residence in the States, she femmed up for the
interview as much as conceivable to the contours of her psychic body,
wearing lipstick, a di√erent hairstyle, and ditching the ever-present
baseball cap. This staging reflects a performativity of exchanges and
concurrent blurrings between masculinity and femininity to present a
heterosexual model of desirable and acceptable ‘‘good citizenship ma-
terial.’’ It was necessary in spite of her claim, as she puts it, that she
‘‘became a lesbian in the U.S.’’ The irony of having to prove her
pre-1990 nonlesbian status to the bureaucracy of the nation-state that
is indeed the geopolitical landscape for the productive site of this
very disallowed identity—namely, her postmigration lesbian identifi-
cation—should not be lost here. While I want to emphasize the multi-
valent and often contradictory discourses that inform these processes,
in this particular narrative, which claims very clear splits between
heterosexuality and homosexuality, the American state attempts to
contain if not erase the very identity it has enabled.∞
Immediately after receiving her green card number and entering
the United States, Sophia shaved her shoulder-length hair o√, e√acing
any femme pretensions and viscerally replicating what would proba-
bly be called a white butch aesthetic. This moment of lesbian assertion
is a ‘‘fuck you’’ act of defiance against a state that policed a racialized
168 jasbir kaur puar

‘‘alien’’ body for eleven years, demanding the invisibility of queerness

in the face of her visibility as raced. At the same time, it is an act
complicitous with white butch-femme aesthetics that produce and
sustain figures through intersections of the nation, whiteness, and
modernity,≤ producing a ‘‘most complicitous–most resistant’’ circuit
of performativity captured by one audience: the nation. If one under-
stands Judith Butler’s ‘‘performativity of gender’’ as the reiterative and
citational practice by which discourse produces the e√ects that it
names, Sophia, through an imperfect repetition of the ‘‘authentic les-
bian body,’’ is at once facing both the impossibility of reproducing the
original while also, and perhaps pleasurably, destabilizing it.≥
In the face of proliferating debates about the globalization of queer-
ness, the travels of discursive sexual regimes, and the rapid emer-
gence of gay and lesbian organizations in the so-called Third World,
what does one do with a narrative that claims ‘‘I became a lesbian after
I migrated to the U.S.’’? (Does ‘‘becoming’’ signal a kind of ‘‘coming
out,’’ or a rejection of it?) It is a trajectory that absolutely refuses
recourse to girlhood crushes on gym teachers, strange aunties, and
other queer theory–type lesbian role models. It rejects any understood
alternative sexual landscapes and may well reiterate lesbianism as
solidly Western and white. And yet, the body that accompanies this
narrative now, upon her return to the Caribbean, attempts to seek out
other women like her, women called ‘‘Zami.’’∂ In this case the U.S.
nation indicates the place of the ‘‘authentic’’ lesbian body; situating
this paradigm within notions of modernity and movement, the white
lesbian body; indeed, to reference the above story, the white masculine
butch lesbian body. Here lesbianism and masculinity as whiteness
converge at the site of the nation to produce and privilege certain
narratives of desire over others.

‘‘Circuits of Desire’’∑
This essay uses ‘‘whiteness’’ as a conceptual category of modernity
that references yet exceeds discrete ethnic categories or markers.∏ The
links between sexualities, modernity, and whiteness are particularly
evident in the case of ‘‘traveling’’ transnational queer bodies that are
interpellated through institutional discourses of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, tourism, gay and lesbian marriages, asylum
laws, human rights organizations, queer liberation movements, and
 configurations of desire 169

conceptualizations of queer diasporas.π This essay attempts to theo-

rize methodological possibilities for talking about transnational sex-
ualities and is a response to the relative marginalization of gender and
sexuality in the literature on transnationalism, as well as to the white-
ness of queer theory, which relies heavily on psychoanalytic models
that presume the primacy of sexual di√erence.∫ In seeking a language
that enables one to read locations across sexualities and sexualities
across locations, I am attempting to negotiate the politics of desiring
subjects with social theories of material analyses, interrogating dif-
ferent relationships between politics and pleasures, or what I call the
‘‘materialities of desire.’’ I argue for an alternative framework of fluid
sexualities that addresses hegemonic hierarchies of nameable identi-
fiable sexualities while at the same time critiquing the privileged epi-
steme of those identities.
Theorists of transnationalism have noted that the fundamental par-
adox of rapid and increased economic globalization is that as the
nation-state is destabilized and national boundaries become econom-
ically porous, it must reassert hegemonies of its imagined cohesive-
ness and geographic boundaries in social terms. Jacqui Alexander, one
of the few theorists who has examined this process in terms of sex-
uality, argues that ‘‘the e√ects of political economic international pro-
cesses provoke a legitimation crisis for the state. It then moves to
restore its legitimacy by recouping heterosexuality through legisla-
tion.’’Ω In their coedited volume Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures, Chandra Mohanty and Alexander e√ectively lay
out the terms within which this recuperation happens.∞≠ This collec-
tion is stunning if only for the mere fact that it places sexuality and its
relations to gender at the very core of the processes that situate the
demand for sameness at the nation’s boundaries, challenging claims
that sexuality is a bourgeois issue belonging at the bottom of a hier-
archy of oppressions. Stuart Hall, however, reminded us some time
ago that the nation mobilizes to recoup itself not only through same-
ness but within and through postmodern capitalist manipulations of
‘‘di√erence.’’∞∞ In this case, one may apply ‘‘di√erence’’ to mean both
sexual di√erence and di√erentiation within/through sexual di√er-
ence, noting that any terms of sexual citizenship are racialized, gen-
dered, and class-inflected as well.
Thus while it is crucial to examine how, as Alexander notes, the
nation ‘‘disallows the queer body,’’∞≤ it may well be necessary to ask
170 jasbir kaur puar

which nation and which queer bodies and to interrogate how nations
not only produce but also sanction certain queer subjectivities over
others.∞≥ Resituating discourses of the nation in ways that complicate a
repressive-versus-productive binary can show how ‘‘sexual political
subjects’’ use, appropriate, reject, rely on, and are even produced
through, rather than simply oppose, discourses of the nation.∞∂ Imme-
diate examples, ones that di√er tremendously in terms of political
impetus and impact, are Queer Nation’s reclamation of a ‘‘queer coun-
terpublic,’’ Cherríe Moraga’s use of national landscapes in ‘‘Queer
Aztlan’’ and Gloria Anzaldúa’s in Borderlands.∞∑ Feminist theorist
Katherine Sugg asserts that in Chicana writings ‘‘lesbianism works in
part to return the narrator to a complex cultural authenticity that re-
sists white liberal feminist discourses of identity and substantiates in
new ways the narrator’s connection to her community and history.’’∞∏
Paula Moya among others has noted the ways in which concepts of
whiteness as ‘‘contaminated privilege’’ function in these reclamations
of lesbianism through nationhood and vice versa.∞π

Queer Diasporas
‘‘Whiteness as contamination’’ is well entrenched in a historical re-
gime of discursive belonging. Every out-and-about dyke of color in
San Francisco knows that the latest hot spot for those who are ‘‘family’’
or ‘‘in the circle’’ has ‘‘gone bad’’ when the white dykes start showing
up.∞∫ Along with alternative linguistic codes to signify lesbian belong-
ing, there is an interesting originary status being claimed here, a
reversal of the usual ‘‘who’s invading whom’’ rhetoric. Whiteness
functions as betrayal; particularly through politicality, feminism, and
sex, whiteness is a betrayal of male ‘‘community’’ leadership. These
paradigms of a sell-out to whiteness speak to nationalism/feminism
oppositions discussed by Lisa Lowe and Inderpal Grewal.∞Ω But as
Gloria Anzaldúa writes, ‘‘for the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion
against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.’’≤≠
These accusations of whiteness, contamination, and sexual betrayal
of the ‘‘motherland’’ as well as of ‘‘culture’’ may result in strengthened
recourses to origins, roots, and sexual ‘‘homes’’ that depend on, rather
than reject, the nation/s. Cases in point are South Asian queer di-
asporic discourses that use Hindu mythology as evidence of same-sex
eroticism as indigenous to Indian culture, a tactic that mobilizes an-
 configurations of desire 171

cient Hindu temple carvings, the Kamasutra, and other avenues of

historical proof. This resistance to the whiteness of queerness through
‘‘reterritorializations’’ of Indian homo/sexual origins in diasporic lo-
cales are an example of what Aihwa Ong refers to as ‘‘transnational
localisms,’’ a response to a threatened or already completed violence of
erasure.≤∞ These creations of ‘‘scenarios of origins’’ result in a mobili-
zation of the Hindu Indian Nation to enter the Queer Nation.≤≤
However, for many in South Asia, indeed in India itself, and those
in the diaspora (due to religion, region, caste, and generational di√er-
ences), Hindu India is not available as a sexual home. Hindu Indian
identity is fixed into a relationship between homosexuality, whiteness,
and modernity (ironically through the use of Hindu ‘‘traditions’’),
such that non-Hindu South Asians could never use such genealogies
to claim queerness.≤≥ In fact, these reclamations are instead often
mobilized as ammunition in reverse by Sikh and Muslim fundamen-
talists, and the logic goes like this: ‘‘Homosexuality is Hindu, modern,
and white, not to mention Indian, and that is what we are resisting.’’
These responses to the ‘‘demand for evidence’’ and accusations of
betrayal parallel the links between whiteness and queerness. They
privilege certain forms of queer identity, visibility, and a modernist
telos of evolution captured by ‘‘coming out’’ and are heavily dependent
on the closet as a metaphor of repression.≤∂

Queer (In)visibilities?
The continuing hegemonic potential of modernist teleologies of evo-
lution should not be underestimated. An example is a recurring sce-
nario at the Pride Parade in San Francisco. The South Asian Gay and
Lesbian organization, Trikone, marches every summer, at the back of
the procession of course (the joke is that all the colored folk get stuck
at the end). Inevitably, a group of ostensibly white queers will come up
to our contingent and ask if there really are gays and lesbians in India.
They might marvel at how we’ve flown all the way from India so that
we can be ‘‘out and proud.’’ Often they will ask where South Asia is. In
many instances we may be subjected to a rambling combination of all
three comments. All of these result from as well as produce specific
erasures; of same-sex sexualities in South Asia (particularly non-
Indian ones), of diasporic queers, and of visibility as a mandated func-
tion of queerness in the West, replicating discourses similar to Homi
172 jasbir kaur puar

Bhabha’s ‘‘white but not quite’’ equation of mimicry: here, but not
quite queer.
The invisibility of queers of color is reiterated through demands for
evidence as predicated by strategies of visibility and other queer coun-
terpublic spaces. One example are the tactics of Queer Nation as de-
scribed by Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman.≤∑ Absent in this
account are questions of relations to the state vis-à-vis who can and
cannot a√ord to participate in such public visibilities, based on an
‘‘uninterrogated assumption of queer citizenship.’’≤∏ Queer Nation’s
strategy of reclaiming ‘‘national icons’’ e√ectively becomes a call for
whiteness that reproduces the white episteme of queerness at the
nation’s boundaries. The irony of Queer Nation is that it is precipi-
tated by the process that Alexander discusses: a reassertion of a hetero-
sexual state that is due in some part to immigrant bodies that threaten
the boundaries/borders of the nation. Queer Nation as an ideology
will remain eternally bound to its whiteness if it cannot address how
immigration functions to keep the nation-state in crisis. This crisis
legitimates the rhetorical strategy of reclaiming the nation through
queerness, noting that immigrants actually produce, in some part, the
spaces of resistance that Queer Nation occupies.≤π
The demand to be visible, according to David Halperin, is created
by a ‘‘modern regime of sexuality which says we can now choose how
to be sexually free, but cannot choose whether to be sexually free.’’≤∫
Rosemary Henessy’s excellent critique of queer visibility as a function
of overdetermined fetishization of class consumption also needs to be
thought of within a framework of modernity and whiteness.≤Ω A cri-
tique of the epistemologies of queer visibility leaves the paradox of
visibility intact, as demonstrated by the parade example. How does
one know queers of color exist if they are not visible? If I am critiquing
the demand to be visible, why am I complaining about the invisibility
of queers of color? An apparent push toward visibility from predomi-
nantly middle-class South Asian diasporic as well as subcontinent
queers contrasts sharply with Martin Manalansan’s observation re-
garding working-class Filipino immigrants, for whom ‘‘visibility is
dangerous.’’≥≠ (And this recalls the story of Sophia’s haircut.) In such
cases perhaps coming out is a narrative eclipsed by ones of immigra-
tion (for example, receiving a green card after waiting for eleven
years). This is not just about immigrant/ethnic queers but also very
specifically linked to class. Privileging such concerns about racialized
 configurations of desire 173

state belongings is directly contradictory to coming out narratives that

posit ‘‘out and proud’’ paradigms as the main prerequisite to queer lib-
eration. Here visibility as a hegemonic discourse of queer cosmopoli-
tanism is also linked to the role of capitalism and urban spaces in the
emergence of gay identities, a process elaborated by John D’Emilio.≥∞
In the ultimate quest to be free of sexuality as a space marking
psychosis, neurosis, and deviance, the commodification and globaliza-
tion of everything about queerness, from dildos, lipstick lesbians,≥≤
and sex clubs, entails that the nation is not innocent or absent in its
collusion with multinational capital in the production of (elite) ‘‘queer
cosmopolitan citizens.’’ Whiteness is thus defined through inclusion
in the global economy. As Anthony Burgess flippantly comments,
‘‘The best homosexuality is in America, like the best everything else,
and [specifically in] California where all national tendencies achieve
their most hyperbolic expression.’’≥≥ Ruth Vanita has stated that most
queers in India live with ‘‘one foot in the west,’’ further noting the
regulating of global queerness through the nation.≥∂

Queer Mobility?
Certain venues of Queer Studies have o√ered up powerful internal
critiques, noting that the category ‘‘queer’’ is a privileged white one
and that visibility and linked discourses of coming out contribute to
hegemonic queernesses. The response to the whiteness of Queer
Studies and its erasure of questions of the nation, race, and ethnicity
has been, it seems, to both expand what queer includes, as well as to
mobilize queerness. In essence there has been a call to queer queer-
ness, stressing its fluidity and liminality, but this is itself another
framework of race and class privilege. Fluidity as mobility is a priv-
ilege. This kind of oversight is not just about exclusions but more
precisely about assumed inclusions. Lisa Duggan calls for a ‘‘No
Promo Hetero’’ campaign and other political activist strategies that do
not force ‘‘us’’ to declare ‘‘who we are.’’≥∑ These approaches become
impossible when the state dictates its very o√erings of belonging
through determining whether one is or isn’t one, in this case, gay or
lesbian. The heterosexual/heterosexist nation, in its need to secure its
social and geographic boundaries vis-à-vis unwelcome Others, is pro-
ductive of certain ‘‘queer cosmopolitan citizens’’ in relation to other
configurations of desire that may fall outside whiteness.
174 jasbir kaur puar

An example of this is asylum based on sexual orientation. While

such asylum provides immigrants with yet another way to access resi-
dency, subjects of this legislation must be interpellated into a ‘‘cita-
tional practice.’’≥∏ As Judith Butler describes it, this is a process that
‘‘names’’ and also produces and privileges the e√ects of that naming.
This practice may well flatten discursively displaced subjects into the
linear subjectivity of the law, erasing, for example, bisexuality. Based
on discourses of gay and lesbian human rights, asylum laws are predi-
cated upon an erroneous modernist notion of the United States as a
place free of violence for queers. Additionally, these laws mystify an
often arbitrary distinction between asylees and those who are undocu-
mented. This version of queer democracy colludes with liberal Euro-
American feminism in its desire to mark a unitary, singular subject,
one that can produce ‘‘evidence’’ of persecution in one’s ‘‘native’’
country. This frees queers of the nation, in the ways Duggan would
like, who are thus not subject to demands of disclosure of sexual
identity. At the same time, it produces a double Othering of asylum
seekers. Resident status becomes contingent on one’s queer status.
How decisions are made in these cases needs to be examined in rela-
tion to U.S. foreign policy stances; for one example, it seems that a
demonized, homogenized ‘‘Islamic subject’’ is in particular need of
salvation, whereas applicants from Mexico may have more di≈culty
proving a ‘‘legitimate’’ case. The new immigration law that went into
e√ect on 1 April 1997 puts a one-year filing limit on these cases. In
other words, immigrants now have only one year to figure out if they
are gay or lesbian, if they haven’t done so already, and to prove that
modern queers cannot exist ‘‘back home,’’ creating an inducement
into white modernity complicit with national discourses. Such evi-
dence assumes that gays and lesbians were ‘‘out’’ in their native coun-
tries in a readable way, preventing any privileging of the slippages of
queer and demanding a singular, homogenized narrative of sexual
activity.≥π
Another example of the national production and privileging of cer-
tain queer subjectivities over others is the debate over same-sex mar-
riage. The irony of the same-sex marriage case in Hawaii is that while
white middle-class gay men are fighting over the ‘‘right’’ to marry and
what this might signify in terms of a supposed binary between assim-
ilationist and progressive queer politics, what is largely overlooked are
the implications of this ruling in terms of nationality. Binational cou-
 configurations of desire 175

ples are looking to this legislation as a subversive alternative to hetero-

sexual marriage to obtain a green card. In a climate where many
communities are actively seeking out and creating alternative models
for coupling and co-parenting, what will become a somewhat hysteri-
cal exercise in futility, should the INS ever recognize such marriages,
is how exactly the INS will decide what is a ‘‘legitimate’’ queer mar-
riage. This is something that is still confounding in terms of assessing
fraudulent heterosexual marriages and results in claims of ‘‘marriage
gridlock.’’ Again, racial and class politics will play themselves out
in terms of this policing—that is, European immigrants are not sus-
pected of ‘‘fraudulent marriages’’ in the same ways as nonwhite im-
migrants. Similar is the case with ‘‘domestic partnerships’’ in San
Francisco. Trinity Ordona asks which immigrant queers wanting to
register their domestic partnerships are going to own up to their ‘‘un-
desirable’’ immigrant status?≥∫ But the point is more that the ins will
probably never, or at least not anytime soon, recognize gay marriages
as an avenue to a green card, thus limiting this option to ‘‘national
queers.’’ In this case gay marriages, as a mandate of the nation/na-
tional belonging, approximates most closely what the nation wants,
separating the good queers from the bad. Some queers are better than
others. This easily replicates familiar national and racialized moraliz-
ing binaries of the body: the body as a sacred site of love, intimacy, and
commitment versus the body as unworthy, exploited, and the site of
degeneracy.≥Ω

Notes on the Closet

The metaphor of the closet, which Eve Sedgwick has theorized as the
‘‘regime of the open secret,’’∂≠ reflects Western epistemologies of pub-
lic/private and secret/disclosure divides, as well as sex and desire as
discourses of modernity, and presumes linear and commensurable
narratives of sexuality across social spaces. The closet in its modern-
ist form equates desire with speech, with agency, with consciousness.
As a confessional space and an instrument of subjectivization, it is
linked to freedom from repression, entrenched in power/knowledge
relations.∂∞
The closet as applied to the nation and other locational problem-
atics that attempt to contest the nation is not any of these things.
If strained, this metaphor implodes through the betrayal of the mate-
176 jasbir kaur puar

rial underpinnings of its own assumptions. Gracepoore, an undocu-

mented South Asian lesbian activist, claims that by necessity, there are
‘‘multiple possibilities for creative resistance by being simultaneously
out of and inside the closet.’’∂≤ The closet here is a paradox of agency
through the withholding of knowledge; and a paradox of censorship,
which produces the subject it seeks to erase, speaking to the problem
of the unknowability of sexuality. How does one attempt to elaborate
on subject formation when objects of study are unknown, indeed
unknowable, when the demand for ‘‘evidence’’ contradicts what José
Muñoz denotes as the ‘‘ephemeral’’ of queerness?∂≥ Should one at-
tempt to qualify the silences of closeted subalterns? Foucault’s ‘‘tech-
nologies of sex’’ describes a process by which discourse turns sex acts
into sex identities and associates those identities with corporalities.∂∂
This ‘‘act to identity’’ telos functions in vertical as well as horizon-
tal modernities, that is, in a linear developmental historical model
through time but also horizontally across geopolitical spaces. In at-
tempting to disrupt the ‘‘queer as Western imperialism’’ versus ‘‘queer
as liberation’’ binary, ‘‘indigenous’’ sexualities often wind up standing
in for ‘‘sex acts’’ in a hierarchy of modernity. This configuration is one
that privileges identity as consciousness, while also e√acing the pres-
ence of postcolonial queers and gay and lesbian organizations in the
‘‘peripheries.’’ Qualifying same-sex eroticism as that which signifies
di√erently is a poststructuralist, culturally relativistic move that must
be countered by carefully situated analyses of power, noting how and
where an ‘‘act versus identity’’ split is mobilized in various globalizing
discourses. These di≈culties do not just exist in the so-called periph-
eries, but also in the metropole, as demonstrated to me in my own
queer outreach work with South Asian diasporic populations, which I
cannot expand upon here. If a move into queerness is indeed a ‘‘move
into modernity,’’ how does the subject exist prior to this move, or does
it? Can one even speak of a ‘‘prior’’? And what subject dis/formations
are necessary for the ‘‘free’’ modern subject of modernity to sustain
itself ?
In closing I want to again remember Sophia, who has had her
green card for six months now. These days she is talking about going
to the Caribbean to do work with emerging gay and lesbian organiza-
tions, an idea that sends my own modernist trappings into horror and
confused convulsions. Why would she go back after waiting so long to
stay here? Or is this ‘‘return home’’ not quite the return I think of ? My
 configurations of desire 177

initial refusal to read her agency is complicated by her active rejection

of queer modernity even as she is an agent of it. The struggles with the
Derridean pharmakons of modernity and the conditional fluidities of
postmodernity continue. This essay is a tribute to Sophia and the
constant vexations she poses to both.

Notes
Much thanks and appreciation to those who read drafts and gave me feed-
back while writing this piece. They are Norma Alarcón, Marisa Belauste-
guigoitia, Mary Pat Brady, Inderpal Grewal, Patricia Penn Hilden, Caren
Kaplan, Rachel Lee, Katherine Sugg, and Jean Walton. I am grateful to the
organizers of the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness conference, espe-
cially Birgit Brander Rasmussen and Jillian Sandell. I would also like to
thank Tania Hammidi and the members of the Queer Cluster at the Univer-
sity of California, Davis, for initiating a rigorous dialogue about this paper.
1 I present the example of Sophia as neither fact nor fiction. My intent here
is to pose the problematics of how the ins regulates gender and sexuality
and decides who is gay and/or lesbian, as well as to note the process of
apprehending identities that cannot be contained by the narration of the
law. This scenario also perhaps marks an avenue of situating and examin-
ing the debates around the readings of Judith Butler’s notion of perfor-
mativity, often critiqued as a problematic version of voluntaristic perfor-
mance. For important discussions see Ki Namaste, ‘‘Tragic Misreadings,’’
in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Anthology, ed.
Brett Breemyn and Mickey Eliason (New York: New York University Press,
1996), and Kath Weston, ‘‘Do Clothes Make the Woman?: Gender, Perfor-
mance Theory, and Lesbian Eroticism,’’ Genders 17 (1993): 1–21.
2 I want to keep the definitions of the term ‘‘modernity’’ in this paper in
tension with each other. At some points I am predominantly referencing a
temporality or periodization common to this term, and at others I am
gesturing to a political condition that is understood in relation to a linear
telos of progress and development. Most important, however, are the ways
in which these two conceptualizations of modernity reinforce and sustain
the production of certain subjects of globalization.
3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 25. These are the relationships being suggested
here: while white femmeness can be rescued from its ‘‘sell-out’’ assump-
tions, the response to femmes of color is still quite often that they are
being duped by their oppressive culture. In this formulation, (white) butch
continues to function as the privileged marker of queerness and as such as
178 jasbir kaur puar

a form of assimilation for dykes of color. For Sophia it marks a double

assimilation—into the queer butch aesthetic as well as the arrival into the
U.S. nation-state.
4 While this word seems most obviously a reference to Audre Lorde’s bio-
mythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), I use it here more
in association with the vernacular of the Caribbean, which Lorde’s work
popularized outside of Caribbean diasporic communities.
5 I am borrowing this phrase from the title of a special edition of Positions (2,
no. 1 [1994]) that Yukiko Hanawa edited (1994). She uses desire to suggest
the ‘‘uneasy absence of a common subject’’ (ix), that defies capture in the
circuits of a sexual political economy defined as ‘‘both local and global at
the same time’’ (viii).
6 Whiteness functions to mark concluding impulses of a linear modernist
telos of progress and development characterized by the ‘‘arrival’’ of the
subject often through class, educational, and income-level status. There
are many examples of this; in liberal multicultural discourses, arrival is
signaled by the notion of inclusion in the national body, curriculum, or
canon; the model-minority discourse associated with Asian Americans is
another example of the ways in which approximating ‘‘whiteness’’ is un-
derstood through acquiring the status of the ‘‘ideal’’ immigrant. (Note the
ways in which Asian Americans are, for example in California, considered
more ‘‘white’’ than Latinos and Chicanos by virtue of this discourse. South
Asians have also been termed ‘‘honorary’’ whites and in fact were not so
long ago categorized as Caucasian.) I am not suggesting that an immi-
grant of color is repeating whiteness simply through class aspirations but
rather that, in collusion with the state, an ideal productive model citizen of
the nation is understood as a white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male.
Similarly, queer visibility also functions as marking a moment of ‘‘real’’
and definitive queer sexual subjectivity.
7 A word on the term ‘‘transnational’’ and how it is being used in this work.
While I have started out with an example of a particular transnational act
or moment, that of migration, I want to situate the transnational as a
‘‘condition,’’ as Jean Walton has called it, one that foregrounds not only
boundary crossings but also the e√ect of neocolonial capitalism, tourism,
and globalization of material and ideological capital. I take my lead on
theorizing the transnational from the introduction to Scattered Hegemonies
by Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal (1994).
8 The whiteness of queer theory could be loosely characterized as referring
to the following tendencies: the Euro-American bias of queer theory, much
of which lacks an analysis of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and citizenship
issues while simultaneously e√acing ‘‘Third World’’ contexts; the emer-
gence of queer theory from literary and psychoanalytic epistemologies,
 configurations of desire 179

supposedly lending to a lack of ‘‘material’’ analyses and global relations;

the positing of subjects that utilize queer sexuality as the only axis of
subordination, excluding other interpellations of identity. Earlier writers
intervening in similar problems in gay and lesbian scholarship include
Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Tomás Almaguer, Cheryl Clarke, and
Barbara Smith, among others. More recent critiques have been generated
by Yukiko Hanawa, Martin Manalansan, Nayan Shah, and Jee Yeun Lee.
9 M. Jacqui Alexander, ‘‘Not Just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of
Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Baha-
mas,’’ Feminist Review 48 (autumn 1994): 9.
10 Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander, eds., Feminist Genealogies,
Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997).
11 Stuart Hall, ‘‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,’’ in
Culture, Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for
the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (London: Macmillan,
1991), 29.
12 Alexander, ‘‘Not Just,’’ 5.
13 There are many complex knots to unravel in the contemplation of what the
nation, as a representational force, and the state, as a legislative apparatus
convened to substantiate that force, are willing to condone and contain.
On one hand, the state does not sanction visible queer identities, as in the
case of the U.S. military’s ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy, and yet, at the same
time, anticipates that explicit queer subjects will avail themselves of queer
asylum o√erings that ultimately require assimilation into national myths
of democracy and freedom. While the October 1998 killing of gay-bashing
victim Matthew Shepard has generated national outrage and sorrow, refer-
endums to allow gay marriages in Hawaii and Alaska were defeated in
November. The proliferation of queer representations is not commensu-
rate with legislative policings, and yet what is acceptable within those
representations mimics certain attributes of ideal citizens of the state:
white middle- and upper-class producers and consumers.
14 Yukiko Hanawa, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Positions: Circuits of Desire, 2, no. 1
(1994): vii.
15 Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), and
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Fran-
cisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
16 Katherine Sugg, ‘‘ ‘The Ultimate Rebellion’: Sexuality and Community in
Contemporary Writing,’’ American Studies Association paper, Kansas
City, November 1996.
17 Paula Moya, ‘‘Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity:
Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism,’’ in Feminist Genealogies, ed.
Mohanty and Alexander.
180 jasbir kaur puar

18 See the film directed by Cianna Stewart and Ming-Yeun S. Ma, There Is No
Name for This (1997).
19 Lisa Lowe, ‘‘Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian Ameri-
can Di√erences,’’ Diasporas 1, no. 1 (spring 1991): 24–44; and Inderpal
Grewal, ‘‘Reading and Writing the South Asian Diaspora: Feminism and
Nationalism in North America,’’ in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the
South Asian Diaspora, ed. Women of South Asian Descent Collective (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1993), 226–36.
20 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 19.
21 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and
the Politics of Di√erence,’’ Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 6–23.
22 Norma Alarcón, ‘‘Anzaldúa’s Frontera: Inscribing Genetics,’’ in Displace-
ment, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swe-
denbeurg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 45.
23 And, in fact, the reverse often happens, in that Hindu forms of situating
queerness blanket over any attempts at destabilizing such genealogies. Ga-
yatri Gopinath, in her reading of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1995),
notes that despite the novel’s Sri Lankan context the cultural appropriations
that occur in New York around the figure of the ‘‘funny boy’’ often use
Hindi language instead of Tamil or Sinhala. See Gayatri Gopinath, ‘‘Nostal-
gia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion,’’ positions 5, no. 2
(1997). This example, to me, speaks volumes about the problems of situating
queer readings. Without wanting to resurrect a binary between the ‘‘truth’’ of
the context of this text and the falsity of the representation of it, and rather
seeing this as a symptom of relevance rather than a problem per se, I think
there is something to be said for the processes of queered displacement that
are profoundly enabling in some instances and yet equally troublesome in
other cases, raising questions about defining diasporic contexts.
24 This pessimistic reading would suggest that all attempts to renarrativize
sexual genealogies are inevitably resignified through heterosexual na-
tionalism as white and Western. In reference to India, Geeta Patel has
argued that any recourse to evidence of the ‘‘past’’ must navigate its con-
tainment through colonial archives (Geeta Patel, Roundtable Discussion at
the South Asian Studies Annual conference, Madison, WI, October, 1997).
Yukiko Hanawa has similarly noted that the reach for origins through
indigenous structures is already framed by colonial mythologies (Yukiko
Hanawa, ‘‘The World of Suzie Wong and M. Butterfly: Race and Gender in
Asian America’’). Radical History Review, 64: (1996): 12–18. For some
examples of this problem in South Asian queer diasporic contexts, see Gita
Thadani, Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India. New York:
Cassell, 1996 and Rakesh Ratti, ed., A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding
of South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. Boston: Alyson, 1993. There
 configurations of desire 181

are, however, moments of hope. In July 1997 at Desh Pardesh, the South
Asian festival held annually in Toronto, I was surprised by my intense
pleasure at watching a performance piece by Himmat Shinhat that sug-
gested Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was ‘‘queer,’’ in the sense that
Guru Nanak wrote his devotional love poetry as female to his male travel-
ing companion. Through a combination of spoken word, song, and metal
guitar, Shinhat performed the scriptures in an intensely moving yet camp
way. There is obviously more to be said about why this recuperation
seemed exciting to me; what struck me most during this piece is how I, as
a Sikh queer, had assumed the complete foreclosure of such strategies
given the hegemonic formations of both Sikh nationalist discourses and
queer Hindu discourses.
25 Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘‘Queer Nationality,’’ in Fear of a
Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Min-
neapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 193–229.
26 Gayatri Gopinath, ‘‘Nostalgia,’’ 455–77.
27 This point bears more in-depth treatment than I can give it here. The ways
in which the nation tends to ‘‘shore up’’ its physical as well as ideological
boundaries in response to labor crises blamed on the outsourcing of pro-
duction processes as well as in response to a fear of a disintegrating na-
tional character due to immigration tends to focus on heteronormative
discourses of ‘‘family values’’ and the notion of limited access to public
resources and jobs. In response, queer activist strategies such as Queer
Nation respond to the heterosexualizing imperatives and impulses fueling
such discourses without addressing the fact of other multiple and overlap-
ping audiences to which the state addresses its disciplinary tactics. In
other words, there may be mandates for the state to carry out that actually
go beyond simply maintaining sexual di√erence. The nation-state may
well intentionally or unintentionally kill two birds with one stone—on the
one hand, continually projecting immigration as well as globalization as a
crisis that threatens the character of American life and, on the other,
promoting heterosexual family values as a way of protecting the national
body. But without linking the genealogies of these two discourses, queer
activists are merely responding to symptoms and not sicknesses of the
nation.
28 David Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
20.
29 Rosemary Hennessey, ‘‘Queer Visibility and Commodity Culture,’’ Cul-
tural Critique 29 (winter) (1994–95), 31–76.
30 Martin Manalansan, ‘‘In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Trans-
national Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 434.
182 jasbir kaur puar

31 John D’Emilio, ‘‘Capitalism and Gay Identity,’’ in The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467–
78.
32 Danae Clark, ‘‘Commodity Lesbianism,’’ in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
ed. Abelove et al., 186–201.
33 Anthony Burgess, ‘‘Notes from the Blue Coast,’’ Saturday Review, 28 April
1979.
34 Ruth Vanita, ‘‘Do Clothes Make the Woman?: Gender, Performance The-
ory, and Lesbian Eroticism,’’ Genders 17 (1993): 1–21.
35 Lisa Duggan, ‘‘Queering the State,’’ Social Text 39 (summer 1994): 8–9.
36 Butler, Gender Trouble, 12.
37 While I feel these critiques are important to make in the face of relentless
neoliberal globalizing forces, I also am aware that many practitioners
involved in queer asylum cases are constantly faced with the problems of
negotiating legal cultural hegemonies, so once again this is an ambivalent
space, producing both possibilities and closures. I would like to thank
Chris Nugent for pointing this out to me. Nevertheless, asylum has always
been a narrative that demands di√erence even as it negates it. It is disturb-
ing, for example, that so few women in comparison to men have received
asylum. (See Clint Steib, ‘‘Experts Warn Time Running out for Gay Refu-
gees,’’ Washington Blade 20 February 1998.) This speaks not only to
questions of resources, access and outreach but, I suspect, also to an
erasure of female same-sex sex that suggests its innocuous, nonthreaten-
ing, or perhaps even assimilatable features in relation to discourses of
buggery, anal sex, phallocentrism, and hiv / aids. It is also the case, as
Heather McClure has pointed out, that women often marry for economic
security and thus cannot participate ‘‘properly’’ in the legal definitions of
queer asylum (Steib, 1998). Now with the one-year filing limit on these
cases placing a temporal element to queer modernity, the question of how
outreach to potential queer asylees is envisioned becomes even more im-
portant, as areas like the Chicano/Latino Mission district in San Francisco,
which is populated with numerous undocumented drag queens and trans-
genders, are often inadvertently overlooked in favor of more ‘‘accessible’’
(and often wealthier) immigrants. In addition, there need to be more
nuanced readings of notions of persecution in terms of bisexual and trans-
gendered subjects, especially in how the legislation handles transsexuality.
See also Heather McClure, Christopher Nugent, and Lavi Soloway, Prepar-
ing Sexual Orientation-Based Asylum Claims.
38 Trinity Ordona et al., 93. ‘‘In Our Own Way: A Roundtable Discussion,’’ in
Asian American Sexualities, ed. Russel Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996),
91–100.
 configurations of desire 183

39 Gayle Rubin, ‘‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality,’’ in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove et al., 3–45.
40 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘‘Epistemology of the Closet,’’ in Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader, ed. Abelove et al., 45.
41 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vin-
tage, 1978).
42 Gracepoore, ‘‘Three Movements in a Minor,’’ Trikone Magazine 12, no. 1
(1997): 10.
43 José Muñoz, ‘‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,’’
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996), 10.
44 Foucault, History of Sexuality.
 Vron Ware

Perfidious Albion: Whiteness and

the International Imagination

There were Africans in Britain before the English came here.

—Peter Fryer∞

Searching for a figure of speech that might convey a sense of white-

ness as an interconnected global system, I remember June Jordan’s
brilliant evocation of the weather in her discussion of the vicissitudes
and unreliability of identity politics.≤ Instead of visualizing whiteness
in terms of a planetary weather system with global patterns, regional
variations, and microclimates, I am inclined to approach whiteness as
pollution. The weather, after all, can be good as well as bad; and
although it may respond to human activity on earth, it mainly follows
its own unfathomable laws. The image of pollution is more suitable
because it is a product of the destructive and exploitative nature of
industrial capitalism; it may be produced in one place, but its e√ects
are not containable by cultural or political borders. It is possible to
organize against the causes and e√ect of pollution on local, national,
and international levels; but unless there is concerted e√ort from
producers, consumers, governments and law enforcers, the measures
taken will have minimal impact on the environmental devastation that
is taking place day by day.
This analogy could be extended, for it fits rather well. I reach for it
here because I have some questions about the internationalist aspira-
tions of this project to ‘‘unmake’’ whiteness. How important is it that
we recognize the parallels and di√erences between discourses of
white supremacy produced in di√erent countries? If, as Fredric Jame-
son pointed out, we can imagine the end of the world more readily
than we can imagine the end of capitalism, how do we envision the
 perfidious albion 185

end of whiteness? Or is it true, as Joel Kovel has argued, that the cure
for white racism is ‘‘quite simple, really. Only get rid of imperialism,
and, what comes to the same thing, see to it that people freely deter-
mine their own history’’?≥
The point about such big questions is to underline the importance
of thinking about whiteness on many di√erent scales. In some ways
this is parallel to new theories of diaspora that have enabled fresh
approaches to black identities and cultures across time and space.
Similarly, whiteness needs to be understood as an interconnected
global system, having di√erent inflections and implications depend-
ing on where and when it has been produced. In other words, the
study of whiteness requires the technologies of satellite as well as
microscope in order to investigate and subvert its origins and e√ects
on local ecologies. The politics of the geo-body are clearly crucial to
this discussion, since ideologies of ‘‘race,’’ ethnicity, and belonging are
fundamentally bound up with the histories of the nation and how it is
defined by competing forces. ‘‘We live in a nationalized world,’’ asserts
Geo√rey Cubitt, author of Imagining Nations.
The concept of the nation is central to the dominant understand-
ings both of political community and of personal identity . . .
Notions of national distinctiveness and of international competi-
tion or comparison have become intrinsic to the ways in which we
think and speak about matters as varied as economics and to-
pography, art and climate, sport and literature, diet and human
character.∂
Writing from London, a city that preceded England, which itself
bears a complex relationship to the wider terms ‘‘British Isles,’’ ‘‘Great
Britain,’’ and ‘‘United Kingdom,’’ I want to address some topics from
this list as a way of analyzing the latest form of identity crisis that has
beset this particular nation. First, I want to emphasize the importance
of ‘‘international competition and comparison’’ without which a dis-
cussion of national anything is meaningless. My intention is to show
that the struggle to define new local, national, and regional identities
appropriate for the twenty-first century can serve as a paradigm for
those dedicated to comprehending and subverting the mechanisms of
whiteness on an international scale. This might sound like an impossi-
ble task, but it might also help to bring about new alliances and strate-
gies that can do battle with the global aspirations of white supremacy.
186 vron ware

It goes almost without saying that it is not a simple matter to

delineate clearly between geography, ethnicity, territory, power, and
national identity in any part of the world. In this essay I will be refer-
ring both to ‘‘Britishness’’ and ‘‘Englishness’’; while these are overlap-
ping categories it is important to understand how both have come to
be contested in particularly important ways in this postcolonial era.
Stuart Hall gives a lucid account of the changing definitions of British-
ness and Englishness in an essay titled ‘‘New Cultures for Old’’:
One only has to think of the regional, cultural, class, gender, ra-
cial, economic and linguistic di√erences which still persist within
its boundaries, of the tensions which now accompany the idea of a
‘‘united’’ kingdom, and of the role of ‘‘Englishness’’ as the hege-
monic culture in relation to the other ‘‘nations’’ within the king-
dom—a fact which irritates many Scots, Welsh, and Northern
Irish people, and which fuels nationalist sentiment and aspira-
tions in di√erent parts of the UK.∑
The U.K. has to be seen as a ‘‘composite nation,’’ and the job of the
national culture is to produce a ‘‘sense of belongingness’’ that might
unify the di√erent elements. The role of ‘‘Englishness’’ is clearly cru-
cial to the national culture as a whole as it has a ‘‘quintessential’’
relation to Britishness. The contingencies of imperialism brought un-
der British jurisdiction many di√erent ethnic groups who continue to
retain an a≈nity with the country, either through direct settlement
here or through structures such as the Commonwealth—but this does
not automatically permit them to identify as English, even if they are
born and brought up in the country. This next part of my argument
will try to place this question of defining Englishness within a wider
context of the national British culture.
To return briefly to the theme of soccer, which might be called a
national obsession (encompassing all the components of the U.K.),
this is one area of popular culture that demonstrates the conveniently
flexible arrangement provided by a consortium of overlapping ‘‘na-
tional’’ identities. If, as I have indicated, the England supporters abroad
are a disgrace, the behavior of Scottish fans is exemplary. When En-
gland failed to qualify for the last World Cup in 1994, the national
media automatically backed the team of the Irish Republic as a substi-
tute—which was less surprising than it might at first seem since a
number of their players were born in England. After the Jamaican team
 perfidious albion 187

failed to win any games in the 1998 tournament, some of their erst-
while supporters living in Britain found themselves enthusiastically
rooting for England. It might not be practical to change one’s sense of
national identity as easily as one might swap a T-shirt or a banner, but
the international arena provided by sport demonstrates the pleasures
and dangers, the significance and the irrelevance, of the strongly held
feeling that one belongs to a nation.
Another important example drawn from popular culture was pro-
vided by the death of Princess Diana in 1997, which has had far-
reaching implications and repercussions that have not yet been fully
understood. It was truly astonishing to see the flowers placed outside
Kensington Palace and hear reports of the mood among the crowds
who gathered to line her funeral procession. At the time it was almost
impossible to understand what this all meant, particularly as the me-
dia abandoned all reasoned debate in the interests of bowing to the
public mood. Although muted voices were heard complaining of the
fact Diana’s fluctuating popularity during her lifetime had, by her
untimely death, given way to nothing less than canonization, many
were clearly delighted to have a new patron saint who was young,
female, fashionable, and against patriarchal authority. As it happened,
the country had just seen a landslide victory for a new Labour govern-
ment whose leader was barely ten years older than the princess. He
palpably demonstrated his own distance from his forebears when he
wept on delivering his public response to her death. What more ef-
fective signs could there be that Britain was poised to begin a new era
in which it turned its back on tradition and presented itself as a youth-
ful, forward-looking, and emotionally expressive nation?
One of the most intriguing components of this new face of Britain
was the complexion of the crowd that paid tribute to Diana. One after
another, journalists noted, often with incredulity, that many of the
women, men, and children who flocked to lay flowers were black or
Asian. It was curious that this should have been a surprise at all, but
the fact that it was so widely reported compounded the sense that
Britain was becoming a very di√erent country than it had been at the
time of the princess’s wedding to Prince Charles in 1981. However,
the mood of optimism and change experienced by many in 1997 was
thoroughly dampened by events of the following year, and not just by
the failure of the new government to prove itself substantially dif-
ferent from the old order. The behavior of England fans during the
188 vron ware

soccer World Cup tournament in France showed that old traditions

really do die hard, especially when it comes to representing the nation
abroad.
In June 1998, the French police were faced with massive security
problems from the day that the England team played its first game in
Marseilles against Tunisia. The rioting and violence that took place as
thousands of fans watched the game on a giant screen outside the
packed stadium continued through the night, provoking the French
police to organize mass expulsions of any English fans thought to
have been involved or who were found to have a criminal record.
Marseilles’s regional police chief was quoted as saying: ‘‘We don’t
want them here, we don’t want them in our city. We don’t want them
in France. We’re going to send them away and hope they don’t come
back.’’∏ Subsequent security arrangements in other cities where En-
gland was due to play included a ban on alcohol for twenty-four hours
before the match, the segregation of English fans, and a massive po-
lice presence; when the team lost to Argentina in the quarter finals,
there was a huge sense of relief that the tournament could continue in
the good-natured and celebratory mood that dominated elsewhere.
The predictably nationalist behavior of some English fans abroad
during international soccer games invariably provokes a frenzy of self-
examination in the media that provides interesting reading on ques-
tions of the national character and consciousness. Under the headline
‘‘Anglophile City Braced for Invading Hordes,’’ one of the culprits in
France, his red shirt marked with a cross of St. George, gave a typically
frank response when asked why he did it: ‘‘That’s a fucking stupid
question. We do it because we’re England, because this is what we
do . . . These French would be Krauts if it wasn’t for the English.
We’re here to represent England, you don’t get respect otherwise.’’π
A columnist writing in the liberal Guardian sought the reason for
this peculiarly English problem. Commenting on the front-page head-
line of a right-wing tabloid paper, which screamed ‘‘Shamed Again by
the Louts,’’ she asked, ‘‘who would want to be English?’’
Yesterday’s Daily Mail called it ‘‘a sickening show of degenerate
patriotism.’’ So where does all this empty pride and false patriot-
ism come from? Who stokes it up? Who poisons the air with the
daft idea that to be English is best? Who pumps the bellows of
belligerent nationalism? Our own right wing press, from the posh
 perfidious albion 189

end of the Euro-hating Telegraph, to the xenophobia of the Mail,

right down to the flagrant loathing of foreigners in the Sun.∫
This diagnosis is entirely correct, but it does not answer the question
of why the English have been so peculiarly receptive to this propa-
ganda, and why other nations have not had the same opportunity to be
inflamed by cynical newspaper magnates. However, leaving aside
these questions for the time being, it is interesting to note that on the
same page as this commentary, the writer Jonathan Freedland pon-
dered the implications of the Labour Party’s elevation of a thirty-five-
year-old gay Asian man to the House of Lords, the unelected second
chamber of British government, under the headline: ‘‘Step Forward
Waheed Alli. You Can Change Our Nation’s Destiny.’’ Freedland’s
concern was not, as might be first assumed, that an Asian peer in the
House of Lords would help to break what he calls the ‘‘white/middle-
aged/straight lock on the upper house’’ but that his refusal of such an
honor, in e√ect a boycotting of the Labour system of patronage, would
help to undermine a fundamentally undemocratic structure; and it
would be this act of courage rather than his age, sexuality, and eth-
nicity that might bring about a change to the nation’s destiny.
These two examples, taken from just one day in the life of a dis-
course of national identity, can be viewed as expressing tiny but signif-
icant elements in a new phase of struggle to shift the way in which the
national collectivity imagines and represents itself. They both o√er
thoughtful reactions to unrelated current events but need to be seen
against a background of newly charged debates on the meanings of
both Britishness and Englishness and the relationship between them.
I want to refer to these debates as a way of testing the concept of white-
ness as a tool with which to make sense of and e√ectively intervene in
the reimagining of a heterogeneous nation. In the course of this I
hope to make some observations about the study of the making and
unmaking of whiteness as a cross-cultural, internationalist exercise
that seems appropriate to the broad project to which this collection is
dedicated.

Prophylactic Identities
A number of di√erent factors have now combined to revive discussion
about what constitutes the national English character, what English
190 vron ware

ethnicity consists of, and, more significantly, why the English need a
strong sense of national identity, now more than ever. These debates
are directly linked to factors such as the devolution of Scottish, Welsh,
and Northern Irish governments, the consolidation of the European
Union, and the wider forces of globalization. But they are also pro-
voked by a backlash against doctrines and practices of multicultural-
ism and a sense that everyone else except the English is expected to
feel some pride in their ethnicity and national culture. Surveys of
white youth are held up to demonstrate that their entrenched racism is
partly a response to being routinely punished for asserting a cultural
identity that mirrors (and stands up to) that of their peers who can
claim African, Caribbean, or South Asian descent. Roger Hewitt, au-
thor of a fascinating study of school kids’ speech patterns in south-east
London, White Talk Black Talk, has carried out extensive research
among white working-class youth in that area.Ω In a short film he
made for use in schools, girls and boys complained bitterly of the
privileges extended to their black counterparts who are allowed to
wear cultural insignia without being accused of racism. This has been
used as evidence by certain commentators who see the destructive
anger of these disempowered and resentful young people as an inevi-
table consequence of misguided antiracist policies.
Ann Leslie, a journalist who served as a foreign correspondent in
the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and who uses this experi-
ence to argue for the psychic benefits of a strong sense of national
identity, cites Hewitt’s film in her advocacy of a positive reevaluation
of Englishness: ‘‘If it is necessary to build up the self esteem of young
blacks (which it is), that should not be at the expense of the self-esteem
of young whites. English people should be proud of ourselves for our
real achievements, past and present. This is not a recipe for rampant
chauvinism. It is quite the opposite. It is a prophylactic against it.’’∞≠
Leslie’s conflation of white with English replicates the common-
sense view that Englishness is deeply imbued with the characteristics
of light skin and the nuances of ‘‘race’’ that float around the category. It
is possible to see here how the theorization of whiteness dovetails
neatly with this explanation of the dominant cultural identity—or ap-
parent lack of it—in Britain. She writes that English people rarely had
to think about their identity, since to have been born English was to
have ‘‘won the first prize in the lottery of life.’’ In an echo of Richard
Dyer’s famous description of the all-or-nothing quality of whiteness,
 perfidious albion 191

Leslie goes on to say that ‘‘we were so convinced that ours was the dom-
inant culture that we scarcely bothered to talk of ‘Englishness’ itself.’’∞∞
Winthrop Jordan has painstakingly shown the historical develop-
ment of aesthetic and moral associations between light skin and
northern European, specifically English, identity;∞≤ and Richard Dyer
has recently returned to and updated this discussion of white as a skin
color that works ‘‘as a category that is internally variable and unclear at
the edges.’’∞≥ Dyer quotes Goethe, for instance, whose contribution to
Enlightenment knowledge claims about ‘‘race’’ was based on the idea
that light skin represented a mark of perfection in the human form.
That citation is worth repeating here because it is a reminder that the
apparent beauty of light skin lay in the absence of color: ‘‘We venture,
however, after what has been adduced, to assert that the white man,
that is, he whose surface varies from white to reddish, yellowish,
brownish, in short, whose surface appears most neutral in hue and
least inclines to any particular or positive color, is the most beauti-
ful.’’∞∂ Dyer is interested in the way that this neutrality combines with
the multiplicity and the ‘‘expressively dynamic’’ characteristic of white-
ness to make it ‘‘amenable to being, within bounds, a matter of
ascription—white people are who people say are white. This has a
profoundly controlling e√ect.’’∞∑
This last observation can be linked to the patient scholarship of
historians like Alexander Saxton, David R. Roediger, Theodore W.
Allen, and Grace Elizabeth Hale, whose work has done so much to
unravel, explain, and challenge the making of whiteness as an eco-
nomic, political, and social category in the United States. In Britain,
however, a slightly di√erent approach is required, one that examines
the fluidity of its naturalizing power in relation to internal di√erences
of class rather than ‘‘race.’’ In the eyes of the ardent race-thinkers of the
nineteenth century, the members of the Empire who had positive color
in their skins were clearly not and never could be white, while the
indigenous urban working class who could claim whiteness through
birth were rendered subhuman by their inferior economic and social
status. The representation of the East End of London as a ‘‘dark conti-
nent’’ is just one example of the racialized discourse of class that
operated in late-nineteenth-century industrial Britain. Anna Davin’s
classic essay on imperialism and motherhood documented the way
that working-class women were targeted by social policies to produce
healthier specimens of white o√spring ready to fight for their country
192 vron ware

and empire.∞∏ This kind of historiographical labor points to the role of

the Englishwoman as a conveyor of both physical characteristics and
dominant culture and shows how notions of whiteness were ascribed
to the body and to the nation according to gender as well as class.
Today, post-Empire, post-decolonization, the content of English-
ness, like whiteness itself, appears to be of a volatile nature, easily
evaporating when put under pressure. Few people are able to define
what it amounts to. In an attempt to find something distinctively
English that might be worth preserving against the homogenizing
forces of the European community, former Prime Minister John Ma-
jor compiled a much-ridiculed list that included village cricket, warm
beer, and old maids cycling to morning communion. Arch conserva-
tive Norman Tebbit fared little better with his notorious cricket test,
which asserted that true Englishmen would support the national team
against Indian, Pakistani, or West Indian opponents.
Leslie points out that this inability to define important ingredients
of Englishness is a significant problem. To prove this she cites an
interview with a group of disa√ected English youth who were inter-
viewed on this question by the Sunday Times: the only English achieve-
ments they could think of were the national football team and a couple
of television soap operas.∞π Even the openly avowed white suprema-
cists are not entirely clear what it is they are fighting for. A recent
interview with a leading member of the far right British Nationalist
Party (bnp)—whose supporters see themselves as the embattled cus-
todians of pure English culture—revealed that the party’s sense of
national identity was largely defined by what it was not and who it was
against. He explained to his interviewer, anthropologist Roland Lit-
tlewood, that his party’s ideology now understood the question of
‘‘race’’ in terms of tribes and customs rather than purely biological
factors. Employing the contemporary language of cultural rather than
racial identity, he claimed that although an individual was assigned to
a particular race by birth, people could choose to which tribe they
belonged, not on the basis of genetics but of culture: ‘‘You know about
African tribes; we are just the same: Celts, Saxons, Normans, Vikings
and so on.’’ How do you know which one you belong to? He admitted
a certain degree of mixing and uncertainty, but said people tend to
stick to their own gang, so they would know their own tribe.∞∫
Here, being English seems to mean living in an enclave supported
by grants for projects such as folk dancing in the church hall, eating
 perfidious albion 193

fish and chips, and pursuing other indigenous customs that might
constitute ethnic culture. Later in the same interview the bnp mem-
ber claimed not to be anti-immigration but concerned about the num-
bers that threatened the beleaguered host community: ‘‘We want a
space to celebrate cultural diversity.’’ The litany of charges against
other ethnic groups was entirely familiar, and the bnp member kept
returning to the refrain: a few is all right; we just don’t want to be
overwhelmed.
If whiteness is synonymous with Englishness, functioning as a
hidden normative code that determines who is in or out on the basis of
birth and complexion, what is to become of the children of settlers
who are born in England but who are not light-skinned and who
cannot automatically assume the same privileges as those who are?
Here the category of Britishness appears to be more flexible and to
o√er a more juridical version of national identity that is more con-
cerned with questions of allegiance and citizenship and less closely
tied to the body. This question of where the new generations of
British-born black inhabitants fit in has been given a fresh slant by
public festivities marking of the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of
the SS Empire Windrush, which carried one of the first contingents of
Caribbean migrant workers to England in 1948. The stories of the
Windrush generation and their descendants are told from the perspec-
tive of those who began life in Britain as outsiders, denied the chance
to belong even as legal citizens, but who have gradually and often
unwillingly begun to consider the country as their home. The histor-
ical reconstruction of their migration to and settlement in Britain,
achieved through writing, photography, and television documentary,
has coincided with this new phase of discourse about the parameters
of English and British identities. I want to consider some aspects of
contemporary debate on the content of this broader category of Brit-
ishness and to examine the prospects for a more inclusive multiethnic
identity that might permanently disrupt the association of white su-
premacy with the future destiny of England.

Rebranding Britain
Although the idea of a national identity in crisis may not be new in the
second half of the twentieth century, the concept of ‘‘branding’’ a coun-
try as if it were some kind of product competing on an open market is
194 vron ware

rather more surprising. Shortly after winning the general election in

May 1997, the new Labour government began making noises about
the need to rethink the meaning of Britishness as a way of underlining
this new phase in its history. The party’s phenomenal success was
evidence that its transformation from ‘‘old’’ to ‘‘New’’ Labour had been
entirely e√ective in changing its public image. Tony Blair spoke of the
need to ‘‘rebrand’’ Britain in order to shift its image away from a fading
imperial power to becoming a vigorous and above all a new, younger
country. This task was picked up by the left think-tank, Demos, whose
arguments were presented in a report titled Britain: Renewing Our
Identity. Its author, Mark Leonard, emphasized Britain’s place as an
exciting center of movement that both attracted and organized the
import and export of ideas, goods, services, people, and cultures. He
represented the country as a vibrant, multicultural entity, with strong
traditions of innovation, nonconformity, and fair play, and made rec-
ommendations that ranged from sending o√ ambassadors all over the
world in order to proclaim Britain’s prowess in the arts, design, and
technology, consolidating Britain’s position as a ‘‘clever island,’’ to
redecorating Britain’s airports and tunnels so that people arriving in
the country might gain a more favorable impression. The report fitted
in well with the Blairite strategy to give the idea of Britishness a well-
earned makeover so that the crusty images of interminable industrial
and imperial decline and rapidly diminishing importance as a world
power associated with seventeen years of Conservative rule give way to
the notion of a youthful, exuberant, and inventive culture that is far
more attractive to customers and investors in a global market.
It is easy to be cynical or at least skeptical about the Rebranding
Britain project. The idea that the success of certain cultural industries
prioritized and promoted by a relatively young government—under
the caption ‘‘Cool Britannia’’—could symbolize the revitalization of
the entire economy and culture has been comprehensively dealt with,
especially since the rumbles of recession could be heard in the dis-
tance. In a defense of the rebranding concept, Leonard agreed that a
country cannot be marketed or sold like a product, but he explained
why he was convinced that image was crucial to a nation’s survival in
the modern world:
Today all modern nations manage their identities. They use logos,
advertising campaigns, festivals, and trade fairs to promote a na-
 perfidious albion 195

tional brand. Some have been incredibly successful. Recently Ire-

land transformed its image from that of a rural, traditional Cath-
olic country to an innovative ‘‘Celtic Tiger.’’ Spain has managed to
shed the shadow of Franco and redefine itself as a modern indus-
trial nation using the España picture by Miró as a national logo
symbolizing a bright, optimistic, young country.∞Ω
The mention of trade fairs is a reminder that the industrial nations
have been holding lavish exhibitions to advertise their economic prow-
ess since the Great Exhibition of 1851 and that these fairs were an
integral part of molding national and nationalist identity in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century well before the power of the logo
was invented. Paul Greenhalgh describes how the Rue des Nations
functioned in the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where one
could stroll along discovering what it meant to be a German, Belgian,
Swede, or Finn by looking at a combination of ‘‘cultural artifacts,
industrial produce and statistical information.’’≤≠
More than this, each nation worked hard to project a national
disposition, a character that united its peoples. The Rue des Na-
tions was not only an exhibition of art or industry, it was flam-
boyant manifestation of nationalist activity which had grown
steadily among advanced nations for much of the previous cen-
tury. As with most nationalist institutions, the atmosphere hang-
ing over the banks of the Seine was a strange one, an uneven
mixture of bombast, pride, fear, insecurity and confusion.
This evocation of Disneyland, which, as many have argued, was a
direct descendant of this type of trade fair, lends a further air of un-
reality—or perhaps what might be termed ‘‘hyperfamiliarity’’—to the
project of rebranding any country’s national identity. On the one
hand, Leonard argues that rebranding is an economic necessity, claim-
ing that three-quarters of the world’s largest companies say that na-
tional identity influences them when they buy and sell goods and
services; on the other, he seems to o√er a constructive political agenda
when he points out that the project represents a fantastic opportunity
to provide Britain with ‘‘a story that makes sense of where we have
come from, reflects the best of what we are and makes a strong state-
ment about where we are going.’’ He believes that identity can be
‘‘worked at’’ so that it includes traditions of cultural openness, toler-
196 vron ware

ance, and ethnic diversity along with stories of economic and political
innovation and creativity. In the current climate, however much one
might detest the language of marketing and image-making, it is cer-
tainly important to consider these arguments seriously and to see
where else they are being made or challenged. Although these ongo-
ing debates about historical memory and national identity have been
central to anyone thinking and writing about the politics of ‘‘race’’
and multiculturalism, winning the argument that Britain is a multi-
cultural, mixed society rather than an imagined community of white
people who tolerate strangers is crucial to the future of democracy in
the country.
This is absolutely not a new area of struggle, as anyone who has
followed these debates will appreciate. But there is a di√erent climate
now, which means that the representation of these issues has par-
ticularly important implications and repercussions in the European
community as well as within Britain. In the context of the electoral
gains being made by the far right in France, Germany, Austria, and
Belgium and the increase in neo-Nazi violence, it is even more urgent
to aspire to the ideal of a national collective that finds itself at ease with
its internal plurality and diversity and therefore able to contribute
more e√ectively to the creation of a democratic, multicultural Euro-
pean federation.
This is one area where the issue of whiteness has to be addressed:
instead of being used to advocate the purity, cleansing power, and
seductiveness of the product being advertised, any illusory sense of
British whiteness must be scrubbed away to reveal the rainbow colors
within. Whether or not the new Labour government is prepared to put
the right amount of spin on that aspect of the nation’s identity remains
to be seen, but these continuing debates will surely involve multi-
faceted attempts to come to terms with the postcolonial realities of life
in Britain.
It might seem anachronistic to start talking about the White Cli√s
of Dover here as a symbol of contemporary discourse; but as one of
the stock visual images of England’s landscape, they do crop up rather
often. Composed of a myriad of microscopic creatures that we call
chalk, sculpted by wind and waves over centuries, the high white cli√s
have become one of the most significant features of the country’s
topography, long celebrated in song, stories, and pictures. Dover is
situated in the extreme southeast of the country, only twenty miles
 perfidious albion 197

from its oldest enemy, France; as Britain’s most symbolic border, the
cli√s have been given added layers of meaning by powerful ideologies
of national belonging and exclusion that have been partly shaped by
the nation’s island consciousness. This was especially true in the
1940s when Hitler’s army was poised to invade the country, when
Churchill made his famous speech about Britain’s finest hour, when
so many took to their boats to prevent an attack by sea in the ill-fated
Dunkirk episode. The reference to Britain’s airports and tunnels made
earlier was not o√hand; it is now only the minority of people who
actually approach the country by boat coming from the southeast. It is
true that passengers in the Eurostar trains only become aware of
entering the country once the train emerges from the gray concrete of
the tunnel entrance and slows down to half speed. As Mark Leonard
points out, the visual impact of the train tunnel for those entering and
leaving the country is negligible; the experience of arriving in most
airport terminals is disorienting and unmemorable. No longer do the
ghostly cli√s, looming through the Channel haze, greet most visitors
or welcome homecomers, and the prospect of Diana airport does not
quite replace the combination of history, geology, geography, and ide-
ology that this other entrance point supplied. However, as Stephen
Daniels writes: ‘‘National identities are co-ordinated, often largely de-
fined, by ‘legends and landscapes,’ by stories of golden ages, enduring
traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or
promised homelands with hallowed sites and scenery.’’≤∞ The survival
of the cli√s as a potent image of identity and belonging at the end of
the twentieth century can be illustrated by recent examples of their
appropriation in political propaganda.
Shortly before the last general election, the leader of the fascist
bnp, John Tyndall, began his party political broadcast standing with
the infamous rock formation in the background. His message was
explicit—England for the English—as well as implicit—Wogs begin at
Calais.≤≤ The following day saw a slightly di√erent picture of Labour
Party leader Tony Blair in a more relaxed and pensive pose, the same
cli√s clearly shown in the background. This was witness to a struggle
by di√erent political parties to signal their di√erent brands of national-
ism in a way that engaged with the old brand of Britain. By choosing
the cli√s as a backdrop, both politicians claimed their allegiance to a
way of thinking and feeling about England that needs to be under-
stood. In the first example, the ancient chalkface is a convenient image
198 vron ware

reflecting the archetypal purity of the nation. The bnp leader posi-
tioned himself on the cli√top, his remaining hair ru∆ed by the sea
wind, his carefully worded broadcast failing to conceal the real agenda
behind the fascist program: rights for whites, and the banishing of all
those who cannot, for reasons of their skin color, belong to the island
race. The choreography of the future prime minister might have rep-
resented his desire to change that particular story of Britain and to
a≈rm the island’s proximity to Europe: part of a new chapter of union
with the continent with its famous sovereignty intact. Alternatively, his
position could also be read as a sign that he too had the old island
mentality and would resist invasion at all costs. The sign of the white
cli√s deliberately and conveniently left this ambiguity open to inter-
pretation.
The same landscape was featured in a charged racist discourse
shortly after this when the National Front, rivals of the bnp, demon-
strated at the arrival of Slovak gypsies claiming refugee status because
of racist persecution in Czechoslovakia. The sight of this miserable
bunch waving their ‘‘Go Home’’ banners in front of television cam-
eras on the sea front perpetuated the illusion that Dover was where the
hordes were still seeping in, expecting free housing and handouts. Not
surprisingly, the mainstream media coverage of the plight of the
Slovak refugees echoed the fascists’ outrage in slightly muted terms,
focusing on the horrified response of the authorities in Dover who
were faced with providing accommodation. The fact that several fam-
ilies genuinely qualified for asylum several months later received still
more muted coverage.
While the view of the cli√s from the land might suggest to the
inhabitants a competing set of ‘‘enduring traditions’’ and di√erent
variations of a ‘‘golden age’’ worth fighting for, the view from the sea
is possibly more significant. Recalling her arrival in Britain as a
Guyanese colonial student in 1951, Beryl Gilroy describes how some
fellow passengers broke into the patriotic song made so popular in the
war, ‘‘There’ll be blue birds over the White Cli√s of Dover,’’ as they
neared the English coastline. These were young men and women who
had grown up in their own homeland with a sense of strong connec-
tion to Britain: ‘‘We saluted the Union Jack on Empire Day, sang ‘I
Vow to Thee My Country,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ ‘The British Grenadiers,’
and ‘Jerusalem’ with pleasure and verve.’’≤≥
Although the majority of migrants from the former colonies en-
 perfidious albion 199

tered Britain at other sites, many have spoken of the conflicting emo-
tions that they experienced on reaching the place they thought they
knew so well. Lord Kitchener, one of the most famous Calypsonians in
the Caribbean, revealed his own reactions in a documented history of
the Windrush voyage:
But entering England . . . I get this kind of wonderful feeling that
I’m going to land on the mother country, the soil of the mother
country . . . Eventually it came up as a famous song. London is
the place for me. How can I describe? It’s just a wonderful feeling.
You know how it is when you are a child, you hear about your
mother country, and you know you’re going to touch the soil of
the mother country, you know what feeling is that? Imagine how I
felt. Here’s where I want to be, in London.≤∂
It is precisely these kind of stories, by no means limited to the postwar
history of Britain but made especially poignant by the living voices
retelling them now, that provide new ways of imagining the nation.
The central feature of the Windrush season was four hour-long televi-
sion documentaries exploring di√erent aspects of the lives of mi-
grants and their descendants from the 1940s to the present day. The
series took a chronological perspective, and each program was edited
around interviews with individuals, occasionally white as well as black,
combined with documentary footage and a single male narrative
voice. Longer versions of the interviews were transcribed in a book
edited by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Inevitable
Rise of Multi-racial Britain, which contained additional analysis and
commentary. Numerous public events were organized to take place in
the Windrush ‘‘season’’; readings, exhibitions, concerts, and other pub-
lications and short films attempted to express and a≈rm the historical
links between Britain and the Caribbean and to investigate all the
di√erent implications of black settlement in the last fifty years.
The material gathered during this unprecedented exercise provides
an extraordinary wealth of oral history that is clearly of great value to
the communities represented by it. Many of the sequences in the bbc
documentaries were harrowing to watch as individuals recalled epi-
sodes of routine discrimination, racist violence, including murder,
and callous or vindictive treatment at the hands of the police and
judiciary system. Other parts were more humorous and self-critical, as
interviewees speculated on the impact of their behavior on indigenous
200 vron ware

culture, particularly in music and dance. However, it was also clear

from watching the four hours of film that much of this history had
been left out and that there was a great deal more to unearth and
record, particularly while the older generations were still alive.
In a short, lively trailer advertising the bbc documentary series,
young and old people of Caribbean descent announced that their pres-
ence had changed what it meant to be British. This confident assertion
showed that to be black and British is no longer a contentious issue,
even though it has not been easily resolved. The banners of black and
white participants in the various demonstrations that marked the
turning points of each decade from 1950 to the present day told their
own story: Keep Britain White; If They’re Black, Send Them Back;
Here to Stay; Black and White Unite and Fight. The final episode in
the television series celebrated the presence of black individuals in
many areas of British cultural and political life that were probably
unimaginable to those on the SS Windrush and even more so to the
Britain that awaited them: a black woman peer in the House of Lords;
black Members of Parliament; key players and champions represent-
ing Britain and England in the world of sport; innovative musicians,
artists, media figures, and designers; and so on. It would have been
hard to have been presented with this evidence and then deny that
Britain had indeed been transformed by the presence and contribu-
tion of postwar Caribbean settlers. But how deep this change really is,
and how di√erent groups of people perceive and experience this shift
outside the main metropolitan centers are questions that might not be
answered for some time. The fact remains that the country has been
o√ered the opportunity to listen to and reflect on the testimony of
some of those who have been traditionally excluded, marginalized,
and silenced.
Using the Windrush material as a resource, I want to flip the em-
phasis from the black British themselves to the view of whiteness that
they both brought with them and encountered for the first time on
their arrival and throughout their subsequent struggles to work and
make new lives. It is important to stress that the newcomers already
had a highly developed sense of what it meant to be white, absorbed
during the course of contact with whites through the various histories
of slavery and colonialism at home; this mirrored the expectations and
associations that indigenous Britons had of blacks without necessarily
having met them before. By concentrating on just some of the testi-
 perfidious albion 201

monies of the West Indian travelers regarding the early days of their
arrival, I hope to suggest the value of pursuing this approach in an
attempt to comprehend the principle of how whiteness operates in
di√erent locations, at di√erent times, and within di√erent sets of so-
cial relations.

Encountering the Color Bar

One of the most striking features of the interviews with older men and
women who arrived in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s is their as-
tonishment at seeing white people doing ordinary, menial labor. Con-
nie Mark recalls her first impressions:
I was blown, I was shocked, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I arrived
at Paddington and it was all very grey and dismal and these little
white men were coming up to take our suitcases and I couldn’t
believe it. In fact, we travelled with a friend who stood there
stunned, and I thinking all during his years as a student here he
never recovered from that because it used to be one of his strong-
est stories. He used to say, ‘‘I couldn’t believe this man coming
and calling me ‘sir.’ ’’≤∑
Jessica Huntley, who came to England in 1958 intending to stay
for a short time and who later founded an independent publishing
house and bookshop in West London, remembers her astonishment
at seeing a white woman with a broom in her hand: ‘‘So in those days
you used to wear the beehive, and she had a big head of hair on top and
well painted, her lips was red and her eyes blue and all the rest of it,
and she was sweeping the platform . . . I mean I’m only accustomed
to seeing white women who’s painted devils but do nothing, they don’t
even sweep their own home! They have six of us to do it for them.’’≤∏
Another feature of these recollections of England in the fifties is the
grayness mentioned by Connie Mark, which seemed to extend to the
people themselves. Many travelers spoke about the shocking poverty
that they encountered on their arrival; they simply had not expected to
find so many destitute English people, as they had grown up with a
sense that whiteness automatically conferred power and wealth. This
realization irrevocably changed their view of England as an invincible
center of empire, and the possession of light skin as a guarantor of
privilege and material reward.
202 vron ware

Other recurrent observations reflect the sheer unfriendliness of the

new culture. Tryphena Anderson echoes the sentiments of many of
her generation:
Nobody tells you the truth and nobody tells you everything. When
I came, I saw everybody going into their little houses, and then
nobody spoke to you. That never happened in Jamaica. As long as
you met somebody in the street—whether you’d met them or
not—it’s good morning, good evening, and hello. And you’d find
you’d be saying to somebody, good morning and good evening
and they never answered you, and then you felt stupid after that,
so you stopped.≤π
These views of English behavior—the majority of migrants settled in
England rather than in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales—were often com-
pounded by a strong sense of homesickness for warmer, friendlier
times. They were also deeply a√ected by the hostility meted out to
them because of their appearance. Although there were many jobs
available to the new migrants, they were forced to learn quickly that
there were many sectors where they were not welcome. Interviewees
described how the trades union movement could be e√ective in block-
ing their employment. Ben Bousquet gave an account of his early
attempts to get work as a young man:
[I]n the local places of employment—whether it be in the Post
O≈ce, whether it be in the railways, whether it be London trans-
port, you know the places which we first went into, even to a
certain extent, the hospitals—it was almost made impossible for
you to get a job. And if you did get the job it became impossible,
almost, to actually join the union . . . they made it that way by not
approaching you, you knew that they didn’t want you.≤∫
Bousquet played a central role in a bbc documentary that exposed
what was known as ‘‘the color bar’’ in the housing market. He was
filmed going from house to house where there were known vacancies
for working men, only to be turned away at the door with all kinds of
excuses. Often landlords would place cards in the window: Room for
Rent: No Irish, No Coloureds, No Dogs. As he recalled this experience
in the television documentary, Bousquet was visibly distressed, even
though it had happened several decades previously. The lack of rooms
available for rent caused enormous hardship, forcing individuals and
 perfidious albion 203

families to pay exorbitant rent for miserable accommodation, not al-

ways owned by whites. A few fellow migrants were able to acquire
property of their own to rent out to people desperate for safe housing.
Patterns of discrimination in housing and employment led inevita-
bly to the development of particular areas of Caribbean settlement in
cities like London, Birmingham, and Nottingham. Because of the ac-
tivities of one particularly exploitative landlord, a significant number
of migrants lived in an area of London known as North Kensington,
which included Notting Hill and Notting Dale. The growth of teddy
boy gangs throughout the 1950s had led to increasing danger on the
streets for black women and men,≤Ω and this threat was compounded
by the activities of the fascist Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. It
was extraordinarily moving to hear older black women and men de-
scribe their experiences of harassment on the streets where they lived
and to learn about their strategies for protecting each other as they
went to and from their homes after dark. Ivan Weekes described a
particularly horrible incident that took place amid escalating violence
from these gangs:
I looked through the fifth floor window where I was, and there
was a battle between black men, policemen, white yobbos and
Teddy Boys. I mean the street was alight, except for fires and
that—Molotov cocktails and so on. And blood was everywhere
and it was awful. And by that time the situation had become so
bad that black men used to come from surrounding areas . . .
knowing the whites were going to hit this particular street, this
particular night. They would come in solidarity, to fight. In other
words, many black people felt, in for a penny, in for a pound.≥≠
The arrival of television and the new media interest in the highly
charged question of colonial immigration focused attention on this
new problem of ‘‘race’’ and urban conflict with the result that the
presence of blacks was represented as a huge problem and the main
cause of the street riots that took place in London and Nottingham at
this time. A journalist writing for a local London paper in 1958 is
quoted at length in the Windrush documentary.≥∞ His portrayal of
the hysterical agitation exhibited by apparently ordinary people—
‘‘cheerful housewives and their husbands’’—who were convinced that
‘‘a gang of negroes’’ was set on attacking them, led by a ‘‘female
brothel keeper,’’ makes entertaining reading now but illustrates the
204 vron ware

terrifying irrationality of mob violence. The murder of Kelso Cochrane

the following year, stabbed to death in the street by a group of teddy
boys, brought an end to the riots and ‘‘closed the era which had
ushered in a period of unprecedented change in the nature of British
society.’’≥≤
These extracts from an edited history of this wave of Caribbean
migration to Britain paint a picture of unremitting bleakness and
victimization. These were not the only kinds of stories to emerge, but
they reveal aspects of Britain that help us to understand its current
identity crisis, both at home and seen from abroad. The whiteness that
shines through these stories conveys an image of people who, often
under duress themselves, found it di≈cult to deal with strangers,
particularly those who looked di√erent and who could be prejudged in
the light of ‘‘race-thinking’’—deeply ingrained views about racial dif-
ference bolstered by long histories of colonialism and racial slavery.
Here whiteness does not just represent a way of thinking and feeling
that sets light-skinned people apart from the rest of the world, but it is
also a belief system that can produce raw hatred, fear, and conse-
quently terror, that main ingredient of white supremacy anywhere in
the world. However, these are not the only stories, and the value of the
Windrush documentaries is that they actually present a far more com-
plex picture of transculturation, demonstrating that any view of the
world in black and white is far too simplistic to be believable. Both
on the screen and in print, these oral testimonies demonstrate the
intimate processes of individual and collective adaptation and self-
discovery. They include moving and often funny accounts of unex-
pected friendship, love, marriage, cooperation, and solidarity from
people who may have considered themselves white but who did not
subscribe to ideologies of white supremacy and who actively chal-
lenged prevailing racist practices by identifying with the migrants’
struggles to make new lives for themselves. It is worth returning to the
Windrush accounts of the 1958 riots and the subsequent murder of
Kelso Cochrane in order to understand how whiteness was not neces-
sarily synonymous with qualities of Englishness or Britishness and
that the victims of race-thinking did not automatically assume that
light skin color represented hostility and danger.
Mike Phillips describes the riots as a ‘‘very British a√air,’’ a com-
ment that betrays an a√ectionate familiarity with the dominant cul-
ture: ‘‘During the fiercest hostilities there were white people going out
 perfidious albion 205

of their way to reassure black people of their friendliness.’’≥≥ He goes

on to cite a cutting from the Times, published on 2 September 1958:
‘‘Your correspondent frequently saw white and coloured children play-
ing together. Just after a violent incident in which a coloured man was
chased down the street by white youths shouting racial slogans, he saw
a white man deliberately cross the street to shake hands with a col-
oured fruit vendor who was terrified.’’
The Windrush account of the funeral of Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter
from Antigua, is perhaps a better example of the truly social history
being brought to light in this period of recollection. Its value lies partly
in its determination to keep Cochrane’s memory alive as a sobering
reminder of Britain’s past, but it also provides important information
about how a self-consciously mixed community was able to deal collec-
tively with the brutalizing e√ects of racial terror and brutality. Rudy
Braithwaite recalled the occasion:
It was a mass funeral. People were crying all over the place. There
were white folks who, from their windows, were hailing the pro-
cessions when they passed. Some of the English people from
around here considered Kelso Cochrane as one of theirs. It’s
rather interesting in that those people had no bitterness, no racist
overtones. Of course, if you are in a society that is steeped with
racism, you must be touched by it in some way or another. But, at
the same time, those people were good people, and so they were
moved.≥∂
I particularly like this extract because it reveals the ways in which
people learned about each other and were able to recognize similarity
and connectedness in place of di√erence and separation. The speaker
expresses a degree of surprise that so many white folks were able to
transcend the racism that surrounded them, implying that this had a
profound impact on the way in which the local community dealt with
the grief and anger that it so visibly shared at this point. It is this kind
of evidence that demonstrates in complex, uneven, and not always
predictable ways, that whiteness is not reducible to skin color but
refers to ways of thinking and behaving ‘‘steeped’’ in histories of
raciology. While the distressing accounts of mob violence and random
attacks provide a glimpse of the energy required to sustain and pro-
voke the terrorizing e√ects of whiteness, equally important are the
less sensational accounts of the responses of people who were able to
206 vron ware

resist, however, temporarily, its devastating allure. It shows the fallacy

of thinking of whiteness as a category that easily contains and en-
velops all those deemed to belong.
Mike Phillips provides a thoughtful overview of this process of
mutual discovery which, in my view, helps to explain this point about
whiteness being an intrinsically leaky vessel. In a letter to Kwesi Phil-
lips, entitled ‘‘From the past, to the present,’’ he recalls his own boy-
hood growing up in London. After describing an incident when he
was beaten up at school after spending an evening at a white girl’s
house, he writes:
If this all sounds like nothing but the story of anger and conflict
and confusion, think again. Because at the bottom of these events
it is now obvious to me that there is a process of discovery going
on. It’s not a simple process, the sort of thing you hear being
described as two lots of people meeting and getting to know each
other’s odd customs and strange habits. It’s a lot more compli-
cated than that. I think that the most important part of what we
learned wasn’t so much about unfamiliar cultures and manners,
it was about ourselves. And, on the other side, I had the sense that
the reactions of the English people we met were moved and
shaped by the feeling about themselves which they brought to the
experience.≥∑
This last point actually refers to the ‘‘tormented look’’ in the eyes of
his schoolboy attacker rather than any sense of self-criticism that it
might imply. This further strengthens his point that when people
from di√erent cultural backgrounds encounter each other this is likely
to precipitate a highly complex and mutual process of learning and
unlearning. This is the key to thinking about the histories of multi-
culturalism in Britain: it argues against the dominant picture of vic-
timized ethnic minorities struggling to integrate into a mainstream
society that is uniformly suspicious and hostile; it instead invites a
much more intricate view that is both holistic and attentive to local
detail.

Entering Another Country

Earlier I referred to the possibility of testing the concept of whiteness
as a tool with which to make sense of and e√ectively intervene in the
 perfidious albion 207

reimagining of a heterogeneous nation. Thinking cross-culturally, re-

ferring to recent work on whiteness on both sides of the Atlantic, it is
important to recognize the unique conditions of each place and to take
into account the specific histories that have produced national and
regional economies and cultures. The need to be alert to these di√er-
ences applies as much to countries within Europe as it does to the
United States and other parts of the world. The fact that most of the
current scholarship on whiteness is specifically addressed to a North
American audience does not mean that it is not applicable elsewhere,
even though some examples are guilty of being insular and clearly
uninterested in making connections beyond the borders of the United
States. However, the strategies of U.S. historians of whiteness cannot
be simply transposed to a British context. Europeans who migrated or
fled to the United States were gradually and unevenly allowed to count
themselves in as white, often at great cost to their humanity and
personal integrity. This point was underlined for the wider British
public recently when Camille O. Cosby’s statement was published in a
tabloid newspaper following the conviction of Ennis Cosby’s mur-
derer, Mikail Markhasev, who was born in Ukraine.≥∏ Under the head-
ing ‘‘America Has Taught Our Son’s Killer to Hate Blacks,’’ Cosby
questioned whether Markhasev had learned to hate black people in his
native country, where the black population was near zero. ‘‘Nor was he
likely to see America’s intolerable, stereotypical movies and tv pro-
grams about blacks which were not shown in the Soviet Union at the
time when he lived there.’’ The article went on to list examples of the
way in which racism and prejudice are ‘‘omnipresent and eternalized’’
in America’s institutions with the result that all African Americans
‘‘are at risk in America because of their skin color.’’ Her point was that
Markhasev had imbibed a way of seeing blacks as part of his education
to become a white American citizen. This echoes James Baldwin’s
argument, cited by David R. Roediger, that ‘‘since ‘there are no white
people,’ ’’ the decision to adopt white identity was ‘‘ ‘absolutely a moral
choice.’ ’’ As Roediger explains: ‘‘Whiteness was a dramatic and an
American choice. At a time when immigration history missed the
drama of the European immigrant’s learning of race relations in the
United States, Baldwin tellingly observed that Norwegians did not sit
around in Norway preening themselves about how wonderfully white
they were.’’≥π
Instead of choosing whiteness by assimilation, the British were
208 vron ware

presented with daily opportunities to make di√erent kinds of moral

choices about the kind of people they thought they were. The postwar
migration of workers and their families from the former colonies
involved a reckoning with ideas about ‘‘race’’ and history and culture
derived from the past. The fact that the nation could—and still can—be
imagined as an ethnically homogenous group that has been over-
whelmed by peoples of di√erent culture reflects a kind of public his-
tory that has been repeatedly told from the top down. As an antidote to
this, the Windrush generation has been o√ered a chance to explain
what they have learned about whiteness in the course of making new
lives for themselves in a strange and hostile land; the results have
provided rich insights into the making of local and national identities,
blurring the imagined line between what it means to be black or white
in London, England, Britain, or even Europe.
In another anthology of black British writing published to mark the
Windrush anniversary, Mike Phillips gives a wonderful account of his
realization that he felt at home in England, based on his travels around
the country.≥∫ He begins by describing his version of normal British
life in the corner of London where he lives. It would be impossible,
he claims, to walk a hundred yards without encountering men and
women who have their origins in all corners of the world. ‘‘This appar-
ent diversity—men in turbans, women wearing masks, the swishing
of multi-coloured saris—has become a normal and inevitable feature
of the urban landscape in Britain, and its absence becomes a fact filled
with meaning.’’≥Ω
Phillips explains that it is common knowledge that as soon as one
moves out of these urbanized, multicultural arenas, one enters an-
other country, where the sight of a black or Asian person is so rare as
to be startling. Intrigued by his own lack of knowledge about his
adopted country, he decided to take a trip to Scotland, stopping in as
many places as he could on the way north. He confesses his wariness
at the prospect, adding that ‘‘being black in Britain confers a special
vulnerability’’ and the fears of black people are rooted in the knowl-
edge that black and Asian people can still be attacked, beaten or killed
at random because of the color of their skins.∂≠ Here he refers specifi-
cally to the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence, who was stabbed to
death in April 1993 by a gang of white youths as he waited for a bus in
a London suburb. As a result of the failure of the investigating police
 perfidious albion 209

to identify and convict Stephen’s killers, the Lawrence family cam-

paign has worked relentlessly to demand justice and to highlight the
racism of the police dealing with this case. A high-profile government
inquiry set up in 1998 to investigate their claims has yet to produce a
final report, but during the course of giving evidence the assistant
commissioner of the Metropolitan Police made a full public apology to
the family for errors of judgment on the part of the authorities. Thus
the vulnerability to which Phillips refers includes both the possibility
of physical assault and the knowledge that racism and prejudice
within the police force are likely to obstruct justice.
Nevertheless, Phillips reached a suburb of Newcastle, one of the
largest cities in the far north of England, without mishap. As he was
walking along, he realized that he had not seen a black or Asian
person for more than half an hour. He was not so much surprised, for
he knew the geography of the area, as more suddenly disoriented by
the e√ect this had: ‘‘. . . but the sense of being the only one for miles
around, a dark speck in the sea of white faces, was curiously dislo-
cating, as if I had suddenly set foot in a foreign country, a tourist,
tentatively surveying the language, the customs and the atmosphere
around me.’’∂∞ His sense of normality was briefly restored when he
spotted a news agent and decided that the purchase of his usual news-
paper would restore his sense of reality. But the fact that the news
agent was white, rather than Asian as an urban dweller might expect,
threw him again and ‘‘heightened the feeling that I was in a foreign,
slightly exotic place.’’
Despite the anxiety that he experienced at that moment, Phillips
discovered as he walked on that no one paid him the slightest attention
or looked at him oddly, nor did he have any reason to look over his
shoulder. What had thrown him was not the hostility of white pas-
sersby but the sheer unfamiliarity of a place that he had expected to
know. He compared this experience with his sense of being a stranger
in the Caribbean where he was born, an outsider in the United States,
a foreigner in Africa. ‘‘In comparison it was only in Britain that I could
stroll through unknown territory, with the same confidence, even in
the whitest pockets of the country, as if this was where I truly be-
longed.’’∂≤ This was a strange realization since it implied that he had in
some sense stepped outside his own familiar urban world where he
had relative control over his identity into a place where he expected to
210 vron ware

be ‘‘a reflected object of the white gaze.’’ Nevertheless, he had found

himself to be almost as relaxed in ‘‘a world of strange whites’’ as he
would have been in his own London neighborhood.
Phillips interprets this discovery in the light of the history that I
have been discussing above, where migrants and settlers from the
Caribbean and from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh had been strug-
gling to establish themselves in the inner cities. He concludes:
Nowadays moving through the ‘‘white’’ areas of the country what I
feel is far from the anxiety of the past. Instead I have the curious
sense that I am in areas which have stayed stuck in the past, and
somehow failed to catch up with the look and the atmosphere of
modern Britain. . . . [L]ocal conflicts may remain, but for the En-
glish the mixture of races is now a real facet of their identity,
whatever color the family next door happens to be.∂≥
This acceptance that Britain, encompassing England, Scotland, Wales,
and Northern Ireland (and not forgetting important regional di√er-
ences exacerbated by uneven economic development and industrial
decline) is a multiethnic nation regardless of the concentration or
dispersal of people who are visibly not white, is an example of the
reimagining process that I have been discussing. But this is not just
about color and visibility. Mike Phillips may not have found the com-
forting presence of an Asian news agent, but he might well have come
across a mainstream radio station playing music by the Asian-British
band Cornershop or, had he been making the same trip this year, the
parodic and subversive World Cup anthem ‘‘Vindaloo.’’ In fact, it
would be extremely hard not to discern some evidence of multi-
culturalism even in the farthest reaches of rural England, if one was
really looking for it.
Those kids interviewed by the Sunday Times could not think of
anything that was purely English because all national cultures are in
fact ‘‘irretrievably hybrid’’ and constantly evolving. The fatal error of
the kind of approach that Leslie advocates, that favors a celebration of
Englishness as a separate entity that will provide support for young
whites in a multiethnic world, is that it colludes with the desire for
some kind of cultural purity or essence: it seeks a return to that bond
between English culture and whiteness that the last fifty years have
done so much to undo. Instead of searching for ‘‘notions of national
distinctiveness’’ among people defined by the anachronism of race
 perfidious albion 211

and its surrogate, color, it would be far more productive and healthy to
open out the definition of Englishness to include the views of relative
newcomers who, like Mike Phillips and many of his generation, have
realized that England is where they feel most at home.
Britain certainly is entering a new phase in its history if, to para-
phrase Richard Dyer, English people are allowed to be who English
people say they are. But this slow and tortuous progress toward a truly
pluralist society is not happening in isolation from the rest of Europe.
As I have been writing this essay, the World Cup tournament has come
to a close. The victory of France over Brazil in the final round has had
extraordinary repercussions that have spread far beyond the commer-
cial world of international soccer. The fact that half the French team
was composed of players whose origins reflected the multiethnic com-
position of the country—Senegal, Guadeloupe, Ghana, New Caledo-
nia, Algeria, Argentina, Pays Basque, and Armenia—acted as a catalyst
for the nation as a whole at a time when the racist far right Front Na-
tional led by the notorious Jean-Marie Le Pen could claim 15 percent of
the national vote. As one commentator pointed out, ‘‘The World Cup
won’t stop people voting for Le Pen, and it certainly won’t put an end to
the ghettoization of the suburbs. But it will a√ect the way the French
think about themselves.’’∂∂ If this sporting event has enabled new ways
of imagining the future of France, however precarious or temporary, it
is also one more example of showing how whiteness might be un-
made, both beyond and within the boundaries of the nation.

Notes
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Lawrence (1975–1993).
1 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London:
Pluto Press, 1984), 1.
2 June Jordan, ‘‘Report from the Bahamas,’’ in her On Call (Boston: South
End Press, 1985), 46.
3 Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), lv–lvi.
4 Geo√rey Cubitt, ed., Imagining Nations (Manchester/New York: Manches-
ter University Press, 1998), 1.
5 Stuart Hall, ‘‘New Cultures for Old,’’ in A Place in the World? Place, Cul-
tures and Globalization, ed. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (London: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 184.
6 The Guardian (U.K.), 16 June 1998.
212 vron ware

7 Ibid.
8 Polly Toynbee, ‘‘The Press Gang,’’ Guardian (U.K.), 17 June 1998.
9 Roger Hewitt, White Talk Black Talk: Inter-Racial Friendship and Communi-
cation amongst Adolescents (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Hewitt’s more recent work in the London borough of Greenwich was
commissioned by the local council: Routes of Racism (London: Greenwich
Council Central Race Equality Unit and Education Service, 1997).
10 Ann Leslie, ‘‘Pride, the Cure for Prejudice,’’ in her Mindfield: The Race
Issue (London: Camden Press, 1998), 79.
11 Ibid., 77.
12 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the
Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Penguin, 1966).
13 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 48.
14 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors (Cambridge, Mass.: mit
Press, 1970), 265; cited in Dyer, White, 70.
15 Dyer, White, 48.
16 Anna Davin, ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’’ History Workshop Journal 5
(spring 1978), 9–65.
17 Leslie, ‘‘Pride, the Cure for Prejudice,’’ 79.
18 Roland Littlewood, ‘‘In Search of the White Tribe,’’ in Mindfield, 25–27.
19 Mark Leonard, ‘‘It’s Not Just Ice-Cream,’’ New Statesman (U.K.), 3 July
1998, 16.
20 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Ex-
hibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988), 112.
21 Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity
in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 5.
22 ‘‘Wogs’’ is the standard British racist epithet, originating in the nineteenth
century, and used to refer derogatively to anyone with ‘‘positive colour.’’
Calais is a port on the northern coast of France, situated twenty miles from
Dover across the English Channel—it therefore represents the beginning
of ‘‘foreign’’ territory.
23 Beryl Gilroy, Leaves in the Wind (London: Mango Publishing, 1998), 193.
24 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-
Racial Britain (London: Harper and Collins, 1998), 66.
25 Interview with Connie Mark in ibid., 126.
26 Interview with Jessica Huntley in ibid., 127–28.
27 Interview with Tryphena Anderson in ibid., 119.
28 Interview with Ben Bousquet in ibid., 119.
29 For a discussion of the origins and significance of teddy boys in 1950s
Britain, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York:
Methuen, 1979).
 perfidious albion 213

30 Windrush, 175.
31 Ibid., 176–77.
32 Ibid., 182.
33 Ibid., 182.
34 Ibid., 187.
35 Ibid., 147–48.
36 The Mirror (U.K.), 10 July 1998, 6.
37 David R. Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be
White (New York: Schocken, 1998), 21.
38 Mike Phillips, ‘‘At Home in England,’’ in Oneyekachi Wambu, ed., Empire
Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain (London: Victor Gol-
lancz, 1998), 426–31.
39 Ibid., 426.
40 Ibid., 428.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 429.
43 Ibid., 431.
44 Nick Fraser, ‘‘Cup of Joy,’’ The Guardian (U.K.), 15 July 1998, 2–3.
 Eric Lott

The New Liberalism in America:

Identity Politics in the ‘‘Vital Center’’

‘‘I think what I need might be,’’ Bob Dylan sings on his 1997 album
Time Out of Mind, ‘‘a full-length leather coat.’’ How else to make it
through middle age? Then a sardonic rhyming afterthought: ‘‘Some-
body just asked me / if I’m registered to vote.’’ Such bleak clarity is
apparently now lost on Dylan’s primary audience, the cohort who
grew up with him. They currently occupy the political-intellectual cen-
ter of the United States, home of the white male baby boomer’s neo-
liberalism, in the form of a relatively new liberal cadre of writers and
academics. This intellectual formation has done the most in recent
years to make America safe for a pallid version of social democracy—
they’re registered to vote—while construing the realm of culture as a
place that ought to be free of partisan political struggle, by which is
meant the specter of so-called identity politics. If the Clintonian ruse
has been to resurrect four-freedoms phraseology into a retreat from
Roosevelt, the president has had a mimic chorus in this reconstructed
intellectual ‘‘vital center.’’ I will argue that an oppressive convergence
of seemingly disparate cultural e√ects, generational ideologies, and
political consequences has eventuated in a liberal discourse of class
that mystifies this crucial determinant by invoking it specifically as an
alternative to calls for racial, gender, and sexual liberation. In this
essay I single out the foul racial nimbus, the overriding interest in
white male political capital, that su√uses the ‘‘class consciousness’’ of
boomer liberalism.
The new liberalism’s trajectory is mapped in the career of someone
like Joe Klein. Klein’s excellent 1980 biography of Woody Guthrie
makes a Carter-era rapprochement with New Deal folkishness, and
inspired Bruce Springsteen himself toward summits of common-man
 the new liberalism in america 215

Americanism thereafter appropriable by the right. Klein went right

more calmly, his political journalism by the mid-1980s touting a vir-
tually reactional populism of the class-not-race variety that has finally
won him a home in the precincts of James Traub, Michael Kelly, Jim
Sleeper, and the rest: the New Yorker in the era of Tina Brown and after.
Nor was Klein’s roam a singular delusion. The 1990s’ grand march to
the center, regularly announced by Richard Rorty in such places as
Harpers and the New Republic and in many ways led by Dissent maga-
zine—the last hardly a surprise, given Irving Howe and Michael Har-
rington’s explicit fondness for the Democratic Party—has been joined
by all manner of erstwhile left-leaning suckers, constituting a powerful
new front apparently all the more convincing for its generational pro-
file. This formation, in fusing a new-found popular-front sensibility
with a crotchety dismissal of new social movements in the name of
realpolitik, now confronts us as the formation most in need of an
antiwhite, antistatist critique. Its rise or emergence has all the seeming
inevitability of a scrappy outsider speaking undeniable sense and is all
the more dangerous for that. Bring out your Dems: Michael Lind,
former William F. Buckley acolyte turned normative nationalist in
such works as The Next American Nation and Up from Conservatism;
Todd Gitlin, antiseparatist ‘‘common dreamer’’ in his most recent
book, The Twilight of Common Dreams; David Hollinger, advocate of
‘‘postethnicity’’ in Postethnic America; Paul Berman, Robespierre-is-
everywhere soothsayer in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of
the Generation of 1968; Sean Wilentz, superb if color-blind historian-
cum-antimulticulturalist; Michael Tomasky, long-lost left journalist
and author of Left for Dead; Greil Marcus, backward-looking post-Situ-
ationist conjurer of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes; Mi-
chael Kazin and Maurice Isserman, lesser-evilist Clintonian historians
of populism and communism, respectively; Thomas Byrne Edsall and
Mary Edsall, New Democrat nostalgics and authors of the influential
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American
Politics; Jim Sleeper, narcoleptic author of the recent attack on racial
self-definition, Liberal Racism; Joe Klein, state romancer in Primary
Colors; and Michael Lerner, Cornel West straight man and creator of
the Clinton-beloved Politics of Meaning. To name only these widely
published and respected writers is to survey the sensibility of a good
sweep of liberal intellectual publication today, from the New Yorker to
the New Republic, from the New York Times to the New York Review of
216 eric lott

Books, from Harpers to Newsweek to the Nation, from Common Knowl-

edge to Tikkun, from Artforum to Dissent. All of these writers, if in
di√ering ways, lament the rise of identity politics and the decline of a
public square defended on behalf of the little people, the have-nots, a
true populism, common dreams—or whatever other euphemism for
class can be conscripted to serve the interests of a white male cadre
badly in need of a political rationale. Their achievement has been to
o√er a sectarian definition of ‘‘culture’’ as apart from the ‘‘real’’ sphere
of political struggle and thereby to implicitly or explicitly buttress a
liberal nationalism many of these writers began their careers protest-
ing. And because, as I will suggest, cultural studies has done too little
until very recently to develop an analysis of culture’s relation to the
state, the new liberalism has been able to read left intellectual work as
turned o√ and tuned out, or, in Gitlin’s corny aperçu, ‘‘marching on the
English department while the right took the White House.’’ This fact
has of course only exaggerated these writers’ sense of hard-won real-
ism and self-importance.
You might say it began with Clintonista in 1992. Maya Angelou at
the inauguration, Harvard’s Robert Reich in the cabinet—the liberal
braintrust was coming back to Washington. Within a month and a
half, Cornel West’s Race Matters made him a middlebrow household
name and Friend of Bill. Then, in rapid succession, Clinton tapped
and then capped Lani Guinier, an actual professor, for assistant at-
torney general for civil rights; Henry Louis Gates Jr. became a house
writer at the new New Yorker; and a series of books by Lind, Gitlin,
Klein, and others consolidated a new ‘‘vital center.’’ No single figure
launched the new sensibility the way Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital
Center had codified Cold War liberalism in 1949, but the climate of
opinion created by journals like the New Yorker, the New Republic,
Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and even the Ba∆er seemed all
the more autonomous and inevitable for that. (Transaction Press has
duly reissued Schlesinger’s Vital Center, and Rortyite fellow-traveler
John Patrick Diggins, with an assist from Michael Lind on the vol-
ume’s introduction, edited the Schlesinger festschrift, The Liberal Per-
suasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past.)
The last few years have constituted a moment of visibility and sway for
boomer liberalism—a moment during which it has as much found its
voice and purpose as enunciated it. The 1995 appearances of Lind’s
Next American Nation and Gitlin’s Twilight of Common Dreams shored
 the new liberalism in america 217

up a left-liberalism perfectly situated to rush in where rightward sen-

sationalism had run its course. Certain key public events, in the inter-
val between the celebrated publication of The Next American Nation
and the spring 1998 University of Virginia neoliberal symposium
organized by Richard Rorty, have conspired to gel the new vital-
centrism into a public, self-consciously united force with crucial ideo-
logical links and mutually informing commitments. Whiteness is
their common ground. Some kind of account of the trek to what I like
to think of as Rortypalooza is necessary to grasp the racial shape of the
new center.
The excitement generated by the election of a new afl-cio leader-
ship under John Sweeney harmonized beautifully with the emergence
of the new liberal formation, which desperately sought a public politi-
cal cause not allied with the radicalisms of the new social movements.
The Columbia University Teach-In with the Labor Movement in Octo-
ber 1996, whose organizers came from the ranks of labor historians
with long records of worker and union interest and involvement, man-
aged to broker a meeting between many intellectuals (including the
Rortyites) and labor leaders/rank-and-file at one rousing public event.
This was an achievement in its own right and one, further, that deliv-
ered the requisite sense of promise to labor and intellectuals long
fallen out in the wake of the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act, which essentially
legitimated red-baiting in the unions in exchange for regular, collec-
tively bargained standard-of-living wage increases. For the neoliberal
intellectuals it was a grand new pact, since for most of them the afl-
cio defines the limit of the labor movement in toto; not for them
independent shop-floor insurgencies, unorganized workers, or radi-
cal democratic visions arising from an original perspective based on
laboring cultures. The hopes all around find their way into the pages
of Audacious Democracy (edited by Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Free-
man), papers collected from the Teach-In talks and speeches. The
collection attests also, though, to disturbing tendencies in the event’s
conception and proceedings that come in part from the organizers’
allegiances. The organizing committee’s co-chairs were the superb
labor historians Steve Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein, both authors of
crucial books and both part of a group of scholars represented, for one
instance, in the major 1989 collection The Rise and Fall of the New Deal
Order, 1930–1980 (edited by Fraser and Gary Gerstle). The almost
wholly white and male authorship and focus of this collection (Elaine
218 eric lott

Tyler May on the postwar family the lone exception), together with the
book’s inclusion of politically ambiguous essays by the aforemen-
tioned Thomas Byrne Edsall, Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin,
are enough to clue you in to the secondary place accorded racial and
other struggles at the Columbia Teach-In. This of course went well
with the predilections of the new centrists, many of whom appeared
on the Columbia panels to argue with the radicals who had in e√ect
brought them there. The main result of this was to dull the edge of the
radicals—socialists of several di√erent stripes—while giving the lib-
erals labor credentials to bolster their rear-guard intellectual/aca-
demic battles. Meanwhile, the Teach-In’s organizing committee’s
white, male, boomerish profile was disheartening evidence of the
unself-conscious Old-Left-meets-New front behind the Teach-In itself.
This Pop Front–like approach, though dutifully attending to racism,
gender inequity, and other struggles alongside the fundamental issue
of labor, only revealed how added-on were the ‘‘extras’’ that would
presumably be taken care of once the (implicitly white) working-class
had won.
Certainly the Teach-In’s roster, if it didn’t skew the event toward the
center, made publicly inescapable the conflicts between a liberal-left
realpolitik and a more socialist left. At the opening summit, for exam-
ple, Richard Rorty, speaking in the company of historians Eric Foner
and Steve Fraser, early feminist (and before that, 1940s labor journal-
ist) Betty Friedan, critical legal scholar Patricia Williams, afl-cio
president John Sweeney, and reputed leftist Cornel West, defended
labor activism and civil disobedience in the strongest terms—which,
other than combating the right, is one of the most useful things a
liberal can do. But then he loudly lamented the 60s flag-burning anti-
war left who ‘‘began to spell ‘America’ with a k’ ’’ and thereby ‘‘did
deeper and more long-lasting damage to the American left than they
could ever have imagined.’’ That got him roundly booed. Surely Rorty
knew that in saying something like this he would be booed, and in that
moment I respected his courage. Point is, there are real divisions here
that get in the way of simplistic notions of left unity and in fact unset-
tled the Teach-In’s idea of the left that was to help buttress the new
afl-cio. How much better it would have been to make alliances, not
with the neolibs, but with successful activist movements all over the
country who might have been able to instruct the white guys on the
nature of work for a strikingly recomposed labor force fighting popu-
 the new liberalism in america 219

lar struggles against the plunder of capital! Instead, vital centrists

policed the left from within its company, not only writing o√ the
student left but also, in the addresses of Todd Gitlin and others, re-
fusing to consider the way blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others
have transformed utterly the very category and meaning of ‘‘the poor’’
or ‘‘the left’’ on behalf of whom they write. In fighting identity politics
from the standpoint of ‘‘labor,’’ these fellas have some thinking to do.
Two crucial developments in the time since the Columbia gathering
have particularly aided boomer liberalism’s credibility. The emergent
cadre themselves were bolstered by the Teach-In in their haves-versus-
have-nots stance. Being able to invoke a labor movement to which they
felt, now, a rather intimate connection (never mind the only fledgling
revival of the afl-cio under the less-than-salvific Sweeney) gave their
perspective point, punch, and currency. Maybe it was time to go back
to the fundamental issue of labor and class! Never mind, either, the
utterly late-coming discovery of labor in most of these writers, who, as
of the early 1990s, were still excoriating radical college professors in
the culture wars—such as Rorty’s attacks on the likes of Frank Lentric-
chia, or Paul Berman on political correctness—with little concern for
their now-espoused object of beauty. The ‘‘labor metaphysic’’ C. Wright
Mills suggested the new left drop in the early 1960s has made a roaring
return.
A second development, though, came along to reinflect this first
one. That of course has been the labor movement’s own abrupt fall
from grace. With the Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s Ron Carey
indicted and ousted for scamming money to fund his reelection cam-
paign against James Ho√a Jr. and the subsequent election of the cor-
rupt Ho√a to lead the Teamsters, the labor movement has promptly
lost the momentum that in some ways o√ered the optative glue of the
new liberalism. Its writers now aloft in a sort of speculative bubble,
the new cadre feels free to opine in the most authoritative fashion
about matters that were not on their plate as recently as three or four
years ago.
The bubble got great girth in March, surely 1998’s cruelest month.
The release of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, the March Dissent (with
new format and carefully collected personnel), and the film Primary
Colors combined with Rortypalooza to achieve a rare aura of syn-
chronicity. Paul Berman, Louis Menand, Sean Wilentz, Michael Lind,
Todd Gitlin, Mark Edmundson, and of course Rorty himself, along
220 eric lott

with a host of bit players (Eric Alterman, Carlin Romano, David Rei√,
Gayatri Spivak, Mark Lilla) convoked to hail the muse of Whitmanian,
Deweyan liberalism. The group’s racial and class musings will be
evident in a few brief notices and excerpted phrases from the three-day
event. Women and people of color from across the country were, for
all intents and purposes, represented in the singular person of Spivak,
the conference’s designated scourge. Berman proclaimed Marx’s la-
bor theory of value ‘‘wrong’’ and Whitman a utopian figure of ‘‘revolu-
tionary socialism.’’ Menand repeated the fossil line that the ‘‘contem-
porary left’’ exists only in the university. Rorty, like Menand, intimated
that policy rather than theory is really what matters, quoted from
Spoon River Anthology and urged a return to Herbert Croly’s patriotic
progressivism. Edmundson named religion the key preoccupation for
Americans today and a prime ground on which intellectuals might
reach them. Gitlin did his part to make Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer safe for liberalism by noting how American commodity
culture, for all its deadening impact, has in its global reach become an
advertisement for democracy. Lilla waxed nearly triumphant on wan-
ing left prospects (‘‘there’s not a chance in hell of the Nation’s hopes
coming true’’). Fareed Zakaria, second-in-command of Foreign A√airs,
counseled against waves of ‘‘revolution’’ abroad (i.e., citizen-activated
social change) in favor of constitutional democracy instituted from
above or from outside and IMF/World Bank ‘‘economic develop-
ment.’’ And Bush’s secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger (why
not?), on the final panel, was sure that nit-picking with China over
human rights was much less e√ective than simply exposing them to
‘‘Western ideas.’’ Lind and Wilentz alone o√ered probing readings of
American party politics in the last two centuries, only in the end to
either reify and eternalize case division (Lind) or too easily to proclaim
it fixable (Wilentz). For her part Spivak performed well as house crank
but was too firmly stationed in this role by the line-up to o√er more
than local, wildcat interventions from the floor on the writings of Marx
(a helpful thing, when Paul Berman’s around).
It was a sad and complacent spectacle for me, who had hoped for
more from the independent left-liberalism of Paul Berman (once
something of a C. L. R. James adherent) or Todd Gitlin. I myself blame
Rorty (along with the aforementioned 1990s developments) for this
conventionalizing and defanging of sometimes powerful cultural and
social critics. To be sure, Rorty cannot alone be held accountable for
 the new liberalism in america 221

Berman’s habit of writing o√ the Black Panthers as vicious thugs (for

example, his review of David Horowitz’s autobiography, Radical Son,
in Dissent—Horowitz may actually be better than Berman on the Pan-
thers), or indeed for the incredible arrogance of Berman’s very title A
Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968,
which generation apparently did not include black activists of impor-
tance. Nor is Rorty to blame for Michael Lind’s anti–a≈rmative action
stance, or Sean Wilentz’s refusal to grant multicultural initiatives any
space in the American cultural scene. (Mark Lilla’s professed ‘‘hatred’’
of rap music at Rortypalooza—especially over breakfast at fine hotels
in foreign lands, he related—is echoed in Rorty’s dismissal of Ice Cube
as anti-Korean in a 1994 Dissent debate with Andrew Ross, but even
this, I freely grant, is relatively minor if utterly symptomatic.) No:
Rorty has, rather, in short pieces for Harper’s, op-eds in major news-
papers, essays and reviews in Dissent, and public lectures all over the
world, created a genealogically rich context for the emergence of the
above sorts of ideas. Achieving Our Country only piles on, rather too
thickly, to this new formation, codifying, assuming, and portending its
continued existence in the face of (shadow) threats from the left.
At least Michael Lind exposes the right—Pat Robertson’s lunatic
anti-Semitism, William F. Buckley’s mercenary ideological compro-
mises. Rorty follows family tradition in standing fast for freedom
against a terrible left specter. In the American Committee for Cultural
Freedom–funded McCarthy and the Communists (1954), James Rorty
and Moshe Decter argued McCarthy’s obvious demagoguery only
sought, as they put it, a way ‘‘to combat Communism responsibly.’’
‘‘Current membership in the Communist Party should be regarded as
prima facie evidence of their unfitness to teach,’’ they wrote, and for
e≈ciency’s sake this might well be adopted as law; as for teachers who
‘‘adhere to the Party line but cannot be shown to be Party members,’’
routine academic processes of evaluation and administration would
take care of them. Rorty fils peddles a much softer version of this sort
of thing in his constant attacks on the ‘‘cultural left.’’ Like so many
others unsure of what to do after the demise of Communism and the
abatement of the culture wars, Rorty espies an imminent derailing of
left hopes by a self-involved and myopic academic set. ‘‘Leftists in the
academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and
have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to
public debate. They are spending energy which should be directed at
222 eric lott

proposing new laws on discussing topics as remote from the country’s

needs as were [Henry] Adams’ musings on the Virgin and the Dy-
namo. The academic Left has no project to propose to America, no
vision of a country to be achieved by building a consensus on the need
for specific reforms. Its members no longer feel the force of [William]
James’s and [Progressive journalist Herbert] Croly’s rhetoric. The
American civic religion seems to them narrow-minded and obsolete
nationalism.’’∞
Fighting words, of course; yet the main charges seem banal next to
the rhetoric that labels the bad left permissive, traitorous, energy-
wasting, and remote in the space of two sentences. Pardon me for
hearing in them the keening anti-left tones of, respectively, the 1950s,
60s, 70s, and 80s played on Rorty’s remarkable polemical instru-
ment. No member of this left is actually named (save Fredric Jameson
in an appendix—a minor operation), which does nothing for his argu-
ment intellectually, but, as with the anti-PC diatribes it lamely echoes,
will do wonders raising the hackles of readers who know no better.
The problem with the cultural left is apparently that it reads the wrong
philosophers and does scholarly work (rather than public-policy ad-
vocacy). Politically it knows not whereof it speaks and talks little sense
within its own academic ranks, let alone to any ‘‘public.’’ It complains
about too many injustices at once when it should stick to economic
inequality. There’s a lot of urgent-seeming moralizing about all this.
In the end you begin to wonder why the writer spends a whole book
attacking such a pathetic thing. But you also sense his disconnection
from his own polemical purpose. He harangues so abstractly that you
doubt he knows much about the ‘‘cultural left’’ he attacks; and what his
‘‘public’’ is supposed to make of all this when they already vote Demo-
cratic is up to you to figure. The overall e√ect is rather like that of a
quaint old crank trying desperately to convince you that Whitman
would have been appalled by the current state of the irs.
With a better sense of his readership Rorty would challenge a broad
public for whom his own cream-of-wheat ideas—secular humanism
and the importance of labor unions—would alone be a di≈cult bolus
to get down. He has occasionally done so, to fine e√ect. Is he afraid to
do other, here, than present himself as a liberal martyr drowned out by
noisy know-nothing leftists? If so, it’s at least a legitimate worry.
There’s little except the hu≈ng and pu≈ng that you can’t find in the
work of, say, Robert Reich or Michael Lind. Presenting yourself as in a
 the new liberalism in america 223

political/intellectual quandary or arguing with your misguided col-

leagues makes liberal common wisdom at least a little more interest-
ing. Rorty even boils down the perspectives of writers like Reich and
Lind to a few obvious liberal propositions: boosted by the kind of
national pride found in Lincoln or Whitman, intellectuals should
focus on policy rather than speculative debate, on economic inequality
rather than what Rorty calls ‘‘stigma’’ (race, for example), and on prac-
tical reform rather than radicalism. ‘‘The heirs of the New Left of the
1960s have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many mem-
bers of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of di√erence’
or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about
stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual
motivations than about shallow and evident greed. . . . The new cul-
tural left . . . has few ties to what remains of the pre-Sixties reformist
Left. . . . This residual reformist Left thinks more about laws that need
to be passed than about a culture that needs to be changed.’’≤ What isn’t
wrong with this passage? The cultural left that cares only about racial,
sexual, and gender di√erence descends from the white- and male-
dominated new left—the one that crumbled when women, blacks, and
queers made their own movements? This left, which reads Marx
rather than Dewey, has had nothing to say about capitalism in its
numerous trivial studies? The ‘‘cultural left’’ is new? (Tell it to Partisan
Review.) Is it a surprise that a broad, long-standing, radical tendency
isn’t inspired by the pre- or post-60s reformist left? (You remember
Mr. Mills, don’t you Mr. Bell?) Mostly, in the end, it seems like the
linguistic turn is over and the social-science turn has arrived. There is
indeed a good bit of the reformed sinner’s tract here. Between you and
me, I never had any doubt that Nabokov was a better read than Fichte,
but I was (kind of ) willing to let Rorty tell me so in Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity. But now—we’ve discovered quantitative sociology will
unlock the doors of perception! What’s next, Hillis Miller doing labor
history?
If only it were that good. Standing firm on the importance of policy,
economics, and reform as opposed to culture, stigma, and radicalism,
Rorty flubs all three key oppositions. First o√, if you thought maybe all
the second terms might have real bearing on the first ones, forget it—
Motown had nothing to do with the Voting Rights Act, black workers
face only economic exploitation, and reform generally has nothing to
do with the push of radicalism. Rorty doesn’t argue this, but his points
224 eric lott

are made so baldly and summarily that he might as well. And yet,
oddly for all its hue and cry, Achieving Our Country advances no policy
proposals of the sort he says we all should; nor is there even ventured a
notion of what counts as a policy proposal. Sometimes it’s ‘‘laws’’ and
other times assorted proclamations, but this book does nothing to
dispel the sense that Rorty never advances any particularly rousing
policy proposals—only the idea of policy-making. (His call in a Decem-
ber 1997 Nation article for universal health care, funding for Head
Start, and the rest, amounting to utopian Clintonism, was proof, not
exception.) He caricatures and traduces a left that has always been
more involved in social justice campaigns locally or nationally than
Rorty himself (even Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Martha Nussbaum took
the stand in actual trials). Is a life change afoot? Rorty now believes
that ‘‘the Left should put a moratorium on theory’’ and thus that his
own celebrated work on other theorists falls short of the political
mark. Maybe it hurts when Congress doesn’t rally round your call for
an end to the category of ‘‘ideology.’’
Rorty’s distinctions seem to collapse under very little pressure, but
that pretty much captures the enterprise. Rorty explicitly disavows
sectarianism in the interest of a healthy, broad left, but the book is on
the whole a liberal’s rather scorching sectarian distancing move from
the ‘‘heirs of the New Left.’’ This tends to get a little confusing. Rorty
begins the final lecture talking about the positive value in the 60s
recognition that ‘‘economic determinism had been too simplistic.’’
One paragraph later he’s riding that way again, into a nostalgic sunset
of Old Left reverie. Rorty’s invocations of the ‘‘money question’’ have
no weight because he doesn’t think it important to discuss its politi-
cal dimension—the nods to greed and selfishness are virtually Dick-
ensian. Which is fine with me, of course, but hey. One infers there
might be more to it than this, but Rorty makes few gestures toward any
real notion of how to achieve economic redistribution, except to pass a
law for it. I’m not alone, I know, in wondering where this would leave
‘‘stigmatized’’ working people whom labor leaders and politicians
might still write out of the ranks of the deserving. Rorty tells the
cultural left to open lines of communication with ‘‘the unions’’ but says
no more—as though that would take care of it just fine. Are we talking
Sweeney, Ho√a, radicalized unions, stagnant unions, leadership only,
insurgent rank and file, what? And what about the 85 percent or so
 the new liberalism in america 225

of nonunionized American workers? Here too the road-to-Damascus

quality of the ideas is a little embarrassing—Rorty seems not to realize
he’s in the rear guard following the ‘‘cultural leftists’’ who are already
there; from the back of the pack it’s apparently di≈cult to glimpse with
any clarity the political ends of the glorious means.
‘‘Stigma,’’ meanwhile, opens up the color-blindness that legiti-
mizes the hollowness of his younger compeers. Why does he refer to
oppressions other than class as stigmas? Certainly it’s meant to trivial-
ize rather than debate the radicals he dislikes; he undoubtedly knows
no one uses the term anymore precisely because it carries the sugges-
tion Rorty wants to put forward, that race, for example, is less funda-
mental than other grounds of exploitation, in the end an issue of
manners and private life rather than public injustice. I think the sneer
backfires because it recalls Rorty’s own generation of work on race—
by Erving Go√man and others—which added dimension to the discus-
sion but should undoubtedly be put aside the way Rorty suggests. This
is not to say it’s at all clear that Rorty doesn’t think about race in just
this limited and trivializing way. Recall the comment at the end of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity where Rorty mentions ‘‘the attitude
of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and
misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities’’: ‘‘Do we say
that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human
beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as
politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans—to insist that it is
outrageous that an American should live without hope.’’ Forget the
case being made, the false choice it proposes: follow the drift of the
remark. Blacks exist in the book for this single moment because they
su√er; and liberals are good liberals when they find the right language
to express pity and outrage for ‘‘these people.’’ National devotion of the
paternalist sort that partially produced the problem will also heal it,
according to Rorty. What did you think was meant by Martha and the
Vandellas’ national notice of ‘‘Dancing in the Street’’ in the classic
moment of mid-60s ghetto misery? I think it wasn’t hopeless but
grateful Negroes waiting for liberals to help out; more like a nation-
wide, self-conscious formation of black people feeling the lift of the
social motion they’d created. Isn’t it time to stop promoting the exem-
plary compassion of liberal pragmatists through useful case studies of
‘‘our’’ su√ering Negroes? For ‘‘stigma’’ is apparently so bad that even
226 eric lott

when you’re avoiding it you run into trouble. The avoidance as well as
the trouble signify the white identity politics barely below the surface
of this kind of new liberal program.
Indeed, Rorty dedicates Achieving Our Country to Irving Howe and
A. Philip Randolph; Howe earns several pages of commentary, Ran-
dolph none. This would be beneath comment if the book weren’t so hot
on practice and policy of the kind Randolph e√ected far, far more than
Howe. Rorty, finally, is a philosopher, more comfortable talking about
Howe’s intellectual self-styling than Randolph’s political thought,
strategy, and action. And yet, if thought is preferred, where are, for
example, Lani Guinier, Mary Frances Berry, Patricia Williams, or
Cheryl Harris, bona fide intellectuals with actual ideas about ‘‘laws’’
and voting policy? I guess the rather airless extracts from Lincoln and
Whitman on democratic ideals are more to the point. Any reason to
think this isn’t a book of cultural leftism, divided against itself ?
To pass from the senior public moralist to the boomer social and
cultural critics is to find a similar Cassandrism dressed up as tough-
minded intellectual responsibility. It ought to be said right away,
though, that the boomer work is weightier and more tenacious than
Rorty’s western wind; there is at least the sense in Berman, Gitlin, and
others of struggles fought for a long time on the ground. It’s just that
1968 seems to have been as traumatic for them as they say it was for
the country: the moment of black and female departures from the
ranks of the student left arrested the latter’s political development at
the Chicago Democratic Convention. With Chicago ’68’s badge of
honor become sackcloth, these ex–new lefters now make a profile of
haranguing identity movements formed out of that moment of trau-
matic separation. Stanley Aronowitz has written of ‘‘when the New
Left was new’’; Gitlin, Berman, and other boomer liberals o√er the
least attractive picture of the new left grown old. Gitlin’s Twilight of
Common Dreams is a convenient summation and attitudinal bell-
wether for the boomer front. Its striking accommodation of con-
sensus visions of the national culture is all the more surreal coming
from a prominent new leftist and former sds president. Gitlin ad-
vances what he calls a ‘‘Left universalism’’ that would bind up the
‘‘profusion of identities’’ (gays, blacks, the Deaf ) into some plausible
left unity; as Gitlin puts it, ‘‘What is a Left without a commons, even a
hypothetical one? If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no
Left.’’ What sounds very much like a resurrected Popular Front slogan
 the new liberalism in america 227

rings strangely on the ears from a writer whose early political commit-
ments devolved precisely upon jettisoning the Old Left. Though sym-
pathetic to many of the changes brought about by the ‘‘new social
movements’ ’’ multiplication of di√erence, Gitlin has trouble seeing
why any of them should retain the autonomy that gave us those
changes or why, even theoretically, it might be important. In a very real
sense he misses their fundamental point. It is not in any way guaran-
teed that, after all is said and done, blacks, Chicanos, gays, lesbians,
women, the disabled, and the working class will find common cause
in some world-transforming purpose; the motive of identity-based
movements, for all their troubles of self-definition, was not to stand up
for their particular rights so that they could take their place amid the
honorable (and now expanded) left. Those movements, rather, have so
utterly transformed the idea of the left that Gitlin’s common dreaming
seems merely half-asleep. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mou√e ar-
gue in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the new social movements are
rarely laterally compatible in any kind of united-front way and in fact
call into question the idea that such a front won’t wind up suppressing
or misrepresenting certain of the interests grouped under its um-
brella: this is Gitlin’s own mistake, particularly in regard to black
struggles. Yet it is at the same time clear that any one of these move-
ments is liable to engage a dominant social formation at one of its
weak points and spark a fire that will earn widespread solidarities. To
me it is revealing that Gitlin refuses even to consider the most widely
debated theorists of particularistic social urgency. Throughout Com-
mon Dreams, Gitlin reviews the wars over grade-school history books,
literary theory, academic politics, political correctness, and more—
rather like the cultural studies scholars he deplores—as though he
would rather deride the more abstruse cultural di≈culties associated
with questions of local autonomy than demonstrate how that auton-
omy cripples the left, which would at least necessitate taking new
social struggles seriously. Instead of putting forward a revanchist idea
of cultural commonality, even if a ‘‘left’’ one, Gitlin contents himself
with assuming that certain black demands, for example, simply har-
monize with the aspirations of his universal left.
Thus such spectacles occur as the Todd Gitlin–Robin Kelley debate
at one of the most volatile panels of the Columbia Teach-In. Gitlin read
a stern and rather dyspeptic screed discounting group demands, such
as those of black militants, as divisive and merely local: ‘‘The fact re-
228 eric lott

mains that African Americans constitute a minority, and no wishful

thinking or census projection changes this fact. . . . Adding up ab-
stract minorities does not automatically produce a victory for general
justice. . . . American history is replete with instances of minorities
submerging their particular claims, only to be forgotten, and this is al-
ways a risk. But it is much too easy to lose sight of the opposite risk, that
of narrowness, and of the gains that have accrued to minorities when
broad-based movements—in particular labor—have been strongest.’’
It’s a measure of Gitlin’s nonrecognition of black left traditions that he
can so appallingly write o√ blacks as a minor political bloc whose inde-
pendent struggles don’t result in ‘‘general justice’’—quite a phrase, this
last, begging the question of just what counts as ‘‘general’’ enough to
warrant struggle (I have a notion or two). American history, I would go
way out on a limb to say, is more replete with instances of submerged
minorities who wound up with little or nothing than it is with the
‘‘narrowness’’ of black demands. (I reserve enough faith in humanity
to find it di≈cult to believe that Gitlin really means to say that abolition-
ism, Du Bois’s naacp, Randolphism, or Kingism were ‘‘narrow’’ non-
contributors to significant ‘‘general justice.’’) Having thus functionally
eviscerated it, Gitlin nonetheless called for a united left front. Kelley
was quick to nail the white, class-not-race-based ideal type of this front,
and he proceeded to show how imaginary Gitlin’s idea of the left was
when the formerly white and male afl-cio membership, to take only
one example, is now significantly female and colored and when catego-
ries such as class, race, and gender are irretrievably disrupted by their
interpenetration as opposed to their simple addition. (For more of
Kelley’s immensely clarifying position on these matters, see chapter 4
of his book Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in
Urban America [1997]).
Examples abound in Common Dreams of Gitlin’s dim view of black
autonomy or self-activity. He can’t even praise Martin Luther King Jr.
without rushing suspiciously to embrace King’s turn to the struggle of
workers and the poor: ‘‘The militants of SNCC had long mocked him
as ‘De Lawd.’ Yet he was there to mock, to oppose, to love. While King
lived, he embodied the possibility of a redemptive struggle across
racial lines. He journeyed to Memphis to support a strike by black
garbage workers—a solidarity that had class as well as race dimen-
sions.’’ There are good left grounds for appreciating King’s turn, but
doing so as a way to write o√ sncc and racial ‘‘separatism’’ smells a
 the new liberalism in america 229

little funny. Indeed, blaming the white left’s late-’60s ‘‘go-for-broke

trajectory’’ on the advent of ‘‘black revolutionism,’’ Gitlin speaks of
this traumatic moment of black independence as though it were re-
sponsible for all manner of ugly white-ethnic reaction. (Gitlin sides
with those New York Jewish teachers in the strike of 1968–69 unfor-
tunate enough to have been ‘‘liberal’’ and ‘‘recently unionized’’ into
‘‘power and legitimacy’’ against the ‘‘insult’’ of black parents demand-
ing more control of their children’s schooling.) These are enough to
remind one of the ire C. L. R. James directed toward similar Popular
Front–era Communist Party sentiments (on the part of historian Her-
bert Aptheker and others) in the 1940s, and the parallel is not mere
happenstance. As at the Columbia Teach-In, one witnesses here the
odd alchemizing of the new left into the image of the old, that is, the
turn from internal divisions, presented as merely cultural, to more
‘‘fundamental’’ matters of economic inequality fought by a united left.
Gitlin often adopts the pose of the persecuted white liberal flayed for
speaking sense instead of going along and getting along, and he even
has Jim Sleeper’s lovely habit of lampooning black middle-class dis-
content by contrasting it with the plight of the black poor. One poor
Berkeley kid comes in for professorial sarcasm during a student strike
for accelerated race-based hiring and admissions. (‘‘In the days lead-
ing up to the strike, the organizers made little e√ort to explain their
demands, let alone defend them,’’ Gitlin avers.) Breaking the strike,
Gitlin tells his students he’ll be in the lecture hall to discuss the strike
issues. Strikers come shouting into the session, Gitlin invites them to
join it, and a black man yells, ‘‘We’re dying out there!’’ Gitlin pulls a
sti√ one from the quiver: ‘‘I asked him, ‘How is admitting more black
students and hiring more black faculty going to stop the dying out
there?’ There was no response.’’ Content in his ability to silence black
youth and ignore connections between black death and black educa-
tional opportunity—in a single bound—Gitlin asks us to take him as
an authoritative guide to left universalism. What response is there to
this sort of thing?
As this episode suggests, there is a decidedly undialectical quality to
Gitlin’s argument that marks it not only as pro√ered within the Anglo-
American academy but as kin to the baser cousin-books it seeks to
subsume and transcend and in some ways does (Allan Bloom’s Closing
of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Richard Bern-
stein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Arthur Schlesinger’s Disuniting of Amer-
230 eric lott

ica, and so on). Gitlin’s ri√ goes like this: look at all of these cultural
excrescences and see how they’re ruining the classical idea of the left!
Any left sociologist worth the name, though, might think twice about
why recent social struggles have taken the form of ‘‘identity’’-based
movements in the first place and relate them to larger questions of
political economy and state formation. Surely the controversies Gitlin
surveys are symptoms of some larger crisis of the state, not simply the
moral failings of the left. In this respect cultural studies has done too
little to address the problem or even idea of the state that the new
liberalism has rushed to provide; in the absence of a convincing coun-
terargument from the left, a weak left-liberal rhetoric holds sway over
an increasingly corporate populism that is only in name by and for
everyday people. The instructive text here is Stuart Hall et al.’s 1978
study Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, a book
tellingly uninfluential in recent U.S. cultural studies work. Taking as
their focus Britain’s media-created mugging scare of the early 1970s
and with their analytical sights clearly on the seams and suturings of
the state apparatuses, Hall et al. show the figure of the black mugger
and the hysteria about rising crime to be a collective way of handling
or managing the crisis of capitalist authority brought about by various
1960s insurrections. It seems equally clear in the present instance
that identity-politics hysteria expresses a crisis of authority on the part
of the American nation-state as well as the left, not only for those to
whom the left never mattered and who now smell blood, but also for
those to whom the canonical revolutionary white male subject is too
dear to let go. If identity-based movements seem in some instances
misguided or superficial, it might make sense to respond not with a
moralizing version of left consensus but with a historical sense of the
way left consensus has usually been a disaster for blacks, women, and
many others. Instead, Gitlin’s searching explanations for ‘‘the dying
out there’’ are the ‘‘historical consequence of slavery and poverty’’ or
the ‘‘direct result of young black men killing other young black men in
the course of criminal activity.’’ Now this is deep. (New York Times,
come back, all is forgiven!) Policing the Crisis has a profounder sense of
how left visionaries might respond:
We can think of the relations of production of capitalism articulat-
ing the classes in distinct ways at each of the levels or instances of
the social formation—economic, political, ideological. . . . Race is
 the new liberalism in america 231

intrinsic to the manner in which the black labouring classes are

complexly constituted at each of those levels. . . . This gives the
matter of race and racism a theoretical as well as a practical cen-
trality to all the relations and practices which a√ect black labour.
The constitution of this class fraction as a class, and the class
relations which inscribe it, function as race relations. The two are
inseparable. Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also
the medium in which class relations are experienced.
This account, it seems to me, points to what Gitlin would still find a
version of ‘‘identity politics’’ but is in fact something subtler and more
di≈cult to grasp (at least for Gitlin): a recognition by new social move-
ments that their struggles, even when parallel to those of Gitlin’s old-
boys’ left, in fact shape up along di√erent axes of social existence.
When fighting exploitative employers or companies, that is, black
workers may well present their case as a racial one. Hence the success
of black worker campaigns in North Carolina, where housekeepers at
the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill or nonunion organizing
campaigns among black workers in poultry gulags or strikes at local
K-Marts have made labor demands in the form of antiracist activism:
these were successful to varying degrees because they foresook the left
fundamentalism that says only ‘‘class’’ matters—and that only with
reference to the afl-cio. Such campaigns meet capital-state forma-
tions or agglomerations the way they’ve been greeted: as particu-
larized, super-exploitable wage labor. To whine about this as divisive,
self-interested, or marginal ‘‘identity politics’’ seems inane when the
country, at local and state levels, and notwithstanding the destruction
of a≈rmative action, now seems less and less able to discredit worker
protests fought on the ground in the name of racial justice.
What thinkers like Gitlin demonstrate, then, is not how wrong it is
to bring politics into the cultural sphere but how wrong they feel a
certain political understanding of culture is. The tactical evacuation
of turf tussles from culture (that’s politics) is only a political read-
ing of culture that brings that category uncomfortably close to mys-
tifying nationalist ideologies of American culture. In insisting on
reading political strife out of culture, in other words, one begs the
time-honored question of just how far a left-liberal universalism is
from, as Earl Browder taught us to think of Communism in the late
1930s, ‘‘twentieth-century Americanism.’’ It’s di≈cult to see how a
232 eric lott

political commitment to radical equality won through conflict can be

combined with a consensus approach to culture in a book devoted to
staving o√ cultural challenges to that approach from the left. When
does your left universalism simply become a hegemonic liberalism?
In his book on the 1960s, Gitlin writes feelingly about the separa-
tist implications of Black Power’s advent, which, given the cross-racial
solidarity so crucial to the early new left, apparently seemed a crushing
rejection of white allies, who were now told to organize in their own
communities. Paul Berman still broods about this political moment in
his attacks on the Panthers. Gitlin’s vehement universalism, like that
of several key boomer liberals, is an imaginary return to early-60s
interracial brotherhood; a legitimate return, of course, though insep-
arable in these writers from an implied white masculinism, not to
mention the naked irony that interracial brotherhood came about in
the first place through the 50’s and early 60’s version of ‘‘identity
politics’’—the independent actions of African American organizers on
specifically African American concerns. Gitlin’s tirades against black
self-activity in the present virtually parade the anger and rejection that
60s black separatism caused in this generation of white, often Jewish,
male intellectuals. The pith and nerve of pain in Gitlin’s accounts of
the racial past and present suggest a primal scene revisited therapeu-
tically in the hope of surcease—even while such returns yield only
further attacks on autonomous black political activity, the drive-by
name for which has become ‘‘identity politics.’’

Katha Pollitt’s June 1998 Nation editorial reflecting on the new lib-
erals, the Rorty conference, and Eric Alterman’s account of same in an
earlier Nation makes the crucial point about the new liberals and their
own identity politics:
All you have to do is look squarely at the world you live in and it is
perfectly obvious that—as a host of scholars and activists, whom
Alterman dismisses as ‘‘the racism/sexism/homophobia crowd,’’
have documented—race and gender are crucial means through
which class is structured. They are not side issues that can be
solved by raising the minimum wage, although that is important,
or even by unionizing more workplaces, although that is impor-
tant too. Inequality in America is too solidly based on racism and
sexism for it to be altered without acknowledging race and sex and
 the new liberalism in america 233

sexuality. Everybody sees this now—even John Sweeney [!] talks

about gay partnership benefits as a working-class issue—except
for a handful of old New Leftists, journalists and mini-pundits,
white men who practice the identity politics that dare not speak
its name.≥
With the arrival of boomer liberalism, one is invited into a middlebrow
discourse whose roots in white male identity are disavowed through
an ironically Marxisant economic fundamentalism. The new liberals
think of other kinds of exploitation and other ways of combating them
as sideshow fights against prejudice—a league apart from the elec-
torally based, elite-ruled, arena of ‘‘real’’ politics that demands hard-
headed accommodation and reformist tinkering, spun in rhetorics
and ideologies of universalism, commonality, idealism, and vision—
almost by definition, given their Caucasian provenance, racially exclu-
sive and constitutive of sex/gender dominance. The broad post–new
left’s return to nationalist social democracy will grace a statist bipar-
tisan waltz into the next century. Here’s hoping our better angels help
us survive the boom.

Notes
1 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14–15.
2 Ibid., 76–77.
3 Katha Pollitt, ‘‘Race and Gender and Class, Oh My!’’ The Nation, 8 June
1998.
 Allan Bérubé

How Gay Stays White and What Kind

of White It Stays

The Stereotype
When I teach college courses on queer history or queer working-class
studies, I encourage students to explore the many ways that homosex-
uality is shaped by race, class, and gender. I know that racialized
phantom figures hover over our classroom and inhabit our conscious-
ness. I try to name these figures out loud to bring them down to earth
so we can begin to resist their stranglehold on our intelligence. One by
one, I recite the social categories that students have already used in
our discussions—immigrant, worker, corporate executive, welfare re-
cipient, student on financial aid, lesbian mother—and ask students
first to imagine the stereotypical figure associated with the category
and then to call out the figure’s race, gender, class, and sexuality. As
we watch each other conjure up and name these phantoms, we are
stunned at how well each of us has learned by heart the same fearful
chorus.
Whenever I get to the social category ‘‘gay man,’’ the students’
response is always the same: ‘‘white and well-to-do.’’ In the United
States today, the dominant image of the typical gay man is a white man
who is financially better o√ than most everyone else.

My White Desires
Since the day I came out to my best friend in 1968, I have inhabited
the social category ‘‘gay white man.’’ As a historian, writer, and activist,
I’ve examined the gay and the male parts of that identity, and more
recently I’ve explored my working-class background and the Franco-
 how gay stays white 235

American ethnicity that is so intertwined with it. But only recently

have I identified with or seriously examined my gay male whiteness.∞
Several years ago I made the decision to put race and class at the
center of my gay writing and activism. I was frustrated at how my own
gay social and activist circles reproduced larger patterns of racial sepa-
ration by remaining almost entirely white. And I felt abandoned as the
vision of the national gay movement and media narrowed from fight-
ing for liberation, freedom, and social justice to expressing personal
pride, achieving visibility, and lobbying for individual equality within
existing institutions. What emerged was too often an exclusively gay
rights agenda isolated from supposedly nongay issues, such as home-
lessness, unemployment, welfare, universal health care, union orga-
nizing, a≈rmative action, and abortion rights. To gain recognition and
credibility, some gay organizations and media began to aggressively
promote the so-called positive image of a generic gay community that
is an upscale, mostly male, and mostly white consumer market with
mainstream, even traditional, values. Such a strategy derives its power
from an unexamined investment in whiteness and middle-class iden-
tification. As a result, its practitioners seemed not to take seriously or
even notice how their gay visibility successes at times exploited and
reinforced a racialized class divide that continues to tear our nation
apart, including our lesbian and gay communities.
My decision to put race and class at the center of my gay work led
me as a historian to pursue the history of a multiracial maritime union
that in the 1930s and 1940s fought for racial equality and the dignity
of openly gay workers.≤ And my decision opened doors that enabled
me as an activist to join multiracial lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender groups whose members have been doing antiracist work for a
long time and in which gay white men are not the majority—groups
that included the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Advisory
Committee to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the
editorial board of the now-defunct national lesbian and gay quarterly
journal Out/Look.
But doing this work also created new and ongoing conflicts in my
relationships with other white men. I want to figure out how to handle
these conflicts as I extend my antiracist work into those areas of my
life where I still find myself among gay white men—especially when
we form new activist and intellectual groups that once again turn out
to be white. To do this I need ‘‘to clarify something for myself,’’ as
236 allan bérubé

James Baldwin put it, when he gave his reason for writing his homo-
sexual novel Giovanni’s Room in the 1950s.≥
I wanted to know how gay gets white, how it stays that way, and how
whiteness is used both to win and attack gay rights campaigns.
I want to learn how to see my own whiteness when I am with gay
white men and to understand what happens among us when one of us
calls attention to our whiteness.
I want to know why I and other gay white men would want to
challenge the racist structures of whiteness, what happens to us when
we try, what makes me keep running away from the task, sometimes
in silent despair, and what makes me want to go back to take up the
task again.
I want to pursue these questions by drawing on a gay ability, devel-
oped over decades of figuring out how to ‘‘come out of the closet,’’ to
bring our hidden lives out into the open. But I want to do this without
encouraging anyone to assign a greater degree of racism to gay white
men, thus exposed, than to other white men more protected from
exposure, and without inviting white men who are not gay to more
safely see gay men’s white racism rather than their own.
I want to know these things because gay white men have been
among the men I have loved and will continue to love. I need them in
my life and at my side as I try to make fighting racism a more central
part of my work. And when students call out ‘‘white’’ to describe the
typical gay man, and they see me standing right there in front of them,
I want to figure out how, from where I am standing, I can intelligently
fight the racist hierarchies that I and my students di√erently inhabit.

Gay Whitening Practices

Despite the stereotype, the gay male population is not as white as it
appears to be in the images of gay men projected by the mainstream
and gay media, or among the ‘‘out’’ men (including myself ) who move
into the public spotlight as representative gay activists, writers, com-
mentators, and spokesmen. Gay men of color, working against the
stereotype, have engaged in long, di≈cult struggles to gain some pub-
lic recognition of their cultural heritages, political activism, and every-
day existence. To educate gay white men, they’ve had to get our atten-
tion by interrupting our business as usual, then convince us that we
don’t speak for them or represent them or know enough about either
 how gay stays white 237

their realities or our own racial assumptions and privileges. And when
I and other gay white men don’t educate ourselves, gay men of color
have done the face-to-face work of educating us about their cultures,
histories, oppression, and particular needs—the kind of personal work
that tires us out when heterosexuals ask us to explain to them what it’s
like to be gay. Also working against their ability to put ‘‘gay’’ and ‘‘men
of color’’ together in the broader white imagination are a great many
other powerful whitening practices that daily construct, maintain, and
fortify the idea that gay male means white.
How does the category ‘‘gay man’’ become white? What are the
whitening practices that perpetuate this stereotype, often without
awareness or comment by gay white men? How do these practices
operate, and what racial work do they perform?
I begin by mining my own experience for clues.∂ I know that if I go
where I’m surrounded by other gay white men, or if I’m having sex
with a white man, it’s unlikely that our race will come up in conversa-
tion. Such racially comfortable, racially familiar situations can make
us mistakenly believe that there are such things as gay issues, spaces,
culture, and relationships that are not ‘‘lived through’’ race, and that
white gay life, so long as it is not named as such, is not about race.∑
These lived assumptions, and the privileges on which they are based,
form a powerful camouflage woven from a web of unquestioned
beliefs—that gay whiteness is unmarked and unremarkable, universal
and representative, powerful and protective, a cohesive bond. The
markings of this camouflage are pale—a characteristic that the wearer
sees neither as entirely invisible nor as a racial ‘‘color,’’ a shade that
allows the wearer to blend into the seemingly neutral background of
white worlds. When we wear this everyday camouflage into a gay
political arena that white men already dominate, our activism comes
wrapped in a pale protective coloring that we may not notice but which is
clearly visible to those who don’t enjoy its protection.
I start to remember specific situations in which I caught glimpses
of how other gay whitening practices work.
One night, arriving at my favorite gay disco bar in San Francisco, I
discovered outside a picket line of people protesting the triple-carding
(requiring three photo id’s) of gay men of color at the door. This
practice was a form of racial exclusion—policing the borders of white
gay institutions to prevent people of color from entering. The manage-
ment was using this discriminatory practice to keep the bar from
238 allan bérubé

‘‘turning,’’ as it’s called—a process by which a ‘‘generically gay’’ bar

(meaning a predominantly white bar) changes into a bar that loses
status and income (meaning gay white men with money won’t go
there) because it has been ‘‘taken over’’ by black, Latino, or Asian gay
men. For many white owners, managers, and patrons of gay bars, only
a white gay bar can be just gay; a bar where men of color go is seen as
racialized. As I joined the picket line, I felt the fears of a white man
who has the privilege to choose on which side of a color line he will
stand. I wanted to support my gay brothers of color who were being
harassed at the door, yet I was afraid that the doorman might recog-
nize me as a regular and refuse to let me back in. That night, I saw a
gay bar’s doorway become a racialized border, where a battle to pre-
serve or challenge the whiteness of the clientele inside was fought
among dozens of gay men who were either standing guard at the door,
allowed to walk through it, or shouting and marching outside. (The
protests eventually made the bar stop the triple-carding.)
I remember seeing how another gay whitening practice works
when I watched, with other members of a sexual politics study group,
an antigay video, ‘‘Gay Rights, Special Rights,’’ produced in 1993 by
The Report, a religious right organization. This practice was the selling
of gay whiteness—the marketing of gays as white and wealthy to make
money and increase political capital, either to raise funds for cam-
paigns (in both progay and antigay benefits, advertising, and direct-
mail appeals) or to gain economic power (by promoting or appealing
to a gay consumer market). The antigay video we watched used ra-
cialized class to undermine alliances between a gay rights movement
portrayed as white and movements of people of color portrayed as
heterosexual. It showed charts comparing mutually exclusive catego-
ries of ‘‘homosexuals’’ and ‘‘African Americans,’’ telling us that homo-
sexuals are wealthy, college-educated white men who vacation more
than anyone else and who demand even more ‘‘special rights and
privileges’’ by taking civil rights away from low-income African Amer-
icans.∏ In this zero-sum, racialized world of the religious right, gay
men are white; gay, lesbian, and bisexual people of color, along with
poor or working-class white gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians, simply
do not exist. The recently vigorous gay media promotion of the high
income, brand-loyal gay consumer market—which is typically por-
trayed as a population of white, well-to-do, college-educated young
 how gay stays white 239

men—only widens the racialized class divisions that the religious right
so eagerly exploits.
During the 1993 Senate hearings on gays in the military, I saw how
these and other whitening practices were used in concentrated form
by another gay institution, the Campaign for Military Service (cms).
The Campaign for Military Service was an ad hoc organization
formed in Washington, D.C., by a group composed primarily of well-
to-do, well-connected, professional men, including billionaires David
Ge√en and Barry Diller, corporate consultant and former antiwar ac-
tivist David Mixner (a personal friend of Bill Clinton), and several gay
and lesbian civil rights attorneys. Their mission was to work with the
Clinton White House and sympathetic senators by coordinating the
gay response to hearings held by the Senate Armed Services Commit-
tee, chaired by Sam Nunn. Their power was derived from their legal
expertise, their access to wealthy donors, and their contacts with high-
level personnel inside the White House, Senate, and Pentagon. The
challenge they faced was to make strategic, pragmatic decisions in the
heat of a rapidly changing national battle over what President Clinton
called ‘‘our nation’s policy toward homosexuals in the military.’’π
The world in and around the cms that David Mixner describes in
his memoir, Stranger among Friends, is a network of professionals
passionately dedicated to gay rights who communicated with Wash-
ington insiders via telephone calls, memos, and meetings in the White
House, the Pentagon, and private homes. Wearing the protective col-
oring of this predominantly white gay world, these professionals en-
tered the similarly white and male but heterosexual world of the U.S.
Senate, where their shared whiteness became a common ground on
which the battle to lift the military’s ban on homosexuals was fought—
and lost.
The cms used a set of arguments they called the race analogy to
persuade senators and military o≈cials to lift the military’s antigay
ban. The strategy was to get these powerful men to take antigay dis-
crimination as seriously as they supposedly took racial discrimination,
so they would lift the military ban on homosexuals as they had elimi-
nated o≈cial policies requiring racial segregation. During the Senate
hearings, the race analogy projected a set of comparisons that led to
heated disputes over whether sexual orientation was analogous to
race, whether sexual desire and conduct were like ‘‘skin color,’’ or,
240 allan bérubé

most specifically, whether being homosexual was like being African

American. (Rarely was ‘‘race’’ explicitly discussed as anything other
than African American.) On their side, the cms argued for a qualified
analogy—what they called ‘‘haunting parallels’’ between ‘‘the words,
rationale and rhetoric invoked in favor of racial discrimination in the
past’’ and those used to ‘‘exclude gays in the military now.’’ ‘‘The
parallel is inexact,’’ they cautioned, because ‘‘a person’s skin color is
not the same as a person’s sexual identity; race is self-evident to many
whereas sexual orientation is not. Moreover, the history of African
Americans is not equivalent to the history of lesbian, gay and bisexual
people in this country.’’ Yet, despite these qualifications, the cms held
firm to the analogy. ‘‘The bigotry expressed is the same; the discrimi-
nation is the same.’’∫
The military responded with an attack on the race analogy as self-
serving, racist, and o√ensive. They were aided by Senator Nunn, who
skillfully managed the hearings in ways that exploited the whiteness of
the cms and their witnesses to advance the military’s antigay agenda.
Working in their favor was the fact that, unlike the cms, the military
had high-ranking o≈cials who were African American. The chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Sta√, Gen. Colin L. Powell, who opposed lifting
the ban, responded to the cms with the argument that the antigay
policy was not analogous to racial segregation because ‘‘skin color’’
was a ‘‘benign characteristic’’ while homosexuality constituted con-
duct that was neither benign nor condoned by most Americans.Ω An-
other African American Army o≈cer, Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller, Gen.
Norman Schwarzkopf ’s deputy commander and the highest-ranking
African American o≈cer in Operation Desert Storm, attacked the race
analogy with these words: ‘‘I had no choice regarding my race when I
was delivered from my mother’s womb. To compare my service in
America’s armed forces with the integration of avowed homosexuals
is personally o√ensive to me.’’∞≠ Antigay white senators mimicked
his outrage.
During the race analogy debates, the fact that only white witnesses
made the analogy, drawing connections between antigay and racial
discrimination without including people of color, reduced the power
of their argument and the credibility it might have gained had it been
made by advocates who had experienced the racial discrimination side
of the analogy.∞∞ But without hearing these voices, everyone in the
debate could imagine homosexuals as either people who do not expe-
 how gay stays white 241

rience racism (the military assumption) or as people who experience

discrimination only as homosexuals (the progay assumption)—two
di√erent routes that ultimately led to the same destination: the place
where gay stays white, the place where the cms chose to make its
stand.
According to Mixner’s memoir, the Senate Armed Services Com-
mittee ‘‘had asked cms to suggest witnesses.’’∞≤ As gay gatekeepers to
the hearings, the cms utilized another whitening practice—mirroring.
This is a political strategy that reflects back the whiteness of the men
who run powerful institutions to persuade them to take ‘‘us’’ seriously,
accept ‘‘us,’’ and let ‘‘us’’ in because ‘‘we are just like you.’’ From the
witnesses they selected, it appears that the cms tried to project an
idealized image of the openly gay service member that mirrored the
senators’ racial makeup and their publicly espoused social values and
sexual mores—the image of the highly competent, patriotic, sexually
abstinent, young, male o≈cer who had earned the right to serve with a
proud record and therefore deserved equality. The cms selected for
the gay panel a group of articulate and courageous veterans—all white
men, except for one white woman.∞≥ Cleverly, Senator Nunn’s sta√
selected a panel of African American ministers opposed to lifting the
ban to precede the gay white panel, so that both sides constructed and
participated in a racialized dramatic conflict that reinforced the twin
myths that gay is white and African Americans are antigay.
Missing was the testimony of service members whose lives bridged
the hearings’ false divide between black and gay—veterans who were
both African American and lesbian, gay, or bisexual. In this context, a
significant whitening practice at the hearings was the exclusion of Sgt.
Perry Watkins as a witness. Watkins was an openly gay, African Ameri-
can veteran considered by many to be a military hero. Kicked out of
the army as a homosexual shortly before his retirement, he suc-
cessfully appealed his discharge to the Supreme Court, becoming
what one attorney called ‘‘the first out gay soldier to retire from the
Army with full honors.’’∞∂
To my knowledge, there is no public record of how or why the cms
did not invite Watkins to testify.∞∑ (This is another privilege that comes
with whiteness—the ability to make decisions that seriously a√ect peo-
ple of color and then protect that decision-making process from public
scrutiny or accountability.) Sabrina Sojourner, who recalls that she was
the only African American at the cms among the nonsupport sta√,
242 allan bérubé

told me that she ‘‘got moved further and further from the decision-
making process’’ because she ‘‘brought up race,’’ including the prob-
lem of the racial dynamic set up by presenting only white witnesses
to testify.∞∏
There was a moment when I was personally involved with this
process. As the author of Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay
Men and Women in World War Two, I was asked by the cms to prepare
to fly from California to Washington to testify, but my appearance was
not approved by the Senate sta√, who allowed no open homosexuals to
testify as expert witnesses.∞π During a phone conversation with a white
cms sta√ member, I remember getting up the courage to ask him why
Watkins wasn’t a witness and was told that ‘‘Perry is a di≈cult person-
ality.’’ I didn’t push my question any further, getting the message that I
shouldn’t ask for complicated explanations during the heat of battle
and deferring to their inside-the-beltway tactical decisions, thus for-
feiting an important opportunity to seriously challenge Watkins’s ex-
clusion. More instances of this painful struggle over Watkins’s partici-
pation in and around the hearings must have been going on behind
the scenes.∞∫ Watkins believed he was shut out because he was a
‘‘queeny’’ African American.∞Ω
It seems that the cms considered Watkins to be the opposite of
their ideal witness. His military story was indeed more complicated
than the generic coming-out story. During his 1968 induction physi-
cal exam in Tacoma, Washington, he had openly declared his homo-
sexuality, checking ‘‘Yes’’ to the written question ‘‘Do you have homo-
sexual tendencies?’’ and freely describing his sexual experiences to the
induction psychiatrist. But the army drafted him nevertheless because
it needed him to fight in Vietnam, along with other mostly working-
class African American men, who, by 1966, accounted for 20 percent
of U.S. combat deaths in that war, when African Americans made up
11 percent of the U.S. population and 12.6 percent of U.S. troops in
Vietnam. Journalist Randy Shilts, who later interviewed Watkins, re-
ported that Watkins believed ‘‘the doctor probably figured Watkins
would . . . go to Vietnam, get killed, and nobody would ever hear
about it again.’’≤≠ So Watkins’s story was not a white narrative. ‘‘If I had
not been black,’’ he told Mary Ann Humphrey in an oral history inter-
view, ‘‘my situation would not have happened as it did. . . . Every white
person I knew from Tacoma who was gay and had checked that box
‘Yes’ did not have to go into the service.’’≤∞ Watkins’s story resonated
 how gay stays white 243

more with how men of color experience antigay racism in the military
than with the story so many white servicemen tell. That white narra-
tive begins with how a gay serviceman never experienced discrimina-
tion until he discovered his homosexuality in the service and ends
with his fighting an antigay discharge, without referring to how he
lived this experience through his whiteness. But Watkins explicitly
talked about how he lived his gay military experience through race.
‘‘People ask me,’’ he explained, ‘‘ ‘How have you managed to tolerate
all that discrimination you have had to deal with in the military?’ My
immediate answer to them was, ‘Hell, I grew up black. Give me a
break.’ ’’≤≤ Watkins had also, while in the military, danced and sang on
U.S. Army bases as the flamboyant ‘‘Simone,’’ his drag persona; as a
veteran he was hiv-positive; and in some gay venues he wore body-
piercings in public.≤≥
Nevertheless, Watkins’s testimony at the hearings could have
struck familiar chords among many Americans, including working-
class and African American communities, as the experience of some-
one who was real rather than an ideal. His story was so compelling, in
fact, that after the hearings he was the subject of two films and a
segment of the television news magazine ‘‘20/20.’’≤∂ But the story of
his military career—which he so openly lived through race (as an
African American), sexuality (had a sex life), and gender (performed
in drag)—seems to have been considered by the cms as too contami-
nated for congressional testimony and too distracting for the personal
media stories that were supposed to focus only on the gay right to
serve.
Watkins’s absence was a lost opportunity to see and hear in na-
tionally televised Senate hearings a gay African American legal hero
talk about his victory over antigay discrimination in the military and
expose the racist hypocrisy of how the antigay ban was in practice
suspended for African Americans during wartime. The lack of testi-
mony from any other lesbian, gay, or bisexual veteran of color was a
lost opportunity to build alliances with communities of color and to do
something about the ‘‘(largely accurate) perception of the gay activist
leadership in Washington as overwhelmingly white.’’≤∑ Their collec-
tive absence reinforced another powerful myth that, even in a military
population that is disproportionately African American and Latino,
the representative gay soldier is a white o≈cer, and the most present-
able gay face of military competence is a white face.
244 allan bérubé

As the hearings progressed, some cms activists, speaking in public

forums outside the hearings, took the race analogy a step further by
promoting the idea that the gay rights movement was like the civil
rights movement. During the hearings, those who argued the race
analogy had drawn parallels between racist and antigay bigotry and
discrimination. But those who extended the race analogy to the civil
rights movement analogy had to take several more steps. First, they
had to reconceptualize the civil rights movement. They took a multira-
cial movement for human equality and human rights, which included
many lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists, and changed it into a nongay,
black movement for African American racial equality. Next, they had
to imagine the gay movement as a white movement for homosexual
rights rather than as a multiracial movement that grew out of and
continued the work of the civil rights movement. Then they could
make the analogy between these two now-separated movements—one
just about race, the other just about homosexuality. The last step was
to symbolically recast gay white men in the roles of African American
civil rights leaders. These moves tried to correct a problem inherent in
such whitening practices as excluding people of color and the wearing,
mirroring, and selling of gay whiteness. Because such practices draw
directly on the privileges of whiteness, they do not on their own carry
much moral weight. The extended race analogy compensates for this
weightlessness by first invoking the moral authority of the civil rights
movement (while erasing its actual history), and then transferring that
unearned moral authority to a white gay movement, without giving
anything back. At its worst, the race analogy can become a form of
historical erasure, political cheating, and, ultimately, a theft of cultural
capital and symbolic value.
David Mixner’s memoir reveals how the extended race analogy was
used in and around the Campaign for Military Service. When Presi-
dent Clinton, at a press conference, revealed that he wouldn’t rule out
separating homosexuals from heterosexuals within the military, Mix-
ner first interpreted Clinton’s comments as condoning gay segrega-
tion, then began equating it with racial segregation. Mixner’s account
of what happened next does not include attempts to seek advice from
or build alliances with people whose histories include long struggles
against legal segregation. This despite solid support for lifting the ban
from civil rights veterans including Coretta Scott King and Roger
Wilkins, the Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum, the Con-
 how gay stays white 245

gressional Black Caucus (including Ron Dellums, chairman of the

House Armed Services Committee and a former marine who even-
tually held House hearings to counter Nunn’s Senate hearings), and,
in public opinion polls, a majority of African Americans (in contrast to
a minority of white Americans).≤∏ Mixner instead describes a series of
decisions and actions in which he invokes scenes from the history of
racial segregation and the civil rights movement and appears to be
reenacting those scenes as if he were a gay (white) version of a black
civil rights leader.
A telling moment was when Mixner asked his friend Troy Perry, a
gay white minister who founded and heads the gay Metropolitan Com-
munity Church, to let him use the Sunday pulpit at the mcc Cathedral
in Dallas as a ‘‘platform from which to speak.’’ Covered by network
television, Mixner delivered a sermon to the nation about the gay
‘‘road to freedom.’’ In his sermon he referred to the military’s antigay
policy as ‘‘ancient apartheid laws’’ and charged that ‘‘Sam Nunn is our
George Wallace’’ and that ‘‘[b]igotry that wears a uniform is nothing
more than a uniform with a hood.’’ He angrily warned President
Clinton, cast as antigay segregationist, that ‘‘with or without you we
will be free . . . we will prevail!’’≤π Shortly after the sermon, Tracy
Thorne, a gay white navy veteran who had courageously faced verbal
abuse at the Senate hearings and who flew to Dallas to support Mixner,
said out loud what had been implied by Mixner’s words and actions.
David Mixner ‘‘could be our Martin Luther King, no questions asked,’’
Thorne told a reporter from a gay newspaper.≤∫
Such dramatic race-analogy scenarios performed by white activists
beg some serious questions. Are actual, rather than ‘‘virtual,’’ people
of color present as major actors in these scenarios, and if not, why not?
What are they saying or how are they being silenced? How is their
actual leadership being supported or not supported by the white peo-
ple who are reenacting this racialized history? And who is the ‘‘we’’ in
this rhetoric? Mixner’s ‘‘we,’’ for example, did not account for those
Americans—including lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender activists
from many racial backgrounds—who did not finally have or indeed
need ‘‘our own George Wallace’’ or ‘‘our own Martin Luther King.’’
‘‘Martin Luther King is the Martin Luther King of the gay community,’’
Dr. Marjorie Hill, board president of Unity Fellowship Church and
former director of the New York City Mayor’s O≈ce for Lesbian and
Gay Issues, has pointedly replied in response to those who were look-
246 allan bérubé

ing for King’s gay equivalent. ‘‘His lesson of equality and truth and
non-violence was for everyone.’’≤Ω If the gay rights movement is al-
ready part of the ongoing struggle for the dignity of all people ex-
emplified in the activism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then there is no
need for gay equivalents of Dr. King, racial segregation, or the civil
rights movement. If the gay rights movement is not already part of the
civil rights movement, then what is it? Answering this question from a
white position with the race analogy—saying that white gay leaders
and martyrs are ‘‘our’’ versions of African American civil rights lead-
ers and martyrs—can’t fix the problem and ultimately undermines the
moral authority that is its aim. This use of the race analogy ends up
reinforcing the whiteness of gay political campaigns rather than doing
the work and holding onto the dream that would continue the legacy
of Dr. King’s leadership and activism.≥≠
What would the gay movement look like if gay white men who use
the race analogy took it more seriously? What work would we have to
do to close the perceived moral authority gap between our gay activism
and the race analogy, to directly establish the kind of moral authority
we seek by analogy? What if we aspired to achieve the great vision, lead-
ership qualities, grass-roots organizing skills, and union-solidarity of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., together with his opposition to war and his
dedication to fighting with the poor and disenfranchised against the
deepening race and class divisions in America and the world? How
could we fight, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A.
Blackmun, for the ‘‘fundamental interest all individuals have in con-
trolling the nature of their intimate associations with others,’’ in ways
that build a broad civil rights movement rather than being ‘‘like’’ it, in
ways that enable the gay movement to grow into one of many powerful
and direct ways to achieve race, gender, and class justice?≥∞
These, then, are only some of the many whitening practices that
structure everyday life and politics in what is often called the ‘‘gay
community’’ and the ‘‘gay movement’’—making race analogies; mirror-
ing the whiteness of men who run powerful institutions as a strategy
for winning credibility, acceptance, and integration; excluding people
of color from gay institutions; selling gay as white to raise money, make
a profit, and gain economic power; and daily wearing the pale protective
coloring that camouflages the unquestioned assumptions and un-
earned privileges of gay whiteness. These practices do serious damage
to real people whenever they mobilize the power and privileges of
 how gay stays white 247

whiteness to protect and strengthen gayness—including the privi-

leges of gay whiteness—without using that power to fight racism—
including gay white racism.
Most of the time, the hard work of identifying such practices, fight-
ing racial discrimination and exclusion, critiquing the assumptions of
whiteness, and racially integrating white gay worlds has been taken up
by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people of color. Freed from
this enforced daily recognition of race and confrontation with racism,
some prominent white men in the gay movement have been able to
advance a gay rights politics that, like the right to serve in the mili-
tary, they imagine to be just gay, not about race. The gay rights move-
ment can’t a√ord to ‘‘dissipate our energies,’’ Andrew Sullivan, former
editor of the New Republic, warned on the Charlie Rose television
program, by getting involved in disagreements over nongay issues
such as ‘‘how one deals with race . . . how we might help the under-
class . . . how we might deal with sexism.’’≥≤
But a gay rights politics that is supposedly color-blind (and sex-
neutral and classless) is in fact a politics of race (and gender and class).
It assumes, without ever having to say it, that gay must equal white
(and male and economically secure); that is, it assumes white (and
male and middle-class) as the default categories that remain once one
discounts those who as gay people must continually and primarily
deal with racism (and sexism and class oppression), especially within
gay communities. It is the politics that remains once one makes the
strategic decision, as a gay activist, to stand outside the social justice
movements for race, gender, or class equality, or to not stand with
disenfranchised communities, among whom are lesbian, bisexual,
gay, or transgender people who depend on these movements for dig-
nity and survival.
For those few who act like, look like, and identify with the white
men who still run our nation’s major institutions, for those few who
can meet with them, talk to them, and be heard by them as peers, the
ability to draw on the enormous power of a shared but unacknowl-
edged whiteness, the ability never to have to bring up race, must feel
like a potentially sturdy shield against antigay discrimination. I can
see how bringing up explicit critiques of white privilege during high-
level gay rights conversations (such as the Senate debates over gays in
the military), or making it possible for people of color to set the agenda
of the gay rights movement, might weaken that white shield (which
248 allan bérubé

relies on racial division to protect)—might even, for some white activ-

ists, threaten to ‘‘turn’’ the gay movement into something less gay, as
gay bars ‘‘turn’’ when they’re no longer predominantly white.
The threat of losing the white shield that protects my own gay rights
raises even more di≈cult questions that I need to ‘‘clarify . . . for
myself ’’: What would I say and do about racism if someday my own
whiteness helped me gain such direct access to men in the centers of
power, as it almost did during the Senate hearings, when all I did was
ask why Perry Watkins wasn’t testifying and accept the answer I was
given? What privileges would I risk losing if I persistently tried to take
activists of color with me into that high-level conversation? How, and
with whom, could I begin planning for that day?
Gay white men who are committed to doing antiracist activism as
gay men have to work within and against these and other powerful
whitening practices. What can we do, and how can we support each
other, when we once again find ourselves involved in gay social and
political worlds that are white and male?

Gay, White, Male and hiv -Negative

A few years ago, in San Francisco, a friend invited me to be part of a
new political discussion group of hiv-negative gay men. Arriving at a
neighbor’s apartment for the group’s first meeting, I once again felt
the relief and pleasure of being among men like me. All of us were
involved in aids activism. We had supported lovers, friends, and
strangers with hiv and were grieving the loss of too many lives. We
didn’t want to take time, attention, and scarce resources away from
people with aids, including many people of color. But we did want to
find a collective, progressive voice as hiv-negative men. We wanted to
find public ways to say to gay men just coming out that ‘‘We are hiv-
negative men, and we want you to stay negative, have hot sex, and live
long lives. We don’t want you to get sick or die.’’ We were trying to
work out a politics in which hiv-negative men, who are relatively
privileged as not being the primary targets of crackdowns on people
who are hiv-positive, could address other hiv-negative men without
trying to establish our legitimacy by positioning ourselves as victims.
When I looked around the room I saw only white men. I knew that
many of them had for years been incorporating antiracist work into
 how gay stays white 249

their gay and aids activism, so this seemed like a safe space to bring
up the whiteness I saw. I really didn’t want to hijack the purpose of the
group by changing its focus from hiv to race, but this was important
because I believed that not talking about our whiteness was going to
hurt our work. Instead of speaking up, however, I hesitated.
Right there. That’s the moment I want to look at—that moment of
silence, when a flood of memories, doubts, and fears rushed into my
head. What made me want to say something about our whiteness and
what was keeping me silent?
My memory took me back to 1990, when I spoke on a panel of gay
historians at the first Out/Write conference of lesbian and gay writers,
held in San Francisco. I was happy to be presenting with two other
community-based historians working outside the academy. But I was
also aware—and concerned—that we were all men. When the question
period began, an African American writer in the audience, a man
whose name I later learned was Fundi, stood up and asked us (as I
recall) how it could happen, at this late date, that a gay history panel
could have only white men on it. Awkward silence. I don’t trust how I
remember his question or what happened next—unreliable memory
and bad thinking must be characteristics of inhabiting whiteness
while it’s being publicly challenged. As the other panelists responded,
I remember wanting to distance myself from their whiteness while
my own mind went blank, and I remember feeling terrified that Fundi
would address me directly and ask me to respond personally. I kept
thinking, ‘‘I don’t know what to say, I can’t think, I want to be invisible,
I want this to be over, now!’’
After the panel was over I spoke privately to Fundi. Later, I resolved
never to be in that situation again—never to agree to be on an all-white
panel without asking ahead of time why it was white, if its whiteness
was crucial to what we were presenting, and, if not, how its composi-
tion might be changed. But in addition to wanting to protect myself
from public embarrassment and to do the right thing, that writer’s
direct challenge made me understand something more clearly: that
only by seeing and naming the whiteness I’m inhabiting, and taking
responsibility for it, can I begin to change it and even do something
constructive with it. At that panel, I learned how motivating though
terrifying it can be as a white person to be placed in such a state of
heightened racial discomfort—to be challenged to see the whiteness
250 allan bérubé

we’ve created, figure out how we created it, and then think critically
about how it works.≥≥
In the moment of silent hesitation I experienced in my hiv-
negative group, I found myself imagining for the first time, years after
it happened, what it must have been like for Fundi to stand up in a
predominantly white audience and ask an all-white panel of gay men
about our whiteness. My friend and colleague Lisa Kahaleole Hall,
who is a brilliant thinker, writer, and teacher, says that privilege is ‘‘the
ability not to have to take other people’s existence seriously,’’ the ‘‘abil-
ity not to have to pay attention.’’≥∂ Until that moment I had mistakenly
thought that Fundi’s anger (and I am not certain that he in fact ex-
pressed any anger toward us) was only about me, about us, as white
men, rather than also about him—the history, desires, and support
that enabled him to speak up, and the fears he faced and risks he took
by doing it. Caught up in my own fear, I had not paid close attention to
the specific question he had asked us. ‘‘The problem of conventional
white men,’’ Fundi later wrote in his own account of why he had
decided to take the risk of speaking up, ‘‘somehow not being able, or
not knowing how, to find and extend themselves to women and people
of color had to be talked through. . . . My question to the panel was
this: ‘What direct skills might you share with particularly the whites in
the audience to help them move on their fears and better extend them-
selves to cultural diversity?’ ’’≥∑ I’m indebted to Fundi for writing that
question down, and for starting a chain of events with his question
that has led to my writing this essay.
I tried to remember who else I had seen bring up whiteness. The
first images that came to mind were all white lesbians and people of
color. White lesbian feminists have as a movement dealt with racism
in a more collective way than have gay white men. In lesbian and gay
activist spaces I and other gay white men have come to rely on white
lesbians and people of color to raise the issue of whiteness and chal-
lenge racism, so that this di≈cult task has become both gendered as
lesbian work and racialized as ‘‘colored’’ work. These images held me
back from saying anything to my hiv-negative group. ‘‘Just who am I
to bring this up?’’ I wondered. ‘‘It’s not my place to do this.’’ Or, more
painfully, ‘‘Who will these men think I think I am?’’ Will they think
I’m trying to pretend I’m not a white man?’’
Then another image flashed in my mind that also held me back. It
 how gay stays white 251

was the caricature of the white moralist—another racialized phantom

figure hovering in the room—who blames and condemns white peo-
ple for our racism, guilt-trips us from either a position of deeper guilt
or holier-than-thou innocence, claims to be more aware of racism than
we are, and is prepared to catalog our o√enses. I see on my mental
screen this self-righteous caricature impersonating a person of color
in an all-white group or, when people of color are present, casting
them again in the role of spectators to a white performance, pushed to
the sidelines from where they must angrily or patiently interrupt a
white conversation to be heard at all. I understand that there is some
truth to this caricature—that part of a destructive racial dynamic
among white people is trying to determine who is more or less respon-
sible for racism, more or less innocent and pure, more or less white.
But I also see how the fear of becoming this caricature has been used
by white people to keep each other from naming the whiteness of all-
white groups we are in. During my moment of hesitation in the
hiv-negative group, the fear of becoming this caricature was suc-
cessfully silencing me.
I didn’t want to pretend to be a white lesbian or a person of color, or
to act like the self-righteous white caricature. ‘‘How do I ask that we
examine our whiteness,’’ I wondered, ‘‘without implying that I’m sep-
arating us into the good guys and bad guys and positioning myself as
the really cool white guy who ‘gets it’ about racism?’’ I needed a way to
speak intelligently from where I was standing without falling into any
of these traps.
I decided to take a chance and say something.
‘‘It appears to me,’’ I began, my voice a little shaky, ‘‘that everyone
here is white. If this is true, I’d like us to find some way to talk about
how our whiteness may be connected to being hiv-negative, because
I suspect there are some political similarities between being in each of
these positions of relative privilege.’’
There was an awkward pause. ‘‘Are you saying,’’ someone asked,
‘‘that we should close the group to men of color?’’
‘‘No,’’ I said, ‘‘but if we’re going to be a white group I’d like us to
talk about our relationship to whiteness here.’’
‘‘Should we do outreach to men of color?’’ someone else asked.
‘‘No, I’m not saying that, either. It’s a little late to do outreach, after
the fact, inviting men of color to integrate our already white group.’’
252 allan bérubé

The other men agreed and the discussion went on to other things.
I, too, didn’t really know where to take this conversation about our
whiteness. By bringing it up, I was implicitly asking for their help in
figuring this out. I hoped I wouldn’t be the only one to bring up the
subject again.
At the next month’s meeting there were new members, and they all
appeared to be white men. When someone reviewed for them what we
had done at the last meeting, he reported that I’d suggested we not
include men of color in the group. ‘‘That’s not right,’’ I corrected him.
‘‘I said that if we’re going to be a white group, I’d like us to talk about
our whiteness and its relation to our hiv-negative status.’’
I was beginning to feel a little disoriented, like I was doing some-
thing wrong. Why was I being so consistently misunderstood as divi-
sive, as if I were saying that I didn’t want men of color in the group?
Had I reacted similarly when, caught up in my own fear of having to
publicly justify our panel’s whiteness, I had misunderstood Fundi’s
specific question—about how we could share our skills with other
white people to help each other move beyond our fear of cultural
diversity—as an accusation that we had deliberately excluded women
and men of color? Was something structural going on here about how
white groups respond to questions that point to our whiteness and ask
what we can do with it?
Walking home from the meeting I asked a friend who’d been there
if what I said had made sense. ‘‘Oh yes,’’ he said, ‘‘it’s just that it all
goes without saying.’’ Well, there it is. That is how it goes, how it stays
white. ‘‘Without saying.’’
Like much of the rest of my gay life, this hiv-negative group turned
out to be unintentionally white, although intentionally gay and inten-
tionally male. It’s important for me to understand exactly how that
racial unintentionality gets constructed, how it’s not just a coincidence.
It seems that so long as white people never consciously decide to be a
white group, a white organization, a white department, so long as we
each individually believe that people of color are always welcome, even
though they are not there, then we do not have to examine our whiteness
because we can believe it is unintentional, it’s not our reason for being
there. That may be why I had been misunderstood to be asking for the
exclusion of men of color. By naming our group as white, I had un-
knowingly raised the question of racial intent—implying that we had
 how gay stays white 253

intended to create an all-white group by deliberately excluding men of

color. If we could believe that our whiteness was purely accidental,
then we could also believe that there was nothing to say about it
because creating an all-white group, which is exactly what we had
done, had never been anyone’s intent, and therefore had no inherent
meaning or purpose. By interrupting the process by which ‘‘it just
goes without saying,’’ by asking us to recognize and ‘‘talk through’’ our
whiteness, I appeared to be saying that we already had and should
continue to exclude men of color from our now very self-consciously
white group.
The reality is that in our hiv-negative group, as in the panel of the
Out/Write conference and in many other all-white groupings, we
each did make a chain of choices, not usually conscious, to invite or
accept an invitation from another white person. We made more deci-
sions whether or not to name our whiteness when we once again
found ourselves in a white group. What would it mean to make such
decisions consciously and out loud, to understand why we made
them, and to take responsibility for them? What if we intentionally
held our identities as white men and gay men in creative tension,
naming ourselves as gay and white, then publicly explored the possi-
bilities for activism this tension might open up? Could investigating
our whiteness o√er us opportunities for reclaiming our humanity
against the ways that racial hierarchies dehumanize us and disconnect
us from ourselves, from each other, and from people of color? If we
took on these di≈cult tasks, how might our gay political reality and
purpose be di√erent?≥∏
When I told this story about our hiv-negative group to Barbara
Smith, a colleague who is an African American lesbian writer and
activist, she asked me a question that pointed to a di√erent ending: ‘‘So
why didn’t you bring up the group’s whiteness again?’’ The easy answer
was that I left the group because I moved to New York City. But the
more di≈cult answer was that I was afraid to lose the trust of these gay
men whom I cared about and needed so much, afraid I would distance
myself from them and be distanced by them, pushed outside the
familiar circle, no longer welcomed as white and not belonging among
people of color, not really gay and not anything else, either. The big fear
is that if I pursue this need to examine whiteness too far, I risk losing
my place among gay white men, forever—and then where would I be?
254 allan bérubé

Pale, Male—and Antiracist

What would happen if we deliberately put together a white gay male
group whose sole purpose was to examine our whiteness and use it to
strengthen our antiracist gay activism?
In November 1995, gay historian John D’Emilio and I tried to do
just that. We organized a workshop at the annual Creating Change
conference of activists put on that year in Detroit by the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force. We called the workshop ‘‘Pale, Male—and
Anti-Racist.’’ At a conference of over 1,000 people (mostly white but
with a large number of people of color), about thirty-five gay white
men attended.≥π
We structured the workshop around three key questions: (1) How
have you successfully used your whiteness to fight racism? (2) What
di≈culties have you faced in doing antiracist activism as a gay white
man? And (3) what kind of support did you get or need or wished you
had received from other gay white men?
Before we could start talking about our successes, warning lights
began to flash. You could sense a high level of mistrust in the room, as
if we were looking at each other and wondering, ‘‘Which kind of white
guy are you?’’ One man wanted to make sure we weren’t going to
waste time congratulating ourselves for sharing our white privilege
with people who don’t have access to it or start whining about how
hard it is to work with communities of color. Someone else wanted to
make sure we weren’t going to guilt-trip each other. Another said,
‘‘I’m so much more aware of my failures in this area, I can’t even see
the accomplishments.’’
But slowly, once all the cautions were out in the open, the success
stories came out. About fighting an anti-a≈rmative action initiative.
About starting a racism study group. About getting a university de-
partment to study why it had no teaching assistants who were students
of color. About persuading a gay organization in Georgia to condemn
the state’s Confederate flag. ‘‘What keeps me from remembering,’’ I
wondered, ‘‘that gay white men publicly do this antiracist work? Why
can’t I keep their images in my mind?’’
One possible answer to my question appeared in the next success
story, which midway made a sharp turn away from our successes
toward how gay white men can discipline each other for standing on
 how gay stays white 255

the ‘‘wrong’’ side of the color line. A man from Texas, Dennis Poplin,
told us about what happened to him as the only white man on the
board of the San Antonio Lesbian and Gay Assembly (salga), a pro-
gressive, multiracial lesbian and gay alliance. When salga mobilized
support that successfully canceled a so-called gay community confer-
ence whose planning committee was all-white—this in a city that was
65 percent Latina/Latino—a ‘‘community scandal’’ exploded, as he put
it, ‘‘about political correctness, quotas, [and] reverse racism.’’ A local
newspaper, which was run by gay white men, started attacking salga.
When a white reporter asked a man of color from salga why the
group’s board had no white men on it, and he replied that Dennis was
on the board, the reporter said, ‘‘He’s not white.’’≥∫
Right away the men in the workshop started talking about the
di≈culties they’d had with other gay white men. ‘‘I find myself like not
even knowing who it’s safe to bring it up with,’’ one man said. When
he tries to talk about race, another said, ‘‘I’m just met with that smug,
flippant, ‘I’m tired of hearing about [all that].’ ’’ Others talked about
fears of being attacked as too ‘‘pc.’’
At the ‘‘risk of opening a whole can of worms,’’ as he put it, another
man moved the discussion away from us to our relationships with
white lesbians and people of color. Some men talked about how tired
they were of being called ‘‘gay white men,’’ feeling labeled then at-
tacked for who they were and for what they tried to do or for not doing
enough; about having to deal with their racism while they didn’t see
communities of color dealing with homophobia; and about how after
years of struggling they felt like giving up. Yet here they all were at this
workshop. I began to realize that all our frustrations were signs of a
dilemma that comes with the privileges of whiteness: having the abil-
ity to decide whether to keep dealing with the accusations, resent-
ments, racial categorizations, and other destructive e√ects of racism
that divide people who are trying to take away its power; or, because
the struggle is so hard, to walk away from it and do something else,
using the slack our whiteness gives us to take a break from racism’s
direct consequences.
Bringing this dilemma into the open enabled us to confront our
expectations about how the antiracist work we do should be appreci-
ated, should be satisfying, and should bring results. One man admit-
ted that he didn’t make antiracist work a higher priority because ‘‘I
256 allan bérubé

[would have to face] a level of discomfort, irritation, boredom, frustra-

tion, [and] enter a lot of [areas where] I feel inept, and don’t have
confidence. It would require a lot of humility. All these are things that
I steer away from.’’
Over and over the men at the workshop expressed similar feelings
of frustration, using such phrases as ‘‘We tried, but . . . ,’’ ‘‘No matter
what you do, you can’t seem to do anything right,’’ and ‘‘You just can’t
win.’’ These seemed to reflect a set of expectations that grew out of the
advantages we have because we are American men and white and
middle-class or even working-class—expectations that we can win, that
we should know how to do it right, that if we try we will succeed.
What do we—what do I—expect to get out of doing antiracist work,
anyway? If it’s because we expect to be able to fix the problem, then we’re
not going to be very satisfied. When I talk with my friend Lisa Kahaleole
Hall about these frustrations, she tells me, ‘‘Sweet pea, if racism were
that easy to fix, we would have fixed it already.’’ The challenge for me in
relation to other gay white men—and in writing this essay—is to figure
out how we can support each other in going exactly into those areas of
whiteness where we feel we have no competence yet, no expertise, no
ability to fix it, where we haven’t even come up with the words we need
to describe what we’re trying to do. For me, it’s an act of faith in the
paradox that if we, together with our friends and allies, can figure out
how our own whiteness works, we can use that knowledge to fight the
racism that gives our whiteness such unearned power.
And whenever this struggle gets too di≈cult, many of us, as white
men, have the option to give up in frustration and retreat into a more
narrowly defined gay rights activism. That project’s goal, according to
gay author Bruce Bawer, one of its advocates, is ‘‘to achieve acceptance,
equal rights, and full integration into the present social and political
structure.’’≥Ω It’s a goal that best serves the needs of men who can live
our gayness through our whiteness and whose only or most important
experience with discrimination is as homosexuals. James Baldwin,
who wrote extensively about whiteness in America, noticed long ago
the sense of entitlement embedded in a gay whiteness that experi-
ences no other form of systematic discrimination. ‘‘[Y]ou are penal-
ized, as it were, unjustly,’’ he said in an interview. ‘‘I think white gay
people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society
in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality
puts them in danger, unexpectedly.’’∂≠
 how gay stays white 257

The gay rights project that grows out of the shocking experience of
being cheated unexpectedly by society because one is gay defines the
gay political problem in its narrowest form. One solution is to get back
the respect one has learned to expect as a white man. Some prominent,
well-connected activists do this by educating the men who run our
nation’s powerful institutions, using reasoned arguments to combat
their homophobia and expose discrimination as irrational—a strategy
that sometimes does open doors but mostly to those who look and
behave like the men in power. I have heard some of these activists ex-
press a belief that less privileged members of the ‘‘gay community’’ will
eventually benefit from these high-level successes, but this would hap-
pen apparently without the more privileged having to do the work of
fighting hierarchies that enforce race, class, and gender inequality.
Their belief in a kind of ‘‘trickle-down’’ gay activism is based on the
idea that powerful men, once enlightened, will generously allow equal-
ity to flow from the top to those near the top and then automatically
trickle down to those down below. An alternative belief in ‘‘bottom-up
activism’’ is based on the idea that, with great e√ort, democratic power
must more slowly be built from the bottom up, and out, experimenting
with more equal power relations along the way by creating links of
solidarity across the divides of di√erence. Some gay white men ex-
plicitly reject, as nongay, this broader goal of joining activists who
stand and work at the intersections of the many struggles to achieve
social justice and to dismantle interlocking systems of domination. In
the narrow world of exclusively gay ‘‘integrationist’’ activism, which its
advocates privilege as the site of ‘‘practical’’ rather than ‘‘utopian’’ poli-
tics,∂∞ college-educated gay white men have a better chance of knowing
what to say and how to be heard, what to do and how to succeed within
existing institutions. Because, when antigay barriers and attitudes are
broken down but no other power relations are changed, we are the
ones most likely to achieve ‘‘full integration into the present social and
political structure.’’ All it takes sometimes is being the white man at
the white place at the white time.
When John and I asked the workshop participants our last ques-
tion—‘‘What would you need from each other to be able to continue
doing antiracist work?’’—the room went silent.
When push comes to shove, I wondered, holding back a sense of
isolation inside my own silence, do gay white men as white men (in-
cluding myself ) have a lasting interest in fighting racism or will we
258 allan bérubé

sooner or later retreat to the safety of our gay white refuges? I know
that gay white men as gay men, just to begin thinking about relying on
each other’s support in an ongoing struggle against racism, have to
confront how we’ve absorbed the antigay lies that we are all wealthy,
irresponsible, and sexually obsessed individuals who can’t make per-
sonal commitments, as well as the reality that we are profoundly ex-
hausted fighting for our lives and for those we love through years of
devastation from the aids epidemic. These challenges all make it hard
enough for me to trust my own long-term commitment to antiracist
work, let alone that of other gay white men.
Yet at this workshop we created the opportunity for us to see that we
were not alone, to risk saying and hearing what we needed from each
other in fighting racism, and to assess what support we could real-
istically hope to get. We wanted the opportunity to complain to an-
other gay white man, to be held and loved when we get discouraged or
feel attacked, whether justifiably or not. We wanted understanding for
all the frustrations we feel fighting racism, the chance just to let them
out with a gay white man who knows that it’s not our racism he’s
supporting but the desire to see it and together figure out what to do
next, so we won’t give up or run away. We wanted other gay white men
to take us seriously enough to call us on our racist shit in ways we
could actually hear without feeling attacked. And we wanted to help
each other lift at least some of the work and responsibility of support-
ing us from the shoulders of our friends and co-workers who are white
women or people of color.
As time ran out at the workshop, I asked everyone to think about
another di≈cult question: ‘‘Who is the gay white man who has had
more experience than you in supporting other gay white men who are
fighting racism, and who you can look to for advice on how to do it
well?’’ ‘‘I think the more interesting question,’’ one man answered, ‘‘is
how many of us don’t have anyone like that.’’ We looked around at
each other, wondering if any of us could name someone, until some-
body said, ‘‘It’s us.’’

Staying White
By trying to figure out what is happening with race in situations I’m
in, I’ve embarked on a journey that I now realize is not headed toward
 how gay stays white 259

innocence or winning or becoming not white or finally getting it right.

I don’t know where it leads, but I have some hopes and desires.
I want to find an antidote to the ways that whiteness numbs me,
makes me not see what is right in front of me, takes away my intel-
ligence, divides me from people I care about. I hope that, by occupying
the seeming contradictions between the ‘‘antiracist’’ and the ‘‘gay
white male’’ parts of myself, I can generate a creative tension that will
motivate me to keep fighting. I hope to help end the exclusionary
practices that make gay worlds stay so white. When I find myself in a
situation that is going to stay white, I want to play a role in deciding
what kind of white it’s going to stay. And I want to become less in-
vested in whiteness while staying white myself—always remembering
that I can’t just decide to stand outside of whiteness or exempt myself
from its unearned privileges.∂≤ I want to be careful not to avoid
its responsibilities by fleeing into narratives of how I have been op-
pressed as a gay man. The ways that I am gay will always be shaped by
the ways that I am white.
Most of all, I want never to forget that the roots of my antiracist
desires and my gay desires are intertwined. As James Baldwin’s words
remind me, acting on my gay desires is about not being afraid to love
and therefore about having to confront this white society’s terror of
love—a terror that lashes out with racist and antigay violence. Follow-
ing both my gay and antiracist desires is about being willing to ‘‘go the
way your blood beats,’’ as Baldwin put it, even into the heart of that
terror, which, he warned, is ‘‘a tremendous danger, a tremendous
responsibility.’’∂≥

Notes

This is an expanded version of a personal essay I presented at the Making

and Unmaking of Whiteness conference at the University of California at
Berkeley in April 1997. I want to acknowledge that my thinking has grown
out of conversations with many friends and colleagues, including Nan
Alamilla Boyd, Margaret Cerullo, John D’Emilio, Arthur Dong, Marla
Erlein, Je√rey Esco≈er, Charlie Fernandez, Dana Frank, Wayne Ho√man,
Amber Hollibaugh, Mitchell Karp, Jonathan Ned Katz, Judith Levine,
William J. Mann, David Meacham, Dennis Poplin, Susan Ra√o, Eric
Rofes, Gayle Rubin, Sabrina Sojourner, Barbara Smith, Nancy Stoller, Car-
260 allan bérubé

ole Vance, and Carmen Vasquez; the editors of this collection, especially
Matt Wray and Irene Nexica; the participants in the ‘‘Pale, Male—and Anti-
Racist’’ workshop at the 1995 Creating Change conference in Detroit; Lisa
Kahaleole Hall and the students I joined in her San Francisco City Col-
lege class on Lesbian and Gay Communities of Color; and the students in
the courses I taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Port-
land State University, Stanford University, and the New School for Social
Research.
1 ‘‘Caught in the Storm: aids and the Meaning of Natural Disaster,’’ Out/
Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly 1 (fall 1988), 8–19; ‘‘ ‘Fitting In’:
Expanding Queer Studies beyond the Closet and Coming Out,’’ paper pre-
sented at Contested Zone: Limitations and Possibilities of a Discourse on
Lesbian and Gay Studies, Pitzer College, 6–7 April 1990, and at the
Fourth Annual Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Conference, Harvard
University, 26–28 October 1990; ‘‘Intellectual Desire,’’ paper presented at
La Ville en rose: Le premier colloque Québécois d’études lesbienne et
gaies (First Quebec Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference), Concordia Uni-
versity and the University of Quebec at Montreal, 12 November 1992,
published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 1 (February
1996): 139–57, reprinted in Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write
about Class, ed. Susan Ra√o (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 43–66;
‘‘Class Dismissed: Queer Storytelling Across the Economic Divide,’’ key-
note address at the Constructing Queer Cultures: Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay
Studies Graduate Student Conference, Cornell University, 9 February
1995, and at the Seventeenth Gender Studies Symposium, Lewis and
Clark College, 12 March 1998; ‘‘I Coulda Been a Whiny White Guy,’’ Gay
Community News 20 (spring 1995): 6–7, 28–30; and ‘‘Sunset Trailer
Park,’’ in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and An-
nalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 15–39.
2 Dream Ships Sail Away (forthcoming, Houghton Mi∆in).
3 ‘‘ ‘Go the Way Your Blood Beats’: An Interview with James Baldwin
(1984),’’ Richard Goldstein, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, ed. Quincy
Troupe (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1989), 176.
4 Personal essays, often assembled in published collections, have become
an important written form for investigating how whiteness works, espe-
cially in individual lives. Personal essays by lesbian, gay, and bisexual
authors that have influenced my own thinking and writing about white-
ness have been collected in James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985); Cherríe Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); Cherríe Mor-
aga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Audre Lorde,
 how gay stays white 261

Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984); Elly Bulkin, Minnie
Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspec-
tives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984);
Essex Hemphill, ed., Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men
(Boston: Alyson, 1991); Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston:
South End Press, 1994); Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class
and Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1994); and Becky Thompson and
Sangeeta Tyagi, eds., Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Iden-
tity (New York: Routledge, 1996).
5 For discussion of how sexual identities are ‘‘lived through race and class,’’
see Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Dysfunktional! (Boston: Beacon, 1997),
114.
6 Whiteness can grant economic advantages to gay as well as straight men,
and gay male couples can sometimes earn more on two men’s incomes
than can straight couples or lesbian couples. But being gay can restrict a
man to lower-paying jobs, and most gay white men are not wealthy; like
the larger male population, they are lower-middle-class, working-class, or
poor. For discussions of the di≈culties of developing an accurate eco-
nomic profile of the ‘‘gay community,’’ and of how both the religious right
and gay marketers promote the idea that gay men are wealthy, see Amy
Gluckman and Betsy Reed, eds., Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community,
and Lesbian and Gay Life (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7 David Mixner, Stranger among Friends (New York: Bantam, 1996), 291. For
accounts of how the Campaign for Military Service was formed, see Mix-
ner’s memoir and Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of
Lesbian and Gay Equality (New York: Anchor, 1995). Preceding the ad hoc
formation of the Campaign for Military Service in January 1993 was the
Military Freedom Project, formed in early 1989 by a group composed
primarily of white feminist lesbians. Overshadowed during the Senate
hearings by the predominantly male Campaign for Military Service, these
activists had raised issues relating the military’s antigay policy to gender,
race, and class; specifically, that lesbians are discharged at a higher rate
than are gay men; that lesbian-baiting is a form of sexual harassment
against women; and that African American and Latino citizens, including
those who are gay, bisexual, or lesbian, are disproportionately represented
in the military, which o√ers poor and working-class youth access to a job,
education, and health care that are often unavailable to them elsewhere.
Vaid, Virtual Equality, 153–59.
8 ‘‘The Race Analogy: Fact Sheet comparing the Military’s Policy of Racial
Segregation in the 1940s to the Current Ban on Lesbians, Gay Men and
Bisexuals,’’ in Briefing Book, prepared by the Legal/Policy Department of
the Campaign for Military Service, Washington, D.C. (1993).
262 allan bérubé

9 Quoted from the Legal Times, 8 February 1993, in Mixner, Stranger among
Friends, 286. Professor of history and civil rights veteran Roger Wilkins,
responding to Powell’s statement, argued that ‘‘Lots of white people don’t
think that being black is benign even in 1993.’’ Mixner, Stranger among
Friends, 286.
10 Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘‘Blacklash?’’ New Yorker, 17 May 1993.
11 For brief discussions of how the whiteness of those making the race anal-
ogy reduced the power of their arguments, see Gates, ‘‘Blacklash?’’ and
David Rayside, On the Fringe: Gays and Lesbians in Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1998), 243.
12 Mixner, Stranger among Friends, 319.
13 The gay service members on this panel were former Sta√ Sgt. Thomas
Pannicia, Sgt. Justin Elzie, and Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer. Mar-
garethe Cammermeyer, with Chris Fisher, Serving in Silence (New York:
Penguin, 1994), 299. Other former gay service members who testified at
the hearings were Sgt. Tracy Thorne and PO Keith Meinhold. Active-duty
lesbian, gay, or bisexual service members could not testify without being
discharged from the military as homosexuals, a situation that still exists
under the current ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ military policy.
14 Mary Dunlap, ‘‘Reminiscences: Honoring Our Legal Hero, Gay Sgt. Perry
Watkins 1949–1996,’’ Gay Community News (winter 1996): 21.
15 In his memoir, Stranger among Friends, Mixner makes no mention of
Watkins.
16 Author’s personal conversation with Sabrina Sojourner, 19 October 1998.
17 An expert witness who was white, male, and not a gay historian was
allowed to introduce a brief written synopsis of historical evidence from
my book.
I was one of the white men working with the cms behind the scenes and
from afar. Early in the hearings, Senator Edward Kennedy’s sta√ asked me
to compile a list of questions for him to ask during the hearings. In July,
after the hearings were over and the ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy had been
adopted, I submitted to the House Armed Services Committee written
testimony, titled ‘‘Historical Overview of the Origins of the Military’s Ban
on Homosexuals,’’ that critiqued the new policy and identified heterosex-
ual masculinity, rather than the competence or behavior of homosexual
service members, as the military problem requiring investigation. And I
sent the cms a copy of a paper I had given in April, ‘‘Stripping Down:
Undressing the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy,’’ that used historical docu-
ments and feminist analysis to argue for investigating the military’s crisis
in heterosexual masculinity. In all these writings, I was trying, unsuc-
cessfully, to get the cms and the Senate to adopt a gender and sexuality
analysis of the military policy; I used race and class analysis only to argue
 how gay stays white 263

that the antigay policies disproportionately a√ected service members who

were people of color and/or working-class.
18 After Watkins’s death in 1996 from complications due to hiv, Mary Dun-
lap, a white civil rights attorney who for years had followed his appeal case,
in a tribute addressed to him, called him a ‘‘generous, tireless leader’’ who
expressed ‘‘open and emphatic criticism and unabashed indictment of the
racism of those among us who so blatantly and hurtfully excluded your
voice and face and words from the publicity surrounding the gaylesbitrans
community’s challenge to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in the early 90s.’’ Dun-
lap, ‘‘Reminiscences,’’ 21.
19 Shamara Riley, ‘‘Perry Watkins, 1948–1996: A Military Trailblazer,’’ Out-
lines, 8 May 1996.
20 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 60, 65; Mary Ann Humphrey, My Country,
My Right to Serve (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 248–57. Statistics are
from D. Michael Shafer, ‘‘The Vietnam-Era Draft: Who Went, Who Didn’t,
and Why It Matters,’’ in The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American
Imagination, ed. D. Michael Shafer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 69.
21 Humphrey, My Country, 255–56.
22 Ibid.
23 Dunlap, ‘‘Reminiscences’’; Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 155–56; Hum-
phrey, My Country, 253–54.
24 A 1996 documentary film, ‘‘Sis: The Perry Watkins Story,’’ was co-
produced by Chiqui Cartagena and Suzanne Newman. On the ‘‘20/20’’
segment and a feature film on Watkins that was in preproduction, see
Jim Knippenberg, ‘‘Gay Soldier Story to Be Filmed,’’ Cincinnati Enquirer,
23 December 1997.
25 Rayside, On the Fringe, 243.
26 Keith Boykin, One More River to Cross: Black and Gay In America (New
York: Anchor, 1996), 186–92.
27 Mixner, Stranger among Friends, 301–2, 308–10.
28 Garland Tillery, ‘‘Interview with Top Gun Pilot Tracy Thorne,’’ Our Own,
18 May 1993.
29 Quoted from the documentary film ‘‘All God’s Children,’’ produced by
Dee Mosbacher, Frances Reid, and Sylvia Rhue (Women Vision, 1996). I
wish to thank Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Stephanie Smith, and Linda Alban for
directing me to this quotation.
30 One way to measure how much moral authority the race analogy tries to
take from the civil rights movement and transfuse it into a predominantly
white gay movement is to see what moral authority remains when the race
analogy is removed. David Mixner would be the David Mixner of the gay
movement, the military’s antigay policy would be a form of antigay bigotry,
264 allan bérubé

and Sam Nunn would be ‘‘our’’ Sam Nunn. Or, to reverse the terms, other
movements for social change would try to gain moral authority by using a
‘‘gay analogy,’’ declaring that their movement was ‘‘like’’ the gay move-
ment. These moves do not seem to carry the moral weight of the race
analogy.
31 Quoted from Justice Blackmun’s dissenting opinion in the U.S. Supreme
Court’s 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision. ‘‘Blackmun’s Opinions Reflect
His Evolution over the 24 Court Years,’’ New York Times, 5 March 1999. I
wish to thank Lisa Kahaleole Hall for the conversation we had on 24 Oc-
tober 1998, out of which emerged the ideas in this essay about how the
civil rights movement analogy works and is used as a strategy for gaining
unearned moral authority, although I am responsible for how they are
presented here.
32 ‘‘Stonewall 25,’’ The Charlie Rose Show, Public Broadcasting System,
24 June 1994. I wish to thank Barbara Smith for lending me her videotape
copy of this program.
33 For Fundi’s reports on this panel and the entire conference, see ‘‘Out/
Write ’90 Report, Part I: Writers Urged to Examine Their Roles, Save
Their Lives,’’ San Diego GLN, 16 March 1990, 7; ‘‘Out/Write Report, Part
II: Ringing Voices,’’ San Diego GLN, 23 March 1990, 7, 9; and ‘‘Out/Write
Report, Part III: Arenas of Interaction,’’ San Diego GLN, 30 March 1990,
7, 9.
34 Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall, ‘‘Bitches in Solitude: Identity Politics and Les-
bian Community,’’ in Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, ed.
Arlene Stein (New York: Plume, 1993), 223, and in personal conversation.
35 Fundi, ‘‘Out/Write Report, Part III,’’ 7, 9.
36 I wish to thank Mitchell Karp for the long dinner conversation we had in
1996 in New York City during which we jointly forged the ideas and
questions in this paragraph.
37 I have transcribed the quotations that follow from an audio tape of the
workshop discussion.
38 I wish to thank Dennis Poplin for allowing me to use his name and tell this
story.
39 Bruce Bawer, ‘‘Utopian Erotics,’’ Lambda Book Report 7 (October 1998):
19–20.
40 Goldstein, ‘‘Go the Way,’’ 180.
41 Bawer, ‘‘Utopian Erotics,’’ 19–20.
42 I wish to thank Amber Hollibaugh for introducing me to this idea of
‘‘staying white’’ during a conversation about how a white person can be
tempted to distance oneself from whiteness and escape the guilt of its
privileges by identifying as a person of color. I was introduced to the idea
that white privilege is unearned and di≈cult to escape at a workshop called
 how gay stays white 265

White Privilege conducted by Jona Olssen at the 1995 Black Nations/

Queer Nations Conference, sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies at the City University of New York. See also Peggy McIntosh,
‘‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,’’ Peace and Freedom
(July/August 1989): 10–12.
43 Goldstein, ‘‘Go the Way,’’ 177.
 Michael Omi

(E)racism: Emerging Practices

of Antiracist Organizations

Whiteness and Antiracism

The recent dramatic flurry of intellectual activities involving white-
ness studies, and their coverage in popular media, disturbs Michael
Eric Dyson. He fears that issues regarding racial representation and
politics are being recentered on whites: ‘‘There’s a suspicion among
African-Americans that whiteness studies is a sneaky form of narcis-
sism. At the very moment when African-American studies and Asian-
American studies and so on are really coming into their own, you have
whiteness studies shifting the focus and maybe the resources back to
white people and their perspective.’’∞
The highlighting of whiteness has important consequences for
antiracist projects as well. Alastair Bonnett argues that whiteness has
become ‘‘both the conceptual centre and the ‘other’ of anti-racism; the
defining, normative term of anti-racist praxis and theory.’’≤ Bonnett
critiques what he calls the ‘‘reification of whiteness’’ within antiracist
discourse and practice. White is often treated as a fixed, objective, and
ahistorical category rather than a mutable social construction. Such a
perspective, he argues, ‘‘enables white people to occupy a privileged
location in anti-racist debate; they are allowed the luxury of being
passive observers, of being altruistically motivated, of knowing that
‘their’ ‘racial’ identity might be reviled and lambasted but never actu-
ally made slippery, torn open, or indeed, abolished.’’≥
To be fair, a number of projects are explicitly concerned with de-
constructing or even ‘‘abolishing’’ whiteness.∂ But the focus often re-
mains on how whites can ‘‘unlearn’’ racism, reject the trappings of
 (e)racism 267

white racial privilege, and challenge the ideology of white supremacy.

While much attention is paid to how whites can divest themselves of
racial prejudices and engage in significant antiracist work, the strug-
gles of people of color in challenging racism often remain in the
shadows.
Our conceptual understanding of precisely who is the subject and
object of antiracist activity is clouded by a rigid, binary understanding
of race. The dominant paradigm of black/white relations (or an ex-
panded notion of white/nonwhite relations) tends to ignore the com-
plexity of racial politics in the contemporary period and limit the types
of antiracist activities that can be imagined and realized. Yes, white
racism is the dominant, hegemonic reality. But this structures rela-
tions between, and among, people of color in often enigmatic ways.
This nation’s historical experience cannot be interpreted, as some
liberal multicultural narratives suggest, as distinct, isolated, and au-
tonomous groups of color confronting a core white center. As George
Lipsitz perceptively notes, ‘‘All racial identities are relational; commu-
nities of color are mutually constitutive of one another, not just com-
petitive or cooperative.’’∑
This is one of the themes I attempt to explore in this essay. It is
based on a larger study of how people think about and engage in
antiracist work. I am currently completing a project that examines
how di√erent organizations, mostly community-based groups, con-
ceptualize contemporary racism and develop a strategic challenge to it
based on that understanding.
It is particularly important to understand and evaluate current anti-
racist interventions given that we exist in a period where everyone
across the political spectrum (with the exception of self-proclaimed
white supremacists) claims to be ‘‘antiracist.’’ That said, contemporary
discourse is littered with confused and contradictory meanings re-
garding racism and antiracism. Bob Blauner has noted that in class-
room discussions of racism white and nonwhite students tend to talk
past one another.∏ Whites tend to locate racism in color consciousness
and find its absence in color-blindness. In so doing, they see the
a≈rmation of di√erence and racial identity among racially defined
minority students as racist. Nonwhite students, by contrast, see rac-
ism as a system of power and correspondingly argue that blacks, for
example, cannot be racist because they lack power. Blauner concludes
268 michael omi

that there are two ‘‘languages’’ of race, one in which members of racial
minorities, especially blacks, see the centrality of race in history and
everyday experience, and another in which whites see race as ‘‘a pe-
ripheral, nonessential reality.’’
The classroom, in this instance, serves as microcosm for dialogues
occurring in the broader social formation. Many whites believe that
the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, that we are
now a ‘‘color-blind’’ society, and that we all need to ‘‘get beyond race.’’
A lingering race consciousness, from such a perspective, only serves
to create racial divisions and demonize whites as oppressors of people
of color.
Such an understanding has profoundly a√ected the discourse of
‘‘minority rights.’’ The notion of ‘‘color-blindness’’ has been strate-
gically appropriated by conservatives seeking to dismantle the social
policies designed to mitigate racial inequality. ‘‘Civil rights’’ initiatives
and court cases are now more likely to involve issues of discrimination
against whites, calling into question so-called ‘‘preferential policies’’
and claiming that it is whites, particularly white males, who are in-
creasingly the victims of racism and racist practices. Challenges by
whites are not framed, however, by explicit appeals for the mainte-
nance of white skin privilege. Indeed, ‘‘whiteness’’ dares not speak its
name. The discourse of ‘‘color-blindness’’ provides a way to preserve
privilege, while disavowing explicit racial appeals.
In this transformed political landscape, traditional civil rights orga-
nizations have experienced a profound crisis of mission, political
values, and strategic orientation. There is a pressing need to both
challenge the political right’s appropriation of civil rights discourse
and, at the same time, to rethink the capacity of state institutions to
deal with persistent forms of racial inequality. Interesting trends have
emerged in response. The traditional heavy reliance on state interven-
tion is now tempered with calls for ‘‘self-help’’ and appeals for private
support for tackling problems of crime, unemployment, and drug
abuse. Integrationist versus ‘‘separate but equal’’ remedies for per-
sistent racial disparities have been revisited in a new light. The civil
rights establishment increasingly confronts a puzzling dilemma—
formal, legal equality has been significantly achieved, but substantive
racial inequality remains and in many cases, has deepened. Given this,
what would constitute an e√ective antiracist strategy and practice?
 (e)racism 269

Concepts of Race and Racism

Part of the di≈culty in sorting out what constitutes a genuine and
e√ective antiracist intervention lies in the conceptual language of race
and racism that we employ. Angela Davis says that she has become
convinced that the category of race is ‘‘so laden with contradictions
that it no longer works in the way it used to, at least within the context
of radical theories and practices.’’π The concept of race in social sci-
ence research has been subject to challenges from a number of dif-
ferent positions. Partially in response to the President’s Initiative on
Race, the American Anthropological Association engaged in a vig-
orous debate regarding whether the concept of race retains any mean-
ing at all as an analytic category when biological definitions have been
so thoroughly discredited.∫ In politics, the use of the ‘‘race card’’ has
been roundly criticized from distinctive political positions. In critical
assessments of the weakness of the American left, identity-based so-
cial movements have been accused of ‘‘essentializing race’’ and sub-
verting the advancement of a universal political subject and unified
political movement.Ω
The concept of race is problematic, but Davis has an important point
to make with respect to the issues raised. ‘‘That ‘race’ no longer works
as a focus of resistance organizing,’’ she asserts, ‘‘does not mean that
racism has become obsolete and that we should discard it as a con-
cept.’’∞≠ Unfortunately, much like race, the term ‘‘racism’’ is also under
critical scrutiny for its conceptual validity and analytic legitimacy. Some
scholars and policy makers suggest that the term itself is subject to so
many varied meanings as to render the concept useless. Some have
proclaimed the ‘‘end of racism,’’ while condoning forms of ‘‘rational
discrimination.’’∞∞ In 1998 John Bunzel, a former member of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights and current senior research fellow at
Stanford’s Hoover Institution, argued in a newspaper op-ed piece that
the President’s Advisory Board on Race should call for a halt to the use
of such terms as ‘‘racism’’ and ‘‘racist’’ since they are ‘‘wielded as
accusations and smear words.’’∞≤ Bunzel argues that evoking the term
‘‘racism’’ often breeds ‘‘bitterness and polarization, not a spirit of prag-
matic reasonableness in confronting our di≈cult problems.’’
In academic and policy circles, the question of who or what is racist
continues to haunt discussions. Prior to World War II, the term ‘‘rac-
270 michael omi

ism’’ was not commonly used in public discourse or in the social

science literature in the United States.∞≥ The term was originally used
to characterize the ideology of white supremacy that was buttressed by
biologically based theories of superiority/inferiority. In the 1950s and
1960s the emphasis of studies shifted to explore individual expres-
sions of prejudice and discrimination.∞∂ The rise of the black power
movement in the 1960s and 1970s fostered a redefinition of racism
that focused on its institutional nature.∞∑
More recent intellectual trends center on the often implicit and
unconscious structures of racial privilege and racial representation in
daily life and popular culture. All this suggests that more precise
terms are needed to examine racial consciousness, institutional bias,
inequality, patterns of segregation, and the distribution of power. Rac-
ism is expressed di√erently at di√erent levels and sites of social ac-
tivity, and we need to be attentive to its shifting meaning in di√erent
contexts. As David Goldberg has stated, ‘‘[T]he presumption of a sin-
gle monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of the multi-
farious historical formulations of racisms.’’∞∏
In Racial Formation in the United States, Howard Winant and I
define racism through our concept of ‘‘racial projects.’’ A racial proj-
ect, from our perspective, is simultaneously an interpretation, rep-
resentation, or explanation of racial dynamics and an e√ort to re-
organize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.∞π
Employing this notion, a racial project can be said to be racist if it
creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist
categories of race.∞∫
Racial projects can, of course, be framed and initiated to challenge
prevailing forms of discriminatory practices, inequitable social pol-
icies, and racist beliefs. In an attempt to map the landscape of anti-
racist interventions, a survey of groups engaged in antiracist work was
conducted to examine how di√erent organizations understand racism
and develop a strategic challenge to it based on that understanding.
Over 200 groups nationwide responded to a brief written survey, and
in-depth case studies were done on six organizations located in New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle, and a regionally based
group in the South.∞Ω The following section provides a general over-
view of the study and highlights some core themes that emerged
from it.
 (e)racism 271

Antiracist Organizations
The organizations profiled in the in-depth case studies illustrate a
compelling range of interpretations of what racism is in the current
period, how racism finds expression in di√erent institutional sites,
and the types of activities that can be organized to confront and con-
test it. There are common themes and points of convergence among
these groups—and there are fundamental di√erences between them
with respect to ideology, organization, and practice. These groups tar-
get di√erent constituencies, and engage the state and civil society in
di√erent ways. The groups can be seen as distinctive racial projects.
— The Dismantling Racism Program of the National Conference in
St. Louis relies on a key-actors strategy to bring about social
change. Organizing dialogue workshops, the group seeks to in-
fluence the racial consciousness of influential religious, corpo-
rate, and community leaders. Individual actors, ‘‘change agents,’’
would presumably influence their respective institutional setting
and contribute to broader initiatives to improve race relations in
the city of St. Louis.
— The Anti-Racism Institute of Clergy and Laity Concerned in
Chicago conducts antiracist training and consulting for pa-
rochial schools, church organizations, and grassroots neigh-
borhood groups. Its e√orts are directed toward education and
consciousness-raising in specific community settings. A signifi-
cant accomplishment of the institute was to facilitate the racial
integration of Evergreen Park, a previously all-white suburb of
Chicago. In cooperation with local church leaders, the institute
developed a strategy to prevent ‘‘white flight’’ and encourage
white families to welcome black families into the community.
— The Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment (nwc)
based in Seattle provides assistance to local communities in a six-
state region (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington,
and Wyoming) to challenge expressions of organized bigotry.
The nwc exposes the ideology and politics of white supremacy
and the attempts of far right extremists to enter the mainstream
of local party politics. In di√erent states, the organization has
helped to organize coalitions to lobby for hate crime legislation.
272 michael omi

— The Southern Empowerment Project (sep) operates in Ten-

nessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Car-
olina. It is an intermediary organization that conducts antiracist
training for a network of community-based organizations. The
sep seeks to make an intervention in the patterns of race in the
South by influencing the agenda, consciousness, and composi-
tion of its nine member organizations. At a six-week summer
organizer school, sep sta√ teach direct-action community orga-
nizing with an explicit focus on antiracist issues. The sep has
significantly helped all-white member organizations to diversify
their sta√ and confront the racial dimensions of the on-going
work they engage in.
— The Labor/Community Strategy Center (l / csc) challenges cor-
porate power and the state in an e√ort to reallocate and redistrib-
ute public resources. Explicitly anticapitalist in orientation, the
l / csc has challenged the environmental and mass transporta-
tion policies and practices that have inequitably a√ected people
of color in the greater Los Angeles area. The center’s most re-
cent accomplishment was the formation of a multiracial Bus
Riders Union that won a multimillion-dollar settlement from
the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority to improve bus
service for poor communities of color. The center framed its suit
as a ‘‘civil rights’’ issue, noting the racial disparities in bus and
rail service to various communities in the greater Los Angeles
area.
— The Committee against Anti-Asian Violence (caaav) organizes
Asian immigrants who are economically and politically vulner-
able and marginalized. Many of the occupations (for example,
taxi drivers, prostitutes, street vendors) are policed and/or regu-
lated by the state, and workers live with the constant threat of
state violence hovering over them. The caaav’s intent in this
setting is to develop e√ective organizer training and worker-
based mobilization. More will be said about the caaav later.
The racial projects these groups articulate, develop, and put forth
can be seen as responses to, and creative engagements with, the pre-
vailing patterns of racial inequality and conflict. There is a vast spec-
trum of ideologies and structures that constitute what racism is—they
encompass individual acts of prejudice, organized expressions of big-
 (e)racism 273

otry, institutional patterns of inequality in the United States, and

global racial conflict. Each organization deals with racism in a specific
locale and institutional setting. Each organizes its activities to confront
particular manifestations of racist practice. In doing so, they help to
redefine our understanding of racism and suggest what antiracist
interventions are possible at the present historical moment.
Several broad themes/categories for comparison emerge from the
study. The vision and practice of these groups provoke a (re)consider-
ation of (1) our understanding of racism; (2) how racism articulates
with other axes of stratification; (3) the forms of antiracist engage-
ment; (4) the impact of global and domestic economic change on race
and racism; (5) the relationship of antiracist groups to the state; and
(6) the impact of the nation’s changing demography and its meaning
for antiracist work.

the nature of racism

All the groups surveyed view racism not simply as a matter of attitudes
and individual prejudices but as an institutional phenomenon. Rac-
ism is seen as an ideology and practice that creates, reproduces, and
maintains inequitable outcomes along racial lines. That said, there are
substantial di√erences between the groups regarding (1) how they
envision and characterize the specific nature of racism in the present
period; (2) how they articulate the connection between racism and
other forms of stratification; and (3) how they define the most e√ective
ways to engage in antiracist activity.
Specific understandings of racism inform the practice of particular
groups. The Dismantling Racism Program in St. Louis examines pat-
terns of racial inequality with respect to jobs, housing, and access to
resources at the local level, and argues that structural changes are
possible by helping key actors recognize and confront racist attitudes
and practices. By contrast, the Labor/Community Strategy Center in
Los Angeles sees racism rooted in the class structure of society and
directly confronts corporate power and the distribution of public capi-
tal. The Southern Empowerment Project is attentive to the di√erential
impact of racism and seeks to diversify all-white organizations, while
simultaneously supporting the formation and development of all-
black organizations.
All the groups surveyed believe that racism, both ideologically and
structurally, has changed or is changing. Things are getting worse
274 michael omi

from the Northwest Coalition’s perspective. Organized bigotry has

evolved as individuals and groups mute explicitly racist appeals in
favor of more coded ideological themes. The results have been the
mainstreaming of far right ideology, growing popular acceptance of its
political themes, and increasing electoral gains by the right.
Many of the groups believe that the right has captured the moral
high ground by arguing for ‘‘color-blind’’ policies, calling for an end to
federal intervention in racial matters, and urging that we ‘‘get beyond’’
race. What is left intact and unexamined are the existing racial in-
equalities that plague various institutional sites in our society. These
enduring disparities are emphasized in many of the analyses of these
antiracist groups. In a di≈cult political context, they attempt to edu-
cate their constituencies and inform the broader public about the
continuing significance of racial inequality and what can be done to
mitigate it.

articulations
All the groups see race as articulating with other axes of stratifica-
tion and di√erence such as class and gender. An important segment of
the sep’s training workshop discusses the relationship between vari-
ous ‘‘-isms’’ based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. The
nwc has expanded its original mission to deal with all forms of ‘‘orga-
nized bigotry’’ and malicious harassment. Recently, for example, the
nwc has organized against violence directed toward gays and les-
bians. The caaav’s Women Workers Project centers on the unique
forms of gender, race, and class oppression that Asian immigrant
prostitutes encounter from their employers, clients, and respective
Asian ethnic communities.
While acknowledging the connections, groups debate the emphasis
that is placed on various forms of inequality. The sep training deals
with di√erent ‘‘-isms,’’ but more time is spent on racism, which is
highlighted in the curriculum as the most significant social division.
Di√erences are present on the nwc’s board of directors with respect
to the time, energy, and resources the group will commit to challeng-
ing anti-Semitism and anti–gay/lesbian initiatives (read, in part, as
‘‘white’’ issues) as opposed to racist acts directed at people of color. The
point is that di√erent groups negotiate the connection between various
forms of oppression in a distinctive manner, one that is shaped by the
evolving ideology of the organization and types of issues they confront.
 (e)racism 275

antiracist intervention
With respect to antiracist engagement, two broad strategic orienta-
tions emerge. Some groups focus on transforming the racial attitudes
of individuals and groups in hopes of a√ecting institutional change.
This is particularly true of organizations that have principally white
constituencies. The hope is that, in raising consciousness about race
and racial issues, the ‘‘invisible’’ aspects of white racial privilege will be
made explicit and visible and that whites will then strive to change the
racial environment of the settings they work in. The Dismantling
Racism Program, for example, trains people to facilitate community
workshops and develop workplace dialogue groups. The goal is for
‘‘change agents’’ to influence the practices of their respective organi-
zations in order to bring about a lessening of racial inequality and
conflict.
Other groups emphasize direct challenges to institutions in order
to disrupt the patterns of racial inequality and facilitate institutional
change. The Labor/Community Strategy Center, for example, directly
confronts institutional authority and power in hopes of redistributing
resources and improving the lives of people of color. To this end, the
self-proclaimed ‘‘think/act tank’’ has conducted extensive research on
the disadvantages that plague communities of color and has utilized
these findings to force significant changes in public policy with re-
spect to air quality, toxic management, and mass transportation.

the impact of global and domestic economic change

All the groups are attentive, in varying degrees, to the impact of global
and domestic economic transformation on the nature of racism. These
changes correspondingly establish the terrain and shape the possibili-
ties for challenging racism. From the caaav’s perspective, the global-
ization of the economy and domestic restructuring have created the
demand for immigrant labor in the United States and profoundly
shaped the social experiences of immigrant workers. In filling specific
niches in the labor market, Asian immigrant workers, for example, are
subject to exploitation and violence. From this perspective, anti-Asian
racism is endemic to the vulnerable location of these workers.
The l / csc sees racism as intimately connected to the dramatic
growth of corporate power, its ability to shape the public agenda, and
the resulting inequitable distribution of resources. Several campaigns
have focused on issues of environmental racism and the lack of access
276 michael omi

to public services. Organizing e√orts have emphasized a critique of

the ability of capital to dictate the ‘‘public good’’ and the importance
of challenging abuses that flow from the concentration of economic
power.
The nwc believes that expressions of organized bigotry are rooted
in the growing economic displacements that plague white rural com-
munities in the Northwest. The group’s recent public education e√orts
attempt to reach ‘‘economically insecure’’ whites who the nwc believes
are susceptible to far right/white supremacist ideology. The nwc
seeks to convince this population that their problems reside in broader
economic changes, not in the increased presence of people of color or
in a global Jewish conspiracy. In a similar manner, the Anti-Racism
Institute’s defense of a≈rmative action asks white men to blame their
economic woes on the state of the economy and not on competition
from people of color. In both these cases, the category of class is evoked
to subvert a racial reading of the problems whites encounter.
While other organizations provide a more explicit race-based un-
derstanding of pressing social issues, all the groups see the changing
economy as a crucial factor shaping the contemporary nature of race
and racism. Economic transformations (such as capital flight, the
changing labor market and its requirements) exacerbate racial prob-
lems, and many of the groups surveyed see economic processes un-
derlying the racial issues they confront. Given this, nearly all the
groups attempt to subvert or undermine the ‘‘racialization’’ of politi-
cal, economic, and social issues. They challenge simplistic racial read-
ings of troubles in the white popular imagination and discourse.

the relationship of antiracist groups to the state

The groups surveyed in this study reveal an interesting dynamic with
respect to their relationship to the state—that is, local, state, and fed-
eral governments and the attendant bureaucracies. The nwc, for ex-
ample, views its connection to, and interaction with, governmental
authorities as a key element of its work. Its board of directors includes
gubernatorial appointees, law enforcement o≈cers, and federal o≈-
cials. Part of the nwc’s charge is in helping law enforcement o≈cers
monitor and enforce malicious-harassment laws. The group also lob-
bies for more stringent hate crime legislation and urges public o≈-
cials to denounce acts of bigotry.
Other groups have taken a more adversarial role with respect to the
 (e)racism 277

state. The l / csc, for example, has pressured the Los Angeles Air
Quality Management District to regulate corporate pollution and chal-
lenged the Metropolitan Transit Authority regarding the allocation of
public capital.
Several of the groups, by contrast, have little or no direct connec-
tion to the state and state activity. The dialogue groups initiated in St.
Louis get conversations about race going, increase racial awareness,
and strive to a√ect the quality of civic life and public engagement. For
these groups, the emphasis is neither on assisting state institutions
nor on making demands on them.
The point is that contemporary antiracist organizing has a varied
relationship to the state. In most instances, the organizing does not
rely on access to the state and state resources but takes place, instead,
‘‘outside’’ of the terrain of state institutions. Organizations may call
upon the state to enact legislation (such as the nwc’s lobbying for hate
crime laws) and enforce existing regulations (for example, the l / csc’s
fight against corporate air polluters), but most do not seek to funda-
mentally transform state activity with respect to race.

changing demography and multiracial coalitions

All the groups express reservations about the dominant black/white
paradigm of race relations. The changing demographic makeup of the
nation is evident to all these groups—even those that are located in
regions where the influx and growth of Latinos and Asian Americans,
among others, have not been dramatic. Though the Northwest is pre-
dominantly white, the Northwest Coalition has involved Asian Ameri-
can and Latino groups, as well as ones that are black and American
Indian, in its organization and activities since its inception. Operating
in deeply segregated cities, both Chicago’s Anti-Racism Institute and
St. Louis’s Dismantling Racism Program have emphasized the impor-
tance of multiracial training.
But while all the groups acknowledge the importance of building
multiracial coalitions, some have been more successful in pursuing
this move than others. The sep recognizes the increasing presence
of poor and low-wage-earning Latino immigrants in the South, but
works within a black/white organizing network where specifically La-
tino issues and initiatives have not been considered or taken up.
The Committee against Anti-Asian Violence is unique in this field
of organizations surveyed since its focus is on Asian immigrant com-
278 michael omi

munities. Such an emphasis is a response to the economic/political

vulnerability and marginality of these communities with respect to the
broader patterns of race relations. What the caaav’s work reveals,
from another perspective, is the incredible heterogeneity within pre-
sumed homogeneous and monolithic racial groups. This prompts us
to question the very categories we use in our work. Multicultural
organizing involves, it would seem, interrogating di√erences within
groups we monolithically treat and regard as Asian American, Latino,
black, and so on.
An important di√erence among the organizations that were pro-
filed is the issue of who is brought together by their respective ini-
tiatives. The Dismantling Racism program, for example, principally
facilitates white-on-white dialogues. The sep’s training focuses on
white/black interactions, while the l / csc’s Bus Riders’ Union was
self-consciously a multiracial project. As the changing racial composi-
tion of the nation becomes more evident in di√erent geographic lo-
cales, issues about engaging diverse groups and forging multiracial
coalitions will become more pronounced and urgent.≤≠
The next section provides a more detailed discussion of one of the
groups surveyed—the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. The
caaav provides a compelling illustration of how racism is (re)defined
and the ways in which it is strategically challenged. The influx of Asian
immigrants to the United States over the past several decades has
been dramatic and has had an impact on the organization of the
economy. Many immigrants have been channeled into specific sectors
of the labor market where the state takes a visible role in policing their
activity. The caaav seeks to organize among immigrant workers and
in so doing o√ers an expansive notion of racial violence.

Racism as Hate
David Theo Goldberg makes the point that in the last decade or so,
racism has been popularly conceived of as hate.≤∞ The category of ‘‘hate
crimes’’ has been introduced in many states as a specific o√ense with
enhanced sentencing consequences. Many colleges and universities
have instituted ‘‘hate speech’’ codes to regulate expression and be-
havior both inside and outside the classroom. In 1998 Richard Ma-
chado, who sent e-mail messages to fifty-nine Asian American stu-
dents and sta√ at the University of California at Irvine vowing to ‘‘find
 (e)racism 279

and kill every one of you personally,’’ became the first person in this
country to be convicted of a federal hate crime committed in cyber-
space. The imposition of such regulations and codes can be seen as a
response to the dramatic increase in acts of racist violence. The hor-
rifying murder of James Byrd Jr., the forty-nine-year-old black man
who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in 1998, is but
one recent example.
The reduction of racism to hate, however, both conceptually and
politically limits our understanding of racism and the ways we can
challenge it. Racism has been silently transformed in the popular
consciousness into acts that are abnormal, unusual, and irrational.
Missing from all this are the ideologies and practices in a variety
of sites in the social formation that reproduce racial inequality and
domination.
Seen from this perspective, expressions of ‘‘hate’’ are an easy target.
Goldberg argues that it is much more di≈cult to criminalize or other-
wise to regulate racist expressions of power, not least because relations
of power are so normalized and constitute ‘‘common threads of the
fabric of our social formation.’’≤≤ How can a more expansive concept
of racial violence be framed—one that seriously interrogates relations
of power in our social formation? The work of the Committee Against
Anti-Asian Violence directly takes up this question. The following
section describes the caaav’s perspective and activities. The caaav
provides us with a di√erent concept of anti-Asian violence—distinct,
that is, from hate crimes—and allows us to consider the political possi-
bilities and strategic orientations that flow from such a perspective.

anti-asian violence and political mobilization

Asian Americans have always been subject to racial violence, but the
specific nature of racial violence and the forms of resistance to it have
historically varied. The brutal murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit in
1982 inspired a wave of organizational e√orts to counter random acts
of anti-Asian violence. Studies of these e√orts have focused on distinc-
tive aspects. Drawing, in part, on an analysis of Detroit’s American
Citizens for Justice, Yen Espiritu argues that the ‘‘race lumping’’ char-
acteristic of anti-Asian violence contributes to Asian panethnic con-
sciousness in the form of ‘‘reactive solidarity.’’≤≥ Kathy Yep, in a case
study analysis of three Asian/Pacific Islander community mobiliza-
tions, concludes that the socioeconomic status and identity politics of
280 michael omi

community members a√ected the types of responses to anti-Asian

violence.≤∂ I want to examine the work of the Committee against Anti-
Asian Violence in New York as a specific intervention that allows us to
rethink the nature of racial violence.
At first glance, the caaav appears to be engaged in a number of
seemingly disparate projects and organizing activities. These include
organizing among South Asian taxi drivers, developing leadership
programs for Vietnamese and Cambodian youth in the Bronx, and
doing outreach with Korean women sex workers at brothels and mas-
sage parlors. But at the center of the caaav’s work, providing co-
herence for its varied programs, is an expansive understanding of
racism and racial violence.
The caaav describes itself as ‘‘a pan-Asian organization committed
to combating violence and police brutality against Asian immigrants
and Asian Americans in New York City.’’≤∑ The organization’s activ-
ities over the nearly twelve years of its existence have dramatically
evolved from addressing ‘‘hate violence’’ to interrogating the nature of
workplace violence in the daily lives of Asian immigrant workers.

origins and focus

In response to the Vincent Chin case and other acts of random vio-
lence directed against Asian Americans, a coalition of community
groups sponsored a forum called ‘‘Violence against Asians in Amer-
ica’’ on 18 October 1986 in New York City.≤∏ The forum was attended
by 250 people and the Coalition against Anti-Asian Violence emerged
from it.≤π Mini Liu, a doctor, an Organization of Asian Women mem-
ber, and one of the founders of the caaav, later commented, ‘‘It was a
radical idea for non-Asians, and some Asians as well, that Asians were
a√ected by violence. Among the topics discussed at the forum was the
issue of police brutality. There was no idea at the time that that would
form the core of our later work.’’≤∫
The focus on police brutality as a form of anti-Asian violence distin-
guishes the caaav from the activities of other anti-Asian violence
groups in the country. Most of the other groups are made up of pro-
fessionals—attorneys, health care providers, college professors, and
politicians—who are concerned with random acts of violence directed
against Asians. These groups critique the prevailing climate of racial
intolerance, the rise of explicitly white-supremacist groups, and the
 (e)racism 281

deepening ‘‘racialization’’ of contemporary political issues. Activities

focus on getting law enforcement agencies to develop more e√ective
‘‘hate crimes’’ policies and practices. These anti-Asian violence groups
are also involved in lobbying for legislation to monitor hate crimes
and subject perpetrators to sti√ penalties. Eric Tang, a caaav sta√
person, is critical of most organizational approaches: ‘‘For the long-
est time, mainstream Asian-American organizations have used anti-
Asian violence as a lobbying issue, but have failed to critically analyze
the systemic roots of such violence and the particular forms it takes in
newly arrived immigrant communities.’’≤Ω The caaav defines its mis-
sion and work in more ‘‘radical’’ terms. Tang states, ‘‘caaav takes on a
lot of issues because we interpret violence broadly. There’s physical
violence, there’s sexual violence, there’s the violence of the workplace.
And there’s the violence of poverty itself.’’≥≠
The organization currently defines anti-Asian violence as
— institutional racism and misconduct, especially that perpetrated
by the police and government (Asian male youth, for example,
are often scapegoated as criminals);
— racist discrimination, including physical harm, by private indi-
viduals whose actions are sanctioned by the culture at large;
— exploitation of immigrant labor, where Asian women are par-
ticularly at risk, manifested in dangerous working conditions
and poor wages.≥∞
Operating with this expanded definition, the caaav has carved out
a series of projects to address the often ‘‘hidden’’ everyday reality
of violence and exploitation experienced by specific Asian ethnic
immigrants. Much of the activity is centered on issues of poverty
and inequality and how they impact Asian immigrant working-class
constituencies.

immigrant labor
Some 80 percent of Asian residents in New York are immigrants, and
the vast majority are concentrated in low-skilled occupations in mar-
ginal industries.≥≤ These include working in restaurants, sewing in
garment factories, driving cabs, cleaning hotel rooms, and working in
massage parlors—jobs that typically o√er less than the minimum
wage and are often associated with unsafe work environments. The
282 michael omi

following 1995 editorial in The CAAAV Voice draws attention to this

situation, and links it to the caaav’s broader antiracist agenda:
Every day there are Asian Americans in New York City who are
victims of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. When we think
of Asians being victimized, we imagine teenagers stalking with
baseball bats or—the more likely occurrence—men in blue with
their nightsticks and guns. In reality, however, New York City
Asians, especially immigrants regularly face the greatest abuse
where they work—from health hazards to homicide. Racism and
anti-immigrant discrimination in the labor market force Asians
into dangerous jobs in marginal industries—jobs with low pay,
long hours, poor working conditions, no benefits and little secu-
rity. These conditions are condoned by the government, whose
regulatory agencies and criminal justice system turn a blind eye to
abusive practices or participate in the abuse themselves.≥≥
The caaav has identified the Asian immigrant working class as its
main constituency, and the organization’s evolving concerns have
highlighted the workplace as a site of exploitation and potential vio-
lence for immigrant workers. Broadly defining and dividing its work
into the core areas of advocacy, community organizing, leadership de-
velopment, community education, and coalition building, the caaav
has developed a number of semi-autonomous projects≥∂ to serve
Asian immigrant communities. One of the first projects was the Lease
Drivers Coalition. Its on-going task is to organize primarily South
Asian immigrant cab drivers to challenge a racist and exploitative taxi
industry in New York.
Another program area is the Youth Leadership Project, which is
geared toward developing youth leadership in low-income and refu-
gee Asian communities. Summer programs have been developed over
the past two years to involve Asian youth in workshops and campaigns
around housing and welfare reform. Youths have conducted door-to-
door campaigns around issues such as tenant rights and securing
social service benefits.
One of the caaav’s most recent initiatives is the Women Workers
Project, which is an attempt to organize Asian women sex workers in
the city. Many immigrant women with limited language and job skills
are often driven to engage in sex work because of the absence of other
 (e)racism 283

economically viable options. They have little say in the conditions of

their existence and are often subject to physical violence. The project is
attempting to promote safe working conditions, health care, and fair
wages for these women.
Interestingly, these program areas were developed by the caaav to
reach di√erent Asian ethnic constituencies. The Lease Drivers Coali-
tion was conceived as a way of organizing the South Asian commu-
nity. The Youth Leadership Program is an attempt to reach Southeast
Asian youth, while the Women Workers Project is an attempt to orga-
nize Korean women. Issues are defined, framed, and organized in
reference to the pressing needs of specific communities.
This is important since di√erent ethnic communities, and classes
within them, are subject to a unique constellation of factors that ac-
count for their location in the broader social formation, how they
experience it, and the problems they encounter. Mindful that distinct
Asian ethnic groups are a√ected by racism, economic exploitation,
and state violence in di√erent ways, the caaav has defined program
areas that target the needs and concerns of specific communities. The
caaav’s approach and activities serve to disrupt the notion of a fixed,
uniform, and homogeneous Asian American community. In many
respects the caaav is a ‘‘coalition’’ of distinct groups and interests.

changes
The caaav has developed a unique approach to antiracist organizing.
It is one that has evolved over the years from a response to ‘‘hate
violence’’ to the initiation of projects that confront the daily violence
that Asian immigrants encounter in the workplace. Central to the
caaav’s expansive definition of anti-Asian violence has been an anal-
ysis of the economy and the state. Asian immigrant workers find
themselves in marginal positions in the labor market that subject
them to exploitative conditions. The state ‘‘polices’’ immigrant popula-
tions and subjects workers to its enforcement, but it fails to ‘‘protect’’
them. Youths are criminalized, sex workers are subject to raids and
arrest, and taxi drivers are regulated by the police. In this respect, the
caaav uniquely challenges the role of state-sanctioned violence on
Asian American communities.
Having started and organized several program areas targeting spe-
cific Asian ethnic communities, the caaav is currently in a period of
284 michael omi

consolidation and transformation. The organization is attempting to

restructure itself to serve as a center to train organizers, to develop
community organizing methodologies, and to frame and advance
antiracist strategies. Its goal is to build and sustain movements in
Asian ethnic communities to deal with distinct forms of institutional
inequality and violence. This is animated by the desire to build the
capacity of di√erent Asian ethnic communities to e√ectively organize
and mobilize around issues on their own behalf.
In the midst of these changes, the caaav maintains an unwavering
commitment to challenging the patterns of violence directed against
and experienced by Asian American communities. This concern con-
stitutes the heart and soul of the organization and informs all of its
antiracist work.

addressing racialized power

The reduction of racism to forms of ‘‘hate,’’ discussed at the start of
this section, severely limits our ability to comprehend the dimensions
of racialized power. Racial violence is regarded in popular opinion as
an irrational act—a ‘‘crime of passion.’’ The ways that racial violence is
perpetrated by the state and by the organization of the economy are
rendered invisible and not subject to interrogation.
The caaav provides a very di√erent and more expansive concept
of racial violence: one that grapples with what Lisa Lowe names as
the ‘‘contradictions of Asian immigration’’ that have ‘‘placed Asians
‘within’ the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet lin-
guistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as ‘foreign’ and ‘out-
side’ the national polity.’’≥∑ From this perspective, anti-Asian violence
is far more pervasive than individual random acts of hate, and the
strategies to challenge and prevent it are far more complex.

Power, Conflict, and the Promise of ‘‘Interracial Justice’’

The issue of racialized power raises a host of important political ques-
tions. One crucial lesson that emerged from this study of antiracist
organizations was the urgent political necessity to rethink race and the
possibilities for alliances among groups of color. This is not to absolve
whites of the responsibility to challenge racism, but it is an attempt to
decenter whiteness in relation to communities of color. Some multi-
 (e)racism 285

cultural narratives, for example, position groups of color vis-à-vis a

core white culture. Groups of color are rarely, if ever, treated as dy-
namic referents for each other. To do so, however, would help to
significantly destabilize the rigid bipolar model of race. It would sug-
gest a profound rethinking of what it means to do antiracist work. This
final section explores this issue and its implications.
In February 1998 the President’s Initiative on Race came to the San
Francisco Bay Area—San Jose to be exact—for a dialogue on race and
poverty. In opening remarks, Judith Winston, the executive director of
the initiative, said, ‘‘California is becoming transformed into one of
America’s truly multicultural societies. If we want to make the future
brighter, we need to understand how to make this multiracial, multi-
ethnic society work better.’’≥∏ Unfortunately, the community dialogue
that followed subsequently degenerated into a shouting match be-
tween various racially defined groups. It seems we have a long way to
go before we ‘‘understand how to make this multiracial, multiethnic
society work better.’’
California, a state that should be o√ering the rest of the nation
positive lessons about the transition to a multiracial society, sadly
provides examples of ill-conceived political reaction. In this regard, it
is important to think about the divisive impact of California’s Proposi-
tion 187 and Proposition 209. Proposition 187 directed the suspen-
sion of social services to ‘‘illegal alien’’ populations, while Proposition
209, the so-called Civil Rights Initiative, prohibited all forms of a≈r-
mative action by the state of California. There were some interesting
parallels between them. In both cases, the focus was on the state and
the allocation and deployment of public resources. And both initia-
tives could be viewed as a distinct form of symbolic politics—one in
which perception of the problem was crucial. In an analysis of Propo-
sition 187, Kitty Calavita argues that supporters did not subscribe to
some of the main policy components of the initiative, but voted for the
measure nonetheless.≥π Supporters did not want to throw ‘‘illegal’’
aliens out of the schools or provoke a public health crisis—but they did
want to send a political message to check immigration.
Part of the ‘‘success’’ of these initiatives was their ability to exploit
conflicts and tensions between (and within) racial minority commu-
nities. Political interests were not framed in reference to whiteness;
the issues were not presented in white versus nonwhite terms. In the
286 michael omi

campaign for Proposition 187, African American ‘‘interests’’ were

framed as counter to that of Latino, and to a lesser extent Asian,
immigrants. From one vantage point, it was argued that immigrants
were siphoning o√ social services and resources that could be utilized
to help impoverished segments of the African American community.
In debates regarding Proposition 209 on a≈rmative action, Asian
American ‘‘interests’’ were defined in opposition to those of blacks
and Latinos. Drawing on admissions controversies in higher educa-
tion, neoconservatives argued, for example, that race-based a≈rma-
tive action victimized Asian Americans as much as, perhaps more
than, it did whites.≥∫
Political issues are frequently racially coded and framed in a man-
ner that uncritically assumes a zero-sum game of race relations. In
this zero-sum game, group members are seen as ‘‘naturally’’ segre-
gated and fundamentally antagonistic toward each other. One group’s
gain is perceived to be another group’s loss. Herein lies the possibili-
ties for open conflict.
We are going to see more of this type of conflict as issues compel
racial interests to be defined in ways that cut across di√erent commu-
nities of color. Clearly a new antiracist politics needs to be articulated
with respect to the impending ‘‘fire next time.’’ Two conceptual cri-
tiques need to be advanced in this revisioning of antiracist politics.
One involves the concept of race, and the other centers on our under-
standing of power.
Much of the existing political discourse employs an essentialist
understanding of race—one that sees races as fixed and given, discrete
and homogeneous. By contrast, what is needed is a politics that takes
seriously the processes of racialization and increasing heterogeneity
within a presumed racial group. Our collective understanding of who
blacks, Latinos, and Asians are has been significantly destabilized by
the dramatic influx and growth of ‘‘new’’ groups—Laotians, Guate-
malans, Haitians, and Sudanese among others. Adding to the mix are
questions of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality that render a cate-
gory such as Asian American or Latino quite problematic constructs
depending on the context.≥Ω What is needed is a politics that is atten-
tive to these di√erences and to their meaning for race-based struggles.
A new antiracist politics needs to revisit the question ‘‘Who has the
power?’’ Many of the groups surveyed define racism as ‘‘prejudice plus
 (e)racism 287

power,’’ and employing this formula they correspondingly argue that

people of color cannot be racist since they lack power. But things are not
that simple or straightforward. In the post–civil rights era, some racial
minority groups have carved out a degree of power in select urban
areas—particularly with respect to administering social services and
distributing economic resources. This has led, in cities like Oakland
and Miami, to conflicts between blacks and Latinos over educational
programs, minority business opportunities, and political power.
Going deeper than this, it is important to see that power is not a
‘‘thing’’—it is a complex field of relationships, including coercive ones
and the ability to produce ideas. Power involves the ability to resist as
well as to rule; it involves challenging large-scale institutions as well as
the meaning-systems we encounter in everyday life. In this sense,
racialized minorities do have at least some power, and it is debilitating
in the long run for a subordinate and oppressed group to think of itself
as powerless.
A starting point for dialogue among racial minorities is to acknowl-
edge the historical and contemporary di√erences in power that dif-
ferent groups possess. Groups are positioned in unequal ways in a
racially stratified society. In a recent study of perceived group competi-
tion in Los Angeles, sociologists Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutch-
ings found, among other things, that whites felt least threatened by
blacks and most threatened by Asians, while Asians felt a greater
threat from blacks than Latinos.∂≠ These findings underscore how
di√erent racial groups serve as dynamic referents for each other and
how they possess a particular understanding of their location in a
racial hierarchy. Such distinct perceptions of ‘‘group position’’ are re-
lated to, and implicated in, the organization of power.
Acknowledging di√erences in power between groups, whether real
or imagined, has profound implications for the possibilities of coali-
tion building. In a recent essay, law professor Eric Yamamoto recounts
the campaign in 1993 among churches within the Hawaii Conference
of the United Church of Christ for an Asian American apology to
Native Hawaiians and for multimillion dollar reparations.∂∞ At issue
was how other Asian Americans, particularly Japanese and Chinese
Americans, have been complicit in the exploitation and oppression of
Native Hawaiians.
Drawing on this case, Yamamoto advances a concept of ‘‘interracial
288 michael omi

justice’’—one that is attentive to the historical and contemporary di√er-

ences in power that di√erent groups possess. Interracial justice reflects
a commitment to antisubordination among nonwhite racial groups:
It entails a hard acknowledgment of the ways in which racial
groups have harmed and continue to harm one another, some-
times though forms of oppression, along with a≈rmative e√orts
to redress past harms with continuing e√ects. More specifically,
interracial justice is comprised of two related dimensions. One
dimension is conceptual . . . it involves a recognition of situated
racial group power. . . . The second dimension is practical. It in-
volves messy, shifting, continual and often localized processes of
interracial healing.∂≤
Such e√orts are not meant to divert attention away from the prevail-
ing reality of white racism. Groups of color labor under a social system
that has been historically structured by white supremacy and continues
in the present to reinforce white privilege. But the hegemonic racial
order has not treated all nonwhite groups in a similar manner. Tomás
Almaguer in his study of white supremacy in nineteenth-century Cali-
fornia notes that di√erent racial/ethnic groups encountered a ‘‘dif-
ferential racialization.’’∂≥ Nonwhite groups were envisioned, socially
constructed, and positioned in relation to each other by white elites.
This has consequences for group position and how political interests
get defined.
A focus on ‘‘interracial justice’’ should not be read as minimizing
or erasing the class and ethnic heterogeneity of the racial categories
that we so glibly refer to as ‘‘black,’’ ‘‘Latino,’’ ‘‘Asian,’’ and so on. The
emphasis here, however, is on racial minority groups to acknowledge
‘‘di√erences’’ and begin to transform ‘‘power over’’ one another into
‘‘power to’’ coexist, cooperate, and work together politically.
All the groups surveyed are grappling with the issue of relations
between communities of color and its meaning for their on-going
work. Even those whose primary constituencies are white and/or
black are attentive to the changing racial composition of the nation
and believe that the dominant black/white paradigm of race is in need
of revision. This acknowledgment, however, has seldom translated
into practical activities tailored to address the processes of di√erential
racialization. But the promise of ‘‘interracial justice’’ remains.
 (e)racism 289

Antiracism in a Post–Civil Rights Era

In many respects, the current political climate is a dismal one. Racial
inequalities are downplayed or ignored; race-based policies such as
a≈rmative action are being questioned or dismantled; and ‘‘color-
blindness’’ is touted as the only e√ective antiracist position. Amid this
landscape, the racial projects the surveyed organizations articulate,
develop, and put forth can be seen as both responses to and creative
engagements with the prevailing patterns of racial inequality and dis-
course. The vision and practice of these groups have been framed,
whether consciously or not, in dialogue with the civil rights move-
ment, and this engagement has shaped, to a large degree, certain
points of convergence with the civil rights agenda. That said, these
organizations should be regarded as new interventions—ones that are
responding to the changing meaning of race in political discourse and
institutional life.
Most of the emerging practices of these organizations are moving
away from the civil rights community’s engagement with litigation
and the strict pursuit of legal and legislative reforms. These groups
operate in distinctive spaces—transforming popular consciousness
in community-based settings, organizing workers in marginal sectors
of the economy, and challenging white supremacist groups in pre-
dominantly white, rural communities. Their presence, organizational
form, and practice suggest that antiracist work has entered a new
phase, one that embraces a vision of social justice that extends beyond
formal legal guarantees of racial equality and equal opportunity. This
vision of social justice argues that ‘‘equality under the law’’ is not
enough. What is required is a hard look at how racial meanings and
practices are su√used into patterns of both everyday and institutional
life and how they indelibly shape individual consciousness, collective
identities, corporate actions, and government policies. The complex-
ity of racism requires an equally complex response and antiracist
challenge.
Of significant note is the development of explicitly antiracist or-
ganizations centered on, and lead by, people of color. Many of the
200 organizations the study initially surveyed were run by whites
whose principal constituencies were white. These groups were in-
volved in prejudice-reduction work among whites or facilitating di-
290 michael omi

alogue among them regarding race and racism. Even in groups that
encouraged dialogue and collective activities between di√erent racial
groups, the focus was often on whites with the goal of substantively
transforming white attitudes toward people of color.
This focus is in many ways understandable, given racial realities in
the United States. As Joe Feagin and Hernán Vera convincingly argue,
racism in the United States is white racism, a ‘‘socially organized set of
attitudes, ideas, and practices that deny African Americans and other
people of color the dignity, opportunities, freedoms, and rewards that
this nation o√ers white Americans.’’∂∂ But racism cannot be simply
challenged by whites becoming racially conscious, unlearning racism,
and/or aggressively denying the privileges of whiteness. Antiracist
work needs to move in several di√erent directions—ones that decenter
the focus on whiteness. Di√erent communities of color need to con-
front divisions and conflicts between them, and coalitions and al-
liances need to be built among all racial groups, with people of color in
leading roles. The movement for racial justice will demand the par-
ticipation of all groups and a commitment to thoroughly interrogate
the dimensions of racialized power. Such an interrogation of power
needs to be attentive to how di√erent groups have been positioned in
the racial hierarchy and how such locations a√ect the framing of politi-
cal interests. This will prove to be quite a challenge.
The organizations profiled in the study remind us of the continu-
ing significance of race and the persistence of racism in di√erent sites
of our social order. In the present political moment, such a reminder
is of crucial importance. The political right trumpets the emergence of
a color-blind society and proudly proclaims the ‘‘end of racism.’’ Even
within progressive circles, Angela Davis notes, ‘‘charges of racism are
often viewed as old and tired arguments.’’ But, she continues, ‘‘there is
a sense in which the term ‘‘racism’’ still maintains its ability to ru∆e
people’s feathers. There is a persistently piercing character about the
term ‘racism’ that is one sign of the perseverance of power relations
based on race.’’∂∑
It is those relations of power that we need to discern, deconstruct,
and challenge. This is a crucial lesson that has emerged from this
study of antiracist organizations. In distinct ways, they have illustrated
the need not only to acknowledge racism but also to actively work
toward its abolition.
 (e)racism 291

Notes
This essay relies on a study of antiracist organizations titled ‘‘Confronting
the New Racisms: Anti-Racist Organizing in the Post–Civil Rights Era,’’
funded by the C. S. Mott Foundation. The study was carried out by the
Applied Research Center in Oakland, California. Researchers on the proj-
ect were Gary Delgado, Rebecca Gordon, and myself. An earlier version of
this essay was presented at the 93d Annual Meeting of the American
Sociological Association, 21–25 August 1998 in San Francisco.
1 Quoted in Margaret Talbot, ‘‘Getting Credit for Being White,’’ New York
Times Magazine, 30 November 1997, 118.
2 Alastair Bonnett, ‘‘Constructions of Whiteness in European and American
Anti-Racism,’’ in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and
the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London
and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1997), 181.
3 Ibid., 178.
4 See, for example, Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, Race Traitor (New York
and London: Routledge, 1996).
5 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People
Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998),
210.
6 Bob Blauner, ‘‘Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages of
Race,’’ in Race and Ethnic Conflict: Contending Views on Prejudice, Discrimi-
nation, and Ethnoviolence, ed. Fred L. Pincus and Howard J. Ehrlich (Boul-
der, Colo.: Westview, 1994).
7 Angela Y. Davis, ‘‘Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism: Rethinking ‘Race’
Politics,’’ in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christo-
pher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 43.
8 Anthropology Newsletter 38, no. 7 (October 1997); 38, no. 9 (December
1997); 39, no. 2 (February 1998); 39, no. 3 (March 1998); 39, no. 5 (May
1998); and 39, no. 6 (September 1998).
9 Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by
Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995).
10 Davis, ‘‘Gender, Class,’’ p. 44.
11 For example, Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press,
1995).
12 John H. Bunzel, ‘‘Words That Smear, Like ‘Racism,’ Provoke Polariza-
tion,’’ San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, 26 July 1998.
13 The term may have first surfaced in Magnus Hirschfeld, Racism (London:
Victor Gollanzc, 1938).
14 T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950);
292 michael omi

Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-

Wesley, 1954).
15 Louis L. Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt, eds., Institutional Racism in Amer-
ica (Englewood Cli√s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Robert Blauner, Racial
Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
16 David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), xiii.
17 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States:
From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 56.
18 Ibid., 71.
19 Michael Omi, Gary Delgado, and Rebecca Gordon, ‘‘Confronting the New
Racisms: Anti-Racist Organizing in the Post-Civil Rights Era,’’ executive
summary prepared by the Applied Research Center for the C. S. Mott
Foundation (January 2000).
20 The implications of this will be discussed below in the discussion on
‘‘interracial justice.’’
21 David Theo Goldberg, ‘‘Hate, or Power?’’ chap. 2 of Racial Subjects: Writing
on Race in America (Routledge, 1997).
22 Ibid., 23.
23 Yen Le Espiritu, ‘‘Reactive Solidarity: Anti-Asian Violence,’’ chap. 6 of
Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
24 Kathy Yep, ‘‘The Power of Collective Voice,’’ Asian American Policy Review 4
(1994): 33–63.
25 Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence brochure 1996.
26 Members of this coalition included the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund, the Coalition of Labor Union Women (New York), the
Japanese American Citizens League (New York), the Khmer Association
in the U.S., Korean Americans for Social Concern, Korean American
Women for Action, the Organization of Asian Women, the Organization
of Chinese Americans (New York), and the Young Korean American Ser-
vice & Education Center.
27 Note that the organization’s name was originally the Coalition Against
Anti-Asian Violence reflecting its emergence from these sponsoring
members. Its name was changed to the Committee Against Anti-Asian
Violence in 1988.
28 Interview with Mini Liu, 4 October 1996, New York. Liu notes that a
forum panelist, Sook Nam Choo, spoke about coalitional work around
police brutality against Koreans in Queens.
29 Interview with Eric Tang, 4 October 1996, New York.
30 Ibid.
31 caaav brochure (1996). With respect to Asian American women it is
 (e)racism 293

interesting to note that this focus on gender is very recent. Though the
organization grew out of the e√orts of the Organization of Asian Women,
their initial activity had no specific gender analysis.
32 ‘‘From Tenants to Taxi Drivers—caaav Organizes in Immigrant Commu-
nities,’’ CAAAV Voice 4, no. 2 (fall 1992): 5.
33 Editorial, CAAAV Voice 7, no. 1 (spring 1995): 1.
34 The projects are semi-autonomous in that they have their own specific
organizers, distinct constituencies, and are not subsumed under the orga-
nizational dictates of the caaav as a whole.
35 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 8.
36 Louis Freedberg, ‘‘State’s Diversity Adds Color to Talks: Race Panel Comes
to San Jose.’’ San Francisco Chronicle, 10 February 1998.
37 Kitty Calavita, ‘‘The New Politics of Immigration: ‘Balanced-Budget Con-
servatism’ and the Symbolism of Proposition 187,’’ Social Problems 43, no.
3 (August 1996): 284–305.
38 Michael Omi and Dana Y. Takagi, ‘‘Situating Asian Americans in the Polit-
ical Discourse of A≈rmative Action’’ Representations, no. 55 (summer
1996): 155–62.
39 Lisa Lowe, ‘‘Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Di√er-
ences,’’ chap. 3 of Immigrant Acts, 60–83.
40 Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, ‘‘Perceptions of Racial Group
Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multira-
cial Social Context,’’ American Sociological Review 61, no. 6 (December
1996): 951–72.
41 Eric Y. Yamamoto, ‘‘Rethinking Alliances: Agency, Responsibility and In-
terracial Justice,’’ UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal 3, no. 1 (fall
1995): 33–74.
42 Ibid., 34–35.
43 Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Su-
premacy in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), 4–7.
44 Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, White Racism (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995), 7.
45 Davis, ‘‘Gender, Class,’’ 44.
 William Aal

Moving from Guilt to Action: Antiracist

Organizing and the Concept of ‘‘Whiteness’’
for Activism and the Academy

As an antiracist organizer and trainer over the last twenty years, I have
grasped at any tools that might make my work easier and more ef-
fective. Many of us who work at the grassroots level against racism do
so because we see it as the fundamental problem underlying and
linking other forms of oppression and social injustice in the United
States. None of us were born antiracist organizers; we became such as
we saw devastating e√ects that racism has on people of color, on the
humanity of white people, and on the moral and spiritual fabric of
society. Like others grappling with the pervasive and seemingly intrac-
table problem of racism in this country, I have studied history, Marx-
ism and other forms of political economy, social psychology, soci-
ology—anything that might help one to understand how our society
got organized the way it is and what it will take to change it.
I became an ‘‘expert’’ at being racist from having been born and
raised ‘‘white’’ in a country that is structured along racist lines. At the
same time, because I am a beneficiary of this system, the impact of
racism is almost entirely invisible to me. In order to get real insight
into the dynamics, it has been necessary for me to read history and
analysis by people of color to get the view from ‘‘outside.’’ In order to
survive each day, whether there is a white person in the room or not,
they have to deal with the consequences of a world ordered by white
skin privilege. They are the experts on whiteness and its impact on
themselves, ‘‘white’’ people, and the United States as a whole.
In the work that I and other trainers and organizers do, it is invalu-
able to define the concept of white identity as privilege. Many people
 moving from guilt to action 295

self-identified as white experience themselves as beyond history and

without community. Their culture is one of consumption—of ideas,
art, and spirituality, as well as of material objects. When trying to
encourage ‘‘white’’ people to help eliminate racism, it is helpful to
encourage them to remember that by fighting racism we act to restore
our own humanity and culture as well. We welcome the academic
study of whiteness as a way to reclaim history, yet many of us are
uneasy with this trend as well. This essay grew out of a concern that
‘‘whiteness’’ as an academic subject of study can easily slip from being
the examination of an important social/political category to becoming
just another career path. People often start out with a commitment to
serve, but the process of professionalization takes them away from the
community. This is a pitfall that is systemic to U.S. work culture. I see
the same dynamic in the dichotomy between diversity training and
anti-oppression organizing. As a ‘‘diversity trainer,’’ it is also easy to
end up making a career of working in the corporate sector and becom-
ing disassociated from the oppressed communities. In fact, there is a
whole generation of people coming through various university pro-
grams in multicultural work or ‘‘cross-cultural’’ training or similar
fields who are looking for work as trainers or organizers and yet have
had very little experience as activists.

I felt very ambivalent about writing for an academic book when first
approached. I didn’t want my work to become more fodder for the
academic paper mill. On other the hand, I have wanted to make a
contribution to the antiracist movement in this country by challenging
academics to produce materials useful to the struggle for justice and
to actively engage—because we could really use a hand!
One lesson I have learned over the years is that in order to eradicate
racism activists and organizers need to start working with those who
benefit from racist structures and who play the biggest part in main-
taining them. So it makes sense for me to use this opportunity to
address academics who are overwhelmingly white and are certainly
among those who benefit from and maintain the status quo. There-
fore, they can play an important part in bringing about change.
There are intellectual projects that could take all of us further. What
we need in the movement is a better understanding of how ‘‘white-
ness’’ as a set of overlapping identities, structures, and power relations
keeps the United States divided along the lines of race, class, and
296 william aal

gender. We need to know more about how we got into the predica-
ment in which most of the ‘‘white’’ people in the United States either
are unaware of the impacts that their daily lives have on ‘‘others,’’ both
inside the United States and around the world, or don’t care. We need
to reclaim our history through an antiracist lens, especially remem-
bering and learning from those of our ancestors who have stood for
justice.∞ And we also need to contribute to the process of creating new
ways of being together across lines of di√erence in classrooms, con-
ferences, and the community.
The stories we tell need to be deep, to promote critical thinking, and
be both accessible and relevant for people outside the academy. I long
for someone to engage with the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart
Hall, bell hooks, Cornel West, Edward Said, Roberto Unger, and oth-
ers in ways that relate these cultural and intellectual struggles with
everyday life. The work of these intellectuals makes an enormous
contribution toward revealing the fact that the structures of injustice
are not natural phenomena (‘‘the way the world has and will always
be’’) but were created by humans in specific historical contexts and
therefore can be changed. By helping us understand the formative
contexts of daily life and the institutional arrangements that maintain
oppression, engaged academics could help foster new ways of think-
ing about our social/political problems.

Stories from a Few Antiracist Whites

To clarify my own thinking, I decided to talk with a few other trainer/
activists around the United States about what the idea of whiteness
means to them and what they would want from the study of white-
ness. I talked with three people who have been doing antiracist work
for many years. Two of them have Ph.D.’s and work in academic
settings, though they both have taken decidedly nontraditional paths.
Each of us is committed to a form of social justice that includes look-
ing at the intersecting axes of class, gender, and race. We take it as a
given that without racial justice, there can be no gender justice and
vice versa. At the same time, each of us understands that racism is at
the center of much of what it means to be white in America. We
understand that our worldview, our sense of what is ours without
asking and our knowledge of what we are not supposed to talk about,
is structured by our white identities. I asked them three or four ques-
 moving from guilt to action 297

tions about their motivations for doing the work, their vision for the
future, what they thought about ‘‘white studies,’’ and what they would
want from such an endeavor. When I mentioned the ambivalence I
myself felt about the field, they acknowledged similar feelings. We all
have learned a lot from academics and at the same time have been
outraged by some of the dynamics described later in this article. These
conversations challenge academics to turn some of their own tools of
critical analysis on their own work: to examine how they make choices
about what to focus on, whose interests the research they are doing
serves, and to whom they are accountable.

Mark Scanlon Green is an academic who has also done a lot of antira-
cist organizing and brings a gender analysis to his thinking about race.
His Ph.D. dissertation was on the subject of white males and diversity
work. He now works in a private academic setting, working principally
with students of color. Mark took up antiracist work, coming out of a
complex personal/family history, his identity as a gay man, and a
political commitment to change from the age of fourteen. ‘‘My choice
to focus on white men is personal and political,’’ he says.
As a white man who has become actively involved in the diversity
movement, I have wondered how it is that I have chosen to chal-
lenge the system that assigns me higher status and more power
than it does to people of color and white women. If all the un-
earned privilege I have is a boon to my personal and professional
development, why would I, or for that matter, any other man in
his right mind, choose to work to eliminate its influence? . . . I
have also realized, however, that over the years, many of my politi-
cal ‘‘fellow travelers’’ were every bit as racist, sexist, and heterosex-
ist as the larger society they claimed they wanted to change. And
since racism is at the heart of the American experience, without
dealing with it, we can’t move forwards with a progressive social
agenda. If the Rosetta Stone is found that decodes the process by
which some white men, who are at the pinnacle of social status
and power, actively engage themselves in changing the system,
significant social change becomes possible.
Eventually he ended up feeling attacked from several fronts in the
‘‘diversity’’ arena. He says, ‘‘It is much harder for a white man to be out
front as a trainer.’’ White people didn’t accept his leadership, and
298 william aal

people of color didn’t trust a white person doing ‘‘diversity training.’’

Mark gave up active organizing with white people since he couldn’t
see social change occurring from doing ‘‘diversity work.’’ He doesn’t
see himself as an activist anymore. He has chosen as his life work to be
supportive of people of color getting access to higher education and
puts the majority of his academic commitment in that direction, men-
toring students from nontraditional backgrounds. He is committed to
‘‘academic excellence’’ not only to help students get access but also to
insist that they grab that access, make it theirs in whatever way makes
sense to them, and to shine in their competence.
His vision of a world that has dealt with racism is one based on
equal access to resources—educational, economic, and political. It has
to do with principles of justice as opposed to ‘‘equality.’’ He wants
academics looking at whiteness to be focused on eliminating the bar-
riers to access within the academy that white people keep putting in
front of people of color. The challenge is to make space for people of
color on a truly equal footing; liberalism, individualism, and tokenism
need to be combated.

Sharon Howell, raised poor, was the first in her family to go to college.
She is now an academic as well. A lifelong antiracist, she has been a
member and a leader of a non-Marxist revolutionary organization that
was dedicated to creating a revolution with people of color in the lead.
She works at a large midwestern university and is a leader in her
community as an antiracist and antihomophobic organizer. She cur-
rently leads the major grassroots e√ort to rebuild Detroit. Along with
Margo Adair, she is a founding member of Tools for Change, a con-
sulting group that conducts workshops around antiracism and eco-
nomic justice in work settings and for political groups.
Sharon would rather do anything else than have to deal with rac-
ism. There are more interesting things to do in the world, she says,
like reconstruct Detroit so that it is a city that sustains all its people.
But, according to her, racism gets in the way of that project. Detroit
was destroyed because of racism. And now the majority of people left
in the city are people who can’t a√ord to leave, so—white, black, Arab,
Asian, or Latino—they have common ground to stand on. Much of
Detroit looks like a war zone. Whole blocks of houses have been
bulldozed to the ground because absentee landlords abandoned their
properties as economic values went down. There is little blue-collar
 moving from guilt to action 299

work left in Detroit proper and its surrounding suburban areas, as the
big auto makers have moved toward automation and outsourcing
overseas and to other, nonunionized parts of the city. So the racial
question has now more clearly than ever become one of class. The
folks at the bottom have to deal with each other in order to survive. Yet
race still is a ‘‘wedge issue’’ that is used to divide people.
So, for Sharon, it is necessary to deal with racism at all levels,
interpersonally, within organizational structures and in ‘‘civil’’ society.
Interpersonal racism, the kind that keeps white people and people of
color from being able to trust each other because of white people’s
conscious or unconscious identification with the white power struc-
ture, needs to be dealt with to build long-lasting relations of solidarity.
A former member of the National Organization for an American Rev-
olution (noar), a revolutionary organization dedicated to the revolu-
tionary leadership of African Americans and other people of color, she
and her writing partner and political comrade Margo Adair started
doing organizational consulting with groups committed to progres-
sive social change in the mid-1980s. They, like Mark, realized that the
relationships of oppression that exist in the dominant society are re-
produced within those groups. Their analysis of organizational cul-
ture as an outgrowth of European American (white) middle-class pa-
triarchal culture led them to look at how patterns of power govern
access to resources and structure relations in groups committed to
ecological or social justice.
They developed the concept of internalized privilege to help explain
why people in positions of power usually don’t see how their actions
impact others and move through the world with a sense of entitle-
ment. They also put forward the idea of ‘‘wonderbreading’’ which is
what assimilation does. In order to make it into the category of ‘‘white’’
and receive its privileges, people were forced to give up their loyalty to
their own traditions, language, community, and principles. In this
framework, ‘‘white’’ is solely an identity of privilege. Value is no longer
placed on community, place, or history but, instead, on access to
power and commodities. Business decisions are based on purely eco-
nomic rationality, without taking into account these other dimen-
sions. Communities are reduced to individuals and families to re-
productive units. Culture becomes devoid of richness. Understanding
these dynamics reveals what white people have to gain by ridding
society of racism. Sharon sees it as important to help people of Euro-
300 william aal

pean descent see how their identification with white privilege keeps
them from moving toward racial justice and how their guilt over that
compounds the problem even more.
Her vision of a society based on principles of justice has led to work
on Detroit Summer, a multigenerational project dedicated to rebuild-
ing the most devastated parts of Detroit. Each summer, youth from
Detroit and all around the country work with neighborhood people
cleaning up parks, reconstructing homes, and re-creating a vital com-
munity. Leadership development and the study of Detroit’s history
and culture are integral parts of the project. Sharon sees this work as
part of her life commitment. Her request to other academics is that
they engage in projects of social justice that will inform their writings
about social movements and help deepen their commitment to elimi-
nate racism.

Marian Meck Root grew up in ‘‘Middle America,’’ in the mainstream

Lutheran church. At an early age, she realized the spiritual void left by
people’s refusal to deal with racism. She is a theologian in a major East
Coast city and is part of a feminist theological center that keeps antira-
cism at the heart of its work.
She and her co-workers are grappling with the spiritual void left by
racism, asking the question ‘‘How did this happen that we as a (white)
people and as individuals are so spiritually afraid and weak?’’ She
believes that when white people begin to address this question, they
will begin to unearth some clues about ending racism. It is a project
that can’t be undertaken individually but, rather, communally. It is one
according to her that can’t be approached merely from the rational,
linear patriarchal side. ‘‘It requires going against . . . the dominant
culture especially of the academy which projects its own fears onto the
feminine.’’
In her exploration of the concept of whiteness she defines white ‘‘to
mean those of us who have had enough European ancestry to benefit
from having white skin and who have been raised to assume that our
culture is generic or universal and to act out of a sense of racial and/or
cultural superiority even when we deny or cannot see ourselves doing
that.’’ She talks about spirituality as in some sense acknowledging
mystery and giving up the illusion of control. Pointing out that white
folks are very attached to control and domination, she draws the con-
clusion that we have a hard time with mystery and hence spirituality.
 moving from guilt to action 301

For Marian, Europeans haven’t always been this way; it is a historical

development of recent vintage. It helps explain our yearnings for spir-
ituality and some of our racist appropriation of other people’s spiritual
traditions.
While acknowledging the yearning, she notes that spirituality has
much to do with ancestors and that white Americans have distanced
themselves, literally, from theirs. ‘‘We don’t know ourselves because
we don’t know where we come from.’’ Looking back on thousands of
years of European history, she sees a progressive disintegration of
tribal life, that is, life connected to the land and to ancestors. Without
romanticizing tribal existence, she states that there was a felt relation-
ship between the spiritual and the material, between intuition and
rational ways of knowing. She calls for a reconnection of mind and
body and spirit as well as for a reintegration of our communities. In
order carry out this project, we as white people have to forgive our
ancestors and ourselves, and we have to hope for forgiveness by peo-
ple of color without having the right to expect it.
What Marian wants from ‘‘whiteness studies’’ is a critique of West-
ern rational thinking and individualism. This critique would help
overcome the dualist splits between mind and body, individual and
community, spirit and idea. The critique would embody a way forward
to a healing transformation.

As for myself, I am an owner of a small house painting business and

work with environmental and economic justice organizations. I am a
former member of noar, along with Sharon, and am also an associ-
ate of Tools for Change. I work on coalition-building with people of
color around issues of ecological and economic justice.
I came to an antiracist sensibility when I was ten or eleven. I grew
up in a lower-middle-class, single-parent, Jewish family in upstate
New York. We lived in a mixed ethnic neighborhood. I saw how much
easier our lives were as a ‘‘white’’ family than those of my ‘‘black’’
friends and their families in similar economic circumstances. In the
1950s and early 1960s, we were able to see our cash-poor life as
merely a temporary setback on the way to a fully middle-class life.
Help from her parents alleviated my mother’s temporary unemploy-
ment, and she knew that with her college education she would even-
tually be able to get a better job in the expanding civil service economy.
My African American neighbors would have to wait a generation for
302 william aal

members of their family to get access to education before being able to

obtain that kind of work—and even then economic life would be pre-
carious at best. Experiencing that di√erence had a profound impact on
how I interpreted the success stories that my upper-middle-class Jew-
ish and white Christian friends were given by their families. It made it
impossible for me to accept the myths of individual progress or the
metaphors of assimilation or the ‘‘melting pot’’ that were the basis of
white American cultural hegemony.
As the Vietnam War unfolded, I began to see the links between
racism at home and U.S. imperialism around the world. It became
clear to me that the reasons racism and its related manifestations of
sexism and homophobia were still present in the United States was
because ‘‘white’’ people, and ‘‘white’’ men especially, were not willing
to give up the position and power that they (we) gained by our white
skin privilege. Of course, at the time I didn’t have an analysis, only a
feeling that something was wrong.
When I first became involved in the movement for racial justice in
the 1960s, the social project seemed clear: to eliminate racism as an
underlying ordering of public space and to create opportunities for
women and men of color to enter into business, academic, and re-
ligious spheres on an ‘‘equal basis.’’ We started with a basic under-
standing that racism is rooted in unfounded negative attitudes about
people of color (prejudice) tied with the power to oppress them (in-
stitutional bias). All that was needed was to ‘‘change people’s atti-
tudes’’ and to make sure that policies in educational institutions, res-
taurants, residences, and banks provided equal access to resources.
In college in the early 1970s, I was exhilarated by the development
of the various identity movements, as they allowed people who had
been locked out of society to express their humanity to the society at
large and begin to claim power for themselves. At the same time, as I
watched the tendency of people in those movements to claim their
piece of the American pie, I became confused. For me it was the very
existence of that pie that required the United States to maintain the
race, class, and gender divides, that kept some people rich while the
majority remained poor. I also saw something like the pain that ‘‘won-
derbreading’’ engendered for my parents’ generation a√ect some Afri-
can American friends of mine when they started going to college.
They lost intimate contact with their childhood friends and sometimes
with their families, as they chose to ‘‘make it’’ in academia or the
 moving from guilt to action 303

business world. In short, I began to see the limitations of the concept

of ‘‘equality’’ since in fact ‘‘equality’’ really meant ‘‘play by the rules of
the game and don’t question the status quo.’’ It didn’t allow for the
transformation of the social context to include all the experiences and
values that are embodied by those who have been locked out. In short,
people were being welcomed to join a society whose rules were set by
the oppressors.
Since identity politics by itself didn’t call for the total transforma-
tion of society, only for either a piece of the pie or for carving out
autonomous spaces for blacks, Latinos, women, gays, lesbians, or
other disadvantaged people, it began to feel in the 1980s that we would
have a fractured society that wasn’t necessarily a more just one. With
my membership in noar, I was able to see the power of being in an
organization dedicated to the leadership of African American people
for the whole country. I was challenged to be a leader in this context
and to think collaboratively with people very di√erent from myself.
What noar was unable to incorporate into its practice was a deep
understanding of the subjective side of reality, social power, and cul-
tural di√erences. Despite our political unity, which included an under-
standing of racism as the underlying contradiction of the United
States, we were still unable to deal with racism and internalized it
within our own ranks.
I joined Tools for Change because, as a group, we grapple with
these kinds of issues and help organizations deal e√ectively with
them. Central to our work is a focus on the subjective side of politics,
which includes the particularities of culture di√erences, the impor-
tance of the sacred, and the dynamics of both formal and informal
power. We try to encourage people and organizations to become vi-
sionary. Without vision, we find ourselves re-creating the same pat-
terns of life. In this context, I am attempting to develop an organiza-
tional development model of ‘‘opening the imagination to change,’’
which incorporates vision, addresses issues of power, and encourages
critical thinking. In this way I hope to be able to help organizations
deal with race and class hierarchies by rethinking their mission and
re-visioning the way they do their work. I would like to challenge
academics to do the same. It would be an exciting program that turned
its critical gaze inward to try to create a real space for people of color.
My own vision for racial justice involves a society that goes beyond
celebrating di√erence, actually embodying cultural di√erences and
304 william aal

gender and gender orientation di√erences—in short embracing all of

its contradictions and highlighting them. People would no longer
have to assimilate to make it; equal access would be a given.

Whiteness and Activism

Whiteness as a conceptual framework in a political context first
emerged out of a need to confront some of the limitations of antiracist
organizing. At the same time, whiteness has been part of the U.S.
sensibility since the country’s founding. Many groups and strata of
‘‘white’’ people have been conscious of their whiteness and protective
of their privileges. The whole process of ‘‘assimilation’’ was one of
immigrants coming to the United States and struggling to become
‘‘white’’ in order to access the legitimacy and resources associated with
that status. But by the late 1950s white skin privilege was no longer
morally unquestioned in public discourse, and by the mid-1960s its
legal status was challenged. By the mid-1970s, at least within the
movements for social justice, it wasn’t supposed to exist. Yet racism
has kept its hold on the fabric of our society and in the structures of
even those organizations committed to social justice. The rhetoric of
antiracism present in these organizations often has actually acted as a
bu√er against challenges to racism. People have a self-image of being
antiracist, yet the middle-class norms that preclude them from admit-
ting mistakes or showing ignorance make it nearly impossible for
them to address these issues. When antiracism is addressed, conver-
sations become focused on intentions rather than the impact.
After years of antiracist organizing, we have learned that white
people can’t ask people of color to do ‘‘our’’ work for us. Many orga-
nizers reluctantly came to the conclusion that the issue was white
people’s inability or lack of will to examine our own privilege. We were
reluctant because we didn’t want to deal with other white people—we
distrusted them, as we distrusted ourselves. Many of us had come to
hate our own whiteness as we learned of the legacy of racism. Not
trusting other white folks, we felt better being in the company of
people of color. We did not want to come to grips with our own history.
Some of us felt that we didn’t even have a culture. But, in order to
eradicate racism, we realized that we had to start working with those
who benefit from racist structures and who play the largest part in
maintaining them.
 moving from guilt to action 305

Those of us who do antiracist organizing and training have found

that white people have developed a lot of avoidance and defense strat-
egies. I see every day how much investment white folks have in hold-
ing onto their power. Recently, this was brought home to me again.
After a major success in grassroots organizing against the World
Trade Organization meeting in late 1999 in Seattle, where a huge
coalition of labor, environmental, human rights activists, and commu-
nity people took to the streets, a lot of money started flowing to con-
tinue the organizing. Many of the groups that organized around this
event took part in evaluations of the work. Jointly we critiqued our
movement around the lack of diversity. Just after the evaluation, one
part of the coalition, a mostly white student group was o√ered money
for organizing at the University of Washington campus, which is also
mostly white. They never even consulted with a partner youth of color
group that had been organizing very e√ectively on this issue over a
longer period. When challenged, the white group said they had never
even thought about it. They had merely seen it as an opportunity to do
the work. They would have done outreach to youth of color, but they
never thought to share resources with or to take leadership from an
already existing group. To date, I am not aware of steps taken to
approach the youth of color group.
We have seen how white people, especially those who are better edu-
cated, are very good at using antiracist language to allow themselves to
feel good about themselves without actually having to change. What
we have had to develop are some ways to help white people understand
what a high price they pay for their privileged position—so that ulti-
mately they can see that the reason to work for justice is also to free
themselves.
We have found in our antiracist work that the first hurdle to get
around is a paralysis of guilt and defensiveness. Most white people
know very well their skin color is tied to social privileges—so they feel
guilty and at the same time don’t feel personally invested in change.
They don’t understand very well the historical nature of our racist
social structure, and so they find it very hard to imagine real change
and what that might look like. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became
White is an example of academic work that can help ‘‘regular white
folks’’ understand whiteness in the context of their own history. It
helps them begin to see their own place in all of this. Although it is
often very painful, using the concept of whiteness has been helpful in
306 william aal

workshops as a tool for breaking through many patterns that hold

back white people from organizing together to eliminate racism.
One of the first things I do in antiracist workshops is to ask people
about their family backgrounds, to help them get in touch with their
own history. From there, we can begin to ask questions like ‘‘What
strengths do you draw from your family history?’’ and ‘‘What did you
and/or your family have to give up to be white?’’ For people to really
become invested in change, they need to get a sense of the violence
they do to themselves and others in order to live in this kind of society.
They need to get in contact with the grief from which they spend so
much time and energy dissociating. When white people understand
how much energy they expend to create the kind of amnesia that is a
necessary part of whiteness, they can begin to see whiteness as a
crippling condition that makes it very hard to imagine what a racially
just society could be about. At this point, the transformation for justice
is as much for ‘‘us’’ as for some distant and impersonal ‘‘them.’’
At the same time, in order to understand the depth and subtleties of
the way racism works in the United States, people need to understand
history and be able to make critical analyses of the power dynamics
they encounter. By looking at the way that class and race intersect,
participants can begin to see the way in which these dynamics hold
each other in place. They are introduced to the concepts of position
(what social strata you come from), stand (whom you are accountable
to), bias (whose interests do your attitudes serve), and impact (who
benefits and who loses from your actions). Understanding the di√er-
ence between impact and intention can help people sort out very
thorny situations and can help us move from guilt into action. In these
workshops, I appeal to the heart and the imagination and the head.
Our own history and our own grief—that is the heart. Understanding
the historical nature of whiteness—that is what helps us imagine alter-
natives. Developing a critical analysis of the power structure and what
can be done to change it—that is the head.

White Studies in the Academy

Many academics have become engaged in the study of whiteness as a
part of their political work to fight racism in the academy as well as
outside, and they courageously pursue their work in the face of great
opposition from more established disciplines. Yet the realities of the
 moving from guilt to action 307

academic environment soon become painfully evident. There is little

support for new faculty, especially in the social sciences and human-
ities. There is an attack on Ethnic and Women’s Studies and related
disciplines, and academic institutions as a whole are less and less open
to new types of knowledge.
Marian Root, in her piece ‘‘The Heart Cannot Express Its Good-
ness,’’ invokes James Baldwin’s statement that the price of whiteness
and membership in the privileged ranks is the loss of community.
Both Root and Sharon Howell note that this loss of community forces
us to be ‘‘self-reliant or perish.’’ Capitalism relies on individualism
and competition. The university as a middle-class institution both
reinforces and reproduces these values. It is organized by and rewards
middle-class values like individualism and competitiveness. Collective
work is generally not rewarded or even recognized—yet fighting rac-
ism has to be more than anything a collective project. Of course, those
who can a√ord individualism are exactly those who have power. Indi-
vidualism is taught in most U.S. schools from first grade on; it is
embedded in the grading system and entrance requirements for un-
dergraduate and graduate programs. Try to imagine a collective Ph.D.!
I do appreciate that this book is an exception to the rule, due to its
having a collective editorial board. And, as I have said before, there are
many who enter academia out of a sense of responsibility to commu-
nities of color. Unfortunately, there are structural forces at work that
make it di≈cult for such academics to stay connected with those
communities.
I have a picture in mind. It is not a photograph of academic reality
but, rather, a painting, a view from an outsider’s eyes. Academics are
forced by the requirements of academic life to search for ‘‘new’’ intel-
lectual terrain to explore and stake out.≤ Identity studies seem to fol-
low a life cycle: as time goes on, important political projects begin to
attract people who are looking to find a new niche in which to build
their careers. At first, the terrain seems ‘‘virginal’’ and untouched (pick
your favorite gender-laden term). So the explorer moves around the
new territory, poking into people’s history, sociology, psychology, and
biology, overturning loose stones and pulling up plants. The explorer
seeks to unveil knowledge, and the one who is there first creates a
claim on large areas of the terrain. The knowledge belongs to the
explorer who ‘‘discovers’’ it. Of course, in culture and social studies,
the terrain involves human beings; the ‘‘new’’ knowledge is about
308 william aal

their lives, their cultures, and their dreams. The academic in general
has no sense of accountability to those who are the ‘‘subjects’’ or
‘‘objects’’ of investigation.
As new investigators arrive, they scour around for new and un-
usual parts of the territory, perhaps a unique species or perhaps a
hidden corner. They compete for control over the territory by writing
in a manner that uses the most abstract prose. Papers are written in a
language so di≈cult to access that most of us lose patience. After an
appropriate tour de force, perhaps the author gains access to scarce
academic resources, a temporary teaching post; perhaps if he or she is
lucky, the fabled tenure-track position. The people or group studied
has not benefited from any of this process, although later they might
get thanked in the credits. Sometimes they find their privacy violated
and see sacred aspects of their culture now displayed in books and
articles, to be read by anonymous strangers who know little, if any-
thing, about the context in which those mysteries were created. Then
there is the worst-case scenario: they find that they no longer have
control of an aspect of their lives that previously they had had. Instead,
they find an insidious slippage into dependency has been initiated by
the whole process. This critique is not new. For example, the field of
anthropology has long challenged researchers and applied anthropol-
ogists to do relevant and accountable work.≥ Obviously, this particular
trajectory has nothing to do with a struggle for social justice or with
those of us who try to organize against racism.
Part of the explanation has to do with how academics do their work.
The prevailing view of academic work comes from the dominant ide-
ology of empirical science: first discover a phenomenon, then analyze
it, and then use it to support your argument (in this case for change).
From my experience, this model of advocacy is ine√ective either as a
way to e√ect change within organizations or as a way to bring people
into movements. No critique by itself has ever sustained transforma-
tion over time on either a personal or a group level. Creating a new
society requires vision, passion, and commitment. Scholarship that
engages reason, the imagination, and the heart and that empowers the
community can help that process. Vine Deloria Jr., bell hooks, Stuart
Hall, and Howard Zinn are role models for those who wish to follow
this path.
Useful scholarship would help us connect ourselves to the histor-
ical and social complexes that we refer to when we speak of whiteness.
 moving from guilt to action 309

But doing scholarship in the service of antiracism also means that

scholars need to pay attention to the language in which they commu-
nicate their thoughts and their findings. Unlike academics, antiracist
organizers cannot a√ord to distance themselves from the community,
nor can we a√ord to slip into a language that alienates and excludes.
There is no antiracist organizing without connection to the commu-
nity. So that is one thing academics who are truly interested in white-
ness in terms of antiracist work might try to think about: are they
writing for tenure committees alone, or are they writing for all of us?
I look forward to an academy that values community, collaboration,
and justice as much as rigor, creativity, and novelty. I have been in-
spired by the words of Roberto Unger in his Politics:
In this work, true satisfaction can be found only in an activ-
ity that enables people to fight back, individually or collectively
against the established settings of our lives—to resist these set-
tings or even to re-make them. Those who have been converted to
this idea of a transformative vocation cannot easily return to the
notion of work as an honorable calling within a fixed scheme of
social roles and hierarchies, nor can they remain content within a
purely instrumental view of labor as a source of material benefits
with which to support themselves and their families.∂
What would a transformative vocation be? What kinds of life and
career choices would need to be made? And what kind of institutional
structures could we create that would allow activists the time and
resources to reflect on their work and academics to engage fully in the
practical e√ort to make society a just and open space? This is a chal-
lenge for activists and scholars alike.

Notes
1 Mab Segrest’s Memoirs of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994),
Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1978), and Linda
Stout’s Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing
(Boston: Beacon, 1996) are all written by southern ‘‘white’’ women com-
mitted to racial justice. Each in her own way examines the experience of
racism in the South and gauges the e√ects of racism and sexism on her
own life and society. All talk about the possibility and impact of standing in
resistance to white supremacy. See also Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Be-
310 william aal

came White (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Howard Zinn, A People’s
History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
2 The Portuguese word explorador has two meanings: to explore and to
exploit. Sometimes I wonder whether the English word should carry both
connotations.
3 See Dell H. Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1999).
4 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory,
Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13.
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Contributors

william aal is an activist and popular educator who for the past twenty years
has brought an antiracist perspective into struggles for economic, gender, and
environmental justice. He is a member of the Seattle Global Economy Working
Group, the Washington Biotechnology Action Council, and the Economic Liter-
acy Action Network, and is a cofounder of the Urban Action School. He does
training, organizational development and consulting as an associate of Tools for
Change (website: www.toolsforchange.org). He resides in Seattle, Washington.

allan bérubé is an independent scholar, a member of the National Writers

Union, and a founder of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.
Since 1978 he has written, lectured, and presented slide shows on U.S. lesbian,
gay, and transgender history. He is author of the award-winning book Coming
Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (Free
Press, 1990). He co-wrote the 1994 Peabody Award–winning documentary
film based on his book. He has taught lesbian and gay history courses at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Portland State Uni-
versity, and the New School for Social Research. In 1994 he was awarded a
Rockefeller fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY, and
in 1996 he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship. He is currently
writing a history of gay work and activism among the crew members of the
great ocean liners from the Great Depression to the Cold War, titled Shipping
Out (Houghton Mi∆in, forthcoming).

dalton conley is currently associate professor of sociology and director of

the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University. Prior
to joining the ranks of nyu, he was a faculty member of the Departments of
Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of
Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Uni-
versity of California Press, 1999), and Honky (University of California Press,
2000), a memoir of growing up white in a predominantly minority urban-
housing project. Conley has written extensively on issues of race and socio-
334 contributors

economic status and is currently working on a project that examines how

siblings from the same family of origin end up in di√erent class positions as
adults. Conley is a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator
Award.

troy duster is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of

California, Berkeley, and is also on the faculty of the Institute for the History
and Production of Knowledge and the Department of Sociology at New York
University.

ruth frankenberg is an associate professor of American studies at the

University of California, Davis. Her works on whiteness include White Women,
Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (University of Minnesota
Press, 1993) and Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
(Duke University Press, 1997), which she edited. Her current work includes an
ethnography in progress, ‘‘A Quiet Revolution: Spiritual Practices in the Con-
temporary United States.’’

john hartigan, jr. currently teaches in the Americo Paredes Center for
Cultural Studies in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas,
Austin. His published works include articles in Social Research, Cultural Studies,
and American Anthropologist, and Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of White-
ness in Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1999).

eric lott teaches American studies at the University of Virginia. He is the

author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(Oxford University Press, 1993) and the forthcoming Darkness USA: The Cul-
tural Contradictions of American Racism.

michael omi is a professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University

of California, Berkeley. He is the author (with Howard Winant) of Racial Forma-
tion in the United States (2d edition, Routledge, 1994), and articles on Asian
Americans and race relations, right-wing political movements, and race and
popular culture. He is currently completing a study of the emerging practices of
antiracist organizations in the United States. In 1990 he was the recipient of
UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

jasbir kaur puar is assistant professor of women’s studies and geography

at Rutgers University. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on transnational sex-
ualities and Trinidad in the department of comparative ethnic studies, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. She has published several articles on South Asian
diasporic cultural politics in Q&A: Queer in Asian America (ed. Eng and Hom,
Temple University Press, 1997), New Frontiers in Women’s Studies (ed. Maynard
and Purvis, Taylor and Francis, 1996), and Socialist Review.
 contributors 335

mab segrest is a writer, organizer, and teacher who lives in Durham, North
Carolina. Her book Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994) won the Lambda Editor’s
Choice and was named an Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North
America. She is currently coordinator of the Urban-Rural Mission (USA). This
essay will be in her next collection, Born to Belonging, forthcoming from Rutgers
University Press.

vron ware is a writer, photographer, and teacher who has one foot in London
and the other in Connecticut. She was editor of the antifascist journal Search-
light in the early 1980s. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History was
published by Verso in 1992, and The Trouble with Whiteness, her new collection
of polemical essays about whiteness, culture, and politics (with Les Back) is
forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

howard winant is a professor of sociology at Temple University. He is the

author of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (1994) and the co-
author (with Michael Omi) of Racial Formation in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1990s (2d ed., Routledge, 1994). He has also written a book on eco-
nomic policy, Stalemate: Political Economic Origins of Supply-Side Policy (Praeger,
1988) and The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New
York: Basic Books, 2001). His work on race examines the continuing centrality
of racial identity and racial inequality. His current research concerns the con-
tested meaning and evolving political dynamics of race in selected European,
African, and American countries.

Editors
birgit brander rasmussen is a doctoral candidate in the department of
comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a
Danish Research Academy fellow. She specializes in comparative ethnic litera-
tures and is writing her dissertation on colonial semiosis—the meeting of het-
erogeneous textual practices—in early and contemporary American literatures.
She has translated Danish immigrant poetry for the Longfellow Institute Series
in American Languages and Literatures at Harvard. She has published short
stories and is a contributor to kvindfo, a web magazine on gender and culture.

eric klinenberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern Uni-

versity, a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and an individual
projects fellow of the Open Society Institute. His forthcoming book, a social au-
topsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave and an account of emergent forms of urban
danger and deprivation, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in
2002. He has published articles in Theory and Society, Body and Society, Ethnog-
raphy, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Actes de la Recherche en Sciènces Sociales.
336 contributors

irene j. nexica is a writer whose latest work analyzes popular music and its
intersections with mainstream and academic theories of gender, ethnicity, na-
tionality, class, and sexuality, particularly in the United States and Britain. She
also researches fandom and the ways that communities converge and interact.
She is currently focusing on the Spice Girls, boy bands, and other ‘‘teen’’ music
marketed to listeners of all ages.

matt wray received his doctorate from the department of comparative ethnic
studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Assistant
Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His forthcoming
book on historical representations of poor rural whites in the United States will
be published by Duke University Press. His articles have appeared in the Min-
nesota Review and Social Justice. He is coeditor of White Trash: Race and Class in
America (Routledge, 1997) and Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life
(New York University Press, 1998).
Index

Aal, William, 13, 17 Antiracist activism: civil rights move-

Abolitionism, 106–8, 228 ment, 91, 102–5, 244–45, 263 n.30,
A≈rmative action: economic status 268–70, 289; diversity training,
and, 275–76; education and, 83, 295–96, 301–2; in the gay commu-
286; ethnicity and, 4, 89; legisla- nity, 235, 248, 254–56, 259, 297–
tion, 4–7, 20 nn.12, 14, 106; South 98; organizations, 49–51, 271–77,
Africa and, 125–26 289–90; whiteness and, 83, 153–57,
afl-cio, 217–18, 228, 231 160–61, 254–56, 266–67, 305–6.
African Americans: Asian Americans See also Race and racism
and, 131, 286; assimilation and, Anti-semitism, 221, 276
302–3; civil rights movement, 4, 5, Anzaldúa, Gloria, 170
102–3; economic status of, 127–28, Apartheid, 122, 124–25, 127, 133 n.1
129; homosexuality and, 240–41; Aronowitz, Stanley, 226
Latinos and, 286–87; in the mili- Asian Americans: African Americans
tary, 240–44, 261 n.7; whiteness and, 131, 286; Committee against
and, 2, 27–28, 31–33, 34 n.22, 77– Anti-Asian Violence (caaav), 272,
81, 249. See also Race and racism 277–81; economic status of, 281–
Afrocentric curriculum, 142–47, 151, 82; education and, 35–36; Organi-
153–57, 160 zation of Asian Women, 280; vio-
aids activism, 243, 248–53, 258 lence against, 279–81, 283–84;
Alexander, M. Jacqui, 13, 169, 172 whiteness of, 21 n.22, 89, 178 n.6
Allen, Theodore, 13, 191 Assimilation, 302–7
Almaguer, Tomàs, 288
Alterman, Eric, 220, 232 Baldwin, James, 207, 236, 259, 307
American Anthropological Associa- Berman, Paul, 215, 219–21, 226, 232
tion, 269 Bernier, François, 26, 31, 33
American Federation of Labor, 119 Bérubé, Allan, 13, 16, 242, 262 n.17
American Sociological Association, Bhabha, Homi, 171–72
86–92 Biology and genetics, 8, 42 n.11, 101,
Angelou, Maya, 216 104, 115–17, 121–22, 133 n.2, 192
Anti-Racism Institute of Clergy and Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership
Laity Concerned (Chicago), 271, 277 Forum, 244
338 index

Black Panthers, 232 Colonialism, 13, 74–75, 81, 98–99,

Black Power, 232 192
Blair, Tony, 194, 197–98 Color blindness, 90–91, 103, 225, 247,
Blumer, Herbert, 101, 104 267–68, 289–90
Bonnett, Alistair, 153, 156, 266 Columbia University Teach-In (1996),
Borders: of race, 8–9, 26, 34–35, 40– 217–20, 227–28, 229
41, 102, 131–32, 237–38; of sex- Committee against Anti-Asian Vio-
uality, 167–74, 182 n.37 lence (caaav), 272, 277–84
Bradshaw, John, 63–65 Communism, 221, 229, 231
Britain: Carribean immigrants in, Congressional Black Caucus, 245
198–200, 203–4, 208; cultural Conley, Dalton, 14, 15
identity of youth in, 190–92, 210– Connerly, Ward, 5, 6–7, 84
11; national identity, 193–95, 198– Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 104
200, 203–6; reimaging of, 192–96; Culture: African Americans and
working class in, 191–92 white, 28, 31–33; and cultural dis-
British Nationalist Party (bnp), 192– function, 65–67; globalization and,
93, 197–98 185, 220; of the Left, 222–23; multi-
Butler, Judith, 168, 174, 177 n.3 culturalism, 130–31, 190, 194–96,
206, 210, 221, 285; of whiteness,
California, 4–7, 19 n.10, 130–31, 136 10–11, 28, 299–301; youth and, 11,
n.30, 285–86 190–92, 210–11
California Civil Rights Initiative, 4–7,
19 n.10, 285–86 Davis, Angela, 269, 290
Campaign for Military Service (cms), De Beauvoir, Simone, 56
239–42, 244 D’Emilio, John, 173, 254
Capitalism, 59, 62, 169, 218–19, 272, Democratic Party, 215, 226
307 Detroit Summer, 300
Carribean/West Indians, 199–200, Diana, Princess of Wales, 187–88
203–4, 208, 209 Discrimination: a≈rmative action
Caste system (India), 126–28, 136 and, 4–7, 20 nn.12, 14, 83, 89, 106,
n.26 125–26, 275–76, 286; and African
Census, United States, 9, 129 Americans in the military, 239–44,
Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 54–55, 67 261 n.7; apartheid, 122, 124–25, 127,
Civil Rights Act (1964), 105 133 n.1; in education, 11–12, 34–35;
Civil rights movement, 91, 102–5, in employment, 202–3, 273; and
244–45, 263 n.30, 268–70, 289 gays and lesbians in the military,
Class: gender and, 172–73, 232, 247, 179 n.13, 239–45, 261 n.7, 262
302; middle class, 6, 25, 34; poverty nn.13, 17; in housing, 11, 27, 117–20,
and, 219; race and, 36–37, 83, 122, 131, 135 n.17, 202–3; police depart-
141–42, 145, 228, 238, 302; working ments and, 124, 208–9; racial pro-
class, 122, 191–92, 217 filing as, 114, 134 n.3
Cold War era, 98–100, 216 Dismantling Racism Program of the
 index 339

National Conference (St. Louis), Fraser, Steve, 217, 218

271, 273, 275, 277, 278 Freire, Paulo, 67
Douglass, Frederick, 52–53, 65–67 Freud, Sigmund, 56–59, 63, 69 n.25
Du Bois, W. E. B., 45–46, 51, 55, 88, Friedan, Betty, 218
99, 104, 108, 228
Duggan, Lisa, 173, 174 Gates, Henry Louis, 216, 224
Durkheim, Emile, 104 Gay men: aids activism and, 243,
Duster, Troy, 15 247–53, 258; antiracist activism
Dyer, Richard, 190–91, 211 and, 248, 254–56, 297–98; gay
rights movement and, 244–45, 263
Economic status: of African Ameri- n.30; in the military, 179 n.13, 239–
cans, 127–28, 129; of Asian Ameri- 45, 261 n.7, 262 nn.13, 17; white-
cans, 281–82; national identity and, ness of, 235–41, 244, 246–50, 261
194–96; New Deal, 118–19; of poor n.6
whites, 89–90, 275–76; wages and, Gilroy, Paul, 72
127–29, 217; whiteness and, 201–2, Gitlin, Todd, 215, 216, 219–20, 226–
244, 247, 261 n.6, 302; of working 27, 229–32
class in Britain, 191–92. See also La- Glazer, Nathan, 103
bor; Working class Globalization: American culture and,
Edmundson, Mark, 219, 220 220; and asylum, 174, 182 n.37; of
Education: Afrocentric curriculum, homosexuality, 168–69, 173; iden-
142–47, 151, 153–57, 160; Asian tity and, 185–86, 194–95; racism
Americans and, 35–36; discrimina- and, 99, 109 n.4
tion in, 11–12, 34–36; legislation Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 191
and, 4, 5, 6–7, 19 n.10, 20 n.15; mi- Go√man, Erving, 224
nority student achievement, 4–7; Goldberg, David, 270, 278–79
the New Left in the university, 220– Gramsci, Antonio, 100, 101, 296
22; public schools, 34–35, 142–46, Green, Mark Scanlon, 297
149–50, 229 Greenhalgh, Paul, 195
Erdich, Louise, 80 Grewal, Inderpal, 170
Espiritu, Yen, 279 Grossberg, Lawrence, 59–60
Ethnicity, 2, 4, 35–40, 89, 192–94, Guinier, Lani, 216, 226
198–200
Ethnography, 140–41, 159–60 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 191
Hall, Lisa Kahaleole, 250, 256
Fabian, Johannes, 144 Hall, Stuart, 75, 169, 186, 230, 296,
Family dysfunction, 63–67 308
Feagin, Joe, 290 Harris, Cheryl, 6, 80, 104, 226
Feminism, 18 n.6, 63, 174 Hartigan, John, Jr., 15
Foner, Eric, 218 Hate crimes, 278–79, 281, 283–84
Foucault, Michel, 101, 176 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 55–
Frankenberg, Ruth, 14, 160, 270 56
340 index

Hennessy, Rosemary, 172 Identity: black, 66, 185, 187, 227; Brit-
Herrnstein, Richard, 121 ain, 185–86, 189–95, 197–200,
Hewitt, Roger, 190 210–11; politics, 1, 184, 216–19,
Hill, Marjorie, 245–46 227, 230–32, 302–3; racial, 38–39,
Hinduism, 171, 180 n.23 52–53, 104, 111 n.25, 115, 117; re-
Ho√a, James, Jr., 219, 224 imaging of, 194–97, 198–200; sex-
Homophobia, 45, 49, 83, 257 ual, 170–73, 176, 179 n.13, 227, 232;
Homosexuality: African Americans sports and, 186–89, 192, 211. See
and, 240–41; aids activism and, also Gay men; Lesbians; Race and
243, 247–53, 258; antiracist activ- racism; Whiteness
ism and, 235, 248, 254–56, 259, Ignatiev, Noel, 124, 305–6
297–98; Black Lesbian and Gay Immigrants and immigration: Asian
Leadership Forum, 244; coming American, 21 n.22, 35–36, 89, 131,
out, 175–76; gay rights movement, 178 n.6, 272, 277–86; assimilation
244–45, 263 n.30; gays and lesbians of, 302–4; in Britain, 193–95, 198–
in the military, 179 n.13, 239–45, 200; from the Carribean, 199–200,
261 n.7, 262 nn.13, 17; globalization 203–4, 207–8, 209; legislation
of, 167–70, 168–69, 173; against, 4–7, 285–86; sexual iden-
homophobia and, 45, 49, 83, 257; tity and, 167–69, 172, 174–75, 177
and marketing of gay whiteness, n.1, 182 n.37; violence against, 203–
238–39, 244, 246, 261 n.6; and 6
marriage and domestic part- India, 78, 126–28, 170–72
nerships, 174–75; national identity
and, 170–73; Queer Nation, 170, James, C. L. R., 62, 229
172, 181 n.27; Queer Studies, 173; Jameson, Fredric, 184, 222
Queer theory, 169, 178 n.8; race Jim Crow, 48, 122
and, 168–69, 236–37, 239–44, Johnson, Lyndon, 105
247, 250, 255, 257–58; San Antonio Jordan, June, 184
Lesbian Gay Assembly (salga), Jordan, Winthrop, 191
255; Trikone (South Asian Gay and
Lesbian Organization), 171–72; Kazin, Michael, 215, 218
whiteness of, 168–73, 178 n.6, 181 Kelley, Robin, 227–28
n.27, 235–41, 244, 246–50, 254– Kelly, Michael, 215
58, 261 n.6. See also Queerness Kimball, Roger, 229
hooks, bell, 10–11, 12, 22 n.34, 44–45, King, Martin Luther, Jr., 5, 103, 105,
296, 308 228–29, 245–46
Horkheimer, Max, 220 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 80
Housing, 11, 27, 117–20, 131, 135 n.17,
202–3 Labor: antiracist activism and, 231,
Howe, Irving, 215, 226 275–76; blacks in, 118, 223; discrim-
Hughes, Henry, 53, 55, 59 ination in, 202–3, 273; immigrants
Hughes, Langston, 2 and, 202–3; in South Africa, 125–
 index 341

26; unions and, 119, 202–3, 217– Michaels, Walter Benn, 104, 106, 108
19, 223–24, 228, 231, 235; wages, Military service: African Americans
127–29, 217; women and, 118, 228, in, 240–44, 261 n.7; Campaign for
280, 282–83 Military Service (cms), 239–42,
Labor/Community Strategy Center 244; gays and lesbians in, 179 n.13,
(l / csc), 272, 275, 277 239–45, 261 n.7, 262 nn.13, 17; Lat-
Laclau, Ernesto, 227 inos in, 261 n.7; Military Freedom
Latinos: a≈rmative action and, 4, 89; Project, 261 n.7
and African Americans, 286–87; in Mills, C. Wright, 219
the military, 261 n.7; and poverty, Mixner, David, 239, 241, 244–45, 261
219, 277; racial identity of, 38 n.7, 263 n.30
The Left, 106, 220–28, 230 Mohanty, Chandra, 13, 169
Legislation: Civil Rights Act (1964), Moraga, Cherríe, 8, 170
105; Jim Crow, 48, 122; National Morrison, Toni, 2, 97
Housing Acts (1934 & 1949), 119, Mou√e, Chantal, 227
120; Proposition 187, 4, 285–86; Multiculturalism, 130–31, 190, 194–
Proposition 209, 4–7, 19 n.10, 285– 96, 206, 210, 221, 285
86; Taft-Hartley Act (1948), 217; Myrdal, Gunnar, 99
Wagner Act (1935), 118–19
Leonard, Mark, 194, 195, 197 National Front, 198, 211
Lesbians, 167–70, 238, 247, 250, 261 National Housing Acts (1934 & 1949),
n.7 119, 120
Leslie, Ann, 190–91, 192 National Organization for an Ameri-
Liberalism, 103–6, 214–21, 225–26, can Revolution (noar), 299, 301,
232–33 303
Lind, Michael, 215, 216, 219–23 Native Americans, 80, 130
Lipsitz, George, 5, 267 Native Hawaiians, 287
Lott, Eric, 16 Neighborhoods, 27–32, 120, 144, 146
Lowe, Lisa, 170, 284 Neoconservatism, 102–3, 105
New Deal, 118–19, 214
Making and Unmaking of Whiteness North Carolinians Against Racist and
conference, 3–4, 84, 130 Religious Violence, 50
Malcolm X Academy (Detroit), 142– Northwest Coalition Against Mali-
46, 149–50 cious Harassment (nwc), 271, 274,
Marcuse, Herbert, 58, 59, 67 276, 277
Marketing: of gay whiteness, 238–39, Nunn, Sam, 239, 240, 245, 263
244, 246, 261 n.6; of national iden- n.30
tity, 194–97, 198–200 Nussbaum, Martha, 224
Marxism, 220, 223
Media images of race, 143–50, 163 Omi, Michael, 16, 98
n.10, 165 n.17, 203–4 Ong, Aihwa, 171
Menand, Louis, 219, 220 Organization of Asian Women, 280
342 index

Perry, Pamela, 131 views on, 102–6, 214–19; racial

Phillips, Mike, 199, 204–6, 208–10 identity, 38–39, 52–53, 104, 111 n.25,
Police departments, 124, 208–9, 276, 115, 117; working class and, 36–37,
280–81 45–46, 141–42. See also Whiteness
Populism, 215, 216 Racial formation theory, 100–101, 109
Poverty, 218–19, 229, 277 n.7, 111 n.25
President’s Initiative on Race, 285 Randolph, A. Philip, 226, 228
Proposition 187, 4, 285–86 Rapping, Elaine, 62, 70 n.31
Proposition 209, 4–7, 19 n.10, 285– Reich, Robert, 216, 222, 223
86 Religion, 171, 220, 300–301
Puar, Jasbir Kaur, 16 Roediger, David, 2, 77–80, 107, 124,
Public schools, 34–35, 142–46, 149, 132, 191, 207
150 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 118
Root, Marian, 300, 307
Quadagno, Jill, 118 Rorty, Richard, 215, 217–19, 220–23,
Queerness: Queer Nation, 170, 172, 224, 226
181 n.27; Queer Studies, 173; Queer
theory, 169, 178 n.8. See also Said, Edward, 296
Homosexuality San Antonio Lesbian Gay Assembly
(salga), 255
Race and racism: academic studies of, Saxton, Alexander, 191
269–70; Afrocentric curriculum, Schlesinger, Arthur, 216, 229–30
142–47, 151, 153–57, 160; antiracist Schuyler, George S., 80
activism, 278–82; Asian Ameri- Sedgwick, Eve, 175
cans, 278–82; biology and genetics Segrest, Mab, 14, 15
of, 8, 42 n.11, 101, 104, 115–17, 121– Slavery, 45–46, 51–56, 59–60, 63–
22, 133 n.2, 192; black/white dual- 67, 130
ism in United States, 11, 130–31, Sleeper, Jim, 215, 229
277; class and, 141–42, 145, 228, Smith, Barbara, 253
232, 238, 302; colonialism and, 74– sncc (Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
75, 98–99; color blindness, 90–91, ing Committee), 228–29
103, 247, 267–68, 289–90; eth- South Africa, 124–26, 127, 129
nicity and, 35–38; family dysfunc- Southern Empowerment Project
tion and, 63–67; gay and lesbian (sep), 272, 274, 278
community and, 168, 236–37, 239– Spivak, Gayatri, 220
44, 247, 250, 257–58; hate crimes, Sugg, Katherine, 170
278–79, 281, 283–84; immigrants Sweeney, John, 217, 218, 224
and immigration, 99, 204–5; invis-
ibility of whiteness, 73–82, 91, 164 Taft-Hartley Act (1948), 217
n.12; media images of, 143–50, 163 Takaki, Ron, 131
n.10, 165 n.17, 203–4; in the mili- Teamsters for a Democratic Union,
tary, 240–44, 261 n.7; political 219
 index 343

Third World, 78, 102, 168 ish) views of, 200–202; contested
Tools for Change, 298, 301, 303 meanings of, 7–11, 76, 81, 85, 106–
Transnationalism, 168–69, 174, 178 8, 111 n.25, 131–32; culture of, 10–
n.8, 182 n.37 11, 28, 299–301; ethnicity, 38–40;
Trikone (South Asian Gay and Lesbian of gays and lesbians, 170–73, 178
Organization), 171–72 n.6, 181 n.27, 235–41, 244–50, 254–
Twelve-Step Program, 60–63, 67, 70 58, 261 n.6; globalization of, 184–
n.31 86; invisibility of, 73–82, 91, 164
n.12; neoconservatism and, 102–3,
unesco Statement on Race (1995), 105; passing for white, 104, 115, 117;
115, 116 reimaging of, 196–98, 300–301;
Unger, Roberto, 296 slavery and, 45–46, 51–56, 59–60,
Unions, 119, 202–3, 217–19, 223–24, 63–67, 130; and white supremacy,
228, 231, 235 12, 43–44, 49–55, 98–103, 184, 271,
276
Violence: against Asian Americans, Wilentz, Sean, 215, 219, 220, 221
279–81, 283–84; black men and, Williams, Patricia, 218, 226
230; in Britain, 203–6, 208; hate Winant, Howard, 15, 270
crimes, 278–79, 281, 283–84; Windrush, 199–200, 203–4, 208
homophobia and, 45, 49, 83, 257; Women: a≈rmative action and, 5–6;
police departments and, 124, 208– Asian American, 282–83; in British
9, 276, 280–81; white supremacy working class, 191–92; feminism,
and, 12, 43–44, 49–55; women and, 18 n.6, 174; and identity politics,
51–55, 78–79 226, 227; and labor, 118, 228, 280,
Voting rights, 5, 106, 118, 223 282–83; lesbians, 167–70, 238,
247, 250, 261 n.7; and poverty, 219;
Wagner Act (1935), 118–19 and union membership, 228; vio-
Ware, Vron, 16 lence toward, 51–55, 78–79;
Waters, Mary, 37–38 women’s studies, 2, 18 n.7
Watkins, Perry, 241, 242–43, 248, 263 Working class: Asian Americans in,
n.18 282; in Britain, 191–92; men in, 6,
Wellman, David, 85 276; racism in, 36–37, 144; stereo-
West, Cornel, 215, 216, 218, 296 types of, 141–42, 165 n.19, 238;
Whiteness: academic studies of, 18 whites in, 45–46, 89–90, 141–42,
n.6, 82–84, 86–92, 295–97, 301, 161–62, 165 n.19
306–9; African Americans and, 2, World Trade Organization, 305
27–28, 31–33, 34 n.22, 77–81, 249;
aids activism and, 243, 247–53, Yamamoto, Eric, 287–88
258; antiracism and, 13, 83, 153–57, Yep, Kathy, 279–80
160–61, 254–56; Asian Americans Youth, 11, 190–92, 210–11, 282
and, 21 n.22, 89, 178 n.6; assimila-
tion, 207–8, 299–307; black (Brit- Zinn, Howard, 308
Additional copyright information

Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to be White, ∫ Dalton Conley

‘‘The Souls of White Folks,’’ ∫ Mab Segrest
White Racial Projects, ∫ Howard Winant
Perfidious Albion: Whiteness and the International Imagination, ∫ Vron Ware
How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays, ∫ Allan Bérubé

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The making and unmaking of whiteness / edited
by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, et al.
p. cm.
Papers from a conference held at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1997.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8223-2730-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 0-8223-2740-6 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Whites—United States—Race identity—Congresses.
2. Race awareness—United States—Congresses.
3. Racism—United States—Congresses.
4. United States—Race relations—Congresses.
5. United States—Social conditions—Congresses.
6. Social classes—United States—Congresses.
I. Brander Rasmussen, Birgit
e184.a1 m2627 2001
305.8%034073—dc21 2001028688