Whiteness studies

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Whiteness studies is a controversial field of study, popular mostly in the United States and the UK, that began appearing as early as 1983 (see the works of Marilyn Frye). However W.E.B. Dubois mentions the "public and psychological" privileges of "white" workers in his 1935 volume Black Reconstruction. As of 2004, according to The Washington Post, at least 30 institutions in the United States including Princeton University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico and University of Massachusetts Amherst currently offer courses in whiteness studies. Teaching and research around whiteness often overlap with research on post-colonial theory and orientalism taking place in the Arts and Humantities, Sociology, Literature, Communications, Cultural and Media and Studies faculties and departments, amongst others (e.g. Kent, Leeds).

The central tenet of whiteness studies (also known as "critical whiteness studies") is a reading of history and its effects on the present, inspired by postmodernism and social constructionism, in which the very concept of race is said to have been constructed by a white power structure in order to justify discrimination against nonwhites. Critics of of the concept of race have existed since the 1800's, such as Darwin, who questioned if human races even exist and pointed out that arbitrary amounts of categories are chosen, and that the idea of race is not about important differences within the human species. Darwin did however believe that ethnic groups within that human species were seperate and distinctive breeds.

Major areas of research include the nature of white identity and of white privilege, the historical process by which a white racial identity was created, the relation of culture to white identity, and possible processes of social change as they affect white identity. Many scientists have demonstrated that racial theories are based upon an arbitrary amount of categories and customs, and can overlook the problem of gradations between categories[citation needed]. and such presumptions also inform work within the field of whiteness studies.

Contents

[edit] History of Whiteness

Whiteness studies draws on research over the last forty years into the definition of race, almost entirely within the American context (though see Bonnett, A. 2000 White Identities). This research emphasizes the social construction of white, Native, and Black identities in interaction with the institutions of slavery, colonial settlement, citizenship, and industrial labor. Scholars such as Winthrop Jordan [1] have traced the evolution of the legally defined line between "blacks" and "whites" to colonial government efforts to prevent cross-racial revolts among unpaid laborers.

Macquarie University academic Joseph Pugliese [2] is among writers who have applied whiteness studies to an Australian context, discussing the ways that Indigenous Australians were marginalized in the wake of European colonization of Australia, as whiteness came to be defined as central to Australian identity. Pugliese discusses the 20th century White Australia policy as a conscious attempt to preserve the "purity" of whiteness in Australian society.[citation needed]

[edit] White privilege

Writers such as Peggy McIntosh have sought to enumerate the social, political and cultural advantages accorded to whites in American society. They argue that these advantages seem invisible to most whites, but obvious to others. They often call for whites to acknowledge, renounce or betray these privileges by using them against racism.

[edit] Schools of thought

[edit] Critical White Studies

Coming out of the legal studies field of Critical Race Theory, theorists of Critical Whiteness Studies seek to examine the construction and moral implications of whiteness. The field inherits from Critical Race Theory a focus on the legal and historical construction of white identity, the use of narratives (whether legal discourse, testimony or fiction) as a tool for exposing systems of racial power.[3]

[edit] Race Traitor

One group of people involved in these discussions advocates a strategy they call race treason, and are grouped around articles appearing in the journal Race Traitor. The adherents' main argument is that whiteness (as a marker of a social status within the United States) is conferred upon people in exchange for an expectation of loyalty to what they consider an oppressive social order. This loyalty has taken a variety of forms over time: suppression of slave rebellions, participation in patrols for runaways, maintenance of race exclusionary unions, participation in riots, support for racist violence, and participation in acts of violence during the conquest of western North America. Like currency, the value of this privilege (for the powerful) depends on the reliability of "white skin" (or as physical anthropologists would deem this construct, the phenotype of historical North Atlantic Europeans) as a marker for social consent. With sufficient "counterfeit whites" resisting racism and capitalism, the writers in this tradition argue, the privilege will be withdrawn or will splinter, prompting an era of conflict and social redefinition. Without such a period, they argue, progress towards social justice is impossible, and thus "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity."

In Race Traitor, the editors cite as the basis for their proposed actions a call by African American writers and activists--notably W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin--for whites to break solidarity with American racism. Since that racism involves the awarding of various forms of white privilege, some have even argued that every white identity is drawn into that system of privilege. Only identities which seek to transcend or defy that privilege, they argue, are effectively antiracist. This essential argument echoes Baldwin's declaration that, "As long as you think you are white, there's no hope for you," in an essay in which he acknowledges a variety of European cultures, a multiracial American culture, but no white culture per se which can be distinguished from the maintenance of racism.

Race Traitor advocates have sought examples of race treason by whites in American history. One historical figure consistently valorized by Race Traitor (a publication favorable to the tenets of whiteness studies) is John Brown, a Northern abolitionist of European descent who battled slavery in western territories of the United States and led a failed but dramatic raid to free slaves and create an armed anti-slavery force at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

Visions of praxis cited by Race Traitor writers range from anti-racist unionism (such as DRUM in Detroit), collaboration in urban uprisings, and documenting and interfering with police abuse of people of color. Joel Olson has written about a theoretical vision in his book The Abolition of White Democracy.

[edit] Whiteness and Femininity

The study of whiteness was taken up by white feminist theorists responding to black feminisms' demands that 'White Women Listen!' (Hazel Carby, 1997) and the critique of the feminist 'sisterhood' as eliding social, cultural and racial differences. This was the subject of an interdisciplinary conference held at York University, in 1998, the proceedings of which were later published in White?Women by Raw Nerve Books [1].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jordan, Winthrop. 'White Over Black'
  2. ^ Dr Joseph Pugliese's page at Macquarie University
  3. ^ See, for example, Haney López, Ian F. White by Law. 1995; Lipsitz, George. Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Delgado, Richard; Williams, Patricial; and Kovel, Joel.

[edit] Further reading

  • Eric Arnesen (2001), "Whiteness and the Historian's Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History 60: 3-32
  • Allen, Theodore W. (1994), The Invention of the White Race: Volume One; Racial Oppression and Social Control, New York and London, Verso.
  • Berger, Maurice (1999), "White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness", New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Bonnett, Alastair (2000) White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives Harlow, Prentice Hall
  • Carby, Hazel (1997), 'White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood', in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader, London and New York, Routledge.
  • Connor, Rachel and Crofts, Charlotte (1998), 'Assuming White Identities: Racial and Gendered Looking Across the Literature / Media Divide', in Heloise Brown, Madi Gilkes, Ann Kaloski-Naylor (eds), White?Women, York: Raw Nerve Books.
  • Davy, Kate (1997), 'Outing Whiteness: A Feminist Lesbian Project', in Mike Hill (ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader, New York and London, New York University Press.
  • Hill, Mike. (2004) After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: NYU Press.
  • Hill, Mike. (1997) Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: NYU Press.
  • Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History 89 (2002) 154-73.
  • Donaldson, Laura E. (1992), Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire, London, Routledge.
  • Dyer, Richard (1997), White, London, Routledge.
  • Gaines, Jane (1986), 'White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory', Cultural Critique, 4, 59-79.
  • Kaplan, E. Ann (1997), Looking For the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, New York and London, Routledge.
  • Lott, Eric (1997), 'The Whiteness of Film Noir', in Mike Hill (ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (1997), New York and London, New York University Press, 81-101
  • Roediger, David R. (1991), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, New York and London, Verso.
  • Shohat, Ella (1991), 'Gender and the Culture of Empire: Towards a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema', Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 13 (1-2): 45-84.

[edit] See also

Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

[edit] External links

[2]

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