A protean concept

Oct 3rd, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Hari Kunzru wrote a brilliant piece on “whiteness” for the New York Review of Books a couple of years ago.

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept that has found its way into conversations about political power, material prosperity, social status, and even cognition. Invoking whiteness can stand in for older leftist ideas about class and power, or it can be a way of modifying those ideas. Whiteness can name a specifically American caste system—a historical product of plantation slavery—or a set of unexamined beliefs about a person’s own centrality, neutrality, authority, and objectivity. It can also take on a transhistorical, even transcendental quality, naming something more like a spiritual condition, a fallen state that is paradoxically also one of culpable innocence.

…Many conservatives affect to believe that we are on the brink of an American rerun of the Cultural Revolution, or possibly even the Haitian one, with dark-skinned folk emerging out of the cane fields and the Amazon warehouses to execute a terrifying inversion of the social order. This fear certainly looms large in the political imagination of the far right, driving recruitment to militias and Boogaloo groups and giving license to the most extreme authoritarian impulses of the White House.

…Though some of the objections to the politics of white privilege are clearly performative, there is reason to be wary of this politics, particularly now that these ideas are being refashioned by corporate America. Whiteness is a concept that can be made to serve many interests and positions, not all of them compatible.

It can make for a nice career for white people, too.

Among the activists beginning to think about the complex interrelationship of race and class [in the late 60s] was Theodore W. Allen, a lifelong Communist who had been a coal miner and labor organizer in West Virginia. Allen took as a starting point a now famous passage from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935):

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.

I think that puts it brilliantly.

In an essay first published in 1967 by the Radical Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Allen identified the “Achilles heel of the American working class” as what he called “white-skin privilege.” Du Bois saw the “psychological wage” as a conscious strategy of the ruling class to co-opt poor whites and prevent an interracial solidarity that might have threatened their ascendency during the period of Reconstruction. Allen edged toward a more sweeping position, identifying this offer of a psychological wage as one of the motors of American history that went back as far as seventeenth-century Virginia. The first use of “white” that he could find was in a Virginia statute of 1691, and he contended that the construction of whiteness as a social and legal identity was a response to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, in which Blacks and whites, including indentured servants, combined to oppose the governor and burn Jamestown. The task of the radical white ally to the Black struggle was to repudiate this privilege, to reject the blandishments of the rulers and persuade white workers to follow suit, developing class unity across racial lines.

Black and white, unite and fight. That used to be a slogan.

In the early 1990s [Noel Ignatiev] cofounded a journal called Race Traitor, under the slogan “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The betrayal of whiteness was now firmly understood not as a repudiation of biology, or even culture, but of a particular kind of social contract. As the editorial for the first issue of Race Traitor put it

The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.

I expect centuries of enslavement helped with that project quite a lot. Prison works the same way now.

In the early 1990s, as Ignatiev was working on Race Traitor, the historian David Roediger published The Wages of Whiteness, a book that expanded Theodore Allen’s account of whiteness as an organizing principle of American society, arguing that as new immigrant groups like the Irish arrived, they learned how to “become white” by aligning themselves with “white” interests. It was not just a question of adopting the manners or even displaying loyalty to the political priorities of the Anglo elite. Whiteness was earned by displays of performative “anti-blackness” (riots, lynchings, and so on), constituting and reinforcing a community that depended for its identity on differentiation from Blacks.

We don’t want to be black because we don’t want to be treated the way we treat black people. The loop has proven hard to break.

The “1619 Project” of The New York Times, created and led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which owes much to Roediger’s understanding of whiteness, asks what happens if we use the date of the arrival of the first Africans in the Jamestown colony to replace 1776 as the key to reading American history. Whether or not this thought experiment counts as “history” in an academic sense, the substantial claim is that if we look at the American story as one of violent struggle and contestation, formed to some large measure through the Atlantic slave trade, we arrive at a very different picture from the one that starts with a formal claim of rights and expands in the direction of an “ever more perfect union.”

And can we really deny that the American story is one of violent struggle? Really? What with slavery and the endless war on indigenous people and the seizure of lands and resources?

There is a hunger for information about the new civil rights movement, and many companies and institutions are beginning to feel that by ignoring it, they are exposing themselves to liability, or failing to get the best performance from their workforce. At the individual level, people who may not have thought much about racism are hurrying to educate themselves. This past June, the top five New York Times nonfiction best sellers were all books about antiracism. At number one was White Fragility, by a diversity consultant named Robin DiAngelo.

Who, let’s not forget, charges tens of thousands of dollars for her consultings.

Diversity consultancy is as much a product of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture as Black Lives Matter, but its lineage is not that of the New Left but the Human Potential movement, and the belief that the goal of existence is “self-actualization,” the apex of the famous pyramid described by Abraham Maslow in his “hierarchy of needs.” Much of the popular literature of antiracism, though it uses the lexicon of left politics (“whiteness,” “identity politics”), deploys self-actualization as its primary enticement to the reader. Follow these rules, and you too can grow into an antiracist. Antiracism is “the work,” and even if the goal is an antiracist society, the royal road runs not through organizing but through personal transformation.

Aw yeah. In short it’s basically about the precious self, as so many things are.

Regardless of DiAngelo’s personal politics, this truth remains. Her business model depends on making people uncomfortable, but not too much, or rather only along certain axes of discomfort. She will not get hired if she asserts that the problem she is proposing to solve may be structural and best addressed by the redistribution of power and resources, rather than maximizing the human potential of the marketing department. Of necessity, in a corporate forum, solutions need to be presented in ways that do not threaten the host organization, and that inevitably leads to their being framed as matters of personal, individual behavior.

Read the whole thing.

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