The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (23 page)

One of the advantages of the
subject(ed)s
of whiteness now
objecting
it (constituting it as a legitimate object of discursive interrogation and thereby objecting to the power of whiteness to iterate domination by remaining amorphous and invisible) is that we demystify the mechanisms by which whiteness has reproduced its foundational myths. We also get a better sense of how whiteness has helped construct blackness, and how whiteness has helped to construct Latino/a, Native American, and Asian identities as well.

We must recognize that current studies of whiteness—especially the groundbreaking writings of white scholars such as David Roediger, Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, and others—are building on the often unacknowledged tradition of black critical reflection on the ways and means of whiteness. To be sure, whiteness studies in its present modes—in terms of the scopes of interrogation, disciplinary methodologies, paradigms of knowledge, theoretical tools of analysis, historical conjunctions, and material supports that make this an ideal intellectual climate for scrutinizing white identities—unquestionably marks a significant scholarly, perhaps even disciplinary, departure in cultural studies of race and ethnicity. But such studies would be impossible, or at least highly unlikely, without the pioneering work of
figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer, and on and on.

To be fair, a number of the “new abolitionist” writers have scrupulously acknowledged their debt to this hidden black intellectual tradition. For instance, David Roediger acknowledges that Du Bois was the first to write, in his magisterial tome
Black Reconstruction
, about the “psychic wages of whiteness,” arguing that even poor workers derived a psychological benefit from their whiteness. Current whiteness studies will only be strengthened as they refer to those texts and figures in black life, and in other minority communities, which have aided in the demythologization of a homogeneous, uniform whiteness.

I think that the study of whiteness will be around for some time because it can give us crucial historical insight into current cultural debates. For example, contentious discussions about the labor movement and its relationship to identity politics would be greatly benefited from a vigorous examination of the role white racial identity played in the formation of the American working class. Despite their economic disadvantage, poor white workers appealed to the surplus value that their whiteness allowed them to accumulate in the political economy of race. Many poor workers invested their surplus valued whiteness into a fund of psychic protection against the perverse, impure meanings of blackness. They drew from their value-added whiteness to not only boost their self-esteem but to assert their relative racial superiority by means of what may be termed a
negative inculpability
: poor whites derived pleasure and some cultural benefit by
not being the nigger
.

Their negative inculpability prevented poor whites from being viewed as the ultimate cause of harm to white civilization—despite the social problems to which their poverty and class oppression gave rise. Their negative inculpability redeemed poor whites, at least partially, by granting them powers to deflect their degraded status through a
comparative racial taxonomy
: poor whites could articulate the reasons for their superiority by naming all the ways they remained white despite their economic hardship. Negative inculpability and comparative racial taxonomy were racial strategies by which poor whites appropriated the dominant meanings of whiteness, and the ideology of white domination, while obscuring the intellectual and material roots of their own suffering. Of course, in objective, empirically verifiable ways, poor whites had much more in common with poor blacks: degraded social status, depressed wages, and stigmatization through social narratives of “the deserving poor” that blamed the poor for their plight. Such studies are of utmost importance in explicating the complex intersections of race, gender, and class in the labor movement, as well as in contemporary cultural politics.

In order to solidify the intellectual foundation of whiteness studies, we should distinguish among at least three economies within whiteness: an
economy of invention
, an
economy of representation
, and an
economy of articulation
. Economies of invention explore how and when the multiple meanings of whiteness are fashioned. Economies of invention permit us to excavate, for instance, the construction of Irish as a white ethnicity, as Noel Ignatiev has done; the making of the white
working class, as David Roediger has done; and the invention of the white race, about which Theodore Allen has written. Economies of invention address the foundational myths of white ethnicity as they are articulated through metaphysical claims of white superiority. Economies of invention help us narrate the means by which culture has colluded with ideology to reproduce whiteness. They help us understand how cultural privilege is assigned to an accidental racial feature like whiteness, and how such privilege gives credence to philosophical arguments about the inherent goodness and supremacy of white identity.

Economies of invention encourage critics to stress how the project of whiteness was constructed on a labor base of exploited indigenous Americans and enslaved blacks. The irony is that enslaved blacks supplied material support and social leisure to white elites as they constructed mythologies of black racial inferiority. Economies of invention also accent a factor I discussed earlier: the symbiotic relationship between white and black identities, practices, and cultures in the construction of the material and cultural means to express whiteness.

In this matter, Orlando Patterson’s important book
Freedom
is crucial in pinpointing the intellectual function of an economy of invention in interrogating the historically and socially constituted meanings of whiteness. Patterson argues that Western conceptions of freedom—as well as the epistemic crucible of Western culture and identity—are contingent on, indeed articulated against, the backdrop of slavery. In other words, there’s no such thing as Western freedom without a corresponding articulation of slave identities; there’s no ideal of freedom within American culture in particular, and Western cultures in general, without the presence of the corollary slave subject that was being constructed and contained within the narrative of freedom to begin with. Economies of invention help us comprehend the extraordinarily intricate construction of white identities in the interstices of hybrid cultural contacts.

Economies of representation examine how whiteness has been manifest, how it has been symbolized, how it has been made visible. Economies of representation highlight how whiteness has been embodied in films, visual art, and branches of culture where public myths of white beauty and intelligence have gained representative authority to rearticulate the superiority and especially the desirability of whiteness. Economies of representation pay attention to the erotic visibility of white identities and images—how whiteness has been fetishized as the ideal expression of human identity.

Economies of representation also underscore the cultural deference paid to white identities, images, styles, and behaviors even as they cast light on the scorn heaped on nonwhite identities in a key strategy of defensive whiteness: demonizing the racialized other as a means of sanctifying the white self; devaluing nonwhite racial identities through stereotypical representations as a means of idealizing white identities; and bestializing the expression of eroticism in nonwhite cultures while eroticizing racial others for white pleasure and consumption.

Finally, economies of articulation name the specific sites of intellectual justification for white superiority and supremacy. From selected writings of Thomas
Jefferson, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson to the writings of Dinesh D’souza (a white superiorist in brown skin), Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and Richard Herrnstein, beliefs in the pathologies and corruptions of black culture, and by extension in the inherent rightness of whiteness, have deluged our intellectual landscape.

Economies of articulation specify how, from the Enlightenment to
The Bell Curve
, ideas of black inferiority have been expressed with vicious consistency. Indeed,
The
Bell Curve
argues black intellectual inferiority through a tangle of pseudo-scientifically manipulated data, leading to what Raymond Franklin has termed “statistical myopia.” Economies of articulation isolate the philosophical architecture and rhetorical scaffolding that joins white superiorist and supremacist thinking to social and cultural practices. Economies of articulation show how myths of value neutrality, ideals of Archimedean-like objectivity, conceptions of theory-free social science, notions of bias-free scholarship, and beliefs in heroically blind moral explanations are deployed to defend (and to coerce others outside of its ideological trajectory to defer to) white civilization. These three economies help us determine, define, and demystify the meanings of whiteness and make sure that the study of white identities, images, and ideologies rests on a critical intellectual foundation.

What about whiteness being discussed outside the confines of academia, or what about the influence of these scholarly discussions on others not in the academy? How can that happen or how is that happening?

I think it certainly is happening. One flagrant example is in the cultural discourse about “white male anger,” which, according to its apologists, is the legitimate bitterness of white men who have been unfairly denied employment because of affirmative action. Debates about white male anger take place in employment arenas, especially fire and police stations, where white men, we are told, have had enough. White male anger has focused on black bodies as its
objet de terror
, its target of rage. In the minds of such men (and their wives and daughters), blacks occupy wrongful places of privilege in the job sector because of their color. Black progress symbolized in affirmative action policies constitutes reverse racism for many whites. This is an extremely volatile occasion outside of the academy where the meanings of whiteness are being fiercely debated.

There were also discussions—sometimes explicit, more often veiled and coded—about whiteness in the recent ordeal of the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, and in its aftermath, the trial of Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh became a flashpoint in the resurfacing of a virulent, violent whiteness that had to be contained for at least three reasons. First, the racial violence that McVeigh symbolized transgressed its historic ethnic limits by, in significant measure, being directed toward other whites. Second, by intentionally targeting the American government, McVeigh’s white racial violence shattered an implicit social contract where the nation absorbed (i.e., excused, overlooked, downplayed,
underestimated, etc.) extralegal racial violence more readily if it was aimed at black or other minority bodies. This was an ideological relic from earlier generations when extralegal white racial violence actually served the interests of the state, or at least multitudes of its officials, by discouraging black insurrection, protest, or rebellion against the legal strictures of white supremacy. Finally, McVeigh’s violence had to be contained, even eradicated, because his poor white rebellion against state authority threatened to symbolically contaminate “purer,” more elite expressions of white ethnicity.

One really gets a sense, from many of the white cultural discussions of McVeigh, of the ethnic betrayal many whites feel in the Oklahoma City bombing. Judging by what I’ve read, McVeigh viewed himself as part of a tiny outpost of pure patriotic rebels whose patriotism was expressed in the logic of radical
antipatriotism
: one must blow up the state as it is to get to the state as it should be. I think that McVeigh believed he was reviving a heroic vision of whiteness that he thought was being suppressed within the institutional matrices of American democracy and “legitimate” government. Apparently in McVeigh’s thinking, the only legitimate government was to be found in the guerrilla gangsterism of his supremacist, antistatist comrades. They are the real Americans, not the namby-pamby politicians and state officials who cater to racial minorities, who endanger the freedom of religious minorities like the followers of the late cult leader David Koresh.

What’s fascinating about McVeigh is that his actions articulate in the extreme the logic of repressive, hegemonic whiteness that hibernates within the structures of legitimate government: vicious attacks on welfare and its recipients; brutal attacks on black progress and its advocates; heartless attacks on the crime-ridden black ghetto; and exploitative attacks on the alleged pathologies of black culture. All of these claims and more have been launched by governmental officials. The cumulative effect of such attacks is the implementation of policies that punish the black poor and stigmatize the black middle class as well as the legitimation of crude cultural biases toward black citizens.

Figures like Timothy McVeigh become hugely discomfiting manifestations of the hidden animus toward blackness and civility that such discourses of attack encourage. McVeigh is the rabid reification of the not too abstract narratives of hatred that flood segments of white talk radio. Bob Grant, Rush Limbaugh, and many other lesser lights discover a living embodiment of their vitriolic, vituperative verbiage in McVeigh. McVeigh is the monster created by the Frankensteins of white hatred. And there’s a great deal of shame in him because he’s out of control and destroying his creators. In this regard, it’s crucial to remember a salient fact: Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but the name of the monster’s creator. The real terror, then, is the mechanisms of reproduction that sustain and rearticulate ideologies of white supremacy, and that sanction the violent attack on black and other minority identities.