On Being White: A Series (4)

As I wrote in my previous post, it is not the fellow-privileged who are the targets of whiteness studies. An indication of their agenda is the motto of a now-defunct journal entitled Race Traitor: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

The word humanity indicates the hard-left orientation of most of these scholars. Some of them, like Roediger, are historians, but increasingly they hang out in university literature departments, where they nurse their rage over the failure of a socialist transformation of America: the capitalists and the warmongers have not been taken out and shot, the White House has not been occupied, the banks and corporations continue to make profits and reward stockholders. Once they saw themselves as the spokesmen of the working classes, but they have been let down. In their incarnation as whiteness scholars they now bear their fangs toward those who have stood athwart the revolution: the white working classes, who are routinely castigated, in the most poisonous rhetoric, as “racists,” “bigots,” and so on.

Nothing better demonstrates their contempt for American ideals — in contrast to their fealty toward "humanitarian" ones — than their attitude toward the immigrant groups that have peopled America — the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and so on. While most of us — us whites, anyway — have been raised with the notion that our forefathers came here to escape the Old World and in the process became “American,” we now learn that the price of coming here was to become “white” and thereby justify black subjugation and degradation.

This was the premise of a short piece by James Baldwin, “On Being White … and Other Lies.” It is from 1984, two decades after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. Just as A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is a foundational text for feminist studies, so, too, Baldwin’s for the field of whiteness studies. As Baldwin noted, the different Old World peoples who settled the North American continent gave up their ethnic identities after their arrival. How true, how true. The result was the eradication of “community” — of German or French or even of the underworld. But it was worse than that: “White men — from Norway, for example, where they are Norwegians — became white; by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.” American Jews, according to Baldwin, have paid the highest price, because they came from countries where they were not white, “and they came here, in part, because they were not white.”

Picture credit: One Archives Foundation