On Being White: A Series (5)

In my previous post I introduced James Baldwin's essay "On Being White ... and Other Lies," mentioning its foundational status for "whiteness studies." The rage Baldwin expressed there was personal, but it had some legitimacy. He wanted to sit at the table, so to speak, to be recognized by the greater culture, composed principally of whites, for the talented man he was. He went to Paris, then to the French Riviera, and had a seat at the table, where, among other things, he wrote a compellingly sensitive essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” published in 1959 in The New York Times Book Review. He had left America, he wrote then, in order not to become “merely a Negro; or, even merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” But Paris also taught him that “there are no untroubled countries in this fearful troubled world.”

Within four years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1968, the year in which Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were murdered and Andy Warhol was shot by a crazy woman representing a group called S.C.U.M., or Society for Cutting Up Men, blacks rioted for weeks in cities across the nation, with disastrous consequences that were still being felt in 1984. “On Being White” is the voice of a disappointed man, but in Baldwin’s accounting it is not the thinking people –– those delusional enough, like Baldwin, to imagine that social transformation would be achieved by single legislative act — were not the problem. It was because of working-class whites who had “got this way by their debasement of black people.” And because of them, as Baldwin wrote, the U.S. was ruled by a “stunning pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre … [and] has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen.” There follows the internationalist note: “… because they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.”

That I considered the Central Park event in terms of “whiteness” is one effect of working in an academic environment for the past several decades. My sensitivity to the absence of blacks, however, has a lot to do with my own astonishment at finding myself at such events. I never attend a New York City Ballet performance or eat at Nougatine, indeed at any event that represent the deployment of a great amount of cultural capital, without feeling a bit like an interloper and, indeed, without being aware of the privilege of being present. I grew up in white-bread Middle America, and indeed white, in the 1950s. The only plays I ever saw before entering college were high school productions. Nothing in my background suggests that I would one day live in New York, earn a Ph.D., become a published writer. Marilyn Frye would claim that my ability to pass, so to speak, is an example of white privilege. But folks back in Louisville would certainly be surprised if they could see me now. I come from the class of people of whom Baldwin wrote in 1984. Like him, I also wanted to sit at the table.

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