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 (3)

I began this series on race in America (see here) with a personal anecdote, because personal stories and subjective accounts are de rigueur in writings in the field of “whiteness studies.” The Wages of Whiteness by the labor historian David Roediger, for instance, opens with a conversion narrative concerning his journey from his racist past. Marilyn Frye, a retired professor of philosophy who has established an academic reputation with work on racism and sexuality, likewise appears to have suffered much from being a white woman, always aware, as she writes, that every choice or decision she makes is “made in a matrix of options,” that all decisions are “an exercise of race privilege.” (My emphasis.)  In the end, however, what it all comes down to is Marilyn Frye: “Does being white make it impossible for me to be a good person?”

The takeoff of whiteness studies occurred less than two decades ago, with Roediger’s study, but the field has had enormous influence over public discourse, especially in the media. The articles and books it has generated, and especially the jargon of the field — white privilege, white racism, and so on — have become self-propelling. This jargon has penetrated the consciousness even of folks who have never heard of Jacques Derrida: the assumptions of whiteness studies have become the “new natural.” Observe a hedge fund manager enjoying a cognac at a smart bar on the Upper West Side (where I live and which is also the throbbing heartbeat of liberal America). If the TV monitor is featuring a rant by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry about “blaming the victim,” you and I might turn away, but he will nod sagely, at least if anyone is watching. Even people who would seem to be the object of scorn of whiteness studies pay lip service to the proposition that they are oppressors of blacks and other minorities.

The white professional classes, however, wear this scorn lightly, like anyone who acts with noblesse oblige. No one is going to take away the privileges they enjoy, even if Bernie Sanders becomes president. “Matrix of options,” indeed. As for the laborers in the the field of whiteness studies, they will fight to their dying breath to retain tenure or, as they call it, “academic freedom.” It is not, however, the fellow-privileged who are the targets of whiteness studies. The object of their scorn is the white working class.

The next installment discusses the political goals of whiteness studies.

Picture credit: Free Republic