On Being White: A Series (6)

I mentioned in the previous post of this series that I often felt like an interloper at cultural events or at fine restaurants. Like James Baldwin in his desire to be acknowledged by the larger cultural elite, I wanted to "sit at the table." Whiteness scholars would say that I am "privileged," but, truth to be told, I have simply learned the "mores" of these environments.

After all, to call an event “white” or to speak of “white” privilege, however, does not mean that all of the people who used to be known as Caucasian would find an opera in Central Park their kind of thing. Besides, in the new millennium you don’t have to be rich to do things that only the really wealthy did in the 1950s. Ordinary working folks nowadays can afford a ten-day vacation tour of France. In our present economy, you distinguish yourself by your choices, consumer and otherwise. Money is of course a good method of doing this, although even spending money that you don’t have is okay, for instance, by maxing out on your credit cards. In such a fluid society, however, it is not enough to do Paris; Paris is so passé, especially when anyone and everyone can afford to go there. Instead, it is important to “discover” the “undiscovered,” the latest best thing, what no one has yet thought of or commodified, be it culinary, geographical, or sexual. Like airplane passenger status, privilege must constantly be upgraded.

Thus, not all whites are “equal,” and some are less equal than people with dark complexions. The people who easily maneuver the new territory of privilege, who keep ahead of the curve, even if their immediate ancestors hail from Hong Kong or Bombay, belong to a new cultural and social elite. This social class is a byproduct of the unprecedented historical prosperity enjoyed by America and other “Western” nations. It goes without saying that all of us have been affected by this prosperity, even conservatives, even leftists, in fact, aside from a few outliers, everyone who is fortunate enough to live in an advanced Western commercial economy, of which the U.S. has simply led the way. Conservatives like good wines and farmers’ markets, too. Thus, if you live in Tucson or Indianapolis and eat Thai or Indian food, if you like to shop at Whole Foods (rather than at the local, lower-priced corporate supermarket), if you don’t mind subtitles with your movies, you are half way to being part of this class. And if you listen to TED talks, if evangelicals creep you out, you are likely to be the real thing.

Continuous upgrading of one’s cultural attitudes comes with this territory: thus, the condescension of this new class toward American whites who are behind the curve, not only in life style, but especially in their professed adherence to “traditional” social views. It is no secret that such condescension, if not outright contempt, is one of the most characteristic attitudes of white liberals toward their less privileged fellow-citizens. President Obama was not admonished for his unpresidential-like comments about the benightedness of gun and religion clingers. Liberal whites agree with him, and whiteness studies provides ready license for such contempt.

Image credit: Kevin Jackson

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

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

On Being White: A Series (2)

A crowd of white persons

It was a summer evening in Central Park in New York. I was attending a Metropolitan Opera performance with a group of friends. The event was free, and since early morning the Sheep Meadow, to the west of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, people had been dropping by to reserve choice spots with blankets and folding chairs. By 6 p.m., two hours before Alan Gilbert hopped up the steps to the platform and lifted his baton, before gratitude had been expressed for the sponsorship of eminent organizations (Bloomberg, Bank of America the crowd stretched all the way back to the Delacorte Theater at the south end of the meadow. By then everyone was chowing down, some plunging into baskets fit for a Downton Abbey picnic. The mood was mellow: even for those who did not experience Manhattan in the bad old days but know the city only in it revived family-friendly incarnation, the mood was one of universal good will. As often happens on such cultural occasions, I surveyed the crowd of several thousand people in order to note what I was certain was missing: black people. Later in the year at a performance of the award-winning musical Hamilton on Broadway, written and performed by the Puerto Rican composer and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, the same thing struck me, the absence of blacks (except among the actors).

Where are the blacks at such events, I ask myself?

Picture credit: An Eventful World

On Being White: A Series (1)

When I entered college at Indiana University in 1961, the subject around which American liberal and illiberal opinion was centered was that of racial integration, a charged issue to which I was introduced, of all places, in my sociology class. In my perusal of the table of contents in the textbook, I had noted that a chapter was devoted to race, but one morning this perplexing American social problem was addressed by my professor with considerable vehemence. I can't recall the specific content of his utterance, for the blood rushed to my head and made coherent thought impossible. To hear this white professor dwell so openly on instances of shameful treatment of blacks made me uncomfortable, which I suppose was his intention. My discomfort could be seen as an effect of the new environment into which I had plunged at seventeen, one that challenged one's dearest preconceptions. Indeed, the episode is the first I recall in which new social realities collided with my own convictions.

I speak not of civil rights, however, but, rather, of the professor's forthrightness. From my point of
view, the professor was engaging in a flagrant breach of decorum: he was talking about inappropriate things, like sexual intercourse, in mixed company. My discomfort was principally because of the black students in the class. Although I could scarcely know what a black person had suffered –– no more than could the professor –– I knew that blacks suffered. But I also felt that suffering was an intensely personal matter and that the real blight was the deep inner wounds. Being forbidden to use a water fountain was not something you wanted people to notice when they thought about you.

 This open injecting of political content into the classroom was a first, but it did not galvanize me to engage in civil rights activity. What had a stronger, if more subtle, effect was the professor's breach of decorum, particularly the lack of challenge or response to it. Although his comments, focused as they were on the less-than-human treatment of blacks, might be very wounding to blacks, openness was apparently all part of being a smart, with-it person, especially if it concerned airing mortifying aspects of one's experience.

Picture credit: The Daily Mail

Boundary work

I came across the term "boundary work" in a book entitled The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment (U Chicago P) by Hjalmar Fors, a Swedish researcher in the history of science. The book caught my eye because of the word "mining" in the title. I have written (see here) on Goethe's interest in mining and in mineralogy, which led to his first "scientific" writings. The impetus for learning about these subjects was his appointment to head a commission to investigate whether the ancient Ilmenau mine could again be made workable and produce some revenue for the duchy.

The Limits of Matter has several subjects. One is to draw attention to the role that Sweden played in the creation of "transnational knowledge" in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly scientific knowledge. France and England are generally seen as the main centers of Enlightenment thought, but this "centrist historiography," as Fors calls it, marginalizes other actors. He wishes to enlarge this narrative. As he writes, “One cannot be content with discussing over and over again the relative importance of the familiar group of well-known heroes that is routinely called up in the older histories of science.”

The copper mine at Falun, Sweden

Sweden’s rulers controlled the Bureau of Mines, which oversaw Europe’s largest (until ca. 1750) export-oriented iron industry. The mines were of course highly dependent on the production of minerals, and mining officials were encouraged to seek ways to improve the flourishing mining concern. As Fors writes, these officials traveled extensively in the Holy Roman Empire, England, and the Netherlands. (I wasn't aware that the Netherlands possessed mines of any importance, but maybe the officials went there because it was a center of publishing.)

Well known, at least in histories of science, are the Swedes Georg Brandt, for his 1735 discovery of cobalt, and Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who discovered nickel in 1751. But Fors' other subject is the way that the new science of chemistry, especially as it developed in identifying and classifying metals and metallic elements, contributed to Enlightenment rationality. For "chymists" in earlier centuries the material world had been considered malleable, shape-changing, transmutable: think alchemy, but also think fairies, trolls, and gnomes. By the late 17th century, however, "all over Europe powerful state actors, driven by economic and political concerns, instigated changes and reforms in mining, smelting, industry, and manufacture,” with the result that "chemists" (as they would be called) excluded all subjects that could not be mechanically known. Fors quotes historian of science Lorraine Daston on the way that phenomena that had earlier interested "natural scientists" became unfashionable, due to their lack of utility: “A new ethos of utility replaced the old one of curiosity … the stabilization of physical phenomena [was understood] as the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for practical applications.”

The process by which this exclusion occurred Fors refers to as boundary-work, a coinage of sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn (see “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review, 48, 6 [1983]: 781-95). Boundary work, as defined by Gieryn, "describes an ideological style found in scientists' attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favorably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities." Fors applies this description to the transition from "chymestry" to "chemistry." In the early period, “interested scholars and learned magicians usually held magic to be within the bounds of nature, and as acting through and within laws of nature." Skepticism against such phenomena as magic and transmutation was still limited, but by the 1760s “an array of entities and phenomena previously conceived of as natural were defined as outside of nature,” and “self-proclaimed enlighteners found the courage to voice public skepticism.”

For Gierkyn, boundary-work is concomitant with discipline formation, as scientists in their various fields attempt to establish the parameters of the discipline. But he adds something that I find of interest, especially in the modern world, which is so fraught with political correctness: “Boundary-work is also a useful ideological style when monopolizing professional authority and resources in the hands of some scientists by excluding others as ‘pseudo-scientists.’” In other words, the circulation of knowledge itself closes off acceptable subjects of discourse.

Two things about the above show Goethe as a denizens of two eras. The first concerns world literature, a very modern idea, which concerns the circulation of ideas beyond national boundaries, indeed the very circulation that Fors describes as occurring among scientific thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries. One is surprised that Goethe, because of his own considerable scientific writing, did not include in his conception the rise of scientific progress that was occurring because of the travels of and among savants.

The other obvious Goethe connection is the subject of witchcraft. As Fors writes: “Witchcraft accusations and the weight they were given in juridical evidence serve as a powerful reminder that people of the late 17 century defined reality quite different” from those of us who live today. And think here of Mephisto: “The early modern body was subject to many influences. Not only could it fall ill and become the victim of sudden physical violence. It could also be bewitched and shape-shifted, even squeezed into a keyhole."