← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Texas Dissident
Thread ID: 3241 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2002-10-27
2002-10-27 10:50 | User Profile
[url=http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1631708]Exactly what does it mean to be white?[/url]
By DALTON CONLEY
Oct. 25, 2002, 9:10PM
Every year, on the first day of my introduction to sociology class, I have asked the 100 or so students to write down the five social categories that best describe who they are. Black students would almost always put their race at or near the top of the list. Latino and Asian-American students would usually list their ethnicity. Until recently, I could be fairly confident that whites would not put their race anywhere. Some might put Polish, German or some other ethnic or national origin, but not one white student would write down Caucasian, white or even Euro-American. And that was the point of my experiment.
Whiteness is a category that holds little or no conscious meaning to the members of the group. More recently, however, the results of my experiment have gotten muddier as more white students list their race. It seems that white-awareness is on the rise.
This mini-trend may be the cause or effect of a growing attention paid to white identity issues in academic research. A database search showed that in the dozen years between 1986 and 1998 there were 35 articles with the phrase "whiteness studies"; but since 1999, there have been 76. More than 100 books in print bill themselves as part of "whiteness studies," most published in the past two years.
Though this trend has taken hold only in the last decade (really since the publication of David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness in 1991), to trace its origins, we need to go back almost four decades. In the 1960s and '70s, the spirit of civil rights and black radicalism penetrated even the ivory tower. While Malcolm X was calling for black power on the streets, inside the academy, black studies was being created. Black student associations, African- American studies programs, journals, symposia and so on were cropping up all over.
There were then and still are at least two rationalizations for creation of black or African-American studies. The first is that black authors, black history, music, fine arts -- in short, the whole of black experience -- is not adequately represented elsewhere inside the university or outside it. The second is that there is something unique to the black experience worthy of study. If organic chemistry is the study of carbon-based molecules, then African-American studies is the study of the black experience.
Surely others would follow. Ethnic studies soon expanded to include Chicano, Asian-American, Jewish and even Irish studies. It seems inevitable that white studies had to emerge eventually. But if the reason is that "white" history, literature and so on needs a home of its own, then it has already got it. It is called the departments of sociology, history, English and so on. Since most of the work studied in these fields is by and about whites, if we are going to take identity politics to its ultimate extreme, we could just rename these departments "whiteness studies."
The second argument for a separate curriculum of white studies -- that there is something unique about the white experience that needs to be studied -- is pretty hard to make when whiteness is a category that most Euro-Americans don't think about in their daily lives. What is there to study? Isn't what whiteness means already captured in the study of blackness, its necessary opposite? In fact, blacks may recognize the privileges of whiteness much better than whites themselves, having to endure them.
There has been much fluff in the scholarship on whiteness, as can be said about almost any field, particularly an emerging one. There are some gems in the rough, however. One strand of writing focuses on how the category of whiteness that seems so natural and innate is actually a flexible label that has expanded over time to include many formerly nonwhite groups such as Jews, Irish and Italians. Another theme is the ways in which whites maintain racial power and privilege; this literature includes studies of social phenomena as diverse as white supremacy movements, country clubs and everyday social interactions. A third motif is the different connotations whiteness can carry; sometimes whiteness acts as a marker of membership in a privileged group (such as when whites are not frisked at the airport), but it can even serve as a stigma. An example of this, documented by one sociologist, was when a white woman working at a low-wage job in a predominantly black neighborhood was made fun of for her lousy job. Black patrons speculated that she must have been a real loser to be white and still be working at the convenience store.
Ultimately, scholars in this field contend, the point of whiteness studies is to make whites aware of their own place in the racial system by studying it critically. "The foundation of white identity is that there isn't any. You're just an individual. You don't have to think about race," says Nell Irvin Painter, professor of history at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book, The History of White People. "So giving white people a racial identity is kind of making them more like nonwhite people."
Many liberal-leaning professor types explain that whiteness is about privilege. It is, for example, about not getting stopped by the cops; about not feeling the weight of representing an entire population of people with one's successes and failures; about not having to think about race much at all. The purpose of all this consciousness-raising is to make whites understand how unlevel the playing field really is. It also serves to rectify something wrong with the way we study race in America: By traditionally focusing on minority groups, the implicit message that scholarship projects is that nonwhites are "deviant," that's why they are studied.
But there is another, more troubling side to this emerging white consciousness. In 1980, before the movement really got under way in universities, the white supremacist David Duke left his position as the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, convinced that the KKK attracted mostly angry nuts with no clear- cut political ideology or savoir-faire. Instead, he founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the NAAWP, attempting to cleanse his movement of its dirty past. In this new framework, Duke presents whites as a besieged minority. In fact, writes sociologist Mitch Berbrier, the NAAWP tried to define the movement as a pro-white, heritage movement as opposed to an anti-black one.
Ironically, Duke uses the very language of black civil-rights leaders. He even claims to admire Malcolm X for what he espoused for his people; Duke argues that he is merely arguing the same separatist line for whites. If the end result of the emergence of white studies is to politically empower extremists by giving them a legitimate language for their racist ends, it wouldn't be the first time that leftist, well-meaning academics had uncorked a genie that did more harm than good. (Remember so-called urban renewal that ruined most American cities in the 1950s and '60s.) After all, black studies certainly helped empower black power movements during the 1960s and 1970s. So it is not farfetched to imagine Duke or others hijacking the message of naive young students and equally naive old professors.
Those worries aside, we might as well get used to the concept of whiteness studies. With whites making up a dwindling proportion of the U.S. population, we can expect more courses such as Point Park (Penn.) College Professor Channa Newman's Wealthy White Males, which addresses this small but disproportionately powerful "minority" group. And I expect to see more and more pale hands go up when I ask my students who wrote "white" down on their identity list. As far as I am concerned, this constitutes progress. Where we go from there is another question entirely.
Conley is author of Honky and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University.
2002-10-27 13:44 | User Profile
**With whites making up a dwindling proportion of the U.S. population, we can expect more courses such as Point Park (Penn.) College Professor Channa Newman's Wealthy White Males, which addresses this small but disproportionately powerful "minority" group. **
As long as we have college professors like Channa Newman, we will. Which in itself indicates the solution.
2002-10-27 17:01 | User Profile
If the end result of the emergence of white studies is to politically empower extremists by giving them a legitimate language for their racist ends
An admission that their logic and rhetoric was actually developed not in the persuit of truth, but in the pursuit of a specific goal. If their studies can not be broadly applied then they must not have any real truth to them.
With whites making up a dwindling proportion of the U.S. population, we can expect more courses such as Point Park (Penn.) College Professor Channa Newman's Wealthy White Males, which addresses this small but disproportionately powerful "minority" group.
Oh how I wish they would use their logic and rhetoric to pursue the most disproportianately powerful 'minority' group, the Jews. Then they could catalogue their role in reducing the white percentage in this country. But as admitted earlier, university studies exists to persue an agenda, not uncover any truth.
2002-10-28 02:09 | User Profile
American academia itself can be thanked (or blamed, depending on your viewpoint) for the demand of white studies programs from students who are getting increasingly sick of having "separatist" education that attempts to promote the egocentric superiority complex of certain races and ethnicities by undermining and / or devaluing whites.
And perhaps a big "thank you" is also due to Jesse Jackson, MEChA, and other "race power" organizations that have been beating the "empowerment for victims of honkey-gringo domination" drum for so long that white students are realizing that hostility towards them for their white skins is being wholeheartedly endorsed by these groups, who really enjoy using their muscle and gangsterism to bend academia to their visions.
Actually, this whole idea of "racial identity / pride" curricula in universities is a load of money-wasting crap. This is "higher education"? Pffft. Fit only for preparing people to be effective purveyors of their undeserved narcissism in taking "pride" in something over which they have no control.
2004-02-01 00:56 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Mercuria]Fit only for preparing people to be effective purveyors of their undeserved narcissism in taking "pride" in something over which they have no control.[/QUOTE]
Sure we have no control over it, but if an enemy is primarily engaging you on that basis, doesn't it only make sense to fight fire with fire?
2004-02-01 05:11 | User Profile
Good lord there is a lot of lies and insult inbedded in this one article. To paraphrase another angry man, when I hear academics talk I want to reach for my revolver.
He denies that Whites self identify as Whites based on his student's answers to his insulting questionnaire. White people know extremely well what their national category is. Only a pest academic could be so stupid as to deny this, but that's marxism for ya.
Actually what "White" people are is very interesting. A case can be made that White = American. In other words, White is what you call American whites who have lost there European ethnicity thru the so-called melting pot. We are a brand new ethnicity. We are also the group that is officially most discriminated against. We founding American Whites are not allowed to organize in this country as Whites. Irish and Italians have clubs, Jews of course have literally thousands of organizations and clubs, blacks, hispanics and all the rest of course do. But not us. This is not news to anyone here I know.
In my opinion, one of the reasons Whites are in cultural disarray is because of our newness in history. We haven't had much time for tradition building. We also have very serious and very loud enemies. Guess who?
This is our thanks for fighting our own kinsmen to save their lousy hides. "Give a Jew a lift and he'll kick you out of your own wagon."