counterpunch | One learns what it means to be white from other white people. It
comes in stories and warnings and descriptions as part of childhood.
Most of those stories are about black people. For white racialized
consciousness, black or brown people become characters in a system of
narratives, anecdotes, and images. In later life, white people relate to
black people through those stories. And they relate to other white
people who see those stories the same way. They enter into friendships
and find social residence in their common understanding language and
attitudes of those stories. In effect, it is not black people they
relate to as they become white, but the white people who tell them the
stories, and to their a white community.
In sum, racism is not a relation between white people and black. It
is a relation between white people for which “black people” are the
means. (As Simone de Beauvoir used to say in a parallel vein, marriage
is a relation between men for which women are the means.) How is a white
person to talk about race if they look at it as a black-white relation?
There is no reciprocity with respect to black people. The power,
gratuitous hostility, domination, inferiorization, patronizing
attitudes, etc. that characterize racism only go in one direction. The
stories are just there to teach white people how to do it. Violence also
only goes in one direction. White people kill, harass, patronize, and
renarrativize black people as part of racializing them. They know they
are dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is a power given them by
white supremacist institutionalities. Thus, racism provides the terms by
which white people can take each for granted.
When black people appear to reciprocate, to fight back, to scorn, to
ignore, to placate, those are not gestures of violence but of
self-defense and possibly rebellion. When done individually, the deck is
stacked against them.
If racism is a form of street-level solidarity among whites, it will
often be enforced by various means, even those of violence. The
solidarism among segregationists, for instance, can take the form of
enlistment to action, sometimes as a racializing project, and sometimes
as “behavior modification.” Against the segregationists, the liberals
argue that a hard exclusionary stance against black people will only
cause trouble and rebellion. The better path is to integrate with its
subtle long-range stratifications. Both see themselves looking out for
the stability of white society, while preserving different forms of
black subordination.
Both segregationists and liberals are fulfilling duties of membership
in whiteness. And neither will disown it. Perhaps they refused to hear
Kaepernick’s gesture of revolt out of a premonition that it would
require them to deny their whiteness. But that is not the question. If
one learns one’s whiteness from other white people, from whom could one
learn to unlearn it?
In closing, we might mention one great vulnerability in whiteness,
the esthetic dimension. It resides in the recognition that the
difference in color between people is actually beautiful. The contrast
between a white arm and a dark brown one set alongside each other is
imminently pleasing if seen in its reality, free of the imposition of
“good vs. evil.” The early colonists in Jamestown saw this immediately
when the first Africans arrived in 1619. The colony quickly tried three
times to outlaw mixed marriages, each time with harsher penalties. And
each time it failed miserably. (Cf. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, Temple UP, 2003, pp 54-57)
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