The Intersections of Whiteness

Evangelia Kindinger, Mark Schmitt, Evangelia Kindinger, Mark Schmitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367581992
• eBook ISBN: 9781351112772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Trumpism and the racially implied Islamophobia of the "travel ban"; Brexit and the yearning for Britain's past imperial grandeur; Black Lives Matter; the public backlash against Merkel's refugee policies in Germany. These seemingly national responses to the changing demographics in a multitude of Western nations need to be understood as effects of a global/transnational crisis of whiteness.

The Intersections of Whiteness brings together scholars from different disciplines to shed light on these manifestations in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Applying methodology stemming from critical race theory's investment in intersectionality, the contributions of this edited collection focus on specific intersections of whiteness with gender, class, space, affect and nationality.

Offering valuable insights into the contours of whiteness and its instrumentalisation across different nations, societies and cultures, this incisive volume creates transnational dialogue and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as critical whiteness and race studies, gender studies, cultural studies and social policy.

Part I

White epistemologies

1 For the common good

Re-inscribing white normalcy into the American body politic

Tonnia L. Anderson

It is normalcy all over our country which leaves the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. It is normalcy all over Alabama that prevents the Negro from becoming a registered voter. No, we will not allow Alabama to return to normalcy. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgement to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.

(King, Jr. 1965)

Introduction

Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid and the 2016 Grand Old Party (GOP) Platform offer useful insights into the concept of whiteness in America. They demonstrate how easily ethno-racial distinctions can be called upon and harnessed to politically mobilize disenchanted whites, certainly dismissing the idea that American society has finally entered a post-racial era signified by the Obama administration. They also challenge Toni Morrison’s powerful fishbowl metaphor that describes whiteness as an invisible structure within society that orders everything within it (1992: 17). White racial normalcy or white privilege – perhaps better understood by the older term ‘white supremacy’ – still holds currency as a visible and viable presence. From Tennessee Congressional candidate Rick Tyler’s infamous billboard “Let’s Make America White Again” (Bever 2016) to Representative Steve King’s (Republican, Iowa) comments about the inferiority of non-white groups (Benen 2017), a discourse about ethnicity and race has opened up, seldom heard in the public sphere since the era of Jim Crow segregation. The 2016 election cycle pulled the alt-right from the fringes into the mainstream and legitimized it through neoconservative appeals to white victimology, the erosion of traditional values, and the crisis of fragmentation allegedly posed by cultural pluralism and liberal democracy. The ideological apparatuses of whiteness and evangelical religion were summoned to deal with the perceived problems of postmodernity and globalization through retrenchment into the past before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when majority culture was perceived to occupy an unproblematic position of dominance within the public sphere. This chapter explores the role that the loss of entitlement plays in white alienation, and why Trump’s populist appeals of bigotry garnered widespread support. It takes the position that the root of the culture war symbolized by Trump’s presidential campaign and by the 2016 GOP Platform stems from an ideology of white racial normalcy and a race-based nationalism that emerges out of Southern Civil Religion. It argues that Southern Civil Religion, based upon the conservative concepts of moral virtue, adherence to authority, and social order, exists as a prescription for a good society that protects whiteness as a form of social and cultural capital against the perceived onslaught of multiculturalism and liberal democracy.

The Southern Civil Religion that had emerged out of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy is relevant to understanding the crisis of identity inherent within whiteness. It helps to explain why the expansion of civil liberties to marginalized groups stimulates identity crises, and why racial taxonomies continue to persist as mechanisms for legitimizing ‘authentic’ whiteness as a positive social good. But most importantly, it helps to better understand how whiteness – as a resource (capital) – became and continues to be a site of struggle over social standing. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) argued that capital informs the basis of the social world, and that different forms of capital exist outside of the realm of market exchange (economic capital). Cultural capital shapes an individual’s social position in life through the symbolic realm of culture and is particularly useful in examining how structures of inequality are reproduced through cultural practices that translate into social assets, which promote or hinder social mobility. Within Southern Civil Religion, whiteness exists as a social asset through which “the relationship of domination is expressed [and] the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds” (Bourdieu 1984: 470–471) as normal and legitimate through intersectionality with those institutional structures that govern everyday life. The viability of whiteness-as-social asset has depended upon the maintenance of those cultural practices (de jure and/or de facto) that reinforce it as a protected caste and through the extension of that protection to whites who had been historically outside of the pale of whiteness.

Civil War and the civil religion that grew out of the Lost Cause created a new habitus based upon Confederate ideals through which whites, regardless of class, could share equal status through their common experiences of war and loss. The rituals, memorials, and celebrations perpetuated a collective memory of the past that served as a mechanism of socialization connecting individual and group identity to Confederate values. This new habitus was different from that which had characterized antebellum southern society. Within the Old South, two competing visions of society existed: a seigneurial society centred on the plantation elite and a Herrenvolk democracy based upon the egalitarianism of all white males (Fredrickson 1971: 61). White male egalitarianism, however, existed more in theory than in fact. As historian Kenneth P. Vickery indicates, Herrenvolk equality in the South was a myth (1974: 310). Citizenship symbolized and embodied the manifestation of egalitarianism through white racial status because of the existence of a class of “inferior beings” (Wilentz 2002: 75), but the general political impotence of the non-slaveholding class reduced its ability to reap the same level of benefit as was accorded to the elite class. Economically, non-elite native whites were often unable or unwilling to compete with either slave, free black, or white immigrant labour, which served to undermine their material interests (cf. Berlin and Gutman 1983; Tillery 2009: 645–647). Also, black slaves, even though they were not citizens, were a manifestation of planter interests (capital), and in varying degrees could mobilize abstractly white entitlement (capital) both for themselves and their owners in ways that yeoman whites could not do. Southern Civil Religion transformed whites’ access to social capital in which white identity and its protection were central features. However, in order for white identity to have value based upon antebellum and Confederate models, blackness (a catch phrase for all ‘deficient’ groups) had to be maintained as a negative value (cf. Fredrickson 1971; Shklar 1991).

Prior to Brown and the tumultuous 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established a pattern of race relations at the close of the nineteenth century that not only helped to re-establish the national reunion of whites through the repudiation of Reconstruction policies and white acceptance of black inferiority through affirming the concept of “separate but equal,” but also, as Cheryl Harris argues, extended legal protection to whiteness as a form of property (1993: 1746). “According whiteness actual legal status,” Harris suggests, “converted an aspect of identity into an external object of property, moving whiteness from privileged identity to a vested interest” (1725). The distinction between “privilege” and “vested interest” is an important one. White privilege confers certain benefits based upon status (cf. McIntosh 1990). These benefits may be tangible or symbolic; they may be perceived or go unrecognized by the beneficiary. However, vested interest or entitlement is predicated upon the legal status of whiteness as property. The Plessy decision, then, affirmed whiteness as a fundamental right central to personhood with inherent value and privileges that carried with it the expected obligation of state and federal protection. Also, the rejection of Homer Plessy’s claim that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been infringed was framed in regard to the protection of whiteness and to the sovereignty of states’ rights. In writing the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Brown indicated that the Louisiana legislature “is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order” (United States Supreme Court 1896: 550). In so doing, Plessy nationally affirmed the basic premises of white supremacy and racial entitlement that had shaped the caste system of the Old South, establishing this type of racial consciousness for the twentieth century that has lingered long after the case was overturned in 1954.

As historian David Brion Davis asserted (2001), the “Confederacy failed militarily, but won ideologically;” it inscribed Confederate ideologies about race into the national consciousness that have persisted into the twenty-first century. Controversies have arisen periodically, reminding the general public that these ideologies still exist, such as Dylann Roof’s deadly 2015 attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (Costa et al. 2015), or when the husband of the mayor for Lahoma, Oklahoma, along with a group of other men, donned Klan robes as a Halloween prank (Boroff 2015). However, these old ideologies extend much deeper into the social fabric than the public displays of the Confederate flag, monuments to heroes of the Confederacy, numerous consumer goods that sport the Confederate logo, or domestic terrorism. While these things may carry ideological significance as ‘race pride,’ ‘heritage,’ or hate, or simply exist as objects of material culture, arguably the most enduring element from the Confederacy is its vision of what constitutes a good society, and how values derived from this vision should shape the national character. Trump’s brand of populism, too, reflects this vision; his populism touched upon many of the ‘hot button’ issues that characterized the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which centred on American national identity and what values constitute a good society. Towards this end, the framework of Southern Civil Religion is used to examine whiteness as ideology and as a property right; furthermore, it offers insight into the effects of political polarization that characterized the 2016 presidential election, and into the underlying ideological implications of the 2016 GOP Platform.

Southern Civil Religion and the Original Nation

Southern Civil Religion, a concept developed by historian Charles Reagan Wilson (1980), examines how groups construct ideal visions of society through mediating lived experiences and political reality with a moral ethos shaped by the region’s history and its religious traditions. The concept was influenced by Robert N. Bellah’s seminal essay, “Civil Religion in America.” Written in 1967 against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, the essay calls attention to the moral heritage – “the religious dimension” – institutionalized in American public life through powerful symbols and rituals that promote “national solidarity […] to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals” (Bellah 1967: 13). Like American Civil Religion, Southern Civil Religion, too, describes the moral heritage and cultural identity of the region. It emerged from Confederate defeat and the memorializing rituals of the Lost Cause. Though the South has never been homogeneous, and as Arthur Remillard (2011) demonstrates, different social groups possessed their own versions of a good society. White evangelical Protestants, who comprised the elite, exerted dominant influence over the public and political life of the region both before and after the Civil War. Consequently, it is their vision of society that carries the most direct relevance here. For white southern adherents to the Confederate cause, defeat and federal military occupation after the War created an existential crisis. “The South faced problems after the Civil War,” Wilson argues, “which were cultural but also religious – the problems of providing meaning to life and society amid the baffling failure of fundamental beliefs, offering comfort to those suffering poverty and disillusionment, and encouraging a sense of belonging in the shattered southern community” (Wilson 1980: 220–221).

The crisis was of an imperilled identity, both religious and secular. The religious culture that had developed during the antebellum period was intimately connected to the region’s defence of slavery. Slaveholders and the clerics who supported them viewed criticism of slavery as evidence of the growing secularization of American society due to industrialization. This secularization, it was argued, sought to displace traditional relationships based upon subordination – man to God, wives to husbands, slaves to masters – as established by Christian principles (Crowther 1992: 627). The pro-slavery argument had at its disposal a primary source, the Bible, which provided the South with a sense of moral legitimacy and moral authority to pursue severance from a heretical government. The tenacious belief that antebellum southern society had represented God’s ideal for humanity justified southern secession and war on moral grounds, and loss was not compatible with the self-image of being God’s Chosen People (Wilson 1980 [2009]: 7–8). The secular crisis stemmed from a loss of status and “humiliation.” Black Codes addressed the problem of formally ending slavery by essentially leaving the old master–slave relationship intact. However, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution infringed upon the protection of whiteness by extending the rights of citizenship to people who had been defined as property. Such an act conflicted with the antebellum view that American democracy and whiteness were interchangeable:

The American “ethnological” self-image, whether described as Anglican, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic-Anglo-Saxon, or simply Caucasian, was being formulated and popularized at the very time when the slavery controversy focused interest on the Negro character. No longer were Americans in general being characterized primarily by their adherence to a set of political and social ideas allegedly representing the universal aspirations of all humanity, but democracy itself was beginning to be defined as racial in origin and thus realizable perhaps only by people with certain hereditary traits.

(Fredrickson 1971: 100–101)

Within the antebellum South, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: White epistemologies
• Part II: Whiteness and global politics
• Part III: White affects
• Part IV: White(ning) spaces
• Index