White Identities

An Historical & International Introduction

Alastair Bonnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317880363
• Print ISBN:
  9780582356276
• Subtopic: Social History

White Identities provides a comprehensive overview of this debate, drawing together the various strands of recent research into an accessible but challenging introduction. The author argues that 'White Studies', as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history. However the book shows that the impact of white identities is international in scope and significance. Thus, only a thorough historical and international perspective on whiteness can provide a proper introduction to the subject, an introduction that has relevance to students worldwide.

CHAPTER 1

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Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness

Introduction

The topic of white identity is currently in vogue within racial and ethnic studies. Most significantly, the nineteenth-and twentieth-century history of how different European groups became accepted as white in the United States has begun to be mapped, principally by US historians (Roediger, 1992; 1994; Ignatiev, 1995; Jacobson, 1998). Yet this, otherwise insightful, critical moment still remains partly trapped inside the mythologies of European whiteness. For whilst European, relatively recent, forms of whiteness are attracting attention, other experiences of whiteness, developed before the late modern era or outside North America and Europe, have receded ever further from view.

The historically and geographically narrow focus of the current debate on whiteness means that the particularity of its modern form continues to evade analysis. Only by positioning European-identified and racialised whiteness within a longer and broader view of white identities can the power of European societies to assert and insert their social categories and symbolisms across the globe be properly understood.

This chapter provides a critical history of the Europeanness and raciali-sation of whiteness. It advances the necessity of a longer historical, and wider geographical, view of the production of white identities and a more sceptical attitude towards the stability of its European configurations. More specifically, it seeks to examine two interrelated historical processes:

1. The development of non-European (and non-racialised) white identities and their marginalisation or erasure by an increasingly hegemonic, European-identified, racialised whiteness. It may be useful to mention, at the outset, a central irony of this process: for whilst the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of an exclusionary association between being white and being European, a counter-tendency amongst racial scientists encouraged the application of the term ‘white’ to a much wider set of people. As we shall see, this latter, ‘scientific’, approach has itself been marginalised by the former, more popularist, discourse.

2. It will be argued that the development of whiteness as a racialised, fet-ishised and exclusively European attribute produced a contradictory, crisis-prone, identity. Two sets of conflicting discourses are implicated in this process: first, colonial, imperial and national rhetorics of European racial equivalence that, ostensibly, offered the privileges of white identity to all European-heritage peoples; second, the denial or margin-alisation of certain European-heritage groups’ whiteness, a process of racial suspicion fostered by social exclusions based on gender, class and ethnicity.

These two arguments are developed in three sections. The chapter commences with a historical account of the formation of non-European white identities. This discussion draws primarily on examples from China and the Middle East. This account is framed by a discussion of the problematic nature of ‘racial histories’ of pre-modern and non-European societies. The second section advances an assessment of the marginalisation or erasure of Chinese and Middle Eastern white identities and the formation of a European racialised whiteness. Third, the ethnic, class and gender particularities and contradictions of this latter identity are examined.

Pre-modern White Identities: China and the Middle East

The modern idea of ‘race’ is distinctive because it emerged from modern attitudes towards nature and politics. In other words, it is the product of European naturalist science and European colonial and imperial power (Miles, 1989; Guillaumin, 1995). If we accept this formulation then we must also conclude that the terminology and praxes of biologically rationalised racial discrimination could not have existed in pre-modern societies. A related implication is that to identify evidence of a population group which defined itself, partly or wholly, by a term that is commonly translated into English as ‘white’ is not necessarily to identify a racial or, indeed, an ethnic, history. Any attempt to chart ‘a history of white identity’ by imaginatively projecting onto other eras its modern form merely contributes to the latter’s naturalisation and, hence, mystification. It follows that the history of the Europeanisation of whiteness is not a history of a European seizure of a pre-formed identity but, rather, a narrative of the ability to marginalise and forget other forms of white identity and to create, assert and disseminate a particular vision of human difference.

The tendency of scholarship into non-European colour consciousness to interpret the history of ‘others’ as merely a series of faltering reflections of the events and ideas of European society means that, before proceeding to my evidence for the development of white identities in China and the Middle East, some contextual remarks are required on the Western historical works that appear to provide most insights into these identities. The most important (and controversial) of these sources are Frank Dikötter’s (1992) The Discourse of Race in Modern China and Bernard Lewis’s (1971) Race and Color in Islam. As their titles imply, both works claim to have uncovered histories of racial thinking in, respectively, China and Islam (a term which Lewis translates geographically as the Middle East). Moreover, they assert that this form of thinking developed many centuries before the existence of Western racial science.

Dikötter is the most bold in this claim (see also Dikötter, 1990; 1994; 1997). He adapts Banton’s (1987) typology of European racial thinking to China (chapter titles include, ‘Race as lineage’, ‘Race as type’ and ‘Race as species’) and asserts the virulence of ‘racial consciousness’ (p.2) and ‘racial discrimination’ (p.3) amongst elite groups in both ancient and medieval Chinese society (see also Kong, 1995). Crucially, he ‘translate by “race” (zu, zhong, zulei, minzu, zhongzu, renzhong, in Chinese) terms that appear to stress the biological rather than the sociocultural aspects of different peoples’ (pp.viii–ix). The application of these translations to pre-modern material is highly problematic (Dirlik, 1993; Stafford, 1993). It should be noted, first, that at least one of these terms is a modern neologism. As Crossley (1990, p.19) notes, the word ‘minzu’ ‘has not yet been traced earlier than 1895’. More fundamentally, the term which Dikötter privileges as a synonym for ‘race’, ‘zu’, ‘evolved from a non-ascriptive, non-taxonomic word of generalized meaning to an ascriptive, taxonomic word’ (Crossley, 1990, p.20) only in the eighteenth century. Moreover, even at this latter date, it still referred essentially to ‘established, historical peoples’; a far cry from naturalist notions of race.

Even on the evidence of Dikötter’s own citations of pre-modern origin his employment of the language of race must be called into question. For they neither refer to, nor emerge from, a discourse concerned with the objective classification of natural differences. Thus, although Dikötter draws the ancient and medieval Chinese tradition of calling certain Chinese people white into his racialised schema, his empirical evidence rebels against his thesis. For what emerges from these sources is not a scientific but a self-consciously symbolic, mythopoetic, rhetoric of white identity. Hence, although we may concur that elite Chinese ‘developed a white-black polarity at a very early stage … and called their complexion white from the most ancient days’ (p.10; see also Maspero, 1978), it must also be noted that Dikötter exemplifies this process, not with evidence of racial thinking but with the following poem (quoted from a collection of poems from the seventh century bc, the Shijing),

Her fingers were like the blades of the young white grass;

Her skin was like congealed ointment;

Her neck was like the tree-grub;

Her teeth were like melon-seeds;

Her head cicada-like;

Her eyebrows the silkworm moth

(cited by Dikötter, 1992, p.10)

It is my contention that, although there were no white racial identities in pre-modern China, there were white identities. In other words, certain Chinese people employed the category ‘white’ to help define which social collectivity they belonged to. The poem cited above is a not untypical example of the way physical evidence of whiteness was positively connoted in early Chinese society. Whiteness was associated with purity, sensitivity and beauty. Drawing on similar verses, Isaacs (1968, p.92) notes that a ‘celebration’ of white skin colour moves ‘gracefully through endless reams of ancient Chinese poetry’.

Betraying the influence of a later, racialised, category of Chinese identity (i.e., the notion of a ‘yellow race’), the French Sinologist Maspero (1978, p.11) opines that the ancient Chinese ‘had that yellow tinge which they always characterised as white’. In the context of encounters with ‘darker-skinned peoples’ from the west and south of China, whiteness was used to distinguish Chinese from non-Chinese peoples. In his study of notions of the exotic during the Tang Dynasty (ad 618–906), Schäfer (1963; see also Isaacs, 1968) locates a persistent tendency to describe the ‘otherness’ of individuals from Persia to Indonesia in terms of their blackness. A later example of the same tendency is to be found in the works of Zhang Xie, a Chinese geographer of the early Ming (1368–1644) period, who noted that, ‘people in Malacca have a black skin, but some are white: these are Chinese’ (cited by Dikötter, 1992, p.11).

Although whiteness was used to define and identify Chinese people, this attribute does not appear to have become fetishised to the exclusion of other physical traits. Thus notions of smell and hair colour were also integrated into notions of Chinese collective identity. Not unrelatedly, the modern idea that white is an objective category rather than a description (as seen, for example, in the notion that all Europeans are white no matter what their skin complexion) is also far less apparent in Chinese interpretations of whiteness. Thus assertions of Chinese whiteness did not imply that other peoples could not be as, or even more, white in appearance. For example, Crossley (1990, p.10), drawing examples from the late nineteenth century, notes that ‘Non-Manchus were commonly convinced that Manchus could be distinguished from Chinese by racial physical traits, like flat heads, or a remarkably white skin.’

That the poem cited earlier concerns a princess may also alert us to the fact that whiteness was associated with membership of the elite. In his study of anti-African discrimination in China, Sullivan (1994, p.440) asserts that the ‘Chinese, who perceived their own skin to be white until the early 20th century, considered individuals with lighter skin as having a higher social status than dark-skinned peoples.’ Sautman (1994, p.427) offers a more precise example and explanation of this process: the ‘most attractive man’ in ‘[traditional Chinese culture,’ he notes, ‘was a “white-faced scholar” (baimian shusheng) whose freedom from manual labour at once implied a high status, potentially leisured life and light complexion.’

For a significant period of Chinese history, the social elite were defined in contrast to ‘black-headed’ or peasant people. Lun (1975) dates the first application of the term ‘black-headed people’ to the Chinese peasantry to the mid-Warring States period (403–221 bc). The term referred to peasants’ supposed black complexion. ‘[T]he peasants’, Lun (p.247) explains, ‘were exploited laborers, and heavy labor in the open fields caused their faces to be burned swarthy by the sun.’

However, Lun’s work also indicates that any attempt to impose a simple black/white chromatisation upon early Chinese class relations would be misplaced. He notes that the Qin Dynasty (221–207 bc) decree (issued in 221 BC) declaring that ‘the name of the common people is changed to black-headed [people]’, reflected a rise in social status for this group, more specifically a change from slave to peasant status. Futhermore, Lun (p.252) asserts that during the Qin Dynasty black ‘became the color that symbolized the government … and was the most exalted color’. This instance of the political mutability of colour symbolism is suggestive of the fact that whiteness, whilst valued amongst the Chinese elite, was understood as a social and political creation. In other words, whiteness was not naturalised as a ‘commonsense’ explanation, or even necessarily a core component, of elite groups’ social superiority.

Early encounters with Europeans do not appear to have disturbed Chinese white identities. Westerners were not interpreted as more authentically white than Chinese people. Indeed, many accounts emphasise the peculiar, ash-like, quality of the former’s skins. Thus whilst Zhang Xie depicted the Chinese as white he noted that the Portuguese ‘are seven feet tall, have eyes like a cat, a mouth like an oriole, an ash-white face’(quoted by Dikötter, 1992, p.14). This interpretation survived into the nineteenth century, Europeans being described ‘as cold and dull as the dead ashes of frogs’ by Jin He (quoted by Issacs, 1968, p.91). A tradition of identifying Europeans not as white but as red was also maintained into the last century. For one nineteenth-century traveller Europeans were ‘reddish purple’, a people who ‘greatly resemble the Mongols’ (quoted by Dikötter, 1992, p.54).

A similar set of sentiments appears in medieval literature from the geographical area described in the contemporary West as the ‘Middle East’. The term ‘white’ was routinely used to identify Middle Eastern peoples and distinguish them from darker-skinned others, a tradition that lingers on today. It has been argued that the formation of relatively stable colour-coded group identities occurred in the context of the expansion by Islamic peoples further into Asia and Africa from the eighth century (Lewis, 1971; Morabia, 1985; Bédoucha, 1982; Lindholm, 1996). Bédoucha (1982, p.533) notes that,

From the death of the prophet, with the commencement of the conquests in Asia and Africa, the situation … changed. This change is clear in the literature. References to nuances of colour that characterise individuals disappear to be replaced by three terms – white, red and black – that have clear ethnic meanings and which, in respect to the blacks, indicate inferiority.

However, Bédoucha also warns against taking this process out of its specific social and historical context. More specifically, he takes Lewis’s book Race and Color in Islam to task for comparing pre-modern Middle Eastern societies with South African apartheid and Nazi Germany Reflecting another strand of criticism, Nyang and Abed-Rabbo (1984, p.267) comment that Race and Color in Islam was written to provide ‘ammunition to those anti-Arab and anti-Islamic elements in the West’ and that its charges of racism are examples ‘of the European pot calling the Arab kettle black’. In fact, Lewis’s misapplication of racial categories is little different from Dikötter’s. Both seek to use Western, modern, categories to understand non-Western, pre-modern societies.

Despite this problematic approach, the work of Lewis and Dikötter evidences a wealth of research of direct relevance to any serious study of identity formation in China and the Middle East. For, although ‘racism’ could not have existed in ancient or medieval Middle Eastern societies, Lewis provides clear evidence that colour-coded identities and social discriminations certainly did.

Like Bédoucha, Lewis argues that a ‘specialization and fixing of color terms’ followed ‘the great Islamic conquests’ in Asia and Africa (p.9; see also Lewis, 1990). One of the ways he evidences this development is by including in Race and Color in Islam numerous painted illustrations taken from a range of Middle Eastern and North African manuscripts. All of these images appear to evidence colour-consciousness, members of the social elite being rendered as white whilst slaves, servants and other groups tend to be painted black or brown (Figure 1.1 shows one of the seventeenth-century manuscripts used by Lewis). However, it must also be noted that Lewis offers no commentary on these images; they are allowed to ‘speak for themselves’, a manoeuvre than inevitably lends itself to the kind of decontextualised, modern reading of source material objected to by Bédoucha. Lewis’s use of textual evidence is more convincing. In particular, he draws attention to the ninth-century writer Jahiz of Basra’s essay ‘The Boast of the Blacks Against the Whites’. The essay is a defence of ‘the Blacks’ against charges made by ‘the Whites’. Clearl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness
• Chapter 2 How the British working class became white
• Chapter 3 A white world? Whiteness and the meaning of modernity in Latin America and Japan
• Chapter 4 Escaping whiteness? Primitivism and the search for human authenticity
• Chapter 5 White identities and anti-racism
• A concluding remark
• References
• Index