Two-Faced Racism

Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage

Leslie Picca, Joe Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415954754
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Two-Faced Racism examines and explains the racial attitudes and behaviours exhibited by whites in private settings. While there are many books that deal with public attitudes, behaviours, and incidences concerning race and racism (frontstage), there are few studies on the attitudes whites display among friends, family, and other whites in private settings (backstage). The core of this book draws upon 626 journals of racial events kept by white college students at twenty-eight colleges in the United States. The book seeks to comprehend how whites think in racial terms by analyzing their reported racial events.

1
CONTEMPORARY RACIAL EVENTS

An Overview

Recently, a white student at a southern university wrote this account of an important racial event in her life:

When I went to pick up the laundry, I saw a young black man sitting in the driver’s side of a mini-van with the engine running. My first thought was that he was waiting for a friend to rob the store and he was the getaway driver. Even worse, I had to look into the store to see what was going on and what (or who) he was waiting for. … I am so embarrassed and saddened by my thinking and I suppose I could even omit this from my journal but it is too important to try to pretend that I don’t have thoughts like this that pop into my head ostensibly from nowhere. (Kristi)

With insight and emotion, this woman records some of the dimensions of contemporary racial events as they play out in the lives of white and black Americans today. She is in a public setting, where the cue of blackness alone triggers a negative stereotype and her own brief investigation based on that stereotype. She did not invent this racial framing of society that she admittedly uses, but probably learned it in her kinship and friendship networks and from the mass media, likely at an early age. After the fact, she is so saddened that she considers omitting the account from her journal. The visual image of blackness, the black stereotype, the surveillance action, the emotions—all are aspects of everyday life in this still racialized society.¹

DIMENSIONS OF RACIAL EVENTS

In this book we use journal accounts from white college students to examine specific racial events—distinctive, often recurring happenings in people’s lives that reveal the larger forces of the centuries-old racial hierarchy of this society. We are concerned here not just with attitudes and inclinations, but with actual happenings and events across an array of whites’ natural habitats. As they happen every day and in all major historically white institutions, racial events are constitutive building blocks of a thoroughly racialized society. They reflect and buttress the larger racial realities of groups, institutions, and society that surround them. The everyday events examined in this book demonstrate the racially related views, inclinations, and actions of whites as they move through their everyday lives. These events usually involve the use of language, but they also show human beings in their material settings and physical movements. This world of racial events is recurring and begins and ends in relationships among individuals caught up in a variety of societal settings.

Examining racial events closely, we highlight several important dimensions: (1) the social actors; (2) the performance of racialized actions, often in a ritualized manner; (3) the broad racial framing with its language, ideas, stereotypes, and interpretations, as well as linked emotional impulses—all lying behind omnipresent racialized actions; (4) the socio-spatial settings, with their audiences and networks, that contextualize the performances; and (5) the larger institutional and societal contexts that undergird and pervade—and are perpetuated by—these omnipresent racial events.²

As we will observe in this and later chapters, most everyday racial events have negative aspects that accent the cultural or social dominance of whites and the cultural or social subordination of people of color. However, those whites involved in racial events do not always act in a manner supportive of white dominance and the hoary racial hierarchy. Indeed, modest numbers sometimes take explicit action, including building strong interracial friendships, to break down the racist character of this society.

THE ARRAY OF ACTORS

Let us now explore in some detail the particular dimensions of the most common racial events, those that signal in some fashion the dominance of whites and the subordinate positions of people of color. In these day-to-day events, whites perform a variety of roles, which we term (1) protagonists, (2) assistants, (3) bystanders, and (4) dissenters. The protagonists in racial events are the central actors who execute the central performances with an array of actions, including an articulation of racial words and images. Throughout many accounts in this book, we observe protagonists acting individually and collectively within important group settings. Other whites act as assistants who urge on and support the actions of the protagonists. Still other whites in racial events act as passive participants, as bystanders who watch and understand but do not intervene in racially hostile actions. Occasionally, a few whites will intervene as dissenters.³ In a previous study, Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien demonstrated how elite white men often report standing by, or being likely to stand by, when other whites engage in overt discrimination.⁴

Survey and in-depth interview studies indicate that today the majority of whites still hold relatively negative understandings, stereotypes, and images in regard to African Americans and other Americans of color.⁵ Frequent repetition of racial jokes, images, stereotypes, with associated emotions and inclinations, is characteristic of many all-white gatherings, especially those behind closed doors. Key symbols and referents in racist “joking” are linked to what Feagin has termed a “white racial framing” of society.⁶ In most accounts in this book we will discern socially anchored relations--that is, the actors are positioned in a group context where shared knowledge helps them relate to one another and accent the social issues at hand.⁷ Racial events are often ritualized and thus part of continuing social relationships.

Moreover, while an individual protagonist or cheerleading assistant may creatively embellish a particular understanding from the prevailing racial frame, even this nuanced understanding is likely just an elaboration of the group’s interpretation. Most racial events have a ritualized character that involves “mutually focused emotions” producing “a momentarily shared reality” that engenders group solidarity.⁸ In her study of how everyday speech integrated an all-white country-and-western group, Nina Eliasoph found that their overtly racist discourse was critical for socially integrating the group at some level. In her view, ending such stereotyped “race” conversations would likely have contributed to the disintegration of these small-scale white groups.⁹ Indeed, as we will observe in our analysis, such groups are formed by shared ideas, inclinations, and actions, which are in turn perpetuated within them. Interactions within such a group have a personal payoff for the individuals involved, including integration into the group and usually a psychological wage that is associated with doing what we might term “grouped whiteness.”

RACIAL PERFORMANCES

In his play As You Like It, William Shakespeare makes use of the theater metaphor for human life: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.” More recent analysts, such as Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman, have systematically extended this metaphor and offered important insights into the everyday performances given by individuals or teams of individuals.¹⁰ By accenting the drama of everyday life, Burke and Goffman press us to look at human performances in their full complexity, including verbal and nonverbal aspects, and not just at the words and language of everyday discourse.

As we conceptualize racial events involving whites, a racial performance typically takes place as part of a larger racial event. It involves the activity of a white person at a particular place and time, and attempts to communicate racial views and images to others. While some racialized actions, such as the first one discussed in this chapter, do not immediately involve an audience of others, most such racialized actions are performances that are socially situated. Indeed, even racial actions taking place without others’ seeing them are oriented to important reference groups. A typical racial performance attempts to do something, typically to relate to the performances of others or to influence the inclinations and actions of others in a particular social setting. In this way, the performance is both goal-oriented and socially situated. In most cases that we examine in this book, the white racial performances reflect a racist framing of society, although in a few accounts whites engage in performances that actively dissent from that racist framing.

Typically, a racial performance involves playing out some part of a social-statusrole—such as that of“white man”—that has been performed on other occasions in other settings. When an individual carries out a performance, there is usually a visible audience, as well as an unseen reference group to which the performance is oriented. People constantly create and observe the performances of others and are affected by social definitions of the situation that such performances suggest.¹¹

Most racial performances are part of a persisting structure of racial oppression in U.S. society, a society whose founding documents and institutions were substantially created by slaveholders and their acolytes. These contemporary racial performances are not isolated or ephemeral phenomena. They do not take place only in gatherings of organized white supremacists. Indeed, whites of various classes and diverse backgrounds give racist performances millions of times each year in various places and spaces, likely in almost every town and city across the United States. The racial performances that constantly target people of color for stereotyping, hostility, and discrimination not only are rooted in a centuries-old system of oppression but also are sustaining and buttressing that system. As we will discuss further in the section below on systemic racism, these racial performances have played a key role in keeping racial oppression substantially in effect now for several centuries of this country’s development.

Let us now illustrate these points with an extended racial event that took place on a rather ordinary day at one of our midwestern colleges. Trevor, a white college student, reports on a typical evening gathering with five white friends:

When any two of us are together, no racial comments or jokes are ever made. However, with the full group membership present, anti-Semitic jokes abound, as do racial slurs and vastly derogatory statements. Jewish people are simply known as “Hebes”, short for Hebrews. Comments were made concerning the construction of a “Hebeagogue,” a term for a Jewish place of worship. Various jokes concerning stereotypes … were also swapped around the gaming table, everything from “How many Hebes fit in a VW beetle?” to “Why did the Jews wander the desert for forty years?” In each case, the punch lines were offensive, even though I’m not Jewish. The answers were “One million (in the ashtray) and four (in the seats)” and “because someone dropped a quarter,” respectively. These jokes degraded into a rendition of the song “Yellow,” which was re-done to represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It contained lines about the shadows of the people being flash-burned into the walls (“and it was all yellow” as the chorus goes in the song)…. It should also be pointed out that the most often uttered phrase in the group is “That’s just wrong.”

Such a performance, according to Erving Goffman, regularly functions “to define the situation for those who observe the performance.”¹² For this group of whites, Jewish Americans are defined as a distinctive racial-ethnic group that is not fully “white,” indeed as an outgroup suitable for vicious stereotyping. After noting the crude and accentuated jokes about Jewish Americans and Asians, Trevor continues in his journal entry with a description of yet another individual performance in this extended racial event:

A member of the group also decided that he has the perfect idea for a Hallmark card. On the cover it would have a few kittens in a basket with ribbons and lace. On the inside it would simply say “You’re a nigger.” I found that incredibly offensive. Supposedly, when questioned about it, the idea of the card was to make it as offensive as humanly possible in order to make the maximal juxtaposition between warm- and ice- hearted. After a brief conversation about the cards which dealt with just how wrong they were, a small kitten was drawn on a piece of paper and handed to me with a simple, three-word message on the back.

This was clearly a long gathering with much action, including speaking, laughing, and gesturing. Trevor completes his account of this long set of performances with notes about his friends’ jokes and comments about two other targeted groups:

After that little incident, the group dynamic switched over to a more personal so less offensive topic: Italians and people of Italian descent. …Then the jokes about the sex drive, smell, and intellect levels of stereotypical Italians began. This I found shocking, as two of our members are very proudly of Italian descent…. Of course, no group is particularly safe from this group’s scathing wit, and the people of Mexico were next to bear the brunt of the jokes. A comment was made about Mexicans driving low-riding cars so they can drive and pick lettuce at the same time. Comments were made about the influx of illegal aliens from Mexico and how fast they produce offspring. (Trevor)

Note here the important group dynamic of this significant racial event. All six actors are white male college students or recent college graduates. We have active protagonists and at least one tentative dissenter. Conspicuous too is the socio-spatial setting where these performances took place. The safety of doing these blatantly racist actions is created by the privacy of the social space. It is also safe because of the number of whites present, as the opening sentence makes evident. Reportedly, this group of men engages in frequent racial performances in their periodic gatherings.

Most striking is the ongoing series of individual and team performances in this rather long event. They are not telling racial-ethnic jokes just to pass time but are using their talents to develop richly detailed, fleshed-out performances in competition with one another. One man’s vision of a “Hallmark card” describes details of ribbons and lace on a basket filled with kittens. The men are collecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Contemporary Racial Events: An Overview
• Chapter 2 The Frontstage
• Chapter 3 The Backstage
• Chapter 4 Backstage, Near the Front
• Chapter 5 Fluid Boundaries, Slippery Regions
• Chapter 6 Observing Racial Discrimination
• Chapter 7 The Continuing Significance of Racism: Reprise and Conclusion
• Index