Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century

Changes and Challenges

Charles A. Gallagher, France Winddance Twine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415680004
• eBook ISBN: 9781317984627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century examines the role whiteness and white identities play in framing and reworking racial categories, hierarchies and boundaries within the context of nation, class, gender and immigration. It takes as its theoretical starting point the understanding that whiteness is not, and nor has it ever been, a static uniform category of social identification. The scholarship in this book uses new empirical studies to show whiteness as a multiplicity of identities that are historically grounded, class specific, politically manipulated and gendered social relations that inhabit local custom and national sentiment.

Contributors to this book examine a wide range of issues, yet all chapters are linked by one common denominator: they examine how power and oppression are articulated, redefined and asserted through various political discourses and cultural practices that privilege whiteness even when the prerogatives of the dominant group are contested. Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century is an important new contribution to the study of whiteness for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and Ethnography.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Introduction
The future of whiteness: a map of the ‘third wave’

France Winddance Twine and Charles A. Gallagher

Abstract

This article surveys the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies and outlines an emerging ‘third wave’ of research in this international and interdisciplinary field. This article begins by locating the origins of whiteness studies in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, who provided the intellectual foundations for this body of scholarship. We then identify three characteristics that distinguish this ‘third wave’ of research from earlier studies. This new wave of research utilizes: 1) innovative research methodologies including analyses of ‘racial consciousness biographies’, music and visual media; 2) an analysis of the recuperation of white innocence and reconstitution of white supremacy in neo-apartheid, postimperial and post-Civil Rights contexts; and 3) analyses of white identity formation among members of racial and ethnic minorities.

The formation of white identities and ideologies and cultural practices that buttress white supremacy, have been central to the intellectual projects of US black scholars for more than a century (DuBois 1970 [1899], 1936; Roediger 1998). In the 1990s the number of scholarly works on the study of whiteness and white identities grew exponentially, particularly in the United States. Among media elites, however, the perception remained, that this field of inquiry was, at best, a passing intellectual fad, and at its worst a means for careerist white academics to acquire, as The New Republic’s Margaret Talbot put it, ‘a portentous new legitimacy’ (1997, p. 118). Whiteness and white identities is not simply a new academic fashion. Writing in The New York Times Magazine over a decade ago Talbot explained that this field of study, or academic ‘enterprise’ as she framed it, consisted of two warring, but equally irrelevant theoretical camps. One approach to whiteness studies was said to be inhabited by ‘post-structural-type scholars who clearly adore the idea of white trash culture’ and the other by anti-racist crusaders hostile to ‘American liberalism’ who wish to ‘abolish’ whiteness. Her understanding of the field simply brokered on two familiar academic stereotypes: the narcissistic, out of touch academic hipster and radical Marxist dinosaurs who loathe US style capitalism. She concluded her withering indictment by suggesting that studying whiteness essentialized race itself, ‘making those categories seem immutable’ even though, by Talbot’s own admission, ‘both fieldwork and statistical studies – the kind of work done, often slowly, in sociology or anthropology departments – is pretty sparse’ (Talbot 1997, p. 119).

The slow, empirical academic work on whiteness has now been done. The study of whiteness and white identities now includes hundreds of books, ethnographies, scholarly articles and reviews that examine the role whiteness and white identities play in framing and reworking racial categories, hierarchies and boundaries. Drawing on how racial identities frame and are framed by nation, class, gender and immigration, these new empirical studies of whiteness and white identities pose novel questions that challenge existing historical and contemporary accounts of racial identity construction. The recent research on whiteness focuses primarily on examining and exposing the often invisible or masked power relations within existing racial hierarchies.

It is simply no longer the case, as Margaret Andersen suggests in an otherwise outstanding overview on whiteness, that the ‘mechanisms and sites of racial domination and subordination’ (Anderson 2003, p. 28) are absent from this area of research. Much of the recent scholarship on whiteness and white identities has moved beyond ‘voyeuristic ethnographic accounts’ and personal narratives. The field now includes critiques of whiteness that examine the institutional arrangements, ideological beliefs and state practices that maintain white privilege even as those prerogatives are being challenged by antiracist social movements, identity politics, multiculturalism and immigration.

The articles in the book explore how white privilege is maintained even as the prerogatives of whiteness are challenged by the new interracial social movements, progressive social policies, democratization projects and multiculturalism. It is these white inflections, the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented, that is the central focus of third wave whiteness. The new scholarship has opened up new lines of research and analyses of racisms and racial formations that we call Third Wave Whiteness. This third wave of whiteness studies incorporates and builds on existing scholarship on racial identity construction with a particular focus on emerging empirical accounts of how whiteness is deployed and the discursive strategies used to maintain and destabilize white identity and privilege. Much of the recent research on whiteness explores the ideological practices that render white privilege invisible (Lipsitz 1998; Twine 1996, 2004; Frankenberg 2001; Gallagher 2003b; Ansell 2006), the ways in which whiteness is increasingly a contested category (Bhattacharyya, Gabriel and Small 2002; Doane 2003; Anderson 2003), how race politics transform whiteness into a ‘victimized’ marked identity (Well-man 1993; Yancey 2003; Gallagher 2004) and the power relations that allow whiteness to be positioned as a benign cultural signifier (Dyer 1997; Bonnett 2000). Third wave analysis takes as its starting the understanding that whiteness is not now, nor has it ever been, a static, uniform category of social identification (Saxton 1990; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 2005, Lundstrom and Twine 2011). In this way third wave whiteness avoids the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity. A third wave perspective sees whiteness as a multiplicity of identities that are historically grounded, class specific, politically manipulated and gendered social locations that inhabit local custom and national sentiments within the context of the new ‘global village’.

This exceptional third wave of intellectual inquiry into whiteness is now examined in virtually every branch of the social sciences. Social geographers map how residential proximity of whites to racialized minority groups shape racial attitudes and group affiliations (Durrheim 2005; Forrest and Dunn 2006; Kincheloe 2006). Postcolonial scholars examine how accounts of nationalism and whiteness become synonymous with citizenship and which groups are granted ‘legitimate’ access to state resources (Nayak 2002; Garner 2006; Twine 2004, 2010). Given the mobilization of far right movements throughout Europe and the United States this line of research is a needed examination of how whiteness and nationalism are used to portray racial minorities as perpetual foreigners, potential terrorists or permanent cultural outsiders (Chan 2006; Juge and Perez 2006; Lamont 2000; Potter and Phillips 2006). Education scholars chronicle how whiteness is learned, internalized, privileged, institutionally reproduced and performed in educational settings (Perry 2002; Gallagher 2003; Lewis 2003; Choules 2006). Feminist scholars address how whiteness and gender shape racialized identities and how identity construction and patriarchy are linked to racism, nation and class location (Twine 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2010; Frankenberg 1993, 2001; Walker 2005).

This diverse scholarship is linked by a common denominator – an examination of how power and oppression are articulated, redefined and reasserted through various political discourses and cultural practices that privilege whiteness even when the prerogatives of the dominant group are contested. Although the symbolic and material value of whiteness is in flux, one can locate whites who belong to economically deprived communities throughout the world. However, the concentration of wealth, power and privilege for the latter groups is, as Howard Winant argues ‘outliers in the planetary correlation of darkness and poverty’ (Winant 2001, p.305). While whiteness often is synonymous with regimes of terror, genocide and white supremacy, a third wave perspective on whiteness rejects the implicit assumption that whiteness is only an unconditional, universal and equally experienced location of privilege and power. The empirical studies included in this book demonstrate the situational, relational and historic contingencies that are reshaping and repositioning white identities within the context of shifting racial boundaries. Reflecting on the relational nature of white privilege, Ruth Frankenberg observes that ‘whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather crosscut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it’ (Frankenberg 2001, p. 76). Poor whites living in the southern part of the United States, London or Africa typically do experience white skin privilege relative to racially subordinated groups. However, whites living in exclusive, all-white gated enclaves throughout the world experience and live whiteness in vastly different ways than poor and socially marginalized white populations. Third wave whiteness makes these contradictions explicit by acknowledging the relational, contextual and situational ways in which white privilege can be at the same time a taken-for granted entitlement, a desired social status, a perceived source of victimization and a tenuous situational identity. It is these white inflections, the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented that is the central focus of third wave whiteness.

First wave whiteness

The critical treatment of whiteness owes its greatest intellectual debt to the work of W.E.B. DuBois. Three observations that DuBois made about race and whiteness provide the theoretical foundation for critical white studies. In Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1936) DuBois argued that white labourers in the United States came to embrace the racial identity of the dominant group, rather than adopt an identity framed around a class solidarity with recently freed slaves, because white workers received a ‘public and psychological wage’ by joining or at least queuing themselves up for admission into the white race. Membership in the dominant group provided labourers on the margins of whiteness an extensive and heady mix of social and material privileges. On the material level white labourers could monopolize economic, social and state resources. At the social psychological level all white workers, but particularly those white workers on the economic or social margins, were provided with an inexhaustible ‘wage’ in the form of social status, symbolic capital and deference from blacks that embracing white supremacy provided. By adopting the racist beliefs and practices of the dominant group, labourers from southern and eastern Europe were able to eventually shed the stigma of occupying a middling racial identity between whites and blacks. The material rewards of whiteness were substantial for immigrant labourers. Whiteness granted workers racially exclusive footing on the first rung of America’s expanding industrial mobility ladder, provided an inherited racialized social status to future generations who would come to see themselves as unambiguously white and created the ability to accumulate and transfer intergenerational wealth (Shapiro 2004).

In The Philadelphia Negro (1970 [1899]) DuBois provides a scathing critique of ‘color prejudice’ that he chronicled in his groundbreaking study of Philadelphia’s SeventhWard. The ideological import, cultural meaning and how the relative invisibility of whiteness by whites maintains white supremacy was observed by DuBois over one hundred years ago. The larger problem combating the issue of racial prejudice, DuBois argued, was that ‘most white people are unconscious of any such powerful and vindictive feeling; they regard color prejudice as the easily explicable feeling that intimate social intercourse with a lower race is not only undesirable but impractical if our present standards of culture are to be maintained’ (1970 [1899], p. 322). DuBois explains that for whites colour prejudice ‘is not to-day responsible for all or perhaps the greatest part of the Negro problems; or of the disabilities under which the race labors … they cannot see how such a feeling has much influence on the real situation or alters the social condition of the mass of Negroes’ (ibid.). What follows in the next thirty-five pages in The Philadelphia Negro is DuBois chronicling the ways white supremacy results in discrimination, institutional racism, prejudice and the material deprivation of blacks, a situation a majority of whites are ‘unconscious’ of, or do not care to ‘see’. This blind spot to racial inequality remains in large part unchanged. In the United States a majority of whites (71 per cent) believe blacks have ‘more’ or ‘about the same opportunities’ as whites (Kaiser 2001) even though every quality of life indicator tells a story of continued and in many cases growing racial inequality.

White supremacy, in concert with early modern capitalism, cemented in place a two-tiered, mutually reinforcing system of material and psychological oppression that is painfully evident throughout the globe. Unlike the rather obvious patterns of discrimination and legally sanctioned state sponsored terror that characterized much of US history, contemporary discursive accounts of race and whiteness serve to make the material benefits of whiteness appear normal, natural and unremarkable. Third wave whiteness is an attempt to make the privileges associated with whiteness ‘conscious’ by illustrating how white advantage are maintained through various ideological narratives. These accounts include how colour blindness as a political ideology is increasingly used to negate institutional racism or state reforms (Twine 1997; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Gallagher 2003; Lewis 2004; Ansell 2006), the use of cultural deficit arguments to explain away racial inequality and demonize racial minorities (Bobo 2001; Bobo and Smith 1998) and how appeals to nationalism are employed to mask the extent to which racism motivates reactionary politics (Lamont 2000). These accounts of inequality also serve to deflect attention away from the critiques of white racial dominance and towards other ostensibly non-racial social concerns like immigration, class inequality, post 9/11 geo-politics and cultural nationalism.

DuBois details, and critical white studies expounds upon, how whiteness operates as the normative cultural center that is for many whites an invisible identity. DuBois understood that whiteness is not monolithic nor is it a uniform category of social identification. As DuBois phrased it in The Souls of Black Folks whites in the South were not of a ‘solid’ or uniform opinion concerning racial matters. He explains that ‘To-day even the attitude of the Southern whites towards blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same’ (1982 [1903], p. 92). While acknowledging that racial prejudice, institutional racism and white supremacy are core features of US society, DuBois nonetheless discerned that there was no single white experience concerning race that all whites universally shared. DuBois’s framing of whiteness as a host of competing, situational, mutating and at time warring ethnic identities is a point of inquiry of third wave whiteness. Finally, DuBois’s observation that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the color line’ has been used as prophetic judgement of the struggles the United States would be forced to confront. However the rest of this oft-quoted line demonstrates DuBois’s keen understanding that white supremacy’s hegemony was global in scope. The entire line in the opening second chapter of Souls reads ‘The problem of the twentieth century in the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea’ (1982 [1903], p. 54). Whiteness as a form of privilege and power ‘travels’ from western countries to colonies throughout the world. As whiteness travels the globe it reinvents itself locally upon arrival. As Raka Shome points out ‘whether it was the physical travel of white bodies colonizing “other worlds” or today’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: The future of whiteness: a map of the ‘third wave’
• 2. Repertoires for talking white: Resistant whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa
• 3. ‘Who wants to feel white?’ Race, Dutch culture and contested identities
• 4. Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia
• 5. Walleye warriors and white identities: Native Americans’ treaty rights, composite identities and social movements
• 6. White dreams and red votes: Mexican Americans and the lure of inclusion in the Republican Party
• 7. The landscape of post-imperial whiteness in rural Britain
• Index