Good White People

The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

Shannon Sullivan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438451688, 9781438451695
• eBook ISBN: 9781438451701
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2016 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society of Professors of Education
2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Building on her book Revealing Whiteness, Shannon Sullivan identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as "white middle-class goodness, " an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one's lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness—especially in the context of white childrearing—and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame, and betrayal. To move beyond these distancing strategies, Sullivan argues, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness in the pursuit of racial justice rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.

1

Dumping on White Trash

Etiquette, Abjection, and Radical Inclusion

The trailer park has become … the only acceptable place to dump one’s racist inclinations.

—Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto

One February weekend in 2002, critical whiteness scholar and English professor Mike Hill infiltrated the fifth American Renaissance conference. The theme for that year’s meeting was “In Defense of Western Man,” and the three hundred conference attendees—all apparently white men—were gathered in the name of “white genetic solidarity.”¹ In past years, the conference had focused on non-European immigrants and citizens of color in the United States. In 2002, its emphasis shifted to “the vicissitudes of white identity as it seemed to disappear before our eyes,” with the goal of bringing about “the racial awakening of an Anglocentric nation in crisis.”² Hill, a white man who edited Whiteness: A Critical Reader in 1997, attended the meeting with permission; he was given an invitation when he truthfully lied that he wrote on whiteness.³ Unbeknownst to the American Renaissance organizers and attendees, Hill was at the conference as a spy on behalf of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. His task was to write “a sort of antiracist exposé” for the journal, which he did for their Spring 2002 issue.⁴ The American Renaissance Web site labels its approach to race as one of “race realism,” and in noninflammatory ways explains that “race is an important aspect of individual and group identity…. Race and racial conflict are at the heart of the most serious challenges the Western World faces in the 21st century. The problems of race cannot be solved without adequate understanding … of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological.”⁵ But as Hill reports, the seemingly respectable title “American Renaissance” is in fact “the name of the most vicious collection of … racists who assemble every two years to discuss among themselves how blacks and other racial minorities are destroying Western civilization.”⁶ In the name of racial justice and in solidarity with black and other people of color, Hill felt that the American Renaissance’s true mission should be exposed. For that reason, Hill was willing “to hold [his] nose and mix it up with people looking more or less like [him],” spending “three agonizingly isolated days among his own kind, mulling over a fantasy of whiteness now storied to be gone.”⁷

The image of an academic playing the role of a spy is striking, and I can’t help but wonder about the anxiety Hill must have experienced in situations when he was in danger of being found out. But what I find most significant about Hill’s story is his description of moments of connection with American Renaissance members that made him profoundly uncomfortable. Hill writes of his irritation that the conference attendees kept bewailing what they called the death of the white race, and then he admits that what was even more irritating was that the weekend “turned out to produce certain moments of intimacy that I would have liked to let go unnoticed.”⁸ As the attendees generated excitement over the topic of whiteness, Hill “could not help making some unseemly comparisons closer to home” between their excitement and the exuberant academic “rush to whiteness” that Hill’s edited volume helped create.⁹ Another significant moment of closeness that Hill wished he hadn’t experienced revolved around class. Many of the conference attendees were “remarkably well attuned to the plight of white working-class men,” and Hill found himself identifying with the American Renaissance’s “white guy next door” who is concerned about declining wages, corporate manipulations of the workforce, and the domestic crisis of the state more broadly.¹⁰ Disturbed by repeated moments of sympathizing and identifying with American Renaissance (AR) attendees, Hill laments “while covering the AR story, I noticed how the same kinds of hopes and fears garnering whiteness its share (and then some) of academic attention were meshing too easily with the tortured hearts and twisted minds I mixed with at the AR conference.”¹¹ Hill makes clear that his commitment to racial justice was never in question at the conference, but this is precisely why his experience was so unsettling. As he asks, “Who would really want to admit to the confusing prospect that opposing evaluations on the white majority’s so-called death could mimic one another on class” and other issues?”¹²

“Tortured” and “twisted,” American Renaissance members also are Hill’s “own kind” whose views on class mirror his own. How could Hill, a white person committed to racial justice, find himself identifying with white supremacists? It seems that, by definition, this situation could not happen, and yet it did—hence Hill’s painful cognitive dissonance and existential confusion. I bet that Hill’s experience would not be unique, however. Many middle-class white people, me included, probably would have felt just as unsettled and disturbed as he did. My point in recounting this story is not to single out Hill, but to show how his experience reveals the commonplace assumption that there should be no points of contact, similarities, or shared interests between white supremacists and white allies. If there are shared interests between them, so the assumption goes, then this fact calls into question a white person’s commitment to racial justice. This assumption is problematic because its denial of connections between white allies and white supremacists posits white supremacists as irremediably other, and as I will argue, this othering supports the very thing—white racism—that white allies are trying to combat.

Hill’s story also helps expose problematic assumptions about who white racists are. They often are thought to be members of an uneducated white lower class: their alleged stupidity is why they continue to think that white people are superior to nonwhite people. This assumption operates in the opposite direction as well: poor white people—so-called white trash, rednecks, and hillbillies—often are automatically assumed to be white racists, and if they aren’t (yet) members of a white supremacist organization, then they are thought to be the best recruiting pool from which white supremacists can draw. As Jim Goad argues, “rednecks are fingered as the primary source of [racial] prejudice,” so much so that “white supremacist” (or “overt white racist”) and “white lower class” often are treated as synonyms.¹³ This claim is confirmed by studies in cultural anthropology that demonstrate how “a comfortable conviction holds sway among middle-class whites that racism is concentrated in the lower classes—that it is certainly present in working-class whites, but bubbles up most vigorously from the hearts of poor whites, as allegorized in the cultural figure of ‘white trash.’ ”¹⁴

In contrast to this stereotype of white racists, the men at the American Renaissance conference were not lower-class, poor, or white trash. They were members of a relatively upscale white middle class. This meant that they were Hill’s own kind not just because they were white and male, but also because they were professionally dressed, well educated, and well spoken. “We white racialists must put away our boots and put on our suits,” as American Renaissance speaker Nick Griffin claimed, reflecting an unspoken dress code clearly in force at the conference.¹⁵ With their coats, ties, and glasses of chardonnay, the American Renaissance conference was not a stereotypical gathering of big-booted white supremacists shouting near a burning cross in a muddy field. “Gathered in a gentlemanly way,” many of the conference attendees possessed postgraduate degrees from leading universities such as Yale, Cambridge, University of North Carolina, Cal State Northridge, and University of London.¹⁶ Hill’s identification with them is unseemly, as he confesses, which is to say indecent, coarse, in poor taste—all the things that an educated middle-class person is not supposed to be and all things that are identified with white racism in a post–Jim Crow world. If the American Renaissance men can be simultaneously unseemly (because racist) and middle-class, then other middle-class white people, such as Hill, cannot be confident that their middle-class status prevents them from being racist.

In this chapter, I examine corrosive divides between classes of white people on which white racism depends, exploring how white trash are othered by good white liberals particularly through race-class etiquette and the resulting abjection of poor whites. If white people are going to figure out how to live their whiteness in ways that challenge racial injustice, then white middle-class othering of white lower classes must be confronted because it serves the interests of white domination. As I will argue, those interests can best be countered by a type of radical inclusion that involves white people of all classes—the “bad” white people as well as the “good” ones—in racial justice movements.

Etiquette concerns conventional requirements or expectations for social behavior. The word originated in eighteenth-century France, meaning “ticket” or “label.” Small cards—les étiquettes—were printed with instructions for how a person was to behave in court or how a soldier was to behave in his lodgings.¹⁷ Les étiquettes ensured that a visitor to the king wouldn’t offend him and that a soldier obtaining lodging wouldn’t harm the property or disturb its owners or other lodgers. Today, of course, we use the word more broadly to refer to a variety of social situations and groups of people. But in all cases, etiquette means the regulation of relationships between individuals by prescribing and proscribing particular forms of their conduct with one another.

Bertram Wilbur Doyle’s classic study of the etiquette of race relations in the U.S. South is useful not only for examining the role that etiquette played between white and black people in antebellum and Jim Crow America, but also for analyzing some of the general features of etiquette.¹⁸ Etiquette is concerned primarily with personal relations, but its meaning and impact stretch far beyond the personal. At its heart, etiquette is a form of social control that defines and maintains social distances between people.¹⁹ If a black person routinely steps off the sidewalk to let a white person pass, this act is more than merely a private matter between the two people. It embodies, repeats, and supports social expectations of black deference and subordination to white people. Even in a case involving two social equals, etiquette tends to regulate their behavior, including the degree of social distance that is supposed to exist between them. Thus, two academics at a conference might shake hands or kiss cheeks when greeting each other, depending on what country they are in (or what kind of philosophy they study). If one person refuses to do so, the breach of etiquette requires an explanation, such as having a bad cold and not wanting to spread germs, which has spawned new forms of etiquette such as the elbow bump. Absent an explanation, the breach of etiquette produces a rupture in social order—in this case, the person refusing the greeting asserts herself as superior to someone who was presumed to be an equal. This rupture in the social fabric leaves the offended party and those who witnessed the snub unsure of how to behave toward the person who violated a social code.

The emphasis on social distance here is important. Etiquette sometimes regulated physical distances between people, as the sidewalk example above illustrates. But the physical distances prescribed by etiquette were and are always in the service of the more crucial matter of social distance. Etiquette is what makes possible physical proximity and intimacy between social superiors and inferiors without collapsing their social status.²⁰ For example, racial etiquette allowed white masters and black slaves to work together side by side on the plantation and black slaves to tend to the most intimate matters of their white master’s hygiene, all without any threat to the white person’s status as superior. As long as both white master and black slave observed the appropriate rules of address and gestural codes of behavior—etiquette is a code that binds both the dominant and subordinate, after all—then significant social distances could be maintained in the midst of intimate physical proximities.²¹ What the example of racial etiquette from antebellum America shows is that “far more than physical separation, white southerners wanted social distance.”²²

For Doyle, etiquette is a form of government, and we can understand this term in a Foucauldian sense.²³ Michel Foucault understood government not as a top-down form of state power, but as a horizontal form of social control embodied in institutions such as schools, medical facilities, and prisons. Governmentality combines strategies and technologies for influencing others with those of caring for or regulating the self.²⁴ In a similar fashion, Doyle argues that the government provided by etiquette is much more basic and extensive than that of legislation or political bodies. Etiquette operates throughout virtually all of our social relationships, and its “jurisdiction” often precedes and operates alongside official legislation and then continues after laws and other formal regulations have been abolished.²⁵ (This was the case after the Civil War, when slavery-era etiquette between white people and newly freed slaves continued even though slavery legally had been abolished.) Etiquette governs informally, and this is precisely why its form of social control is effective.

Another way of approaching etiquette’s informality—and thus also its effectiveness—is to understand etiquette as a form of habit. Habit is a predisposition for transacting with the world in a particular way. Habits operate on subconscious and sometimes even unconscious levels: they are what we do “without thinking.” This doesn’t mean, however, that habits necessarily are trivial or minor, as when, for example, a person absentmindedly twirls a lock of her hair while reading. Just the opposite: some of the most complex skills that human beings acquire—such as playing the violin or driving a manual transmission automobile—are only fully acquired when they have become habit. But even these examples do not make the point about habit’s ontological significance strongly enough, for habit is constitutive of the self. The gendered, raced, classed, and other patterns of transacting with the world that a person develops help constitute who that person is.

Etiquette does not always take the form of habit. This is because it sometimes is an act that a person consciously decides to engage in. But when etiquette is at its most effective, it operates subconsciously or unconsciously. Quoting William Graham Sumner and using Sumner’s “social ritual” as a synonym for “etiquette,” Doyle explains that “ritual, as Sumner points out, ‘is not something to be thought or felt. It is something to be done.’ In fact, ‘ritual is strongest when it is perfunctory and excites no thought.’ ”²⁶ As in the case of all habits, etiquette can become so engrained in the self that it can seem instinctual, as if it were not learned behavior. This explains how black slaves sometimes appeared “naturally” or “natively” deferential toward white people.²⁷ When it takes the form of habit, etiquette allows people to engage each other with the least expenditure of energy required by conscious thought. In this way, it facilitates smooth and easy transactions with one’s environment.

As it does so, however, the social order preserved by etiquette also exerts its most effective—and thus potentially most harmful—control.²⁸ While some contemporary white philosophers have argued that etiquette must be part of attempts to defeat racism and thus that etiquette has a transformative role to play in an oppressive society, the forms of etiquette they describe tend to be mere pleasantries between people that eliminate social tension but for that reason don’t bring about any substantial change.²⁹ (I’m reminded of Martin Luther King’s criticism of “the white moderate, who is mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Good White Liberals
• 1. Dumping on White Trash: Etiquette, Abjection, and Radical Inclusion
• 2. Demonizing White Ancestors: Unconscious Histories and Racial Responsibilities
• 3. The Dis-ease of Color Blindness: Racial Absences and Invisibilities in the Reproduction of Whiteness
• 4. The Dangers of White Guilt, Shame, and Betrayal: Toward White Self-Love
• Conclusion: Struggles over Love
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover