Abstract
The field that came to be known as Whiteness Studies in the United States in the 1990s has much intellectual debt to black scholars in the Americas. By the 1930s, African American scholars like W. E. B. DuBois in the United States and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos in Brazil understood the value of viewing whiteness as an analytical category crucial in understanding racial inequality. In Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1936), DuBois argued that white American workers received a public and “psychological wage” by grounding their identities and communities primarily on their white race, rather than forging class solidarities across the color line. 1 DuBois understood that white supremacy usurped people of color of their very humanity and personhood, of their right to self-definition and self-determination. A contemporary of DuBois, Afro-Brazilian social scientist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos published Patologia social do “branco” brasileiro (Social Pathology of the “White” Brazilian), a 1955 pamphlet that introduced whiteness, a topic from a book of poems he wrote in the 1930s, into Latin American social sciences. 2 Trained in sociology and social work, Guerreiro Ramos contended that Brazilians faced a sort of cognitive dissonance in which “whiteness” remained the preferred aesthetic referent in a predominantly non-white country, a “neocolonial fixation on Europe.” Guerreiro Ramos noted, inhibited the development of a Brazilian national identity expansive enough to acknowledge the plight and contributions of a majority of the country’s population. 3 For Guerreiro Ramos, the so-called racial problem in Brazil, and which had captured the interest of scholars of the time, was one of naturalizing the supremacy of whiteness as much, if not more, than of rejecting blackness.
The authors I review in this essay, while belonging to a more recent wave of U.S. Whiteness Studies scholarship, share several observations that DuBois and Guerreiro Ramos made about the naturalization of whiteness, the ordinariness of white supremacy, and the inextricable ways in which white supremacy becomes grounded in affective, emotive, and psychological dynamics that intersect with structural and institutional inequalities. Taken together, these authors explore an array of topics, from the psychological wages of whiteness to the powerful and vindictive feelings displayed by whites throughout American continental history, from a failure in grasping how racial predispositions influence real situations to how they insure the material deprivations, exclusion, and social conditions of non-whites. These works demonstrate the need to investigate beyond the institutional realm, to the ways in which intimate, interior worlds operate dialectically with material and structural systems of racial inequality and white supremacy. Directly or tacitly, these writers ask us to remain attentive to how racial politics are felt, acted upon, reproduced, and how they become “ordinary.”
Contemporary research on whiteness explores the ideological practices that render white privilege invisible or neutral, the ways in which whiteness is increasingly a contested category, the processes through which race politics transform whiteness into a victimized marked identity, and the power relations that allow whiteness to be positioned as a benign cultural signifier. However, the authors under discussion further demonstrate how racial markers, locations, and systems of white supremacy might result in designing effective interventions to interrupt and reverse the course of racism. The lives and mental worlds of people racialized as white provide important social maps to larger institutional, governmental, and capitalist relations.
Whiteness becomes codified and naturalized through everyday practices. Affective and psychological expectations, as well as ideological narratives acquire materiality at various scales of sociality, from civic and familial institutions and neighborhood life to nation-state, transnational, and hemispheric projects. The authors reviewed here consider the cultural practices, discursive strategies, and racial socialization of whites as they struggle to hold on to privilege and constitute, recover or restore white supremacy in the United States from Reconstruction through the post-Civil Rights and postindustrial eras.
In the twentieth-anniversary edition of his historically grounded classic The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, George Lipsitz considers the investment in whiteness to be possessive to stress the relationship between racial privilege and capital accumulation. The everyday attitudes of whites are invariably connected to group interests, the deployment of symbolic and material “wages,” and deeply rooted on racial loyalties. Significantly, this possessive investment in whiteness weakens the position of working-class whites by preventing them from recognizing class similarities across racial lines and making productive alliances accordingly.
Erika Lee convincingly demonstrates in America for Americans that xenophobia has been neither an aberration nor isolated episodes in the history of U.S. immigration. The phenomenon is an American tradition inextricably connected to race making in the country, a form of racism that has shaped how Americans classify and rank people by race and institutionalize racial discrimination and white supremacy. At every turn in U.S. history, immigrants were declared the chief source of crime and public incivility. This was done through the recycling of language first used to sign racial inferiority, such as Texan Congressman John C. Box description of Mexicans as a dangerous cocktail of “low-grade Spaniards, peonized Indian, and negro slave mixed with negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels and some sorry whites” (p. 156). Even after the end of immigration quotas in 1965, immigration reform did not mean that U.S. Congress supported increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Indeed, officials on all sides of the immigration debate routinely cited examples of the system’s injustice against white Europeans (p. 235).
In Vanishing Eden, Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage document how Civil Rights racial integration practices in 1960s Chicago were experienced in the everyday, block-by-block lives of residents in two white neighborhoods. Interviewing whites who lived through these charged racial tensions, Maly and Dalmage analyze community loss and nostalgia as crucial tropes through which to make sense of how race, whiteness, and privilege were understood and enacted over time. Likewise, in Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt situates the Klan in the mainstream culture of the 1920s, equivalent in membership, popularity, and scope to other social movements of the time, and as much characteristic of the era as images of the “Roaring Twenties” or the “Jazz Age.” Shifting away from official leaders and members of the Klan, Harcourt reveal how the white supremacist group, its activities, and meetings were ubiquitous in American media and popular culture. With great nuance and in locally specific ways, these authors examine the function and optics of whiteness in popular culture and social movements, neighborhood life, nation-state xenophobia, and as a “possession” that confers upon white people unique levels of material, psychological, and symbolic capital.
Each of these works aims to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct or snarling contempt than it is a system designated to protect the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility. Looming under these works, even if perhaps not explicitly addressed, is the role of what I call elsewhere a moral economy of privilege. 4 Whereas whites could certainly be openly and unapologetically racist, the reality is that they have the psychological and affective desire to continue to view and justify their identities as “good people.” Notwithstanding a profoundly flawed racial logic, this moral economy of privilege unfolds not primarily at the macro levels of the state or the nation, but at the intimate levels of everyday life through the control of structures of feelings in neighborhoods and communities, the protection of social reproduction in the family, and readings of racial dynamics in terms of affect. This is not to say that these intimate-level forms of sociability overtake or supersede macro-scale of institutions. Quite the contrary. The most enduring institutions and nation-state projects are those that benefit from the moral economies that cultivate, sustain, and foster racial privilege through ordinary forms of intimacy and kinship.
Critical to that moral economy of privilege is the production of whiteness as both ordinary and as requiring profound levels of cultivation, often in fundamentally affective and emotional terms. Elsewhere, I call this connection between the cultivation, ordinariness, and affective dimensions of whiteness “interiority currency.” Ulla Berg and I have theorized its operations as racialized affect. 5 I have deconstructed these intersections of race and affect in my ethnographic work among Latinx and Latin American working-class populations in Newark, New Jersey, 6 as well as in my more current examination of how white elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico deploy parenting ideologies to privatize neighborhoods, institute notions of “appropriate” personhood vis-à-vis the domestic workers they hire, and endorse white American neoliberal hemispheric interests. The works reviewed here, even if not explicitly about race and affect, show how white populations claim space—whether the nation, the neighborhood, or mainstream popular culture—through everyday sociability, nostalgia, selective memory, and a cultivated and intergenerational sense of entitlement.
Fear, for instance, becomes a ubiquitous affective and emotional response that all authors consider dominant among white individuals and communities. As Lipsitz notes, the possessive investment in whiteness creates a vicious cycle. The more fearful, fragile, and headed for failure that whites feel, the more avidly they pursue the idealized fantasy of uninhibited power and agency to which they believe their whiteness entitles them (p. 120). The ordinary is expansively developed in relation to nativism, or fear of “strangers” and those deliberately rendered strangers. Erika Lee’s primary argument that American xenophobia, rather than being a product of U.S. foreign policy alone, is rooted on the racial projects of the U.S. nation-state and the systems on white supremacy on which the nation was legally, spatially, culturally, and economically edified. As Lee documents, xenophobia in the United States has persevered alongside civil rights. It endures because xenophobia provides the foundation for the United States’s most important institutions: capitalism, democracy, and foreign relations. More significantly, though, xenophobia endures because it appeals to the affective dimensions of these very institutions.
Recent scholarly histories of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) generally recognize that the white supremacist order was far from an aberration. Rather, the institution possessed strong and direct links to mainstream American society. The group constituted an important thread in the fabric of U.S. life for several decades in the twentieth century. As Harcourt and others have shown, its membership was drawn from a balanced cross-section of the white male Protestant population and functioned like many other social movements in U.S. history. Drawing on evidence from a broad media selection, Harcourt examines the group’s engagement with, and impact on, the emerging popular culture, press, media, tabloid press, and film production of the period. Just like the xenophobia Erika Lee documents, Harcourt shows that the Klan was thoroughly American. Its influence had perhaps less to do with the development of a group of officially affiliated Klansmen, than with a structure of feelings shared by ordinary like-minded neighbors, clergy, kin networks, and friendships. These were supporters and sympathizers, who were culturally and affectively drawn to the loosely sketched positions and de-centralized KKK platform, yielding a national movement unified under a consumable cultural identity.
In popular books, films, and the tabloid press, the Klan’s presence appealed to the emotions of consumers who were intrigued by the workings of the organization and acknowledged its prominent if ambiguous place in American everyday life in the 1920s. Even scholars in elite universities studied the Klan viewed the group at a local, grassroots organization and downplayed the organization’s foundation on hate and prejudices in favor of viewing it as a morally, idealistic group, which furthermore shows how the Klan was central, not only to white neighborhood cohesiveness but also to the structure of feelings of the time more broadly (p. 59). Harcourt compellingly argues that, rather than focusing on the rise and fall of the Klan’s official membership, a better metric for the hooded order’s influence is its widespread cultural influence. As other social movements, the Klan produced and inspired widely circulated newspapers, books, and films; built its own radio stations; played baseball against Jewish and Catholic teams; and, ironically, even recorded its own jazz music.
Nostalgic narratives of white virtuosity, community longing, and collective memory are strategic discourses that situate white supremacy in a moral economy of privilege. As Maly and Dalmage note, identity, race, and neighborhood are important analytics through which to examine how “doing race” and teaching privilege require the active and continuous (re)creation of ideological and institutional borders. Through nostalgia narratives, the Chicago whites in Maly and Dalmage’s research perceived themselves as victimized and try to regain white ownership, racial privilege, and social position, while maintaining a white identity in the era of color-blind discourse. Through archival work and oral histories, Maly and Dalmage examine how, as racial change began to threaten their neighborhoods, whites organized themselves, and their identities, roles, and emotions, as “white ethnics.” Empathy for the plight of people of color was lost to an amplified concern for the well-being of these presumably victimized “white ethnic” group. As an individual and group identity, “white ethnics” forged close kinships or interest groups that concealed or undermined white supremacy by highlighting the moral, familial, affective, and psychological qualities of whites. Unjust access, prejudice, and the racial disadvantage blacks face became illegible to whites, who maneuvered through a politics of ignorance.
A moral economy of privilege in fact requires that such a politics of ignorance is complemented, ironically, by a process of learning American racial discourse. Learning such racial talk often serves as a baseline for sociality and the maintenance of social mobility and networks, and crucial to the process of social reproduction.
From an array of methodological and theoretical perspectives, the authors reviewed here observe the centrality of what children hear and learn in their communities and what their parents say about race, integration, and humanity. This becomes their socialization into whiteness. While racial change signaled a loss of neighborhood, social networks, one’s country, and sense of community, such perceived threats were tied to radical political economic changes toward a precarious postindustrial economy and suburban living. Few forms of relatedness are as revealing of the contours of whiteness, racial privilege, and definitions of morality as parenting is. In their roles as parents, whites policed each other’s whiteness, dictated acceptable behavior, and equated cultural capital with childrearing. Parenting and the processes of racialization taught to children happened in contexts in which families and communities shared mainstream classed, religious, and gendered perspectives.
Enforcing racial borders in neighborhoods, schools, and everyday routes and routines was perhaps the most enduring feature of how whites parented and how white children learned to internalize privilege and entitlement in spatial ways. Harcourt documents the Klan’s strong concerns over illiteracy in the United States were channeled through their crusade for universal public schooling and against Catholic parochial schools. This passion for public education became more evident in debates over school textbooks, where they managed to remove (and burn) books they found offensive and replace them with ones that aligned better with more “patriotic” ones (pp. 69-70). Erika Lee also notes the xenophobe’s concern over the perceived Catholic threat to public education and the process of becoming “good Americans.” As a response, Catholics established independent Catholic school systems across the United States which continue to educate large numbers of immigrants, particularly from the predominantly Latin American and Caribbean countries. As full Americanness was extended to all European immigrants and their children, regardless of religion or nationality, white narratives of belonging, ownership, and longing conveniently ignored African Americans, Mexican Americans, and hundreds of native nations occupying North American land long before white settlement.
Matthew Jacobson and other historians of whiteness have retold the story of race and ethnic identity in the United States by examining how changes in American labor practices, the racial ambiguity of European immigrants, and the tangible rewards groups received for aligning themselves with the dominant group all conspired to reframe race, rework whiteness, and maintain white supremacy. 7 Continuing this historiographic tradition, Erika Lee teases out the contradiction at the foundation of the United States: on one hand, a “nation of immigrants,” on the other, a nation of xenophobia. As she notes, to many whites, Italians were both “like Negroes” and also “as bad as Negroes.” And yet, in some areas of the Jim Crow South, Italians also crossed racial lines by working alongside, fraternizing with, and even marrying African Americans. While whites believed that physical borders and segregated institutions indicated a “natural” order, they still recognized the artificiality or permeability of such borders. They devoted great energy and went to considerable lengths to avoid sending their children to integrated schools and fought for the homogeneity of their neighborhoods. Families served a function of caring, nurturing, socializing youth into race, and providing the ideological, material, and cultural tools to live in a racially changing world while recognizing themselves as white and preserving the advantages of their whiteness.
These authors recognize the uncertain, precarious relationship of working-class and poor whites to privilege, as well as ideological differences between politically progressive whites versus reactionary ones. They also acknowledge the multiple levels at which whiteness operates, from the psychological gains to the level of the neighborhood and the nation-state. Racial privilege is invariably intersectional, as the contours of whiteness are filtered along axes of gender, nationality, sexuality, and legal status, among others. As Lipsitz notes, such intersectionality does not preclude all whites, regardless of gender, sexuality, and even class, from earning benefits from their “possessive investment in whiteness.” What makes them all white is their access to things from which others are excluded by virtue of their race.
More need to be done, however. Despite the enormous intellectual contributions in the field of Whiteness Studies, including the authors reviewed here, it continues to suffer from U.S.-centric and geopolitical constraints. Scholars need to widen the analytical lens of whiteness beyond European immigrants and their descendants toward an analysis of white identity formation beyond a still-dominant black/white binary. 8 The complicated meaning of whiteness and white identities to the Latinx populations, for instance, has been undertheorized by Whiteness Studies scholars, particularly as it intersects with age, class, skin color, tenure, and region in the United States.
My own ethnographic research finds that American-centered fields of Urban History, American Studies, and Whiteness Studies must explore how moral identities (e.g., parent) and interiority, affective projects play critical roles in the production and transformation of U.S. hemispheric and imperial projects beyond nation-state boundaries. 9 These authors move the discussion in that direction, illustrated by three distinct threads they share. First, whiteness is a social practice that transforms itself into a moral economy. Second, the moral economy of whiteness requires its ordinariness to operate effectively and is achieved through class and racial projects built on affect and interiority capital. Finally, all forms of American sociability, and increasingly forms of sociability across the Americas, require racial learning; the socialization into race becomes critical to forging social networks. As suggested by W. E .B. DuBois and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, the contours of whiteness permeate all scales of life, from the individual to the hemispheric, in affective and ordinary ways.