Critically Engaging Whitness Through Sustained Dialogue

While many argue that progress has been made in the realm of race relations both in the United States and abroad, many more would argue that this progress falls far short of the diverse nation that liberal America often touts. The structures which maintain systemic oppression against bodies of color has not changed since Du Bois’ 1903 statement was made, and this can not be chalked up to the slow moving wheels of progress. The maintenance and investment in this oppression is deliberately perpetrated by a historical system of white supremacy. In this paper I will use the term whiteness as a stand-in for white supremacy, but there should be no mistaking that whiteness is supremacist in nature. It is important then to establish that the term ‘white supremacist’ in this context is not reserved exclusively for fringe groups like the KKK, and is not confined to the ideologies of those who believe white people to be superior to all other persons. Instead it is crucial to view whiteness as a system of structures that, through its normalization, is perpetually enforced and serves to position whites as the “standard” group from which all other racialized experiences are deviations. It is important to note that scholars critical of CWS have made calls for vigilance in the act of engaging with this type of work.

In her paper The Phenomenology of Whiteness, Sara Ahmed cautions that any project with the aim of dismantling or challenging the categories that are made invisible through privilege are bound to participate in the object of their critique (Ahmed). This highlights how projects of critique can be complicit in what they aim to disrupt, but that vigilance can serve to mitigate these risks and produce a more nuanced understanding of whiteness (Applebaum). While there can be no argument against the notion that action should be taken, it is important to ensure that scholars are not so committed to a vision of change that the potential of any strategy to replicate and perpetuate oppression is ignored (Moon & Flores). The purpose of this paper is not to examine all the nuances within whiteness that have allowed it to remain a system of dominance since the first European explorers set foot on African, Asian, and American soil. While I will highlight some of the definitions that have been posited for whiteness, and touch upon the means through which it is perpetuated in society, to offer a comprehensive exploration of all that makes whiteness what it is would be to go beyond the scope of what this paper hopes to achieve. This paper aims to function within the stated goals of the practitioners and scholars devoted to Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), and therefore bring that which is invisible into the light (Dyer). I posit that through the practice of sustained dialogue white individuals can move through models of change which will call upon them to critically engage with their own privilege and the ways in which they willingly and unknowingly perpetuate the supremacy of whiteness. It is hoped that once ignorance is dispelled and patterns of oppression are made visible, individuals will have a greater understanding of the role they play in maintaining structures of whiteness, and can thus work to dismantle them. Models of change will be examined, and the choice of sustained dialogue as the proposed vehicle within which to traverse these models will be explained. Finally, I will propose a curriculum for a sustained dialogue with the aim of moving participants from a position of passive to active and responsible allyship through their critical engagement with their own whiteness and the greater white supremacist society.

Whiteness Is…Like race itself, most who enter the field of CWS agree that whiteness is socially constructed and is a means through which privilege for white individuals is normalized (Applebaum). In seeking to understand racism, whiteness is viewed as being central to the very construction of racism, primarily in the juxtaposition offered in a white supremacist society of the white individual against the racialized “other” (Applebaum, Frankenburg). The dominance of whiteness has served to homogenize what were once various white ethnicities into a single raceless norm, thus ensuring that race is only cast upon non-whites (Leistyna). There is, however, no single agreed upon definition for whiteness. Some scholars posit that whiteness is best defined as a system of organization that establishes a social hierarchy with whites in the dominant role (Dwyer & Jones) and against which differently racialized groups are ordered and valued (Bonds, Anne, Inwood, Joshua).

Sociologist Ruth Frankenburg offered a threefold definition which identifies whiteness as first a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a standpoint from which white people look at themselves, at others, and at society. Finally, whiteness refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed (Frankenburg). Similarly whiteness has been classified as a social location of power, privilege, and prestige (Flagg). In regards to whiteness as a means of ordering and existing within space, it is argued that whiteness is tied to the tendency for white people “to act and think as if all spaces-whether geographic, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise - are or should be available to them to move in and out of as they wish" (Sullivan & Tauna). That is to say that through whiteness, white individuals can continuously center and re-center themselves within all spaces, emphasizing the ‘normalization’ of whiteness and the tendency of white individuals to make whiteness synonymous with the “human” experience. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris offers the notion that whiteness is best understood as a form of property rights that are guaranteed and protected by the law (Harris). She explains how the right to own property stems from being white, as historically white law and force was used to claim Black bodies and Native land as property. As skin color was once the sole determinant of freedom, white skin thus determined whether an individual had the right to own property and, presently, positions one to achieve social and economic superiority as individuals of color are systematically disadvantaged in the acquisition of property (Harris). She is not alone in this likening of whiteness to a system of property rights. Scholars have cited the case of a Susie Guillory Phipps, a Louisiana woman who, in the latter half of the 20th century, sued to have the racial designation on her birth certificate changed from ‘colored’ to ‘white’ after learning that she was not legally considered white (Hasian, Nakayama). Barbara J Flagg offers the definition of whiteness as a type of ‘metaprivilege’. In her piece Whiteness as Metaprivilege she highlights that whiteness “is not only an identity, but the power to name and shape identities. Whiteness not only has control of valuable resources, but has the ability to limit access to those resources to those who reflect its own image. Whiteness not only constitutes a distinct perspective on events, but has the authority to generate definitive cultural narratives. And Whiteness not only is a set of unearned privileges, but the capacity to disguise those privileges behind structures of silence, obfuscation, and denial” (Flagg). She likens whiteness to a stabilizing agent which ensures that structures which concentrate power with white bodies remain intact.

Historicized Whiteness

In his essay The Souls of White Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois asserts that “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s people is a very modern thing. The ancient world would have laughed at such a thing... Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful” (Du Bois). The construction of whiteness is rooted in the colonial logic of race which placed the white European male at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy and all others in various positions of subordination (Bonnett). The 18th century Enlightenment in Europe led to a break with the church as the source of knowledge in favor of the scientific. Scholars like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would put forth assertions that the white European man was the only “human”, the only being capable of achieving self determination. This provided a logic by which colonial projects could be justified (). The distinctions essential to the establishment of a racialized system of social structure used to understand human difference only emerged once Europeans reached the Western hemisphere (Omi & Winant). What followed was the establishment of a deliberate and mechanized system of state sponsored oppression, bolstered by notions of manifest destiny and mercantilism. In Europe and North America this appeared first in the violent removal of Indigenous populations from their land, the forging and abandoning of treaties, and establishment of chattel slavery. In Australia the Aboriginal peoples were forcibly incorporated as subjects of the British crown, thus freeing the colonial powers from any claims of dispossession (Hixson).

The truth within whiteness’ construction, laden with genocide, slavery, anddispossession, is replaced with mythologies of rugged individualism and White ingenuity in the mission to tame a wild frontier, thus providing the illusion that nations like the United States achieved their dominance despite theft and slavery and not because of it (Baptist; Harris). This mythology serves as the base upon which the intractability of modern whiteness takes hold, and provides the launching place from which its perpetuation is ensured.

Perpetuating Whiteness

In her discussion of metaprivilige, Barbara J Flagg also touches upon one of the means through which whiteness is perpetuated, the ability for whites to remain ignorant of it. She states that being white means that participation in anti racist work is optional (Flagg). Her utilization of the term anti racist is deliberate, as she explains an anti racist is someone working against racism, where as a non racist is someone who claims to hold no racist ideology but still enjoys all of the benefits of white privilege (Flagg). This non racist category is a hallmark of liberal white ideology and feeds into the notion of the “good” white person, one who is unlike the explicit racists of fringe groups like the KKK.