The Meaning of Whiteness

To date, we've looked through two lenses

  1. As Americaness
  1. through public policy:
    1. immigration exclusion: 1790 Naturalization Act, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 1924 Immigration Control Act
    1. segregation: Dred Scot Decision, Plessy v. Ferguson (Separate but Equal), state and local segregation laws
  1. through representation
    1. the war hero, Uncle Sam, the marlboro man
    2. the unassimilable (immigrants of color, African-Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos)
  1. As Ethnicity
  1. the immigrant narrative as a model of immigrant assimilation
  2. Sociologists Robert Park & Nathan Glaser and models of inevitable immigrant assimilation as a generational process
  3. Hyphenated-Americans: Immigration as The American experience, one that links all Americans of European-descent

Each of these lenses can be seen as the basis for either an inclusive or an exclusive Americaness.

Inclusiveness: Universal Rights or Earned Citizenship

  1. If American Identity is based on the principles of democracy and individual rights, not a single common ethnic identity, then all people (whether native-born or not) would seem eligible not only for legal citizenship, but for cultural and representational citizenship as well.
  2. Or if Americaness is based on demonstrated loyalty to American democratic principles, then individuals can be seen as earning their Americaness either through their service to the nation (African-Americaness and immigrant service in U.S. wars) or their fulfillment of the American Dream (entrepreneurs, and self-made men, etc.)

Problem with these definitions is that logically neither can be limited to whites, both americaness and ethnicity are non-racial categories that clearly can be applied to non-whites. Thus, to define whiteness in either of those terms implies that creation of a racial boundary that is not implicit in either term.

Exclusiveness: The Persistence of Racial and Ethnic Prerequisites

  1. Americanness: Takaki's story of the cab ride: race and ethnicity as permanent markers of foreignness
  2. Ethnicity: Linking immigrant earned citizenship to the defense of white privileges and power.

A third perspective on the meaning of whiteness in American society would suggest that while nationality (Americaness) and/or ethnicity may provide the content for white identities, the value inherent in whiteness is based solely on the privilege and power it conveys to individuals. In other words, this perspective argues that whiteness is neither a nationality or an ethnicity, precisely because it lacks a specific cultural content, and that it meaning lies solely on the advantages it conveys… in its placement of individuals at the top of the hierarchy of races.

Power and Privileged conveyed through public policy and cultural representation (not simply media representation, but broadly-understood cultural ideas of "white" characteristics and of the centrality of white people within the society.)

To Repeat: Why Power/Privilege? Why Not Americanness and Ethnicity?

McIntosh's focus is not on the cultural or political origins of white privilege but on its lived experience on a daily basis:

Central point: whiteness defines the norm (as does maleness-- impact of medical study), its privileges are largely invisible (housing example, hard work is seen, not the rise of property values based on all-white location), they are rarely recognized until they are lost; one is judged as an individual, not against a racial or ethnic stereotype (Claude Steel's stereotype threat and his findings)

Thus, McIntosh demonstrates Tatum's point that racism operate primarily as a system of advantage, not as the power to enact prejudice-- only a handful actively work to maintain all-white neighborhoods; the majority operate within the constraints of the system without thinking about its racial implications; at best, they feel constrained by value concerns from choosing an integrated area.

Lipsitz and Sugrue lay out the case for the ways that white privilege has been and continues to be entrenched in our public policy, not simply through racist policies like segregation and immigration bans, but in the very way that the New Deal built the welfare state:

  1. Social Security not offered to farm workers and domestic servants (disproportionately black job sectors)
  2. FHA mortgage assistance denied to minority and integrated areas (through the process of red-lining-- carried out by real estate professionals hired by the FHA)
  3. Segregation and discrimination in Works Progress Administration and other New Deal employment initiatives
  4. Segregated public housing until the 1950's-- result is racialized public housing communities without political clout
  5. Segregated military units until the 1950's
  6. Inability to pass federal anti-discrimination law until the 1960's
  7. Urban Renewal programs that destroyed black neighborhoods, failed to effectively replace the lost housing, and largely benefitted local real estate and business interests.
  8. Zoning regulations and local funding of public schools through property taxes
  9. Labor law fails to outlaw racial discrimination; sanction to seniority systems that put black workers at a disadvantage, federal aid goes to union-sponsored al-white apprenticeship programs (result is that the only ethnic niche open to blacks is in government jobs. And even then author Suzanne Model finds that black government sector workers earn lower wages than white private and government sector workers.)

Gov't policies maintain racial inequity through acts of omission as well as commission:

  1. Failure to fund effective enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in employment and housing
  2. Federal support for highway construction and lack of support for urban mass transit
  3. Failure to address disparate racial impact of corporate decentralization and the deindustrialization of major cities.

This set of policies instiled both immediate white privilege and create wealth gap between whites and blacks.

My grandparents' experience as homeowners demonstrates how the persistence of racialized housing markets has created a racial disparity in the generational transfer of capital assets.

But why were these policies established? Lipsitz blames New Deal alliance with southern segregationists-- powerful southerners demand racially discriminatory policy in return for their support for New Deal legislation.

Sugrue adds the role of working and middle-class Democratic constituencies in the North. Despite support for abstract principles of civil rights, these communities objected to local implementation of those principles: opposing integrated public housing, insisting on a right to maintain all-white neighborhoods, resisting efforts to implement racially equitable hiring, promotion, and seniority provisions in employment.

To Repeat:

Why The Persistence of Racialized Public Policy?

Suburban Political Power: By the 1970's, white flight had grown suburbs to the point that suburban voters are able to dominate in both state and national elections

 

What to do if whiteness is inherently a category of dominance that requires the subordination of others-- particularly, in a society which has, at least in principle, outlawed racial discrimination and exclusion?