whiteness studies, a introduction by Rajiv malhotra
"I advance it, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."
-- Thomas Jefferson, author of the famous statement, "All men are created equal."
"Whiteness studies [is] a controversial and relatively new academic field that seeks to change how white people think about race. The field is based on a left-leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for two centuries. Advocates of whiteness studies - most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race - believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race."
-- "Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies': An Academic Field's Take on Race Stirs Interest and Anger," By Darryl Fears, Washington Post. June 20, 2003.
"Whiteness is a derogatory name for Western civilization"
-- Matthew Spalding, Director of the Center for American Studies, Heritage Foundation.
"White American culture holds power to control resources, set rules, and influence events...It must give up the center...Colorblindness encourages silence that continues the status quo."
-- Jeff Hitchcock, Center for the Study of White American Culture
"Many Asian/Hispanic immigrants regard white as synonymous with American, with belonging, with fitting in... They equate whiteness with opportunity and inclusion..."
-- L.A. Times [1]
"[T]he American education system (with strong reinforcement from the media) has bred a nation of what I will call 'closet racists.' Closet racists are unaware of their prejudices."
-- Paul Gorski
It is clear from the above quotes that the examination of whiteness is a hotly contested field even without introducing Indians into it.
This column is a conversation with Jeff Hitchcock, a liberal white American who specializes in studying white culture. I hope to bring Indians and Indianness into this vibrant debate, and to use whiteness as the context in which to re-examine various issues concerning Indian identity and culture.
But first I introduce the reason for wanting to do this. Every serious thinker in the world today must have an independent and deep understanding of America and its culture. While American pop culture is understood by many Indian intellectuals, one must look beneath this surface to discover the underlying reality of America. For example, a foreigner judging America on the basis of sports and entertainment could falsely conclude that blacks enjoy a high status in American society. The danger of being an outsider looking in is that generalized surface impressions become naively accepted as deep-seated truths rather than the superficial façade they truly represent. Far too many Indian writers have interpreted America by focusing only on its pop culture, where they disproportionately focus on symbols of postmodernity, i.e. such images as Madonna with a bindi or the latest belly-button of Britney Spears.
However, America's institutions of power – government, business and church – are the true windows into her soul, and yet have not been adequately examined by Indians in the humanities. One must even go beyond the institutions and analyze the white culture, both codified and uncodified, both known and subliminal, by which these institutions operate. In understanding white culture, one must bear in mind that Middle America is distinct from Elite America of Ivy League cocoons, Broadway shows and The New York Times best-sellers.
For years, I have wanted to start a new discipline, which I had tentatively called Westology, to study the West in the same manner as Indology was started in the 19th century by outsiders to study India.
But luckily, I came across an exciting new academic field that already does much of what I had envisioned in Westology. This field is called Whiteness Studies (or White Studies), and is taught in over 30 US colleges. For instance, in Princeton University, an undergraduate course on Whiteness is among the most popular courses in the entire university, and the vast majority of students taking it are whites who want to better understand themselves.
In the late 1980s, an article by Richard Dyer appearing in Screen, a British film magazine, sparked great intellectual interest in the field. But Whiteness Studies gained academic momentum only after a watershed event where some students organized a highly successful academic conference on this topic in Berkeley, in April 1997.
A central concept of this discipline is white privilege, which has been defined as "a package of benefits, granted to people in our society who have white skin, which allows them certain free passes to certain things in our society that are not easily available to people of color[2].
In his speech, The New Abolitionism, Noel Ignatiev said, "Race is not a biological but a social category. The white race consists of those who partake of the privileges of white skin. The most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system...Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, racial oppression is not the work of racists."
While reading the scholarship in this field, I came across an interesting research and outreach group, called The Center for the Study of White American Culture, and its co-founder, Jeff Hitchcock[3]. We are now developing a series of joint projects to study whiteness through the lenses of anthropology, mythology, etc., and the complex relationships that Indians have with it.
The reasons I consider it of paramount importance to understand white culture may be summarized as follows:
Whiteness as the cultural currency: Gazing at whiteness (rather than from it) enables one to better recognize that white epistemologies and worldviews are relative, not universal. This would help level the playing field between cultures as equals.
Expanding the epistemologies and worldviews: European culture's systematic study of others for centuries became an instrument of power and led to representations that were spread as "universal truths and values." Undoubtedly, white people's epistemologies have made major contributions to all humanity, but they also need to be understood as being relative to certain experiences of certain people.
White persons' identities: While some liberal whites champion the objective study of their identity and culture from various perspectives, many other white liberals resist being gazed at so intimately. This discipline remains largely ignored and sometimes even blocked. However, since whites are a small minority in the world population, and may become a minority even within the US (which depends on the extent to which non-white immigrants "become white" over time), it is imperative that they should know how others perceive them.
Human rights and peace: Lowell Thompson, who describes himself as the world's first whiteologist, concluded that "the reason America still has a race problem was because we were studying the wrong race [i.e. blacks]." He advocates that scholars should be studying whiteness in order to deal with race issues, and not using white gazes to study exclusively black, Hispanic, Asian, and other cultures of color. Indian intellectuals who wish to promote multiculturalism must better understand the dominant white culture in order to help decenter it as one of many cultures.
Indians' identity formation: Those Indians who are trying to become "whitewashed" must first properly learn about white culture to be able to mimic it authentically. Other Indians who are keen to retain and better understand their own non-white identities must understand how to interact with and negotiate with the dominant white culture as their equal "other." As a byproduct, Indian scholars would advance the global project of understanding whiteness. This would also serve to "return the favor," given that white people have studied Indian culture and civilization for centuries, and taught us many of the commonly accepted ideas about ourselves.
The goal of White Studies is to neither demonize nor glorify whiteness, but to understand it, and to give white culture its rightful place among the various cultures of the world. The idea is to show that though whiteness dominates by occupying the central spot today, it is neither intrinsically superior nor inferior to other cultures, and that its dominant position is the result of history. (See endnotes for some references on Whiteness Studies[4].
Dialog with Jeff Hitchcock
Rajiv: You have mentioned that the main power of whiteness is silence. Could you explain this?
Jeff: There is a concerted effort to keep discussion of whiteness out of public discourse. This begins with mis-education in our primary and secondary schools, and to a lesser extent, even in higher education. Mainstream media engages in a studied ignorance and selective forgetting. This makes it seem like whiteness is not really an issue, so innocent looking is the lack of attention paid to it. But raise the topic and you will witness a sudden flurry of repair work brought forth by self-appointed guardians of the status quo. Whiteness is a powerful, unseen, and sometimes vengeful force that permeates every part of our lives. White Americans enjoy the privileges of whiteness without having to accept the identity of white.
For people of color who are assimilating to whiteness to enter the mainstream, collaborating on the silence becomes a key requirement. They can reap rich rewards by pretending denial of the situation.
White culture creates the conditions it wants to hear; it makes it so it cannot hear what people of other races are actually experiencing. Through control of the media and suppression of alternate views, it demands unity on white terms and rewards both white people and people of color who police this demand.
Rajiv: What is at stake that makes this denial so important?
Jeff: Whiteness is not neutral. It looks out for its own interests. White American culture holds greater power to control resources, set rules, and influence events. This position of dominance is not an accident, but rather a product of our history, involving elements of economic and political struggle. In the past, this struggle included practices such as enslavement and genocide of people and cultures of color, justified by an avowed white supremacy that celebrated whiteness as God's appointed agent.
Rajiv: Why is white privilege a problem?
Jeff: White American culture was created with a frontier mentality that encouraged a nearly ravenous exploitation and consumption of newly appropriated natural resources, and a disregard of those defined as not white. In our contemporary world, these elements of white culture are clearly becoming dysfunctional.
We need to accept that white culture cannot deliver multiracial comfort. It can only deliver white comfort. White culture cannot deliver multiracial safety. It can only deliver white safety. White culture cannot deliver multiracial community. It can only deliver white community. White culture cannot deliver multiracial justice. It can only deliver white justice. White culture must give up the center if multiracial justice, multiracial community, multiracial safety and multiracial comfort are ever to become central to our society.
Rajiv: I often hear liberal persons say that they are colorblind, i.e. they do not see any difference among persons based on color. But you and most White Studies scholars criticize the policy known as colorblindness. Why?
Jeff: Of course, colorblindness is far better than racism. But it is not good enough. Colorblindness says that race shouldn't make a difference in people's lives, and hence we should not mention it because mentioning it creates problems. But in practice, this silence preserves the status quo of white privilege.
White people who claim to be colorblind do not want to publicly see themselves as white in other than a superficial way. They know which box to check on census forms, but do not believe (or at least do not want to believe) that the status of being white has any effect on their lives. By this denial they absolve themselves of the need to undo the problems that history has given us. It is irresponsible to suppress the problems behind blind spots, just to avoid the discomfort that pops up. Structural change cannot be made using colorblind policies.
Whiteness forms the center of our society and as long as it does, we cannot have a society centered on multiracial values. The irony of colorblindness is that by not seeing whiteness, it keeps whiteness centered. In order to decenter whiteness we need to name it. White culture has been described as invisible, normative, transparent, raceless, and the undefined definer of others. These are all descriptions that come from within whiteness itself. Most white people cannot name whiteness.
Rajiv: In short, colorblindness leads to invisibility, which perpetuates the status quo. We started with silence as the source of white power. The vicious cycle will continue as long as we do not break it by examining whiteness explicitly and publicly.
Furthermore, colorblindness allows the closet racist to hide. Paul Gorski writes in The Language of Closet Racism: "[T]he American education system (with strong reinforcement from the media) has bred a nation of what I will call 'closet racists.' Closet racists are unaware of their prejudices. They have learned from text books presented to them by people who are supposedly knowledgeable enough to choose the best possible materials. They are trained, or more precisely, coerced into believing in 'the system'...A closet racist is defined, then, as simply a person with racial prejudices who is unaware of those prejudices as such, usually because he or she has never been afforded the opportunity to discuss racial prejudices..."
Jeff: The invisibility of whiteness behind the claim of neutrality has enabled it to hide from scrutiny, and this has been misused by whites to speak for universal humanity. Ani explains it as follows:
"The Roman self-image as "world conqueror" and "savior" issues from an ego that does not confine itself to the limitations of a culture, a nation, or even a continent, but from an ego that views its boundaries as ultra universal. This is the counterpart of the intellectual self-image of the European as "universal man"...he, therefore, has the right to spread himself universally in order to "enlighten" the world." (Ani, p. 253)
"According to European nationalism, other traditions and earlier ones were expressions of mythological beliefs only: Christianity was an expression of historical fact. To this day, the most threatening appositional phrase that an avowed Christian can be presented with is 'Christian Mythology.' To accept its validity is to shake the ground of her/his belief." (Ani, p. 141)
Warren Hedges writes:
"In order for white men to rationalize their privileges under segregation, they imagined themselves as transcending their particular self-interests and speaking for society as a whole. As Toni Morrison has pointed out, this meant presenting whiteness as something neutral - the blending of all colors that somehow transcends and contains them. The belief that white men represented society's interests was at least as old as slavery in the Americas, but it had formally applied mainly to the wealthy. However, with the onset of universal male suffrage, first for whites, then supposedly for all men, the only way to maintain black disenfranchisement was to equate adult "objectivity" with all white men and "child-like" "irrationality" with men of color and women. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, racism in the U.S. was bolstered by political imperialism in the Philippines and economic and cultural imperialism elsewhere. White men, so the ideology went, were fit to be self-governing, while darker-skinned peoples needed help to be governed - the so-called "white man's burden."
Rajiv: Robert Jensen goes even further and blames liberals for helping perpetuate invisible whiteness. In his essay, White Privilege Shapes the US, he writes: "I don't think liberalism offers real solutions because it doesn't attack the systems of power and structures of illegitimate authority that are the root cause of oppression, be it based on race, gender, sexuality, or class. These systems of oppression, which are enmeshed and interlocking, require radical solutions."
Let us move on to an even more controversial topic – the role of institutionalized Christianity in all this. (I differentiate between the teachings of Jesus and institutionalized Christianity, and focus only on the latter.) Please give me your views on the following quote from the Center for Democratic Renewal's summary of their analysis:
Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention said: "Our culture is superior to other cultures, superior because our religion is Christianity."
While the Klan is seen as being against all who are not white, radical conservatives like Pat Buchanan or religious leaders like Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition prefer to advocate for Western civilization and Christianity. [They] see themselves as threatened by a non-white, non-European-dominated future America.
White supremacist beliefs, though largely invisible to the majority of the American public, regardless of race, are at the heart of the American experience. The persistence of these beliefs suggests that the racial myths and stereotypes common to white supremacy are integral to the maintenance of the U.S. social order.
Sometimes the tenets of white supremacist groups can be helpful when they reflect, epitomize, crystallize or even clarify the perceptions of a predominantly white Christian society. Each of these beliefs is a reassertion of European nationalism and its successor, American nationalism. White supremacy, assuming its own universal value and superiority, justifies the aggressive imposition of its own assumptions on other peoples and cultures.
The invisibility of white supremacy masks how violence and the threat of violence guarantee its durability. White people assert their moral right to use violent force whenever their group interests are threatened. People of color have no equivalent moral right to defend themselves against European aggression, especially when such aggression is done in the name of "law and order" [and nowadays, in the name of "human rights."]
This paradoxical belief has been a powerful weapon with which to steal and exploit land and other natural resources, to defend slavery and racism, to condemn lesbians and gays, and to deride all who are not Christian. Those who are not white or Christian are expected, at best to merge into the dominant culture and political system, or worst, to remain invisible and not to challenge white Christian hegemony. Outsiders seeking acceptance are constantly pressured to prove themselves, to suppress their indigenous culture, and to assimilate into the "mainstream" to achieve upward mobility.
White supremacist beliefs are perpetuated through a series of social conventions irrespective of political boundaries. Organized white supremacy makes prevailing attitudes of prejudice appear moderate and reasonable: it normalizes everyday injustice. For example, a 1993 study commissioned by the National Science Foundation found that racist attitudes and stereotypes are rampant among whites, regardless of political affiliation.
Most white supremacists in America believe that the United States is a "Christian" nation, with a special relationship between religion and the rule of law. Because racists give themselves divine permission from God to hate, they often don't see that their actions are driven by hate; they claim to "just love God and the white race." If they are religious, they distort Biblical passages to justify their bigotry. A popular religion called Christian Identity provides a theological bond across organizational lines. Identity churches are ministered by charismatic leaders who promote racial intolerance and religious division. Even for those who are not religious, "racist" to them means being racially conscious and seeing the world through a prism of inescapable biological determinism with different races having different pre-ordained destinies.
Jeff: Mel Gibson took extraordinary pains to assure the historical accuracy of his recent film, The Passion of the Christ, even to the point of using Aramaic as the language in the film. So it's ironic, though in many ways not surprising, that he chose a white actor to portray Jesus. "White," of course, was not a term in use two thousand years ago, but clearly Jesus would have been of similar appearance to people of the region in which he was born and spent his life. In today's world, people who are described as "white" do not fit that description.
Christianity is a broad and diverse faith community founded on the teachings of a man of color. The message of universal love brought forth by Jesus, and later institutionalized by Paul, makes the race of people irrelevant. Love of God and acceptance of Jesus as Savior transcend worldly distinctions. In the worldwide Christian community, which includes a vast number of people of color, Christianity has done much to bring spiritual uplift.
Yet there is a discomforting history of association between Christianity and whiteness. Why would Gibson use a white actor? If race did not matter, but historical accuracy was paramount, why not use an actor who reflected Jesus' time and place and local culture? Gibson set the terms of his work. The burden is on him to explain this contradiction. Still, we can speculate. In the United States (I have far less knowledge of circumstances in Europe) Jesus has commonly been portrayed as a white man, often with long, gently curling, blond hair. The message is clear. Jesus is like "us." In the 1990s this played out another way here in New Jersey, one of the most diverse states in the United States. A black actor was chosen to play the role of Jesus in a well known annual public performance of a passion play. A public outcry resulted. Many were outraged, though also many condemned the bigotry the public outcry revealed. Still, in one of the most liberal states of the United States, in one of the most ethnically mixed regions of that state, a substantial number of white people fervently believe there is a clear and necessary connection between Jesus and whiteness.
Our history tells us that the English identified first as "Christians" in early colonial Virginia, and that "white" emerged as a common identity among these same people only after three or four generations of settlement. Christian identity, then, is the historical precursor of white identity in the culture that is now the dominant one in the United States.
The "Jesus is like us" equation is used by white Christians to justify dominance of people of color. Put another way, if you are not like us (i.e. a person of color), then you are outside of Jesus' protection, and either we are entitled to bring God's will to bear upon your circumstances, or you are unworthy of humanistic concern. The worldly translation of this sense of entitlement often entails appropriation of resources from people of color, and the assertion of power and control of their cultures.
Rajiv: Mel Gibson merely continues an established practice. How did Jesus "become white" in the mainstream? The painters of the Italian Renaissance found that the market was larger when Jesus was depicted as a European, and later he was also made blue-eyed. Elaine Pagels and other scholars explain how various pagan rituals, images and myths were appropriated into Christianity and the original cultural sources erased and the cultures often genocided. Today, we see yoga becoming subsumed into white culture and Christianity.
So a key success factor of white supremacy has been the skillful management of its symbol portfolio. This is a multi-faceted management system:
Others' symbols of value are appropriated in the same manner as land, gold and natural resources have been appropriated. This symbol appropriation continues today even by liberal white scholars: my U-Turn Theory explains this.
White symbols are continually upgraded by association with "goodness." So whiteness and Jesus get conflated. As part of image damage control, Abu Ghraib atrocities were not interpreted as a "Christian crime," whereas similar episodes from other religions are invariably named with "Islamic" or "Hindu" hyphens. Timothy McVeigh and hundreds of other heinous criminals who are white Christians are not explicitly branded as "Christian terrorists," but merely as generic individuals who broke the law.
New white Christian symbols are constantly being added to the portfolio, recent examples being Lady Diana and Mother Teresa. These symbols of goodness become marketing campaign brands targeting people of color. They are promised a boost in identity by association with the "superior" brand.
Downgrading others' cultural and symbolic capital is as intense as ever. Christian as well as liberal white scholars (along with their Indian cronies) obsessively denigrate Hindu deities, practices and culture under the guise of using "theories." It is shocking how prevalent this has become in the mainstream liberal academy. The personal risks of pointing this out run high, because the establishment intellectuals hunt in packs.
You seem to locate the start of whiteness only from 17th century America. I agree that that was when "white persons" entered the vocabulary. But Marimba Ani and other African scholars trace the origins to the 4th century, when Roman Emperor Constantine appropriated Christianity for Empire building.
I have synthesized various scholars' versions of Whiteness History into a series of four "releases" of whiteness as cultural operating systems. Release 1 is where Marimba Ani locates it: Roman Imperialism incorporates the religious zeal of monotheism, a unique combination. She explains this as follows:
"Politically, the Roman ideology was the perfect counterpart [of Christianity]...These formulations posited a perpetual opposition between those who did not share the ideologies expressed and those who did. Both statements contained justifications and directives for the "conversion" of and "recruitment" of those outside the cultural group with which they were identified. Perhaps, the single most important ingredient shared by these "brother" ideologies (actually two arms of the same ideological weapon) is their vision of the world as the "turf" of a single culture. Any and everyone presently under the ideological and political control of the Christians and Romans was fair game...The synthesis [between Roman Imperialism and Christianity] made political sense...The two ideologies, put to the service of one cultural group and espousing compatible values and objectives worked hand in hand, to command the same allegiances, to conquer the same world." (Ani, pp. 129-130)
Release 2 is simply the external expansion of Release 1, i.e. the spread of militaristic Christianity as the first pan-European common ideology. Here is what Marimba Ani writes:
The Roman Cooptation: Two Imperialistic Ideologies:
"Christianity was a more refined tool [than paganism] for the selling of European imperialism...As the imperialistic goals of these fledgling Europeans expanded, the various modalities of the cultural structure grew out of sync with one another. If they had not been reshaped, readjusted to form a cohesive unit, Europe would have failed...The European institutionalization of Christianity was something akin to a technological advance. It added the element of proselytizing that much more suited the objective of imperialistic expansionism within which those objectives could be hidden or camouflaged. Xenophobic, aggressive, and violent tendencies were molded into a more subtle statement that packaged them in a universalistic, peaceful, and moralistic rhetoric...Christianity helped to define who the "others" were in a way that fitted the European progress ideology. Making a Roman, a Briton, a Frank, and so forth into a "European" would not be easy, but it was the order of the day in terms of European development...Christianity achieved the unification of the new European self...It helped to redefine European imperialism as universal imperialism...European civilization has been so successful in part because of its ability to outward direct hostility...The destructive tendencies within are so intense and so endemic to the culture that it must continually be redirected. The cooptation of Christianity represented such a redirection of aggressive energy...Pagan religions were aggressive but not expansionist [and hence unsuitable for Roman imperialism]."
[Ani, Marimba, "YURUGU," pp. 169-170]
Corey Gilkes explains the same process as follows:
"The history of Christianity is the political history of Europe. With regard to the influence that Christianity has had upon ancient and medieval Europe [and ultimately the Americas] it is quite fair to say that the Church has left a legacy, a worldview that permeates every aspect of Western European-centered societies. Today, even though most Western societies can boast of a separation between Church and state, their very laws and cultural traits have been shaped in no small way by early ecclesiastical authorities. Actually, what the Church has done was to harmonize these cultural traits that have characterized European societies since primordial times... There is no doubt...that Christianity unified Western Europe in ways that transcended the narrow confines of tribalism. That it sought to include everyone through its message of a universal brotherhood...However, there is another side to this story; one that is by no means as romanticized as it is often made out to be. Exactly how the Christian Church went about unifying and transforming Europe, if one looks at it honestly, is shameful to say the least. Christianity, as defined by Rome, Greece and to some extent Asia Minor, brought religious intolerance to a level never before seen. It provided justification for the taking of other people's lands by cleverly disguising ethnocentrism and an expansionist ideology in a message of universal brotherhood. Ironically it used this universal brotherhood message to maintain a hierarchical structure that saw Europe and European-centered societies at the pinnacle while the conquered lands and peoples occupied the lower rungs..."
["Orthodox" Christianity and the birth of European Nationalism, by Corey Gilkes
http://www.trinicenter.com/Gilkes/2002/0902.htm]
Release 3 is where you locate whiteness: At this point, I change the term from Proto-Whiteness to Whiteness at this point. (Ani divides Release 3 into two releases, one starting in 17th century America and the other being the Protestant Reformation.)
I agree with Ani that though whiteness was unnamed before America, its groundwork had been laid in proto form by Emperor Constantine. What do you think of the following flowchart of the history of whiteness? Release 4 is the latest version that started with Barry Goldwater and has become the dominant mainstream culture[5].
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Read the rest in the link provided.
