Best,
Melanie
Subject: "The Unbearable Being of Whiteness"
A VERY interesting and thought-provoking piece. . . .
____________________________________________________________________________
(written in the June 13th issue of Slate - www.slate.com)
The Unbearable Being of Whiteness
You worship your melanin level. Get over it.
By Eric Liu
What would it be like to be white?
It's a question I've never really considered, but pondering it
now, I find the answer unsettling: It wouldn't be all that different.
Yes, of course it would mean unstitching from my soul that thread of
thoughts and habits one might call "Chinese"--and who knows just how
unraveled I'd become without that thread? But as far as how the world
would treat me--ignoring me or not, abusing me or not, redeeming me or
not--I can't say I would be much better off for being white. For although
I am Chinese-American and thus a "person of color," I am also this: child
of the suburbs, product of mostly white schools, junior officer of the
overclass, skeptic of hard-core multiculturalism, friendly with many
minorities but friends with few, never once the victim of blatant
discrimination, husband now of a woman named Haymon. I am, by the
reasoning of racial ascription, already quite white.
What that says about me I'll leave for those who know me to
assess. What it says about our idea of whiteness, though, is for all of us
to contemplate. In the cosmology of race, whiteness is something like a
black hole--a crushingly dense complex of myth and rumor that pulls us,
invisibly and irresistibly, into its hold. We move according to its
properties, yet we know not why we move.
Consider, for instance, the now-standard formulation that if
blacks would only surrender their race-consciousness, we could all ascend
to a colorblind nirvana. You hear this line from plenty of well-meaning
whites. But you also find it embedded in nasty right-wing polemics against
diversity and affirmative action. The idea is simple: Given "the end of
racism," or at least the end of "irrational" discrimination, minority
bellyaching only upsets what would otherwise be the proper social
equilibrium.
I'm the first to concede the awful, balkanizing folly of many
left-liberals on race. And to be sure, we've stockpiled so much
"difference" over the years that a round of identity disarmament would be
welcome. But we should first acknowledge that it is white
race-consciousness --never quite named as such in our popular discourse--
that begets the compensatory identities of nonwhite Americans. And it is
whiteness that must first be revealed and surrendered before we can ever
hope to transcend race.
White race-consciousness manifests itself in two forms: as
blessing and as burden. In both cases, it exists mainly by negation; it
nourishes itself upon all that it excludes. Thus it is that whites don't
generally think of themselves as having a race at all. To be white,
really, is not to be many things--most notably, black--and to derive both
security and standing from the absence of the stigma.
It is precisely this sense of "anti-race" --this affectation of
colorless neutrality --that has allowed whiteness to insinuate itself as
the social norm. This is whiteness-as-blessing: the knowledge whites have
that in law, in literature, in politics, and in a hundred other realms, "a
regular person" is, by default, a white person. Our vocabulary for
assimilation makes the point. How do we describe the method by which
nonwhites enter the mainstream and climb the class ladder? We say, or at
least think, that they're "becoming white." It used to be, of course,
that "becoming white" was an option open only to European immigrants. But
over the last generation, high-achieving Asian-Americans have been
anointed "honorary" whites, usually so ordained by conservatives wary of
black militancy. By striving and succeeding without complaint, Asian
immigrants have become, in the words of Irving Kristol, "just another
'European' ethnic group."
Ah, I see: Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still
others have whiteness thrust upon them. This is sheer narcissism, the
notion that "making it" means whitening. And when it comes from the white
right, it's narcissism in the service of hypocrisy. For some of the very
guardians of America's alabaster template--Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow,
and their ilk--are the same ideologues who reflexively rebuke blacks for
any show of ethnocentrism.
The second variety of white race-consciousness
--whiteness-as-burden-- is no less tangled up in hypocrisy. But while
whiteness-as-blessing expresses the arrogance of privilege,
whiteness-as-burden reveals the willful ignorance of privilege. Nowhere
is that more clear than in the periodic appearance of what I call the
Left-Behind White.
In the '70s, the Left-Behind White appeared in the form of the
"unmeltable ethnic," that long-assimilated Italian- or Irish- or
Polish-American who, in the wake of the Black Power movement, felt it
necessary to dust off and revive the ways of the Old Country. He
re-materialized in the late '80s, this time in the guise of the Angry
White Male, the forgotten victim of minority preferences and "reverse
discrimination." A decade later, he has entered the scene again, dressed
now in the finery of the Euro-American, a pitiable white who can't find
his heritage but doesn't want to get left behind in the parade of
affirming identities.
The spectacle of the Left-Behind White tells us again that many
whites who complain about black obsessions with blackness are themselves
obsessed with whiteness. What they are obsessed with in this case, though,
is the cultural emptiness of whiteness. In a cruel reversal, it is the
white guy, with no tradition to call his own, no history but one laden
with guilt and apology, who is "truly disadvantaged."
Just deserts, you might say, for those minority multiculturalists
who pretended that equality of cultural recognition was as good as
equality of actual power: Now whites want to play the same game,
recounting to us the sufferings of the Celts, the indignities borne by the
Welsh, yet still retaining the power premium they've long enjoyed--as
whites.
But alas, we've hit a sure conversation-stopper now: the question
of white power. No one, really, wants to talk about that. Perhaps it's
because "white power" sounds too much like an accusation. Perhaps it's
because "white power" brings to mind those neo-Nazi supremacists, those
hateful extremists who, most white folks will say, "aren't like us"--and
who, truly, aren't like most white folks. But whatever the reason, we have
an almost allergic reaction to any serious consideration of the ideology
of privilege we call "whiteness."
How else to explain the reaction to "whiteness studies," an
academic discipline that has emerged in the last few years? Sure,
whiteness studies, which might include everything from the history of
Irish laborers to the folkways of suburban mallrats, is open to abuse, and
therefore to ridicule. It appears, at a glance, like ethnic studies gone
fatuously awry--and some of it is indeed loopy.
But whiteness studies has also been mightily, and deliberately,
misunderstood. It is not the self-adulation of an already dominant class,
or a crusade by the oppressed to demonize The Man. It is simply an attempt
to identify the ways that whites remain blind to, and blinded by, an
unspoken faith in race--and to expose the means by which white skin and
"white attitudes" still confer social advantage.
It seems to me that we could all use some of that schooling. For
it is whiteness--not blackness--that is the original sin of identity
politics. And it falls on all our shoulders--not just colored ones--to rid
the country of its viral color-consciousness. What would it be like to be
white? One day, perhaps, there will be a better way to measure the
blessings and burdens of American life.
>At 2:03 PM 10/4/97, gkcunn01 who-is-at ulkyvm.louisville.edu wrote:
><snip>
>>
>>The standard technique of trying to teach classroom of white students that
>>they should be ashamed of who they are because of the color of their skin
>>is not going to work.
>
><snip>
>
>Whooooaaaa there - who said diversity education was about try to teach
>white students to feel shame about the colour of their skin?
>Methinks the shame is a consequence of learning about white privilege,
>and because white privilege is most insidiously about denying white privilege,
>the shame triggers hostility, a "how-dare-you" kind of defence.
>
>it's not about how this-or-that person is white and so therefore
>responsible for racism; but about how the dominant culture organizes its
>insitutions and social structures to privilege the white folks - and the
>recognition of that,
>
> which, unfortunately, in individualistic idelogies such as those espoused
>by white-conservative America, tends to get interpreted as
>"you"/"me"/"her"/"him"...
>
>Anger is a good place to start asking the hard questions. Why does racism
>make white people so angry when they, effectively, benefit from it?
>
>diane
>
>"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"
> (Ani Difranco)
>*********************************************
>
> diane celia hodges
> faculty of graduate studies
>(604) 253-4807 centre for the study of curriculum and
>instruction
> university of british
>columbia,
> vancouver, british
>columbia, canada V6T 1Z4
>
>
>dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Melanie S. Miran Hahn School of Education
E-mail Address: melhahn who-is-at earthlink.net Dominican College of San Rafael
San Rafael, California 94901-8008
Telephone
(415)257-1347
"Movement is what creates life. Stillness is what creates love. To be
still and still moving--this is everything."
Do Hyun Choe