White like me

If there's one new thing happening in race issues in America, it's that whites are being urged to take a look at their own racial identity -- to celebrate it, to cast it off, to write their dissertations on it. But even for the well-meaning academics who are leading the charge, "whiteness studies" opens a Pandora's box of ugly questions.

by Ellen Barry

Are you white?

If so, the first step is to admit that you are white.

This is not as simple as it may sound. When you arrange to meet a stranger over the phone, you probably do not say, "I am white," because the information seems gratuitous. But you are, in fact. You are a member of a large group that includes -- but is not defined by -- Spam eaters, Bermuda-shorts wearers, suburban "wiggers," Madeleine Albright, the male angry, the liberal guilty, and virtually every CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Whether or not you admit it, you occupy a place in our national race hierarchy. Every time you walk into a room, you bring your whiteness with you.

And once you do admit it, the difficult part is still coming. You're white: what are you going to do about it?

To blacks, talking about whiteness is hardly a bold postmodern gambit; they've been doing it for a while now. It was 75 years ago that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: "None there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them . . . I see the workings of their entrails."

And only five years ago, in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992), Toni Morrison eloquently called for mainstream scholars to perform the same exercise. "The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture," she acknowledged, but she urged liberals to abandon the illusion of colorblindness. "My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from racial object to racial subject; from described and imagined to describer and imaginer; from the server to the served."

What's changed now is that whites are beginning to pick up the gauntlet. In his June 14 speech calling for a national discussion on race issues, Bill Clinton -- slyly identifying himself as a "Scotch-Irish Southern Baptist" -- urged white Americans to jump into the fray: "I know that for many white Americans, this conversation may seem to exclude them or threaten them. This must not be so." Across the country, corporate diversity consultants are encouraging whites to examine their own place in the racial universe. Aiding in the effort is a panoply of new books with titles like A Race Is a Nice Thing To Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life (Content Communications, 1992), which delivers the good news that "while racism and racial privilege are bad, having a racial identity, even if it is a white one, can be a positive thing."

And it is, perhaps, no surprise that gun-show fliers and critiques of Roseanne are finding their way into seminars in universities all over the country. Newly-minted academics who cut their teeth on multicultural curricula and critical race theory have been only too eager to take on Toni Morrison's challenge, as was evident from this spring's UC Berkeley seminar on "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness." Suddenly, young white scholars have a genuine mandate to talk about race, and the results are rolling off the presses -- studies on white supremacists and white trash, white privilege, white customs, white psychology, and white visions of whiteness. Special editions of the Minnesota Review and the Harvard journal Transition were devoted to the topic this year.

But in the midst of all this lit-crit flag-planting are deep disagreements about where whiteness is headed, and whether an anatomy of the dominant culture is what we really need in the first place. Somerville historian Noel Ignatiev, a former Harvard lecturer whose book How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995) helped set off the whole whiteness craze, has publicly turned his back on the trend, charging that it runs the risk of degenerating into apolitical white narcissism or even -- what would be far worse -- inadvertently legitimizing white nationalism.

"One of the dangers is the transformation of [white studies] from a project that aims to expose injustice to a project that simply wants to talk about `what an interesting group of people,' " he says. "It's anthropological. Observing."

And Ignatiev is not the only one squirming in his seat. A good deal of the Minnesota Review issue was dedicated to speculation on how whiteness studies could go awry -- by anointing poor whites as the new Other, by displacing multicultural studies, by existing at all in a permanent form. And the editors of the new anthology Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (Routledge, 1997) -- a few short paragraphs after patting themselves on the back for being pioneers -- suggest querulously that "maybe this should be the last book on whiteness." Well, it hasn't been, and as the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in this country dwindles (by the year 2050, that group should drop from 83 percent of the population to 53 percent), the subject of whiteness is likely to come up more and more often. What will result from this discussion is uncertain. One thing is for sure, though. There is something very, very dangerous about admitting you are white.

Part 2 - The invention of whiteness

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry@phx.com.