White like me

Part 4 - Racism 101

by Ellen Barry

It's clear, reading Wray's elaborate argument for the cultural significance of "white trash," that the white-culture business has a big problem: no one has provided a satisfying definition of what white culture is. And even some of its self-appointed describers have serious doubts about the whole enterprise -- namely, in an academic world that already revolves around white culture, why bother?

Jessie Daniels, whose book White Lies was published by Routledge this year, has her own answer: white studies should be the study of racist thought. Though that's not the only quality that whites have, she argues, it's the most important one, and one that influences the political mainstream more than many white people would like to admit. If you deny the biological fact of a white race, as most of the whiteness scholars do, there's not much to unite whites except for privilege. So whiteness studies, as practiced by scholars like Daniels, paints a grim and deterministic picture of what it means to be white: whites built a racist state and whites perpetuate it. In her view, white-trash deconstruction work is a mere distraction.

"I don't think there's any usefulness to studying gun shows and trailer parks when people are willing to kill or die for the cause of white power," says Daniels, who is an assistant professor of sociology at Hofstra University.

"If the raison d'être of white studies isn't about dismantling this form of apartheid we have inherited," she adds, "then it's not worth doing."

So White Lies is peppered with illustrations like one from the white supremacist publication WAR (White Aryan Resistance), which bears the heading "Let's Answer the Scientific Question . . . What's On A Nigger's Mind?" It divides a crudely-caricatured black man's brain into segments labeled "crave for watermelon, crave for drugs, alcohol, pussy, gold chains and drumbeats, and criminal behavior." In a minuscule corner of the brain are "responsibility, vocal skills, intelligence, hygiene, creative skills (must be viewed through microscope), logic, and proportion."

As Daniels stresses in her introduction, the point of reprinting this sort of literature is not to allow white readers to congratulate themselves on being less racist than WAR magazine, but to identify the racism inherent in mainstream society. That's not a common white activity; the day before Clinton announced his race initiative, a Gallup poll revealed that whites are far more cheerful than blacks about the state of race relations. Most whites consider themselves to be free of prejudice. In effect, most whites consider racism to be over.

It's not. A General Social Survey taken by the National Opinon Research Center in 1991 offered these statistics: 78 percent of whites thought blacks were more likely than whites to live on welfare; 62 percent of whites thought blacks were less likely to be hard-working; 53 percent of whites thought blacks were less intelligent; 51 percent thought blacks were less patriotic. The year the survey was taken, former KKK leader David Duke received 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor's race. The white-supremacist movement, which Daniels says has quadrupled its number of dues-paying members since 1978, has spawned dozens of new, violent groups such as the Neo-Nazi skinheads and White Aryan Resistance.

Still, it's wrong to equate the ethnography of whiteness with the study of racism. Werner Sollors, who teaches in Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, points out the danger of generalizing about whites just as we are veering away from "single definitions of blackness."

"Examining racist theory critically is a legitimate and important enterprise in a democracy, as racism poses one of the greatest threats to democracy," he said in an e-mail interview. "Yet believing that a given ethnic background makes an intellectual, or a Hollywood producer, automatically a racist may itself be the result of a vulgar form of biological determinism that was at the core of fascist racism."

The young scholars on the critical vanguard argue that their work -- as Eric Lott, of the University of Virginia, put it -- is "defining something in order to tear it down." But they don't sound much like people tearing something down; they sound like scholars who are busy defining a discrete white world. For a group of people united in the project of trying to destroy whiteness, no one seems to have much of a plan.

Part 5 - Redneck Trotsky

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.