White like me

Part 6 - Race to the finish

by Ellen Barry

The whiteness scholars are, by and large, an anxious bunch. Their language is timorous. Their forewords are overwrought. They make much of their "uneasiness," and of the "sneakiness" of their subject matter, and of the fact that, as one professor told me, "it's not supposed to be a comfortable activity." For professors, they seem to get a lot of night sweats.

They are right to.

Multicultural education has painted whites into a corner: if, as current curricula suggest, there are discrete African-American and Asian-American racial identities in America, then of course white American exists as a racial identity too, and it was only a matter of time before it ended up under the critical microscope. To some extent, this is good. Many whites still think of themselves as ethnically neutral -- and thus shut out of the discussion of race, hovering somewhere above the fray. So it's about time for whites to admit they are white, and that they have garnered certain advantages from it.

But if whiteness studies makes everyone so uncomfortable, maybe it's because the work really is dangerous. It's dangerous because it divides a racially mixed culture into white culture and nonwhite culture. It's dangerous because white studies -- and the white professors who, by and large, teach it -- could infringe on the small academic space now allotted to people of color.

And it's also dangerous because whiteness studies does not supply a usable past or a promising future. Scholars are "tearing down" whiteness without any reliable vision of what comes after. People Who Lack Color? Uncolored People? As Jeff Ferguson points out, this work is not clearing up anyone's ideas of what is to be done. Far from it.

Yet it's impossible to stop up the flow of discussion, and particularly in the area of race, it would be a terrible mistake to try. Talk -- so universally reviled as a strategy for social action -- is the only option for a first step in this particular area. The most well-meaning whites still experience a form of social apoplexy when race comes up in an unfriendly way; fairly ordinary remarks on the subject can still send a dinner-party conversation into sudden death. So if it takes a period of painful, and occasionally ridiculous, self-examination to bring whites into the dialogue, then it's probably worth it.

More worrisome than what whiteness studies reveals, though, is what it sometimes looks away from: namely, the absurd distribution of privilege in this country and the tortured, faltering attempt to fix it. It's a broad picture, and it involves all of us. Today, although most white Americans say they would be willing to live in the same neighborhood with blacks, the proportion of resident blacks needs to climb to only seven percent before the whites start moving out. The average weekly earnings of a white person ($506) are considerably higher than those of a black person ($387). In the first year of the bans on affirmative action at state universities in Texas and California, the incoming law-school classes at those schools contain a total of four black students in 770 slots.

And white Americans, by and large, think the race problem has been taken care of. As long as we're getting things off our chest, can we talk about that?

I am white. Hear me roar.

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