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Title: Whiteness and Its Complications., By: Roediger, David R., Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982,7/14/2006, Vol. 52, Issue 45Database: Academic Search Premier

Whiteness and Its Complications

The theologian Thandeka tells of being faced with a daunting request during herfirst meal with a woman she had recently met. The new acquaintance, adescendant of the New England elite, urgently wanted to know "what it felt like tobe black." Trusting in the sincerity and openness of her questioner, but knowingthat racial understanding had to also involve self-knowledge, Thandeka proposed

that the woman play the "race game" before the two met again. The game, as described in Thandeka'sbrilliant 1999 book Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (Continuum, 1999), involvedthe woman temporarily identifying the race of all white people to whom she referred: "my dear whitefriend," "my beautiful white child," "my white husband," and so on. Thandeka lost her dining companion.

Her account of the "race game" captures much of the project of the scholarly field known as criticalwhiteness studies. Thandeka's insistence on naming whiteness counters what scholars have called the"invisibility" of the dominant race's political and cultural presence. But the game's move, especially for ascholar as deeply suspicious of fixed racial categories as Thandeka, is far from an essentialist one. Inemphasizing that white people have racial identities that are constructed and remarkable rather thannatural and normative, she makes "white" an adjective, a recurring reminder of the late cultural criticEdward Said's apt point that "no one today is purely one thing." The presence of whiteness is announcedby its complications.

The "race game" also suggests why critical studies of whiteness have been subject to misunderstandingand dismissal. When challenged to experience the game, some white people find it easy enough todismiss it -- and critical whiteness studies generally -- as glib and gimmicky. Focusing only on thevisibility of whiteness, they miss the complexity of the category, raising fears that critical whitenessstudies will too easily descend into playing the race card.

The very way that scholarly work in this area has emerged has ensured as much. If we date the field'spresence in academe to the 1990 publication of its foundational text in history, Alexander Saxton's TheRise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America(Verso), and to the 1992 publication of its seminal text in literary criticism, Toni Morrison's Playing in theDark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press), we are reminded that criticalstudies of whiteness are only now reaching adolescence. The field in the United States has no journals,no professional association (which it does have in Australia), no book series, and no presence as anacademic department anywhere. Yet despite its modest proportions, it is at times castigated as if it sitsatop the academic food chain, begging to be brought down to size.

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That is at least partly because studying whiteness critically has featured dimensions that function as alightning rod for critics. The tone of writings on whiteness has reflected not a hesitancy born of its shallowroots in academe, but a self-confidence drawing on long traditions of people of color who have studiedwhiteness as a pressing and puzzling problem, traditions dating from slave folklore and indigenous talesreflecting on contact with the white settler population. The most influential studies from the early 1990swere not specialized ones that could later be deployed to create a broader narrative: Instead, studies thatstaked out broad claims across time and space came first. Asking why so many studies of the ideology ofwhite racism were circular -- racism, the argument often boiled down to, made whites racist -- Saxtonbroke a wide swath of new ground with his analysis of the role that class politics and mass culture playedin developing that ideology. Morrison sweepingly argued that literary critics have universalized whitenessand missed the "Africanist presence" in even canonical literature.

Produced in a wave of reflection on race and working-class conservatism that followed Ronald Reagan'ssuccess at wooing white working-class, even unionized, "Reagan Democrats," many critical studies ofwhiteness reflected the Marxist commitments of some of their authors and a sense of urgency indefending affirmative action and other race-based solutions to social problems.

White identity was, for those studies, distinctly a problem to be explained and addressed. The historianTheodore W. Allen, in his two volumes The Invention of the White Race (Verso, 1994 and 1997), bestcaptured that point of view. He held that the development, originating in the need for social control, of thevery idea that there is a white race should be regarded as Anglo-America's "peculiar institution," ratherthan simply casting slavery in that role.

Such early works tended toward high seriousness, if not stridency, in their political emphases. Given theleftist radicalism of such writers as Allen, the anthropologist Karen Brodkin, the historian Noel Ignatiev, thepolitical scientist Michael Rogin, Saxton, and myself, whiteness studies seemed too hard-edged to somecritics. At the same time, influenced by such analytic approaches as cultural studies (laying bare, forexample, the ways that the white "gaze" on others shaped racial understanding) and psychoanalysis(linking, for example, the racial, and often gender, cross-dressing of blackface minstrel performances todeep desires as well as to racism), it also seemed too soft.

Liberal labor historians proved the most ready to dismiss the new scholarship as either a set of outlandishtheory-driven propositions or as commonplaces that everybody somehow already knew. Thus the much-cited 2001 round table on "whiteness studies" -- attacks on the project almost always dropped "critical"from its name -- in International Labor and Working Class History could wonder whether there was"anything there" for the historian, answering overwhelmingly in the negative, without inviting to the tableany of the scholars whose work was under the microscope.

The five recent books considered here all play the "race game" with varying degrees of sophistication andskill. They carefully name the particularities of their delimited, though still far from narrow, subjects: Jewishwhiteness, Irish whiteness, "white ethnics," white women, and white Southerners. Collectively theysuggest where the critical study of whiteness is -- and might be going -- as it reaches the age when itmight be expected to be learning how to drive.

The direction that these books reflect will make it much harder for out-of-hand dismissals of the field topersist. At the same time, the books capture the ways that the changing political climate, and settling intoacademe, create the possibility that critical studies of whiteness will become less provocative as theybecome more respectable.

Part of the sophistication of this recent outpouring of books lies in the maturing of debates within criticalwhiteness studies itself. Nowhere is that clearer than in the set of questions that Eric L. Goldstein's ThePrice of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006) addresses andattempts to redefine.

The book joins a large literature on how European immigrant groups, whose "racial stock" was suspect athome and in America, or both, experienced, learned, and reshaped the racial order in their new country.Borrowing from the seminal work of James Baldwin, who wrote of such racial learning as the "price of theticket" of becoming American, such writers as Brodkin, Thomas A. Guglielmo, Ignatiev, and others have

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produced histories that let us argue about the very plot of race and immigration history. Baldwin's view thatnewcomers "became white" over a long period in the United States has been leavened, for example, byGuglielmo's reminder that in many critical ways they were "white on arrival."

Goldstein's new work provides ample evidence that racial identity was made in large part in America. Healso challenges us to return to another of Baldwin's insights. Baldwin simultaneously insisted that theacceptance of whiteness by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was "absolutely a moralchoice" and that it was one made under "a vast amount of coercion." Such a view illuminates the ways inwhich race functions as both a category into which people are slotted and as a consciousness that theyembrace or reject in perilous and costly ways. More than any other historian to date, Goldstein, anassistant professor of history at Emory University, shows the changing ways in which Jewish Americansthemselves argued either for their own racial particularity, or for their inclusions as whites, or for both. Heinsists on coercion, in Europe and the United States, as central to his story; he challenges the singularemphasis of prior authors on what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "wages" of whiteness, totaling up costs aswell; he does not deny that whiteness is a prize but forcefully argues that it also carries a price.

If Goldstein self-consciously positions himself in regard to debates within critical studies of whiteness,the volume The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006),edited by Diane Negra, a senior lecturer in the School of Film and Television Studies at the University ofEast Anglia, packages matters differently: Its cover alerts readers neither to an emphasis on whitenessnor even on race. And yet we are scarcely a page into the book's introduction before we learn, in thecontext of a discussion of whiteness, that a "strong connecting thread among the essays is their sharedconcern with the flexible racial status of Irishness."

To note the ways that what one contributor calls the "complex oscillation between otherness andwhiteness" animates the essays in The Irish in Us, while being absent from the title, is not to raise truth-in-advertising concerns. Instead that presence and absence offer a place from which to reflect on thedirection of the critical study of whiteness: As a project, it has, by and large, shunned the forms ofinstitutionalization that typically define the status of a field. It may well be that the best writing onwhiteness will in the future speak in other names, with the suffusion of its best questions into otherliteratures its central contribution.

In any case, The Irish in Us represents cutting edges of the critical study of whiteness. Fiercelyinterdisciplinary, it is also profoundly transnational, with essays on the country star Garth Brooks playing inIreland, on Ray Charles schooling the Belfast-born Van Morrison, and on views of Ireland as a northernoutpost of the Caribbean being entertained and analyzed. The coproduction of "blackness" and Irishness --so aptly historicized and so forcefully brought down to the present in the contribution to the volume byCatherine M. Eagan, an instructor in English at Las Positas College -- is broached with the sameengaging combination of interest and astringency that the abolitionist and visitor to Ireland FrederickDouglass brought to the topic in his seminal contributions to the critical study of whiteness 160 yearsago. Eagan demonstrates, for example, that school curricula covering the Irish famine and migration to theUnited States can hardly avoid comparisons with the slave trade but have, to date, generally failed tomount such comparisons with the requisite profundity and subtlety.

Matthew Frye Jacobson's Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (HarvardUniversity Press, 2006) powerfully helps us to understand how Irish-American whiteness could emerge inthe four decades since the height of the American civil-rights movement as a distinctive appealing identity-- avowedly innocent of the racism practiced by earlier white groups like slaveholders or Jim Crowsupporters. Jacobson, a professor of history and American and African-American studies at YaleUniversity, sifts through a mountain of evidence, from social theory to political debate to popular culture, toremind us of the very recent provenance and complex history of the term "white ethnic." He places itsemergence squarely in the era of black pride and the heroic movement to end the inequities of Jim CrowAmerica.

In that context, a supple "Ellis Island whiteness" could emerge. Distinct from assimilationist ideals of the1950s, such an identity could variously accent either "white" or "ethnic" to provide a critique of a nationseen as too culturally bland and too dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites. It could claim affinitieswith African-American inspirations, and establish distance from people of color. It could animate the

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neoconservatism that Jacobson discusses so penetratingly and could inflect second-wave feminism in theunexpected ways detailed in the book's best and fullest chapter. For example, he shows that some of thereceptivity to consciousness-raising among second-wave feminists found its roots in the ways that activistslike Mary Gordon, Kate Millett, and Betty Friedan grew up in white ethnic communities conscious of theirown vulnerabilities to the judgments of Anglo-Saxon elites. In those same communities, women'saspirations could also be dismissed in particular ways.

Winifred Breines's The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in theFeminist Movement (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Jason Sokol's upcoming There Goes MyEverything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Alfred A. Knopf, to be published inAugust) speak to topics in which the marking of whiteness is far more longstanding than in the field ofimmigration history. In the region Sokol treats, "Southerner" is often reduced in both academic and populardiscussion to "white Southerner"; while that identification is too simplistic, nonetheless white allies andwhite opponents of civil rights must be central to the story of the freedom movement in the South. Therace of participants must be named for the story to make sense. Similarly, Breines, a professor ofsociology at Northeastern University, deliberately sets out to write an "uneasy history," in part because shewas active in movements where disquietingly explicit identifications of the "white left," "white liberals," and"white feminism" regularly occurred. The Euro-American subjects of Sokol's and Breines's books wouldthus have been named as white even without the rise of critical studies of whiteness.

However, the well-established presence of the "white Southerner" in civil-rights history and of the "whitewoman" in feminist history can make such figures so familiar, and so anchored by their distinction from anequally familiar African-American other, as to seem natural rather than peculiar. While deeply researchedand able to narrate both well-known and buried stories compellingly, the important works of Breines andSokol can read at times as if some people really are white and as if their embrace of whiteness can beunderstood simply by addressing their differences with African-Americans.

Such gaps help to explain the curious fact that the section of the nation most identified with whiteness,the South, has generally not been the site for the most probing studies of whiteness. There areadmittedly impressive exceptions: Allen's two volumes, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (Harcourt, Braceand Company, 1935), and Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in theSouth, 1890-1940 (Pantheon Books, 1998). But in the main, the presumably simple and transparent racialcharacter of the South has made scholars more likely to describe the motion of the races there than toproblematize how the races came, and continue, to be.

In Breines's case, the adventuresome association of whiteness and pain, so well set out in her earlierYoung, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Beacon Press, 1992), seldom appears inher new story of white feminism. In The Trouble Between Us, intriguing ideas on how "white nostalgia" hasanimated reminiscences and scholarly studies, romanticizing the "beloved community" of integrationistmovements, are not fully followed up. The book offers thoughtful observations on how male/femaleconflicts among African-Americans shaped black feminism, but far less on the ways that white-on-whitegender oppression influenced how white feminists organized themselves and imagined the women of colorwith whom they sought to ally. Where Breines does most engage such issues -- in a superb account ofthe early women's liberation group Bread and Roses -- the emphasis on "white social feminists' ability tocut ties with men and families, to focus primarily on gender" leaves too much unsaid.

Breines writes that "because white women were members of the dominant race, they had little allegianceto their men." However, her book cites polls revealing higher support for second-wave feminist policy goalsamong black women than among white women. If we carry the story forward to more recent referendaopposing affirmative action, white women have at times been effectively mobilized against policiessupporting gender equity in ways that tragically ally them with "their men" on racial grounds. Breinesacutely understands how whiteness was a problem that troubled possibilities of alliances with women ofcolor, but sometimes misses why: the ways in which white women might prioritize racial interests overgender ones.

The sense in which whiteness functions as what the theorist Amoja Three Rivers calls an "alliance," anddraws people with very different interests into that alliance, is similarly little developed in There Goes MyEverything. Sokol, who recently received his doctorate in history from the University of California at

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Berkeley, sets out to restore and understand lost white voices, refusing to let extremist mobs, politicians,and sheriffs stand in for all of white opinion, as they often do in civil-rights histories. He recovers the viewsand actions of more "silent" whites assiduously and tells critical stories of how grudging acceptance ofdesegregation could occur, often at first among handfuls of highly conflicted white Southerners. The resultis an apt and even arresting narration of the ways that the white South included hard and soft racism, ironcertainty and deep doubt. However, other divisions among whites that a presumed racial unity paperedover, especially those of class and gender, find little sustained place in the story.

To an extent, in all the recent books discussed here, white identity appears far less "peculiar" than it didto Allen 15 years ago. Sweeping explanations emphasizing political economy are very little present, andthe most interesting hints of possible Freudian approaches can be relegated to a footnote. It would betempting to attribute that sea change to the disciplining force of academe as the critical study ofwhiteness matures -- to the very processes that will makes these weighty and respectable volumes sohard to dismiss -- and to the declining appeals of Marxism and psychoanalysis.

However, what has changed outside the university has mattered at least as much. The novelty of asignificant white working-class vote for conservatives has worn off. The racial loyalty of organized whiteworkers has become a less-charged topic as the unions themselves have suffered mounting losses ofmembership. Court decisions have left only a meager remnant of affirmative action to be defended, whileimplying that the remnant is safe for a least a short while.

The critical study of whiteness emerged, from slave and American Indian traditions forward, from the ideathat whiteness is a problem to be investigated and confronted. The present moment encouragesacademic studies to tip toward investigation and away from confrontation: The production andreproduction of whiteness are considered with great sophistication as a historical problem, but with lessurgency as a moral and political question.

It remains possible that critical studies of whiteness will grow to a still more substantial maturity -- criticsmight say descend into a second childhood -- that recaptures earlier political urgency. But in the absenceof breakthroughs applying scholarly insights to how contemporary racial issues intersect with immigration,and to how white identity has functioned transnationally, the field seems likely to contribute solidly andrespectably, but less than provocatively.

Books Reviewed in This EssayThe Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture edited by Diane Negra (Duke UniversityPress, 2006)

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein (Princeton UniversityPress, 2006)

Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America by Matthew Frye Jacobson (HarvardUniversity Press, 2006)

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 by Jason Sokol(Alfred A. Knopf, to be published in August)

The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement byWinifred Breines (Oxford University Press, 2006)

PHOTO (COLOR)

~~~~~~~~

By David R. Roediger

David R. Roediger is a professor of African-American studies and history at University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign. His recent books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America's ImmigrantsBecame White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books, 2005; paperbackedition from Perseus Books Group, 2006) and the collection of essays History Against Misery (Charles H.

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Kerr, 2006).

The Chronicle of Higher Education: (http://chronicle.com) 1-800-728-2803 Copyright of Chronicle of HigherEducation is the property of Chronicle of Higher Education and its content may not be copied or emailed tomultiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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