[Marxism] Once more on "whiteness" [Was: Black Commentator...]

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've addressed the question repeatedly and not one of the points I raised
has ever been addressed by those who continue to apply the term.  Here are a
few major objections to the concept.

I think any one of them might raise questions as to the merits of the
"whiteness" model....

1. It tells us absolutely nothing that we didn't already know.  So long as
the race system in American civilization has been criticized, we have known
that race is a cultural construct.  Most of the earlier writers had the
additional virtue of understanding that it was also more than a cultural
construct.

2. Any social sciency modeling of reality generalizes to the point where it
runs the risk of being overgeneralized.  That is, it tends to apply the
generalization to situations without actually looking at the evidence.  The
assumption that white supremacism was a universal norm because the ruling
class wanted it to be runs the risk of missing the many ways in which it was
not.  We have the persistent example of the maroons over centuries and of
the distinctive spectrum of thinking about race on the frontier.  In terms
of white workingclass people, Brian Kelly's new edition of Bernard Mandel's
LABOR, FREE AND SLAVE from the 1950s revealed a much more complex realities.

Btw, while working on my own YOUNG AMERICA, I read one of these studies that
asserted confidently that the workingclass land reform movement of the 1840s
and 1850s advocated Indian extermination in order to divide the land among
white workers.  At the time, I had a plowed through a mountain of material
on the movement without ever having encountered the least documentary
support for that innane assertion.  In contrast, I had encountered a
mountain of evidence indicating explicit solidarity with the Indians,
regular quoting and praising Indian leaders, resolutions to contact them,
etc.  The point being that the model was an excuse not to look at the
evidence.

The new anniversary history of "bleeding Kansas" from that state's
university press reexamines the experience in terms of race.  Yet, there
isn't a single mention in the entire book of Indians.  Given the choice
between making simplistic assertions and acknowledging the existence of an
entire population of non-whites, which do you think prevails in the
"whiteness" model?

3. When I was entering history as a field, the New Left historians called
for a reexamination of social history and labor history "from the bottom
up."  The "whiteness" model represents just the opposite, an embrace of
top-down standards of race.  And, like all models, what doesn't fit is
either misrepresented or unaddressed.

4. When people first started talking about "whiteness" in academe, I joked
to the effect that the white boys in the elite universities had finally
found a way to make race about them.  That was intended as a joke, but the
prescriptive "politics" of "whiteness" are absolutely and utterly about
whites and how they think about themselves.  We need to "repudiate" our
"whitness" in an act of psychological cleansing.

In a racist market economy, you are going to be treated one way or the other
based on race.  You can choose, where you can, not to take advantage of
race, but mostly it's not up to you.  You go for a job, apply for a school,
try to get into a profession, buy a house, etc., etc., etc. whites will
generally be accorded better treatment.  The idea of psychologically
"repudiating" one's race or telling yourself that you are personally "race
blind" may be very comforting, but they are socially and politically
meaningless, in and of themselves.

5. The diffusion of the "whiteness" model in academe paradoxically reflects
the inherently white racist nature of the academic system.  I am not saying
that each and every white academic is a racist or that most are, but the
institution--how it functions and replicates itself--absolutely and
definitely is.

In my field, most African-Americans study black history and race.  In what
amounts largely to a de facto racial division of labor, white wanting to
study black history and race had to sell what they were doing as something
else...Southern history, Civil War history or social history.  At this
point, postmodernist methods began trying to refocus discussion on the
concept of "identity."   It seems quite clear, in History at least, that
"whiteness" emeged as a rather clever way to permit white scholars to talk
about race in a way acceptable to the profession.

Any one of these points should provide some grounds for caution in adopting
the model.....

Solidarity!
Mark L.










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