[PEN-L:1315] Investing in whiteness

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Bautiste wrote on LBO-Talk:
>What about the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans? Conquest was not unknown to the
>Native Americans. There were some civilizations in the southern part of the
>continent, around the Mississippi, which I am unfamiliar with, that practiced
>conquest. Slavery was also known in Native American societies.

[Below are pages 2-5 of George Lipsitz's newly released "The Possessive
Investment in Whiteness," Temple Press. Lipsitz is also the author of the
groundbreaking "Rainbow at Midnight," which also deals with the dialectic
of race and class.]

Race is a cultural construct, but one with sinister structural causes and
consequences. Conscious and deliberate actions have institutionalized group
identity in the United States, not just through the dissemination of
cultural stories, but also through systematic efforts from colonial times
to the present to create economic advantages through a possessive
investment in whiteness for European Americans. Studies of culture too far
removed from studies of social structure leave us with inadequate
explanations for understanding racism and inadequate remedies for combating
it.

Desire for slave labor encouraged European settlers in North America to
view, first, Native Americans and, later, African Americans as racially
inferior people suited "by nature" for the humiliating subordination of
involuntary servitude. The long history of the possessive investment in
whiteness stems in no small measure from the fact that all subsequent
immigrants to North America have come to an already racialized society.
>From the start, European settlers in North America established structures
encouraging a possessive investment in whiteness. The colonial and early
national legal systems authorized attacks on Native Americans and
encouraged the appropriation of their lands. They legitimated racialized
chattel slavery, limited naturalized citizenship to "white" immigrants,
identified Asian immigrants as expressly unwelcome (through legislation
aimed at immigrants from China in 1882, from India in 1917, from Japan in
1924, and from the Philippines in 1934), and provided pretexts for
restricting the voting, exploiting the labor, and seizing the property of
Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans.

The possessive investment in whiteness is not a simple matter of black and
white; all racialized minority groups have suffered from it, albeit to
different degrees and in different ways. The African slave trade began in
earnest only after large-scale Native American slavery proved impractical
in North America. The abolition of slavery led to the importation of
low-wage labor from Asia. Legislation banning immigration from Asia set the
stage for the recruitment of low-labor from Mexico. The new racial
categories that emerged in each of these eras all revolved around applying
racial labels to "nonwhite" groups in or to stigmatize and exploit them
while at the same time preserving the value of whiteness.

Although reproduced in new form in every era, the possessive investment
whiteness has always been influenced by its origins in the racialized
history of the United States--by its legacy of slavery and segregation, of
"Indian" extermination and immigrant restriction, of conquest and
colonialism. Although slavery has existed in many countries without any
particular racial dimensions the slave system that emerged in North America
soon took on distinctly forms. Africans enslaved in North America faced a
racialized system of power that reserved permanent, hereditary, chattel
slavery for black people. White settlers institutionalized a possessive
investment in whiteness by making blackness synonymous with slavery and
whiteness synonymous with freedom, also by pitting people of color against
one another. Fearful of alliances between Native Americans and African
Americans that might challenge the prerogatives of whiteness, white
settlers prohibited slaves and free blacks from settling in "Indian
country." European Americans used diplomacy and force to compel Native
Americans to return runaway slaves to their white masters. During the Stono
Rebellion of 1739, colonial authorities offered Native Americans a bounty
for every rebellious slave they captured or killed. At the same British
settlers recruited black slaves to fight against Native Americans in
colonial militias. The power of whiteness depended not only on white
hegemony over separate racialized groups, but also on manipulating racial
outsiders to fight against one another, to compete with each other for
white approval, and to seek the rewards and privileges of whiteness for
themselves at the expense of other racialized populations.

Aggrieved communities of color have often curried favor with whites in
or-to make gains at each other's expense. For example, in the nineteenth
century some Native Americans held black slaves (in part to prove to whites
that they could adopt "civilized" European American ways), and some of the
first chartered African American units in the U.S. army went to war against
Comanches in Texas or served as security forces for wagon trains of white
settlers on the trails to California. The defeat of the Comanches in the
1870s sparked a mass migration by Spanish-speaking residents of New Mexico
into the areas of West Texas formerly occupied by the vanquished Native
Americans. Immigrants from Asia sought the rewards of whiteness for
themselves by asking the courts to recognize them as "white" and therefore
eligible for naturalized citizenship according to the Immigration and
Naturalization Act of 1790; Mexican Americans also insisted on being
classified as white. In the early twentieth century, black soldiers
accustomed to fighting Native Americans in the Southwest participated in
the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and the punitive expedition against
Pancho Villa in Mexico. Asian American managers cracked down on efforts by
Mexican American farm workers to unionize, while the Pullman Company tried
to break the African American Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by
importing Filipinos to work as porters. Mexican Americans and blacks took
possession of some of the property confiscated from Japanese Americans
during the internment of the 1940s, and Asian Americans, blacks, and
Mexican Americans all secured advantages for themselves by cooperating with
the exploitation of Native Americans.

Yet while all racialized minority groups have sometimes sought the rewards
of whiteness, they have also been able to come together in interethnic
antiracist alliances. Native American tribes often harbored runaway slaves
and drew upon their expertise in combat against whites, as in 1711 when an
African named Harry helped lead the Tuscaroras against the British. Native
Americans secured the cooperation of black slaves in their attacks on the
French settlement near Natchez in colonial Louisiana in 1729, and black
Seminoles in Florida routinely recruited slaves from Georgia plantations to
their side in battles against European Americans. African Americans
resisting slavery and white supremacy in the United States during the
nineteenth century sometimes looked to Mexico as a refuge (especially after
that nation abolished slavery), and in the twentieth century the rise of
Japan as a successful non-white world power often served as a source of
inspiration and emulation among African American nationalists. Mexican
American and Japanese American farm workers joined forces in Oxnard,
California, in 1903 to wage a successful strike in the beet fields, and
subsequently members of the two groups organized an interracial union, the
Japanese Mexican Labor Association. Yet whether characterized by conflict
or cooperation, all relations among aggrieved racialized minorities stemmed
from recognition of the rewards of whiteness and the concomitant penalties
imposed upon "nonwhite" populations.


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)