Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
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Overview
Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226873428 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2001 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 333 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Les Back teaches sociology and urban studies at Goldsmiths College University of London. He is the author of New Ethnicities, Multiple Racisms: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives.
Vron Ware is a lecturer in sociology and in women’s and gender studies at Yale University. She is the author of Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History.
Les Back teaches sociology and urban studies at Goldsmiths College University of London. He is the author of New Ethnicities, Multiple Racisms: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives.
Read an Excerpt
OUT OF WHITENESS
COLOR, POLITICS, AND CULTURE
By Vron Ware Les Back
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2002 Vron Ware and Les Back
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-87342-8
Chapter One
OTHERWORLDLY KNOWLEDGE : TOWARD A "LANGUAGE OF PERSP ICUOUS CONTRAST"
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then whatever falls is in the ordinary course of things-neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.
This is a story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily.
He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again. -RUDYARD KIPLING
Within the rigid order of colonial society, narrated here by Rudyard Kipling, "decent everyday society" is constructed in opposition to "native life." This is naturalized in the formulation of "White" and "Black," defined along the knife edge of caste, race, and breed-three words, in case one is not clear enough. Franz Fanon, writing from Algeria in the 1960s, provides another view of the Manichaean separation of worlds within colonial society: "The colonial world is a world cut in two.... This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species." The physical organization of space that Fanon describes, in which the settler and the native live on opposite sides of a frontier patrolled by the policeman and the soldier, was both a cause and a consequence of the underlying economic order of French colonial society in North Africa. According to Fanon, the destruction of this colonial world depended not on establishing lines of communication between the two zones or on cultivating understanding between them, but on abolishing the zone of the settlers completely.
In 1940 W. E. B. Du Bois used the analogy of different worlds to describe his experience of growing up in a society founded and organized on the principle of white supremacy: "Much as I knew of this class structure of the world, I should never have realized it so vividly and fully if I had not been born into its modern counterpart, racial segregation, first into a world composed of people with colored skins who remembered slavery and endured discrimination; and who had to a degree their own habits, customs, and ideals; but in addition to this I lived in an environment which I came to call the white world." Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he developed through living in these two worlds simultaneously, is well known, but it is worth repeating his account of exactly how he was conditioned and constrained by "the white world" from early childhood: "I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily account the reaction of the white environing world. How I traveled and where, what work I did, what income I received, where I ate, where I slept, with whom I talked, where I sought recreation, where I studied, what I wrote and what I could get published-all this depended primarily upon an overwhelming mass of my fellow citizens in the United States, from whose society I was largely excluded."
"Of course," continued Du Bois, "... there was no real wall between us." He knew since childhood that "in all things in general, white people were just the same as I." However, one big difference was that whites did not have to take "into careful daily account" the reactions of the people who lived across the color line. Whites did not automatically, out of necessity, develop an intimate sense of their black "prisoners" that was passed down from one generation to another. The way in which the two groups perceived each other was as asymmetrical as their relationship to power and privilege. Perhaps this was what Cornel West meant when he spoke of the distance that still separates Americans from each other: "It's fairly clear that the gulf is quite deep between Black and white worlds and Black and Jewish worlds. Blacks and whites, Blacks and Jews, live in such different worlds and look at the world through such different lenses. This poses a huge challenge. We have to cultivate a much deeper understanding of the various perceptions from the different worlds."
This extract from West's discussion with Michael Lerner reiterates the widely held view that race is the central organizing feature of U.S. society. There are different worlds, three it would seem (although we are not clear what the relationship is between the Jewish and the white worlds), and there are gulfs between them, and each world has its own lens through which it perceives the others. Clearly this is partly a rhetorical device dramatizing West's perception of the crisis in U.S. race relations that he addresses in his work. My initial reaction is to question the use of this metaphor as a basis for making progressive political alliances-as a basis for a politics of antiracism. In a country deeply divided by social and economic inequalities the discourse of separate worlds might make sense when you encounter people who hold opinions vastly different from yours and who have limited experience with and interest in people and cultures that are different from those with which they are familiar. But even if one experienced the world only through television, this viewpoint would begin to look strained after sitting through just a few hours of talk shows. Here the spectacle of public opinion and private testimony indicates a much smaller universe than West describes, and one in which social relations of gender, class, sexuality, and age and emotions such as love, desire, hatred, and jealousy are just as likely to affect one's lens as the color of one's skin and racial identification. With the expansion of the global media and the rise of phenomenal mass markets in consumer products it could also be argued that the walls between worlds are more likely than ever to be built on money rather than a spurious notion of "race" or hierarchies based on skin color.
On second thought, however, it is also important to acknowledge the mechanisms of segregation that continue to operate both in and beyond the United States. It is one thing to reject a racialized language that con- fines us all in different worlds or indeed on different planets according to ethnic and cultural background, but another to deny the very real social geographies of "race" and class, which are instrumental in determining where people live, the patterns of their daily lives, and their subjective view of the "environing world" and their place within (or outside) it. But even so, on what grounds can we who live in the overindustrialized, postcolonial world continue to use such Manichaean terms to describe the chaos of racialized order that exists today?
The first three writers quoted above testify to the difficulty, even the impossibility, of breaking this dualism and crossing the line between black and white, but that was under colonialism and Jim Crow. West is talking about the situation as he sees it in the contemporary United States-his bleak formula might appear to many to be a symptom of the typical race-thinking that consolidates the notion of unbridgeable difference rather than challenging it. One of the problems with this rhetorical dualism is that it erases all those who are not yet fully racialized as either black or white, or at least marshals them into one category or the other in the manner of Kipling. Added to this, West implies that being black or white or Jewish confers on the individual a prepackaged view of the world, which suggests that how you look largely determines how you see.
There are important theoretical debates today about the relationship Otherworldly Knowledge: Toward a "Language of Perspicuous Contrast" between knowledge and experience. For the sake of argument we will begin by temporarily accepting the hypothesis that there are two types of people, black and white, and that they see the world through very different lenses. The blacks know a great deal about the whites, as they have been warily studying their reactions for hundreds of years. The whites know little of the blacks and, as Du Bois and many others have observed, rarely stop to think about what life looks like for them. One way out of this impasse might be, as West suggests, for each side to learn how the other half lives and to become more understanding of the other. But Kipling's foolhardy protagonist, Trejago, learned the hard way that having a partial inside knowledge about the ways of black folk did not prevent him from misunderstanding: "He knew too much in the first instance, he saw too much in the second." Had he not been able to decipher the coded message sent to him by his forbidden love, Bisesa, he would not have known to visit her in the alley at night. But had he been more conversant with native customs, he would have known that this illicit meeting would invite violent reprisals for both of them. Perhaps he was prepared to risk this outcome, driven by infatuation for the veiled woman. In the end it was only the permanent limp that bore witness to his lack of understanding and his desire to know and to see too much. However, in Kipling's story the object of Trejago's knowledge and vision, the seen one, paid far more heavily for his transgression and her acts as an accomplice by having her hands severed at the wrists. What would Kipling think of the technological advances in our ways of seeing now, which mean that all manner of things concerning native life can be learned without leaving the armchair position of decent everyday society for a minute? There are plenty of opportunities to view other people's worlds on screens, if not through lenses, and yet there is no substantive evidence to prove that this alone has hastened the progress of democratic multiculturalism.
Another view might be to follow Fanon's advice and destroy the zone of the whites so that there ceases to be a justification for believing there are two species. How this hypothesis is resolved will depend on what one considers to be the basis on which the original differences are premised. But by reducing the scale of the problem faced by all societies founded on histories of white supremacy to this absurd caricature of a planet inhabited by two types of people, we perhaps run the risk of trivializing it. In the light of the theoretical debates referred to above-which deal with the complexity of identity politics, the perils of essentialism, and the impact of other kinds of social divisions-the differences between people can neither be organized so neatly nor be done away with so comprehensively. This brings us to what might appear to be a glaring contradiction in our thesis: that in order to investigate what we call whiteness, the main aim of this book, we are in danger of reproducing an unhealthy dualism that does little to challenge the fundamental principle of "race."
It is necessary to confront this problem before embarking on the critical study of whiteness as a strategy for subverting or abolishing white racism, white supremacism, White Power (sometimes we do have to use several words). There is a need to guard against the prospect of a field of study that constructs the people who fall into the category of white as separate and homogenous and that effectively reifies whiteness as being marked in or on the body. This tendency can legitimize an insidious division of labor that allocates both scholarly and activist roles on the basis of color: "Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black." Such crude separatism lies at the heart of what we call race-thinking, undermining any pretensions to radicalism and subversion that might be intended. Yet these criticisms and caveats are not meant to obscure the potential benefits to be gained from analyzing and disaggregating whiteness as part of a more holistic political project against injustice, and against the notion of "race" in general. Developing the tools to demonstrate the contingency, the changeability, the inconsistency of all racial categories, over time and place, requires rigorous and concerted work across the demarcation lines drawn by race-thinking. Within this context the deconstruction of whiteness presents vital opportunities to smudge and blur these lines instead of rendering the distinctions even sharper.
David R. Roediger argues that "making whiteness rather than simply white racism, the focus of study has had the effect of throwing into sharp relief the impact that the dominant racial identity in the US has had not only on the treatment of racial 'others' but also on the way that whites think of themselves, of power, of pleasure, and of gender." If that is the case, then several tricky questions immediately suggest themselves as to how that whiteness is defined, in the first place, and how this research is to be carried out, not just in the United States, but also in different specific and comparative locations. How does gender, or class (not just wealth or poverty, but inherited, shared values), or sexuality, for instance, enter into the way in which the discursive power of whiteness is perceived, experienced, encountered, and rejected? Moving away from the stark duotone imagery of the colonial world, this chapter will resort to a more muted, messy, and chaotic palate that does not allow for the purity of any one color. But this is no empty canvas: the critical analysis of whiteness as outlined by Roediger has been under way for well over a decade. Before beginning to investigate some of the problems and possibilities that flow from this endeavor it is necessary to assess the conceptual work that has informed, influenced, and enraged the perspectives outlined in this book.
Peering into the Dark
[W]alk around the silent swelling of When I am Pregnant. Trace the shape as it grows obliquely out of the wall and then suddenly when you stand in front of it, face to face, it is there no longer; only a luminous aureole remains to return you to the memory of stillness, as the wall turns transparent, from white to light. -HOMI BHABHA
In the process of writing this chapter I happened to visit an exhibition of sculptor Anish Kapoor's work at the Hayward Gallery in London. The first installation looked from a distance like a large rectangular painting of the deepest blue imaginable. Close up, it invited the viewer to locate its surface on a two-dimensional plane that seemed to retreat into the distance the more one tried to fix it. The security guard had her work cut out to prevent people from leaning over the ropes to touch the blue surface, to feel with their hands what their eyes refused to tell them. In another room the installation described above by Homi Bhabha had a similar effect, although this time it was white and the perceptual disturbance was produced by the surface protruding into the room rather than disappearing into the wall. It was a curiously exhilarating experience trying to fathom what had happened to the bulge as you looked straight at it, seeing only a dense white flat surface. Only when you moved to the side could you see the profile reemerge and make sense of the title of this piece. I encountered a similar sensation with Kapoor's White Dark series as I stared into his hollow, three-dimensional shapes without being able to see corners, sides, edges, and depths. The white space inside was uncannily vacant, but also powerfully empty. It was hardly surprising that many complained of dizziness once they left the building.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from OUT OF WHITENESS by Vron Ware Les Back Copyright © 2002 by Vron Ware and Les Back. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Outside the Whale
1. Otherworldly Knowledge: Toward a "Language of Perspicuous Contrast"
2. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? The Political Morality of Investigating Whiteness in the Gray Zone
3. Seeing through Skin/Seeing through Epidermalization
4. Wagner and Power Chords: Skinheadism, White Power Music, and the Internet
5. Mothers of Invention: Good Hearts, Intelligent Minds, and Subversive Acts
6. Syncopated Synergy: Dance, Embodiment, and the Call of the Jitterbug
7. Ghosts, Trails, and Bones: Circuits of Memory and Traditions of Resistance
8. Out of Sight: Southern Music and the Coloring of Sound
9. Room with a View
Notes
Index