Mention race and racism to many white people, and they will say those issues have nothing to do with them. Race is something people of color must deal with, they say.
This is the kind of thinking that intrigues a group of scholars who are working in a new and growing field, the study of “whiteness.”
Challenging the idea that only blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians have racial identities, these scholars seek to understand what it means to be white, and how white identity came into being. Scholars from a variety of disciplines -- sociology, history, and legal, cultural, and literary studies -- are attempting to lift the veil from whiteness. Their work builds on years of writing by noted black critics such W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes.
Scholars who study white identity argue that race is not a natural category, but rather a complex and often unstable social construct. Whiteness, they say, is a relatively recent concept and has been shaped by social, economic, and historical processes. At various times, for example, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and Latinos all have been considered “non-white.”
“When we talk about race and racism, many whites have turned off that debate,” says David R. Roediger, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. “They may believe that racism has been transcended, and that when you talk about racism you’re really talking about the Klan or neo-Nazis.
“Yet many white students who would be loath to think of themselves as racists are willing to think of themselves as white. They have a community and a consciousness about being white.”
Mr. Roediger, the author of The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (both published by Verso), is often cited as a leading analyst of whiteness and its role in American society. He and other scholars, including Theodore Allen, bell hooks, Ruth Frankenberg, Noel Ignatiev, Toni Morrison, Michael Omi, Alexander Saxton, Vron Ware, and Howard Winant have argued that questions about race have for too long focused on people of color -- those who differ from the “norm.”
“We’ve never really recognized whiteness as a racial category until recently,” says David Wellman, a professor of community studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge University Press). “It was always taken for granted as normal. Therefore it was unmarked.
“As women, people of color, and gay communities became more visible, it was less possible for whiteness and masculinity to go unmarked,” he says. “The current scholarly interest reflects that process.”
This year, at least three more books on the topic are being published. White Guys (Routledge), by Fred Pfeil, examines contradictions in white heterosexual masculinity over the past 15 years. White by Law (New York University Press), by Ian F. Haney Lopez, explores the legal origins of white racial identity.
How the Irish Became White (Routledge), by Mr. Ignatiev, is a look at how Irish immigrants rose from being racially oppressed to racial oppressor. He is a lecturer at Harvard University and the editor of Race Traitor, a journal based in Cambridge, Mass., whose motto is “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Selections from the journal will be published by Routledge next year in an anthology.
Meanwhile, Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, are putting together a book about marginal whites called White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge). And Ms. Frankenberg is editing a collection of essays on whiteness for Duke University Press.
Whiteness is an essential part of race relations that needs to be addressed, says Ms. Frankenberg, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of California at Davis. “If there is a dominant group, who are they? And isn’t it time we looked at them?”
She describes whiteness as a place of privilege in racial categories and a standpoint from which white people look at the world. In The Social Construction of Whiteness (University of Minnesota Press), she notes that to examine the social construction of whiteness is to look “head-on at a site of dominance.”
“To speak of whiteness is, I think, to assign everyone a place in the relations of racism,” she wrote. “It is to emphasize that dealing with racism is not merely an option for white people -- that, rather, racism shapes white people’s lives and identities in a way that is inseparable from other facts of daily life.”
Her book is based on interviews with 30 white women from Santa Cruz and San Francisco. She was moved to examine how race shapes their lives because of the charges of racism leveled against the feminist movement in the ‘80s. Frequently, she says, race privilege is a “lived but not seen aspect” of white experience, given segregation and environments that militate against conscious attention to racism.
Mr. Roediger describes race as something that many people recognize as a social construct, not “real” yet tremendously powerful. “There is the ability of whiteness to be mobilized for right-wing political purposes,” he says, “but there is also a very strong attraction to African-American culture among white kids.”
He is working on a book for the Free Press called Shades of Pale, a study of whiteness since the Civil War. It is an analysis of how immigrants to the United States learned to think of themselves as white, and how whiteness became identified as a Southern and Western phenomenon in the late 19th century.
Men tended to learn about their racial identity through work and citizenship, he points out. “Women also learned things at work, but their learning also took place at home, through ideas of purity and defense of the home.”
Although whiteness conveys privilege, its identifying marks are virtually invisible, Mr. Roediger and other scholars note. In fact, development of white racial identity often depended on comparisons with an “other,” and specifically on the idea of being “not-black.”
In The Wages of Whiteness, Mr. Roediger argues that white identity and its privileges arose among workers in the 19th century as a compensation for being exploited. Even if they were miserable, they could believe that they were not as bad off as the slaves were. They constructed an image of the black population as other -- “embodying the preindustrial, erotic, careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for,” he wrote.
Mr. Wellman of Santa Cruz argues that a new meaning of whiteness has developed from the debate over affirmative action. He draws parallels between anti-affirmative-action sentiments today and the minstrel shows of the 19th century. “Some historians have argued that minstrelsy was not about black people but about white male immigrants whose lives were being transformed,” he says. “One of the ways they negotiated the trauma of industrialization was to create stereotypes which allowed them to differentiate themselves. The caricatures in the shows were a new kind of other.
“Today, it seems that despite the arguments we generate in favor of affirmative action and whatever scientific evidence we marshal, it doesn’t matter. This has real parallels to what was going on in the 1840s and 1850s; the economics and sociology are very similar. A new meaning of whiteness is being generated, and it’s ‘not-affirmative action.’”
Related story: New Views on America’s Continuing Dilemma of Race
