Whiteness as a Social Phenomenon

Whiteness is ownership of the earth. -- W.E.B. Du Bois

Black advocate Mark Haley tells a story where he and Malcolm X are in an airport together. A plane lands and a group of bright-eyed Eastern European children take their first steps on American soil. Malcolm turns to Haley and says, "Pretty little children. Soon they're going to learn their first English word: nigger."

Broadly -- very, broadly -- Malcolm might be right. The viral permanency of “race” as a social concept is a uniquely American phenomenon. America is the one nation in the world that imported a group of people half-way around the world, bred them and then enslaved them. As a result, no facet of modern American society can escape the ever-presence of race -- no social progress or economic betterment or political victory is exempted. In fact, as citizens of a nation whose identity is a product of its history, no person in america can act, personally or institutionally outside the framework of race relations, who is advantaged and why.

Of course, the word “race” refers to much more than biology or skin colors. “Whiteness,” specifically, is a social construction, aptly conceptualized as cultural property. It is a possession that provides tremendous material and symbolic privilege. It is a constellation of norms, ideologies, economic factors and social predisposions that gives rise to a hierarchical system of existence, created at the birth of this nation for the expressed purpose of power and subjugation. The 2005 academy award-winning movie Crash provocatively and unflinchingly examines this concept of whiteness, in essence, the concept of ownership over society.

American progressives work to inculcate children with the truth that racism exists in society. They weave the familiar narrative that oppression puts people down, and that American culture has nurtured – even today – this oppressive dynamic. This story, however, is not complete. Importantly, the accepted concept of racism neglects the reciprocal relationship between oppression and profit, that whiteness depends not just on the elevation of one culture, but also, fundamentally, on the devaluation of other culture. This story neglects that the existence of “Black disadvantage” necessitates the existence of “white advantage.” This unacknowledged privilege, enjoyed by every single white person in society, is the essence of “whiteness” as a social construction.

Race solidified as a particularly American occurrence at the birth of the nation. Early colonists at the Jamestown settlement were predominately Anglo males looking to make money off material investment. In tobacco farming they found an economically solvent system. The tobacco crop, however, dependeed on cheap labor, and an indentured servants system where bond-laborers exchanged work for land precipiated. All evidence indicates that when Blacks emmigrated from the Caribbean to Virginia, they were treated as equal members of an oppressed class. By the 1660s, tobacco farming continued its concentration wealth into the hands of an increasingly select colonial plantocracy. By 1673, indentured servant, poor and disenfranched, errupted in rebellion Bacon’s Rebellion.

In an effort to both placate indentured servant discontent and still feed the voracious appetite for cheap labor, the plantocracy begins to construct a system of “race” subjugation in the most modern sense. By the 1670s, the House of Burgess imposed legislation mandating that all descendents from “non-Christian” nations (Blacks) must serve a lifetime tenure as an indentured servant; In 1691 a law was enacted for the "prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue" of intermarriage of Black men with "English or other white women." Historian Theodore Allen remarks on the fermentation of “whiteness,” “The exclusion of free African-Americans from the intermediate stratum was a corollary of the establishment of ‘white’ identity as a mark of social status.” Thus, the division of races and the development of “whiteness,” borne out of a need for cheap labor by the Virginian elites, continued to a point where no hypocrisy was seen by the framers of the U.S. Constitution in designing a system that propped itself up on the pillars of liberty and equality while simultaneously facilitating the enslavement of Blacks. Race was therefore made not born.

Modern-day whiteness is seen in two forms. The “material” privilege of whiteness is, quite clearly, the explicit ownership by whites of the political and economic mechanisms that control society. Aside from knowing that “the man in power” is a member of one’s own race, the white privilege abounds on an everyday level because of this material privilege. Access to top-notch education, for one, is statistically reserved within whiteness. African Americans, left in poverty after years of enslavement, are forced to stay there by the archaic tax-law system that funds the U.S. public education system. Inequality is compulsory. In a nation that prides itself on concepts of capitalistic individualism, its no surprise that a private property taxes pays for educational opportunity; however, no child owns what is his. A poor man might be discredited for laziness or drunkardness, but a poor Black child has lost nothing but a genetic lottery. As Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities points out, it isn’t survival of the fittest in this nation’s public education system, it’s survival of the children of the parent who are the fittest. The de jure segregation of America’s public education system does much to define and propel whiteness. Kozol remarks that America has “turned its back upon the moral implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of the Brown [v. Board of Education] decision” mandating integration of public facilities. Because of this, “the fact of ghetto education as permanent American reality appear[s] to be accepted” (4). Education is thus a material and tangible aspect of white privilege.

The daily guarantee of civil liberty and respect, moreover, is an unquestioned layer of whiteness. In Crash a wealthy African American couple is pulled over because their car is vaguely similar to one reportedly high jacked; a hard-working Latino locksmith promises his daughter that they are safe now, because they moved to a white neighborhood. Those two examples indicate a broader theme: Racism is embedded within patterns and systems. The white privilege on a microscale, therefore, might be knowing that if you’re targeted by the IRS or the police it is not because of the color of your skin. The white privilege is moving to a safe neighborhood and being accepted; the white privilege is moving to a neighborhood where you’re accepted and being safe. It is having access to legal and medical help without skin color working against you. It is not questioning the racial overtones of everyday occurrences, the events that compound and interact to shape the concept of whiteness.

Beyond the more documented injustices of material whiteness lies the realm of symbolic whiteness, where “beauty” and “success” are defined relative to whiteness as to implicitly exclude people of colors. Whiteness is normalized within society; as the norm it tyrannizes the efforts for advancement by non-whites. It crowds out Blacks as “Others.” Seen as “exotic” or politely ignored by well-meaning whites, all non-whites are “marked” as deviations. Whiteness therefore is the standard by which other aspects of society are judged and neatly categorized.

The implications of a normalized and naturalized whiteness are important; sitting comfortably as the norm, in and of itself, is an aspect of white privilege. When American children learn “history,” for example, they are really learning “white history.” However, the concept of whiteness has pervaded to the point of implication; it has become both indivisible and mutually understood. Learning about the plight of the African American, however, is denoted as “Black history.” Whites are privileged as the norm because acceptance facilitates complacency. Whiteness protects the individual from being called forth to speak for the entirety of his race. It protects the successful individual from being applauded as credits to his race. Fred, an advisor to L.A.’s Attorney General Rick Cabot in Crash, asks the Black detective, Graham whether Black children need another “‘drug-dealin’ corrupt cop.’” White privilege protects a failed individual from putting his race on trial. Whiteness as the norm, therefore, demands less self-understanding.

Whiteness as a norm, moreover, constructs a system where non-white success is predicated on exceptionalism. Few people, for example, tout the fact that a newly-elected Senator is white. On the other hand, a successful Black man is defined often by the nature of his non-whiteness. Whiteness thus monopolizes the concept of success. A proactive Black man must often face the unfortunate decision to accept whiteness as success or decline success to perpetuate a cohesive identity. Being successful is acting in accordance to whiteness. A dialogue in Crash transpires where a successful African American director Cameron is confronting his wife Christine. After being sexually violated by a white cop, she remarks of his subservience to the concept of whiteness. Cameron tells her, “It's about time you realize what it's like to be Black.” She replies, “Oh, and you're talking about being Black? The closest you ever came to being Black, Cameron, was watching the Cosby Show.” The implication, of course, is that his success had violated the cohesion of African American movement, that he rejected his Black roots. Later in the movie, the mild-mannered Cameron confronts a cop to flailing and conspicuously vindicate his Blackness. The cop says, “I’m trying to help you here.” Cameron shouts back, “I didn't ask for your help, did I?” The African American director rejects the help of the white cop in order to assert his identity as a non-white entity. He rejects the cop in an effort to reject his emasculation as a Black man within the upper echelons of society, to reject the racialization of his success. As a successful cop, Graham tells his mother about his killed brother, “I promise, I’m gunna find out who did this.” She tells him, “I already know who did this. You did.” Success, she seems to tell him, is violating his racial destiny.

Whiteness must be accepted beyond biological fact. It is a lens through which members of society are afforded symbolic and material privilege. This lens is not fact. It was no spontaneously assembled within the contours of American social progression. Instead, whiteness was manufactured by a moneyed elite for the purpose of domination and subjugation. The value system of whiteness, however, rests on more than just greed. Greed is a force confronted by all people throughout history everywhere; it is often deterred and invariably frowned upon. Instead, the idea of whiteness is about control. Every member of white society – well-meaning or otherwise – must come to terms with the advantage of control. The ultimate white privilege, perhaps, is the power to acknowledge unearned advantage – to look it in the eye – and decide to ignore it.

Works Cited
Allen, Theodore. The Invention of the White Race: the Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. Vol. 2. Verso Books, 1997.
Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X : as Told to Alex Haley. Ballantine Books, 1987. 1-496.
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Harper Perennial, 1992.

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