Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls
This volume is a collection in critical white studies with a specific focus on privilege. We come from the academic field of philosophy, but we are aware that the subject of white privilege has emerged from a host of disciplines, including philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology, and intellectual history. We have invited our contributors to adopt an expository style called “braided narrative,” which links the authors’ critical analyses to events and values that they identify as formative within their own lives. Our hope is that this stylistic innovation will provide students and readers with useful pedagogical tool, motivating them to inquire into their own experience of privilege. Our aim here is to map out relations between conscious perception, self-evaluation, and the ideas and images of white privilege tied to cultural and social institutions. It is in the service of this mapping that the personal narratives, which our expository choice “braids into” scholarly analysis, emerge as a crucial feature of critical white studies, as we understand it.
A critical white studies with a focus on privilege confronts the difficulty of the multiple meanings and interpretations of privilege. It raises the question of how to begin to study privilege in a synthetic way, a way that investigates the mutually reinforcing tendencies of privileges without obscuring the ways that each of them, as a distinct claim, enacts its own logic of entitlement. Privilege has a thick interpretive component, in that the identification of privilege carries a critical awareness of its presence and its impact, and this is invariably a matter of comparisons—among types of privilege but also among bearers of privilege. One need only point out a privilege to elicit responses as varied as recognition and resignation, or indeed the conviction that the privilege in question is an earned right. Within a supposedly neutral framework, we discover that one person’s privilege is frequently another’s just deserts. Part of the difficulty lies in the absence of an overarching point of comparison: if one compares oneself to persons belonging to social or cultural groups, or to economic classes of people who have limited access to education, financial resources, or practical goods, one might say that one has privilege. Frequently, however, the response is to challenge that comparison with the claim that it is every bit as legitimate to compare oneself only with the members of one’s own socioeconomic or cultural or educational group. A number of authors (George Yancy and Ernest-Marie Mbonda, among others) have pointed to this claim as salient to the invisibility, especially to whites, of whiteness as race and symbol.1 And the presupposition of the universality or normalcy of one’s racial or ethnic position may indeed influence the choice to compare oneself with members of one’s primary reference group.
An interesting feature of this process lies in the close relationship between certain affects, like resentment or victimization, and the ability to perceive privilege at all. We see this in the protest, “But I worked for everything that I have; I have given back to my community; I pay taxes.” In chapter 7 in this volume, George Yancy notes that a white student in his class on slavery and racism remarked, incongruously, “that she did not understand how her whiteness could possibly be a site of terror as she did not own any black people as slaves and was not violent toward black people.” Moreover, the insistence that responses like these refuse to acknowledge privilege is similarly deflected as “liberal guilt,” “ideology,” or, worse, third-party “resentment.” This has the effect of reducing the debate to parochialism, in that from a fictive, overarching viewpoint, differences in perspective are judged irreconcilable and in some sense equal; or again, that the critical, privilege-confronting perspective suffers as much from “ideology” as the perspective of the taxpayer who has harmed no one deliberately. In other words, the defensive reflex adopts a view from nowhere as a defense against what it perceives as a false “transcendentalism,” whereby the critic or questioner forces his or her interlocutor to adopt—against his or her interests—a metaclass or metarace perspective. The contest here is for the “right” to assert the metaposition, which, in presenting comparative discourse as a competition for rhetorical hegemony, weakens all interclass and interracial comparison. Hence the terrible problem of identifying “privilege.” How do we get past this conundrum?
If we consider the etymology of the word “privilege”—its formulation out of the verb legere (to bind), itself related to lex, legis (law)—then privi-legere looks like a contradiction.2 What would a private law mean? The first etymological definition is suggestive: “An exceptional law that concerns a specific individual” could either elevate or diminish that individual’s freedom of action or status within the community. In practice, however, social privileges—working as if they were “private laws”—typically elevate those persons they target. In critical white studies, a focus on privilege, understood minimally as the examination of the governing norms and symbols within given communities, entails grasping the history and dynamics through which persons or groups are constituted within a larger community as differently subject to precisely what holds the larger community together—i.e., the shared laws. In this regard, “privilege” as privum-lex frequently undermines the solidarity of the community, restructuring it in a vertical sense such that, practically and juridically, certain laws apply principally to the unprivileged while other laws relate to the privileged. Privilege is thus hostile to a system of social organization built upon concepts of equality and fairness—for example, a rule of law dedicated to the provision of common, even universal, human rights.
To be sure, discussions of the meaning of privilege in light of privum lex and its negative impact on communities will go on. In effect, this may be an “ideological” interpretation of privilegere (as though a private law could exist without a system of ideas supporting it), one that we are reading back into the complexities of the Roman law from a contemporary critical approach to white privilege. According to that objection, the critical perspective starts from a conception of implicit unearned advantages, setting those who have them outside an undetermined larger community in which some people are denied comparable privileges. But that debate remains within the stalemate of abstraction, like the competition for metapositions mentioned above.
The object of this volume is the operation of segregating and sanctioning that underlies the privilege reflex. As Peggy McIntosh, one of the earliest analysts of white privilege, observes, “though ‘privilege’ may confer power, it does not confer moral strength,” and therefore it is crucial “to distinguish between earned strength [often on the part of the dominated] and unearned power conferred systemically” (1986, 296). The systemic bestowal of privilege as unearned power is perpetuated through its connection with mystifications and symbolic strategies that sacralize or give a timeless, universal character to the entitlements of privilege. Having admitted the difficulties, and above all the artificiality, of the polemics staking out metapositions, we approach the concept from the perspective of the application of laws and norms. If this volume operates on a presupposition, it is the desirability of promoting equality, but also equity, in a society based on democratic values.
Following McIntosh in examining the function of segregation and sanction that underlie the privilege reflex, we would emphasize that the isolated identification of privilege may entail three negative consequences. First, it may produce a recursive essentialization whereby the holder of privilege employs a naturalist argument to justify the discrimination it promotes, using anecdotes and sometimes science to insist that people are only “differentially equal,” and that in fact some are better able than others to procure social advantage or other goods. Second, the isolated identification of privilege may elicit quietism or despair: even if the power of a group set apart is not natural, little can be done to dismantle it. Indeed, there are so many privilege structures to be dismantled that one scarcely knows where to begin. Third, and perhaps most pernicious, the isolated identification of privilege may create the impression of a greater activism and engagement than mere identification can nourish. More is required—namely, extensive dialogue and interaction with social, legal, and political groups outside the “ivory tower.” Given the mechanisms of self-legitimation that accompany and promote privilege, instituting and perpetuating its hegemony, we cannot in good conscience assume that social change will naturally follow from academic debate about privilege.
In short, we submit that there is an irresponsible attitude toward privilege that encourages the exculpatory view that “everyone has some form of privilege,” or that “what is earned (or unearned) is ultimately indeterminable.” On this view, we are all “equal,” and we are all complicit in the systems of privilege within which we operate. The diversity of forms of privilege cannot and must not be allowed to follow George Orwell’s famously ironic dictum in Animal Farm that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (1951, 114). No doubt, the curious “private rights and benefits” implicit in the concept are many; they vary over time and place. Yet we must not turn away from the reality that—using McIntosh’s analogy of privilege as a bank account—a person whose privilege takes the form of white skin has more “income” to spend, and certainly more places to spend it, than the nonwhite person whose privilege conforms to a different model of the socially constructed “normal” citizen (including simply being able-bodied or heterosexual). So, while it is true—and necessary to acknowledge—that privileges come in many forms, we, the current social actors in a society still shaped by its history of racism against black people and white supremacist dogma, must become conscious of the particular perniciousness of white privilege. This, in essence, is why we feel the need at this time to contribute a volume in the area of critical white studies that challenges our readers to attend to the braiding of personal comforts into a broader economy of privilege.
White privilege can be empirically demonstrated: sociologists and anthropologists examine it as a process, for example, that takes shape in education, in the evolution of neighborhoods, in political representation, and in cultural creation. In these areas, privilege entails obstacles to and foreclosures of participation and presence in what is defined as common space. However, when proponents of the concept of privilege confront accusations that they are ideologically motivated, or pursuing restricted, parochial interests, and that they cannot prove that they are pursuing an authentically good life of a political community—or indeed, when they are accused of bad faith and resentment—this use of privilege opens onto what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard calls “a differend.”
A differend is what takes place when a group voices a complaint or a demand, say, as a plaintiff in a lawsuit. In voicing its demand, the group must use a language impervious to its experience; sometimes this is the language of the court itself, or of empirical science, or indeed of statistics. The language that must be heard and evaluated silences the demand or complaint; neither seen nor heard, the claimants discover that their lived experience cannot reach the legal or political status of that against which they are speaking. Thus, a differend is a communicative impasse. Practically speaking, it may be the death of the plaintiffs. Lyotard gives the example of plaintiffs bringing suit against the revisionist historian Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier in France (1988, 3–14). The claim they contest is one of existence itself: there were no gas chambers in Poland; therefore, there were no camps of “death.” If there had been, then those in the death camps would have been exterminated. But if the plaintiffs are alive to contest the Holocaust denier, then either they really do not know that the camps “killed” people (they could have been worked to death), or they would have to be dead themselves. Prove to us, then, you who are alive, that there were actual gassings. Many deniers resort to “scientific” arguments, objecting that they have sampled the stone in the structures remaining from the gas chambers and find no trace of gas. Thus the process, and even the question of proof, is stymied in a differend; in the language of chemistry and law, the plaintiffs can only adduce the numbers of the dead, perhaps in studies but above all of witnesses. Whether we have direct eyewitness accounts of lethal situations or not—in the case of the Holocaust, they exist in the journals of kapos and in transcripts of the trials of SS members, among others—the possibility of witnessing remains. One can bear witness to a differend by attempting to give voice to those whose voices do not qualify, that fail to reach the metaphorical radar screen of the dominant or reference group and its language. Precisely because analyses of privilege confront this accusation of ideological motivation, and are thereby reduced to relativistic and opportunistic claims for the authority of the metaposition—because the question of proof is stymied within this rhetorical contest of “competing ideologies”—we need to use braided narrative to produce the possibility of witnessing. In this volume, we present direct witnesses, frequently using braided narrative to that end. These witnesses examine their privilege and present examples of the denial of rights and benefits that they have witnessed. This is no longer “science”; it is an essential restoration of voice. Without a voice, confrontation and dialogue are impossible.
For all of these reasons, a focus on white privilege must be multiperspectival. It must assemble a variety of disciplines and discourses, that is, if it is to decompartmentalize “studies” and unite voices from poetry, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. From the vast contributions of women’s studies, critical race theory, and critical white studies, we draw the lines that intersect around white privilege itself, as an idea and as a multiplicity of lived realities.
This focus leads to a kind of epistemic crossroads at which the critical, comparative approaches to over- and underprivileged groups, to strategies of privilege conferral, and to the social outcomes of privilege distinctions can be examined from the perspective of a variety of academic disciplines. The decisive advantage of such a focus is the possibility of an expanded basis for comparison. Through a comparative approach, we can discern parallels and distinctions in strategic exclusions, and the institution of norms and myths that perpetuate them. Critical comparison brings to light the “factitious” quality of the social, psychological, and legal categories mobilized to maintain or increase privilege. It shows that these categories are neither inherent nor immutable. It brings to light the dynamic variety of external references—from language, to clothing, to social codes—and to what are deemed the “internal” aspects of privilege, understood here as gender, color, and physiognomy, to name a few. As an exercise in demystification, such an approach is useful for decompartmentalizing the important insights and analytic advances made by gender studies, critical race theory, critical white studies, and other class and gender analyses.
From a historical perspective, such a demystification project might ask, with respect to racial privilege, who is white, and why should we care today? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, Poles, Italians, and Russian and eastern European Jews—were not considered white. But today, it appears, they are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to speak English. Whiteness is a mythological category—denoting sameness, purity, and an internally changing yet fixed “transcendental”—even before it is ethnic or demographic. It might be surprising to hear whiteness described as mythological, but the research of many disciplines over the past several decades suggests that this is precisely how we should understand both race and privilege.3 When the question of white privilege was first raised, isolated attempts were made to theorize it within specific disciplines, occasionally broadening into interdisciplinary efforts. Today, however, analyses of white privilege are spilling over disciplinary boundaries, and we are beginning to see the formation of multidisciplinary discourse on the subject. This more encompassing way of conceptualizing privilege has many styles.
The collection of essays presented here encourages this transgression of disciplinary boundaries by bringing together the finest creative nonfiction, statistical analysis, and clinical and cross-cultural research in the philosophical framework of critical white studies. We have attempted to collect a representative cross-section of research by some of the most prominent scholars of white privilege and marginalization in the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, and literature, including some intriguing new voices. Our approach to white privilege is an intentional act of subversion of the so-called silos that academic disciplines often are, each holding itself out as the site at which reality is being critically investigated within the academy. These diverse interrogations, taking place in parallel and without sufficient reference to one another, sometimes create what the philosopher Lewis Gordon calls “disciplinary decadence”: the territoriality and self-imposed isolation of academic discourses. While it must be acknowledged that each of the disciplines studying privilege, how it functions, and its consequences is producing valuable and exciting research, we think that the findings are more valuable when the disciplines cross-fertilize one another. When we arrive at a crossroads at which we can see disciplinary convergences and divergences, we confront the possibility of a more critical discourse—because better informed by interdisciplinary insights—and more coherent strategies for building socially just communities. Our hope in marking this crossroads is precisely to illuminate the commonalities and interconnections of apparently discrete interrogations by placing them side by side.
Thus our approach to privilege is grounded in attention to equity and solidarity. Perhaps the best way to describe what is at stake is to highlight the discussion of one of our contributors, the philosopher Marilyn Nissim-Sabat. Nissim-Sabat recounts Lewis Gordon’s argument for abandoning the trope of white privilege: “A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the white privilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things?” (quoted in Nissim-Sabat’s chapter in this volume). Opposing rights to privileges in this way suggests two important aspects of our inquiry: first, whether either discursive community realizes it or not, discourse on privilege is linked conceptually to discourse on human rights. Second, scholarly attention to white privilege should be the academic counterpart to the public policy of affirmative action. That is, it should be a broad-based initiative that aims to bring about its own eventual demise. The critiques of white privilege being produced in different disciplinary domains these days—a diversity reflected in this volume—will ultimately (or should ultimately) bring about a recognition that privilege, as privilegere, must be abolished if we are to create a world in which “necessities for a decent life” (Gordon’s phrase) are acknowledged as everybody’s basic human right.
A crossroads is a place at which people can, by definition, arrive by different paths. In identifying interdisciplinary investigation into white privilege as a crossroads, it is our hope to trace the origins of our journey to this point modestly and contingently, noting our multiple starting points. One such journey was Eula Biss’s collection of essays Notes from No Man’s Land, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009. Part of the power of this book is precisely its use of “braided narrative” in autobiographical essays that provide historical and social analysis of racism in the United States. Moved by her fresh and incisive analysis, we invited some of the most creative writers in critical race theory and critical white studies to contribute an essay to this volume. In adopting an approach that seeks to combine disciplines and well-structured personal narratives, we look at privilege as an experiential reality in the lives of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and poets—whether African American, African, Caribbean, Latino/Latina, or white.
In the pages that follow, the insights of personal experience ground the chapters in individual lives, even as they destabilize any academic claim that this discourse belongs to a specific discipline or disciplines that could have the final, authoritative word. Our conception of braided narrative encompasses both first-person-singular and first-person-plural voices—speaking into the scholarly record of the lived realities of groups and nationalities, as well as individuals, on the matter of white privilege. Some of our contributors have taken up this methodology, as invitation or as challenge, and have woven deeply personal memoirs and anecdotes into their analyses of privilege. Other chapters provide a metadiscussion; see, for instance, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s discussion of the social and statistical array of colors along the color line in Brazil; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Victor Ray, and Louise Seamster’s meditation on global racialized practices in the age of Obama; and Paget Henry’s account of the interwoven history of Africana phenomenology and political economy with European history. Their contributions model forms of cultural hybridity that expand our conception of “braiding” as a narrative synthesis of theory and practice.
1. To be sure, this is much less the case among persons claiming whiteness as a sovereign or hegemonic identity and aesthetic object of pride. That is, if one is persuaded that European culture represents the highest realization of all human cultures, then one already has a legitimation mechanism so powerful that one will be impervious to the question of “privilege.” Privilege per se will flow by definition from cultural and social Darwinism.
2. The Dictionnaire latin français, known as the “Gaffiot,” defines “privilegium” as the synthesis of privus and lex, thus “an exceptional law that especially concerns a particular person or group, and is passed against him or them.” It refers to Cicero, De legibus (On the laws), 3.44. At its inception, “private law” circumscribed particular persons or groups with a view to social or legal exclusion. Later, it took on an expanded sense, moving from circumscription to the normalization of unearned entitlements. See Gaffiot 1934.
3. See, for example, Yancy 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2010. A comprehensive list would be impossible here, but Bhabha 1998, Feagin 1995, Ignatiev and Garvey 1996, Guess 2006, Kincheloe 1999, Omi and Winant 1986, Perea 1997, and Stanfield 1985, among others, discuss this question.
Bhabha, Homi. 1998. The white stuff (political aspects of whiteness). Artforum International 36, no. 9: 21–23.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2010. Anything but racism: How social scientists limit the significance of racism. New York: Routledge.
Feagin, Joe. 2000. Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations. New York: Routledge.
Feagin, Joe, Hernán Vera, and Pinar Batur. 1995. White racism. New York: Routledge.
Gaffiot, Félix. 1934. Dictionnaire latin français. Paris: Hachette. http://www.lexilogos.com/latin/gaffiot.php.
Guess, Teresa. 2006. The sociological construction of whiteness: Racism by intent, racism by consequence. Critical Sociology 32, no. 4: 649–73.
Ignatiev, Noel, and John Garvey, eds. 1996. Race traitor. New York: Routledge.
Kincheloe, Joe L. 1999. The struggle to define and reinvent whiteness: A pedagogical analysis. College Literature 26, no. 3: 162–94.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The differend: Phrases in dispute. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. Working Paper #189, Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, Massachusetts.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Orwell, George. 1951. Animal farm. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Perea, Juan. 1997. The black/white binary paradigm of race: The “normal science” of American racial thought. California Law Review 85, no. 5: 1213–58.
Stanfield, John H. 1985. Theoretical and ideological barriers to the study of race-making. Research in Race and Ethnic Relations 4:161–81.
Yancy, George. 2003. Who is white? Latinos, Asians, and the new black/nonblack divide. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.