Race in Mind: Critical Essays

What’s Critical about White Studies

I have left this essay substantially as it appeared in 2004, with updating mainly in the notes. The fashion in Whiteness studies has continued in the intervening decade in much the shape that it took then. Both the praise and the cautions I laid out originally still apply to this robust field of scholarship.

In the spring of 1966 many Black and some White and Asian students at Seattle’s inner-city Garfield High School went on strike, asking the school board to devote more resources to educating minority children, hire more minority teachers, and install antiracist curriculum. One of the speakers at a rally and workshop at Mt. Zion Baptist Church was James Bevel, an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and intimate of Dr. Martin Luther King. One of the White participants asked Bevel, “What is the place of White people in the Negro revolution?” (Remember, this was 1966, and the terminological turn to Black Power would not hit the streets of African American neighborhoods for another year.) He apparently regarded himself as a member of the liberal vanguard, was excited to be at this revolutionary gathering, and wanted specific direction as to how to be helpful. He may also have wanted to be told what a fine thing it was for a White person such as himself to do something on behalf of Blacks.

So it was with some dismay that he received Bevel’s reply: “There is no place for White people in the Negro revolution. We are trying to organize ourselves to take control of our lives. White people are the problem. You need to go back to White people and teach them not to be racists.” It was not what that White person wanted to hear, for he was looking for a way to be at the center of the action, where Black people were making a social revolution. Now he was being told not to sap the energy of the Black people around him, to go home and attend to a less glamorous chore, the subtle and difficult task of addressing White racism from within the White community. To his credit, he did just that, and spent much of the next decade talking to White people about their racism.

The sentiment in Bevel’s injunction to go back to White people and teach them not to do bad stuff about race seems to be at the base of the enduring vogue in White studies. There has been an extraordinary outpouring of literature examining Whiteness. If one typed the word Whiteness into a library catalogue in 1995, one might pull up a half-dozen references. Typing the same word in 2002 yields hundreds. In the 2010s, typing it into Google yields thousands. This essay surveys the first decade of that literature, its premises, preoccupations, and themes. Further, it attempts to sort out what parts of the White studies literature are helpful in challenging the system of racial hierarchy that governs American social relations and what parts tend toward other effects—to determine, in short, what is critical about White studies.¹

Jonathan Rutherford, a British critic, writes about his motivation to study Whiteness.

I was prompted to start thinking about my own ethnic identity by the contemporary generation of black and Asian English intellectuals—Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Lola Young, Pratibha Parmar—who were thinking reflexively and historically about race, gender and ethnicity. My involvement in radical politics on the left had taught me to disavow the racial exclusivity of white ethnicity, but never to analyse or try and understand it. Being white was a vague, amorphous concept to get hold of; it wasn’t a colour, it was invisible. And who wanted the risible, sometimes ugly, baggage of Englishness? Everything which signified Englishness—the embarrassing legacy of racial supremacy and empire, the union jack waving crowds, the royalty, the rhetoric about Britain’s standing in the world—suggested a conservative deference to nostalgia. The problem with intellectually disowning white English ethnicity was that the left never got around to working out what it was, and what our own emotional connections to it were.²

Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey pride themselves on being “race traitors.” Like Rutherford, they are White but would disavow Whiteness. They begin with an insight with which this writer would not disagree: “the key to fundamental social change in the US is the challenge to the system of race privilege that embraces all whites.” Their definition of Whiteness is perhaps a bit idiosyncratic: “The white race consists of those who partake of the privileges of white skin…. [P]eople were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as ‘white’ because they were favored.” Then, invoking the memory of John Brown, they issue a call to “focus on whiteness and the struggle to abolish the white race from within” by disavowing the privileges of White skin.³

This, they say, is the “key to solving the social problems of our age…. [T]he majority of so-called whites in this country are neither deeply nor consciously committed to white supremacy; like most human beings in most times and places, they would do the right thing if it were convenient…. By engaging these dissidents in a journey of discovery into whiteness and its discontents, we hope to take part … in the process of defining a new human community.” They conclude, “The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.” What is not clear in this formulation is just how that “defection” from the White race is to be accomplished or how one can disavow one’s Whiteness and make it stick.⁴

OLDER TRADITIONS IN WHITE STUDIES

Garvey, Ignatiev, and Rutherford would study Whiteness in order to dethrone it. This is a different business from most older studies of White people, although, as we shall see, there are some points of similarity.⁵ The older Whiteness studies took several perspectives. First were the rantings of early-twentieth-century pseudoscientific racialists. Their name was legion, but among the most memorable of such writers were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Grant’s masterwork was The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (1916), in which he divided all of humankind into “races” on supposedly scientific principles and told why it was that vigor and virtue emerged out of competition among races as the distinctive qualities of Nordic peoples who drew their origins from Aryan ancestors. Grant argued that “conservation of [the White] race” was “the true spirit of Americanism.” Hitler apparently read Grant and thought it the true spirit of the Third Reich as well. Stoddard followed soon after with The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920), which made dire predictions of White people in Europe and North America being outbred and eventually overrun by fecund hordes of “inferior stocks”—Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans. Stoddard’s writing and Grant’s played a part in the racially inflected quotas and exclusions that distinguished the Immigration Act of 1924.⁶

Grant and Stoddard were crude, White supremacist race-baiters. Yet their racial assumptions have found marginally more genteel echoes in more recent times, covered by a thin veneer of pseudoscience and policy concern. Few were more prominent than Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), an attack on affirmative action hidden in a welter of bad science and bogus statistics. Almost as widely read and no less pernicious was Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation (1996). Here, an Anglo-Saxon immigrant attempted to pull up the ladder behind him, charging that brown and yellow immigrants were “making America … a freak among the world’s nations because of the unprecedented demographic mutation it is inflicting on itself.” Patrick Buchanan strummed the same chords in The Death of the West (2002).

Immigrant invasions imperil our county and citilization…. Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common—not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons…. Not only ethnically and racially, but culturally and morally, we are no longer one people or “one nation under God.” … In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots.

Samuel Huntington adopted a more genteel, sometimes scholarly tone and talked about “culture” when he meant “race,” but his message was essentially the same in Who Are We? (2005). These were relatively explicit celebrations of what the authors regarded as White superiority, a kind of literary Klanism.⁷

There has been a less overtly malevolent but still insidious literature: studies that focused on the experiences of White ethnic groups in such a way as to tend to ignore the fundamental differences between the experiences of White people and those of people of color in the United States. Books like Thomas Sowell’s Ethnic America (1981), Nathan Glazer’s Ethnic Dilemmas (1983), and Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1973) wrote about African Americans and other peoples of color as if they were ethnic groups just like Greeks and Swedes. The tendency of such works was to focus on the hardships faced by some White immigrant groups, to bare their grievances, and to shade into justification of White privilege by denying its distinctive existence.⁸

Then there were quite a large number of studies of White immigrant groups that lacked the racist political agenda of the books described above. The list includes many excellent titles, for example, The Transplanted, by John Bodnar; Voyagers to the West, by Bernard Bailyn (1986); Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer (1989); and Ethnic Identity, by Richard D. Alba (1990).⁹ These authors and others like them focused on White people and tried to understand and represent their experiences without any particular racist edge to their interpretations.

Finally, there were studies of White attitudes about race. Again, the list includes many distinguished books: The Nature of Prejudice, by Gordon W. Allport (1954); White over Black, by Winthrop D. Jordan (1968); The Black Image in the White Mind, by George Fredrickson (1971); American Slavery—American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan (1975); and The White Man’s Indian, by Robert Berkhofer (1978).¹⁰ These were varieties of Whiteness studies, too. They focused on the historical contexts in which and the social and psychological processes by which White people constructed the American racial system in slavery and colonialism and the outworkings of that system in White minds in later years.

This brief tour of older studies of Whiteness is not intended to assert direct lines of descent from, say, Madison Grant or Edmund Morgan to the Whiteness studies boom of the turn of the millennium. They were writers of different times, operating with different tools and insights and from different motives. I do intend to suggest, however, that the range of Whiteness studies in earlier eras—from studies of White racism to works on specific White groups to books that fail to recognize their racism and, finally, to those that openly express it—is echoed in the new. In the new Whiteness studies as in the old, there are substantial and important works that contribute vital insights to our understanding of race and racism; there are also other books, alas, that shade over into White-centeredness and finally into racist abuse. One of the tasks of this chapter is to sort out one from another.

NEW WHITENESS STUDIES

Among the older strands of Whiteness studies, the ones I have marked as racist (Stoddard, Herrnstein, Buchanan, et al.) had origins on the political right. The studies of White immigrant groups and White racial thinking before the 1990s hewed more to the middle of the road. The new Whiteness studies of the 1990s and the twenty-first century, by contrast, stem from the political left.

The founding parents of this latter movement were Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and Toni Morrison. Saxton’s book, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, started the trend in 1990. It is an analysis of the role of racial thinking in the shifting class bases of political parties in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. Saxton begins with the assumption that racial ideas began in North America as an attempt by Europeans to justify enslavement of Africans and expropriation and expulsion of Native Americans.¹¹ He then traces changes in racial thinking by various groups of Americans, as the vehicle by which he explains the changing alignments of White class groupings in the major political parties. In short, Saxton treats “the generation and regeneration of white racism ‘as part of the process of class conflict and compromise.’”¹²

Saxton, then, is interested in the history of the creation and transformation of concepts about racial inequality. Underlying that, he is interested in the course of class conflict. He sees racial thinking primarily as a tool created and used by White people to pursue class-based political alliances among White people. This is not quite crude Marxism—race as mere false consciousness, a gloss on class. It nonetheless amounts to an admittedly sophisticated and informed attempt to reduce racial oppression to an expression of class conflict.¹³ The Rise and Fall of the White Republic is a serious attempt to understand the ways that racial ideas and racial marking on the part of Whites shaped US politics in the nineteenth century.

David Roediger’s much-acclaimed Wages of Whiteness (1991) is a book about class formation among Whites, too. Bearing the subtitle, Race and the Making of the American Working Class, it argues that White workers in the mid-nineteenth century gathered themselves into a self-conscious, activist working class, not only on the basis of class interests, but also on the basis of a racist intention to distance themselves from that other great part of the working class, Black workers. Roediger starts from an elaboration of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of a psychic wage that accrued to Whites from their very Whiteness: “The pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers. That is, status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South. White workers could, and did, define and accept their class positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and as ‘not Blacks.’” Thus, “working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the US white working class.”¹⁴

The power of Roediger’s book is enhanced by the subtlety of his argument and the variety of his methods and areas of inquiry. He examines political speech, crowd behavior, folklore, humor, and audience responses to minstrel shows, among other things. His argument is, in the end, equal parts psychological and class analysis: “Whiteness was a way in which workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline. As the US working class matured, principally in the North, within a slaveholding republic, the heritage of the Revolution made independence a powerful masculine personal ideal. But slave labor and ‘hireling’ wage labor proliferated in the new nation. One way to make peace with the latter was to differentiate it sharply from the former…. [T]he white working class, disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to construct an image of the Black population as ‘other’—as embodying the preindustrial, erotic, careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for.”¹⁵

Roediger starts from the conviction, adopted from Coco Fusco, that “to ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it.”¹⁶ This conviction stands at the ideological base of Whiteness studies. Yet if there is a criticism to be made of The Wages of Whiteness, it is that in it Roediger, like most of the Whiteness studies writers, expresses a rhetoric of normative Whiteness. “Workers” are assumed to be White unless they are racially marked as “Blacks,” and the most important thing about Black workers is their Blackness, not their participation in the working class.¹⁷ Roediger recognized the dangers in this posture and worked to undercut it in several later works. A volume of essays, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), took up several themes tangential to The Wages of Whiteness. More consistently than in the first book he treated Blacks and other people of color as actors in their own right, not merely as foils for White workers. In Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998), Roediger reproduced the writings of four dozen African American writers, from Anna Julia Cooper to Lewis Gordon. Here was a book about Whiteness, but it was not fixed on the ideas of White people. Rather, it sought to dethrone White privilege by putting the analysis of Whiteness in the hands of Blacks. In Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005), Roediger carried the story forward into the twentieth century and detailed how, he thought, immigrants at first were not White in America and how they worked hard to become Whites in the national imagination, against a tide of nativist sentiment and anti-immigrant legislation.¹⁸

Toni Morrison completed the foundation of the White studies movement in 1992 with Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Roediger and Saxton are interested in the White working class and its relationship to racial identity politics. Morrison’s interest is American literature. Not only, Morrison said, has American literature been dominated by White male authors and White male critics, but the values of literary criticism, the decisions as to what is important and excellent and true, have been appropriated by White men in hegemonic ways that have denied that appropriation. Valuing the universal (read “White”) over the particular (read “Black”), they have virtually erased Black characters, Black authors, Black themes, Black issues from the central part of American literature. But just as Saxton and Roediger find White workers defining their identities against Black workers, so, too, Morrison finds the White writers of the canon (Hemingway, Faulkner, and others) defining the major issues, indeed the national character, in relationship to Blackness. She argues that “the metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive places in American literature, in the ‘national’ character, and ought to be a major concern of the literary scholarship that tries to know it.”¹⁹

The Wages of Whiteness, Playing in the Dark, and The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, then, are foundational examples of what is substantive and distinctive about Whiteness studies. Morrison, Roediger, and, less explicitly, Saxton analyze Whiteness in order, one might say, to decenter it, to make it less hegemonic, to reduce its power. Other useful examples of White studies abound.

Theodore Allen joined the discussion with The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997). Instead of the nineteenth century as the critical time for White racial formation, Allen looks to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He posits a time before the categories “White” and “Black” had social meaning, when national labels such as “English” and “Irish” were the modes of identity. He argues with polemical ferocity that the White race was invented no later than the middle of the eighteenth century by the planter elite of the Chesapeake colonies, as a deliberate measure of social control. The laboring classes were divided, White and free on one side, Black and slave on the other.²⁰

Tomás Almaguer expanded the discussion beyond the Black/White dichotomy in Racial Fault Lines (1994). Roediger had made some mention of White workers defining themselves against Chinese workers in the West, but otherwise the authors discussed up to this point all saw race as a binary relationship between Black and White. Looking at the construction and uses of Whiteness in California in the second half of the nineteenth century, Almaguer paints a more complicated picture. Here there were not just White and Black people but Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Native Americans as well.²¹ Almaguer found White people coming to the West with preexisting convictions about White racial superiority and then creating a new racial hierarchy out of local materials.

For Almaguer, as for Saxton, Allen, and Roediger, race making is critically intertwined with class making. But unlike them, he argues for “the primacy of race…. Beginning in 1870 and intensifying dramatically in the 1880s, an economy based on wage labor eclipsed that based on the unfree labor system of the Mexican period. Once unleashed, this proletarianization absorbed both the indigenous Mexican population and the numerous white and nonwhite immigrant groups that settled in the area.” “Racial status” played a “central role” in co-creating the new class structure.

Far from being merely an ideological construct or an anachronistic status designation, race became the key organizing principle structuring white supremacist economic, as well as political, institutions that were introduced in California. White male immigrants became farmers, proprietors, professionals, and white-collar employees, while the Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian male populations were securely ensconced at the bottom end of the class structure as unskilled manual workers.²²

The multiple sides of Almaguer’s analysis may tempt some to conclude that Racial Fault Lines is something other than Whiteness studies. But though he is sensitive to the existence and issues of other groups, the actors in his story are White people, and the story is about the ways they drew lines between themselves and various peoples of color—the ways they defined and used Whiteness.

Neil Foley echoed Almaguer’s description of a multiple-sided racial encounter in The White Scourge (1997). Set in the cotton country of Central Texas, mainly in the first decades of the twentieth century, The White Scourge examines the relationships between Blacks, Mexicans, and poor Whites. Where Almaguer focused on Whites making racial distinctions, Foley treats all three of the groups under study as actors and attends to the ways they negotiated their identities and class positions. For Foley, as for Almaguer, the critical item under negotiation was Whiteness. As cotton farming grew into agribusiness at the dawn of the century, former sharecroppers and tenant farmers became proletarian field workers. Foley finds that, for a time, poor Whites lost some of their racial privilege relative to Black and especially to Mexican agricultural workers. Conversely, for a brief period, Mexicans were able to negotiate a place for themselves partway between Black and White, taking on, Foley says, a measure of Whiteness.²³

George Lipsitz turned a harsh lens on White privilege in an influential essay and book, both titled The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1995, 1998).²⁴ Lipsitz offers a brilliant tour of American racial history, showing how, in each era from Jamestown up to the present, and in various sectors of the economy and polity, powerful Whites have chosen to establish structures that favored European-derived Americans over peoples of color and then masked those decisions behind the language of individualism. “From the start,” says Lipsitz, “European settlers in North America established structures encouraging 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, restricted naturalized citizenship to ‘white’ immigrants, and provided pretexts for exploiting labor, seizing property, and denying the franchise to Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans.”²⁵

This drawing a line between Whites and people of color, and favoring the former over the latter, did not end with slavery, however. Lipsitz offers example after example of this practice, from the racist quality of the American seizure of the Philippines to the 1978 Bakke decision against affirmative action to FHA housing policies that helped create all-White suburbs. Nonetheless, he concludes, almost hopefully, “The problem with white people is not our whiteness, but our possessive investment in it. Created by politics, culture, and consciousness, our possessive investment in whiteness can be altered by those same processes, but only if we face the hard facts openly…. How can we account for the ways in which white people refuse to acknowledge their possessive investment in whiteness even as they work to increase its value every day? We can’t blame the color of our skin. It must be the content of our character.”²⁶

One of the most sophisticated examples of the merits of White studies is Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998).²⁷ Jacobson attempts to chart the entire history of the European immigrant peoples of the United States and to examine the relationships among those peoples. He divides American racial history into three periods. The first was 1790–1840, when “free white persons” as designated in the first naturalization law was an amorphous category that had some element of hierarchy within it but that did not sharply delineate among varieties of European-descended peoples. For Jacobson, the crucial tool that made these peoples a common White race was republican ideology—an estimate of their fitness for self-government. In the second period, 1840–1924, Jacobson finds the White race broken up into some groups that are White and some that are less so—perhaps even some that are not White (he is not consistent on that point)—under the force of more varied immigration, the rise of industry, and pseudoscientific racial theorizing. That hierarchy among Whitenesses explains the Anglocentric quota system at the heart of the 1924 Immigration Act. In the third period, 1924–65, White people were mushed together again into an amorphous group called Caucasians.²⁸

The strength of Whiteness of a Different Color is that it takes seriously the hierarchies that existed among White people and tries to account for them. There are some problems near the book’s core, however. For one thing, although on nearly every page Jacobson speaks of the “racial” character of this or that distinction, at no place does he define what “racial” means for him.²⁹ So when he says that the differences among Anglo-Americans, Irish, and Jews were racial, we are not quite sure what he means. He seems to want to set up various European immigrant peoples as racially separate from the dominant group of Whites, especially in his middle period. Surely, there was hierarchy among Whites (and surely, by his own evidence but contrary to his schema, it existed in all three periods). But that does not mean that the disabilities suffered by Irish or Italians or Jews in the United States achieved the same scale as those suffered by peoples of color. Some people may have used “race” language in the middle period to describe what they called “ethnic” differences in another period, but that does not mean that the groups were more sharply divided in the middle period; it may only mean that the language fashion changed.

Jacobson very seldom even mentions African or Native or Mexican or Asian Americans, but on those few occasions when he does, it is clear that the disabilities suffered by subordinate White “races” pale by comparison. He writes:

Reconstruction collapsed in the South, raising new questions about the relations among whites and blacks in an era of black Emancipation and the reintegration of the South into national political life. In the aftermath of Custer’s demise … the Great Sioux Wars ended with the defeat of the Minneconjou Sioux; Sitting Bull escaped to Canada, and Crazy Horse surrendered to federal troops. A vocal and often violent anti-Chinese movement coalesced in the West, particularly in California, where white workers decried the labor competition of “Mongolians” and insisted upon a “white man’s republic.” The East and Midwest, meanwhile, were wracked by labor unrest which raised questions in some quarters about the white immigrant working class itself.³⁰

“Raised questions” versus killed, enslaved, imprisoned on reservations, and excluded from the country. Yes, there were groups of Whites who were set off from the dominant group, and they had less privilege, but that does not mean that they were racially separate from dominant-group Whites or that their disadvantage came close to that experienced by peoples of color. They could vote, they were eligible for naturalization, and no one was killing them on account of their ethnicity. Theirs was, as the title suggests, not non-Whiteness but “Whiteness of a different color.” Yet Jacobson’s book is premised in part on their being more separate and disadvantaged than that, and the evidence just will not support such a claim.

Despite such shortcomings, Whiteness of a Different Color, like The White Scourge, The Wages of Whiteness, and other similar books, is a significant help to our understanding of the ways that race has been constructed and used. The best White studies are like these, historically grounded studies of how the White group was formed and how power has been employed to enhance and maintain it.³¹

There is a related movement—critical race theory—that is worth mentioning as an adjunct to Whiteness studies. Critical race theory is an intellectual movement primarily within legal scholarship circles.³² Some progressive legal scholars saw the modest gains experienced by people of color during the Civil Rights movement disappearing in the 1970s. They grew impatient with the standard liberal approaches to racial justice. Turning to neo-Marxist and postmodern ideas, they fashioned a new approach to legal interpretation surrounding racial issues.³³ Critical race theory intersects with Whiteness studies through one of its offshoots: critical White studies. The branching began with an article by Cheryl Harris in the Harvard Law Review, “Whiteness as Property” (1993). There, she made from a legal point of view much the same argument that Lipsitz would later make in terms more broadly cultural and political. In White by Law (1996), Ian Haney López broadened Harris’s analysis to show how Whites used the law to draw lines around their Whiteness and reinforce their privilege. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (1997) widened the discussion of critical White studies in a massive compendium of writings by legal scholars and others on the ways that White people have created and maintained White privilege.³⁴

WE ARE OTHER, TOO: THE PROBLEM WITH WHITENESS STUDIES

If these are the many strengths and important achievements of Whiteness studies, are there weaknesses, too? Alas, there are. The problems stem from what seem to be the motivations behind much of the White studies movement. One factor seems to be embarrassment on the part of some White people who regard themselves as sensitive to racial issues—embarrassment that they are White. Jonathan Rutherford, in the passage quoted early in this chapter, used that word to describe the root of his desire to study Whiteness.³⁵ No one wants to be part of the problem. People of sensitivity and goodwill want to be part of the solution. However, that desire may shade over into a longing to be at the center of action, racially speaking. Like the young man whose story opened this chapter, Whiteness studies people want to be on the side of progressive social change in racial matters.

Embarrassment and a desire to be at the center of action lead some people to want to flee their Whiteness. Rutherford writes of a longing to “disown … white English ethnicity,” and Ignatiev and Garvey call on progressive Whites to “defect” from, in fact to “abolish,” the White race.³⁶ That would neatly solve the embarrassment problem and perhaps put one at the center of the action, but how can one do that? The Black theologian James Cone put a positive spin on the dilemma in 1970, long before the White studies movement: “There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’”³⁷

One way, perhaps, to lessen the tension is to suggest that one is not an oppressor because one is not quite so White as those bad Whites who are the main oppressors. This leads to the We Are Other, Too fallacy that is a significant subtheme in the Whiteness studies movement. Some White people, in desiring to flee or disavow their Whiteness, retreat into the comforting assertion that they (or some other Whites with whom they identify) are not, or were not always, quite so White as the main White oppressors.

They begin with the accurate observation that there has long been a hierarchy among White Americans along lines of ancestral nationality and that it has sometimes assumed a racial tone (i.e., the language people have used to describe it has sometimes referred to supposedly innate characteristics and phenotype). This hierarchy within Whiteness can be illustrated by the following exercise. More than two hundred audiences over thirty-five years—students, church groups, and people attending public lectures—have been asked to rank ten American ethnic groups “according to how closely they approximate the core of what it means to be an American.” In every single case, the audience, on average, gave a ranking that looked about like this:³⁸

1. English

2. Swedish

3. Irish

4. Polish

5. Jewish

6. Black

7. American Indian

8. Mexican

9. Japanese

10. Arab

Something very like this hierarchy was coded into the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on Eastern and Southern European immigrants and banned Asians outright. Such a hierarchy was assumed by Florence Ewing, a kind White woman from Missouri, who early in the twentieth century wrote the names of all her high school friends next to their pictures in her scrapbook. The ethnicity of her Anglo-American, German, and Scandinavian Protestant and Irish Catholic friends went unmarked, but she felt compelled to write “Jewish” next to the names of those to whom that appellation might be applied. It did not mean that she was not equally their friend, only that their Jewish identity made them something less than other Whites.³⁹

Starting from the observation of such a hierarchy among White people, some students of Whiteness take it a step further to the assertion that Jews or Irish or Italians or some other group of White people once were not White. Thus we see books and articles about How Whomever Became White. The unspoken assertion is, “We have race, too, the same as people of color. We are not part of the problem because we are Other, too.”

The standard-bearer in this trend is Noel Ignatiev, in an influential book with the provocative title, How the Irish Became White (1995). Intrinsic to Ignatiev’s argument is an idiosyncratic definition of Whiteness. He begins with the observations that race is not biological in origin but rather that people are assigned to races, and that there is an intimate “connection … between concepts of race and acts of oppression.” One is not White in one’s person, and a group of people are not a White group in their being. Rather, they are White insofar as they participate in oppressing others who are defined as the racial target for subordination. For Ignatiev, “The white race consists of those who partake of the privileges of white skin.” This provides him with the conceptual foundation from which to argue that for Irish Americans in the nineteenth century, “to enter the white race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society.”⁴⁰ That is, by the quirks of Ignatiev’s definitions, the Irish were once not White, and then they worked to become White by drawing a distinction between themselves and people who were not White and actively oppressing those people.

Ignatiev argues there was a time in Ireland when Irish people were oppressed in something like racial terms. English people colonized Ireland, took away people’s lands and livelihoods, and created an ideology of Irish innate, quasi-biological inferiority—not quite Black, but not like English people either. Irish people came to America and were slotted into low class positions—though not as low as slaves or free Blacks. Here, according to Ignatiev, instead of making class solidarity with African Americans, the Irish chose to be White—that is, to be oppressive—in order to distance themselves from Blacks and improve their social and economic possibilities. Through the Catholic Church, labor unions, and the Democratic Party they claimed a place in what was becoming the White Republic.

The important contributions of Ignatiev’s polemic are his insistence on examining relations between White and Black members of the working class and his conclusion that adopting anti-Black attitudes and activities was essential to Irish Americans making a place for themselves above the bottom rung in the United States. His broader contention highlighted in the title, that the Irish were once not White and then chose to become White, is intelligible—but only if one recognizes and accepts his idiosyncratic definition of Whiteness not as biology or group identity but rather as choosing to act oppressively toward African Americans.

Yet the impact of the title and argument is quite different. Very few people comprehend Ignatiev’s definition of Whiteness, and fewer still accept it as normative. This writer has heard dozens of times since Ignatiev’s book was published, from White laypeople and scholars alike, some version of the following statement: “You know, the Irish weren’t always White. Once they were not White, and then they became White.” The implication is that the kind of mobility that Irish Americans are said to have experienced is readily available to people of color in the United States. It is an easy step from there to the racist conclusion that Blacks or Latinos or Indians or Asians have chosen not to become White out of their own perversity. Like the Irish, they could have become White and escaped the disabilities that are their lot.

Ignatiev would not own that interpretation. In Race Traitor and in How the Irish Became White he shows how vehemently he opposes White privilege and oppressiveness. That is why he wants to disown Whiteness. It is a noble urge but ultimately a misguided one. Ignatiev and other Whites (including this writer) cannot effectively disown our Whiteness, much as we might like to do so. We necessarily carry White privilege whether we want to do so or not. To illustrate: try as I may, I cannot change the fact that I can get a cab easily in midtown Manhattan, while a middle-aged Black man wearing similar clothing cannot. More consequentially, we will be seen differently when applying for a loan, seeking a job, or confronting a police officer. Whites as a group have better life chances than African Americans and other people of color. We can hate White privilege, we can denounce it, but until race is irrelevant in America—a distant day indeed—we cannot be not privileged. We can fight against racial hierarchy and oppression daily, but we cannot abolish the White race. We still enjoy the fruits of Whiteness, whether we want them or not.

The We Are Other, Too trend is carried further by Karen Brodkin in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America.⁴¹ One hesitates to cast aspersions on a book as good as How Jews Became White Folks. Brodkin began the study as an attempt to understand how race, class, and gender interpenetrate one another in American society. Gradually it turned, however, first into an exploration of changes in the nature of Jewishness and then into a kind of family history of racial identity. How Jews Became White Folks in fact does a superb job of illuminating how gender and class work together with race in the formation of identities and hierarchies in the American economic and political systems.

But in the more expansive theme that gives the book its title, Brodkin loses her way. Her central contention is that there was a time in American history when Jews were non-Whites. When she hews closer to her evidence, she describes Jews as being “not-quite white” or having “a whiteness of our own.”⁴² Here she refers to the fact that Jews have long held a lower position in the American ethnoracial hierarchy than White Gentiles (although that position has improved in recent generations and though it was never so low as any of the nation’s peoples of color). But more frequently than such nuanced phrasings, Brodkin boldly asserts, again and again, and without any supporting evidence, that Jews were in fact not White.

This is an example of Whiteness studies run amok. If this trend continues, one can expect to see books before long on How the Italians Became White,⁴³ How the Swedes Became White, perhaps even How the English Became White. It is pretty silly, and disrespectful of the genuine disabilities faced by people of color in America’s racial system.⁴⁴

The ultimate absurdity on the theme We Are Other, Too is John Gennari’s 1996 article, “Passing for Italian.” On the cover of the once-trendy cultural studies journal Transition that title runs across a picture of Denny Mendez, Miss Italia 1996—an apparently Black woman. One might expect Gennari’s article to be a meditation on the complexities of Italian identity in an age when immigrants (including the Dominican-born Mendez) are remaking the ethnic map of places that are frequently thought to be racially homogeneous. That would be a worthy subject. Instead, we are treated to a self-indulgent essay whose central contention is that there is “a distinct tradition of interethnic identification[,] … the black/Italian crossover fantasy,” which Gennari calls “‘goombah blackness’—an affective alliance between Italian and African Americans based on mutual desires and pleasures, and grounded particularly in a tradition of boisterous male assertiveness.” Blacks and Italians, says Gennari, are natural pals.

Gennari’s evidence? He has almost none, beyond assertions that Marvin Gaye admired Frank Sinatra, that Sinatra admired Billie Holiday, that Sinatra hung out with Sammy Davis Jr., and that Sinatra and some gangsta rappers had similar attitudes toward women. The suspicion lingers that Gennari is just a White guy attempting to appropriate Blackness in order to make himself look more hip. It does not work. Sinatra’s attitudes may have been similar to those of some hip-hop artists, and there surely have been times and places where Blacks and Italians (and others) have interacted (see the description of Herb Jeffries’s career in chapter 2). But I know of no Black neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s where more than a tiny handful of people even listened to Frank Sinatra, much less thought him one of their own. There is no evidence at all of a special affinity between the Black and Italian American populations at large. “Passing for Italian” is pernicious silliness.⁴⁵

Thus, many White studies authors assert, without adequate foundation, a parallel between racial divisions and the situations of White ethnic groups. And almost none ask the comparative questions that would be needed to prove their assumptions true. For example, precisely how are the disabilities suffered by Jews or Italians like—and how are they unlike—those suffered by Blacks and Indians? Do those disabilities stem from the same causes? Are they equally susceptible to remediation? These and questions like them are worth asking, but one will not find them asked in Whiteness studies.

There is another theme in some studies of Whiteness by White feminists, and it borders on an assertion that We Are Other, Too. It is the implication that femaleness Blackens, that because a White person or group is female that person or group does not partake of White privilege to the same degree as do White males. I take that to be a nearly spoken subtext in the interchange between Catharine MacKinnon and Martha Mahoney in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (1991, 1993).⁴⁶ I do not wish to contest or discount the very real disabilities faced by White women in a sexist society—quite the contrary. In fact, I offer this observation with the utmost tentativeness, as I am a White male and so am of the oppressing class on both counts. Nonetheless, there is something pernicious about adopting, even by subtle implication, the oppression of members of a group to which one does not belong. Salient refutations of such an assertion of common otherness are made by a number of feminists of color, among them bell hooks, Hazel Carby, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Donna Awatere.⁴⁷

Finally, the We Are Other, Too vector in Whiteness studies extends to skinhead chic. The taking off point here is a smart, funny, subversive collection of essays called White Trash (1997), edited by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz. The editors describe their project thus: “Poor or marginal whites occupy an uncharted space in recent identity studies, particularly because they do not easily fit the model of whiteness-as-power proposed by many multiculturalist or minority discourses. Associated in mainstream culture with ‘trashy’ kitsch or dangerous pathologies rather than with the material realities of economic life, poor whites are treated as degraded caricatures rather than as real people living in conditions of poverty and disempowerment.”⁴⁸ Thandeka, in a Tikkun essay called “The Cost of Whiteness” (1999), echoed that analysis.

I am not denying “white privilege.” All whites … benefit from their wage of whiteness. Such talk of privilege, however, is incomplete unless we also speak of its penalty. For poorer wage earners without power, money or influence, their wage of whiteness functions as a kind of workers’ … “consolation prize” to persons, who, although not wealthy, do not have to consider themselves losers because they are, at least, white…. These workers are, in effect, exploited twice: first as workers and then as “whites.” … Whiteness functions as a distraction from the pervasive class problem.⁴⁹

This is a convoluted way of saying that Thandeka wants the real problem to be class, not race. But it is also a serious attempt to address the disabilities faced by poor people who are White.

Where are the lines between (1) exploring Whiteness, (2) rescuing White working-class culture from abuse by outsiders, (3) celebrating Whiteness as a positive identity, and (4) embracing White supremacist racism? It is not always clear. A tour of who-bought-what-else from Amazon.com led from excellent Whiteness studies books by Roediger and Jacobson to White trash books like Wray and Newitz’s. Then the trail went on to Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (1998). Finally, it landed in the heart of Aryan Nation: They Were White and They Were Slaves (1993) by Michael Hoffman and The South Was Right! (1994) by James Ronald Kennedy.⁵⁰ Where exactly was it that the antiracist intent of Whiteness studies shaded into advocacy of White racism? It is not clear, but that is the path it took.

Brodkin, Ignatiev, and nearly all the authors of the We Are Other, Too school express a desire to undermine White privilege. These authors, as much as Lipsitz, Roediger, and the other more successful writers on the theme, seem to be trying conscientiously to do what James Bevel instructed that White man to do in 1966: go back and teach White people about their bigotry. The best examples of Whiteness studies achieve that goal. Still, even the best authors in this field spend nearly all their time talking about White people. And there are so many authors, writing so much about Whiteness.⁵¹ Each of them surely makes a contribution to the understanding of Whiteness. And White studies has opened up space for some very creative and insightful riffing on activities around race.⁵² But they place White people at the center of investigation, saying by implication, “It is White people who are the important ones.”⁵³

The sheer volume of Whiteness studies overwhelms the senses. Even in the study of race, an exhorbitant amount of attention seems to be going to White people. Early in the 2000s, I was standing on a street corner talking with a Filipino American scholar about Whiteness studies. He asked, “Don’t you White guys have enough already? You are the subject matter of almost all the departments on campus. Now you want ethnic studies, too?” His observation was not far off the mark. How sad that some of the makers of White studies should, in attempting to dethrone Whiteness, end up examining it obsessively and placing it at the center yet again.

NOTES

This chapter originally appeared in Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel, eds., Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 248–74. It appeared again in Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan, ed. David J. Libby, Paul Spickard, and Susan Ditto (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 107–25. Patrick Miller, Lori Pierce, Nick Spreitzer, Puk Degnegaard, Stephen Cornell, Laurie Mengel, Reginald Daniel, David Torres-Rouff, Ingrid Page, Lynda Dumais, Ivana Lauro, and Jonathan Glickstein were all generous in contributing to my thinking about White studies; none should be held responsible for the final shape of this essay.

1. See also Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32; Eric Arnesen, “A Paler Shade of White,” New Republic (June 24, 2002): 33–38. I am grateful for copies provided by Professor Arnesen. My take on the strengths and shortcomings of the Whiteness studies movement is different from Arnesen’s, as my analysis proceeds from different principles and focuses on different issues. Arnesen takes David Roediger and other scholars of Whiteness to task for being less than careful about definitions and less than thorough in their research, in a jot-and-tittle analysis of their argument and evidence. I argue more broadly about themes, motives, and potential social impact. Despite our differences of approach, I find Arnesen’s arguments and evidence generally convincing.

2. Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 5.

3. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–2, 9–10.

4. Ibid., 10–14.

5. Of course, one might point out that most studies of US history and culture for many decades were studies of White people, for people of color were left out. In this essay I focus on works that explicitly addressed the White race and its standing in the world.

6. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s, 1916 [several later editions]), ix; Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1920 [several later editions]). See also Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper, 1909) and The Day of the Saxon (New York: Harper, 1912); F. G. Crookshank, The Mongol in Our Midst (New York: Dutton, 1924). For analysis, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat from Scientific Racism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

7. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper, 1996), xxi; Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Declining Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 3–5; Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005). See also Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007); Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997); Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995); Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).

For correctives, see Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Patrick B. Miller, “The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement,” in We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity, ed. Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 124–41; Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

8. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Nathan Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), esp. “Blacks and Ethnic Groups: The Difference and the Political Difference It Makes,” 70–93; Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1973).

9. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). One might even call a book like Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks (New York: Knopf, 1934) an example of Whiteness studies.

10. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian (New York: Random House, 1978).

11. His ideas here are essentially those of Edmund Morgan in American Slavery—American Freedom. For a different view, see Jordan, White over Black.

12. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 1–18, 387, passim.

13. Perhaps the preeminent attempt to free Marxist interpreters from the assumption that class trumps, in fact is formative of race, is Robert Miles, Racism after “Race Relations” (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

14. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 13, 8. Roediger acknowledges his debt to Du Bois. It is not clear whether he intends, as Du Bois did, to invoke the biblical contention that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

15. Ibid., 13–14.

16. Ibid., 6.

17. Ibid., 173 and passim. Roediger later apologized for what he regarded as a mistake in the subtitle: adopting the rhetorical position that Whites (and in his reading of his own book, males) were the only members of the working class. The Wages of Whiteness, 188–89.

18. David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994); David R. Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998); David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Roediger’s collection of essays on the theme is Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16.3 (Spring 1997): 3–44.

19. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 63.

20. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994); vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 1997). Allen takes issue at length with the interpretations advanced by Jordan in White over Black. I find Jordan’s arguments more persuasive, as they are based on a careful reading of the historical sources and advanced with little polemic aforethought. For a nuanced account of the other side of the coin—the making of African American identity—in a similar time period, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

21. Truth be told, there were not just White and Black people in the places Saxton, Roediger, Allen, and Morrison examined, but they tended not to see Native Americans and others.

22. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 209, 104.

23. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

24. George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 369–87; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). See also the expanded edition, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

25. Lipsitz, “Possessive Investment,” 371.

26. Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, 233.

27. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). The analysis and some of the language used here are drawn from my review of this book for Social History 26.1 (2001).

28. The periods were not that simple, of course; in fact, the processes were so complex that it takes Jacobson every bit of 135 pages just to describe them. Part of his problem is that his evidence does not fit his periodization very well; he is continually forced to explain why key developments happened outside the periods to which they belong thematically. The schema has a simple beauty at its most abstract level, but when Jacobson gets down to the details it does not hold together.

29. To be fair, neither does this chapter define race. For my take on the meaning of race, see Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, “We Are a People,” in We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity, ed. Spickard and Burroughs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), esp. 2–7; and chaps. 1, 2, and 4 of this book.

30. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 140; emphasis added.

31. Other examples of excellence in Whiteness studies include Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010); Melanie E. L. Bush, Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a “Post-Racial” World, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011); Michelle Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Arab American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

There is a subgenre: practical manuals that encourage Whites to understand and work against their own racial privilege. Among these are Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2011); Tim Wise, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010); Shelly Tochluk, Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk about Race and How to Do It, 2nd ed. (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005).

32. There is an unrelated movement bearing the name “critical race theory” in education studies, too, but it is less well articulated and has had less impact.

33. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory (New York: New Press, 1995); Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

34. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707–91; Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). Harris drew on a number of roots in earlier legal studies of race, including A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). The title of this chapter is a play on the name of this movement. Looking beyond merely legal studies, it seeks to determine just what is critical (and what may not be) about White studies.

35. Rutherford, Forever England, 5.

36. Ibid.; Ignatiev and Garvey, Race Traitor, 10.

37. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), vii.

38. I have reported on this exercise in more detail in “Who Is an American? Teaching about Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy,” Immigration and Ethnic History Society Newsletter 31.1 (May 1999).

39. Scrapbook in the possession of the author.

40. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–2.

41. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). The analysis and some of the language used here are drawn from my review of this book for Social History 26.1 (2001). Far more thoughtful on the racial position of Jews in America is Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

42. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 22, 138.

43. In fact, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno published an edited collection of essays, Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003).

44. This is not to assert that White groups did not suffer terribly in other settings. The Irish in Ireland suffered bitter racialized oppression, as did Jews in Germany, Mennonites in Russia, and Armenians in Turkey. It is, however, to insist that there has been a qualitative difference between the disabilities suffered in the United States by lower-status Whites and those endured by people of color.

45. John Gennari, “Passing for Italian: Crooners and Gangsters in Crossover Culture,” Transition, no. 72 (1996): 36–48.

46. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman Anyway?,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1991): 13–33; Martha R. Mahoney, “Whiteness and Women, in Practice and Theory: A Reply to Catharine MacKinnon,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 5 (1993): 217–51. For related themes, see also Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Hauraki Greenland, “Maori Ethnicity as Ideology,” in Nga Take: Ethnic Relations and Racism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley, David Pearson, and Cluny Macpherson (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore, 1991), 90–107; Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Maureen T. Reddy, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Lewis Gordon makes a reflexive assertion that Blacks constitute a race gendered female, in “Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World,” in Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 73–88.

47. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Haunani-Kay Trask, “Pacific Island Women and White Feminism,” in From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 263–77; Donna Awatere, Maori Sovereignty (Auckland, NZ: Bradsheet, 1984), 42 and passim.

48. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), back cover. Wray carried this vector of argument to a triumphal conclusion in Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

49. Thandeka, “The Cost of Whiteness,” Tikkun 14.3 (May–June 1999): 33–38. See also Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (London: Continuum, 1999).

50. I made this investigation of www.amazon.com connections on July 29, 2000. Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Touchstone, 1998); Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold Story of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, 4th ed. (Dresden, NY: Independent History, 1993); James Ronald Kennedy, The South Was Right!, reprint ed. (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1994). Cf. Jeffrey Kaplan, ed., Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2000).

52. See, e.g., The White Issue, no. 73 of Transition (1996).

53. Richard Delgado makes essentially the same point, expressing amazement at “how white people, even ones of good will, twist discussions concerning race so that the conversation becomes about themselves.” Delgado, Critical Race Theory, xiii.