Discussing Donald Trump’s election victory with a panel of TV pundits, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude explained it with reference to race. “There’s this sense,” he said, “that whiteness is under threat.” He went on to elaborate, if not elucidate, what he meant by this. “All these demographic shifts,” he said, “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.” They are “confusing the hell out of” white people, and these white people, confused by children’s faces on Cheerios boxes, and threatened by this confusion, reacted against this “sense” of threat by voting for Trump. Glaude gave no evidence of white people confused by children’s
faces, or of the feelings of threat these young faces were supposedly causing.
You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.
Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.
This is the second election in a row where a professor at an elite American university provoked scorn and mockery by using “whiteness” to explain things that non-white people had done. Writing in The Washington Post after the 2020 election, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán characterised increasing pro-Trump sentiment among blacks and especially Latinos as expressing “multiracial whiteness”. This apparently self-contradictory phrase was widely mocked by readers, who turned “multiracial whiteness” into a meme that still circulates on social media today.
Through three elections I have refrained from becoming a Donald Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his massive presence in American politics has had some positive effects. For example, he seems to have inspired this healthy reshuffling in ethnic voting patterns that some are calling “racial depolarisation”. And this is giving academics like Glaude and Beltrán the opportunity to beclown themselves before the general public by looking at things that non-white people are doing and ascribing them, somehow, to “whiteness”. And, in doing this, they are helping to discredit the increasingly empty and useless concept of “whiteness”.
“Whiteness” wasn’t always an empty and useless concept. The text that probably did more to push “Whiteness Studies” toward the academic mainstream was Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book How the Irish Became White. But Ignatiev’s study was very different from the work that came to characterise the academic preoccupation with whiteness, and it was infused with a very different set of political concerns. Ignatiev wasn’t a diversity bureaucrat or a professor of racial studies. He was a historian. But he didn’t get his PhD until he was in his forties. Before that he was a Pennsylvania steelworker and labour organiser.
For him, “whiteness” wasn’t an infinitely bendable abstraction that could be applied to anything a professor disapproves of. It referred to a specific historical process that Ignatiev illustrated with reference to a specific population. Ignatiev describes how, in the northern states of early 19th-century America, newly arrived Irish struggled to enter menial jobs and labour organisations. Over time, they succeeded, pushing free black workers out of many sectors, as native workers came to view the Irish as “white”. Through a complex process of assimilation and exclusion, native white workers’ hostility to free blacks intensified as they slowly embraced the Irish as fellow whites. The result for blacks in the supposedly free states was both economic and physical insecurity, as white workers refused to work with them and white mobs sometimes attacked them.
Whiteness in Ignatiev’s treatment is a historical, contingent phenomenon. It emerges in its importance over a particular span of time, as an effect of particular forces. It is subject, in other words, to the usual tides of historical change. The same general phenomenon Ignatiev describes certainly replicated itself later. Surely it has appeared at different times, with different populations, driven by different concrete interests, and these instances can be assembled into broader tendencies that one might identify as “whiteness”. For example, the assimilation and loyalty of immigrants who came to the US in large numbers from southern and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was pursued by employers and civic leaders, and the immigrants themselves, through the assurance that they were not black. They were “white”. And this fact of “race” gave them a preferred claim to communal membership in their new nation, preferred, that is, over the black people already here. But these instances exist in historical time. The force of whiteness they illustrate is a historical thing.
Something happens to this “whiteness”, though, in the hands of politicised academics like Glaude and Beltrán, and influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. It gets transformed from a contingent historical entity — a political force that emerges in time and changes with time, grows and weakens like the other contingent things of history — into a different sort of entity. It becomes metaphysical, a superordinate force that exists outside of history. Historical change is understood in terms of it. Historical change, especially in America, happens within, not to, the metaphysical contours of whiteness, in this understanding.
In other words, whiteness is transformed into a constant, like energy in the first law of thermodynamics. Its form can change — so that the behaviour of black people and Latino people can be labelled “whiteness” if one finds it discreditable enough — but its magnitude or quantity must stay the same. To say that whiteness is on the wane, that it exerts less influence now than it used to, is an anathema. Things might appear to change, but — deeper down, in their true essence — they don’t. They can’t. The iron law of the preservation of whiteness says they can’t. A political coalition adds an unprecedented number of black and Latino voters. Then the academic appears on the scene to characterise this new development with the same conceptual tool they applied to an earlier, very different set of facts, and the determination is: whiteness. It’s multiracial, but it’s whiteness. Whatever it is, if it’s distasteful enough to us in the “whiteness” business, it’s whiteness.
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the most famous, and the most rhetorically powerful and effective, purveyor of this understanding of whiteness. In his bestselling book, Between the World and Me, he quotes John C. Calhoun, the notorious pro-slavery ideologist and senator from South Carolina, who declared that the main division in society was not between rich and poor but between “white and black”. This fact, Calhoun wrote, assures a pleasing equality among whites, from the saddest vagrant and the poorest dirt farmer to the wealthiest planter. By virtue of their superiority as white people over black people, they “all belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equal”. This is indeed a ghoulish formulation of a diabolical arrangement, but it’s also pro-slavery ideologist John C. Calhoun propounding it, and it’s also, like, 1848. Can it be that this construction of white belonging upon black oppression has not somehow weakened or slackened in the intervening 176 years? No, it cannot be. That this arrangement defines America, Coates writes, “was true in 1776. It is true today.”
This understanding of whiteness as unabating but unspoken, omnipresent but hidden, is a boon to many race-studies academics, and to writers like Coates, who conduct social analysis via the methods of literary criticism. They look onto the visible surface of Americans’ speech and behaviour and magically discover that this roiled mess of ambiguous signs is transparently legible, and that, surprise, it confirms the Theory of Everything that has lodged itself in their heads. You might find the deeper meaning of a cranky woman yelling at Coates’s young son on a New York City escalator to be fairly elusive, suggestive of many possible readings including, it being New York City, that the woman was insane — because what mentally composed person yells at a five-year-old boy? But for Coates, as he relates it in his book, the meaning of this maddening event reveals itself clearly and simply in the fact that it happened in America, and that it’s maddening to him as a black man, and it involved a black boy and a white woman. It was, ergo those things, another predictable instance of white presumption as to “black bodies”.
The whiteness paradigm is also a boon to diversity consultants who help businesses and organisations cow and train their employees by forcing them into mandatory struggle sessions, in which those employees are forced to confess the inescapable whiteness that turns them into half-thinking agents of racial domination. For these consultants, the idea that whiteness is unchangingly ubiquitous and always suppressed offers a delectable setup for their operational model. The conceit of suppression justifies their invasive procedures, and the conceit of ubiquitousness assures that the procedures will always uncover what they’re looking for.
It’s also a boon for people trained in schools of education, whom it empowers to discredit the difficult subjects they may not understand or be able to teach, because these subjects are produced by or infected with whiteness. And it justifies pedagogical methods that resemble those of the diversity consultants, in which the whiteness hidden inside children is brought to light and exorcised. For institutions, in other words, real power, power over the docile “bodies” of workers and children, flows out of the “whiteness” paradigm.
One urgent and interesting question is how devotees of this paradigm — smart writers and well-trained professors — can treat its central concept so dogmatically. How can they understand a phenomenon, bad and historically prominent as it’s been, as if it’s not just empirically persistent but metaphysically permanent? How can they treat something that is obviously historical as if it exists outside of history, a condition rather than an effect of historical change? How can things that Latinos and black people do be understood as new forms of whiteness?
The answer to these questions is “America”. The theorists and analysts of whiteness define America by, and identify it with, whiteness. Now it’s true, as I note above, that whiteness has been used by both industrial bosses and American politicians to build political communion upon racial difference. But, for these thinkers, understanding whiteness in these banal terms of empirical history fails to get at its centrality for the American project. Rather, for them, whiteness is “structurally necessary”. America would not exist, they believe, were it not for whiteness.
Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would. I can’t say for sure. But I get why you might want to think of it in these terms. I understand the philosophical appeal of treating certain interpretive frameworks that come from your brain as real structures in the world, and then treating those structures as having a higher reality, as existing in a different sort of historical time, than the everyday things they supposedly comprehend. I went to grad school. I understand how pleasing it is to walk around with a paradigm that explains everything, a theory of society that’s not meant to be tested, much less falsified, but merely confirmed. Something usually happens that will do this confirming for you, not because America is infected with this one bad thing in particular but because America is a huge and unruly country. It’s infected with everything. And I imagine this appeal is even greater for people with a personal axe to grind against this country, supposedly their country, which has treated them and theirs pretty badly over the last four centuries or so. But I also get why people believe in conspiracy theories, which aren’t much different. In other words, the whiteness paradigm represents a failure of scepticism, and a triumph of gullible pessimism.
I’m not saying the remedy is optimism. I’m not saying that America is necessarily, inevitably improving, that the ideal of the equality of all men enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is being better realised all the time thanks to its essential truth, or to America’s essential goodness. I’m saying that things change, in whatever moral direction. Things fall apart. Over time they’re replaced by new things. That a political arrangement described by John C. Calhoun 176 years ago has succumbed to historical entropy is almost certain, not necessarily because America is “better than that” now, though it probably is, but because it was 176 years ago.
Regular people seem more willing to acknowledge this than their supposed representatives in the intelligentsia. The writers and professors remain attached to certain prescribed ideas of political identification, and for obvious reasons. They’re the ones who prescribe those ideas. When Cristina Beltrán writes, “Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition,” she assumes there’s something perverse in this promise. This inclination can only be explained by a desire to “lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination”. Professor Beltrán seems alarmingly ready to believe terrible things about her fellow Latinos, as long as Trump is in the picture. But maybe Trump’s importance is that, even with his crudeness and scapegoating, he treats them as something other than objects of symbolic pandering.
That is, a simpler, less invidious, less conspiratorial explanation than “whiteness”, or “multiracial whiteness”, might be that people in America’s minority and immigrant populations find it kind of depressing and taxing to be addressed as separate communities as a rule. Maybe they don’t want to have intellectuals telling them that a “politics of identity and recognition” is the only proper way for them to be citizens, that they must be treated as precious ethnic others, delicate and vulnerable. Maybe what they want to be, finally, is Americans, just Americans, not because America is so great, necessarily, but because America is where they live, and American is what they are.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/