20 November 2007

In his essay, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America" (Journal of American Historians, June 2002), Peter Kolchin takes a look at historians and anthropoligists to discuss the issues of race, class, and whiteness and by so doing, exposes the underlying factors to this equation: context and language.

He begins by turning away from the treatment of 'black' and 'white' as binary concepts and suggests gradations to whiteness and to color. He looks at what other whiteness studies historians concentrate on:

1) Construction of whiteness,

2) How diverse groups identify themselves as white,

3) What whiteness means for the social order, and

4) Race as ideology or as a social construct.

He then calls for a shift in focus away from how Americans view blacks to how they view whites and whiteness, as a central component of American racial ideology.

Beginning with Roediger's Wages of Whiteness (1991), Kolchin makes four points:

1) White working class Americans emerged in a slaveholding republic and so were defined by what they were not - not black and not slaves,

2) Roediger pays almost exclusionary attention to Irish immigrants,

3) Although Roediger is a Marxist historian, he rejects race as superstructural and posits race and color as equal, and

4) Roediger focuses on language, as with these two examples:

a) he differentiates wage slavery from white slavery in which the latter is a condition of free white working class Americans and

b) he argues a highly speculative psychological perspective that as the country industrialized, the increasingly controlled and disciplined white population viewed blacks as their former, uninhibited selves, highlighted in the acting out of blackface and minstrel.

Against Roediger's arguments, Kolchin turns to Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1999). In his book, Jacobson focuses on European immigrants to the United States between 1790 and 1965. He then analyzes how other Americans perceived immigrants, rather than on their own self-perception, thus exposing the complexities amongst race, ethinicity, and nationality. Kolchin cites Jacobson's incisive breakdown of the said time period:

1) 1790 - 1840: the issue is one of color - white and black,

2) 1840 - 1920s: the issue is one of a variegated whiteness with the influx of massive foreign immigrants in which some appeared 'whiter' than others,

3) 1920s - 1965: the issue becomes color as a badge of race and race as an ideological and political deployment against the neutral, biologically determined element of nature. During this time, immigration restrictions come into effect as Americans celebrate an extoled Caucasian race.

Kolchin reduces the differences between Roediger and Jacobson to this:

Whereas Jacobson approaches the past almost entirely in cultural terms, concerning himself with images and representations over social relations, Roediger concentrates on class and economy and is thus overly deterministic, missing the full complexity of whiteness in its viscissitudes. Jacobson points to an 'ethnic revival' in America amongst groups denying white privilege to black Americans and concludes that racism is a fundamental factor to the working of American democracy. In contrast, Roediger exposes a sense of political disillusionment and conviction that class-based efforts to remake the world have been tried and found wanting to link his perception of the bleak current situation with his understanding of the past

Interestingly, Kolchin views the differences between Roediger and Jacobson differently from the way Jacobson does:

Jacobson sees his study, in contrast to Roediger's, as a difference in degree and not essence. Jacobson views Roediger as paying careful attention to cultural manifestations rather than being economically deterministic. He finds agreement with Roediger that race is an artificial construct without inherent meaning, though he feels Roediger is less inclined to see race as a function of concrete class relations.

Kolchin feels a general unease with whiteness studies centering on the elusive and undefined nature of whiteness. He is concerned about the overreliance on whiteness in exploring the American past. For him, underlying whiteness studies is the use of race as a construct rather than as an objective way of exploring differences amongst human beings. (And here, language and objectivity come back to center stage as a focal point in critical analysis.) Indeed, he sees race as a fale conept 'made' by humans and cites four points from Barbara J. Field's essay, "Ideology and Race in American History" (1982):

1) ideas about color derive their definition from context,

2) understanding how groups see others in relation to the self begins by analyzing patterns of social relations,

3) race is shaped by concrete human action, interaction, and class relations, and

4) race is a subjective ideological construct whereas class is an objective category.

Against Roediger's and Jacobson's general contention that race is a ubiquitous and unchanging transhistorical force rather than a shifting or contingent construction, Kolchin raises historian Theodore W. Allen's and anthropologist Karen Brodkin's arguments respectively, that the white race was invented by 'plantation bourgeoisie' to facilitate oppression of black slaves and that race is a way white Americans organized labor and the explanation they used to justify it as natural.

Ultimately, against Roediger and Jacobson, Kolchin argues that they deprive whiteness of its proper historical context. For Kolchin, Roediger's flaw is three-fold:

1) Roediger defines the self as 'not black' and this is not equivalent to 'not slave',

2) the 'not slave' formulation leads to the elaboration of 'free labor' ideology emphasizing the dignity of labor and condemnation of chattel slavery as the antithesis of free, republican values, and

3) the 'not black' formulation leads to the racist denigration of non-white and the insistence that America remain 'white man's country'.

Kolchin makes strong and critically relevant points:

1) whiteness is a blunt instrument for dissecting nuances or even major outlines of political ideology and behavior,

2) few historians have ever been as eager to mix scholarly analysis with prescriptive advice or to proclaim their political goals so blatantly as those engaged in whiteness studies,

3) race-making applies to whites and non-whites because white racism is not specifically an American phenomenon in the context of Europe,

4) racial categories are not always a binary opposition, and

5) race needs to be contextualized in its proper historical setting.

Rather than reducing whiteness studies, race, class, and inequality to an issue of historical context, I argue it is language as the fundamental structure and structuring agent of context, change, and accuracy that should be the necessary focus. Not just with this highly volatile issue of culture and race, but also with all sectors of society - with what we grapple with, are challenged by, and with what we challenge and learn to transcend - all of this rests with a critical turn to language and the existing doxa fostering and/or hindering this language.

Undeniably, the call for dynamic change is strident. The race continues for traditional normative constants to take note and meet the change that refuses to wait nor to stop. With present electronic technologies mediating multiple spheres of virtuality within the individual's transcending reality, no longer can we nor must we be stagnant and stigmatized by anachronistic traditions anchoring us from our growing flight.

The lightning beacon of potentiality is within our grasp, why must we force our hands back, tied by our stubborn persistence to structures no longer structuring our reality?

When will we acknowledge the inaccurate as such and make corrections towards our relevance?

In a transcending reality, there is no excuse for the remnant shackles of inequality, intolerance, and indifference to handicap and to suffocate our flourishing potentiality.