Yesterday I upset some folks by casually referring to the attempt to create an anti-white counter culture in an anarchist group I was part of. I haven't been flamed like that since
David Horowitz compared me to Stalin and Farrakhan.
I was so casual in my use of this term because I had thought, wrongly, that the discussion of "whiteness" and the
arguments for its abolition which began in earnest in academia back in the early nineties had by now made it to the mainstream. Certainly,
Tim Wise has been speaking about many of the ideas bandied about by abolitionists, although he still describes himself as a "white anti-racist," not an abolitionist.
So, the whole analysis of race that focuses on whiteness and argues that our efforts to eliminate white privilege should use terms like "anti-white" instead of the more moral-sounding "anti-racist" requires some explaining. If this all seems like hollow semantics, think about this: The terms that we use come from the ideas and power structures that we live in, and often we have to shift the frame significantly in order to avoid replicating the very values that we are trying to combat.
So...why do abolitionists say "anti-white" and "abolish the white race?" Why don't they just say anti-white-privilege? or anti-racist?
The use of provocative sounding phrases like "anti-white" and "abolish whiteness" is based on the notion that "whiteness" is a social category that describes a position of privilege, not a natural attribute of someone's being, or a group of actual people. Whiteness is an
institution created by human beings, and originated in the United States as a means of maintaining a slave labor force. When people talk about being white, they're referring to opposition to a system of oppression, not to a hatred of a set of people.
One reason not to use the term "anti-racist" is that it implies the "realness" of race as a biological attribute. The other, and in my opinion, more important problem with "anti-racism" as a way of talking about race is that it doesn't specifically identify white privilege as the problem. It makes racism a personal behavior or feeling (which can be held by a person of any race against a person of any other race) instead of an institutional practice. It's vague and avoids historical realities. As
Michael Omi and Howard Winant suggest, race blindness is the new hegemonic discourse that upholds racial inequality. In this logic, which has been used to challenge affirmative action, references to race become defined as "reverse racism."
But what's so bad about "whiteness" all together - why so much hostility? If you really think about how whiteness is defined, you'll come to see that there's nothing good about it all. James Baldwin once said,
As long as you think you're white, there's no hope for you." Whiteness is nothing but an oppressive identity.
As Noel Ignatiev points out, if you start looking for "white culture" you aren't going to find something that isn't influenced by something not-white, because "whiteness" itself is defined by exclusion. As Steve Gilliard explained in a long post quoted on
Meteor Blades' diary on Barack Obama's relationship to "blackness" - being white is defined by NOT having visible Black (Asian or Indian) ancestry. The notion of whiteness in and of itself is about exclusion. For this reason, there is no such thing as "white culture" that can be saved.
Ignatiev argues:
Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.
To say you are anti-white in this context does not mean that you hate people with "white" skin, but that you hate the significance and power that is connected to having that skin and want to abolish it, that you would find it insignificant if your children or partner did not have that skin, and in this post-Bakke era, that you would not complain about the privileges associated with that skin color were denied you, and act as if you were losing a right.
Some people (Horowitz loudly among them) have argued that this is all just "white guilt" but I honestly have found the idea of "abolishing whiteness" very personally liberating.
oh yeah, my blog:
http://redredbecca.blogspot.com