Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education 9004376305, 9789004376304

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Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education

Critical Understanding in Education Series Editors William M. Reynolds (Georgia Southern University, USA) Brad Porfilio (Seattle University, USA)

Volume 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cue

Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education Edited by

Zachary A. Casey

leiden | boston

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2589-7187 isbn 978-90-04-37630-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-44483-6 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements xiii Notes on Contributors xiv 1

Introduction 1 Zachary A. Casey

2

Affirmative Action 4 Dwuana Bradley

3

Alt-Right 15 Blair Taylor

4

American Indian Boarding Schools 23 Sean Ryan

5

American Indians and Whiteness 33 Zachary A. Casey

6

Antisemitism 39 Samuel J. Tanner

7

Arab Americans and Whiteness 42 Muna Altowajri

8

Asian Americans and Whiteness 52 Nicholas D. Hartlep and Nicholas C. Ozment

9

Baldwin, James 58 Shannon K. McManimon and Michael D. Smith

10

Basement Culture 66 Timothy J. Lensmire

11

Black Americans and Whiteness 70 Shalyse I. Iseminger

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Brokenness 77 Zachary A. Casey

13

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 81 Allison Mattheis

14

Capitalism and Whiteness 89 Zachary A. Casey

15

Caucasian 95 Noelle Chaddock

16

Christianity and Whiteness 98 Erin T. Miller

17

Colorblindness 106 Sheri A. Castro-Atwater

18

Critical Race Theory 119 Rachel McMillian and Brittany Aronson

19

Discourse and Whiteness 133 Jenna Cushing-Leubner

20

Du Bois, W.E.B. 144 Brian D. Lozenski

21

Early Childhood Education and Whiteness 152 Erin T. Miller

22

Elementary Education and Whiteness 159 Ann M. Mason, Younkyung Hong and Ryan C. Kiesel

23

Ellison, Ralph 167 Timothy J. Lensmire

24

Emotionality and Whiteness 171 Cheryl E. Matias

25

Essentialism 179 Stephen May and Lincoln Dam

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26

Eugenics 188 Bretton A. Varga, Julian E. Maguregui, Jr. and Michael J. Berson

27

Extraordinary Rule (Three-Fifths Compromise) 198 Joseph Flynn and Darius Jackson

28

False Consciousness 204 Peter Hossler

29

Feminism and Whiteness 212 Katerina Deliovsky

30

First-Wave Critical White Studies 222 James C. Jupp

31

Guilt 231 Joseph Flynn and Erin Rae

32

Health Disparities 239 Kristie J. Lipford

33

Higher-Class Whites 250 Jonathan Tyler Baker

34

Higher Education and Whiteness 257 Elizabeth A. Collins, Devon Thomas, Chris Corces-Zimmerman and Nolan L. Cabrera

35

Hip Hop 266 Todd Fraley

36

hooks, bell 274 Dawn N. Hicks Tafari, LaWanda M. Simpkins and Shawn Arango Ricks

37

Hyperindividualism 279 Zachary A. Casey

38

Immigration 286 Michael McCanless

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Integration of Schools 295 Allison Mattheis

40

Interest Convergence 303 Brian T. Collins II and Cleveland Hayes

41

Intersectionality 310 Antonio Duran and Susan R. Jones

42

Islamophobia 321 Tina G. Patel

43

Jewishness and Whiteness 328 Samuel J. Tanner

44

Jim Crow 331 Duane T. Loynes, Sr.

45

Labor and Whiteness 341 Erin Dyke

46

Ladson-Billings, Gloria 350 Nini Hayes and Leta Hooper

47

Latinx Peoples and Whiteness 358 Zachary A. Casey

48

Lynching 363 Anthony C. Siracusa

49

Marxism and Whiteness 372 Zachary A. Casey

50

Mass Incarceration 377 Gilda Graff

51

McIntosh, Peggy 384 Melanie M. Wilcox, Danielle N. Franks and Chelsea Cody

52

Microaggressions 393 Melanie M. Wilcox, Danielle N. Franks and Michael Azarani

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53

Minstrelsy 399 Brad Bierdz

54

Mixed Race Identity 405 Peter J. Aspinall

55

Nationalism 412 Zachary A. Casey

56

Neoliberalism 418 Peter Hossler

57

Omi and Winant 425 Colleen Rost-Banik

58

Ontological Expansiveness 432 Chris Corces-Zimmerman, Devon Thomas, Elizabeth A. Collins and Nolan L. Cabrera

59

Orientalism 439 Ryuko Kubota

60

Passing 447 Jenny LaFleur

61

Police Violence 453 Nini Hayes, Amy Sánchez and Molly Reetz

62

Political Correctness 461 Sara B. Demoiny, Hannah Carson Baggett and Kamden K. Strunk

63

Postcolonialism and Whiteness 468 Phyllis Kyei Mensah

64

Post-Racialism 476 Danielle N. Franks, Melanie M. Wilcox and Michael Azarani

65

Poverty and Whiteness 484 Colleen H. Clements and Ann M. Mason

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Privilege 492 Shannon K. McManimon

67

Probationary Whiteness 505 Annie Jaffee

68

Psychoanalysis and Whiteness Studies 513 Ross Truscott

69

Race Treason 521 Hannah R. Stohry

70

Racial Melancholia 528 Justin Grinage

71

Racial Profiling 534 Crystal Simmons and Hannah Carson Bagget

72

Reparations 543 Jenna Cushing-Leubner

73

Revolutionary Consciousness 552 Walter D. Greason, Nicole Pulliam and Vernon Smith

74

Roediger, David 558 Walter D. Greason, Nicole Pulliam and Vernon Smith

75

School Choice 563 Erin Baugher

76

School Discipline Gap 571 Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Hilary A. Lustick and Alesia Hubert

77

School-to-Prison Pipeline 578 Hilary A. Lustick, Katherine Cumings Mansfield and LaShaunda Brown

78

Scientific Racism 585 Virginia Lea

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Second-Wave Critical White Studies 596 James C. Jupp and Pauli Badenhorst

80

Secondary Education and Whiteness 609 Chanelle Wilson

81

Segregation in Schools 617 Max Cuddy

82

Settler Colonialism 624 Annie Jaffee and Zachary A. Casey

83

Shame 630 Elise Toedt and Abby Boehm-Turner

84

Social Class and Whiteness 638 Abby Boehm-Turner and Elise Toedt

85

Social Construction 646 Colleen Rost-Banik

86

South Africa and Whiteness 651 Pauli Badenhorst

87

Stereotype Threat 659 Danielle N. Franks, Melanie M. Wilcox and Chelsea Cody

88

Thandeka 669 Annie Jaffee

89

Tokenism 675 Megan Ruby

90

Trump, Donald 681 Zachary A. Casey and Annie Jaffee

91

Wage Slaves 686 Thomas M. Falk

92

White Supremacy 694 Annie Jaffee and Zachary A. Casey

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Whiteness and the Law 703 Thomas A. Mitchell

94

Whiteness as Property 708 Brad Bierdz

95

Whiteness Norms 714 Jennifer L.S. Chandler and Erica Wiborg

96

White Teacher Identity Studies 722 James C. Jupp

Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the contributions of many scholars, thinkers, writers, and pedagogues. It has been my pleasure and privilege to compile the work of so many brilliant minds, both in and outside, the field of education. I’m especially thankful to the series editors Brad Porfilio and Bill Reynolds for their support and the opportunity to edit and contribute to such an important area of scholarship. Rhodes College was generous in supporting me in this project, including the fellowship that allowed the remarkable Ms. Annie Jaffee to serve as my research assistant for two years on this encyclopedia. Ms. Jaffee worked with me at every stage of the process and I will be forever grateful for her humor and patience throughout our work together. Finally, I’d like to thank my incomparable partner Elyse Wigen, and our daughter Zadie Michael Casey. Without the two of you, I would have never found it in me to complete this.

Notes on Contributors Muna Altowajri is currently a PhD student and research assistant at the educational leadership graduate program at Miami University. Before joining Miami University, Muna pursued a Bachelor of Arts in Education and a Master of Business Administration. For years now, she has been an inherent and meticulous professional with extensive teaching and leadership skills implanted and gained from her diverse work experiences with schools, profit- and non-profit organizations. Her desire as an educator to be an element of change within society motivates her to work through research and practice toward building environments that provide better education opportunities for each student to work toward achieving educational equity and social justice. Brittany Aronson is an Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Foundations in Educational Leadership at Miami University. She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies in Education from the University of Tennessee and she also holds two certificates in Qualitative Research Methods in Education and Educational Policy. Brittany’s research and teaching are grounded in issues of critical social justice for both future and practicing educators. Her research interests include critical teacher preparation, social justice education, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and educational policy. These interest stem from her former elementary school teaching experiences and current work with teacher education. Her research couples her cultural studies and social foundations in education background with current contemporary issues. She has been published in Review of Educational Research, Journal of Critical Policy Studies, Teachers College Record, and Multicultural Perspectives. Peter J. Aspinall is Emeritus Reader in Population Health at the University of Kent, UK. He has worked as principal and co-investigator on studies of mixed race identity and on the history of mixed race, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and British Academy, respectively. He was national convenor for the ethnic group question in the Office for National Statistics’ 2001 Census Development Program (which secured ‘mixed’ categorization), a member of the Academic Advisory Group for the ethnic group question in the 2011 Census and is currently a member of the ONS Ethnic Group Assurance Panel for the 2021 Census. He was academic consultant for the BBC2 Television Mixed Britannia Season

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(October 2011) and is joint Director, with Chamion Caballero, of the Mixed Museum, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded Digital Transformations Program (see: http://www.mix-d.org/museum/timeline). His publications comprise 71 journal articles (23 on mixed race/ethnicity or the census categorization of ethnic groups), two books on mixed race: Mixed Race Identities (with A. M. Song, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Mixed Race Britain in the Twentieth Century (with C. Caballero, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and chapters in books on global mixed race (International Perspectives on Racial Mixing and Mixedness, Routledge, 2012 and Global Mixed Race, NYU Press, 2014). Michael Azarani is currently completing his second year of doctoral training in the Counseling Psychology program at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Michael received his master’s in professional counseling from The University of Oklahoma in 2015 and received his bachelor’s in music and psychology from Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Michael’s professional interest include Indigenous psychology and sociopolitical positionality, racial justice, multicultural counseling, and Critical Race Theory. At present, Michael hopes to utilize critical racial frameworks to help understand Native graduate student experience of microaggression in counseling psychology training programs. Upon completing his doctoral training, Michael hopes to work closely with his Indigenous community in both academic and clinical settings. Pauli Badenhorst earned his dual PhD in Curriculum & Instruction and Comparative & International Education from The Pennsylvania State University. An educational anthropologist, Pauli’s research investigates the psycho-affective dynamics that inform socialization into racialized identity and embodiment, as well as the implications of such for schools and society. A teacher educator, he is also particularly focused on the design of holistic epistemological and pedagogical frames to inform antiracism and intersectional teaching, learning, and curriculum. Pauli is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education in the Department of Teaching & Learning at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Hannah Carson Baggett is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Auburn University. Her research interests include critical theories, race and education, and educator beliefs. She also has particular interest in qualitative and participatory methods and works with high school students in alternative contexts as they build

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critical consciousness and collect data around topics of concern in their communities. Her work has been published in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Teaching and Teacher Education, Critical Questions in Education, and Educational Studies. Jonathan Tyler Baker is a PhD student and instructor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University (OH) who studies the organization of American higher education with a particular interest in accessibility and the financial development of state universities. Jonathan recently completed an article on the historical and socio-economic roots of Ohio’s contemporary system of higher education. Erin Baugher is Assistant Director for the Partnership of Public Education at the University of Delaware and a doctoral candidate in the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration. Erin’s research expertise is in public policy and sociopolitical theory and recent work focuses on race in education policy – including the performed and performative nature of Whiteness in school choice policy in the United States. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics, political theory, public policy, and education policy, and works with in-service educators in the development of equity-oriented professional learning opportunities. Erin has a Master of Arts in Political Science and International Relations and a Bachelor of Science in Education. Michael J. Berson is a Professor of Social Science Education at the University of South Florida and a Senior Fellow in The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. He coordinates the U.S. F College of Education PhD Program in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Social Science Education. Michael has served as an advisor on cybersecurity and the integration of technology into education to companies and organizations throughout the world. Among his leadership positions, he was elected Chair of the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies, Vice President of the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education, President of the Social Science Education Consortium, and a member of the Advisory Board for the International Society for the Social Studies. He has extensively published books, chapters, and journal articles and presented his research worldwide. He was named the Association of Educational Publishers Distinguished Achievement Award Winner in the Learned Article category. He has been the principal investigator, co-principal investigator, or primary partner on grants from the United States

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Department of Education, Florida Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the Library of Congress. Brad Bierdz is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying the philosophy of education through the lens of diversity and inclusion in higher education. He attained both of his bachelor’s degrees at Rhodes College in History and Educational Studies, particularly focusing on Africana Studies and Critical Pedagogy. Moreover, his scholarship has been published in the Journal of Educational Thought and Disability and Society with one article using a poststructural lens to criticalize restorative justice in primary and secondary education while the other demonstrates the inherent colonizing logics of accommodations for folks with mental disabilities in higher education. Once he graduates from his program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he then plans to attain his doctoral degree in the philosophy of education. Abby Boehm-Turner is a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota; her major field is Literacy Education: Literacy, Language, and Culture, with a supporting area of Culture and Teaching. Her research interests are centered in teacher education and teacher identity; she is especially interested in how the racialized identities and social justice orientations of preservice teachers and their teacher educators intersect with the embodied and systemic realities encountered in secondary schools. Her commitments to racial equity in educational systems are inspired by her seventeen years of teaching secondary English in a large public urban school district, as well as her experiences working with future English teachers at the post-secondary level. Dwuana Bradley is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. As a critical policy analyst her scholarship focuses on policies at the institutional, state, and federal level that affect student access and success in the U.S. education system. She uses mixed methodologies to consider the ways policies act as barriers perpetuating social stratification at critical transitions in the educational pipeline for low-income and racially marginalized student populations. Her work on equity for marginalized campus populations include topics on issues pertaining to policy barriers for community college transfer students, diversity and inclusion policy issues in hostile racial political climates, enrollment management issues in quasi-performance-based funding contexts, and anti-blackness in the academy.

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LaShaunda Brown works as a teacher in Guilford County Schools, has served as a reading specialist in Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools, and taught as an adjunct instructor for Adult Basic Education at Guilford Technical Community College, all in North Carolina. Currently, she is a full-time graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro pursuing a master’s degree in School Administration. She received an undergraduate degree in Elementary Education and a master’s degree in Reading Education both from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Brown is interested in research topics including teacher retention & mentoring, equity in high impact schools, and the influence of policy on social justice issues and reforms. Nolan L. Cabrera is a nationally-recognized expert in the areas of racism/anti-racism on college campuses, Whiteness, and ethnic studies. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, and was the only academic featured in the MTV documentary White People. His new book, White Guys on Campus (Rutgers University Press, 2018), is a deep exploration of White male racism, and occasional anti-racism, on college campuses – a text Jeff Chang (author of We Gon’ Be Alright) described as “A timely, provocative, even hopeful book.” Additionally, Dr. Cabrera was an expert witness in the Tucson Unified Mexican American Studies case (Arce v. Douglas), which is the highest-profile ethnic studies case in the country’s history. He has given hundreds of lectures, keynote addresses, and trainings, throughout the country on challenging racism/Whiteness, working through unconscious bias, creating inclusive college campuses, and the expansion of ethnic studies programs. Dr. Cabrera is an award-winning scholar whose numerous publications have appeared in some of the most prestigious journals in the fields of education and racial studies. He completed his graduate work at UCLA in Higher Education & Organizational Change and Dr. Cabrera earned his BA from Stanford University in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (Education focus). He is a former Director of a Boys & Girls Club in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is originally from McMinnville, Oregon. Zachary A. Casey is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, U.S. and serves as the editor of this encyclopedia. His research and teaching focuses on multicultural education, critical whiteness studies, teacher education, and critical pedagogy. Dr. Casey is particularly interested in the ways racial identity and systemic racism intersect in classrooms, schools, and in the lives of teachers and students. His work focuses

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on building critical racial literacy and antiracist pedagogies with practicing and future teachers, as well as the social, cultural, and philosophical contexts of education. He co-edited Whiteness at the Table with Dr. Shannon K. McManimon and Dr. Christina Berchini (Lexington Press) in 2018. His latest book, Building Pedagogues: White Practicing Teachers and the Struggle for Antiracist Work in Schools, (co-authored with Shannon K. McManimon) will be published by SUNY Press in 2020. He received the 2019 Rising Alumni Award from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota and his first book, A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism, was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the Society of Professors of Education. Sheri A. Castro-Atwater is a Professor and Director of the Counseling Programs at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches courses in applied developmental psychology, individual and group counseling, multicultural counseling, counseling theories and techniques, and psychological assessment. Dr. Atwater received her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.A., P.P.S. Credential, and PhD (School Psychology) from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2012–2014, Dr. Atwater served as co-Principal Investigator for the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Student Mental Health Initiative, a grant that provided training in suicide prevention and postvention to pre-service teachers, counselors, and administrators. Dr. Atwater has also served as past President of the School Psychology Educators of California (SPEC); member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Multicultural Education (CSULA); and Editorial Review Board Member for Scientific Journals International. She is the creator and Project Director of the SUCCESS Coaching program, a multi-year collaboration with several local Los Angeles school districts where she supervises graduate students as they provided clinical services to K-8 students. Dr. Atwater’s research interests include the role of social-emotional learning programs in schools and its impact on the arts; ethical decision-making models among helping professionals; and the role of implicit bias and colorblind ideology in schools that serves to promote the status quo and alienate marginalized communities of color. Her most recent national workshop presentations focus on how educators can foster effective culturally-relevant dialogue in classrooms and schools to avoid the “trap” of colorblind racial ideology. Noelle Chaddock is Vice President of Equity and Inclusion at Bates College where Chaddock focuses on equity, inclusion, access, antiracism and social justice across the institution. Chaddock contributes to programs and departments such as Africana

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Studies, Gender Studies and Theatre. Chaddock was previously an Associate Provost at Rhodes College where Chaddock had considerable impact on the hiring diversity of the faculty. Chaddock’s scholarly examinations include the spring 2018 original theatre-activism production Harlem to Hamilton – a creative collaboration with student directors grounded in pedagogies of teaching black theatre arts to white students at pervasively white institutions and the problematization of historical white consumption of black bodies in performance. Chaddock is the co-editor of Antagonizing White Feminism: Women’s Studies, Feminism, Gender Identity, and the Academy (Lexington, 2019) and the solo-author of Hiring the Antagonist, a forthcoming book which looks critically at the role of black female identified persons in formal and informal crisis response roles on college campuses. Chaddock hails from Endicott, New York and received her PhD in Philosophy at Binghamton University. Jennifer L. S. Chandler holds a PhD in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service and is currently a Lecturer in the Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies Department, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. She is the lead author of Critical Leadership Theory: Integrating Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and the author of Colluding, Colliding, and Contending with Norms of Whiteness (Information Age Publishing, 2016). She serves as the Leadership Advisor for the National Science Foundation’s Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics where she integrates and applies leadership theories in their mentorship program for graduate students during summer research programs. Colleen H. Clements is a lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Clements’ research focuses on social class and racialized identity, critical foundations in education, and antiracist pedagogy. Her teaching interests are in the areas of social class and education, critical social foundations and antiracist pedagogy, and leadership. Her most recent research is centered on the question how to create inclusive curricula and pedagogical practices for antiracist pedagogies to engage students with multiple and varying racialized identities in teacher education programs. Chelsea Cody has completed her master’s degree in Counseling and is currently working towards her Doctorate in Counseling Psychology at Oklahoma State University. Chelsea’s research interests involve cultural considerations in psychotherapy with survivors of complex and developmental traumas, as well as trauma-informed social justice advocacy for adjudicated and marginalized youth. Of note,

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Chelsea has provided community-based psychotherapy and advocacy as a Licensed Professional Counselor with adjudicated youth, and adolescent survivors of human trafficking. In that vein, Chelsea is interested in the ways in which systems of power both create and maintain the Commercial Sex Exploitation of Children as a phenomenon, as well as the historical, epigenetic, complex, and developmental traumas that inform psychotherapy with adjudicated youth, youth living in poverty, and survivors of Commercial Sex Exploitation. Elizabeth A. Collins is a doctoral student in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. She received her Master’s in Postsecondary Administration and Student Affairs from the University of Southern California and has worked within academic advising for the past six years. Her research interests include a critique of whiteness in higher education, particularly within the practices of higher education professionals who work at historically white universities. She is interested in using critical whiteness studies to consider the everyday practices within student affairs and academic affairs. Brian Todd Collins II received his Bachelor of Science Degree from Morehouse College in 2011 and MA in Sociology from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in 2015. Currently he is a graduate student in IUPUI’s Urban Education Studies doctoral program. Collins is a McNair Scholar and a graduate assistant for the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education. On April 10, 2019, Collins was awarded IUPUI’s Elite 50, which recognizes 50 of IUPUI’s +8,000 graduate & professional students who demonstrate excellence outside of the classroom in campus leadership, scholarly work, and community engagement. Upon receiving his PhD, he intends on becoming a tenured professor. Collins’ research interests focus on two areas. The first is in examining the experiences and perspectives of African American students attending a no-excuses school. In particular, Collins focuses on the behavioral skills and definitions of success that students are learning from attending a no-excuse school. He situates his discussion in an explication of critical race theory and include arguments that no-excuse models require African American students’ to conform to make their own decisions. His second interest is working with first and second year teachers who aim to implement culturally relevant & sustaining pedagogy at No-Excuses institutions. Chris Corces-Zimmerman is a doctoral candidate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona and a research fellow for the Arizona Medical Education Research Initiative. His research centers on a critique of whiteness in higher

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education and the ways that it impacts students, staff, and faculty at both individual and institutional levels. Max Cuddy is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His dissertation explores the politics of race and class during a school consolidation between two demographically disparate schools. He and his co-authors have multiple papers under review on the nexus between families’ housing and school decisions, how families engage with information about schools, and how parents navigate the educational marketplace. Previously, he taught at a high school in Philadelphia and was a Fulbright -English Teaching Assistant in South Africa. Jenna Cushing-Leubner is an Assistant Professor of Second Language Education at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In addition to teaching courses in the world language, bilingual/bicultural education, and English as a second language programs, she is the designer and coordinator of the Certificate in Heritage Language Education. She is a long-time collaborator with the Jóvenes con Derechos and Hmong Educators Coalition projects. Her scholarship and teaching focus on critical approaches to bilingual/multilingual education, heritage language education, and critical whiteness studies connected to teacher education. As a community-engaged and activist researcher, she works in close relationships with youth, teachers, and community educators. Together, they use participatory design and action research to develop community-driven curriculum, learning contexts, and professional development. Her scholarship examines ways to expand the question “what should teachers know and be able to do” to serve the desires and dreams of the youth and communities who participate in the U.S. schooling experience. Lincoln Dam is Associate Director (Research Development) in the Public Policy Institute, and a Professional Teaching Fellow in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His work draws on, intersects and contributes to the fields of sociology, political studies and education. His current research is broadly centered on the ethics and politics of biculturalism and multiculturalism in Aotearoa-New Zealand, developed in relation to the ethical-political philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. His homepage is: https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/people/ lincoln-dam

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Katerina Deliovsky publishes in the area of critical race feminism with an emphasis on whiteness studies. She has published White Femininity: Race, Gender and Power (Fernwood Publishing, 2010) which examines the racialized, sexualized and gendered dimensions of European Canadian women’s identities and experiences. She has published book chapters and articles on the gendered dimensions of racialization, antiracist feminist theory and methodology and mixed unions in Canada. She is also the co-editor (with Njoki Wane and Erica Lawson) of Back to the Drawing Board: African Canadian Feminisms (Sumach Press, 2002). Her current scholarship extends her critical race feminist focus to explore (white) women’s sex tourism and transnational relationships in, but not limited to, the Caribbean. She also teaches at Brock University located in Ontario, Canada. Sara B. Demoiny is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University. Her research interests include the manner in which race is taught in social studies teacher education, critical literacy, and social justice approaches to social studies education. Sara’s recent work has been published in Social Studies Research & Practice, The History Teacher, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and The Social Studies. Before arriving at Auburn University, Sara taught for eight years as a middle school teacher in the School District of Philadelphia (PA). Antonio Duran (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at The Ohio State University. Antonio received his undergraduate degree in English and American Literature from New York University and his master’s degree in Student Affairs in Higher Education from Miami University. Antonio’s research agenda involves using critical frameworks to complicate the study of college student development and identity. He is particularly interested in the experiences of students with multiple marginalized identities with an attention to sexuality, race, gender, and spirituality. Antonio’s work utilizes frameworks such as intersectionality and queer of color critique to interrogate how systems of power influence student development and identity. Erin Dyke is an assistant professor of curriculum studies at Oklahoma State University. Her research interests include pedagogies of social movement spaces; activist research methods; social justice, abolitionist, and decolonial movements in education; and gender/sexuality and education. Lately, her work has been

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focused on better understanding the recent resurgence in K12 teacher strikes. She is currently coauthoring a book manuscript with a West Virginia high school teacher and union activist out of their interview study with 28 teacher organizers in the spring 2018 “red state revolt” (West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona). She is also in the process of conducting a Spencer Foundation-supported community-based participatory oral history project with a team of 12 teacher-researchers. The team is collecting and studying oral history narratives of teachers active in the 2018 strike from across the state of Oklahoma. The oral histories will then be archived and publicly accessible through the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program. Her written work has appeared in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Urban Education, The International Handbook of Indigenous Education, Berkeley Review of Education, and Transformations: A Journal of Inclusive Scholarship. Thomas M. Falk lives in Ohio with his wife and child. He is a critical theorist who studies Education, Political Economy, and Phenomenology. Holding a B.A. in Anthropology from Ohio University and a PhD in Philosophy of Education from Ohio State University, he currently teaches courses in Educational Foundations and International Comparative Studies at the University of Dayton. His work has appeared in numerous journals and outlets, including in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical Education, and in The Relationship and the Need of History and Philosophy of Education, edited by Antoinette Errante & Jackie Blount. Joseph Flynn is the Associate Director for Academic Affairs for the Center for Black Studies and an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Northern Illinois University. He is also president of the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum. His teaching and scholarship focus on the intersection of multicultural and social justice education, Whiteness Studies, media and popular culture, and curriculum. In addition to his professional development work with regional schools and colleges in northern Illinois, Dr. Flynn has published scholarship related to the aforementioned topics, and he co-edited the book Rubric Nation: Critical Inquiries on the Impact of Rubrics in Education (Information Age Publishing, 2015). More recently, Dr. Flynn founded the three-day Social Justice Summer Camp for Educators at Northern Illinois University. Additionally, Dr. Flynn serves as an editorialist on Perspectives, a radio program on WNIJ, an NPR affiliate, and as a co-host for the podcast Mental Illness in Popular Culture. Most recently, Dr. Flynn published White Fatigue: Rethinking Resistance for Social Justice (Peter Lang, 2018), a book that considers the

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critical question of why it is a challenge to teach White students about race? The book has been awarded the O.L. Davis, Jr. Outstanding Book Award from the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum. Todd Fraley currently severs as the Associate Dean in the Honors College at East Carolina University. He is also an Associate Professor in the School of Communication. He has also served as their Coordinator for Undergraduate Studies and the Internship Director. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Sociology from James Madison University and earned his MA and PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Georgia, Athens. While at ECU, Todd has been awarded the University Centennial Award for Excellence in Leadership and the Alumni Award for Outstanding Teaching. He is also a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow and a William C. Friday Fellow for Human Relations. He has numerous publications and presentations focused on the politics of representation in popular culture, as well as the relationship between media and democracy. Outside of the classroom, Todd serves on the Board of Directors of the Greenville Human Relations Council, and enjoys traveling, reading, and spending time with his wife and two children. Danielle N. Franks is a fourth-year Counseling Psychology doctoral student at Louisiana Tech University. She will soon complete her pre-doctoral internship at the Ball State University’s Counseling Center. Danielle has a broad range of research interests that generally fall under the umbrella of multiculturalism, advocacy, and social justice. Her work has focused on attitudes about race and social class, the relationship between racial attitudes and political affiliation and policy position, and the role of racial identity and racial privilege awareness in college students’ perception of campus climate. Her current research, including her dissertation, is centered on an examination of the predictors of White individuals’ engagement in racial justice activism and advocacy efforts. She is ambitious about continuing this line of research as she hopes to further contribute to racial justice scholarship. Gilda Graff (MA, LP) is Vice President of the International Psychohistorical Association, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City and Nassau County, and was a supervisor and staff therapist at Washington Square Institute in NYC. Her publications include contributions to journals such as The Journal of Psychohistory and Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

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Walter Greason is among the most prominent historians, educators, and urbanists in the United States. He has spent the past 30 years speaking to audiences on over 100 college and high school campuses. His work is available on Twitter, @worldprofessor. Greason is the author or editor of six books, including his two latest, Industrial Segregation (Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2018) and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2018). Other books include Suburban Erasure: How Suburbanization Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010); The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey (The History Press, 2014); The Land Speaks (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Encyclopedia of Black Comics (Fulcrum, 2017); The American Economy (Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2016); and Planning Future Cities (Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2017). Greason’s digital humanities projects, “The Wakanda Syllabus” and “The Racial Violence Syllabus,” produced global responses. After the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, “The Racial Violence Syllabus” attracted over 4 million individual uses, was translated into seven languages, and inspired projects like the Oscar-winning film “BlackKklansman.” The 2016 “Wakanda Syllabus” defined Afrofuturism as one of the core themes of media convergence and was a crucial element in the public acclaim that supported Marvel Studios’ Oscar-winning feature film, “Black Panther.” His social justice work began with training by Otty Nxumalo, Director-General of KwaZulu-Natal under Nelson Mandela, and has continued through projects with Maya Angelou, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, Desmond Tutu, Sonia Sanchez, Robin D.G. Kelley, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Dwayne McDuffie, Christopher Priest, John Jennings, David Blight, James Oliver Horton. Justin Grinage is an assistant professor in literacy education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. His research uses the concept of racial melancholia to discern the mechanisms by which racial trauma impacts education, teaching, and learning. His work has been published in Harvard Educational Review, English Education and Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. A former English language arts teacher, he worked in multiracial high school classrooms in the Twin Cities area for over a decade. Nicholas D. Hartlep is the Robert Charles Billings Chair in Education at Berea College where he chairs the Department of Education Studies. Before coming to Berea College, Dr. Hartlep chaired the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Metropolitan State University, an Asian American and Native Ameri-

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can Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also served as the Graduate Program Coordinator. Dr. Hartlep has published 22 books, including Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty: Perspectives and Lessons from Higher Education (co-edited with Daisy Ball; Routledge, 2020). His book, The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in U.S. Higher Education, with Lucille L. T. Eckrich and Brandon O. Hensley (Routledge, 2017), was named an Outstanding Book by the Society of Professors of Education and nominated for a Grawemeyer Award in Education. In 2020, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education named Dr. Hartlep an Emerging Scholar. In 2018, the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) granted Dr. Hartlep the John Saltmarsh Award for Emerging Leaders in Civic Engagement Award. In 2017, Metropolitan State University presented him with both the 2017 Community Engaged Scholarship Award and the President’s Circle of Engagement Award. In 2016, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee presented him with a Graduate of the Last Decade Award for his prolific writing. In 2015, he received the University Research Initiative Award from Illinois State University and a Distinguished Young Alumni Award from Winona State University. He is currently writing, What Can Be Learned from Work Colleges? An Education That Works (SUNY Press). Cleveland Hayes is a professor of education in the School of Education at Indiana University-Indianapolis. Dr. Hayes teaches elementary foundations of education, elementary science methods and qualitative research methods. Dr. Hayes’s research interest includes the use of Critical Race Theory in Education, Historical and Contemporary Issues in Black Education to include the school to prison pipeline, Teaching and Learning in the Latino Community, Whiteness and the Intersections of Sexuality and Race. Dr. Hayes is an active member of the American Education Research Association (AERA) at the Division Level, SIG level and committee level. He currently serves as a section Co-Chair for Division K and is a member of the Special Interest Group Executive Committee. He is also the president of the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA). Dr. Hayes’s research can be found in Democracy and Education, Qualitative Studies in Education, and Gender and Education, Urban Review, and Power of Education. In addition, he is the co-editor of the books titled: Unhooking from Whiteness: The Key to Dismantling Racism in the United States (Sense, 2013) and Unhooking from Whiteness: Resisting the Esprit de Corps (Sense, 2016). Nini Visaya Hayes is a former elementary teacher who now works in the Environmental Studies Department at Western Washington University. Their research interests in-

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clude diversity and equity in teaching and learning, social justice education, teacher education, and critical environmental education. They are drawn to the intersections of the historical, cultural, political, and social necessity of preparing critical and justice oriented environmental educators. Their recent publications include contributions to the journal Administrative Theory & Praxis and the book Who Decides Who Becomes a Teacher? Schools of Education as Sites of Resistance (Routledge, 2018). Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is a native New Yorker, and passionate about the arts, culture, education, and translating theory into practice. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Hofstra University, her Master of Arts in Teaching from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies as well as her PhD in Educational Studies with a Specialization in Cultural Studies from The University of North Carolina Greensboro. She has served as an elementary school teacher, a curriculum facilitator, an educational consultant, and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Urban Education and Interim Program Coordinator for Birth-Kindergarten Education at Winston-Salem State University. Her research interests include Black Feminist Thought, Black male elementary school teachers, Hip-Hop culture’s influence on identity development, Hip-Hop feminism, critical race theory, and narrative research. Dr. Tafari has authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and conference presentations focused on the intersections of hip hop, critical race theory, and critical black feminism. Dawn is the 2017 recipient and 2019 nominee of the Winston-Salem State University & Wake Forest University Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Building the Dream Award and has been featured in the Winston-Salem Chronicle as “Busta Brown’s Person of the Week.” She is also co-founder of the Greensboro Kwanzaa Collective, a grassroots organization that organizes Greensboro’s citywide 7-day Kwanzaa celebration. Younkyung Hong believes that teaching is a political endeavor that should result in improvements in education for all students. She works to support preservice teachers to ask critical questions about social issues and to connect their academic learning with their teaching practice and daily lives. Younkyung is a doctoral candidate in elementary education with a focus on curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where she teaches an undergraduate course in the Elementary Teacher Education program and supervises master’s degree students in their licensure programs. She is a former public elementary school teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and participated in educational activism as a member of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers

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Union (KTU) before embarking on her doctoral studies in the United States. Her research interests include situating and challenging Western/Eurocentric perspectives in the context beyond the U.S. She has been developing her work on topics related to elementary education, social justice education, teacher education, and discourse analysis with a phenomenological perspective. Leta Hooper (Ed.D.) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Coppin State University. Dr. Hooper received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Elementary Education from Tuskegee University; a Master of Science Degree in Special Education with a concentration in Early Childhood from Johns Hopkins University; and a Doctor of Education Degree in Teacher Education and School Improvement from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Hooper’s research interests are teacher identity and development, biographical research on Black teachers, as well as Black feminism and critical pedagogy in education. Peter Hossler is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Community Health at Rhodes College in the Urban Studies Program. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Georgia in 2011 and his research focuses on the political economy of the nonprofit sector, with a particular focus on the health care safety-net in the United States. His work explores the set of governmental, nonprofit, and private market actors and institutions that produce and maintain health care spaces that strive to provide access to U.S. residents that have been left out of our traditional mechanisms for obtaining health care services (e.g. private insurance and Medicare). Dr. Hossler’s work has paid particular attention to the role of nonprofit health care systems, Medical Schools and faith-based initiatives that frequently serve as the foundation for the health care safety-net. Additionally, Dr. Hossler’s work engages with the political implications of nonprofits and the tensions between revolutionary change and the politics of the body. Alesia Hubert has worked as an educator for National Heritage Academies charter schools in Wake and Guilford Counties in North Carolina. She received her undergraduate degree in Elementary Education with a concentration in English Language Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Currently, she is a full-time student at UNCG for a master’s degree in School Administration. Hubert is a graduate assistant for the UNCG McNair Program and a North Carolina Principal Fellow. She is passionate about social justice and equity for students and staff, specifically with racially marginalized groups of individuals. Hubert

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desires to pursue her doctorate degree that will help eradicate oppressive educational policies and practices. Shalyse I. Iseminger holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from Purdue University, Indiana, U.S. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in education and agriculture focused on multiculturalism and social justice. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University in the College of Agriculture’s Office of Multicultural Programs. Her research interests include using diversity education in the context of churches to increase racial inclusion, incorporating multicultural education into public pedagogical spaces, student participation in diversity and social justice courses, the experiences of teaching assistants in diversity and social justice courses, and how Whiteness influences these different phenomena. Darius Jackson is an Instructor in the Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations Department at Northern Illinois University. He received his B.A. in English and his M.S.Ed. in Foundations of Education at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on social justice and cultural awareness in education. Annie Jaffee is a senior at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN majoring in Anthropology and Sociology. Her work centers around questions of social justice and activism, including her internships with the feminist magazine, Women Across Frontiers and an anti-sex trafficking organization called the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. In addition, she worked as a policy intern for the Greenwich Village Chamber of Commerce in New York City. With the goal to provide legal representation for marginalized groups, she is currently studying for the LSAT, and intends on pursuing her passion for civil rights law as an attorney. Ms. Jaffee served as the Research Assistant for this volume, responsible for recruiting scholars, co-editing manuscripts, and writing entries. She is especially grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with incredible scholars around the world to write this encyclopedia. Susan Robb Jones (she/her) is Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at The Ohio State University. Dr. Jones earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in College Student Personnel Administration from the Counseling and Personnel Services Department at the University of Maryland; her Master of Education in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration at the University of Vermont; and her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Saint Lawrence University.

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She has published over 25 journal articles, over 26 book chapters, and 5 books. Her research addresses topics such as intersectionality, psychosocial development, qualitative methodologies, and service-learning in higher education. She is the co-author of Identity Development of College Students (with Elisa S. Abes, John Wiley & Sons, 2013) and Negotiating the Complexities of Qualitative Research: Fundamental Elements and Issues (2nd ed., Routledge, 2014) (with Vasti Torres and Jan Arminio; John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Jones is co-editor of the book Rethinking College Student Development Theory Using Critical Frameworks (with Elisa Abes and Dafina-Lazarus Stewart; Stylus Publishing, 2019) and is one of the co-editors of Student Services: A Handbook for the Profession (John Wiley & Sons, 2017). James C. Jupp is Professor and Chair in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He worked in rural and inner-city Title I settings for 18 years before accepting a position working with teachers, administrators, and researchers at the university level. A public school teacher in diverse rural poor and inner-city Title I schools, his first line of research focuses on White teachers’ understandings of race, class, language, and difference pedagogy in teaching across cultural and racial difference. Drawing on his experiences as teacher and researcher, he was the Lead Editor of a special issue of Teaching Education titled “What is to be done with curriculum studies and educational foundations’ critical knowledges?” and he recently published a conceptual essay on that topic as an overview in the same journal. Additionally, drawing on his experiences living and studying in Spanish language traditions in Mexico and Texas, his second line of research develops internationalized sensibilities in education with an emphasis on decolonial Hispanophone curriculum targeted at informing education in Latinx serving institutions, teacher education programs, and preservice and professional teacher education. Overall, he has published more than 30 scholarly articles in a variety of journals including the Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, Whiteness and Education, International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, Multicultural Perspectives, Urban Education, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, the English Journal, and Multicultural Review. His second book, Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students, was published by Sense Publishers in 2013. Ryan C. Kiesel was formerly an elementary school teacher in Oakland, California and is currently an MA student at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. In his teaching practices with elementary students, as well as in his university teaching,

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he holds commitments to anti-oppressive and culturally relevant pedagogies. His work stresses the importance of collaborative practices, reflexivity and dialogue. He is currently engaged in work to support teacher candidates and novice teachers in their capacity as agents of change in public schools. Ryuko Kubota is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education at University of British Columbia, Canada, where she teaches applied linguistics and teacher education in English as an additional language and modern languages. From 1995 to 2008, she taught in the School of Education and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. Her research draws on critical approaches to applied linguistics and second language education, focusing on antiracism, culture, and language ideology. She is a co-editor of Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice (Routledge, 2009) and Demystifying Career Paths after Graduate School: A Guide for Second Language Professionals in Higher Education (Information Age Publishing, 2012). She has also published three volumes written in Japanese on language education. Her publications also appear in such journals as Applied Linguistics, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Foreign Language Annals, International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, Modern Language Journal, and tesol Quarterly. She has edited special issues, such as: “Re-examining and re-envisioning criticality in language studies” for Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (with Elizabeth Miller in 2017), “Race and language learning in multicultural Canada” for Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2015), “Race and TESOL” for tesol Quarterly (with Angel Lin in 2006). Phyllis Kyei Mensah is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Ohio. Her work focuses on critical investigations of educational practice in West Africa, including decolonizing curriculum and educational practices in Ghana; The intersection of culture, critical pedagogy, and educational practices in authoritarian and patriarchal societies; Culturally responsive education as it relates to multi-ethnic societies; and locating the history and remembrance of the Atlantic slave trade in the educational curriculum and discourse in origin and destination countries. Jenny LaFleur is a doctoral student in Brandeis University’s joint program in sociology and social policy. She received a BA from Carleton College and an Ed.M. from Harvard

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University. Her research seeks to apply Critical Race Theory, critical geography, and practice theory to analyses of social problems and social policy. Her work considers how built and social space are constitutive of a raced and classed social structure, and how these spaces facilitate the reproduction or disruption of inequality. Additionally, she is interested in how current social policy’s market logics interface with social structures to shape outcomes for historically and contemporarily minoritized individuals. Her recent research examines how: privatization impacts educational opportunity; residential segregation influences children’s exposure to disease and chronic health conditions; the parents of Black and Latinx students view inter-district school desegregation programs; charter school locational patterns; and the impact of neighborhood contexts and resources on outcomes for public school students with disabilities. Virginia Lea is a Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Her courses focus on preparing pre-service teachers to become critically aware of the systemic, neo-colonial and cultural hegemonic barriers to social justice, equity and inclusion in education, and to develop critical multicultural teaching strategies to address these barriers. Her last edited publication from Peter Lang (2018), Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness: Views from the Past and Present, with Darren Lund and Paul Carr, received a 2018, American Educational Studies Critics’ Choice Book Award. Virginia tries to live a commitment to socioeconomic, political and educational caring, equity, and justice through her everyday actions, social and educultural activism, research, and teaching. Timothy J. Lensmire is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in literacy, critical pedagogy, and race. His early work focused on how the teaching of writing might contribute to education for radical democracy, and includes his books, When Children Write (Teachers College Press, 1994) and Powerful Writing/Responsible Teaching (Teachers College Press, 2010). In his current work, Lensmire is attempting to re-imagine white people as racialized actors in U.S. schools and society, as part of the broader effort to mobilize white people for social justice work. His most recent book, White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America (Routledge, 2017), is grounded in the stories of eight people from a small rural community in Wisconsin – the community in which Lensmire was born and raised. Drawing on in-depth interviews, as well as on his own experiences, Lensmire explores how white people learn to be ‘white’ and how their lives are dependent on people of color, even in situations where white people have little or no contact with racial others.

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Kristie J. Lipford (PhD) is a social epidemiologist and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies and Health Equity Program at Rhodes College. Her research broadly examines the social and environmental determinants of health in urban and minority populations. Her most recent project investigates the quality of neighborhood green space and its association with health behaviors and quality of life among city residents. Dr. Lipford’s long term objective is to develop and pinpoint multi-level interventions that will advance place-making and environmental walkability in urban areas to benefit population and human health. Duane T. Loynes, Sr. is an assistant professor of Urban Studies and Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Religious Studies from Marquette University, a program that allowed him to engage theology, philosophy, and culture. His teaching and research focus on racial disparities in American life, especially in the relationship between Black communities and law enforcement. He is a sought-after workshop leader specializing in organizational cultural intelligence and unconscious bias in healthcare. Dr. Loynes also serves the Religious Studies Department and teaches courses on ethics, social justice, and religion. Brian D. Lozenski is an associate professor of urban and multicultural education in the Educational Studies Department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota where he studied the cultural contexts of teaching and learning. His research explores the intersections of critical participatory action research, black intellectual traditions in education, and cultural sustainability in the education of youth of African descent. Prior to pursuing his PhD, Dr. Lozenski taught for over a decade in Philadelphia, PA and St. Paul, MN. As a teacher educator and researcher, he has worked with other educators, parents, schools, and districts to develop perspectives and strategies that aspire toward social justice while illuminating the historical realities that have created current educational disparities. He has publications in educational research journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Review of Research in Education, and Equity & Excellence in Education, among others. Dr. Lozenski holds deep commitments to a community-engaged research framework where academic researchers follow the lead of community members and organizations to identify prevalent issues that can be addressed through an inquiry-based approach. In this effort he is affiliated

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with organizations such as the Network for the Development of Children of African Descent, the African Diaspora Consortium, the Education for Liberation Network, and the Twin Cities Solidarity Committee. Hilary A. Lustick is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Texas State University. She researches topics related to school culture-building, but her main foci are restorative justice, the school to prison pipeline, and college access. Hilary earned her doctorate in educational leadership at New York University in 2016 and worked before that as an English teacher and community organizer in Boston and New York City. Hilary is published in International Journal of Leadership in Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Urban Education. Julian E. Maguregui, Jr. is a doctoral student of social science education at the University of South Florida as well as a high school teacher for Hillsborough County Public Schools. His research focuses include the usage of the feminist pedagogy within the secondary social studies classroom to be more inclusive of historically underrepresented groups. He is also interested in the uses of culturally relevant pedagogy that seeks to build relationships between teachers and students while undermining the power dynamic between the two in education. Katherine Cumings Mansfield is a first-generation college graduate, and seasoned schoolteacher and program administrator. She is currently Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Mansfield graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in Educational Policy and Planning and a doctoral portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies. Mansfield’s research is deeply embedded in the historical, political, and sociocultural contexts of education, and draws attention to how social identifies such as gender, race/ethnicity, and class matter when considering educational policy and practice, research approaches, and organizational change. Mansfield is published in Educational Administration Quarterly, Educational Studies, Education Policy Analysis Archives, International Journal of Multicultural Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Teachers College Record. Mansfield has co-edited two books: Women Interrupting, Disrupting, and Revolutionizing Educational Policy and Practice with Whitney Sherman Newcomb (2014) and Identity Intersectionalities, Mentoring, and Work-Life (Im)Balance with Anjalé Welton and Pei-Ling Lee (2016), both with Information Age Publishing.

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Ann Mogush Mason believes that schools can be models for the just futures we all deserve. She works primarily with preservice teachers to understand how their personal identities impact their work, urging students to cultivate orientations toward social justice. Mason directs the Elementary Teacher Education program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she and colleagues are working to reduce discriminatory barriers to teacher licensure and to bring an intersectional and race-conscious framework to curriculum and instruction. Her work involves writing and speaking on topics related to teacher education, the relationship between white supremacy and education, and sociocultural perspectives on “trauma.” She publishes in scholarly journals such as International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Educational Studies, Multicultural Perspectives, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Cheryl E. Matias is an Associate Professor in the School of Education & Human Development (SEHD) at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on race and ethnic studies in education with a theoretical focus on critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical pedagogy and feminism of color. Specifically, she uses a feminist of color approach to deconstruct the emotionality of whiteness in urban teacher education and how it impacts urban education. Her other research interest is on motherscholarship and supporting woman of color and motherscholars in the academy. A former K-12 teacher in both South Central, Los Angeles Unified School District and Bed-Stuyvesant, New York City Department of Education, she earned her bachelors in cultural communication from University of California San Diego, teaching credential at San Diego State University, and her master’s in social and Multicultural Foundations at California State University, Long Beach. She earned her doctorate at UCLA with an emphasis in race and ethnic studies in education. She delivers national talks and workshops on whiteness, racial justice, and diversity. She was awarded the 2014 American Educational Research Association’s Division K (Teacher Education) Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education Award and the 2015 and 2017 Colorado Rosa Parks Diversity Award. In 2015, she was awarded Researcher of the Year by the School of Education & Human Development at University of Colorado Denver. In 2016 she was awarded the university’s 2016 Graduate School’s Dean Mentoring Award. Some of her publications can be found in Race, Ethnicity, and Education, Teacher Education Quarterly, Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, Equity and Excellence, Journal of Teacher Education and Multicultural Perspectives. Recently, she finished her first solo-authored book entitled Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education (Sense, 2016), which earned the 2017 Honorable Mention for the

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Society of Professors of Education. She is a motherscholar of three, including boy-girl twins, an avid Lakers fan, and Bachata ballroom dancer. Allison Mattheis learned what it means to be a white person from the United States through her experiences growing up as an Army brat and from her eight years of teaching middle school science. As a graduate student she spent five years studying school desegregation history and integration policy in Minnesota. She is now an Associate Professor in the Division of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education at California State University Los Angeles, where she works with preand in-service teachers to develop anti-oppressive pedagogies and collectively build our capacities to serve as change agents in schools and communities. Stephen May is Professor of Education in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is an international authority on language rights, language policy, bilingualism and bilingual education and critical multicultural approaches to education. Additional research interests are in the wider politics of multiculturalism, ethnicity and nationalism, social theory (particularly the work of Bourdieu), sociolinguistics, and critical ethnography. Stephen has published over 100 articles and book chapters, along with numerous books, in these areas, including The Multilingual Turn (Routledge, 2014) and Language and Minority Rights (Routledge, 2008, 2nd ed., 2012). He is Editor-in-Chief of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Springer, 3rd ed., 2017), and founding co-editor of the journal Ethnicities. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). His homepage is http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/stephen-may Michael McCanless is a graduate student in Geography at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY, U.S. His research and interests revolve around the changing conditions of work and the everyday financial practices that connect subjects – and sites of subject formation – to the global economy (and vice versa). Michael’s previous work has been featured in the Berkeley Review of Education and the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. Shannon K. McManimon is Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she teaches courses in educational foundations, multicultural and antioppressive education, and qualitative research methods. She

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coordinates the Master of Professional Studies in Humanistic/Multicultural education, which serves educators working in higher education, P12 settings, nonprofits, human services, and informal learning environments. Her research and teaching draw on her experiences not only in formal education, but on her work in nonprofits and informal learning. Largely using narrative, arts-based, and participatory methods, she studies the social and cultural contexts of innovative, equity-focused teaching and learning in content areas that include literacy, STEM, and professional development for educators. She completed her PhD in Culture and Teaching at the University of Minnesota. Rachel McMillian is currently a high school social studies teacher in Cincinnati, OH, and a doctoral student in Educational Leadership at Miami University. Rachel has taught teacher education and leadership courses as well as social studies education methods courses at Miami University. Rachel has a passion for educating teachers and, specifically, recruiting and educating pre-service teachers of color. Rachel’s research interests include social studies/civics education for Black students, Black Critical Theory in education, Black Feminist Theory, and anti-Blackness in educational policies and curriculum. Erin T. Miller (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in The Reading and Elementary Education Department in the Cato College of Education at The University of North Carolina Charlotte. She is the coordinator of the Urban Literacy/Reading Strand for the Curriculum and Instruction PhD Program. She teaches courses such as: Language Arts for Elementary School Learners, Theories and Practice for Equity in Urban Education, Racial Identity Development and Antiracist Activism in Urban Education. Dr. Miller’s multi-layered research examines a) racial identity construction in childhood with a particular focus on white children; b) the early racialized memories/experiences of white teacher candidates and the possible impact those might have on their practice, and c) the development of antiracist pedagogies for elementary aged children through culturally relevant/sustaining early literacy practices. Across these inquiries, she focuses on the intersections of race, racism, and racial identity in dialogue with Critical Whiteness Studies/White Teacher Identity Studies. Dr. Miller’s research leverages participatory qualitative inquiry and postmodern, critical theories to expose and disrupt the social construction of racial identities and their intersection within and around schools and communities. Her work has been published in journals such as: The Urban Review, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Ethnography and Education, Action in Teacher Education, and Journal of

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Early Childhood Teacher Education. Dr. Miller is the ex-officio chair of the Early Childhood Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) serves on NCTE’s Elementary Steering Committee. Thomas A. Mitchell is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. His research interests lie at the intersection of religion, education, and politics, with a focus upon the role that religion and education play in the forming and sustaining of political ideologies. Nicholas C. Ozment has a BA in English and an MA in English Language & Literature from Winona State University, where he taught for eight years. He is currently a professional tour guide and historical scholar in southeast Minnesota. Tina G. Patel is a senior lecturer in Criminology based at the University of Salford, United Kingdom. Tina is author of a number of books, including: Race, Crime and Resistance (Sage, 2011, co-authored with David Tyrer) and Race and Society (Sage, 2017). These examined the patterns of processed of continued racism in what is often referred to as a post-race society. Tina has widely presented and published papers on the subjects of ‘race’/ethnicity, hate crime, the experiences of people of color with the criminal justice system, post-race racism, identity and crime. Tina is currently working on projects examining post-race racism in the UK, and community relations following Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Nicole Pulliam is an Associate Professor of Educational Counseling at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Her work on social justice in American education has distinguished her work as a scholar, counselor, and community leader. Erin Rae is a Curriculum Director in Lockport Illinois and pursuing her PhD in Education at Northern Illinois University. Her research and work focus on equity and social justice in the context of serving families and humanizing approaches to working with educational assessment data. She oversees all curricular matters for her district as well as engaging in professional development with practicing teachers.

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Molly Reetz is an undergraduate at Western Washington University working towards a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Education. Outside of class, she has been involved with the University while working as the Zero Waste Assistant in the Office of Sustainability, as a facilitator for the Food Recovery Network, and as a Faculty assistant with Dr. Nini Hayes. She is interested in Tribal Critical Race Theory and how that informs her passion for Environmental Education. Shawn Arango Ricks (PhD, LPC, LCAS, cHT) is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in Winston-Salem, NC. Dr. Ricks has been a nationally invited speaker and facilitator in the areas of diversity, equity and social justice. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations, and a Masters in Counselor Education from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Dr. Ricks is also a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Licensed Clinical Addictions Specialist and a nationally certified Hypnotherapist in private practice in WinstonSalem, NC. She is trained through SAMHSA in Motivational Interviewing, Strengthening Families and Preventing Long Term Anger and Aggression in Youth (PLAAY). Dr. Ricks is also a human services board certified practitioner, and co-editor of the Journal of Human Services. Her research interests include the psychosocial wellbeing of Black women (both inside and outside of the academy), epistemic injustice, and the impact of racial trauma on Black women and girls. Colleen Rost-Banik specializes in the sociology of education, stratification and inequality, gender and sexuality, and critical service learning. Interested in how issues of racial and economic justice are taught and conceived within higher education, her current research project uses critical ethnography to interrogate the dynamics of power and stratification within university service learning environments. Colleen teaches sociology and social foundations of education courses in university and community college settings, including credit-bearing courses at a women’s correctional facility. In addition to teaching and research, Colleen has a vast array of experience within higher education, which includes coordinating multicultural programs and civic engagement opportunities as well as serving as an academic and student group advisor. Colleen is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She also holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa and a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.

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Megan Ruby received her bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education in 2008 from Northeastern State University and her master’s in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership with an emphasis on Math Education in 2017 from Oklahoma State University. Megan is currently a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University and plans to graduate with her doctoral degree in Curriculum Studies in May 2021. She taught in the public education system from 2010–2018. She has researched and presented on the emotional aspect of teacher burnout in terms of neoliberalism versus care theory. Megan has also spent time abroad in Europe and Asia studying international higher education issues. Megan is currently the lead editor on the forthcoming 12th annual Curriculum and Pedagogy Edited Book called Making a Spectacle: Examining Curriculum/Pedagogy as Recovery From Political Trauma (IAP) due out in 2020. Her research interests are in critical whiteness studies, examining the discourse around niceness, whiteness, and education, gender and education, and critical university studies. Sean Ryan (M.Ed.) is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas studying higher education. He serves as Senior Academic Counselor for the Honors College also at the University of North Texas. His research emphasizes the historical legacy of status and inequality as it pertains to organizational decision-making and higher education policy. Amy Sánchez received her Master’s in Environmental Education from Western Washington University. Her studies focused on critical theory within education and examining identity in relation to land and sense of place. She is currently teaching at Western Washington University. Crystal Simmons is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies, Multicultural, and International Education in the School of Education at SUNY Geneseo. Her research interests include Black History K-12 curriculum, critical race theory, multicultural education, and teacher education. Most of her research has examined the ways both traditional and Black history textbooks and state standards have addressed race, racism, and blackness. In addition to her research, she also has served as the program director where she leads a study abroad experience for student teachers in Ghana. Her work has been published in Social Education and Journal of Education along with several book chapters.

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LaWanda M. Simpkins (PhD) is an independent scholar and founder and President of Creative Justice, Inc., a non-profit organization which specializes in creating spaces for conversations centered on social justice and advocacy. As an academic, Simpkins specializes in courses and curriculum development in areas directly connected with women’s & gender studies, race and adult education. Due to her extensive background, Simpkins approaches teaching and learning from a Freirean approach, which is radical in nature. Her research focuses on hegemonic norms and how dominant structures and ideologies affect the collective identity of marginalized populations, specifically Black women. Her terminal degree lies within Educational Leadership & Cultural Foundations with a certification in Women’s & Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She also has a master’s degree in Adult Education and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration Marketing from North Carolina A&T State University. Simpkins has extensive experience in working with audiences on issues dealing with cultural competency and diversity. She is also a consultant with Renaissance Educational Group, Inc. Anthony C. Siracusa is the Director of Community Engagement at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The World as it Should Be: Religion and Nonviolence Before King (UNC Press, 2021), and he has written extensively about race, youth activism, and civil rights in modern America. His work has appeared in edited volumes from the University of Mississippi, the University of Kentucky, and Stylus Publishing, as well as the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, The Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers. Michael D. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Special Education, Language, and Literacy Department at The College of New Jersey. He provides professional training for public schools on issues of diversity and inclusion. His research interests include teacher preparation for diversity and issues of power and privilege in education. Smith has published multiple articles on critical reflection, culturally responsive pedagogy, and teacher education. Vernon Smith is an Assistant Professor and Program Director of Educational Counseling at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. His innovative “Empowering Young Black Males” initiative serves over 100 students and mentors through bi-monthly meetings based through the academic year.

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Hannah R. Stohry is a PhD student in Educational Leadership (Leadership, Culture, and Curriculum program) at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is currently employed as a Graduate Assistant at the Mindfulness & Contemplative Inquiry Center. Hannah recently published two book chapters on consciousness-raising for multi-racial Third Culture Kids. She is currently co-authoring a journal article (under review) with colleagues on AfroAsian Imaginations and Futures, examining the relationship of Black Panther, Wakanda and Korea using critically collaborative autoethnography. Her current research interests (in no particular order) include: mixed identities, contemplative practices, multiculturalism, Third Culture Kids, wokeness, Chicana feminism, radical love, womxnism, Asian American identities, intersectionality, humanizing pedagogy, cultural humility, wokeness, vulnerability, critical whiteness studies, autoethnography, and AfroAsian Futurism. She is a proud member of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and is a licensed social worker with experience working as a home-based family therapist prior to beginning her graduate degree. Kamden K. Strunk is an Assistant Professor of Educational Research at Auburn University, where he teaches quantitative methods coursework. He is also coordinator of the Educational Psychology PhD program, and a faculty affiliate of the Critical Studies Working Group at Auburn. He received his PhD in Educational Psychology from Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on intersections of sexual, gender, and racial identities in higher education, and broadly on social justice and equity in education. His recent publications include Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Queering Education in the Deep South (Information Age Publishing, 2018), and Oppression and Resistance in Southern Higher and Adult Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Samuel J. Tanner is an assistant professor in the Penn State system. His research concerns issues of whiteness, improvisation, and democratic education. His most recent book Whiteness, Pedagogy, and Youth in America was published by Routledge in 2018. Find out more about Sam’s intellectual and artistic work here: www.samjtanner.com Blair Taylor is director of the Institute for Social Ecology, a popular education center for ecological scholarship and advocacy founded in 1974. His research focuses on

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social movements and political theory; he has lectured and published on contemporary far-right politics, political ecology, capitalism, anarchism, and the history of the left. His work has been featured in Les Temps Modernes, American Studies, and City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action. He is co-editor of the Murray Bookchin anthology The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2014). Devon Thomas is the Senior Coordinator for Student Engagement with the Student Engagement & Career Development team at the University of Arizona where she coordinates campus-wide skill building programs that connect undergraduates with opportunities for experiential learning both within and beyond the classroom. She is also a PhD student in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include whiteness in higher education and resource allocation for undergraduate co-curricular programs. Elise Toedt is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota in the field of Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Literacy Education: Literacy, Language and Culture. Her supporting area is Culture and Teaching. In her poetry and in her research, Elise is interested in who and what silence protects in communal and institutional spaces. Related to this, she is interested in how teachers embody their intersectional identities, and in the possibilities and limitations of critical creative writing practices in 5–12 English classrooms. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Elise taught secondary English for eight years in urban schools and at an international school in Java, Indonesia. Ross Truscott is a researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape in South Africa, working under the research platform, Aesthetic Education. Prior to taking up this position he was a postdoctoral fellow in Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies at Duke University in the U.S. His research interests include: the relation between the psychic and the social, with a focus on postcolonial transformation; aesthetics and politics; psychoanalysis and critical social theory. He is an associate editor of Psychology in Society and Kronos: Southern African Histories, is on the editorial board of Social Dynamics: Journal of African Studies, and is an editor of Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid (Wits University Press, 2017). His work has been published in, among other places, Journal of Philosophical and Theoretical Psychology, Psychoanalysis,

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Culture and Society, and Subjectivity. The monograph on which he is working is tentatively titled The Order of Empathy: A Genealogy of Postcolonial Feeling. Bretton A. Varga is a doctoral candidate of social science education at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on using visual methods and artistic mediums to unveil historically marginalized perspectives. This includes inquiring how aesthetics and various (trans)materialities relate to corresponding cognitive effects and emotional affects. Also, he is concerned with investigating contemporary methods that seek to build cultural competence with an emphasis on anti-oppressive education. He has published in The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies, Social Studies and the Young Learner, The Social Studies, and Teachers College Record. Erica Wiborg is a PhD candidate in the Higher Education program at Florida State University (FSU). Her research focuses on critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and Whiteness in leadership education and scholarship. In her role as a research assistant in the Leadership Learning Research Center at FSU, she coordinates research projects. Erica received her bachelor’s degree in business marketing with a certificate in leadership studies from Florida State University and obtained her master’s degree in Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education at Texas A&M University. Melanie M. Wilcox is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Doctoral Training for Counseling Psychology at Oklahoma State University. She earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University at Albany in 2015. Her research predominantly focuses on multicultural counseling and multicultural training, multicultural orientation, racial justice, Whiteness, economic justice, and social justice advocacy. Of particular interest to Dr. Wilcox is what therapist characteristics are most important in psychotherapy with clients from marginalized backgrounds; how best to train therapists to work with clients from marginalized backgrounds; how best to train therapists to engage in social justice advocacy; and understanding how Whiteness operates to reproduce individual, interpersonal, and structural racism. Chanelle Wilson is a teacher scholar, committed to achieving social and racial justice in education. Chanelle began her career in education as a certified Teacher of English.

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While pursuing a Master of Education at Temple University, she also served as an English Teaching Assistant, through the J. William Fulbright Program, in South Africa. Chanelle earned a doctoral degree in Education Leadership, at the University of Delaware and currently teaches in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program. Her work as a public school practitioner, teaching secondary education students, in the United States and around the world, has fueled her desire to positively impact teaching and learning. Chanelle enjoys facilitating knowledge in a way that encourages personal connections, promotes critical thinking, highlights contemporary relevance, and necessitates centering and reconceptualizing power, privilege, and oppression. Her current research project is a cross-continental study of culturally relevant pedagogy in the United States and Northern Ghana. She is also collaborating with colleagues to institutionalize antiracist literacy practices, from a grassroots level. Chanelle is dedicated to developing relationships with students and celebrates her service as a faculty mentor to many students. She has a passion for using research to improve the educational experiences of marginalized and minoritized groups, promoting equity and critical race-focused conversations. Her life’s goal is to rethink, reimagine, and revolutionize education to meet the needs of all children.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Zachary A. Casey

Whiteness studies is a fraught and difficult interdisciplinary field of inquiry that focuses on the study of white racial identity in the context of white supremacy. Even this opening sentence might be contentious for some, because despite multiple attempts at creating typologies or catchall descriptors for different styles of whiteness studies scholarship, the entire field remains under attack from both within and without. Some scholars argue that whiteness studies as a field represents an appropriation of the freedom struggle of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Others critique whiteness studies as being an outlet for white people to write about other white people in ways that “recenter” whiteness problematically. Still others see whiteness studies scholarship as distracting from more pressing educational needs and questions. And of course, there are also reactionary critiques from conservative commentators who reject the critical study of white racial identity as anti-American and anti-Western Civilization. It should be stated plainly that while many scholars in the field of whiteness studies are white, their/our work is indebted to and builds upon centuries of theorizing by peoples of color. Thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Ralph Ellison and many others set the stage for what would later become critical whiteness studies. While white scholars like David Roediger and Peggy McIntosh are often seen as originary figures in the field, we must make clear that the critical study of whiteness did not begin with white scholars in the late 20th century. Roediger in particular has worked to make this clear, editing a collection called Black on White that documents a vast array of black authors theorizing whiteness long before there was a field called whiteness studies. Still, however, the problem of appropriation is clear: what does it mean for a mostly white group of scholars to engage with the intellectual legacy of black writers to theorize white racial identity and antiracist futures? This question is one that we should resist attempting to answer for now. Put simply, we do not yet know what will come of whiteness studies. We do know that white supremacy remains one of the most hegemonically powerful conceptions in human history, and the struggle to eradicate it must involve all peoples with commitments to realizing their own capacity to become more fully human.

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_001

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Robyn Wiegman worked to categorize and sort whiteness studies scholarship into three camps or schools. She called them the race traitor school, the white trash school and the class solidarity school. Within the field of educational research, whiteness studies has been growing steadily for the past three decades and has largely focused on the class solidarity school. While there are scholars in education whose work fits better in the race traitor or white trash schools, the class solidarity camp has emerged as the dominant framework for critical whiteness studies in education. We can think about this work as fitting into waves of scholarship. First wave critical whiteness work largely focused on understanding white privilege, especially as embodied and enacted by white teachers and teacher education students. Often this work focused on documenting evidence of racism and privilege in educational contexts that functioned as a kind of pointing project – pointing out moments of tension and conflict between the commitments of multicultural, culturally relevant, and critical pedagogies with enactments of whiteness. This first wave work became limited, however, because of a lack of attention to the specificities, complexities, and intersectionalities of white racial identities. Locating structural advantage, evidence of privilege, and instances of resistant or outright white supremacist discourse was an important starting point. However, there was a lack of pedagogical response to much of this work – there was little left to do but to educate white people about their privilege. This prompted the emergence of a second wave of critical whiteness studies in education that has a more pedagogical character and works to complicate and nuance much of the findings of first wave work. Second wave whiteness studies investigate white antiracism, limitations with theories of white privilege, and engage new theories and methodologies including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and autoethnography (among many others). Second wave work seeks to better align with the class solidarity school of whiteness studies by understanding the ways dominant frames around race, whiteness, and education can often stifle, rather than scaffold, work on the side of antiracism. There is a growing body of work that investigates pedagogical approaches to working with white teachers and teacher candidates to support antiracist praxis that goes beyond much of the findings of first wave projects. This shift is documented and presented in this volume in a wide range of entries that follow. For this encyclopedia I worked with my research assistant Ms. Annie Jaffee to iteratively engage the field of whiteness studies in education over the past three years. While my own work and scholarship is in critical whiteness studies, I wanted to take a broader look at the field and those scholars who are pushing us in new directions. Thus, we worked to build a list of themes

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from our engagement with the literature that eventually became our list of entries. Following this, we aimed to contact scholars across the globe whose work we had located in our literature review. The contributors to this volume represent some of the most accomplished and widely cited whiteness scholars in education, as well as a wide range of emerging scholars from a variety of academic disciplines and specializations. We invited contributions and engaged in an editing practice wherein we sought to maintain as much heterogeneity as possible. That is, I wanted to make sure that my own commitments and preferences within whiteness work did not result in an encyclopedia that fit narrowly within my own scholarship. Instead, we sought divergent perspectives and topics in order to present critical whiteness studies in education as an unstable field that is continually undergoing shifts and changes. To this end, I also did not impose blanket rules about how particular concepts should be presented. For instance, some contributors capitalize racial descriptors like White and Black, others do not. The entries themselves focus mainly on concepts drawn from whiteness studies in educational research, but also cover important figures in the field, and a wide range of explorations of whiteness studies work in different contexts. Each entry also offers related entries as a way of navigating the encyclopedia, so readers can locate related work and concepts as they engage the volume. Whiteness scholarship in education has been dominated by U.S. based scholars, and this is reflected in many of the contributions featured here. However, scholars from across the Anglophone world contributed to this project, signaling the growing internationalization of whiteness studies more broadly. It is my sincere hope that this encyclopedia can serve as a source for future scholarship on the side of antiracism by presenting the ever-expanding field of whiteness studies in a singular research volume. While encyclopedia projects are common in educational research, to date no other encyclopedia has been created focused specifically on critical whiteness work in educational research. I am thus honored to have been able to shepherd this project these past few years. I am indebted to the many brilliant contributors whose work makes up the pages of this encyclopedia. Efforts like this are never singular, and this volume would not exist without not only those whose words and ideas are featured here, but also the many other scholars across the disciplines who have contributed to the broader field of critical whiteness studies. Complex and fraught as this work is, I remain committed to the belief that critical scholarship can work on the side of humanization. I hope this resource helps you, the reader, in your work and in your understandings of white racial identity, white supremacy, and education.

CHAPTER 2

Affirmative Action Dwuana Bradley

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Colorblindness; Jim Crow; Whiteness and Higher Education

… President John F. Kennedy coined the phrase “affirmative action” in a U.S. executive order in 1961 where he compelled government contractors to counteract discriminatory practices related to hiring along the lines of “race, creed, color, or national origin” (Executive Order 10925). Affirmative action refers to the practice of actively recruiting and enacting policies that consider an applicant’s racial or gender minority status to improve the inclusion of historically and contemporarily underrepresented groups. Not unique to the United States, affirmative action has been practiced in the workforce, housing, and in U.S. public colleges and universities in accordance with a range of selection procedures that vary in degree as it relates to the level of consideration given to the protected class status of race and gender. In its most popularly conceptualized variation, affirmative action is misconstrued as the illegal act of filling positions through the use of quotas on the basis of race alone as the single most important qualifier. In its most highly contested variation, affirmative action favors applicants who are unequally qualified along traditional measures of merit for the sake of increasing diversity and acquiring candidates that offer unique or specialized talents and skill sets that are not captured through traditional measures of merit. However, in its most widely supported variation, affirmative action considers the underrepresented social class of race and gender as a preferred attribute when all other qualifications are equal or negligibly unequal. The purpose of affirmative action is to balance the long history of legal and illegal discrimination against the society’s most vulnerable populations where whiteness and maleness have enjoyed longstanding and continued privilege in a country that legalized these privileges through the institution of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in conjunction with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1868, legally ended U.S. chattel slavery – except as a punishment for crime. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_002

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Following this legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1868, established the standing definition of naturalized citizenship and the rights afforded to those defined as U.S. citizens, with equal protection under the law. With formerly enslaved Africans then occupying the peculiar space of freed citizen, but still heavily oppressed by their prior social status as an enslaved people, the aforementioned federal acts were critical in providing a ground for legal relief in instances of persistent and unjust practices of racial discrimination (Alexander & Alexander, 2017). Until that point, racial discrimination continued to preclude people of color from equal access to protection under the law, housing, employment, voting, and public education. At that time in U.S. history, rights in these public spheres were legally reserved for White males who owned property and expressly denied to formerly enslaved African peoples who were classified as property, rather than human or citizen, since they were deemed 3/5ths of a person. Though the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment acknowledged the latter group as citizens with rights equal to that of their white counterparts, white supremacy and the racial caste system that facilitated legal racial discrimination in public spheres, persisted well beyond the enactment of these legal statutes. The paradigm of white supremacy primarily prevailed through Jim Crow laws in the southern region of the United States and less overt forms of racism in the northern regions. However, it was the northern state of Massachusetts that first introduced the legal precedent of “separate, but equal” in 1844 (Alexander & Alexander, 2017). Just over 50 years later, the highest court in the United States – the Federal Supreme Court – acknowledged and upheld the state-established precedent of “separate, but equal” through Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896. Their ruling meant that White citizens were not legally bound to occupy the same public spheres as people of color, and people of color could not legally occupy the same public spheres as White citizens as long as the state provided an equal alternative. Plessy v. Ferguson effectively sanctioned de jure segregation in the U.S. on the basis of racial status and further privileged the status of whiteness. Though “separate, but equal” was the ideology at that time, whiteness continued to remain the privileged status because it was rare that separate ever meant equal in any public sphere – including the highest rungs of the U.S. workforce, the U.S. housing market, and the public sphere of the U.S. education system from primary school to the most advanced and professional degree levels. While segregation and its prescribed antidote, affirmative action, impact multiple public spheres, this entry centers the history and trajectory of segregation and affirmative action as it relates to the U.S. education system because it is the one social institution explicitly rooted in

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exclusionary practices by nature (across various subjective measures of merit, including race at a point in history) and it is intricately tied to the life opportunities citizens have in every other public sphere (e.g. the workforce and housing market).

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Shifting Cultural Paradigms & Legal Endorsement of Separate But Equal

According to Alexander and Alexander (2017), it would not be until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that the U.S. constitution would reflect the unfair reality of racial segregation, outlawing it across the land. In its 1938, Missouri ex re. Gaines v. Canada decision, The Supreme Court determined that no state could defer its responsibility to provide “separate, but equal” educational facilities to another state in lieu of admission to its public colleges and universities. The “separate, but equal” doctrine further unraveled when the U.S. Supreme Court Justices delivered their 1950 decisions in: (a) Sweatt v. Painter, pertaining to law school admissions at the University of Texas at Austin; and (b) McLaruin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, pertaining to the treatment of enrolled students at Oklahoma State University. However, it was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that officially overturned the “seperate, but equal” paradigm established by Plessy v. Ferguson (Daniel, Gee, Pauken, & Sun, 2012). The Court’s reliance on social science research helped them determine that separate would always be inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, based on the 14th amendment. The act of legislating integration, as opposed to outlawing segregation, began with the second Brown case – which led The Supreme Court to order resistant southern school districts to integrate their public schools with “deliberate speed” (Alexander & Alexander, 2017; Daniel et al., 2012). In 1964, when congress adopted Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare became constitutionally obligated to enforce integration in public colleges and universities in states that had legal segregation at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, upending the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent. Using voluntary institutional affirmative action policies to advance the goal of integration, efforts of higher education administrators have been consistently thwarted by state and federal antiaffirmative action lawsuits. These lawsuits have been brought forth primarily on the basis that White students suffer an undue burden in the process of remedying the longstanding effects of prior state and federally sanctioned segregation through affirmative action admissions policies.

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Affirmative Action

Despite the privileged social positionality of White U.S. citizens at every level of education, popular concern related to notions of anti-whiteness, and what opponents of this narrative refer to as “reverse discrimination,” has marked The Supreme Court’s framing and court opinions pertaining to the constitutionality of affirmative action across all public spheres (Cabrera, 2014; Hammon, 2013; Leonardo, 2002). Specific to the field of education, these concerns have been used to oppose the institutional use of affirmative practices by college and university admissions departments, since the end of de jure discrimination. In response to the wave of backlash that followed the advancement of people of color in education systems through affirmative action, Supreme Court Justices have responded by upholding two major premises: (1) the use of race to confer a benefit of any sort, is an “inherently suspect” practice, worthy of “the most exacting judicial examination” in any public context (438 U.S. 265, 1978); and (2) the use of race in admissions cannot be used to remedy the ills of historical discrimination, as the only constitutionally supported justification for use of race in admissions is to exercise the right of the institution to determine the student body of its incoming freshman class. Justice Powell’s cited court opinion above reflects a systematic and intentional protection of whiteness and the rights of those who happen to be white to benefit from years of privileged access to educational spaces, while simultaneously endorsing the idea that those who happen to be white might benefit from affirmative action in a growing global and diversifying consumer economy and workforce if universities and colleges were more diverse. Stripping the policy of its connection to the country’s deficiency in racial equity due to its past indiscretions has made affirmative action a contentious topic for debate and target of litigation as a policy that disadvantages those who are racially privileged as individuals, despite white women being the primary benefactors of affirmative action policies to date. The following sections detail the history and decay of affirmative action through educational litigation intended to challenge the constitutionality of affirmative action in university admissions on the basis of individualistic principalities – a poignant value perpetuated through the embodiment of whiteness – rather than collective restorative justice.

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Affirmative Action: A Brief History

In landmark affirmative action cases, Regents of The University of California v. Bakke (1978), Hopwood v. Texas (1996), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Gratz v.

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Bollinger (2003), and Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016), the United States judicial system issued tide changing decisions related to affirmative action in higher education. The tenants of thought, resulting from each of these foundational cases, undergirds the decay of affirmative action policies to date and demonstrate a range of contested selection procedures from quotas, to unequal comparisons, to semi- and equal-comparison procedures. Moreover, they provide ammunition for anti-affirmative action legal agendas nationwide and support evolving legal strategies advanced by affirmative action opponents in lawsuits such as the pending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University case (Wright & Garces, 2018), which demonstrates the alignment of principles of whiteness with the agendas of those deemed by people who happen to be white as “model minorities.” These cases have been used to set the tone of suspicion related to institutional policies that sought to bring forth the promise of Brown v. Board of Education to integrate public schools for the sake of restorative justice in the wake of slavery, segregation, and its aftermath. The following sections offer a brief summary of each case and the shifting logic of the courts on the topic of affirmative action in higher education.

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Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)

The Bakke case set the legal parameters for what is now understood largely as wholistic review, rather than affirmative action. In this case, the medical school of the University of California Davis (UC Davis) devised an admission process that implemented diversity quotas. In an effort to remedy the effects of racial discrimination, UC Davis filled the quotas using a separate admissions process with lower standards for acceptance for prospective students of color than their white peers, (Daniel et al., 2012). On the legal grounds of the 14th amendment, Title VI, and the Civil rights Act of 1964, Bakke (a white male) who was twice denied admission to the university’s medical school, sued the institution for racial discrimination. In hearing this case, the Supreme Court decided in a split decision that (1) the use of quotas and separate procedures for file review in the admissions process was unconstitutional, (2) it is the individual who is entitled to equal protection under the 14th amendment, regardless of their racial background, and (3) in any case where decisions are made based on the category of race, “strict scrutiny” must be applied to determine the constitutionality of the circumstance. Though the Bakke decision significantly limited the way race might be used in affirmative practices, it did not completely rule that the use of race in admissions was unconstitutional. Indeed, it left the use of race as one factor of

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many intact for the purposes of constructing a diverse student body. However, it gutted the intention of affirmative action to restore balance where balance had been thwarted, due to hundreds of years of slavery and decades of legal segregation. Most important to note, it shifted the burden for universities to prove that their processes were “narrowly tailored” and guided by a substantial interest in increasing diversity. After the ruling on Bakke, there was only one constitutionally supported interest left for considering race in the admissions process: delivering an educational benefit to White students.

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Hopwood v. Texas (1996)

Hopwood v. Texas (1996) represents the first significant, nationwide blow to affirmative action. Cheryl Hopwood (along with three other plaintiffs) filed suit in 1992 against UT Austin’s law school alleging that the school’s admission process violated white students’ rights to equal protection under the law (Scanlan, 1996). The lawsuit contended that the consideration of race, on its face, was unconstitutional despite the courts’ ruling in Bakke v California (1978) and asserted that the current process did not meet the criteria of narrow tailoring. At the time, the law school’s practice included considering race as one of many factors, but the process for review entailed that students under consideration for affirmative action be considered in a separate applicant pool – not because students were considered inferior, but out of convenience for staff members and sorting purposes (Scanlan, 1996). While the courts determined that the race conscious admissions program was not inherently unconstitutional, they also determined that the admissions process violated the Supreme Court’s past ruling in Bakke v. California. The portion of the process, which required staff to sort students of color into a pool of applicants for special consideration, was deemed an insulating mechanism to prevent competition between white students and those from underrepresented backgrounds (Scanlan, 1996). The Courts, therefore, struck down this portion of the process. In addition, the process entailed varying thresholds for admissible test scores (Scanlan, 1996). The established thresholds acknowledged The Court’s affirmation of the constitutionality of race conscious standardized test cut offs (“United states v. Fordice,” 1992). The constitutionality of this process was based on the fact that SAT and ACT cut off scores at institutions around the nation were all different and based on the average scores of all white student bodies. This reality had previously been acknowledged by the Supreme Court justices as a reason to favor affirmative action, as these differences were found to be evidence of the systematic disadvantages faced by Black and Hispanic

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students, who’s scores were shown to be lower due to past educational inequities imposed by the state of Mississippi in United States v Fordice (1992). However, the plaintiffs, all of whom were white, argued that these preferences by the committee violated their 14th and 6th amendment rights to equal protection under the law, by advantaging “less qualified Black and Hispanic applicants” (Scanlan, 1996). Though the rights of white students were upheld in this decision, the use of race in admissions remained a constitutional practice. Unsatisfied, the plaintiff’s appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals at the 5th Circuit. The justices of the lower court then ignored the United States v Fordice (1992) decision and determined that educational diversity was not a compelling state interest, and that if it were the law school would have to be the entity responsible for the past discrimination in need of reconciliation through affirmative action policy, not the state of Texas as was being argued by the respondents (Scanlan, 1996). This, of course, was in direct contradiction to Justice Powell’s “lonely opinion” (Daniel et al., 2012) in Bakke v California (1972). The Hopwood decision led to the restriction of considering race as a factor for admission in any capacity, until the companion cases of Gratz v Bollinger (2003) and Grutter v Bollinger (2003) 7 years later.

6

Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), & Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)

In the cases of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Grutter, a White student, sued The University of Michigan Law School after being denied admission based on the fact that she had been discriminated against due to her race. However, at the time, the admissions officials followed a policy that led them to evaluate each applicant based on all the information available in their file. This included file components such as a statement of purpose, reference letters, and a diversity statement on the value they might add to the university climate and advancing the mission of the law school. The policy did not restrict the types of diversity contributions eligible for “substantial weight” in the admissions process but included ethnic diversity as one factor for consideration. The law school aimed to enroll a “critical mass of underrepresented minority students” to avoid tokenism (Alexander & Alexander, 2017; Daniel et al., 2012). In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) Gratz and Hamacher – two White students – sued the university after being denied admission to the undergraduate college of Literature, Science, and the Arts. They contended that the school’s process was not narrowly tailored, nor did their consideration of race in admissions serve a compelling state interest; and by considering race in admissions, the

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university disadvantaged white students in the process on the grounds of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In reviewing the case, the courts determined that the undergraduate process, which automatically awarded points on the basis of race, did not provide the level of individual assessment required to pass the test of strict scrutiny and the students were granted relief (Daniel et al., 2012). Ultimately, leaving the use of race in admissions intact and more precisely defined, the Bollinger companion cases reaffirmed the use of race as one of many factors, in narrowly tailored individualized admissions processes, for the purposes of ascertaining the educational benefits of diversity in a higher education setting. Many institutions then reinstated race-conscious admissions processes modeled on the opinions of the court in relation to these cases and the Bakke opinion.

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Fisher v. University of Texas (UT) (2013, 2016)

Fisher v University of Texas at Austin (2008, 2014) followed the Bollinger companion cases that reinstituted the use of race in admissions (Huskey, 2004). Abigail Fisher sued UT Austin in 2008 when her application was denied under their admissions process, which reserved 75% of seats for seniors graduating in the top 7% of their class and considered the other 25% under holistic review (Alexander & Alexander, 2017). Though the university took a yearlong measure to consider whether the top 10% plan (set in place in response to Hopwood) was an adequate race-neutral alternative before reinstituting a race conscious admissions process, Fisher sued UT claiming that the university overlooked the top 10% plan as a race neutral alternative. Fisher argued that UT’s admission process, therefore, illegally denied her application in favor of “less qualified” Black and Latinx applicants, violating her right to equal protection under the law. The district court upheld UT’s use of race in their admissions process. However, the case troubled the vague notion of “critical mass,” though ultimately the court deferred to the institution on this principle. The courts confirmed that the top 10% rule did not disqualify the university from considering race as one of many factors in their admissions process. It was also determined that Fisher’s application would not have been accepted regardless of the top 10% plan or the institution’s process, which considered race as a plus one factor. Fisher then appealed her case to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, however, rather than making a decision, the

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Supreme Court remanded the case back to the district courts, stating that they had misinterpreted the Justices’ interpretation of strict scrutiny. The district court, however, upheld their initial decision. In response, Fisher appealed once more to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. However, in deciding Fisher’s second appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the University of Texas’s process was in fact constitutional (Alexander & Alexander, 2017; Daniel et al., 2012; Jayakumar, Garces, & Park, 2018; Wright & Garces, 2018). The loss of Fisher I & II led Fisher’s attorneys to seek out Asian students who have been denied admission as new complainants (Wright & Garces, 2018). While these cases have yet to be determined, changing their complainants race presents a new angle to their attacks on affirmative action and offer a new opportunity to eradicate the legal consideration of race in access governing policies across the U.S. (Wright & Garces, 2018). In their latest pending case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Fisher’s attorneys have found a way to ostensibly break the Black/White binary that is often critiqued by proponents of affirmative action (Wright & Garces, 2018). They have done so by exploiting the conferred benefits of whiteness afforded to some groups within the Asian American diaspora who have enjoyed greater academic success in American systems of higher education than others. It is the Court’s position on individual rights and commitment to ignoring years of U.S. discrimination that gives this latest anti-affirmative action lawsuit a legal ground to stand on. By refusing to acknowledge the degradation of the Asian American community and the historical exclusion of economically disadvantaged and unskilled Asian American ethnic groups through acts of legislation like the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, The Courts have disincentivized the alignment of their collective plight with other communities of color who have been systematically disadvantaged as a result of legally sanctioned discrimination. At the same time the courts have incentivized their alignment with the perceived plight of those who have been legally privileged based on race (Jayakumar & Garces, 2015; Wright & Garces, 2018).

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Whiteness & Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court has resisted restorative justice and protected whiteness in its decisions on affirmative action. By prioritizing the use of colorblind notions of equality as a tool to combat false equivocations between perceptions of anti-whiteness (as a social construct, worldview, or perspective) and reverse racism, the logic that undergirds The Court’s rationale for using race as a factor

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in admissions has come to ignore the materialized historical legacy of de jure racism and contemporary manifestations of anti-minority discrimination and de facto segregation (Hammon, 2013). As a result, White women have become the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, while people of color who have been historically marginalized have become the target of anti-affirmative action backlash. For this reason, whiteness as a social construct, worldview, or perspective, and the public interest to resist it, must be decoupled from its popular connotation, which inextricably binds it to the social identity of people who happen to bare the marker of white skin (Leonardo, 2002). Critical whiteness theory provides a lens by which this feat of decoupling can take place and reveals the false construct of anti-whiteness as an obstruction to the spirit of affirmative action integration policies.

References Alexander, K. W., & Alexander, K. (2017). Higher education law: Policy and perspectives (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis. Cabrera, N. L. (2014). Exposing whiteness in higher education: white male college students minimizing racism, claiming victimization, and recreating white supremacy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 30–55. Daniel, P. T. K., Gee, E. G., Pauken, P. D., & Sun, J. C. (2012). Law, policy, and higher education. LexisNexis. Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, No. 11-345, 133 2411 (Supreme Court 2013). Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, No. 14-981, 136 2198 (Supreme Court 2016). Gratz v. Bollinger, No. 02-516, 539 244 (Supreme Court 2003). Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, 539 306 (Supreme Court 2003). Hammon, B. (2013). Playing the race card: White Americans’ sense of victimization in response to affirmative action. Texas Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, 19, 95–120. Jayakumar, U. M., & Garces, L. M. (2015). Working collectively toward racial equity in higher education policy. Routledge. Jayakumar, U. M., Garces, L. M., & Park, J. J. (2018). Reclaiming diversity: Advancing the next generation of diversity research toward racial equity Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 11–79). Springer. Leonardo, Z. (2002). The Souls of White Folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), 29–50. Matias, C. E., Viesca, K. M., Garrison-Wade, D. F., Tandon, M., & Galindo, R. (2014). “What is critical whiteness doing in OUR nice field like critical race theory?” Applying CRT and CWS to understand the white imaginations of White teacher candidates. Equity & Excellence in Education, 47(3), 289–304.

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Scanlan, L. C. (1996). Hopwood v. Texas: A backward look at affirmative action in education. New York University Law Review, 71, 1580. Wright, D. K., & Garces, L. M. (2018). Understanding the controversy around racebased affirmative action in American higher education. In J. Blanchard (Ed.), Controversies on campus: Debating the issues confronting American Universities in the 21st century (p. 3). Praeger Publishing.

CHAPTER 3

Alt-Right Blair Taylor

Related Entries: Nationalism; Racial Realism; Scientific Racism; Trump, Donald White Supremacy

1

Origins and Early History

The alt-right, short for alternative right, is a constellation of right-wing forces loosely united by a critique of traditional conservatism animated by political commitments to white nationalism or ultranationalism, authoritarianism and rejection of democracy, gender traditionalism, hatred of the left and liberalism, and antisemitism. The alt-right is an amorphous term that encompasses a spectrum of far-right actors that includes white nationalists, “race realists,” neo-Nazis, far-right academics, esoteric antimodernists, and the misogynist “manosphere.” This diversity is reflected in the division between alt-right – who openly embrace white nationalism, fascism, or Nazism – and the “alt-lite,” who advocate civic, rather than white, nationalism and welcome participation by Jews, gays, and people of color. They are united by the belief that “all men are created unequal” (Spencer, 2020). Human inequality is at the core of the alt-right, understood as an inherent and inescapable fact of life that manifests between races, nations, culture, sexes, and sexualities. Straight white western men are situated at the apex of this civilizational hierarchy. The term alt-right was coined in 2008 by prominent movement figure Richard Spencer, an editor at The American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine before founding AlternativeRight.com and the Radix journal. It began as an online phenomenon clustered around anonymous forums like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit’s r/TheRedPill as well as far-right websites like American Renaissance, VDARE, Breitbart, and Counter-Currents.com. These diverse groups were initially united by their opposition to establishment conservatism. The alt-right believes these “cuckservatives,” a slang term combining cuckold – the husband of an unfaithful wife – and conservative, have betrayed conservativism by meekly accepting hegemonic liberal norms like equality and multiculturalism. They are conservatives who “care more about the free market than preserving western culture, and who are happy to endanger the latter with © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_003

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mass immigration where it serves the purposes of big business” (Bokhari & Yiannopoulos, 2016). The alt-right therefore often assume an oppositional posture towards the American culture and government, drawing inspiration from the antimodernist, revolutionary, and fascist right. Utilizing social media platforms like 4chan and 8chan, Reddit, YouTube and Twitter, the movement has skilfully used irony, irreverence, and humor to give far-right politics a hip, edgy makeover. By challenging established political categories and finding an ally in President Donald Trump, the alt-right has transformed the political landscape in the United States by mainstreaming far-right ideas.

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Political and Intellectual Composition

Echoing Andrew Breitbart’s statement that “politics is downstream from culture,” the alt-right has prioritized disseminating ideas by founding journals and websites, producing irreverent visual memes, and building interlocking media platforms (Nagle 2016 p. 42). This “metapolitical” strategy seeks to change society via the dissemination of right-wing ideas rather than through seizing state power. This gives the movement an intellectual, quasi-academic flavor; leaders Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer hold advanced degrees from elite universities like Yale and the University of Chicago and speak in an academic idiom. They draw on intellectual and political sources including paleoconservatism, the European New Right (ENR), race realism, Neoreaction (NRx), patriarchal ideologies, and classical fascism. Alt-right ideology borrows many themes from Alain de Benoist and the French Nouvelle Droit, embedding critiques of capitalism and immigration in the language of cultural diversity and ethnopluralism. It also draws heavily on various “declinist” thinkers from German nationalist Oswald Spengler to Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin. These narratives center on reversing perceived civilizational decline through “palingenesis,” a national or racial rebirth that wipes away the old order (Griffin, 1991). This revolutionary antimodernism or ultra-traditionalism rejects the “mongrelizing” forces of capitalism, individualism, and multiculturalism. The alt-right’s critique of free market capitalism, authoritarianism, and embrace of explicit white racial politics strongly resonates with classical fascism. The movement has embraced a wide variety of fascist thinkers including esoteric Italian neofascist Julius Evola, Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and vegan ecofascist Savitri Devi. These sources shape the alt-right’s critique of capitalism, arguing it promotes a spiritually empty materialism that undermines national sentiment, racial identification, and the patriarchal family. This

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sentiment was reflected in Steve Bannon’s Vatican speech on the “crisis of capitalism,” which combined classic elements of rightist critiques of capitalism including producerism, nativism, social Catholicism, and an antisemitic fixation on finance. This dovetails with their hostility towards “globalism,” a vague euphemism for alleged Jewish control of the global economy and transnational institutions from the European Union to the World Trade Organization. To counter the global monoculture of capitalism and modernity, many in the alt-right valorize pre-Christian spiritual traditions like Paganism, Norse mythology, and Heathenism. The movement also articulates a right-wing environmentalism, using ecological discourse to justify social inequality and domination as part of the “natural order.” This ecofascist tendency has rediscovered Nazism’s commitments to organic agriculture and animal welfare, while developing novel right-wing interpretations of biodiversity, deep ecology, bioregionalism, Indigenism, and anarchism. By addressing issues associated with the left, Richard Spencer claims the alt-right represents “liberation from a left-right dialectic” – a classic characteristic of fascist movements. The alt-right is also strongly influenced by the isolationist ethos of paleoconservatism, especially the critiques of U.S. military intervention, free trade, and immigration advanced by Pat Buchanan and Taki’s Magazine. This informs an anti-imperialist orientation that rejects war and empire as inevitably leading to the mixture and dilution of distinct cultures and traditions. It has put shared politics before national loyalties, frequently expressing admiration for the authoritarian nationalism of other nations, especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. While most in the alt-right are skeptical if not openly hostile to the state, it is also opportunistic. Some wish to smash the existing government apparatus while others envision taking it over. Many advocate creating decentralized non-statist political communities based on race, “tribe,” or bioregion, a position popularized by groups like Attack the System, National Anarchism, and the Wolves of Vinland.

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Racial Discourse

Race is central to the alt-right. For Richard Spencer and most of the alt-right, race “is real” and forms “the foundation of identity” (Spencer, 2020). With few exceptions, movement participants embrace “white nationalism,” the need to defend white identity, culture, and interests through a variety of means including white-only political communities or “ethnostates.” White identity politics are presented as the natural corollary to non-white identity politics, evident in the presentation of “Identitarian” groups like Identity Evropa. According to

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alt-right writer Lawrence Murray, “The new left doctrine of racial struggle in favor of non-Whites only […] must be repudiated and Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs” (Murray, 2016). White backlash to Obama and the Black Lives Matter Movement has been an important political theme and source of recruitment. There has been much debate as to what, if anything, distinguishes the altright from traditional white supremacy, fascism, and neo-Nazism. The movement has an explicitly fascist or neo-Nazi wing which openly embraces the imagery and ideology of National Socialism, including outlets such as the neoNazi site Stormfront, Mike Enoch’s The Right Stuff blog and The Daily Shoah podcast, and Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer. Yet others reject neo-Nazism as outmoded or alienating. This wing of the alt-right attempts to distance itself from the negative connotation of white supremacy by advocating the protection of “cultural difference” and “diversity” by means of ethnonationalist separation. This is often tied to fears of “white genocide” resulting from demographic trends. The concepts of “race-realism,” “Human Biological Diversity,” and “ethnopluralism” feature prominently in alt-right discourse, terms which repackage familiar arguments about racialized difference and inequality in pseudo-scientific language. In contrast to the subcultural, poorly-educated, working-class image of neo-Nazis, the alt-right seeks to project a more cleancut, mainstream, upper-middle class identity. Yet at the same time, not all altright groups are primarily concerned with race, and there are a few prominent non-white participants, such as Tusitala “Tiny” Toese or Joey Gibson. These activists typically identify with the alt-right’s ultranationalism, traditionalism, and hostility towards immigrants, blacks, Muslims, feminism, and leftists, but reject explicit white supremacy and neo-Nazism. As they claim the U.S. has conquered racism, they serve an important legitimating role for the movement. The issues of Nazism and non-white participation are core fault lines distinguishing the alt-right and alt-light. Antisemitism is a defining feature of most in the alt-right, even though the movement remains internally divided on Jewish participation and Israel. Jews are frequently identified as a powerful force ultimately responsible for the evils of globalism, free market capitalism, communism, sexual degeneracy, and political correctness. Antisemitic content is prominently featured on platforms like The Daily Shoah and Counter-Currents, and academic anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald is a star of the alt-right. Antisemitic conspiracy theories perform a crucial function within alt-right ideology as they explain how “inferior” races, women, and homosexuals have successfully challenged white male supremacy since the 1960s: they argue it was a secret plot enabled by powerful Jews. This trope often takes the form of “Cultural Marxism,” a conspiracy

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by Jewish academic and media elites to undermine western culture through concepts like “political correctness” and multiculturalism, attributed to Jewish academics like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Judith Butler. Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a common target of antisemitic conspiracies which identify him as the main funder of attacks on western civilization. The alt-right also popularized the practice of putting triple parentheses ((())) around names and terms to designate them as Jewish, to signify how Jewish power “echoes” throughout history. Gender is as central to alt-right ideology as race. The movement articulates a traditionalist gender politics that seeks to restore patriarchy and heterosexual masculinity, believed to be under assault by feminism. It has close ties to the “manosphere,” an online male subculture united by misogyny and male victimhood, a milieu that includes Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) who feel oppressed by an allegedly anti-male society, Pickup Artists (PUAs) that preach manipulation of women for sex, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs) who abstain from relationships with women, and male tribalists. Gamergate, Men’s Rights Activists, and other attacks on feminism have been central for movement consolidation. Prominent figures like Daryush Valizadeh move between both milieus. Defending traditional gender roles is central to the popularity of the Proud Boys, the male-only “western chauvinist” fraternity founded by Vice Magazine founder Gavin McInnes, which longs “for the days when girls were girls and men were men” (Proudboysusa.com, 2019). Although one of the most visible groups in violent clashes with antifascist activists, the group rejects the alt-right label, stating it is open to “all races, all religions, gay or straight” so long as one is “born a man and loves the west” (Proudboysusa.com, 2019). Jack Donovan is another figure that straddles the manosphere and the alt-right. He is a leading member of the Wolves of Vinland (WoV), a neofascist group dedicated to violent male fraternity, paganism, and an ecological antimodernism. Donovan is also gay, joining a small handful of other gay alt-right figures who use their sexual identity to legitimate anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian politics, including media provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Death in June singer Douglas Peace, and white nationalist author James O’Meara. Although welcomed by some, many in the alt-right continue to disavow gay participation.

4

Trump and the Alt-Right

The alt-right gained much wider visibility during the 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s “America First” presidential candidacy provided a figure to rally behind and an opportunity to disseminate their

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views to a much wider audience. Trump’s aggressive stance on issues including immigration, Muslims, the Republican establishment, and mainstream media resonated with alt-right positions. Trump has drawn ideas and personnel from this milieu, appointing as chief strategist Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon, who described the media empire as a “platform for the alt-right,” and retweeting content and themes from alt-right sources. The alt-right has enthusiastically supported Trump. At a National Policy Institute conference after the inauguration, Richard Spencer led the crowd in chants of “Hail Trump” punctuated by fascist salutes and proclaimed, “Trump was the first step towards [white] identity politics in the United States” (Dart, 2016). Trump’s ambiguous reaction to his far-right supporters has widely been interpreted as subtly affirming. Only after intense pressure by media and mainstream Republicans did he renounce the endorsement of longtime white supremacist David Duke. In the wake of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, he claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” an equivocation of fascists and antifascists that earned praise from alt-right leaders (Thrush & Haberman, 2017). Despite consolidating behind Trump as their movement’s tribune, many in the alt-right quickly denounced him for allegedly betraying his “America First” platform, especially by dismissing Steve Bannon and launching missile strikes in Syria. These actions were interpreted by the alt-right as caving to establishment conservatives and Jewish influence, especially that of son-in-law Jared Kushner. The alt-right’s relationship to Trump remains opportunistic; it seeks to use him to advance their goals by mainstreaming far-right politics while remaining independent of his administration and skeptical of electoral politics generally. The alt-right has mobilized around various other U.S. political events and figures. It joined Steve Bannon in supporting the senate bid of Ray Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court Justice who lost to a Democrat in Alabama amid accusations of pedophilia which divided Republican support. Moore’s far-right politics had gained a national spotlight, including virulently anti-gay statements, connections to white supremacist groups, and support for the “Birther” conspiracy movement that claimed president Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. Others on the alt-right, however, felt Moore’s old-fashioned Christian fundamentalism had little in common with their movement. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s blatant racial profiling of Latinx peoples in Arizona also attracted alt-right supporters. He was eventually found guilty of criminal contempt of court for refusal to obey injunctions to cease the practice but was pardoned by president Trump in 2017. Conspiracy theories are an important strain within the alt-right, acting as a gateway for conspiracies centered on Jews, liberals, and people of color. The combination of paranoia,

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racialized grievance, and rage that characterize figures like Alex Jones or the “QAnon” movement align with the culture of the alt-right.

5

The Post-Election Alt-Right

After a peak of visibility in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the alt-right has been in a period of decline. Since firing Bannon, Trump has slowly distanced himself from the alt-right while edging closer to mainstream Republicans. The 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, its largest physical manifestation, only brought out 1,000–1,500 participants from across the country and engendered a massive backlash against the racist violence on display. It’s 2018 sequel, Unite the Right 2, was a failure with less than 30 participants dwarfed by thousands of counter-demonstrators. Online platforms like Patreon, Twitter, and YouTube have slowly banned or restricted alt-right figures like Alex Jones and Richard Spencer. The so-called “alt-light” has maintained a greater street-level presence, with groups like Joey Gibson’s “pro-free speech” Patriot Prayer, the “western chauvinist” Proud Boys, and Matt Heimbach’s nowdisbanded Traditionalist Worker Party engaging in a series of violent clashes with anti-fascist demonstrators across the United States from 2016 to present. The Traditionalist Worker Party disbanded in 2018 amidst a sex scandal, the Proud Boys were designated an extremist group by the FBI after a brawl in NYC, and the electoral campaigns of Joey Gibson and other far-right candidates were rebuked at the polls. The coalition between Patriot groups and the alt-right fractured over participation by neo-Nazis. James A. Fields was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of antifascist demonstrator Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right Rally. Yet hate crimes by right-wing extremists have continued to surge in recent years; 2018 had 50 murders by right extremists, the fourth largest number since 1970 (Anti-Defamation League 2019). Although the altright is not likely to disappear due to these setbacks, the combination of public backlash and heightened internal divisions suggests a movement in disarray.

References Anti-Defamation League. (2019). Murder and extremism in the United States in 2018. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism2018#executive-summary Bokhari, A., & Yiannopoulos, M. (2016, March 30). An establishment conservative’s guide to the alt-right. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

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Dart, T. (2016, December 7). White nationalist Richard Spencer fuels protest as he mocks critics in Texas. The Guardian. Griffin, R. (1991). The nature of fascism. Pinter Publishers. Lawrence, M. (2016, March 6). The fight for the alt-right: The rising tide of ideological autism against big-tent supremacy. The Right Stuff. http://therightstuff.biz/2016/03/ 06/big-tentism/ Nagle, A (2016). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. Zero Books. Proud Boys. (2020, May 26). About us. Proud Boys USA. https://proudboysusa.com/ aboutus/ Spencer, R. B. (2020, July 4). The metapolitics of America. https://radixjournal.com/ 2020/07/2014-7-4-the-metapolitics-of-america/ Thrush, G., & Haberman, M. (2017, August 15). Trump gives White supremacists an unequivocal boost. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/ politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists.html

CHAPTER 4

American Indian Boarding Schools Sean Ryan

Related Entries: American Indians and Whiteness; Scientific Racism; Settler Colonialism; White Supremacy

1

Introduction

American Indian boarding schools emerged during the 19th century through United States Federal policy efforts to educate native children in the industrial and agricultural arts, teach English as a primary language, and prepare tribal communities for mainstream society. Regarded as a solution to the “Indian problem” (Miles, 1879), boarding schools served as an alternative to outright genocide of native peoples. The legacy of the schools represents attempts to quickly absorb native children into mainstream American society, while simultaneously eradicating tribal cultures. Initial attempts by the U.S. to educate and convert native tribes began in the early 19th century, with federal money channeled through various religious organizations that built and operated schools on Indian reservations in western territories. The acceleration of westward expansion, particularly after the Civil War, pushed American interests further into indigenous territories established through various treaties with the U.S. government. The collapse of buffalo populations forced tribes to reservation systems and further dependence on federal support that required attendance at schools for native children. Though initially these efforts relied on the cooperation of various religious groups, most notability the Quaker community, the Bureau of Indian Affairs eventually acquired full authority to develop a national system of Indian schools. In a move away from traditional reservation schools, the U.S. government created Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which served as the first federally funded, off-reservation boarding school for Indian children. Founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle became the flagship Indian boarding school and provided a model for similar institutions created during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Guided by his experience leading African-American soldiers and Indian scouts as a cavalry officer during the U.S. Army’s campaigns against native tribes of the Western Plains, Pratt © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_004

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believed racial differences did not dictate ability, and American Indians were fully capable of joining white society. Pratt’s motto, “kill the Indian… save the man” (1892), became the foundation of his work at Carlisle, where separating young children from their tribe and schooling them in white ways, became a means of Americanizing Indians while obliterating their native cultures. Indian boarding schools would come to serve two separate but interrelated goals pertaining to the destruction of tribal communities: Assimilate native children into mainstream society as a means of acculturating an entire race, while simultaneously demonstrating to white society the capabilities of American Indians in becoming U.S. citizens. Between 1860 and 1971 the Bureau of Indian Affairs established almost 100 boarding schools in 18 U.S. states. Though an exact total is unknown, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of children were removed from their tribal homes and placed in these schools.

2

Race and Citizenship in 19th Century America

American Indian boarding schools emerged during a period of intense debate regarding the concepts of race and citizenship. While early American definitions of race blended notions of geography, culture, and notions of blood, 19th century classifications utilized pseudo-scientific reasoning to separate groups from one another. Samuel George Martin, a Philadelphia physician and natural scientist, applied developments in natural history to explain questions of racial differences through the use of craniology (Gould, 1996). Martin theorized that skull capacity was an indicator of intellectual and moral ability. By measuring the skulls of various ethnic groups, Martin argued craniology provided evidence of a natural racial hierarchy that placed Whites at the top, Native Americans in the middle, and African Americans on the bottom. Citizenship for Native peoples was a radical idea. Native people were excluded and considered members of sovereign governments beginning at the founding of the country. Article I of the U.S. Constitution places the responsibility of negotiating with Native tribes with Congress, and Indians were not to be counted for the apportioning of representatives and federal funding unless they paid taxes. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law and birthright citizenship to any person born or naturalized in the U.S., but it excluded Native people because Congress still considered Indians members of sovereign governments. After the Civil War, the U.S. struggled to replace the political and social customs of slavery, while thousands of immigrants from countries around the world challenged previously held notions of whiteness (Fear-Segal, 2007).

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The prevailing racial discourse regarding American Indians considered their culture and society as primitive and crude yet broke into differing opinions about the nature and extent of their savagery. The organization and practices of U.S. education efforts highlights these opposing perspectives on the capabilities of native people. Those who believed Indians were depraved and bestial savages unable to join mainstream white society saw basic agricultural education, taught in the native language of their people, as a means to provide tribes with economic opportunities so they would no longer be reliant on federal assistance. Supporters of this approach preferred a separation of Indians from white society. Others promoted educational efforts rooted in the progressive racialization of non-white people that attempted to absorb the remnants of tribes into mainstream society. This would require the teaching of English as the student’s primary language, and removal from tribal lands to increase interactions with white society.

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Early American Indian Education – Mission Schools and Christian Conversion

The Civilization Fund, passed by Congress in 1819, created dedicated financial resources intended to encourage religious organizations in the education and civilization of Native peoples. In 1824, Congress created the Bureau of Indian Affairs, originally located in the War Department and later within the Department of Interior, to monitor and administer the funds. Over the next decade, the U.S. Supreme Court, through a series of rulings regarding state and federal authority over Indian lands, determined Native tribes were not sovereign nations, but rather classified as domestic dependents. Over the next several decades, a loosely organized system of Indian day and boarding schools developed on reservations throughout the U.S., with the vast majority of enrollment occurring at religiously affiliated mission schools. The schools worked to convert native people to Christianity, provide a basic education, and took a bilingual approach to educating Native children – lessons were taught in English and a tribe’s own language. Entire libraries were translated into various Native languages, with the Bible being the most important, and thus most frequently translated into indigenous languages. The bilingual approach to schooling formed a powerful strategy of control over students, and the emphasis on Christian conversion carried aspects similar to the role missionaries played in European colonization efforts (Fear-Segal, 2007). As U.S. interests continued to expand into Native territories, the Federal government began focusing on the important role Indian schools would have on incorporating tribal communities into mainstream society and instilling

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loyalty to the U.S. government. Beginning with the Treaties of Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie in 1867, any native child living on the newly formed reservations was required to attend an Indian school. As outlined by Francis Walker (1874), Commissioner of Indian Affairs under President Grant, the purpose of requiring Native children to attend reservation schools was “to learn and practice the arts of industry, at least until one generation shall have been fairly started on a course of self-improvement.” Federal initiatives would provide agricultural education and equipment, but would require a strict reservation policy of “secluding Indians from whites for the good of both races,” as it was believed Native people were “disposed to submit… to the lower and baser elements of civilized society, and to acquire the vices and not the virtues of the whites.” In 1871, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, ending Indian tribes’ status as domestic dependents. Tribes lost their semi-independent status and were now classified as wards of the federal government opening discussion about the long-term status of Indians as U.S. citizens. The Bureau of Indian Affairs implemented a strict policy of instruction only in English, much to the dismay of various school leaders. The move away from conversion to Christianity and towards rapid assimilation demonstrated a pivotal shift in federal authority over Indian education and national perceptions on indigenous languages. These policies were rooted in the prevailing white supremacist attitudes of the late 19th century and a desire for the economic isolation of tribes.

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Richard Henry Pratt

Given his limited education and background, Captain Richard Henry Pratt emerged as an unlikely school leader and administrator. Born in upstate New York, and raised in Indiana, Pratt had limited formal schooling and enlisted in the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. After earning the rank of captain, he returned to civilian life only to reenter the military in 1867 as an officer for the 10th U.S. Cavalry, a regiment composed of Indian scouts and Black men known as the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory, Pratt and his regiment participated in several military campaigns against Native tribes who were raiding along the western frontier territory. Pratt’s time with the 10th Cavalry was formative to the development of his ideas on race and citizenship. The vast majority of Americans viewed the attacks along the frontier as evidence native people were ruthless savages unable to be civilized. Pratt (1964) understood these raids as a reaction to the system of civil and military

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control that was “full of vexatious complications and lack of harmony… the government through its Indian Bureau was sadly lacking in keeping its treaty obligations, which goaded the Indians to rebel against being reservated [sic]” (p. 31). He outlines the defacto strategy used by the military and U.S. interests to control Native peoples: The general destruction of the buffalo was ordered as a military measure because it was plain that the Indians could not be controlled on their reservations as long as their greatest resource, the buffalo, were so plentiful. Cross continental railroads were completed, and eastern interests sought the meat, hides, hair and bones for commerce. Scores of frontier settlers went out and made great gain from the slaughter of this greatest and plentiful of our American beasts. This the Indians resented and fatal collisions between them and the white buffalo hunters occurred. In a few years the buffalo were gone, and the Indians driven onto the reservations. (p. 63) The end of formal hostilities with the tribes of the Great Plains, and their removal to reservations, produced a great number of Indian prisoners. The Attorney General ruled, “a state of war could not exist between a nation and its wards” thus a military commission to try the prisoners would not be permitted. A civilian court trial was also out of the question, as it was believed an impartial jury could not be obtained due to frontier feelings towards the Indian population. Thus, the most notorious of the tribal members would be held indefinitely at an eastern fort as prisoners of war. Pratt volunteered his services to accompany these prisoners back east. In a correspondence with his commanding officer, Pratt (1964) stated that changes in administration and policy may allow the prisoners to return “to their people sooner or later, much can and should be done to reform these young men while under this banishment” (p. 106). Pratt would go on to escort 72 prisoners from the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida in May of 1875. Pratt would spend 3 years at Fort Marion, building the foundations of Indian Education he would go on to implement at Carlisle. This included teaching the prisoners English, dressing them in military uniforms, the cutting of their long hair, and exposure to the community of St. Augustine. Thousands of people visited Fort Marion to observe the transformation of the Indian prisoners into civilized soldiers. These visits not only provided the Indian prisoners with exposure to the civilized world, but also grabbed the attention of

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American society to demonstrate what Indians could accomplish if allowed proper opportunities. Pratt’s time at Fort Marion, along with his experiences with the 10th Cavalry, led him to strong convictions about the American Indian’s place in America. Pratt believed that native people were capable of joining American society but needed the help and instruction of white people. More than anything, white Americans would need to be convinced of the capabilities of the Indians if they would ever be able to join mainstream society and become citizens.

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Carlisle Indian Industrial School

After three years at Fort Marion the Indian prisoners had the opportunity to return to their people. Pratt’s time in Florida strengthened his convictions that native people, given the opportunity of white education and a separation from their tribe, could leave their old ways behind and join mainstream society. The more difficult task involved convincing white Americans that Indians were capable of citizenship. Pratt left Fort Marion with an invitation to join General Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a school founded to provide former slaves with a post-secondary education and technical training. 17 of Pratt’s prisoner-students agreed to accompany him to Virginia to continue their education at Hampton. He was hopeful this experience would be just the first group of native students to attend Hampton, but he conflicted with Armstrong about the nature of education for non-whites. Armstrong believed all other races were inferior to white people, therefore, they required special educational efforts. For Armstrong, racial distinctions emphasized biological differences between races that would prevent an Indian, or an African-American, from competing with white people. It was best to provide these groups with basic education and technical training so they could live separately. With support from the U.S. Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pratt lobbied Congress for the creation of the first off-reservation Indian boarding school. An abandoned Army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania was provided for his school. By 1879, Pratt had recruited his first class made up of 136 boys and girls and began the long process of renovating the campus and preparing his students. This included hiring a barber to begin cutting the hair of his male pupils. In his autobiography, Pratt recounts the experience of one individual, who refused to have his hair cut by the barber only to do it himself with a knife late in the evening, demonstrating the psychological trauma suffered by students at the school:

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He then said his people always wailed after cutting their hair, as it was an evidence of mourning, and he had come out on the parade ground to show his grief. His voice had awakened the girls, who joined with their shrill voices, then other boys joined and hence the commotion. (Pratt, 1964, p. 232) At Carlisle, Pratt continued the practice of organizing the students into military companies with sergeants and corporals. He taught students how to march, stand at attention, and eventually guard themselves. They wore military style uniforms – the same outfits worn by U.S. soldiers who were at war with their tribes just a few years earlier. The Indians were being controlled through a constant system of self-surveillance. Though the school reinforced its power through continuous symbols of military authority, the primary model of control rested not with the threat of violence but with the fear of being caught doing something wrong. The system of control at Carlisle was comprised of what Michel Foucault (1995) described as sovereign power and disciplinary power. The hair cutting, uniforms, and military marching were a display of the sovereign power; what was seen and shown. The disciplinary power of Carlisle existed through the coercion of students to police themselves. The continuous sense of surveillance, both by school officials and each other, established a principle of compulsory visibility, and ensured the continued authority over them by the institution. The influence of White supremacist power would transcend their time at Carlisle, as Foucault points out that “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (p. 201). The popularity of photography in American culture at the end of the 19th century provided Pratt with an opportunity to display the impact Carlisle had on the Americanization of Native students. Advancements in technology and printing made photography an affordable propaganda tool for the school. When Carlisle opened in 1879, one of Pratt’s first hires was photographer John Nicholas Choate, who would document the daily lives of students and the campus. One of the most effective methods to demonstrate the influence of White education on Native students were the “before” and “after” photographs. Students would pose in their traditional clothing when they first arrived at Carlisle, then again after some time at the school. With shorter hair and mainstream clothing, the students often appeared whiter in appearance. In some instances, Choate utilized lighting techniques and the use of makeup powder to enhance the lightening of his subject’s skin. An important aspect of Pratt’s vision for off-reservation boarding schools included increasing the exposure Indian students had with white society. In what became known as the “Outing” program, students would live and work

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with American families. Students would work for pay, typically on farms in the vicinity of Carlisle, but most importantly they learned the customs and habits of White family life. Outing was popular with members of the local community as it provided them with inexpensive labor, and at the height of the program, nearly half of the enrolled students were living off campus with American families. This program not only increased student’s exposure to (white) American life, but also demonstrated to upstanding white citizens that the Carlisle experiment was working. Unfortunately, with so many students participating in the program it was nearly impossible to ensure the safety of all students and the program ended shortly after Pratt left Carlisle (Fear-Segal, 2007). Carlisle strictly enforced the speaking of English, and many younger students lost knowledge of their indigenous languages while away from home. When recruiting students from the Reservations, Pratt convinced Native chiefs and tribal councils of the power of the English language. During one of his visits Pratt was confronted by Spotted Tail, a Lakota chief, about an unfair treaty that stripped the Black Hills from his tribe. Pratt’s response stressed the Indians’ inability to read the treaty they were forced to sign was the reason for their loss of territory. “Spotted Tail, cannot you see that if you had been educated as the white man is educated that you might right now have all your people out there in the Black Hills, digging out the gold for your own uses[?]” (p. 223). Highlighting the usefulness of speaking English to ensure truthful treaties with the U.S. government became an effective recruitment method as Pratt worked his way across the western territories. Relegated to the Reservations, tribes needed to find new weapons in the fight for the preservation of their culture and heritage. Leaders, such as Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Lakota, recruited white educated tribe members to sit in on negotiations to ensure agreements and treaties actually reflected the tribe’s interests. Young men such as Samuel Townsend, a Pawnee tribe member who studied at Carlisle, returned to the reservation and provided advice and leadership in negotiations. Townsend’s time at the off-reservation boarding school provided him with not only fluency in English, but with connections to members of other tribes. The diverse array of tribal representation at Carlisle provided an unintended networking opportunity for students who kept in contact to inform one another of events occurring within their respective communities. This provided tribal leaders with valuable information regarding the prices paid for land to other tribes, allowing some advantage in their own negotiations. Pratt remained the superintendent of Carlisle for 24 years but was forced to retire in 1903 after he criticized the Bureau of Indians Affairs, stating it would have been better “for the Indians, had there never been a Bureau” (1964, p. 336).

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Pratt was expressing his displeasure with the government’s movement away from off-reservation schools and towards reservation systems. America’s views on race continued to change in the early 20th century, and this was being reflected once again in the policies related to the education of Native populations. Pratt believed that the Carlisle experiment demonstrated the American Indian was able to assimilate into mainstream American society, but regardless of their clothing, short hair, and English fluency, Native people were still considered non-white. It was not until 1924 that Congress passed legislation granting U.S. citizenship to all native people, yet many states barred American Indian people from voting well into the 1950s.

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Lasting Impacts of American Indian Boarding Schools

Off-reservation boarding schools created a social void for tribal communities. Formal Eurocentric educational practices and institutions were a foreign concept to native tribes. Learning through everyday practices, traditions, and interactions was a unifying quality of tribal life. Education was woven into daily life as a means to pass on important beliefs and customs to the next generation. Young people would learn to be members of a tribe by being present and participating in everyday tasks and rituals. Removal to boarding schools uprooted this practice and stripped daily activities of their pedagogical capacity. In his autobiography, Pratt mentions only one student death: a sharp contrast to the hundreds of native children who died during the school’s existence. Hidden away along the edge of the campus, no photographs exist of the school’s cemetery from Pratt’s time heading Carlisle. The cemetery is the final resting place for almost 200 American Indian children, though many students who were sick returned home to die amongst their people. These 200 children never left Carlisle, and those who did suffered from a fractured identity in an unfamiliar world. Most of them returned to their reservations, where some were able to utilize aspects of their white education to benefit their tribes and communities. Indian education was a fundamental component of federal policies geared towards controlling Native people. Indian tribes were first stripped of their land, and then their children, as the U.S. government worked to erase their culture and identity.

References Fear-Segal, J. (2007) White man’s club. University of Nebraska Press.

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Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Random House. Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man. Norton & Company. Miles, N. A. (1879). The Indian problem. The North American Review, 128(268), 304–314. Pratt, R. H. (1964). Battlefield and classroom. Yale University Press. Walker, F. (1874). The Indian question. James R. Osgood and Company.

CHAPTER 5

American Indians and Whiteness Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: American Indian Boarding Schools; Settler Colonialism; White Supremacy

… Indigenous peoples in North America have come to be known by many collective names, including Indians, Native Americans, First Nations Peoples, and American Indians. Various indigenous peoples have argued for their preferred terminology; however, we must stress that any of these groupings are problematic because they presume shared cultural practices across the many thousands of indigenous tribes and peoples across the continent. While Western archeological work has found evidence for a series of migrations from North East Asia and Siberia to North America from 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, the vast majority of indigenous communities have origin narratives that make no mention of ever living anywhere else (Grande, 2015). Instead, indigenous peoples often identify explicitly not only with their tribe, but also with the physical lands they are native to. Dakota, for instance, means a people, a language, and a place. It is not the case that there is one word for each of these different elements, rather, they are the same concept: the Dakota are the language, the place, and the people, all at the same time. Thus, European notions of land, property, and language are fundamentally at odds with many indigenous peoples ways of knowing and living. These conflicts remain today, as indigenous peoples continue to struggle for sovereignty against the ongoing settler colonial project of the United States. Whiteness came with Europeans to North America at the end of the 15th century, and left devastation on a scale never before recorded in human history. The genocide of tens of millions of indigenous peoples happened largely without military conflicts or grand battles. While accounts of Cortez, Ponce de Leon, and other European colonizers battling indigenous communities are widely known, the vast majority of indigenous peoples never participated in an outright war with their colonizers. Instead, European colonizers brought a range of diseases and illnesses with them to North America that indigenous peoples did not have immunity to. As most Europeans at the time practiced © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_005

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almost no hygiene or bathing, diseases moved with white peoples and then spread even farther through exchanges between indigenous communities. Thus, many indigenous peoples died of European diseases without ever coming into contact with Europeans. Hegemonic notions of indigenous peoples can sometimes end in 1492 and the beginning of European colonization of the Western hemisphere, as if all indigenous peoples ceased to exist after Europeans initially stole their lands. Of course, indigenous communities survive and continue today, though their lives are still utterly determined by white supremacy. While many tribes hold ancestral lands as reservations, many others are denied federal recognition and thus any kind of services from the federal government. Seattle, Washington makes for an excellent example of this, as the city takes its name from Chief Sealth, whose people, the Duwamish, are not federally recognized. Thus, while projects of language reclamation from Ojibwa to Hawaii offer sources of hope for the future of indigenous rights and culture, there are countless languages and cultures that have been lost to white supremacist settler colonialism. In 1493 the Catholic Church issued a papal bull that declared all lands in the Western Hemisphere open to European plunder and exploitation. No indigenous peoples were consulted or considered in the proceedings, and the results were catastrophic for the non-European world. From 1500 on, more and more Europeans entered and settled on stolen indigenous lands. Celebrations like Thanksgiving in the U.S. serve as an ideological cover to this process, inventing a story from Massachusetts of indigenous peoples and Europeans sharing resources and a meal together. The actual practices were more like a land seizure: indigenous peoples were forced off their lands as Europeans decimated the local ecosystems by importing destructive practices from their homelands. The loss of biodiversity, plants, and animals wrought further destruction on indigenous communities, because many were unable to continue their past ways of being in the absence of the species they relied on for food, clothing, and shelter. Thus, even for those indigenous people who fought off European disease and dispossession, their lives were upended all the same because so much of what they had relied on was being destroyed for the sake of European profit. Beginning in 1537, the Catholic Church ruled that indigenous peoples were truly human and thus deserving of conversion to the Catholic faith. This missionary work would function to ameliorate many Europeans’ notions of devastating indigenous communities into the conception of saving their souls. European colonization was thus seen as a blessing for indigenous communities, who otherwise would not have known the gospels and the path to eternal salvation. France and Spain were especially active in working to convert

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indigenous peoples to Catholicism, but protestant nations like Great Britain also engaged in missionary work that proved to be deadly to many indigenous communities. While some tribes were able to create treaties and agreements with Europeans over trade and territory, the vast majority were never compensated for the loss of their land and communities. The 1830 Indian Removal Act signed by President Andrew Jackson created a massive forced migration now known as the Trail of Tears. Indigenous peoples were wiped off their lands east of the Mississippi river and “resettled” in Indian Territory, largely present-day Oklahoma. Thousands died en route, and an enormous swath of land was colonized for further European settlement. In 1851 the U.S. Congress passed legislation to create the Indian Reservation System. This practice saw the removal and relocation of many indigenous communities, often forcing them on to lands that were not part of their ancestral homes. These lands also had fewer resources and came with very serious restrictions. Indigenous peoples were not allowed to leave their reservations, thus cementing white supremacist authority and protecting the material interests of white settlers and land developers. As white colonizers explored more of the stolen indigenous lands, they regularly encountered lucrative commercial possibilities in tribal territories. For instance, in 1874 gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota. While the area had already been allocated to indigenous peoples as part of the reservation system, the potential wealth to be made from extracting gold was too great for white colonizers to resist. The U.S. military intervened on behalf of the white prospectors and continued a pattern that was common throughout the 19th century. The pattern in question functioned as follows: white colonizers locate sources of wealth in indigenous territories and lands, the military intervenes on their behalf, indigenous peoples are dispossessed, and white people come to reap all of the rewards. The end of the 19th century saw the creation of American Indian Boarding Schools. These schools were modeled after the Carlisle School, created by Richard Henry Pratt and designed to function like military academies. Indigenous youth were required to cut their hair, take new Christian names, and adopt Western styled dress and behaviors. Further, they were required to speak English and not the languages they brought with them from their homes. The boarding schools functioned to produce generations of indigenous peoples who no longer knew their ancestral languages. Pratt’s notion was that he could “kill the Indian and save the man” through military style drills and procedures (Adams, 1995). It is important to note that Pratt was seen as a progressive in his time, as working with indigenous peoples to assimilate them into Eurocentric ways of being was seen by many as an impossible project. The logic of the time was that indigenous peoples were too “savage” and “barbarous” to

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be educated in a Western style school. Pratt encouraged moments when his students could show off their “success” in assimilating, regularly performing concerts and plays for white audiences. Pratt ultimately succeeded in further alienating indigenous peoples from their homelands and ways of being, and the boarding schools continued well into the 20th century. In 1887 President Grover Cleveland signed the Dawes Act, which mandated private property in place of tribal customs on Indian Reservations. By 1934, it is estimated that indigenous peoples had lost almost two-thirds of the lands they had held in 1887. Thus, while officially aiming to create a system of property ownership that would bring indigenous peoples further into the capitalist conception of private property, the Dawes Act mostly functioned to remove indigenous peoples further from their lands. The government proceeded to implement the Dawes Act on a tribe-by-tribe basis and was thus able to better undermine traditional ways of land stewardship by indigenous communities in context. By 1924, indigenous peoples were forced into becoming citizens of the United States, rather than tribal citizens. This further eroded indigenous sovereignty and in the period of the early 20th century many past practices were lost, including tribal councils, courts, and leadership. While some of these rights were restored in the 1930s under Roosevelt’s New Deal Programs, the losses from the Dawes Act and its subsequent implementation represent both material and conceptual damages to indigenous communities. Being forced into citizenship, losing tribal rights and customs, losing languages, and losing lands all became hallmarks of indigenous life in the 20th century. It wasn’t until the 1960s that President Johnson signed the Indian Civil Rights Act, part of the broader Civil Rights legislation of the time, that gave indigenous peoples most of the rights detailed in the constitution of the U.S. as the Bill of Rights. This sprung from the American Indian Movement, which began in the 20th century as more and more indigenous peoples were relocating from reservations to living in settler colonial cities. This group sought intertribal solidarity as American Indians and has continued to champion causes that connect urban and rural indigenous peoples’ struggles for sovereignty and equal rights. Today indigenous communities continue to suffer disproportionately under the weight of white supremacy. Indigenous peoples face the highest rates of diabetes, suicide, and death by injury of any ethnic or racial group in the U.S. Indigenous peoples are the most likely to be uninsured, which in the U.S. system is akin to not having health care. Rates of alcoholism and other addictions are also higher in indigenous communities than in any other across the country. These disparities should be seen as further evidence of the ongoing legacies and practices of white supremacy and the destruction of indigenous

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communities. Much of these deleterious outcomes stem from juridical efforts to remove indigenous peoples from their lands and homes, and from practicing their traditional ways of life. However, they also stem from the ongoing practices that restrict indigenous peoples from full participation while simultaneously restricting them from engaging in their own traditional practices. Thus, indigenous peoples are stuck in a perpetual double bind: hailed to assimilate as much as possible and in so doing surrendering tribal rights, or maintaining active participation on reservation lands, and in so doing being removed from infrastructure and resources available in settler colonial areas. One third of Navajo peoples do not have running water in their homes on their reservation, a reality that is unimaginable for the vast majority of settler peoples living in the United States. Contemporary indigenous scholars, especially Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), have emphatically insisted that “decolonization is not a metaphor” in advocating against the widespread use of “decolonizing” without attention to indigenous sovereignty. They argue that far too often such discourses function in ways that protect settler innocence, the notion that settler colonial peoples, those who are not indigenous to the lands they occupy, are innocent or not culpable for the incredible amount of destruction of indigenous life. Tuck and Yang instead advocate for an “ethic of incommensurability,” wherein “To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples” (p. 36). Settler futurity is premised on settlers remaining on stolen indigenous lands and regularly leads to calls for reconciliation. Tuck and Yang argue, Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. (p. 35) Thus, an ethic of incommensurability that rejects settler futurity becomes a call for authentic decolonization: a return of lands to indigenous peoples and settlers removing themselves from the territories they currently occupy. It is difficult to conceptualize the amount of loss and dispossession that has characterized indigenous peoples’ lives over the past six centuries. Still, tribes and indigenous communities continue to resist white supremacy on multiple fronts. From establishing land trusts, to advocating for the ability to practice

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traditional activities, to language reclamation, to robust calls and actions of the side of decolonization, indigenous peoples are actively resisting white supremacy. Perhaps what is most critical in the context of indigenous peoples and whiteness is that there has never been a moment when white supremacist settler colonialism was not being resisted. Indigenous peoples’ persistence and perseverance can thus serve as a model for actively living in opposition to white supremacy, and a reminder that often work that aims to be on the side of justice can function to invisiblize indigenous peoples or appropriate calls for decolonization metaphorically.

References Adams, D. W. (1995). Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875–1928. University Press of Kansas. Grande, S. (2015). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–41.

CHAPTER 6

Antisemitism Samuel J. Tanner

Related Entries: Alt-Right; Eugenics; Immigration; Scientific Racism; Whiteness and Judaism

… Antisemitism, according to a working definition1 created by the International Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA) plenary held in Budapest in 2015, is a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” Expressions of antisemitism, according to the IHRA plenary’s definition, might include “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” but they also point out that criticism of the state of Israel that is “similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” This plenary argued that antisemitism often charges Jews with “conspiring to harm humanity” and is “expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.” The plenary suggested that contemporary antisemitism occurs in “public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere.” According to the plenary’s definition, antisemetic acts include examples such as: (1) Inciting or aiding the harming or killing of Jews in the name of religion, politics, or ideology, (2) Dehumanizing Jews as individuals or as a collective, (3) Accusing all Jews as being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews. While the IHRA plenary’s definition is exhaustive and helpful, it’s important to examine the sociocultural context of their explanation of antisemitism and its contemporary examples. The terms “Semitic,” “antisemitic,” and “Jewish” are discussed more below. The term “Semitic” was first used in the 1770’s by members of the Gottingen School of History to describe an ethnic, cultural, and racial group who speak or spoke what was, at the time, labeled as a language from a shared, “Semitic” linguistic category. The word Semitic resulted from pseudoscience on race that separated people into three groups thought to be traced to the Biblical flood. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_006

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The phrase Semitic derived from the Hebrew word “Shem,” the name of one of Noah’s sons that is used in the Book of Genesis. This system of racial classification also led to the labels “Hamites” and “Japhetities” to denote people descended from Noah’s 2 other sons. Though this racial classification system is now considered obsolete, especially because it was derived out of the work to legitimate and bolster the superiority of white Europeans, the word Semitic, as is obvious in the definition of antisemitism reached by the IHRA plenary in 2015, still has contemporary utility. The term “antisemitism” was first used in the German press in 1879. The word was coined by German writer Wilhelm Marr and quickly became popular as a way to conceptualize a hostility towards and fear of Jews as a uniform, villainous group. Ultimately, the use of the term led to the emergence of antisemitic movements that took place in central Europe at the end of the 19th century. According to Tal & Gordon (2018), the word antisemitism “has always been a reflection of the social and political climate of the time” (p. 2) and pointed towards a 2005 definition of antisemitism that was reached by the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia that eventually turned into the definition adopted by the IHRA plenary and described above (Porat, 2007). The word “Jewish” refers to an ethnoreligious group of people thought to originate from the Israelites or Hebrews of the historical kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Jewish ethnicity, religiosity, and nationhood have become strongly entangled, though each is complicated in its own right. The Hebrews, a nomadic people, are thought to be an outgrowth of the Canaanite population during the second millennium BCE who consolidated their power with the emergence of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish people and has greatly influenced other major monotheistic religions. Jewish people are credited with authorship of the Bible, the founding of early Christianity, and having a powerful influence on the development of Islam. Jewish nationalism, often described as Zionism, is connected to the creation of the Jewish state of Israel after World War II. Zionism is rooted in a belief that Jews have a historical claim to land in the Middle East that is referred to by some as Israel and by others as Palestine. The word Jewish, as briefly discussed here, carries many competing ideologies, values, and meanings and is difficult to use as a singular way to understand a group of heterogenous people. However, the word does describe particular political, religious and ethnic investments, both in terms of the affirmation and oppression of an ethnoreligious group. Zygmunt Bauman and Artur Sandauer have more recently conceptualized the idea of allosemitism to assert that Jews have always been seen in a way that cannot be compared to any other minority group to imply a fundamental marginalization, discrimination, and persecution (Sandauer & Ury, 2005).

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Ben-Rafael (2017) contended that, despite (and perhaps because of) the contemporary pervasiveness of globalization and multiculturalism, “hatred of Jews has worsened over recent years” and “Jews’ understanding of this antisemitism converges, actually, with the notion of allosemitism” (p. 291). This is to say that, regardless of the complex semantic history mentioned above, there is still a pressing need to name and consider antisemitism as a specific form of violence, hatred, and oppression that emerges out of white supremacy and continues to have utility in the present moment. Indeed, in a recent study conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, an overwhelming number of people who identified as Jews felt that antisemitism was increasing online and in public and private spaces across Europe. This increase in antisemitism has been felt in the United States as well, especially in relation to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the intensification of the alt-right movement. More recent acts of antisemitism in the United States after 9/11 include but are not limited to antisemitic incidents on college campus that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights described as a serious problem in 2006, a rise in Swastika graffiti document by the New York Police Department from 2016–2018, holocaust denial, and acts of violence such as the murder of 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018.

Note 1 See https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism, accessed December 10, 2018.

References Ben-Rafael, E. (2017). Belgian Jews and Neo-Antisemitism. Contemporary Jewry, 37(2), 275–293. Persistent antisemitism hangs over EU. (2018, December 10). European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. http://fra.europa.eu/en/press-release/2018/persistent-antisemitism-hangs-over-eu. Porat, D. (2007, October 26). Definition of antisemitism. Campaign Against Antisemitism. https://antisemitism.org/definition/ Sandauer A., & Ury, S. (2005). Studies on Polish Jewry: On the situation of the Polish writer of Jewish descent in the twentieth century. Hebrew University of Jerusalem Magnes Press. Tal, D., & Gordon, A. (2018). Antisemitism and Islamophobia: What does a bibliometric study reveal? Scientometrics, 1–11.

CHAPTER 7

Arab Americans and Whiteness Muna Altowajri

Related Entries: Capitalism and Whiteness; Caucasian; White Supremacy

… Arabic-speaking people came to the United States in three waves – each wave marked by different cultural and regional demographics, and reasons for migration. The first wave was in the early 1890s and brought primarily Catholic folks from Syria and Lebanon into the U.S. (Suleiman, 2000; McCarus, 1994; Naber, 2000). The second wave came from Palestine, which was a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began in the 1930s (Suleiman, 2000). And finally, the third wave is marked by the arrival of Arab immigrants from various countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, who sought professional and economic opportunities in America (Suleiman, 2000; McCarus, 1994). Arab Americans are less visible than other minorities due to various social structures and perceptions. According to Suleiman (2000), “Overall, unlike many minority groups, Arab immigrants have made a ‘smooth transition’ into the American society” (p. 6). However, anti-Arab perceptions in the media and popular culture more broadly make Arab Americans more visible in an explicitly negative way. This entry explains how early Arabs had to prove their whiteness in order to gain U.S citizenship. The first part recounts a brief history of whiteness in the United States, and then I explain how Arabs have become and continue to become citizens in the United States. Finally, I explain the impact of anti-Arab racism before and after 9/11.

1

History of Whiteness

Jacobson (1999) explains the history of whiteness in the United States, dividing it into three eras. The first era involved the migration of Northern and Western Europeans into the U.S. The era was marked by a focus on naturalization, and more specifically, the 1790 law emphasizing “fitness for self-government” that limited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” (Jacobson, 1999). He writes that, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_007

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In 1790 congress enacted ‘that all free white persons who, have, or shall migrate into the united states, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the united states for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship. (p. 22) The second phase, which was between 1840 and 1924 – also known as the nativism era – arose in response to the 1790 naturalization law and worked to revise “whiteness” as a concept (Jacobson, 1999). A new interpretation of “white” was created after a massive group of “undesirable” white people arrived from Ireland (Jacobson, 1999). In 1880, and after World War I, millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (especially Jews, Poles, and Italians) were pushed to the United States by difficult political and economic conditions (McCarus, 1994). These waves of immigrants were different from one another in cultures, religions, diets, histories, languages, and customs. In 1910, the United States began to consider if all Europeans should be allowed to enter the United States. Although the majority of European immigrants were considered white, there was still debate over which groups were truly, “fit for self-government” – and ultimately this description was only applied to Anglo-Saxons (Jacobson, 1999). When the idea of the melting pot formed during this immigration phase, Anglo-Saxon conformity came to be the ideal, and immigrants had to assimilate into it, in hopes of producing a homogeneous new race (McCarus, 1994). This phase, marked by the reframing of whiteness, also represents a shift from one kind of racism to another. As Jacobson (1999) explains, “from the unquestioned hegemony of a unified race of ‘white persons’ to a contest over political ‘fitness’ among a new fragmented, hierarchal arranged series of distinct ‘white races’” animated racial relations among different “white” groups (p. 43). The third era took place between 1924 and 1965 when a pattern of what Jacobson calls “Caucasian unity” gradually took its place in the United States (Jacobson, 1999). In this era whiteness in the U.S. lost most of its qualifiers. Various European ethno-cultural groups (e.g. German American, Irish American, etc.) started to have less and less explanatory power in a system where racial apartheid systems like Jim Crow created only two races: white or black.

2

Arabs and White Identity

In the last quarter of the 19th century Arabic-speaking people began to immigrate to the United States from the Ottoman province of Syria, which included the administrative district of Mount Lebanon. While it is hard to identify the

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first wave of Arab immigrants who arrived in 1882, because U.S. officials had classified them as Turks along with Greeks, Albanians, Armenians and other Eastern groups who came from the Ottoman Empire, it is known that the first wave of Arabs who immigrated to the U.S. were primarily Christian. In 1899, immigration officials began to classify some early immigrants as a separate ‘Syrian’ ethnic group, however, the census of 1910 continued to include ‘Syrians’ under the category ‘Turkey in Asia’ (Naber, 2000). According to Naber (2000), “by 1916 it is estimated that 100,000 Arabs had immigrated to the U.S., and by 1924 the Arab population in the U.S. reached 200,000, [and approximately] 185,000 were Christians and 5,000 were divided between Muslims and Druze” (p. 38). For most of the immigrants, the main motive for immigration was economic opportunity (Naber, 2000). Even though many of the earliest Arab immigrants came to the U.S. with a goal to gain wealth and then return back to their native land, most of them stayed in the United States, and eventually brought their families (McCarus, 1994; Naber, 2000). The first wave of immigrants had been highly entrepreneurial, and heavily engaged in retail trade, carving out occupational niches and establishing economic and employment patterns that continue to characterize today’s Arab-American communities in the United States. However, the second wave of immigrants, who came after World War II, were better educated, politically more sophisticated, and more aware of their Arabness, especially after wars in 1948 and 1967 in the Middle East region (McCarusa, 1994; Naber, 2000). According to Cainkar (2006), The earliest Arab immigrants were predominantly uneducated Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian peasants, while since the 1950s Arab immigrants include highly educated Egyptians and Iraqis, pre-dominantly entrepreneurial Jordanians and Yemenis, and better educated Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. In 2000, the proportion of Arabs with high school diplomas and bachelor’s degrees was higher than that of the total U.S. population, a figure that applies to every Arab nationality group. (p. 244) Finally, the third wave of Arabs immigrants who came post-1965 hail from every Arabic-speaking country. While they were mostly Muslims, nearly all religious groups in the Arab area are represented in immigrant populations in the U.S. (Naber, 2000).

3

Early Arab Immigrants Citizenship Cases

In the period between1790 and 1952, the U.S. Congress restricted naturalization to free white people, which meanst being white was a condition for acquiring

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citizenship (Lopez, 1997). Therefore, states and federal courts decided case by case who was White enough to naturalize as a citizen. In the early prerequisite cases of naturalization, courts used scientific evidence-based rationales to justify racial divisions and categorize who should be considered White (Lopez, 1997). However, the change in immigrant demographics in 1909 – particularly the new wave of dark-skinned immigrants from western and southern Asia, such as Syrians and Indians demonstrated inconsistency between science and common knowledge from judges’ perspectives (Lopez, 1997). When science was unable to prove that Syrians and Indians were non-white, the courts instead of reexamining the nature of race, began to disparage science. Therefore, prerequisite courts began to construct Whiteness in a two-step process. First, they established that who was white or not white would be done on a case-by-case basis. Then, they would decide if the person had the content of white character (Lopez, 1997). Their conclusions separated non-whites, who were excluded from citizenship as inferior, from whites who were admitted to citizenship as superior. Syrians’ relative white status, being the first Arab group to enter the United States, was examined in different racial prerequisite cases starting early in the 1900s. In 1909, Costa George Najoure was declared one of the first Syrians to seek naturalization. In this case, Costa challenged the term “free white person,” explaining that the term is used to refer to race rather than color (Lopez, 1997). Therefore, he claimed that Syrians, being a part of the Caucasian race, belong to the white race. Newman, the district judge, explained that Najour came from Mt. Lebanon near Beirut, and he “was not dark, did not have the appearance of the Mongolian race and indeed, had the appearance and characteristics of the Caucasian race (Lopez, 1997). According to The Worlds People by Dr. A. H. Keane, Syrians are part of the Caucasian race and thus the white race (Lopez, 1997). The judge used the “scientific” evidence as a rationale, and referred to Dr. Keane and his division of the world’s people into four classes, The Negro or black, in the Sudan, South Africa, and Oceania (Australasia); Mongol or yellow, in Central, North, and East Asia; Amerinds (red or brown), in the new World; and Caucasians (white and also dark), in North Africa, Europe, Iran, India, Western Asia, and Polynesia. (Lopez, 1996, p. 172) Therefore, the judge ruled that Najour belonged to the white race and was entitled to naturalization. After the Najour case, other rulings of early prerequisite racial cases in 1909 and 1910 continued to “prove” that Syrians are white using different rationales such as similar scientific evidence, legal precedent, congressional intent, and common knowledge.

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However, in 1913, the court reversed their previous decisions, claiming that Syrians are not white. The case of Shahid, a 59 year-old Christian born in Zahle in Asia Minor, Syria, who applied for naturalization 11 years after moving to the United States, was the turning point in Syrian racial classification. The judge claimed that Shahid was darker than the “usual mulatto of one-half mixed blood between the white and the Negro races” (Lopez, 1997). The judge also claimed that the term “free white persons” meant all persons belonging to the European races, should be counted as white, as well as their descendants. This ruptured the linkage between the term “free white persons” as meaning a “Caucasian” race (Lopez, 1996). In the same year, applicant George Dow was excluded from naturalization because of his darker skin as the judge described him “darker than the usual person of white European descent” (Majaj, 2000, p. 322). Consequently, debate among the meaning of “free white persons” was once again open. In 1914 a national argument began regarding the racial status of “Syrians” because of the complex nature of Arab identity. In Naber’s (2000) study of Syrians’ citizenship cases in federal courts in the period between 1914 and 1923, he states that, A South Carolina judge ruled that ‘while Syrians may be Caucasian, they were not a part of the group, ‘that particular free white person to whom the Act of Congress [1790] had denoted the privilege of citizenship’ – a privilege he ruled was intended for persons of European descent. (p. 39) One example of discrimination that Naber provides is when Edward Corsi, the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization in the New York district, wrote a piece in the journal, In the Shadow of Liberty stating that, “Syrian is a ‘doubtful element’ of ‘Mongolian plasma’ attempting to contaminate the pure American stock” (Naber, 2000, p. 39). Early Syrian immigrants were granted a precarious social position within the U.S. racial. Naber (2000) explains that, On the one hand, the Syrians’ non-European origin received national attention, while on the other hand, they were not targeted by racism and discrimination to the same extent as other communities, who were more distinctly categorized as non-whites, such as the Chinese, blacks, Jews, or Italians. (p. 40) Therefore, Arab Americans found themselves blending in with the European American population at times, while still maintaining unique cultural characteristics. In 1923, the 1914 court decision of excluding Caucasians with darker

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skin from naturalization was reversed after many cases of discrimination against Syrian folks were reported – Syrians gained a “foreigner” status, leaving them out of the country’s white social structures and economic opportunities. Later in 1942, as a wave of Arabs immigrants came from every Arabicspeaking country the term Arabians started to appear on the racial prerequisite cases, shifting the focus from Syrian folks to Arabs, with more questions about the nature of a particular Arab’s identity as Caucasian and a white person (Lopez, 1997). In 1942 Ahmed Hassan’s case, the first Arabian non-Syrian applicant naturalization case, the judge declared that Arabians are not white. The explanation behind the denial of naturalization to Yemeni applicant Ahmed Hassan was the clear link between western, European, Christian identity and whiteness in the naturalization era (Majaj, 2000). The judge interpreted whiteness in this case as a characteristic of European Christians but not of nonEuropeans or non-Christians. The judge argued that, “apart from the dark skin of the Arabs… it is well known that they are a part of the Mohammedan world and that a wide gulf separate their culture from that of the predominantly Christian peoples of Europe” (Majaj, 2000, p. 323). However, later in 1944, Arabs were able to reclaim a whiteness identity after the ruling of Mohriez’s case that Arabians are white using the rationale of common knowledge and legal precedent (Lopez, 1997).

4

The Arab-American Experience: Stereotypes and Outcomes

With a few exceptions, much of the Arab American experience between 1880 and 1930 was similar to that of groups deemed ‘white’ as measured by residential, employment, and marital patterns as well as land ownership, voting, and naturalization rights. However, after the Civil Rights Movements and the final determination of the categories of white, non-white, and minorities, and the classification of Arabs as white, the Arab experience in the United States can be characterized as a double burden – they are excluded from the full experience of whiteness and from recognition as people of color (Cainkar, 2006). According to Cainkar (2006), Arab Americans “are therefore still officially white and ineligible for affirmative action” (p. 251). In the 1960s, Arab Americans experienced exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and selective policy enforcement. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, racist attitudes, discrimination and hate crimes – vandalized Mosques, people fired from jobs, assaulted on the streets, etc. – against Arabs were reported in the United States (Cainkar, 2006; Marvastie, 2005). In 1972, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States launched one of its first national campaigns to interview and

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deport Arab Americans shortly after the hostage-taking incident in Munich where 8 Palestinian militants took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the Olympic Games (Marvasti, 2005). Indeed, during the German authorities’ attempt to release the hostages, the lives of all 11 hostages and 5 of the 8 terrorists were ended (Marvasti, 2005). The negative stereotyping of Middle Eastern Americans was reinforced again during “the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, the first Gulf War in 1991, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center” (Marvastie, 2005). Political conflicts in the Middle East and terrorism have created identity crises and reinforced the negative stereotypes attached to Arab Americans. According to Marvasti (2005), an ABC News poll conducted during the Persian Gulf crisis in February 1991 found that, “majorities of Americans said the following terms applied to Arabs: ‘religious’ (81%), ‘terrorists’ (81%), ‘violent’ (58%) and ‘religious fanatics’ (56%)” (Marvasti, 2005, p. 530). According to McCarus (1994) the early Anti-Arab violence stems from three main sources: (1) Ideologically motivated violence, such as that by the Jewish Defense League, a Jewish terrorist group that attacks ‘the enemies of Israel’ and is the FBI’s prime suspect in the murder of Alex Odeh; (2) Anti-Arab xenophobia, which has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict but is based on perceived differences of race, culture, ethnicity, or religion; and (3) jingoist racism, a blend of knee-jerk patriotism and homegrown white racism toward the Other; it usually occurs during heightened international tensions (hijackings, hostage takings, or military conflict). (p. 6) While Arab Americans have been targets of racist policies, their experiences have been rendered invisible by dominant discourses about race. Their exclusion has been obvious in multicultural pedagogy and in political mobilizations (Cainkar, 2006). According to Cainkar (2006), Political exclusion of Arab voices in mainstream civil society has been reinforced by issue-control, through which organizational leaders silence discussion of issues that challenge U.S. policies in the Arab world (e.g., Palestine, Iraq) when assertion of them may frustrate other organizational objectives. (p. 252) In pedagogy as well, less attention was paid to Arabs in racial and ethnic studies than other groups mentioned. However, although anti-Arab violence usually goes unreported, or is ignored by the mass media in the United States, the anti-Arab perception in the media makes the ‘invisible’ Arab American group

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visible, albeit in a negative way. As media plays a significant role in the representation of Arabs and their cultures, Arab Americans have also been denied their rights by official state policies and by white Americans who have interpreted this group as outside the bounds of U.S. cultural citizenship (Cainkar & Maira, 2005; Suleiman, 2000). Schools in the American educational system as well have been ineffective in reducing stereotypical images about Arabs (Suleiman, 2000).

5

Post-9/11: Ethnicity v. Religion

The conflation between the terms “Arab” and “Muslim” in American society makes it difficult to understand what specific factors have caused racialization to occur, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to Selod (2015), the racialization “of Arabs and Muslims in mainstream American culture represents the way religion and ethnicity are used interchangeably in discussions on race and racialization without distinction of the uniqueness each identity contributes to this process, or how they may intersect” (p. 3). For example, a recent study among Arab Americans in Detroit shows that Arab Muslims are more likely to self-identify as “other” over white, while Arab Christians were more likely to identify as “white,” even though both religious groups are classified as white by the U.S. Census (Selod, 2015). However, persons with Arabic-sounding names and Arabic-physical appearance, whether Christian or Muslim, report experiencing discrimination and physical attacks in some cases, regardless of their religion.

6

Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Sentiments

Even though stereotyping, discrimination, and racialization against Arab Americans may be traced far back, the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 created negative sentiments among some of the American people that led to subsequent widespread distrust and fear of Arabs and Muslims among white peoples in the U.S. According to Muna Ali (2011) “discussions among and about Muslim Americans today inevitably take place in the context of the events of September 11th, 2001” (as cited in Ahmed et al., 2017, p. 133). Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a Newsweek poll indicated that, “32% of Americans think Arabs living in this country should be put under special surveillance as Japanese Americans were” (Marvasti, 2005, p. 530). In June 2002, as well, a Gallup survey of 1,360 American adults demonstrated that, “of

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the five immigrant groups tested [Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and Europeans], the public is least accepting of Arab immigrants, as 54% say there are too many entering the United States” (Marvasti, 2005, p. 530). Consequently, Middle Eastern folks, Arabs, and Muslims have experienced racial profiling after 9/11 in many ways. One example is shortly after September 11th, when over 1,200 noncitizens were arrested for further investigation to prevent any future terrorist attacks, even though none of the persons arrested had been identified with terrorist groups, or had engaged in any terrorist activity (Volopp, 2003). Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Justice directed more than 5,000 investigatory interviews of male noncitizens between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Islamic-majority countries, or countries with some suspected tie to Al Qaeda, who entered into the country after January 1, 2000 (Volpp, 2003). Moreover, in the time period between the 9/11 attack and 2003, the government removed 320,000 noncitizens of Middle Eastern or Muslim background with final orders of deportation but at that time they had not yet left the country based on the terms in the “Absconder Apprehension Initiative” (Volpp, 2003). Additionally, airport officials and airlines have also practiced racial profiling against those appearing Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim, kicking them off of airplanes because the airline staff and other passengers have refused to fly with them on board (Volpp, 2003; Marvasti, 2005). According to Vlopp (2003), Since September 11, the general public has engaged in extralegal racial profiling in the form of over one thousand incidents of violence – homes, businesses, mosques, temples, and gurdwaras firebombed; individuals attacked with guns, knives, fists, and words; women with headscarves beaten, pushed off buses, spat upon; children in school harassed by parents of other children, by classmates, and by teachers. (p. 1580) Certainly, most individuals who are profiled are citizens either by birth or naturalization (Volpp, 2003). However, white Americans have historically excluded these groups from the ‘us,’ which means they are not considered citizens as a matter of identity and they do not represent the nation (Volpp, 2003). Furthermore, after the 9/11 attack, Arabs have become most vulnerable to blame whenever an incident takes place (Suleiman, 2000). Thousands of Middle Eastern men have been arrested and deported for minor violations through using the term “suspected terrorists,” showcasing the power of whiteness and white supremacy in the lives of Arab Americans in the 21st century (Marvasti, 2005).

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References Ahmed, H. M., Raihanah, M. M., & Hashim, R. S. (2017). Muslim revert narrative and American gaze post 9/11 in Jamilah Kolocotronis’ rebounding. 3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 23(3), 133–146. Cainkar, L. (2006). The social construction of difference and the Arab American experience. Journal of American Ethnic History, 37. Cainkar, L., & Maira, S. (2005). Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian Americans: Criminalization and cultural citizenship. Amerasia Journal, 31(3), 1–28. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. Lopez, I. H. (1997). White by law: The legal construction of race. NYU Press. Majaj, L. S. (2000). Arab-Americans and the meanings of race. In A. Singh & P. Schmidt (Eds.), Postcolonial theory and the United States: Race, ethnicity, and literature (pp. 320–337). University Press of Mississippi. Marvasti, A. (2005). Being Middle Eastern American: Identity negotiation in the context of the war on terror. Symbolic Interaction, 28(4), 525–547. McCarus, E. N. (Ed.). (1994). The development of Arab-American identity. University of Michigan Press. Naber, N. (2000). Ambiguous insiders: An investigation of Arab American invisibility. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(1), 37–61. Suleiman, M. (2000). Teaching about Arab Americans: What social studies teachers should know. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED442714 Selod, S. (2015). Citizenship denied: The racialization of Muslim American men and women post-9/11. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 77–95. Volpp, L. (2003). The citizen and the terrorist. In M. B. Young, E. T. May, M. L. Dudziak, G. M. Joseph, & E. S. Rosenberg (Eds.), September 11 in history (pp. 147–162). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384939-007

CHAPTER 8

Asian Americans and Whiteness Nicholas D. Hartlep and Nicholas C. Ozment

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Caucasian; Critical Race Theory; Orientalism

… Writing in 1860, Ethiop published his now famous “What Shall We Do with White People?” in the Anglo-African Magazine. Historians know Ethiop to be William J. Wilson, a once prolific African American essayist who often published under this pseudonym. Wilson’s words should be read, considered, reflected upon, and used when it comes to Asians and their connections to Whiteness. Why? Because Wilson’s words and experiences come to us from 1860, and the turbulent period that would shortly blow up into full-fledged civil war. During this time, the United States had its 15th President, James Buchanan, and slavery was still the rule of the land. The Emancipation Proclamation would not be proclaimed until 3 years later. Consequently, Wilson’s commentary on White people and Whiteness is telling due to the historical moment he was observing and commenting on firsthand. Building from Wilson’s words in 1860, this entry addresses Asians and Whiteness, raising the contemporary question “What Asians should do with White people?” First, this entry identifies what Whiteness is. Who “Asians” are is illustrated by citing cases where Asians have wanted to claim Whiteness and highlighting what these cases tell us about the nature of Whiteness. By comparing these historical cases to more contemporary ones, it can be argued that “mutiny” is necessary in order to push back against Whiteness: a form of resistance for Asians to consider nearly 160 years after Ethiop wrote his seminal essay.

1

What Is Whiteness?

Nell Irvin Painter (2015), in a New York Times opinion piece, wrote: “We don’t know the history of whiteness, and therefore are ignorant of the many ways it has changed over the years. If you investigate that history, you’ll see that white © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_008

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identity has been no more stable than black identity. While we recognize the evolution of ‘negro’ to ‘colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Afro-American’ to ‘AfricanAmerican,’ we draw a blank when it comes to whiteness. To the contrary, whiteness has a history of multiplicity” (para. 6). Two Supreme Court cases attest to the accuracy of Painter’s claim that Whiteness has been mercurial over time. Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922) and, three months later, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) illustrate how Asians’ approximation to Whiteness has been unclear. Murky as the relationship might be (far less binary than White/Black), historical evidence does demonstrate that Asians have never truly been considered White or equal to White. Ozawa was a businessperson from Japan who attended the University of California, Berkeley. In 1915 he applied for U.S. citizenship. He claimed that his skin was White and that because he also spoke English, he was White. The Supreme Court ruled that only Caucasians are White: Ozawa was not Caucasian; therefore, he was not White. Three months later, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Thind, a South Asian from India, defended his claim that he was Caucasian and therefore White. He argued that he was Caucasian because South Asians were considered Caucasian; ergo, according to the Court’s own ruling three months earlier, he was White. The Supreme Court, however, concluded that although Thind may have been Caucasian, he was not White because most people would not say he was White if they saw him. Whiteness was conferred via the common White man. The Supreme Court Justices never did offer a conclusion as to what Whiteness was, only what it was not. This suppression of Asian equality, while not always as glaringly obvious as with Black people who were enslaved, was just as persistent and pernicious. During the 1860s many Chinese in the United States helped build the transcontinental railroad, yet 20 years after White people exploited their labor, the Chinese could not immigrate to the United States thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. White supremacy can be seen in how Chinese workers were exploited and their labor unrewarded. As hard as they sweat and bled, there was no number of railroad ties they could lay that would bring them to the “Promised Land” their White employers were conquering, taming, and opening for settlement. They were more like beasts of burden, to be used until their strength was exhausted and then sent away, hopefully far out of sight and forgotten. Leland Stanford, a Sinophobe who made his money from the railroad, eventually created Stanford University. Stanford was the governor of California from 1862 until 1863. At his gubernatorial inauguration address, he said the following to those attending:

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While the settlement of our State is of the first importance, the character of those who shall become settlers is worthy of scarcely less consideration. To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged, by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. Large numbers of this class are already here; and, unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question, which of the two tides of immigration, meeting upon the shores of the Pacific, shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration, when far more difficult than now of disposal. There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races. (Stanford, 1862)

2

“What Shall We Do with White People?”

Many White people have no clue what Whiteness is. Many White people are racially “fragile,” to use Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) terminology. DiAngelo’s (2018) scholarly term – “white fragility” – is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice” (Oxford Dictionary). Then, what shall we do with White people? We’ve written how White people mistake Asian Americans for being a model minority and deny that they deserve affirmative action (Hartlep & Ozment, 2019). The “model minority” stereotype is bolstered by spotlighting stories of Asian American academic success, and then used to two deleterious ends. First, some Whites have disingenuously used Asian success stories to scold Black and Latinx peoples, essentially arguing, “Look, they’ve done just fine – if you’re not it must be your fault.” Second, there is a backlash of resentment against Asian Americans from Whites who perceive that they are taking away opportunities for education and good jobs. Another corollary is that some Asian Americans are denied much-needed assistance because they have been aggregated into one monolithic block (representing people from many distinct nations and ethnicities). We should ask White people why they pit Asian Americans against other racial groups when it comes to affirmative action, especially when they benefit most from affirmative action (Katznelson, 2005). Like James Baldwin, who said that he did not create the “Nigger,” so too we should ask White people why

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they say Asian Americans are model minorities? Ethiop, aka William J. Wilson, asks, What shall we do with White people rhetorically in the sense that nothing can be done to them. They have taken indigenous peoples’ lands; they have stolen Africans and enslaved them; they have written laws that serve their interests; and they deluded themselves that they are pious and hardworking people. In 2019, the answer to the question “What shall we do with White people?” may be different from what it was in 1860. Liou (2018) writes that “Whiteness is a plague. It burrows its ideas of power, domination, superiority, and ownership into any healthy tissue it can find” (p. 80). Mutiny against Whiteness, to Liou (2018), means “reject[ing] Whiteness and the well-worn narratives it has projected on us to build community that can reclaim possibilities for Asian Americanness” (p. 81).

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What Does Mutiny Look Like for Asians Against Whiteness?

Whiteness is always shifting, which makes mutiny challenging. For instance, simply countering or opposing model minority narratives is not enough. In fact, by pushing back against the narratives, we must (re)state what the narrative says, which can unwittingly give more bandwidth to it. This paradox is something Tuck (2009) raises in her article “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Tuck (2009) states that damage-centered research is different from desire-based research and that “[s]urvivance is a key component to a framework of desire” (p. 422). In other words, Asian Americans are not successful per se, but rather survivors of racism in the United States. Asian Americans should not accept the model minority stereotype; they should mutiny against it. However, in order for Asians to be mutinous they will also need to narrate who they are, not just who they are not. For Asians, Whiteness has always been about approximating Whiteness, but never truly being White. Lee and Bean (2007) write that Asians have approached Whiteness. According to Lee and Bean (2007), “Asian ethnic immigrant groups such as the Chinese and the Japanese also changed their racial status from almost black to almost white” (p. 566). However, does embracing “honorary Whiteness” or approaching Whiteness have any material benefit for disrupting Whiteness? No. Asian Americans should not allow themselves to – as Mari Matsuda (1996) calls it – “be used.”

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William J. Wilson’s words from 1860 should give Asians pause. Historically, Asians have been “yellow perils,” railroad workers, and evil villains, yet their identity took a turn in the 1960s when they transitioned to become “model minorities.” Yet “honorary White” or model minority status does not mean any improvement for Asian American humanity when it comes to White supremacy. Historically, Asians did not receive Whiteness. Contemporarily, Asians are, at best, model minorities; but, at worst, loved by racists only because they separate Whiteness from Blackness. By being mutinous, this arbitrary line separating Whites and Blacks goes away. This means they do not behave in ways that maintain tropes of submissiveness, intelligence, docility, effeminacy, and political meekness.

References DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for White people to talk about racism. Beacon Press. Ethiop. (1860). What shall we do with White people? Anglo-African Magazine, 2(2), 41–44. https://dcc.newberry.org/items/what-shall-we-do-with-white-people Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was White: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. W.W. Norton. Kuo, I. (2018, August 31). The ‘whitening’ of Asian Americans. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/the-whitening-of-asianamericans/563336/ Lee, J., & Bean, F. D. (2007). Reinventing the color line immigration and America’s new racial/ethnic divide. Social Forces, 86(2), 561–586. Liou, A. (2018). Model minority mutiny: Whiteness is a plague. Asian American Policy Review, 28, 79–82. Matsuda, M. J. (1996). Where is your body? And other essays on race, gender, and the law. Beacon Press. Oxford Dictionary. (n.d.). White fragility: Definition of White fragility. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/white_fragility Painter, N. I. (2015, June 20). What is whiteness? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html Shiao, J. L. (2017). The meaning of honorary Whiteness for Asian Americans: Boundary expansion or something else? Comparative Sociology, 16(6), 788–813. Stanford, L. (1862). Inaugural address. https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/ 08-Stanford.html Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational

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Review, 79(3), 409–427. http://pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_web/ES-114A/Week% 204/TuckHEdR79-3.pdf Yancy, G. (2003). Who is White? Latinos, Asians, and the new Black/Nonblack divide. Lynne Rienner. Zhou, M. (2004). Are Asian Americans becoming “White”? Contexts, 3(1), 29–37. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2004.3.1.29

CHAPTER 9

Baldwin, James Shannon K. McManimon and Michael D. Smith

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Roediger, David; Social Construction

… As a writer and a human, James Baldwin was invested in resisting (un)complicated categorization and (re)imagining existential possibilities. In his intimate and urgent work as a poet, playwright, novelist, orator, activist, essayist, and cultural critic, he narrated his personal experience of the world while also exploring the collective human experience, evolved his ideology while challenging dominant ideologies, and attempted to reconcile the United States’ past with its tumultuous present and uncertain future. Baldwin was a public intellectual whose oeuvre complicated and problematized the structures and strictures of socialization while providing unparalleled insight into both the broader sociohistorical moments of his lifetime and negotiations of his own social locations. Often calling himself a witness, Baldwin’s words evidenced a profound love for human beings. This was no easy love, but one nourished by the pain and struggle he witnessed and experienced, such as growing up in poverty as the oldest of nine children in Harlem, his experiences as a “child preacher” in a Black church, discrimination against Black GIs returning from World War II, and the Black civil rights and Black Power movements. His love was also nurtured through friendships, conversation, and the beauty and healing of (Black) art, music, and writing. Living in France or Turkey for much of his adult life (as a “transatlantic commuter”) to mitigate the violence he experienced in the United States, Baldwin came to an even greater understanding of what it meant to be an American, in particular understanding race as a social construction. Like others (e.g., Toni Morrison), Baldwin explored race as relational, particularly focusing on the intimate relationship between Blackness and whiteness. Though he did not use the term “whiteness,” Baldwin “was the greatest expert on white consciousness in the twentieth century United States” (Roediger, 1998, p. 177). He positioned whiteness as an historical, political, and economic creation, inextricably linked with the founding of the United States as a nation. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_009

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Creating whiteness was necessary to justify Black enslavement and subjugation as well as massacres and genocide of the land’s original inhabitants. In other words, white people created race to benefit themselves and to justify violence; in the process, they trapped both themselves and people of color within a predicament that continues to exact immense psychological and physical tolls. The path through these original sins of White supremacy and institutionalized oppression would, according to Baldwin, require a fundamentally reimagined (in)formal education – a re-education that inculcated in students, teachers, administrators, and communities radically different habits of mind, heart, and spirit. Drawing in particular on Baldwin’s (1963/1985a) “A Talk to Teachers,” this entry outlines the timely and timeless quality of his writing on the confluence of education and race and the attendant purposes, paradoxes, and promises.

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Purposes of Education

Baldwin began his address by laying bare the reality that teaching – whether formally in schools or informally at home – is a decidedly political act carrying a host of ethical and moral responsibilities. In a brilliant rhetorical turn, Baldwin (1963/1985a) addressed not just people of color and their allies, but “any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people” (p. 678). In so doing, he widened the scope of his audience, creating a cognitive dissonance-inducing bind for those who might be resistant. For Baldwin, the purpose of education was cultivating critical consciousness and awakening agency. Baldwin specifically addressed the purpose of education for Black children. He respected young children enough to understand that they drew conclusions about social arrangements (and the accompanying values placed on them) far sooner than adults were comfortable acknowledging. Furthermore, Baldwin, perhaps because of his own experience as a child “with old eyes,” recognized children’s capacity to reflect on their social identities and to intuitively evaluate their place within the social hierarchy, even before they had the language to express the depth of their understanding. For instance, a Black child understood “that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no room in it for him” (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, p. 681). These same children, moving into predominantly white spaces (such as schools), found themselves in a world that was hard to relate to, knowing “instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told” (p. 680). Baldwin also

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recognized that society had little interest in preserving the innocence of Black children – it was simply not a privilege afforded to them. Because of the social and material costs of Blackness and the stakes for (mis)education, schools were a critical space in a child’s life. Baldwin does not obfuscate the intentions of those at the centers of power. He warned those who dared take up the challenge to teach boldly that the magnitude and import of the task were neither for the marginally committed nor the weak-hearted. Instead, he cautioned That in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen. (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, p. 678) The stakes were clear: a “person who figures himself as responsible” was obligated to “examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change” (p. 679). Baldwin’s witness was one of hope that education and relationship could right societal injustices.

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Paradoxes

Yet Baldwin was no naïve optimist. He recognized that learning to critically view the world and to have a sense of an ability to exert force on those circumstances was fraught because schools are nested within larger societal structures and often (re)produce societal inequalities. Baldwin (1963/1985a) thus noted that The crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society… The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. (p. 678) Examining society is not a value-neutral proposition. “Being educated” in this sense means lifting the veil, seeing the confluence of circumstances leading to this moment, and recognizing the machinations of oppression. For Baldwin,

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writing as a Black man in a “revolutionary situation,” this meant challenging the social construction of race, and, in particular, whiteness. Over decades, Baldwin detailed how the social construction of race in the United States resulted in a brutal assault on the communities, lives, bodies, and psyches of people of color; for Black people, this meant a past of “rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone” (Baldwin, 1962/1985b, p. 376). This “blasphemy” was intentional: It was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, pp. 328–329) And it was not just the past, for as he wrote in 1985, “[t]here was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution,” with power consolidated, token concessions notwithstanding, in white bodies (p. xvii). White people had the power to define the world, past and present, on their own terms, justifying actions, behaviors, and thoughts that directly contradicted the stated democratic values upon which the nation was founded. Baldwin understood that justifying these inequities also required constructing personal racialized identities. Whiteness, in other words, required an “other.” To justify the ongoing “criminal conspiracy to destroy” lives (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, p. 331), “in order to feel safe,” white people “invented black people to give white people identity” (Baldwin & Giovanni, 1975, p. 88). Simultaneously, white people created and continue to believe in a (superior) white identity based in a “series of myths” (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, p. 330) about heroic ancestors who loved freedom and who reside(d) in the greatest country of all time. Schools perpetuate(d) these lies. Based in these fabrications, white identity in the past and today, Baldwin claimed, was also a lie. Baldwin knew that the consequences of what we now name white racial hegemony and normativity were far-reaching. In the 1960s, he asserted that it was white people’s “innocence which constitutes the crime” (Baldwin, 1962/1985b, p. 334); ignorance, a refusal to acknowledge history, led white people to a “fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality – to lose touch, that is, with themselves” (Baldwin, 1965/1998a, p. 323). Clinging to a revisionist history, refusing to take responsibility for “an appallingly oppressive and bloody history known all over the world” (Baldwin, 1965/1998a, p. 320), made white people delusional. In the 1980s, having witnessed the murder of

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Black friends and colleagues and the continuing destruction of Black communities, particularly through violence, poverty, and urban oppression, Baldwin asserted that white people had become “the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen” (Baldwin, 1984/1998b, p. 179). They had no (earned) moral authority yet great power, a combination which menaced the world. For Baldwin, being truly educated included the burden of action. That is, Baldwin (1963/1985a) expected people to leverage their knowledge into action, even as this was risky because “at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society” (p. 685). He cautioned that this awakening, while necessary and ultimately liberating, would make a person inconvenient, an irritant to the inertia of the established social order. Individuals with a greater sense of personal agency and critical consciousness must situate themselves differently in the world. The person who is truly educated must ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, [it] is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. (pp. 678–679) This move to action, Baldwin asserted throughout his life, exacted a price. At the same time, Baldwin addressed the paradox of whiteness: it was a trap. Because humans exist in relationship, dehumanizing others – for instance, “persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life” (Baldwin, 1984/1998b, p. 179) – also dehumanized and debased white people. For white people, the price of the ticket to participate in the United States – or perhaps more accurately, the price of the trap of (believing the lie of) whiteness – was captivity. Baldwin recognized that people were not white before they came to the United States and that it took “a vast amount of coercion” (Baldwin, 1984/1998b, p. 178) for many to think of themselves as white. Unless and until white people acknowledged this captivity and its roots in oppressive histories of nation building and capitalism, Baldwin (1965/1998a) said, they remained trapped, “impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin… incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world” (p. 321). White identity exacted a terrible price for white people: “white people are not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are” (Baldwin, 1963/1985a, p. xiv). White people, Baldwin (1962/1985c) concluded, “are, in effect, trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (p. 336).

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Promises

Despite the paradoxes of both education and whiteness, Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” ends with hope. Alternating between “I would try to teach them” and “I would try to make them know,” Baldwin reimagined the possibilities for education and articulated a vision for how students, particularly Black students, could inoculate themselves against the toxicity of the cultural environment and prepare themselves to thrive. Baldwin saw promise in an education that valued critical thinking (“the right and the necessity to examine everything”), recognized and resisted systemic oppression (“those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal”), and praised personal agency (“he must at once decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and that he must never make peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth”). More than anything, Baldwin empowered students – which should include all of us – to dream bigger than they feel they have any right to do. Baldwin’s vision for a liberatory education challenged students to question all master narratives and narratives of masters. Perhaps the greatest gift to Baldwin’s figurative student – and the greatest gift we can give our students today – is to “try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and it belongs to him” (p. 686). In holding up this promise, Baldwin was also unsparing in his critique of whiteness. For instance, he asserted that white liberals could not deal with Black people as human, only as symbols or as victims, even as Blackness in the United States “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible” (Baldwin, 1962/1985c, p. 379). As a witness, he called white people to awaken to the social and economic realities of whiteness (and its implications for attributions of Blackness). This was dangerous to most white people, because it would entail a loss of their identity and would require learning “how to accept and love themselves and each other” (Baldwin, 1962/1985b, p. 340). Further, it would require action and commitment, including “radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure” that white people were (are) unwilling to even envision (Baldwin, 1962/1985b, p. 370). Baldwin declared that humans pay for our pasts, for our actions and inactions, either willingly or unwillingly. Yet since humans have constructed whiteness and carried it out through societal, political, and educational institutions, “relatively conscious” racialized humans can, together, “end the racial

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nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, 1962/1985b, p. 379). He thus called on all people to discover how they are connected to each other. He knew this would not be easy, that it might even be impossible, as it would require people (of all races and identities) to risk giving and loving (Baldwin, 1962/1985c) and “love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free” (Baldwin, in Thorsen, 1990). Yet despite resistance and criticism from many sides, Baldwin believed that “people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that that burden is reality and arrive where reality is” (Baldwin, 1962/1985c, p. 372). Today, Baldwin’s work resonates precisely because so many historically marginalized groups find the quotidian task of living a frequently dangerous undertaking; the extraordinary ordinariness of social inequity has for generations so normalized inequality that an honest reckoning (and reconciliation) with our past has been nearly impossible. That Baldwin’s work still feels so relevant and even necessary speaks to both the prescience and clarity of his writing, as well as the intractability of much of what he inveighed against. Today, still, active resistance to institutional, systemic, and personal perpetuation of oppression remains righteous yet revolutionary. Baldwin functions as an eternal Janus figure, forever fixing his critical gaze toward the past and peering forward into the future. Both radical and accessible, Baldwin provides a living testimony of actively wrestling with and ultimately defying the restrictions of society while remaining unyielding in speaking truth to power.

References Baldwin, J. (1985a). A talk to teachers. In J. Baldwin (Ed.), The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948–1985 (pp. 352–332). St. Martin’s/Marek. (Original work published 1963) Baldwin, J. (1985b). Down at the cross: Letter from a region in my mind (from The fire next time). In J. Baldwin (Ed.), The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948–1985 (pp. 337–379). St. Martin’s/Marek. (Original work published 1962) Baldwin, J. (1985c). My dungeon shook. Letter to my nephew on the one-hundredth anniversary of the emancipation (from The fire next time). In J. Baldwin (Ed.), The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948–1985 (pp. 333–336). St. Martin’s/Marek. (Original work published 1962) Baldwin, J. (1998a). White man’s guilt. In D. Roediger (Ed.), Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white (pp. 320–325). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1965)

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Baldwin, J. (1998b). On being “white”… and other lies. In D. Roediger (Ed.), Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white (pp. 177–180). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1984) Baldwin, J., & Giovanni, N. (1975). A dialogue. Lippincott. Roediger, D. (1998). Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white. Schocken Books. Thorsen, K. (1990). James Baldwin: The price of the ticket. California Newsreel.

CHAPTER 10

Basement Culture Timothy J. Lensmire

Related Entries: Ellison, Ralph; Political Correctness; Second Wave Whiteness Studies

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Introduction

The idea that white people participate in a basement culture was put forward by Lensmire (2017) in his book, White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Frank (pseudonym), one of the participants in the research study upon which Lensmire’s book was based, described basement culture as one of two primary spaces that white people occupied in contemporary U.S. society. With reference to his experiences with friends in a weekly poker game, Frank characterized basement culture as a “low” space that contrasted sharply to the other primary realm within which white people lived and worked – a polite, “high” space in which they had to talk in “politically correct” ways. The two spaces were related inasmuch as talk and ideas that were discouraged or suppressed in the high space were imagined as being pushed down into and expressed in the low, basement culture. Frank was a complex social actor whose account of high and low white spaces talks back to white privilege and colorblind racism conceptualizations of who white people are and what they are up to. Frank knew that he was supposed to not sound racist in the high space and that he would be regarded positively for sounding racist in the low space. His white racial identity was not characterized by some easy embrace of privilege or a white supremacist ideology, but by confusion and conflict. Further, for Frank, neither the high, “politically-correct” space nor the low basement culture provided room for the exploration and sorting out of his own confused and divergent thoughts and feelings about race.

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Characteristics of Basement Culture

Four key features were identified by Lensmire in his analysis of Frank’s account of basement culture. The first was a greater freedom of talk and behavior than was available in the polite, high space. There were similarities, here, to how Bakhtin (1984) contrasted folk culture and official culture. For Bakhtin, official culture was held in place by fear, while folk culture sought to defeat or disrupt this fear with laughter. For Frank, white people lived in fear of being called a racist in the high space, while in the low space, racist humor flourished and was rewarded. Indeed, Frank went so far as to suggest that racist jokes and stories were demanded of participants in basement culture, so that what appeared at first to be greater freedom or license was actually an alternative set of expectations and responsibilities (rather than the absence of these). A second feature of basement culture was a particular set of topics that were taken up regularly within this space. Frank said that race, sex, work, marriage, and current news stories were typical subjects of conversation, and he emphasized that these topics were not discussed politely, but instead pursued in “extreme” ways. Somewhat surprisingly, political discussion across conservative and liberal positions was frowned upon. In relation to all other topics, it was assumed that individual people would be able to monitor and control themselves in the event of disagreement. However, Frank reported that he and his friends had learned that this assumption of self-control did not work in relation to political discussion and that they had instituted a rule against it in this social space. Basement culture was often talked about by Frank as in direct opposition to the high, “politically-correct” space. A third key feature of basement culture was the absence of what Frank thought was prominent in the high space – the shaming of white people, by other white people, through accusations of racism. In other words, in the high space, anyone (including people Frank himself considered quite racist) might accuse another of being racist, shame them, and diminish their social standing in the local community. Such accusations and shaming were not part of basement culture. The final feature of basement culture was that it not only expressed alreadyformed racist meanings and values but contributed to or produced these meanings and values. Frank noted that most of the men in his poker game had extremely limited contact with actual people of color. Consequently, he worried that the racist caricatures and stereotypes that were in abundance in the basement culture shaped how these men thought about and oriented themselves toward racial others. In this, basement culture can be seen as

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functioning similarly to 19th century blackface minstrelsy, which Gottschild (1996) characterized as solidifying and propagating racist stereotypes as “the true picture of black offstage life” (p. 124).

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Conclusion

Theoretically, the notion of a basement culture serves as a supplement or corrective to how sociologists such as Bonilla-Silva (2003) and Frankenberg (1993) discuss colorblind discourse and ideology. For these theorists, colorblind talk is a mask or cover for a deeper, recalcitrant racist ideology and white supremacist society. This racist ideology and reality sometimes erupts into or disrupts white people’s attempts to think and talk in colorblind ways. With reference to the white women she interviewed, Frankenberg (1993) noted that their Efforts to “not see” race difference despite its continued salience in society and in their own lives generated a fault line or contradiction in their consciousness… [They] grappled with and tried to pacify the contradiction between a society structured in dominance and the desire to see society only in terms of universal sameness and individual difference. The peace was an uneasy one, however, always on the brink of being disturbed. (p. 149) Instead of focusing on a fault line or contradiction in white people’s consciousness, the idea of a basement culture directs attention to how conflicts and contradictions play out across different white spaces and among different white individuals. In accounts such as Frankenberg’s, above, a fault line arises because of the tension or conflict that exists between, on the one hand, an individual, sense-making white person and, on the other hand, the racist ideology (in this case, colorblindness) meant to orient them to the world. The idea of a basement culture helps us understand that conflicts also exist (1) across diverse white spaces that are characterized by disparate meanings and values as regards race and (2) among white people who orient themselves, variously, in relation to these disparate meanings and values. In other words, a colorblind ideology is not the final or only word about race for white people, and a conflicted, ambivalent white racial identity is formed and forms itself across different white spaces and in relation to divergent meanings and values (see Lensmire, 2017). In education and educational research, the idea of a basement culture contributes to second wave whiteness studies, especially this field’s insistence on

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the complexity of white racial identities. Too often, research and pedagogical frameworks have assumed that white lives are all of one piece or that one aspect of white people’s identities (such as white privilege) is the only one that requires attention. Such assumptions lead to a reduction or flattening of white racial identity, with dire consequences for imagining and pursuing pedagogies that might actually mobilize white people for antiracist action. However, Frank’s characterization of basement culture leads to an alternative assumption, one that supports an image of white racial identities as complex and conflicted – that white people learn to be and perform being white across high and low white spaces that feature divergent meanings and values.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Indiana University. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. University of Minnesota. Gottschild, B. D. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance and other contexts. Greenwood. Lensmire, T. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge.

CHAPTER 11

Black Americans and Whiteness Shalyse I. Iseminger

Related Entries: Colorblindness; School-to-Prison Pipeline; Shame; Social Construction; Thandeka

… Whiteness and Blackness do not exist without one another. They are oppositional; the creation of one necessitated the creation of the other and they have engaged in an ongoing battle since their inception. When discussing the concepts of Whiteness and Blackness, an important distinction must be made; I am not referring to White and Black people, but rather, socially constructed systems of inequality built around race. (The first letters of Black and White are intentionally capitalized for the sake of designating them as racial groups rather than colors. This is to resist the conflation of these racial groups with the characteristics that the colors represent (ex. White = pure, black = malevolent).) To understand Whiteness, one must first realize how Whiteness was designed on the foundation of White supremacy and how Blackness came to exist as a result. Grasping how Whiteness continues to manifest itself, and how Black Americans have resisted White supremacy throughout history and continue to do so, is also important. Historically, Whiteness was invented by the White elite to maintain their positions of power in society. In the United States, the earliest colonies had indentured servants from Ireland and Africa; these groups were the poorest and most numerous of the socioeconomic classes. Because they were outnumbered, the elite class had to find a way to preserve their power and status. They needed a way to divide and conquer the poor, so they invented race. More specifically, they invented Whiteness and Blackness. Poor Whites were granted privileges that poor Blacks were not, such as the right to bear arms or the right to beat Blacks; Whites were also legally exempt from physical beatings by their masters. The elites also created differential punishments for White workers and Black workers, even if they had committed the same crime, and began enforcing life-long work sentences on Black workers, which eventually transformed into chattel slavery. This introduction of race had the effect of satiating the White working class, because although their life conditions were © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_011

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characterized by poverty and inequitable treatment, they could rest peacefully with the knowledge that they were not slaves and/or Black. Thus, the social stratification based on race in the U.S. began. In order to maintain that stratification, narratives of Whiteness and Blackness had to be created. These narratives have evolved throughout history to maintain White supremacy and are described throughout the remainder of this entry. White innocence is the primary narrative related to Whiteness that is discussed here. Each narrative about Blackness serves to reinforce White innocence which upholds White supremacy. The narrative of White innocence is the assumption that White people are blameless and should be given the benefit of the doubt; with this narrative comes the assumption of Black criminality. James Baldwin posits that Europeans likely defined Africans as Black and labeled themselves as White in part because of the cultural, religious, and sexual associations aligned with those colors: white symbolizes innocence and chastity while black represents evil and defilement. These color designations allowed Europeans to justify their subjugation of Africans initially, but as time passed and thinking evolved, the narratives needed to change to maintain the social order. As the U.S. became more industrialized, the economy of the South remained reliant on slave labor, while that of the North no longer did. Although there had always been those who decried slavery as immoral, Northern calls to end slavery in the South increased at the turn of the 19th century. The narrative of Sambo was created to justify the continuation of slavery. Sambo was the “childlike, irresponsible, lazy, affectionate, and happy” Black person who needed/ wanted to be enslaved for their own good (Takaki, 2008, p. 104). For White southerners, this narrative served as an attempt to pacify complaints from the North while also assuaging their own moral misgivings about slavery. White innocence was reinforced in the sense that Whites framed slavery as their Christian duty or as an act of benevolence because otherwise, Blacks would descend into squalor. Black people were not passive in this system, however. Many wore the mask of Sambo as a defense mechanism that hid intentions of escaping or revolting. Others feigned illness or incompetence to sabotage the operations of their masters as a form of resistance to their own enslavement. Some also resisted their enslavement through uprisings and revolts, the most famous being Nat Turner. After slavery ended, for White supremacy to remain the foundation of the social structure in the U.S., new laws were passed. The narratives supporting White supremacy remained, but new ways of disseminating those narratives were created. In her book, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo argues that White people project onto Black people characteristics that they do not want to possess as their

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own. This was exemplified by White slave owners labeling their slaves, who endured continuous backbreaking work, as lazy, while they themselves were exempt from the labor. After slavery ended, imaginary Blackness serving as a mirror for Whiteness was demonstrated in minstrel shows. These exhibitions where Whites would paint their skins black and act out what they imagined Blackness to be (e.g. foolish, care-free), served to appease White ethnic shame while simultaneously promoting White supremacy. (For more on the idea of White ethnic shame and how imaginary Blackness served as a mirror for Whiteness, see the entries on Thandeka and Shame.) As technology advanced, film was employed to further the narrative of White innocence. The 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, romanticized the Ku Klux Klan and reinforced the idea of White female purity that had to be protected from savage, dangerous, oversexualized Black men. The imaginary Blackness depicted in this film mirrors Whiteness while maintaining White innocence in multiple ways. Historically, as well as at the time this film was created, White men were a greater threat to the physical safety of Black people, yet Black men were depicted as the real threats. Additionally, Black women were historically objectified, sexualized, and raped by White men as could be seen in examples such as the exploitation of Saartjie Baartman or the treatment of female slaves by White masters. This legacy demanded the need for Black women to be protected from White men, yet White innocence constructed the opposite narrative. Black Americans resisted these narratives in multiple ways. Many were galvanized into protesting the showing of the film, The Birth of a Nation, which laid the groundwork for later protests in the Civil Rights movement. Sojourner Truth challenged the narratives about Black women with her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.” Others sought to challenge false narratives about and injustices toward Black women through womanism, a movement that acknowledged the oppression that Black women received for both their race and gender. The politics of respectability was another method used to resist the false narratives that propagated the negative stereotypes of Blackness. This approach, deployed by many sectors of Black society, was predicated on the belief that Black oppression was at least partially linked to prevailing, but ultimately changeable, stereotypes about Black people and blackness itself. By meeting White standards of cleanliness, thriftiness, or sexual purity, many Blacks aimed to defy negative stereotypes and better position themselves to struggle for equity and inclusion within dominant society. (Higgenbotham, as cited in Hill, 2018, p. 293) Respectability politics is one method of resistance that many Black Americans still employ today.

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In addition to negative narratives about Blackness, White supremacy was upheld through laws and policies in the U.S. After the Civil War, Black codes were enacted in the South; these eventually became Jim Crow laws which relegated Blackness to a second-class status. In the absence of legally mandated segregation in the North, banking policies and racist neighborhood covenants maintained racial separation. Additionally, the voting rights of Black Americans were repressed through racially discriminatory laws and intimidation. White supremacy was maintained throughout the U.S. through laws, intimidation, violence, lynchings, and even bombings of entire towns. Lynchings were an especially brutal form of intimidation and were often performed publicly. Black people were burned, hanged from trees, and mutilated, with parts of their bodiesw often being taken as souvenirs. Below is an excerpt of an account of one such event. After Mary Turner had been Hanged, covered with oil and gasoline and burned… As she dangled from the rope, a man stepped forward with a pocketknife and ripped open her abdomen in a crude caesarean operation. Out tumbled the prematurely born child… Two feeble cries it gave-and received for answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of its tiny form. (Degruy, 2005, p. 92) Between the years of 1882 and 1967, 200 bills went before Congress to outlaw lynching and were rejected. In 2018, a bill designating lynching a federal crime was passed in the Senate. The Civil Rights movement resisted White supremacy by securing legislation meant to ensure voting rights for Black Americans, desegregate schools (from a legal standpoint) and other public facilities, and end legal discrimination in hiring based on race. Most people associated with the Civil Rights movement used nonviolent protest to achieve their goals, however, other groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers championed gaining equality by any means necessary. The Black Panthers, for example, used symbols of power and violence, such as rifles, to ward off police brutality against those living in Black communities. In her history of the Black Panthers, Franziska Meister recounts how the Panthers used their knowledge of the law to oppose the racist institution of the police; the public nature of their actions served as a way to politically educate the Black community. These groups focused on Black empowerment in a society determined to disenfranchise; integration was not their main goal. Despite the gains made in the 1950s and 1960s, Whiteness still reigned supreme in the U.S. Although de jure discrimination was illegal, de facto discrimination thrived. Inequitable housing loan practices during the 1930s to 1950s deeply entrenched residential segregation in American society and

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created a wealth gap that remains. At that time, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Authority refused to loan money to Black people, actively promoted restrictive racial covenants, and denied loans to White people if they wanted to live somewhere that had been redlined. Redlining was a process banks used to designate “undesirable” neighborhoods (those with predominant populations of color). These discriminatory housing practices led to Whites moving to the suburbs, concurrently taking businesses with them, and leaving inner cities to be composed primarily of ethnic minorities. As a result, White neighborhoods became characterized as good and stable with employed and employable people, while Black neighborhoods became labeled as bad and unstable containing unemployable people with low work ethics. Another contributing factor to residential segregation was White flight. When institutionalized housing discrimination became illegal, as Black people began moving into White neighborhoods, White people left. Because people of color (PoC) make up less of the housing market, the values of the homes in these neighborhoods began depreciating, and eventually these neighborhoods became sites for increased placement of government subsidized housing. Contemporarily, Blacks and Latinx peoples continue to experience housing discrimination in their efforts to rent or buy. For example, Black people are likely to be shown fewer apartments, more likely to be quoted higher rents, or be steered to certain neighborhoods. The effects of residential segregation are amplified in the fact that where a person lives largely determines the educational opportunities they receive. Because public schools are mostly funded by property taxes, segregated inner city schools are often woefully underresourced in comparison to schools in the suburbs. In desegregated schools, children of color are still disenfranchised since Whites and Asians are statistically more likely to be placed on a higher academic track (such as Advanced Placement courses) than comparably achieving Black and Latinx students. The above described phenomena are examples of the new racial structure described by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in what he terms “color-blind racism.” This new racial structure supports White innocence in that racism is covert in nature, racial terminology is avoided, and the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality are invisible. Therefore, if a person of color claims to be racially discriminated against, they are the deviant ones for mentioning race. Additionally, policies such as affirmative action are framed as racially discriminatory against White people. Since White people are presumed innocent, the assumption is made that Black beneficiaries of affirmative action are unqualified and are taking jobs away from more deserving White people. Colorblind

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racism maintains White supremacy because it pretends that White supremacy no longer exists while dismissing anyone who tries to challenge it as racist. One prominent example of colorblind racism is the current U.S. system of mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander terms this “the new Jim Crow.” Two main sources of prisoners come from the “war on drugs” and the school-toprison pipeline. Since White supremacy’s previous work in neighborhood segregation had effectively painted a narrative of Black neighborhoods as bad neighborhoods, the media campaign of the Reagan era that sensationalized the use of crack in inner cities was plausible to the public. Communities of color became targets for policing, including “stop and frisk.” Because PoC were (and are) searched more often, they are more likely to be found with illegal drugs, even though drug use is fairly equal across races. The legal penalties for crack (a drug used more by PoC) was 100:1 the penalties for cocaine (a drug used more by White people) even though both drugs are equally dangerous. This penalty proportion was recently reduced to 18:1, which is better, but still inequitable. As a result, the population of those under the penal system is disproportionately Black and Latinx. Similarly, the school-to-prison pipeline maintains White supremacy in the current day. This pipeline largely arose from zero-tolerance policies related to guns and the introduction of police officers (school resource officers) into schools as a result of school shootings such as Columbine. Although these security measures were a result of school shootings that occurred in predominantly White, suburban schools, because of the narrative that has been constructed about Black spaces, these policies have been most readily enacted in schools with a majority of students of color. What initially began as zero-tolerance policies for guns was expanded over time to include drugs, and eventually minor behavioral issues such as tardiness, defiance, and disorderly conduct. These zero-tolerance policies have increased the numbers of suspensions, expulsions, drop-outs and push-outs from schools, which are “highly correlated with future involvement in the juvenile and adult legal systems, creating an indirect pathway out of school and into jail” (Heitzeg, 2016, p. 10). This pipeline disproportionately affects students of color, poor students, and students with disabilities. Despite the many ways that Whiteness works to maintain and advance White supremacy, Blackness remains in an ongoing struggle to undermine these efforts. In contemporary times, critical race theory (CRT), originally developed in the legal field, has been employed in the field of law and expanded into fields such as education to better understand and counteract the effects of the racism that is endemic in our society. The concept of interest convergence,

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which states that PoC only advance in society when Whites have something to gain from their advancement, has been used to achieve desired outcomes for PoC. Also, within CRT, the use of counternarratives are used to challenge master-narratives, which dominate societal thought because they are rarely examined. Counternarratives have been used by Black Americans in myriad outlets including music, fine art, poetry, film, and books. More recently, social media has taken the form of what Marc Lamont Hill describes as a “digital counterpublic” to promote counternarratives about Blackness than those that have been told. Hashtags such as #Blackexcellence and #Blackgirlmagic highlight the achievements of Black people in a society that assumes Black mediocrity. #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and #SayHerName have demanded attention for the executions of Black people by the police with no trial. From these social media campaigns, activists have been mobilized to protest and fight for law and policy changes. Additionally, respectability politics have been challenged by BLM; Black lives matter regardless of whether they meet whatever standard Whiteness has deemed appropriate. Black Americans have challenged Whiteness since its inception; Blackness and Whiteness remain oppositional. As White innocence continues to uphold the structure of White supremacy in the U.S., Black Americans will continue to counter it. Through protest, legislation, and counternarratives, Black people work to control the stories that have been told about us while paving a path for a better experience for the next generation. To close, I leave you with an excerpt from the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun, of our new day begun. Let us march on, ‘til victory is won. (Johnson, 1900)

References DeGruy, J. (2005). Post traumatic slave syndrome: America’s legacy of enduring injury and healing. Uptone Press. Heitzeg, N. (2016). The school-to-prison pipeline: Education, discipline, and racialized double standards. ABC-CLIO, LLC. Hill, M. L. (2018). “Thank you, Black Twitter”: State violence, digital counterpublics, and pedagogies of resistance. Urban Education, 53(2), 286–302. Johnson, J. (1900). Lift ev’ry voice and sing [Song]. Takaki, R. (2008). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America (revised ed.). Back Bay Books.

CHAPTER 12

Brokenness Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Emotionality and Whiteness; Psychoanalysis and Whiteness; Racial Melancholia; Thandeka

… Brokenness refers to the socio-emotional state of the recognition of imperfection and dehumanization brought on by social participation in an oppressive society. In research on whiteness, white racial identity, and education, the concept of brokenness offers ways of understanding how those who benefit from a white supremacist society, by way of privilege, are simultaneously dehumanized. Brokenness thus offers a frame for antiracist praxis that goes beyond the narrow always-positive connotations of white racial privilege, and instead points to the ways that participation in our white supremacist social reality breaks all social actors. For South African scholar Jonathan Jansen (2009), brokenness refers to “the idea that in our human state we are prone to failure and incompletion, and that as imperfect humans we constantly seek a higher order of living. Brokenness is the realization of imperfection…” (p. 269). Jansen sees brokenness as part of his conception of a “post-conflict pedagogy” – an approach to teaching and learning focused on social justice and on explicating the ways that our conflictual past and present must be central to our work with and for students. Jansen sees white learners not as merely privileged, but rather as brining particular knowledges to bear on their engagements with questions of race, racism, and multicultural education. He calls this knowledge “bitter knowledge” to reflect ways that white South Africans who came of age after Apartheid have still internalized a white supremacist social reality despite the end of de jure white supremacy. While the legal protections for white South Africans have been abolished, the racialized memories of explicit legal rights for white people remain part of the “knowledge” in play in that context. Rather than seeing brokenness only as a way of articulating the harm and pain produced by white supremacy on peoples of color, Jansen sees brokenness as a condition that is produced across varyingly privileged social actors. Brokenness can then name the socio-emotional reactions to learning about © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_012

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systemic oppressions as well as the more localized and embodied experiences of racialized traumas. This does not mean that people of color and white people experience the same brokenness; such a move would negate the embodied experiences of communities of color in opposition to white supremacy. Instead, Jansen’s perspective on brokenness offers ways of rethinking solidarities across racial lines in opposition to white supremacy. Presently, a kind of intellectual loop is produced in much antiracist thought with regard to white people. This loop functions as follows: white people cause racial violence in white supremacy, white supremacy dehumanizes and degrades communities of color, white people who recognize their complicity can come to support people of color in their struggle against white supremacy. The loop is completed by the inability for white people, with such a framing, to transform the struggle against white supremacy from one that is for and by peoples of color with white people playing ancillary and supporting roles. Remaining on the sidelines in such struggles is akin to reproducing the relative privilege of white racial identity to choose how and when to engage questions of race and racism. Brokenness offers a theoretical intervention in this loop by locating a shared source of solidarity. Rather than relying on a kind of pity-inducing plea for white people to join people of color in their struggle, brokenness offers a language to locate ways that white people too are dehumanized in white supremacy. Existing in a white supremacist society, even when one receives relative privileges through their participation, breaks us. All of us. Thus, brokenness is a frame that can scaffold white social actors from the recognition of relative privilege to working in solidarity to transform our oppressive status quo. For the Rev. Thandeka, brokenness is connected to white shame. White shame, unlike guilt, which refers to conscious regret of actual wrongdoing, names the feeling of being flawed without immediate recourse to make such feelings go away. White shame is the feeling of inner turmoil over recognition of the ways one has rejected aspects of their full humanity in order to become white. Thandeka (2006) writes, of white people in a white supremacist society, “this self, seeing its own brokenness, feels shame” (p. 108). Such a linkage thus offers us a way of understanding brokenness as something that follows from an initial discovery of the ways that a social actor is incapable of realizing their own full potential as a human because of our oppressive social reality. Brokenness, for white people, then functions to produce white shame wherein shame can be seen as the emotional evidence for a state of brokenness. Thandeka argues compellingly that we should imagine parts of white people that are “not ‘theoretically white,’” (p. 75). This is the portion that has been abused and made white by “adult silence to racial abuse” (p. 24). This racial abuse of young white

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people is comprised most of moments wherein young white people are forced to make decisions that will secure the love and affection of their white parents and caretakers, as well as other prominent adults in their lives, like teachers. Thandeka offers numerous examples of these moments of brokenness in the first chapter of her book Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America. For instance, she tells us about a white man named Dan, who supported a black male student to become part of his all-white fraternity. After it was found out at the national headquarters that the chapter had admitted a black student, Dan was tasked with telling the student he could no longer rush the fraternity because of his race. As he retold this story to the Rev. Thandeka, he broke down in tears. Thandeka theorizes this as an example of Dan’s brokenness because even decades later he was still struggling with his moral failure and culpability with white supremacy in kicking his black friend out of their frat. She further argues that we can see in Dan’s story the ways that brokenness names something more powerful than merely signaling racism. Dan is left with only racism as the explanatory mechanism for his feelings of hurt and discomfort with the white supremacist organization and broader social reality he finds himself in. Thandeka argues that Dan is not racist, but that racism is the only conceptual device available to him, and thus he understands this incident as evidence of his own racism. Thandeka disagrees, seeing Dan’s emotional state as evidence not of white racism, but rather of the ways that Dan himself is broken through participation in white supremacy. His moral failure in this instance stems from his inability to break with the white group of peers and mentors in his fraternity: he chooses being included over sharing exclusion with his black friend. For Thandeka, too often our analyses stop at the level of racism: once located we identify the racist incident and move on, without examining it in greater detail for its additional meanings. Attending to brokenness thus entails locating the emotional underpinnings of racialized memories, actions, and reflections as always more than isolated and individuated acts. Instead, we would do better to excavate the ways that our present white supremacist social totality has warped our abilities to read social contexts as containing contradictions and complications. An additional example from Thandeka’s work can help make this more recognizable. Another story she relays early in her work is that of a white man named Jack who had two black neighbors around his own age who lived in the house behind his family’s growing up. The three would often play together, until a birthday party was being hosted for Jack by his parents. Seeing his friends in the back yard, he invited them to join, but noticed almost immediately that something had changed with the white adults at the party. They were

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uncomfortable, and even at five years old, Jack “knew he had somehow done something wrong and was sorry” (p. 5). For Thandeka, such a story is far more than a story of white racism. It is instead a story of how young white people are socialized into whiteness, by choosing to affirm their group membership with their families and caretakers instead of with people of color. As an adult, this story gives evidence for Jack’s brokenness because in it he names his emotional reactions to breaking an unspoken social contract in his home for the party. He was not supposed to invite his black friends, and he learned this through witnessing the white adults who cared most for him becoming visibly uncomfortable at their inclusion in the party. The name we can give to such a state of recognition is brokenness. Brokenness is not an invitation for white social actors to reject culpability in systems of oppression. Instead, it names the emotional state when one recognizes their own inability to live up to their full human potential. Naming such a state, on its own, does nothing to combat white supremacy, and thus there is no sense of finality or completion that comes from recognizing one’s brokenness. However, such recognition might well lead to responses that have heretofore been unrealized because of our collective inability to understand the ways that a system that supposedly benefits white social actors functions, on the whole, to limit their capacity to become more fully human. Brokenness can then be seen as offering pedagogical possibilities: not as a destination to reach, but a way of naming our realities that might help us articulate new forms of resistance to white supremacy.

References Jansen, J. D. (2009). Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Stanford University Press. Thandeka. (2006). Learning to be white money, race, and God in America. Continuum International Group.

CHAPTER 13

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Allison Mattheis

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Integration of Schools; Interest Convergence; Segregation in Schooling

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Introduction

Public schools play a central role in the democratic imagination of the U.S. and are key sites of social and political development. Categorizing – and thereby separating – children based on social markers begins early and continues throughout their schooling. Public education has therefore reinforced the cultural and psychological conditioning needed to maintain white supremacy in the U.S. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most well known Supreme Court cases in U.S. history and holds a unique position in the popular imagination. Rather than evidence of constant progress toward racial justice as part of the American story, however, the struggle to fully integrate public spaces following Brown is a telling example of the deep-rooted nature of white supremacy in U.S. policies. The impact of the case on public opinion and as legal precedent has perhaps been much stronger than in effecting true and lasting change in education. Under the Jim Crow laws deemed legal by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, public spaces including schools in the United States were segregated by race, both legally (de jure), as in many parts of the South, and in practice by virtue of demographics and geography (de facto) in many parts of the North. Although Black children were guaranteed the right to attend public schools free of charge, their schools were not adequately resourced by government funds – the superiority of schools attended by white children reinforced false notions of the superiority of the children themselves. Thus, school desegregation became part of a movement that sought to overturn policies premised on the notion of “separate but equal” as unjust from a civil rights perspective and unfeasible in practice. During the 20th century the judicial branch of U.S. government was increasingly used by people seeking redress for violations of civil rights or to force © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_013

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legal change when legislative process or executive power was hostile to the rights of marginalized groups of people. Deeper cultural and social shifts, however, are needed if revised interpretations of the Constitution are to be implemented and enforced in ways that redistribute rights to previously excluded groups of people. Although Brown was a landmark case in symbolically overturning the legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” enacting it was significantly more difficult. Decades later, white resistance to desegregation and integration continues. Although demographics have changed dramatically across the U.S., K-12 schools remain predictably segregated by race, ethnicity, and income.

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Context: U.S. Courts and Racial Categorization in Public Schools

The complex history of racialization in the United States is reflected in how racial categories have been defined and interpreted through case law. The legal and political system of the country was originally established to protect the citizenship rights of a narrow group of people – Christian land-holding men – while subsequent changes somewhat expanded the definition of “citizen” but in inconsistent and unequal ways. Indigenous peoples were systematically and genocidally killed and forced off their lands (in most cases with no compensation) and Native Americans were not granted full citizenship under U.S. law until 1924. The racial category of “white” was established as a way to distinguish European Americans from enslaved African Americans and members of indigenous communities and was recognized in judicial contexts by the early 18th century. Rights were therefore only granted to those who were classified as white and reified a binary understanding of race. The legal ending of slavery in the mid-19th century did not lead to full enfranchisement of Black Americans but did contribute to a reification of a racial binary of white-Black in the U.S. judicial system. In the early twentieth century, demographic shifts occurred quickly in some regions as the borders of the United States expanded to capture more and more land that had previously been governed by other nations, including the seizure of lands previously designated as Native American reservations, and much territory in the Southwestern U.S. that had been part of Mexico. Workers from other parts of the world – most notably, Asia – were also brought to the U.S. to labor on the construction of infrastructure projects such as the trans-continental railroad. Prior to the Brown case, school desegregation lawsuits demonstrated the impact of this complex history of how various ethnic groups in the U.S. were racialized. In California, two important cases considered how children of Mexican origin were racially categorized. In the 1931 Lemon Grove Case (Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District), the County Superior Court found that Mexican and Mexican

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American children could not be assigned to segregated schools because under state law they were considered white. In 1947, the Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County case was brought by a Mexican American family whose light-skinned children were admitted to the local school district without problem, but their darker skinned cousins were sent to a segregated remedial school (similar schools existed throughout the Southwest and Texas). Although the plaintiffs’ attorney argued that all the children were white based on California Education code, the judge in the case found the school assignment unconstitutional because of the inferior quality of education offered at the “Mexican” school. The inconsistent application of Jim Crow laws was also evidenced in the South, where some Chinese American children were allowed access to white schools in the 1930s via efforts to gain favor with local white elites. In order to maintain their association with whiteness, however, many Chinese communities effectively distanced themselves from their Black neighbors. These cases demonstrate how the promise of superior schooling opportunities for children created circumstances in which it was advantageous for citizens marginalized by ethnic identity to argue that they were white, rather than dispute the whiteBlack binary reified in law or to challenge the flawed logics used to categorize people by race. By the 1950s, economic, legal, and political power was still solidly in the control of white men. The Brown case was heard by a Supreme Court comprised entirely of white men and led by chief justice Earl Warren who had been appointed by President Eisenhower, but the reputation of the United States in the post WWII era was an important factor in influencing how the justices were predisposed to consider claims of racial injustice in the courts. After defending the military actions of the Allies in Europe and Asia as morally justifiable, the treatment of minority groups in the United States began to receive international critique following the end of the war, during which many countries began to enact laws and policies that were decidedly more progressive in terms of providing rights to racial and ethnic minorities and women. Critical Race legal scholar Derrick Bell highlighted the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown as a classic example of “interest convergence,” demonstrating that in deciding in favor of the plaintiffs the justices were still upholding white interests because of the positive boost to the country’s international reputation that resulted from its actions.

3

Context: The NAACP and Civil Rights Activism in the Courts

Access to education was one of the primary objectives of the NAACP’s civil rights activist agenda from its founding at the start of the twentieth century

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but became the focus of the organization’s efforts to challenge Jim Crow with the guidance of Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston served as the first legal counsel to the NAACP in the 1930s, prior to the establishment of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1940, and developed its strategy of targeting segregation of public schools as evidence that “separate but equal” facilities and services had never been provided to Black people following the Plessy ruling and arguing for it to be overturned. He began these efforts by filing a series of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of segregated law schools, effectively setting the stage for Brown. As a law professor at Howard University, Houston also mentored other prominent Black lawyers who became key figures in civil rights advocacy, including Thurgood Marshall. Black educators were key supporters of the NAACP, which had filed lawsuits regarding pay equity on their behalf in the 1930s. The NAACP especially relied on the coordinated efforts of Black teachers in the South, through organizations such as the Georgia Teachers and Educators Association (GTEA) which had been founded in 1878 to protest unequal funding for Black and white schools, to support its broader civil rights advocacy efforts. In places where it was often risky for people to join the NAACP, supporting teachers’ activism was a way to support a broader project of racial justice, and highlight issues that were related to the organization’s efforts in other parts of the country. By the time the Brown case was brought before the Supreme Court, the NAACP had been developing and honing a coordinated legal strategy aimed at overturning Jim Crow for over a decade. At the same time, the U.S. was beginning to receive increased international scrutiny regarding its treatment of Black citizens. These factors combined to create a set of circumstances that ultimately led to the final landmark decision. 3.1 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (I) The initial legal complaint that led to the Supreme Court case was a class action lawsuit filed in 1951 on behalf of a group of African American parents and their children in Topeka, Kansas. Oliver Brown, on behalf of his daughter Linda (then a third grader) agreed to be the named plaintiff, while all thirteen parents were engaged in a coordinated effort supported by the NAACP. Knowing that they would be denied access, the parents nonetheless attempted to register their children at segregated white schools located within their neighborhoods. In its ruling, the District Court that heard the original Brown case acknowledged that segregated schooling harmed Black children but upheld the Topeka Board of Education’s policy as constitutional under Plessy v. Ferguson. In addition to the Brown case, the NAACP had also organized similar lawsuits in four other locations: Washington, D.C., Virginia, Delaware, and South

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Carolina. In only one of these cases was the discrimination enacted by segregated schooling found to be unlawful. Thurgood Marshall, who graduated at the top of his Howard Law School class, joined the NAACP’s staff in 1934 and eventually became chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He served as the head of the legal team that successfully argued the Brown cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, and later became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court. At the heart of the Brown case was the interpretation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens access to due process and equal protection under the law. On behalf of Oliver Brown and the other plaintiffs, Marshall alleged that the Topeka Board of Education’s enforcement of segregated schooling violated African American students’ access to equal treatment – the decision of the Supreme Court in this case was seen as a revisiting of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The majority opinion, authorized by Chief Justice Warren, claimed that the Court found that children from minority groups could not receive equal educational opportunities if their access to these opportunities was limited by racial segregation. In deciding Brown in favor of the plaintiffs, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision partially overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had guided racialized policy-making in the country for over fifty years. 3.2 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas II (1955) The Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1954 Brown case established that de jure segregation of public schools was a violation of the equal protection clause, but it was the subsequent ruling in Brown II in 1955 that called for action. The key legal question considered in Brown II was the means by which the principles of Brown I should be implemented; in its decision, the Court directed school boards and other local authorities to dismantle existing segregation with “all deliberate speed.” Echoing parts of the arguments made by social scientists in Brown I that segregated schooling was inherently damaging to Black children’s social, psychological, and academic development, the court’s decision in Brown II noted that it was in the “personal interest of the plaintiffs” to be admitted to public schools “as soon as practicable on a nondiscriminatory basis.” The decision also acknowledged that local circumstances and variation in existing school districts would result in different approaches to implementation but emphasized that disagreement based on existing beliefs and practices was not a legitimate reason to avoid or slow desegregation. Despite the court’s directives to immediately begin the process of desegregating public schools, Brown II was met with both explicit and implicit resistance by the white power structure. School officials in many communities

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alternately failed to fully implement court-ordered plans or deliberately subverted the plans due to fear of social disruption or deeply rooted racist beliefs. In addition to districts that simply refused to comply with mandates to desegregate schools, other communities engaged in practices that undermined these efforts or shifted responsibility for implementation.

4

The Incompleteness of School Desegregation

In her documentation of the civil rights activism of Black teachers pre-Brown, Vanessa Siddle-Walker highlighted the concerns of these educators that school boards in the South, almost exclusively controlled by white representatives who had been responsible for maintaining segregation “could not be trusted to implement fair integration policies.” Black activists recognized that other racial inequities would necessarily impact the speed and fidelity of desegregation efforts. In 1954, 40% of students in U.S. public schools attended de jure segregated schools. Many of the mandated desegregation programs enacted in the 1960s and 1970s following Brown II, however, were dismantled by the end of the 20th century, and many school districts across the country – particularly those in urban areas – are now just as segregated by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status as they were before. The way desegregation programs were implemented in many parts of the South also effectively dismantled a burgeoning African American middle class comprised of educated schoolteachers. A majority of schools that had exclusively served Black children pre-Brown were closed, and Black teachers were rarely hired at the newly integrated schools. Thus, although children were moved through busing and school assignment programs in attempts to achieve racial balance, the teachers who remained or were newly hired at these schools were almost exclusively white. Not only were many Black educators left unemployed following desegregation, the curricular initiatives they had instituted in many communities designed to teach Black children about their own histories were erased. Without the inclusion of this community knowledge, children from all racialized backgrounds were now integrated into schools dominated by white curricula that did not respect or honor other sources of expertise. A phenomenon known as “second generation segregation” also quickly emerged in many newly desegregated schools and has continued to the present day. Although overall school demographics in individual schools may reflect the racial diversity of larger communities, tracking by supposed academic ability (often measured using culturally irrelevant and racially biased achievement tests), behavior, or linguistic background separates students within these

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schools. Such practices have resulted in disproportionate assignment of white students to Advanced Placement or college preparatory classes, the overidentification of Black students as in need of special education services, school schedules that prevent English learner students from enrolling in advanced coursework, and unjust school discipline policies that disproportionately label and punish students of color.

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Ultimately, Brown has had a much stronger influence on the American imagination than it has on the lived realities of children in U.S. schools. Critical Race scholars have summarized its limitations as an attempt to apply “a mathematical solution to a social problem” (Tate, Ladson-Billings, & Grant, 1993). The 1954 Brown decision was also significant in cementing the ideological centrality of public schools in developing ideals of American citizenship, and the idea that racial integration is a defining characteristic of U.S. democracy: the majority decision claimed “today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Now, over 65 years later, a great deal of evidence exists to demonstrate that children from all backgrounds benefit academically and socially from attending schools that are racially integrated, but few children attending schools in the U.S. have access to classrooms that are truly diverse. Students of color are still more likely to attend schools with fewer or inadequate resources than their white peers, and the teacher corps of the U.S. is far from reflective of the diversity of students. A lasting message for educators of the Brown v. Board of Education decisions is that schools alone cannot dismantle whiteness – as Gloria Ladson Billings (2004) noted, the decisions in Brown allowed for an analysis of how plaintiffs who were pathologized by their racialized identities were mistreated under the law, but did not “address… the underlying pathology – White supremacy” (p. 5).

References Bell, D. (2004). Silent covenants: Brown v. Board of education and the unfulfilled hopes for racial reform. Oxford University Press. Brown v. Board of Education (I), 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). Brown v. Board of Education (II), 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955).

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Ladson-Billings, G. (2004). Landing on the wrong note: The price we paid for Brown. Educational Researcher, 33(7), 3–13. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256 (1896). Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, No. 66625 Cal Super. (1931). Siddle-Walker, V. (2009). Second-class integration: A historical perspective for a contemporary agenda. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 269–284. Tate, W., Ladson-Billings, G., & Grant, C. A. (1993). The Brown decision revisited: Mathematizing social problems. Educational Policy, 7(3), 255–275. Westminster School Dist. of Orange County v. Mendez, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947).

CHAPTER 14

Capitalism and Whiteness Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Marxism; Nationalism; Settler Colonialism; Whiteness as Property

… Capitalism is an economic system premised on the private ownership of property wherein one class of people control and profit from the labor of the subordinate class(es). Capitalism produces a political economy wherein property rights come to be more hegemonically powerful than the needs of individuals or communities. We can think of capitalism as a mode of production, to use the Marxist terminology, meaning the way that a society makes goods and services in order to sustain and reproduce itself. One can gain an historical understanding of capitalism as a mode of production if we compare it to the dominant mode in Western societies that came immediately before: feudalism. In feudalism, landed nobility controlled the labor of those who were vassals – those who were sworn to a particular lord and who were granted tenancy or a fief in return for producing in accordance with the landed nobility’s wishes. Production in feudalism was not contingent on a market, rather everything produced could actually go solely to the lord and the lord’s estate and never have any exchange of money or other goods. In feudalism the vast majority of people were not vassals, however, but rather were peasants. Peasants were often serfs, tied to a particular place and owing taxes and labor to a (land)lord. Some were considered free tenants, but the vast majority of European peoples in the Middle Ages up to the 16th century experienced a life premised on debt-bondage, working as indentured laborers who were regarded as the property of landed nobility. They could be bought and sold, often as part of the land they were required to labor on, but often such movement of land was not actually marketized – rather land and all the people on it could be gifted by greater lords to their lesser lords and vassals or could be lost in battles and wars. The earliest forms of capitalism can be thought of as merchant-based and are ancient. Artisans and traders exchanged gold and coin for goods across the globe for millennia and often sold them at a profit, but capitalism as the © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_014

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primary mode of production necessitated a host of political and technological transformations in order to come to dominate the global political economy. Marx located this shift in the 16th century, as colonialism and imperialism led to greater and greater marketization of goods and commerce. Traders created corporations and joint stock companies to help offset potential losses on long and expensive ocean voyages bringing goods to Europe from Asia, Africa, and North and South America. These early forms of capital investment eventually led to the contemporary financialization of capital, in which the exchange of goods is only part of the broader political economy which now also includes the creation of financial instruments that can be structured as a commodity (for instance, mutual or hedge funds). In capitalism, all aspects of the process of production are privately held, meaning that both the inputs and outputs of production are owned by individuals rather than a social collective. This means that, in capitalism, every stage of producing a commodity follows the logic of exchange: the purpose of creating a commodity is not simply for the utility of the commodity – its use value – but rather for its ability to be exchanged and circulate in the market, with the aim of making a profit on such exchange. Capitalism values exchange and profit over and above other human desires, such as progress or the alleviation of suffering. Certainly, particular goods and services can make a positive contribution to individuals in terms of improving their lives, but these are ancillary to the primary purpose of capitalist accumulation and exchange: profit. If a good or service is not profitable, its use value is overwhelmed by the negative return on the exchange value, and thus the system of capitalism negates it by means of the market. What is not profitable is not distributed, creating a circular movement in which all goods and services derive their primary purpose by way of exchange and the return on investment that constitutes profit for the capitalists. Such a political economy functions to create social classes at the site of production, chiefly the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, who own and control production. They buy the labor of others and own what is produced by their laborers, whom they pay a wage that is less than the exchange value of what the laborers produce. For Marx, this is the source of all wealth in capitalism: the surplus value, representing the difference in what it costs the capitalist to produce a particular good and what they are able to make from selling it. Rather than the laborer sharing in the profits, the capitalist is able to keep profit for themselves, to grow their capital and ability to command and contort the labors of others.

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The proletariat are laborers who are forced to sell their labor in order to subsist as laborers for capital. Proletarians are “free” to sell their labor to different capitalists, but ultimately are forced into participation in capitalism in order to survive. Consider just the most basic of human needs: for food, shelter, and clothing. All of these needs, in capitalist societies, are privatized sources of profit: from grocery stores, to restaurants, to the mortgage and rent based housing market, to clothing brands; fulfilling basic human needs represents a constellation of private profit-making activity. Proletarians must sell their labor in order to live, thus producing a cycle in which proletarians are simultaneously rendered as both laborers and consumers for capital. Proletarians produce goods and services for the capitalists, then buy goods and services from capitalists in order to meet their basic needs so that they can go on laboring. The result is that entire cultures and peoples are made to exist to produce profit for a very small group of people who own the means of production. The purpose of production is to maximize exchange values: the return on investment for the capitalist class. This results in capital accumulation: greater and greater concentration of ownership of the means of production for the bourgeoisie. This helps one understand why capitalism is required to continually extend and grow as a system in order to incessantly channel rewards and profits for the capitalists. Creating new products is in many ways less critical than locating new sources for exchange: new markets. Today this can be heard in discussions of so-called “emerging markets,” which signal areas that capitalists can expand their reach and thus achieve greater profits by means of exchange. We can also understand this in the case of planned obsolescence: the notion that goods should not be of the highest possible quality, but rather should eventually need to be replaced in order to achieve even greater exchange values and profits. The example of smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone make for an especially strong instance of planned obsolescence, with the company forced to pay a fine after it was shown they intentionally sent updates to phones intended to slow down their functioning and incentivizing users to purchase newer models. The iPhone can also help us understand why capitalism is incapable of fully realizing human flourishing. Future models of the phone are already patented and designed, but the way to maximize profit is not to release the newest and fastest technologies possible. Rather, profit will be greater with incremental steps and gradual increases in functionality and use value. Quarterly profits are the primary purpose of iPhones, not greater connectivity with others or expanding what is possible in one’s leisure time. Thus, capital accumulation by means of profit making can be seen across the global capitalist system as

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functioning to reward the owners of the means of production while stifling and limiting what is possible for the great majority of humanity: the proletariat. In capitalism, wage labor becomes practically universal. While we often ideologically locate wage labor as menial or “blue collar” jobs and juxtapose these with “salaried” or “white collar” jobs, we are in fact talking about the exact same system of labor and exploitation. Marx was clear that increases in wages can never reconcile the imbalance in capitalist exchange, because the capitalist by necessity must extract as much as possible from the surplus labor produced by the laborer. Thus, even if wages were higher, there would still need to be a gap or distance between wages and the actual price paid for exchanging the goods or services produced by the laborer for the capitalist. If this were not the case, the business would not be able to continue and would be failing to realize the fundamental purpose of capitalism: to create profit by means of exchange. This is the inherently alienating quality of life in capitalism, because one’s full contribution and worth as a person and laborer is subsumed by the capitalist in reaping profit via surplus labor value. In order for such a system to function on a global scale there must also be an ideological dimension in play to convince people to participate in such a system. This process has happened gradually, but today one of the hallmarks of capitalist societies is the widely shared belief in bourgeois values. For instance, the notion of meritocracy, of a society premised on rewarding hard work, functions to justify our oppressive social totality as the outcome of nature. Those who are the owners of the means of production are such because of their fitness for the role, their hard work, and unique skills and abilities. Thus, they deserve to keep far more of the purchasing power and profits than those who labor for them, because these laborers have not worked as hard or are not as meritorious as the owners of the means of production. The result is the widespread acceptance of a society in which a tiny minority possess vastly more wealth than the great masses of people. In the United States today the richest 400 capitalists own more wealth than the bottom 150,000,000 people combined. Bourgeois values like meritocracy rationalize and legitimize an oppressive status quo by reinforcing their will in as many areas of the economy as possible. Mass media functions to reinforce these values in everything from popular music, to film and television, to advertising across digital and analog spaces. The ideological features of capitalism work to normalize and naturalize dehumanizing elements of the system and can even distort them into evidence of the worth or value of capitalism. For instance, one can think of a simplistic argument in favor of capitalism that no better alternative exists as a way of reducing or outright ignoring failures of capitalism. But if one takes such an argument further, one can recognize the intimate links between white

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supremacy and capitalism. From their origins historically to the present ways in which they structure and determine life chances, capitalism and white supremacy work in concert to continually redistribute wealth from marginalized communities into the hands of capitalists. This is why there should be no surprise when one examines the most affluent and powerful peoples in the world: the vast majority are white men. This outcome has nothing to do with a meritocratic system that rewards skill and hard work but rather gives evidence for the ways that capitalism is able to mobilize any and every possible tool at its disposal. White supremacy insists that white people are superior to every other racial group in much the same ways that capitalism centers the needs and demands of capitalists over and against those of laborers. We can think of whiteness and capitalism working in concert to further support the ideological mystification necessary for the great majority of humanity to accept the conditions of capitalism as always-already, as natural. White supremacy functions to confirm what is already present in capitalism but reduces it to the level of race and by so doing obfuscates features of the economic system that harm, rather than help, efforts at greater human flourishing. Historical examples of this can be found in racial restrictions of union membership, which functioned to prevent peoples of color from being part of collective bargaining with capitalists. The outcome is that white laborers and laborers of color were pitted against one another, rather than in a shared struggle against the excesses of capitalism and the owners of the means of production. White supremacy functioned to protect the interests of capital and thus capitalism supported it, as the primary purpose of capitalism is to increase profits. White supremacy has not known a moment in which it was in conflict with capitalism. The two systems work off of and inform one another, so much so that they become linked permanently. White supremacy fits in capitalism because it rationalizes and defends it. Capitalism fits in white supremacy because of the very same reason, white racism is profitable when it allows for exchange and creates surplus value. Thus, differentiating different markets along racial lines represents a form of “emerging markets,” as addressed earlier. If one is able to create products specifically for a particular racial group, or goods that are premised on the rejection of different groups, the particular sociopolitical concerns can be subsumed in the overriding aim of capitalist accumulation. Further, capitalism can serve as a kind of cover for white supremacy: choices made to maximize investments make logical sense in capitalism, even if the result disproportionately harms communities of color. Redlining certainly represents a classic case of white supremacy, wherein different lending rates were maintained based on the racial makeup of a

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neighborhood in order to “protect” the property values of white residents at the expense of people of color being denied homes. To understand this process, one might stop at the level of white supremacy: redlining was devised to prevent peoples of color from securing greater wealth from homeownership, and to enforce de facto segregation. But this misses the mark precisely because it once again naturalizes capitalism. Instead, one would do better to understand redlining as an instance of capitalism realizing its aims and purposes: securing greater capital through return on investment. Working in concert with white supremacy, redlining functioned to siphon off resources and wealth from communities of color to line the pockets of white capitalists. This is precisely why one must attend to issues of capitalism in the context of antiracism: eliminating racial hatred would not automatically end the material disparities between white and black peoples, because these disparities, while certainly racialized, are made necessary in capitalism. In antiracist work, we must center the role of capitalism in defining and determining life chances. It is simply incomplete to stop at the level of material redistribution within capitalism, reparations as it is often called, without attending to the ways in which our political economic system has propped up and supported the centuries old project of white supremacy. More businesses owned by people of color cannot end capitalist exploitation, at best it would only reorganize it. Oppression is oppression – the owners of the means of production are disproportionately white men but moving to a model wherein said owners represent their particular demographic constituencies better would not end the material suffering that characterizes the vast majority of humans’ lived realities in capitalism. If working class students of color go on to become hedge fund managers, who maintain modern day versions of redlining to limit the life chances of the communities they are from, we will not have realized antiracism nor a more just social reality. This is why anticapitalism must be linked with antiracism, because white supremacy and capitalism are so enmeshed, so entangled with one another, that work focused on only one or the other is incapable of destroying the complete system. Understanding capitalism and white supremacy in such a way offers us new ways forward in antiracist struggle on the side of the great masses of people who continue to be dehumanized and alienated at the site of production.

CHAPTER 15

Caucasian Noelle Chaddock

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Immigration; Jim Crow; White Supremacy

… The term Caucasian has multiple (mis)usages. Caucasian describes a regional people, a racial construct, a racial categorization, and a politicized conflation of ethnicities and world histories toward the end of hegemonic domination. The term Caucasian is activated, engaged and weaponized in a multiplicity of ways as it applies to socio-cultural realities and critical race examination, discourse, teaching and scholarship. First we should consider the “correct” and least used application of the term Caucasian, which speaks to a geo-cultural location and people. Caucasians are a diverse people who inhabit the Caucus region and are made up of approximately 50 ethno-cultural-linguistic populations. The Caucus region covers areas across the Russian Federation, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Iran. Caucasian is a lived identity connected to this specific geographic region and cultural history. The way in which Caucasian is used to describe an abstracted and culturally unrelated population of people, white people, has contributed to an erasure of the Caucus people. The appropriation of Caucasian to describe white raced people has tied the socio-racial identity, Caucasian, to power and coloniality in misleading and misrepresenting ways. This slippage is rarely corrected and is reinforced in the West in systemic and legal ways. The more commonly used, and deeply problematic, understanding of Caucasian stems from 18th century European colonization which resulted in the designation of humans into racial types and order for the purpose of domination, annihilation, enslavement and the production of free labor. The classification work of Christoph Meiners and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach produced three major racial categories: Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid. Blumenbach, who is most often credited with the racial typologies, locates Caucasian as the superior most evolved racial category based on skull measurement and aesthetic. Caucasian became and remains the racial identity of

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the highest race/cast regardless of geographic origin or relationship to global histories and lived experiences. As the term Caucasian became understood as both the superior and most aesthetically pleasing race of humans, it was relocated away from the Caucus mountain region. Caucasian racial identity was applied to European colonizers and traders giving them the power to dominate non-Caucasian, non-White raced, peoples which lead to racial slavery and human trade. The fluidity and relocation of the Caucasian designation moves with hegemonic capitalism as well as immigration into Western countries. Caucasian as a racial identity is assigned to dominant majorities globally, losing its original grounding in the Caucus region and peoples. White Anglo Saxon Protestants arrived in the Americas with the racial designation of Caucasian as well as the hegemonic dominance and power of that racial designation. The ascribed superiority of the Caucasian racial identity supported the domination of indigenous populations, enslavement of Africans and African Americans, as well as the ability to transfer and bestow Caucasian racial identity status on future immigrants like the Italian, Irish and Spanish, thus creating a questionable racial majority in the Americas and in the United States in particular. Racial typology and designation, along with all of the consequences thereof, became practice and then law in the colonies. With Caucasians in control of order, law and consequences, the racial designation retained supremacy and dominance from the 18th century into the 2000s. In the United States the racial designation of Caucasian is the federally preserved and accepted term for anyone who is not Black, Native American, Pacific Islander, Asian and/ or Afro-Latino. This conflation and mis-naming of white raced world peoples has created generous cover to perpetuate the power of whiteness, white dominance, white supremacy and systems of whiteness. Caucasian also gives cover to suppress the unique and diverse histories of white raced populations, allowing for a sharing of power and social mobility across cultural histories that have not always been understood as white. The invocation of Caucasian racial identity, rather than white raced identity, functions to “un-race” white people, which deepens the sense that issues of race belong only to non-white raced people. White raced people are the only population that has retained the original race typology designation terminology. Negroid and Mongoloid are no longer functional terms in the West. The weaponization of the term/identity Caucasian happens in part through the ignoring of the histories of whiteness, white dominance, white supremacy and systems of whiteness. The naming of all “white” ethnic people as Caucasian serves to suppress a diversity of histories while falsely inflating the demographic numbers of the “majority race.” This allows white raced people

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to disavow themselves of histories of oppression and current contributions to systemic inequity and state violences. Across “races,” peoples from specific countries, regions, and ethnicities experience the conflation of ethnicities and socio-cultural realities which prevents the retention of individual world histories and experiences. This generates, in white raced people, Caucasians, a good amount of distance from the global impact of white supremacy and coloniality. In other words, one can claim to be Caucasian without claiming the ethno-cultural realities and impacts of white raced people. In the Americas, the United States in particular, racial typology designation moved from practices of social morality and separation, to law. The impact of the enforcement of racial designation and socio-cultural consequences of those designations is as present in 2019 as it was in the 1800s. The invocation of Caucasian as a federal racial category signals a particular intentionality in the maintaining of a systemic hierarchy that benefits white raced peoples. Caucasian remains on federal forms while Negroid and Mongoloid do not. The retention of this misapplied term, Caucasian, holds space for what we understand and experience as white supremacy and violence in the West. While there is evidence to suggest that racial categories share global histories and experiences predicated on membership in a category, those designated Caucasian have the least consistent shared experience and history. The majority of those who claim Caucasian racial identities are not genealogically connected to the Caucus region nor to shared histories. They are, however, connected to the dominant structures of white raced identities and histories.

CHAPTER 16

Christianity and Whiteness Erin T. Miller

Related Entries: Christianity; Guilt; Shame; Thandeka; White Supremacy

1

Christianity in Colonial America

Christianity in colonial America and the Caribbean Isles had the unique effect of shaping whiteness as a racial category. When the profitable sugar and rice plantations on the Caribbean Isles and the South Carolina coast fueled the insatiable European appetite for African slaves in the 1600s, the population of enslaved Africans outnumbered their enslavers at staggering rates. Enslaved Africans plotted and executed numerous successful revolts against their English slaveholders. Examples include revolts in Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, and on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. In order to build a strong colonial force to support and defend the growing institution of slavery in the “New World,” English Protestants recruited and joined forces with Irish and Scottish Catholics (otherwise ethnic minorities in Europe with a prior history of conflict with Protestants) to create a protective force that became Christian whiteness against African, non-Christian blackness. Thus, the quest to control enslaved Africans had the distinctive effect of uniting religiously polarized Catholics and Protestants as a single group of newly constructed white Christians. While this merging stronghold of Protestants and Catholics to suppress enslaved Africans from revolting was hardly seamless, the project of racism ultimately overshadowed divisions among white people related to religious and ethnic differences. Horne (2014) explains, “In the overriding context of Catholic-Protestant conflict, seizing more Africans for enslavement while trying to incorporate Irish and other dissidents in the superseding category of ‘whiteness’ made sense – expect for the Africans for which this trend was disastrous” (p. 28). This is not to say that there were not ethnic and religious hierarchies among those who came to be known as white people. For example, Protestants claimed legal and social power over Catholics and Jews in colonial America, but newly united by whiteness, the religiously and ethnically plural Europeans formed the more encompassing racialized hierarchies that became the bedrock of America’s racial caste system. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_016

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Christianity, Slavery, Genocide

Within these racialized hierarchies, white Christians in early America used interpretations of biblical scripture to justify slavery and the eradication of Indigenous peoples. For example, referencing the Christian bible, slave owners noted that Abraham, (known among Christians as the biblical Father of Faith), as well as all of the patriarchs of the Old Testament, enslaved others without God’s disapproval (Gen. 21:9–10 New International Version). It was also noted that Noah, another biblical patriarch, ordered his grandson, Canaan, into slavery. This became known as the Curse of Ham, wherein men’s dominion over other men was interpreted as a natural order (Gen 9:20–27). Prominent Protestant Christian leaders like Martin Luther and John Calvin maintained rigid views of social hierarchy as hereditary and static. Furthermore, Christian slave owners and supporters of slavery noted that Jesus did not speak out against Roman slavery and, therefore, discerned it was not a biblical sin. As Euro-American colonization pushed westward in the 18th and 19th centuries, Euro-Americans used Christianity to continue to justify the cultural and literal genocide of millions of indigenous peoples because of the belief that white Christian Euro-Americans were divinely appointed to inhabit Western land and spread Christianity across North America as Manifest Destiny.

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Christianity and Conversion

Less certain among white Euro-American Christians in the established racial caste system of early America was whether enslaved humans should be taught about or converted to Christianity. On one hand, Christians believed accepting Christ as savior could save one from eternal damnation fated for believers of non-Christian (Indigenous and African) religions. Biblical prophets, Christians argued, encouraged the spread of the word of the Christian God. On the other hand, this evangelism created moral conundrums. For example, if Christians, both white enslavers and enslaved Africans, ascend to heaven (the Christian afterlife), would they go to the same heaven? So deep seated were racist ideals that few white slave owners could imagine sharing the afterlife with a former slave. While thoughts varied on how to settle this spiritual dilemma, some suggested that Heaven itself is a segregated space. Another confusion among white enslavers was whether or not enslaved Christians, freed in spirit by Christ’s resurrection, could be enslaved at all. Wrestling with this debate in 1656 in Virginia, an enslaved woman of African descent successfully sued for her freedom on the grounds that she was

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Christian, and therefore could not be enslaved. This positioned the Virginia Assembly with a challenging precedent since many enslaved Africans had, by this time, converted to Christianity. The assembly enacted a law in 1667 conferring that a Christian baptism does not change the status of the enslaved. In these ways, interpretations of Christianity were embedded into the laws and systems that protected the newly established racial order of whiteness in colonial America. Even after slavery was abolished in America in 1865, laws and systems continued to enforce white Christian dominance with the rise of Christian white supremacist groups in the 20th and 21st centuries.

4

Christian White Supremacist Groups

Many white supremacist groups of the last 2 centuries used Christian scripture and symbols to organize. For example, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), outlines in its rulebook, The Kloran, that burning crosses, routinely used by members of the KKK to demarcate sites of racialized terror, are intended to send the light of Christ to the world. KKK artifacts, like crosses, hoods, and robes, “communicated the order’s ideals – Christianity, white supremacy, and patriotism – as well as their vision of America as a nation created and maintained solely for white Protestants” (Baker, 2017, The Artifacts, para. 5). In fact, the mere act of a Klansman putting on and taking off his uniform – a long white robe – commemorated the life and death of Jesus. Baker (2017) explains that the all-white Klansman robe is only punctuated with one red patch cradling a cross with a teardrop inside of it. The cross “symbolized the order’s commitment to Christianity while the teardrop symbolized the blood Jesus shed to redeem humanity” (Baker, 2017, May the God, para. 4). The robes themselves were inspired by the vision of William J. Simmons, a Christian minister and Klan leader, whose vision became the impetus for the second revival of the Klan beginning in 1915. Today, there are known ordained Christian ministers leading various factions of the modern day KKK, and although the organization is not cohesive among its subgroups, it is united by the belief that white, Protestant America has a God-given superiority against immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans, and other non-white, non-Protestant groups. The KKK is not the only Christian white supremacist group. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identifies 954 hate groups currently operating in the United States, and many of these include organizations that profess to be driven by Christian ideals and argue that Christianity has fallen astray from God-ordained whiteness and is under the control and influence of Satan, manifested as most forms of diversity. Christian white supremacist

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groups generally espouse that the bible is the story of the white race and teach that interracial marriage is an abomination, a satanic attempt meant to destroy the chosen white seed line. For example, the white Christian hate group,1 Kingdom Identity Ministries, believes that white Protestant males are superior to all other groups of people and opposes interracial marriage because of their mission to preserve the white race. Likewise, America’s Promise Ministries, another Christian hate group, believes that white people are solely responsible for any greatness one can attribute to America. Thus, from the inception of American slavery to the Christian hate groups across the U.S. in modern times, Christianity has been used to justify, shape, and maintain whiteness in America.

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The Whiteness of Christianity

While Christianity shaped the formation of whiteness, whiteness, in turn, shaped Christianity. The whitening and gentilizing of the image of Christ and the Virgin Mary perpetuated racial superiority because these images were juxtaposed, in the white imagination, against Blackness, which encompassed all things “evil, dirty, unclean, and sinful” (Yancy, 2012, p. 5). Philosopher George Yancy (2012) argues the imaginary is where most white people come to know people of color, so these images were of profound cultural influence as they conflated Christianity with whiteness. Ruether (2012) elaborates on this idea by explaining that “whiteness implies a connection to Christ, the epitome of goodness, godliness and redeemed and redemptive being over against its opposite. That Christ must ‘look’ and ‘be’ white takes on a theological meaning” (p. 105). The power of this cannot be understated as spiritual and religious lessons are cornerstones in the development a white supremacist view and are often shaped during the time of early childhood within a familial context. The white writer, Lillian Smith (1949), reflects on the insidious lessons from her Christian childhood in the pre-Civil Rights era South, I do not remember how or when but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is his Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro. (p. 28) Smith’s recollection is salient in understanding the relationship between whiteness and Christianity because it speaks to the internalized white superiority learned alongside and within religious lessons and because it illuminates

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a kind of cultural knowing shared among whites and learned early that lays down a foundation for racism for a lifetime.

6

Afro/African American Resistance

It is important to note that enslaved Africans long resisted Christianity branded by white supremacy and used to justify slavery and oppression. In rejecting the ideological claims that to be black meant one was legitimately destined for servitude, people of African descent reinterpreted Christian scriptures to reflect the rituals and cultural practices of myriad African cultures. Centuries after the abolishment of slavery, black theologians of the Black Power Movement, such as Albert Cleage interpreted Jesus “as an armed Zealot” (Ruether, 2012, p. 106) working against the rule of a white nation in Rome and suggested that Jesus is embodied in black people engaged today who are engaged “in a struggle to liberate themselves from a white imperial domination” (Ruether, 2012, p. 106). In a less literal fashion, theologian James Cone (1986) ascribes to the notion of Jesus as black “in the sense of being historically on the side of the oppressed” (p. 106). Black women theologians, too, have addressed both the racism and sexism of white Christianity by giving attention to legendary African female Christ figures, like Anowa, the African priestess, who risked her life to lead her people to a promised land. In these ways, Africans, African Americans, and other racially oppressed peoples in America have a long-standing history of decolonizing the whiteness of Christianity even as Christian whiteness was constructed to support and enforce white supremacy.

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Christianity and Antiracism

Unlike many African Americans, Christian white people have, generally, not had a similar resistance to white supremacy within religious contexts. Scholars argue that many mainstream white Christians perpetually live in active or passive complicity with racially unjust practices. This complicity mirrors white interpretations of Jesus as passive and loving, but far from activist. Ruether (2012) writes, “This traditional image of Christ spoke of him abstractly as loving God but in no way that touched on real historical circumstances of oppression and injustice” (p. 109). From a psycho-emotional level, Reverend Thandeka (1999) argues that white people transform their white shame, or being ashamed of who they are as racial actors, into white guilt. As guilt, one is ashamed of not who one is, but what one has done. What was done in the

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name of racism to racialized others is an act of sin. This renders white people powerless because of their belief that only God can handle sin. Since Christians believe every human commits sin, the sin of racism is simply a fact of life. While white people may experience guilt related to racism, no human effort can rectify sin. Only God can address sin, so therefore, “countering racism is futile” (p. 114). In other words, racism, for Christian whites, is a moral problem that is in God’s hands so the best one can offer is prayers as a counter to racism. Additionally, many mainstream white Christians today focus exclusively on people of color as victims of racism without considering the white role in creating and maintaining racism. Harvey (2011) explains this as a refusal to look at the whiteness at the root of racism and as such, “Black suffering [can be] repeatedly named but causes of the suffering [are] not” (p. 63). Teel (2013) suggests that complicity to racism, or the belief it is out of one’s hands because it is held within Gods, is the less troublesome path for whites since “confronting and resisting whiteness generates a painful and ongoing identity crisis, frustration and weariness, anger and hatred, grief and loss, loss and destruction and uncertainty about the future” (p. 89). Yancy (2012) wonders how the Christian church might change if white people prayed to God: “I continue to carry the weight of white racist training in my body… I want you to pray for me so that I can become aware [of my whiteness]” (p. 3). Thandeka argues that by stripping white racism of its roots in human mistreatment, whiteness is left unexplored as a seat of racial abuse against both Euro-Americans and African Americans. Admonishing a lack of attention to how racism involves what was done to Euro-Americans by Euro-Americans in the creation of whiteness, Thandeka explains, “This racial strategy deals with what one does racially as a white but not with what was done to oneself in order to make one think of oneself as white” (p. 116). White people, in order to become white, had to turn against the part of themselves that loved and wanted to be with people of color; but, to become white, this was not possible. This absence of attention to the emotional abuse related to the construction of whiteness diminishes the ability to be fully human and masks how Euro-Americans injured both themselves and African Americans in their becoming white.

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On Christianity and Whiteness: Moving Forward

Looking forward, Yancy (2012) asks, what are white Christians to do with their problem of their whiteness? Many contemporary theologians who take up whiteness suggest acknowledging whiteness is the first step (Teel, 2012). Theologian Jennifer Harvey (2011) explains, “Without acknowledging and

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addressing… the active participation and perpetration of racial injustice by white people, attempts to challenge racism remain inadequate” (p. 58). Harvey suggests more than reconciliation of past harms is needed and argues instead for reparations. Differentiating between the two, Harvey writes, “reparations recognize that brokenness comes from specific harms done” and also requires “addressing that harm and naming a perpetrator” (p. 64). Examining reparations in a theological framework, some theologians direct attention to the biblical figure, Zacchaeus, who repents his wrongdoings by giving half of his wealth to the poor and repays anyone he has defrauded with four times what he has taken (Luke 19:8). Theologians James Cone and Karen Teel also stress the urgency for white Christians to take up whiteness because whiteness, they posit, is the opposite of love and humanity. Cone (1986) argues love is a refusal to accept whiteness. Likewise, Teel (2012) suggests that refusing to acknowledge whiteness is a failure to be fully human. Common among such schools of thought is the bottom line assumption that whiteness, as a political site of power and privilege, stands in contrast to a conception of Jesus “whose life and message were implicative of overcoming domination and oppression” (Yancy, 2012, p. 12).

Note 1 The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. For more information, see https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

References Baker, K. (2017, June 14). The artifacts of white supremacy. Forum. https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/06/14/813/ Cone, A. B. (1968). The Black Messiah. Sheed and Ward. Harvey, J. (2011). Which way to justice? Reconciliation, reparations and the problem of whiteness in U.S. protestantism. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 31(1), 57–77. Horne, G. (2014). The counter-revolution of 1776: Slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America. New York University Press. Ruether, R. R (2012). Is Christ White? Racism and christiolgy. In G. Yancy (Ed.), Christology and whiteness: What would Jesus do? Routledge. Smith, L. (1949). Killers of the dream. W.W. Norton & Company.

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Teel, K. (2012). What Jesus wouldn’t do: A white theologian engages whiteness. In G. Yancy (Ed). Christology and whiteness: What would Jesus do? Routledge. Teel, K. (2013). My whiteness, myself: A review of George Yancy’s look, a white! Philosophia Africana, 15(2), 89–96. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race and God in America. Continuum. Yancy, G. (Ed.). (2012). Christology and whiteness: What would Jesus do? Routledge.

CHAPTER 17

Colorblindness Sheri A. Castro-Atwater

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Microaggressions; Political Correctness; Stereotype Threat; White Teacher Identity Studies

1

Introduction

Years of research in the area of racial inequality demonstrates that inequality is often perpetuated by those adopting a colorblind racial ideology, in which race-conscious decision-making is seen as antithetical to the goal of an ideal, politically correct “colorblind” world. Colorblindness has been defined as the “new racism,” whose covert methods are “subtle, institutional, and apparently non-racial” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 3). With or without deliberate malice or forethought on the part of those in power, treating others all the same, because we should be all the same, is often the attitude adopted by those who believe strongly that by simply ignoring differences in racial group membership or skin color, all resulting decisions and practices will be fair and impartial. Yet according to the latest research on the brain and the active and powerful role that our unconscious biases have on our decision-making, this colorblind belief is very far from the reality that people of color live with every day. Educators may all agree, in an ideal world individuals should be treated fairly regardless of race, ethnicity, and social position. Unfortunately, the education system in the United States is far from achieving this ideal; it continues to support espoused ideologies, structures, and policies which contribute to individual and systemic racial inequality. In 2015, African-American children were twice as likely as Latinx children to be born in poverty, and nearly three times as likely as “non-Hispanic White” children (Child Trends Databank, 2016). In recent years, high school dropout rates for African American students in the U.S. have been twice as high as the rate for white students and almost three times higher than whites for Latinx students (Child Trends Databank, 2016). As can be inferred from the example above, the school climate is not just formed by individual educators but is often shaped by the decisions and ideological practices of school administrators. Teachers employed in schools where administrative efforts are made to move beyond colorblindness to create a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_017

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color-conscious, spoken affirmation of racial disparities have been found to be more likely to engage students in racial discourse and to move toward more color-conscious practices (Marx & Larson, 2012). The goal of this entry on colorblindness and its impact in education is thus two-fold: first, to review current research that explores the notions of colorblindness and implicit bias and their impact in the world of education. Research documenting colorblindness in educational systems is presented, highlighting studies illuminating their detrimental effect on both student outcomes (performance on test scores, student achievement, quality of educator-student relationships) and educator effectiveness. Second, this article aims to discuss strategies to address these important concerns. Having documented the deleterious effects of colorblindness and implicit bias within educational settings, what educational policies, practices, and curriculum changes must be created to counteract their documented negative effects? The entry concludes by identifying strategies to mitigate colorblindness and implicit bias that educators are encouraged to adopt in order to ensure a fairer and more inclusive future for all.

2

Defining Colorblindness

Over 20 years ago, Williams (1997) defined the notion of colorblindness, stating that it: Constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst… Much is overlooked in the move to undo that which clearly and unfortunately matters just by labeling it that which ‘makes no difference.’ This dismissiveness, however unintentional, leaves [people of color] pulled between the clarity of their own experience and the often alienating terms in which they must seek social acceptance. (p. 7) Neville et al. (2013) define colorblindness as being characterized by the interrelated domains of color-evasion (i.e., denial of racial differences by emphasizing sameness) and power-evasion (i.e., denial of racism by emphasizing equal opportunities). Employing colorblindness can include both domains, and can be seen when individuals engage in a denial of: (1) race (e.g. “we are all the same”); (2) blatant racial issues (i.e. racial discrimination based on skin color), (3) institutional racism (e.g. cumulative polices, practices, and norms that disadvantage students of color), and/or (d) White privilege (e.g. superior access and opportunities based on unearned skin color advantage). Thus, individuals

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who adopt a colorblindness perspective do not acknowledge the structures, policies, and racial beliefs that unfairly discriminate against marginalized people of color, justifying this lack of acknowledgment under the premise that race should not – and therefore does not – matter. Ullucci and Battey (2011) further contend that the first foundation of colorblindness lies in the interconnected U.S. historical ideas of merit (hard work will objectively earn one’s rewards, regardless of historical constructs) and individualism (personal characteristics, rather than group membership, are the sole determinant in one’s life outcomes), both of which fail to accept that life rewards (such as upward socioeconomic mobility) are historically connected to race and social class. They state that the third foundational idea on which colorblindness is based is “Whiteness”: the idea of equating “White” with “normal” that encourages a monolithic racial worldview in which other racial worldviews are judged against as “less than” or “different” (Ullucci & Battey, 2011). Colorblindness must first be recognized as being problematic before it can be addressed and actively reversed. Some have argued that researchers and academics should focus less on the deleterious effects of colorblindness and more on the dismantling of blatant, overt acts of racism, such as the “macro-aggressions” and hate crimes that have increased in frequency and intensity since the rise of the 2016 U.S. political administration. Yet researchers argue that the main reasons these overt racist acts occur repeatedly is largely due to the popularity of employing colorblind ideology, which denies that U.S. racial inequality and racism is a problem – and thus can categorize such overt racist acts as anomalies that can be largely ignored. In today’s racially stratified U.S. educational system, for example, colorblindness ignores and masks important aspects of the identity, history, and daily struggles of students of color. Choosing to remain ignorant about the realities of racism and the impact of colorblindness allows individuals to employ this problematic ideology without addressing the negative outcomes (in student achievement, motivation, bullying and cognitive thinking skills, to name a few) that result. Thus, while historically marketed as a politically correct philosophy – skin color should not matter, therefore ignoring it will eradicate racial problems – colorblindness leads to a misrepresentation of reality in ways that allow and even encourage discrimination against students of color in education.

3

Defining Implicit Bias

The fundamental difficulty of equating colorblindness with “non-racial” equality is that the human brain relies consistently and heavily on the use

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of race-based “implicit biases” (IB) – the attitudes and stereotypes of groups learned and absorbed from an early age and held in our individual and collective unconscious. A recent report on implicit bias from the Kirwan Institute (2014) found that human brains rely upon implicit biases daily, to understand, mitigate, and make quick decisions about the world around us. As Staats (2016) states, “… because implicit biases are unconscious and involuntarily activated… we are not even aware that they exist, yet they can have a tremendous impact on decision-making” (p. 30). Both white and non-white individuals are affected by implicit bias: in fact, when it comes to unconscious bias no one is immune. The difference is, of course, that white individuals typically hold more power in institutions in the United States, whether in corporations, government organizations, or educational institutions – and thus, tend to make more powerful decisions every day about who should be hired, fired, educationally promoted, or arrested, as well as who should be provided or denied funding, housing, or financial/educational/institutional support, to name a few. The unconscious use of racial implicit biases combined with a conscious, “race does not matter” philosophy hinders individual success and continues to give power to those in education to avoid important race discussions. Thus, combined with implicit bias, colorblindness as an adopted ideology among educators, contributes to a shared communal ignorance that allows those in power in the U.S. educational system to continue to ignore and deny the realities of racism in schools. Recognizing that implicit biases affect our understanding, actions, and decision-making –and are activated without our conscious awareness or intentional control is thus the single, most important information we need to disseminate if we are to unpack the effects of colorblindness as an individual and societal philosophy. Consciously wanting to ignore the harsh realities of racism does not protect oneself from the biases operating underneath our conscious minds.

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The Effect of Colorblindness on Teachers’ Expectations and Student Achievement

In education, we know that the role that educators play in the lives of their students and their potential to impact their students’ performance, values, attitudes, and goals cannot be taken lightly. Even without conscious intent to discriminate or to advocate the use of colorblind ideology, many educators operate on implicit assumptions about students of color that places them at a very real disadvantage (Larson & Ovando, 2001). Students of color can often

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sense these biases, and the stereotype “threat in the air” can hinder student performance and achievement (Steele, 1997). Educators often hold and act upon their unconscious implicit cultural biases, which can spark racialized or cultural “Pygmalion effects” in the classroom as well (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966). It can be assumed that teaching, like most helping professions, tends to attract caring and egalitarian personalities; yet educational research continues to show that educators’ differences in student expectations – however inadvertent, unconscious or unintentional – are affected by a student’s skin color, race or ethnicity. Why is this so? Marx (2002) explored this question by examining the altruistic incentives of nine white, female pre-service educators who tutored “Hispanic” English Language Learners (ELLs) during a semester course. Using observations, journal entries, and detailed interviews with the educators on their teaching aspirations, the children they tutored, and their own racial identity, the study revealed that all participants were influenced by their own sense of white identity, which influenced their beliefs about the children of color they tutored. Although the participants were devoted to children and education and were generous with their time and efforts, the educators shared a vision – often unconsciously – of the children’s “Hispanic” culture as a “deficit” to their success. This deficit thinking affected educators’ contact with and beliefs about their Latinx students in the form of antipathy, resentment, and low academic expectations. Rather than focusing more on the children’s academic needs, the educators in the study consistently focused on an effort to interfere with what they believed were student’s parental, emotional, and social disadvantages. Interestingly, in the Marx study, educators clearly revealed implicit cultural biases; yet all of the teacher participants described themselves as non-racist and non-prejudiced. This paradox of “I’m not racist!” v. the actions and decision-making that clearly demonstrates bias is a common one: individuals can and do view themselves as consciously and intentionally “not racist” even though their unconscious minds work by operating on implicit racial and gender biases. Educators are, of course, human and also operate with these same implicit biases that we all hold that often go unaddressed. It appears that, despite good intentions, educators often inadvertently bring to the classroom unconscious biases that certain cultural practices are “deficits” to individual growth, both of which result in low student expectations of success. Immersed in deficit theories, educators may inadvertently view their own students of color as burdens rather than assets in the classroom; these negative thoughts then infect the teaching and learning that subsequently occurs (Ulluci & Battey, 2011). In what specific ways does such thinking impact students?

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A classic study by Steele and Aronson (1995) showed that educators’ biased expectations – often based on unconscious, or unintentional racial assumptions – can have a very real impact on student achievement. Steele & Aronson examined the performance of 250 African-American college students on standardized tests. Stereotype threat –the experience of being in a situation where one recognizes that a negative stereotype about one’s group is applicable to oneself – was upsetting, distracting, and ultimately detrimental to students’ performance. They concluded that this distraction and subsequent lowered academic performance occurs when students of color can sense when they could be judged or treated in terms of biases or stereotypes commonly held by others. When colorblindness is a consciously promoted philosophy of schools, it hides the unconscious biases of school staff, educators, and administrators. The deliberate avoidance of recognizing racial differences – and any bias – thus leads to discrimination, favoritism, or classroom conflict all while going unaddressed. For example, many educators may believe that by ignoring student’s racial questions or comments or differences, they are treating their students “all the same,” and that addressing such inequities would only create uncomfortable moments that “aren’t really there.” In reality, avoiding racial questions and comments can directly impact students’ conceptual development on the topic.

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How Colorblindness Affects Developing Minds

Teachers’ avoidance of racial questions because they are “uncomfortable” or “sensitive” can affect the racial ideas and attitudes of children in negative ways. These effects may be profoundly different for white children and children of color; for white children, this avoidance may only emphasize that racial differences are negative and are not “fit” for discussion; for children of color, it may also dismiss or trivialize the discrimination that they regularly encounter. Constructivist theory reminds us that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current or previous knowledge (Bruner, 1966; Vygotsky, 1978). To assist in the forming of these new concepts, instructors and learners should engage in an active exchange of ideas. The task of the teacher is to help the learner come to a better way of understanding concepts by explaining information that fits within the learner’s current developmental capacity. Thus, from a socio-constructivist theoretical perspective, ignoring or side-stepping discussions about race can leave both white children and children of color without assistance in their

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reasoning on the issues and may in fact encourage faulty conclusions about racial differences. Although we often think of young children as possessing an innate openness and innocence that will protect them from societal prejudice, in reality, studies have shown that children as young as 6 years old demonstrate implicit racial bias with remarkable ease (Staats, 2014). Educators who dismiss student’s questions or comments about race – fearing that they will introduce prejudice into the child’s life or assuming that differences “do not matter” – thwart the child’s ability to engage in constructive discourse and to develop critical thinking on the subject (Luke, Kale, Singh, Hill, & Daliri, 1994; Rodriguez & Kies, 1998). These “conversation stoppers” leave the child unable to develop racial conceptions and beliefs with the informative help that an older adult can provide, the help that Vygotsky posits is essential to developing sophisticated reasoning in the child.

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Documenting Colorblindness in Schools

It is important to note that to actively employ a colorblind ideology does not require an overtly racist individual; the use of colorblindness as the “new racism,” whose covert methods are “subtle, institutional, and apparently non-racial,” is abundant (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 3). Indeed, its use is promoted frequently in schools as a benign, politically correct ideology for educators to employ. One of the first, most comprehensive studies to examine colorblindness was Schofield’s (1982) multi-year ethnographic study of a desegregated 1,200student middle school in the Northeast U.S. The school opened as a desegregated institution with a roughly 50/50% black/white student ratio; the majority of students had come from elementary schools that had been highly segregated. Data showed that the colorblind perspective was widely held by the school community. Teachers not only consistently denied that they noticed children’s race, both to researchers and among themselves, they also believed that students did not notice the race of their peers (interviews with students revealed the opposite). Schofield also found that race was a taboo topic: Words such as black and white were rarely used, and when used, were viewed as racial epithets. Although the school went to great lengths to prepare the physical campus for desegregation, and educators believed that they treated all students equally, over time clear “color” stereotypes emerged among the school community: white was synonymous with “success,” while black was associated with academic weakness (Schofield, 1982, 1986). Schofield concluded that

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colorblindness was relied upon so heavily within the school because it served several functions, including: (1) reducing the potential for overt racial conflict; (2) minimizing discomfort or embarrassment among educators and students; and (3) increasing educators’ freedom to make what appeared to be “non-racebased” decisions. Despite these alleged advantages, colorblindness caused several setbacks within the school environment. First, school personnel’s failure to acknowledge cultural differences influenced the different ways that white and black students functioned and succeeded in school and caused a number of misinterpretations and misunderstandings of student behavior – often resulting in increased discipline action toward Black students. Second, educators’ colorblindness enabled them to believe that implementing course materials that reflected this new diversity was irrelevant, since race “does not matter”; and consequently, black students were unable to see themselves as validated in the curriculum. Similarly, in a year-long, ethnographic study of a predominantly white, middle-class suburban school, Lewis (2001) examined the racial discourse of educators, parents and administrators and found similar evidence of a colorblind ideology among the school community. Interestingly, unlike Schofield’s earlier study within the context of desegregation, Lewis purposely chose a predominantly white, middle-class school community in order to examine the impact of white people’s lack of contact with other-race members on their multicultural attitudes and school practices. Similar to Schofield’s findings, although school community members consistently denied the salience of race and advocated a colorblind paradigm, Lewis documented an underlying reality of “racialized practices and color-conscious understandings” that directly impacted the school’s few students of color and indirectly supported white students’ views of their non-white peers as inferior (p. 781). Moreover, reliance on colorblindness has been shown to occur at all levels of education. Han, S (2010) explored the multicultural beliefs of 95 Kindergarten educators through surveys and randomly selected follow-up interviews and recorded rich narratives that revealed a reliance on colorblindness when teaching. Indeed, the educators interviewed often justified their use of colorblindness through the “young age” or simple curriculum of the Kindergarten child, whose worlds could not possibly be affected by race or skin color; in one participant’s words, “Everything is wonderful when you’re 5” (p. 90). Given what we know about when racial awareness and attitudes begin to take cognitive shape in the young child, one could argue that this is exactly the age at which educators should employ a clear, color-conscious paradigm when discussing racial and cultural differences with students.

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Similarly, ethnographic interviews with white secondary school educators have also revealed a reliance on colorblindness in either overt beliefs, in practice, or both, often in complex ways. For example, Blaisdell (2005) found that the use of colorblindness among four white high school educators he interviewed was rarely straightforward; even when denying their colorblindness, educators often relied upon it in practice (e.g. stating that students of color should be given extra attention to overcome stereotypes, but not following through in the classroom, etc.). Blaisdell notes that one difficulty in addressing colorblindness in the schools is that it is often entangled with – and operates alongside – ideas of color-conscious beliefs or practices. He notes, “[Teachers] are often colorblind and color conscious at the same time” (p. 35). Taken collectively, studies on colorblindness within educational systems suggest several important issues. First, colorblindness is often relied upon by educators because of its seeming “advantages”: when there is fear of conflict, or a fear of appearing prejudiced, the “race does not matter” approach offers a paradigm of easy escapism to avoid dealing with the cultural reality. Second, colorblindness is often not as straightforward as it seems; educators may use colorblindness in practice but deny that it is part of their belief system as they remain unaware of their own implicit bias. This unconscious bias that operates to make their decisions makes the need for any interventions to alter colorblindness one that also educates about and addresses implicit bias. Finally, educators have been found to rely on colorblindness both in their dealings with students and in their classroom and curriculum decisions. This ideology appears to be influenced by a number of inter-related variables, including educators’ cultural worldview (monolithic/ethnocentric versus pluralistic/ ethnorelative); the amount and type of prior exposure they have had to cultural pedagogy; their racial identity (or lack of one); and their perception of the school climate as open to racial awareness and color-conscious practices. The challenge and complexity inherent in adopting a color-conscious curriculum is the ability to adequately address each of these inter-related variables, and to address the resistance that pre-service educators may bring in creating this fundamental shift in ideology from colorblindness to color-consciousness.

7

Variables Influencing Color-Conscious Ideology

Given what we know about colorblindness, how, then, might educators come to adopt a color-conscious paradigm where racial differences are handled directly and honestly; and where unconscious, implicit biases are acknowledged as detrimentally impacting decision-making? Although a review of

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current research identifies a number of factors may affect one’s ability to engage in racial discourse and employ color-conscious practices, four distinct variables repeatedly emerge as particularly influential in educators’ willingness and practice of open racial discourse: (1) educators’ cultural “world view” (including adherence to an ethnocentric, colorblind world view versus an ethnorelative perspective); (2) racial/ethnic identity (e.g. identifying as “white” or a person of color); (3) the perceived level of administrative/community support for race discussions and color-conscious practices within the school climate; and (4) exposure to cultural pedagogy (e.g. critical race theory, anti-bias or color-conscious curriculum) in their own pre-service teacher education or in-service professional development programs. Rather than viewed as independent, these inter-related variables may often interact in a dynamic way to affect educators’ classroom practices.

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Toward a Color-Conscious Approach in Teacher Education

During the early elementary school years when children are actively constructing concepts about race and forming racial attitudes and evaluations – and they are particularly influenced by the implicit messages they receive from parents, educators, and the larger society – educators have a critical role to play in promoting a positive development of children’s racial attitudes and in recognizing and influencing the development of implicit bias. Their understanding of how to do so actively (and with administrative support) is thus critical in order to end the cycle of ignorance that allows the continued use of the colorblind ideology to be promoted in schools, an ideology that denies the realities of racism and detrimentally impacts students. A number of teacher educators have documented programs, practices, and interventions designed to move pre-service educators toward color-conscious ideology and to disassemble their previously held beliefs and reliance on colorblindness, including the use of anti-bias training, critical race theory, and color-conscious practices. Schniedewind (2005) examined the impact of color-conscious training on the practices of five educators who participated in a long-term professional development program in diversity education and documented their reflection on the development of their consciousness of race, racism, and whiteness and subsequent implications for their work. She found that educators often provided revealing narratives, reflecting common themes that later emerged as color-conscious practices (e.g. supporting students of color, educating about stereotyping, addressing white privilege, and challenging institutional racism).

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Ullucci and Battey (2011) provide a thoughtful, comprehensive review of color-conscious interventions that they have found to be successful in their own teacher education practice. The authors first list desirable student outcomes of color-conscious teacher education and then list specific interventions that address each outcome that they have used with success in their own “race in education” courses (including specific articles and course readings, videos, course exercises, critical race autobiographies and biographies, and field placement activities). Similarly, Choi (2008) in her article, “Unlearning Colorblind Ideology in Education Class” describes her own remarkable transformation from a teacher educator ill-prepared to confront the surprising and frequent espousal of colorblindness among her pre-service students to one who adopts a successful critical race theory narrative to combat the classroom discourse that espouses colorblindness as an acceptable response to racial issues. Recently, the infusion of experiences and discussions of color-conscious training throughout the curriculum of teacher preparation programs (rather than as a separate “stand alone” topic often tacked-on to a prepared curriculum) has been highlighted as a necessary element in order to allow ample time and opportunity to shift educators racial ideology and help them to recognize their own “invisible” whiteness; understand, acknowledge and confront their own implicit biases; and grasp the effect of systemic and institutional racism. Research on the effectiveness of ‘color-conscious paradigm’ teacher training thus suggests that it can effectively impact educators’ attitudes, decrease adherence to the colorblind ideology, and help educators understand and confront the implicit bias and white privilege that affects their students. Teachers undergoing such color-conscious training have been found to be more prepared – and thus more likely – to engage students in racial and cultural discourse in the classroom and to examine systemic racism in their school communities.

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Conclusion and Areas for Further Research

The studies to date on colorblindness have helped to delineate the issues of unconscious, implicit biases, the “invisible” white culture, the dynamics of white privilege, and the way that colorblindness serves the needs of educators to the detriment of themselves and their students. Despite a recent growth of interest in the educational and psychological realms on colorblindness and its consequences for educators and students, several questions remain. Gaps in the data on the empirical measurement of educators’ colorblind attitudes, especially in a progressive, diverse school climate where educators work daily

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with diverse students, are apparent. Personal or situational variables – such as educators’ racial/cultural identity and experiences with diversity, dominant cultural “world view,” teacher education models (in pre-service or in-service training), and whether educators perceive that they work in a school climate that values diversity – can all affect how and when educators discuss race in the classroom and if they feel empowered or encouraged to become active adopters of color-conscious practices. Teacher educators should be cognizant of these variables – as well as the powerful role of implicit bias and the consequences of adopting colorblindness – in order to help educators create an environment for children to learn about racial differences and to feel comfortable and compelled to actively combat racism and racist decision-making in schools. Thus, any campaign to support educators’ conscious rejection of colorblindness in education must be two-fold: first, educators must have acknowledged agreement that racial inequalities, discrimination, and implicit biases and stereotypes are in fact real, continual problems that exist to support the undesirable “status quo”; once this agreement is made, educators can make conscious efforts to learn and understand the myriad ways that the use of colorblindness ignores and perpetuates negative student outcomes. In other words, the goal of eradicating the negative outcomes of the adoption of colorblindness in schools must be tied to first acknowledging the existence of racial inequalities, and then educating those – particularly educators, educational administrators, and others “at the top” of the educational hierarchy – about colorblindness’s consequences. Only once educators are armed with a shared acknowledgement of the inevitable outcomes of colorblindness and an informed understanding of how colorblindness contributes to these outcomes can they begin to embrace the adoption of viable alternative ideologies (e.g. a color-conscious approach).

References Blaisdell, B. (2005). Seeing every student as a 10: Using critical race theory to engage White teachers’ colorblindness. International Journal of Educational Policy, Research, and Practice: Reconceptualizing Childhood Studies, 6(1), 31–50. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Child Trends Databank. (2012). Children in poverty. Retrieved January 11, 2019, from https://www.childtrends.org/indicators?research-topic%5B%5D=poverty-andinequality

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Child Trends Databank. (2016). High school dropout rates. Retrieved January 11, 2019, from https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/high-school-dropout-rates Choi, J. (2008). Unlearning colorblind ideologies in education class. Educational Foundations. Summer/Fall, 53–71. Larson, C., & Ovando, C. (2001). The color of bureaucracy: The politics of equity in multicultural school communities. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Lewis, A. (2001). There is no “race” in the schoolyard: Color-blind ideology in an (almost) all-White school. American Education Research Journal, 38(4), 781–811. Marx, S. (2002, April). Entanglements of altruism, whiteness, and deficit thinking. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. Marx, S., & Larson, L. (2012). Taking off the color-blind glasses: Recognizing and supporting Latina/o students in a predominantly white school. Educational Administration Quarterly, 48(2), 259–303. Neville, H., Awad, G., Brooks, J., Flores, M., & Bluemel, J. (2013). Color-blind racial ideology: Theory, training, and measurement implications in psychology. American Psychologist, 68(6), 455–466. Rodriguez, I., & Kies, D. (1998). Developing critical thinking through probative questioning. Reading Improvement, 35(2), 80–89. Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers’ expectancies: Determinants of pupils’ IQ gains. Psychological Report, 19, 115–118. Schniedewind, N. (2005). “There ain’t no White people here!” The transforming impact of teachers’ racial consciousness on students and schools. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38(4), 280–289. Schofield, J. W. (1982). Black and White in school: Trust tension or tolerance? Praeger. Schofield, J. W. (1986). Causes and consequences of the colorblind perspective. In S. Gaertner & J. Dovidio (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination and racism: Theory and practice (pp. 231–253). Academic Press. Staats, C. (2016). Understanding implicit bias: What educators should know. American Educator, Winter 2015–2016, 29–33. Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air. American Psychologist, 52, 613–619. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797–811. Ullucci, K., & Battey, D. (2011) Exposing Color blindness/grounding color consciousness: Challenges for teacher education. Urban Education, 46(6), 1195–1225. Williams, P. (1997). Seeing a color-blind future: The paradox of race. The Noonday Press.

CHAPTER 18

Critical Race Theory Rachel McMillian and Brittany Aronson

Related Entries: Intersectionality; Interest Convergence; Ladson-Billings, Gloria; Whiteness as Property

… Understandings of race have moved beyond the scientific notions of “biogenetic categories” (Ladson-Billings, 2004, p. 50), yet questions about race and societal issues of racism still abound. This encyclopedia entry discusses Critical Race Studies as both a theory and a movement to address such questions of race and challenge white supremacy. Critical race theory (CRT) continues to evolve, grow, thrive, and confront “practices of subordination” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. xviii). Because of the expansive nature of CRT, this entry (a) explains the origins of the theory in the field of law; (b) describes several major tenets that critical race theorists include in their work; (c) recognizes historical voices in the genealogy of CRT; (d) and, discusses the role of CRT in the field of education. In the conclusion, this entry discusses the “indispensable” nature of CRT (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), especially within the field of education. As Angela Harris states, “race relations continue to shape our lives in the new century setting the stage for new tragedies and new hope – [and] critical race theory has become an indispensable tool for making sense of it all” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. xix).

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The Origins of Critical Race Theory

Originating from the work of Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Lani Guinier, Charles Lawrence, Patricia Williams, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, CRT developed in the 1970’s when lawyers and scholars laid out what they believed to be the shortcomings of critical legal studies. Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw argued that race seemed to play a supporting role to class in the examination of society; noting that even after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, racism in America still prevailed – albeit in more covert forms.

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Thus, CRT was a response to the “stalled progress of traditional civil rights litigation to produce meaningful racial reform” (Taylor, 1998, p. 122). In describing the purposes of CRT, Mari Matsuda (1991) states that CRT is The work of progressive legal scholars of Color who are attempting to develop a jurisprudence that accounts for the role of racism in American law and that work toward the elimination of racism as part of a larger goal of eliminating all forms of subordination. (p. 1331) Drawing from the work of such theorists and historical figures as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Cesar Chavez among others, CRT is oppositional scholarship in that it challenges the dominant narratives of society by grounding the work in the experiences of people of color. CRT has developed into a movement in that activists and scholars aim to “[transform] the relationship among race, racism, and power” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 3). CRT as a movement places the issues of race, racism, and power in a broader context including the fields of “economics, history… group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 3). CRT is even recognized as a catalyst for the creation of specific subgroups such as Latinx-critical scholars (LatCrit), queer-critical theorists (QueerCrit), and Asian American (AsianCrit) interest groups.

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Major Tenets of Critical Race Theory

While there are no definitive set of core tenets that guide CRT, there are several commonly cited perspectives that CRT scholars take up in their work. Among these perspectives it is widely agreed upon that CRT: (1) recognizes and accepts the permanence and “ordinary” nature of racism (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) and that it challenges and critiques liberalism’s notions of colorblindness, meritocracy, and neutrality; (2) recognizes that racial equality for people of color will only be accommodated when it converges with the interests of whites, or what Bell (1980) referred to as ‘interest convergence’; (3) exposes and challenges ‘master’ narratives through the lived experiences of people of color; (4) holds an understanding that ‘race’ is socially constructed and that racial difference is “invented, perpetuated, and reinforced by society” (Gilborn, 2015, p. 278); (5) challenges White supremacy and ‘whiteness as property’ (Harris, 1993); (6) recognizes that while race and racism are the primary modes of analysis in CRT, race interacts with other forms of oppression such as

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sexism, classism, sexuality, language and religion, or what Kimberlé Crenshaw (1995) termed “intersectionality”; and lastly, (7) CRT is committed to social justice that influences curriculum and pedagogy in education. 2.1 The Permanence of Racism and “Colorblindness” Affirmative action laws and anti-discrimination acts cause many people to believe that racism is declining, no longer exists, or that racism has been solved. CRT scholars, however, make the claim that racism is a pervasive and firmly entrenched part of society. Racism is so deeply embedded in the thought processes and societal structures, that “only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 27). Thereby, the first major tenet of CRT is “ordinariness” which posits that “racism is difficult to address or cure because it is not acknowledged” (Delgado, 2012, p. 8). Because of ordinariness, whites have very little motivation to end racism. CRT scholars further argue that the major reason racism remains hidden is through the guise of “normalcy” or “neutrality”: Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture. Formal equal opportunity – rules and laws that insist on treating blacks and Whites (for example) alike – can thus remedy only the more extreme and shocking forms of injustice, the ones that do stand out. It can do little about the business-as-usual forms of racism that people of color confront every day. (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. xvi) Central to the concept of ordinariness is a critique of colorblindness, or the belief that “one should treat all persons equally without regard to their race” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 158). This ideology is “based on the superficial extension of the principles of liberalism to racial matters that results in ‘raceless’ explanations for all sorts of race-related affairs” (Bonilla-Silva, 2015, p. 1364). Scholars of CRT label colorblindness as perverse when it “stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help those in need” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 26). Furthermore, colorblind racism seeks to ignore racial categories while also exempting whiteness from discussions of inequity. Through the suggestion that “our society is no longer meaningfully constructed along racial lines,” colorblind racism further implies that we live in a post-racial society (Bonilla-Silva, 2015, p. 1364). Of importance, in 2013, scholars in special education introduced a new framework combining aspects of CRT with Disability Studies called DisCrit (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013). DisCrit incorporates a new analysis of race

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and ability and thus intentionally challenges ableist language practices. Thus, DisCrit scholars would advocate for the terminology of “color evasiveness” to replace that of “colorblindness” in any CRT analysis. 2.2 Interest Convergence As Delgado and Stefancic (2012) note, “because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it” (p. 8). This illustrates a second major tenet of CRT called “interest convergence” or material determinism. The theory of interest-convergence was first introduced by Derrick Bell in the Harvard Law Review in the article “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma” (1980). In this article Bell argued that “civil rights for Blacks always seemed to coincide with changing economic conditions and the self-interest of elite whites” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 22). By utilizing the historic, landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, Bell presents a strong argument that the Supreme Court was more concerned with the moral image of the United States than the plight of Blacks. Although African Americans had been in the fight against school segregation for many years, the Supreme Court suddenly decided to give them what they wanted in 1954. The year is significant because the United States was in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Bell argues that it would not have looked good for the United States if the international news media continued to present stories of lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence towards African Americans. Therefore, for a brief moment in 1954, the interests of whites and Blacks converged, and the United States was able to improve its moral image in the eyes of the world. The tenet of interest convergence is further illustrated in Bell’s (1992) science fiction short story, The Space Traders. In this metaphorical story, the United States is invaded by aliens who promise a supply of gold to bailout the government; chemicals to unpollute the environment while restoring it to its original “pristine” state, and safe nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. In exchange for these promises, all the aliens asked for in return was to take back to their planet all the African Americans who lived in the United States. The crux of the story is that many white Americans were willing to exchange the lives of African Americans for the country’s economic self-interests. This story is often used to illustrate that throughout history white Americans have been willing to sacrifice the well-being of marginalized groups for their own personal gains. In fact, there is a continued subordination of minoritized groups in order to sustain the “economic and legal structures that promote white privilege” (Taylor, 1998, p. 123).

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2.3 Counternarratives, Counter-Storytelling and Voices of Color Marginalized groups have historically used “stories, parables, parody, and satire to tell of their experiences and provide another version of society” (Williams, 2004, p. 166). Thus, arguably the most prominent tenet of CRT is the voice-of-color thesis. The voice-of-color thesis holds that minoritized groups, because of their experiences with oppression, can “communicate to their white counterparts matters that whites are unlikely to know” through the use of narratives, or “counternarratives” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 10). These counternarratives serve to challenge dominant ideologies about race. Scholars of CRT use “the power of stories to come to a deeper understanding of how Americans see race” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 44). In explaining the nature of storytelling in CRT, Delgado (1989) describes the dominant group (white males) as the “in-group” and people of color as “out-groups” (p. 71). Storytelling is evident in both groups, yet counter storytelling, as described by Delgado and Stefancic, focuses on the importance of “Black and Brown writers [using their unique perspectives] to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 10). While the dominant group creates stories, members of said out-groups are those whose stories or voices have historically been “suppressed, devalued, and abnormalized” (Delgado, 2012, p. 71). Similarly, testimonio is a Latin American storytelling tradition used to reveal experiences and events about social injustice. In particular, feminists of Color, including Latina feminists, have used testimonio as a transformative venue to speak out about their experiences of oppression, to point out injustice, and to produce knowledge about how our social world can be changed for the betterment of humanity. The value of counter storytelling and testimonio within minoritized groups is that it brings strength and cohesiveness to the groups. Additionally, the act of counter storytelling allows people of color to communicate their experiences with oppression to their white counterparts (Delgado, 1989). 2.4 The Social Construction of Race The fourth major tenet highlights the social construction thesis which postulates that “race and races are products of social thought and relations” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 8). There is no biological basis of race and any attempts to argue for such “seek to remove the concept of race from fundamental social, political, or economic determination” (Omi & Winant, 2014, p. 4). In discussing the social construction of race, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2014) explain:

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The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society, in both collective action and personal practice. In the process, racial categories themselves are formed, transformed, destroyed and reformed. We use the term racial formation to refer to the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings. Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social relations which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception. (p. 5) Furthermore, “races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 8). While there are similarities in skin color, hair, and physique among those of common origin, race has nothing to do with the higher order traits associated with humanity such as personality, intelligence, or morality. CRT lawyers noted that society tends to racialize “different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as a labor market” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 9). For example, throughout American history there have been instances in which Mexican agricultural workers were favored over Blacks or when Blacks were used in the labor force instead of those of Japanese descent. This tenet of CRT also argues that stereotypes of different races shift with the times. In the case of Blacks in America, at one time they could be described as happy, dancing, and simple-minded; whereas during a different era they might be described as dangerous or as super-predators. 2.5 Whiteness as Property Connected to the social construction of race is also the social construction of whiteness. Just like race, “whiteness” is a socially constructed and malleable identity. Leonardo (2009) explains, “Whiteness” is a racial discourse, whereas the category “white people” represents a socially constructed identity, usually based on skin color. Within CRT, this fifth tenet unpacks the link between “whiteness” and property ownership. In 1993, legal scholar Cheryl Harris wrote the foundational piece “Whiteness as Property,” which illustrated how racialization (i.e. in this case whiteness) provides access to spaces. Harris (1993) explains: The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress blacks and Indians, rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property which played a

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critical role in establishing and maintaining racial economic subordination. (p. 1716, emphasis in original) She argues that racial identity and property are interrelated concepts. This includes: (1) rights of disposition, which is displayed when students are rewarded for conformity to perceived “white norms” or sanctioned for cultural practices such as dress, speech, knowledge; (2) rights to use and enjoyment such as how whiteness allows for use of school property; (3) reputation and status property, which asserts concepts such as “bilingualism” or “urban” are linked to lower status reputations; and (4) the absolute right to exclude, which is seen through instances such as white flight or vouchers used for private school attendance to maintain segregation. Harris argues that whiteness was created after colonization and during American slavery as a means for whites to continue gaining access to racialized privilege. Over time, the concept of whiteness became legitimized, as legal measures limited non-whites from land ownership. Even though legal segregation has ended in the United States, CRT scholars argue that whiteness as property continues to function as a barrier for people of color to gain access to spaces and does not allow for effective change in reducing inequality. 2.6 Intersectionality Intersectionality is the examination of how different social categorizations of identity interact with each other and at times intersect at “recognized sites of oppression” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 57). In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined this sixth tenet of CRT known as “intersectionality.” She argues that there was a “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 139) yet, “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 10). Although the term intersectionality was developed relatively recently, the concept can be traced throughout history. CRT and intersectionality visibly emerged within the context of the American anti-slavery movement of the 1800’s and the late 19th century. This is evident in the life and work of African American scholar, educator, and activist Anna Julia Cooper. Born into slavery in the year 1858, Cooper was the daughter of Hannah Stanley Haywood and her “mother’s master,”George Washington Haywood (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016, p. 32). Learning to read while enslaved, Cooper entered St. Augustine’s Normal School – a school designed for Black students to become educators during the Reconstruction era – at a young age (May 2012). Recognizing that the male students were allowed to take advanced courses such as Latin and Greek and female students were not, Cooper took her complaints of gender inequities to the

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principal. As a result, female students were given the opportunity to attend the advanced classes that were originally designed for men; winning Cooper her first fight against gender discrimination. Although Cooper’s work challenged “the system of white power and privilege” (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016, p. 29), as May (2012) notes, “the evolution of Cooper’s intellectual and activist contributions has not yet been adequately considered” (p. 1). Cooper is “often treated as if she were simply a quaint historical figure rather than a major theorist” (May, 2012, p. 4). Therefore, unlike her contemporary W.E.B. Du Bois, Cooper remains under discussed in the field of CRT. Cooper’s work, however, positions her as a crusader against race, class, and gender oppression, and as a key figure in Black feminist thought and “Womanism.” Through her writings, Cooper “denaturalizes white superiority [by arguing] that Black men and women are agents of knowledge, culture, and transformation” (May, 2012, p. 6). Cooper’s foundational work A Voice from the South: by a Black Woman from the South (1892) served as both a “counter narrative and as a pedagogical device” (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016, p. 31). The collection of essays presented in A Voice from the South discuss the intersections of race, gender, and class. Making the assertion that the uplift of the African American race is only possible through the uplifting of Black women, Cooper states, “When and where I enter in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me” (Cooper, 1892, p. 31). Further arguing that Black women were the “moral barometer of America” (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016, p. 35), Cooper discusses intersectionality almost a century before the term was coined in the belief that Black women had a unique and valuable perspective on society because of their “intersecting oppressions” (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016, p. 37). By 1989, “intersectionality” officially began a part of the academy. In the article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Crenshaw (1989) argues that, “because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (p. 3). Therefore, intersectional analysis attempts to answer questions of identity such as: What does it mean for an educator to be both Black and female? What if the educator is gay? And what role do intersectional beings have in social movements such as feminism? The concept of intersectionality can be further explored in the article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (1991). In this article, Crenshaw notes that within the realm of identity politics, intragroup differences are often ignored although identities, loyalties,

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and oppressions can overlap. Continuing to focus on the intersections of race and gender, Crenshaw discusses male violence against Black women and other women of Color with the goal of highlighting the need to discuss multiple forms of identity when considering the construction of society. From the speeches of Sojourner Truth, to the writings of Audre Lorde and bell hooks, there are many instances of scholarly work or social movements that developed to resist intersectional oppressions related to race, class, gender, sex, or religion. One such example can be seen in the Combahee River Collective which developed in 1974 as a Black, feminist, lesbian group to address issues of “racism in the white women’s movement” (Combahee River Collective, 1979). Similarly, the feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1983), worked to “create a definition that expands what ‘feminist’ means” while expressing to all women, the experiences and identities that divide feminists (p. xxiii). In addition to these works, several theoretical fields have developed out of the concept of intersectionality. Critical race feminist scholars examine the “relations between men and women of Color; sterilization of Black, Latina, and Indian women; and the impact of changes in welfare, family policies, and child-support laws” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 94). In like manner, QueerCrit theorists study the interaction between race and sexual norms. 2.7 Commitment to Social Justice Within this seventh CRT tenet, perhaps the most logical connection between theory and practice is the commitment to social justice. This commitment provides the link to a critical race pedagogy and critical race curriculum. “Critical race curriculum is the approach to understanding curricular structures, processes, and discourses, informed by critical race theory (CRT)” (Yosso, 2002, p. 98). A critical race curriculum has the potential to make movement towards a critical consciousness due to its emphasis on challenging racism, class exploitation, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Thus, critical race educators aim to center social justice as the center of their curriculum and pedagogy. Critical race pedagogy (CRP) adapts CRT’s tenets for application in the classroom in a way that critically addresses race and racism. CRP draws from African American epistemological traditions that seek, challenge, and critique social justice issues while building upon the knowledges of people of color. CRT scholars believe CRP to be essential due to the rapidly changing demographics of the U.S. and must be utilized if antiracist educators intend to avoid mirroring the social reproduction that maintains institutional racism. Critical race pedagogy and a commitment to social justice can be viewed through the work of several early 20th century African American scholars who, knowing the importance of a culturally relevant curriculum, directly

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challenged the “explicit and implicit imagery of African Americans found in school text[s]” (Brown, 2010, p. 54). One such scholar was Carter G. Woodson who, through the “genre of curriculum writing” (Brown, 2010, p. 55), challenged the prevailing narratives presented throughout textbooks in which African Americans were portrayed as “a people without a history” (Brown, 2010, p. 60). Woodson, the first African American of slave parentage to earn a Ph.D., argued that if African Americans held to the same narratives as white Americans, it “would lead to the psychological and cultural death of the African American population” (Asante, 1991, p. 170). Therefore, if education were to ever be meaningful for African American students, curriculum needed to address the experiences and stories of African Americans; both in Africa and America. Viewing the creation of curriculum centered on the experiences of African Americans as a political act, Carter G. Woodson collaborated with African American historian Charles H. Wesley to rewrite “historical narratives that had direct implications to the symbolic rendering of African Americans in public life” (Brown, 2010, p. 62). The curriculum and textbooks created by Woodson and Wesley served as a form of “counter-memory” (Lipsitz, 1990) by identifying the myths presented in the dominant history and by providing a different interpretation of the past.

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CRT in Education

Although emerging from the field of law in the 1970’s, CRT soon spread to the field of education. Within this field, CRT scholars analyze educational issues, policies, and practices to better understand why racial inequities continue to exist. The desegregation efforts of the 1950’s and 60’s continued to reinforce social reproduction, albeit more subtly through tactics such as tracking, sustaining racial disparities for students of color. In the 1960s, sociologists conducted research situating children of color as “culturally deprived” or “deficient” in some way, rather than addressing systemic and institutional racism (Hill, 2016). As Ladson-Billings (1999) explained, “the school’s role was to compensate for the children’s presumed lack of socialization and cultural resources” (p. 216, emphasis in original). Thus, education required new analytical tools to fight these new forms of racism. The work of CRT in the legal system caught the attention of scholars of color in education. It has been over two decades since Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate (1995) introduced CRT to the field of education in their infamous article, “Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education,” which advocated for CRT as an analytical tool for critiquing educational theory, policy, and practice.

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They argued for three primary propositions that would allow for “a critical race theoretical perspective in education analogous to that of critical race theory in legal scholarship” (p. 47): 1. 2. 3.

Race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States; U.S. Society is based on property rights; and The intersection of race and property creates an analytical tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently school) inequity. (p. 48)

Race is continually cited as a factor when discussing “high school dropout rates, suspension rates, and incarceration rates” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 48). Additionally, race continues to be a significant component when measuring and understanding inequality in U.S. public schools. Building off of Derrick’s Bell’s (1987) argument that universal human rights and land property rights were never equitable in the U.S. constitution from its inception, LadsonBillings and Tate (1995) further argue that in the United States, democracy was built on capitalism leading to an inherent tension between human rights and property rights: This tension was greatly exacerbated by the presence of African peoples as slaves in America. The purpose of the government was to protect the main object of society – property. The slave status of most African Americans (as well as women and children) resulted in their being objectified as property. And, a government constructed to protect the rights of property owners lacked the incentive to secure human rights for the African Americans. (p. 53) Of further consequence, property relates to education in explicit ways in how property taxes are used to pay for schools. Additionally, Ladson-Billings and Tate argue curriculum represents a form of “intellectual property” such as the course offerings in a school, materials and technologies available. Finally, if broader society was defined legally through human rights and property rights, then the intersection of these things created “the construction of whiteness as the ultimate property” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 58). These understandings lay the groundwork for how CRT can be a useful analytical tool for measuring educational inequity. Since being introduced to the educational landscape nearly 25 years ago, there has been a number of articles, books, and edited volumes dedicated to

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CRT scholarship. CRT has become an important theoretical tool in both K-12 schooling and higher education. Dixon and Rousseau (2005) reviewed the literature on CRT in education 10 years post Ladson-Billings and Tate’s (1995) piece. Between 1995 and 2005, the body of literature in education “has drawn upon a variety of constructs from legal studies, including the property value of whiteness, voice, restrictive v. expansive visions of antidiscrimination law, and the problem with colorblindness” (Dixon & Rousseau, 2005, p. 17). Upon reviewing this literature, they ultimately argue there is a lack of linking theory to practice as seen in the law scholarship that needs to be addressed in education. They concluded that scholars using CRT in education needed to “recouple” their work with critical race legal scholarship if the elimination of racial oppression were to be actualized. Building off of this work, Ledesma and Calderón (2015) reviewed more recent literature from 2006 to 2015. They found the K-12 literature was organized around themes regarding a) curriculum and pedagogy, b) teaching and learning, c) schooling, and d) policy/finance and community engagement. Whereas in higher education, the literature focused on themes of, a) colorblindness, b) admissions policies, c) campus racial climates. Ultimately, they too agreed that there has been an emphasis on “overtheorizing as opposed to linking theory to practice” (Ledesma & Calderon, 2015, p. 207). Thus, while strides have been made in the scholarship, CRT scholars argue we have further to go before we see CRT in education reach its full potential.

References Annamma, S. A., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. Asante, M. K. (1991). The Afrocentric idea in education. The Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 170–180. Bell, D. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518–533. Bell, D. (1987). And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice. Basic Books. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well. Basic Books. Brown, A. L. (2010). Counter-memory and race: An examination of African American scholars’ challenges to early twentieth century k-12 historical discourses. The Journal of Negro Education, 79(1), 54–65. Cooper, A. J. (1892). A voice from the South: By a Black woman of the South. Aldine Printing House.

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Crenshaw, K. W. (1995). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, & K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 357–383). New Press. Delgado, R. (1989). Storytelling for oppositionists and others: A plea for narrative. Michigan Law Review, 87(8), 2411–2441. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2012). Critical race theory: An introduction (2nd ed.). New York University Press. Dixson, A. D., & Rousseau, C. K. (2005). And we are still not saved: Critical race theory in education ten years later. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8, 7–27. Gillborn, D. (2015). Intersectionality, critical race theory, and the primacy of racism: Race, class, gender, and disability in education. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 277–287. Grant, C. A., Brown, K. D., & Brown, A. L. (2016). Black intellectual thought in education: The missing traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke. Routledge. Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 1707–1791. Hill, H. C. (2016, July 13). 50 years ago, one report introduced Americans to the blackwhite achievement gap. Here’s what we’ve learned since. https://www.chalkbeat.org/ posts/us/2016/07/13/50-years-ago-the-coleman-report-revealed-the-black-whiteachievement-gap-in-america-heres-what-weve-learned-since/ Ladson-Billings, G. (2004). Just what is critical race theory and what is it doing in a nice field of education? In D. Gillborn & G. Ladson-Billings (Eds.), The Routledge Falmer reader in multicultural education (pp. 49–67). Routledge Falmer. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. Ledesma, M. C., & Calderón, D. (2015). Critical race theory in education: A review of past literature and a look to the future. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 206–222. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. Routledge. Lipsitz, G. (2001). Time passages: Collective memory and American popular culture. University of Minnesota Press. Matsuda, M. J. (1991). Voices of America: Accent, antidiscrimination law, and a jurisprudence for the last reconstruction. The Yale Law Journal, 100(5), 1329–1407. May, V. M. (2012). Anna Julia Cooper, visionary Black feminist: A critical introduction. Routledge. Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (1983). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (2nd ed.). Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge. Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–24.

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Taylor, E. (1998). A primer on critical race theory. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 19, 122–124. Williams, B. T. (2004). The truth in the tale: Race and “counter storytelling” in the classroom. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 48(2), 164–169. Woodson, C. G. (1933). Mis-education of the Negro. The Associated Publishers. Yosso, T. J. (2002). Toward a critical race curriculum. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 93–107.

CHAPTER 19

Discourse and Whiteness Jenna Cushing-Leubner

Related Entries: Baldwin, James; Brokennes; Colorblindness; Guilt; Privilege; Shame

… To know that race itself, and whiteness in particular, is a parlor trick of epic proportion does little to pull the rug out from under its life and death impacts. As James Baldwin notes in his essay “On being ‘white,’ and other lies…,” being white is Absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people) [yet people socialized into whiteness] have brought humanity to the edge of extinction: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife – looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt. (Baldwin, 1984, as cited in Roediger, 2010, p. 180) As a social construct, whiteness is both imagined and unstable. It is formed out of and actively reconstitutes a social contract of both tacit and overt agreement with a distortion of power (Mills, 2014). It is a shapeshifter, defining itself through combinations of social factors that change depending on geopolitical and sociopolitical contexts (Sen & Wasow, 2017) and expand at points of particular social and political pressure (Painter, 2010) in order to maintain its uneven and coercive control over resources and governance. Though it is transliterated into biocultural traits (e.g., phenotypes, languages, religious signifiers), whiteness is ideological and is constructed and adhered to discursively. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_019

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In exchange, people, communities, and institutions that support the maintenance of an imagined ‘white’ elite become white through adherence to ideologies and practices of whiteness and then go on to socialize others into racial logics that both define the norms of whiteness and the formations of racial others. Though discourses of whiteness may be taken up by anybody, the protections of whiteness are only available to those who fit the terms of the white-racial frame (Feagin, 2013). Even then, these protections are only fully provided to the minor element (i.e., the ‘white’ elite, wealthy, and ruling class), whose social and political position whiteness has historically been designed out of, and whose social and political position whiteness has historically been designed to maintain.

1

Why Are White People Called White?

In the United States, race is recorded on official certificates of birth and of death. Every 10 years, anyone dwelling in the United States is asked to fill out a census by the U.S. Census Bureau, where households must officially document individuals living there using (among other things) racial categories. In the 2010 census, households were given 19 options for race and ethnicity, including “some other race.” In 1790, there were three options to choose from: (1) “Free white males, Free white females,” (2) “Slaves,” and (3) “All other free persons.” From 1790 to 2010, there were expansions to a select offering of ethnic identities and a fracturing of distinctions for types of blackness (e.g., All other free persons, Free colored males and females, Slaves, Black slaves, Mulatto slaves, Quadroon, Octoroon, of Negro descent, Mulatto, Negro, Black, African American). However, “white” has remained constant, changing only in 1850, when the designation of “free” was removed – a change in nomenclature that reflected a massive expansion and incorporation of European ethnic minority groups that had until that point not been within the bounds of both the legal and social categories of whiteness. The generalized use of the concept of a “white race” emerged in Europe in the 17th century. “White” as a descriptor of people’s relative skin color, and to categorize and describe a group of distanced others (the Germanic Teutons), can be found in Greco-Roman writings. However, these were not projects of legal or sociopolitical racialization and certainly did not elevate the so-called white Germanic tribes. Rather, the whiteness of the Teutons was accompanied by descriptions that bordered on horror at their dress, communal living, and eating practices, and mused at what must be a fragile existence to be so endangered by the elements. It wasn’t until Germanic racial thought – which, in line with broader European racial frameworks, relies heavily on ethnicity

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and nationality to do the primary work of social stratification – retrieved the notion of a “white other” as its origin story that white people as a racial category was birthed and began to take shape. During the peak years of the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 18th and 19th centuries, racial pseudoscience emerged to fill a modern need to distinguish Europeans from the people Europeans were enslaving throughout Africa and the Americas. Racial architects that included Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Arthur de Gobineu retrieved the concept of a “white people” and converted it into racial terms. They conceived of a “white race” as distinct from global others (e.g., Blumenbach’s racial categories of “Mongolian,” “Aethiopian,” “American,” “Malayan” or de Gobineu’s racial categories of “black” and “yellow”). This development of a “white race” as constructed in opposition to racial others made for a distinction amongst Europeans (so considered “white” because of their lighter phenotypical features of skin, hair, and eye tones and colors) and global others. They argued that the lightness of “white” people’s skin, eyes, and hair reflected their closeness with a Euro-Christian God, thus proving their intellectual, societal, and spiritual superiority over others. This moral wrapping was a foil for the defense of “white” people’s broadscale enslavement, buying, and selling of people ascribed to other racial categories. Europeans’ violent attempts at domination over others through imperial expansion was legitimated by their construction of racial others’ distance from whiteness – and therefore, their distance from God and godly humans (white people), and their proximity to animals, which were viewed through Christian narratives of being created for the purpose of upholding and benefiting the health and prosperity of white people as God’s children. (For a full and extensive historical tracing, see Nell Irvine Painter’s book The History of White People.) While “white people” and the early constructions of a “white race” grew up in Europe, being “white” – its legal and social constructions, as well as its association (primarily) with people of European-descent – has taken hold in the settler-colonial states that are outgrowths of the United Kingdom and the British Empire: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In contemporary terms, “white people” are mostly (but not always) people of European descent. Importantly, not all people who have been legally deemed “white” in the United States have been European, and not all people of European descent have been immediately considered white.

2

What Does It Mean to Be White?

As a legal and social category, whiteness is weighted with benefits that are proffered, accumulated, dangled, retracted, and denied. Two discursive roots

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shape the ideological construction of whiteness in the context of the United States: racial capital (Robinson, 2000) and empire expansion in the form of settler-colonialism (Wolfe, 2006). These shape particular ways of being and ways of knowing or processing the world, which serve to protect and assert white people’s positioning as being white people – oftentimes carried out by people relatively recently incorporated into whiteness and those who are precariously positioned within whiteness.

3

Whiteness in the Service of the Nation-State

A nation-state is a political and economic enterprise. Its security is bound in its ability to assert itself on a global stage of capitalist exchange and to define and defend its borders – a practice that is not only outwardly facing (to defend a potential breach from an outside force) but inwardly facing as well (to defend from an inner force that could undermine the stability of the state). Considering whiteness (as imagined entity, but concrete in its impacts) and its discursive formation must then take as a starting point how whiteness is construed and maintained for the purpose of maintaining the state. In the case of the United States, whiteness serves two masters: capitalism and settler-colonialism. Specifically, as a state physically and economically built through enslaved labor, whiteness is constructed and can be understood through discourses of racial capitalism, property, and wealth accumulation. As a nation-state constructed through mechanisms of settler-colonialism, whiteness is constructed in the service of sustaining social and political colonial structures (e.g., systems, institutions, policies, laws, social norms) in order to maintain the futurity of the state itself (Wolfe, 2006).

4

Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and the U.S.

Racial capitalism describes the interconnectedness of socially constructed and juridical racism and capitalism (Robinson, 2000). Robinson argues that capitalism is inherently reliant on racism and cannot be disentangled. Racial capitalism accounts for the commodification of peoples, cultural practices, and intellectual traditions and the coalescence of sociopolitical classes with racial categorization of peoples. Additionally, racial capitalism recognizes racialism as already integral to the fabric of Western civilization and argues that, as capitalism emerged from Western social and political thought’s exit from feudalism, racialism was already deeply ingrained. Propertied elites could only exist

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in a dialectal relationship with commodified lands and people, with a laboring class. Laborers (proletariat) were always already conceived of as racial subjects (in Europe, Irish, Jews, Roma, Slavs), experienced racist dispossession of land and property, enslavement, and commodification on the markets of colonialism. Therefore, a capitalist nation-state is by definition a racial construct. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris (1992) developed an argument of “whiteness as property.” Beyond the concrete ability to legally possess and own property, Harris details the ways that property itself is a fluid concept (e.g., intellectual property) that is based in possession. In this way, access to state-sanctioned education and certifications of that access are the possession of a form of property (a state-sanctioned education). Property possession is linked to personhood, and personhood is defined by the ability to possess property. In a racial-capitalist nation-state, personhood is defined by whiteness and whiteness is the ability to possess property. As a governmental arm of the racialcapitalist nation-state, a person possessing a certificate of education (a diploma, a G.E.D.) possesses a form of whiteness: a certificate of possession of the property of an official education. The ability to accumulate properties as possessions determines access to whiteness, as well as the strength or precarity of that whiteness. In other words, property can be possessed and accumulated, but one can also be dispossessed of property, and the fewer properties one accumulates, the greater the impact of that dispossession on their standing as a propertied (“white”) person. The discursive construction of whiteness as access to possession of property, accumulation of property, and protection from the dispossession of property provides material consideration of what it means to be white, how whiteness as a category expands to incorporate communities of people who had not previously been considered white, and how whiteness can not only seem to be – but really be – a precariously held position of protection that newly incorporated white people will fight for access to and defend their standing in at the expense of minoritized racial others (Woods, 2015). Accumulation and dispossession are also central to what W.E.B. Du Bois (1998) and David Roediger (1999) articulated as “wages of whiteness.” In concrete terms, poor and laboring class white people and European ethnic minorities could continue to be paid a low and even unlivable wage but would receive public and psychological wages that were not afforded to people deemed “black,” and later a wide range of people of color. These psychological wages have roots in concrete laws, such as the Virginia Slave Codes which dictated that white landowners were allowed to use corporal punishment on European-origin (white) indentured workers, and African-origin (black) enslaved workers, and could require black enslaved people to strip naked first, but were

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not allowed to do so with a white worker. Here, there was a material benefit to being construed as white (if not free and white), as opposed to being constructed as black. These material benefits shaped a psychological wage that a white worker had something to lose by being constructed as black. And, because whiteness and blackness – particularly on the margins – are largely imagined distinctions in terms of experience in the racial-capitalist nation-state, this psychological wage created a discourse of white lives and bodies having particular value in relationship to black lives and bodies. Within this discourse of whiteness, white bodies and lives mattered. Unless they were fulfilling their financial investment by white people who possessed them, black bodies and lives did not. Du Bois (1998) describes this as the central distinction between what would grow to become the “white working class” and the “black working class.” Beyond the broad-stroke black-white racial binary, Bonilla-Silva (2002) offers a framework for viewing the parsing of “social whites,” “social blacks,” and communities of color who are positioned as being in closer proximity to the social wages of whiteness or blackness. Today, the wages of whiteness continue to be accrued. They can be seen in the state’s continuation of not prosecuting or regularly acquitting the murder of unarmed people of color – in particular black people. These wages can also be seen in the wholesale disposal of the educational rights and outcomes of black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color in comparison to the opportunities afforded to white youth in public schools, including working class and rural white youth.

5

Whiteness, Settler Futurity, and the U.S.

Settler-colonialism is a type of colonialism that is distinct from contact colonialism, which can point to a time period of contact with an invasive empire, allowing for a post-colonial period. Nation-states formed through settlercolonialism experience colonialism as an ongoing structure in which the invading empire, in order to lay claim and possess lands as commodifiable property, uses the technology of settlement. Settlement is an ongoing process that works to replace the Indigenous populations (peoples, lands, and nonhuman relations) with first settlers and ultimately citizenry. Settler-colonialism relies on biocultural removal and replacement through the importing of people, non-human life, governing structures, and social and spiritual practices. Through physical removal of Indigenous life and both physical and psychological replacement, the nation-state is formed through a settler citizenry who play particular and necessary roles in the maintenance of the security of the state. Whiteness is constructed as settlers, and those employed and working

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towards the futurity of the settler state engage in projects of whiteness. In this discursive construction, whiteness becomes compliant with “Americanness” (whiteness means not being asked where you are from – where you’re really from – where your family is from). In settler states that were formed through British imperial expansion, to be white is to be English-speaking, to be English-speaking in a particular way and with a particular accent, and to be English speaking in a phenotypically “white” body (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Taken alongside Bonilla-Silva’s (2002) racial trinary model, whiteness as settler expands (Painter, 2010) so that over time communities of color are incorporated into the position of settler (whiteness) if they are already positioned in proximity to whiteness, are willing to replace their ethnic practices (Baldwin, 1998) for settler practices, and prove they will engage in the required violences of biocultural removal against communities positioned as native/Indigenous, black, or as being in closer relative proximity to blackness (Woods, 2015). The discursive construction of whiteness as settler for the maintenance and futurity of a settler-colonial nation-state plays out in clear ways in schools. Schools and the institution of schooling are a direct mechanism of the state. What gets learned, what is deemed appropriate forms of instruction, how learning is assessed and evaluated, physical spaces for learning, state mandates of participation, the time spent in attendance, gatekeeping mechanisms of enrollment and completion, qualifications to become and remain a teacher – these form the knowledge system of state schooling. The elements of this knowledge system dictate the project of schooling as defined by the nationstate. As an institutional arm of the state, schools and schooling become mechanisms of socialization into the positional roles that are required for the futurity of a settler-colonial nation-state: “settlers,” “natives,” and “slaves” (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006). The futurity of the state requires the formation of settlers (whiteness) from natives (Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and those imported from other regions of the world due to economic, political, and environmental pressures – typically traceable directly to local contact with imperial expansion and colonialism), the importation and socialization of new settlers, and the utilization of a commodified other (slaves). These logics are built into the knowledge system of the schooling project (from early childhood through teacher education).

6

Performances of Whiteness

The project of maintaining whiteness – as capital and as nationhood – is collectively imagined, materially asserted and maintained, and necessary for

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the survival of the state in its current form. These discursive performances of whiteness are numerous and evolve to fit the needs of the particular pressures of the sociopolitical moment. Aspects of two overarching performance discourses are outlined here: emotionality and social positioning.

7

White People’s Emotions

Whiteness is sometimes construed as emotionally rational, bifurcated from the raw emotions that it claims reveals the lesser intellectual control of racialized others. However, whiteness is also deeply shaped by an emotional range that has been weaponized to defend and protect the social positioning of being white, woven into the material benefits and safeties that whiteness provides (DiAngelo, 2011; Matias, 2016). When whiteness is performed, this range of emotionality includes fragility, vulnerability, brokenness (Jansen, 2008), and endangerment (Matias, 2016); guilt and shame (Thandeka, 1999); entitlement and privilege (McIntosh, 1990); desire (Lensmire, 2012); and ambivalence (Lensmire, 2017). These discourses, too, are shaped by and shape deeper entanglements. These include a defense of white national and settler-colonial projects (in the name of God-given entitlement); legitimation of the murder of black, Indigenous, and other people of color because of white fear of endangerment; and a volatile relationship with silence and action when it comes to encounters with racialized realities and the impacts of white supremacist and settler ideologies, systems, institutional practices, laws, and policies.

8

White People’s Positioning

Whiteness positions itself within a racial-capitalist settler-colonial nationstate in myriad ways. White nationalism serves the state by flexing across mainstream levels of acceptability (standing for the national anthem; the legal requirement that U.S. schools recite the pledge of allegiance weekly) to socially unacceptable (white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us” and protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue; the murdering of nine Black people during a prayer service at a historically Black church by a white male who is said to have professed that “blacks were taking over the world”). Whiteness, patriotism, and the national interest are so fused that even white liberalism is defined by shared beliefs in the promise and futurity of a settler state that is defined by racial capitalism. Colorblindness – or new racism – is the divergence from the overt pseudoscience of racial determinism and the shift to

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a rationalization that people of color are inferior, not due to biological differences, but instead due to individual characteristics, in-born tendencies, or their personal fit for different contexts. Through colorblind racist discourses, whiteness and its benefits are maintained while making a case for being post-racial. Whiteness as race-consciousness and antiracist makes itself available across elite, working class, and proximal positionalities through formations of race traitors, white trash, and class solidarity (Weagman, 1999). So-called “race traitors” is sometimes used as an explicit or implicit pejorative reference from within white social groups in reference to a white person who has acted in opposition to the social bonds of whiteness (e.g. participating in interracial romantic and platonic relationships, participating in antiracist practices, voicing agreement with antiracist policies). As a school of thought within critical whiteness studies, the race traitor trajectory describes a general disengagement from racial logics of white solidarity, dominance, supremacy, and accompanying social bonds. “White trash” reflects internal class conflicts of whiteness, particularly concerning who Weagman calls the “permanent poor.” In other words, “white trash” whiteness recognizes that not all white people are equally white. When white people are externally positioned as white trash by other white people, the impact is internal racial distancing based on socioeconomic class distinction, i.e. “we” are better (white people) than “that trash” (who are generalized into whiteness, though not initially and perhaps mistakenly). Positioning others as white trash confers an elevated status within whiteness, thus making a case for closer proximity to the stability of the elite strata of whiteness (i.e. original whiteness). This distancing also reveals a distrust of white people within whiteness and highlights the desire for social punishment in response to the historical and possible cross-racial class struggles against elite white people. When used by white people positioned as white trash to self-identify as white trash, it similarly positions a distance and distinction from elite whiteness. To be white trash delimits the benefits and privileges of whiteness conferred upon more elite white people. This class consciousness can, and at times has, work on the side of racial solidarity. It is also enlisted to claim that the benefits and privileges of whiteness are not evenly distributed, playing into a discourse of entitlement to the privileges of whiteness as something white people “deserve.” This discourse is most commonly displayed when white people positioned as white trash express resistance to the idea that all white people benefit from white privilege. While white trash resistance to white privilege is rooted in a racially-informed class consciousness, it is also evasive of the fact that white trash – as socially recognized members of whiteness – are able to benefit from social wages of whiteness, in particular when they exhibit a willingness to engage in hostilities against people of color and Indigenous people

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in order to claim their status as distinct, and thus, still white. Whiteness as performance of “class solidarity” views social class solidarity (e.g. racial and economic) as the pathway to cross-racial alliance. This class-conscious formation of whiteness relies heavily on histories of working-class struggle defined by solidarities and contingent collaborations across racialized communities to define a possibility of antiracist white identity. These formations of race-conscious and antiracist whiteness can be understood as being taken up in an effort to escape the social positioning of whiteness during historical moments when public opinion is effective in situating whiteness as being defined by its historical and contemporary violences. They may also be utilized as people socialized into whiteness grapple with engaging in social identities and practices of allyship and as accomplices in struggles for racial equity, against racial capitalism, or against and outside of the settler state. These and other terms for the discursive formation, enactment, and positioning of whiteness and white people in a racial-capitalist settler-colonial nation-state should be understood as temporal in their usage and application. As social formations shift, so does and will terminology – particularly in tension with the persistence of structural and systemic racism and Indigenous erasure.

References Baldwin, J. (1998). James Baldwin: Collected essays. Library of America. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2002). We are all Americans! The Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the U.S. Race and Society, 5(1), 3–16. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield. DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54–70. Du Bois, W. (1998). Black reconstruction in America 1860–1880. Free Press. Feagin, J. R. (2013). The White racial frame: Centuries of racial framing and counter-framing. Routledge. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. Harris, C. I. (1992). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707. Jansen, J. (2008). Bearing whiteness: A pedagogy of compassion in a time of troubles. Education as Change, 12(2), 59–75. Lensmire, A. (2012). White urban teachers: Stories of fear, violence, and desire. Rowman & Littlefield.

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Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense. McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 90(2), 31–36. Mills, C. W. (2014). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of White people. W.W. Norton & Company. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Roediger, D. R. (2010). Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be White. Knopf Group. Sen, M., & Wasow, O. (2016). Race as a bundle of sticks: Designs that estimate effects of seemingly immutable characteristics. Annual Review of Political Science, 19, 499–522. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Continuum International Publishing Group. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1). Wiegman, R. (1999). Whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity. Boundary 2, 26(3), 115–150. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler-colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. Woods, L. (2015). Killing for inclusion: Racial violence and assimilation into the whiteness gang. In E. Harris & A. Tillis (Eds.), The Trayvon Martin in U.S.: An American tragedy (pp. 113–124). Peter Lang.

CHAPTER 20

Du Bois, W.E.B. Brian D. Lozenski

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Marxism; Postcolonialism and Whiteness; Roediger, David; Whiteness and Labor

… The intellectual and political contributions of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois to the social welfare of peoples of African descent and marginalized populations, globally, cannot be overstated. A towering 20th century intellectual and activist, Du Bois was prominent in the development of the academic fields of sociology, Africana Studies, history, and education. As a theoretician, Du Bois’s ideation spanned the paradigms of legal theory, political theories of democracy, Pan-Africanism, Marxism, and racial theory. Notably, Du Bois represented the epitome of what, today, is referred to as an engaged scholar, whose intellectual work in the academy is inseparable from the political organizing and activism being done in communities vying for political power toward social transformation and self-determination. Du Bois’s capacity for synthesizing theory and practice remains the standard for people who understand those as insoluble elements in projects of human liberation.

1

Biographical Context of Du Boisian Social Theory

Born in 1868, just after the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States, Du Bois’s life spanned the periods of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, both World Wars, and ended at the height of the Civil Rights and African Independence Movements in 1963. Each of these epochs became fodder for Du Bois’s scholarship and political organizing. As a child, growing up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois belonged to one of the few families of color who were free and land-holding. Consequently, he was largely shielded from the harsh realities faced by the majority of black people with whom he would soon become inextricably linked. Du Bois has referenced his childhood experience, growing up in close proximity to white families, as a key factor in his developing racial sensibilities. As a racial theorist, Du Bois was one of the first scholars © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_020

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to articulate race as a social construct that included the notion of whiteness as concomitant and co-constitutive of blackness. Du Bois’s educational journey into adulthood continued to provide this proximity as he studied at both Fisk University, a historically black university in Tennessee, and at the worldrenowned Harvard College in Massachusetts. He then pursued graduate studies in sociology at the University of Berlin and became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Soon after receiving his doctorate, Du Bois accepted a position as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. In a landmark study that would begin to define the contours of Du Bois’s critical scholarship, he accepted funding from the Wharton family – who later founded the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania – to study “the Negro Problem” in Philadelphia. Du Bois was expected to explicate the “pathology” of African Americans who experienced higher rates of morbidity, illness, crime, homelessness, and a lack of education as compared to whites. In the study he titled, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), rather than pathologizing African Americans as inherently susceptible to these ailments, Du Bois systematically identified the ways in which structural violences, and patterns of discrimination and dispossession led to the dehumanizing conditions faced by those socially positioned as black. This early research in Du Bois’s career detailed the ways in which whiteness was not only a psychological construct, but also a mechanism for deeming some as unworthy of living in conditions of relative comfort. As Weis and Fine (2012) describe, the Philadelphia Negro study incorporated methodologically creative means to: (1) Document the economic, historic, educational, and social groundings of these problems. (2) Reverse the gaze of causality that landed squarely on the bodies and genetics of ostensible Black inferiority. (3) Problematize the racialized and classed knots of dispossession and privilege. (p.176) Given the source of the study’s funding, the Philadelphia Negro stands as an example of a counternarrative that situates social ills within a structural critique of the entanglements of capitalism and whiteness. After leaving Philadelphia, and facing racial discrimination in the academy, Du Bois took a faculty position at Atlanta University, a historically black university in Georgia. There he created what has come to be known as the Atlanta School of Sociology, which was largely responsible for creating the methodological foundations of the field of sociology. Although Du Bois’s scholarship in Atlanta predates that of the Chicago School, which is widely credited for shaping the field of Sociology through the 20th century, his work has become

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marginalized in popular historical tracings of the field. According to historians of sociology (Morris, 2017; Rabaka, 2007; Zuckerman, 2004), Du Bois’s contributions to the development of sociological study in the United States included: establishing the first sociological laboratory to engage in empirical research; defying disciplinary boundaries by integrating history, political science, economics, the humanities, and anthropology into sociological study; “pioneering the data-gathering technique known as triangulation” by integrating quantitative analysis, surveying, interviewing, and participant observation; and theorizing race as a social construct rather than a biological fact (Morris, 2017, p. 47). It was during his tenure in Atlanta at the turn of the 20th century when Du Bois authored his most lauded work, The Souls of Black Folk (2015/1903). In this text Du Bois formulated his theorization of double-consciousness, where he argued that due to the conditions of structural white supremacy, black people were subject to a psychological bifurcation that forced them to see themselves and their social worlds through the racial lenses of whiteness and blackness. Du Bois used the metaphor of seeing the world through a veil to illustrate constant racial filtering that circumscribed the lives of black people based on the legal and social structures that ordered society. It was also in The Souls of Black Folk where Du Bois outlined a sharp critique of prominent educational leader Booker T. Washington’s racial uplift ideology, which foregrounded vocational training for black people. Du Bois argued that vocational training alone would continue to relegate black people to the bottom of the social order, and that study in the humanities and social sciences, including African history, would give deeper meaning and provide direction to the liberation struggles of the descendants of enslaved Africans. In 1905, Du Bois and other prominent black scholars, professionals, and activists met in Niagara Falls, Ontario where they created The Niagara Movement, advocating for robust social programs that would meet the intellectual and material needs of black people. While the Niagara Movement was shortlived, it was an antecedent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which has been in existence for over a century. Du Bois served as the NAACP’s first director and spent several decades working for the organization where he was the editor of its popular monthly publication, The Crisis. Although the NAACP was focused on the domestic conditions of African Americans, Du Bois continued to develop an internationalist perspective on the plight of peoples of African descent. This became most evident at the outbreak of the First World War, which became a testing ground for Du Bois’s developing racial theory and pragmatic strategies for black advancement. Du Bois was largely criticized for his stance that African Americans should “close

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ranks” and participate in U.S. involvement in the war. This stance, he later admitted, was problematic (see Dusk of Dawn, 2017a/1940), for it lacked “foresight” and failed to understand the limitations of war as an effective conduit for global democracy (Williams, 2018). Du Bois’s miscalculations about the potential of World War I withstanding, in its aftermath he led the efforts to establish the first Pan-African Congress in 1919, in Paris, bringing together delegates from fifteen countries. After the war the role of European colonization as a primary factor in the dispossession of the masses of African peoples became clearer to Du Bois. He began to think and organize internationally while also developing a more poignant critique of capitalism. His radicalization through the intersections of Pan-Africanism and Marxism served to marginalize his stature in the liberation struggles of African Americans, which marked his later life. It was in his later works, including Black Reconstruction (1935/2017b), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), and the autobiographical Dusk of Dawn (1940/2017a) that Du Bois provided his most insightful theorizations of race, capital, and colonialism. Increasingly, Du Bois faced surveillance and repression from the U.S. government for his leftist leanings, and although he never admitted to being a communist, Du Bois was condemned and tried in 1951 for being a “foreign agent.” Although his case was dismissed, Du Bois’s passport was confiscated. His disillusionment with the potential of the U.S. to ever achieve racial justice was palpable by the end of his life, as he died in 1963 in exile in the newly independent Ghana, at the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement.

2

Du Boisian Theorizations of Whiteness and Capital

For over a century Du Bois has remained essential to theorizations of race, capital, and democracy, and their intersections amidst a broader colonial context. The emergence of a Du Boisian scholarly tradition has transcended the disciplines of Africana Studies, History, and Educational Studies. The Du Boisian tradition requires scholars pay particular attention to the convergence of the psychological and material implications of race and capital. This movement was evident in Du Bois’s early work exploring the psychological consequences of the subhuman material conditions faced by black people in Philadelphia and Atlanta. His theorization of double-consciousness continued this trajectory, explicitly naming the psychological splitting faced by those socially positioned as black. His work also recognized the psychological implications of a racial paradigm on those socially positioned as white. In works like Darkwater

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(1920/1999), Du Bois examined the dialectical dimensions of race on those who seemingly benefitted from its construction. As Cedric Robinson (1983) theorizes, the black radical tradition owes much to the work of Du Bois, who was among the foundational scholars who formulated what has come to be known as the theory of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism emerged from a Du Boisian lens, suggesting that racial ideation predated a capitalist socioeconomic structure, and that racialism is about the degradation of land and labor, of which capitalism is a technology.

3

The Psychology of Race

Du Bois begins his essay The Souls of White Folk (a chapter in the book Darkwater) by clearly defining whiteness as “the ownership of the earth forever and ever” (p. 30). This materialist assertion stands at the heart of Du Boisian racial theory, which posits that race is a social construct that places labor into a hierarchy, which then has psychological reverberations across the sociopolitical spectrum. These reverberations include power relations of dominance and subordination, and social discourses of normalcy and deviance that constitute and reinforce hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. As Du Bois goes on to explore in his essay, there are dilemmas that arise for white people as they attempt to enact this force of totalizing ownership. These dilemmas sit on the shaky foundation of the social apparatus that underpins the lie that people positioned as white are superior. Du Bois begins his earlier and most popular book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903/2015), with the premise that people of color and specifically people constructed as “black” must ask themselves: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (p. 7). This question punctuated Du Bois’s lifetime of racial analysis. For a group to be considered “a problem” means that the group is, first, being “considered,” and thus constructed by others. This consideration depends on the absence of subjectivity and agency. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois grapples with these dilemmas of subjectivity, most famously in his theorization of black double consciousness. Du Bois suggests that black people, as problems, exist in a reality where they are constantly seen through the lens of whiteness as beasts of burden, only to be pitied or exploited. Simultaneously, he describes black people as enacting their subjectivities on the world, thus, creating a dual consciousness about the nature of reality. Du Bois argues that double consciousness elicits a feeling of tearing across the psyche of black people. “One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 8).

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The complexity of Du Boisian racial theory, however, does not let people who are constructed as white to be unmolested by racialism. Du Bois describes how the dynamics of race serve to not only provide an inflated sense of accomplishment for white people, generally, who can continue to remain ignorant of world history, but it also obfuscates the denigration of white labor by masking socioeconomic class. It is in the latter assertion that Du Boisian theorizations of whiteness and capital are most palpable.

4

The Materiality of Race

In Black Reconstruction (1935/2017b), Du Bois explicitly lays out the ways in which race becomes a useful mechanism to blind white labor to its exploitation by an elite planter class, who benefit from both the economic arrangements of capitalism and the social arrangements of racism in the late 19th century. He writes, “But the poor whites and their leaders could not for a moment contemplate a fight of united white and black labor against their exploiters” (p. 27). A fundamental question Du Bois poses in the massive study of the post-Civil War reordering of power in the U.S., explores how a small minority of white elites can control a disproportionately larger population of white and black laborers. Like The Philadelphia Negro did over 30 years prior by explicating social conditions in Philadelphia, Black Reconstruction provided a substantive alternative to mainstream narratives of the intention and outcomes of the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Du Bois points to this period as one of the most significant in human history as it represented the final collapse of the global slave trade and an essential reordering within the contestations of labor and capital. As Robinson (1983) notes, the importance of Du Bois’s analysis was in the construction of the humanity of black people. “It was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance that these Black men, women, and children had for American development. It was as labor” (p. 199). The naming of black labor as a historical entity represented a radical historical shift in understandings of the relationship between capital and labor due to the assertion that “American slavery was a subsystem of world capitalism” (p. 200).

5

Applications of Du Boisian Social Theory

Du Bois’s work is deeply embedded in critical theory to the extent that it is impossible to trace the myriad scholars who have drawn from his tradition. Du Boisian scholarship entails merging historiography, mixed-methods empirical

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research, and political activism in the service of structural transformation. Foundational theories that have important explanatory implications for the workings of race and capital owe their origins to this tradition. Although the coinage of the phrase “racial capitalism” derives from Robinson’s (1983) Black Marxism, Robinson dedicates much of his tracing of this theorization to the scholarship of Du Bois. Du Bois was among the first scholars to begin to apply Marxist thought to the context of the U.S. In this application, he troubled traditional Marxist framings that did not take into account race as inextricably linked to capital accumulation and labor exploitation. Educational theorists have depended on Du Bois to deepen racial theory regarding the use of schooling as a technology of white supremacy. Building from Du Bois, who argued that educational self-determination for black communities should take priority over desegregation (Du Bois, 1935b), Du Boisian scholars have explicated how anti-blackness is inherent in most educational systems. Critical whiteness scholars have named Du Bois as one of the creators of the field. Historian David Roediger’s foundational text, The Wages of Whiteness, is another work that furthers a Du Boisian theory of the insoluble relationship between whiteness and capitalism. Arguing that racial logics ultimately degrade white labor as well as black labor, Roediger connects Du Bois’s articulation of the psychological benefits of race, writing, “The problem is not just that the white working class is at critical junctures manipulated into racism, but that it comes to think of itself and its interests as white” (p. 12). Du Bois’s unyielding assault on the global racial order remains the bedrock upon which entire fields of thought have been erected. Beginning with his life experiences and extending through his empirical research, Du Bois’s social theory has left a profound mark on the world, planting seeds for posterity.

References Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Does the Negro need separate schools (pp. 423–431). Howard University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1945). Color and democracy: Colonies and peace. Harcourt, Brace and Co. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). Darkwater: Voices from within the veil. Courier Corporation. (Original work published 1920) Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015). Souls of Black folk. Routledge. (Original work published 1903) Du Bois, W. E. B. (2017a). Dusk of dawn! An essay toward an autobiography of race concept. Routledge. (Original work published 1940)

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Du Bois, W. E. B. (2017b). Black reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860– 1880. Routledge. (Original work published 1935) Du Bois, W. E. B., & Eaton, I. (1899). The Philadelphia Negro: A social study (No. 14). The University. Morris, A. (2017). The scholar denied: WEB Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. University of California Press. Rabaka, R. (2007). WEB Du Bois and the problems of the twenty-first century: An essay on Africana critical theory. Lexington Books. Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Weis, L., & Fine, M. (2012). Critical bifocality and circuits of privilege: Expanding critical ethnographic theory and design. Harvard Educational Review, 82(2), 173–201. Williams, C. (2018, February 19). W.E.B. Du Bois, World War I and the question of failure. Black Perspectives. https://www.aaihs.org/w-e-b-du-bois-world-war-i-and-thequestion-of-failure/ Zuckerman, P. (2004). The social theory of WEB Du Bois. Sage Publications.

CHAPTER 21

Early Childhood Education and Whiteness Erin T. Miller

Related Entries: Brown v. Board; Neoliberalism; Ontological Expansiveness; Settler Colonialism

1

Whiteness and Early Childhood

Early childhood is generally defined in the United States as the stage in life between birth and age eight. It is shaped by and has a complex relationship with whiteness via its entanglement with the ecological, social and political inheritances of settler colonialism. The very idea that childhood is a unique and special phase of human development is a construct ordained by whiteskinned, European philosophers and educators of the 1600s and 1700s (i.e., Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, and Froebel) and has fueled considerable European and Euro-American research over the last 300 years responsible for compartmentalizing, generalizing, and labeling “appropriate” behaviors for various maturational phases of childhood as if they were universal, objective, and neutrally experienced by various groups of racialized peoples. The ways that education concerning young children is policed to support such hegemonic understandings of development is the outgrowth of these Eurocentric interpretations of childhood. Despite the plethora of counter narratives which validate how experiences during the early years of life are culturally contoured and widely diverse, the Piagetian stronghold of “normal” and “ideal” childhood behaviors drives policies and practices that concern all things related to child-rearing and child-educating in the early years. To provide practical examples of diversity in childhood norms, ethnographer Barbara Rogoff’s cross-cultural research (2003) illuminates how Efe toddlers in the Congo skillfully cut fruit with machetes; how Guatemalan six-year-olds care for newborns; and, how in New Guinea, Fore babies expertly handle fires. Yet, these cultural norms stand in deficient divergence to what European and Euro-Americans have defined (largely based on observations of European and Euro-American communities) as developmentally appropriate, legal behavior for children. Consider, for example, that in the United Kingdom, a parent could be charged with willful neglect for leaving a child under the age of 16 at home without © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_021

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an adult (Family and Parenting Institute, 2007) and in the United States, The American Academy of Pediatrics (2017) recommends that matches and lighters are kept locked away from young children. In these ways, such flagship organizations define and perpetuate “norms” for child development as universal without consideration to the myopic zoom on European and Euro-American children upon which they were constructed.

2

The Effects of Whiteness on Child Welfare in America

Western, settler-colonial understandings of early childhood are not merely harmless interpretations of human development. They are tools that have been used by those who came to be known as white people to perpetuate global racism and cultural genocide. A resounding example of this is related to the ways Euro-American standards for child welfare have led to the removal of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous and African American children from their homes over the last three centuries in the U.S. From the forced separation of African American families because they were not considered human within the institution of slavery to the era of Indian Boarding Schools with explicit missions to commit cultural genocide on Indigenous children, colonial settler logics continue to flourish through modern-day manifestations of foster care practices. This far-reaching assault on diverse cultural child-rearing practices relies on Eurocentric understandings of what are considered “appropriate” practices in early childhood and of who gets to decide and enforce those standards. In a special NPR series, Native Foster Care: Lost Children Shattered Families (2011), Sullivan and Waters report that a staggering number of Native American children continue to be placed in foster care with white families, despite the Indian Childcare Welfare Act of 1978 intended as a reparation from laws and policies that forcibly removed indigenous children from their homes and communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. To provide a state-specific example, between 2002 and 2013, the Main Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Commission (2015) reported that native children in Maine were five times more likely than non-native children to be placed in foster care. Repeatedly, Indigenous children are removed from their families for “neglect” (or for no reasons given to victims at all) characterized by subjective and biased interpretations around cultural practices such as communal food sharing, cohabiting, and “kinship care” (Denby, 2015). gkisdtanamoogk, commissioned to research the Main Wabanki child separation cases describes to viewers in the documentary, First Light (2016), “Imagine the love you have for your little one. Then, imagine someone outside the family, someone you don’t even know, making claims on

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your little one [by suggesting] I don’t like the way you live. Imagine what the loss is when an entire community loses its children.” This is but one example of how Western notions of “appropriate” childcare have dismantled communities of racialized others.

3

The Impact of Whiteness on Early Formal Education

In the more formal context of school, whiteness dominates curricula, pedagogies and assessments of “effective” early childhood education. These are largely shared as developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) by the National Council of Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and “constitute an approach to teaching grounded in the research on how young children develop and learn and in what is known about effective early education” (NAEYC, Such Piagetian influenced benchmarks are rooted in the intellectual and social traditions of Western industrialized societies, which include, among other things, individualistic notions of child maturation in the name of progress. Much of the science used to define what is appropriate for early childhood is based on positivistic orientations that value detached observations, generalizations from particulars and which rely on a progression of linear movement through hierarchical bodies of knowledge. These notions rest within a longstanding tradition of colonizing, truth-claiming educational research that subsumes naming and sorting knowledge as an integral component of colonialism. Compartmentalizing a whole into disparate parts is endemic to colonial epistemologies which have run roughshod over conceptions of life as holistic, complex and interdependent: epistemological and ontological orientations of the world held by many whom were constructed as racialized “others” through the normalization of whiteness. The racialized stratifying of early childhood education is evidenced in myriad ways: the physical structures of early childhood centers, the influence of Western epistemologies on neoliberal pedagogies, and nationally and state adopted curriculum and assessment for young children. Australian researcher, Melinda Miller (2016), drawing on Harris’ (2007) notion of whiteness as property, demonstrates how whiteness can be traced through the physical structures that house early childhood programs. The very proximity of the nursery room and the toddler room in early childcare centers on opposites sides of the building to the 3 and 4-year-old rooms, is a physical representation of the western thought that children ideally should progress through life with other children in similar age groups. The organization and separation of older children and younger children with walls is bound by western ideals of childcare

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that compartmentalize the experiences of children and organize them by age and developmental progression. In relation to the privileging of the importance of nature within the wave of neoliberal early childhood education programs, human centric and universalized views of place abound, promoting the suggestion that children and nature belong together as sites of innocence and purity and that children today are experiencing a “nature deficit disorder” (Nxumaldo & Cedillo, 2015). Such an Anthropocene perspective celebrates destructive power over the environment as something intrinsic to being human and “fails to differentiate between human cultures and their radically uneven impacts on the environment [and that] not all cultures everywhere see themselves as separate to nature, omnipotent and invincible (Taylor, 2017, p. 1449). These perspectives conceive of nature (non-human) as a separate site of discoverable territory, unoccupied, and static and resource-rich. They effectively work to dehumanize landscapes through erasing Indigenous presences. In these ways, colonizing, racialized notions of the environment, Inform the dominant North American pedagogical imagination, side-stepping the colonial, raced, and gendered politics impacting accessibility and affordability of outdoor education programs, and they are marked by an absence of critical engagement with Euro Western assumptions underpinning what counts as “normal” childhood experiences of nature. (Nxumaldo & Cedillo, 2015, p. 101) Racialized bias seeps through early childhood curricula and assessments oftused in the education of young children, the effects of which can be devastating on children’s academic trajectories if they do not measure up to idealized white norms for childhood development. It is widely heralded in teacher education programs that lowered expectations among educators toward children lead to school failure (Ladson-Billings, 2009); yet, deficit views abound precisely because of the legacies of settler colonial logic on early childhood research and early childhood education. A profound example of this related to early childhood literacy is Hart and Risley’s (1995) word gap study, critiqued widely for its methodological flaws (Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Michaels, 2013). This oft-cited study on U.S. children’s everyday language experiences in early childhood constructed the major finding that children from professional households hear 30 million more words than children from poor families. Hart and Risely extrapolated that by the time children reach four years of age, the social experiences in the homes of welfare families will produce such a “word gap” with children from professional families that school failure is a likely

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early “catastrophe” because of such deficient childhood vocabulary. Hart and Risley assert that poverty stunts early language development (as defined by the “norms” of the professional families). Although the study side-stepped an explicit racial lens by forwarding class as the major reason for such differences, Flores and Rosa (2015) suggest the raciolinguistic approaches used by Hart and Risley position racialized others as inherently deficit in their knowledge by objectifying, analyzing and qualifying the early experiences of children of color compared to an esteemed white (and middle class) language standard. Yet, these ideologies are part and parcel to the body of knowledge that constitutes early childhood education. To this point, the Hart and Risley study is widely embraced and continues to be taught, affirmed, and readily digested in early childhood professional spaces. For example, The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) draws upon these deficit understandings in their 2009 position statement on developmentally appropriate practice suggesting that children “growing up in low-income families have dramatically less rich experience with language in their homes than do middle class children.” The NAEYC relies on such assertions to dole out recommendations to catch low-income children (disproportionally children of color in the U.S.) up to children from middle class norms. In these ways, pervasive pathologizing continues to exist to support raciolinguism despite overwhelming evidence that differences in language acquisition are not indicative of cognitive superiority, an idea that in and of itself perpetuates and reinforces the racism of genetic sciences.

4

Early Childhood as an Age of Innocence: A Pathway for Race-Evasion

The hegemonic white ideals of early childhood as a time of innocence are reflected in the developmental paradigms of Western science that continue to be imported, elevated and heralded as essential knowledge in early childhood education programs. Despite widespread assertions that young children can engage in critical thought to challenge and deconstruct issues of race and racism (Souto-Manning, 2009; Vasquez, 2003), gaps in research hovering around the intersectionality of early childhood and racism can largely be attributed to Western paradigms that suggest young children are not capable of thinking about complex social issues until they enter developmental stages of concrete thought (around the maturational age of eight). Research that has been done on young children’s racialized behavior, however, suggests that it is during this time where opportunities abound for children to confront racial inequities (Vandantam, 2010). In an ethnographic study of how her own three children

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are socialized, Miller (2015) suggests adult avoidance of these topics is often a mask for the lack of competency educators and parents feel in taking up discussions about whiteness. It is also during these early years in human life that internalized notions of inferiority settle for some children of color. An important and well-cited reminder of this is Kenneth and Mammie Clark’s (1940) doll study. In this study, African American children between the ages of 3–7 were asked to identify which diaper clad dolls, identical except for their color, were “nice,” “pretty,” “ugly,” and “bad.” The majority of the children pointed to the brown-skinned dolls to represent negative attributes. While some scholars argue the doll study enjoyed an inflated historical significance, it is largely credited as being an important component of the Brown v. Board Supreme Court case because it demonstrated how young children of color can internalize white supremacy to their own psychological detriment. Reminders of low racialized esteem can also be found in examples of children of color imagining themselves as white in stories (Elliot, 2019). This erasure of people of color (Miller, 2015) also occurs, conversely, as white children “white out” people of color in the white imaginary. While research has demonstrated how race-centric spaces can be successful insulators against the risk factor of internalized inferiority for children of color, more attention should be paid to the ways white children – the inheritors of whiteness – are being or not being schooled to challenge whiteness in white spaces. The antecedent to this is a return to the Eurocratic formation of early childhood as a construct and will include an intentional challenge to the romantic ideals of childhood as a time of racial innocence and purity.

References Clark, K. B., & Clark, M. K. (1940). Skin color as a factor in racial identification of Negro preschool children. The Journal of Social Psychology, 11(1), 159–169. Denby, R. W. (2015). Kinship care: Increasing child well-being through practice, policy, and research. Springer Publishing Company. Dudley-Marling, C., & Lucas, K. (2009). Pathologizing the language and culture of poor children. Language Arts, 86(5), 362–370. Elliot, Z. (2019). When writing fantasy, Black magic matters. The record.com. https://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/9109581-when-writing-fantasy-blackmagic-matters-says-zetta-elliott/ Family and Parenting Institute. (2007). Is it legal? A parent’s guide to the law. https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/pdf/FPI%20is%20it%20legal%20Feb_08.pdf Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171.

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gkisdtanamoogk. (2016). First light [Documentary]. Upstander Films, Inc. Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1710–1791. Hart, B., & Risely, T. (1994). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. John Wiley & Sons. Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission. (2015). Beyond the mandate: Continuing the conversation. http://www.mainewabanakitrc.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/07/TRC-Report-Expanded_July2015.pdf Michaels, S. (2013). Commentary: Déjà Vu all over again: What’s wrong with Hart & Risley and a “linguistic deficit” framework in early childhood education? LEARNing Landscapes, 7(1), 23–41. Miller, E. (2015). Discourses of whiteness and blackness: An ethnographic study of three young children learning to be White. Ethnography and Education, 10(2), 137– 153. Miller, M. (2016). Whiteness scholarship in early childhood education. NZRECE Journal, 19, 49–61. National Association for the Education of Young Children. (2009). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age 8. National Association for the Education of Young Children. (2020, April 1). Developmentally appropriate practice. Retrieved September 5, 2020, from https://www.naeyc.org/resources/topics/dap Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99–112. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press. Souto-Manning, M. (2009). Negotiating culturally responsive pedagogy through multicultural children’s literature: Towards critical democratic literacy practices in a first grade classroom, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9(1), 50–74. Sullivan, L., & Waters, A. (2011). Native foster care: Lost children shattered families. National Public Radio. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. The American Academy of Pediatrics. (2017). Safety and prevention. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-home/Pages/ Kitchen-Safety.aspx Vasquez, V. M. (2003). Negotiating critical literacies with young children. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Vedantam, S. (2010). The hidden brain: How our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives. Random House Digital, Inc.

CHAPTER 22

Elementary Education and Whiteness Ann M. Mason, Younkyung Hong and Ryan C. Kiesel

Related Entries: Baldwin, James; Discourse and Whiteness; Ladson-Billings, Gloria; Second Wave Whiteness Studies; White Supremacy

… United States elementary schools can be understood as key locations for young people’s acculturation to norms of whiteness. In elementary school, young children experience explicit curriculum that communicates the expectations of academic and social literacies, while implicit curricula simultaneously transmit messages about what is right, good, and true according to the dominant culture. These explicit and implicit expectations of elementary school are necessary components of the U.S. racial project – a project that relies upon the continued maintenance of a populace believing that what is good, right, and true must look, sound, and act in accordance with the norms of whiteness. Those for whom the norms of whiteness are neither endemic nor desirable thus experience schooling as a persistent form of suffering. Aligning one’s learning with explicit academic literacies (e.g., being a good reader means choosing a “just-right” book and not one that poses too great a challenge to one’s current school-assessed vocabulary or comprehension skills) is well understood as a demand for success in elementary school. However, the fact that these literacies are also culturally and institutionally determined is typically not as deeply considered. The intellectual roots of mainstream academic content in the U.S. have been Eurocentric, patriarchal, and they consistently erase the stories of people and groups with marginalized identities. In this entry, we refer to the current manifestations of these roots as the whiteness of elementary school. Regardless of how well critical scholars and practitioners may recognize and critique the whiteness of elementary school curriculum, most of what is included in state and national standards for elementary school children remains rooted in white logics and histories. The implicit messages in elementary school curriculum, pedagogy, and physical environments, however, are less visible and less understood as key aspects of how school operates as a force for the maintenance and reproduction of white supremacy. This entry © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_022

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addresses some less-visible ways in which elementary school plays its role as a reliable accomplice in this process. First, though, note that normative culture also plays a major role in shaping which adult bodies are in elementary schools to begin with; the predominant whiteness and femininity of the elementary school teaching force and the gendered expectations of the role itself constitute living reminders of these historical and ongoing forces.

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Logics of Whiteness in U.S. Elementary Schools

Elementary schools are culturally white spaces. This section demonstrates how the normative whiteness of elementary school is rooted in individualistic logics that are inextricable from the capitalist building blocks of white supremacy. The disciplining nature of whiteness-as-individualism operates in ways that are visible, audible, and experienced in the body. Individualistic cultures place more emphasis on independence and respect for personal space than on communal space or collective responsibility. These aspects align with the behavioral expectations of elementary school students. Specifically, elementary schools are often peppered with language around the concept of “kindness.” Being friendly and helpful in this context is, in part, based on the premise of respecting others’ personal space. U.S. students learn respecting each other’s space as soon as they enter kindergarten. Schools teach this expectation in various ways; for example, teachers ask students to imagine that each of them is in a bubble and should be mindful of their own and others’ bubbles. Respecting personal space means more than securing one’s own physical space. Teachers consistently direct students to complete their own task before caring for their classmates. In this regard, kindness – being friendly and helpful – in the U.S elementary classroom is expected and valued when one helps others after completing their own responsibility, rarely in the completion of shared tasks that build collective value. The concept of responsibility in the U.S. elementary classroom features individualism and rarely includes communal responsibility, or responsibility for and with others. Similar to how kindness is valued and operates, one’s responsibility for one’s own task and achievement is foremost. In this kind of context, self-expression is considered part of a student’s academic ability and achievement, as well as an indicator of independence. In contrast to a culture in which students are taught to listen to other people rather than voice their own opinion, quiet students in the U.S. elementary classroom are often viewed as lacking in participation and confidence. Furthermore, elementary schools teach students to be able to verbally express themselves, instead of

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enabling different routes of self-expression, including non-verbal and collective expression. Whereas the concept of “community” might suggest communal goals and collective investments (Philip et al., 2013), when it is framed within U.S. elementary education contexts, community is often linked to individual responsibility. It is not difficult to find elementary schools that refer to themselves as communities while maintaining conventional features of teaching, communication, values, and physical spaces. For instance, school walls tend to be decorated with slogans about communal goals, but behavior within the same schools tends to emphasize the responsibility of individualized property and independent problem-solving. Similarly, common expectations around parent communication and collaboration with families are rooted in the responsibility of each family, rather than in shared leadership and communication. These contradictory associations are exemplary of how whiteness itself is a poorly articulated identity and system, and how white people often live with failures and/or refusals to see our own cultures and histories. As James Baldwin (1962/1999) wrote, “they [white people] are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand” (p. 67).

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Capitalism

Elementary school teachers experience countless opportunities to learn how to increase their capitalist efficiency. Capitalism is particularly well served by the notion that the U.S. education system is rife with problems that current policies and practices are failing to solve. Elementary schools consistently adopt new policies, educational models, and technologies that emphasize time and cost efficiency. The neoliberal thinkers behind these innovations approach educational issues with a business lens; they view students, parents, and teachers as educational consumers and attract them by inviting solutions to endemic problems in education, such as individualized learning, parent communication for working families, and skills for a technology-oriented future. The business-minded perspective has generated a social discourse and belief that a materially well-resourced classroom is required for a quality education. A prominent example of this trend is the adoption of technology in the classroom, specifically iPads or other tablets distributed to individual students. School districts tout their “1:1 technology initiatives” to attract families, and vendors jump at the chance to sell district administrators the latest software or hardware necessary to build those material resources. Of course, these technologies need consistent updating, and so a single purchase is rare.

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Industrial products filling the spaces of elementary schools cannot avoid shaping the values, experience, thoughts, interactions, culture, and context of the student and the classroom. Spaces (such as assigned seats), furniture, and items distributed to individual students allow them to practice responsibility with personal property and learn capitalist rules of ownership. Also, students are accustomed to spending time efficiently completing their individual tasks within the certain spatial and temporal boundaries planned and set by the authority, usually a teacher. As school districts spend increasing amounts of money, professional development time, and human resources on electronic devices, elementary schools increasingly encourage students to solve problems and participate in activities on them. As individual students seem to be able to experience various activities and practice transcending a limited classroom space and time, technology in the classroom is often regarded as individualized instruction. While advertising that technology bridges various gaps through a customized learning process, the current education system maintains the premise that, if students work harder, they can solve more problems and do a better job in school. Also, this often directly links to better acknowledgment by teachers and peers. Each of these aspects greatly resembles the concepts of free competition, opportunity cost, efficiency, and legitimizing supremacy in capitalism. One might argue that technology has improved the collective work environment as it provides better tools and makes collaboration processes easier. Despite advanced devices and applications, collaboration with electronic devices perpetuates marginalization as the interfaces are not accessible for all people. In addition, collective work with technology can make individuals’ input more visible; this aspect can contribute to marginalized students being even more excluded from classroom work. Elementary education rooted in capitalism functions to naturalize this system. Elementary school thus plays a key role in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist logics, a key component of white supremacy.

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Whiteness in Elementary School Pedagogy

Elementary school reproduces white supremacy through pedagogy. Curriculum and pedagogy shape and are shaped by the cultural context, of course, which we have explored in the previous section. Here, we consider some examples of how the whiteness of elementary school is visible in its pedagogies. Specifically, this section discusses how the ways that teachers talk to children, the construction of “classroom management,” and conceptions of stage developmentalism contribute to the demands placed upon all children in elementary

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schools to adhere to oppressive norms of whiteness that prepare them for life in a white supremacist society. Delpit (2006) famously guided educators to understand the inherent whiteness in the phrasing of questions like, “do you want to push in that chair on your way to line up?” This culturally specific (white) pattern of adult-child interaction is a command masquerading as a question. Similarly, elementary teachers might ask questions like, “Is that how we treat our friends?,” never intending the child to offer a genuine response. Since this and other early research in culturally relevant pedagogies (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995) and in more recent iterations (e.g., Paris & Alim, 2014; San Pedro, 2018), scholars have suggested that white teachers at the very least learn to validate their students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires in their curriculum and pedagogy. Nevertheless, the expectation that children adhere to white norms of language and discourse remains virtually untouched in mainstream elementary school practice.

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Classroom Management

Elementary teachers have access to countless resources for building systems and practices to support the types of behavior they want to see from their students. Even so, new elementary teachers consistently report that classroom management is among the most difficult things to learn on the job, and that their coursework and experiences in teacher preparation had little effect on their ability to “manage” a classroom. Classroom management strategies tend to emphasize the norms of efficiency and order discussed in the previous section on the impact of capitalism on elementary school curriculum and pedagogies. Since the introduction of classroom management strategies that purport to focus on community-building instead of punishment for what is perceived as negative behavior (for example, Responsive Classroom or Cooperative Learning strategies), children have become accustomed to the expectation that they support the community by upholding norms of positive behavior at school. While this is not necessarily entirely negative, it can become fertile ground for production of raced and classed notions of who does the policing and who needs to be policed. Consider a white kindergartener who attends a predominately white school reporting to his parent, “school was mostly good, but Anthony (one of a few students of color in the classroom) was having trouble today…” At that moment, this white child in his first year of formal schooling already knows his place in the authoritative structure. The white child’s body was right and good; this was assumed. The brown body of his classmate was his to police, to observe, to control.

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Developmentalism

Stage developmentalism, or the notion that people grow and change according to a predetermined set of cumulative milestones, has been explained as culturally myopic and simplistic. Relatedly, the pervasive belief that certain understandings of the world are only available according to one’s life “stage” has a dramatic impact on how teachers perceive what and how young children can learn. Unsurprisingly, these notions tend to be rooted in a deep desire to protect what is widely perceived as children’s innocence, which is rarely interrogated for its inherent whiteness. Pedagogically, stage developmentalism thus contributes to the notion of teacher neutrality or the apolitical culture of elementary school. Instead of acknowledging that the outside world is always shaping children’s experiences and perspectives inside of school, stage developmentalism provides a protective shield for the cultural desire to protect the perceived innocence of white children at the expense of the lived experiences of their classmates of color. This transmits yet another cultural message that whiteness determines what is right, good, and true.

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Second-Wave Critical Whiteness Studies as Interventions in Elementary Settings

As elementary classrooms are understood as culturally white spaces, it is important to analyze the ways in which teachers and teacher actions work to maintain or disrupt white supremacy in schools. Classroom teachers continue to be disproportionately white and female (AACTE, 2018). Since the 1990s, teacher licensure programs have begun to require coursework on diversity and cultural competency for pre-service teachers. Recent research explores the possibilities and complexities of growing a teaching force that recognizes how white supremacy is endemic to the U.S. schooling system. Nevertheless, as diversity courses and the discourses surrounding them become the norm, individual courses will never instigate the systemic changes necessary to transform the whiteness of elementary schools. Given the whiteness of the teaching profession and the culture of schooling, the institutionalization of Whiteness as ‘normalcy’ (Giroux, 1997), and, as Baldwin (1962/1999) reminds us, that individual white people tend to misunderstand their own histories, all people who desire to become teachers have been socialized to and through a white supremacist system. Each of them, particularly white pre-service teachers, require structured practice in understanding themselves as raced, and questioning how race and racism, contemporary

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and historical, shape and influence classroom interactions. Simultaneously, elementary education licensure programs must work to increase the number of students of color they attract, retain, and support into the early years of teaching, which can be particularly taxing for new teachers of color entering the unquestionably white cultural contexts of U.S. elementary schools. The development of critical racial consciousness is a cognitively and emotionally challenging task. In many cases teachers are able to develop a cognitively progressive disposition, but then do not realize an agentive practice in their work with children (e.g., Mason, 2016). Because this process is so highly personal, many white teachers struggle to engage with its emotional aspects, retreating into defensiveness and defaulting to a ‘race-evasive’ stance (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016). Because whiteness allows white people to step into and step out of racialized stress, white teachers are under-trained in handling the emotional toll involved in deepening their racial consciousness. Teacher education programs must cultivate environments that acknowledge the emotional stress of maintaining or developing a race-visible way of being in the world.

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Conclusion

Elementary school is often referred to as a microcosm of society at large. The mundane and remarkable daily struggles that plague society are similarly at play in the classrooms, halls, and playgrounds where our young children spend their days. As children learn the written rules of getting along, sharing, being a member of a community, and conducting oneself in public, they are simultaneously soaking in the unwritten rules of succeeding according to the norms of whiteness in the United States. These rules are often most visible to those who have never and could not have followed them, and so it is they to whom we will turn when U.S. schools finally develop the courage to move through and beyond the repressive hold of whiteness.

References American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. (2018). Student diversity is up but teachers are mostly white. Retrieved December 1, 2019, from https://aacte.org/ news-room/aacte-in-the-news/347-student-diversity-is-up-but-teachers-aremostly-white

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Baldwin, J. (1999, January). A letter to my nephew. The Progressive, 67. (Original work published 1962) Delpit, L. (2006). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. The New Press. Giroux, H. (1997). Rewriting the discourse of racial identity: Towards a pedagogy and politics of whiteness. Harvard Educational Review, 67(2), 285–321. Jupp, J. C., Berry, T. R., & Lensmire, T. J. (2016). Second-wave white teacher identity studies: A review of white teacher identity literatures from 2004 through 2014. Review of Educational Research, 20(10), 1–41. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Education Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Mason, A. M. (2016). Taking time, breaking codes: Moments in white teacher candidates’ exploration of racism and teacher identity. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(8), 1045–1058. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100. Philip, T. M., Way, W., Garcia, A. D., Schuler-Brown, S., & Navarro, O. (2013). When educators attempt to make “community” a part of classroom learning: The dangers of (mis)appropriating students’ communities into schools. Teaching and Teacher Education, 34, 174–183. San Pedro, T. (2018). Abby as ally: An argument for culturally disruptive pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 55(6), 1193–1232.

CHAPTER 23

Ellison, Ralph Timothy J. Lensmire

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Psychoanalysis of Whiteness; White Supremacy

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Introduction

When his writing is mentioned in educational literatures, it is Ralph Ellison’s (1952/1995) acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, that is most often referenced. Considerably less attention has been paid to Ellison’s (1953/1995, 1986) two collections of essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. In addition to powerful reflections on and insights into literature, black experience, and democracy in the United States, these volumes offer resources for a compelling account of white racial identity (see Lensmire, 2017). Ellison believed that scapegoating rites or rituals were crucial to the creation and maintenance of white American selves, and that at the center of these scapegoating rites were black people.

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Scapegoating, Stereotypes and White Racial Identity

In his readings of American literature and popular culture, Ellison drew special attention to racist stereotypes and caricatures. Ellison (1953/95) thought it a mistake to conceive of such stereotypes and caricatures as merely incorrect information or to imagine that their significance was exhausted in their role as “simple racial clichés introduced into society by a ruling class to control political and economic realities” (p. 28). For Ellison, racist stereotypes should also be recognized as a particular example or instance of a broader category of scapegoating rituals in which white people participated, as part of creating and maintaining their sense of themselves as white. Another example of scapegoating that Ellison (1986) analyzed was lynching, in which white people – in contrast to the symbolic killing performed by racist representation – literally killed black people in a “primitive blood rite of human sacrifice” (p. 177).

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For Ellison, scapegoating rituals had three parts or moments (see Eddy, 2003). In the first, the scapegoat was thought of as part of or as a stand-in for the group. Then, in the second moment, the scapegoat was separated or pushed out from the group, was declared an Other. Finally, in the third moment, the group experienced a renewed and strengthened sense of its own identity. In his analysis of scapegoating rituals in the lives of poor Southern white farmers during Jim Crow, Ellison argued that it was exactly the fact that the social and material conditions of these white farmers’ lives were so similar to those of their black neighbors that caused anxiety for them. What if they weren’t actually different from and superior to black people? Sitting, as they did, at the bottom of white hierarchies of social worth and standing, all that these impoverished farmers had going for them was their whiteness, which they asserted (and reasserted, again and again) in scapegoating rituals. They needed to reassert their whiteness because it was not secure, given their closeness to blackness. In other words, these white farmers needed ways to reassure themselves and others of their whiteness and superiority. As Ellison (1986) put it: In rationalizing their condition, they required victims, real or symbolic, and in the daily rituals which gave support to their cherished myth of white supremacy, anti-Negro stereotypes and epithets served as symbolic substitutions for the primitive blood rite of human sacrifice to which they resorted in times of racial tension. (p. 177) Ellison thought it fortunate that the “Southern rituals of race were usually confined to the realm of the symbolic” (p. 177). However, when these rituals did not suffice in reassuring white people of their whiteness and superiority, the lynch mob did its work. Ellison did not believe that it was only poor white people who engaged in scapegoating. He also analyzed the crucial role that scapegoating black people played in the creation of the United States. Ellison (1986) thought of the Constitution as a sacred document and a “script by which we seek to act out the drama of democracy, and the stage upon which we enact our roles” (p. 330). However, for Ellison, the Founding Fathers’ actions clashed straightaway with their noble spoken lines. He argued that the Founding Fathers balked in the face of the economic consequences of dismantling slavery and retreated from the hard work and uncertainty that accompanied the pursuit of democracy: At Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers were presented the fleeting opportunity of mounting to the very peak of social possibility afforded by democracy. But after ascending to within a few yards of the summit they

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paused, finding the view to be one combining splendor with terror… if there was radiance and glory in the future that stretched so grandly before them, there was also mystery and turbulence and darkness astir in its depths… So, having climbed so heroically, they descended and laid a foundation for democracy at a less breathtaking altitude, and in justification of their failure of nerve before the challenge of the summit, the Founding Fathers committed the sin of American racial pride. (pp. 334–335) In other words, the Founding Fathers scapegoated black people and claimed that slavery would continue, and that actual democracy was impossible, because of the inferiority of black people (rather than because of the Founding Fathers’ own inadequacies and failure of nerve). This early betrayal of what Ellison thought of as America’s sacred creed of equality had serious consequences for the generations of Americans that followed. Obviously, the consequences for black Americans were profound and horrific, including slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, mass incarceration, and racist representation (seemingly without end). However, Ellison thought that there were negative consequences for white Americans, as well. He believed that the continual scapegoating of black people required to reassure white people of their own superiority and to convince them of the goodness of the United States caused white people to live in a fog; that this continual scapegoating made white people unable to see themselves and their country clearly. Ellison imagined white people as caught or stuck in a dilemma. He thought that, on the one hand, white people believed in equality and wanted to live in a society characterized by it. On the other hand, white people knew that U.S. society featured, not equality, but massive inequality. Ellison thought that scapegoating was the way that most white Americans dealt with this dilemma, this conflict of desiring equality and knowing that the United States did not pursue or live up to this ideal. Instead of taking up antiracist action to change society, white people scapegoated black people in order to get temporary relief from the tension between their noble spoken lines and their ignoble practices. Or as Ellison put it: Whatever else the Negro stereotype might be as a social instrumentality, it is also a key figure in a magic rite by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising between his democratic beliefs and certain antidemocratic practices, between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not… Perhaps the object of the stereotype is not so much to crush the Negro as to console the white man. (pp. 28, 41)

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Conclusion

Ellison’s writing on white racial identities makes at least two important contributions to work on whiteness and race in education. First, his work illuminates the significance of people of color to the ongoing social production of white racial identities. Since white people in the United States lead segregated lives, it is often assumed that people of color are not present in those lives. Ellison helps us understand that white people are always already in relationships with people of color and “know” them, even if these relationships and knowledge are rooted in scapegoating and stereotypes. Second, Ellison’s work contributes to our understanding of the persistence, functions, and effects of stereotypes. Stereotypes are typically conceptualized as representations of the Other that support oppressive racial systems, by justifying racism and violence against people of color. While this is an important function of stereotypes, Ellison’s theorizing of stereotypes as essential to white people’s sense of themselves as white in the United States helps us better understand why they are so tenacious. It also creates a space for us to consider the costs of scapegoating and stereotypes for white people. This is not meant to ignore the oppression, misery, and death that scapegoating and stereotypes have produced and continue to produce for people of color. However, Ellison’s conceptualization of scapegoating rituals and stereotypes points to conflicts and struggles that attend playing the role of white American. A better understanding of these struggles should inform critical pedagogical work on race with white people.

References Eddy, B. (2003). The rites of identity: The religious naturalism and cultural criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. Princeton University. Ellison, R. (1986). Going to the territory. Vintage International. Ellison, R. (1995). Invisible man. Vintage International. (Original work published 1952) Ellison, R. (1995). Shadow and act. Vintage International. (Original work published 1953) Lensmire, T. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge.

CHAPTER 24

Emotionality and Whiteness Cheryl E. Matias

Related Entries: Baldwin, James; Psychoanalysis and Whiteness; Race Treason; Thandeka; White Supremacy

1

Surface Exploration: An Introduction

Whiteness, as Lipsitz (2006) suggests, is “everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see” (p. 1). This invisibility is due in part because of its normalizing factor. That is, whiteness is embedded in every fabric of social, political, epistemological, psychological, popular, even emotional life such that it exists as normal as a lion eats an antelope. Yet, in its “normalcy” whiteness has very real consequences. Or, as Morrison (1992) warns, assuming the naturalness of whiteness in literature “risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artists” (p. 12). Ignatiev and Garvey (1996) even assert that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” which said another way, sadly means loyalty to whiteness is treason to humanity (p. 10). Whiteness, as such, is nothing less than false and oppressive (Leonardo, 2016). Though Matias (2016) asserts there are many elements of whiteness from xenophobia to entitlement, not popularly discussed is the psychological dimensions of whiteness, which thus warrants psychoanalysis of whiteness. In fact, there has been so much resistance to psychoanalytically investigating whiteness due to the fact that such a process conjures up deeply rooted issues of fear, abandonment, and incompetence. Notwithstanding this resistance, I begin with an exploration into what lurks below our surface understanding of race and whiteness.

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Deeper into Race and Whiteness

The litany of research on race and racism, moreover white supremacy and whiteness, suggest that when these concepts are understood one is better informed on racially equitable, racially just, or more humanizing practices. Indeed, as Ignatiev and Garvey’s (1996) prophetic phrase suggests, learning © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_024

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how to debunk whiteness or undo racist practices brings one closer to humanity. Yet, as admirable as loyalty to humanity sounds and as much as people claim they love all people, why is it then that debunking whiteness, deeply understanding the dynamics of racism, or even merely talking about race is so difficult? The difficulty to entertain racial realism, as so proffered by Bell (1992), is captured in various disciplinary research on race. For example, Bonilla-Silva (2006) cogently argues the manifestation of colorblind racism whereby individuals use semantic and rhetorical maneuvers such as abstract liberalism as a way to engage in racist rhetoric all while never uttering the word race. Even more psychologically compelling is that while these individuals engage in racist colorblind rhetoric, they do so while denying the reality of race altogether. Additionally, Mills (1997) warns us that when one consciously or subconsciously denies racial realism or, more poignantly, chooses to actively remain ignorant to race, “the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than be torn up altogether, and justice will continue to be restricted to ‘just us’” (p. 133). Sadly, as Mills and Bonilla-Silva so offer, there exists a curious, moreover befuddling, technology, if one will, for why individuals engage in racism while denying (almost to the death) that racism does not exist. If, as many assert, race is not real, irrelevant, or gone and done with, then why is it that individuals have such visceral emotional reactions to merely talking about race? Herein lies the quandary that warrants more psychoanalysis of whiteness itself. If race were just a sociological phenomenon then one can stand back and see how socializing processes can impact how we engage in society. For example, Rosaldo (1993) investigates the cultural practice of headhunting found in the Filipino Ilongot tribe. That is, he studies why this practice embeds expressions of extreme grief and anger. However, his research was devoid of a deeper understanding of the emotional attachment to the cultural practice until Rosaldo admits to his readers that he could not fully comprehend the emotional attachment to headhunting until he himself lost his wife to cancer. The grief he experienced was intermixed with extreme anger. There were not clear delineations. No neat categorizations. In fact, according to Rosaldo, his overwhelming emotions, were a necessary occurrence that needed to transpire in order to fully grasp his study of headhunting. It was at this moment when Rosaldo realized that embedded in sociological cultural practices are psychoanalytic and emotional attachments, which hit at the core of who we are. Indeed, emotions are a precarious topic; for although it is popularly assumed that emotions are innate, scholarly research dictates otherwise. Boler’s (1999) studies on emotions, for example, clearly denotes that although emotions are recognized as both cognitive and physiological responses, they are also embedded “in relation[s] to power and culture” (p. 6). Using Jacques

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Lacan’s psychoanalysis of object relations, Boler argues that in conceptualizing emotions in a broader politically embedded sense, one better understands the “relationships between what one can and cannot say, what is conscious and what seems to be inaccessible to our consciousness and thus our language” (p. 84). I extend this resultant beyond language and into our very understanding of the self and society. Overlaying this theory of emotions onto to BonillaSilva’s work where one can engage in colorblind racism while adamantly, almost angrily, denying racism tells us a deeper story as to why one may be so vehement in their denial. Meaning, if whites routinely emotionally deny, abhor, or reject the relevance or reality of race they do so from a position of power. As Boler suggests, if emotions are about power and culture, then there are deeper reasons as to why one would engage in this obstinate emotional stance. It is neither benign nor simple ignorance. Instead, they resist as a symbolic reference to the power structure knowing full well they are situated at the apex of that power structure. With respect to Boler’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the individual who engages in colorblind racism while rejecting the reality of racism through the use of language also does so to affirm their sense of self, especially with respect to where they are situated in that society. Meaning, their emotional and linguistic behaviors are not done in isolation. Rather, these expressions, whether emotional or linguistic, are done within the context of power within a particular society. To put it another way, I draw from Bourdieu’s (2003) notion of symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu, language, rhetoric, and communication are not devoid of power relations. The topic of speech, who is speaking, who is receiving, the social locations of the speaker to the receiver, and the power dynamics of the society from which the speaker and receiver are from are all involved in understanding the symbolic violence embedded in discourse. Embedded in language is symbolic power “that is defined in its and through given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it; i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and reproduced” (p. 170). Therefore, being the Determiner of what is and what is not about race, while never bearing witness to race, reproduces a real racial power structure whereby whites are the only ones who can dictate the definition of race. In fact, by asserting that race is not real while engaging in racial privilege is in and of itself an enactment of symbolic violence because it acknowledges a historical, political, and legal history whereby whites accrued social, economic, and political privilege at the expense of the humanity of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx and Asian Americans; all this while denying they’ve accrued such material benefits. Or, as Bourdieu writes, “Symbolic systems owe their distinctive power to the fact that the relations of power expressed through them

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are manifested only in the misrecognizable form of relations of meaning” (p. 170). That is, when colorblind racists deny racism they make race, let alone racial oppression, almost unrecognizable. The distinctive power is not only their denial to racial reality, but denying it, whether consciously or not, while accruing power and obscuring that reality. In all, it is much like the literary story of Don Quixote whereby everyone is aware of his delusions of grandeur. However, unlike Don Quixote, this symbolic power is both knowing his delusions but being forced to accept the delusions as reality, lest be punished for calling out the delusions. In this lengthy revelation, there is something that lurks below the seemingly innocent emotional reactions to race, let alone the emotions of whiteness, that then necessitates the need for psychoanalysis of whiteness. If, as Matias (2016) cogently argues, there exists emotionalities of whiteness that undergird the expressed surface white emotions then much is to be done to unveil these deeper emotionalities. That is, Matias (2016) argues that routinely expressed white emotions such as defensiveness, anger, guilt, and sadness are just surface level emotions, emotional defense mechanisms that mask deeper emotional trauma in whiteness. Coining it, emotionalities of whiteness, Matias argues they are deeper emotions wrought with traumas regarding race, particularly whiteness. Aforementioned above was the question of “Why is it then that debunking whiteness, deeply understanding the dynamics of racism, or even merely talking about race is so difficult?” There must be deeply rooted psychological components to whiteness, which makes one so adamant or resolute in their convictions about race. In fact, these deeply rooted psychological attachments to whiteness defines their sense of self; whiteness and identity become one. So, when confronted with the reality of race the person psychologically translates it to that of an attack to their core sense of self. The psychology of whiteness thus precedes psychoanalysis of whiteness.

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Psychology and Whiteness

Helms’s (1990) popularized white racial identity model not only draws from William Cross’s psychological work on identity development, it is readily accepted as a litmus of white racial identity formation. This ready acceptance links psychology and whiteness. Furthermore, Thandeka (1999) long discusses how whiteness is psychologically embedded during white childhood, thus developing a deep-rooted sense of white ethnic shame. In fact, she argues this shame is developed when their white parents socialize white children into

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white communities and, thus, attempting to step out of whiteness conjures deep shame. She furthers this argument by saying when socializing into white communities whites are then taught to deny the reality of race despite clearly seeing racial realities. If they were to bear witness to racism, whites would then be ostracized from their white communities. As such they are to bear false witness, so to speak, to racial realism and in doing so develop a deeply rooted sense of shame. Matias and Allen (2016) develop this argument further by positing that in psychologically building white racial identities off of this complicity to an unhealthy unconditional love of white parents and white communities and fearing ever leaving the community of whiteness, whites are then engaging in a sadomasochistic love; one that hurts both self and people of color. Fanon (1967) and Baldwin (1963) also wrote extensively about the psychological component of whiteness on white identity. For example, Baldwin writes, In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So, where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t, and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis. (p. 329) In this excerpt Baldwin clearly demonstrates the psychological connection between whiteness and Blackness. Meaning, whiteness has no merit on its own, instead, it can only be defined by its ontological opposite: the vilification of Blackness. This is echoed in Fanon’s (1967) psychoanalysis of the Negro man. On one occasion Fanon shares an experience of witnessing how scared a white boy was upon seeing Fanon. The little boy does not fear Fanon himself; for he does not even know Fanon. Instead the little boy’s fears are psychologically bound to the ontological, moreover, the psychological constructions of what it means to be Black in a white supremacist society. Or, as Fanon (1967) states, “it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world” (p. 111). Suffice it to say that his Black body is ontologically tied to race power relations; one which castigates Black as villainous, violent, and sinister. Conversely, it

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positions whiteness as innocent, pure, and benevolent. Simply put, “for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 1967, p. 110). However, beyond the ontological marriage of whiteness to Blackness, there is an emotional element that must be further interrogated. Emotions are typically understood as innate sentiments developed individually. Yet, as Ahmed (2004) suggests, emotions, like that of fear mentioned above, are not as much individually grown than they are enmeshed in a global economy of fear. In fact, “fear works to secure forms of the collective” that when materialized allows the “individual subject [to] come into being through its very alignment with the collective” (p. 71). The technology of fear then is not an individual experience because its visceral existence is in and of itself inextricably bound to ontological meanings that are made to be feared. One does not simply fear Franz Fanon or James Baldwin. One fears what Fanon and Baldwin’s Black bodies psycho-socially embody. And that embodiment is defined through the operations of whiteness, forever deeming Blackness as the dark shadow of itself.

4

Lurking Below: Psychoanalysis of Whiteness

According to Cheng (2000) a psychoanalysis of race “could illuminate the race question: not insofar as it elucidates private desires and psychology, but because psychoanalysis understands those private desires to be enmeshed in social relations” (p. 27). Because the emotionalities of whiteness are both innate and enmeshed in the power relations within a particular society, psychoanalysis reveals how emotionalities of whiteness live betwixt and in between the inner psyche and social, moreover, racial society. Furthermore, since these emotionalities of whiteness stem from traumatic experiences with race since childhood they are, nonetheless, “forms of psychosis that become overt as a result of traumatic experience” (Fanon, 1967, p. 85). Just as a Black man experiences trauma in the world through an embodied existential relationship with the white gaze, so too is the white man experiencing the world through an embodied relationship with white dominance. And in living this experience, one develops their sense of identity. Du Bois (1903) informs that living in this embodied Black body cultivates a double consciousness. Yancy’s (2017) experience of riding in an elevator with a white woman and her symbolic interactions with his Black body defines him as “the pre-marked Black thing, that site of historical white discursive marking that precede[s] my birth, leaving my Black body typified and anonymous” (p. 44). Essentially, their lived experiences give rise to their sense of self, their consciousness, and their way of being and knowing the world around them.

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Inasmuch as Blacks have developed a unique understanding of race in society, so too have whites; albeit an understanding that is wrought with privilege and power. As such, when Matias (2016) states, “our [people of Color] tears become only three-fifths of the pain of a White person” (p. 10) she inadvertently acknowledges that even the emotionalities of whiteness have power and privilege over the racialized emotions of people of Color. Plainly stated, whiteness has structured the lived experiences of white bodies such that they developed their sense of self, their consciousness, and their way of being and knowing the world around them off that specific point of departure. The social component of whiteness becomes the internal understanding of the self, such that when confronted with race, let alone the hegemony of whiteness, many white people instantly take a mere dialogue on race as a deep personal attack on their identity. In order to assuage these unsettling feelings of whiteness they, as many with internal traumas do, engage in defensive mechanisms as a pseudo sense of protection. Yet, because they occupy the upper echelon of the racial hierarchy they operationalize racial power by belittling, decrying, or altogether denying racial realism based on their unfettered sentiments. Beyond unhealthily assuaging unfettered emotions of discomfort by denouncing racism altogether, there is still something lingering even deeper in the psychosis of whiteness. Beneath the anger, defensiveness, sadness, denial, and other defensive mechanisms is an abyss of fear: inadequacy, loss, abandonment, betrayal, etc. Whites have long been taught to comply to whiteness lest be ostracized from the white community. This fear of being abandoned by the community that has given rise to their consciousness, sense of self, or even identity in general, conjures up the humanly fear of isolation. Isolation is but a primal fear of human beings. Additionally, when textbooks, rhetoric, history, laws, media, and just about everything in a given society presents whiteness as the standard of heroism, humanism, and virtue, realizing its oppressive nature can potentially disrupt one’s entire sense of morality. If everything I thought was good about myself was a lie then how am I to judge my own virtue? Furthermore, if everything that was told to me and experienced by me was a lie, then bellowing deep within my soul is, “who am I, really?” This sense of betrayal or isolation is at the gut of the emotionalities of whiteness. It is nothing more than an existential crisis of being. Yet, if one truly wants to commit to a humanizing society, then they must deal with their traumatized pasts that first dehumanized them. Since whiteness, Matias and Allen (2016) suggest, sadomasochistically dehumanizes both people of Color and white people, then nowhere is the need for psychoanalysis of whiteness more needed in liberating the dehumanized. Beyond the sneers of anger, the obstinate denials, and guilty cries is a deeper psychoanalytical problem of whiteness. Disregarding this denies us of what truly lurks below.

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References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotions. Routledge. Baldwin, J. (1985). The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction, 1948–1985. St. Martin’s Press. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racist color-blind racism & racial inequality in contemporary America. Rowman & Littlefield. Bourdieu, P. (2003). Language & symbolic power. Harvard University Press. Cheng, A. (2000). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, White masks. Grove Press. Helms, J, (1990). Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Praeger. Ignatiev, N., & Garvey, J. (1996). Race traitor. Routledge. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers. Matias, C. E., & Allen, R. L. (2016). Loving whiteness to death: Sadomasochism, emotionality, and the possibility of humanizing love. In C. E. Matias (Ed.), Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Vintage Books. Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture & truth: The remaking of social analysis. Beacon Press. Yancy, G. (2017). Black bodies, White gaze: The continuing significance of race in America. Rowman & Littlefield.

CHAPTER 25

Essentialism Stephen May and Lincoln Dam

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Intersectionality; Ladson-Billings, Gloria

1

Introduction

We live demonstrably in dyspeptic times. In the West, this has been marked by a relentless rise in right-wing extremism, particularly post 9-11 , and a related burgeoning visceral skepticism of the merits of multiculturalism as public policy. The recognition of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity, underpinning multiculturalism, has increasingly been constructed as public anathema. Among its most bellicose critics are far-right, nationalist politicians and their followers. Many of the latter now identify as the “newly oppressed’ or the so-called “new minority” – working- or middle-class Whites, White males, and/or monolingual English speakers (Gest, 2016). Such individuals regularly denounce multiculturalism for affording “special privileges” to minority groups and are a key constituency that has fueled the rise and current ascendancy of Trump’s America. Meanwhile, this (re)positioning of “disadvantage” conveniently overlooks the histories and products of imperialism and colonization that continue to shape the present, and from which Whites invariably benefit in settler colonies, often unconsciously and covertly. So-called “new minorities” and the political Right are not alone in their opposition to multiculturalism. Those on the Left have also consistently criticized multiculturalism, or more specifically its most popular variant: liberal multiculturalism – particularly, those adopting a critical race theory (CRT) approach. What these critics are most often exercised by is the cultural essentialism that too-often underpins liberal multiculturalism. Cultural essentialism is taken to mean here “the endemic tendency to assume that distinctive cultural attributes are the defining feature of all groups” (Barry, 2001, p. 305). While often well meaning, these essentialist constructions of culture simply entrench, rather than subvert, White supremacy because they simultaneously “museumize” and “exoticize” the cultural attributes of minority ethnic groups. What is needed instead are material and structural analyses that challenge the dominance of majority ethnic groups, along with the normalization of their © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_025

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cultural mores, in the key institutions of the nation-state, as in education, for example. It is to these critiques of multiculturalism that we turn in this entry. We begin by examining liberal multiculturalism and its limits, particularly in relation to the cultural essentialism that still too regularly underpins it. We then argue that, along with critical race theory (CRT), critical multiculturalism should be considered as a useful theoretical complement for explaining, and critiquing, the current socio-political conditions that appear so antithetical to a continuing commitment to public multiculturalism.

2

Liberal Multiculturalism and Its Limits

For much of its history, multiculturalism has been plagued by an idealistic, naive preoccupation with culture at the expense of power relations, and broader material and structural concerns. If only cultural differences could be recognized, or so the story went, the prospects of a harmonious multi-ethnic society could then (more easily) be achieved. This strain of multiculturalism is most evident in the rhetoric of early forms of multicultural education, developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s (for useful critiques, see Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Modood & May, 2001). It is encapsulated by the British antiracist commentator Hatcher’s (1987) observation that: [While] culture is the central concept around which [this] multiculturalism is constructed, the concept is given only a taken-for-granted common sense meaning, impoverished both theoretically and in terms of concrete lived experience. It is a concept of culture innocent of class. (p. 188) Hatcher’s acerbic assessment formed part of a sustained assault by antiracist theorists in Britain in the 1980s and, subsequently, critical race theorists in the United States from the 1990s onward, on what they perceived to be the endemic utopianism and naivety associated with the multicultural education movement. This movement has since come to be described as “liberal multiculturalism” in the United States and “benevolent multiculturalism” elsewhere (see May, 2009; Sleeter & Delgado Bernal, 2004). The crux of liberal multiculturalism is that individuals, groups, and societies will “get along better” through greater recognition and inclusion of – and respect for – ethnic, religious, linguistic, and/or cultural diversity. Here, the source of conflict is perceived to be simply a misunderstanding of cultural differences (as opposed to inequitable power relations, to which we return

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shortly). Within liberal multiculturalism, culture, which is regularly elided with ethnicity, is thus treated in historicist and essentialist terms. That is, culture is perceived to be a set of homogenous characteristics and practices, frozen in time, that attach unproblematically to all members of (usually) an ethnic minority group. From this, liberal multiculturalism dubiously avers that these static characteristics and practices can be described, celebrated, and taught to promote intercultural understanding. This – often superficial and tokenistic – celebration of difference(s) is evident via (multi)cultural fairs and festivals for example, as well as many multicultural curriculum programs in schools. Liberal multiculturalism’s propensity to treat culture as a set of fixed characteristics and practices is highly problematic. This historicist and essentialist understanding of culture reflects an obsolete colonial view that dominated the work of anthropologists until roughly half a century ago. Its stance is one of “‘other people’ have culture out there, and our job is to study it through its artifacts” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 5). In so doing, liberal multiculturalism produces reified, uniform conceptions of cultures that exoticize and romanticize difference, while also often retrospectively creating fictional accounts of their supposed evolution. This is a process that can occur even when the narrators themselves are members of the (ethnic) group they are describing. Such an approach not only homogenizes intragroup cultural characteristics, it also entrenches intergroup boundaries, both of which run counter to the actual dynamism, fluidity, multiplicity and interspersion of individual and group identities. The problem of essentializing group identities (and related group boundaries) has long been raised in anthropology, particularly since Barth’s (1969) seminal essay on ethnic group boundaries. It is evident in a parallel sociological consensus on the arbitrary constructedness of ethnic groups– a process Brubaker (2002) has dismissively described as “groupism” – and a related rejection of the apparent fixity of such identities. Barth, for example, argued that ethnic groups could not be defined on the basis of their particular cultural (and linguistic) characteristics, what he termed the “cultural stuff” of ethnicity. Rather, ethnic groups are situationally defined in relationship to their social interactions with other groups, and the boundaries established and maintained between them as a result of these interactions. In other words, cultural attributes only become significant as markers of ethnic identity when a group deems them to be necessary, or socially effective, for such purposes. Thus, particular cultural attributes may vary in salience, may be constructed or reconstructed, and may even be discarded by an ethnic group, depending on the particular sociohistorical circumstances of their interactions with other groups, and the need to maintain effectively the boundaries between them.

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In short, there is no inevitable link between particular cultural attributes and particular ethnic group identities. Liberal multiculturalism fundamentally overlooks the fact that ethnic culture – while important and influential – is but only one aspect of a person’s identity. The historicist and essentialist view of culture underpinning liberal multiculturalism thus runs directly counter to constructionist accounts of culture and ethnicity, as well as postmodernist accounts of fluid and overlapping identities and related discussions of hybridity within postcolonial theory (see, e.g. Bhabha, 2004; Gilroy, 2000). As Said (1994) contends, “No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points” (p. 336). Liberal multiculturalism, then, attributes culture to (ethnic) minorities in ways that do not account for the multiplicity of their bona fide, lived experiences. Notwithstanding those issues, liberal multiculturalism has gained significant purchase as a “ready” response to the “management” of cultural diversity, particularly in fields such as education. It appears to be an immediately implementable solution to the “problem” of diversity. In schooling for instance, lesson plans that teach about visible cultural differences are easily obtained by teachers. Similarly, holding a (multi)cultural fair/festival at a local park – with performances, music and cuisine to celebrate the kaleidoscope of cultures that make up our cities and countries – is not exactly out of reach. Liberal multiculturalism may be easy to implement, but this is only so because it fails to recognize and address unequal power relations that underpin inequity and limit cultural interaction. In education, for example, such an approach merely adds an “ethnic” component to the existing and invariably monocultural (White) curriculum and society, while the normativity, universality and supremacy of the dominant group (Whiteness) continues to eschew questioning. Invariably, celebrations of difference(s) embody an ephemeral commitment/quality– lasting a day or a week at best – after which, minority groups must return to schools and societies that represent and reflect the cultural specificities of the dominant (White) group. Liberal multiculturalism, then, is “a feel-good celebration of ethno-cultural diversity” (Kymlicka, 2010, p. 98), which emphasizes the lifestyles of ethnic minority groups (through customs, traditions, performances, cuisine and music) as opposed to their life chances. To be sure, our argument is not that the recognition of ethnic, religious, linguistic and/or cultural differences – and their incorporation within multicultural or antiracist practice within education, or elsewhere – are insignificant. Indeed, they are important because such understandings, while always partial, are vital for productive engagements. Our point, rather, is that such celebrations of difference(s) are simply inadequate on their own. After all, it is one

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thing to describe and acknowledge ethnic, religious, linguistic and/or cultural differences. It is quite another to uncover and disrupt the inherent monoculturalism of societal practices and institutions, and the unequal power relations and inequities that permeate, underpin and are promulgated by the current social order. Despite appearing to act in the interests of (ethnic) minorities, the celebration of cultural differences through multicultural curricula, festivals, performances, music and cuisine simply conceals the unchanged nature of power relations and the normativity of White supremacy.

3

Critical Multiculturalism

In light of the issues discussed thus far, how might multiculturalism be (re) developed into a non-essentialist, “sensible, theoretically refined, and defensible paradigm” (Torres, 1998, p. 446)? Critical race theory (CRT) is the most commonly adopted theoretical position by which this question is addressed – usually, via a rejection of any possibilities therein for multiculturalism’s redemption. However, we suggest below that critical multiculturalism constitutes just such a paradigm – one that can resituate, rather than simply dispense with, multiculturalism as a response to racism and other material forms of inequality (May, 1999, 2009). By “critical multiculturalism,” we mean an approach to multiculturalism that integrates and advances various critical theoretical threads. We also interpret “critical multiculturalism” here to mean a form of multiculturalism that is critical (i.e. vital) to responding to the ascendant right-wing nationalist, anti-immigration/diversity milieu we presently face in the West, and increasingly worldwide. Developing a non-essentialist conception of cultural difference requires unmasking and deconstructing the façade of (cultural) neutrality and universality that shrouds the nation-state and its institutions. The nation-state and its institutions – such as schools – are not neutral, nor have they ever been. Rather, the public sphere of the nation-state represents and reflects the ethnic, religious, linguistic and/or cultural particularities of the dominant (White) group. For instance, nation-states observe public holidays that reflect a particular religious calendar(s) and accentuate a particular lingua franca(s). In Western societies, traditional university lecture halls (and the authoritarian pedagogical method such spaces facilitate) are structured to resemble a particular religious establishment – namely, the church. There are countless other examples. A plausible and effective approach to multiculturalism must prioritize structural analyses of unequal power relations that inhibit the life chances

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of minority groups, rather than simply advocating for greater understanding and celebration of cultural differences (lifestyles). Unlike liberal approaches to multiculturalism discussed earlier, the interrogation of unequal power relations is a feature that is at the heart of critical multiculturalism – as it also is in CRT. Acknowledging and challenging power relations requires understanding how power is exercised and institutionalized and taking collective action to produce change to improve the life chances of minority groups. In particular, it requires actively and critically questioning whose ontologies and epistemologies come to be subjugated/excluded, and whose are accepted/included, within nation-states and their institutions. Like CRT, critical multiculturalism interrogates the normativity, universalization and supremacy of majoritarian forms of identity – most notably that of Whiteness – which tend not to be questioned, nor be deemed questionable. Critical multiculturalism also situates culture and identities in the context of how unequal power relations – experienced through daily interactions – contribute to their production, rather than framing culture primarily as a fixed, historical artifact. Identities – be they ethnic or otherwise – are not, and indeed cannot, be freely selected. Rather, identity choices are inevitably shaped and constrained by one’s position(ing) in the wider society, a product in turn of power relations. For instance, a White American may have a wide range of ethnic options from which to choose, both hyphenated (e.g. Italian American) and/or hybrid. In contrast, an African American is confronted with essentially one ethnic choice – Black; irrespective of any preferred ethnic (or, for that matter, other) alternatives they might wish to employ. Identity choices are shaped by class, ethnic and gender stratification, object constraints and historical determinations. Put differently, individuals and groups are inevitably situated, and often differentially constrained, by broader structural influences such as capitalism, racism, colonialism and sexism. Approaches to multiculturalism that both essentialize and depoliticize culture – reifying culture and cultural difference, while simultaneously disregarding the broader social and political context, as is the case in liberal multiculturalism – are therefore fundamentally limited. Grounded in postmodernist conceptions of identity, critical multiculturalism recognizes that culture and identity are multilayered, fluid, complex, and encompass and intersect with numerous other social categories (such as class, gender, sexuality, and so on). Concomitantly, culture and identities are being reconstructed, realigned and reimagined through participation in social situations. Such a positive, dynamic conception of culture continues to recognize, however, “that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by

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that position” (Hall, 1992, p. 258, emphasis added). In other words, the acknowledgment of our cultural and historical situatedness should not define the boundaries of ethnicity and culture, nor should it undermine the validity of other, equally legitimate forms of identity. Critical multiculturalism provides us then with a non-essentialist construction of both ethnicity and cultural identity, along with their complex intersection with other forms of identity formation and structural dis/advantages. Such an approach offers a theoretical complement to one of the most significant developments in critical race theory: the application of counter-storytelling to accentuate the voices of (the often voiceless) minority groups and their lived experiences of discrimination. Where critical multiculturalism differs from critical race theory is largely in emphasis and by degree. First, intersectionality has been a feature of a critical multicultural lens from the start, while it is only in more recent work that intersectionality in CRT has come to the fore (see, e.g. Gillborn, 2015). Second, from its inception critical multiculturalism has drawn on theoretical discussions on racism from both the European and American sociological traditions, albeit disavowing the reified conception of “race” that is still central to many discussions of racism in the United States. Third, critical multiculturalism accordingly provides a stronger international perspective on, and engagement with issues attendant upon, racism and in/equalities. While CRT has again attempted to internationalize its discussions in recent years (see, e.g. Gillborn, 2017), its grounding remains firmly situated within the history and context of the United States. This amounts to a form of “methodological nationalism” that Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2003) describe as a “territorial limitation which confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries of a particular nation-state” (p. 578). In order to overcome this, they assert that “[w] e need to think outside of the box of dominant national discourses” (p. 581).

4

Conclusion

Multiculturalism has promised much but has had little to offer since its accession in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is particularly so with respect to its most popular variant: liberal multiculturalism. As demonstrated here, liberal multiculturalism – however well-intentioned – has grave limitations. Chief among these limitations are its antiquated historicist and essentialist views of culture, and its inability to challenge the inherent monoculturalism (White supremacy) of the nation-state and its institutions, along with wider unequal power relations and inequities. As a consequence, liberal multiculturalism,

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particularly as enacted in fields like education, has had a largely negligible impact on the life chances of minority groups. Despite these demonstrable inadequacies, there are still some signs of hope for the further development of multiculturalism. We have argued in the latter half of this entry that what has come to be known as “critical multiculturalism” provides a key way forward for multiculturalism, both in education and the wider public sphere. Critical multiculturalism addresses the above-mentioned caveats of liberal multiculturalism, particularly by prioritizing structural analyses of unequal power relations that inhibit the life chances of minority groups. Critical multiculturalism engages actively with postmodernist conceptions of the contingent nature of identity and situates culture within the wider nexus of power relations of which they form a part. And critical multiculturalism disrupts the normativity, universalization and supremacy of majoritarian forms of identity, specifically Whiteness. In conjunction with the related strengths of CRT, critical multiculturalism can also address directly the seemingly inexorable rise of right-wing nationalist, anti-immigration/diversity sentiments, and the associated burgeoning callous violence toward minority groups. The apparent entrenchment and expansion of these latter developments in the West, and increasingly worldwide, provide all the more reasons why we must articulate, defend and practice critical, overtly antiracist, forms of multiculturalism in their stead.

References Barry, B. (2001). Culture and equality: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism. Harvard University Press. Barth, F. (1969). Introduction. Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference (pp. 9–38). Little, Brown and Co. Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The location of culture (2nd ed.). Routledge. Brubaker, R. (2002). Ethnicity without groups. Archives Européènes de Sociologie, 53(2), 163–89. Gest, J. (2016). The new minority: White working-class politics in an age of immigration and inequality. Oxford University Press. Gillborn, D. (2015). Intersectionality, critical race theory and the primacy of racism: Race, class, gender and disability in education. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 277–287. Gillborn, D. (2017). Critical race theory beyond North America: Towards a Trans-Atlantic dialogue on racism and antiracism in educational theory and praxis. In A. Dixson, C. Rousseau Anderson, & J. Donnor (Eds.), Critical race theory in education: All God’s children got a song (2nd ed.). Routledge.

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Gilroy, P. (2000). Between camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race. Allen Lane/ Penguin Press. Hall, S. (1992). New ethnicities. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.), “Race,” culture and difference (pp. 252–259). Sage. Hatcher, R. (1987). Race and education: Two perspectives for change. In B. Troyna (Ed.), Racial inequality in education (pp. 184–200). Tavistock. Kymlicka, W. (2010). The rise and fall of multiculturalism? New debates on inclusion and accommodation in diverse societies. International Social Science Journal, 61(199), 97–112. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Towards a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97, 47–68. May, S. (Ed.). (1999). Critical multiculturalism: Rethinking multicultural and antiracist education. Falmer Press. May, S. (2009). Critical multiculturalism and education. In J. Banks (Ed.), The Routledge international companion to multicultural education (pp. 33–48). Routledge. May, S., & Sleeter, C. (2010). Introduction. Critical multiculturalism: Theory and praxis. In S. May & C. Sleeter (Eds.), Critical multiculturalism: Theory and praxis (pp. 1–16). Routledge. Modood, T., & May, S. (2001). Multiculturalism and education in Britain: An internally contested debate. International Journal of Educational Research, 35, 305–317. Said, E. (1994). Culture and imperialism. Vintage Books. Sleeter, C. E., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2004). Critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and antiracist education: Implications for multicultural education. In J. Banks & C. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 240– 258). Jossey-Bass. Torres, C. (1998). Democracy, education and multiculturalism: Dilemmas of citizenship in a global world. Comparative Education Review, 42, 421–447. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2003). Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. The International Migration Review, 37, 576–610.

CHAPTER 26

Eugenics Bretton A. Varga, Julian E. Maguregui, Jr. and Michael J. Berson

Related Entries: Higher Class Whites; Immigration; Privilege; Social Class

1

Introduction

Eugenics aims to promote the evolution of specific desired traits in the human population by using scientific advancements and social policy to regulate reproduction (Kevles, 1985). Rooted in Plato’s (c. 380/2013) recommendation to apply principles from selective breeding of animals to achieve an ideal society “made of the human beings whose lives are worthy to be preserved” (p. 139), the term “eugenics” was first coined by Francis Galton in 1883. Significant historical and social developments along with innovations in human genetics and reproductive technology have influenced the evolution of eugenics. Modern manifestations of eugenics continue to be openly debated around the world.

2

Fathering Eugenics

Perhaps, Francis Galton – the founding father of eugenics – looked about England as a young boy and marveled over ways in which humanity sought to improve foundational aspects of society. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and advancements significantly transformed the lives of many people. In 1859, Charles Darwin – the half-cousin of Galton – published The Origin of Species, sparking public deliberation over the survival of the human species. Not lost on Galton were Darwin’s notions of heredity and evolution, both of which would serve as the impetus for Galton’s work Hereditary Talent and Character, published in 1865. In this publication, Galton (1865/2002) expounded the goal of eugenics as being the improvement of the human species through purposeful selection of parents. Bifurcating how to achieve this, Galton conceptualized eugenics as being both positive and negative. In positive eugenics, individuals exhibiting remarkable mental and physical faculties were encouraged to produce more offspring. Conversely, negative eugenics suggested that those with inferior © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_026

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skills should abdicate their reproductive rights. To enforce this reproductive confinement, Galton recommended systemic seclusion, strict matrimonial regulations, and sterilization. He would later explain this in Inquire into Human Faculty: Whenever an inferior race is preserved under conditions of life that exact a high level of efficiency, it must be subjected to rigorous selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live. On the other hand, if a higher race be substituted for the low one, all this terrible misery disappears. The most merciful form of what I ventured to call “eugenics” would consist in watching for the indications of superior strains or races, and in so favoring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one. (Galton, 1883, pp. 198–200) Galton’s iteration of eugenics inspired a host of sociologists that perpetuated a narrative that eugenics was in the best interest of humankind. One such sociologist, Richard Dugdale, relied on Galton’s work to design a study that examined the behavioral, intellectual, and socioeconomic traits of the Jukes family (pseudonym). While interviewing prisoners at a jail, Dugdale (1900) identified six inmates that were related to the Jukes family. He spent the next several years tracking down relatives of the Jukes before ultimately concluding that the adversity endured by the Jukes family was due to both environmental conditions and heredity. From this study, people began to correlate factors such as congenital syphilis, alcoholism, and pauperism with criminal behaviors, cognitive maturation, and imbecility (Carlson, 1980). Prompted by Dugdale’s findings in the Jukes report, a new wave of eugenicists would emerge promoting Galton’s negative eugenics.

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Advancing Legislation and Influential Publications

To curb what was deemed transmissible promiscuity and imbecility, eugenicists initially made a call for the internment and segregation of people with social inadequacies and physical deficiencies (Gray, 1999). State legislation soon followed, and in 1895, Connecticut became the first state to outlaw marriage between people with physical, intellectual, or social irregularities. However, despite 41 other states following Connecticut’s marriage ban (Kevles, 1985), eugenicists soon proposed more extreme methods for maintaining the integrity of American stock.

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With advancements in medicine offering contemporary “solutions” for addressing “the problem” of those deemed to be of lesser societal value, in 1899, Albert Oschsner published Surgical Treatment of Habitual Criminals. In this work, Oschsner (1899) outlined how if “it was possible to eliminate all habitual criminals from having children, there would soon be a very marked decrease in this class” (p. 867). Thus, Oschsner (1899) proposed that habitual criminals, chronic inebriates, feeble-minded individuals, sexual deviants, and paupers be given vasectomies. In 1909, Harry Sharp published Vasectomy As a Means of Preventing Procreation in Defectives, furthering Ochsner’s advocacy for surgical sterilization. He implored colleagues and constituents to campaign for legislation that would create statewide clinics to be used for rendering any males with social, emotional, or physical maladies sterile. The writings of Oschsner and Sharp resulted in a spike of national publications all centered around the benefits of compulsory sterilization (Drake, Mills, & Cranston, 1999). This influx of literature had a profound effect on public opinion and state legislation. By the end of 1910, Washington, California, and Connecticut all passed genetic statutes that legalized the involuntary sterilization of those deemed deranged, imbecilic, or criminal. California would become a leader in the practice of forced sterilizations, recording an estimated 20,000 between 1909–1963 (Gould, 1985). Concordantly, a continual inpouring of immigrants from eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, and Italy in the early 1900s fueled public acceptance of sterilization (Dowbiggin, 2003). As the number of incoming foreigners increased, so too did public anxiety. Fueled by eugenicists’ false claims that immigrants possessed lower intellectual capacity, many began to believe that the inundation of immigrants was eroding the bedrock of American society. Empowered by this upsurge in public support, eugenicists increased their efforts to influence government policy. These efforts impacted Congress and assisted with the eventual passage of the 1924 Immigration Act and the Oriental Exclusion Act. While these examples of exclusionary statutes reduced the number of immigrants (from approximately 1 million a year to 165,000), eugenicists used the swelling economic and social challenges of the Great Depression to underscore their position (Selden, 1999). This position would subsequently be tested by the highest court in the United States, and the court’s ruling would have global consequences.

4

Buck v. Bell

The Supreme Court heard the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927. During this appeal, the court heard the fateful story of Carrie Buck, who was adopted by the Dobbs

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family after Carrie’s mother Emma was committed to the Virginia State Colony of Epileptics and Feebleminded (VSCEF). As the court learned, growing up with the Dobbs was not easy for Carrie (Berson & Cruz, 2001). The Dobbs consistently overburdened Carrie with extra chores and frequently berated her with verbal insults. While on a family trip, one of the Dobbs’ nephews raped Carrie Buck, resulting in her becoming pregnant. Wanting separation from Carrie’s “feeblemindedness” and “illegitimate mating” (Lombardo, 2001, p. 278), the Dobbs committed Carrie to VSCEF after she gave birth to Vivian Buck on March 28, 1924. Before the 1927 Supreme Court hearing and Vivian’s birth, in 1924, the state of Virginia passed a compulsory sterilization law. Under this law and at the insistence of VSCEF’s superintendent, Alfred Sidney Priddy, Carrie Buck was to become the first legally sterilized person in the state of Virginia. After hearing the case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of sterilization, 8-1. On May 2, 1927, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who at the time was in his mid-eighties, expressed the now infamous majority opinion of the court: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices… It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (Buck v. Bell, 1927, p. 208) Based on this ruling, Carrie Buck was sterilized for the “good of herself” in October 1927. As eugenicists celebrated their victory, multiple states passed statutes leading to the estimated sterilization of 100,000 Americans (Kevles, 1985). The decision of the Supreme Court also gripped the attention of another country eagerly waiting to further their own eugenics program: Nazi Germany.

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Eugenics in Nazi Germany

As Germany endured defeat in World War I, all aspects of German society experienced turmoil. Social, economic, and political issues required rapid resolution, leading to numerous opinions on the direction of the nation. While the country began to reconstruct itself, a novel, yet insidious, approach to German identity emerged: Volk. Volk involved viewing society as an organism, while

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simultaneously promoting an iteration of government that emphasized the desires of the state over the needs of the people (Sofair & Kaldjian, 2000). Volk quickly became fundamental to the ideology of the Nazi party and empowered several traditionally scrutinized professions in Germany: doctors, medics, and physicians. With this newfound pride in their occupation, these eager medical professionals became more politically active. In 1923, several aspiring medical professionals collaborated on a paper, Human Heredity, that would significantly influence the philosophical development of a recently imprisoned 34 year old Austrian: Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler would not be given the mantle of German power until 1933, scholars believe that it was this work that shaped Hitler’s position on cultural and racial characteristics (Glass, 1981; Grodin, Miller, & Kelly, 2018; Sofair & Kaldijan, 2000). The contents of Human Heredity dangerously suggested a link between cultural differences and a person’s cognitive endowment. For a vulnerable nation searching for a new identity, these provocations, and later aggrandizements of superiority/inferiority would have grave consequences. In the years leading up to Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933, the burgeoning medical profession in Germany began conceptualizing ways to “improve” public health and hygiene (Rassenhygiene) in accordance with the national-racist objectives in Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf. Throughout this book, Hitler frequently referenced Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre and Rassenhygiene (Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene) and eugenics. Despite Hitler’s call for a master-Aryan race (Aryan Herrenvolk), with no official legislative doctrine the sterilization program in Germany continued to expand at only an incremental rate. However, jurisdictive measures would coincide with Hitler’s rise to power and on July 14, 1933 – just six months after being appointed German Chancellor – the first sterilization law was enacted. Taking its cue from the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (LPGDO) – commonly known as the “Sterilization Law” – required sterilization of people with congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, chorea, inherited blindness and deafness, malformation, and severe alcoholism. Nazi officials would oversee the capture of identified individuals and then send them to eugenic health courts to be tried by a threeperson panel (two physicians, one reporting official of the Nazi party). From the period between 1933 and 1939 historians have estimated that 360,000 people were sterilized in Germany (Grodin et al., 2018). While the LPGDO initially targeted persons with mental illness, lower cognitive abilities, physical deformities, and social deficiencies, it would later pave the way for more extreme

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practice that specifically targeted, dehumanized, and murdered other culturally diverse populations in Germany: euthanasia. In its ongoing quest to actualize the Volk, Nazi officials delineated euthanasia publicly as a merciful path towards the purification and elevation of the German people (Sofair & Kaldijan, 2000). Perilous governmental policies were decreed, including the germinal order from the Reich Ministry of the Interior demanding that physicians, nurses, and midwives report newborns and children displaying symptoms/signs of physical and mental abnormalities for euthanasia. It is estimated that this initial phase of the German euthanasia program killed 5,000 German and Austrian children by the end of 1939 (Mitchell & Snyder, 2010). During this time, Hitler signed a covert piece of legislation that protected individuals in the medical field from prosecution. With the legal backing of Hitler, doctors, physicians, and medical administrators could further develop the German euthanasia campaign beyond disabled children. This new iteration of the German euthanasia campaign – named T4 for the program’s coordinating office address on Tiergartenstrasse 4 – immediately established six gassing centers. According to records recovered from these death sites, between the start of 1940 to August of 1941, 70,273 people were killed (Mitchell & Snyder, 2010). While it was the goal of Hitler and participating doctors and administrators of the German Euthanasia Program to keep the intentions of the program secretive, the public quickly became aware of what was happening. Despite public animus and a halting of the T4 program by Hitler in August of 1941, performative efforts to dehumanize and murder Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, members of LGBT communities, Roma Gypsies, and other groups continued until the end of World War II and beyond. In total, academics and historians estimate that between 250,000 and 300,000 people lost their lives as a direct result of the German Euthanasia Program (Grodin et al., 2018).

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Cration of Planned Parenthood

Throughout World War II, the sterilization movement in the United States also evolved. Leading this evolvement was Margaret Sanger and her advocation of more reproductive rights for women. As one of the founders of the organization that ultimately would become Planned Parenthood, Sanger argued that women had (un)consciously accepted their inferior status with relation to men. This social construct became the catalyst of Sanger’s desire to actualize

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circumstances that would give women a heightened degree of reproductive control (Sanger, 2007). As part of Sanger’s efforts to enhance the societal status of women, the American eugenics movement continued to gain acceptance as a tool for the improvement of the human race. Sanger’s work had some distinct similarities to the eugenics’ notion of population manipulation. Often, she publicly advocated for the sterilization of the insane and feeble minded. Congruently, Sanger subscribed to the growing sentiment that immigration was a direct cause for the rise in numbers of “unfit” people. She also endorsed the segregation of “illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends” until these populations were able to develop moral conduct so that they could return to society (Sanger, 2007, p. 216). While Sanger (1919) holds many similar thoughts to eugenicists, her position is distinctly different in terms of methods. Laying out this difference in an excerpt from The Birth Control Review, Sanger said: Like advocates of Birth Control, the eugenicists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end, but they lay emphasis upon different methods… We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those are born in health. The eugenicist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. (p. 11) Despite constant criticism, Planned Parenthood has grown into an organization that provides healthcare for women and advocates for women’s reproductive rights. At its core, and perhaps the most significant difference between birth control and traditional eugenic means, is choice.

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Eugenics in the Modern World

Eugenicists and others concerned with the costs of implementing public health measures (such as better sanitation and nutrition, living wages, or safer working and housing conditions in these centers) often erringly classify problematic experiences of the masses as being subjugated to social traits of the poor, rather than as consequences of the way society was/is organized (Stote, 2012). Stemming from the late 1800s, critics point to mishandling of sterilization and youth welfare programs involving Indigenous populations in Canada.

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According to scholars, Canada has a long history of sterilizing Indigenous women (Christian & Barker, 1973; Grekul, Krahn, & Odynak, 2004). Specifically, various Indigenous nations were targeted under Alberta’s eugenic legislation from 1928–1972, accounting for roughly 8% of those sterilized overall (despite only being about 3% of the population). This disproportionate percentage rose steadily and reached its peak between 1969–1972, when 25% of all Canadians sterilized were members of Indigenous nations. In 2016, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, a class-action lawsuit was brought on by 60 Indigenous women for their coerced sterilization by medical professionals over the last 25 years (Parker, 2018). Stories from First Nations’ women have begun to surface, allowing the public to bear witness to the atrocities being committed in the name of modern eugenics. Written and oral accounts give voice to these women, stating – under duress – that sterilization would be in their best health interest moving forward. While these cases continue to develop in 2018, they are clear reminders that the principles of eugenics endure, insidiously guiding and shaping government policies. Additionally, modern eugenics continues to evolve. Scientific advancements have provided geneticists with technological tools to modify human DNA. Gene editors now use a technology named CRISPR-Cas9 to create genetically modified human beings. These “designer babies” are embryos that have been selected and edited under the pretext of eradicating particular defects or ensuring a specific gene is present (Grodin et al., 2018). Recently, in the fall of 2018, a Chinese scientist claimed that he used CRISPR-Cas9 to successfully edit the genes of human embryos, resulting in the birth of healthy, genetically modified twin girls (Marchione, 2018). While this news has elicited a wide range of reactions in the scientific community and public sphere, the responses reflect the ongoing controversy surrounding recent iterations of eugenics and the continued relevance of this topic in the contemporary context. With advancements in genetic technologies, it is clear that the historical concerns about eugenics prevail in modern debates of bioethics and medical advances to eradicate disease. Eugenics is omnipresent in current practices, fueling the continuous discourse over innovations with the potential for social good and the danger of unjust applications.

References Berson, M. J., & Cruz, B. (2001). Eugenics past and present. Social Education, 65(5), 300–306. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. (1927).

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Carlson, E. A. (1980). R. L. Dugdale and the Juke family: A historical injustice corrected. American Institute of Biological Sciences, 30(8), 535–539. Christian, T. J., & Barker, B. (1973). The mentally ill and human rights in Alberta: Study of the Alberta sexual sterilization act. University of Alberta. Darwin, C. (2008). On the origin of species. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1859) Dowbiggin, I. R. (2003). Keeping America sane: Psychiatry and eugenics in the United States, 1880–1940. Cornell University Press. Drake, M. J., Mills, I. W., & Cranston, D. (1999). On the chequered history of vasectomy. BJU International, 84(1), 475–481. Dugdale, R. L. (1900). The Jukes: A study in crime, pauperism, disease, and heredity. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into human faculty. Macmillan. Galton, F. (2002). Hereditary talent and character. The Occidental Quarterly, 2(3), 45–68. (Original work published 1865) Glass, B. (1981). A hidden chapter of German eugenics between the two world wars. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 125(5), 357–367. Gould, S. J. (1985). The flamingo’s smile: Reflections in natural history. Norton & Company. Gray, P. (1999). Cursed by eugenics. Time, 153(1), 84–85. Grekul, J., Krahn, H., & Odynak, D. (2004). Sterilizing the ‘feeble-minded: Eugenics in Alberta, Canada 1929–1972. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17(4), 358–384. Grodin, M. A., Miller, L. E., & Kelly, I. J. (2018). The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and euthanasia: Lessons for today. American Journal of Public Health, 108(1), 53–57. Immigration Act of 1924, Pub. L. 68–139, 43 Stat. 153. (1924). Kevles, D. J. (1985). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Harvard University Press. Lombardo, P. A. (2001). Carrie Buck’s pedigree. The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine, 138(4), 278–282. Marchione, M. (2018, November 26). Chinese researcher claims first gene-edited babies. AP News. https://apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d Mitchell, D., & Snyder, S. (2010). The eugenic Atlantic: Race, disability, and the making of an international eugenic science 1800–1845. Disability & Science, 18(7), 843–864. Oschsner, A. J. (1899). Surgical treatment of habitual criminals. JAMA, 33(1), 867–868. Parker, C. (2018). An act of genocide: Canada’s coerced sterilization of First Nations women. https://intercontinentalcry.org/canadas-coerced-sterilization-of-firstnations-women/ Plato. (2013). The republic. Harvard University Press. (Original work published c. 380) Sanger, A. (2007). Eugenics, race, and Margaret Sanger revisited: Reproductive freedom for all? Hypatia, 22(2), 210–217.

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Sanger, M. (1919). Birth control and racial betterment. The Birth Control Review, 3(2), 11–12. Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. Teachers College Press. Sharp, H. C. (1909). Vasectomy as a means of preventing procreation in defectives. JAMA, 53(23), 1897–1902. Sofair, A. N., & Kaldjian, L. C. (2000). Eugenic sterilization and a qualified Nazi analogy: The United States and Germany, 1930–1945. Annals of Internal Medicine, 132(4), 312–319. Stote, K. (2012). The coercive sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 36(3), 117–150.

CHAPTER 27

Extraordinary Rule (Three-Fifths Compromise) Joseph Flynn and Darius Jackson

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Capitalism; Critical Race Theory; White Supremacy

… The invention and maintenance of White racism is a 400 year history that is evidenced in practically every institution we can identify. Similarly, we often hear the popular proclamation that the United States is racist to its core. Arguably this belief is evident in the three-fifths compromise embedded in the Constitution of the United States. Simply put, the three-fifths compromise was a compromise between the Southern states (or pro-slavery states) and the Northern states (or anti-slavery states) over how enslaved Africans would count for congressional representation. The contested issue arose during the 1787 Constitutional Congress and it is believed the nation as we know it would not have happened had it not been for the compromise. However, it can also be argued that this was the opportunity for the Framers to truly embrace the equality of the races, or at the very least, recognize slavery as an abomination not worthy of inclusion in the birth of the nation. The three-fifths compromise declared that a state’s slave population counted as three-fifths in apportioning representatives, presidential electors, and taxation. Popularly, the clause is interpreted as saying both that slaves represented only three-fifths of a human being and more perniciously that Africans and/or African-Americans were not fully human, in effect furthering the privilege of Whiteness through the structure of the Constitution. Although there were several compromises in the creation of the Constitution this was one of the most controversial, then and now.

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Constitutional Compromises and the Birth of the Three-Fifths Clause

The development of the Constitution was years in the making and vigorous debate ensued throughout. When there is debate, compromise must follow, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_027

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and the Framers of the Constitution made many compromises, but a few key compromises radically shaped the Constitution and the nation as we know it. The Great Compromise established a bicameral legislature, allowing for a Senate to be comprised of equal representation and a House of Representatives to allow representation based on a state’s population. The next compromise was the creation of the Electoral College, which eased small states’ concern of being disregarded in presidential elections. And, finally, the biggest one of all, the three-fifths Compromise. The first major compromise regarded federal representation. Also known as the Connecticut Compromise, it created a bicameral legislature, or two houses of Congress. The first house – the Senate – would allow all states to have equal representation of two senators from each state. The second house – the House of Representatives – would allow for each state to have a number of representatives based on the states’ populations. This compromise allowed for all states, regardless of size, to have equal voice in legislative matters, while also having representation that matched the size of the state. The next major compromise created the Electoral College, which allows for a number of electors for each state to cast the final vote for president. Then there is the three-fifths compromise. Slavery had been a growing and controversial institution in the British North American colonies since 1619, when the first cargo of enslaved Africans docked on the coast of Virginia. During the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery had expanded to all original 13 Colonies, but Northern colonies (eventually states) had growing trepidation around slavery. By the middle 1700s there was increased pro-abolition protest, and by 1789 many of the Northern states responded by either abolishing slavery outright or developing plans to “phase out” slavery. This philosophical and moral dividing line was in fact a thorny issue for the Framers, precipitating the exclusion of the word slavery in the Constitution, a strategic rhetorical move in and of itself that allowed the Framers to not have to take up a debate about the morality of the institution (Berry, 1995; Higginbotham, 1996). For the South though, slavery was fundamental. It was without doubt that slavery had developed both the North’s and the South’s economy, but the South could have barely survived without it and this fact was carried into the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As legal scholar and historian A. Leon Higginbotham (1996) wrote: Although slavery offered some commercial advantages to most northern states, it was obvious that the financial viability of the southern states was primarily dependent upon slave labor. The southern representatives

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had made it abundantly clear that they would not agree to a federal union that would have the national power to tamper with any state’s maintenance of domestic slavery… there was an overwhelming consensus that the new federal government would sanction slavery as it had in the past. (p. 68) Contrary to the Northern states’ consternation around slavery, the institution was fully embraced by the Southern delegation, and as the Constitutional debate raged on it became evident that the South wanted to use slavery for all its worth, while the Northern delegation considered various means to find a compromise. Even though slaves had no rights – as they were technically chattel or property – Southern representatives believed their slaves should be counted as part of their state populations and by extension have a strategic impact on representation (number of Congressional seats) and taxation. Had the Southern states been allowed to count their slaves as part of the population it would have resulted in an unfair imbalance and the Southern states would have more easily controlled the balance of power in the budding government. This resulted in an impasse that put the possibility of a United States in jeopardy. In fact, this compromise had originally been offered in the 1783 Continental Congress as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation had previously dictated that taxes would be apportioned according to land value, resulting in some states regularly undervaluing their lands. To rectify this trend, it was agreed that taxation and representation would be based on population size, but that of course was problematic due to enslaved populations. By 1783, abolitionist efforts had taken root throughout the Northern states and as mentioned above most of them were well on their way to abolishing slavery. There were other proposed representation compromises, including counting the enslaved as one-half or three-fourths (Willis, 2003). Ultimately, future president James Madison suggested counting a state’s slave population as three-fifths of the total number of slaves. Although not ratified as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation, the idea was resurrected during the Constitutional Convention and ultimately made its way into the Constitution through the following language: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole

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Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2) The added compromise assuaged the Southern representatives’ concerns and the Constitution was eventually ratified with the language. Although slavery is not expressly mentioned in the Constitution, the language of the three-fifths compromise clearly indicated that all the Framers were willing to allow the continuance of slavery by legally inscribing the inferiority of Africans and African Americans. It was further agreed in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution that the issue of slavery would not be taken up again for at least 20 years.

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Repercussions and Legacy of the Three-Fifths Compromise

The immediate repercussion of the three-fifths compromise was that its codification into the Constitution allowed for both the establishment of the nation and the continuation of slavery. The drafting of the Constitution was one of those watershed moments in history wherein the better of ourselves (the Framers in this case) ought to have come to the fore. The guiding edict of the Declaration of Independence passed a decade earlier in 1776, proclaimed that all men are created equal, but the three-fifths compromise consciously suspended the extension of that edict to all. What is most troubling is that this compromise came at a time when there was widespread and growing disdain toward slavery – both in the budding country and internationally. However, there is an important point to consider. As Nichols (1988) elucidates, contemporary critics tend to superimpose today’s values onto the Framers, and he further argues that the move to include the Compromise was not intended to be a comfortable allowance of slavery. Drawing on the work of political scientist Herbert Storing, Nichols stated that: The three-fifths compromise did not have the same pejorative connotations in the minds of the framers as it has today. (It) did not express the delegates’ common belief that slaves possessed only three-fifths of the humanity of whites… It was the leaders of the free states who argued that slaves should not be counted for purposes of representation; after all, their Southern owners refused to extend them the privileges of citizenship. (p. 35)

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Despite the ratification of the Constitution with the three-fifths compromise language, the move only emboldened the pro-abolitionists and went on to open the door toward slavery’s abolition through the 13th Amendment (Chambers, 2013; Harris, 2013). Then and now, there is lingering debate about whether or not the inclusion of the three-fifths compromise was an attempt to legitimate slavery and thus framing the Constitution as a racist document. Constitutional historian Howard Ohline (1971) opined that without the clause slave and abolitionist states would not have been able to come together to form the national union. As he states, “The three-fifths clause in its final form was the major instrument in uniting slave and nonslave states in a national legislature that represented a significant advance over the static form of English constitutional structure” (p. 584). However, he also pointed out that “the new nation had to acknowledge the existence of slavery in its legislature… and that the major dispute in the Convention was not whether this should or should not be, but how it would be done” (p. 584). In effect, as others have pointed out, the inclusion of the compromise provided the Framers an out from engaging a more substantive debate about slavery’s moral foundation and whether or not it actually comported with the budding nation’s expressed values. As history moved on from 1787 and the Constitution was ratified, the door was now open for the Abolitionists to boldly attack, eventually leading to a Civil War and the passage the 13th Amendment in 1865. An equally important repercussion of the three-fifths compromise was that it greatly bolstered Southern legislative possibilities. As Rael (2016) pointed out, the three-fifths compromise artificially inflated the South’s influence in both the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Since the southern states had significantly more numbers, they were able to leverage those numbers into electoral power. As mentioned above, the Electoral College was directly tied to states’ populations. Estes (2011) explains that had it not been for the inflated representation via the compromise, the South may not have been able to get Thomas Jefferson elected over John Adams, an abolitionist. It is always dangerous to play “what-if” games with history. Once can never really know. However, we do know that the three-fifths clause extended the legal institution of slavery by almost 80 years and resulted – in part – in a Civil War that almost crushed the nation. We also know that the compromise was another plot point in the long story of the dehumanization of Africans and African Americans and the furthering of White racial privilege.

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References Berry, M. F. (1995). Slavery, the Constitution, and the founding fathers: The African American vision. In J. H. Franklin & G. R. McNeil (Eds.), African Americans and the living Constitution (pp. 11–20). Smithsonian Institution Press. Chambers, Jr. H. (2013, February 26). Morality wasn’t the issue in 1787. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/02/26/theconstitutionsimmoral-compromise/morality-wasn’t-the-issue-in-1787 Estes, T. (2011). The Connecticut effect: The great compromise of 1787 and the history of small state impact on Electoral College outcomes. The Historian, 73(2), 255–283. Harris, L. M. (2013, February 26). A moral stand was not out of the question. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/02/26/theconstitutionsimmoralcompromise/a-moral-stand-was-not-out-of-the-question/ Higginbotham, A. L. (1996). Shades of freedom: Racial politics and presumptions of the American legal process. Oxford University Press. Nichols, D. (1988). How five (partly true) myths can help teachers teach about the Constitution. OAH Magazine of History, 3(1), 31–37. Ohline, H. A. (1971). Republicanism and slavery: Origins of the three-fifths clause in the United States constitution. The William and Mary Quarterly, 28(4), 563–584. Rael, P. (2016, December 19). A compact for the good of America? Slavery and the threefifths compromise. https://www.aaihs.org/a-compcat-for-the-good-ofamericaslavery-and-the-three-fifths-compromise/ U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2. Wills, G. (2003). Negro president: Jefferson and the slave power. Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER 28

False Consciousness Peter Hossler

Related Entries: Capitalism; Marxism; McIntosh, Peggy; Nationalism; Revolutionary Consciousness

… False consciousness is a central concept within political Marxism (i.e. theorists and scholars using Marxist scholarship to theorize class-based political struggles). False consciousness describes a distorted understanding(s) of reality produced through dominant or hegemonic belief systems (e.g. ideologies). The concept addresses two of the central questions within Marxist scholarship: (1) why does the working class frequently fail to understand the nature of their own exploitation; and (2) what prevents the working class from transforming into the revolutionary agents ushering in the transition from capitalism to socialism? The question of working class consciousness is a central problematic in the writings of a wide array of Marxist writers including Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Additionally, it continues to animate important discussions about the relationship between Marxist theory, identity politics, and New Social Movements. Specifically, false consciousness and ideology serve as pivotal concepts through which scholars theorize the role of religion, nationalism, gender, and racism within capitalist exploitation, class consciousness, and class struggle. On the other hand, critics of Marxism, such as critical race theory (CRT), often highlight false consciousness as another example of Marxist economic reductionism. Scholars have claimed that false consciousness reduces the complexity of social relations into a static conception of base/superstructure that privileges economic relations. Lost in much of the criticism of false consciousness is the continued necessity of theories and concepts that explore political consciousness, political struggle, and the material realities that are both their cause and their consequences. Although Karl Marx never specifically used the term false consciousness, his long-time writing partner Friedrich Engels did. Engels first used the term false consciousness in a letter to German communist Franz Mehring in 1893. Engels (1893) writes: © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_028

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Ideology is a process which of course is carried on with the consciousness of the so-called thinker but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move him, he remains unaware of, otherwise it would not be an ideological process. He therefore imagines false or apparent driving forces. Because it is a thought process, he derives both its content and form from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with purely conceptual material which he unwittingly takes over as the product of thought and therefore does not investigate its relations to a process further removed from and independent of thought. Indeed this seems to him self-evident, for it appears to him that since all activity is mediated by thought, it is ultimately grounded in thought. (Engels 1893) This first mention by Engels provides several important foundational traits that continue to be important to the contemporary usage of false consciousness and ideology. First, false consciousness is internally related to ideology, it is an expression of ideologies, or a set of distorted or false beliefs and ideas that often serve as a form of common sense. Second, the false in false consciousness is not an expression of the validity of the truth claim, rather it relates to the motives or rationales behind the truth claim. As such, knowledge may be objectively true, while still being a form of false consciousness and ideology. For example, attempts throughout the 20th century to rationalize racialized capitalism and white supremacy (e.g. environmental determinism, culture of poverty, welfare queens) have consistently relied on the statistically valid correlations between race and economic wealth in the United States. The objective fact that African-Americans, Latinx, and other people of color are disproportionately poor, can still be a form of false consciousness, as the racist motives and idealist epistemologies behind this work remain hidden from the actors. Third, ideology and false consciousness are not individual processes; they are social in nature. Ideologies are not based on the belief of one person; their power only emerges through shared (false) understandings of the world. Finally, ideologies and false consciousness are an expression of idealism; they are born in the conceptual world, typically from the ruling class, and obscure the material limits of these belief systems. The early engagement with ideology by Marx and Engels tended to focus on the consciousness of the capitalists, the political and intellectual elites. This is largely the result of Marx and Engels’s theorization of the base and superstructure. While the base includes the relations of production (e.g. labor, technology, environmental basis, property, etc.), the superstructure is the culture, political organization, rituals and common sense that inform our understandings

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of the world. Marx and Engels saw the working class as existing largely separate from the established political practices and cultural organizations of the superstructure. Consequently, according to them, they did not participate in the construction of these ideological structures, as their activity was limited largely to the base, or economic activities. Additionally, the nature of the proletariat’s existence as laborers (e.g. dangerous working conditions, long hours, low wages, etc.) served to diminish the seductiveness of the ideologies of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels, instead, were particularly critical of the intellectuals on the Left, who focused solely on changing our knowledge, rather than recognizing the dialectical relationship between knowledge and praxis (e.g. Young Hegelians, utopian socialist, etc.), as well as classical political economists such as Malthus. Ultimately, Marx and Engels used false consciousness and ideology similarly and their discussion is limited to intellectuals and capitalists, as they are the ones vulnerable to idealism; their labor process obscured the general production process. This narrowness eventually led other theorists to explore more specifically the working class’s relationship with ideology and false consciousness. Russian philosopher and politician Vladimir Lenin offered an important complement to this early work; Lenin saw the central question for working class consciousness as between reformism and revolutionary consciousness. Reformism offered short-term gains (e.g. small wage increases, reduction in the working day) over more systemic revolutionary changes (e.g. abolition of private property). Lenin positions the debate between reformist and revolutionary ideologies not through epistemology and ontology, but rather as a question of tactics. He argued that ideologies produced by the elites and intellectuals of the ruling class would generate reformist understandings of the world, rather than revolutionary ones. Consequently, the revolutionary party was the critical organizational space for developing a revolutionary consciousness. Lenin’s contributions stopped short of suggesting that the working class could have false consciousness; he like Marx and Engels before him, theorized that the lived experience of the working class would prevent the full incorporation of ruling class ideologies. However, his work paved the way for taking working class subjectivity and consciousness seriously. This contribution was extended by the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who made working class consciousness one of the central objects of his scholarship. Gramsci’s work begins to separate conceptually false consciousness from ideology, splitting the unitary concept offered by Marx, Engels and Lenin. First, Gramsci expands the notion of ideology to include both those systems of thought that serve as counter-revolutionary justification for the status quo and those that worked to spark revolutionary consciousness and class

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struggle. Consequently, ideology is now different from false consciousness as both Marxism and bourgeois nationalism, or market-based freedom, perform ideological functions, all of which compete to “explain” social reality. False consciousness, on the other hand is transformed by Gramsci from a passively received, subjective experience of ideology mapped onto working class subjectivity, to a more fluid consciousness that emerges from experience and action blending science and myth, religion and class relations into working class consciousness. Second, Gramsci positions the working class as active participants in the construction of ideology. His theorization of the “organic” intellectuals recognizes the important role that the working class can play in producing revolutionary ideology. Ultimately, Gramsci produces a new understanding of ideology and false consciousness. False consciousness, according to Gramsci, is part of the mixture of experience and culture that produces working class consciousness. It is false, in the sense that it includes distorted or narrow understandings of the nature of exploitation and the tactics to change it. Ideology then becomes competing explanations of the nature of the oppression; these can be reformist, or revolutionary and it is the working class intellectuals, or organic intellectual’s role, to bring about a revolutionary ideology. The general split from a unitary conception to a separate understanding of ideology and false consciousness becomes the dominant understanding within Marxist thought through the work of Lukács and the Frankfort School of Critical Theory. Lukács similarly understood false consciousness as a distorted social understanding of oppression and ideologies as the offered explanation for its origins. However, Lukács expanded the production of ideology beyond the creation of ideas to the very heart of capitalism itself. Using Marx’s work on fetishization, Lukács explored how the everyday practices of capitalism through a process of reification (i.e. everyday life naturalizes the origins and consequences of capitalism) creates false consciousness in both the bourgeois and proletariat. The only difference is the proletariat or working class are the only class with an interest in overcoming this false consciousness. Lukacs’s work and that of the Frankfurt School continued to explore the production of the working class (false consciousness) particularly in the context of World War II and the failure of the German and Italian working classes to oppose Fascism. Additionally, the split of false consciousness and ideology would also become central to a wide range of writers theorizing racism and white supremacy. Oliver Cromwell (O.C.) Cox, Franz Fanon, Paulo Freire, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James all examined the role of consciousness and capitalism as they relate to white supremacy and racialized exploitation. In various ways, all four of these authors brought attention to the economic functions that racism played in the growing international political economy. Central to these lines of

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theorization was an exploration of the “productive” role that racism played for the dynamics of capitalism. The emphasis on who/what produces false consciousness and racialist ideology and who benefits differs amongst the writers. These differences mirror some of the central debates between the Marxist originators of the concepts previously discussed. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois emphasized the role of white capitalist elites in producing racist ideologies and false consciousness. Du Bois argued that “race” and racism are a key ideological construct supporting the continued dominance of capital. Du Bois explains, in Black Reconstruction in America, the lack of a significant labor movement in the south is a result of false consciousness on the part of white laborers. He argues that white political and economic elites cultivate white supremacy and racism to undermine the construction of a trans-racial labor movement. In doing so, white, working class laborers benefited from a “psychological wage,” stoking feelings of superiority amongst the poor white workers at the expense of more meaningful economic benefits. He goes on to argue in other work that race serves as a form of “blind unreason” concealing from view the intelligent response to contemporary problems. O.C. Cox, on the other hand, turns his attention to the material benefits that the white working class receive from ideologies such as racism and nationalism. Cox’s (1948) seminal work Caste, Class, and Race explores the similarities and differences between the Indian Caste system and the racial hierarchies in the United States. It’s central focus was a critique of Gunner Myrdal’s work in An American Dilemma, which theorized racism as an outcome of “cumulative causation” whereby white racism leads to the increased impoverishment of black communities, which leads to a range of correlated social problems, which then reinforce white racism. Cox critiques Myrdal’s reasoning on a number of fronts. First, Cox argues that it homogenizes class distinctions amongst the white population, and as such ignores the economic benefits of racial oppression for economic elites and the white working class. Second, Cox argues that the white working class exhibits a “false consciousness” in relation to racism and nationalism. Rather than emerging from Myrdal’s cumulative causation thesis, Cox focuses on the economic benefits of nationalism and racism that accrue to the white working class. Echoing similarities between Lenin’s discussion of tactics and reformist ideologies, Cox focuses on the tangible economic benefits that flow to both the white working class and capitalist elites of racism and a divided labor force. C.L.R. James focused on the revolutionary potential of the “Negro” struggle on the development of the revolutionary proletariat. Rejecting claims that Marxist thinking universally marginalizes the black radical tradition, James’ work reveals that an independent “Negro” movement can play a crucial role

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in resolving false consciousness on the part of the white working class. A central assumption within this claim is that the white working class indeed suffers from a distorted understanding of their exploitation, which can be diminished through the development of black political movements. James’ work not only focuses on the white working class, but the consciousness of the hyper-exploited black working class in locations across the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. Each of these scholars, along with Fanon, and Freire, highlight the intersection of race and class and the economic incentives and material outcomes of white supremacy and racism. However, the explosion of post-structural and thematic focus on identity in the 1970s and 80s led to a backlash against viewing racism and white supremacy as a function of ideology and false consciousness. This backlash can be best viewed in the emergence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the work of Charles Mills. Mills’ work, along with historians such as Cedric Robinson and Robin Kelley, argue that race, not class, is the “primary contradiction” within the United States. Their critiques of Marxist inspired approaches to race and racism begin with an assumption that Marxism is a form of class reductionism and economic determinism. Mills takes the additional step of arguing that this is largely a function of Marx’s own racism, which prompted him to focus on the “privileged” white proletariat. The central argument here is that racism blinds even progressive whites from seeing racism, and consequently conceals the primary political tactics, which become antiracism. This line of reasoning is consistent with Peggy McIntosh’s work on white privilege, which aligns a wide range of inequalities within the historic racial hierarchies. Mills argues that this providing of class is inconsistent with the actual lived experience of both the black and white working classes. First, Mills argues that there are no transracial class struggles, yet there are many transclass racial movements. Consequently, for Mills, racial identity is the stable reference point for determining who becomes “us” and who is “them.” Mills, drawing upon empiricist arguments, suggests that because race is more visible and tangible it marks bodies in a manner that class cannot. As such, class becomes secondary to the “real” contradiction between racialized bodies operating within the ideology of white supremacy. Furthering this argument, Mills harnesses the work of Marxist scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that white academics, including Marxists, had ignored the central role that race played in exploitation and domination. Kelley’s introduction to Robinson’s Black Marxism shares this critique, arguing that historical materialism has ignored the pre-history of racism and white supremacy that emerged prior to modern capitalism. Consequently, for scholars such as Kelley, Mills, and Robinson, racism was the foundation of materiality, not an ideology that emerges as a tool of capitalism.

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The critiques of Mills, Kelley and Robinson distort key concepts of Marx and Marxism in a number of ways. First, although there are certainly orthodox Marxist literatures that present tautological arguments that reduce all social activity to the mode of production, Marx and Engels, as well as many of the other scholars theorizing working class consciousness, had a much more expansive view of the importance of the superstructure and ideology. Marx and Engels, in various places, made clear that the base/superstructure conception was not unilinear, base producing the superstructure, but rather cultural beliefs, political structures, and ideologies such as racism could be central to the expression of the base. Marx himself was a staunch abolitionist and argued that the abolition of slavery was a critical step in the development of a working class movement in the United States. Second, much of the evidence harnessed by Mills and other CRT scholars, in particular, describe powerfully the central role race plays in the daily life of the United States, but fail to explain those tendencies. For example, while Mills recognizes the lack of transracial working class movements, he fails to account for why this is so beyond the equally deterministic language of racism and white supremacy. While scholars such as Robinson contextualize this history beyond the time period of modern capitalism, scholars still lack a clear historical material understanding of how these less rigid racial hierarchies become embedded within the emergent racialized capitalism of the United States, and why. In doing so these authors position false consciousness and ideology, as well as their critique of it, as a static form of economic reductionism. This brings the question back to an examination of false consciousness and its utility for antiracism in the 21st century. First, false consciousness offers a lens through which scholars and activists can engage with the question of the white working classes’ complicity in the continued exploitation of their own labor, as well as the labor of people of color. Rather than merely explaining the histories of this complicity – white union organizing, the charter school movement, the movements for social security and Medicaid – false consciousness helps us situate these failures within a broader understanding of the continuous entanglements of capitalism (base) and racism (superstructure) which produce material and psychological benefits for the white working class that are explained through racist ideologies, along with other ideological structures (e.g. the patriarchy, meritocracy, individualism, freedom and religion). Second, retaining false consciousness as a core theoretical concept that explores the deviations between social interests and cultural beliefs allows scholars to continue to examine the wide range of ideological structures that support the continued maintenance of capitalism. The rejection of false consciousness, as reducing race to class, serves as an equally powerful critique of examining

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the intersection of gender and class, or nationalism and class, or religion and class. This rejection excludes a number of critical avenues where tactics such as Freire’s critical pedagogy might facilitate new understandings of a material intersectionality which draws out the multiple ideologies which reify capitalist logics and sustain the class dynamics of its mode of production. Finally, a rejection of false consciousness, ideology and Marxism more generally offers significant threats to the material politics of antiracism. The marginalization of class struggle from antiracist activism, under the guise of economic reductionism, leaves us with an idealist politics, one where our best option is living in a world where the ideologies of racism have been reduced, and the bodily violence of capitalism is at best more equitably distributed. Consequently, a conception of false consciousness that centers class yet retains the superstructure as a central element in the production and maintenance of the mode of production offers an opportunity to acknowledge, as CLR James, OC Cox, and Marx and Engels did, the powerful utility of independent antiracist struggles for the construction of a broader-based class struggle.

References Cox, O. C. (1948). Caste, class, & race: A study in social dynamics. Doubleday. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2017). Black reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860– 1880. Routledge. Engels, F. (1893). Engels to Franz Mehring. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm Myrdal, G. (2017). An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy (Vol. 1). Routledge. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 29

Feminism and Whiteness Katerina Deliovsky

Related Entries: Eugenics; hooks, bell; Intersectionality; White Supremacy

… It was Simone de Beauvoir who wrote in The Second Sex “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1975, p. 267). In her existential examination of woman’s oppression, she stressed that being a “woman” is not a fait accompli, but rather a becoming. Not only did this insight provide the nascent distinction between sex and gender, and that biology is not destiny (Spelman, 1988, p. 66), it also validated the belief that there is indeed a commonality to being a woman. While de Beauvoir arrested the eternalistic and transcendental perspective which essentialized the category woman, her insight paradoxically transferred essentialism from one domain to another. No longer was woman biologically determined, but rather a creation of the social forces which brought the universal woman into being; thus, suggesting women share a common locus of oppression as gendered beings vis-à-vis a universal patriarchy. Rooted in the first wave women’s movement, this commonality of experience and suffering of womanhood is the basis of Western White feminist knowledge production. Importantly to note, the wave metaphor has been criticized for obscuring women’s global efforts to challenge patriarchal configurations prior to the 1800s. It has also been criticized for being ethnocentric and assuming that feminist activity originated in the West by primarily white middle upper class women (See Cott, 1987; Nicholson, 2013).While recognizing the relevance of the critique, for the sake of ease and simplicity, I use the wave metaphor. In the pursuit and theorization of this commonality, feminist inquiries have raised fundamental challenges to not only the misogynistic and androcentric worldviews that portrayed and conceptualized women in derogatory terms, but also to the androcentric conceptual and methodological tools of positivist science. From literature to medicine, feminists deconstructed how social meanings have been historically and ideologically attributed to women’s bodies – thus shaping women’s lived reality. Building on the rights secured in the first wave feminist movement and the theoretical and political assertions of 1960s feminist radicalism, feminists from all disciplines challenged © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_029

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the distinctions in the social sciences of subject/object, mind/body and political/personal. Radical feminist scholars declared that the personal was indeed political and therefore any inquiry into women’s lives must seek to explicate this relationship. Under the influence of this injunction, some feminists proclaimed that objectivity and value free social science were fictions of the patriarchal order; others yet stated that if such a goal were possible, it would not be desirable. Having rejected the reigning masculinist imperialism of the social sciences, feminists were confronted with the challenges of developing epistemological, methodological and research tools consistent with the feminist ideal of liberating women’s minds and bodies. Feminist theorists from various schools of thought debated over what were the best and most suitable methodological and theoretical tools in pursuit of this liberation and toward understanding women’s lives. Some suggested that a phenomenological approach (grounded in the experiential) was required; others suggested that a Marxist political economy approach toward understanding women’s exploitation in the economy should be the goal of rescuing and restoring women to history. Striking a middle ground, a few feminist scholars advocated a holistic and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation and production that would ground theory in the concrete realm of women’s lives. The attempt, however, to create “herstory” grounded in a “feminist standpoint” or “standpoint of women,” although promising, revealed serious limitations. One limitation rested on the very foundation on which it was conceptualized: the idea that there was a herstory rather than herstories. But more than that, the basis for herstory was set in the earliest stages of first wave feminism, when White women in effect demanded gender equality by articulating their trustworthiness as “White” social actors (i.e. builders of nations as pure, “White” mothers), thus indelibly connecting Whiteness and feminism. While the first wave women’s suffrage movement in Canada and the U.S. was aligned with the temperance and abolitionist movements and included various Black liberation activists such as Sojourner Truth, Ida B Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, it privileged White feminists. The movement also arrogated to White women, in general, and elite White women, in particular, a distinctly superior location as “mothers of the race.” From this social location they advocated for greater social, economic and political rights. Notable feminist scholar bell hooks brought this issue to the forefront of feminist thought in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981). While among several Black feminists and feminists of color who highlighted the racist and exclusionary practices of the first and second wave women’s movement (see for example Davis, 1983; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981), she was the earliest Black feminist to receive mainstream academic feminist recognition.

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hooks (1981) explains that the “racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement” (p. 124). White women suffragists’ racism and allegiance to white supremacy manifested in several ways. It was, for example, demonstrated in the responses of White women reformers who vehemently opposed Black freed men’s enfranchisement over theirs because as the superior “mothers of the race” they believed themselves more deserving, rational, responsible and therefore entitled. hooks (1981) points out that even notable women’s rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton “who had never before argued for women’s right on a racially imperialistic platform expressed outrage that inferior [Black men] would be granted the vote while ‘superior’ White women remained disenfranchised” (p. 127). Their racial commitments were also evinced in instances when southern White women blocked Black women’s participation in the women’s movement and from suffrage. Through invoking the privileges of white supremacy, White women activists exposed how they were influenced by and contributed to the pernicious ideological influence of racism. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1997) states that racism and discrimination against African American women reformers was indeed the rule rather than the exception in the early woman’s right movement (1830’s to 1920). The prioritization of White women’s goals and the role of racism within the women’s movement left an indelible mark carried into second wave feminism. As such, the structure of the second wave women’s movement, in many respects, was no different from the first. Mirroring patterns of White domination in the context of colonialism as evinced by the early White American suffragists, second wave White middle-class feminists appropriated, assimilated and domesticated the experiences and voices of racially marginalized women to give White women, who were the venerated glorification of the ideal woman, the relative upper hand in the fight for women’s rights. hooks (1984) points out that much like their predecessors, White women who launched the contemporary women’s movement advanced their cause in the wake of the 60s Black liberation movement. One of the strategies used by conservative and liberal feminists to draw attention to their cause was the notion of shared sisterhood of victimization. While obscuring and/or ignoring the actual lived reality of victimization of Black women, women of color, and poor working class women, most White feminists theorized a common and consistent emphasis on women as an essential category encountering male domination. This universalization and essentialization of White women’s experiences was accomplished by positing or theorizing a universal woman who did not belong to a “race” or ethnicity and only sometimes had a sexual orientation

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or class location (Spelman, 1988). Because this woman was rarely marked by social and cultural categories, by default she was a White, heterosexual middle-class woman. If differences among women were highlighted, they were demarcated by class (i.e. Marxists, Socialist feminism). In some cases, race was a benighted notation or footnote to the larger theme of gender and/or class oppression. It is within this predominantly race-absent theorization that feminism’s catch phrase “as a woman” or “as women,” which actually meant “as a White middle-class woman,” was most evident. Elizabeth Spelman (1988) explains the concept “as women” is the Trojan horse of White feminist ethnocentrism because its use creates the illusion that a woman’s sex is neatly isolated from her race or class or ethnicity. Emblematic of this type of feminist theorizing is Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan’s work has been heralded within white feminist hegemony as laying the groundwork for the “second wave” feminist movement. She writes, “it is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity – a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique” (1963, p. 133). Friedan explains this feminine mystique keeps women from self-actualization because they are bound to feminine ideals that perpetuate images of the “happy housewife.” She maintains that women can no longer ignore that voice within that declares they want “something more” than their husband, their children and their home. This something more to which Friedan refers is work – “work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society… the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession” (1963, p. 476). While Friedan’s work galvanized many women to think about their roles and identities in the context of an oppressive “feminine mystique,” it undeniably signaled a type of theorization which ignored the existence of a social hierarchy that determined the extent to which the feminine mystique would be an oppressive force in women’s lives. Drawing attention to Friedan’s universalizing and essentializing tendency and how this merged and meshed with the class, race and other biases encoded in her narrative, hooks (1984) states She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more [White] women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with White men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-White women and poor White women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a baby sister, a factory worker, a clerk or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife. (p. 1)

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Apart from the racist and classist assumptions that rendered Friedan’s work inapplicable to many Black women, women of color and other working-class women who joined the labor force by necessity, it contributed to a white feminist hegemony that made the condition of married, middle-upper class White women synonymous with all women. This homogenization constructed women as victimized by a sexist ideology which forced them to remain in the home, ultimately obscuring the crucial ways women’s life opportunities for self-actualization were not only mediated but also impinged by race, class, and sexuality. Phyllis Marynick Palmer (1983) pointed out, for example, that claims of a universal women’s oppression in reality distorted the material and economic differences between White and Black women based on race and class differentiations. Importantly, she illustrated that in a context of (heterosexual) marriage where White males were economically privileged relative to other males “most White women [did] not in reality live on what they [earned]; they [had] access to the resources of White male income earners, whose incomes contribute substantially to the actual standard of living for the household” (p. 162). The important point made by Palmer and others is that ignoring, omitting or obscuring the differences between women distorted feminist analysis and positioned gender divisions and sexism as an a priori in feminism. It also locked woman as victim into a universalist, oppressive patriarchal regime and presumed women did not victimize each other based on class, sexual, race and ethnic disparities. hooks (1984) points out, for example, given how class structure in North American society is shaped by the racial politics of white supremacy, to disregard how racism functions in a capitalist society, suppresses a feminist understanding of how race, and class inform women’s experiences with men, but also with other women. Not only was this type of feminist theorization Eurocentric and ethnocentric, it was also a distortion of fact and reality with deleterious consequences for Black women and women of color. A crucial instance where the damage was particularly manifest was feminist activism that centered on motherhood and reproductive rights. Angela Davis (1983) points out, while the realities of the birth control movement clearly varied by race, class, and gender, White middle-class feminists were reluctant to recognize or prioritize the concerns of Black women, women of color, Native American and poor white women regarding forced sterilization and the lack of availability of prenatal care. For White women, birth control and abortion rights signaled freedom from “compulsory motherhood” (Davis, 1983); however, for Black women, women of color, and Native American women in particular, it signaled a troubling link between eugenics and birth control. Davis states, for example, in 1932 about “twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of ‘unfit’

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persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing” (p. 214). Native American, Hispanic and African American women were disproportionately affected. By the 1970s, for example, 43% of all women sterilized were African American, 35% were Puerto Rican and 24% were Native American (Davis, 1983, pp. 218–219). More troubling was the eugenic movement’s connection to the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Advocating for a progressive platform that ensured women’s right of “voluntary motherhood” while supporting eugenics, Sanger offered her public approval of forced sterilization. In a radio talkshow she claimed: “‘Morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends’ ought to be surgically sterilized…” (as cited in Davis, 1983, p. 214). Advocating for voluntary motherhood while simultaneously supporting population control reveals Sanger’s commitment to a “voluntary motherhood” that was White, middle class and abled. Although appalling in its implications, the reality was that eugenic ideas about family were influenced by the 19th century “cult of true womanhood,” which, through the “ideological exaltation of motherhood” (Davis, 1983; see also Roberts, 1992) defined White middle-class women primarily as “mothers of the race.” Eugenic discourses about family, motherhood and race were about delineating racial and gendered distinctions through notions of “fit,” “unfit,” “natural” and “unnatural.” By the late 1980s and early 1990s, largely through the critical analytical insights of Black feminists, feminists of color (see for example Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981) and a small coterie of White feminists (see for example Spelman, 1993), it became apparent that feminist epistemology and research, mirroring the social hierarchies at large, were exclusionary in praxis. It was demonstrated that White middle-class feminists had the power to inject their ideas into academic and political discourse and construct a white feminist hegemony largely as a consequence of a hierarchy of race and class which positioned them on top and unfairly distributed advantages and disadvantages to those in the hierarchy. It was also this white feminist hegemony which created the fallacy that White women were not only the primary founders of the feminist movement, but also its intellectual backbone. Pointing out this obscurantism, The Combahee River Collective Statement states that while a Black feminist perspective and presence may have evolved “most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s”; from its inception, Black women, women of color and other working class women have been active in the feminist movement, “but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure [their] participation” (Smith, 2000, p. 265).

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Inveighing against the perniciousness and universalism of a white feminist hegemony, Black feminists critiqued White feminist middle-class theorizations but also developed epistemological and methodological tools that reflected their specific concerns and goals. Speaking to this concern, The Combahee River Collective Statement points out “no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered [Black women’s] specific oppression as priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression” (Smith, 2000, p. 267). With this purpose informing their politics, Black feminists articulated their experiences of the “dialectic of Black womanhood” (Dill, 1983), “simultaneity of oppression” (Smith, 2000), the “politics of domination” (hooks, 1984), “multiple jeopardy” (King, 1988), “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1989) and the “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990). In agreement, they argued that a specificity existed to being Black women that White feminist theory and methodology were incapable of apprehending. As a result, the need to articulate and conceptualize a distinctive Black women’s standpoint became paramount for Black feminists. Patricia Hill Collins (1995), a notable example, stated: Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can withstand the translation from one epistemology to another, time might be better spent rearticulating a Black woman’s standpoint in order to give African American women the tools to resist their own subordination. (p. 540) For Collins (1995), one of the conditions for producing a Black feminist standpoint was living life as African American women (p. 539). This lived reality was a necessary prerequisite because knowledge production within Black women’s communities was produced and legitimated within “a particular set of historical, material and epistemological conditions” (p. 539). These conditions gave African American women particular insight into dominant power structures and the processes by which they manifest. Collins qualified her epistemological claims, however, by pointing out that while Black women’s standpoint and its accompanying epistemology stem from Black women’s experiences of race and gender oppression, “they are not simply the result of combining Afrocentric and female values” (p. 532). Instead Black women’s “standpoints are rooted in real material conditions structured by social class” (p. 532). Critical interventions posed by Collins and other Black feminists called attention to the problematic conceptualization of equal oppression among all women. With varying emphasis, it was argued that women occupy different cultural, sexual, racial, and class locations and thus their experiences and

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consequently their standpoints would vary. These varying standpoints necessitated an approach that attended to the contextual and historical intersections and realities of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality, among other things. Moreover, it was argued that if feminism was to be an ethically humane and a liberatory enterprise it must engage deeply with interconnected inequities within social relations and, thus, within feminism itself. Countering the monistic hegemony of an undifferentiated womanhood, the appellation of “intersectionality” in particular was mobilized to critique straight White middle class theorizing as well as to critically specify women’s difference and relatedness (Brewer, 1999). Intersectionality here follows Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) conceptualization and Black feminist theorizing which posits the “embeddedness and relationality of race, class and gender and the multiplicative nature of these relationships” (Brewer, 1999, p. 16). As Barbara Smith (2000) asserts, “The simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought” (p. xxxiv). Seriously engaging “intersectionality” in 21st century feminist theorizing means, ultimately, more than analyzing race, class, and gender from the standpoint of women stigmatized by these inequities. As suggested by hooks (1990), this engagement necessitates the development of a “discourse on race that interrogates whiteness” (p. 54). For the most part, race in a variety of feminist theorizing has principally been undertaken from the standpoint of negatively racialized women – that is, those who are marginalized and penalized because they are persons of color and/or indigenous. But if feminism is to be for everybody, as hooks (2000) argues, then integral to it must be a theorization of how racism, as a system of power, creates a racial hierarchy and arrogates positional superiority to White feminists. This theorization ought to demystify “womanness” as a transcendental property of White middle-class women and it should open opportunities for an inclusive feminism founded on a radical critique of Whiteness. This radical criticism includes the interrogation and explication of white standpoints that define the parameters of feminism and constrains how women can speak to other women. Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman (1995) poignantly capture the insidious silencing of a white feminist hegemony, We and you do not talk the same language… Your language and your theories are inadequate in expressing our experience, we only succeed in communicating our experience of exclusion. We cannot talk to you in our language because you do not understand it. So the brute facts [are] that we understand your language and that the place where most theorizing

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about women is taking place is your place, both combine to require that we either use your language and distort our experience not just in speaking about it but in the living of it, or that we remain silent. (p. 498) Without such a radical criticism, a white feminist hegemony is “not-known” (Wekker, 2016), glossed over by an avoidance of White women’s “positional superiority” (Said, 1979) and the reproduction of White feminist dominance. To be engaged with Black feminist praxis and feminist of color critique, the simultaneity of oppression means to embrace theoretically and methodologically the contradictions, complexities, compromises and nuances of domination, power, privilege and subordination differentially articulated in women’s lives. Anything else, Barbara Smith argues, is (White middle class feminist) self-aggrandizement. But this kind of feminism, premised on a political philosophy of liberation, is always a work in progress moving toward it, but never quite completing its journey since there is no end to history and to human struggle.

References Brewer. R. (1999). Theorizing race class and gender. In S. James & A. Busia (Eds.), Theorizing Black feminism: The visionary pragmatism of Black women (pp. 13–30). Routledge. Collins, P. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. Routledge. Collins, P. (1995). The social construction of Black feminist thought. In N. Tuana & R. Tong (Eds.), Feminism and philosophy: Essential readings in theory, reinterpretation and application (pp. 526–547). Westview Press. Cott, N. (1987). The grounding of modern feminism. Yale University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1(8), 139–67. Davis, A. (1983). Women, race and class. Vintage Books. Dill, B. (1983). Race, class, and gender: Prospects for an all-inclusive sisterhood. Feminist Studies, 9(1), 131–150. Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. W.W. Norton & Co. hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press. hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. South End Press. hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. South End Press. King, D. (1988). Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: The context of a Black feminist ideology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(1), 42–72.

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Lugones, M., & Spelman, E. (1995). Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for the ‘the woman’s voice.’ In N. Tuana & R. Tong (Eds.), Feminism and philosophy: Essential readings in theory, reinterpretation and application (pp. 494–507). Westview Press. Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. E. (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Persephone Press. Nicholson, L. (2013). Feminism in “waves”: Useful metaphor or not? In C. Mccann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist theory reader: Local and global perspectives (pp. 49–55). Routledge. Palmer, P. (1983). White women/Black women: The dualism of female identity and experience in the United States. Feminist Studies, 9(1), 151–170. Roberts, D. (1992). Racism and patriarchy in the meaning of motherhood. The American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, 1(1), 1–38. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage Books. Smith, B. (2000). Combahee river collective statement. In B. Smith (Ed.), Home girls: A Black feminist anthology. Rutgers University Press. Spelman, E. (1988). Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Beacon Press. Terborg-Penn, R. (1997). Discrimination against Afro-American women in the woman’s movement, 1830–1920. In S. Harley & R. Terborg-Penn (Eds.), The Afro-American woman: Struggles and images (pp. 17–27). Black Classic Press. Wekker, G. (2016) White innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 30

First-Wave Critical White Studies James C. Jupp

Related Entries: Colorblindness; Critical Race Theory; McIntosh, Peggy; Privilege

… Following Delgado and Stefancic’s (1997) still relevant early field-defining compendium, this encyclopedia entry uses the term “critical White studies” (CWS) where the terms “whiteness studies” or “critical whiteness studies” are sometimes synonymous. Nonetheless, this entry differs from Delgado and Stefancic’s reading of CWS by emphasizing and laying out resources that organize CWS, not as an outgrowth field from critical legal studies or critical race theory, but instead as its own independent field of inquiry. By definition, CWS refers to an emancipatory, predominantly Anglophone, and interdisciplinary body of historical, social science, literary, and aesthetic intellectual production that critically examines White people’s individual, collective, social, and historical experiences. As an emancipatory social science, this definition of CWS recognizes the centrality of scholars’ historical-social embeddedness in the research and also Scholars of Color and White scholars’ different positionalities with the whiteness of historical narratives, the social sciences, and the field of CWS itself. Overall, this entry provides a historicizing interpretation of CWS as field of inquiry, describes the ontological and epistemological emphases of first-wave CWS’ intellectual production, and signals the new conceptual and pedagogical emphases that represent CWS’ growing second-wave of research. Historically, CWS built on African-American and African-Caribbean intellectuals’ contributions in advancing one example of the emancipatory social sciences produced in the wake of the international new left social movements emblematic of 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, first-wave CWS provided the following ontological and epistemological emphases: whiteness as hegemonic normativity, White identity and nation building, White privilege and property, and colorblind racism and race-evasion. Since the early 2000s, second-wave CWS has produced new conceptual and pedagogical emphases that drive toward White people’s racial conscientization and also toward complex conscientization processes for an anti-fascist, multi-identarian, and multiracial democracy. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_030

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As an organizing statement, this entry on first-wave CWS: (a) outlines African-American and African-Caribbean scholars’ historic contributions to CWS, (b) historically situates first-wave CWS as one example of the emancipatory social sciences, (c) describes first-wave CWS’ ontological and epistemological emphases, and (d) briefly signals the conceptual and pedagogical “change,” “shift,” or “move” that demarcates CWS’ second-wave since the early 2000s. In sum, this entry aims at contextualizing and describing CWS’ first-wave of development while also providing a lead-in for the entry titled “Second-wave critical White studies,” also documented in this encyclopedia.

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African-American and African-Caribbean Scholars’ Contributions

In order to approach CWS, it is necessary to emphasize predominantly Anglophone, African-American, and African-Caribbean scholars’ theoretical and conceptual-empirical research on race, whiteness, and White identities. Paradoxically for race-based frameworks like CWS and others, recognizing African-American and African-Caribbean scholars is important because these scholars were often ignored in first-wave CWS research. Against the grain of epistemic racism that enables these omissions, this entry emphasizes the historical contributions of scholars like Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Franz Fanon, Carter Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, Malcom X, Toni Morrison, and Sylvia Wynter. Emphatically now, these scholars provided the broad social-historical understandings of race, whiteness, and White identities that provide the horizon of intelligibility for race-based frameworks like CWS in the first place. Providing this horizon of intelligibility, African-American and AfricanCaribbean scholars effectively took on the Herculean task of dislodging previous White supremacist epistemic regimes foundational to settler colonialism in the U.S. and elsewhere. These White supremacist regimes included the whiteness inherent in Medieval and Renaissance Euro-Christian colonialism along with 19th century Spencerian social evolution and different manifestations of scientific racism from the Enlightenment into the present. Emphasizing Wynter’s (2003) contemporary cosmopolite leveraging of the African-American and African-Caribbean archives among others, CWS insists on advancing racializing, historical, and ethical reasoning in order to unsettle the epistemic racism inherent in the Western European ethno-class and its ongoing orderings of what is, counts for, or by degrees approximates “human” in the present moment.

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CWS as an Example of the Emancipatory Social Sciences

Recognizing African-American and African-Caribbean scholars’ contributions, as a field CWS provides an example of the emancipatory social sciences. The emancipatory social sciences became visible and then prominent in the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., Habermas, 1965/1972). Confluent with the social crises that preceded and advanced anti-colonial, Black, feminist, gay, student, anti-war and other criticalities emblematic of 1968, several emancipatory social sciences surged in the wake of international, new left, social movements. These emancipatory social sciences served both as supporting intellectual content for the movements and as continuations of these social movements within the academy as well. Supporting and continuing these movements, the emancipatory social sciences emphasized a new politics of knowledge. This new politics of knowledge denounced and challenged previous traditional-managerial social sciences’ Malthusian and technical rationales inherent in structural-functional models of the social sciences (e.g., Parsons, 1951/2012). Denouncing traditional-managerial rationales, the emancipatory social sciences like CWS and others purposefully insisted on pressing the following moral/aesthetic question: Whose interests are served by social science knowledge production? Taking psychoanalysis as reflexive yet tumultuous model, the emancipatory social sciences rejected liberal foundations’ bastions of positivist “objectivity” and humanist “universality.” Instead, emancipatory social sciences emphasized situated knowledges that interrupted local-global power relations embedded first in race, class, and gender and later in sexuality, ability, language, and other differences. Emphasizing these situated and local-global knowledges, the emancipatory social sciences insisted on a guerilla, revelatory, conjunctural, and conceptual-empirical knowledge production that understood its “findings” as critical interventions into the social world (e.g., Hall, 1992). As the emancipatory social sciences developed, first-wave CWS’ intellectual production provided important conceptual-empirical content that denounced and challenged traditional-managerial social sciences’ inherent whiteness. Never cancelling out much less eclipsing the traditional-managerial social sciences, nonetheless, the emancipatory social sciences served as the broad backdrop in the 1970s from which first-wave CWS could emerge in the 1980s into early 1990s. Following the new social movements mentioned above, the new emancipatory social sciences included gender studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, multicultural education, critical legal studies, critical race theory, and other fields. In the crucible of these new fields, the emergence of first-wave CWS in gender studies (hooks, 1992; McIntosh, 1988), cultural studies

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(Dyer, 1988; Hall, 1981), multicultural education (King, 1991; Sleeter, 1992), and critical race theory (Bell, 1980; Harris, 1993/1995) comes as no surprise. Proliferating from these fields as an ostensible “hot topic” in the 1990s, firstwave CWS also infiltrated and subverted traditional-managerial social science disciplines as well. As a result, traditional-managerial social sciences like sociology (e.g., Frankenberg, 1993), psychology (e.g., Helms, 1991), labor history (e.g., Roediger, 1994), curriculum (e.g., Giroux, 1997), and other disciplines also became sites for first-wave CWS’ intellectual production. Roundly denouncing, yet at times paradoxically reproducing whiteness (Paraskeva, 2016), first-wave CWS as well as other emancipatory social science fields contributed to rupturing the post-War, U.S.-Europe led hegemonic consensus, as currently evinced in ahistorical media discussions on “social divisiveness,” “factionist politics,” “fascist nationalists,” “the terrorist threat,” or “the culture wars.”

3

First-wave CWS’ Ontological and Epistemological Emphases

Though ongoing refinements continue to be made to first-wave emphases through the present (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 2003/2017; Leonardo, 2009), initial conceptual-empirical research on first-wave CWS emphases all occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. As an example of the emancipatory social sciences, these emphases included: (i) Whiteness as hegemonic normativity, (ii) White identity and nation building, (iii) White privilege and property, and (iv) White colorblind racism and race-evasion. Each of these dimensions are briefly summarized and discussed below, referencing key scholars’ work. First, whiteness as hegemonic normativity refers to whiteness as the racial-ontological structuring that establishes the commonsense humanity or normality of White-skinned people against which racialized others are measured as less human or deficient. White hegemony references the racial component of the hegemonic matrix in which Eurocentrism, Anglophone, White supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and other dominance markers are assumed, invisible, and historic backdrops or norms for concepts such as economic development, human progress, or personal improvement. White normativity racializes the structuration of White middle-class common sense, lifestyles, and “successes” as universal aspiration of all people as referenced in the “first” African-American this or “first” Latinx that discourses. These “first” discourses suggest People of Color are always behind but can and do “catch up” with Whites when/if they become sufficiently meritorious thereby playing into liberal “diversity” tropes used to administrate structural-historical injustices and inequalities. Often abbreviated as whiteness, the notion of whiteness

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is regularly trafficked in critical research on race to articulate the racial component of hegemony, discussed above. Overall, scholars such as Dyer, Hall, hooks, West, Sleeter, Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, and others specifically worked on conceptualizing whiteness. By this researcher’s account, Hall’s (1981) discussion of “the white eye” (Hall, 1981, p. 39) initiated this explicit linkage between whiteness and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Second, White identity and nation building refer to the historical construction of White national identity tied to colonial administration and political nation building in the U.S. The overarching theme of this line of research demonstrates the political manipulation and assimilation of not-yet-White immigrants by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership class that advanced a political platform constructing White identities and White self-interests. The mainstay of the Jacksonian “democratic uprising,” the Democratic political platform specifically secured voting rights for the White “rabble,” provided federal guarantees for African slavery, advanced aggressive Native American genocide and Indian Removal, and sought militaristic seizure of Mexican territories in the expansion of U.S. settler colonialism. Making a key contribution to first-wave CWS’ White ontology, White identity and nation building provided heavily documented historical narratives that re-articulated celebratory post-World War II consensual “progress” histories as the rise of a White herrenvolk U.S. Republic. Overall, scholars such as Allen, Saxton, Roediger, Brodkin, Ignatiev, Lipsitz, and others, specifically re-narrativized U.S. national history as a story that explicitly combines populist movements, White identity enticements, nation building and White solidarity, and specifically, White populist democracy as a violent, genocidal form of White racism still relevant in the Trump phenomena. By this researcher’s account, Saxton (1990) provides an under-read yet crucial account of the inherent White racism in U.S. consensual historians’ schoolbook narratives of U.S. “progress.” Third, White privilege and property refer to the unearned privileges and property rights accrued by White-skinned individuals. White privilege speaks directly to the unearned economic and social privileges incurred by White skinned individuals’ positive associations with White supremacy. White privilege specifically conceptualizes the economic and social surplus values of passing as a normal “human being” rather than being marked by racial difference and deficit through non-White skin pigmentation. In particular, White privileges include membership in whiteness, wages of whiteness in the economic sphere, participation in and understanding of White social codes, ease of access to upwardly mobile social spaces, and most generally, the benefits of being socially perceived as a natural and normal “human” rather than a racialized “other.” White property refers to the historical relation of legal and property rights allowed to White-skinned individuals that map historical-legal

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“guarantees” and individual “rights” onto skin color. Part and parcel of settler colonialism, the Whites-only citizenship law established at the first meeting of the U.S. Congress in 1789 became emblematic of the connection of White legal rights and guarantees inherent in the notion of White property. Overall, scholars such as McIntosh, Rains, Scheurich, Roman, Harris, and others, conceptualized notions of White privilege and property that tied White-skin, legal rights, citizenship, and economic benefits. By this researcher’s account, Harris’s (1993/1995) characterization of legal-historical documentation on the subject provides the most compelling conceptual-empirical research, though McIntosh (1988) is systematically over-cited as representative of White privilege and CWS writ large (Lensmire et al., 2013). Fourth, Colorblind racism and race-evasion refer to White-skinned individuals’ on-going denials of race as salient social phenomenon. These denials range from Whites’ colorblind stance that denies “seeing” race to race-evasive discursive strategies that acknowledge yet diminish race’s confluence and role in the reproduction of social inequalities. Currently, colorblind racism and race-evasion provide an extensive research base tied to empirical research on White respondents’ understandings of whiteness, White privilege, and White property discussed above. In discussions on inequality, colorblind racism refers to a key category of post-Civil Rights racism articulated through White research respondents’ insistence that they “do not see race” but rather deficits or weaknesses in character as explanations of historical racialized injustices and inequalities. Documented extensively in sociological and educational research, colorblind racism recreates racial hierarchies through a re-coding of “individual” deficits, “character” flaws, and “personal” problems of People of Color where pre-Civil Rights racist stereotypes previously existed. Similarly, race-evasion refers to the multifaceted discursive strategies that White research respondents use to diminish or derail discussions of race as salient social factor. Demonstrated in qualitative empirical literature, race-evasive discursive strategies include White research respondents’ defensive silences, simplistic “swaps” of race for class, denials of the salience of race, White guilty pleas for absolution, and White outrage against “reverse racism.” Frankenberg, Sleeter, Bonilla-Silva, McIntyre, Mazzei, and many others developed the empirical body of research on colorblind racism and race-evasion. By this researcher’s account, Sleeter (1992) provided an early empirical account of race evasion in multicultural education; however, Bonilla-Silva’s (2003/2017) book remains a key contribution to CWS both in its findings and its methodological sophistication. In sum, first-wave CWS built on African-American and African-Caribbean scholars’ research and emerged within the intellectual foment of the emancipatory social sciences that shadowed 1968’s international, new left, social

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movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, first-wave CWS provided a conceptual ontology that emphasized the notions of whiteness, White identity and nation building, and White privilege and property as constructed realities within White-dominated societies, with special reference to U.S. contexts and history. Additionally, first-wave CWS provided a paradoxical, empirically-based, and qualitative epistemology that outlined White research respondents’ colorblind racism and race-evasion. Still often under-theorized benignly as Whites’ racial “ignorance,” this White empirically-based epistemology clearly demonstrated over two decades that many White research respondents’ studiously learned and carefully displayed knowledge of discursive strategies that – via silence, denial, evasion, diminution, and more – drove relentlessly and violently at the extinction of race as a salient social concept and, by extension, the extinction of racialized identities of People of Color. As a whole, first-wave CWS’s analytic arch demonstrates Whites’ overall desire to invisibilize, disappear, or otherwise make extinct multi-variegated racialized realities, knowledges, and identities.

4

Second-Wave CWS’ Pedagogical Shift

Since the early 2000s (Ulysse, Berry, & Jupp, 2016), second-wave CWS studies emerged as a conditioning, re-articulation, and re-deployment of CWS’ firstwave concepts outlined above along with providing new conceptual directions and pedagogical emphases. Further documented under the entry titled “Second-wave Critical White Studies” in this encyclopedia, second-wave CWS emerged from antiracist scholars’ critiques and re-deployment of first-wave CWS intellectual content and an emergent focus on whiteness pedagogies. What follows here provides a brief lead-in for the full entry titled “Second-wave Critical White Studies.” Cogently organized in an early essay by Bonnett (1997) and continued by many others, second-wave CWS developed several lines of critique from within first-wave CWS itself. Advanced by Scholars of Color and White scholars, these critiques emphasized first-wave CWS’ essentializing Black/White binary, totalizing understandings of whiteness and White privilege, lack of specificity or historicity in discussing whiteness and White identities, confessional White privilege pedagogies, or uncomplicated notions of White allies. For many second-wave CWS antiracist scholars and activists, the standard pedagogical model in McIntosh (1988) that elicits White privilege confessions of “good Whites” who, after confessions, are understood as facile “allies” to People of Color became a conceptual and pedagogical target for second-wave CWS scholars.

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Nonetheless, unlike rampant and continuing conservative attacks on CWS, second-wave CWS did not aim at dismissing CWS. Rather, second-wave CWS’ critiques aimed at conditioning, re-capacitating, and re-deploying CWS’ concepts for continued antiracist whiteness pedagogies. Rather than denying the saliency of first-wave CWS’ concepts outlined above, second-wave CWS has moved in several key directions that include (i) different historical and social science concepts or “frameworks” to analyze data, (ii) attention to White identities’ empirical contradictions and complexities, (iii) the importance of social psychoanalysis in CWS pedagogies, and (iv) the study of emotionality and researchers’ positionalities. Cheryl Matias (2016), Tim Lensmire (2017), Joseph Flynn (2018), and Christine Sleeter (2018) have recently produced full-length, sole-authored books, that embody one or more of these key directions. Importantly, this entry emphasizes the historical trajectory of CWS, and in doing so, this entry seeks to advance the field via a historical dialectic that moves “backwards” to historical resources in order to go “forward” with compelling emancipatory social science research. Overall, second-wave CWS seeks to integrate African-American and African-Caribbean scholars’ contributions and first-wave CWS resources, and by doing so, differently advances CWS toward pedagogical-ethical considerations and the field’s continued historicity, reflexivity, criticality, and saliency. Following historical and recent directions, CWS continues to provide a key example of a predominantly Anglophone and inter-disciplinary critical pedagogy that drives at and reveals the complex conscientization processes for an anti-fascist, multi-identarian, and multiracial democracy.

References Bonnett, A. (1997). Constructions of whiteness in European and American anti-racism. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 173–192). Zed Books. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical White studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. Dyer, R. (1988). White. Screen, 29(4), 44–64. Flynn, J. E. (2018). White fatigue: Rethinking resistance for social justice. Peter Lang. Frankenberg, R. (1993). The social construction of whiteness: White women, race matters. University of Minnesota Press. Giroux, H. A. (1997). Rewriting the discourse on racial identity: Toward a pedagogy and politics of whiteness. Harvard Educational Review, 67, 285–320.

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Hall, S. (1981). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In G. Bridges & R. Brunt (Eds.), Silver linings: Some strategies for the eighties (pp. 28–52). Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1992). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 277–286). Routledge. Habermas, J. (1972). Knowledge and human interests: A general perspective. Heinemann. Harris, C. (1995). Whiteness as property. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, & K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 276–291). The New Press. Helms, J. E. (1990). Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Greenwood Press. hooks, b. (1992). Representing whiteness in the Black imagination. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 338–346). Routledge. King, J. E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. The Journal of Negro Education, 60, 133–146. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Lensmire, T. J., McManimon, S, Dockter Tierney, J., Lee-Nichols, M. E., Casey, Z. A., & Davis, B. M. (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education’s focus on White privilege undermines anti-racism. Harvard Education Review, 83, 410–431. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. Routledge. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. Wellesley Center for Research on Women. Working Paper 189. Paraskeva, J. M. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide: Towards an itinerant curriculum theory. Routledge. Parsons, T. (2012). The social system. Quid Pro Quo Books. Roediger, D. (1994). Toward the abolition of whiteness: Essays on race, politics, and working class history. Verso. Saxton, A. (1990). The rise and fall of the White republic. Verso. Sleeter, C. E. (1992). Resisting racial awareness: How teachers understand the social order from their racial, gender, and class locations. Educational Foundations, 6(2), 7–31. Sleeter, C. E. (2018). The inheritance. Sleeter Publishing. Ulysse, B., Berry, T. R., & Jupp, J. C. (2016). On the elephant in the room: Toward a generative politics of place on race in academic discourse. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29, 989–1001. Wallerstein, I. (2007). Geopolítica y cultura: Ensayos sobre el moderno sistema mundial. Editorial Kairós.

CHAPTER 31

Guilt Joseph Flynn and Erin Rae

Related Entries: Christianity and Whiteness; Ellison, Ralph; Privilege; Shame; Thandeka

… In 1940, C.S. Lewis wrote about white guilt by saying, “A reaction – in itself wholesome – is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of morality, a reawakening of the social conscious. We feel ourselves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt” (Lewis, 1940, p. 48). Within the context of Lewis’ time, this characterization of white guilt as a corporate notion, as a shared guilt across the white race, achieves an accuracy that individual guilt (or shame) could not. Lewis also had the desire to right the wrongs of social inequity and recognized its collective nature. In the process of understanding race and racism there are a number of ways White folks respond. Rarely is the response blind acceptance. Rather, various forms of White resistance manifest and those forms of resistance can be challenging to address and ameliorate. One of the most confusing and evident is the notion of white guilt. Guilt is a fascinating response because on one hand guilt can indicate an understanding of the depth of dehumanization racism causes. On the other hand, guilt can often be an immobilizing force that prevents antiracist action and by extension reifying racism. As such it is critical to understand and consider guilt as an essential factor in understanding racism, antiracist work, and white identity.

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Defining White Guilt

From a very young age, white children are often oblivious of the dynamics of racism and the lived realities of non-white counterparts. They rarely see themselves as a race; race is the reality of “others.” Like Debby Irving (2014) stated in her critical autobiography Waking Up White: Finding Myself in the Story of Race, “The way I understood it, race was for other people, brown- and black-skinned people” (p. xi). As white children grow and socialize, messages from media, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_031

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popular culture, family, friends, and the general K-12 curriculum (and practically every other institution for that matter) routinely teach white youth about “others” alongside incomplete stories about history that center whiteness as the norm. Instances of systemic and institutional oppression become simply failures of individuals. Likewise, major sociopolitical movements like the Civil Rights Movement of 1955–1968 reify stories of the exceptional individual over the collective effort, reifying the myth of the rugged individual. All the while those same white children want to play with children who may not be white. They form friendships and bonds, and even form those bonds with non-white adults, such as coaches, teachers, medical professionals, and other community members. However, they still see the myths of whiteness as their norm. Then one day, and this day varies from person to person, they are introduced to information that challenges their norms and assumptions about how society functions. They are introduced to ideas and experiences that encourage them to challenge their assumptions about our society’s relationship with race. Upon being exposed to issues that often do not get fully explored in K-12 schools and popular culture they begin to see the world differently, recognizing that the assumptions they had about race may be flawed, if not wholly wrong. Now they must grapple with grave issues like the extent of Native American land theft and genocide, the depravity of exploitation and marginalization of Africans and African Americans, the violent annexing of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the suppression of Asians and Asian Americans, and other real events that have had real consequences. In short, they realize that the stories of bootstraps to pull one’s self up, Manifest Destiny, bold and brave white leaders and politicians, brilliant white inventors, media makers, and others happened in the light of the systemic and institutional marginalization of non-whites. That recognition and acceptance often ushers in the feeling of guilt. White guilt is associated with the negative or uncomfortable feelings that arise from White folks’ initial exposure to the ill actions of previous generations and the unearned assets accumulated through racial privilege (Hitchcock, 2002; Flynn, 2018). Flynn (2018) says that “white guilt emerges from the feelings that arise when trying to come to grips with the weight and repercussions of historic events, and the crippling feeling that one has no idea of what to do to make it all better” (p. 62, emphasis in original). Adding to Flynn’s comment, when white folks are introduced to the reality of systemic and institutional hurdles of marginalization against non-whites, which were designed by other white folks, there is a sinking feeling of confusion and frustration at not knowing both how to reverse the impact of that history and why they did not know these ideas and issues already.

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Similarly, Robin DiAngelo (2012) states, “White guilt can be a general reaction to the realization that racism is a system from which they benefit while others suffer” (p. 199). That is a stunning notion to grapple with, especially if one’s psyche is inundated with specific egocentric notions about success and failure as tropes that obscure how institutional and systemic racism function to produce the marginalization of non-whites. The challenge is not necessarily white guilt, as guilt is a sensible reaction. The challenge is what one chooses to do with their guilt. As DiAngelo goes on to say: We can use our guilt to avoid further engagement (“It just makes me feel too bad so I don’t want to deal with it”) or become resentful (“You are making me feel guilty and that is not fair!”) or we can become incapacitated (“I am such a bad person – I give up”). (p. 199) Oftentimes white students, when learning about critical issues like race, display the paralysis of guilt by lamenting how huge of a problem racism is, or succumb to thinking racism is something we will just always have to deal with. Such expressions are not neccesarily resultant from the problem and feelings of ineptitude about developing antiracist strategies and acts. Leonardo (2004) pointed out that white guilt is often couched in persistent attempts to fix racism as an individual phenomenon rather than a complex, systemic, and institutional reality. What he says deserves full quotation: White guilt blocks critical reflection because whites end up feeling individually blameworthy for racism. In fact, they become overconcerned with whether or not they “look racist” and forsake the more central project of understanding the contours of structural racism. Anyone who has taught racial themes has witnessed this situation. Many whites subvert a structural study of racism with personalistic concerns over how they are perceived as individuals. (p. 140) As inconvenient as this is, the trend is the very point of white supremacy and the nature of systemic and institutional racism. Across institutions – education, media, law enforcement, criminal justice, government, and so on – there is consistent emphasis on the individual, and that emphasis on the individual is reflective of white epistemologies and ways of being (Katz, 2003). The privileging of racism as an individual’s failings rather than a systemic phenomenon not only hampers antiracism efforts but also impacts the shaping of white racial identity. Grappling with guilt is an essential component of white racial identity and its development.

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The white racial identity exists as an impaired sense of a core self bestowed upon whites by caregivers. As children they were their true selves, their individual true nature. Upon realizing they are white, they now become something else, a bastardized version of their original true self (Thandeka, 1999, p. 18). For example, we can imagine a child with many neighborhood black friends realizing he is not supposed to play with these friends and now must tread on eggshells or abandon these ties. His social world is turned upside down. His view of himself is turned upside down as well, as he must now delegitimize the sense of himself that is othered (DiAngelo, 2011), the part of himself who wanted to maintain those friendships. Take an example by Thandecka (1999). A young girl, for instance, who wants to play dress-up with the daughter of the Mexican maid is chided for doing so, and so in turn, will never again risk losing her parents’ love and acceptance. Her core self no longer exists and is replaced by the impaired, whited, version. Her ability to relate to other Mexican children with integrity is forever altered and will forever be shaped by the moment she took on the mask of white superiority. “Whiteness destroys and masks her true self” (Thandeka, 1999, p. 128). This young girl is now separated from her own self that had positive, resonant feelings towards a racially identified other. Additionally, the girl is now experiencing negative feelings for the first time towards her own white community for having forbidden the proscribed other. This conundrum of identity is a crucial aspect of guilt in that once these challenges are embraced by a white person that confusion can give way to guilt, and guilt can be a debilitating feeling for many white folks (Thompson, 2003). In order to deal with the recognition of guilt, one can go down the path of attempting to make white folks feel good about themselves. Like Audrey Thompson (2003) opined, Covertly, their guilt also served to exonerate them. Guilt mourns a past that cannot be changed; since clearly it would have been wrong for me to blame them for something that was merely an oversight, their guilt carried the seeds of their absolution. (p. 23) And that is the challenge of white guilt. On one hand it is an active engagement with the reality and impact of racism, and on the other hand guilt can cause white folks to dwell on the inability to really do anything about racism and thus the desire to just feel good. This is often marked in classes and professional development seminars with the question, “But what can I do to make things better” or “What do I do now?” The possibility that guilt morphs into immobility stems from the urge to situate both one’s identity and whiteness at the center of antiracist projects rather

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than the amelioration of racism itself. In effect, when confronted with past wrongs and the ways in which systems of racial oppression confer privilege onto white folks there is a tendency to personalize this and white folks begin to question their own role in systems of oppression. This alludes to the reasoning why antiracist projects can seem to not be successful; they are born out of guilt rather than responsibility or empowerment. The Reverend Thandeka (1999) has deeply explored and theorized how white people become white. Lensmire (2008) summarizes one of the key points of her project by saying “She believes that (anti-racist) programs are failing because they are based on motivating white people through white guilt, and in the process, these efforts ignore ambivalence and white shame” (316). White guilt is quite unlike white shame. Guilt, according to Thandeka, is the psychological feeling that results from having done wrong individually. It is the condemning of oneself for the wrongs done by oneself. Upon having done this wrong, one may make restitution if one is so inclined, in order to make the wrong righted (Thandeka, 1999). This is in contrast to shame, which cannot be made right. White guilt is the recognition of the historic and contemporary wrongs white folks have committed while one is in the process of accepting their white racial identity and the role of white supremacy as part of that identity. White guilt is due to the costs “entailed in making, acquiring, and protecting this personal investment in a white racial identity” (Thandeka, p. 86). A key point of white guilt is that it is not simply guilt regarding the past actions of one’s white ancestors; it is guilt for the current protection of whiteness. Thandeka asserts that while whites are acutely aware that their white racial identity can be lost, they cannot ruminate on that thought for very long, and thus this protecting of whiteness becomes systemic. White people feel shame about themselves when they realize that what they imagine about race is not shared by their parents, caregivers, and white society as a whole. They feel shame but often do not know why. Lea and Griggs (2005) quote Thandeka (1999) as saying, “white children are often greeted with censure by their parents when their opinions don’t reflect the parents’ attitudes toward minorities, friends, or others in their social networks, and fearing the loss of these significant others, they retreat” (p. 94). White guilt is the emotion that white folks experience upon realizing that racial superiority and racial inequality in America is both illusion and illegitimate. When they realize that racial superiority is unearned and constructed (oftentimes purposefully), they feel the desire to make restitution. When they realize that the assumptions they have held, often the majority of their lives, were manufactured by manipulations of information, history, policy, and law at the behest of their white ancestors, they feel the urge to rectify. They know

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a wrong has been perpetrated and they wish to make that wrong righted. This guilt is consuming, an almost undeniable need to make right the racial inequalities in their white world, but that is coupled with the crushing feeling of immobility and unsureness of how to “fix” the problem (Iyer, Leach, & Crosby, 2005). White guilt is elemental in perpetuating white supremacy because this consuming guilt causes the group as a whole to become paralyzed by their guilt. Banscombe (1998) sums up the cause of this paralysis. In recognizing the white group’s guilt and illegitimacy of their supremacy, they view themselves as immoral and inadequate. This inadequacy manifests in the feeling that they cannot right the wrongs of the past nor the present. The inability to make restitution further solidifies the collective guilt, exacerbates white supremacy, and seeks to further entrench systems of racial oppression. White guilt, the acknowledgment of one’s illegitimacy in superiority, actually has the undesired effect of cementing systems of racial oppression. The knowledge of one’s whiteness and the white guilt that accompanies this knowledge also opens the door to the knowledge of several facets of the nonwhite world. The knowledge of a nonwhite zone exists. There are, in nearly every American city, actual physical non-white residential zones that white people know their white norms encourage them to avoid. For example, when there is a designation of “ghetto” there is the tacit understanding that it means: danger, depravity, destruction, poverty, and black. These physical zones are reinforced when law enforcement excludes whites from entry by warning them that they won’t be safe in these neighborhoods, harassing them as they enter and leave, follow their cars, interrogate them for their reasons for being present in these so-called off limits communities, and even pull guns on young white children who have not yet learned of their whiteness (Thandeka, 1999, p. 25). This intersection of white guilt and law enforcement exist because white material advantages can be lost (Thandeka, 1999, p. 86) and this knowledge that the privileges and advantages of whiteness can be lost are known through white guilt. White guilt causes them both collectively and individually to know that they have ill-gotten superiority and that at any minute, it could be gone.

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Conclusion

White guilt is a negative reaction white folks have in learning that their assumptions about the world were created out of an insidious white supremacy. By whatever means, many white folks arrive at a point in their racial identity

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development where they not only begin to accept but also begin to consider the implications of more complex forms of racism in shaping what they think, believe, and shaping their entire reality. Upon that recognition, there is the crushing weight of guilt about past and current wrongs directed at racial others. This guilt can be immobilizing, and that frustration has the result of a quest for feeling better, manifesting in platitudes. By the same token, guilt can foster a commitment to take responsibility for one’s own complicity in racism and a commitment to antiracist practices. Guilt may be seen as an overall problematic reality for antiracism, as the feelings of white folks in the antiracist project is centered. However, it can also be argued that guilt is a sensible response given the weight of the technologies of racism. As debilitating as guilt can be, an individual who is grappling with guilt is at the least considering issues. Thompson (2003) appropriately summarizes: White guilt mourns genocide, slavery, land theft, lynchings, and broken promises as part of a past that can no longer be changed – and in so doing seeks to return to an imagined innocence. Since the past cannot be changed, we insist on being allowed to feel good about ourselves. Yet this is a solution only if the problem is white helplessness rather than racism. Taking on the alleviation of white guilt as an antiracist project keeps whiteness at the center of antiracism. (p. 24)

References Baldwin, J. (1998). Words of a native son. In T. Morrison (Ed.), James Baldwin: Collected works (pp. 707–713). Library of America. Branscombe, N. R. (1998). Thinking about one’s gender group’s privileges or disadvantages: Consequences for well-being in women and men. British Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 167–184. DiAngelo, R. (2012). Common patterns of well-intentioned white people. Counterpoints: What does it mean to be white? Developing white racial literacy, 398, 199–220. Flynn, J. E. (2018). White fatigue: Rethinking resistance for social justice. Peter Lang Publishing. Helms, J. E. (1993). Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Praeger. Hitchcock, J. (2011). Lifting the white veil: A look at White American culture. Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books.

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Irving, D. (2014). Waking up white: And finding myself in the story of race. Elephant Room Press. Iyer, A., Leach, C. W., & Crosby, F. J. (2003). White Guilt and Racial Compensation: The benefits and limits of self-focus. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(1), 117–129. Katz, J. (2003). White awareness: Handbook for anti-racist training (2nd ed. Revised and expanded). University of Oklahoma Press. Lea, V., & Griggs, T. (2005). Behind the mask and beneath the story: Enabling students-teachers to reflect critically on the socially-constructed nature of their “normal” practice. Teacher Education Quarterly, 32(1), 93–114. Lensmire, T. J. (2008). How I became White while punching de tar baby. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(3), 299–322. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of “White privilege.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 137–152. Lewis, C. S. (1967). The problem of pain. Macmillan. Swim, J. K., & Miller, D. L. (1999). White guilt: Its antecedents and consequences for attitudes toward affirmative action. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(4), 500–514. Tanner, S. J. (2019). Whiteness, pedagogy, and youth in America: Critical whiteness studies in the classroom. Routledge. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Continuum. Thandeka. (2019, February 2). Today’s White Niggers | Part 2: “White-skin privilege” exposed. http://revthandeka.org/todays-white-niggers-part-2 Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, friend of people of color: White investments in antiracism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(1), 7–29.

CHAPTER 32

Health Disparities Kristie J. Lipford

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Scientific Racism

1

Introduction: Health Disparities

Health disparities is a term commonly used in the United States (U.S.) and describes the differences in health, health related factors, and health outcomes between population groups. One of the most important distinctions concerning health disparities is that they are strongly associated with socioeconomic, sociopolitical, sociocultural, and environmental disadvantage. Populations that have been systematically excluded and/or subjugated due to race, ethnicity, religion, physical capacities, gender, and other sociodemographic characteristics, that have been historical markers for discrimination, typically have worse health outcomes. Furthermore, the disparity between these groups and advantaged populations are significant. Health disparities are rooted in inequities that stem from social injustice within U.S. society. These systemic barriers, often a result of racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism, are greater for racial minorities. Due to structural and cultural barriers, racial minorities often experience lower quality of healthcare, greater challenges in accessing care, and higher incidence and/or greater disease severity (Williams et al., 2010). Generally, health disparities are a result of societally induced barriers and a large majority of the health differences observed are preventable and “plausibly avoidable” (Braveman et al., 2011). Thus, scholars typically measure these health differences by comparing and contrasting socially disadvantaged populations to socially advantaged populations. Some of the health differences that researchers focus on are a specific subset of preventable morbidities (e.g. hypertension, diabetes, kidney diseases, etc.), mortality, injury, violence, differences in health care services, health access, and the access to opportunities to attain the best health possible. There are three broad approaches typically used to examine health disparities: the sociocultural approach, the structural approach, and the biogenetic

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approach (Diez, 2002; Stephens, 2012). This entry offers both structural and interpersonal examples for each framework.

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Cultural Perspectives

As the cultural diversity of the United States increases, more researchers are using socio-behavioral perspectives to explain health disparities. Sociocultural approaches suggest that the cause of health inequalities are due to the variation in the cultural lifestyles of ethnic groups. Cultural lifestyles include diet and eating patterns, wellness and exercise practices, familial/social networks, substance use norms, etc. In this regard, these cultural factors influence population health. For example, research has shown that African Americans have a high degree of plasticity concerning body types and what constitutes a healthy weight (Cameron et al., 2018; Bailey, 2006; Sanchez-Johnsen et al., 2003). Bailey’s (2006) research on African Americans’ health suggests that this flexibility “promotes the acceptance of overweight and obesity as the norm within the African American community” (p. 44). As a result, a heavier body type is more ideal than a smaller, thinner one. This cultural worldview stands in stark contrast to current white, Eurocentric norms which lean towards slender phenotypes. Cultural explanations for health gaps are often viewed as a “blame the victim” approach (Castle et al., 2018). Many scholars who are critical of this lens fail to recognize the strength of sociocultural frameworks in that they address limitations in other theoretical perspectives. As opposed to simply ignoring the heterogeneity within groups, sociocultural models are able to account for differences in health beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes that exist within-groups. Acculturation is the sociocultural process of adopting the dominant group’s culture and it is one of the most frequently used conceptualizations to measure intra-racial heterogeneity in health research. Some studies have suggested that lower degrees of acculturation are linked to poor mental health, unfavorable health lifestyles, unhealthy dietary patterns, and negative health outcomes (Airhihenbenhuwa et al., 2000; Bediako et al., 2004; Guzan et al., 2018; Frisco et al., 2019; Johnson, 2002; Sauceda et al., 2018) while another body of literature discusses the health promoting benefits of acculturation (Akresh et al., 2018). Pierre and Mahalik (2005) explore the role of cultural identity and African self-consciousness as predictors of Black male mental health. Findings indicated that Black men who had high levels of cultural identity had better mental and physical health. Similarly, Mossakowski (2003) explores the link

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between ethnic identity and mental health among Filipino Americans. Findings indicated that high levels of ethnic identity significantly correlate with low symptoms of depression. Results also suggest that a strong ethnic identity provides a buffer between racial discrimination and depression. Findings are significant because they suggest that cultural awareness provides protective mechanisms for positive health among ethnic minorities. The effect of identity on the type of leisure and wellness activities individuals participate in has also been researched. Three general perspectives are used to explain ethnic differences in physical fitness and leisure activities: (1) the marginality perspective, (2) the leisure socialization perspective, and (3) the ethnicity perspective (Mowatt, 2017; Stodolska et al., 2015). The marginality theory is a socioeconomic explanation that pinpoints class as the cause of leisure differences. The theory argues that groups engage in different leisure activities because of differences in economic and cultural resources (e.g. money, equipment, exposure, etc.). As a result, marginalized communities lack the resources to engage in specific activities (e.g. rowing, skiing, golf) which subsequently limits leisure options. This theory highlights that the historical oppression and segregation of ethnic minorities has created separate and distinct racial environments which in turn affects contemporary leisure choices and activities. On the other hand, the leisure socialization perspective explains ethnic differences by highlighting the role of socialization. Scholars argue that individuals develop leisure identities through leisure socialization. In this regard, leisure socialization occurs on the micro level, such as a boy being socialized into baseball by playing “catch” with his father in the evenings. However, leisure socialization can also be seen on the macro-level. Martin (2004), analyzes over 4,000 advertisements of outdoor leisure activities in print media. Results show that models who are people of color, Black models specifically, are narrowly depicted in outdoor ads, in comparison to White models. The race depiction of models in magazine advertisements helps contribute to what Martin refers to as a “racialized outdoor leisure identity” (Martin, 2004, p. 513). This work is significant to culture and health lifestyle in that many minorities, urban Blacks in particular, may shy away from activities that are deemed as inconsistent with their racial/cultural identity. Similarly, the ethnicity perspective views culture as the primary rationale behind differences in health lifestyle. Generally speaking, leisure choices and activities are a reflection of group culture; different cultures produce different sets of values and those values determine leisure decisions. Cultural identities and diet are well documented. Orsi’s (1985) research on Italian Harlem shows how food preparation among Italian American women

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helps sustain and recreate a distinct cultural and Catholic identity (Chafetz & Ebaugh, 2000). Other studies examining religion and eating habits, note the central role of food in African American religious practices and how food preparation aids as a tool for cultural and health socialization. As these studies suggest, food can be important in solidifying culture, however it becomes problematic when food choices, food preparation, and eating habits are unhealthy. Food choices and food preparation also reflect the social history of many racial and ethnic groups. For example, soul food as affectionately described by the African American community has its roots in African U.S. enslavement and fry bread, an American Indian delicacy, (a combination of lard, flour, salt, and sugar, salt that was given to the Navajo by the U.S. government after compulsory relocation to land that would not support their traditional diet) are both preferential food outcomes of barriers and food insufficiencies that were forced on these groups due to their colonized status in White America. Subsequently, formative cultural dietary preferences for specific foods are a direct result of colonization and often are of poor nutritional value, which contribute to unfavorable health outcomes.

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Structural Perspectives

Structural perspectives suggests that health differences exist between races because minority populations are disproportionally overrepresented in the lower socioeconomic strata; and thus, more vulnerable to health risks due to lifestyles that accompany lower income living. However, this perspective has been criticized because race is often used as a replacement or proxy for class. This race for class substitution fails to consider that the socioeconomic differences between races are primarily a result of institutional racism. Thus, the main critique of socioeconomic perspectives (as explanations of health disparities) is the prevailing notion that racial minorities, specifically African Americans, are randomly and disproportionally represented in America’s underclass, when in reality, African American overrepresentation in lower socioeconomic brackets is caused by systematic and institutional discrimination that results from the stigma attached to being “Black” (Hummer, 1996). Therefore, merely accounting for class in analyses is insufficient because disparities in morbidity and mortality are better examined by examining both race and socioeconomic inequalities. As Hummer writes, Controlling for socioeconomic class’ in studies of black-white health and mortality differences should be implemented only when it is explicitly

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recognized that differences in the socioeconomic distribution of resources stem from the racist ideology that existed and continues to exist in U.S. society. (Hummer, 1996, p. 111) Another perspective is social disorganization, which is widely used in criminology. More recently, health researchers study the correlation between social disorganization and health. The rationale behind the theory is that scarce socio-economic resources in disadvantaged areas make neighborhoods susceptible to physical disorder and social disarray. In turn, this adversely affects community health. In a widely cited study, Ross and Mirowsky (2001) examine the effects of neighborhood disorder on physical health to test the assumption that neighborhood disorder impairs its resident’s health. In this study, two types of community disorders are identified: physical disorder and social disorder. Physical disorder is characterized by the actual aesthetics (or lack thereof) such as graffiti, wreckage, and neglected buildings. Social disorders are the neighborhood activities such as criminal offenses, misdemeanors, loitering, and unrestricted alcohol and drug consumption. Ross and Mirowsky (2001) argue that either of these types of disorders discourage its residents from engaging in outside leisure activities due to fear of crime. Moreover, the threatening feelings associated with neighborhood disorder triggers a physiological deluge of stress hormones that weakens health. These hormones can be damaging to health by (1) producing symptoms normally perceived and experienced as ill health, (2) increasing vulnerability to pathogens and infectious conditions, and/or (3) hastening the degradation process of an individual’s physiological functions. Latkin and Curry (2003) study the association between social disorder and mental health. Using data collected from a community sample of adults they answer two questions related to mental health: (1) “Is social disorganization an important chronic stressor that leads to higher levels of depressive symptoms in inner-city environments?” and (2) “Is there a main effect or buffering effect of social support among persons living in high crime areas with high levels of environment stress?” (Latkin & Curry, 2003, p. 36). The researchers hypothesize that individuals who live in neighborhoods with high and varying indicators of social decay would be more likely to suffer from symptoms of depression. They also suggest that those individuals who perceive greater levels of disorder in their communities are likely to use illicit drugs when compared to individuals who have lower perceptions of neighborhood decay. Results indicated that there is a significant association between depression and perceived neighborhood disorder. Furthermore, findings indicate that living in a socially disorganized community is a huge stressor for its inhabitants.

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Other mental health studies focus on minority psychosocial health and pinpoint racial and ethnic discrimination as significant factors that influence psychological health. Utsey (1997) examines the association between stress, racism, and psychological health. Results suggest that African American men who experience some form of racial antagonism are more likely to have higher levels of stress than those who do not experience racism. Other studies that examine relationships between experiences of racism and health have similar findings (Franklin-Jackson & Carter, 2007; Paradies et al., 2015; Phelan et al., 2015). Racial discrimination not only plays a role in psychosocial health but is also a significant factor in health service access. Researchers suggest that the historical background of racially biased treatment against racial and ethnic minorities provides a helpful paradigm in explaining inequalities in health access and health disparities in medical care (Semmes, 1996; Washington, 2007). In addition to racial discrimination, socioeconomic status (SES) is also a factor in explaining health service use. For instance, Kirby and Kaneda (2006) found that people who reside in communities with high population turnovers (an indicator of the SES make-up of the inhabitants), have very little access to health care when compared to those who live in more residentially stable communities. Sherkat et al. (2007) explore the effect of SES on morbidity, mortality, and health care use among the African American elderly. Using physician billing records from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Medicare Enrollment Database (EDB) these researchers found that race disparities in physician visits shed light on the relationship between mortality differences among the Black and White elderly population. Although race was a factor, Sherkat et al. (2007) conclude that mortality racial gaps in health service use are primarily caused by differences in socioeconomic status. Race and socioeconomic status also play a role in dietary habits; along with SES, gender and race are significant factors that influence food insufficiency. Food insufficiency can help explain health disparities because an inadequate diet can lead to very serious diseases due to poor nutrient intake. Siefert (2004) examines the effect of food insufficiency on the mental and physical health among women who receive welfare. Analyzing the Women’s Employment Study (1997–2003) data, these researchers find that women who have an inadequate diet are more likely to report fair or poor health and are also more likely to have poor psychological health. Other research finds that structural factors are related to dietary habits and lean disproportionally to women of color. Whiting, Vatanparast, Taylor, and Adolphe (2010) conducted interviews to explore potential barriers to healthy eating. They found that income and accessibility are both major obstacles in healthy dietary habits.

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Biogenetic Perspectives

The racial genetic approach explains health differences by suggesting that variations in health are caused by genetic differences. The idea behind this approach is that particular genetic structures make certain racial groups more prone or susceptible to higher morbidity rates in some disease categories than others. According to Kawachi, Daniels, and Robinson (2005), this theory has roots in antebellum times when race was used as a rationale to morally justify chattel slavery in the United States. Mainstream scholarship has come to view race taxons as “social constructions,” however, the biological perspective of race still influences contemporary, medical research. For instance, African Americans and American Indians disproportionally suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure (Nandakumar et al., 2017). These conditions are just two examples of chronic diseases that current research in pharmacogenetics have tried to link to a specific “gene” that makes these populations more vulnerable to particular illnesses. On the other hand, research has found some evidence that lends to race based medicine. For example, studies have shown that a specific class of pharmaceutical drugs [angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors] which are commonly prescribed to prevent and treat myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), cerebrovascular accidents (stroke), and hypertension have been shown to be less effective in African Americans than whites (Brewster et al., 2013). The rationale for these differences range from a pharmacodynamics explanation that details differences in drug interaction between the two groups to pathophysiology explanations that discuss variation in disease symptoms between patients of African ancestry and those of European ancestry. However, exact reasons for the disparity in ACE inhibitors effectiveness among African Americans are still inconclusive, to date (Brewster et al., 2013). There are several critiques of race based medicine, however, that are worth noting. Race based prescription practices tend to oversimplify something as complex as genetics. It is often stated that there is more genetic diversity within racial subsets than between (Kittles & Charmaine, 2003; Roberts, 2008). Therefore, it’s important to focus on other determinants. Researchers are cautioned not to overemphasize genetics as an explanation for health disparities and instead focus on more substantial indicators such as sociocultural and structural factors. Furthermore, race based medicine is sometimes viewed as a hegemonic scapegoat and “shifts responsibility for addressing disease from the government to the individual by suggesting that health disparities are a result of genetic variation rather than inequitable social structures and access to health care” (Roberts, 2008, p. 537; see also Roberts, 2011). Additionally, race based medicine may further contribute to mistrust among racial minorities.

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Conclusion

This entry reviewed three broad perspectives to examine health disparities: the sociocultural approach, the structural approach, and the biogenetic approach. All three approaches have strengths and weaknesses, however the structural framework has great validity because the main cause of health disparities are health inequities caused by past and current injustices. The combination of exclusionary racial separation (“separate and unequal”), and discriminatory social and economic policy have created conditions of daily living that negatively influence the health of racial minorities in the United States. The quality of group health is a product of the group’s status in society. Oppressed groups have decreased capacities in securing needed and desirable resources to compete, prosper, and survive. Oppression is, indeed, a “vicious cycle” that contributes to poor health and in turn poor health contributes to increased impediments for group advancement, thus stabilizing the cycle of oppression. If the elimination of health inequities and subsequently health disparities is a national priority, several suggestions can be offered. According to the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health (2008), countries must first improve the standard of living and conditions of daily life for those at risk for preventable diseases caused by inequities. Second, countries must undertake the task of equitably distributing social, economic, and political power. Health disparities are a result of systemic oppression and structural inequality in U.S. society. The acknowledgement of this reality in research and practice can have positive results on the reduction of health gaps. Equitable distribution of resources signals an understanding that the most effective method to decrease health disparities is to place greater attention on improving the social determinants of health that exacerbate inequities (Marmot et al., 2008). Finally, in order to decrease disparities, governments must wholly comprehend the current problem and be proactive in assessing defined outcomes.

References Adler, N. E., Boyce, T., Chesney, M. A., Cohen, S., Folkman, S., Kahn, R. L., & Syme, S. L. (1994). Socioeconomic status and health: The challenge of the gradient. American Psychologist, 49(1), 15. Airhihenbuwa, C. O., Kumanyika, S. K., Agurs, T. D., Lowe, A., Saunders, D., & Morssink, C. B. (1996). Cultural aspects of African American eating patterns. Ethnicity & Health, 1(3), 245–260.

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Airhihenbuwa, C. O., Kumanyika, S., TenHave, T. R., & Morssink, C. (2000). Cultural identity and health lifestyles among African Americans: A new direction for health intervention research? Ethnicity & Disease, 10(2), 148–164. Akresh, I. R., Do, D. P., & Frank, R. (2016). Segmented assimilation, neighborhood disadvantage, and Hispanic immigrant health. Social Science & Medicine, 149, 114–121. Bailey, E. J. (2006). Food choice and obesity in Black America: Creating a new cultural diet. Praeger Publishing. Betancourt, J. R., Green, A. R., Carrillo, J. E., & Owusu Ananeh-Firempong, I. I. (2016). Defining cultural competence: A practical framework for addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care. Public Health Reports. Betsch, C., Böhm, R., Airhihenbuwa, C. O., Butler, R., Chapman, G. B., Haase, N., & Nurm, Ü. K. (2016). Improving medical decision making and health promotion through culture-sensitive health communication: An agenda for science and practice. Medical Decision Making, 36(7), 811–833. Braveman, P. A., Cubbin, C., Egerter, S., Williams, D. R., & Pamuk, E. (2010). Socioeconomic disparities in health in the United States: What the patterns tell us. American Journal of Public Health, 100(S1), S186–S196. Brewster, L. M., & Seedat, Y. K. (2013). Why do hypertensive patients of African ancestry respond better to calcium blockers and diuretics than to ACE inhibitors and βadrenergic blockers? A systematic review. BMC Medicine, 11(1), 141. Castle, B., Wendel, M., Kerr, J., Brooms, D., & Rollins, A. (2018). Public health’s approach to systemic racism: A systematic literature review. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1–10. Chafetz, J. S., & Ebaugh, H. R. (2000). Religion and the new immigrants: Continuities and adaptations in immigrant congregations. AltaMira Press. Diez Roux, A. V. (2012). Conceptual approaches to the study of health disparities. Annual Review of Public Health, 33, 41–58. Dong, Y., Haidong, Z., Giuseppe, S. A., Carter, N. D. Cook, D., & Cappuccio, F. P. (1999). Association between the C825T polymorphism of the G protein ß3-subunit gene and hypertension in blacks. Hypertension, 34, 1193–11963. Fernandez, M., Shinew, K. J., & Stodolska, M. (2015). Effects of acculturation and access on recreation participation among Latinos. Leisure sciences, 37(3), 210–231. Floyd, M. F. (1998). Getting beyond marginality and ethnicity: The challenge for race and ethnic studies in leisure research. Journal of Leisure Research, 30(1), 3–22. Franklin-Jackson, D., & Carter, R. T. (2007). The relationships between race-related stress, racial identity, and mental health for Black Americans. Journal of Black Psychology, 33(1), 5–26. Frisco, M. L., Martin, M. A., & Van Hook, J. (2019). Socioeconomic status and acculturation: Why Mexican Americans are heavier than Mexican immigrants and whites ƿ. In Immigration and health (pp. 71–96). Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Guzman, C. E. V., & Sanchez, G. R. (2018). The impact of acculturation and racialization on self-rated health status among U.S. Latinos. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 1–7. Hummer, R. A., Rogers, R. G., Nam, C. B., & LeClere, F. B. (1999). Race/ethnicity, nativity, and U.S. adult mortality. Social Science Quarterly, 136–153. Kawachi, I., Daniels, N., & Robinson, D. E. (2005). Health disparities by race and class: Why both matter. Health Affairs, 24(2), 343–352. Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B. P., Lochner, K., & Prothrow-Stith, D. (1997). Social capital, income inequality, and mortality. American Journal of Public Health, 87(9), 1491–1498. Kirby, J. B., & Kaneda, T. (2006). Access to health care: Does neighborhood residential instability matter? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 47(2), 142–155. Kittles, R., & Charmaine R. (2003). The genetics of African Americans: Implications for disease gene mapping and identity. In A. H. Goodman, D. Heath, & M. Susan Lindee (Eds.), Genetic nature/culture: Anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide (pp. 219–233). University of California Berkeley Press. Latkin, C. A., & Curry, A. D. (2003). Stressful neighborhoods and depression: A prospective study of the impact of neighborhood disorder. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 34–44. Marmot, M., Friel, S., Bell, R., Houweling, T. A., Taylor, S., & Commission on Social Determinants of Health. (2008). Closing the gap in a generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health. The Lancet, 372(9650), 1661–1669. Martin, D. C. (2004). Apartheid in the great outdoors: American advertising and the reproduction of a racialized outdoor leisure identity. Journal of Leisure Research, 36(4), 513–535. Mossakowski, K. N. (2003). Coping with perceived discrimination: Does ethnic identity protect mental health? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 318–331. Mowatt, R. A. (2017). A critical expansion of theories on race and ethnicity in leisure studies. In The Palgrave handbook of leisure theory (pp. 577–594). Palgrave Macmillan. Nuru-Jeter, A. M., Michaels, E. K., Thomas, M. D., Reeves, A. N., Thorpe Jr., R. J., & LaVeist, T. A. (2018). Relative roles of race versus socioeconomic position in studies of health inequalities: A matter of interpretation. Annual Review of Public Health, 39, 169–188. Orsi, R. A. (2010). The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. Yale University Press. Paradies, Y., Ben, J., Denson, N., Elias, A., Priest, N., Pieterse, A., Gupta, A., Kelaher, A., & Gee, G. (2015). Racism as a determinant of health: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PloS One, 10(9), e0138511. Phelan, J. C., & Link, B. G. (2015). Is racism a fundamental cause of inequalities in health? Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 311–330.

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Pierre, M. R., & Mahalik, J. R. (2005). Examining African self-consciousness and Black racial identity as predictors of Black men’s psychological well-being. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 11(1), 28. Roberts, D. E. (2008). Is race based medicine good for us? African American approaches to race, biomedicine, and equality. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 36(3), 537–545. Ross, C. E., & Mirowsky, J. (2001). Neighborhood disadvantage, disorder, and health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 258–276. Russell, D. W., Clavél, F. D., Cutrona, C. E., Abraham, W. T., & Burzette, R. G. (2018). Neighborhood racial discrimination and the development of major depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 127(2), 150. Sherkat, D. E., Kilbourne, B. S., Cain, V. A., Hull, P. C., Levine, R. S., & Husaini, B. A. (2007). The impact of health service use on racial differences in mortality among the elderly. Research on Aging, 29(3), 207–224. Siefert, K., Heflin, C. M., Corcoran, M. E., & Williams, D. R. (2004). Food insufficiency and physical and mental health in a longitudinal survey of welfare recipients. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45(2), 171–186. Utsey, S. O. (1997). Racism and the psychological well-being of African American men. Journal of African American Men, 3(1), 69–87. Washington, H. (2006). Medical apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. Doubleday. Whiting, J. W., Larson, L. R., Green, G. T., & Kralowec, C. (2017). Outdoor recreation motivation and site preferences across diverse racial/ethnic groups: A case study of Georgia State Parks. Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, 18, 10–21. WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. (2008). Closing the gap in a generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health: Final report of the commission on social determinants of health. Williams, D. R., Mohammed, S. A., Leavell, J., & Collins, C. (2010). Race, socioeconomic status, and health: complexities, ongoing challenges, and research opportunities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1186(1), 69–101. Williams, N. J., Grandner, M. A., Snipes, S. A., Rogers, A., Williams, O., Airhihenbuwa, C., & Jean-Louis, G. (2015). Racial/ethnic disparities in sleep health and health care: Importance of the sociocultural context. Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation, 1(1), 28–35.

CHAPTER 33

Higher-Class Whites Jonathan Tyler Baker

Related Entries: Postcolonialism and Whiteness; Second Wave Whiteness Studies; Social Class; Social Construction; Whiteness and the Law

… The emergence of critical whiteness studies as a subfield of critical race studies in the last 20 years has reshaped the way scholars look at whiteness. At the same time, economists, critical theorists, and sociologists have all looked for the intersection between race and class in varying degrees of analysis. There is no denying the rich body of scholarship connecting white privilege with economic success, but the shelves of university libraries are relatively bare when it comes to literature analyzing the role of class within whiteness. Over the last decade a new body of scholarship analyzing the characteristics of higher-class whites emerged in what Twine and Gallagher (2008) would call the third wave of critical whiteness studies. Unlike the first two waves – which focused primarily on the United States or the role of European imperialism – the third wave of critical whiteness studies includes key themes, such as an international emphasis of whiteness in diverse economic systems and a growing number of white authors contributing to critical whiteness studies. In the case of higher-class whites, both themes hold true. It is impossible to discuss the study of higher-class whites without situating it in the belly of critical whiteness studies. The same can also be said about the relationship between higher-class whites and the bourgeoning field of elite studies. Flemmen et al. (2017) maintain that with the financial crisis of 2007, scholars and the general public have become increasingly interested in the social composition of the world’s financial elite. As a result, the social scientific study of the world’s elite has moved beyond economic analysis to look at the role of ethnicity, race, gender, cultural capital and geographic space to uncover the process of how people become – or maintain their status of – elite. The earliest writings on the role of social or financial elites came from American political scientists and sociologists writing primarily in the 1950s. Most influential of these early works was C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which argued that mechanisms of political © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_033

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power, social mobility, and economic influence had become so concentrated that only a select group – ‘the power elite’ – wielded power in industrialized nations. Much of Mills’ sociological theoretical framework still guides the field of elite studies to this day as the bulk of scholarship in elite studies is housed in sociology departments across Europe. Taken together, the fields of critical whiteness and elite studies provide the scaffolding for scholars to analyze higher-class whites. The key themes presently emerging from this field – whiteness as social, economic and cultural capital, a hierarchical design within whiteness, and economic inequality as racial oppression – characterize the direction and scope of higher-class white studies. Each theme is discussed here with the purview of understanding the construction and stratification of whiteness, how it intersects with elitism, and the way higher-class whites continue to maintain their position in society.

1

The Construction of and Inequality in Whiteness: Who Is White?

Whiteness should not be viewed as skin color, but instead as a construction of race used to provide an array of benefits to those considered white. Critical whiteness scholars argue that white cultural and behavioral norms are taken for granted as the neutral standard for society –especially by white people – because of their historically rooted place in the United States. The intellectual tradition of rationality, born out of European Enlightenment thought, found a home in Colonial America and quickly became a universalized signifier of whiteness, which represented rationality, orderliness, self-control, empirical thinking positively and anything non-white as violent, chaotic and irrational. The construction of rationality also permeated economic thought. By the turn of the 20th century, much of the world’s economy hinged on the Enlightenment-based concepts of exchange values and the free market economy. The group most affected by the assumed dominance of white intellectualism were Black Africans. Rather than acknowledging the existence of multiple epistemologies, White Europeans viewed Black Africans as no more than an economic commodity due to their lack of Enlightenment-based thinking. As a result, White Europeans created a system of chattel slavery that forced Black Africans into centuries of human bondage. With control of the technological, economic, and intellectual currents of the world, whiteness became synonymous with power. Nonetheless, not all Europeans were considered white. This is where the construction of whiteness takes on even greater meaning. Even though it was clear the benefits of whiteness were not available to those with black or brown skin, immigrants

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from eastern and southern Europe in the 19th century found whiteness was an aspirational goal in the United States. Haney Lopez (1996) and Bell (1992) believe the qualification for who is white in the United States derived largely from the legal system through Supreme Court cases, naturalization laws, and the canonization of race as a biological science. Concepts like common knowledge, physical appearance, geographic location, ancestry, and societal conditions were all considered to be signs of whether a person qualified as white or reaped the benefits of whiteness. What resulted was a systematic sorting of different nationalities and ethnic groups – all who appeared, at least on the surface, to be white – into a hierarchy of privilege, access and power.

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Continued Inequality in Whiteness

What ensued was a nationwide game of cultural assimilation for those with white skin. Physical appearances, methods of education, work ethic, religious values, and standards of behavior took on a homogenized hue while racial segregation intensified. In return for their efforts to participate in historicized notions of whiteness, groups like the Irish, Slavs, Italians, and Jews all found some form of benefit to acting white. The belief in capitalism, empirical thinking, rationality and race as a fixed scientific category stand out as some of the pillars of whiteness in early 20th century America. The struggle for some ethnic groups to be viewed as white dwindled as the century wore on and what remained was a stark dichotomy between whiteness and the black and brown body. By the 1950s, a new message emerged for all to witness first-hand: whiteness was attainable for those with white skin, but never for those without it. The benefits of whiteness have always been historically privileged to a certain portion of the population, yet the physical evidence of racialized exclusion became most pronounced during the era of Jim Crow. That is not to say white privilege, the benefits afforded to those with white skin, did not exist until the 19th and 20th centuries. It did. The character of racial segregation, and denial of upward mobility to, black and brown bodies during the era of Jim Crow forcefully exposed the hegemonic control of whiteness in the United States. Even with the subtle legal deconstruction of whiteness with landmark Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, white people still held nearly every dominant position in America’s cultural, economic, social and political spheres, which allowed for de facto residential, educational, economic, and occupational segregation to continue.

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The Construction of Higher-Class Whites

What began as the historical and legal construction of whiteness turned into the invisible system of white privilege that has, in many ways, returned to its’ historical roots of bifurcating white identity. It is important here to note the difference between racism and the privilege afforded to dominant groups based on skin color. Applebaum (2016) argues privilege is the “unearned benefits and advantages that accrue to dominant group members solely by virtue of occupying a dominant social position and often regardless of one’s attitude, volition, or belief” (p. 5). The racialization of white identity continued even after the deconstruction of legal whiteness. But how? Despite the deconstruction of de jure racism, there is still a large amount of privilege, or social, economic, and political benefit, that comes with being able to claim whiteness. It is this concept of privilege that guides today’s critical whiteness scholars. Although there is undoubtedly a system of privilege granted to those who can claim whiteness, it is important to note that whiteness is not a one-size-fits-all benefit. Anybody who studies whiteness must account for the complications of intersectionality. This is especially true when accounting for the complexity of class. Nearly 60 years prior to the explosion of literature about the perils of the white working class in the United States after the Tea Party Movement in 2010 and the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, a segment of political scientists and sociologists were trying to make the public aware of the sociopolitical and economic gap among white people in the United States. The most influential of the political scientists was Robert A. Dahl, who argued throughout several works published from 1957 to 1978 that a few groups of elites, who were mostly white, controlled nearly all the power in the United States. Following the sociological tradition established by C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff (1979) found that the United States was dominated by a historically entrenched political and economic master class whose ranks rarely grew due to the successful subordination of lower classes. It is safe to say that the study of economic and political elites slowly faded during the 1980s and 1990s as ideological conservatism grew and the threat of communism ended. It is only in recent years that scholars have re-established an interest in elite studies. One may find it difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when class, or socio-economic status, came to matter more to whiteness than ethnicity, but the largest contemporary factor determining who gets full access to the privilege of whiteness is largely decided by social and economic capital. Although there has always been a divide between the white elite and proletariat, scholars agree the gap between rich and poor on a worldwide

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scale has driven the economic gulf among whites to historically new highs not only in the United States, but nearly everywhere in the Western world. What has developed since the financial crisis of 2007 is a re-emergence of elite studies through a sociological framework that ties together the concepts of class, economic capital, cultural capital, whiteness, and social mobility. Missing from much of this swath of literature, however, is an explicit discussion of whiteness. Michael Schwartz (2017) makes a compelling case that the field of sociology has a longstanding tradition of silencing activist writing wherein “the sociological establishment” prevented “the penetration of Du Boisian/activist/ social constructivist/human agency/anti-racist analyses into the (lily-white) ivory tower” of sociology (p. 59). In many ways, Schwartz is correct. The field of sociology has historically failed to address issues of race and has only recently reconciled this fact through the dedicated work of European and American scholars who wish to address the intersection of class and whiteness. And that brings us to the present moment. It seems there is a continental division on the study of higher-class whites. European scholars, who are almost exclusively white and primarily located in Norway, focus on the micro-effects of elite whites and the way in which affluence is reproduced through residential and educational segregation (Dowling, 2009; Toft, 2017). American scholars have studied similar aspects of race-based residential segregation, but have yet to explore how, or why, white folks are divided by socio-economic status. There are several explanations for the divergence between American and European scholars. First, whiteness in the United States is often studied as a social identity historically rooted in an oppressive relationship with non-white ethnic groups. As a result, whiteness is rarely analyzed through an intersectional lens, which has often left criteria like class on the sideline. In the last three years, however, the combination of deindustrialization, the re-emergence of white supremacist groups, and renewed media attention on the status of poor whites has pushed scholars to analyze the economic divisions inherent to whiteness. While some American historians have begun to address the historic economic divisions in whiteness, they’ve yet to consider the role of elite studies nor the social construction of whiteness in their writings.

4

Conclusion

The study of higher-class whites is still in its infancy. Sociologists, economists, historians and political scientists must concentrate their future scholarship on the interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of whiteness studies. It is near impossible to think one discipline alone has the proper tools to further our

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collective understandings of the way whiteness interacts with socio-economic status, geographic position, and historically rooted socio-cultural issues to produce higher-class whites across the world.

References Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge Press. Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. Anderson, C. (2017). White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. Bloomsbury. Applebaum, B. (2016). “Listening silence” and its discursive effects. Educational Theory, 66(3), 37–56. Alcoff, L. M. (1998). What should white people do? Hypatia, 13(3), 6–26. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books. Benson, M. (2014). Trajectories of middle-class belonging: The dynamics of place attachment and class identities. Urban Studies, 51, 3097–3112. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press. Domhoff, G. W. (1979). The powers that be: Processes of ruling class domination in America. Random House. Domhoff, G. W. (2006). Who rules America? Power, politics, and social change (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill. Flemmen, M. P., Toft, M., Anderson, P. L., Hansen, M. N., & Ljunggren, J. (2017). Forms of capital and modes of closure in upper class reproduction. Sociology, 51(6), 1277–1298. Gillborn, D. (2006). Critical race theory and education: Racism and anti-racism in educational theory and praxis. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(1), 11–32. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad faith and anti-black racism. Humanities Press. Hacker, A. (1992). Two nations: Black and white, separate, hostile, unequal. Ballantine Books. Haney-López, I. (1996). White by law: The legal construction of race. New York University Press. Hook, D. (2005). Affecting whiteness: Racism as technology of affect. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 16(1), 74–99. Kendall, F. E. (2013). Understanding White privilege: Creating pathways to authentic relationships across race (2nd ed.). Routledge. McIntosh, P. (1997). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical White studies: Looking behind the mirror (pp. 291–99). Temple University Press.

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McMillen, L. (1995, September). Lifting the veil of whiteness: Growing body of scholarship challenges a racial norm. The Chronicle of Higher Education, A23. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford University Press. Morris, A. (2015). The scholar denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. University of California Press. Morris, A. (2016). W. E. B. Du Bois at the center: From science, civil rights movement, to Black lives matter. The British Journal of Sociology, 68(1), 3–16. Reardon, S. F., & Bischoff, K. (2011). Income inequality and income segregation. American Journal of Sociology, 116(4), 1092–1153. Schwartz, M. (2017). Sociology is an applied science, and the application is social change: A contribution to the discussion of Aldon Morris’ the scholar denied. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(8), 1227–1230. Sharkey, P. (2013). Stuck in place: Urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality. University of Chicago Press. Tatum, B. D. (2003). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? And other conversations about race. Basic Books. Toft, M. (2018). Enduring contexts: Segregation by affluence throughout the life course. The Sociological Review, 66(3), 645–664. Twine, F. W., & Gallagher, C. (2008). The future of whiteness: A map of the ‘third wave.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), 4–24.

CHAPTER 34

Higher Education and Whiteness Elizabeth A. Collins, Devon Thomas, Chris Corces-Zimmerman and Nolan L. Cabrera

Related Entries: Affirmative Action; Colorblindness; Microaggressions; Stereotype Threat; White Supremacy

1

Introduction

Although most institutions of higher education espouse democratic goals of equity, inclusion, and opportunity, these goals are less frequently realized in practice. This is because colleges and universities in the United States have both a past and present that are deeply rooted in Whiteness and the maintenance of White supremacy. While college campuses are slowly making improvements to their compositional diversity, Cabrera (2019) argues, “Institutions of higher education were not created to be racially inclusive, and they have been struggling with that legacy ever since” (p. 4). Thus, institutions of higher education have simultaneously been core areas for disrupting “cycles of racial segregation” (Saénz, 2010), while also being the center of the intergenerational reproduction of white racial privilege (Carnevale & Strohl, 2013). Exploring the role Whiteness plays in perpetuating racial inequity is an important first step in uprooting White supremacy and challenging racism in higher education. Within this context, we explore the history of Whiteness and White dominance in higher education, and the occasional challenge to this system. We begin by defining Whiteness and offering a brief historical overview of the ways that institutions of higher education have served as mechanisms for maintaining White supremacy. We then discuss how hegemonic Whiteness continues to shape college campuses today through practices including admissions policies, campus space, and pedagogy. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for research and practice.

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Defining and Interrogating Whiteness

Often “Whiteness” is conflated with “White people.” Leonardo (2009) makes an important distinction when he argues, “‘Whiteness’ is a racial discourse, whereas the category ‘white people’ represents a socially constructed identity, usually based on skin color… Whiteness is not a culture but a social concept” (pp. 169–170). Whiteness describes more than individual thoughts, values, or actions, racist or otherwise, perpetrated by individual White people against People of Color. Moving beyond discourses and social structures to habits, Sullivan (2006) distinguishes “White” from “being whitely” and says, “‘Being white’ refers to physical traits such as pale skin color, while ‘being whitely’ refers to a deeply ingrained way of being in the world that includes behaviors, habits, and dispositions” (p. 160). We describe Whiteness as a discourse, ideology, and social habit, in understanding higher education institutional practices and policies both historically and contemporarily. The difficulty with Whiteness is that it is a malleable form of social oppression, constantly adapting to changing terrain. In a historical example we will detail later in this chapter, holistic review of college applications was meant as a way to keep “undesirables” – in particular Jewish students – from gaining admission (Karabel, 2005), while achieving high scores on standardized tests and related measures of merit became avenues for the traditionally excluded to gain access to higher education (Lemann, 2000). Contemporarily, the over-reliance on test scores serves to limit access for minoritized students, while holistic review is a means of providing a more racially equitable method of making admissions decisions. By understanding White supremacy as an oppressive social structure, we can then explore how it is ingrained in the organizational logics and structures of higher education institutions. Access to and success within institutions of higher education play a central role in awarding the societal benefits promised with a college degree. While gaining access to higher education is supposed to be meritocratic – where individuals are granted access based upon their own abilities – the reality is that access tends to more accurately reflect whether individuals were fortunate enough to be born White and middle or upper class. Within this context, the hidden norms within higher education institutions seem neutral on the surface yet serve to reinforce White supremacy in practice.

3

A Brief History of White Supremacy in U.S. Higher Education

From their inception, U.S. institutions of higher education have largely operated as exclusive sites for the replication of the dominant White social order

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(Wilder, 2013). Elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton historically excluded students based on characteristics including family social status, religion, and White ethnicity. They were not meritocratic in any sense as they were social institutions where the rich could send their (male) children to fraternize with other rich (male) students, creating social networks that would allow them to keep and enhance their social status. Hard work and being studious was discouraged as many strove to get by on a “gentleman’s C” (Karabel, 2005). At this historical point in time, it was socially acceptable to believe that nonWhite people were lesser beings – less developed and more primitive than White people. Therefore, the leaders of colleges and universities did not find it troubling if the numbers of minoritized students attending their institutions were incredibly low. To them, it was a natural outcome stemming from nonWhite innate mental inferiority. In 1891, Harvard President Charles Eliot wrote a letter of recommendation for W.E.B. Du Bois for a fellowship. President Eliot wrote of Du Bois, who would become one of the greatest scholars in U.S. history, that Harvard would consider Du Bois a good student if he were White rather than Black. Access to higher education for racial minorities expanded with the Morrill Land Grant Acts, however, the expansion was uneven. First, access for Black students was largely channeled through HBCUs which also tended to be extremely underfunded and under-resourced. Additionally, the curricula of many HBCUs tended to focus on vocational training. This was the time when Plessy was the law of the land and racially separate educational institutions were allowed to the extent that they were “equal.” Roebuck and Murty (1993) argued that the expansion of HBCUs was directly linked to White people not wanting to go to school with Blacks, “To get millions of dollars in federal funds for the development of white land-grant universities, to limit African American education to vocational training, and to prevent African Americans from attending white land-grant colleges” (p. 27). Thus, while access to higher education increased for all, there were mechanisms of Whiteness in place to keep the races separate. Following World War II and the subsequent expansion of higher education in the post-G.I. Bill and post-Brown v. Board of Education period, colleges and universities shifted to more obscure and insidious efforts to maintain Whiteness and White supremacy. Rather than relying overtly on traits like a student’s family status or religious background, colleges and universities prioritized supposedly objective measures of a student’s giftedness and deservedness like standardized test scores and high school GPA. This shift allowed institutions to hide behind a veil of race-neutrality and meritocracy while using raciallybiased admissions criteria that disproportionately upheld White ways of being. This period of time also saw the development of affirmative action programs

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which did serve to modestly challenge White dominance in higher education. However, the modest gains from affirmative action were quickly reversed as the program has been under constant legal threat since the late 1970s under the guise that it is a form of “reverse discrimination” (Crosby, 2004). Moving into a knowledge-based economy, there are some who argue the U.S. has moved from mass to universal higher education (e.g., Trow, 1970). While we think this is an overstatement, access to higher education is at an all-time high in U.S. history. However, there are some important caveats. Gaps in access between White students and underrepresented minorities (URMs) has not changed much over the past 41 years. In addition, the increased access for URMs tends to be directed toward open access institutions where there are fewer resources. How do these patterns of racial exclusion and separation continue despite the fact that de jure racial discrimination was made illegal more than 50 years ago? We next demonstrate how many higher education institutions still rely on policies and institutional logics that are racist in the sense that they disproportionately and adversely affect Students of Color, thus serving as vehicles to uphold Whiteness and White supremacy.

4

Whiteness and Meritocracy as a Hidden Norm in Higher Education

Higher education institutions serve as sites where White supremacy is both reproduced and challenged, as Whiteness operates on systemic and individual levels within local college campus contexts. Both institutional practices and individual actions uphold Whiteness as the dominant norm in higher education. In order for higher education institutions to work toward a more equitable future, it is necessary to forefront a critique of Whiteness, and the role that individuals and institutions play in perpetuating racist systems. This section highlights some of the many ways that Whiteness shapes institutions, specifically through assumptions about meritocracy, segregated campus spaces, and even social justice pedagogy. Institutional leaders at colleges and universities tend to profess that they are meritocratic, or that people within them rise and fall based upon their own abilities. However, meritocracy only became an underlying ideology of higher education in the late 20th century. In the early 20th century, Jewish students were gaining more access to education, since they were performing well academically and on standardized testing measures. This caused concern for college leadership given their anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic attitudes towards Jewish applicants, who were at the time considered racially inferior. Holistic review processes were developed as a strategy to bar entrance to elite colleges

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for Jewish students by altering definitions of merit that prioritized wealthy, Protestant, male applicants. Later, the use of holistic review practices supported the implementation of affirmative action as an opportunity to increase access to higher education for minority students. Affirmative action and race-based admissions policies made it possible for more minority students to gain access to higher education, and college enrollments increased throughout the late 1960’s through the mid1970’s. Affirmative action and the flexibility within holistic review processes allowed institutions to address the injustices and racial bias in their admissions practices. However, affirmative action came under an incredible amount of scrutiny and challenge, in part, because it was seen as a non-meritocratic way of gaining admissions (Crosby, 2004). Despite the positive outcomes of affirmative action policies, legislation in response to Supreme Court decisions has since rolled back much of the progress intended to disrupt the Whiteness inherent in higher education institutions. Some states including Texas and California saw a decline in postsecondary enrollments after removing race as one of many factors in admissions decisions. In an ironic twist of fate, holistic review that was initially meant to keep Jewish students out, is now a mechanism to address these declines in URM enrollments after the elimination of affirmative action programs. Opposition to race-conscious access programs like affirmative action is often a way to maintain White supremacy through race-evasiveness. Raceevasiveness, also known as colorblindness, is the idea that when topics of race arise, White people maintain ahistorical and race neutral views. This is how meritocracy and White supremacy go hand-in-hand. Under the guise of meritocracy, seemingly race-neutral criteria are put forth and tend to benefit White students, and when White students reap the benefits, they feel they earned them because of their own merit. However, when the “merit” system ceases to benefit White people, they frequently change the criteria. While admissions/ meritocracy is an incredibly important component of Whiteness and higher education, Whiteness is also manifest in the actual spaces on college campuses.

5

Racialized Campus Spaces and Climate

Another way White supremacy is reinforced within higher education is through racialized campus spaces, which informs the campus racial climate. Moving beyond just the numbers of Students of Color on campus, the campus racial climate also consists of: (1) the historical legacy of inclusion/exclusion; (2) the psychological dimension (i.e., how students perceive the climate); (3)

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the behavioral dimension (i.e., the quantity and quality of cross-racial interactions); and (4) the organizational dimension (i.e., the extent to which diversity is incorporated into university policy) (Milem, Chang, & antonio, 2005). There is a great deal of potential in cross-racial interactions to foster more racially inclusive campus climates, but this potential is frequently lost due to balkanization – or campus racial segregation (antonio, 2001; Clarke & antonio, 2012). One of the most pronounced areas of campus segregation is housed Greek life because they are one of the few areas on campus where students have the explicit ability to exclude others. When White students are only in the company of other White students in these organizations, this provides them license to participate in racial joking and also heightens a perception that White people are racial victims. This sense of racial victimization, stemming from a structured racial insulation, is another way that White supremacy is reinforced within institutions of higher education. In addition, it supports White racial ignorance. The concept of racial ignorance assumes that Whites engage in behaviors like making racist jokes or segregating themselves because they lack racial knowledge. Rather, White individuals actively avoid racial analysis of social systems since they know the truth and do not want to confront it. This leads White students to believe that truly racist behaviors rarely occur since racism is only perpetrated by overtly racist White supremacist groups. White students who engage in racist behavior through their joking, yet still conceptualize themselves as non-racist individuals, uphold racial ignorance on campus. Beyond individual actions, racial joking and other microaggressions are approved and promoted when universities individualize such behavior, passing incidents off as “a few bad apples” (Cabrera et al., 2016; Yosso et al., 2009). White supremacy is therefore maintained because White students and White space are privileged by normalizing Whiteness on campuses. Even areas on college campuses that are meant to disrupt Whiteness can inadvertently reproduce these structures (e.g. designating marginal spaces as locations for minoritized affinity groups to meet, etc.).

6

Social Justice Pedagogy and Racial Comfort

When institutions of higher education do create opportunities for students to address racial issues, there is frequently a call for the creation of “safe space” where participants can speak openly about their experiences with race and racism (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). These safe spaces are intended to provide

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ground rules and behavioral standards to increase the comfort for White students to engage in a necessarily uncomfortable subject. Leonardo and Porter (2010) argue that in order to have transformative dialogue around race and racism, the idea of safe spaces must be disrupted, since safety within race discourse only serves to reinforce White supremacy as spaces made safe for whiteness are a priori violent for students of Color. Thus, the creation of “safe space” means creating a safe space for White dominance while centering White racial comfort (Cabrera et al., 2017; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). Instead, White students will need to recognize the realities of systemic racism, which frequently results in feelings of racial dissonance, discomfort, and being unsafe. When safe spaces become a prerequisite to racial dialogue, this dialogue may not adequately address the painful experiences of oppression that marginalized students face within higher education. When the comfort of White students is given precedence, White students can maintain a sense of security and racial comfort that sanctions their own lack of racial awareness while at the same time further marginalizing Students of Color who are forced to accommodate the White fragility and White guilt of their White peers (DiAngelo, 2018). Moreover, conversations around race and racism tend to remain race evasive and free from critical investigations of racism that would call into question the individual and institutional actions that benefit White people regardless of their personal intent. The frequent inability of White students to engage in racial dialogue, learn about the histories of People of Color, and uncover their own privilege and dominance, further contributes to a hostile climate for Students of Color. Therefore, higher education institutions reproduce Whiteness when educators fail to provide opportunities for racial dissonance and growth for White students to examine their racial identity and their responsibility in maintaining White supremacy.

7

Implications and Future Directions

Today, institutions of higher education do not have to be explicitly racist to create unwelcoming environments for People of Color. Instead, White dominance is maintained when institutions fail to critically examine the ways Whiteness has become embedded within everyday decisions and behaviors like perceptions of merit, the organization of campus spaces, and pedagogical decisions. Research in higher education has begun to address the ways that campuses are racialized by interrogating the ways that Whiteness has been ingrained into the institutional structure through policies, procedures, and assumptions. However, institutional and policy analyses are lacking as students tend to be

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the primary unit of analysis. Given that Whiteness remains invisible to most White people and operates subtly as the norm in institutions, this work of acknowledging and critiquing Whiteness is difficult because the “cracks in the walls of Whiteness” are frequently hidden (Bush, 2011). While the cracks are small, they exist, and this becomes the central challenge of the work – developing institutional norms that favor the racially marginalized to transform higher education from a tool of White supremacy to one of racial justice.

References antonio, a. l. (2001). Diversity and the influence of friendship groups in college. The Review of Higher Education, 25(1), 63–89. Bush, M. E. L. (2011). Everyday forms of whiteness: Understanding race in a “post-racial” world (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Cabrera, N. L. (2019). White guys on campus: Racism, White immunity, and the myth of ‘post-racial’ higher education. Rutgers University Press. Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2017). Whiteness in higher education: The invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses. Whiteness in higher education. ASHE Higher Education Report, 42(6), 7–125. Cabrera, N. L., Watson, J. S., & Franklin, J. D. (2016). Racial arrested development: A critical Whiteness analysis of the campus ecology. Journal of College Student Development, 57(2), 119–134. Carnevale, A. P., & Strohl, J. (2013). Separate & unequal: How higher education reinforces the intergenerational reproduction of white racial privilege. Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Clarke, C. G., & antonio, a. l. (2012). Rethinking research on the impact of racial diversity in higher education. The Review of Higher Education, 36(1), 25–50. Crosby, F. J. (2004). Affirmative action is dead: Long live affirmative action. Yale University Press. DiAngelo, R. J. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard to talk to white people about racism. Beacon Press. Karabel, J. (2005). The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Mariner Books. Lemann, N. (2000). The big test: The secret history of the American meritocracy. Macmillan. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. Routledge. Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a fanonian theory of “safety” in race dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157.

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Milem, J. F., Chang, M. J., & antonio, a. l. (2005). Making diversity work on campus: A research-based perspective. Association of American Colleges and Universities. Roebuck, J. B., & Murty, K. S. (1993). Historically Black colleges and universities: Their place in American higher education. Praeger. Saénz, V. B. (2010). Breaking the cycle of segregation: Examining students’ precollege racial environments and college diversity experiences. Review of Higher Education, 34(1), 1–37. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indiana University Press. Trow, M. (1970). Reflections on the transition from mass to universal higher education. Daedalus, 99(1), 1–42. Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. Bloomsbury. Yosso, T. J., Smith, W.A., Ceja, M., & Solórzano, D. G. (2009). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and the campus climate for Latina/o undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659–690.

CHAPTER 35

Hip Hop Todd Fraley

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Social Construction

1

Hip Hop as a Force for Democracy

The privileged and powerful location of whiteness in a problematic racial hierarchy stems from a long history of invisibility. As whiteness enjoys its status as the norm, “Others” are raced and effectively marginalized. In turn, Giroux (1997) argued that scholars must critically analyze Whiteness and its media representations as pedagogical texts in the struggle to rearticulate what it means to be White “precisely because of [their] popularity and widespread appeal” (p. 8). With its origins in New York City’s communities of color, hip hop upends this reality as Blackness represents normalcy and Whiteness becomes racially marked and othered. Alridge and Stewart (2005) explain that hip hop can be traced to the early 1970’s South Bronx, and consists of 4 fundamental elements: djing, break dancing, graffiti art, and rapping. Reflecting a style of dress, language, and worldview, it has been commodified and distributed to the masses, and histories have been published to ensure it is taken seriously and understood as a powerful cultural artifact (Alridge & Stewart, 2005). While some have argued that hip hop reinforces historical stereotypes about African Americans (Aldridge & Stewart, 2005), some suggest that “rap… troubles and problematizes [society’s] system of racial difference” (Best & Kellner, 1999, p. 16). Hip hop has moved from a marginalized subculture to a major driver of globalized popular culture. During this time, “diverse racial identities have become more visible and more hybrid because of the… prominence of hip-hop culture” (Giroux, 1997, p. 8). In addition, the hip hop generation has been credited with creating a new politics of race resisting traditional notions of difference (Kitwana, 2005). Authenticity in hip hop is tied to its representations of African-American identity, and this requires white rap artists to carefully negotiate their place within hip-hop culture (Hess, 2006). Hip hop offers another example of white artists topping the charts with black music and culture they have adapted, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_035

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mimicked, poached, and exploited for a white mainstream (Hess, 2006). Beyond the artists themselves, many white consumers perceive hip hop as mere entertainment and spectacle. As these listeners dismiss white privilege and deny the diversity of blackness, they ignore its capacity to operate as an agent of social change (Netcoh, 2013). This also makes it difficult for hip hop to destabilize entrenched forms of institutionalized racism (Netcoh, 2013). Nonetheless, White participation can no longer be discarded wholeheartedly as modern-day minstrelsy. Hip hop must be accepted as an entry point for discussing the competing articulations of whiteness, a mediascape revealing the democratic possibilities of hybrid and interpositional identities, and an amplifier for social justice. White emcees are not simply “stealing” black music, and participation in hip-hop should not be naively dismissed as cultural theft and/or imitation of black culture (Grealy, 2010). Many white artists either imitated rags-to-riches narratives of black artists, or inverted these narratives, but the reaction to Vanilla Ice changed how white rap artists confront their whiteness (Hess, 2006). Legitimate questions concerning intent are supported by a problematic racial history, but hip hop cannot overlook white MC’s and audiences who are working for an antiracist society. Hip hop is creating sites for youth of diverse racial backgrounds to converge and share common interests (Netcoh, 2013), mobilizing racially and socially just democratic ideologies, and empowering listeners to see themselves as politically active citizens (Bry, 2014). Put simply, hip hop unsettles culture, and must be taken seriously as a critical component of this social transformation. Attempting to demonstrate their authenticity and care for a culture that is understandably cautious, white MC’s have recently employed different strategies and revealed a more critical awareness of race and its historical implications. Ultimately, artists and their audiences can be pivotal in establishing and understanding non-racist and liberating constructions of Whiteness (Giroux, 1997). As Everlast, front man for House of Pain, noted: The Beastie Boys cut the bushes out of the road, then 3rd Bass proved that some White boys could get down. With House of Pain, we came through and paved that Motherfucker we actually stated we were White boys who could get down. (Diehl, 1999) This entry situates the hip hop generation as crucial to surmounting cemented racial borders, recognizing racial interposers and hybrid identities as spaces disrupting essentialism with the potential to establish a socially just and democratic society supported by racial alliances. As Sule (2015) argues, hip hop allows whites to interrogate racial power hierarchies and privilege, participate

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in meaningful cross-racial engagement, and ultimately cultivate conversations about privilege and social equity (p. 214). This process requires an understanding of whiteness that moves from condemnations and denials of whiteness to overt recognitions of white privilege and finally a space acknowledging the importance of lived experience. As Macklemore stated on his single White Privilege 2, “what if I actually read an article, actually had a dialogue?/actually looked at myself, actually got involved?/if I’m aware of my privilege and do nothing at all, I don’t know.”

2

I’m Down: The Hybrid White Interposer

In hip hop, the audience is pivotal in conferring authenticity. This is often linked to skill, not race, but white rappers still labor to demonstrate an acceptable and believable authenticity (Hahn, 2014). In 1986, the Beastie Boy’s Licensed to Ill became the first rap record to reach number one, yet they were deemed inauthentic and criticized for mocking a black art form. In 1990, Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was the first hip hop single to top the billboard charts, yet his insincere and fraudulent biography stalled his rap career. Near the same time, MC Serch of 3rd Bass was applauded and accepted for being himself and Five non-Black men from New York City referred to themselves as “Young Black Teenagers” and claimed if you didn’t know my color you wouldn’t know I was White. Giroux (1997) challenged the contention that creating an antiracist society requires a renunciation of one’s Whiteness and an adoption of simplistic characteristics of the “other.” These artists emphasized hallmarks of authenticity (representing the street, connections with old school hip hop, hypermasculinity, and non-whiteness), and reinforced essentialized notions of race. Some mc’s even forged a white identity requiring they “feel guilty about their association with a group perpetuating racial oppression” (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, p. 10). On his song Daylight, Brother Ali states: “They ask me if I’m black or white, I’m neither….” This approach has proven “ineffective in the struggle for justice, democracy and self-efficacy” (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, p. 12). A more just understanding of racial identity and privilege should seek to rearticulate Whiteness by “rejecting it as a racist form of identity” (Giroux, 1997, p. 8). As Sule (2015) argues, white males who immerse themselves in hip hop culture are creating a new racial politics among racially diverse peers (p. 18). In turn, hip hop allows white youth to remake their whiteness/identity in ways that resist domination and work for the cause of racial justice (Bry, 2014). In his early years, Eminem asked, “How can I be White – I don’t even

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exist.” Over time, he revealed a more sophisticated understanding of race and challenged comprehensions of Whiteness and acknowledged the power and privilege it afforded him. In White America, Eminem raps: “Let’s do the math – if I was Black, I woulda sold half.” It is important to pay particular attention to hip hop’s inclusion of hybrid and interpositional identities. These constructs, when connected to antiracist efforts, function as a disruption to the legitimacy of a hegemonic racial order built upon separation and privilege. Hybridity, defined as “a space where bodies and identity resist stable categories” exposes whiteness as a discourse and presents a serious threat to its stability and dominance (Shugart, 2007). If hybridity is a place “where previous separate cultural systems mingle, symbolic interactions are deterritorialized, and impure genres rule” attention must be paid to the ways individuals create “symbolic codes and cultural discourses… to construct, preserve, and defend hybrid identities”(Kraidy, 1999). This move creates space for new identities offering emancipatory possibilities. The hybrid interposer disrupts established, hegemonic blocks, and fuses new racial constructs. Vanilla Ice remained a marginal stranger, a permanent other, trying to negotiate the culture of the other through the appropriation of exaggerated and stereotypical cultural representations. Today, rather than define themselves by surface stylistic choices that disguise significant power relations, white MC’s acknowledge porous cultural borders and present diverse lived experiences. Asher Roth, a blonde-haired blue-eyed man from Philadelphia, rapped about college, and in 2013 Macklemore won album of the year while recognizing his privilege (Bry, 2014). As mbschonze (2013) states, white rappers now counteract questions of exploitation and cultural appropriation, are coming to terms with whiteness by admitting white privilege and being true to their own life experiences. If hip hop can flex its liberatory potential, and forge multiracial coalitions, it emerges as a prime location for whites to interrogate systematic racial oppression (Netchoh, 2013, p. 18). As Loving (2017) argues, Post Malone’s concerts are where Compton and Portland meet. On White Privilege II, Macklemore asks the listener, “you speak about equality, but do you really mean it? Are you marching for freedom, or when it’s convenient?” He follows that with additional tough questions, “We want to dress like, walk like, talk like, dance like, yet we just stand by… will we show up for Black lives?” How do white rappers justify their positions in an industry that grew out of serving African American communities? This is what Macklemore seems to grapple with in White Privilege and White Privilege II.

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We’ve Come Full Cypher

Eminem’s iconic status altered the path of what today is recognized as a powerful cultural and social phenomenon that can “potentially serve as a model for minimizing the impact of race and removing discrimination” (Hahn, 2014, p. 6). As Sule (2015) argues, as hip hop creates exposure and openness, people learn from each other and can hopefully create a just society. Whiteness can work as an opposition category as individuals become allies in the struggle for racial equality. Eminem and Macklemore both represent this thinking in recent tracks. In White Privilege, Macklemore rhymes: “Where’s my place in a music that’s been taken by my race/culturally appropriated by the white face?/ and we don’t want to admit this is existing/so scared to acknowledge the benefits of our white privilege.” Later in the song he adds, “I was put in a position where I could choose my options/blessed with the privilege that my parents could send me to college… if I think I understand just because I flow, too?/ that means I’m not keeping it true.” His efforts reflect the value of cross racial understanding and reveal how hip hop can bring diverse people together, create diverse interactions, and ultimately the personal understanding necessary for a just society. Hip hop broadcasts truths about oppression and inequality and enables racial alliances challenging social inequities (Sule, 2015). If White hip hop fans can imagine an oppositional and equity based whiteness, demonstrate heightened racial ally behaviors, and challenge injustices, hip hop holds promise (Sule, 2015). This is pivotal to promoting dialogue and critical thought about social issues, and Eminem is leading the way. During his BET Cypher in 2018, he subtly showed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, denounced President Trump as a racist, and called for his listeners to choose a side. In his follow up single, Untouchable, he linked a deplorable national history to serious issues confronting Black America today, acknowledged white privilege, outlined the consequences of racial biases, and reaffirmed his support for the Black Lives Matters movement. Macklemore noted that if a “black MC examined race, there goes half their fan base, white kids” so it is imperative that there can be “no racist beliefs, no rest til we’re free.” At the end of White Privilege II, the white listener is asked, What are you willing to risk? What are you willing to sacrifice to create a more just society?” And reminded, “your silence is a luxury, hip hop is not a luxury.” It is in these moments where hip hop presents a conception of whiteness navigating black spaces in ways that do not disregard, deceive, or dominate,” but instead ensures an “opportunity for cross racial dialogue and cultivating racial justice allies” (Sule, 2015, p. 224).

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Conclusion

The American Anthropological Association (1998) notes the concept of race developed as a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people, and evolved as a worldview that distorted ideas about human differences and group behavior. In addition, Nakayama and Krizek (1995) explain Whiteness should be understood as a rhetorical construction used to justify a dominant racial order. The result is an otherness communicated “to reify traditional discourses of whiteness…” (Shugart, 2007). Hybrid and interpositional identities challenge traditional racial dichotomies. If differences are cultural, they are open to modification and change, but if they appear natural, they support the strategy of fixed difference that becomes easier to secure (Hall, 1997). They demand further analysis regarding popular responses to shifting and fluid identities posing challenges to traditional boundaries. Media, and specifically hip hop, present a locale for this analysis, and can function as a challenge to these hegemonic racial boundaries. Such spaces present “racial identities as multiple, porous, complex and shifting” and portray interposers as individuals who “cross racial lines not in order to become black, but to begin to forge multiracial coalitions based on critical engagement rather than a denial of whiteness” (Hall, 1995). Brother Ali presents this complex view of racial identity when he raps, “Race is a made up thing I don’t believe in it/My genes tie me to those that despised me/Made a living killing the ones that inspired me/I ain’t just talking about singing and dancing/I was taught life and manhood by black men/So I’m a product of that understanding/And a small part of me feels like I am them/Does that make me a liar maybe/but I don’t want the white folks that praise me to think they can claim me/’Cause you didn’t make me.” These words lay bare the intricacies of this conversation. The intersection of Whiteness and hip hop compels contemplation about the difference between racial allies and cultural poachers. The idea is not to dismiss racial differences or lived experience, but to move beyond discussions of racial insiders and outsiders. We are in an “age where cultural space becomes unfixed, unsettled, porous, and hybrid, and it becomes difficult to defend notions of singular identity” (Giroux, 1994, p. 40). For those interested in the connection between racial identities and an antiracist project, hip hop enables an important conversation, as it positions a newly defined/ rearticulated whiteness within the current racial hierarchy by rejecting a racist white identity and challenging essentialist notions of black and white. Thankfully, hip hop emboldens communication across barriers and allows for a discursive space for expressing the reality of fluid, antiracist identities.

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References Alridge, D., & Stewart, P. (2005). Introduction: Hip hop in history: Past, present, and future. The Journal of African American History, 90(3), 190–195. American Anthropological Association. (1998). Statement on ‘race.’ http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1999). Rap, Black rage, and racial difference. Enculturation, 2(2), http://enculturation.gmu.edu/2_2/best-kellner.html Bry, D. (2014), Fear of a White genre. The New Republic [Electroinc version]. Retrieved December 12, 2018, from newrepublic.com/article/116649/white-hip-hop-artists Diehl, M. (1999). Pretty fly. Rolling Stone, 18. Giroux, H. (1994). Disturbing pleasures: Learning popular culture. Routledge. Giroux, H. (1997). Rewriting the discourse of racial identity: Towards a pedagogy and politics of Whiteness. Harvard Education Review, 67, 285–320. Grealy, L. (2010). Negotiating cultural authenticity in hip-hop: Mimicry, whiteness and Eminem. Continuum, 22(6), 851–865. Hahn, J. (2014, June 8). The politics of race in rap, Harvard Political Review. Hall, S. (1995). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In G. Dines & J. M. Humez (Eds.), Gender, race and class in media (pp. 18–22). Sage. Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the other. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representation and signifying practice (pp. 223–290). Sage. Hess, M. (2005) Hip-hop realness and the White performer. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22(5), 372–389. Kincheloe, J., & Steinberg, S. (1998). White reign: Deploying whiteness in America. St. Martin’s Press. Kitwana, B. (2005). Why white kids love hip hop: Wankstas, wiggers, wannabees, and the new reality of race in America. Basic Civitas Books. Kraidy, M. (1999). The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 16, 456–476. Loving, B. (2017). Is post Malone just another White rapper? Retrieved February 2, 2019, from http://studybreaks.com/culture/music/post-malone-another-white-rapper/ Mbschonze. (2013). On White rappers rapping about being white and rapping. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://wewriteaboutmusicandwhiteness.wordpress.com/ 2013/12/16/on-white-rappers-rapping-about-being-white-and-rapping/ Nakayama, T., & Krizek, R. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric [electronic version]. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291–309. Netcoh, S. (2013). Droppin’ knowledge on race: Hip-hop, White adolescents, and anti-racism education. Radical Teacher, 97, 10–19.

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Shugart, H. (2007). Crossing over: Hybridity and hegemony in the popular media. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4(2), 115–141. Sule, V. (2015), White privilege: The intersection of hip-hop and whiteness as a catalyst for cross-racial interaction among White males. Equity and Excellence in Education, 48(2), 212–226.

CHAPTER 36

hooks, bell Dawn N. Hicks Tafari, LaWanda M. Simpkins and Shawn Arango Ricks

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Feminism and Whiteness; Intersectionality; White Supremacy

1

Background

Born on September 25, 1952, Gloria Jean Watkins would live on to become one of the greatest feminist philosophers of her time. Borrowing the name of her maternal great grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, hooks has consistently been passionate about finding truth while acknowledging the other. hooks made it a point to appropriately use lower case letters for her name as to not focus on herself as an author. Over time, however, people were so preoccupied with the lower case letters that, in many ways, the opposite occurred. With five sisters and one brother, hooks came from a house full of noise, but where ultimately she had no voice. This lack of a voice at home was part of the impetus for hooks dealing with her issues of subjectivity and voice throughout her career. Beginning at age 19, when she first wrote what would become Ain’t I a woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), she began a critical postmodern examination of race, class, and gender in the continued oppression of all peoples. As such, hooks is one of the premiere Black feminist writers to demand that people view these systems of oppression as interlocking. Growing up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to working class parents during the civil rights era influenced hooks’s work greatly. She has written over 30 books and countless articles which discuss topics such as feminism, sexuality, race, gender, class, and pedagogy. Her influence on the collective identity of Black women has been tremendous. Additionally, her reflections on whiteness as property – particularly within the feminist movement – have impacted the way people view feminism and the divisions that lie within. Her lifelong commitment to serve as a thoughtful teacher is evidenced in all the work that she has produced. Her work has provided more inclusive definitions to debunk many mainstream master narratives.

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Nothing speaks to this idea more than her first work, Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981). In her title, hooks paid homage to Black woman activist Sojourner Truth, who questioned the very notion of what it meant to be a Black woman during the 1851 women’s rights convention held in Akron, Ohio where she gave a speech by this very name. Much like her foremorther, in her literary work, hooks saliently exploits the unquestioned truth that many hold, that white is right. Whether explicitly in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) or speaking on Happy to Be Nappy (1999) to young Black girls, hooks intertwines the notion of Blackness in all of her works as a counter narrative to whiteness as absolute.

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Feminist Critique

Central to bell hooks’ work to debunk particular mainstream narratives is a multi-faceted, critical Black feminist critique. In the seminal text, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks (1984) writes: Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually – women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. (p. 1) hooks explains that white-stream feminism is the voice of the privileged. It does not problematize ethnic, racial, sexual preference, religion, or class boundaries: boundaries that are shaped, in large part, by white supremacy. The multiple and competing oppressions that Black women face are not reflected or unpacked in white-stream feminist discourse. White feminists are not sympathetic to the interlocking oppressions that Black women face, as white-stream feminism is “one-dimensional” because it only addresses the experiences of white, middle-class, college-educated women (p. 3). hooks’ critique of white-stream feminism is clear and consistent throughout her body of work. Also, clear and consistent is her call for Black women to not abandon the feminist movement. Instead, she posits that Black women must work within the movement to consistently, openly, and unapologetically fight racism in an effort to expand the purview of feminism to include a lens that is intersectional (see Crenshaw, 1989) and reflects women impacted by a multitude of oppressions.

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White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

To help put words to this intersectional lens, hooks introduced the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” in her work. In the 1997 Media Education Foundation documentary, bell hooks – Cultural Criticism & Transformation, hooks explains why she felt this term was necessary and important: I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives [emphasis added] and that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a Black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me. (Jhally, 1997) For hooks, coining this term”white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” helped to provide context and understanding to the complexity of intersectionality and to bring a sense of wholeness to the divisions that lie within. It was always important for hooks and others around her to address the multiple and competing facets of one’s identity. In fact, much of her academic critique was for those of the dominant race who only wanted to capture the voices of Black women in a way that was suitable for them. The absence of authenticity in wanting to hear a shared voice positioned hooks to always keep her intersecting identities at the forefront of conversations. Nothing displayed this more than her works on education.

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Education as a Practice of Freedom The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine

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ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. (hooks, 1994, p. 207) hooks’ (1994) asserts repeadedly that “no education is politically neutral,” it is indeed a political act. Much of hooks’ visions of how education should be is based on the influence of Paulo Freire. Freire’s critical analysis of education and the “banking” system lit a fire in hooks, igniting within her the passion that allowed her to continue to question and move on. Utilizing the politics of location, hooks describes her view of transforming the margins in which Black women have been pushed into spaces which will “nourish one’s capacity to resist… to imagine alternative, new worlds” (hooks, 2004, p. 157). These spaces are important to Black women who may live and work at the center and are yet pushed to the margins daily. Her main theme of liberation via education is supported by language (privilege, class), freedom (self-love, belonging, fear, healing), teaching as a political act, and obedience (mind/body split). hooks (1994) states: To educate as a practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn that learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin. (p. 13) The messages hooks tries to impart with her emphasis on language underscores her view of teaching as a political act. She states “writing, I believed then, was all about private longing and personal glory, but teaching was about service, giving back to one’s community. For Black folks, teaching – educating – was fundamentally political because it was rooted in antiracist struggle” (hooks, 1994, p. 2). This subtitle to Teaching to Transgress recognizes that freedom, liberation, is an important goal that can be reached in the classroom, both as the teacher and as the student. Her view on the use of education as a tool for liberation is based on the premise that teaching is not just about the sharing of information with our students. It is also about sharing in their/our growth. One of the many reasons hooks is such a well-respected and highly lauded author and scholar is because her work is multidimensional. As essential as her work on gender, power, and interlocking systems of domination are, her work surrounding eros and freedom in the classroom also stands tall. She pushes this concept in Teaching to Transgress (1994) explicitly. This important

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message is often overlooked by the academy, as teaching is based on “rigor,” and the competition that ensues among faculty is more about who is teaching the “harder” courses. Thus, hooks’ emphasis on education as a liberatory experience, instead of a simply rigorous one, has solidified this child of the Civil Rights era, her place as a prolific feminist scholar, author, and teacher who contributes multi-faceted ideas to an ever-growing body of knowledge.

References Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), article 8. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/ uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman Black women and feminism. Pluto Press. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center (1st ed). South End Press. hooks, b. (1988). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black. Between the Lines Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as a practice of freedom. Routledge. hooks, b. (1999). Happy to be nappy. Hyperion Books for Children. hooks, b. (2004). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press. Jhally, S. (Director). (1997). bell hooks – Cultural criticism & transformation [Motion Picture].

CHAPTER 37

Hyperindividualism Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Capitalism; McIntosh, Peggy; Neoliberalism; Ontological Expansiveness; White Supremacy

… Hyperindividualism is the tendency, in a liberal individualist society, for social actors to understand themselves as disparate entities rather than primarily as members of collectives or groups. Liberal individualism, as an epistemology and way of being, sees the primary social actor as an individual who is capable of transcending any and all social categories that that person might be a part of. While there are group level phenomena in this worldview, those groups can best be understood as collectives of individuals. This means that our analysis must center and focus on individuals capable of making and defining their own realities and subjectivities. Hyperindividualism can thus be understood as what happens when liberal individualists are reinforced in their individuality to the extent that social categories lose any and all meanings. Everyone is an independent social agent, and so everyone is thus independently responsible for their social location and social realities. In the context of white supremacy, hyperindividualism functions to distort structural and systemic manifestations of discrimination and dehumanization to the level of individuals. Organizations and institutions cannot be racist in this view; rather, there are isolated individuals with malicious and racist ideologies who act on those commitments to limit the life chances of people of color. An organization that regularly facilitates unequal and inequitable outcomes for peoples of color then must automatically contain white supremacist social actors with a conscious desire to belittle peoples of color. There must be individuals who have enough power to act on their bigoted beliefs – any notion of systemic racism, or what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2017) calls “racism without racists” disappears. Appearing a year before his (1996/2006) landmark text The Possessive Investment in Whiteness sociologist George Lipsitz (1995) wrote in the American Quarterly

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As long as we define social life as the sum total of conscious and deliberate individual activities, then only individual manifestations of personal prejudice and hostility will be seen as racist. Systemic, collective, and coordinated behavior disappears from sight. Collective exercises of group power relentlessly channeling rewards, resources, and opportunities from one group to another will not appear to be “racist” from this perspective because they rarely announce their intention to discriminate against individuals. But they work to construct racial identities by giving people of different races vastly different life chances. (p. 381) To follow Lipsitz here, then, we need accounts of whiteness and white racial identity that are not collapsed into simple and tired “liberal individualist” accounts of racism. We must move away from simply identifying those individual moments, persons, or discourses seen as “racist” to a critical examination of the ways in which such “calling out” continually reinforces a hyperindividualist understanding of racism and white supremacy, obscuring focus and attention from the shared, systemic, and structural realities of oppression in our contemporary social reality. Hyperindividualism is an ideology rooted in the particularly “American” notions of “Manifest Destiny” and “Rugged Individualism” that characterized the popular “American” ethos of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Manifest Destiny refers to the notion that through individual determination and will one could realize aims to colonize and settle the whole of North America, most common in the 19th century. Rugged Individualism refers to the notion that it should be individuals, not governments, who are primarily responsible for realizing their own aspirations, rejecting most or all governmental assistance. Rugged individualism is most commonly associated with the policies of Herbert Hoover and 20th century Republican values. Notions that one can succeed despite any and all hardships they encounter, through determination and hard work, produces a logic that then blames any individuals who are not successful in our society for their own oppressions and marginalizations. Thus, hyperindividualism is conceived of here as an ideology wherein which the singular individual is the center of any and all political and social action. Collectives or groups, in this ideology, are comprised of individuals: they are reducible to their constituent participants as distinct, specific, and particular from one another. Whatever they might share, it is shared at the level of discrete persons who are utterly independent and, exercising a “freedom of choice,” to choose those groups to which they belong. We can immediately recognize in such an ideology practices and discourses that are desired in capitalism. Rational actors, operating independently, are

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given the “option” of meritocratically “working hard” in order to achieve “success,” and thus a hyperindividualist ideology seeks to maximize these individuated freedoms at the level of the particular. Hyperindividualism can then be understood as an outcome of the dominant economic mode of production in our current era of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism seeks to maximize the abilities of private interests to access any and all global markets in an effort to privatize and monetize all elements of society. Neoliberalism hails us to understand all social entities as akin to businesses, and centers logics of “free market” capitalism in areas heretofore deemed public or beyond the purview of private economic interests. Schools and universities, for instance, in neoliberalism become more akin to businesses, with the “products” they produce being students as commodities. Once commoditized, students are dehumanized so as to maximize the “effectiveness” of the school or university in its return on various “investments.” Rather than broad and shared aims of educating future citizens and members of society for collective benefits, education becomes a credential that is a testament to an individual’s work and skills, seen as benefiting only the particular individual in question. Teachers thus become functionaries who produce student-commodities, sorted based on their individual merits. Historically, hyperindividualism has been accelerated by economic theorists following in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, though in those discourses the term “individualism” is used. For Hayek (1948/1980), individualism emerged from the Christian preoccupation with “saving” individual souls. He argued for an individualism in contemporary life that makes possible social equality based on the recognition of individual differences in “natural endowments and capacities” through economic means (p. 13). Hayek’s sense of “natural” abilities creates an equality premised on all social actors being equally individual. Their equality derives from their immutability as individuals, and thus any kind of social inequality is evidence for the “natural” differences Hayek’s theory rests on. Economic theories that follow in this tradition celebrate individuals as entrepreneurs of themselves. In our contemporary reality, we can think of the notion of one’s own “personal brand” as an example of this ideology. Each individual is a business entity, or at least can best be understood as such, and so maximizing returns on investments allows the rational social actor hypothesis to go unquestioned. Hyperindividualism then produces an additional social impact, in terms of how we conceptualize group level discriminations. Market logics that cluster various business entities into particular markets and categories can be extended to social groups. Those who come from historically marginalized backgrounds are thus not so much suffering from structural discriminations as much as struggling in the marketplace to realize their own capacities to

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maximize profits and achieve individual success. This presents an impediment to social endeavors at the level of the group or society, like Affirmative Action and other similar policies aimed at redressing historical oppressions. For hyperindividualists, such programs undermine and distort the “natural” order of society premised on meritocracy, and thus should be resisted. Similarly, notions of a “living wage” are seen by hyperindividualists as disincentivizing individual effort and limiting the individual will and power of entrepreneurs to set and maintain their own practices regarding their employees. In education one of the foremost examples of hyperindividualism can be seen in debates surrounding school vouchers. As famed Chicago School economist Milton Friedman (1962) defined them, school vouchers are a system in which, Governments could require a minimum level of school financed by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum they themselves provided on purchasing education services from an “approved” institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions. The role of the government would be limited to insuring that the schools met certain minimum standards. (p. 89) Friedman’s thesis rests on the premise that public education presently lacks “competition” that spurs innovation. By offering parents and guardians educational credits in the form of a voucher, private for-profit entities will create competition for students in the form of private schools that accept vouchers. He also argues that the voucher will not be the only resources parents and guardians can expend on their students’ educations – those who wish to spend/invest more will be able to. Friedman wishes to see a fully privatized, for profit, educational system replace the current public system. He believes that by giving families vouchers based on money that would have gone to public schools, in the form of per-pupil-spending, parents and guardians will be incentivized to invest that money in a school of their choice, thereby creating demand for many different schools. Such a logic is premised on the hyperindividualist notion of education not being a shared or social good, but rather an independent and privately held commodity-credential. If the purposes of schooling are hyperindividualized, parents and guardians are hailed to make rational and savvy marketplace decisions about their students’ education for their own purposes and

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aims. Hyperindividualists thus often celebrate homeschooling, religious-based schooling, and for-profit programs because of the customizability and individuality central to such programs. So long as everyone is given an equal access to making such choices, Hayek’s notions of “natural ability” will then function to determine schooling outcomes for individual students. Any parents or guardians not opting for their new choices of schools beyond neighborhood public schools are thus making a choice as consumers in the educational marketplace. Countering this call for choice is akin to denying freedom of choice and self-expression. Hyperindividualism rejects all collectivist calls for placing the needs of the greater social body ahead of the individual, and thus no other option beyond education as a privately held commodity is available in this worldview. Hyperindividualist conceptions of whiteness follow from these broader aims and dispositions. The tendency to collapse manifestations of white supremacy to isolated and independent malicious social actors seeps into many discourses and practices that aim to counter systemic racism. Far too often, antiracist teacher education functions to shift attention away from the collective and systemic to the particular ways in which an individual white actor participates in white supremacy, usually through the lens of white privilege. While understanding one’s own complicity and culpability in maintaining oppressive systems is valuable, such understandings on their own, in a hyperindividualist vacuum, limit rather than expand the terrain of white antiracism. Such approaches call on white social actors to locate the local and personal ways they are implicated through their participation in social systems that function to privilege and marginalize based on race. Individual desires to remain seen as “good” hegemonically produce notions that white people who themselves do not harbor racist and malicious thoughts about peoples of color are not part of the maintenance of white supremacy as a global conditioning logic. Yet through discoursal and policy agendas that center “colorblind” and race-evasive approaches to understanding race and racism, the ways that following all instructions and policies can have deleterious outcomes for peoples of color regardless of malice or intent are invisiblized. An example of this process can be found in the most common way for white people to be understood in our contemporary antiracist work: through the lens of white privilege. Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) original article on white privilege, though she spends the vast majority of the essay detailing the systemic nature of white supremacy, is often reduced to her infamous list of privileges – all of which use the personal pronoun I, and call readers to find the ways that they themselves are privileged. Such work, though impactful for many, creates an always-already

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hyperindividualized approach to oppressive social phenomenon that, by definition, are not products of individuals, but of collectives, groups, and systems. While coordinated structural violence and oppression is the cause of white racial privilege, centering only the ways the outcomes of these oppressions, as they impact independent white social actors, distorts the coordination therein. In other words, white privilege frameworks can be coopted in hyperindividualist approaches that argue for white social actors, as isolated independent beings, to come to articulate their own relative privileges as the sum total of white supremacy. It is as though the primary result of centuries of white supremacy is the creation and maintenance of white racial privilege, rather than the collective oppression of peoples of color. Certainly, white supremacy has ensured white social actors receive a form of privilege through their racial proximity to the economic elite, but this is an effect of the material oppressions targeting peoples of color, not a cause of those oppressions. Hyperindividualism offers ways of universalizing a very particular constellation of Eurocentric beliefs and desires as “natural.” Any such claims of human nature should thus be read as ideological devices, as claims on what is natural that are in fact of human making and design. There is of course no basis in nature or science for the social practices that animate our present racial condition of white supremacy across the globe. Looking only to explanations that center and universalize a particular frame of “human” limit the range of possibilities for social movement and resistance to white supremacy. They entrench us in logics that offer only the individual as a possible social agent, a technique commensurate with preventing group level solidarities. These tactics have been mobilized from the 17th century to our present day in order to divide groups from recognizing their similarities and shared struggles and banding together to affect transformation. If individuals can only be held to act on and for themselves, no such solidarities are possible or desired. Resisting white supremacy in the 21st century thus calls on critical agents to reject hyperindividualist frames and logics in favor of broader collectives and solidarities that exist at the group, rather than individual levels. Structural realities are produced by coordinated, not independent, efforts. It thus stands to reason that collective and shared efforts are the only ones capable of acting on the whole of our oppressive social reality. Hyperindividualism offers us a way of articulating how neoliberal understandings inform racial understandings in ways that limit the possibilities for antiracism on more than a personal and local level. Rejecting hyperindividual desires and pursuits offers a way of organizing and orienting our work toward collective struggles for justice and transformation.

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References Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1980). Individualism and economic order. University of Chicago Press. Lipsitz, G. (1995). The possessive investment in whiteness: Racialized social democracy and the ‘white’ problem in American studies. American Quarterly, 47(3), 369–387. Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in Whiteness: How White people profit from identity politics. Temple. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, Winter.

CHAPTER 38

Immigration Michael McCanless

Related Entries: Probationary Whiteness; Roediger, David; Thandeka; White Supremacy; Whiteness and the Law

… Whiteness is often understood as a fixed concept, defined by a series of cultural, biological, economic, and political certainties that light the path towards becoming white. From schools, to policing, to the economy, race permeates the fabric of American society in a way that can feel totalizing and impenetrable for practitioners, activists, and scholars operating at the intersections of race and education. Finding ways to historicize race and its subsequent signage can allow us to break apart whiteness and penetrate into the fractured, fragmented form of white racial hegemony. Contrary to the idea that race exists in a state of biological certainty, whiteness is tied to flows of people, capital, and power across space. The articulation of race that we experience in the present moment is dependent upon a series of contemporary and historical brokerages, negotiations, and compromises designed to capture and preserve power through white racial identity. When contextualized within these flows of people and power across space/ time, race begins to feel a more knowable (read: changeable) project. Immigration as a central concept within whiteness studies provides a lens through which we can document the preservation of power through white racial identity and how that identity is dependent upon the constant negotiation and renegotiation of whiteness in order to maintain the fabrication of race. From the initial contract set down by indentured servants and colonial landowners, to the “making white” of Irish immigrants, to contemporary brokerages of power designed to maintain white supremacy in the wake of a growing white nationalism, race and immigration are tied as central concepts in the making of whiteness.

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Whiteness and Work

The mold for contemporary white racial identity can be traced back to the forced labor migrations of enslaved peoples from the African continent and the indentured servants of colonial Virginia. Until the mid 17th century, the vast majority of those working the fields of Virginia were brought on contracts of indentured servitude. As Edmund Morgan (2003) notes in his book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, class and race were difficult to tease apart in the formative years of the colonial Americas. That began to change, however, as limited markets for indentured servitude and declining mortality rates in the colonies made chattel slavery a more profitable investment for Virginia’s labor barons. Whereas indentured servants were purchased for a set period of time, enslaved people were to be owned for life. With the farmlands of Virginia becoming increasingly connected to flows of global capital across the Atlantic, the demand for labor intensified, necessitating the reconstitution of an enslaved workforce if the dividends of colonial production were to be maintained. By the close of the 17th century, nearly half of Virginia’s workforce were brought to the colonies as slaves. With indentured servitude and slavery coalescing as the backbone of colonial production, a critical mass of forced migrants would begin to strain the capacity of plantation owners to maintain order over a system in which forced labor functioned as the lived common denominator between enslaved and indentured workers. It was not uncommon to find black and white workers eating, drinking, living, and ultimately rebelling together against existing systems of colonial governance. Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, in which Jamestown was burned to the ground by a coalition of indentured and enslaved people, racial divisions would be crystallized through what the Rev. Thandeka (1999) calls the “sinister design of racism” (p. 46). As part of that design, the manufactured character of racial contempt would function to stabilize colonial power through a series of race laws enacted in the 17th and 18th centuries. Beginning in 1680, the Virginia legislature dictated that black and native people were not allowed to own “Christian” (i.e. white) slaves, while simultaneously regulating the brutality of colonialism as applied, differentially, upon black and white bodies. White workers were no longer allowed to be whipped upon their bare backs, as it was deemed to be too brutal for “Christian” men. The brutality of whipping, however, was not to be stopped; rather, abuse became strategically positioned as a means of creating obedience in the formation of white working class consciousness (Thandeka, 1999). As an extension of this project, all property was confiscated from enslaved people and sold for the benefit of poor whites; white workers who had

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completed a contract of indentured servitude received an allotment of corn and land; and colonial plantations were mandated to employ a constant ratio of free white men. This coordinated effort in elevating the social and economic status of the white worker functioned “as a wall [emphasis added] between poor whites and blacks, protecting masters and their slave-produced wealth from both lower-class whites and slaves” (p. 46). By 1825 white workers had lost connection to the shared material conditions that challenged colonial power in the late 17th century. Whiteness, as laid down during this period, represents the formative contract that would morph and change throughout American history. In a colonial system where race had not yet been fully articulated, the influx of poor workers threatened entrenched forms of power and necessitated the initial contract of whiteness as a means of maintaining the contradictory demands of cheap labor and social stability.

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Whiteness and Governance

If racial contempt has its origin in the roots of colonial law, that seed would quickly spread to emergent questions of citizenship in the period after the revolutionary war. As the racial apparatus of American society evolved to meet the demands of a changing world, whiteness as a founding principle of the American nation-state would build upon the Virginian labor coalition as a model for centering whiteness within the American national subjectivity. In Matthew Frye Jacobson’s (1999) book Whiteness of of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race, he argues that class and labor analyses of whiteness tell an important – if incomplete – history. The other half of that story revolves around the divisions within whiteness, and the political mobilizations designed to encapsulate who and to what degree people “count” as white. Targeting immigration law as reflective of this intraracial governance, Jacobson presents an articulation of whiteness that has pushed beyond its utility in managing migrant flows to ensure cheap and stable forms of labor. The question of citizenship as it pertains to whiteness represents an expansion, one that becomes increasingly complex as it circumscribes larger amounts of power in the construction of American racial hegemony. In the period immediately after the revolutionary war, citizenship and the questions attached to civic participation became increasingly pertinent. For a nation seeking to build consensus amongst groups holding disparate ethnic, national, and religious identities, whiteness functioned as a stable bedrock upon which national identity could be built. Immigration legislation shows

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that whiteness was positioned in the broadest possible way so as to simultaneously maintain the ideologies supporting the social and economic apparatus of slavery, while also bringing an increasing number of immigrants under the banner of whiteness for the purpose of expanding the citizenry. For example, in 1790 Congress declared that all free white persons who had resided in the United States for a period of one year were granted the right to citizenship: That all free white persons who, have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United State for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship. (Congress, 1857, p. 184, as cited in Jacobson, 1999) The remarkable breadth (and narrowness) of this definition illustrates the political expansion of whiteness, and the correlative contradictions in Republicanism over who is and is not fit for self-governance. All people with white skin were brought under the umbrella of whiteness as a catalyst for nation building, providing (white) bodies upon which national subjectivity was to be formed. So embedded was this connection between whiteness and citizenship that it can be traced back to the founding principles of Republicanism and the formation of American bourgeoisie democracy. Central to the concept of self-governance was a manufactured division between those who were capable of self-governance, and those who were not. These ideas – gendered, racialized and classed – were rooted in connections to rationality and Christianity. The “savage” and the “heathen,” divorced from the model rationality of the newly minted white citizenry, functioned as a backdrop upon which the power of a white nation state could be built. J.H Van Evrie, a vehement pro-slavery advocate, went as far as to say that the juxtaposition between the superiority of the “white” race, and the inferiority of the “Negro” and “American-Indian” races “led directly to the establishment of a new system and a new civilization [American democracy] based on foundations of everlasting truth – the legal and political equality of the race, or of all those whom the Almighty creator has Himself made equal” (Van Evrie, 1863, as cited in Jacobson, 1999, p. 31). Those “everlasting truths” would prove more fluid than Van Evrie predicted, however. As political and economic fractures brought a surge of European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Russia into American ports, the social contract of white immigration would grow increasingly strained.

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A new type of whiteness, with distinct ethnic and cultural features would challenge the processes of assimilation that had previously incorporated, unquestioned, all white immigrants within the ruling class of American society. As these tensions came to a head in the mid-19th century, the definition of whiteness-as-citizenship would remain unabridged, but as anxieties rose around the “savage” and “uncivilized” white immigrants from central and eastern Europe, intraracial governance would begin to manifest itself within the social, not governmental, creation of multiple “white races.” The concepts of modernity, rationality, and Christianity were positioned as the backdrop upon which these newly minted, white citizens of the republic would have their “fitness” for self-governance evaluated. The contradictorily broad (and narrow), definition of the 1790 immigration law led to struggles over who and how immigrants would be counted as white. For east Asian immigrants and other immigrants of color, this decision was made quickly, mobilizing a growing scientific authority via the eugenics movement to conclude that “races” from non-European countries were unfit for self-governance and must undergo significant reform before (if ever) they would be allowed to participate in the democratic project. For immigrants with white skin, the process of ascribing national identity became more complicated. The predominant voices to revise the old codes of white racial identity argued that sowed within the eugenically constructed identities of European immigrants were the seeds of failure for the American republic. Signaling the long history of conflict and imperial collapse within Europe, proponents for limiting the parameters of whiteness believed that hierarchies must be established in order to insulate the ruling American class from the destructive potential of an expansive, unruly white underclass. Those hierarchies would remain confined to the social, however, as attempts to shrink the legal category of whiteness were met with the prospect of fragmenting the white political coalition. Popular caricatures and forms of discrimination against the marginally “white races” were no less real, however, as Jews, Celts, Armenians, and many others were relegated to the depths of the country’s white social order. It was through this division that the AngloSaxon class was able to position itself as the height of American civilization, solidifying both their whiteness and capacity to rule through the connection of citizenship to the modeled understandings of rationality, modernity, and Christianity. Riddled throughout this compromise, where white immigrants were denied status but granted legal protections, were the seeds of a tension that held the capacity to bring the entire apparatus of whiteness crumbling down.

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Whiteness and Naturalization

The formation of multiple “white races” can be rightly understood as a response to increasing flows of migrants during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. If power was to be maintained in its Anglo-Saxon form, hierarchies of whiteness were necessary in order to maintain control over the newly minted, potentially disruptive, white citizens of the Republic. That does not mean, however, that the fractures in whiteness generated by these hierarches were sustainable, or that the positionality of whiteness as an amalgamation of multiple racial groups could continue if racial hegemony was to be maintained. Aligning with the boom in the eugenics movement, scientists began a mad dash to prove the superiority of the white race and to find a common thread amongst the disparate white racial groups of the Republic. The idea undergirding this movement was “deceptive in its apparent simplicity: physical markers generate race consciousness, and race consciousness in turn influences social relations” (Jacobson, 1999, p. 105). The origins of the “Caucasian” race, as understood by eugenicists, can be found in this linear relation between “physical traits” and “racial consciousness.” As evidenced through popular works like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920) and Reforging America (1927), the ramifications of World War I and the sense of vulnerability it instilled within euro-modernity radically altered the worldview of whiteness and white supremacy. Utilizing the shared “physical traits” of European immigrants as a platform upon which a new coalition would be built, eugenicist scientists forged a Caucasian “family of races” within collective understandings of whiteness; the idea being that European immigrants held a form of “racial consciousness” more easily assimilated within traditionally Anglo-saxon conceptions of power and self-governance. By moving the borders of whiteness to fully include immigrants with white skin, power was circumscribed, but the frontiers of immigration were fundamentally altered to tie whiteness and American-ness in a way that had previously been contested, but not complete. As a consequence, the frontiers of immigration were radically changed as the whiteness of immigrants from eastern, southern, and central Europe was more fully incorporated within the ideal of American citizenship. Where previously European immigrants were marked as marginal, contested, and probationary, assimilation as a concept began to emerge as these new immigrants moved from periphery to center in the construction of American nationality. For people of color from non-European countries, this shift would provide the foundation upon which contemporary understandings of immigration

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would be built. Naturalization became a process by which immigrants of color, deemed to have limited “racial consciousness,” would contest and struggle for the right to citizenship. The European immigrant, by contrast, was made “white upon arrival” – effectively embedding naturalization within the contract of whiteness and constructing the domain of immigration as a fundamentally racialized process. For evidence of how naturalization was positioned as the lever by which the citizenship of non-white immigrants would be regulated, we need not look further than the inscription of whiteness within twentieth century case law. Ian Haney Lopez, in his book White by Law (1996) traces the legal history of whiteness and the ways in which ‘the immigrant’ became tied to bodies of color. Using two court cases as an illustration of whiteness’ position within immigration law, he demonstrates the contradictory, yet meaningful relation of race as it morphed in response to the unification of the Caucasian “family of races.” In Ozawa v. United States, a Japanese man living in the United States, educated at the University of California-Berkeley, and fully integrated within the fabric of American society after 28 years of residence, appealed for naturalized citizenship on the grounds that he embodied the ideals of American citizenship. As part of his claim, he argued that his white skin should qualify him as a “free white person,” and that coupled with his upstanding citizenship, granted him the right to naturalization. In the court’s rejection of his appeal, they cited that while the man may have had white skin, physical appearance was of no concern to the “free white men” clause included in the 1790 immigration law. Instead they turned to the body of eugenic literature, citing the racial classification of Japanese immigrants as “Mongoloid,” and thus not white. By relying upon the scientific authority of eugenics to deny a literalist interpretation (i.e. someone with “white skin”) of citizenship, the courts would position the “Caucasian” archetype of race as legitimate, setting the legal precedent by which whiteness would be assessed. Several months after the Ozawa decision, Thind v. United States brought the case of an Asian-Indian immigrant that would quickly overhaul the precedent set in Ozawa. Bhagat Singh Thind, positioned at the highest tiers of the Indian caste system and educated in the country’s most prestigious institutions, argued on the back of the Ozawa decision that his elite status, coupled with the racial classification of Asian-Indians as “Caucasian” (derived from the Aryan connection prominent within the eugenics movement) ensured his right to citizenship. The court, in this instance, rejected the “scientific” claim made by Thind on the basis that it violated “common sense” understandings of whiteness. More pointedly, it violated the understanding of whiteness that

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the everyday, white citizen now held in understanding who and how someone is white. Moving from the “scientific” to the “common sense” as a standard for determining naturalized citizenship allowed the courts to institutionalize the consensus formed through unifying the white races, answering what was a fundamental question on the relationship whiteness would hold to immigration. The oscillation of the courts between scientific and common sense interpretations of race speaks to that “profound but simple question: was race natural, or merely a social construction” (Lopez, 1999, p. 66)? At the very moment the Caucasian race became the legal standard of citizenship, it was stripped of its legal authority in favor of a definition that centered what was, in essence, whiteness’ understanding of itself. It is in this form that whiteness becomes a construct made to seem natural; rooted not in biology, but in the material conditions of a society that chose to maintain power through the consolidation of multiple cultural, ethnic, and national identities.

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Conclusion

As we turn outwards from these historical systems and towards their manifestation within the contemporary conjuncture, linkages between whiteness and immigration abound. The rise in white supremacy that has ushered Donald Trump into power constructs immigration as a process for people of color – decrying the “loopholes” that allow for Latinx families to migrate together, while keeping oddly quiet about a real estate mogul who pulls the same levers to obtain citizenship for his wife’s Slovenian family. The difference – of course, is whiteness – and the ways in which white immigrants continue to be understood as having the requisite “racial consciousness” needed for citizenship. Far from what contemporary “common sense” would have us believe, the origins of American immigration aren’t rooted in “skills” or “merit,” but rather the social relations that have defined, and continue to define which immigrants would and would not become white. For practitioners seeking to integrate antiracism within their classroom and world, whiteness can feel totalizing in its ability to naturalize the social production of race. However, by leveraging these points in history, we can identify the initial contracts upon which whiteness was set down and denaturalize the social production of race. If whiteness was brokered to become what it is today, then it can also be intervened upon and reconstructed in the pursuit of alternative futures.

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References Annals of Congress. (1857). Abridgements of the debates of congress, 1789–1856 (Vol. 1, p. 184). D. Appleton and Co. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. Lopez, I. H. (1997). White by law: The legal construction of race. NYU Press. Morgan, E. S. (2003). American slavery, American freedom. W. W. Norton & Company. Stoddard, T. L. (1920). The rising tide of color against White world-supremacy. Blue Ribbon Books. Stoddard, T. L. (1927). Re-forging America – Lothrop Stoddard (1927). http://archive.org/ details/AmericaRaceReforgingAmericaLothropTheodoreStoddard Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Continuum. Van Evrie, J. H. (1863). Negroes and Negro slavery: The first an inferior race: The latter its normal condition. Horton.

CHAPTER 39

Integration of Schools Allison Mattheis

Related Entries: Brown v. Board of Education; School Choice; Segregation of Schooling

1

Introduction

The Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas found that racially segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. One year later, in Brown II, the Court called for the dismantling of segregated school systems “with all deliberate speed.” Despite the legacy of Brown, many – if not most – urban school districts in the U.S. operate schools that are inherently separate and unequal. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods tend to enroll more white students and Black and Latinx students are much more likely to attend schools in lower income neighborhoods. The current status of schools in the U.S., however, does not reflect a “failure” of Brown so much as the continued strength of white supremacy in maintaining inequitable control of public resources. Many of the desegregation plans implemented in response to Brown II, were in fact quite effective in creating racially mixed learning environments that had positive impacts for the students who attended these integrated schools. A primary lesson presented by the legacy of the Brown cases is the inability of schools alone to combat cultural and sociopolitical contexts that continue to concentrate and distribute power unequally.

2

School Desegregation and White Resistance After Brown

Coordinated and explicit efforts to resist desegregating public schools continued until the late 1970s in many communities. In many cases, these efforts were publicly supported by school authorities and government officials; two prominent examples include the actions of the governor of Arkansas, who in 1957 called on the state National Guard to prevent the entry of Black students to Central High School in Little Rock, and of the superintendent of schools of © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_039

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Mansfield, Texas who in 1956 directly defied the ruling of a circuit court judge to desegregate schools in that state, with the support of the town’s mayor and police chief. Although schools in these communities were eventually integrated when local leaders were overruled (in the case of Little Rock by the President of the U.S., and in the case of Mansfield by the Texas governor), throughout the South, “segregation academies” were created in direct response to the Brown decisions as a way to effectively channel public funds to private schools that excluded Black students. The fact that these schools could be legally established is an example of how Brown II created a “flawed compromise” (Orfield & Eaton, 1996) in which new forms of legal separation could be enacted. Most school districts that did commit to making good faith efforts to desegregate did so via busing programs and school assignment strategies that varied by region and state. In places where schools had been segregated de jure, Black students were often bused to schools that had previously been designated white-only, while schools that had only been attended by Black students were often closed. In areas where schools were segregated de facto, busing plans were often based on neighborhood, and aimed to account for residential segregation by creating racial balance targets for individual schools that would reflect overall community demographics. Other strategies included busing students across district or city lines, or school attendance policies that encouraged “majority to minority” moves based on existing racial attendance numbers. At the same time that these plans were implemented, however, other inequitable social policies continued to disproportionately impact Black communities, including employment discrimination, lack of access to higher education, “redlining” that limited housing options, and infrastructure projects such as the construction of highways through neighborhoods in ways that disrupted long-standing support networks. In this context, Black children (and Latinx children in communities where their numbers were significant) were much more likely to be bused to attend schools in predominantly white neighborhoods than the reverse, and even in these newly integrated school spaces, children of all backgrounds were overwhelmingly taught by white educators. Despite the fact that the burden for desegregation therefore fell primarily on communities of color, white resistance slowed implementation and limited its impact. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which broadened anti-discrimination protections based on race, color, national origin, sex, and religion, provided additional support for school desegregation efforts. New lawsuits against individual school districts that had not developed effective integration plans or engaged in meaningful implementation were heard in courts across the country, and the denial of federal funds became a powerful enforcement tool.

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During this phase, white resistance to integration took a new form in a phenomenon known as “second generation segregation” which quickly emerged in many newly desegregated schools and has continued to the present day. Although overall school demographics in individual schools may reflect the racial diversity of larger communities, tracking by supposed academic ability (often measured using culturally irrelevant and racially biased achievement tests), behavior, or linguistic background separates students within these schools. Such practices have resulted in disproportionate assignment of white students to Advanced Placement or college preparatory classes, the overidentification of Black students as in need of special education services, school schedules that prevent English learner students from enrolling in advanced coursework, and unjust school discipline policies that disproportionately label and punish students of color.

3

School Resegregation in the Late 20th Century

In the 1980s and 90s many school districts were released from court-mandated desegregation plans and the busing programs that had been commonplace across the country began to be discontinued. In most cases, the dismantling of such plans required approval by relevant courts in the form of a “unitary status” designation, which was effectively defined by the Supreme Court in its ruling in the 1968 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County case that addressed “freedom-of-choice” student attendance plans in a school district in Virginia. In Green the Court found that districts previously found to be segregated (and therefore operating “dual” systems) could be declared unitary if they could demonstrate evidence of having enacted desegregation plans in good faith and had effectively addressed six factors of unequal schooling conditions: facilities, extracurricular activities, transportation, and racial composition of faculty, staff, and student body. Lower district courts had latitude in interpreting these measures, however, and demographic shifts, including “white flight” to rapidly expanding suburbs and increasing diversity in many urban areas due to immigration from Asia and Latin America, made it difficult for many districts to meet the integration targets originally specified in court decrees. Desegregation programs that attempted to address residential segregation across school district lines were significantly weakened by the Court’s ruling in the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley case, in which mandatory cross-district school assignment plans with the goal of addressing racial imbalances were deemed “wholly impermissible” in a 5-to-4 decision. Without inter-district busing, many schools could not achieve the measures of white-Black student

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contact laid out in their initial desegregation plans because residential segregation was now evident across town lines, rather than neighborhood boundaries within the same community. Thus, many districts achieved unitary status designation without ever having effectively provided integrated schooling opportunities to their students. The continued reality of separate and unequal educational experiences of children in different communities and neighborhoods – and the connections between race and poverty in the U.S. – has been addressed in many subsequent court cases. In the 1990s the Abbott series of cases in New Jersey were significant in raising national awareness of the role of local property tax guidelines in contributing to school funding inequities and resulted in some limits on the degree to which wealthy districts could voluntarily “outspend” neighboring communities. But in other instances, efforts to address racial disparities came under attack. In 2003 the Supreme Court heard the Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger cases, which challenged the use of race as one factor in student admissions policies at the University of Michigan. In its consideration of whether student-body diversity is a “compelling state interest,” the Court overturned the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions but upheld its use in the University’s Law School. Although focused on higher education, these cases had impacts at the K-12 level as well, and the key arguments foreshadowed those at the heart of the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County cases, heard jointly by the Court in 2007. Unlike previous lawsuits that had been brought to force districts to desegregate their schools, these lawsuits challenged the desegregation plans in place in Seattle, Washington and Jefferson County Schools near Louisville, Kentucky. In its 5-4 split decision, the Court majority upheld its finding that diversity can be considered a compelling state interest but overturned lower court rulings that had upheld the existing school assignment plans in the two districts. Instead, the Supreme Court found that the goal of establishing diverse schools was valuable, but that the systems in place were not sufficiently tailored to allow for the consideration of race in student assignment to individual schools. In his majority opinion, Justice John Roberts wrote that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” and declared that although legally mandated racial segregation of schools is unconstitutional, the Constitution is not violated by racial imbalances that could not be proven the result of de jure segregation. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent, however, described the local efforts in Louisville and Seattle as similar to many efforts enacted across the nation that were designed to “bring about the kind of racially integrated education that Brown v. Board

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of Education long ago promised” and of the type that the court had repeatedly “required, permitted and encouraged” local authorities to undertake. The impact of the Court’s decisions in these cases can be seen in more frequent references to socioeconomic status rather than race in student assignment to schools, and the popularity of magnet schools, which rely on voluntary enrollment by families, as a way to promote integration. Many scholars have described how these types of strategies are more palatable to white community members because they focus on “choice” rather than mandatory assignment. Although magnet programs can be effective in addressing the impacts of residential segregation if enough spaces are available and access is equitably controlled, such schools are frequently marketed toward wealthier and whiter families as a way to encourage them to keep their children enrolled in public schools, rather than moving out of urban districts or enrolling their children in private schools. Some research has also suggested that establishing magnet options in neighborhoods that have been seen as “undesirable” can contribute to gentrification and displace residents of color. In other instances, wealthier parents have advocated for magnet or charter options in their neighborhoods but then resisted efforts to open access to children from less wealthy neighborhoods. Overall, voluntary integration strategies have been much less effective in creating integrated schooling environments than previous court-mandated programs. Even in well-organized magnet systems, lower-income students of color are more likely to spend hours a day on a bus in order to attend a magnet program or school in another neighborhood or nearby community, and their families are less likely to be able to attend meetings or participate in school activities due to geographic distance.

4

School Choice v. School Integration?

Beyond the implementation of student assignment policies that consider different social factors in enrolling students in local public schools, the “school choice” movement of the last quarter century has significantly changed the landscape of K-12 education in the United States. Although school choice proponents often claim that charter schools or voucher programs promote equity by giving more autonomy to parents over their children’s educational opportunities, these claims ignore the historical impacts of white supremacy that have limited the options of certain families and communities. In order to navigate complex choice systems, parents need to understand district organizational structures and have sufficient informational resources to distinguish between

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different types of schools. “Choice” processes remain biased toward educated, middle class parents who are more likely to be fluent in English and have the time and other resources necessary to effectively parse the options that are available and select among them. Philosophically, school choice policies are predicated on capitalist logics that treat public education as a market and assume that increased competition will lead to increased quality. Accountability metrics based on high stakes testing and other such standardized markers of quality provide an ahistorical way for white parents to justify their selection of schools – by narrowly classifying “good” schools as those that produce positive outcomes based on culturally unresponsive and racist measures, other social benefits provided by attending school with diverse peer groups become secondary qualifications. The social reproduction of opportunity and unequal distribution of wealth by race further restricts “choice” for parents of color, increasing the decision-making power of white parents. The most widespread form of school choice is the growth of charter schools, which are funded through public monies but subject to fewer restrictions as traditional public schools. Since the first charter school was opened in 1991, what was once a niche effort to create spaces for experimental practice that would ostensibly be transferred to the rest of the public school system has now become a separate industry in many urban communities, particularly those with high percentages of Black and Latinx children. Research suggests that charters in general are more segregated by race and socioeconomic status than traditional public schools and are less likely to enroll students with special needs or who speak languages other than English at home. This segregation has worked in both directions – some charters in wealthier communities are majority white, while even in districts where a majority of students are people of color, charters show higher concentrations of students in poverty and from Black and Latinx communities. Although some charter schools have produced higher rates of success than neighborhood schools to which students would otherwise have been assigned, most charters end up mirroring the existing district in terms of academic achievement. Importantly, however, most charter school employees are not unionized, and many are run by Charter Management Organizations with connections to profit-motivated organizations, often through philanthropic branches of large multinational companies. These neoliberal aspects of charter schools reveal their function as primarily designed to disrupt existing public educational systems rather than offering a holistic alternative for reform. The fact that the most frequent reason for charter school closings is financial mismanagement (of public funds) suggests that already vulnerable communities are at risk of exploitation. The communities with

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the highest rates of charterization are not coincidentally those with high rates of poverty and with predominantly “non-white” populations. Post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans is a case study of how school choice advocates saw a natural disaster that decimated existing social support networks as a political opportunity to gain control of an entire community’s schools. By 2018, control of all schools in New Orleans had been effectively handed over to charters. Voucher programs, in which per-pupil funding is given to parents who may choose where to apply it for their children’s education, are another form of school choice that diverts public funds to private entities. Although research has consistently demonstrated that students who use vouchers to attend parochial or other private educational options do not perform better academically than those who attend the existing public schools available to them, such programs are frequently espoused by conservative lawmakers backed by wealthy white constituents. When viewed in aggregate, school choice programs tend to apply untested reforms to communities of color, undermine employment protections for existing educational staff, and draw funds away from traditional public schools. Parents who already have the most options in terms of where to send their children to school are often those who benefit the most from these “choices,” and student enrollment in these programs do not function in a way that promotes racial integration.

5

Conclusion

The history of school desegregation and integration in the United States reflects a broader conflict between a collective commitment to acknowledging the country’s history of racial discrimination and enacting social policies that take responsibility for past inequities. Current practices continue to prioritize individual freedoms by emphasizing choice and ahistorically erasing racial differences in the name of equality in the present. As Anderson (2006) wrote: The history of public school segregation, desegregation, and re-segregation from the antebellum period to the present constitutes an American story of contradictory legal and social reforms – reforms that are liberal regarding standards of constitutional equality and conservative with respect to the subtle and institutionalized arrangements designed to sustain racial inequality and school segregation in day to day life. (p. 30) By the 1970s and 80s public schools in the United States were significantly less segregated in terms of overall student demographics than they had been in

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the 1950s and 60s; the maintenance of political power by white elites, however, meant that racial discrimination in other areas of social significance – particularly housing and employment – was perpetuated and changed little during the same period of time. Although measurable benefits were bestowed on many individual Black and white children who attended integrated schools, they graduated into a society that remained highly divided. Shifting judicial perspectives about the tangible benefits of racial diversity in public education over the last three decades reflect broader tensions over inequitably distributed goods in a highly stratified society. Along with weakened support for the consideration of race in K-12 school assignment practices, the federal government has advanced neoliberal policies that encourage the application of competitive market models to local educational systems have been strong drivers of changes at the state and district level. Ultimately, U.S. public schools have never yet been fully integrated because white political power has never been dismantled; goals of achieving racial equity in schools are inextricably connected to broader goals of social justice.

References Anderson, J. D. (2006). Still desegregated, still unequal: Lessons from up north. Educational Researcher, 35(1), 31–33. Brown v. Board of Education (I), 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873. (1954). Brown v. Board of Education (II), 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083. (1955). Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244, 123 S. Ct. 2411, 156 L. Ed. 2d 257. (2003). Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L. Ed. 2d 304. (2003). Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 88 S. Ct. 1689, 20 L. Ed. 2d 716. (1968). Meredith v. Jefferson County Bd. of Educ., 549 U.S. 1017, 127 S. Ct. 575. (2006). Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S. Ct. 3112, 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069. (1974). Orfield, G., & Eaton, S. (1996). Dismantling desegregation: The quiet reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. The New Press. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, No. 1, 426 F.3d 1162. (9th Cir. 2005).

CHAPTER 40

Interest Convergence Brian T. Collins II and Cleveland Hayes

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; White Supremacy; Whiteness as Property

1

Defining Interest Convergence

Interest Convergence is the notion that progress towards equality for people of color will only come when it convergences with the interests of Whites. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a theoretical approach to challenging mainstream notions of race, racism, and racial inequalities in American society. CRT originated from the mid-1970s by Derrick Bell as a response to the failure of Critical Legal Studies to adequately address the effects of race and racism in U.S jurisprudence. Bell and other law professors became disillusioned with the slow pace and unrealized promises of Civil Rights legislation. Though Blacks had supposedly gained equality before the law, they pointed out that Whites continued to wield disproportionate power and enjoy inequitable privileges. One of CRT’s most important topics of continued discussion revolves around its challenge to dominant ideology, or interest-convergence. Interest convergence is the notion that judicial progress towards racial equality is only pursued when it converges with the interests of Whites. That is to say that no matter the injustices of slavery, segregation, exclusion, miseducation, and violence faced by Nonwhites (or non-Europeans) in U.S. society, policy change only comes when policy makers recognize that such relief will, in some way, accommodate the interest of Whites. CRT argues that traditional claims toward colorblindness, meritocracy, and race-neutrality act as smokescreens for self-interest, power, and privilege, and ultimately the maintenance of whiteness in the U.S. Introduced over three decades ago, Bell’s critical examination of the historical events leading to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education were all but altruistic for the benefit of people of color. Instead, Bell (1995) argued that the decisions of the Supreme Court converged with the interest of providing credibility to America’s struggles with communist countries rather than in taking the moral high ground (p. 233). Bell has argued that the courts’ decision came down to three issues of the time. First was the © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_040

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impending threat of the communist movement and the hypocritical nature of the United States’s segregated system. By legally uprooting the separate but equal doctrine at home, the United States could make a better case for its pursuit for democracy abroad; second, the assurance to returning African American males from WWII who had fought for liberty and freedom in foreign countries, that they were returning to a home with equal rights; third, the transformation of the southern economy from an agricultural one to an industrialized one that required a better educated work force, including NonWhite laborers. Our purpose in this entry is to advance Bell’s interest convergence principle as an analytical lens for examining the maintenance of white supremacy within U.S society. Our aim is to illustrate through contemporary examples how interest convergence has a tendency of ignoring or minimally meeting the needs of Nonwhites in order to further advance many different interests of Whites. Our hope is that our critical examination of fundamental relationships between interest convergence and Nonwhites’ struggles for equality of rights will serve as a learning tool for understanding and considering how interest convergence plays a role in White peoples’ decisions.

2

Problematizing Interest Convergence

To understand the impact of interest convergence on Nonwhites requires the critical examination of its true essence and intentions. To begin, lets breakdown the definition of interest convergence by looking at the notion that progress towards equality “benefits” Nonwhites. At “face-value,” these acts of progress appear to be good deeds and appear to come from a place of openness and willingness to build equal opportunity. However, when said deeds come with strings attached, ideally serving the economic, cultural, and political interest of Whites, can one say they really benefit the advancement of Nonwhites? Consider the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Board of Governors’ decision to relocate championship events from North Carolina. On September 12, 2016, the NCAA announced the removal of championship events in North Carolina in response to the state’s passing of the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (House Bill 2) on March 23, 2016 (Tracy, 2017). House Bill 2 removed anti-discriminatory protections for LGBTQ persons and required transgender people to use bathrooms in public facilities that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. NCAA officials stated that North Carolina’s law had “minimally achieved a situation where NCAA championships could be conducted in a safe, healthy, and discrimination free environment.” Despite this statement,

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NCAA did not lobby for specific law changes and North Carolina’s replacement law, HB142, made minimal changes to the old law. However, six months later, NCAA lifted its ban on holding championship events in North Carolina, despite the marginal legislative change. When we pause to examine the decisions in this case, it becomes very evident how interest convergence played a role in the legislation decisions of policy makers. At face-value, the NCAA actions appeared to be in defense of LGBTQ rights of choice by warning the state of North Carolina to repeal House Bill 2 and initiating a ban of championship events. However, by NCAA reluctantly removing the ban, an opportunity was provided for North Carolina and other states to know that they can still be rewarded with NCAA events and could go forward with anti-queer legislation with little to minimum challenge. However, North Carolina has historically been a popular state for NCAA tournaments, such as basketball, baseball, and soccer. Thus, NCAA’s interest for hosting at a popular sports site outweighed the protection of the LGBTQ persons. Then, consider the interest convergence on the end of the state. Had legislators truly wanted to uphold their anti-discriminatory laws, the state could have easily refused NCAA participation. However, it would have cost the state an estimated $4 billion over 12 years because of canceled events, including men’s basketball games in the early rounds and regions, due to large crowds and extra revenue for local economies. In conclusion, securing the rights for the LGBTQ community were a smokescreen for the true interest of monetary benefits that the state would receive for welcoming NCAA events.

3

Avoiding White Guilt

Another issue with interest convergence is its ability to relieve Whites from having to acknowledge their white privilege and white guilt. White privilege is defined as the often unseen or unacknowledged advantages that Whites receive due to being the beneficiaries in a society unequally structured by race. Awareness of white privilege has been found to correlate to awareness of white guilt and white shame, feelings of group self-blame for illegitimate racial advantages. Unfortunately, interest convergence shields Whites from having to acknowledge white privilege, guilt, and shame in two ways. First, Whites can be relieved from feelings of white guilt when policy changes provide seemingly positive solutions for people of color. It is at this junction where Whites can be relieved of white guilt via psychological disillusion that they don’t live in a world that disadvantages and oppresses people of color, as evidenced by the fact that policy changes are being made for the inclusion of minoritzed

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persons. However, this logic prevents Whites from having to acknowledge the historical, political, and social context that paved the way for this system to exist. Second, the basic principal of interest convergence is to pay dividends via policies that will ultimately benefit the interest of Whites. This in turn will further add to the privileges that Whites receive at the cost of minoritzed persons. Again however, due to the nature of the seemingly good deed for minoritzed persons, Whites may not recognize how the interest converges with their needs. Consider the example of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential election, the first African American elected president in U.S history. Born the son of a White mother and a Kenyan immigrant father who left his family early in his life, Obama’s triumph over a divorced home and the difficulty of “difference” as a biracial minority enabled some to believe that within this nation we had beaten a long and sad history of racism. Obama’s supporters spanned across the nation from multiple races of various backgrounds. For many, Obama’s family history, upbringing, Ivy League education, work as a community organizer, rapid political rise, and decisive victory represented that America had moved beyond racism and was now living in a colorblind society. While people can claim that Obama’s election represents the country’s readiness to look past racism, it does not change the cognitive dissonance that Whites experience. Nor did Obama’s election negate the fact that people of color in the U.S on average suffered from a lower quality of life in the areas of poverty, employment, and median household income than Whites. In this example, one can see ways in which interest convergence allows Whites to be relieved of white guilt while enjoying the same superior quality of life without having to talk about racism or having to understand the social realities that others have to endure. Even in an Obama-led United States, the inferior financial and cultural status of people of color persists, and the systemic advantage of Whites who benefit from such oppression remains. Further, the many racial incidents and death threats Obama experienced as president clearly show that the United States was far from living in a colorblind society. By solely focusing on the benefits Nonwhites receive, white guilt can be avoided, preventing Whites from recognizing how the circumstances nonwhites suffer is historically, economically and legally produced.

4

Interest Convergence Maintains White Supremacy

At the heart of interest convergence is the maintenance of White Supremacy. To conceptualize this, it is first important to operationally define White

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Supremacy within the context of CRT. While “White Supremacy” is typically understood as having ties to neo-Nazi organizations, the Ku Klux Klan, or extreme political movements that openly mobilize based on race hatred: CRT theorists see White Supremacy as the regime of assumptions and practices that maintain the privilege and social, political, cultural, and economic interests of Whites. The ultimate goal of White Supremacy is to position whiteness as the superior and normative standard within a society. As this relates to interest convergence, in order to maintain White Supremacy in a society the rights of Whites must be on a pedestal above Nonwhites. Any act of legislation that does not provide benefits towards Whites is aberrant and against that which maintains white supremacy. Yet in order to maintain whiteness as the norm in society requires the oppressing of Nonwhites from equal rights and having access to positions of power.

5

The Model Minority

Within interest convergence, Nonwhites can make demands on society but can only merit society’s rewards if they are willing to converge with the needs, approval, and interest of Whites. In the case of holding positions of power, this requires for Nonwhites to learn a certain etiquette of behavior that is not too pushy, aggressive, and falls in line within the White agenda. In short, Nonwhites are capable of reaping certain benefits and privileges of Whites. However, this requires Nonwhites to be willing to conform and perform traits desirable by Whites and to become the “model minority” or risk marginalization. Examples of a model minority include one who is a hard worker, has a positive attitude, speaks English, is not too aggressive or demanding, and of course does not make White people feel racist. Consider the example of Barack Obama and Andrew Gillum, Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida in the 2018 election. In the case of Barack Obama, many factors contributed towards him being viewed as the model minority and validated as “capable” by Whites in comparison to Gillum. For some it was Obama’s ability to transcend many of the barriers that a black man has to go through in America and that he was Ivy League-educated. For others, Obama’s charismatic character and reluctance to critically discuss issues of race and racism prevented Whites from having to acknowledge white guilt and the lack of equality Nonwhites suffer in American society. Further, Obama was notoriously willing to converge with the interests of elite Whites. Gillum, on-the-other-hand, an HBCU graduate who as Mayor of Tallahassee supported programs for diverse youth and had no problem openly addressing issues of

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race and racism, including referencing Florida’s system of restoration rights as a relic of “Jim Crow” and calling out his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis for his “monkey this up” dog whistle after the gubernatiorial primary results (Walters, 2018). Further, Gillum publicly supported many views opposite to that of U.S president Trump including replacement of ICE with the U.S Department of Justice, acceptance of the scientific consensus on climate change, and calling for the impeachment of the President. While both Obama and Gillum are Black men, elite forces were more likely to support Obama who was viewed as a better model minority willing to conform to meet their interest over Gillum who was not afraid to publicly speak on matters of race.

6

Conclusion

An interest convergence explanation reveals many reasons towards the lack of judicial equality for Nonwhites in American society. Due to its ties within White Supremacy, interest convergence is a system that always places the interest of Nonwhites on the back burner in order to advance and maintain the privileges and benefits of Whites. So long as interest convergence is tied to white supremacy, Nonwhites will always be multiple steps behind Whites in attaining the same civil rights and privileges that Whites have long enjoyed in the U.S. Even when people of color do receive benefits of legislative change, it only comes when there is also benefits for Whites or because Nonwhites were able to assimilate to a desirable standard of behavior for Whites.

References Bell, D. (2000). Brown v. board of education: Forty‐five years after the fact. Ohio Northern Law Review, 26(171), 171–182. https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle= hein.journals/onulr26&div=13&g_sent=1&casa_token Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., & Peller, G. (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press. Delgado, R. (1990). Affirmative action as a majoritarian device: Or, do you really want to be a role model. Michigan Law Review, 89, 1222. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. NYU Press. Donnor, J. K. (2005). Towards an interest‐convergence in the education of African‐ American football student athletes in major college sports. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 45–67.

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Driver, J. (2011). Rethinking the interest-convergence thesis. Northwestern University Law Review, 105(1), 149. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (2000). Toward a critical race theory of education. In S. J. Ball (Ed.), Sociology of education: Major themes (pp. 322–342). https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tQneTdYPDdMC&oi= fnd&pg=PA322&dq=Ladson-Billings,+G.,+%26+Tate,+W.+(2000).+Toward+a+ critical+race+theory+of+education.%C2%A0SJ+Ball,++Sociology+of+Education:+ Major+Themes,+322-342.&ots=ZbsXc2BbZR&sig=PkmstFrOW4E8ITMBr4 QxfjPYto4#v=onepage&q&f=false Lopez, I. H. (1997). White by law: The legal construction of race. New York University Press. Tracy, M. (2017). N.C.A.A ends boycott of North Carolina after so-called bathroom bill is repealed. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/sports/ ncaa-hb2-north-carolina-boycott-bathroom-bill.html Turner, C. S. V., & González, J. C. (2011). Faculty women of color: The critical nexus of race and gender. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 4(4), 199–211. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Caroline_Turner4/publication/232511695_ Faculty_Women_of_Color_The_Critical_Nexus_of_Race_and_Gender/links/ 5491a36e0cf2f3c6657b7003/Faculty-Women-of-Color-The-Critical-Nexus-of-Raceand-Gender.pdf Walters, J. (2018, August 29). Ron DeSantis tells Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by choosing Gillum. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/ aug/29/ron-desantis-racism-monkey-up-andrew-gillum-florida-governor-election

CHAPTER 41

Intersectionality Antonio Duran and Susan R. Jones

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Feminism and Whiteness; Privilege

… In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the framework of intersectionality to legal studies through her essay, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policies. Crenshaw’s (1989) central argument concerned the troubling reality that antidiscrimination law court cases regularly dismissed the unique forms of marginalization that Black women encountered. Instead of accounting for the ways that Black women’s multiple marginalized identities shaped their realities, courts frequently made decisions in accordance with single-axis forms of thinking. What this meant was that people saw discrimination occurring based on the premise of sex or race, which did not sufficiently capture Black women’s experiences of oppression. Yet, Crenshaw (1989) noted that this single-issue approach extended far beyond antidiscrimination law, having long existed in feminist movements and racial advocacy. Originally presented in Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) formative writings, intersectionality has now become one of the most utilized theories to describe and combat overlapping systems of oppression across a number of academic disciplines (Carastathis, 2014, 2016; Carbado et al., 2013; Cho et al., 2013; Collins & Bilge, 2016; May, 2015; McCall, 2005). With the rise in popularity of the use of intersectionality, critique about the ways in which scholars employ intersectionality has grown. In fact, Davis (2008) commented on intersectionality’s standing as a buzzword in academic communities, contending that individuals fall short on the promise of intersectional theorizing, with subsequent scholars like Carastathis (2013b, 2016), Collins (2015), May (2015), and Nash (2011) echoing her claim. Rather than engaging its original focus on structural inequities, intersectionality has become a proxy for multiple identities. Put simply, intersectionality has become more about the intersections of identity and has strayed away from its intention to serve as an analytical tool to comprehend intersecting structures of domination. This misappropriation of the framework in turn overlooks Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_041

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initial theorizing and its genealogy in Black feminism. To equip individuals to practice appropriate stewardship of intersectionality (Hancock, 2016; Moradi & Grzanka, 2017), this entry discusses intersectionality’s origins in Black feminism, Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) conceptualization of intersectionality, the theoretical interventions of the framework, and its reach as an analytical tool.

1

Origins of Intersectionality

Although Kimberlé Crenshaw played an integral role in bringing intersectionality into the academy, Crenshaw’s framework stemmed from a long history of Black feminism and a larger genealogy of Women of Color activism. Intersectional thought existed far before Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) introduction of the term, but scholars frequently omit these activist origins of intersectionality. This inattention to intersectionality’s roots promotes what Bilge (2013) named as the “whitening of intersectionality,” shrouding the actions of people with multiple marginalized identities – especially Black women (p. 412). To stay true to its historical intentions and to actualize the potential of intersectionality, as Moradi and Grzanka (2017) argued, requires scholars to understand the ways that Black women and Women of Color challenged oppressive structures like racism and sexism throughout history. In her 1989 text, Crenshaw herself referenced the examples of Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper to describe the injustices faced by Black women. Whereas Sojourner Truth shed light on the exclusion of Black women in women’s movements, Anna Julia Cooper brought attention to their systematic erasure by Black men in Black liberation politics (Crenshaw, 1989). Both of these Black feminists were key to Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) imagining of intersectionality, functioning as prominent examples of the ways that society differentially impacted Black women because of their multiple marginalized identities. In her intellectual history of intersectionality, Hancock (2016) also recognized the influential Black feminist Maria Stewart, as one of the earliest documented examples of intersectional theorizing. Stewart advocated for the rights of Black women in Boston and published pamphlets communicating this message in 1831. These types of actions led Hancock (2016) to characterize Maria Stewart as the first documented “acknowledgement of multiple axes of formations of difference” that inevitably paved the way for future Black feminists (p. 24). Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and the lesser publically-recognized Maria Stewart are essential actors in the origins of intersectionality. In addition to the activism of 19th century Black feminists, another significant period of intersectionality’s genealogy involved the writings of Black

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feminist theorists that surfaced between the 1960s and the 1980s. A notable example included Frances Beal’s (1969/1970) writings in which she utilized the term, double jeopardy, to share the distinctive experiences of Black women. Similar to Crenshaw (1989, 1991), Beal discussed the ineffectiveness of single-axis approaches to comprehend the realities of Black women. In the same decade, the Combahee River Collective (1977/1993), a Black feminist lesbian organization, published a statement in which they declared their fight against racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. The Combahee River Collective (1977/1993) statement professed that these “major systems of oppression are interlocking” and shape the lives of marginalized individuals (p. 13). Around the time that Crenshaw (1989, 1991) published her own writings on intersectionality, Black feminist scholars like Deborah King (1988) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) proposed frameworks such as multiple jeopardy and matrix of domination respectively to explain the power relationships that frame Black women’s experiences. Furthermore, other Women of Color wrote about similar concepts around this same time (e.g., García, 1997; Lorde, 1982; Min-Ha, 1989; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983; Sandoval, 2000). These texts represent a few examples of the contexts in which Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) work emerged. Importantly, scholars must return to Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) initial theorizations and analysis to understand the nuances behind the framework of intersectionality.

2

Crenshaw’s Conceptualization of Intersectionality

From its first introduction into the academy, intersectionality has traveled across numerous academic disciplines (Lewis, 2013). Though intersectionality’s moves have provided a variety of scholars with the analytic tools to address interlocking systems of power and oppression, theorists such as Lewis (2013) have warned against the unsafe travel of intersectionality, one that has led people to obscure its feminist and antiracist intent. Crenshaw (2011) communicated this point when she stated, “There is a sense that efforts to repackage intersectionality for universal consumption require a re-marginalizing of black women” (p. 224). Consequently, it is crucial to reexamine Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) original theorizations of intersectionality in order to resist the whitening of the framework that has occurred as a result of mis-applications of the framework. As noted in the introduction to this entry, Crenshaw (1989) employed the language of intersectionality to critique the rhetoric that Black women’s claims could sufficiently fall under arguments of race or sex discrimination in employment. To do so, Crenshaw (1989) presented several examples of

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antidiscrimination cases revealing that this single-issue approach to comprehending the marginalization of Black women fell short. Crenshaw’s metaphor of a four-way traffic stop, in which Black women are situated at the intersection of racism and sexism, is now a commonly recognized image to reference the overlapping nature of oppression that intersectionality interrogates. Crenshaw also included the analogy of a basement to depict the differential positions of power that those with majority identities hold within minoritized groups (i.e., white women along the category of women or Men of Color within Communities of Color). In this basement, people are arranged so that those who are oppressed at the intersections of multiple categories (e.g., race, ability, sexuality) are at the bottom. Should a hatch become available at the top of the room, those who hold majority identities have an easier time escaping from the basement. Interestingly, Carastathis (2013a) commented that Crenshaw’s (1989) four-way traffic stop metaphor has gained more attention than that of the basement. However, the basement analogy not only shows the compounding of marginalization that Black women face, but also how social hierarchies are reified through single-issue analyses. This privileging of majority groups within minoritized communities is a pattern that has existed in feminist politics and antiracist movements, one that can be addressed by embracing an intersectional praxis. Though her 1989 article set an important foundation for intersectional theorizing, Crenshaw’s 1991 text further expanded upon her vision of intersectionality. Of note, Crenshaw’s (1991) subsequent work employed intersectionality to explain Women of Color’s marginalization in identity politics and violence against women. As Crenshaw described, identity politics erase within-group differences. For example, when feminist movements fight to achieve equity for the category of “women,” they regularly eschew the experiences of sub-populations (e.g., Women of Color). Crenshaw (1991) explained, “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices” (p. 1242). To show how this happens, Crenshaw (1991) provided three conceptualizations of intersectionality – structural, representational, and political – to address violence encountered by Women of Color. These three conceptualizations to frame intersectionality are inextricably tied to power dynamics and structures of inequality. Structural intersectionality elucidates how institutions and their policies disenfranchise Women of Color who face issues like domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform. Crenshaw (1991) made the meaningful distinction that when institutional actors build policies and practices for women as a broad category, they do not consider the additional barriers that exist for Women of Color, immigrant women, or poor women (e.g., cultural barriers, not meeting criteria for waivers, or

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issues extraneous to the rape case). When it comes to political intersectionality, Women of Color are located in a liminal space, one where they are part of two marginalized communities that fight for differing causes. The reason this is the case is that women’s groups and antiracist movements frequently lack an attentiveness to other forms of oppression, which leads to the decentering of Women of Color. For example, Crenshaw’s framework suggested that while fighting for Black liberation, people simultaneously justified gender-based violence by positing Black communities as inherently and naturally patriarchal. Finally, representational intersectionality targets cultural images and social constructions of Women of Color that reinforces dominant racist or sexist ideologies. By using cases of Women of Color without actually serving to positively affect their realities, antiracist and feminist groups contribute to oppression. Structural, political, and representational forms of intersectionality underscore the framework’s potential as an analytic to focus on systemic inequities. However, as Cho et al. (2013) contended, scholars who have rendered intersectionality to a theory of intersecting identities have overlooked the structural, representational, and political analyses that Crenshaw (1991) presented. Stemming from Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) ideas in her original essays, core tenets of the framework have emerged that are central to any robust application.

3

Theoretical Interventions Introduced by Intersectionality

In their article, Carbado et al. (2013) described intersectionality as a constant work-in-progress, highlighting that Crenshaw (1989) conceded that her theorizing solely represented one potential way that the framework can function. This status as a work-in-progress led Collins (2015) to comment on the definitional dilemmas of intersectionality. As Collins (2015) stated, a dilemma exists in “defining the field neither so narrowly that it reflects the interests of any one segment nor so broadly that its very popularity causes it to lose meaning” (p. 2). Though intersectionality has now taken many forms across various academic disciplines, Collins (2015) argued that there are a certain number of agreedupon “contours” of the framework (p. 2). These contours frequently include an attention to overlapping axes of oppression, goals of social justice and action, as well as the centering of marginalized populations. Theorists such as Collins and Bilge (2016), Dill and Zambrana (2009), and May (2015) have each offered their own contributions to these contours. For the purposes of this entry, we cover Dill and Zambrana’s (2009) description of the theoretical interventions that intersectionality introduced to showcase the analytic potential of intersectionality: “Centering the Experiences of People of Color” (p. 5), “Complicating

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Identity (p. 6), “Unveiling Power in Interconnected Structures of Inequality” (p. 7), and “Promoting Social Justice and Social Change” (p. 11). To begin, Dill and Zambrana (2009) argued that intersectionality inherently foregrounds the lives of People of Color, honoring the framework’s genealogy in Black feminism and Women of Color feminism. Intersectional thinkers beginning from the times of Maria Stewart consistently fought for liberation from oppressive political, social, and legal systems. Consequently, people from historically marginalized communities have a special vantage point from which to understand inequitable structures: “For intersectional theorists, marginalized subjects have an epistemic advantage, a particular perspective that scholars should consider, if not adopt, when crafting a normative vision of a just society” (Nash, 2008, p. 3). As a theoretical intervention, intersectionality embodied this idea of an epistemic advantage. Even when Black women are not the subject of intersectional analyses, the framework provides researchers with a tool to envision a more just society from the perspective of those who encounter marginalizing experiences. Attached to this idea is the belief that intersectionality complicates understandings of individual and group identities. Next, intersectionality complicates identity by bringing a focus to within-group, and not simply across-group differences. Stemming from Crenshaw’s (1991) initial challenge to identity politics that rely upon single identity categories (e.g., women), intersectionality resists essentializing communities. May (2015) took this argument further when she noted that intersectionality serves to not only reject a single-axis mode of analysis (solely examining issues of race or gender, for example), but also should not fall into the trap of engaging in double-axis analyses. Instead, intersectionality must be attentive to numerous systems of power and privilege. By acknowledging that individuals and groups encounter varying levels of privilege and oppression, scholars adhere to intersectionality’s original mission of creating social movements that are more equitable. To accomplish this goal, intersectionality not only addresses identities, but also how identities are situated within larger structures. Intersectionality stresses the importance of looking at the relationship between identities and power systems; however, theorists like Collins (2009) have disapprovingly observed that people have reduced the framework to an analysis of multiple identities: “In recent years, intersectional analyses have far too often turned inward, to the level of personal identity narratives… Yet this turning inward also reflects the shift within American society away from social structural analyses of social problems…” (p. ix). Without an attention to interwoven structures of power and oppression, intersectionality moves away from its original intention in a manner that is destructive. Of note, intersectionality

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grew in popularity during a time when Collins (1990) provided a similar analytical tool in the form of her matrix of domination. Collins’ (1990) work revealed how overlapping structures of race, gender, and class discrimination disenfranchised Black women. Hence, both Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and Collins (1990) communicated an imperative to interrogate how systems affected those with multiple marginalized identities. Moreover, intersectionality not only seeks to identify these systemic injustices, but also encourages people to address them. The final theoretical intervention of intersectionality, as outlined by Dill and Zambrana (2009), includes the advancement of social change. With its roots in activist movements (Cho et al., 2013; Cole, 2008; Hancock, 2016), intersectional theorizing involves critical reflection on how to combat systems of inequality. Hancock (2007) summarized this argument when she stated, “Intersectionality’s will to progressive social transformation is throughout its history” (p. 626). In examining social structures with an attention to marginality and privilege, intersectionality helps generate movements to reform policy and practices. Because of the ambiguous nature of the framework (Davis, 2008), scholars have scrutinized inequities across different fields, all with the ultimate goal of producing a more socially just society.

4

Intersectionality’s Reach as an Analytical Framework

In exploring intersectionality’s core theoretical interventions as conceptualized by Dill and Zambrana (2009), a number of reasons emerge as to why intersectionality continues to grab the attention of multiple disciplines. As McCall (2005) explained, it is possible that “intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far” (p. 1771). Part of the explanation as to why this is the case, according to Davis (2008), is that intersectionality attended to one of the longest lasting concerns of feminist theorizing: how women are different (e.g., Women of Color and white women) and importantly, how these differences lead to very real social and material issues. By touching upon both of these “strands of contemporary feminist thought” (Davis, 2008, p. 70), intersectionality generated an accessible framework to analyze these realities. However, intersectionality also functions in a way that can capture a number of different experiences and social structures, moving beyond race and sex as its only categories of interest. Nash (2008) engaged this claim by asking, “Who is intersectional?” (p. 9). According to Nash (2008), intersectionality applies to populations other than Black women, illuminating how all forms of power and oppression (e.g., racism, heterosexism, sexism, and classism)

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disproportionately affect certain demographics and privilege others. Resembling this contention, Carastathis (2008) noted that theorists, at times, fail to interrogate privilege in their applications of intersectionality. For Carastathis (2008), whiteness and majority groups can also be the subject of intersectional analyses because they are situated within structures of domination. Thus, scholars can interrogate the privileges that majority populations hold, as long as they retain intersectionality’s focus on centering the needs of People of Color and advancing social change (Dill & Zambrana, 2009). Yet, post-intersectional theorists have critiqued intersectionality’s reach, arguing that intersectionality overlooks marginalization tied to social identities like sexuality (e.g., Hutchinson, 2001; Kwan, 2000; Mutua, 2013; Valdes, 1997). Nevertheless, intersectional theorists have questioned the intention behind these criticisms. To this point, May (2015) stated, “how intersectionality is read and portrayed (and not) can be troubling, particularly when basic intersectional premises… are violated by a critic’s operative assumptions and interpretive methods” (p. 98). In fact, post-intersectionality reproduces the analytical techniques of Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) framework while removing its origins in Women of Color feminism, and especially Black feminist thought. Carbado (2013) explained a disturbing trend in which academics have moved away from theories rooted in Black women’s experiences. As Lewis (2013) suggested, honoring intersectionality as significant to academic theorizing recognizes “that black women and other women of color produce knowledge” that becomes part of a more “generalizable theoretical, methodological, and conceptual tool kit” (p. 871). Thus, although intersectionality has frequently been the subject of critique, the framework’s staying power lies in its ability to capture the structural inequalities that shape people’s lives while always centering the contributions of Black women.

5

Conclusion

Though ever-changing in its form, intersectionality continues to hold great promise as an analytic tool to describe and challenge interlocking structures of inequality in society. However, in order to actualize this potential, scholars and activists must engage intersectional theorizing with care and responsibility. As Hancock (2016) noted, to utilize intersectionality means to accept the role of a steward, deploying the framework to achieve the ends it was designed to meet. To this point, it is simply not enough to use the term intersectionality to describe experiences of marginalization; individuals must be prepared to enact change by using the framework. Furthermore, it is important to pay homage to

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the histories of intersectional thinking and Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) initial theorizing. By comprehending intersectionality’s past, scholars can better envision more equitable futures for historically disenfranchised communities.

References Beal, F. M. (1970). Double jeopardy: To be Black and female. In T. Cade (Ed.), The Black woman: An anthology (pp. 90–100). Signet. Bilge, S. (2013). Intersectionality undone: Saving intersectionality from intersectionality studies. Du Bois Review, 10(2), 405–424. Carastathis, A. (2008). The invisibility of privilege: A critique of intersectional models of identity. Les Ateliers De L’Éthique, 3(2), 23–38. Carastathis, A. (2013a). Basements and intersections. Hypatia, 28(4), 698–715. Carastathis, A. (2013b). Identity categories as potential coalitions. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 941–965. Carastathis, A. (2014). The concept of intersectionality in feminist theory. Philosophy Compass, 9(5), 304–314. Carastathis, A. (2016). Intersectionality: Origins, contestations, horizons. University of Nebraska Press. Carbado, D. W. (2013). Colorblind intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 811–845. Carbado, D. W., Crenshaw, K. W., Mays, V. M., & Tomlinson, B. (2013). Intersectionality: Mapping the movements of a theory. Du Bois Review, 10(2), 303–312. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 785–810. Cole, E. R. (2008). Coalitions as a model for intersectionality: From practice to theory. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 443–453. Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2009). Foreword. In B. T. Dill & R. E. Zambrana (Eds.), Emerging intersections: Race, class, and gender in theory, policy, and practice (pp. vii–xiii). Rutgers University Press. Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41(1), 1–20. Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Polity Press. Combahee River Collective. (1993). A Black feminist statement. In G. Hull, P. B. Scott, & B. Smith (Eds.), All the women are White, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black women’s studies (pp. 13–22). Feminist Press at CUNY.

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Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 8(1), 139–167. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. Crenshaw, K. (2011). Postscript. In H. Lutz, M. T. H. Vivar, & L. Supik (Eds.), Framing intersectionality: Debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies (pp. 221–234). Ashgate. Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory, 9(1), 67–85. Dill, B. T., & Zambrana, R. E. (2009). Emerging intersections: Race, class, and gender in theory, policy, and practice. Rutgers University Press. García, A. (Ed.). (1997). Chicana feminist thought: The basic historical writings. Routledge. Hancock, A.-M. (2007). When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition: Examining intersectionality as a research paradigm. Perspectives on Politics, 5(1), 63–79. Hancock, A.-M. (2016). Intersectionality: An intellectual history. Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, D. L. (2001). Identity crisis: Intersectionality, multidimensionality, and the development of an adequate theory of subordination. Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 6, 285–317. King, D. K. (1988). Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: The context of a Black feminist ideology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(1), 42–72. Kwan, P. (2000). Complicity and complexity: Cosynthesis and praxis. DePaul Law Review, 49(3), 673–692. Lewis, G. (2013). Unsafe travel: Experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 869–892. Lorde, A. (1982). ZAMI: A new spelling of my name. Crossing Press. May, V. M. (2015). Pursuing intersectionality, unsettling dominant imaginaries. Routledge. McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), 1771–1800. Min-Ha, T. T. (1989). Women, native, other: Writing post-coloniality and feminism. Indiana University Press. Moradi, B., & Grzanka, P. R. (2017). Using intersectionality responsibly: Toward critical epistemology, structural analysis, and social justice activism. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 64(5), 500–513. Moraga, C. L., & Anzaldúa, G. E. (1983). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical Women of Color (2nd ed.). Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. Mutua, A. D. (2013). Multidimensionality is to masculinities what intersectionality is to feminism. Nevada Law Journal, 13(2), 341–367. Nash, J. C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89(1), 1–15.

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Nash, J. C. (2011). “Home truths” on intersectionality. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 23(2), 445–470. Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press. Valdes, F. (1997). Queer margins, queer ethics: A call to account for race and ethnicity in the law, theory, and politics of “sexual orientation.” Hutchinson Law Journal, 48(6), 1293–1341.

CHAPTER 42

Islamophobia Tina G. Patel

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Orientalism; Postcolonialism and Whiteness; Post-Racialism; Racial Profiling

… Based on a hierarchical “Othering” process, Islamophobia has a long global history. It is only relatively recently however, that the “Othering” of Muslims has attracted attention beyond academic studies and anti-discrimination equality-based activism. Islamophobia and its hate-based conceptualisation are often linked to the work of Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism, where Said argued that the West had long associated Islam with negative images, sentiments, and stereotypes. More recently, it was the Runneymede Trust report (1997), Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, that signalled the start of contemporary understandings of Islamophobia as “a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims” (Runnymede Trust, 1997, p. 1). Both Islam and Christianity heavily informed the development of societies in Europe, and beyond, with both faiths being “open” to others given the “universal stature of their religions” (Weitz, 2005, in Taras, 2013, p. 423). Historically though, Islamophobia relied on and reinforced the construction of Islam and Muslims as inferior, barbarically violent and culturally backwards – resistant to negotiation and progress (see Taras (2013) for a useful outline of the historical development of the Muslim Other). Within this imagery, there has been a steadfast narrative, which presents Islam to be at odds with, and, indeed a threat to, the “well-being” and “survival” of Christianity (López, 2011, p. 569): the latter simultaneously presented as puritanical, moral and ideologically “good.” Almost 1,400 years old, this “clash-of-civilisations” perspective remains a strong feature of contemporary Islamophobic narratives, resulting in a dialectical process where each side raises fears about the other (Taras, 2013, p. 419). Today, the term is used to describe these hostilities as well as providing a language for denouncing them. Contemporary narratives of Islamophobia are further complicated when it becomes “fused” with the “racist ideologies of the twentieth century” (Allen © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_042

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2010, in Taras, 2013, p. 419). A combination of “deep structures and shallow stereotypes are implicated in the construction of Islam as ‘Other’” (Taras, 2013, p. 419). Although still contextualized within the notion of racial differences, Islamophobia has moved away, partly, from reference to biological and genetic difference and has instead drawn on notions of difference (clash) emerging from cultural features such as dress, religious performance, etc. Therefore, although still influenced by notions of racial difference, the substance of “race” and being “racially different” has shifted. Islamophobia in this sense is functionally like “xenophobia” (Sheridan, 2006, p. 317) – a type of “new racism” that critiques claims of a post-race society (Patel, 2017a). In looking at the persistent and continued presence of racism, albeit in its varied forms, Abbas (2004) argues that this “‘new’ racism differs from the ‘old’ racism in that it is subtler but, at the same time, explicit in the direction it has taken” (Abbas, 2004, p. 30). So, in the post-September 11th, 2001 (henceforth referred to as 9/11) era, politicians have used the people’s historically-based and deep-rooted fear and hostility towards Islam, along with its historical racist practices, such as those found in Empire-building and imperialism, for their own ends and in ways that are now presented as non-racial. This is done via the use of a new “postracial” narrative, which talks about the “war on terror” and the over-focus on both Islam as a faith and Muslims as a population group, resulting in the quick and hasty introduction of policy and practice measures which are presented as necessary and linked to national security. However, as Abbas (2004) notes, there is still the continued use of “the existing anti-Muslim frame of reference” which is now just being replaced with the idea of “terror” (p. 30). One of the main sticking points in discussions about Islamophobia is whether it is discrimination that is still based on notions of difference (or, inferiority) around “race” (i.e. skin color), or ethnic origin, or religion? Or, whether it was a combination of all these elements. Consequently, there has been a diverse set of emerging definitions and conceptualisations: for instance, those that see it as (i) a form of religious intolerance; (ii) (color-coded) racism; or in particular, “new racism”; (iii) cultural racism (Modood, 1997); see Bleich (2011) for a fuller discussion, as well as a thoughtful critique, on the varied definitions of Islamophobia. Consequently, the result is the continued use of racist ideology when discussing Muslim populations within a period that claims Muslims are not racial groups, and as such cannot be victims of racism. This has resulted in support for continued use of the term “Islamophobia.” This is an advance, because as Cole (2011, p. 252) notes, although Islamophobia may be “sparked off by skin color,” it is not always “triggered” by skin color but can instead be triggered by other real or perceived symbols of the Muslim faith, such as body presentation (beards), dress (headscarves), or behavior (prayer).

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Writing in 1999, Fred Halliday argued the term Islamophobia needs to be reconsidered, not least because the term suggests hostility towards Islam as a faith, whereas this is not the actual case – rather such hostility is directed towards Muslims as a population group. Consequently, although agreement is still in transition, the term Islamophobia is now commonly used to refer to anti-Muslim sentiment, including prejudice against and hatred towards people of the Muslim faith, and a fear of the religion of Islam itself. Taras (2013, p. 425) usefully notes that Islamophobia actually combines, or as they call it, “bundles” together prejudices based on notions of religious, ethnic, and cultural difference. Contemporary Islamophobia draws attention to the popularity and normalisation even, of hostility towards (real and perceived) Muslims, associated with historical (Orientalist) ideas about Islam; security (“war on terror”) panics around the Muslim (brown) body; and, a fear of culture-clashes and Islamification (population figures and Sharia law) of countries in the West (Taras, 2013). It is difficult to confirm accurate levels of Islamophobia – as Bleich (2011) notes, this is because: first, there is a tendency to use indirect indicators, such as an assumed presence of historically rooted Islamophobia; second, providing examples of Islamophobia that are anecdotal or symbolic; and third, use of research that conflates Islamophobia with attitudes toward overlapping ethic, national-origin, or immigrant status groups. Current figures provided by UK-based anti-Muslim monitoring group, Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), estimate that that there were 1,201 verified reports submitted in 2017 of anti-Muslim attacks in the UK – an increase of 26% from the previous year (Tell MAMA, 2018). Similarly, in the U.S., 2,599 incidents of anti-Muslim bias in 2017 were logged by the Council on American-Islamic Relations – a figure that was up 17% on the previous year (CAIR, 2017, cited in Reuters, 2018). What is clear is that Islamophobia is now a normative feature, with palatability for it evolving around white and/or Christian fears about the faith as a social evil – views which were reinforced with recent terror-related events such as 9/11. An alternative Islamophobic stance has, however, become popularized. Sitting more comfortably within the post-race narrative, this asserts that this biased behavior is not based on hostility towards Muslim people, but rather a distrust if Islam as a doctrine. This view sees Islamophobia as a rational response to what is considered to be a problematic, divisive and discriminatory set of standards, for example, in its treatment of women. Events in the U.S. on 9/11 and other terror attacks carried out by extremists stated their action was in the name of Islam. This cemented contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia. The West’s response to 9/11 was swift and fierce, and ultimately in its narrative of “the war on terror,” it declared a

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post-race war on Muslims, including all those perceived (due to “brown” visual markers (Patel, 2012)) to be (like) them or the same category of threat as them; for example, immigrants, economic migrants, 2/3rd generation South Asians, international students, tourists, refugees and asylum seekers. As a result, even though the Islamic world is diverse, crossing nationality, language, ethnicity, culture, and so on, Muslims (and non-Muslim “brown bodies”) in post-race society continue to be Islamophobically racialized – marked out as a singular racial group, defined by visual cues and superficial biological and cultural ideas. This is a relatively easy process for the West, given the legacy of Orientalism (Said, 1978), which Kumar (2010) argues re-surfaced in the “clash of civilizations” thesis of U.S. administrations of Bush Sr. and Clinton. This thesis drew on five taken-for-granted Orientalist ideas of Islam and Muslims (see Kumar (2010) for further detail), which presented the faith and its followers as irrational, uncivilized, barbaric, evil – and as such, in opposition to the West, which was presented as good, moral, democratic and ultimately, the savior of humanity. Although Islamophobia has emerged from and/or drawn upon varied histories across the Western world, 9/11 unified negative sentiments about Islam and those perceived to be Muslim. Here, pre-9/11 “Othering” of all those perceived to be Muslim (or similar to them), received its “ideological payout” (Noble & Poynting, 2003) after 9/11 – “a sort of ‘I told you so’ effect” used to legitimate heightened attacks on Islam and Muslims (Poynting & Mason, 2007, p. 81). Cole (2011) argues that in recent history, contemporary Islamophobia had less to do with immigration panics (as it had with other racialized groups, for instance the Windrush racism in the UK), and more to do with 9/11. Although images of the “Muslim extremist” and the “Muslim terrorist” had been a common feature of American-hero movies (Shaheen, 2009), 9/11 and other attacks that followed, both relied on intensified existing anti-Muslim/Islam hostility, but now adding an additional element of fear – a narrative of the “enemy within” (Sheridan, 2006). This is the idea that the Muslim population residing within the West, such as in Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada, and France, are an undifferentiated mass of outsiders, whose intolerance of the views and rights of others, and the Western (i.e. British, American, etc) way of life means that even though they may have been born in the West and/or claim to have that national identity, they are not substantially of the West (Braham, 2003). That is, they are not considered to be committed to the principles of the West, which within a “war on terror” context, relates to ideas of democracy, citizenship and equality – in other words qualities that are presented as essentially Western values: see Patel’s (2017b) discussion on the UK’s (counter-terror based) CONTEST

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strategy, which utilizes a “civilizing” narrative about a commitment to British values and national security to perpetuate the idea of Muslims as “suspect” and prone to radicalization and extremism. Essentially, the idea of the “enemy within” presents Muslims as hostile bodies who are a security threat to both the physical and moral borders of the West. This level and type of Islamophobia compounded ‘white fears’ and sentiments about a condition of “white victimhood” (Patel & Tyrer, 2011; Patel, 2017a). This narrative gained momentum quickly and widely, drawing on white supremacy. The concept of white supremacy was popularised by Critical Race theorists (CRT) who drew our attention to how white supremacist thinking and action goes beyond extreme right-wing hate groups. For many people of color, the racialization (specifically: Islamification) of events such as 9/11, grossly impacted on their citizenship status and freedom of movement. For example, in the UK this included the extension of stop-and-search powers granted under sections 44 and 45 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (Home Office, 2000), which permitted stop-and-search without “reasonable suspicion.” Unlike the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Home Office, 1984), the police officer did not need to have reasonable suspicion for the stop and search (– a position that in January 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled should be dropped, given that it was potentially open to discriminatory abuse, as well as being in violation of Article 8 (regarding privacy rights) of the European Convention on Human Rights). The Act was later followed by a number of others which served to over-criminalize Muslim populations and present them as illegal, criminal, and a source of threat. More recently, in the U.S., there has been a raft of legislation introduced by current President Donald Trump which has focused on banning immigrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In explaining the ban, Trump stated that the goal is to keep radical Islamic terrorists out: “We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people” (CNN Politics, 2017). In addition, the ensuing racialization of 9/11 and the “war on terror” was a matter of life and death. Take, for example, one case in France, the country that in 2010 banned face coverings, including women wearing the niqab. In January 2015, Mohamed El Makouli was stabbed to death at home by his 28-year-old neighbor, Thomas Gambet, who shouted during the attack: “I am your God, I am your Islam” (Independent, 2015). Islamophobia exists and impacts on the rights and lives of people in very profound ways. Clearly Islamophobia is political, and used to serve such ends, but a fuller discussion of it has now emerged, which, used by academics and

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activists alike, is now able to more accurately highlight “the specific social reality of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim sentiment in Western liberal democracies today” (Bleich, 2011, p. 1593).

References Abbas, T. (2004). After 9/11: British South Asian Muslims, Islamophobia, multiculturalism, and the State. The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 21(3), 26–38. Bleich, E. (2011). What is Islamophobia and how much is there? Theorizing and measuring an emerging comparative concept. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(12), 1581–1600. Braham, P. (2003). Race and the media. In G. Bolaffi, R. Bracalenti, P. Braham, & S. Gindro (Eds.), Dictionary of race, ethnicity and culture. Sage. Cole, M. (2011). The CRT concept of “White supremacy” as applied to the UK: Eight major problematics and some educational implications. In K. Hylton, A. Pilkington, P. Warmington, & S. Housee (Eds.), Atlantic crossings: International dialogues on critical race theory. The Higher Education Academy. CNN Politics. (2017, January 30). Trump signs executive order to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists.” CNN Politics reported by Dan Mercia. https://edition.cnn.com/ 2017/01/27/politics/trump-plans-to-sign-executive-action-on-refugees-extremevetting/index.html Halliday, F. (1999). Islamophobia reconsidered. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(5), 892–302. Home Office. (1984). Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. HMSO. Home Office. (2000). Terrorism Act 2000. HMSO. Independent. (2015, January 17). Moroccan man in France killed at home in front of wife in “horrible Islamophobic attack.” Independent (Reported by Lamiat Sabin). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/moroccan-man-in-francekilled-at-home-in-front-of-wife-by-intruder-shouting-about-islam-9985072.html Kumar, D. (2010). Framing Islam: The resurgence of orientalism during the Bush II era. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(3), 254–277. López, F. B. (2011). Towards a definition of Islamophobia: Approximations of the early twentieth century. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(4), 556–573. Modood, T. (1997). Difference, cultural racism and anti-racism. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: The multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 154–172). Zed Books. Noble, G., & Poynting, S. (2003) Acts of war: Military metaphors in the representation of Lebanese youth gangs. Media International Australia: Culture and Politics, 106, 110–123.

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Patel, T. G. (2012). Surveillance, suspicion and stigma: Brown bodies in a terror-panic climate. Surveillance and Society, 10(3–4), 215–234. Patel, T. G. (2017a). Race and society. Sage. Patel, T. G. (2017b). It’s not about security, it’s about racism: Counter-terror strategies, civilizing processes and the post-race fiction. Palgrave Communications, 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201731 Patel, T. G., & Tyrer, D. (2011). Race, crime and resistance. Sage. Poynting, S., & Mason, V. (2007). The resistible rise of Islamophobia. Journal of Sociology, 43(1), 61–86. Reuters. (2018, April 23). U.S. anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 15 percent in 2017: Advocacy group. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-islam-hatecrime/u-s-anti-muslimhate-crimes-rose-15-%-in-2017-advocacy-group-idU.S. KBN1HU240 Runnymede Trust. (1997). Islamophobia: A challenge for us all. The Runnymede Trust. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Works. Shaheen, J. (2009). Reel bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people. Olive Branch Press. Sheridan, L. (2006). Islamophobia pre- and post-September 11th, 2001. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21(3), 317–336. Taras, R. (2013). Islamophobia never stands still: Race, religion, and culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(3), 417–433. Tell MAMA. (2018). Beyond the incident: Outcomes for victims of anti-Muslim prejudice. Faith Matters.

CHAPTER 43

Jewishness and Whiteness Samuel J. Tanner

Related Entries: Alt-Right; Anti-Semitism; Eugenics; Immigration; Scientific Racism

… The question as to whether or not Jews are white, especially in the United States, continues to provoke a heated, often confusing debate. There is little consensus as to the relationship between whiteness and Jewishness. Indeed, according to Brodkin (1998), “in the last hundred years, Jews in the United States have been shuttled from one side of the American racial binary to the other” (p. 175). Jews, at times, have held different positionalities in relation to the overarching constructs and expressions of white supremacy. In fact, Brodkin (1998) wrote that “Jews’ unwhitening and whitening were not of their own making,” but, instead, were influenced by “changes in scientific and public discourses about race in general and Jews in particular” (p. 175). The Jewish population in the United States is the result of immigration mostly from diaspora communities in Europe. Societal and entrepreneurial opportunity attracted Jewish immigration to the country and, later, the United States provided refuge from the ongoing antisemitism in Europe leading up to and resulting in the holocaust during World War II. The number of Jewish residents in the United States increased from roughly 1,000–2,000 people in 1790 to about 15,000 in 1840. This number swelled to 250,000 people by 1880. The majority of these Jewish immigrants came from German-speaking states. Roughly 2,000,000 Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from diaspora communities in Eastern Europe between 1880 and the start of World War I. There was more opposition to immigration in the United States in the late 1930’s leading up to World War II. Between 1934 and 1943, the United States accepted roughly 21,000 refugees from Europe. The United States accepted far fewer Jews per capita than many other neutral European countries and many scholars attribute this to increasing antisemitism in the country. This brief overview of the history of Jewish immigration to the United States suggests a complex relationship as to whether or not Jews were considered white during this time. Indeed, Jacobsen (2000) argued that “from 1790 onward © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_043

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Jews were indeed ‘white’ by the most significant measure of that appellation: They could enter the country and become naturalized citizens” (p. 241). However, Jacobsen (2000) qualified this claim by suggesting that “given the shades of meaning attaching to various racial classification,” the question is not if Jews are white or even how white they are but, instead, “have they been both white and Other?” (p. 241). Further, Jacobsen asks, “what have been the historical terms of their probationary whiteness?” (p. 241). Jacobsen goes on to contend that, in the aftermath of World War II, the probationary whiteness of Jews in the United States was solidified as a response to the holocaust, which was largely ignored by the media in the United States as it was happening. American Jews were extended many of the privileges of whiteness after World War II. This inclusion in whiteness complicated what it meant to be Jewish in the United States and, due to the projection of postwar U.S. power, across the world. Many of the same factions in the Western world that reviled European Jews as an inferior race through the nativism and xenophobia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries later embraced Jews as model members of the white middle class in the latter parts of the 20th century. This drastic turn in the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness continued to grow complex into the early part of the 21st century and, in fact, might be why there are so many competing views as to whether or not Jews ought to be thought of as white in relation to the structurings of white supremacy. Affirmation of Jews and Jewish communities in the United States grew after World War II, as the details of the holocaust became part of the imagination through literature, school curriculum, and national discourse. More recently, the trend toward antisemitism in the United States that was bolstered by the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the increasing strength of the alt-right has once again brought the probationary whiteness extended to Jews into question. Recent anti-Jewish sentiments in the United States and Europe complicate Jewish racial positionality as it becomes clear that, at least for certain groups, Jews are not and have never been members of the white race. Still, according to Brodkin (1998), a challenge for Jews today is to confront whiteness as part of a developing sense of their Jewishness, thereby creating the same problem other groups of white people have: Making sense of the nuance and ambivalence at the core of their racial identities. Ultimately, the relationship between whiteness and Jewishness is fraught with complexity. Indeed, Goldstein (2006) wrote that “the story of American Jewish racial identity” makes clear how persistent “the tensions between whiteness and Jewishness have been” (p. 4). According to Goldstein, “the entrance of Jews into the white mainstream did not resolve” Jewish racial identity but, instead, created more impulse for Jewish “distinctiveness” to emerge (pp. 4–5).

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Goldstein was concerned with how Jews “negotiated their place in a complex racial world where Jewishness, whiteness, and blackness have all made significant claims on them” (p. 5). For Goldstein (2006), “as long as whiteness, with its demand for a modicum of group homogeneity, remains the social ideal for American Jews, there seems little hope” for what Goldstein called a “tribalist revival” in which Jews reclaim some of their historical solidarity with marginalized peoples (p. 239). The tension that Goldstein names here is the one between the homogeneous uniformity offered by whiteness and the local or shared values or investments that different groups of Jewish people have developed across different times and spaces of different histories and cultural moments. This is to say that there is varying degrees of commitment different groups of Jewish people have to conforming to or resisting white ideals, and this influences how Jews negotiate racial identity in various social and discursive contexts in the U.S., and across the world.

References Brodkin, K. (1998). How Jews became White folks and what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press. Goldstein, E. L. (2006). The price of whiteness: Jews, race, and American identity. Princeton University Press. Jacobson, M. F. (2000). Looking Jewish, seeing Jews. In L. Back & J. Solomos (Eds.), Theories of race and racism: A reader (pp. 238–252). Routledge.

CHAPTER 44

Jim Crow Duane T. Loynes, Sr.

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Mass Incarceration; Minstrelsy; Social Construction; White Supremacy

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Introduction: The Origins of Jim Crow

“Jim Crow” is the shorthand designation for a cultural system of economic, political, and social practices in the United States designed to perpetuate White Supremacy in the wake of both the Civil War and the cessation of formal chattel slavery. Similar to the apartheid system of South Africa (1948–1994), the central aims of Jim Crow were the segregation and subordination of Black bodies, and the normalization of Whiteness as the defining structural ideology of the nation. The term “Jim Crow” is relatively obscure in its origin. There is some evidence that the expression is derived from African mythology, possibly a conniving crow named Jim. There is also evidence, perhaps connected to these African legends brought to America by slaves, of slave songs that reference a dance described as “Jump Jim Crow.” Whatever the root of the expression, its meaning took an important turn in the 19th century at the hands of minstrel performer Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. Minstrel shows were hugely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. White performers would put on black makeup and perform derogatory imitations of Black life in song and dance routines. Rice claimed that the origin for his extremely successful “Jump Jim Crow” routine was his witnessing of a Black slave with a disability attempting to dance to a song. Rice transformed this experience into a highly stereotypical and offensive element of his show, leading to a significant level of popularity in the United States and abroad. Over time, “Jim Crow” became a generic reference for Black Americans and eventually came to denote the segregationist system that now bears its name. Jim Crow policies were magisterial in their scope, ensuring radical disenfranchisement for Black Americans by circumscribing most elements of their human existence. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward notes the broad sweep of Jim Crow laws, including relationships, housing, religion, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_044

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education, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, recreational facilities, prisons/jails, mental health institutions, restaurants, orphanages, and the military (2002, pp. 7–10). Jim Crow codes were established not only to ensure the permanent second-class citizenship of Black Americans, but also to radically reinforce the central tenets of White Supremacy, especially the inevitability that “relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings” (Ansley, 1989, p. 1024). Although the Jim Crow era is usually dated as commencing at the end of Reconstruction (1865–1877), there were antecedents in U.S. culture even prior to the Emancipation Proclamation Executive Order of 1863. Policies of segregation were both impractical and unnecessary up to this point because of the need for White slaveowners to be in proximity to their slaves to guarantee their compliance and to minimize costs associated with oversight. However, plantation slavery was not the only embodiment of Black life before 1863. Some Blacks were free citizens and some slaves – especially those who lived on plantations near urban areas – were granted the relative freedom to travel into town to run errands or conduct business on behalf of their owners (Woodward, 2002). In these conditions, we see the burgeoning of an incipient Jim Crow system of segregation with the establishment of ordinances restricting the movements of freed and enslaved Blacks, with the latter requiring written permission from their owners at all times. It is also during the pre-Emancipation period that many Southern states created crude law enforcement units largely dedicated to policing Black bodies. Thus, Jim Crow, though largely conceived as a southern reality, was in fact a national one. Southern states had more de jure (legal) restrictions codified in public policies, but northern states would often achieve similar outcomes by appealing to de facto (customary) social mores. Furthermore, because northern states had a higher percentage of free Blacks in the population vis-à-vis southern states, the origins of Jim Crow can be seen most definitively in the North, with the system “permeat[ing] all aspects of Negro life in the free states by 1860,” especially with regard to public accommodations and transportation (Woodward, 2002, p. 18). The most immediate antecedent to Jim Crow laws was the establishment of Black Codes in the aftermath of the Civil War. Exploiting the “loophole” found in the 13th Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution that eradicated slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (§ 1), Black Codes were enacted to capitalize on the social construction of the Black body as criminal and were designed to make even the most mundane elements of Black life illegal. The punishment

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for these often-unavoidable transgressions was generally some form of forced servitude to replace the cultural loss of free (slave) labor. Some examples of Black Code violations included vagrancy, not having a job, assembling without the permission of a White citizen, and carelessly handling money. The Black Codes worked in tandem with convict leasing arrangements, whereby Black prisoners would be contracted out to companies and plantations to engage in hard labor under horrific conditions.

2

The Advent of Jim Crow

Resistance to the gains of the newly-freed Black population was swift. At the end of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee. Originally a fraternal organization founded by veterans of the Confederacy, the KKK eventually morphed into a domestic terrorism group intent on resisting all forms of Black progress. In particular, the KKK targeted activities that symbolized the full participation of Blacks in the civic life of America, such as voting or integrating previously-segregated neighborhoods. It was primarily in response to the activity of the KKK (and other similar groups) that Congress passed a series of laws in the mid-1860s and 1870s to enhance federal protection of the rights of Black citizens to engage in the political life of the United States. It was widely recognized that, without federal intervention, individual states would impede the progress of the Black population as much as possible. In 1868, Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing the rights of citizens and prohibiting states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (§ 1). In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts with the objectives of the KKK unambiguously in their purview. The first Enforcement Act (May 1870) explicitly prohibited individuals from conspiring to prohibit U.S. citizens from voting, including “by force, bribery, threats, intimidation, or other unlawful means” (§ 4). The second Enforcement Act (February 1871) transferred oversight of the electoral process to the federal government. The third Enforcement Act (April 1871), also known as the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” gave the President an expanded set of powers and wide discretion (most notably the suspension of habeus corpus) to directly intervene in the prosecution of KKK members. Finally, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This law represented the last formal effort by Congress to protect the recent freedoms of the formerly enslaved Black community, reflected in the expansive language of the first section:

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Be it enacted, That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude. (§ 1) Many of these gains would be undone, however, in the wake of the 1876 Presidential election. Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden were the major party candidates for the presidency and the election resulted in a popular vote win for the Republican Hayes, but an electoral college vote win for the Democrat Tilden. The votes of four states had still not been counted and the entire process reached an impasse. Months after the election, a commission was formed, and a closed-door agreement was reached. Democrats would support Hayes’ accession to the presidency if he agreed to remove federal troops from the Southern states, all but ending the Reconstruction era and paving the way for “Redeemer” Democrats (conservative politicians representing the aristocracy of the Old South) to control southern lawmaking bodies and, in the name of states’ rights, abrogate the legislative civil rights gains of Reconstruction. Two incidents stand out in the aftermath of the Hayes Compromise. First, in 1883, the Supreme Court, reviewing five lower court cases featuring Black plaintiffs who were challenging segregationist statutes, ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, contending that although the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and the 14th Amendment protected Black citizens from discrimination from states, these amendments did not extend to possible discrimination from individuals and private institutions. The majority decision, written by Justice Joseph Bradley, claims: When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected. There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty, and property the same as white citizens; yet no one, at that time, thought that it was any invasion of their personal status as freemen because they were not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because they were subjected

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to discriminations in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public conveyances, and places of amusement. (Civil Rights Cases, 1883) Second, in 1892, Homer Plessy was chosen by a civil rights organization in New Orleans to challenge the Separate Car Act of 1890, a statute that allowed for separate but equal railway accommodations for Blacks and Whites. Plessy, a native of New Orleans born a free man, had European ancestry and could “pass” for White, but was still considered Black due to hypodescent, the practice of racially categorizing the offspring of interracial relationships as having the status of the culturally-subordinate group (otherwise known as the “one drop rule”). Plessy purchased a ticket, sat in a Whites-only car, informed the conductor of his racial status, and was immediately arrested. The judge who heard the case, John Howard Ferguson, agreed with the Louisiana law and upheld Plessy’s arrest. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling endorsed the lower court’s decision, thus giving the imprimatur of the Supreme Court to laws that allowed for separate but equal facilities. These two Supreme Court decisions provided federal protection for hundreds of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws that reasserted the dominance of White citizens and relegated Black residents even farther to the margins of society. A particular target of these efforts focused on creating insurmountable obstacles prohibiting Blacks from access to the levers of political power, ranging from literacy tests to excessive poll taxes. In some cases, these tactics were painfully explicit, such as states that only allowed Whites to vote in primaries.

3

The Whitening Effects of Jim Crow

It is obvious how Jim Crow laws protected the sacred nature of Whiteness, allowing White citizens to maintain cultural dominance and carve out protected enclaves of Whiteness. What is less known is the role played by the Jim Crow system in creating a bifurcated racial caste system in which the only options were “Black” or “White.” With regard to Whiteness, this had the unintended effect of forcing a reconceptualization of race toward a more inclusive rendering of who can count as White. Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998), in Whiteness of a Different Color, roots this reconfiguring of Whiteness in the political crisis that arose out of the Naturalization Act of 1790 passed by Congress. This law was the United States’ first attempt to articulate what it meant to be a U.S. citizen. In particular, the law stated that any “free white person” who had resided in the United States for at

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least two years and was a “person of good character” was eligible to become a citizen upon taking an oath to support the Constitution. What was ostensibly a straightforward litmus test for citizenship became problematic due to the vague inclusivity of the primary term: “white.” Although, presumably, the authors of the law had a particular conception of Whiteness in mind (i.e., Anglo-Saxon property owners), the monolithic category “White” became disrupted when industrialization in the second half of the 19th century spurred a radical influx of European immigrants whose ethnic identities challenged the basis of White identity. In a relatively short period of time, the United States had to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants from European countries: the Irish, Germans, Italians, Russian Jews, Poles, Greeks, and a whole host of others. The initial response by those who cherished their unique Anglo-Saxon identity was to view these immigrants as deficient, portraying them as savage interlopers benefiting from the gains of “pure” Whites. References abound in literature from this era lamenting the incursion of these uncivilized peoples and advocating a segregationist posture toward them. In fact, several police departments in the North (including Boston, New York, and Chicago) were formed partly in response to fears aroused by immigrant protests against the abusive practices of industrialization. Jacobson notes, as one example of many, the disruptive performance of Italians in the Jim Crow South: their physiognomy was not legible as completely White, they accepted positions deemed fit only for Blacks, and they even transgressed deep-rooted cultural norms by having social and sexual relations with Blacks. Italians and Jews were also lynched at the hands of groups similar to the KKK. However, this cultural discourse regarding what Jacobson (1998) refers to as “variegated Whiteness” (i.e., a negotiation about who gets to count as White) was undercut by the concurrent emergence of Jim Crow. Left unchecked, the broad scope of Whiteness that was being debated may have resulted in eventual ethnic distinctions that would have further sub-divided the categorization of U.S. citizens. However, Jim Crow laws enforced an “unforgiving, binary caste system of white-over-black” that foregrounded race far more than ethnicity and nationality (Jacobson, 1998, p. 57). The binary logic of Jim Crow was not only that it impeded the lives of Black citizens by imposing undeserved burdens and penalties, but also that it provided unmerited privileges to White citizens. Jim Crow, rooted in the culturally antecedent ideology of White Supremacy, could not allow for conflicting ethnic-based conceptions of Whiteness that might frustrate the unifying power of a generic White identity. As Jacobson notes, when “questions pertaining to slavery or expansion took center stage… racial differences among white

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populations receded” (p. 44). The salient racial category became an all-encompassing Whiteness, relegating ethnic/national distinctions to the background in the face of common Jim Crow laws (e.g., public spaces with zones designated as “Whites Only” or “Colored Only”). In such a context, there was no cultural space for racial ambiguity. Not only did the public have to make category decisions regarding the race of specific groups, but members of the groups themselves were forced to self-identify as the privileged White or the despised non-White. This explains how ethnic groups that arrived on the shores of America as non-White became White through the cultural assimilation brought on by Jim Crow. Over time, laws appeared that provided a legal basis for this broad application of Whiteness. Jacobson notes the 1909 In re Halladjian case in Massachusetts that intentionally rendered White as an inclusive category by noting that the four Armenian petitioners had never been excluded by U.S. laws and therefore were entitled to be classified as White. Thus, in the same way that Blackness was an oppositional category (i.e., not White), Whiteness eventually became the same: to be White included everyone who was not Black or Indian (Jacobson, 1998). Jacobson concludes his treatment of this era of U.S. history by noting that: Civil rights agitation around questions of Jim Crow in the 1930s and after has quietly but decisively ratified the racial logic of white-over-color, helping so many immigrant Hebrews, Letts, Celts, and Mediterraneans to become the Caucasians of our modern-day visual and conceptual lexicon. (pp. 244–245)

4

Resisting Jim Crow

One of the common misconceptions regarding Black citizens during the Jim Crow era is that they were passive recipients of violence and injustice during this time. However, as examined in the excellent historical analysis by Vincent Harding in There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, there have always been streams of resistance emanating from the Black community. From slave spirituals cloaked in religious language to mask their subversive intent, to forbidden assemblies in pine bluffs that formed “the invisible institution” (the harbinger of the Black Church), Blacks in America have always resisted the tyranny of a nation meant to destroy them. Three prevailing ideologies emerged regarding the appropriate moral response to Jim Crow: accommodationism (or, assimilationism), nationalism,

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and integrationism. Accommodationism, most often associated with the pioneering work of Booker T. Washington, advocated that the best approach to Jim Crow was not to challenge it directly, but attempt to carve out the best life possible within the system. The focus, therefore, was on the cultivation of vocational skills subject to the constraints of the period (primarily farming, industrial, and domestic work). The overarching perspective of accommodationism was a self-imposed gradualism: change will come in time, but it must come at the comfortability of the larger White population. Blacks, if they excelled at the limited opportunities presented to them, would prove to the broader culture that they were ready to take on the full mantle of civic participation and equal rights. In his famous 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech delivered to a largely White audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Washington argued that the United States was not ready for Black equality, but – using the metaphor of a ship lost at sea – the Black population could prepare for such a time by accepting the conventional wisdom of the time and “Cast[ing] down your bucket where you are.” Washington, catching the ear of numerous philanthropists, was able to raise enormous funds toward the erection of schools and vocational institutes for Blacks. Nationalism, whose proponents included Malcolm X, the Black Power Movement, and the Black Panthers, articulated a radical response to Jim Crow by advocating for the establishment of social, economic, political, and religious institutions apart from the hegemony of White society. Unlike segregationism, which advocated separation based upon relations of White superiority and Black subordination, nationalism contended that Black citizens needed to separate under equal relations in order to focus unhindered on its two primary goals: a positive Black self-identity and Black self-determination. Self-identity was an important concern for nationalists due to their contention that America, as its core, was damaging to the psychological makeup of its Black citizens even beyond the outward manifestations of Jim Crow. This was the basis for the groundbreaking work done by sociologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark that culminated in their famous “doll experiment” which demonstrated the devastating mental and emotional toll that Jim Crow exacted. This study would be a significant part of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that is considered the formal beginning of the classical civil rights movement. Lastly, integrationism, largely associated with Martin Luther King Jr., maintained that resistance to Jim Crow should largely take place in the legal realm. Integrationists affirmed the soundness of American ideals as stated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, contending that Jim Crow could best be eradicated by overturning the formal and informal structures that conflict with the country’s nobler (though ideal) aspirations. As such,

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integrationism did not focus on the establishment of Black institutions, more concerned to fight for the full and uninhibited engagement of Blacks in existing centers of American life. The formal structures that characterized Jim Crow came to an end in the 1960s, largely due to seminal legal gains, most notably: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling (that prohibited laws banning interracial relationships), and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Recent scholarship pertaining to Jim Crow has focused on the modern-day systems that continue to implicitly reproduce the same racial inequities that were explicitly sanctioned during the Jim Crow era. Even though formal Jim Crow era laws have been deemed unconstitutional, the same structural relations of inequality that characterized Jim Crow, and even slavery, continue to persist. A notable example of this intellectual trajectory is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama. With more Black citizens either in prison, on probation, or on parole today than were enslaved in the middle of the 19th century, Alexander explores the state-sanctioned criminalization of Black bodies that are “leased” to businesses for the extraction of cheap labor. Furthermore, Alexander argues, the assignation of the label “felon” to mass quantities of Black bodies surreptitiously allows for the ongoing legal disenfranchisement of Black citizens in the same cultural categories that were once the focus of Jim Crow laws (e.g., voting, employment, housing). This argument – that the alleged gains of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement are largely “non-events” that merely reorganized structures of oppression – is being made with increasing force by a group of scholars organized around a relatively-recent interpretive framework known as “Afro-pessimism.” Many of the seminal figures in this movement, such as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, Frank Wilderson III, and Jared Sexton, focus on the social constructions of Blackness and Whiteness as problematic features of contemporary America that undergird ongoing systems of discrimination. Therefore, many scholars contend, the response to Jim Crow in the 21st century should not be the celebration of its formal demise a half century earlier, but rather the ongoing struggle against current manifestations in the face of a protean White supremacy.

References Ansley, F. L. (1989). Stirring the ashes: Race, class and the future of civil rights scholarship. Cornell Law Review, 74, 993–1077. Civil Rights Act of 1875.

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Civil Rights Cases. 109 U.S. 3. Supreme Court of the United States. 1883. Enforcement Act of 1870. Jacobson, M. F. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Harvard University Press. Naturalization Act of 1790. U.S. Const. amend. XIII. U.S. Const. amend. XIV. Woodward, C. V. (2002). The strange career of Jim Crow: A commemorative edition. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 45

Labor and Whiteness Erin Dyke

Related Entries: Capitalism; Intersectionality; Neoliberalism; Settler Colonialism; Social Class

… The wealth of the U.S. nation is predicated on early Anglo European settlers’ violent appropriation of Indigenous land and acts of genocide against its peoples. It is also predicated on the free labor of enslaved African, especially West African, peoples to farm, mine and otherwise extract resources from stolen Indigenous lands. Stolen land and labor during the 16th through 19th centuries created a wealthy elite owning class, whose descendants continue, today, to benefit from generations of wealth and land accumulation. With the abolition of slavery, waged work gained primacy in the late 19th and early 20th century – a period of stark political-economic change in the industrializing U.S. Offering up illustrative examples, the following provides a brief overview of the emergence of “white labor” in the U.S. and its impacts on organized labor and interrelated social movements to resist the ongoing Indigenous land accumulation and labor exploitation by the U.S. and transnational ruling class.

1

Industrializing America and the Emergence of White Labor

Critical race and whiteness scholars have argued that up until the mid-to-late 19th century, racialized categories were contradictory, changing, and regionally specific to the social and political landscapes of the Northeast, North (now Minnesota), South, Indian Territory (now-Oklahoma), and West Coast. This period in history was one of immense change: Post-Civil War Black, Indigenous, agrarian populist, Chinese worker, and Irish and Eastern European immigrant radical socialist, among other resistance movements threatened the contingent social order of the emerging nation. In the early colonies, the Anglo-European ruling elite had already begun “racially elevating” poor white European indentured servants, the majority of the non-enslaved workforce, by ensuring free white men’s “legal, political, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_045

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emotional, social, and financial status […] was directly related to the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes” (Thandeka, 2001, p. 43). Laws and policies emerged that encoded and hierarchized racial and gender difference and responded primarily to white indentured servants’ “intraclass collaboration” with enslaved workers, who often conspired to run away together, engaged in sexual relationships, and otherwise caused land and slave owners trouble (p. 44). Legal and social mechanisms of racial and gender hierarchy persisted in the industrializing U.S. as a means to tamp down on worker rebelliousness. Many critical whiteness scholars have suggested that constructions and mobilizations of racist stereotypes have played (and continue to play) a critical role in not-quite-white communities’ self- and community-shaming of cultural practices and ways of being not considered compatible with whiteness. Thandeka (2001) describes the ways in which the widespread practice of minstrelsy in this era, or white actors’ comedic blackface stage performances, participated in this self-shaming process. Such performances articulated Blackness visà-vis the white social imagination. Minstrelsy (and, today, related forms of entertainment that peddle in stereotype) enabled whitening communities to mock and distance themselves from “non-white” parts of themselves (i.e., their desires for collectivity, alternative kinship practices, and leisure over work). Participation as actor or audience, allowed whitening communities to socially subscribe to the “superiority” of white ways of being, including rugged individualism, a Protestant work ethic, and heteronormative nuclear family arrangements. Provisionally, white communities’ subscription to the imagined superiority of whiteness had deleterious effects on the capacities of emerging multiracial worker uprisings. As an illustrative example, in 1877, a tenuously biracial socialist workers’ council took over the St. Louis city government and declared a commune for nearly a week. The council was connected to a larger, national general strike effort against four major railroad companies conspiring together to cut workers’ wages. While police repression, in part, ended the strike and city takeover, “an increasing desire among white strike leaders to distance themselves from Black participation and to redefine the struggle as one of ‘white labor’” contributed to ending the rebellion from within, including an unrealized plan to hire 500 “special policemen” to remove Black participants from protests (Roediger, 1999, p. 167). Roediger (1999) writes that the biracial effort illuminates both the contingency of race and racialization during the Reconstruction era and the violent efforts to redefine the labor movement as one led by and for “white labor,” more specifically white working men. One of the more revolutionary early union efforts included a push for industrial unionism. The largest industrial movement in the U.S. was led by

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the Industrial Workers of the World (members of which were/are colloquially called “wobblies”), an explicitly anti-capitalist, multiracial, and, in part, mixed gender union movement formed on the heels of the Haymarket Rebellion in Chicago. Where emerging and more powerful trade union organizations would not organize – due to perceptions that the struggles were unwinnable or racially undesireable – the IWW tended to organize. Its most successful committee was the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), which, at its height, comprised around 100,000 multiracial members across the nation. The AWO pulled off one of the largest agricultural worker uprisings of its era in 1904, creating “‘the world’s longest picket line’ running 800 miles from Kansas up to Rapid City, South Dakota… Confronted with a critical labor shortage at the time, the growers had to give in” (Sakai, 2014, p. 155). Despite the organization’s multiracialism, historians of the IWW suggest that its failure, in practice, to create antiracist, anti-sexist leadership and organizing practices, alongside (and partly due to) its violent repression by the state, ensured that revolutionary industrial unionism remained (and continues to remain) a marginal ideology within the broader labor movement.

2

Whiteness and the Emergence of Trade Unions

The history of the IWW offers an example of the significant role violent repression played in short-circuiting multiracial worker organizing. In her memoir, historian and Oklahoman Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2006) recounts her wobbly grandfather’s vicious physical attack by Klu Klux Klan members in the 1910s for subscribing to the IWW’s racial politics. As in many other places, the Klan grew in power and position within the governance structures of Oklahoma, ousting its substantial socialist element. Often companies would hire groups of armed men to protect their interests. In 1917, Mexican copper miners organized as part of the IWW to strike against the mining companies that controlled the town of Bisbee, Arizona. More than a thousand men were rounded up by a vigilante militia, hired by the mining companies and their interests, detained, and then illegally deported to Mexico. It is during this era of the co-constitutive decline of the IWW and socialist, antiracist, and militant action tendencies in the labor movement writ large that we can understand the development of contemporary labor unions. Often, as with the Arizona IWW example, companies would hire their own armed forces to quell labor uprisings. The 1914 Ludlow Massacre (21 people killed, including 11 children) and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia (around 100 people killed) were tipping points that finally spurred the government to intervene in labor-capital relations (Smith, 2018).

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Early labor acts, like the Railway Labor Act of 1926 began to create mediating boards between companies and their workers. It wasn’t until the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act), that basic governmental protections were established for unionizing and unionized workers. The act legally protected the right to collective bargain and to participate in collective action, including the right to engage in a strike. Later, the TaftHartley Act of 1947 would roll back many of these protections, including making it illegal to engage in more militant actions, like wildcat strikes, and forcing union members to sign non-communist affidavits. These acts increasingly ensured the bureaucratization and centralization of white masculinist union leadership. In effect, such acts and governmental regulation of labor organization pushed out the more radical elements of industrial unions or otherwise. On the education scene in 1940s New York, the Teachers Union (TU) comprised a mainly women-led, community-based labor movement that vied for control of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s major teachers’ union. Many members of TU were also members of the Communist Party and organized on a platform of anti-poverty and anti-racism and in solidarity with parents and Black and Brown-led community-based organizations. With the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and the McCarthy-era repression of communism, many TU teachers were ousted from their jobs and the TU declined in membership and influence, and eventually disbanded. Similarly, the Chicago Teachers Federation’s first vice president, Margaret Haley, fought for inclusion within the American Federation of Teachers in the early 20th century. As a union activist, she struggled against the corporate evasion of taxes that produced stark inequalities within the Chicago public school system. The broader history of teacher unionization to this day is largely one of women union activists fighting to be taken seriously by their broader union organizations and the men who, in effect, made and continue to make most educational decisions, including city, administrator, and school board officials. As labor laws continued to constrain the work and role of unions through articulating increasingly employer-friendly demarcations of legal and illegal union activities, trade unions of majority white men workers in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) gained power and influence within the New Deal-era Democratic Party by constraining actions disruptive to production and smoothing over relations with employers. At the same time, the Roosevelt-led Democratic Party in power used violent force to shut down poor worker of Color uprisings, like the previously mentioned Mexican-American mine worker uprising in the Southwest or railway

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strike in St. Louis. Workers of Color were further excluded from formal trade union organizations through race laws and ever-present white supremacism. The emergence of trade unions and their integration with the Democratic Party in the early-mid 20th century illuminate the ways in which whiteness as an (a)racial category became more rigid and fixed, subsuming and assimilating an emergent white working class.

3

Trade Unionism in Tension with Civil Rights Era Movements

Still into the 1960s and 70s, especially in major urban areas, many white ethnic communities were still only precariously white. During the Civil Rights Era, as Black Power, Third World Liberation, Feminist, Gay and Lesbian, AntiImperialist, and American Indian movements gained momentum, the U.S. trade labor movement began to decline. With limited capacity to organize more militant action and pressure combined with labor leaders’ entanglements with the Democratic Party and corporate interests, industrial production shifted to the less-unionized South (partly a result of the Taft-Hartley Act enabling the passage of state “right to work” anti-union laws), and eventually to Latin America and overseas. Jon Shelton (2017) in his study of the teacher strikes during the Civil Rights Era, suggests that the education labor movement played a significant role in shifting public support from a labor-liberal coalition to a predominating neoliberal ideology. “Labor-liberal coalition” describes the New Deal-era partnership between the Democratic Party and labor, underpinned by the understanding that a healthy economy is predicated on workers’ ability to make enough money to buy things. Generally, there was tacit support for unions to fight and win decent working conditions. However, during the “long 70s” of various social uprisings in the U.S., racial tensions were high. During this time, more than 300 teacher strikes took place across the nation – the most notorious and better studied taking place in New York and New Jersey. Shelton (2017) argues that corporate interests and many white working and middle class people comprised a “producerist” coalition, or “individuals” who supposedly work, make, do, and otherwise contribute to society – recalling a Protestant work ethic. Striking teachers and other militant workers were imagined in the public eye as “non-producers” and at risk of becoming associated in some way with the anti-Black “welfare queen” trope, and as collectivist, lazy, or people who want more money for less work. Within teachers’ union movements, struggles over gender hierarchies and ideological sway continued to

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persist, with waves of social movement unionism sparking struggles for ethnic and decolonial studies, anti-red-lining, and desegregation movements. Yet, teacher union leadership often, but not always, deferred solidarity with interrelated social movements in order to articulate demands that aimed to carve out and stabilize a white, middle class professional status. One significant example is Jerard Podair’s (2002) careful study of the United Federation of Teachers’ (UFT’s) series of strikes in 1968 against New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville (OHB) neighborhood experiment in Black community control. Many years of tireless grassroots organizing by a coalition of Blackled community groups, including the remaining antiracist, radical TU organizers, won a community-elected district governing board, with hiring and firing power and control over OHB’s curriculum (p. 5). The board sought to redefine school success against narrow individualism and along the lines of community responsibility (p. 76). The Albert Shanker-led UFT struck in response to the power carried by the local district board and the firing of a number of racist teachers resistant to Black curricular control. UFT leaders were particularly upset that elected board members comprised a majority of so-called “uneducated” poor Black mothers, whose movement work made the OHB experiment possible in the first place (p. 87). As the labor-liberal coalition declined in public support, neoliberalism gained primacy. “Neoliberalism relies on the notion that virtually every aspect of life is better off organized by a marketplace because the ‘competition’ sorts out the winners from the losers” (Shelton, 2017, pp. 21–22). With the development of technologies and mechanisms of financialization, a “healthy” economy no longer needed to rely on workers earning a decent wage. As long as workers could access credit, they could buy things. Thandeka (2001) argues that white people’s rejection of their class associations and an impossible and abusive ambition to become ruling-class-white has ensured their shackling debt. The study of whiteness and labor history in this era suggests that despite the effectiveness of the mobilization of whiteness and, interrelatedly, normative constructions of gender and sexuality to divide the working class; antiracist, anti-colonial, and/or feminist/queer working class movements have always existed and challenged (and continue to challenge) trade unions to grapple with the conflation of “worker” with white and masculine/man. For example, in the 1970s, a transnational feminist movement demanded “wages for housework” and sprouted organizations like Black Women for Wages for Housework. The movement argued that domestic work was, in fact, unpaid yet socially necessary labor. Often led primarily by People of Color and women, such movements have challenged the ways in which trade unions have often historically capitulated to stabilizing whiteness and white supremacy through racial exclusions from union organizations and/or union leadership

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347

Whiteness in/and Contemporary Resurgences in Organized Labor

Despite the ways in which the predominating logic of neoliberalism has impacted the capacity and support for labor organization, social movements from below have spurred hesitant union leadership to shift from mainly or only lobbying strategies to take up campaigns that major unions previously considered unwinnable. For example, in 2012, on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began to put resources into organizing low wage service workers under the banner “Fight for 15,” demanding the federal minimum wage be raised to $15 dollars per hour. SEIU joined the effort after a number of poor workers’ unions successfully organized fast food strikes in major urban areas. In other sectors comprised predominantly of immigrant, women, and/or workers of Color, grassroots union movements have been gaining traction. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have organized primarily migrant farm workers and workers across the food chain to fight for fair wages and working conditions, addressing the intersections between food and labor justice. Non-trade union-affiliated grassroots movements in many states to organize home health workers and domestic workers have fought for liveable wages, social supports, and fair working conditions (Tait, 2005). Some labor scholars have suggested that, given the preponderance of anti-union sentiment, laws, and power in recent decades coupled with trade unions’ race and gender track record, poor worker-led movements provide important lessons for both strategy and more liberatory political visions for the labor movement as a whole (Tait, 2005). The recent resurgence in the education labor movement suggests a possible shift in the race and gender politics of labor organizing. In spring 2018, statewide teachers strikes cascaded through four primarily Republican-led states with strong anti-union laws on their books. Through coordination of grassroots solidarity organizing, teachers, staff, and students pushed established teachers unions to support a mass strike action. On the heels of the initial strike wave, the next academic year saw strikes in some of the most populous school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, and another statewide two-day statewide strike in West Virginia. The 2011 Wisconsin teacher walkouts and the 2012 Chicago teachers strike are oft-cited inspirations and foregrounding events for this most recent strike resurgence. The largely women-led teacher strikes are the largest national worker rebellion of late and encompass many elements of antiracist social movement unionism. For example, in Los Angeles, where teachers are majority Latinx, demands went well beyond wages and targeted the ways schools had

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been impacted by intersecting racist gentrification and privatization schemes. In West Virginia’s latest strike, teachers walked out against a bill that aimed to privatize schools through charter schools and a voucher system despite a teacher pay raise included in the legislation. The bill would have predominantly affected the schooling opportunities for poor white and communities of Color in the state. These latest examples gesture to the ways in which new union movements cannot be read outside of the broader antiracist and decolonial movements that have made them possible. Further, increasing public support for organized labor and labor militancy suggests that the more rigid, racialized associations with union militants-as-nonproducers may be waning or perhaps, merely shifting. For now, the rising tide of the education labor movement and its widespread public support suggest a challenge to the sedimented white and masculinist associations with “worker.”

5

In Summary

Since the colonization of the U.S., the ruling class has mobilized legal, social, and other mechanisms to create and sediment racial and gender hierarchies in response to acts of multiracial worker solidarity that would threaten the predominating social order. White communities’ subscriptions to white supremacy – facilitated through the creation and circulation of stereotypes, state repression of more radical labor movements, and the encoding of racial and gender hierarchies into law and policy – have constrained and limited the potency of the labor movement. Today, with the decline of the labor-liberal coalition and the primacy of neoliberalism in governance and policy, the successful militancy of poor workers’ and education workers’ movements suggest significant shifts and openings in the race and gender politics of contemporary labor movements.

References Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2006). Red dirt: Growing up Okie. University of Oklahoma Press. Federici, S. (1975). Wages against housework. Falling Wall Press [for] the Power of Women Collective. Roediger, D. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso.

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Sakai, J. (2014). Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from mayflower to modern. PM Press. Shelton, J. (2017). Teacher strike! Public education and the making of a new American political order. University of Illinois Press. Smith, S. (2018). Subterranean fire (Updated edition): A history of working-class radicalism in the United States. Haymarket Books. Tait, V. (2016). Poor worker’s unions: Rebuilding labor from below (Completely revised and updated edition). Haymarket Books. Thandeka. (2000). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 46

Ladson-Billings, Gloria Nini Hayes and Leta Hooper

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Omni and Winant; Whiteness as Property

… Gloria Ladson-Billings is a distinguished academic and educational researcher. She is a Professor Emerita and former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has won numerous honors: she was the 2005–2006 president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), a recipient of the AERA Distinguished Research Award, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is best known for her contributions to the social and historical context of schooling and curriculum, critical race theory in education, culturally relevant pedagogy, a critical analysis of the racial achievement gap, and teachers who are successful working with Black students. One of her many significant contributions to the field of education is her co-authored article with William F. Tate IV (1995), “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” and her subsequent piece, “Just What is Critical Race Theory, and What’s It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” (1998). These works extend the intellectual contributions of legal scholars; Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris, Lani Guinier, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Linda Greene, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and; sociological scholars Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Most notably, the theory of racial realism by Derrick Bell was deeply influential to Ladson-Billings. Racial realism requires an understanding of the permanence of racism in the U.S., thereby informing how Black Americans should rethink how racial progress can be accomplished while living in a continual condition of white supremacy. Informed by these scholars, Ladson-Billings and Tate assert that to understand school inequities, one must begin with a premise on race, property, and their intersections; thereby articulating a lens of racial realism that should be considered in the study of education and work of educational researchers.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_046

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In “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” they name three central propositions: (1) Race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States; (2) U.S. society is based on property rights, and; (3) the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently, school) inequity. (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 48) This influential intellectual labor of introducing legal scholarship to education, illustrating how schooling is fundamentally about white racial dominance, laid the groundwork for critical race theory (CRT) in education. As follows, they introduced tenets of CRT; racism as endemic and deeply ingrained in American life; a reinterpretation of ineffective Civil Rights law, and; challenging claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, pp. 55–56). Thus, when using a critical race lens in education, the emphasis is not on the disingenuous claim post Brown v. Board of Education that educational equality exists and multicultural reforms will eliminate racism and solve inequities, but on the inherent function of education and schooling in the U.S.; that the education system was created to perpetuate and maintain white racial domination. Therefore, CRT in education implores educators to question race first and then create “radically new paradigms that ensure justice” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 62). Ladson-Billings’ (1998) follow up article, “Just What is Critical Race Theory, and What’s It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” uses CRT to analyze the intersection of race and citizenship as it pertains to the goal of “social justice and democracy and the role of education in reproducing or interrupting current practices” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 9). Since education is considered a pillar of democracy, she explicates a proposition of CRT she believes most applicable to understanding educational issues, the conceptualization of “property” in the U.S. “The significance of property ownership as a prerequisite to citizenship was tied to the British notion that only people who owned the country, not merely those who lived in it, were eligible to make decisions about it” (LadsonBillings, 1998, p. 15, emphasis in original). She argues that this understanding is imperative in order to grasp the educational experiences and outcomes for Black Americans. The notion of who belongs, who is entitled to education, and Whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), presented a particular problem for Black Americans “because not only were they not accorded individual civil rights because they were not White and owned no property, but they were constructed as property!” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 15). Therefore, the construction

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of Whiteness as the ultimate form of property (Harris, 1993) ensures that Black Americans are positioned so “they will never possess this ultimate property” hence, they are pessimistic about U.S. citizenship (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 15). After establishing the role of property rights in understanding citizenship, Ladson-Billings traces legislation that has attempted to address educational inequalities for Black Americans, yet they have fallen short in redressing pass inequities or creating an education system where Black Americans are supported in academic achievement. Thus, she articulates that CRT can be used as an analytical tool for the constant inequity that people of color experience and demonstrates this by using the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment, school funding, and desegregation as examples of the relationship between CRT and education. In sum, school curriculum in the U.S. is “a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (Swartz, 1992, p. 341); the instruction of Black students positions them as devoid of intellectual abilities; assessment is rooted in scientific racism that legitimizes Black students’ deficiency; since most school funding is based on property taxes, it undergirds institutional and structural racism, and; desegregation has most been successful in advantaging Whites (Bell, 1990). The pattern she establishes makes evident that “CRT becomes an important intellectual and social tool for deconstruction, reconstruction, and construction: deconstruction of oppressive structures and discourses, reconstruction of human agency, and construction of equitable and socially just relations of power” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 9). Ladson-Billings’ (2006) work, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” shows an evolution of her work from historicizing educational discrimination against Black students, to articulating a CRT for education, to offering a comprehensive breakdown on the state of education. At the time, national discourse on education was consumed with conversations about the “achievement gap,” a term referring to the disparity in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latinx and White, and recent immigrant and White students. The article critiqued White supremacist notions and deficit-centered research that suggested that the achievement gap between minority and disadvantaged students compared to White students exists due to cultural deficits of Black, Brown and poor students. She suggests the term “education debt,” a term and concept to move the discourse in a direction of accountability; one that is transparent about the debt that the U.S. has accumulated at the expense of Black and Brown children. This article uses economics and the concept of debt as literal and metaphorical analysis to explain how and what is owed to disenfranchised Black, Brown,

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and immigrant students. She theorizes that the education debt, the systematic withholding of schooling resources, has created a historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debt. The historical debt documents the history of racist public schooling in the U.S. From forbidding the education of enslaved Africans, segregated schools, American Indian boarding schools, and the exclusion of Latinx students. The historical debt is a well-documented pattern of White supremacist logics to ensure White racial domination. The economic debt provides the quantitative reality of funding disparities. Funding disparities in the U.S. can be mapped to the racial and ethnic makeup of schools as school funding is based on property taxes. “This pattern of inequitable funding has occurred over centuries,” thus, because earnings ratios are related to years of schooling and data suggests that more schooling leads to higher earnings, there is no surprise then that the economic debt is later compounded by the wealth disparity that mirrors the racial and ethnic data of the economic debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 6). “The sociopolitical debt reflects the degree to which communities of color are excluded from the civic process” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 7). This includes little to no access to franchise, voting discrimination, and lack of power and decision making in schools and districts that dictated the educational experiences of students of color. Lastly, the moral debt, is about the inability of the U.S. to live in line with values that are espoused regarding what we know is right, equality, equity, and democracy. One of the most egregious examples are settler colonial logics that aim to fully eradicate Indigenous peoples from their land, culture, and futures. Ladson-Billings’ articulation of an education debt is a call to teachers, educational researchers, policy makers, and communities to address the aforementioned historical, economic, sociopolitical and moral debt because not only is it the equitable thing to do but because it has serious implications for the kind of lives people can live and the kind of world we live in. She suggests three major reasons for addressing the debt, (1) the impact the debt has on present education progress, (2) the value of understanding the debt in relation to past education research findings, and (3) the potential for forging a better educational future (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 9). This article has been a critical call to action and influential in the field of educational research; the theorization of the discipline gap and the opportunity gap are examples. Inspired by her personal experience of teaching and findings of research that examines multicultural and equity teaching practices, Gloria Ladson-Billings coined the term culturally relevant pedagogy. Ladson-Billings’s purpose of developing this pedagogy is to bring forth attention to the teachers’ exemplary pedagogy of and for African American students in teacher education research.

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According to Ladson-Billings (1994), culturally relevant pedagogy is designed “to empower students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 20). There are three tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy that teachers need to adopt: initiating and maintaining student learning and academic success, developing and maintaining cultural competency of students, and incorporating socio-political consciousness in the school curricula in order to challenge the social order that frequently denigrates people of color. Culturally relevant pedagogy is committed to the empowerment of marginalized and minoritized communities. This pedagogy recognizes students of color’s knowledges, experiences, familial and community resources such that they are included in a school’s existing curriculum in order to disrupt the ways whiteness erases and problematizes people of color. Culturally relevant pedagogy has also influenced scholarship in teacher education to challenge neoliberal education policies, individualism, competition, and mainstream pedagogy. The workings of culturally relevant pedagogy have evolved to advance theories such as culturally sustaining pedagogy, which adopted the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy but also examined identities that are not limited to race and ethnicity and students’ performances of extracurricular activities at school (Paris & Alim, 2017). Ladson-Billings published several well-acclaimed books that are widely used in the teacher education field: The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers for African American Children, Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, and Beyond the Big House: African American Educators on Teacher Education. These books were written in response to the collective concerns from multicultural educators following the civil rights era on pre-service and in-service teachers inadequately prepared to support students of color to academically succeed. The tenets of critical race theory are executed in order to oppose the pathologies and stereotypes of Black and Brown communities. They also offer alternative research methodologies that challenge traditional conceptions of intellectualism, pedagogy, and epistemology. These methodologies aim to counter the positivism paradigm in research, elitism, and access to knowledge limited to scholars in higher education. The research methodologies and theories provided in these books redefine the notion of “good teaching” and “caring.” The book, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers for African American Children, highlights the common ideologies and practices teachers used to successfully teach African American students. She makes a connection on how the traits of culturally relevant pedagogy that were delivered by the eight teachers echoes sentiments of Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Based on the educators’ experiences, Ladson-Billings addresses the tenets of culturally

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relevant pedagogy which are: (a) teachers perceptions of themselves influence how they see their students, (b) teachers being contributors of their students’ community and encouraging students to do the same for their community; (c) teachers sees the students as contributors of knowledge, (d) teachers making connections of students identities through a global, community, and national lens; and (e) teacher seeing success for all students. Ladson-Billings illustrates how culturally relevant pedagogy and African feminist epistemology contrast westernized methodologies and philosophies that focus on individualism and positionality of people based on a racial superiority structure. This epistemology is liberating and applicable to people of any identity. Considering the works of critical pedagogy and identification of “experts” or “organic intellectuals,” African feminist epistemology valued the teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and judgments as well as African American parents’ voices for determining conceptions of effective pedagogy. These books unapologetically centered the voices of educators of color, specifically Black and/or African American educators in order to draw attention to the systematic oppressive structures in PK-12 and higher education institutions. Inspired by the biblical passage of Moses passing his leadership responsibility to Joshua during their journey to the promised land, the book, Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms shows Ladson-Billings’s vision for teacher education programs to prepare prospective and novice teachers to effectively teach racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse children. In this book, Ladson-Billings takes a step further by illustrating the novice teachers’ experiences of making meaning of culturally relevant pedagogies while enrolled in teacher preparation programs. It also addressed the importance on the presence of teacher educators of color in teacher education/preparation programs, partnership with local community agencies and families, dialogue influenced by critical pedagogy to unpack novice teacher’s interactional experiences with students and families, classroom dynamics, and refraining the use of “single static measurement” (p. 76) as a standard to determine student’s and teacher’s knowledge of content. These factors are essential in redesigning because it prohibits the reproduction of a racially homogeneous – that is, White – and monolingual teaching force. In response to the most salient but unmentioned dominance of White male professors in teacher education, the book, Beyond the Big House; African American Educators on Teacher Education uses portraiture as a methodology to shed light on the experiences of seven African American teacher educators who constantly had to navigate whiteness in order to be successful and tenured in higher education. Ladson-Billings skillfully explains how the “Big House,” which is a plantation logic that was common during the enslavement period

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of African Americans in the U.S., symbolizes universities and colleges today for faculty of color. She selected prominent Black American revolutionary historical figures during the 19th and 20th century to align the traits of teacher educators represented in the book. Gloria Ladson-Billings has also published numerous articles that address how race influences the standards, development, structure, and students’ positionality of learning and performance for content curriculum, such as social studies, math, science, and language arts. Her scholarly work in this area unpacks how the superficial to non-existent considerations of race in the official curriculum is systematic and impacts students of color. The impact has traditionally affected their participation and perceptions of thinking in the classroom and vision of themselves in various professions and society. For example, in the book chapter, “Differing Concepts of Citizenship: Schools and Communities as Sites of Civic Development,” Ladson-Billings argue how passive, irrelevant, uncontroversial curriculum and instruction fails to develop and position students as active citizens in a democratic society. Rather, the meaning of citizenship is limited to White racial identity, adoption of American nationality, and common political practices. In summary, the body of Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work brings attention to White supremacist logics within the structural and institutional paradigms of schooling in the U.S. Her work is particularly relevant for the fields of teacher education, anthropology and education, cultural studies, critical race theory, social justice education, and sociology. The collection of Gloria Ladson-Billings’s work uses critical consciousness to disrupt and raise moral and ethical questions about the “normalcy” and objectivity of teaching, research, and educational leadership practices. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s advocacy is concentrated on equity for people of color, and as such, her contributions to social justice and transformative work in teacher education will long inform the fields of teaching, learning, and educational research.

References Bell, D. (1990). Brown and the interest-convergence dilemma. In D. Bell (Ed.), Shades of Brown: New perspectives on school desegregation (pp. 90–106). Teachers College Press. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707–1791. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. Jossey-Bass.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. Ladson-Billings, G. (2001). Crossing over to Canaan: The journey of new teachers in diverse classrooms. Jossey-Bass. Ladson-Billings, G. (2005). Differing concepts of citizenship: Schools and communities as sites of civic development. In N. Noddings (Ed.), Educating citizens for global awareness (pp. 69–80). Teachers College Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press. Swartz, E. (1992). Emancipatory narratives: Rewriting the master script in the school curriculum. Journal of Negro Education, 61, 341–355.

CHAPTER 47

Latinx Peoples and Whiteness Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Capitalism; Privilege; Settler Colonialism; White Supremacy

… The term Latinx is the gender-inclusive term for people with Latin American ancestry and heritage in the United States. Latinx identity is complicated on multiple fronts, including the very term, which is not actually Spanish. Latino is masculine in Spanish, Latina is feminine, but using the masculine for all is patriarchal, and including both Latina and Latino, for instance with “Latin@,” functions to exclude non-binary peoples with Latin American identities. Thus, Latinx functions as the most inclusive term for those with ancestry in Central and South America in the U.S. today. The history of Latinx peoples and whiteness largely originates with the Mexican American War, in 1848. After the U.S. victory, Mexico lost over half of its territory to the U.S., eventually becoming the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The war also meant the maintenance of Texas as a state in the U.S., though it had been contested by President Santa Anna of Mexico, where it had been part of the country prior to 1836. The result was a wide range of peoples who had been “Mexican” becoming “American,” as citizenship was extended to those peoples living in the newly conquered territories. We can think of these peoples as the first Latinx folks in the United States and can also get a sense of how significant it is that in these states the people did not move, the borders did. With a rise in population of Spanish speaking Latinx peoples in the U.S., anti-Latinx sentiment became part of the repertoire of white supremacy, following many of the same patterns as anti-black and anti-indigenous racisms. After the Mexican American War, many industries in the United States sought to import laborers from Mexico, especially to work on the railroads and other emerging industries. With new immigrants came white supremacist resistance, and a host of laws and policies banning Latinx peoples from being able to access goods and services deemed only for white peoples. In the Southwest, these were most often explicated as bans on Mexicans, with signs like “No © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_047

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Mexicans Allowed” displayed outside shops and businesses. Similar to black peoples in the South, Latinx peoples in the Southwest regularly confronted white lynch mobs and evasions of justice. The California gold rush exacerbated anti-Latinx white supremacy as white peoples moved into the territory to prospect and faced locals who were resistant to white peoples working to extract riches from their lands. Competition for lands and claims often ended with white folks banding together to overwhelm and even murder Latinx peoples. Sometimes these were premised on claims that a Latinx man had slept with a white woman, or that a Latinx person had committed murder. Vigilante justice and widespread white racial superiority resulted in many Latinx peoples being dispossessed, and hundreds if not thousands lost their lives to white violence. By the time of the Great Depression a broad narrative of immigrant peoples taking the jobs of white citizens had taken hold. This took on a racialized character in the context of Latinx people, who “looked” foreign and thus were marked as immigrants regardless of actual citizenship and immigration status. The Great Depression made competition for work especially fierce, and the U.S. government responded with massive deportations. From the Great Depression to the 1950s, the U.S. deported over 1.5 million people to Mexico – over half were U.S. citizens. This pattern persists, as deportations tend to accelerate most in times of economic turmoil and job competition. President Barack Obama deported the most people of any president in U.S. history during his eight-year term, which followed and responded to the Great Recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Latinx peoples faced a range of exclusions in the Southwestern U.S. from the 19th century on. They were often banned from restaurants, shopping markets, and theatres. Further, they were required to attend segregated schools, though there were not explicit laws requiring such separation as there were for black students in the U.S. South. So-called “Mexican schools” began to show up in the 1870s and tended to emerge in farming communities as schools that offered instruction in Spanish for the children of farm workers. But these schools continued to grow, and soon were not only in rural farming communities but were commonplace in cities as well. By 1940, 80% of Latinx students attended a segregated school based on their identity. Again, paralleling much of the white supremacy faced by black people in the South, Mexican schools were underfunded and lacked many of the basic resources needed for education. Second or third hand textbooks, rotting and molding materials, and poor facilities were all hallmarks of the segregated schools Latinx youth were forced to attend. The schools often had an explicitly vocational orientation, functioning to socially reproduce Latinx youth as laborers for agriculture and other industries in the Southwest. These separate schools for Latinx children were challenged in the

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Mendez v. Westminster School District case that went to the Ninth Circuit Court after the district challenged the original ruling that the separate schools for Latinx students constituted a violation of their constitutional rights. California subsequently outlawed school segregation in 1946, with other states in the Southwest following suit thereafter. Still, anti-Latinx sentiment continued, albeit typically with different targets identified primarily with a country of ancestry, like Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Mexican. In the 1970s, Spanish speaking activists successfully lobbied the census bureau to create a new designation for Latinx peoples, “Hispanic.” The need arose because activists wanted the government to have a better record of the ways that Latinx peoples suffered poverty disproportionately from the racial group they were categorized into: white. In order to bring more attention and resources to Latinx communities, the Hispanic category was invented to bring a wide range of peoples together under one shared identity of Spanish speaking peoples with ancestry in Central and South America. As Mora (2014) argues, until the 1970s there were separate regional marketing and media efforts pitched specifically at Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Americans. The shift with the invention of the Hispanic category created a national pan-ethnic Spanish speaking media market that continues to grow today. Thus, what began as an activist justice oriented project to bring greater attention to the disproportional poverty faced by Latinx peoples became a convenient marketing strategy that nationalized what had been a regional endeavor. The result was a host of new ads and programming for Hispanic peoples that cut across differences between diverse Spanish speaking communities. But the similarities invented in the creation of Hispanic that bring together all peoples with ancestry in Latin America function to obscure the very real differences and wide variations in the group of peoples we now know as Latinx. A fourth generation white-presenting person whose great grandparents emigrated from Uruguay and does not speak Spanish compared to a darkskinned person who immigrated from Honduras last month who only speaks Spanish have seemingly very little in common. Why would both be considered Hispanic? Why would both be considered Latinx? While there remain many different conceptions and notions of who ought to be considered in the various categories of Hispanic and Latinx, we can make some broad parameters to help us understand what is entailed in either conception. Hispanic refers to peoples with an ancestral connection to Spain, even if this is only through the Spanish language. Thus, someone from Spain, or the Dominican Republic, is Hispanic. Latinx more often refers to peoples who are descended from those who survived colonization in Central and South America. This would mean someone from Spain is not Latinx, but it also means that

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peoples without a history of speaking Spanish would be considered Latinx: peoples from Brazil, Curaçao, or Haiti, for instance. Thus, Hispanic is best suited to refer to Spanish speaking peoples broadly construed, whereas Latinx functions more as a raciopolitical identity for those who are the descendants of peoples who were colonized in Central and South America. Importantly, there can often be strong associations and preferences in different communities for different identifiers to be used – many Chicanos or Tejanas might resist identifying as Hispanic, for instance. Other groups or peoples might prefer Hispanic to Latinx, and so on. The role whiteness plays in Latinx identities is multifaceted. For one, about 10% of the population of the U.S. are people who identify as white and Hispanic or Latinx. Thus, many people who are Latinx are also white. Yet, Latinx peoples have faced a host of white supremacist discrimination, from segregated public facilities and schools, to lynch mobs, to forced deportation. But Latinx peoples can be any race – thus one must look further into the particular ways white supremacy shapes the life chances of Latinx peoples. Those who are able to pass as white are more often able to live more financially secure lives than those who are not. We can thus gain a glimpse of the schisms and tensions within Latinx identity. Latinx is simultaneously racialized in the U.S. as meaning non-white, yet inclusive of a wide range of white peoples. It further calls into question the seemingly stable racial categories of other peoples, such as white or black. Latinx identities reveal the impossibility of deriving race from biology or physiognomy. They also reveal how complex intra-Latinx solidarities can be. In Rosa’s (2019) ethnography of a high school in Chicago he focuses on a series of students who identify as Puerto Rican or Mexican. He includes detailed field notes and interviews with students to learn more about how the students construct notions of Mexicanness and Puerto Ricanness as they navigate their school and neighborhoods. From hairstyles, to clothing, to foods, to language, students are quick to identify what they see as clear differences between peoples “from” Mexico and Puerto Rico – though many of the students come from families who have been in the mainland U.S. for generations. Still, with strong associations to Mexico and Puerto Rico being part of the social expectations in their high school, many of these students have to navigate the complexities of their own relationship to these places. Many of the Puerto Rican students have never been to the island, for instance, and many students do not speak Spanish. In one particularly revealing case, a student who grew up speaking Spanish in her home nearly failed an intermediate level Spanish course in college, because she did not have practice with writing formally in the language. Rosa theorizes this case and others as a kind of “languagelessness,” wherein Latinx

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youth do not possess formal academic Spanish or English, and thus seemingly do not have a language. With the close ties between Spanish and Latinx identities, Rosa showcases the title of his work, “Looking like a language, sounding like a race.” Yet this description reveals the deep complexities and complications in locating Latinx peoples as a racial group, a linguistic group, or something else. What Rosa’s work helps us with in the context of Latinx peoples and whiteness is that Latinx students navigate a host of intraracial and intraethnic tensions that are predicated on performances of their identities. Students are hailed to perform their identities in ways that offer different raciopolitical possibilities that exceed hegemonic conceptions of racial identities. Still, students who are both white and Latinx are likely to experience identity-based oppressions regardless of their racial affiliation as white. For one, many Latinx peoples who identify as white are not interpellated as white by other social actors. Others, who may pass as white, are likely to confront anti-Latinx racisms that are not directed at them, but rather are directed at Latinx others that the person might identify with. Regardless, white supremacy shapes and contorts Latinx possibilities in profound ways. Rosa calls attention to the futurist orientation of much theorizing of Latinx subjectivities. There is almost always consideration given to the demographic projections of when Latinx peoples will become x% of the population when one is reading or writing about Latinx peoples in the United States. Yet such projections take as fixed the notion of Latinx identities as stable racial categories. Perhaps something similar to Irish and Italian immigrants will happen in the coming years, with Latinx peoples “becoming” white by way of their apparent differences no longer meaning much? Perhaps Latinx people who identify as white will collectively work to no longer make such identifications as a way of resisting culpability in white supremacy? Perhaps something else entirely will happen? What should be clear, however, is that such projections presume the impossible: that we can accurately predict the future. Latinx identities cross and intersect with all racial categories and thus, perhaps, offer us ways of further resisting white supremacy by continually rejecting simplistic conceptions of racial identity and fixing such identities to particular territories.

References Mora, G. C. (2014). Making Hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats, and media constructed a new American. University of Chicago Press. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 48

Lynching Anthony C. Siracusa

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Ellison, Ralph; Jim Crow

1

Introduction

Following the Civil War, the United States seemed poised for a profound transformation in social relations. African Americans, 179,000 of whom had fought for the union to end slavery, sought and gained full citizenship with the passage of the 14th amendment. The 13th amendment banned involuntary servitude except, problematically, in the case of crime – and ended the system of black bondage that had been a hallmark of U.S. life since the nation’s founding. The 15th amendment brought the promise of enfranchisement for black men. Black families separated during slavery were reunited in cities and towns across the country by the Freedmen’s Bureau in the years following the war, and black men were elected to city councils, state legislatures, and even the U.S. Congress in the period between 1865 and the end of Reconstruction in 1877. But at every turn, these efforts among black women and men to live as fully self-governing citizens were contested and, by the late 19th century, stymied in the transition from slavery to freedom. The “Black Codes” became an early effort to use the law to restore the social order of slavery as so called “vagrancy laws” were used to punish blacks not employed as sharecroppers by southern planters. And while a Republican congress in Reconstruction attempted to prohibit such legal persecution of blacks by passing the Civil Rights Acts in 1866 and 1875 – the first over a presidential veto from Tennessean Andrew Johnson – the United States Supreme Court in 1883 ultimately invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875’s federal protection of black civil rights and paved the way for the legal discrimination and segregation of African Americans in public spaces. These legal efforts to establish non-white Americans as second-class citizens were codified in the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, whose majority opinion gave us the language “separate but equal” and made segregation the law of the land for nearly 70 years.

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But the law worked in tandem with violence, and in particular extralegal violence in the form of lynching, as many whites sought to restore American social relations to the days of chattel slavery and plantation capitalism. Between 1877 and 1945, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,000 black Americans were killed by whites without a trial – and often in public spaces using spectacle violence (Equal Justice Initiative, 2019). Lynching, as this practice came to be known, was used to prevent black economic advancement, intimidate black men and women into complying with Jim Crow, and suppress political efforts aimed at enfranchising black leaders through electoral processes. Although lynching was not the exclusive method used to achieve these goals, it did emerge as a tragically common practice in the late 19th and early 20th century as ideas about what whiteness was were shifting from a complex tapestry of ethnic-national identities into a singular, cogent, socio-political identity, a phenomenon that emerging colonial powers, including the United States, took note of as they sought to build power over nonwhite populations across the globe. The role of lynching in the late 19th and early 20th century also belonged to a discourse around the relationship between civilization and whiteness. Black voting, social equality, and black economic advancement were perceived as a threat to a modern white civilization in the United States – a phenomena most powerfully illustrated by the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” On the other hand, the brutality of spectacle lynching was seen by some “moderate” whites as an affront to this modern civilization. These so-called white moderates believed that Jim Crow segregation was a more civilized and humane way of keeping black Americans in their place. Ideas about manhood also punctuated this discourse around civilization and lynching, as white public violence against black men was often justified, falsely as the black journalist Ida B. Wells proved, by accusations that black men raped white women. In practice, the two seemingly distinct approaches of law and violence were deeply intertwined in maintaining white supremacy: spectacle lynching and public violence functioned to reinforce the strictures of Jim Crow segregation by publicly illustrating the consequences of defiance. The barbarity of lynching between 1877 and 1945 gave way to a nonviolent revolution in the United States, however, in part because the horrors of the holocaust made race-based spectacle lynching increasingly difficult to defend.

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Lynching and the Law

In the wake of the Civil War, the 4 million African Americans held in bondage migrated from rural plantations to cities and towns seeking to give reality

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to the meaning of freedom by finding lost relatives, building institutions like churches and businesses, and seeking the education denied to them under slavery. Few places were as important to this process as Memphis, Tennessee – located at the top of the Mississippi Delta, America’s fertile crescent and home to some of the largest slaveholding plantations in the country. On April 30, 1866, black soldiers from the Third Colored Infantry, still garrisoned at Fort Pickering in Memphis, scuffled with the white Irish who served on the local police force in Memphis. A congressional inquiry into what followed opened a window into the barbarous white violence that would characterize the next eight decades in the United States. On May 1, 1866, a group of white local people opened fire on a crowd in a South Memphis black neighborhood, leading to three days of fire, bullets, and rape that left 46 African Americans dead, 91 houses, four churches, and 12 schools torched, and at least five women were subjected to sexual violence and rape. The attack in Memphis represented the beginning of a white mob violence mentality directed against black Americans routinely in the late 19th and early 20th century. Whites would formally organize their violent efforts at keeping blacks from exercising political power through the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 by six confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee – including Nathan Bedford Forrest. Based on the “night riders” used to ensure blacks did not leave plantations at night without permission during enslavement, the Klan used spectacle, theatre, and ritual to intimidate and sow fear among black Americans. Congress took action to limit the Klan’s power in 1871, but it’s founding goals of using intimidation and violence to prevent black political and economic advancement was carried forward in cities and towns across the United States between 1871 and the Klan’s later revival in the 1920s. Two additional legal considerations are essential to understanding how and why lynching and extralegal violence came to be so widespread between 1880 and 1945. First, in 1872, a set of cases related to the rights of slaughterhouse owners to buy and sell meat led individual states to acquire great power in determining the scope and extent of the rights for those people living within their borders. The “Slaughterhouse Cases” narrowed those “privileges and immunities” protected by the federal government – including the guarantee of equal protection for all American citizens provided by the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Slaughterhouse Cases were critical in giving states the power to determine and enforce what black Americans could do and could not do. Secondly, in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that only those actions perpetrated by the state itself – not the actions of individual citizens – were subject to scrutiny under the equal protection clause of the U.S. constitution. This ruling opened the door for whites intent on preventing black

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economic and political advancement to use violence and murder with impunity against black Americans. These cases were concurrent with the efforts of African Americans to exercise their right to vote in the 1870s, a right guaranteed to them by the 15th amendment. But in cities across the United States, black voters were met with violence at the polls. An especially horrific example of how mob violence was used to suppress black voting occurred in Louisiana in 1872. As the African American man P.B.S. Pinchback sought to become the first black governor elected in the United States, black freedmen flocked to the polls to support his candidacy. But on election day they were met at the Colfax County courthouse by whites armed with a canon and rifles. Ultimately, as many as 150 black freedmen were killed – the majority of whom surrendered to the armed whites but were killed nonetheless. When federal troops were withdrawn from the former confederate states in 1877, the final protections on life and property for recently freed Black people were removed. With the repeal of the Civil Rights cases in 1883, black Americans no longer had either legal protection or physical federal protection from wanton white violence. With more than 90% of African Americans living in the former confederacy or border states, legal discrimination against black Americans became widespread and violence was used routinely to try and prevent black Americans from changing these legal, social, and economic conditions.

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Lynching, Civilization, and Empire

As the United States expansion westward accelerated through the 1880s, leading Frederick Jackson Turner to declare that the frontier was officially closed in 1893, the nation described its conquest of the west as a divinely ordained “Manifest Destiny.” Central to this idea of Manifest Destiny was the notion that white Americans developed a unique civilized culture, a culture they were expected to share with non-civilized peoples and in particular those peoples that were indigenous to the Americas. This idea has been captured succinctly by Rudyard Kipling’s phrase “The White Man’s Burden.” The United States had, for decades, fought with native peoples and claimed their land – often using dubious means. But with the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, this “civilizing mission” gave authority to the President to force native peoples onto reservations as allocated by the U.S. government in exchange for U.S. Citizenship. For those that resisted, as did Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce among many other tribes, they were hunted down and killed.

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This language of civilization was also central to the discourse around lynching. As the anti-lynching crusader and journalist Ida B. Wells has written, “the Southern white man, as a tribute to the 19th century civilization, was in a manner compelled to give excuses for his barbarism” (Wells, 2015, p. 71). These excuses often included the idea that the barbarism of lynching was merely the price of preserving civilization. Whites often used the line that black men raped white women as an excuse to form lynch mobs and kill black men, citing a reasoning that the protection of white womanhood was tantamount to protecting civilization: if we cannot protect our women, all is lost. The idea that women were a class of people to be protected by men was tied to Victorian sensibilities and the “cult of true womanhood,” the idea that women were pretty, pure, pious, and private – not public and therefore needed to be protected publicly by their men. First wave feminists would contest this idea in the late 19th and early 20th century. But this civilizing discourse found receptive audiences in the colonizing impulses of late 19th century imperial powers, as the emerging nations of Canada and Australia looked to the United States and saw, in their brutality against native peoples and black Americans, that “racial identities” could be central to “the construction of modern political subjectivities” (Lake & Reynolds, 2008). The United States drew on these racial identities to make claims on what was civilized and who needed civilizing as they fought for and gained military control over the former Spanish colonies of Haiti, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. As William Howard Taft, the first American General-Governor of the Philippines, told President William McKinley: “our little brown brothers” required “‘fifty or one hundred years” of outside rule “to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills” (Miller, 1982, p. 134). At home in the United States, unparalleled immigration in the 1890s led to a complex tapestry of whiteness. Immigrants from England, Ireland, and Scandinavia arrived in large numbers in the middle of the 19th century, while Slovenians, Italians, Poles and others from central and eastern Europe arrived in the late 19th century – creating a hierarchy with western European immigrants at the top in many American cities that translated directly into limited opportunities for central and eastern European immigrants. Chinese immigrants were barred completely with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888, and the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ of 1907 severely limited Japanese immigration. For African Americans, the largest ‘non-white’ population in the United States, the late 19th and early 20th century became what Rayford Logan (1997) has called the “nadir” of African American history – chiefly because lynching and other extra-legal violence continued to be widespread.

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Between 1891 and 1901, there were no fewer than 106 documented lynchings per year in the United States. In 1892, the year Ida. B. Wells published “Southern Horrors” documenting lynchings across the South using investigative journalism techniques, the number surged to 230. Between 1901 and 1911, there were, on average, 85 lynchings per year in the United States. It was not until the mid-1920s that lynching ebbed – and even then there were often dozens of lynchings annually until the eve of the Second World War. Many times, these lynchings were public and intended as spectacle. A “carnival like atmosphere” was repeatedly noted, as candy, popcorn, and drinks were often for sale. Public lynchings were often family affairs, and sometimes children were let out of school to attend the public executions. On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington – accused of “raping” his white employer’s wife – was pulled from his jail cell by a mob in Robinson, Texas. He was publicly castrated, and his fingers were cut from his hands. He was slowly raised and lowered over a bonfire for hours before his blackened body was dismembered and sold piecemeal for souvenirs. More than 10,000 were reported in attendance, including elected officials and law enforcement. While the size of the crowd at the Washington lynching was perhaps exceptionally large, having a crowd to witness lynchings was, itself, not exceptional at all in this period. Postcards of public lynchings, including photographs of individuals with mutilated bodies, were common souvenirs sent to relative who could not attend. These public and brutal executions of blacks by whites in the United States was accompanied by widespread routine mob violence in the early 20th century. In East St. Louis in July of 1917, as many as 200 black Americans were killed and 6,000 left homeless as whites devastated the black quarter of the city in response to black workers taking positions in wartime industry during the First World War. As soldiers returned home in the summer of 1919, white mobs led violent crusades in dozens of cities – including in Chicago where 23 blacks were killed and nearly 1,000 homes were burned. Such violence became more frequent as whites in northern cities encountered blacks travelling from the rural south as part of the Great Migration, a massive intra-national movement of people that totaled 1.6 million black Americans shifting from the rural south to the urban north between 1916 and 1940. Mob violence continued in the years following the First World War, and in May of 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma more than 200 blacks were killed over two days and more than 10,000 people left homeless after 40 blocks were devastated by white mobs. Black Americans did not sit idly by throughout this process. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 to battle discrimination and fight the violence used to preserve discrimination. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

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used military symbols and pomp to send a powerful and unified message to white Americans, attracting as many as 800,000 black members and building 700 branches in 38 states by the early 1920s. Self-defense became a common option for blacks, both rural and urban, and Ida B. Wells declared that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home” (Royster, 2016, p. 4) After the lynching of Sam Hose in Atlanta in 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the most important intellectual of the 20th century and a prominent black leader, proclaimed that if any whites sought to do him harm he would “spray their guts all over the grass” (Pease, 1994, p. 322). Legal efforts to end lynching in the United States, however, were unsuccessful throughout the early 20th century. Despite numerous attempts, no bill designed explicitly to prevent lynching was passed in the United States until December of 2018, when the U.S. Congress finally declared lynching in the United States a hate crime. Speaking to this common theme of white violence directed at black people for more than 80 years following slavery, the historian and sociologist Charles Payne (2007) noted that “the point was there didn’t have to be a point; Black life could be snuffed out on a whim, you could be killed because some ignorant white man didn’t like the color of your shirt or the way you drove a wagon” (p. 15). Lynching and extralegal violence was used routinely to intimidate and punish blacks who sought political or economic advancement, and whites too frequently killed blacks in a spirit of hate and prejudice – rarely facing legal consequences for doing so before the Second World War.

4

Lynching and the Paradox of Nonviolent Revolution

While lynchings declined precipitously after the Second World War, perhaps the most famous extra-legal murder of a black American actually took place in August of 1955. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, was brutally killed by a group of white men in Money, Mississippi. Till was taken from his uncle’s house in the middle of the night, beaten and castrated before a 74 pound cotton gin fan was attached to his neck with barbed wire. He was thrown into the Tallahatchie River in hopes of never being found again. Till was accused by a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, of whistling at her and grabbing her waist. In 2017, the historian Timothy Tyson revealed that Bryant lied in her testimony about that day, conceding that Till did not in fact touch her. She lamented that “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him” (p. 7). Sadly, Bryant’s recanting came not only too late, it also exposed the larger lie

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often used to justify the lynching of black men in the United States. When Till’s body surfaced in the Tallahatchie, his mother – Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley – called newspapers all over the country to tell them what those white men in Mississippi had done to her son. She called for an open casket funeral and drew more than 100,000 people to view the brutalized body of her slain son. The public attention Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley brought to the barbaric slaying of her son followed the Nuremberg Trials, which revealed to the world in 1945 and 1946 the extent of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. It followed the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlined by the newly formed United Nations in 1945, and it came at a moment when the United States was claiming a leading role in guaranteeing the rights of dispossessed peoples in the postwar world. In this context, the public horror of lynching was increasingly a problem for a nation seeking to craft a different international image for itself. Such an image was especially important for the United States as it jockeyed for influence in non-white nations across the world, seeking to best the Soviet Union in an emerging Cold War international order by sending a more progressive message about the way it treated non-white peoples at home. But it was black Americans who led the way in revolutionizing social relations between white and black people in the United States, and they did so by intentionally using nonviolent methods to challenge the brutal violence used for centuries to dehumanize and intimidate black Americans. The sit-in tactic did not originate in 1960, but the tactic did rise to prominence on February 1, 1960 when four students from Greensboro A&T College refused to give up their seats to whites at a segregated lunch counter. By the end of February, more than 30 communities had used the sit-in technique. At year’s end, more than 70,000 women and men – the vast majority of them black – had participated in nonviolent sit-in demonstrations and pickets in an effort to end Jim Crow. If the power of lynching was derived, in part, from its ability to convey fear, black Americans communicated to the world in the late 1950s and 1960s that they would no longer be intimidated by these violent tactics. Their public witness permanently transformed the trajectory of the nation away from the barbarity of spectacle lynching. Remembering the history of lynching in the United States, however, is a continual process particularly as activists continue to battle against the public killing of unarmed black men and women at the hands of police.

References Equal Justice Initiative. (2019). Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror. Equal Justice Initiative report. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/

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Lake, M., & Reynolds, H. (2008). Drawing the global colour line: White men’s countries and the question of racial equality. Melbourne University Publishing. Logan, R. W. (1997). The betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. Collier Books. Miller, S. C. (1982). “Benevolent assimilation”: The American conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. Yale University Press. Payne, C. M. (2007). I’ve got the light of freedom: The organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle. University of California Press. Pease, D. E. (1994). Revisionary interventions into the Americanist Canon. Duke University Press. Royster, J. J. (2016). Southern horrors and other writings: The anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. Macmillan Higher Education. Tyson, T. B. (2017). The blood of Emmett Till. Simon and Schuster. Wells, I. B. (2015). The red record. Open Road Media.

CHAPTER 49

Marxism and Whiteness Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Capitalism; False Consciousness; Neoliberalism; Whiteness as Property

… Marxism is an approach to political economy that stresses the conflict between social classes in capitalism as first articulated by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. Marxists (1981) focus on relations to the means of production, referring to one’s social location with respect to the productive forces of capitalism, and surplus labor value, referring to the difference between what a laborer is paid for their labor compared to what the capitalist is able to sell the products of their labor for. The social classes that emerge in capitalism are in constant conflict, because of their relationship to the means of production and their agency (or lack thereof) over their own labor. The proletariat are workers who do not own the means of production and thus are forced to sell their labor to the capitalists, who compensate them with a wage that is less than what they produce for the capitalist. The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, who buy and sell the labor of others and profit from the surplus that results from paying workers less than the products of their labor are sold for. The conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat stems from the alienation of workers that is produced in the relations of production. Marxists see this conflict as producing class consciousness in the proletariat as they grow to understand their alienation in capitalism and build capacity to band together to overthrow capitalism, the nation state, and private property. Marxism centers social class in analyses of revolutionary consciousness and action. Because of this, some postmodern and poststructural critics have argued Marxism is essentialist and that it cannot account for identity-based oppressions, like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Importantly, Marxism does not see social class as an identity akin to race, gender, or sexuality. Rather, Marxists understand class as a material production, as a product of the capitalist economic system. That is, the economic system of capitalism necessitates proletarian workers and produces the conditions for alienated labor. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_049

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Social class is thus not an identity, but rather articulates one’s positionality with regard to the means of production. To say that a working class person is working class is thus not essentialist, but rather is naming the objective conditions of said working class person’s location within capitalism. Marxists do not seek to deny proletarians their own identities that are sources of resilience and specificity, rather they argue for the need for workers of the world to unite as proletarian, as a global social class that has been brought into existence by the capitalist economic system. This does not mean that other elements of identity are delegitimated or wane in Marxist analyses. Instead, the social class position of proletarian social actors can become a source of solidarity for collective struggles that transgress traditional lines of identification. Still, the history of Marxist and Marxist-influenced social movements have resulted in significant moments of race based white supremacist exclusions. Union membership in particular has been deeply racialized, with most unions explicitly denying access to membership for workers of color in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We can think of such moments as extensions of the insidious logics of capitalism that produce false scarcity via the relations of production. That is, scarcity is a product of the distribution of social goods – not the forces of production, but the relations of production – and scarcity logics support exclusions that function in opposition to the humanizing aims and desires of Marxists. Worker alienation, in the case of unions, can be warped ideologically to supplant collectivist understandings with individualistic ones. Thinking first of one’s self as isolated and removed from wider social systems is a symptom of internalized capitalist logics. This is why it is in the interest of the owners of the means of production for there to be schisms and exclusions among their workers: divided workers are far easier to dominate and far less likely to band together to resist capitalist exploitation. Marxism remains a powerful frame for understanding 21st century white supremacy. For instance, attention to Marxism can help us understand how so often the capitalist system itself is used as a neutral way to measure relative oppression. Take the example of the wage gap between men and women in the United States. Women make approximately 80 cents on the dollar compared to men with the same credentials in the same positions. We often use this empirical finding as evidence of patriarchy, but only as evidence of patriarchy. Another example is the wealth gap between white people and people of color. On average, white families have between 50–80 times more wealth than families of color in the U.S. Often such statistics are part of the empirical evidence of white supremacy, of specific ways that white people are rewarded, and people of color oppressed, in our society. The functions of capitalism, of distribution, of the relations of production, are obscured and invisiblized in such accounts, thus leading to narrow identity-based understandings of oppression.

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Instead, a Marxist analysis allows us to see in both the example of the wage gap and the wealth gap that the capitalist system is being normalized when in actuality it has been designed to function in very particular ways for the benefits of only one class: the bourgeoisie. Because the bourgeoisie has made use of all productive forces available to secure their own interests, oppressive ideologies such as white supremacy and patriarchy become technologies of capitalism. Of course, this does not mean that our analyses must reduce all forms of oppression solely to economic concerns. Rather, Marxism necessitates that we view our social reality as a totality and thus we must account for the ways that the economic is always-already determining possibilities and social outcomes. Determinism in Marxism can be thought of on two levels: as the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures. The setting of limits can be thought of as top-down. This is the form of determinism produced by the capitalist economic system that limits the possibilities for freedom and agency. The exertion of pressures can be thought of as bottom-up. This is the form of determinism produced within communities that structures expectations for membership and belonging as well as social participation. Taken together, we can see that human agency in capitalism is determined by the forces and means of production. Adding race to our analysis entails seeing racial determinants as structured modes of being that function to support capitalism. From restricting union membership, to white supremacist hiring practices, to oppressive stereotypic understandings of difference, all forms of white supremacy carry with them (often unspoken) understandings of the political economy and a codependence on capitalism. Scholars of color have engaged with Marxism to elucidate ways that Marxist thinking can help us better understand freedom struggles. For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1998) Black Reconstruction in America argues that emancipated black people in the U.S. after the Civil War be seen as proletarian, and for Reconstruction to be seen more broadly as a dictatorship of the proletariat, citing black judges ruling in favor of black claimants in land disputes with their white former masters. Du Bois found that Reconstruction became dangerous to Northern industrialists (owners of the means of production) who feared that wealth redistribution in the South could lead to demands for greater equity and redistribution in the North as well. The needs and demands of capital thus ended the period of Reconstruction and ushered in the Jim Crow era in the United States, in large part as a response to the collectivist possibilities that Reconstruction brought about that could block the reach of capitalism. Cedric Robinson’s (2000) Black Marxism takes a different approach, arguing that Marxist models of social transformation are Eurocentric in privileging European notions of politics and history. He argues that black freedom struggle must be located with roots in Africa and take account of the unique

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experiences black peoples have had in North and South America. Thus, Marxism has been both celebrated as offering powerful ways of understanding freedom struggles in communities of color and critiqued as overly Eurocentric and not taking full account of the complexities of the experiences of communities of color in capitalism. Returning to Du Bois, while Black Reconstruction mobilizes Marxist frames of analysis, he remained concerned that white supremacy in the United States made it almost impossible to imagine a multi-racial proletarian revolution. In his 1933 essay “Marxism and the Negro Problem” Du Bois discusses both the “genius” of Marx’s Capital, but also the ways that such analyses are incomplete in explaining race and labor in the U.S. context. Du Bois offers two critiques of Marxian analysis with regards to African Americans. The first argues that “while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers” (Wintz, 2015, p. 149). Du Bois argued that while it was clear that proletarians in the United States were oppressed, black people in the United States experienced a form of oppression in addition to the capitalist exploitation meted out by the white bourgeoisie. Du Bois argued it was actually white proletarians (white laborers) who “deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliations with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination” (Wintz, 2015, p. 149). In other words, the owners of the means of production, while certainly responsible for much of the oppression of black Americans (and we could extend this analysis, as Du Bois does in other writing, to Latinx peoples, and peoples of color more broadly in the United States) a strict Marxist analysis that locates all oppression as stemming directly from the owners of the means of production cannot account for the embodied experiences of black people and other people of color in the United States. Still, this does not foreclose mobilizing Marxian insights in antiracist struggles. If white supremacy makes use of capitalism in reproducing racial exclusions and discriminations, the same is true in reverse: capitalism makes use of white supremacy in reproducing the conditions for private ownership of the means of production. The systems work off of and feed one another. To follow critical black feminist Kimberle Crenshaw (1992), we can argue that capitalism and white supremacy intersect in ways that make delineating neatly between where one’s oppression stems from – capitalism or white supremacy – lacks in explanatory power. It is the interaction and intersection of oppressive systems that must be radically transformed. Such transformation can be far better understood if one has engaged Marxian analyses of capitalism and the ways capitalism structures our social reality: including white supremacy.

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What cannot be permitted is the abuse of Marxist perspectives and insights as a way of avoiding engagement with white supremacy and structural racism. Social class cannot account for all forms of experience, nor identity. But, because social class structures and conditions all forms of experience and identity, it simultaneously cannot be ignored. Thus, notions of having to “choose” between Marxism and antiracism are false choices that function on the side of reproducing our oppressive status quo. Instead, an intersectional approach to understanding white supremacy necessitates attention to social class, and the conditions that produce particular possibilities for social class membership. Capitalism is not then separate, or outside of white supremacy, but rather functions as an oppressive economic system that can be instrumentalized to achieve white supremacist desires. Marxist analyses inherit the full and messy history of Marxian social interventions, revolutions, and critical theories. To be clear, none of the so-called “communist” states that have existed on this earth have ever realized a form of social living that Marx would regard as actually communist. But this does not mean that the referents for Marxism do not carry with them significant and problematic baggage. While communist parties in the United States have historically been more inclusive of peoples of color than other social formations and political parties that are predominantly white, such history is not immediately apparent for contemporary social actors. Perhaps Marxism can be better thought of, in the context of antiracism, as a series of analytical and political insights that can be mobilized to aid us in the praxis of combatting capitalism and white supremacy simultaneously. Marxism offers the most sophisticated analysis of the contradictions of capitalism available to us. It is now the task of existing social actors to make use of this analysis in order to put it to work on the side of antiracism.

References Crenshaw, K. (1992). Race, gender, and sexual harassment. Southern California Law Review, 65. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black reconstruction in America. Free Press. Marx, K. (1981). Capital: A critique of political economy (B. Fowkes & D. Fernbach, Trans.). Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Wintz, C. D. (Ed.). (2015). African American political thought, 1890–1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph. Routledge.

CHAPTER 50

Mass Incarceration Gilda Graff

Related Entries: Jim Crow; Lynching; Police Brutality; Reparations; School-toPrison Pipeline

… Michelle Alexander pointed out in a New York Times article on 11/11/18 that “astonishing progress has been made in the past several years on a wide range of criminal justice issues,” and James Bennet, in an Editor’s Note regarding Ta-Nehisi Coates’ October, 2015 Atlantic article “The Black Family in an Age of Mass Incarceration,” stated that it was “startling how suddenly mass incarceration has come to seem like a bad idea” (Bennet, 2015, p. 8). In the 2018 midterm elections, Florida restored the vote to 1.4 million people with felony convictions, Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize recreational marijuana, and Louisiana passed a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials (Alexander, 2018). Indeed, since the publication of Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow in 2010 there have been significant changes to drug policy, sentencing, and re-entry, including “ban the box” initiatives “aimed at eliminating barriers to employment for the formerly incarcerated” (Alexander, 2018). On 12/21/18 President Trump signed the First Step Act which “expands in-prison and post release employment programming, includes components related to alternatives to prison for low-risk prisoners such as home confinement, prohibits restraints on pregnant prisoners, and mandates evidence-based treatment for opioid and heroin abuse” (Holliday, 2018). It also creates incentives and new programs aimed at reducing recidivism rates (Fandos & Haberman, 2018), and revises the Controlled Substances Act’s harsh drug penalties, including a lowering of the “three strikes” rule for drug felons that had sent them to life in prison, now down to 25 years. In addition, it changes the two or more felonies within the rule from any “felony drug offense” to “a serious drug felony or serious violent felony,” defined in the text of the bill (Holliday, 2018). The First Step Act will not directly affect state prisons but could encourage states to change their laws.

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“Although Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the N.Y.U. School of Law and a frequent Trump critic on policy, sounded optimistic” about this proposed legislation, (Fandos and Haberman, 2018), both James Bennet and Michele Alexander warn that mass incarceration came about as a system of racial and social control. Bennet wondered in his 2015 Editor’s Note why politicians were “awakening to the monstrous mistake of mass incarceration only now.” He felt that the deeper question is “how the idea of mass incarceration took such a firm hold in the first place” and stated that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article indicates that white Americans fear black Americans and that their impulse to control blacks is “integral” to the rise of the carceral state. Coates himself stated that the early 20th century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South than in the North because, until the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, Jim Crow controlled blacks in the South. After the 1960’s, the South’s rate of imprisonment surged far past the North’s (Coates, 2015 p. 82). Bennet warns that if Americans do not face and understand the history of mass incarceration the next spike in crime – “the next spike in fear – may doom the nation” to repeat the cycle (Bennet, 2015, p. 8). Alexander warns that the seeds of a system of e-incarceration, or electronic monitoring, is already contained in current reform efforts. Such monitoring although preferable to being in prison, could keep prisoners out of neighborhoods where there are jobs and opportunities – thus creating a system of “e-gentrification” (Alexander (2018). The desire to control African Americans cited by both Alexander in 2018, and by Bennet in 2015, started, but obviously did not end, with slavery. Caricatures of huge, threatening blacks with exaggerated sexual abilities still titillate and terrify. After the Civil War, during the period of Jim Crow, convict leasing, which began in Mississippi and soon spread to other Southern states, was one measure of control. The titles of two books about convict leasing convey some of the horror of this form of control: Slavery by Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon, and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David M Ochinsky. Blacks were supplied when and where they were needed by simply arresting them on petty charges such as vagrancy, gambling, disorderly conduct, assault, etc. and then turning them over to small local businesses or to the biggest U.S. companies. U.S. Steel, in its acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad, also inherited the mines’ convict leasing system (Stein, 2012). Blackmon vividly describes the arrest of Green Cottenham for vagrancy on March 30, 1908 and his sale some 4 days later to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel Corporation. In return, the company gave Shelby County, Alabama $12 a mouth to pay off the

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fines and fees against him. Because he could not pay these amounts, his 30-day sentence of hard labor was extended to nearly a year (Blackmon, 2008). Not only were criminal charges like vagrancy invented for black men, but “a portrait emerged nearly 150 years before the infamy of Willie Horton, of blacks as highly prone to criminality, and generally, beyond the scope of rehabilitation” (Coates, 2015, p. 69). Many jurisdictions, per Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, even made slaves into “criminals” by prohibiting them from engaging in a wide range of activities that whites were free to pursue. “Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves – and only one for whites” (Coates, 2015, p. 70). The 13th Amendment, which forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, provides an exception that allows slavery as a punishment for those who have been convicted of a crime. That criminality clause, like the criminal charges invented for black men, and convict leasing, contributed to the idea that black men were criminals (Traister, 2016). From the 1890s through the 1940s the assumption of black criminality was used to justify black inequality and mortality. Blacks were considered to be “criminal brutes by nature,” and “naturally intemperate.” It was felt that society must defend itself from contamination by the “crime stained blackness of the negro.” “The strength of crime statistics” was used by James K. Vardaman, the governor of Mississippi in 1904, as a justification for the lack of interest in education funding for blacks (Coates, 2015, p. 70). In 1914 the federal government launched its first war on drugs, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of cocaine and opiates. At the time, The New York Times published an article by a physician stating that the South was threatened by “cocaine crazed negroes.” Another physician, Hamilton Wright, reported to Congress that “It has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country” (Coates, 2015, p. 71). The notion that blacks were especially prone to crime extended even to the state’s view of black leadership. Harriet Tubman, who rescued many blacks via the Underground Railroad, was considered a bandit of the highest order. Frederick Douglas would tell his audiences “I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.” J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for nearly fifty years, harassed three generations of black leaders from Marcus Garvey, who he pursued into jail and deportation, to Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he called “the most notorious liar in the country,” and to the Black Panther Party, against whose leaders he authorized a repressive lethal campaign that culminated in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of 1969 (Coates, 2015). No doubt the notion of black criminality made it easier for Southern governors

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and law enforcement officials to mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement under the rubric of “law and order,” contending that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. At about the same time (beginning in the 1960s for a period of about 10 years) the FBI was reporting fairly dramatic increases in the national crime rate. By 1968, 81% of those replying to the Gallup Poll agreed that ‘law and order has broken down in this country,” and the majority blamed “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists” (Alexander, 2010, p. 46). When Nixon proclaimed drugs “public enemy No. 1” or declared “war against the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives,” he didn’t need to name the threat. A century long legacy of equating blacks with criminals and moral degenerates did the work for him. (Coates, 2015, p. 72) While Nixon called for “law and order” and a “war on drugs,” he did not propose a dramatic change in drug policy. In October 1982, Reagan announced a War on Drugs although, at the time, less than 2% of Americans believed drugs were the most important issue facing the country. That did not concern Reagan because, from the beginning, the drug war really reflected the public’s concerns about race, rather than drugs. The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among inner city residents due to globalization and deindustrialization increased incentives to sell drugs. Crack hit the streets in 1985 leading to a spike in violence. As David Kennedy observed, “Crack blew through America’s poor black neighborhoods like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse,” leaving behind unspeakable devastation and suffering (Alexander, 2010, p. 51). Some countries, such as Portugal, chose drug treatment, prevention, and education or economic investment in crime-ridden communities, but the United States chose war. In September 1986 during a “media frenzy” about the drug problem, the House of Representatives allocated $2 billion to the antidrug crusade, and shortly thereafter the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act into law. The Act included mandatory minimum sentences for the sale of cocaine, including punishing the sale of five ounces of crack cocaine, associated with blacks, the same as the sale of 500 grams of powder cocaine, associated with whites. Almost 80% of those sentenced under this law were African American, although most users and sellers of crack cocaine were/are not African American. The new law provided $1.7 billion to states for new prison construction. In 25 years the U.S. prison and jail populations grew from 350,000 to 2.3 million (Graff, 2015, p. 124). About a

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quarter of the 2.3 million were in prison or jail because of the war on drugs, while at least half had committed non-violent offenses (Stein, 2012, p. 259). The drug laws “adopted in the 1980’s and 90’s did little to reduce crime, but a lot to normalize prison in black communities” (Coates, 2015, p. 74). Devah Pager, a Harvard sociologist, stated that the number of African Americans imprisoned for drug offenses increased more than 26 fold, while the increase for whites during the same period (1983–1997) was seven fold. This disparity existed despite the fact that blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rates. By the close of the 20th century, prison was a more common experience for young black men than either military service or college graduation. The idea of blacks as criminals extends to youth of color who are often seen as pre-criminals. Although in the last 25 years the Supreme Court has recognized youth as a mitigating factor in even the most serious criminal behavior by adolescents (Henning, 2013, p. 385); the developmental research which influenced the Court’s decisions has had little effect in reversing the pervasive overreliance on law enforcement officials and juvenile courts when responding to typical adolescent behaviors, particularly among youth of color. A schoolyard fight is labeled as a felony assault, and students who play “catch” with a teacher’s hat are “charged with robbery” (Henning, 2013, p. 386). Racial disparities pervade the juvenile justice system. From 2002–2004 black youths comprised 16% of American youths, but accounted for 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of detained youth, 34% of those formally processed by the juvenile court, 35% of those judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of youth sent to adult state prison (Henning, 2013, p. 386). The U.N. Committee Against Torture expressed concern about the many reports of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against black youth, while another U.N. Committee criticized the high rate at which black youth from racial and ethnic minorities are referred to the criminal justice system, prosecuted as adults, and incarcerated in adult prisons (Amusa, 2014). These U.N. criticisms reflect the belief that subjecting youth to adult criminal punishments rather than providing rehabilitative programs during a crucial time in their development will have a lifelong detrimental impact (Amusa, 2014). Possible results of a felony drug offence, including simple possession of marijuana, were disenfranchisement, a five-year limit on welfare assistance, a permanent lifetime ban on eligibility for food stamps, exclusion from public housing, and discrimination in employment, access to education, and housing. Some have thought that private prisons would do a better job than those run by the government. Such prisons incarcerated 128,063 in 2016, which was 8.5% of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000 those housed

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in private prisons have increased by 47% compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 9% (Sentencing Project, 2018). In early August of 2016, The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report which showed that private prisons have far higher rates of violence and lockdowns and poorer access to medical care, than comparable federally run prisons. A few weeks later Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates directed the Bureau of Prisons to phase out its use of private prisons. However, after the election of Donald Trump, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the decision. Joseph Margulies of Time magazine pointed out that the “real” reason private prisons should not be used is that “justice should not be administered through the prism of profit.” He pointed out that private prisons have a financial interest in the growth of mass incarceration and invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and stated “Especially today, when the systemic, deeply entrenched, racialized problems with the criminal justice system are increasingly apparent, we should not endorse strategies that encourage the expansion of the carceral state” (Margulies, 2016). Although some important changes are being made in the criminal justice system, we must remember the warnings of Michelle Alexander, James Bennet and Ta-Nehisi Coates that mass incarceration came about as a system of racial and social control and that the next spike in fear could lead to a repetition of the cycle. We must also take seriously Alexander’s imagining that after the drug war finally ends historians will be fascinated that: A drug war was waged almost exclusively against people of color… trapped in ghettos… They were packed away in prisons, and when released… [they] were denied the right to vote, barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits and shamed… for failing to hold together their families… Historians will likely wonder how we could describe [this] as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create – rather than prevent crime. (Alexander, 2010, pp. 175–176)

References Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Alexander M. (2018, November 11). The newest Jim Crow. The New York Times Week in Review, p. 3.

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Amusa, T. (2014). OP-ED: UN calls out U.S. on police violence, criminalization of youth of color. Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. https://jjie.org/2014/12/08/op-ed-uncalls-out-us-on-police/-criminalization-of-youth-of-color/ Bennet, J. (2015, October). Deviancy, defined [Editor’s note]. The Atlantic, p. 8. Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor Books. Coates, T. N. (2015, October). The Black family in the age of mass incarceration. The Atlantic, pp. 60–84. Fandos, N., & Haberman, M. (2018, November 14). Trump endorses easing some mandatory sentencing laws. The New York Times. Graff, G. (2015). Redesigning racial caste in American via mass incarceration. Journal of Psychohistory, 43(2), 120–133. Henning, K. N. (2013). Criminalizing normal adolescent behavior in communities of color: The role of prosecutors in juvenile justice reform. Cornell Law Review, 98, 383–462. Holliday, E. M. (2018, December 21). Jurist – Legal News & Commentary. https://www.jurist.org/ Margulies, J. (2016, August 24). This is the real reason private prisons should be outlawed. Time. https://time.com/4461791/private-prisons-department-of-justice/ Mathis, A. (2018, December 1). The academy. The New York Times Style Magazine, pp. 136–139. Ochinsky, D. M. (1996). Worse than slavery: Parchman farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow justice. Free Press Paperbacks. Sentencing Project. (2019, October 24). Private prisons in the United States. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisonsunited-states/ Traister, R. (2016, September 19). In conversation: Ava Duvernay. New York, pp. 42–47.

CHAPTER 51

McIntosh, Peggy Melanie M. Wilcox, Danielle N. Franks and Chelsea Cody

Related Entries: First Wave Whiteness Studies; Privilege; White Supremacy

… Inspiring a generation of scholars and a field of study, Dr. Peggy McIntosh (1988, 1989) published what would become world-renowned works identifying the concept of White privilege, the better known of these is “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” White privilege refers to the unearned advantages bestowed upon White individuals (or presumed-White individuals) based on their racial group membership. As a cisgender White woman, recognition of McIntosh’s White privilege was a surprising revelation to her and more intrapsychically difficult than identifying cisgender male privilege. She detailed a list of 46 examples of daily advantages (or privileges) she experiences as a result of her skin color. The insidious, taken-for-granted nature of such privileges led McIntosh to describe these privileges as an “invisible knapsack” that White individuals carry through life, containing tools and passes that smooth the way for White individuals. McIntosh’s early papers on privilege laid the foundation for her work and for White privilege pedagogy more broadly. Her work is considered so universal in White privilege pedagogy that it has been described as “authoritative” (Lensmire et al., 2013). She founded the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum at Wellesley Center for Women, Wellesley College, and she has continued to write, speak, and consult nationally and internationally on issues of inclusivity and privilege. Undoubtedly, her work has given educators, and Whites in general, a way to begin demystifying the existence of racism in everyday life, and how Whites benefit from it. Still, despite its renown and its role in highlighting Whites as contemporary beneficiaries of racism, her work is not without its limitations and criticisms.

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Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

As noted, McIntosh’s (1989) Knapsack article was the instigative article not only for McIntosh’s career, but for the field of privilege studies broadly. The easily digestible and disseminable list of privileges identified by McIntosh provided a way to provoke White individuals into thinking about themselves as racialized beings and beneficiaries of racism, and how they are indeed treated as White despite their own likely obliviousness. Examples from her list of White privileges include “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race,” and, “If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing a house in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.” She notes in the accompanying text that Whites’ obliviousness is taught, including by a presumed neutrality associated with individuality, and understanding racism as “individual acts of meanness” (p. 1) rather than systems of dominance. At present, a Google search for “list of White privileges” returns 53.8 million results, any number of which are reproductions of her original list, explainers on her original article, or expansions upon her list. Further, others have sought to use her privilege checklist format to identify other forms of privilege such as male privilege, heterosexual privilege, able-bodied privilege, and Christian privilege. Some scholars have sought to quantify awareness of such privileges; for example, the White Privilege Attitudes Scale (Pinterits, Poteat, & Spanierman, 2009). The “Privilege Walk” has become a commonly used pedagogical exercise in which participants begin in a horizontal line and, in response to privileges read aloud, step forward (holding privilege) or backward (lacking privilege); at its culmination, they are asked to reflect upon the distances between one another. Again, an internet search returns countless versions of this exercise. The language of privilege appears to have reached cultural saturation.

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In addition to her work in academia, Peggy McIntosh co-founded The SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project, which aims to understand and positively impact modern pedagogy’s propagation of White neutrality in K-12 curricula and beyond. The SEED Project utilizes the privilege framework created by Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) hallmark Knapsack article to affect institutional change by naming, addressing, and disrupting implicit bias and privilege

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in our school systems and larger institutions with open and conscious conversation. SEED seeks to provide a platform for exploration intended to assist educators in driving their own continuing education in the direction of equity for all identities. The SEED Project also works to evolve graduate and undergraduate pedagogical praxis through emphasis on continuous experiential conversation around power and privilege, in lieu of one-time lecture-based training that may inadvertently communicate a false sense of competence. The SEED Project asks beneficiaries of privilege to connect to, sit with, and process the ways in which they have unknowingly received unearned power and advantage to the detriment of marginalized identities. SEED acknowledges that feelings of shame, blame, and guilt are inherent to the difficult dialogues being had, but that the focus should remain on developing a deeper relationship with the privileges and oppressions that we participate in. Peggy McIntosh’s work and activism around raising the awareness of privilege and systems of power have remained a pivotal point of discussion in social justice education and advocacy work. Education as a discipline has been deeply affected by her contributions surrounding White Privilege, and how that privilege intertwines with individual and systemic unexamined advantage. Following the publication of Knapsack, McIntosh has continued her work towards reshaping both educators and the significant power education holds as an institution. Her work is cited gratuitously in academic writing across many fields and has served as the basis from which many scholars explore, examine, and push the boundaries of research in their fields. Currently, her efforts have turned towards making real change in the application of social science outside of academia, and her focus has narrowed to counseling practitioners. In one of her most recent publications, “Extending the Knapsack: Using the White Privilege Analysis to Examine Conferred Advantage and Disadvantage,” Peggy McIntosh (2015) explores the implementation of privilege awareness and process-oriented dialogue with mental health professionals, the aim of which is to impactfully demonstrate in the present moment how the therapist engages with and unknowingly propagates systems of power and oppression in psychotherapy. Acknowledging the meaningful and groundbreaking work done by scholars of color, Peggy McIntosh has aided in co-creating a dialogue calling attention to Whiteness in ways that many White educators and practitioners had not yet considered. In many ways, she and other scholars helped to introduce Whites to the radical impact of their racial identity, moving them towards compassionately reflecting on and reshaping their daily participation in oppressive systems.

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Critical Perspectives on McIntosh and Privilege Pedagogy

Undoubtedly, McIntosh references systems of domination and oppression in her work. Still, critiques of McIntosh note significant limitations in the ability of her work to truly advance White individuals’ understanding of White supremacy and their complicity in it. A foundational limitation of McIntosh’s work (and privilege studies more broadly) is the focus on the individual privileges and their recipients, absent an analysis of the structures of domination that create and maintain such individual privileges. As noted by Leonardo (2009), “The conditions of White supremacy make White privilege possible…” (p. 265). For example, let us return to McIntosh’s housing preference privilege: “If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing a house in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.” The focus of such an example is on the ease and mindlessness with which White individuals can enjoy housing preference. Missing, however, is the structural history of White supremacy that underlies the creation and maintenance of such a privilege (e.g., Whites building capital while Black individuals were enslaved; redlining; racial targeting in subprime lending; etc.). Such a structural and historical analysis is necessary not only to understand White privilege, but also to provide White individuals with constructive directions in which to work for racial justice. White privilege analysis suggests that White individuals should abdicate these privileges somehow; however, their systemic entrenchment often prohibits a simple abdication or divestment. Instead, they must be dismantled at the systemic level, which cannot be done if the systems of domination that secure privilege are mystified and obscured. In fact, Leonardo (2009) argued, the very discourse on White privilege, with its focus on the personal, obscures the systemic. Although McIntosh and others name such systems in their work, systems-level analysis is rarely (if ever) built upon. Related to the lack of systems-level analysis is the avoidance of naming White supremacy. As Lensmire and colleagues (2013) noted, McIntosh’s work provides little in the way of understanding or dismantling of White supremacy. Most commonly, McIntosh’s primary works are disseminated simply as lists of privileges, without the accompanying narrative. It is not enough to name and analyze systems broadly; we must name and address the predominant system of oppression and domination, White supremacy. Failure to do so may create a feel-good illusion for White people that they are working for racial justice, while simultaneously avoiding the difficult work that dismantling White

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supremacy would actually require. Indeed, Lensmire and colleagues (2013) discuss how White privilege pedagogy’s ultimate goal, including (and perhaps especially) within the work of SEED, appears to be White confession. Such confessional approaches, while perhaps cathartic, stalls antiracism by presenting the confessional as the end rather than one step toward a greater end. Such consciousness-raising may represent moral advancement; however, without guided movement toward activism, consciousness-raising does little to dismantle White supremacy. As Blum (2008) noted, what is necessary is moving from simply seeking misguided divestment from one’s White privilege to instead asking, “What can I do to make my society more racially just?” (p. 318). By avoiding the naming and deconstruction of White supremacy in favor of individualism and catharsis, the systems and structures of White supremacy remain mystified, and thus reified. A further consequence of the lack of structural analysis and focus on individuals – as well as a consequence directly of her original list – is equating superficial privileges (e.g., the color of Band-aids) with the aforementioned deeper, more systemic injustices such as those that have led to housing inequities. Blum (2008) delineates three different types of privileges, urging the analysis of privilege through such a taxonomy: spared injustice, unjust enrichment, and non-justice related. Band-aids, for instance, might be considered a spared injustice as it spares White people the indignity of “flesh” colored Band-aids not matching one’s flesh, a reminder of subordination; however, a focus on spared injustices, and especially one that is superficial and outside most individuals’ control, allows White people to forego responsibility for benefiting from, and taking action against, White supremacy. Further, in White privilege pedagogy, inclusion of such superficial spared injustices – while they may certainly highlight the pervasiveness of White supremacy in everyday life – may contribute to increasing students’ resistance on the basis that such a small indignity is hardly meaningful. Indeed, in isolation, it may not be; however, its power lies in what it signifies: the constant, systemic domination and subordination of people of color by way of White supremacy. By ending the analysis at the level of individual indignity, we not only miss the mark, but risk losing the opportunity to help White students understand the White supremacist underpinnings of spared injustices, even when superficial. Additionally, the lack of attention to intersectionality in White privilege analysis and pedagogy may lead to further resistance to McIntosh’s work and the concept of White privilege broadly. For example, Lensmire and colleagues (2013) note that issues of social class and geography lead to different experiences of “Whiteness,” and as a result, that McIntosh’s list of privileges may fit more or less for some White individuals. This is particularly troubling given the emphasis on confession and conceding the correctness of McIntosh’s work

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in “successful” White privilege pedagogy. For some students, this may result in simply saying the “correct” things despite internal resistance; for others, this may mean expressing resistance, and subsequently having it interpreted as racism. Taking again the housing example: a White person’s ability to rent or purchase housing in an area they both can afford and would want to live in is dependent upon socioeconomic status. Further, the experiences of cisgender White women may obviously be quite different than the experiences of cisgender White men. By only examining one of the many identities that impact one’s experience, we are unable to fully conceptualize how identity shapes experience. In fact, Liu (2017) argued that what is experienced by anyone other than the White cis-male Christian bourgeois is not privilege per se, but rather, proxy privilege; that is, privilege is bestowed by the ruling class upon privilege-adjacent individuals (e.g., White upper-middle class ciswomen; lower class White men), but can be taken away (for example, being fired from one’s job) if one does not conform to the rules of their intersectional identities (i.e., in this case, White upper middle-class femininity or White lower-class masculinity). Such an understanding of privilege is a departure from McIntosh’s conceptualization, as she describes White people as “not [having] much to lose” in working against injustice (McIntosh, 2012, p. 196). As a result of the overly simplistic approach of most attempts to delineate privileges, some White people may genuinely not see themselves represented in the lists. Yet, reluctance to identify with McIntosh’s lists is often viewed as evidence of racism. Gaining buy-in from more White people may require a more nuanced, intersectional approach to understanding privilege, and a more nuanced, contextual interpretation of reluctance. Not only does White privilege analysis and pedagogy often assume a homogeneity of Whiteness, but it also assumes a homogeneity of all people of color, i.e. a homogeneity of non-Whiteness (see Blum, 2008). As previously described, individual expressions of privilege have their roots in systems of dominance and oppression; however, the histories of how White supremacy enacted domination and subordination of people and communities of color differs widely by racial groups. As Blum (2008) outlines, the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States has led to systematic, intergenerational, material disadvantages for African American individuals and communities that no other racial group in the U.S. has experienced. As well, Native Americans have uniquely experienced devastation and displacement. Contemporarily, Latinx and Middle-Eastern individuals and communities within the U.S. are uniquely experiencing a rise in dangerous xenophobia rooted in their identities being constructed by Whites as “foreigners.” Oversimplification of understanding privilege results in the oversimplification of oppression, including failure to

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recognize the unique histories of domination and subordination exacted upon specific communities of color. Notably, it is not uncommon in White privilege discourse for white people to be discouraged (including by McIntosh herself) from feeling guilt for these histories of White supremacist oppression, a rhetoric of absolution that may discourage racial justice action. Finally, Logue (2005) argued an understanding of privilege requires an understanding not only of how systems of domination (including White supremacy) harm people but also how they harm the oppressor. This is, of course, not to equate the pain and suffering of the oppressed with the oppressor; it is a careful line to walk. However, Logue (2005) explained that privilege is almost exclusively discussed in terms of its perks; McIntosh (2012) has even recently described White privilege as the “upside” to racism. Rarely is there discussion of the fact that the “perk” is membership into a state of dehumanization, “psychic alienation,” and “corporeal malediction” (p. 371). Additionally, Kivel (2002) notes that in accepting the benefits of White privilege, Whites have lost their ancestral cultural heritage, developed a false sense of superiority, developed a distorted sense of history that devalues accomplishments of people of color, developed a false sense of racialized “danger,” and tend to have fewer deep relationships with people of color. Given the “hidden costs” of the “free ticket” of privilege, Logue (2005) recommends understanding privilege “contrapuntally,” that is, understanding both its perks and costs. In explaining one significant reason for the necessity of such an approach, Logue highlights the importance of fostering racial justice commitments amongst Whites rooted in something more than the White savior phenomenon. By framing racism as a system that all (although not equally so) are disadvantaged under, Whites can begin to fight for the mutual interest that they share with people of color. Further, the positive, perk-like connotation of privilege may be difficult for some White individuals to identify with, not only due to differing intersectional realities, but also because inherent in the connotation is a suggestion of success, of happiness, of ease; and, these may be feelings genuinely difficult for oppressors in this late stage of modernity to identify with. As necessary as buy-in is, we may, in the long-run, generate more buy-in from White people when White privilege pedagogy educators can help them see their own liberation in the liberation of people of color and the deconstruction of White supremacy.

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Peggy McIntosh’s landmark papers on White privilege have allowed for a new language for teaching White people to acknowledge racism and how they

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benefit from it. The language of privilege now permeates American culture and is considered the multidisciplinary gold standard in diversity curricula. Undoubtedly, her work has provided novel ways to generate “buy-in” on the part of White people to begin to deconstruct racism and White supremacy. Although her work provided a much-needed starting place for White people, it has become both a starting place and an ending place, rather than a point from which White people dive more deeply into understanding and deconstructing White supremacy. This entry has summarized a number of critiques of her work, including what is perhaps the foundational limitation, the lack of systems-level analysis, including ahistoricism and an obfuscation of White supremacy. McIntosh (2012) does call for more complexity and nuance in future privilege studies, including consideration of and attention to intersectionality; however, similar calls existed in her landmark works as well. It remains to be seen whether privilege studies will remain stalled on individualism or will eventually serve as an entry point to deconstructing White supremacy.

References Blum, L. (2008). White privilege: A mild critique. Theory and Research in Education, 6, 309–321. Israel, T. (2012). 2011 society of counseling psychology presidential address: Exploring privilege in counseling psychology: Shifting the lens. The Counseling Psychologist, 40, 158–180. Kivel, P. (2002). Uprooting racism: How White people can work for racial justice. New Society Publishers. Lensmire, T. J., McManimon, S. K., Tierney, J. D., Lee-Nichols, M. E., Casey, Z. A., Lensmire, A., & Davis, B. M. (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education’s focus on White privilege undermines antiracism. Harvard Educational Review, 83, 410–431. Leonardo, Z. (2009). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of “White privilege.” In E. Taylor, D. Gillborn, & G. Ladson-Billings (Eds.), Foundations of critical race theory in education (2nd ed., pp. 265–277). Routledge. Liu, W. M. (2017). White male power and privilege: The relationship between White supremacy and social class. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 64, 349–358. Logue, J. (2005). Deconstructing privilege: A contrapuntal approach. Philosophy of Education, 371–379. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working paper no. 189). Wellesley Centers for Women.

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McIntosh, P. (1989). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom, July/August, 10–12. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. McIntosh, P. (2012). Reflections and future directions for privilege studies. Journal of Social Issues, 68, 194–206. McIntosh, P. (2015). Extending the knapsack: Using the White privilege analysis to examine conferred advantage and disadvantage. Women and Therapy, 38, 232–245. Pinterits, E. J., Poteat, V. P., & Spanierman, L. B. (2009). The White privilege attitudes scale: Development and initial validation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 56, 417–429.

CHAPTER 52

Microaggressions Melanie M. Wilcox, Danielle N. Franks and Michael Azarani

Related Entries: Colorblindness; Critical Race Theory; Post-Racialism; Stereotype Threat

… Originally termed “offensive mechanisms” (Pierce, 1969), the term microaggression was coined by psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce in 1970. Subsequently, counseling psychologist and scholar Dr. Derald Wing Sue has popularized the study and understanding of microaggressions and is often credited with its modern definition. Sue and colleagues (2007) define racial microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (p. 271). Racial microaggressions are further described as pervasive and automatic; they are constant in the daily milieu of people of color, result in cumulative, lifelong stress, and serve as continuous reminders of their oppression. Racism has, over time, evolved from predominantly overt forms of racism (i.e. old-fashioned racism) to predominantly covert forms of racism (e.g., colorblind racism; aversive racism); racial microaggressions primarily result from these more covert forms of racism, resulting in experiences so nebulous and subtle that they can be difficult to identify. Nonetheless, racial microaggressions have detrimental effects on people of color, both singularly and cumulatively. Sue and colleagues (2007) developed a taxonomy, identifying three forms of microaggressions: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. Microassaults are more clearly identifiable as racism; they are intentional, represent an attack, and may be verbal (e.g., racial epithets) or non-verbal (e.g., avoiding a person of color; displaying racist symbolism; etc.). Microinsults, in contrast, are more unconscious; they are rude or insensitive verbal or nonverbal slights that serve to demean the person of color. For example, “You are so articulate!” spoken to a black person – while perhaps seemingly innocuous – is a microinsult that conveys an underlying message: it is surprising that you are articulate; I expected you to not be; and, more deeply, a belief that black people are inarticulate. Rarely is such a statement spoken to a white person. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_052

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Finally, microinvalidations are verbal slights that seek to deny or negate the reality of people of color. Statements such as “you’re too sensitive,” and colorblind insistences in general (“I don’t see color”), are examples of microinvalidations (Sue et al., 2007). Microinsults and microinvalidations in particular are insidious specifically due to their subtlety; offenders are often unaware of what they have conveyed, and even their recipients may be unaware as well. Sue and colleagues further identified nine different themes of microaggressions. The term “microaggression” may be confusing to some, as they are often not experienced as “micro” in impact. The term, however, is not meant to minimize the effect of microaggressions on people of color, but to identify acts that occur at the interpersonal, or microsystem, level. This is in contrast to acts that occur at the macrosystem level, macroaggressions, or systemic and institutional-level forms of racism that affect large groups of marginalized individuals. Research has demonstrated that the effects of microaggressions on their targets are anything but small, with scholars noting that they contribute to “racial battle fatigue” (Smith, Hung, & Franklin, 2011; Sue et al., 2019).

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The Detrimental Impact of Microaggressions

Although society has seen a decrease in overt, “old-fashioned” forms of prejudice (Bonilla-Silva, 2001), racism continues to persist in subtle, covert, and implicit ways. Bonilla-Silva (2001) states that this transition from overt to covert racism (i.e. new racism) involved the avoidance of discussing race, avoiding the use of racial terminology, and the use of colorblind ideology in policy and public discourse. From this perspective, acts of overt racism are replaced with the use of microaggressions. It is not surprising then, that the prevalence rate of experiences of microaggressions is rather high. For example, in a study of Asian participants, Ong and colleagues (2013) reported that 78% of participants reported having experienced some form of microaggression over the course of a 2-week period. Furthermore, the American Psychological Association (APA, 2016) reported that ethnic and racial minorities report experiencing discriminatory acts such as being treated with less courtesy or respect, being treated as if they are not smart, or receiving poorer services more so than their White counterparts. Unfortunately, the effects of this new covert system of racial prejudice may contribute more to self-esteem issues, fatigue, and stress than overt forms of racism. Indeed, the APA (2016) reported that daily experiences of racism contribute to increased experiences of stress and other health disparities. Additionally, evidence has amassed that connects microaggressions with a decrease

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in emotional well-being (Ong, Burrow, Fuller-Rowell, Ja, & Sue, 2013), increase in depression (Nadal, Griffin, Wong, Hamit, & Rasmus, 2014; Torres-Harding, Torres, & Yeo, 2020), increase in suicidality (Salim, Robinson, & Flanders, 2019), and increased hypervigilance, feelings of isolation and inferiority, and a decreased sense of belonging (Sue, Capodilupo, & Holder, 2008). Research into the nature of microaggressions has demonstrated that daily negative racial interactions contribute to hostile environments across various social and academic settings. Colorblind racial ideology, which is often argued as a viable solution to racial antagonism, remains endemic to societal structures and maintains racial prejudices and inequities. Although researchers have proposed methods to address microaggressions, one’s engagement with intentional acts of resistance often necessitate education that goes beyond what most educational and training programs tend to offer. Indeed, researchers have noted that predominantly White intuitions (PWIs) tend to create academic spaces rife with cultural tones and experiences congruent with the dominant group (i.e. oppressors), while lacking representation of culturally relevant images, activities, or spaces congruent with ethnic and racial minority cultural experiences. As a result, microaggressions go unnoticed to the point that groups of color begin to question the validity of their experiences. People of color may experience increased hypervigilance and stress when grappling with the consequences of addressing racist remarks. On the one hand, they may be consumed with fears of reinforcing racial stereotypes by speaking out, and on the other, they may experience a sense of guilt for not challenging racial stereotypes.

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A Critical Race Theory Perspective

Previous analysis of the role of microaggressions in society has rightfully explained how the use of microaggressions perpetuates White supremacy. However, even when the system of White Supremacy is named as the source of microaggressions, focus on the individual (e.g., perpetrator or recipient) as the unit of analysis (psychology’s predominant mode) fails to examine and deconstruct such systems. A Critical Race Theory (CRT) analysis of microaggressions would, among other things, aim to examine and dismantle the ideological and institutional roots from which microaggressions sprout. As Huber and Solórzano (2014) noted in their CRT analysis of microaggressions, microaggressions serve to reify, and are reflections of, the overarching system of White Supremacy. White Supremacy, and the institutional racism it produces, are what allow for the expression and acceptance of racial microaggressions. Huber

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and Solórzano (2014) emphasized that racism (and its expressions, including microaggressions) may be considered a symptom, whereas White Supremacy is the disease; and, that attempts to eradicate racism necessitate that we address the disease, rather than merely its symptoms. Sue (2004) identified this as well, noting that it has been the inability to deconstruct systems of whiteness that have allowed for the continuation of racism. A CRT perspective on racial microaggressions would also seek to account for the intersectional experience of such microaggressions. Expressions of oppression generally, including microaggressions, are often experienced at intersections; that is, the experiences of racism of a cisgender man of color are qualitatively different than those of a cisgender woman of color. Indeed, consider that transgender women of color experience some of the highest rates of violence and murder. To understand and deconstruct the systems behind racist expressions, such as microaggressions, analyses must take into account the intersectional nature of such experiences. Although CRT is predominantly concerned with the experiences of people of color, Sue (2004) importantly noted that deconstructing systems of whiteness are necessary; so too, then, is understanding how whiteness operates. A Critical Whiteness perspective on microaggressions would seek to understand the processes of whiteness that simultaneously result in microaggressions and work to uphold White Supremacy. For example, “colorblindness,” liberalism, and individualizing and pathologizing racism are intricately intertwined strategies used by whites that drive microaggressions and maintain the white supremacist status quo. Colorblindness, or the claim that one “does not see color,” not only defies psychological science but also obscures personal responsibility for racism. Beliefs in colorblindness are themselves rooted in the false assumption that racism consists of individual malicious acts committed by “bad” (or even “ill”) people. Liberalism, with its focus on “goodness” and “neutrality” is aided by colorblind and hyperindividualist ideology as it allows whites who do not commit egregious, overtly racist acts to see themselves as “not-racist” and therefore “good.” By using such tactics to avoid confronting the ubiquitousness of racism, the system of white supremacy, and the ways in which they benefit both historically and contemporarily from it, whites tacitly endorse and reinforce white supremacy. As explained by Sue (2004): colorblindness is a denial of differences, which is a denial of the existence of the unfair balance of power, which allows whites to deny how they benefit from white supremacy. Sue goes on to state that the benefits placate whites to the point of complicity. Yet, racism is ubiquitous, and white supremacy the status quo. Thus, it would be impossible for whites to be completely “not-racist.” As racism evolved from its overt form to its modern covert forms, racism has been driven from

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the consciousness of whites who wish to see themselves as “good,” and forced into their unconscious, where it operates to quietly inform their attitudes and behaviors. A series of defense mechanisms and heuristics informed by white supremacy lead often well-meaning whites who see themselves as “colorblind,” and thus, as “good,” to respond to racial stimuli (e.g., a person of color giving a speech) with racial microaggressions (“You are so articulate!”) without being aware of it. Challenging microaggressions when they occur can also become fraught, as doing so inherently challenges the white person’s sense of self as “not-racist” and thus “good.” The defensive reactions often evoked from white perpetrators of microaggressions further serve to maintain white supremacy by using gaslighting (“What I said wasn’t racist”), aversive emotion (anger, crying), and other tactics to dissuade people from addressing their racism. Through combining race-obfuscating ideology, defense mechanisms, gaslighting, and aversive tactics, perpetrators of microaggressions simultaneously ensure that the entrenched system of white supremacy is neither questioned nor examined; that the perpetrator need not engage in any self-examination; that the white supremacist beliefs of others in view of the microaggression are strengthened; and that the affected person(s) of color are further disempowered.

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Racial microaggressions are a harmful part of the daily milieu for people of color. Be they verbal, nonverbal, environmental, intentional, unintentional, well-meaning, malicious, obvious, or subtle, their deleterious effects on the physical and psychological health of people of color has been well-documented. Modern racism, colorblind ideology, and liberalism work together to simultaneously allow for the perpetration of racial microaggressions rooted in white supremacy yet keep perpetrators themselves unaware of their own racism and thus complicit in upholding white supremacy. To end microaggressions would require an end to white supremacy; thus, useful analyses of microaggressions require the kind of examination rooted in systems, history, and intersectionality that CRT demands. The research to date on microaggressions has advanced understanding of the effects of microaggressions as well as the attitudes of perpetrators, and Sue and colleagues’ (2019) recent work on microinterventions to combat microaggressions will undoubtedly contribute to making the world a less hostile place for people of color. However, systemic, intersectional analyses that address white supremacy are needed in order to deconstruct the whiteness that Sue (2004) presciently identified as the barrier to addressing and reducing microaggressions.

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References American Psychological Association (APA). (2016). Stress in America: The impact of discrimination. Stress in America Survey, 2016. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001). White supremacy and racism in the post civil rights era. Lynne Rienner. Huber, L. P., & Solórzano, D. G. (2014). Racial microaggressions as a tool for critical race research. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18, 297–320. Nadal, K. L., Griffin, K. E., Wong, Y., Hamit, S., & Rasmus, M. (2014). The impact of racial microaggressions on mental health: Counseling implications for clients of color. Journal of Counseling and Development, 92, 57–66. Ong, A. D., Burrow, A. L., Fuller-Rowell, T. E., Ja, N. M., & Sue, D. W. (2013). Racial microaggressions and daily well-being among Asian Americans. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60, 188–199. Pierce, C. (1969). Is bigotry the basis of the medical problem in the ghetto? In J. Norman (Ed.), Medicine in the ghetto (pp. 301–314). Meredith Corporation. Pierce, C. (1970). Offensive mechanisms. In F. Barbour (Ed.), In the Black seventies (pp. 265–282). Porter Sargent. Salim, S., Robinson, M., & Flanders, C. E. (2019). Bisexual women’s experiences of microaggressions and microaffirmations and their relation to mental health. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 6(3), 336. Smith, W. A., Hung, M., & Franklin, J. D. (2011). Racial battle fatigue and the miseducation of Black men: Microaggressions, societal problems and environmental stress. The Journal of Negro Education, 80, 63–82. Sue, D. W. (2004). Whiteness and ethnocentric monoculturalism: Making the invisible visible. American Psychologist, 59, 761–769. Sue, D. W., Alsaidi, S., Awad, M. N., Glaeser, E., Calle, C. Z., & Mendez, N. (2019). Disarming racial microaggressions: Microintervention strategies for targets, white allies, and bystanders. American Psychologist, 74, 128–142. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., & Holder, A. M. B. (2008). Racial microaggressions in the life experience of Black Americans. Professional Psychology, Research and Practice, 39, 329–336. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62, 271–286. Torres-Harding, S., Torres, L., & Yeo, E. (2019). Depression and perceived stress as mediators between racial microaggressions and somatic symptoms in college students of color. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 90(1), 125.

CHAPTER 53

Minstrelsy Brad Bierdz

Related Entries: Black American and Whiteness; False Consciousness; Jim Crow; Poverty; Privilege; White Supremacy

… Some might position blackface and minstrelsy in an arguably reductionist lens. The emotional, personal, and identity-grasping pieces of blackface minstrelsy (re)create a perceived positionality as it pertains to antiracism and social justice. In other words, many may argue that the horrendous nature of blackface minstrelsy befit a singular frame of analysis such that we should disregard minstrelsy as a pure form of racist recitation of the Other – a way in which the powerful or the psychologically waged workers of racism position themselves, their own humanity, in seemingly grotesque and opposite ways of those that are consistently and consciously victims of systemized and wholesale racism. In particular, Frederick Douglass (1848) described the agents of minstrelsy and its reproductions as, “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money and pander to the corrupt taste of their fellow citizens” (p. 18). Blackface minstrelsy found its roots in the 1830s within the U.S., and subsequently, it became one of the most popular forms of entertainment throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Eric Lott’s (1995) Love and Theft, the author details how economic relations amongst the white working class were intimately intertwined with the sensuous “need” for the development and continuation for such a theatrical form. Blackface minstrelsy became considerably popular in urban centers throughout the North and was a performance in which primarily white men took on satirized images of black folks as to entertain a crowd of people; though black and white in some instances, the crowds were primarily and ostensibly white in racial makeup yet differentiated among class and ethnic group. On the stage there would be a semicircle of around five white men in blackface, each would be playing a different part of the characterization of black folks and each held a different instrument. Traditionally, there would be a single man in blackface in the center of the semicircle, and they would act as the connection between the audience and this seemingly © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_053

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foreign ideal of black identity. The person in the middle would be considered the Interlocutor, and from the beginning, his dress would be subliminally less overdone, less ragged than the other men in blackface, his voice would be less toned in “black dialect,” and he would address the audience in a conversational tone, ultimately connecting this piece of performance to the audience (Lott, 1995; Lensmire & Snaza, 2010). Blackface minstrelsy also had three main parts that constituted a performance. First, the semicircle of men in blackface would perform a seemingly random collection of songs that passed as “black” while also committing themselves to what would be considered “black clowning or comedy.” Following the musical performance, the semicircle of men in blackface would then participate in novelty performances, such as comedic dialogues, monologues, speeches to each other and the audience, and other like types of performances. Finally, those same performers would finish their performance with a short play that was usually set in the South and usually included exaggerated dancing, singing, mouth movements, and some sort of burlesque component. Moreover, though we can in some ways simplify the aspects of blackface minstrel shows down to these three basic elements, the shows themselves cannot justifiably be simplified into a wholly racist image of hegemonic Whiteness. In other words, though it may be simpler to position blackface minstrelsy as a racist determination of society and the individuals involved, this reduces a complicated form of art and expression to an oversimplified conceptualization of inherent racism. Minstrelsy was more than simple racism. Further, though I do not mean to deny the racist aspects, affects, and realities within and without blackface minstrelsy, I also want to draw our attention to the complicated ways in which racial creation and determinations have evolved through and as a result of blackface minstrelsy – how class, whitened ethnic identity, and phenotypicalized race have operated through logics of psychological wage and public privilege. Even more, I want to draw out how blackface minstrelsy not only operates as products of mockery, rage, and fear but also through internalized black attraction and desire. For instance, though many scholars argue that there is only inherent violence and fear within the performance of blackface minstrelsy, many other scholars (see Lensmire & Snaza, 2010) propose a relation of desire and deep-seeded attraction towards these cultural forms and realities that the white audiences and white performers were drawn to; while there is simultaneously mockery at the base of the blackface minstrel performance, there is also a desire to hear musical syncopation, to be a part of Africanist expressive forms, and to be intimately related to the African body on stage.

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Blackface minstrelsy, though a complex creation and constant reaffirmation of fear and desire, was also a way in which class determinations were somewhat suppressed against that classification of race. For instance, even before the introduction of blackface minstrel shows, white elites were creating positionalities in which white working class folks and white indentured servants were given psychological and public wages/privileges for the very essence of their whiteness. In particular, slave codes gave white enslaved peoples the social benefit of never having to take off their shirt to be beat by their masters, while black enslaved peoples never had that privilege. Similarly, according to those same slave codes, white enslaved peoples could beat black enslaved peoples, but the opposite relation was never allowed to take place. This foundational aspect of slavery and social reality built and necessitated a sense of white privilege both amongst the most economically advantaged white folks and those white folks that were indentured servants, such that no matter what position a white person may find themselves in, there would always be someone who was Othered by a hegemonic racialization system below them – in this sense any black person would always be seen and treated as lesser than any other white person. Blackface minstrel shows simultaneously operated as a way in which ethnic difference amongst white folks was erased and class difference was glaring yet ameliorated. Particularly, the essence of blackness on stage created a situational and eventually total consideration of what was Othered in regards to whiteness. In this Orientalist vision of American racialization, blackface minstrel shows went on to (re)define what aspects of human experience and humanity would be considered white and American and which other aspects of that experience would be considered black and Othered. While hard work and determination were defined as white aspects of humanity, on stage, blackness was then defined and redefined as laziness and hardheadedness. In whichever ways the performers defined themselves, they also positioned themselves against whiteness. While in blackface, they performed what they believed blackness to be, while reaffirming the “positive” and inalienable aspects of whiteness. Moreover, in so doing, the performers, consciously or not, denoted whiteness as malleable and encompassing; thus, they began yet another expansion of whiteness past white ethnic determinations and towards a more homogenized, phenotypical interpretation of race and rights. Still, on the other hand, while this seeming expansion of privilege and psychological wage was being enacted and performed there was still a clear division of class and ethnic reality expressed through the audience. Though on stage white performers were ostensibly uniting white peoples against the backdrop of an

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Othered people through a deterministic vision of social reality, the audience was still a model of class and ethnic division among the white race. Working class white folks in the audience sat in the pit right in front of the stage, and those wealthier white citizens had the privileges of sitting in the balcony, both distanced from the white rabble and the racist mockery happening on the stage, yet all the while still able to enjoy the show and their class superiority over those white folks found physically below them. Ultimately, though blackface minstrel shows operated in a variety of ways that went towards the homogenization of the white race, expanding classifications of whiteness on those European ethnic groups that were traditionally excluded – demonstrating the popularized images of the Others while demanding assimilation – the shows were simultaneously images of economic and class discrimination coupled with ethnic divisions still extant within our society. Though blackface minstrel shows may intimate a racist society founded on a system of Othered categories, the performances also demonstrate a desire of black cultural forms, of the black body, and the black mind. Embedded within those performances, there is also a desire to be a part of this preindustrialized life of the black man; there is a deep-seeded desire to be free from the yoke of the industrialized agents of society, to be free from the incessant work dictated by the owners of the means of production. Embedded within the images and plays of the blackface minstrel shows, there is a desire for play outside of work, for leisure and time with and among family. Though we also have to be aware of the colonizing aspect of desire, what bell hooks (1992) denoted as “eating the Other,” we also have to create teacher education programs and classes within our schools that take into account the humanity and desire to know within white minds and bodies. In particular, if we are to continue to demonstrate the inherent racism within whiteness and those humans having such pigmentation, then we may just continue to deny that desire for more knowledge and connection, destroying their would-be association to blackness and antiracism: if we continue to treat all white folks as only racist, with antiracist hostility instead of carefully educating and joyfully cocreating, then we may just continue to propagate and build upon a self-fulfilling prophecy of racism amongst students, future teachers, and those around us. Still, a colonization of culture is at the precipice of this attraction towards black culture. While that desire may be used towards antiracist goals, helping to envision a commitment to destroying hegemonic racialization, it can just as easily be turned to “eating the Other” (bell hooks, 1992). For instance, just as blackface minstrel shows were once one of the most popular pieces of entertainment, we can also see how the rise of hip hop culture has become one of the major interests of contemporary white youth that can be noted, and

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as such, while in some instances, hip hop culture is being used in “eating the Other” (bell hooks, 1992), in other ways, hip hop culture is also being used to continue to educate white folks about racially and socially constructed injustices that take place within their communities and within their country. Moreover, as touched on before, blackface minstrel shows demonstrated this Otherness that was defined as blackness such that the white folks performing in such shows built an Orientalist view of racial construction in which blackness was defined as lazy while whiteness was defined as hardworking. However, all the while, within this construction of race and idealism, there was also a subliminal uncertainty. While the white audience was to identify with the hard-working antithesis of the portrayal of lazy Otherness, there was also a desire to be lazy – to be free of the loads of work, to be liberated from the means of production. Even more, while the characterizations of blackness were created to portray this Otherness as hypersexual and insatiable, there was still desire on behalf of white audience members. During these shows, there was simultaneous desire and repudiation, there was space to be horrified at what was happening on stage, at the very least in an outward appearance, but all the while, the white audience would still desire the space to be lazy, to be sexual, and to be human. This is the construction and manipulability of stereotype, a way in which white folks continue to trust in democracy, while still betraying the foundational principles such that all people are created equal (Lensmire & Snaza, 2010). This power found within uncertainty and social construction allows white folks to bridge seeming idiosyncrasies with logical foundations. In the end, we treat our primarily white students in teacher education programs and our white students broadly in such a way that mimics the popularized and monolithic histories and genealogies of blackface minstrelsy. In other words, we presume our white students are racist beings before they enter our classrooms, and as such, we ignore the complexity within whiteness and the racial construction of selfhood. We ignore the desire intimately imbedded within the entirety of blackface minstrelsy, and as such, we also ignore the multifarious intimacy within the infatuation with hip-hop culture, seemingly racist motives, and the identity of whiteness. Furthermore, to counteract this within all levels of education, we must at the very minimum presuppose or hope for an uncertain white selfhood – the desire to be antiracist and within a communion of humanity: to be outside systems of regimentation and oppression. More, we should not deny that racism exists or that it operates within our society; we should alternatively note the often times complex manner that racism has within our society and peoples. And finally, we must also understand the power struggles within the white mind and body as they act within education and social reality, such that they are constantly being hailed to accept

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some form of humanity outside their own, that they are being demanded upon to act within the parameters of racism, though they may be uncertain as to how they fit into the systems of oppression. We must recognize that systems of power are always already operating among the body and the mind of the white individual just as they do every other determination of subjectivity and personhood. As educators, we must keep this in mind, hoping to avoid acting in presumptive and deterministic ways thereby potentially urging on racist behaviors and realities, going directly against our mission as antiracist educators.

References Douglass, F. (1848, October 27). The North Star. Foster, G. (2012). Performing whiteness: Postmodern re/constructions in the cinema. SUNY Press. Gottschild, B. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance and other contexts. Greenwood Publishing. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press. Lott, E. (1995). Love & theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. Oxford University Press. Thandeka. (2000). Learning to be White. Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 54

Mixed Race Identity Peter J. Aspinall

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Immigration; Social Construction

… A person’s “mixed race identity” is widely regarded as the subjective self-identification of their mixedness. Clearly, this may be expressed within many diverse contexts, such as informal discourse or the completion of a survey or census questionnaire. Further, it is an expression of how the person wishes to describe themselves in their own words, best captured without the prompting of predesignated categories in an ethnic/racial group classification or specific examples. Yet such designations cannot always be so straightforwardly constructed. Cognitive research has shown that some people require the context of a question on race or ethnic group and its set of options to fully understand the meaning of concepts like mixed race, multiracial, and mixed. Some measure of “mixed race identity” is now frequently required in surveys and censuses, especially in the U.K. and U.S., but increasingly in other countries, and these responses are generally termed as such because of the underlying focus in these questions on subjective identification. For example, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the census agency for England and Wales, has argued that “categories should be used… that reflect people’s own preferred ethnic descriptions of themselves” (ONS, 2003). The U.S. Census Bureau, too, has emphasized that the terms used to identify population groups should be familiar and acceptable to the people described “if the principle of self-identification is to be honored” (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 1997). Similarly, Williams and Jackson (2000) have urged in a U.S. public health context that “efforts should be made to use the most preferred terms for racial populations… and to periodically monitor and update racial categories” (p. 1729). This conjunction and interplay of subjective identities and categories in censuses/surveys is best understood from a theoretical perspective. The distinction is made by Jenkins (1996) between processes of group identification (how group members identify themselves) and social categorization (definition by observers). He proposes a model of the internal-external dialectic of © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_054

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identification whereby the two processes feed upon each other and are mutually implicated. Peterson (1997), in similar vein, has observed that categories have the capability to create or shape group identities, suggesting that “few things facilitate a category’s coalescence into a group so readily as its designation by an official body” (p. 218). Brubaker et al. (2004) have also argued that “even when census categories are initially remote from prevailing self-understandings, they may be taken up by cultural and political entrepreneurs and eventually reshape lines of identification” (p. 34). Thus, while there may be two analytically distinct types of “mixed race identities” – those reported by respondents in unprompted open text and those where the respondent identifies as “mixed race” though selecting one or more predesignated category options, a process of “fitting in” that Roth (2016) has called “racial self-classification” – both types are likely to be mutually entailed in each other. These two types of mixed race identity can be understood by reference to a survey of 326 young people aged 18 to 25, attending colleges in England (Aspinall and Song, 2013). The decennial census categorisation only offered these respondents the options of “White and Black Caribbean,” “White and Black African,” “White and Asian,” and an open response “Any other Mixed background.” However, the very first survey question – “Please describe your racial/ ethnic identity in your own words in the text box” – and the use of an extended “mixed” classification yielded insights into the students’ mixed race identities and the limitations of census categorisations. The entirely unprompted free text option revealed a huge diversity, complexity, and granularity of descriptions, one in five respondents naming three or more groups, against the census’s two group exact combinations. Some combined racial/pan-ethnic terms like “black” and “white” with ethnic/national origin terms such as “English,” “Somali,” and “Polish” in the same description. Moreover, many did not differentiate clearly between racial, ethnic, national, and regional modes of identification and belonging, suggesting layered and multiple modes of affiliation and belonging. Such evidence indicates that many mixed individuals are required to simplify their responses when using the Census’s “mixed” categorization of dual groupings. Further, additional heterogeneity was revealed when respondents were invited to classify themselves using an extended “mixed” classification involving 12 categories (5 with write-in options). When categories of “Chinese and White,” “Other E or SE Asian and White,” “Arab and White,” and “minority mixed” were offered, all concealed within the census categories, around a quarter of the sample identified with one of these options. Thus, what is captured in racial self-classification questions depends very substantially on their

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format. The exact combinations approach, as asked in the England and Wales census question, imposes strict limitations on mixed race identifications by virtue of its prescriptiveness. The approach adopted in the U.S. and Canada censuses – an instruction to tick all categories that apply across the categories in the race (or population group) questions – offers more flexibility and is particularly effective in capturing multiplicity in mixed race identifications. However, both approaches lack efficacy with regard to more nuanced and layered descriptions. These are best obtained in “mixed” write-in options that provide scope for respondents to record their mixed race identities in their own and frequently granular terms. However, as Jenkins (1996) reminds us, even this approach is not entirely free from the influence of social categorisation. Obtaining some measure of mixed race identifications is further complicated by the underlying concept used in racial self-identification questions. ‘Race’ is an overarching or umbrella term that may reference different and frequently distinct dimensions across national settings and may invoke different and sometimes changing understandings. In addition to already discussed ‘racial identity’ and “racial self-classification,” Roth (2016) adds “observed race,” “reflected race,” “phenotype,” and “racial ancestry.” In addition, many countries choose “ethnic group” or “ethnicity” rather than “race” in their census terminology. This means that mixed race may be defined in terms of these different concepts. Perhaps the most notable cleavages across these measures of mixedness are between “mixed race” and “mixed ethnicity” and between “mixed race/ ethnicity” and “mixed racial/ethnic ancestry.” While some scholars advocate the usage of “mixed race” to encompass combinations that abridge diverse ethnic/national origins, that is, “multiethnicity,” Azoulay (2003,) argues that the historical particularity of “mixed race” justifies its retention as a distinct concept. Widening the definition “is a frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race” (p. 234). Other terms may reference “mixed race” while eschewing the term “race.” For example, in England and Wales, the 2011 Census question on “ethnic group” includes a “mixed/multiple ethnic groups” section. The tick options of the three exact combinations (all prioritising White as the first-named group) are “mixed race” (mixed pan-ethnicities) in all but name, though termed “mixed/multiple ethnic background” options. A more complex challenge is the difference between the “mixed race identity” v. “mixed racial ancestry” dimensions that brings to the fore the concept of identity and its interpretation by respondents in racial self-classification questions. These two measures – identity and (ancestral) origin – yield different

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populations. Some studies in the UK indicate that operational definitions of mixedness based on parentage capture a substantially larger (by a multiple of over 3) “mixed” population (McFall, 2012). These measures are usually derived from data specifying the race/ethnic group of the respondent’s parents and are not a measure of self-identity. Thus, the majority of persons who have mixed parentage identify with a single group, highlighting the important distinction between “mixed race identity” and terms like “mixed parentage,” “dual heritage,” and even (unqualified) “mixed race.” The Pew Research Center reported in its 2015 survey findings that 1.4% of the U.S. adult population self-described as two-or-more-races (Pew Research Center 2015). However, a further 2.9% were of multiracial background based on their parents and an additional 2.6% were of multiracial background based on their grandparents, making 6.9% in all. Only 4-in-10 adults with a mixed racial background (39%) said they considered themselves to be “mixed race or multiracial,” a similar proportion to that in the UK. Besides these differences in the dimensions/concepts of race, other complexities in the measurement of mixed race add intractability to the term. “Mixed race identity,” as recorded in censuses and surveys, might be expected to yield stable or consistent measures over time and in different contexts. This would especially be the case if race embodied other dimensions like observed race (how persons are seen by others), reflected race (how they believe they are seen by others), and phenotype. However, “mixed race” yields inconsistent measures of racial self-classification and this has been found across different methods of capture and different concepts, suggesting that “race” is interpreted in a much looser way, such as socio-cultural group and national origins (even though reported at the broader “race” or pan-ethnicity level). Tests of reproducibility indicate that the U.S. 2000 (and 2010) Census option to “mark one or more” races (across 15 tick boxes) produced problematic data: in a post-census validation survey, of non-Hispanic panel respondents reporting two or more races in the U.S. 2000 Census, only 40% (724,686/1,814,610) also reported two or more races in the Census Quality Survey (CQS) initial contact (60% switched to reporting a single race) (Bentley et al., 2003). These findings suggest problems of unreliability with the “mark one or more” format. However, high levels of inconsistency are also found in the exact combinations approach used in the England and Wales 2001 and 2011 Censuses. Long-term stability and change between decennial population censuses can be assessed by comparing responses to the ethnic question in the 2001 and 2011 Censuses amongst ONS Longitudinal Study participants. Across the four census “Mixed” groups, only modest proportions stayed in the same “mixed” group from one census to the next: White and Black Caribbean, 76.4%; White

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and Asian, 58.8%; White and Black African, 56.8%; and Any other Mixed background, 29.6% (Simpson et al., 2015), all proportions below the stand alone White group (99.2%); and the constituent minority ethnic groups (Black Caribbean, Black African, and Asian). The poor stability in the Other Mixed group is to be expected, given its heterogeneity, but the modest proportions in the White and Black African and White and Asian groups is worrying. The specification of exact combinations, unexpectedly, does not deliver stability, except in the White and Black Caribbean group. Broadly similar findings were reported in a study that compared ethnicity recording for the same children (6.7 million matched records) in the same year but across two different sources, linked recorded ethnicity in the 2011 Census and the 2011 English School Census (ONS, 2014). Further, whether racial self-classification is captured by multi-ticking or the use of exact combinations, it is clear that the resultant measures of mixedness or multiraciality will depend heavily on the tick box options or exact combinations used. The U.S. 2000 and 2010 Censuses, for example, do not capture mixes of two or more races that include Hispanic, as Hispanic origin is asked in a separate “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” question. Several exploratory approaches to combining the race and Hispanic origin questions into one item reported a two or more responses population of between 3.9% and 6.8% (Compton et al., 2013), compared with 2.9% of the population recorded in the 2010 U.S. Census. In the 2006 Canadian Census, 458,240 people (1.5% of the population) reported multiple responses in the population group question. However, as the self-reporting Aboriginal population was not included in this question, the multiple responses exclude mixes involving this group (including the Métis population). Similarly, in England and Wales, the ethnic group question selects for exact combinations of White and pan-ethnic groups. The latter all relate to Britain’s colonial past and are only a subset of other potentially important pairings like White and Chinese, White and South-East Asian, White and Arab, and minority ethnic group combinations, such respondents only having recourse to the write-in “Any other Mixed/multiple ethnic background” category. We have only limited data on “mixed race identity,” which requires an open response, unprompted write-in field for capture. Such an approach was found in Scotland’s 2011 Census to produce highly disparate findings that lacked utility for the understanding of mixedness. However, in practice, measures of mixed race identity and self-classification as collected in censuses and surveys are to some degree mutually implicated in each other. They tend to be substantially determined by the concept and question asked, method of capture, and how the data is reported. Thus, the U.S. National Research Council (2004,)’s

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Panel to Review the 2000 Census concluded that the “significant inconsistency in multirace reporting indicates that membership in the multiracial population is highly unstable and therefore that the multiracial population identified on Census Day is only one of many multiracial populations that might have been enumerated” (p. 320). Given the increasing diversity of populations and mixing in Britain and North America, multiethnicity and multiraciality are becoming increasingly complex and multigenerational. Yet survey research shows that in England “mixed race” is the favored term to describe mixedness, far surpassing terms such as “mixed heritage,” “multiethnic,” and “mixed origins” (Aspinall and Song 2013). The major challenge for census agencies is to develop methods of capture that are sensitive to the cognitive system by which people and groups express their mixed race identities.

References Aspinall, P. J., & Song, M. (2013). Mixed race identities. Palgrave Macmillan. Azoulay, K. G. (2003). Rethinking ‘mixed race.’ Research in African Literatures, 34(2), 233–235. Bentley, M., Mattingly, T., Hough, C., & Bennett, C. (2003). Census quality survey to evaluate responses to the census 2000 question on race: An introduction to the data. Census 2000 evaluation B.3. U.S. Census Bureau. Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., & Stamatov, P. (2004). Ethnicity as cognition. Theory and Society, 33, 31–64. Compton, E., Bentley, M., Ennis, S., & Rastogi, S. (2013). 2010 census race and Hispanic origin alternative questionnaire experiment. United States Census Bureau. Jenkins, R. (1996). Social identity. Routlege. McFall, S. L. (2012). Understanding society: Findings 2012. Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. National Research Council. (2004). The 2000 census: Counting under adversity. Panel to Review the 2000 census. The National Academies Press. Office for National Statistics. (2013). How do you define ethnicity? ONS. Office for National Statistics. (2014). Beyond 2011: Statistical research update (M13). ONS. Peterson, W. (1987). Politics and the measurement of ethnicity. In W. Alonso & P. Starr (Eds.), The politics of numbers. Russell Sage Foundation. Pew Research Center. (2015). Multiracial in America. Proud, diverse and growing in numbers. Pew Research Center. Roth, W. D. (2016). The multiple dimensions of race. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(8), 1310–1338.

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Simpson, L., Warren, J., & Jivraj, S. (2015). Do people change their ethnicity over time. In S. Jivraj & L. Simpson (Eds.), Ethnic identity and inequalities in Britain (pp. 79–92). Policy Press. U.S. Office of Management and Budget. (2007). Federal register 7 September 1997, Part II, pp. 36873–36946. Williams, D. R., & Jackson, J. S. (2000). Race/ethnicity and the 2000 census: Recommendations for African American and other Black populations in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 90, 1728–1730.

CHAPTER 55

Nationalism Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Capitalism; Neoliberalism; Settler Colonialism; White Supremacy

… Nationalism refers to a subject’s identification with membership in a nation, most often a particular nation state. This practice of identification functions to create multiple ideological linkages between a subject and their nation, working to determine those who are to be considered insiders and outsiders, who should be seen as inherently similar or different, and those who deserve support because of their shared identification with the same nation, or not. Sociologist Jyoti Puri (2004) highlights these fissures, writing, “National identities do not have any inherent essence, but are defined in opposition to another” (p. 15). In other words, in order for one to have a sense of the nation and belonging, one must have a sense of who is to be included and excluded. This process of marking others and insiders has the effect of simultaneously creating cohesions and establishing norms within the insider group while demarcating the otherness of those who are to be excluded. Nationalisms thus function by producing and sustaining notions of otherness and sameness that work ideologically to shape social and political realities the world over. Nationalisms can make use of any and every identity formation or construct in order to realize the establishment of insiders and outsiders of a nation. As Aminzade (2020) argues, “Although all forms of nationalism are xenophobic to some degree in that they entail exclusionary boundaries distinguishing citizens from foreigners, the forms and targets of exclusion vary considerably” (p. 25). There are many identities against which a given nationalism may create and maintain the status of its other. Xenophobia can be kindled by a host of representations and identities, including sexual orientation, gender, social class, religion, and race. Because nationalisms must be formed and maintained in response to others, inherent in any form of nationalism is the propensity to exclude. We can think of this as a kind of boundary making and policing, nationalisms must be bounded in order to be meaningful. Were a nationalism to have no outsiders or no limits to participation, it would cease to be meaningful as a means of sustaining the interests of the dominant powers within © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_055

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a given nation. If one considers the creation of political borders, often established in arbitrary ways, one can understand the very same process working ideologically as it does territorially. Nationalisms can be thought of as the ideological borders of particular nations, and just like international borders, nationalisms are policed and protected. It is important to note that the hegemonic notion of nationalism as derived from shared descent and kinship is a function of its ideological power, not a historically accurate account of the formations of nationalisms. Invented notions of common descent and culture are ancient in the context of nation building, from Romulus and Remus in Rome, to George Washington unable to tell a lie in the United States (U.S.). Yet in every nation making project, the importance of establishing who is to be included and who is to be excluded overshadows any kind of romantic claims to a shared ancestral past. Denoting a nation, the “motherland” or “fatherland,” or using family metaphors such as the “founding fathers” offer evidence of the ways kinship is invented for ideological ends in nationalisms. Common descent is of course assumed if one shares a parent, yet such “parents” in this case have almost no connection to those currently living in a particular nation. Settler colonial nations offer prime examples of the ways that kinship ties are incapable of fully explaining nationalisms, because they showcase the historical break between the originary nations of the one they are currently occupying. In such contexts one often finds evidence for heightened levels of nationalism that revolve around invented and ahistorical notions of commonality and difference; perhaps none more so than race. We can see the United States as an especially revealing example of these mechanisms and processes. The land that we now consider to be the U.S. was part of colonial projects from a host of European nations, including Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. At the time of the U.S. war of independence with Great Britain, portions of the present-day country were still parts of Spain and France. Further, the people in the early United States represented a wide range of ethnic, racial, and religious identities that did not signal a common and shared past. U.S. nationalism thus could not rely solely on primordial histories to invent and sustain the national body. While the American Revolutionary War with Great Britain has become a watershed in a “widely remembered past,” it shaped a context for U.S. nationalism as anti-British (Calhoun, 2004, p. 33). The basis of U.S. nationalism emerged from conflict with competing nationalisms. We can think, for instance, of the many people who remained loyal to the British government as settler colonists living in the U.S. functioning as an internal other to the bourgeois independence struggle of the revolutionary era. These internal others came to be sources for nationalisms in the U.S. that were anti-British, but projected onto those close at hand,

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living in the same nation. We can also think of the British soldiers and government as external others and yet another competing nationalism. The U.S. example also showcases just how much notions of the other, who is internal, and who is external can shift over time. From trade to culture to language, the links between the U.S. and Great Britain today give no evidence for antagonism and a history of multiple wars for control of peoples and territories. Western Europe more broadly has become a kind of originary location for many white people in the U.S., thus offering even further ideological mystifying under the guise of racial nationalisms. In settler colonial contexts like the U.S., inventing shared racial orientations and identifications can work to overcome intraracial differences and conflicts. It can also function to make explicitly racialized nationalisms the most pervasive and powerful in a particular nation. Manzo (1998) writes, “Nationalism may invent, ignore or dissolve racial boundaries… But nationalism is racial when it treats permanent difference… as alien, threatening, and a problem to be solved” (p. 19). Manzo argues that nationalisms would not exist or be possible without the “twin concepts” of the nation and the alien. This can help us understand that these two concepts inform one another in any and all nationalisms, but also signal how insidious racialized conceptions of “the nation” and “the alien” can be. Imperialism and colonialism have left colonial legacies that help to explain the salience of race in nationalisms. In the U.S. this was largely accomplished through the invention of a racial solidarity that could overcome and undermine other forms of solidarity, such as social class. Thus, working class white people came to see themselves as more similar to white plantation and factory owners rather than to black peoples whose lives and work were far more similar to their own. Colonial practices often functioned to create multiple races and succeeding post-colonial nationalisms often are forced to recon with (invented) racial hierarches. Racism and white supremacy were hallmarks of colonialism that persist today across the globe. The creation and maintenance of racial others has been foundational for nationalisms ranging from Rwanda (Mamdani, 2001), to Australia (Manzo, 1998), to the U.S. Marx (1998) tells us that in the case of the U.S., “Institutionalizing common prejudice against blacks reinforced white nationalism” (p. 12). He theorizes that intraracial conflicts among whites, hegemonically understood as that between Southerners and Northerners in the Antebellum Period, required juridical reactions to invent and maintain racialized others in order to build intraracial solidarity amongst white people. Following the earlier definitions of nationalism, we can see evidence here for the project of inventing (racial) others so as to create new forms of connection and

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similarity reified into a white supremacist nationalism capable of overcoming regional tensions and differences. White peoples’ differences and intraracial conflicts can be refracted by reinforcing the notion that a common racial identity is more powerful than other forms of identification and identity. The link between white supremacy and nationalism should thus be clear, as nationalism was and is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of ideological nation building. White peoples were (are) often hailed upon arrival to the U.S. to appropriate particular white supremacist discourses and to oppress peoples of color out of allegiance to the white collective. In so doing, they are attempting to become national insiders through contributing to the maintenance of white supremacy. The presence of racialized others functions to “whiten” anyone who is able to pass as white and decreases the amount of distance or difference amongst white folks more broadly. That is, where there are differing norms and customs from different European contexts living in the same space in the colony, such differences appear lessened when racialized to contrast with a non-white racial other. The Jim Crow South in the U.S. had the effect of whitening everyone who could not be considered black in the binary system where laws only applied to white and black people, creating only two possible racial identities. It should be noted, however, that the process of institutionalizing racialized oppression functions to produce resistances and other competing nationalisms. In the case of the U.S., black unity was built in opposition to explicitly white supremacist laws at the exact same time that white intraracial unity was built in white supremacist nationalism. We can think here of “Black Nationalism” and the various black nationalist movements from Malcolm X and the black Muslims, to the Black Panthers, and the myriad other groups we could list here. Whiteness and nationalism thus work together to accomplish at least two things: maintenance of the racial hierarchy and thus intraracial solidarity, and to protect national identities that sustain nationalisms through the maintenance of racial others. In the U.S., black people represent an internal other against which whites can construct identities and know themselves to be white. The ideology of nationalism coupled with the racial ideology of white supremacy operates side by side to preserve the status quo. In practice, white supremacy and nationalism work so complimentarily that it can be difficult to tell where one process ends and the other begins. To return to the example of Jim Crow, we can see nationalist undertones in white Northerners who allowed persistent discrimination and oppression of black peoples by white Southerners in order to maintain national white solidarity. This process can be seen as the realization of a form of nationalism: as the state mobilizing notions of common descent and heritage in order to stave off conflicts that might

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undermine nation and wealth building. The very same process can be seen in explicitly racial terms: a white supremacist government legislating the oppression of people of color. To treat Jim Crow as solely racial or solely nationalist misses the extent to which whiteness and nationalism are so deeply enmeshed with one another. The concepts of whiteness and nationalism in the U.S. should thus be approached with a similar critical orientation that recognizes evidence of nationalism is also evidence of white supremacy. Even with the earlier example of Black Nationalism, such an expression of nationalism enters into engagement with whiteness immediately: the qualifier of “black” signals a differentiation in racial terms. There could not be Black Nationalism if there were not a competing white nationalism that creates the oppositional mechanism for the direction of Black Nationalist activity. Further, were white supremacy not so overwhelmingly powerful in defining and limiting life chances, there would be no need for an oppositional Black Nationalism. Concomitantly, resistance to white supremacy can reinforce notions of the state and the nation. In advocating for an oppositional nationalism, there is a tendency to reify the state and miss the potentially more radical aim of abolishing nation states and political borders central to leftist projects from Marxism to Anarchism. Nationalisms can then be seen as incredibly powerful ideological projects that can work for liberation and recognition while simultaneously reinforcing elements of the oppressive status quo, such as the state. Resisting nationalisms is complex work precisely because of the propensity for nationalisms to create and maintain competing versions or expressions of nationalism that work off of and inform one another. Locating white supremacy within nationalisms and working to rid expressions of nationalism of all white supremacist positions might actually be an impossible project because of the centuries of white supremacy and nation building that have preceded our current moment. Nation states as a concept have colonial and European origins that have been superimposed on the world and thus, if one protects the concept of the nation in opposition to white supremacist nationalisms, one is participating in a reformist rather than revolutionary project. Reforming the nation state, premised as it is on the creation and maintenance of xenophobia, to cease being xenophobic is thus ridiculous if one is rooted to the radical solidarity possible among the great masses of people across the globe. Resisting white supremacy, however, entails resisting the many means by which it reinvigorates and sustains its hegemonic hold over the great majority of people. Paying close attention to the exclusionary elements of organizations and communities that are working to resist white supremacy can offer us insight and additional avenues for sustaining such work and resisting nationalisms.

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References Aminzade, R. R. (2020). Nationalism and the politics of exclusion: An historical sociology of Tanzanian nationalism. Manuscript in preparation. Calhoun, C. J. (2004). Nationalism. University of Minnesota Press. Mamdani, M. (2001). When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press. Manzo, K. A. (1998). Creating boundaries the politics of race and nation. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Marx, A. W. (1998). Making race and nation: A comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge University Press. Puri, J. (2004). Encountering nationalism. Blackwell.

CHAPTER 56

Neoliberalism Peter Hossler

Related Entries: Capitalism; False Consciousness; Marxism; School Choice

… Neoliberalism is many things and its meaning can shift depending on the actors who deploy the term and their intended audience. For example, neoliberalism is both a set of political economic theories that radically re-organize the relationship between the state, society and the market and a suite of policy prescriptions that serve to protect the political and economic power of elites. It is both a specific set of political and economic doctrine that interrogated the meaning of the state and capitalism in the aftermath of Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression and a theoretical hammer used to critique a set of loosely related policies that increase wealth inequality and diminish meaningful democratic participation. It is both a theoretical framework for understanding new modalities in the government of the self and a metaphor that serves as a rallying cry for activists across the globe demanding greater access to the means of survival and political participation. As a result, neoliberalism is often critiqued as a chaotic and ill-defined term that is both everywhere and nowhere. That said, it remains a central tool for evangelizing, critiquing, and resisting a series of changes in the relationship between the market, state, and society. At its core, neoliberalism, or neoliberal capitalism (neoliberalism is an extension of liberalism’s theorization of capitalism, as such it exists within an already established field of economic thought that has key assumptions and rationalities embedded within it), is a set of political economic doctrines that proposes: (1) human flourishing can best be attainted through market relationships, as it provides the most accurate and efficient signals of social demand and can best coordinate supply; (2) governments should be limited to providing the necessary infrastructure to support a properly functioning market (e.g. protection of private property and the provision of security); and (3) government and social infrastructure should promote individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills (i.e. cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit by limiting entitlements). Along with this theoretical foundation has emerged a set of key © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_056

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incontestable policy prescriptions that now dominate the global landscape and have been championed by think tanks and academics and dictated by global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. These include privatization, free trade, de-regulation, reductions in government spending, welfare reform, and financialization. These policies have come to affect a wide-range of political, economic, and social spaces, from the regulation of global finance to the operation of local schools. In the process, it has become one of the key ideological struggles activating social movements and activist from across the globe. Although, present day usage of neoliberalism is often linked to the rise of conservative political movements in the United States (e.g. Ronald Reagan’s “revolution”) and the United Kingdom (e.g. Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”) during the 1980s, its intellectual origins date back to conversations, among a relatively small collective, of German and American political-economists in the 1930s and 40s, who would become better known as the Ordoliberals and the Chicago School of Economics. The Ordo-liberals were composed of primarily German scholars, who saw the failure of the Weimer Republic and the rise of Nazism as the result of Germany’s failure to implement a properly functioning market economy, rather than an outcome of the contradictions of capitalist markets. This prompted a key epistemological break from the earlier versions of classic liberalism, which saw the market as a “natural” outcome of competition, an innate human tendency. This break lead to a fundamental re-shaping of how Ordo-liberals understood the relationship between the market and the state. Rather than theorizing the role of a minimalist state, that should restrict itself to external and domestic security and the protection of private property, Ordo-liberals believed that the state must play an active role in constructing and maintaining properly functioning markets (i.e. regulations to prevent monopolies, upholding and enforcing contracts, etc.). While the Ordo-liberals sought to reconcile the German State and economy in the aftershock of Nazism, the Chicago School of Economics’ central problematic was American capitalism in light of the Great Depression and the New Deal. The Chicago School, similarly to the Ordo-liberals, argued that the state’s primary role should be to ensure a properly functioning economy, which would ensure political and economic freedom. However, they differed from the Ordo-liberals in two significant ways. First, unlike the Ordo-liberals, they saw monopoly as the result of government interferences, rather than seeing government regulation as a key mechanism for preventing the development of monopolies. They believed the most effective tool for preventing monopolies was more capitalism; this would serve as a critical argument for present-day neoliberal policy, where every failure within neoliberal capitalism is

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“solved” through more neoliberalism. Second, while the Ordo-liberals saw the state as governing in support of the market, the Chicago School saw the state and society as enterprises to be governed through economic logic. Instead of the state regulating the economy to create and maintain a better functioning market, they theorized that the state and society should be governed by economic principles of rational choice, efficiency and competition. Together the Ordo-liberals and Chicago School offered a radical alternative to both classic liberalism and its theories of a market, working alongside the political state and society, and state-directed socialism. Seizing upon the seductiveness of their central discursive metaphors of freedom, private property, and competition, these two approaches would prove critical in the rise of neoliberal economic policy beginning in the 1970s. Although the Ordo-liberals often use the term neo-liberal to describe their alternative to liberalism, the term itself was not frequently used within the broader range of academic discourse until the 1980s. By the 1990s it emerged as one of the primary analytical concepts used by political economists, geographers, sociologists, political scientists, post-colonial scholars and educational theorists in theorizing a series of radical changes in economic, social and public policy. Within this range of theorists, neoliberalism has been used in three primary ways: (1) neoliberalism as governmentality; (2) neoliberalism as class struggle; and (3) neoliberalism as critique. First, drawing on the work of Foucault, and more specifically a series of lectures he gave on the Birth of Biopolitics in 1978 and 1979, scholars have explored neoliberalism as a political rationality that governs the knowable, truth, and “common sense.” This rationality is expressed as a form of governmentality or governing of conduct, “the conduct of conduct.” Foucault’s concept of governmentality theorizes two key objects for governmental management: the conduct of others and the conduct of the self. Neoliberal governmentality is associated with increasing use of market logics into political and social spaces, within the management of others and the self. For example, since the 1980s the discourse of “school choice” has embedded itself within contemporary educational policy in the United States and across the globe. First suggested by Milton Friedman, a leading figure within the Chicago School of Economics, in his 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” school choice has become a foundational policy prescription for neoliberal educational reforms. School choice embodies a number of different educational policies, such as vouchers and charter schools. Vouchers are public funds that families can use to purchase educational services at any educational entity (e.g. private schools, religious schools, non-profit schools, etc.) of their choosing. Charter schools began in the 1990s and are public schools

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that are privately managed with students applying for admission. Originally conceived as a mechanism for teacher-led public school management, charter schools have become a pillar of the school choice movement. Both vouchers and charter schools use the tools of government to construct an educational marketplace where students and their families are fashioned as consumers of educational services, rather than citizens entitled to the public good of education. Consequently, schools are no longer public services, but businesses that provide educational services and as such can be evaluated in the educational marketplace along axes of efficiency and quality. In this manner neoliberalism as governmentality re-orients the role of families from their traditional roles as citizen stakeholders to those of market consumers. This results in the creation of a new economic rationality, where schools are evaluated against each other in the educational marketplace, and families are able to “purchase” those services. Lost in the exuberance over the new opportunities of “choice” is the ways in which these choices intersect with expanding wealth inequality and the ways in which vouchers and charter schools often remain unusable for low-income families who are unable to afford the remaining tuition and/or transport themselves to charter schools. However, as Foucault theorized, neoliberal governmentality does not just infiltrate our external management systems, rather it also permeates our individual subjectivity and self-management. Educational policy again provides a useful exemplary of the impact of neoliberal governmentality on common sense understandings of self-management. For example, along with the rise of vouchers and charter schools the last three decades have seen the growth of regimes of accountability through high-stakes standardized tests. Although standardized tests pre-date many neoliberal reforms, the advent of federal educational policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top centered these tests as a key component of school and teacher evaluation, as well as teacher pay and job security. Policy does not have to dictate how teachers teach or their pedagogical commitments specifically, rather the rationalities of testing regimes produce new styles of self-management as educators respond to the neoliberal priorities of measurement and accountability. Foucauldian approaches that frame neoliberalism as a political rationality highlight the importance of neoliberal, market logics not only in specific policy arenas, but also in the construction of individual consciousness and subjectivity. The second primary usage of neoliberalism is an analysis of its importance as a tool of class struggle, or specifically attempts by wealthy elites to maintain their economic and political dominance. David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, has been a key interlocutor of this approach, exploring the ways in which neoliberal economic policy served as a vehicle for maintaining and expanding

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the power of wealthy elites. While Foucauldian approaches situate neoliberalism within key questions of state management, Harvey argues that these concerns were secondary to neoliberalism’s primary objective: class struggle. Harvey, and many of his contemporaries, argue that neoliberalism is largely a set of governmental and economic tools such as privatization, de-regulation, financialization, corporate personhood, and welfare reform that serve to restore class power during an age of increasing social friction. Harvey’s (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism addresses the early history of neoliberal theory through the work of the Mount Pelerin Society (an organization formed in 1947 by members of both the Ordo-liberal school and Chicago School of Economics) and in particular the work of Friedrich von Hayek. However, the text focuses on the economic and social crises of the 1970s in the form of rising unemployment, accelerated inflation, and growing labor unrest, alongside newly emerging urban social movements. Harvey argues that neoliberalism provided both a powerful discourse, freedom, and a set of policy tools that could diminish the strength of growing social movements and increase the power of capital. Central to Harvey’s understanding of neoliberalism is “accumulation by dispossession,” a concept that is an expansion of Marx’s original theorization of “primitive accumulation.” Marx used the term primitive accumulation to explore the pre-conditions of capitalism; how capitalists centralized wealth in order to convert it into capital (wealth that is invested in pursuit of increased wealth). Marx focuses on the enclosure laws in Britain, or the conversion of communal lands to private ownership, and colonialism as key pillars of primitive accumulation. Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession expands this concept and explores the ways in which privatization, in particular, continues to direct resources away from common/public to private ownership and as a result opens up new lands, resources, and labor forces to the dictates of capital accumulation. The chief feature of this process is the redistribution of resources from the proletariat (e.g. working class and unemployed) to the bourgeoisie (e.g. capitalists). Again, shifts in educational policy provide concrete illustrations of the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has served as an ideological apparatus for a redistribution of wealth from low-income and working class households to wealthy elites. For example, the growth of voucher programs, often discursively framed as a tool of “empowering” low-income families to access higher quality education that is theoretically located in elite private and religious schools, has instead served as a subsidy for upper-middle class and wealthy families to access these elite schools. Indiana’s statewide voucher program, the largest voucher program in the United States, is indicative of these trends. The program was inaugurated as a vehicle for low-income families and communities

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to access higher performing schools in the private market. However, by 2016 only 1% of voucher recipients were low-income families who had previously been attending public schools. Additionally, the rates of African-American participation dropped from 23% in the first year of the program in 2011 to 12% by 2016. Conversely participation amongst white families escalated from 46% to 60% and families from suburban areas’ participation increased from 16% to 23% over that same time period. Rather than providing a tool for low-income communities of color to access the private school marketplace, the vouchers served as a tool for redistributing public resources into disproportionately wealthier and whiter families. The growth of charter schools is also a form of “accumulation by dispossession,” seizing formerly public goods and placing them under private control and management. While charter schools were ostensibly developed to grant greater control to teachers and school administrators in the operations of public schools, they have become assets in the portfolios of for-profit, educational management organizations (e.g. Edison Schools), or nonprofit and for-profit, charter school management organizations (e.g. KIPP, K12, etc.). These companies accumulate profits, and/or income by charging the state for educating its youth and spending less of this income then their expenses (on teacher salaries, educational supplies, etc.). Charter schools are indicative of Harvey’s argument that neoliberalism is a form of class struggle disguised within discourses of economic freedom and choice. They disproportionately redistribute resources from low-income families and their students, as well as open up new institutions and space to capital accumulation. Finally, neoliberalism is also a rallying cry to frame and resist myriad struggles across the Global North and South against marginalization and violence at the hands of global capital and the state. In recent years scholars have begun to worry about the ambiguousness of the term neoliberalism and its wide range of uses. Scholars have worried that if everything is “neoliberal” then its clarity and utility as a tool for explaining social processes may be lost. This has led to a number of scholars calling for greater precision, or in some cases a rejection of the term in its entirety. There is certainly a need, particularly within academic spaces, to preserve some sense of what neoliberalism is in terms of a theoretical foundation and the relationship between its theories and its policy implementation (i.e. actually existing neoliberalism). However, theoretical precision should not come at the expense of political activism and organization. For example, resisting “neoliberalism” and imagining alternatives has become a central objective at the annual World Social Forum (WSF). Academics and activists from across the globe, but in particular the Global South, who attend the WSF have a range of understandings of neoliberal capitalism, corporatism,

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financialization, and state violence. Some of these understandings would be consistent with the Foucauldian approaches, or Harvey’s class struggle, others would be grounded within more localized structures and contexts. However, notwithstanding of their theoretical consistency, neoliberalism offers a key political rallying cry for connecting local land struggles in Chiapas, Mexico to efforts to resist water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to struggles to oppose urban renewal in Seoul, South Korea, to the Occupy movement in New York City. Consequently, attempts by academics to police the boundaries of true neoliberalism run the risk of undermining a key political resource that serves to connect struggles across the globe to a general, if slightly chaotic, understanding of the violence and inequity that accompanies contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

References Foucault, M., Davidson, A. I., & Burchell, G. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Springer. Friedman, M. (1955). The role of government in education (Vol. 13). Rutgers University Press. Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 57

Omi and Winant Colleen Rost-Banik

Related entries: Colorblindness; Intersectionality; Nationalism; Social Class; Social Construction

… Michael Omi and Howard Winant are recognized most prominently for their theory of racial formation. In their book Racial Formation in the United States (2015), they contribute to the understanding of race and racism by illustrating how the U.S. is a “racially organized social and political system” (p. 245). First published in 1986, they updated with a second edition in 1994 and then a third edition in 2015. Major revisions to their work happened in the 2015 edition as the intermittent 30 years had seen the election of the first Black president of the U.S., great strides in the LGBT movement, and an articulation of intersectionality, but also the rise of Islamophobia, the “war on terror,” the increase in mass incarceration of people of color, and the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism and colorblind racism. In the third edition of the book, they assert race as a “master category” (p. viii) that influences all aspects of social life. Additionally, they argue that all social conflicts (e.g., colonialism, sex, gender, class, immigration, etc.) must consider the role and significance of race in order to be fully understood. In other words, each of these concepts cannot be considered individually; people’s experience of and the structures that shape these concepts, are all intertwined with representations and systems of race. To make their claims, Omi and Winant trace the history of race in the U.S., particularly how race has been conceived, studied, and employed. They review the limits of how the social sciences have treated race, particularly noting how racial concepts initially described by W.E.B. Du Bois were not given attention until written about by white scholars. More pointedly, to help explicate their theory of racial formation, Omi and Winant first offer an overview and critique of various theoretical frameworks that scholars and practitioners have used to understand race, namely through ethnicity-, class-, and nation-based paradigms. The ethnicity paradigm relies heavily on representations of identity but dismisses how corporeal aspects of race are read and ascribed to people rather © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_057

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than chosen. This approach also assumes that people wish to assimilate into (white, mainstream) U.S. culture as opposed to seeking recognition of their own uniqueness. The class paradigm centers inequality and speculates that the marketplace, with little government intervention, can solve problems of how resources are distributed. Despite economic factors being important to understanding race, Omi and Winant assert that they do not consider how other social, psychological, and political determinants (e.g., white flight, implicit bias, and laws that have weakened unions) influence and are influenced by the economy. The nation-based paradigm begins with the idea that the U.S. has been a white nation ever since European settlement, despite the realities of slavery, conquest, genocide, and immigration. Connecting race and nation, the concept of “peoplehood” (p. 78) is stressed within this paradigm. While Omi and Winant acknowledge that nationalisms like Pan-Africanism, cultural nationalism, Marxist-influenced attempts at self-determination, and groups that have appealed to arguments about internal colonization (e.g., ghettos or barrios inside the U.S.) have been important, they have not adequately dealt with the realities of people who are mixed-race nor with the circumstances of in/voluntary immigration, and diaspora. Overall, Omi and Winant contend that each of these paradigms reduce race to a single dimension, and therefore do not allow for the complex ways in which race is influenced by each of the other categories, do not grant space for how people resisted these ideologies in theory and practice, and do not account for the fluidity of race, including how the state could adapt – even amidst contradictory notions of race and racial resistance – to maintain white supremacy. Rejecting the ethnicity, class and nation-based paradigms to understand race, Omi and Winant use intersectional and poststructural influences to posit their own definition and analysis of race and racial formation. They note that race is often viewed as “essence” – the idea that there is some core or biological feature that defines race, or “illusion” – the idea that race is simply a made-up construct and therefore does not really exist. Refusing both sides of the spectrum, they argue, “Race is strategic; race does ideological and political work” (p. 111). Describing race, Omi and Winant assert that race is a dynamic process that occurs on both societal (macro) and individual (micro) levels and “operates… at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet. It is socially constructed and historically fluid. It is continuingly being made and remade in everyday life. Race is continually in formation” (p. x). They propose “racial formation” as a way to explain how race is socially constructed. They define racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 109).

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To illuminate how racial formation has occurred throughout the history of the U.S., Omi and Winant use the concept of “racial projects,” which they define as “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines” (p. 125). In other words, racial projects consider how race is depicted and understood through individual identity and how race shapes and is shaped by social institutions. Through racial projects, the racial characteristics of systems and individual experiences of race are understood to reciprocally impact one another. They further explain, “Every racial project is both a reflection of and response to the broader patterning of race in the overall social system. In turn, every racial project attempts to reproduce, extend, subvert, or directly challenge that system” (p. 125). Racial projects can be large, small, collective, individual, imposed from above, subverted from below, and are all overlapping as a “synthesis, a constantly reiterated outcome” of societal encounters (p. 127). With this account of race and racial formation, Omi and Winant argue that race impacts all elements of life. Examples of racial projects range from racial profiling in policing to individuals protesting police murders of black and brown people; from redistricting voting blocks along racial lines to ensuring that voting rights law is followed; from the war on drugs, (disproportionately imprisoning black and brown people) to individual decisions of dress and speech; from affirmative action to organizing against immigrant deportation. Omi and Winant note that racial projects are neither solely racist or antiracist – that can only be determined by whether they (re)produce or dismantle “structures of domination based on racial significations and identities” (p. 129). The collection of racial projects work to create the “social structures of race and racism” as well as the experiences of “racial subjectivity” (p. 137). Because everyone is differently situated, they “conceive of, operate, and inhabit their own racial projects,” and “experience” race in different ways (p. 137). Omi and Winant stress that we cannot assume that everyone’s experience of oppression, resistance, and freedom are the same; therefore, we must realize that policies and social structures will not benefit everyone equally. Omi and Winant detail examples of racial formation to illustrate their theory and to explicate how race operates as a master category. During Reconstruction – which they reference as the first period of significant racial transformation in the U.S. – the legal system remade the concept and experiences of race. As the 13th through 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution were instituted, slavery became illegal, full citizenship was granted to all people born or naturalized to the U.S. (greatly impacting black people, who were previously counted as threefifths of a citizen), and voting was extended to people of color. These major

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changes in laws began to change the way race was experienced for individuals and society as a whole. However, just because amendments to the Constitution were ratified did not mean that the laws were enforced equally or that white people would not find other ways to practice racism. Notably, black women were not included in the 15th amendment, and even though black men were legally allowed to vote, they were often denied the opportunity. Additionally, many black men were forced back into a “new” form of slavery via vagrancy laws. While these practices may have been targeted toward Black people, they impacted everyone, as racial representations were internalized about who was ranked as superior and inferior and institutions were designed for people to have extremely different experiences based on their race. Omi and Winant write extensively about how the social movements postWorld War II, which they consider the second major period of racial transformation, also offer prime examples of how race and racial formation impact individuals and institutions via every avenue of life. As various organizers and organizations within the civil rights movement worked to expand the inclusion of black people and their concerns in politics, not only was a different racial subjectivity articulated (infused with themes of resistance and emancipation) but new laws were enacted (e.g., Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act). Representations of race (e.g. from the Black is Beautiful campaign to boycotts and sit-ins) and the structures that reiteratively defined race (e.g., education, employment, voting, housing) operated simultaneously to impact how people shaped and were shaped by race and racism. These social movements, which have come not only from African and African Americans but also from Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx, have provided “racial resistance” to “racial despotism” (p. 131). Omi and Winant observe that these challenges to racial rule have sparked modest gains in legislation and public policy but have not revolutionized social systems. Noting the remarkable ability of race to be fluid, they posit that rather than resistance achieving racial democracy, it becomes incorporated into the state, allowing for racial domination to be transformed into hegemony as people consent to racial rule instead of needing to be coerced. For instance, as more Black people became formally involved in politics and were hired to implement programs achieved through civil rights legislation, their entry into state systems made little change for most people of color. Instead, it permitted the dismissal of more radical demands. Omi and Winant argue that the state uses the constantly changing and conflicting contours of race and takes advantage of the seemingly contradictory practices of racial despotism and democracy to incite action both for and

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against (racist) social institutions. One of the ways this happens is through a “rearticulation” of politics that have significant racial implications (p. 185). For example, when structural changes were made to mandate school desegregation via bussing, rather than decry racial integration, white people used coded language to argue that the policy attacked communities and families because it did not allow all children in the neighborhood to stay in the same school. Similarly, in the 1960s, when California outlawed housing discrimination, in part, to assist with school integration, people contested that it went against homeowners’ and sellers’ “freedom to choose” who lived in or bought their home (p. 193). The law against housing discrimination was overturned as challengers rearticulated civil rights into property rights. These policies, and the rearticulations of them, went far beyond impacting their specific proponents or opponents. Everyone in the U.S. and institutions at every level have been touched by how race has been (trans)formed in these projects. Take the “Southern strategy” as an example. Beginning in the late 1960s, a shift in political language that referenced “law and order” was a way to curry favor with people and institutions frustrated by the social conditions that resulted from the civil rights movement. The rhetoric, more palatable than overtly racist language, stressed “personal responsibility” and demeaned big government when it came to social programs. Even though the largest number of people depending on welfare were (and continue to be) white, the claims against government handouts were targeted against black people. The rhetorical moves, which expanded to include “family values,” were a strategy to dismantle the welfare state. Additionally, emphasizing patriotism and social control afforded a way to heighten militarism at home and abroad. As the neoliberal and global phase of capitalism took hold, race interacted with politics, the economy, and people’s subjectivities. Omi and Winant point out that in a paradoxical way, the racial state and the insurgencies against it are dependent on one another to exist. By moderately incorporating the oppositional movements into its institutional structures, the U.S. is able to maintain racial hegemony without needing to assert domination, and without the demand to completely revolutionize its systems. Another instance of this is through the advent of colorblind ideology. Omi and Winant assert that this notion initially was formulated during the early civil rights movement as a way to oppose the stark realities of Jim Crow laws and to aspire to a social system where skin color did not matter. As only moderate gains were made, the rhetoric needed to shift in order to address the deep inequality and discrimination that continues. However, the colorblind logic – that race does not matter – has been redeployed as a veiled attempt to uphold white

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supremacy. Colorblindness does not account for all of the social conditions (e.g., schooling, what knowledge is valued, social networks, family wealth, geographic location, etc.) that in/directly influence people’s lives.

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Critiques of Racial Formation Theory

Omi and Winant’s theory has made a significant contribution to understanding how race reiteratively forms identities and institutions. Numerous social scientists have used this theory in their scholarship. However, like all good scholarship, Omi and Winant’s theory has been contested. Most critiques were generated prior to the third edition of Racial Formation in the United States. For instance, Bonilla-Silva (1996) critiques Omi and Winant’s 1994 edition with reducing race to a set of ideas rather than more fully developing a structural understanding of race and racism. Feagin and Elias (2013) offer a more extensive critique, arguing that racial formation theory does not fully account for the myriad, complex ways in which race and racism operates in U.S. institutions. Countering with systematic racism theory, Feagin and Elias not only point to how racism is foundational to the creation of the U.S. but also explicitly name that the system of racism is employed by white people against people of color. In addition to critiquing how racial formation theory does not draw on more radical race scholars, dismisses how racism is embedded in the founding documents and institutions of the U.S., lacks significant attention to how racial conflict and group resistance has shaped the U.S., and gives too much credence to the “The Great Transformation” post-World War II for advancing racial equality, Feagin and Elias contend that racial formation theory restricts the practice of racism to individual encounters rather than how it operates on an institutional level. Ultimately, Feagin and Elias argue that with these limitations, racial formation theory ignores how material inequalities appear and are perpetuated, mostly by white people. Teasing apart the differences between Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory and Feagin and Elias’ systematic racism theory, Golash-Boza (2013) clarifies that Omi and Winant focus more on examining how race is constructed and represented in order to understand racism. Meanwhile, Feagin and Elias, believe that it works the other way around. That is, we need to comprehend how racism works in order to make sense of the meaning of race. Golash-Boza argues that we need both frameworks. In the third edition of their book, Omi and Winant try to address the serious critiques and limitations of their theory as well as their articulation of it. Specifically, they address how the nation’s founding practices and documents

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were based in racial genocide and slavery; how institutions, mostly run by white people, have maintained racial rule, how gains made by the civil rights movement have been weakened; and how Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has operated to incorporate racial stratification, but not without resistance from various groups of color. However, they argue that race and racism should not be limited to a white racial frame (as Feagin and Elias offer) because race cannot be considered merely as “teams” pitted against each other. They maintain that a white racial frame does not adequately take account of people of color’s agency, the role of white antiracists, nor the ways in which people (especially those who ascribe to a mixed-race identity) experience race as complexly mixed and influenced by politics.

References Bonilla-Silva, E. (1997). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465–480. Feagin, J., & Elias, S. (2013). Rethinking racial formation theory: A systemic racism critique. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(6), 931–960. Golash-Boza, T. (2013). Does racial formation theory lack the conceptual tools to understand racism? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(6), 994–999. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States. Routledge.

CHAPTER 58

Ontological Expansiveness Chris Corces-Zimmerman, Devon Thomas, Elizabeth A. Collins and Nolan L. Cabrera

Related Entries: Privilege; Second Wave Whiteness Studies; Segregation in Schools; White Supremacy

1

Introduction and Overview of Ontological Expansiveness

Ontological Expansiveness is a theoretical framework used under the umbrella of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that was conceptualized by Sullivan (2006) to describe the complex and nuanced relationships that exist among race, Whiteness, and space. Sullivan (2006) argues, “As ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces – whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, or otherwise – are or should be available to them to move in and out as they wish” (p. 10). Essential to the definition of ontological expansiveness are two important characteristics: (1) that it is a co-constitutive relationship between White individuals and their environment, “such that space is raced and that bodies become raced through their lived spatiality” (Sullivan, 2006, p. 143), and (2) that it is fueled by a desire for mastery and control over space in all its forms. Rooted in the larger concept of ontology, or the philosophical study of being and existing in the world, ontological expansiveness explains how Whiteness as a structuring ideology in U.S. society permits White people to think, act, and interact with the space around them in such a way that they have the right to inhabit any space, be it material or otherwise. In the United States, where Whiteness and White supremacy are the defining ideologies that structure racial power dynamics, ontological expansiveness is a way to understand how many White people actualize their White privilege through how they think about and behave in relation to the space around them. In addition, ontological expansiveness directly speaks to the ways that White people frequently conceptualize the world through a solipsistic lens. By this Sullivan suggests that White people tend to think of themselves as though they are the only people to exist or have worth in the world. This mentality is largely facilitated by the tendency for White people to be both physically and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_058

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socially isolated from People of Color. Sullivan (2006) states, “In many people’s day-to-day lives, it can seem as if only White people exist. While the literal existence of People of Color may be acknowledged, such acknowledgment often occurs on an abstract level…” (p. 17). This perception frequently leads to the mutually reinforcing beliefs that all spaces are open to White people, and that any attempt to restrict access to or usage of space is a violation of the rights of White people. Sullivan also explains that while ontological expansiveness as a concept and practice is reinforcing of Whiteness and White supremacy, it is not an act that is limited to “bad White people,” but rather is a characteristic that can be embodied by any White person, even those who view themselves as “good” or altruistic. To demonstrate the nuances of ontological expansiveness, the following sections explore, first, two historical examples of the ways that White people in the U.S. have enacted ontological expansiveness to justify colonization and Manifest Destiny, followed by examples of how the concept has been applied in educational scholarship and practice and concluding thoughts as to how White people can address and resist ontological expansiveness.

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Foundational Examples of Ontological Expansiveness

Colonialism is the epitome of ontological expansiveness, and it is a core example within Sullivan’s (2006) work as it exemplifies the ways that White colonizers thought and acted as though they were wholly entitled to occupy and own Indigenous lands. They accomplished this through the complimentary beliefs that people of European descent were the most civilized in the world, and that those in Africa, Asia, and the “New World” were more primitive beings. Part of this belief in the superiority of Europeans was rooted in Christianity and the desire to spread the word of God to the “darker” regions of the world further justified colonization. From this belief system, people of European descent, who would later become White, engaged in massive thefts of land and natural resources, but they did not consider it stealing because they believed their more “civilized” nature entitled them to this ownership. Thus, the creation of the U.S. was founded upon an ontologically expansive orientation where colonizers believed and acted as if all space should be open and accessible to them (Sullivan, 2006). Subsequently, White people maintained an ideology of ontological expansiveness in the mid-19th century through their policies of Manifest Destiny that permitted White colonizers to steal land in the Western U.S. that was the ancestral homes of Indigenous peoples. By identifying Indigenous lands and people as undeveloped, a designation rooted in and defined by Whiteness,

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White colonizers were able to justify their right to that land under the guise of developing or civilizing it (Kendi, 2016). Both of these examples epitomize Du Bois’s (2003) critique of Whiteness which leads White people to act as if, “It is the duty of White Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good” (p. 52). In essence, Whiteness afforded the White colonizers the ability to occupy, use, and eventually own non-White spaces without resistance or moral confliction. Where these examples provide context for the ways that ontological expansiveness has been enacted throughout history more broadly, the following sections provide education-specific examples that help to further illustrate the concept.

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Ontological Expansiveness as a Theoretical Framework

Scholarly contributions to the growing body of literature on ontological expansiveness tend to center how researchers conceptualize space, most notably as physical, linguistic, or cultural space. In these studies, space is most frequently operationalized literally as physical space, notably highlighting how White individuals tend to think that all educational space should be open to them and center their needs. Examples of the ways that White people tend to physically occupy and claim ownership over educational spaces, as well as how they respond when faced with challenges to their perceptions of space as uniquely open to them, include studies of segregation, Whiteness in higher education, “voluntourism,” and notions of citizenship and cultural invasion. Similarly, ontological expansiveness is used to explore how White people frequently claim ownership over linguistic spaces. For instance, White people have historically created definitions of what is “proper” or acceptable in terms of language, tone, and communication style based on rules of Whiteness. Similarly, the practice of coding language as White through its associations with Whiteness serves to project upon the speaker certain privileges rooted in Whiteness (Pitts, 2015). Linguistically, this can also entail White people using the n-word and feeling entitled to use Ebonics, an ostensibly Black form of communication, without any consideration of how this is not their linguistic space to occupy. Lastly, ontological expansiveness is frequently applied to explore how White people often think and act as if they should have access to the cultural practices of People and Communities of Color. Most notable amongst this subset of literature are works on instances of cultural appropriation and White saviorism, coupled with claims of reverse racism when their ontological expansiveness is challenged (Cabrera, 2014). Moreover, it should be noted that ontological

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expansiveness is sometimes enacted by White researchers when they pursue research studies that both exploit Communities of Color and allow them to benefit as scholars and “experts” on the lived experiences of marginalized individuals (Gómez-Barris, 2017).

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Enacting Ontological Expansiveness

In educational spaces specifically, ontological expansiveness is advanced in two general ways: (1) instances where White people seek to occupy space that is ostensibly owned/occupied by People of Color, and (2) moments when White people challenge attempts to limit their expansive entitlement to space. In the first set of examples, ontological expansiveness is understood through the claims to space that White people frequently articulate through their actions, thoughts, and behaviors. In contrast, the second set of examples demonstrate how any sort of barrier, legitimate or perceived, to this expansive spatial relationship can feel to White people like a form of “reverse racism” (Cabrera, 2014). Here we focus on the two common educational practice of White saviorism and cultural appropriation.

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White Saviorism

Given that educators, and the field of education more broadly, are generally thought of as altruistic and benevolent, it is frequently the case that White educators think of their work with Students of Color as one of serving those in need (Applebaum, 2010). This is similar to how White colonizers viewed Indigenous communities as being in need of saving and development (Kendi, 2016). White educators tend to view themselves as uniquely capable and permitted to enter Communities of Color to “fix” issues, many of which were created by White people to begin with. Two common examples of this include programs like Teach for America and service learning college courses. Through both of these examples, White people frequently embody a sense of what many refer to as the White savior. In these instances, many White people enter Communities of Color in order to save marginalized peoples from what they perceive to be economic and cultural poverty. Celebrating White people in these roles serves to uphold White dominance over educational spaces as the only path toward making a difference in low-income Communities of Color. This White entitlement to access Communities of Color is often rooted in a desire of White people to feel good about themselves, alleviating their complicity in

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racist systems through service work rather than challenging the practices and beliefs that maintain racist educational systems (Applebaum, 2010). Another mechanism through which White people enact ontological expansiveness is that of cultural appropriation.

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Cultural Appropriation

By cultural appropriation, we mean the process by which White people demonstrate racially-entitled access to cultural practices and spaces including music, dance, dress, and language. As Sullivan (2006) states, White people frequently act as if, “The appropriate relationship is one of appropriation: taking land, people, and the fruit of others’ labor and creativity as one’s own” (p. 122). Frequently, instances of White people engaging in acts of cultural appropriation represent a fetishizing and exploitation of the language, customs, or practices of Communities of Color. In these exchanges, aspects of the lived experiences of People of Color are considered to be both attractive and fashionable and can be treated as commodities to be used for the benefit of White people and then discarded at their discretion. A common way this is manifest within institutions of higher education is through racial-themed parties whereby largely White students dress and act in stereotypical Black or Brown ways. This can entail dressing in blackface or wearing a sombrero, flippantly celebrating holidays like Cinco de Mayo or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or throwing “ratchet” or “thug”-themed parties. Similarly, Cabrera (2019) demonstrates how White male students frequently use the n-word, justifying their behavior by saying that if Students of Color can use the terms, they should be able to as well. Moreover, White students advocating for White Student Unions or White ethnic studies curricula demonstrate the belief that Students of Color-specific programming discriminates against White students (Cabrera, Franklin, & Watson, 2017). Finally, racial justice allyship or activism can become a form of ontological expansiveness when said allyship results in White people inserting themselves into positions in which they believe they are needed in order to save Students of Color from racial oppression. These examples beg a larger question: What is to be done about ontological expansiveness?

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Addressing and Challenging Ontological Expansiveness

In addition to developing the concept of ontological expansiveness, Sullivan (2006, 2007) also offers her thoughts on what White people can do about it.

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Central to her recommendations is the premise that it is neither possible for White people to overcome ontological expansiveness, nor Whiteness more broadly. However, it remains important for White people to limit the adverse impacts of their ontological expansiveness as much as possible. Sullivan (2006) argues that, “White people must curb the expansive, ubiquitous way in which they often transact, including the way that they transact as if no one else of significance does or should inhabit the world” (p. 163). From this premise, however, Sullivan (2006) does not suggest that the solution is for White people to retreat to racially-segregated White communities, but rather, she argues that they must undo their own psychological erasure of Communities of Color that frequently leads to ontological expansiveness. While ontologically expansive beliefs and actions are frequently rooted in systemic and individual-level White privilege, the decision to occupy space in a more just manner is also contextualized in White privilege (Applebaum, 2010). While this does not preclude White people from developing racial agency, Sullivan (2006) suggests that it does require that they leverage their White privilege towards a more racially equitable end. For example, Sullivan (2006) addresses the tendency of many White people to purchase homes in Communities of Color as a way of challenging issues of segregation and inequitable funding of schools. In these instances, not only is their ability to make this choice deeply rooted in Whiteness and White privilege, but in many ways, it also can inadvertently lead to gentrification (Lipsitz, 2011). Alternatively, Sullivan (2006) suggests that White people leverage their White privilege to live in predominantly White communities, using their awareness of Whiteness and racism to challenge their neighbors and family members and their racist beliefs and social policies. In this way she suggests that a crucial way that White people can challenge their habits of ontological expansiveness is to “stay home” (p. 21) and do the work of challenging racism within predominantly White communities. Lastly, Sullivan (2006) stresses that, “white people must recognize that it is not inappropriate or unjust for them to feel uncomfortable when they do enter spaces that are predominantly non-white” (p. 164). Discomfort is a common social growing pain that many White people experience when in spaces where they are not the majority, despite the fact that they are still the dominant group. This discomfort only becomes problematic when White people exercise their White privilege to demand racial social comfort. From this context, Sullivan (2006) is clear that addressing ontological expansiveness is not only the responsibility of so-called “racist White people,” but is a project that all White people must undertake if they wish to challenge and transform Whiteness and White privilege. While Sullivan does not offer definitive guidance for how to

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challenge or entirely rid oneself of ontological expansiveness, she argues that White people must commit to a constant state of resistance and awareness of how Whiteness and White privilege impact their lives and the lives of People of Color.

References Applebaum, B. (2010). Being White, being good: White complicity, White moral responsibility, and social justice pedagogy. Lexington Books. Cabrera, N. L. (2014). “But I’m oppressed too”: White male college students framing racial emotions as facts and recreating racism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(6), 768–784. Cabrera, N. L. (2019). White guys on campus: Racism, white immunity, and the myth of ‘post-racial’ higher education. Rutgers University Press. Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2017). Whiteness in higher education: The invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses (Association for the Study of Higher Education monograph series). Jossey-Bass. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2003). The souls of White folk. Monthly Review, 55(6), 44–58. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press. Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books. Lipsitz, G. (2011). How racism takes place. Temple University Press. Pitts, A. J. (2015). Racial interpellation and second-personhood: Understanding the normative dynamics of race talk (Doctoral dissertation). Vanderbilt University. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indiana University Press. Sullivan, S. (2007). On revealing whiteness: A reply to critics. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 21(3), 231–242.

CHAPTER 59

Orientalism Ryuko Kubota

Related Entries: Arabs and Whiteness; Asians and Whiteness; Essentialism; Islamophobia

1

Introduction

The notion of Orientalism, notably discussed by Said (1978), refers to Western approaches to understanding and describing the Orient. Said problematizes how the essentialist images of the Global East are constructed in European discourses. This entry briefly outlines Said’s discussion of Orientalism and reviews some of the major criticisms of his work. This is followed by examples of how racialization, racism, and cultural essentialism underlying Orientalism have been addressed in research on education for people of Asian and Arab heritage as well as some studies on teaching English as a second language (ESL).

2

Orientalism by Edward Said

In 1978, Edward W. Said, a Palestinian intellectual, published a book entitled Orientalism. Born in an educated family in 1935, Said spent his childhood in Palestine and Egypt, two former British colonies. Later, he moved to the United States to pursue his degrees in higher education. In 1963, he joined Columbia University as a faculty member in English and comparative literature and continued his intellectual work until he died in 2003. In Orientalism, Said drew on the notion of discourse in the earlier writings of Michel Foucault to unpack how images of the Orient – mainly the Middle East – were produced in European texts written in English and French in various genres, including literature, religious studies, philology, political tracts, journalistic texts, and travel books. By locating these texts from the 19th century to the end of World War II in France and Britain and shifting the focus to the United Sates thereafter, Said argued that they represent the culture, society, history, language, and people of the Orient as the inferior Other, in contrast to the superiority of Europe. More specifically, this dichotomy positions the © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_059

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Orient as irrational, illogical, childlike, barbaric, passive, silent, ossified, inorganic, unchanging, and backward, whereas the West is depicted as rational, logical, mature, sophisticated, alive, organic, and advanced. Put more simply, the Orient is discursively constructed as abnormal and inferior, in sharp contrast with the image of Europe as normal and superior. Said also used Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to critique this unequal relation of power as the Western will to dominate and govern the Orient. For Said, the discourse of Orientalism is “a system of knowledge about the Orient” (Said, 1976, p. 6), produced in colonial and imperial structures and reproduced intertextually. In this process, ethnocentrism and racial prejudice are reinforced. Orientalism influenced many scholarly fields and contributed to the establishment of postcolonial studies in North America. However, in the 1980s, critics began to point out contradictions and shortcomings. To be fair, it is nonetheless important to recognize the positionality of Said. In the introduction of the book, Said articulates his motivation for pursuing the topic. As an Arab Palestinian living in the West, he faced dehumanizing attitudes and acts of racism against people of Middle Eastern origin like himself. There were very few scholars of Middle Eastern studies who identified themselves with the Arabs. This disheartenment compelled him to politicize and historicize the European literary canon and to critique white Western imperialism and colonialism that constructed the racialized Other, while simultaneously honoring the cultural heritage of Palestine.

3

Criticisms of Orientalism

Several years after the publication of Orientalism, criticisms began to emerge. They pointed out conceptual and methodological issues as well as the author’s positioning as a postcolonial critic in the Global North. A major theoretical criticism of Orientalism is concerned with the author’s silence on how the Oriental Other responded to or resisted the Orientalist discourse produced by the West (Moore-Gilbert, 1997), which is inconsistent with the Foucauldian understanding of power, a conceptual lens he drew on. Foucauldian power is conceptualized today as not possessed or imposed in a top-down manner, but rather it is thought to exist everywhere, circulate in a chain, and work relationally. This allows for the possibility of resistance. Foucault argues, “where there is power, there is resistance” and the “points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network” (Foucault, 1990, p. 95). Yet, Said’s text provides little discussion on how the colonized people in the Orient reacted, adopted, or resisted the Orientalist discourse. In this sense, the

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analysis is one-way and incomplete. However, this criticism might be rather unfair for Said since Foucault’s elaborated discussions on power seems to have evolved around the same time Said published his book. For instance, The archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language (Foucault, 1972), one of Foucault’s texts Said cites, concentrates on discursive formations of medical, economic, legal, linguistic, and other kinds of knowledge in historical contexts. The above problem also applies to the notion of hegemony discussed by Gramsci, a Marxist scholar. In fact, Gramsci was: Less concerned with the repressive apparatuses of state power and more with the way that the consent of the subordinate (or ‘subaltern’) sectors of the society is ‘solicited in the domain of ‘civil society’ through such channels as education and cultural practices. (Moore-Gilbert, 1997, p. 37) Orientalism speaks little about subalterns’ consent to accept or resist the hegemony of European colonizers. The above critique appears to indicate a theoretical alliance between Foucault and Gramsci as they appear in Orientalism. However, they are not entirely compatible since Foucault did not align himself with Marxism (Ahmad, 1992; Moore-Gilbert, 1997). Another related theoretical critique has to do with a pitfall in critiquing how the Self (Europe) discursively constructed the Other (Orient). While this critique uncovers colonial relations of power, it tends to homogenize not only the Orient but also the imperialist culture of the West, slipping into the very cultural essentialism that is the target of the criticism (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). Furthermore, the critique of discursive construction of the Other contains ambivalence; on the one hand, Said attempts to reveal the intertextual representation rather than the reality of the Orient, while on the other hand, he also refers to the misrepresentation of the Orient, implying that objective realities exist (Clifford, 1988; Pennycook, 1999). Critics have also pointed out Orientalism’s missing link to the role and agency of women in colonialism. Lewis (1996), for example, uncovered European women’s differential, less pejorative engagement with Orientalism, disrupting the monolithic view of Orientalism as produced only by male colonialists and drawing attention to a more nuanced nature of Orientalism. Conversely, Yeǧenoǧlu, (1998) shed light on European women travellers’ complicity with the masculine Orientalist texts. More recently, especially since the tragic events on September 11, 2001, Muslim women’s status has become increasingly threatened with the intensified Orientalist image imposed on them as sexualized subjects and voiceless Others waiting to be liberated from fanatical Muslim men – a trope that justifies military violence. Many Muslim women

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have been silenced, being caught between the U.S. imperial desire to rule the Muslim world under the disguise of emancipatory rhetoric and a sense of religious responsibility to protect their people from Western encroachment (Zine, 2006). Finally, despite his racialized background, critics problematized the irony of Said’s middle-class privileged position within Western education, which re-inscribed the epistemological hegemony of the West. Ahmad (1992) pointed out the paradox in which Said relied on the Western canon, which had oppressed and silenced the Orient, in order to debunk Western power over the Orient. In general, postcolonial scholars from the Third World like Said, who settled in North America, paradoxically benefitted professionally from critiquing the Western domination of the Third World (Ahmad, 1992; Dirlik, 1994).

4

Ideological Traces of Orientalism in North American Education

In educational research in North America, the Orientalist construction of the racialized Other is typically discussed in relation to people of East, Southeast, and South Asian origins in the United States. Orientalist discourse, manifested as racial, cultural, and linguistic stereotypes, affects these Asian students and teachers in many ways. While the powerful essentialist discourse creates fixed images of Asians, researchers pay attention to diversity among this population and the relational nature of racialization. Asian students in North America tend to be lumped together and described as model minorities due to their perceived academic success (Ng, Lee, & Pak, 2007). Although Asian children in the aggregate indeed do well academically, as seen in higher grade point averages, a greater number of students in gifted programs, and lower dropout rates (Rong & Preissle, 2009), this view ignores diversity within this group in terms of not only ethnic/national origin (broadly categorized into East Asians, South Asians, and Southeast Asians) but also gender, class, religion, and other identity categories. Even among Southeast Asian students alone, they include Vietnamese, Hmong, Cambodian, Lao, and other ethnicities. These groups differ in terms of educational achievement as well as ethnic stereotypes attached to them (Ngo & Lee, 2007). In addition, the racial ideology of the black-white binary in the United States leads to “ideological whitening… of economically successful East Asian and South Asian groups… and the ideological blackening of low-income Southeast Asians” (Ngo & Lee, 2007, p. 442), further reducing their diverse racial/ethnic identities into a static binary. Moreover, many Asian students internalize the model minority

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stereotype regardless of their ability, often causing negative psychological consequences. Asian students with the model minority label are simultaneously constructed as perpetual foreigners or forever foreigners (Lee, Wong, & Alvarez, 2009). Again, the black-white binary only leaves an ambiguous space for Asians. This image is reproduced through popular culture, which often portrays Asians as smart yet passive, submissive, and nerdy with visual images that evoke foreignness and accented English (Lee, Wong, & Alvarez, 2009). The model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes together parallel the Orientalist discourse. They construct Asians in North America as the racially, culturally, and linguistically different Other, outside of the white Euro-American norm. Although Asians are academically and economically successful in the aggregate, they are institutionally underrepresented or alienated in many professional fields, including education. The number of Asian American teachers in American primary and secondary schools is disproportionately small and Asian American faculty members in higher education face a glass ceiling (Ng, Lee, & Pak, 2007). Asian female faculty members especially suffer from racialized and sexualized stereotypes of the exotic dragon lady or tiger mother, while they are pejoratively viewed as petite, cute, and non-threatening as well. In a Canadian context, Mayuzumi (2014) demonstrates that Orientalism shapes the experiences of Asian female professors in universities, who struggle with the images and labels, such as “inscrutable Oriental” or “angry Asian woman,” constructed by their white colleagues. Such labels patronize them and alienate them from white and other racialized colleagues, while their perceived bodily images illegitimatize their ability and authority. With regard to Arab Muslim students, diversity also exists in terms of their ethnic/national origins. For example, among Arab immigrants in the United States, the first wave of immigration from the late 19th century to World War II included mostly Christian immigrants, whereas Arab Muslims have become the fastest growing immigrants in the second wave (Allman, 2017). Research shows that Arab American students in schools suffer from racism and Islamophobia as they are constructed as terrorists or regarded as the uncivilized Other (Allman, 2017). All in all, Orientalism in contemporary North American society, as seen in stereotypes and racism, exerts power over Asian populations and subordinates them institutionally. At the same time, educational research on Asians in North American underscores the existence of a great deal of diversity among this group. It is also significant to note that despite more than a century history

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of Asian immigration to North America, racial prejudices of Orientalism still persist.

5

Orientalism in Contact Zone: English Language Education

Within the field of education, teaching English to speakers of other languages in various parts of the world has created contact zones for people through direct and imagined communication. Focusing on South American and African colonial contexts, Pratt (2008, p. 8) defines a contact zone as “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” In cultural and linguistic contact zones involving English, the Orientalist discourse emerges in scholarly discussions not only in the traditional Anglophone countries but also internationally. One influential Orientalist text on English language teaching is Robert B. Kaplan’s “Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education” (Kaplan, 1966), which was published around the time when U.S. universities began to enroll an unprecedented number of non-native English-speaking international students from non-Anglophone countries in need of academic support. According to Kaplan, each language or language group (e.g., English, Semitic, Oriental, Romance, Russian) has a unique cultural thought pattern, which negatively affects English texts written by ESL students. Kaplan graphically depicted paragraph organization in English with a straight vertical line, whereas he depicted other languages/language groups with horizontally parallel lines, a circular line, or a digressively zigzagging line, implying that ESL students should adopt the English way of writing. Kaplan’s research became an inquiry field called contrastive rhetoric, and the assumption about cultural/linguistic difference was largely accepted until the 1990s. Clearly, this model reflects the Orientalist binary distinction between the normal and superior Self and the different and inferior Other in its description of the former as direct, logical, and linear and the latter as indirect, nonlogical, deviant (Kubota & Lehner, 2004). A similar stereotype is also found in another discussion on culture and Asian ESL students, who are depicted as lacking critical thinking skills, needing to acculturate into the mainstream North American academic traditions (Atkinson, 1997). Here again, Asian ESL students are described with Orientalist discourses. While these essentialist images of Asian culture as the Other are reproduced in Western scholarly texts in language education, the same images are constructed in Japanese academic and public discourses through

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self-Orientalization, which in turn undergirds nationalism (Kubota, 1999). Here, what is discursively constructed is not only the cultural Other but also the Self. Furthermore, a review of literature on educational reform in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that the images of the Self (e.g., students and teachers in American schools and universities) are also politically and discursively constructed, oscillating from negative images when there was no referent category, to positive ones when the Self was contrasted with Asian Others (Kubota, 2001). As evident from the above discussions, the Orientalist and colonialist discourse not only dichotomizes Western and Eastern cultures as entirely different, but also molds them into a fixed power hierarchy. This also implies racial hierarchization. In fact, culture is often used as a proxy of race in contemporary discourse, positioning whiteness as superior to other races. Local and global contact zones in language education indeed create cultural and racial inequalities of power.

6

Conclusion

The notion of Orientalism discussed by Said (1978) has raised many discussions and debates in diverse disciplines, offering critical insights into the conceptualization of cultural differences between the East and the West in (post) colonial relations of power. It offers timeless reflections on how race, gender, class, religion, politics, and other elements are intertwined in the conceptualization of Us and Them. Whether or not Orientalism will remain unchanged would depend on civil society’s ethical engagement in social justice.

References Allman, K. R. (2017). “I’m not ashamed of who I am”: Counter-stories of Muslim, Arab immigrant students in North Carolina. In X. L. Rong & J. Hilburn (Eds.), Immigration and education in North Carolina; The challenges and responses in a new gateway state (81–102). Sense Publishers. Ahmad, A. (1992). In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. Verso. Atkinson, D. (1997). A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 71–94. Clifford, J. (1988). Predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Harvard University Press.

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Dirlik, A (1994). The postcolonial aura: Third world criticism in the age of global capitalism. Critical Inquiry, 20, 328–356. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language. Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction. Vantage Books. Kaplan, R. B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education. Language Learning, 16, 1–20. Kubota, R. (1999). Japanese culture constructed by discourses: Implications for applied linguistic research and English language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 9–35. Kubota, R. (2001). Discursive construction of the images of U.S. classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 35, 9–38. Kubota, R., & Lehner, A. (2004). Toward critical contrastive rhetoric. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13, 7–27. Lee, S. J., Wong, N.-W., A., & Alvarez, A. N. (2009). The model minority and the perpetual foreigner: Stereotypes of Asian Americans. In N. Tewari & A. N. Alvarez (Eds.), Asian American psychology: Current perspectives (pp. 69–84). Routledge. Lewis, R. (1996). Gendering orientalism: Race, femininity, and representation. Routledge. Mayuzumi, K. (2015). Navigating orientalism: Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 18, 277–296. Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial theory: Contexts, practices, and politics. Verso. Ng, B., & Lee, S. J. (2007). Complicating the image of model minority success: A review of Southeast Asian American education. Review of Educational Research, 77, 415–453. Ng, J. C., Lee, S. S., & Pak, Y. K. (2007). Contesting the model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes: A critical review of literature on Asian Americans in education. Review of Research in Education, 31, 95–130. Pennycook, A. (1999). English and the discourses of colonialism. Routledge. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturalism (2nd ed.). Routledge. Rong, X. R., & Preissle, J. (2009). Educating immigrant students in the 21st century: What educators need to know. Corwin Press. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books. Yeǧenoǧlu, M. (1998). Colonial fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of orientalism. Cambridge University Press. Zine, J. (2006). Between Orientalism and fundamentalism: The politics of Muslim women’s feminist engagement. Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, 3(1), 1–24.

CHAPTER 60

Passing Jenny LaFleur

Related Entries: Essentialism; Mixed-Race Identity; Social Construction; Whiteness as Property

… In the United States, passing is the successful, but not necessarily intentional, practice of representing oneself as a member of a racial group to which one is not conventionally understood to belong. Given the saliency of white supremacy among the organizing logics of social life in the United States, there are material benefits for those who represent themselves as white. Access to whiteness, thus, has been both constructed and patrolled by social and legal convention. Specifically, hypodecent – or the one-drop rule – has limited access to whiteness to those whose ancestry includes only those individuals whose phenotypes have been racialized as “white” and of European descent (Lopez, 1997). A social structure organized around a hierarchy that valorizes Whiteness incentivizes passing in a unidirectional manner – from a non-white to white identity – however, a broader understanding of “passing” may include a shifting of identification across any ethnic, racial, or cultural category. The association between white racial ascription and the rights of citizenship has historically incentivized passing for white by individuals who, when judged by the white supremacist logic of hypo-descent, would be categorized as non-white. Harris (1992) documents the emergence of whiteness as a form of property through the racial caste system used to enforce chattel slavery. The association of racial categories with legally protected property rights led to the emergence of whiteness, according to Harris, as a “highly volatile and unstable form of property” (p. 1718). Scholarship exploring passing has its strongest presence in the fields of history, literary criticism, and legal studies; in the social sciences, passing is taken up with less frequency. The disciplinary location of scholarship on passing is reflective of the temporal nature of data that are required to identify and describe the phenomenon. Oral histories, personal journals or diaries, autobiographies, and family genealogies are among the richest data sources © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_060

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for scholars interested in exploring passing as a social practice. Cross-sectional data such as those collected by the U.S. Census are unable to capture the dynamic nature of passing. Individuals who elect to shift racial categories tend to disappear into the destination group; “successful” passing renders the process invisible to the casual observer or data collector. Given the types of data that are available to scholars examining passing, extant literature tends to focus on the stories of individual actors rather than the phenomena of passing, broadly cast. For example, Horne (2009) explored the transformation of an American individual whose biography took him from a black upbringing to an adulthood which he lived out as a white man involved with a fascist social movement in the 1930s. Similarly, Sharfstein (2012), a legal historian, examined the transformation of three families who migrated from black to white identities before the American Revolution. Dawkins’s (2012) scholarship includes the investigation of historical cases of passing, including the story of Homer Plessy, the white-passing plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” racial segregation. Field’s (2018) examination of race and migration in the post-Civil War period similarly explored the movement of a family between various racial categories. Field noted that individuals’ decisions to pass were informed by their spatial and historical contexts. During periods when racial hierarchy and segregation were more rigidly enforced, Field (2018) noted that passing yielded substantial material dividends, offering reprieve from both symbolic and physical violence. In contrast to scholars who have examined passing within the context of a single or small number of individual narratives, Hobbs (2014) presented a chronologically organized historiography of passing from the colonial period to the present day. While her narrative is constructed around data from a set of individuals, the scope of Hobbs’s work allows her to identify shifts in the practice of passing that moved in tandem with broader trends in the enforcement of racial categorization and segregation. Hobbs noted that the first apparent written references to passing were newspaper advertisements seeking to retrieve runaway slaves. Such newspaper advertisements would provide physical descriptions of the individual being sought and would sometimes warn that he or she may be traveling “under the pretense of being white” (Hobbs, 2014, p. 30). Passing, Hobbs wrote, suggests movement and travel, as changing one’s racial identity is less plausible if one remains stationary in a single social landscape. The road, she noted, becomes a “paradigmatic site of passing” (Hobbs, 2014, p. 113) where assuming a contestable racial identity was made less risky by the presence of strangers. While passing was more viable in times of widespread

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migration – such as the aftermath of the Civil War – Hobbs noted that periods of increased racial violence and segregation also spurred individuals to pass. During Reconstruction, for example, the perception of increasing opportunities for and within the Black community made passing seem less necessary (Hobbs, 2014). By the turn of the 20th century, however, backlash to Reconstruction and marginal Black political and economic advancement came in the form of white racial violence and the emergence of Jim Crow segregation. With the constricting of freedom for Black Americans and increased instances of racial violence, passing was again utilized as a pathway out of oppression for those whose phenotypes offered ascriptive flexibility. Williams (1997), noted that phenotypes are the “fulcrum on which passing teeters back and forth as a possibility” (p. 62). While passing may rely heavily on social comportment and personal presentation, it also requires mobilizing certain physical characteristics commonly racialized to signal whiteness. Thus, passing – as a social practice – involves the concomitant participation in and the subversion of biological racial essentialism. The very possibility of passing problematizes the racialization of phenotypical features, despite the practice’s reliance on the performance of racial categories. Passing provides a rich example for understanding race and racial categorization as flexible – as social constructions that are situationally and temporally, rather than genetically determined. Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory highlights the social nature of both historical and contemporary conceptualizations of race. Contrary to allegations of biological determination, Omi and Winant demonstrate the instability of race and racial categories by marshaling evidence of their definitional dependence on historical and geographic contexts (1994). Understandings of racial categorizations as socially – rather than genetically – determined are supported by theories of identity that highlight the relational determinants of both identification and ascription. Social identity theory, for example, holds that individuals form their self-conceptions and self-presentations through their involvement and engagement with others. This dependence on social context suggests that racial identification and ascription have the capacity to shift in accordance with an individual’s social-spatial location. Echoing the work of Goffman (1977) and West and Fenstermaker (1995) Bey and Sakellarides (2016) argued that racial passing’s performative nature means that its practice must be socially legible. Citing the work of Butler (1990), Bey and Sakellarides suggested that in order for one’s identity to be socially read, it must be performed in (or out of) accordance with expectations. Brubacker (2016) described the phenomenon of passing as an essentially supra-individual phenomenon.

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The acceleration of urban migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made passing a temporary or permanent option for those who elected to migrate. The anonymity available to migrants in urban centers grew enormously through much of the 20th century as industrialization and urbanization accelerated in American cities. Despite the material incentives for those with the phenotypic flexibility to pass, there is evidence from both historical and fictional narratives that the act of passing is fraught – netting advantage at considerable cost. Hobbs’s (2014) compilation of historical evidence revealed the dimensions of loss that come with leaving one’s identity and social context behind. Hobbs’s research also provided ample evidence that passing should not be conceived of as a social terminus. An individual might make an instrumental decision to pass, for example, in order to travel through potentially hostile white areas, however, Hobbs argued that same individual might then reassume a Black identity as they established themselves in a new socio-spatial landscape. Writers identified with the Harlem Renaissance turned to passing as a generative topic for developing narrative – from Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, amongst others explored the phenomenon of passing through their literary characters. While narratives of passing are often interpreted as stories of individuals who misrepresented their “authentic” identity, Pfeiffer (2003) suggested that these characters could be read as rejections of racial essentialism who construct new identities. Pfeiffer’s analysis challenged typical interpretations to passing in literary criticism where it is portrayed as an opportunistic form of trespass. The notion that passing inherently requires trespass on the part of the subject is challenged, however, by scholars arguing that passing can also be understood as a rejection of categorical racial essentialism on the part of multiracial individuals (Pfeiffer, 2003). The understanding of race as a socially constructed and maintained concept requires an understanding of its fluidity and instability, even within a single individual. Brunsma et al. (2013) made the argument that Turner’s (1969) conceptualization of liminality in the socio-cultural landscape is applicable to individuals who find themselves “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (p. 95). While individuals may privately reject racial binaries, whether their public racial ascription will follow suit is not guaranteed. In the United States, a historical and formal understanding of passing, leaves little room for non-binary identification. Hobbs’s account of passing in the U.S. makes the argument that both societal and cultural shifts led to the decrease in the practice of passing as the 20th century progressed. The restriction of full citizenship to Black Americans was slowed by the social movements that book-ended the Brown v. the Board of

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Education of Topeka County Supreme Court’s decision and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The outlawing of racial segregation and the expansion of citizenship rights to people of color provided a structural affirmation of the decades of groundwork to end white supremacist practices because of the efforts of Black Americans. Hobbs (2014) noted that the loosening of racialized restrictions on economic and political participation throughout the 20th century diminished the utility of passing. The work of Black nationalist and Black power social movements also encouraged a cultural shift, at least among Black Americans, to elevate the status of Black identity – even if anti-Blackness was still a prevalent sentiment in the wider social milieu. On the heels of social movements seeking to validate and uplift Black identity came shifts in the ways in which racial “divisions” were conceived. The institutional expansion of racial categorization to include multiracial identities was signaled by changes to the 2000 U.S. Census which, for the first time, allowed individuals to identify themselves with multiple racial categories. Hobbs’s concluding chapters argue that racial passing is a phenomenon of decreasing contemporary prevalence that is largely of interest to those scholars who examine historical phenomena. Despite its declining prevalence as a contemporary practice, it remains a generative topic for scholars of history and for those across multiple disciplines who see the practice as a valuable heuristic tool for exploring the nexus of racial hierarchy, identity, and performance in the U.S. Scholars interested in issues of race and ethnicity, for example, took up the topic of passing when Rachel Dolezal, a woman living in the Western U.S. who publicly identified as Black, received media attention when a news reporter revealed her parents were white-presenting, and identified as white Americans of European ancestry. Beydoun and Wilson (2017) term the phenomenon of white-presenting individuals who identify with a minoritized group as “reverse passing” and argued that it is a practice that is incentivized by the legal machinations of affirmative action. Because there are limited but widely known – and highly scrutinized – material benefits to people of color, Bey and Sakellarides (2016) named “reverse passing” to be the practice of whitepresenting individuals attempting to pass for a person of color in order to take advantage of affirmative action policies. The extent to which “reverse passing” is practiced is unclear; however, the increasing availability of ancestry tests may provide opportunities for white-presenting and white-identifying individuals to claim descent from non-white ancestry. 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren, was critiqued for offering “proof” of her American Indian ancestry by publicizing the results of a genetic ancestry test as “evidence” of her claim (Resnick, 2018). Thus, despite Hobbs’s 2014 prediction that passing is a phenomenon whose time had largely passed,

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a reactivation of biological (mis)conceptualizations of “racial” origin may see an uptick as white-presenting individuals seek a “re-reading” of their racial ascription based on otherwise hidden geographies of ancestry.

References Bey, M., & Sakellarides, T. (2016). When we enter: The blackness of Rachel Dolezal. The Black Scholar, 46(4), 33–48. Beydoun, K. A., & Wilson, E. K. (2017). Reverse passing. UCLA Law Review, 64, 282–355. Brubaker, R. (2016). The Dolezal affair: Race, gender, and the micropolitics of identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(3), 414–48. Brunsma, D. L., Delgado, D., & Rockquemore, K. A. (2013). Liminality in the multiracial experience: Towards a concept of identity matrix. Identities, 20(5), 481–502. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, thinking gender. Routledge. Dawkins, M. A. (2012). Clearly invisible: Racial passing and the color of cultural identity. Baylor University Press. Field, K. T. (2018). Growing up with the country: Family, race, and nation after the civil war. Yale University Press. Harris, C. I. (1992). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707–91. Hobbs, A. (2014). A chosen exile: A history of racial passing in American life. Harvard University Press. Horne, G. (2009). The color of fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial passing, and the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States. NYU Press. Lopez, I. H. (1997). White by law: The legal construction of race. NYU Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the U.S.: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Routledge. Pfeiffer, K. (2009). Race passing and American individualism. University of Massachusetts Press. Resnick, B. (2018). What Elizabeth Warren’s DNA teaches us about ancestry. Vox. Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/ 10/15/17978158/elizabeth-warren-native-american-claims-dna-ancestry-tests Sharfstein, D. (2012). The invisible line: A secret history of race in America. Penguin. Turner, V., (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Cornell University Press. West, C., & Fenstermaker, S. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society, 9(1), 8–37. Williams, T. K. (1997). Race-ing and being raced: The critical interrogation of ‘passing.’ Amerasia Journal, 23(1),61–65.

CHAPTER 61

Police Violence Nini Hayes, Amy Sánchez and Molly Reetz

Related Entries: Mass Incarceration; White Supremacy; Whiteness and the Law, Whiteness as Property

… Police violence is excessive force by police members against individuals or groups of people. The World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (World Health Organization, 2002). The definition of violence includes but is not limited to; intimidation, verbal harassment, false arrests or detentions, torture, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Police violence in the U.S. is a chronic issue that is historical, institutional, and systemic. The call to end and redress excessive police force on civilians draws protest and action that demands policy and programs focused on substantive change, especially for communities of Color who disproportionately bear the brunt of police violence. Like many institutions, policing has lofty goals; their noted moto is to protect and to serve. All officers take an oath of honor, that I, do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of constable with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, and that I will uphold fundamental human rights and accord equal respect to all people, according to law. Despite espousing these values, policing does not exist in a vacuum and is subject to the same systemic, pervasive, and structural manifestations of bias, oppression and inequality endemic in the U.S. One case of police violence would seem shocking if it proved to be an isolated incident, but the continual condition of police violence in the U.S. is indicative of structural and societal oppression. Repeated incidences of police violence is a pressing threat to public health and an equitable and socially just society. The United States is a nation established on settler-colonialism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and capitalism; which is reflected in the societal norms, institutions, and policies that have and continue to underpin modern day © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_061

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policing and the ways in which police violence is sanctioned, reproduced and maintained. Inherited from England, in the early 1600s there were systems of social obligation that included sheriffs, constables and watchmen. This type of early, informal and communal policing was on a volunteer basis in addition to private and for-profit surveillance and enforcement that sought to protect the material interest of those who employed these services. The first informal police organizations in the U.S. were organized watchmen in colonial Boston in 1631, followed by organized watchmen in 1637 New Amsterdam, later renamed New York City. In the late 1600s, as the enslaved African population in the Southern colonies increased, settler colonial and white supremacist logics dictated the protection of a slave owner’s property. A response to this was the creation of slave patrols and slave codes. In 1691, South Carolina enacted slave codes that then served as a model for the other colonies. In 1704, Slave patrols began in South Carolina then spread to all the slave holding colonies and existing long after the American Revolution. Slave patrols were made of up armed white men, a form of organized terror that was a response to the fear of resistance and rebellion of enslaved Africans. Laws, called slave codes, regulated the return of enslaved persons who did not have proper documentation for leave from a plantation. These laws subjected enslaved Africans to questioning, searches, harassment, sale to another plantation and/or violence. Subsequently, slave codes were adopted in the Northern colonies. This early surveillance and control of Black and Brown bodies in the U.S. is the genesis of the continued and disproportionate criminalization and policing of Black and Brown bodies in present day United States. The creation of centralized and bureaucratic police departments emerged in the mid-1700s and 1800s with departments established in Philadelphia, PA; Richmond, VA; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; and Baltimore, MD. A centralized police force shifted policing from vigilante and regulator groups to local and state sanctioned police apparatuses as crime in cities grew, settlers invaded the Western United States, the White perception of undesirable immigration increased, and the growing political and economic pressure to control underclasses became a target for policing. By the late 1880s, every major U.S. city had a police force in operation. Institutionalized policing in the U.S. has a documented history of violence. The racist and classist roots of U.S. American society allowed and encouraged policing to serve the interests of the economically elite and racially privileged. In particular, a response to the rapidly changing demographics in the mid 1800s, utilized police violence to maintain the productivity of the economic

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sector by using police force to quell the political unrest of the underclasses under the auspices of the rule of law. The underclass was made up of poor, laborers, European immigrants, and free Blacks. This shift towards social control created and reinforced stereotypes about groups of people who were vilified as malcontent, biologically inferior, morally corrupt, lazy and uneducated. This normalization and socialization of prejudice and discrimination towards whole groups of people as being responsible for crime and societal disorder persists today. Thus, policing and its’ resources has been and continues to be used for preserving the social hierarchy of those in power. This effectively moved policing away from reactionary policing that addressed crime as it occurred to preventative policing that attributed criminality to the underclass thereby justifying the hyper-surveillance, over policing, and use of force to maintain White racial domination. Preventative policing is evident in the relationship between police violence and Black and Brown communities. Post-Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, 13th Amendment, and the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, white fear and white supremacy created and maintains the mythology of Black criminality. Despite slavery and the slave codes being legally terminated, informal patrols that sought to terrorize, injure and murder free Blacks continued after the Civil War. Police violence endured throughout the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement and the application of 21st century criminology like broken windows policing, stop-and-frisk policies, and illegal quotas for citations and arrests of civilians continue this legacy presently. During the Jim Crow era, a segregated society was imposed and maintained with police violence that involved but was not restricted to the constant humiliation and harassment of people of color, the enforcement of racist segregation laws, hyper-surveillance and unnecessary policing in Black and Brown communities, threats of violence and acts of violence that caused injury and death. During the Civil Rights Movement, police violence was characterized by incessant and violent policing in communities of color. Moreover, police violence used aggressive tactics such as police dogs, fire hoses, and beatings of non-violent protesters and civilians. An incident of police violence that helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement was the 1946 police beating and false arrest of WWII veteran, Isaac Woodard while dressed in his U.S Army uniform. Without warrant, he was forcibly removed from the passenger bus he was traveling on, brutally beaten by police and reprimanded under false charges. Evidenced in historical documents, each of Woodard’s globes were ruptured irreparably in their sockets leaving him completely and permanently blind in addition to partial amnesia. Woodard’s story, like many before and after him, is symptomatic of policing in the U.S. that is designed as a neoliberal racial

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project. A project that functions like a well-oiled machine to ensure White racial domination, exacerbate inequalities, especially based on racism, settler colonialism, and poverty. While People of Color and poor people have always organized to counter and contest the police violence directed towards them, the culture of police violence has been aptly aided in meeting that resistance with the support of institutions and governments, legislation, and the judicial system. For example, the War on Drugs, minimum sentencing guidelines, the private prison industrial complex, the militarization of the police force, and impunity for numerous murders of unarmed People of Color. In 1970, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. While the act aimed to be comprehensive, focusing on treatment, law enforcement and education, the Nixon administration sought to emphasize the role of law enforcement and in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Moreover, as the war on drugs was taking off, the country was faced with the decline of social safety nets, the defunding of public schools, disappearing jobs and job training, and the lack of affordable housing. The war on drugs campaign was successful in vilifying and associating Vietnam war protesters with marijuana and Blacks with heroin. Thus, aiding the police in criminalizing and disrupting those communities with harassment, violence and arrests. The war on drugs disproportionally impacts Black and Latinx communities. Policing in Black and Brown communities led to an increase in citations and arrests for drugs. Despite evidence that has consistently proved that White people are more likely than Black and Latinx people to sell drugs and consume drugs at about the same rates. Yet, Whites are arrested and prosecuted less than People of Color (United States Sentencing Commission, 2016). Therefore, Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use or sales in these communities, but rather of a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities and on communities of color as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system. (Drug Policy Alliance, 2019) Minimum sentencing guidelines represented the legislative strong arm in the war on drugs. These inherently racist guidelines were created to disproportionately impact People of Color more harshly than Whites. This is clear in the arrest and sentencing of those who use powder cocaine versus crack cocaine. There are no pharmacological differences between powder cocaine and crack

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cocaine, the only difference is how you take it. Despite these two drugs being identical and that White statistically use more crack cocaine than Black and Latinx peoples, the arrests and punishments for crack has disproportionately affected Black people. Prior to 2010, the sentencing for crack versus powder cocaine was 100 to 1, meaning while 5 grams of crack carried a 5-year mandatory minimum, it would take 500 grams of cocaine to garner the same 5-year sentence. Although statistics prove Whites use more crack cocaine than Black people, Black people are disproportionately arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced. Thus, Black people receive harsher sentences for the same drug. Minimum sentencing guidelines requires a prison sentence. Thus, the war on drugs and disproportionate sentencing increased the prison population and grew the private prison industrial complex. The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world. In 1971, the prison population was 200,000 and today is over two million with the majority of those incarcerated being Black and Latinx (U.S. Department of Justice, 2018). The over-policing of Communities of Color and poor communities has been supported with an increase in the militarization of police. In recent decades, law enforcement has acquired the use of military equipment and tactics. This has highlighted the escalating tensions and broken relationships between communities of Color, poor communities and the police. A 2017 study showed that military equipment does lead police to be more violent (Delehanty et al., 2017). As police have become more violent, there has been an increase in the murders of civilians. Specifically, the increase of murders of unarmed People of Color with impunity, especially Indigenous and Black people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while Native Americans makeup a small percentage of the U.S. population, they are murdered by police at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group. Moreover, these deaths rarely gain national public/media attention. For this reason, in addition to underreported numbers of Indigenous people who have died as a result of police violence, the misidentification of Indigenous people, and that the deaths take place in small or remote communities, it is not widely known that police violence is perpetrated against Indigenous people. As a response, Black Elk and Corey Kanosh started Native Lives Matter in 2014. The group is loosely modeled after Black Lives Matter. The disproportionate rate at which Black people experience police violence, whether in the form of more frequent targeted searches or the use of excessive force resulting in injury or death, is rooted in a culture of anti-blackness. Anti-blackness in the U.S. continues to socially and culturally place Blackness in a state of dehumanization and criminalization that distorts societal

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perception of basic human rights deserved by Black people and fuels a fear of Black bodies and presence. Media portrayals of police violence highlights and perpetuates the desensitization to violence inflicted on Black and Brown bodies in the United States. By far not an exhaustive list, police murders of Black people that have garnered wide public outrage and media reporting in the U.S. are the murders of 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in 1999; 57-year-old Alberta Spruill in 2003; 23-yearold Sean Bell in 2006; 22-year-old Oscar Grant in 2009; 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in 2010; 18-year-old Gil Collar in 2012; 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in 2012; 27-yearold Shelly Frey in 2012; 34-year-old Miriam Carey in 2013; 43-year-old Eric Garner in 2014; 28-year-old Akai Gurley; 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014; 50-year-old Michelle Cusseaux in 2014; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014; 17-yearold Laquan McDonald in 2014; 50-year-old Walter Scott in 2015; 25-year-old Freddie Gray in 2015; 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson in 2015; 23-year-old Korryn Gaines in 2016; 37-year-old Alton Sterling in 2016; 32-year-old Philando Castile in 2016; 30-year-old Charleena Lyles in 2017; 22-year-old Stephon Clark in 2018; 21-year-old Emantic Bradford Jr. in 2018; and 20-year-old Willie McCoy in 2019. Responses to state sanctioned police violence has always been met with resistance; notable opposition includes the Zoot Suit protests of 1943, the 1966 creation of the Black Panther Party, the Stonewall protests of 1969, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, and the 2015 report and social media campaign #SayHerName. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was created in response to the extrajudicial murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. It has grown to become an organization that positions itself as an “ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza, 2014). The work of Black Lives Matter evolved and organized to support community activism after the murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 in St. Louis, Missouri by a Ferguson police officer. The Ferguson Uprising drew scrutiny and national focus on the relationship between Black people and policing, paramilitary policing, and the use of force against civilians. The Department of Justice investigated the law enforcement practices of the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) and 2015 determined that the FPD engaged in a pattern and practice of police conduct that included violating the civil rights of citizens, using arrest warrants for threats and coercion, and disproportionately discriminating against and arresting Black citizens.

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The long tradition and history of resistance to police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement inspired Colin Kaepernick, a former American football player and Eric Reid, a current American football player, to kneel instead of stand for the national anthem in protest of racism and the murders of unarmed Black people with impunity by police. In 2016, he cited the police murders of 40-year-old Terence Crutcher and 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott as perfect examples of what his protest was about. Their protest helped to broaden the audience and echo and maintain a national discourse about police violence. Some of these conversations have led interventions including, but not limited to; the examination of stop and frisk policies and broken windows policing that has been used to disproportionately harass Black, Latinx and poor populations; mental health training and interventions for police officers; increased and shared data collection detailing interactions between civilians and law enforcement; the dismantling and acknowledgment of the failed war on drugs; drug treatment diversion programs; police training to address and eliminate implicit bias and racial profiling; community policing; federal consent decrees intended to identify law enforcement misconduct and promote police integrity; the establishment of civilian oversight boards; and the implementation of embedded technologies such as dashboard and body cameras. Take for example the increase of film technologies such as the ability of bystanders and victims to video record police violence, such as in the death of Eric Garner and Philando Castile, and the use of dashboard and body cameras by police such as in the police death of 28-year-old Sandra Bland in 2015. While such technology has the potential to increase transparency and accountability, there is a lack of consistency in how footage is recorded, managed and released in cases of police violence, in addition to the deterrent and reprisal of law enforcement towards individuals who exercise their first amendment right to record police. This kind of documentation has not stemmed police violence and among other things, has desensitized people to police murders and made a public spectacle of Black and Brown death at the hands of police. Much work remains to redress the relationship between police and communities of Color and poor communities. While these ongoing conversations have highlighted the need for the critical analysis of power deployed by law enforcement and the redress of policing that equates to colonial technologies that are always inflicted on raced peoples deserving of subjugation such that it preserves White racial domination, policing still maintains a focus on bad actors rather than the socioeconomic conditions that are criminogenic in their outcomes. Police violence continues despite the aforementioned interventions. Thus, a growing conversation about police abolition in favor of a different

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system(s) that would center community solutions and transformative justice has been gaining advocation and practice. In the U.S., all officers take an oath of honor and law enforcement espouses values of fairness, integrity, and impartiality. Yet, policing in the U.S. is not neutral. As a result, police violence is rooted in the socioeconomic preservation of colonial encounters that created a neoliberal racial project to protect and maintain White racial domination. To understand, analyze, bear witness, and oppose police violence is to resist the common narrative that policing is neutral and necessary. The work to redress and end police violence in the U.S. requires the continuation and ongoing resistance against policing that aims to serve the foundations of settler-colonialism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and capitalism. As is the work of groups like Critical Resistance, Assata’s Daughters, #LetUsBreathe Collective, and Incite!, including the countless unnamed collectives and individuals dedicated to ending police violence.

References Delehanty, C., Mewhirter, J., Welch, R., & Wilks, J. (2017). Militarization and police violence: The case of the 1033 program. Research & Politics, 4(2), 1–7. Drug Policy Alliance. (2019). Race and the drug war. http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/ race-and-drug-war Garza, A. (2014). A herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter movement by Alicia Garza. https://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/ United States Sentencing Commission. (2016). U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2016 sourcebook of federal sentencing statistics. https://www.ussc.gov/research/ sourcebook-2016 United States Department of Justice. (2018). Correctional populations in the United States, 2016. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus16.pdf World Health Organization. (2002). World report on violence and health: Summary. http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/ summary_en.pdf

CHAPTER 62

Political Correctness Sara B. Demoiny, Hannah Carson Baggett and Kamden K. Strunk

Related Entries: Discourse & Whiteness; Psychoanalysis of Whiteness; Trump, Donald; Whiteness & Higher Education

… Political correctness has varied definitions depending on the audience. It has been defined over time as representing a set of humanizing values by the Left and as the arbitrary policing of one’s free speech by the Right. Often, political correctness is framed simply in terms of language or speech, yet language is intricately connected to discourse, power, and ideology within a society. Since political correctness has been focused on language, it has given an opportunity for the Right to center the issue on groups or individuals who are offended by certain terms. This focus on offensiveness has removed the responsibility of examining the inequity which gave rise to political correctness and has allowed for the exposure of White emotionalities of anger and defensiveness. The response by White people (often aligned with Rightist ideologies) who perceive their language as being critiqued and curtailed is to center these perceptions in arguments about supposed attacks on their freedom of speech. Scholars of race in the U.S. have argued this focus on language and offense also gives cover to systemic oppression by wrapping it in colorblind or colorevasive language. Thus, at the root of the current political correctness debate is an epistemological question of, “Whose truth counts?” Though this controversy is often enacted in the social and public sphere via popular press and mass media, public education is positioned squarely at the center of this debate. For example, attention to political correctness in education functions to highlight the ways that partisan interests are pitted against one another about the purposes of education. One “side” often argues that schools, teachers, and classrooms are sites of neutrality and objectivity and those who would work to expose the cultural politics at work in them as “radicals.” Another “side” describes schools as inherently political and argues they are precisely the place for students to learn to think critically about the relationships among power, authority, and knowledge. In this view, schooling only appears “neutral” because of its alignment with dominant, hegemonic © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_062

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ideologies. Partisan groups also dispute the relationship between academic freedom and pedagogy, arguing that any instruction rooted in progressivism, advocacy, and activism is tantamount to indoctrination. Thus, democratic and liberatory educational practices and the teachers who enact them become points of criticism and heightened scrutiny and are accused of silencing students whose opinions are aligned with dominant ideologies.

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History of Political Correctness Controversy

The United States has been built on the premise of forced assimilation on a continuum between nativism and cosmopolitan liberalism. Nativists opposed immigration out of fear of losing a white, Protestant national identity, while cosmopolitan liberals were tolerant, even welcoming, of immigrants as long as they ascribed to “American” ideals and customs. Both of these stances were present from the American Revolution through the mid-twentieth century. After World War II, there was a palpable frustration among Citizens of Color and women who, even after serving their country and “proving” their patriotism during war, continued to experience discrimination. This resentment became a leading factor in birthing the Civil Rights Movement. Equity and emancipation from white dominance were goals of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements during the 1950s and 1960s, focused within both political and educational systems. During this time, multicultural education developed as, a movement where People of Color, and, eventually other oppressed identity groups, joined together to challenge the hegemonic systems in U.S. schooling. Much of this equity work took place through student movements, which initially called for self-determination and complete restructuring of institutions. As a response, states and education agencies chose to adopt “minority difference” as important while deceivingly changing the focus of the student movements from a desire for redistribution of power to championing a message of representation. It was during this time period that the term “political correctness” originated, but it did not become commonplace until the mid1980s and 1990s. As the Left shifted from a post-war fight for redistributive justice to equal representation, a cultural politics formed centering “recognition, identity, and difference” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 20). During the Reagan-Thatcher era, the Right labeled the Left’s cultural politics as political correctness, and by doing so, successfully labeled heterogeneous loosely aligned groups of people, who recognized oppression in U.S. society, as a homogenous group attacking American identity. The Right’s new framing of political correctness included a

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burgeoning argument that the Left was infringing on free speech, which inherently is anti-democratic. In 1990, after attending the Western Humanities Conference at UC Berkeley, Bernstein (1990) wrote a New York Times op-ed laying out a Rightist argument against political correctness. He illustrated his point, describing a new policy for freshmen composition courses at the University of Texas. Instead of writing compositions focused on literary classics from the Western canon, students would be writing compositions on issues of difference, like affirmative action. In the op-ed, Bernstein claimed that liberal political correctness had become a new orthodoxy with its own set of correct beliefs about race, feminism, sexuality, and culture, leaving no room for debate. Bernstein’s (1990) article seemed to kick-start a public, national debate in which the Right positioned political correctness and academia as synonyms. As progressives, or Leftists, in higher education made headway in expanding the curriculum to be more inclusive, adding ethnic and gender studies for example, conservatives perceived this as an attack on the Western canon, which they deemed as superior. During this same time, the Right framed political correctness as a threat to free speech. New Right think tanks formed and began strategizing political and legal means to defeat political correctness. Several “free speech” organizations formed, including legal defense organizations. These New Right organizations have won several court cases against universities citing their policies, such as speech codes, as unconstitutional. The Right used arguments of neutrality, free speech and impartial educational ideals to combat political correctness. Within this context, campuses vie for top rankings on “free speech” indices promoted by outside groups and mobilize language about the “marketplace of ideas” and “vigorous debate,” often resulting in policies that provide cover for and lend credence to white supremacist ideas and white nationalist speakers (Shih, 2017). These arguments cast political correctness as a policing of language, while originally, political correctness was understood as a belief that “othering” people is wrong and that all citizens should be recognized and valued. Yet, political correctness and its shift towards representation encourages people to focus on individual’s personal beliefs (and uses of language) instead of challenging hegemonic ideologies built into our systems and institutions.

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Attention to Political Correctness and White Supremacy

Attention to political correctness functions on the side of white supremacy in multiple ways. When racialized and racist language that others and criminalizes is employed in the sociopolitical sphere, it enters the social consciousness

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and is perpetuated, serving to reify white superiority. Some examples of this language include the use of “illegal alien” when referring to undocumented people; the use of “thug” or “super predator” when referring to young, Black men; and the use of the phrase “welfare queen” when referring to Black mothers. These phrasings are often invoked by members of conservative, partisan groups to signal (i.e. dog whistle) to supporters a racist ideology, rooted in the belief of white supremacy and white superiority, while simultaneously renouncing that they themselves are racist. These oppressive discourses are creative and resilient and seem to reinvent themselves over time. As one term becomes read as offensive, other more color-evasive language emerges to take its place, allowing those discourses to continue and providing plausible racial deniability. This language is often challenged by opposing partisan groups on the Left, who point out the ways that racist ideology goes beyond racial slurs and epithets and how it shows up in new ways in contemporary discourse that reveal deeply entrenched dehumanizing perspectives, prejudices, and stereotypes. Focusing on political correctness as a purely linguistic endeavor has led to a “call out culture” wherein the perpetrators of that language, usually labeled as “racist” serve as scapegoats to be vilified in the public sphere. Thus, on one hand, Leftist progressives focus on words and phrases that are problematic, calling out those who use them, and Rightist conservatives respond that liberals and progressives are “snowflakes.” “But you knew what I meant,” is a common refrain that indicates the exasperation with being language-policed and provides opportunity to deflect responsibility for the animating ideology by instead focusing on frustration around linguistic shifts. Problematic in this “language loop” is that the focus often remains on the language and the individual who employed the language, rather than attention to the ways that language and ideology inform one another. While analysis of language is important in the project of examining the intersection of discourse, power, and ideology, equally integral to dismantling racist systems rooted in white supremacy is a focus on the ways that racism is “baked in” to systems and structures. In other words, focusing squarely on language and who is subsequently “racist” prevents a deeper analysis of how language and ideology work as mechanisms in a white supremacist project and how institutionalized racism functions with material consequences to People of Color in the U.S. This focus on language rather than a deeper cultural politics at work also serves to excuse “good, White liberals” from the hard work of challenging systemic injustice. Majoritized individuals can absolve themselves of collective responsibility for ongoing marginalization and oppression by avoiding using

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“politically incorrect” language and saying the right things. Language, then, functions as elite discourse (van Dijk, 1993) and “correct” language obscures inherently racist/white supremacist ideology. White people (and members of other dominant groups) can learn to use “politically correct” language and also fail to understand the material consequences of racist and oppressive systems. In this way, focusing on only language becomes an exercise in semantics and a distraction from dealing with existential questions around whose truth matters and the ways in which racism and oppression shape our lives and livelihoods; it further serves to cleanse oppressive systems of their animus. Thus, although linguistic shifts are the first steps in cultural reparations, it is here that the work to dismantle oppression often ends. The linguistic shifts allow dominant cultures to appear racially conscious and appease the calls for equitable representation by oppressed groups without having to redistribute any power with which they and the systems that privilege them hold. An example of the ways that political correctness is employed in the field of education is illustrated by the language regarding the “achievement gap” between students of Color and White students in K-12 schools. Put forth by the Coleman Report and employed for almost five decades since, the “achievement gap” has been deemed a “politically correct” phrasing in its use of language (it only implies that Students of Color are intellectually inferior rather than an explicit statement). However, this language is problematic in that it locates the “gap” to the student, rather than to the racist systems that have caused it (i.e. redlining; unequal school financing formulas; unbalanced teacher quality and preparation pathways; culturally irrelevant and irresponsive curricula; biased tests) and the history that spawned it (i.e. the ways that Whites whipped and lynched enslaved Africans and later, freedpeople, for learning to read and attending school; the ways that White lawmakers prevented entrance to higher education; and the ways that, after Brown v. Board, White education officials removed huge swaths of Black teachers from public schools in the name of “integration”). Thus, this phrasing acts as a linguistic tool to center the responsibility for “achievement” to students rather than schools. Though scholars in education have challenged “achievement gap” language (i.e. Ladson-Billings’ work on the “education debt”; Milner’s work on the “opportunity gap”), few have work that has crossed over to mainstream media dissemination, such that the underlying premise of the gap remains in the public consciousness: that Black and Brown students are deficient/not as smart as their White peers. Thus, this language, although “politically correct,” distracts from focused efforts to end the systemic conditions (i.e. housing discrimination, unequal school funding, etc.) that lead to inequitable material outcomes for Students of Color.

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Political Correctness in the Era of Trump

As previously stated, political correctness is often invoked in discussion about partisan politics with regards to language choice. In this sphere, it functions as a policing mechanism by those on the Left about language used by those on the Right that is viewed to be problematic at best, and racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or bigoted at worst. Progressives, then, challenge conservatives to adopt new forms of nomenclature and ways of talking with an end of discrimination in mind. While a longstanding cause célèbre of those on the Right, Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Presidential campaign and subsequent tenure as president renewed a focus on politically correct language. For example, in an appearance on Meet the Press in August 2015, Trump claimed “And this political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country. You can’t say anything. Anything you say today, they’ll find a reason why it’s not good” (Cillizza, 2018). As conservatives connected to and praised Trump’s comment, they expressed a liberation to freely voice their suppressed beliefs in a way that now seemed socially acceptable. In response, Bouie (2017) noted, “When [Trump’s] supporters praised his honesty and bluntness, aka his political incorrectness, what they meant was his willingness to air bigotry as truth. For them, his public prejudice was a kind of liberation from an oppressive atmosphere of conformity” (para. 2). Trump’s attacks on political correctness have resonated with those on the Right who feel consistently chastised by the Left. The connection between a frustration with political correctness and whiteness was apparent in the 2016 presidential election. Major, Blodorn, and Blascovich (2018) conducted a survey with nearly 400 White Americans during the 2016 primaries and found that Whites who identified highly with their ethnic identity had an increased opposition to political correctness. With this renewed focus on political correctness as a form of languagepolicing has come a rise in “political incorrectness,” or deliberate employment of language that is commonly and widely accepted to be racist and white supremacist. In 2017, White supremacists organized a Unite the Right rally protesting the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia. Carrying tiki torches and displaying Nazi and Confederate flags, they performed explicitly racist chants. When opposition formed, the rallygoers clashed, resulting in the murder of counter protester, Heather Heyer. Regarding the events at Charlottesville, President Trump stated there “were very fine people, on both sides,” invoking condemnation by liberals and moderates; yet, the debate became an argument over political correctness and what the President really meant to say. The focus on Trump’s language allowed the analysis

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and condemnation of white supremacy to remain at the individual level (i.e. on the White men with tiki torches) instead of analysis of how white supremacist ideologies remain prevalent in U.S. society. In many ways, Trump’s presidency provides an opportunity to return to the origins of political correctness and to usurp its well-meaning, yet misguided, purpose with a true, critical reflection and analysis of U.S. systems, institutions, and ideologies that maintain white supremacy today.

References Bernstein, R. (1990, October 28). The rising hegemony of the politically correct. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/28/weekinreview/ideastrends-the-rising-hegemony-of-the-politically-correct.html Bouie, J. (2017, Sept. 19). The real political correctness. Slate. https://slate.com/newsand-politics/2017/09/the-real-political-correctness-is-what-put-trump-in-thewhite-house.html Cillizza, C. (October 30, 2018) The dangerous consequences of Trump’s all-out assault on political correctness. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/politics/donaldtrump-hate-speech-anti-semitism-steve-king-kevin-mccarthy/index.html Coleman, J. S. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. National Center for Education Statistics. Fairclough, N. (2003). ‘Political correctness’: The politics of culture and language. Discourse Society, 14(1), 17–28. Major, B., Blodorn, A., & Major Blascovich, G. (2018). The threat of increasing diversity: Why many White Americans support Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(6), 931–940. Shih, D. (2017, May 3). Hate speech and the misnomer of ‘the marketplace of ideas.’ National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/03/ 483264173/hate-speech-and-the-misnomer-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism (Vol. 6). Sage.

CHAPTER 63

Postcolonialism and Whiteness Phyllis Kyei Mensah

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Nationalism

1

Introduction: Early Infsluences on Fanon

As the darkest of eight children, Fanon recalls how his half-French mother only sang “French love songs” to them, forbade them to speak Creole unless to servants and peasants, and chastised him to “stop acting like a nigger” when she deemed his behavior to be unacceptable (Ehlen, 2000, p. 20; Fanon, 1967a, p. 191). His racialized upbringing, representing the norm in his home country of Martinique (a colony of France during Fanon’s childhood and youth), erased Fanon’s black consciousness and black identity. Thus, Fanon grew up as an extremely sensitive person full of self-doubts, which put him in a perpetual quest to understand himself by engaging his own “conscience and consciousness” as a victim of colonialism (Ehlen, 2000; Gendzier, 1973, p. 4). This selfinterrogation reached a peak first during his military service in the French army and during his student days in France. His writings, thus, follow his personal transformative journey of self-doubt, self-reflection and self-actualization. His appointment to a psychiatric hospital in Blida-Joinville, Algeria in 1953, began his career as a fierce anti-colonial activist and writer for the independence movements in Algeria and other African countries. It is also during this time that he solidified his theory on the effect of the colonial apparatus on the psyche of the colonized (Fanon, 1967a, p. 120). He regarded the anti-colonial revolution as a collective mobilization action which needed to be achieved through all means possible, including “violence” (Mbembe, 2012). Mbembe (2012) argues that he advocated for three forms of violence, namely; “colonial violence,” “emancipatory violence” by the colonized” and “international violence” (p. 22). Fanon was inspired by several prominent scholars of his time. Aime Cesaire was the first scholar to inspire a black consciousness in Fanon (and other Martinicans), which he greatly admired him for (Ehlen, 2000, p. 33; Fanon, 1967a, p. 187). He would, however, become one of Cesaire’s critics later in his writings. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_063

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Others included: Jean-Paul Sartre (Fanon, 1967a) and Hegel (Fanon, 1967a, p. 217). Conceptualizing anti-colonial revolution, Fanon relied on Marxism to advocate for African countries to return to a collective grassroot movement (Fanon, 1967b). His training in psychiatry and his personal psychological experiences informed his study of the psychological impact of colonialism on the colonized. Methodologically, he sought, through psychological analysis, to propose “the liberation of the man of color from himself” (Fanon, 1967a, p. 10) by studying the “metaphysics” of both the black and white person and their relationship with each other so as “to set man free” (Fanon, 1967a, p. 11). Although he dwells overwhelmingly on this analysis, he also studies the effect of colonialism on the relationship between the educated and uneducated black.

2

Fanon on White Supremacy and Post(-)colonial Theory1

Some have traced Fanon’s major contribution to post(-)colonial theory to his theorization of the effects of colonialism beyond the exterior and emphasizing its dehumanizing impact on the colonized. Jeyifo (2007) further attributes his prominence to the trajectory of his writings – which moves from personal psychological struggles with colonialism to generalizations at the national level and for collective groups. Mbembe calls him “a man of the world” (Mbembe, 2012, p. 24), whose name serves as both a sign of hope and a call to revolution (Mellino, 2011, cited in Mbembe, 2012, p. 20). Therefore, even though, post(-) colonial theory did not begin with Fanon, he is nevertheless regarded as a major influencer, whose thoughts are “metamorphic” to the field (Mbembe, 2012, p. 20). Despite writing in the colonial era, Fanon’s themes are still extremely relevant now. Black Skin, White Masks (originally published in 1952) uses sociopsychological analysis to discuss white supremacy, oppression and the impact of colonialism on the colonized. As his first publication while still living in France, he grappled with doubts about his consciousness and black identity as a victim of colonization and the racism he encountered. Gendzier (1975) also describes this book as his attempt to envision a possible relationship that could exist between white and black people, should all discrimination be cast aside. Fanon’s theory on white supremacy is based on two points: (1) “White men consider themselves superior to black men” (2) “Black men want to prove to white men, at all cost, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect” (Fanon, 1967a, p. 12). Thus, he argues that black people, including him, always wrestle with their identity and a sense of inferiority when in contact with the white race, and this manifests in the use of colonial language; the

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alienation of black people in the diaspora from Africans on the continent, and educated blacks from the black peasant; racism as the basis for colonization; and amorous relationships between the two races; among others. Wretched of the Earth (originally published in 1961) addresses the political and economic challenges of white supremacy and colonialism to the liberation struggles for newly and burgeoning independent nations. Here, Fanon affirms and embraces his black identity and affiliation to colonized people on the continent of Africa, dedicating his career and life towards the liberation of the colonized in Algeria. He further advocates the need for Africans to revisit past history and civilizations as both a “necessity” to redeem both their black consciousness, and their history, which has been absolutely vilified by colonialists (Fanon, 1963, p. 211). In this book, he variously discusses oppression as a tool of white supremacy, which could only be overthrown through a systemic revolution; nation-building challenges for nations and their leaders after independence; neocolonialism, and others. Toward the African Revolution is a collection of several of his essays that were published posthumously. These essays address the violence of white supremacy and colonial rule in the colonies, and resistance to this violence. In summary, he discusses his psychiatry practice in Algeria; his assessment of the psyche of the colonized; the brutality of the French in Algeria; the concept of racism and its form in America; and challenges to African unity. A Dying Colonialism, also published posthumously, is a collection of essays dedicated mostly to the decolonizing struggle of Algerians, and highlights some of the decolonization strategies that he hoped could be applied in other colonized places. The tone of his writings depict a radical critic of white supremacy and its colonial apparatus. Not only is he critical of colonialists, he is also extremely critical of the black middle-class intellectuals and their role in the liberation movement (Fanon, 1963, p. 59). While some scholars have hailed Fanon as a prophet who predicted an end to colonialism long before the system ended, he also foresaw the extension of white supremacy to post(-)colonial global affairs, fearing that not even liberation could erase the “true legacy of colonialism” on these nations (Mbembe, 2012, p. 25).

3

The Complexities of Post(-)colonial Theory

Scholars have diversified Fanon’s psychoanalysis of white supremacy to include deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, critical analysis, and several others, and this body of knowledge have come to be regarded loosely as post(-)colonial.

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Post(-)colonial scholarship is said to have emerged as a product of “interaction between imperial culture and indigenous cultural practices” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2006, p. 1) and as such, describe the period from colonization to the present. Ashcroft et al. (2002) further argue that the theory was conceived as a result of the inability of European theory to adequately address the complex culture of such societies. Gandhi (1998) describes post(-)colonialism as “a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath” and a discipline that is “devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past” (p. 4). Some scholars find that post(-)colonial literature developed through historical stages, from when texts were produced by “representatives” of the imperial power such as colonial administrators, missionaries, travelers, etc.; to texts produced by educated “natives” who mostly belonged to the privileged class; to the present (Ashcroft et al., 2002). By nature, post(-)colonial theory is viewed as a complex field that encapsulates diverse cultures, experiences, complexities and identities that intersect and also generate debates. Prominent among these contestations regards which period accurately describes post(-)colonial, and whether to name it postcolonial or post-colonial – where the hyphen represents a break in history before and after colonialism, and its absence represents a continuum (Gandhi, 1998). Ashcroft et al. (2006) maintain that the theory should not only apply to the period after colonialism, but be expanded to include the beginning of colonialism, for an inherently historical outlook. Additionally, post(-)colonial theorists debate over race; ethnic identity; politics of the field’s location; the differences in history and experiences of colonized people in different geographic locations; the agency of colonized people; what work is authentically post(-)colonial and who originated the field; among many others. While some scholars call Fanon the “father of postcolonial theory,” others refer to the “Holy Trinity” of Edward Said, G.C. Spivak and H.K. Bhabha as the collective founders (Courville, 2007, p. 218). As some criticize early anti-colonial writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alexander Crummel, Aime Cesaire and the Negritude Movement for their “nativism”2 approach (William & Chrisman, 1994, p. 14), others have also questioned the lack of recognition of other Fanon contemporaries and Third World anti-colonial theorists like Albert Memmi, George Padmore, and Kwame Nkrumah, among many others. These ever-increasing contestations in the field have been attributed to the growing number of marginal “voices” we are hearing in contemporary times (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). Regardless, Fanon’s works continue to inspire scholars from former colonies in Asia, Africa, the West Indies, and Latin America in their fight against white supremacy and its different manifestations.

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How Post(-)colonial Theory Extends Fanon’s Theory on White Supremacy

This section briefly discusses a few tenets of white supremacy that have been challenged by post-Fanon post(-)colonial scholars, which is demonstrative of how the field has expanded and grown over the decades. Lamming (1960) bemoans how the disconnection of West Indians from their African roots has resulted in their lack of an authentic culture (p. 17). Brathwaite (1971), in contrast, theorizes on the hybridity of culture in Jamaica and the West Indies that creates an authentic culture for Africans in the diaspora (p. 154). Mishra (1996), Hall (1990), Said (1984/2006a), and Rushdie (1982) also discuss the various positionalities of people from the colonized world in the diaspora and how their geographic location intersects or affects their conceptualization of their cultures and identities. Said (1984/2006a), in Orientalism, discusses the identity and body of knowledge that western scholarship and academia create and recreate to represent the colonized (“Orient”) in an unequal power relationship that favors the colonizer. The theory also pioneered the distinction between the West and East and is hailed as the pioneer of colonial discourse theory or analysis. Subaltern Studies seeks to evaluate post-colonial India’s challenge of colonial rule and Eurocentric concepts like “nationalism, liberalism and democracy” and how they are practiced in non-Western countries, through critical dialogue (Majumdar, 2010, p. 25; Chakrabarty, 2000). Spivak (1991) also addresses various ways in which the “subaltern” or colonized can make their voices heard. Appiah (1991) and Bhabha (1994) discuss the “illusion” of race and racializing and their implications for people of color at home and in the diaspora. Minh-Ha (1989), Petersen (1984), and Spivak (1991) also analyze the dual oppression of women through patriarchy and colonization, an experience Spivak (1991) calls “double silencing” of women in the masculine colonial imperial construction (p. 32). While Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1981), Achebe (1989), Kachru (1990) and Ashcroft (2001) critique the politics of colonial language use as prominent tools of imperialism in schools in the post(-)colonial era, Katrak (1989) laments the general lack of western appreciation of texts, theories and scholarship by non-western post(-)colonial scholars, especially women of color.

5

Conclusion: Theorizing Resistance

Scholars, activists and revolutionaries have regarded Fanon as the ultimate icon of resistance to oppression. After his analysis of the violent nature of colonialism and white supremacy, Fanon advocated for both a psychological and

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physical resistance to systemic oppression, using violence if needed. However, his critics have labeled him as an advocate of violence. Nevertheless, post(-) colonial theorists advocate for a rejection of European culture and ideals, and a revival of a consciousness that embraces the language, art, culture, knowledge, and history, of colonized and oppressed people. Said (1978/2006b) details ways in which post(-)colonial writers have retold the dehumanizing stories that Europeans have written about the cultures of colonized people, as a way to both reclaim their lost territories from colonizers and to produce counter knowledges to the dominant Eurocentric narratives. He further conceptualizes resistance, not only as a reaction to white supremacy, but as an “alternative way” to reconceptualize our history for an “integrative view of human community and liberation” (Said, 1978/2006b, p. 97). After many decades, and despite the criticisms of instigating violence, Fanon’s writings continue to inspire and energize many marginalized and oppressed groups to resist all forms of oppression, including white supremacy. For the future of the field, some post(-)colonial critics have argued for the field to promote cross-cultural and transcultural dialogue among black intellectuals and other groups. Ashcroft et al. (2002) have further expressed concerns about reevaluating who the audience of post(-)colonial theory are and whose needs they serve – between grassroots activists and intellectuals. As systems of oppression and white supremacy evolve, people continue to resist in various ways. Therefore, post(-)colonial theory will continue to grapple with questions regarding globalization, environment, gender, race, culture, diaspora, educational curriculum, sexuality, religion, and ableism, among others, and these will continue to expand and reshape the nature of conversations within post(-) colonial theory. We are, however, optimistic and agree with Fanon that the inherent trait of all humans to resist domination and oppression will continue to influence post(-)colonial scholars now and in the future.

Notes 1 I put the hyphen in brackets to generalize about the field without leaning toward a specific school of thought within the field. I will discuss this in detail in the subsequent section. 2 It sought a return to “an unsullied indigenous cultural tradition” or an “authentic ethnic identity.”

References Achebe, C. (2006). The politics of language. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 268–271). Routledge.

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Appiah, K. A. (2006). The illusions of race. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 224–226). Routledge. Ashcroft, B. (2006). Language and transformation. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 277–280). Routledge. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (Eds.). (2002). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. Routledge. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (Eds.). (2006). The post-colonial studies reader. Routledge. Bhaba, H. K. (2006). Race, time and the revision of modernity. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 219–223). Routledge. Brathwaite, E. K. (2006). Creolization in Jamaica. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 152–154). Routledge. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(1), 9. Courville, M. E. (2007). Genealogies of postcolonialism: A slight return from Said and Foucault back to Fanon and Sartre (Michel Foucault, Edward W. Said). Studies in Religion-Sciences Religieuses, 36(2), 215–240. Ehlen, P. (2000). Frantz Fanon: A spiritual biography. Crossroad Pub. Co. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967a). Black skin, White masks. Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967b). Toward the African revolution; Political essays. Grove Press. Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial theory: A critical introduction. Columbia University Press. Gendzier, I. L. (1973). Frantz Fanon: A critical study. Pantheon Books. Hall, S. (2006). Cultural identity and diaspora. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 435–439). Routledge. Jeyifo, B. (2007). An African cultural modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the philosophy of decolonization. Socialism & Democracy, 21(3), 125–141. Kachru, B. B. 2006). The alchemy of English. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 27–275). Routledge. Katrak, K. H. (2006). Decolonizing culture: Toward a theory for postcolonial women’s text. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 239–241). Routledge. Lamming, G. (2006). The occasion for speaking. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 14–23). Routledge. Majumdar, R. (2010). Writing postcolonial history. Bloomsbury Academic. Mbembe, A. (2012). Metamorphic thought: The works of Frantz Fanon. African Studies, 71(1), 19–28. Minh-Ha, T. T. (2006). Writing postcoloniality and feminism. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 246–249). Routledge.

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Mishra, V. (2006). The diasporic imaginary: Theorizing the Indian diaspora. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 447–450). Routledge. Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial theory: Contexts, practices, politics. Verso. Petersen, K. H. (2006). First things first: Problems of a feminist approach to African literature. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 235–238). Routledge. Said, E. W. (2006a). Orientalism. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 24–27). Routledge. (Original work published 1984) Said, E. W. (2006b). The mind of winter. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 439–442). Routledge. (Original work published 1978) Spivak, G. C. (2006). Can the subaltern speak? In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 102–106). Routledge. Thiongo’o, N. W. (2006). The language of African literature. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 263–265). Routledge. Williams, R. J. P., & Chrisman, L. (1994). Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader. Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 64

Post-Racialism Danielle N. Franks, Melanie M. Wilcox and Michael Azarani

Related Entries: Affirmative Action; Colorblindness; Critical Race Theory; Discourse and Whiteness; Microaggressions

… A term that became commonly used to describe the sociopolitical landscape during the 2008 United States presidential election, post-racialism refers to A twenty-first century ideology that reflects a belief that due to the significant racial progress that has been made, the state need not engage in race-based decision-making or adopt race-based remedies, and that civil society should eschew race as a central organizing principle. (Cho, 2009, p. 1594) Numerous studies document that there continue to be disparities between Whites and people of color in the realms of income (Fox, 2004; Quadagno, 1994), education (Davis Jr., 2017; Nitardy, Duke, Pettingell, & Borowsky, 2015), physical health (Malat, Clark-Hitt, Burgess, Friedemann-Sanchez, & Van Ryn, 2010; Rhodes & Warkentien, 2017; Smedley, Stith, & Nelson, 2003), mental health (Chow, Jaffee, Snowden, 2003; Eack & Newhill, 2012), rates of arrest and incarceration (Carson, 2018; Vogel & Porter, 2016), and countless other domains. Because of these disparities, claims that the U.S. has become post-racial, and thus that racism no longer exists, continue to perpetuate the system of White supremacy and racial oppression. Although the term post-racial has most recently been used to describe the sociopolitical climate during and after the election of President Obama in 2008, conservative pundits began making post-racial claims as early as the late 1990’s, stating that the country had made substantial colorblind strides that no longer necessitate programs such as affirmative action. According to Cho (2009), post-racialism ideology has four components: neutral universalism, moral equivalence, racial progress, and distancing moves. Neutral universalism argues that the law should not recognize race-based policies because they are seen as divisive and only benefiting some Americans, rather than all Americans. Cho argues that the outcomes of policies that are allegedly © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_064

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neutral tend to further advantage dominant groups. Moral equivalence refers to the equivalency made between the White supremacists and racial justice advocates on the basis that both are drawing undue attention to race and thus both are problematic. This equivalency is, of course, false, as one group seeks domination, and the other seeks to be free of domination. The racial progress component of post-racialism argues that society has made great strides in overcoming racism and for this reason, current attempts to discuss race are unwarranted. Cho noted that those who accept the racial progress argument may still agree that discrimination exists, but significantly downplay this reality in the name of racial progress. Lastly, the distancing move refers to those in favor of post-racialism actively distancing themselves from the civil rights rhetoric of the 1960’s and 1970’s and the race-conscious rhetoric of today. By distancing themselves from those whom they perceive as polarizing (i.e. naming racism), post-racialists can remain, in their eyes, morally and politically neutral. Along with the four components of post-racialism, Cho (2009) noted that post-racial ideology has a strong overlap with colorblind racial ideology. Those who hold colorblind racial attitudes believe that race should not and does not play a role in society. As the Civil Rights era came to a close, it was no longer socially desirable to hold overt racist attitudes. The proposed solution, for many, was to claim that they do not see color in an effort to move society towards a utopia in which everyone is treated equally. Like post-racialism, colorblindness is problematic as it denies the racial realities of people of color, whom society does not treat “colorblindly.” Similar to claims of post-racialism, the ideal of colorblindness perpetuates White supremacy and racial oppression because it denies the reality of racial dynamics in society and obfuscates the system of White supremacy. Below, the history of claims towards an American post-racial society are discussed within the context of colorblindness, the candidacy and presidency of Barack Obama, and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

1

Colorblindness and Post-Racialism

Kuryla (2011) argued that one of the first instances of an individual in power advocating for colorblindness as an ideal was president Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1965 speech at Howard University. There, President Johnson stated that there must be “equality as a fact and equality as a result” (Kuryla, 2011, p. 122). In other words, in order to have equality as a fact in society, the result of racially sensitive policies must also be equal across racial groups. In this way, President Johnson was advocating for equality rather than equity by calling for policy to treat everyone equally regardless of individuals’ differing circumstances.

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After the Civil Rights Movement and the establishment of affirmative action policies, a general attitude of racial colorblindness was adopted by White America. Bonilla-Silva (2015) outlines how the system of racial oppression evolved during this time and argues that the end of Jim Crow was not the end of racism, but rather the beginning of “new racism” (p. 1362). Bonilla-Silva stated that new racism involves making racial practices and discourse more covert and implicit; avoiding explicit mention of race and racial language; the adoption of public policies that abandon or downplay race; efforts to maintain racial privilege; and efforts to rebrand racist practices of the past. It is helpful to conceptualize claims of post-racialism and the ideal of colorblindness within this framework. First, if racial attitudes become more covert, it is more difficult to see how racism clearly plays a role in society, especially when comparing this to the age of explicit, overt racism. When racism is more subtle, it is easier to deny that it is a reality. Second, when social norms evolve such that discussions of race become taboo, it is easy to then adopt the colorblind perspective and claim that one does not see race and that race does not matter. When racial terminology is erased from sociopolitical conversations, it is easy for Whites to begin believing that racism is no longer an issue (i.e. because it is not being discussed, it must not be an issue). Winant (2004) notes that this tactic perpetuates White supremacy because it obscures the reality of racial discrimination. Much like not discussing race, the adoption of public policy that avoids racial terminology again perpetuates post-racial and colorblind ideas because it removes race from the equation, making it easier for Whites to claim that race no longer matters. The first three practices of Bonilla-Silva’s “new racism” all work to continue the fourth practice: White privilege. If efforts are not made to remedy the system of racial oppression, White privilege continues to persist. Bonilla-Silva’s last practice of new racism is rebranding old racist practices to make them more palatable for the society created under new racism. By removing overt racist language from policies and political rhetoric, it is easier to claim that society has transcended race, while simultaneously continuing to systematically subjugate and oppress people of color. Bonilla-Silva (2015) further discusses other problematic facets of colorblindness and how they perpetuate the view of a post-racial society. For example, those who adopt the colorblind perspective engage in abstract liberalism, which aims to decontextualize and abstract racial problems by discussing them in vague language and failing to offer any concrete solutions. In addition to using vague, abstract language, those who adopt the colorblind perspective also use coded language and “semantic moves” to avoid being labeled racist (e.g., “I’m not a racist, but I believe Blacks misuse the welfare system” (p. 1365)). Lastly, those who espouse colorblind attitudes are likely to employ racial stories, or racial scripts that societies adopt to make sense of racial disparities

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(e.g., claiming that “The past is the past” equates racism solely to slavery and Jim Crow, which allows the person to state that racism is also a thing of the past). The use of abstract liberalism, semantic moves, and racial stories allow Whites who espouse colorblindness to tell a false story about race in America; one in which discrimination is due to individual deficits and not systemic factors. In doing so, these Whites are able to retain their morality and privilege without understanding or acknowledging racism because they are not acting in an overtly racist manner. The effects of such ideology became clear in the 1990’s when many conservative politicians sought to reverse affirmative action legislation because, in their opinion, it unfairly advantaged racial minorities and caused Whites to experience “reverse racism” (Winant, 2004). These claims are highly problematic, but make logical sense when one employs the colorblind, post-racial perspective: because race is not discussed in the law or commonplace discourse, it must not be a problem, therefore, society has reached post-racialism and is no longer in need of affirmative action legislation. Another example of the interplay of colorblindness and post-racial claims is when individuals from racial minority groups become successful. When this occurs, those who adopt the colorblind perspective use this as evidence for society’s transcendence of racism (e.g., “How can we live in a racist society when Barack Obama was president?”). This perspective betrays many cognitive distortions. First, it is a gross overgeneralization to claim that all Black and African Americans have been liberated from White supremacy because one Black man was elected president. Second, it ignores the individual and systemic barriers that the successful person had to overcome in order to be successful. Finally, this perspective ignores the majority of the oppressed group who have not reached that level of success and whose lives are still substantially held back by White supremacy. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama’s candidacy was described as evidence that the U.S. had entered into a post-racial era. As aforementioned, these claims are false and highly problematic, but several have argued that it is not a coincidence that Barack Obama became the poster child for post-racialism. His background, platform, and manner in which he discussed race uniquely positioned him, as many have claimed, as America’s solution for racism.

2

Barack Obama: America’s Post-Racial President

As the son of a White woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Barack Obama has a unique positionality. President Obama’s racial background as a biracial individual provides much insight into

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how Americans continue to view race despite being allegedly post-racial. Even though President Obama is half White, he is still called America’s first Black president, a demonstration of America’s binary racial thinking that was perpetuated by the “one drop rule” (Kuryla, 2011). In addition to his racial background, Obama’s platform was perhaps more colorblind than that of other Black politicians who have run for president. In his 2006 Democratic National Convention speech that introduced him to a national audience, he stated, “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America – There is the United States of America” (Obama, 2008, p. 136). Many critics claim that statements such as these are problematic because they minimize the oppression that people of color in America face on a daily basis. Perhaps in response to such critics, in his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama maintains that the U.S. is far from post-racial: Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters – that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted… To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities [between Whites and people of color] is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience – and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right. (p. 137) Here, America’s symbol and proof of post-racialism is denying the existence of a post-racial society. Still, Obama’s critics maintain that he has evaded racial discussions and race based policies unless explicitly called to speak on such issues. Further, some argue that it was precisely this nonracial stance that won Obama the presidency because he was able to reach White voters. In other words, Obama was “the president who happens to be Black” rather than “the Black president” (Winant, 2009).

3

Post-Racialism from a CRT Perspective

CRT scholars denounce the colorblind and post-racial perspective, arguing that these ideologies perpetuate White supremacy. For example, Gotanda (2000) stated that employing the colorblind perspective is not only problematic and dangerous, it is literally impossible. According to Gotanda (2000),

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when an individual claims that they are “noticing but not considering race,” they are involving themselves in a series of mental gymnastics that is ultimately impossible to accomplish (p. 35). This nonrecognition of race involves the presence of a racial characteristic that can be classified under a racial category; the characteristic must then be acknowledged by the individual, and then the individual must consciously choose to not consider the aforementioned characteristic when making a decision. This process is akin to asking someone to not think about elephants. Because the person has been primed to think about elephants, they will inevitably think about elephants (termed by psychologists as “ironic process theory”). Gotanda goes on to argue that even if the colorblind perspective were possible to adopt, doing so would still be problematic because it denies the existence of racial oppression and the pain associated with it. By ignoring racial realities, colorblind individuals allow the system of White supremacy to maintain the status quo. Cho (2009) noted that while both colorblindness and post-racial ideology maintain the status quo, post-racialism possesses the added narrative of “transcendent racial progress” (p. 1642). This narrative is especially troublesome because progress is fragile and continuously being challenged. Further, when those who are fighting for progress are not vigilant to this, it can easily foster a sense of complacency, especially in Whites who consider themselves allies in the struggle for racial justice. Cho argues that politically moderate to liberal Whites are especially susceptible to the racial progress component of post-racialism because it allows them to relieve themselves of the “racial exhaustion” they may feel from having to remain politically correct in conversations about race (p. 1599). Here, Cho argues that post-racialism allows Whites to retreat into the rosy colorblind perspective that White privilege affords them. For this reason, people of color and White allies must remain vigilant and critical of claims of post-racialism in society.

4

Conclusion

Post-racialism is an ideology characterized by claims of radical racial progress since the Civil Rights Movement and that this progress warrants a complete avoidance of race-conscious decision making. Claims of the existence of post-racialism in American society began in the 1990s, but intensified after the 2008 presidential election, with claims that the election of Obama as definitive proof of a post-racial society. The concept of colorblindness has much overlap with post-racial ideology, as they both claim that race does not matter in contemporary society. Both post-racial and colorblind ideology operate

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under what Bonilla-Silva (2015) argues is new racism, a system in which racial terminology is avoided in an attempt to maintain White supremacy without seeming overtly racist. Similarly, CRT theorists maintain that colorblind and post-racial ideology perpetuate the system of White supremacy by lulling White liberals into a false sense of accomplishment, allowing them to believe that the fight for racial justice has been won–despite the multitude of data and the racial realities of people of color that would suggest otherwise.

References Bonilla-Silva, E. (2015). The structure of racism in color-blind, “post-racial” America. American Behavioral Scientist, 59, 1358–1376. Bonilla-Silva, E., & Ray, V. (2009). When Whites love a Black leader: Race matters in Obamerica. Journal of African American Studies, 13, 176–183. Carson, E. A. (2018). Prisoners in 2016. U.S. Department of Justice. http://www.bjs.gov/ index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6187 Cho, S. (2009). Post-racialism. Iowa Law Review, 94, 1589–1649. Chow, J. C.-C., Jaffee, K., & Snowden, L. (2003). Racial/ethnic disparities in the use of mental health services in poverty areas. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 792– 797. Davis Jr., T. J. (2017). The politics of race and educational disparities in Delaware’s public schools. Education and Urban Society, 49, 135–162. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York University Press. Eack, S. M., & Newhill, C. E. (2012). Racial disparities in mental health outcomes after psychiatric hospital discharge among individuals with severe mental illness. Social Work Research, 36, 41–52. Fox, C. (2004). The changing color of welfare? How Whites’ attitudes towards Latinos influence support for welfare. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 580–625. Gotanda, N. (2000). A critique of “our constitution is color-blind.” In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.). Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed., pp. 35–38). Temple University Press. Kuryla, P. (2011). Barack Obama and the American Island of the color blind. Patterns of Prejudice, 45, 119–132. Malat, J., Clark-Hitt, R., Burgess, D. J., Friedemann-Sanchez, G., & Van Ryn, M. (2010). White doctors and nurses on racial inequality in health care in the U.S.: Whiteness and color-blind racial ideology. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33, 1431–1450. Neville, H. A., Awad, G. H., Brooks, J. E., Flores, M. P., & Blumel, J. (2013). Color-blind racial ideology: Theory, training, and measurement implication in psychology. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 4, 236–249.

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Neville, H. A., Lilly, R. L., Duran, G., Lee, R. M., & Browne, L. (2000). Construction and initial validation of the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS). Journal of Counseling Psychology, 47, 59–70. Nitardy, C. M., Duke, N. N., Pettingell, S. L., & Borowsky, I. W. (2015). Racial and ethnic disparities in educational achievement and aspirations: Findings from a statewide survey from 1998 to 2010. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 19, 58–66. Obama, B. (2008). The audacity of hope: Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream. Crown Publishers. Okamura, J. Y. (2011). Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: Perspectives from Asian America and Hawai’i. Patterns of Prejudice, 45, 133–153. Quadagno, J. (1994). The color of welfare: How racism undermined the war on poverty. Oxford University Press. Rhodes, A., & Warkentien, S. (2017). Unwrapping the suburban “package deal’: Race, class, and school access. American Educational Research Journal, 54, 168S–169S. Smedley, B. D., Stith, A. Y., & Nelson, A. R. (Eds.). (2003). Unequal treatment: Confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. The National Academies Press. Vaught, S., Hernandez, G., Acholonu, I., Frommherz, A., & Phelps, B. (2013). Post-racial critical race praxis. In M. Lynn & A. D. Dixon (Eds.), Handbook of critical race theory in education (pp. 368–385). Routledge. Vogel, M., & Porter, L. C. (2016). Toward a demographic understanding of incarceration disparities: Race, ethnicity, and age structure. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 32, 515–530. Winant, H. (2004). The new politics of race: Globalism, difference, justice. University of Minnesota Press. Winant, H. (2009). Just do it: Notes on politics and race at the dawn of the Obama presidency. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 6, 49–70.

CHAPTER 65

Poverty and Whiteness Colleen H. Clements and Ann M. Mason

Related Entries: Capitalism; Roediger, David; Second Wave Whiteness Studies; Social Class; Whiteness and Labor

… 1

Introduction

The critical study of whiteness as a socially constructed identity lays bare the connection between poverty and the deliberate historical construction of whiteness as a racialized identity. The study of the historical construction of white identity allows for the deconstruction of racialized identity through critical whiteness studies by framing racism as a systemic or structural invention and as a problem in which social actors participate and are implicated in various and complicated ways. This framing is necessary to examine and critique the norms upheld by white racialized identity and for white people to begin to see their roles in constructing and maintaining this system. Once whiteness as a racialized identity can be seen in relation to structural racism, it affords opportunities to look for ways that individuals, as participants in that system, partake of it, and to look for ways to resist complicity and build alliances. This entry reviews each of these histories in order to situate the relationship between whiteness and poverty in its social, political, and historical contexts and its implications for the field of education.

2

Whiteness as Racialized Identity: Race and Education

The United States school system remains a key site for reproduction of this country’s deeply rooted structural racism. Innumerable accounts document this reproduction, through critiques of language related to the “achievement gap,” the normalization of dominant white, middle-class experience and identity within standardized tests, or how race impacts relationships between students or between students and teachers (e.g., Lensmire et al., 2013; © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_065

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Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2009; Moore, 2005). For this reason, education scholars have taken up critical whiteness studies as an antiracist project to help deconstruct racialized dynamics, to validate the experiences of those marginalized by racism, and to build resistance to dominant norms and practices around race in education. In keeping with the tenets of critical whiteness studies, it is important to recognize that white identity can be understood as a socially-constructed, racialized identity that is learned, and that there is no monolithic version of whiteness. In addition, understanding whiteness as a historically- and socially-constructed racialized identity is an important aspect of understanding one’s self or others who identify with socially-constructed racialized identities other than white. In addition, the exploration of white racialized identity allows us to engage in critical examination of whiteness and helps us develop ways to enact antiracist teaching and activism. A deeper understanding of white racialized identity is especially important for educators in the U.S., given our violent history of structural racism that both conservative and neoliberal narratives would have us believe is a relic of an earlier time. There is ample evidence to the contrary, including the persistent and problematic discourse around the “achievement gap,” continued high rates of poverty in communities of color, and often full-blown racism in our politics and popular culture. All of these issues have relevance in our educational systems, and therefore must be addressed by those who care about the furthering of democratic education for all children.

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Poverty and the Historical Construction of White Racialized Identity: Critical Whiteness Studies

An examination of the social construction of whiteness from a historical perspective illuminates the ways that class and race have been and continue to be entangled in the U.S., and these entanglements contribute to the ongoing injustices outlined throughout this entry. The deliberate division of labor along racialized lines during the founding of the U.S. demonstrates the significant role that whiteness played in the shaping of the U.S. economy. In its early colonial years, much of the labor responsible for building the infrastructure of the U.S. was performed by indentured servants and those considered “non-white,” primarily Black slaves. The definition of the citizen, one with full rights during this period, was the land-owning, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon white male, while all other categories of people were afforded less than full citizenship status. That the privilege and power associated with full citizenship was conferred

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solely on the elite class of white males established the white, heteronormative, patriarchal order that was, and continues to be, the basis of the U.S. system. This social order of the white, male, land- and slave-owning elite was disrupted by the growing population of immigrants to the U.S., starting in the colonial period and continuing throughout the 19th century. These new arrivals, mainly indentured servants, won their passage to the U.S. with the expectation that, upon arrival, their labor would be enlisted in this new land. Newly arriving immigrants to the U.S. intermingled freely with the established labor class in the U.S., by this time comprised primarily of non-white laborers. This presented a problem for the land-owning elites, in that as the ranks of these laborers grew, and their tendency to co-mingle freely extended over time, the class of established elite white males sensed a threat to their power. Thus, the elite class created a system to “divide and conquer,” in order to prevent this growing population of working class laborers from using the strength of its numbers to upend the status quo. The solution the elite white men in power produced was to convince white laborers to see themselves as inherently different from their non-white counterparts in the same (or very similar) circumstances. Thus, a not-so-subtle bid was made to the laborers who could be identified as white, with the promise that through their labor, they may one day be part of the dominant class of white patriarchal power. This move constitutes the central element of the construction of white and non-white racialized identity in the U.S., as the essential assumption of this line of thought was that non-white members of the labor class could not similarly aspire to white patriarchal privilege and power. Indeed, this aspiration to power presumed that non-white members of the working class were not to be trusted nor mingled with, putting an end to the foundation of worker solidarity and further contributing to the false notion of racial difference based on one’s skin tone. In this way, racialized identity (whiteness in particular) and markers of social class were and continue to be forged inextricably in the U.S. In order to gain entry into the elite class of patriarchal whiteness, white male members of the working class were convinced that their continued labor and aspiration would lead to membership in the white, male elite social class. Thus, white racialized identity based on social class and a desire to rise out of poverty not only establishes a hierarchy which one might strive to climb, it leads to a process of striving to become “whiter,” a desire central to the notion of upwardly mobility, in order to separate oneself from those in “lower” classes. As such, social class and the threat of poverty become tools for the creation and maintenance of racial divides based on the false premise of race as defined by the color of one’s skin.

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This historical framing shows the origins and motivations for the ways in which white racialized identity, desire for a certain social class-status, and fear of poverty were mobilized for the purposes of wealth consolidation in the U.S. One need not look far to note that the same forces are at work in contemporary U.S. culture in numerous contexts, including, but not limited to housing policy, the criminal justice system, electoral politics, and education. In the academic field of critical whiteness studies, scholars have come to think of whiteness as not only a racialized identity, but also as a force for normalization in U.S. culture more broadly. This normalizing force, unless highlighted and examined, runs the risk of remaining invisible to a significant portion of the very people who could make change: middle-class white people. As it stands, middle class and working class white people play crucial roles in maintaining the systems of racialized and classed power and dominance described in the previous sections. White people embody and enforce white cultural norms. Even when we (white people) allow ourselves to believe otherwise, our institutions are designed to reward the reinforcement of these norms; it is often painfully obvious to people of color that whiteness operates in this way. A common concern in the U.S. with regard to white identity and the maintenance of white hegemony is the question of working-class and working-poor white people voting against their own interest and electing conservative politicians who do not tend to recognize or serve their needs. While it is important to try to understand this phenomenon, it is also important to recognize that any explanation of this phenomenon runs the risk of creating an essentializing narrative that does not reflect the lived experiences of real working-class and working-poor people. One problematic example of this is Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance (2016), which is a single narrative by a white, cis-gender male whose story is held up as evidence of the potential success of individuals rather than as a critique of oppressive systems. This narrative flattens the experiences of working-class people, in that it assumes an essentialized version of white, working-classness. Additionally, it is important to note that white, middle-class suburban voters hold equal, if not more, responsibility for the election of conservative politicians who tend to work against anti-poverty measures. In the interest of making sense of the aforementioned phenomenon, however, there are a number of important points to note. One way of understanding the issue of working-class and working-poor individuals voting against their own economic interest can be found in the material existence of those who have seen their livelihoods replaced by technological advances, and employment opportunities being concentrated in urban centers and away from rural areas. This can result in more reliance on government assistance, while also contributing

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to a feeling of distrust in a government that would allow this to happen, creating a sense of resentment in those whose lives have become dependent on a government that does not seem to recognize their plight. While the above considerations are significant, it is also important to recognize the role that race and racism can play in this realm. In “The Antidemocratic Power of Whiteness,” Cleaver makes reference to the work of David Roediger in illustrating a nuanced and critical notion of whiteness as a force that complicates and communicates internal meaning, while simultaneously fulfilling anti-black functions (Cleaver, 1995). She goes on to note that in his “welcome addition” to critical whiteness studies, rather than focusing on the privilege conferred by white skin, Roediger highlights the agency of working class men in the U.S. in the 19th century and how they constructed the meaning of whiteness. Roediger states about the 19th century working man, “He began to want, not comfort for all men but power over other men” (p. 157). This is a complicated perspective on critical whiteness studies that unearths the subtle but powerful way that whiteness operates on white people, as well as acknowledging the power relations and imbalance inherent in the construction of white racialized identity, which seems to offer white people more in terms of critique and joint struggle against hegemonic forces, while simultaneously recognizing the privileging power of whiteness. Barnett and Roediger (2002) elucidate further the theory of the construction of white identity as tied to working class immigrants and their struggle for material success in the U.S. They argue that language was one way that workers could be perceived as white – those immigrants who spoke English were considered white, while other (mainly eastern European) immigrants were considered “foreigners.” They also highlight language used in the social sciences of the time, which referred to members of the immigrant working class as “our temporary Negroes” and “not-yet-white ethnics.” This perspective illustrates clearly the construction of whiteness as a social force that operates in U.S. culture to reinforce norms of whiteness and thereby maintain hegemony. Such a clear illustration affords space for fruitful dialogue among white people about whiteness.

4

Antiracist Work: What Shall We Do?

Delgado and Stefancic (1997) ask “What Then Shall We Do? A Role for Whites,” proposing a number of ideas centered on notions of the abolishment of white racialized identity and becoming “race traitors.” At first, these ideas may sound

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frightening and violent, but there are numerous reasons why it is necessary for white people to work for the abolishment of the socially constructed identity of whiteness (and not actual white people); however, any action in this direction is dependent on a nuanced understanding of what is meant by whiteness and white racialized identity, and how white people might work for its demise. The demise of whiteness, when held into relief with its roots in economic oppression, would also contribute to a future free from wealth consolidation and the capitalist order more generally. In the same vein, Leonardo (2009) discusses two options for white people who wish to engage in social transformation: reconstructivism or abolitionism. In the former, Leonardo critiques the notion that whiteness can be reconceived as a hopeful identity for individual white people, even if they are interested in change; whereas he finds Roediger’s assertion that “whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive” (p. 92; emphasis in original) as well as arguing for the abolition of whiteness as an ultimately more productive project for all people. Leonardo notes that there is debate among critical whiteness scholars as to which approach is more likely to gain support from white people, as some scholars argue that the approach of abolition may have the effect of creating resistance to change in white people, which is the opposite of the desired effect. In the end, Leonardo notes that reconstructing white racialized identity may be a way into a critical engagement with whiteness, while abolition may be the way out. It is important here for white people to have a clear, critical grasp of whiteness as a socially constructed racialized identity in order to dispel any notion that these authors are working for the demise of white bodies. As Leonardo notes, there is a difference between “white people” and “white bodies,” and race traitors are white bodies that no longer act like white people. This differentiation underscores the necessity of a nuanced conceptualization of white racialized identity, including an examination of social class and poverty, although even such an understanding will not solve all the problems inherent in the desire for people with white bodies to attempt to reject white racialized identity. Critical whiteness studies can help us to engage in conversations about white identity that move beyond notions of “white privilege” that often reify notions of privilege and reinforce the position of whiteness as one of privilege in the conversation; and to move towards one in which white people can see their own racial identities in complicated ways that allow for a critique of the construction of white identity as a broader force in today’s neoliberal capitalist system. In so doing, white people will then be able to take up the racial project

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of beginning to examine the ways in which we participate in a racist system that perpetuates racial injustice and promotes whiteness as a privileged status, rather than simply acknowledging and confessing to that privilege. When we understand whiteness as part of a racialized system that is also designed to maintain unjust divisions among social classes, it becomes important to recognize the danger for white people to talk about socially constructed white identity in uncritical ways that do nothing to decenter whiteness as a privileged identity; and can even tip over into discussions about white identity politics and white victimization, which do nothing to disrupt power imbalances between races, and therefore also fail to address systemic and structural racism.

5

Conclusion

It is important to understand and make visible the entangled relationship between the social construction of whiteness as a racialized identity and poverty in the U.S., particularly when notions of social class and poverty are invoked as a way to deflect serious and necessary considerations or race and antiracist work. It is often noted that white people from working-class and working-poor backgrounds tend to protest, in the face of conversations about racial injustice and privilege, that their “Father worked hard” or that they “never got anything handed to them.” Responses such as these are premised on a kind of zero-sum thinking, in which it is important to claim one’s own share of oppression. Such responses are also often mobilized as an attempt to reject one’s own internalized racism or notions of privilege, both by individuals in certain moments as well as in larger cultural narratives that seek to keep working-class and working-poor white and non-white people from coming together to fight against systems of oppression. A clear examination of the link between racialized identity and poverty, however, offers an important opportunity for solidarity between white and non-white working-class and working-poor communities. Rather than allowing the introduction of social class and relative poverty to become a separate focal point in the conversation, a deeper analysis of the ways that these notions are linked to race in U.S. culture and society has the potential to reveal common interests that could be the basis for strong alliances. It is for this reason that careful consideration of the links between whiteness and poverty are made visible, understood, and constitutes an important element of antiracist work.

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References Barrett, J. R., & Roediger, D. (2002). How White people became White. White Privilege, 29–34. Cleaver, K. N. (1995). The antidemocratic power of whiteness. Chicago Kent Law Review, 70, 1375–1390. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (2009). Critical race theory in education. In M. W. E. Apple, L. A. E. Gandin, & W. E. Au (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of critical education (pp. 110–122). Routledge. Lensmire, T. J., McManimon, S., Dockter Tierney, J., Lee-Nichols, M. E., Casey, Z. A., & Davis, B. M. (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education’s focus on White privilege undermines anti-racism. Harvard Education Review, 83, 410–431. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. Routledge. Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157. Moore, H. A. (2005). Testing whiteness: No child or no school left behind. Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 18, 173. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States. Routledge. Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Harper Collins.

CHAPTER 66

Privilege Shannon K. McManimon

Related Entries: Colorblindness; Discourse and Whiteness; Intersectionality; McIntosh, Peggy; White Supremacy

… Privilege confers unearned and unjustified material, social, and psychological benefits and access to resources, social rewards, power, and status; it is systematically conferred to individuals because of their actual or perceived membership in a social group (in the case of white privilege, the racialized category white). Privilege facilitates movement through the world both through an absence of barriers and through positive advantages such as acceptance and inclusion; privilege is both institutional (e.g., access to desirable housing or schools and protection from incarceration) and interpersonal (e.g., being respected). Because these benefits, access, and advantages are pervasive, they are often considered normal by those within a privileged social group. Yet while frequently invisible or unacknowledged by those with privilege, they are highly recognizable from other social locations. This process is also circular as privilege confers power, giving those with privilege the ability to define (and redefine) norms, values, and standards – in other words, both to define reality and to presume superiority. This occurs through systematic domination by, identification with, and centering of the privileged group. Like other forms of privilege, white privilege is temporally, spatially, and socially situated, leading Sullivan (2006) to assert that “White privilege is best understood as a constellation of psychical and somatic habits formed through transaction with a racist world” (p. 63). This entry first examines the most broadly cited and well-known theorization of white privilege, originally published by Peggy McIntosh in 1988. This examination is crucial both because of this citation’s ubiquity (Google Scholar returns 4000 citations for the 1988 article; a Google Scholar search on “McIntosh white privilege” returns over 17,000 results) and because this conception has become the dominant frame for engaging white people in antiracist work. This entry then examines the usefulness of this theorization, specifically its explanatory power, its historical and intellectual contributions, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_066

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and its standing the test of time. Yet, conceptual challenges attend it through oversimplification, conceptual ambiguity, confusing cause and effect, focusing on individuals rather than systems, and a lack of attention to intersectionality (privilege as always relative). Further, privilege concepts often fall short pedagogically, particularly when individual confession of privilege stands-in for action or whiteness is recentered. A necessary addition to an individualized focus on privilege is an examination of systems, particularly white supremacy.

1

McIntosh’s Conception of White Privilege

In 1988, McIntosh released a groundbreaking paper entitled “White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies.” Her autobiographical account began with noticing how her male university colleagues failed to acknowledge that men were over-privileged in curriculum, even if they acknowledged that women were disadvantaged. Recognizing that hierarchies are “interlocking” (p. 17) led her to a corresponding acknowledgement: while she had been taught that racism put people of color at a disadvantage, she had not been taught how white privilege put her, as a white person, at an advantage. She conceptualized this advantage As an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks. (McIntosh, 1988, pp. 1–2) This quotation is the origin for frequent excerpts of the original piece, usually titled “White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.” While the term white privilege had been used before her piece, in the last 30 years, McIntosh’s work has been referenced nearly ubiquitously in both academic and popular understandings of white privilege. Despite the multiple forms of privilege that McIntosh’s 1988 piece addressed (e.g., heterosexual privilege), it is most often known for what she herself called a “partial record of my personal observations, and not a scholarly analysis” (p. 1): a list of 46 observations regarding how being white had shaped her life. She noted that she had unconsciously attributed her life experiences to her own moral strength within a culture and society that worked as they should; these privileges were “special circumstances and conditions I experience

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which I did not earn but which I have been made to feel are mine by birth, by citizenship, and by virtue of being a conscientious law-abiding ‘normal’ person of good will,” recognizing that, for the most part, African-Americans whom she knew did not have these privileges (p. 6). According to McIntosh, privileges can be either positive (unearned advantage) or negative (conferred dominance that reinforces damaging hierarchies). As her original list is just that (a list), grouping her concrete examples can provide a better understanding of the contours of white privilege in McIntosh’s initial understanding. Her long list is powerful because it describes much of what many (U.S.) white people experience in the world daily. White privilege means that white people can expect positive experiences; will see representations that mirror themselves; can expect to personally participate in groups or cultural products; and are led to believe that meritocracy works and provides access. Examples follow. A concrete benefit of white privilege is generally not having to worry about whether other (white) people will respond positively to a white person or attribute their experiences to their racialized identity. This is especially true in relationship to people in power, such as employers, government officials, and business owners, but also for those seemingly on equal footing such as neighbors or colleagues. Specific examples from McIntosh’s life included “I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives”; “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race”; and “If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my race is not the problem.” White privilege means that white people don’t have to consider their race as a marker that shapes reactions to them; that is to say, by not being scapegoated and stereotyped for hundreds of years, they enjoy a sense of self-worth and confidence that is tied to their individual behavior and accomplishments. The world is full of positive, not hostile, situations. Another one-third of the privileges McIntosh listed revolve around being represented – as a white person, the world is mirrored back consistently and thus offers space to be heard, to exist freely, and to be legitimated. School curricula, the media, and popular culture represented McIntosh’s race (and thus, by extension, her personhood). Her sense of being okay in the world, an assumption that she could spend time with people like her, and the mostly effortlessness of activities of her daily life were taken for granted as normal because the world was mirrored safely back to her. Specifically she wrote, “When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is”; “I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection”; and “I am never

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asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.” Unconsciously, as a result, white people perceive themselves and their culture as normal, standard, and good. Relatedly, McIntosh named participation in groups or texts that included her, providing a right (or ability) to make contributions and to feel connected and comfortable. White privilege confers a sense of belonging and an ability to contribute to society (which is implicitly defined as white). For example, she wrote, “If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege”; “I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared”; and “I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.” In addition, white people can ignore the voices and contributions of people of color without peril; they have some degree of safety in critiquing dominant society. Such connections also contribute to a belief in meritocracy. White people, McIntosh said, expect to get what they need. Negative interactions and life experiences are not attributed to race. For example, “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race” or “I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.” This protects white people from feelings of anger, hostility, fear, or distress. Access to needs (actual and potential) is taken for granted under the assumption that one deserves these rights or needs to be met. McIntosh repeatedly emphasized that her 1988 writing was a work in progress, at one point even stating that The word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. Its connotations are too positive to fit the conditions and behaviors which “privilege systems” produce… The kind of privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be referred to as a desirable attribute. (p. 12) She noted that “we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege” (p. 10) to explain what, in some cases, should be desired for all people in a just society and, in other cases, are examples of ignorance and violence. In 1988, McIntosh asked, “What will we do with such knowledge?” (p. 19). Her answer has been to not stay silent about privilege, asserting that both popular and academic cultures have often recognized discrimination and injustice but failed to examine privilege systems (McIntosh, 2009a). In the last decades,

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McIntosh’s goal in writing and speaking about privilege has thus been to help those with the most power to recognize the advantages privilege confers and to debunk the myth of meritocracy. For McIntosh (2009b), “seeing privilege is the missing link between understanding discrimination of any kind and understanding how to end it” (p. 2). Specifically, white people could use their white privilege: “I have come to see privilege as a bank account that I did not ask for but that I may choose to spend” (McIntosh, 2009b, p. 5). Using white privilege could, she wrote, lessen racism, as “Privilege gives me power that I can use for social change” (McIntosh, 2009b, p. 2). In other words, white people could use the unearned advantages and power of white privilege constructively, to share power and to repair the harms of racism.

2

The Usefulness of the Theorization of White Privilege

Most basically, the concept of white privilege is useful because of its truth. It names realities that both white people and people of color experience; McIntosh’s original 46 examples have multiplied exponentially into an almost endless list of the ways in which (perceived) whiteness impacts daily life as well as life chances and outcomes. Privileges attending whiteness cross all sectors of human experience and access: institutional, social, cultural, legal, economic, political, relational. Practically, then, white privilege is an accessible lens through which to understand racialized experiences of the world, including both interpersonal and institutional phenomena. The concept, in other words, has explanatory power. White privilege also adds to and challenges the historical and intellectual ways in which white people have often understood race. First, it insists that all people are raced, which is particularly important as white people have often considered themselves “raceless.” Second, it centers power, naming what racialized group has it and how it circulates in ways both acknowledged and unacknowledged. It calls attention to the reality that what white people have labeled neutral, standard, normal, or even morally good comes from a positionality of economic, historic, political, and social power; this also challenges the myth of meritocracy, foundational to many (white) people’s understanding of themselves and of the United States. Additionally, the concept of privilege challenges deficit framings of people of color by holding up a mirror to white people, turning their gaze from the perceived disadvantages or deficits of people of color and indigenous peoples to the unearned access and benefits they experience as white people. These framings ask white people to take responsibility and to examine themselves as racialized. Doing so is necessary to any antiracist endeavor, as failing to understand how whiteness has been

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constructed to privilege those racialized as white has impeded antiracist work both historically and today. The concept of white privilege also stands the test of time, even as what resonated with people in 1988 is different from what resonates today. While of course we are far from equal or equitable, some of the (perhaps more superficial) white privileges McIntosh named have been at least partly mitigated as they have been acknowledged as unequal: bandages come in multiple skintone shades, grocery stores stock a wider variety of foods and hair care products, and school curricula are marginally more inclusive or have removed some of the most egregiously violent language or examples (e.g., “Columbus discovered America”). (It is worth noting, though, that these examples are related to capitalism: these changes make money for those who produce and sell these products.) Today, white privilege has entered the pop culture lexicon, particularly through social media; newscasters talk about privilege (even when they sometimes get it wrong) and activists, musicians, and actors call attention to it in song (e.g., “White Privilege” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, featuring Jamila Woods), in protest (e.g., #OscarsSoWhite), and in podcasts, blogs, and other media. That the ways in which white privilege is discussed have changed also demonstrates one of the concept’s underpinnings: white privilege is socially constructed, both in terms of the privileges themselves and of how social groups are constructed. Privileged groups define and construct the categories themselves, meaning that while they may seem fixed at a particular time and place, they are actually porous and changing. “White” as a racial identity is not and has not been stable across time and places; neither are the privileges that attend it. As society changes, so do the privileges associated with membership in this social group.

3

Conceptual and Pedagogical Shortcomings of White Privilege

While explanatory, accessible, and a complement to intellectual and social justice movements, white privilege, like any concept, falls short. Often, this is due to the ways it has been coopted or subverted – particularly ways in which its complexity has been simplified conceptually and pedagogically. McIntosh herself, whose name is in some ways synonymous with white privilege (see Lensmire et al., 2013), seems aware that her work has been used irresponsibly or incompletely. In 2008, she released notes on facilitating her work that addresses many of the below shortcomings. These included a need to explain the word “systemic” and an emphasis that privilege exists in multiple dimensions of identity. While white privilege is about “thinking systemically and

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personally” (p. 1), she also reminded readers that her papers were about her experience and needed to be kept in their autobiographical contexts. The list of unearned privileges, she stated, was not a checklist, questionnaire, or confessional. Further, educators should be wary of exercises that asked people to step forward or backward on one issue of identity. However, these cautions as well as critiques coming from careful scholarly and community-engaged work are consistently ignored in practice. White privilege is often addressed only on a surface (and personal) level that dichotomizes people into two easy racialized groups, one with privilege and one without. Conceptual troubles also attend white privilege, including confusion about what a privilege is, insufficient attention to the relationship between the individual and the system, conflating cause and effect (and thus ignoring the why), and inattention to intersectionality and the ways in which privilege is always relative and relational. These challenges are amplified through common white privilege pedagogies, particularly the ways in which the concept is simplified and deified, focusing on confession as a stand-in for action and recentering whiteness.

4

Conceptual Challenges

A first conceptual challenge stems from confusion about the word “privilege” itself. No distinction is made between rights, particularly human rights, and privileges, and inadequate attention is paid to moral wrongs. Asking white people to renounce or lessen their own human rights is at odds with social justice aims of extending human rights for all people. Further, while all privilege is advantageous, not all advantages are privileges; to be privileges, they must be part of systems of domination and play a role in maintaining those systems. These confusions provide easy outs for white people who don’t want to consider this concept; they can, for instance, point to affirmative action as a “privilege” for people of color, or rightly point out that as a white person, they cannot or should not be asked to give up being treated with respect or having access to health care. Because of this conceptual slippage, white privilege discourses often assume that privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin: lessening privileges would also lessen oppression. But a white person’s no longer having access to health care does not mean that a person of color then has access. Thus, the common call to lessen one’s individual white privilege makes no sense. More significantly, white privilege, taken up as discourse and pedagogy, frequently confuses or conflates cause and effect. McIntosh (2009b) contended

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that white privilege is “the central actor in racism – the central force that creates racism and keeps it in place” (p. 2). This does not make sense. Certainly, a white person’s white privileges of, for instance, being able to be oblivious to the histories and experiences of peoples of color or assuming the normalcy of white norms or customs perpetuates racialized oppressions. But these white privileges did not create racialized oppressions. White privilege is not the cause of racial oppression, but an effect of white supremacy: a social, economic, political, legal, cultural, and historical construction of domination on the basis of what we now call race, enacted over hundreds of years of laws, regulations, policies, practices, and beliefs. White privilege thus obscures the why: the purposes, agents, and mechanisms through which this domination is enacted. White privilege would not exist outside of the social and historical racial structure of white supremacy; it is this system that led to what we now know as a category called “white” that is marked by privilege. White people have racial privilege because of white supremacy, a system of domination; white supremacy, enacted through structures, makes “white privilege possible” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 137). By itself, white privilege does not explain how, where, why, or by whom whiteness is inscribed into and on white bodies. As Bailey (1998) wrote, without understanding how privilege maintains systems of domination, privilege as a concept can be meaningless. The concept of privilege centers the individual, focusing on the who rather than the how of whiteness. In other words, white privilege work involves personal examination of an individualistic concept: white privilege within/ for an individual white person, rather than how whiteness and its attendant privileges are produced and in what contexts. Indeed, the word privilege itself comes from the Latin privus (one’s own) and lex (law), meaning to exempt oneself from laws applied to others (Gordon, 2004). Yet paradoxically, while white privilege is accorded to a white individual, it is not about the individual, but about the system of white supremacy. Despite frequent calls to rid oneself, as a white person, of white privilege, this is not really possible – or if it is, it has little or no effect on the systems that maintain racialized oppression and domination. Further, a focus on the personal may actually buttress the individualism that is often at the heart of white supremacy, further reinforcing this system of white supremacy. The conflation of cause and effect and failure to differentiate between the personal and the structural aspects of whiteness has several consequences. It can exempt white people from difficult conversations about structures, as the ways in which white privilege discourse is mobilized rarely make connections between an individual and these larger structures and processes. Solely focusing on white privilege or unearned advantages, what Leonardo (2004) also

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called white racial hegemony, downplays white racial domination – “the active role of whites who take resources from people of color all over the world, appropriate their labor, and construct policies that deny minorities’ full participation in society” (p. 138). As a result, white privilege discourse is often “a discursive space they [whites] can negotiate as safe participants in race critique” while not moving beyond this entry point to a larger discussion of structural racism and white supremacy (Leonardo, 2004, pp. 149–150). Focusing on the individual can stall racial analyses at personal levels, masking the reality that systemic oppression (white supremacy) cannot be overcome by addressing individual privileges. In other words, a white person can list white privileges ad nauseum, undertaking a robust personal examination, but not enact changes to the system. Thus, perhaps more importantly, white privilege cannot explain how to dismantle this oppressive racialized system. Additionally, privilege is always relative. Often as an attempt to not allow white people a way out of potentially difficult or uncomfortable discussions, privilege is made out to be a monolith: all white people have white privilege. Yet white privilege is inscribed differently on different bodies (and differently across space and time). Whiteness has never been entirely distinct from other social identities. The very roots of this racialized construct are in class struggle; whiteness has been gendered and sexualized throughout time in very specific ways. Whiteness is but one part of each white person’s identity and interacts with gender, social class, language, sexuality, geography, experience, education, religion, and a host of other factors and identities. An assumed uniformity of whiteness clearly demarcates white and person of color (also, however, failing to recognize ethnic differences within racialized groups), but doesn’t adequately explore racial disparities in different domains (particularly intersections with social class) or in historical or geographical contexts. Further, because all people are members of multiple social groups, we often experience privilege and oppression simultaneously. Arguing over various points of white privilege can mean arguing over one’s own social location – “I, personally, don’t have this particular white privilege because of this other reason.” Ironically, then, white privilege, as an isolated concept, both denies each person’s multiple identities (including the concept of intersectionality) and enables those with privilege to distance themselves with “yes, but” moves; yes, but, I am a woman or live in poverty or am queer.

5

Pedagogical Challenges

White privilege is a concept meant to explain; it is pedagogical. In addition to the above conceptual shortcomings, popular ways in which white privilege is

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taken up pedagogically are troubling, particularly when they actually diminish rather than enhance antiracist work. As mentioned above, white privilege pedagogies and discourses are often simplified or calcified: discussion of privilege becomes an activity, such as dropping written privileges into a backpack, doing a privilege walk, or completing a checklist. These activities ask white people to “see their privilege.” In their enactment, due to inadequate explanation or connection to structural oppression or to multiple systems of oppression and identity, these activities may be alienating or cause learners to disengage. Further, ironically, what is in many ways an attempt to not position people of color as deficit (by focusing not on their disadvantage but on the advantage of white people), may end up positioning white people as deficit: any white person who cannot read themselves into the white privilege checklist, adequately name their own privileges, or questions how or whether this idea fits their own experiences is labeled a racist: a deficient, bad, or unworthy white person. (The same happens for people with more sophisticated critiques or analyses of white supremacy: often, the questions they raise are not allowed when white privilege discourses are centralized.) A more important consideration, though, is what comes next. As Ahmed (2004) wrote, What I want to question is whether learning to see the mark of privilege involves unlearning that privilege. What are we learning to see when we learn to see privilege? (Of course, this question reminds us that the project of “learning to see” is addressed to privileged subjects). (para. 36) In other words, what happens once a white person “sees” white privilege? In essence, what comes next is often tantamount to confession: white people are asked to confess (admit to) their white privilege. Frequently, this confession is accompanied by emotional release and relief: having confessed, a white person feels better. They are among the “good ones.” Sometimes, they may be absolved, either by other white people or by people of color (whose role in these confessions seems to be only to listen). As McIntosh (2009b) wrote, “it feels good to stop being resented or even hated” (p. 7). But these discourses don’t address the question of why white people might be resented or hated – even more problematically, they assume that people of color must hate or resent. These practices teach that naming, disclosing, and “disposing” of privilege is the necessary action to overcome white supremacy (assuming also that before doing so or before reading about white privilege, a white person was ignorant). Yet as the model for antiracist action, what confession teaches may be

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more disabling than enabling. Confession, in itself, cannot end or even change privilege. Instead, confession fulfills a “redemptive function” that “releases the bearer of white privilege from the responsibility of action” (Levine-Rasky, 2000, p. 276). While the redemptive act of confessing to whiteness is supposed to release the white person from complicity in white supremacy, it provides no mechanisms for action in the world or ways of understanding the structural nature of white supremacy. Thus, this individualized action leads to a circular bind: “The possibility of overcoming the tautology through a heroic act of confession reveals a supreme faith in the individual to discern and act upon the world, to be her or his own vehicle for effecting change” (Levine-Rasky, 2000, p. 277); “[r]enouncing privilege ultimately substitutes an individual solution for a structural and social problem” (Kimmel, 2010, p. 9). Confession does not demand accountability, nor does it acknowledge the structural (that many of the privileges to which a white person is confessing are outside of their control), nor does it actually result in action that could lead to change. Naming or admission is the action, the accomplishment, what Ahmed (2004) called a “politics of declaration,” which is not actually antiracist action. This is not to say that acknowledging complicity or understanding the concept of white privilege is not important; it can be. But it is not enough. In other words, white privilege discourse/pedagogy, in and of itself, is overly narrow, limiting the ways white people can work toward racial justice, particularly as many white people have little personal control over the material conditions of others’ lives. In suggesting that the primary task is naming (having knowledge) and then divesting one’s self of privilege, it provides little room for agency or direction for dismantling oppressive systems. Lastly, ironically, white privilege discourses and pedagogy often do exactly what they ostensibly mean to work against: recenter white people. This happens in multiple ways: through reading and analysis centering and by white people (alone) and ignoring the work of scholars of color, through calls for safety (which often mask a refusal to face racial domination or terror), through making white people the implicit reference group, or through the myth that good intentions are enough. Again, ironically, choosing to deal with white privilege is, in and of itself, a white privilege. And, as Lorde (1984) declared, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (p. 110).

6

Beyond Privilege

In closing, privilege discourse neither addresses the structural nor the intersectionality of identities. As such, privilege discourse can actually be

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dehumanizing. It is dehumanizing when used to scold or to shame people into accepting its discourse as truth. It is dehumanizing when it places blame and cause unto persons (individuals) instead of directing attention toward the structures that shape each person along racialized lines, into belief systems, into discourses. It is dehumanizing when it makes all white people, regardless of class, gender, sexuality, background, into one thing, white and privileged, because in addition to potentially shaming, it is not true. It is dehumanizing because in failing to more fully examine intersectionality, it denies people their own experiences and positions in relation to structures of power. It is dehumanizing when it asks white people to “act” only in the form of confession. Rather than insisting that white privilege is the most important concept in understanding racism, we need to examine how our own personal stories and positionalities intersect – and diverge – from the structural and how structures and institutions were deliberately created and fostered. From there, we can move to individual and collective action to end white supremacy, using frameworks that illuminate both the structural and the personal. Rather than a personal, psychological position, which is where white privilege discourse is situated, we need to talk about historical and social situations, about white supremacy.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Borderlands, 3(2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_ declarations.htm Bailey, A. (1998). Privilege: Expanding on Marilyn Frye’s “oppression.” Journal of Social Philosophy, 29(3), 104–119. Gordon, L. R. (2004). Critical reflections on three popular tropes in the study of whiteness. In G. Yancy (Ed.), What white looks like: African-American philosophers on the whiteness question (pp. 173–193). Routledge. Kimmel, M. S. (2010). Introduction: Toward a pedagogy of the oppressor. In M. S. Kimmel & A. L. Ferber (Eds.), Privilege: A reader (2nd ed.). Westview Press. Lensmire, T. J., McManimon, S. K., Tierney, J. D., Lee-Nichols, M. E., Casey, Z. A., Lensmire, A., & Davis, B. M. (Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective). (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education’s focus on white privilege undermines antiracism. Harvard Educational Review, 83(3), 410–431. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of “White privilege.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 137–152.

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Levine-Rasky, C. (2000). Framing whiteness: Working through the tensions in introducing whiteness to educators. Race Ethnicity and Education, 3(3), 271–292. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working paper No. 189). Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. McIntosh, P. (2008). Some notes for facilitators on presenting my white privilege papers. Wellesley Centers for Women. McIntosh, P. (2009a). Foreword. In K. Weekes (Ed.), Privilege and prejudice: Twenty years with the invisible knapsack (pp. ix–xiii). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McIntosh, P. (2009b). White privilege: An account to spend. SEED Project and the Saint Paul Foundation. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 67

Probationary Whiteness Annie Jaffee

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Minstrelsy; Roediger, David; Whiteness as Property

1

Definition

Probationary Whiteness, coined by historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, describes the process through which groups of people have historically gained “white” status, and are therefore free from punishment for their ethnic identity and/or background. In other words, certain groups were de-whitened and re-whitened, and were given punishments as their place in the social hierarchy changed. The concept suggests that race is not stagnant, but rather is fluid, ever-changing and completely depends upon social context. Some racial classifications have disappeared entirely, and others have consistently kept their status and implications throughout history. Regardless, race has been used to control and enforce power dynamics. While race is constantly evolving and unstable, it has very real implications, resulting in violence and systemic subjugation of different ethnic groups. Races are not inherent, but rather, are created. As Jacobson (1999) explains in his book, Whiteness of a Different Color, “The contest over whiteness – its definition, its internal hierarchies, its proper boundaries, and its rightful claimants – has been critical to American culture throughout the nation’s history, and it has been a fairly untidy affair” (p. 5). Racial structures are about who belongs where, and with whom, and who does not – the very foundation of race is social exclusion and exploitation.

2

History of Whiteness in the U.S.

Citizenship in the United States has always been intrinsically linked to whiteness. In 1790, Congress declared that, “all free white persons who, have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_067

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be entitled to the rights of citizenship” (as referenced in Jacobson, 1999, p. 22). Whiteness was so normalized in the U.S. that the explicit white supremacy in this article did not spur debates or uproar. The question of what and who was considered white, however, was a question left open for debate based on the legislation. For instance, whether Jewish and Catholic individuals should be considered white sparked much controversy. Congress discussed the concept of “political probation,” for new folks entering the country, and limitations on who may hold political office. Amidst all of the questions regarding citizenship, the race question was never up for debate–only white people would gain citizenship. White status determined who could marry, vote, hold office, serve in the military and the roles different social actors would play in enslavement practices. Whiteness, clearly, began as a political construction, which is best demonstrated through the history of immigration, and policy shifts and attitudes surrounding it. Beginning in the 1840s, a heavy migration of European immigrants into the United States were seen as a political danger for American citizens. And with this threat to order came a new understanding of whiteness. In particular, Irish, German, Italian and Russian (many of whom were Jewish) folks came in large numbers between the early 1850s to the early 1900s. The definition of whiteness framed politics and policy in early America. In 1859, the terms “Anglo-Saxon race,” and, “English race,” were added to the lexicon. And after a naturalization law that granted Europeans open, absolute immigration and public, political and social participation was passed, “white” was broken down into different white groups. As Jacobson (1999) explains, this law, “rendered racially in a series of subcategorical white groupings – Celt, Slav, Hebrew, Iberic, Mediterranean, and so on – white Others of a supreme AngloSaxondom” (p. 42). As demographics changed, what it meant to be white was reconsidered. By 1860, “the foreign-born population of the United States was more than 4 million, of whom 1,611,304 had been born in Ireland, and 1,276,075 in Germany,” (Jacobson, 1999, p. 43). By 1920, a striking number of 13.5 million non-native white people lived in the United States.

3

White Racial Groups and Political Limitations

Distinctions continued to be made between the various European immigrants. These stereotypes were pervasive, impacting institutions, politics and cultural practices. In particular, the Irish were under constant verbal attack – they were consistently and publicly dehumanized. Starting in the 1840s, their physical characteristics (small noses and “darker” skin tones) were mocked

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by newspapers, media outlets and other public platforms. Irish folks’ appearance was compared to various animals, making the group the punch line of jokes, and subject of cartoons and other mocking images. The stereotypes extended beyond the exterior and surrounded the entire population’s character. For instance, the Irish were described by the New York Tribune as, “a race with more wholesome and probably unreasonable terror of law than any other” (Jacobson, 1999, p. 166) She then begged the question, “Is there no other way [besides violence] to civilize them?” (p. 166). The Irish were understood as violent – often referenced is their participation in predominantly working class led-draft riots in New York City – and therefore as people that must be controlled. Italians faced similar discrimination and violence across the country. For instance, in 1891, there was an anti-Italian mob in New Orleans, Louisiana, for similar sentiments of the group being aggressive, violent and animalistic. To the public, the concept of “criminal,” was central to who Italian folks were. And in response, other white ethnic groups used force against Italians, leading up to 11 lynchings of Italian people who were accused of planning to commit acts of terror against the government. These events called into question whether or not Italians were fit for self-government, if they were white “enough,” and who else was or was not. Despite these stereotypes, Irish and Italian people were still considered white people when they entered the country but could lose their status as ‘free white people,’ based off their interactions and relationships with people of color. In particular, Italian folks suffered these consequences. As Jacobson (1999) explains, Politically Italians were indeed white enough for naturalization and for the ballot, but socially they represented a problem population at best. Their distance from a more abiding brand of social whiteness (what Benjamin Franklin might have meant by “lovely white”) was marked by the common epithet “dago” – a word whose decidedly racial meaning was widely recognized at the time and was underscored by the more obviously racial “white nigger.” (p. 57) “Acting non-white,” which led to the stripping of privileges accessible to free whites, had to do with (often imagined) proximity to black people. For instance, residing too closely to black people, or marrying them, could cause an Italian individual or group to lose their status. Additionally, non-white actions were intimately connected to labor practices. For instance, many Italian people worked on farms, which was seen as a non-white job. If they held the same job

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as their black counterparts, they automatically held the same status as them. Italians, then, existed in a space between racial lines – they got certain privileges, but had others taken away depending upon how “white” the things they said and did were perceived to be. Jewish people also moved between racial lines, and the question of whether or not they, as a group, should be considered white, and therefore have access to the rights of free white people, persisted for decades. Jewish identity was also complex because of the intersections between race, religion and ethnicity – how Jewish people should be classified, then, was dynamic. Without clear identification, Jewish people were Othered, facing violence and oppression. The lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 highlights the racialization of Jewish folks. A young white girl was found dead in the basement of a factory, which Frank co-owned. While the evidence did not suggest Frank committed the crime, he was charged with murder, and was himself, lynched. The criminalization of Frank’s body was intrinsically tied to his Jewishness – and the question of race which caused suspicion in the first place. Jewish folks were seen as permanent outsiders, impacting their social/political status in ways that continue to reverberate today, with the global increase in Anti-Semitic violence and cries of “Jews will not replace us” heard at Alt-Right political rallies.

4

Eugenics

Eugenics played an important role in the formation of whiteness and racialized laws. By the early 1920s, immigration discourse was underscored by rising eugenic perspectives. Influential and well-respected intellectuals across the country began publishing books and articles in support of eugenics. In Madison Grant’s book, Passing of the Great Race, he articulated concerns around race-mixing, suggesting that “white” culture may be lost, and without white culture, the nation would crumble. To this end, Grant found it increasingly important to not let people who were not already considered white to claim that they were. He wrote that, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (as quoted in Jacobson, 1999, p. 91). He even went on to say that progressive and inclusive immigration laws equated to, “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race” (Jacobson, 1999, p. 91). The Johnson-Reed Act, which became law in 1927, was rooted in eugenics and was similar to a census. The act was seen as offering “help” to guide American

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immigration law. The claim was that the information gathered would not be used to exclude folks, but rather to make sure that only people “beneficial,” to the country would enter. The idea that discrimination was necessary for the saving of the country’s values was widely accepted. Breaking down, “white,” into racially distinct groups, then, could save the country. After this act was passed, Celts, Slavs and Hebrews were identified as distinct racial groups. In the years to come, advertisements starkly stereotyping these groups were in full swing, and eugenicist politics were in full effect. Depictions of racial groups highlighted their differences from one another, and from “actual” white people. The Johnson-Reed Act set new racial lines, making whiteness more inclusive, and segregation between white people and people of color harsher. By the middle of the 20th century, racial distinctions between groups were not as stark. Because large divides throughout the country were core to the conversation of improving the country, smaller ones – such as ethnic groups as a sub-set of white folks – failed to last. As eugenicists explained, the “major divides” referred to so-called Caucasians, Mongolians, and Negroids. A shift toward this larger, and, “more important,” issue led European Americans to be un-racialized, and simply existed as a non-racial category, as the default. That being said, this shift was incremental, and discrimination against various groups continued to occur in different contexts. For instance, a bank in California in the 1940s refused specific groups the right to own, or even reside in certain properties, unless they were serving their, “fully white” counterparts who lived there. The consolidation of ethnic groups into one, larger “white” group, had to do with, “defining who they were not” (Deliovsky, 2010, p. 21). She goes on to say that, “Clearly, a fundamental part of this ‘white-nation-building exercise was not only the strict control of citizenship that produced restrictive immigration policies, but also entailed the ‘othering’ of specific undesirable groups” (p. 21). After the consolidation of whiteness, the issue became more black and white.

5

Whiteness and Blackness

Core to the discussion of citizenship and whiteness in the United States was the idea that only certain racial groups – those falling under the “white” category – were, “fit for self-government.” The Dred Scott case in 1857 declared that black people were not citizens and did not have rights. The country’s very foundation was rooted in the enslavement of black people, but the Great Migration played a huge role in probationary whiteness. The large movement of African Americans from the South to the North (1910s–1940s), changed

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the racial makeup in the U.S. – who was considered white, and who was punished, continued to shift and move as differently racialized people increasingly came to share the same social spaces. Racial difference became an important national discussion, but not differences between white people. This became reinforced through media, advertisements and other public visual displays. As Jacobson (1999) explains, The late nineteenth century’s probationary white groups were now remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian race – an earlier era’s Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Iberics, and Saracens, among others, had become the Caucasians so familiar to our own visual economy and racial lexicon. (p. 8) In other words, people who were once considered probationary white people, were now considered white people. People who were probationary whites became white at the expense of non-white people. Put simply, whiteness, as we know it today, could not exist without blackness.

6

Class and the Construction of Whiteness

Capitalism and republicanism shaped whiteness in the United States. From the 1920s to the 1960s, groups that were once distinct from one another began to clump together. “White” was divided into different racial categories when oppression against people of color was publicly accepted and discussed throughout the U.S. – as more people of color who were seen as “clearly” nonwhite, racial tensions amongst European Americans dissipated resulting in the monolithic notion of “whiteness” that continues to link all white-passing peoples today simply as “white” without the need for any additional national or ethnic qualifier (e.g. Irish-American, German-American, etc.). However, the construction of whiteness in the United States depended upon the construction of blackness. As Jacobson (1999) explains, “Immigration restriction… altered the nation’s racial alchemy and redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs” (p. 14). In order to understand these re-classifications, it is critical that political and economic changes are acknowledged. Race is intrinsically linked to property. Whiteness must be understood in the context of capitalism and class. Under this framework, it becomes clear that it is not natural, but rather a social construct used to control. There is a psychological component of race that underpins the construction of whiteness. As

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W.E.B. Du Bois explains, while white people across class lines have different levels of compensation, they are rewarded a, “public and psychological wage” (see Roediger, 1999). In other words, while race is linked to class, not all white people are financially stable, but their whiteness still remains an important source of domination and power. Class struggle alongside race power was especially true for working class Celt folks in 19 century America. As Jacobson (1999) explains, Celts, “however lowly their social status might otherwise be… were endowed with all the immunities, rights, and privileges of ‘American whites,’” and thus became “enrolled in the system of racial oppression of all African-Americans” (p. 17).

7

Reproductive Politics

Creating sexual boundaries and controlling bodies is the very foundation of the creation of race and social control. Economic and social power, then, is intrinsically linked to sexuality. From the “One Drop Rule,” which declared that anyone with even one drop of “black blood” was to be regarded as black, to the erasure and denial of indigenous Native American folks’ existence throughout American history, shows that race is never stagnant, and always works to serve a political agenda. In other words, which groups are invalidated, and which are overly-validated depends upon which display works to further white supremacy. Who can reproduce with whom is both culturally and institutionally determined. Sterilization laws, which have their basis in eugenics, were first legalized in 1907 in Indiana. 30 other states shortly followed Indiana’s lead, and enacted laws of their own. These laws were set out so that people who were seen as “unfit” for society, mentally or physically, would not reproduce. These laws explicitly targeted people of color. Between the years of 1907 and 1963, over 64,000 people were sterilized. Control over people’s bodily functions on the basis of racial classification becomes clear here – it was illegal for many people of color to reproduce, but reproduction was basically forced upon white women (enforced by denying their access to abortion). Race meant difference, and difference was policed. Whiteness equated to, “fitness for government,” a concept which guided race politics and structures.

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Resistances and Modern-Day Probationary Whiteness

Resistances to probationary whiteness have existed throughout history but are often done at the expense of people of color. For instance, in 1863, Irish people

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fought against the draft because of their white status. Different ethnic groups claimed whiteness in order to gain rights and privileges, which of course, maintains a racial structure with white people at the top. However, the fights of other groups, such as Chinese, Syrian or Armenian folks (as well as others), for citizenship were not at the expense of others, and challenged the racial hierarchy, and whiteness as a norm. Resistance today continues for folks who are not offered the right to become full citizens of the U.S., and resistances of previously-labeled probationary white people continue as well. For instance, Jewish people continue to face anti-Semitism, and have created their own movements of resistance. Some Jewish communities have taken up the practice of being openly and publicly proud of, “looking Jewish,” which can be understood as an act of resistance toward a past of discrimination in this U.S. In terms of racial identity today, legally and interpersonally, people are recognized for multiple racial and ethnic identities. This being said, “white,” is a monolith, but ethnic or native diversity is acknowledged – a person can be white and Irish. Racial classifications, which created probationary whiteness, due to civil rights legislation and fights for racial justice, have shifted, and people are no longer legally deemed as probationary whites. The concept of probationary whiteness, however, offers both historical and contemporary insight into the multiple intersections of racial identity and the ongoing project of white nationalism in the United States and around the world.

References Deliovsky, K. (2010). White femininity: Race, gender & power. Fernwood Pub. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso.

CHAPTER 68

Psychoanalysis and Whiteness Studies Ross Truscott

Related Entries: Baldwin, James; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Emotionality and Whiteness; Postcolonialism and Whiteness; Racial Melancholia; Roediger, David

1

Introduction

While there are psychoanalytic currents in the work of scholars who, with some ambivalence, place their interventions under the heading of whiteness studies, psychoanalysis is not a dominant frame within whiteness studies. Where psychoanalysis has been invoked in whiteness studies to disclose the unconscious aspects of whiteness, there has infrequently been a sustained critical engagement with psychoanalytic theory and its quandaries. However, texts drawing on psychoanalysis, or, rather, texts seemingly psychoanalytic in their preoccupations, have been repeatedly invoked as a spur for the emergence of whiteness studies – that these texts are written by black authors is of no small importance. Any consideration of how whiteness studies and psychoanalysis can be brought together, then, requires attention to the ways in which psychoanalysis had already been taken up within a tradition of scholarship in the wake of which whiteness studies places itself in narrating its origins. Such an undertaking would be incomplete without attention to critiques of whiteness emerging from within postcolonial studies, within which psychoanalysis is considerably less marginal than it is in whiteness studies. Sometimes dwelling on the psychopathologies of white subjectivity, the focus of this scholarship has largely been whiteness as a problem that concerns all marked by colonialism, which equated being human with being white. The critical study of whiteness and psychoanalysis has thus been, and can still be, brought into a complementary relation, along numerous lines, some of

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which are noted below. But, once brought together, they also begin to productively trouble each other.

2

Pleasure in Whiteness Studies

David Roediger’s (1991) The Wages of Whiteness is often taken as the founding text of whiteness studies. It is a claim worth refusing, as Roediger (2010) himself does by offering an account of the beginnings of whiteness studies according to which, long before the 1990s, whiteness had been treated as a problem by black writers, most notably, though not only, W.E.B Du Bois, who drew on Freud later in his career, C.L.R James, who was resistant to psychoanalysis, James Baldwin, who made occasional use of it, and Frantz Fanon, who reworked it tirelessly, calling it into question but never fully relinquishing it. It is well known that Wages takes its title from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. Of the failure of southern white workers to unite with fellow black workers, Du Bois (1935) writes: “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” (p. 700). It is from this formulation that Roediger (1991) takes the idea that “the pleasures [emphasis added] of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers” (p. 13). With the notion of pleasure as a wage, Roediger makes a very particular historical argument, but it bears a kinship with psychoanalytic critiques of racism more generally, including those in postcolonial studies. In the uneven field of the psychoanalysis of race there are as many forms of racism as there are psychoanalytic diagnoses, and one could, in an encyclopedic spirit, catalog the use made of each of the major psychoanalytic concepts to critique racism. At its most elemental, however, Freud’s (1900) “royal road to the unconscious activities of the mind” (p. 604) offers a method by which to follow the circuitous routes along which forbidden wishes are relayed, finding disguised gratification, bypassing censorship. What most psychoanalytic formulations of racism share, despite their heterogeneity, is a foregrounding of the pleasure of racism. Stuart Hall (1992), for example, has written of how new forms of racism, no longer brazen, require attention to the censorship of racist pleasure, which functions, as Hall puts it, “rather more like Freud’s dreamwork than like anything else” (p. 2). Employing a related mode of reading, J. M. Coetzee (1991) diagnosed apartheid whiteness as a form of obsessional neurosis, the pleasure of which made use of a number of associative paths, predominantly its very negation. Indeed, for Coetzee, apartheid was a “counter-attack upon desire” (p. 17) that was “continually bursting at the seams and leaking” (p. 20) with precisely what it aimed to contain.

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The Ambivalence of Whiteness

One of the key insights to be drawn from a tradition of black writing making use of psychoanalysis to critique whiteness is the way that white subjects invest in blackness all that they cannot consciously acknowledge about themselves, all that they have supposedly been required to relinquish as the cost of constituting themselves as white, producing blackness as, for instance, sexually virile, aggressive, but also sensuous, intuitive, rhythmically in tune with nature, and so on. As Baldwin (1961) writes, “to be an American Negro Male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others” (p. 217). Thus, for Baldwin and others, between whiteness and blackness there is no relation, for in blackness the white subject sees only itself, frightened by and, simultaneously, drawn back to, blackness as an image of whiteness in an unalienated state. This is a formulation found widely in psychoanalytic scholarship on race. Homi Bhabha’s (1994) use of Freud’s notion of fetishism to understand racial stereotypes is perhaps the most influential version of it. While Fanon’s (1952) Black Skin, White Masks is frequently invoked as a first iteration, a version of this formulation was sounded out in the mid-1930s by South African social psychologist, I.D. MacCrone. MacCrone (1937) writes: “Upon the man with the black skin there is projected the evil which the white man refuses to acknowledge as part of his own nature, and the black man becomes the scapegoat of the white” (pp. 298–299). While MacCrone’s is an inside out model of applied psychoanalysis according to which the social world is shaped by internal, subjective conditions, more recent psychoanalytic critiques of racism emerging from within psychosocial studies and postcolonial theory attempt to think through the social and the psychic as being in a reciprocal, mutually constitutive relation. In this way, the ambivalence of whiteness has been brought into critical focus, the way blackness is produced by whiteness as both threatening and, at the same time, alluring. Psychoanalysis has provided a conceptual vocabulary according to which whiteness – in its symptomatic ambivalence, an ambivalence acted out rather than articulated reasonably, in its fragile narcissism – can be understood as having a pathological psychic organization.

4

Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

Notions of the “primitive” and the “civilized,” while jarring to readers of Freud today, are built into psychoanalytic theory; grounded on a division between the sensible and the intelligible – a division older than the eighteenth century,

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but which has come to the present shaped by Kantian philosophy and its legacy, of which Freud is an inheritor – the “primitive” and the “civilized” is an opposition assumed in psychoanalysis. The critique of whiteness that psychoanalysis enables runs into trouble in this opposition. As Stephen Frosh (2013) renders this trouble: A primitive impulse is never a rational one; it always arises unmediated from the unconscious and hence has not been worked over by the secondary processes of thought. The sleight of hand then is to link this kind of primitivity with the irrationality of the colonized other and then to make rationality itself the marker of civilized human society. (p. 144) Freud performs this “sleight of hand” repeatedly, from The Interpretation of Dreams onwards; he inherits a Kantian dualism that has never been undone within the psychoanalytic tradition – the apartness between thought and the body is tirelessly bridged but, for all that, presumed. However useful psychoanalysis might be for whiteness studies, the historical association of blackness with the body and thought with whiteness haunts every psychoanalysis of racism. Frosh (2013) concedes “the rootedness of much psychoanalytic thought in colonial assumptions,” but argues that psychoanalysis “both draws on colonialism and disrupts its categories at the same time” (pp. 144–145). As a bodily state, “primitivity” is always insufficiently mastered by reason; it is not that, in the struggle, reason is overcome by affect, but, in and through reason as the form of that mastery, “primitivity” returns. Reason is thus placed into a kinship with so many forms of unreason, “rationality is underpinned,” as Frosh (2013) writes, “by violence and irrationality” (p. 145). Here, one might speak of rationality’s wish fulfilments, its forms of enjoyment, often sadistic, “primitive” pleasures. It is no secret that psychoanalysis has been critiqued for its Eurocentrism, and not without good reason given how psychoanalysis was used not only against, but also in the interests of, colonialism. While many may wish to frame these as so many misapplications of psychoanalysis, the latent colonial assumptions within psychoanalysis make such misuse possible, even likely. Celia Brickman (2003: 72), for instance, writes: The psychoanalytically conceived norm of mature subjectivity was, by virtue of the correlation of libidinal development with the cultural evolutionary scale, a rationalism whose unstated color was white, just as its unstated gender was male. (p. 72)

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The more even handed interventions that draw attention to the colonial conditions of possibility of psychoanalytic theory, the ways in which colonial geopolitics came to structure the psychoanalytic conception of the subject, have aimed to abide by that which within psychoanalysis may still allow the contradictions of modernity, specifically nationalism in its relation to race, to be critically apprehended.

5

The Wager of Whiteness Studies

In its relationship to the work of black scholars who have made use of psychoanalysis, whiteness studies declares an intellectual debt. This is not the same as blackness being narcissistically apprehended as the phantasmatic origin of whiteness. But there is a repetition in which whiteness studies participates insofar as it is against the “primitivity,” not of blackness but of pathological whitenesses, that its own, ostensibly already analyzed, non-pathological relation to blackness emerges. Here it may be worth taking seriously Fanon’s (1952, p. xii) claim that “an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them” (p. xii), precisely because such a libidinal investment maintains the very mechanism that produces these racialized positions in the first place. The modes of warding off narcissistic wounds to whiteness, to which whiteness studies scholars draw attention using psychoanalysis, occur on a developmental spectrum that positions some defensive structures as more “primitive” than others. Indeed, it is not blackness that, for whiteness studies, is “primitive,” but whiteness itself; in its irrationalities, in its defenses – whether neurotic, perverse, or psychotic – in the circuitous routes of its pleasure – that is, in the way defenses fail, or are circumvented – whiteness is rendered, more or less, “primitive.” Beyond the libidinal investments of whiteness studies in blackness, beyond what whiteness studies has been prepared, and not without some violence, to annex as a part of its own historical development, at stake here is the way whiteness studies draws its frontiers between itself and “primitive” whitenesses. In making use of a psychoanalytic conceptual apparatus, whiteness studies finds itself – in rehearsing, pedagogically, and as if for the benefit of afflicted whitenesses, a different relation to blackness – within and a part of the very field it works to unsettle. This does not mean that psychoanalysis is useless for the critical study of whiteness; indeed, acknowledging this implication in the scene under analysis would be but a first step of the process. This is one of the great strengths of psychoanalysis, the way it always reflexively counts itself into what it seeks to think through. But there is a limit to what psychoanalysis

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can contribute to the critique of racism. Perhaps the most one can hope for with this framing of the problem of racism is a reversal of positions. To circle back on the point with which I began, the very move of placing psychoanalysis, through the work of black scholars, at the beginnings of whiteness studies can be questioned. It is true that Du Bois (1940) notes in The Dusk of Dawn that he began reading Freud seriously in the 1930s: “I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing… unconscious habit and irrational urge…” (p. 140). The language of psychoanalysis does recur through this and subsequent texts. But the mistake should not be made of reading Du Bois as simply applying Freudian ideas, reducing Du Bois’s thought to a form of psychoanalysis. One might say that both he and Freud set to work upon related problems, that he and Freud are intellectual contemporaries (Zwarg, 2002), a point that requires returning to the concept of “double consciousness” set out in The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, 1903), prior to Du Bois’s reading of Freud. There is, here, a concept that cannot, without a certain Eurocentrism, be called psychoanalytic. Similarly, Baldwin does utilize formulations that seem, at face value, psychoanalytic, but as Baldwin scholars underline he is at his most complex, and attends to racial ambivalences most keenly, in his fiction. One should exercise caution in folding Baldwin into psychoanalysis, for a reading of his oeuvre as a whole will not be pressed neatly into psychoanalysis. Fetishism, in other words, has many forms.

6

Conclusion

Psychoanalysis has been used to critique whiteness, and there can be little doubt about how productive such a pairing has been in addressing questions of the libidinal recalcitrance of racism. But the pairing might also reveal certain blind spots of both fields of inquiry. On the one hand, the psychoanalytic concepts marshalled to critique the problem of whiteness can be extended to whiteness studies itself, to the ways in which it is more implicated in the problems it addresses than it is often prepared to admit. On the other hand, psychoanalysis can be treated as part of the problem whiteness studies addresses – as has been suggested, psychoanalysis has been, and remains, ensnared in histories of whiteness, which came to mark Freud’s work, written in an anti-Semitic Vienna, from the outset, as both Sander Gilman (1993) and, more recently, Alfred López (2005) have argued. That the particular values of whiteness have operated as universals has been a central point made

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in the critical study of whiteness, and what whiteness studies would be able to contribute to the critique of the universalism of psychoanalysis remains a question yet to be pursued in any sustained way. If politically committed psychoanalytic critiques of whiteness are not to repeat an epistemological kinship with the very problem under study, this relation has to be foregrounded and worked through. The relation between reason and the body that psychoanalytic formulations always entail – between the sensory data it is reason’s purpose to synthesize, arrange, order, even stand over – has to be thought in its correspondence with a racialized social order wherein some are designated as the bearers of bodily being, others the life of reason. Such a possessive relation to bodiliness – one always has a body, while reason is exercised – cannot simply be reduced to a racialized division of labor in which certain bodies can be possessed, but it has to be thought in relation to it.

References Baldwin, J. (1984). On being “white”… and other lies. In D. Roediger (Ed.), Black on White: Black writers on what it means to be White (pp. 177–180). Schocken Books. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Brickman, C. (2003). Aboriginal populations of the mind: Race and primitivity in psychoanalysis. Columbia University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1991). The mind of apartheid: Geoffrey Cronje (1907–). Social Dynamics, 17(1), 1–35. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. Penguin. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black reconstruction: An essay toward a history of the part played which Black folk played in the attempts to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860– 1880. Harcourt, Brace, and Co. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940). The dusk of Dawn. Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, White masks (R. Philcox, Ttrans.). Grove Press. Freud, S. (2010). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Basic Books. Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. Palgrave. Gilman, S. (1993). Freud, race and gender. Princeton University Press. Hall, S. (1992). Race, culture, and communications: Looking backward and forward at cultural studies. Rethinking Marxism, 5(1), 10–18. López, A. J. (2005). The gaze of the white wolf: Psychoanalysis, whiteness, and colonial trauma. In A. J. Lopez (Ed.), Postcolonial whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire (pp. 155–181). State University of New York Press.

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MacCrone, I. D. (1937). Race attitudes in South Africa: Historical, experimental and psychological studies. Witwatersrand University Press. Roediger, D. (1991). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class (rev. ed.). Verso. Roediger, D. (2010). Accounting for the wages of whiteness: U.S. Marxism and the critical history of race. In W. D. Hund, J. Krikler, & D. Roediger (Eds.), Wages of whiteness and racist symbolic capital. Lit Verlag. Zwarg, C. (2002). Du Bois on trauma: Psychoanalysis and the would-be black savant. Cultural Critique, 51, 1–39.

CHAPTER 69

Race Treason Hannah R. Stohry

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; Interest Convergence; Marxism; Passing; Roediger, David

… A journal called Race Traitor was created in 1992, by white intellectual abolitionists Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, for the purpose of dismantling the destructive structure of white supremacy. The journal’s mantra resounds that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 10). The main premises conclude that white supremacy exists because racial categories were socially constructed and upheld to maintain a social hierarchy where white people experience exponential privilege and status according to inherited and assigned race, at the disproportionate expense of People of Color (POC). In the case of America’s history, people were stolen as slaves and were forcibly brought to America and as the country began to form strict laws (e.g. no land ownership for POC) were consecutively established to keep POC in a place of subservience to white people, or the people that established themselves as white. Some European ethnic groups (like the Irish American communities) established themselves as white in America, in order to position themselves as having more benefits than African Americans, in efforts to move away from slavery and indentured servitude to free citizen status. According to Race Traitor (RT), the white race is explained as an exclusive membership club into which white people are born, reinforced to participate in and maintain acceptance of the benefits. This selective club is “reproduced in each generation” (Ignatiev, 1996, p. 17), and is entirely dependent on the unanimity of those in the club. Consequently, “Race Traitor seeks to disrupt racial categories and offer a concrete agenda for the enactment of a political subjectivity” (Flores & Moon, 2002, p. 183) and seeks to abolish whiteness because “race is very much one of the things that we do to and with each other. So long as we do not challenge what we do to and with each other, we will be stuck with it” (Garvey, 1996, p. 256). The importance of abolishing whiteness is clear in the published responses to RT that people are interested in making change and that RT is causing people to take on a new perspective about issues related © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_069

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to race. RT aims to “dissolve the club, to break it apart, to explode it” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 11) and is geared toward white people who realize the membership’s unfair benefits, and “understand whiteness to be a problem that perpetuates injustice” (p. 13), especially toward People of Color. What does whiteness mean? Whiteness is described as “the structural valuation of skin color” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 92), preference of white skin color over those with more melanin, or the “ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity,” and that this kind of humanity is “spiritually impoverished and in many ways destructive” (Sleeter, 1996, p. 264). White privilege can be considered those unearned privileges that white people receive as a result of those structures, thus automatically recruiting white people (from birth) into the club of unearned privilege and damning POC to a lifetime of extreme exclusion from this club. When it comes to privilege, there is an assumption that all white people are satisfied with their membership and complicity, but Ignatiev (1996) exposes the possibility of the dissolution of the white race, as evidenced by events that demonstrated “a mass break with the conformity that preserves the white race” (p. 23). Some examples of breaks with conformity that have helped influence white people’s courage have included massive cultural shifts in terminology used by People of Color that defines a group (e.g. reclaiming identity by moving from “Negro” to “Black”). RT affirms the fact that white people are capable of subverting cultural expectations and creating revolutionary change by assuming new roles, both of which are choices to adopt a new identity rather than be constricted by the idea that change means loss. Social constructions can be de-constructed, and the act of dismantling whiteness is sociopolitical, but most effective by those willing to commit race treason. The word “treason” can signal betrayal, distrust, disloyalty, unfaithfulness, and infidelity, and acts of race treason can be anything that is considered disloyal to the norms that uphold one’s socially constructed race. When it comes to committing race treason and resisting conformity and white club membership, it means that those who were considered loyal to their race are now placed in opposition to one’s home group. Race Traitor provides several examples of white people who are committing treason to their own race and disrupting norms for the purpose of equity for all humans. RT may not be considered a “coherent political movement” (Preston & Chadderton, 2012, p. 87), but it is intended as a rebellious movement to completely unsettle white supremacy under the assumed reality “that capitalism hinges on the maintenance of white hegemony” (p. 87). Humans are socialized to project onto others how one must look and behave according to their

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physical characteristics and are treated accordingly if they do not conform to socially recognized standards, even those white people in their “failure to behave as whites were expected in racial matters” (Peeples, 1996, p. 74). Those people then become race traitors by breaking with the white racial bonding, and the norms that uphold the systems, which contradict the American capitalist ideals, and contradict white people’s best interests. Although RT focuses on white people as spearheading the treasonous movements, it is clear that the term “race traitor” is not just used for white people. People of Color are also labeled “race traitor” when they are found acting in ways that are not similarly deemed appropriate or loyal to their perceived racial characteristics, like those who have resisted being white streamed, or the internalization of white supremacy in the educational system. In the American context, People of Color (POC) have been historically subjugated, leading to the belief that all People of Color should vote in what is culturally considered their best interest, to vote for the Democratic party, which is considered socially liberal and provides better opportunities for POC. If not, then it is perceived that they are betraying their community (e.g. Uncle Tom characters) by voting for conservative parties, or political parties that support policies that are not in their assumed best interest, thus committing race treason, and begging the question of loyalty based on levels of identification with one’s own race. Like in the instance of African American political voting habits, since identity and political behavior are not straightforward, it would beg further study to understand the full complexity of what motivates people to motivate against seemingly obvious community interests. Other POC with complex identities are Latinx immigration enforcement agents who serve as U.S. Border Patrol agents. Their positions beg the question of whose perspective determines who a race traitor is, and points to the complexity and contradiction of one’s identity, how one performs identity, and how one responds to being considered a race traitor. Dismantling a system may require a complete upheaval and may necessitate “armed militia that takes to the streets” and perhaps “the only avenue for change is in the complete destruction of the system, preferably through direct action” (Flores & Moon, 2002, p. 184). One may be running the risk and potential that “race can very often unleash violence against the traitor” (Preston & Chadderton, 2012, p. 87), calling into question the levels of commitment to a common humanity. When one reads the following statement “abolish the white race by any means necessary” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 9), one might wonder what the authors mean by “by any means necessary,” and to what extent people will go to create change and “disrupt that conformity” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 36).

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Fully understanding the embodiment of racial oppression and the power/ privilege differentials is the beginning of resistance to the oppressive systems and a movement toward the assumption of the title “race traitor,” and a “potential act of betrayal/emancipation, ethical practice, and a discourse of recognition” (Kannen, 2008, p. 150). This self has the ability to assume identities and one has opportunities to pass with another identity other than what one has been socially prescribed (e.g. biracial people passing as white); this passing is a “form of betrayal,” (Kannen, 2008, p. 157) a “dissolution of boundaries” (Kannen, 2008, p. 158) or an act of race treason by one’s presumed communities. Race traitors and white abolitionists “by acting boldly… jeopardize their membership in the white club and their ability to draw upon its privileges” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 36). This means leaving one’s comfort, for the sake of another, or for People of Color. It is a notion that the most powerful can, and must, have an impact by “confusing and disrupting the circuits of whiteness so that the state and capital cannot trust that white people will act in the interests of white supremacy” (Preston & Chadderton, 2012, p. 94). It is argued that if “a critical mass of people who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race will undergo fission, and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 37). Perhaps this means that enough white people need to revolt against whiteness and white supremacy, and to forsake privileges of white people.

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Race Treason and the Field of Education

There is a case for race treason within the field of education in that whiteness is so pervasive that it impacts the quality of education given by white teachers to children of Color, as they are taught according to the (un)conscious beliefs by white teachers that children of color are not capable or worthy of quality education. It is known as a hidden curriculum that the teachers enforce and enact discrimination toward students, and as a result, students then grow to resist, and a perpetuating cycle of classroom power battles ensues. The curriculum and pedagogy that uphold white supremacy are considered white streaming, in that it is so pervasive that it is internalized and reproduced (e.g. ideas of inferiority). It is a system where student resistance to marginalization and control results in the reproduction of school authority figures asserting more control over students. RT also “lacks a theory of cross-race relations” (Allen, 2004, p. 125) and Allen (2004) argues for a critical pedagogy and humanizing Freirean pedagogy where one engages in a resistive curriculum. This requires examining the discourse

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on power, privilege, and white supremacy; these actions are considered to be “a progressive starting point because it does not cater to white racial thinking” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 150) thus becoming a “pedagogical possibility” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 150). It is possible to recognize the emotionality and white fragility of white students in the classroom, and to address it with tough love. This love deserves a closer look, to understand the complicated relationships, to understand the pain given and received. Educators hold an interesting position of needing to understand white students’ emotionality, white power and privilege. The relationship to whiteness is an unhealthy one, one which is romanticized and attractive, but, ultimately harmful for white people and POC, and perhaps even more harmful in the emotionality that ensues when white students get a whiff of a suggestion for race treason. Matias & Allen (2013) propose a humanizing love, a realistic love, that will inevitably be painful in the breakup with whiteness, but “beyond cognitive changes, reborn whites must situate ourselves in opposition to whiteness and risk our standing in the white community by becoming traitors to the normative functioning of our group” (Allen, 2004, p. 130) White educators have the potential and responsibility to be race traitors, and to create healing relationships within the classroom, as they may strive to create student race traitors.

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Critiques and Solutions for the Ideas of Race Treason

The treasonous movements by white people are contested and questioned in many ways. There are arguments against the movement and Ignatiev’s efforts by “contemporary critics of being fascist and individualized” (Preston & Chadderton, 2012, p. 86) while Cole (2012) reports that Ignatiev verbalized his aversion to fascism. Other critics say that RT’s ideas are not radical enough, despite Ignatiev (1996) insisting that “no serious reform is possible without the overthrow of capital” (p. 101). The lack of strength for the levels of radicality, one must realize that at the end of the day, the white people making the so-called radical changes to commit race treason are still white with all of the attributed privileges. There is not enough acknowledgement of the true impact that slavery and segregation has had on communities of Color. Additionally, Ignatiev & Garvey (1996) do not attempt to define the boundaries of treasonous acts. There are many motivators to prevent people from committing race treason. The risk of giving up privileges is controlled by the threat of the white mob/ mass coming to correct the threat of race treason, preserving the “white racial

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bonding” (Preston & Chadderton, 2012, p. 87) ideas proffered by Ignatiev and Garvey (1996). The idea of shedding power and privilege is also complicated since power and privilege are subjective ideas, and it is argued that one cannot completely shed whiteness, power, or privilege. Cole (2012) critiques the movement of “Race Traitor” in three ways: it is easily misunderstood; it only thinks in the black/white binary; and it is not clear about what comes after the abolition of the white race. The misunderstanding by so many people (and as evidenced by feedback given to the contributors of RT) is that they think that abolition of the white race means killing white people. It is easy to misconstrue this abolition since we are socialized to think that race is a biological fact rather than a social construct. People are socialized to see a body and its skin color labels as synonymous, and only in binary terms (e.g. white and black). The binary is evident as RT rejects whiteness and is even suggested to appropriate blackness, and by “appropriating the redemptive power of blackness then becomes a way of avoiding the racial injustice of whiteness” (Flores & Moon, 2002, p. 190). Despite the valiant efforts of Ignatiev, Garvey and the RT movement to establish loyalty to humanity, many scholars illuminate that the term “race traitor” was not, in fact, coined by Ignatiev and Garvey, but has been used in many other historical contexts. For example, the term “race traitor” was a racial slur or a derogatory term, from Nazi communication about undesirables (anyone who was not a supporter of monoracial communities) and even toward POC. RT does not cite the historical accounts of the term “race traitor”; it may be considered an appropriation and while not the intent, many critics have mentioned RT’s lack of acknowledgement of the term’s origins. An interesting notion of cultural crossover is that white culture appropriates what is black culture at an ease which is not afforded, or wanted, or reciprocated by the Black culture. Jazz music is one historical example where its origins were a method and expression of liberation by POC from whiteness and the lingering effects of the atrocities of slavery and segregation but are now arguably appropriated by white people. One must conclude that RT may be considered a radical movement but begs many questions about application, scope, and reality. As a solution for some of the misgivings of RT, Cole (2012) hypothesized that multicultural socialism is the best alternative to neoliberal capitalism rather than the ideas of Ignatiev’s and Garvey’s movement (p. 204) and that Marxism is not, in fact, a part of the movement. With all of Cole’s (2012) critiques, they also call into question RT’s future in competition with contemporary application of race treason. One solution for RT’s struggle with contemporary relevance lies with Preston’s and Chadderton’s (2012) idea for the application of Critical Race Theory

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(CRT) and public pedagogy. Given how RT has been criticized for being too white and centering white people who act as race traitors as heroes rather than centering POC as heroes in movements that benefit them, applying CRT pushes for the action, consistency, and accountability that is spoken about by those who identify as race traitors.

References Allen, R. L. (2004). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 121–136. Cole, M. (2012). ‘Abolish the white race’ or ‘transfer economic power to the people’? Some educational implications. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 10(2), 202–232. Flores, L. A., & Moon, D. G. (2002). Rethinking race, revealing dilemmas: Imagining a new racial subject in Race Traitor. Western Journal of Communication, 66(2), 181–207. Garvey, J. (1996). Family matters. In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 247– 256). Routledge. Ignatiev, N. (1996). Immigrants and Whites. In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 15–24). Routledge. Ignatiev, N. (1996). The American intifada. In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 97–101). Routledge. Ignatiev, N., & Garvey, J. (Eds.). (1996). Race traitor. Routledge. Kannen, V. (2008). Identity treason: Race, disability, queerness, and the ethics of (post) identity practices. Culture, Theory & Critique, 49(2), 149–163. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 137–152. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. Routledge. Matias, C. E., & Allen, R. L. (2013). Loving whiteness to death: Sadomasochism, emotionality, and the possibility of humanizing love. Berkeley Review of Education, 4(2), 285–309. Peeples, E. H. (1996). Richmond journal: Thirty years in Black and White. In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 67–83). Routledge. Preston, J., & Chadderton, C. (2012). Rediscovering ‘race traitor’: Towards a critical race theory informed public pedagogy. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 15(1), 85–100. Sleeter, C. (1996). White silence, White solidarity. In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 257–265). Routledge.

CHAPTER 70

Racial Melancholia Justin Grinage

Related Entries: Emotionality and Whiteness; Guilt; Psychoanalysis and Whiteness; Shame

… Racial melancholia is a psychoanalytic conception of unresolved grief that frames racialization within white supremacist societies. Scholars have used racial melancholia as a framework to analyze racial subjectivities in the United States by theorizing how repressed racial histories and traumatic losses stemming from these histories constitute American identity. The usage of melancholia in this context has been deployed to understand racialization and the intersections of subjectivity, assimilation, and trauma. In particular, Cheng’s (2001) book, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, outlines a theory of melancholia that draws attention to the hypocritical positioning of America as having achieved democratic ideals in spite of past racial transgressions that disprove this national adoption of equality. For Cheng (2001), racial melancholia originates because of the rift between the American history of slavery, imperialism, and colonization and the cultural amnesia that occurs from repeatedly normalizing these atrocities in an attempt to expunge them from historical memory. Thus, the core of racial melancholia is the fact that the United States was founded on this hypocritical relationship; this form of betrayal serves as a distinctive characteristic of racialization. The origins of racial melancholia are derived from Freud’s (1917, 1923) writing on the distinctions between mourning and melancholia in relation to a lost object. According to Freud (1917) melancholia occurs as a result of one’s incapacity to successfully mourn a particular lost object, whether that be the loss of a loved one or a lost ideal. The response to this lack of mourning is for the individual to repress their painful feelings related to the lost object and as a result the lost object becomes the formation of the ego. Cheng (2001) indicates that one’s melancholic relationship with race emerges through the U.S. nation-states’ inability to reconcile past racial atrocities as the nation continues to endorse white supremacy. Racial melancholia therefore symbolizes the lost ideal of racial equality as ostensibly declared by the nation’s © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_070

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founding documents e.g. “all men are created equal” and espoused as a part of the nation’s values e.g. “freedom and justice for all.” The result is a collectively melancholic nation unable to reconcile its hypocritical racial existence. Cheng (2001) poses a crucial question in this regard: “How does the nation ‘go on’ while remembering those transgressions? How does it sustain the remnants of denigration and disgust created in the name of progress and the formation of an American identity?” (p. 11, emphasis in original). Exploring these questions becomes the basis for a melancholic analysis of the foundations of racial trauma and unresolved racial grief fundamental to racial identities in a white supremacist nation-state.

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White Racial Melancholia

It is important to note that white supremacy is a global phenomenon, however the theory of racial melancholia outlined here embodies the unique aspects of white supremacy that constitutes American identities. Specifically, when referring to the notion of white racial melancholia, white identity is imagined as white American identity through a primary engagement with Cheng’s (2001) theorizing of whiteness and the U.S. nation-state. Although this theory of racial melancholia is focused on whiteness in the context of the U.S., there are presumably transferrable assumptions and connections that could be made between U.S. conceptions of whiteness and global white supremacy. Additionally, scholars have also used melancholia outside the realm of race to critique a variety of different understandings of oppression and the traumatic experiences that occur as a result. These concepts include postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy, 2005; Khanna, 2004), gender melancholia (Butler, 1995), and melancholia and queer politics (Crimp, 2002). These various critical theories of melancholia suggest that not only is there potential for links between formations of U.S. racialization and global white supremacy, but also there are opportunities for intersectional analyses of melancholia that stretches across multiple facets of identity. The introductory chapter in The Melancholy of Race provides an illustration of white racial melancholia through what Cheng (2001) describes as an “imbricated but denied relationship” where white people display “an entangled network of repulsion and sympathy, fear and desire, repudiation and identification” in relation to people of color (p. 12). The function of melancholia for white identity revolves around the hypocritical nexus of the ideal of equality and the continued evidence of rampant racial oppression. Cheng explains that white identity functions melancholically through a system where there is

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both psychic and social consumption and denial of the racial other as a means for dealing with this hypocritical nexus. The psychic effects of this existence involve the haunting presence of the racial other that forms the basis for unresolved racial grief since these ghosts cannot be exorcised. Cheng describes white racial melancholia through the imagery of choking, as white identity cannot swallow or expel the ghosts that stem from the unresolved and unassimilable hypocritical white supremacist nation-state. The conception of white racial melancholia explained here goes beyond colloquial understandings of feeling melancholic as a mere form of sadness or gloominess and points toward how melancholia can become the foundation of the ego itself (in psychoanalytic terms) and becomes fundamental to the formation of white identity. The system of white racial melancholia operates because of the notion that people of color are integral to the U.S. nation-state despite the dehumanizing and violent history of racist actions that suggest otherwise. Cheng (2001) provides an example of this interlocked relationship through naming racial projects such as slavery and colonialism as “internally fraught institutions not because they have eliminated the other but because they need the very thing they hate or fear” (p. 12). Further highlighting this dynamic is the enduring legacy of black face minstrelsy where entanglements between fear and desire become center stage within the white psyche (Lott, 1993). What these characterizations of racialization help to recognize is how racial melancholia “theoretically accounts for the guilt and the denial of guilt, the blending of shame and omnipotence in the racist imaginary” (Cheng, 2001, p. 12, emphasis in original). Using white racial melancholia to theorize white identity in this manner enables an interpretation of how the white psyche grapples with how whiteness is predicated on oppression and frames how the elaborate array of affective and emotional responses to this reality function through unresolved racial grief.

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Racial Melancholia and White Racial Melancholia in Education Research

Racial melancholia has been used as a critical tool in education research to critique racism in a variety of capacities, including settler colonialism, young adult literature, Black education, and Asian American teacher subjectivity. The focus of the majority of this research has been on understanding how racial grief and trauma impact the lives of people of color. In fact, outside of education research this has primarily been the case, most prominently in the fields of cultural studies and literary studies. With some exceptions (Cheng, 2001;

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Matias, 2016), theorizing whiteness in the context of racial melancholia is in its nascent stages of development, both inside and outside the field of education. Although white racial melancholia has been employed in a limited fashion within education research, two studies (Vaught, 2012; Grinage, 2019) highlight the analytic potential of the concept. Vaught (2012) uses racial melancholia and “whiteness as property” (Harris, 1993) to analyze data from a critical ethnographic study conducted in a juvenile prison school. Vaught’s (2012) argument centers on the concept of “institutional racist melancholia” where the prison school, itself, exhibited affective modalities “by which the subjects – White society and its constructed institutions – cannot release their object of grief” (p. 63). In this case the object of white grief is the black and brown bodies who have been turned into “living ghosts – zombies of the White world” which “underwrites the ongoing narrative of liberty, justice, and White supremacy” (p. 66). Citing Cheng (2001), Vaught argues that this narrative normalizes the incarceration of young men of color to uphold whiteness. Similar to Vaught, Grinage (2019) theorizes affect in the context of whiteness and melancholia as part of a critical ethnographic study conducted in a high school classroom. Using both “whiteness as technology of affect” (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013) and what Grinage defines as “melancholic affects” to critique an encounter between a black student and a white student during a class discussion about racial progress in the U.S., Grinage underscores how whiteness disrupts racial dialogues. The encounter involved students placing their bodies on an imaginary continuum in the classroom between 1, no racial progress since the 1930s and 10, full racial equity. When the black student placed himself on the low end of the continuum and the white student placed himself on the high end, the white teacher facilitator walked to stand next to the white student while verbally supporting the black student’s opinion. This movement reproduced whiteness and reopened racial wounds originating from the unresolved racial grief propagated by the nation’s hypocritical racial existence. Both Vaught and Grinage effectively illustrate how the intersections between affect and whiteness induce traumas as a result of the U.S. nationstate’s melancholic relationship with race.

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Possibilities for Future Engagement with White Racial Melancholia

Despite white racial melancholia’s limited presence in education research, there is great potential for future engagements beyond the studies cited previously. Eng and Kazanjian (2003) demonstrate in their edited volume, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, the robust theoretical potential of melancholia:

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As both a formal relation and a structure of feeling, a mechanism of disavowal and a constellation of affect, melancholia offers a capaciousness of meaning in relation to losses encompassing the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the material, the psychic and the social, and the aesthetic and the political. (p. 3) There is a need for more studies that take up how the dynamics of whiteness intersect with melancholia, loss, and grief as it relates to education in a white supremacist society. In conclusion, one crucial intersection might include a deeper analysis of how Cheng’s (2001) assertion of white racial melancholia’s “imbricated but denied” (p. 12) relationship with people of color functions within the context of education. There are certainly generative linkages that could be forged and developed based on past education research concerning white emotionality, blackface minstrelsy and teacher education and white ambivalence. These analytic entry points could encompass how racial melancholia’s attachments to hypocritical American democratic values are vital to white subjectivity and help to shape ontological and epistemological formations of white identity and white supremacy. In turn, these theoretical orientations could provide innovative lenses for interpreting how whiteness operates in educational spaces to engender new ways of thinking about antiracism.

References Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy gender – Refused identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5(2), 165–180. Cheng, A. A. (2001). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. Oxford University Press. Crimp, D. (2002). Melancholia and moralism: Essays on AIDS and queer politics. MIT Press. Eng, D. L., & Kazanjian, D. (2003). Loss: The politics of mourning. University of California Press. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Eds.), The standard edition of the complete original works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. Norton. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1709–1791. Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial melancholia. Columbia University Press. Grinage, J. (2019). Reopening racial wounds: Whiteness, melancholia, and affect in the English classroom. English Education, 51(2), 126–150.

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Khanna, R. (2004). Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Duke University Press. Leonardo, Z., & Zembylas, M. (2013). Whiteness as technology of affect: Implications for educational praxis. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(1), 150–165. Lott, E. (1993). Love & theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. Oxford University Press. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers. Vaught, S. E. (2012). Institutional racist melancholia: A structural understanding of grief and power in schooling. Harvard Educational Review, 82(1), 52–77.

CHAPTER 71

Racial Profiling Crystal Simmons and Hannah Carson Bagget

Related Entries: Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration; Police Brutality

… Racial profiling is a discriminatory and controversial practice to identify, label, and judge someone based on (mis)perceptions about people. It has been defined as the “inappropriate use of race, ethnicity, or national origin, rather than behavior in individualized suspicion to focus on an individual for additional investigation” (Ramirez, Hoopes, & Quinlan, 2003, p. 1205). Often situated in discourse about the criminal justice system and in tandem with policing practices, profiling systematically targets and criminalizes People of Color, many of whom are young men. For example, police routinely stop People of Color for alleged traffic violations, often with the belief that drugs and/or weapons will be found. As a result of this practice, many People of Color have experienced the consequential effects of racial profiling, including introduction into the criminal justice system and increases in incarceration and sentencing periods. Historical and recent events that chronicle the untimely deaths of Black U.S. Americans at the hands of the police demonstrate the inherent and institutionalized impact of racism on Communities of Color. Racial profiling, however, extends beyond the fields of policing and of the criminal justice system; it intersects and shapes all aspects of U.S. American life. While the stereotype of the Black criminal is rooted in U.S. history since enslavement, so too are stereotypes of other People of Color, including Latinx people. Routinely perceived as “foreigners in their own land,” Chicanx- and Mexican-Americans, for example, are profiled based on (mis)perceptions about immigration status and linguistic ability. Profiling, its effects, and the ways that it intersects with stereotypes and discourse about People of Color in the U.S. are grounded in White Supremacist ideology and rooted in racist historical practices in the U.S.

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The Social Construction of Race

To understand how and why racial profiling exists, one must examine the social construction of race. Race viewed from a social lens relates physical characteristics such as skin color, hair type, and facial features to intellectual abilities, cultural achievements, and moral superiority. This construction of race began with European and American scientists such as Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Samuel Morton, and Charles Darwin in the late 1700s and 1800s who attempted to classify and separate humans based on unscientific evidence such as brain size or phrenology and the theory of natural selection. At the top of these hierarchies were Anglo-Saxons/Caucasians while Africans were relegated to the bottom. This “scientific” form of racism created the concept of race that would be used to justify the ongoing enslavement and the subhuman treatment of Africans. Despite the ending of slavery, the inhumane treatment of Black people remained a central and permanent fixture of American society, particularly during the nadir ofrace relations.

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Black Codes, Convict Leasing, and Peonage

The rise of the Jim Crow Era after the Civil War marked one of the most violent and pervasive eras of white aggression and hostility towards Black people in U.S. history. The denial of Black citizenship and civil rights was legalized through legislative policies and laws. Embedded within these structures were some of the first instances of racial profiling, the Black Codes. The Black Codes enacted by Southern whites after the Civil War limited the rights and freedoms of Black people through punitive measures like imprisonment for vagrancy. Such laws began the criminalization of Black people, especially men, for petty and sometimes nonexistent offenses. This new form of slave labor predicated on the incarceration of Black people was supported by the 13th amendment. The 13th amendment states: Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime [emphasis added] whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction and set the stage for the new racial caste system for Black people during this era through mass incarceration. To replace the economic benefits of plantation slavery, southern Whites utilized the labor of imprisoned Black men through convict leasing and debt peonage. Convict leasing allowed

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businesses and corporations to lease out penal labor. Similarly, peonage allowed workers or those convicted of crimes but who could not pay off their fines to work off their debt through labor. This system was vastly different from enslavement where slave owners had vested interest and wanted to protect their property. Instead, businesses and corporations would continue to lease out more labor when men got sick or died. Overall, racially profiling and stereotyping Black people as inherent criminals was a strategic and systematic way to rebuild southern prosperity while also controlling and minimizing the freedoms of Blacks.

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Stereotypes and Jim Crow Era

During the height of the Jim Crow era, negative and erroneous imagery of Black people as lazy, irresponsible, savages, and sexual deviants were portrayed throughout U.S. society. The term “Jim Crow” was derived from a Blackface character created by Thomas Rice. Such minstrel shows promulgated stereotypical beliefs regarding Black people. In addition, the silent 1915 film Birth of a Nation depicted Black men as sexually aggressive towards White women. The representation of the Ku Klux Klan as the protectors and guardians of White women against such crimes in the film led to their reemergence in the early 20th century. Outside of entertainment, scholarship in the social sciences also contributed to the negative stereotypes of Blacks. Like the early scholars of anthropology who used science to justify their beliefs and classifications on race, sociology scholars like Franklin Giddings and Thomas Jesse Jones built upon those ideas through their scholarship and teaching. Jones, who was mentored by Giddings, took interest in the education of Blacks and worked at Hampton Institute where he believed in training and preparing them for their “subordinate” position in society. Instead of teaching and educating Blacks to think for themselves and challenge racist structures, he believed in teaching them to accept the conditions of society. Jones once stated, “We want the enthusiasms of the Negro, his patriotism, his generosity, but we want to tone down his enthusiasm so that it does not become reckless impulsiveness which contributes to violent mob action and senseless rivalries” (Jones, 1926, p. 16). Jones’s statement is just one of the many where he demonstrates his belief in the Black race as being potentially impulsive and violent thus illustrating society’s judgment of Black people.

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The War on Drugs and Racial Profiling

Immediately following legislative and civil rights advancements for People of Color during the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon’s administration during the early 1970s initiated a “war on drugs.” This government-led program was ostensibly established to monitor, prevent, and control the use of illegal drugs. During Nixon’s administration, the scheduling of drugs like marijuana as dangerous and addictive, mandatory drug sentencing, and the creation and funding of the Drug and Enforcement Agency (DEA) were all established. Consequently, as stated by John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon advisor, the war on drugs was a deliberate effort by the administration to profile and target Black communities. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know that we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. (as cited in Baum, 2016, p. 2) This blatant admission of racial profiling signaled the transition from visible and overt forms of racism displayed during the Civil Rights Movement to the hidden and aversive form of racism embedded in governmental policies and social programs. This governmental policy led to an explosion in incarceration rates for People of Color during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Reagan’s discourse and focus on the crack epidemic in Black communities fueled racist and stereotypical images of drug use in America like the “crack baby” being born to poor, Black mothers. These narratives spurred Nancy Reagan’s campaign of “Just Say No” to drugs. This anti-drug message shielded the racist undertones of her husband’s policy by identifying the program as a public health issue. The failure of the Reagan administration to also address and impose harsh sentencing to cocaine users who were typically White revealed the intent to imprison Black men for lesser offenses (Alexander, 2010). Under Clinton’s administration, the curtailing of violent crime under the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act also ushered in a rise in

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mass incarceration by extending mandatory minimum sentencing, increased funding for prisons, and the hiring of thousands of law enforcement officers. As a result, Black and Latinx people were profiled, and continue to be profiled due to skin color while driving, using public transportation, walking in neighborhoods, and even at work. These practices also serve to reify stereotypes of People of Color as criminal and deviant. White people often view the increased imprisonment and incarceration of People of Color as evidence of a greater propensity toward criminal behavior.

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Racial Profiling and Political Rhetoric

Racial profiling has also been used in politics to promote fear and question citizenship status and rights. For example, amidst the decades of exploding incarceration rates, George H.W. Bush ran a political campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black man who had been convicted of raping a White woman; this ad was a watershed moment in mass media that effectively sealed the image of the criminal Black man in contemporary collective consciousness. The election and presidency of Barack Hussein Obama also revealed deep racial tensions and ideologies in present day U.S. society. Uncertainty surrounding Obama’s middle name and the origin of his birth led many White Americans to question his religion and citizenship. The Birther Movement, led and supported by many conservative politicians including President Trump, pushed President Obama to reveal his birth certificate to the general public. More recently, political rhetoric has focused on Latinx people, and specifically people of Mexican descent and Mexican-Americans as “drug smugglers,” “rapists,” and “criminals,” such that people who phenotypically look “brown” are routinely stopped by police and immigration officials who ask for proof of legal residency.

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Racial Profiling and September 11th

Attacks on U.S. soil, both historically and in contemporary times, have led to the racial profiling of groups based on their ethnic and religious identity. For example, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces resulted in the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. President Roosevelt’s attempt to protect U.S. interests and safety from espionage was grounded in fear and xenophobia. Similarly, the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 resulted in increased profiling of Arabs and Muslims through the passage of the Patriot Act by Congress and

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Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “Special Registration” policy. Both governmental policies gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies permission to conduct investigations, which included the acquisition of wiretaps, telephone, and internet records, and to require foreigners from designated countries to register in the U.S. In many parts of the nation, hate crimes and Islamophobia also increased due to government suspicion. Profiling and discriminatory practices continue today under the Trump administration with efforts to ban immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.

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Material, Physical, and Psychological Effects of Profiling

Racial profiling has material, physical, and psychological consequences for People of Color. For example, housing and lending audits across the country reveal that People of Color face profiling when submitting leasing and mortgage applications (Blank, Venkatachalam, McNeil, & Green, 2005). The practice of “redlining” discriminates against People of Color, concentrating communities into low-income neighborhoods and housing developments and preventing the accumulation of property wealth via discriminatory and predatory lending (Coates, 2014). Profiling routinely occurs in employment practices as well. For example, hiring studies indicate that people whose names ‘sound African American’ are less likely to get callbacks for interviews even when credentials are equal or more desirable than applicants with “White sounding names” (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). Racial profiling further manifests in physical ways for People of Color. The most obvious physical effect of racial profiling is loss of life. Police shootings, killings, and mistreatment of People of Color, such as the high-profile police beating of Rodney King in 1991, frequently occur without provocation or justification in the U.S. Similarly, racial profiling by citizens also occurs, often with the same consequences, such as Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of George Zimmerman. This loss of life is substantial and has also historically been unaccounted for in that many police municipalities and surrounding communities do not track deaths that result from profiling. Physical effects of profiling and discrimination also manifest in the form of higher rates of heart disease in adults of Color and increased anxiety and depression in adolescents of Color. Psychological effects from profiling are also profound. For example, many scholars of color have written (from experience) about the ‘racial battle fatigue’ that comes with being forced to navigate Whiteness and oppressive systems and the everyday microaggressions that People of Color face due to racialized

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perceptions. Parents of Color often must socialize their children with ways to navigate situations and contexts where their children may be profiled by police, shopkeepers, and educators. Parents routinely advise their children of Color to be obedient, compliant, and quiet, or risk great harm or peril; even when children of Color adopt and employ these behaviors, they are not always safe from the psychological and physical effects of racial profiling.

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Challenging Racial Profiling in Social Spheres

High profile murders of People of Color, especially African American people, have spurned increased scrutiny of profiling patterns. Police departments, such as those in Ferguson, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Los Angeles often face lawsuits due to profiling patterns; these legal actions occur in conjunction with increased demands for body cameras from criminal justice communities and the general public. The rise of social media has also brought into focus the ways in which People of Color are regularly reported for swimming, studying, shopping, and simply existing in spaces that are perceived to be “White.” Altercations are often filmed via smartphone and posted online where they become “viral” and the “profiler” is exposed, often facing legal or employment consequences. In the public education system, school-based practitioners and police officers in schools often profile Students of Color based on the same stereotypes that exist in broader societal contexts. For example, the characterization of urban schools as unruly, violent, poor and low-performing has created a stigma amongst teachers and parents, resulting in “White flight” and increasing segregation. Students of color are often assigned harsh disciplinary consequences and subsequently excluded from instruction based on offenses that are open to practitioner interpretation, such as “defiance.” These trends have led to an increased focus on the “school to prison pipeline,” which posits that students who are excluded from school and introduced into the juvenile justice system for school-based incidents have difficulty in exiting that system. Efforts to disrupt the pipeline have included the introduction of legislation that prohibits exclusionary practices (suspensions, expulsions, etc.) as a consequence for “subjective” discipline. Other efforts include commitments from groups like the American Bar Association and the Southern Poverty Law Center to raise awareness about school discipline trends and advocate for students and parents who are forced to navigate the juvenile justice system because of schoolbased incidents.

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Current Movements to End Racial Profiling

In 2001 prior to September 11th, members of the 107th Congress introduced the End Racial Profiling Act which sought to end racial profiling in law enforcement. Under this proposed bill, any individual could bring forth civil lawsuits for justified cases of racial profiling. It also required law enforcement agencies to eliminate practices and to maintain and develop policies and procedures that would prevent racial profiling. The bill has been reintroduced on numerous occasions, but Congress has failed to enact it. The most recent iteration includes religion in the title to reflect recent discourse around the Muslim Ban. Failure of the government, however, to react and respond to these civil rights violations has resulted in the formation of advocacy groups and movements like Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee. Black Lives Matter, which has gained global attention, grew out of the national outrage and senseless death of Trayvon Martin who was racially profiled by George Zimmerman, a community watch leader. Followed by other state-sanctioned killings of unarmed Black people, the movement continues to promote awareness and advocacy through organized protests. Most recently, Colin Kaepernick has served as one of the faces of the movement through his protests of the national anthem during his tenure as a quarterback in the National Football League. His kneeling during the anthem was in response to police brutality and the anti-black racism that permeates society. Consequently, his decision to protest cost him his job, thus reiterating the role and power of White Supremacy. Immigration and Muslim American groups also continue to counter practices in racial profiling. Political rhetoric has played an instrumental role in the profiling of these groups. Citing fear and promoting xenophobia by characterizing these groups as violent criminals who pose as a threat to our democracy has led to extreme immigration policies. Questionable tactics like the separation of families and placing children in cages used by border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents has incited many groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to file civil complaints and federal lawsuits against the government. Finally, to address the “War on Drugs,” many states have decriminalized and/or legalized the use of marijuana, which is a scheduled one drug, classified under Nixon’s administration. These efforts have the potential to reduce the number of People of Color profiled and arrested for possession charges.

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References Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Baum, D. (2016). Legalize it all: How to win the war on drugs. Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991–1013. Blank, E. C., Venkatachalam, P., McNeil, L., & Green, R. D. (2005). Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in Washington, DC: A mixed methods approach. The Review of Black Political Economy, 33(2), 9–30. Coates, T. (June, 2014). The case for reparations. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ Jones, T. J. (1926). Four essentials of education. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Ramirez, D. A., Hoopes, J., & Quinlan, T. L. (2003). Defining racial profiling in a post-September 11 world. American Criminal Law Review, 40, 1195.

CHAPTER 72

Reparations Jenna Cushing-Leubner

Related Entries: American Indian Boarding Schools; Brown v. Board; Integration of Schools; Settler Colonialism; Whiteness as Property

… Making, or paying, reparations happens when one party (typically a government or nation-state) makes payments (e.g., actions, policies, lands, money) to another party (e.g., a group of people or other nation-states) in an effort to compensate for wrong-doings and atrocities they have committed. One wellknown example of large-scale reparations is the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that required the German government and other members of the Central Powers pay reparations for the atrocities they committed during World War I. 32 years later, West Germany’s first post-World War II Chancellor Konrad Adenauer committed to pay reparations to European Jews following the Shoah (also referred to as the Holocaust), saying, “In our name, unspeakable crimes have been committed and [we will] demand compensation and restitution, both moral and material, for the persons and properties of the Jews who have been so seriously harmed” (Brooks, 1999, p. 61). His own Social Democrats party was split in their support, and the announcement was met with public violence, civil unrest, and myriad forms of refusal. Reactions by Jewish survivors of the Shoah, too, were mixed, including a sense that accepting reparations would serve as allowing perpetrators (individuals, governments, and companies) to wash their hands of the atrocities committed. In the end, payments were made to the newly-formed Israeli state over 10 years in the form of billions of German Marks, which funded (among other things) a variety of state infrastructure projects and individual claims.

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Examples of Reparations Claims and Failings in Settler Colonial States

Governments are called on to make reparations often in response to atrocities committed against racialized groups and Indigenous peoples. These calls © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_072

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typically occur during what is viewed as a “post”-period of atrocities, during a time of transitional justice (Minnow, 1998). One example of reparations for racial atrocities during a government-organized phase of transitional justice is the South African government’s reparations programs in conjunction with the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s. A post-period is not, however, a requirement or even the “appropriate time” for reparations, particularly in the case of nation-states formed through settler colonialism, which are not defined by bounded periods of contact and mass atrocities. Rather, enduring structures and systems of ongoing colonization, removal, replacement, and control shape the sociopolitical environment of the nation-state. Distinct from contact-colonialism, settler colonialism is a form of empire expansion and state-building that utilizes extended mechanisms of biocultural removal and replacement that supersede concepts of a start and end point for the colonial project (Wolfe, 2006). In these settings – such as what is currently referred to as the United States, Canada, Australia, etc. – techniques of racial capitalism and extraction-occupation through settlement form an ongoing basis for systems that form the fabric of social and governmental structures. These systems include schooling, carceral policing and justice systems, military complexes, labor market determinants of citizenship, and ecological commodification. The atrocities committed by and within settler colonial nation-states are rooted in the state’s reliance on historic and systemic racial capitalism and commodification of peoples (e.g. enslavement of Africans, native populations, and twice colonized Indigenous-Mexicans; mass incarcerations; capital and political disenfranchisement; commodification of the natural world paired with extraction) as an ongoing reality (Robinson, 2006). Thus, for reparations to be made in a post-period, beyond a time when atrocities have occurred, is inconsistent with the state-sanctioned violence that is instrumental in the formation and ongoing constitution of settler colonial nation states. In the United States, there have been public calls for large-scale reparations in response to atrocities and violence perpetrated against communities and peoples based on racial grouping, ethnicity, and Indigeneity. For one popular example, see Ta-Nahisi Coates’ (2014) well-circulated Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” which circulated following the NAACP’s high-profile backing of the reintroduction of H.R. 40 – a bill first introduced by Representative John Conyers and reintroduced in every Congress since 1989. There have also been direct public action cases for government reparations and lawsuits against private institutions. The earliest efforts to demand reparations from the United States for generations of African and African-American enslavement occurred

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in the late 1800s through William T. Sherman’s Special Order 15 (1865) (i.e. “40 acres and a mule”), Pennsylvania Senator Thaddeus Stevens (1866 & 1867 Slave Reparations Bill), and by Callie House (founder of the “National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association” and designer of the taxation plan that served as the basis for legislating its enactment). Of these early efforts, Sherman’s and Stevens’ were both either dismantled or vetoed by then-President Andrew Johnson. The state punished neither Sherman nor Stevens – both men of European and land-owning descent (Salzberger & Turck, 2004), while Callie House – a woman of African descent who had been born into enslavement – was arrested and imprisoned (Berry, 2009). This serves as a reminder of the unequal response governments serve those who call for and instrumentalize reparations. The most well-known example of a reparations promise in the United States is encapsulated in the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” representing the U.S. government’s promise to make reparations to enslaved peoples of African descent during Reconstruction. Specifically, William T. Sherman issued Special Order 15 (January 1865) in response to dialogue with 20 leaders of Savannah, Georgia’s Black community. The order outlined 400,000 acres of seacoast and islands from Charleston, SC to the St John’s River in Florida, reaching 30 miles inland. The order included language that specified that this land be parceled up to no more than 40 acres of tillable land and that this land would be fully governed and inhabited by people of African descent in perpetuity (Myers, 2017). The “mule” refers to a later inclusion of lending mules to the 40,000 Freedmen who settled on the land. The U.S. government did not fulfill this reparation promise of land and self-governance. U.S. President Andrew Johnson overturned Special Order 15 in fall of 1865 and returned the land to Euro-American settlers. It has remained as the foundation for ongoing calls by people of formerly enslaved African descent for the U.S. government to make reparations for large-scale kidnapping, enslavement, mass murder, mass sexualized violence, and ongoing structural violence (Commission to Study Reparation, 1989–2018; Kelley, 2002; Ogletree, 2003). In 1989, U.S. President Ronald Reagan made a formal apology on behalf of the U.S. government to people of Japanese descent who had been forcefully removed from their homes, had their assets frozen, were compelled to sell their property, and were sometimes sent hundreds of miles away to internment camps during World War II. This formal apology was a part of the Civil Liberties Act and was accompanied by payments of $20,000 to just over 100,000 survivors of U.S. internment. The formal apology was offered to the community. Reparations payments were made only to living survivors.

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In regard to First Nations and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, the U.S. and Canadian governments both have long-standing histories of making and breaking treaties, seizing land, separating children from families, and enforcing compulsory residential and English language Euro-American schooling. Ongoing litigation and class-action lawsuits using both tribal law and U.S./ Canadian government law have resulted in settlements, dismissals, and active ongoing negotiations. There is significant debate and disagreement around the case for reparations, which relies on a non-Indigenous justice paradigm that includes continued commodification and territorializing of land (e.g. cash settlements as compensation for illegal seizure of land) (Bradford, 2005; see also, for example, “Give Back the Black Hills/The Black Hills are Not for Sale”). Calls for reparations have long constituted a central part of struggles for Black liberation. These calls have offered expansive definitions of the shapes, opportunities, and endemic requirements for reparations viewed holistically. In The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, eminent sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois laid out the unwillingness of white America (inclusive of the structures of governmentality and the hegemonic ideologies on which they are predicated) to acknowledge and account for the legacies of enslavement (as just one mechanism of racial capitalism). He argued that reparations in the context of Black struggle be viewed as the right to self-determination. Marcus Garvey and the Back to Africa movement of the 1920s and 1930s articulated this holistic and multi-faceted approach to reparations, the possibilities and demands for which were amplified by the Black Panther Party’s development of free breakfast programs, free clinics and medical care, continuation of Freedom Schools, strategic and organized cross-group demands for ethnic studies and affirmative action for access to higher education, and prison and carceral state abolition efforts. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. mapped the entanglements of a global reckoning with what postcolonial scholar Lisa Lowe has since described as the intimacies of four continents: the expansion of empire and formation of colonial and postcolonial nation-states through mechanisms of racial capitalism rooted in the exploitation and humiliation of Indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Asia. King called for a “broad-based and gigantic” reparation, saying that The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures, which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such

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measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. (p. 59)

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Reparations as a Form of Justice

Conceiving of reparations is a means of conceiving of justice. In his theory of reparations, legal scholar James Bolner (1968) defined reparations as “[b] enefits extended in various forms to those injured by racial discrimination practiced by, or with the acquiescence of, the government of a representative democracy […] a payment of damages to those nonwhites who have been injured by racial discrimination” (p. 41). Reparations within European and American paradigms of justice are, in this way, a form of corrective justice – a necessity in maintaining a precariously stitched together and foundationally unjust society. Discursively, reparations as a form of European and American paradigms of justice present as restitution, restorative justice, transformative justice, and transitional justice. Critiques of conceiving reparations as a means towards restorative and corrective justice highlight the ways that reparations as a discourse can be used to sustain white and settler supremacist systems in fundamentally unjust nation-states. When calls for reparations are utilized to make the case of correcting harms in order to restore justice, reparations are framed as a possibility to return to a time of justice. This suggests that there was a time when there was justice in the nation-state. In the context of nationstates rooted in racial capitalism and settler colonialism, calls for reparations as a means to an end of the critique and truth-telling of the endemic violence of the nation-state thus run counter to the possibilities of a yet-unformed paradigm of justice. Apache legal scholar William Bradford (2004) suggests that calls for and responses to reparations exist across four approaches to justice: supersession, compensation, restoration, and justice as Indigenism. Compensation and restoration account for the approaches discussed to this point. Supersession relies on an argument of the innocence and precarity of the current state, arguing against reparations by making the case that comprehensive reparations would negatively impact members of the current society and the state itself such that these impacts would outweigh (and thus supersede) the historical impacts they were designed to compensate for. Justice as Indigenism offers a course towards reparations and possibilities of justice along seven distinct and inextricable stages. These stages are: (1) acknowledgment, (2) apology, (3) peacemaking, (4) commemoration, (5) compensation – though not in the

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form of wealth transfer, (6) land restoration, (7) legal reformation for Indian self-determination, and only then might the stage of reconciliation be opened. Because reparations can be conceived of across these multiple approaches to and paradigms of justice, calls for the form reparations take can also be incommensurable with one another. These incommensurabilities speak to the interlocking logics of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure, and anti-Blackness. Thus, reparations that rely on the use of propertized Indigenous lands as capital to repay the economic, political, and moral debts owed to descendants of enslaved Africans serve to attempt to “make right” the impacts of state-serving and sanctioned white supremacy while maintaining the futurity of the settler state’s project of Indigenous removal and replacement.

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Forms of Reparations in Education

Some critical race and NativeCrit scholars recognize tensions in reparations-thinking regarding resource distribution that includes land-as-property to people who do not claim indigeneity as being incommensurable with native sovereignty. NativeCrit education scholars in particular outline calls for reparations-thinking in regard to the biocultural acts of terrorism and removal of native communities in part through the destructive forces of family separation and forced placement of children into government and settler boarding schools. For these reasons, and for myriad systemic examples of deculturation perpetrated through schools and schooling (Spring, 2016), education itself is a site for reparations. Reparations in the case of schooling should be considered broadly and taken across the mechanisms of curriculum, pedagogical practices, teacher certification, school policies, and learning environments. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) engages reparations-thinking in her outlining of educational debts that result in widespread, entrenched patterns of disparities in educational outcomes. In her presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, Ladson-Billings laid out a framework of four areas of historically accumulated educational debts that result in persistent “achievement gaps.” These debts are historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral in nature. She argued that these debts must be addressed in order to shift the present state of education and schools, understand the offerings of educational research to date, and (potentially) transform the future trajectory of education in its relationship to public institutions. Curriculum and curriculum studies can serve to promulgate the logics and processes of whiteness and settler futurity or they can work to upend settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Eve Tuck (2011) suggests that an anticolonial

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curriculum could serve as rematriation in the face of ongoing colonial practices of racialization, privileging, protecting, and preserving whiteness. Curricular rematriation goes beyond repatriation (“restoring homeland, or going home again” [p. 35]) and re-visions towards Indigenous reclamation of education that includes “cultural knowledge and artifacts, theories, epistemologies and axiologies” (p. 35). As reparations with a paradigm of Indigenism, curricular rematriation must be participatory and anticolonial, done with communities of people most historically negatively impacted by the patterns of deculturalization endemic to the project of schooling. Educational reparations in the form of rematriation can be seen in community-determined education efforts and struggles for community-driven designs for education. The more than 50-year struggle for ethnic studies in K-16 schools holds steady in its strategic demand to change curricular content, instructional approaches, and credentialing of teachers. Freedom Schools, developed in the 1960s by the U.S.-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have maintained their autonomy and their mission of corrective action to counter “sharecropper education” of children of African descent and white children raised in low-income settings. Over time, Freedom Schools have expanded to offer corrective approaches to educational reparations for youth from multiple racialized communities. There are numerous examples of Native, Indigenous, and First Nations education struggles for rights to sovereignty in the education of youth that honor place, language, and ceremony. Papahana Kaiapuni – a Hawai’ian school started through language revitalization efforts and led by families – “sought reparations for the injustices against their government, land, and people […] calling for sovereignty and restoration of many culturally important practices [that included the Hawai’ian language]” (Luning & Yamauchi, 2010, p. 47). Examples of Indigenous language and culture revitalization efforts embedded in and beyond the schooling project can be found nearly any place schools have been used in an effort to colonize and coerce. For those interested in reparations, this opens up philosophical and strategic questions of conceiving of reparations as a political and legal tool for leveraging and/or sustaining sovereignty. Additionally, reparations connected to education can be conceived of in myriad ways, all of which contribute to educational systems’ perpetration of state-sanctioned violence that result in claims to reparations across dispossessions of opportunity, health, and livelihood. These include: (1) The distribution of funding, material resources, and structural aspects that overdistribute in recognition of generations of under resourcing. (2) Policies that direct resource and wealth distribution on the neighborhoods and regions historically restricted

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from accumulating educational rights and self-determination. (3) Culturally and linguistically sustaining health and wellness programs that are designed from within communities to heal from toxic stress and generational traumas. (4) The institutionalization of learning and knowing as segmented post-Enlightenment disciplines. (5) Structures and policies that utilize management discourses to construct and frame youth as bad/good, with direct linkages to processes of enslavement and incarceration. (6) Colonial, settler, racialized, and classed languages as gatekeepers for educational access and attainment. (7) Curriculum and pedagogies that extract and restrict what knowledge and ways of knowing are considered valuable and legitimate across the curriculum. and (8) Institutional and political policies that govern what knowledge, experiences, and forms of education legitimate who becomes a teacher, what is required of a teacher, and what is allowable for a teacher to say and do.

References Berry, M. F. (2009). My face is Black is true: Callie house and the struggle for ex-slave reparations. Vintage. Bolner, J. (1968). Toward a theory of racial reparations. Phylon (1960-), 29(1), 41–47. Bradford, W. (2004). Beyond reparations: An American Indian theory of justice. Ohio St. Law Journal, 66, 1. Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for Africa-American’s Act. H.R.40 to 115th Congress. (2017–2018). Sponsor Rep Conyers John, Jr. First proposed to Congress 1989. Kelley, R. D. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Beacon Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. Luning, R. J., & Yamauchi, L. A. (2010). The influences of indigenous heritage language education on students and families in a Hawaiian language immersion program. Heritage Language Journal, 7(2), 46–75. Minow, M. (1998). Between vengeance and forgiveness: Facing history after genocide and mass violence. Beacon Press. Myers, B. (2017, June 8). Sherman’s field order no. 15. New Georgia Encyclopedia. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermansfield-order-no-15 Ogletree Jr., C. J. (2003). Repairing the past: New efforts in the reparations debate in America. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 38, 279. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press.

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Salzberger, R. P., & Turck, M. (Eds.). (2004). Reparations for slavery: A reader. Rowman & Littlefield. Spring, J. (2016). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States. Routledge. Tuck, E. (2011). Rematriating curriculum studies. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 8(1), 34–37. Wildcat, D. R. (2014). Why native Americans don’t want reparations. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/06/10/why-nativeamericans-dont-want-reparations/

CHAPTER 73

Revolutionary Consciousness Walter D. Greason, Nicole Pulliam and Vernon Smith

Related Entries: False Consciousness; Marxism; Postcolonialism and Whiteness; White Supremacy

… The ability to transform civilization relies on the concept of revolutionary consciousness. Benjamin Franklin attempted this work in the ways that he imagined the possibility of “America” as a sovereign republic. In 1749, he proposed the creation of an academy that would cultivate the knowledge and skills among young men that might generate a revolutionary consciousness. A generation later, his experiment yielded an elite class of landowners who believed they shared a culture distinct from their ancestry in Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence proposed a vision of human freedom and individual rights that became the transformative ideals for two centuries. However, the origins of revolutionary consciousness precede the modern era. Human civilization evolved in eruptions and discontinuities over the last 5,000 years. Social and personal commitments to revolution shaped each transition. Racial Consciousness moved from the definition of Europeans as “white” based on their Christianity through the emergence of post-colonial identities that reshaped racial and ethnic perceptions in human civilization. The 21st century will be defined by the success of intersectional analysis to dismantle white supremacy, patriarchy, and global capitalism. Revolutions carry the implications of military violence. Transitions among empires and within them most often involved the deaths of thousands of human beings. However, a true revolution involves a transformation of ideas. In that way, revolutionary consciousness is the core of any social transformation, whether violent or not. Human history revolves around religious revolutions – from the ancient Hebrews, Axumites, Greeks, and Romans through the medieval emergence of Islam. The core debate among these traditions focused on the structure of devotion – many gods or a single one. Ideological revolutions often followed technological breakthroughs, the most famous example being Guttenberg’s press and the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church. When human beings began to transition from writing to printing, the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_073

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framework for human ideas transformed in fundamental ways. It is this standard of revolutionary consciousness that best informs our current approach to the topic. From the European Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the framework of human expression relied on words (semantics), sounds (music), and images (semiotics). From the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, humanity radically transformed its ideological expressions in all three categories. John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson have remained the focus of the debates about the Enlightenment of the 18th century that shaped the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the emphasis shifts to Kant, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger for the discussion of human liberty and capacity. This shift reflects a broad portrait of the modern intellect – a range of portraits about the dynamics and limitations of human rationality. The racial consensus around white supremacy appeared self-evident to these writers, despite extensive literary and scientific evidence to the contrary. Their committed belief in a racial hierarchy of human beings defined modernism at its core. The earliest forms of white supremacy in Europe revolved around fear and hatred towards Muslims. Catholic writers equated whiteness with purity and holiness, and then they extended the symbolic meaning into the literal flesh of Central and Western Europe. The geographic centers of these discussions were Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid. By 1515, the budding successes of Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish imperial projects spawned narratives of indigenous, African, and Asian inferiority. As George Fredrickson has noted, race inscribes the differences of ethnicity with a permanence about character and nature. Perceptions about racial groups developed into religious justifications for slavery and exploitation. Most persistent among these stories was the “Curse of Ham” – a narrative about the descendants of Noah’s son being marked by God as servants to his brother’s descendants in perpetuity. The confluence of cultural contact and religious conformity in the 16th and 17th centuries drove the construction of a racial consciousness among Europeans that shaped imperial ambitions. Johannes Blumenbach wrote the treatise that informed much of Enlightenment opinion in his On the Unity of Mankind (1795). He expanded on the work of Carl Linnaeus in Systema Natura (1758). These efforts laid the foundations for rational inquiry in emerging fields like biology and anthropology but carried the fundamental irrationality of white supremacy as their foundation. These attempts at rationalizing settler colonialism persisted for two centuries with religious justifications for their prevalence. However, as industrialization transformed European empires in the late 19th century, science increasingly provided explanations to reinforce social perceptions of racial

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differences. Francis Galton led this transformation with his book, Hereditary Genius (1869). Charles Davenport took up this banner through the Eugenics Record Office, generating an international movement in support of sterilizing the genetically “unfit.” This movement gained strength and momentum between 1912 and 1939. The adoption of these principles by the National Socialist government of Germany led to some of the worst human rights abuses in recorded history. The emergence of empirical social science developed a series of ethical limitations on biological research among human beings, most notably the 1947 Nuremberg Code that produced the concept of informed consent. This statement led to the adaptive frameworks represented by the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki (1964–2008). All of these discussions represented the evolution of racial consciousness since the middle of the 19th century. Hundreds of political movements used these concepts to segregate and oppress people of African, Asian, and indigenous ancestry. Prominent examples in the United States include the Temperance movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the White Citizens’ Councils. This fetish of rationalism reached its crescendo in the accelerating waves of technological industrialization and the compounded catastrophes of two world wars and a great depression. From the Bolshevik Revolution through the Independence movements in Asia, Africa, and South America, the second half of the 20th century fixated on a profound uncertainty about the application of Enlightenment ideals to every individual human being. Lenin, Du Bois, Robeson, Mao, Cabral, Kenyatta, Castro, Fanon, Baldwin, and Chavez all challenged the remnants of the European imperial order. For the most part, they failed to dislodge the center of intellectual discourse from its foundations in Berlin, Paris, London, and New York. As a result, revolutionary consciousness has stagnated across the ideological spectrum. A fetid moderation defines one pole, while reactionary conservativism pulls the global political economy back toward the 18th century. Postcolonial theory confronted these limitations and attempted to define a transcendent humanism that celebrated human diversity and autonomy simultaneously. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights has sustained this vision for the last three generations. Ella Baker’s vision of democratic grassroots revolution stretched beyond the limitations of Gandhi’s Hindu nationalism and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s beloved community. Grounded in a working-class black feminism that viewed nonviolence as a tactic, not an ideology, the greatest victory of this revolutionary consciousness was the adoption of the South African Constitution following the collapse of the Afrikaner apartheid regime in 1994. Based on the expansion of human freedom celebrated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nelson Mandela became a symbol for the possibility of an

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inclusive and socially just society. The collapse of the Soviet Union at nearly the same moment offered a possibility to envision democratic accountability across national boundaries in the form of institutions like the World Bank, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, and International Criminal Court. Intersectionality emerged from this foundation to radicalize democracy in the hands of global majorities in Africa, India, China, and South America. Against the broad, imperial evolution of racial consciousness, social scientists and educators in the 19th and 20th centuries created ideologies of humanism, both religious and secular. The most notable advocates for these ideas in the United States prior to the Civil War were the radical abolitionists. From David Walker to Sojourner Truth to John Brown to Frederick Douglass, these leading intellectuals used a variety of arguments to counter the mythology of racial difference and its debilitating political consequences. In the aftermath of the victory of Radical Republicans during the early years of Reconstruction, it became apparent that the abolition of racial slavery did not end the adherence to white supremacy as a founding principle. Before the start of the twentieth century, racial segregation became the prevailing legal doctrine in every large, industrial society around the world. The outcry against industrial segregation around the world was led by voices like T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Their versions of social democracy focused on dismantling all forms of public policy based in the doctrines of white supremacy. Newspapers, magazines, and social movements emerged between 1881 and 1933 to create hundreds of coalitions in cities around the world to overthrow governments dedicated to racial segregation. The confluence of academic research that empirically revealed the biological similarities of all human beings with the inclusion of immigrants and African Americans in the New Deal coalition transformed the political economy of the United States between 1933 and 1968. This form of secular humanism at the basis of both national and foreign policy framed the emergence of fields like social history within the academy and popular pressure for inclusive initiatives like Black Studies programs. In South Africa, Steve Biko called for the abolition of apartheid and the rise of inclusive democracy. Toni Morrison published a body of literature about slavery, segregation, and liberation that defied description a decade earlier. Nikhil Pal Singh imagined the possibilities of transnational social justice movements to dismantle the remnants of European empires. Nell Irvin Painter catalogued the evolution of white identity from antiquity though the early 21st century in an effort to reveal the essential falsehoods of the modern age. Thousands of scholars, writers, politicians, and industrialists adopted the possibilities of creating networks of inclusive prosperity after 1972. Yet

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few of these transformations thoughtfully engaged in principles of antiracism rooted in the social integration of indigenous, African, and Asian populations into the global body politic. These organizations fell far short of their promises over the last generation as they relied on the expansion of global finance capital. These organizations turned away from the revolutionary visions of Baker and Mandela in ways that allowed autocracies to emerge in Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Fundamentalist theocracies in Israel, Iran, and the United States fueled a global regression against the principle of universal human rights. At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the best hope for revolutionary consciousness relied on nongovernmental organizations, universities, and widespread access to social media. How the majority of humanity embraces indigenous feminism in a struggle against financial capitalism will determine the nature of revolutionary consciousness in the decades ahead.

References Baldwin, J. (1963). The fire next time. Vintage. Branch, T. (2007). Parting the waters: America in the king years 1954–1963. Simon & Schuster. Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2004). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. Routledge. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2014). Black reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois): An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860–1880. Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, White masks. Grove Press. Feagin, J. R. (2010). Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations. Routledge. Fredrickson, G. M. (1987). The Black image in the White mind: The debate on Afro-American character and destiny, 1817–1914. Wesleyan University Press. Hobbes, T. (1988). The Leviathan. Prometheus Books. Jefferson, T. (1832). Notes on the state of Virginia. Lilly and Wait. Jordan, W. D. (2013). White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Katznelson, I. (2006). When affirmative action was White: An untold history of racial Inequality in twentieth-century America. W. W. Norton & Company Kelley, R. (1996). Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black working class. Simon & Schuster.

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Locke, J. (1824). Two treatises of government. Whitmore and Fenn. Nietzsche, F. W. (1907). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. Macmillan. Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. University of North Carolina Press. Robeson, P. (1998). Here I stand. Beacon Press. Smith, A. (2017). The wealth of nations book 1. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

CHAPTER 74

Roediger, David Walter D. Greason, Nicole Pulliam and Vernon Smith

Related Entries: False Consciousness; Revolutionary Consciousness; Whiteness as Property

… David Roediger is the Foundation Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. Author of 27 books and dozens of scholarly articles, Roediger is the definitive historian of the social construction of white identity in American history. His award-winning book, The Wages of Whiteness challenged a century of analysis about immigration in the 19th century. The combination of his theoretical rigor and his meticulous documentary research contributed to the legitimacy of American Studies as a field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Prior to the emergence of his scholarship, historians and social scientists attempted to study racial formation as a process exclusive to people of African, Asian, and indigenous ancestry in the United States. It was a field defined by the study of negative discrimination and its consequences. Roediger’s work enabled the engagement with processes of positive discrimination and the concepts of racial privilege. Roediger began his career at Northwestern University before moving to a tenure-track position at the University of Missouri. Earning tenure and promotion there, he then moved to the University of Minnesota, and later the University of Kansas. He worked as a Visiting Scholar and Fellow at the most prestigious institutions in the world, building a vibrant body of research about the history and contemporary implications of white supremacy that is unparalleled. Roediger won numerous awards for both his teaching and research, including the Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Carlton C. Qualey Memorial Award from the Journal of American Ethnic History. Born in southern Illinois in 1952, and educated in local public schools, Roediger graduated from the University of Northern Illinois with a Bachelor of Science degree in Education. He then earned his Doctor of Philosophy in History at Northwestern University in 1979. His activism includes work with

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the surrealist movement, support for organized labor, and antiracist organizing worldwide. Roediger is the son of Arthur E. Roediger and Mary Ann Lind Roediger. He married Jean Marie Allman (a professor of African history), and they have two sons, Brendan David and Donovan Joseph. The publication of The Wages of Whiteness in 1991 signaled a transformation in the trajectory of American history in the United States. Roediger began the analysis by reflecting on his personal autobiography and its impact on his theoretical approaches to Marxism. The modern professional historiography about race and racism ignored the work of African-American historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, and E. Franklin Frazier. The leading scholars of black women’s history (Darlene Clark Hine, Barbara Ransby, Paula Giddings, and Nell Irvin Painter, to name a very few) remain on the fringes of mainstream American historians’ approaches to understanding the past. That veil of ignorance began to lift with new approaches to understanding slavery as articulated by Winthrop Jordan, George Fredrickson, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, and Peter Kolchin. Roediger broke through the discussion of racial oppression based on the theories of history regarding African enslavement by moving the discussion of racial construction to European immigrants, notably from Ireland. This turn enabled new scholars to ask questions about the construction of white identity at different moments and in different places. Many black scholars had examined these questions – most notably, Du Bois and Hubert Harrison. However, the effort by a white scholar to engage in this introspection was necessary to overturn decades of professional hubris, marking a significant change in the historical profession. Roediger (1991) contests the Marxian approach to social class that sublimates race as a useful concept in historical analysis. In his words, “Meaning is thus always multifaceted and socially contested, but it is neither absent nor unconnected with social relations” (p. 15). Working men’s use of language remained the central feature of Wages of Whiteness, examining the changing deployment of words like gypsyhead, hireling, master, and boss. Roediger first constructs the ways that “white workers” understood themselves, then captures their lexicons in the discussion of their social worlds. The politics of this language follows the changing social structure of the antebellum United States before focusing on the myriad performances of racial perception in public venues like the minstrel theater. The analysis closes with insights about emancipation and the transformation of whiteness as a marker of free labor during and after Reconstruction. Whiteness, between the mid-17th and mid-18th century, carried with it economic and religious connotations. The ideas about white capacities and

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capabilities shaped the decades that preceded the European Enlightenment, based in mythologies about the Renaissance and Mediterranean antiquity. Benjamin Franklin’s imaginary “American” in the two decades prior to the American Revolution relied on these pillars of liberty in both material and spiritual terms. Roediger marks this transformation in his analysis of the word “mechanic.” Shaped as a term for degraded white labor, the Revolution opened the door for the mechanic to become synonymous with “freeman” – a person defending both political and economic liberty. In contrast, the delicate avoidance of the term “slave” in the Constitution reflected social concerns among whites of all social classes about the fragility of liberty. Whiteness became a category that indicated the capacity for freedom, while blackness presumed the permanence of bondage. During the second generation of the American republic, 1824 to 1851, these debates gained rigidity and adopted aspects of an urban patriarchy full in psychosexual anxiety, in Roediger’s words. The New York City riot of 1834 showed that the revolutionary tensions around racial concepts of whiteness and blackness had begun to flower. Young, white men – desirous of greater economic, political, and sexual freedom – openly lashed out against the concept of racial amalgamation. Their violence demonstrated a determination to prevent interracial sex whatever the cost. Attacks on black churches often featured minstrel performances in the tradition that became known as “Jim Crow.” A variety of epithets like nigger drunk developed into an extensive lexicon condemning shameful social behaviors as uniquely attributable to African heritage. In the worst instances, mobs destroyed black orphanages as symbols of impurity and social degradation. The frequency of the most dramatic events supported the adoption of racial thought as part of an American hermeneutic. Anti-black racism continued to evolve as a series of pseudo-scientific theories, but also, brutally, became an entrenched set of behaviors in American culture and society. Peter Kolchin met the challenge of Roediger’s efforts to engage in the historical understanding of white identity by rejecting the utility of the concept. For Kolchin (2002), the ideological fluidity of whiteness, its defiance of clear classification, undermined a careful, materialist analysis of American history. Not only did it defy the rigor of Marxian political economy, but it cultivated a more general lack of disciplinary restraint about the specific historical facts that scholars treasure. The etymology of the symbolic nature of whiteness derived from the works of George Fredrickson, Winthrop Jordan, and W.E.B. Du Bois in the historical profession (p. 160) Kolchin’s grounding in the literature of American slavery emphasized the rigorous distinctions of class and caste in

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contrast to the more intellectual preoccupation with race. This distinction in methodology shows a vast chasm in American historiography, even among the most ambitious and radical scholars. Where Roediger showed the power of whiteness as a concept to transform social relations in antebellum America, Kolchin analyzed the myriad distinctions among white property owners, and even specifically, slaveholders, during the same era. Both authors employed a vast body of primary source evidence, and both used innovative, interpretative readings of outstanding secondary literature to support their conclusions. Ultimately, this clash between two schools of American historiography reveals that the nuances of scholarly understanding must never yield a singular perspective on the past. The debate itself provides the most effective instruction in the ongoing study of humanity. Kolchin’s synthesis of the emerging field of whiteness studies points to this powerful conclusion. As he considers the contradictions among the interdisciplinary scholars who approach the understanding of white identity, Kolchin mentions the work of Ruth Frankenberg, who described whiteness as an ‘“unmarked marker of others’ differences” (Kolchin, 2002, p. 160). This duality of omnipresence and invisibility, explaining “everything and nothing,” helps new students approach the categorical problems of race and racism in the modern world. Roediger complicates the choices in behavior and language that two generations of Americans faced in the first half of the 19th century. The first generation’s fears about the possible failures of a radical experiment in freedom yielded a vocabulary to limit freedom to a small group of heirs – European, Christian, immigrant, landholders. In the second generation, that fear became the core of a social anxiety as the experiment began to succeed. Perhaps freedom was only possible, if restricted to the few. That break with the fundamentally radical promise of the Declaration of Independence, and all of the legal, political, economic, and cultural barriers that followed from it reflected the core insecurities of white supremacy. Even Kolchin’s fixation on the materialist basis for history (as opposed to the plausibility of Roediger’s cultural methodology) reflects this underlying sense of danger. David Roediger is the very rare scholar whose craft as an historian has transformed the profession, the academy, and public discourse. His work benefits in profound ways from generations of scholars whose bibliographies suffered systemic neglect. Roediger stands at the forefront of interdisciplinary researchers who successfully dismantled social barriers within the academy in order to democratize the institution globally. Whatever limitations his work evinces, the successes of the research agenda far outweigh the failures.

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References Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Brodkin, K. (1998). How Jews became White folks and what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (1997). Critical White studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. Feagin, J. R. (2010). Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations. Routledge. Fredrickson, G. M. (1982). White supremacy: A comparative study of American and South African history. Oxford UP. Greason, W. (2009). Blackness and whiteness as historical forces in the 20th century United States. Multicultural Perspectives, 11(1), 49–53. Guglielmo, J., & Salerno, S. (2012). Are Italians White? How race is made in America. Routledge. Katznelson, I. (2006). When affirmative action was White: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. W. W. Norton & Company. Kolchin, P. (2002). Whiteness studies: The new history of race in America. The Journal of American History, 89(1), 154–173. Roediger, D. R. (1994). Towards the abolition of Whiteness: Essays on race, politics, and working class history. Verso. Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Roediger, D. R. (2003). Colored White: Transcending the racial past. University of California Press. Roediger, D. R. (2006). Working toward whiteness: How America’s immigrants became white: The strange journey from Ellis Island to the suburbs. Basic Books. Wise, T. (2010). White like me: Reflections on race from a privileged son. Soft Skull.

CHAPTER 75

School Choice Erin Baugher

Related Entries: Brown v. Board; Integration of Schools; Neoliberalism; Segregation in Schooling

… In a July 2017 meeting of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), AFT President Weingarten asserted that school choice programs – such as forprofit charters, vouchers, and tax credit programs – were rooted in the United States’ segregationist history; Weingarten stated, “[the] use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” The concern for many critics of school choice is the extent to which school choice policies are a continuation and exacerbation of a system of segregated education and furthermore that privatization efforts are a damaging withdrawal from public education. Weingarten’s comments voice what many school choice opponents fear, the ramifications of policies that allow for further ethnoracial and socioeconomic segregation and the ability of public education to persist in the face of strategic starvation through disinvestment. In spite of the opposition, the school choice movement in the United States continues to grow in support and operation. While over 80% of the school-aged population in the United States attend traditional public schools, the school choice movement has increased numbers of and enrollment in non-traditional public schools for students and families. As of 2019, 43 states and the District of Columbia allow charter schools and 30 states as well as the District of Columbia have adopted state-level school choice policies, including vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, personal tax credits, and Education Savings Accounts. Understood as a philosophical orientation, school choice is entirely consistent with American notions of individualism and freedom. School choice offers families increased levels of autonomy and enables them to make educational decisions that best serve their needs and interests. School choice has garnered a broad-base of social support which transcends social cleavages; what was in origins a movement of largely White, conservative proponents, choice is now supported by many social-justice-oriented liberal supporters as

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well. The spectrum of choice supporters is as wide and varied as choice policies themselves; choice policies range from the limited use of charter schools to large-scale disinvestment in public education through the use of vouchers. For many liberal choice proponents, including the Obama administration, charter schools are a viable alternative to redress the needs of historically underserved communities largely of low-income students and students of color. For other more ardent choice supporters, including the Trump administration, choice presents an opportunity to fulfill Milton Friedman’s vision for the abolition of government administered public education – instead favoring a free market approach which is merely governmentally subsidized through the use of educational vouchers. The broad coalitional nature of choice supporters, along with the discursive construction of choice in ways that appeal to American ideals of individualism and freedom, can make it difficult to understand the opposition to school choice; understanding school choice and its opposition requires examination of the sociohistorical origins of school choice. School choice policies emerged at a unique moment of issue convergence in the United States following a series of Supreme Court decisions limiting religion in public education, a series of judicial and federal actions to address school segregation, and the increased adoption of neoliberal social and fiscal policies designed to chip away at the social safety-net of the welfare state and protect economic self-interest. The sociohistorical impetus and design of school choice policies were intended for the preservation of White hegemony and affluence. Thus, for opponents of choice, the question is to what extent could a system designed for the preservation of White social and economic hegemony ever serve to address the oppression and subjection of underserved and marginalized populations? And further, how can choice policy be reconciled with the disinvestment in neighborhood public schools – still the first choice for the majority of families in the United States?

1

The Sociohistorical Origins of Choice

Horace Mann, first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, was instrumental in the creation of the system of compulsory public education. Mann’s justification for the necessity of public education was wrought with humanitarian and racist tensions that remain illustrative of the institution to this day. There existed a humanitarian, albeit paternalistic, concern which recognized the importance of a guaranteed welfare for the underclasses and its necessity for the preservation of civil, democratic society. At the same time,

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those justifications articulated a necessity for the protection and preservation of Whiteness through the creation of common culture. Those same justifications were utilized in the overtly racist and deculturizing efforts such as the operation of Native American Boarding Schools. By design, the system of public education was intended for social welfare, albeit through deculturalization of underclasses. Public education has always been highly decentralized and thus facilitated segregation through residential housing patterns, only exacerbated by discriminatory housing and lending practices. Public education has and continues to offer a great deal of autonomy to states and districts. The fragmented nature of schooling has meant that for some, school choice has always been a prominent feature of American schools. White populations of a certain socioeconomic status have always exercised choice by residential movement – “choice by feet.” Residential segregation patterns and local funding schemes have only perpetuated inequities and ethnoracial and socioeconomic segregation in schooling. Nevertheless, the perceived threats to White hegemony during the Civil Rights Era would give rise to the school choice movement, another means by which to further protect the interests of White affluence in the United States. The first in a series of perceived losses to White culture were the Supreme Court decisions throughout the mid-century, ruling religious activities in schools a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The first decision, McCollum v. Board of Education District 71 (1948), decided that the use of tax-established and supported property for religious instruction was unconstitutional. In the subsequent Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) decisions the higher court ruled that it was unconstitutional for schools to compose and require recitation of prayers and that mandatory Bible readings were an impermissible religious exercise by the government. The decisions taken in concert chipped away at the overt AngloSaxon Protestant dominion in schools and choice proponents would later use these decisions to support voucher payments to be directed to families for the purchase of private religious educational instruction, thereby circumventing the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. However, the most defining decision of the mid-century was the Court’s ruling in Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) which overturned the 60-year precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which had ruled segregated schools “separate but equal.” The Brown case began as five lawsuits brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of Black children and their families. The lead plaintiff Oliver Brown filed suit against the school board of Topeka, Kansas in 1951 after his daughter was denied admission to a White elementary school. The Brown

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decision ruled state-sanctioned segregation of public schools a violation of the 14th amendment. In spite of the Court’s 1955 Brown II guidance that desegregation begin “with all deliberate speed” the decision was met with resistance and cries of judicial activism. In 1956, led by Representative Howard Smith, a representative from Virginia and chairman of the House Rules Committee, members of Congress endorsed the Southern Manifesto to actively resist school desegregation and stymie legislative efforts to enforce desegregation. Without the capacity to execute or enforce desegregation activities, local school authorities and lower courts continued to uphold school segregation. Following the Brown decision, a number of southern schools began adopting voucher programs to allow for the continued segregation through the voucher financing of segregated White schools. The Prince Edward County School Board in Virginia went so far as to shutter its public schools completely to avoid desegregation and instead offered vouchers to White families. The actions of Prince Edward County were a model for districts throughout the country that willfully chose to oppose desegregation efforts and even further incentivize White students and families to leave desegregated schools. It was not until the 1964 decision Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, that the school board was forced to reopen its schools. Nevertheless, tuition grants to White students to attend private or out of district school options, allowed segregation to persist. The following year, a lower court ruled that the state tuition grants could not be used on public institutions that denied admission to students on the basis of race. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally afforded the federal government the power to enforce school desegregation. In addition to banning segregation in schools, the Act allowed the Attorney General to sue schools that failed to desegregate and further to withhold funding from segregated schools. Title IV of the Act allowed money for assistance in desegregating schools and allowed for federal government to initiate lawsuits to compel desegregation. Tile VI permitted the federal government to deny funds to schools that discriminated on the basis of race, color, and national origin and required schools receiving federal assistance to meet national standards for desegregation, thus paving the way for the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA, signed into law April 9, 1965, dedicated Title I funds to schools serving economically disadvantaged students. While not an explicitly race-conscious policy, Title I funds along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, aimed to redress the marginalization of Black students. A year after the Brown decision, Milton Friedman, intellectual father of school choice in the United States, wrote his first, in what would be a series of

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articles and books, on the disinvestment in public education through school vouchers (Friedman, 1955; Friedman, 1962; Friedman & Friedman, 1980). Friedman’s work ushered the language of school choice into the educational lexicon and embodied the neoliberal ideology omnipresent in the United States today. While recognizing the necessity of the government funding for public education, Friedman (1962) wrote of the governmental administration of education as “an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility” (p. 85). His proposal was to finance education “by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on approved education services” (Friedman, 1955, p. 125). The denationalization of education, Friedman proposed, would be met with increased school choices as a variety of schools would be created to meet the demand for alternatives. The proposal was rooted in neoliberal ideology of free markets and introduced the language of producer and consumer into the educational discourse; the Friedmans (1980) wrote, “in schooling, the parent and child are consumers, the teacher and school administrator are producers. Centralization in schooling has meant larger size units, a reduction in the ability of consumers to choose, and an increase in the power of producers” (p. 157). Further reflecting the neoliberal propensity to induce behavioral modification through social policy, Friedman (1955) posited school denationalization as a way of top-down social engineering, writing, “the advantage of imposing the costs on the parents is that it would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size” (p. 124). Friedman’s writings evoked the now familiar trope of the failures of public education, writing of the declining quality, unconducive learning environments, concerns over school safety, and rising costs. The racial paranoia of the era was at times only thinly-veiled and used as further justification for the necessity of school denationalization. The Friedmans (1980) wrote of the plight of urban spaces, fraught with violence where “school is more like that of a prison than a place of learning” (p. 158). The pathologizing of urban spaces and Black bodies as violent and dangerous was unconcealed; to this point, they wrote “much of the objection to forced integration reflects not racism but more or less well-founded fears about the physical safety of children and the quality of their schooling” (p. 165). Today the language of good schools, good neighborhoods, and suburban spaces continues to operate as code for White spaces. While school choice has become a policy promulgated for the advancement of historically marginalized and underserved student populations, in spite of its racist foundations, the origins reveal an overt concern for the protection of capitalist self-interest and White affluence. Friedman’s (1955) primary concern

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was one of double taxation; those forced to “pay twice for education – once in the form of general taxes and once directly” (p. 125). Required local school taxes and private school tuition were understood as a financial penalty and hinderance to freedom of choice. At times, the concern for the protection of affluence was couched within a concern for lower-income families who were unable to exercise choice – neither able to afford private school tuition nor move; however, at the crux of the opposition to the system was a matter of justice and fairness for those most apt and able to currently opt-out of the system of public education. As evidenced by the expansion of the Indiana school voucher program, originally passed in 2011 to provide vouchers for low-income students currently attending public schools, universal vouchers have been utilized more so by middle- and upper-income families already paying for private educations; since expansion of the voucher program in 2013, more than half the current voucher recipients never attended public schools before receiving the vouchers and the proportions of White and suburban voucher recipients have increased, while proportions of urban and Black students receiving vouchers has decreased (Turner et al., 2017). Consistent with Friedman’s intentions, vouchers are shown to subsidize private-school educations for families that have already chosen to opt out of the system of public education and tax dollars are being redirected from public schools to private educational institutions. Understanding school choice through a lens of critical race theory elucidates the ways in which seemingly race-neutral policies – guised under the language of choice and freedom – served and continue to serve the interest of White elites. Racism and Whiteness operate through pre-existing systems and structures in ways which obfuscate the racial overture; the adoption of policy and social change can only be understood with attention to how those actions benefit those in power. It was in this moment of elite-White interest convergence that the school choice movement emerged. The perceived threat to White hegemony through removal of state-sanctioned religious education and desegregation, along with the desire to protect economic self-interest, gave rise to the school choice movement in the United States.

2

Choice Today

Choice policies are common place in the United States today and take varying forms: charter schools, a publicly funded alternative to traditional public schools; school vouchers, also known as opportunity scholarships, which allow families to pay for schools outside the traditional, public education system; tax

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credit scholarships which allow corporations and individuals to deduct contributions to scholarship programs; individual tax credits which allow families to receive credits or deductions on state income tax to cover educational expenses, including private school tuition; and Education Savings Accounts (ESA) which allow families to contribute to government-authorized private savings accounts for authorized educational expenses. Since the adoption of the first voucher program in Wisconsin in 1990 and the passage of the first charter school legislation in Minnesota in 1991, 30 states and the District of Columbia have adopted choice policies and 43 states along with the District of Columbia have adopted charter school policies. Charter schools are among the most common and fastest growing forms of school choice in the United States today. Public elementary and secondary school options include traditional governmentally established and operated schools – often referred to as neighborhood schools because their enrollment is assured based upon residential feeder patterns; magnet schools – public schools which offer specialized subject areas and often require specialized admissions processes; and charter schools – funded by public monies but not assured enrollment and often operating with a far greater degree of autonomy. Between 2000 and 2015, the percentage of charter schools as a proportion of all public schools increased from 2% to 7% and in 2016, 5% of school-aged children enrolled in public schools were enrolled in a public-charter school (Snyder et al., 2019). Charter schools are public schools, as a matter of financial support, that have been chartered by the state, district, or other authorizing entity. Depending on the nature of the charter, charters are independently operated, by for- or non-profit organizations, and function in a semi-autonomous fashion which may allow a degree of latitude from certain laws and regulations of traditional public schools. At the onset of charter schools over 25 years ago, these schools were lauded as laboratories for educational innovation. The results of charter schools on educational outcomes have been mixed but charters nevertheless remain an important component of educational choice policies. While public schools remain the most common form of schooling for children in the United States (90.5% of school-aged enrollments) in 2016, almost 10% of the school-aged population attended a private school. Of those enrolled in private school, approximately 80% attended a religious private school and 20% attended a nonsectarian school (Snyder et al., 2019). Private schools are schools not primarily supported by public funds – religious or nonsectarian – and generally operate through tuition and private monies. However, as a result of the passage of school choice policies, private schools may now receive state funds through vouchers and tax subsidies. As an examination

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of Catholic school financing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin showed, vouchers, rather than worshippers, were now the largest source of revenue for voucheraccepting schools in the city (Hungerman et al., 2017). Under the auspices of the Trump administration, it is likely school choice policies will continue to advance throughout the United States. Despite its beginnings as a policy designed for the preservation and protection of Whiteness, a broad coalition has formed with the belief that school choice may be an answer to a beleaguered system of public education which has failed to address inequities in educational opportunity and outcomes. Ultimately, however, policies which allow for public education funding allocations to follow the child mean substantially less resources for public neighborhood schools. School choice policies run the risk of not merely replicating the system it purports to rectify but may further increase the social stratification by serving the interests of those most able to exercise choice. The threat posed by school choice is the threat of undermining the first choice for the majority of Americans – the choice of their neighborhood public school.

References Friedman, M. (1955). The role of government in education. In R. A. Solo (Ed.), Economics and the public interest (pp. 123–141). Rutgers University Press. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. The University of Chicago Press. Friedman, M., & Friedman, R. (1980). Free to choose: A personal statement. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hungerman, D. M., Rinz, K., & Frymark, J. (2019). Beyond the classroom: The implications of school vouchers for church finances. Review of Economics and Statistics, 101(4), 588–601. Snyder, T. D., de Brey, C., & Dillow, S. A. (2019). Digest of education statistics 2017, NCES 2018-070. National Center for Education Statistics. Turner, C., Weddle, E., & Balonon-Rosen, P. (2017, May 12). The promise and peril of school vouchers. National Public Radio, Morning Edition.

CHAPTER 76

School Discipline Gap Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Hilary A. Lustick and Alesia Hubert

Related Entries: Ladson Billings, Gloria; Mass Incarceration; Segregation in Schooling; School-to-Prison Pipeline

… The term, “school discipline gap,” refers to the disparate way teachers discipline students in schools according to social identities and educational labels. For example, educators suspend male students, African American students, and students with disabilities at far higher rates than their peers. Moreover, the likelihood of educators suspending Black students is two to three times greater than for White students (Carr, 2012; Gregory & Weinstein, 2008). And students with disabilities are twice as likely to face exclusionary discipline when compared with their peers (Crenshaw, Ocen, Nanda, & Carranza, 2015). Further, in the United States, during the 2013–2014 school year, White students comprised 50% of the total student population, but only 35.1% of students who were suspended. On the other hand, during the 2013–2014 school year, Black students accounted for 40% of the total suspensions, yet they comprised only 15.5% of the total student population in public schools (Office of Civil Rights, 2015). In addition to inequitable treatment, another serious concern is that exclusionary discipline practices do not work. Rather than curbing perceived misbehavior, when educators suspend students, there are greater chances students will be less interested and engaged in school and participate in increased risk-taking behaviors such as drug use. Further, exclusionary discipline starts a chain reaction of events that places students at risk for future incarceration. This is especially alarming when one considers that in 2012, Virginia reported the highest rate of school-based arrests and court referrals of any state in the nation (Legal Aid Justice Center, 2016). Moreover, during the 2012–2013 school year, almost 79,000 Virginia students were suspended or expelled with one fifth of the total occurring in elementary schools (Mansfield et al., 2018). Virginia also has a problem with recidivism rates; that is, punishments included 137,151 short-term suspensions of 10 days or less, 5,517 long-term suspensions of between 11 and 365 days, and 518 expulsions that comprised at least 365 days (Mansfield et al., 2018). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_076

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In addition to looking at national and state-level data, it is helpful to understand how the school discipline gap plays out in local education agencies (LEAs). For example, in 2017, Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, enrolled nearly 73,000 students with 11% of the overall student body receiving discipline referrals (Guilford County Schools, 2017). Taken together, referrals comprised more Black students than White students. But this is unsurprising since total enrollment of Black students is higher than that of White students. However, when one considers the proportion of total students in different identity groups that are referred for discipline violations, a more accurate picture emerges. For example, of the approximately 24,000 White students in Guilford County, teachers referred only 1,439 for discipline violations. In contrast, of the almost 30,000 Black students, teachers referred 5,113, nearly three times that of White students (Guilford County Schools, 2017). Moreover, the number of instructional days denied Black students is higher than any other subgroup within Guilford County Schools (Guilford County Schools, 2017). This holds true across the state: Kinsler (2011) found that Black students in North Carolina were suspended an average of 1 day longer than White students caught fighting. In fact, out-of-school suspensions for simple rule violations were, on average, 22% longer for Black students when compared to White students. Thus, in addition to being suspended in greater proportions, constituting the school discipline gap, Black students are also punished more harshly, exacerbating related connections to the school-to-prison pipeline. But, the school discipline gap and the school-to-prison pipeline are not just Southern problems. Rather, these troubling patterns persist in communities across the United States and are connected to educator partiality, whether intentional or not.

1

Connections to White Supremacy

Some may argue that the discipline gap is a normal and natural outcome to the increased frequency and/or severity of Black students’ misbehavior. However, research shows that this assumption is incorrect. In actuality, White students are more likely than Black students to break more uniformly recognizable policies such as fighting, while Black students are more likely than White students to be punished for interpretively subjective reasons such as violating dress code or perceived disrespect. Further, Sanchez (2015) found that at least 80% of police arrests in Chicago’s public schools were for minor infractions that would not have constituted arrests in other public settings. Even when controlling for poverty, disability, and a host of other variables, students of color

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are punished at higher rates and disciplined more harshly than White students. Further, Fabelo et al. (2011) found that in Texas, after controlling for over 80 other variables, African American ninth graders were 31% more likely to face discretionary exclusion than either White or Latinx peers. However, when it came to policies mandating automatic exclusion, Black students were 23% less likely than White freshmen to be found guilty of such offences (Fabelo et al., 2011). Thus, rather than blame the behavior of Black students for the school discipline gap, it is urgent that we examine the overrepresentation of minority students in school discipline data with a different lens. For instance, Anyon et al. (2014) studied contributing factors to the discipline gap and found that differential selection and differential processing were primary reasons students of color were disciplined more often and more harshly than White students. That is, Black and Latinx students are more often viewed by teachers as threatening as compared to teachers’ perceptions of White or Asian students; and thus, more often selected by teachers to receive office referrals. Six years prior, in their study of middle school students, Gregory and Weinstein (2008) found that teachers tended to classify Black students as more disrespectful or defiant than their White classmates. In this same study, they also found that almost 75% of teacher referrals for Black students across the United States were for behaviors labeled by teachers as defiant. Jean-Marie and Mansfield (2013) consider this tendency to view students of color as behaving less appropriately than White students as an example of cultural racism: “Found in both individuals and institutions, cultural racism attributes values and normality to White people and Whiteness, and devalues, stereotypes, and labels people of color as ‘other,’ different, less than” (p. 22). While teachers may not even be aware of their own racial biases, teachers who perceive Black students’ behavior as too far outside a valued norm, will practice what Anyon et al. (2014) called differential selection. This is an important consideration because the initial teacher referral is the first step in youth being sent to a school administrator where they could potentially be suspended for their behavior. Relatedly, the second contributor to the school discipline gap is in the differential processing of the referral by the school administrator. A study of Denver Public Schools found that while teachers were more likely to refer Black, Latinx, Native American, and multiracial students to the office than White students, only Black and multiracial students were the ones most likely to be suspended as well as face harsher penalties for similar offenses when compared with other students (Anyon et al., 2014). Thus, there is an element of anti-Black Whiteness that influences the school discipline gap to a noteworthy extent.

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Examples of Resistances

The inequitable representation of racial subgroups in school discipline data has been documented for at least two decades, while the overrepresentation of Black students receiving school discipline extends back even further to nearly 40 years. “This pattern of disproportionality is alarming in and of itself, but the knowledge that even one school suspension seriously curtails students’ life chances makes finding a solution all the more urgent” (Mansfield et al., 2018, p. 1). Thankfully, the situation is attracting the attention of lawmakers. For example, in 2012, the Colorado legislature struck down zero tolerance policies while New York City’s Education Chancellor called for an end to school suspensions in 2015. In addition, student led activists in Chicago co-authored Senate Bill 100 which requires an overhaul of discipline practices across Illinois. In addition to political examples of resistance, research also points to the need to: reform educator preparation programs, offer antiracism professional development for teachers and principals already in the field, and transform school culture generally, and discipline practices specifically, inside schools. Inextricable from efforts to close the discipline gap are efforts to center implicit bias as a topic in professional development, particularly White teachers. More White teachers are sharing personal stories of unlearning White privilege and working to end racism. While this personal work is key, it will be in vain if it does not connect directly to antiracist classroom and school practices. These practices include discipline. Lustick (2016) wrote about the strange separation between literatures on discipline reform and culturally responsive pedagogy, noting that the two are intertwined. She proposed a framework for culturally responsive, positive school discipline that incorporates elements of restorative justice with Ladson-Billings’s (1996) concept of culturally relevant pedagogy. Restorative practices are organized into three tiers in pyramid formation. This signifies that all students will receive some level of preventative support around community-building, social skills, and emotional management. Tier 1 restorative practices include community-building circles. In addition, Tier 1 would also include explicitly antiracist, culturally responsive lessons geared toward cultivating students’ critical consciousness and awareness of systems. Likewise, professional development would include opportunities for teachers to build restorative community at the staff level, and to cultivate their own critical consciousness. The International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP, 2010) recommends that restorative practices take place at the staff level for a full year before schoolwide implementation. In the restorative model, those who need additional support, or encounter conflict, will receive Tier 2 or moderate interventions (IIRP, 2010). These

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can include restorative conversations about how behavior impacts others and restorative circles to heal relationships and strengthen community when harm has occurred. In the culturally responsive discipline model, however, these practices must explicitly engage topics of structural discrimination and personal biases. This means, pragmatically, that teachers must be open to recognizing when bias has played a role in their disciplinary decisions or classroom management. Emerging research highlights students at a restorative school who undergo explicit curriculum on systems of oppression; leadership training in restorative facilitation; and ongoing support in social and emotional management. These student leaders expressed feeling cared for by their teachers and empowered to voice their opinions on school community matters (Lustick & Hinojosa, 2019). Tier 3 features the most formal components of the restorative model (IIRP, 2010). Tier 3 includes restorative conferences that are held in response to a serious incident or pattern of less serious incidents. These conferences involve a trained facilitator and offer the offender, victim, and supporters of both to express their feelings and concerns. The leader facilitates solution-making and navigates the reintegration of the offender into the community (Mansfield et al., 2018). Fowler, Rainbolt, and Mansfield (in press) heard similar comments from students on how participating in restorative discipline practices transformed the overall school culture and how students perceived their relationships with teachers, school administrators, and fellow students. For example, one student expressed that he was confident his principal cared for him and saw him “as a person rather than just another discipline referral.” He went on to explain that through the restorative conversations with his school administrator, that he was able to express some hard times he was having with his family and doing so “created a strong bond” with his school administrator. Another student remarked that the atmosphere felt “kind of like a family here.” The above examples align with other research that has shown that African American youth are perceived by teachers to be less defiant and more responsive to authority when students believe they have been heard and treated fairly, two cornerstones of restorative practices. Further, Morrison and Vaandering (2012) assert that all people, regardless of social identities, are found to be more cooperative when feeling respected by a group and proud of their membership. Thus, a restorative and culturally responsive approach to schooling can potentially transform life in schools for all students and the educators who work there. At the local level, there are specific examples of antiracist professional development. For example, The African American Male Initiative (AAMI) is a program that is currently active in several schools in Guilford County, North Carolina. The AAMI’s goal is two-fold: to enhance literacy instruction for students

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in Kindergarten through third grade and to expand teacher’s instructional strategies that would ultimately reach diverse learning styles. One essential component to reaching these goals is providing suggestions for long-term solutions to institutionalized oppression of people of color, specifically Black male students. For example, before working within Guilford County schools, teachers are required to attend antiracism training to learn how racism has historically impacted and currently impacts the well-being of African American males. Furthermore, a discipline initiative was piloted to “challenge beliefs and improve school climate” (Brinkley et al., 2018, p. 23). Eric Hines, the director of equity and inclusion led the initiative and provided daily coaching to teachers who were experiencing challenges within their classrooms. The goal was to share more equitable approaches to discipline as well as build more positive relationships between students and teachers. Consequently, referrals were reduced, and students felt more support from adults at the school. In conclusion, transformation begins with a mindset shift. A collective effort from school leaders, teachers, and the surrounding communities must emerge towards equitable practices. Administrators must model a critical consciousness against unjust policies and practices. Educators must take the path of least resistance to reject oppressive discipline measures. Courageous leaders ought to serve as advocates and reject the deficit images of traditionally marginalized groups of students who are essentially becoming excommunicated from their own school communities. Moreover, due to its subjective design, the current discipline system has long served as a tool of repression for minoritized students. Schools serve as gatekeepers by which a student’s future is determined. White supremacist thought and power has dominated the institution of schooling and this mindset has been carried down for generations. Nevertheless, by relentless exposure of the impact of white supremacy within the school systems, it can serve as the starting point for the eradication of the persistent discipline gap.

References Anyon, Y., Jenson, J. M., Altschul, I., Farrar, J., McQueen, J., Greer, E., & Simmons, J. (2014). The persistent effect of race and the promise of alternatives to suspension in school discipline outcomes. Children and Youth Services Review, 44, 379–386. Brinkley, B., Hines, E., Jones, A., McMillian, E., Sturdivant, B., & Walker, M. (2018). Fixing systems, not kids: Changing the narrative of Black males in guilford county schools. VUE, 48, 19–25. Carr, S. (2012, May 22). Do “zero tolerance” school discipline policies go too far? Time. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2115402,00.html

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Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., Nanda, J., & Carranza, T. (2015). Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced, and under protected. Columbia Law School, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, African American Policy Forum. Fowler, E., Rainbolt, S., & Mansfield, K. C. (in press). “It’s kind of like a family here”: Students’ perceptions of their experiences with restorative practices in an urban high school. Gregory, A., & Weinstein, R. S. (2008). The discipline gap and African Americans: Defiance or cooperation in the high school classroom. Journal of School Psychology, 46(4), 455–475. Guilford County Schools. (2017). Analysis of 2016–2017 discipline data. Division of Accountability and Research. https://www.gcsnc.com/Page/43601 International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP). (2010). Restorative practices handbook. IIRP Press. Jean-Marie, G., & Mansfield, K. (2013). School leader’s courageous conversation about race: Race and racial discrimination in schools. In J. Brooks & N. W. Arnold (Eds.), Antiracist school leadership: Toward equity in education for America’s children (pp. 19–36). Information Age Publishing, Inc. Kinsler, J. (2011). Understanding the Black–White school discipline gap. Economics of Education Review, 30(6), 1370–1383. Ladson-Billings, G. (1996). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Legal Aid Justice Center. (2016). JustChildren program. https://www.justice4all.org/ justchildren-program/ Lustick, H. A. (2016). Making discipline relevant: Toward a theory of culturally responsive schoolwide discipline. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 20(5), 681–695. Lustick, H. A., & Hinojosa, O. (2019). Critical restorative justice in action: A case study. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON. Mansfield, K. C., Fowler, E., & Rainbolt, S. (2018). The potential of restorative practices to ameliorate discipline gaps: The story of one high school’s leadership team. Educational Administration Quarterly, 54(2), 303–323. Mansfield, K. C., Rainbolt, S., & Fowler, E. (2018). Implementing restorative justice as a step toward racial equity in school discipline. Teachers College Record, 120(14), 1–24. Morrison, B. E., & Vaandering, D. (2012). Restorative justice: Pedagogy, praxis, and discipline. Journal of School Violence, 11(2), 138–155. Office of Civil Rights. (2015). Civil Rights data collection: 2013–2014 state and national estimations. https://ocrdata.ed.gov/StateNationalEstimations/Estimations_2013_14 Sanchez, J. I. (2015, May 21). VOYCE’s groundbreaking bill, SB 100, to address “schoolto-prison pipeline” passes Illinois legislature. http://voyceproject.org/2015/05/21/ groundbreaking-bill-sb-100-to-address-school-to-prison-pipeline-passes-illinoislegislature/

CHAPTER 77

School-to-Prison Pipeline Hilary A. Lustick, Katherine Cumings Mansfield and LaShaunda Brown

Related Entries: Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration; School Discipline Gap; White Supremacy

… The term school-to-prison pipeline refers to the relationship between a student’s experiences with exclusionary discipline in schools and their later involvement with the criminal justice system. The school-to-prison pipeline has been exacerbated by the advent of get-tough drug policy coupled with zero tolerance disciplinary practices in schools. Moreover, white supremacy is implicated in this so-called pipeline due to the historic and continued disparate treatment of Black and Brown students in American schools. These factors, along with the continued expansion of the prison-industrial complex generally, have pushed the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline to public consciousness.

1

Disparate Treatment and the School-Prison Connection

Disparate treatment of historically marginalized students in schools has taken many forms including but not limited to the overrepresentation or underrepresentation of African American students in special education or gifted programming, respectively. Perhaps most pertinent to the discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline is the overrepresentation of students of color when it comes to what has been referred to as the discipline gap or the persistent disparities in the number of suspensions incurred by public school students of color as compared to their White counterparts. For example, in the 2013–2014 school year, White students comprised 50% of the total student population, but only 35.1% of students who were suspended (Office of Civil Rights, 2015). On the other hand, during the 2014–2015 school year, Black students accounted for 40% of the total suspensions whereas they comprised only 15.5% of the total student population in public schools. Thus, Black students are two to three times as likely to be suspended as White students (Crenshaw, Ocen, Nanda, & © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_077

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Carranza, 2015). Exclusionary discipline practices have serious life-long implications, including reduced engagement, lower achievement, increased truancy and risk-taking behaviors, all related to dropping (or being pushed) out and incarceration. Similar to the life-long implications of exclusionary discipline practices, incarceration not only robs people of time, but of status and economic standing, making it harder to gain employment even after release. While the gap between Black and White prison populations has narrowed in recent years (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018), African Americans and Latinx folks are still incarcerated at significantly higher rates than Whites. For example, while African Americans comprise 12% of the total U.S. population, they account for 33% of the prison population. In addition, Latinx persons comprise only 16% of the total U.S. population but account for 23% of the prison population. Meanwhile, Whites account for the majority of the general population at 64%; however, only 30% of the prison population is White (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016, as cited in Pew Research Center, 2018). These persistent and stark statistics have led researchers to refer to mass incarceration as “The new Jim Crow” (Alexander, 2012) and the school discipline gap and color and class divide in gifted education as tools for continued school segregation that was supposedly outlawed in 1954. Thus, the school discipline gap and its connection to incarceration is part of a legacy of White supremacy in our public school and criminal justice systems.

2

Zero Tolerance, Color Blindness, and the War on Drugs

Zero tolerance policies are, on the surface, race-neutral, meaning they prescribe the same uniformly harsh consequences for behavior, regardless of the race of the person exhibiting that behavior. However, by examining the behaviors for which various student populations receive suspensions in schools, we see clear differences in severity and frequency. For instance, Skiba, Michael, Nardo, and Peterson (2002) found that Black and Latinx students are often suspended for insubordination; that is, talking disrespectfully to a teacher, refusing to move when asked, or refusing to remove one’s hat. White students, while suspended less often, are also more likely to be suspended for objective and observable offenses, such as smoking in the bathroom, selling drugs, or skipping class. Thus, a presumably race-neutral policy that ultimately has race-disparate impacts is, in deed if not in word, a discriminatory policy. The common word for such a policy is colorblind, a term that technically means an inability to see racial difference, but in this context, connotes an unwillingness to take

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race into account when processing policy outcomes. Zero tolerance discipline policies are colorblind policies that result in disproportionate suspension of Black and other students of color. In turn, repeated suspension and expulsion of students of color makes these students more likely to end up in prison. The move toward zero tolerance discipline policies in schools correlated with the criminal justice system’s War on Drugs. As a result to this crack down, in the form of drug raids and stop-and-frisk policies, the incarceration of Black people living in poverty increased exponentially. Throughout the 1990s, both major political parties actively vied for the support of majority white populations with their tough on crime stance. As a result of this new wave of social control, mass incarceration enjoyed an all-time-high level of support, and this bolstered the use of zero tolerance discipline in schools as well. Alexander (2012) notes that, while these policies were touted as a means of making neighborhoods safer, the strongest predictor for support of the War on Drugs was not commitment to fighting crime. Rather, it was race. Whites were more likely to support the get-tough-on-crime drug laws, as well as anti-welfare measures. Starting in the 1970s, “among whites, those expressing the highest degree of concern about crime also tend to oppose racial reform” (Alexander, 2012, p. 54). Their support, she emphasized, was unrelated to their own likelihood of victimization. In fact, Gilliard (2018) wrote that “White youth are seven times more likely to use cocaine and heroin than Black youth and three times more likely to sell drugs; yet, Blacks represent the majority of drug offenders in prison” (p. 25). The criminalization of blackness starts as early as preschool. While Black preschoolers represent 18% of all preschoolers nationally, they represent almost half of all preschoolers who are punished with more than one out of school suspension (Gilliard, 2018).

3

Using Punishment to Assuage White Fear and Maintain Hegemony

There is a strong tradition, dating back to slavery and the Jim Crow Era, of treating Black people not only as criminals but as savages, as subhuman, as incapable of reforming their behavior. Policies rooted in this belief are responsible for perpetuating White supremacy and the oppression of Black Americans. One manifestation of this belief, key to the development of mass incarceration and zero tolerance policies, was the theory of the super predator. In the 1990s, John DiIulio (1995) invented the term super predator to summarize a population he described as a rise in numbers of sociopathic

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Black males, victims to the crack epidemic and single-parent childhoods, who would never develop empathy. He predicted a staggering spike in murders by the year 2000, tapping into a preexisting ideology of Black inhumanity, which sparked the get-tough approach against Black youth in schools and neighborhoods (Vitale, 2015). Perhaps the most influential of these movements was the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, which required schools to expel any student who possessed a gun (later modified to include any weapon) for one year. Moreover, educators were required to refer students to the juvenile or criminal justice systems (Kafka, 2011, p. 2). This federal zero tolerance discipline policy brought with it the same trappings that zero-tolerance drug policy brought on Black communities: surveillance in the form of metal detectors, cameras, and school safety officers authorized to issue citations. Despite the steady decrease in school violence throughout the 1990s, high-profile school shootings – most notably, the Columbine massacre of 1999 – raised public alarm that schools were violent places that necessitated tighter security. Anderson and Grinberg (1998) described this as moral panic that justified an increased get-tough approach. Later, Noguera (2007) emphasized that these policies were disproportionately meted out in inner-city schools serving Black and brown students. While the super predator prediction never came true – and DiIulio himself has long since recanted his assertions – the get-tough attitude toward disciplining Black youth still manifests in the discriminatory use of zero tolerance policies. Even in schools where administrators attempt to implement alternatives to suspension such as restorative practices, students of color are more likely to be disciplined than their White peers. Tellingly, schools with high enrollment of Black students are also less likely to employ such practices in the first place.

4

Examples of Resistance to the Schools-to-Prison Pipeline

Three decades’ worth of research have documented zero tolerance policies’ ineffectiveness to reduce violence or misbehavior, as well as their tendency to alienate students. Resistance is happening in schools, districts, the U.S. Department of Education, and through legal advocacy. Yet these efforts are now in jeopardy. Since 2016, legal advances are being tempered by political attempts to return to a get-tough approach, an attitude that is bolstered by the recent rash of school shootings in 2018–2019. The single most influential example of resistance to the school-to-prison pipeline occurred during the Obama Administration. As part of the Rethinking

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Discipline Initiative, a Dear Colleague Letter (U.S. DOE, 2014) compelled school districts to address racial gaps in their disciplinary outcomes. The letter explains that, whether or not there is evidence of discriminatory intent, the Office of Civil Rights may open an investigation on any school district with persistent proportional differences in discipline rates for White students versus students of color. A number of major urban districts have received consent decrees since 2014 including Seattle, Oakland, and Meridian. Additionally, a larger number of districts have taken initiative to shift their districtwide discipline policy away from zero tolerance and toward more preventative options. For example, Denver Public Schools, Austin Independent School District, New York City Department of Education, and Los Angeles Public Schools have each implemented suspension bans and provided additional funding to their highest need schools to implement preventative strategies. In some cases, racial disparities are reduced along with overall suspension rates. Of course, a change in policies does not necessarily represent a change in practice, or an amelioration of implicit or explicit biases. While reform initiatives in Denver and Los Angeles have reduced suspension rates overall, they have not reduced racial disproportionalities in these districts. Additionally, the Rethinking Discipline Initiative is now facing opposition from the Trump Administration’s Safety Commission. Holding fast to the equivalent fear-mongering arguments that popularized zero tolerance and mass incarceration in the 1980s and 90s, the Commission is suggesting that focusing on racial disparities merely distracts educators from dealing with the real issue at hand: school safety. The American public fears school violence. After all, 2018 saw some of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, from Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to Santa Fe High School in Texas. Yet, it is a false dichotomy to say we cannot address school safety, security, climate, and equity all at the same time. Furthermore, focusing solely on security will enable districts in pro-gun areas to pass laws requiring teachers and other school personnel to carry firearms in school. This approach, fueled by fear rather than knowledge of research, will make schools less safe for all students – but particularly for those groups that have historically experienced hyper-discipline and exclusion. The richest opportunities to resist the school to prison pipeline arise when district leaders are willing to shift their policies and educators are willing to face implicit and explicit biases. Increasingly, districts are pairing trainings in restorative practices with trainings in anti-bias and culturally responsive pedagogy. In many cities, activist and community organizations are leading the way. Organizations like the Dignity in Schools Campaign work nationally to bring awareness to discipline reform. In addition, local community organizations

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have worked successfully with school districts to provide parents, families, and teachers a voice in how discipline policy can better serve school communities. Examples include Padres y Jovenes Unidos in Denver (Wadhwa, 2010), Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth,1 Teachers Unite, based in New York City, that formed to “stand against racism and oppression,”2 Richmond Teachers for Social Justice, a grassroots organization comprised of school teachers, education professors, parents, students, and other community organizers3 and the Virginia Association of Community and Restorative Justice comprised of educators, attorneys, law enforcement, and other community activists.4

Notes 1 2 3 4

More information available at http://rjoyoakland.org/ See https://teachersunite.org See https://rvatsj.org See https://www.vacrj.org/about-us

References Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Anderson, G. L., & Grinberg, J. (1998). Educational administration as a disciplinary practice: Appropriating Foucault’s view of power, discourse, and method. Educational Administration Quarterly, 34(3), 329–353. Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., Nanda, J., & Carranza, T. (2015). Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced, and under protected. Columbia Law School, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, African American Policy Forum. Gilliard, D. D. (2018). Rethinking incarceration. InterVarsity Press. Kafka, J. (2011). The history of “zero tolerance” in American public schooling. Macmillan. Noguera, P. A. (2007). School reform and second-generation discrimination: Toward the development of equitable schools. Annenberg Institute for School Reform. http://www.indiana.edu/~atlantic/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Noguera-SchoolReform-and-Second-Generation-Discrimination.pdf Office of Civil Rights. (2015). 2013–2014 Estimations of discipline by type. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-2015-16.html Pew Research Center. (2018). Blacks and Hispanics are overrepresented in U.S. prisons. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/shrinking-gap-betweennumber-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/ft_18-01-10_prisonracegaps_2/

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Skiba, R. J., Michael, R. S., Nardo, A. C., & Peterson, R. L. (2002). The color of discipline: Sources of racial and gender disproportionality in school punishment. The Urban Review, 34(4), 314–342. Vitale, A. (2015). A short history of cops terrorizing students. The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/a-short-history-of-cops-terrorizing-students/ Wadhwa, A. (2010). ‘There has never been a glory day in education for non-whites’: Critical race theory and discipline reform in Denver. The International Journal on School Disaffection, 7(2), 21–28.

CHAPTER 78

Scientific Racism Virginia Lea

Related Entries: White Supremacy; Whiteness and the Law; Whiteness as Property

1

What Is Scientific Racism?

An oligarchy, used synonymously in this entry with the term, “elite,” is a type of power structure in which a small, privileged group has control over a society, an institution or an organization, and uses their power for their own selfish, often corrupt ends. In the United States and elsewhere, oligarchies have traditionally used all of the tools at their disposal to hold on to and extend their economic and cultural power. Since the conception of the United States, these tools have included the fiction of “race,” which evolved from a political and cultural concept of “race” in the early part of the 17th century into what we know as scientific racism. Scientific racism is the pseudo-scientific belief that there is a biological basis for the historical divisions of people into distinct racial groups. Scientific racism began in the 17th century and slowly became less salient in the 20th century. This rejection of a scientific basis for race gained momentum after the 1960s Civil Rights legislation sent the message to people that the law would no longer sanction institutional racist practices. I say “began” because there remain a considerable number of people in the United States who still adhere to scientific racism and act accordingly, including a few of the students at the rural Midwest university at which I teach. Certain laws, policies and dominant cultural norms and values also reproduce scientific racism on an ongoing, daily basis. As a person of European descent, with some Arab ancestry, raised in England, I am very aware of the power of families and small town and village communities to submerge members in the water of scientific racism, with the consequence that the idea seems quite normal, natural and common sense. This persuasive cultural hegemony is a big part of the longevity of scientific racism.

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The European history of Scientific Racism

The 17th century was the age of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon, and Descartes. This was the age in which the telescope and the microscope were invented, and in which mathematics and applied science/engineering contributed to the buildings, roads, bridges and canals of the time. Prior to this era, alchemists protected their power as the primary knowers of the workings of the natural world by maintaining an aura of secrecy. For many scientists, this secrecy would run counter to their goal of sharing their discoveries in the quest for enlightenment and a better human society. Science was becoming a legitimate means of explaining a mysterious universe. It was also becoming a tool that could be manipulated in the service of the elite. As Michel Foucault (1995) suggested, once science became an accepted vehicle of knowledge, it also became a way through which power could be constituted. Scientific knowledge has become inviolate to many, in the same way that religious authorities’ pronouncements, claiming to embody truth, have historically, and still do, exert enormous power. The ideas of European scientific thinkers who toyed with the ideas of monogenism versus polygenism – that human beings either came from one single stock or developed as distinct and separate “races” – were therefore becoming imbued with scientific authority. Until the 18th century, people used the terms “race” and “species” as synonymous with each other. With the help of anthropologists and other pseudo-scientists, Europeans engaged in many research projects to classify human beings into distinct groups based on, for example, the size of their craniums. In fact, this theory of the origins of human beings, known as “craniometry,” played a huge role in “validating” polygenism. Samuel George Mortin (1899–1851) was one of the foremost proponents of the idea that one could judge the intellectual ability of a “race” by cranial capacity. Although his research was challenged, principally in modern times by palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of Science, Stephen J. Gould in the Mismeasure of Man (1996), Gould’s work itself has been challenged by others set on proving polygenism. Whether cranium size actually relates to intelligence is quite another matter, especially given that women, every bit as intelligent as men, tend to have smaller craniums. In the minds of many who entered the “race” fray, the pseudo-science of polygenism had enormous economic value. This pseudo-science allowed for the arrangement of groups into a hierarchy, which in turn validated exploitation such as the colonization of Africa, documented by Pakenham (1993) as the “Scramble for Africa.” One of the lowest points in European hegemony, the leaders of which acted with a deep belief in their own racial and cultural superiority, was when they vied for control of the African continent and the

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extraction of human beings to be sold for profit in the Americas, the so-called “new world.” The cruelty meted out in the process was horrific and many would argue only possible if the perpetrators believed in a form of scientific racism. Adam Hochschild (1998) documents the ghastly, racist exploits of colonialism in his description of the activities of King Leopold of the Belgiums in the Congo. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold’s lackeys perpetrated the most horrendous terror on the Congolese people to aggrandize the King’s personal fortune (about $1.1 billion in today’s money), decimating the population by about a half in the process. He saw the Congo’s rich natural mineral mines as his personal bank. This exploitation through colonialism and slavery was shared by many European and settler-colonial countries, including the United States. European colonialism and slavery were the vehicles through which European elites developed their wealth, power and hegemony. In this endeavour, the growing authority of science would be combined with the on-going power of the law, made by and at the authority of elites, to legitimize slavery and colonialism. While Europeans have not been the only people in human history to engage in slavery and the exploitation of human beings for their own ends, they are the most recent to do so on a grand scale to build their own wealth and hegemony, as well as that of the societies they spawned. One of these societies is the United States, currently the world’s primary hegemonic power.

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The Backdrop to United States’ Scientific Racism

About a year ago, Edward Burmila (2018) wrote an article in the Nation titled, “Scientific Racism Isn’t ‘Back’ – It Never Went Away. In the age of Trump, believers of the once-popular tenets of scientific racism are feeling emboldened.” The economic systems at the heart of early American colonialism and slavery were founded on pseudo-scientific racism. In turn, many of those who would benefit from the systems of colonialism and slavery were primed to accept the basis of polygenism and biological racism through cultural mechanisms. In 1611, Shakespeare’s play, the Tempest, first played to the English populace. According to Ronald Takaki (1993/2008) in his history of multicultural America, What was happening on stage (in the Tempest) was a metaphor for English expansion into America… Like Caliban (in the play), the native people of America were viewed as the “other.” European culture was delineating the border, the hierarchical division between civilization and wildness… To the theatregoers, Caliban represented what the Euro-

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peans had been when they were lower on the scale of development. To be civilized, they believed, required denial of wholeness – the repression of the instinctual forces of human nature. A personification of civilized man, Prospero identified himself as mind rather than body. (Takaki, 1993, pp. 29–32) That some settlers in the so-called “New World” arrived with a deeply rooted sense of superiority is significant. It made the agenda of elites easier to achieve. Like all elites, they made choices to build an economic infrastructure that they believed would serve them best. In the southern colonies in the 17th century, the oligarchy believed there were too many laboring class Europeans (Allen, 1997). They feared resistance to their hegemony, to white laborers joining with black bond-laborers to overthrow the ruling class. They also feared “Negro” insurrections. They knew that to be effective, slavery required the support of the white populace, especially the poorer members who would not benefit economically from the forced free labor of enslaved Africans. In fact, the insurrections that did take place in the 17th century, fermented against elites by White laborers and Africans, were indications that the White laborers needed to be persuaded to change their allegiance. As a result, “race” categories were encoded in law in the seventeenth century to garner the support of white working people for slavery and colonial practice. This strategy built on existing views of indigenous people: The term “white” arose as a designation for European explorers, traders and settlers who came into contact with Africans and the indigenous people of the Americas… The prehistory of the white worker begins with the settler images of Native Americans… Settler ideology held that improvident, sexually abandoned, ‘lazy’ Indians were failing to ‘husband’ or subdue the resources God had provided and thus should forfeit these resources. Work and whiteness joined in the argument for dispossession. (Roediger, 1991, p. 23) With the complicity of the law, possessing African “blood” or heritage came to mean that one was less than human and fodder for enslavement. For whites, their perceived superiority over Africans and the minor rewards given them by the oligarchy in terms of small pieces of land, erected a wall between erstwhile black and white insurrectionists. White supremacy was institutionalized. Whiteness became associated with freedom; and blackness associated with bondage. As Theodore Allen (1997) states, the “free negro” was categorically rejected in the 17th century in colonial America:

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Like the capitalist enclosers of the peasants’ land in sixteenth century England, the men for whom the plantation world was made needed an effective intermediate yeoman-type social control stratum. Whiteness was the result of the desire for social control, to divide and rule white and black bond-laborers. (p. 245)

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Scientific Racism, Eugenics and the United States

The United States was born out of scientific racism. As has been suggested, the wealth of most of the “founding fathers” came from the system of chattel slavery – an economic system that required the cooperation of “free,” often poor colonial whites (Memmi, 1991) to keep Africans in a condition of enslavement in perpetuity. Again, pseudo-scientific “race” theory was created to legitimize the slave trade, and chattel slavery. In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson penned the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, the preamble of which declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet, he wrote these words while he owned other human beings – up to 200 at one point in his holdings. In fact, this reality would not prove to be a problem for the founders, since their belief in scientific racism meant they did not have to include people of color in the concept of “men.” (White women were also considered outside the category of white men, especially white propertied men.) In fact, Jefferson “advance(d) it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (Jefferson, 1787). Such a discourse is a powerful justification for the system of slavery, of which he took full advantage. It is also a powerful espousal of scientific racism. The founders’ constituency was therefore white men. Seeking to build a new nation out of on-going colonialism and slavery, the founders had to persuade these white men that their new world would offer freedom and justice for all of them, at the same time only allowing white propertied men to vote, committing cultural and physical genocide against Native people, and treating people of African descent as chattel under a system that rendered enslaved people worth three-fifths of a human being – all under the powerful, validating eye of the law. The system of slavery could not offer these white men high wages for manual work, since a lot of it was being done for free by enslaved Africans. Therefore, they had to be brought into the heart of scientific racism:

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convinced to believe that the color of their skin, their race was more important than the money they earned. They had to be convinced to identify with whiteness and power over their working class, enslaved brethren. With limited economic rewards, such as those small parcels of land mentioned above, the process was very successful. Ultimately a vision of the United States was born, in which people of color and poor people have been largely written out of its story. Indeed, they still are in many History text books. Thus, scientific racism underlay the United States nation building project. The civil war was fought in favor of capitalism, an economic system that northern elites, the northern oligarchy, calculated would better serve a growing nation, and better serve themselves. Under this new system, workers could go where new economic needs were presented rather than relying on the sedentary nature of slavery. Nevertheless, this new system was still led by white men committed to scientific racism. Abraham Lincoln said about people of African descent: I will say, then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races–-that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race…. (Lincoln, 1858) Indeed, this perspective undergirded the political and economic practice in the United States up until the second world war. Scientific racism, in complicity with the law, allowed the white population in the South to enact laws that destroyed the political gains of freed Black people during Reconstruction. In 1896, the Plessey v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision upheld the “separate but equal doctrine”; and Jim Crow laws followed that enabled further racist political and economic practices. White supremacist terror continued: Although lynchings were not confined to the South in the United States, “Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative found that nearly 4,000 black people were killed in lynchings in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950” (Bliss, 2017, January 17). Immigration laws were also given character by scientific racism, leading to discriminatory, oppressive immigration practices in the early 20th century.

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The first large wave of immigrants from Mexico began in 1910 and federal policy against Mexicans was debated for the first time in 1921. Japanese and Chinese immigrants were also victims of anti-immigrant sentiment, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion act in 1882. This was the first federal immigration law. It prevented Chinese immigration for a period of 10 years and disallowed Chinese people from acquiring U.S. citizenship. In 1922, the same exclusion from citizenship was extended to Japanese immigrants (Lea, 2017). In the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenics movement grew out of notions of scientific racism and economic insecurity. Eugenics was the science of “improving” a human population by selective breeding. It aimed to increase the reproduction of desirable heritable traits, associated with people of northern European descent, and eliminate negative traits, associated with poor, unschooled people, people of color, and people who were differently abled. As Daniel Okrent (2019) argues in his new book, The Guarded Gate, the eugenics movement was “junk science that stemmed from the belief that certain races and ethnicities were morally and genetically superior to others… (The eugenics movement) informed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted entrance to the U.S.” In the case of this particular immigration act, “Eugenics was used as a primary weapon in the effort to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans out of the country… [The eugenics movement] made it a palatable act, because it was based on science or presumed science.” Eugenics impacted education through the testing regimes developed by Dr. Lewis Terman, of Stanford University. Terman’s assessment system was based on the premise that some human beings are biologically inferior to others, and that this difference should be upheld to create a hierarchical, white supremacist society. Terman concluded that “mental tests given to nearly 30,000 children in Oakland prove conclusively that the proportion of failures due chiefly to mental inferiority is nearer 90% than 50%” (Epstein, 2006, p. 20). Eugenics was also popularized by major figures like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, John Maynard Keynes, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, and President Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, Wilson encouraged the first showing of the racist film, Birth of a Nation that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, in the White House. The American eugenics movement was a major influence on Nazi Germany’s eugenic and racial ideology. Hitler and his regime were willing to turn its most extreme tenets into state policy, which delighted scientific racists who wondered why the United States was not more aggressive. In 1934, Joseph DeJarnette, the superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, with a mixture of envy and admiration, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” Ultimately, the association with Nazism is often said to have led to the repudiation of eugenics and theories of racial

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superiority at the conclusion of World War II. If true at all, this assertion applied only to scientific and cultural elites (Burmila, 2018).

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Eurocentric Epistemology, Scientific Racism and Cultural Hegemony

A society or community’s worldview arises out of its economic foundation. In developing capitalism, the United States, the most individualist culture the world has ever known, was gradually developed out of many collectivist immigrants in the new society of the United States. Individualism suited capitalism in that its characteristics include independence, individual achievement, self-direction, acting on the environment, and a commitment to universal values like laws, rules and policies (Spring, 2008). How could a society of independent people bind together and maintain order without a strong allegiance to universal laws and a sense of nationhood that governed them all? Thus, it would be much easier for the oligarchy of said society to govern if its citizens embodied perhaps the important characteristic of individualism, categorical thinking. Extreme individualists value classification over relationships, resulting, for example, in perceiving divisions between its people in terms of racial categories as common sense. This bifurcated, race-based reality in the United States – enslaved and Native people of color v. free white people – may not have been inevitable, but it was helped by European epistemology, supported by Christianity, that shaped the worldview of people of European descent. This epistemology promoted a view of the world split into dualisms: good v. evil; black v. white; mind v. body (Darder, 2019). When a people possess a bi-polar view of knowledge, it is much easier for elites to argue that an outsider group is less human than they are and thus may be legitimately treated in inhuman ways for economic gain. Cultural hegemony is the process whereby people in positions of power persuade those in lesser positions that the norms, values and interests that serve the elite are normal, natural, and common sense. Hegemonic tools are numerous and include individualization, standardization, regulation, and surveillance (Foucault, 1995), all cultural norms that constitute a worldview. The biological or pseudo-scientific fiction of “race” was and remains a powerful symptom of this worldview (Lea, 2014; Lea et al., 2018). It was and is a tool for classifying groups of people and then dividing and ruling them for economic and political purposes. This was so under colonialism and slavery and continues under capitalism. “The limits of the 1924 Immigration Act remained in place until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended immigration

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restrictions based on nationality, ethnicity and race” (Gross, 2019). Scientific racism may have been officially curtailed by the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, but its seeds continue to divide and rule the United States population. Under the current President Trump, supported by one third at least of the voting public, the polygenist ideas that informed the Immigration Act remain salient. As Okrent (2019) stated, The [current] rhetoric of criminality, the attribution of criminality – not to individual criminals but to hundreds of thousands of people of various nationalities – that’s very similar to the notion of moral deficiency that was hurled by the eugenicists at the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the 1910s and ‘20s. (p. 16)

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Towards the Eradication of Scientific Racism: Counter-Hegemonic Movement

Race still divides us and shapes differential experiences in schools and elsewhere. Large numbers of people still identify strongly with different racialized groups and live together in segregated communities. White people are the group that has the strongest preference for living in a community made up of people from the same racialized group (Denvir, 2015). When people do not know each other they often bring stereotypical ideas of each other to their inter-racial encounters and engagement with others at school, work and politics. These views have been handed down over generations and aided by the media. Nevertheless, in spite of President Trump’s racist rhetoric and immigration policies, there is some evidence that larger numbers of younger European Americans are constructing somewhat different meanings about what race means and how they should live together. Antagonism to the white supremacist Charlottesville rally in 2017, and the murderous actions of racist individuals like Dylann Roof, have been strong and have come from all ethnic groups. However, progress is likely to be slow. As Yale psychologist Richeson said, Yes, there have been gains in policy like allowing interracial marriage and discrimination laws, but when it comes to our interpersonal biases, it’s simply not true that we just need to wait for the few old racist men left in the South to die off and then we’ll be fine. The rhetoric for racism is still in place. The environment for racism is still there. Unless we change that, we can’t lessen racism. (Wan & Kaplan, 2017, para. 5; see also Coates, 2015)

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References Allen, T. W. (1997). The invention of the white race – And the ordeal of America. In From the invention of the White race: The origin of racial oppression in Anglo-America (pp. 239–259). Verso. Burmila, E. (2018, April 6). Scientific racism isn’t ‘back’ – It never went away. In the age of Trump, believers of the once-popular tenets of scientific racism are feeling emboldened. The Nation. Coates, T. N. (2015). Between the world and me. Random House. Darder, A. (Ed.). (2019). Decolonizing interpretive research: A subaltern methodology for social change. Routledge. Denvir, D. (2015, June15). It’s mostly White people who prefer to live in segregated neigh borhoods. City Lab. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/06/its-mostly-white-people-who-prefer-to-live-in-segregated-neighborhoods/396887/ Epstein, K. K. (2006). A different view of urban schools: Civil rights, critical race theory, and unexplored realities. Peter Lang. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. Random House. Gould, S. (1996). The mismeasure of man. W.W. Norton. Gross, T. (2019, May 8). Eugenics, anti-immigration laws of the past still resonate today, journalist says. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/05/08/721371176/eugenics-antiimmigration-laws-of-the-past-still-resonate-today-journalist-says Hochschild, A. (1999). King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Jefferson, T. (1787). From notes on the state of Virginia. Jefferson on race and slavery. http://pasleybrothers.com/jefferson/jefferson_on_race_and_slavery.htm Lea, V. (2014). Constructing critical consciousness: Narratives that unmask hegemony, and ideas for creating greater equity in education. Peter Lang. Lea, V. (2017). Re-routing the nightmare: Why we need another movement to create an equitable public education system in Wisconsin and across the United States. In R. Ahquist, P. Gorski, & T. Montano (Eds.), Assault on kids: Hyper-accountability, corporatization, Ruby Payne, & deficit theories (2nd ed.). Peter Lang. Lea, V., Lund, D., & Carr, P. (2018). Critical multicultural perspectives on whiteness: Views from the past and present. Peter Lang. Lincoln, A. (1858, September 18). Fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois. In R. P. Basler (Ed.), The collected works of Abraham Lincoln (Vol. III, pp. 145–146). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;idno=lincoln3;rgn=div2;view=text;cc=lincoln;node=lincoln3%3A20.1 Memmi, A. (1991). The colonizer and the colonized. Beacon Press. Okrent, D. (2019). The guarded gate. Scribner. Pakenham, (1993). The scramble for Africa. Abacus.

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Roediger, D. R. (1991). The wages of Whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class (pp. 19–40). Verso. Spring, J. (2008). The intersection of cultures: Multicultural schools and culturally relevant pedagogy in the United States and the global economy (4th ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum. Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Little. Wan, W., & Kaplan, S. (2017, August 14). Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/14/why-are-people-still-racist-what-sciencesays-about-americas-race-problem/

CHAPTER 79

Second-Wave Critical White Studies James C. Jupp and Pauli Badenhorst

Related Entries: Du Bois, W.E.B.; First Wave Critical White Studies; Teacher Identity and Whiteness; Thandeka

… The purpose of this encyclopedia entry is to provide a brief outline that documents a “shift,” “move,” or “wave” in critical White studies (CWS) called second-wave CWS. This entry is the companion entry for “First-wave Critical White Studies,” also published in this encyclopedia. For delineations of terminology, definitions, and a previous periodization of CWS, readers might consult the opening paragraph of the “first-wave” entry. As the second-wave of CWS is still underway, the outline is necessarily subjunctive and imprecise, though nonetheless important for continued critical and decolonial work in CWS. Overall, this entry seeks to outline and reorganize historical and contemporary resources for continued generative intellectual production in CWS. The reorganized outline presented here simultaneously reaches back into the historical archive and pushes CWS forward via CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptualempirical arc. As an area of social science, CWS historically emerged from AfricanAmerican and African-Caribbean, predominantly anglophone, foundations along with the new left emancipatory social sciences emblematic of the social upheavals of 1968. Beginning in the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, firstwave CWS advanced the race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc for which the terms “whiteness” and “White privilege” became first proliferative, then ubiquitous, and finally popularized social science terms, available in recent U.S. political discourse. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, researchers of Color and White researchers critiqued first-wave CWS’ essentializations inherent in the terms above and advanced an anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc that this entry documents as second-wave CWS. Still developing, second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing arc advances CWS through the notion of contrapuntal hermeneutics that seeks to proliferate CWS as oppositional, global-local, and antiracist social science emphasizing the centrality of critical whiteness pedagogies. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_079

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As an organizing statement, this entry (a) outlines the necessary background to approach second-wave CWS, (b) briefly recounts first-wave CWS’ race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc, (c) documents critiques of First-wave CWS’ essentializations, (d) outlines second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc, and (e) proposes the notion of contrapuntal hermeneutics to advance CWS in the present. As its principal contribution, section three of this entry lays out the anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc that has been emergent in CWS since the 2000s. The anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc includes the following dimensions: (i) White materiality and contextuality, (ii) White complexities and relationalities, (iii) whiteness and ethics, and (iv) social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies. In its discussion and conclusion, this entry develops the notion of contrapuntal hermeneutics to reflexively remediate and recondition first-wave CWS concepts for continued emancipatory and antiracist social science research. Via contrapuntal hermeneutics, second-wave CWS emphasizes reflexive, materially and economically located, complex and relational, ethical-philosophical, social psychoanalytic, and pedagogical-cognitive conditionings of first-wave concepts.

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Necessary Background to Approach Second-wave CWS

This section provides the necessary background to approach second-wave CWS. African-American and African-Caribbean historical foundations on race along with the emancipatory social sciences provided the basic horizon of intelligibility for first-wave CWS research in the 1980s and 1990s. Regarding African-American and African-Caribbean traditions, Black intellectuals such as Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Anna Julia Cooper, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, C.L.R. James and others took on the Herculean task of countering dyed-in-the-wool Spencerian evolutionary-biological paradigms of race in 19th and 20th century scientific racisms. Countering scientific racisms in these historically vast “natural sciences” such as phrenology or eugenics, Black intellectuals combatted biological essentialisms of scientific racisms and provided understandings of race as a located, historical, social, economic, and social psycho-analytic set of social relations. Regarding the emancipatory social sciences emblematic of 1968, Global South anti-colonial and Global North Civil Rights movements challenged previous social scientists’ Malthusian-bureaucratic and Parsonian-functional “state management” paradigms of knowledge production. New left critical intellectuals such as Audra Lorde, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Jürgen

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Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Derek Bell, Henry Giroux and others confronted the bureaucratic-functional social sciences by insisting that intellectual work begin with one simple question: Whose interests are served? Emphatically now, Black and new left intellectual traditions provided the horizon of intelligibility from which first-wave CWS might appear as an area of social science inquiry in the first place. In the 1980s, CWS conceptual-empirical research first appeared in new left fields like cultural studies, gender studies, multicultural education, critical legal studies, critical race theory (CRT), and other areas. By the early 1990s, CWS was an ostensible “hot topic” that had also infiltrated traditionally functionalbureaucratic social science and humanities disciplines such as sociology, psychology, geography, history, literary criticism, and curriculum. Between 1980 and 2000, CWS’ first-wave provided the race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc. The race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc articulated the following interlocking ontological-epistemological emphases: whiteness as hegemonic normativity, White identity and nation building, White privilege and property, and White colorblind racism and race-evasion. Whiteness as hegemonic normativity refers to whiteness as the racialontological structuring that establishes the commonsense humanity or normality of phenotypically White individuals against which racialized others are measured as less human or deficient. Often abbreviated to just “whiteness,” this refers to U.S. and European historical-social positions and identities passing as un-marked, natural, neutral, and normal as opposed to people of color’s racialized-ethnic positions and identities. White identity and nation building refer to the historical construction of White national identity tied to colonial administration, the expropriation of indigenous people’s lands, and the conscious political organization of White suffrage and racialized self-interest. Tied to counter-narrative histories, this critical revisionist historical work re-reads primary documents and secondary consensual-progressive national histories as appeals to White racism in the calculated expansion of White male suffrage inherent in the creation of modern nation-states, especially the U.S. White privilege and property refer to the unearned privileges and property rights accrued by phenotypically White individuals. Referring to both immediate race-currency and long term wealth accumulation, White privilege and property demarcate the hegemonic social-historical capital and immediate economic gains of phenotypically White individuals solely by virtue of skin color. Colorblind racism and race-evasion refer to phenotypically White individuals’ on-going denials of race as salient social phenomenon. Describing these performed denials and evasions, colorblind racism and race-evasion present the manifold ways in which White individuals variously deny, evade, or diminish

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race as structuring feature of social-historical inequalities and thereby perform identity violences in desiring the annihilation of race-based identities. This entry emphasizes that these concepts, when taken together as an analytic whole, provided first-wave CWS’ unifying race-evasive, conceptualempirical arc. Specifically, as first-wave CWS’ conceptual-empirical arc, whiteness as hegemonic normativity and White nation building served to out or make visible White social structurings and identities of phenotypically White individuals within and beyond the social science research. This outing of White structurings and identities challenged previously “acceptable,” 70s and 80s, post-Civil Rights era, conservative, or liberal-progressive research respondents’ colorblind discourses on race. In challenging colorblind discourses, CWS researchers captured research respondents’ White privilege and race-evasion on White identity, demonstrating White respondents’ evasion if not denial of or belligerence toward race as a salient social phenomenon. Importantly, in the 1980s and 1990s, first-wave CWS served to disrupt university-level learning and teaching on race that had previously found safety in a colorblind discursive home for “good whites.” Instead, first-wave CWS insurgently advanced a different critical and oppositional discussion that insisted on calling out whiteness and White identities in hundreds of qualitative, ethnographic, and narrative research studies. As a note, Bonilla Silva’s (2003/2017) Racism without Racists very much documented first-wave CWS as an exemplary articulation of the race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc, including sophisticated discussions of empirical research methods.

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Critiques of First-Wave CWS’ Essentialization of Complex Identities

This section outlines critiques of first-wave CWS’ race-evasive conceptualempirical arc. By the mid 2000s, a series of critiques had already emerged that countered first-wave CWS’ essentialization of complex identities. To be clear, the phrase essentialization of complex identities refers to the reduction of multidimensional, biological, cognitive, self-narrativized, contextual, intersectional, relational, social, and historical identities to static or binary identity representations. Coming from new left scholarship that included cultural studies, gender studies, CRT, and CWS alike, these critiques problematized essentializations of identity writ large but also challenged specific essentializations of White identities in CWS scholarship. In the paragraph below, this entry documents several critiques of first-wave CWS’ essentialization of complex identities that had emerged in the late 1990s to the mid 2000s.

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Bonnet (1997) reviewed first-wave CWS work in labor history and cultural studies and argued against abstract Black/White binaries in CWS and instead posited socially, historically, and geographically located understandings of antiracist activism. Moon and Flores (2000) critiqued Ignatiev and Garvey and others’ White abolitionist identities as reifying White/Black binaries and “good” versus “evil” categorical representations. Seibel Trainor (2002) identified essentialization of White identities as paradoxical toward and counter-productive to first-wave CWS goals of Whites’ racial conscientization and instead posited social-psychoanalytic concepts as key to whiteness pedagogies in her teaching. Bonilla-Silva (2002) analyzed U.S. census data to complexify binary White/Black understandings and predicted a “Latin Americanization” of U.S. racial hierarchies in which White identifying people of color created protective buffer groups to support White hegemonic interests. McCarthy (2003) reviewed a special issue on CWS in teacher education and argued that researchers in the issue equated White female teachers as simplistic embodiments of White privilege instead of complex, historically located identities. Leonardo (2004) argued that CWS push beyond merely identifying White privilege toward Althuserian social psychoanalytic frameworks and relevant empirical methods that allow researchers to articulate specific narrative processes through which Whites re/constitute hegemonic group status. By the mid 2000s, McDermott and Sampson (2005) neatly summarized this crescendo of critiques that countered first-wave CWS’ essentialization of complex identities: Whiteness has become synonymous with privilege in much scholarly writing, although recent empirical work strives to re-consider white racial identity as a complex and situated one rather than a monolithic one. The study of white identity can benefit from moving away from simply naming whiteness as an overlooked, privileged identity and paying closer attention to empirical studies of racial and ethnic identity by those studying social movements, ethnic identity, and social psychology. (p. 245) Emblematic of many critiques, McDermott and Samson clearly articulated the critique and suggested future conceptual-empirical directions that, since the early 2000s, many CWS researchers were either already pursuing or later pursued. As a note, Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica, and Wray’s (2001) edited volume The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness provided a period piece that documented both scholars of Color and White scholars’ grappling with essentialization of complex identities, among other issues.

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Second-Wave CWS’ Anti-Essentializing Conceptual-Empirical Arc

This section outlines the interlocking, anti-essentializing, conceptualempirical arc characteristic of CWS’ second wave (see Figure 79.1). Though this conceptual-empirical arc represents a more recent set of concepts for approaching CWS research, this does not mean that research deploying firstwave CWS’ race-evasive conceptual-empirical arc ever disappeared. Rather, the second-wave anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc provides a reflexive re-conditioning, complexifying, and generative schemata that continues CWS’ relevancy, especially as CWS relates to race-based critical race and whiteness pedagogies. Specifically, second-wave CWS provides the following concepts as part of its interlocking conceptual-empirical arc: White materiality and place, White complexities and relationalities, Whiteness and ethics, and social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies. While not many authors referenced below used the term “second-wave CWS” in their work, the purpose of this entry is merely to document an emergent and anti-essentializing shift in CWS using the term “second-wave” to accomplish the documentarian task. White materiality and place refer to enhanced emphases on the importance of the body, phenotype, embodiment, and the materiality of place for what race is and how it operates. Since this work also engages space and place, this strand brings new conceptual and methodological approaches to old questions such as the racist rationales, apartheid histories, and ongoing present-day segregation. At its heart, this work tenders a strong critique of race as totalizing social construct exclusively embedded within the essentializing contours of categorical language and representation. Rather, as bounded within whiteness as field-power relation, race is demonstrated to be an ever-unfolding, dynamic, in situ, and corporeal encounter in which specific collectivities viscously stick together and impermeably segregate relative to material variables such as embodiment, phenotype, and location. As relationally bounded,

figure 79.1 Second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc

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these variables are never fully determined because they exist within specificities of materiality, place, time, and other variables. Demonstrated in this work, these specificities include body, region, municipality, and community as well as institution, public common, school, “track,” and classroom. This work even includes reckoning with the implications of non-human material agents such as hurricanes and climate change as racialization processes. Moreover, this work on White materiality and place recognizes the non-static and virtual capacity of whiteness to undo, creatively morph and adapt, reinvent and reconstitute, and disseminate itself according to material place. Researchers such as Buchanan, Delany, Duster, Dwyer and Jones, Gusa, Hoelscher, Rai, and Saldanha are scholars who advance this anti-essentializing work that this entry documents as one component of second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc. Saldanha’s (2007) Psychedelic White serves as notable exemplar of CWS’ anthropological engagement with White materiality and place. White complexities and relationalities refer to understandings of White privilege and White identities that account for intersectional and relational complexities in identities’ constitution. Often emerging from directions in empirical sociology, narrative research, and psychology, White complexities and relationalities serve to “complexify” White identities by examining race as co-constructed with multidimensional identarian intersections such as class, gender, sexuality, ability, language, region, and religion. Additionally, this work also emerges from careful readings of White respondents’ empirical ethnographic or narrative interview transcripts that have served to trouble first-wave CWS’ grand theoretical abstractions or over-determined readings that analytically insisted on shoe-horning all White speech acts into colorblind analytical containers. Pointedly, this work breaks with essentializations inherent in CWS’ first-wave as exemplified by Frankenburg, McIntosh, McIntyre, Sleeter, Scheurich, and others whose research often assumed White privilege and whiteness as uniformly, smoothly, and unquestionably experienced by all phenotypically White individuals. Despite breaking with these essentializations, this work advances discussions of first-wave CWS’ conceptual-empirical arc by insisting on White identities’ complexity and relationalities. Rather than dismissing first-wave work, research focusing on White complexities and relationalities seeks to open difficult and contested notions of interracial yet shifting alliances and mutual class, gender, or sexual intergroup political agendas that strive for multiracial democracy. Researchers such as Eidsted, Hartigan, Lensmire, McCarthy, Perry and Shotwell, and Zingsheim and Goltz represent scholars whom this entry documents as having opened

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up second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc. Lensmire’s (2017) White folks provides an exemplary narrative study of White identity complexities and relationalities that de-essentializes first-wave essentializations in order to capacitate new, unfixed, and critical discussion on race and whiteness. Whiteness and ethics refers to work that articulates an ethics of ongoing engagement, working-though race, self-accountability, and racial vigilance. Among other directions, this work stresses the implementation of antiracist theory into practice, uncovering modes of white complicity in racism, and moving beyond the oversimplified and confessional blame-guilt binary inherent in first-wave CWS’ notions of White allyship. Importantly, this work often insists on articulating new ethical understandings, relations, positions, and responsibilities with special emphasis on Whites’ accountability to both themselves and people of Color. Moreover, this work insists on advancing a priori understandings of ethical responsibility predicated on the centering of the vulnerability of face and body as primary onto-ethical concern to racial relationality. Rather than curtailing White ethical agency through essentializations of Whites as naturally racist, ignorant, or violent, this work foregrounds the ongoing responsibility of White people to introspect and transform as an ethical responsibility towards racialized others within the ongoing history of racialized violence. Additionally, this work requires Whites who are involved in antiracist work to deeply engage themselves, their complicities in whiteness, and their ongoing racist praxis in ways that critique and move beyond simple confessional White allyship identities of first-wave CWS, especially as manifest in multicultural education. Often drawing from the ethico-phenomenological work of thinkers like Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Applebaum, Bernasconi, Hoagland, Sullivan, and Vice are scholars who have advanced this work within the area of critical philosophy of race. Along with other work that problematizes supposed middle-class progressive or critical identities as “morally good,” Barbara Appelbaum’s (2010) Being White, Being Good stands out as a seminal work within this strand. Social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies refers to complex psychoanalytic grapplings with relational dynamics and articulations of critical pedagogy that focus either on White identities’ racial conscientization or the affective experiences of people of Color in proximity to whiteness. Specifically, rather than restricting psychoanalytic engagement to the traditional domains of the therapeutic or the personal, psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies frames the interconnectedness and mutual implications of the personal and the public, so that the personal comes to be imbued with political significance. In

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other words, whiteness as racialized phenomenon collapses the self into the social and social into self, hereby attributing political significance to affect and emotion. It follows then that tropes of how whiteness is performed, such as confession and silence, are scrutinized at a psychic level beneath superficial essentializations of ideological critiques that affix phenotypically White individuals to social histories of whiteness in monolithic or oversimplified ways. Conditioning ideological critiques, emotional and affective experiences like outrage, resentment, disgust, shame, guilt, anxiety, and ambiguity are granted primary epistemic and ethical import, especially as primary materials for critical engagement in whiteness pedagogies. Furthermore, following the developmental trajectory of psychoanalysis proper, this work engages desire and libidinal investments that structure the racialized relational configurations of social actors, yet also contends with those destructive, repetition-based beliefs and actions that exemplify White identity fetishes and manifold forms of violence against the racialized, relationally-interconnected self and other. Scholars doing this work include Cheng, Eng, Grand, Hook, Matias, Shim, and Thandeka, and this work often draws heavily from prior psychoanalytic traditions of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, and Britzman. Anne Anlin Cheng’s (2000) The Melancholy of Race provides an account of racial grief as not only a result of racism, but as a primary foundation for racial identity including racial identities grounded in whiteness.

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Discussion and Conclusion

This final section describes the relationship between first- and second-wave CWS work and then historically re-locates second-wave CWS work within the intellectual and decolonial concerns of African-American and AfricanCaribbean anglophone traditions. This description of the relationship and historical relocation of second-wave CWS work seek to recirculate and refocus CWS in order to create a dialogue with both its recent first-wave past and its broader intellectual trajectory emerging from African-American and AfricanCaribbean traditions. First, this section describes the relationship between first- and second-wave CWS work. Second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arc brings it into contrapuntal relationship with earlier first-wave CWS’ raceevasive conceptual-empirical arc. According to Said (1994), contrapuntal hermeneutics reads traditions and texts from both the former historical perspectives and present-day emergent ones in order to achieve a relative

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counterpoint that advances both previous and historical intellectual work in ways that are interdependent and complementary. Such reading is imbued with both tensions and generative possibilities giving rise to multiple interpretations while simultaneously providing further alternatives for emancipatory politics or, as emphasized here, emancipatory social science research emblematic of 1968. Figure 79.2 illustrates the contrapuntal relationship suggested above. Figure 79.2 represents the potential contrapuntal and generative relationships between first-wave CWS’ race-evasive and second-wave CWS’ anti-essentializing conceptual-empirical arcs. In the process of placing any of the themes in the top row in dialog with any of the themes in the bottom row, researchers, educators, and activists initiate a reflexive filtering, re-conditioning, complexifying, and generative use of concepts. As an example, White privilege and property from the top row and White materiality and place from the bottom row could be read together. Reading these concepts together might inform careful ethnographic study of the geospatial dynamics informing how Whiteness morphs in localized contexts relative to, for instance, skin-bleaching practices that reinscribe upon the collective flesh colonial valuations of lighter phenotype as preferred, prestigious, and thereby privileged. As another example, White identity and nation building from the top row and social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies from the bottom could be read together. Reading these concepts together might inform careful and detailed historical analyses of whitestream consensual textbook histories that provide a hegemonic public pedagogy of White desire and fetish. Of course, more examples might be generated via contrapuntal relationships suggested in the matrix that seek to advance serious, committed, yet nuanced concepts and related activisms and critical projects. These contrapuntal

figure 79.2 Contrapuntal, generative dialectics suggested by second-wave CWS work

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understandings might avoid truncated, over-simplified mass media essentializations or static, binary, or fixed academic interventions that too often end in pre-determined identity cul-de-sacs rather than animated conversations or, more importantly, committed antiracist activism. Important in this contrapuntal work is the creation of pedagogical research representations that consciously and reflexively fold back into antiracist and whiteness pedagogy interventions in the racial conscientization of White identities. This interventional goal highlights the importance of social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies that understands the purpose of research representations in creating pathways for difficult knowledges. In sum, this entry emphasizes the generative matrix in Figure 79.2 for those interested in doing this necessarily complex intellectual work that might drive newly committed antiracist and whiteness pedagogies. Second, the entry emphasizes second-wave CWS’ echo of key intellectual content from African-American and African-Caribbean anglophone traditions, especially content from Du Bois and Wynter. Du Bois’s work precedes and is echoed in second-wave CWS work. Insightfully, in writing a history of the U.S. Reconstruction, Du Bois (1935/1998a, 1920/1998b) emphasized the wages of whiteness that secured working class, White, immigrant, rabble both psychic and economic wages in the creation of political self-interest. This White political self-interest was designed by industrial elites and local politicians in the U.S. South to peel away material-political proximities of working class Whites from those of people of Color. Moreover, Du Bois emphasized the grand notion of hegemonic whiteness tied to industrial capitalism of his time that schematized White psychic self-interest and, after Reconstruction, sought new Black and Brown bodies via unequal, imperialist, and racialized economic relations in other regions of the world following the collapse of slave economies in the U.S. South. Du Bois work resonates with second-wave notions of White materiality and contextuality, White complexities and relationalities, and social psychoanalysis in whiteness pedagogies that help to recover and advance work that pushes beyond specific identity-limited concepts prevalent in anglophone emancipatory social sciences since 1968. Besides Du Bois’s work, Wynter’s work precedes and is echoed in second-wave CWS work. Wynter (1995, 2003) argued that what is at stake in the intellectual work of the present moment will not be resolved if framed at the level of individuals or identities. Rather, Wynter insisted on an epochal consciousness shift that advances different biological, cognitive, historical, social, and most importantly, ethical consciousness about what counts as human. Dialogically reaching back, this entry emphasizes Wynter’s required epochal shift as both preceding yet congruent with second-wave CWS anti-essentializing

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conceptual-empirical arc that seeks interventions both at the level of identities and broader social-historical consciousness. Emphasizing intra- and inter-subjective epistemic cognitive shift at the same time as recognizing work on identities will require different ways of thinking and doing antiracist and whiteness pedagogies across the board. This entry advances the contrapuntal relationship described above as one means of opposing, dislodging, and decentering historical relations rooted in White supremacy that Wynter described as unsettling colonialism.

References Appelbaum, B. (2010). Being white, being good: White complicity, white moral responsibility, and social justice pedagogy. Rowman & Littlefield. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Bonnett, A. (1997). Constructions of whiteness in European and American anti-racism. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 173–192). Zed Books. Cheng, A. A. (2000). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. Oxford University. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998a). Black reconstruction in America 1860–1880. Free Press. (Original work published 1935) Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998b). The souls of White folk. In D. Roediger (Ed.). Black on White: Black writers on what it means to be White (pp. 184–203). Schocton Books. (Original work published 1920) Dwyer, O. J., & Jones, J. P. (2000). White socio-spatial epistemology. Social and Cultural Geography, 1(2), 209–222. Lensmire, T. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 137–152. McCarthy, C. (2003). Contradictions of power and identity: Whiteness studies in the call of teacher education. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16, 127–133. McDermott, M., & Samson, F. L. (2005). White racial and ethnic identity in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 245–261. Moon, D., & Flores, L. A. (2000). Antiracism and the abolition of whiteness: Rhetorical strategies of domination among “race traitors.” Communication Studies, 51, 97–115. Rasmussen, B. B., Klinenberg, E., Nexica, I. J., & Wray, M. (2001). The making and unmaking of whiteness. Duke University Press. Said, E. (1994). Culture and imperialism. Vintage.

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Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race. University of Minnesota. Trainor, J. S. (2002). Critical pedagogy’s “other”: Constructions of whiteness in education for social change. College Composition and Communication, 53, 631–650. Wynter, S. (1995). 1492: A new world view. In V. Lawrence Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view. Smithsonian Institution. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

CHAPTER 80

Secondary Education and Whiteness Chanelle Wilson

Related Entries: American Indian Boarding Schools; Essentialism; Privilege; School-to-Prison Pipeline; School Discipline Gap

… The system of public education is fundamentally racialized in the United States. Whiteness and U.S. secondary education are intricately woven together in ways that perpetuate the ideals of white supremacy. Secondary schools function to sort and categorize students, thus serving to preserve and replicate societal inequities. White supremacy, as a systematized force in the United States, prioritizes the legacy of Eurocentric practices and beliefs, creating a system of unearned privileges that harnesses and weaponizes power. Whiteness, as an element of white supremacy, creates the prototype for behavior consistent with ideals of white supremacy. Whiteness is woven into the fabric of traditional public schools, and the themes of perfectionism, individualism, objectivity, and the right to comfort, identified by Jones and Okun (2001), as tenets of white supremacy culture, manifest in the policies and practices of secondary education in the United States. Secondary schools were founded as selective institutions of education that prepared wealthy white men for liberal arts colleges. Those who did not pursue secondary education entered the workforce to help support their family, developed trade skills, and maintained this cycle. When high schools became compulsory for all students, historically, these were still places for white children. Segregated schools normalized racialized learning environments, so it is intuitive that the education system would be structured by the ideals of whiteness and white supremacy culture. Whiteness has been defined as a manufactured construct with a set of performative practices that embody invisibility, spread dsomination, false authority, camouflaged neutrality, institutionalized and “established in order to unite, advance, support, control, and organize the population” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 136). Horace Mann is celebrated as the father of public education, but his goal of common education and socializing the underclass came with consequences that prioritized and cemented practices of whiteness in education. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_080

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Supported by Richard H. Pratt, Native American boarding schools are a prime example of this practice where the goal was to “kill the Indian, and save the man” (Prucha, 1973, p. 260). This operated under the assumption that if the school system could strip the child of their native language, customs, norms, and tradition, and assimilate them to performing whiteness, they would better integrate in the society that Euro-descended whites had created. The annexation of Puerto Rico and the subsequent English-only curricula offered in public schools, on the island, was also a failed attempt to Americanize students. It is an interesting nuance that white people are both the beneficiaries and victims of whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy. A matter of truth is that all white individuals do not inhabit the performance of whiteness. Skin color provides general privilege, but it takes time to be socialized into the practices of whiteness. These practices are learned behaviors that can advantage students in secondary schooling spaces, but the performance of whiteness is not innate. White students, similar to students of color, can be damaged and traumatized by adopting the practices of whiteness, but they are more likely to benefit from assimilation. This benefit may outweigh the cost for some, but not for all. White supremacy is a dangerous system for most white students, as it is for students of color, but this reality is often invisible or ignored. School policies, practices, and curriculum center Whiteness, in content offered, as well as ways of knowing and doing. Essentialism is a factor that influences the perpetuation of whiteness in secondary schools. Essentialism can be defined as the perspective that all children should be exposed to traditional information that is a reflection of the dominant culture, read whiteness. Curriculum decisions are necessary for the structure of a short secondary schooling period, but the choices that have historically been made, have essentialized whiteness and Eurocratic ways of knowing.

1

Whiteness in Individualism

The concept of what students must learn is often based in white ways of knowing, and how students must perform is established in white ways of doing. In cultures around the world, the collective and family is what drives a person’s actions, but the social construct of whiteness is focused on individualism, individual success, and constant competition. Eurocentric practices counter social behavior in separating students and creating hierarchies. Grade point averages (GPA) and class rank are examples of the ways students are encouraged to rely on their individual ability to succeed in secondary education. Students are pitted against each other to reach the top percentile, and a student’s place

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within the class rank can dictate their life after graduation, especially considering college scholarship access and post-secondary acceptance, while GPA can impact internship and employment opportunities. Relatedly, the myth of meritocracy is one that upholds whiteness in secondary education. Students of color are expected and encouraged to achieve in spite of the system set before them, where white students will achieve because of the system created for them. Students are told to study hard, maintain perfect attendance, ask the right questions, read all materials, and they will succeed. However, often ignored is the reality that white people created the traditional school system, for white people, meaning the characteristics of whiteness are valued, mainstreamed, and rewarded. If a student is willing to assimilate and adopt the practices of whiteness, they are more likely to succeed. This does not mean that students of color are not innately able to achieve academically, but they must navigate a complex set of racialized guidelines in order to make headway. This can be damaging to some but may motivate others.

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Whiteness as Standard

Secondary schools seek to instill the values, policies, and performance of whiteness in all students, by holding them all to the same expectation. Rather than allowing students to explore unique interests and to critique the world around them, curriculum is dictated to them from the perspective of whiteness as the ideal. James Baldwin suggests in “A Letter to Teachers,” that teachers do not know, nor do they care to know their students, particularly students of color. The reason is that the school system expects students to adopt the elements of what it means to perform whiteness in classrooms, rather than to truly diversify how students are allowed to operate in classrooms spaces. What does it look like to perform whiteness? A student is a passive participant in their education. They follow all rules and only offer critique that is comfortable to the educator and the educational system. The student aspires to obtain high marks on all assessments and does not stir the waters with comments or topics that are polemic. The student plays by the rule of whiteness, waiting for opportunity to open to them, rather than charting paths. The opposite of these actions are uniquely preserved for white males – white male students are praised for going against the system and for operating within it. Freire (1987) asserts that students must engage in “reading and writing words, [that also] encompasses the reading and writing of the world, that is the critical understanding of politics” (pp. 212–213). However, this way of learning, from a pedagogy of freedom perspective, is not encouraged in traditional

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education for all children. Students are punished when they ask too many questions, when they desire to examine social inequities, and if they attempt to advocate change within their sphere of influence, which is often within their school building. Students in specialized courses are permitted to think beyond prescribed norms, but this is generally reserved for students who are in advanced and honors courses, being groomed for positions of leadership. Tracking, curriculum, and discipline are key areas for critique in secondary education.

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Whiteness in Tracking

Secondary schools may offer multiple tracks for students; these are disguised by the premise that students can access content suitable to their intellectual abilities and interests. The system of tracking, however, works to create hierarchy and structural inequity. Common academic tracks in secondary schools are: Vocational, General Education (GE), College Preparation (CP), Honors, Advanced Placement (AP), and International Baccalaureate (IB). Special education is technically not considered a track as it works to provide support for students with academic, physical, psychosocial, and emotional needs, but this can also be used to advantage whiteness in Education. AP, IB programs, and Honors courses are the educational versions of societal white privilege. AP and IB create systematized ways that students can earn college credits, thus encouraging college going and subsidizing college savings. AP and IB also open up other opportunities for students, but it must be noted that even within these courses, though they are highly regarded, they can offer harmful environments where students are being taught to a rigid test curriculum and freedom of thought and expression can be inhibited to what will be formulaically assessed on standardized tests. AP, IB, and Honors courses also may give students an advantage in GPA calculations – in some school districts these courses are weighted more heavily than general education courses, so students’ GPAs are subsidized. These numbers often correlate to college scholarships and other opportunities beyond schooling. Another layer to the system of tracking is the level of personnel support it requires to maintain the function of categorization and hierarchy. Often, external forces are a factor in the track that students are placed in. For example, guidance counselors’ input/influence, teachers’ recommendations, and standardized test scores, create a student’s profile for tracking. A student’s profile is systematically crafted from the time they are enrolled in school, until they have completed it. For access to higher tracks, students require a certain GPA,

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recommendation by a guidance counselor or a previous teacher, and for some programs, specific grades in content areas, or test scores that meet a predetermined threshold. This process creates the perception that a track is bias-free and systematic, but the hidden impact is that tracking advantages students who inhabit the performance of whiteness, and disadvantages those who do not. Individual bias can work to support this institutional practice, cloaking whiteness, and placing blame on student performance as the outcome. Gifted and Talented tracks overwhelmingly include Euro-descended students, while students of color are disproportionality funneled into low tracks and tested into special education. This process is based in racial bias, cultural incompetence, and low expectations; tracking begins at young ages and follows students to the conclusion and beyond their pre-kindergarten – 12th grade academic career. The better students inhabit the performance of whiteness, the more likely they are to access higher academic tracks.

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Whiteness in Curriculum

Curriculum has always been an essential factor in secondary education. From its inception in colonized North America, what information people are allowed to know, and the types of people who are permitted to impact curriculum has been heavily controlled. Traditionally, curriculum is established as a guideline for standard content that all students should encounter by the time they graduate. Implicitly, curriculum has worked to center whiteness and Eurocratic perspectives that uphold whiteness as the authority. The focus of subject areas accomplish this work. For example, the English curriculum in secondary schools is often required for all four years of schooling. These courses operate around teaching students with texts from “The Canon.” The Canon is an authoritative list of texts that primarily highlight Europeans or Euro-descended authors. All students are expected to read Shakespeare’s centuries old pieces, or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Many students will read Puritan-era literature, such as The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. Centering these texts as the traditionally common pieces, explicitly communicates that literature authored by white writers, generally male, are superior texts. Further, Standardized American English is prioritized in speaking and writing, which can alienate students for whom English is not their first language, and even students who also speak other dialects of the English language. Math is another subject area that is generally required for all four years of secondary school. Math is regarded as sophisticated and complicated, and

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one that many students are socialized into thinking they are not adept at the prescribed skills. Logic and rational thinking is upheld as the basis, so when students have difficulty understanding the content, this may communicate that the problem is a personal one, rather than pedagogical and systematic. Also, it is rarely recognized that the concept of Math was originated by indigenous peoples and ancient Africans – disregarding this truth makes students believe that Math was originated by white men, which can alienate some from interest. Further, tracking may prevent students from accessing advanced mathematical concepts, because basic skills are a general education focus, which can also bore students, promoting apathy. This disinterest can impact the fields of study and professions that students choose, beyond schooling, which furthers under-representation in respected and high-paying career fields. These same issues exist within the subject area of science, a discipline reputed as neutral and objective, which is blatantly untrue. Science is touted as impartial investigation that follows a set of practices and procedures, but what is taught to students has been impacted by scientist’s historic, cultural, and personal bias. Similarly, in this field, students can also be tracked into lower basic skill focused courses that do not allow access to higher-level science application courses, which can also impact college courses they choose and professional decisions beyond that. White males as leaders, discoverers, pioneers, and champions also dominate History, similar to English. This focus promulgates the perception that the world was saved by the pervasion of whiteness as a common good, which in reality, European white dominance was most detrimental to civilizations around the globe. In World History courses, Europe is taught as a cornerstone, and there is rarely a study of Ancient Africa, or the southern Western Hemisphere. Egypt may be included, but these people are included, potentially because of their proximity to Europe, and they are portrayed with traditionally European features, such as light skin. In U.S. History, most students begin with Christopher Columbus discovering the New World and fast forward over 100 years to the Mayflower’s arrival. This bastardization of truth and historical fact minimizes the presence and genocide of the indigenous peoples present in the Western Hemisphere. It also supports the authority of whiteness as a necessity, over the lives and existence of other groups, propagating the narrative that whiteness is fundamental. Interestingly, in the U.S., more students will encounter content about the European Holocaust, than they will learn about the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African peoples, the annexation of Mexico and Puerto Rico, the internment of Japanese Americans, the exclusion of Asians, all during the welcoming of European immigrants. History that is comfortable perpetuates

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the narrative of whiteness as good, as powerful, as necessary. Increasingly, the recognition of people of color has been including during certain times in a school year, but this is generally limited to a heroes and holidays approach (see Banks, 1993), where certain palatable figures are highlighted, or certain eras that support the story of white dominance and benevolence, are included. Foreign Languages and the Fine and Performing Arts are generally limited, under-funded in under-resourced schools, and perceived as extraneous. Foreign language is treated as a checklist, which prioritizes the adoption of Standardized American English, and the value in mastering foreign languages is minimized. Further, the creative expression and outlet that the fine and performing arts may offer students is regarded as a privilege, rather than a core content area.

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Whiteness in Discipline

Discipline in secondary schools is perceived as important, as some say, secondary professionals are preparing students for the real-world, upon graduation. As mentioned above, the performance of whiteness requires a set of skills and practices that students must display. In secondary schools, students experience limited free thought and repressed creativity. Further, the rigid structure and lack of freedom, intellectually and physically, can have an impact on student behavior. Further, if they resist the adoption of the practices of whiteness, they may become a target for disciplinary action. Discipline referrals can be based in teacher bias, if a student’s performance of whiteness wavers, or if a student’s actions have made a teacher uncomfortable or violated their perceived authority. Discipline Officer bias impacts the decisions that are made for detention, suspension, and sometimes expulsion. It is important to note that the majority of school professionals and administrators are white people who have been socialized to inhabit and value the practices of whiteness. After the tragic Columbine shooting, zero-tolerance policies were instituted in schools with a focus to limit bullying and school violence. Ironically, however, this increased metal detectors in majority-minority serving school buildings and increased the number of school resource officers (SRO) and police officers present in schooling spaces. However, almost all school shooting instances have occurred in predominantly white-serving institutions. The increase in law enforcement officials in schools has increased school arrests for students of color, which negatively impacts their future, as students who encounter the criminal justice system at young ages are more likely to return to this system. Further, students of color and students receiving special education services are

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disproportionately targeted by SROs and receive harsher punishments than their white regular education counterparts, even when exhibiting the same behaviors. This increases a student’s chance of entering the school-to-prison pipeline, which funnels students from school institutions into county, state, and federal institutions of incarceration. This likelihood of students of color being perceived as criminally violent only perpetuates the narrative of white behavior as favored, acceptable, and innocent.

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Summary

Secondary schools are places that function to uphold and perpetuate the values of whiteness in academic tracking, curriculum, and discipline practices. These institutions work to socialize and reinforce the practices of whiteness, which impact a students’ positive or negative experience in school, and their future beyond it. This reality is damaging, primarily for students of color, but for white students, as well. The methods to disrupt and resist this legacy are based in antiracist practices that highlight and critique inequities, working to advocate change and revealing the invisibility of whiteness in secondary education.

References Baldwin, J., & Morrison, T. (1998). James Baldwin: Collected essays: Notes of a native son/ nobody knows my name/the fire next time/no name in the street/the devil finds work/ other essays (T. Morrison, Ed.). Library of America. Banks, J. (1993). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. In J. Banks & C. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. Allyn & Bacon. DiAngelo, R. (2012). What does it mean to be White. Developing White Racial Literacy, 44, 52–63. Freire, P. (1987). Letter to North American teachers. In I. Shor (Ed.), Freire for the classroom: A sourcebook for liberatory teaching (pp. 211–215). Boynton/Cook. Jones, K., & Okun, T. (2001). White supremacy culture. In T. Okun (Ed.), Dismantling racism: A workbook for social change groups (pp. 1–23). ChangeWork. Prucha, F. P. (1973) Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900. Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 81

Segregation in Schools Max Cuddy

Related Entries: Brown v. Board; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Elementary Education and Whiteness; Integration of Schools; School Choice

… School segregation is the separation of students into different schools on the basis of race. In the United States, segregation has taken two main forms: de jure segregation in which separation is required by law and de facto segregation in which separation exists without any legal stipulations. While de jure segregation was ruled unlawful in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, many K-12 schools look just as racially segregated in 2019 as they did in the 1950s and 60s. For instance, in 2009–2010, 75% of Black students and 80% of Latinx students attended schools that were majority non-white. For Black students these numbers are almost exactly the same as in 1968–1969 and for Latinx students the percentage has increased (from 55%). Furthermore, in 2009–2010, 38% of Black students and 43% of Latinx students still attended schools where less than 10% of the students were white (Orfield et al., 2012). Put differently, in 2012–2013, more than one in three public schools nationwide were either 90–100% white or 90–100% nonwhite (Orfield et al., 2016). The Brown v. Board of Education ruling is often cited as a turning point in the history of segregation. However, the Supreme Court did not outline how schools and districts should desegregate, nor did it provide a timeline, save for declaring that states should proceed “with all deliberate speed.” Hence, more than a decade after the ruling, schools were no more integrated because school districts had not been compelled to take substantive action. It took further Supreme Court rulings to begin desegregation in earnest: Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) allowed courts to order districts to reassign students based on race, and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) upheld mandatory busing as an appropriate way to transport students to desegregated schools. These judicial actions prompted a wave of court-ordered desegregation plans within school districts nationwide. In the South, where states had de jure segregation, between 1964 and 1971 the number

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_081

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of Black students attending all-Black schools dropped from 99% to only 20% (Cascio et al., 2008). At the same time, cities were starting to shift demographically as suburbanization drew white people out of central cities. In fact, some whites chose to move to the suburbs in response to desegregation orders within cities. Besides gaining residential distance from Blacks, these moves also landed whites in majority-white suburban school districts. This was particularly the case in the Northeast and Midwest where rigid school district boundaries between many cities and their surrounding suburbs meant that white families’ property taxes, PTO funds, and social and cultural capital all benefited other white children. Realizing this trend, desegregation supporters pushed for inter-district busing plans between cities and suburbs. The Supreme Court ruled against them in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), declaring that inter-district integration could not be mandatorily enacted unless the state was shown to be responsible for between-district segregation. This high burden of proof largely ended hopes of instituting regional desegregation efforts between school districts. The result was that white parents in many metropolitan areas were now safe from the threat of desegregation once they moved into majority white suburbs. This decision has had reverberating effects: a much larger portion of school segregation is between schools in different school districts than it is between schools in the same districts. Still, single district desegregation policies were largely effective in increasing integration during the 1970s and into the 1980s. For instance, from 1968 to 1991, the percentage of Black students nationwide attending schools that were 90–100% nonwhite dropped in half (from 64% to 32%) (Orfield et al., 2012). Yet, white parents did not take these changes lightly, and desegregation policies were met with fierce opposition in almost every district they were implemented. Often, parents were incensed that their child would be “bussed” to a different school in order to desegregate. Indeed, the era of the 1970s and 1980s is now commonly referred to as the “busing” era. However, this is a false notion for two reasons: (1) even at the peak of busing in the 1970s, less than 5% of students nationwide were bused because of a court-ordered mandate, and (2) before desegregation plans, white students were often bused to different schools in large numbers with no objections (Delmont, 2016). Overall, 755 school districts throughout the country have, at some point, been under court orders to desegregate (In 2013–2014 there were 13,601 school districts in the United States [NCES, 2018]). The number, though, has been dwindling over the years as a series of Supreme Court decisions (especially Board of Education v. Dowell [1991], Freeman v. Pitts [1992], and Missouri v. Jenkins [1995]) in the early 1990s made it easier for districts to be released from

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judicial oversight. In 1990, there were 483 large school districts (over 2,000 students) still under court order. By 2009, almost half (215 districts) had been released. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those released districts have seen a substantial amount of resegregation in the ensuing years (Reardon et al., 2012). Much of present day school segregation is rooted in both the historical drawing of school district boundaries and the lack of policies promoting integration. Still, white parents’ decision-making at the individual level cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor to segregation. Within districts, white parents are still likely to choose whiter schools for their children – whether through public school choice or private schools. In school districts serving the 100 largest cities, school segregation increased from 1990 to 2010 (Billingham, 2015). In other words, white families who decide to live in racially diverse districts (instead of fleeing to racially homogenous ones) are still opting for whiter schools. Nationwide, neighborhood schools are less white than their corresponding catchment areas because white families are sending their children to non-neighborhood schools. In fact, the less white an attendance area is, the less likely that white students who live in that attendance area will enroll at the neighborhood school. White parents applying to high schools for their children in racially diverse districts have been shown to primarily select schools on the basis of racial demographics, filtering out schools that are predominantly Black (even when those schools are more academically successful) (Saporito and Lareau 1999). Other research emphasizes that white adults are less likely to choose a school as the proportion of black students increases, even after controlling for common racial “proxies,” such as academic performance and school safety (Billingham & Hunt, 2016).

1

Tracking within Racially Mixed Schools

Despite all of the evidence that schools are still segregated, there are many schools that are racially mixed. These schools are not all paragons of integration, though. Often, there is an unequal distribution of resources within the schools – most notably in what courses students of color end up in. Curricular differentiation – or “tracking,” as it’s more commonly referred to – means that students are slotted into different courses (such as general education, honors, AP, etc.) based on their putative academic ability. Tracking became a way to prevent black students from learning in the same classrooms as white students and within-school segregation increased as the percentage of black students rose in the 1970s and 80s (Clotfelter, 2004). While different court decisions (see Hobson v. Hansen [1967] and People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education

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School District No. 205 [1994]) have found tracking to be an intentional tool of resegregation, the practice persists. Tracking has detrimental academic effects (lower grades and standardized test scores) because students in lower academic tracks generally receive less rigorous instruction delivered by less experienced teachers (Oakes, 2005). Tracking also does not reflect the outcome of meritocratic processes. A large study of 12th graders in Charlotte found that Black students ended up in lower academic tracks despite controlling for their prior academic achievement (Mickelson, 2001). Tracking has symbolic and psychological effects as well. In a study of a racially mixed high school where higher academic tracks are disproportionately white, researchers found that racialized tracking had become so normalized that students and staff had begun to view lower tracks as “belonging” to Blacks and Latinos while honors classes were seen as the domain of white students. Thus, Black parents often faced resistance from staff members when they advocated for their children to be placed in advanced classes. On the other hand, White parents reported easily switching their children’s classes to place them in higher tracks – even when teachers recommended that they stay in a lower track (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). Tracking in racially mixed schools affects the social dynamics of schooling for Black students, as well. Whites in high track classes can act possessively over “their” space, directing racial microaggressions against the few students of color. In addition, Black students in high-track classes at predominantly white schools are more negatively perceived by their Black peers because racialized tracking signals to Black students that achievement is associated with whiteness. By contrast, since majority Black schools have more Black students in gifted or advanced classes, these students come under less scrutiny from their peers.

2

Origins of Segregation and Debates within the Black Community

At the time of the Brown decision (1954), 17 states legally mandated racial segregation in schools by constitution or statute, four states made racial segregation optional, and 27 states prohibited segregation on the basis of race in public schools (Sutherland, 1955). But the northern and western states that prohibited segregation had not always done so. In 1850, the case of Roberts v. City of Boston marked the first legal challenge to school segregation. Benjamin Roberts, a Black father, sued Boston because his daughter, Sarah, had to arduously walk past five white schools to attend her Black school. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled against them, finding that the city was not at fault

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for segregating its schools. Five years later, though, the state legislature passed a law forbidding distinction on the basis of race (Bell, 1977). Still, this did not suddenly integrate schools in Massachusetts (nor did similar laws spark widespread integration in other northern and western states). Of course, whites did not rush to invite Black children to their schools. But some Black parents were skeptical and hesitant about integrated schools, as well. They were worried that their child would be taunted by peers, mistreated by (white) teachers, and not learn anything about Black history. Indeed, from the 1800s to the present day, many Black parents and activists have questioned desegregation’s premises, aims, and implementation. W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1935) essay “Does the Negro need separate schools?” warns that Black children could have irrevocably damaging experiences in hostile white spaces. Ultimately, Du Bois concludes that “the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education” (p. 335). The idea that integration is not the only solution to Black educational inequality carried through to the Black Power activists in the 1960s and beyond. Indeed, Black skeptics argued that in the post-Brown years there was a preoccupation with ensuring racial balance rather than school quality. As such, there was less attention paid to the educational well-being of Black students and an overemphasis on making sure Black students were in the same buildings as White students. By the same token, desegregation plans often led to the closure of Black schools, the firing of Black teachers and principals, and longer commutes for Black students (Delmont, 2016; Shujaa, 1996). Moreover, segregated Black schools were often given short shrift during the height of the integration discourse, not recognized for the bedrock community institutions that they were. In sum, not all in the Black community were always so keen on the “integration or bust” agenda that major civil rights organizations (most notably the NAACP) championed throughout the 20th century.

3

Looking Forward

The future of school segregation looks mixed. The Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2007) that voluntary assignment policies that took race into account were unconstitutional. The Court argued that colorblindness, not color-consciousness, was the primary objective of the Brown decision and therefore, in the words of Justice Roberts, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” While formal desegregation programs had already been on the decline, advocates saw this as a devastating blow to their

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mission. In the wake of the Parents Involved decision, some school districts have moved towards “controlled choice” policies that employ a “generalized use” of race– such as considering the racial demographics of a unit rather than an individual (Frankenberg, 2017). Some districts have gone farther, scrubbing away any mention of race. For instance, Chicago Public Schools now uses socioeconomic indicators at the census tract level to establish four tiers from which they ensure certain numbers of students from each tier are admitted at magnet and selective schools. Nonetheless, a 2016 analysis found 91 districts or charter networks that had institutionalized socioeconomic integration plans – up from 40 in 2007 (Potter et al., 2016). There has also been a renewed interest in school segregation in the popular media, as well. Moreover, in the future it will be harder to segregate schools because of sheer demographic changes. White students accounted for 50% of public school students enrolled in prekindergarten to 12th grade in 2013–2014, the first year in United States public education history that they were not the majority (NCES, 2017). And as the population of the United States continues to diversify, students of color are projected to be the majority of public school students for many years to come.

References Bell, D. A. (1977). The legacy of WEB Du Bois: A rational model for achieving public school equity for America’s Black children. Creighton Law Review, 11, 409–32. Billingham, C. M. (2019). Within-district racial segregation and the elusiveness of White student return to Urban public schools. Urban Education, 54(2), 151–181. Billingham, C. M., & Hunt, M. O. (2016). School racial composition and parental choice: New evidence on the preferences of White parents in the United States. Sociology of Education, 89(2), 99–117. Cascio, E., Gordon, N., Lewis, E., & Reber, S. (2008). From Brown to Busing. Journal of Urban Economics, 64(2), 296–325. Clotfelter, C. T. (2004). After Brown: The rise and retreat of school desegregation. Princeton University Press. Delmont, M. (2016). Why busing failed: Race, media, and the national resistance to school desegregation. University of California Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Does the Negro need separate schools? Journal of Negro Education, 4(3), 328–335. Frankenberg, E. (2017). Assessing segregation under a new generation of controlled choice policies. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 219–250.

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Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press. Lewis, A. E., & Diamond, J. B. (2015). Despite the best intentions: How racial inequality thrives in good schools. Oxford University Press. Mickelson, R. A. (2001). Subverting Swann: First-and second-generation segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. American Educational Research Journal, 38(2), 215–252. National Center for Education Statistics. (2017). Status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups 2017. U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Digest of education statistics 2016. U.S. Department of Education. Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. Yale University Press. Orfield, G., Jongyeon, E., Frankenberg, E., & Siegel-Hawley, G. (2016). Brown at 62: School segregation by race, poverty and state. Civil Rights Project. Orfield, G., Kucsera, J., & Siegel-Hawley, G. (2012). E pluribus separation: Deepening double segregation for more students. Civil Rights Project. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, 551 U.S. 41. (2007). Potter, H., Quick, K., & Davies, E. (2016). A new wave of school integration: Districts and charters pursuing socioeconomic diversity. The Century Foundation. Reardon, S. F., Tej Grewal E., Kalogrides, D., & Greenberg, E. (2012). Brown fades: The end of court-ordered school desegregation and the resegregation of American public schools. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 31(4), 876–904. Saporito, S., & Lareau, A. (1999). School selection as a process: The multiple dimensions of race in framing educational choice. Social Problems, 46(3), 418–439. Shujaa, M. J. (1996). Beyond desegregation: The politics of quality in African American Schooling. Corwin Press, Inc. Sutherland, A. E. (1955). Segregation by race in public schools retrospect and prospect. Law and Contemporary Problems, 20(1), 169–183.

CHAPTER 82

Settler Colonialism Annie Jaffee and Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: American Indian Boarding Schools; Capitalism; Indigenous Americans and Whiteness; Nationalism; South Africa and Whiteness

… Settler colonialism is a form of imperialism wherein colonizers occupy and remain on stolen colonized land, recreating the social structures, economic systems and political power within that region. Colonialism creates power structures, and colonizers’ intent is to control, dominate and overtake land for the purposes of securing greater wealth and power. The goal of settler colonialism goes further, attempting to eliminate colonial variation, ultimately creating a new top-notch, highly-skilled and sovereign population. In her book, White Femininity, Katerina Deliovsky (2010) contends that settler colonialism is at the very core of North American history, explaining that, “Through a complex interplay of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, capitalism and European cultural practices, including science, religion and law, Europeans came to occupy ‘positional superiority’ (Said, 1979) on a world scale” (Deliovsky, 2010, p. 12). She goes on to further explain Said’s point, arguing that Anglo-Saxon whiteness has been so pervasive it continues to impact regions across the world. Of course, settler colonialism in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world, with its basis in whiteness and juridical white supremacy, comes with the erasure of indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, being, and living. Settler colonialism describes a process of violence, genocide and exploitation. There are two main types of settler colonialism: internal and external. The primary difference between the two is simply who holds power – for internal colonialism, control is held by those living (almost always the elite) within the region, and for external colonialism, control is held by those living outside that region, most often the elite living in the metropole. Both of these processes are racialized, as race is used as a distinguishing feature to defend colonialism as well as to organize colonizing relations. Sociologist Robert Blauner (1969) writes that, “The colonizing power carries out a policy which constrains, transforms, or destroys indigenous values, orientations, and ways of life” (p. 396). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_082

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Internal and External Colonialisms

Internal colonialism refers to the process in which a group of people in a nation-state, with the intention of controlling social structures and redistributing resources, ultimately make their lives on stolen and/or colonized land. The location of the colonized and the colonizers is perhaps not divided through a physical barrier, but rather by culture, ideals, education, natural resources, and social relations. The most important key feature of colonization, which distinguishes internal colonialism from external colonialism, is where power comes from, and who is able to move their power from one space to another. Robert Blauner (1969) first coined the term, “internal colonialism,” in his article, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt.” Blauner (1969) argues that internal colonialism as a concept works to, “integrate the insights of caste and racism, ethnicity, culture, and economic exploitation into an overall conceptual scheme” (p. 394). Important to emphasize here is that internal colonialism revolves around social dynamics, not merely economic or political domination. He explains that, “there is an impact on the culture and social organization of the colonized people which is more than just a result of such ‘natural’ processes as contact and acculturation” (Blauner, 1969, p. 396). Thus, internal colonialism functions to create competing nationalisms amid competing senses of place and space on top of one another, such that relations within the colonial territory are irrevocably altered. Internal colonialism then articulates a form of colonialism in which the colonizers overtake a community, nation, or area and remain. Persisting in this way results in a shift in all directions: the colonized are left to create new ways of knowing and being in response to their colonial overseers, and the colonizers create meaning and new ways of knowing and being in response to their role and experiences as colonizers. External colonialism refers to the process by which a metropole imposes its will and authority on a space or territory yet does not settle permanently. One can think of these forms of colonialism as extractive: removing resources to be redistributed elsewhere, especially at the center of colonial power and authority. Examples include the Portuguese in Africa, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the United States historically in the Philippines, and today in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. Premised on the creation of wealth and capital, external colonialism often renders existing populations with the demand to fight amongst one another, the result of the so-called “divide and conquer” strategy of imperialism, for scarce resources. Such horrors as the Tutsi genocide give evidence for the ways that external colonialism rewrites and restructures past ways of being and knowing while also building off of preexisting and historical relations as they are deemed advantageous for the purpose of

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securing ever greater capital for the colonial power. External colonialism helps to frame those instances of imperialism wherein the colonizers did not move on to and settle permanently in the colonized space, yet functioned to erase entire cultures, and remake all that remained.

2

Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy

In many places around the world, internal colonialisms led to entire erasures of peoples and culture. The genocide of tens of millions of indigenous peoples in the Americas in the wake of European colonization is argued to have resulted far more from the spreading of European diseases than to grand military battles. Still, contemporary hegemonic culture in the United States functions to erase the many indigenous peoples who live on, in spite of and in resistance to, an ideological invisibilizing. While many cities, counties, states, and provinces take their names from indigenous sources, internal colonialism works to create a version of, say, “Mississippi,” for instance, without any notion of there being a Mississippian people indigenous to the land and existing for centuries. Far more people today would associate Mississippi as a contested space along the racial binary of white supremacy and black resistance. This is an example of internal conflicts among colonizer societies coming to dominate over and against the fundamental antagonism of European settler colonialism. It is important to note that expressions of colonialism often import and recreate imperialist principles and practices that come to function ideologically to reify colonial relations and logics as “commonsense.” Importing such practices often represents a form of hailing in which others are to understand the value of something based on its origins in the metropole, or city/state/ capitol from which settler colonizers base their colony/ies on. The commonsensical notions of “barbarians” and “savages” as descriptors of indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, Oceana, and the Americas animated settler colonialism with a justification premised on European Christian supremacy. As imperialism continued and indigenous societies were decimated the world over, many converted to Christianity, especially Catholicism. This shift in the United States, for instance, eventually led to the shift in terminology for colonial citizens from “Christian” to “White.” Early questions for European imperial forces often rejected the notion of indigenous peoples having a soul, and how their spiritual awakening as Christians should thereby proceed. While different European imperial states approached proselytizing in different ways, with some emphasizing conversion (Spain, France, etc.) and others prioritizing commerce (Netherlands, Portugal,

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etc.), all sought to remake indigenous lands and societies as part of a religious as well as political expression of dominance over all possible resources, including human resources. The European demand for lucrative commercial farming goods led to the creation of plantation societies across the globe. These societies came to structure everything about daily life across the Caribbean and the Southern United States, and colonial logics of the time, from associations of light skin to types of labor one was suited for, persist to this day. Colonization should be understood as always-already racialized and as impacted by racial hierarchies and social structures imported both from the metropole and the existing colonized territory. For instance, these tensions, relationships and oppressions – particularly under the framework of white supremacy– can be seen in the U.S. in the 1960s at the time Blauner was writing. Blauner showed that, concomitantly with the rise of demonstrations and political mobilization in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, black people in the U.S. began increasingly to identify with independence struggles in Africa and the Caribbean. Further, pan-Africanism and black freedom struggle highlighted the fundamental links between anti-black white supremacy in the United States, and the enduring legacies of European colonization in newly created nations across the Global South. To a similar end, Blauner posited that “Black colonization” in the United States is enforced and maintained through social structures – sometimes physical ones – including neighborhood “ghettos.” While these areas are a part of a larger social world, they are organized, structured and overseen by colonizers to control the economic, political, and social lives of the region’s members. Thus, one might think about contemporary social relations in settler-colonial nations like the United States as having competing colonial projects: one focused on those who are descended from peoples abducted and forced into chattel slavery and the other against the original inhabitants of the lands that now make up the U.S. Colonialism is capable of overcoming such internal contradictions and complications because of an underlying principle shared across both projects: white supremacy. European exceptionalism, recreated as American exceptionalism contemporaneously, legitimates any and all intrusions into indigenous ways of life as evidence of progress because of the inherently backward nature projected onto any and all non-European cultures. That is, if one is able to view any differences from a hegemonic ideal as evidence for a lack or deficit, one is better capable of dehumanizing others enough that their lives can come to be seen as existing for the purpose of serving other, more important, lives – and nothing more. This is the logic necessary to understand how in confronting peoples without a history of passing private ownership of land generationally, one would think the land was therefore available

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for the taking in order for it to become someone else’s private property. Or, in the same type of white supremacist distortion, if in confronting an Other, with a different religion, one thought that their absence of knowledge of Christ meant that they did not deserve their ancestral lands and homes, and often even their lives. White supremacy thus works in concert with settler colonialism as a justificatory logic. White supremacy is essential in settler colonial nations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States precisely because of what would be at stake if it were not: how could white people justify any of their past or future on lands that were not rightfully “theirs?” Independence struggles with Great Britain function to reinforce a nationalism capable of locating a causal chain of events that rationalize settler colonialism: we fought and won a war (or wars) to be able to live here, we thus deserve to reap the rewards of winning. This logic omits indigenous peoples entirely, invisibilizing them to the point that one does not even need to reference their presence as a settler colonial on stolen land when one explains where they live in present day North America (we write this, at present, on the stolen land of the Chocktaw and Chicasaw peoples, who were brutally removed from their land, underwent the Trail of Tears, and were forcibly “resettled” in what is now Oklahoma). Entertaining the notion of indigenous sovereignty is only recently making strides in Anglophone nations (other than the United States). Indigenous scholars often regard such efforts as too little, too late and argue instead for a radical restructuring of the settler colonial status quo. They call for a radical decolonization of indigenous lands and insist that “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

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Decolonization

Decolonization is about resource distribution, and land rights. Access to space is core to the discussion of decolonization. Ultimately, without radical economic redistribution, true decolonization cannot be achieved. Decolonization is not an abstract concept, it is emphatically not a metaphor, but instead involves real, tangible actions that those in power must make to create equity and justice for indigenous folks and the resulting marginalized communities who have undergone and continue to live under conditions of colonization. Linking the struggle of indigenous peoples and peoples descended from other colonial histories of oppression offers the grounds for a coalition that would comprise the great majority of people across the world. Reparations should

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be seen as only a step toward decolonization, not as an end in itself, or way of paying off the “debt” accrued by centuries of white supremacist dispossession. Even if indigenous peoples were allowed full participation and truly equitable access to resources, they would still be required to conform to settler colonial logics. This is why it is not possible to resolve the fundamental antagonism of settler colonialism through paying off those who have suffered most: it requires an assimilation that results in the complete erasure of indigeneity. Additionally, many scholars argue for a cultural aspect of decolonization. As Blauner (1969) says at the end of his piece, “Cultural revitalization movements play a key role in anti-colonial movements” (p. 402). Cultural shifts can be achieved in part through institutional and systemic changes. For instance, Blauner writes, “The key institutions that anti-colonialists want to take over or control are business, social services, schools, and the police” (p. 403). In other words, for Blauner, decolonization and redistribution involves, at a minimum, marginalized folks holding positions of power in all systems and institutions. Yet for many indigenous communities, this evades the central problematic in question. Equal access to participate in capitalist oppression and ideological state apparatuses such as the police or schools is not what is demanded in bids for authentic sovereignty. To become fully realized, decolonization would require all groups of peoples, who presently exist as settler colonists on unseeded indigenous lands, to leave. The demands and desires of settler colonialism continue to play out the world over and are having a disproportionate impact presently in communities being transformed through climate change. Yet another example of settler colonialism on a global scale, we have already begun to see the impacts of unprecedented greenhouse gasses emitted by the Global North and the ways they are and will continue to harm indigenous communities in the Global South the most. From South Africa, to Australia, to North America, settler colonialism shows no signs presently of abating, and works in concert with white supremacy to secure material benefits for colonizers at the expense of indigenous peoples.

References Blauner, R. (1969). Internal colonialism and ghetto revolt. Social Problems, 16(4), 393– 408. Deliovsky, K. (2010). White femininity: Race, gender & power. Fernwood Publishing. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

CHAPTER 83

Shame Elise Toedt and Abby Boehm-Turner

Related Entries: Guilt; McIntosh, Peggy; Privilege; Social Class; Thandeka

… In her book Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America, Reverend Thandeka (1999), a Unitarian Universalist minister, examines the psychosocial implications of becoming white, grounding her analysis in a historical positioning of whiteness in relationship to social class. Thandeka offers a framework for understanding whiteness based on the development of white racial shame; this white racial shame framework articulates how white shame forms when white children learn to stifle discordant thoughts and feelings concerning the othering and oppression of people of color. They do this in order to maintain the love and belonging they require as children from their caregivers. In this way young whites become complicit in white supremacist, racist systems initially because belonging in white communities is dependent on their learning to separate themselves from those who are non-white and their remaining silent about the oppression incurred on people of color. Thandeka theorizes that due to stifling their convictions of injustice, instead of feeling guilt for their own racist actions, white people learn to feel shame about who they are. To prevent these feelings of shame, white people use psychological maneuvers to ignore whiteness and its unjust, inhumane implications for people of color. This individual shame is counterproductive, because it obscures the ways that whiteness is maintained and functions in white communities and within a white supremacist system which benefits white elites the most; the elite continue to incur benefits from an individual, rather than a structural, approach to addressing white supremacy in America. In what follows we work to show how Thandeka’s framework for white racial shame functions in relationship to racism, including how it can be a productive response to white supremacy for white antiracist social actors.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_083

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The Development and Function of White Shame

After asking many colleagues, friends, and strangers to talk about “their earliest memory of incidents that helped form their white racial identities” Thandeka collected stories to show how the development of white racial shame begins in childhood (p. 4). Dan, a white minister with whom Thandeka worked on several interfaith committees, recounted how, in 1952 on an eighth-grade graduation trip to Washington D.C. with his classmates, he noticed “colored” and “white” signs posted above drinking fountains and bathrooms. He was deeply troubled by these signs, but none of his teachers or peers said anything, and so he buried these feelings. Later, when Dan was in college, his fraternity pledged its first black member at his prompting. However, when the fraternity’s national headquarters found out, they ordered the expulsion of the black student; Dan was elected to tell the member. When recounting this memory to Thandeka, Dan broke down into tears, saying, “I am so ashamed of what I did… I have carried this burden for forty years… I will carry it to my grave” (p. 1). Dan’s story demonstrates a trend Thandeka found, where In the face of adult silence to racial abuse, the [white] child learns to silence and then deny its own resonant feelings towards racially proscribed others, not because it chooses to become white, but because it wishes to remain within the community that is quite literally its life. The child thus learns, ‘layer by layer,’ to stay away from the nonwhite zones of its own desires. (p. 24) Children are not born racist; they learn to adopt a white identity from their white community, who require it for membership. Until this identity is formed, white children are attacked by parents, caretakers, and peers until they begin to embody the ideal. This happens when, for instance, a child invites a nonwhite friend to his birthday party and is scolded by parents afterward; when a young white person chooses to date someone nonwhite and this person is rejected by their white family; or when a child’s expressed concern over daily mistreatments of non-whites is rationalized, silenced, or punished. The white child learns that in order to be loved and accepted by their caregivers, they must agree to transgress their internal sense of right and wrong, stifle their desire to befriend those whose skin color is different from their own, and push down the troubled feelings that arise when they notice structural racism (like Dan’s moral troubling over the bathroom “white” and “colored” signs). These instances are often so discreet, however, and race is so rarely discussed in white community spaces, that white children do not explore these thoughts or

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feelings. Thus, they become adults with a deep confusion and shame concerning their racial identity. The function of white shame is to psychologically police the behavior of whites, ensuring their loyalty to the systemic racism that protects their place within a white supremacist system. This is done when whites learn to control their emotions, which becomes unconscious. Thandeka theorizes that when whites feel something that is forbidden, often as a result of race-mixing or rage towards their own white community, “the ensuing internal battle often ends as a stalemate, a momentary paralysis marked by the red flag of a blush or the cold sweat of a frozen grimace” (p. 12). At this point, shame and fear push this feeling away in order to prevent its escape, extinguishing the kindled desire to break from white community norms. By adulthood this policing has become so successful that whites express shock and astonishment when they are confronted with truths which cause them to question their loyalty to white behavioral norms, such as when a white person first learns about the ways they benefit in terms of housing, income, and schooling outcomes due to their skin color; when they learn that Christopher Columbus was not the just and kind white hero they learned about; or when they hear stories from people of color about regular racist encounters with white people. These moments of confronting racial truths are often avoided, dismissed, or distorted because “looking at these uncomplimentary mugshots, one feels shame as in the feeling that ‘I am unlovable’” (p. 12). One problem, Thandeka notes, is that often in these moments of revelation, whites feel that they are bad, and do not have the language to move through these feelings, as the discourse is often centered around whether one is racist or not, rather than a working through of complex feelings. In the story of Dan, for instance, Thandeka points out how Dan might confess his guilt as a racist because this was the only way to stop the charge of racism for his act and also because racism was the only category he had to express a deeper loss and regret: his stifled feelings and blunted desires for a more inclusive community… He cried because his impulses to moral action had been slain by his own fear of racial exile. (p. 9) Thandeka argues that blaming the individual rather than focusing on the social order stems from the Calvinistic Christian belief that humankind is totally depraved and separated from God due to their personal sins. She writes that this understanding of sinfulness “has at its core a theory that blames the victim for its own brokenness rather than the social order that assaulted it”

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(p. 118). Whites feel that if they accept and are present with these feelings of badness, the loss is too much: it means admitting their core is inherently evil. Stephanie Wildman and Adrienne Davis (2016) write that a stalemate occurs when whites conflate racist actions within a racist system with personal “badness”; “white people know they do not want to be labeled a racist; they become concerned with how to avoid that label, rather than worrying about systemic racism and how to change it” (p. 139). The emphasis shifts to confessing or escaping accusation of one’s personal racism, rather than a tracing of how white individuals function within a system of white supremacy maintained through white shame. Thandeka (1999) suggests that whites must learn the source and function of this feeling of personal badness, or white shame, in order to counter this obsession with the label of “racist.” She explains that “they feel white shame because the persons who ostensibly loved and respected them the most actually abused them and justified it in the name of race, money, and God” (p. 134). But why do white caretakers and communities choose to teach and enforce this shame, if it is harmful to their own and their children’s inner sense of self and their ability to relate to others, as Thandeka claims? For Thandeka, whiteness cannot be understood without historically locating shame’s function to maintain white supremacy and by tracing the reasons for its maintenance: to create a tenuous loyalty in poor and middle-class whites towards white elites, in order to protect America’s most wealthy.

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Re-Framing the White Privilege Discourse

Thandeka’s white racial shame framework makes an explicit connection between white racial shame and white supremacy by locating the formation of white shame within the development of social class in the United States. She traces the history of white racial abuse to white elites, who early in the formation of the United States feared that poor whites would realize their similar causes of oppression with African slaves and engage in rebellion against white elites, as demonstrated by Bacon’s rebellion in 1676. In order to prevent alliances between working class whites and non-whites, white elites created privileges on the basis of skin color which led poor whites to associate their race as a mark of superiority; though often the accompanying privileges were meager indeed. Casey (2016) points out that “the material lives of white plantation workers (first indentured servants, and later paid middle managers) were actually far more similar to the lives of black slaves than they were to the white elite” (p. 56). A recognition of this, however, would be supremely dangerous to

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the material and social interests of white elites, and so laws were created on the basis of skin color to give poor whites limited access to the power of white elites, thus creating a sense of kinship with race that outweighed class kinships with non-whites. Through “laws and social tactics,” white elites “succeeded in persuading white working people to embrace the idea of white supremacy” (Lensmire, 2017, p. 33). Thandeka (1999) points out that, today, whites continue to prioritize race solidarity over class solidarity – even against their own interests. This can be seen in the voting patterns of lower and middle-class whites, who frequently align their votes with white elites. She also points to the overspending and debt of this same group, who, in a desire to appear “whiter,” like those most benefiting from white supremacist capitalist systems, are motivated by white shame to mimic the spending behaviors of white elites. White individuals usually do not learn to think about the connections between race and class in their own communities, however; instead, they learn the American myth of meritocracy, believing that one’s abilities, and not hierarchies of class power, determine personal success. This individualistic approach to understanding how skin color functions in American society is upheld in the popular white privilege framework first articulated by Peggy McIntosh (1988) in her article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” McIntosh’s work has had a profound effect on discussions about whiteness in fields including social work, therapy, and education. In her article, McIntosh asks whites to individually consider everyday privileges incurred due to their skin color. Privileges include defining the societal norm, benefiting from this definition, and being able to rely on their privilege while ignoring its existence and maintaining blindness to oppression of racialized others. McIntosh explicitly acknowledges the existence of privilege by providing a list of privileges individual whites regularly experience due to their skin color, such as: shopping without being harassed, receiving medical or legal help without worrying whether skin color will affect services, and finding bandages which match one’s skin tone. The exercise of interacting with the list of privileges leads whites to personalize racism, which often causes denial, blame, or a confession of privilege and a sense of helplessness when they feel that if they admit to these privileges, who they are is racist and therefore inherently bad. Even when whites embrace the white privilege framework, they may admit white privilege in order to avoid looking even more racist, and they never attend to the systemic nature of racism. Instances of individual privileges incurred by whites must be put in conversation with a legacy of structural domination, because “the discourse on privilege comes with the unfortunate consequence of masking history, obfuscating

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agents of domination, and removing the actions that make it clear who is doing what to whom… It mistakes the symptoms for causes” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 138). This dangerous maneuver makes it seem as though undoing white privilege is solely an individual matter. It fails to trace the individual privileges discussed by McIntosh to the laws, policies, and social practices deliberately created to institutionalize the oppression of people of color for white political, social, and material gain. As Leonardo (2004) aptly points out, “a critical pedagogy of white racial supremacy revolves less around the issue of unearned advantages, or the state of being dominant, and more around direct processes that secure domination and the privileges associated with it” (p. 137). Peel back McIntosh’s list and you will find the source of each privilege: a system of domination maintained within a white supremacist society, which is protected by obscuring this system, removing white elites as the known agents of creation, and stifling open dialogue about the creation and maintenance of race in America. The emphasis on individuality within the white privilege framework dangerously clouds the very explicit ways the founders of the United States equated “equality” with only those who were white, heterosexual, and land-owning; thus, privileges were first only for the very elite, and today are still nuanced by social positioning.

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Conclusion

So how can Thandeka’s (1999) white racial shame framework help whites move towards more productive antiracist identities? Thandeka postulates that the answer to this is multifaceted: individuals and communities need to understand how white racial shame is cultivated by caretakers, and how this fractures one’s sense of self while upholding white supremacy. This then leads to political and social moves to acknowledge and make reparations for structural domination. First, in order for whites to shed the shame which entraps them as perpetrators of personal, communal, and structural racism, counter-discourses need to occur in white communities. White people need to explore and understand their feelings of self-contempt, “name the actual feelings of self-contempt engendered,” and trace when “they are forced to act ‘white’ in order to survive their own communities” (Thandeka, 1999, p. 133). White community members can focus on the root causes of feelings of shame in order to find their way “back to the site of an injury to the child’s sense of self: an attack against the child by members of its own white community because the child is not yet

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white” (p. 18). They can recognize that what they were taught by caregivers, for the benefit of white supremacy, was to the detriment of their self-worth. When they become caretakers themselves, this could empower whites to refrain from reenacting the norms which damaged their own sense of self. Further, whites can understand that white self-consciousness was constructed in order to “control rebellions against the white elite by both black and white members of the lower classes” (p. 133). Instead of feeling that they are bad, or focusing on confessing their race privilege, whites can instead see how their feelings point to a “broken human spirit” and reveal that personal and communal wrongs have been committed (p. 133). Following this examination of and change in discourses, whites can become invested in political and social actions to undo the structural nature of racial oppression. Leonardo (2004) suggests, for instance, that the U.S could learn from nations like Australia, who have instituted a national day of grieving and atonement for the atrocities committed against the aboriginal population: White Australians are encouraged to sign a “sorry book” to apologize to indigenous people and acknowledge responsibility for the history of colonization and its continuing legacies, like the lost generation of aboriginal people whom the Australian government took from their families and tried to assimilate into white culture. (p. 149) While Leonardo points out that this is not a solution, it is a move to explicitly name the history of racial domination in which whites continue to participate. The United States has no such practice in place; the white racial shame framework demands that structural, alongside individual, manifestations of racism like this example are addressed. Rather than give concrete action steps, Thandeka ends Learning to be White with a hope that her framework will be taken up by others in productive ways. In her epilogue, she is optimistic that from using the white racial shame framework, “new conversations about money, race, and God in America can commence,” where “loyalties are no longer skin deep” and “broken humanity can be healed” (p. 135).

References Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism and resistance in education. SUNY Press. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge.

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Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’ Educational Philosophy & Theory, 36(2), 137–152. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working Paper 189). Wellesley Center for Research on Women. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Bloomsbury. Wildman, S., & Davis, A. (2016). Making systems of privilege visible. In P. Rothenburg (Ed.), White privilege: Essential readings on the other side of racism (5th ed., pp. 137– 143). Worth Publishers.

CHAPTER 84

Social Class and Whiteness Abby Boehm-Turner and Elise Toedt

Related Entries: Capitalism; Shame; White Supremacy; Whiteness and Labor; Whiteness as Property

… Throughout the history of the United States, members of the wealthy white elite have driven a wedge between poor whites and people from marginalized communities, constructing people of color as “other” and less than; they have used ideologies of white supremacy to create a social hierarchy, which protects their own financial interests. In her book Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (1999), the Reverend Thandeka explicates the historical basis for the creation of whiteness, as well as its social, emotional, and political effects, including how shame functions as an integral part of white identity. She outlines the intentional moves made by wealthy white elites to maintain a racist system in order to protect their economic interests as well as their personal safety. According to Zachary Casey (2016), the “history of white people’s exploitation of people of color” is integrally connected to economics, and the system of capitalism itself “perpetuates racialized inequalities” (p. 32). However, because capitalist racism is socially normalized by whites, the embeddedness of racialized inequalities in the history and daily workings of United States’ politics and social functioning frequently goes unexamined. This entry delves into the intersections between whiteness and social class, beginning with an historical situating of the construction of whiteness in order to maintain capitalism. The entry continues with an examination of Thandeka’s conception of white class shame and how it has functioned to both create and maintain white supremacy and ends with an investigation of the depictions of and violence between white people from different social classes.

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Whiteness & Capitalism

White elites created racial hierarchies in order to maintain the capital and economic advantages gained through slave labor and to quell restless poor © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_084

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whites by legalizing skin color privileges. In his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin reminded his audience that “keeping the Negro in his place” is an American pastime: It was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. (p. 682) Slavery, literally “mak[ing] money from black flesh,” is integrally connected to the rise of modern capitalism in the United States. America’s use of slavery and the subsequent use of sharecropping are “inextricably connected to commodity production and international trade” (p. 12), and “provided America the financial reserves to industrialize and become a (the) world power” (Watkins, 2001, p. 6). To justify their use of African slaves, white colonizers spread the ideology of white intellectual superiority and white civilization as the only civilization. At the same time, they perpetuated theories of other groups’ inferiority, in part by using Christian doctrine to “prove” that slavery and white superiority were ordained by God. They assigned animal characteristics to blacks, including brute strength and docility, that lent themselves to slave labor, and painted Native Americans as uncivilized, pagan savages. By theorizing themselves as superior, white elites created justifications for slavery and for stripping land and rights from both Indigenous and black individuals and communities. Whiteness as a racialized identity marker in the United States was created by wealthy elites in order to provide a barrier between indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa. Thandeka (1999) explains how “the natural class affinities between indentured servants and slaves presented a danger to the masters” (p. 45), and plantation owners and other wealthy whites began to fear that poor white servants would join forces with black slaves and rebel. Thus, the elite created laws to split the two groups, convincing indentured servants of their superiority to black slaves through privileges assigned to them due to their whiteness. Like slaves, indentured servants were seen as inferior by the ruling elite, so assigning them the marker of whiteness served as a promotion, a way of dividing them from black slaves with whom they shared jobs and ways of life, without actually improving their economic realities. Wealthy whites engaged in a series of moves to “divide and conquer common people, often by granting limited standing and privilege to white folk while denying it to their black sisters and brothers” (Lensmire, 2017,

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p. 33). One example was wealthy whites’ use of white indentured servants as slave catchers, a process which discouraged whites and blacks from working together to escape, as well using this position of power to help “poor whites to identify with the ruling elite” (Thandeka, 1999, p. 46). In addition, indentured servants were given the right to be whipped with their shirts on, whereas black slaves could be whipped with their shirts off. Although both groups could be physically abused by their white superiors, this law allowed the white indentured servants to “come to think of themselves as superior to, and hold in contempt, the black people with whom they worked side by side every day” (Lensmire, 2017, p. 33). Thus, whiteness came to be constructed as a way to differentiate who was above and who was below; who could be whipped with shirt on and who with shirt off. Meanwhile, the wealthy elite remained on top, dividing the lower classes and gaining allies without giving up their economic and political superiority.

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White Classism

Thandeka defines white classism as the contempt that upper class whites had for poorer whites, a contempt which was demonstrated through violence. In the late 1600s, poor whites and black slaves, led by Nathaniel Bacon, rose up against the governor of Virginia. The rebellion was eventually suppressed with the support of forces sent from England, with violence meted out to both white and black rebels. These events sparked fear for elite whites who realized the power that the lower classes could have if they worked together. Thandeka (1999) explains, “white racism was thus a means to an end, and the end was the defense of Virginia’s class structure and the further subjugation of the poor of all ‘racial’ colors” (p. 47). One way in which Virginia’s ruling class constructed racism was with the creation of the slave codes, which served to further separate the poor along color lines. Casey (2016) discusses how the effects of these laws are still felt today: Intended to thwart class solidarity, the initial whiteness laws in the U.S. have had a ripple effect still present today in the common practice in the United States of identifying first along racial lines, and only secondarily along class lines. (p. 56) These laws, as well as others, solidified the racial divide, although the lawmakers were careful not to grant poor and working class whites too many rights, as they, too, were viewed as inferior.

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Intraracial violence between white elites and poor and working class whites has continued since Bacon’s Rebellion. Wealthy whites brutalized black bodies as a “warning to all persons ‘black’ or ‘white’ who would not conform to white, upper-class authority that they would be swiftly and summarily dealt with” (Thandeka, 1999, pp. 132–133). While clearly black slaves had more to fear and have borne the generational trauma associated with this violence, the violent actions nevertheless also provoked fear for poor whites, who worried that unless they proved their non-blackness, unless they conformed to behavioral expectations of whiteness, they would end up in a similar situation. By creating a “‘white’ self-consciousness filled with a darkened self-contempt for lower-class weaknesses and vulnerabilities” (Thandeka, 1999, p. 133), both the shame within poor whites and the divide between white and black grew. According to Lensmire (2017), “even as it has always been an advantage to be white in this country, there have also been consequential struggles among different white ethnic groups and social classes over who are deemed worthy and less worthy white people” (p. 40). Interestingly the same laws which were used to convince working class whites of their superiority to people of color, also established them as less than elite whites (Lensmire, 2017). One such example is the laws about whipping referenced above, which served to create a strict hierarchy: white indentured servants were above black slaves, but wealthy whites, allowed by law to use physical violence against both groups, were clearly at the top. Joe Feagin (2013) argues that from the mid1600s and continuing through today, “most working class and middle class whites have accepted a higher position in the racial hierarchy and racial privileges (symbolic and status capital) from the white capitalist elite in return for giving up much class struggle against that elite” (p. 61). The privileges associated with being considered white have been enough for working and middle class whites to sacrifice other potential economic advantages and social programs. Affluence is closely associated with whiteness in the United States. Casey (2016) writes, “the richest four hundred people have more money than the bottom 150,000,000” in the U.S. (p. 87), and he describes how much of our current capitalist logic protects the interests of the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. With their desire to be considered white, and the close association with wealth that that entails, Thandeka (1999) details how many from the lower classes have suffered the penalty of significant debt from their attempts to “keep up the appearance of being part of the elite class” (p. 98). White shame motivates their overspending, as well as their tendency to vote with white elites and against their own economic interests, as is discussed below.

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White Class Shame

The elite used laws and socialization to create a division between poor whites and blacks; these divisions created a sense of superiority for poor white folks, who, although their lives were similar to black folks, began to associate their identities with the white elite. As they looked around and saw the similarities in their lives to black people, poor whites were consumed with shame for embodying the lifestyle and behavior of those who were theoretically their inferiors. Lensmire (2017) writes, This conviction, this belief in their superiority, however, was challenged at every moment of every day by the actual material conditions of their lives and by their position at the bottom of the South’s white social hierarchy that defined them as ‘poor white trash.’ (p. 47) Thandeka (1999) theorizes that many poor and working class white people felt that, in order to truly be white, they needed to live like the white elite. Two different strategies were used: classism, Thandeka writes, was used to “hide and thereby to promote or to protect economic class interests” of elite whites (p. 42). The other strategy, racism, psychosocially policed whites by teaching them that in order to maintain a place in white communities, they must “hide feelings of racial shame either by diverting attention to the supposed racial flaws in others or by calling attention to oneself as racially superior” (p. 42). Thandeka goes on to explain white racial shame as the feeling white people experience when they are not good enough or feel unlovable: because they fear being ostracized from their white communities for not being “white enough,” as well as because their selfhood, intertwined with maintaining whiteness, conflicts with their internal sense of justice. White class shame is experienced by poor and middle class whites, whose economic situations fail to match the affluence which is envisioned as being a right and expectation of whiteness. White class shame is used by wealthy whites, again to maintain their position, property, and capital, and to prevent interracial alliances. The shame poor whites feel has led to rage, which then has led to violence. But rather than their rage and violence being directed at the people who put them in this position, poor and middle class whites act out against people of color. This violence becomes yet another way to prove their difference, to prove their superiority, to prove their right to whiteness and all of the privileges that color entails. As part of the attempt to divide the lower classes along race lines, people of color needed to be constructed as “Other.” David Roediger (1991) explains how recent immigrants were forced into “white middle class” behaviors in order to

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access and maintain their working class jobs; in the effort to assimilate, they gave up their culture, traditions, languages, and as they did so, their resentment of black folks grew. Thandeka (1999) describes this process: “forgetting their prewhited selves began to empty the workers’ core sense of self” (p. 69); at the same time, they resented blacks whom they painted in the image of all that they had lost: “sensuality, sexuality, free play, the premodern home, whimsy, strutting, zipping, dashing, clowning, cooing, cooning” (p. 70). This desire to be like the Other, whom they had constructed as both inferior and envied, contributed to feelings of personal shame, internalized and reproduced in these new white communities, thereby continuing to protect the privileges of the elite. During industrialization, acting out with violence and racism against black people was used as a way for new immigrants to establish their whiteness, and therefore attain rights and status. New immigrants, arriving to the United States and becoming laborers in factories, were brutalized by (newly) white people who had been in the country longer and had assimilated to behaviors associated with the white middle class. Many new immigrants were perceived as notyet-white by coworkers or peers who had been in the country for a generation; in fact, becoming white was integrally connected with becoming American. Louis Woods (2015) goes so far as to name “a deadly posture toward African Americans” as the “ticket to upward mobility” (p. 114). Again, we can see the intimate connection of racism and capitalism – racism became a requirement for achieving the capitalist’s “American dream.”

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“Bad Whites” and the Worst Racists

Despite elite whites undeniably orchestrating racism through the development of laws and socialization, poor and working class whites are frequently depicted as the most vehement racists. Lensmire (2017) uses Ralph Ellison to discuss the situation of poor whites in the Jim Crow south. Frustrated by how close they were to former slaves in terms of economic status, poor whites used vicious stereotyping and violence to distance themselves and demonstrate their superiority. Even so, Lensmire explains how Ellison pushed back against the theory that racist beliefs were centered in poor and working class whites, stating that he “had no interest in supporting, even implicitly, the common-sense notion in the United States that it was poor and working white people who were the ‘real’ racists, allowing higher-classed Whites to congratulate themselves on their racial enlightenment and sophistication” (Lensmire, 2017, pp. 47–48). The “original script” for racist beliefs and stereotypes had been

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written long before these particular southern whites were born; the “founding fathers” created a story wherein a “mostly anti-democratic, often slaveholding, group of elite white men were said to be heroes championing ideals of equality and democracy” (Feagin, 2013, p. 34). This myth has continued for centuries, contributing to the false notion that the United States and its capitalist systems are normal, logical, and beacons of equality, democracy, and economic justice. Nevertheless, racism has long been associated with lower class whites, in part because of the racial divisions so carefully crafted by white elites, including the requirement of poor whites to enact racism in order to prove their whiteness. Racism has thus come to be associated with working-class white folks, allowing middle and upper class whites to separate themselves from these “bad whites,” a continuation of white classism and the contempt that elite whites have for the lower classes.

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Conclusion

The intersections of whiteness and social class, including Thandeka’s theorization about white class shame, are illustrated by the recent (2016) election of Donald Trump. Cheryl Matias and Donald Newlove (2017) discuss an “emboldened en/whitening epistemology,” which they argue is replacing a colorblind epistemology and is at the root of Trump’s election (p. 921). According to Thandeka (1999), colorblindness is a result of white shame, a technique white people use to demonstrate their “goodness” by refusing to see color; they claim that everyone is the same on the inside in order to protect their positive perception of themselves. The new en/whitening epistemology, on the other hand, is connected to a resurgence of overt racism and white nationalism. Voting for Trump is an example of Thandeka’s theory of white shame, which “makes white working-class and middle-class Americans vote as if their economic interests are identical to those of the rich” (Thandeka, 1999, p. 91). As demonstrated throughout the history of the United States, poor and middle class white folks will go to any length to separate themselves from people of color whom they perceive as the “other.” Much as indentured servants accepted perceived elevation in exchange for racial loyalty, working class Americans trade their loyalty for a perceived connection to wealth. White people are desperate to hold onto their self-image and belonging in their white communities. According to Thandeka, the possibility of facing their shame is so intolerable that they will go to any lengths to avoid it, including making personal and political moves that go against their own economic interests, and that violate their sense of self-worth. The wealthy white elite, meanwhile,

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enjoy their property, privilege, and power uncontested, fulfilling the intent of the colonial aristocracy and maintaining white supremacy.

References Baldwin, J. (1998). A talk to teachers. In James Baldwin: Collected essays (pp. 678–686). The Library of America. Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education. State University of New York Press. Feagin, J. R. (2013). The white racial frame (2nd ed.). Routledge. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’ Educational Philosophy & Theory, 36(2), 137–152. Matias, C. E., & Newlove, P. M. (2017). Better the devil you see, than the one you don’t: Bearing witness to emboldened en-whitening epistemology in the Trump era. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(10), 920–928. Roediger, D. R. (1991). The wages of Whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. Bloomsbury. Watkins, W. H. (2001). The white architects of black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865–1954. Teachers College Press. Woods, L. L. (2015). Killing for inclusion: Racial violence and assimilation into the whiteness gang. In E. Harris & A. D. Tillis (Eds.), The Trayvon Martin in U.S.: An American tragedy (pp. 113–124). Peter Lang.

CHAPTER 85

Social Construction Colleen Rost-Banik

Related Entries: Colorblindness; Omi and Winant; Scientific Racism; Social Darwinism

… Social construction holds that concepts like race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and class change based on time and place; they are historically situated in how they influence and are influenced by society (Omi & Winant, 2015). Thus, these concepts are dynamic and fluid. Additionally, social construction theory asserts that concepts are reiteratively shaped by representations and institutions. Two people who have made significant contributions to the understanding of how race is socially constructed are Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In Racial Formation in the United States (2015), they explain that social concepts (like race) are often viewed in one of two ways: (1) as having an “essence” – that there is some core, stable component to the concept, or (2) as an “illusion” – that because the concept is socially constructed, it does not exist in reality; it is simply made up. Writing specifically about race, they reject both sides of this spectrum. Even though they assert that race is socially constructed, they argue, “Race is strategic; race does ideological and political work” (p. 111). They further describe race as a dynamic process that occurs on both societal (macro) and individual (micro) levels and “operates… at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet. It is socially constructed and historically fluid. It is continuingly being made and remade in everyday life. Race is continually in formation” (p. x). An example of the changing parameters of race is that groups of people have been ascribed different races and associated representations throughout history. For instance, Irish and Jewish immigrants were not always considered white. They obtained the status of being white in the U.S. only after competing to assimilate into the ranks of white people. How race is favored has also changed throughout time. At some moments, Asian Americans have been considered a threat and at other times as the “model minority” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 13). Fluctuations in jobs have influenced whether Latinx people were © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_085

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seen as white people or if they were viewed as a group distinct from white people (Foley, 1998). Additionally, race has been defined and considered differently in various countries. For instance, in the U.S., a mix of white and nonwhite typically defaults a person to the non-white category, while in Brazil, the logic is the opposite. Time and location matter to the understanding of race. Thus, race is socially constructed; its meaning is determined by the social, temporal, and spatial context in which it is being evoked. Taking account of race as historically situated helps to illuminate how race influences and is influenced by society. One of the ways Omi and Winant illustrate how race is socially constructed is by tracing how race is not only differently understood across time and space but also via the different fields of religion, politics, and science. History and anthropology reveal that while there always have been distinctions made amongst various groups of people, racialized distinctions did not emerge until Europeans encountered various Indigenous peoples in their “discoveries” of other lands. Prior to that, divisions among people mostly were based along the lines of religion or status. However, as Europeans traveled the planet, they used Christianity to position themselves as God’s “chosen” people. They used religion to question whether Indigenous peoples could be considered human, and to institute systems of conquest and slavery. Omi and Winant suggest that the European conquest of the Americas was the first and most significant project of racial formation. Politics is another field of social influence on concepts like race. Similar to religion, politics has treated race differently at various points in time and space. Specifically, the state has defined and classified race, thereby influencing everything from people’s social status and identity to their access to economic and political resources and rights. One illustration of this is through the population count, otherwise known as the census. Omi and Winant detail how the census operates as a tool to define race as well as politically, socially, and economically (disen)franchise particular racial groups, typically along white/ non-white lines. They explain that various “racial” categories have appeared on the census and reveal that there are no consistent characteristics that define each “racial” group. For instance, in 1977, Black was considered as having ancestry with “black racial groups of Africa” (p. 122); Hispanic and Asian and Pacific Islander categories were treated as ethnic groups from certain nations (regardless of their color); American Indians or Alaskan Natives could only be considered as such if they had “tribal affiliation or community recognition” (p. 122); meanwhile, the category of White was not given any of these definitions. The five “racial” categories from the 1977 census have become the standard choices on many institutional forms. Adding to these categories’

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limits, Omi and Winant note that in the 1920 census, anyone who had any mixture beyond white was supposed to designate their race as the non-white category. This was influenced by the “one-drop rule” (p. 123), which signified people as non-white if they had any ancestry of another racial group. The census has since changed, and similar to the 1890 census, currently there is a recognition that people can be comprised of more than one race. Census forms now allow people to mark their specificity of Asian, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic identity. The forms also offer the option to designate more than one race. These categories have become extremely significant because they are used to determine life shaping consequences such as civil rights protections, distribution of resources, and voter districts. Due to this importance, various groups have vied to add their classification to the list instead of being subsumed under a larger category. The example of the census illustrates how definitions and understandings of race are contested and transform over time and are influenced by politics. Science has also weighed-in to shape understandings of race, particularly in an effort to prove a racial hierarchy of humans. For instance, Social Darwinism, the idea of “survival of the fittest,” was applied to race by Herbert Spencer. He asserted that races had unique characteristics, which influenced people’s likelihood of survival. Thus, a racial hierarchy could be demarcated, justifying the racial dominance of some groups by others. Biological understandings of race assume that there is an “essence” of race (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 118). Even though scientific determinations of race (e.g., eugenics) were largely discredited and disproven after the experiments conducted in Nazi Germany and the U.S., Omi and Winant point out that scientific explanations for race have contemporary manifestations. For example, certain industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals, DNA testing) continue research attempting to link race and genetics. Whether pursuing medications targeted to specific racial populations, determining perpetrators of crimes, or proving who can claim enough Native American ancestry to obtain certain benefits, there continue to be efforts to connect race and biology. Psychology has also traipsed into more deterministic approaches to race by studying how implicit biases of the unconscious mind may be attached to the limbic system, and thus impact our perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. In addition to dismissing how individual agency is employed and shapes these factors, Omi and Winant (2015) raise the critical point that scientific understandings of race can be viewed as socially constructed. Ideologically, social construction is often positioned to counter biologic, deterministic, and static approaches to race. Further illustrating how science is socially constructed, anthropologists Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar

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(1979) conducted research in a science laboratory to trace how “scientific facts” are formed. They assert that like most concepts, scientific facts are informed by fields of knowledge, are contested, are influenced by power hierarchies, and therefore, are (socially) created. That position is rather controversial among scientists who assert that there is a scientific (objective) position of reality (whether or not humans understand or have discovered that reality). In their work The Social Construction of What?, Hacking and Hacking (1999) argue that neither side is completely accurate. They assert that both scientific fact and social constructivism are useful in understanding reality and how it is shaped. Despite contentions between scientific determinations and social construction, Omi and Winant (2015) maintain that race is not biologic, shifts via time and space, and therefore, is socially constructed. They define race as “a ‘crossroads’ where social structure and cultural representation meet” (p. 124). They contend that efforts to describe race as simply cultural symbols or a social system fall short of capturing the complexity of race. Instead, “Race is both a social/historical structure and a set of accumulated signifiers that suffuse individual and collective identities, inform social practices, shape institutions and communities, demarcate social boundaries, and organize the distribution of resources” (p. 125). To clarify this notion, they offer the following: “We cannot understand how racial representations set up patterns of residential segregation, for example, without considering how segregation reciprocally shapes and reinforces the meaning of race itself” (p. 125). To further explain how race is socially constructed, they offer a theory of “racial formation,” which they define as “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 109). Using multiple examples, they illustrate in detail how race is socially constructed. It is important to note that because a social constructivist account of race views race as real, assertions of colorblindness are not valid. Colorblind ideology suggests that race does not matter; everyone is human and therefore, race is insignificant, especially when it comes to resource distribution. However, social constructionists point out that they reject colorblind ideology because it ignores the corporeal aspects of race and how race is ascribed to people; dismisses that people enjoy and seek to affirm representational aspects of their race; and discounts how race is embedded into institutions, thereby making people’s experiences seem like common sense, when they are actually racially impacted. Omi and Winant (2015) note, “We should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion” (p. 112).

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References Foley, N. (1998). The white scourge: Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites in Texas cotton culture. University of California Press. Hacking, I., & Hacking, J. (1999). The social construction of what? Harvard University Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Sage. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States. Routledge.

CHAPTER 86

South Africa and Whiteness Pauli Badenhorst

Related Entries: Nationalism; Settler Colonialism; Shame; White Fear; White Supremacy

1

Colonial Background to Whiteness in South Africa

Far from being discoverers, the first whites to land in the Cape arrived long after local indigenous peoples like the Khoikhoi had established themselves as inhabitants. The first whites to set foot on Southern African soil in 1488 were Portuguese sailors under the command of explorer, Bartolomeu Dias. While not establishing a permanent colony at the time, the Portuguese set up replenishment and trading posts for a maritime route between Europe and Asia. Later, in 1652, under Jan van Riebeeck and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch disembarked at the Cape of Good Hope and established the first settler colony. During the period of Dutch colonization, and despite resistance, the indigenous Khoikhoi people were dispossessed of their land in the Cape. An influx of other Europeans including Germans (1652–1806), French Huguenots (1688–1706), and British Settlers (1820) also subsequently arrived, though it is the British who would eventually colonize larger parts of Southern Africa in intermittent years between 1795 and 1961. The colonization of Southern Africa also brought on the practice of slavery. Between 1653 and 1822, slaves were coercively relocated by the Dutch to the Cape Colony from present-day Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as slave markets in Mozambique and Madagascar. The non-white slaves of the Cape Colony, however, exercised profound influence over the emergence of white Afrikaner culture, and especially the development of the Afrikaans language. From 1836 to 1846, a large group of non-English speaking, predominantly Dutch-heritage white settlers – forbearers of the Afrikaners known as Voortrekkers – migrated east-and-northward by wagon into the plateau of Southern Africa to escape British rule. This migration of white settlers, also known as the Great Trek, frequently led to clashes with the southward migrating Bantu peoples. The most famous of these clashes, the Battle of Blood River (1838) – during which 470 Voortrekkers allegedly defeated a Zulu impi consisting © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_086

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of 10,000 to 15,000 Zulu men – would later be used to justify the Afrikaner nationalist claim, also propagated by the Dutch Reformed Church, that whites were ordained by the will of God to be a white light civilizing and modernizing Africa, the supposed Dark Continent. The Great Trek concluded with a period in which numerous Boer republics were established. Following the discovery of gold and diamonds in the Southern African interior, the British annexed the two primary Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Two bloody wars were subsequently fought between the British and the Boers – the latter who were considered inferior whites by the English. During the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), 32,000 Boer women and children died in British concentration camps, while Boer farmsteads were torched according to the Scorched Earth Policy endorsed by the British Crown. After 1902, poverty and socio-political marginalization experienced by the Afrikaners, formerly known as the Boers, led to widespread resentment against British colonial rule and the rise of an Afrikaner nationalism that, at times, even bore National Socialist sympathies through movements like the Second World War-era Ossewabrandwag, or Ox-wagon Sentinel. However, most Afrikaners eventually acceded to British rule under the Union of South Africa.

2

Whiteness during Apartheid

In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party (NP) came to power and re-codified numerous existing British colonial laws that segregated Europeans (whites) from Non-Europeans (non-whites), granting even greater degrees of institutional privilege and superiority to whites. These laws were implemented within the framework of a larger state ideology known as Apartheid, translating to apartness. The engineers and leaders of Apartheid were members of the Afrikaner Broederbond (or Afrikaner Brotherhood) who justified the system through a white supremacist interpretation of Calvinist theology. Apartheid purported the faux equal, yet separate development of racial groups who, through the population Registration Act of 1950, were classified relative to four categories as determined by phenotypic appearance and ancestry: White, Black, Colored, and Indian. Interracial marriage and extramarital sex between members of racial groups was outlawed. Racial groups were also segregated with regard to schooling, with all non-white students obligated to learn Afrikaans. Apartheid legislation, in turn, entitled whites to an inordinate degree of privilege and superiority in context to land tenure rights, job reservation, freedom of movement, and political representation. Whites who comprised approximately 20% of the population owned roughly 80% of the land.

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Within urban areas, a number of established non-white neighborhoods like District Six and Sophiatown were declared whites-only, and the inhabitants forcibly relocated to townships with minimal infrastructure on the outskirts of cities. Black ethnic groups, in turn, were designated to 10 subordinate rural homelands, also known as Bantustans. From the mid-60s to the late-80s, the now nuclear-armed Apartheid state became embroiled in a war that centered on South African occupation of the former German colony of South West Africa and the resultant fight for independence by Black Namibians. The war – a simultaneous Cold War proxy – also known as the Bush or Border War among white South Africans, was conducted in South West Africa, Angola, and Zambia, and framed as a defensive war against the threat of the encroaching communist Rooi Gevaar (Red Danger) and Swart Gevaar (Black Danger) of Black liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC), who operated from bases in African countries to the north of South Africa with the aid of Russia, China, and numerous Eastern Bloc countries. This war, in conjunction with severe state-of-emergency-level internal unrest in the Black townships targeted at resisting white minority rule, fueled paranoia among the majority of white South Africans that they were under insurgent threat of mass-murder in an event referred to as Uhuru, or Night of the Long Knives. Despite increased international economic sanctions and isolation from international sporting events, the Apartheid regime continued to enforce media censorship, and initiated brutal counter-insurgency campaigns to quell Black revolutionary resistance. Counter-insurgent operations were conducted beyond SA’s borders by the South African Defense Force, Koevoet (or Crowbar, a branch of the South West African Police), and hit squads comprising government assassins, as well as internally by a brutal paramilitary death squad stationed at Vlakplaas. Such violent oppression was accompanied by Project Coast, a top-secret eugenic chemical and biological weapons program that – among others – sought to develop covert birth control methods to reduce the Black birthrate. Whiteness in South Africa then cannot be understood without accounting for the complicity of everyday white South Africans in upholding violent minority rule over the Black and Brown majority, as well as the accompanying paranoia that white South Africans experienced in response to violent revolution as exemplified through, for instance, numerous bombings in white urban areas throughout the 1980s. That said, during Apartheid, a number of whites participated in resistance movements against white domination, and many of them were imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated. Some examples of white resistance include the Black Sash – a non-violent white women’s resistance organization – as well as liberal white clerics and theologians like Beyers Naudé, Peter Storey, Albert Geyser,

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and Johan Heyns. In 1983, the anti-Apartheid End Conscription Campaign was founded by a group of white conscientious objectors to oppose the mandatory conscription of all white South African men in the South African Defense Force. Numerous white writers, poets, and artists facing censorship and exile also sought to actively either denounce white supremacy or analyze the white condition and disturbed psyche through their work. Notable influential examples include Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, and Ingrid Jonker. In particular, J.M. Coetzee’s (1988) White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa gives thorough treatment to the manner in which white authored literature of Africa echoes the persistent colonial ideological motifs of, among others, European romanticism and racist representations of the non-white African Other. Rian Malan’s (1990) nonfictional, semi-autobiographic My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face his Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience, in turn, sought to explore – albeit in highly confessional terms that have since been critiqued by Critical Whiteness Studies – the profound physical and emotional damage unleashed by Apartheid on both Black and white South Africans. In 1988, an anti-Apartheid Afrikaans national weekly publication by the name of Vrye Weekblad (or Free Weekly Press) was launched under editor Max du Preez and journalist Jacques Pauw. Around this time, a collaborative of white Afrikaans musicians – Johannes Kerkorrel, Andre du Toit, James Phillips, Bernoldus Niemand, and Karla Krimpelien – also founded the very vocal, anti-establishment and anti-Apartheid Voëlvry (or Free as a Bird) movement that was based around the Shifty Records label. Taken together, whiteness in a South African Apartheid context is rooted in the inordinate historical exercize of racial domination and white supremacy, both through institutional means and by force. While there was a measure of white resistance to Apartheid, the identity of the average white South African was undeniably sculpted by family, church, and school to become a complicit participant in the Apartheid system through conformist acquiescence as well as the enjoyment of a sense of racial superiority. Fall from this perch that once guaranteed unparalleled socioeconomic and political privilege, positioning, and power started in 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and is still ongoing.

3

Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Following the abolition of Apartheid between 1990 and 1994, contemporary whiteness in South Africa is analyzed relative to tensions surrounding white people’s static and shifting identities that oscillate between belonging and

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new becoming. Here, “belonging” refers to the covert and resistant maintenance of racist worldviews and discourses, often rooted in nostalgic fantasy of the good old days, while “becoming” points to that transitory, interstitial, and unfinished identity renovation and excavation required by those who are “no longer European, not yet African” (Coetzee, 1988, p. 11). Needless to say, while the deleterious socio-economic and psycho-emotional effects of colonization-cum-Apartheid have yet to be fully redressed in South African society at large, white people in South Africa have undeniably experienced a profound crisis of identity, especially regarding the ongoing negotiation of their place as citizens of the Rainbow Nation, as well as their grappling with an ethical response to their historical complicity in a white supremacist system of domination and oppression. The academic study of whiteness in South Africa (see West & Schmidt, 2010) has highlighted a number of these concerns. In 2010, Rhodes University scholar, Samantha Vice published the controversial paper “How Do I Live in This Strange Place?” in which she proposes that the contemporary postApartheid South African context – still marked with pervasive socioeconomic inequalities from which most whites are sheltered – requires white people to live with their shame by cultivating a personal, inward-directed project of self-rehabilitation in humility and political silence. Subsequently, an entire issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy was devoted to critical discussion of not only Vice’s central theoretical contentions, but especially to the appropriate ethical and affective responses that are required by white South Africans relative to their historical complicity in Apartheid and the manifold social brutalities it unleashed upon South African society. Sally Matthews, Melissa Steyn, and Derek Hook count as some of the leading South African scholars engaging with these issues, often in a manner that locates South African whiteness in relation to globalization and global iterations of whiteness, while Eusebius McKaiser has also enjoyed widespread attention via both social and traditional media platforms with his popular discussions of whiteness in relation to day-to-day local racialized events. Yet, what is to be made of everyday South African whiteness, post-1990, beyond the academy? The years of intensive negotiation and transition that marked the South African political landscape were tumultuous. While the 1992 referendum on ending Apartheid, and in which only whites participated, resulted in a 68.73% “yes” and 31.27% “no” outcome, such result lays bare the reality that at least a third of white South Africans were opposed to the abolition of Apartheid and concomitant movement towards a multiparty, multiracial system of democratic representation and governance. Following the referendum, the South African white right-wing – consisting of groups

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like the neo-Nazi separatist Afrikaner Weerstandstandsbeweging (AWB) and slightly more moderate Afrikaner Volksfront – experienced a temporary boom in support that climaxed with its militant disruption of multiparty, multiracial negotiations in Kempton Park in 1993. However, following the AWB and Volksfront’s humiliating ‘94 retreat from the former Bantustans territory of Bophuthatswana where armed white militias sought to uphold the rulership of its leader Lucas Mangope in the attempt to further validate right-wing calls for the right to self-determination and the establishment of a Boer republic, as well as the right-wing assassination of prominent Black politician Chris Hani, an event that brought the country to the brink of civil war, the white right-wing was reduced to a small group of racist extremists. An expensive 11-year trial (2002–2013) of 26 white men associated with an Afrikaner extremist group known as the Boeremag further highlights how fragmented, disorganized, and infiltrated the white right-wing has become. Following the victory of the predominantly Black African National Congress (ANC) revolutionary organization in the 1994 elections, Nelson Mandela became the first Black, fully-elected president of the Republic of South Africa. White South Africans, for the most part, experienced a brief foretaste of racial conciliation when President Mandela offered public support for the overwhelmingly white Springbok national rugby team throughout their successful 1995 Rugby World Cup campaign. However, in the years that followed, it was not uncommon to witness the old Apartheid-era South African flag brandished at rugby and cricket fixtures. A section from the old Apartheid-era South African anthem was also still sung at sporting events as an accommodation to more conservative white sentiment, while many white South Africans bemoaned increased calls for the implementation of racial quotas in sport. In the second half of the 90s, white people were daily barraged via media broadcasts with graphic details of extreme Apartheid human rights atrocities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Desmond Tutu. Antjie Krog (2000) details several of these accounts in her book, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. While inadequately providing justice and restitution for Black and Brown victims of Apartheid atrocities, the TRC did succeed in shattering the myth of Apartheid as white benevolence. Testimonies of the hatred, cruelty, and enjoyment associated with Apartheid state-sanctioned atrocities further fed into the white experience of profound guilt and shame. Anger also manifested as in when white journalist Chris Louw, who committed suicide in 2009, published a damning, controversial letter in preeminent Afrikaans newspaper, Beeld. This letter, Boetman is die Bliksem In (or Boetman is Really Angry) levels significant scorn and accusation against the older Broederbond

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Apartheid elite, most of whom retired in luxury and without ever accepting responsibility. Most recently, whiteness in South Africa has been characterized by anxiety arising from the persistent issue of racial disparities in land ownership and calls from Black pan-Africanist revolutionary socialist groups like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Black First Land First (BLF) for the forceful redistribution of commercial and privately-owned white farmland and assets without compensation. Of course, the extent to which white South Africans, descendants of settler colonizers, can lay authentic claim to land in South Africa is an ongoing controversy. In response, prominent Afrikaner advocacy groups like Afriforum cite the failure of fast-track forced land removal policies predicated on zero-compensation such as occurred in Zimbabwe in mid-November 2008 when hyperinflation soared to 79,600,000,000%. Groups like Afriforum also point to farm attacks and murders against white farmers in rural areas which they present as evidence for looming white genocide. White Afrikaner survivalist groups like the Suidlanders, in turn, capitalize on the narrative of exclusive persecution which they contextualize through alluding to the century-old prophetic writings of Siener van Rensburg who they claim warns of impending white genocide. While there is much disagreement regarding accurate figures pertaining to farm murders and attacks, it is here tendered that the broader social psycho-emotional scars unleashed by Apartheid do not render white anxiety entirely irrational. In the words of Fanon (1963), “The colonized subject is a persecuted man who forever dreams of becoming the persecutor” (p. 16). That said, white anxiety is largely predicated on the stereotyped perception of Black and Brown other as perpetual threat, and ignores data indicating Black and Brown people as victims of violent crime at levels exceeding those of whites. Furthermore, discourses of whiteness in South Africa often center around the persistent, rampant corruption and violent crime that are plaguing the country under its Black government. Scandals like Guptagate in which former president Jacob Zuma and senior ANC officials allowed unscrupulous foreign private interest groups significant influence over the state’s decision-making processes for personal gain are often cited to call the ability of Black people to govern into question. More recently, use of explicitly racist discourse in the form of racial slurs has been outlawed. An example is the prosecution and sentencing of Vicki Momberg – a white woman who embarked on a public racist tirade in 2016. That said, creative, never-before-seen covert manipulations of discourse are beginning to emerge in South African white society. Zef – or kitsch; redneck – is a musical and aesthetic sub-cultural form characterized by hip hop beats; gangsta imagery; poor white chic; translanguaging between English, Cape Flats

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Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and Fanagalo, among others, as well as grim imagery and blackface. Popularized by artists like Die Antwoord (in collaboration with U.S. artist Roger Ballen) and Jack Parow, Zef culture presents all the trimmings of a thoroughly multicultural artform. Yet, Zef is also highly problematic in that the race bending it attempts involves invoking representations that play into highly racist tropes and racialized appropriations. In many ways, Zef represents the gritty, chaotic, unfinished, process-based work of renegotiating identity that white South Africans are undertaking. However, it is impossible for white South Africans to perform such work in racial isolation. White desire for conciliation with the racial Other requires active pursuit of relationality. While relationship often involves working through existing pain in ways that may yet be further agonizing and conflicted, it also frees white people from melancholic, solipsistic fantasies in which the racial Other is desired but always held at a distance.

References Coetzee, J. M. (1988). White writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa. Yale University. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the Earth. Grove. Krog, A. (2000). Country of my skull: Guilt, sorrow, and the limits of forgiveness in the New South Africa. Vintage. Malan, R. (1990). My traitor’s heart: A South African exile returns to face his country, his tribe, and his conscience. Grove. Vice, S. (2010). How do I live in this strange place? Journal of Social Philosophy, 41(3), 323–342. West, M., & Schmidt, J. M. (2010). Whiteness studies in South Africa: A South African perspective. English in Africa, 37(1), 9–13.

CHAPTER 87

Stereotype Threat Danielle N. Franks, Melanie M. Wilcox and Chelsea Cody

Related Entries: Emotionality and Whiteness; Microaggressions; Social Construction; Whiteness and Psychoanalysis

… Stereotype threat is a social-psychological phenomenon characterized by negative effects on task performance when a negative stereotype is primed (that is, unconsciously activated) about a group to which one belongs. Claude Steele coined “stereotype threat” in his 1995 landmark study with Joshua Aronson. Even prior, however, Steele’s work had a racial justice focus as seen in his work on self-affirmation theory and on the challenges faced by Black Americans in academia. As a professor at the University of Michigan, Steele served on the committee of minority student recruitment and retention, where he noticed a significant racial achievement divide between White and Black students. He suspected the gap was not due to intrinsic student factors, but rather the types of experiences Black students were having as compared to White students. Steele posited that marginalization resulted in Black students’ underperformance, and that marginalization could also cause the underperformance of other stigmatized groups. In this way, Steele centralized the issue of societal context in stereotype threat, claiming that achievement gaps may result from the continual experiences of being marginalized or “othered” in one’s learning environment. Steele and Aronson (1995) argued that in order for stereotype threat to be activated, the individual must recognize that they are in a situation in which their own individual performance may confirm a negative belief about their group (e.g., Black people; women) as a whole. They further argued that stereotype threat is a “self-evaluative threat” in that, when presented with an opportunity to confirm or disconfirm a negative stereotype about one’s in-group, individuals experience anxiety that they may confirm negative beliefs about their group to others, and perhaps more insidiously, themselves. The anxiety itself may be detrimental to performance, heightening the risk of underperforming and thus confirming the stereotype – a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

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In Steele and Aronson’s (1995) original study, they activated racial stereotype threat by randomly assigning African American and White participants from Stanford University to one of three conditions and then presenting them difficult items from the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Participants in the “diagnostic” condition were told that the test was a measure of their intellectual ability, whereas participants in the other conditions were only informed that the assessment would help the researchers better understand verbal ability. Results from two studies demonstrated the same phenomenon: African American participants in the diagnostic condition performed significantly worse than all other experimental groups and reported significantly lower perceived performance. African American participants in the non-diagnostic conditions performed comparably to White participants. Steele and Aronson argued that the differences resulted from activation of the stereotype that African Americans are intellectually inferior, which led not only to these participants performing more poorly, but also to their perceiving that they performed poorly. These results were groundbreaking as they demonstrated that, when individuals from marginalized groups are primed about a negative stereotype about the marginalized group, their performance is negatively affected. Steele and Aronson (1995) further examined the role of both stereotype activation and self-doubt activation. The stereotype activation prime involved participants being presented with word fragments that implicitly addressed race (e.g., _ _ ACK could be completed as BLACK), and the self-doubt activation prime presented fragments that implicitly addressed self-doubt (e.g., LO_ _ _ could be completed as LOSER). As with their other studies, participants were assigned to either diagnostic or non-diagnostic conditions. African American participants in the diagnostic condition provided significantly more racially-stereotyped and self-doubt-related words than White participants and participants in non-diagnostic conditions. Interestingly, African American participants in this diagnostic condition were less likely to indicate their race on the demographic questionnaire (i.e. only 25%, whereas 100% of participants in other conditions reported race). These results suggest that priming participants about their marginalized identities seems to trigger anxiety or feelings of selfdoubt which, in turn, affects performance. Steele and Aronson (1995) argue that one reason the Black participants in the diagnostic condition performed the worst is because they likely experienced cognitive overload due to having to manage the demands of the task in addition to the negative feelings that were elicited through the priming of the negative stereotype. Steele and Aronson’s (1995) original study was significant because it introduced the phenomenon of stereotype threat and provided a compelling explanation for achievement gaps.

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Later Work on Stereotype Threat

Prior to Steele and Aronson’s work, some psychologists and others offensively (and incorrectly) posited that genetically-based differences accounted for the racial educational achievement gap. However, Steele and Aronson’s demonstration that these differences in achievement were not in fact due to Black genetic inferiority, but rather stereotype threat induced by specific environmental cues, was a major advancement for both psychology and education. Eventually, meta-analyses corroborated their original findings in a multitude of ways, including significant effects on students’ physiological homeostasis (Blascovich et al., 2001), working memory ability (Schmader & Johns, 2003), and increased levels of anxiety (Aronson et al., 1999). It was also discovered that specific primers that address threatening cues could reverse gaps in performance. Since Steele and Aronson’s (1995) study, researchers have also expanded this line of research to examine how stereotype threat affects other groups. In addition to racial stereotype threat, there is a large collection of studies examining gender stereotype threat (e.g., Martens et al., 2006; Schmader, 2002; Spencer et al., 1999) as well as the intersection of race and gender in stereotype threat (e.g., Abdou & Fingerhut, 2014; Nguyen & Ryan, 2008). There have been studies examining stereotype threat for age (O’Brien & Hummert, 2006), social class (Harrison et al., 2006), sexual orientation (Bosson et al., 2004), immigrant groups (Deaux et al., 2007), and persons with physical disabilities (Silverman & Cohen, 2014). The majority of stereotype threat research, however, has examined race (and, to a lesser but still substantial extent, gender) stereotype threat.

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Racial Stereotype Threat

Scholars have sought to examine and expand upon racial stereotype threat. Thames and colleagues (2013) examined the interaction between participants’ race and the race of the experimenter in the classic diagnostic versus nondiagnostic paradigm. Black participants in the diagnostic condition wherein the experimenter was White performed significantly worse than Black participants matched to a Black experimenter as well as Black participants in the non-diagnostic condition. The effects of stereotype threat are also seen in children. Alter and colleagues (2010) found that, when Black school children were asked to report their race before taking a math test, they performed significantly worse than participants who were asked to report their race afterward instead. Perhaps even more troubling, Taylor and Walton (2011) found

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that stereotype threat not only affects performance but also learning. Participants were instructed to study a series of rare words under either a threat or non-threat condition and were asked to recall the words during a later session in either a threat or non-threat condition. Black participants in the original threat condition performed worse than other participants regardless of their experimental group in the later session. That is, the presence of the initial threat affected their ability to learn and later recall the words. Other researchers have examined protective factors that combat stereotype threat. For example, Oliver and colleagues (2017) examined the effects of stereotype threat on Black psychology majors versus Black Africana Studies majors. They assessed students’ level of Black identity development before and after the stereotype threat was activated. They found that the Africana Studies students experienced no significant change in their sense of identity, whereas psychology students experienced a change to sense of identity that was consistent with race-based distress. Oliver and colleagues posited that the pro-Black curriculum of Africana Studies may have acted as a buffer for stereotype threat.

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Stereotype Threat from a Critical Race Perspective

As noted, Steele positioned societal context as central to stereotype threat. Critical Race Theory (CRT) posits that racism is a normal, ordinary occurrence in society, rather than unusual. Further, CRT argues that racism is structural, systemic, and involves much more than racist attitudes. Stereotype threat is an example of how systems of oppression can be internalized by the oppressed. Likely, the Black participants in the diagnostic condition in Steele and Aronson’s (1995) original study were aware of society’s messages about the intellectual abilities of Black people. Steele and Aronson noted the insidiousness of stereotype threat in that the individual need not explicitly believe the stereotype; they need only believe that confirming the stereotype is a possible outcome. This aspect of stereotype threat is especially harmful because it undermines the individual’s self-efficacy even (perhaps especially) when they are actively working against the stereotype.

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Contextualizing Stereotype Threat Theory

Steele developed stereotype threat theory largely through his work with underachieving Black students at the University of Michigan and high achieving Black students at Stanford University. These facts are integral to the theory

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and its connection to CRT for several reasons. First, Steele (2010) noted that the achievement gap between Black and White students is “so common and predictable as to nearly be lawful” (p. 58). Steele and Aronson (2004) noted that stereotype threat is a promising, but not the only, explanation for the achievement gap. They noted that stereotype threat is one of a multitude of societal and psychological factors contributing to the achievement gap. Consistent with CRT, Steele and Aronson (2004) again contextualized the issue by stating that the achievement gap must be examined from a perspective that takes into account the structural disadvantages of people of color and how these disadvantages may affect them psychologically. To this end, Love (2004) employed CRT to explain how the concept of the achievement gap is in itself rooted in White supremacy. She noted that the invisibility of White privilege, White normativity, and the myth of meritocracy function to create the narrative of Black intellectual inferiority and thus the achievement gap. She explained that Whites are conditioned to believe that their reality is the reality. By arguing that White people’s narrative is objective, Whites can then discuss standardized testing differences between Whites and Blacks as an “achievement gap.” Love astutely noted that this is not the case when discussing Asians’ superior performance on standardized tests; because Whites control the narrative, standardized testing differences are only deemed an “achievement gap” when they are lower than Whites’ scores. Whites’ ability to control the narrative and be the comparison group is a facet of White normativity. White normativity argues that Whiteness is the standard to which all is compared and judged. It also implicitly assumes that what is in the best interest for White people is in the best interest of all. Through this logic, Whites administer culturally biased tests and expect all groups to perform similarly. When this does not occur, Whites attribute this difference to intellectual inferiority, rather than White normativity and supremacy. Further, the myth of meritocracy claims that resources in society are distributed in a fair and just fashion to those who have rightfully earned them. Love (2004) posited that, when using the myth of meritocracy to explain the achievement gap, several underlying false assumptions are made. Namely, the myth of meritocracy argues that society is fair and just; that there are objective, non-culturally biased assessments to measure achievement; that there is equal opportunity for all students to succeed on such measures; and that there are fair and neutral ways to score, interpret, and report the results of the measures. All of these assumptions work to uphold and intensify the narrative of White supremacy. These myths also obscure White supremacy such to protect the mirage of White superiority. In reality, the so-called “achievement gap” is made up of

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racial educational disparities produced by multigenerational White supremacist policies designed to strip African Americans of economic security, safety, wealth, and opportunities. The suburban “white flight” in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, redlining, racial targeting in subprime mortgage lending, and other forms of de facto housing segregation, combined with rooting the funding of public education in property taxes, has resulted in the systematic underfunding of public schools that serve communities of color. Further yet, modern policy designed ostensibly to close the “achievement gap” (e.g., No Child Left Behind) has instead widened racial educational disparities. Yet, because these systemic forces are obfuscated for both people of color and, often, White people, enduring racial educational disparities are often seen as proof that the “achievement gap” results from the immutable, inferior characteristics of students of color (and particularly Black students). Although stereotype threat is often discussed in terms of individuals, what is arguably activated in stereotype threat is one’s prescribed role and destiny in the system of White supremacy. Taken together, the systemic forces of White supremacy work in tandem with individual psychological forces such as stereotype threat to keep racial minorities in the lower rungs of the social strata. The interaction of these social and psychological factors create an uneven playing field for racial minority students, creating and maintaining what has been deemed the “achievement gap.”

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Contextualizing Steele and Aronson’s (1995) Original Study

It is also important to consider Steele and Aronson’s (1995) original study within its sociocultural context. All participants were students at Stanford University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Steele (2010) highlights the gravity of these results by stating that even though the Black students in the diagnostic condition were at the upper echelon of academic success, as evidenced by their admission into Stanford, they still fell prey to stereotype threat. In studying this phenomenon with high school students, Steele (2010) found that high-achieving Black students who placed importance on education fell prey to stereotype threat, but low-achieving Black students who did not place importance on education did not. Notably, a similar process has been observed for women: women who highly identified with math experienced the most performance deficits when completing math tasks while exposed to subtle cues that communicate stereotype threat. This would, on the surface, appear to support a central tenet of Steele’s (1997) theory: that school success requires that academic success be an integral part

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of one’s identity. From a CRT perspective, however, these results may be seen to demonstrate the consequences of defying a cardinal rule of White supremacy: maintaining the status quo. In a sort of twisted irony, it was the students who were actively working to defy stereotypes (and, thus, subvert White supremacy) who fell prey to stereotype threat. Steele (2010) noted that if one were to simply examine the outcome measures of the high-achieving and low-achieving Black students in this study, it would be difficult to distinguish between the groups (i.e. both groups performed poorly). In this way, stereotype threat acts to maintain White supremacy by maintaining the racial achievement gap between White and Black students, and thereby also maintaining the White supremacist mythos.

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The Future of Stereotype Threat Theory

Stereotype threat scholarship also allows for contextualizing working and learning environments from an intersectional perspective. Steele (2010) argues that when conceptualizing working and learning environments through the lens of stereotype threat, we are able to see that environments that have traditionally been seen as neutral and fair (e.g. the classroom, the boardroom, university campuses) are anything but. In other words, environments serve different individuals differently. Steele (2010) argues that acknowledging this reality highlights the importance of individuals’ positionalities. Because individuals are not treated equally, it is important to be mindful of the role of positionalities in social environments because they will inevitably have an effect on how individuals perform and how they are treated. There are two important limitations to stereotype theory from a CRT perspective. The first is the apparent false equivalence between different groups’ experiences of stereotype threat, irrespective of systems of subordination and domination. Indeed, Steele (1997) noted that stereotype threat may exist for skateboarders or White men in the context of the existence of a negative stereotype. While certainly Liu’s (2017) concept of proxy privilege would suggest that, in the hierarchy of White supremacy, any non-member of the ruling class (including lower-class White men) may experience fear and anxiety related to their role performance upon which their access to privilege is granted, it remains problematic to equate protection of one’s privilege to experiences of oppression and domination. The second is the focus on individuals and microsystems. Steele (1997), to his credit, identifies and attempts to address the history of attributing the “problem” as existing within the individual by recommending changes to classroom and school

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cultures, and does attend to the influence of sociopolitical contexts; however, a focus on microsystems interventions fails to address, and indeed may be impeded by, White supremacy at the exosystemic and macrosystem levels. Thus, while stereotype threat theory offers important understanding with regard to the intrapsychic effects of domination-based stereotypes on Black students, it is important that stereotype threat theory be rooted in the dynamics of domination and oppression, systems analysis, and a historical understanding of White supremacist systems.

7

Conclusion

Through the work of Steele and his colleagues as well as later stereotype threat scholars, researchers have learned more about the certain types of situations that elicit stereotype threat and the situations that buffer against its effects (e.g., engaging in self-affirmation, developing a positive Black identity, etc.). Stereotype threat is one of the many suspected culprits for the achievement gap that exists between Black and White students at all levels of education. From a CRT perspective, it seems clear that stereotype threat functions to maintain White supremacy, and indeed most greatly affects those who try to defy White supremacist stereotypes (Steele, 2010). Understanding stereotype threat and how it operates, particularly through a critical race lens, allows us to better understand and contextualize working and learning environments so to properly attribute differences between racial groups on measures such as standardized tests to their proper source: the system of White supremacy.

References Abdou, C. M., & Fingerhut, A. W. (2014). Stereotype threat among Black and White women in health care settings. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 20, 316–323. Alter, A. L., Aronson, J., Darley, J. M., Rodriguez, C., & Ruble, D. N. (2010). Rising to the threat: Reducing stereotype threat by reframing the threat as a challenge. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 166–171. Aronson, J., Lusting, M. J., Good, C., Keogh, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When White men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 29–46. Blascovich, J., Spencer, S. J., Quinn, D., & Steele, C. (2001). African Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. Psychological Science, 12, 225–229.

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Bosson, J. K., Haymovitz, E. L., & Pinel, E. C. (2004). When saying and doing diverge there are effects of stereotype threat on self-reported versus non-verbal anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 247–255. Deaux, K., Bikmen, N., Gilkes, A., Ventuneac, A., Joseph, Y., Payne, Y. A., & Steele, C. M. (2007). Becoming American: Stereotype threat effects in Afro-Caribbean immigrant groups. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70, 384–404. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York University Press. Harrison, L. A., Stevens, C. M., Monty, A. N., & Coakley, C. A. (2006). The consequences of stereotype threat on the academic performance of White and non-White lower income college students. Social Psychology of Education, 9, 341–357. Liu, W. M. (2017). White male power and privilege: The relationship between White supremacy and social class. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 64, 349–358. Love, B. J. (2004). Brown plus 50 counter-storytelling: A critical race theory analysis of the “majoritarian achievement gap” story. Equity and Excellence in Education, 37, 227–247. Martens, A., Johns, M., Greenberg, J., & Schimel, J. (2006). Combating stereotype threat: The effect on women’s intellectual performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 236–243. Nguyen, H. D., & Ryan, A. M. (2008). Does stereotype threat affect test performance of minorities and women? A meta-analysis of experimental evidence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 1314–1334. O’Brien, L. T., & Hummert, M. L. (2006). Memory performance of late middle-aged adults: Contrasting self-stereotyping and stereotype threat accounts of assimilation to age stereotypes. Social Cognition, 24, 338–358. Oliver, A., Andemeskel, G., King, C. R., Wallace, L., McDougal, S., & Ben-Zeev, A. (2017). ‘I’m Black and I’m proud’: A majority ecological context protects affective aspects of Black identity under stereotype threat. Race and Social Problems, 9, 313–320. Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741–763. Schmader, T. (2002). Gender identification moderates stereotype threat effects on women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 194–201. Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging evidence that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 440–452. Silverman, A. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Stereotypes as stumbling-blocks: How coping with stereotype threat affects life outcomes for people with physical disabilities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 1330–1340. Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4–28.

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Steele, C. M. (1992). Race and the schooling of Black Americans. The Atlantic, 269, 68–78. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/04/race-and-the-schoolingof-black-americans/306073/ Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: how stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52, 613–629. Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi and all other clues to how stereotypes affect us. W. W. Norton & Company. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and intellectual performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797–811. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. A. (2004). Stereotype threat does not live by Steele and Aronson (1995) alone. The American Psychologist, 59, 47–55. Taylor, E. (2006). A critical race analysis of the achievement gap in the United States: Politics, reality, and hope. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 5, 71–87. Taylor, V. J., & Walton, G. M. (2011). Stereotype threat undermines academic learning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1055–1067. Thames, A. D., Hinkin, C. H., Byrd, D. A., Bilder, R. M., Duff, K. J., Rivera Mindt, M., & Streiff, V. (2013). Effects of stereotype threat, perceived discrimination, and examiner race on neuropsychological performance: Simple as Black and White? Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 19, 583–593.

CHAPTER 88

Thandeka Annie Jaffee

Related Entries: Guilt; Second Wave Whiteness Studies; Shame; Whiteness as Property

… The Revered Thandeka is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister who received her Ph.D. in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University. She was given the Xhosa name Thandeka by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which means “beloved,” in 1984. While her work spans multiple genres, including philosophy of religion and theology, as well as works that are particular to Universalist Unitarians, this entry focuses specifically on her contributions to critical whiteness studies.

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Learning to Be White

In her book Learning to Be White: Money Race, and God in America, the Thandeka (1999) offers a psycho-social analysis of whiteness, explaining the ways in which it is constructed and maintained in the U.S. Her work is intersectional, highlighting the ways in which an individual’s background and various identifiers impact the way they learn and experience whiteness. The book opens with a series of interviews Thandeka conducted with white adults who recount their personal experiences of becoming white. She threads their stories together by the common theme of fear. White domination, Thandeka suggests, comes with white people’s fear that they will be rejected by their white families and friends. At various stages of life, white people learn to reject the parts of themselves deemed as unacceptable, or, “not white” enough. The sets of norms and values which white people must uphold in particular social settings creates deep anxiety, ultimately guiding racist attitudes and actions. At the very root of racism in the United States, Thandeka argues, is white folks’ fear of losing their whiteness. Fear that an individual is not “white enough,” Thandeka argues, must be understood within the context of “white shame,”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_088

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the central theme of the book. White shame suggests that rejection from their own white communities leave white people ashamed of who they are.

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Shame v. Guilt

Thandeka (1999) makes an important distinction between shame and guilt. Guilt is defined in the text as, “a feeling that results from a wrongful deed, a self-condemnation for what one has done” (p. 13). However, shame offers no opportunity for redemption or fixing, because the individual is ashamed of themselves – who they are, as opposed to an action they have made. Thandeka defines white shame as a, “deeply private feeling of not being at home within one’s own white community” (p. 13). She contends that while guilt would allow the opportunity for folks to take responsibility of their individual and collective racist actions and practices, white people in this country instead experience deep shame. In other words, white folks become ashamed of their failure to live up to their ideal sense of self and disengage from discussions about whiteness and racial justice as a way of maintaining membership in the white race. Shame is unproductive, as it causes people to remove themselves from racial discourse, allowing racism and domination to persist. Refusing to acknowledge race keeps folks of color at a disadvantage – oppression cannot be dismantled if white people refuse to see it. Shame allows white people to ignore race realities, and ultimately leaves white people, “ignoring the extent or ways in which race shapes life opportunities [which] validates whites’ social location in the existing racial hierarchy while legitimating the political and economic arrangements that perpetuate and reproduce racial inequality and privilege” (p. 77). The first step toward undoing racial harm and creating a more equitable world is actually to acknowledge and regard race. The feelings of shame that white people experience lead them to disconnect from racial discourse and remove themselves from the fight for justice and equity. Another complicating feature of white shame, Thandeka argues, is that it frames racism as an individual issue, rather than a collective one. Focusing on an individual’s thoughts, words and actions ignores the realities of institutional domination. White shame, then, largely furthers ignorance of white supremacist functions. In other words, white folks deeply fear being called “racist,” and focus their energy on not getting that label assigned to them, rather than working as a collective to play an active role in the dismantling of white supremacist structures. Shame and responses to shame are learned and are shaped by social contexts – white people learn what is and is not acceptable in their white communities.

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Experiences of shame begin early in life, when white children are punished by their families and friends for engaging in behavior that is, ‘not white,’ or goes against social norms. For instance, Thandeka recounts the story of a white woman named Sarah. When she was a teenager, she brought a friend over to her house, and once the friend left, her mother asked Sarah to not invite her over again. When she asked why, Sarah’s mother explained, “Because she’s colored” (p. 2). After this instance, Sarah was very shaken up, because she realized that, for the first time in her life, her relationship with her mother was threatened, and it was because she interacted with a person of color in a way deemed inappropriate by her white community. This moment, Thandeka explains, is an example of a white person’s, “discovery that their behavior must be governed by white racial rules of conduct” (p. 2). It is this discovery that produces white shame. Another example of shame can be shown through another white woman, Jackie. She formed a close relationship with a teacher of hers in high school and suggested that her parents invite him over for dinner at their house, so that they could meet the person who had been an important figure in her life and show their appreciation. Jackie recalls her mother’s face when he arrived, and her mother realized that the man her daughter spoke so highly of, and invited into their home, was black. After dinner, when the teacher had left, her parents expressed to Jackie their anger and deep disappointment in her for not revealing the teacher’s race to them before they invited him into their home. She had, “broken a rule that until that moment she did not realize existed” (p. 6). Moving forward, Jackie made sure to not make her parents go through that again. Shame is an internal conflict, and one which causes white people to center themselves, becoming so ashamed of who they are and afraid of being rejected by others in their community, that they are ultimately paralyzed.

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White Children as Racial Victims

The process of learning to be white is one of violence and victimization. White children, whose experiences are marked by shame for letting down their white communities, can be understood as racial victims. White children are institutionally and interpersonally policed by their own white communities, having their thoughts, feelings and actions restricted, and constantly working to avoid fearing the loss of their whiteness. Thandeka explains that, “The EuroAmerican child… is a racial victim of its own white community of parents, caretakers, and peers, who attack it because it does not yet have a white racial identity” (p. 13). White people learn how to be white through the other white

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folks in their life, and through the punishments they face for actions that are, “not white enough.” In order to not let their white communities down, white children learn at a young age that they must follow a social and cultural script that will protect them from societal rejection. Learning to Be White highlights the moments of discovery white people have at different points throughout their childhood. Thandeka says that after years of internalizing these social scripts, eventually, a white child, “[begins] to think and act like its community’s ideal of a white self” (p. 13). This is the process of learning to be white. Human beings deeply desire to be loved and accepted by those around them, and Thandeka suggests that white children are in a constant battle to achieve this in their white social settings. This helps to explain the connection between personal prejudice and structural racism. She explains that, “the denial of one’s own feelings in order to be loved is affirmed by one’s community and… tends to become a personal value” (p. 17). She then explains that these “personal values,” become prejudices against those who do not hold these values, ultimately leading to institutional discrimination. Euro-American children learn (from their own white communities) that they are to be ashamed of the things that separate them from the white people around them. Thandeka summarizes the victimization of white children by explaining that in the United States, there is, “an attack against the child by members of its own white community because the child is not yet white” (p. 18). In order to achieve racial justice and equity, this attack must be deeply understood and addressed – as long as white people must follow a script and fear their white communities, according to Thandeka, the oppression of people of color will persist.

4

White Supremacy and Capitalism

Thandeka contends that whiteness and capitalism are intimately linked in the U.S. The American capitalist system, born out of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, is deeply racialized. Our economic system only functions the way it does with the maintenance and deep commitment to white supremacy. Social class, then, cannot be understood separately from an individual’s racial experience. With this understanding in mind, she describes classism as, “racial strategies devised to hide and thereby promote or to protect economic class interests” (p. 42). Historically, economic – and therefore social, political and emotional – gain for white folks in this country has depended upon the subjugation of black and indigenous folks. This can first be demonstrated through Colonial Virginia’s Race Laws. For instance, free black people could not own “Christian,”

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(white) servants, and Native Americans, or “Indians,” were able to be owned. No matter what a white person’s financial status, they were given more privileges and opportunities than people of color. Thandeka explains that through these and similar laws, “racial superiority and thus the right to rule came to be equated with middle-class respectability and a middle class disposition” (p. 44). Capitalism in the U.S., then, must be understood within the framework of white supremacy – stereotypes and other forms of racial subjugation are intimately linked to economic power structures. To this end, Thandeka goes on to say that, “white racism was from the start a vehicle for classism; its primary goal was not to elevate a race but to denigrate a class” (p. 47). In discussing the relationship between lower-class white people and people of color historically (lower-class white folks not believing in racial oppression because of their own suffering), Thandeka explains modern-day tensions between racial and class groups, which helps to explain the best ways to dismantle structural racism and white supremacy. White shame is also intimately linked to capitalism. This connection was particularly clear during the Civil War. In an attempt to separate themselves from black people, white people worked against their own class interests by continuing to support the ruling-class political agenda that was deep, structural racism. Lynching, and other acts of violence against people of color – but in particular, black folks – is a result of white shame. Thandeka writes that, “the constructed racial identity of the poor white is not the product of an act of love and respect by a ruling elite, but rather is the result of upper-class race ploys for the purpose of social control” (p. 54). And finally, Thandeka explains the ways in which lower-class white people have historically worked against their own best interest by subjugating their black counterparts and other people of color. In doing so, the focus is taken off of the oppressor (upper class white elites), and no structural change is actually achieved. In Thandeka’s words, “Rather than confront the class injury to the white self by fellow whites and thus fully face the extent of the injury to the white body from its own community,” lower-class white people have turned “the embodied feelings of the white into the feelings of the Negro” (p. 56). While racial and class oppressions may play out differently – the oppressor is the same and must be held accountable for social tensions and injustices.

5

Conclusion

Learning to be white is a process which not only maintains the subjugation of people of color, but also involves victimization, violence and deep policing of

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white people by members of their own white communities. In order to achieve racial justice, white people must face the ways that their social location as white is contingent on regular and sanctioned racial violence against communities of color coupled with the standards of what it means to be “white.” For Thandeka, antiracist projects must work to uncover the ways that all peoples are raced and that the activity of becoming raced carries with it a host of social, emotional, and political struggles. She sees white people someday becoming “people of color,” in the sense that whiteness will no longer have a manufactured status as “best” or “normal.” Such a project is impossible if one does not begin at the beginning of white racial identity formation – hence her emphasis on the ways that young white people are socialized into whiteness and must risk losing the love of their parents and caretakers if they go against their wishes. Interrupting this cycle is a pedagogical challenge, one that Thandeka’s work can accelerate.

Reference Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be white: Money, race and God in America. Continuum.

CHAPTER 89

Tokenism Megan Ruby

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Latinx Folks and Whiteness; Stereotype Threat

… Tokenism is “the practice or policy of admitting an extremely small number of members of racial (e.g. African American), ethnic (e.g. Latino) or gender (i.e. women) groups… to give the impression of being inclusive, when in actuality these groups are not welcomed” (Riccucci, 2008, p. 132). The U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 declared that segregation was no longer legally allowed in public schools. Yet, inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class, and so on persisted and continue to persist in the education system. There would be many more Supreme Court cases to follow in the 1960s and 1970s fighting these ongoing battles. During President Eisenhower’s time as president in the 1950s, he was against enforcing anti-discriminatory policies because he saw them as exaggerated and not as prevalent as the public believed. Henceforth, in 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order for Affirmative Action to create positive steps in overcoming obstacles of those who were still being discriminated against after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and pressured shifts in racial representation, tokenism became a mechanism by which government and institutions could appear to be inclusive without substantively engaging the deeper critiques put forward by the movement (e.g., radically redistributing wealth, resources, and institutional power to people of Color). Currently, tokenism still exists as a white desire to once again “prove” how diverse one’s business or school can be. The people of color are put into situations to become racial tokens in education and the media that perpetuate white supremacy ideals that further the narrative that we live in a post-racial world.

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Tokenism and the Media

While the 13th amendment of the U.S. constitution abolished slavery, the amendment includes the qualifying phrase, “except as a punishment for a crime.” In the 1915 film Birth of a Nation black men were villainized and criminalized by white men wearing black face and portrayed as the enemy to the plantation way of life in the South. This film had a tremendous impact on how people of color were portrayed and created a narrative of them as the villain in the minds of White America. Timothy Lensmire (2017) describes this as black minstrelsy, where the white man could benefit from the stereotypes they created so they could go on benefitting from a massively unjust and unequal world. People of color are also portrayed in stereotypical ways in literature and TV shows. Men and women of color are used as tokens by perpetuating a stereotype of the white imagination of how people of color act in the ways white people expect them to. For instance, in the show Big Bang Theory, the Indian American Rajesh stereotypically has an accent, and is super smart, but is socially awkward. In multiple movies, there is a token gay best friend that is always good with fashion and is only there to help the white hetero-protagonist. There is also a Black female or male character that is there to be sassy and used to further the storyline of the white main character. These characters are usually interchangeable without notice, for example after the first Iron Man, Terrance Howard was replaced with Don Cheadle and no one seemed to notice. These portrayals push the token narrative that people of color are only used in supportive roles and are rarely given their own storylines. When they are given their own storyline, it is an American trope of what that person or character should be cast as, for example Octavia Spencer playing a maid in the novel turned movie, The Help. Furthermore, people of color are also being tokenized in the media to push the idea of rags to riches stories. These stories bring about the neoliberal ideology of “if this person can do it, so can you” which discounts what obstacles it actually takes to get there. In 2011, a black homeless man named Ted Williams was panhandling on the side of the road in Columbus, Ohio. He had fallen on hard times and lost his job as a radio-announcer. Overnight, he became an “international media frenzy” or a token as you will (Gent, 2007). Williams went on to do talk shows, interviews, and write an autobiography. With each interview, media personalities made comments such as, “you need proof that life in this country can change overnight, look no further than Ted Williams.” After all, it is the perfect “rags to riches” story (Gent, 2017, p. 218). American media insists on its rags to riches story especially when it pushes the narrative of the American dream as feasible for all who just work hard enough.

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Oprah Winfrey and President Obama have also been used as racial tokens in this way. As Milner (2010) suggests, these stories feed into the myth of meritocracy, or the idea that if one simply works hard enough, irrespective of their socioeconomic conditions, one can achieve anything. The proliferation of racial tokens like media representations of Ted Williams’ story, furthers the neoliberal ideology that rugged individualism and competition will ensure greater access and equality for all. In other words, it is on Ted Williams, not on the wealthy elite who, by withholding taxes and engaging in insidious labor practices, continue to profit from the legacies of slavery.

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Tokenism and Education

Education has often been imagined in dominant public discourse as a site of social mobility – the way to a better life, a higher paying job, etc. For people of color, access to an education has never been easy. Before (and after) Brown v. Board of Education, segregation was (is) common. After,the Supreme Court ruling in 1954, there was still a great amount of backlash in the process of creating an equal environment that had been systematically separated by racism for multiple generations. Even Martin Luther King warned against this type of tokenism in many of his speeches. He stated that “massive resistance has given way in the South to a kind of sophisticated resistance embodied in tokenism. If we are to have a truly integrated society, it will never develop through tokenism” (as cited in Niemann, 2016, p. 452). Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking to the notion that one cannot just put a few students of color in an all-white school and claim that as equal. True equality would come from 100% inclusion, something America still struggles with today. Today’s tokenism in education looks a little different than it did in Martin Luther King Jr’s day. Many notions of tokenism happen in the world of academia, whether as a student or as a faculty member. In Subrina J. Robinson’s (2013) article on how black women navigate the white waters of graduate school she coined the term spoketokenism. Spoketokenism is the words spoken and token which “convey the significance of voice and physical presence and to underscore the perceived role of the speaker to particular audiences” (p. 161). In essence, the black women that Robinson interviewed said that they made a decision on when to speak and when not to speak. Every time they did speak they felt that they were speaking for their whole race. However, not all of them saw being a token as a negative thing. One Black woman, Tricia, stated that “it made her feel good because there’s nobody else there – if I don’t do it then who else is going to do it at this point[?]” (p. 161). Others still felt the

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burden of being the only person of color in the classroom. They felt that they had become “white-ified” and that their racial identity was being taken away due to being used as stereotypical tropes throughout their college experience and their struggle to prove their worth in the eyes of their white colleagues. Similar themes are explored in Hilton Kelly’s (2007) study on black teachers working in predominately white schools. Timothy, a black male teacher, was told by a white female teacher that she did not think of him as Black because he was the “least Black person she knew.” His response was one of awe and confusion. He told her he respected her but that she just told him he was not black. She went on to explain that no, he was Black but just not “hard core Black” (p. 251). In higher education, faculty of color often find that they are tokenized as embodying and specializing in “diversity” solely based on their race. Faculty that belong to a minority group will be asked to take on classes that teach about diversity even if it is beyond their scholarly area of expertise or a white colleague may put their name on a grant or proposal that requires an emphasis on diversity with or without their permission (Niemann, 2016). Faculty of color may face consequences from administration or be pushed out of the university for turning down these forced obligations because they are seen as “being selfish, at best, and as traitors, at worst” (p. 455). On the other hand, their white colleagues are not held to the same stringent standards and are allowed to turn down diversity work if they so choose or if they perceive their area of expertise is not “diversity.”

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Tokenism and Whiteness

Tokenism started out as just filling a quota to meet the mandate of Affirmative Action but has also become a way of creating a trope of using people of color as a means to prove diversity in the workplace and education. It is all centered on how white culture defines itself. In Lensmire’s (2017) book, White Folks, he suggests white people rely on stereotypes of people of color in order to ease the tensions that arise out of the pervasive evidence in white people’s everyday lives that our society is inherently unequal, violent, and undemocratic. Robinson (2013) noticed this when a white male classmate asked another white female classmate “why can’t she get over this racial shit” (p. 155). This racist ideology happens because of what Nolan Cabrera (2014) calls “sincere fictions.” White men and women live in a world that is surrounded by whiteness most of the time. They live in communities surrounded mostly by whiteness

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and many of them do not experience any diversity until they reach college. Even then, they still surround themselves with other whites, which creates a “basement culture” where whites discuss how they are the ones who are discriminated against and see laws such as Affirmative Action as reverse racism (Lensmire, 2017). Using narratives as reverse racism creates the trope of whites seeing themselves as the victims, further perpetuating the ideas of white supremacy and trying to lessen the powerful effects of what racism does (Cabrera, 2014). However, when people of color fit the narrative of what white people desire, then they can become a token to further prove to white people that the world is getting better and/or that they live in a post-racial world. For instance, when Timothy’s colleague accused him of not being black or when Crystal felt that she had been “white-if” because she had been taught how to perform in white culture, which ingrains the tokenization of people of color inside the minds of both white folks and people of color alike.

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Conclusion

People of color are tokenized in the media, higher education, and the workplace to show lawmakers that whites were/are abiding by affirmative action and broader surface-level endoresements of “diversity.” In education, faculty of color, especially black women, continue to be asked to take on additional, often unpaid, work teaching white faculty and students about racism. In classrooms, people of color are often asked to speak for the whole of their racial category. As Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “Tokenism can now be seen not only as a useless goal, but a genuine menace” (as cited in Niemann, 2016, p. 457). The menace of tokenism lies in the ways in which institutions use people of color in order to appear “diverse” without substantively addressing the systematic exclusion and marginalization of people of color in these spaces.

References Cabrera, N. L. (2014). Exposing Whiteness in higher education: White male college students minimizing racism, claiming victimization, and recreating White supremacy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 30–55. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, White masks. Grove Press. Gent, W. (2017). Tokenism and cultural (mis) recognition in the “man with the golden voice.” Howard Journal of Communications, 28(3), 217–233. hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. Psychology Press.

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Kelly, H. (2007). Racial tokenism in the school workplace: An exploratory study of Black teachers in overwhelmingly white schools. Educational Studies, 41(3), 230–254. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Milner, H. R. (2010). Start where you are, but don’t stay there. Harvard University Press. Niemann, Y. F. (2016). The social ecology of tokenism in higher education. Peace Review, 28(4), 451–458. Riccucci, N. M. (2008). Tokenism. In J. Hartwell Moore (Ed.), Encyclopedia of race and racism (pp. 132–134). Macmillan Reference. Robinson, S. J. (2013). Spoke tokenism: Black women talking back about graduate school experiences. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(2), 155–181.

CHAPTER 90

Trump, Donald Zachary A. Casey and Annie Jaffee

Related Entries: Alt-Right; Discourse and Whiteness; Hyperindividualism; Nationalism

… Donald Trump – as a businessman, celebrity, and politician – is intimately linked to white supremacy. Although Donald Trump has said that he is, “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” his actions, policies and tweets show a deep commitment to upholding the structure of white supremacy – even to reinvigorating the explicitly white supremacist past of the United States. While his overtly racist proclamations are so consistent, much of the country, even those committed to racial justice, have become numb to his bigotry. The comments are so frequent that when news regarding Trump’s behavior breaks – behavior that under other circumstances, may be grounds for impeachment and removal from the office of the Presidency – it is seen as routine, just another part of many people’s morning routines. The impact is that Trump’s white supremacist discourse and worldview have become banal, and many struggle to understand how it has become exceedingly normal for the President of the United States to use social media to spread white nationalist hate speech. While Trump’s ascendancy to political power is recent in the broader context of the era of whiteness studies this volume seeks to contribute to, he is included here because of the importance of theorizing white racial identity in context. One cannot make sense of whiteness in the United States, nor across the globe, in our current political moment without an engagement with what Trump has said, done, and what he stands (in) for in the context of entrenched white supremacy. While white supremacy is certainly the foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency, historical context demonstrates that his relationship with racism is long and complex. For instance, in 1973, the Trump Foundation was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for racial discrimination in his apartment buildings, for violating the Fair Housing Act. In this instance, Trump was caught lying to numerous black folks looking at his buildings, and explicitly did not allow them to rent out the apartments. Trump justified his actions by © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_090

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placing the blame on the government, stating that they were trying to coerce him and his foundation into providing people living on welfare with housing as residents. After this incident, Trump had to sign an agreement not to discriminate against his tenants. Further, individual accounts of racism by black staff that worked in his buildings across the nation have been recorded throughout his career. There are many accounts of Trump’s racist sentiments across his long career. In the 1990s he argued that many Native American tribes should not be allowed to operate casinos because “they don’t look like Indians to me.” In 2005 he pitched the idea for his reality TV show The Apprentice to have a season that featured two teams: a black team and a white team that would compete against one another. Perhaps the greatest white supremacist act that brought Trump into politics, however, was his role in the “Birtherism” battle in the context of President Barack Obama. Trump was among the loudest voices in the country who argued that President Obama was not, in fact, a U.S. citizen. He went as far as hiring private investigators to look into Obama’s birth certificate in Hawaii, before Obama finally made his birth certificate public in order to quell any additional conspiracy theories about his nationality. Trump also sought access to President Obama’s college transcripts, doubting that he was able to attend Columbia University and Harvard Law School on his own merits. These sentiments helped Trump gain a foothold with explicitly white supremacist groups on the Right and led to his campaign actively courting these voters throughout the 2016 presidential race. Donald Trump has also made many remarks about majority non-white countries and the people who live in them. In early 2018 he remarked, after discussing policies related to protecting immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and African nations, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He suggested that immigration policy should instead privilege people from countries like Norway, and Asian countries because he sees Asian peoples as helping the U.S. economically. His administration also worked to create a “Muslim ban,” restricting visas and travel from six majority-Muslim nations. The list of restricted countries has since expanded to include North Korea and Venezuela, with Sudan being removed from the list. However, the impact of the “Muslim ban” further entrenched Trump and his supporters in an explicitly white nationalist frame. Banning people from so-called “Muslim” nations as a means of preventing future terroristic activities presents a logic that terrorism directed against the United States is a result of pathological people of color who are not white nor Christian. This essentializes the absences of whiteness and Christianity to mean that someone is unfit for membership and participation in the United States. However, from 2011 to August of 2019, there

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have been 16 mass shootings killing 175 people across the world in which the murderer(s) held an explicitly white nationalist and white supremacist worldview and carried out their attack in order to further that agenda. Almost all of these shooters used rhetoric taken directly from Trump, to describe immigrants, refugees, and people of color as “invaders,” as the reason for their butchery. In 2019 alone, the Trump campaign posted more than 2,000 Facebook ads that explicitly used the term “invasion” in the context of immigration. The very foundation of Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election was rooted in white supremacy. Trump’s public endorsement of white supremacy is demonstrated most explicitly through his anti-immigrant remarks and polices, as well as his passivity while gaining endorsements from white supremacist leaders across the nation along with his infamous campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The question of what the slogan means has been up for debate – when was America great, and what makes America great? Critical race scholars, politicians and social justice advocates alike suggest that a slogan that better represents President Trump’s agenda is, “Make America Hate Again.” In other words, his catchphrase calls for a rollback on progressive politics: America was “great” when marriage was solely between a man and a woman, there were explicit laws limiting the ability of people of color to live, work, and shop where they pleased, we were “tough on crime,” when people weren’t as “sensitive,” young people were kept out of politics and we lived in a colorblind world. In other words, this slogan was a form of backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency; it functions as Trump’s pledge to make America more explicitly white supremacist again. Donald Trump’s top priority since the very beginning of his campaign has been restricting immigration. His public obsession with border security began in 2015 during the launch of his campaign, when he infamously called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and accused them of, “bringing drugs,” and “bringing crime,” into the U.S. He advocated for a wall which would keep the groups of people that he deemed dangerous out of the country and promised “Mexico will pay for it.” Since that early campaign speech, his administration has implemented one of the most barbarous and horrific practices in recent U.S. history of “family separation.” At the height of the policy’s enforcement, more than 2,600 children – some under a year old – were separated from their parents and held in detention centers at the U.S. Mexico border. The policy was put in place as a scare tactic, in hopes that the threat of taking children away from their parents would result in fewer people seeking asylum in the United States. The results are a form of concentration camps with multiple reports of grossly negligent behavior, including denying children and adults access to food, bathing, and bedding.

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Trump’s campaign explicitly courted avowed white supremacists and followers of figures like Richard Spencer, a leader of the so-called “Alt-Right” movement. Trump’s explicitly white supremacist campaign led to many white supremacists’ public endorsement of him as their pick for president. Importantly, Trump has never openly condemned their support, nor spoken against them in any direct way. His campaign worked to condemn the explicitly white supremacist shooting in El Paso, Texas in August of 2019 that killed 22 people, most of whom were Latinx, with Trump saying, “In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” Yet Trump seemed to place the majority of responsibility for the attack on violent video games and offered no policy or actions that he would take or advocate for moving forward. In fact, that very same day saw additional ads for the President’s re-election campaign that used the term “invasion” about immigrants: the very same language used in the “manifesto” left by the El Paso mass-murderer. In August of 2017 a white supremacist rally was held on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville sponsored by a coalition of the Ku Klux Klan, the Daily Stormer, and multiple other Rightwing militia and white supremacist organizations. The protestors marched around campus, carrying tiki torches and chanting “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” The next day a counter-protestor was killed by a white supremacist in his car as he drove into the protestors, additionally injuring 19 people. Trump’s response was the following: “We condemn in the strong as possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” His interruption of himself, repeating “on many sides” signaled to many listening that he was not actually condemning the white supremacist rally and violence that killed one and injured many others, but rather was condemning the counter protestors in such a way that made the two groups, one a coalition of the KKK, neo-Nazis, and militia groups and the other a group of mostly college student counter protestors, equivalent. The problem was not white supremacist hate and violence, the problem was rather that, in Trump’s words from the same speech, “We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and really, I say this so strongly, true affection for each other” spoke to the frustration of most people across the nation that he was condemning resistance to white supremacy, not white supremacy, with his remarks. While a spokesperson for the President worked to explain later that the President had “meant” his comments to be directed against white supremacists, Trump himself has never apologized for this mistake, if in fact that’s what it was. Rather, in the context of the rest of his presidency and campaign, we can see Charlottesville and the President’s response as further evidence of his white supremacist commitments and sentiments.

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Trump has reprimanded protesters of systemic racism on other occasions as well, such as the choice of some NFL football players – like Colin Kapernick – to kneel during the national anthem as a protest against institutionalized white supremacy, and a demonstration of solidarity with black Americans. Trump called for a “boycott” of the NFL by fans until the protests stopped. He has tweeted epithets in reference to the Trail of Tears, the city of Baltimore, and dozens of other racist pronouncements since assuming office. In 2019 he targeted four congresswomen of color in a tweet asking of the four, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three of the four were born in the United States, and the other has been a U.S. citizen since she was a teenager. Calls for people of color to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin are explicitly xenophobic and white nationalist sentiments, coming from the very highest office in the country. What remains complex and mystified at the time of this writing is how Trump will impact whiteness and critical whiteness studies more broadly in the years to come. His backward-looking mantra of “Make America Great Again” carries with it the citational violence of times when the United States had laws that required and upheld white supremacy. His election served as the final death knell in the notion of a “post-racial” United States, speculated about throughout the years President Obama was in office. Trump has been compared to George Wallace, the last presidential candidate to run primarily on the issue of segregation as a segregationist, more than other Republican presidents (e.g. Nixon, Reagan, etc.) who realized white nationalist desires without the rhetoric of white supremacy that Trump has used to galvanize his base and remain wildly popular with Republican voters. Much of the popular coverage of President Trump has focused on the “populist” character of his message, without further interrogating what makes white nationalist sentiment popular enough to mobilize supporters. Further research on Trump and his supporters that mobilizes insights drawn from critical whiteness studies would go far in helping us understand, in scholarly terms, what impact Trump has had on the broader phenomenon of whiteness. History may mark the Trump presidency as a turning point in the fight for racial equity. On the other hand, Trump might be emblematic of other Right wing movements across the globe, from Europe, to Asia, to Africa that are gaining momentum at the time of this writing. What we know now is that President Donald Trump has been a destructive and unsettling political force who has used white supremacy as a tool to win voters, as a governing strategy from which to set policy, and as a worldview. What is clear is that the impacts on the U.S. and world from the Trump presidency will be felt for generations to come.

CHAPTER 91

Wage Slaves Thomas M. Falk

Related Entries: Du Bois, W.E.B.; Capitalism; Marxism; Roediger, David

… In political-economic terms, wage slaves are persons who must sell their labor in order to survive. Often compared to chattel slavery, wherein a class of masters directly owns workers as property, wage slavery refers to a system in which an owning class, through its dominion over land and the means of production, coerces workers into selling their labor. Historically, chattel slavery has tended to arise in circumstances of low population density and high demand for labor, such as the American South. By contrast, wage slavery has developed in circumstances of high population density and labor surplus, such as Industrial Britain and the American North. Both modes of production feature a small exploiting class appropriating the labor value of a much larger producing class (Graeber, 2006). Philosophers also paint wage slavery in ontological and phenomenological terms. Paid work, Aristotle believed, degraded human character by diverting people away from leisure (Pieper, 2019). Of “hired workmen,” Cicero wrote that “the wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery” (Cicero, 1913). The Christian Diggers, in their 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, condemned the incipient capitalist ethos that abided the subjugation of one person to any other (Graham, 2005). Drawing upon the Natural Rights Theory of Jean Gerson, Thomas Hobbes argued that reasonable persons could voluntarily sell or rent their liberty, an idea still supported by many Libertarians (Graeber, 2012, p. 206; Hobbes, 1651). Werner von Humboldt, in 1791, declared inhuman any work that did not directly issue from the free mind and will of the worker (Chomsky, 1993, p. 16). In the 19th century, Marx and Engels attacked wage labor for alienating humanity from its species being – its unique capacity for self-creation (Kramer, 2000). Analogous views of the wage contract also appear throughout the developing world, among peasant cultures who have surrounded it with myths of occult horror. Michael Taussig documented peasants in Bolivia and Columbia who claimed to sign contracts with the devil, exchanging their souls for wages, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_091

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before going to work in tin and copper mines. Folk from Tanzania, Jamaica, and West Cameroon accuse capitalists of paying witches to turn their kin into zombies who labor for wages as farmers, construction workers, and clerks (Taussig, 1990). The term wage slavery, which emerged during the Industrial Revolution in dialectic with the ideology of whiteness, carries both political-economic and ontological significance. As the factory system pressed upon the lives of once-independent farmers and tradesfolk, workers questioned the wage contract’s compatibility with Enlightenment ideals of Liberty and Equality. In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David Roediger argues that the existence of chattel slavery made these workers’ demands for better wages and conditions far more fraught. By offering public and psychological wages as compensation, the ideology of white supremacy contributed to white workers’ acquiescence to subjugation within the emerging capitalist political economy (Roediger, 2007).

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Pre-History and Emergence of the White Working Class

Through the 17th and much of the 18th century, chattel slavery remained common in both the Northern and Southern British colonies. David Galenson finds that a majority of colonists arrived under some form of indenture, which often entailed long hours of hard work, abuse, arbitrary extensions of service, and lack of legal protection. Most perished before fulfilling the terms of their bondage (Williams, 2008). “Master” and “servant” remained common and apt terms with which workers described their political-economic lives. Although indenture had largely disappeared by the Age of Jackson, once-independent artisans and farmers entering the ranks of wagedom struggled to reconcile their changing identities with Enlightenment ideals of Liberty and Equality. Enduring overcrowded and fetid living conditions while subsisting upon “unhealthy and scanty” food, industrial workers grew “pale, feeble, and finally broken in constitution” (Ware, 1964, p. 80). The average length of an Irish life in Boston, the city’s Commission on Internal Health would find in 1849, was 14 years (p. 14). According to Harriet Robinson, the term wage slave first appeared in 1836, when Lowell Mill girls protested against the degradation of the emerging factory system. That same year, journeyman tailors in New York City (NYC) responded to an anti-labor court decision by declaring that “Freemen of the North are now on a level with slaves of the South” (Roediger, 2007, p. 65). NYC trade unionists expressed their displeasure by referring to themselves as white

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slaves laboring under “despotic” and “rapacious” masters (p. 53). While artisans characterized themselves as “slaves in the strictest sense of the word,” early labor leaders such as Stephen Simpson identified “capital as the master” (p. 71). Between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, ordinary Americans, men in particular, increasingly identified themselves in relation to race and slavery (p. 20). Despite powerful resentment and condemnation of their growing subordination to capital, white workers nonetheless pointed to Black slaves as the embodiment of the slavishness and servility that they despised and feared. In accordance with political philosophy of the time, many attributed this slavishness to the Blackness of the enslaved rather than to slavery itself. Roediger argues that this had the effect of tempering critiques of the wage system and providing white workers a platform from which to reconcile their newfound servility with republican and Jacksonian political ideals. Many workers were averse, observed Richard Parkinson, to acknowledging the inequality inherent to the wage contract (Roediger, 2007, p. 54). In the decades preceding the Civil War, white workers employed euphemistic language to distinguish themselves from the slavishness and servility associated with Black slaves. Shedding linguistic associations with slavery by referring to their employers with the Dutch word boss, in lieu of master, and substituting the terms help and hired hand for servant, white workers emphasized their relative independence. This helped an emerging white working class to identify itself with white capital over and against Black labor. According to Oliver Cox, the American ruling class wielded the ideology of white supremacy as a tool to divide and conquer the new working class. W.E.B. Du Bois identified the wages of whiteness – psychological rewards and political-economic entitlements over Blacks, namely the opportunity for social mobility and representation on juries and police forces – as a principal means by which this was achieved (Du Bois, 1977). John C. Calhoun offered an exemplary articulation of the wages of whiteness before the Senate in 1848: The two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious, and hence have a position and pride of character which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them. (Calhoun, 1848/1888) Educational historians have portrayed compulsory schooling as a principal means by which the ruling class sought to invest the working class with bourgeois attitudes, values, and habits – which Harvey Graff identifies as a moral economy of discipline, docility, and private ambition – while teaching

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its children to identify with and aspire toward the bourgeoisie (Graff, 1991, pp. 26–28; see also Perlman, 1967). Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis documented working class resistance to compulsory schooling laws in the decades surrounding the Civil War. As workers failed to gain representation on early school boards, many communities regarded those who controlled the schools as masters seeking to corrupt their children (Bowles & Gintis, 1977). Early school reformers such as Horace Mann countered popular resistance by casting school as “the great balance wheel of the social machinery” and a bulwark against “the domination of capital and the servility of labor” (Mann, 1848/1957, pp. 87–88). According to Christopher Lasch, Americans in the first half of the 19th century believed in the ideal of a classless society rather than the promise of social mobility within a hierarchical class structure. That ideal became untenable in the second half of the century, however, rendering pursuit of social mobility a next-best option (Lasch, 1991). Critical theorists argue that the racially segregated and unequal school system served as an escape hatch that the bourgeoisie offered to the children of the white working class in order to gain their compliance in internalizing the institution’s disciplinary regime, together with the larger political economy that it served (Spivey, 1978; Schmidt, 2001). Without rejecting the above analysis, Roediger assumes that the white working class exercised substantial agency in its own creation. His perspective bears evidence in the complex ways through which folks granted, refused, negotiated, and portrayed whiteness. For instance, nativists initially denied the Irish, in addition to other Central and Southern European immigrant groups, status as white. These “non-white” ethnic groups often lived alongside “free Blacks” and assumed the most arduous jobs along with them. In order to gain recognition as white, they first had to distinguish and separate themselves from their Black counterparts. The Industrial Revolution ushered a dramatic transition from rural and peasant lifeways into urban and proletarian ones. This entailed the separation of work from home, internalization of factory discipline, elimination of holidays, and bridling of sexuality. As Americans embraced their new identity and work ethic, they both longed for and despised those recently lost. Nostalgic visions of this former way of life appeared prominently in Blackface Minstrel shows, whose characters projected pre-capitalist values and behaviors onto Blacks (Saxton). Blackface, wrote George Lipsitz, licensed actors to express “the natural self at odds with the normative self of industrial culture” (Lipsitz, 1990, p. 64). Racism, wrote George Rawick (1972) in From Sunup to Sundown, was connected to a loss of humanity suffered in the transition to industrial capitalism.

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Contemporary racial epithets such as coon and buck, for example, originated in the early 19th century in reference to those who did not evidence internalization of capitalist work discipline. The racist, just like a reformed sinner, argues Rawick, saw in the Black a “comrade of his previous debaucheries… a pornography of his former life,” and insisted upon a great difference between himself and this creature so that he would not backslide into his old ways (p. 133). Next to caricatures of servile and indolent Black slaves on one hand and caricatures of the similarly indolent but exceedingly non-servile “Red Man” on the other, whites could see themselves as hardworking, independent, and civilized. Minstrel shows in which white folks relished portrayals of Black shiftlessness, treachery, sexuality, and animality often ended in mob violence against “free Blacks” (Roediger, 2007). Through the Civil War, the labor movement made few alliances with the abolition movement. Staunch labor advocates including Mike Walsh, Theophilus Fisk, Ely Moore, Orestes Brownson, and John Finch, who each maintained that working conditions of Black slaves compared favorably to those of Northern wage workers, nonetheless painted abolition as a capitalist plot to lower white workers to the condition of Blacks (Brownson, 1840/2001; Tise, 1987). Upon his emancipation, Frederick Douglass celebrated the freedom of wage work over his former state of bondage. And yet Douglass soon condemned both systems, declaring the slavery of wages to be only slightly less crushing than chattel slavery. Solidarity between Black and white labor, he argued, would be required to combat rule by the capitalist and slaveholder class (Allen, 2002).

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Racism & Class Consciousness in Post-Bellum America

“Labor in white skin,” wrote Marx (1967), “cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded” (Marx, p. 301). Following the Civil War and Emancipation, Marx observed a stunning “moral impetus” injected into the American labor movement, as if a giant obstacle had been removed (Roediger, 2007, p. 168). The valor of Black soldiers during the war forced a white reckoning with long-held assumptions about the Black as sub-human. Without a Black slave to confirm free white identity, white workers questioned conceptions of themselves as independent and industrious. This fueled demands for better pay and conditions. Labor leaders such as Ira Steward vigorously tied emancipation of Black chattel slaves to a vision of white workers’ emancipation from the wage system (Fones-Wolf, 1981). Wage slavery, observed Lawrence Glickman, made a dramatic post-bellum resurgence in the language of organized labor

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(Glickman, 1999, p. 19). While “John Brown’s Body” became a labor anthem, workers referred broadly to anti-labor court rulings as “Dredd Scott decisions” (Roediger, 2007, p. 176). The New York Times, in 1869, described wage labor as “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South” (Sandel, 1969, p. 181). In the wake of the Civil War, scrubwomen, actors, longshoremen, carpenters, shoemakers, police, and workers of all stripes organized and agitated to win pay raises, safety improvements, and eight-hour days. Black and white worker unity frequently bolstered labor’s victories. Nonetheless, white supremacy, writes Theodore Allen (2002), had already established itself as an “American super-religion.” Capitalists successfully stoked racial animosity by utilizing African-Americans as strikebreakers. Still seeing Blackness as a form of servility, although now before capital, trade and craft unions raised and maintained color barriers. Noting that regimes of industrial work discipline were first developed on slave plantations, Roediger argues that whiteness prevented American labor from adopting the wisdom that enslaved people had cultivated over many generations of resistance (James, 1938). By the 19th century, Mark Smith (1998) and Robert Starobin (1970) both found, Southern chattel slaves relied upon music, religion, negligence, slowdown, feigned sickness, refusal to work, pilferage, arson, assault, and rebellion as means of achieving degrees of autonomy that in many cases compared favorably with those enjoyed by Northern wage. “The black slave,” observed Du Bois (1924) in The Gift of Black Folk, “was not as easily reduced to be the mechanical draft horse which the northern European laborer became” (p. 53).

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Wage Slavery in the 21st Century

“Slavery,” writes Pierre Dockes (1982), “is the primary and primordial relation of exploitation, that form out of which serfdom and wage labor arise, and that form toward which the master always strives” (p. 2). Following the Black Power and Feminist movements of the 1960s, which extended voting and civil rights, raised the wage floor, and won recognition of the value of childcare labor, the U.S. working class reached its historic peak of power as measured by work hours, real wages, security, and solidarity (Caffentzis, 1998). Threatened, capital retaliated through combinations of technological advance and political maneuver: automation, surveillance, outsourcing, union-busting, austerity, and the stoking of racial and ethnic animosities to divide and conquer workers. As a result, the 21st century has witnessed a proliferation of various forms

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of “unfree labor” – including serfdom, debt bondage, and prison labor – that so plagued the 19th century (Alexander, 2010; Silver-Greenberg, 2011; Vanden Heuvel, 2010).

References Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New Press. Allen, T. (2002). On Roediger’s wages of whiteness. http://www5.csudh.edu/ dearhabermas/allen01.htm Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1977). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books. Brownson, O. (2001). The laboring classes. In D. Hollinger & C. Capper (Eds.), The American intellectual tradition (Vol. I). Oxford University Press. 294–309. (Original work published 1840) Caffentzis, G. (1998). From capitalist crisis to proletarian slavery: An introduction to class struggle in the U.S., 1973–1998. Midnight Notes. Calhoun, J. C. (1888). On the Oregon bill. In R. K. Cralle (Ed.), The works of John C. Calhoun (Vol. 4, pp. 503–512). D. Appleton & Co. (Original work published 1848) Cicero, M. T. (1913). De Officiis (Book I, XLII). Loeb Classical Library. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-de_officiis/1913/pb_ LCL030.153.xml Chomsky, N. (1993). Year 501: The conquest continues. Verso. Dockes, P. (1982). Medieval slavery and liberation (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1924). The gifts of Black folk. Millwood, NY. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1977). Black reconstruction in the United States, 1860–1880. Free Press. Fones-Wolf, K. (1981). Boston eight hour men, New York marxists and the emergence of the International Labor Union. Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 9. Glickman, L. (1999). A living wage: American workers and the making of consumer society. Cornell University Press. Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The first 5000 years. Melville House Publishing. Graeber, D. (2016). Turning modes of production inside out: Or, why capitalism is a transformation of slavery. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1). Graff, H. (1991). The literacy myth: Cultural integration and social structure in the nineteenth century. Transaction Publishers. Graham, R. (Ed.). (2005). Anarchism: A documentary history of libertarian ideas, volume one: From anarchy to anarchism (300CE to 1939). Black Rose Books. Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan (Book II, Ch. 20). https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/martmurdvee/EconPsy/6/Hobbes_Thomas_1660_The_Leviathan.pdf

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James, C. L. R. (1938). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Secker and Warburg. Kramer, L. (2000). Marx’s social critique. European thought and culture in the 19th century [Audio lecture]. The Teaching Company. Lasch, C. (1991). The true and only heaven: Progress and its critics. W.W. Norton & Company. Lipsitz, G. (1990). Time passages: Collective memory and American popular culture. University of Minnesota Press. Mann, H. (1957). Twelfth annual report. In L. Cremin (Ed.), The republic and the school: Horace Mann on the education of free men. Teachers College Press. (Original work published 1848) Marx, K. (1967). Capital (Vol. I, Ch. 10). International Publishers. Perlman, F. (1967, October). Critical education. The Journal of General Education, 19(3), 179–193. Pieper, J. (2009). Leisure the basis of culture. Ignatius Press. Rawick, G. (1972). From sunup to sundown: The making of the Black community. Greenwood. Roediger, D. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso. Sandel, M. (1996). Democracy’s discontent: America in search of a public philosophy. Belknap Press. Saxton, A. (1990). Rise & fall of the White republic. Verso. Schmidt, J. (2001). Disciplined minds. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Silver-Greenberg. (2011, March 16). Welcome to debtor’s prison, 2011 edition. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704396504576204553811636 610 Smith, M. (1998). Debating slavery: Economy and society in the antebellum American South. Cambridge University Press. Spivey, D. (1978). Schooling for the new slavery: Black industrial education, 1868–1915. Greenwood Press. Starobin, R. S. (1970). Industrial slavery in the old South. Oxford University Press. Taussig, M. (1980). The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. The University of North Carolina Press. Tise, L. (1987). Proslavery: A history of the defense of slavery in America, 1701–1840. Ohio University Press. Vanden Heuvel, K. (2010, March 28). Modern slavery. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/modern-slavery/ Ware, N. (1964). The industrial worker: 1840–1860. Quadrangle Books. Williams, J. (2008, Fall). Student debt and the spirit of indenture. Dissent Magazine. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1303

CHAPTER 92

White Supremacy Annie Jaffee and Zachary A. Casey

Related Entries: Capitalism; Critical Race Theory; Emotionality and Whiteness; Labor and Whiteness

… White supremacy refers to a system of violence and oppression which upholds beliefs and practices in society structured around a white racial ideal. White supremacy is “an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by [elite] white peoples and nations… for the purposes of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege” (Challenging White Supremacy Workshop). In her book, White Femininity, Deliovsky (2010) writes that, “‘white’ became (and still functions today as) a political, cultural and psychological fiction used to exploit and oppress groups of people not defined as ‘white’ for the mass accumulation of wealth, power and psychological advantage” (p. 20). Although race is a fiction, it has serious social realities. In other words, race – although a social construction without biological underpinnings – has real implications, and shapes people’s lives, opportunities, and culture. White supremacy, then, is the cultural and structural system of domination that works against non-white people in the United States and around the globe. In the United States, whiteness centers both institutions and culture, suggesting that anything other than white is considered “other.” Systemic violence, laws, policing and language have been used in order to maintain white supremacy. Deliovsky writes, “Through a complex interplay of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, capitalism and European cultural practices, including science, religion and law, Europeans came to occupy ‘positional superiority’ (Said 1979) on a world scale” (p. 3). She goes on to explain that, while individuals certainly participate in oppressive practices, white supremacy is an institutionalized phenomenon, and can only be understood through systems of domination. White supremacy is a structure, upheld by individuals, that promotes the superiority of white folks, and the subjugation of people of color. Whiteness is a social process and depends upon the creation of racial Others.

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The very foundation of the United States was wedded to white supremacy. It is deeply ingrained in our institutions and culture and has held legal basis since the country’s founding. In 1790, Congress (in the Articles of Confederation) declared that, All free white persons who, have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship. (Jacobson, 1999, p. 22) The U.S. Constitution declared that enslaved peoples were three-fifths of a person, suggesting that humanity and agency were not to be given to non-white people. And even after the Civil War marked the end of chattel slavery, white supremacy persisted – in Jim Crow policies, predatory housing restrictions, and through white supremacist groups. Such groups run on the belief that the white race is at risk of oppression as immigrants and non-white people come to hold more positions of power and more representation in media. White supremacist groups are rooted in intimidation and violence. Typically, these groups arise during times of radical social change and efforts toward justice; for instance, during Reconstruction in the South, and in response to the Civil Rights Movement. One of the most popular and well-known white supremacist groups, the Ku Klux Klan (the KKK), was founded during the Reconstruction period in the South after the Civil War. Established in 1866 in Tennessee by Confederate soldier Nathan Bedford Forrest, the group acted as a space in which white Southern men could resist the granting of civil rights to non-white people in the United States through laws and other policy changes. Over time the KKK waned in importance and impact, but it underwent a renaissance in the early 20th century to condemn pro-immigrant policies and rhetoric as well as terrorizing black communities across the country. The group’s peak was in the 1920s, when it boasted 4 million active members. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s also prompted a resurgence in KKK membership, as discourse surrounding reparations and racial equity became more popular. Members’ participation included physical attacks on non-white people in public spaces, such as violence against folks incarcerated as well as lynchings. Among these attacks was the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which four young black girls were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15th, 1963. The KKK put bombs beneath the historically black church, and four young black girls were killed after a Sunday school session. Historically, black churches have

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been a recurring target of the white supremacist group. As recently as 1995, members of the KKK burned down Mount Zion AME Church in Greelyville, South Carolina. The KKK conducted many other murders, including the murder of white civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and the lynching of Michael Donald, a young African American man in Mobile, Alabama in 1981 after he was falsely charged with murdering a white policeman. The group’s brutal, and often times fatal attacks, continue even today. More recently, the murder of 14-year old black boy Jason Smith in Eros, Louisiana, Jewish Community center murders in Overland Park, Kansas in 2014, and attacks on antiwhite supremacy groups at a rally in Anaheim, California in 2016 have all been carried out by the KKK. While the group particularly rises in times of leftist demands for social change and transformation, they have remained visible since being founded in 1866. White supremacy is directly linked to the patriarchy. Intersectionality is core to understanding social movements and oppression – mobilization and sustainable change can only happen as long as these intersections are acknowledged. White supremacy, for this reason, is intimately connected to systemic patriarchal structures. As critical black feminist scholar bell hooks suggests, our current system must be explained as an, “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2003). This definition suggests that in the United States, oppressions are so interconnected that they cannot be separated from one another. As Deliovsky explains, “European women are expected to demonstrate their loyalty to whiteness and patriarchy” (Deliovsky, 2010, p. 12). The complex relationship between race and gender may be traced back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in which White masculinity was created through white men’s oppression of other, non-white people. Determining how “manly” a person was depended on how much cultural, social, political and economic capital he had – and, in turn, that economic capital (which impacted all other forms of capital and vice versa) was contingent in the South upon the number of slaves he had. Masculinity, then, rested on the ownership of other human beings. As Walter Johnson (2009) says in Soul by Soul, while slaveholders, “moved upward through the social hierarchy, they gained access to ever more rarified fantasies of what it meant to be a white man and slaveholder in the antebellum South,” and that they, “could not hide their reliance upon the people they bought” (p. 88). That a white man’s manhood in the ideal sense at the beginning of the United States depended upon how many slaves he held and his relationship with slavery underscores the close relationship between sexism and racism, though

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importantly one should not conflate the oppression of white women and people of color. In fact, many white women used slavery to their advantage – to combat white male patriarchy, and ultimately gain the same cultural, social, political and economic capital as their white male counterparts. Johnson (2009) writes, “Some white women went a step further than Miriam Hilliard or Kitty Hamilton: they used slavery to dismantle the patriarchy” (p. 97). If slaveholding meant upward mobility, white women took the opportunity as it came. Johnson goes on to explain that, “the process by which they participated in slave buying was itself a renegotiation of the terms of domestic patriarchy” (p. 100). Because the basis of all capital is derived from surplus labor value, one oppressed group became oppressors themselves in order to challenge their own oppression as well as to grow their relative privilege. White women wanted power – and power meant being a white man, and being a white man meant buying, selling and owning people of African descent. This relationship helps explain the historical tension between women’s rights movements led by white women and anti-slavery movements. White women attempted to gain upward mobility at the expense of black people, rather than joining coalitions to tear down white masculinity and power. This relationship can be explored under many different frameworks, including women’s fight for reproductive freedom. This helps to explain tensions between different social groups and movements – in this case, white and black women. White women’s push for birth control conflicted with black women who fought birth control because it was used to “sterilize” them, so that they could not have kids. The origins of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights groups sprung from the Eugenics movement, which saw genetic inferiority in any and all people not deemed white in the early 20th century. Birth control was seen by white women as a way of taking charge over their own bodies and growing their political power, while birth control for women of color, especially black women, represented a further biopolitical tool in maintaining white supremacy. Here, the connection between the maintenance of white supremacy and the policing of women’s bodies – a foundational act of the patriarchy – becomes clear. Understanding this relationship intersectionally requires that we see patriarchy as part of the arsenal for maintaining white supremacy, and inversely that white supremacy supports patriarchy in contorting who can fully participate in society. Notions like “women’s movement” require further contextualization because of the history of white supremacy creating “women” as white women, excluding women of color because of a lack of engagement with the ways race and racism impact the marginalizations experienced by women of color that differentiates their experiences of what it means to be a woman.

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Racism, while it can certainly be ingrained in individuals epistemologically and ontologically, is also systemic, and continues to play out in the institutions we live under today. As a result, our world cannot be understood solely through personal circumstances and experiences, but rather through the broader optics of historical and institutional influences. White supremacy in the United States, as stated earlier, can be traced all the way back to the very foundation of the country, and was continued through the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and 20th centuries, which legalized racial segregation. Although race-based segregation was made illegal after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, discrimination on the basis of race still flourished, and continues to flourish within institutions today. Higher mass incarceration rates for people of color in the U.S. demonstrate a significant way in which white supremacy is institutionalized. Additionally, unemployment rates, hate crime statistics, wealth gaps, and access to fair housing and education show further evidence of the current and persistent racial imbalance in America. People of color remain at a significant disadvantage because of the residual impacts of the institution of slavery and discriminatory laws, as well as through ongoing marginalizations and exclusionary policies that restrict access. Even seemingly “neutral” institutions, such as those in the science or medical fields, have roots in the Slave Trade and other systems of oppression. For instance, today, on average, patients of color receive less pain medication than white patients and women (particularly women of color) are given less pain medication than their male counterparts – both of which can be traced back to historic oppressions and notions of the “savagery” of peoples of color. Stereotypes that black people don’t feel pain (rooted in ideas that black people are not fully human beings), and that women are too emotional and constantly overreact (rooted in misogynistic ideals that kept women out of the workforce, political sphere, etc.) have created large disparities that show the difference in experiences between white men, white women, and people of color. Homeownership discrimination, redlining, legal residential segregation and employment inequities all have encouraged and perpetuated government-sanctioned racism. Where someone lives is linked to life outcomes in American society – whether they will thrive or suffer. Location and family wealth dictates access to education, jobs, transportation, social networking, and has historically been determined by race and racism. Discrimination in the housing market came not only from individual realtors but existed when black people tried to obtain federal loans and access other bank resources. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would only award FHA loans to white homebuyers who lived in a racially restrictive area from its inception until 1968.

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The elimination of Jim Crow laws and juridical white supremacy did not suddenly bestow acceptance of people of color into white American institutions and culture. While the legal basis for racial segregation has been gone for more than 50 years, we find evidence almost everywhere of the ways white supremacy remains the central animating feature of social life in the U.S. Seeing as the U.S. never worked to redistribute wealth in the wake of slavery and Jim Crow, nor attempted to make reparations, the stage was set from the outset for many more years of exploitation. The cultural and systematic always impact one another – the existence of segregation laws paired with recurring negative images of black folks and other peoples of color shown through advertisements, media, unequal representation and popular culture kept notions of people of color as inferior, undeserving, and “other” long after such laws were no longer enforceable. When one considers the number of homes and neighborhoods across the country built prior to 1968, we can better understand the ways that a cultural white supremacy has taken a permanent hold of the U.S. Although U.S. society is certainly different from what it was hundreds of years ago, white supremacist worldviews and rationales remain much the same as that of the 19th and 20th centuries. Social structures, such as schools and churches, have a cultural aspect to them that can and often do function to further white supremacy. This can be further explained by understanding de jure v. de facto segregation. While de jure segregation refers to separation by law, de facto segregation refers to separation by fact, or, in other words, the legacy of discrimination leads to segregation and further discrimination, whether it is technically “legal” or not. For instance, once segregated schools were made illegal in 1954 after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board, historically white schools had more resources than others because of active housing segregation, property tax bases, and regularized violence against people of color. In addition, many white folks left areas that were being integrated, taking along with them power and resources; a process often referred to as “white flight.” Integration of schools proceeded in explicitly white supremacist ways, particularly in that it was unidirectional. Rather than combining schools across racial lines, students of color were sent to historically white schools. Historically black schools were mostly closed, with the teachers in them facing unemployment and a lack of opportunities in historically white schools. Even in areas where the black schools were deemed “better” academically than white schools, integration only went one way: from black to white. Such examples function to show the whitely character even of efforts that are nominally about granting further access to people of color. Centering white ways of being and knowing and having these become the basis for what is expected of all children in school in order to be “successful” entrenches a

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cultural white supremacy that remains present in the 21st century. Repeatedly, conceptions of beauty, intelligence, and language have centered cis-male, white, middle and upper class desires that function to demean and belittle communities of color. These all constitute examples of cultural white supremacy, created in oppressive social systems and maintained simultaneously by those systems as well as by the cultural norms and practices that flow from them. Today, “white” has become the default subjectivity for white people. When describing a person, white people typically only point out their race if they are not white. Whiteness is not mentioned because it is assumed, and, as scholar Richard Dyer (1997) suggests, “as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm,” suggesting that, “other people are raced, we are just people” (p. 1). If “white” is the default, then white people are not only free to be individuals not defined by their race but are seen as more fully human. This functions again to place peoples of color on a spectrum under which they are always judged against the norms and desires of whiteness. Allowing a “default” racial location to take hold in white people produces a set of rhetorical and political maneuvers that continually center white subjectivities as better than and removed from the subjectivities of people of color. It becomes clear that racism is not only deeply embedded in our institutions, legal system and founding documents, but exists in our unspoken rules as well, such as beauty standards. Institutionalizing beauty standards has covertly preserved racism in the United States. For centuries, beauty standards that glorify whiteness have prevailed in the U.S. and because of the massive culture industry in this country, around the world, and reflect much deeper racial issues. Black women are punished – even institutionally oppressed – for expressing their culture. Unfair treatment for exposing natural features dates back to slavery, when enslaved women with more “European” appearing features such as the width of their noses and thickness of their hair were given more privileged positions and seen as more desirable than women with more “African” appearing features. This “European” appearance was very often the result of white slave masters raping their slaves in order to grow their wealth in the form of creating more slaves. Still, notions of appearing closer to whiteness created hierarchies that continue to play out in communities of color today, with regular examples of “colorism,” or biases for lighter toned skin than darker, evidenced from the African American community in the U.S. to Bollywood actors in South Asia. Since institutions and cultures are constantly impacting each other, these unspoken rules often become institutionalized. For instance, the U.S. Army remains persistent in creating strict rules that target women of color.

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Dreadlocks and many kinds of twists are often banned from certain sectors of the military, leaving many women of color with few options. People of color continue to be policed and punished for sustaining agency and their own cultures. Whitely standards and internalized racism can do serious psychic, emotional and political damage, often forcing people of color into an impossible position of having to choose between conforming to oppressive white ideals, or resisting as they work to hold onto their culture, all while having to face the repercussions of being a person of color in a white supremacist society, no matter their decision. As much as white supremacy contorts and determines so much of the globe, there has always been resistance to injustice and oppression. Throughout history, people have formed organizations to counter hate and to promote equity and justice. Such groups have been formal and informal, officially sanctioned and established piecemeal in real time, government-supported and independently run. Examples from the U.S. range from the American Civil Liberties Union, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to movements such as Black Lives Matter. These organizations participate in forms of protest such as marches, sit-ins, walk-outs, as well as policy reform and legislative change. Government policies in recent decades in the U.S. have extended beyond simply making race-based discrimination illegal but have also taken the form of attempting to level the playing field for people and communities of color. For instance, Affirmative Action policies, although not perfect and often abused for oppressive ends, exist to offer more opportunity for people of color applying for jobs and educational opportunities. Affirmative Action is a result of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. President Kennedy first used the term, “affirmative action” in 1961, while giving an executive order about the need for equal employment opportunities. Disparities between white people and people of color in colleges and universities remained, despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an Executive Order that required affirmative action policies. But it was activist groups that demanded such legislative change, calling for reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the many years of discrimination against people of color that followed. White supremacy remains culturally and institutionally embedded in the United States, and across the world. Because social institutions, which we continue to live under today, were constructed based on explicit white supremacy in order to secure and maintain power structures for white elites, those structures continue to influence how we live and interact with one another, so one cannot simply abolish them and assume that those power structures would automatically disappear as well. This is why we must understand white

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supremacy as simultaneously cultural and systemic: baked into social services as well as hearts and minds. The persistence of white supremacy can be seen through hate crimes committed against people of color in the United States, with Right wing Trump-inspired shooters killing dozens of people just this month in August of 2019. The continued prevalence of white supremacist groups, supported currently by the President of the United States and numerous reactionary anti-immigrant parties across Europe, necessitates greater engagement with social structures that function to protect the interests of white elites to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity. Better understandings of white supremacy have the potential to support ongoing efforts across the globe to create a more fully human reality for all peoples. While we should remain hopeful in antiracist work, the challenges of the centuries old system of global domination known as white supremacy remain firmly wedged in place.

References Challenging White Supremacy Workshop. (2000, December). Political perspectives of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops. Retrieved March 14, 2011, from http://www.cwsworkshop.org/about/1Pol_Persp_of_CWS.PDF Deliovsky, K. (2010). White femininity: Race, gender & power. Fernwood. Dyer, R. (1997). White. Routledge. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community a pedagogy of hope. Routledge. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Harvard University Press. Johnson, W. (2009). Soul by soul. Harvard University Press. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage Books.

CHAPTER 93

Whiteness and the Law Thomas A. Mitchell

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Integration of Schools; Jim Crow; White Supremacy; Whiteness as Property

… Whiteness, as an exclusionary construct, is a complex amalgamation of cultural, economic, legal, and social forces established in opposition to the perceived negative attributes, behaviors, and characteristics of other constructed groups. In this construct lies the reality that whiteness is often not seen. Which is to say that in the conversation that follows, none of the various laws or court rulings examined or explored the presence of whiteness – they only explored the subjects’ nonwhiteness. As a result of this construction, those qualities attributed to whiteness are placed at the helm of the social and legal hierarchy. This placement is unchanging, regardless of the malleable definition of whiteness. Where the United States is concerned, the continuing construction of whiteness occurs in tandem with legal holdings and pursuits that further illustrate the distinction between whiteness and the other. As a result of these distinctions, racial classes have access to a varying degree of structures and experiences in daily life. This access is so heavily dependent upon a racial class first being established that it is easy to conflate race and any other identifier, as they have often resulted in the same socio-economic and political realities. Despite the malleability of racial definitions and classifications, changes in class definitions have never been so drastic so as to supplant the supremacy of whiteness. From its earliest construction, whiteness has found protection and validity in the law. In spite of the classist undertones that formed the basis for British colonization of North America, wherever the assumed purity of whiteness was threatened, the legislative and legal systems of state were prepared to inculcate whiteness from the other. In the direct aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion, the colonial government of Virginia recognized that there was little distinction between white indentured servants and black enslaved persons. The same was true of white landowners and black landowners. As a result, the legislature introduced new policies that established clear distinctions between white and black © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004444836_093

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persons. Among them, enslavement became a hereditary position based upon the mother’s lineage, and enslaved black persons and white indentured servants were given codes of dress and punishment. To be clear, these legal distinctions were presented and established by the wealthy, white planter class, highlighting the economic ties between capitalism and whiteness that would serve to further entrench the United States in a juridically protected white supremacy. The legal supports of whiteness established in Virginia were subsequently adopted by other colonies and would be adopted in various contexts throughout the United States. Although none of these laws made explicit reference to citizenship, a unique interpretation of jus soli made clear that birthright citizenship was reserved for whites alone. The question of naturalization was addressed through the Naturalization Act of 1790 and established, as U.S. law the following conditions for naturalized citizenship: All free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship. (Jacobson, 1999, p. 22) This law and the various colonial statutes that preceded it were fashioned with the intent of determining and distinguishing whiteness. This system relied upon physical characteristics, such as the visibility of darker skin to determine rights and privileges afforded by the state. Subsequent naturalization legislation maintained the “free white persons” language, while modifying the residency requirement. The inclusion of that clause was central to the dismissal of Dred Scott’s infamous suit against his enslaver. Roger Taney’s supreme court held that naturalization laws were “confided to persons born in a foreign country, under a foreign government” (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857). Moreover, naturalization was a not a “power to raise to the rank of a citizen anyone… who from birth or parentage, by the laws of the country, belongs to an inferior and subordinate class” (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857). The court went to great lengths to make clear that black persons were not intended to be citizens of the United States, noting that legislation regarding the employment of seamen after the War of 1812, read “… it shall not be lawful to employ… any person or persons except citizens of the United States, or persons of color, natives of the United States” (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857). Clearly, in the opinion of the United States Congress, with the now explicit support of the court, the concept and construction of citizenship was separate and distinct from the classification as a person of color. As a result of their exhaustive explanation of race and the law, the

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court held that black persons were never intended to, and thus could never be, considered citizens of the United States. The court’s rejection of Scott’s argument was so thorough that it dismissed the majority of his claims on the basis that noncitizens were not entitled to access the courts of law. There were many consequences of this decision, both short and long-term. Among them, a clear legal foundation for the idea that whites were inherently superior to other races. Scott v. Sandford and the various naturalization acts of the pre-Civil War U.S. were superseded by the ratification of the 14th amendment, which bestowed citizenship upon formerly enslaved persons, and the Naturalization Act of 1870, which allowed for the naturalization of “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” The extension of citizenship did nothing to supplant the hierarchical positioning of whiteness. Throughout the nation, and particularly in the American South, state governments responded with the passage of a series of acts, coined “Jim Crow” laws, that banned or severely restricted black persons’ access to public spaces such as parks, restrooms, mass transit, and schools. When challenged, these various laws and restrictions were upheld as constitutionally permissible in Plessy v. Ferguson. In addition to codified white supremacy, the legal system turned a blind eye towards the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and its extrajudicial actions that served to maintain the established racial hierarchy. The Ku Klux Klan carried out the work that the legal system could no longer explicitly condone. In the same conversation regarding citizenship and civil rights stood other racial and ethnic groups. As whiteness allowed blacks to enter into the legal bounds of citizenship, it took intentional actions to exclude others. In the decade following the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1870, Congress passed an act banning Chinese women from immigrating to the United States. A few years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act extended the ban to Chinese men. In 1924, Congress would ban immigration from any Asian nation. These restrictions were motivated by the belief that Chinese laborers would replace more deserving whites. Asians were not the only group whites sought to protect themselves from, as the same act barring immigration from Asia also established strict quotas on the immigration of eastern Europeans. These Europeans, Jews, Poles, Italians, and Slavs among them, were not considered as part of the then constructed understanding of whiteness. As whites looked to the law to protect others from entering the nation, they also went to great lengths to further establish their domain over the vast expanse of the North American continent. Native Americans, long treated as an ostracized other, also saw their position diminished, as Congress gave nearly 160 million acres of land to whites through a series of “Homestead Acts.” The vast majority of this land, located in the midwestern and western United

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States, had been previously granted to Native Americans. Although, black Americans were able to legally lay claim to homesteaded land, racial terror and discrimination greatly diminished their ability to fully enjoy the privileges granted in the acts. Overall, the various homestead acts resulted in a mass transfer of economic power from nonwhites to whites based solely upon the dictates established by the racial hierarchy of the United States. The established notion of using the law as a bastion for whiteness was woven throughout all facets of the legal framework, including the presidency and the highest seat of the Supreme Court. William H. Taft’s Supreme Court established successively more narrow definitions of whiteness in several landmark cases. During his term as Chief Justice, the court held that even “high-caste” Indians, long recognized as being Indo-Europeans, were, in fact, too dark to be considered white due to their marriages with non-Indo-Europeans (United States v. Thind,1923). Several years later, the same court held that a Mississippi school district did not violate the Equal Protection Clause in suddenly ordering a first-generation ChineseAmerican to attend a school for non-white children. The court did not question the child’s race. It simply recognized that she was not white and thus not entitled to any of the rights or privileges that white school children otherwise enjoyed. In both of these cases, it was clear that the Court’s ruling rested upon a defense and protection of whiteness. Each case sought to ensure a sort of hierarchical purity and the Supreme Court stood at the ready to further codify the distinction between the pure and impure. White dominance in the law continued throughout much of the 20th century. During the New Deal, President Roosevelt ushered in a series of efforts designed to mitigate the effects of the global collapse of the capitalist system. And while he enjoyed the electoral support of black Americans, the most significant New Deal programs were openly discriminatory against blacks. The National Recovery Administration, designed to establish more objective fair labor standards, fair pay, and some price controls, established a separate pay scale for black Americans. This pay scale allowed black Americans to be paid less than their white counterparts. The Civilian Conservation Corps placed a cap on the number of blacks who could join as members, required them to live and serve in segregated companies, and in some southern states were barred from joining all-together as state governments argued they were needed for agricultural work. Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration, established to create better standards for housing construction and increase home ownership through mortgage financing, refused to issue mortgages to blacks attempting to purchase homes in neighborhoods already inhabited by white families. The agency also established the practice of redlining, in which even private

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mortgage lenders were heavily discouraged from investing in minority areas. In addition to these more overt displays of the prioritization of whiteness, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s discrimination was quieter. In an effort to reduce a surplus of agricultural product, the AAA was authorized to pay landowners to stop cultivating parts of their land. As a direct result of this policy, tens of thousands of black sharecroppers were left unemployed. A particularly protectionist action took place at the beginning of the Great Depression under President Hoover. As the depression began, Hoover created a national work program that guaranteed “American jobs for real Americans.” His government arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans. Local governments passed laws banning the employment of any persons who could be considered Mexican. In the vast majority of these cases, there were no trials or sufficient time to produce documents. Officials simply deported individuals based upon the color of their skin. This policy was continued under FDR and resulted in the deportation of nearly 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s, despite the reality that the majority of them were citizens of the United States, as they had been born on U.S. soil. Here, as with the laws banning Asian immigration, the motivation for these actions was rooted in a perceived need to protect white Americans from labor and market forces. This idea of protection is at the heart of the relationship between whiteness and the law. The law is as malleable as the definition of whiteness itself. Its present condition is still stained by its past. Although the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to formerly enslaved persons, it did very little to erase the very public declaration made from the bench of the United States Supreme Court: the same bench from which segregation, school exclusion, the imprisonment of Asian-Americans were all upheld. While those decisions were later overturned, the legacy of the original holdings still affects the American psyche. Those decisions and legal renderings are the foundation of the de facto inequities between whites and nonwhites in housing, employment, education, income, and wealth that exist in the United States today. Regardless of how one qualifies the definition of whiteness, it remains true that the legal work undertaken in its construction, defense, and execution is a foundational pillar in the development of both the internal and external identities of the United States.

Reference Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 94

Whiteness as Property Brad Bierdz

Related Entries: Black Americans and Whiteness; Critical Race Theory; Discourse and Whiteness; Labor and Whiteness; Privilege; Social Construction

… Whiteness as property has a long and evolutionary history within the U.S. and beyond our borders. Over time, it has mutated and changed depending on how the meaning and purpose of property has changed. However, at this conceptual base, whiteness and property have continued to share one centralizing aspect – the right to exclude (Harris, 1993). The conceptual hallmark has been a cornerstone of how whiteness and property have mutually been constructed and take form in real experiences – how they have supported and taken advantage of each other both legally and experientially, both personally and socially. For instance, during the period of slavery and wholesale domination, whiteness operated within the explicit degradation of those excluded from the white race, imprisoning, selling, killing, torturing, and ultimately profiteering off of those who were non-white. In regard to both Black folk and Indigenous populations, whiteness operated as a way of legal categorization, thereby legitimating the appropriation of labor and the appropriation of land. In particular, indigenous populations had their homes taken away from them and were summarily forced to work on plantations and other installations of forced labor upon the soil of their stolen homes. On the other hand, Black folks were tortured and stolen from the interior and coasts of Africa, their continent being economically and eventually politically colonized by Western European nations, and whole populations finding themselves on foreign ground forced to labor for the rest of their lives and their posterity (Harris, 1993). All of this was ratified and legitimated by law, and even more, all of this was supported and would continue to be supported by the racial logics of superiority and domination that cemented themselves in the legal systems of the U.S. and the mindsets of those with the rights to be called free Americans. Following, these legal and social constructions that identified slavery, labor, and whiteness also laid the foundations for the legal conceptualization for property and how it was to be organized and controlled. Therefore, quite © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_094

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unsurprisingly, since labor and the institution of slavery were so intermixed within the concept of economic relations and development, the new conceptualizations of property were fused within these logics of racial domination, slavery, and economic relations. Continuing this historical trend, we can further complicate the Representation Clause of the Constitution, which allowed states to count population for the House of Representatives by calculating all white persons and three-fifths of all other persons, which included enslaved peoples. In doing this, however, the legislature and the states put the questions of property and humanity within this strange dance. On one hand, enslaved peoples were constituted as property so much that even their children would still be understood as the property of the owner, perpetuating this objectification and propertied ideology. However, on the other hand, legally enslaved peoples were still to be understood as three-fifths of a person, while no other property was also counted for the House of Representatives. Ultimately, though this seeming conundrum existed within legalese, slavery and its systemization of property confined by race gave a here-unseen power to whiteness (Harris, 1993). There was an unimaginable importance to someone’s identity as white – to have the property of whiteness and the ability to be called white, to be seen as white, and to be understood as a white person. Whiteness was the attribute and characteristic of free people, of economically advantaged people, and of those that could hold full and uninhibited representational power. Continuing, whiteness as property is also upheld and can be understood through the new conceptualizations of property during the founding era. For instance, many traditional theorists from this time period understood property as something originating from the natural aspect of property as custom, thereby to some extent negating or nullifying the influence of the state or sovereign power in allotting property (Harris, 1993). Moreover, this custom that was defining and redefining the economic relations of the time and the conceptions of property was found within the hands of the conqueror, and through such logics, being the conqueror of indigenous populations, whiteness operated as a justification and causation of such superiority – of the theft of native and the subordination and torture of indigenous populations through forced labor, migration, and enslavement. Moreover, by this sense of custom and property, John Locke argued that slavery was justified through the power of a State of War, giving conquerors the ability to do what they wished with the conquered. By waging war with African peoples, Europeans had the right as conquerors to do as they wished with the conquered, whether that be enslavement or wholesale death. Thus, as custom denoted, the power of whiteness, the title of conqueror, and the idea of property were conflated; with whiteness defined as conqueror and non-whites

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defined as the conquered; it was by right that white folks had legal and custom authority to do as they wished with conquered populations. While the historical conception of property follows the custom of the time, having to deal with the desires and valuations of the conquerors, the modern conception takes into account a more contingent understanding while also contending that the understanding and rights found within property should be expanded past the historical and somewhat contemporary boundaries. For instance, newer, democratized conceptions of property include things such as jobs, government entitlements, contracts, subsidies, and a collection of things that are intangible (Harris, 1993). However, at the same time, while this “expansion” of the understandings of property has come to pass, there is also an understanding of property through a critical theory lens, such that property is socially and deterministically bound – that the understandings of property can only really be grasped while also being coupled with the power of social relations and any made-inherent meaning of property (Crenshaw & Gotanda, 1996). Thus, as the expectation of white privilege that was grown and nurtured within the founding era instituted new understandings of social arrangements and relations, so too did the understanding of property mold to fit within this expectation – within this custom that was imbedded within the social understandings of U.S. society. Even more, as whiteness originally founded its place within the idea of the conquerors, pseudo-medical fact, and legalese, it also melded itself to objectivity and reified itself to our understandings of law, property, logic, and social reality. Thus, whiteness became and continues to become an object over which control and rights have been deterministically understood and expected – a property that can neither be taken away nor intruded upon without proper consent – simultaneously upholding the subordination of black folks and non-white folks in the process: those without the social expectation and pigmentation of whiteness understood as property and continual (Harris, 1993). Realistically, this social custom pre-positioned and understood as the property of white folks also functioned through the material benefits for those who could socially be read as white, while those being classified on a daily basis as non-white or Black were socially excluded, subordinated, and perceived as less than – without such naturalized and customary property as whiteness and the resultant privilege. Even when whiteness did not benefit white working class folks economically throughout history, it has still paid a public and psychological wage to those white folks; they could freely go throughout town, attend public parks, be seen at public functions without fear of retribution, ostracizement, or refusal. Whiteness also operated by and within the logics of national identity and republicanism. Owning whiteness, or rather being born with

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whiteness, gave white folks a sense of liberty and belonging within the U.S., while black folks were subsequently and repeatedly defined as the Othered within this nation, neither truly belonging nor having those liberties accorded to whiteness. In particular, while new age democracy provides ever-expanding rights to folks that can prove themselves to be white, black folks have been put into a cycle of an ever-increasing spiral of oppression, such that while whiteness reigns as a property of privilege and as privilege increases in accordance to logics of democracy, so too does the oppression and subordination of black folks within the same society. Within the history of this nation, the rhetoric of freedom has always been defined by the contradistinction of blackness, such that whiteness determined freedom, while blackness or otherness determined servitude and wholesale torture. Moreover, this distinction was not defined within a void, but by the social reality in which we find ourselves; this distinction was defined by an already understood logic of non-white degradation – the positionality of the conquered and the causal and resultant counter-position of inferiority. The rights and privileges of the new republic were given to those who had the tacit right to exercise them, which was then denoted by racial identity. Whiteness was given the status of property by the mere fact that it was privileged with rights – those who could claim whiteness were allowed freedom, economic latitude, and public and psychological wages. Further, for the next couple of centuries, this connection between whiteness and privilege not only continued but also expanded, building on the propertied rights of those who could claim whiteness as an identity while devaluing and subordinating the realities and selves of those who could not claim such pigmentation. Whiteness has been and continues to be the core understanding of privilege and hierarchy, deigning those who have it with abilities and social rights that are not given to Others, and with that, continues a pseudo-religion of hierarchization and socialized power through rights founded in race, gender, and other social categories (Crenshaw & Gotanda, 1996). Furthermore, when we criticalize education to also operate under the auspices of Critical Race Theory as Ladson-Billings and Tate did more than 20 years ago, then we also have to realize other aspects of Critical Race Theory affecting education than those that are usually used to understand and make sense of education. For instance, if we are to more fully understand these interstices within education, then we also have to use Critical Race Theory (CRT) to comprehend that whiteness always already operates as a property of privilege. In other words, in using CRT, we can more fully grasp the ways in which whiteness is perpetually used and operated through the logics of the concept of property, such that white students almost exclusively appreciate

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access to higher quality education, a more demanding curriculum, schools with greater ability and leniency to appoint ad hoc extra-curricular activities for its students, which are all upheld and re-supported by school (re)segregation. Thus, again, black students and non-white students, the students who are othered in these situations and who are denied the right to whiteness are also denied the privileges mentioned above, resulting in less preparedness for college attendance, restricted access to safe and well-resourced schools, and a position of educational and societal subordination. If we were to take this discussion even further, we would find that students are also (pre)defined in terms of how close they ostensibly and more intimately align themselves with the ideal of the assimilated and controllable student. In other words, if the student is already understood in terms of whiteness as a result of the historical narrative, such that education was a right reserved to white men and then white people, then it would follow that today some of those very same logics hold true for students (Harris, 1993). For instance, if black folks want to grasp or own some sense of their African identity, or rather their identity outside of the strictures of the white student construct, than at many times this transgression is used against the student, deterministically denoting the student as “controversial” or “unacceptable” (Zamudio et al., 2010). Ultimately, a similar logic mentioned before follows in this description as well. Since the student was historically always already white, being that it was made illegal to educate enslaved peoples due to the slave codes devised during the 1680s (Harris, 1993), then it would also follow that this kind of logic and custom would perpetuate itself throughout our own history and into the present. As evidence, we could merely look at the ways in which segregation delegitimized, defunded, and subordinated black schools and black students throughout the following centuries – how resegregation today has also committed the same atrocities towards now black schools and their students – delegitimizing certain identities in schools such as blackness and privileging whiteness at the same time, giving white folks propertied rights of enjoyment and exclusion (Zamudio et al., 2010). Ultimately, instead of only signifying phenotypical distinctions, within our contemporary society race has come to signify a convolution of signified entities such as a multitude of cultural formulations. However, this does not counteract or act against this conceptualization of whiteness as property, but rather enhances our understanding of whiteness as a privileged cultural state as well (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004). For instance, throughout many CRT explications, researchers define black and white against one another, while only a tangential piece of the research pertains to denotations outside of that socially constructed binary such as Latinx configurations of culture and LatCrit.

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Moreover, within contemporary understandings of race and this conceptual framework of whiteness as property, privilege and denotations of privileging begins to be more fully understood as whiteness and the lack thereof. Further, while blackness has ostensibly been used to stand in for the Othered categories of being within the U.S., especially in CRT research, we have come further in distinguishing the power relation not as blackness itself but as the negation of whiteness, such that a cultural ranking or the privileging of racial property is more fully designated by who is White, or rather more substantially as who is not White. Furthermore, whiteness – the aspect of owning whiteness – predetermines a whole host of factors for those entering and those existing within those walls of the school. Those having the unalienable right to whiteness have better access to higher quality schools; they have the public and psychological wages of knowing they are white, coming with the psychological benefit of predetermined betterment or superiority; white students have a greater chance of being seen as nonthreatening and going “undisciplined”; and they are more likely to be college ready because of all of this and more (Zamudio et al., 2010). But rather than end this, we have to also understand that all of this privilege of whiteness as property also comes with the subordination of non-white students – students defining themselves as Black, Latinx, Hmong, Mexican, or others. Rather than having a propertied aspect of Latinxness, these students are continually and consistently stolen from, denigrated, and put into positions with diminished chances for economic, social and political success. This is whiteness as a propertied positionality and non-whiteness as a depropertied position, a positionality in which “democratized” rights and privileges are taken away from Othered humanities and potentialities.

References Crenshaw, K., & Gotanda, N. (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press. DeCuir, J., & Dixson, A. (2004). “So when it comes out, they aren’t that surprised that it is there”: Using critical racetheory as a tool of analysis of race and racism in education. Educational Researcher, 26–31. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 1707–1791. Zamudio, M., Russell, C., Rios, F., & Bridgeman, J. (2010). Critical race theory matters: Education and ideology. Routledge.

CHAPTER 95

Whiteness Norms Jennifer L.S. Chandler and Erica Wiborg

Related Entries: Colorblindness; Higher Education and Whiteness; Interest Convergence; White Teacher Identity Studies

… Whiteness norms are recurring patterns of behaviors that systemically benefit White people. The specific enactment of behaviors in one location and context can differ from the behaviors in other locations and contexts. These behaviors are enacted by all people, not just by White people. Whoever enacts the behaviors typically derives some contextual social benefit for doing so. Frankenberg’s (1993) work referred to Whiteness as “a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (p. 1) and the familiar and often unexamined cultural practices Frankenberg referred to include social norms. Bonilla-Silva (2010) examined what he referred to as the “White habitus, a racialized, uninterrupted, socialization process, that conditions and creates Whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (p. 104). That socialization process also conditions and creates behavior. That is, it conditions and creates Whiteness norms. Concentrating on the area of education, Leonardo (2009) argued that the entire U.S. education system was created to inculcate behavior that benefits White people and he argued that it has continued to reproduce those behaviors. Those behaviors are Whiteness norms and the field of critical Whiteness studies has grown since Frankenberg’s days; nevertheless, attention to social norms remains vital to understanding and exploring Whiteness.

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Function and Components of Social Norms

Human social norms contain three mechanisms according to Hechter and Opp (2001). First there is some common behavior that can be regularly observed. The behavior need not be enacted by every person in every situation to be regular. The second mechanism is referred to as “oughtness” (Hechter & Opp, 2001), which means the behavior is accepted as the way things are and it is © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_095

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not questioned by the people performing the behavior. The third component of human social norms according to Hechter and Opp (2001) is the construct of sanctions. Sanctions are actions that either reward people for enacting the norm or reprimand them for not abiding by the norm. Enacting social norms benefits individuals, although sometimes the only benefit is avoiding the sanctions for not adhering to the norm. Sanctions do not need to be applied every time for a norm to be maintained and reinforced. Social norms operate in all human groups and humans enact social norms without always thinking about them consciously. Moreover, social norms function to identify group members and establish what a group does. Norms are learned in all societies through modeling, direct instruction, and through sanctions. It has been argued that this behavior provided evolutionary value to human groups as it increased the likelihood of success in cooperative endeavors such as obtaining food and defense. Hence, the content of a social norm matters less than the act of adhering to it as a means of demonstrating one’s willingness to cooperate. While humans tend to abide by the dominant social norms enacted in their social groups, negotiating the complexities of the social norms available in any given situation reflects individual choices, because individuals do not always abide by or enact the dominant social norms of the groups in which they participate. Indeed, social norms evolve over time. Social autopilot and social radar are two transmission theories explained by Morris, Hong, Chiu, and Liu (2015) that help to explain how social norms are transmitted and how they evolve. Social autopilot, much like the autopilot of a plane, “automatically guides immediate responses in a socially safe direction” (Morris et al., 2015, p. 7). Because social autopilot behaviors move a person in what is considered in their specific context as a socially safe direction, this process most likely is initiated during times of stress or perceived danger. The social safety or danger perceived is context specific rather than an objective assessment because what is perceived as dangerous for one person in one situation is not a universal experience. Nevertheless, norms guide immediate responses to situations without any analysis of whether the behavior aligns or reflects one’s personal beliefs or values. Contrastingly, social radar transmission of social norms is a process of strategically selecting which behaviors of which people to emulate to assert one’s identity as belonging to the group of like people.

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Critically Examining Whiteness Norms in Education

Critical Whiteness studies does not focus solely on individual behaviors and interactions with an aim of describing or categorizing them. Rather, a critical

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study examines the social structures, institutions, and organizations and the ways in which individuals are rewarded for participating in those structures. In other words, ensuring that the level of analysis is at the institutional or organizational level is part of a critical approach. Such an approach also disqualifies the “bad apples” defense that argues that a systemic approach is not necessary because there are only a few people whose behavior is a problem. Taking a Whiteness norms approach acknowledges that there are behaviors embedded into what is considered normal behavior in the culture that must be exposed and analyzed. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to provide an exhaustive list of Whiteness norms already revealed in the realm of education. The work by Battey et al. (2018); Fasching-Varner (2012); Gordon (2005); Lensmire (2012); Low (2009); Parks (2006); Pennington, Brock, and Ndura (2012); Picower (2009); Sleeter (2005); and Yoon (2012) are just some of the studies that described teachers’ and preservice teachers’ behaviors interacting with Whiteness norms in their education environments even though those researchers did not explicitly employ a Whiteness norms approach. Many of these studies were qualitative exploratory or case studies working with small sample sizes, unlike Battey et al.’s (2018) quantitative study that compared the “relational interactions” between Black students and their Black teachers with relational interactions between Black students and White teachers to determine their ability to predict achievement outcomes in math classes. They found that White urban teachers engaged in behaviors to “intensely [and] negatively focus on behavior, ability, student contributions, and emotional expectations” (Battey et al., 2018, p. 476) of the Black students in their classes and their behaviors significantly differed from those of White suburban or Black urban teachers’ behaviors with the Black students in their classes. Many qualitative studies have focused on interviews with White teachers. For example, Picower’s (2009) aim was to “better understand how White teachers construct identities of people different than themselves” (p. 198). Conversely, Lensmire (2012) asked her participants to tell stories of “their work as White teachers” (p. xiii). She positioned their stories as not only “socially produced ways of recalling and retelling experiences” (Lensmire, 2012, p. xiv) but as vehicles that also carried embedded within them what it means to be a White teacher. Using an observational approach, rather than interviewing, Yoon (2012) examined conversations among White teachers at work to reveal components of Whiteness which she framed as a hidden process. Pennington, Brock, and Ndura (2012) analyzed the ways in which teachers came to understand how their own “White racial identities influenced their teaching of children of color” (p. 744). Similarly, Segall and Garrett (2013) sought to “highlight

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what teachers in fact do with regard to race and then use those understandings to offer ways in which we, as teacher educators, might better address the issue” (p. 267). Similar qualitative studies with preservice teachers have been published. For instance, Parks (2006) sought to determine the identity stage of her 75 students using the Helms’s (2008) White Identity stages. Fasching-Varner (2012) examined the motivations for preservice teachers to understand how their narratives explaining their desires to become teachers were woven into their pedagogical practices because “narratives have the potential to help us understand the ways in which teachers’ beliefs about race perpetuate racial stratification and maintain white supremacy through the socializing nature of public education” (p. 2). Similarly, Case and Hemmings (2005) “explored the distancing strategies that kept White women students from full engagement with an antiracist curriculum in a teacher education course on social inequities” (p. 607). Lastly, Jupp, Berry, and Lensmire’s (2016) review usefully summarized and organized a set of studies that revealed Whiteness norms, although the aim of their study was to identify emergent thematic shifts in the field of critical Whiteness studies. In higher education, studies include research on educators, students, and college campuses as White spaces. Furthermore, Cabrera, Franklin, and Watson (2016) discussed the many ways in which “Whiteness is the invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses” (p. 7). Galman, Pica-Smith, and Rosenberger (2010) found that as White faculty members for teacher education they affirmed their own and White students’ non-participation in learning about race or racism. In addition, they often missed or skipped over opportunities to address racism in the curriculum. This same finding occurred in a study of service-learning pedagogy by Mitchell, Donahue and Young-Law (2012), where Whiteness norms were perpetuated through the instructor’s assumptions and reflective stance, the framing and structure of service learning, and teaching and talking about race. Within higher education administrator preparation, Bondi (2012) found that White students enrolled in a student affairs social justice course, who had little experience with issues of race or racism prior to the program, claimed to be open to learning but were defensive when their assumptions were challenged by their classmates of color. Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, and Galindo (2014) found in their efforts to use critical Whiteness, their students “refused to critically understand how their White imagination produces a perverted sense of race understanding” (p. 301). Alternatively, Brunsma, Brown, and Placier (2012) critically analyzed their experiences as professors who teach race and racism describing “walls of Whiteness” in the context of higher education as spatial, curricular, and ideological walls. As a result, students’

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Actions and practices are fully embedded within this ignorance, and White cognition adjusts to any and all deviations from it, producing denial, evasion, self-lying, and non-located guilt as the person behind this wall fails to see the central societal reality of injustice, inequality, and disorder caused by White domination. (Brunsma, Brown, & Placier, 2012, p. 725) For students that do not deny Whiteness, many scholars have identified that White students can talk the talk, but few actually walk the walk when it comes to attempts to detach from structural domination or support for racially equitable policies. In fact, Bonilla-Silva and Forman (2000) identified that students used strategies to avoid saying what they thought would sound racist, but their actions revealed their Whiteness norms; for example, living in all-White neighborhoods and sending their children to all-White schools while claiming to value racial integration. Malott, and colleagues (2015) found that the White antiracists in their study, who were identified in the autonomy stage of Helms’s (2008) model, enacted the same Whiteness norms and struggled with making sense of the contradictions between their behaviors and their value claims. Naming these realities and explicating Whiteness norms loosens the structured invisibility of Whiteness, thereby accomplishing a step toward the possibility of habit change that Ahmed (2007) asserts exists. However, since the specific enactment of Whiteness norms is always localized, a definitive list of Whiteness norms is not the end goal but would be a starting place for researchers and those interested in organizational change. In future studies, a Whiteness norms approach could result in findings that can more readily be consolidated across studies while also revealing useful entry points for change within specific organizations. A useful framework for analyzing Whiteness norms can be found in Chandler’s (2017) model of colluding, colliding, and contending with Whiteness norms. Taking a Whiteness norms approach requires one to acknowledge that adherence to a social norm is not the only option available. Adherence to a social norm is collusion, but people can and do refuse to collude with Whiteness norms. Consequently, to expose and examine Whiteness norms functioning in an organization, one must uncover and examine Whiteness norms that people interact with in ways other than collusion. Smith and Lander (2012) cogently described collusions and collisions with social norms and Chandler’s (2017) work also used those constructs and included a third way of interacting with Whiteness norms which is contention. Those three constructs: collusion, collision, and contention are briefly described below. Collusion is a social process that draws from Goffman’s (1959) conception of teams. His notion of teams is not the common use of that word in organizations today. Goffman (1959) defined a team as “a set of individuals whose intimate

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co-operation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained” (p. 104). Therefore, collusion is cooperation among team members to maintain the status quo. Thus, all the dominant social norms that exist for a team are part of and maintain the status quo. Collisions comes from Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of a breach with social expectations when combined with Goffman’s (1959) concept of team performances. When a person behaves in an unexpected way that does not support the performance illusion, it is a breach because it threatens the performance. Collisions are often filled with emotion as they are noticeable fractures in the smooth collusion among all team members to maintain the status quo. Many people only begin to see and recognize their own collusions with some Whiteness norms after recognizing their collisions with other Whiteness norms. Just because a person has learned to recognize certain Whiteness norms does not mean they will be able to recognize them all. The concept of contention does not refer to disagreements, rather it relies on the work by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) who addressed contention as a necessary process because they “treat social interaction, social ties, communication, and conversation not merely as expressions of structure, rationality, consciousness, or culture but as active sites of creation and change” (p. 22). Contentions are productive pressures on the Whiteness norms asking that they be changed. Because collisions are recognizable and memorable, they are a viable place to start the analysis necessary to uncover Whiteness norms operating in a specific organization with the goal being not to eliminate collisions, but to use collisions as the indicators of places for deeper analysis by collecting information about the collisions and analyzing that information. This strategy demands that participants accept the discomfort that accompanies collisions. As described earlier, accepting this discomfort is part of critically examining the Whiteness norm of comfort. Feelings of safety perpetuate a legacy of refusal to address race and racism; and such behaviors recycle the privilege that Whites accomplish by sidestepping contentions with Whiteness norms. Identifying and analyzing existing Whiteness norms with the goal of identifying and implementing inclusive norms to replace them is a critical Whiteness project that can be used in any area of education not as a panacea, but as one component of the labors required as an organization moves toward creating and maintaining equitable educational spaces.

References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168.

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Battey, D., Leyva, L. A., Williams, I., Belizario, V. A., Greco, R., & Shah, R. (2018). Racial (mis)match in middle school mathematics classrooms: Relational interactions as a racialized mechanism. Harvard Educational Review, 88(4), 455–482. Bondi, S. (2012). Students and institutions protecting Whiteness as property: A critical race theory analysis of student affairs preparation. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 49(4), 397–414. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2010). Racism without racists (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Bonilla-Silva, E., & Forman, T. A. (2000). “I am not a racist but…”: Mapping White college students’ racial ideology in the U.S. Discourse & Society, 11(1), 50–85. Brunsma, D. L., Brown, E. S., & Placier, P. (2012). Teaching race at historically White colleges and universities: Identifying and dismantling the walls of Whiteness. Critical Sociology, 39, 717–738. Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2016). Whiteness in higher education: The invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses. ASHE Higher Education Report, 42(6), 7–125. Case, K. A., & Hemmings, A. (2005). Distancing strategies: White women preservice teachers and antiracist curriculum. Urban Education, 40(6), 606–626. Chandler, J. L. (2017). Colluding, colliding, and contending with norms of Whiteness. Information Age Publishing. Douglass, F. (1848, October 27). The North Star. Fasching-Varner, K. (2012). Working through Whiteness: Examining White racial identity and profession with pre-service teachers. Lexington Books. Foster, G. (2012). Performing whiteness: Postmodern re/constructions in the cinema. SUNY Press. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press. Galman, S., Pica-Smith, C., & Rosenberg, C. (2010). Aggressive and tender navigations: Teacher educators confront whiteness in their practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(3), 225–236. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of everyday self. Anchor Books. Gordon, J. (2005). White on White: Researcher reflexivity and the logics of privilege in White schools undertaking reform. The Urban Review, 37(4), 279–301. Gottschild, B. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance and other contexts. Greenwood Publishing. Hechter, M., & Opp, K. D. (Eds.). (2001). Social norms. Russell Sage Foundation. Helms, J. E. (2008). A race is a nice thing to have: A guide to being a White person or understanding White persons in your life (2nd ed.). Microtraining Associates. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press. Jupp, J. C., Berry, T. R., & Lensmire, T. J. (2016). Second-wave White teacher identity studies: A review of White teacher identity literatures from 2004 through 2014. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 1151–1191.

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Lensmire, A. (2012). White urban teachers: Stories of fear, violence, and desire. Rowman & Littlefield Education. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, Whiteness, and education. Routledge. Lott, E. (1995). Love & theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. Oxford University Press. Low, S. (2009). Maintaining whiteness: The fear of others and niceness. Transforming Anthropology, 17(2), 79–92. Malott, K. M., Paone, T. R., Schaefle, S., Cates, J., & Haizlip, B. (2015). Expanding White racial identity theory: A qualitative investigations of Whites engaged in antiracist action. Journal of Counseling and Development, 93, 333–343. Matias, C. E., Viesca, K. M., Garrison-Wade, D. F., Tandon, M., & Galindo, R. (2014). “What is critical Whiteness doing in OUR nice field like critical race theory?” Applying CRT and CWS to understand the White imaginations of White teacher candidates. Equity & Excellence in Education, 47(3), 289–304. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, T. D., Donahue, D. M., & Young-Law, C. (2012). Service learning as a pedagogy of Whiteness. Equity & Excellence in Education, 45(4), 612–629. Morris, M. W., Hong, Y., Chiu, C., & Liu, Z. (2015). Normology: Integrating insights about social norms to understand cultural dynamics. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 129, 1–13. Parks, M. W. (2006). I am from a very small town: Social reconstructionism and multicultural education. Multicultural Perspectives, 82(2), 46–50. Pennington, J. L., Brock, C. H., & Ndura, E. (2012). Unraveling the threads of White teachers’ conceptions of caring: Repositioning White privilege. Urban Education, 47(4), 743–775. Picower, B. (2009). The unexamined Whiteness of teaching: How White teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 197–215. Segall, A., & Garrett, J. (2013). White teachers talking race. Teaching Education, 24(3), 265–291. Sleeter, C. E. (2005). How White teachers construct race. In C. McCarthy, W. Crichlow, G. Dimitriadis, & N. Dolby (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (critical social thought) (2nd ed., pp. 157–171). Routledge. Smith, H. J., & Lander, V. (2012). Collusion or collision: Effects of teacher ethnicity in the teaching of critical Whiteness. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(3), 231–351. Thandeka. (2000). Learning to be White. Bloomsbury. Yoon, I. H. (2012). The paradoxical nature of Whiteness-at-work in the daily life of schools and teacher communities. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(5), 587–613.

CHAPTER 96

White Teacher Identity Studies James C. Jupp

Related Entries: Critical Race Theory; First Wave Critical Whiteness Studies; Privilege; Second Wave Critical Whiteness Studies

… The purpose of this encyclopedia entry is to advance the field of White teacher identity studies (WTIS) as one key race-based field of emancipatory education science research. Advancing this field, this entry provides a reflexive, historicized, and comprehensive outline of WTIS for researchers and graduate students. Organizing historical and contemporary resources, this entry posits WTIS as a distinct field of research where over-generalizing elisions often occur with broader fields such as “critical White studies “ (CWS), “critical race theory” (CRT), “CWS in education,” or “CRT in education.” As a map, this entry (a) defines and contextualizes WTIS as a field; (b) describes the development of WTIS as co-constitutive subfield tied to CWS; (c) characterizes WTIS’ development over nearly three decades; and, (d) outlines WTIS’ intellectual production and contributions. In its trajectory, this entry makes the case that WTIS is a distinct field that provides one dimension of race-based emancipatory education sciences with relevance to other areas of study including EPPs and teacher professional development, CWS writ large and CRT, ethnic studies, reflexive critical theory, and the decolonizing social sciences.

1

WTIS – Definition, Contexts, Purpose

As definition, the term WTIS refers to the field of emancipatory, interdisciplinary, qualitative or narrative education science that critically examines White preservice and in-service teachers’ understandings, experiences, and/or conscientization processes with race, whiteness, and White identity. Inherent in its definition as an emancipatory education science, WTIS recognizes the centrality of researchers’ personal-social-historical embeddedness in the research and also researchers of Color and White researchers’ different positionalities © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004444836_096

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within the whiteness of historical narratives, the social sciences, and the field of WTIS itself. Three relevant contexts of WTIS are the (a) demographic imperative, (b) the White problem in education, and (c) predominantly White educator preparation programs (EPPs) and professional development settings. The demographic imperative provides the first relevant context for WTIS. The demographic imperative refers to three intractable statistical realities in public schools. First, children of Color as proportion of public school enrollment steadily grew until they represented a minoritized-majority of students (National Center of Educational Statics [NCES], 2015). Second, White teachers were and continue to be an over-represented majority of public school teachers presently constituting 85% of the teacher workforce (NCES, 2013). Third, public schools trended toward re-segregation since the 1980s with increasing concentrations of minoritized students in under-funded and segregated public schools (Orfield et al., 2015). Together called the “demographic imperative,” these three statistical realities contextualize WTIS’ development because they denote the over-representation of White teachers serving a minoritized-majority of children of Color in segregated public schools. When read critically, the demographic imperative re-frames what was historically called the “minority problem” in education as the “White problem.” The White problem in education provides the second relevant context for WTIS. The notion of the White problem in education draws specifically on CWS and CRT’s critical conceptual content. This conceptual content recognizes the centrality of White supremacy, the permanence of racism, and the exigencies of racial conscientization as fundamental starting points in the long march for social justice in European settler colonial societies. Directly taking on the White problem in education, WTIS emphasizes how whitened public schools and curriculum standards underserve, neglect, and dehumanize minoritized communities, families, and children in their routine functioning. As part of a struggle that leverages minoritized communities’ identarian resources toward self-determination, WTIS provides but one dimension of a broad array of race-based criticalities to be deployed in critically-oriented EPPs and professional development according to setting. Responsive to institution, program, and classroom, WTIS seeks to critically confront and interrupt predominantly White EPPs and professional development. Predominantly White EPPs and professional development provide the third relevant context for WTIS. Confronting and interrupting predominantly White EPPs and professional development, WTIS recognizes the need for teacher educators and professional development leaders to differentiate resources, materials, and activities in engaging preservice and in-service teachers’ in racial

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conscientization processes (e.g., Blaisdell, 2018; McManimon & Casey, 2018; Whitaker et al., 2018). Beyond the paternalistic White supremacy in humanist “caring” or “student-centered” pedagogies, WTIS drives at advancing White teachers’ ongoing critical and racial conscientization with the purpose of providing public school children of Color with developmentally-, culturally-, and linguistically sustainable identities within communities. Articulating one type of racialized critical pedagogy, WTIS emphasizes White teachers’ ability to critically analyze and advocate across historical and structural inequalities of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, language and other differences in community contexts. Yet beyond analysis and advocacy, WTIS also advances ethnic studies and additional critical curricular and pedagogical content in predominantly White EPPs and professional development to better inform teachers’ day-today perspectives, selection of curricular materials, and curriculum development in context. Focusing on these three relevant contexts, the purpose of WTIS is to provide a knowledge-base for critically-oriented and predominantly White EPPs to conduct ongoing research and practice with White preservice and in-service teachers. Overall, WTIS represents an area of study for race-based critical pedagogies that drive at White preservice and in-service teachers’ racial conscientization, critical-structural analyses, advocacy for communities of Color, and culturally- and linguistically sustaining practices in public schools.

2

The Emergence of WTIS as a Subfield of CWS

Historically, WTIS both emerged from and co-developed as a subfield of CWS. As foundation of WTIS, CWS developed in “moments,” “shifts,” or “waves” of conceptual-empirical research. However, before historicizing CWS’ waves as foundational of WTIS, it is necessary to recognize African-American and Caribbean-American, historical, and sociological traditions for which the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Carter G. Woodson, and C. L. R. James are emblematic. Creating a path for CWS, WTIS, and other race-based emancipatory social science research, African-American and African-Caribbean traditions anchored a Herculean historical struggle in understanding race through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This historical shift countered and discredited successive Christian and scientific White supremacist epistemes by emphasizing historical-social understandings of race over then predominant religious or biological ones. Difficult to overstate these scholars’ contributions,

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it is safe to say that without these traditions’ generative historical-social understandings of race, whiteness, and White identity that fields like CWS, WTIS, and other race-based emancipatory fields would not exist in the first place. In sum, understandings from these traditions should be leveraged for new work in both WTIS, CWS, and other race-based fields of inquiry. Preceding yet also co-constituting WTIS, CWS emerged as an emancipatory social science in the 1980s and moved through two distinct waves of research. Following the critical foment of the international, new left, social movements emblematic of 1968, CWS first emerged in the interactions of other new emancipatory social and education science fields such as cultural studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, curriculum studies, and multicultural education. During the late 1980s and 1990s, first-wave CWS theorized and empirically substantiated a series of transmissive ontological and epistemological concepts including whiteness, White privilege, and race-evasion that, when taken together, articulated the analytical arc of colorblind racism. Unquestionably, these first-wave concepts remain foundational to CWS and WTIS research, even when these concepts are critiqued and newly deployed. Since the early 2000s, second-wave CWS refined first-wave ontologies and epistemologies that, especially via scholars’ of Color positionalities, added new dimensions and understandings to colorblind racism’s analytical arc. Specifically, scholars of color in CWS demonstrated the rageful and violent reactions of White preservice and in-service teachers, mostly White women, to their learning on race, whiteness, and White identity as documented in experienced trauma for themselves and students of color in the classroom. Additionally, via scholars of Color and White scholars’ contributions, second-wave CWS also drove at new empirically-based conceptual content from which the concepts of White identity complexity, contextuality, relationality, race-visibility, and racial conscientization processes have also provided emergent content. Finally, second-wave CWS adapted new historical, literary, narrative, psychoanalytic, and decolonial perspectives for the study of race, whiteness, and White identities. (For more on CWS’ intellectual history, see entries in this encyclopedia on First and Second Wave whiteness studies). To summarize, WTIS emerged as a subfield of CWS, and the two fields continue to overlap, co-emerge, and share content. Nonetheless, emerging from the exigencies of the White problem in education, the quantity and quality of sustained intellectual production in WTIS has created the necessity of recognizing WTIS as a separate field of inquiry.

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WTIS’ Development as a Field

Mirroring yet co-developing as a subfield of CWS, WTIS also passed through two distinctive waves of research. To a great degree, first-wave WTIS applied CWS concepts of whiteness, White privilege, and race-evasion to White teachers’ qualitative and narrative experiential data transcripts. Documenting the numerous instantiations of White teachers’ silences on, resistances to, and evasions of the saliency of race in their teaching with children of Color, WTIS became a key research site that empirically articulated colorblind racism’s analytical arc. Often advanced in multicultural education forums, first-wave WTIS documented White teachers’ manifold denials of race that often reproduced racist stereotypes via de-racializing terms such as “dirty neighborhoods,” “bad parenting,” “character flaws,” or “laziness” that White teachers used to describe children of Color, their families, and their communities. Noting early contributions by Haberman and King, nonetheless, it was Sleeter who propelled WTIS’ first-wave by importing CWS content into the critical examination of data transcripts that captured White teachers’ responses to her race-based multicultural professional development in the late 1980s. Working with this empirical data along with her experiences on teaching about race, Sleeter created first-wave WTIS’ analytical vocabulary that emphasized White teachers’ race resistance (1992), race-evasion (1993), and silence/ solidarity (1994). Moreover, after a decade of research advancing WTIS, Sleeter (2001) emphasized the often-referenced WTIS notion of the “overwhelming presence of whiteness” (p. 94) in teacher education that remains as relevant today as it was back then. Sleeter’s early work in WTIS is emblematic of firstwave WTIS, which articulated White teachers’ race resistance, race evasion, and White silence//solidarity within the whitening contexts of colleges of education and EPPs. After a decade in which the field pursued these directions, several (now senior but then) rising scholars of Color in education challenged WTIS to move beyond over-simple and essentialized understandings of whiteness, White privilege, and White identity (e.g., Asher, 2007, Leonardo, 2002; McCarthy, 2003). Published under Scheurich’s editorial leadership, Marx’s (2003) special issue of Qualitative Studies in Education became emblematic of the shift between first and second-wave WTIS both in identifying the frustrations with (Thompson, 2003) and the critique of (McCarthy, 2003) WTIS as a field in the 1990s. Additionally, Marx’s special issue provided new directions in WTIS on whiteness pedagogy (Marx & Pennington, 2003) that became emblematic of second-wave WTIS’ directions. Overall, Pennington’s research, both by herself

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and with others (Marx & Pennington, 2003; Pennington, 2007; Pennington, Brock, & Ndura, 2012), exemplifies WTIS in transition between denouncing White teachers’ privilege and race resistance toward commitments to both (a) denouncing White teachers’ colorblind racism and (b) carefully studying whiteness pedagogies that advance White teachers’ racial conscientization. Since Marx’s special issue, WTIS has entered its second-wave that extends WTIS initial work on documenting colorblind racism but, to a greater extent, focuses on critical race and whiteness pedagogies. Significant currents in second-wave WTIS leverage new and historical pedagogical analyses toward reading White teachers’ data transcripts with the purpose of folding the findings directly back into learning and teaching about race, whiteness, and White identities with preservice and in-service teachers. These new and historical pedagogical analyses emphasize social-psychoanalytic dynamics of race, whiteness, and White identity represented in Ignatiev, Thandeka, Cheng, Adorno, Fromm, Du Bois, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Cash. Additionally, these social-psychoanalytic dynamics emphasize White preservice and in-service teachers’ emotionality, fraughtness, becoming, developing understandings, pedagogical openings for learning, and race-visible learning and teaching in school subjects. In developing through social psychoanalytic dynamics, WTIS’ second-wave focuses on whiteness pedagogies through new and historical concepts in social psychology, Frankfurt school research reflexivity, African-American social science and literary traditions, and content from critical southern studies. Currently, second-wave WTIS represents a developing field that continues to refine notions of whiteness, White privilege, and race-evasion that constitute colorblind racism’s analytical arc. Nonetheless, WTIS also drives at problematic and necessarily reflexive, social-psychoanalytic whiteness pedagogies that study White teachers’ racial conscientization processes and potential race-visible learning and teaching in classrooms. In taking social-psychoanalytic concepts into whiteness pedagogies along with White teachers’ race-visibility and racial conscientization processes as emphases, second-wave WTIS moves beyond first-wave goals of simply documenting all of the different instantiations of colorblind racism. Instead, second-wave WTIS moved toward an emancipatory, social psychoanalytic, and pedagogical education science that seeks to infiltrate and critically impact predominantly White EPPs and professional development. In these contexts, WTIS seeks to reflexively understand and work through White teachers’ racialized experiences and discourses in order to better conduct affective, cognitive, and pedagogical interventions for learning and teaching about race, whiteness, and White identity.

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WTIS’ Intellectual Production and Contributions

Through its first- and second-waves, WTIS is now coming up on three decades of research. In documenting WTIS first 25 years (1990–2015), Jupp, Leckie, Cabrera, and Utt (2019) counted 136 peer-reviewed, qualitative or narrative, empirical journal articles with White teachers as central topic. In unpublished research that surveys WTIS through 2017, Leckie and Jupp (2018) documented an additional 27 peer-reviewed, qualitative or narrative, empirical journal articles with White teachers as central topic (N=163). However, necessarily narrowing the total extant research, these recent counts purposefully excluded textbook sections, companion texts, research books, edited volumes, book chapters, and experiential, conceptual, or autobiographical essays in order to make the archive more manageable for review and reporting. Given these exclusions, the total WTIS document universe of peer-reviewed research promises to be significantly more than currently analyzed and reviewed. Additionally, WTIS intellectual production includes three special issues dedicated entirely or in part to WTIS (Jupp and Lensmire, 2016; Jupp et al., 2018; Marx, 2003). Moreover, WTIS production also includes four defining literature reviews that provide time-bound snapshots of WTIS’ development at different junctures for interested researchers and graduate students (e.g. Cochn-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016; Lowenstein, 2009; Sleeter, 2001). Finally, by this researcher’s count, there were 16 original sole-authored, multi-authored, or edited books between 1990 and 2018 that had White teachers, whiteness pedagogies, and EPPs or professional development as central topics (see Figure 96.1). The point of listing WTIS’ 16 books and other resources above is to push critically-oriented EPP practitioners in predominantly White contexts beyond established content such as McIntosh or Howard toward recent empirical-conceptual social psychanalytic content emergent in WTIS. That is, this entry suggests that critically-oriented instructors who work in predominantly White EPPs or professional development contexts seriously study and implement WTIS as part of their ethical vocation in the development of White, predominantly female, teachers. As a field historically tethered to CWS, nonetheless, WTIS’ intellectual production provides clear contributions to the following fields of study: EPPs and teacher professional development, CWS writ large and CRT, ethnic studies, reflexive critical theory, and the decolonizing social sciences. At this stage in the field’s development, it becomes important to recognize and advance potential contributions beyond WTIS itself toward implementation and implications in other areas.

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Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education. SUNY Press. Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood… and the rest of Y’all Too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Beacon Press. Flynn, J. E. (2018). White fatigue: Rethinking resistance for social justice. Peter Lang. Howard, G. (1999). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools. Teachers College Press. Jupp, J. C. (2013). Becoming teachers of inner-city students. Life histories and teacher stories of committed White teachers. Sense Publishers. Landsman, J. (2005). A White teacher talks about race. Rowman & Littlefield. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. Routledge. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling White: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers. Matias, C. E. (2020). Surviving Becky(s): Pedagogies of whiteness and gender. Lexington Books. Marx, S. (2006). Revealing the invisible: Confronting passive racism in teacher education. Routledge. McIntyre, A. (1997). Making meaning of whiteness: Exploring identity with White teachers. SUNY Press. McManimon, S. K.; Casey, Z. A.; & Berchini, C. (Eds.) (2018). Whiteness at the table: Antiracism, racism, and identity in education. Lexington Books. Michael, A. (2015). Raising race questions: Whiteness and inquiry in education. Teachers College Press. Sleeter, C. E. (2018). The inheritance: A novel. Sleeter Publishing Sleeter, C. E. (2015). White bread: Weaving cultural pluralism into the present. Sense Publishers. Tanner, S. J. (2018). Whiteness, youth, and pedagogy in America: Critical whiteness studies in the classroom. Routledge. figure 96.1 WTIS books

For EPPs and professional development, WTIS provides a field for studying White teachers that directly confronts the White problem in education and insists on action in EPPs and professional development’s commitments as a key reversal of the “minority problem” in education. Contextualized via predominantly White EPPs and professional development, WTIS offers an extensive practical research data base that engages White preservice and in-service teachers’ colorblind race-evasion, always partial racial conscientization processes, and forays into race-visible teaching.

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Regarding CWS writ large and to a lesser extent CRT, WTIS has provided copious empirical qualitative or narrative data on White identities that requires CWS to leave behind its essentializing intellectual habits that felicitously documented in White evasive/White ally binaries. Rather, via first- and second-waves’ intellectual production, WTIS emerges as an emancipatory education science that seeks psychoanalytic openings both for affective pedagogical interventions and for self-reflection processes that move beyond over-simple “White ally” goals. Regarding ethnic studies, WTIS insists on identifying and critically examining the monstrous White hegemonic center and associated identities in European settler colonial societies within specific contexts like schools. Via WTIS, ethnic studies takes on colonizing histories, self-denials, irrational insistence on a-historical White “common sense,” and rage at confronting its own past. Perhaps more importantly, in some cases WTIS demonstrates White identities’ partial racial learning, grappling with, working through, and trying to ethically do something in EPPs and schools. Regarding reflexive critical theory, WTIS exemplifies What a Europeanand Frankfurt-influenced, now multi-racial Anglophone, emancipatory and psychoanalytic education science might accomplish. As a multiracial critical education science, WTIS provides a potential critical, non-linear, racialized, reflexive, therapeutic arc of whiteness pedagogies and White respondents’ race-evasion and denials, partial learning, and race-visible learning and teaching. This therapeutic arc provides key resources for historicized identification changes, especially for Whites identities but also for learning and teaching in multiracial contexts. Regarding emergent decolonial social sciences, WTIS seems to suggest (however tentatively) a paradoxical Anglophone-originated, multi-racial, emancipatory education science in which White, hegemonic historical identities might attempt to do decolonizing psychoanalytic work on themselves as related to both scholars of Color and White scholars’ critical whiteness pedagogies. Focused on the critical examination of White identities in learning and teaching contexts, the WTIS archive has the potential for generative, ethical, and decolonizing White identity work in multiple contexts. Via these contributions mentioned above, WTIS has become one dimension of a broad array of race-based criticalities that must be differentiated in conjunctural practice per specific institutional context. As conjunctural practices responsive to institution, program, and classroom, WTIS is one key dimension for re-deploying multi-racial work within Gramscian-Marxian educational criticism or critical pedagogy traditions within European and White dominated settler colonial societies and related educational contexts.

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