"And this is why I think your notion of "defection" utterly incoherent. My statement was that having Berry say "you'll always be my nigga" is not just a fantasy, its quintessentially white. This is not a minor statement. It means the very structure of the film's logic is built on a narrative culminating on the pleasure of the white male hero. (In and of itself, this is not evil; but when one remembers that this makes it like 98% of the tripe in Hollywood, one pauses from joining in the celebration.) To the extent that that is true, the "information", political and sexual, the movie communicates can be assumed to have an audience structured through certain racial identifications, and not others. This is elementary film theory. If that's true, no "defection" has taken place at all, and the racial world continues unchallenged."
I find it hard to accept that having a white character come to the defense of Black youths harrassed by white cops is a "quintessentially" white fantasy. If 98% of Hollywood films employed this trope, like Beatty does in BULWORTH, then at least in one area of US popular culture we would have achieved some real success in fighting white racial oppression. It would certainly make it a lot easier to talk about police violence in Black communities, especially in the classroom, and about the role whites could play in fighting it. It would legitimize the action. As it stands this is nearly impossible, largely because of the mass media's white racist portrayal of Black youth culture, and the idea that white racist cops are a good thing to have around--they protect whites from Black criminals, etc.
Kenneth Mostern wrote:
"To which my obvious, and consistent, response is: how can you possibly imagine that racial ideology doesn't interpollate you? The very fact that you imagine this only suggests to me that at unconscious (and perhaps conscious) levels it does. Our disagreement is not I teach "professionally" while you try to be racially explicit; our disagreement is that you seem to think that, if you explicitly deny white identification, that's as good as "not being white", while I say that a light-skinned person who says "I'm not white" is, in fact, practicing whiteness. (A dark-skinned person wouldn't have to say this, you know . . .) Saying "I'm not white" in a classroom can be done easily enough by anyone who accepts white privilege, and refuses to see their own structuration (including their presence in that classroom) by a history of whiteness. Likewise, breaking down white supremacy -- acting in genuine solidarity with black people, refusing and exposing racial privilege when there are only white people around, etc. -- is perfectly compatible with, as a teacher in a classroom, performing one's whiteness explicitly, and self-critically. That, for the record, is what the black feminists of the early 1980s (cf. Barbara Smith's Home Girls), who appear to have been utterly forgetten (oh, they're "essentialist", aren't they?) advocated."
If you mean by "performing one's whiteness explicitly" the act of renouncing white skin privileges, then I understand what you're saying. But what does "whiteness" have to do with it?
I didn't say white racial ideology didn't interpollate me. I said that when it does, I ignore the call. To my mind, anytime you accept your "whiteness" (even it's in order to question it), you answer the call.
It's not just saying "I'm not white" that makes you a defector. Where did I say that?
Being a defector is a life-long committment. The work of defection is in organized labor. As a European American professor of African American lit., the task is to show Euro-American students a way through so they're not simply left feeling bad about their phenotypic endowment. Being "self-critical" is important, but that's tied up with guilt and anxiety, like it or not. What I was suggesting is that defection is about getting away from the race and skin-color equation, of being an opponent of white racial oppression on behalf of working-class self-emancipation. That's the only thing that gets you through the equation and on to the other side‹the "Black" side, as you suggest with your reference to solidarity work.
There's no evidence that racial oppression has anything to do with skin color--the case of the Irish proves this, for example. To see racial oppression as a system of social control is the beginning of defection; self-criticism is not, I think. To defect means to renounce the ideology of white supremacy wherever it works. Self-criticsm implies stasis, where you do it over and over again in the same place.
Kenneth Mostern wrote:
"P.S. Your list of people who claim that race has nothing to do with skin color is dead wrong; rather than enter into a polemic about each one, I will refer you to my article "Three Theories of the Race of W.E.B. Du Bois", in Cultural Critique 34, for an extended discussion about how for Du Bois precisely because race is genetically meaningless, skin-color is its necessary ideological glue. And there is no mystery in the fact that white people have written good books about black history and social theory. Why are you telling me that? I hope you'll think that my forthcoming book is one of them
I told you that no European Americans have ever written anything that challenges white supremacy? Where was I?
I'll check out your article. Thanks for the reference. It'll be a hard sell, though, convincing me that DuBois thought poor whites were trapped terminably in their own skins. You'd have to throw out BLACK RECONSTRUCTION in that case. By objectifying "whiteness" in that text, doesn't DuBois show how vulnerable it is to deconstruction (through the work of a working-class political party)?
Easy,
Jonathan