Ode to Whiteness

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Sun Jan 10 22:59:53 PST 1999


Actually, Toni Morrison tried to explain it recently in the NEW YORKER and was taken to task for it by quite a few editorials. Recently (can't remember when--but within the last couple of months) a columnist writing about Trent Lott's address to a white citizens' council-type group quoted one of its leaders' (writing in a flyer) as referring to Clinton as the first black president. (Wahneema Lubiano)

One might also say that Clinton's behavior is understood as 'black' whereas it is really working class, and this is reconstructed as 'black' to avoid the generalizing implications . . .This is not to say that Clinton's life style is exclusive to or especially pervasive among the working class, only that acknowledgement of its commonality (beyond minorities) is suppressed. (Max Sawicky)

Yeah, you've got a point here. People do like to make fun of Clinton's "white trash" roots. The scene in Primary Colors when Travolta is getting outside all those Krispy Kremes says it all. See Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge, 1996). All in English, with a chapter by yours truly on race, income, and work, called "Trash-o-nomics." (Doug Henwood)

Doug

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This ode to whiteness is going to be long and complicated, because that is the way I like to write.

Max Sawicky noted that Clinton's behavior could be understood as 'black' whereas in reality it was merely working class, and was reconstructed as 'black' to avoid the generalizing implications. Max's view suggests that the Right is more fully conscious of its class position than its race. If I read Max correctly, then that would mean that the Right is moved more by fear of a working class unity, than a vague and indefinite racial anxiety.

I could agree with Max's assessment if I thought the Right was moved by its petite bourgeoise origins. See, I don't think the Right actually originates from working class experience at all, but is much more dominated by a specifically bourgeois sensibility. In any case, I don't think speculative class psychology is at work. In fact, since I have decided temporarily to convert my views of the Right into an entirely racial view, I have become more aware that the Right has very little class consciousness except in the strategic sense of attempting to make nominal gains above their grade for the obvious reason that they are no in fact part of the power elite. More money is also a reason. But in any event, they seem completely bereft of any of the cultural interests and international perspectives that I associate with the elite. As for my other view of them, that is the socio-economic and political one, I always have a very difficult time attempting to re-construct their economic interests. I never get further than seeing their economic interests and their constituency as middle income, white, of insecure circumstance located predominately in semi-urban areas--suburbs or mid-size to small towns. But very little of that seems to characterize them quite as well as pursuing their conceptions of race.

Before I go on, let me make it clear when I talk about race here, I am not talking about African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, or any minority group. I am talking about the ideology of a specifically American white race bounded by its bourgeois class.

When I read that Toni Morrison thought the best thing white people could do to understand race, was to start discovering what it means to be white, I was disgusted and thought the last thing I needed to do was start thinking about the white race. First of all, I didn't and still don't think there is such thing and second of all, even from a social construction theory of race, then again, the last thing I need or want to do would be to start socially constructing such an animal. Of course, I resented the idea of whiteness, because I resented the history it represents and what that implies. It was an America I want to get rid of and bury and have spent years fighting against and distancing myself from it.

In Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray's collection White Trash, the editors attempt to construct white trash as an ethnic identity formed through the economics of class reflected in a cultural marginalization. Doug Henwood in his contribution, "Trash-o-nomics" opened with,

"In the American mind, poor and black are virtually synonymous." Doug continues, "An intellectual left dominated by such attitudes can only cope with rebellion in the white heartland by demonizing it as further proof of the the warmongering bigots' true nature. Several thousand men in fatigues are taken as the avant garde of fascism, the armed wing of the white backlash, a violent reassertion of privileges that have been slipping"

Then from the concluding paragraph of the essay, "Tim McVeigh's bomb brought forth a gusher of liberal angst about mid- and downscale whites as the shock troops of a new American fascism. 'The militias' came to stand for a whole array of resentments among non-elite whites that have roots in loss of income and status, and the transformation of American mobility from the upward to the downward kind. The right has cannily channeled this resentment away from the folks who inhabit corporate boardrooms and bond-trading desks and towards the usual substitute targets--immigrants, the cultural elite, welfare moms, and their criminal teenage issue." (177p,190p, _White Trash_)

Between these quotes, Doug goes on to lay out the statistical tale of a white increased share in the harvest of the down slope. Obviously, I don't disagree with either the cultural or economic wing in these white studies.

However, what is missing in both, is an explanation and exploration of the bourgeois Right and its views of race, that is the Right race. Remember, I am talking about race as the white race, because I think the Right doesn't care about constructing any other race, beyond some convenient and quite void stereotypes. Instead, the Right bourgeois, not bound by rationalism, empiricism, historical scholarship or scientific methodologies, has been very busy re-constructing white back into an eternal essence, fabricating and fashioning its newer dimensions and configurations. From this perspective then, white does not include Timothy McVeigh to these middle and upper middle income genteel folk of America's newly constructed heartland. Timothy McVeigh has been tainted by too many different circumstances, and is in fact a much lesser sort to be white in quite the grand sense that our neue heartland would consider white. In other words white trash is white but, not white enough. This is in line with the idea that William Jefferson Clinton is white, but not white enough for these folk of the American heartland. Thus racism in this particular context shows itself in exactly that provision, not white enough. In fact, I think the reason the bourgeois Right has become embolden over these last several years, is that with each of their disclosures, Clinton becomes less and less white, and therefore more and more their object of scorn. And, therefore, Clinton can be used to define ever more clearly what white is and isn't.

In the media of recent years, it has become popular to visit a re-constructed heartland and call it The Heartland. For example, the Jim Lerher News Hour visited the suburbs of Denver at several points last year to gage the feeling of the people over the Clinton scandals, and the news producers considered the people there representative of a typical American place and sensibility. Certainly it was just about as white as it can get these days and was typical of the Right Heartland of semi-urban, semi-rural, suburban, middle town regions where there are few minorities, immigrants, and even fewer tracks of obvious poverty. Probably too controversial, but in fact identical was Simi Valley were an equally typical and impartial jury rendered the famous Rodney King verdict.

The problem is that Simi Valley at the periphery of Los Angeles is just like the outlands of numerous other urban areas and it is important to remember that jury did not consider itself racist. I am sure the good folks from Denver on the News Hour do not consider themselves racist either. They are probably not racist in the more usual orientation of the term. In other words, they probably don't harbor profoundly hostile feelings towards other races and ethnic groups, and are most probably uninterested in a systematic oppression and exploitation. Such ideas are quite far from their minds, despite the fact that most no doubt work in businesses and institutions that do just that--but don't we all. Most likely many of these folks know a few people at work or in their decreasing leisure hours who are African American or Mexican American and get along just fine. Our good folk don't harbor those old fashioned and quite crude views captured in white trash slang. In a sense, they are probably moderately liberal and tolerant in formal social settings. Yet the anxiety implicit in where they live and how, and the less obviously but critical belief that indeed the future of their children will not be like their own past--all that seems to betray them.

What is really at stake in this anxiety? How do those vague and indefinite fears play into the constructions and codes of a white race? How do the good folk construct their own race? At first, it would seem natural to select other races as scapegoats, and then conceive themselves as Not That. But after decades of propaganda against such an option, anxiety shies away from such an explicit and concrete form. However, that still leaves other apparently white people to hate freely and openly, which in fact they do. So the enemy the true enemy is within the ranks and not without. Hence the vehement hatred of Clinton, an easy execution of McVeigh, and a complete castigation of anything smacking of white liberalism or more abstractly, humanism--the favorite evil of the Christian Right.

Why does the acceptance of a complex world as it is, not appear to be an option? This option is ruled out by the continual and relentless economic pressure downward, which is exactly contradictory to the belief that good folk raise, not fall. The slow and lazy spiral down, is accompanied by a complex of reactions and justifications that oscillate between loathing of the concrete present and desire for change, then falls into paroxysms of guilt over all the minor accidents of chance and circumstance that have wrought this limbo and produces all the grieving that cascades from such impotence, from the impossibility of changing anything at all.

Instead of perceiving a moderate prosperity in decline, the landscape seems transformed into a sea of victims, indefinite victims of indeterminant crimes. To live in the suburban vacuum of no time and no place robs this dreamworld of whatever limited sense of time and place it could develop if only.., while the death of the future robs it of the potential promise that should follow in the as yet to be. Among the poles of this otherwise featureless landscape, it is the closing of the future that is the most compelling and leads almost invitable toward an impossible past. There in a selection of pasts, which are marketed as trivial commercial seduction, are to be found all the images and their imagined feelings, all the accessories for a nostalgia of identities before there was the world of today. Thus the New Heartland harkens back to once upon a time, a time not of concrete place, not of explicit hours, but one farther away, the one the lives as a mythological tableaux. Lest the imagination fail there is a mass culture that fills every minute of every day with such tableaux and thereby creates a seamless envelop which can be entered at anytime to refresh and savor these mythological significations.

Amid the numerous but identical tableaux is to be found the very construction of whiteness that seems to fix in the emptiness of a multidimensional chaos something to be, some order to begin working toward. It embodies all the good that should be and isn't and smoothes over all the detail of an annoying and errant reality. Each edge is clear, each surface is smoothly pebbled in pleasing colors, each face is given its perfection of line. The immaculate conscience issues directly from the idealization, the simplicity, the ease of perception, and the absolute clarity of moral and temporal order. It is a supra-rationalism of the tableaux that easily works through the labyrinth of concrete and complexly given moral questions and yields such astonishingly simple answers. While the concrete realities of all races, ethnicities, languages, histories, and cultures can be dismissed to an annoying and anonymous other, they can also be replaced by their cleaner, clearer and handsomely colored simulacra in the moving media travel brochures as tourist attractions of quaintness. Once reduced to merely pleasing images, this leaves the primary focus free to examine and please itself with the far less bothersome problems of whiteness turning forever about itself. Most important of all, whiteness needs isolation in order to establish its rectitude to itself as the clean moral heart of its own universe. What lays beyond such a whiteness is simply more whiteness, more order, more quietude, more cleanliness.

It is no accident that whiteness finds in a Christianity of a certain restricted and reduced form, many of the prescriptions necessary to set the outer world in order. Just as isolation and insulation are provided by the indefiniteness of time and place found in the semi-urban, semi-rural regions, so moral clarity and order are given by an indefinite, simplified, ahistorical Christianity. Such a rarefied envelop is thus both remote and removed from all the complexity and contradiction of its origins as a living part of many peoples and cultures, in many places over many centuries. All of that, like all the rest of history is consigned to the same anonymity as simply Other, or perhaps as moments of color as in the Old Testament, but in any case, not Christian. To be white, it must be re-born in clean child-like simplicity. It must be virgin and immaterial, immaculate and fastidious, orderly and without guilt so as to perfectly co-line with its embedding in an equally reduced and barren psychological template of purified mediocrity. What can be found in this Christian whiteness is nothing more than an idealized banality. It is neither sinister nor profound. It is as blank as its own child-like gaze.

Do any of you recognize that gaze?

Chuck Grimes



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