kelley wrote:
> 2. that "whiteness" has a history. that you need to look at both the
> "racialized" targeted group and the "whites" in order to fully grasp how
> that history unfolded and how it manifests itself today.
It is always easy to say -- I do it a lot -- that "X has a history." It is not always, however, true. Sometimes what has a history are the social relations that give rise to the insistence that "X has a history."
White supremacy has a history (though not, in my view, a very long one: I would say that its full flowering only began on July 4, 1776). The oppression of blacks *as blacks* has a history -- again, essentially stretching back only to to 1776, though the oppression of the Irish as a "race," begins much earlier and became a sort of template for "racial" (as opposed to primarily economic) oppression of blacks.
I speak only of the United States. "Racism," "Race," etcetera have quite different histories, and need to be quite differently analyzed, in each nation separately..
Getting back to "whiteness," I think it has to be demonstrated that it has a history of more than 20 or 30 years. In my youth people use to casually claim, when balked, "I am free, white and twenty-one": an obvious seed for an ideology of whiteness, but not I think an instance. White supremacy (as it began to be called in the '60s) as an objective reality has a history as old as racism, but no ideology of whiteness (as opposed to an ideology of black racial inferiority) accompanied that history until it was sharply attacked in the '50s and '60s. Before that, "White" did not mean white -- it simply meant human. It wasn't special to be white; it was special to be black (or to be an 'honorary' black in certain areas: Hispanic, Native American, Irish, etc.)
See Barbara Fields's arguments that there is only one "race" -- the black "race" (No, I'm neither going to summarize her argument nor fwd her article to the list, but people who want to talk about racism owe it to themselves to read her carefully, whether they end up agreeing or disagreeing.) If you think it is merely silly to say that there is only one race, then you really ought to look up Fields. It may be wrong, it is not in the least silly.
One more remark on "whiteness." Jesse Jackson was a *black* candidate. Dukakis was a *candidate*, period.
Carrol