I think that whiteness has gone through the following trajectory: a volatile society of seventeenth-century colonial America, before the invention of race, when the meanings of freedom and servitude were still contested -> near the end of the seventeenth century, when free men of African descent as well as bonded laborers of African descent became branded as Black and men of European descent, with or without property ownership, got raised above Blacks of all classes -> white bonded labor waned, and whiteness became endowed with the presumption of freedom -> the Civil War, Black Reconstruction, and Populism, during which meanings of freedom and servitude were once again contested, the turmoil eventually quelled by self-conscious white reaction -> establishment of Jim Crow and reconciliation of Northern and Southern ruling classes, making whiteness the invisible national norm, "the Birth of the Nation" as we know it -> Black migration to the North and post-WW1 race riots, as well as the rise of modern immigration restriction, through which whiteness became visible again -> the rise of the Communist Party, industrial unionism (as opposed to craft unionism), WW2, and the Double V campaign, challenging the implicit equation of the American identity with whiteness -> the Red Purge, and re-establishment of implicit whiteness as the American identity -> the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Vietnam War, through which whiteness and the American identity became visibly contested again -> self-conscious white reaction arose, but gains of the Civil Rights movement were not all taken away -> today, significant segments of the top 20% of Blacks are attempting to break with the Black working class, claiming a biracial identity (if they are liberal or centrist, like Barack Obama and Tiger Woods) and the American identity (if they are Black neo-cons, like Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas) + traditional Black leaders (like Jesse Jackson) as "race brokers" between white Democratic Party leaders and Black workers are adrift, becoming disconnected from both + continuing immigration from Mexico and other Latin American nations, complicating the position of Blacks within the US working class in particular as well as the US in general.
What's interesting about the Iraq War is that this is the first big bloody US war after Blacks finally became to a large extent "American," both because they have not lost all the gains of the Civil Rights movement and because they have lost the sharpest edge of Black internationalism of the era of concurrent Black struggles at home and anti-colonial struggles abroad. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>