On the Subject of Whiteness

One of my earliest posts in this blog was on the subject of race and the U.S. Census; that had to do with the controversy about the inclusion of the word “negro” in the question about race. My recommendation was that everyone choose “other” for their race and write in “human.” (The Census information page warns you that if you write in “human” your race will not be counted; I ended up marking “white”).

When I got my census form I was amazed at the number of categories for people of Asian and Pacific Island extraction—Korean, Filipino, and Samoan all had individual categories—but there were no individualizing categories for “White.”

What does “white” mean anyway? The absence of any trace of all the other categories? Some kind of negative race, where everything else is subtracted out?

The April 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker has a review by Kelefa Sanneh (“Beyond the Pale”) of some recent books about race and in particular, the White race. I capitalize it, even though that seems strange to me, after reading some articles in a Black women’s magazine I picked up at a doctor’s office—it had never occurred to me before seeing it there that White should be capitalized like Black or Hispanic.

The article quotes labor historian David Roediger’s 1994 book “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness”: “Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.”

The United States was founded on the one-drop rule—if there is the slightest amount of “colored” blood in a person they cannot be considered white. Our current President proves that rule is still in effect—why is he called Black when he is half White? (see my article “Dreaming of a Post-Racial Future”)

The New Yorker article chronicles the history of whiteness and shows that the definition has shifted over the years. In eighteenth century America, “white” meant Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain. Eastern and Southern Europeans—Poles, Russians, Italians—were not included in the category of “white.” White indicated the people who could have political power. To be white meant you were part of the dominant culture.

Over time, as more and more immigrants from many nations landed on these shores, the definition of whiteness grew to include more Europeans. However, as Sanneh writes, “There remains something particularly fraught about the whiteness of Italian-Americans, which has been contested for centuries. Roediger notes that ‘Guineas,’ an old marker for African-Americans originally signaling their origins on the West African slaving coast, came to be applied widely and pejoratively to Italian-Americans.”

And now the question is being asked, are Hispanics White? The 2010 Census asks about Hispanic origin in the question before the race question, as if the designers of the Census were confused. Yesterday I saw a protest by Latinos over racial profiling, and they were yelling out, “Hispanics are white, and brown, and black, and yellow.” They were advocating the end of the concept of races.

Sanneh ends the article by encouraging the idea of a “white” people and culture, which seems odd to me. “But,” he concludes, “if the old race theory was brutally reductive, there is something reductive, too, about the idea that whiteness, for all its paradoxes, isn’t real. The history of human culture is the history of forgeries that become genuine, categories that people make and cannot simply unmake. So we should probably stop thinking of whiteness as an error, and start thinking of it, instead, as a work in progress. Historians have sometimes framed the treacherous history of whiteness as the slow death of an idea. Perhaps it’s time we start viewing it, instead, as the slow birth of a people.”

It’s too bad Sanneh hadn’t heard of Martin Mull’s hilarious spoof on whiteness, called “The History of White People in America” (published 1985). Mull’s book portrays whiteness as the middle-class WASP America of the 1950s. One of the memorable chapters is about a White Thanksgiving, with the turkey so dry from overcooking it requires one tureen of gravy per diner, served alongside the jello salad.

I think American life has gotten much more interesting and exciting as the whiteness of our culture has declined. Let’s do away with this politically-motivated racial construct.

2010 Census: My race is human

Earlier this month there was a bit of an uproar about the inclusion of the word “Negro” on the 2010 U.S. Census. My response: start a movement where everyone checks “other” on their Census form and writes in “human.” Maybe it’s time to drop all this ridiculousness about there being anything real that distinguishes human beings from each other. Race is a completely fabricated way of separating people.

Recent research in population genetics has shown that only 50,000 years ago the entire population of Homo sapiens was 2,000 (see “The Human Family”). We are just one large extended family.

What does it mean to be African-American for example? As I wrote in an article about Barack Obama in the summer of 2008, why is someone like Obama considered black? He is as much white as he is black. As Eugene Robinson wrote in the Washington Post, it’s the one-percent rule: “…American society enforced the ‘one-drop’ rule: If you had any African blood at all, you were black.”

What is the purpose of dividing Americans by race in the Census anyway? Certainly there is still a need for affirmative action—I am not arguing against that by any means—but why do we need to know how many “Alaskan Natives” live in Buncombe County North Carolina?
I googled “racial categories us census” and found an interesting New York Times article from 2007, "On Race and the Census: Struggling With Categories That No Longer Apply," by Brent Staples :

Imagine the Census Bureau announcing that it would end the practice of asking people to identify themselves by race beginning in 2010. Black elected officials and their allies in the civil rights community would fight the proposal tooth and nail by arguing that racial statistics were necessary for enforcing civil rights laws — especially the Voting Rights Act —and that dropping race from the census would dilute black political strength. Enemies of affirmative action would jump for joy, believing that they had finally won.

But these antagonists aren’t the only factions in the fight. A growing number of demographers and historians who are fully sympathetic to the civil rights struggle would probably be happy to see the word “race” disappear from the census as well. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether...

[T]he historian Margo Anderson writes that official statistics on “race” or “color” were inaugurated into the federal statistical system in the early 19th century. By then the government had embraced the view that people of African descent were from genetically inferior ancestral groups and could never escape subordinate status...

This period marked the rise of the so-called “one-drop rule” — which defined as black anyone with any African heritage at all. That often meant banishment from jobs, housing and public schools set aside for whites...

Indeed, the seemingly innocuous act of assigning people to “races” still sets them sociologically and biologically apart in a way that scientists and anthropologists have long since rejected.

The government Census website says it collects racial data because: “Information on race is required for many federal programs and is critical in making policy decisions, particularly for civil rights. States use these data to meet legislative redistricting principles. Race data also are used to promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks.”

I could argue that using race for legislative redistricting principles has hurt the country as a whole and has hurt the minorities it's supposed to help.