By Steven Watts
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Whiteness lies at the heart of American degradation, we
are told constantly by figures on the left these days. After the horrifying,
disgraceful January 6 attack on the national Capitol Building, Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi claimed that rioters “have chosen their whiteness over
democracy. That’s what this is about.” Progressives blame whiteness for
creating COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on minority communities and insist
that racial justice, not the vulnerability of the elderly, should determine vaccination
priority because “older populations are whiter.” They denounce education for
offering a “monolithic, European perspective” that “upholds Whiteness.” They
dismiss old-fashioned journalistic standards of even-handedness because “the
views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.”
They discern the insidious influence of whiteness in religion, law, sports, and
entertainment.
Whiteness, according to this pervasive left-wing
narrative, inspires and shapes all problems in the United States, which
therefore must be relentlessly racialized in order to root whiteness out. As
one critic who accuses Greek and Roman classical texts of undergirding a
Western civilization of racial repression recently put it, “Classics and
whiteness are the bone and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together
and they may have to die together.” To such ends a flotilla of progressive
Ahabs grimly pursues the whale of whiteness into every inlet and channel of
American life with political harpoons poised and ready to strike.
This ideological assault invites several questions. What
exactly is whiteness? How does it work? Where did this influential paradigm
come from? The search for answers, unsurprisingly, leads to the academic world,
where nearly everything that is disturbingly extremist in modern leftist
discourse seems to percolate before spilling out into the public arena. A good
starting point is in the field of American history, where two books appeared
about 30 years ago that provided the Ur-texts for the modern gospel of
whiteness.
The notion of whiteness emerged from debates among
academic leftists near the end of the Reagan/Bush era. They were wrestling with
the old American political anomaly: why working-class whites supposedly voted
against their own interests by failing to embrace socialism. The recent
appearance of Reagan Democrats and growing working-class support for the
Republican Party had been a particularly galling development. Alexander
Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White
Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
(1990), followed closely by David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1991), attempted to tackle this “problem” with a new perspective.
“Whiteness,” each book claimed in its own way, explained all.
Saxton’s White Republic
examined the dynamic development of the United States in the 19th century and
reached a striking conclusion: White racism was its driving force. In his
“ideological interpretation,” Saxton posited that a white man’s nation had
emerged from the intersecting efforts of Southern slaveholders, Jacksonian
Democrats and Whigs who pursued racist social and economic policies, frontier
novelists and blackface minstrel performers, Republican ideologues who joined
opportunity and egalitarianism with the glue of white racism, scientists who
advocated Social Darwinism, and trade unionists who marginalized black workers
to achieve white, working-class solidarity. In Saxton’s rendering, the story of
America is one of creating a “white republic” by using racism to strengthen and
legitimate industrial capitalism.
Roediger’s Wages of
Whiteness took the racial analysis a step further. Also focusing on the
United States in the 1800s, he contended that not just racism but also a deeply
cynical notion of “whiteness” had been foisted onto the working class.
Beginning with the modern scientific conclusion that race is not biological but
socially constructed, Roediger claimed that “it has become possible to ask
bedrock questions such as, ‘What makes some people think they are white?’ and
“When did white people become white?’” He drew upon W. E. B. Du Bois, the
notable African-American Marxist intellectual, who had asserted in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
that shrewd capitalists had bought off industrial workers with a “psychological
wage” of “whiteness” — something like, “No matter how oppressive the work
discipline or class oppression you face, at least you are superior to blacks.”
This was the foundation for Roediger’s argument that the “wages of whiteness”
fueled the development of American capitalism, only now the old Marxist process
of class formation was accompanied, and perhaps superseded, by a process of
race formation. A racial manipulation of language provided one means of shaping
a cross-class white identity, as when the traditional republican word
“freeman,” indicating an independent voter and worker, took on a racial
coloration to denote a contrast with “unfree” black slaves. The gradual
whitening of immigrants, such as the Irish, as they poured into the United
States in the mid 1800s, provided another. Ultimately, complicit industrial
laborers joined greedy capitalists to embrace the notion that they were white,
and hence superior to a “degraded” black race. In Roediger’s grand
reformulation, the consolidation of modern industrial capitalism depended on a
sordid series of race-mongering maneuvers that sullied notions of equality and
justice, hamstrung efforts at working-class solidarity, and guaranteed the
ongoing oppression of African Americans.
The recasting of American history in White Republic and Wages of
Whiteness inspired an avalanche of whiteness studies that inundated a
leftist-dominated American academy. Over the next three decades, dozens of
articles and books poured forth exploring every possible facet of whiteness and
its corruptions. Not content with dominating lecture halls and conference
rooms, whiteness acolytes swept it into the public realm as they spread the
message of “white privilege” and “systemic racism” into our public discourse.
The Black Lives Matter organization, as well as the controversial 1619 Project,
which seeks to revamp the grade-school and secondary-school curriculum in the
United States around a central theme of racial oppression, eventually emerged
from whiteness studies.
A close look at Saxton’s and Roediger’s formulations,
however, reveals enormous problems. One involves historical explanation. To
anyone not predisposed to conversion, the gospel of whiteness obfuscates more
than it reveals about the American experience. To begin with, we never really
know exactly what whiteness is. This
promiscuous concept sometimes appears as just another word for racist ideas,
while other times it connotes power, material benefit, social opportunity, or
just about anything else its adherents desire. In his book’s introduction
alone, Roediger defines whiteness as a “racial identity,” an “ethnicity,”
“status and privileges conferred by race,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “a
way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and
to the necessities of work discipline.” This grab bag of meanings suggests that
whiteness is little more than a deus ex
machina lowered onto the historical stage to wondrously resolve a tangle of
problems. Too wondrously.
Moreover, we seldom see how whiteness actually works in
the real world. This reified concept hovers above lived experience,
mysteriously bending the arc of history. The underlying problem is a paucity,
or distortion, of supporting facts, which leaves Saxton and Roediger pounding
many evidentiary square pegs into explanatory round holes. For example, Saxton
excoriates the Whig Party in the 1830s and 1840s for its combination of
capitalist bias and elitist racism, but cites as his main example John Quincy
Adams, one of America’s staunchest opponents of slavery. Roediger misleads
similarly with his jaundiced analysis of “freeman.” This term and its partner,
“free labor,” indeed took on a racialized meaning in antebellum America that
contrasted with the bound labor of African-American slaves. But it also became
the central feature of the anti-slavery
movement as it fueled growing denunciations of slave labor, prompted opposition
to its expansion into the western territories, and inspired the founding of the
anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1850s.
Both historians suffer the same blind spot. They portray
a 19th-century America in which citizens either embraced black freedom and
equality without reservation or embraced whiteness. This produces not a
gathering of information and fair-minded analysis that leads to a measured
judgment, the historian’s task, but a process where evidence is cherry-picked
or twisted to buttress a predetermined conclusion. It oversimplifies the messy,
tangled, multifaceted development of the American republic, replete with
ambiguous motivations and unintended consequences, and replaces it with a
simplistic morality play where all whites are racists outright, or racist
dupes. The monocausal steamroller of whiteness history, lumbering about amid
historical complexity, simply flattens the American past.
The clinching example is the Civil War. Surely the
central event in American history, one that tore the country apart and was
inexorably bound up with race, politics, social values, and economic
development, would have supplied a linchpin in these arguments for the
centrality of whiteness. Curiously, it doesn’t. Saxton ignores the Civil War
almost completely, only briefly mentioning it in a half-dozen different spots.
And Roediger, almost as briefly, simply makes the facile claim that it was a
“white man’s war” between Southern defenders of black slavery and Northern
defenders of class slavery. Why this neglect of the Civil War? Perhaps because
of the fact, inconvenient for whiteness theorists, that hundreds of thousands
of ordinary white Northerners died in a conflict originally devoted to stopping
the spread of black slavery, and ultimately aimed at abolishing it.
The implications of Saxton’s and Roediger’s whiteness
schema for solving America’s racial problems discloses more difficulties. In a
sign of things to come for leftist politics, it frames the issue as a matter of
identity, only for white Americans instead of marginalized groups. This
self-defeating formulation not only constructs a tribal gathering spot where
right-wing extremists are all too happy to assemble, but also cuts off other
means of rectification. Political movements, legislation, religious exhortation
can accomplish little against the scourge of whiteness. The only solution is
therapeutic atonement: a public confession of racial sins, followed by
reeducation, as white people struggle to reconfigure their identity.
Interracial understanding, cooperation, and alliance in pursuit of equality and
justice are impossible.
The analytical and programmatic problems of The White Republic and Wages of Whiteness stem from the radical
political agenda informing them. They are not so much historical texts as
political polemics that weaponize history in the service of revolution. Both
Saxton and Roediger, as they freely admit, are Marxists who seek to modify that
framework by elevating race to an equal place with class in unmasking the
oppressions of modern capitalism. Saxton, who died in 2012, was a member of the
American Communist Party throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s and wrote a
column for the Daily Worker before
entering the academy to pursue activist scholarship. Roediger’s background with
Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s led to subsequent
involvement with an eclectic array of Marxist groups and projects and an
occasional flirtation with anarchism. His political hero is John Brown, whose
“nonwhite radicalism” sent him to the ramparts alongside black “freedom
fighters.” (Brown’s murderous rampages in Kansas and his attempt to foment a
race war with the ill-fated Harper’s Ferry raid go unmentioned.) The White Republic and Wages of Whiteness were published by
Verso, the legendary radical-left press that advertises its books as “of
interest to socialists both in the USA and throughout the world” and dedicates
them to a “living legacy of political activism and commitment.” For Roediger’s
and Saxton’s coterie, anti-racism and anti-capitalism are synonymous.
Milan Kundera, in his brilliant novel of ideas The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(1984), suggests a final reflection on the radical politics of whiteness. The
book coins a term for the rapturous utopianism of the socialist Left: the Grand
March. Noting that lofty political movements rest on images, dreams, and
archetypes, he writes that the “fantasy of the Grand March . . . is the
political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. . . . [It] is
the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it
goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be.” While
this may seem a sentimental, harmless conceit, he continues, it conceals a
dogmatic darkness, and “the image of that evil was a parade of people marching
by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.” For Kundera,
the burden of such strident, single-minded political absolutism weighs down
lives and helps make the natural lightness of being unbearable.
The Grand March of whiteness studies presents its own version of this flaw, one that might cause thoughtful observers to lower their fists and step out of line. Eradicating racism is a salutary, indeed necessary, endeavor among a humane, free citizenry living in a democratic republic. But automatically attributing racist expressions, inclinations, and creations to all white people by dint of the color of their skin, regardless of their actual opinions, beliefs, characters, histories, and actions, simply offers racism as a cure for racism. It proposes, in reverse, what too many whites have done to too many blacks for too many years. For all of us, that is truly unbearable.
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