White-Blindness

In honor of BitchPhD's brilliant and impassioned takedown of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts's "reasoning" while explaining why the Court struck down some voluntary desegregation plans, I'll direct my handful of loyal readers and googlers lost in blogoramaville to my mid-'90s pre-blog graduate-student web-rant on whiteness, which was reprinted in slightly different form as "White-Blindness" in the 1998 and 2005 editions of The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (and which I last updated in 2005 to bring a few personal references up to date).

[Update: For more on race, you must check out Daniel Gall's plans for Hug the Shoggoth. If this isn't on your blogroll, it should be!]

Special bonus for those too lazy to click, here's my now-dated-yet-still-sadly-relevant piece, with dead links restored thanks to the Internet Archive and a few extra comments and sources thrown in for fun:

If you're coming from my OJ Page, you're probably wondering why I highlighted "white." I'll try to make the explanation brief and make it make sense even if you haven't come from there, and get on to the point of this page.

Why should it matter that I'm white in my opinion over OJ's guilt or innocence? What does my being white have to do with considering the evidence and making a decision? In short, what does race have to do with issues of evaluation, judgment, or epistemology? Hasn't the notion of race itself been shown to be incoherent, self-contradictory, fallacious, without basis in scientific fact or religious doctrine? So what influence can an illusion have on people or their habits of mind?

Well, I suspect that most people would say that the answers are simple: it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, nothing,　yes, and nothing. But I'm not so sure the answers to these questions are at all simple (and I have a sneaking suspicion that "most people" really means "most white people"). I certainly understand and feel the appeal　that the utopic vision of color-blindness underlying these questions and answers has, given the horrible history that race-thinking has been such a constitutive part of in modernity, from the slave trade and slavery to　genocide to ethnic cleansing. But I want to question the assumption that if we stop noticing race, if we stop talking about race, if we stop thinking of ourselves as belonging to any race but the human, then the system of racial oppression that those who have identified themselves as white have established will simply go away. I want to question the assumption that to "stop" doing any of these things is a simple and easy process. I want to question the assumption so endemic to "color-blind" thinking on race that the best way to fight racism is to attack the notion of race by showing it to be a cognitive error.

You can see, then, that I fully subscribe to the insight of the social construction of race, but that I do not conflate the idea of "social construction" with the notion of "fallacy" or "cognitive error" or "illusion." I prefer to think the idea of social construction through the lens of such concepts as "ideology," "narrative" and "public fantasy." (But more on that elsewhere.) Thus I can fully agree that I am not "essentially" white (particularly because, as Karen Sacks and Sander Gilman have shown, Jews became white in the New World; David Roediger, Theodore Allen, and Noel Ignatiev have made similar arguments on behalf of Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the nineteenth century--for cites, see below), but at the same time I can not ignore, downplay, or dismiss the privilege being positioned as white tends to bestow, and not only in this country. Nor can I simply assume that how I've been positioned in and by U.S. race discourses and formations has nothing to do with how I experience or reflect upon the world.

So let me pose an alternative set of questions that will bring out why I think my being white has a lot to do with how I understand the OJ case: How does my self-perception and self-identification as "white" (as well as perceptions and identifications by others) affect my perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and judgments, not to mention my life chances? What does thinking of myself as "white" enable me to recognize or cause me to gloss over or elide? What relation does my "whiteness" have to other aspects of my "identity"--class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, order and area of birth, and on and on to even less obvious ones like the enjoyment I get out of watching The Tick, Daria, South Park, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-head, and, well, just about anything on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim)?

Here's why I think these questions are better than the first three above. For one thing, those questions take for granted as natural and eternal the existence of "the white race." I would counter that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and that thinking of whiteness or race as some simple biological fact is a mistake. I discuss why this is so at length in my race page, so I'll just say it again briefly here. When I say that it matters that I'm white in how I view the OJ case, I don't mean that my whiteness is this accident of birth that has locked me into an inability to understand people of "other races" ("it's a white thing, I can't understand"). Rather, I mean that being treated as white throughout my entire life (along with a whole range of other socially significant categories--male, middle class, short, Jewish, from upstate NY [no, not just north of NYC--the real thing!], and so on) has contributed toward shaping my habits of mind and emotions, including what I tend to take for granted and my gut reactions, my attitudes toward the police, crime, authority, and the law, where I've lived, who I hang with and am close to, and so on. What I'm saying is that "being white" is a learned phenomenon, and until I started thinking about what kinds of lessons I was learning (usually after a friend took the time to call me out on something), I didn't even recognize that I was being taught, much less question the value of the lessons I had been learning.

For another thing, the first three questions above assume that color-blindness is always in and of itself a good thing. But think about that word. When you are color-blind, you only see in black and white, right? (Well, not exactly, they tell me I'm red/green color blind, although I can almost always tell them apart in real-life situations; still, I don't play those damn orange golf balls! But you can see the point here, right?) Isn't that counter-productive? Doesn't it actually reduce the question of race--the experience of living in a thoroughly racialized society--to a binary, instead of opening it up for interrogation? I can go on with this line of argument (the problems you run into when you reduce the complex history of race discourse, racial formations, and racial oppression to the realms of color, vision, and perception, particularly if you are committed to an anti-racist agenda that amounts to more than diversity management), but let's for the moment take this kind of "I treat people as people" position charitably. I submit that if you are truly committed to color-blindness, then your task shouldn't be to go around lecturing to all those (usually people of color) who are still caught in the grips of race-consciousness, but instead to make the case to whites of the necessity of color-blindness, that is, the recognition and rejection of white racial privilege. (For a less charitable take on "color blindness"--not to mention the first serious response to these comments of mine to date--check out Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele's "The Problem with Color Blindness".)

For those to whom this way of thinking is new, I would like to recommend a few works that were crucial in advancing the discussion and analysis of "whiteness" and "the white race" and which are indispensable today:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (especially the opening first few pages and the last chapter, but it runs throughout this 1903 book);
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," in his mid-'20s essay collection, Darkwater;
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (a thick tome from the 1930s that challenges the then-popular racist interpretations of the Reconstruction era [1865-1877], but still a classic, and the source of the "wages of whiteness" thesis);
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (this 1940 autobiography/history of the pre-WW II era is still not often cited in discussions of Du Bois's career, but it is an absolutely crucial text for so many reasons, including an imagined discussion with a white friend in the middle of the book);
  
• Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (largely ignored by whites in the academy in the 1950s, this is now the bible of the "race and American literature and culture" movement; see also "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" in Going to the Territory for an update of his ideas, and of course read his novel Invisible Man if you haven't already);
  
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (don't believe the hype that puts him as the black demon to Martin Luther King's black angel; read this for yourself--he's one of the best at exposing white supremacy, not only as it worked in the past, but how it is working in the present as well);
  
• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (a major collection of short and accessible essays that problematize the whiteness of the '70s women's movement and put racism squarely on the table in a challenging and constructive manner);
  
• James Baldwin, "On Being White . . . and Other Lies," in Essence (from 1984; good, short, accessible);
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (very recent but very influential book on the literary construction of blackness and whiteness, and of course don't forget to read all her novels and the less well-known essay collections she's edited--on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas and OJ Simpson spectacles);
  
• bell hooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (in the collection Cultural Studies and elsewhere);
  
• Patricia Williams, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano;
  
• Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (excellent historical study that is a response to hooks's and others' work, including George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind).
  

The reason I cite these classics along with the more recent African Americanist work on whiteness is that any exploration of whiteness today is practically worthless if it doesn't engage, question, and respond to them. People of color have had to figure out white people and survive under white supremacy for centuries. These works represent the tip of the iceberg of black thinking on whiteness. Check out collections like Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, ...But Some of Us Are Brave, Homegirls, Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Criticism in the Borderlands, The Ethnic Canon, Mapping Multiculturalism, Race Consciousness, and The House that Race Built for a slightly larger (and broader) portion of the iceberg.

This is not the place to go into my full response to the important work of a journal like Race Traitor or David Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness or Ian Haney Lopez's White by Law, but I can at least recommend these and other works on the history and politics of whiteness (in no particular order, with no attempt at completeness, and perpetually [if rather belatedly] under construction):

• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Towards the Abolition of Whiteness ; Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
  
• Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
  
• Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.1 (Winter 1988); White
  
• Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic
  
• Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, et al.
  
• Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor
  
• Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale
  
• Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters
  
• Eric Lott, Love and Theft
  
• Karen Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek
  
• Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
  
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; ed., Race Traitor
  
• Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism
  
• Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law
  
• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
  
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color
  

You might also check out the following links:

• Whiteness Studies, Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin
  
• Overview of "White" Talk Today by Howard Winant
  
• Articles and essays on race, racism, and white privilege, Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
  
• Race Traitor
  
• WhitePrivilege.com
  
• Colours of Resistance
  
• Something I Wrote Awhile Ago on Affirmative Action
  
• My Spring 2005 Introduction to Ethnicity/Race Course at SUNY Fredonia
  

Pointless Plug

As if linking here to Mostly Harmless's Take Your Blog to the Course: U.S. Women's Open event will help encourage non-golf bloggers to give in to the carnival's spirit.... At least doing so might help explain to CitizenSE's few readers why I have been abusing your sites with comment spam and LPGA concern trolling this week. Despite the fact that so far as I can recall, Hawthorne devoted exactly zero words to golf. He mentioned Utica, NY, more often than golf, that's for sure--which is where my friend Moira Dunn is from, although not where she's at (Pine Needles, in fact).

Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate Over Japan

The lazy blogging from my upcoming talk continues...

Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan

The continuing influence of this initial image of Japan as an exotic and backward society can be seen even in the writings of a sympathetic turn-of-the-century participant-observer like Lafcadio Hearn, who showed a marked preference for traditional and folk culture throughout his fourteen years of living in Japan. It’s not that he was unaware of the rapid modernization, industrialization, and nationalist consolidation of Japan in the Meiji era--surely the parallels between Japanese and American expansionism from the mid-1860s until his death in 1904 (after a civil war, the victors first gained control of core territories, then asserted influence abroad through annexation and occupation) didn’t escape him. Indeed, as distinguished Hearn scholar Roy Starrs has recently argued, it was precisely Hearn’s love of traditional Japanese culture that lead him to excuse and indeed support the very state policies in Japan that lead him to leave the United States and give up his American citizenship. At the end of his 1904 work, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, Hearn justifies the Meiji regime’s wars against China and Russia as attempts to preserve Japanese sovereignty against a gathering threat of European imperialism and cautions the regime to preserve as much of traditional Japanese culture as possible to avoid Western cultural imperialism.

It’s worth contrasting Hearn with another well-travelled American contemporary of his who in his journalism and fiction came to opposite conclusions about the tendency and legitimacy of Meiji-era transformations: Jack London. In such articles as “The Yellow Peril” and “If Japan Should Awaken China,” such short stories as “Goliath” and “The Unparalleled Invasion,” and most notably in his dystopian science fiction novel of 1908, The Iron Heel, London characterizes Japan as a potentially imperialist threat to China, the West, and the international socialist movement. As University of California at Berkeley American literature scholar Colleen Lye demonstrates in her brilliant study America’s Asia, London was particularly worried that Japanese military and management prowess and Chinese size and labor/trading capacity could combine to form a commercially dynamic, technologically advanced rival to Anglo-American civilization.

One way of reading these diametrically opposed attitudes toward and images of Japan from Hearn and London is to link their Pacific writings to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century debates within American culture over the U.S.’s own modernization, industrialization, national consolidation, and expansionism. Hearn’s sympathy for a putatively anti-colonial Japanese imperialism and London’s horror at a putatively imperialist Japanese anti-colonialism are two sides of the same coin. They express the ambivalence many Americans were feeling toward the transformations of their own society and culture. With Germany and Russia, Japan and the U.S. were leading rising powers in an age characterized by the dominance of the British Empire; each modernizing nation-state had to choose whether to follow or how to modify the templates of European imperialism established by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and British. It was precisely Japan’s similarities to the U.S. around 1900 that made its actions such a controversial mirror for even dissident Americans of the time.

Why Close Reading Matters I: Guantánamo Bay Poetry

Yoshie Furuhashi just forwarded the following Wall Street Journal article, Yochi Dreasen's The Prison Poets of Guantánamo Find a Publisher, along with a link to the collection of poetry it is about, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (Iowa, 2007) to the MLA's Radical Caucus's listserv. It's particularly relevant to me not just as a scholar and teacher interested in Hawthorne's portrayal of Puritan punishments or as a fan of Alan Moore's comic book series V for Vendetta, but also as a teacher of courses like Introduction to Ethnicity/Race and American Identities. I hope it will be of interest to you, too. Perhaps the following quotations will help inspire you to inquire into the reasoning behind the title of this post:

"While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art," says Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman. "They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies."

U.S. authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems in a June 2006 letter to one of Mr. Falkoff's colleagues. "Poetry...presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language," it said. The military says poetry is harder to vet than conventional letters because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants.

The letter told defense lawyers to translate any works they wanted to release publicly into English and then submit the translations to the government for review.

The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that Mr. Falkoff had to use linguists with secret-level security clearances rather than translators who specialize in poetry. The resulting translations, Mr. Falkoff writes in the book, "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadences of the originals."

For the military, even some of the translations appeared to go too far. Mr. Falkoff says it rejected three of the five translated poems he submitted, along with a dozen others submitted by his colleagues.

Cmdr. Gordon says he doesn't know how many poems were rejected but adds that the military "absolutely" remains concerned that poetry could be used to pass coded messages to other militants.

And maybe those with somewhat freer time than mine might, say, move from taking down Ann Althouse to taking on the American military's approach to literature. If I had the time, I would tell a long story about how Tom Keenan taught a 1980s'-era CIA-authored counter-insurgency manual's discussion of rhetoric in a grad course I was taking on literary theory, but I have holes to plug in one talk and another to start before I sleep....

We Take Requests II

When Hug the Shoggoth asks about one of the section titles of next week's talk, CitizenSE listens. And excerpts:

Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the “Opening” of Japan

It makes sense to begin a history of shifting American images of Japan with the expeditions headed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854. But I want to start in the previous decade with the Mexican War of 1846-1848, for there is a direct connection between it and the appearance of the Black Ships off Edo Bay. Beyond the fact that Perry himself was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War, I will go further and claim that the “opening of Japan” was made possible by the “winning of the West.” To see why this is so, let’s review the larger history of U.S. westward expansion over the course of the nineteenth century and examine notions of American manifest destiny that became popular by mid-century.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States went from being a small nation of thirteen states on the east coast of North America to a large nation in possession and control of much of the continent, including the noncontiguous territories of Alaska and Hawaii. Before the Mexican War, the largest expansion of U.S. borders occurred in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. What we now know as the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful slave revolt, made this purchase possible, as France lost interest in its North American holdings after losing the most valuable colony in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century. It took most of the first half of the nineteenth century for the U.S. to actually control the territory it purchased, as Indian Wars and Indian Removals punctuated crises and compromises over the expansion of American slavery. But by the mid-1840s, after the purchase of the Oregon territory from England, a border dispute between the recently-independent nation of Mexico (formerly New Spain) and the even-more-recently independent Republic of Texas (formerly part of Mexico) provided a pretext for the U.S. to start the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war in 1848 on highly favorable terms to the U.S., along with the California gold rush in 1849, gave the U.S. government great incentive to turn their paper purchase of what is now the American Southwest into actual U.S.-controlled territory, not least to have Pacific ports for exploration, trade, and projection of military forces and strategic interests. Although this process was interrupted by the Civil War and took up much of the second half of the nineteenth century, even by mid-century many American explorers, scientists, and missionaries had joined the whalers and traders criss-crossing the Pacific—not to mention Herman Melville, who published several novels set in the Pacific and Pacific islands years before Perry arrived in Japan.

Having reviewed this process of U.S. westward expansion over both land and sea, we are now in a position to appreciate how white Americans’ prior experiences with, and representations of, enslaved Africans and their African American descendants, American Indians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and peoples of the Caribbean and Pacific influenced their views of Japan and the Japanese people. The Perry expeditions also relied on European, particularly Dutch and English, accounts of Japanese culture and society, which were shaped in part by their own histories of colonization of Asia and elsewhere. Combined with the fact that the U.S. delegation wasn’t permitted to visit major Tokugawa cities, it’s no wonder the earliest American representations of Japan focused on exotic landscapes, architecture, and clothing, on village culture, non-Western religion, primitive technology, and simple weaponry, as John Dower’s Black Ships and Samurai documents. They fastened on what their history prepared them to see.

Please tell me how to make this better! And, if possible, shorter!

To Delight and Instruct: Required Reading for Grad Students (and Others)

Click here. Read and click as directed, until done. End public service announcement. Back to bad bad bad bad bad ok bad bad bad bad bad decent bad bad bad bad [good coming anytime soon?] writing.

Shifting American Images of Japan

Still submerged in the non-bloggy writing process, so I'm going to do a cheap post today which excerpts my opening moves in my first of three lectures on shifting American images of Japan--it gives an overview of the lecture series, so should be of relatively general interest!

Thank you, Murahashi-san, for your generous and kind introduction. And thank you for the invitation to speak here once again--or rather, I should say, to follow up on my February talk with this “American Studies 101” lecture series. Its topic, “Shifting American Images of Japan,” has interested me for a long time, since I first became aware that a good deal of the popular culture I grew up on came from Japan or was influenced by Japanese culture, but I only started researching it in earnest two summers ago, back when I began working on my application for a Fulbright grant to teach American Studies in Japan. Having taught the course based on that research, “Representing Japan in American Culture,” to two classes of entering students in Kyushu University’s 21st Century Program this semester and last as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer, I’m eager to share the results of my research and teaching with a wider audience. So thank you very much for inviting me back here and giving me the opportunity to do just that.

My talk today is entitled “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945,” but before I attempt to cover 99 years of American images of Japan in 33 minutes, I should say just a little bit more about the lecture series and the course it is based upon. I designed “Representing Japan in American Culture” as an introduction to American cultural studies for first-year undergraduate students in Japan. My goal was to offer a survey of changing American images of Japan, focusing on their form and structure, development and context, and effects and stakes. Along the way, I also emphasized the acquisition and development of certain interpretive methods and intellectual skills, such as close, contextual, and comparative reading and viewing and critical thinking, writing, and speaking. I wanted my students to be able, by the end of the course, to analyze any American image of Japan they happened to come across, from any time period, using a variety of approaches--but especially to consider how it relates to the history of American representations of Japan, what it reveals about American culture and society of its time, how it compares to Japanese self-representations, what it contributes to our understanding of present and future of U.S.-Japanese relations, and what it suggests about the possibilities and pitfalls of cross-cultural representation and intercultural communication. Through weekly readings, viewings, lectures, and discussions, a group presentation, and a final research paper, my students not only got many chances to practice these various analytical methods but also got to practice communicating their ideas and insights in a variety of fora and formats. In a sense, then, this lecture series is my own final exam: how well will I be able to do what I ask of my students? how effectively can I condense the flavor of my Representing Japan course?

Well, I want to start by commenting on one sentence from Murahashi-san’s preview flyer in particular: “By reviewing how America has observed Japan, the lectures will give a unique opportunity to see Japan in the reflections of American eyes and reflect on what those images reveal about American observers.” This language--of image and imagery, viewing and reviewing, vision and revision, reflecting and reflection, sight and insight, eyes and Is, observers and observed--should call to mind a variety of associations, from the inevitable distortions of any reflection to the necessity of perspective to the eyes as the mirror of the soul. It should call our attention to the relations between objectivity and subjectivity, perceptions and ideas, the material and the visual/discursive, and more. But we shouldn’t allow the richness of this language to lead us to assume that U.S.-Japanese representations and relations should be studied in isolation, as if the two countries were alone in the world, endlessly mirroring one another.

To counter this assumption, my goal in these three talks is to introduce you to the broader historical and political contexts in which American representations of Japan are created, circulated, and consumed. By demonstrating how American images of Japan borrow from and are in dialogue with representations of other countries and cultures, I aim to encourage you to look at American and Japanese history differently.

Today, then, I focus on representations of Japan from three time periods--the mid-nineteenth century, the turn into the twentieth century, and the mid-twentieth century--in order to recontextualize the War in the Pacific. My talk is divided into three sections--“Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan,” “Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan,” and “Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific”--that look in turn at key patterns in and examples from American images of Japan in the 1840s and 1850s, the 1890s and 1900s, and the 1930s and 1940s.

So what do you think? Let me know before June 30th!