Becoming 'White'.

(x-posted from U.S. of J.)

The weather in Charlottesville is kind of gloomy today, which gives me a reason to stay inside and ample opportunity to comment on the “stack” of blog posts and articles I’ve accumulated over the past few days.  One of those is Matt Yglesias’ recent post on the future of whiteness:

This, in turn, reminded me of another issue that also came to mind when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates casually refer to Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O as a “white girl.” In reality she is, as they say, “Half Korean, 100% Rock Star”. Nevertheless, I think there’s a clear sense in which it strikes people as more intuitive to refer to a half-white, half-Korean indie rock star born in Korea and raised by both parents in New Jersey as “white” than it is to refer to a half-white, half-Kenyan President born in Hawaii and raised by his white mom and grandparents as “white.”

All of which is to say that there’s a decent chance that we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between “white” and “non-white” but between “black” and “non-black.” [Emphasis mine]

Yglesias is correct here, but I’d add that it has always been the case  that when it comes to race relations, the salient divide is between “black” and “non-black.”  As Yglesias notes, for a good chunk of American history, the Irish, Italians and Jews weren’t considered “white” in the proper sense.  Yes, they possessed fair skin, but to a sizeable majority of Americans they were seen as little more than cultural outsiders and treated as such.  Of course, eventually those groups became white, and they did so by juxtaposing themselves with African-Americans and successfully defining themselves as not black.  It’s always worth noting that in the United States , race operates on a sort of continuum, with “white” on one end and “black” at the other.  Those racial groups closest to white (Jews, Irish, Italians) are eventually assimilated into America’s white majority, while those closest to “black” are kept on the margins (darker-skinned Mexicans are a good example of this).  Yglesias is right to say that in the near-future, certain groups of Hispanics and (probably) Asians will enter the ranks of “white America.”  But it’s critical to remember that the “expansion” of whiteness has been regular and consistent for most of American history.

Jamelle

Jamelle Bouie is a writer for Slate. He has also written for The Daily Beast, The American Prospect and The Nation. His work centers on politics, race, and the intersection of the two.

You can find him on Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram as jbouie.

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  • SEK

    There’s also a geographical component to this: in Southern Louisiana, for example, I can tell you that Jews aren’t considered remotely white. This came up inthe comments to my post on the Jena Six case two years back, but I wanted to add to that one little item: seems like the community of bloggers tends to homogenize certain groups by dint of being a community of bloggers. That is, because we’re post-state? pro-federal? because we think in national terms more often than not, certain distinctions get obscured because they’re inextricably local. As I said in the Jena Six post, it’s difficult to imagine David Duke successfully winning a seat in the Louisiana House, and mounting damn-near successful runs for Governor and US Senator outside of the South. But in the South, there’s a sort of resignation to this aw-shucks-who-me? racism. All of which is only to say, I can’t see Hispanics becoming white in, say, Texas anytime soon, but I can see them becoming white somewhere like Florida.

  • Grump

    Really, the worst that could happen is to call one(Mexican) something else(Cuban).

  • Big Word

    Honestly mentioning Southern Louisiana as evidence of a geographical component to this argument leaves a person on really shaky ground. I don’t the Irish or Italians are considered really white there either. They don’t consider themselves black either, thats fer damn sure.

  • SEK

    Really, the worst that could happen is to call one(Mexican) something else(Cuban).

    I wasn’t thinking about Cubans in Florida so much as the quasi-middle-class of Hispanics from Texas who moved to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Andrew and established a number of small businesses devoted to post-hurricane reconstruction. (I don’t remember where I read about the phenomenon off hand, but it likely had something to do with the intersection of class and race, how class feeds into and off of conceptions of whiteness, &c.)

    Honestly mentioning Southern Louisiana as evidence of a geographical component to this argument leaves a person on really shaky ground. I don’t the Irish or Italians are considered really white there either.

    New Orleans ain’t Creole country, though, so I suppose I should’ve been more specific about which areas of Southern Louisiana I meant. (I can’t tell now whether this is self-petard hoisting or a case of my sloppiness unwittingly supporting my argument.)

  • thinking of a name

    So … where will the dark East Indians and Sri Lankans fall? Will they become “white”?

  • the black scientist

    beyond establishing oneself as not black, ‘whiteness’ is also inextricably linked to property. a large part of european ethnics becoming white in the early 20th century had to do with them being accepted into unions, as well as new deal-era suburbanization and the drive for immigrants to own homes. who is white i think is still largely dependent on class performance.

  • thinking of a name

    So, can an individual who is visibly dark and of African decent who is of upper-middle or higher class become white? And does it matter if the person is American by birth or American by naturalization (such as someone who migrated from Somalia)? Can Ethiopians and Somalians ever become white? Can an individual African-American become white? Has Tiger Woods become white?

  • I know I’ve been doing this too long when I can excerpt my answer from one of my own posts on my blog.

    EXCERPT:

    One of the more curious features of American life has been the ability of our citizenry to merge common customs of certain ethnicities – in particular, the characteristics of the Irish, the Italians, the Croations, the French, the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Russians, the Polish, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Austrians, the Danish, the Finish, the Romanians, the Norwegians, the Ukrainians – into an über whiteness, a self image purer than the reality of those who wear its mantle.

    Whiteness is as much a property, a state of being, as much as it is a trait – within the Big Tent of racial and cultural amalgamation we know as “White America”, it is a badge of membership, of belonging, that supersedes individual differences.

    Obama and Racial Ambiguity: Acting White

  • socgrad

    And this is exactly how white people in America will maintain power as they become a numerical minority. The boundaries of whiteness will shift and expand so that some of the groups we think of as racial / ethnic minorities now (Asians and some Hispanics) will become white.

    But the salient point is that even as “whiteness” expands and changes, “blackness” will remain as its polar opposite. That’s why, thinking of a name, prosperity for native born black people and African immigrants will most likely not translate into becoming white. In this new version of the old American hierarchy, someone will still have to be the Other, and native born black people, dark skinned Hispanics, and African immigrants will most likely fill this role as some sort of pan-black group.

    It’s incredibly depressing when you think about it, because at a time with the influx of many non-white people (Asian, Hispanic, African) we have the opportunity to fundamentally change America’s racial hierarchy. Unfortunately most people, including immigrant populations, simply accept the hierarchy and ask, how do I get to be white?, rather than, does “white” have to be at the top?. Because of this, we fail to recognize the real possibility of change.

  • socgrad

    @ thinking of a name

    you say that “being white offers the possibility of boundless access” and then ask “who are these white people who will maintain power?”. Your first comment answers the question. In a society, like America, where access, opportunity, and privilege are distributed disproportionately based on race, white people, in general, are the recipients of disproportional power and rewards, even without conscious efforts on the part of most white people to maintain power. Accepting the racial hierarchy is enough.

    In an example, many white people who lived in segregated neighborhoods up through the 1960s did not have to actively work to keep their neighborhoods segregated. All they had to do is turn a blind eye to the federal policies and discriminatory practices of lenders and brokers that kept non-white people from buying homes in their neighborhood. A tacit acceptance of the racial hierarchy was enough to help most white people maintain the privileges (in terms of better schools and better city services, among other things) that went with residential segregation.

    I’m not suggesting that everyone become black. What I’m suggesting is that since demographics are quickly making non-white people the majority in America, we have the real possibility to critically ask: “why do we have a racial hierarchy that places white people on top?” and “do we really have to have this racial hierarchy?”.

    Also, if African immigrants and other immigrants of African descent don’t want to be considered black in America because it doesn’t reflect their cultural heritage that’s one thing. However, when immigrants of African descent reject being considered black in America because they effectively don’t want to be lumped in with a low status group, well then they’re really just accepting the racial hierarchy that’s in place (with its denigration of black people in general), rather than pushing back against the racial hierarchy that denigrates black people in the first place. To be perfectly blunt, it smacks of self-hate.

    Finally, I tried to follow your second paragraph, but it really didn’t make a lot of sense.

  • socgrad

    @ winslowalrob

    I think we actually agree more than disagree and the confusion is due to the fact that I didn’t make myself clear about what I mean by changing the racial hierarchy. When you say, “Race is inherently imbued with hierarchy, therefore the idea of race is inherently racist. That is not the same as seeing prototypical difference, mind you, but that race and racism are both sides of the same coin (to use a popular analogy ).”, I agree with you.

    What I mean by changing the racial hierarchy is recognizing and accepting difference between people in America without automatically assigning status to these different groups. Kind of like the issue of white ethnicity in America. We recognize that Irish and Italian descent is different, but both of these groups are considered equally part of the larger white group (now).

    Where I disagree with you is on the consequences of expanding “whiteness” to as many people as possible. Whiteness in America works (abstractly and in terms of the material privileges of whiteness) only in so far as there is a group that remains categorically not white. If we expand whiteness to include many currently non-white groups, this will only work as long as some group is designated the Other, not white people. This expanded whiteness will be great for the newly incorporated groups, but will *really* suck for the group that gets designated as the Other. They will be on the bottom of society and will be there for no other reason than the fact that they’re not white.

    The only way to avoid this is to effectively do away with whiteness as a racial category (decouple whiteness from race), since as a racial category it is therefore inhererently a part of the racist structure of American society (see your comment above). If this is possible (big if), I think whiteness would revert to a shorthand for class, with people who are economically successful or secure considered white and poor people considered not white. This opens up a whole other can of worms. But it has an advatage over the current system where race is effectively a shorthand for class, so that most white people are assumed economically successful by virtue of being white and (more to the point) most black and dark skinned non-white people are assumed poor by virtue of their race.