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".
See also Ce Cole's "CIVIL RIGHTS AFTERMATH:
Two Americas, Black and Middle-Class; Black and Poor".)
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:
Last updated: 2/5/05 5:37 pm