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Whiteness.

  
  

Page: 123(4)5

 
 
Ex
19:44 / 04.12.03
the concept of whiteness is not one that is in our everyday but one that we are groping for.

I'm with Flyboy on this - it exists and its power is that it is un-thought-of, unquestioned and invisible.
I think (and I dislike analogising between categories, but I'll try not to be fuckwitted about it) it's up there with a lot of other categories where one party doesn't have to think about it. My dear father doesn't spend time musing about his sexuality, his gender, his class, his race or his 'whiteness' - it doesn't mean he doesn't have any of these things, it just means that in my part of the world, each of those categories has won a small but significant tussle over declaring itself the norm, the unthought, the unproblematic.

whiteness is a false construct when you consider how wide it is.

Yes; I think the instability and contradictory nature of the idea of 'whiteness' - the fact that it works in different ways, means different things to different people, and will operate differently depending on class, sex, location and other variables - is bloody useful, and could be used to break it. Again, I could compare it to other categorisations which are precisely not unitary, not universal, and cross-cut each other. Race, class, gender and sexuality are all unstable categories - should we never think about how any of them operate?

I think, ultimately, and I don't want to paraphrase you wrongly, we have the same fears about segregation. But you see this process of unearthing 'whiteness' as reifying the concept of whiteness, and I see it as digging up its hidden manifestation and taking them to pieces. I see hazards; but I think it's contributing more to the destruction of categorisation than its continuation.

By interogation of a group, be it white or black or whatever, what is gained? Items by which that group can be identified, details of common traits shared amongst them. But what are these details useful for but to create stereotypes used to fuel racism?

I'm not terribly keen on identity politics myself, inasfar as it naturalises categories that are usually constructed. But I think that there's a difference between remarking on shared similarities and scuritnising what expectations of shared identity exist. And digging into the insecure identity of the usually-dominant party can precisely undo that dominance, because, as mentioned above, it doesn't usually get scrutinised.

I'm also aware that there are issues of attention and funding, in academia and the press, which can make talking about whiteness a perilously diverting distraction from the business of talking about racism. But nobody's really brought that up yet. Maybe I should. Possibly later, when not so rushed.
 
 
Cat Chant
20:32 / 04.12.03
Deva wants to explore the plurality of white experiences... what you end up doing is just exploring the plurality of human experiences. ... in Deva's post, "white" goes along with "middle class" and it seems to me that the latter is by far the more apt descriptor.

Ohhh! Finally, I see where we differ on this one, Lurid (I think). My initial reaction to this comment of yours is that I have no idea what it's like to be black middle-class, so I would be very hesitant about generalizing my experience out and making the assumption (on what grounds?) that my racial identity/skin colour/etc has nothing to do with the way I experience class. Saying "[X] has nothing to do with 'race'" is every bit as much a racial generalization, with (potentially - depending on the 'X') as harmful, discriminatory and persecutory consequences, as saying "[X] is racially determined".

So I think what it is is this: I am coming from a position/theoretical perspective which seeks to avoid repeating the racist 'universalizing' tactic of dominant, majority or colonizing groups - passing off the experience or cultural values of a dominant group as 'universal' - by particularizing and relativizing those values and experiences. I feel, myself, that this, as a dominant-culture tactic, is certainly as dangerous as (and more pernicious/mainstream/invisible than) the tactics of 'fringe' white-supremacist groups which position whiteness as a (threatened, fragile) entity. I don't think taking the position that "everything that happens to me as a white person is just part of the universal human condition" is non-racist, particularly given the history and contexts in which that position has been used (white = normal, white = universal...).

Tryphena:
All of you are assuming that white means automatic privilege in this country.

Could you avoid terms like "all of you", please? Particularly because no-one has said any such thing, and I for one have said the opposite on at least one occasion in this thread (page one: This does not mean that all white people are privileged over all brown people).

Actually, has anyone in this thread tried to say anything about 'whiteness' or experiences that they feel relate to their identification as 'white' which was anything more than partial, tentative, and historically situated? Has anyone actually made claims about how "all people" in a particular category have the same experience or characteristics? Because I think the people you're arguing against, um, aren't posting on this thread.

I'd be really happy to see this whole discussion moved to a thread of its own (Why Interrogate Whiteness?), and to let this thread go on with what it wants to do. I feel like too many potentially interesting Head Shop threads have been strangled at birth recently by arguments about why it's a bad idea to have the discussion suggested, and although I do think it's important to talk about why one might want to talk about whiteness(es), I also think it would be nice to have a space where those who want to could get on with doing so, rather than just having this argument again: I think I've made the same post (content-wise) about six times now in the (misguided, I know) hopes that I will finally make myself clear.

Ooh, incidentally - this is a bit sideways-like to the theme of 'white'/'British' as competing identity terms, but I saw a really cool advert for Dairy Milk on a billboard recently which I can't help reading in racial (and specifically mixed-race/hybrid) terms, since the signifier seemed to be the milk-chocolate colour (rather than the purple foil, which they were using a lot recently) juxtaposed to the phrase "the taste of the nation". I'm trying to work out how to read the white writing on brown background of the 'Cadbury's' symbol written on milk on the squares of chocolate (especially since Richard Dyer talks a lot about whiteness as a 'blank page').
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:02 / 05.12.03
Ohhh! Finally, I see where we differ on this one, Lurid (I think). My initial reaction to this comment of yours is that I have no idea what it's like to be black middle-class, so I would be very hesitant about generalizing my experience out and making the assumption (on what grounds?) that my racial identity/skin colour/etc has nothing to do with the way I experience class.

Fair enough, but...I thought that you were posting in order to explore whiteness. And this carries with it the assumption that you are universalising across class (and many other boundaries). I can't see how you can object that your experiences don't offer an exploration of being middle class (because you aren't black) yet do offer an exploration of whiteness (despite your class). I mean, it may be true that one distinction is more important than the other, sure. But you aren't arguing it. It seems to me that you are implicitly assuming that colour of skin trumps all other differences.

Now, you might say that you aren't trying to universalise over class either. Again, fair enough, but then in what sense are you exploring whiteness? Surely you would be exploring what it means to be "Deva"?

I am [seeking] to avoid repeating the racist 'universalizing' tactic of...passing off the experience or cultural values of a dominant group as 'universal'... I feel, myself, that this, as a dominant-culture tactic, is certainly as dangerous as (and more pernicious/mainstream/invisible than) the tactics of 'fringe' white-supremacist groups

I agree that you are highlighting a problem, and one should not ignore it. However, I do disagree that the othering of certain groups is only of marginal concern. I think it is behind immigration and asylum issues as well as Islamophobia (which I'd say were the most prominent examples of racism in the West). More generally, I'd argue that "othering" is behind institutional racism as it is displayed in the legal system and the job market.

FTR - I'm not saying that we shouldn't interrogate whiteness. But I am saying that the process itself is problematic in ways that we shouldn't ignore.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:34 / 05.12.03
More generally, I'd argue that "othering" is behind institutional racism as it is displayed in the legal system and the job market.

It seems to me that through clarifying the position of whiteness we place those who aren't white in to the category of victim. It's not something that people are trying to do but I think something that happens automatically.

I agree with Lurid on his last point btw, with an analysis like this it seems necessary to interrogate the purpose behind the analysis simply because it can be a dangerous thing.

When I read the first post here I could not define whiteness. I sat and thought about it and every definition went hand in hand with another definition... class and sexuality being the two big ones. Now when you say this very problem could be used to break it I'm not sure what you want to break. White privilege? I'd like to break it too but I'm also aware that an awful lot of people are happy as privileged members of society. Seeing homeless people doesn't break the economic class barrier and analysing sexuality doesn't necessarily make people of different sexualities hang around together and coming from a Jewish German background doesn't make people condemn Guantanamo despite their analysis of their own family history. The very notion of difference through skin colour needs to be broken and in that case emphasising that difference seems to take the wrong path.

Race, class, gender and sexuality are all unstable categories - should we never think about how any of them operate?

Yes we should. We should always take the time to pull apart our own constructs. The thing is that all the examples you've given admit to being cultural constructs to a certain degree. People won't confess the same about skin colour, in order to analyse colour it has to be redefined and society doesn't seem prepared for this at all probably because the difference is worn on the outside.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:25 / 05.12.03
rushed, and time's ticking but wanted to requote this:

"But you see this process of unearthing 'whiteness' as reifying the concept of whiteness, and I see it as digging up its hidden manifestation and taking them to pieces. I see hazards; but I think it's contributing more to the destruction of categorisation than its continuation"


As I thoroughly agree and it's clarified alot for me.

Also, i defintiely think a valid objection is the funding/spaces/diversion one that Ex mentions, which is one reason i thought/think spaces like this might be good/better places for this kind of dicussion to take place.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:29 / 05.12.03
"- I'm not saying that we shouldn't interrogate whiteness. But I am saying that the process itself is problematic in ways that we shouldn't ignore"

absolutely. and i've never said otherwise. that's why i've used words like 'suggested', invited people to try etc. it's an experiment, and one i think is worthwhile, especially given the level of scrutiny that I hoped it would (and has) attracted.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:37 / 05.12.03
sorry to hit and run but one more requote:

"Has anyone actually made claims about how "all people" in a particular category have the same experience or characteristics? Because I think the people you're arguing against, um, aren't posting on this thread."

Agreed, reading back i can't find the dogmatic, determined, programmatic, generalising, closed-ended posters you seem to be arguing against. You may be concerned about the dangers of this approach, you may suspect that this is a generalising, brutalising, dangerous road, but I don't think you've got much evidence for the juggernaut you seem to be angry with/worried about in this thread

I can see a lot of tentative exploration, some very obviously strategic poking, endless mentions of the specificity of people's viewpoints, and an exploration which has begun to take apart a term and mess it up, while constantly exercising reflexivity on its motivations/engaging with objections...
 
 
Ex
12:36 / 09.12.03
Sorry, this is a bit long and picking up on Tryphena again...

Now when you say this very problem could be used to break it I'm not sure what you want to break. White privilege? I'd like to break it too but I'm also aware that an awful lot of people are happy as privileged members of society. Seeing homeless people doesn't break the economic class barrier and analysing sexuality doesn't necessarily make people of different sexualities hang around together

I agree that the connection between this discussion and any practical outcome is uncertain. As you point out, seeing contradictions in existing systems of power doesn’t stop them operating, which might suggest this is all innefectual. But at the same time you suggest it could be too effectual:

If it really is built than it will enter the press with full force and retain influence. It's fodder for the BNP not the anti-Nazi league.

I’m also unsure where the discussion might lead in practical terms.
Thus I wasn’t hoping to ‘break’ white privilege - bloody ambitious - but to insert a miniscule wedge into the idea of coherence in whiteness - in your words, if I can steal them, The very notion of difference through skin colour. I want, through excavation, to show that ‘whiteness’ is thought to have common features, but is ultimately a duct-taped together assemblage of inherently contradictory concepts.
Possibly my own examples weren’t much help in this respect. Sorry about that. I was trying to show the links between practical concerns, cultural constructs, the effects of racism, and personal experience.
I understand this potential for showing up contradictions better in the realm of gender identity, and while generalising across categories is a bit dodgy, I think it’s a useful comparison. My best example would be that masculinity is often supposed to be very ‘physical’ (work, strength, muscles), while femininity is more ‘mental’ (emotional, spiritual and physically feeble). At the same time, masculinity is more ‘mental' (reason, intellect) while feminity is more ‘physical’ (concerned with biological processes, not transcendent). Which is a bloody clever trick to have pulled off.
Clearly pointing this out won’t immediately crumble gender, or even smite the sexist with a bolt of astonishment, but I think it’s a useful thing to note, as some of these broader assumption underlie more precise and practical discussions.
To give examples of what the contradictions in ‘whitness’ might be, because I am a beginner in this whole debate, I’ll nick a bit from Dyer:

White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes; a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, and individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against seuxal desire and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead.

(I think he spends the whole of the rest of the book elaborating that, so I hope we can excuse it for being a bit dense and sweeping.)
And you suggest that this thread could lead to shame, which is unwarranted, but also to pride, which is unearned and leads to racism again - the fact that white pride and white shame are both seen as intrinsic and problematic sections of the same identity is one of the contradictions that I think could be usefully excavated.

To this end, I was rather hoping that someone would take me on over how I located my own experienced in relation to being ‘white’ - it would have been very instructive if another poster had said “I’m in a similar position, but I experience something utterly different” or “I don’t think that’s to do with you being white at all, it’s to do with XXXX.”

(I hope I’m justified in rotting the thread to address why the thread should exist because I’ve stuck in a chunk of Dyer which fits neatly into the original discussion.)

And lastly and briefly and on another topic:

The thing is that all the examples you've given admit to being cultural constructs to a certain degree. People won't confess the same about skin colour, in order to analyse colour it has to be redefined and society doesn't seem prepared for this at all probably because the difference is worn on the outside.

I’m not sure it’s unique in this - sex is also “worn on the outside”, if not quite as visibly, and yet society has (partly) accepted a seperation between sex and gender (the biological and cultural aspects). Although I’m not sure that this is entirely helpful for sex/gender, or something that I’d want replicated in studies of ‘race’ - to achieve a certain level of understanding that race is a cultural construct, but to leave intact the idea that ‘there just are’ certain biological differences between peoples seems a neat way of essentialising a core belief in skin-based differences. But I don't think 'whiteness' is more problematic when trying to discuss how the physical and cultural aspects interconnect.
 
 
Cat Chant
16:17 / 14.01.04
Bit of a hit and run, but I found this while I was reading Barthes for teaching and it seems to me to sum up so beautifully some of the arguments that surfaced in this thread:

According to Freud (in the book about Moses), one touch of difference leads to racism. But a great deal of difference leads away from it, irremediably. To equalize, democratize, homogenize - all such efforts will never manage to expel "the tiniest difference," seed of racial intolerance. For that one must pluralize, refine, continuously. (Roland Barthes)
 
 
Eppy
21:25 / 14.01.04
Speaking from the US here...

I'm familiar with this idea, and it seems a bit silly to me, or at least a bit half-hearted. I'm all for white people acknowledging their whiteness more readily, but at the same time, the problems we're actually trying to correct with this are no longer specific but general, no longer institutionalized but institutional. In other words, the issues of racism that could be traced to a specific act or institution have mostly been dealt with, certain irregularities aside for the moment. There is now equal protection under the law, there's just not necessarily equality under the economy. These problems can't really be fixed by legislation or caveat, we all seem to agree, but the problem is that what we're basically talking about is a power imbalance, in the very specific present set of conditions, between whites and non-whites. And this particular power imbalance can only be easily rectified by violent revolution, which I (unlike a few other people, which always confuses me) am against, personally. In other words, we've sort of run out of problems which it's in the interests of those with power to fix, and so since we can't, sort of by definition, raise the impotent to positions of authority without a massive, sudden, probably destructive shift, we're going to have to figure out how to either make that power shift in the interests of those with power, or we're going to have to start letting those with power use that power to increase the greater social good.

That's why I'm not sure exactly how useful "interrogating whiteness" can actually be, because as noted upstream, its primary goal seems to be shaming white people, specifically about the power inherent in being white, and so discouraging them from using this power. But the problem is that if they don't use their power, somebody else with power will, and they presumably haven't gone to the trouble of interrogating their whiteness. (Or if they did, they came to the conclusion that it's just fine, thank you.) Personally, I'd hate to have someone representing me who felt the need to apologize for what their ancestors did rather than do something to improve conditions in the present. I don't care what race my representative is--I just want someone who's unafraid to use their influence to promote justice, freedom, equality, and all those good things. But maybe I'm too stuck in the political here.

So in other words, go interrogate whiteness in high school and college, read the Zinn and Chomsky alternative histories and get excited about them. But then, hopefully, realize that we've all sort of acknowledged the stuff they present as hidden truths, and come to the understanding that your whiteness is not a curse, saddling you with the burden of being a member of an evil race, but a gift, in a way, with the power it implies. The power of whiteness is a tool, and no tool is evil--just the way you use it.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:53 / 14.01.04
At the risk of sounding silly, how about if we *pretend* that looking at whiteness might have a function beyond shaming white people? And therefore that possibly looking at what whiteness means may be a useful step in the path to using the inherent privilege of whiteness that you assume in a productive fashion?

The further we go here, the more it seems that "white" is an inadequate descriptor, but does that mean we should abandon it along with other descriptors of the same nature, or that we should look at why it is invalid when others seem not to be? I'm wonderng, for example, whether it is because whiteness is not in itself a qualifying descriptor, that is it is one where the symbologies are for the most part left open. This, of course, operating in a fairly small space, that being media created in and for the west, but one which nonetheless has a surprisingly wide range and influce...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:22 / 15.01.04
that "white" is an inadequate descriptor, but does that mean we should abandon it along with other descriptors of the same nature, or that we should look at why it is invalid when others seem not to be?

I think that white is only an inadequate decriptor when taken on its own. Alone it suffers from too big a generalisation because it's such a loose term and depends entirely on our ability to see. I'm not saying that it isn't a cultural reference, don't get me wrong that's absolutely impossible to deny but without another reference it's useless because it only says 'that person is white' and not 'that person is white but finds it more difficult to feed her children than that man'. So I don't think the term should be abandoned, it's just hopeless to use it without some other reference to class, gender or another term that elucidates its specific meaning.

the fact that white pride and white shame are both seen as intrinsic and problematic sections of the same identity is one of the contradictions that I think could be usefully excavated

That's a lovely philosophical argument that assumes that the same people will react to things in the same way. A logical argument in fact that is invalid because liberal white shame is in part a reaction to fascist white pride. In cultural theory it works and were I meaning to refer to a cultural reaction I would utterly agree with you but I was really attempting (badly) to describe subsections of society- the BNP and the anti-Nazi league belong to the same culture but they're reacting to it differently and their views are purposefully contradictory. When you term it like this- ‘whiteness’ is thought to have common features, but is ultimately a duct-taped together assemblage of inherently contradictory concepts I can't disagree with you but then that's my problem with the analysis of it, 'whiteness' alone is contradictory in wider culture. I don't think it works as a unified concept, in fact I think that because it is purely (literally) our perception that creates whiteness that it doesn't actually exist in anything other than cultural terms. So there's the real problem again of discussing something that exists only in culture and yet means so little in itself. It means the colour of you skin is white. 'Whiteness' does not mean privilege except in reference to another term. I don't think that gender does exist purely in cultural terms though I would quite like it to but the truth is that reproduction looms over us... we can subvert that in a whole variety of ways but it is a subversion and the fact remains that men just can't reproduce. Culturally gender clearly means a whole lot more than reproduction but it does kind of come down to that and that's why I think it's more complex because reproduction actually means something and colour at the most basic level doesn't (or damn well shouldn't).
 
 
Cat Chant
09:55 / 15.01.04
the truth is that reproduction looms over us...

You could also say (along with me and Judith Butler) that the truth is that 'reproduction', like the idea that 'race' has a biologically deterministic dimension, is constantly brought in to shore up culturally constructed and economically useful power imbalances between 'genders' and 'races'. That is, the cultural dimension comes first and is legitimized through constant references to 'biology' or 'nature', which is fantasized as preceding the cultural elements of gender. Eg, on a crude level, the ideological myth is: "Women reproduce, therefore they are more nurturing", rather than: "It serves the dominant economic pattern for women to perform unpaid childcare, therefore women are encouraged to be more nurturing".

If it's wrong to do that with 'race' - "When it comes right down to it, they're just different, aren't they?" - I don't see how it's okay to do it with 'gender' - When it comes round down to it, women can get pregnant and men can't. Or rather, of course, When it comes round down to it, some women within a specific age bracket can get pregnant, and some men within a rather wider age bracket can cause that to happen, though of course even people who are not 'naturally' fertile can also reproduce with the aid of technology and/or through adoption, so therefore 'reproduction' means there is a 'real' difference between all men and all women. Sorry, I don't see it.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:11 / 15.01.04
You and Judith Butler seems to want to apply words like nurture to this when they're not applicable to what I'm saying in the slightest. That women 'nurture' is a cultural myth, that women reproduce is a physical fact that effects our behaviour. Psychoanalytically a significant amount of our behaviour is related to sex, the fact that we have babies is a consistent worry for any woman who doesn't want to have one and practices heterosexual sex. It is not a consistent worry for a man who cannot physically conceive. Any woman could be infertile but she wouldn't know it and thus it doesn't actually effect her behaviour. The colour of your skin does not effect a major physical change in your body outside of culture thus there's a very significant difference in gender and colour.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:21 / 15.01.04
Tryphena - I notice you've moved on from saying "women" to "any woman [who, by implication of the rest of your post, believes herself to be fertile], who doesn't want to have [a baby] and practices heterosexual sex." So would you say that

[woman] is... an inadequate decriptor when taken on its own... it's hopeless to use it without some other reference to class, [fertility, sexual practice] or another term that elucidates its specific meaning?

Anyway. Trying to drag myself away from what I think is becoming an increasingly unproductive exchange, I've been meaning to post this link for a while: it's an essay by Peggy McIntosh on white privilege and I found it really eye-opening when i came across it a few years ago: it (gradually, and along with some other things) completely changed the way I thought about racism.

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

And this list has become quasi-canonical, I think. (It's from the same article, but I'm not bolding it because I think it makes it harder to read.)

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization", I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the worlds' majority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings or organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color that more or less matches my skin.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:09 / 15.01.04
Deva I have to take a stab at the idea that heterosexual sex is an action, even the majority of lesbians that I've come across have had regular sex with a man at some point in their lives. In fact I can think of one lesbian out of a broad acquaintance who hasn't and she's only 20 (though I doubt she ever will sleep with a man) but this is getting in to the realm of personal experience and it's unecessary so... I disagree with the application of the idea that the label woman doesn't mean different from man on more than a cultural basis. The fertile/infertile argument I've already dismissed, all women assume they're fertile unless specifically told otherwise and the majority will have heterosexual sex and if not will consider the notion of having babies at some point even if only to dismiss it.

As to the criteria for white privilege, scanning the list I notice most of them work in the UK but are rather dependent on location to make sense. The second sentence on the list for example is dependent on money as well race. Number 8 I'm a little cynical of because it's pretty difficult to get published anyway and it seems to drag a bit on educational privilege but I think is still a valid example of privilege- a white asylum seeker is after all more likely to get published than a black asylum seeker.

Number 22 on the list deals with racism not privilege. Actually I think a few of the sentences on that list say more about racism by white people than white privilege. I don't feel privileged because I can walk in to an office and be accepted as white, I feel disgusted at the attitude of people that a black person can walk in to an office and be questioned because they're not white. There's a fine line to be drawn between the two I admit and actually I think it's worth going in to.
 
 
Lurid Archive
17:31 / 15.01.04
Interesting list, Deva. I think the idea that being white confers advantages is an important one we should acknowledge. And I entirely accept the opposition inevitable in articulating such a list. Nevertheless...

One of the problems in the list as it is, is the conflation of being part of a dominant ethnic group and being white. So, for instance, the list only makes sense in the context of somewhere like the US or UK. (In other countries, one might analagously talk of Black privilege.)

An obvious ommission, perhaps, but already one gets the idea of a certain egocentricity to the list. So, for instance, part of what is being said is that being white automatically makes one identify with the culture. In fact, if one has white privilege, one can find the right food or music.

That means that white immigrants do not have white privilege. Fair enough, I suppose. But turn that on its head. Does being black in Britain mean that it is impossible to think of British cultural artifacts as your own?*

I think that is the implicit assumption in much of this thread. I don't deny that one is seen differently and has a different set of experiences according to skin colour. Sure. But to say that "white privilege" is little more than feeling part of the cultural mainstream or that it automatically trumps all other considerations is to make some implicit assumptions that I find disturbing.

I think that the most important aspects of this would be practical. To see, and embrace, the concept that colour of skin is an irreducible division is little comfort to those who would fight racism and (what I would call) white privilege. I see the unequal treatment in law, employment, education and daily life of non-whites in the UK as evidence of racism. But why couldn't they equally be taken as evidence of those vast differences that exist between people of different pigmentation? If being Black means that that person can never see the food in their country as other than alien, why should we expect them to embrace any of our abstract "white" values? Lawfulness, ambition, intellectual curiosity, apprecitaion of art, tolerance with regards to race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.

I think the Kilroy article makes a good reference point.





*I've been pulled up for referring to Britain specifically. But, as I've said, most of the white privilege referred to doesn't hold for white immigrants. So much of the list has to be based round essentially national concepts.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
21:41 / 15.01.04
Lawfulness, ambition, intellectual curiosity, apprecitaion of art, tolerance with regards to race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.

Who said these were "white" ideas, even abstractly "white" ones? Tell me so I can make them read some history books.
 
 
Mr Tricks
22:43 / 15.01.04
But, as I've said, most of the white privilege referred to doesn't hold for white immigrants.

I've seen mention of the "White Immigrants" being treated equally as badly as a "Non-White Immigrants"

Am I understanding that correctly?

Is that based on some sort of research or observation I missed?

I'm not sure I would agree; In the U.S. one can look at the immigration policies with regards to Haiti verse Eastern Europe or even Cuba and notice some significant differences. Granted there's a heavy political factor here, but I personally doubt there isn't a significant "racial" aspect.
A blonde haired blued eyed immigrant is still less likely to be pulled over while driving than is an immigrant with brown skin etc...

Deja vu, I think I typed this same thing before

I also popped on over to the U.S. Census Bureau and found a variety of "official documents" that break "race" down like so:

  • White (non-hispanic)
  • Black
  • Asian & Pacific Islander
  • Hispanic (of any race)
  • American Indian / Alaska Native


Curious use of Color, Culture and Region.

PS: I seen that list before . . . and variations there of.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:14 / 15.01.04
've seen mention of the "White Immigrants" being treated equally as badly as a "Non-White Immigrants"

Am I understanding that correctly?

I think this is an interesting question, and possibly a very British one, in the sense that our media tend to reserve the right to take whiteness (in the specific sense that Flyboy criticises above) away from you if you don't fit the profile. It's a worthwhile case of whiteness not being purely determined by skin colour. So, immigrnat from Eastern Europe, for example, don't get to be white, become they are not behaving in a suitably white way, as their actions are recorded by the national press...
 
 
Ex
14:14 / 16.01.04
our media tend to reserve the right to take whiteness (in the specific sense that Flyboy criticises above) away from you if you don't fit the profile. It's a worthwhile case of whiteness not being purely determined by skin colour.

Do you think it works out this way - ie, does Texan anti-immigration rhetoric generate a sense of Whiteness using generalisations of visual and physical difference about immigrant populations (as well as cultural stereotypes), while UK media (for immigrants from Eastern Europe) has to concentrate more on cultural steroetypes?

(Not that culture can't scratch up visible racial stereotypes for "white" races when it suits - I've been really struck by the caricatures of "The Irish" from the last century which support the idea that they're not white [in some cases, arguing that they're literally descended from colonising Africans]. The images are repeated over and over, it's clear that the readers were expected to be able to "spot" Irishness from a series of facial features. To my eye they feel very alien - although anti-Irish prejudice is obviously still kicking around, I don't know that many people these days would recognise these images (protruding mouth, low brows, curled hair) as an Irish stereotype. Something previously assumed to be obvious, reognisable, physical, immutable and indelible has - I hope and I think - just fallen out of use.)

I'm fascinated, but having read the defence of Kilroy in this week's Express, too nauseated to pursue further at present.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:22 / 16.01.04
Lurid:

So, for instance, part of what is being said is that being white automatically makes one identify with the culture. In fact, if one has white privilege, one can find the right food or music.

That means that white immigrants do not have white privilege. Fair enough, I suppose. But turn that on its head. Does being black in Britain mean that it is impossible to think of British cultural artifacts as your own?

I think this is the heart of the whole interestingness of this thread. I myself think Peggy McIntosh manages not to imply that being white "automatically" means you identify with the dominant US/UK culture, by carefully using "I" throughout the list - I mean, I think that's more than an empty stylistic trick. And the bits on the list that I found made me think about my own position as culturally privileged were things like "I am told that people of my colour made my country/'civilization' the way it is": that is, that part of being white for me (and, I suspect, for most white people who feel more-or-less part of the dominant culture) is that almost imperceptible series of reassurances that my race and my culture overlap or are the same as each other. So it's a difficult and many-sided task trying to unravel (i) whiteness as an identification from (ii) whiteness as a racially privileged position (in UK/US culture - as you say, in other cultures the kinds of privileges Peggy McIntosh describes might be enjoyed by black people, though I do think that the legacy of European colonization complicates that picture) from (iii) the dimension of dominant (national? regional?) culture. Because part of the way white privilege operates is precisely to surreptitiously identify all those three elements with one another, so that someone who's "properly white" - in the way that we've been suggesting immigrants, the Irish, etc, aren't - will be able to take it for granted that the three dimensions are identical. Does that make sense? So part of white privilege is exactly what you're arguing against - the comforting feeling of identification of a national culture with a racial group.

Naturally I can't think of any examples right now, but recently there have been a lot of times when I've needed to think of a description for "white British" that would correspond to what my Australian girlfriend calls "Anglo" or, I guess, to WASP in American terms. Because I think the assumption is still that "British" = "white" unless a qualifier is added (black British, British Asian, etc). So... I think and hope that part of the motivation for this thread is to disentangle whiteness from Britishness. But as it stands, whiteness is in a particular relation to Britishness, a relation that white people are encouraged to see as untroubled and self-evident - I mean that there is a perceived tension in identifications like "black British" or "British Asian" (it's that tension that can turn into the rhetoric of 'divided loyalty' when it comes to rounding up 'terrorist suspects' or policing immigration), whereas the two terms in the identification "white British" sort of work together rather than in tension with each other. A term like "Anglo" might start working towards putting those two terms into a productive tension...

Argh. I hope you can see what I'm getting at, anyway.
 
 
Mr Tricks
16:30 / 16.01.04
Hmmm that sounds similar to the Hyphenated American. One can be African-American, Latin-American, Asian-American, Native-American and even Irish-American. However, anyone who identifies themself as "American" is more than likely "white." Hence fostering the perception of white being the defacto American while others would have American as a secondary quality to their source of Ethnic or National origin, even if this hypothetical individual's family has been a part of the nation for generations.
 
 
XXII:X:II = XXX
03:25 / 18.01.04
Christ, I'm not reading all this. Sorry if I step on anyone's toes, but I have an interesting perspective on all this.

I come out of out a purely Eastern European Jewish background: I'm half Russian, a quarter Hungarian and a quarter Polish (from my paternal grandmother, the only direct relative living at my birth who wasn't born in the U.S.). So, obviously, most people look at me and I am undeniably caucasian.

Except that I've never considered myself as such.

To be honest, I'm not fond of the concept of race, and it's only been in my adult years that I've found out that that's for a very good reason: race is a social fiction unsupported by science. That aside, I can remember that until maybe first grade I never considered my Latino classmates any different from myself; the only concept of differentiation I knew was white, black and Asian (which I think I just referred to as "Chinese"). I was mostly insulated from such considerations through my mid-teens, as the school I attended for eight years was overwhelmingly WASPy, in which I was a definite exotic bird.

Suddenly, when I got to tenth grade and went away to an extremely PC school, all of these distinctions got shoved onto me, which I attempted to assimilate, until the bullshit factor got a little too deep for me: when a school meeting was called to declare that it was no longer polite to say "sexual preference," it was now to be "sexual orientation," I realized some of these were merely out of vanity than any real taxonomy.

Given that, I realize that it's merely my own choice that I don't consider myself caucasian in the strictest sense of the word. However, this is a feeling that others who are definitely not caucasian have confirmed. My friend Mustapha, who is of an East Indian background, has said to me on more than one occasion, "You ain't white. I don't know what you are, but you ain't white." He is, I'm sure, in the minority on that opinion, but I'm sure that the difference is that he knows me and knows who I am. I certainly don't come from the stock of people who had much to do with the slave trade or colonial imperialism (save perhaps for the Moranos who sailed with Columbus) or most of the other acts of cruelty or exploitation visited upon the world's people chiefly by Western Europe and its descendents. I personally don't hold much in the way of a grudge against such people, but I can understand why some might.

More recently, I was updating a personal profile where one HAD to choose from the options given. I really didn't want to check caucasian, so I checked it and "Middle Eastern." I eventually unchecked Middle Eastern, but added, "I resent having to identify of one non-existent group or another."

I realize that for many people they have a sense of belonging and history that makes them proud to indentify with their background. I'm certainly not ashamed of my ethnicity, such as it is, but it's more like a punchline for me than anything else. I feel somewhat bad for people who do need to define themselves by these social fictions, because I feel as though these names are kept alive not out of cultural heritage, per se, but in order to say, "We are not THEM."

Which is what I'm doing, too, I realize.

But then again, I'm eschewing one group and choosing solidarity with the rest of humanity. So I can live with that.

VJB2
 
 
Cat Chant
10:55 / 18.01.04
Christ, I'm not reading all this.

Oh, go on. You never know, you might find it interesting. Especially the four pages where we discuss whether there's any merit in using a social fiction as an identifier. (Mod hat: see also here.)

This bit:

I was updating a personal profile where one HAD to choose from the options given. I... added, "I resent having to identify of one non-existent group or another."

I realize that for many people they have a sense of belonging and history that makes them proud to identify with their background.

is combining interestingly in my head with a couple of things Lurid said:

in what sense are you exploring whiteness? Surely you would be exploring what it means to be "Deva"?

and

you are implicitly assuming that colour of skin trumps all other differences.

I think there's a series of considerations of what it means to identify or be identified at all tacitly underlying a lot of this discussion. I don't know what the "personal profile" in your example was being used for, VJB, but I do know that a friend of mine found it very difficult to prove constructive dismissal on racial grounds when she was forced out of her job recently, in part because so many people had failed to fill in the Equal Opportunities forms that would have helped her show that almost no non-white people were employed in the first place.

While I don't think census forms/personal profiles etc should necessarily be submitted to unquestioningly, as they are often stupid and bear no relation to the experience of the people they are trying to monitor, I also think they're forms, not journals. They're not supposed to bear witness to the whole wonderful, myriad, contradictory, miraculous assemblage that is you as an individual, they're supposed to provide a broad, crude - and sometimes invaluable - pool of data about institutions' racial/ethnic makeup and practices. In short, I think soul-searching in front of an Equal Opportunities form doesn't do anyone any good ("It's so reductive to say that this university is all-white! We're all unique and complex individuals with unique and complex identifications! How dare you reduce us to our skin colour?") and filling them in generally does, or at least can ("Hmm. This university seems to be all-white. What can we do about that?")

So... there seems to be a feeling* that any kind of reference to someone's racial/ethnic background functions reductively - reduces their individuality to just an example of the characteristics of their 'race', subordinates their personality to that identification. That is, either "race" trumps all other factors about a person, or one is talking only about the unique, irreplaceable individual and "race" becomes irrelevant. Me personally,** I think race is sort of a vector of identity that intersects, at varying angles, with other factors - sex/gender, sexual orientation, class, nationality, language, phobias, neuroses, tastes, etc. None of them 'trumps' any other, but if you're talking about any of them I think it's dangerous to make advance assumptions about what will or will not turn out to be raced, gendered, classed, etc. I guess I'm thinking about consciousness-raising groups as a model: you talk about your diverse experiences and see if any common ground emerges, and then model what the culturally shared features of 'whiteness' are, rather than deciding that it is known in advance what 'whiteness' is and that we don't want anything to do with it, thanks. Of course 'race' (or any other single generic factor) is inadequate as an expression of a person's uniqueness, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist and it doesn't have effects.

I also think that this is a prime example of the asymmetry between white and non-white Bengali in Platforms was talking about before. To me, the spectacle of a white person refusing to be reduced to hir 'race' because hir humanity is too many-sided and complex to be caught up in such a category is a different phenomenon - because differently historically situated - from, say, a black person doing the same thing. (For the moment I'm talking roughly about the Northern European and North American context.) Because in the histories and imaginaries and mythologies*** of those cultures, white people haven't had a 'race' because they're the universal type of humanity, and non-white people have had nothing but 'race'.

*I'm constructing this out of fragments of Lurid's and VJB's posts in particular - I don't mean to attribute this as a conscious belief to either of you, but I'd be interested to know whether you agree that it bears some relation to an underlying set of assumptions behind what you've posted, and what you think of the function of 'race' as a factor in identity more generally.

**by which I mean 'me after a fair bit of study'

***in Barthes' sense, not, like, the Norse gods.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:36 / 18.01.04
I find this take quite interesting: I certainly don't come from the stock of people who had much to do with the slave trade or colonial imperialism (save perhaps for the Moranos who sailed with Columbus) or most of the other acts of cruelty or exploitation visited upon the world's people chiefly by Western Europe.

For me a question arises from this... as a white person living in the West do you have to take responsibility for these things anyway? After all a significant majority of White Westerners had very little to do with the slave trade and colonialism particularly those of the working classes. So where's the responsibility implied by our backgrounds?

And Deva when you say that white people haven't had a 'race' because they're the universal type of humanity, and non-white people have had nothing but 'race'. How do we fit the perception of Israel and the Jewish nation in to this because to an extent the Jews have had nothing but 'race'. Can we count them as non-white?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:18 / 18.01.04
I think we probably can say that the idea of whiteness is a failry recent one, and one that is culturally constructed. European Jewry was until fairly recently not considered a part of the dominant (caucasian, Anglo-Saxon) racial consensus. This seems failry uncontroversial as a statement - so, in post-Renaissance Europe you get a distinction drawn not quite on racial grounds, but also not quite not on religious grounds - "Jew" occupies a position between race and religion, and is antithesised with "Christian", but it does not only describe a religious position, but also encompasses a number of other elements, some physiological (red hair, curved noses, the usual caricatures), some of it social (outside the courtly structure, able to lend money at interest) and so on. Even in the construction of modern Israel, you've got racial constructions beyond the idea of "Jew" - most obviously, the distinctions (physical, social and cultural) between the Sephardim and the Ashkenaze. While one might look at an Ashkenaze Jew and think "white", that would be a very limited description, and would again possibly bump up against the idea that white skin might not be an adequate signifier of "whiteness" - see Mr. Tricks above). I think the fact that "white" and "Christian" can no longer be dichotomised quite so neatly may be a reason why "Whiteness" is at times expected to do duty for the ideas of *civilisation*, where back in the day one could instead be described as "a Christian gentleman".

This, incidentally, is perhaps why we can see Vladimir's "as a descendant of Jews of the 19th and 20th Century diasporas, I don't feel caucasian" as not a massively novel position. It also confuses "caucasian" (an ethnic identifier) with "white" (which we are seeing as at least not purely an ethnic identifier), but, as Deva says, that's the kind of thing that reading threads before posting to them helps you out with sometimes... there's quite a lot of stuff about Slavic and Eastern European positionality with regard to whiteness that you may find interesting as well, Vladimir.

To pop onto Tryphena's:

For me a question arises from this... as a white person living in the West do you have to take responsibility for these things anyway? After all a significant majority of White Westerners had very little to do with the slave trade and colonialism particularly those of the working classes. So where's the responsibility implied by our backgrounds?

Interesting one. One might say that post-imperial responsibility is a bit like imperial responsibility, but in another direction - that is, that "the white man's burden" back then was to spread the civilising impact of (Christian) whiteness to the savages, whereas now it is trying to roll back the damage done by exploitation that has created a privileged and wealthy West and fucked up everywhere else. On t'other hand, you could argue that this is just the march of history; the English don't have to feel bad for the Spanish because of privateering, the Catholics have to feel bad only in a very abstract sense about the reign of Queen Mary and as such is it really the white guys' fault, or the Western Europeans' fault, or the daughters of Jefferson's fault, that their ancestors happened to get the sea travel and the gunpowder sorted first. Is a sense of responsibility an element of whiteness, at least from the point of view of interrogation?
 
 
chairmanWOW
09:48 / 18.02.04
Why should anyone have to examine their whiteness? Just because all first world countries happen to contain a lot of whiteness and other not so first world countries have a lot more blackness, is no excuse. White-guilt...sad.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:11 / 18.02.04
coma wendigo, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer me honestly.

Have you read this thread?
 
 
grant
18:17 / 02.06.04
I already linked to this blog over in my "Adoptions from China" thread in the conversation, but the newest entry has some very pertinent stuff to say about what whiteness is as a positive presence (as opposed to a neutral absence).

This is written by a Korean woman who was adopted as an infant and reared by a conservative Christian family in northern Minnesota, removed from anything vaguely Korean except herself and her sister.

White Americans who don't bump up against other races in their everyday living are a funny bunch because they see their Whiteness as normal, neutral, and empty. Whereas I feel like I'm filled with something--and it ain't Korean-ness. I am filled with hotdish recipes, taxidermy, Lysol, hymns, the English language, coupons, cheese, family stories, fishing rods, worries about osteoporosis (which I was just told only European-descended women get.) I am filled with my family's whiteness. And everything Garrison Keillor says is true. And I still live in Minnesota because my sister and her family still live here.



She's got lots of comments and insight about being "white on the inside" -- she has to communicate to her birth family through a translator, for instance.
And she's in a unique position to interrogate what that means.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:44 / 03.06.04
I dropped out of this thread early because of thesis commitments but am still really interested in what it did/does. Particuarly the way that people have been arguing about whiteness's relation to other axes of identification, ie gender, class, sexuality. I don't have time to read the entire four pages right now, but I wanted to add that whiteness is also inextricably related to nationalism or feelings of 'national identity'. Lurid, perhaps this deals with your feelings about white immigrants, although being myself the descendant of English migrants to Australia, I thinkg white migrants (particularly English speaking migrants) definitely do feel an automatic feeling of belonging.

Anyhow, I wanted to post this link, to a review of a book called White Nation by (Lebanese-Australian author) Ghassan Hage. Hage relates whiteness to nationalism by reading Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital. His idea is that the economy of national belonging actually works to give people the idea that they have a 'say' in managing the nation-state, and that the hierarchy of national belonging (found through all kinds of things like skin colour, language, cultural practices, gender, class, sexuality) means that some people feel a greater sense of ownership over the space of the nation than others. This means that some 'tolerant' (what he calls 'good nationalists') still engage in a kind of racism because they feel like they have the power to speak out about what should 'happen' to non-white people.

I'd like to quote a big slab of this because I'm at uni and my precis of it has been pretty shocking, but this definitely provides a way of explaining why racism and migration and nationalism are linked, and for me, it gives me a far better idea of how the privileges of whiteness convert in political/material/discursive effects.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:44 / 03.06.04
the link:

http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/words/white.html
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:31 / 03.06.04
Eppy: come to the understanding that your whiteness is not a curse, saddling you with the burden of being a member of an evil race, but a gift, in a way, with the power it implies. The power of whiteness is a tool, and no tool is evil--just the way you use it.

Haus: At the risk of sounding silly, how about if we *pretend* that looking at whiteness might have a function beyond shaming white people? And therefore that possibly looking at what whiteness means may be a useful step in the path to using the inherent privilege of whiteness that you assume in a productive fashion?

Indeed.

Pointing these up because the idea that the process of examining whiteness is used as a (shaming) weapon against someone keeps recurring. I really can't see where I or anyone else says that interrogating whiteness is to be done in order to a)induce guilt b)persecute white people.

So why does this interpretation keep surfacing? Why is it deemed useful to examine masculinity and class privilege but an aggressive/pointless act of persecution to do the same with racial privilege?

reproduction actually means something and colour at the most basic level doesn't (or damn well shouldn't).

Again, I disagree, if I've understood you. What is 'colour's most basic level'? Do you mean that no-one should differentiate bewteen people on the basis of colour? Or that no-one should make value judgements based on it? Or that variations in skin colour should become conceptually invisible?

I'd agree with the second of these, but if you're refusing the others, you're refusing me the right to enjoy/engage with parts of me that are important. Your Polish heritage is important to you, my Bengali one is to me, and is bound up with my race.


Thanks for posting that list, Deva, for something solid to critique. Some of those criteria are less about privilege than about numerical minority status, no.1 strikes me like this, the effects of this can be more serious but needn't neccessarily be so. And as Anna says, 8 is a little specious.

But others are about that minority status - not specifically non-whiteness, here - resulting in greater potential for proscription of personal power...

or about the potential for pyschological weakening based on not seeing yourself reflected/validated around you.

5/6/7 would not have been at all present in my upbringing were it not for my parents, and meant that i got some pretty contradictory messages. (eg learning English history at school, with tales of Empire, and being taught history at home by a mother whose academic specialism was Indian Indepnedence.)

With 19, I'd certainly adapt that along the lines of 'If I am pulled over/recieve attention from the police', I can be sure there are no racial overtones... and say no. The 'stop and search' figures aren't encouraging:

"The latest available figures show there was a 20% rise in stop and searches in 2001-2002. Stops of black people rose by almost a quarter, by 40% for Asians and by a third for other ethnic groups.

Home Office statistics also show black people are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people - although there are wide regional variations. On average, 13% of those stopped are subsequently arrested for an offence."

I've been in a 'stop and search' situation a couple of times. Is that a common experience round here? It would seem to be fact of 'appearing/presenting' white, no matter how meaingless/broad this term may be to one's broader identity/experiences, that S&S is less likely to happen.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:32 / 03.06.04
Do you mean that no-one should differentiate bewteen people on the basis of colour? Or that no-one should make value judgements based on it? Or that variations in skin colour should become conceptually invisible?

I'd agree with the second of these, but if you're refusing the others, you're refusing me the right to enjoy/engage with parts of me that are important. Your Polish heritage is important to you, my Bengali one is to me, and is bound up with my race.

I think your Bengali heritage and the colour of your skin would be two very different things without the prescence of value judgements. Of course your skin shouldn't be the basis of differentiation... your physical being shouldn't be read in the way that it is. Variations in skin colour should become conceptually invisible because they're the rough side of cultural heritage, when I see you I (white girl) should not even notice that your skin is a different shade to mine. That's not to say you should abandon the connection that you have to another society, just that it should mean in the same way that an Eastern European background means to me. The colour of anyone's skin should not be accepted as a valid cultural construction and by accepting it as a factor I think that we do all validate it (and yes I'm talking about what should be).

Why does your colour define you? Isn't it because you've been judged through it? Isn't it because there are some terrible people who think it makes you a lesser person? Are you then happy with the idea of separation through something so simple and utterly ludicrous? I know that culturally at the moment it's more than a pipe dream to write something like this out but shouldn't we be aiming for a society devoid of colour judgements (which is why I had a problem with this thread)?
 
 
grant
19:13 / 03.06.04
I can't recommend Trenka's blog enough.
One of her archived entries has led me back to Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which says early on:

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege.... I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable.

And then gives the above-quoted list.

Maybe thinking in terms of visibility and accountability might get around the air of shame & guilt that seem to be haunting some of the posts here.
 
  

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