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Whiteness.

  
  

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Char Aina
10:21 / 10.11.03
I happen to know some analytic thinkers who happen not to be white

and i know some great dancers who are white. surely what we are trying to do here is not find traits that are unique to a racial group, but ones which can be identified as part of a culture?
no one is suggesting that black people are incapable of linear/analytic thought, much the same way as no one is suggesting no white people are able to rap/jump/reach your womb with every thrust.
 
 
Char Aina
10:25 / 10.11.03
i should mention that i meant that to be directed towards ms. platforms as well. i know that there were a lot of developments from asia in the field of mathematics(and many others), i just think the search for facts for facts' sake is more a white quest than an asian one.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:57 / 10.11.03
surely what we are trying to do here is not find traits that are unique to a racial group, but ones which can be identified as part of a culture?

See I think this is where things get problematic because is whiteness cultural? Is any colour a cultural thing or a thing that creates a culture? I'm certain that class is and I'm sure that colour can, in some way, effect culture but as a thing that's cultural in and of itself- I just don't know.
 
 
Char Aina
11:02 / 10.11.03
i dont think whiteness is cultural, but i did think that we were trying to establish a cultural identity for whitey.
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:57 / 10.11.03
We are saying that whiteness is a concept which signifies in people's experience of the world in a variety of ways, which should be examined lest we repeat the racist rhetoric that white people don't have a race. - Deva

And my response to that is that being part of a large majority does not constitute a common experience. It makes sense to talk about a white experience in the context of a minority in a non-white nation or situation, but not really in the UK.

I don't think Jefe used the term 'english' as synonymous 'white' at any point, so I'm not sure why you're introducing it - Deva

Because saying that "analytic" is "white" is at heart a cultural point. Italians would not, on the whole, accept that they are "analytic" and a british person could well be influenced by a culture which values analytic thinking despite their colour. "White", as Jefe is using it, includes black british people and excludes Italians. So I feel that "white" is implicitly being used to mean "british" by Jefe, though I'll grant that it isn't explicit.

[What I am] trying to talk about is the way that certain characteristics are 'raced', in much the same way that certain characteristics are 'gendered' or 'classed'.

Again the culture clash. Were you to do so, Deva, I would probably consider the statement to be sexist or classist. Black people can dance, Jews are good with money, women are intuitive, the working classes are loyal etc etc.

These are attitudes to fight, in my view, not embrace. I don't intend to upset anyone here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about.

Similarly, the fact that analytical thought is raced 'white' is going to mean that people's racial identification is likely to come into play in their relationship to analytical thought. This seems to me to be a fairly minimal claim which is not at all equivalent to saying that anyone who thinks analytically is racially white.

But I didn't say that. I summarised the position by saying that a person who thinks analytically thinks "like a white person", not that they *are* white. If you intend to mean that there is a historical basis for the association, validated through understood use then my position doesn't really budge, as what is being said seems to act as a reinforcing of existing prejudice, as I see it. It is so reminiscent of racist rants, that I am rather unsettled.
 
 
Linus Dunce
12:33 / 10.11.03
Haus: privilege is not intrinsic to whiteness

Deva: I have to disagree here: privilege is absolutely intrinsic to whiteness, in that whiteness is privileged over brownness.

I'd like to agree with Haus here. White people do, on average, fare better than brown people in western societies, but that's not because white people are privileged. White people fare better by default. The white experience is the norm, the modal average and, BTW, it's not that of the educated middle class. No one gets extra points for being white, which would be a privilege by the correct definition of the word. What happens is, points are deducted for being non-white. That's not privilege, that's negative discrimination. There is a difference. If it is privilege, what is it white people need to give up? The Porsche? The house in Tuscany?

The only thing "we" have that we could give up is our conscious and unconscious acceptance of unfairness. And telling people (nearly all of whom spend their whole lives in a shit job paying back their debts to a bank because they have no other choice) that they are "privileged" is an abuse of the word and unlikely to bring about any constructive change in that direction.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:52 / 10.11.03
Oh, wait, I know this one - we shouldn't use the word 'privilege' because it makes it sound like lovely lovely middle class white people might have their computers taken away from them - sorry, because of "an implied assertion in the term that the proper remedy is a leveling-down, rather than a leveling-up".

Mmmm. Didn't buy it then, don't buy it now.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:28 / 10.11.03
Ignatius I think you're arguing language when really the definition comes down to the same thing. At the root of it all discrimination of all people who have darker skin leads to privileged white people. It strikes me that it's discrimination only when there's a higher proportion of white people and that's an odd way to look at things because you're boiling it down to those rather vague things called statistics. The porsche and other consumer goods are rather beside the point, if in this society you have an advantage as a white skinned person than you are privileged and a poverty stricken black family usually comes off worse than a poverty stricken white family. This is very off topic though and I'm rambling a little incoherently and unsure of my reasoning so...
 
 
Linus Dunce
14:09 / 10.11.03
In the spirit of interrogating my own racial identity, I have realised I have an issue with the use of the word "privilege." No matter how much one writes, to me it will never mean exactly the same thing as "advantage." If you want to say it does, go ahead ...

Actually, I'm quite poor myself at the moment (this internet connection really is on borrowed time), maybe this is colouring my view. I can see how a poor non-white family with an ill-educated white landlord may end up in more trouble than a white family in the same situation. And it's always been obvious to me that it's easier to get a job if you are white. But it should be equally easy for anyone. Merely feeling guilty and ashamed of "privilege" is not going to fix this. After all, one can justify guilty discrimination quite easily: "I would like to let this family stay on in the house and feel guilty that I don't, but they won't have the same financial security as a white family and I can't afford to pay the mortgage without a steady rent income." "I would like to hire this person and feel guilty that I don't, but he just wouldn't fit in with my existing workforce."

The root of many problems of discrimination I think are not that services, jobs etc. are necessarily actively denied to non-white people (though of course they often are) but that there is a huge communication problem: we just don't speak the same language -- I don't mean phonetically, but culturally -- and this is what we should be examining, not whether or not we feel sufficiently "guilty." A realisation that the idea of "white" culture is as much an anachronism as "black" culture might be a start.
 
 
grant
16:28 / 10.11.03
Here's an attempt at a structural map for whiteness:

1. Whiteness is not monolithic, but it appears to be. Personally, for example, I tend to think of myself as of South African & German descent first, and white second. It could be that whiteness is constituted such that nationality matters more than color (and that this isn't true for non-whiteness, where color comes first), but I'm not sure I buy that.

2. Whiteness exists along cultural/linguistic lines. This ties into the nationality idea. In the United States, speech pattern is a significant indicator of whiteness. Sidney Poitier, Colin Powell, Ileana Ross-Lehtinen and Anthony Quinn get "whiteness points," even though they're Afro-Caribbean and Latino, respectively. The better your vocabulary, the closer to the center of whiteness you are.

3. Whiteness values a certain kind of education. Manual labor - even extraordinarily skilled handwork - isn't as white as word-work or think-work. Mastery of words and numbers is more valuable than mastery of physical objects, because that kind of abstract education allows you to master the physical. This may be a condition of modernity, moreso than something essentially white (although the very idea of modernity could be a symptom of whiteness). This also has to do with rule-making.

4. Whiteness invokes rules of propriety, and projects itself into an idealized version of what ought to be. I'm not sure this is unique to whiteness, and might have more to do with the human need to define tribal boundaries. The mores, though, seem to be more abstract than they could be... more concerned with ideals than with material things. "I pledge allegiance to the flag," for instance. White theology - although it comes out of the non-white Middle East - is based around a rather abstract singular deity, whose name has the identical etymology to the word "good" in English (as in the abstract embodiment of "goodness"), and whose primary contribution to His creation was the institution of a code of conduct.

5. Whiteness sees itself as light, in the sense of Enlightenment as knowledge. Whiteness is not only the product of history, but the guardian of history and the inheritor of historical progress. As such, whiteness (believes itself to) equal out to reason. Non-whites are naturally (supposedly) more "emotional". Emotions equal the risk of transgressing the abstract codes of white culture. Thus, the light of whiteness is a cold and distant light. Darkness is equatorial. Whiteness is northern, aligned with snow and ice and a progression of seasons. Linear direction is important, as is a hierarchy in which "up" is good and "down" is bad - the (bright) sky over the (dark) earth.

I'm starting to get all Joseph Campbell now, so I think I'll stop.

Feel free to poke holes in this as they fit.
 
 
grant
16:29 / 10.11.03
By the way, I've tried to avoid the sense of whiteness-as-majority, because I know that that's not always the case. I've been in non-white majority countries and felt acutely white. So some of the above may be based on that.
 
 
cusm
18:43 / 10.11.03
My experience of Whiteness is as a part of a majority, as others have stated. Its in that sense more of an unexperience, as I don't have to think about it. I'm not even confronted by it much. Its not important, normally, as it is the norm.

The term itself is one of meta-racialism. Suddenly, one is no longer British, French, or Italian. One is simply "white" the same way anyone from Africa is "black" and anyone from Asia "yellow". By deferring to the most basic differentiating charastic, race is ignored at the detail level, but made more important at the meta level. Now, you only need to hate certain sets of people, while before you hated everyone not from your own piss-ant European tract of land. So its debatable if its use at all is a step in the right direction. If we see color instead of country and then come to thinking of color as silly and unnecessary to be concerned with (which is easier to do than with refrence to country, which brings back memories of politics), it may be easier to enforce the idea that we're all just monkies with different sorts of fur and get over ourselves.

But back to reality, I think a useful comparason with whiteness would be to consider how other dominant cultures view "outsiders". Asians, for example, are historically as much a lot of cronic racists as Europeans. But the language for someone of an "inferior" race is more one of "non-person" than the dualistic colors used in the west. I think this is a valid point to consider, as this attitude is the same among racists in the west. For really, the majority group is what members of that group define as "proper humans". Anyone else will be seen as less.

Lastly, my perception of beauty is an important factor in whiteness. I find fair skin and fine, easily distinguished features to be attractive, and therefore a sign of "whiteness" in the sense of it being desirable features in a person. A person I find unattractive, I might consider "less white", were I thinking in those terms (I'm not, ugly is ugly, but I've enough of a racist family background to think that way again for the purposes of discussion.) But the point being, if someone is seen as beautiful, they will be more easily accepted into the idea of "whiteness", even if their skin is of a distinctly darker hue. For example, I've heard my mom describe a beautiful African woman as "almost white", which I think speaks volumes. I think from this is rooted ideas of superiority, as surely a more "evolved" person would be more beautiful, as one is thinking of beauty in absolute rather than culturally relativistic terms.
 
 
slinkyvagabond
21:00 / 10.11.03
Um.

Some here have protested that looking at "whiteness" within the framework of a predominately white culture is not productive. That strikes me as such a weird argument. Surely it is the best place to examine the concept? To examine whiteness, shall we say, under stress, for example the scenario of the one white family living in a black area, really seems to be missing the point. Whiteness is constructed from a place of power. (Whether or not individuals are operating from a powerful/privileged/advantageous position is irrelevant, I'm afraid. I'm damn sure that the Saudi royals are richer than my family but they're still just towel-heads or terrorists or whatever to certain people and will always be. They cannot escape their race, notionally I can escape my relative poverty.) Therefore examine it where it is powerful.
 
 
slinkyvagabond
21:24 / 10.11.03
"The thing about being white is that it doesn't mean very much at all, the definition really exists in what you are not, who you are individually." - A dL

Mm, that seems to me typical of the centre of power effectively making itself invisible. We can always turn the focus back onto the other - thus being white becomes about being not-black/Asian/whoever which instead of leading us to examine whiteness leads us to examine blackness etc because we claim to be so dependent on an oppositional definition. Which to some extent is true - I'm sure that just as the state of heterosexuality depends on the definition of homosexuality so whiteness depends on blackness but I think this emphasises the point that power is always attempting to hide itself, to become that blank that white people are taught to see themselves as, by continually refocussing the debate on its supposed deviant, or negative. We're lead to believe that whiteness doesn't mean anything at all, but actually I think we're confusing the absence of having to think about it, [the absence] of being constantly confronted by it as "non-white" (I really hate that term but I can't think of another that wouldn't involve using hideous amounts of "/") people are, with the absence of meaning.
 
 
No star here laces
23:58 / 10.11.03
Lurid - quick point. I would've said that the centuries long tradition of deductive philosophy, studied theology and experimental investigation of the physical sciences in Italian culture seems to point to something of a predilection for analytic thought, particularly when contrasted with, say, Egypt. I'd also say that France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries have an even stronger tradition of analytical rationalism than Britain, so I would strongly refute the suggestion that I was only talking about the English (I'm not even English myself!)

As a mathematician yourself, I'm sure you're aware that there is a difference between saying the means of two populations differ and saying that all members of one population all have the same characteristics. So even if I had been trying to say "white people are, on average, more analytic than black people" it would not have been the same thing as saying "all white people are more analytic than all black people". So individual counterexamples really have very little relevance to any argument about race. (not that I was trying to make any such claim in the first place)

But, that is all by the by - as Deva has pointed out - we are talking about things that are perceived to be culturally white. Thus, to quote an earlier example, although the vast majority of hip hop records are bought by white people, and although some of the biggest selling artists are white, hip hop is seen culturally as black. Therefore it is not necessary for analytic thought to be the sole property of white people for all eternity in order for it to be considered culturally white.

I don't want to labour the point because I"m not absolutely convinced of its rightness - as I mentioned I think the Indian tradition of analytic thought is also very strong. But it was a difference between Europe/America and Asia that struck me very strongly.

And your "thinking like a white person" phrase actually strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that might be said to certain groups using analytic thinking in certain situations.

Whether that is right or wrong is beside the point. Ignorance of prejudice will hardly make it go away...
 
 
at the scarwash
00:10 / 11.11.03
So I'll say it again, I find linear, analytic thought to be the most 'white' thing I can think of. - Jefe

I think that Talmudic scholars, Hindu grammaticians, and Muslim geometricians would probably have issues with that statement.
 
 
at the scarwash
00:16 / 11.11.03
Oh, and is our Whiteness here equivalent to Caucasian? If so, I suppose my above-posted remark is invalid and humbly withdraw it.
 
 
No star here laces
04:32 / 11.11.03
I might refer you to the post immediately above yours in which I directly reference indian analytic traditions.

Anyway I kind of chucked that in as a starter for ten.

I think Grant's points 3,4 and 5 might be a subtler and more accurate description of the same thing.

One way of looking at this might be through culture - what pieces of culture do we find to be definitively white?

(first person to say Skrewdriver gets a smack in the mouth for facetiousness....)

I would have said, for example, that Bach, The Beatles, punk, trance and The Smiths are all very culturally white, to my way of looking at things. But why?

Literature and film are harder to do.

I would say this, but I also think it might be more constructive (and less loaded) to compare whiteness to Chinese-ness rather than blackness. Chinese culture, for example, has a pragmatism and an emphasis on context that I think is less true of whiteness.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:44 / 11.11.03
Jefe: Excellent. We agree then. When you said

So I'll say it again, I find linear, analytic thought to be the most 'white' thing I can think of.

you neither meant that to apply to individuals or some group average, but rather as a way of confronting "ignorance of prejudice". I said it was racist and it seems that you agree with me, but want to make the point that analytic though is "perceived to be culturally white". I've no real argument there. In much the same way we might see ambition, intelligence and hard work as "culturally white" as part of a racist justification for inequality. That said, I think this mode of expression leaves a lot to be desired.

And your "thinking like a white person" phrase actually strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that might be said to certain groups using analytic thinking in certain situations.

Agreed. Though I feel my point was fairly clearly that it is difficult to imagine this not being offensive.

BTW - the discussion of Italian identity is interesting and complex and is, in my experience, slightly at odds with the history you rightly bring up.

grant: not sure about 1 and 4. I think that 2, 3 and 5 are related. Racist thinking sees whiteness as intellectually superior, thereby justifying economic (amongst other) privilege. This is evidenced by education and articulacy, amongst other things. I feel that the dislike of manual labour is a class issue, primarily, but there is obviously going to be some overlap here.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:47 / 11.11.03
what pieces of culture do we find to be definitively white?

Afternoon tea, cricket (colonialism), alphabetic-phonetic language (as a comparison to the Chinese dialects), Christianity (as in its roots), aristocracy (Lord of the Manor), Ealing comedy.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:18 / 11.11.03
See, I'd regard several of those as not 'culturally white' - even cricket and colonialism. Do we start without criteria and then see if we can construct some from what emerges?

I think rock music (as in hair metal etc.) is quite culturally 'white', as is a lot of indie music. I think orchestras are as well, and opera; and ballet too, though not dance as a whole, of course.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:49 / 11.11.03
Well I really meant that cricket emerged as a multicultural sport as a result of white colonialism. So it kind of indicates whiteness to me.

I think opera's a difficult one, it's mostly white and written by white people but look at the setting of Turandot, Madame Butterfly etc. It's a bit like cricket actually.
 
 
Saveloy
16:10 / 11.11.03
Things I think of as culturally 'white':

- Goth (the whitest subculture of all, perhaps?)
- Sci-Fi
- Nihilism

This is almost impossible to do without feeling like an idiot if, like me, you are ignorant about non-white cultures, isn't it? Perhaps that partially explains the reluctance on the part of many to be specific.
 
 
salix lucida
16:21 / 11.11.03
A lot of (white) people here are talking about their experience of whiteness as priveledged majority. I admit I very rarely think about my own such experience in my little corporate drone world, but the conversation (and the funny looks I got for my blue hair in the elevator this morning, as many) brings up memories of when I worked in a part of the city where Black American Culture was the majority, forcing my difference into the forefront.

First of all, I use the term Black American Culture because there is a not-insubstantial visually 'white' population integrated into it (and the other way around). Dress, speech patterns, mannerisms, all that is (sub)cultural help one in such an environment cross those visual barriers, and it is fairly well-accepted where I live -- so long as that is how one has been raised, rather than adopting later and "trying to be Black". There were a few such people where I worked, and there were "culturally white" people in management. I, on the other hand, in the trenches with my rather morbid taste, black wardrobe, and skewed outlook, while visually white and not attempting to adopt this Black American Culture, was pretty much the odd one out. But I got respect and was socially approachable - moreso than the overwhelmingly "white" management. The respect I got was from seemingly thumbing my nose at this default white culture, for having rejected the priveledge that comes with conforming to it and subjecting myself to the same unspoken disapproving superior attitude that everyone else there felt they faced.

"Whiteness", there, was conformity to the standard middle-and-upper class as-seen-on-tv homogenized America. It came with corporate acceptance, better education (though not higher intelligence) and therefore an assumption of relative affluence, and the Man not bustin' yo' ass for no reason. It also came with disrespect for perceived racism the individual may not even perpetrate and generalised resentment for this priveledge. Whiteness could not be overcome past childhood by acting in accordance with another ethnically-defined culture. Whiteness could, however, be overcome by throwing oneself into an alternative, still-white subculture, and thus still taking shit while not pretending to be anything else.
Solidarity among the downtrodden.

I had no idea that's what I was doing, though conversations later with friends that have been in similar situations have the same themes. I'm still not sure if it's really how it works. But it seems like it, and I got some good friends out of the experience that I wouldn't have been able to connect with otherwise.

But that's the only time I think about it.
I'm only white when I'm the minority.

Crazy Whitey, signing off.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:15 / 11.11.03
The better your vocabulary, the closer to the center of whiteness you are.

That's a very interesting phrase. I think what is probably actually meant is "the whiter your vocabulary, the closer to the centre of whiteness you are"...

(Sorry to hit and run - lots of v. interesting stuff here, but I'm out of time right now - this just leapt out at me)
 
 
grant
21:08 / 11.11.03
Heheh. Good catch, that.

I'd like to think I was trying to segue into the idea of having a large vocabulary of "proper" words, but yeah. It's there.
 
 
Mr Tricks
23:23 / 11.11.03
sorry I'm late . . .

an unseelie presence Solid Post... well said.

So at the risk of being incoherient (never stopped me before) and most likely horribly misspelled, I'll just ramble on.

I get the sence that a discussion of "whiteness" as stated amongst "white" folk is difficult. Perhaps in the same way as discussing water to a fish. Once the fish has been pulled out of the water and experiences its absence, it can then begin to define, that, which has pervaded its entire existance. Of course people are much more complex than fish and the concept of "whiteness" is much more abstract than that of water, so the annalogy is clumsy at best.

Still; I think it's well worth examining. The essential sentiment seems to be reinforced by several posts. Ones which indicate insights gained when a "white" person enters a Non-white dominant culture.

While there may be such a thing as a "white-culture" I would say it's more of a construct when compared to a culture built of ethnic/regional identification. While someone from the Dominican Republic can be catagorized as hispanic, alongside someone from Puerto Rico, there's a long history of cultural antagonism that makes good use of racist idology. Interestingly, racism(along with classism, sexism, ageism) really fits a much broader phonominom that can be discribed as RANKism. No matter where you are on the planet, no matter what your skin color, sexual preferences, age, gender or yearly income is, at one point or another you'll end up on the recieving end of being "ranked."

Whiteness = Privilege?
I feel that I will have to come down on the yes side of that question. As a lite-skinned hispanic I've had TO MANY opportunities to benefit from "white privilege." On the other hand, being famular with latin culter and have a grasp of spanish has allowed be to benifit from "non-whiteness" while traveling in non-white regions.

Of course this doesn't mean that globaly whites are richer than non-whites but centuries of white dominance have effected everything from perceptions of beauty to the placement of supermarkets in "low-income" communities, to the intrest rates offered by banks. Sure if you're "white" you're percieved as less of a threat and if you're "black" you're more likely to get randomly pull over while driving.

I think Deva's point...
  • "So whiteness may be unstable, precarious, and assigned to different groups on a sort of sliding scale, but it's still privileged."

...speaks volumes.

I don't think this implies a need to "bring down" the privilaged "whites" but certainly calls for a reevaluation of every norm, from Language to Academia to City Planning and Economic Theory.

hmmm... there was more I wanted to say but I'll have to do so again later...(assuming it's still relevant by then)
 
 
Guy Parsons
12:29 / 12.11.03
I can't think of racial attributes or descriptions without looking back at place-of-origin... hence I see "whiteness" as Westerness, "blackness" as Africaness, "asianess" as being Far Eastern, and so on.

What else was I going to say? Umm, that white-pride or identification isn't going to occur unless whiteness is challenged. Thus, I have more 'pride' or 'identity' as an indie-kid with longish hair after repeated cries of 'poof' and 'ladyboy'. Hence: black-pride (or perhaps simple self-respect) and feminism.

Feel way out of my depth here. As you were...
 
 
Quantum
11:13 / 13.11.03
Great post Unseelie Presence, I agree. For me Whiteness tallies with the colonial overseer stereotype, now typified by middle/senior management in the corporate feudal structure (here in the 'West'). Whiteness is like The Man, and subcultures (Goth, Traveller, anti-war protestor, BDSM etc etc.) seem less 'white' than mainstream authority culture (e.g. the tabloid press).
I like the fish and water metaphor, it doesn't seem like a privelege until it's gone.
 
 
Ex
15:02 / 13.11.03
(Excuse me if this loses coherence, it's a retype of a post I lost in the ether.)

Accepting all the points made about the inherent instability and problematic nature of identity labels based on coralling people into colours, I think interrogating whiteness is worth doing.
Doesn't mean I came up with anything useful at first, though. My take on it as an identity grouping only came into focus when I thought of what being a white woman means to me. The two labels even function in similar ways, to me - consciously, I don't think I'm very attached to either, but I have bugger all experience of the alternatives, I carry both as an external badge, everywhere, and am shaped them more than I could possibly imagine -'whiteness' giving me, I would agree, a hodload of privilege.
Anyway, I'm very conscious that my whiteness, weight and age stick me firmly in a normative category. I see versions of me all over advertising and the media. None of them are right, of course. But non-white (yes, dodgy term) women, I feel, have to go a bloody long way to find any representation of themselves in mainstream culture - and that usually they appear when a company/campaign is trying to designate inclusiveness or multiculturalism. (See E45's latest ad - for everybody's skin.)
And in terms of the beauty myth, I'm supposedly an example of the template from which other non-white women's faces are measured, and described in terms of having features which are too something or not enough something else. I've read accounts of what having 'good' (straight) hair and 'good' (light) skin has meant to black american women. I never have to think of that. Which is scary.
(I've also read rewritings of beauty from a non-white perspective which emphasise white faces as lacking or excessive - and felt instantly pissy and indignant. Which just demonstrates how annoyed I can get when these my advantages are undermined.)

I see a lot of white (me-identified) women rejecting norms of femininity - going for androgyny, or a subculture like punk. But I know that it means something different as an option for us. I'm wary of saying "I can always wear heels and get a proper job" - because that kind of criticism tends to invalidate other white subcultural lives ("That traveller can always chop off his dreds and leave his van and shoot his dog and get a proper job, the lazy bugger"). But on a lot of levels, I feel I'm able (with a light heart and some truly awful haircuts) to reject traditional femninity because as an able-bodied thin white young woman, I feel utterly within arms-reach of it.

That's only some stuff on gender and appearance. I don't feel quite capable of discussing the big things - sex, and work, for starters - yet.
But I'm interested to know whether other posters - who often seem to be drawing a blank about what 'white' might mean - find it easier to conceptualise whiteness when added to a gender or a class, as Xoc mentioned.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:14 / 13.11.03
I certainly do, that's why I kind of rubbished the whole notion of whiteness in the first place, the fact that it had to go hand in hand with my class or gender.
 
 
Olulabelle
15:25 / 13.11.03
So by definition then, the most privileged or advantaged a person could ever be would be what? This?

Male
White
Heterosexual
Right Handed

Or does being white come before being male?

I’ve been thinking about this whole thread a lot, and so far I can only conclude that being white is the least important aspect of who I am bodily (without referring to personality or character.) But that’s quite likely to be because I am white.

I would have said that I am:

Female
Left handed
Heterosexual
White

Which is interesting, because the first two bodily descriptors are the most ‘minority’ aspects of me.

In fact now I think about it, being white is quite possibly a bit like being right handed. (Stay with me!) If you’re left handed, you tend to think about it daily – I do when I iron, when I open a bottle of wine, when I smudge the letters I write. If you’re right handed you don’t think about it at all. It just doesn’t enter your consciousness because it doesn’t need to.

That’s what being white is like.

Whiteness for me is simply a description of what a person looks like, because culturally there is very little group pride or feeling of oneness in being white, like there is in being black or Asian for example. To be white is not to belong to a specific group, other than to imply that one is a/advantaged and b/western. Any pride there perhaps once was in being white and specifically white British, has been taken over by racist groups, and now to say you are proud to be white is tantamount to declaring yourself racist, despite what you actually may mean. It’s just not OK to do that in our society. Imagine if I went out and stood on the street and shouted out ‘I am proud to be white!’ I’d get a very different reaction to someone who stood on the street and shouted ‘I am proud to be black’. The black person would be making a statement. The white person would (probably) be accused of racism.

What I mean is it’s very hard to discuss white identity, or what it means to be white, because being white isn’t considered to be being a minority. Minority groups discuss their situation more, because ‘ism’s mean they are forced to. For instance, I discuss what it means to be female, because sexism exists, I discuss what it means to be left handed because right handedness is preferred/assumed by manufacturers. I don’t tend to consider or discuss what it means to be heterosexual because there is (generally) no ‘ism’ attached to that, just the same as I don’t discuss what it means to be white.

So I would assume that in countries where the majority of people are another colour, not much discussion happens of what it means to be that colour. Because the people who belong to that group are not in the minority they are not confronted by racism/’colourism.’

I’m not entirely sure of the relevance of this, but it’s interesting that in Thailand the Thai word ferrang which everyone assumes to mean ‘white person’, is actually translated as ‘not Thai.’ African, Chinese, European, Indian or American people, in fact every other colour group or nationality in the world, are all put into the same ‘not Thai’ category.
 
 
Mr Tricks
17:35 / 13.11.03
  • "That until there no longer
    First class and second class citizens of any nation
    Until the colour of a man's skin
    Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -
    Me say war."
    ---Bob Marley


olulabelle, the high priestess of Odd:
That was an excellent post, especially:
"now I think about it, being white is quite possibly a bit like being right handed. (Stay with me!) If you’re left handed, you tend to think about it daily – I do when I iron, when I open a bottle of wine, when I smudge the letters I write. If you’re right handed you don’t think about it at all. It just doesn’t enter your consciousness because it doesn’t need to."

I would tend to agree with that, as well as the bit about Male over whiteness. Take the example of some-one like Genral Colon Powel.

While traveling in Africa I learned the word "Toobob" which was translate to us as being "white American." The implication of course was that all Americans where RICH... and really we where... even the poorist of "us." Take for example the accessability of toilet paper in a public bathroom.

Anyway, I was traveling with a rather mixed group of people which includes several "whites;" 3female 3male, a female student from china, and 1 Afro-American male and 2 females. I counted my self as 1 male Hispanic.

Interestingly I found that if I spoke Spanish I was warmly accepted, more so once my "dreds" grew in (Ironicly I was named Bob Marley by the locals... though at the time I had never listened to his music; which course is regretable in retrospect). The Afro-American females where also quickly accepted more so when they stuck with the handful of tribal words they learned and stuck with any language other than english (spanish or french). The Chinese student was never refered to as a Toobob, while the whites and the afro-american male frequently had that label attached to them.

Dispite his skin color, he could not escape having "whitness" applied to him. Though he was Afro-American, being Male and an english speaking American superseeded any identity his skin color may have offered. An extraordinary phonomenon in light of the subtle sexism the women experienced, and the "exceptions" offered to me via language and superficial image.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
17:37 / 13.11.03
BiP, certainly I accept your point, I wasn't really as if I were expecting interrogations to be carried out by Matthew Hopkins. But then again demonising wasn't intended by it's dictionary definition and once again my low ability to communicate has pulled me up short.

Where I'm going with this is that unless the whole whites to interrogate whiteness thing is designed to be tea and biscuits for the socio-politically aware then stuff like this should really trade on a language with more of an open face than 'interrogation'. It carries a weight that is unlikely to turn over fast in the event of a definition.

If the language doesn't turn on the lowest common denominator understanding then the non-white commentators are going to find themselves sorely disappointed.

I apologise for the rottage.
 
 
Cat Chant
18:06 / 13.11.03
Ah, Lurid, my old nemesis...
Okay, I'm going to have one more go at this, and then I'm going to stop, because I think it's derailing a really important and potentially lovely thread (possibly we should start a meta-thread):

Me: [What I am] trying to talk about is the way that certain characteristics are 'raced', in much the same way that certain characteristics are 'gendered' or 'classed'.

Lurid: Again the culture clash. Were you to do so, Deva, I would probably consider the statement to be sexist or classist. Black people can dance, Jews are good with money, women are intuitive, the working classes are loyal etc etc.

I think you're conflating two very different things ('racial' and 'raced', probably: cultural studies jargon does sometimes have a specific meaning, and I do use the words gendered and raced [rather than 'sexual' or 'racial'] for a reason, not just because they look trendier). It seems to be fairly common-sensical to me that - for example - a man wearing a skirt and lipstick means something different from a woman wearing a skirt and lipstick; a white person dreadlocking their hair means something different, in terms of that person's relationship to various cultures, histories, religions, etc, from a black person dreadlocking their hair. I think talking about how things are gendered or raced is, in fact, absolutely opposed to saying 'Women are intuitive', 'Black people are incapable of analytical thought'. Your statement reads to me as though you are saying that it is impossible to talk about race, racial identity or the politics of 'race' without repeating the rhetoric of the BNP, which I would find a rather alarming position.

Anyway, that's my last attempt to clarify my position on this. Let me answer some of BiP's original questions (incidentally, I'm listening to that song as we speak, BiP):

What is whiteness, how is it constructed, what white identities are there, how do you relate to/inhabit them? Are there positive/aspirational white models? Do you have white pride? is it possible? Desireable?

Mostly, I was thinking about all these questions and thinking 'Dunno, dunno, no, no, no' ('white pride' is a vile, vile idea, says my whiteness). But I'll tell you what is the beginning of a 'yes' to me, and that, as I said early on, is music. There are a few singers whose voices - the grain of the voice, Barthes calls it - create emotional spaces that I inhabit, that take me apart and put me back together again, completely known and better. Or they are like the 'muscular music' in Barthes' 'Musica Practica', an experience of listening to music that is strenuous and rigorous, like playing music. They give me a way of being me; a strength and a language of being me.

Among them: the bloke out of the Divine Comedy, Morrissey, Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and David Bowie (though less so these days). They're all recognizably white voices (at least to me), though I don't explicitly experience the dissolution and re-formation, the bliss, that they provoke in me as a racial identification (that is, I don't think 'God, I love being white!' - but then I don't exactly think at all in this experience). But it is part of a way of identifying or being identified, beyond my conscious will - they sing in me and I sing in them - and it does seem to be specifically white (men's) voices that do it... There's a specific resonance to the strength in them, and a particular kind of fragility or vulnerability to them: thin voices, many of them, only precariously on the note, singing from the throat.

(Hmm. Another thing I thought of when I was thinking of white cultural forms - Goth, I think, is a specifically white aesthetic in some of its forms - like the vampire in the white European imaginary; bloodless, pale, attenuated, limp, yet strong in a way that has no obvious physical basis. Like Morrissey's voice again? No, because my white voices have associations of a structural solidity, a bone-deep strength, where vampires' strength is sort of mystical, not bodily. Hmm.)

(The women's voices that give me a similar sort of feeling are, oddly enough, white women who famously sound 'black': Melanie Safka, Janis Joplin. But the breakability in their voices isn't as enjoyable an element of the strength, because of them being women and 'breakable women' being too much of a fetish object. Don't know what that says in terms of the raced positioning of my relationship to my boys' voices...)
 
  

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