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Whiteness.

  
  

Page: 12(3)45

 
 
Cat Chant
18:11 / 13.11.03
By which I mean men's voices, obviously, though I think the fetishizing of the choirboy soprano is a very white thing as well: sexless, spiritualized, 'angelic', pure voices... I suspect the slightly rougher, but still with something thin/clear about them, voices I like are playing off that paradigm to some extent.
 
 
Cat Chant
19:33 / 13.11.03
Whiteness sees itself as light,

In really, really pragmatic ways. One of the things that really spun my head in the Richard Dyer book was the discussion of the history of photographic/film technology, and how difficult it is to photograph white and black people in the same shot because colour film (and, to a lesser extent, b&w) is based around the ability to represent white (ie, Caucasian/pinky-grey) skin realistically. (Apparently if you want to get the colour adjustment on your TV right, you should concentrate on the white faces - everything else will follow.) Not sure I've explained this very clearly - maybe someone else who's read the book can do better...
 
 
Quantum
10:48 / 14.11.03
So by definition then, the most privileged or advantaged a person could ever be would be what? This?
Male
White
Heterosexual
Right Handed (Olulabelle)
If only! Let's not forget 'Wealthy' at the top of any list of privileges, which can largely override other factors- a rich black left handed lesbian will get a lot less grief than a poor one. And possibly 'Educated' as an equally important indicator of privelege.

I'm all those things 'lula listed and I'd rank myself as;
Male
Heterosexual
White
Right Handed
..but as she says, these things are largely invisible to me and I almost never notice them because the world I inhabit is geared to pander to people like me. If I was in Africa my Whiteness would be first, if I lived in a left-handed world that would be first etc.

So if whiteness is largely affected by location, and is in contrast to the environment, what valid conclusions can we draw about Whiteness as a universal? Any? Can we even examine British or even English whiteness? It's quite different to be white in Tottenham than in Winchester, I can tell you.
 
 
Ex
11:18 / 14.11.03
Something else I thought of while debating my christmas plans - Family stuff.

I find it quite easy to have a semi-detatched (or indeed, entirely detatched with a large perimeter and CCTV) relationship with my family.
I know that large and/or extended (as opposed to two-kid, nuclear families) are seen as a common feature of a lot of non-white cultures (I think the idea of white working class and white catholic families having a lot of children is an interesting complicating factor there).
(In fact - side-point - I get quite fed up with mainstream dramas of non-white community lives focusing on the young upstart, fighting their family prohibitions and traditions to become a much more individualistic hero, liberated in sex and gender terms. I know many non-white people feel that to be the case, but it's a very palatable idea for white culture to depict - that non-white culture is always 'old-fashioned' and repressive. Feels like white culture slapping itself on the back.)

Anyway, I was just thinking that - my family's just my family. If I want to celebrate my heritage, my culture, hang out with people who share me background and skin colour, my (lapsed) religion - mainstream Brit society pretty much does it for me. It observes my religious holidays, the newspapers report my news, the radio - well, the radio more or less plays my music (Morissey was on Radio 2 yesterday, and one can't be too fussy).
So I don't need my family or my hometown community for any of that. And if I were to have little me-clones as childrens, I wouldn't feel a burning need to preserve or pass on or make them aware of any aspects of their ethnicity. I suppose I'd like it if they knew their great-grandfather worked on Portsmouth docks, but it's not an urgent need. They'll get it all elsewhere.
So - being white means I can get my culture sanctioned everywhere - and seeing as I have a minimal amount invested in my parents, if they tick me off, I can phone them less.
This is, again, implying a generalisation about the experience of non-white people, but I'm mainly spinning off anthologies of coming out stories by queers of colour, where rejecting the family seemed less of a solution, to many contributors, than it does in white coming out stories.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:38 / 14.11.03
(wow. this is so interesting, and thanks for the fab answers, Ex and Deva. oh, and I'm not here, carry on. *g*)
 
 
grant
18:35 / 14.11.03
Deva: Not sure I've explained this very clearly - maybe someone else who's read the book can do better...

I haven't read the book (that I can remember), but it seems like Dyer's describing a kind of unforeseen technological result of (supposed) omnipresence. a human = a white human, so that's what the equipment is calibrated for. I should know this, with all the video work I've done, but I wonder if that's true for new digital cameras. The Canon XL-1 (relatively recent "prosumer" digital video camera) seemed to do fine in getting black and white faces together in projects I've worked on, but I was doing sound for those.

I also wonder if whiteness, in the negative sense, is associated with blandness in the UK. Like, mayo on white bread, overboiled pasta, Midwestern macaroni and cheese, Martin Mull comedy routine whiteness. Sort of a flipside of being the norm.
 
 
Mr Tricks
19:25 / 14.11.03
So by definition then, the most privileged or advantaged a person could ever be would be what? This?
Male
White
Heterosexual
Right Handed (Olulabelle)
Let's not forget 'Wealthy' at the top of any list of privileges, which can largely override other factors- a rich black left handed lesbian will get a lot less grief than a poor one. And possibly 'Educated' as an equally important indicator of privelege.(Quantum)

Good points,

Consider also that Access to "education" is a more readily "white" convention... as recently debated with U.S. supreme court review of Affirmative Action policies.
Also, in general terms, access to "wealth" is largely "white;" at least in the U.S. Of course there are non-white millionares, but what's the first image that pops into your head when thinking of Millionares? Especially if you think in terms of "family wealth" as opposed to "self made" wealth.

grant:
interesting you comments could also cross over to the use (by non-whites) of terms like "*Bannanna" or "**Oreo."

*Bannanna:
A terms used to discribe Americanized Asians (orientials?); Yellow on the Outside, White on the inside.

**Oreo:
Same thing for African Americans; Black on the outside, white on the inside.

The closest "white" equivilent I can thing of it "Wigger."
 
 
Disco is My Class War
20:22 / 14.11.03
This will be short, cuz I only have tes before I have to leave for work.

The thread seems to be going in three different directions. On one hand, there are the people articulating what practices/lifestyles 'are' white, which may or may not be essentially 'true' (ie privilege, analytical thinking). Secondly, we've got people talking about their own personal experience of being 'white'. Thirdly, we have the cultural studies kids who are thinking in terms of representation, the ways that meanings circulate -- perhaps in terms of behaviour (see muscular music) but it's the way representation works, and influences practices, rather than the way people are. I would encourage folks to talk about things in the third way, if only because it might clear up some of the arguments around what *is* white and what *isn't*... There is no is or isn't. Let's forget ontology.

So, white trash. (Only a minute left now.) White trash interests me because it's a raced and classed designation. It's not British, and its cultural specificity (I may be wrong) seems to come from a belief-system in American culture that whiteness and lumpenproletariat-ness are mutually exclusive categories. Not only is there a kind of aspirational distinction between modes of working-classness (say, working-class and upwardly-mobile, disciplined, versus poor and non-aspirational) but those classes are very raced. To specify that the 'trash' are white means you have to assume that most of the 'trash' are non-white to begin with.

There's an interesting example of how race and clas intersect in the production of meanings of 'whiteness'. Now I have to fly.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:17 / 14.11.03
Right... from the very beginning and I hope this makes sense because my eyes are closing as I type.

It's been suggested by various non-white commentators recently that one of the most useful things in thought terms that can be done for the future of race relations is for white people to interrogate whiteness.

This for various reasons but mainly as it's beginning to be seen by race relations activists as being one way out of some of the impasse situations that the 'multiculturalism' discourse often find itself right now.

Otherwise, we'll keep getting mulitculturalism/racism/nationalism debates that have to take on the weight(and therefore the fears/emotional investments) of unexamined white identity as well as the culturally-specific issues at hand.

If we're going to look at this from a point of view that locates itself in the cultural exchange of meaning and representation than we have to recognise the problems with postmodernism. It has governed the notion of multiculturalism in recent years and really puts forward a relative view. There are few certainties, if any, when you're taking a postmodernist stance. That is really why the approach to multiculturalism has been in so much trouble and why I dislike this examination of whiteness so much. In order to examine you need to compare because there is no definition of whiteness that does not rely, in the postmodern frame, on our perception of minorities, on the relativity of cultures and thus with such intense recognition of difference the debate continues and is not resolved.

Examining white identity is frankly a lifetimes work. It is possible to examine a minority group, it's possible to generalise about them because you can apply very strict terms and conditions to the subject of your scrutiny. You can say, what do progressive, reform and hasidic Jews have in common and what does it mean? Limiting whiteness means that you're not examining whiteness but are examining British white culture and that's something different and much easier to approach.

My problem with this thread so far has not been in my own knowledge of the problems of examining my own whiteness. It lies in the idea that you can generalise that much in the current frame of cultural theory- were you to examine a white minority in another country you would get a picture that might work but in applying such observation to a majority you run across magnificent problems because the majority divides itself in to minority groups. Groups defined by cultural background, religion, sexuality and these groups are at odds with one another. It becomes a contextual discussion... what do these people have in common? It becomes a discussion about white brits and the things that each of them possess within a certain culture and thus is limited. It's fine in reference to that culture but then the term white trash which is not really a part of British language must be examined out of that context and within another. That is why the postmodernist, multicultural argument is flawed and why it's necessarily difficult to place whiteness just as it is ridiculous to take one guy from the Middle East, one from Pakistan and one from Zimbabwe and ask them about blackness.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:22 / 14.11.03
Oh and one more thing... a misquote from one of the last British colonial authors:

'Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only whiteness seems to distinguish among them'.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
12:56 / 22.11.03
Who Invented White People?
 
 
at the scarwash
21:20 / 24.11.03
As absolutely otherizing as he was, Durrell could certainly turn a phrase.

"White trash" is certainly a descriptor that polarizes the thusly-signified against other colors of supposed trash. I think it's a mistake to assume however, that it comes from a conception of the lumpenproletariat as living a less-than-white lifestyle. I can't trace the expression, but I would posit that it was first applied to white sharecroppers, as opposed to whites of any class that owned their own property. This would explain why the adjective "white" was considered necessary. This is only conjecture, based upon my personal knowledge of who gets called "white trash."
 
 
No star here laces
06:42 / 25.11.03
From Arundhati Roy's "The end of imagination":

Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man who ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

So I want to talk about the thing that I think has determined a lot of the posts of this thread, but has also been pussy-footed around.

Lets talk about guilt and shame.

If a race can be said to have pride (and they frequently are) and people can be proud of their race, then can't (and shouldn't?) other emotions be associated with race too? If a race can have an identity, then that identity can have a mood, can't it?

The tricky thing about race is that it doesn't really matter how you personally see it. It's how all those other people with a different colour see it, and by extension you, that matters.

Black people in the US weren't treated as second class citizens, and subhuman animals for decades just because they didn't stand up for themselves and have pride in their race. It happened because white people saw them that way.

So, fellow whiteys, we probably ought to face facts and realise that most of the world sees us as arrogant, soulless colonizing scum who have raped, pillaged and fucked with the world in a pretty much unchecked fashion for about five hundred years.

And I don't know about you, but that makes me feel fairly ashamed.

And I'm afraid that colouring your hair won't make anybody who feels that way see you as any less white, just as a black man in a suit would still be a 'just an uppity nigger'.

Because that's pretty much the problem with race. Unfortunately the vast majority of humanity do think along racial lines. (Talk to a chinese person about Malays or Indians if you want to get a real shock.) And so long as people think along racial lines, individuals and individual races don't get to determine what other people think of them.

So an intelligent, wise person like Roy (who certainly knows what she is doing) can use words like "meathooks in the brain" in conjunction with "whiteness" and in one sense be considered justified and accurate in doing so...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:46 / 25.11.03
So perhaps, as someone who places themselves right in the centre of white cultural shame you would now like to analyse precisely what's wrong with that?

Shame surely takes racism and drags it on. Not only does it make the difference between people even more distinct, not only does it segregate people further but you are normalising that segregation by feeling guilty for being born a certain way. You feel cultural shame for a privilege you can't control and that simply isn't right. You should enjoy that privilege, you should feel damn lucky that you're white and middle class and a myriad of other things and work towards thinking at odds with racial lines and difference. That's all you can do because an anti-racist stance needs to become normal and not in any way radical.
 
 
_Boboss
09:22 / 25.11.03
shoelaces, wasn't it you on t'other page who said something along the lines of 'spent my whole life trying to be as non-white as possible' ? that kind of implies you must have a pretty solid working definition of whiteness already. is it shame that is the prime motivator of this effort to disassociate your-self from your-skin colour?

knowing your love of hiphop and etceteras, how does your non-white stance fit with the core hiphop concept of 'keeping it real yo'?
 
 
_Boboss
09:25 / 25.11.03
sorry just read that back and it sounds a bit arsey. not meant to be arsey at all, i'm just interested. soz
 
 
No star here laces
23:37 / 25.11.03
Tryphena, that's exactly why this is a fascinating topic - it's got that many wrinkles.

Agreed - shame does contribute to racism.

BUT - given that the perception is out there that "the white race" has sinned, is it better to feel shame or not?

And lets distinguish between guilt and shame - I don't feel guilty - I don't think that I've done anything wrong. But I do feel ashamed when people look at me and see "oppressor".

And if the eventual goal is, as you put it, for "an anti-racist stance to become normal" what is going to get us there quicker - white people being apologetic, or white people pretending there's nothing wrong?

I guess one of the things I'm trying to get at is that the genie is out of the bottle here. The majority of humans on the planet probably now have a fairly negative set of assumptions about white people. So what's the response? How do you turn that around, and given that we have all the privilege, can you or should you? I certainly don't think my "enjoying the privileges of being white" is going to help make your average starving beggar on the streets of calcutta see me in any more of a positive light.

Khaologan, "trying to be as non-white as possible" was a glib comment designed to amuse. But yes, I do have a strong working definition of whiteness. And, speaking personally, I've got very little interest in keeping things real. Quite the opposite, really.
 
 
_Boboss
08:40 / 26.11.03
ah
 
 
Rage
19:34 / 28.11.03
Why are the majority of LSD users white? What about comic book readers? Industrial/cyberkids? Internet users, even? David Bowie is wicked cool- yet nobody likes that Bush guy. I have some white friends. I heard I was white the other day, but it didn't really phase me. White people are pretty good at creating new inventions and starting wars. Got no "white pride" over here: the majority of people who do are obvious reactionaries. If anyone wants to change this it's gonna take a lot of work.
 
 
cusm
22:15 / 28.11.03
soulless colonizing scum who have raped, pillaged and fucked with the world in a pretty much unchecked fashion for about five hundred years.

Everybody raped, pilliaged, and fucked with everyone else regardless of race for the remainder of human history. That Northern Europeans were on top of the game in the last 500 years is meaningless in the light of history as a whole. If you want to feel ashamed of something, be ashamed of humanity itself, not one part of it. There are no innocent parties here.

And if the eventual goal is, as you put it, for "an anti-racist stance to become normal" what is going to get us there quicker - white people being apologetic, or white people pretending there's nothing wrong?

White people not thinking of themselves as "white people" at all, and everyone else following suit with their own race. And then, weeding out attitudes of aggression until men become as timid sheep. For as long as people are nasty to eachother and favor one person over another, these problems will continue. Racial predejudice is no different that religious or political predejudice. Its just a different meme to compete with others of its ilk. As long as people have different ideas, they'll fight about it and hate eachother, and frankly that's just fine considering the stagnantcy of the alternative. But I'm ranting now, aren't I?

I do find the bit on LSD use interesting, though. I'll have to support that, in that the only black folks I've known to take the stuff were selling it to me, and of those I can count teribly few. Though I think the point there is less a black/white issue so much as urban culture vs the sort of counter culture into LSD. Drugs draw a particular sort looking for the experiencce they have to offer, a topic of interest on its own. Urban street culture just isn't into trip, which is funny considering the widespread use of "trippin" as a synonym for "crazy". And as for the culture into LSD, while predominantly white, aren't they largely counter to what might be considered "white culture"?

This leads me to thinking of "white" as having terribly little to do with skin color at all. "White" is "The Man", the perceived dominant culture and ruling elite. The attitude would be the same regardless of who was on top. Those who get ahead at the game are hated by those who they step on on their way up. So should I go to some third world country in Africa, its Bush they'll be seeing when they throw stones at me, not me at all. For this I say that Whiteness is a lie, an illusion, a stereotype to identify The Current Oppressor. Its a fantasy. It just has the unfortunate nature of being linked to a skin color.
 
 
No star here laces
03:03 / 29.11.03
Now why didn't I realise it was all so terribly convenient? Silly me.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
11:29 / 29.11.03
It occurs to me looking through this thread that when you are speaking of 'whiteness' aren't you really meaning 'class' ? A concept that then allows 'Powell' and 'Rice' to exist alongside 'Bush' and 'Blair'. The problem with the idea of 'whiteness' is that it is based on the non-to-secret model of human rights, the liberal tolerant version where we all are supposed to formulate his or her phantasy of our guilt and/or victimisation. You could say what is wrong with this but personally I think what is wrong with this is that if we start using concepts of whiteness we are assuming that only a person directly affected by their suffering and oppression can tell the story of their suffering. So to invert the 'whiteness' argument - only a black woman can really know and say what it means to be a black woman etc. But as endless radical philosophers have pointed out notably Lyotard and Deleuze te reference of authentic experience as the basis for an ethical argument always ends up in a reactionary position.

The point about using 'class' is that anyone can use it without falling into the trap of using terms like 'whiteness'.

regards
s
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:18 / 02.12.03
reference of authentic experience as the basis for an ethical argument always ends up in a reactionary position

Leading on from this notion, as this thread appears to be some kind of thought experiment, what happens if we entirely reverse 'white' and 'black' in BiP's original post? Are we comfortable with the result? I'm certainly not because the reversal brings up the notion of segregation in full force as does the original post if you look at it in the right light. The post basically, in reverse asks what all black people have in common. All black people. Is that generalisation not rather racist? I don't ask a British asian kid where they're from originally or assume that they have anything in common with a British kid of West Indian origin. I don't want to be treated in that way myself. It reeks of ignorance to ignore class, location and cultural background.

BUT - given that the perception is out there that "the white race" has sinned, is it better to feel shame or not?

Not. The white race may have sinned but so has the black race, Jews circumcise their male babies and African tribes circumcise their female children. Better to feel guilt about sitting at home during a protest against a man who is committing racist acts of a religious nature by placing people in the camps at Guantanamo.

what is going to get us there quicker - white people being apologetic, or white people pretending there's nothing wrong?

Neither. We shouldn't apologise for the things that we are not responsible for but neither should we ignore a problem. There aren't two choices here, there are a myriad of decisions before each of us. Join the anti-Nazi league, vote against the BNP, campaign against racism and speak out against racist language if you hear it bandied about around you but don't feel shame for being white because if you're born white, you're born white and if you're born black than you're born black.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:45 / 02.12.03
Tryphena:

The post basically, in reverse asks what all black people have in common. All black people.

And the answer is: that they're black. Then the interesting stuff comes in, which is when every black person in the world (and maybe some non-black people as well) posts to the thread about the different things that 'being' 'black' means to them, both through their own feelings of identity/belonging/history and through the ways in which they get interpellated as black by other people. Don't personally see that as generalizing, racist, or attempting to ontologize blackness: exactly the opposite, in fact.

An analogy I've been thinking about recently is identifying as a slash fan. It is strikingly impossible to generalize from someone's being a m/m slash fan to their sexual practice (on the B7 list I'm on there are straight monogamous men and women, polyamorous queer women, monogamous married-type lesbians, and probably a ton of practices and desires that don't get talked about so much). When I say that being a slash fan is part of the way I experience my sexuality as queer, the straight women don't get all hysterical and tell me that I'm generalizing and anti-het, they tell me about how slash is part of heterosexuality for them. This is the very house of difference, dude!

Why is it so difficult to do the same for race?

BiP, still thinking about being white, now along the lines of the adjectives I use for... sort of exoticized, 'darker' white people ('vivid' was the one that struck me while I was listening to a paper by an olive-skinned lovely with floaty hair at a conference last weekend) and how they impact backwards onto my own 'blank' whiteness (asked my gf and apparently none of my Eastern European genes show up to give me a gypsy allure. hmph)... I wonder whether part of the difficulty of thinking about the 'positive'* attributes of being white middle-class is that it's internalized/experienced as a series of 'nots' or absences. Not laughing too loudly/ wearing too much makeup or heavy gold jewellery/ braiding hair. It's also a position it's easy to wriggle sideways from, because whenever the characteristics of the white middle-class are pinpointed and dissected as such (usually in comedy), one is usually able to find enough distance from it to laugh and go "God, yeah, those public-school wankers! More champagne, Crispian?"** As if just having any particular class/race markers were, in itself, not white middle-class and thus 'other'. (Wonder how things like Goodness Gracious Me fit in here - same sort of structure of identification-disidentification going on there?)

Back when I have more ideas.

*I don't mean positive as in good, I mean as in actually existing rather than just notbeingblack.

**Okay, that's upper-class. Never mind.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:34 / 02.12.03
Don't personally see that as generalizing, racist, or attempting to ontologize blackness: exactly the opposite, in fact.

So the massive difference between black (white) people of different location and situation is totally overlooked? Or do you attempt to conceive of it as all falling under the same heading? And what is the aim of this interrogation of blackness (whiteness)?

I know I've opposed this thread dreadfully and I don't mean it as a slight but this seems like a negative thread to me and has all the way through. I think it's an example of the way we segregate ourselves and it actually upsets me that people seem so happy and gung-ho, all out to go ahead and do it. I would like to know, in a bid to feel less unhappy about the reactions of people on this board which I think reek of middle class guilt towards their own colour, who suggested (the theorist?) in the first place that we interrogate whiteness?
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:53 / 02.12.03
I'm in hearty agreement with Tryphena here so should probably leave the thread to her, but just one comment.

Why is it so difficult to do the same for race? - Deva

Essentially, Deva wants to explore the plurality of white experiences as a way of examining the question. The objections that some of us have, is that what you end up doing is just exploring the plurality of human experiences. If no effort is made to justify the attribution of whiteness, then what have you really done? I mean, 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. Also, the comment on "darker" white means that the discussion of whiteness excludes certain europeans, say.

I don't think one can say that the description of certain very specific cultural groupings counts as "whiteness" or a contribution to understanding it. Certainly not without some justification. To do so requires that we see the colour of someones skin as overriding pretty much everything else.
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:14 / 02.12.03
FTR, I think that there is an interesting analysis of whiteness to be had more directly in terms of privilege. Namely, what does it mean to be white in a first world country which has a minority of non-whites and a continuing history of racism? For instance, what advantages, economically and socially, can we identify as being related to colour of skin. I'm thinking job oppurtunities, the entirety of the legal system and all manifestations of the absence of racism both institutional and otherwise.

Having said that, it strikes me that what I am describing is really a enquiry into racism rather than "whiteness". I suppose that betrays where I am coming from.
 
 
Cat Chant
19:08 / 02.12.03
Me: every black person in the world (and maybe some non-black people as well) posts to the thread about the DIFFERENT things that 'being' 'black' means to them [caps added]

Tryphena: the massive DIFFERENCE between black (white) people of DIFFERENT location and situation is totally overlooked? [caps added]

No, the thread is about the massive difference etc. That's what my whole post was about. Can you tell me how you read it as homogenizing, please, so I can not do it again?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
07:58 / 03.12.03
ok, extremely tired and fried but a quick bunch of references for Tryph. The kind of thing I'm thinking of, basically.

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose.
Bhabba, Homi. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse”,
(Dyer, Richard. White.)
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.
edited , i think, by toni morrison - Race-ing, Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality.
bell hooks. Representations of Whiteness. In Black Looks: Race and Representation.


and I'm not hiding away from this conversation, i'm just not in any state right now to respond thoughtfully.

When i can, i will.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
08:05 / 03.12.03
"what happens if we entirely reverse 'white' and 'black' in BiP's original post? "

As you then go on to demonstrate, it's not a simple reversal. It's hugely contextual. It doesn't translate in the same way as a strict reverse image.

(and half my point is that the interrogation of blackness goes on all the time, without much thought as to aims/whys, it's just accepted as so. )

And i'm in no way suggesting(have i anywhere in this thread?) that non-white races don't have their own dubious histories to come to terms with. But that's probably another thread. Start it and i'll contribute enthusiastically.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:33 / 03.12.03
It does add up to the same thing. It segregates in the same way, the behaviour of a person categorising people by colour itself is wrong not (only) the history behind it. The interrogation of blackness is a bad thing, people in the music forum are always criticising NME terribly for treating blackness as an entity rather than simply the colour of a persons skin and to me it does reverse perfectly.

This thread does not take difference in to account because it fails to account for the fact that whiteness does not currently exist. You're in the process of actually building a dominant construct that we would be better without. It's not that white people don't walk on British streets everyday but the concept of whiteness is not one that is in our everyday but one that we are groping for. That's what we need to do, this construct would be negative. 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. All of you are assuming that white means automatic privilege in this country. For all of us it does but not for everyone. An asylum seeker who's white is treated just as terribly as a black asylum seeker, sometimes worse because being white they are assumed to be privileged wherever they go. If we analyse whiteness from within we need the man who's gone to his local pub every night for 20 years, the immigrant from Serbia, the aristocrat who's lost all his money. Those people aren't here and whiteness is a false construct when you consider how wide it is. This thread does nothing but show an inherent racism in all of us or at the very least a need to box ourselves up and categorise people by skin colour. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:06 / 03.12.03
(People seem to arguing at cross purposes here and it's all getting rather heated. I hope this post helps...)

Surely, Tryphena, the point is that "whiteness" does exist as a construct, however artificial - and it exists, although this might seem paradoxical, in its own invisibility. It exists as the inverse of a construct of "blackness" or perhaps more accurately "non-whiteness", it exists as a constructed absence of idiosyncratic values assigned to an "other"... This is how ideas of a "norm" or default setting are constructed. (Obviously it's not desirable that this should have happened, which is what at some points in your argument you seem to be implying that people are saying, as if they are wanting something to be so rather than claiming to observe that it is so.)

Now, I agree that when invited to consider the kind of values that are attributed when these constructions are made (by colonialism, Orientalism, call it what you like), there *is* a danger of talking about them as if they were inherent. And once you start doing that, then yes, basically you are doing the same thing, and adding to that construction, and this is completely undesirable.

But I also think that to "interrogate whiteness" can also mean something else. It can mean to trace the very artificiality and spuriousness of the values that are attributed to "whiteness" and then bring them to light, expose them for what they are, rubbish them, undermine the construction. Because if people *don't* do that, then these assumptions will continue to be made, "whiteness" will continue to have certain values assigned to it which ultimately help perpetuate a very colonial way of thinking. You've reiterated your opposition to segregation, but surely you can't fight segregation without knowing as much as possible about how, why, where and when it occurs. And I do think that one of the ways it occurs is in the unconscious, internal acceptance of a constructed "whiteness" by white people. So inviting them to recognise this, and interrogate it, which is what I think this thread is doing at its best, isn't wrong - it may in fact be very useful/beneficial. (Hope this is clear.)
 
 
No star here laces
13:03 / 03.12.03
I would also add, further to this, a point I've tried (unsuccessfully) to make several times in this thread.

The assumption running through a lot of these posts is "there is no accepted concept of whiteness".

This is the foundation of the argument "if we create a concept of whiteness, then that furthers racism".

But I have to beg to utterly differ.

There is an accepted concept of whiteness, just not one held by white people. Most non-white people have a very clear idea of what whiteness means.

I live in a place where white people are less than 2% of the population and am constantly encountering an asian view of what whiteness means. I get called "ang mo" and "gwai lo" (meaning "red-hair" and "ghost") and am subject to all sorts of assumptions about my character and beliefs on the basis of my colour.

This is the core of the issue about race: it does not matter what you personally think your race means. The others who are not of your race have a fixed opinion of it, regardless.

Obviously this sucks. But it should also be acknowledged. Therefore protesting the existence of this thread simply goes to show just how blinkered white people can be about the experience of people of another colour.

Can you imagine a group of Indians saying "we should not discuss what it means to be Indian, because we should not encourage white people to have a stereotypical view of us".

I mean, come on!
 
 
cusm
14:40 / 03.12.03
Can you imagine a group of Indians saying "we should not discuss what it means to be Indian, because we should not encourage white people to have a stereotypical view of us".

I think you're hitting the problem there, actually. 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?

Its therefore not that we need to interrogate whiteness, so much as stop interrogating blackness. That's progress. Interrogating anythingness is only continuing to perpetuate racial thinking and attitudes. This stuff is never going to go away if we can't stop making it so much of an issue.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:36 / 03.12.03
This is a bit rushed because I'm at work, I hope I've covered my ground and actually written what I mean, if not I'll get back and sort it out later...

Though the writing of it may seem callous I do agree with Cusm. We need to interrogate not whiteness but the very nature of the interrogation itself.

"we should not discuss what it means to be Indian, because we should not encourage white people to have a stereotypical view of us"

The question shouldn't be 'what does it mean to be Indian?' It should be 'what does it mean to be a person (or an animal, or just alive)?' But actually we're not discussing anything so defined here, we're discussing colour... the question is actually 'what does it mean to be white?' Colour and culture are separate things, colour certainly falls in to definitions of culture but without them it's worthless. It's a cultural construct and without culture colour is nothing, whiteness is a term that's utterly worthless in a country torn apart by civil war, white against white. It is entirely contextual so when asked about whiteness or blackness can we have anything to say that doesn't automatically segregating people from one another?

And I do think that one of the ways it occurs is in the unconscious, internal acceptance of a constructed "whiteness" by white people

Collectively we are often very unhappy when the Daily Mail start to ascribe terms like Britishness to the population and relate it to a behavioural form. There are many exceptions, all british people aren't football hooligans, all football fans are not prone to acts of violence. In focusing on this analogy I may lose my point but it's the only analogy I can come up with to state that whiteness is a non-term, a segregatory term and a generalisation. A clear picture of whiteness is implausible from anything anyone has or is capable of saying here. The term's too large and to apply it to a smaller definition would be to do the term a disservice. What you end up with in asking for people's limited experience is not an actual working definition of whiteness at all even within a national framework.

I have no doubt that people start with a construction of whiteness in their heads but we aren't redefining it as much as clarifying and how will that help us do anything? More to the point we're clarifying the wrong perception. A perception of privilege and not an examination of the other things that whiteness envelopes and the areas of the world without that definition. I think that the clarification is the wrong approach to this topic, just as examining blackness is wrong. I'll try and work out what I feel the right approach is.
 
  

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