My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from within Whiteness
A SCHOLARLY PAPER FROM THE GRIEVANCE STUDIES PROJECT
Summary
In the name of Carol Miller, Ph.D. (fictitious) of the (fictitious) Portland Ungendering Research (PUR) Initiative by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose.
Discipline/subdiscipline: critical race studies, whiteness studies
Summary: This paper is an autoethnography that tracks a white lesbian woman who becomes radicalized against “Whiteness” (intentionally capitalized) by engaging with critical race literature to discover her own alleged default complicity in racism until she hates herself for it. This paper is a rewrite of selections drawn from throughout Volume 1 of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, replacing “the Jew” with “White people” and “Whiteness” and adding plenty of jargon and critical race theory.
Purpose: That we could find “theory” to make anything (in this case, selected sections of Mein Kampf in which Hitler criticizes Jews, replacing Jews with white people and/or whiteness) acceptable to journals if we mixed and matched fashionable arguments.
Notes on Status:
Peer reviewed and rejected by Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Selected Reviewer Comments:
“I found the author’s effort to center this self-critical struggle refreshing. The author demonstrates a strong ability to link personal narration to theory, particularly by highlighting the work of several women of color writers .” -Reviewer 1, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
“This article “My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from Within Whiteness” focuses on extremely important subject matter with a significant and thoughtful methodology. With revision particularly for precision, clarity, explanation of assertions and adding concrete examples, the article has potential to be a powerful and particular contribution to literature related to the mechanisms that reinforce white adherence to white supremacist perspectives, and to the process by which individuals can come into deeper levels of social and racial consciousness .” -Reviewer 2, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Contents:
Abstract
Whiteness
Scottsdale
Jackson
Painful Awakening: The Unendurable Ravages of Whiteness
A Further Awakening
References
Reviewer Comments
Abstract
The academic study of Whiteness is integral to the critical study of race, and it has mostly been done by People of Color. Simultaneously, some of the most effective scholarly inquiry into Whiteness utilizes autoethnographic methods in which Women of Color document a critical examination of the influences of race and gender upon their lived experience, including Whiteness. Although pioneering white scholars like Peggy McIntosh have explored the issue, little autoethnographic research has documented the white subject’s discovery of her own complicity in Whiteness. This autoethnographical account of a White woman problematizing her own Whiteness seeks to fill that gap.
Keywords: Autoethnography; Whiteness Studies; White supremacy; Critical Race Theory; Privilege; Racism
The academic study of Whiteness has a rich history, yet most White people remain unaware of this history, their White privilege, and its array of attendant consequences. This pernicious ignorance led bell hooks (1995) to remark in Killing Rage: Ending Racism, “Whether they are able to enact it as lived practice or not, many white folks active in anti-racist struggle today are able to acknowledge that all whites (as well as everyone else within white supremacist culture) have learned to overvalue ‘whiteness’ even as they simultaneously learn to devalue blackness” (150). People of Color, because they are devalued, have no such luxury. Consequently, most scholarly criticisms of Whiteness emerged from People of Color generally and from Women of Color specifically. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, for example, hooks (1992) rightly argued that People of Color have always had a “special knowledge” of Whiteness because of their subordinate status to it
One way Women of Color have addressed this “special knowledge of whiteness” and attempted to communicate it in a scholarly way has been through autoethnography. Robin Baylorn (2008), for example, draws on hooks to argue for the usefulness of autoethnographic methodologies, writing, “Turning the ethnographic gaze in on itself, autoethnography allows the marginalized voice to speak for itself. Grounded in experience and written in evocative prose, autoethnography is intended to provoke other stories” (414). Authoethnography has provided an opportunity and a venue to speak despite dominant discourses of Whiteness, and as scholarship it provides a unique way for those experiences to be heard.
Autoethnography alone, however, cannot dismantle Whiteness if White people refuse to acknowledge its existence. In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, hooks (2003:25–26) tells a story of a classroom exercise she utilizes when she encounters students telling her that racism is no longer relevant, that “we are all just people.” hooks then challenges the students to imagine choosing to be reincarnated as one of a white male, white female, black male, or white female. Invariably, white males are chosen most often and black females are chosen least often. As hooks writes, “When I ask students to explain their choice they proceed to do a sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race” (26). This means the problems attendant to gender and, more, to race are understood; they’re just ignored. hooks (1995) identified the ultimate problem causing this disconnect earlier in Killing Rage, where she wrote, “While it has become ‘cool’ for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism” (157). In order to dismantle Whiteness, then, there must be acknowledgement and recognition, but there must also be the desire to utilize that recognition to overcome the cultural persistence of White supremacy.
This sort of recognition and will to re-examine and question privilege from within Whiteness is modelled by white scholar, Peggy McIntosh, in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (originally written in 1988). McIntosh (2004) likened the denial of White privilege to the denial of male privilege, noting that, “To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here” (192). Most significantly, McIntosh applies her analysis to herself and to her way of thinking and writing: “In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in the invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth” (191). In this vein, autoethnography is a valuable tool for communicating to White people what they should perceive, address, and ultimately work toward to remediate Whiteness. Autoethnography thus has the potential to function as a “response to the alienating effects on both researchers and audiences of impersonal, passionless, abstract claims of truth generated by such research practices and clothed in exclusionary scientific discourse” (Ellingson and Ellis 2008:450). That is, autoethnography may not be able to dismantle Whiteness itself, but it lays crucial planks on the bridge that must be crossed if Whiteness is ever to be dismantled.
This paper broaches different territory. By using an autoethnographic methodology to examine the construction of Whiteness from a White lived experience that realized the need to dismantle Whiteness, it examines how Whiteness and White privilege were revealed to the author through decades of studying the writings of People of Color and allies, such as McIntosh. It takes care to honor both the “auto” and the “ethno” part of the method (Winkler 2018:2) and balances a personal story with a critical analysis of culture. It thus weaves together evocative (Muncey 2010) and analytical (Anderson 2006) autoethnography in order to achieve the affective/narratorial element and a rigorous cultural critique (Colyar 2013).
Whiteness
Thinking back, it is almost impossible for me to remember when Whiteness began to bring particular thoughts to my consciousness. Particularly, I do not remember even having heard the word in my home during my mother’s lifetime. The (political) concept of “Whiteness” was, in retrospect, ubiquitously present and yet conspicuously absent from my formative experiences. Although extensive scholarship into Whiteness had been done long before I was born and the works of W. E. B DuBois, for example, were readily available to me, I did not even know of their existence. Nor did the extensive writings on White privilege of Theodore W. Allen, although much of it was published in my own lifetime, permeate my consciousness. I did not know, as they could have shown me, the history of my race and, for example, its invention of the late 17th century plantations at the continuing expense of African Americans.
Within my own home in Scottsdale, Arizona, if “Black” was ever mentioned in a derogatory sense, my mother, who prided herself on kindness and decency, would likely have considered those who used it as such as being uneducated, unkind, and vulgar. In the course of her career as a social worker she had come to be compassionate and mild-mannered, which had a contagious effect on me. In my schooling I found no reason to alter the picture of our shared cultural reality that I formed in my home. This kind of obliviousness is typical for White people as Peggy McIntosh (1988), the first white woman to pay any attention to what Women of Color have been telling us for so long, reveals:
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow “them” to be more like “us.” (188)
Reading this admission of McIntosh’s was what first persuaded me to (re)consider my life, assumptions, and my own Whiteness. I was anxious not to, yet again, center White women’s experiences but to confront myself and learn how to confront other White people; I could try and relieve People of Color of the burden they have always carried of the “special knowledge” of Whiteness invisible to White people (hooks 1992).
Scottsdale
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood in Scottsdale, Arizona, where nearly everyone is either white or White. Though superficially confusing, the distinction between white and White is not without practical consequence or theoretical importance (Young 2015a, 2015b). Lower-case-w white people are white people, for whom their Whiteness—and their privilege—seems not an issue because their whiteness is the happenstance condition of having been born as a white person. Capital-W White, however, is another matter. Capital-W Whiteness is the outgrowth of a toxic racial consciousness upon the fact of being white (Young 2015a, 2015b).
As a White person at the time, it was not until I was thirteen or fourteen that my encounters with the words “White” and “White privilege” became frequent, mostly in connection with political controversies and issues of Social Justice (for examples, the murder of unarmed Black men by police, rampant racial injustices in the prison system, sentencing inequalities in the court system, discriminatory hiring and employment practices, etc.). These discussions aroused an uncomfortable aversion in me, and I always had a disquieting feeling descend upon me when listening to Social Justice conversations (Bailey 2017; DiAngelo 2011). During this time in my youth, though awakening somewhat, I had no other feeling about issues surrounding Whiteness, privilege, or Social Justice.
At the time, Whiteness in Scottsdale was typical enough for the Southwest and yet atypical of the somewhat complicated racial affair constituting contemporary American culture. Over the decades, the Whites who lived in Scottsdale came to represent three fairly distinct groups, a privileged elite whose Whiteness was apparent (yet incidental in a way consistent with tacit intentionality intrinsic to White social dynamics [Lipsitz 2006; Painter 2011]), an overtly racist pseudo-elite whose Whiteness defined them, and a smaller set who, though w/White, appropriated Black culture and attempted to make it an integral aspect of their own lived reality (hooks 1995; Kajikawa 2009; Tate 2003). There was a simultaneous awareness of all three groups but only the first two mattered to my lived experience.
To address these ostensibly disparate groups, many within the last category had appropriated much culture from People of Color, yet I did not have cause to look at them as cultural thieves (Colley 2000; Sears 2007; Stanwood 2006). Regarding the former two, I saw them as entirely distinct. I did not perceive the ridiculousness of my illusion because the only external impression I recognized as distinguishing white people from Black people was their skin color, and I found racism intolerable. On the other hand, I heard people routinely making jokes about Whites, to the point where white people were sometimes perceived negatively because of their pigmentation. My revulsion to hearing remarks and cautions against them grew into a feeling of disgust (cf. DiAngelo 2011, 2015).
As a child in Scottsdale, Whiteness seemed irrelevant and whiteness simple: there were (White) racists and people who happened to be white, and to conflate the latter with the former was as much a “sin” as any other form of racial discrimination (King 1967:78–103). Paradoxically, though it would seem otherwise, there is very little to say about those overtly racist Whites whose Whiteness and racism are conspicuous. Their racism is coarse and blatant, and it is only that theirs is little different than the elite systemic racism and Whiteness that makes the point of this paper trenchant. For these unabashedly racist Whites, so infamously common in the South, their behavior was often violent in its verbal expression against People of Color, but it was also all the easier to ignore because of its vulgarity. Because times have changed, even in Arizona, no one appreciated these Whites, and we all—whites, Whites, and People of Color—knew to avoid them and their openly regressive attitudes. That left us the problem of witnessing and enduring as little of their abuse and violence as we could, standing up to it when possible, and otherwise getting on with our lives (cf. Dizard 1970).
Where there is the most to reflect upon lies in the privileged elite whose Whiteness carried the usual power and soft domination of the privileged. These Whites did not appear to be racist—and I did not think they were—but their racism was all the worse for the fact of its seeming gentleness and near-invisibility. McIntosh (2004) poignantly articulated this problem:
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege… I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. (188)
While McIntosh’s observation is pertinent and useful, Black feminists have a deeper insight, and many, like hooks (1992), have long argued that Black people have a “special knowledge” of Whiteness because of their subordinated status. White people are usually blind to functions and borders of Whiteness that are immediately obvious to People of Color. Black feminists, in response, have addressed White women with such works as Hazel Carby’s “White Woman Listen!” (1982) and Nicole Ward Jouve’s White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue (1991), appealing to them, often angrily, to see the racism concealed beneath illusions of gentleness.
Unlike more obviously racist expressions, soft Whiteness provides no nucleation point for outright racism. People of Color, thus, have had to resort to enduring what has come to be understood as tides of microaggressive attacks and ostensibly “anti-racist” attitudes from within soft Whiteness without being given any clear reason to resist, fight, or even to avoid it—or even to find a point upon which to launch a defensive attack (Sue et al. 2008). Due to the evocation of “White Fragility” (DiAngelo 2011, 2015) when soft Whiteness is racially challenged, this problem has been perennially compounded. Questioning these stance, (im)postures, and phrases often provoked seemingly gentle Whites to dive more deeply into their soft Whiteness and to become that much more subtly aggressive against People of Color, especially Blacks. DiAngelo explains White Fragility thusly:
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to… White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. (DiAngelo 2011:116–117)
Ultimately, even without invoking Fragility, Whites in thrall to soft Whiteness can be wolves in sheep’s clothing because the disguise (of not being overtly racist) has fooled even themselves and prevented them from working against racism (hooks 1995). People of Color are forced merely to accept their anti-racist charade as part of the dehumanizing lived experience familiar to all People of Color in White America (Cameron 2010). This is the Whiteness I participated in without even realizing how racist I was as a young White woman in hyper-w/White Scottsdale, Arizona, in the early 2000s. Then, just after I turned twenty, I moved to Jackson, Mississippi.
Jackson
Jackson ain’t Scottsdale. Confused and overwhelmed by the impressions from my architectural, geographic, and cultural surroundings, still naive from my experiences as a young woman in Scottsdale, and depressed by my economic situation, initially I did not distinguish between various social strata of the population of Jackson. Nearly 90% of Scottsdale is w/White, with approximately 5% People of Color, and these factors are nearly reversed in Jackson, but oddly I did not appreciate the full impact of the racial demographics of my new home despite having grown up in Scottsdale (Statistical Atlas 2017a, 2017b). I assumed things must be like they were in Scottsdale, in that we were well into the 2010s by then: the area must contain some racist Whites among a many other people who merely happened to be white, and my initial experiences in Jackson seemed to confirm this ontological intuition. At first, the swampy Southern air in place of a dry Western desert was harder for me to adjust to than the shift in demographics.
During the first months following my move, I struggled to cope with the onslaught of the various realities in this bewildering new geographical situation; the social and cultural milieu around me seemed normal, if not irrelevant. It was not until I had gradually nested into my situation that this initially confused picture became clear—I acquired a more discerning view of my new environment. And with that clarity I came up, as though for the first time, against the true magnitude of the problem of Whiteness because White supremacy all but defines Jackson despite some fewer than 20% of its population being w/White. This period, then, extending from roughly the third month after my move to until the end of my first year there (though it continues to this day) marked my true awakening to the severity of the issues of race in America and of the reality that the ultimate source of these problematic trends in American society rests in Whiteness itself, as is borne out extensively in literature I was, until that time, unaware of (McKinney 2003).
In deference to my mother’s belief in kindness and dignity, I will not say that the manner in which I first became acquainted with the magnitude of the problem of Whiteness was particularly unpleasant. It was more than the subtle signs of White supremacy surrounded me in much the same way as the heavy, Gulf air. Still, in the White person I still saw only an individual who lived in a white body, more or less the same as me within, and therefore, on morally-rooted grounds of human tolerance, I was implacably opposed to the notion that she should be criticized because of pigmentation. These noble and high-minded views of (imperfect) egalitarian society had their roots in the memory of a few traumatizing events from my childhood (having witnessed racism can steel one against wishing to participate in anything that might exhibit any signs of racial prejudice), along with the memory of my mother’s wisdom about treating people with that same dignity I wished to receive, and I felt that I should not like to see those events repeated or my mother’s wise words despoiled. I therefore regarded anti-Whiteness more as products of jealousy or even envy as opposed to expressions of a sincere, though wrong-headed, resistance.
In the course of my experiences, however, I had many opinions resonating in my personal experience confirmed by a careful and deliberate process in which I analyzed and reacted to the stories appearing almost weekly, then daily, on the news. Another Black youth murdered; another political attack on the suffrage of People of Color; another attempt to deport Latinx people, this being prominent in the political culture; and so on, day after day, week after week, all as much a part of the atmosphere in Jackson as unbearable humidity. I frequently became disgusted by the exploitative ways in which the media made a ratings-based spectacle out of the suffering of People of Color over the treatment they were bestowed from what could only be understood as Whiteness, and the ways in which that very media environment played lackey to a monstrous political regime bent upon both disenfranchising and exploiting the suffering of the non-white population (Sanders 2015). That, then, began to open my eyes to the need for radical thought and intervention upon the problem of Whiteness and became the first blot staining my appreciation of the American-capitalist political and media machines.
Even more disconcerting was the way in which this same political-media machine commodified the suffering of People of Color for their own gain, be it capitalistic or reactionary (Sanders 2015). Concurrently, our news environment took up an apparent attitude of anxiety about the welfare and fate of People of Color (Dixon 2008; Kelly 2010), by which they attempted to cloak their exploitation in the serious air of “detached” reporting, as though the stories they reported weren’t the gravest injustices: the very murder of Black flesh by privileged Whiteness itself. To my eyes, however, their ruthless exploitation was only poorly hidden, no matter how they protested their neutrality or even their anti-racism—by which the true racist is so often known. Instead, they pretended they were fulfilling a journalistic duty to report
objectively upon the truth, but their very claim to “objective truth” came from a position situated within Whiteness.
Painful Awakening: The Unendurable Ravages of Whiteness
To understand these phenomena, Alison Wolf (2017) draws on Bailey’s privilege preserving epistemic pushback. Wolf explores the reason/emotion divide by which the Western philosophical tradition of prioritizing reason is assumed to be naturally superior to experience and emotion. It is also assumed to be equally applicable to all identity groups. In this way, she argues, the experiences and feelings of People of Color can be dismissed in the name of an objective truth discernible by reason (even when the shared epistemic resources by which this is evaluated does not include the perspective of People of Color) (Dotson 2014). So excusing themselves, acting as though they were tenderly compassionate and earnestly defending the rights, freedoms, and very lives of People of Color, they picked upon a deeply colored sore spot and then bored ruthlessly under the scab (Berenstain 2016). And this, more than any other insult of Whiteness, boiled my blood and left me unable to believe in what I came to know as the White media.
As if these insults weren’t offensive enough, the American political machine, along with the tacit intentionality (Gilborn 2007) it tapped into (and a majority of the White electorate it panders to), used the media to cultivate an admiration for a strand of Americanness that is the most overtly identifiable with Whiteness—even the outright courting of White Supremacy—since before 1968. This barely concealed racial domination is so deeply embedded in centuries of culture, economics, and history that its presence in institutions and policies appears normal and unexceptional to whites motivated towards willful and pernicious ignorance (Bailey 2017; Dotson 2011).
Fast forward to Trump’s Presidential campaign.
In this regressive milestone in American history, I realized there was nothing to feel about being American except ashamed when confronted by the nation’s sudden return to White ethnonationalist supremacy under the mellifluous hymn of “Make America Great Again.” I cannot count the times this thinly veiled wretched racist exhortation caused me to turn off my television or shut down my computer in disgust. I now recognize this as my own cowardly refusal to sit with and learn from discomfort (Applebaum 2017; Boler 1999). Even under that duress, I was not in accord with a fully radicalized activism against Whiteness, but again and again I was forced to accept that the recurrence of these dominant themes in society were grounds for serious reflection and consideration.
It was an elementary sense of justice and growing appreciation for the truths explained by critical race theory that left me with no option but to change my opinions. I slowly took upon myself (once I had found better grounds for making a judgment about society [e.g., Coates 2015]) an outspoken attitude that remaking American society by means—radical means, if necessary—consistent with the application of critical race theory is necessary to achieve racial and social justice, to say nothing of a fully equitable and just society (Trevino et al. 2008).
Thus, my ideas about Whiteness began to shift with the passage of time. The memory of my mother’s commitment to racial egalitarianism and the principles it is built upon led me to an internal conflict. It was only by re-examining my mother’s commitments and advice through a lens of critical theory that was I able to settle the ongoing war between my application of critical scholarship and naive sentiment—the matter being decided ever more solidly in favor of the former. Over the course of a deeply politically embattled year, even sentiment came to the side of critical scholarship, however, and has now become a faithful guardian and useful counselor. For example, the psychoanalytical approach of Franz Fanon (1963) impressed upon me the depth to which White supremacy had damaged the Black psyche, but as a White woman I was wary of the trap of believing I could truly comprehend its extent. Nakayama and Krizek’s (1999) work on the discourse of Whiteness was more accessible to me, providing me with tools to deconstruct commonplace figures of speech and behold, for the first time, the inherent racial bias at work. Perhaps most significantly, the work of David Roediger (1991) enabled me to understand the class inequalities born of the construction of Whiteness and from this was born my radical and goal-orientated attitude.
Throughout this bitter struggle between the calm and precise theoretical considerations and application of scholarly critical theory and with the sentiments tied up in the memories of my childhood and of my mother, the lessons I learned served me with invaluable assistance. Eventually my eyes were opened, and I no longer had the ability to pass with the blindness of my youthful naiveté as I had done throughout my years in Scottsdale. My eyes opened to the truth of race, and in particular the unendurable ravages of Whiteness.
A Further Awakening
All at once, when passing through downtown, I suddenly encountered a large number of lightskinned people with blond hair. They were rowdy and seemingly jovial. They stared at me, and my first thought was: Are these white people or White people? Rather than looking away and hurrying about my own business, I decided to study the group cautiously and with great interest. I never answered the central question of whether they were merely white or fully White (though the demographics and my experiences in Scottsdale suggest they are the more kindly, thus insidious type of the latter), but the longer I stared at their countenance and examined their features, the more clear the questions became: Are these Whites like me? Am I like them?
As was my habit with when encountering unfamiliar experiences, I turned to books for help in settling my doubts. For the first time in my life I went to the university library at Jackson State University and read deeply into the scholarly Social Justice and critical race theory literature (as opposed to having browsed it online). But unfortunately everything I read began with the assumption that readers had at least a minimal degree of familiarity with the questions of privilege and of Whiteness. Moreover, the oscillating tone of most of these books and articles (between apologetic [e.g., Smith 2014] and explanatory [e.g., DiAngelo 2010, 2011, 2015] was such that I became doubtful again, in part because it seemed to me that many of the arguments and appeals made were somewhat superficial and the proofs unscientific and lacking rigor. There was also a wholesale lack of genealogical explanatory models [e.g., Rasmussen 2011; West 1982] that would have helped me to make historical sense of these phenomena (Rasmussen 2011; West 1982).
Having put to rest my lingering questions about biology, culture, social behavior, and their covariant relationships, I soon returned to my old way of thinking despite having seen the problem of Whiteness with my eyes and felt it within my lived experience. Whiteness was again just a matter of chance pigmentation, but the questions I had were rooted in experience and therefore lingered until they gnawed at me. The subject became so all-encompassing, particularly in Jackson where I was not around people who looked and acted like me, and the accusations of White privilege were so far-reaching that I was afraid of dealing with it unjustly or capriciously. I did not want my desire for what I hoped to be true to cloud my vision of what was actually the case, and so I became again anxious, uncertain, and frustrated by my failure to find answers.
I could no longer doubt that in Whiteness there was an entirely different people with different social and economic lives and different privileges due to accidents of birth (Roediger 1991). As I began to sincerely investigate the matter and observe White people in as detached a way as I can, trying to apply a critical-race lens, I concurrently began to feel absolutely overwhelmed—emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, and even physically—by how different we were and also how categorically different White lives were. This sense was enhanced in me by careful and deliberate consideration provided within the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially his essays about the 2016 political election and its fallout and, even more, his groundbreaking book Between the World and Me (Coates 2015, 2016, 2017):
You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. (Coates 2015:70)
Suddenly, informed by Coates, Jackson’s inhabitants appeared to me in a different light. Wherever I went I saw not just white people but Whites, mostly of the subtler systemic and thus “soft” hidden kind, and the more Whites I saw the more strikingly and clearly they stood out as a different from People of Color. (The suburbs and surrounding rural areas in particular swarmed with a people who, even in outer appearance, bore no similarity to People of Color.)
Reading Coates was a watershed moment for me, but it still fought against the seemingly calm wisdom of my mother who taught us to hold our heads higher and rise above the problems I had come to see as constitutive of Whiteness. But any indecisions I may have felt were finally extirpated by the activities of a certain section of Whiteness itself. Following the official nomination of Donald Trump for the highest office in American politics, movements such as Neo-Nazism, Neo-Klanism, and other strains of explicit White supremacy arose among Whites as an outgrowth of the masked toxic Whiteness which Coates had pointed to and that Whiteness studies had explained all along (Coates 2015; Delgado and Stefancic 2017). Its aim was to assert the racial character of Whites, and as such the movement came unavoidably crashing into my consciousness due to events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017.
To outward appearances it seemed as if only one small group of a thousand threatened Whites with Tiki torches, claiming victimhood over little more than an imperceptible loss in their status of White American privilege, championed this movement, while the great majority of w/White people, and even respectable-seeming “soft” Whites, disapproved or repudiated the open expression of a new American White supremacy (Ipsos Public Affairs 2017). But a deeper and more probing investigation showed that those outward appearances were intentionally and numerically misleading. These reactions emerged from an amalgam of theories which had been produced for reasons of expediency, if not for purposes of outright deception (Birt 2004). For that part of Whiteness which self-describes as “Liberal” did not disown the supremacists as if they were not members of their race but rather saw them to be brother and sister w/Whites who publicly professed their Whiteness in an unpractical and ugly way, so as to create a danger for Whiteness itself (Delgado and Stefancic 2017). Thus there was no genuine rift in the internal solidarity of Whiteness or reduction in its othering of People of Color. There was no push to dismantle Whiteness from within Whiteness itself.
The fictitious conflict between White supremacists and allegedly “Woke” Liberals soon repulsed and horrified me while concurrently filling me with shame and anxiety; for it was an entirely false narrative and stood in diametric opposition to the moral high ground and immaculate character upon which Liberalism publicly prided itself (Delgado and Stefancic 2000:esp. 1–39; Delgado and Stefancic 2017:esp. 26–31). This circumstance soon gave me pause for serious consideration. (Neo)liberal exploitations and its manifestations (Davis 2012), along with the activities of Whites in all branches of public life was a mystery I attempted to unveil. Was there any form of racial politics, especially in cultural and economic life, in which Whites as self-described Liberals did not participate? As Giroux (2010) argues, “Racism survives through the guise of neoliberalism, a kind of repartee that imagines human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship and agency being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” (191).
The charge against Whiteness grew until it became grave—in the moment I discovered open White advocacy and race-baiting in the press, government, literature, and media. One needed only to look at syndicated columnists, congressmen and allegedly distinguished senators, and those in the upper echelons of the film industry, and study the authors who were highly lauded in order to become permanently awakened to questions and intrinsic problems of Whiteness (Gray 2016; Kirk 2016; Kuykendall 2016; United States House 2018). Through this examination, I came to understand a moral pestilence with which the public was infected, and it was in lethal doses that these toxins were manufactured and distributed—with the lower the intellectual and moral level of media producers, the more tireless their fecundity. In America today we must recognize there is no limit to the number of such people and all w/White people are complicit. It was from this disturbing thought, though it cannot be avoided, that I recognized that Whiteness in America, and with it all American Whites, are specially destined by their complicity in Whiteness itself to play a shameful part (Eddo-Lodge 2017).
From this realization, I began to inquire into the people who fabricated these cultural artifacts that were ubiquitous in public life, e.g., White Jesus, White Santa Claus, Superman, Batman, television shows with token People of Color (of which South Park has reminded us), games, movies, the ubiquity of culinary preferences, and even facial recognition software (Entman and Rojecki 2001; Boylorn 2008; Finley 2017; Townsend 2017). The result of my inquiry was even more unfavorable yet forceful in shaping my attitude which I had previously held regarding w/Whites, including myself. Though my feelings might be in revolt, theory now led me to ineluctable, fact-based conclusions.
The deeper my inquiry went, the less respect I had for institutions I formerly admired (judicial, academic, film, mainstream press, the Senate and House of Representatives, necessarily now the American presidency itself, and even “Liberal” bastions like the New York Times). I had no option left but to reject their socially constructed narratives of domination and privileged positions from which they spring into being (Entman and Rojecki 2001). To claim that their unspoken biases, views, and general attitudes were impartial was more false than true, and in virtually every instance their leadership was occupied by economically privileged white people who are by their very natures also White (Lipsitz 2006; Shapiro 2004).
Scores of details I previously noticed but paid little attention to now devoured my attention. I slowly and methodically began to pierce the veil of constructed narratives of social dominance, supremacy, and political systems as their enablers that were formerly masked. When I went to critical race theory, it merely informed me, but when critical race theory came to me, I was fundamentally changed. For example, I now saw Liberalism in an entirely different garb. Its previously dignified tone in response to the attacks of its detractors and its silence in other instances now became evident as part of a reprehensible way of deceiving the populace with regard to privilege while consistently reestablishing Whiteness as normative. Its critics were either praised by w/White authors, or criticism was reserved exclusively for non-w/Whites, or non-w/Whites were insincerely praised to placate other (usually Liberal) non-w/Whites. Underneath this veneer stood the implicit, systematic condemnation of African culture and civilization, and those of African descent, along with other non-w/White cultures and genealogies repugnant and disruptive to the White American ideal (Delgado and Stefancic 2000).
Moreover, regarding the print media, the content of feuilletons in Liberal papers like the New York Times was trivial and banal (e.g., “The Best TV Shows of 2017” or “Gentlemen of the Road: On Discord Arising From Excessive Love of a Hat”). It was the lingua franca of the
Liberal press that had the accent of a colonizing people. The tone was explicitly White and implicitly derogatory to People of Color, and I cannot help but to think this was a byproduct of colonialist thinking and (subconscious and internalized) attempts to reinforce narratives and
entrenched power dynamics that marginalize People of Color and maintain hegemonic White normativity throughout American culture. Liberalism carries the seeds and defenses of perpetual racism and exploitation.
Then something happened that pushed me into a new realization. I saw through an entire series of events that were taking place in other facets of life. This awakening was inspired by being a cocktail server for a wedding at the house of an elite White family. Here, the concept of manners and morals, which was openly put into practice by a large section of the “non-racist” Whites, was on full display. It was unavoidable to come away from this elite White party, in which I was treated far better than People of Color and yet expected to be servile to Whiteness, without observing that the life I observed in, and thus in America more broadly, was constrained by systemic racism to teach People of Color what Whiteness really is.
In the months that followed I had no more reluctance to bring the problem of Whiteness to light. Henceforth, on moral grounds, I was thus determined to do so. But as I studied the work of w/Whites of influence in different spheres of cultural, economic, and artistic life, I was far too slow to realize to degree to which we control all aspects of the political parties and positions in Mississippi (e.g., Governor Phil Bryant, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, State Auditor Stacey Pickering, Commissioner of Agriculture Cindy Hyde Smith, Commissioner of Insurance Mike Chaney). When confronted with the stark fact that Mississippi as a political entity is also Whiteness as a political entity, the scales fell from my eyes. Finally, my long inner struggle between the scholarship of critical theory and the sentimentality of my childhood ended and I began to take action, beginning with a return to studying scholarly critical race theory.
Steeped thusly in my studies, and trying to make sense of my experiences, I made a sincere effort to overcome my natural reticence and expand my reading further. I studied articles published in the mainstream venues but in the process of doing so my concerns increased commensurately. To help reconcile my experience with what I was reading, I attempted to learn something about the people who published and wrote this content. From the publisher to the producer on down, virtually everyone was w/White, and so, in expressing an irrepressible need to project their Whiteness, these media producers even made Black stories like the Black Lives Matter protests into White stories (Duncan-Shippy et al. 2017). I then recalled the faces of public officials of major political parties and mainstream media outlets, and nearly every single one of them was also w/White—from the representatives in the United Nations (Nikki Haley) to the street agitators like Antifa. One fact became evident: w/Whites occupied the leadership of all minor and major political parties and every single mainstream media outlet (Painter 2011). Thus, finally, I came to discover the truth of what was oppressing People of Color.
My critical reading journey in Jackson proved sufficient to convince me that I was not so rooted in my preconceived convictions that I would not surrender them in face of clearer and superior explanations and arguments. So, with the guidance of academic mentors, I delved into in the doctrines of Neo-Nazis, the KKK, and White supremacists—and I used this knowledge like a hammer to nail down my convictions. The populace can be rescued by a remaking of society, but not absent sufficient time and immeasurable patience. A White person in a White society, however, can never be rescued from privilege (Bailey 2017; Leonardo 2004; Wallis 2016).
With guidance from other scholars it was then elementary to show the injustice of the White way of being in the world (cf. Garvey 1935). Within my small circle I talked with an open heart to Whites I knew until my voice became hoarse and my throat sore. I still held out hope, believing that I could finally persuade them of the danger and inhumanity inherent in Whiteness and privilege, but verbal outreach as a form of activism was not enough. Tragically, I achieved a contrary result. The moment the catastrophic effect of Whiteness and its application became evident, the stronger became their denial (Applebaum 2017; Bailey 2017; DiAngelo 2010, 2011, 2015). The more I discussed and then debated, the more familiar I became with White Fragility and its related dialectical and rhetorical tactics. Some counted upon the ignorance of their opponents, but when they became entangled so that they could not find an exit, they acted like they were suddenly the victims. Their fear of having their own sense of goodness challenged (Bailey 2017) produced resistance, denial, anger, and even trauma (DiAngelo 2011, 2015). They would naively claim, for example, that People of Color already have equal opportunities in America, or that a poor Black is better off here than in Africa, or that we cannot fix our public schools because that would increase deficits. Alternatively, they rejected Whiteness studies and advocated social Darwinism, or in more extreme cases, argued for a kind of genetic epistemology where one’s understanding is rooted in one’s biology (with White, colonialist knowledge occupying the highest echelon).
Once these arguments were shown to not be based upon sufficient evidence to warrant belief, they acted as if they did not understand counterarguments and switched the conversation. Immediately before this happened, they would offer truisms and platitudes (“Fairness is good,” “All lives matter,” and “No justice, no peace”); and, if I temporarily assented, then they were applied to distinct matters of different nature from the original conversation. This is an example of what Allison Bailey calls “privilege preserving epistemic pushback” which is a form of willful ignorance designed to protect privileged epistemologies. Bailey refers to this as a “shadow text” which runs alongside the discussion but offers no epistemic friction, serving only a protective purpose (2017:877). When confronted with this, they would obfuscate, sometimes becoming angry and confused, and demonstrate the phenomenon DiAngelo describes as White Fragility.
Whenever I tried to firmly grasp the arguments of these apostles of Whiteness, it was as though my hand grasped only Jell-O which slipped through my fingers. If they were compelled to relent to my argument, perhaps because of other People of Color or w/White allies who were present, then I thought, “At last I have gained ground,” yet my surprise immediately followed once the circumstances changed. The White person would be utterly oblivious (or pretend to be) to what just happened, and he would once again begin to repeat his former racist and privileged notions, as if nothing had happened. This phenomenon, described by Dotson (2014) as “epistemic resilience,” reveals the difficulty of penetrating an accepted epistemology which a privileged group is motivated to preserve.
If I became indignant and reminded him of our conversation, he feigned astonishment and claimed he did not remember anything, except that previously he proved his statements were correct. As a result, sometimes I was dumbfounded. Sometimes I was hurt. Always I was concerned. And more often than not I was amazed; I do not know what amazed me more—the excessive verbiage, unjust “just” rhetoric, or the artful ways in which Whiteness systematically clothed falsehoods. And to think: this had been me; I am complicit in this! The willful ignorance of privilege preserving epistemic pushback (Bailey 2017), always easily perceptible by People of Color (hooks 1992) once recognized, became intolerable. To be completely candid, I came to loathe them, though in time I came to realize it is Whiteness itself that I loathe.
From that point forward, I began to study contemporary White thought leaders such as Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, and Steve Bannon, with a goal of understanding the overall principles of the emergent White supremacy movement. I was able to attain my objective more quickly than I expected. This is because of the deeper insight into the question of Whiteness which I gained from filtering these authors through the lens of critical race theory and comparing them against Coates and others (Baum 2017; Coates 2012, 2015; hooks 1995; Ray et al. 2017).
These most recent studies enabled me to make a practical comparison between content and theoretical pretentiousness of the pedagogies and practices of the apostolic founders of, for example, White and Male (Neo)-Liberalism (Harvey 2007); because I now understood the discourses of White privilege both from the emic perspective of White supremacists themselves and through the etic insights of critical race scholarship (Levin and Guenther 2017). These I compared against the parallel co-constituted problems of Maleness in society, better known as Patriarchy (as recommended by McIntosh [2004], cf. hooks [1995]). Above all, I realized that w/White people (and males in particular) use language for the purpose of disguising their thought or at least veiling it, all the while constructing the social, political, and economic hegemony of Whiteness.
The work of McIntosh began this journey but hooks, Jouve, and Carby had called to me insistently demanding that I listen. Nayakama and Krizek had made me able to hear and Dotson, DiAngelo, Bailey and Wolf had enabled me, to some degree, to understand. This knowledge brought with it the most profound inner revolution in my life. Still, even now, as I study the activities of w/White people throughout recorded history (with a particular emphasis of colonialism), I am filled with anxieties. I interrogated myself as to whether, for reasons I could not fathom, fate may have demanded that a final victory would be bestowed on this relatively small group of under-pigmented yet supremacist and colonialist people. Clearly, it is the right of oppressed and colonized peoples to struggle for equality and self-preservation against such hegemonic Whiteness, but what can be done do dismantle Whiteness from within?
White privilege repudiates the principles of social and economic justice and substitutes for it hammers of domination and subordination based upon skin color. Thus it denies the individual worth of the human personality, impugns the teaching that other races have a primary significance, and by doing this it takes away the foundations of human dignity. If the coconstituted doctrines of w/White privilege were to continue to be accepted as foundational and apodictic, they would lead to cementing of economic and social order and the erasure of personal and racial sovereignty. Whiteness, then, must be dismantled, for should Whiteness, with the aid of supremacist doctrines, maintain its triumph over the people of this world, its crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind.
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Reviewer Comments
Editorial and reviewers’ comments on the “White Mein Kampf” paper
Decision at Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: August 9, 2018
Dear Dr. Miller:
We write you in regards to manuscript # SRE-18-0053 entitled “My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from within Whiteness” which you submitted to Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
The reviews of your manuscript are now in. Our close read of the reviewer(s) comments, found at the bottom of this letter, along with our own close examination of the manuscript itself, lead to our decision to not accept your manuscript for publication in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
We understand that this is not the decision you were hoping to receive, however, please understand that Sociology of Race and Ethnicity only accepts a small proportion of manuscripts it receives.
Thank you for considering Sociology of Race and Ethnicity for the publication of your research. We hope the outcome of this specific submission will not discourage you from the submission of future manuscripts.
Sincerely,
[REDACTED], [REDACTED]Editors in Chief, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Reviewer Comments to the Author
Reviewer #1:
Comments to the Author
Review of: “My struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from within Whiteness.”
The author sets out to conduct an autoethnography of whiteness. In “problematizing her own whiteness,” the author seeks to address a void within critical whiteness scholarship. Given that most reflexive commentary on whiteness is relegated to “methodological appendices” or “positionality statements,” I found the author’s effort to center this self-critical struggle refreshing. The author demonstrates a strong ability to link personal narration to theory, particularly by highlighting the work of several women of color writers. I’ve organized my comments in sections corresponding to those within the paper beginning with the research method. I offer these comments and critiques in hopes that they will facilitate the author’s efforts to improve the paper.
Method
I am intrigued by the author’s use of autoethnography as a research method. There exists some tensions though in conducting an autoethnography on whiteness. For example, on p. 2 the author cites Robin Baylorn who notes that “…autoethnography allows the marginalized voice to speak for itself.” This passage seems to undermine the author’s central claims related to whiteness. For example, how does the author square this citation with the consistently dominant voice of whiteness and white people? Is the author referring to some other aspect of their identity that is marginalized? To address this issue the author may consider other examples of autoethnography where the subject/researcher is wrestling with other dimensions of privilege.
I appreciated the author’s emphasis on both the “auto” and “ethnography” of autoethnography. The “auto” is fairly evident throughout. However, there could have been greater discussion about the procedures associated with to your approach. In order show how systematic the approach actually was, the author could give more details on the steps required to gather the data. Providing such details could also build greater trust in the results.
Theoretical points
1. At some points it felt as if white privilege and whiteness were conflated. Peggy McIntosh’s work seems more focused on white privilege than whiteness. I am curious to know how the author distinguishes between whiteness and white privilege. One way to think through this is by revisiting Du Bois’ conception of a whiteness as a “public and psychological wage.” Perhaps it is worth thinking the material and immaterial aspects of whiteness. Some scholars have described whiteness as a sort of cognitive orientation that supports the increase of a psychological and psychic wage. Here are a couple passages that may be useful.
• Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
o Hartman conceptualizes whiteness as an “incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance from chattel slavery” (Hartman 1997: 24).
• Charles Mills: The Racial Contract. “Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations” (Mills 1997: 127). Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy (Mills 1997:126-7)
• George Lipsitz: How Racism Takes Place. Whiteness is not a color, but a condition (Lipsitz 2011:49).
• Joe Feagin conceptualizes “The White Racial Frame” as the dominant racial frame that has long legitimated, rationalized , and shaped racial oppression and inequality in this country (Feagin 2013: x)
2. Given the risk for white scholars to re-center whiteness in their attempts to undo it, this paper is an ambitious endeavor. I appreciate the author’s mention of their attention to this potential risk on p. 5. I wonder though in an effort to “confront myself and other white people,” if they obscure the relational dimension of whiteness. For example, the introspective aspect of autoethnography may center the Self at the expense of the Other. In other words, without providing more vivid examples of their relations to nonwhite people and the relationality of whiteness itself, the author may fall into the initial trap of centering whiteness that they were trying to avoid. Part of dismantling whiteness may also involve a meta-analysis of the author’s research method. For example, is there a double standard when it comes to white and nonwhite autoethnographers? How would an autoethnography of a nonwhite/negativelyracialized person be read? Women of color feminists have pointed out that only certain ontologies are permitted to be “objective,” “rational,” “truthful,” “dispassionate,” etc. Pointing out this double standard could help signal the author’s commitment to their struggle to dismantle whiteness. More importantly, it could help the author consider ways to disassociate whiteness from that categories of truth and validity.
Engaging with the relationality of whiteness can also help the author wrestle with the tensions of trying to dismantle whiteness. For example, because whiteness is relational as much as white people in the US try to avoid reaping this ongoing “inheritance” from settler colonialism and slavery, they cannot prevent other white people from offering them a public wage (in multiple forms). To quote McIntosh, “I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a ‘white’ skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.”
Here is one potentially useful reference for attending to the relationality of whiteness and considering how exploring how it “is ‘real’, material and lived.”
• Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory. 8(2): 149-68.
3. I wonder the extent to which the concept of “soft whiteness” is related to what Meghan Burke (2012) describes as “racial ambivalence” – the idea of being deeply committed to racial justice in the abstract, but relying on colorblind ideologies to inform one’s patterns of action. Burke, Meghan. 2012. Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities: Whiteness and the Power of Color-Blind Ideologies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Matthew Hughey offers a similar critique of white antiracist in Whitebound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meaning of Race. (2012)
4. Dotson’s concept of “epistemic resilience,” seems similar to Charles Mills’ concept of “white ignorance.” While Dotson and Mills are already in conversation with one another, it may be useful to note this connection in your work. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mill, Charles. 2007. “White Ignorance.” Pp. 13-38 in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
5. Several scholars have discussed the challenges of dismantling whiteness in part because of its “possessive” character. For Lipsitz, “possessive” is a double entendre. It is both the desire to possess and be controlling of, but also the risk of being possessed by whiteness (what Tim Wise calls “the trick of whiteness”).
Cheryl Harris also discusses the challenges of relinquishing whiteness because, as “property,” it undergirds the “settled expectations of whites.” According to Harris (1993: 1720), “Whiteness became a shield from slavery, a highly volatile and unstable form of property.
Organization
1. It was a bit unclear why the paper began with “Methodology” as a heading. It was not such an issue of conventionality, as it just didn’t seem to reflect the initial paper setup. It may be worth just beginning with an “Introduction” and then working into the autoethnography as part of a separate Methods section.
Language and voice.
1. Overall, the author exemplifies a strong and illustrative writing style by helping the reader imagine the context in which many events are taking place. There were some minor issues that could be addressed through a careful review of language and voice. For example, I would consider the risks of using the passive voice, especially in a paper about whiteness – a concept that is often accepted as a “hidden ethnicity,” (See Doane 1997). At the same time whiteness is hidden, it is also predicated on the construction of white people as active agents and nonwhite people as passive subjects. For example, on p. 4, the author describes examining “how whiteness and white privilege were revealed” to them “through decades of studying the writings of People of Color and allies…” Saying “were revealed” renders those doing the revealing invisible. If people of color and allies taught the author, then they should be credited for their teaching by making them active subjects in the story.
2. Some metaphors were a bit confusing. For example, on p. 4, the author describes the need to lay “crucial planks on the bridge that must be crossed if whiteness is ever to be dismantled.” As a reader, the relationship between crossing a bridge to dismantle something is a bit hazy.
3. The use capitalization of “Social Justice,” “People of Color,” and “Whiteness” was a bit confusing. Though a seemingly minor point, it may be worth considering the choice to capitalize these terms. This could be addressed through the footnote/endnote.
I believe that there is an important intervention to be made in this paper and I believe it could be improved through greater attention to the nuances and complexities of an autoethnography of whiteness.
Reviewer #2:
Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript.
This article “My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from Within Whiteness” focuses on extremely important subject matter with a significant and thoughtful methodology. With revision particularly for precision, clarity, explanation of assertions and adding concrete examples, the article has potential to be a powerful and particular contribution to literature related to the mechanisms that reinforce white adherence to white supremacist perspectives, and to the process by which individuals can come into deeper levels of social and racial consciousness. That said, there is significant work to be done to make the primary and secondary points clear, provide more specific examples of the author’s process (ways of thinking as well as action) and reference to the source of statements being made. It will help to sort out theory, statements of fact, descriptions of lived experiences and conclusions. The content is mostly included though sometimes with either ambiguous language or somewhat exaggerated assertions. With revision these can be cleared up. Reverse outlining and clarifying what points are being made where within the article might help. The weakness is both of organization and unclear content.
The author describes the process of struggle that they engaged in an attempt at “dismantling” their whiteness. In particular, they recognize the role that women of color have historically played in providing clarity about the dynamics of racial and gender hierarchies as orchestrated through routine experiences in the interface with social institutions, as well as interpersonal interactions. Several aspects of the article as it stands need remedy for the paper to be clear, powerful and useful:
1) The author makes several arguments that are not sufficiently explained. It would help to more deliberate about primary versus secondary points. For example,
A) The utility of auto-ethnography as a methodology for examining the lived experiences of privilege, dominance, subordination, etc.;
B) The importance of people who benefit from social hierarchies taking responsibility for challenging the structures that create and reproduce corresponding inequalities and injustices;
C) The relationship of lived experience to one’s understanding of structure and system e.g. white supremacy, patriarchy etc. This point is particularly made in relation to Black women; women of color; and people of color however less so in terms of white people especially in relation to gender. This also relates to the point about the significance of exposure and environment in shifting racialized perspectives.
D) Notions of “kindness and decency” / “soft” whiteness complicate recognition of the systemic nature of white supremacy. Important point not sufficiently discussed.
E) Distinctions between different ways to “be” white/White etc.
F) White fragility / epistemic resilience
G) What can be done to “dismantle Whiteness from within” (p25, line 43)
2) Throughout the article assertions are made without corresponding explanation about what evidence these conclusions draw from. They need clarification about what is meant. In some cases the language is misleading or confusing. These either need explication or references and/or to be more precise. These points may be valid though they need more substance to be effective. Examples, p1: “The academic study (as opposed to popular?) of Whiteness (significance of caps?) is integral to the critical study of race, and it has mostly (?) been done by People of Color (significance of caps?).” “…utilizes auto-ethnographic methods in which Women of Color (significance of caps?) document a critical examination of the influences of race and gender… (Examples?) “…seeks to fill that gap” (fill or contribute to filling?) Similarly on page 5, line 45, to “relieve people of color of the burden…” p.2: Is the point of paragraph 1 about white ignorance, about the overvaluation of whiteness, about the privilege (?) of both of these realities? “…most scholarly criticisms of Whiteness emerged from People of Color generally and from Women of Color specifically” (provide explanation of what this assertion is based on – for example, Du Bois wrote extensively about whiteness, where does that fit in this argument?).
In paragraph 2, the point about auto-ethnography needs to make the connection between the statements that “…auto-ethnography allows the marginalized voice to speak for itself…” and how this methodology is important in the excavation of white privilege and dominance. Discussion of the importance of auto-ethnography could be articulated as a key thematic of this article, with the various ways that this methodology is particularly powerful.
p.7, line 19: Unclear what point the author is making in the statement “My revulsion…feeling of disgust.” Similarly, line 42, “Because times have changed, even in Arizona, no one appreciated these whites…” (based on what evidence?)
p.8, line 35: Use of “nucleation point”? Not clear what is meant here throughout the paragraph. 3) The author rightfully asserts that words, spellings, punctuations etc. have significance though provides explanations for some and not other distinctions. The point made to distinguish “white” and “White” people should be at the beginning of the article (now on page 5) and consistently. Also, needs explanation of the significance of capitalization of People of Color, Social Justice, etc. where that appears. Especially in an article such as this, United Statesian or US American is preferable to equating being of the US and being “American”.
4) The Abstract, and beginning of the article need some statement of why this type of reflection is so important. What is the significance and implication? Why is this examination and methodological approach important?
5) At numerous points in the article reference is made to dismantling whiteness. The discussion is engaged through an individual lens rather than in relation to social movements, structural transformation etc. The points would benefit from more thoughtful discussion of the relationship between structure, agency, ideology as well as history of white supremacy and the mechanisms that have contributed to its reproduction and entrenchment. (c.f. Bush, Bonilla-Silva, Hira noted below as resources to help historicize, contextualize and discuss how social change happens.) Is at issue the need to “overcome the cultural persistence of White supremacy” or to “remediate whiteness” or to radically transform the entire system that includes structure, ideology, and daily practices?
In each of these examples, it may be the writing that is imprecise rather than the ideas being insufficiently explored. Either way this pattern is replicated throughout the article.
6) While the author talks about the need for a personal story, that story is not sufficiently evident in this article until roughly page 12. Using the third person can be confusing unless they are not referring to themself e.g. p6, line 52 “There was a simultaneous awareness …” Why not “I had…” p9, line 40: Author notes “This is the whiteness I participated in…” though provides no examples of what they specifically did. Similarly, p10, line 29, … came up … against the true magnitude of the problem of Whiteness because White supremacy all but defines Jackson…” What happened, how did she become aware etc. This discussion is too vague to support any point. Similarly statements about deference to their mother and their mother’s wisdom, and “wrong-headed resistance” (p.11, line 19) needs to be more specific. It is unclear what point is being made.
What shifted in her thinking, what led to their greater awareness of the frequency and intensity of violence inflicted on communities of color? What had she thought of these incidences prior to this shift? Was it the consistency of the news reporting? At the end of page 11, beginning of 12, the author’s voice gets stronger and clearer though still not especially auto-ethnographic. It is not a problem to be primarily focused theoretically however that impacts the writing style. Again, page 12, line 45 –reference point for “tenderly compassionate… picked upon a deeply colored sore spot…” is not clear. Page 13, line 24, “nation’s sudden return…” is actually not historically accurate. The nation never receded fully and the return was not as sudden as we are led to believe. The pages that follow are written more thoughtfully and explain the process and struggle of awakening. It would be helpful to be more specific about examples, and use those to discuss theory in ways that can draw the lessons of this experience of transition.
There are many references to literature – what was learned from people she interacted with?
7) Several resources that may be particularly useful include:
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. https://rowman.com/isbn/978144
Hira, Sandew https://www.din.today/the-theo
Bush, Melanie E L Bush https://rowman.com/ISBN/978074
Roediger, David http://www.davidroediger.org/b
Grosfoguel, Ramon https://scholarworks.umb.edu/h
8) Need to review for typos e.g. p10, line 10, “Whites among a many other people”
Great start, just needs revision for clarity of the arguments being made and specificity related to theprocess being described.
Reviewer #3:
Consider: Is there a theory grounded way of telling this story? As written, the reader has little understanding as to how the author came to her purported enlightened state.
The paper would benefit from better organization. I would also encourage the author to add an introduction (the first heading and words of the body of the paper are Methodology) that situates the work and amplifies its merits.
Like all methodologies, autoethnography has detractors. I would caution the author that one of the criticisms of autoethnography used in this vein is that it allows the writer to view him or herself as a “good white” and paint other less enlightened whites as bad, but what purpose does this serve towards dismantling the beast of racism? It does not UNLESS the author presses beyond this. I encourage more critical reflection. For example, at page 5 the author discusses her mother. The mother is painted as a bastion of virtue. Are any of us so one-sided? Perhaps the author could you explore the private versus public talk she noted. As the author notes her own personal path to “enlightenment” about her white privilege, there is a suggestion that she was once unenlightened. How does white ignorance form in such a home where a child is raised “by a mother who prided herself on kindness and decency?” Certainly, parents are not the only influences on a child. I encourage the author to consider making place a more prominent focus in the work (beyond vilifying the Deep South and noting the lack of racial ethnic diversity in Scottsdale, which the author writes is “typical enough for the Southwest”). Are some places less likely than others to birth a consciousness of white privilege in its citizenry? Some of this work has been done by education scholars, but it still might be worth exploring.
Places like Alabama and Mississippi are often used as examples to make other places feel more progressive, but as Malcolm X famously stated, “Anything below Canada is the South.” The author seems to fall into this trap of vilifying the South, and it clouds the ability to see elements of the Deep South in Scottsdale (and other places). This particularly occurs in the discussion on page 10. Is the author suggesting that white supremacy defines Jackson, MS but not Scottsdale? The absences of people of color from the landscape—social and physical—of Scottsdale may itself be a result (or aim) of white supremacy.
I would encourage the author to make the analysis used to reach conclusions (such as the grouping of Whites in Scottsdale discussed at page 6, lines 35-54) more transparent. The author should provide the reader with insight into how she arrived at those groupings and why these matter.
A few things interfered with my ability to understand/follow the piece.
• There are a lot of vague pronoun references throughout the article. This begins with the first sentence of the abstract, which reads, “The academic study of Whiteness is integral to the critical study of race, and it [emphasis added] has mostly been done by People of Color.” Is the author suggesting that Whiteness studies have mostly been done by people of color? I am not sure I agree with that. Is the author instead saying that the critical study of race has been primarily done by people of color and that this work often involves the study of racism? I could agree with the later. [This occurs throughout the piece. For example, on page 4 (lines 42-47) the author seems to infer that Du Bois’ body of work is about whiteness. That is not accurate. Ruth Frankenberg (1996:7) notes, “[Whiteness].. comes to selfname, invents itself, by means of its declaration that it is not that what it projects as Other.” Similarly, Du Bois writes about people of color (the Others), and in his inquiry he finds it necessary to discuss racism, white supremacy, and/or whiteness, but whiteness is not his chief inquiry.
• On page 3, lines 49-52 the author writes, “In this vein, autoethnography is a valuable tool for communicating to White people what they should perceive, address, and ultimately work toward to remediate Whiteness.” Does/should Whiteness be remediated? Should, instead, the aim be to dismantle white supremacy and racism?
• Discussion of white or White (which begin at the bottom of page 5) may be important, but the distinction given left me more confused. My confusion was amplified on page 6, line 15 (which is the paragraph following this discussion) the author writes, “As a White person at the time…” I am unclear what this means or what the author is trying to suggest.
• There were references to unfair representations of people of color in the media and conversations with peers, but scant details were offered to form the context and better understand the author’s ethnographic journey of discovery.
Housekeeping Things:
• Page 2, line 36 you have Baylorn. The references list Boylorn as the author. Boylorn is correct.
• Page 4, line 22. In the in-text citation the Winkler date reference is 2018, but it is 2017 on the references. Which is correct?
• In the author’s references to Peggy McIntosh’s “Invisible Knapsack” piece, the author sometimes cites 1988 (see page 5, line 17) and sometimes uses 2004.
• Gilborn (page 13 (line 3) is not listed on the references.
• Giroux. In paper 2010 is publication year, but in the references it is 2003.
• Throughout there are a number of statements that come off as very self-serving (See point above about the dangers of autoethnography in this vein). Here are a few examples: “My revulsion to hearing such remarks and cautions against them grew into a feeling of disgust” (page 7, lines 10-22); “I frequently became disgusted by the exploitative ways in which the media made a ratings based spectacle out of the suffering of People of Color…played lackey to a monstrous political regime” (page 11, lines 33-45); “boiled my blood’ (page 12, lines 49-52); “Eventually my eyes were opened, and I no longer had the ability to pass with the blindness of my youthful naivete as I had done throughout my years in Scottsdale” (page 14, lines 44-48); “In the months that followed I had no more reluctance to bring the problem of Whiteness to light. Henceforth on moral [emphasis added] grounds, I was thus determined to do so” (page 21, lines 17-20); and “…my voice became hoarse and my throat sore. I still held out hope, believing that I could persuade them of the danger and inhumanity inherent in Whiteness
and privilege” (page 22, lines 42-54).
Suggested Readings:
Brunsma David L., Brown Eric S., Placier Peggy. 2012. “Teaching Race at Historically White Colleges and Universities: Identifying and Dismantling the Walls of Whiteness.” Critical Sociology 395:717–38.
Combs, Barbara Harris. 2017.“No Rest for the Weary: The Weight of Race, Gender, and Place Inside and Outside a Southern Classroom.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3 (4), 491-505.
Doane, Ashley W. 2006. “What is Racism?” Racial Discourse and Racial Politics.” Critical Sociology
Feagin Joe R. 2013. The White Racial Frame. 2d ed. New York: Routledge.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1996. “When We are Capable of Stopping, We can Begin to See.” In B. Thompson & S. Tyagi (Eds) Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity (New York, Routledge).
Hartmann Douglas, Gerteis Joseph, Croll Paul R. 2009. “An Empirical Assessment of Whiteness Theory: Hidden from how Many?” Social Problems 563:403–24.
Hughey Matthew W., Byrd Carson. 2013. “ The Souls of White Folk Beyond Formation and Structure: Bound to Identity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 366:974–81.
Jungkunz Vincent, White Julie. 2013. “ Ignorance, Innocence, and Democratic Responsibility: Seeing Race, Hearing Racism.” The Journal of Politics 752:436–50.
Lavelle, Kristen. 2014. Whitewashing the South: White Southerners’ Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mueller, Jennifer. 2017. “Producing Colorblindness: Everyday Mechanisms of White Ignorance.” Social Problems 64(2):219-238.
2 comments
Quote ” read mine Kraft Unquote
Lol – could there be a link between that & the way this indubitably most interesting by far aspect of james lindsays work goes almost comment -less aside a tiny satire ..
If it wasn’t for the grievance studies, which i class as once of the finest acts of resistance since the modern totalitarian age began – i’d think Lindsay was one of the cabalists frankly. His daily grift is so inferior to the grievance studies its almost worth wondering if he took part.
Same is potential true of hitlers so called struggle – i’d doubt he wrote it. And have NO DOUBT that perpetrators of his deeds did lurk in corridors of power far higher than this little hitlers. The social engineering that drives the public perception that man made the decisions that drove WW2 are simply ludicrous. Hitler et all = his relatively unimportant set of dispensable was a puppet dictatorship for a much darker more powerful source that never went away nor faced the consequences.
‘His Struggle’ thus should have described true true existential crisis not a fake one. I.E if we don’t win, only the secret location of the loot is keeping me alive <<< and FACT such as that.
I have been too lazy to read mine Kraft, would you possibly explain which sections are based on that book?