Whiteness: The Meaning of a Racial, Social and Legal Construct

let me just briefly introduce our panelists to at my far end is dr jane jun she is professor of political science at the university of southern california and next to her is nancy eisenberg who is the t harry williams professor of history at louisiana state university next to her is richard delgado who is the professor and john j sparkman chair of law at the university of alabama school of law and next to him is david icard who is professor of african american and diaspora studies and director of african american and diaspora studies at vanderbilt university and to my immediate left is david roediger who is the foundation professor of american studies at the university of kansas so please join me in welcoming our guests so we're going to start off with about 50 minutes of a moderated discussion and then we're going to open the floor up for questions at the end and i'll give you instructions for that as we get closer to that time period so first i just wanted to start off with this question um and it's going to be for everybody but i'm going to start with jane um so lots of people have heard about the idea that race is a social construct so what does that mean when we say that race is a social uh construct and why does or doesn't that matter well i mean the idea of social construction is a long-standing question and an approach to how not only humanists but social scientists think about the world i think there are three important features of social construction with respect to race and the first one is that social construction is often seen as a distinction from making in this case created by society rather than by a biological or strict scientific foundation that would be among the most important points and i think other of my colleagues up here will further amplify that the second thing about social construction is that social constructions are usually specific to particular time periods to languages to distinct cultures and nation states and for example of course race is implicated in very different ways and created in very different ways let's say if you were in brazil or india or even in france britain or in the united states and finally i think it's important as the political scientist in addition to andra on this panel to note that the groupings and in this case the social categories of race are usually created to distinguish one from another white only means something in relationship to black and it's usually in the united states in particular and so when we think about social construction how we create meaning for them they are always relative in some way in contrast to or sometimes triangulated so asian americans are the best example of a group that has been triangulated with respect to other minorities and whites better than in many cases african americans conceived of and triangulated put in between whites so i think with respect to that one of the best examples of how to think about race in the united states is how to think about it with respect to the united states census now is there by the way is the census everybody does a census right and you all do it we all do it now we we started doing it ourselves in 1960 prior to that you were enumerated by an enumerator someone who came up and looked at you and decided what kind of what race you were um but in this changes in 1960 um where does the origin for the census come from we've been doing it since 17 since the very beginning is it in the constitution is it the requirement of the census yes the census of i'm talking about the institution and do we is it required to be done by race does it say anywhere in the in the constitution it's done by race why is it done by race that's in the constitution why do we have to know how many whites there are compared to in this case slaves three fists compromise exactly and so the requirement for this the requirement for the united st is rooted deeply not by by the institution itself but the categories themselves have to be created in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery in the united states and over time these categories have changed there are only three categories that are four really that remain consistent from the beginning they are white black or negro indian native american and chinese why is chinese in there from eight from the 1750s and 60s why is chinese in there so it's an interesting question we may come back to it and those categories do change over time so if mr khan where's mr khan from pakistan right originally from pakistan if mr khan was enumerated by the united states census in 1930 or 1940 he would have been enumerated as hindu you're thinking what yeah he would have been enumerated as hindu and the categorization of asian indians and pakistanis has changed over time from hindu in 1930 and 40 to white in 1950 to other and then david please correct me if these are incorrect and others of the history the historians but over time what's changed asian indians are now considered part of asian americans so one of the other crazy and confusing things that happens is that whites are one big category blacks are one big category latinos are not a race according to the us racial taxonomy latinos are what an ethnicity right but if you are any any other asians in the room besides me raise your hand asians okay what kind of asian are you what asian are you nepalese cambodian anybody else filipino korean now the u.s racial taxonomy treats all of us for all four of us are different races on the basis of national origin so if you look at the census enumeration form asians are not a race we are separated by national origin even though for latinos from mexico or el salvador are created or treated as any race but cannot bring their national origin as a race how bizarre is that right that is the best example of the social construction of race does anybody else want to jump in and i can um oh let me grab the mic i i want to think about this from a kind of a pedagogical standpoint because it's it's always a question that students have particularly my black students because you know for them like the the idea that race is a social construction doesn't have a whole lot of traction in their lived experience right it seems very far-fetched to be talking about race as a social construction when your material reality is your dark skin your curly hair your hip heart garb marks you in a way that could quite literally get you killed and so it seems like a beside the point a kind of issue for them and one of the things that i you know i teach a lot of james baldwin one of the things that james baldwin says he said in the 1950s and fire next time he said that the only thing that whites have that black people need is power or should want is power and nobody holds on to power forever now the reason why that is significant in this context and how i teach this and and try and make it pragmatic for my my students is that what james baldwin is doing in his critique of kind of whiteness there is really exploding this idea that there is something essential about whiteness that connects it to some kind of intellectual cultural notion of superiority that in fact that at the at a fundamental level this is about power in the and and the ways in which power creates these types of categories and then how these categories then you know perpetuate certain types of material realities and so that makes a lot of sense to them because then they begin to see that you know their construction as black and how that you know marks them but also how they perpetuate that themselves in terms of how they see themselves in relationship to the world it it situates their agency in a very different way for example i tell my students that if you were to go to as a lot of black intellectuals black scholars like literary folks go to africa thinking in this kind of internalized way about race that we have in america that hey i'm going to the motherland so i'm gonna go to ghana i'm gonna go to nigeria and i'm gonna meet my brother and then when they go to these places oftentimes what happens is the africans in these spaces treat them as white americans and it's for the first time they realize whoa i'm i've always thought of myself as black in a particular kind of way i've never necessarily thought of myself as american but i am an american and not only that but when i move in that space i am privileged in a very visible material way like even when i ask for things that i don't get it and i'm like wait a minute i'm supposed to have internet people scramble like for real they scramble do you need to talk to the manager can there's anything and i'm just not used to having that kind of right and that comes with being right what is considered a wealthy american in this space they are not seeing me as black not in the way that i think of myself as black and so i think it's very important you know when you kind of teach that to uh students who experience blackness in a very visceral lived experience way to show them like how those dynamics of social construction actually operate and how portable they are when you move through through space yeah yeah so this question is for nancy and for david roediger so can you trace the evolution of the concept of whiteness in america what does it mean to be white and has it always meant the same thing [Music] well as a historian i'd say obviously it's changed i mean that's the whole reason you study history is that things that you think are givens in today's society are just not true in the past and i think if we think about the way in which whiteness was thought about in the 1600s i know this is a period that you're all really interested in right but one of the things that's very strange uh is that it is the british who imagined themselves they admired their oval faces the paleness of their skin of course today we would think that they're sickly and and not at all healthy and to be to be admired and queen elizabeth was admired for her red hair um so whiteness was very much attached to nationality and then again how categories change the way in which the contrast talking about how there's always othering going on the principle othering that's happening in the 1600s during the colonial period is with native americans native americans are constructed as the other and they are seen as tawny and what the british did is they took categories from europe so the spanish were also considered tawny so things that we would never even see and this reinforces this idea of social construction is they took categories from europe and then just adapted them and applied them to native americans because that's what they were familiar with and that and it emphasizes what i think is so important is people see the world through their predetermined ideology we don't see a pure world we don't even though the enlightenment likes to imagine and compare vision and the mind to a computer or to a camera in fact that's not the way it works we see it through these various filters and just to give you a few examples if we move into the 18th century and that's where race and whiteness was very much contingent on environment and it was also very much associated by continent so the assumptions that were connected to that which we would think is very strange and was very anti-essentialist was that race was a dynamic category that someone that that the leading french theorists uh bouffant would argue that essentially if someone is born on one continent they may have one racial identity but this was actually a very good friend of thomas jefferson wrote to him repeating these ideas that it was theorized that if african americans moved to sweden they would turn white now these are again ideas that we could not possibly we don't think in those ways but this was considered the dominant theory the dominant idea of the time if we move into the 19th century whiteness particularly in southern culture was seen as a luxury it was very much something associated with the elite it was very much associated again with gender because gender is also a constructed identity uh that it was something that was very much associated with the privilege of protecting your skin color the idea that to be sunburned was seen as a sign that you were lower class and this was actually used in the campaign the 1828 campaign of andrew jackson his wife they they were attacked in part because his wife was accused of committing adultery which had happened [Laughter] she had been previously married and her marriage had not divorce had not been finalized and she sort of ran off with andrew jackson and then ended up marrying him but no one in tennessee actually cared when they returned but then it became a campaign issue uh but she was also very much ridiculed for her son's her sunburned skin and this also uh led to one of a highly racist attack against her that uh an anti-jackson partisan basically said that she could not conceal her class identity not only was she uncouth and sunburned but he compared it to uh the black mistress of a white elite trying to socialize with elites and wearing a white mask so when we think about like whiteness it also and and i think this is something that i wanted to say later but i'll just say it now that term white privilege is borrowed from class privilege it's barred from the way we thought of class privilege but it it has had a long history of very much being something that certain people who we today would call white didn't have that privilege of whiteness david yes thank you um my favorite two words defining or describing whiteness come from emoji three rivers is this great theorist and uh she describes whiteness as she says it's a political alliance and what she means is it's a political alliance that brings together the people who are european americans who are best served by this economic system and the people who are worse served by this economic system and the historia i'm also a historian so the historiography of that i think a hundred years ago just about today du bois was writing about this and he said personal whiteness the idea that you own your own skin personal whiteness he thought was about 250 years old and it's another case where du bois is just light years ahead of everybody if you go back and do the math he's getting you to bacon's rebellion and these series of tobacco-cutting riots and rebellions in virginia and maryland that encouraged the rulers of those places to divide white from black at law and also to import many more slaves and turn to a slave labor force regarding an integrated free black and uh poor white labor force indentured servant labor force says too unruly so that's the story i've told forever i just got back from a long stay in australia and every time i go to australia i think it's not quite right we we define black as the other of white in the united states australia yields very very similar uh white supremacy without any african population without any slave trade and so i think we cry out for an account of the development of whiteness that takes settler colonialism seriously i'd say two other things whenever we talk about race in the united states we have to keep in mind that race always means two things it means what's ascribed to you what the cop thinks you are what the realtor thinks you are what the landlord thinks you are what the judge professor thinks you are ah but it also is what you do with that patricia williams says it's it's description and aspiration at the same time so we're talking when we talk about whiteness as how people are categorized but also then whether they claim that category in a certain way or not in a certain way and then lastly and most difficult and i'm glad you mentioned baldwin whiteness is a way that misery gets dealt out to people of color but it's also a way that misery is accepted by whites and particularly by poorer whites so i think it's all of those things alluded to it a little bit already but richard since you are the legal scholar here i wanted to ask you about the legal construction of race what does that mean that race is a legal um construct and can you outline the ways that race has been legally inscribed into american society in particular how do i love thee let me count the ways start in 1790 when when a very early congress one of the one of the first congresses figured out that the united states that the young young nation was really kind of going to be the hot uh party in in in town um a lot of people were going to want to immigrate here it was beautiful uh it was rich it was largely uninhabited there was plenty of space for for almost anyone uh so what kind of people would would the new nation like to have coming coming in they then passed in 1790 the natural the naturalization act of that of that year which limited acquisition of united states citizenship to free white people that was it if you were a free black person or a free asian person or i guess a free latino person like me you could not acquire u.s citizenship if you were born here well lucky you you were a u.s citizen you citizen by birthright but otherwise the whole rest of the world was barred from coming to the united states in in being citizens believe it or not that statute stood basically unaltered for 160 years regulating the uh the the composition of the of the u.s population the the faces and the the accents and the sounds and the and the smells of the food and so on that you you meet as you walk on a typical street in an american city free white people only the rest no way a little later the the southern states got got particularly interested in in in family relations so so they uh uh uh added more more more more details to to to marriage law and uh uh enacted regulations about who could marry whom under the first statute the naturalization statute american courts for 160 years had to figure out in naturalization petitions whether this particular person who might be half canadian and half syrian or uh from the caucasus region uh the middle east and and who is arguing on that on that basis i must be a caucasian whether those people were white enough to qualify for for naturalization in most cases they said no but the south really got fancy about who who was white and capable of mary uh barred from marrying a not non-white person and you all probably know about the one one drop rule and miscegenation statutes that lasted on the books until 1967 when a famous case decided they were unconstitutional i wonder what that was that case anyone know got it loving versus virginia excellent um by the way indians came in for for for their own early relegation to the to the uh the netherworld of non-whiteness in johnson versus macintosh the most famous supreme court justice in in history john marshall decided it decided that if you if you were indian and thought you you own some land too bad for you the doctrine of manifest destiny meant that european nations who got here first owned it all too bad for you get lost or go live in a reservation somewhere so yeah the the law has played a significant part in determining who is white who who is non-white who can marry who cannot marry who can live with with the rest of us in our cities and and the like but you know something it doesn't happen just by itself it's not like a machine you turn the crank and it it yields decisions you win you you lose we are have been responsible for those laws those appalling laws that i just mentioned and dozens more that help help create who's one up who's one down who's white who's not who can come here who can't so we've seen that whiteness is a social construct and it's a legal construct david how is it a cultural construct how has whiteness been inscribed in american popular culture wow [Music] let's think about it i'll give you an example i use with my students and then i'll kind of see if i can't bring it up to to uh speed and talk about my girl iggy um you talking about australians right um uh i asked my students usually the first day of class particularly in my literature courses i i say what is the difference in terms who is a um considered a universal author versus a race author between william shakespeare and tony morrison right who your who's the who's the universal author who's the one that can speak across class and race and you know gender and you know and i just let them raise their hand you know and and people say well you know it's shakespeare it's a universal writer because he's you know he does this and there's this and and tony morrison she's the race author and i go wrong it's wrong wrong and then after a while the hands start kind of going down like what's the what's going on like the difference between shakespeare morrison in terms who's a universalist writer and who's a race writer is white power who determines what is universal right who determines how something is valued right culturally and this thing comes it turns into cultural common sense right um jane was uh uh it wasn't no nancy was talking about how we we we see our worlds through the ideological filters that we are given right um so for example africans didn't become africans until uh europe invaded africa because before then they were zulus they were ebos they didn't think of themselves as africans right that was imported right um so it's you have to think about it within the context of power and who can appropriate that power in certain kind of ways so for example you think about iggy azalea right this australian woman who comes to the u.s she is kind of picked up by t.i he basically writes her lyrics and she appropriates this black southern hip-hop like flavor and flow and you have all these talented black women out there who've been on the grind forever can't get no love iggy comes from austria not even speaking in her native accent and suddenly she is on the cover of gq the new face of hip-hop right and suddenly you know everybody is talking about iggy as this very top as if somehow the lyrics that she's saying in her cadence they've never heard before they're brand new they've redis you know these are new things just like when white folks start wearing cornrows or whatever oh my gosh look at this cutting-edge style right it's amazing where did this come from right um and it's you know folks are looking around going seriously um like this is this is this is this is the appropriation this is the cultural appropriation of our day so we start thinking about the and that's again it gets us back to race as a construction you talk about the portability of this right that you can literally like say oh i want a little bit of this i don't want a little bit of this but it's it's almost like um greg tate says you know white america wants everything but the burden right they want everything but the burden so i think in that way in terms of that cultural construction you literally see um the way that somebody can come not just white in america white from a completely different country from a completely different culture and just say oh i'm gonna take some of that black girl magic and i'm gonna put it in here and i'm gonna present it to the world and people oh my god where did that comfort that's so new that's so cutting edge and you know um tamika like for real like seriously so there's and i and i'll end with this it was a great moment in uh dave chappelle when dave chappelle's skit was when his his variety show was was the show where he said you know i'm gonna say some racial stuff but because you can't hear me as a black man said i brought this white opera singer here so i'm going to say these things and she i'm going to let her sing them and in some ways he was signifying on that moment that literally his embodied blackness rendered what he said death to his white audience is but that same type of that's the same word same ideas rendered through this white woman and her voice and her you write her embodied whiteness suddenly rings true rings insightful uh what have you so you you know you literally see these moments in which that that dynamic of embody blackness and body whiteness you know um communicates these different messages so um white has also not been a static category we've talked about this a little bit so this question is for david roediger and for richard how did new groups coming to the united states become white um by what criteria are some groups counted as white and other groups not so since we've been talking about culture and you've already halfway referenced to cartage the kardashian how did the kardashians get to be get to be white well let me talk about about arrogance microphones [Music] they're the really interesting case cases for for my money were the huge waves of immigrants from from southern in eastern europe who arrived in this country starting in the early early years of the 20th century usually through through ellis island these were people who under the the naturalization stat statute were und undeniably european they were you know white they were entitled to to come here and become u.s citizens if they wanted to fill out the fill out the papers but but real white people in the united states i mean you know nordic the aryan whites from northern europe didn't know what to make of them and didn't particularly like them these were people from from italy from from greece they were slavs from you know the very slavic slavic nations they they were often kind of swarthy looking and not not really black but not not pale white either and besides they they didn't act right they uh they they continued speaking their weird languages uh months after after being here and they ate unusual food and you know ravioli and spaghetti and not hamburgers and you know good american fare and um you know peculiar music and dance and and dresses and so on they didn't really fit in they they were not really white white white people in in fact many of them millions of them were deemed black i believe believe it or not consider considered you know black like african african african-americans eventually they worked their way in into into the white category and are today you know white white people uh with italian ancestry or greek ancestry or or whatever and they uh they did it in the story that david has taught uh david roediger here he has told better than any anyone else and it seems to come down to three ways they became white through number one acquiring wealth money money lightened them sometimes their money came from nefarious that's the new uh hot word today uh sources like gambling and numbers rackets and protection rackets and and gangster activity and and so on but after a while some of them had you know real serious money one step toward whiteness number two they they they became white by um joining the democratic party that was really important the democratic party accepted them loved them taught them how to vote and now they became americans democrats but americans and third they they gained admission to the white race by agreeing to and learning how to be really racist really to stomp on the people who were at the very bottom of the ladder namely blacks three routes to whiteness for those millions of people from the nether regions of europe the south and in the east basically [Music] yes i can't improve on that uh scarcely at all but uh i i would say that i'm really excited about this uh term that's come out of britain recently a sociologist named satnam verdi a south asian sociologist who has coined the term racialized outsiders and he's tried to write a whole history of britain as if it were not a white country as if its social movements were always enriched by africans were always enriched by south asians were at other periods always enriched by the irish who were considered not quite uh white always enriched by jews and in leading roles so he's after this changing but on trial group of people and some aren't on trial africans are just excluded and in the united states too but there's always this population in the united states or often this population of what verde would call the racialized outsiders and it's an interesting term because it kind of implies that as you shed those food ways and language habits and dances and things that richard was just talking about you're going to move toward a mainstream position in toward a white position but your own country people who come in later are still going to be seen as racialized outsiders so i i think it really is a a key way to think about the racial order in the united states now eduardo benia silva's been saying there's a new division is between black and non-black and i think it's between black non-black and racialized outsiders increasingly in the united states so we've mentioned it before we've talked about this term white privilege how would you all define white privilege what is it [Music] i would give examples not a definition white people are rarely challenged in in stores and suspected of being shoplifters or or people who who shouldn't be here people of color frequently have have that that experience let's see oh well peggy mcintosh has her a famous list of 46 privileges that come her way by by virtue of being being white and then recently of course police citizen interactions have been have been in in the news whites are very very rarely treated uh brutally when they're when they're stopped by a by a police officer or approached on a on a sidewalk and and uh associated uh squeezed to death but these happens uh fairly commonly and uh with people with people of color especially young young young men of of color so it's a it's a privilege not to have to worry about that a lot of white white folks basically have a bad attitude towards the cops something happened to them or a friend of a friend of theirs and they got caught and the cop was rude to them and took them downtown and they had a fine of 350 and that was all radically unfair because what they did was basically not that bad so they have a poor attitude toward the toward the police but but bla for black people who did the same thing uh might have a fine that's much larger might have spent a much longer period of time in in jail the bail that was set for them might have been much larger so it's it's a it's a it's an aspect of white privilege to be treated not too badly when you mess up [Music] i think i think peggy mcintyre i think it's peggy magen mcintosh who says that the or maybe robert jensen who says the ultimate white privilege is a privilege basically of not having to think about race or its implications in your life right i mean you know you know it's like you get up in the morning and as a as a as a as a black person you can't just to say you know what today i'm gonna just be david you know what i'm saying forget all this race stuff i'm just gonna be me right right till you drive and you get stopped by the cops right right or you you know you have a you know a you know a in you know an intense kind of conversation with your your your your white in some cases woman uh scholar and she starts crying and suddenly you have a white male you know peer of yours cut to come to the rescue and the white tears and you're looking around going what just happened right i'm just you know um or the other thing that that i like the analogy that i use to my students is like say you somebody knocks on your door um and you go to open the door you look down and you see a bag full of money now there's bullets in there and there's blood in there a little bit of hair you're looking around you don't say well i don't know where this money came from so you kind of take it in and maybe the first day you report it to the police you know it's just money as my door i don't know and then every day that money keeps coming you know sometimes well well you know nobody's reporting this maybe i'll just use something for rent maybe i'll just use some of it for christmas and i'll take some of it back but every day you get this kind of free now you know there's some maybe some nefarious things going on because you see the blood the bullets and everything but you don't ask any questions you sometimes you try to do the right thing to turn it in now on the flip side tyrone and tamika are getting a bill right they're getting a bill in the mail it says look you owe 50 000 on this new ford explorer that's what i've never bought a ford explorer it's like no but your name is on here this is your social security number right and you're gonna have to pay this and you keep going like well wait a minute i'm running up these debts and i'm you know i'm trying to keep up with my own deals and i keep getting this debt and this debt and this debt right so on the one hand you have somebody's getting all of this stuff that they haven't earned the other this person is having to pay so then when the one confronts the other says look all that money you've been getting that's my money he said look i didn't know right so like yeah you didn't know but you spent like two hundred thousand dollars but you didn't know but you spent the money so how about you give me back that money so wait a minute how about we how about we do this how about i not take the money anymore and we're good right that's called neo-liberalism in case definitions right so that's that's why privilege right that that this that that um james baldwin says um when they they would they would sometimes you know these whites would sometimes take me into the basement of these precincts and they would tell me the deep secrets because they knew that even if i spoke the you know i told some people later on what they said they would not believe me because they would know that what i'm saying is true i want you to get that they they knew their secret was safe with me because they know if i spoke them out in public nobody would believe me because they would know that what i'm saying is true do you guys get the paradox like so you can speak freely about this kind of stuff in the presence of a black person and because the society is set up to not know what they know to be true so when colin kaepernick takes a knee we're talking about the national anthem right we cannot talk about the thing right that we know is there right because that thing that that's there is going to make me think differently about myself so i'm going to talk about the thing i can talk about to keep me from talking about the thing i know that it's there and that in some ways is how white privilege works it is a what tony morrison calls a distraction it's always one more thing so let me build on this um with nancy um and with david roediger so as you've mentioned nancy already white privilege connotes affluence and advantage and clearly not all white people are equally advantaged um so what does white privilege mean for those who are economically disadvantaged yeah i um you know i i teach a class called crime conspiracy and courtroom dramas it's my approach to legal history and you know i have my students look at you know who's on death row it's poor people poor whites poor blacks and i think one of the things we have you know we have to be always conscious of and i very since i'm also a feminist i'm very conscious that white privilege doesn't work for me the same way it works for donald trump so i think what we what we have to be uh conscious of and since when i went through graduate school there was a great attention play to race class and gender that these things are constantly interacting and intertwined and the mass media at times wants to pick one category over the other and simplify it and unfortunately and this is where academics get in trouble we know it's more complicated than that that it's not just one versus the other and i always worry when when we kind of fall into that simplifying of the category and i think one of the things historically we have to think about and one of the things that i write about i'll just show you again some examples of things you probably don't aren't aware of to show how complicated race can be and why gender and sexuality and what my two categories that i focus a lot on are the categories of breeding and pedigree breeding and pedigree these are categories we inherited from great britain they have class contestations class lineage class ancestry your name these are all categories that are used to define your class position but breeding was also very popular because people were analogized to animals so breeding became another way to sort and divide people um and it had racial and class connotations um and when what i want to make you sort of again think about the complexities of race and class for example in the state of virginia in 1663 the way in which one was defined a slave was whether your mother was a slave it was a system of breeding it's essentially said that the children of a slave woman became a slave now think about what that means that means if she has sex with a white man her child is still going to be a slave now why we have to be reminded of this is because this other language of pedigree and breeding has also dominated the rhetoric and how we sort and divide people and one of the things that my work uncovered is that many of the things that are used as terms of derision that we associate with racial terms of derision have often been used as class terms of division what we also inherited from the english was this obsession and this is so central to american identity and our politics today is this assumption that some people work hard and you know they work hard and they get what they deserve and then there's somehow people who don't work hard who are waiting for handouts this kind of notion of work why are we so obsessed with that well because the british were obsessed with idleness being idle being lazy and the terms that were constantly used well into the 20th century to dismiss poor whites and poor blacks was being shiftless um the other term that was readily applied is is that's important for to me is that class identity was linked to whether you owned land and as you know property is an essential legal legal category it was the reason that slaves were defined as who they were they were also defined as chattel property women were also denied the vote because under the terms of coverture they were not seen as autonomous human beings when they were married their identity was subsumed into their husbands so one of the things we do have to remember is that when we try to understand whiteness as i said earlier it is a category that is manipulated by class so yeah and gender and and the fact is that privileges i mean i was thinking about when you said about not having to think about it this is what elite people have to they don't have to worry about things because in the past they had servants doing things they didn't want to do they were protected and isolated so they in a sense had the privilege of not having to think about responsibilities and i think that's one of the things we have to always kind of include and with gender i think we have to make it even more problematic because whiteness for white women is often not a privilege it often can be very constricting and if we go back to the way in which women were seen as trophies that have to be controlled and manipulated and that their sexuality has to be protected and defended to such a degree that lynch mobs could be formed that was not a privilege that was another way to control them by claiming that there they symbolized whiteness and purity but in fact it is not at all a privilege thanks um you kind of stuck with me naming people i love and think know more about this than i do uh i always think that there's no reason that if there's some other scholar that has a better idea than i that i'm just gonna send you to that other scholar sometimes just to credit the other scholar but in this case to say you need to all go out and read this other scholar and the scholar is cheryl harris uh the great legal scholar at ucla show wrote paired articles in about 25 years ago now in harvard law review and cardozo law review the harvard law review one was called whiteness as property and she kind of charts for 100 pages all the different ways in which whiteness and property and the pursuit of property were related in law uh in the united states um and the title begs for the begs for somebody to ask the question well what about whites who don't have property and at a certain point about halfway through the article cheryl directly takes this on and she says one of the things you have to realize if white property is also an expectation of payoff an expectation of benefit and so if you actually have no other property accept your property in whiteness your what du bois called your personal whiteness you might be more tempted to say that's what i own that's what i identify with now we've seen in history the opposite happen and poor and working whites become available for interracial alliances of the poor but there is cheryl says a certain logic to this and then in to to not making that choice and to identifying with with whiteness and then in finding sojourner's truth she says something very like what what you just said she says how do what's the difference between in most of us history between a black woman and a white woman of whatever class white woman and the difference is she says one can only give birth to to slavery and the other can only give birth to freedom and that's a profound material difference that she's that she's talking about there yeah so we've been talking about privilege but jane we know that there's polling data that suggests that there are whites who think that they are discriminated against because they are white so what do these respondents mean when they say that they're being discriminated discriminated against because they're white and how does that perception correlate with other attitudes i believe that the most recent study out about this is was done by the national public radio along with the i think it was the robert wood johnson foundation and the harvard school of something and you can't remember it's a harvard school though so you think it's good quality data and it probably is in the sense that uh whites in this study they're very infrequently asked about their experiences with discrimination usually those questions are are given to people who are more likely who have been thought to be victims of discrimination or on the receiving end just to clarify the question and this was i think just october of 2017 didn't ask if you were personally discriminated against it asked whether whites uh if if there was discrimination against whites in america what proportion do you think said yes to that in in 2017 now we don't have good historical data in other words by historical data i mean like two years ago we don't have good data over time it's 55 okay so 55 of whites say that there's discrimination against whites in america but a much smaller proportion say that they themselves experienced it they think that it exists but they did not think much smaller proportions less than half across a variety of things in a store at school in a job trying to rent a place much smaller proportions on the flip side of course when whites were asked do minorities experience discrimination in the united states the proportion is much higher and the the study reports out at 84 so despite the fact that there it's you might think it's a relatively large number but then at the same time um this is a different america and i think within the context of thinking about this the the idea of white privilege and this goes back to something david said it's not having to think about it i just want to give you an example from politics in 2008 you remember the good old days in 2008 when i remember when cindy mccain um had she's an alumnus of the university that i teach at and they were describing her as you know potentially the next uh first lady but they also described michelle obama as the next black first lady and the possible black first lady you would never hear cindy mccain described as a white first lady you would never hear us say well a man named donald trump is the white candidate for president it never it is never whiteness requires no modifier and because it is the def and therefore being the default category is part of what of what that white privilege is you don't you can say you're american you don't have to say you're asian american and then people will say well where are you from and you say well i'm from california and they'll say where are you from and then i know what they mean because it's not necessarily a negative question it simply says that my status as an american is is always going to be challenged as a function of the fact that i don't look and don't appear and never have been classified as white so i just want to say within the context of that if we think about if we were wondering whether or not perceptions of discrimination are getting more intense among white americans you might think about this within the context of status anxiety and the significance of having a black president for the last two terms and in this case status anxiety comes from what its status anxiety usually comes under situations where an established order a well-established order is undergoing change if white privilege is under if not attack at least some is shaking a bit one could argue that that is a sign that there is significant change in the social structure coming and the biggest example of that would be that the person at the very top of not only the united states government but the democratic party was a black man for two terms so the way to think about status anxiety and in particular how and when an established order is threatened is to imagine the southwest airlines a a130 a31 to 60 you've all you've all gotten your boarding pass this happened to me the other in fact just yesterday printed my boarding pass i'm b-22 i'm like ah b22 but i know that i'm b22 and at least i'm ahead of c40 right so then i'm like all good we get on the plane then they tell us it's a well-established order everybody knows what their number is and they say hey what are you oh i'm b19 i'm ahead of you it's a well-established order and then once we're on the plane there's something wrong with something in the bathroom so they make us all get off and then they tell us we're just we're just going to get on again mayhem ensues right because you're like but i was b 26 or 22. and then everybody says no i was a5 you know i was actually the first in line so when a well-established order is disrupted when it when the rules are there the rules begin to go away and everybody in a thinks that i could end up at the back of the plane in the middle seat then they begin to get concerned and so when if it isn't a privilege but it's necessarily a place in a location when whiteness or when the privilege is threatened that well-established order is then then creates anxiety and creates in many cases animosity you want to turn to david icard and and ask some more questions about gender it's already come up but in what ways what are the connections between whiteness and masculinity um and then how does that complicate our understanding of gender equality broadly now ask that one more time so in what ways what are the connections between whiteness and our notions of masculinity yeah what is in our notions of masculinity well you know that's a that's a that's a great question um because i think it goes back to some of the things that jane was saying about whiteness as normalcy um and i'm thinking here about paul d and tony morrison's beloved right and paul d you know he lived on a plantation with a prior master who gave the black men guns and allowed them to marry and allow them to have a certain amount of freedom and then when that uh master died and they got a new master and that master took away their guns and started to like quote unquote emasculate them pau d goes through a process in which he wonders if his masculinity if his manhood was tied to this white man who could give it and take it away right on one level but also this kind of notion that somehow masculinity normative masculinity is also tethered to whiteness right and and and this notion of patriarchy right this nuclear family so as a black man in order for me to be a man in the society and be visibly visible and be seen then i have to be a provider i have to protect my woman i have to demand certain kinds of respect in in spaces right which is why you see for example you look at earlier early hip-hop you had these kind of audacious displays of like like wealth like the big gold chains and right in the in the in the cars and you and you had to have multiple women right in some ways because you saw this kind of exaggerated notion of masculinity right absent real structural political power like trump doesn't have to walk around even though he does right but he doesn't have to walk around to remind people he's rich in a certain kind of way whereas if you don't have access to those kind those trappings of normative quote-unquote normative masculinity then you have to put that on display that oftentimes creates tension particularly between black men and black women in hetero normative relations because there are expectations sometimes spoken sometimes unspoken we always see this in these kind of conversations about gender and expectations who pays the bill what does that mean right um joan morgan does a great job when she talks about right and in terms of being a hip-hop feminist she's like look now i'm going to be real with you right she's like when i'm at dinner like i'm a feminist but like if dude slides the bill over to me or says split the check i'm feeling some kind of way about that right and and part of that is there is kind of a sense of an expectation of his masculinity but also black women have not had the experience of being in this interesting like and problematic way of being elevated in the context of being considered ladies women and even though we're like oh you know we didn't need that and that's that's bosh well actually there is a currency with being respected in a certain kind of way where somebody stops and opens the door for you or somebody pays a certain kind of respect to you there is some currency to that and for us to deny that that doesn't exist is for us not to be real remember when i was first married give me the example i'm now divorced but i remember the first valentine's day i was like you know what you know valentine's day is bogus about i mean my mother she was like yeah yeah you're absolutely right but i want roses and we better go up get something really nice to eat right so so right masculinity matters in this kind of way and and because it's normative what that means is that black men are always trying to negotiate what that masculinity means in terms of their self-worth and i and i'll make this last point because of that oftentimes you see black men and i think michael eric dyson makes this point uh very eloquently you see black men kind of dawn this kind of exterior in terms of their garb in their clothes you know the baggy pants the big coats whatever and we see that kind of as threatening but the way he argues is this is a kind of protection because the number one emotion that black men when when they when they surveyed black men asking what is your number one what do you feel most of the day you know what they say you know what the number one emotion that black men say that they fear on a daily basis fear now think about this constructed as that's so lethal and dangerous in their body that trayvon martin who was unarmed they made an argument in the court that oh no he was armed he had the concrete are you so you so he had the con you're comparing the concrete to somebody with a loaded weapon who is 80 pounds heavier than he is like that's how lethal our bodies are constructed well if that's the case then i'm a walking bazooka which means that any type of violence that is enacted upon me to to contain me is always already justified right and so to kind of think about that construction of of fear right and the ways in which you know america looks at black men and how we're kind of negotiating our masculinity they're not going to be able to see my beautiful son and his complexity and his sensitivity and his insight all they're going to see is kind of an exterior a threat and so to kind of raise a black boy right raise a black boy to have that level of sensitivity to have that level of of insight but at the same time having to tell him that the world is not going to see that they're not going to see all of that beauty to use james baldwin's language what's going to happen to all that beauty they're not going to see that they're going to see this kind of distorted notion of this lethal person and i think trying to negotiate that that from a standpoint of of a boy and a man it's it's really a difficult negotiation and i have not figured out right you know as a parent as a man um how to how to how to navigate that but it is a real pressing pressing question before we open it up for questions we've got to talk about a couple of really contemporary things so i'm just going to sort of modify this a little bit and just ask questions about 2016. so how does whiteness explain the results of the 2016 election do you want to start jane well there's much to say but i think one of the most puzzling aspects if not puzzling one of the most jarring aspects for many people my myself included but only i'm technically an expert in this but i didn't actually know this until a few years ago when someone asked me to look at the voting data disaggregated for women by race because for so long we have heard the story that women are more democratic and women are indeed more democratic than men in america in american politics and in fact a very large gender gap usually seven eight this election this past election of 11 points women are more democratic than men you probably heard about the results of the election the governor's elections in particular in virginia and new jersey where democrats won in both of these locations and the story line is what who made that happen women made that happen right was it all women that made that happen so what do we know about uh white women in 2016. so after the access hollywood tape you thought it's over for him right and you think well women aren't going to vote for this guy do white women vote majority for trump and larger numbers for trump or for hillary clinton the in fact descriptive representative of white women herself both gender and race did white women in 2016 vote more for trump or more for clinton for trump you all know now right and it was a pretty good march when i was i think 52 to 43. why did that happen how and under what circumstances when women when white women and by the way is this a weird thing like didn't didn't white women vote for for obama in 8 and 12. majority of white women vote for obama no they did not in neither election okay how about earlier on how about for kennedy they go for kennedy white women you're like you're setting me up no they did not they did not so it's not an unusual thing it's not like a departure some great departure from the past but over the 18 federal elections for united states president between 1952 and 2016 in how many elections did white women vote democratic how many do you think two right what were they they had to be blowouts right or they had to be someone special 64. it was a blow up crazy bear goldwater you might have thought that was going to happen in 16 but it didn't um and also in 1996 william jefferson clinton majority of white women vote for for hillary clinton's husband um and that those are the only two elections in which that is the case but then you have to ask yourself if gender is a category of analysis and a state of relative deprivation in a gender hierarchy where men are on top in terms of who's more powerful and women are are below that why why do white women behave so differently right why is it that when donald trump extends his hand he's got a velvet glove on it's probably red and underneath that after the access hollywood tape he reveals it's the iron fist of patriarchy white women still go there why do they go there why don't they take the extended hand of their gender and race representative they do not and yet at the same time what makes women look democratic overall then who's making that happen women of color are making that happen so women of color vote something like 94 percent democratic in new jersey and virginia so the majority of white women and by the way in the in new jersey and virginia in this most recent election to white women support democratic candidates they did not buy a majority so it's it's women of color and they're more women of color because of immigration and the voting rights act that's why we see what we see but you have to ask yourself and this is one of the most interesting questions for for me why is it how is it that the same heat so there's there's a psychologist called gordon alport who had who's who wrote something so profound and yet so ordinary you turn the skillet on you turn your stove on you put the skillet and it heats up you put butter in and it melts you put an egg in it hardens the same heat that melts the butter hardens the egg the same access hollywood video that same comment it melts resistance for some it hardens resolve for others i think that is one of the critical observations of american politics today and why race and gender need to be analyzed together so i want to ask two more questions i'm going to ask them in succession um so they both relate to class so nancy i wonder if you could talk about the results of what we think about as working-class white voters in pennsylvania and wisconsin and michigan in 2016. and then david roediger i wanted to ask you about populism and about the ways that white privilege inflects bernie sanders version of populism yeah i just want to add one more thing about gender is that one of the reasons that i think white women also tend to be historically very conservative is also the way in which and this is a very old trope but it still holds true is that men essentially are seen as representing the world women are only apart um and this is even true in terms of how they view themselves i mean one of the things i i said i'm a feminist one of the things we have to know is that women can often be the worst critics of other women so i think if we also did a survey of who hated hillary the most we know who would be at the top of the list um and that's again because the expectations and the anger and the resentment i'll throw in one more point the one time when women and even conservative women loved hillary clinton was when it was revealed about monica lewinsky and they thought well that woman got knocked down she's suffering like i am and now i like her um so yes i think the the gender politics of power and the way in which women identify with themselves is also um extremely important as far as the the election i mean the the strange thing we have to realize and is that if one of the problems i think with the media is that they keep talking about the white working class and that's a completely inappropriate category because we know that people who voted for trump were across the economic spectrum and it came from the rallies and in fact even before they were calling them white working class they were calling them white trash um because of the men in the caps and and the the incident where a a white man you know you know punched a black man who was with black my you know who was protesting so that image in a sense shifted from white trash to white working class and and the problem with that is that it doesn't you know reflect the final results in terms of the way women voted one interesting fact about wisconsin is that in the primary conservative middle class suburban catholics outside of milwaukee voted for ted cruz it was rural americans who voted for trump and that's actually one of the things that i think is really important dynamic for understanding this election is the urban rural divide and then that gets overlain with a political ideology of cosmopolitan versus provincialism um and that's sort of another trope that we have to kind of throw into the the complicated way identity is located to place and location and the way in which that also defines one's race and also defines uh one's class identity because many people even if it's not true even if they're living in small towns that are dying they still have a romantic idea of like main street usa and that somehow if we think about the rhetoric i thought this is also one really interesting observation we know the tea party which has been alluded to used the rhetoric that they wanted to take their country back where it had gone they felt it had been stolen from them the the trump camp voiced a similar critique where they describe themselves as being disinherited and that brings us back to this idea that certain people imagine that they have inherited america and have more rights to it more claim to it than other people and this applies across the board in terms of race in terms of ethnicity and i think this is sort of another complicated way we have to think about identity and and not sort of think of trumpites as just white working class think of them as also having an imagined identity of where they position themselves where they live and then how that takes on these other again distinctions between they're fighting washington because that's where the pedigreed elites live they believe in hard work with a pedigreed elites believe in meritocracy so it's it's a much broader spectrum of how people define themselves that contributed to the divide between trump and hillary besides really really hating hillary because she was a woman this is a hard part to make and i think it's particularly maybe a hard point to make in the carter library but i think that we we sometimes only see half the picture if we think that the role of whiteness in elections is to make people prefer donald trump over hillary clinton or to give us reagan and reagan democrats at a certain point i think the longer harder story is that whiteness also gives us a certain kind of democratic party that's very timid in the demands that it can make either on behalf of people of color are on behalf of white working people and so one of the favorite things after the election was reporters would go down to harlan county or some terribly poor place in coal country and they'd interview somebody who had lost their obamacare after voting for trump and we were supposed to think oh stupid uh kentuckian person and you know mistakes were made it was a a terrible thing that that happened but nobody asked well what if the demand had actually been socialized medicine and uh free health care for all might that have been a little easier to defend uh so we get this extraordinarily incomplete welfare state uh and we get in in the clintons the people who promised to get rid of welfare as we know it and delivered on that promise so you know another part of the story of the election was that in certain key areas black women didn't vote in the numbers that they voted for obama and there were reasons for that so i think and i don't think i want to talk about sanders but i do think that that's an important uh point to make and i think that you know we have to and maybe this is the sanders point we have to at some point say uh we have to quit talking about race our class and sanders still wanted to talk about can't we avoid talking about race if we talk about class in a with enough finesse and to try to figure out what kinds of political movements can realize that only with uh deep demands for racial justice and for class justice can any kind of meaningful coalition be built right i'm a mere law professor so what do i know about elections but i but i will say this one thing that we should keep in mind i think in connection with the 2016 election is that we were choosing obama's successor i think that's a that's a key thing the country was choosing someone who would follow obama a black man a fairly successful successful one with a happy family beautiful children and so on living in in the white house and to build on something that that i think nancy said uh his his presidency certainly unleashed a great deal of anxiety a lot of people were very unhappy with that um the the racial crowd didn't didn't like that at all but at the same time his his presidency offered a kind of comfort level and a kind of complacency for another large swath of the american population uh it allowed it to think that we're now entering a post-racial age when when race really doesn't matter very very much a black and a latino and a white are all on the same setting same footing and and so judges actually have started you can count the cases now you could i have started considering that a a social practice or measure that disadvantages whites is just as racist just as discriminatory is one against blacks or latinos or asians never mind the horrible bloody history of this country with slavery and japanese relocation and the war against mexico and uh build a wall in in in all of that we're now even everybody's even we've had obama and and so we no longer we no longer need to worry about about about ra race any anymore so part of the country was intensely uncomfortable with obama and wanted a radically different kind of a president and part of the country thought that that the whole racial thing didn't matter now it's time to think about class and economics so this will be the last question since david you have the mike in your hand i'm going to start with you um how can somebody and a white person in particular embrace their whiteness their white identity their their genealogical heritage um and do so in an anti-racist fashion um i i've argued that that's not actually possible i wrote an article for counseling psychologists because is there a healthy white personality and i try to tease that tease that out i i think that any kind of commitment to racial justice involves a critique of whiteness there's another problem though and that is that some of my uh associates on the left sort of say well you can be a race trader and you can say i'm not white anymore and i feel like that's too easy too i feel like white people have to admit that they're stuck in this situation in which they need to develop a critique of their own uh position but without then saying oh i've jumped over there now i'm beyond race and i don't have to think about that anymore um your questions have been amazing i mean i am over here going my brain is on fire um there's a what faces that you guys familiar with derek bell's faces at the at the bottom of a well if if if you're not run out and get it right now um but there's a there's a law professor and you know he kind of teases out these certain similar kinds of issues through in through a creative process and and one of the stories he talks about a group of that's composed of all white activists and this this um in this particular story he the uh derrick bell you know fictionalizing himself finds himself wandering through the woods and is accosted by some white militants who want to you know do some really nasty things to him and he's rescued by this this kind of white feminist kind of activist um ally and they have this this very insightful conversation and one of the conversations is about why this group literally called ycbs i forget what their acronym but get it why cbs right um that one of the things that she says is that they don't allow blacks in their groups and the reason why they don't allow blacks in their groups because they don't want any of the white people to to start feeling like somehow by being anti-racist they're doing black people a favor so they they don't they can't have it's almost like right you you can't have black folks in this space because the way that whiteness works it will automatically trigger a certain kind of emotional currency well look at me look at look at me doing this thing for this this black person right as opposed to focusing on what the kind of what pathologies whiteness forces one to right kind of internalize and how it kind of plays out in certain ways and there's a there's a moment i don't know why i'm thinking about tony morrison but there's this moment um where paul d and haley as black men are really grappling with their masculinity they're talking about the women that they love and the ways in which they couldn't protect these women against these this kind of white assault of rape right and and and disruption and how that affects them as men right and they're they're sitting out and paul d is he's he's getting drunk right he's thinking about seth for this woman he loves but he can't open up to her because he can't find it in himself to be vulnerable as a man in front of her haley is talking about his you know his wife that the slave master son would come every weekend to pick up to to have sex with and then he'd drop her off the next day and nod his hat and she always told him look don't retaliate don't retaliate because if you retaliate against him not only am i having to deal with this assault but then i lose i lose you as well and they're both kind of grappling with it and they're sitting there and they're having this kind of a conversation that's really hard for black men to have about their vulnerability as men and then this white man just comes in on a horse right and just completely disrupts their conversation hey he says hey anybody any of you guys know this woman by the name of jane right jane and and haley's like i don't know a you know and paul d is drinking and tony morrison doesn't tell us what he's doing but we can infer that he is not doing the kind of song and dance that haley is doing because haley is going into his old shucks kind of thing and so the white guy could and we know why he's there he's there because he's going to bed this black woman that's the only reason he's in this community and he's disrupted these black men trying to be intimate about things that make them vulnerable as men and so when when he as he rides off ev he turns around and comes back and he doesn't like the way that paul d is not genuflecting he just there's something about it so he says is that a church right there and haley suggest that's a church right there he says well why is he sitting here drinking because he should be respecting that church and haley says oh that's why i came over here i came over here to tell him about about this thing that's why and then of course he rides off and he tries to have this conversation with with paul diam and he says probably you can go anywhere in this place to bed down because this is a community he said well can i go to can i go over there to jane's house can i go to jane's house because he's angry right but he feels masculine he's like dude i feel emasculated too but i've gotta play this particular kind of game i bring that up not to talk about so much about what they're struggling with in terms of their masculine as men but what the hell is going on with the white man that thinks they're entitled to this black woman's body and does not see the pain and the suffering that they have written and scripted onto this black community and not only not see that but feel like they are moral barometers and policemen of religion and ethics like what does like what is what is that about what kind of cancer does that do to white consciousness it ain't about black people like there's some soul-searching that white america has to do because that's a cancer and it's a cancer that's not just gonna affect like their relationships with black people that's gonna affect their relationship with their sons their daughters their community they're god right so i think that when we start talking about you know whiteness as a critique right in terms of thinking about that it ain't just about what you're doing to black people it's what whiteness does to white consciousness richard does anybody else have any other things that they'd like to add well we'd like to open it up for a couple of questions we're running short on time but we did want to open it up for some audience questions what you'd like to do is that if you could line up on the sides and then we'll go from side to side um please keep your questions short so if you want to you know engage the speakers and tell them your story please do that afterwards but if you could just keep your questions brief very brief um and i apologize looking at this wonderful group of questions we're definitely not going to be able to get to all of them already do you want to i will start here with you and just please project okay if you can also repeat the question sure i will hear it absolutely so i'll try to make this as quick as possible so there's a viral video circulating that shows a man who presents itself or you could assume reasonably that he was asian-american a white man smacks him in the face twice and then he calls him a chinese n-word and no one gets up to help him until he stands up to defend himself and they stop him from attacking the white man and that made me think in america there's whiteness and then there's all the other otherized minorities underneath this whiteness so my two questions are what it made me think two things why it's so hard for us to band together as minorities and empathize with each other and fight against the dominant culture one and two why do we work so hard to protect whiteness or white supremacy even when it's smacking us in the face so the two questions here are about pan minority unity so so solidarity amongst minority groups who may be othered and victimized by whiteness and then also what does that look like when we try to preserve and defend whiteness in the face of obvious exploitation do you want to answer yes wow so yeah i'm just repeating the question for for next time i would i would say that that we've been trying to do that for a long time right oppressed people should come together people who are not necessarily only oppressed but not but a you know the victim of aggression and i would point you to the this question or this this literature and theories of racial triangulation and then what ends up happening is the dominant group will then say you should really be fighting that group because you're both worse and if you want to come up like the irish and the italians in the early 20th century you you need to be like us but there's no way that an asian person or a black person can ever move to whiteness phenotypically to the extent that we're categorized in this way and so the the part of the difficulty and part of the genius of white supremacy is to pit two groups against one another so that they each compete to get closer up to the apex so it is a profound question thank you i i cannot answer it i don't know that any of us can answer it though i do think i'm laying the blame again on white supremacy but nevertheless i think the more that we can understand those dynamics the easier it will be for us to find ways to collaborate and if not collaborate not to include but to um not to collude but to um work together okay sorry it's a profound question thank you yeah sir okay so i think nancy made the comment before earlier about how white women don't get the same commoditization of whiteness or white privilege that white males do and while i do agree with that part i think i also still agree with david's comment that there's still a currency that's involved with whiteness what it was called the psychic wage of whiteness and what i mean by that is i can see that there's a stratification amongst women because consistently if there is no currency for white women for being white then why don't white feminists show up for black women so so this is a question of the cleavages between white feminists and and women of color yeah i mean i think you know this is again the problem of of how women are often pitted against each other too and as we know politics exploits these kinds of tensions between different groups and i think that you know the point i was trying to get back is that one of the the the baggage and this is again i have to throw history in but all the way back to our second president john adams he realized another important category which divides us it's not only birth it's not only wealth but it's beauty and i think one of the the ways that black women are divided from white women and one of the ways that women are manipulated by the dominant society is the manipulation of appearance and beauty they carry the weight for that now it doesn't mean yes men still get privileges if they are attractive or handsome but the the expectations that come with that um are are you in a sense make women not only obsessive about their looks to an extreme degree but let me just throw in one one other example from my book is dolly pardon a very smart feminist historian argued that dolly pardon even though she's attacked was attacked as a floozy uh her performative style was excessive womanhood because she didn't herself imagine when she was growing up that she was ever given any of the privileges of being a woman she would look at magazines of models and think those women's lives have nothing to do with mine so i think that the the battle that that women face is very much on their bodies and it's very much connected to the power associated with beauty and how that is manipulated and how that also as we know in hollywood pits how you know beautiful white women can behave as opposed to how black women can behave um and it's another way to divide women you know across the spectrum sir hello thanks by the way i've learned a lot i'm english so i did not appreciate the dis on shakespeare facts the question i had was more on the legal kind of suppressive uh history so you mentioned a little bit and there's also things like the oriental exclusion act you know the different versions and so on so i wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on how that that is combined with things like religion and the lobby groups behind religion and how that's been used make sure you use it the mic yeah that's for you yeah well all the groups are racialized and and you know smashed down in in in different different different ways some somebody reason of their religion others by reason of their language others by reason of well this or that uh it's it's all basically racism and and sexism i was intrigued by uh previous question that that asked two questions really that asked why the why the groups don't get together and and uh unite against the the power that's that's oppressing all of them i mean if they all did their numbers would be you know very great and and they they might get better laws and better administration and and division of resources and and and so on and the it seems to me that that the answer is too easy if you say well white people manipulated them against each other so they would fight over the over the crumbs and and ignore what we're doing and the top getting richer and richer i i think that it's it's very very often that uh that one group christians just don't see themselves in the predicament of muslims who are being hounded and harassed i i think it's it's very often that latinos just don't see their fate and is it all like that which befell blacks and i think it's very often that black people just don't give a to hoots about what happens to the to the latinos today if trump builds the wall and deports several hundred thousand and so on that's fine but there'd be more black black jobs i think it's it's it's our fault that we haven't thought long and hard enough about about the the matrix of of oppression and how on one level uh you know black feminists and white feminists really uh are confronting much the same uh power male power and uh latinos and blacks and indians and and asians and and and so on are being uh manipulated and put down for many of the same reasons simply profit and because it feels good sometimes to put someone down can i just make a comment about the chinese exclusion act because that also was connected to gender um when uh chinese americans migrated to this country in the late 19th century it was a predominantly male population and they were attacked because it was viewed that women were treated as concubines and seen as prostitutes and that was kind of the group that they they wanted to exclude they focused the target um against uh asian women so there again this problem of how racial identity is often connected to gender identity because race is reproduced through sexuality i'm not sure that that is that is accurate that the chinese exclusion act is i think it's 1882 and it's a federal act developed only after california is sought after in federal elections in other words electoral college votes and i believe that the prohibition of chinese women occurs subsequently it doesn't occur with it coterminously with 1882. i think it's the geary act isn't there an earlier one so that's the first okay but but the issue of the reason why chinese women are are are um created or constructed socially constructed to be prostitutes is because they're forced into prostitution once they get here but the main reason and why you see the the idea of the asian bachelor the lonely filipino bachelor what and it's not only chinese it's any other group as well it's because federal officials did not and congress did not want asian americans to have children and they did not want to to allow uh asian women into the united states for that reason i don't believe it's the beginning of that the gendered aspects of it come early on in in chinese exclusion uh nevertheless it's tied up with gender but it's tied up with gender only to the extent that it's after chinese men have been allowed in not only chinese men but many of them come through mexico and through other locations the philippines as well as india some of the uh some of our earliest immigrants are from india i'd like to to to kind of push back a little bit um on this kind of notion that we're all in this thing together i'm thinking about the title of the black feminist and anthology all the women are white all the blacks are men but some of us are brave um white women have constructed their identity parasitically in relationship to black women right so when we started talking about white women getting a certain kind of cultural currency for being chased that was of course pitted against black women as being always already sexually open right hypersexual right so so this idea that you could rape a black woman right then constructed an ideology of the time was was they were unrapeable in fact the reason why this idea of rape is something that is a modern right from a new historicist standpoint of us now in this current moment looking back and then saying things like rape that has to do with the way in which we're experiencing it now not how they experienced it you if you read uh sadia hartman's the scenes of subjection i think one of the things that she she makes very very clear is that even within the context of all that white patriarchal capitalist power they constructed black women as somehow seducers of white men who were trying to be paternal to them so that rape was was not only considered non-rape it was considered a seduction by the black women of the white men if you go and you look at door hood nice or her sins their eyes are watching god the opening scene though the white man goes down get ready to go to the fight in the war he goes down to um janie's mother who's given just giving birth to her grandmother just giving birth and kind of says you know wink wink kiss kiss cause that's of course his child as soon as he leaves the mistress the white mistress comes and says that's that's that's i know who that baby is and now that he is gone i'm going to basically beat you and i'm going to beat that baby and both of you i don't give a damn right now the response from um jamie's mother is i'm just a and a slave i do what i'm supposed to do i i e i don't control my body you know that you know i don't have control of my body through the laws of curvature you're yourself property but you know i have no control and instead of generating empathy it makes the white mistress even angrier right so let's be very clear that even though the stake should be the the there should be empathy what actually drives particularly where people's experiences are actually more closely aligned what drives the division is that dynamic of difference that gives somebody a a sense right a currency absent any kind of capital that i am i may be we may be working in the same factory but i'm white so that gives me that one kind of step above you right in that way and it's the policing of that right that and i'll say this one thing what would probably shock a lot of people is that you would think that with all this proliferation of black people being beat and shot on on unarmed people being shot that that would generate among whites some empathy in terms of black pain but they have found that in fact the more you show black death in that way the more confident white people are in the police force and derek bale theorizes that part of the the capital of white is particularly white folks who don't have that that you know are aren't rich right is to see through this experience of this kind of black suffering right how the capital of their whiteness gets raised right so that could never happen to me so now i feel more comfortable in my whiteness so here you are thinking no we're going to expose this we're going to suppose this but the way it works in terms of white consciousness it actually reinforces a sense of like my whiteness has currency so it's important for us to kind of understand when we start talking about unity across these lines actually how that that dynamic of power is experience because the reality of it is yeah you may be a white woman yeah you may some be a brown man but i can tell you because i've lived in miami those cubans in miami the majority of them they are white and in fact i have seen them in instances come to me and create some kind of tension so that they could perform that whiteness so i could know that they are not the same as me even though our skin tone is practically the same i have seen this right so it's very important we're going to talk about very seriously about unity and how it is that we can cross these kinds of things we got to be honest too about how whiteness is portable in this kind of space and how even those who are marginalized because of gender and sexuality right and i'm shout out to my queer white men right how you people are still trafficking in their dynamics of privilege so that's actually a great advertisement for our next public dialogue which is going to be on black latinx relations what i'd like to do for the final five is if i could just actually have you very quickly state your questions and then we'll have the panelists just respond to them in kind so so my question will be real simple i may have missed a few the beginning parts of the man on the session but i noticed that when i'm having these conversations about race black lives matter i get this phrase of i don't see color i just see people and for me i know that colorblindness is very problematic um and so i just wanted someone to kind of expound on how this notion of colorblindness um actually creates or fosters this racist notion rather than actually solve that the way that we think about race okay then so got that thank you so i uh just wanted to sort of ask a question about the degree to which donald trump's obsession with barack obama seems to be eliminative of sort of the kind of racial moment that we're living in because it almost seems to be as though there's this sort of conflict between notions of black exceptionalism and notions of white mediocrity and that that seems to be coming to the surface by the fact that he just won't shut up about him right that's right right okay great yes um i wanted to kind of bring up two points and see what the panelists had to say i didn't hear a lot of talk about um violence from the white community a lady spoke earlier about why didn't didn't anybody like why don't people band together why did they only stop the um i think he was chinese or asian man and there's a long history of the local state and federal government coming in to the aid of white people whether they were actually harmed or just said they were and so that puts out to everybody that if you touch these people the fbi the uh you know he'll go all the way up to the um i'm sorry national guard will come in and how that um keeps us from fighting white supremacy and then the last one is um what i've noticed lately with just being in inundated with all of this is the constitution still has us as three-fifths as a person my right to be a citizen isn't an amendment not in the document itself and i believe that sin from the very be founding of our government when you say we are all created equal and in that same exact document um there is you know people listed as three fifths that was the beginning of the cancer and until that's cured we're going to always have these problems because we have a situation where we're branded um the united states is branded as freedom but it's never been okay thank you my question is has there ever been a time in history anywhere in the world where a diverse group of people live together without living in a social construct hawaii hawaii okay and finally my question is um kind of focused around the idea of welfare and um i've had this conversation a lot about how welfare is defined differently based on who it's doled out to and about the ideas that um post slavery 1865 until let's say you know african americans got the full citizenship rights and other groups as well as they've made their journey throughout um i believe we're still paying taxes and other as white society got programs to allow them to buy homes and acquire property and do all these different things that created the american dream of the 50s in the middle 20th century we don't talk about that as welfare but it's like directly welfare and so i'm just curious about that and how what you all think about the ideas of kind of economics and who pays into the system and who's allowed to withdraw from the system when is actually paying into it so i'm just going to read these questions very quickly and then you can answer them as well so the first question was about how notions of colorblindness actually perpetuate white supremacy and then the second question was about um the ways in which president trump is obsessed with president obama i mean how that manifests itself um we had a question about white violence to aid and support white supremacy and then what i took from the discussion of the constitution is what are remedies to the fact that the original part of our constitution does actually include racist elements we had a question about whether or not diversity has ever worked in any society in the world in history ever and then um the final question was about the racial construction of welfare programs and about how different types of welfare programs are perceived differently based on who is the beneficiary of them i'll take just a brief shot at putting one and three together so color blindness and white violence together during the mike brown demonstrations in st louis and ferguson there was a moment when there were police lines and people were photographing these police lines and ferguson had a virtually all-white police force people had so much armor on you they appeared as white power you couldn't tell really but it made me realize that all the times i've said whiteness is invisible it flies under the radar that's already white to say that that's already a perception that is saying white white power was whiteness was not invisible to black people protesting the murder of mike brown it was just it was right there i have some doubts about color blindness even as an ideology how seriously we sometimes take it i think a big part of trump is that he keeps saying i'm saying the things that you already say in your home and you know that's true in a lot of cases that he's playing on on that and able to to do that and then what it does is return the center of power in the united states to white households these things that are internal truths and now somebody's finally brave enough to see him so i i think that we we have to re-examine how seriously we take color blindness and and even the notion that whiteness is invisible okay i think that welfare programs that that largely target poor black per latino people like nutritional aid snaps food stamps tend to draw intense criticism there's a certain type of white person who absolutely hates that and uh and and thinks that it's bad for their character uh that they'll just have more babies if we uh if we uh uh feed them so they don't they don't starve and and and so on whereas other programs that largely benefit white people like the gi bill like social security medicare medicaid and so don't seem like welfare programs at all they're not bad for your character they're we earned it that's that's my my medicare what do you mean you're going to take it away away from from us i don't know where i was going with that yeah i'll just add to that i mean i think this is actually an old battle that that even goes back to the jackson era about uh who does the government give privileges to and we draw this distinction between people who are seen as worthy and deserving of those privileges and people who are not deserving and worthy and that's kind of an old category to even talk about poverty the worthy poor and the unworthy poor and we have not come close to breaking out of that that way of thinking about how we divide who deserves assistance from the government and who doesn't i'll address the the orange one um my current book is called lovable racist magical negroes and white messiahs and one of the the people that i identify as a lovable racist is donald trump and what i mean by lovable races is that not only is whiteness kind of constructed as normalcy right when you when you survey white people and you ask them how they identify racially they said well i'm i'm just normal right they don't see themselves as white because whiteness and normalcy are conflated right so they just see themselves as normal they are the unspoken norm right in that way um what that what what is also unsp spoken what is also normalized is what carol anderson would call white rage yeah right so that you know you you've seen this right some white billionaire is mad about welfare reform and you're like what you you have more money than god like why do you care about what tyrone is getting like seriously where are where does all of that rage come from so donald trump is born with a silver spoon in his mouth right he's got all of these benefits he's he's he is he is white male capitalist patriarchal privilege personified why is he so angry where is all of this anger coming from because obama's better than him right but but the thing is i think that i think the thing is within the context of white humanity that type of inexplicable pathological rage is normalized so we don't critique it as being a problem because it's so normalized and so carol anderson says look the problem we keep talking about the problem is like black people fighting back and resisting no no the problem is white rage right the fact that it it's it's it operates invisibly and we don't critique it as as being a problem which is why for some unbeknownst reason a white man could go on a black church on a wednesday night slaughter everybody and then when a black person said that's terrorism somebody looked at you like chris no no no he's just disturbed that's not terrorism even though an entire community is literally terrorized like the concept cannot stick because of the way in which that kind of white rage is constructed and finally what i will say um in this context is it also allows someone to be in our society virulently racist and yet get the benefit of that in terms of their humanity right so donald trump can can um say that you know all these mexicans are rapists and whatever even though we know right if you actually know any anything about the actual sociological dynamics that the people who come to our country will immigrate from mexico immigrants in general actually come here they actually commit less crimes they're actually more law abiding when they come in so this got this kind of notion that somehow the rapists are coming in it's just it's simply not factual now what we also know is that second generation actually they become more criminal but what we discovered is that becoming more criminal is actually associated with the fact that they assimilate to our society they become more like us right so on some level you know so he did that and yet there were all these hispanic groups and all of all kinds of groups protesting him going on what was it um what's the show what's the variety comedy show a saturday night live right and yet they put him on that show anyway and and made him lovable and whatever now they're doing all this stuff to critique him like he's such a bad person they're the ones who also normalized him too in that context so it's very important as we kind of see these kind of dynamics how white rage how this kind of ways in which we can be both you can be white and and be virulently racist but also warm and fuzzy how those different dynamics exists in our society unquestioned [Music] i um so do we have any more specific questions i want to be sure that we answer we've sort of talked about the question of white violence but if you want to tie in the rise of the alt-right uh please do and then also the constitutional question before we close oh that's such a hard one i mean they're all hard and and i i don't have an answer for them i just wanted to end with an observation about something that we began with and that you know what they tell you in modern dance like if you're gonna this is what my roommate told me when you do a modern dance if you have no idea what you're doing just start in the same place and end at the same place that's where i am now because this is such it's such a profound conversation and and we're still here and it's a half hour over when we're supposed to be here it says quite a lot and you're still sitting there but i guess the thing is we start with we started with the concept of social construction and how it is in fact a fictive set of things effective set of categories that we have created and then built entire hundreds of years worth of governments and the subjugation of human beings on the basis of these categories race is invented to justify slavery it is it is there and it then creates the foundation for everything and yet at the same time these when we speak of social constructions and categories and we talk about things like white rage i think that we don't we sometimes run the risk of um removing from ourselves the agency to go beyond it the agency to say this isn't a category i believe in we can recreate it we can reinvent it we can because if we create it in the first place we can reinvent it we can't redo the constitution unfortunately but there is a way and it's going to be there it is sort of like one really bad cell but our immune system can be built up right our immune system can attack that and i think in many ways we we have to we when we focus when we talk about social construction and racial hierarchy and indeed things like white supremacy that are so deeply embedded in our culture and society and our politics and economy for goodness sakes capitalism is totally driven by all these same things it it sometimes makes makes you feel powerless as an individual and i i think that it is our job to think if we created this we can also uncreate it it's not going to be easy it will take way longer than we're all going to be here but i think we're all here trying to make that effort and so i i hope that we can see our individual humanity as as powerful as the social categories that are created to oppress one another [Applause] so

Channel: Emory University

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Id: mWsvx-ZakBQ

Length: 115min 50sec (6950 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2017