Mixed Race Studies

The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle

Journal of Black Studies
Published online before print 2016-03-21
DOI: 10.1177/0021934716638802

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor in Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the two only British big budget movies about transatlantic slavery, Amazing Grace and Belle, the article argues that such films serve as the celluloid hallucinations that reinforce the psychosis of Whiteness. The features of this discourse that arose from the analysis included the lack of Black agency, distancing Britain from the horrors of slavery, and downplaying the role of racism.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interview: Whiteness Redux

borderlands: e-journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (2004)

Mike Hill, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
State University of New York, Albany

Damien W. Riggs
University of Adelaide, South Australia

1. Damien: As a research area that is rapidly growing within ‘Western nations’, how would you understand whiteness studies as both creating the potential for critique, but also the potential for reinforcing the normative status of whiteness?

2. Mike: It’s interesting that you use the word “potential.” Because one of the issues that the whiteness studies phenomena in the US has raised—productively, if painfully—is whether or not humanities research in Western nations is at this moment capable of doing anything significant at all, critical, normative, whatever. Whither whiteness, and with it, whither scholarly books as the most effective basis for political agency? From a historical vantage point this is not a flippant question. We assume that writing leads to what significant social event, exactly? On the whiteness front, we know that writing has lead, well, to more writing, more conferences, additional debate. Do we presume a connection between this relatively recent outpouring of scholarship and progressive mass movements, radical insurgencies, real social change? The relation between humanities knowledge and the masses has I believe never been more confused. But neither has it been more crucial.

…15. Damien: There has been much talk recently, particular within the US and UK, of white people engaging in a movement towards ‘race abolitionism’, and as being ‘race traitors’. Do you think this connects with work in the area of whiteness studies, and in what regards (if any) do you see it as creating the potential for challenging the racialised structures of ‘Western societies’?

16. Mike: That word “potential” again. If we could only measure such a force in some way beyond just saying “yes, this or that provides our one true hope,” or “no, it surely does not.” I’ve been somewhat critical of the race traitor movement in the US on the grounds that it was voluntaristic and prone to all sorts of ontological thefting, to fetishizing the margins, to romantically blackening up, and so on. Maybe these charges were facile, or the underlying logic not so clear. But I still wonder, as I did in an article for Postmodern Culture back in 1997, about programatically performing “treason to whiteness” in order to ensure one’s “loyalty to humanity,” as that historically imperious neo-Enlightenment slogan goes. Humanity is a nice desire. But I wonder if this term, as evoked by the race traitor group, might turn on the way white men in particular are playing out a sense of late-capitalist public disenfranchisement, variously retooling, or really, gearing up their affective relations to colour, for everyone to witness and once again applaud…

…36. Damien: Whilst it is important to recognise the very local ways in which whiteness achieves hegemony, it has also been suggested that there are broader connections between the practices of whiteness in differing countries, particularly through their relation to discourses of empire and imperialism. Where do you see some of the important international connections within the study of whiteness?…

…40. Mike: Enter here the multiracial movement, which maintains an express disavowal of whiteness and, for that matter, disavows allegiance to blackness, our two longstanding oppositional correlates. There are something like sixty multiracial organizations in the US touting the cause of civil rights, self- and state-recognition, full and frank disclosure that the population designated black is mostly mixed race (as if race is a quantifiable set of blood ratios!). As I said, it’s significant that, for them, “white” is a bunk historical fiction. But it’s a horror for the NAACP that so too is “black.” The multiracial activists seek the right to be counted as one would choose, which means the full extension of a civil rights legacy that emphasises self- over observer-enumeration. Race is addressed once again as the matter of getting identity correct in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the state. This time though, the traditional categories of race are exhausted thevery moment that race is embraced.

41. What the old civil rights organization’s realised, especially given the enthusiasm of republican legislators to get multiracial people officially counted, is that the new abundance of race categories threaten to terminate the juridical unity of race altogether. A new and accelerated civil rights lexicon increases the number of race categories that individuals may legally claim. On this order, race is everywhere significant and nowhere identifiable in the old formalist sense. So you have the NAACP’s awkward defence of the one-drop rule of hypo-descent—formerly associated with Jim Crow—as a sort of desperate, ironic collective self-defence against the difficulties implicit in the post-civil rights epoch.

42. This latest process of governing vis-à-vis racial distinction is different from previous civil rights struggles, which tried to liberalise the state and get government justly interested in the racial identities it once denied. Under this new set of protocols, the state has admitted racial interest and with ever greater freedom and nuance. But it has done so in order to rob racial coherency of its former political significance.

43. If you pursue the multiracialism debate to its logical ends, you can start to see how an individual’s right to self-identify, paradoxically, provides an opportunity for racial identity itself to release the state from its previous civil rights obligations. In this way, the state jettisons the most important historical cite of domestic dissent the very moment it presumes to go global. You could say that the neo-nationalist end of liberalism is hereby found dormant in the logic of its once benevolent ends. In effect, all and no race relations exist in the eyes of a racially emancipated state. Multiplicity is unleashed upon identity, and the organizational capacity of government is both maximised and evaporated within the simple act of saying, “I am…”…

Read the entire article here.

The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance

Temple University Press
November 2002
256 pages
Cloth EAN: 978-1-56639-981-4, ISBN: 1-56639-981-5
Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-982-1, ISBN: 1-56639-982-3

Steve Martinot, Adjunct Professor
San Francisco State University

A significant re-writing of the history of class formation in the US

An important history of the way class formed in the US, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.

Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions. Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries.

A uniquely compelling book, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations.

Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The History And Construction Of Slavery And Race
2. Racialization And Class Structure
3. The Contemporary Control Stratum
4. The Meanings Of White Racialized Identity
Notes
Index

White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach

Pluto Press
2009-11-06
240 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
ISBN: 9780745327488

Steve Garner, Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University

Simon Clarke, Director
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies
University of the West of England

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic.

Whiteness has traditionally been seen as “ethnically transparent” – the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner’s book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas.

Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity.

Contents

• 1. Researching ‘Whiteness’: An Introduction
• 2. Whiteness Studies in the Context of the USA
• 3. Empirical research into white racialised identities in Britain
• 4. Britishness
• 5. Whiteness and Post-Imperial Britain
• 6. Psycho-Social Interpretations of Cultural Identity: constructing the white ‘we’
• 7. Media Representations: constructing the ‘not white’ Other
• 8. Whiteness, Home and Community
• 9. Researching Whiteness: Psycho-Social Methodologies
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Critical Whiteness Studies Symposium: Call for Papers

Critical Whiteness Studies Symposium
University of Iowa
2010-09-23 through 2010-09-24
Abstract Deadline: 2010-03-12

Keynote Speakers:

David Roediger, Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Karyn McKinney, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Education, Human Development, & Social Sciences
Penn State University, Altoona

Abstract deadline March 12, 2010.

This two-day symposium examines the social, cultural and historical production of whiteness, particularly in the age of Obama. The symposium takes up a critical race theory paradigm to engage whiteness and whiteness studies in conversation with the humanities and social sciences. Questions of importance include: How can we interrogate and employ whiteness studies in ways that do not re-center or reify whiteness? Should whiteness studies take an increasingly critical stand in the wake of an Obama Presidency? In other words, how do we maintain a focus on social justice in the face of complacency around institutionalized oppression? We are particularly interested in engaging these and other questions about whiteness in an historical context, thinking through the particular shapes of whiteness, privilege and oppression in the contemporary moment while debunking the ideological lure of a “postracial” America.

We seek abstract submissions that address but are not limited to:

• Whiteness and sexualities
• Whiteness, class and labor struggle
• Whiteness, Orientalism and the Occidental Gaze
• Social movements
• Postracism, postfeminism and post-identity formations
• Homonormativity
• American exceptionalism and Homonationalism
• Mixed race whiteness and white ethnicity
• Whiteness, food culture and “eating the Other”
• Whiteness and regionalism; Midwestern critical whiteness
• Neoliberalism, whiteness and global capitalism
• Representing and consuming whiteness (e.g., visually, aurally, performatively)
• Whiteness and digital culture
• Whiteness, critical pedagogies and the classroom

Panel submissions, as well as submissions of individual papers and creative performances are welcome.

Critical Whiteness Studies is organized by the Project On Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) at the University of Iowa. The symposium will consist of two public lectures featuring David Roediger and Karyn McKinney, performances, visual installations and scholarly panels that critically examine whiteness. POROI is an interdisciplinary program dedicated to the exploration of how scholarship and professional discourses are conducted through argument, how paradigms of knowledge are sensitive to social-political contexts, and how the presentation of scholarly and professional findings involve the recognition and negotiation of audiences.

Please submit abstracts for papers, panels, or roundtables, accompanied by one-page vitas. Include any AV needs you may have. Submit materials by March 12, 2010.

The History of White People

W. W. Norton & Company
March 2010
448 pages
6.125 × 9.25 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-04934-3

Nell Irvin Painter

A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness”—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.

Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time.

A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.

Mixed Race… Mixed Up?

Presentation at the Canadian Critical Race Conference 2003

Charito Gailling

Mee Lain Ling

Our workshop will explore “mixed race experience” by referring to our own experiences as mixed race women. We are particularly interested in fostering discussion that critically examines racial binaries of whiteness vs non-whiteness and how mixed race voices are negotiated and made invisible. Using exercises, discussion and group work, we will invite participants to consider how re-presentations of power and privilege are present in popular and academic discourses on this topic. We hope to challenge participants to become aware of their own specific “lenses” and think through intersections of identity, racialization, gender, etc. which can be highlighted through the experience of being a mixed race person.

View the presentation here.

The Gap Between Whites and Whiteness: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
September 2006
Volume 3, Issue 2
pages 341-363
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X06060231

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Amy C. Steinbugler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dickinson University

How do White members of Black-White interracial families negotiate the meanings of race, and particularly Whiteness? Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois‘s concept of double consciousness, this article argues that interracial intimacy is a microlevel political site where White people can acquire a critical analytical lens that we conceptualize as racial literacy. This article fills a gap in the empirical and theoretical literature on race and Whiteness by including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual families on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects involving one hundred and twenty-one interracial families in the United Kingdom and the eastern United States, we provide an analysis of how White people learn to translate racial codes, decipher racial structures, and manage the racial climate in their communities. We draw on “racial consciousness” interviews conducted with one hundred and one heterosexual families and twenty gay and lesbian families to present seven portraits that illuminate three dimensions of racial literacy: double consciousness, negotiation of local racial meanings, and seeing routine forms of everyday racism.

Read the entire article here.