Whiteness
Encyclopedia of American Studies
One of the most influential ideologies in history of America is also one of the least discussed. Whiteness, that fathomless sea of unmarked power and privilege, is so intertwined with America that the two cannot as yet be separated.
In the earliest years of the English colonies, Whiteness had yet to develop. Europeans tended to think of "races" as the bloodlines of nations. But in their contacts with Native Americans (and Africans and Asians) race began to mutate into the idea of continental bloodlines, divinely segregating the "civilized" from the "savages." This idea developed, especially as many indigenous peoples embraced Christianity: when their "heathenism" no longer explained away their rights, what would? The idea of Whiteness made ethical the subordination and slaughter of Indians.
In their relationship to aboriginal peoples, Euro-Americans or "Whites" behaved similarly to Europeans who colonized other parts of the globe: they fashioned racial, religious, and cultural justifications for their conquests. But America played a unique and powerful role in the emergence of Whites, and in few places is the idea so developed. In addition to (1) serving as an attempt to explain the difference between European settlers and aboriginal peoples, the idea of a White race was (2) intractable from the ideology of slavery (3) a method by which White and non-White working classes were kept at odds, and (4) a cartel created to share and consolidate power among a diversity of wealthy Euro-Americans.
In the earliest decades of the colonies, Africans were among those who freely immigrated to the New World. But as the colonies expanded, so too did the practice of slavery. The population of Africans in America swelled. However, the presence of free Blacks--Blacks who had purchased their freedom, completed their indentured servitude, or immigrated on their own--implicitly challenged the institution of slavery: their near-citizenship and Christianity complicated slavery. It was a troubling question: why were some people free while others were not, and why were some African-Americans slaves while others were free? And what to make of the children born of White men and their raped Black slaves?
The arbitrariness of enslavement left its practitioners and accomplices uneasy. In order for slavery and its enormous profits to persist, a more cogent ideological system was required. For the wealthy landowners who owned slaves, it made sense to argue that Africans were uniquely and inherently suited, racially suited, to be owned as property. According to this logic, even the mixed race "mulattos," who were born with equal or greater to the infamous "one drop" of African blood, were legally defined as Negroes: non-persons excluded from the U.S. Constitution and categorizable as property.
Thus evolved the idea of Blacks as innately depraved savages: it was clearly defined and it was substantiated by twisted Christian and scientific reasoning. In these ways slavery, racism, and Whiteness achieved moral and intellectual fortitude. The idea of "race" was instrumental to the practice of slavery, and so race became institutionalized in the American economy, culture, and Constitution. And thus, Whiteness and Blackness were fused like conjoined twins: sharing vital organs, defining one another, and inseparable.
Much later on, even as slavery waned and died, Whiteness was steadily growing as an idea and as an identity. Vast numbers of working class European-Americans, especially those who were not purely English in origin, laid claim to idea that they were part of a body of common racial identity; that their birth and skin entitled them to rights equal to English immigrants, that this White inheritance entitled them also to wages and rights better than those of free Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. W.E.B. DuBois, a scholar seminal to the critical study of Whiteness, referred to these privileges as "the wages of Whiteness."
Following DuBois, many historians, including David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Alexander Saxon, argue that the wages of Whiteness were a means by which American ruling classes suppressed overall wages. With the idea of Whiteness, those who received slightly better wages, and those who received less, tended to accept their racialized economic places.
America's territorial expansions, into Indian lands, Mexico, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands, were also dependent on racist notions. The ideology of Whiteness, teamed Christian ideas and technological dominance, gave Americans moral justification for a sphere of control which has grown to become the largest the Earth has ever witnessed.
Only with post-colonial independence movements (1945-present) and the Civil Rights movement (1950s and 1960s), has American Whiteness been truly threatened. By the end of the 20th century, Whiteness was increasingly understood to be a malign ideology created to subordinate Others and accumulate power.
Frankenberg, Ruth (ed.). 1997. Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hill, Mike (ed.). 1997. Whiteness : A Critical Reader. NY: New York University Press.
Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. NY: Routledge.
Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Roediger, David R. (ed.) 1998. Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White. NY: Schocken Books.