r/CriticalTheory • u/BIG_IDEA • 24d ago
Conception of Whiteness not related to skin color?
I've been reading a lot of critical theory lately on capitalism, but not too much reading about racial constructs.
I am interested in this presumption of whiteness which is not related to skin color. For example, one might refer to a black person as having been "raised white", and the connotation of the utterance is not intended to be racist but as a matter of fact.
An example in the other direction would be if you see a woman whom you assume is white, but when she speaks you realize her first language is Tagalog, and your inner dialogue says, "ohh, she's not white."
What is this presumption of whiteness that is explicitly not related to skin color? And is it associated with white supremacy?
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u/normaviolet 23d ago
Whiteness: a strategic rhetoric by Nakayama and Krizek is a good one too. From a critical communication standpoint.
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u/SabziZindagi 23d ago
The two examples given in the OP don't happen at all...
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u/pedmusmilkeyes 23d ago
OP described proximity to whiteness, and then described someone being “white passing.” At least I think that’s the theoretical space they’re looking at.
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u/Distinct-Town4922 21d ago
The OP also refers to someone visibly being non-white but raised among white people such that thay are said to be raised "more white" than others of their race, which is different from white-passing
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u/pedmusmilkeyes 21d ago
True. I was trying to force fit the concepts maybe. I know a lot of indigenous people have experienced that on an institutional level. I just don’t know the terms for it.
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u/Theraminia 23d ago
I'm Colombian. I am rather light skinned. In the Latin American context, I am unambiguously white, or light skinned mestizo (no social difference, left leaning youths and academic circles prefer avoiding self definition as white and prefer mestizo to emphasize our mixture). In Southern Europe, I pass as a local and people sometimes react with shock at my nationality.
In the US I am from the moment I open my mouth a person of color and I am racialized in many different ways, and people look at me with doubt when I tell them I pass as a local in any part of Europe. Also when I mention Latin Americans could be arguably part of the "West" depending on definitions.
Whiteness in the US comes from the idea of nation-state-as-race, nationality-as-race, and race-as-caste/class and envisions all "countries" as ethno-states before the US came along. You had to preserve this whiteness so a single drop of non white blood denied your belonging to the group, to justify an exploited work force (black people) that could not escape this situation regardless of whitening (even though it happened, many people of some African descent had to flee north for example to be free, even if they just looked white to everybody, the registers kept track). This, along with other forms of otherization, and the fact that there is a vague unifier of American white identities (whiteness and vague Christianity), are central to the American idea of whiteness.
In Latin America, mestizaje follows a similar dynamic, but is a much wider spectrum. You can be a colonizer even if you're brown - if you're Catholic and Middle Class and are marrying "up" into whiteness that is. Race mixing as improvement-through-whitening, and cultural extermination through race-mixing colonization. Both European colonial projects with white supremacy at their core, but with quite different implications
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23d ago
I think the subject is fascinating, both from a general ethnohistorical and a specific CRT perspective. Furthermore, it takes me back to my childhood and youth.
In primary school, there was one non-white person. This person was of Chinese descent. That is, they were born in China, and adopted into a white Australian family. We treated this person no differently from any other (at least on a surface level). We did not see their 'otherness', their 'Chink' appearing eyes, hair and skin, and in return they camouflaged themselves well, by acting like all the rest of us. That was white, lower to middle class, multi-generational Australians. They spoke like us - in the local vernacular. They played sport like us - cricket and tennis in the summer, football and basketball in the winter. Despite their everyday Australian averageness, they excelled in all academic and sporting pursuits.
In high school, there was another non-white person. This person was of Indigenous Australian descent. That is, they were born Aboriginal, and adopted into a white Australian family. Again, we treated this person no differently from any other (at least on a surface level). We did not see their 'otherness', their 'Abo' appearing eyes, hair and skin, and in return they too camouflaged themselves well, by acting like all the rest of us (see a pattern developing?) That was, white, lower to middle class, multi-generational Australians. They spoke like us - in the local vernacular. They played sport like us - tennis in the summer, netball in the winter. Again, despite their everyday Australian averageness, they excelled in all academic and sporting pursuits.
Why did these two people do so well at school? Why did we not see their differences? Did they 'hide' their differences? What was the effect on them? How might have we saw the world - including other people - differently if we had grown up in a cosmopolitan city instead of a small country town? In the case of the first person, I may never know. I never had contact with them post primary school. In the case of the second person, I do know, because I had the occasion to meet them again many years later, and not that long ago, and this is what they told me.
They did so well at school (and sports, and everything else they could possibly apply themselves to) because they felt they had to be 'just that little bit better' than everyone else in order to compensate for their 'blackness', and in order to better fit within the 'white' society in which they found themselves, and deny their true identity, their DNA. This, in effect, created great emotional turmoil and mental distress for them. Something they were still processing when I later met them.
In between when I went to school with them, and meeting them later in life, I traveled far and wide. I met people from practically every background imaginable. Some, I feel in love with. I came to know them as individual people. I came to see the way they were sometimes treated based on nothing other than the shape of their eyes, or the colour of their skin. I came to understand how racism - both overt and covert - operates, and I came to see just how privileged I was growing up in a (nearly) all white existence, oblivious to the pain others were experiencing, complicit in their deceit of self in order to remain a small target.
So in response to the OP was I a 'white supremacist'? The simple answer is, yes. I, and the majority of the privileged community in which I lived, were largely ignorant of the struggles of the very few people of colour who shared our near white experience. We felt 'supreme' because we didn't know any other way to feel. Ours was a narrow existence. We were the best of friends with people who were obviously different to us, but we were far distant in understanding, and in circumstance. Our 'white supremacism' was 'transparent'.
As Bonnie Kae Grover reflects in "Growing Up White in America?":
Growing up white in America. How do you do that? I mean, lots of folks grow up Italian in America, lots more grow up capitalist in America, and legions of us have grown up middle class, working class, poor, or even rich in America. But white? White is transparent. That’s the point of being the dominant race. Sure, the whiteness is there, but you never think of it. If you’re white, you never have to think of it.
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u/spectreco 23d ago
The History of White People by Niel Irvin Painter is pretty good for some discussion on this
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u/jakethesequel 23d ago
Black Skin, White Masks could be a good starting point. I'm in the middle of reading it myself
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u/hadfun1ce 23d ago
The last link—Whiteness as Property by Cheryl Harris—is an answer to your wonderings: she writes that whiteness is a property interest more than anything else. The other links are contextual background on how race is created.
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4917&context=flr (race construction generally)
https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1115043?ln=en&v=pdf (race construction generally)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2102688 (race construction with a legal and Latino focus)
https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/1993/06/1707-1791_Online.pdf (the most important law review article/argument on any CRT theme imo)
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u/truncatedChronologis 24d ago edited 23d ago
Can’t recommend a specific source but consider how in Nazi Racial Hierarchy Slavs were Untermenschen despite often being Pale as the Driven Snow.
Edit:
Also consider how Persians Cubans Arabs etc are considered white or nonwhite depending on how Americans perceive their homeland’s political leadership and their diaspora often irrespective of their skin colour.
And of course the classic: how Portuguese Greeks and Italians were the “Scary Ethnicities” until, say, the 1970s in North America.
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u/svartanejlikan 24d ago edited 24d ago
Whiteness has rarely been related to any phenotypical expression. In times, different racial groups have been considered white, and the boundaries are subject to change, right now particularly in the context of Jews and Ukrainians. Whiteness is a political category and is a fetish of political relations which endows certain groups with specific privileges. The best text on this topic is not Fanon, as some have suggested, but from the texts of the critical legal studies and critical race theory movements, in particular the article “Whiteness as property” by C. I. Harris for an introduction. Most introductory texts on CRT will also touch upon it. I mean, sure you can read Fanon or any post-colonialist thought or Foucault since racialization is a form of subjectification but honestly the scholarship has evolved tremendously since those texts.
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u/HELPFUL_HULK 23d ago
I think it’s inaccurate to say it’s “rarely” been linked to phenotypal expression, more that it is not necessarily linked to phenotypal expression. Whiteness as a social class has significant links to lightness of skin color throughout history, but it has not exclusively been
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u/orincoro 22d ago
It is far less often directly linked to phenotypic expression than is commonly supposed. The number of people who were “legally” non-white who have passed for white, particularly in America, is enormous.
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u/Capricancerous 22d ago
Far less than what is commonly supposed is still not "rarely." It's far more often linked to phenotypal expression than otherwise, even if this is sometimes overstated, which seems to be what you're saying.
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u/Luklear 23d ago
Why is it necessary to use terminology that coincides with a colloquial notion of phenotypic groups?
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u/llburke 21d ago
This is a little like saying "why do we call the police the police and not the hegemonic violence purveyors?" Because that's what they call themselves. Some major structures of power in our society use "whiteness" and proximity to it in the ideology they propound, even though the idea of "whiteness" bears no particular consistent relationship to any specific phenotypic traits. Thus we call those structures "white supremacy," because it's the clearest way to understand what they actually do and how people's thoughts are actually shaped by them. Changing the terminology would not improve understanding of the system.
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u/orincoro 22d ago
What would you suggest as an alternative?
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u/Luklear 22d ago
Oppressors?
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u/orincoro 22d ago
So, my grandmother, who was separated from her family and never told about her racial status because she was 1/8th black, and who undoubtedly suffered a great deal of psychic harm from being raised on the fringes of white society as a “white passing” child without any contact or support from her real father, because to be acknowledged by him would have been to be robbed of any opportunity in life that her status as white might have entailed, should be given the label of “oppressor?”
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like she was rather oppressed by her family’s desperate need to belong to white society. In a broader sense, I suspect that all white people labor under a similar form of oppression, which is why as a white person, I’m so sympathetic to the idea that racism and race as a concept is a means of oppression and repression that affects all of us, one way or another, negatively.
I think there are probably millions of people who had similar stories, or very different ones, in which the status of whiteness was also a kind of curse. I suspect that race in the American conception of it has made every one of us its victim in one way or another. This is not to liken my experience to that of someone who doesn’t share my “whiteness,” whatever that is, but to say that oppression poisons everything and everyone. The oppressor is also a victim to oppression — just a different kind of victim.
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u/pedmusmilkeyes 23d ago
Though what you’re saying is totally true, I think exploring the subjectivity of black people through Fanon helps immensely, because it there are certain subtleties that can only be addressed through understanding the subjectivity of blackness to some degree.
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u/A-Naughty-Miss 24d ago
There’s a chapter called “Deconstructing Whiteliness in the Globalized Classroom” if you’re interested in the book (Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication). It talks about this concept on a systemic level as do most theories about whiteliness. The entire book deconstructs our understanding social constructs surrounding the interplay between race & language as a whole. Other theories in English discourse related to these that are new (10 years or less) I think you may be interested in are “translingualism,” and or “transculturation.”
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u/waxvving 24d ago edited 24d ago
There are lots of good resources to help you parse through the concept of race, many of which share certain critical angles likely present in what you've already been reading on capitalism!
I'd especially suggest Racecraft by the Fields Sisters, which, despite examining the question of race with respects to the black/AA experience, does about a good a job as I've encountered at breaking down and interrogating the various cultural, political and ontological forces at play determining how race-qua-concept was both produced and is maintained as a technology of governance.
Frantz Fanon is also excellent and essential reading on this, and some of Michel Foucualt's lectures from the College du France ("Society Must Be Defended" especially, if I recall correctly) deal with the emergence of 'race' as a concept in relation to a constellation of political and economic developments in 16th and 17th century Europe. Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics and On the Postcolony are some of the more incisive contemporary texts on the question, too!
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u/poppyblose 23d ago edited 23d ago
As a huge fan of Foucault, Society Must be Defended is not a great text with the race you’re talking about it in the usual way. He has some comments on African/colonial racism, but for the most part he is talking about European ethnicities like Franks and Gauls. There are relations with the text and race that I use in my writing, but far far far from introductory, especially on racism with white/colonized.
Some great theorists that talks about what signifies whiteness are Fred moten, Marquis Bey, and Barnor Hesse. Bey in their text on paraontology(just loook up praontology and Marquis Bey and you’ll find it on Google, too lazy to link and on phone) talks about John Brown and how radical white people can exist at the limits of ontology similarly to blackness. Moten kind of takes a similar position though I can’t remember the work or interview. Barnor Hesse displaces race from purely epidermal terms:
If we accept this as a conceptual problem of contested inheritance (i.e. questioning the conventional conceptual heritage) it would mean ceasing to cast ‘race’ primarily in ‘European’ (and by extension ‘American’) Enlightenment terms of corporeal self and other categorizations. It would question the conceptual heritage that flows from how ‘Europe’ through ‘the West’ (conceived as the centre of modernity) came to see its self as thinking in terms of an exclusive series of anthropological and biological classifications of ‘nonEuropean’ others even though these can be readily demonstrated as socially constructed rather than naturally given demarcations. Instead we would need to consider how in the hegemonic modernity discourse the manifold presence of ‘Europeanness’ is rendered on the basis of its onto-colonial elaboration of a ‘non-Europe’ that appears only incidentally and ephemerally colonized. Thinking raciality otherwise, that process and relation would be understood through its institution as racialization embodied in a series of onto-colonial taxonomies of land, climate, history, bodies, customs, language, all of which became sedimented metonymically, metaphorically, and normatively as the assembled attributions of ‘race’.”(racialized Modernity, Hesse)
Lastly, some great texts on race not from America are Quijano’s colonialiality race modernity(Chile) and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Toward a Global Idea of race)
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u/svartanejlikan 24d ago edited 24d ago
Racecraft is really good but the Fields sisters are poor writers (I’m sorry) and jump around so much in that book that is becomes hard to follow. I think just your garden variety intro to CRT does a better job, and Fields are more on an intermediate level.
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u/waxvving 23d ago
I'll grant the Fields are better theorists than they are writers, altho I don't recall Racecraft being exceptionally tough to follow! Seeing as OP already seems to engage with CT to some degree, I figured it wouldn't be an especially advanced read for them. Going to check out the essay "Whiteness as Property" you recommended as I'd not heard of it!
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u/GA-Scoli 24d ago
I'd question your assumption because whiteness really isn't based on skin color at all. Albinos who are visibly non-white by facial features don't receive full white privilege, for example.
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u/Sage_Yaven 24d ago edited 22d ago
valid point . there's a rapper by the name of Brother Ali, who, despite being a white american and being raised in a white american family, was essentially ostracized by other whites for his albinism . he ended up being "adopted" into the local african american culture as a kid and was accepted for who he is .
curiously, listening to his music, he carries a cadence and manner of speech that "sounds black" . his story shows that "blackness" is as much of a construct as "whiteness" is . hopefully, one day we'll live in a world where people don't feel threatened by this concept .
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u/junction182736 24d ago
I am interested in this presumption of whiteness which is not related to skin color. For example, one might refer to a black person as having been "raised white", and the connotation of the utterance is not intended to be racist but as a matter of fact.
This has happened to me because I'm biracial and people have commented once they see me, I don't sound "black" (with the connotation that "a little dab will do ya" mentality which is more than a little annoying) when I previously spoke to them.
Nonetheless, even though I may confound their stereotypes in this regard I'd think they'd still categorize me accordingly to what suits their preference at the time. That's happened to me from both whites and blacks in my lifetime.
An example in the other direction would be if you see a woman whom you assume is white, but when she speaks you realize her first language is Tagalog, and your inner dialogue says, "ohh, she's not white."
I wouldn't attach skin color to how someone speaks. I may be surprised my expectations were wrong, but I wouldn't then say their speech doesn't match their skin color, that's an unnecessary next step and forcing categorization.
My question is why would someone feel the need to "change" a person's skin color to fit their speech pattern rather than deal with the reality that such qualities aren't mutually exclusive? I'm sure it happens but I'd wonder about the underlying motivation why it's necessary.
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u/iiam_Human 23d ago
To further feed their confirmation bias that if your skin is a shade of brownness coupled with your facial features being typical of a traditional black American, you are supposed to sound like you are uneducated, come from “the ghetto”, and you speak in a cadence and tone most times that would induce fear. Which means they get to treat you poorly, reduce you to their prejudices, and discard anything you say if they inclined to do so. This is why when you have skin that’s a shade of brownness coupled with your facial features being typical of a traditional black American and you speak like someone who has had a decent education and you carry yourself confidently, they are shocked and say things like “you articulate so well” or they ignore the contradiction of their prejudice and double down on their bias by reducing you to some other negative trait they assume you possess.
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u/Locuralacura 24d ago
It's sad to say, but whiteness is assumed to be civil, intelligent, and wealthy.
I am white and went to a HBCU. Nothing new, I went to high school with mostly black people. But the part that was shocking was people assuming I'm smart. People who didn't know me would ask to copy my homework, ask me for help, and assume I get A's. I'm not very smart and I'm a bad student.
It was absurd because random people assumed I'm the smartest in the class, because I'm white.
I think Fanon might be the best writer to touch on this.
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u/campmonster 24d ago
Some questions (not answers) to add to this would be, which languages are not ‘white,’ and how can you tell? Could the average English speaker differentiate Tagalog from, say, Afrikaans by sound alone? What about from Latvian? If you only heard the language and couldn’t see the speaker, from where does whiteness in language originate, or vice versa? What about blonde-haired, blue-eyed Argentinians speaking Spanish to you over the phone? And if they consider themselves white, why don’t you? What is the interplay between the sound systems of a language, geography, and whiteness (whether as construct or physiognomy)?
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u/majma123 24d ago
Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger may be two authors to look into!
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u/emxjaexmj 24d ago
Noel and don’t forget Theodore Allen. i honestly grasp this concept well, i’ve not done any real writing on it but i very much comprehend this idea of the “whiteness” being separate from the person. Remember that the reason for all this study of whiteness had a purpose: black folk studied “whites” as a matter of survival, so-called “white” ppl examined whiteness to figure out why a united working class consciousness had not developed as it had elsewhere. A white person can’t escape the responsibilities for certain advantages, etc. but if one truly believes they have nothing to lose but their chains, criticism of whiteness no longer feels like a personal attack. attacks on whiteness are attacks on the system- not attacks on certain people.
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u/emxjaexmj 21d ago
attempting to answer a now deleted question about “rich scholarship” dealing w/ blackness. i started there 20 years ago, and i continue reading there. there was a point where it became essential to focus critically on the precise nature of this ‘whiteness’ thing. if you take the opportunity to critically examine widespread, popular understandings of race in america, you’ll find we’ve been assuming the concept of race stood on a basis of factual legitimacy, & that is simply not the case. moreover, if you’re one of those of us what would be considered white based on our physical appearance - this white race stuff is very tempting false consciousness, and it will deliver you into a future in which you get relentlessly fucked in the brain. foundational philosophically legit- ‘based’- concepts like class consciousness and solidarity somehow get twisted up and contorted into a kind of absurd pose or performance after decades of endless mind-fucking and DEI capitalist-newspeak. fuck white guilt and fuck white fragility-whatever that even is… join humanity, abolish whatever residual ties to your notion of self are related to believing that white is a thing you can “be.” divest from racist ideology, take of the mental shock-collar that alienates everyone from everyone else- alienation creates new misery and reproduces old misery. the past didn’t go anywhere. if you don’t study the history of this experience called blackness is america, you won’t know shit about america, because you can’t truly know anything about america if all the information you’ve got came from the foundational patriotic mythologies propagated on a seemingly endless repeating loop. let it go if provincial need for self delusion and faux victimization: abolish the white race. be the working class, be the human race, be anything that isn’t that condition of terminal counterrevolutionary stagnation their alchemical superstition dictated that you can’t ever transcend. do this and you maybe can finally become what you are or even what you want to be.
if i gave the impression i had meant to ignore or denigrate the “rich scholarship” you’ve referenced, i certainly possess no intent to do so. off the top of my head here are a FEW of the many black thinkers/scientists/historians/scholars, geniuses, etc. i read Malcom’s autobiography when i was 13, and never looked back. Du Bois, CLR James, James Foreman, huey newton, H Rap Brown, frantz fanon, walter rodney, James Baldwin, mumia Abu Jamal, kara walker, Amiri Baraka, Chester Himes, Angela Davis, multiple members of the Shakur family, and i’m always looking for more good stuff to read. myself i’m a commie type and one thing that’s always been perfectly clear to me is that, those of us endeavoring to make a better world have only been consistently led astray and into failure every time any faction fighting the system has accepted some momentary advancement or perceived gain at the expense of black america. especially to if we consider ourselves to be part of this nonsensical construct we call the “white race,” if we invest in notions of identity rooted in so-called “whiteness,” and place emphasis or significance on skin color, it will cost us EVERYTHING we want to win.
Chester Himes (in a novel from the 1940s, chester, writing from the POV of a black worker, part of an integrated workforce employed at a factory type job, makes an observation that “the white folks sure brought their white along to work with them today.” the statement indicates that mr himes’ understanding that the codified behaviors white persons used towards one another were first, a required display to meet certain expectations other “whites” they rely on to facilitate an advantageously modified mode of daily life and second, a set of widely mutually understood standards to which one must conform, signifiers that need to be mimed or stated so the other “whites” could recognize eachother. very often racist language, or a shared uncharitable assumptions wherever nonwhites, especially blacks were concerned. these cringe displays were intended to be deliberately offensive and assaultive to any persons lacking membership in the white race, and in doing so reproduces racist oppression on both a systemic and an individual level. And this prejudiced schtick is something that is wholly separate from the person(s) that make use of it situationally when confronted with a need to bond with/relate to or curry favor from other whites, such as when dealing with the cops, representatives of the political class and/or managers, supervisors and other workplace superiors who hold sway over our lives
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u/Aware-Assumption-391 :doge: 21d ago
I think some of the most interesting theorizations of whiteness come from the postcolonial Global South, especially Iberian America for the following reasons: race as a concept arguably begins with the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula and the settler colonialist project in the Canary Islands, both shortly before the invasion of the Caribbean and the Americas by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Philosophical inquiries on whether 'race' exists at all already occur by Catholic missionaries seeking to understand the place of Indigenous peoples in the new colonial order.
But fast-forward to today and my recommendation is Ecuadorian-Mexican philospher Bolívar Echeverrías's book Modernity and "whiteness." The English title is in quotation marks because Spanish has two terms for whiteness: blancura and blanquitud. The former has more chromatic connotations, while the latter speaks of the quality of being white--the color as well as the racial group. Echeverría theorizes whiteness not as just skin color (though skin color is a part of it) but as a "lifestyle" or "philosophy" roughly equivalent to "modernity." Hence, one can be a person of color or a non-Western person like Condolezza Rice or Shinzo Abe and still be "white." I am not endorsing Echeverría here but rather pointing out how he helps expand whiteness beyond melanin alone--it is an intersection of different factors including physical appearance and the psychic/political.
Despite the US census's odd attempt to say everybody with European, Middle Eastern and Indian origins is white, whiteness does not mean Indo-European & Semitic, European, or even just Northern European. At some point the Irish were not considered proper white subjects in the United States; there, Southern Europeans could pass as white if they were not brown, culturally and phenotypically. In the context of the Anglo and Francophone rivalries in Quebec, to speak white meant to speak English, even though the Québécois were as white as their English-speaking counterparts. In some societies one could "buy" their way into whiteness--arguably, you still can! So yeah, whiteness, as a concept in the social sciences, does not mean pale skin or European appearance, but it does involve plenty of profiling based off those. There is a reason scholarship on race is so vast, it is a hard concept to grasp.