When the President of the Brookings Institution--a career military man, a centrist if ever there was one--feels obliged to talk about "White Supremacy" as a threat at home comparable to "terrorism" abroad, you know some kind of watershed has been breached. (And just a couple days ago, a number of Brookings scholars rightly lambasted Michael Bloomberg for his ignorance of the direct and active role of race in American politics.)
It seems that "whiteness" has become a workable bit of our public discourse. And I think it's well past time that this is so. Indeed, this is one of the most interesting things in public discourse in recent years.
What it is, is this: We've seen the general emergence of "whiteness" as a category of socio-cultural understanding. This has happened on the popular level, in public discourse, and in scholarship as well, in multiple fields in the social sciences and the humanities. Now in some scholarly fields and for some more public and even popular communities of discourse, "whiteness" has never not been an analytic tool--at least for the past several decades. But, speaking as an N of one, and a white male one, it seems to me that "whiteness" as a topic has emerged in public discourse and in scholarship especially in the past decade and particularly in the past three or four years, since the emergence of Donald Trump as a figure explicitly arguing for what I would call a "white grievance" political agenda.
Speaking again as an N of one, one of the things that's been interesting for me is realizing how the affect of speaking about "whiteness" is so interestingly charged, for me at least. To name something or someone as "white" once seemed to me, at a visceral level of response, almost impolite, and likely to be immediately awkward. Of course one can argue--I would argue--this is part of what makes naming whiteness so important. In higher education, we are supposed to talk about challenging things, hard things, and difficult topics. Isn't it precisely this kind of awkwardness we should interrogate? I think so. And it looks like we're doing so.
Evidence of this has been gathering on my computer for a while, and I've been meaning to write this piece for a few months now. First of all, the death of Noel Ignatiev, the historian who wrote the book How the Irish Became White, died last week. The obits for him that I've seen don't quite capture Ignatiev's orneriness. Suffice to say, he could be difficult, and was occasionally accused of anti-semitic attitudes or writings. But his work on how whiteness is constructed seems to have become something almost taken-for-granted in scholarship on race.
Then I thought back on the presence of "whiteness" as a category in scholarship. It's seemed to be rising in recent years. Not just in the humanities and "softer" social sciences like anthropology, but in more quantitative fields. For instance, the latest issue of The Forum (a journal of "applied research in contemporary politics) is largely about whiteness. It's appearing even in the field of "economic sociology".
Then, I did a couple google N-gram searches on this (if you don't know "google ngram," you should, well, google it, and you too can become an undisciplined and cheap-ass social thinker just like me!) on a couple terms, just to see what happened. I chose "whiteness" and "white supremacy." Unfortunately so far as I can tell, the ngram viewer doesn't allow you to track stuff past 2008, so the period I want to know more about is unavailable to me. (If anyone knows how to find out about the popularity of words since 2008, please let me know.) But what I found is interesting:
The phrase "white supremacy" bottomed out in 1991 but has risen since then. (You can see it on this chart.)
The phrase "whiteness" bottomed out in the 1980s and started climbing in 1990. (You can see that one in this chart.)
Someone mentioned this thing called "Google trends" to me, which I'd never used before, but it looks pretty interesting as well--a kind of way of mapping not public discourse but private google searches (umm, I guess private? How does Google gather this info after all?).
Also the "N-grams Data" website looks cool, but it's a bit intimidating to me.
This is interesting to me, because it gives credence to my thought that a viable (not proven, just viable) narrative of what is going on in America has developed in the past several years, a narrative not just about America today, but about its past.
Part of this has been the emergence (to wide acknowledgment) of Afro-pessimism over the past decade, and the impact of this has been large, but mostly immediately confined to higher ed and the humanities. Something else happened with Trump, however.
This great review essay of a number of these books makes the case that only one, Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness, accurately points out the operative factor here, namely a besieged sense of whiteness endangered.
It also offers a powerful statement of a position that I too think is probably the right one going forward:
Building a new and durable electoral coalition to defeat Trumpism requires confronting the nation’s past of government-backed whiteness, as well as breaking the recurrent cycle of racially infused backlash politics now as old as the Watergate building and misty memories of Woodstock. This new coalition demands deeper thinking than the formulations about false consciousness. It demands that we unpack the connections between patriotism and prejudice, violence and alienation, gender and nationalism, and, most of all, white privilege and how the state has long exercised power on its behalf.
Maybe we only learn what we are forced to learn. I think of something said by a murderer in a Flannery O'Connor story "A Good Man is Hard to Find": "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." America can maybe learn, under pain of existential danger. Well, maybe some of us can. A little bit, anyhow. For a minute, anyway.
Post script: For another point of view, suggesting we need to get over race altogether, consider this thoughtful and long piece on Thomas Chatterton Williams on the illusion of race. I find it really interesting, even if I don't buy the availability of the ultimate aim, at least in this generation. But even Williams seems to be able to speak about whiteness, not only about blackness, in a vivid way. That seems to me something worth noting.