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An Analytic of Whiteness

Social identities in general are a bit of a conundrum, resisted by many. Do we really have to accept these labels? Don't they do more harm than good? How can identity terms of any sort reflect the messy fluidities of human social reality? To get at whiteness, we need first to consider social identity categories in general, and then whiteness in particular. This chapter will try to make some headway in regard to these two tasks.

Whiteness is most obviously a concept, or social construct, and a relatively recent idea in the long expanse of human history. It is not a natural, found object. Differences in skin shades can hardly be classified and neatly categorized with any obvious uniformity, when dark complexioned Greeks, olive-skinned Italians, and pale Scandinavians are grouped together. We have created whiteness as a social category of identity. Or somebody has.

Importantly, because racial concepts are social, ideas about particular races can change pretty radically in different social contexts, across time and space, both in terms of the content of the ideas and in terms of how this particular content is valued. Nothing about our social identities is absolutely fixed.

Our growing sophistication about the variable, context-dependent nature of social categories of identity, together with our growing awareness of the intense damage such divisions have wrought, incline many people today to view social categories as subject to choice. If these categories are socially constructed, it seems to follow that we can choose to un-construct them, so to speak. People around us certainly seem to make conscious choices about how much importance to attach to such categories, and the fact that their choices vary seems to show that this is an arena of free will. Further, it is clear that this process happens not only individually but collectively: by working collectively within communities and societies – using our legislatures and other representative bodies – we can choose whether and how to count races, and how to name, define, and distinguish them, and we can choose whether to base public policy on them. We can enforce their segregation or encourage their integration. We can promote their importance, or try to make it wither away. Or so it would seem.

Two Negative Examples

Societies across the globe are struggling especially with the categories of race and gender, debating whether it is a good idea to acknowledge them, to encourage them, or best to try and ignore them. Consider two stark examples that illustrate the conflicting approaches to identity recently taken in government policy. In the former Yugoslavia, three main ethnic groups – the Serbian, Croatian, and the Bosnian – coexisted relatively peacefully for generations (Glenny 1996, 2012; Silber 1997). Although these groups are generally understood to be ethnic rather than racial, when I visited Dubrovnik in 2012 I found many who claimed that there are discernible physical features that can allow one roughly to distinguish them. This means that, in some important respects, these group identities are operating in the way that racial identities do: through visible or otherwise discernible features. “Slavic” identity in general, under which all of these groups are categorized, has a long history of being associated by western Europeans with negative and immutable attributes involving behavioral as well as intellectual capacities, much like racial concepts.

The socialist government in Yugoslavia fell shortly after Tito died in 1980. A tense coalition of communist groups maintained power for 10 years afterward, but when they lost power, several nationalist political parties were quickly formed, dividing the six federated states of the former Yugoslavia strictly along ethnic lines. Parties that used ethnic identity terms in their name – such as the Serbian Democratic Party and the Croatian People's Party – effected a neat conflation of the targeted constituency's ethnic and political identities, as if one's ethnicity determined, and delimited, one's political agenda. Political parties exclusive to specific groups can divide a shared public political culture in a way that is difficult to moderate, replacing a general discussion of the public good with a competition between interest groups defined as oppositional. Such parties institutionalize, in effect, what Cornel West (1994) has called “racial reasoning,” in which identity or authenticity checks replace reasoned argument.

In the postcommunist period, stark debates materialized over how this very multiethnic nation should be structured: some supported federalism, others “unitarism,” but the situation devolved all too quickly into violence. Adult men were rounded up, sequestered, tortured, and sometimes killed, based only on their ethnic lineage. Women of certain groups were sexually tortured in institutionalized camps, with the conscious aim of demoralizing communities and fracturing their identity alignments.

In the divided areas still today, there are segregated public schools that teach children different accounts of the recent debacle, just as generations of children in the United States learned different versions of the Civil War depending on whether they happened to live north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Serbian children are taught that their country was engulfed in a civil war spurred on by other groups, Croatian children learn that their people were engaged in a war of self-defense, while Bosnian children are taught that Bosnians suffered a war of genocidal aggression. The segregated educational institutions make it almost impossible for students to develop a comprehensive narrative that might adjudicate between competing claims or develop an adequate explanation for either the development of the war or its legacy. And this seems to be the direct result of treating social categories of identity as determinative and irreducible, with clear-cut definitions and boundaries enforceable by the state.

A second example comes from Rwanda where, by contrast, political and national unity prevails today after the intense period of violence that began in 1994, around the same time as the Balkan War. Rwanda's current government is pursuing a quite different strategy, however, to ameliorate the effects of the war and heal the divisions. Before the war, Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi identities were differentiated by distinctive class positions and accompanying social status, a hierarchy that emerged during the colonial period. The Tutsi were relative newcomers to this area of Africa, and, as Mahmood Mamdani explains: “Through this distinction between alien and indigenous, the Tutsi came to be defined as a race – the Hamitic race – different from the Hutu, who were constructed as indigenous Bantu” (2001, 99). Before independence from colonial rule was won, many Tutsi accepted comprador positions that buffered the white colonizers from the Hutu masses. For this, many were compensated with educational opportunities and material privileges. It is also important to note that Hutu and Tutsi identities, like Yugoslavian ethnicities, are correlated to racialized and generally visible phenotypic features that map their status onto Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies: the Tutsi are generally taller and lighter skinned.

Given the central role of Hutu and Tutsi identities in mobilizing political and military conflict in the region, and the longstanding class differences and antagonisms between these groups, the current government of Rwanda has endeavored to render these identities politically null in the public domain. Government forms cannot mention them or measure them; official discourses refrain from even noting their existence. In this way, the government hopes to create the nation anew on unified ground.

I want to suggest here that neither of these policies – so diametrically opposed – is plausibly workable. It is highly unlikely that either the segregationist strategy in the former Yugoslavia or the official silence on identity in Rwanda will be effective in avoiding conflict, repairing national trauma, or enhancing solidarity. Schools in the divided nations of the former Yugoslavia are separated from the very populations who not only have a different political orientation, but important experiences necessary for a full understanding of the actions taken by their own leadership during the war. Fairytales with comforting or exculpatory historical narratives will not be challenged. The Rwandan government is similarly attempting to transcend traumatic historical events by a kind of non-engagement. In truth, Hutu and Tutsi identities continue to affect social interactions, whether recognized by the government or not. These identities with longstanding tensions now have the added intensity of traumatic memories of atrocity, of victimization, and, no less traumatically, of the culpability for atrocities. To amass them together asks people, as Sonia Sikka points out, “to identify themselves with groups which…committed wrongs against their proximate ancestors. For most people, such self-identification is, at a psychological level, simply impossible” (2004, 348). Censoring identity talk only impedes the project of reassessing identities and reimagining their possible interrelationships. The meanings of identities are fluid, but segregation and silence hinder the process in which the meanings of identities may be understood more comprehensively and accurately, and hence transformed.

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