White

“White” is a tricky word.  As a descriptor for a human grouping it seems, on the surface to be obvious — people with pale (white-like) skin. 

White as a power category also appears uncomplicated. Those who look white are included in the group socialized and legally constituted to have a superior power position in America to those who don’t. You don’t get to choose your whiteness — or reject it. You are granted it automatically because the power structure needs an easy-to-police dividing line. 

When I say “white” gets tricky, I mean when you try to pin down the definition in regards to each individual, you start to realize you are deciding who exactly gets to be included in the power category. Somebody has to be not-white, if white is to remain a power category.

Who do you want to allow to be white? Who do you force not to be? What quantity of melanin is too much? What family ancestry qualifies or disqualifies? The obviousness of the division crumbles. 

When I did a semester in London years ago, I stayed with a family where the mother was a brown-skinned American latina and the father was a pale-skinned Brit. They had two children, one a blonde, pale-skinned girl, the other a boy darker than his mother with black hair. If you were sorting purely by a glance, the daughter would be white and the son wouldn’t. That doesn’t seem fair. But, of course, none of this is fair. 

In an essay about multiculturalism Jack Foley remembers a family discussion:

My son Sean came home from school recently and told me that he had seen some T-shirts which had the equivalent of the phrase ‘Black Is Beautiful’ on them. (I believe the phrase was in fact ‘Black By Popular Demand.’) He complained that he couldn’t wear a shirt saying, ‘White Is Beautiful” or ‘White By Popular Demand.’ I said, ‘That’s true, but you could wear a shirt saying, “Irish Is Beautiful” or, “Italian Is Beautiful” or, “Jewish Is Beautiful.”’ The point is that white is not an ethnic group. [italics in original]  [W]hat is it? 

I think the answer is that … ‘White’ … is always an indication of power … In [a text I quoted] from 1726 … the opposite of ‘Whites’ is not ‘Blacks’ but ‘Slaves.’

“White” is not an innocent category, one we can take for granted. White and other so-called racial categories are not clear natural sortings with no more social significance than those who can curl their tongues and those who can’t. Rather, these are power categories, with white being the dominant power. Wearing a “White Power” t-shirt you declare yourself a member of the superior power category — and one who is willing to make sure that category remains exclusive and that you will police the borders of the category to keep others out (and out of power). 

Any other declaration, even “Black Power,” is, at most, aspirational. Everybody knows where the power lies. 

source:

“Multiculturalism and the Media”

an essay by Jack Foley

Multi-America: essays on cultural wars and cultural peace

1998. Penguin Books, New York