I. The Social Construction of Whiteness
As recent critical scholarship has shown, race is a social construction in which whiteness is a distinct, socially constructed identity. Since race is a phenomenon always in formation, then whiteness-like other racial constructions-is subject to contest and change. Whiteness is historically located, malleable, contingent, and capable of being transformed. Arguments about the malleability and contingency of white privilege, and its dysfunctionality for white working people, seem counterintuitive in today's legal and social discourses. These discourses generally emphasize what whites gain-the existence and benefits of privilege-or what whites lose-the costs of change for whites-rather than looking at transformative interests for whites. Yet historical struggles characterized by antiracist, multiracial struggle in defense of shared class interests have historically won significant successes, even under the apparently impossible conditions of formal segregation, fomentation of race hatred, exploitation, and abuse. One important goal in the transformative project is therefore to identify those points about whiteness that are most susceptible to working for change-especially those points that reveal potential for undermining the construction of privilege and subordination and for uniting whites, along with people of color, in opposition to privilege.
Race is a social construction, not “a natural division of human-kind.” As a concept or an ideology, however, race derives much of its power from seeming to be a natural or biological phenomenon or, at the very least, a coherent social category. For whites, residential segregation is one of the forces giving race a “natural” appearance: “good” neighborhoods are equated with whiteness, and “black” neighborhoods are equated with joblessness. The construction of race in America today allows whiteness to remain a dominant background norm, associated with positive qualities, for white people, and it allows unemployment and underemployment to seem like natural features of black communities. As I tell my Property students, when you wake up in the morning and go to the kitchen for coffee, you do not feel as if you hold partial interests or particular sticks in a bundle of rights in the structure you inhabit, nor does it feel as if land-use regulation shaped your structure, street, and community. This is home, where you roll out of bed, smell the coffee, reach for clothing, and inhabit the “reality” of the house. The physicality of home and community-that apparently natural quality from which Property professors must detach students to teach legal concepts-tends to make our lived experience appear natural. The appearance that this is “the way things are” in turn tends to make prevailing patterns of race, ethnicity, power, and the distribution of privilege appear as features of the natural world.
Race is a relational concept. It describes at least two social and cultural groups in relation to each other. The concept of race acquires meaning only in the context of historical development and existing race relations. Therefore, the construction of whiteness as “naturally” employed and employable, and blackness as “naturally” unemployed and unemployable, are both examples of the way in which concepts of whiteness and blackness imply whiteness as dominant and blackness as “other.” Both become part of the way of thinking about race in America.
Race is a powerful concept, even though it is neither natural nor fixed. Social constructions acquire power because we inhabit their landscape and see through their lenses. Therefore, change cannot be achieved by a decision not to act racially, given the patterns of privilege and exclusion, dominance, and subordination that characterize individual and collective life in a racialized society. Large-scale patterns of urban development have shaped patterns of privilege for mostly white areas and subordination, including economic decline, for many mostly black areas and have made these patterns part of the space we inhabit. In the context of residential segregation and urban/suburban development, therefore, the challenge of ending subordination involves changing widespread patterns of residence and economic development and changing the social meanings attached to these patterns.
Recently, social and legal theorists have begun to “interrogate whiteness.” There are several parts to this project. The dominant norm, the transparency phenomenon, must be made visible and cognizable to those within its sphere. Whiteness is historically and culturally specific. It has changed over time and continues to change. Whites need to find antiracist ways in which whiteness can be identified and changed. The point of inquiry is to identify how the concept “white” can be explored and understood, a project made difficult in part because explicit discussion of whiteness is usually associated only with white supremacists. We especially need to identify those moments in time and points in social understanding at which shared social interests exist, rather than treat white privilege as a fixed and frozen artifact.
Ruth Frankenberg divides whiteness into a set of “linked dimensions”: a location of structural advantage and race privilege; a “standpoint” from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society; and a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed. Frankenberg explores the ways in which material existence and the way we understand and describe it are interconnected in the construction of whiteness. The interaction of the material world and the ways we explain and understand it “generates experience” and, therefore, the “experience” of lived whiteness is something continuously constructed, reconstructed, and transformed for white people. Frankenberg's description of the relationship between the material world and our understanding of our experience helps explain the ways in which urban segregation itself becomes a force in constructing social concepts of race. For whites, white neighborhoods become part of the “natural” world, helping to keep their whiteness unnoticed and undisturbed, and helping to equate whiteness with something that reflects positive values and feels like home.
Whites have difficulty perceiving whiteness, both because of its cultural prevalence and because of its cultural dominance. Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo describes “culture” as something perceived in someone else, something one does not perceive oneself as having. “Culture” is a feature that marks a community in inverse proportion with power, so that the less full citizenship one possesses, the more “culture” one is likely to have. What we ourselves do and think does not appear to us to be “culture,” but rather appears to be the definition of what is normal and neutral, like the air we breathe, transparent from our perspective.
Like culture, race is something whites notice in ourselves only in relation to others. Privileged identity requires reinforcement and maintenance, but protection against seeing the mechanisms that socially reproduce and maintain privilege is an important component of the privilege itself. Peggy McIntosh conceptualizes white privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack” of provisions, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, compasses, and blank checks. The privilege that facilitates mobility and comfort in ordinary life is particularly difficult for whites to see. Opening a bank account appears routine, as does air travel without police stops, or shopping without facing questions about one's identification-unless the absence of suspicion is a privilege of whiteness.
White privilege therefore includes the ability to not-see whiteness and its privileges. Whites fail to see ourselves clearly, and we also fail to see the way white privilege appears to those defined into the category of “Other.” Among other whites, white people generally perceive that no race at all is present. “Race” itself comes to mean “Other” or “Black.” In the context of housing and urban development, terms like “racially identifiable” are generally used to refer to locations that are racially identifiably black. Similarly, “impacted” or “racially impacted” are terms that refer to black neighborhoods-not white neighborhoods. There is no “impact” to whiteness because it defines the norm. Dominant culture remains transparent to those inside it.
Because the dominant norms of whiteness are not visible to whites, whites are free to see ourselves as “individuals,” rather than as members of a culture. Individualism in turn becomes part of white resistance to perceiving whiteness and indeed to being placed in the category “white” at all. The shift in vision that makes whiteness perceptible is thus doubly threatening for whites: It places us in a category that our whiteness itself requires us to be able to ignore, and it asks us to admit into our perception of ourselves the perceptions of those defined outside the circle of whiteness.
Ruth Frankenberg identified discursive repertoires in the way white women were “thinking through race,” essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance. Color and power evasion are the key strategies in the colorblind ideology that characterizes most legal opinions and predominates in most areas of public discourse in the United States today. Color evasion is similar to what Neil Gotanda calls the myth of “non-recognition.” Noticing a person's color, and noticing differences between another person's color and one's own, is equated with being “prejudiced.” Whites are color evasive about people of color, often declining to identify the race of someone who is “other” than white in an effort to avoid appearing prejudiced. Notably, whites are also color evasive when describing a white self in relation to people of color. For whites, noticing race is not nice for whites because the meaning of “race” itself is “Other,” inferior, and stigmatized. The colorblind approach, which is generally adopted by whites to avoid being racist, therefore implicitly preserves much of the power structure of essentialist racism. Power evasion, in Frankenberg's terms, is color evasion with a different edge. Whites notice difference but do not allow into consciousness those differences that threaten white self-perceptions or make whites feel bad.
Race cognizance, Frankenberg's third category, means recognizing difference on the basis of cultural autonomy and empowerment for people of color. Because white privilege and whiteness are not visible, whites can only recognize “racism” or animus-but we recognize this quality in others more than ourselves. Therefore, most whites perceive racism as something that a second party (the racist actor) does to a third party (the subordinated person of a minority race). For white Americans of middle-class and elite status-the people who write the books and do the social analysis-racism is something that working-class whites (particularly Southerners) do to blacks and other people of color. Although racism is capable of being recognized in this framework, it appears as an unchanging artifact that is assigned to a social location within the white working class.
When racism becomes a feature possessed by “other” whites, whites of more elite status acquire a double layer of protection. First, they are protected racially. Because the focus on racism avoids the problems inherent in exploring privilege, this approach tends to exonerate the elite from responsibility for the reproduction of racial power and subordination. Second, blaming less elite whites for racism protects elite whites in class terms as well: racism becomes evidence against the potential for working-class solidarity, and therefore class privilege exists not because of a system that produces and distributes wealth to the advantage of elite whites, but because of the failures of white working-class people themselves.
Whiteness is visible to whites, however, when it appears to be the basis on which well-being is threatened. Whites perceive racism against ourselves when, through interventions in the norm of transparency, we are forced to experience the consciousness of whiteness. In the logic of white privilege, making whites feel white equals racism. A recent poll of young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four (called the “post-civil-rights” generation) showed that 68% of blacks felt that blacks were discriminated against on the basis of race, 52% of Hispanics felt Hispanics were discriminated against on the basis of race, and 49% of white people felt that whites were being discriminated against on the basis of race. Many whites explain the gap between black and white earnings not by invoking inequality and prejudice, but by relying on “individualistic” explanations about thrift, hard work, and other factors-all of which tend to explain white success through white merit and equate whiteness with stability and employability.
In the context of desegregation and urban development, the routine acceptance of whiteness as a dominant background norm is apparent in attitude surveys that inquire about the percentage of blacks whom whites would be willing to tolerate as neighbors. Whites are seldom asked how many whites they require as neighbors in order to feel comfortable. The accepted concept of “neighbors” or “area residents” is one that is white. On the other hand, defensive white self-awareness manifests itself quickly during times of racial transition in an area, or in relation to nearby groups in “other” neighborhoods.
