III. Transforming the Social Construction of Whiteness and Blackness
Transformative work against segregation and racial oppression must therefore directly confront racism and the social construction of race, rather than seeking only universalist solutions or avoiding confronting the issue of race. Professor Johnson calls for destabilizing the concept of race itself in pursuit of transformative change. There is much to be learned from inquiry into the social construction of race. But changing the processes that create “race” and attach meaning to it in American society requires social and economic programs that consciously seek to change the way society is racialized and that go beyond the initial program of destabilizing the category of race. “Race” as a social construction is not only produced by the persistence of “old” attitudes or of ignorance, but by social processes that directly reproduce poverty and segregation and then identify poverty and unemployment as features of blackness and inner-city space-and, therefore, identify stability, employment and employability as features of whiteness.
Whiteness and blackness are not merely mirror images of each other. “White” does not only mean “opposite of Other” but also stands for the dominant, transparent norm that defines what attributes of race should be counted, how to count them, and who (as in white employers or mortgage bankers) gets to do the counting. Therefore, destabilizing “Other”-ness doesn't entirely destabilize the dominance of whiteness. Even though race has no natural reality or truth, it has great social force. More work is required, therefore, to undo the many forms of harm that have been part of the construction of race in America, including the perpetuation of residential segregation and the impoverishment of black individuals and communities.
Because whiteness is a transparent and dominant norm, part of the transformative project necessarily involves exposing white privilege to white people. From outside the cultural circle of whiteness, white retention of privilege looks willful. Some protection of privilege is indeed self-consciously willful, a conscious preference for whites and against people of color, a conscious protection of assets and access in society. At other times, a preference for whiteness reflects a preference for the qualities that have been attached to whiteness. For example, consider those employers who artlessly and bluntly interpreted race, class, and status in describing their hiring preferences in the study by Kirschenman and Neckerman. Because maintaining white consciousness requires not-seeing whiteness and not-seeing race, in many situations white privilege will also reproduce itself unconsciously and through a formal attachment to colorblindness. As Barbara Flagg has pointed out, positioned white decision-making that protects and perpetuates white privilege usually lacks the sort of “intent” to discriminate that law often requires before being willing to remedy subordination.
Transformative work on whiteness therefore requires attacking its power as a dominant norm, while seeking points of potential for change in the social construction of whiteness. Frankenberg's concept of race cognizance recognizes difference on the basis of cultural autonomy and empowerment for people of color. Necessary steps toward change include attacking the power of whiteness as an invisible, dominant social norm; participating in the project (necessarily repeated) that reiterates the existence of subordination and privilege by revealing the ongoing reproduction of white privilege and power; disputing the legal and social preference for colorblind approaches that reproduce color and power evasion, protect privilege, and deny cultural autonomy; and seeking points of unity and transformative potential.
In the context of residential segregation, antidiscrimination law is part of the attack on whiteness as a dominant norm. Whiteness has been constructed by excluding blacks, by defining white areas as superior, and by allocating to white areas the resources that reinforce privilege. Housing discrimination perpetuates segregation. It reflects the social construction of race-blacks as undesirable residents for white areas, whites as desirable residents for those areas-and perpetuates the processes that concentrate black poverty and continue to reproduce race and racism in America. A straight-forward attack on housing discrimination is therefore vital to break down walls of exclusion and begin the process of including people of color into formerly all-white or mostly white areas. Fighting housing discrimination is an important part of transforming whiteness in America.
Antidiscrimination law by itself, however, even when combined with a ban on employment discrimination, is insufficient to undo the processes by which residential life is segregated by race and racial concentration of blacks is linked with poverty. The many areas of selective investment and divestment that continue to reproduce segregation and exclusion and protect white privilege are larger social processes than can be attacked through antidiscrimination law. Therefore, the processes that reproduce whiteness and blackness must be deprived of their apparently natural quality, revealing the multiple forces and factors linking whiteness with access and economic development, and linking blackness with exclusion and impoverishment.
Land-use decisions affect the development of jobs and housing and the racialized allocation of resources and economic access-even when those decisions appear to have nothing to do with race. Decisions like highway planning, industrial-park location, bridge development, and other decisions should all be evaluated for their impact on the perpetuation of current patterns of racial segregation in housing and employment. All decisions should then be scrutinized for their effect on the racial reproduction of power and access in employment and on residence as well. Reports evaluating potential decisions would project the impact of any development on residential and employment segregation.
The idea of this proposal is to undo the apparently natural quality that accompanies the reproduction of whiteness, leaving a paper trial of land-use decision-making in the reproduction of power that can be identified and disputed. Unlike an environmental impact report, which embodies a more straightforward weighing of environmental factors, the emphasis here would be on revealing the reproduction of power and making it possible to trace causality when differential impacts ensue (or do not achieve what their proponents hope or promise)-rather than on evaluating whether certain regulatory standards have been met. The success of this measure, therefore, would not be measured directly because the actions taken might not always be those with the most beneficial impact on current patterns of segregation and economic concentration. Rather, the entire “natural” quality that makes white privilege and concentrated black poverty seem features of a physical landscape as inevitable as mountains or rivers would be challenged by showing the very processes of the construction of power and reproduction of racial exclusion and privilege. This proposal carries the danger that the discussion will become inflammatory and that power will be reproduced anyway, but it would have the helpful effect of revealing the production of white privilege and revealing some of the processes by which black communities are separated from opportunity and access.
Overall, the project of revealing power helps show the difference between treating race as a social construction and treating it as a natural phenomenon. Many discussions of race and poverty emphasize deconcentrating black people and black communities. These approaches treat race as a natural phenomenon. They have been criticized by scholars such as John Calmore, who emphasizes “spatial equality,” economic and social access, and development for black communities, rather than integration. Arguments about spatial equality tend to reveal the ongoing exercise of power and dominance. This approach attacks the link between blackness and inferiority (the social construction of blackness) by revealing the power that reproduces inequality, rather than by emphasizing deconcentration of black people's residential locations.
Because the social construction of race is not symmetrical, and because blackness is not simply the mirror image of whiteness, there is a difference between the effects of deconcentration on blacks compared to the effects on whites. For whites, the concentration of blacks somewhere other than white neighborhoods is the spatial phenomenon that allows whiteness to remain both exclusive (that is, physically populated mostly by white persons) and a dominant norm (unnoticed except when threatened). Breaking down the walls of exclusion therefore has the effect of breaking down white dominance as well as making white spaces less white. Residence in white neighborhoods obviously has some advantages for those black individuals who find that it detaches some of the social construction of blackness (including identification with “inner-city” or “unemployable”) for some of the privileges of whiteness (“suburban” and, often, “employable”). But, as Calmore points out, part of contesting the social construction of blackness involves defending the strengths and potential of black people and neighborhoods. Racial concentration is therefore different for white areas than for black areas.
Another way to attack both privilege and subordination in the social construction of race is to identify potential points of unity and mutual interest by examining the relationship between employment and residence-the two major aspects of the “built environment.” Employment and residence are linked together in the reproduction of white privilege and power, but there are important differences between them. White working class interests in both residential and workplace contexts run at least in part counter to the perpetuation of white privilege-even though complex and partial shared interests against oppression are seldom discussed today in either context.
Part of the problem with finding shared interests against racism lies in prevailing American concepts of “class.” Legal and social analysts most commonly use the term “class” to refer to socioeconomic status, rather than to describe a role in a system of production. Status-oriented accounts of white privilege, including concepts of group status and the concept of a “property right in whiteness,” are based on the concept of class as socioeconomic status. When class is understood to refer to labor, to a set of shared interests in a system of production, shared interests immediately appear that have the potential to help whites understand the need for antiracist unity with people of color.
The “property right in whiteness” is a metaphor that captures much of the systematic quality of the retention of white privilege in law and in society. But whiteness is also dynamic, continually in the process of formation, in transition for better or for worse. Therefore, it is also important to identify the ways in which many social structures operate to make the “property right in whiteness” not merely some form of additional status but a social premium that has formed the “consolation prize” for low income and lack of other substantive rights for working class whites in America. It is the lack of those “other” substantive rights that creates further possibilities for educating whites about the costs of racism.
In the workplace, white interest in solidarity can provide the basis for finding transformative potential and shared interests against racism. Because middle-class and elite whites treat racism as a fixed artifact and then locate this artifact in the white working class, racism tends to be seen as evidence against the possibility for labor solidarity. It is true that “race”-meaning racism, or the unwillingness of whites to see their futures as interdependent with blacks and other people of color-has weakened the labor movement in America. At various times, however, labor solidarity has also proved to be a mobilizing force against white privilege. Therefore, a view of whiteness as historically located and subject to change would emphasize instead the potential that shared interests through labor solidarity could help to work against racism.
Outside the workplace, low-income white residents of urban communities have been harmed in some ways by the social construction of race, even as it has protected them in other ways. In recent decades, racism masked economic decline in the United States. White privilege protected relatively greater access to jobs and housing by perpetuating exclusion. The racialized discourses of our time have, however, disguised long-term economic trends disfavoring all working-class people. The transition to high rates of permanent unemployment and the transition from an industrial to a service economy have serious negative consequences for American labor. But these trends were racialized based on their impact on black communities. The development of an underclass, the feminization of poverty, and related phenomena were treated as racial phenomena and discussed in political and social discourse as characteristics of black inner-city communities, when in fact they are part of the nationwide transitions in work opportunity that now impact white working people as well as blacks.
An examination of Massey and Denton's statistics on segregation shows how the process of protecting white privilege works to white material advantage in some ways while disguising (and perhaps therefore discouraging) white low-income interest in structural economic change. When black poverty occurs at a higher rate than white poverty, lower-income whites profit by the diminished exposure to the problems of poverty that come from concentrating black poverty. Segregation significantly reduces the extent to which low-income whites must live with the effects of poverty, whether or not income segregation or racial segregation are factors in residential patterns. Therefore, the “property right in whiteness” is not merely a psychological or an inchoate group-status effect, but a material advantage in living in communities less impacted by the effects of poverty. As Massey and Denton explain, this structure shifts the effects of poverty to hypersegregated black communities and thereby intensifies the negative effects of segregation for blacks.
This form of white privilege, however, depends on acceptance of a background regime in which the economy continues to deteriorate and labor continues to be an ever-weaker social and political force. If class only means status, then it is difficult to find a shared interest in bettering conditions for all. But if blacks and whites share interests in developing jobs, improving working conditions, and improving salaries for low-income workers, then whites might be better off (as Derrick Bell has pointed out) by abandoning attachment to white race privilege and working with blacks to accomplish this goal.
I do not mean to suggest that we de-emphasize race and promote only programs with broad class benefits for low-income Americans. In America, social and economic programs do not exist outside the process of the construction of race. Programs like public housing, Medicaid, welfare, and food stamps have become publicly “raced” and endowed with a racial character (marked as nonwhite) in white perception and in much political discourse despite the fact that whites are at least a plurality of the beneficiaries. Programs such as aid to farmers and bailouts for large corporations are officially treated as if they are “non-raced” when in actuality they are “white-raced.” In the category of social programs covertly coded white, I would include Social Security, because as enacted it so thoroughly excluded so many African-Americans. The social construction of race is capable of overtaking nonracial programs, stigmatizing them as “assistance” and treating them as “racial” whenever any significant proportion of benefits is provided to people of color.
Rather, I propose class-conscious work on an antiracist basis, not on a race-blind basis. Whites, and especially white working class men, are being told by political figures like Jesse Helms, Patrick Buchanan, and David Duke that they are suffering from illegitimate “preferences” for all women and all people of color. The anti-affirmative-action rhetoric of our time perpetuates the dominant norm of whiteness by treating the current distribution of power and access as natural and just. This rhetoric also makes the structural economic problems of working-class whites invisible by blaming the advent of people of color for the downturn in white working-class earning power.
The difference between the workplace and residential contexts is not that low-income whites share interests and potential alliance with blacks in one context and not the other. Rather, there exist more potential vehicles within the workplace for identifying shared interests and achieving shared mobilization. Heightened racism and lowered class consciousness are both part of the conservatizing effect of residential segregation on working white Americans. Achieving home ownership-more open to working-class whites than to blacks-helped white American workers achieve “middle-class” status in socioeconomic terms. The social processes that opened home ownership to whites and not blacks-and equated whiteness with positive social qualities like employability, comfort, and security-also consolidated racial attitudes that institutionalized urban/suburban divisions that in turn make shared work on job development difficult. Whites need to see how white privilege has hurt, as well as helped, the interests of many white people. The challenge is to identify the ways in which we can help show this point.
Professor, University of Miami School of Law. B.A. 1981, Regents College; M.A. 1985, Tulane University; J.D. 1989, Stanford Law School.
