Positive White Identity

In “whiteness without white supremacy,” feminist philosopher of racial identity Linda Martin Alcoff articulated a conceptualization of white identity as a direct challenge “to white activists telling us to give up on whiteness… Baldwin writing that “whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.” … Ta-Nehisi Coates writing that whiteness “has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power.” Here are some of her ideas about “positive white identity”:

Is whiteness constituted by white supremacy in the way some theorists put it today, so that to be white is to have a form of subjectivity that’s imbued with white supremacist ideas? I just think that’s a mistaken view of how subjectivity works, how fluid and changeable it is… I don’t think we can get to utopia… I think the political establishment doesn’t know what to do with the white working class and the white poor. The liberal political establishment has decided they don’t need this constituency to vote for the Democrat party, they can still win without them. I think that’s a colossal mistake… I think what’s necessary [to form political coalitions across racial lines] …is for white people to be able to come to those coalitions as white people and not be viewed as not bringing anything to the table or not having a right to be there… So any kind of move forward on class dimensions is going to have to figure out how to create that coalition across racial differences, and that means addressing racism, but it also means thinking about how white people are a part of that coalition…

Identity politics is the idea of taking identity as politically relevant, but if you see whiteness as only negatively politically influential, of course that’s a problem. I don’t. I think it’s got mixed political implications. I do very much fault a lot of the left… who have characterized the white working class as hopelessly racist in a way that doesn’t merit any kind of effort at coalition work. I think there has been an abandonment and an essentializing… To bring white people into a pluralistic space like that requires more work because of the long history of… colonialism and imperialism and racism… I do think all white people have benefitted from white supremacy… you get a psychological benefit from all this constant cultural affirmation of being the smartest and the best and the most advanced. So there’s definitely a psychological benefit. And there’s been a real economic benefit as well for most white people to some extent, even if it’s comparatively small; you still get a comparative advantage, which is now eroding I think… Since the 1970s it’s been getting worse and worse for the white middle class and working class, and that creates new crises, new opportunities, and also the danger of fascism…

Some people say we need race to talk about racism. But I think we need it for more than that. We need it to understand social identities as parts of who we are. I want to emphasize, more than I think some other people do, the importance of history in forming us… European settler immigrants, almost all of whom came to the United States because of economic desperation, some of whom also came because of political persecution… were coming for the same reason that Guatemalans are coming today. So it wasn’t so much that… they were doing fine — no, they were pushed out, they were starved out, and they had to live, and this was a place where they could come. That experience created commonalities across the national and ethnic groups of Europe that before had been steeped in a lot of animosity. You still had ranking orders or pecking orders among the European ethnicities, but you also had cross-ethnic experiences of identification, certainly among the impoverished immigrants coming here. Whiteness filled a gap of what to call oneself… It’s a word that names a real experience that is common among a large swath of people who are today called white… People took up this idea because it explained their experience and made sense with their lives and the societies that they saw. It also gave them some way to differentiate themselves from others.

One of the histories that I read was about the Irish… who came in as indentured servants. Nell Painter uses the term slavery for their condition because they couldn’t change employment, couldn’t move around. We’re talking in the 1600s, 1700s. But their situation did change as chattel slavery became singularly tied to African heritage. So whiteness didn’t just come from the State; it really made a huge difference in your life, whether or not you were white. You’d still be poor, but you were free of chattel slavery and the conditions of indenturement could end. Your children would not be indentured servants just because you were an indentured servant. So there was a distinction there, that was a social and economic fact of experience that whiteness was a way to refer to…

When we think about substantive white culture, a lot of it is local… It’s not uniform; it’s not all white people. White people in New York don’t listen to country music. In North Dakota, it’s different than it is in New York City; in New York City, it’s different than it is in the South and so forth. So it doesn’t seem like there’s “A White Culture.” There are multiple forms of it… What we call white culture so much of the time in the United States is actually not pure white because they were living in different parts of the country, they were living among different people. There’s not this one uniform cultural manifestation that is unique to whites. But that’s true of every group…

I think that we have to think seriously about the majority of whites, you know, the Walmart workforce. I was recently in North Carolina in a fairly rural area going to flea markets, and people are selling tables full of broken pottery to other people who are buying broken pottery. And the concept of privilege does not spring to mind when you are in those locations. There’s a lot of white poverty, so when you talk about criminal power, I think it has limited explanatory reach over the conditions of lives of the white poor, or the lower-waged working class…

If you even talk about white culture it sounds like you have this Klan mentality because nobody talks about it in a positive way other than white racists….[But] what do white people bring to the table in terms of their experiences or point of view? It is an amalgamation… When we talk about US culture, what is it? It’s an amalgamation in which clearly European immigrants have played a large role. If you think about it for half a second, the idea that European-American immigrants to the United States don’t have anything in common, don’t have any culture that they brought, it’s just unrealistic. Obviously they had a certain set of experiences and commonalities. But it’s a huge group, it’s a very diverse group; it’s more diverse than other groups in some respects just because of numbers. The most common experience is the experience of immigration from Europe, which was economically motivated. They came for survival. Most families have some lore about that...

I was worried that when we start talking very positively about US culture it always leads to more imperial adventures. But we don’t have to rewrite everything; we can draw from positive elements of US culture and politics and philosophy that were created here to give people a different sense of the possibilities for the future…

I think the term “ally” emerges in black and brown communities … among activists who think that whites can only be there as allies. I don’t think it’s that they’re not allies. I think sometimes there are allies in social movements — it’s not bad to be an ally. But I don’t think, in regard to white supremacy, whites are just in the position of allies, because they have their own skin in the game — it’s a different skin in the game. But they do have their own skin in the game in terms of… wanting to chart a realistic future for their children... Whites have an interest in their children being safe and secure and flourishing, and white supremacy is not the way to secure that… They’re also there as allies… but they’re there for their own reasons, and I think that’s important to think about.