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UNIT 5_ WHITENESS

The document explores the construct of whiteness, tracing its origins to the Aryans and the development of racial concepts in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the context of European imperialism and American identity. It discusses how whiteness serves as a unifying coalition among various groups, creating hierarchies and privileges, while also highlighting the absence of whiteness in discussions of race. The text emphasizes the importance of studying whiteness to understand its power dynamics and its role in shaping societal norms.

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Laura Bzn
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110 views4 pages

UNIT 5_ WHITENESS

The document explores the construct of whiteness, tracing its origins to the Aryans and the development of racial concepts in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the context of European imperialism and American identity. It discusses how whiteness serves as a unifying coalition among various groups, creating hierarchies and privileges, while also highlighting the absence of whiteness in discussions of race. The text emphasizes the importance of studying whiteness to understand its power dynamics and its role in shaping societal norms.

Uploaded by

Laura Bzn
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNIT 5: WHITENESS

1. How is whiteness a construct? Where did this idea begin? What do the different
authors have to say about whiteness?

Elaborated concepts of race began to be developed in the eighteenth century and to


take hold in the nineteenth. With European Imperialism the conflation of body and
temperament a full concept of race comes into being.

The origin of whiteness is found in genealogy, focused on the Aryans (ancient


inhabitants of what is now North West India and Pakistan.) Aryans had emigrated to the West
and been the founding people of Europe. The term comes into prominence in the early
nineteenth century from the Sanskrit word meaning “of noble birth.” Indian ancestors of the
Aryans were identified as “Brahmins”. A sense of being white, of belonging to a White race,
only widely developed in the USA in the nineteenth century as part of the process of
establishing US identity. This idea of whiteness was constructed against images of native
Northamerican Indians and African slaves. Certainly British, and even Irish, Polish or Greek,
now became “White.” Whiteness unified coalitions of disparate groups of people. It was
more effective than class in uniting people across national cultural differences and against
their best interests.

As a coalition it incited the notion that some whites are whiter than others, with the
Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Scandinavians at the apex of whiteness under British
imperialism, US development and Nazism. The Caucasian (term coined J. F. Blumenbach in
1795) variant of Aryan theory. Aryans came to Europe through and from the Caucasus
mountains. This served as a barrier to determine white racial formation and severed the
Aryan myth, most notably at the hands of Nazism, from its Asian associations. Greek culture,
based on the Egyptians and Phoenicians, is integrated into this myth.

The quest for Aryan/Caucasian roots is to locate and define the white race and its
origins. Motivated by the search for the origins of humankind (descended from Ham, Shem
and Japeth, the sons of Noah (Johan Boemus 1521)). This ideology considers that white
people represent the only sub-race that has remained pure to the human race’s Aryan
forbears, non-whites then become seen as degenerative, falling away from the true nature of
the (human) race. The interpretation we take is that either whites are a distinct, pure race,
superior to all others, or else they are the purest expression of the human race itself.
These internal hierarchies of whiteness were unstable. However, because whiteness
carries rewards and privileges, the sense of a border that might be crossed and a hierarchy
that might be climbed has produced a dynamic that has enthralled people who have had any
chance of participating in it.

“White:” responds to the concept of “just human” or “white people are just people.”
Consequences: Their claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity.
Raced people are denied this power, and only speak about their racial community. This is
exemplified by the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of
white people in the West. New attention is drawn to white people and their whiteness. Liberal
whites react when they are seen by non-white people as White. Example: “Representing
Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” bell hooks

Whiteness looks for a white racial purity. However, imperialism creates interbreeding.
For example, in the southern US: elaborate tabulations of degrees of blackness mulatto,
quadroon, octoroon) were developed. In many states the “one-drop” definition was
promulgated, suggesting that even as much as one drop of black blood was enough to make a
person black. Brazil, on the other hand, positively encouraged the population to gradually
become whiter and the black and native elements to be bred out. Both approaches make the
same assumptions: that it is better to be white and that sexual reproduction is the key to
achieving whiteness. Inter–racial (non-white on white) rape is thus represented as bestiality
storming the citadel of civilisation.

The basic premise of whiteness is racial imagery is central to the organization of the
modern world. Race, and racial imagery are not the only governing factor. People of goodwill
struggle to overcome the prejudices and barriers of race. Yet it is never not a factor, never not
in play. Despite living a world of multiple identities, of hybridity, of decentredness and
fragmentation, White people and white cultural agendas are still in the ascendant

Texts of colonialism and post–colonialism, are interested in the analysis of racial


imagery and the deconstruction of the fetish of the racial Other. However, there is an absence
of the study of images of white people. Interest in race has come to mean an interest in any
racial imagery other than that of white people. As long as race is something only applied to
non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function
as a human norm. Other people are “raced,” we (white) are just people.
Postmodern multiculturalism may have genuinely opened up a space for the voices of
the other, challenging the authority of the white West. However, this simultaneously functions
as a side-show for white people who look on with delight at all the differences that surround
them.

Seeing whiteness, its power, and particularity its limitedness, helps put it in its place
and end its rule. This is why studying whiteness matters.

White Perspective: “all that we achieve, is to be accounted for in terms of our


individuality”. Therefore as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone
both defines normality and fully inhabits it. This secures a position of power, although this is
mediated through class, gender and other factors.

How exactly have the images of whiteness been constructed? “Black” is the term
preferred by many theorists and activists. This excludes a huge range of people who are
neither white nor black. Also, Black is a term in the construction of white racial imagery. The
privilege of being white in white culture is that one is not subjected to stereotyping in relation
to one's whiteness. (only to sexuality, disability, class). Whiteness generally colonizes the
stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of race. Black people can be
reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white people are something
else that is realized in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal or racial.

In White, Richard Dyer considers there are two aspects to take into account:

1. White makings of whiteness within Western culture and the control over these
representations
2. The visual, and principally photographic, representations of whiteness

The basic premise is that racial imagery is central to the organization of the modern
world. Race, and racial imagery are not the only governing factor. People of goodwill
struggle to overcome the prejudices and barriers of race. Yet it is never not a factor, never not
in play.

In A Phenomenology of Whiteness, Sarah Ahmed considers that “Bodies are shaped


by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’, a world that is inherited, or which
is already given before the point of an individual’s arrival” (153) and that “Bodies remember
such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body,
or even shape how bodies surface” (154).

This phenomenological reading is then applied to Fanon’s White Masks, Black Skin,
his hypersensitivity and hyper rationalization to his body in public space, mediated through a
black/white dichotomy. Fanon was from Martinique and on arriving in Paris he emerged from
his own fantasy of whiteness, which was connected to his idea of being French. For the first
time he actually sees himself in relation to the white other.

Whiteness “does not command attention” in the same manner in which Franz Fanon’s
body does in Black Skin, White Masks. As such it “trails behind in the performing of action”
(156). It has the quality of being neutral and thus “goes unnoticed” (156).

White bodies don’t have to face their bodies; they“lag behind” yet they actually
overreach themselves in the sense that they have become invisible yet ubiquitous. This is
power mediated through ideas of race. This gives way to a “whiteness of space” (157).

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