WHITE RACIAL DUALISM: In the post-civil rights period, what did it mean to be white? During the epoch of racial war of maneuver, in which exclusion was the predominant status assigned to racially-identified minorities, white identity (and particularly white male identity) was “normalized”; “otherness” was elsewhere: among people “of color” and to some extent women. All these were marked by their identities, but under conditions of virtually unchallenged white supremacy, white men were not. Once “white egalitarianism” (Saxton 1990) had been established as the political price elites had to pay to secure mass electoral support, herrenvolk Republicanism (Roediger 1991) became the organizing principle of 19th century US politics and culture. Only whites (only white men) were full citizens; only they were fully formed individuals. In terms of race and gender their identities were, so to speak, transparent, which is what we mean by the term “normalized.”
Of course, for a long time many whites partook of an ethnic “otherness” which placed them in an ambiguous relationship with both established WASP elites and with racially-defined minorities. But by the 1960s white ethnicity was in serious decline. Large-scale European immigration had become a thing of the past; while urban ethnic enclaves continued to exist in many major cities, suburbanization and gentrification had taken their toll. Communal forms of white ethnic identity had been eroded by outmarriage, and by heterogeneous contact in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and religious settings (Alba 1990, Waters 1990).
Nor were alternative collective identities, other forms of solidarity, readily available to whites. Class-based identities had always been weak in the US, and were particularly debilitated in the wake of the red-baiting period of the late 1940s and 50s, the same moment in which the black movement was gathering strength. What remained was the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) of white racial nationalism (Walters 1987): the US as a “white man’s country,” etc. It was this ideological construct of whiteness, already deeply problematic in a thoroughly modernized, advanced industrial society, which the black movement confronted in the post-WWII period.
Detached from the previous generations’ ethnic ties, unable to see themselves as part of a potentially majoritarian working class with larger social justice interests, and unable to revert to the discredited white supremacy of an earlier period, most whites were ripe for conversion to neoconservative racial ideology after the civil rights “victory” in the mid-1960s. Efforts on the part of Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and even the Black Panther Party to forge multiracial alliances for large-scale redistributive policies and other forms of substantive social justice never had a serious chance in the national political arena.
Instead, neoconservative and new right politicians, initiated by the Wallace campaigns of the mid-1960s, appealed to white workers on the basis of their residual commitments to racial “status honor” (Edsalls 1992). Wallace, and Nixon in his “southern strategy,” invoked the powerful remnants of white supremacy and white privilege. Since white identities could no longer be overtly depicted as superior, they were now presented in “coded” fashion as a beleaguered American individualism, as the hallmarks of a noble tradition now unfairly put upon by unworthy challengers, as the “silent majority” etc. The racial reaction begun by Wallace and consummated by Reagan, which resurrected 20th century Republicanism from the oblivion to which the New Deal had supposedly consigned it, was thus a fairly direct descendant of the “white labor republicanism” (Roediger 1991, Saxton 1990) which had shaped the US working class along racial lines more than a century earlier.
In this fashion from the late 1960s on, white identity was reinterpreted, rearticulated in a dualistic fashion: on the one hand egalitarian, on the other hand privileged; on the one hand individualistic and “color-blind,” on the other hand “normalized” and white. With Reagan’s election in 1980, the process reached its peak. A class policy of regressive redistribution was adopted; working-class incomes, stagnant since the mid-1970s, continued to drop in real terms as profits soared. Neoconservative racial ideology — with its commitment to formal racial equality and its professions of “color-blindness” — now proved particularly useful: it served to organize and rationalize white working class resentments against declining living standards. To hear Reagan, Bush, Gramm, etc. etc. tell it, the problems faced by white workers did not derive from corporate hunger for ever-greater profits, from deindustrialization and the “downsizing” of workforces; rather their troubles emanated from the welfare state, which expropriated the taxes of the productive citizens who “played by the rules” and “went to work each day” in order to subsidize unproductive and parasitic welfare queens and career criminals “who didn’t want to work.”
Nowhere was this new framework of the white “politics of difference” more clearly on display than in the reaction to affirmative action policies of all sorts (in hiring, university admissions, federal contracting, etc.). Assaults on these policies, which have been developing since their introduction as tentative and quite limited efforts at racial redistribution (Johnson 1967), are currently at hysterical levels. These attacks are clearly designed to effect ideological shifts, rather than to shift resources in any meaningful way. They represent whiteness as disadvantage, something which has few precedents in US racial history (Gallagher 1994). This imaginary white disadvantage — for which there is almost no evidence at the empirical level — has achieved widespread popular credence, and provides the cultural and political “glue” that holds together a wide variety of reactionary racial politics.
To summarize: today, the politics of white identity is undergoing a profound political crisis. The destruction of the communal bases of white ethnicity is far advanced, yet whiteness remains a significant source of “status honor.” White privilege — a relic of centuries of herrenvolk democracy — has been called into question in the post-civil rights period. Yet, far from being destroyed, the white “politics of difference” is now being trumpeted as an ideology of victimization. The situation would be farcical if it weren’t so dangerous, reflecting venerable white anxieties and fortifying the drift to the right which, now as in the past, is highly conducive to race-baiting. Today’s “color-blind” white supremacy, then, embodies the racial duality of contemporary white identity.
It is not the case, however, that whites have unequivocally or unanimously embraced the right, though certainly the ideological effects of neoconservatism have been profound, particularly on economically vulnerable whites. Although undoubtedly a minority among whites, there are still millions who have resisted the siren-song of neoconservatism, recognizing that the claim of “color-blindness” masks a continuing current of white supremacy and racism.
Why? What enables any whites to adhere to the objective of substantive social justice, rather than its merely formal illusions? And how deep does this commitment run? We know little about the sources of white anti-racism today. Yet few themes on the domestic political horizon are more important.
Without becoming entirely speculative, it is possible to identify a few elements of white experience which have potential anti-racist dimensions. Feminism and gay liberation have developed critiques of discrimination which are intimately related to the experiences of racially-defined minorities. Furthermore, these struggles can trace their origins back to the black struggles of the 19th century as well as those of the 1960s. Millions of white lives have been changed by these movements. Other forms of radical political experience also taught basic anti-racist lessons, despite various political and ideological limitations. Here I am thinking of the great industrial organizing drives of the 1930s, the various communist currents, new left and anti-war activities during the 1960s, the farmworkers movement, the solidarity movements with Central America in the 1970s and 80s, and above all, the civil rights movement, in which many thousands of whites were involved.
These political struggles exercised a moral influence on whites, just as they did on national politics; that influence has perhaps waned under decades of assault from the right, but it has proved far more difficult to eradicate than its opponents expected. Beyond its fundamentally ethical character, it draws upon various material interests as well (I recognize that this distinction is not an absolute one). Among these is the difficulty of uniting all whites under conservative banners: Jews in particular (whose “whiteness” continues to exhibit fissures and cultural contradictions) (Sacks 1994) still adhere disproportionately to social and political liberalism for reasons which have been extensively analyzed. Arab Americans, paradoxically, are in much the same position. Other sources of white anti-racism may be located in religious institutions, the academy, and popular cultural forms, although none of these is free of ambiguity and contradiction.
In short, the problematic and volatile quality of contemporary white identities, not their consolidation, is evident at all levels of US society: from the most casual conversation to the contortions and contradictions of national politics. This volatility provides ongoing evidence of racial dualism among whites.
TOWARD RADICAL DEMOCRRACY
As US politics plunges to the right, as the aspirations of the activists and adherents of the 1960s movements are forsaken, as indeed the legacy of those struggles is twisted and tortured into service as an obstacle to the achievement of real social and racial justice, the attempt to imagine a greater and more robust democracy, racially inclusive as well as substantively egalitarian, seems almost utopian. Yet I submit that it is precisely that task which most cries out for thought and action today. Those who wish to halt the gallop to the right need to be able to envision a convincing political alternative, if the cause of racial justice, and indeed of radical democracy, is ever to resume its advance.
Without presumption — for this task is more than the work of an article — I would like to suggest that the recognition of widespread racial dualism in US politics and culture at century’s end suggests certain principles that can be applied to this work of imagination.
To acknowledge racial dualism is to understand the malleability and flexibility of all identities, especially racial ones. One of the recognitions hard won by the movements of the 1960s — not only the racially-based ones, but all the so-called new social movements across the globe — was that identity is a political construct. Not carved in stone, not “sutured” (Mouffe and Laclau 1985), our concepts of ourselves can be dramatically altered by new movements, new articulations of the possible. It may yet turn out that the greatest achievement of the 1960s movements, sparked by the black movement, was not the political reforms they accomplished, but the new possibilities for racial identity they engendered, not just for black people, but for everyone.
The right wing has in a certain sense understood the challenge of “reimagining” race, for it has clearly articulated a particular vision of the meaning of race in a conservative democratic society. This is the concept of “color-blindness.” Undeniably this vision has a certain appeal, not only as a cover for the perpetuation of white supremacy, but as a plausible reinvention of fundamental elements of national ideology: indi
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