Todd M. Kuchta

Department of English
Indiana University
tkuchta@indiana.edu

 

Richard Dyer, White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

 

“White people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their image” (9). This premise drives Richard Dyer’s White, “a study of the representation of white people in Western culture” (xii), with particular emphasis on the media of photography and film. Dyer’s premise is also resonant of much recent work in the emergent field of “White Studies”–or what one of its practitioners, Mike Hill, has called “critical ethnography’s next-big-thing” (“What” 1). Though a nascent interest in whiteness goes at least as far back as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, the more recent genealogy of White Studies can be traced to the work of contemporary non-white cultural critics like bell hooks, Cornel West, and Stuart Hall.¹ Among the first sustained inquiries into the ubiquitous yet invisible character of whiteness, however, was Dyer’s own essay “White,” published in a 1988 issue of the British film journal Screen. That essay, which includes many of the ideas given fuller shape in his book, provided an innovative reading of the depiction of white characters in the films Simba, Jezebel, and Night of the Living Dead. According to Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, Dyer’s essay “inaugurate[d] a paradigmatic shift” in film and cultural studies “by precisely registering the re-orientation of ethnicity” called for by Stuart Hall (6). Perhaps more importantly, “White” offered the theoretical ground for interrogating whiteness in other areas of cultural inquiry. Often cited in work far removed from film studies, Dyer’s essay was a driving force behind white critique’s “first wave” (Hill, “Introduction” 2).

 

In the nine years between Dyer’s essay and book, there has been a proliferation of works addressing the production, representation, deconstruction, and transformation of white culture in literature, history, pedagogy, television, and film.² Overall, White benefits greatly from its engagement with the debates surrounding white critique. For example, Dyer takes issue with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Edward Said’s Orientalism, both of which argue that white Western culture defined itself in contrast to its non-white others. “This function,” Dyer suggests, “is indeed characteristic of white culture, but it is not the whole story and may reinforce the notion that whiteness is only racial when it is ‘marked’ by the presence of the truly raced, that is, the non-white subject” (14). Unlike his essay, then, which emphasized the role of blackness in demarcating whiteness, Dyer’s study uses a wide range of visual texts–mostly films and film stills, but also magazine ads and illustrations, oil paintings, daguerreotypes, movie posters, and novel covers–to call attention to “whiteness qua whiteness,” for the purpose of “making whiteness strange” (4, emphasis mine). Yet Dyer also complicates monolithic understandings of whiteness which focus solely on race by providing nuanced readings of its articulation through gender and class. Moreover, he cogently frames these readings within insightful analyses of the historical, cultural, and technological conditions that have made whiteness the ostensible standard of power, reason, and beauty within Western codes of representation.

 

When bell hooks first suggested the possibility of white critique, she wanted “all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what’s going on with whiteness” (Yearning 54). For better or worse, hooks’s wish has come true. As Peter Erickson notes, “the exploration of white identity is increasingly the purview of whites themselves” (171), a tendency which E. Ann Kaplan suggests might keep whiteness “at the center where it has always been” (328). Dyer, himself white, is conscious of this danger, which he refers to as the “green light problem” (giving whites the go-ahead to remain focused on themselves); likewise, he recognizes in White Studies the risks of “me-too-ism” (whites can join in a multicultural world, even claim victimization and guilt) (10-11). But Dyer hardly threatens to succumb to these problems, given that the impulse behind his study is to deconstruct white hegemony. “The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power… by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world” (2).³ By seeking the abolition of whiteness and remaining within the agenda of white critique’s first wave, however, Dyer fails to distinguish between negative and positive manifestations of whiteness, implying that it must be deconstructed tout court rather than interrogated and transformed. Not only does this wholesale abolition of whiteness seem untenable (if white people remain, won’t some form of whiteness as well?), but it risks immobilizing whites themselves–those perhaps most capable of change, if only for the positions of power they inhabit in the world. What is to be done, Dyer leaves us wondering, once we see that with or without his clothes, the emperor is still white?

 

Dyer’s disrobing of whiteness, however, is lucid and deft. For him, whiteness is fraught with paradox. As a hue, white is both the combination of all colors and no color at all. As a racial designation, white describes people whose skin color is not literally white–and because “white” skin presumes the absence of ethnicity, whites rarely consider themselves racially marked. Since “whites are everywhere in representation… they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites” (3). Rather than its weakness, however, Dyer claims such paradoxes offer whiteness its representational power, inoculating it against stereotypes by suggesting that whites are both infinite in variety yet representative of humanity per se. “At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (3). Unlike individuals of other ethnicities, a white person need never fear representing all whites. Moreover, the paradoxes of whiteness enable it “to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin” (57). But within the fluid boundaries of whiteness lies its ultimate contradiction: “Whiteness as ideal can never be attained, not only because white skin can never be hue white, but because ideally white is absence: to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing” (78).

 

Dyer’s recognition of the impossibility of pure whiteness not only unveils its mythic quality, but also emphasizes the paradoxical struggle between body and spirit which, for him, is central to the history of white representation. Dyer argues that Europeans constructed whiteness via Christianity, racial discourse, and imperialism as a spirit “that is in but not of the body” (14). While Christianity struggles to deny the body’s urges, for example, it emphasizes “the spirit that is ‘in’ the body” (16). Mary’s immaculate conception and Christ’s transcendence of his human appetites both reflect the Christian ideal of attaining the spirit by denying the body in which the spirit resides. As the dominant religion of Europe, Christianity’s ideal of bodily transcendence became synonymous with the ideal of whiteness itself, in turn shaping the European discourse on race throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dyer argues that by applying both genealogical accounts of lineage and biological analyses of individual bodies to the study of other races, whites largely avoided biological self-analysis which might have rendered them, “like non-whites, no more than their bodies” (23). Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did whites attempt to justify their biological superiority–and then by recourse to blood and genes, which like spirit were hidden from plain sight.

 

As in Christianity, then, the European discourse on race imagined the invisible spirit which defined whiteness–its virtue, aspiration, intelligence, refinement–as something that “could both master and transcend the white body” even while inside it (23). This paradox of white embodiment is also evident among European and American imperialists who set out to remake the world in their own image, but passed themselves off as “subjects without properties,” making their own interests seem the natural order of things. Where others were “particular, marked, raced,” the white man was “without properties, unmarked, universal, just human” (38). Dyer contends that this position of apparent disinterest (“abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity”) has been more important to the construction of whiteness than racial distinctions themselves (38-39). Thus, like Christianity and the discourse of race, imperialism offered a terrain upon which to negotiate the contradictory character of white embodiment–that is, its drive to be truly disembodied.

 

While emphasizing race, Dyer’s genealogy of whiteness frequently turns to gender. Dyer argues, for example, that in epitomizing the ideal of bodily transcendence, Christ and Mary provide gendered models of white behavior. White women are held to Mary’s “passivity, expectancy, receptivity… [and] sacred readiness” in regard to motherhood, while Christ’s struggle between body and spirit projects suffering on white men “as the supreme expression of both spiritual and physical striving” (17). This ideal of transcendence is challenged, however, by the need to reproduce white bodies. As such, race and heterosexuality are inextricable–but sex itself, the very means of reproducing whiteness, involves a carnality associated with darkness, and hence with non-white others. European sexual roles thus projected racial difference upon the Christian contrast between body and spirit for both white males (who struggle like Christ to overcome their dark bodily urges) and white females (who, like Mary, are supposed to be pure white and without such urges in the first place).

 

In addition to gender analysis, Dyer also shows how the body-spirit paradox of whiteness has been central to the technology of photography and cinema. Reminiscent of John Berger’s claims that oil painting provided the visual medium par excellence for an emerging bourgeoisie, and Laura Mulvey’s argument that the cinematic apparatus reproduces the heterosexual male gaze, Dyer maintains that as media of light, photography and film were designed to depict the spirit of the white body, to make whites look ideal, bright, and in some cases, literally white. The white, often female face was not only the litmus test by which the proper coloring in photography and cinema was gauged, but also the benchmark when experimenting with new techniques and equipment. Though “photographing non-white people is typically construed as a problem,” Dyer shows that alternatives to “white-centric” technology have always been available. “It may be–certainly was–true that photo and film apparatuses have seemed to work better with light-skinned peoples, but that is because they were made that way, not because there was no other way” (89-90). However, since “the photographic media hold together translucence and materiality,” they offer the consummate means of representing the supposed ideals of whiteness: “it is the mix, in the very medi[a themselves], of light and substance that is central to the conception of white humanity” (115). At the same time, Dyer emphasizes the consistency with which men and the lower classes are depicted in darker, hard-edged tones than women and the upper classes, who are usually rendered in gauzy translucence. Though this finding is somewhat predictable, and Dyer’s overview of different lighting techniques risks tedium, the chapter provides a thorough and stunning corrective to the notion that the use of technology is neutral to matters of race.

 

All in all, then, Dyer skillfully illuminates the paradoxes of white embodiment within analyses of technology and cultural history that concern race, as well as gender and class. The cumulative strength of this framework is especially evident in his chapter on films starring white bodybuilders. The tendency to associate bodybuilding with whiteness originates, for Dyer, in the cultural genealogy of the sport’s modern iconography–a mix of Greek and Roman classicism, Californian health and leisure, comic book barbarianism, and crucifixion imagery. As in Christianity, racial discourse, and imperialism, the white man’s trained body displays the victory of spirit over flesh, or to be more precise, the spirit’s transformation of the flesh. “The built white body is not the body that white men are born with,” but rather “made possible by their natural mental superiority…. a product of the application of thought and planning” (164). Not surprisingly, then, “the built body and the imperial enterprise are analogous” (165). Dyer reads the Tarzan films and bodybuilder action movies like Stallone’s Rambo series as articulations of white masculinity that justify American foreign policy by equating the hero’s trained muscles with the spirit needed to discipline the “enfeebled or raw” body of colonial lands (165). Dyer concludes the chapter with an analysis of the popular cycle of Italian peplum films made between 1957-1965. The peplum, Dyer argues, celebrated the white man’s muscles at a historical moment when their value was diminished by Italy’s shift away from both manual labor and fascist ideology. Though explicit references to fascism are hostile in the peplum, Dyer argues that the films employ fascistic structures of feeling by providing the working class with mythical heroes they can both associate with and–like the American bodybuilder stars or il Duce himself–bow down to.

 

The 1984 British TV miniseries The Jewel in the Crown serves as Dyer’s case study for representations of female whiteness. Noting the centrality of women to narratives of imperial decline, Dyer links this story of the final days of British India to texts like A Passage to India and The Raj Quartet which blame the empire’s fall on a female presence. Though women are the central protagonists of Jewel, and female modes of address predominate throughout, women’s action repeatedly fails, and the series’ narrative organization creates a sense of torpor and fixity–all of which together emphasize the helplessness and impotence of white women in the face of historical change. While the chapter contributes to the book’s general concerns by distinguishing between male and female versions of whiteness, its lack of reference to the body-spirit dynamic leaves it somewhat out of touch with the rest of the study. Moreover, as in the chapter on technology, Dyer’s pace drops considerably here. Nevertheless, the chapter convincingly illustrates how Jewel, and by extension, other imperial narratives, allow white women to “take the blame, and provide the spectacle of moral suffering, for the loss of empire” (206).

 

This spectacle of suffering and loss is echoed by the recurrent association between whiteness and death that is the focus of Dyer’s final chapter. If the history of white representation is a recurrent struggle to become disembodied, then death is the extreme version of whiteness. Horror films like Dracula and Night of the Living Dead emphasize the terrors of extreme whiteness, and science fiction movies such as Alien and Blade Runner depict the extreme whiteness of androids as the unattainable–if not ultimately undesirable–height of human perfection. But certain films also temper their apparent critiques of extreme whiteness by recourse to ordinary whiteness. In Blade Runner, the bleached, Aryan features of replicants played by Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer contrast with the ordinary whiteness of Harrison Ford, the cop who “retires” them. Likewise, Falling Down, a parable of the death of the modern white male, juxtaposes the extreme whiteness of an angry Michael Douglas with the warmth and tenderness of Robert Duvall. Both Blade Runner and Falling Down thus recontain a dangerous whiteness gone overboard with exemplars of white commonness and invisibility. As such, extreme whiteness is a distraction from the hegemony of ordinary whiteness. “The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanity’s most average and unremarkable representatives” (223). The death of extreme whiteness only keeps ordinary whiteness alive.

 

Dyer ultimately hopes that “if the white association with death is the logical outcome of the way in which whites have had power, then perhaps recognition of our deathliness may be the one thing that will make us relinquish it” (208). As he does repeatedly throughout his study, Dyer here emphasizes his desire for white critique to undermine white authority and dislodge whites from positions of power. But must all whiteness be bad, or incapable of good? AnnLouise Keating has noted the problematic tendency among some scholars to conflate whiteness and white people–a gesture which “implies that all human beings classified as ‘white’ automatically exhibit the traits associated with ‘whiteness’: they are, by nature, insidious, superior, empty, terrible, terrifying, and so on” (907). Dyer does not go quite so far. After all, he emphasizes the construction of whiteness, and his definition of it is far from reductive; moreover, by emphasizing its articulation through gender and class, Dyer challenges superficial conceptions of whiteness that focus on race alone.

 

At the same time, Dyer’s goal to eliminate whiteness altogether risks undermining the transformative power he seeks. Of course, white critique makes visible the power that even the most progressive and antiracist white people consciously or unconsciously exert upon the world simply by being white. It shows that asymmetrical relations of power obtain within Western culture regardless of intent. But this must not resign whites to complete inaction or renunciation of authority as such. Rather, White Studies must work in tandem with other forms of critique–racial as well as gender and class–to disengage that which inhibits equality from that which advances it. White Studies, in other words, must make whites more–not less–responsible for positive social (inter)action. As Peter Erickson suggests, “whiteness will not go away tomorrow; what we need is a theory and a practice that will make possible living with whiteness today” (185). Or as Henry Giroux puts it: “A critical analysis of whiteness should address its historical legacy and existing complicity with racist exclusion and oppression, but it is equally important that such an examination distinguish between whiteness as a racial practice that is antiracist and those aspects of whiteness that are racist” (“Racial” 310). Such a distinction is necessary, Giroux believes, in order to “challenge the conventional leftist analysis of whiteness as a space between guilt and denial, a space that offers limited forms of resistance and engagement” (“Racial” 313). Despite its clarity, coherence, and power, Dyer limits White to such a space–leaving whiteness of any kind in dire straits.

 

Notes

 

1. Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, particularly the essay “Stranger in the Village,” is often cited as an early inquiry into whiteness, as is Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” first published in the Partisan Review in 1958 and later included in Shadow and Act (Fishkin 428). David Roediger has recently edited an anthology entitled Black on White, consisting of writings about white people by African Americans from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recent calls to interrogate whiteness began in the late eighties and early nineties. In her 1990 book Yearning, for example, bell hooks claimed “a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness” could serve as an antidote to the problematic assumption that race is “always an issue of Otherness that is not white” (54). The same year, Cornel West wrote that “one cannot deconstruct the binary oppositional logic of images of Blackness without extending it to the contrary condition of… Whiteness itself” (212). During this time, Stuart Hall was in the midst of publishing a series of essays proposing to rehabilitate the term “ethnicity.” Like hooks and West, Hall’s goal was to emphasize the situated and highly disparate forms of all racial identities. This “new ethnicity” sought “the displacement of the ‘centered’ discourses of the West” by “putting into question its universalist character and transcendent claims to speak for everyone, while itself being everywhere and nowhere” (“New Ethnicities” 446). See also Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “Ethnicity and Difference,” and “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.”

 

2. On the construction of whiteness in South African and American literature respectively, see Coetzee and Morrison; on its historical and cultural significance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, particularly for the working classes, see Ignatiev, Lott, and Roediger; on the relation between whiteness and gender, see Frankenberg and Ware; on the pedagogical advantages and problems of interrogating whiteness, see Giroux and Keating; for the dynamics of whiteness on late-eighties television, see Fiske; and on its relation to film, see Gaines, Kaplan, and, of course, Dyer.

 

3. Dyer’s claim echoes hooks’s famous essay on “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in which she claims that critiquing whiteness could “deconstruct practices of racism and make possible the dissociation of whiteness with terror in the black imagination,” so that “whiteness no longer signifies the right to dominate. It truly becomes a benevolent absence” (179). According to West, however, “a mere dismantling” of whiteness “will not do–for the very notion of a deconstructive social theory is oxymoronic” (212). These divergent agendas are reflected in Peter Erickson’s claim that there currently exist “two basic approaches to the issue of what form a political critique of white privilege should take.” While one seeks the abolition and erasure of whiteness, the other “imagines a redefinition or reconstitution, a transformation even, of whiteness, with the aim of establishing new, critical, white identities” which “at no point engage in a denial of whiteness” (184). This difference corresponds roughly, though not completely, to Mike Hill’s distinction between a first wave of white critique which emphasizes the “invisibility and impermanence” of whiteness, and a second wave which addresses “the epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling immanent” in the work of white critics who must acknowledge their whiteness while attempting to distance themselves from it–without disavowing it (“Introduction” 2-3).

Works Cited

 

• Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin, 1972.
• Coetzee, J. M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988.
• Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 44-64.
• —. White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Erickson, Peter. “Seeing White.” Transition 67 (Fall 1995): 166-85.
• Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture.” American Quarterly 47.3 (September 1995): 428-66.
• Fiske, John. Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Gaines, Jane. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 12-26.
• Giroux, Henry A. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• —. “Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 294-315.
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 222-37.
• —. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” Radical America 13 (June 1991): 9-20.
• —. “New Ethnicities.” 1988. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 441-49.
• —. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Culture, Globalization, and the World System. Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1991. 41-68.
• Hill, Mike. “Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-La.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 1-18.
• —. “What Was (the White) Race? Memory, Categories, Change.” Postmodern Culture 7.2 (1997).
• hooks, bell. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 165-78.
• —. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
• Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
• Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. “Introduction: De Margin and De Centre.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 2-10.
• Kaplan, E. Ann. “The ‘Look’ Returned: Knowledge Production and Constructions of ‘Whiteness’ in Humanities Scholarship and Independent Film.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 316-28.
• Keating, AnnLouise. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ (De)Constructing ‘Race.'” College English 57.8 (December 1995): 901-18.
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
• Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means To Be White. New York: Schocken, 1998.
• —. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. London: Verso, 1994.
• —. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
• Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 1992.
• West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” October 53 (Summer 1990). Rpt. in The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 203-17.