Mike Hill

University of Michigan
mikehill@umich.edu

 

Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (NY: Routledge, 1996), and Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
 

...it's impossible to me to separate black studies from white studies.

 

--C.L.R. James

 

Whiteness Redux

 

When Timothy McVeigh’s photo appeared on the cover of Time, it was emblazoned with a caption that read “the face of terror.” Not a year later came the arrest of “Team Viper.” You may recall, the Vipers were that otherwise unremarkable group of suburbanites from West Shangri-La Lane, Arizona, who were caught with a half-ton of the same ammonium-nitrate compound that exploded in Oklahoma City, this time tucked away in the garage next to the gardening tools and other middle-class accouterments. Both events were reported to have “shocked” the nation, but why?

 

These events, I would suggest, exhibit a fundamental Western, white, and modern anxiety, one that emerges somewhere between the putative normativity of the everyday and the eventual awareness of an other that is us. Not to slight the brutal tragedy of 168 dead, but glossy magazines and the evening news know that when blue-eyed, blond-haired, white men and outwardly peaceable suburbanites are cast as anti-government guerrilla warriors, it makes for a hot-button scoop–flashier, say, than repeating those hopelessly redundant statistics about government-sanctioned corporate greed and the new economic world order. Home-grown anti-federalism is a good story because distinctions and oppositions emerge where before were just stock commonalities. Here, you might say, Benjaminian “estrangement” meets the rank pastiche of Hard Copy or A Current Affair. A clean-cut, Caucasian “John Doe” in a moving van, or a middle-class home replete with ornamental cactuses and well-groomed lawns, are at some historical flash point transformed to disclose the barbarism just under the veneer of ordinary life.

 

Indeed, to ferret out the ontological absenteeism implicit in the concept of the “ordinary” is at least one objective made available lately by the (also widely reported) “rise of White Studies,” a.k.a., critical ethnography’s next-big-thing.¹ It was until recently assumed that white identity was all-but-featureless, a-categorical background, some unspeakable neutrality by which the default mechanism for otherness was automatically set. But, at least in theory, distinction has crossed the ontological tracks, and whiteness is no longer what James Baldwin calls the “jewel of naïveté.”² No longer, that is, does whiteness in its omnipotence and absence afford white folk absolution on matters of race. Whiteness is instead a function of material inequity, even if it is also a fragile historical fiction.

 

But “White Studies,” so far anyway, has hardly resulted in the political dispersion of whiteness on behalf of exclusively post-white agendas. Indeed, the simple declarative act of tagging whiteness with a temporal marker seems to have lead, with our barely noticing, to an inescapable performative irony, a sort of visibility blues wherein whiteness is (still), as Richard Dyer puts it, both there and not there.³ My question is: if whiteness is being variously examined in its normative capacity, is it (still) master of itself? The critical study of whiteness initiates a series of similarly awkward questions which bear as much relevance to the sly ontological struggles of (white) majoritarian culture over formerly colonized and enslaved peoples (of color) as they do the discovery of what Theodore Allen calls in another context that “truly peculiar institution.”⁴ Allen is referring here to the peculiarity of the category of whiteness itself to afford material privilege. But the critical rush to the study of whiteness is arguably no less peculiar. “White Studies” is peculiar at the very least insofar as this work, unlike Black, Hispanic, or Asian Studies, is eager to pursue the necessary disintegration of its object. The nettlesome epistemological questions inherent in this task, not to mention how (or whether) such a thing counts as politics, have yet to be seriously discussed.

 

So I want to begin to do that here; but before plunging ahead, it is hard to resist mentioning one other recent media affair. Whether “jewel of naïveté” or not, Richard Jewell (one-time unofficial suspect of the Atlanta Olympics bombing) is the latest name in a growing cluster of nationally known, martially bent, more or less “ordinary” white guys. His, too, is a story of visibility, publicity, and distinction gone nastily awry, but with the added twist that in this allegory of white representation, the desire for unremarkability and ordinary life is apparently proportionate to exactly that impossibility. The levels of marking and re-marking still operative around Jewell (compounded now by my own) are too numerous to name, but they range from his longtime desire to be famous, to the apparently false report that he did the deed, to his lawsuit and the media’s odd tautological self-defense that he was, after all (that is, after all the publicity), a public figure. Willingly or not, Richard Jewell seemed to realize a certain lesson taught by discourse theory: that outside representation (self-, media-, legal-representation) “Richard Jewell” did not, in effect, exist. The irony of his finally becoming represented, and with nothing shy of a material force (lesson number two of discourse theory), is that Richard Jewell has in the final instance become a twisted rendition of his own purportedly benevolent dreams.

 

My point in mentioning the Jewell saga is to note the cruel simultaneity of what the newspapers later called his “hero to villain to victim” status. “White Studies” itself initiates a similar conundrum. It, too, comes replete with the unintentional critical fallout of what must to some look like a white renaissance, with the ironies, reversals, and inversions that sober cultural workers might prefer to avoid for the sterner stuff of political self-mastery. “White Studies” seems to flirt with the same visibility problems that continue to dog Richard Jewell, where a protect-and-serve desire to secure for all better life (“heroism”), the indomitable urge to advertise it (in this case eventuating “villainy”), and a subsequent hero-villain reversal (“victimage”), re-combine in exceedingly troublesome ways. This process, it turns out, circumscribes the founding predicament of “White Studies,” now that its presence is official.

 

In this review I want to explore “White Studies” as an engagement precisely of this sort, one that barely separates its ethnic heroes, villains, and victims. Such ambivalence is, I will suggest, an inevitable condition of work which is itself as much a political symptom of, as a political act upon, white skin privilege. “White Studies” seems to bring with it a politics of change that is also one of categorical misrecognition (of whiteness by newly race-conscious whites, and of “White Studies” by others). The irony attendant on the renewed institutional presence of whiteness indicates a certain awkwardness to be sure, but I think irony is nonetheless the right condition for a politics at the same time critical of whiteness. Indeed, the irony of whiteness in our midst initiates a process of identity re-negotiation wherein the white subject doing white critique is involved in a process of recollecting desires not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, its own. How else can “White Studies” interrogate whiteness as historical race “villain,” while imagining post-white “heroes,” all at once? The specific books under examination here are, first, Race Traitor edited by Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey and, second, Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest.

 

Cross-Over Dreams

 

It's gotten to the point where white folks own hip-hop. Black folks are just renting it.

 

--Danyel Smith, Vibe

 

Race Traitor is an edited volume of essays, editorials, and letters from the first five issues of the journal by the same name inaugurated in 1992. The premises of Race Traitor, which more or less repeat the boilerplate story of “White Studies,” are as follows: first, “the white race is a historically constructed formation” (9); second, whiteness is “a product of some people’s responses to historical circumstances” (9); and third, whiteness allows “those assigned a place within it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interest they hold” (10). Thus it is proposed that “the key to fundamental social change in the U.S. is the challenge to the system of race privilege that embraces all whites” (1). Neither “whiteness” nor “race” itself essentially exist; and if enough white folk choose to belong to categories that are not-white (for Race Traitor, resolutely black), the world might change for the better.

 

That identity is mediated, categories permeable and impure, and that associations and the comparability of peoples are influenced by political interests but not necessarily fixed by them, seem unimpeachable premises this side of cultural nationalism. And the clarity and frankness with which Race Traitor holds its racial nominalism forth is probably unmatched in the widening congregation of critical work on whiteness. Contributors in the volume range from bike messengers, to cooks and prisoners, to intellectuals and managerial folk, to a powerful essay by Herbert Hill (former labor secretary of the NAACP). Most contributions are stories of “cross-over dreams” (148), others are polemics, others historical analysis or commentary on current events, and there is also a sort of primer on Israeli/Palestinian relations. Although an occasional anti-intellectual vibe sneaks through the book (as with the oddly reactionary deconstruction bashing that goes on now and again [e.g., 113]), there is something extraordinarily general-reader friendly and activist-inspired about Race Traitor. Whether or not the kinds of general reading the book longs for or the popular activism it seeks actually exist is something left by the by. But alongside David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, and more recently, Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters and Fred Pfeil’s White Guys, Race Traitor will be an essential volume for anyone interested in the critical study of whiteness.⁵

 

There are pressing questions, however, and certain contradictions immanent to white “race trading” that make the word “dream” in “cross-over dreams” sound perhaps a little too innocuous. First, how to know an effective “race trade”; that is, how to distinguish the self-conscious choice of abandoning white skin privilege from a friendly little game of margin poaching, what Eric Lott calls “love and theft”⁶? This is something, after all, that the white popular media has been doing at least since minstrelsy and as recently, as my epigram above suggests, as rap.⁷ Second, to the extent that a race trade is at all thinkable–and I think ultimately it is, but something much less easily volunteered–how can it be separated from the privilege of whiteness to go on choosing where to draw the lines between its former self (as white “villain”), the other it has historically disenfranchised (the not-white “victims” of whiteness), and the eventual victory of post-white self-consciousness (that is, as “hero” qua “race traitor”)? Might this not arguably be a process of white fantasy rather than its dream, of psychic transferal, recuperation, and transcendence, white fright as well as fancy?

 

One might fairly suggest that (the white privilege of) desiring to cast-off “white privilege,” our newfound eagerness to embrace brothers and sisters of color we now choose (whether or not they choose us), eventually runs up against a rather sneaky inverse narcissism. “Race trading” (recall the Jewell-effect) seems in part to enable whiteness to play the victim and the hero of its own imagined opposite, and such a thing warrants considerable explanation. While I may not want to dismiss out of hand some specific political value in the kind of auto-critique that might emerge on such a condition (more on this below), Race Traitor itself pays the inevitable complexity of crossing ontological margins no explicit or sustained attention. Its use of weak compensatory slogans lifted from the British Enlightenment like “loyalty to humanity” seem–it must be said–like liberal mish-mash in the face of the nettlesome identity troubles inherent to re-classifying oneself as an other. That white folk remain at the threshold of a political awakening that (still) lays claim to all and each alike is historically dubious. Without a great deal of qualification and careful explaining, “race trading” teeters on becoming patronizing, romantic, perhaps even downright insulting.

 

For example, a white man looking back thirty years on Virginia’s unsavory race politics recalls “an attractive black woman.” He writes, “I could not elude my fascination with this woman…. Perhaps, in some primitive way, I sensed that we both shared the burden of cruelty in our lives” (71). Now at least two readings of these lines are possible. Do the words “attraction,” “fascination,” and “primitive” betray a wolf’s racism in the sheep’s guise of sharing human cruelty, where “human” is dictated Crusoe-like by the white attraction towards and projection upon the other as my fear and fantasy? Or does the story gesture towards some sort of political counter-memory, a performative admission that for white folk the best possible intentions emerge necessarily from the position of power? Without more explicit attention to the perhaps wearisome and certainly complex questions surrounding alterity, desire, and the classificatory struggles around identity formation and re-formation, the second option seems rather a generous stretch.

 

Genre Trouble

 

I urge each one of us here to reach down into that place of knowledge inside of herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

 

--Audre Lorde

 

The story of white desire (probably) gone wrong that I cited in the section above invites further pause over the near-absent gender politics in Race Traitor. It is from the perspective of gender–as, put a little awkwardly, an alternative alterity to the simple white/not-white distinction–that I think “race trading’s” inverse narcissism can be grabbed two-handedly and steered towards the more nuanced and, one hopes, more politically solvent prospects held forth by post-formalist notions of (racial) categories.

 

One of the more intricate stories within the volume concerns interracial marriage. After having married a black man, a white, middle-class woman recalls her family’s and neighbor’s adverse reactions. For example, her grandmother refuses to meet with the couple on the grounds that she must have become “white trash” (86). The narrative continues: “there was no refuge for me in the suburbs, so resolutely white, which had defined themselves by distance from pain and struggle and anger and vulnerability and loss, as well as from the injustice the very distancing created and creates…. To be white means to be insensitive to the possibilities for oppression within oneself” (87-88).

 

This story, unique in Race Traitor, complicates by pluralizing the “distance(s)” between otherness, identity, and the desires by which (white) self-identification is either maintained or displaced. It calls attention to the radical nuances around the issues of memory, categories, and change. To begin with, alterity is posited here not simply as a white/not-white distinction of race, but as a portable and pluralistic function of additional alterities, here of gender and class. Here, a “race trade” means less adopting the status of an ideal marginality of inverted whiteness as “primitive,” “attractive,” or “fascinating”–what I called earlier inverse narcissism–than it does trading amongst and between alternate forms of otherness which also, but not directly or binaristically, function to shore up white race privilege.

 

The grandmother’s reaction to the mixed marriage is revealing on this score. The term “white trash” hinges upon the author’s eventual dis-identification with her group (“suburbia”), but also in her being moved between groups: class as sex as race trading, where the middle distinction remediates the other two without becoming their mere opposite. Thus does gender designate what might ostensibly be described as a genre problem, where genre is construed as: first, a semiotic performance on the mixed nature of all phenomena; and second, not only the mediation of identities by the categories under which they are habitually placed, but the remediation of those categories by other categories they inadvertently imply. Anne Freedman and Amanda MacDonald call this latter process “templating.”⁸ In applying this concept to an effective “race trade,” the initial category of race, designated by a white/not-white distinction, is not simply reversed but is “templated” through the “meta-functional” presence of other distinctions, other categories, here based on gender and class. These alternatives within the distinction of race are “meta-functional” because they have an associative status that cannot be reduced to the non-identical opposite of whiteness. Through the cross mediation (“templating”) of (“meta-functional”) non-identical alternative categories, the good-woman/not, and middle-class/not distinctions which the author describes are shattered so that the associate distinction of white/not is dispersed into an array of onto-generic components that allow identity to be categorized with other than an either white/not white status.

 

I am proposing then that categories of race carry within them a (gendered) “meta-functional” feature or alternative alterity from which the color line can be indirectly dotted. Put a different way, the significance of gender to the problem of racial categories does not so much posit the easy collapse of the white/not-white distinction as Race Traitor seems too easily to suggest, than it points towards “family” matters in a more general sense of kin, that is, in the sense not only of the intimate sphere gone communicatively awry, but of post-formalist notions of kind, ontology as comparability, identity as a performative semiotic process that is negotiated through the multi-relational and therefore mutable existence of superficial sets of like/not-like combinations.

 

The author’s own refusal to “distance” herself from “the injustices distancing creates” is also important in that it speaks directly to the necessity of the intimacy of categorical in-betweenness (as opposed to simple white inversion) that is implicit in her “race trade.” Insofar as she recognizes that the primary challenge to whiteness is an intimate question (her marriage, the refusal of “distance,” and ultimately “oppression within”), she is not capable of moving herself totally beyond the recognition of white race privilege, which she realizes in the interpellative misfire of being (mis)recognized by suburbia as now not altogether a good white woman, and yet not exactly not that either. The author’s suggestion that white privilege is simultaneously an intimate problem places her at a point of what might be called categorical and communicative displacement, a point of onto-generic interstices between herself and the (white) community that addresses and repudiates, respectively, a white middle-class woman and the critical alternative she eventually becomes.

 

Thus, again, the problem of “race trading” seems most effectively approached by conceiving of whiteness, not so that it affords the political good conscience of being traded away or not, but as a problem that finds political effects in duplicity and mistake, a problem of working progressively within incommensurably mixed ontological combinations (here, gender, race, and class) that provide unfinished critical supplements rather than easy correspondences. The story of mixed marriage is important to this volume, then, precisely because of the conclusions it offers regarding categorical mixing in general. The story manifests a notion of “race trading” that provides a way around (or perhaps through) white narcissism. Here, as is not typically the case elsewhere in Race Traitor, “race trading” intimates a liminal proximity of otherness to whiteness, but not as its mere opposite. The question of race across gender (and finally, towards class) necessitates a process of political remembrance (intimacy as opposed to “distancing”) that is neither transparently schematic (i.e., moving beyond the limit of white/black), nor overly volunteeristic (since the post-white recollection brings about the specific onto-generic misfire of being another within a category formerly one’s own). Perhaps it might be said that remembering (the white) race and its categorical disintegration is also the form of gendered integration in process “within” and on the other side of whiteness. This, I shall finally suggest, comprises a more viable critical front for “White Studies” as a form of “race trading,” and it is precisely the point of Mab Segrest’s Memoirs of a Race Traitor.

 

Coming Out White

 

In 1963, history came to dinner.
 

--Mab Segrest

 

Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor is a book involving unlikely combinations where “race trading” is a sometimes painfully intimate and considerably intricate affair. It is ostensibly the tale of (white) anti-racist activism during the 1980s and 1990s. Spurred into action by the dismissal of neo-facist murders in 1980, Segrest joins North Carolina Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV) and, guided by black mentor Reverend Wilson Lee, eventually becomes its coordinator. Segrest is also motivated by the realization of her own genealogy as inextricably intertwined with white privilege and racism. She thus recalls the death of Sammy Younge in 1965 at the hand of her cousin Marvin Segrest, and the latter’s eventual dismissal by an all-white jury. This is the characteristic outcome of the Klan murders she would later confront in her anti-racist activist work. The history that “came to dinner” in 1963 is George Wallace’s “segregation forever” speech, which was a favorite of Segrest’s father. With almost unbearable frankness Segrest traces her lineage back to one Mabrose Cobbs, who landed in York Town in 1613. This connects her to the genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, and finally to her immediate family’s far-right political views. Woven into the narrative describing her family and descriptions of her tenure at the NCARRV is the death from AIDS of a close friend and fellow (gay) activist. Segrest’s mother dies as well. Thus, she writes, “I was a person haunted by the dead” (1, 127).

 

Indeed, a political haunting is probably the best way to describe this book; for while it is a “memoir,” it is as the title intimates a memoir of its author as an other, or more precisely, as an other other than, but not the opposite of, white. This is a book therefore in hot pursuit of, as I earlier described, the onto-generic irregularities that less nimble and less modest accounts of “race trading” tend to ignore:

 

Our identities, structured as they are on what we hate, resist, and fear, are disturbingly unstable. This leads to further repression and gives us a curious interest in proliferating the things we oppose.... My "racist self" resists, for example, Sammy Younge, Christina and Reverend Lee; my "anti-racist self" resists my parents and Marvin Segrest. So they all shape me (a hybrid of the slayer and the slain). (176)

 

The white “hybridity” being described here denotes not a transcendent cosmopolitanism or the inverse narcissism I described before, but a critical encounter with the proximity of power to white interest, manifest even in the white struggle against whiteness itself. Segrest thus “questions the law of physics that no two objects could occupy the same space at the same time” (21). The statement harkens back to the slippery hero/victim inversion which I called the “Jewell-effect,” the path of narcissism on the one hand and, on the other, what “haunts” the white imagination to be otherwise. “I began to feel pretty irregularly white…. I often found my self hating white people, including myself. As I took on racism, I also found its effects could be turned on me” (80). Thus, the activism recalled by Segrest alludes both to a resilient commitment to the rough-and-tumble world of actually existing struggles within white civil society, but it is also an activism at work on the author as she negotiates the often incommensurable, but completely interrelated, extra-intentional privileges of membership within the very identity she wants to resist.

 

In the way I described above using the story of mixed-marriage from the Race Traitor anthology, the eventual disintegration of the white race for Segrest, or at least the process for “irregularizing” one’s whiteness and moving white self-occupation towards politics, becomes a resolutely gendered process of integration already at work. Within two or three sentences in the book’s introduction, she informs us of her immediate connection to white violence vis-à-vis Marvin Segrest and his unthinkable acquittal, and then matter of factly states, “a decade later I recognized I was a lesbian” (2).

 

An alternative title of this book might have been “coming out white.” Segrest uses the metaphor of “bad blood” to get at the complex interrelation between categorical alterities–gay, women, poor, of color–which, while not ontologically correspondent, provide critical positions beyond white skin privilege that are not merely the simple inversion of whiteness. I tried to describe this before as “templating,” that is, as the remediation of categories (of race) with other categories (here, of gender) so as to undo the material (class) privileges of white skin, and all this without inadvertently stealing alternative agencies by simply declaring alterity to be simply whatever whiteness is not. “Like the Muskogees on whose land she grew up, my mother was pulled in opposite directions” (101), Segrest writes. And so pulls her lesbian feminist politics in relation to her anti-racist activism and emergent socialist consciousness. The chapter “Bad Blood” immediately follows the chapter “Coming Out.” Given this important sequence, Segrest searches for a way to articulate what she calls the “material reality of the intersection” between alterities immanent (but not reducible) to matters of race and sex. The metaphor “bad blood” is thus outwardly a recognition of a comrade’s death from AIDS, but it is also less obviously (and less volunteeristically) an image about forbidden mixing, about the possibility of associational rights that would otherwise go unobserved.

 

“The key to writing a good crime story,” Segrest recalls, “is in the gaps” (103). So too her memoir. Her “race trade” comes not simply by becoming white identity’s ideal other, but comes instead by imagining herself looked at differently from within a white community she both recognizes as her own and not. “I have worked on this essay to both think myself and unthink myself white” (226). In doing so, Segrest avoids simply “mimicking” an inversion of whiteness (19). Hers is the remediation of the white/not categorical distinction with an alternative alterity which is gender. Thus does her recollection of differently raced and gendered “selves” place her in the “gaps” between one identity and another.

 

If the alternative to whiteness is present partly by negative association (“by proliferating what we hate,” a “haunting,” or what I more abstractly termed identity’s “metafunction”), for Segrest this alternative is decidedly not manifest as identity’s mere inversion. In Memoir of a Race Traitor, “race trading” alludes ultimately to the discovery of a certain politics that are both profound and, in the end, committed to reflecting critically on the profoundly ordinary. Such a politics amounts in effect to the critical marking of the otherwise unremarkable, the outwardly stated but exceedingly fleeting objective of a new “White Studies.” The “queer socialism” which Segrest finally espouses not only invites but performs the critical mis/recognition of what heretofore seemed quintessentially normative categories (white, heterosexual, middle-class). In the sense that these otherwise invisible identities are turned towards alternatives for the sake of material equity (and sacrifice) which they cannot both know about and remain unaffected by that act of knowing, this exceptional book is above all an invitation for “ordinary” white-folk to re-read themselves.

 

Notes

 

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Lingua Franca have both carried articles declaring the emergence of the new “White Studies.” See Liz McMillen, “Lifting the Veil From Whiteness: Growing Body of Scholarship Challenges a Racial ‘Norm,'” The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 8, 1995): A23; and David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People,” Lingua Franca (September/October 1996): 68-77. Scholarly journals which have done or will be doing special issues on whiteness include: Socialist Review; Lusatania; the Minnesota Review; Transition; and American Quarterly. For an encyclopedic review of the growing body of scholarly white writing, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly 47.3 (September 1995): 428-66.

 

2. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983) 166.

 

3. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 45-64; see also, Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and the Right to Look,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 13-27.

 

4. See Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994) 24.

 

5. Theodore Allen, op. cit.; Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994); and Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Essays in Postmodern Domination (London: Verso, 1995).

 

6. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993).

 

7. While this objection is raised by Salim Washington and Paul Garon in response to Phil Rubio’s essay on the “exceptional white” who uses black popular culture, but it goes unanswered in the book. The section following the “Cross-over Dreams” section is titled, probably with unintentional irony, “White Silence” (179).

 

8. Anne Feedman and Amanda Macdonald, What is this Thing Called Genre? (Mount Nebo: Boombana, 1992) 20. Thanks to Ross Chambers for his bringing this book and its relevance to whiteness to my attention.