Module 10: The Social Construction of Whiteness
Readings: Warner, "Experiencing Ethnicity"; Horning, "In Search of a 'Hollow Ethnicity'"
What archaeological data does Warner examine? Broken dishes—from
where? What did he discover? That matched sets of tableware are a distinctive
trait of White ethnicity. Why do we know this? Because he found similar
markers of distinctiveness among two unrelated ethnic groups, African
Americans in Annapolis and Miami Indians in Oklahoma. There is no possibility
that this distinctiveness results from traits surviving from a period
of cultural isolation, so why would they be the same? It must have been
a cultural convergence as a result of interaction/reaction to White/Anglo
culture. Which approach to ethnicity best fits these circumstances? Certainly
not a primordial/isolationist approach, because the use of unmatched sets
of china is not a cultural trait that African Americans or Native Americans
inherited from their cultural pasts. To me, power/domination fits best
because African Americans and Native Americans are similar in rejecting
the norms of a White culture that has oppressed them.
What I like about this article:
•It picks up the story of African American identity 100 years after Parting Ways.
•With African Americans, like everyone else, using more stylized, mass-produced goods and fewer goods of their own making, you might think that ethnicity would be difficult to express and to identify in the archaeological record. This is one reason why Euro-American archaeologists need to collaborate with African American archaeologists or at least African American consultants (there are few African American archaeologists—maybe it hasn't seemed relevant; the Society for American Archaeology and American Anthropological Association have diversity scholarships). The key is to focus less on objects and more on distinctive patterns of use, in what combinations and why—in this case, tableware in matched sets (White) and unmatched sets (African Americans and the Miami).
•It shows that "White American" is an ethnicity. Several of you in class have expressed the feeling that you don't have a special ethnicity, just American. This article suggests that you do have an ethnicity, and that your ethnicity is totally unconscious; it can be taken for granted only because "White America" is the dominant group, the 500-pound gorilla that others have to learn to cope with.
What is whiteness? I see it as having three components.
(1) In terms of cultural content, whiteness is WASP culture, which is the Georgian culture described by Deetz. Characteristics of this culture involve formality and balance (formal rules of interaction and rigid rules of artifact use); individuality (concern with personal morality and securing a personal destiny, the belief that there would be no social problems if each individual took care of him or herself, valuing the enterprising individual); control (a rejection of emotion and sensuality, or at least public displays of emotion and sensuality, and for men, valuing the man who can control the situation—i.e., control nature and/or interpersonal interactions); and order (based on classification, hierarchy, and the rule of law) (in addition to Deetz, see Dyer 1997, esp. pp. 30-40).
2) But whiteness is also normativity, that is, equating what White people do with the definition of American culture: White=American. So White people can think of themselves as just "American," but other people must be labeled as "African American" or "Mexican American," etc. "American history" focuses on Whites, but if you want the history of African Americans, this is no longer "American history," it's "Black history." We have "American literature" and "African American literature." But is African American literature any less American than Euro-American literature? Haven't Blacks been in this country just as long as Whites? Haven't Native Americans been here even longer? (see Frankenberg 1993, esp. pp. 236-7).
3) And finally, whiteness is privilege. According to Peggy McIntosh (1989), White privilege includes all those taken-for-granted benefits of being White, like not being followed to see if you are going to shoplift when you go into a store; like being able to look at policemen as protectors instead of people who will arbitrarily stop you and harass you and possibly kill you; like being able to wear shabby, comfortable clothes without having people attribute this to your poverty and lack of education; like being able to move into a neighborhood without worrying whether your neighbors are going to like you. We will discuss White privilege more after we see the video "Skin Deep."
What is meant by the phrase, "the social construction of Whiteness?"