Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture by Vron Ware

Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture Reviews

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  Don

  Back and Ware locate their positon within the frame of the ‘new abolishionist’ approach to anti-racism which calls for ‘treason to whiteness’ in order to demonstrate loyalty to humanity.
  
  All of which leaves a fair amount of explaining to do. It the ‘whiteness’ so despised a quality of the pigmentation of a particular ethnic group? Decidedly not. It is a call for a revolt against the social system which bestows privilege on the people who carry that marker. The authors concern in this series of essays is to explore the nature of this white power and the moments of politics and culture which allow it to be constituted.
  
  The work of John Howard Griffin looms large in explicating this account. Griffin was a white journalist who, in the winter of 1959, darkened skin through a series of treatments to a point where he could be taken as being black. He then set off on a six week journey through the US southern states in an effort to experience the everyday racism ensured by black people at that time. His account of this experiment, set out in the best-seller ‘Black Like Me’, has been deplored by many antiracists who have objected to the vicariousness of its attempt to participate in the experiences that black people endure everyday. Back and Ware do not dispute this judgment but find that Griffin’s work, and that of other explorers of the ‘grey area’ such as Grace Halsell, Gunter Walraff and Yoram Binur, had other dimensions which make them worthy of note. This concerned not so much what they became, i.e. black, but rather what they ceased to be by reconstituting themselves as visibly black. Griffin’s account of staring at his image in a mirror at the conclusion of the treatments that had darkened his skin dwelt on the sense of a loss of security and self-confidence, or power, which was more psychologically challenging than the mere visual change. What was the nature of this power which had been dissolved on becoming, apparently, black?
  
  The authors locate its origin and dynamic in a binomial process in which both blackness and whiteness play a role in the constitution of whiteness. There is a nuanced difference between this and an explanation for white power which sees it as an outward expansion of drives to domination that had existed before whites had ever encountered blacks. There were no ‘white devils’ back at the dawn of history whose sense of superiority was already in place before they ever encountered a black person.
  
  A deconstruction of skinheadism goes someway to clarifying what the authors are arguing here. An aggressive assertion of male, working class identity, the early skinheads embraced racism as their movement spread from its birthplace in London. For many racialized and heterosexual masculine identity was the essence of what it was to be skinhead with little more to be said about the phenomenon. But Back and Ware show polarised tendencies taking a grip on the movement as female skinheads (‘rennes’) asserted their identity and contingents of gay and black skins began to appear. The confrontations between the skin tribes moved into the terrains and of the marketplace and cyberspace as the proponents of racism sought to consolidate their cultural stand by producing and selling goods – cds, teeshirts, nazi regalia and the like. Others moved against this as the racial message become more explicit and played a role in the antiracist cultural movements – Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, etc – which were significant forces on the social scene in the 1970s.
  
  The point here is that even in the heartlands of racism, the white identities constructed around profound senses of loss and marginalisation, white supremacy appears as a problematic concept that repels as well as attracts. The ‘race traitor’ stance, when it takes the form of a committed political strategy is useful at this point because it looks for opportunities to work on exactly this terrain. ‘New Abolitionism’ takes is cue from the old abolitionists of the struggles against slavery, who declared that they repudiated the advantages that arose from the forced labour of the plantation system. When the battlefield for the modern struggle against racism is seem as the cultural skirmishes that require populations to stand with police forces that shoot black people off the streets, or push refugees and migrants to the margins of society, then traction is there to be had to a new call to denounce the benefits which supposedly come from keeping such folk under the heel.
  
  Whilst the theme of an ambiguous white power which provokes a sense of disorder and unease even amongst the people it is supposed to nurture is runs throughout the chapters in this book it does so in a discursive rather than programmatic fashion. An essay towards the end provides one of the authors the opportunity to explore the roots of his own antiracism in an adolescent passion for r and b soul music. Whilst Wilson Pickett or Aretha Franklin were at the front of the stage the thing that intrigued many of us who loved this music was the knowledge that so much of this stuff was driven along by the famed ‘Good Ole Boys’ who made up the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The sight of Steve Cropper and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn in the house band of artistes in the Stax stable hinted at the construction of a ‘black’ power which involved interracial collaboration, just as female, black and gay skinheads had sketched out the prospect of an authentic cultural working class power that was confronting its racist demons.