Complicating Whiteness

 I loved Lorna Roth’s exploration of color norms and camera technology as historically and ideologically whitewashed.  This made me think of all sorts of different things, including a conversation in my Advanced Feminist/Queer Theories class last night.  Somehow we ended up asking which populations bear the burden of social change, and if it is possible for a hegemonic position to have a subversive vision – from what positions can you see and situate yourself critically?  This is a class in which we’ve been looking at postmodernist literary and cinematic productions in which the nuance and political intensity of these books and films often seem to come from their embeddedness in situations of racial, gender, sexual and political subjugation.  I found myself wondering if it is possible to write a postmodern novel or produce a postmodern film about being white, male, heterosexual, middle class.  What would that kind of narrative look like?  Can seeming hegemony occupy reflexivity? 

This article also made me think about something my mom used to do with her Women’s Studies class.  She would buy a set of People Paints (something like this: http://www.fasart.com/peoplepaint.htm) and have them participate in an activity modeled after one from Teaching Tolerance, a curricular project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Basically, the students were asked to take the colors and mix the shades to match their own skin.  Beforehand, I think they had to say what color they “were”.  Of course, what emerged from this was a) no one is literally just one color represented by the words we usually use to describe race and b) very different colored-people could be using the same tones to make up their skin color.  This doesn’t mean racial identity isn’t material or shared in terms of deep-seated histories of discrimination and violence (and also resistance).  But this also complicates a simple understanding of color – and, especially relevant I think, a lack of understanding of whiteness. 

How these two different lines of thought come together for me is that I think some of the implications of anti-racism also have to do with re-envisioning whiteness.  Clearly, the whole system of racial and racist classification has to be destabilized, and “of color” – in the US this particularly means Blackness – has to be foundationally de-linked from, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, the abject.  At the same time, one of the most insidious things facilitating white privilege is the very invisibility, immateriality and ideological isolation of whiteness (and this can also be said about other hegemonic identities – heterosexuality and masculinity/maleness, for example). 

Given that, I think disrupting ideas, institutions and technologies that literally privilege whiteness as the color standard may have to do with differently conceptualizing and representing whiteness as both much more solid and much less real than we currently tend to see it.  I think we need to interrogate whiteness as material, lived, nuanced, privileged and also necessarily and thoroughly linked to its others – in the same way that the People Paints exercise illuminates both whiteness as just a much a color as anything else and how closely related it is to these other shades – and therefore as harboring subversive (and perhaps postmodern) potential.

So, finally, I wonder to what extent Roth would frame (haha!) this engagement with whiteness as possible or useful within the development of a model of cognitive equity, especially as this manifests in terms of visual technology.  Is it possible to conceive of this endeavor, not only as one in which all colors are equally beautiful, represented and valued but also in which they are necessarily ideologically – and often genetically – linked?  To what extent does this contribute to the materialization or dematerialization of race as an experience of color, identity, oppression?  What are the political implications of undoing whiteness as invisible standard in a way that problematizes the delimited nature of racial distinctions in the first place?  And what is the role of cinematic visibility in this?