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Late Night Writing Makes Me Crazy/Brilliant
Crazy? Brilliant? Both? Neither? You make the pick. This is what happens when you write huge posts at 3 AM.
Whiteness Candidates and Post-Racial America.
Be forewarned: It’s long–four sections, over 3,000 words and six pages single-spaced.
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5 Responses to “Late Night Writing Makes Me Crazy/Brilliant”
These are the two thoughts that ran through my head as I read this:
1- These are interesting ideas, does he have any documentation for them?
2- This is very racist and extremely offensive.
Well, there was the third…
3- Whiteness Central Command hasn’t told me ANY of this, why didn’t I get the memo?!
Imagine for just one moment that you were writing about ANY other race. Do you think for one second that you could get away with “blackness” and “The Blacks want” or “Blacks fear…”? I guess you could turn it around and say that it’s just another sign of the dominance of Whiteness, that stereotyping is free of PC persecution.
So Asians are going to be declared white? Oh no, what’s going to happen is that Asians are going to BECOME white and still be called Asians, to reinforce the lie of “fairness”. So how do you become white without actually being white? By ACTING white, of course! And what’s that about? Beats me but apparently that’s the way. But then, somehow it doesn’t work for everyone, is Obama white? Condi or Powell? They all “act white” (which is a derogatory statement BTW for all of you who have never lived in a white-as-minority situation), but they won’t be incorporated?
As I see it, the pressure is far more inclined towards behaviour and success than it is towards race. A race that consistently manages to succeed like the “whites” will be accepted. Not as “other whites” just as co-equals. Why? Beyond a certain critical mass, the correlation between race A and upbringing/education A becomes strong enough to become a stereotype. Asians aren’t associated with eating dog stew anymore, they are associated with knowing way more about your computer than you do. Still a stereotype, but a positive one. They are not, nor do I believe that they will ever “become white” unless the meaning of “white” is completely distorted to simply mean “successful”.
1) Blogging doesn’t lend itself well to footnoting (especially academic pieces), but the here are the citations for the articles I do reference:
Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993).
Mari J. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations, 22 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 323 (1987) (I misquoted, it’s “legitimating power,” not “force”
Frank H. Wu, Neither Black nor White: Asian-Americans and Affirmative Acftion, 16 B.C. Third World L.J. 225 (1995).
Other works which influenced:
Jonathan W. Warren & France Winddance Twine, “White Americans, The New Minority?: Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness,†Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997), 200-218
David S. Owen, Towards a Critical Theory of Whiteness, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 203-222 (2007).
Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple UP 1997).
2) Okay, I was going to call this out the last time but nows good as any. The “find/replace White with Black” argument is sloppy and not intellectually compelling. They are not equivilent categories. To use an extreme example (though not too extreme at some parts of our history–I’d say it would be quite apt during the slave era), saying a statement is appalling because it would sound bad if we replaced “White” with “Black” is like saying a statement is bad because it would replace “Hitler” with “Mother Teresa” (“
HitlerMother Teresa was interested in mass genocide and slaughter, and is one of the word tyrants of the 20th century”). The relationship isn’t that dichotomous today, but the point still remains–Whites and Blacks are not in same position, statements that make sense applied to one don’t when applied to other. It is apples to oranges–or as different as black and white.But the really odd thing is that this is one of the cases the critique make no sense. I do think one can talk about Blackness in a structural capacity too (“Blacks want civil rights”, “Blacks fear a reversion to Jim Crow”) and construct rational choice models to account for that. I couldn’t do the identical game with Blacks because this dynamic of “inviting” groups into Blackness has never really occurred before, for obvious reasons. But the overall rational choice metrics are quite applicable, and I have indeed used them before to talk about Blacks (in a critique of Marcus Garvey, specifically).
3) I noted in my first observation that I view Whiteness as a structuring phenomenom that is largely beyond the control of its constituent parts at this stage of the game. You (and me) are not going to get messages from White central command. I was very careful in my essay to call “Whiteness” and not “Whites” the actor in almost every case. The analogy might be to the ruling class of capitalism (the wealthy elite). Wealth has an interest in maintaining its dominance. It can do so without “wealth central command” sending out orders. Because it is a structuring property of the (capitalist) system, it can work to maintain itself without its agents consciously saying “let’s screw the poor today!” As long as they innocently pursue their relative self-interest, it will come about (see Rodney D. Peterson, Political Economy and American Capitalism. (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991), pg. 37 for an example).
4) “Performing” Whiteness is generally a part of becoming White, but its hardly sufficient. Performing Whiteness, incidentally, is quite real, and I’m sure you could think of actions which fall under its metric (I’ll throw the obvious one out–the attorney who listens to classic rock instead of Tupac in his office because his clients would be uncomfortable with the latter). This should be considered a problem–I shouldn’t have to perform the characteristics of another race to be considered equal. So right there, you’re conceding a mechanism Whiteness uses to exclude and maintain its dominance. But performing is not enough: Obama is not White, nor is Condi Rice or Colin Powell. Hence my language of “invitation” and “candidates.” Blacks have not been extended an invitation into Whiteness, so the act doesn’t make them White. It is still considered an act, they’re still considered outsiders.
Becoming White doesn’t mean becoming successful (many Asians are successful but I don’t think they’re considered White). It means access to the nexus of privileges Whiteness entails. One can marry Whites without stigma, Whites don’t grimace when working under you (this still happens for Asians), one is not tracked into particular career choices and led away from others (this is a huge problem for Asians who are wildly underrepresented in management). One is not psychologically burdened with being part of “the minority”. Whiteness does not track identically with success–it brings its own logic to the game, and I think I spent a fair amount of time articulating this point.
It’s mere post-modernist pathology (sickness). If you can’t claim discrimination, claim “domination” or “privilege” — it’s still radical egalitarianism out of touch with reality but fully in line with a leftist world view, and an unsound basis for hypocritical reverse racism (while the claim normally is also made that race is a “social construct” [sic; construction]).
It’s just academic play-pen left-wing BS. Radical egalitarianism is never satisfied.
The claim and the title we see here on this posting (and found too often elsewhere) is immature and self-absorbed.
So what’s wrong with 3am? A vast chunk of my intellectual process happens between the hours of 0-dark-30 and dawn, mostly due to my nocturnal nature.
3am is only an odd time to do things when you normally get up at 7am. When your body clock, and employment schedule naturally, have you getting up at 1p, 3am is suppertime.
Many of us are night owls. While Mr. Schraub is wrong about much (he is substituting his desires and his politics in place of facts), his writing isn’t bad. (I didn’t bother nitpickign the spelling and grammatical errors, as a result; for all I know he not only can produce this amount of text when on a roll, but does so at lightning speed.)