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Peculiar Relations: White Identity and Imaginative Literature

By Jonathan Scott

"Racism is taking the place of pornography."
- Jim Goad (James, 208)

In the 1990s a new theory of race came from the U.S. academy. It posited race as a social construction. The theory argues that race is both a category to organize group consciousness and a concept organizing individual subjectivities (Stoler). According to the social constructivists, "race" is no different than "class," "gender," "nation," or "sexuality" in that it is a knowledge produced automatically by a diffuse network of social systems such as the family, the media, education, and language. The outcome is a performance of attitudes and beliefs felt by its performers as unchanging, natural, timeless, and predictable. The social construction theory contends that people live their lives transparently, unaware that their social identities are often contradictory performances played out on a stage which they, ironically, direct. To change people's attitudes and beliefs about race or anything else, one would need to re-stage the whole socialization-performance process.

This re-staging effort was crystallized toward the end of the decade with the publication of two special "White" issues of academic journals. The first was by the minnesota review in 1996, edited by Mike Hill, who also edited a volume published by New York University Press a year later entitled Whiteness: A Critical Reader. The second was by Transition in 1998. These special "White" issues announced what was already underway in the U.S. academy: a radical swing away from "blackness" to "whiteness" as the preferred object of intellectual inquiry.

On June 22, 2003 the Washington Post ran a front-page story on whiteness studies in the academy, reporting that "at least 30 institutions-from Princeton University to the University of California at Los Angeles-teach courses in whiteness studies." This development is a result of the work done by scholars during the '90s. By the middle of the decade, Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race, Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Eric Lott's, Love and Theft, David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters, Fred Pfeil's White Guys, and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White had been published by major academic presses, and reviewed in a broad array of newspapers, journals, and magazines. The new theorists of race, in particular Mike Hill, had seized the day with these special issues. Behind the momentum of cultural theory, which was taking hold in almost every discipline in the humanities, from anthropology and psychology to English studies, the proponents of whiteness studies had made a successful historic intervention into one of the most enduring discourses in U.S. society-"race."

It should be noted that the scholarship produced during the 1990s was not at all uniform, and that certain key distinctions among the aforementioned works deserve recognition. The main distinction, apparent in their respective titles, has to do with the object of inquiry. Although they all share in common an objectification of whiteness, only Allen and Saxton pursue the historical origin of the "white race" as a social formation. Hence, the distinction is between a culturalist approach to whiteness and a historical one. Not surprisingly, the culturalist approach has gained the most attention in the academy, and is responsible for the establishment of whiteness studies.

The new cultural theory of race was a step forward, a direct challenge to the biological theory. It rightly shifted attention back to the social character of race, in the tradition of Dr. DuBois and the African American civil rights struggle. But there was one question the social constructivists seemed to avoid, perhaps from a desire to be true to their Foucauldian method of analyzing power: Who is constructing the social constructs? Foucault's maxim that "power is diffuse" appeared to govern the culturalist approach to whiteness, in that there was a discernible attempt to bracket issues of ruling-class agency in the formation of the "white race." Reading the new theorists of race in the '90s, I felt a certain disappointment. If race is a social construction, located diffusely in culture, and no one knows or is concerned very much about who is doing all the constructing, then what can we do to change it? The moment evokes a passage from Antonio Gramsci where he talks about the interregnum in which the old is dying and the new is being born. In that moment, he wrote, "a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." For if nothing can be done to change the white racial order of things, then why study it? It would seem that to study the "white race" as a social construction-as a whole system of political classifications as well as social rights, and privileges-without a concept of how to eradicate it is, to borrow Toni Morrison's felicitous phrase, "playing in the dark." To put it less felicitously, it could start to look like pornography.

In this case the old was the biological theory of race and all its new variants, including psychoculturalism and civilizationalism, which had been swept away by the force of the African American civil rights struggle. The civil rights movement persuaded the world that white racial oppression is a historical question having little to do with human psychology, biology or civilization. Racial discrimination is institutional, a product of state policy, legally imposed by a ruling class, with more than two centuries of empirically verifiable history behind it. It did not matter that the makers and enforcers of Jim Crow were racists, for the fact was that African Americans were no longer willing to accept the system as lawful. If whites retired from Jim Crow, that would help the cause immensely, but if they did not, the struggle would continue regardless of white people's attitudes and beliefs about race. The civil rights movement argued that after the successful overthrow of the Jim Crow system of rule, if white people's attitudes and beliefs about race did not change, that intransigence would come at their own peril. In the thick of the struggle, James Baldwin put it sharply: "People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead."

Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and down to the present, the imaginative literature of the United States has been in the peculiar position of mediating a monolith-the "white race." In all hitherto existing class societies, the position of literature has always been unstable insofar as everything depends on the specific class situation at hand. In all events, a society in open class struggle delimits ideologically the kinds of literature produced and disseminated therein. Historically, literature has served many sundry purposes, including a humanizing function. But is it possible for literature to play a humanizing role in a society founded on racial slavery and oppression? How could literature have pretended to be about humanizing people in a society where it was a federal crime for every not-"white" person to read and write? That this basic question has never been posed explicitly by any of the United States' greatest authors, except its African American writers, is evidence enough that there exists in the world today a peculiar relationship between literature and society-a systemic "white blindspot" that has simultaneously deformed and enabled the production of U.S. literature. Moreover, my thesis is that in the microcosm of this peculiar relationship can be seen the macrocosm of U.S. society's development as a whole. While many Euroamerican imaginative writers have responded directly to these contradictory relations, particularly to the aporia between the literary ideology of American democratic pluralism and the actual lived social relations between whites and not-whites, few have treated white racial oppression as the ordeal of America, as the society's most central and enduring problem. Among these few are Herman Melville and Sinclair Lewis. Why they were able to break free of the white blindspot is impossible to determine in the end; the more fruitful question is how they did it, and how scholars and teachers today could use their rather unpredictable contributions to better reveal and disable the white blindspot.

On the eve of the U.S. Civil War, Herman Melville published a peculiar novella entitled "Benito Cereno." The narrative, which was included as part of a collection of stories under the name The Piazza Tales (1856), was odd for a number of reasons. First, the main character is a Spaniard, and of course Catholic. Two, a lengthy legal deposition follows the fictional narrative. And third, there is no hero of the story but rather a group of heroes, and they are all not-white. The narrative is of an African mutiny in 1799 on a Spanish slave ship called the San Dominick. The story is told from the point of view of a European American spectator, ostensibly a sailor since the details provided are organic to the daily operation of a large ship. The word "peculiar" is deployed more than a dozen times in the story, and when it is not being used to describe the situation on board the slave ship, the words "odd" and "strange" take its place. But what is so "peculiar" or "strange" about a mutiny on board a slave ship? Clearly had the captives been European the event of a mutiny would have been perceived by the Euroamerican spectator without any of the absurd misrecognitions that motivate the plot of "Benito Cereno." In fact, what Melville achieves in the story is a masterful act of "signifyin'," in the African American sense of the term: a cunning detour around an oppressive obstacle placed deliberately in the way of a person's advancement. In Melville's case with "Benito Cereno," that obstacle is the white identity and his strategy is to objectify it-to make it peculiar and strange.

The story begins with an inexplicable gray fog and ends with a perfectly lucid legal document explaining exactly what just happened on board the Spanish slave ship. The whole structure of the story mimics the coming to consciousness of a deeply repressed and psychotic individual who believes his mental state is entirely normal and unproblematic. Embodied by the story's only Euroamerican character, Captain Amasa Delano, the peculiar psychosis under analysis is white identity. He is described by the narrator, without irony, as "a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature" (142). While there are several deep layers of the story, each is a product of Delano's blithe refusal to see on board the San Dominick the simple, dramatic unfolding of an African mutiny. When confronted with African resistance to enslavement, Delano produces a fantastic mosaic of delusional storytelling, related patiently to readers by a calm, unironic, and unassuming narrator. It is an assemblage of psychotic virtuosity and the raison d'être of the story itself. Melville's insight is that in no other society could this kind of thing happen-could mutinous resistance, a normal outcome of enslavement and oppression, produce all the essential elements of modernist art.