By the same token, and also with reference to Frankenburg, whitenesses and their shifting enunciation become even more complex when one considers them in conjunction with gender and attached notions of sexuality. Chambers "obviously" excludes white women and white male gays from the pool of the unmarked whites he describes. He therefore "obviously" defines the normative unmarked white in the United States as really male heterosexual. If the sheer mass of literature on the subject is any gauge,46 race and ethnicity today strongly interact with roles of gender and gendered sexuality. It would be hopelessly naive to speak of simple "whites" without further identifying qualifiers. This not only increases the spectrum of whitenesses that opposes monolithic concepts of whiteness but also asks how the socially centralizing power of whiteness is currently served by its interaction with masculinity.
46
What is meant here is everything from fiction such as the novels of Toni Morrison and even Ishmael Reed to increasingly non-fictive works such as the mixed forms produced by Gloria Anzaldua to the large number of academic studies which explore such topics as "double-discrimination" and patriarchy in various ethnic groups.
This section examines that centralizing power in terms of borders. First, after a discussion of identity borders, it will explore the sad fact that the fluidity of a male signifier coupled with that of a white signifier has not increased the visible fluidity of the conceptual borders of white masculinity. Indeed, this coupling is commonly seen as reducing it for white men and their Others. The discussion then turns to various alternative structures of identification in the America to examine how they potentially conflict with the social borders of white masculinity. In anticipation of the next section, this section then concludes by examining the way in which whiteness and white masculinity have defused the conflicts of those alternative structures through its centralizing power. Corresponding to the increase of potential material privileges of whites as they also identify as male is the increase of potential difference within the group of white males. The borders of white masculinity have expanded to subsume alternative forms of identity and perform them within a field of normative white masculinity.
Where do these borders emerge? What dictates when identity is performed or privileged? If the performance of identity appears at moments of contact, then the privileging of that identity begins at its borders. More specifically, it is the limits of the definition of an object which determine that object's relation to other objects. With respect to race and ethnic identity, the definition of identities is as important for what it includes as what it excludes, and it is this work that becomes essential when discussing for what a racial or ethnic category stands. If whiteness as a social identity is not simply the presence of the color white or the absence of other colors, one must ask not only what is being delineated by whiteness but how. Borders form an important part of this study, most explicitly in chapter 3, "Insider art". These borders are geographical as well as conceptual, playing the key role in determining race relations in what Pratt terms "contact zones". These she defines as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power".47 In chapter 3, a detailed concept of borders is worked out which conceives rewriting borders as a deconstructive project. Borders represent the space where discursive différance emerges, as a sign that denotes categorical limits of signification.
It has already been said that whiteness is both a sign and a process for creating a sign, and the same can be said for the borders of whiteness. Whiteness and whitenesses
47
would not exist without borders of whiteness which indicate what whiteness is not. At the same time, these contact zone borders provide a means to understand the existence of whitenesses. Contact zones represent spaces of conflict between various kinds of historical master narratives, whether of civilization, religious, biological, or cultural difference. These conflicts succeed each other, and yet they remain present, coexisting as a discursive sediment upon which whiteness rests. The contact zones between white and non-white in North America that accompanied United States expansion and growth have thus been great motors for the literature and thinking which has produced normative whitenesses juxtaposed with white Otherness. These contacts have resulted in strata of characteristics that at one time or another have been important for defining American identity in terms of whitenesses. Together these characteristics constitute a totality of speakable and unspeakable forms of whiteness in America. The limits of that totality, where the (un-)speakability of whitenesses begins, are the borders, layered like whiteness itself.
As a race category, always coupled with patrolling the borders of whiteness has been patrolling the borders of gender. It is here that masculinity takes on its major role in fixing the limits of (un-)speakable whiteness. One of the earliest works to examine the intersection of race with gender roles was Hernton's Sex and Racism.48 It predates deconstructionist concerns and queer theory but nonetheless provides an important starting point from which to engage heterosexual gender roles as historically determining racial borders of difference. He sees racial difference arising through the contact between black and white in the context of slavery. The definition of this contact zone depended on the separation of black and white in terms of slave and master.
Much of Hernton's discussion revolves around what he terms the "cult of sacred white womanhood".49 A collaboration between plantation-owning white men and women, Hernton relates that it constructed the role of white women as wives who were the untouchable object of their society. This "true" white womanhood was intended to both give white men an object of aspiration and to alleviate guilt over their desire for the black women under their dominion. In such a constellation, white women could be carefully separated from their black gendered others, regulating both white and black women through different means. White women were constructed as "untouchable"
48
Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965).
49
asexual objects kept in the house and black women as inherently "touchable" sexualized objects kept in the fields.
Analogously, black women and men could also be regulated through different means. "Black" was given a strong association with "primitive" unrepressed sexuality. In this scenario, animal, sexual black men desired white women as objects of civilized aspiration, and thus they needed to be "tamed" in terms of the "male-male" violence of beating, humiliation, and emasculation. Black women, however, also entirely sexualized, engendered white male desire and deserved, indeed needed, to be "tamed" through rape. The structure Hernton sketches emanates from a normative heterosexual white male as master, both physically and discursively. This heterosexual white male is defined above all through acts of violence which serve to clarify the limits of his identity. A sociologist, in his fieldwork he identified several modern (mid-1960s) variations of this cross-border racial and gender identification which he traced back genealogically to this origin. As such, he anticipated the work of Frankenburg who discovered similar forms of Self- Other identification at moments when white women came into contact with their racially and gendered Others.
Robert Connell, on the other hand, examines in his Masculinities the way in which the contact with racial Others solidified the borders of gender difference and informed current forms of masculinity. To reconstruct his argumentation, it is important first to recognize that he structures masculinity as an identity much in the way Babb does whiteness. He distinguishes between those who bear the signs of that identity and the system of practices based around the discourse in which those signs are incorporated. Connell posits, "Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered. In gender processes, the everyday conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction."50
That said, he speaks of plural "masculinities", much as White Men Write Now does of whitenesses, as part of "conflicting forms of knowledge about gender [which] betray the presence of different practices of addressing gender."51 At issue for him are both what these forms of knowledge are, how they came to be, and why certain masculinities are favored today. He traces this development back to origins of European modernity at around 1500 when "man" in patriarchal societies became associated with that era's emergence of rationalism, a new emphasis on individualism, and the growth of
50
European empires. He writes, "With masculinity defined as a character structure marked by rationality, and Western civilization defined as a bearer of reason to a benighted world, a cultural link between the legitimation of patriarchy and the legitimation of empire was formed."52
Connell's is an important insight, for it demonstrates that multiple discursive levels interact simultaneously. Theories of civilization, race, culture, and gender interact, and in the context of colonial contact they take static forms in the identity of (European) "man". The emergence of that concept of "man" is thus profoundly influenced by the contact with European (non-white) Others, the dawning of a new picture of a much larger world. The contact between parties leaves a remnant of that contact, a conceptual end of oneself, the hyphen between "Self-Other". This conceptual border marks the beginning and end of difference and of (un-)speakable forms of the Self. Connell's construction shifts the focus to the cultural formation of that difference. What concepts from a culturally shared symbolic world inform the representation of that difference? What relationships of power determine the exact forms those concepts take in their representation? Bhabha describes cultural difference as enunciative, but the question remains as to what factors determine that enunciation, and what alternative structures of identity are left unenunciated.
It is exactly these questions which are at the core of the work by a group of materialist Marxist and post-Marxist critics who have addressed white masculinity. They focus on "white male" (heterosexual, etc.) identity in terms of the normative place it has in class and labor conflicts in the United States. Noel Ignatiev and the rest of the Race Traitor group view whiteness as a conspiratorial force used to elide class discrepancy in the United States. Whiteness establishes a "false" border which allies poor and wealthy white men together against their Others, often relying on the poor whites as "muscle" for keeping the Others oppressed. Thus, in their view, it is a means for obscuring the "true" border of economic class. The Race Traitors preach the "Huckleberry Finn moment" in which whites, who are otherwise blind to identity, suddenly discover it and at the same time discover their common cause with their heretofore racial/ethnic others.53 Their
51 Connell 5. 52 Connell 186. 53
John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev, "Toward a New Abolitionism: A Race Traitor Manifesto", Hill Whiteness: 349.
construction of racial identity is based on a theory of the class origins of race, a case made in various histories of the concept of whiteness in America (see next section).
The same theorizing of race forms the critical basis for one camp in the relatively new field of "white trash" study. This looks at underprivileged white Americans who bear this label as an indication of "failed" white. Since "white" as privilege should translate to upper-class, poor whites have failed to live up to that standard and are thus "trash". Newitz and Wray write, "Unlike unmarked hegemonic forms of whiteness, the category of white trash is marked as white from the outset. But in addition to being racially marked, it is simultaneously marked as trash, as something that must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for the whiteness to achieve and maintain social dominance."54
Though white trash complicates the model of "white" as a privileged norm, it is ambivalent for theorists who idealize it as an essentially heroic component of class conflict because it cannot be readily idealized. "White trash" often includes people who would be equally or more likely to join the Ku Klux Klan than a labor union (though there are many who belong to both). These two theorists conclude that they are unsure whether the new interest in white trash represents a conservative backlash against multiculturalism or the first wave of white achieving a multicultural identity.55
Similar contradictions have led the Race Traitor group to analyze with less equivocation Kansas City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the boys behind the Columbine High School massacre as victims of the system in which they lived. Their white masculinity, the thinking goes, blinded them to the dehumanizing forces of familiar Marxist complaints: capital, class, commodification, and popular culture.56 Such phenomena, however, far from being so clear cut, have lent themselves just as easily to both conservative and leftist critiques of media images, guns in American society, the loss of morals, and the rest of the items on their respective agendas. That is not to say that the multitude of analyses makes the Race Traitor view false. However, it arouses the suspicion that the spectacular horror of these events is merely being instrumentally
54
Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, "What is 'White Trash'? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor White Trash in the United States", Hill, Whiteness: 169.
55
Newitz and Wray 173.
56
See John Garvey, "The Life and Death of Timothy McVeigh", Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism 15 (2001), 17 Aug. 2003 <http://www.racetraitor.org/lifeanddeath.html> and the on-line "rant" by Joel Olson, "The Massacre at Littleton" 27 April 1999, 17 Aug. 2003
invoked like "September 11th" as a vehicle to draw conclusions more easily accepted in the emotional atmosphere they evoke.
A far greater problem in this materialist kind of analysis lies in the continued objectification of people who have had to bear reversals because of labels of racial, ethnic, and gender difference. Long "without a voice", they are again robbed of the ability to speak from their own subject position, because it has theoretically been predetermined for them. For this reason, for example, Ralph Ellison provides such a scathing critique of the Communist Party in his Invisible Man in which the anonymous narrator is hired as a talking puppet. He is valuable to the party's cause by virtue of his black skin which serves as an instantly readable marker of labor exploitation.
Labor critique and the Communist Party (or parties) are not identical, but the tendency to over-represent figures according to class and labor status is common to both. Young writes, "Here the problem rests on the fact that for orthodox Marxism, there can be only one 'other', that of the working class, into which all other oppressed groups, so called 'minorities', must in the last instance be subsumed."57 It is also a form of critique which, in reconstructing "true" borders of class, does not recognize in- betweenness, "third-spaces", hybridity, or multiple subject positions. Culture is again cast as consisting of an instantly readable "symbolic textuality" and as such opposes the enunciative potential of a plurality of representative forms.
The response from such camps is that Bhabha, Spivak, and others who advocate the power of identity performativity to subvert hierarchies are ignoring the real material source of the construction of identity. A section of the recent popular leftist attack on contemporary culture, Empire, attempts to put an end to postcolonial theory by specifically criticizing Bhabha. Accusing him of opposing old forms of domination with his hybridity theories, Hardt and Negri criticize his collusion with postmodern theory in a, "united attack on the dialectics of modern sovereignty and the proposition of liberation as a politics of difference".58 Essentially, they find his work based on an illusory structure of power, unlike their own worldview of diffuse global capitalism ("Empire") versus the "multitude". Aside from the fact that Bhabha is not all of postcolonial theory and that he is extremely simplified in their book, such a critique is based on a logic which precludes all other structures of knowledge as illusory, only "symptoms of the epochal shift we are
57
Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990): 4.
58
undergoing".59 That said, it is not the intention to disprove Hardt and Negri in this space but rather to point out the field of highly contested knowledge which informs contemporary constructions of identity.
It is along these lines that many factions can be identified within minority movements in the United States. There is no end to the debate among Chicana/o and African American groups about whether or not they must bear the class identity of poor and working-class as an essential part of their ethnic/racial identities. Individual material advancement is often decried by some factions while others hold such successful people up as role models. One need only consider the debate over how to "view" Colin Powell, whether as a success of assimilation, a black sell-out, or not really African American because his parents immigrated from Jamaica. Individual "dropping out" in the counter- culture sense or the "right to exit"60 are similarly complicated. They are also tainted with the idea of betrayal, and do not guarantee a new community with "drop-outs" from other groups.
Conversely, as Roediger and others have pointed out, in incipient labor movements in the United States, there was considerable deliberation over whether unions were supposed to be inclusive of all people. In early days they were not, often explicitly excluding various non-white groups.61 Whether or not one can pin that down to a conspiratorial move by capitalists to divide the labor movement is largely a matter of point of view. The interaction of the two markers of identity, class and race, is at least as complex as that of gender and race. The fact is, however, that individual class mobility does exist in the United States, for all people, but that mobility differs depending on