Abstract
Over the past 30 years and more, whiteness studies have extensively charted and analysed how whiteness has operated as a historically contingent ideological mechanism that establishes notions of racial superiority, maintains social status, power and privilege, and endorses discrimination and injustice against non-white people and cultures. The critical purpose of whiteness studies as a field has been to show how this is achieved primarily through rendering whiteness as both normal and invisible, a taken-for-granted standard that becomes central to constructions of national belonging and identity, and to dialectical comparisons with ethnic minorities. So, for example, the development of Australia as a British colony was coterminous with the ascendant definition of Australian identity as white, regardless of the indigenous black population who were socially marginalised as well as racially derogated. One among many consequences of this was that love relationships between a white man and a black woman were tabooed, so when they did occur they figured as a point of conflict, ignominy and aggression, for with such cross-ethnic relationships the otherwise abiding normalcy of whiteness was eroded, along with a tacit acceptance of the rightness of white status and privilege, though of course the invisibility of such status and privilege only applied to white people themselves. Whiteness for black people has always been highly visible. 1
Peggy McIntosh (2016) has noted that for her whiteness has been ‘an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in every day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious’ (p. 188). The inevitable corollary of this is that the greater the extent to which whiteness is unquestioningly accepted as normal and invisible, the greater the extent to which ethnic minorities are stereotypically ‘othered’ and structurally relegated or sidelined. This works to bolster white power and privilege, as is attested, for example, by the fact that, of the 45 presidents of the United States, only 1 has been black, and he, Barack Obama, was elected as recently as 2008. For Toni Morrison, whiteness is, unlike blackness, ‘mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable’, with one apposite example of this being the need to refer to Barack Obama as the first black American president, whereas reference to the skin colour of any other American president has historically been omitted. So while identifying someone as South African says very little because of the need to add an adjectival qualifier – ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ – in the United States ‘it is quite the reverse’, for ‘American means white’, implicitly and implacably (Morrison, 1993: 47, 59). In the States, whiteness is, as it were, whited out, while the term ‘non-black’ is, if unknown, highly uncommon.
Both of the books I shall discuss in this review essay are focused on North America, and both make the point that, socially and historically, the meaning and import of whiteness shifts, so adding to its elusiveness. It may always seem to function as a way of legitimating and upholding white power and privilege, but how it does so varies from one social location to another, and from one period of time to another. So, as the editors of Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness put it at the start of their introduction, while some see the current period as just plain ‘old school white supremacy’, whiteness is nevertheless subject to various twists and turns ‘related to the long-term overall aims and interests of white hegemony and the continual development of the means to achieve these aims and interests’ (pp. 1–2). In light of this point, and without questioning the long-term persistence of hegemonic whiteness, the purpose of the book is to explore certain specific features of the way whiteness is deployed in the early twenty-first century.
One such feature of course is an increase in racial prejudice and discourse. This seems to have arisen out of anxiety over the putative loss of majority status and power for white people. Far-right racist groups and networks have steadily grown in the first 20 years of this century, fostering fear of and hostility towards immigrants, and at the same time promoting the values of white nationalism. Such values are based upon notions of fundamental differences between different categories of people. At least in some ways, this seems like a throwback to hierarchical forms of racial classification. Notwithstanding the haziness of meaning associated with ‘race’, these were once highly influential, and, despite their more general diminution, it is clear that this influence remains in white nationalist rhetoric. The revival of race-thinking in recent times has also arisen as a backlash against the move towards the promotion and cultivation of greater equality between different ethnic groups in multicultural societies. These developments have occurred across Europe and the United States, with Polish nationalists adopting the slogan ‘Pure Poland, white Poland’, anti-immigrant policies being key to the popularity of the Italian League party and Alternative für Deutschland winning more than 12% of the vote in the federal elections of 2017. The return of ‘scientific’ racism in academic institutions may be just around the corner.
In the book as a whole, the communicative power of whiteness is not attended to solely through the lens of race, for racial values and assumptions operate across many different locations and situations, and cross between different categories and identities. Accordingly, the approach adopted in the book is based on the conceptual framework of intersectionality. In the opening section, the communicative power of whiteness is interrogated through its intersectional capacities as these are related to ‘bodies of colour’. Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung discuss the performance of Asian Americans in the representational context of white supremacy, with a specific focus on Ken Jeong’s conforming to racialised stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans via his performance of the Asian American buffoon in a 2014 photo shoot for GQ magazine. Shinsuke Eguchi shows how whiteness is central to gay culture through a discussion of the gay Asian American porn star/producer, Peter Le, his hypermasculinised image intersecting with racism and xenophobia in white gay sexual cultures. The final chapter in this section takes up again the issue of whiteness being invisible and universally applicable. Using personal narratives, Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Calafell explore how non-whiteness is only specific and applicable to non-white communities, with people of colour having therefore to perform with and against whiteness.
The second part of the book offers intersectional readings of whiteness through white bodies. Rachel Alicia Griffin deconstructs Donald Trump’s toxic white masculinity as embedded in his presidential rhetoric; Dawan Marie D. McIntosh examines various performances of white American femininity – White Virgin, Good White Female Employee, White Pin-up, White Supermom, White Trash Mama and White Lady, while Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies provide an analysis of the case of Carrie Buck, a 17-year-old, working-class white woman who, following her rape and impregnation by a relative of her foster parents, became the first woman to be legally sterilised in Virginia in 1927. The reason for this was her supposed feeblemindedness, this being the catch-all phrase for ‘any individual who was considered to have mental, social or moral deficiencies’ (p. 133). The conception of such deficiencies was very much influenced by eugenics, the ‘science’ developed at University College, London, by Francis Galton, which claimed that racial quality could and should be improved by selective human breeding. ‘Mentally feeble’ people were among those who were adjudged to be inferior and undesirable. The remaining chapter in this section is by Tasha R. Dunn, the author of the other book to be discussed. It draws very much on this book and so will be taken up later.
The final section is devoted to intersectional readings of whiteness through discursive strategies. Here the book turns again to the presidential discourse of Donald Trump. Rachel Dubrofsky views him as a repackaged version of age-old misogynist, racist, homophobic, white supremacist values. However, although he regards neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protesters as morally equivalent, and brands Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists, she argues against seeing or constructing Trump simply as abhorrent precisely because this ignores the ways in which he normalises white supremacist values, allowing them an expanded and less unacceptable presence and voice in social and public life. Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller turn to the discursive construction of terrorism, uncovering its racialised features through attending to the Breivik attacks in Norway, the ‘Boston bombers’, and Trump’s executive orders on restrictive immigration. In the final two chapters, Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez look at Trump’s repeal of the policy ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’, the representation of those affected and the constitutive rhetoric of deportability, while Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas de la Garza focus on the relationship of whiteness and Christianity, looking at how Christianity has operated, and continues to operate, as a racialised code for whiteness through the production of a white saviour trope, the ‘Colonial Jesus’ ‘deemed to be the “One”, the axiomatic norm that defines racial “differences”, which maintains the status of a “superior” race and yet, paradoxically, as unraced, human as such’ (Yancy, 2015: 197). Following their tracing of the genealogy of the Colonial Jesus, they show how this connects to contemporary whiteness in the United States through a case study of the racial politics involved in the discourse surrounding the 2017 white supremacist riot in Charlottesville.
This is a valuable collection of essays dealing with the diverse ways in which whiteness strives to maintain its dominance and relegate non-whites to peripheral or subordinate positions through processes of ‘othering’ that define them stereotypically as different or as a threat to the social order. Whiteness may maintain its dominance by assuming a normative, invisible presence, but it is dynamic and multifaceted, at times also asserting itself in a violent or homicidal manner. Its communicative power is then far from invisible. Recognition of the invisibility of whiteness for whites and the ways in which this has acted as an implicit process of validating white power and privilege has of course been a considerable step forward, though at the same time there is a marked tendency in whiteness studies to homogenise whiteness and, with regard to relations of power, to underplay class structure and class reproduction. It is interesting in this respect that Alexander Saxton’s (1990) excellent study, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, which, along with David Roediger’s (1991) The Wages of Whiteness, helped pave the way for whiteness studies, is notable for its centrality of focus on social class, and more particularly on the interrelation of shifting conceptions of race and changes in class structure. It is unfortunate that this focus has not been more widely deployed, but a significant exception to this is Tasha Dunn who, in her chapter and at much greater length in her book, investigates those who exist in the liminal space between whites and non-whites, the marginalised American working class who live in mobile homes. Their media visibility in this space, most apparent in the ‘trailer trash’ or ‘white trash’ stereotype, is directly proportionate to their divergence from the standards of middle-class and upper-class whites. Dunn’s focus is thus not only on race but also on how social class informs the lived experience of whiteness. Here again is a connection to Trump, whose occupancy of the White House has, in part at least, been attributed to a shift of white working-class voters into the Republican ranks. Trump’s appeal, particularly to voters in the Rust Belt states, derives from his promises to improve their lot, bringing back the manufacturing jobs that have been lost through the closures of car, steel and related factories.
Dunn’s concern throughout the book is with the relations between outsider mediated representation and insider lived experience. She attends both to her own responses to depictions of white working-class people in popular media and through her fieldwork to the responses of those within this demographic. Her book presents four main chapters in all. She deals first with the historical formation and development of mediated representations of the white working class in America and then moves to an examination of cultural ‘othering’ and the stereotypical characteristics associated with their portrayal on American television. In her third chapter, she offers an autoethnographic account of returning to her own working-class roots, and finally she explores ‘what happens when living and mediated bodies intersect’, and ‘particularly what understandings of class and race’ then emerge (p. 103). Key processes and practices here are identification, dis-identification, negotiation and oppositional and critical engagement. In her conclusion, Dunn discusses how her perspective on films and television shows featuring white working-class people changed during the course of her research; how such changes were caused by talking and listening to such people; why this is important to both understanding audience negotiations and analysing media forms and discursive strategies; and how the knowledge she has gained through her work ‘can meaningfully contribute to and inform rising cultural conversations about class that have been fuelled by Donald Trump’s presidency’ (p. 126).
Having recently read J.D. Vance’s (2017) Hillbilly Elegy in order to develop a better understanding of Rust Belt experience and how this has been exploited in white populist nationalism, I eagerly took up Tasha Dunn’s book in expectation of expanding and refining this understanding. I have not been disappointed. While the prose in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness is occasionally puffed up and jargon laden, this is never the case with Dunn, who writes with clarity and precision in an accessible style. Central to its achievement, Talking White Trash adopts an approach informed by media and cultural studies together with the data obtained from qualitative interviews and focus groups, adding to this judicious mix an absorbing reflexive autoethnography. Altogether, Dunn provides a fine synthesis of material and approach, and offers in the process an exemplary model of mixed-methods work in communications scholarship.