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"If for no other reason than that the circulation of racialized power has been and is fractured, multi-faceted, contradictory, and continual, then this collection would be valuable in its attention to the accumulation of the political and disciplinary effects of whiteness. The particular strength of this attention is magnified by the combination of work herein that originates in both academic and other than academic sites. And it is brave work; it proceeds without guarantees of its own outcome, without knowing what questions it might settle."--Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University

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Making & Unmaking- CL

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to Be White

I am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle-class, despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am white, but I grew up in an inner city housing project where most everyone was black or Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of privileges that were denied my neighbors but that most Americans take for granted. In fact, my childhood was like a social science experiment: Find out what being middle-class really means by raising a kid from a "good" family in a "bad" neighborhood. Define whiteness by putting a light-skinned kid in the midst of a community of color. If the exception proves the rule, I'm that exception.

Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe him, and he will most likely put black or African American at the top of the list. Ask someone of European descent the same question, and white will be far down on the list, if at all. Not so for me. I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar, its parts of speech; I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought. For example, I had to learn that I was supposed to look white people in the eye when I spoke to them, that it didn't mean that I wanted to "throw down"-challenge them to a fight. I learned that snapping that someone's mother was so poor that she put a Big Mac on layaway was not taken with good humor. There's an old saying that you never really know your own language until you learn another. It's the same with race. In fact, race is nothing more than a language, a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality.

In learning this language of race, and thereby learning to be white, I was no different than European culture as a whole. Early modern conceptions of the white race-in fact of all races-stemmed from confrontation with and domination of peoples outside the European sphere. As the story goes, scientific theories of race arose in tandem with the ascent of colonialism. In 1684, Francois Bernier, a French physician who had traveled widely, published an article in a Parisian journal on the subject of human differences. "The geographers up until this point," he claimed, "have divided the world up only according to the different countries or regions." He then suggested a novel classification scheme based on the facial lineaments and bodily conformations of the peoples of the world. Bernier proceeded to divide the world's peoples into four categories: the Europeans, the Far Easterners, the blacks, and the Lapps. Native Americans he did not classify as a separate people or lump in any of his four groupings. Less than a century later, another Frenchman, George-Louis LeClerc Buffon, formally categorized the "races" of the world as part of a larger project of classifying all living species, published in the forty-four-volume Histoire naturelle (1749-1804). With the publication of these and related volumes, the modern European conception of race was born.

These early conceptions of race, however, were quite different than those commonly held today in the scientific community or by the public at large. Back then, racial differences were seen as a result of local climates and thus mutable-fluid both within and across generations. In fact, in 1787, the Reverend Mr. Samuel Stanhope Smith (president of the College of New Jersey-now Princeton University) wrote that dark skins could be considered a "universal freckle." Early modern racial theorists such as Smith believed that, over the course of several generations in a different climate, racial attributes would gradually change to adapt to local conditions. That is, northern peoples would get progressively darker, and darker peoples would loose their pigmentation with migration.

Almost three centuries after Bernier carved up the world according to his schema of physical attributes, my white parents crossed over the contemporary equivalent of a racial border, moving into a nonprofit housing project on the Lower East Side of New York City. Compressed into the area of two city blocks, our housing complex had a population comparable to the town of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, where my mother had grown up before moving to New York. It was composed of mostly African American and Puerto Rican families; we were one of the few white households. What distinguished my family from our neighbors was not so much the color of our skin per se as it was how we had arrived at the buildings in which we lived out our lives. The essential difference was that we had some degree of choice about whether to live there or not. Our black and Hispanic neighbors, for the most part, did not. This difference was a whiteness lesson that I would not learn until much later, when I was deciding as an adult where in New York to live. As for my parents, my father was a painter, my mother a writer; in short, they had no money. But still, white poor people have choices in America that minorities do not enjoy. They could have lived in a white, working-class neighborhood in the outer boroughs or in New Jersey, for example. Our neighbors were not so lucky, however, being largely unwelcome elsewhere on account of the fact that they would probably lower property values because of the linkage between race and economics in our society.

That is, white neighborhoods are consistently worth more than black neighborhoods with similar housing stock. This pattern is maintained by the fact that when a white neighborhood just begins to integrate (usually somewhere around the 10 to 20 percent minority range) many of the white residents move out, fearing that the neighborhood will "tip" from white to black, depressing their housing values. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Property values drop since whites, who make up most of the demand for housing, sell in droves and flood the market.

Likewise, when whites move into a minority neighborhood with low housing values, prices start to climb, and these early, "pioneer" whites reap the profits. Through these waves of neighborhood succession, whites manage to squeeze dollars out of the symbolic advantage of their race. Though they were "pioneers," there was no such luck for my parents since the projects were not part of the private market and white "gentrification" would never take place there. That said, given their ostensible other options, I have often wondered why my parents made the choices they did in 1968. Whenever I ask them, they tell stories about having to move quickly because of a vendetta against my mother on the part of a burglar she had caught and prosecuted. But I think the real answer is somewhat along the lines of the reason white kids in the suburbs now buy more rap music than any other group: the mystique of the "ghetto," an attraction to the other that many middle-class individuals experience today. Such is the strange political economy of race in contemporary America. It is a political economy in which whites like my sister's husband, who grew up across the river in northern New Jersey, memorize rap lyrics and pine to be darker or at least to be called "white chocolate." It is a political economy where rap artists themselves brag at how "project" they are to sell records to these white teenagers. The essential rule of this...