White like me

Part 2 - The invention of whiteness

by Ellen Barry

A long, long time ago, when "queer" still meant "strange" and the canon could be invoked without invisible quotation marks, race was taught as a biological fact and slavery as a polyp on American history. It wasn't until the 1970s that revisionist historians got their hands on what Edmund Morgan dubbed the "American Paradox" -- that the American ideal of freedom could not have been extended to poor whites without the institution of slavery.

As radical as that seemed in the mid 1970s, Morgan and his peers were retreading ground covered long before by black writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. This time, though, the race-based reading of history was at the center of debate among white academics as well. Their fundamental assertion was that race itself was invented to justify slavery. Previous cultures certainly recognized ethnicity, but color was not always a dividing line; "whites" like the Greeks mixed freely with "blacks" like the Ethiopians. Ignatiev put it this way: "People from Africa were not enslaved because they were black; they were defined as black because they were enslaved."

Scholars then picked up the "invention of race" idea and applied it to the history of the American white working class, a group that had generally been regarded through the sympathetic lens of labor history. Here, too, Du Bois had laid the groundwork. In his 1935 book Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had written of white workers who "everywhere received a low wage [but were] compensated in part . . . by a public and psychological wage."

That wage was being white. David Roediger revived that theory in his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso), and then, in 1995, Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White picked up the same thread, telling the story of how Irish immigrants, "in becoming White, ceased to be Green."

In the country they left, Irish Catholics had been an underclass -- barred from voting, running for office, or going into the law or the military. Catholic taxes went to the Protestant church, and Catholic orphans were brought up Protestant. When the first wave of immigration began, America did not offer much immediate relief; in the South, Irish workers were sometimes hired for work so dangerous that it wasn't worth risking a slave's life. Blacks were sometimes referred to as "smoked Irish," and the Irish as "niggers turned inside out."

How the Irish Became White examined how white workers used race to put distance between themselves and the blacks they mingled with, thereby ensuring themselves a better spot in society. This, Ignatiev proposes, is why the Irish, who had a long tradition of opposing slavery at home, never rose to the abolitionist cause, and in fact became virulent racists. The sharper the distinction between whites and blacks, the safer they were.

According to this analysis, white identity means nothing but the privilege of not being black.

"Whiteness is not merely empty and false. It's pernicious," says Ignatiev. "It's a terrifying effort to build an identity based on what is not."

Roediger's and Ignatiev's work on whiteness began to percolate through history departments all over the country. But even as the pioneers of a new reading of history, they were teetering on an uncomfortable precipice -- their scholarship analyzed the evolution of a category that they felt should not exist. Having established that, these scholars were ready to leave "white culture" alone. It's not there. End of discussion.

"I don't want to give the slightest bit of validity to the idea that there is some kind of ethnic category as `white,' " says Ignatiev. "That comes very close to the concept of white supremacists and white nationalists and people like that. Now, I understand that most people in white studies are opposed to all that. Yet they are playing into their hands."

By the time the historians came to that conclusion, though, it was too late. The Great White Hype, as the Minnesota Review termed it, was off the ground.

Part 3 - White folks' ethnography

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry@phx.com.