The wreckage of white supremacy

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• race
• supremacy
• privilege

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin (1969: 257-58)

Introduction

Walter Benjamin’s famous passage from Illuminations (Benjamin 1969) is difficult to do justice, but its oracular character is hard to escape. In its prophetic mode, his allegorical angel of history is blown backward through its moment in time and on into a future not of its making; retaining in view the past only as catastrophe at its feet. In our present, flagstones of anti-racism are being upturned and piled high. In this wreckage, fascists are renamed ‘populists’, white ‘racial self-interest’ is not racism, and minorities pose a ‘demographic challenge’. Frequently, those who govern us make a virtue of this debris and recast it as necessary features of discourse and policy, perhaps as part of ‘perform[ing] the problem of totalizing a people’ (Bhabha 1994, 160–1). The storm that propels our present wreckage is carried by the force of whiteness, as racial privilege and as supremacy, and just as in Benjamin’s time, there is a current of intellectual collusion, in that some social and political scientists have offerred 'analytical apologetics for the frank neo-fascism expressed by much of the new populist politics' (Favell, 2019: 159). This is obscured by a sleight of hand: in the name of supposedly value free enquiry, they smuggle a normative cargo that platforms a white majoritarianism. Reliant on a faulty view of the social sciences, in which a subscription to a very narrowly conceived hypothetico-deduction shields them from ethical responsibility, it is empirically dubious because it is philosophically mistaken. At its core, it confuses the explanadum with the explanans. To frame it in these terms borrows from Hempel and Oppenheim (1948, 152) who wanted to use these terms to understand events ‘by virtue of the realization of certain specified antecedent conditions’. In this respect, the explanandum (what is the contemporary provenance of racist ‘populist’ nationalism?) meets the response of the explanans (‘the presence of racial minorities’). Any discerning social and political scientist should see this for what it is – an intellectual justification for racism.

By contrast in this special issue, the contributors seek to study the dynamic social and political character of whiteness as privilege and whiteness as supremacy. This simple objective makes for a difficult task. One reason is analytical. As Twine and Gallagher (2008, 10) put it some years ago, social science often struggles to focus ‘on the institutions that created, reproduced and normalized white supremacy’, concentrating instead on ‘the pathology of racist individuals rather than the structural forces that produced racist social systems’. There are exceptions to this of course, especially amongst those informed from by Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies traditions surveyed in this special issue. These exceptions recognise that the challenge is not only an analytical narrowness, but the constant reassertion and renewal of racial projects which seek to normalise the different facets of white supremacy, perhaps as what Peter Hervik (this issue) terms a ‘fractal logic’ – a never ending pattern that recursively feeds itself. It is to both these concerns, the analytical and the political, that the collection of papers in this special issue are oriented. In this very short introduction, and drawing on previously published ideas, I sketch out and re-state some of the historical terrain on which this contribution proceeds.

While all of the papers in this collection are present focused, the issues they address are shaped by a historical character of white supremacy. Of course provenance and continuity are two different things, and for this reason merely noting the objectives of the nineteenth century racial scientists who gave form and content to whiteness is insufficient in explaining present social and political implications, even if it was instructive. This includes physiologists and anthropologists such as Johann Blumenbach, who divided the people of the world into ‘Caucasians’, ‘Mongolians’, ‘Malayans’, ‘Negroids’ and ‘Americans’ (First Nations). The ‘Caucasian variety’, owed its title to Mount Caucasus because ‘its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men’. Like many of his contemporaries, Blumenbach curated a racial hierarchy in which Northern Europeans were ascendant (Meer 2014).

The fascinating point is that this hierarchy was always fragile, vulnerable under the weight of its own contradictions, and deeply insecure. In his account, Bonnett (2008) excavates an ‘ethno-cultural repertoire’ of whiteness, and the ways this was given particular content by writers who anxiously debated the ‘decline’ of white dominance (ibid.: 23). Amongst others, Bonnett (2008) identifies Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (Kidd 1894) and Principles of Western Civilisation (Kidd 1902), each of which prefigure the current theories of European decline (Meer, 2012). Of course, Kidd was writing at a time when the British Empire reigned over nearly a quarter of planet’s landmass and people, and alongside other European powers grew wealthy from what they had taken. Pointing to the thesis of the nineteenth-century educationalist and politician Charles Pearson in particular, Bonnett (2008, 18) describes some recurring features in this perception of decline:

Pearson’s principle explanation of why white expansion was at an end and white supremacy in retreat rests on demographics (notably Chinese and African fertility), geographical determinism (the unsuitability of the ‘wet tropics’ for white settlement) and the deleterious consequences of urbanisation on human ‘character’. Moreover, and crucially the economic ascendancy of those who Inge, following Pearson, was later to term ‘the cheaper races’ (Inge 1922, 27), meant the white ‘will be driven from every neutral market and forced to confine himself within his own’ (Pearson, 1894: 137).

There is much here which spans several presumed features of culture and civilisation (intertwined in biology and environment), but which is principally underwritten by the ways in which whiteness served as a form of substantive rationality that fashioned geopolitics in its own image. Empire and colonialism are thus understood as natural states of international relations and indicative of human progress. Amongst writers of the day, challenges to this hegemony (and related geopolitical formations) must have raised some profound existential questions. These were certainly evident following the Japanese naval annihilation of the Russian fleet in 1904, where ‘for the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war’ (Mishra 2012, 1).

What is especially interesting is that this violent disruption occurred just at the moment the transaction between Whiteness and the West had been taking place, but in a manner ‘in which the mass of white people are treated with suspicion’ (Bonnett 2008, 20). This seeming paradox is explained by an internal racial hierarchy that drew upon notions of both race and class and informed what would later become familiar tropes of social Darwinism and eugenicist thinking. This tension, ‘of asserting both white solidarity and class elitism was resolved, in part, by asserting that the “best stock” of the working class had long since climbed upwards’ (ibid.: 21), and which continued to feed into parallel debates about culture and political economy (McDermott 2006). The especially relevant implications of this genealogy for our discussion in that ‘[w]hilst “Westerner” can and does sometimes operate as a substitute term for “white”, it also operates within new landscapes of power and discrimination that have new and often fragile relationships with the increasingly widely repudiated language of race’ (Bonnett 2008, 18).

In another reading, meanwhile, Virdee (2014) has charted the ways in which whiteness during the same period became ‘democratised’, not least through the expansion of social democratic politics on which pivots a historical seesaw of inclusion and exclusion. It is a dramatic and compelling account in so far as ‘[e]ach time the boundary of the nation was extended to encompass ever more members of the working class, it was accompanied and legitimised through the further racialization of nationalism that prevented another more recently arrived group from being included’ (Virdee, 2014, 5). In this account, race and whiteness were ‘constitutive in the making, unmaking and remaking of the working class in England across two centuries’ (Virdee 2014: 5–6). As such, and especially in the organisation of social and political life, ‘there were historical moments when the working class suppressed such expressions of racism, and on occasion, actively rejected it’ (ibid.). Such is the nature of racialization: a juddering movement of the rejection of one group and the incorporation of another (or later indeed the same group), yet which can be quite consistent with intellectual and popular logics of racializing.

These are principally European and imperial trajectories of whiteness of course, and a different account emerges from the north American experience; an account that has been especially compelling for its exploration of whiteness in social relations, specifically what Dyer (1988, 44) once termed as ‘seeming not to be anything in particular’. In addition to routinised racial terror, from the US literature in particular, we grasp the paradox which stems from being intimately part of a polity while excluded from its formal story, or, as Du Bois 1999, 10–11) put it, ‘being an outcast and stranger in mine own house’. What Du Bois termed ‘double consciousness’ mediated between agency and structure, individual and society, and between minority and majority subjectivities. It would span the internalisation by African-Americans of the contempt white America had for them, and the creation of an additional perspective in the form of a ‘gifted second sight’ to which experiencing this gives rise. It would highlight the incongruences emerge from conceiving of African-Americans as having fewer civic rights but no less the duties or responsibilities of an ideal of American citizenship, and the diverging sets of unreconciled ideals or ‘strivings’ held by African-Americans which are objected to by white society, specifically emerging from an ‘enduring hyphenation’ signalled in his notion of ‘twoness’.

Drawing on this, what the modern US literature emphasises is that white supremacy might be easier to name than the ways in which whiteness serves as what Du Bois termed a public and psychological wage, and what others have termed a ‘knapsack’ (McIntosh 1988) or ‘possessive investment’ (Lipstiz 1998). Each of these refer to a kind of capital, and are illustrated in what Duster (2001, 114–15) elaborates as ‘deeply embedded in the routine structures of economic and political life. From ordinary service at Denny’s restaurants, to far greater access to bank loans to simple police-event-free driving – all these things have come unreflectively with the territory of being white’. In social and political contexts characterised by a hyper-vigilance of non-whites, and as Damian Breen and myself show (this issue) of Muslims in particular, this latent whiteness is often given renewed content through a particular racialization of these groups. Simultaneously, it is sustained by how whiteness is a type of habitus and the norm against which others are judged, in which ‘culture and ideology constantly re-cloak whiteness as a normative identity’ (ibid.: 12). As Escafre-Dublet (this issue) shows of French cultural policy, white boundary making is embedded in the ‘routine structures’ of cultural life. She illustrates this through the example of national cultural policy which privileges white majorities and demands that minorities justify the social benefit of any of their artistic initiative. Indeed, the privilege of white majorities is not to have to justify any social benefit – they can pursue art for the sake of it, but minorities have to justify that what they do is useful (or more specifically, to perform to their integration to French society).

What is also implied here is that individuals do not have to be ‘white people’ to actively reinforce and act in the interests of whiteness (Ladson-Billings, 1998). Whiteness thus sits at an intersection between historical privilege and identity, something that has a contemporary dynamic but which is not an unbroken history (or can be distant to) how many white people experience their identities. As Frankenberg (2001, 76) puts it ‘whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather cross-cut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it’. One of the sociological implications of this is that there is a documented tendency amongst ‘ethnically ambiguous’ minorities to seek the material and symbolic rewards of whiteness by positioning themselves as white in such things as applications for education employment, and other training (Warren and Twine 1997; Lee, 2001). This is evident, argue Twine and Gallagher (2008, 14), in how ‘whiteness is continuing to expand in the United States, and that it continues to incorporate ethnics of multiracial, Asian, Mexican and other Latinos of non-European heritage’. The study of whiteness then struggles with a wide front of sociological realities, including forms of innovative anti-racist action discussed by Alana Lentin (this issue). None of this should not be taken to imply a lack of agency to resist amongst those deemed non-white in the past (including people who may be deemed white today), and especially people from the Global South, whether in the metropole or periphery, who mobilised, resisted, remade solidarity and found common cause despite conditions of brutal occupation and cultural denigration (Gopal, 2019).

It is especially implausible then that non-whiteness is laundered from prevailing stories of the working-class. This is different from the concerns that the attribution of a conscious or unwitting white dominance may under-recognise how ‘[t]he economic and psychological wages of whiteness may be more meagre (and thus more precious) the lower down the social hierarchy the white subject is located’ (Garner 2006, 262). Of course, a prevailing danger here, as shown by Mondon and Winter (this issue) is that such framings exclude working-class Black, Minority Ethnic and immigrant experiences, and probationary membership, of this strata. As they elaborate, such representations of the white working-class as left behind, sometimes in the service of racist nationalisms and anti-immigration politics, work together in a form of racialised divide and rule to deny belonging and resources, and reinforce racism and racial inequality. In opening up these readings, Nayak’s (Nayak 2003a, 2003b) research has utilised ethnographic methods in post-industrial settings in order to explore how whiteness intersects with class and masculinities, and so is negotiated in ways that takes on ‘multiple and contingent’ meanings (Nayak 2003a, 319). This is especially evident in terms of how ‘young people inhabit white ethnicities to different degrees and with varying consequences’ (ibid.) not least because ‘whiteness is not simply constituted in relation to blackness, but is also fashioned through and against other versions of whiteness’ (ibid.: 320, emphasis added). What this emphasises is that whiteness is curated and sustained by much more than imperial legacies (Meer 2018).

Of course, and to restate the argument I have made previously, this does not mean uncoupling whiteness from race writ large. On the contrary, the challenge is to get a sense of how that manifests itself in contemporary social processes. As Leonard (this issue) puts it, ‘whiteness not only continues to deliver entitlements but, in multiple contexts and political moments, is demonstrating a “backlash” against the assumed gains of non-white Other’. Uncoupling power in the name of complexity, however, is a prominent feature of some contemporary discussion. Perhaps then in thinking about white supremacy we need to connect the two slightly different frames. By supremacy what is meant is dominance, explicitly as coercion but also implicitly through kinds of prevailing consensus amongst white-majority society. Illustrations of the latter include the ways in which once racially segregated societies continue to operate racial zones even while there is no formal policy to support it. Obvious examples are post-Apartheid South Africa and post-Segregation southern states in the US, where racial categories are keenly related to the exercise of power. Yet there are also less obvious examples found in every liberal-democratic European Union state, manifested in the reluctance of visible minorities to move or live outside of urban centres that are often considered much ‘safer’ than non-urban conurbations (Neal, 2009). This is a different kind of white dominance to that of explicitly white nationalist movements such as the Klu Klux Klan in the US, though of course far right-wing parties in Europe often form part of the political mainstream and may also be in governing coalitions, and look set to feature more.

With their opening paper, Mondon and Winter (this issue) chart a re-emergence and reassertion of white supremacy as a normalised political category, and racism as a legitimate political position across the right of the political spectrum. Using the US and British cases, they discuss the mainstreaming of the far-right and racism with a particular emphasis on the racialisation of the working class as ‘people’ or ‘demos’ in the Brexit and Trump campaigns, which not only made race central, but delegitimised Black, minority ethnic and immigrant experiences and interests. Moving to northern Europe and turning to the use of ‘fractal logics’, as a means to re-think racialization and ideas and practices of whiteness, Hervik (these issues) focuses on the trope of a white ‘nation-in-danger’. Found in circulating images, soundbites, visual signs, metaphors, and narratives created in political communication and news media, this discursive portrayal becomes impossible to understand without an account of the prevailing racialization of non-white minorities to whom it is related.

From here a pair of articles discuss whiteness and France. In the first, using ethnographic research amongst France’s North African second-generation, Beaman (this issue) discusses how whiteness is at the centre of France’s racial project where, as per Omi and Winant’s (1994) formulation, differences among individuals are marked without explicit state-sanctioned racial and ethnic categories. In her analysis, and despite an official ‘masking’ of difference based on France’s Republican ideology, the state has an increasingly narrow definition of what it means to be ‘French’, a definition which often excludes particular populations within French society, including those who were born in France to parents who are immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. In the second, meanwhile, Escafré-Dublet details how cultural life and the arts re-state an implicit white hegemony. Far from addressing a limited audience in France, cultural policies are an area of definition of a common national culture. They are continuously called upon, she argues, in order to solve identity-related issues such as secularism, religious radicalism or national integration. The prevailing whiteness of this cultural definition is unrecognised even while is serves to establish a universal and unqualified norm.

Part of the dynamic force of white privilege is that in the rare cases it is undeniably explicit, counter-strategies avail themselves to off-set it. How this is negotiated amongst white actors is taken up by Leonard’s (this issue) discussion of post-Apartheid south Africa. Her analysis builds on scholarship examining historical processes of readjustment, by drawing on research conducted with a diverse sample of ‘white British’ who migrated to South Africa in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Her research reveals that amongst British – born residents in South Africa, a range of rhetorical tactics help negotiate a position in relation to both the retreating apartheid regime and the contemporary state. Underpinning the diversity of these subjectivities, a sense of detachment from the nation is demonstrated, and albeit articulated in very different ways, the longstanding identification of the British as ‘ambivalent’ emerges as a valuable resource by which to excuse an ongoing lack of participatory nationhood in the ‘new’ South Africa. In the contribution from Breen and myself (this issue), we revisit systems approaches to white privilege and supremacy by returning to Critical Race Theory and tests it explanatory capacity against the contemporary racialization of minorities in Europe, most specifically the experience of British Muslim communities. In a social and political context characterised by a hypervigilance of non-white difference, the article argues that CRT can provide a fruitful means of gauging the ways in which anti-Muslim discrimination might be engendered. This includes the ways in which anti-Muslim discrimination is articulated at the macro level in public discourse and public policy. The article concludes that applying CRT allows us to explore how interest convergence sanctions racialization in context where whiteness and white privilege often run together. Finally, in her closing paper Lentin (this issue) examines a recent arrival in the antiracist toolkit of mobile phone apps for education and intervention, and how this reflects their relation to whiteness as a site for antiracist intervention. Her paper concludes by suggesting a need for wariness around the centring of whiteness in the antiracism struggle, an endeavour which by replicating it, potentially fails in the aim of dismantling white supremacist structures – an objective to which this entire issue is presented.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to all the contributors to this special issue, which was first commissioned by Claire Alexander in 2017 before I took up the role of Editor in Chief. A special thanks to Gezim Krazniqi for overseeing the reviewing process, and to Aaron, Angeline, and Jean for helpful comments on this introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.