Ambivalent white racial identities: fear and an elusive innocence

Abstract

This article examines the complex social production of white racial identity. Specifically, the author theorizes white people's fear of people of color and make a case for conceiving of white racial identities as profoundly ambivalent. Drawing from a larger ethnographic interview study conducted in a small, rural, white community in the Midwest of the United States, and grounded in critical whiteness studies, this article explores how Delores, an elementary school teacher, experienced being white, and how being white for Delores was very much intertwined with ways of thinking and feeling that she had learned growing up in this rural community. The purpose is to describe and theorize white identity and whiteness in ways that avoid essentializing them, but that also keep in view white privilege and a larger white supremacist context. A growing number of researchers and educators argue that our previous conceptions of white identity have too often hurt rather than helped our critical pedagogies with white students. This article, then, contributes to a more nuanced and helpful portrait of white racial identity that we might draw on in our social justice efforts.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• white racial identity
• white fear

Notes

1. There are, of course, exceptions – see, for example, Apple (2004), Fine (2004), Giroux (1997), and Winans (2005). Leonardo (2002) has argued persuasively in this journal that our understanding of whiteness must be informed by critical insights into globalization, if an effective critical pedagogy of whiteness is to be created.

2. In late August 1968, the Democratic Party held its national convention in Chicago to nominate its presidential candidate. The convention became the center of a storm of protest, with between 10,000 and 15,000 demonstrators in conflict with 12,000 police and 6000 National Guard troops. See Blobaum (2000) for a chronology of events leading up to, during, and after the convention.

3. On November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges, who was six years old, became the first black student at William Frantz Elementary School, an all‐white school in New Orleans. She is credited with being the first black student to attend any white school in the south. Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With portrays the young Bridges walking between the federal marshals who escorted her into the school (see http://www.lewisbond.com/rckwellpgs/problem.html for an image of the painting). In 1991, Rodney King, a black taxi driver, was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers after being stopped for speeding. The event was videotaped by a bystander. See Gooding‐Williams (1993) for a reading of the event against the backdrop of US race relations and history.

4. On 4 May 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, members of the Ohio National Guard shot at students, four of whom were killed, with another nine wounded. Some of the students involved had been protesting the American invasion of Cambodia; others were observing or walking nearby. See Caputo (2005) for an account of the shootings. Later that same year, on 24 August 1970, there was a bombing in Sterling Hall of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in protest against the University's connections with the US military. A physics professor was killed, with four others suffering severe injuries – see Bates (1992).

5. I am certainly persuaded by work on how the claim of innocence functions within whiteness to justify white privilege and superiority. Carol Schick and Verna St. Denis (2005), for example, write that ‘Goodness and innocence are talismans of one's superiority. The claim of innocence acts as both cause and effect: one is produced through innocence as superior; superiority is claimed as a sign of one's innocence’ (308; see also Srivastava 2005). However, I believe something different was going on with Delores. Instead of innocence as ‘goodness’ (which Delores often attributed, not to white people, but to people of color such as Dr. King and Ruby Bridges), Delores seemed to be trading off a meaning of innocence closer to ‘purity’ or ‘inexperience’ – innocent because not involved, not experienced, in the open battles she saw going on between the police and protestors. Of course, Delores eventually questioned whether this sort of innocence – the separateness of an ‘innocent bystander’ – was actually possible, much less desirable.