White Bound

Stanford University Press

Contents

Chapter One

White antiracists? Misguided folks, but I get them, I mean, [long pause] they want to have equality and multiculturalism, and so do we ... In many ways, we are not all that different. In fact, I consider myself one of them [laughing]. I don't use your language, but yeah, I'm a white antiracist! —Robert, National Equality for All

The white nationalist movement today, they are using our rhetoric, our ideas ... because they feel threatened. I guess on some level they want to be respected as individual human beings, just like we want all people to be respected as human beings. That's similar ... in a strange sort of way. —Philip, Whites for Racial Justice

A LARGE OAK TABLE WITH PAPERS, books, and several coffee cups strewn about occupies the middle of the room. Numerous people sit in bulky, inflexible chairs. Some type on laptops, several busy themselves with reading, and others jot down notes on yellow legal pads. A few people scurry about the room, dive in and out of file cabinets, briefly speak with colleagues, and wait for a turn at one of the few computers to send an email or look up needed information. The phone has been ringing incessantly for the past hour. Call after call is fielded, schedules double-checked, and appointments made. People are a bit on edge. Still, most manage to smile and remain courteous to one another. In less than a week, it will be the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday—a U.S. federal holiday since 1986. People are readying their commemoration of the day by preparing press packets about the life and legacy of Dr. King to disseminate to radio, tv, and blogs. Derek, a thirty-four-year-old advertising and marketing agent, sits down beside me. Seemingly exhausted, he slumps into the chair with a deep sigh. He removes his glasses with his left hand, holding them unfolded in his outstretched arm. With his right hand he loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his shirt. For more than a few moments he slowly rubs his forehead as if trying to massage away a deadening headache. After some time he slowly replaces his glasses, looks down at the floor, and says in a low tone: "It's hard to fight all the disinformation out there ..." his voice trailing off as he speaks. "But!" he asserts emphatically as he turns to look at me, placing his hand on my shoulder. "We've got to get the truth out there to people. This is one of the few times each year when people will really listen." Derek smiles and rises from his seat to greet a colleague who has entered the room. "I think the big selling point we have," says Derek, looking back at me as his colleague walks up to greet him with a handshake, "is that King was against affirmative action, we're not saying anything different.... We as white people must protect our racial heritage and separate. That is the key to our self-determination." This is "The Office," the unofficial moniker for the national headquarters of "National Equality for All," a white nationalist organization located in a metropolitan area on the East Coast of the United States.

"Whites for Racial Justice" is also located on the outskirts of a city on the East Coast of the United States. It is the headquarters of a nationwide white antiracist organization and is no more than a few hours' drive from the headquarters of National Equality for All. The group meets in the basement of a member's house, but it is not the stereotypical dark and dimly lit space. A few years ago, the members pitched in and finished it with drywall, wall-to-wall carpeting, and modern wood furnishings. Bookshelves are everywhere in the room. Many volumes end up in large piles several feet tall, stacked next to the walls. There are history books on the civil rights era, the speeches of Frederick Douglass, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, and the heavily used and dog-eared pages of Whites Confront Racism by sociologist Eileen O'Brien. On this day, like many others before it, members slowly trickle in for the biweekly gathering. The theme for today's meeting is "Everyday Insurrections," or what white people can do on a daily basis to fight racism. Malcolm, one of the official "coordinators" of the organization, enters the room, greeting every person individually. After enjoining everyone to take his or her seat and begin, Malcolm introduces a supplement to the day's agenda: "I think what we need to do, as conscious, thinking, aware human beings who have decided to take a stand against racism, is what we can, or rather, need [emphasizing the word] to do to stop racism in our own lives as well as take a stand against it structurally, is ... well ... to constantly ask ourselves, 'How can I become less "white"?'" His fingers make the motion of air quotes around the word white as he speaks. Smiling nods and looks of sincere appreciation greet his commentary. This is a typical meeting of Whites for Racial Justice.

For a little over one year—from May 2006 through June 2007—I spent at least one day a week with members of the white nationalist organization National Equality for All (NEA) and the white antiracist organization Whites for Racial Justice (WRJ). I attended their meetings, analyzed their literature, interviewed their members, and informally spent time with those members in a variety of settings: from long stays in organizations' offices and members' homes to quick trips to the post office and supermarket. I hung out with their friends and listened to their life stories. I shared meals with them in their homes. I met the elder members of their families, and I played with many of their children.

I came to NEA and WRJ with the interest of comparing how these two groups make meaning of white racial identity. In many ways, these two organizations are everything one would expect. They act, talk, and look quite different. They are near-perfect examples of how white racial identity can be marshaled toward antagonistic political projects. While they may seem strange and radical to many observers, they both appeal to fairly normative and logical arguments to shield their activism. They both spend a great deal of time defending who they are and what they do from outsiders. They detest jokes about their activism, they work very hard to be taken seriously, and they both worry about the future of race relations and white people in the United States, if not across the globe.

Like many whites today, both white nationalists and white antiracists see themselves as autonomous individuals making independent choices that reflect their authentic desires and true selves. Yet these choices, desires, and selves are anchored to racial categories and meanings that structure how they negotiate the world. It is important to recognize, then, that these actors do not engage in their activism in isolation. Both the white nationalists and white antiracists craft their understandings of the world, and who they are as white people in that world, out of available meanings and shared expectations. The members of both organizations use the dominant understandings of race today to continually re-create and re-form both their individual and collective white racial identities. They then use those identities as potent resources and rationales for how they should marshal their activism toward the world's problems.

I neither defend nor demonize either group or its members in this book. Rather, I present a comparative examination of how the members of both groups make meaning of race, particularly whiteness, in social situations of meaningful interaction. In coming to address this focus, I found something quite unexpected. Located just a short distance from one another on the East Coast of the United States, the members of these two groups inhabit incredibly different social worlds. Yet they rely on similar racial and cultural meanings to interpret and navigate those worlds. And while I document many of the differences between these two groups in the pages that follow, I concentrate on how they make meaning of whiteness in strikingly similar ways. This is a book about the racialized ideals that are held in common between white nationalists and white antiracists—and how such commonality relates to the reproduction of both racism and white racial identity. Several dimensions of this white ideal—what I call "hegemonic whiteness"—will be discussed in the chapters that follow. But before we embark on that journey, it is necessary to lay a foundation.

The Project of White Racial Identity

Making the argument that important and crucial similarities exist between white nationalists and white antiracists is rife with the potential to agitate. My point is not to provoke but rather to draw attention to how whites come to construct their own identities in ways that are simultaneously distinct and surprisingly similar. Whereas a great deal of scholarship views the vast landscape of different white racial identities as the result of antagonistic political ideologies and stratified material resources, I focus instead on how actors negotiate, contest, and reform the dominant meanings of white racial identity in everyday social relations. My goal is not to refute the standard arguments about the power of political ideals and material resources. This line of inquiry and reasoning has led to important insights. My concern centers on the ways that racialized meanings propel whites' interpersonal social relations and how white racial identity is enacted through these social relations. By social relations, I mean situations in which actors create or rely on a sense of who they think they are (here, white racial identity) in relation to real and/or imagined others in the situation or expected situations.

Racial identity—as categories arranged in relational hierarchy—serves as a convenient and "commonsense" system for organizing social action and order across an array of social contexts. The meanings associated with race do not evaporate with the passing of one social relation to the next but structure our activities and identities across time and space. I will show how the dominant meanings of race organize our social relations and how this social order works to reproduce racist schema and racial inequality through the mundane activities of everyday life. To examine white racial identity, we must examine it as an ongoing process, as a meaningful accomplishment, and as a kind of "project." Omi and Winant argue that racial projects "connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning." I follow suit to examine whiteness neither as a biological fact nor as an illusion but as a real social classification that supplies a meaningful worldview and set of strategies to those who embody that category. To empirically access these meanings and strategies, I focus on the symbolic boundaries and shared narratives that make up white social relations.

"Symbolic boundaries" are the conceptual divisions that people make between objects, between themselves and other people, and between practices. These meaningful distinctions operate as a "system of rules that guide interaction by affecting who comes together to engage in what social act." Applied to race, these boundaries then constitute, and often justify or naturalize, a system of classification that defines hierarchy and moral worth between and within racial groups. Such "boundary work" involves the construction of a collective white identity by drawing on supposedly common traits, experiences, and a shared sense of belonging. Regarding "shared narratives," the key idea is that people interpret their lives as a set of recognizable stories that contain causally linked sequences of events. Shared narratives are central to how we construct racial identities because they link the social world together; stories provide accounts of how individuals view themselves in relation to others. Narratives affect behavior because people often choose actions that are consistent with the meaningful expectations of their racial identities. Together, symbolic boundaries illuminate the meanings and cultural basis of racial categories, and narratives order the links between categories in a recognizable story. Only when these categories and stories are "widely agreed upon can they take on a constraining character and pattern social interaction in important ways ... [as] identifiable patterns of social exclusion."

People are bound to meaningful categories and stories to establish group membership, to cope with their lives, and to provide strategies for resisting and reproducing aspects of society they find troubling and pleasing. For the white activists covered in this book, the already established meanings of race were used to construct stable, knowable, and respected white racial identities. In thinking about white racial identities as strategic and usable things, I certainly do not imply that the white nationalists and white antiracists studied herein always made rational and conscious decisions through a sort of "cost/benefit" approach to life. Rather, these white racial activists employed the cultural resources of symbolic boundaries and shared narratives in intelligent, creative, savvy, and emotional ways. And at the same time, these strategies held unconscious, unforeseen, and unintended results; sometimes the actors even reproduced the very dilemmas they sought to displace. And while I consider white racial identity to be an ongoing act of accomplishment that gains significance in social interaction, I note the importance that these activists place on portraying coherent and firm identities that seem anything but in flux.

In the chapters that follow, I argue that these white racial activists are fastened to the dominant expectations of white racial identity and are in search of idealized forms of that identity; thus the double entendre of White Bound as a sense of attachment and trajectory. Each chapter demonstrates how the shared meanings of race and whiteness—and the strategies derived from those meanings—affect NEA's and WRJ's antithetical goals in strikingly similar ways. On the whole, this book throws theoretical speculation about the supposed bifurcation of white racial identity into relief against the realities of two groups never before directly compared. In a recent study of white identity, sociologist Paul Croll wrote, "There is a significant relationship between boundary maintenance and claiming a strong white racial identity ... By and large, scholars have either focused their research on racist organizations or on anti-racism activities, rarely have they looked at both." By examining seemingly antithetical white groups, we can begin to see not just a plurality of white racial identities but also the strategies that recreate the dominant ways of being white.

Rethinking Racial Dichotomies

We love things that come in pairs. Whether male/female, nature/nurture, fact/opinion, mind/body, reason/emotion, winners/losers, or good/bad, binaries are a cornerstone of social structure and a road map for our navigation of everyday life. The lumping and splitting of our culture into distinct and polarized categories is a meaningful enterprise. After all, particular descriptions of reality are quite arbitrary, and categorization does not merely sort our experiences but helps to infuse everyday life with specific meanings. And when the controversial topics of racism and racial identity are introduced, binaries become extremely useful frameworks for making agreed-on meaning out of racial chaos, controversy, and conflict.

Consequently, North Americans generally discuss racism along the lines of "racists and antiracists." This is not a new phenomenon. The categories "racist" and "antiracist" are deeply historical. The historian Herbert Apthecker documented white racist and white antiracist activism from the 1600s to the 1860s. He effectively challenged the notion that whites universally accepted racism until the outbreak of the Civil War, bringing to light a neglected, but vibrant, white antiracist history. Yet, as amateur historians, we tend to examine such tales through a bifurcated lens. Driven by this paradigm, "white racists" become the originators and protectors of slavery, the cause of Jim Crow segregation, the supporters of eugenics, and the keepers of hidden prejudices toward immigrants. Conversely, the "white antiracists" are the enlightened; a group that somehow escaped the disgrace of supporting "Manifest Destiny" against Native Americans, decried the internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, and traversed the U.S. South on "Freedom Rides" in the 1960s. While some of this story is certainly true, such a view is dangerously reductive and violently oversimplified for understanding the link between racism and white racial identity.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from White Boundby Matthew W. Hughey Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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