Theorizing White Racial Trauma and its Remedies

In this paper we will be drawing upon historical work on race consciousness, contemporary work on trauma, and scholarship on activism and social change to offer a vision of what a critical white double consciousness might look like. We juxtapose this critical white consciousness with what Veronica Watson has termed a “white schizophrenic subjectivity” which has been explored by intellectuals like Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. Each of these writers called attention to a whiteness that works to maintain disconnection from people of color and disassociation from their own moral selves, a white schizophrenic subjectivity that prevented white folks from acknowledging or challenging racism while still continuing to think of themselves as moral and upstanding citizens of their communities and nation.

Making Whiteness in Reenactments of Slavery

I study enactments of slavery in two sites that share a similar educational mission. I argue that white performances of slavery facilitate whites to make racial redemptive claims through their consumptive identification of black bondage and trauma. In these performances, whites seemingly minimize and abdicate their self-ascribed moral superiority by engaging with slavery but as Saidiya Hartman notes, ‘the imagined and simulated captivity…assumes the ease of grappling with terror, of representing slavery’s crime, and ably standing in the other’s shoes…(but, in fact)…it doesn’t minimize the very terror it sets out to represent through these mundane reenactments’. In fact, the performances of slavery re-center and re/produce white supremacy in new ways.

Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century

In this chapter, I examine the extent to which one-drop ideology continues to dictate the legal definition of whiteness. The following questions serve as the basis of my research: 1) How do “white,” “mixed race or colored,” and the “one-drop rule” operate as ideographs in post-civil rights legal discourse? 2) Has the codification of the one-drop rule and whiteness been severed in contemporary legal discourse? To address the first research question, I use an ideographic analysis to examine legal briefs from the Malone Brothers and Mary Walker cases. To address my second research question, I complete a content analysis of state and/or federal court cases, 12 involving racial identity from 1980 to 2012, thereby demonstrating that a dramatic shift occurs in how white and mixed race are defined in the language endorsed by court justices.

About Schmidt’s Whiteness

Drawing on recent work in affect studies and on analyses of white masculinity in European American literature and other modes of cultural production, this essay explicates the depiction in Louis Begley’s novel About Schmidt (1996) of a contemporary white male psyche in crisis. Begley’s protagonist, 60-year old widower and recently retired lawyer Albert Schmidt, embodies and enacts the emotional atrophy and consequent “ugly feelings,” in Sianne Ngai’s terms, of a late-twentieth century, self-declared and self-sabotaging White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In this satiric, traditionally literary novel, the central character demonstrates that in part because, in Thandeka’s psychoanalytic terms, he has “learned to be white” via identity-forming imaginings of racialized others, he has yet to achieve a mature degree of compassionate humanity

Restitution Claims for Wrongful Enslavement and the Doctrine of the Master’s Good Faith

This chapter begins with the suggestion made by Judge Posner in his opinion for the majority in the case of In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation to the effect that the injuries exacted by slavery were imposed on the slaves alone, and thus provide no standing to their descendants to sue for restitution of their ancestors’ injuries. Legal procedural doctrines such as standing or time limits or sovereign immunity have successfully blocked consideration by courts of contemporary claims for slavery reparations. In light of conflicting views about the significance of temporality, it has become clear that part of the challenge of understanding contemporary whiteness practices was to make a constructive return to their foundational moments during slavery, to determine what discourses governed the allocation of restitution in both law and equity when enslavement was acknowledged in some cases to have been wrongful, and no procedural doctrines blocked consideration of restitution on the merits.

Charles W. Chesnutt, Whiteness, and the Problem of Citizenship

In this chapter, I will examine perhaps Charles W. Chesnutt’s most celebrated color-line novel, The House Behind the Cedars, as a philosophical and legalistic engagement of the problem of citizenship. Through a reading of Chesnutt’s racial non-fiction, including several of his unpublished essays and speeches, I also want to show how the novel engages Chesnutt’s perspective on race—one that held racial difference to be at once a “social fiction” and a “social disability.” Through his portrayal of the black mulatto in this novel, Chesnutt argues for an inclusive ideal of citizenship in response to the ascriptive ideology that defined American Jim Crow society in the wake of the 1896 Plessy decision.

The Battle Over Racial Identity in Popular and Legal Cultures, 1810–1860

This chapter challenges the view of legal historians that the “one-drop rule” did not exist before the early twentieth century. It argues that the one-drop rule was enforced in white culture and entered the opinions of local judges during the early nineteenth century. Middleton shows that trial courts and circuit courts, while they are not the final authority on the law, frequently used one-drop language in racial identity cases. He also provides evidence illustrating that these judges frequently told juries that if a mixed race person had any black blood whatsoever, they should be looked upon as black.

Hegemonic Whiteness

To better understand how whiteness is continually constructed, research must highlight patterned sets of expectations, obligations, and accountabilities that govern the racial identity performances of whites across varying material resources, professed attitudes, and political sensibilities. Without such a move, recent sociological research may mask, mystify, or marginalize the social-psychological and cultural mechanisms that simultaneously constrain and enable the formations of white racial identity, and thus, white actions. As a resolution to this dilemma, I expand upon my previous work with a variety of data (white activist discourse, film reviews, historical events, etc.) to examine how whiteness is continually (re)crafted from an allegiant pursuit of an idealized and specific form of white racial identity.

Emancipation from Whiteness

The analysis offered here stresses that whites were able to imagine freedom and move toward it because they did to some extent join suffering humanity. They could no longer take for granted the ideological connections of whiteness with independence and with ability that had been so hard-wired into the fabric of antebellum nationalism. My goal is to keep the inspiration of emancipation at play together with the war’s role in destroying white bodies and illusions as this article accounts for what I have also elsewhere called the brief period of “emancipation from whiteness” after the Civil War. I further show that inspiration and disillusion were present at the same time. Both led to intensified capacities to imagine and to pursue new freedom dreams among whites.

Introduction

This brief introduction to The Construction of Whiteness begins with discussion of the evolution of critical whiteness studies over the last quarter of a century. Emphasis is laid on the sub-discipline’s dramatic rise and then its productive transformation towards making smaller but perhaps more decisive contributions to a range of scholarly endeavors. The balance of the introduction considers the need for a new collection of writings in the area, one reflecting these trends, and surveys the sections of the book as well as the individual contributions to it.