I wrote what I now see as a
overly lengthy, poorly written post about a month ago on the topic of white identity in the United States. As the post noted, I wrote it from the middle of a dead, near frozen and dark MARC train in West Arundel at around 7 AM, and was just grateful to get to work by 12:30 PM. I did not edit the piece to any proper extent, and it showed. When I reposted this post to another blog, a mostly liberal audience was mostly hostile to my confused writing, although some managed to pierce through the my frozen bitterness at the loss of five hours of lawyer wages and see the point I was trying to make. A few saw through my poor writing and just disagreed - good for them.
I will condense my points into simpler language here.
1. Most White Americans identify as "white" to a greater or lesser extent. To identify oneself or something else is to draw a circle and define what's in and what's outside of that circle.
2. White identity is not the same concept as identifying as an American, as a Westerner (as in Western Civilization) or as a person of general or specific European descent. Many Americans, Westerners and Europeans do not identify or get identified as "white" in the specific American sense of the word. While skin color is an element of white identity, but not a reliable boundary marker.
3. Most white Americans had European ancestors who did not identify self-consciously as white, but rather as something else (such as by nation, region, religion, etc.) When those ancestors flew or sailed here, most of them melted into the Melting Pot of American identity, but that Melting Pot also contained the element of white identity for most or all of them. They became white but did not identify as white before they "melted," since European identities focused on other issues.
4. Identity means "if and only if, THEN...." . It is hard to fill into the blank of "if
and only if you are a white American, THEN you are very likely to be/do this: ___________." If there is no meaningful answer to the foregoing fill-in-the-blank, then whiteness itself may already be past its shelf life. Many things pass the "if" test but not the "only if" part.
Some might say that some aspects of Southern culture are so solidly identified with whiteness - NASCAR, country music and some religious traditions come to mind - that one could make a case for a regional white identity, maybe. Southern white identity may have some real defining cultural content, but American white identity plays out in all fifty states, including places where Southern music, stock car racing and Southern religious traditions have no meaning for local residents. When Northern whites move south, terms like "Damyankee" and "Carpetbagger" have sometimes greeted them to emphasize the
lack of white unity between the North and the South. Even today the town of Cary, North Carolina is known as the acronym for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Southern whiteness is different from American whiteness as a whole. It does not pass the "if and only if" test.
If you are white, odds are pretty good that you have much more in common with members of your:
- religion;
- ethnic group;
- college;
- profession or trade;
- economic class;
- political party;
- region in the U.S.; or
- your hobbies or interests,
than you do with other whites as whites, i.e. "if and only if" things in common as whites.
If whiteness in and of itself had a lot of heart-felt meaning to white people, "white pride festivals" would not be hate group events for the violent anti-social fringe. 20 million drinkers want to play Irish on St. Patrick's Day, but you can't get a "white pride day" off the ground and likely would not want to. Why? Because being Irish has some meaning and feeling behind it for Irish-Americans and the legions of "Irish for a day", but whiteness in itself doesn't seem to have much draw, much meaning, for the overwhelming majority of socially adjusted white people.
Marxist critics have criticized the use of race as a means of keeping working people from uniting based on economic class. I am no Marxist but you need not accept Marxist ideology to see how
plastering Willie Horton's obviously black face on a advertisement helped George H. W. Bush to get elected President in 1988. Had Willie Horton looked like George Clooney or George Jetson, one suspects that the reaction of white voters would have been somewhat different. Whether it truly won the race for Bush is a historical point; Dukakis' campaign was infamously inept across the board and managed to lose a 17 point lead. But
Lee Atwater, the architect of Bush's hardest hitting campaign tactics, later repented shortly before his death and apologized to Dukakis for this race-based manipulation of white voters.
If white identity exists primarily for the convenience of political spinners and hate mongers, but has little other meaning of its own, we shouldn't miss it much once it is gone.
