The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

W hiteness lies at the heart of American degradation, we are told constantly by figures on the left these days. After the horrifying, disgraceful January 6 attack on the national Capitol Building, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that rioters “have chosen their whiteness over democracy. That’s what this is about.” Progressives blame whiteness for creating COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on minority communities and insist that racial justice, not the vulnerability of the elderly, should determine vaccination priority because “older populations are whiter.” They denounce education for offering a “monolithic, European perspective” that “upholds Whiteness.” They dismiss old-fashioned journalistic standards of even-handedness because “the views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.” They discern the insidious influence of whiteness in religion, law, sports, and entertainment.

Whiteness, according to this pervasive left-wing narrative, inspires and shapes all problems in the United States, which therefore must be relentlessly racialized in order to root whiteness out. As one critic who accuses Greek and Roman classical texts of undergirding a Western civilization of racial repression recently put it, “Classics and whiteness are the bone and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together and they may have to die together.” To such ends a flotilla of progressive Ahabs grimly pursues the whale of whiteness into every inlet and channel of American life with political harpoons poised and ready to strike.

This ideological assault invites several questions. What exactly is whiteness? How does it work? Where did this influential paradigm come from? The search for answers, unsurprisingly, leads to the academic world, where nearly everything that is disturbingly extremist in modern leftist discourse seems to percolate before spilling out into the public arena. A good starting point is in the field of American history, where two books appeared about 30 years ago that provided the Ur-texts for the modern gospel of whiteness.

The notion of whiteness emerged from debates among academic leftists near the end of the Reagan/Bush era. They were wrestling with the old American political anomaly: why working-class whites supposedly voted against their own interests by failing to embrace socialism. The recent appearance of Reagan Democrats and growing working-class support for the Republican Party had been a particularly galling development. Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), followed closely by David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), attempted to tackle this “problem” with a new perspective. “Whiteness,” each book claimed in its own way, explained all.

Saxton’s White Republic examined the dynamic development of the United States in the 19th century and reached a striking conclusion: White racism was its driving force. In his “ideological interpretation,” Saxton posited that a white man’s nation had emerged from the intersecting efforts of Southern slaveholders, Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs who pursued racist social and economic policies, frontier novelists and blackface minstrel performers, Republican ideologues who joined opportunity and egalitarianism with the glue of white racism, scientists who advocated Social Darwinism, and trade unionists who marginalized black workers to achieve white, working-class solidarity. In Saxton’s rendering, the story of America is one of creating a “white republic” by using racism to strengthen and legitimate industrial capitalism.

Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness took the racial analysis a step further. Also focusing on the United States in the 1800s, he contended that not just racism but also a deeply cynical notion of “whiteness” had been foisted onto the working class. Beginning with the modern scientific conclusion that race is not biological but socially constructed, Roediger claimed that “it has become possible to ask bedrock questions such as, ‘What makes some people think they are white?’ and “When did white people become white?’” He drew upon W. E. B. Du Bois, the notable African-American Marxist intellectual, who had asserted in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that shrewd capitalists had bought off industrial workers with a “psychological wage” of “whiteness” — something like, “No matter how oppressive the work discipline or class oppression you face, at least you are superior to blacks.” This was the foundation for Roediger’s argument that the “wages of whiteness” fueled the development of American capitalism, only now the old Marxist process of class formation was accompanied, and perhaps superseded, by a process of race formation. A racial manipulation of language provided one means of shaping a cross-class white identity, as when the traditional republican word “freeman,” indicating an independent voter and worker, took on a racial coloration to denote a contrast with “unfree” black slaves. The gradual whitening of immigrants, such as the Irish, as they poured into the United States in the mid 1800s, provided another. Ultimately, complicit industrial laborers joined greedy capitalists to embrace the notion that they were white, and hence superior to a “degraded” black race. In Roediger’s grand reformulation, the consolidation of modern industrial capitalism depended on a sordid series of race-mongering maneuvers that sullied notions of equality and justice, hamstrung efforts at working-class solidarity, and guaranteed the ongoing oppression of African Americans.

The recasting of American history in White Republic and Wages of Whiteness inspired an avalanche of whiteness studies that inundated a leftist-dominated American academy. Over the next three decades, dozens of articles and books poured forth exploring every possible facet of whiteness and its corruptions. Not content with dominating lecture halls and conference rooms, whiteness acolytes swept it into the public realm as they spread the message of “white privilege” and “systemic racism” into our public discourse. The Black Lives Matter organization, as well as the controversial 1619 Project, which seeks to revamp the grade-school and secondary-school curriculum in the United States around a central theme of racial oppression, eventually emerged from whiteness studies.

A close look at Saxton’s and Roediger’s formulations, however, reveals enormous problems. One involves historical explanation. To anyone not predisposed to conversion, the gospel of whiteness obfuscates more than it reveals about the American experience. To begin with, we never really know exactly what whiteness is. This promiscuous concept sometimes appears as just another word for racist ideas, while other times it connotes power, material benefit, social opportunity, or just about anything else its adherents desire. In his book’s introduction alone, Roediger defines whiteness as a “racial identity,” an “ethnicity,” “status and privileges conferred by race,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of work discipline.” This grab bag of meanings suggests that whiteness is little more than a deus ex machina lowered onto the historical stage to wondrously resolve a tangle of problems. Too wondrously.

Moreover, we seldom see how whiteness actually works in the real world. This reified concept hovers above lived experience, mysteriously bending the arc of history. The underlying problem is a paucity, or distortion, of supporting facts, which leaves Saxton and Roediger pounding many evidentiary square pegs into explanatory round holes. For example, Saxton excoriates the Whig Party in the 1830s and 1840s for its combination of capitalist bias and elitist racism, but cites as his main example John Quincy Adams, one of America’s staunchest opponents of slavery. Roediger misleads similarly with his jaundiced analysis of “freeman.” This term and its partner, “free labor,” indeed took on a racialized meaning in antebellum America that contrasted with the bound labor of African-American slaves. But it also became the central feature of the anti-slavery movement as it fueled growing denunciations of slave labor, prompted opposition to its expansion into the western territories, and inspired the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1850s.

Both historians suffer the same blind spot. They portray a 19th-century America in which citizens either embraced black freedom and equality without reservation or embraced whiteness. This produces not a gathering of information and fair-minded analysis that leads to a measured judgment, the historian’s task, but a process where evidence is cherry-picked or twisted to buttress a predetermined conclusion. It oversimplifies the messy, tangled, multifaceted development of the American republic, replete with ambiguous motivations and unintended consequences, and replaces it with a simplistic morality play where all whites are racists outright, or racist dupes. The monocausal steamroller of whiteness history, lumbering about amid historical complexity, simply flattens the American past.

The clinching example is the Civil War. Surely the central event in American history, one that tore the country apart and was inexorably bound up with race, politics, social values, and economic development, would have supplied a linchpin in these arguments for the centrality of whiteness. Curiously, it doesn’t. Saxton ignores the Civil War almost completely, only briefly mentioning it in a half-dozen different spots. And Roediger, almost as briefly, simply makes the facile claim that it was a “white man’s war” between Southern defenders of black slavery and Northern defenders of class slavery. Why this neglect of the Civil War? Perhaps because of the fact, inconvenient for whiteness theorists, that hundreds of thousands of ordinary white Northerners died in a conflict originally devoted to stopping the spread of black slavery, and ultimately aimed at abolishing it.

The implications of Saxton’s and Roediger’s whiteness schema for solving America’s racial problems discloses more difficulties. In a sign of things to come for leftist politics, it frames the issue as a matter of identity, only for white Americans instead of marginalized groups. This self-defeating formulation not only constructs a tribal gathering spot where right-wing extremists are all too happy to assemble, but also cuts off other means of rectification. Political movements, legislation, religious exhortation can accomplish little against the scourge of whiteness. The only solution is therapeutic atonement: a public confession of racial sins, followed by reeducation, as white people struggle to reconfigure their identity. Interracial understanding, cooperation, and alliance in pursuit of equality and justice are impossible.

The analytical and programmatic problems of The White Republic and Wages of Whiteness stem from the radical political agenda informing them. They are not so much historical texts as political polemics that weaponize history in the service of revolution. Both Saxton and Roediger, as they freely admit, are Marxists who seek to modify that framework by elevating race to an equal place with class in unmasking the oppressions of modern capitalism. Saxton, who died in 2012, was a member of the American Communist Party throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s and wrote a column for the Daily Worker before entering the academy to pursue activist scholarship. Roediger’s background with Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s led to subsequent involvement with an eclectic array of Marxist groups and projects and an occasional flirtation with anarchism. His political hero is John Brown, whose “nonwhite radicalism” sent him to the ramparts alongside black “freedom fighters.” (Brown’s murderous rampages in Kansas and his attempt to foment a race war with the ill-fated Harper’s Ferry raid go unmentioned.) The White Republic and Wages of Whiteness were published by Verso, the legendary radical-left press that advertises its books as “of interest to socialists both in the USA and throughout the world” and dedicates them to a “living legacy of political activism and commitment.” For Roediger’s and Saxton’s coterie, anti-racism and anti-capitalism are synonymous.

Milan Kundera, in his brilliant novel of ideas The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), suggests a final reflection on the radical politics of whiteness. The book coins a term for the rapturous utopianism of the socialist Left: the Grand March. Noting that lofty political movements rest on images, dreams, and archetypes, he writes that the “fantasy of the Grand March . . . is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. . . . [It] is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be.” While this may seem a sentimental, harmless conceit, he continues, it conceals a dogmatic darkness, and “the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.” For Kundera, the burden of such strident, single-minded political absolutism weighs down lives and helps make the natural lightness of being unbearable.

The Grand March of whiteness studies presents its own version of this flaw, one that might cause thoughtful observers to lower their fists and step out of line. Eradicating racism is a salutary, indeed necessary, endeavor among a humane, free citizenry living in a democratic republic. But automatically attributing racist expressions, inclinations, and creations to all white people by dint of the color of their skin, regardless of their actual opinions, beliefs, characters, histories, and actions, simply offers racism as a cure for racism. It proposes, in reverse, what too many whites have done to too many blacks for too many years. For all of us, that is truly unbearable.