". . . Scholars from many fields throughout the country will bring together their work in "white studies" for the conference. Titled "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness," it is sponsored by UC Berkeley's Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies.
"The event reflects a growing interest in understanding whiteness both as a specific race and as a social category which has played a central role in perpetuating inequality.
"Partial titles from some of the approximately 30 speakers are provocative: "The Yiddish are Coming," "You're Stealing my Soul," "The Not-So-Great White Way," "How 'Gay' Stays White," and "Loss of Privilege Inside White Working Class Masculinity in the 1990s."
"The study of whiteness is both comparative, in that whiteness is understood as one specific race among others, and critical, in that whiteness is generally viewed as a socially-constructed identity which has historically helped to perpetuate social inequalities.
"Our aim is to present the study of whiteness as an example of interdisciplinary studies in action; at the same time, we want to call attention to the specificity of what it means to be critical of whiteness in a society which has traditionally valued 'white folks' above all others. . . "
Against that backdrop, please look at some of the abstracts:
Allan Bérubé, Independent Scholar and Community Historian,
on:
"How Gay Stays White":
". . . This personal essay is an attempt to see and speak about some of the ways that gay white use our whiteness. We often inhabit whiteness as an imagined refuge from racial conflict, an erotic category seemingly unmarked by race, and a way to make our gay worlds seem comfortably familiar to our families of origin. We use the power of whiteness both as a shield against anti-gay discrimination and as a way to keep our meeting places and organizations from being "taken over" by gay men of color. By exploring several episodes from my own life where "gay male" has already been racialized as white, I try to see how that whiteness is maintained, and under what conditions we can let go of our investment in the unearned power and privileges it grants us . . . "
Michelle Fine CUNY Graduate Center, on: "You're Stealing My Soul":
Preserving Whiteness as Quality in Public High School":
". . . (T)hrough a critical analysis of four "scenes of whiteness" (Fine) will probe the ways in which whiteness is preserved as quality in standard whitetalk by students, the ways in which faculty can self-consciously dislodge whiteness as center, the strategies by which the School Board, representing the Sate, (sic) works to reinstate whiteness as privilege, and the fractured and contradictory dynamics within the class and between students and their families . . . "
John Hartigan, Department of Anthropology and Sociology Knox College, on:
"Establishing the Fact of Whiteness":
". . . I argue that the problem of whiteness needs to be partially reatriculated through an attention to the multiplicity of manners in which racialness is significant locally, nationally, and globally. The task of determining what whiteness "is" leads to an attention to the conflation of racial and class identities following the contours of place specific dynamics that undermine the clarity and certainty of whiteness as an object of cultural critique . . . "
Eric Lott, Department of Literature, University of Virginia, on:
"Race Traitor, Patriot, Iceman, Pig: The New Discourses of Whiteness":
". . . My paper argues that . . . current discussions of whiteness may in fact be little less than displaced or distorted attempts--whether self-consciously anarchist, right-libertarian, Afro sci-fi, conspiratorial, or downright realist--to imagine the "withering away" of the contemporary American state. . . "
Steve Martinot, Independent Scholar, on: "Racialized Whiteness: its
Meaning, History, and Politics":
". . . The structure of whiteness that I analyze is what reveals itself behind the notion that whites racialize others as non-white in order to racialize themselves as white. . . "
Walter Benn Michaels, Department of American Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
on: "Whiteness as Social Construct?":
". . . This paper will argue that . . . if races do not exist as biological entities, there are no such things as races. . . "
Annalee Newitz, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley"
on: "On the Whiteness of the Police":
". . . the police themselves are considered to be among the most viriulently racist group of workers in the United States. Recent media spectacles such as the Rodney King beating video, and Mark Fuhrman's bizarre testimony in the OJ Simpson trial, have confirmed and reiterated the popular notion that white racism is in some way enforced by the police . . . "
John Powell, University of Minnesota, on: "The Fluidity of the Self
and the Stability of Race":
". . . What I proposed to write and speak on is the racial implications of this socially constructed multiple self. In our understanding of multiplicity, there is often the insight that we are made up of what is there and what is excluded. . . "
Jasbir Puar, Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies University of California,
Berkeley, on: "Transnational Configurations of Desire: The Nation and
its White Closets":
". . . The links between modernity and whiteness are particularly evident in the case of traveling transnational queer bodies which are interpellated through discourses of the INS, tourism, gay and lesbian marriages, asylum laws, human rights, and globalized queer 'liberation' movements, as well as conceptualizations of 'queer diasporas'. . . "
Sorry, folks. I couldn't help myself. You have seen the film "One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?
Here I must tell you a story that fits, out of my own college days:
We had in our class this huge, black man whose name was Napoleon Jones.
Mr. Jones supported himself as a part time nurses' aide in a local mental
hospital re-christened Rehab Center.
Periodically this Rehab Center put on dances at which the staff were required
to give the patients therapeutic whirls.
Thus, Napoleon danced with a tiny white lady who chirped: "My name
is Beatrice. What's yours?"
Napoleon trumpeted: "Napoleon!"
The lady patient, meditatively: "And all this time I thought you were
an orderly."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Eggheads, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!"
(Adlai Stevenson)