Feb. 25, 2012 at 6:40pm with 14 notes
Reblogged from sijemesouviensbien

sijemesouviensbien:

interruptions:

sijemesouviensbien:

interruptions replied to your post: No.

I’ve never understood quite what Dag means when he says whiteness is a legal construct - it has a genealogy bound up with juridical norms, definitely, but it just so obviously seems to go far beyond that.

What seems to go far beyond that? Whiteness or its genealogy? I no longer buy the whole whiteness as ontological property of white subjects thing. He talks about it as if it’s a property and not a perception. That’s why the whole thing is bunk. 

What I mean is that whiteness is more than its articulation in legal institutions. It’s embodied in a network of norms and practices that penetrate much more deeply into our social lives than just to our relationship with state authority. I don’t think Dag would actually deny that, which is why I scratch my head when he describes whiteness as first and foremost a legal construct.

The thing is we talk about whiteness as a hypostatization. No, it does not penetrate our social lives if we acknowledge it’s there, we are not somehow perpetrating or engaging in Whiteness. White privilege, legally speaking, is a completely separate issue which exists and is undeniable. But to claim that whiteness exists in all of us is absolutely ridiculous. You’d have to define all the exemplary facets of normative whiteness and then define how they’re exclusively white as opposed to influenced by all the cultures that have mixed, and even just with respect to here in the U.S. that would prove untenable.

So, the context I use to try and think through some of these issues is the intercollegiate debate community. Many of the black men and women doing anti-racist work in that community described it as “suffused with whiteness” - by which they didn’t mean that there were lots of white people participating, exactly (though there were) but that they experienced certain practices and discourses within the community as norming whiteness. So, for instance, African-American Vernacular English speakers perform worse competitively than Standard English speakers, the lived experiences of people of color are frequently delegitimated when narrative accounts are used as evidence in debates, and there are some other, more idiosyncratic features of the style of debate I participated in that are implicated in this that I wont get into. My point is that I’m not really all that interested in talking about whiteness as something that “exists in all of us”, but I do think that we can talk meaningfully about whiteness as something that the norms and practices that generate white privilege participate in. I don’t really want to pick up any ontological commitments here, I just think this is a useful way to frame discourse about certain features of our social reality.

So I largely disagree that it’s this mode of Being. That’s nonsense. I’m white for the purposes of the U.S. census, but I’ve never experienced myself as white in my community, nor in my native country. I would argue that it’s a dominant sociocultural hegemony that contingently takes different forms in the major European countries and the U.S. The norms we have here which embody whiteness are not exactly commensurable to the norms of other countries. It’s naive to think that because there exists a systematic oppression of PoC that they haven’t contributed to the norms and practices of the dominant sociocultural hegemony; in fact, it’s the 21st century and it would be ridiculous to assume said hegemony hasn’t adapted to the proliferation of different demographics.

I think we’re on the same page as far as the contingency of different forms of sociocultural hegemony. I’m not even sure what our point of disagreement is, if there is one. I’m just trying to think out loud a bit.

  1. dourque reblogged this from machistado