Whiteness Studies The New History of Race in AmericaAu.docx

Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America
Author(s): Peter Kolchin
Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jun.,
2002), pp. 154-173
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of
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Whiteness Studies: The New History
of Race in America
Peter Kolchin
Suddenly whiteness studies are everywhere. The rapid
proliferation of a genre that
appears to have come out of nowhere is little short of
astonishing: a recent keyword
search on my university library's electronic catalog yielded
fifty-one books containing
the word "whiteness" in their titles, almost all published in the
past decade and most
published in the past five years.1 All around us, American
historians and scholars in
related disciplines from sociology and law to cultural studies
and education are writ-
ing books with titles such as The White Scourge, How the Irish
Became White, Making
Whiteness, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and
Critical White Studies.2
Although the term "whiteness studies" might at first glance
suggest works that pro-
mote white identity or constitute part of a racist backlash
against multiculturalism
and "political correctness," virtually all the whiteness studies
authors seek to confront
white privilege-that is, racism-and virtually all identify at some
level with the
political Left. Most of them see a close link between their
scholarly efforts and the

goal of creating a more humane social order.
Whiteness studies authors manifest a wide variety of
approaches. In many of the
disciplines outside history, prescriptive policy goals assume a
central position; writing
on whiteness in education, for example, Nelson M. Rodriguez
calls for the creation
of "'pedagogies of whiteness' as a counterhegemonic act"
predicated on the need to
"refigure whiteness in antiracist, antihomophobic, and
antisexist ways."3 Although
Peter Kolchin is Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the
University of Delaware.
I would like to thank Margaret L. Andersen, Anne M. Boylan,
Lori Ginzberg, and the graduate students in my
advanced seminar (Tracey Birdwell, Evelyn Causey, John
Davies, Karen Ryder, and Christine Sears) for helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Readers may contact Kolchin at <[email protected]>.
1 DELCAT search,
<http://www.lib.udel.edu/databases/delcat.html> (Sept. 26,
2001). Of the 51 titles, 3 have
publication dates before 1990, 3 from 1990 to 1993, 12 from
1994 to 1997, and 33 from 1998 to September
2001. The figures do not represent a precise and all-inclusive
total of whiteness studies books: a few, including the
oldest (a 1943 work on visual perception), are unrelated to the
field, and other whiteness studies books are not on
the list because the word "whiteness" does not appear in their
titles. Whiteness articles are vastly more numerous:
an online search of Expanded Academic ASAP (published by

Gale Group) yielded 373 references to works pub-
lished since 1985 containing "whiteness" in their titles,
citations, or abstracts.
2 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor
Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997);
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995);
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Cul-
ture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998);
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in White-
ness: How White People Profitfrom Identity Politics
(Philadelphia, 1998); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds.,
Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror
(Philadelphia, 1997).
3 Nelson M. Rodriguez, "Emptying the Content of Whiteness:
Toward an Understanding of the Relation
154 The Journal of American History June 2002
2019 15:29:43 UTC
Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 155
such didacticism is far from absent in the work of whiteness
studies historians, their
focus has been on the construction of whiteness-how diverse
groups in the United
States came to identify, and be identified by others, as white-
and what that has
meant for the social order. Starting from the now widely shared

premise that race is
an ideological or social construct rather than a biological fact,
they have at least par-
tially shifted attention from how Americans have looked at
blacks to how they have
looked at whites, and to whiteness as a central component of
Americans' racial ideol-
ogy. In doing so, they have already had a substantial impact on
historians whose work
does not fall fully within the rubric of whiteness studies but
who have borrowed
some of the field's insights, concerns, and language.4
This essay represents an effort by a sympathetic but critical
outsider to come to
grips with this burgeoning field. I will deal primarily with
historical literature,
although I will refer to works in other disciplines, and I will
pay particular attention
to two books that are among the best and most influential of the
whiteness studies
works: David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness and
Matthew Frye Jacobson's
Whiteness of a Different Color.5 Because the two books differ
from each other in
important respects, they reveal both the diversity within and
the common assump-
tions behind whiteness studies, and they suggest some of the
insights and potential
pitfalls of the genre. My aim is to produce not so much a final
evaluation of a finished
project as a tentative progress report on a literature still very
much in evolution.6

One of the earliest of the historical whiteness works, The
Wages of Whiteness (1991)
focuses on how white workers in the antebellum United States
came to identify as
white. Roediger's essential starting point is that because the
white working class in
the United States emerged in a slaveholding republic, its
members came to define
themselves by what they were not: slaves and blacks. Building
on Alexander Saxton's
analysis of the "ambivalent stance" of white workers in a racist
society, Roediger pays
particular attention to the efforts of Irish immigrants-who faced
such extreme prej-
udice that "it was by no means clear that the[y] were white"-to
differentiate them-
between Whiteness and Pedagogy," in White Reign: Deploying
Whiteness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe et al.
(New York, 1998), 33.
4 See, for example, Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
Wenches, andAnxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and
Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Walter
Johnson, Soul by Soul. Life inside the Antebellum Slave Mar-
ket (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Ariela J. Gross, Double
Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern
Courtroom (Princeton, 2000); and Bruce Nelson, Divided We
Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black
Equality (Princeton, 2001).
5David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (New York,
1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color:

European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1998). See also the revised edition of Roediger's
Wages, which reprints the original edition with the
original pagination, adding an "Afterword" and a list of
"Selected Critical Writings": David R. Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York, 1999), 185-89, 190.
6 Extensive scholarly commentary on the whiteness studies
literature is just beginning to appear. A symposium
that appeared too late to consult in preparation for this article
includes a sharply critical essay by Eric Arnesen with
responses (also mostly critical) by six historians: "Scholarly
Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians' Imagina-
tion," International Labor and Working-Class History (no. 60,
Fall 2001), 1-92. For a perceptive evaluation that
focuses on works by nonhistorians, see Margaret L. Andersen,
"Whitewashing Race: A Critical Review Essay on
'Whiteness,"' in Deconstructing Whiteness, Deconstructing
White Supremacy, ed. Woody Doane and Eduardo Bo-
nilla-Silva (New York, forthcoming).
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selves from black slaves, establish their own whiteness, and
thereby prove their
Americanness. (This argument receives further elaboration in
Noel Ignatiev's sugges-
tively titled book, How the Irish Became White.)7

Roediger combines the emphasis on class that one would expect
of a labor histo-
rian with some decidedly nontraditional-postmodern-touches.
He displays a par-
ticular sensitivity to the significance of language, from
metaphorical attacks on
British "slavery" by American revolutionaries to use of the
terms "wage slavery" and
especially "white slavery" to describe the condition of free
white workers; in rejecting
the word "servant" in favor of "hand" or "help," he suggests,
"farm and household
workers ... were becoming white workers who identified their
freedom and their dig-
nity in work as being suited to those who were 'not slaves' and
'not negurs."' He also
provides an intriguing if highly speculative psychological
argument that as the coun-
try industrialized, the increasingly controlled and disciplined
white population came
to view blacks as their former, uninhibited selves, a perception
highlighted in the
"acting out" evident in the newly popular blackface and
minstrelsy, in which partici-
pants could "both display and reject the 'natural self."' And, in
a practice he shares
with many other whiteness studies authors-especially those
working in disciplines
other than history-Roediger foregrounds himself and his
subjective reaction to his
subject, beginning the book with a personal narrative of his
own route from a racist
past.8
Although Matthew Frye Jacobson's overall subject is the same
as Roediger's how

people came to "be" white-his subjects are European
immigrants to the United
States over the long period from 1790 to 1965, and his focus is
on how other Ameri-
cans perceived those immigrants, not on their self-perception.
Jacobson's broad scope
enables him to depart from a binary (black/white) view of race
and to explore the
close, troubling, and troublesome relationship among race,
ethnicity, and national-
ity.9 Revealing the extraordinary malleability of American
conceptualizations of race,
Jacobson outlines a three-stage chronological progression of
racial categorization.
From the 1790s to the 1840s, in an era of relatively few
immigrants, Americans saw
people as either white or black. Between the 1840s and the
1920s, a period of mas-
sive foreign immigration and pervasive prejudice against
various immigrant groups,
there emerged a pattern of "variegated whiteness" in which
some groups appeared
better-whiter-than others. Finally, beginning in the 1920s, with
immigration
restriction, color again triumphed as a badge of race, and
Americans came to see-
and celebrate the diversity of-a "Caucasian" race that
encompassed diverse nation-
alities previously deemed racially deficient. "To trace the
process by which Celts or
7Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 134; Alexander Saxton, The
Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics
and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York,
1990); Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.

8 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 49, 116, 3-5.
9 Another book moves beyond a binary treatment of race by
focusing on the interaction among whites, blacks,
and Mexicans in central Texas: see Foley, White Scourge. For
the suggestion that "adding Indians to the picture
changes our view of the history of race in the South," see
Ariela Gross, "Beyond Black and White: Cultural
Approaches to Race and Slavery," Columbia Law Review, 101
(April 2001), 681. Roediger has recently praised the
effort to move beyond the black/white racial framework of The
Wages of Whiteness; see David R. Roediger, "The
Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-
1860," Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter
1999), esp. 592-600.
2019 15:29:43 UTC
Slavs became Caucasians," Jacobson writes, "is to recognize
race as an ideological,
political deployment rather than as a neutral, biologically
determined element of
nature."10
Although sharing Roediger's interest in the construction of
race, his didactic goal
in exposing that construction, and his belief in the centrality of
race-and racism-
to American history, Jacobson differs from Roediger in

approaching the past almost
entirely in cultural terms. Indeed, he suggests that in focusing
too heavily on "class
and economics," Roediger is overly deterministic and misses
"the full complexity of
whiteness in its vicissitudes." Dealing principally with
perceptions of immigrants
rather than with the immigrants themselves, Jacobson is more
concerned with images
and representations than with actual social relations. (This
"American studies"
approach is even more pronounced in Grace Elizabeth Hale's
book Making White-
ness, which delineates the emergence of a southern "culture of
segregation" in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Nevertheless, the
difference between
Jacobson's approach and Roediger's is more one of degree than
of essence: despite his
focus on the working class, Roediger pays careful attention to
cultural manifestations
and is hardly an economic determinist. Indeed, as I will suggest
below, if both Roedi-
ger and Jacobson start from the premise that race is artificial,
constructed, and with-
out inherent meaning, in some ways Roediger appears even less
inclined than
Jacobson to see race as a function of concrete-class-
relationships.
One's first reaction to Roediger's and Jacobson's books-and to
the field of whiteness
studies in general-is likely to be excitement. Indeed, even after
repeated readings of
these books (in conjunction with using them in graduate
seminars), I still find myself

sharing in the students' typical feelings of discovery and
delight in a promising new
way to look at history. But a vague yet persistent sense of
unease is also a predictable
response. Although the precise nature of the unease may
emerge only gradually, it
centers on the elusive, undefined nature of whiteness and on
concern about overreli-
ance on whiteness in explaining the American past.
In approaching both the excitement and the unease generated
by whiteness stud-
ies, it is useful to begin with an understanding that underlies
the entire genre. White-
ness studies authors build on what is now a historical (and
biological and
anthropological) commonplace: race is a "construct" rather than
an objective way of
explaining differences among human beings. There are varying
versions of this pro-
cess: historians typically refer to either the "social,"
"historical," or "ideological" con-
struction of race; according to the anthropologist Edgar T.
Thompson, "races are
made in culture, not found in nature"; the biologist Stephen Jay
Gould rebuts what
he terms "biological determinism"-the belief that "shared
behavioral norms . . .
arise from inherited, inborn distinctions." But all the versions
mean essentially the
10 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 14.
11 Ibid., 18; Hale, Making Whiteness. In criticizing Roediger
for focusing too heavily on economics, Jacobson

also targets TheodoreW Allen's account of the rise of white
racial consciousness in the English mainland American
colonies. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White
Race (2 vols., New York, 1994-1997).
2019 15:29:43 UTC
same thing: race is "made" by humans; how humans have
assigned people to one race
or another has varied dramatically over time and space; and
racial categorizations
have no intrinsic meaning or validity aside from the particular
social circumstances
that engender them.12
An almost infinite number of examples illustrate the
constructed nature of race-
and of whiteness in particular. Although the well-known "one-
drop rule" dictates
that in the United States anyone with the slightest bit of black
"blood" be categorized
as black, there is no particular logic to labeling people black
who are part white and
part black, and in some places they are not so labeled. Two
possibly apocryphal sto-
ries drive home the arbitrary character of such racial
categorization. According to
one, the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier insisted that the
Haitian population was

98 percent white. Asked by a puzzled American how this could
be, he responded
with a question: "How do you define black in your country?"
"Receiving the expla-
nation that in the United States anyone with any black blood
was considered black,
Duvalier nodded and said, 'Well, that's the way we define white
in my country."'
Equally telling is a story about the Mexican War: "When
Americans marched into
the Mexican city of Saltillo in 1847, they were greeted by a
woman from New Jersey,
who worked in a Mexican textile mill. 'Americans I am glad to
see you,' she
exclaimed. 'I have seen but one white man in eight months, a
negro from New
Orleans.""3
But perhaps the most striking example of the arbitrary and
changing nature of
race, cited by Jacobson, is to be found in Benjamin Franklin's
remarkable classifica-
tion of the world's population in 1751:
All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America
(exclusive of the newcom-
ers [that is, the English]) wholly so. And in Europe, the
Spaniards, Italians, French,
Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy
complexion; as are the
Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the
English, make the principal
body of white people on the face of the earth.
What clearer evidence could current Americans need of the

subjectivity of race than
Franklin's insistence that Germans and Swedes were
nonwhite?14
Whereas the immediate excitement about whiteness studies
stems from their new
way of underscoring the subjectivity of race, the accompanying
unease relates to the
version of that subjectivity that the whiteness studies authors
propound. The seminal
historical statement on the construction of race, of which the
construction of white-
12 Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations,
and the South: The Regimentation of Populations
(Durham, 1975), 325; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of
Man (New York, 1981), 20. See also Joseph L.
Graves Jr., The Emperors New Clothes: Biological Theories of
Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, 2001). For a
prominent historian's recent assertion that "historical
construction" of race is more accurate than "social construc-
tion," see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,
Mass., 1998), 1.
13 For the first story, see Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race
in American History," in Region, Race, and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J.
Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New
York, 1982), 146; for the second, see David Montgomery,
"Empire, Race, and Working-Class Mobilizations," in
Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in
Britain, the USA, and Africa, ed. Peter Alexander and
Rick Halpern (Houndsmill, Eng., 2000), 15.

14Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 40.
2019 15:29:43 UTC
ness is a variant, is to be found in Barbara J. Fields's
influential essay "Ideology and
Race in American History" (1982). Noting that "ideas about
color, like ideas about
anything else, derive their importance, indeed their very
definition, from their con-
text," Fields warned against reifying racial "attitudes," which
have no meaning aside
from their concrete historical setting. "An understanding of
how groups of people see
other groups in relation to themselves must begin by analyzing
the pattern of their
social relation," she explained, "-not by enumerating 'attitudes'
which, endowed
with independent life, are supposed to act upon the historical
process from outside."
Suggesting that there can be no such thing as a generalized
"white" attitude toward
"blacks" (or, one might add, toward "whites"), she argued that
race is shaped by con-
crete human interactions, particularly by class relations.
Because race is a subjective
ideological construct whereas class "can assert itself
independently of people's con-
sciousness"-that is, class can be an objective category-"class
and race are concepts

of a different order; they do not occupy the same analytical
space, and thus cannot
constitute explanatory alternatives to each other."'15
Fields's formulation of the construction of race frames a set of
tricky problems cen-
tering on the reality, pervasiveness, and permanence of
whiteness and especially its
relationship to concrete historical conditions. Scholars
approach the problems in dif-
ferent ways. Some explain whiteness as a direct function of
dominant economic
interests. According to the historian Theodore W Allen, for
example, the "white
race was invented by the "plantation bourgeoisie" in order to
facilitate its oppression
of African slaves. Similarly, the anthropologist Karen Brodkin
maintains that in the
United States Jews were treated as racially different so that
they could be exploited as
industrial laborers. "Initially invented to justify a brutal but
profitable regime of slave
labor," she explains, "race became the way America organized
labor and the explana-
tion it used to justify it as natural."'16
Leery of an approach that they see as overly deterministic,
Jacobson and Roedi-
ger-along with many other whiteness studies authors-go to the
other extreme, not
only denying that race is a direct function of dominant class
interest, but coming
close to portraying race as a ubiquitous and unchanging
transhistorical force rather

than a shifting and contingent "construction." Reflecting a
broad-based, ongoing
shift in the historical profession from social to cultural history,
they are more com-
fortable discussing "tropes" than actual social relations, and
they display notable
unease about coming to grips with class, interest, and power.
Jacobson explains that
class has received enough attention from others and that he will
therefore emphasize
"other areas." Hale, in her delineation of the "culture of
segregation," almost totally
ignores class-indeed, power relations of any sort-speaking
broadly of the attitudes
of "whites," "southerners," and "Americans" as if these had
generalized meaning
divorced from their specific environment. Even Roediger, who
identifies himself as a
Marxist, firmly rejects the view that race is superstructural.
Specifically contesting
Fields's assertion that whereas race is entirely constructed,
class has both objective
15Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," 146, 149,
150.
16Allen, Invention of the White Race, II, 97; Karen Brodkin,
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says
about Race in America (New Brunswick, 1998), 75. See also
Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic.
2019 15:29:43 UTC

and subjective components, he maintains that neither race nor
class has meaning
aside from people's consciousness of them. Roediger
recognizes the problem: "To set
race within social formations is absolutely necessary," he
writes, "but to reduce race
to class is damaging." True enough, but in positing race and
class as equal-and
equally constructed-he backs away from examining race
"within social formations"
and implies that it has intrinsic meaning apart from specific
relations of power. 17
In short, there is a persistent dualism evident in the work of the
best whiteness
studies authors. At times, race-and more specifically,
whiteness-is treated as an
artificial construct with no real meaning aside from its
particular social setting; at
other times it becomes not only real, but omnipresent and
unchanging, deserving
attention as an independent force. Race appears as both real
and unreal, transitory
and permanent, ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and
nowhere, everything and
nothing. Many of the whiteness studies authors are aware of
this dualism and see it as

a reflection of a similar dualism in whiteness itself. "Whiteness
is everywhere in U.S.
culture," notes one, "but it is very hard to see"; "no one at this
point really knows
exactly what whiteness is," assert two others, even while
discussing its pervasiveness.
Observing that the white women she interviewed in California
did not feet white so
much as "normal" or "regular," the sociologist Ruth
Frankenberg calls whiteness "an
unmarked marker of others' differentness"; just as many people
consider their own
speech-unlike the accents they hear all around them-standard,
whiteness, even
while omnipresent, appears unrecognized except as that which
is normal. Jacobson
apologizes for not putting "race," "white," and other racial
"fabrications" in quota-
tion marks but then asserts that "race and races are American
history . .. ; to write
about race in American culture is to exclude virtually nothing."
The all-and-nothing
character of race challenges all the whiteness studies authors,
who must decide
whether race is-and explains-everything or nothing.18
The central question one must confront in evaluating whiteness
studies is the
salience of whiteness as an explanation for exploitation,
injustice, and, more gener-
ally, the American past. In addressing that question, the matter
of context becomes

crucial. Simply put, in making whiteness omnipresent,
whiteness studies authors risk
losing sight of contextual variations and thereby undermining
the very understand-
ing of race and whiteness as socially constructed.
17 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 21; Hale, Making
Whiteness; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 8. For
Roediger's discomfort with Barbara J. Fields's formulation of
the relationship between race and class, see David R.
Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on
Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York, 1994),
25-27. Iver Bernstein has suggested that Roediger's approach
"takes its cue from the recent critical writings of
George M. Fredrickson urging greater consideration of race as
an independent psychological category of analysis
and, like Fredrickson's work, calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois's
dissatisfaction with the materialist treatment of race
by American Marxists during the 1930s"; Iver Bernstein,
review of The Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger,
Journal ofAmerican History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 1120.
18 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 1; Joe L.
Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, "Addressing the Cri-
sis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy
of Whiteness," in White Reign, ed. Kincheloe et al.,
4; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social
Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993), 198;
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, ix-x, 11. One of the
first whiteness studies works to note this "everything-
and-nothing quality" was an …

C O N C L U S I O N
Thirteen Ways of Lookmg at Whiteness
Scholars of African hmerican literature have done as much as
anyone to
revitalize the study of the humanities in the late tsxentieth
century, but
there remains important ground to be turned in the history,
literature,
and rhetoric of American race relations. The relative absence of
white
tests in the discussion of racial discourse has allowed scholar
and
teacher alike to rely on black texts to shoulder the burden of
race theory
and race history; if a twentieth-century Lvhite test makes it into
a "liter-
ature of race" classroom, it is all too often a mere caricature, a
Gone with
the W%d or, worse, Thomas Dixon's Thr C / u m m n . T h s is
both unfortu-
nate and incomplete in much the same way that caricaturing
black writ-
ing or thinking was incomplete two or three decades ago.
African Xmer-
ican studies have long since destabilized notions of racial

identity held
I?P/IEJ~P~ groups; this book hopes to challenge the stubborn
idea of mono-
lithic racial identity, in this case "whiteness," ~ . ' i f h i ~ z a
particular group.
"We can agree that the notion of a unitary black man is as
imaginary
(and as real) as Tallace Stevens's blackbirds are; and yet to be a
black
man in twentieth-century America is to be heir to a set of
anxieties: be-
ginning with what it m a n s to be a black man," writes Henry
Louis Gates
Jr. in Thirteen Lf%.s oJ'Looki/g ut a BLuck i l h . "All of the
protagonists of
this book confront the 'burden of representation: the homely
notion
that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray
your race
or honor it. . . . Each, in his own way, rages against the dread
require-
ment t o represent; against the demands of 'authenticity' "
(xvii).
The same can be said of the white authors dmussed in this book.
All
four were white, but all four shuddered under the burden of the
corro-
sive racial and gender discourse of their day; their ambivalences

prove
that this discourse also damaged members of the "majority"
culture,
Co
py
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gh
t
@
19
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f
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ss
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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 9/16/2019
11:36 AM via INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA
AN: 137910 ; Jenkins, McKay.; The South in Black and White :
Race, Sex, and Literature in the
1940s
Account: s3915756.main.ehost
even, strangely enough, those who c o m p ~ l s i ~ e l r
perpetuated it. "The
paradigm of racc is the antithesis of freedom," John Edgar
Tideman
writes.
It locks white people in a morally and ethically indefensible
posi-
tion they must preserve by force. Fosters a myth of superiority
they must act out: dictates to them h o r n they should love and
hate. Since it sanctions and reinforces the idea that some people
are born better than others, deserve more than others, have an

in-
nate right, even duty, to seize from others what they want, the
par-
adigm of race is destructive to a n p n e not white, and
ultimately
also self-destructive for whites. A racist disposition towards
non-
whites, because it hardens the heart and rationalizes extremes of
selfishness and brutality, inevitably reappears in the way whites
re-
gard and treat other whites. The pervasive ~ i o l e n c e in our
soci-
ety-from domestic abuse to economic exploitation to capital
punishment to punitive expeditionary wars-is rooted in the par-
adigm of race. (xxv)
Carefully scrutinizing these texts, we can also tear apart the
notion
that even writers from the same race, time, and region
necessarily con-
structed race-their own or that of others-the same way. Looking
for
the contra&ctory, disjointed, even subversive shades u~zthh
"whiteness"

-looking, for example, at the difference gender and sexuality
make in
the way individual writers see race-also helps keep us vigilant
about
psychological as well as historical and regional specificity Just
as hfissis-
sippi has everything and nothing in common with South
Carolina, just
as Richard Wright has everything and nothing in common with
Zora
Neale Hurston, so does William Alexander Percy have
everything and
nothing in common with Carson McCullers. As with black texts,
once
white texts are relieved of the need to fall into line, to be
conceived of as
monochromatic and uniform, we can more easily understand the
con-
tradictions and nuances of color that exist within them. It is
interesting
to note, for example, that Smith and hlcCullers seemed so much
more
willing to esplore the psychosexual fault lines in their own
minds and
communities than Cash and Percy, who were otherwise so astute

in their
observation and analysis. Perhaps the two men were no less
aware of
these fault lines; perhaps they merely felt incapable of finding
the
courage or the language to express them. The construction of
Southern
masculinity has never allowed for frank discussion of emotion
and sex-
uality, and when that discussion involves sexual ambiguity or
lifelong
I 86 C O N C L U S I O N C
op
yr
ig
ht
@
1
99
9.
T
he
U
ni
ve
rs
it
y
of
N
or

th
C
ar
ol
in
a
Pr
es
s.
Al
l
ri
gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n
ot
b
e
re
pr
od
uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo

rm
w
it
ho
ut
p
er
mi
ss
io
n
fr
om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
ex
ce
pt
f
ai
r
us
es
p
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tt
ed
u
nd

er
U
.S
.
or
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w.
PENNSYLVANIA
1940s
impotence, it can only be forced underground. "'Vl'hite" texts-
and the
authors who write them-are as idiosyncratic and rhetorically
variable
one from the other as they are from "black texts; indeed, Smith

has
more in common rhetorically with Richard Wright than she does
with
McCullers, who was of the same race, class, home state, and (at
least in
part) sexual preference.
Beyond dismantling the idea of a monolithic "white" voice,
taldng
the next theoretical step-proving that "race" itself is merely a
mirage
constructed idiosyncraticall!- in the minds of each thinker-is a
rela-
tively easy mom. "Race only becomes 'real' as a social force
when indi-
viduals or groups beha-e toward each other in ways which
cithcr rcflcct
or perpetuate the hegemonic ideology of subordination and the
pat-
terns of inequality of daily lifc," writes the historian Manning
Marable in
Bqond Black and K'hite.
To move into the future will require that ve bury the racial
barri-
ers of the past, for good. T h e essential point of departure is

the
deconstruction of the idea of "whiteness," the ideology of white
power, privilege and elitism which remains heavily embedded
within the dominant culture, social institutions and economic
arrangements of the society. But we must d o more than
critique
the white pillars of race, gender and class domination. We must
re-
think and restructure the central social categories of collective
struggle by which we conceive and understand our own political
reality. We must redefine "blackness" and other traditional
racial
categories to be more inclusive of contemporary ethnic realities.
To be truly liberating, a social theory must reflect the actual
prob-
lems of a historical conjuncture with a cornmitmcnt to rigor and
scholastic truth. (199 -200)
Applying this thinking to "whiteness" helps move us in the same
di-
rection. If African American literary, historical, and legal
studies have

smashed the lens through which race has been viewed in this
country
for centuries, the study of white texts using these new reading
tech-
niques can help us take the nest step. We are now aware that
there are
multiple voices in our communities; we must now acknowledge
that
there are, as it were, multiple voices in our own heads. Shelley
Fisher
Fishkin posits that Huck learned to speak from Jim; following
Toni
Morrison, we now can begin to explore how all American
literature, and
Southern literature in particular, has been raised by black
surrogates as
well as white parents. If Percy was brought up by a black
nursemaid, so
C O N C L U S I O N l g 7 C
op
yr
ig
ht
@
1
99
9.
T

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U
ni
ve
rs
it
y
of
N
or
th
C
ar
ol
in
a
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ay
n
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b
e

re
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od
uc
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i
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fo
rm
w
it
ho
ut
p
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mi
ss
io
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om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
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pt
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PENNSYLVANIA
1940s

was his mind and the creative work that emanated from it.
White sensi-
bilities depend o n black sensibilities; it is the relationship
between the two,
not so much the separate halves, that is interesting. Willie
Morris, a con-
temporary white Rlississippi writer, reveals a moment in The
Ghosts qf
1'1fed~arEven in which a white friend from the Delta refigured
his family's
traditional feelings about race: "His mother died when he was
little, and
his father was courting again, and for all purposes he was raised
by an
illiterate black muledriver named Shotgun, whom he loved. 'The
black
people of the Delta didn't sail past the Statue of Liberty when
they came
to this country,' my friend once said to me. 'They made this
place down
here. They workcd to dcath and got nothin', cxccpt just the
ground it-
self and it wasn't theirs either. I'd look out from my porch at
night when
I was a boy and wonder what they were thinking that night with
their

lamps blinking in the shadows. Now I know they were thinking
of the
same things 1 was' " (I 3).
I think of this book, then, as standing not only between
Faulkner and
Styion but between Charles Chesnutt and iZugust Kilson,
between Du
Bois and Baldwin, between Hurston and Toni Morrison as well.
Ideally
I consider all these writers' works as interworen and
interdependent; a
fully realized discussion of race in twentieth-century American
literature
cannot stand without the consideration of all thrse texts bound
to-
gether. Ideally, a deep understanding of race and human
relations more
broadly conceived will incorporate allvoices, each validated,
each distinct,
each acknowledged as contributing to the conversation, both
scholarly
and pedagogical. "That both whites and blacks, or more broadly
people
of all colrxs, cannot truly embrace the range of North American
h u -

manity as their own, as their imagined community, is the
collective cost,"
Grace Elizabeth Hale writes. "Mahng whiteness American
culture, the
nation has foregone other possibilities. The hybridity that could
have
been our greatest strength has been made into a means of
playing across
the color line, with its rotting distance of voyeurism and
partisanship, a
confirmation of social and psychological division" (10).
In my experience, using white texts in addition to black texts to
es-
plore the roots of racial discourse forces students of all races to
more
directly confront themselves. Once they are introduced to the
rhetori-
cal miscegenation that exists in white as well as black texts, it
quickly be-
comes evident that students (and the texts themselves) do not
have a dif-
ferent history from "the other" and never did. Black and white
are and
always have been inextricably Linked, just as male and female
have always

been inextricably linked. "One of the most important results of
recon-
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@
19
99
.
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e
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iv
er
si
ty
o
f
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rt
h
Ca
ro
li
na
P
re
ss
.
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l

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gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n
ot
b
e
re
pr
od
uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo
rm
w
it
ho
ut
p
er
mi
ss
io
n
fr

om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
ex
ce
pt
f
ai
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es
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.S
.
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ri
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la
w.
PENNSYLVANIA
1940s
ceptualizing from 'objective truth' to rhetorical event will be a
more nu-
anced sense of legal and social responsibility," writes Patricia
Williams,
whose L41chemj ofRace and R&bts incisively examines the
racial thicket of
contemporary legal discourse.
This will be so because much of what is spoken in so-called
objec-
tive, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities
and
unexarnined claims that make property of others beyond the
self,

all the while denying such connections. . . . In racial contexts,
[this]
is related to the familiar offensiveness of people who wiU say,
"Our
maid is black and she says that blacks want. . . I'; such
statements
both universalize the lone black voice and disguise, enhance,
and
"objectify the authority of the individual white speaker. As a
legal
tool, however, it is an extremely common device by which not
just
subject positioning is obscured, but by which agency and
respon-
sibility are hopelessly befuddled. (11)
This is my impulse as well: to nudge scholarship and students
alike to
examine and take responsibility for their 01urz language, their
awn racial
thinking, their own sense of personal and cultural histor!; rather
than
treating race (and African American literature, through which
race issues
are most frequently taught) as a kind of localized anthropology
project.
" E w n among left-inclined students, the idea that race is
natural is so in-

grained that there is an assumption that liberal and even radical
educa-
tion must be trying to teach that race is not very important, but
nonethe-
less a material realitj~," David Roediger writes in Toward the
Abolition of
Whitpne.rx "When students do 'get it,' they are often
tremendolisly en-
thusiastic. Seeing race as a category constantly being struggled
over and
remade, they sense that the possibilities of political action in
particular
and human agency in general are vastly larger than they had
thought.
They reflect o n the manner in which structures of social
oppression have
contributed to the tragic ways that race has been given meaning.
They
often come to indict those structures" (2).
As uncomfortable as some white students might be to get
"inside" a
black text and dscover a wound that "their" ancestors might
have some-
how "caused," looking directly at white texts to discover the
racial com-

plexity and pain there as well is an entirely different
experience. Lillian
Smith offers a very different reading experience than reading
&chard
W i g h t o n the "same subject." White readers of Wight, for
example,
might find easy access to his anger, but the? are still somehow
capable of
keeping it at arm's length; it is, after all, "his" (that is to say
black) anger.
Co
py
ri
gh
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@
19
99
.
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e
Un
iv
er
si
ty
o
f
No
rt
h
Ca

ro
li
na
P
re
ss
.
Al
l
ri
gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n
ot
b
e
re
pr
od
uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo
rm
w

it
ho
ut
p
er
mi
ss
io
n
fr
om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
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ce
pt
f
ai
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us
es
p
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U

.S
.
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t
la
w.
PENNSYLVANIA
1940s
By contrast, white readers of Smith, or any of the others in this
study,
will find an entirely dfferent entrance into the psychological
experience
of race and racism. Examining the seeds of racism in fertile
ground is
quite difierent from seeing them in full bloom.

Black readers should also find such an analytical tool useful,
for it
shifts the weight, or the "problem," of race from the shoulders
of hfri-
can American literature onto the shoulders of American
literature writ
large. In my experience, African Xmerican students tire quickly
of
African Xmerican literature being used as the only vehicle
through
which racial discourse can be examined; introducing white texts
into this
mix would certainly balance the account. Reading white texts,
of course,
would also force black students to complicate their own
understanding
of race, to realize that white racial thinking is n o more simple
or mono-
lithic than black racial thinking. Reading Cash the week after
reading
Percy the week after reading Faulkner would certainly go some
distance
to proving this. Now that we have made significant strides in
adding

black texts to the American canon, we can encourage students to
engage
d l / the myriad voices threadmg through ail their texts (and all
their
heads), be they black or white. It is, of course, as useful for
black read-
ers to understand the complexities and vagaries of the white
mind as it
has been for white rcaders to understand the vagaries and
complexities
of the black mind.
Historically speaking, of course, the late twentieth century
offers a
fascinating coda to the mid-twentieth century who would have
thought
that reverse migration, among Aifrican Americans in particular,
would
have taken hold just a few decades after s o many people left?
Willie
hlorris discusses a 1997 ~Vew~week story in which it was
reported that the
reverse migration of middle-class blacks back to the South was
up 92
percent over the 1980s and that "a net tide of 2.7 million-more
than
half of the post 1940s migration-will have headed South
between

1975 and zoro." Earlier this year, black and white residents of
two cen-
tral Georgia counties held an art exhibit memorializing two
black cou-
ples lynched in broad daylight in 1946 One oil painting,
according to the
A t h t a Constitzdon, portrayed two couples "first enjoying life
and then
. . . after their bodes were riddled with bullets." Clearly, the
South is no
closer to finishing its struggle with questions of race than is the
rest of
the country
Eventually, of course, we will begin to understand that all these
voices
exist and always have existed together, as instruments in the
same band.
"Our ability to transcend racial chauvinism and inter-ethnic
hatred and
Co
py
ri
gh
t
@
19

99
.
Th
e
Un
iv
er
si
ty
o
f
No
rt
h
Ca
ro
li
na
P
re
ss
.
Al
l
ri
gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n

ot
b
e
re
pr
od
uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo
rm
w
it
ho
ut
p
er
mi
ss
io
n
fr
om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
ex
ce

pt
f
ai
r
us
es
p
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ed
u
nd
er
U
.S
.
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ri
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la
w.
PENNSYLVANIA

1940s
the old definitions of 'race,' to recognize the class
commonalities and
joint social-justice interests of all groups in the restructuring of
this na-
tion's economy and social order, will be the key to constructing
a non-
racist democracy, transcending ancient malls of white violence,
corpo-
rate power and class privilege," Marable writes. "B!-
dismantling the
narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by
going be-
yond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new
institutions
and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial
categories and
racial oppression" (201 - 2).
In a similar vein, Wideman writes in Futhuruloig that "the
implicit pres-
ence of the paracbgm of race flickers just beneath the surface,
offering
its quasi-religious authority to the notion that problem groups

are some-
how fundamentally different from the rest of us, sanctioning the
most
drastic solutions to maintain the world as it should be. T i t h
the same
blind, rclcntlcss logic of the computer whirring through the
billion on/
off choices of its circuitry, the Yestern mindset seems disposed
to con-
quer by dviding, apprehending the world in polarized terms of
ei-
ther/orn (67 - 68).
Fifty years before Kideman, Ralter White wrote of the dangers
of
the dualistic thinhng he found so prevalent among his
contemporary
white Southerners. "It ~ n a d r no cliiference how intelligent
or rnlented my
millions of brothers and I were, or hen- virtuously u7e lived. X
curse like
that of Judas was upon us, a mark of degradation fashioned with
heax=
enly authority" Vhite wrote in his 1948 autobiography. "There
were
white men who said Negroes had no souls, and who proved it by

the
Bible. . . . Theirs was a world of contrasts in x-alues: superior
and infe-
rior, profit and loss, cooperatix-e and noncooperative, civilized
and abo-
riginal, white and black. If p u were o n the wrong end of the
compari-
son, if you were inferior, if you were noncooperative, if you u w
e
aboriginal, if you mere black, then you were marked for
excision, espul-
sion, o r extinction. 1 was a Negro; I was therefore that part of
history
which opposed the good, the just, and the enlightened" ( I T -
12).
There is something of the !;in and yang in this. The cultural is
not only made up of two complementary colors (in this case
black and
white); each side also has the seed of its opposite growing
within it.
White is defined by the existence of black, not just opposite it
but ~vithitz
it as well, and vice versa. This, to be sure, is a radically
different notion
from the system of racial "opposites" we as a country (and as a
Kestern

civilization) ha-e been cultivating for centuries, a dualism that
creates hi-
erarchies of separation flowing quickly from white/black and
man/
C O N C L U S I O N I 9 I C
op
yr
ig
ht
@
1
99
9.
T
he
U
ni
ve
rs
it
y
of
N
or
th
C
ar
ol
in
a
Pr
es
s.

Al
l
ri
gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n
ot
b
e
re
pr
od
uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo
rm
w
it
ho
ut
p
er
mi
ss
io

n
fr
om
t
he
p
ub
li
sh
er
,
ex
ce
pt
f
ai
r
us
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u
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U
.S
.
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a
pp
li
ca
bl

e
co
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la
w.
PENNSYLVANIA
1940s
woman to rich/poor and good/evil. One way to tear down these
duali-
ties is to reveal the complexities and "inner opposites" inherent
within
each of us. As Faulkner explored so intricately inilbsalom,
Absalom!, once
white is revealed to cofztaitz and dqend [email protected]~n
black, ancient myths of racial
purity vanish like so much Appalachian mist. This, of course, is
why the
metaphor of miscegenation holds so much power in Southern
litera-
ture; once black blood is found to be flowing in white veins,

images of
unalloyed "whiteness" can n o longer be taken seriously
Hallowed por-
traits of pure-blooded ancestors must be removed from the
walls, and
reframed.
Co
py
ri
gh
t
@
19
99
.
Th
e
Un
iv
er
si
ty
o
f
No
rt
h
Ca
ro
li
na
P
re

ss
.
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l
ri
gh
ts
r
es
er
ve
d.
M
ay
n
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b
e
re
pr
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uc
ed
i
n
an
y
fo
rm
w
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mi
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io
n
fr
om
t
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p
ub
li
sh
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,
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pt
f
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.
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PENNSYLVANIA
1940s
Temple University Press
Chapter Title: The End of the Great White Male
Chapter Author(s): JOHN R. GRAHAM
Book Title: Critical White Studies
Book Editor(s): Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic
Published by: Temple University Press. (1997)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bw1kc5.5

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to Critical White Studies
2019 15:26:28 UTC
Part I
How Whites See Themselves
If any theme is characteristic of contemporary thought in the
social sciences
and in cultural studies, it is "perspectivalism"-the idea that
one's view-
point matters. Indeed, every chapter in this book can be seen as
an effort to

analyze, defend, criticize, celebrate, or examine one perspective
or another
about race and whiteness. Some even question, not how, but do
whites see
themselves? Upon looking into and beyond the mirror, whites
have found
their whiteness both opaque and transparent. Most whites have
not thought
much about their race. Few, upon being asked to identify
themselves by at-
tributes, would name whiteness among their primary
characteristics.
Part I offers a variety of ways whites, and some nonwhites, see
the white
race, ranging from biological and social-construction theory, to
economic
determinism and advantage and disadvantage, to innocence
(feigned or
real). Later parts deal with how whites see other races (Part II),
how earlier
periods saw whites and whiteness (Part III), the role of language
and color
imagery (Part V), and white consciousness and white power
(Part X). As

the reader will soon notice, these sections overlap thematically
to some ex-
tent. The reason is simple: Race seems to be, to a large extent,
relational.
Whiteness, acknowledged or not, has been a norm against which
other
races are judged. One cannot get clear about whiteness without
also gain-
ing a sense of what it means to be nonwhite-and vice versa.
The examinations of whiteness presented in this book may open
a way for
whites to talk about race and racial problems acceptably and
nondefensively.
Copyrighted Material
2019 15:26:28 UTC
2019 15:26:28 UTC

1
The End of the Great White Male
JOHN R. GRAHAM
After more than two centuries of running the nation,
American white men are being threatened with loss of power.
Five centuries ago, the foundations of the world were shaken.
So-called
immutable truths toppled forever as man was replaced by the
sun as the center of our uni-
verse. Equally wrenching is the current shattering of white
males' world view, in which
they long have seen themselves as the central characters on
society's stage. All around are
the effects of a revolution that is both painfully distressing and
totally confusing to what
well may become known as the last of the great white males.
As the turmoil continues, white males are the inevitable
scapegoats-and their difficul-
ties only are beginning. The illustrations are everywhere. Even
though rumblings have
been heard for more than a decade now, the Earth really shook
when the national United
Way organization was disrupted in 1992. The white male who
built and ran the powerful
agency for two decades was knocked out of his seat of power
and replaced by an Asian
woman. To focus on the fact that she is Asian and female is to
miss the point. She happens
to know the current rules of the game: You don't turn the
business into a private sandbox.
Limos and other self-serving luxuries aren't part of the bargain

today, a lesson that has
been lost on white males, many of whom continue to believe
that they possess a divine
right to the perks of power.
The cracks in the Earth's surface widened as the quakes have
come fast and furious with the
deposing of great white males throughout Fortune 500 firms.
The great white males feel
threatened and somewhat confused about why it is happening.
Until now, the great white male
had considered it no one's business what he takes out of the
company, the way he conducts
business, how much he is paid, or even how he treats his
subordinates, particularly women.
Throughout the last several hundred years, the great white male
has lived by the strict
code of the old-boy network. The dismissal of corporate leaders
symbolizes the replace-
ment of the old-boy network by quite a different code of
behavior-competence. Who you
know is giving way to what you know, a sure sign that
Americans finally have entered the
information age full tilt.
Several other threats plague the great white male. One of them
is sheer numbers.
The Huns once again are invading, but this time they come
masked as Hispanics,
Asians, and, yes, women. Even though Americans are told in a

dozen ways that His-
panics are the fastest growing segment of U.S. society, the great
white male mentality
can not accept change, just as many refused to acknowledge that
the sun was the cen-
USA TODAY, November 26, 1993. Originally published in USA
Today. Reprinted by permission.
2019 15:26:28 UTC
4 John R. Graham
ter of our universe. Meanwhile, sheer energy, drive, and
education soon will give
Asians the upper hand in American business. Although they may
be today's small
merchants, they will emerge as tomorrow's leaders in
manufacturing, education, and
finance. The great white male is no match for the Asian drive
and work ethic. At one
point, the Wall Street Journal noted that American business is
not running as fast as
it did in the past. The great white males are having a difficult
time keeping up with the
emerging minorities.
The major threat to the great white male, however, clearly is
women. He honestly be-

lieves there is a conspiracy afoot and that females are the
enemy, working feverishly to
take control of everything. Like most other conspiracy theories,
the conclusion does not re-
flect the facts. What actually is happening is totally different,
since the great white male is
doing everything possible to hand over the jobs and to transfer
the power of business and
politics to women. The number of females elected to the u.s.
Senate and House in 1992 af-
firms the direction.
The most intense drama in the world of politics was presented
on TV for everyone to
see. This watershed event was the 1991 Clarence Thomas
Supreme Court confirmation
hearings that were brought to the public's attention by the
Senate, the last bastion of the
great white male. No single subject drives the great white male
into an irrational frenzy
faster than Anita Hill. The debate continues long after Thomas
has taken his seat on the
Court. The attempts to discredit Hill and resurrect Thomas'
reputation continue unabated.
More than a desire to arrive at the facts, it would appear that
this may well be the last ef-
fort to help the American male become whole again.
Why was it that the great white males of the Senate Judiciary
Committee found it so
easy to sympathize with Thomas? Or, to state it more
accurately, why did they find it so
hard to side with Hill? Had they found her truthful, they would
be presiding over their
own demise. Many women seem to understand easily what white
males have difficulty

grasping. When it was over and all the votes had been tallied,
Thomas lost (even though
he was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice) and Hill won.
It is no accident that hundreds of women have burst upon the
political scene following
the confirmation hearings. Nor is it a quirk of fate that the great
white males in the halls
of Congress are dropping like flies. The number who chose to
retire at the end of 1992 was
the highest in history. Although they expressed disdain for
politics as the main reason for
leaving office on their own, they saw that their world had
changed.
It is fascinating that the great white male always expects to be
taken care of by his co-
conspirators-the other great white males. While growing up,
every boy learned the first
lesson of manhood: "Take care of your friends and they will
take care of you." Later, go-
ing to college, it was given a socially acceptable description of
"male bonding."
In many important ways, women are different from the great
white males of the past.
Women seem to harbor the strange notion that hard work,
knowledge, competence, and
persistence are the proper ingredients for success. On the other
hand, the traditional great
white male scoffs at such nonsense. "Who you know is all that
counts," he repeats confi-
dently. The lairs of maledom down through the decades-
everywhere from the poker
party to the private club-attest to belief in the proposition.

The corollary is that the great white male harbors the illusion
that, once he rises to the
top, he has a right to all the goodies he can get and that he has
to answer to no one. It re-
ally doesn't make any difference how the goodies are obtained.
Wasn't that the lesson men
learned when they were elected to the House of
Representatives-to the victors belong the
2019 15:26:28 UTC
The End of the Great White Male 5
spoils? This applied even to accepting cash bribes or
propositioning a woman in the office-
or elsewhere.
Those who are threatening the great white male-women,
Hispanics, and Asians-hold
a totally different view of the world, as different from that of
the great white male as the
change which occurred 500 years ago. The code of competence
holds that the farther one
rises, the greater the responsibility-a truly remarkable idea!
Where you park your car or
the location of your office in reference to the power brokers is
inconsequential in terms of
defining your worth, status, or importance when it comes to the
business of business or the
business of politics. In effect, American society finally may be

arriving at the point where
it's what you know, not who you know, that counts.
Extinction Ahead?
What about the future? Will the great white male become
extinct? Will
he no longer be seated in the offices of the corporation, at the
head of the table? Will he be
only a memory in the halls of political power? What about the
u.s. presidency? These
questions are far more pertinent than even in the recent past. It
is no accident so many jokes
about Hillary Clinton are making the rounds today. One way or
another, they all point in
one direction and make one point as they portray "The President
of the United States and
Mr. Clinton." However, Americans shouldn't be surprised that
the stories bring only un-
comfortable laughter. Something happened when Bill and
Hillary moved to 1600 Penn-
sylvania Ave. that is very different from the days of Ronnie and
Nancy or Babs and George.
Many are having difficulty accepting that Hillary Clinton is
comfortable with herself, a
situation that makes great white males (and others) uneasy. The
critics were quick to com-
plain that she wasn't elected to office when her husband
appointed her to head the power-
ful commission on health care. Yet few thought it unseemly that
a James Baker or Sherman
Adams should exert such inordinate influence without benefit of
election. Why is Hillary
Clinton so different?-simply because she is a woman who has
dared to enter the male lair.

What abou t the future of the great white male? Whether he is
destined for a final resting
place in the museums of the land remains to be seen. There will
be pitiful efforts to restore
his feathers, to prop up his prowess and power. Nevertheless,
the great white male's day has
passed, along with his unlimited, unilateral power and
influence. Even as noble a figure as
Lee Iacocca is in danger of finding himself sadly irrelevant,
somehow out of step with the
times. From now on, the great white male will be one of many.
He no longer will be able to
say, "It's lonely at the top." Whether it takes another 500 years
for the next total upheaval
in the intellectual history of society remains to be seen. In the
meantime, it will be inter-
esting to watch how the great white males take to their changing
circumstances.
2019 15:26:28 UTC

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