In 1997, a conference was hosted in Berkeley, California. It was titled, “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.” One of the talks given at the conference was given by a Jewish scholar named Noel Ignatiev, a P.h.D. graduate from Harvard University. His talk was titled, “The Point is Not to Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It.” A luring and provocative title, you could say.
I stumbled upon this talk not from Ignatiev himself, but through Derrick Bell, a former Harvard Law professor, and most notably, one of the founding proponents of critical race theory (CRT). In a 2002 column in the Harvard Magazine, Bell references Ignatiev as one of the many “whites” taking on the “herculean task” of enlightening other white people on “the great cost of their property in ‘whiteness’”.1
Considering such an interesting endorsement, I decided to take a further look into Ignatiev’s work. After all, being a white man myself, I figured it was best to be open to being enlightened. Soon afterwards I found myself happening upon the transcript for the talk he gave at Berkeley. It wasn’t long before I came across some truly remarkable statements. One of them stuck out in particular, where Ignatiev states,
“We hold that so-called whites must cease to exist as whites in order to realize themselves as something else; to put it another way: white people must commit suicide as whites in order to come alive as workers, or youth, or women, or whatever other identity can induce them to change from the miserable, petulant, subordinated creatures they now are into freely associated, fully developed human subjects.” (italics added for emphasis)
Now, if you’re the average white person reading this, you’ll likely find a statement like this a bit troubling and, to be fair, you wouldn’t be wrong for feeling that way. After all, it’s quite a striking thing to hear from someone, especially a Harvard graduate, that identifying as white makes you a “miserable, petulant, subordinated creature” that must commit identity suicide in order to metamorphosize from something subhuman into something fully human. It might leave a normal person, regardless of their skin color, wondering what would motivate a person to think in such crass and embittered terms about white people. Moreover, it may leave one wondering: what exactly is “whiteness”?
It’s that question in particular that I want to offer, albeit briefly, an answer to today. Instead of allowing offense, outrage, or sensitivity to dictate our actions and reactions, we are first called upon to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger” (James 1:19). It’s the absence of that principle in our mainstream cultural and political discourse on race that is causing all sorts of unnecessary conflict at the moment. So the aim here is to help others understand. After all, we shouldn’t criticize what we don’t understand.
With that in mind, I’m going to spend my time in this post unpacking the concept of whiteness, as understood by men like Ignatiev and critical race scholars like Bell. The aim here is not so much to offer a full-fledged rebuttal or an in-depth critical analysis on the concept, as it is to help others establish a baseline understanding. This post, rather, will be the first in a series of many posts to come on the topic of race.
So, that being said, to the question: What is whiteness?
To give the devils their due, when CRT scholars refer to whiteness, they are not so much referring to the color of skin as much as they are referring to an idea, or concept, that pertains to the white race.2 The concept of whiteness, in their view, is attached to our nation’s history and its subsequent structural make-up. More specifically, from their perspective, whiteness is attached to their fundamental assertion that America is built on a racial hierarchy that has been designed to perpetuate special advantages for white people and systematically disadvantage non-white racial groups, or BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color). In simple terms, whiteness is about keeping white people powerful and non-white people powerless.
According to Ignatiev, this power manifests itself at every rung of society:
“Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, so racial oppression is not the work of “racists.” It is maintained by the principal institutions of society, including the schools (which define “excellence”), the labor market (which defines “employment”), the legal system (which defines “crime”), the welfare system (which defines “poverty”), the medical industry (which defines “health”), and the family (which defines “kinship”). Many of these institutions are administered by people who would be offended if accused of complicity with racial oppression.”
That last remark in particular, regarding the association between our institutions and “racial oppression”, demonstrates more clearly what critical race theorists believe about the relationship between whiteness and the institutional DNA of America: namely, that at every level, whether it’s the education system, the health system, the capitalist system, the legal system, the welfare system, or even the family system, whiteness is baked into all of it. In other words, racism isn’t confined just to particular individuals within our institutions. It’s that racism is baked into the institutions themselves–in the policies, practices, and personnel.
In fact, a few years ago, the Smithsonian institution of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) echoed this sentiment through an infographic they released on whiteness, explicitly stating thus:
“White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States. And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we have all internalized some aspects of white culture — including people of color.”
Now, let’s set aside the separate discussion on the odd elements the Smithsonian’s infographic lists as examples of whiteness, such as “hard work” or “rational, linear thinking”. Instead, what is more relevant here is the implicit messaging couched in a statement such as “white people still hold most of the institutional power in America”. The subtext is easy to see: namely, that America is systemically racist because it systematically perpetuates whiteness in nearly all of its institutions. Now, thankfully, the NMAAHC eventually removed the infographic due to social pressure (which was warranted). But that hardly means much. The ideas still persist.
CRT proponents, then, hold this truth to be self-evident: that America is racist to its bones. And, ultimately, this is what they regard as the primary explanation for the purported racial inequality and injustice in our country to date. Systemic racial inequality, they contend, is nothing more than the result of whiteness baked into our institutions.
This is why Cheryl Harris, a prominent critical race theorist, has coined whiteness as “property.”3 According to her, being white in America has given a person a distinct advantage to property rights over the course of our nation’s history, and since property ownership is the surest sign of wealth, then wealth is determined by the degree of whiteness one possesses. Simply put, being white gives a person distinct institutional and structural value that BIPOC don’t possess to the same degree–the quintessence of “white privilege.”
Furthermore, this is why critiques against whiteness have often gone hand-in-hand with critiques against capitalism within the CRT movement. Many critical race theorists and the thinkers that preceded them, such as Cedric Robinson, criticize American capitalism, because they believe it has been invariably mixed up with notions of race. They contend that it has been used historically to exploit BIPOC for cheap labor, perpetuating the continuance of a racial hierarchy that gives specific economic advantages to white people (particularly white men).
Furthermore, this is why many critical race theorists have emerged as resembling a new type of Marxist. Scholars and intellectuals such as Kimberlee Crenshaw and Richard Delgado, as well as Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, and Antonio Gramsci–these all share in common with Marx a mutual disdain for capitalism’s purported exploitative nature of the lower class (the proletariat), the appeal to mass redistribution of power and wealth, the classic dualistic worldview that divides all of humanity into one of two categories: oppressor and oppressed, and the idea that hierarchies are more fundamentally composed of the will to power opposed to competence and merit. Where they differ, however, is that, while Marx focused solely on social and economic class, these thinkers tend to see class and race as inextricably linked, especially in the context of American history.
One such example of this neo-Marxist conception of the world is an article from assistant professor at Denver Sturm College of Law, Nancy Leong. Here she lays out the Marxist connections in her work quite clearly. Writing on “racial capitalism”, she states that she uses,
…a Marxian conception of capital to understand how assigning value to race leads to the commodification and subsequent capitalization of race. Marxian theory provides an imperfect analogy for this process, but it supplies a useful starting point for an analysis of the way that racial identity generally — and nonwhiteness in particular — functions as capital. I use Marx’s market rhetoric in my analysis of how race is commodified and capitalized. The result is jarring. But this is precisely my intent. By exposing the dissonance between market rhetoric and racial identity, I lay the preliminary groundwork for my critique of racial identity markets… The Marxian analysis thus provides a lens for examining the way that racial identity is produced, used, and exchanged in society.4
In light of all this, it becomes clearer what whiteness is. According to these scholars and thinkers, whiteness is construed as a symbol of oppression. Whiteness is what our systems, structures, and institutions are historically built on–systems that continue to persist today, fueling racial injustice and inequality up to our present moment.
Ultimately, this is why Noel Ignatiev goes as far to describe himself as a “new abolitionist”, whose expressed aim is “to abolish the white race.” Whereas the original abolitionists sought to abolish slavery, the new abolitionists, along with the critical race theorists, are now out to abolish the white race altogether.
Yet, there’s one last piece to this that serves as perhaps the most important element in coming to understand these notions of whiteness. In fact, it’s the essential, foundational structure on which these claims are built. Without this element, all notions of whiteness can’t be properly understood, or at the very least, justified. I’m talking about the element of history.
The crucial role the past plays in all of this can’t be avoided or overlooked. It’s in looking to history that we gather what both the new abolitionists and critical race theorists believe give them license to form these sorts of concepts of whiteness, as well as the justification they believe it gives them to abolish it. After all, in our own individual lives, we look to our past to make sense of our present. In like manner, these anti-whiteness groups look to the racial injustices of the past to make sense of the supposed racial inequalities in the present.
Thus, part of the impetus that fuels and bolsters their sentiments on whiteness are sentiments rooted in specific historical narratives, and, needless to say, these narratives have tremendous paradigm-shaping power. The significance of this from a philosophical level can’t be understated. After all, a worldview is the story we live in, and stories inform our perception of the world and the events that take place within it. These sorts of narratives serve as lenses through which we interpret the world around us.
Consequently, there are two historical narratives in particular that carry the most weight for the critical race theorists–ones which you’re likely familiar with by now. They are ones which fundamentally shape their paradigm on race, particularly in America. They are as follows:
- European colonial settlers, motivated by white supremacy, engaged in a genocidal conquest of the indigenous Native Americans when they set foot in the new world.
- America is racist to its core because it was built upon the foundation of slavery.
These two historical narratives, standing simultaneously side-by-side, are the fundamental historical pillars that the anti-whiteness groups often stand on in order to ground their claims. Therefore, if you attempt to deconstruct their notions of whiteness, you will inevitably find the conversation coming back to these paradigmatic historical narratives, because it’s ultimately the the lenses through which they interpret the present world, as evidenced by projects like The 1619 Project. If you want to understand whiteness, you have to understand American history.
From their historical perspective, racism is not just the particular sin of select individuals from our past. Racism is the original sin of an entire group of people–particularly, white colonial settlers of European descent who saw the world through a Eurocentric lens. This Eurocentrism supposedly permeated throughout our institutions at every level, spreading whiteness and its power into every corner and sinew of America’s structural makeup, instantiating white supremacy into the laws and customs of our land–the roots of America’s founding thus poisoned with the sin of racism. As NYT bestseller Ibram X. Kendi has popularly put it, America is “stamped from the beginning.”
This is whiteness.
And with all this in mind, we may reasonably conclude that we have a summarized and sufficient understanding of what whiteness means to the new abolitionists like Ignatiev and critical race theorists like Bell. We can see more clearly the stories that these men and women inhabit and the resulting–and unsurprising–animus they have for what they perceive as oppression and racial injustice at the hands of the white race.
We see more clearly now what motivates someone like Ignatiev to make a claim as provocative as “white people must commit suicide in order to come alive as whites” and the resulting determination of his and others’ cause to abolish whiteness . And now that we understand it, we can finally ask ourselves the tangible, pressing question: should we join them in their cause?
To that, I respond by offering a resounding and unapologetic…
No.
As I mentioned earlier, I will dive deeper into the reasons why we should reject these formulations of whiteness and the cause to abolish it, laying out the arguments against these views in greater detail later. As previously mentioned, this is only the first in a series of many posts to come. The aim here was to help the reader establish a basic understanding.
Nonetheless, I’d be remiss to leave the reader here without offering something to chew on. That being said, for now, I’ll opt for summarizing some major counter-points I plan to lay out an argument for in greater detail in the future, into 6 brief, yet clear and straightforward statements. In the time between now and future posts, I’ll leave it to the reader to examine these for themselves.
That being said, here are, at minimum, 6 reasons why you should reject these notions of whiteness and the clarion call to join their cause of abolishment:
- The two primary historical narratives that underlie this concept of whiteness are gravely misinformed and selective with the facts, whether it’s ignoring, over-embellishing, or rearranging certain historical facts in order to make them fit their preconceived paradigm. This is, in part, because these narratives are not formed by historians, but largely articulated by legal scholars and political activists.
- These historical narratives are criticized, scrutinized, and rejected by a broad consensus of credible, distinguished historians.
- These notions of whiteness are typically formulated by ideologues entrenched in a form of identity politics that weaponizes racial identity for political ends. In turn, this causes them to undermine the individual and his/her varying identities of more significant import, and overlook obvious aspects of reality that don’t correspond to their racial identitarian paradigm.
- Whether unintentionally or deliberately, these notions of whiteness encouraged a generation of young people, especially young white men, to feel shame for sins they’ve never committed, and did not consider what broader consequences it might have on these men, as well as on the state of race-relations, and the whole of society at large.
- Even if these notions of whiteness were granted, the proposed solutions for rectifying the problems of racial inequality will only result in worse outcomes on a larger societal scale.
- Neo-marxist conceptions of the world are simply not compatible with a Christian worldview.
For these 6 reasons alone, one should reject the ideology of the new abolitionists and critical race theorists.
In the future, I will unpack these in greater detail. But, for now, this will have to do. If you want to follow along with the series, subscribe with your email, and stick around for more. We’ve only barely scratched the surface.
Footnotes
- “Abolish the White Race,” Harvard Magazine, September–October 2002, 30 ↩︎
- While Noel Ignatiev is not formally recognized as a critical race theorist, his ideas certainly overlap with CRT. Which is why, Bell, the intellectual founder of CRT himself, gave Ignatiev such a glowing endorsement to his work. Moreover, CRT was only just beginning to form into a full-fledged theoreotical framework at the time Ignatiev gave his speech at Berkeley. ↩︎
- Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787. ↩︎
- Leong, Nancy. “RACIAL CAPITALISM.” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (2013): 2151–2226. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23415098. ↩︎
Colton Banks 