Shelby Steele says Howard Dean has come up against the established limits on identity politics in the West:
... it is absolutely verboten for either party, or any white candidate, to appeal to whites as a racial identity group. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world.
For the same reason that we think nothing of the existence of a Congressional Black Caucus, but wouldn't stand for the idea of a white one, Dean has had to backtrack on his suggestion that white Confederate flag pickup drivers might also have some group "identity" and merit commensurate political representation and power. As Steele says:
He inadvertently sanctioned one of history's most destructive formulas: race alone justifying power. And yet, had he reached out to angry black separatists, he would have been hailed as a racial healer. Why the difference?
Well, white guilt is the difference:
White guilt--the need to win enough moral authority around race to prove that one is not a racist--is the price whites today pay for this history. Political correctness is a language that enables whites to show by wildly exaggerated courtesy that they are not racist; diversity does this for institutions. But white guilt's greatest taboo is the one that Howard Dean violated--assigning whites a racial identity out of which they can pursue power as whites.Yet Mr. Dean did not cross this taboo as a racist; he crossed it as a hard-core liberal, a supporter of race-based affirmative action, who in the name of racial progress has learned to mentally compartmentalize Americans by atavisms. So used was he to acknowledging the atavistic identity of every minority in the country, it was no doubt a small leap to "include" Confederate-flag whites.
The underlying irony here is that white guilt has given America a liberalism that revives as virtue the precise moral formula at the core of fascism: power justified by race alone. Today a wealthy black will be preferred over the son of a white mailman at all of America's best universities. This of course is illiberalism of the same sort that segregation was.
Read it all. Really.
Posted by dan at November 13, 2003 01:57 PMI think that Dean had the right idea, and it would be nice to see more rural confederate whites vote Democratic, considering that the Democrats tend to pay more attention to the less affluent among us.
But I disagree w/the idea that whites are forbidden to have an identity. I would argue that they have chosen throughout history and continue to choose today to forgo one. And those who do seek one out tend to seek supremacy, not pride.
Throughout the history of this country, white elites have made it their business to place others into artificial racial groupings and discriminate based on such groupings. The idea is to stigmatize others into "inferior" and "abnormal" categories. One side effect of this is that b/c "white" was the "normal" group, "normal" is almost by definition poorly defined, hence lack of white identity from the beginning.
Even today, most whites don't see themselves in a racial context, though they are often quick to label others racially. Think about this: imagine that you're talking w/a white friend, and your friend is describing someone else to you. Chances are, if the person your friend is describing is black, Asian, Latino/a, etc., your friend will say, "this black/Asian/Hispanic guy," but if the person is white, race will be omitted as a descriptive. The conversation may have absolutely nothing to do with race, but a non-white person's race will usually be mentioned regardless.
And on pride, I don't think that there is anything wrong w/whites being proud of their heritage. But too often supremacy is mistaken for pride, especially in the case of white ppl. When you hear, for example, black ppl speaking of "black pride," they might be separatists. but they might just be speaking of pride in their heritage that they are trying to self-reinforce in a society that still looks down on this group. Having this pride doesn't mean that being black is necessarily better than being white, but it is said to be just as good. However, when whites get into "white pride," you rarely hear it as a healthy sort of pride in one's heritage as a white person, but it is usually said from a supremacist pov, as if to say that being white is better than being black.
So in terms of racial identity, whites should not hold animosity towards non-whites who choose to assert their identities, just b/c they choose not to assert theirs. In terms of not having an identity, whites have no one to blame but themselves.
Posted by: Jessi at December 7, 2003 01:48 AM