America’s Nationhood Must Not Be Reduced to Its ‘Whiteness’

PARADISE, CALIF. —  I have been submerged in every aspect of mainstream “white culture” since birth. I attended majority schools; I studied majority curricula. No multicultural emphasis here. Dead white men all the way. Raised Catholic and Southern, the churches at which I worshiped were at least half-white.

I read mainstream magazines, attended mainstream functions, watched mainstream TV shows, listened to mainstream music. Raised in integrated neighborhoods, I played and fought with white children, celebrated birthdays at mostly white parties, ate dinner in white folks’ homes.

I attended Harvard, lived in mostly white dormitory housing at that mostly white university. I was exposed to the cultural tastes and biases to which any similarly privileged white child would have been exposed. I absorbed all this while being simultaneously immersed in African American culture, the home-grown American subculture born of descendants of African slaves.

There is only one aspect of what’s considered “white culture” with which I am not as familiar as any other citizen, and that is its historical contempt for black (and other minority) Americans. All other aspects of “white” are mine--and I am black.

The recent media buzz on the subject of “whiteness studies” (yet a new expertise in which to earn a PhD) has minimized an issue that’s among the most important we face. You can’t ask who is “white” without asking, by association, who is “American.” The words have been inextricably entwined throughout U.S. history. The former describes nothing, but remains tied to the latter, threatening to drag it down into the void as well. It’s imperative that we revisit the definitions of both words if we’re ever to stop the unprecedented dissociation of the American people from any idea of nationhood.

To principally define oneself as “white,” as the majority of Americans have throughout U.S. history, said nothing of your culture. It said nothing of your view of God, death, man’s place on Earth, magic, your ancestors or your history. It has no cultural significance, and it is ethnically meaningless. Yet, the majority of Americans have always been defined as such.

Of course, there are infinite bona-fide cultures represented in America, the members of which call themselves “white.” Germans, Jews, Irish, Greeks, some Latinos, Russians, Italians, etc., are all “white Americans.” Many of the cultures these groups represent have little in common. For instance, the traditional German cultural view of the world is notoriously different from the traditional Italian view. These cultures can share little or nothing, yet all their people are identified as “white.” Why? What is the significance of this ridiculously broad, yet empty term?

As Harvard Professor Nathan Glazer noted in his book “Affirmative Discrimination,” most immigrants divested themselves of their indigenous cultural baggage to become American, part of the mainstream--not Irish or German, but simply (white) Americans. They shed their old-world cultural identity in favor of a new-world political identity. They wanted to be “of the land of freedom and opportunity.” And that political identity was reserved for whites. There was an unspoken, whispered “white” before the word “American” that guaranteed access to these freedoms. “White” was the secret password allowing access to the American political vaults.

This was particularly true in the South, where white Southerners gladly put aside their European origins in favor of a glorifying whiteness. What they adopted was a more overt and vicious version of what occurred in the rest of the country. They openly prided themselves on a white identity that bred an utterly decadent Southern culture, built as it was on the enslavement of a people.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put the last nail in the coffin of the political definition of (white) American. Whiteness had made sense in a segregated world. Blacks did not have access to education, therefore whites were educated people--doctors and lawyers. Blacks did not have access to the political process, therefore whites were politicians. Blacks did not have access to financial institutions, therefore whites were businessmen and entrepreneurs. To reap the fruits of America--to be American--was to be white. The two were inextricable.

In an integrated society, though, white identity loses its significance, and even becomes a detriment to this society’s ideal of nationhood. In an integrated society, blacks can be educated, blacks can be doctors and lawyers, blacks can be politicians and entrepreneurs--all those things that previously gave meaning to the word “white.” To uphold the majority’s traditional identity is to bemoan the expansion of minority opportunity, to mock the notion of “freedom and justice for all.”

Today, the passions against even quota-less affirmative-action programs that promote qualified minorities is a symptom of this disease, as is the fantasy that hundreds of years of history are wiped clean the moment the majority decides it has been struck “colorblind.” Many Americans remain nervous at the prospect of hordes of blacks who have mastered the mainstream. “White” as an identity, and the historical definition of “American,” are both threatened by that prospect. (Colin L. Powell in a sea of “white people” is one thing, but how often is he allowed to be photographed in a sea of black faces?)

Seeking votes, Southern conservatives bemoan the revolutions of the ‘60s as the death knell of “good America.” They never specifically mention the civil rights movement. Nor do they exempt it. The suggestion is plain. A traditional America is a white America. A traditional America is a good America.

I know now that there was a reason a stadium full of white people singing along as Kate Smith yowled “This Is My Country” made me feel like I was watching that blond boy in “Cabaret” sing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.” No wonder, even as a child, displays of flag-waving and apple pie, those quintessential American visions, the ones in which Ronald Reagan specialized, sent a chill through me. They were celebrations of exclusion, revels in an identity that existed only in opposition--to those like me.

Some complain that it’s African Americans or Latinos or Asians exerting cultural identity that has caused fissures in the American fabric. On the contrary. America was constructed on a fissure. The “identity” that is most harmful to the prospect of “one nation, indivisible,” is the oldest, and the least meaningful. It is “white.”

Perhaps those who previously identified themselves as such should follow the examples of darker-skinned hyphenates and reclaim old cultures, the old ways of seeing and being. Those cultures would surely offer more spiritual sustenance than a political identity historically based on fear and contempt.