After-Whiteness Studies

In 1997 I wrote a symplokē review essay of five “second wave” books in “whiteness studies.” I based my definition of the second wave on that offered by Mike Hill’s introduction to his edited collection, Whiteness: A Critical Reader. The first wave, Hill argued, focused on making whiteness visible, marking it as a social construction that is situated, flexible, and impermanent. The focus of first wave writings was on creating awareness that whiteness mattered, that Whites have privileges due solely to racial categorization. Second wave whiteness studies, Hill continued, examine how whiteness connects with other social categories (of gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.), issues, and powers. Articles and books of the second wave explore particular ways in which whiteness matters, and the consequences of specific articulation. In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, Hill stated that the second wave should not be constructed “in an attempt to ‘lactify’ ethnic differences and stay relevant in these lean, mean times of liquid cultural capital” (12), but never got around to full explanation of such an intriguing thumbnail. Hill’s solo follow-up project—After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority—gives us powerful elaboration of the flexibility of American whiteness.

“The core concern of After Whiteness,” Hill writes (8), “is to explore the remnants of white identity as a way of mobilizing one’s democratic commitments within what might be called (a little awkwardly, I realize), an economy of absence.” In other words, many White people have an unfounded present fear that in the near future they will be a minority of American citizens, and therefore look back to an imagined past to try to make sense of whiteness that is “both absent and present, authorized and repressed, feared and desired, celebrated and denounced, disintegrated and strengthened, post-ed and recovered, everywhere and all at once” (82). Hill’s goal is to “advance the agenda of a post-white analytic, that is, to assess how we presume to know and value a thing by the fact of its not being there” (9). While at present Whites still make up over 70 percent of the American population, the country is undergoing unprecedented evolution of the nature and dynamics of racial identity, thus new analytical frameworks must be created.

Hill most successfully theorizes the post-white analytic in the first section of the book, “Incalculable Community: Multiracialism, U.S. Census 2000, and the Crisis of the Liberal State.” Emending W.E.B. DuBois’s color line aphorism—“the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the color lines . . . with a new and indomitable emphasis on the plural” (22; emphasis in original), Hill shows how twenty-first century America is a place where “race is everywhere significant and nowhere identifiable in the old formalist sense” (44). More specifically, Hill reads the attempt to add a sixth official racial category on the 2000 U.S. Census (“multiracial,” possibly joining American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, White, and Hispanic/non-Hispanic) to analyze what he terms “de-disciplinary government power,” where “the state has admitted racial interest with ever greater nuance, but it has done so such that race is evacuated of former political significance” (45). Although the Census Bureau rejected a “multiracial” category, for the first time ever Americans could check off more than one race. Hill constructs a compelling Foucauldian analysis of “the official dissolution of racial categories precisely through close attention to them . . . [via] a check-all-that-applies option for the census” (41). This “new tactic in the procedures of governing seems to offer citizens the kind of freedom that terminates belonging while enforcing it as never before. Identity claims proliferate beyond the formal capacities of race to contain them. The racial subject is officially encouraged to diversify in such a way that self-recognition loses its former political success” (58).

Unfortunately, Hill does not sustain sharp insight creation in the second of three sections of After Whiteness. The five subsections of “A Fascism of Benevolence: God and Family in the...