Race, Ethics, Seduction, Politics: On Shannon Sullivan's Revealing Whiteness

When one agrees with a book as completely as I agree with Shannon Sullivan's Revealing Whiteness, it is both a joy and a challenge to reflect in writing on that book's achievement. The joy comes in part from finding validation for one's interests and additional support for one's convictions and in rediscovering one's old intellectual haunts in the company of a new and congenial guide. The challenge lies in offering commentary without nit-picking or fawning and in distinguishing substantive disagreements from individual differences—determining, in other words, whether the rare claim or move that gives one pause is genuinely problematic or simply the marker of a different mode of expression or choice of theoretical resources.

Like Sullivan, I believe that racial categories are real, that saying this does not commit one to a static ontology of fixed essences, and that the proper contexts for these claims are political and ethical but informed, as DuBois advised, by history and sociology. I share her view that the relations between and the dynamics involving these categories—some of which we assign the name “white privilege”—will remain inexplicable and unchangeable until they are revealed as simultaneously psychical, somatic, and structural and until the need for and resistance to revelation on this point are themselves scrutinized and diagnosed. I agree that loose talk of color blindness is one of the obscuring mechanisms that necessitates the revelatory work of critical race theory. And I agree further that Deweyan accounts of habit and transaction are ideal theoretical resources for those of us who seek to do this work.

Unlike Sullivan, though, I would not unpack my transactional pragmatic realism about race by appeal to the psychoanalytic tradition. This is not a matter of a generalized or principled objection. I am happy to credit the tradition's ground-breaking clarification of the complexities of selfhood, especially after Sullivan translates the move into the pragmatist's language of habit and puts both traditions into mutually edifying conversation with each other. I am happy to side with Cavell (1987) in problematizing Freud's exclusion from the philosophical canon. And I share the sense, voiced by Sullivan and many others, that Freud's contribution actually becomes easier to see once we distinguish him from Freudians like Lacan. But I am uneasy about the specific mechanisms that are supposed to do the explanatory work for these Freudians, borrowed—and, so to speak, inflated—as they are from Freud's already dubious appropriation of contemporaneous scientific resources (Kitcher 1992). The conceptual and intuitive resources to push beyond this unease are simply not in my tool kit, and my philosophical upbringing did not condition me to feel their absence at all acutely.

I mention my orientation to psychoanalytic work because this contrast with Sullivan may seem to drive one of my substantive concerns about her account. In the interests of full disclosure, I want to foreground this possibility. Unless I am self-deluded, though, my worry has less to do with the overall role of psychoanalysis in Revealing Whiteness than with the details of its application in one particular domain.

My other substantive worries about Revealing Whiteness focus on details as well. I find that the ethical import of Sullivan's account is in at least one respect oddly unclear, that the political valence of the argument is similarly unclear, and that she is too quick to conflate arguments for color blindness with arguments for diversity. I will develop these four concerns below.

1

I will begin with the ethical problem, which appears in the chapter 7 discussion of racial separatism. Here Sullivan discusses what we might call the white liberal double bind. This is the situation that well-intentioned white people find themselves in when they sincerely want to deal productively with race-related issues but seem condemned to screw up no matter what they do.

In Sullivan's scenario, a group of white women convene to get up to speed on race and racism, and they limit their membership to white women so as not to “burden non-white...