Into the Heart of Whiteness

In "Differences from Somewhere: The Normativity of Whiteness in Bioethics in the United States," Catherine Myser (2003) initiates a long-needed conversation about the "inadequate attention [paid] to ... questioning ... the dominance and normativity of whiteness in the cultural construction of bioethics in the United States." I applaud and am generally supportive of her effort and position. Whiteness, however, remains (intentionally) a problematic sociohistorical construct, constantly shifting in light of new circumstances and various dynamic relations of power. Studies concerning "whiteness entail" not simply "rendering whiteness particular" but engaging with the "ways that being particular" can not "divest whiteness of its universal epistemological power" (Weigman 1999, 137).

Reading through Myser's article and several peer responses, I see several misconceptions. Whiteness is not so much a "signifier for a pinkish people of predominately European anscestry as it is for a system that constructs relationships of power, hierarchy and privilege" (Olsen 2002, 399), while remaining the invisible unit by which all others are measured. Whiteness is a myriad of complex, contradictory, competing discourses and discursive practices that are always contested and always in formation.

Whiteness (as interventionist praxis) is a highly progressive politicalactivity, positioning academics as cultural and intellectual workers; it is not simply a knowledge-producing pursuit (to be consumed by a few like-minded scholars); nor is it designed to raise consciousness, celebrate white ethnicity, become a talk-show confessional for white guilt, white ambivalence, or white rage. Rather, whiteness seeks to transform and dismantle the unequal unjust relations of power that (despite years of inclusionary multicultural rhetoric) consistently reproduce and reify a seemingly static social order. Whiteness is not about diversity (as in celebrations of otherness) in bioethics (or any other discipline) per se; it is about politically intervening and "developing self-conscious ethical subjects" committed to transforming the racist relations of production that "naturalize colonialist discourses as a fixed center from which all valid discourses emerge" (McLaren 1997, 17). It represents a rupture in the way we think about and act upon even the most prosaic, seemingly benign action and activities.

Although Myser asserts she is not counting white people, she still "lament[s] the fact that the vast majority of bioethicists are white." By identifying the "overwhelming" number of "White/Caucasians" in the field and regarding that percentage as a serious "concern," she invites the "misunderstandings" she seeks to "head off." Her tentative use of language, including the language of "risk," skirts around something that is apparent: Why would bioethics be anything but demographically and consciously white? Lockhart (2000) writes that "Most ethicists accept ... the binary hypothesis . . . actions cannot be partially right or wrong but must be either right or wrong tout a fait" (vii). Traditional ethics articulations of universal principles (of right, goodness, etc.) are abstracted from social and power formations (as if they did not exist). The presumption/assumption of universality intermingles with particular notions of reason and rationality, negating multiplicity (often conflating multiplicity with relativity). Thus, if there is a center in bioethics, it is the Eurocenter, the logic of which surfaced during the Enlightenment as "the conceptual base around which civilization and savagery could be delineated" (Kincheloe 1999, 170). These time-honored perrenialist traditions (including reason, rationality, and the "common" good) were naturalized (as if they mean the same thing to all people at all times), as whiteness itself became an invisible matrix of power unlike any form of domination/exploitation in human history. Whiteness correctives do not order culture hierarchically against the invisible norm of whiteness "in a liberal swirl of diversity but reject the idea of a preexisting center" (McLaren 1997, 282). Whiteness is not a postmodern commemoration of vive la difference but a historically grounded, politically and economically situated examination of the effects of over 500 years of the Colonizers' Model of the World (to co-opt the title of Blaut's 1993 book).

Baker (2003) writes that there is no "problem of difference to be addressed ... hence there...