Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction

Conclusion: Gifts beyond the Pale

Conclusion Gifts beyond the Pale Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past—episodes and figures to which the country should remain true. Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country I have been working on this scholarly project, on and off, for the last ten years, and I have been thinking about race and whiteness ever since my return to the States at age fourteen made being white seem awfully weird to me. Nonetheless, I am still trying to figure out how to bring these pieces together—the history, the gift, the need to balance pride and shame—in order to reconstruct the habits of whiteness that I live through. Luckily, I entered philosophy late enough to benefit from educators at Hamilton College and the University of Oregon who impressed upon me the need to philosophize in the service of humanity with an eye on class, race, gender, and sexuality. My run of luck brought me to Eastern Washington University, where my exchanges with students and colleagues reinforce these early lessons daily. Nonetheless, it is sometimes difficult for me to locate my work inside even this expanded and pluralistic canon of philosophy , what with all this stuff about gift giving, habits, and pride. Perhaps the best way to connect this atypical work of philosophy with the larger tradition would be to draw a comparison between it and Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Coun- 212 · habits of whiteness try, wherein one of the most notable pragmatist philosophers of the last quartercentury writes about achieving our national potential, using much the same language I use to talk about achieving a harmonious and just community across race and ethnicity. While it’s obvious that this work pales compared to his, I am trying to do much the same thing that he and other pragmatist philosophers have done and still do: tell inspiring stories that critique the past, give hope for the future, and impart a proper sense of pride and shame. It should be clear by now that the task of reconstructing a set of habits as ingrained and wide-ranging as those associated with whiteness is not an easy task and that different people will need to work this transmutation differently. One thing that has worked for me is to look at our current problems with racism in America not just through the lenses we find in pragmatist, feminist, and anticolonialist theory, but also through the perspectives I draw from my family’s past, and the histories of the different cultures in which my ancestors were raised. I, like most white Americans, descend from people who themselves came from very different cultures. On my mother’s side I have ties to Italy. On my father’s side I have ties to the German immigrants called the Pennsylvania Dutch. However, the tradition that was most dominant in my household as a child and in my life as an adult comes from Ireland. My father’s father and my mother’s mother were Irish. My father’s uncle, Fr. Charles MacMullan S.J., used to tell me in our relatively few conversations about our family’s tradition in the Catholic Church, and about how the history of Christianity runs through Ireland before it gets back to Rome.1 The last time I really talked to him was when I was taking college prep classes at Harvard during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. Truth be told, I was not excited to spend an afternoon talking to my then frail and stooped great-uncle; I was much more interested in exploring Boston and talking up the young ladies from my classes, since, to a student at an all-male school, female classmates where quite a welcomed novelty. Nonetheless, my dad told me in no uncertain terms that I had no choice. Once I got to the cloister, I could tell this was really important to Father Charlie, and I thankfully had enough sense to pay attention. He was well into his eighties when we spoke, but he still radiated the intellectual energy that is the hallmark of his order, the compassion of a man who spent decades...