White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

6. Thinking Through Race

6 Thinking Through Race What does it mean to suggest that white women "think through race"? Given that in a sense this entire book is about how white women think through race, delimiting the scope of this chapter is a difficult task. In earlier chapters on childhood and on interracial relationships, I have explored the mutual constitution of material environments and conceptual frameworks, arguing that while they are in constant interplay, they are analytically distinguishable from one another. The relationship between people and discourses that emerges from these narratives is complex and multifaceted. I have shown, for example, that white women's childhood experiences of the ra­ cial patterning of their environments did not simply entail direct apprehension of the material realm so much as a process in which material landscapes were experienced and given meaning through conceptual frameworks, through discourse. I have also pointed out that the women frequently reinterpreted their material land­ scapes over time, in effect remaking their experiences and seeing them, as it were, through new eyes. In discussing interracial relationships (in chapters 4 and 5), I ar­ gued that racist discourses have a range of separable effects on white women's experience. Thus, for some women, a discourse against interracial relationships provided the framework by means of which they conceptualized and evaluated such relationships. Others found that same discourse inadequate and, in fact, wrong as an interpretive apparatus for understanding interracial couples' experience, operating instead as one of the "external" factors that affected their lives. For this latter group, the discourse (or, to be precise, the actions of others on the basis of their "belief" in the discourse) was in effect part of the material rather than the con­ ceptual environment. And for still others, the discourse against interracial relationships was a conceptual apparatus with power to influence their feelings against their better judgment, as it were, 137 138 THINKING THROUGH RACE producing a mix of self­consciousness, self­criticism, and simul­ taneous complicity with elements of racist discourses. These white women, then, were neither passive nor identical to one another in the modes of their inscription into discourses on race, but they were also limited within identifiable parameters. Consciously and unconsciously, the women engaged with shifting histories of race and racism as well as with shifting material rela­ tions patterned by race. In pointing to the historical roots of par­ ticular discursive elements (the aftereffects of pseudoscientific rac­ ism and antimiscegenation laws in shaping present­day responses to interracial couples, the repetition of elements of colonial dis­ course in late twentieth century constructions of cultural authen­ ticity), I have begun to suggest that conceptual transformation does not take place randomly, but rather in response to what has gone before and in the context of choosing among or challenging preexisting discursive frameworks. In the present chapter I will explore how white women think through race and pursue in more detail questions about white women's inscription into discourses on race difference. The very use of the term "race" raises the idea of difference, for "race" is above all a marker of difference, an axis of differentia­ tion. What kind of difference race is and what difference race makes in real terms are the questions that are contested in com­ peting modes of thinking through race. Thus, for example, some women said that race makes, or should make, no difference be­ tween people. Others discussed the significance of race in terms of cultural differences or economic and sociopolitical differences. The women also placed different kinds of value on "seeing differ­ ence": for some, seeing race differences at all made one a "racist," while for others, not seeing the differences race makes was a "rac­ ist" oversight. The discourse that views race as a marker of ontological, essen­ tial, or biological difference—a discourse that dominated white thinking on race for much of U.S. history and that I refer to here as essentialist racism (see chapter 1)—is in many ways the absent presence in these women's discussions of race and difference. None of the women I interviewed described herself as consciously or explicitly espousing the idea of race as an axis of ontological or biological difference and inequality. However, I suggest that much of what the women said about the kind of difference race makes refers back to that mode of thinking through race. THINKING THROUGH RACE 139 Essentialist racism has left...