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10. Whiteness as Family: Race, Class, and Responsibility
- Fordham University Press
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10 Whiteness as Family Race, Class, and Responsibility S H A N N O N S U L L I VA N In the end, [white slaveholding] Southerners were asking, ‘‘What is history about? What is it for?’’ In what measure are human beings the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those who have gone before? —Historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class If one is going to reproach little children for the sins of their grandfathers, one must first of all have a very primitive conception of what constitutes responsibility. . . . One must believe that what their elders did the young are capable of doing. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew It is all too easy to think of historical events in which white people have dominated, oppressed, and even exterminated people of color. Native American genocide, the Middle Passage and the enslavement of Africans, and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans are just a few of the most obvious examples from American history. Outside of militant racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, most people today agree that whiteness has had a shameful past. There is less agreement, however, about how antiracist white people should respond to their past and, in particular, to the racial category of whiteness. If whiteness is and can mean nothing other than white supremacy, domination, and privilege, then the continuation of whiteness necessarily means the continuation of a racist past into the present. In that case, whiteness should be abolished.1 But if 162 whiteness could become something other than the domination and oppression of people of color, then its transformation, rather than abolition, might be called for.2 The pressing question that emerges from this disagreement is, what could whiteness be or become? My response is that whiteness can and should be reconceived as family. Thought of as family, whiteness becomes the group of people—both past, present, and future, and with all their flaws, faults, and crimes—that a white person is particularly responsible to and for. Contra Jean-Paul Sartre , this does not entail operating with a crude notion of responsibility. Thinking of whiteness as family does not mean reproaching a person today for the racism of his or her ancestors years ago, as if that person personally chose their racist beliefs and actions for them. It does, however, mean giving history its due. And it gives history its due in a more personal and gripping way than does the notion of collective responsibility for the past, making it harder for contemporary white people to shrug off questions concerning their relationship to previous generations.3 Thinking of whiteness as family means reckoning with the ways in which white people today are the descendants of white people who have gone before and the fact that they often have the ability to do things similar to what their elders did. Even if, for example, a particular white person’s ‘‘blood’’ ancestors never owned slaves or lynched black people, contemporary white people still can and need to respond to the racism of earlier generations. This is because their racism is not merely past history; it lives on today. Although conspicuous and deliberate displays of white domination in the United States and other Western nations generally have disappeared since the late 1960s, white racism against people of color continues to operate, and it does so in increasingly hidden, seemingly nonexistent ways. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the conscious affirmation of white supremacy was transformed into the unconscious habits of white privilege .4 This unconscious connection with earlier generations of white people is one important reason those earlier generations are the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of white people today. In what follows, I draw on the work of the French psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche to explain some of the transgenerational unconscious connections between white people that make them subtly and intricately responsible for each other. I then focus on a group of people who are very difficult for most contemporary white people to affirm as their ancestors: white Southern slaveholders of the nineteenth century. Considering them as part of a family to which contemporary white people belong, I argue that for the sake of antiracist struggle, white slaveholders should not be dismissed as monstrously evil and thus as being of no relation to white Shannon Sullivan 163 [44.197.195.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:18 GMT...