"It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be."
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I think Kelefa Sanneh nails it here. Zadie Smith and – new to me – the fabulous Valarie Kaur both have spoken beautifully about how a flourishing of mixed/mulatta experience disrupts traditional constructions of race and racial privilege. In the latter half of the twentieth century (inaugurated, perhaps, by Loving v. Virginia), children began to be born who felt entirely at home in what had previously been distinct spheres of experience and self-understanding. I’ve been moved by the picture Kaur and Smith paint of what that coming of age offers our culture, but have been skeptical that it can really start to tear at the edges of white institutional supremacy in a real way.
I think Sanneh’s is a first answer. Whiteness is indeed defined by the unnamed-nature that allows it to take whatever form necessary. As the multivocal (Zadie’s term) and the shadow children (Valarie’s term) grow in number, they give the lie to the invisibility of whiteness. I love the Tea Party example because it’s so immediate. The more we are able to name – to make conspicuous – White America, the more difficult it becomes for whiteness to shapeshift as it did a century ago in an effort to maintain power. I don’t think this is the answer, if there were one, and I certainly don’t think white privilege is going anywhere anytime soon, but this passage from Sanneh’s solid piece really turned a light on for me.
# ‘Beyond the Pale’ in the New Yorker
