Social Change, Class, and the Problem of White Racialized Identity
In the US, the central historical problem of working class organization has been the hold of racism on white workers. It has been a barrier to both union organizing and socialist class consciousness. In the past, typically in the South, white workers have actually rejected unionism because it implied shared membership with black workers. They thus traded away economic improvement and a class political voice for a certain sense of cultural belonging with often very illusory privileges. Radicals and organizers usually explain racism as a management tactic to divide and control the working class. But this explains neither its power, its acceptance, nor its tenacity. There are notable historical exceptions, but they suggest, in being exceptional, a more extensive dynamic.
Labor history also suggests racism is more than a class tactic. At the turn of the 19th century, in the wake of the revolution, white craft workers and artisans supported the abolition of slavery in the northern states, mainly because slaves with craft skills equal to their own had been thrust into competition by white slaveowners. This was uncontestible competition in that the slaveholders right remained sacrosanct. After abolition, these same workers voted for disfranchisement, excluded the freed slaves from their organizations, and even organized boycotts against employers who continued to use black skilled labor. Thus, they helped initiate early forms of segregation. By treating black workers as competition, white workers not only created them as competitors, they abandoned the unity that would have rendered them a more significant political force in the new states. (McManus) Their rhetorical rationale, that black labor was inferior and incapable of good work, was ironically proclaimed at the precise moment when the skill of black workers was at its height, and in demand as equal to or better than that of white workers. (MacLeod)
Similar contradictions emerge around the "free labor" ideology of the 1850s. While marking an affirmation of the dignity of work, the "free labor" slogan also assumed class mobility; its main tenet supposed that wage laborers would eventually seek to escape into self-employment; and it accused capital of being exploitative only when it hampered this process by getting too big -- a notion which has appeared in populist movements. (Foner) In early California, the "free labor" movement, by equating even free black workers with slavery, sought to exclude African-Americans whose competition they saw as unfair a priori and degrading the dignity of white labor. But they nevertheless welcomed newly arriving white workers, whom they admitted into their craft and political organizations, while refusing black and Chinese workers. (Saxton) To all this, we can add the segregationist stand of the National Labor Union, and labor's support for Jim Crow in the 1890s. In other words, there is a fundamental racist thread that runs through the entire history of how the working class has attempted to constitute itself as a class.
Ultimately, free African-Americans were not excluded from California, but they were disenfrachised and segregated as unskilled labor. While assuming class mobility for themselves, white workers throughout the 19th century have consigned black labor to permenant proletarianization. That is, the "free labor" slogan signified a sense of class difference between white and black workers; in enacting it as an ideological programmatic, white workers at one and the same time constructed themselves as white and participated in constructing a class being in alterity between themselves and black workers. And in each instance, this has involved a populist movement that sought political influence and engaged in economic action, such as boycotts. (McManus)
This populism must be understood as expressing something very profound about white working class being. As Saxton has argued, white solidarity has appeared as a real form taken by class solidarity. Though the terms have been different, but the structure has been the same. In every major populist movement, poor white people, whether workers or farmers, have struggled against an elite structure, whether a hegemonic party or corporate capital, primarily for a voice and for recognition, and not for systematic change; and it has always been through the use of a non-white group as a foil. If populism has built cooperatives at time, it has been to equalize the strength of corporate capital, but not as a step toward socialism. This has been a thread throughout US history, from Bacon's Rebellion to the present -- to which I will return below.
To excavate the source of this, we will have to return to its antecedents in the colonial period. What I wish to construct here is an outline of the semiotic structure of white racialized identity, as an approach to its inner workings, and its demonstrated priority to class being. I suggest that this is the problematic at the core of any attempt at social change in this country.
The central socio-economic elements characterizing the plantation colonies were 1) allegiance to the colony, 2) a corporate mode of social organization that emphasized profitability, and relied upon the central administration of production, marketing, and labor, and 3) the evolution of a system of slavery that was markedly different from that in the Caribbean. The Caribbean sugar plantations took the form of resource extraction through military occupation; they were run like concentration camps, for which labor was always expendible, rather than as economic enterprises. In Virginia, the plantations were capitalized enterprises whose convertible value was of equal importance to their profitability. (Allen)
Two factors contributed to this difference, and participated in a particular process of racialization. The first was the slave market. While the Caribbean market served as a terminal for distribution of African labor, in Virginia, it came to serve as an essential measure of capital value (as the stock market functions today as a measure of stock values). While the first chattel laborers were English (as Allen has argued), they had contracts (for length of service and conditions of release, etc.) which determined their value. Africans were not given contracts. Not only did this absence require that the body of the bond-laborer be present, but it eventually militated for perpetual servitude for Africans, as well as their transformation from labor as such into transferrable real estate value. Punishment for escape was made more severe for Africans than for English during the 1650s, and statutory perpetual servitude was legislated for Africans in 1662. The second factor was the legislation of sexuality. In 1662, the colony established that the servitude status of a child would follow that of its mother -- in clear violation of a central tenet of patriarchal succession, but clearly pursuant to the capitalization of accumulated wealth.
Both factors contributed to an eventual biologization of the growing legislated differential between English from African labor. What is significant is that it took more than a century in the English colonies to transform the original binary of "christian" and "heathen" (that had first rationalized slavery in both continental and Caribbean colonies), to a binary of "English" and "Negro" as it became by midcentury, to "Christian" and "Negro" as more Africans converted to christianity, and finally, after the 1690, to "white" and "black" as racialized terms (as opposed to their being merely descirptive, as can be seen in European literature before that time). The term "white" to refer to an English person first appears in the Virginia statutes in 1691, in an anti-miscegenation statute.
Before looking at the role that Bacon's Rebellion played in the process of racialization (which will return us to the problem of populism), it is necessary to understand that the above transformation of terms is not simply linguistic. Its semiotic and phenomenological character is critical. Each stage of evolution (which took roughly a generation) toward words that could be racialized (white and black), a different mode of social identity was created that culturally conditioned certain transformations in the socio-economic fabric of the colony (from a corporate enterprise dependent upon English labor, to a capitalized dependence on African labor, to a codified slave society, and finally, to a racialized social structure). Social identity, as defined by a semiotic binary, constituted the character of the colony's social interaction with itself. Let us take a look at the structuring of white and black, as social categories rather than as descriptive terms, which are the most relevant to our situation today.
Let us begin by looking at the primary relation of signs. In order for a sign for a color to signify, it must be in differential relation to other signifiers for color. In particular, for "white" to be a signifier, it must be in such a differential relation. For people to consider themselves to be white, as a social category, as a way of naming a social relation, they must have already defined others as non-white. Others are defined as non-white in order for whites to define themselves as white. Whiteness becomes a means of bestowing meaning upon an individual, through and in opposition to that bestowed on others by different terms of color. That is, the center of white being is always elsewhere, in the other through whom whiteness is defined. In Virginia, the moment of appearance of the term white, as a social rather than descriptive term, was also the moment of transformation of "Negro," which was used as a general reference to a blurred African origin, into "black."
As social meaning, the signifiers of whiteness prescribe an identity for a group, a mode of being with which its members can then identify. Its necessary condition, as a process, is social hierarchy, since it presumes the power to define in the first place. And it constitutes the condition for racialization, since it produces a relation of social meaning as the means by which those racialized as white racialize themselves through racializing others. The use of "white" as a social meaning provides the means of identification with "whiteness" as a social signifier. As such, others as excluded and dominated are always already the substance of white racialized identity. Thus, whiteness, which continually reifies itself as such, is always only the existence of a double negative; it is what is not not-white. (Lopez, Mills)
An immediate corollary of this is that, if the definition of another as non-white is at the core of white self-definition, then to be white is to find the core of one's identity elsewhere. This is perhaps one of the sources of white obsession with the racialized other. The non-white becomes at once nemesis, fascination, and self. Real (and always gratuitous) violence is the constant concomitant of such a system. The other is both placed at the center of white identity and continually evicted from it.
But this is only the most fundamental plane of semiosis. If the signifier "white" becomes an identification, it can exist only because others (whites) affirm it. If the terms of race, and the racism already implicit in the hieraarchical power that grounds it, provide a political symbol system for a group, they also provide a coherence around which a white socius coalesces. But to see how that social body becomes the real meaning of the "white" sign system, the means of belonging to it through white identity as a membership card, the means of its constitution must be understood.
Upon the primary semiotic relation, a number of linguistic reifications take place. We can map three levels of linguistic structure here. The first level is that of generalization. To have defined another is to have established a generality about them, against which one in the same gesture establishes an unspoken generality about oneself. Generalization of an other, in the case of racial discourse, establishes what is to be noticed about a person, both physically and in terms of propensities, capabilities, etc. (who the person is). The other is de-differentiated, and understood primarily as members of a group, rather than as an individual. (Allen)
But this contains an aporia, one which begins the process of insulating racial discourse from both experience and argument. People present themselves only as individuals, and never as generalities. Generalizations are not experienceable in an individual. To encounter an other through a generalization is to have brought the generalization to bear apriori; that is, to have obtained it from prior social sources elsewhere. As "knowledge" about a group, generalizations constitute pre-knowledge, imposed upon a group by a group, while subordinating an individual's being to what is given to be noticed about him/her. But to the extent that generalization erases the "other's" individual self-presentation, it substitutes itself for it. In this sense, generalization obviates experience; it renders a person unknowable, precisely because "pre-known." It is to compensate for this erasure of the individual that racializing discourse resorts to biology, whose scientificity and objectivity becomes the alibi for the other's unknowability. Indeed, a similar paradigm holds for masculinism, in its generalizations of women; a man will often find himself alone in his relationship with a woman because he will have, in rendering her unknowable through his generalizations, also rendered her psychically non-existent.
A second aporia emerges within a second level of linguistic structure. If one is to be in some social relation (however hierarchical) with the generalized, and hence unknowable other, then an alternate knowability must be constructed. The "other" must be endowed with a subjectivity, an intentionality, a temperament and capability by which to be encountered. In the case of racism, a vast system of narratives are produced to this end that reinvent personhood and subjectivity for the one generalized. This is not the mere solipsism of an attribution of self in apprehending another as a subject, as Sartre reveals in for Heidegger and Hegel. It is a true invention of the other that relies upon the prior structure of power by which one had already defined the other as other. And because what is not thus re-narrativized remains unseen or unheard, such narratives present themselves as originary. They constitute speaking for the other, as well as bespeaking him/her, and thus silencing the other as an autonomous being (Cf. Gayatri Spivak; "Can the Subaltern Speak?"). As Simone de Beauvoir points out, patriarchy says to women, we will paint your portrait so you can get started imitating it.
From its very inception, for instance, the Virginia colony re-narrativizing the indigenous as always war-hungry and treacherous, especially in their friendly overtures and fair dealings, on which it based its exclusionism. Though the narratives may shift over time, their imposition will always be derogatory, reflecting the act of generalization that generates them.
A third level of linguistic structure emerges in that this system of narratives becomes conscripted as a language. As the means whereby the unknowable becomes known, it function itself as a system of signs that others re-affirm by using in turn. The hegemonic group, in defining itself through an other, does not reconstitute the other but transforms the other into terms that function socially. Though this narrative sign system ostensibly refers to the generalized "other," its real meaning is to function as white discourse as such. For white people, the vast system of narratives invented about the other constitute the foundation for a language of white discourse as white, the medium of conversation between whites as whites. Though its foundation is a system of narratives, the signs that signify these narratives are repeated in common speech as allusion, abbreviated references, derogatory terms, and even just tones of voice. They constitutes the speech by which whites proclaim themselves to be white, and recognize each other as white within each situation in which those signs are used. Though a white speaker may be addressing a designated "non-white" person, to the extent that this language is the one spoken, the person is in reality speaking to other whites. This also reflects the fact that such a language is hegemonic; it recognizes that the social structures of exclusion will not work if the excluded are able to include their own story in the social discourse. In similar fashion, de Beauvoir points out that marriage is a relation between men for which women are the means. Racism is a relation between whites for which non-white people are the language.
What emerges from the operation of such a language is that form of society, that social structure known as the white race. The white identity that the signifier "white" and its "white language" constitute remains wholly contingent on affirmation by other whites. White people become white by coalescing around the language of whiteness as a symbol system, which prescribes the identity of the group. In effect, group identification becomes the real meaning of the "white" sign system; and whiteness, identification of oneself as white, constitutes the means of belonging to it. If white identity becomes a membership card in this society, it is a membership that must be continually renewed, or reaffirmed through deployment of gratuitous derogation and acts of violence. Speaking the symbols, and retelling the narratives (that describe the violence too often re-enacted) become the various modes of "performance" of white membership, and of white identity.
White identified people cannot escape the effect of this structure. Identification of oneself as "white" brings with it the entire structure of racializing definitions, objectifications, and derogations. This is the arena in which white liberalism and white supremacy conjoin. While the white supremacist accentuates exclusion, as a form of appropriation, white liberalism accentuates inclusion or absorption as a form of reified alterity. Liberalism's focus on the effects of racial oppression continues the designated "other's" objectification while leaving the structure of whiteness that objectifies intact. To the extent that both identify themselves as white, they both reduce a designated "other" to a meaning for themselves, and thus to a non-personhood. Ironically, it is precisely because whiteness is a language that racism, though its existence silences whole groups of people, has been able to coexist with the Bill of Rights, with the right of free speech -- and even seek protection for itself within that right. For the racist, free speech extends only to the users of language; it does not extend to those who are a language.
The central social element in this vast semiotic structure, from the original social designation of a white/non-white binary to the enforced community around a white narrative sign system as language, is a question of allegiance. As a social structure, the existence of whiteness is contingent upon loyalty. And the source of this demand lies at the core of the earliest moments of the Virginia colony.
In its first years, before any Africans arrived, the colony found itself unable to cope with the wilderness and faced rampant starvation. Many English sought to escape to nearby indigenous communities (a number of Algonquin peoples) who understood the land and suffered no hardships there. Escape to the wilderness, however, threatened the Virginia colony's social fabric: it was considered desertion, and punished severely. Recaptured escapees were publicly tortured, often to death. (Zinn) Though the rationale was an allegiance to Christian membership against the so-called "heathen," as a primary response to internal crisis, its effect was to impose absolute allegiance to English origins. It was accompanied and rationalized by a demonization of the Algonquin, whose nature, personality and intention were re-narrativized as hypocritical and war-like, even in their most banal acts of friendship. (John Smith)
It is this sense of allegiance that reappears before the Civil War for the preservation of slavery, and after it for the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments. As Genovese points out, from 1830 to 1850, 90% of the people lynched in the south were white, mostly people associated with abolition. After the War, the KKK was one of many paramilitary groups whose function was to destroy the leadership of the radical Republican clubs that functioned with the integrated reconstruction governments, throughout the south, the majority of which was white. (Bennett) It is this same sense allegiance that the colonial elite played on to deal with the threat that Bacon's Rebellion raised.
Bacon's Rebellion (1676) can be considered the prototype of all populist movements in the US. It erupted from a geopolitical contradiction in the colony. The acquisition of land, as the prime source of wealth, was curtailed by Crown restrictions on land-claims beyond the colony's boundary in the name of trading relations with the Algonquin. And poor farmers were given peripheral land by the governing elite to serve as a buffer between the two peoples. Bacon organized these marginalized farmers against the elite for representation and for new lands. But he did so by first attacking the Algonquin and then accusing the governing elite of inadequate solidarity in defending the small farmers against Algonquin counter-attacks. His campaign contained three components: 1) a struggle of (outlying) farmers against the central elite for greater representation; 2) a struggle of small county farmers for county councils; and 3) a chauvinist campaign against the indigenous as the real enemy. As with Tom Watson's People's Party of the 1890s, or the anti-Chinese movement on the Pacific coast in the 1850s, it was a struggle against an elite for recognition, through a chauvinist campaign that deployed a non-white people as an instrumentality, and through which the notion of recognition was racialized. For populism in general, there is a conjunction of democratic pretensions (a rhetorical class struggle against the rich) with an extremely chauvinist but opportunistically machinated campaign against a non-white group.
When Bacon's movement was defeated, many Africans were found in his ranks. Though common cause had been normal in the case of escapees from bond-servitude, this was significant in that Africans were under arms and welcomed as such by the English rebels, despite long-standing colonial prohibitions against their bearing arms (since 1648). It testified to the fact that social antipathy toward African bond-laborers was in general class-based, having social importance mainly for the elite (i.e. it did not pre-date the colony, as in Winthrop Jordan's account).
According to Zinn, the rebellion convinced the colonial elite to take measures foreclosing further concerted action by its laborers. Laws against the special danger of "Negro insurrection" appear in the slave codes of 1682, (SL,II:492) in language that echoed early diatribes against the Algonquin. And poor white farmers were conscripted to the task of enforcing the slave codes. Their job was to be shock troops, patrols and commandos under elite direction, guarding against runaways, mutinies, or any appearance of personal autonomy among the slaves. Negligence in this duty was punishable. Thus, the poor white's share in colonial socio-politics amounted to policing rather than making policy. And through the threat of "Negro rebellion," they were set in solidarity with the planters, in what thereafter took the form of a white solidarity. In this way, economic competition between white agricultural strata was prevented from becoming a class distinction by engendering a system in which the fundamental class antagonism was between planters and slaves. Though still powerless, whites laborers themselves were kept from running away and hard at work by giving them a role, if not rule.
This returns us to the problematic thread in US labor history referred to at the beginning of this paper. The white working class has always labored under the aegis of its whiteness, its consciousness as working class being filtered through whiteness, and its consciousness as white giving it claim on a solidarity with a ruling class that class interest would proclaim its enemy. If class struggle requires class unity, that class unity is at all times tempered by a white solidarity that constitutes a form of class collaboration. Perhaps this explains why the Marxist concept of an historical destiny for the working class to end class society, as the logic of class struggle, has never made sense to the white working class. Even at the height of industrial union organization in the 30s, the populist core of the demand for union recognition was a demand for positional status, which it got. The socialist call for class unity, which addresses itself to white workers as workers, has had no meaning for white workers as white.
It further suggests that racism has the tenacity it does in the US against class interest because it is not a division of the working class, but the white worker's most fundamental dimension of allegiance. In an ontological sense, this refers not only to social being, in the Sartrean sense of seriality, but of identity, of what Sartre would call the fundamental project of the white worker, not to find a way of living the world as a worker whose consciousness of class power is a possible future, but as a white person whose possibilities are in the present in solidarity with an elite to whom s/he is already inextricably linked.
Populism, in the US, to the extent is does not question its foundation in white hegemony (nor its view that black movements are always in some sense insurrectionary, and thus never populist), has always defeated itself or become reactionary through its limitation to a demand for (white) recognition. And this is also what happened to the movement against the Vietnamese War. Though it started out a multi-racial movement, it ended up white because the white activists in it could not see their white hegemony, and thus were unable to contest it. The special insight that black and Chicano anti-war thinking could have brought, from their being as internally colonized, went unheard. Thus the movement lost its main avenue to longevity, and dissolved with the end of the war.
The implication of this critique is that social change toward an egalitarianism in the US depends on the dismantling and dispelling of white hegemony as a structure of social institutions and of social subjectivity.
Works Referenced
Allen, Theodore; The Invention of the White Race.
Barthes, Roland; Elements of Semiology.
Bennett, Lerone; Black Power, U.S.A.
Boskin, Joseph; Into Slavery: Racial decision in the Virginia Colony.
Derrida, Jacques; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak.
Foner, Eric; Free Labor, Free Soil.
Genovese, Eugene; Roll, Jordan, Roll.
Hening, William W.; ed., Statutes at Large: a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia.
Jordan, Winthrop; White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812.
Lopez, Ian; "White by Law"; in Critical Race Theory, ed. Richard Delgado.
MacLeod, Duncan; Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution.
McManus, Edgar; A History of Negro Slavery in New York.
Mills, Charles; The Racial Contract.
Roediger, David; Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.
Sartre, Jean-Paul; Being and Nothingness; trans. Hazel Barnes.
Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensible Enemy.
Woodward, C. Vann; Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel.
Zinn, Howard; A People's History of the United States.