How does it feel to be a
problem? Du Bois’ great question—the
one that, for Dubois, goes unasked or cannot be asked directly—haunts Robert
Huber’s recent article, “Being White in Philly:
Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.” Many
have already
offered their
own critical
commentaries on Huber’s, well, racist nonsense, and many of them are fantastic.
Here, I want to track how Huber implicitly draws upon currents of black
Atlantic 20th century social theory in order to construct whiteness
as a kind of public disability. Huber’s piece tries (journalistically) tacking
between the sociological and the phenomenological, between an appreciation of
the structuring of social reality and the modalities by which social reality
comes to appearance. Huber’s piece should be located, then, in a genealogy of
black thought that might go from Douglass to Du Bois to Fanon. Black thought is
repurposed to construct an aggrieved white subjectivity. How does it feel to be
a problem? A white guy from the Mount Airy is going to let you know.
Indeed, the rhetoric of the
problem is set to work both in Huber’s piece and in the
justification for running the article offered by Philly Mag’s editor. Tom
McGrath gives two reasons for publishing Huber’s article. First, black people
have kind of monopolized discussions of race, and, you see, “to pretend that
white people don’t also have thoughts and feelings about the issue is
dishonest.” So, Huber offers to readers a kind of Cugoano-esque Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Race.
As a second reason for publishing the article, McGrath offers that “not to do
this story would be to declare that the problems of Philadelphia’s underclass
are theirs and theirs alone.” Apparently, the Philly poors are so poor that
they can no longer claim possession of their problems. If failing to publish
the story would be to cede possession of these “problems” wholesale to Philly’s
underclass, publishing the story functions as a declaration of proprietorship,
of property. These problems affect white people, too—particularly when these
“problems” become embodied and personified in people bearing black skins. For McGrath and Huber, the primary problem
affecting white people is that “being white” disqualifies white people from
assuming some form of public proprietorship over the public discourse of race
and racism. “Being white” means that you don’t get to articulate all of those
“thoughts and feelings” welling up in your white breast. “Being white” means
that the moment you try to articulate those thoughts and feelings, you become a
problem, you risk being racist. What McGrath and Huber are after, quite simply,
is a way of “being white” that is not “being racist.” They want a public
discussion where people with white skin can speak as white, as “being white,” and to have this racialized knowledge
accepted as a meaningful and valid contribution to the public. But, alas, to be
white is to be a problem.
So, how does it feel to be a
problem? After telling us that he lives on a “mostly African-American block” in
Mount Airy, Huber confesses:
Yet
there’s a dance I do when I go to the Wawa on Germantown Avenue. I find myself
being overly polite. Each time I hold the door a little too long for a person
of color, I laugh at myself, both for being so self-consciously courteous and
for knowing that I’m measuring the thank-you’s.
One can hear, in this
quotidian staging of racial awareness, of becoming raced, echoes of Du Bois,
echoes of Fanon. One can hear the opening lines of the chapter “The Facts of
Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks,
the lines that resound throughout Fanon’s meditation on what being black is:
“Look, a Negro!” Huber feels a duplication of consciousness, he feels the
awareness that another’s eyes are running over his body, that his skin conveys
certain meanings. “Look, a white guy! Being liberal!” He feels awkward, he
laughs at himself. But this awkwardness conveys a deep anxiety: Huber knows
that all of his actions are scripted, that he’s performing a certain kind of
liberal whiteness, and he knows that the black people for whom he holds doors
know it too. When he “measure[es] the thank-you’s,” he’s not simply
disciplining potentially discourteous black people with his judging eyes; he
is, first and foremost, trying to ascertain whether or not he properly pulled
off the performances that being a liberal white guy entails. Huber, in essence,
is non-sovereign: to be a good liberal white he has to act in a certain way but—and
here’s the kicker—he is himself not allowed to judge the felicity of his own
performance. Non-sovereignty marks the
quotidian phenomenology of being-white-around-black-people. To feel white is to
feel compelled to perform a set of actions whose success white people are
constitutively prevented from measuring.
Huber, in effect, suddenly
feels what it is to feel racially marked, to feel that one’s existence is a
problem for reasons derived from a source beyond one’s immediate control. He
recognizes that the black guy passing through the door that he holds open has
him pegged, that his capacity for free and spontaneous action has been
constricted—so temporarily—by the fact that this black guy has a kind of
knowledge of the generic forms Huber’s actions can take. (That Huber has a
special kind of racial mobility, that he can drive through the ghetto and get out
quickly, that he can ask his son to move from his gentrifying but “dangerous”
neighborhood—this raced/classed ability to avoid
encounters is ignored.) The problem is that Huber wants to convert this
felt recognition of extremely temporary non-sovereignty into the basis of a
plea for racial sovereignty. He doesn’t want to destroy whiteness; rather, he
wants whiteness to be something more than the awkward embodiment of a
structural entitlement. He wants whiteness to signify a special claim to a
special knowledge. He wants whiteness to be a substantive identity in the
public sphere, one that can claim some kind of knowledge, some kind of property
in the common problem of race. He wants to transform the fact of passively
being white into an active identity: To fix the “problems” of race, white
people have to start being white.
Moreover, they have to be allowed to be white in the public sphere, to speak as white. As Huber relates, white dudes
are already speaking privately about race, anyhow (pooling knowledge on how to
say hi to people with black skins, for instance); this knowledge simply needs
to be made public. At stake, McGrath claims, is the future of the future, of
progress itself: “To not talk about race is to admit that we can never move
forward.”
The fantasy underpinning all
of this horseshit is that “we can…move forward” without the “we” undergoing a
qualitative alteration, that racism can be ended without whiteness being
eradicated. Let’s be clear: Whiteness has no future. Huber knows this: being white,
holding open a door in Germantown, suspended on the threshold, he knows that
his capacity for action is limited, that he can’t move forward or backward,
that whiteness can only maintain itself so long as it preserves a suspended
present. And note all the space-thinking in his article: all synchrony, no
diachrony: whiteness can only preserve itself by eliding open time from the
equation and distributing temporality throughout contained spaces. Huber wants
to think of “being white” as identical to being any other race (although, as
many have pointed out, he elides the multi-racial composition of Philly). Indeed,
as I’m suggesting, he deploys classic moves of black social critique in order
to code whiteness as a tragic form of epidermalization, a terrible denial of
his full range of human potential. He wants white to be (like) black, as if
race-thinking and the horizontal, non-hierarchical thinking of democratic
publicness were in any way compatible. They aren’t. Race is always already a
discourse and material practice of stratification, with White Guy sitting at
the top of the heap. The problem of race is
the fact of whiteness.
This means, well, being
white contains no special insights into race, it doesn’t offer a program for
progress into an anti-racist future. “Being white” in a publically active sense
or claiming whiteness as a viable identity will never yield an anti-racist
politics. Anti-racism is the dialectical negation of whiteness. There is quite
simply no way of achieving an anti-racist society and preserving whiteness.
Negating whiteness isn’t/won’t be easy; it necessitates a wholesale structural
transformation, from reconstitutions of ordinary language and social ritual to
massive politico-economic revolutions. It also necessitates that white liberals
like Huber take seriously the fact that “being white” offers no insight into how these
transformations will come about, that racialized people have knowledges (like,
say, a knowledge of Huber’s scripted performance) that people committed to
“being white” do not possess, and that people with white skins need to listen,
learn, and follow—not preach. The negation of whiteness does not begin from within
whiteness. It never has.
Huber is not alone in
possessing these thoughts and feelings, of course. The intimate public of
middle-aged well-off white dudes he writes for is pretty broad. I hate this
fucking article so much because he wants to conscript me, a white Philly-born well-ff
guy, into his public; he wants me to say, I hear ya, man, shit’s fucked up when
a field of being is marked as constitutively beyond the range of the
social-managerial authority constitutive of being white. The article will no
doubt be met with quiet nods of assent from readers in Center City, Bucks
County, the Main Line…a group of already privileged people will have learned
that being white entails even more privileges than they knew about: White
people should be allowed to speak with untrammelled authority about black
people, once again—that’s what racial equality is all about. The article will
be discussed at dinner parties, a reasonably priced bottle of wine in; it will
be introduced in a conspiratorial tone, as one white dude hopes another feels,
like he does, the burden of having a white skin. They will learn, together, that
the problem of being white is not whiteness but their not being allowed to be white. But a tremor of anxiety will
inflect the conversation, an anxiety produced by the only knowledge that comes
with being white—that whiteness has no future, that it cannot last. And maybe
one of their kids, home for the weekend from Villanova, having just read Fanon
and Du Bois, will tell them why that is so.
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