Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. I am using the term “race-conscious affirmative action programs” because, in the United States, affirmative action has seemingly transformed itself from being whitee to meaning black. For a good overview of when affirmative action was white, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America, 2005. 2. For Justice Harlan, colorblindness was supposed to transform the unequal social conditions of blacks in relation to whites. Moreover, for him, colorblindness would change the legal and not the economic status of blacks. 3. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. 4. Today, there are countless incidents that dehumanize blacks and other non- whites. In the chapters that follow, I will draw specifically on police violence perpetrated toward black men. 5. Even though “post-racial” is a fairly new term, critical race theorist Der- rick Bell made reference to the term in 1989 in “After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculation of America in a ‘Post-Racial’ Epoch.” Also, Howard Winant, in his 1999 essay “The President’s Race Initiative: Race-Conscious Judo Meets the Stiff-Funky Reality” and his 2002 book The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War III, discusses “post-racialism.” In the former, he writes, “Postracialism in contemporary United States often takes the form of putative ‘color-blindness’” (1999, 71). 6. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971. 7. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse, I am using “discourse” in the Foucaultian sense to denote the deeper meanings that lie behind the ideas that we take for granted. 8. The emergence of “whiteness studies” was noted on September 8, 1995, in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article written by Liz McMillen titled “Lifting the Veil from Whiteness: Growing Body of Scholarship Challenges a ‘Racial’ Norm” and in Lingua Franca in the article, “Uncolored People” written by David Stowe in 1996. Also, see Alastair Bonnett, “‘White Studies’: The Problems and Projects of a New Research Agenda,” 1996. In disciplines as diverse as history, gender studies, political science, film studies, media studies, humor studies, linguistics, art history, rhetoric and communication, 130 NOTES material culture, and dance, scholars focusing on whiteness as a concept for analysis have been lumped together under the opportune label of “whiteness studies” (Fishkin 1995, 442). 9. Critical race theory is an outgrowth of the critical legal studies movement, which came about in the 1970s to challenge accepted norms and standards in legal theory and practice. 10. What comes to mind is the legal case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in which race famously became a “suspect classification” and was subjected to “strict scrutiny” under the Equal Protection Clause. Partly for this reason, the University of California Board of Regents ruled that race could not be a factor in university admission in 1995. In 1996, in the case Hopwood v. Texas, the court claimed that affirmative action discriminated against whites. And in 2003, in the case Grutter v. Bollinger, Kirk O. Kolbo, the attorney for the plaintiff, argued that to use race as the primary reason to enroll students into law school was unconstitutional. Given the manner in which whiteness func- tions in the United States, we cannot be surprised about the outcomes of these cases, which deny the saliency of race in the United States. 11.To demonstrate the significance of race, Mervyn M. Dymally, by using ads that did not allow voters in California to identify him as black, was able to win the lieutenant governor’s race in 1975. 12.Mills 1998, xiv. 13. Gilroy 2000b, 11. 14. For more on whiteness invisibility, see Richard Dyer, “White,” 1988; and Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and the Right to Look,” 1988. However, during the Jim Crow era, whiteness was far from invisible. For whites, the lynching of blacks was a social event that was well attended. Postcards were replicated from the pictures that were taken during lynchings to send to relatives and friends. 15. Of course, whites can experience all forms of prejudice. However, I think that it is important not to confuse prejudice stemming, for example, from gender, sexuality, class, abilities, and disabilities with race prejudice. Whites do not, in my sense, experience racism. 16. Ahmed 2004. 17. See Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1993. 18.Frankenberg 1993, 6. 19. Alcoff 1998, 17. 20. Ibid. For more on white privilege, see Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” 2007. 21. The expression, “the wages of whiteness” was coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, his magnum opus on whiteness. “The wages of whiteness” is more than economic; it includes a “psychologi- cal benefit” that all whites receive in spite of their class position. For more on the wages of whiteness, see Charles W. Mills, “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness,” 2004, 43–45; and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of American Working Class, 1991. NOTES 131 22. In the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the University of California, Davis, for denying him admit- tance into its medical school. The medical school had set aside 16 out of its 100 spots for applicants from marginalized groups. The California Supreme Court ordered the medical school to accept Bakke and disallowed California universities to take race into account when admissions are being considered. For an overview of the Bakke case, see John C. Jeffries, “Bakke Revisited,” 2003; Bernard Schwartz, Behind Bakke: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court, 1988; and Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 1985, 293–315. 23. Kennedy 1986, 1342. 24. For more on the Reagan administration’s stance on race-based policies, see Nicolas Laham, The Reagan Presidency and the Politics of Race: In Pursuit of Colorblind Justice and Limited Governmentt, 1998; Steven A. Shull, A Kinder, Gentler Racism? The Reagan-Bush Legacy, 1993; and Bernard Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, 1992. 25. Young 1989, 267. 26. On the problematic of tolerance, see my book, The Politics of Race and Eth- nicity in the United States: Americanization, De-Americanization, and Racial- ized Ethnic Groups: “Tolerance, as a concept, harbors a deep intolerance. One who is tolerant is equally intolerant” (2010, 100–101). 27. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 1986. Also, see Joan Wallach Scott, chapter 1, “The Headscarf Controversies,” 2007. 28. For more on “affirmative racism,” see Charles Murray, “Affirmative Rac- ism,” 1984. 29. The tools of racialization are employed to draw on the intimate relationship between racial difference and the formulation of cultural difference that pro- motes anxiety among the masses about the dangerous terrorists, the Muslim “others,” and the criminalized Mexican border crossers into the United States. 30. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, 2000a. An interesting follow-up to Gilroy’s “against race” is that for Joshua Glasgow, “race is an illusion unworthy of our credence” (2009,1) Hence for Glasgow, a change of name from “race” to “race*” is based on “racial reconstructivism” and a shift from biology to social construction is necessary. See Joshua Glasgow, A Theory of Race, 2009. Also, see J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparation, 2003. 31. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” 1985. This insistence in “wishing race away” (da Silver 2011, 4) would not do in the face of the presumptive hegemony of whiteness. It is more important to work to dismantle systems and structures that render race and its implications permissible and effective. I can see then, why for Robert Miles, in Racism after ‘Race Relations,’ the abandonment of the race concept would be purely an intellectual exercise for those for whom race and racism do not matter. Miles notes, “We are free to analyze the origin and con- sequences of racism without the distorting prism implanted by the use of the idea of ‘race’ as an analytic concept” (1993, 21). And even though scholars 132 NOTES such as Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Joshua Glasgow, and J. Angelo Corlett have argued against the concept of race “as we know it” in the United States, these scholars are not blinded by the fact that racism is alive and well. However, Angelo J. Corlett, for instance, defines racism as “ethnic prejudice and discrimination” (2003, 66), which points to the conflating of race and ethnicity. In this sense, the racialization of ethnicity is not fully analyzed. 32. Even though the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution declared that no state shall deprive blacks from voting because of their former condition of servitude, voting rights and the constitutional liberties of blacks were not legally recognized until the passing of the voting rights act of 1965. Prior to the legislation, blacks were disenfranchised through a variety of state laws including the poll tax, literacy test, and the grandfather clause. Also, after 1890, white primaries were used in the Southern states to disenfran- chise black voters. When all this failed, state-sanctioned violence of vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was instituted and maintained to hamstring blacks from voting. 33. According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, of the 622 black state legislators, 30 percent represented white constituencies in 2008. 34. Other black politicians such as former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker, New York governor David Patterson, and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick have not pursued race-based politics.

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