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Introduction Mapping the Fault Lines Notes Introduction Mapping the Fault Lines 1. The form was created by the Youth Enrichment Services (YES) program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of New York. 2. This is not to suggest that the environment had been safe prior to the incidents. The fact that they took place reveals how unsafe it really was. Still, after such incidents the environment took on a particularly acute kind of danger for people of color in the community. This was not only because of the sheer ugliness of the incidents themselves, but also because of the too often paltry responses that came from many white members of the Union community in reaction to them. 3. Scholar and activist Irene Monroe says there is no “anti-racist” option for white people in the current social context. The best that white folks can do, she says, is to attempt to be “racially responsible.” 4. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 275. 5. I purposely sidestep here a number of debates over “identity politics” and their utility and dangers, and refer to such movements in their best sense. For exam- ple, as Angela Davis says, “In my opinion, the most exciting potential of women of color formations resides in the possibility of politicizing this identity—basing the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.” Interview with Lisa Lowe, “Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class and Gender in the USA,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997), 318. For examples of movements in which complex coalitions are being attempted, even while identities of race and class are given significance, see John Anner, ed., Beyond Identity Politics: Emerging Social Justice Movements in Communities of Color (Boston: South End Press, 1996). 6. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York & London: Routledge, 1997), 23. 7. Tat-siong Benny Liew and Vincent L. Wimbush, “Contact Zones and Zoning Contexts: From the Los Angeles ‘Riot’ to a New York Symposium,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no. 1–2 (2002): 24. 184 Notes 8. She also points out that such so-called virtues are, in fact, behaviors compelled by capitalism. Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 2. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Consideration of difference is not sufficient in its own terms, e.g. Thus, Celina Romany writes that one of the failures of postmodernism is that while it allows for a meeting of discourses, it does not provide the means for an encounter at the concrete level of differential power and privilege. Celina Romany, “Ain’t I a Feminist?” in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York & London: New York University Press, 1997), 22. Philip J. Deloria, exploring historiographical issues, writes that postcolonial perspectives may be preferred in Native American scholarship over postmodernism. While both give attention to the ways particular individuals and communities constitute and identify themselves, postcolonial frameworks compel “a confrontation with history” that the postmodern embrace of the individual subject can too easily attenuate. Philip J. Deloria, “Historiography,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 20. 12. In vignette #1, the possibility exists that the young people encountered trou- ble because they had never thought of themselves as white. But, in the context of the racial diversity of New York City’s public schools and the awareness of difference that affirmations of multiculturalism brings, their trouble more likely came from uncertainty about what it means to identify as white while simultaneously having some cognizance of racism. Perhaps there was also a fear that claiming such might be to affirm supremacy or a desire to avoid being identified with the historical legacies attending such racialization. In vignette #2, the Social Action Caucus ignored the demand for particularity. The white antiracism group embraced it, while modifying white by denoting themselves antiracist. The vortex opens because one must struggle from a place of locatedness, yet white is overly identified with the historical legacies and social realities of white supremacy and antiracist is not a recognizable social location. Finally, in vignette #3 (as is true for all three examples), white is not a simple parallel to other identifications. Thus, when white feminists identify as such, they are not just another voice in a multicultural mix. And, invocation of white particularity falls short because political struggles and epistemological frameworks that undermine or disrupt the linkage between white and white supremacy are, as of yet, insufficiently realized. 13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994), 9. 14. Ibid., 1. 15. I do not suggest this to be an original inversion. Indeed, in 1860, Brooklyn schoolteacher William J. Wilson wrote a piece entitled “What Shall We Do with the White People?” See David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2002), 21. Obviously, people of color have always known white people are the problem. Moreover, many intellectuals have made this presumption Notes 185 a specific lens for their work. Along with Du Bois, a select few include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Recently emergent “critical studies of whiteness” at their best are heir to this scholarship. 16. It may be ironic but this contention is grounded in my sense that an ongoing reckoning with what it means to be the problem can offer liberation options for moral and political agency, in contrast to the (privilege reifying) paralysis of guilt or the crippling cynicism of despair and resignation. This is not to reject completely the phenomenon of guilt. Indeed, guilt can signal being con- victed of transgression. Mary Hobgood writes, helpfully, “White people are tempted to guilt and/or hopelessness when we learn about the enormity of the racialized system and how it privileges and disables us as it disadvantages and oppresses others. Being embarrassed and feeling shame may be good insofar as they maintain our moral bearings and prompt us to develop a positive agenda for change.” Mary Elizabeth Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000), 41. 17. The claim of part one could lead to a number of different foci for part two, as there are many imperatives in the project of disrupting whiteness. For example, one might focus on the role of the prison industrial complex as a necessary site for disruption of whiteness. I choose reparations because of the manner in which Native genocide and chattel slavery were both the context for the origins of race in what became the United States as well as United States’ “original sins.” See Larry L. Rasmussen, “Scrupulous Memory,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no. 1–2 (2002): 85. Moreover, one of the ways white supremacy is sustained is through a radical ahistoricity. Thus, to locate the present realities of racial injustice in some of their earliest historical emergences in what became the United States is important. 18. James Baldwin’s words echo here: “White man, hear me! History,...does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from that fact that we carry it within us, are uncon- sciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt,” in The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), 409. 19. Roediger, Colored White, 22. 20. I credit Larry L. Rasmussen for pushing me to recognize the importance of making the framework undergirding my overt use of the language of morality. 21. This is not to say that it is the only starting point for me. Embedded in this starting point is the belief that the divine also resides in, is broken by, and yet transcends the social realities in which human life and, consequently, ethical practice take place. 22. Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8. 23. Feminists of every color are among those particularly responsible for the development of theological anthropology in this regard in Christian ethics. For example, Hobgood writes that humans have a “fundamentally communal nature.” As a result, human beings have a “need for self-awareness, affection, respect, sexual fulfillment, and self-management over one’s activities, especially one’s work.” Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege, 8. 186 Notes 24. Smith, Moral, Believing Animals, 14. 25. See ibid., especially chapter two. 26. Smith writes, e.g., “social institutions are always morally animated enterprises. All social institutions are embedded within and give expression to moral orders that generate, define, and govern them.” Ibid., 22. In the context of recognizing human society as moral order, a case could be made that even with- out the theo-ethical assumptions inherent in this project as a work in Christian ethics, being white can be recognized as a moral crisis because of the way the constitution of whiteness violates the formal public rhetoric of the U.S. body politic. Namely, in the United States, narratives of justice, equality, and, increasingly, valuations of diversity and multiculturalism abound in the public sphere. 27. Beverly Wildung Harrison made this case throughout the corpus of her teaching and writing. For just one example, see Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The Role of Social Theory in Religious Social Ethics: Reconsidering the Case for Marxian Political Economy,” in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed.
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