The future of whiteness (original) (raw)

2016, Contemporary Political Theory

Within the next few decades white people will lose their majority status in the United States and perhaps also in parts of Europe. This is the context in which Linda Martín Alcoff sets out to ask whether there could be 'a place in the rainbow' for whites: could whites become just an 'ordinary' group among others in the rainbow, or is whitenessas critical race theorists and whiteness studies scholars most often argueso intrinsically tied to racism and white supremacy as to make this impossible? Alcoff is well aware of the racist baggage, the supremacist claims and privileges that continue to accompany whiteness. Even so, she argues that a place for whites qua white in the rainbow is possible and desirable. The intended audience for this book is mainly antiracist progressives, among whom Alcoff has long established her own credentials as an activist and critical thinker. She insists that it is now imperative for them to consider how whiteness could become lived or 'inhabited' as a positive identity that is delinked from racism. The history of whiteness, as Alcoff nicely exemplifies, is complex and far from homogenous, and its future meanings, too, are in principle multiple and open. Accordingly, she argues 'against the idea that white identity cannot adapt in positive ways to a loss of centrality [for] it is not at all clear that, without white supremacy, there can be no whiteness' (p. 19). To the contrary, she insists, the 'essentializing of whiteness as necessarily, fundamentally and centrally about white supremacy is simply ahistorical, and based in a wrong understanding of how meanings operate as well as of how social identities are formed' (pp. 19-20). Essentializing whiteness is not only conceptually misguided, it is also politically counterproductive. What she calls 'antiracist white exceptionalism', wherein whiteness is conceived as nothing but a project of race supremacy, has serious costs for progressive politics. For exceptionalism not only expunges numerous instances of transracial collective action from the historical record but also obscures potential sites for such action today. In addition to rejecting essentialist conceptions of race, Alcoff also criticizes those alternative views she calls 'eliminativism'. By eliminativism she refers to left-wing