Taylor Swift and Some Meanings of Whiteness (original) (raw)
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Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2008
James Saynor felt able to write that 'It would be hard to imagine someone writing a book about what it means to white'. Such a remark seems quaint today. However, it remains the case that those authors who are addressing the topic often feel the need to assert the ...
Overcoming Habits of Whiteliness: Reading Shannon Sullivan's Revealing Whiteness
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2008
In an essay for the New York Times magazine this past summer, the accomplished short story writer Carolyn Ferrell (2007) refl ects back on her student days. Ferrell attended an exclusive college but as a "poor brown-skinned girl from the wrong side of Long Island." To help with expenses she took a summer job as a cook's assistant at the estate of a wealthy white woman. The day she arrived, the maid quit, and her job expanded to fourteen-hour days but with no pay increase. Ferrell could not bring herself to protest. Nothing terribly egregious occurred during the rest of the summer, no blatant racial taunts or unwanted sexual advances; but the conditions of her employment nonetheless tapped into a partly intangible legacy of race and class tensions with vast consequences. "My Employer was frequently gone from the estate," Ferrell writes, but "I could feel the polite disdain of her gaze upon me at all times-while ironing her expensive blouses with lavender perfume, for instance." After two months Ferrell quit her job, and she did not see her employer again until some years later while on the way for a stay at the Barn, Edward Albee's artists' colony. The former employer warmly embraced her onetime employee and, after hearing of Ferrell's many accomplishments, invited her to come by the house, adding that she "could use some extra help in the kitchen." Ferrell writes that she "looked into [those] cheery eyes and stood there helpless and humiliated: the old defeat still lay heavy in my bones" (2007, 54). Old habits of response and bone-weary memories that are both personal and collective are the subject of Shannon Sullivan's important new book, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. The book confronts those subtle aspects of white privilege that render whites complicit with a system of racial oppression that many of us might aim to oppose. This exposure of a disavowed complicity is not an easy undertaking. In contrast to the self-professed ideologies of racial superiority that have propped up Jim Crow and slavery, white privilege functions for the most part as an invisible fi eld of force even if it shares many of the same aims. In order to theorize this oppressive force, Sullivan draws on refl ections of Dewey, DuBois, Fanon, and Jane Addams, as well as contemporary fi gures such as Patricia Williams and Jean Laplanche.
Turning the screw: The double terror of whiteness
Athanor
Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw is a poignant reminder to us that what we see if often not what is there, and conversely, that what is right in front of our faces can be precisely what we cannot (or refuse) to see. James' novel speaks of lost objects, of melancholic identifications, and most importantly, of how the ghostly, and in particular the ghostliness of whiteness, is reflected back upon those white people who speak as if it were they who were being haunted. As such, the novel brings us to the heart of what I refer to in this paper as 'white terror', and illustrates its double nature: the term refers to both the ongoing hegemony of white imperialism, and the simultaneous ways in which white hegemony is challenged at the very moments of its greatest enactments. As a result, I propose within this paper that what is required is an understanding of how forms of white terror are constitutive of white subjectivities. In bringing psychoanalytic and critical psychological concepts to bear upon the issue of white terror and white subjectivities, I contend that such subjectivities within the context of Australia may be understood as thoroughly social practices that are constituted through melancholic forms of identification. Whilst such melancholia is often managed rhetorically through the forms of historical accountability employed by white people, it nonetheless continues to unsettle white hegemony, and thus, through its metaleptic effects, turns acts of white terror back upon themselves. In this sense, to speak ethically as a white subject in a colonial nation is not to either politely acknowledge, or vehemently claim, a place within white terror, but rather to work precisely within the discomfort that the double effects of metalepsis and melancholia produce.