During February, it’s not uncommon to hear the refrain, “If there’s an African-American History Month, why isn’t there a white one?”
This question, and its close relative “What’s wrong with being proud of being white?” sometimes comes from people who sincerely, if oversimplistically, think racial equality should mean identical treatment for all racial identity groups.
But it’s also the kind of idea you might hear from members of the self-described “alt-right” and groups with closely related beliefs: white nationalists and white supremacists. They have in common agendas that would do serious harm to — or eliminate — members of racial and ethnic minority groups. “White pride” is what fueled racist alt-right leader Richard Spencer to tweet during the 2017 Super Bowl that he was cheering for the Patriots to win because of their “Three White wide receivers,” and because they’re “[c]onsistently NFL's whitest team.” He celebrated afterward with, “For the white race, it’s never over.” These views don’t just live on Twitter. Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has made the case that white nationalism is the best description of the Trump administration’s ideology.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to give a thorough response to their rhetoric — even things like calls for celebrations of “white pride,” white identity, and white history that many would easily laugh off as absurd.
To help explain this, I spoke to Daniel Hirschman, an assistant professor of sociology at Brown University, whose current research focuses on the politics of race and decision-making in higher education, consumer credit, and insurance.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.
Jenée Desmond-Harris
Can you explain, as simply as possible, why we don’t have White History Month? And why this makes sense, even though black Americans and other ethnic groups have celebrations dedicated to their heritage?
Daniel Hirschman
We celebrate the accomplishments of white people every day. Calls to celebrate whiteness ignore the institutionalized celebration of whiteness that’s built into the very fabric of our day-to-day lives, along with the more overt celebrations in every history textbook.
Yesterday, I went to an event at the Rhode Island State House. The hallways in the State House are decorated with portraits of past political leaders, including all of Rhode Island’s governors. And they’re all white. (Until 2015, the governors were all men too.) This pattern is common. If you walk through Sayles Hall here at Brown University, you’ll see portraits of past board members and university presidents — again, almost all white. We institutionalize that celebration in the names of our businesses, our towns and streets, our schools and universities, our prestigious awards, and more.
Such calls imply that, absent such a specified month, we would somehow have a state of equality. In so many words, they are saying, “It’s unfair that we recognize the accomplishments of African Americans but never white people.” One of the most pernicious forms of contemporary racism is the attempt to downplay how much inequality remains — economic inequality, political inequality, but also symbolic inequality, an inequality of respect and recognition.
Jenée Desmond-Harris
What do white nationalist and white supremacists really want when they call for celebrations of whiteness? How should people understand this? What’s the historical and sociological context that we need to make sense of these ideas?
Daniel Hirschman
When white nationalist and white supremacist movements call to celebrate whiteness, they claim or imply that white people are under threat from nonwhite people. That is a cover to justify white people’s monopoly on wealth, income, property values, prestige power, and other desirable things. So they are deeply invested in inventing a particular understanding of race and a particular understanding of history that supports their narrative of white people under siege.
This is nothing new. Centuries ago, white supremacists spread the lie that slaves were both inferior and dangerous to justify slavery. And now they need to argue that Islam is an essentially and historically hateful religion of dangerous, nonwhite fanatics and that the contemporary Muslim ban is the only way to protect white people. (Many American Muslims identify as white, but white nationalists consider them nonwhite.)
All of these claims are, quite literally, “white lies.” They are lies told by (some) white people to justify a political project of protecting and empowering white people against nonwhite others. You can see telltale signs of these politics today, for example, in the move to turn the “Countering Violent Extremism” program into the “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” program — despite the fact that law enforcement believes white supremacists to be a greater terrorist threat. Anyone interested in better understanding contemporary white nationalists and white supremacists and their place in the history of such movements can start by reading Kelly Baker’s fantastic work.
Jenée Desmond-Harris
It’s been suggested that there should be some focus on whiteness that addresses the social construction of whiteness and its consequences: For example, Portland Community College has held “Whiteness History Month” event, which its website described as “a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage” that “seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.” What’s your take on something like this?
Daniel Hirschman
I think it’s great! We should be talking more about whiteness. There was a recent controversy over a course being offered at the University of Wisconsin Madison on “The Problem of Whiteness.” I looked over the syllabus — it’s a great example of how to think and teach about race by foregrounding whiteness rather than nonwhiteness. That is, when we talk and write about race, we almost automatically assume that race is something that African Americans and Latinxs and Asians and Native Americans have; white people are just people. By foregrounding whiteness, we remind ourselves that race is a social construct that, for the most part, white people have used to assert or imply that white people are superior.
That last bit is hard to swallow, and probably causes the most confusion of any concept I’ve ever learned or tried to teach in sociology. The first thing people learn in sociology about race is that race is “socially constructed.” By this, we mean that race isn’t essential, unchanging, fixed, or biological. Race meant something different 100 years ago, and something very different 400 years ago. The map from human biology to social races is basically nonexistent — despite repeated attempts to prove otherwise. (For excellent analysis, see books by Ann Morning and Alondra Nelson). But even though race is socially constructed, it’s a very firm construct.
Race and racism are real, even though they’re not biological. You can’t get rid of them by simply pretending they don’t exist. And this is the tricky part. Race has real consequences. White people built a very strong, very racist social foundation for race. And that foundation is built on and continually reinforces the distinction between those who are white and those who are not. So understanding the reality of race requires understanding the history of whiteness — how white people have organized collectively at different moments in time to declare their superiority and to ensure their dominance.
Jenée Desmond-Harris
Related, what are some other topics that a curriculum or program on the history of the category of whiteness and its consequences would cover?
Daniel Hirschman
A sociological class on whiteness should explain the institutional dynamics of racism and white racial identity, put in historical context. You can’t leave that history out. If I were teaching a class on whiteness, I’d probably focus on a few different institutions that are central to American life today and racially unequal — like property ownership and higher education — and trace their history to a few key moments in American history. I’d start with settler colonialism.
So you’d want to talk about how colonists defined their whiteness against Native Americans and how that paid off. Colonists’ land grab was only made possible by the mass exploitation and extermination of Native Americans. And that placement helped to justify massive dispossession.
Then slavery. That’s also foundational. We think about the history of slavery as part of African-American history, but slavery is just as much white history. Slavery helped to define whiteness and enrich white people through the brutal treatment of mostly black Africans. And not just in the South — as recent discussions of slavery at elite Northern institutions like Brown and Columbia have shown, slave labor in the North and profits from investments in Southern slavery labor were essential in the formation of those institutions, with ripple effects to today.
From there, I’d probably jump ahead to Reconstruction. We all talk about the Civil War (although what narrative we learn about it depends on where you grew up). But no one wants to talk about Reconstruction. If you read W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic work, Black Reconstruction in America, you get one of the clearest understandings of why we don’t. Reconstruction was when America decided that it didn’t have the will to actually undo race-based oppression. In the absence of slavery, white people created new tools to maintain the color line, like sharecropping, and voter disenfranchisement. Perhaps the portraits in the Rhode Island State House would look different today if the American leadership had instead instituted reparations at that time.
Violent white terrorism is part of this history, particularly race riots and lynchings. When we talk about “race riots,” I think we almost always assume we’re talking about Detroit in 1967 or LA in 1992 — poor, urban, black, or Latinx people lashing out against economic and political oppression. But the first race riots in the US were all about "whiteness defending itself” (to borrow a phrase from Tressie McMillan Cottom).
I grew up just outside of Detroit, and I learned a lot about the 1967 riots. But no one ever mentioned the 1943 riot, when white Detroiters formed a violent mob to prevent black Detroiters from moving into their neighborhood. Lynchings were perhaps the most effective form of white terrorism, as the recent discussions of Emmett Till’s murder should remind us.
To get to consequences, I’d assign Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fantastic “The Case for Reparations.” I actually do assign this piece in two classes already. Coates links white violence to black poverty, and specifically the black-white wealth gap. He focuses on the crucial issue of homeownership, which is the primarily basis of wealth for middle-class Americans, and that wealth gets transferred generation to generation. Most black people were denied the opportunity to buy houses up until the 1960s and 1970s, barred from buying houses in white neighborhoods, and only offered contracts with exploitive terms in black neighborhoods. The consequences couldn’t be clearer.