Whiteness
What does my “cultural wallpaper” have to do with racism?
“Being White in America has long been treated, at least by White people, as too familiar to be of much interest. It’s been the default identity, the cultural wallpaper — something described, when described at all, using bland metaphors like milk and vanilla and codes like “cornfed” and “all-American.” Grass is green, the sky is blue and, until very recently, a product described as “nude” or “flesh-colored” probably looked like White people’s skin.” (Emily Bazelon, 2018).
Many White people would agree with this characterization of Whiteness as a neutral background, as the taken-for-granted “cultural wallpaper” of their lives. While most White people would probably also agree that racism has a harmful impact, that evaluation would not extend to Whiteness. Where’s the harm in wallpaper?
The terms White and Whiteness are used in various ways. They refer, of course, to the phenotype (i.e., a collection of physical traits that you can see) that identifies an individual to others in society as a member of the group that we call White people. Whiteness also refers to a cultural context that reflects the experiences, the values, and the telling of history that reflects the perspectives of the people in that group. Importantly, this context and its elements usually go unmarked, unnamed, and unmentioned by White people and, as we will discuss below, are considered to be synonymous with “normal.”
So Whiteness refers to a phenotype, and it refers to a cultural context. As James Baldwin suggests, Whiteness has an additional dimension as well:
“Whiteness is a metaphor for power.” (James Baldwin, quotation from the film “I Am Not Your Negro”, 2017)
Baldwin’s writings laid bare the associations between Whiteness and sociocultural power relations — not a surprising association when we consider that it was the transatlantic slave trade that catalyzed the establishment of Whiteness in the first place. As documented by Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter¹, until that time, the people who came to be known as White would have referred to themselves with ethnic or religious descriptors like English or Dutch or Protestant. These early colonists of the American continent had seized upon a bonanza in the form of lands and resources, but they were missing a crucial ingredient in their ability to monetize them: labor.
Enter the slave trade and the vast pool of free labor that it promised — along with an ethical and rhetorical dilemma. How could a group of men who were creating documents about life and liberty explain the kidnapped Africans that they confined out back to do all the work of their plantations? A rationale emerged via the “otherization” of enslaved people as posited by Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders: Black people were categorized as ownable, not-fully-human beings in contrast to their human counterparts/owners, who were now collectively referred to as White. White people were hereby created as an American legal entity, solely eligible to own property, create wealth, and otherwise pursue happiness.
(But weren’t there White-appearing people before the 1700s? Fair-skinned people? Blondes? Yes, of course there were, and there were undoubtedly times that they made reference to their phenotype, just as you might hear left-handed people talk about being lefties, or red-haired people talk about being gingers. The point is that, until the 1700s, being a White was not a designation that was sociopolitically meaningful nor reified in legal codes — anymore than being left-handed is today. The slave trade and the motivation to participate in it changed all that.)
These connections hint to us that whenever we are talking about Whiteness, we are referencing race and racism. At the same time, Whiteness is a part of the conversation that we rarely focus squarely upon. Part of the reason is that we usually equate racism with overt hateful, discriminatory, and/or harmful acts and then we confine the discussion to those. As mentioned, the cultural wallpaper aspect of Whiteness has, by contrast, has come to be so embedded within our taken-for-granted realities that it can hide in plain sight.
That is to say, it is hidden for White people, who have learned to equate their own cultural experiences as Whites with just normal, business-as-usual life on Earth. These experiences include the relative, unnoticed ease with which we enter stores and receive the attention of store clerks and not security personnel. Of course we can linger in Starbucks — why not? Of course a vacant apartment will be shown to me if I ask to see it. Do I worry that the name at the top of my resume will land me in the don’t-call pile? Never. We are annoyed but not in fear for our lives when a cop pulls us over for a traffic violation. We are completely unsurprised upon seeing a picture of the US Senate floor, or of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and seeing an all-White (or an overwhelmingly White) group of faces. The sight of armed White men carrying long guns through the streets of Milwaukee in protest of the COVID quarantine does not create much of a ripple. Whiteness is embedded in our ideas about beauty and professional attire, as when we think young women look best with their hair blown out or young men look best in khakis (which by now, incidentally, have been de facto adopted as the uniform of White nationalists).
People of color, on the other hand, perceive Whiteness and its operations readily. It is a cultural wallpaper that they don’t blend into — it is a conception of “normal” that excludes them. As such, their activities immediately draw the attention of Whites, who frequently view them with alarm. You know what comes next: the Barbeque Becky or #LivingWhileBlack scenarios, in which White people instantly evaluate a Black person with suspicion and call 911 or the police. In fact, what these Black people were doing was miles away from marching en masse through an American city carrying rifles — they had merely appeared in a space that a White person expected to be White.
The “normal” backgrounded operation of Whiteness not only functions to exclude people of color from opportunities and civic protections, it also transforms their everyday life into a minefield. As Ijeoma Oluo put it, “I am drowning in Whiteness:”
[Y]ou understand that for every decision you make, you’re going, “What will white people think about this?” You have to. …[Y]ou know really quickly that if you don’t know what white people want — what they’re doing and why; what’s going to make them mad; what’s going to make them scared; what’s going to make them happy — you will not be able to go anywhere…
People tell me to stop making things about race all of the time. But when you are not making things about race, you’re making them about whiteness all of the time.
The propensity for Whiteness to escape mention in discussions of racism makes it an especially powerful and effective vehicle by which racism is perpetuated from generation to generation. The usual suspects — overt racists and their visible actions — draw our attention, and we are led to believe that, if we could just rid our society of them, then the problem of racism would be solved. Yes, to eradicate racism, we certainly do need to shut down the bad actors that come to national attention — but more importantly, as White people, we need to interrogate, address, and change our own ways of constructing and navigating everyday life.
We can catalyze this process by going to foundational works by authors and artists of color to educate ourselves about Whiteness and racism, and then applying a new analysis to ourselves and our lives. That analysis can go on to become the basis of new attitudes and new actions as a way of life. Just because we were born into the group called White people doesn’t mean that we are forced into the business of maintaining Whiteness and racism forever and ever, generation after generation. You yourself have a critical role to play.
Ijeoma Oluo commented upon the necessary work of White people like us to start pulling down the old cultural wallpaper and doing the every-single-day work necessary to create a new normal:
[I]t is uncomfortable to realize how much easier you may have had things…But I will say this: It will not kill you. But if you don’t see it, it will kill me, or it will kill my brother, or it will kill my son. You have to get used to this.
We are drowning in it and the least you can do is be uncomfortable.
¹ Nell Irvin Painter (2010), The History of White People
