This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness unsettle and disrupt particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do trajectories of whiteness get remixed over time and space? How are have particular sites of assumed whiteness been challenged by particular racial and ethnic groups shifting the assumed meanings and connotations of whiteness by "coloring" it through assertions and/ subversion of its constructs?
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Module 5- Race Remixed
This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness unsettle and disrupt particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do trajectories of whiteness get remixed over time and space? How are have particular sites of assumed whiteness been challenged by particular racial and ethnic groups shifting the assumed meanings and connotations of whiteness by "coloring" it through assertions and/ subversion of its constructs?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
David R. Roediger critically examines whiteness in order to show why arguments such as the “race is over” or “colorblindness” are more like myths than reality. In his book, Colored White, Transcending the Racial Past, Roediger argues that, “These attitudal shifts, which underpin “race is over” arguments, are suspect for three reasons.” He then goes on by counting these reasons as, “One, racist practices may function despite reported shift in attitude. Second, studies sometimes presume that white respondents are the experts on changing racial attitudes and practices. Poll among people of color may tell different story.” And as the third reason he believes that while racism is not openly exercised today, it is still a very live component of the United States’ cultural hegemony. Here Roediger problematizes the power of white privilege in shaping the debates around racial formations as well as religion, politics, and gender. By employing the example of immigrants, he tends to illustrate that in the United States, the white cultural hegemony defines who can be fitted for citizenship and who cannot and this process is completely based upon the racial formation. His argument of “inbetween” peoples, though is contextualized in the argument related to race and whiteness, get repeated in Brown, Deer, and Nyong’o argument on punk music. Both Roediger and the group of Brown, Deer, and Nyong’o define “Inbetween” peoples as individuals constantly aware of their social status and differences with those privileged ones with the power to shape the cultural hegemony. Thus, through drawing comparison with the norms, inbetween peoples constantly reinvent and upgrade themselves with the hope of gaining some degree of privilege. Punk music as Brown, Deer, and Nyong’o define it is “always self-conscious, foreshadowing the spirit of continuous self-invention.” Though mostly considered as a white experience, black punk artists believe that punk music has equipped them with a way of expression which kinds of summarizes their daily struggles. As a great number of them state, “Not fitting anywhere is a shared feeling between black people and punk music.”
ReplyDeleteRana Esfandiary
Roediger’s Whiteness Studies provides a key foundation for understanding that whiteness is not the normative. The seemingly simple study of how whiteness and white privilege dramatically shapes western culture provides a key understanding of the United States cultural landscape. In the past individuals have often had difficulty grappling their own identity with issues of privilege, as it seems to war with the very notion of American identity and the "even playing field" of capitalism.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the differences in race have become more noticeable in the last few years following the unfortunate deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to the recent shooting of Walter Scott. These deaths have brought discussions of race back to the forefront and how police and other institutions react differently to individuals based upon the color of one's skin. It is becoming increasingly difficult in American society to argue that there is a privilege to one's whiteness.
Brown, Deer, and Nyong’o’s introduction offers interesting sentiments about punk and its incompleteness. This argument I found interesting as it seems that early understandings of whiteness were defined primarily by its own incompleteness. Before Whiteness studies, Whiteness was defined by markers of what it wasn’t, allowing for it to unfortunately slip into the “normative.”
Simiarly, feelings of incompleteness seem to dominate the landscape as Millennials grow up and claims of being colorblind seem to come to the forefront. However, a void of incompleteness appears in individuals when they know and realize their difference but are not allowed to talk about it. A post race society does not need to occupy itself with discussions of race. But as these recent shooting show, we are not a post race society, just a society that refuses to talk about the issue of race. And that leaves our society as nothing more than incomplete.
The module “Race Remixed” contains experiences which explore what happens when we “remix” culture within a popular social moment or movement, and explore race from within. In the documentary Afropunk, James Spooner interviews a large number of musicians/music lovers of color immersed in the punk scene – a heavily white subculture, which forces them to negotiate their identities in numerous ways. They face racism for their blackness from both within and outside the punk culture, marginalization from their families for their punk identities, and from each other, they find anything from instant connection to ostracism. These teens and young adults felt drawn to a culture that rebels against the status quo, but they also find the status quo of racial injustices enforced inside this very same subculture. Yet, toward the end of the documentary, we find hope from these voices. One man speaks of leading an Afro-centric student group at historically black Howard University, while also performing in a punk band, and how these dual aspects of his leadership in differing cultural spaces broadens him as a person for the positive.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, we also have the work of David Roediger, whose Colored White examines a present full of racist ideology and practice. His work constructs whiteness as a racial identity which formulates at the exclusion of others, and he alerts us to the inherent issues surrounding colorblind rhetoric and the uninformed idea that we are now “beyond race.” He calls upon us to move toward a world without racism; but argues that in doing so, demographic predictions and colorblindness will not light the path. Instead, we must embrace, like the young man from Afropunk, how all of our cultures, colors, and experiences construct a history that still informs the present; but we can still broaden our perspectives for the better, and for greater inclusion.
In “This Balaclava Is Too Hot” Browning posits her “domesticated” balaclava-ing as an appropriate appropriation of the feminist spirit in “Punk Prayer”. In concert with the rest of Punk and Its Afterlives, this piece provides an echo of normative bodies in search of what Muñoz calls, “a mode of “being-with” that defies social conventions and conformism and is ... desirous for the world ... that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed through logics and practices of exploitation”: desirous for “something else” (96). One recurring question is what does it mean to have normative subjects (specifically white, heterosexual males and females) “going gaga” (Halberstam), inhabiting the “periphery” (Carrillo-Vincent), or “formally playing out the continuing tribulations of cultural exchange” in covering reggae songs and forms (Cohen and Coyle 115)?
ReplyDeleteIn the writing Browning presents a privileged position: an academic, engaging the questions Pussy Riot has raised from the safe distance of academic forum, ukulele covers, and the socially acceptably feminine (also, domestic) form of knitting. Browning in other contexts seems to match the persona she performs in “This Balaclava...”, that of a white female of relative privilege and self-reflexivity (x). She questions her own too-easy appropriation of the balaclava, yet implicitly insists on the acknowledgement of the skill of knitting as echo of Pussy Riot’s unacknowledged skill. Browning’s appropriation has lower stakes than it would if band members were women of color. In this case Browning’s actions do not seem to traffic in hierarchy or exploitation. If the “grrrls” are growing, then the balaclava-lites provide a mode of “being-with” that would put their wearers in defiance of “conformism”. Affect theory and the study of punk in this issue seem to open these possibilities, and Browning’s essay upholds the possibilities even as she looks askance at herself for availing herself of them.
Personal PS (This is going beyond 300 words): Watching my friends join in a (probably white and –lite) punk scene, I wanted to join them in something violently affirming of an anti-normative aesthetic. My very limited, diluted understanding of punk formed for me an imagined space where resistance to the norm was normal, even though I never joined them at the concert (due to a combination of financial constraints, shyness, and religious indoctrination about the relative (un)importance of popular music). Perhaps the knitted balaclavas formed the potential in the imaginaries of those ordering them.
David Roediger argues that anticipating an end to ‘blackness’ is as absurd as whiteness disappearing. It’s not going to happen. The intent behind this desire may be noble, in part. Few want to be individually accused of participating in racism— that is, discriminating solely on the basis of skin color. But what this colorblind worldview fails to recognize is the color of white skin. Peggy McIntosh argues that whiteness has its perks. It is Roediger who contextualizes her argument as he explains that Rush Limbaugh too often leads the charge protesting: “black folks can get away with saying nigger whereas whites cannot.” What folks like Limbaugh fail to acknowledge is that they have been getting away with something far more grave for far too long. Although Roediger is not condemning whites for their whiteness, he is arguing that colorblindness ignores the inequality of Black Americans, which directly allows systematic racism to barrel forward unchecked. In a world that wants race to be a thing of the past, Roediger is definitely saying, think again.
ReplyDeleteJenna Lyons
ReplyDeleteMany of the articles from this special edition of Social Text explored the idea of the peripheral space that punk culture opened up for individuals. Muñoz discussed the formation of a punk commons developed as a result of the need for a space of one’s own outside the usual white and male dominated social spaces. These spaces, commons, or communities were “created by [and for] nonconformists, misfits, and the alienated” (5).
Matthew Carrillo-Vincent’s argument in “Wallflower Masculinities and the Peripheral Politics of Emo” offers an interesting way to consider how dominance can be challenged by the dominant. Carrillo-Vincent argues that the normative position of white, maleness allows emo teen boys to critique the normativity of which they are a part. Because their masculinity is questioned by the affective relationship they have with music, they are marginalized—but only as far as a white, male can ever be marginalized. Carrillo-Vincent notes this unique, and somewhat transitional, position: “a site critical of normativity that acknowledged its own complicity and shortcomings” (44).
The idea of using one’s position of dominance to recognize and critically engage with one’s “own complicity and shortcomings” relates to Roediger’s call for white historians to recognize their “complicity and shortcomings” regarding their white privilege. Roediger tries to create the same type of peripheral space Carrillo-Vincent discusses, for white scholars to examine normativity from their own normative position.