Whiteness Studies: Deceptive or Welcome Discourse?

Dr. Maulana Karenga was one of the scholars who pressed for Black studies in the late 60's and early 70s. As the author of Introduction to Black Studies, a text used widely throughout the academy, he also is the founder of Kwanzaa, a celebration of family, community, and culture observed each December by many African Americans. Currently professor and chair of the Black studies department at California State University-Long Beach, Karenga recently shared his views about the emergence of Whiteness studies and its impact on existing ethnic studies scholarship with Black Issues Associate Editor Robin Bennefield. The following are excerpts from that exchange.

BI: What are your thoughts on the works of Whiteness scholars and the value of Whiteness as a field of study?

MK: The new focus on the study of Whiteness by Whites and other scholars engenders ambivalence on several levels.  It immediately raises questions about its intent, methodology and effect.  As a Black studies scholar, my tendency is to be ambivalent about new calls for the study of White people when the majority of the curriculum is about them and usually in the most Eurocentric and vulgarly self-congratulatory forms.  Certainly, my colleagues in Black studies and I have been consistent in our calls for the critical study of the pathologies of White society, especially its addiction to racism and White supremacy.  So, in as far as Whiteness studies offers an additional critique of the source and character of White domination and contributes to public policy initiatives to correct wealth and power inequities, we see this as a reaffirmation of our ongoing contentions and a useful addition to our own work and we welcome the discourse. 
However, such a thrust carries with it a capacity to become both conceptually diversionary and intellectually deceptive. First, such studies of "Whiteness" as a concept as distinct from White supremacy as thought and practice of domination can end up psychologizing White domination in counterproductive ways.  This begins with one's rediscovering and trotting out the old liberal argument that Whites are victimized like the people of color they victimize.  This leads to comparative victimization discourse and thus, the intentional or inadvertent cultivation of an empathetic understanding of the oppressor. Whatever merit this approach may have in mitigating White angst about their power and privilege, it tends to diminish the necessary moral and social distinction between oppressor and oppressed, and thus moves away from the central issue of White domination.
Closely related to this conceptual misadventure, Whiteness studies might also revive the Hegelian doctrine of the master's struggle for recognition as master as a kind of social and moral equivalency of the enslaved person's struggle for recognition as a human being.  Again, such studies must be careful not to suggest such social or moral equivalence with the peoples' of color ongoing struggle against White supremacy and for human freedom and human flourishing.  Otherwise, Whiteness studies again deteriorates into a problematic comparative study of the oppression of people of color and Whites which cannot be sustained intellectually or morally.
Also, focusing on Whiteness as a concept can degenerate into a project that results in treating Whiteness as simply an intellectual problem of abnormal and contradictory thought and "invention" rather than a social problem of domination, unequal wealth and power, injustice and unfreedom.  The central problem is not White attitudes but White domination.  This discussion of the abolition of the concept of Whiteness still leaves White power in tact.  Whether White people see themselves in cultural terms (Europeans) or racial terms (White) does not solve the problem of their domination of peoples of color.  It is this attitudinal approach that leads to focus on the alleged "invisibility of Whiteness," when in fact evidence of its reality and power in the academy, society, and the world is visible and abundant.  It is clearly assumed to be "natural" and thus often not engaged as problematic.  But it is hardly invisible.  What is required here then is not only more categorical preciseness in use of terms, but also focus on concrete expressions of White power rather than on muddled and mistaken conceptions of self by White people. Key to avoiding these conceptual problems is to focus not on Whiteness as a concept, but on White supremacy as a social problem, a problem of thought and practice which destroys human lives, human cultures, and human possibility and requires radical treatment on a global scale.
White studies can also begin to cultivate misunderstanding, as did early studies on racial prejudice, by confusing or conflating racial prejudice with racism.  For racial prejudice is simply an attitude, hostility, and hatred of the other based on assumptions about the biological and its effect on the social and cultural.  But racism is the practice of turning that hatred and hostility into public policy.  Racism expresses itself in three basic ways: as imposition — an act of force and violence; as ideology — pseudo-scientific, religious, biological, and cultural absurdities about the inferiority of the other in order to justify domination; and as institutional arrangement - the establishment of structures and processes to insure and perpetuate the domination.
If Whiteness studies focuses on these factors, it reaffirms and reinforces Black studies initiatives and the initiatives of other ethnic studies.  If it doesn't and focuses on Whites' invention of themselves, on reaffirmations that biologically we are similar, and that some Whites were once treated like Blacks, etc., then it brings nothing new to the discussion and can quite possibly divert us from focus on the fact of White domination and the policy initiatives and struggles necessary to end it.
As far as these Whiteness studies scholars adequately attend to these concerns, the field has possibilities and again simply reaffirms and augments Black studies scholars' work. I think it would be an important act of collegiality and honest scholarship as well as grounds for a collaboration, if these scholars would concede the early and ongoing contributions to this discourse by Black studies and other ethnic studies scholars.