The Essence of Whiteness; by Daniel Boscaljon
The Essence of Whiteness
Daniel Boscaljon
As a humanist, Daniel Boscaljon explores the human capacity for the infinite that comes through embracing, rather than overcoming, our limitations. He has received two doctorate degrees: his first was in Religious Studies, where he focused on agnostic theology; the second was in English, where his emphasis was on 19th-century American Literature and narrative theory. Co-founder of the Center for Humanist Inquiries, Dan has created a series of workshops designed to emphasize the skills and concepts important for living well as an adult. For more about his work, please visit his website: www.danielboscaljon.com. A series of essays entitled Idolatrous Whiteness are forthcoming from Wiley Publishing’s Religious Studies Review.
Introduction:
This essay begins by (1) defining the term “essence,” followed by (2) a discussion of how force extracts an “essence” from living things in an initial discussion of whiteness with reference to Achille Mbembe—Instrumentality, Merchandise, Hierarchy. This latter category breaks apart four levels of being human in racialized cultures: the general, the universal, the exceptional, and the singular. It then goes on to discuss (3) how Herman Melville writes about American whiteness before discussing (4) how Erich Fromm describes the rise of American Fascism before concluding with (5) the importance of care, intersectionality, and relationality as the alternative to American Fascism.
We begin here with segment II. For segment I and the introduction and discussion of the term “essence,” please click on the link, above.
II: The Gift of Screws
Roses:
The shift from essential to extract indicates an emphasis on a “property” within an object (itself a set of relationships) that is deemed desirable. The extract exists when this “essential property” it is removed (extracted) from its initial context and set of relations and owned, sold, traded, or altered. As a property, the extract provides an ease of access and transfer. The process of extraction requires the application of force. Emily Dickinson describes this process in a short poem below:
ESSENTIAL oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.
The general rose decays;
But this, in lady’s drawer,
Makes summer when the lady lies
In ceaseless rosemary.
The internal composition, the essential property, is what is recognized as valuable precisely because it can be determined as an extractable good. The other remaining goods—the flower, stem, and other corporeal elements that are essential to the rose’s existence within a botanical world—are not valued because they refuse extraction in the same way. The attar (or essence) of rose is expressed (a word replete with connotations) by suns alone, but requires the mechanical work of violent intervention.
The first function provided by extraction of is the preservation of essence. While the “general rose decays,” fading in time, the extracted property of rose allows for a “ceaseless” existence. The use of “general” here is also telling—no individual or specific rose is memorialized in attar. Further, while the rose itself dies instantly in the process of extraction, that which was taken from it can live forever. The value of this sort of ceaseless existence would likely have been recognized in the context of Reformation Europe who lived in fear of death and desired that the soul should live.
The second function is to recreate the extracted essence into a saleable commodity. This reinvents the rose. It is no longer something beautiful in relation to its vital context, expressed by suns. Its purpose now is to “make summer” within a lady’s drawer. Dickinson refrains from judging the value of the rose’s expression and the quality of ceaseless rosemary: she does not opine (as she dares, at times, for trees) concerning the attitude that a rose might have toward such a gift of second “life.” An essence is a version of immortality, rendered violently, for the pleasure or profit of another. It is the gift of screws.
Imperialism:
The gift of screws was offered by Europeans to the continent of Africa. The question of what was “essential” to Africa, understood by European countries as “what of its properties could be extracted” altered over time. In The Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe offers a discussion of three waves of essentialism: humans, goods, space. This set up three different forms of imperial domination: enslavement, settler and plantation colonies, and extraction colonies. Each of these allowed white Europeans to no longer apply the misery of extraction to themselves, but to engage in “civilizing” Africa. It provided its technologies of civilization—Christianity and Capitalism—but imposed these tools violently through the application of different modes of violence: displacement, separation from family, and forced labor. After the Enlightenment, Democracy was added as though it were distant from the initial work of colonization; however, as Mbembe points out
“To dissimulate the contingency of its foundations and the violence constituting its hidden aspects, modern democracy needed at its inception to envelop itself in a quasi-mythological structure. As we have just seen, the orders of democracy, the plantation, and colonialism have long maintained relations of twinship.”
The American economic system was initially based in plantation slavery. White male property owners justified enslaving other humans by a host of theological and scientific claims embedded in claims of predestination. Segregationists used a variety of racist justifications for this, arguing that the Black person was spiritually cursed by God (the curse of Noah’s son Ham) or, after Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton (who pioneered eugenics), that the Black person was genetically inferior.[1] Assimilationists argued that enslaving Blacks would provide the gifts of culture—Christianity and Capitalism—that would allow enslaved persons to become fully human. Poor white laborers and servants who did not wish to undergo the extraction process entailed by enslavement desired a sense of belonging that would save them from finding this fate. Following Mbembe, what was produced by enslavement, therefore, was Blackness. Mbembe describes this in Critique of Black Reason:
To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection as a body of extraction, that is, a body entirely exposed to the will of the master, a body from which great effort is made to extract maximum profit. An exploitable object, the Black Man [sic] is also the name of a wound, the symbol of a person at the mercy of the whip and suffering in a field of struggle that opposes socioracially segmented groups and factions (18).[2]
Having extracted the person as property from a set of relations, and denying any ability to maintain a sense of relation by keeping “Blacks of the plantation socialized into the hatred of others, particularly of other Blacks” (18). Whites who worked as laborers and servants worked to secure their position as “white” in relation to the Blackness of the enslaved persons extracted as labor. Once the illusion of “lifelong servitude” became biologically deterministic, “The distinctions between White servants and Black slaves became much sharper. The plantation gradually took shape as an economic, disciplinary, and penal institutions in which Blacks and their descendants could be bought for life” (19).
The resulting sense of “whiteness” began to form in America due to its proximity to the Blackness that slave owning was essentially anxious. It carried the essential anxiety relative to Capitalism and economic insecurity (it no longer participated in a shared sense of substance as abundance), and that relative to Christianity (where the soul was likely doomed to hell by an angry God) that the self was bound to face alone. As Blackness became essentialized and extracted in the form of Black labor, a corresponding but opposed sense of essential whiteness began to develop in opposition to the material force of essential Blackness.
Not surprisingly, this sense of American whiteness built on the foundation that had already developed in Europe, where the characterization of Whiteness—especially for men—had been increasingly divested by insecurity. Fromm argues that the “modern” white European man “has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self—intellect and willpower—to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.” This is an extraction of whiteness—what white men saw as valuable in themselves—that could be severed from relations in the whole self and the relations that these men may have with others. Predicated on a sense of removal, however, meant that the spaces white men created for themselves left them feeling destitute and abandoned. The extraction of intellect and will means these are also displaced, such that “He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality, his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built” (117).
1: Instrumentality:
The extraction of Blackness occurred through violent, hateful abuse of the minds, souls, and bodies of the enslaved. These technologies were used, with less violence, to extract whiteness through an emphasis on instrumentality to the extent that whites are differently inhumane relative to each other at all times: “Not only the economic but also the personal relations between men have this character of alienation: instead of relations between human beings, they assume the character of relations between things,” an attitude carried into an extractive attitude—the marriage of instrumentality and alienation, to use Fromm’s terms, into the “individual’s relationship to his own self,” whereby “he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity” (119). This internal relationship, circumscribed by religious forces that foster a sense of guilt and damnation and economic circumstances that produce a disembodied form of self-commodification, often fosters the illusion of “selfishness” and the accumulation of property, but this, in itself, is a form of self-hatred (115).
Continuing to create American whiteness, especially after the Civil War, required the imposition of legal forms that maintained the illusion that whites were “owners” beyond being “owned.” The question of the rights of whiteness persisted in a few concrete forms:
1) The ability to continue to subject Black bodies to violence—lynchings and beatings—without fear of being prosecuted. This maintained Blackness as something devoid of human rights, and allowed those who exercised this form of whiteness to find this as a form of consolation.
2) The ability to use law as a technology that would continue to subject Black bodies to violence without ramification, which has led to the current state of mass incarceration.
3) The ability to amass wealth at the expense of Blackness through differences in wages and different advantages in lending practices. Men born with whiteness gained these privileges and advantages as a birthright, and exploited them over women and other minorities who were deemed to lack adequate whiteness (BIPOC, rather than Black per se).
2: Merchandise:
Because whiteness had external legal protections, the question of property could be extended as part of the colonizing process through the expansion of capitalism. The “property” traded often comprised the material and labor that had been extracted from its substantial relations and transformed into a commodity. The commodity was a material body acquired (initially) by white men as consolation for having sacrificed relationships with their own bodies. Because neither wealth nor property provided the sense of wholeness (provided by participating in substantial relations) that the process of extraction had erased, white men desired for an increase of profits as a form of compensation or consolation. This meant infecting new markets with new forms of disembodied desire that would invite others to join in forms of disembodied, dislocated desire.
Colonization and commerce introduced a new level of domination and subjection. Mbembe discusses how the “potentate’s mechanism of fantasy pivots on the regulation of needs and the flow of desire,” where “merchandise” becomes the catch-all term (114). Because the essential system begins with a disruption of substance in favor of what can be extracted, manufactured, and traded, it is important for basic needs to join objects of desire in a larger economy that becomes inescapable. The “desire” introduced has more in common with an economy of lack instead of the plentitude of desire freely available to all who participate in relations with what is present. The alternative, what Mbembe calls the “frantic pursuit of desire and enjoyment” is the kind of desire left to men characterized by whiteness, divorced from a total self and left only with intellect and volition, and is thus “a desire free from responsibility” (which presumes relations) and the pursuit of enjoyment as a mentality” (118) that fuses intellect and volition.
This form of domination was not enforced by violence, but was taught by those who had learned it from their own hands. Mbembe describes the process.
To obtain new goods, however, the colonized had to put himself in a position of complete servitude to the potentate. He had to inscribe himself in a relation of debt—the debt of dependence on the master. He had to commit himself to a pedagogy aimed at inculcating the vices of venality, vanity, and cupidity. As both natural instincts and deliberately cultivated impulses, vanity, venality, and cupidity constituted the three privileged expressions of servitude with regard to the master and the cult of the potentate. The colonized thus set off on a long and winding path toward the enjoyment of new possessions and the promise of citizenship, but the possibility of any real fulfillment of the newly born desires was constantly deferred. If there is a secret to the colony, it is clearly this: the subjection of the native by way of desire. In the colonial context it is subjection to desire that ultimately draws the colonized “outside themselves,” deceived as they are by the vain chimera of the image and the of the spell (119).
The process of merchandising mirrors the essential work described initially, but also reflects much about the inner workings of whiteness. The notion of an excess or surplus are incurred through a relationship of debt—a debt that extracts people from relationships important to the needs of a whole self. These desires—for a kind of “more” invited by the potentate through the acquisition of what had been extracted before—are secondary. The pursuit of these objects, to be enjoyed without relation, responsibility, and “as a mentality” further divorced those learning these desires from their own bodies and selves. Obtaining these objects created a sense of debt that could only be repaid through labor and the use of time, and “enjoying” these objects only increased the presence of being-dominated.
Domination was ingredient in this form of desire. Developed by the disembodied, instrumentalized men of whiteness, objects of “pleasure” were meant to assault the senses with the essence of an activity. Extracts allowed any activity to become more powerful, and thus capable of being experienced by those divorced from their bodies. Food required more additives and extracts that would allow it to deliver something chemically designed to be pleasurable to the human palate. Pornography allowed the sight and sound of sex in constructed, heightened forms to be experienced alone—without relation or responsibility. Objects that were less instantly sensory became invested with questions of status, allowed by a conspicuous consumerism that a secular society no longer frowned upon; alternately, the development of “prosperity gospels” allowed those who had attained material success to “prove” they were also blessed by god, in a reversal and perversion of American Puritan values. This cycle of values and desires—the machinery set up to dysregulate people from spaces of abundance and dysregulate their sense of control, fueling a sense of pain and creating chemical addictions and dependencies, was part of what America was increasingly able to produce and export: whiteness itself.
Finally, it is notable that this form of whiteness as domination occurs through the acquisition of debt. America is a country created out of debt. The country had initially obtained its dominance through the surplus obtained by its racist practices. This included the debt to the Indigenous populations from whom land was violently stolen and from the Black populations whose labor was violently extracted. But the hunger of the systems developed by white men and the weakness of whiteness—its anxieties—that had evolved in Europe and relative to its proximity to Blackness, meant that whiteness eventually had become another property that could be extracted and exploited in others.
3. Hierarchy:
The use of extracts relative to whiteness creates a universal world divided into four groups: the general, the individual, the exceptional, and the singular. These groups are divided based on their ability to make choices about what makes them essential and to what extent their ability to make rights claims are recognized by the universal world (which includes the world of laws and expectation of equal treatment). Once whiteness becomes exported as a way of dominating those who were not born with whiteness, through a logic of introduced desire and demand, it begins to set up a series of social relations familiar to those in America.
The General:
The general population is excluded from the universal world’s benefits: they provide the essence that allows for the universal world to function. This population is deemed “essential workers” for this reason, but, like the general rose that decays—any given life in the population is disposable. Their essence is important, but only when it is removed from both life and individuality. The general population in 21st-century America includes those whose visible features identify them as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or People of Color). Relative to individuals who inhabit the universal world, members of the general population are deemed disposable or expendable, not valuable or grievable.
An easy test that allows one to determine whether someone is part of the general population is the extent to which an individual becomes able to represent the whole. When those who claim the privilege of whiteness develop racist attitudes, they’re often connected to a either a first-hand account of a negative interaction with someone lacking whiteness (this can also include a news report or story from a trusted friend). Those who have had positive interactions with someone visibly manifesting a BIPOC identity will consider this relationship to stand in as positive support for other races as a whole, even if they maintain segregationist or assimilationist attitudes as a general rule.[3] Because the general population is valued for their essence (generally labor), they are perceived (by the universal order) in terms of their bodies (which those who are characterized by whiteness have extracted from their sense of self) and thus become essentialized by their race.
The Individual:
The individual is the inhabitants of the universal world. I follow Richard Dyer here, in his book White: “white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail” (9). White people do not see themselves as raced, they are “just people” (2), whereas the indigeneity of an indigenous person precludes their ability to represent the “universal.” Because “whiteness” is not deemed worthy of comment, white people are freed to be individuals with other dominant signifiers they can celebrate and explore.
Placed within the safe confines of this world, their perspectives on themselves and their values are mirrored and reinforced. They gain access to the universal and the consolations its provides by making a sacrifice of their individual essence in exchange for universal power. Supported by the universal, individual deviations become the exceptions from the rule. Those who can claim the privilege of whiteness thus become “people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised, and abled” (3). Claiming access to the universal world requires that those who wish to claim privileges sacrifice their essence (as an extract) in order to find a place within the hierarchy that shapes the universal order. This hierarchy provides a weighted scale—where white, propertied, abled-bodied educated men have the most power, and atypical women without education and subject to food or house insecurity often have the fewest claims. The hierarchy is premised on the myth of meritocracy and oriented toward an individualistic culture.
The fact that individuals achieve success within the universal at the expense of their essence means that, ironically, many individuals end up with just as little of their essence as those confined to the general population. One major difference is that individuals are compensated and rewarded for the sacrifice of their essence, while those in the general population are seen as having less inherent dignity or worth because of it. Dyer cites David Lloyd, who argues that the pinnacle of the universal world is a space purified of any distinguishing feature. Thus, according to Lloyd, the goal of one’s sacrifice is becoming “a subject without properties” and therefore the most crucial elements in the development of white identity “the attainment of a position of disinterest—abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity—which creates a public sphere that is the mark of civilisation, itself the aim of human history” (38).
This attribute in part stems from the paradoxical quality of whiteness. Desiring to become essentially white means voluntarily abstracting from the kinds of relational embeddedness that give rise to personal qualities, strengths, memories, or desires. Although American whiteness has been noted for generating “white women’s tears,” which arise when white women feel guilty about the facts of racism and ask for others (often BIPOC women) to comfort them, as well as white male violence (part of a larger project for securing individual rights that are routinely denied those in the general population), these reactions, goals, and desires often represent the cultural universal and are not reactions anchored in the individual person. To become successfully “white” at the level of the universal—someone truly freed from the distortions of the personal—is to become a blank. The consolation for one’s voluntary blankness is the ability to have security, respect, and all of one’s culturally derived interests supplied. The ultimate goal, Dyer suggests, is indistinguishable from death.
The Exceptional:
According to Ibram X. Kendi, America has often excused its segregationist policies by displaying certain persons who display adequate amounts of whiteness. Examples of the exceptional minority have become touchstones through the course of American history, from Phyllis Wheatley to Beyonce, from Frederick Douglass to MLK. Such persons are clearly gifted with talents, abilities, and distinguishing qualities that make them exceptional relative to white individuals. As tokens, they become names that white people who disavow explicit segregationist racist policies will learn in order to reinforce the belief that they are not racist.
Although these are particular persons, named and thus not part of the general population, they remain too distinctive to be deemed “individual” in a universal culture designed to become disembodied. Exceptions to the general population, they also are exceptions to the universal order. Rather than having their essence extracted or being allowed to sacrifice it in the name of conformity, exceptional persons are allowed to navigate the universal world as something other. Exceptional persons, by virtue of being the exception, are no longer allowed to represent their race. Rather than disproving segregationist or assimilationist views, which hold that anything other than pure whiteness is inferior, the exception reinforces the general truth of the rule. Assimilationists may view the exceptional person as “someone who successfully overcame a lack of whiteness,” while segregationists could—at most—allow the exceptional person to justify their racist outlook. Generally, any discussion of an exceptional person’s attributes are described as “affirmative action” or a form of tokenism that thereby wholly undermines the essence of the exceptional person and attribute it to the gracious attitudes that are essential to whiteness.
Despite accolades, even exceptional BIPOC individuals are often unrecognized for greatness relative to universal standards. The #oscarssowhite hashtag, which April Reign started in 2015, drew attention to the lack of BIPOC representation for major awards—only two BIPOC persons were nominated that year. As a result, the Oscars have become modestly more diverse—for example, Spike Lee received his first Oscar in 2018 for BlackKklansman after a 30-year drought—but large gaps in opportunities still remain throughout the film industry.[4]
The Singular:
The singular consists of those persons who refuse to make the sacrifices required to fit into the hierarchy that comprises the universal. These are persons who retain their essence, refusing to become amalgamated into either the general or the universal. Soren Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, discusses the singular person as one who relates absolutely to the absolute, ignoring the conventions of the universal altogether. This disregard of the universal is neither conformity nor rebellion; instead, singular persons become revolutionary in their willingness to remain different. Because the nature of this difference involves their essence, rather than the kinds of qualities that are expunged within the general and sacrificed within the universal, this is a different kind of difference than what the universal’s more simple system of identity can process. It is quite likely that exceptional persons are also singular persons relative to themselves—Toni Morrison, for example, simply acted according to what she believed was best without regarding what the universal system believed desirable or possible for BIPOC persons or for women. Emily Dickinson and Soren Kierkegaard are examples of other singular persons.
The singular is a category that relates to one that Herman Melville, in his final novel The Confidence Man, defines as possessed of an “original character.” Melville argues that most characters are, at best, “odd” and not truly original: “characters, merely singular, imply but singular form, original ones, truly so, imply original instincts.” The benefit of the truly original is that in “real history” these become “a new law-giver, a revolutionizing philosopher, or the founder of a new religion” (239). Melville allows that “nearly all the original characters” retain some essence of the personal, something “prevailingly local, or of the age,” which is consistent with embodied finitude—the essence of a particular existence. However, an original character can transform the world that it is placed in by providing an orientation that differs from that of the universal: “everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it” (239).
I will follow Melville to allow that the singular is a more expansive group than the original. Although perhaps not every singular person will be equipped to be fully revolutionary, I believe that singular persons who retain their essence without regard to the universal would inherently show the structures of the universal in a different light. At the very least, the mode of individuality presented by singular persons is uniquely individual, self-generating. Especially for those who would have the option of embracing the universal nature of whiteness, the audacity of refusing to sacrifice essence and choosing instead to repudiate an ethic of conformity creates a sense of unease that lacks the forgiving diminution that attends the “exceptional” person, which excuses singularity under a blanket of racism.
[1] Mbembe describes how this scientistic bent remains prevalent in America in a discussion of “nanoracism” in Necropolitics.
[2] Angela Davis in Women, Race, and Class discusses how Black women’s bodies were not only used as sites of extraction for Blackness but were violated and made productive through rape as well.
[3] I deeply appreciate Ibram X. Kendi’s work in Stamped from the Beginning—the delineation of these attitudes as perspectives that Americans hold toward race, as well as the history of how these attitudes are held by various influential persons throughout the history of America, makes for crucial reading.
[4] Ava DuVernay’s election to the Academy Board (as of 10 June 2020) is part of a trend in the proper direction as the 54 person board now has 26 women and 12 people of color. This may not, however, be adequate to eliminating a century of racist values that influence scripts, casting, directing, and financing of movies. Often, the fate of cultural products mirrors the trouble that people have. Thus, art that originates from those who whose claims to the universal are denied due to race are either dismissed as “general” or deemed “exceptional.”