What is whiteness? It’s complexion, sure. It’s a political category that has both broadened and shrunk over decades. It’s the binary opposite of Blackness as necessitated by anti-Black racist hierarchy. It’s something you can identify as, but it’s also something people can and will say you aren’t. It’s a medical term as well, used interchangeably with “Caucasian,” itself a term rooted in racist phrenology. Confusingly, it can be — and is — all of these things, depending on context. Even in academic circles there’s disagreenent over definitions of the term. The difficulty in defining whiteness is not accidental; it’s paramount that the label be difficult to pin down so that new groups can be absorbed when convenient and cast out just as easily when power demands it. The boundaries of race are constructed not around objective qualities but around utility to oppressors and proximity to power.
A common talking point of armchair sociologists is that there was a time when Jews, Italians and Irish weren’t considered white. Yet, it’s vital to understand that these groups were still allowed in white-only establishments in the Jim Crow South and were granted the benefits of the GI bill where their Black peers were not. So, while it’s true — as mentioned by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in his book Racism without Racists — that they were seen as lesser to their WASP counterparts and disallowed from working for or joining certain establishments, they were never Black — they were just lesser races under an umbrella of whiteness. Legally, the Irish have almost always been considered white, but they did not earn the respect and dignity of whiteness until, as historian Art McDonald writes:
“They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation … And so, we have the tragic story of how one oppressed ‘race,’ Irish Catholics, learned how to collaborate in the oppression of another ‘race,’ Africans in America, in order to secure their place in the white republic.”
As always, reality complicates our simple narratives. Especially in the case of the Irish, learning to play by the rules of the racist hierarchy, to stomp the boot down on the shoulders of those below you to stand a bit higher, was enough to earn them true “whiteness” in the sociopolitical sense. They were fully assimilated and nowadays no one in their right mind would challenge an Irish man’s whiteness. This goes to show how flexible the category can be if you become useful to and closer to the white powers that be.
However, the label can also be a consolation prize to placate groups who still face discrimination. Those labeled as white do not always reap the benefits of the classification. Legal or medical designation does not necessarily confer safety, acceptance or equality. In fact, it can be a form of structural violence to identify a group as such when they do not have a lived experience that matches that of their supposed white peers. The mental and physical health disparities between white and Arab individuals due to the impact of discrimination and inequality are not negligible and they are currently unaccounted for in most medical research. This invisible “white, but not quite” experience plays its own role in the hierarchy. You are less likely to challenge white supremacy if you have more to gain from it than others, if you believe one day you might earn your way into the dominant group or if you fear that your near-white status will be revoked should you misbehave. We might have seen the whiteness of Arabs become less contentious, much like it did for the Irish, had it not been for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the resulting tsunami of Islamophobic rhetoric and political violence, but that isn’t the world we live in. Instead, we live in a world where despite being considered white by medical journals, Arabs face discrimination daily on the grounds of islamophobia, racism and general xenophobia. In his book “The Limits of Whiteness,” Neda Maghbouleh writes: “They say, ‘If you’re Iranian, then you’re white.’ And it’s like, okay, can you pronounce my last name correctly, please? … And am I ‘white’ like you when I’m at the airport? No. I’m not white.”
The flexible nature of whiteness is not incidental, but an intentional and insidious mechanism designed to grant privileges to those groups who capitulate and to punish those groups who do not. While pale-skinned European immigrants were gradually absorbed into true sociopolitical whiteness, many Arab and Latine individuals still occupy liminal spaces, legally white but socially othered. Whiteness is a constantly negotiated status that can be granted or withheld to enforce hierarchy. To deeply and honestly analyze racial inequality, we must understand race, whiteness and non-whiteness for their functions as social constructs wielded to maintain domination. We must engage critically with our dark past and troubling present to find our way to a brighter future.