The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition by George Lipsitz

Author:George Lipsitz [Lipsitz, George]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, United States, General, Social Science, History
ISBN: 9781592134939
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2006-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R

8

“Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”:

Antiblack Racism and White

Identity

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be

described as deluded—about themselves and

the world they live in. . . . The reason for this, at bottom, is that the doctrine of white

supremacy, which still controls most white

people, is itself a stupendous delusion: but to be born black in America is an immediate, a

mortal challenge.

—JAMES BALDWIN

People of color have never been merely passive victims of white supremacist power. The active agency of aggrieved communities has always served as an important counterweight to white power. In the process of defending themselves and advancing their own immediate interests, individuals and communities struggling against white supremacy have often created ways of knowing, forms of struggle, and visions of the future important to all people. Even seemingly insignificant cultural expressions often prove to be important reservoirs of collective memory and cultural critique about the possessive investment in whiteness. Scholarly studies of racism in the United States suffer when they fail to recognize the knowledge about social relations contained in music, literature, and folklore, but those scholars who develop respect and understanding for popular ways of knowing can create highly enlightening and important works.

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C H A P T E R 8

To uninitiated listeners, Dizzy Gillespie’s 1959 composition “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” might have sounded trivial, frivolous, and insignificant.

Gillespie combined fragments of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

with advertising jingles. He mixed jazz improvisation, Afro-Cuban drumming, Yoruba chants, rhythm-and-blues melodies, and quotes from General Douglas MacArthur’s famous 1951 farewell speech. Gillespie’s lyrics playfully imbued Cadillacs with the reverence that slaves a century earlier reserved for the chariots that they imagined would take them to heaven. He transposed General MacArthur’s line “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away” to “Old Cadillacs never die, the finance company just fades them away.” Yet for all its inventive contrasts, the humor and the seriousness encoded in “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”

contained a communication of great significance.

Gillespie’s mischievous conflation of divinity with consumer desire in the song brought to the surface the connections between the secular and the sacred in the history of slavery and segregation in the United States. The slaves who sang about chariots coming to carry them home actually had no homes in this world, though their uncompensated labor created comfortable homes for others. Slaves owned no commodities, but their labor made it possible for others to accumulate assets, to ride in fine carriages—while the legal and social systems transformed slaves from human persons to private property. In the antebellum period, abolitionists used spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

to remind the public of the slaves’ humanity by focusing attention on their faith, on their own assumptions about themselves as people with souls entitled to the fellowship in Christ promised to all by Christianity. Yet after emancipation, as Jon Cruz’s innovative research convincingly demonstrates, these same spirituals served fundamentally different purposes.

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