What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era by Carlos Lozada

Author:Carlos Lozada [Lozada, Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: 1982145625
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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That category, in the argot of identity politics, is “whiteness.” Whiteness does not mean white people, at least not necessarily. For most identity authors, whiteness is the presumption that white is normal, the universal standard against which all else conforms or from which all else deviates. “Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive,” Michael Eric Dyson argues in Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (2017). “It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.” For all the discussions of white privilege, this default position on humanity’s drop-down menu is the greatest entitlement of whiteness. “My story is not about condemning white people,” Brown writes in I’m Still Here, “but about rejecting the assumption—sometimes spoken, sometimes not—that white is right: closer to God, holy, chosen, the epitome of being.”

Even critics of whiteness soak in it, to the point that they fail to notice its pervasiveness. For Jennine Capó Crucet, growing up Cuban American in South Florida—a community full of Cuban doctors and Cuban police officers and Cuban politicians—meant enjoying the benefits of such status. “To be Cuban in Miami was to be a kind of white, with all the privileges and sense of cultural neutrality whiteness affords,” she writes in My Time Among the Whites, published in 2019.

The culture shock of student life at Cornell University compels Crucet to embrace Hispanic identity. “I became Latinx to find community, to survive,” she explains, and her new perspective shifted everything, in ways that were profound, mundane, and occasionally hilarious. The beloved Disney World of her childhood, for instance, suddenly becomes a kingdom whose only magic is to manufacture a white, straight American fantasy. (When Crucet visits the theme park with her family as a college senior and spends the trip pointing out the heteronormativity, patriarchy, and bigotry implicit in every ride, her parents wonder if elite higher education had somehow ruined her ability to enjoy things.) And the wedding reception Crucet eventually plans must be made to appeal to her fiancé’s white midwestern relatives, which means holding in check those qualities that would make it a more Cuban affair.

Even Crucet’s first name—like that of Austin Channing Brown—grasps at the advantages of whiteness. Her parents, Cuban refugees, adapted “Jennine” from the name of a white Miss USA contestant in 1980. (Crucet reshaped this decision into a story for a fiction workshop in college, only to be admonished by white classmates that a real Cuban couple would never do that.) Crucet, now a professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, recalls how, during her elementary school years, her mother wondered aloud why Jennine couldn’t be more like a white classmate. “She just wanted better for me, which meant: whiter.”

White Americans have the luxury of seeing themselves as “culture-less, as vanilla,” Crucet writes, which only proves how little race intrudes on their daily lives. Whiteness is not a preoccupation when it seems ubiquitous. But that may have changed in 2016, when most white voters cast their ballot for Trump, who “essentially ran on a version of whiteness,” Crucet writes.

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