White Bound by Hughey Matthew;

Author:Hughey, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Color Capital and White Debt

So yeah, well, as much as we, even myself personally, I mean, [long pause] as much I might hate to admit it, . . . especially not in public, there is just something cool, I mean, well, put it this way, black people own the whole notion of “cool” . . . Yeah, sometimes I do get jealous . . . I’d be lying if I didn’t sometimes, especially years ago, I mean, want to be cool like black people.

—Steven, National Equality for All

We were at this party a few months back, and normally, it’s not like there are a lot of black people that come in there, which is messed up because they segregate, but you know, it’s a problem of racism . . . Anyway, these guys walked in, they were black, and they started dancing, and we all formed a circle around them and were clapping and cheering because they were just amazing . . . Black people are so cool when they dance . . . I wish I could dance like that.

—Cassandra, Whites for Racial Justice

The Souls of White Folk

Although The Souls of Black Folk is probably W. E. B. Du Bois’s best-known book, he penned another essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” in which he wrote:

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obbligato of tune and tone . . .1

Du Bois set an important trajectory for the research of whiteness as a social identity thought “inherently and obviously better.” To Du Bois, a supremacist self-appraisal infected an array of whites—from overt racists to the “sweeter souls.” To explain this widespread view, Du Bois argued that white racial identity sprang from identifying not as an enslaved worker but as a free and superior identity to those inferior persons of darker hues. Later, in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois wrote that, because white workers eschewed solidarity with nonwhite workers, they received a “public and psychological wage”—a set of symbolic and material privileges that nonwhites did not possess.2 Moreover, Du Bois provided a robust overview of how the creation of whiteness as an identity couched in superiority was maintained by whites being “unconscious of any such powerful and vindictive feeling.”3

Alongside this unconscious superiority, whites also possessed a paradoxical desire for contact with, and imitation of, nonwhites over whom they exercise power. Du Bois made clear that blacks were robust contributors to society, yet he distinguished among the different kinds of white usages of black offerings and practices.4 For example, while Du Bois celebrated “Negro folk-songs as striking and characteristic,” he lambasted white replication in minstrel shows as “debasements and imitations.”5 Hence, white racial identity and its performative interactions with nonwhite “others” developed in Janus-faced fashion—as both an identity superior to nonwhite otherness and as an identity dependent on appropriating that otherness.

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