The Works of Whiteness: Crisis, Culturelessness, and Redemption

The Inauguration of President Obama inaugurated a regime of forgetting, of concealing and coding the “histories of determination” (Ahmed) that place official American political rhetoric at the “beyond” of a democracy to come. The pure idealism of American Liberalism establishes its self-contained dialectic of newness, its continual circles of origins and beginnings, in the ceaselessness of its blind ahistoricism. At an absolutely singular moment when the shame of American (neo)liberalism is everywhere displaced and disrupted by the material realities of economic collapse, extra-judicial political violence (the execution-style killing Oscar Grant constitutes the most recent and visible case), racial profiling and detainment, American exceptionalism and triumphantalism returns to the absolutely singular promise of a nation on the long path toward the twilight of history. Obama’s comments just days before his inauguration concerning the prosecution of the Bush regime for war crimes, speaks to the radical passivity of the politics of forgetting that have been represented as “hope” and “change”. The narratives of progress, newness, and hope, demand (narratives and tropes central to Obama’s campaign) deploy a particular concept of history that links universal regimes of truth without contextualization or social location. The lack of these narratives is positioned as the always potential accomplishment of "democracy", the task to come.




The “post-racial” is not just a strictly political ideology but extends into the realm of political economy as a commodified life-style and cultural indicator. As a discourse of advertising and mass culture, the “post-racial” has signaled a shift in the racialization of commercials, films, and television shows. The coding and recoding of consumption in the context of the “post-racial”, points to the framework of color-blind ideology as one way to deconstruct and interrogate the fluidity and rapid circulation of the “post-racial” image and “post-racial” visual culture at large. In his ethnographic study of white-youth culture and the appropriation of hip-hop, Rodriquez examines the relationship between color-blind ideologies and cultural practices. Central to his examination of that relationship, Rodriquez’s discussion of blackness as cultural indicator of subcultural style (coolness) and in-group claims to authenticity is a helpful framework for reading the “post-racial” in terms of subcultural practices, reading-formations, and popular culture. Color-blindness is related to the schemata of the “post-racial” in that it affirms the “invisibility” of whiteness as the lens through which all other races and ethnicities are imagined, and yet color-blindness and the “post-racial” are themselves, particular kinds of imaginaries. As pedagogic whiteness, both imaginaries instruct, through cultural tools, the coding and decoding of cultural practices embedded in particular racial and ethnic histories and struggles and then decontextualize, destabilize, and reinscribe those practices as cultural available to “all” (which means to whites). That is, both “post-racial” and color-blind ideologies enable whites to position their racial identities as “culture-less” and devoid of historically and socially embedded meaning. In "post-racial" visual culture such "culture-lessness" accomplishes one of the primary works of white privilege and supremacy, a work of erasure of the histories of determination that imagine whiteness as a kind of post-modern crisis of shattered self and subjectivity, a theme of the recent film "Revolutionary Road". Similarly, this cultureless-ness (a result of self-marginalization and effacement) produces a liminality of whiteness that establishes whiteness as “in-between” or beyond racial binaries and constructions. The construction of the crisis of whiteness signals racial redemption only through the agency of whitness itself.