Nature as metaphor

Nature as metaphor

Week 9: Normative sexuality, Donald Trump, and whiteness

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/9.2

Main reading: Bjork-James (2020)

What to do about repugnant cultural others?

A word of warning: This week we are learning about what racists think. This is different from how everyone in this class thinks, and it is also an ugly, repulsive way of thinking.

Neo-Nazis and white nationalists are “repugnant cultural others” (Harding 1991).

We don’t have to accept what someone believes in order to learn more about it.

• We can and should have an honest reaction,
• but we should also be aware of how that reaction might also keep us from asking important questions.

Racist people are racist but Bjork-James (2020) reveals that they are also obsessed with sex. Why?

Even if we do reject their ideas, it is still worth asking this question because we want to understand better the world we live in now, and this is a world that we, unfortunately, share with racists.

“One ever feels his two-ness”

W. E. B. Du Bois describes what it is like to be African American in the early 20th century:

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois 1903, 3)

Talk about the highlighted phrases. What do they mean?

• born with a veil
• gifted with second-sight
• double-consciousness

Can you think of examples of these?

“Of them I am singularly clairvoyant”

Du Bois also describes what is like to be an African American sociologist and thinker:

“HIGH in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

“Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know.” (Du Bois 1921, 29)

What does clairvoyance mean here?

It seems to be more than just knowledge of the oppressed, so what is it?

Cultural anthropology and the fight against pseudoscientific racism in the early 20th century

Cultural anthropology is founded in the 20th century as a challenge to pseudoscientific ideas:

• that humans belonged to different racial types; and
• that one’s racial type determined one’s intelligence, behavior, and the kind of society one would live in.

Franz Boas argued

• that there is no natural or intrinsic link between race, intelligence, behavior, or cultural expression:
  • “Any attempt to explain cultural forms on a purely biological basis is doomed to failure” (Boas [1930] 1940, 265; see also Boas [1931] 1940, 1912).
• that cultures can not be ranked on a single scale:
  • “[E]ach cultural group has its own unique history, dependent partly upon the inner development of the social group, and partly upon the foreign influences to which it has been subjected” (Boas [1920] 1940, 286; see also Boas 1889).

Du Bois goes one step further

Boas and Du Bois both collaborated and influenced each other’s thinking (Harrison 1992; Muller 1992).

Arguably, Du Bois goes one step farther than Boas, by also critiquing whiteness:

• “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing, a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. […] Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!” (Du Bois 1921, 29–30)

Boas would, I think, approve:

• “I do not believe that any convincing proof has ever been given of a direct relation between race and culture. […] Hereditary characteristics when socially significant have a cultural value as in all cases of race discrimination or in those cultural conditions in which a specially gifted line is given the opportunity to impress itself upon the general culture” (Boas [1930] 1940, 265, original emphases).

The making of a “seventh son”

For Du Bois, races have no biological reality, but world history has produced different kinds of people.

This begins with the “discovery of personal whiteness,” that is,

• the European invention of a specific idea of humanity, which they claimed was universal but was implicitly based on themselves as a model (Du Bois 1921, 29, 42).

In that sense, African Americans are the “seventh” race (Du Bois 1903, 3).

• They are a product of the formation of a racial order in the US, and thus are a distinct historical formation rather than descendants of an original, biological African race.

Du Bois’s ideas are developed by Omi and Winant

Michael Omi and Howard Winant ([1986] 2014) argue that racial categories are products of a historical formation. They distinguish between:

• racialization: symbolic classification of people, and the association of physical differences with language, culture, place, etc. with specific racial groups
• racial projects: the social means, formal and informal, by which racializations are put into practice and made socially significant
  • racial projects can be either racist (based on assumptions of racial inferiority) or anti-racist. Racism is, hence, more than merely a person’s prejudices or biases.

Whiteness as a racial project

Winant (2001) has also argued that there are many new and different “white racial projects” now being carried out.

There have always been two separate yet interacting racial projects to establish what whiteness means:

• One is a project of centering, in which whiteness does not utter its name.
  • One group is defined as normal and everyone else is marked as other.
  • This is a polarized model of human differences, some people being pulled to one end or pushed to its opposite end.
• The other is a project of bounding. It exists to secure the first project.
  • It cuts the continuum with two poles into segments, making boxes to put people in.

In an era where people now reject the legitimacy of a centering project for whiteness, the project of bounding has become more important.

Whiteness is not and has never been real, but in a racial project of bounding, white people are racialized and a racial essence of whiteness is projected onto many different people with very little in common.

White nationalists are obsessed with sex

US white nationalists are preoccupied with heterosexual, procreative sex because for them, this is how they can create white people, that is, people who possess a racial essence. This is their version of the white racial project of bounding.

They think about kinship very much the way Schneider ([1968] 1980) says that Americans have always imagined kinship: A shared biogenetic substance.

Women, as mothers, and their children are symbols of purity.

Stuart Hall on difference and (inter)dependence

“I don’t want other people to be like me. I don’t know why they should be. I don’t think my experience is rich enough to embrace the existence of the rest of the world. I have to find a way of recognising that I cannot be self sufficient in myself. I am, from the moment of birth, from the moment of entry into language and culture, dependent on that which is different from me. Otherwise love is self love, love is narcissism, love is locked in solipsism, never gets out of the confines of the reflection in the mirror. It’s not enough. We are dependent on the other - to feed us, to recognise who we are, to speak a language. Our common humanity, which is what you are speaking about, is the process of reciprocity with that which is not us, which is other than us, which is different. So I hope that when we tear each other apart, we’ll find a little bit of common humanity, just so that we don’t fall into what Hobbes called the war of all against all. But humanism is not any longer quite enough for me.” (Hall 2007, 155)

References and further reading

Bjork-James, Sophie. 2020. “White Sexual Politics: The Patriarchal Family in White Nationalism and the Religious Right.” Transforming Anthropology 28 (1): 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12167.

Boas, Franz. 1889. “On Alternating Sounds.” American Anthropologist 2 (1): 47–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/658803.

———. 1912. “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants.” American Anthropologist 14 (3): 530–62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/659886.

———. (1931) 1940. “Race and Progress.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 3–17. New York: The Macmillan Company.

———. (1930) 1940. “Some Problems of Methodology in the Social Sciences.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 260–69. New York: The Macmillan Company.

———. (1920) 1940. “The Methods of Ethnology.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 281–89. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 1–12. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. https://archive.org/details/cu31924024920492.

———. 1921. “The souls of white folk.” In Darkwater: Voices from within the veil, 29–52. New York: Harcourt, Brace. http://archive.org/details/darkwatervoicesf00duborich.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with Difference: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December):148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.

Harding, Susan. 1991. “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other.” Social Research 58 (2): 373–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970650.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. “The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 12 (3): 239–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X9201200303.

Muller, Nancy Ladd. 1992. “Du Boisian Pragmatism and ‘The Problem of the Twentieth Century’.” Critique of Anthropology 12 (3): 319–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X9201200307.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. (1986) 2014. “The Theory of Racial Formation.” In Racial Formation in the United States. London: Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1715791.

Schneider, David M. (1968) 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winant, Howard. 2001. “White Racial Projects.” In The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, 97–112. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381044.