Today’s show deals the word “white”—meant here not as a color but as a way of describing people.
I wrote the following paragraph to my friend Jan Steckel after the mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, July, 2019. And now we have the El Paso massacre and the Dayton, Ohio massacre:
The old racist slogan, “If you’re white, you’re right,” seems to have become “If you’re white, you’re a blight”—a precise description of our Racist in Chief. I’m Irish and Italian. The Irish and the Italians were only marginally white for many years. I think we ought to resign any membership in the group. The concept of “white” as a word for people didn’t exist—it’s not in Shakespeare though one of his plays features a “Moor”—until the advent of the slave ships. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the word “white” meaning “A white man; a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion,” was in 1671—some years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The second was in 1726. The speaker is a ship’s captain:
There may be about 20000 Whites (or I should say Portuguese, for they are none of the whitest,) and about treble that number of Slaves.
Note in what he says, especially, that the opposite of “white” is not “black”; the opposite of “white” is “Slave.” “White” does not refer to the dubious concept of “race”: it refers, deeply, to power. To be “white” is to be a master, not a slave. Has slavery, in any sense, ever ended in this country? One person answered that question with, “Not only has it not ended. There are more people in bondage now than there ever were.”
At the conclusion of the great Brecht-Weill theater piece, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), the Street Singer narrator, seemingly alone on the stage, sings,
Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht.
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.
For some are in darkness / And others are in the light / And you see the ones in the light / You don’t see those in darkness (in Marc Blitzstein’s rhymed translation: There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in light / And you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight). Suddenly, behind the singer, the stage lights up and we see—beggars (what we would call “street people”). They are precisely what the theater audience went to the theater to avoid. It is a moment of violent contradiction and illumination. For a moment, the theater, in all its falseness, is alive with reality.
That impulse to illuminate what Langston Hughes called “the darker brother” (“I, Too”) has been at the heart of one of the great struggles of the twentieth/twenty-first century, and it has taken place both in the realm of politics and the realm of the psyche. What is “the Unconscious” if not “the darker brother” understood as a fact of mind? Und man siehet die in Lichte / Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.
I recently wrote this poem about “white privilege”:
The term “white privilege”
Has one word too many
White means privilege
It is the opinion of some
That they have lost their privilege
That their whiteness is in question
It is the opinion of some
That they have been
Deprived of their birthright
And that “the darker brother”
Has taken their world away.
They are angry
Confused
And unaware of the closeness
Of their DNA
To that of the darker brother
To that of all darker brothers
They wish to regain
Their privilege
A privilege
Which
In fact
They have never
Possessed.
Whiteness
Is the flag they wave
They are
A huge blank
In a world of color.
Is not the philosopher John Searle
Defender of landlords
Attacker of Derrida
Purveyor of academic plums
In exchange for plummy sex
With young women
A white male?
Did he not enjoy the privileges
Of the white male?
Has he not been stripped of his titles
And shamed in his profession?
Has he not become
Another victim
Not only of his own greed
And desire for power
But of
Whiteness?
…
To speak of “multiculturalism” is to speak of a way of seeing the world without whiteness.