White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. By Ruth Frankenberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. x + 274 pages. $44.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).

Memoir of a Race Traitor. By Mab Segrest. Boston: South End Press, 1994. x + 274 pages. $30.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).

White writing is white only insofar as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African.

The premise of these works is that white women are raced as well as gendered subjects. This important insight allows us to wrest the usually assumed (and therefore dangerous) equivalences between race and blackness or gender and women. Because these books align themselves with the notion that "race is socially constructed," they become testaments to the theoretical possibility of denouncing the discursively produced identity, whiteness. All three authors have been engaged in antiracist work--Segrest as former coordinator of North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, Frankenberg in feminist collectives in northern California, and Ware in England with interracial groups as well as internationally with ecofeminists. Collectively, they imagine a new version of coalition politics.

It is significant that these books have begun to examine the racialized gender of whiteness--to look as did Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs) at white women's complicity with and resistance to white womanhood. It was nineteenth-century black feminists, perhaps beginning with Sojourner Truth of "Ain't I a Woman" fame, who began to articulate the inherent whiteness of "true womanhood" that contemporary black feminists such as Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, and Kim Crenshaw have continued to theorize.¹

As part of a generation of ambivalent race-thinkers, the authors could conceivably take eminent white South African Coetzee's statement, quoted above, as an anthem. Like a growing number of contemporary antiracist intellectuals, the authors at times feel that it is unconscionable to be white in a white supremacist world. Not coincidentally, this yearning for what David Roediger calls the "abolition of whiteness" occurs during an increase in the number of international neo-Nazi pro-white groups and the violent acts they organize and execute. As Mab Segrest's book makes clear, the resurgence of racism makes antiracist organizing all the more dire. Although there are definite differences between the stated goals and the latent assumptions of each of these texts, they agree that race must matter to white people (and especially to white feminists) if racism is to end.

Vron Ware's substantial study, Beyond the Pale, untangles the nineteenth-century Anglo-American roots of (white) feminism that were entangled with struggles for black liberation. Thus, three of her five lengthy chapters analyze selected moments in the history of liberation for [End Page 154] blacks and women. Ware, a British journalist, historian, and filmmaker, focuses on individual white women who were involved intimately in abolitionist movements, in colonial education, and in the international antilynching campaign waged by black activist Ida B. Wells. The ideological fissures created among Frances Willard, Catherine Impey, and Ida B. Wells around lynching exemplify Ware's attempts to be nonreductive in addressing the complications of class, race, and gender as they were played out on the uneven fields of radical political struggle. Ware's genealogy of antiracist activists, some of whom were racist nonetheless, uncovers the invisible process by which white women, particularly of the middle classes, were conscripted to conform to and perform white femininity. In her critique of several important "do-gooders" (including popular British business woman Anita Roddick, owner of the Body Shop chain), Ware shows that "the very idea of shared sisterhood was dangerously close to the imperialist ideologies of a universal womanhood" (160).² Ware takes this lesson seriously by articulating the conflicting interests of specific advocacy groups.

The first chapter is somewhat more anecdotal than the last, more theoretical chapter. These opening and closing chapters expand the historical body of the text, framing the issues of white women's race relations. The nonuniform style of her prose engages the reader and reflects the uneven and imbricated nature of her topic. It is this kind of integrated thinking that seems to be particularly instructive for cultural theorists. Although Ware's text does much to amend the historiography of abolition, the book misses an opportunity to analyze the relevant construction of lower-class and sexually deviant women as (not) white in nineteenth-century discourse. So too, because Ware's text is "a call to refuse racist definitions of white femininity" (253), the author should have paid some attention to constructions of lesbian and queer women as "not white."³

Beyond the Pale contains some stunning photographic images (one I have used in my own courses, culled from a New York Times Sunday magazine, of the statuesque model Jerry Hall rising like Botticelli's Venus amid a group of Islamic women in purdah); but unfortunately, Ware does not provide any analysis of these photos. Thus, the pictures are dispersed throughout the text as mere chapter-candy. This is particularly sad because Ware is a fine reader of images, as her analysis of a racist British advert in the first chapter demonstrates. As one of the first forays into this emerging field, Ware's efforts must be commended--especially her ability to complicate the work of Wells, Impey, and other post-abolitionist feminists. [End Page 155]

Where Ware's text discusses "not what it is to be a white woman, but what it is to be thought of as a white woman . . . [and] concentrates on the development of ideas of whiteness rather than analyzing what it actually means to grow up white in a white supremacist society" (xii), Ruth Frankenberg's semisociological study, White Women, Race Matters, looks at and listens to the lived experiences and everyday racial encounters of thirty white women from northern California. In keeping with current anthropological practice, Frankenberg acts as a kind of participant/observer in her research. She calls this "insider" reporting, "white on white."⁴ Frankenberg's interviewees discuss their childhoods, interracial relations, family histories, and conceptions of race. This well-organized book divides the interviews into topical or thematic sections, discussing race, sex, and intimacy from different perspectives and exploring "questions of culture and belonging." One criticism I have is that such groupings emphasize the rather ahistorical arguments of the text.

The snippets selected suggest that there are at least two recurring discursive "repertoires" to which the women interviewed refer, one of the most dangerous being the inability to "see" race, which at times is read as a progressive stand. It is the ability to make patently clear the pitfalls of race-blind and race-neutral attitudes that is most memorable about White Women, Race Matters. The text effectively demonstrates that race does indeed shape white women's lives, often in ways they do not comprehend. This sociopsychological, geographically specific study also analyzes white women's interactions with and images of various ethnic and religious differences, which were sometimes conflated with race difference (such as classifying people of Jewish descent or Hispanic origin). Several of the interviewees flesh out Richard Dyer's thesis that understands modernist and especially postmodern whiteness as not only something normative, invisible, unmarked and unremarkable but also as empty, lacking, and often "dead."⁵

Even while documenting the diversity of white women's voices, the text unproblematically calls out to "white sisters" without qualifying acute differences. In exploring the "average" white person's racial formation, this book also attempts to connect whiteness with imperialism. Although it does not directly discuss radical minorities and therefore does not adequately expose the links between so-called racial extremists and systematic racial domination practiced in safe, quiet suburbs like Simi Valley, it does suggest that whiteness is a colonizing mode or stance.

Readers learn in the first chapter that the author's own understanding of [End Page 156] racism was affected profoundly in the 1980s when she moved to the United States from Britain and became involved with women of color in feminist collectives. Befriended by someone willing to educate her about racism, she "learned by proximity" (4). The difficulty here is that Frankenberg's readers are denied the opportunity to learn from the sage advice she received from her friend. At several turns, the narrative thwarts the possibility for discordant voices, missing an opportunity for counternarrative. There is, then, a slight conflict in its methodology. Unwittingly, it reproduces the very segregation it wishes to critique and perhaps falls prey to its own narrative exclusions by not interviewing the people of color to whom it alludes and makes parenthetical. One wonders how the incorporation of such testimony might have changed the book. This tendency to marginalize women of color or, rather, to reference them without really using their differing ideas as tools for thinking about the simultaneity of race, class, and gender is one of the risks of recentering whiteness in an effort to make it visible in all its multiplicity.

Mab Segrest's text seems to be steeped in (African) American history and front-line, antiracist politics. The first page credits W. E. B. DuBois for advancing critiques of the color line from a complex and varied perspective. By not merely referencing DuBois's work but taking his mixed-genre masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, as a model, however obliquely, Memoir of a Race Traitor succeeds in messing with categories that preserve and presume segregation. (In fact, I discovered Segrest's book in the university's African American collection.) The opening statement explains that the author has "written this treatise on the souls of white folks with an urgency that it be exemplary, a template into which white readers can read themselves. [She has] worried that its very particularities will create ruptures in the identification she seeks" (xi). Especially interesting, if notedly schematic, is the chapter that borrows the title of a Baldwin essay, "On Whiteness and Other Lies: A History of Racism in the U.S." Here Segrest reveals and renounces her patrician and thoroughly racist lineage. Like the fictional Forrest Gump, she too descends directly from one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. The personal patriarchal lineage she maps out is actually a succinct political, legal, and economic history of United States imperialism. This is very well done and adds texture to the more intimate accounts of the previous essays that chart her coming out as a lesbian, her work on feminist journals, and her dealings with anti-Klan organizations. The book concludes with Segrest's keynote address originally delivered in 1993 at the National Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Task [End Page 157] Force Conference in North Carolina. The lecture, entitled "A Bridge Not a Wedge," does not mention the Kate Rushin poem taken as the title of the well-known volume by and about radical women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981); but its thesis, that white people need to become the bridge in various coalitions, made me think about the substitution of white women for race women.⁶

In black vernacular, the term race man or race woman designates an individual who works tirelessly for the liberation of the race. According to this definition, Segrest, as well as Frankenberg and Ware, aspire to be race women. They challenge their implicit audience of white women to give up their white womanhood by giving up their ability to reflect and reproduce white heteropatriarchy.⁷ But is renouncing whiteness or white skin privilege (which some black people possess) enough? Is the choice theirs? Or, to put it differently, how is one to effect such difference? How can one rewrite without erasing history and historical locations that have staged us differently?

Although these texts do not fully answer these difficult questions, they do present a strong case for the moral imperative that would require other white women to recognize their whiteness as a means of disorganizing white supremacy. This achievement lessens the negative effect of the few troubling moments when race became analogous to sexuality or race stood in for gender. Another lingering point hinted at in these books concerns the idea that exposure to or intimate relations with people of color galvanizes white people to think more viscerally about racism. Like the rationales for integration and one-way busing, such arguments stress the benefits of desegregation for white people by claiming that this antiracist work will be to their advantage. Such experience, as nearly every Hollywood-produced Whoopi Goldberg vehicle confirms, is meant to transform white people into morally responsible, empathetic human beings. Although I do not deny that such contact may indeed move people, there may be other ways to effect change. Finally, the authors might have broached (because it cannot be untangled) the admittedly thorny topic of distinguishing among race as culture, race as visibility, and race as specific kinds of social construction.⁸

Despite the fact that the texts do not always adequately address the more fundamental political/philosophical questions that they implicitly raise, the studies do contribute to the fight against easy essentialism, some forms of multiculturalism, and the continued masking of whiteness as the universal or unnamed norm. They will have broad appeal because they are free of [End Page 158] jargon and for the most part well-written. Also, they would work wonderfully well for courses in women's studies, American studies, and ethnic studies. These books are compelling--chock full of amazing if often infuriating vignettes.

The goal of these texts and of the race traitor⁹ movement in general is to undo, at least theoretically, the power of whiteness. Because there are actual material consequences at stake, merely renouncing, abolishing, or proclaiming on the semantic level can only be an important first step. In 1955 James Baldwin, among the most sophisticated theorists of whiteness, wrote, "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."¹⁰ By taking up Baldwin's charge, the rapidly amassing literature on whiteness, of which these texts are a part, provides answers to "one of the key cultural questions on the contemporary agenda . . . [namely] the construction of whiteness."¹¹ Betwixt and between, feeling themselves white and not white, a new generation of race traitors grapples with the legacy (because the origins are impossible) of their specific staging. In short, these texts by and about white women certainly do much to make whiteness matter, in both senses of this term.

2. Here she repeats some of the arguments made in Hazel Carby's seminal essay, "White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London, 1981).

3. See the chapter entitled "Race and Reproduction: Single White Female" in Lynda Hart's Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton, 1994) for a discussion of this topic.

4. Perhaps the first accounts of "white people" came from those who were in a position to confront such difference: namely numerous critical "black" readers such as Olaudah Equiano, slaves who witnessed which "family" members were legitimized and which stigmatized, and all nonwhite natives who observed and reported on white cultural customs.

5. See Richard Dyer's excellent article, "White," Screen 29 (Autumn 1988): 44-64.

6. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (New York, 1981).

7. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York, 1993).

8. Here, it would have been helpful had the authors consulted the work of artist/philosopher Adrian Piper. Particularly relevant is her confrontational video installation, "Cornered" (1991), in which the implied white audience is asked: "Now that you know you are no longer white, what are you going to do about it?" See also her article, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," Transition 58 (1992): 4-30.

9. Segrest notes that this term is a slur used in white and Aryan resistance movements. Thus, it functions as an oppositional term that allows its users to self-consciously occupy and revalue a degraded identity. I am grateful to Joe Razza for acquainting me with documents relating to the race traitor movement.

10. James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village," in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, 1955), 175.

11. Kobena Mercer, "Skin Head Sex Thing," in Bad Object Choices, eds., How Do I Look? Essays on Queer Film and Video (Seattle, 1991), 205.