1

Southernication, Romanticization and the Recovery of White Supremacy (Winter, 2006) (in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 8, 1, pp. 27-46.

The Southern Place and Racial Politics: Southernification, Romanticization, and the Recovery of White Supremacy

Joe L. Kincheloe

The political changes that have rocked the United States over the last few decades are profound. In other work I have argued that a central dimension of a right-wing movement in American political life has revolved around the perception among many white people that because of the Civil Rights Movement and social policies such as affirmative action, the real victims of racism in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are white people, white men in particular. In this essay I would like to employ what my colleague, Aaron Gresson first labeled as the recovery-of-white-supremacy thesis (subsequently referenced as the recovery movement) in relation to some important issues in African American studies as they relate to views of the South—especially the romanticization of the region—and the larger process of the Southernification of the United States. Using a critical theoretical/pedagogical base, such analysis opens new perspectives on black politics in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century (1).

The South, Racial Politics, and the White Recovery Movement

In the tradition of Black Studies’ radical eye, my work as a white Southerner engages a critical interracialism that avoids essentialism as it works for racial, class, and gender justice. In this context I’ve used the conceptual lenses of a critical multiculturalism to explore the evolving nature of racism and racial identity in the contemporary era. In my work in whiteness studies I have operated on the assumption that whiteness studies conducted by white people must always be undertaken as an interracial act. A study of whiteness suffers when it is not directly connected to African American studies, Latino/Chicano studies, indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonialism and the way white power and the historical white construction of “reason” have attempted to position non-white peoples. Obviously, the histories of the world’s various peoples in general as well as non-European peoples in Western societies in particular have often been told from a white historiographical perspective. Such accounts have erased the values, epistemologies, ontologies, and belief systems that grounded the cultural practices of these diverse peoples. In this essay these concerns and modes of analysis will be brought to bear on the South, the growing Southernification of the United States, and the racial politics surrounding this larger manifestation of whiteness.

A critical understanding of whiteness/white power and its effect on racial politics is possible only if we understand in great specificity the multiple meanings of whiteness and their effects on the way white consciousness is historically structured and socially inscribed. Without such appreciations and the meta-consciousness they ground, an awareness of the privilege and dominance of white Northern European vantage points is buried in the cemetery of power evasion. The mutations in white consciousness over the last few decades join other occluded insights into whiteness in this conceptual graveyard. Students of African American studies need to exhume such concepts in the pursuit of a contemporary understanding of black life in the twenty-first century.

One way to mitigate the repressive effects of this hegemonic white power is bring the multilogicality of postcolonialism to the conceptual mix. Central to the critical study of whiteness and its effects on people of color is an appreciation of the historical origins of the twentieth century anti-colonial rebellion movements that emerged in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. All of these movements, including indigenous peoples’ movements around the world, can be connected to a more inclusive anti/postcolonialism whose origins can be traced to these movements. Familiarity with the multiple perspectives emerging from such an anti/postcolonialism moves disciplines of knowledge to new conceptual domains. In the ruins of traditional disciplinarity the multilogicality of these new perspectives and their relationships to other ways of seeing are invaluable to critical scholars.

Inject the South and Southern studies into this critical theoretical mix. Many white Southerners in the contemporary socio-cultural landscape prefer to focus on the wounds inflicted on them rather than on the injustices they have imposed on others. Here rests a central force driving contemporary American socio-political life. As working class and numerous middle level jobs have been outsourced to parts unknown, many white males have been introduced to a situation African Americans and other people of color have suffered with for a long time—a declining domain for individual development and progression. In this new context fewer white men are going to college. In this twenty-first century context some of these southern (and of course American in general) men are sensing a decline in the traditional privileges accorded them. At the same time they feel this loss, they are watching media images and representations of them as the subjugators of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, women, and others. For a majority of these men, history and its influence on the present is not a topic understood or deemed important.

In this dehistoricized context the representation of white male as victim can be promoted in a way that resonates with the larger society to such a degree that it alters the political landscape. With the image of white male as racial victim firmly entrenched, any discussion of racism in the national political discourse or even in classrooms can be characterized as a personal attack on white people and their “traditional values.” When this is the case a new form of racial politics dominates the cultural landscape. On such a terrain the idea of multilogicality and its postcolonial multiple perspectives become threats to the existing social order that must be squelched. Without such perspectives monological forms of knowledge, unilateral perceptions begin to emerge. Uncontested [concepts]such a racialized reductionism comes to dominate educational and other socio-political institutions. A radical reeducation of the public is the result. While there are many sources of redress and many individuals who challenge such a racial politics, these cultural dynamics are certainly at work in contemporary America. To attempt to understand the South and its relation to racial politics outside these conceptual boundaries is to fall into the trap of a one-dimensional region-done-wrong story, a socio-cultural country song (2).

Manning Marable (3) contends that the creation of a living history for African Americans is not possible without understanding it in the context of the larger society and grander social movements. Marable’s thesis applies directly to the purpose of this essay—the effort to understand the role of the South in the complex racial politics of the twenty-first century. Willie Morris (4), the famous Mississippi chronicler, argued that somewhere buried in the experience of the South exists something of great value for America. What happens in small town Mississippi, he concluded, will be of enduring importance to America’ quest for its soul. In this context I believe that an understanding of the racial politics of that Southern place can, in Marable’s words, “reshape contemporary civic outcomes…and transform the objective material and cultural conditions and subordinate status of marginalized groups” (5). Indeed, without an understanding the South, its relation to the recovery movement, and the impact of these dynamics on contemporary racial politics in particular and American politics in general, interracial struggles against racial oppression and ideologies of racism will find it difficult to prosper.

Without such understandings it will be difficult for white people to transform racial identities being forged around new articulations of white supremacy. The critical analysis of racial politics pursued here seeks, of course, to engage readers of all racial backgrounds; it is, however, particularly interested in challenging and pushing the boundaries of whiteness. Such confrontation attempts to move white people to examine the privilege of white identity in a manner that induces them to change the way they live their lives, the way they relate to the people with whom they come into contact. In other words such work attempts to promote a “Freedom Summer of racial consciousness”—a form of critical ontological labor that understands the construction of self so that we can become more than we presently are. Here white people—as well as individuals from other races and ethnicities—come to understand how their political opinions and racial identities have been shaped by dominant power.

From the Anti-Colonial Movement to the Recovery Movement

A critical understanding of racial politics is acutely focused on the larger historical context in which the issues we are dealing with in this essay are situated. The last 500 years of Euro-American colonialism exerts a dramatic everyday effect on sociopolitical, economic, cultural, philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical structures and, in turn, everyday life. After several centuries of exploitation, the early twentieth century began to witness a growing impatience of colonized peoples with their status. A half millennium of colonial violence had convinced many Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples around the world that enough was enough. Picking up steam after World War Two, colonized peoples around the world threw off colonial governmental strictures and set out on a troubled journey toward independence. The European colonial powers, however, were not about to give up such lucrative socio-economic relationships so easily. With the United States leading the way Western societies developed a wide-array of neo-colonial strategies for maintaining the benefits of colonialism. This neo-colonial effort continues unabated and in many ways with a new intensity in an era of transnational corporations and the “war on terror” in the twenty-first century.

As students of African American studies know these anti-colonial rebellions constructed the theoretical foundation for the Civil Rights Movement and other liberation struggles in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. For example, Martin Luther King wrote his dissertation on the anti-colonial rebellion against the British led by Monhandas Ghandi in India. King focused his scholarly attention on Ghandi’s non-violent colonial resistance tactics, later drawing upon such strategies in the Civil Rights Movement. The generation of black intellectuals emerging at the time such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon were profoundly affected by these anti-colonial movements. Central to the issues of recovery, the Southern place, and Southernification is that in the United States by the mid-1970s a conservative counterreaction to these liberation movements was taking shape. Its goal was make sure that white people would recover what they perceived to have lost in the liberation process (6).

While, of course, there are many other factors that play a profound role in shaping the racial politics of the last three decades, the effort to recover white supremacy is a very important and often overlooked aspect of the process. The “culture wars,” the educational and psychological debates about intelligence and school policy, and the political discourse and policies of the era all reflect the influence of the recovery movement. In my field of education one does not have to look hard to see the fingerprints of recovery on educational policy in recent American educational history. Efforts to diversify the American elementary, secondary, and university curricula, for example, to reflect the knowledge produced by various cultural traditions has been meet by fierce resistance. Understanding that progressive educators were attempting to extend the goals of the liberation movements, right-wing strategists sought to subvert the public and civic dimensions of schooling. Instead of helping to prepare society for a socially mobile and egalitarian democracy, education in the formulation of the right-wing recovery movement redefined schooling as a private concern.

In this context the recovery movement’s cognitive theorists, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, (7) provided bogus “proof” that efforts to use education to provide social mobility to students of color could not work because of their intellectual inferiority. Recovery, thus, was necessary in such a construction to save the nation from the racially inferior incompetents moving into positions of authority. Deploying a rhetoric of loss, the promoters of recovery made reference to a loss of standards, personal discipline, civility, and proper English. America was in decline directly because of the pursuit of racial justice and cultural diversity. In the discourse of recovery the notion of loss and falling standards was always accompanied by strategically placed critiques of affirmative action, racial preferences, and multiculturalism. Though the connection was obvious, plausible deniability was maintained—“we are not racists, we only want to protect our country from the destruction of its most treasured values.”

Not surprisingly, another rhetorical device of the recovery is the accusation of “reverse racism.” In the recovery discursive cosmos anti-racist activity and work for racial justice can always be represented as a form of black racism toward white people. We have reached “end of racism” toward people of color, as recovery poster boy Dinesh D’Souza (8) proclaimed in 1995. Given this new non-racist social reality, many white citizens, politicians, students, and activists express great anger when Black, Latino and indigenous peoples keep bringing up historical and contemporary racism. We are victims of “political correctness,” advocates of recovery contend. Before the liberation movements, the recovery narrative tells us, we lived in a safe country where you could leave your doors unlocked, schools maintained strong discipline and high standards, and there were no language police to take away our freedom to express ourselves freely.

The advocates of recovery possess a disconcerting similarity to the advocates of retrenchment in the South of the late nineteenth century. After the attempts of Reconstruction to bring about more racial power sharing in the South, advocates of the “recovery” of white domination regained political power in the region. In control of southern statehouses by the 1890s the “Redeemers” established Jim Crow legislation that worked to disenfranchise and segregate African Americans while denying them legal protection from lynching and other forms of violence. Northern journalists and authors of the period shifted their representations of the South from rebellious foe to noble partner. By the end of the nineteenth century the South in the national consciousness had become a land of dignity, a place whose (white) people were characterized by chivalry and honor (9). The image of the Southerners as genteel plantation owners had been “recovered” from the representation of Southerner as rebellious and violent slave owner.

This late nineteenth century recovery of southern nobility helped set the tone of racial politics throughout the next fifty years. It was much more difficult, for example, to pass anti-lynching legislation in an era where white Southerners were represented in the public mind as chivalrous and honorable. Thus, this laudatory image of the Southerner interacted with the politics of whiteness during the era. The white privilege of universalizing its characteristics as the “proper way to be” has continuously undermined the efforts of African Americans to improve their condition in numerous twentieth and now twenty-first century contexts. At times such universalizing has produced self-loathing among individual members of oppressed groups, as they internalize the “truths” about themselves. A critical racial politics that studies whiteness reveals such power-related processes to whites and people of color alike, exposing how individuals from both of these groups are stripped of self-knowledge—an understanding of socio-historical construction.

Without the help of such a critical racial politics white people in the twenty-first century unconsciously shaped by the tacit epistemology and ontology of the recovery movement. Robert Bork, for example, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline argues that “American culture is Eurocentric and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaningless” (10). In this book the famous jurist maintains that white people must relearn their [supremacy]. If there are any questions Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, assures whites that their racial supremacy is validated by hard science.

This re-validation of white supremacy and Western ways of seeing the world and producing knowledge is a key dimension of the recovery movement. In this context the politics of knowledge, the control of information has emerged as a central aspect of white recovery. By the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century it is growing more difficult to find anti-colonial, anti-racist perspectives in the mainstream print and visual media. The representations of whiteness that are typically found in the contemporary media follow a Forrest Gump model: they portray an innocent whiteness. In this context 9-11 can be represented in the white-as-victim and innocent-whiteness modality. America did nothing to the Muslim world to elicit such an attack—we (white Americans) are as chaste as the virgin lamb (11).