The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies

SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR II, A FRENCH REPORTER ASKED EXPATRIate Richard Wright his opinion about the in the United States. The author replied There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a problem.' By inverting the reporter's question, Wright called attention to its hidden assumptions-that racial polarization comes from the existence of blacks rather than from the behavior of whites, that black people are a problem for whites rather than fellow citizens entitled to justice, and that unless otherwise specified, means whites.2 But Wright's formulation also placed political mobilization by African Americans in context, attributing it to the systemic practices of aversion, exploitation, denigration, and discrimination practiced by people who think of themselves as white. Whiteness is everywhere in American culture, but it is very hard to see. As Richard Dyer argues, white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.3 As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.4 To identify, analyze, and oppose the destructive consequences of whiteness, we need what Walter Benjamin called presence of mind. Benjamin wrote that people visit fortune-tellers not so much out of a desire to know the future but rather out of a fear of not noticing some