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A hundred years later, I find myself uttering the same words, updated: Doesn't the whole South Carolina confederate flag thing drive you crazy? Or, By the way, my sister is black. I grope awkwardly— and unsuccessfully—to make a connection, to say without using the words: I see you as a human being. I reject racism. I am not prejudiced.
I behave, in fact, like any well-educated, good-intentioned, middle-class woman afflicted by Whiteness.
In the last two years I've become increasingly willing to consider the part Whiteness plays in my life. Not coincidentally, I've also spent the last two years finishing my Ph.D. in American Studies. Whiteness was born in academia; "Whiteness studies" exploded in the 1990s, fueled by a growing discontent with the de facto segregation of American university campuses. African American Studies departments study black America, but don't have much interaction with the history and religion departments that are scrutinizing white America. Black students flee from "regular" literature courses and enroll in courses on black literature, taught by black faculty. Amiable middle-class college students, raised to understand that any display of prejudice is in bad taste, nevertheless eat, sleep, and entertain themselves apart.
University cafeterias are the showplace for this voluntary ghettoization: "There's a sea of pink and peach faces … all gathered around the front tables by the salad bar," observes Princeton Theological Seminary student Sarah Hinlicky in First Things. "Look farther back and at the other end of the room, by the cereal and the back door, all the brown and black faces together." Despite the civil rights revolution, the last wall between the races—the social wall—remains thick and high.
White students, knowing their own good will, have felt that the segregation is voluntary. "It's embarrassing, like Rosa Parks on the bus, except the other way around," Hinlicky writes. "We don't care to sit in the front with you, thanks, we'll retreat to the back on our own." But scholars of race, unhappy with a solution that shifts the blame onto students of color, have come up with another explanation. Whites have made it impossible for students of color to take full part in university culture—not by acting prejudiced, but simply by acting white.
For those who have difficulty wrapping their brains around the concept of Whiteness, Unitarian theologian Thandeka suggests the Race Game. The Game has only one rule: use the term "white" whenever you mention the name of a European American friend or relative, as in "My white husband John told me . …" Thandeka in vented the Race Game when a white colleague of hers at Smith College asked her, over lunch, what it felt like to be black. "I guaranteed her," she writes in Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America, "that if she [played the Race Game] for a week and then met me for lunch, I could answer her question using terms she would understand. We never had lunch together again. Apparently my suggestion had made her uncomfortable."
This discomfort, Thandeka explains, comes from the nature of Whiteness; it is the racial identity which never has to speak its name. "Whiteness" is the invisible norm against which all other cultural groups are defined. Among all racial groups—African-American, Native American, Hispanic American, Asian American—only whites are "assumed not to 'have race,' " observes David Roediger, one of the leading theorists of Whiteness. American culture, George Lipsitz writes, is "obviously white culture"; to speak of the "American people" is to imply white people, unless a qualifier is inserted (as in "the black vote"). Mainstream America is white; Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, and John Grisham are at the center, while Frederick Douglass and Frances Harper are sideshows. ("What about Oprah?" is not, according to scholars of race, an appropriate question to ask at this point.)
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