BLACK ON WHITE
Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
Edited with Introduction by David R. Roediger

If you're already active in the struggle for freedom now for all, David Roediger's excellent new anthology will give you a firmer grounding in the history and literature of that struggle, as well as a deep wellspring of ideas and inspirations to advance the cause. And if you happen to think you're white, the book will not only help you overcome that deadly delusion, but should also renew your hopes for a future worth dreaming about and fighting for. For as James Baldwin pointed out years ago, "As long as you think you're white, there's no hope for you."

The fact that so many so-called "whites" today are refusing to think and act white is surely one of the most hopeful developments on the U.S. political horizon. That the so-called "white race" is not a scientific category but rather a historically constructed social formation, i.e., a kind of myth and indeed a life-threatening lie, is now widely recognized even in that bastion of white supremacy known as Academia. Not yet a decade old, the new abolitionist movement—the organized effort to abolish the white race as a social category, along with the whole miserabilist system that it does so much to sustain—reflects a widespread and growing grassroots ferment with its own characteristic forms of direct action (such as the "cop watch") and an ebullient periodical literature, exemplified by the lively journal, Race Traitor, whose motto, "Treason to Whiteness Is Loyality to Humanity," is perhaps the best short definition of the new movement.

Since belief in the white mystique has a demonstrably paralyzing effect on the collective solution of social problems, the current defection from whiteness must be seen as an authentically revolutionary sign of the times. Predictably, the powers-that-be have responded to the new abolitionism the way they always respond to emancipatory currents: with incomprehension and malice. An article in the New York Times Magazine (November, 1997) set the tone, deriding recent criticism of whiteness not only as an academic fad ("like porn studies a few years ago and queer theory before that"), but also as a trend established by and for whites.

This accusation conveniently overlooks an essential point that Roediger has repeatedly emphasized: that the critique of whiteness has been most profoundly articulated by those best equipped to see through the white mirage and to recognize it as the all-time scam of scams: that is, by Black people. (Native Americans and Asians, as Roediger notes, have also contributed appreciably to this critique.) Roediger's originality and brilliance as historian and theorist—and he is unquestionably one of contemporary abolitionism's leading thinkers—is not in the least diminished by the fact that his Wages of Whiteness (1991) draws on W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of whiteness as a kind of "psychological wage," just as his Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994) develops some of the heterodox ideas of James Baldwin. Roediger's aim in Black on White, as he states in his preface, is not only to counter the mistaken notion that "whiteness studies" are the recent product of white scholars, but above all to drive home the point that "such studies are part of the long, rich, varied and unsurpassed tradition of Black thought about white people and whiteness."

When interviewed by the aforementioned New York Times writer, Roediger in fact cited only Black authors; in the published article, however, all such refererences were suppressed. If Black writings on whiteness are unknown to most non-Black Americans, it's largely because the white media-and that's 99.9% of the media-has preferred to ignore them.

Black on White will make it much harder to ignore them. Astounding in its scope, insightfulness, intensity, and power, this collection of writings by Black critics of whiteness brings together fifty-one texts ranging from the days of slavery to the present. Its six sections, arranged thematically, feature illuminating explorations of myriad aspects of the White Problem, including white hypocrisy, the economics of whiteness, white plunder of black folklore and popular culture, whiteness as moral degradation, lynching and other forms of white terrorism. The book's 352 pages contain articles, essays, poems, short fiction, bits of autobiography, an excerpt from a novel and another from a play. Headnotes to each selection provide biographical background and historical context.

Among the anthologized authors are ex-slaves, celebrated literary figures, philosophers, wage-workers, lawyers, feminists, Marxists and music critics. Most of the texts were written for a popular audience; a few are more specialized, but all are easy to understand. And all are unrelentingly critical.

The earliest piece is excerpted from David Walker's insurrectionary Appeal (1830), in which "whites" are defined as "an unjust, jealous, unmerciful and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority." The most recent, Mia Bay's "The Color of Heaven" (1997) is a young historian's survey of slave attitudes regarding the place of white folks in Heaven. ("They was good whites I heard tell of," one slave woman remarked, but "they is plenty mo' of them in Hell, too").

A few of the texts are classics, such as Du Bois's 1890 Harvard commencement address, "Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization"—a masterpiece of ironic understatement. Given the segregated teaching methods that still permeate U.S. schools, even the major essays by world-renowned authors will probably be new to most non-Black readers: James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man," for example, which relates whiteness and sexual violence; or Toni Morrison's revelatory discussion of the "Afro-American presence" in U.S. literature, or her penetrating pages on Moby Dick; or Lewis Gordon's far-reaching reflections on the ambivalent place of white women in white supremacist society.

From the loftiest questions in the realm of ideas to the smallest details of daily life, these writers confront whiteness and its discontents point-blank, head-on, and from all sides. Among the most provocative are Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" ("perhaps the most important historical treatment of whiteness," says Roediger, "since Du Bois's Black Reconstruction"), Nelson George's peppery send-off of Elvis Presley, and bell hook's scathing glance at what rock-star Madonna likes to call her "fascist side." There are stunning pieces by Frederick Douglass, pioneering African-American feminist Anna Julia Cooper, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Greg Tate, Nell Irvin Painter, Derrick Bell, and dozens more.

Several other dimensions, imaginative, playful and insurgent, are added by the poems—by Sterling Brown, Frank Marshall Davis, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Elma Stuckey, whose "Enslaved," a 12-line tale of a poor white trapped by whiteness, is one of the strongest texts in the book.

On the visual side, there's an anti-Klan cartoon by Charles Johnson, a suite of Jacob Lawrence's hauntingly evocative paintings of John Brown, and four "Vanilla Nightmares" by Adrian Piper.

Not surprisingly, in view of the massive suffering, death and devastation that the myth of white superiority has imposed on the world, many selections zero in on whiteness as horror. But there is also a large, rich vein of humor in this book, for whiteness is also a joke, its pretensions always laughable. William J. Wilson's superb piece, "What Shall We Do With the White People?" (1860), Langston Hughes's story, "Slave on the Block," Ralph Ellison's "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," and Amiri Baraka's "White Wages" are examples of critical humor at its best and blackest.

Just as the new abolitionism is a qualitative leap beyond mere "anti-racism," Black on White transcends the sociological and moralistic didacticism of so many books on "race relations." Roediger quotes Baraka: "The only whitey is system and ideology." The writings collected here indict a system so mindlessly acquisitive and oppressive that those who identify with it obviously have no idea of what life is all about. But these writings also indicate ways out of the white fog, and remind us of the great Wobbly watchword: An injury to one is an injury to all! Filled to the brim with genius, anger, lucidity, poetry, passion, laughter, solidarity, the spirit of freedom and love of life, Black on White shows us a new world in the making-a world beyond the manifold miseries of whiteness-and invites us all to take part in it.

Reviewed by Franklin Rosemont