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John O. Calmore
Abstracted from< John O.
Calmore, Whiteness as Audition and Blackness as Performance: Status
Protest from The Margin , 18 Washington University Journal of Law
and Policy 99-128, 99-104 (2005)(130 footnotes)
Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be
about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance
while denying that systems of dominance exist.
-- Peggy McIntosh
If race is something about which we dare not speak in polite
social company, the same cannot be said of the viewing of race. How,
or whether, blacks are seen depends upon a dynamic of display that
ricochets between hypervisibility and oblivion. . . . If, moreover,
the real lives of real blacks unfold outside the view of many
whites, the fantasy of black life as a theatrical enterprise is an
almost obsessive indulgence.
-- Patricia Williams
You can't explain to Whites what they can't see.
-- A Latina law student, University of Michigan Introduction
This essay responds to the introductory epigraphs. It seeks to
make visible a white social identity that presents itself as
abstract individualism while masking its support from systems of
dominance. Against this hidden connection, blacks must not only
represent our reality, but also advocate on its behalf to bring some
balance to a form of dominant white voyeurism that places us in the
ricocheting tension "between hypervisibility and oblivion."
Finally, I hope that my personal story provides an illustration of
racialized experience that performs identity beyond this voyeurism
and beyond what many whites cannot, or will not, see. In short, this
essay addresses racialized identity (blackness) as performance and
whiteness as audition. Moreover, as a marginal man, I view my
marginality as a positive position from which to launch a status
protest.
As sociologist Howard Winant points out, common approaches to the
study of race have displayed "an insufficient appreciation of the
performative aspect of race." In looking at the performance of race,
moreover, as Sarah Susannah Willie's study shows we gain a better
appreciation of how race is "defined by both subject and situation."
Thus, context becomes a key focus point. In Willie's study of black
alumni from Northwestern and Howard universities, she found that
race was highly malleable and contingent. Her subjects reflected
this through their descriptions of the ways they consciously acted
white in certain settings and acted black in others. According to
Willie:
Although they saw themselves as black, that did not mean they
understood blackness as something simple or simplistic. The
people with whom I spoke treated race as sets of behaviors that
they could choose to act out, as expectations they had of
themselves and others, as physical difference, and as ethnicity
and subculture. Consciously negotiating their identities, even
when there was sometimes very little room to do so, the men and
women in this study described performing. Acting black for me,
however, is not a matter of vacillating from acting white to
black in certain settings.
I seek constancy, though I adjust to settings where my acting
black defies conventional expectations and stereotypes but does not
entail acting white. At this margin, strange though it may appear,
sometimes acting black must be performed in personally unprecedented
circumstances, representing a new experience even for the actor.
When this is the case, life is not merely a script; it is often an
improvisation. The performance of identity thus must be nimble and
open to constant change. As Homi Bhabha says, "the question of
identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity,
never a self-fulfilling prophecy--it is always the production of an
image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming
that image." Non-white performance in a dominantly white setting has
been a historical predicament. From 1790 to 1952, whiteness was a
prerequisite for naturalized citizenship. From the first racial
prerequisite case in 1878, a total of fifty-two cases were brought
before such racial restrictions were eliminated in 1952. In these
cases, immigrant applications for citizenship were assessed in terms
of whether the applicant could perform whiteness. Indeed, the rights
enjoyed by white males could only be obtained through assimilatory
behavior. Under these circumstances, in social contract terms, white
performance was the quid pro quo for white privilege. Today, this is
still largely the quid pro quo, but this is a bad bargain for people
of color.
In 1992, I wrote an article about the jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp
in which I associated his "fire music" with critical race theory. In
that article, I wrote something that is still pertinent: "As a form
of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the
universality of [combined] white experience [and] judgment as the
authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively
measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper
thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." This essay is an
extension of that earlier observation.
In focusing on the relational identities of black and white, I
traverse the complex ground where identity and subjectivity
interrelate. Julie Matthews points out that, "while 'identity' and
'subjectivity' are often used interchangeably, in contemporary
social theory 'identity' refers to the recognition of a person or
thing. It is a strategic and relational entity that is 'marked out'
by symbols and does not signal a stable core of the self." In
performing identity, recognition by others often includes a
deployment of "marked-out" symbols that undergird the process of
audition. For me, the self-recognition aspect of performing identity
is race-consciously subjective, where "[s]ubjectivity demarcates the
site of feeling and consciousness." As Matthews elaborates,
subjectivity, in contemporary usage, "does not signal a unitary
identity or source of agency, but a consciousness determined,
regulated and produced by social relations and language."
Accordingly, I will explore what whiteness means to me as a black
man; what it means not only as a concept, but also as an operational
influence in the performance of my own racial identity. Race
consciousness is my springboard. Thus introduced, this essay
proceeds in four parts. Part I examines the audition frame of
dominant, standard-bearing whiteness as it subjects black identity
to perform against a backdrop of white narratives that portray
oppositional dualities of representation where white images are
positive and black images are negative. Here, individually holding
white privilege may appear to be benign, but that privilege is not
held independently of group-based white supremacy, dominance, and
power. Part II discusses the operation of a racialized identity that
implores blacks to re-invent themselves as they perform within a
framework of whiteness as audition. This performance often places
blacks at the margin of dominant society's expectations. Part III
incorporates the sociological analyses of Robert Park, Everett
Stonequist, and Everett Hughes in discussing performance as a status
protest rather than as accommodation, assimilation, or retreat.
Under my analysis, marginality is translated into a positive
orientation. Finally, Part IV looks at black identity's diversity
within itself, raising the issue whether dominant society is
inclined to subordinate African-Americans and, at their expense,
reward those blacks who are not descendants of slaves.
Self-conscious adoption of a diaspora identity may help blacks to
transcend intra-group conflicts and establish common operational
grounds based on our collective hybridity. |
