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Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History
Daniel Wickberg
| Twenty-five years ago, if one had told the practitioners of the newly arrived African American history that in the future cutting-edge progressive, or Left-oriented, scholarship would focus on the history of something called "whiteness," one would have met, I think, bemusement or disbelief. In works such as Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Herbert G. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, and John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community, the attempt to recover the experience and agency of black actors in American history was central. The works arose out of the general orientation of the so-called new social history and the specific orientation of the civil rights movement. One of their criticisms of the dominant consensus history of the 1950s was that it adopted the point of view of whites, that blacks came into the story only as objects of white attention, rather than as historical actors and agents in their own right. The new black studies programs of the 1970s installed black experience, agency, and resistance—rather than white power and racism—at the center of historical study. When the popular humorist Martin Mull released his television "mockumentary" and the accompanying book, The History of White People in America, in 1985, modeled on a post-civil rights black history of accomplishments and contributions, the joke was that American history had previously always been written as the history of white people. To reconfigure whites on the model of a previously excluded ethnic or racial group was to point out exactly how white American history had always been. The absence of a visible white culture in American history led Mull to elevate bland and banal social practices such as lawn care, golf, and eating mayonnaise into a would-be white cultural tradition, only to mock it. His Institute for White Studies was a parody of academic culture that was only slightly prescient.1 |
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The new history of whiteness that has developed over the last decade, however, is anything but a joke. The history of whiteness, which first appeared in popular culture as farce, was destined to reappear in scholarship as tragedy. The story the historians have told depicts the way whiteness has functioned as an obstacle to the fulfillment of egalitarian and democratic ideals. Despite some recent assessments of the proliferation of whiteness studies, no one has quite figured out how we got from Black Culture and Black Consciousness to The Wages of Whiteness. Suffice it to say that the practitioners of social history in the 1970s would never have anticipated such a future for themselves and their scholarship. Just when they thought they had moved whites out of the center of history, here they are, back in a new and different form: the return of the repressed.2 |
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