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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2001)
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| THIS IS A PROMISING LITTLE BOOK (only 126 pages of actual text) that, in the end, did not fulfill the expectations I had for it. Since readers of this journal would likely bring similar expectations to this book, I want to work a bit with them. But then I want to emphasize that, disappointed expectations aside, When Whites Riot raises valuable questions that are worth our consideration. |
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One important caveat for readers of Labour/LeTravail: Smith McKoy is not an historian. She is an English professor, within a department (Vanderbilt University) that emphasizes the somewhat innovative practices of "comparative literature" and "cultural studies." She and her colleagues do not simply study poems, short stories, memoirs, novels, and the like, but they extend their investigations to "texts," which include not only all of the literary products I have already mentioned, but also plays, films, photographs, newspaper articles, material objects, laws and court decisions, speeches, and more, including riots and how they are represented. |
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For those students of labour history who learned from the likes of E.P. Thompson to squeeze all possible meaning from scant primary documents, it is not such a great leap to swim around in these new disciplines of "comparative literature" and "cultural studies." At the same time, however, we often find less regard for historical contextualization and less attention to the systematic consideration of evidence and the construction of analytical frameworks than we try to practice and expect from our peers. Here, more often than not I find, is where we become disappointed, if not downright dissatisfied, with these new intellectual endeavours. |
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And so I came to When Whites Riot with expectations of a systematic comparison of key instances of racial violence in the United States and South Africa. To be fair, Smith McKoy nowhere promises that this is her scholarly agenda. Rather, she selects "episodes" from both countries that illustrate her argument. These "episodes" are not selected because they emerged from parallel historical contexts or grew out of synchronous historical dynamics. They do follow the etiology that Smith McKoy lays out, and in that sense they do indeed illustrate her argument. And in so doing, they encourage readers to think in some new ways about racial violence and its representation in both the US and South Africa (and, perhaps, by inference, in Canada). But this mode of presentation does not deepen our sense of the comparative histories of the two countries, nor the specific roles played by violence in the maintenance of racial hierarchy in them. That important task is left to an as yet unwritten book. |
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When Whites Riot proceeds from some key basic assumptions, which are themselves the products of fairly recent work by such US historians as George Frederickson, John W. Cell, and David Roediger, among others. First, the notion of "apartheid" is as applicable to the US South in the era of "Jim Crow" as it is to South Africa under the hegemony of the National Party after World War II. Second, "race" is not the property of people of colour alone, but characterizes white people ("whiteness") as a corollary of the "race" ("blackness"), which characterizes African Americans and indigenous South Africans. Third, while these various peoples might have different and disparate cultural values and practices, the "whiteness" and "blackness" that are ascribed to them and even claimed by them are historically and socially produced, driven by ideological beliefs and social-psychological practices of repression and projection. And, fourth, these ascribed differences are mobilized to support existing racial hierarchies (i.e. white supremacy) and, when their assertion alone is insufficient, violence has been utilized to enforce those hierarchies. |
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From this foundation, Smith McKoy proffers her major innovative insight — that what have typically been called "race riots" in both the US and South Africa have, in fact, been "white riots," in which the agents of aggression have been whites. Through the intervention of the mass media — newspapers in the 19th century, TV, film, and video more recently — this underlying social reality has been camouflaged and, in its place, images of out of control, threatening, dangerous black bodies have been inserted. In the public consciousness, then, "race riots" are viewed as "black" riots, just the opposite of what they are about. The historical course of the violence is, Smith McKoy suggests in a lovely turn of phrase, "raced" and "erased." Such a (mis)representation then has material power of its own, reaffirming the justice and necessity of the existing racial hierarchies. Indeed, she argues, the news and commercialized mass entertainment create and perpetuate a trope of violent black bodies which must be controlled. Finally, Smith McKoy also points out that African Americans (like the novelist Charles Chestnutt in his The Marrow of Tradition) and indigenous South Africans (like the playwright and filmmaker Mbongeni Ngema in his "Sarafina!") have manifested agency and resistance in their efforts to construct representations that do identify the instigators of racial violence and legitimate resistance to it. |
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These are useful insights that we should keep in mind from our engagement with newspaper documents in the archives to our viewing of the evening news or the latest action flick. While I might wish that Smith McKoy had chosen her historical "episodes" systematically, that she had placed them within specific historical contexts, and that she had used them to flesh out a structured comparison of the reproduction of racial hierarchies in the US and South Africa, I am grateful to her for having stirred up for me this entire question of how moments of social conflict can be "raced" and then their authorship "erased." As historians and as citizens, we should be ever vigilant about these processes. |
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Peter Rachleff
Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota |
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