White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race

Chapter 6 turns away from legal theory to focus on white identity. It argues that the whiteness prerequisite cases helped create perpetuates harmful racial identities that must be abandoned to promote racial justice.

Transparency and the Naturalization of Whiteness

Haney López cites a feminist conference to explain the omnipresence of white transparency. The participants were asked to describe themselves in two or three words. All the participants of color chose at least one racial term, while none of the white participants referred to their race. As Haney López observes, whiteness is considred normal and, as such, often remains unexamined.

Transparency relates to and confers privilege. White people rarely think about their race, to their great psychological benefit. They do not experience the indignities and slights of racism, the anger that accompanies it, and the self-doubt it engenders. However, privilege cannot fully explain transparency. Prerequisite cases suggest that the naturalization of whiteness contributes significantly to maintaining transparency. Prerequisite cases naturalized whiteness physically by treating race as biological. The language of In re Knight is informative: The court denied the applicant citizenship because he was of English, Chinese, and Japanese descent, describing him as a “half-breed” (112). Prerequisite cases also naturalized whiteness by linking cultural and cognitive traits to physical appearance. For example, the 1912 Washington case connected “yellow or bronze racial color” to “Oriental despotism” (114), linking race to political temperament, and making culture a manifestation of race. Prerequisite cases hid whiteness by presenting it as inherent, unalterable, and so essential that it required no reflection.

The Content of White Identity

In addition to naturalizing whiteness, prerequisite cases elaborated on the content of white identity by conceptualizing it in relational terms. By constructing racial categories, courts also constructed hierarchical relationships of domination and subordination, privilege and disadvantage, and normativity and marginality. Prerequisite cases constructed race in binary opposition—white and non-white–allowing races to be defined in relation to one another, both physically and culturally. According to constructs, white Americans are civilized and practice a republican form of government, while non-white Asians are uncivilized despots. This binary creates incoherent racial meanings and hierarchies. White identity is always positive, which imposes a negative identity on all non-white people. These myths form the content of whiteness, impacting people’s views of themselves and others.

Positive White Identity and Race Blindness

This section examines the implications of white race-consciousness. Some scholars recommend eschewing race-consciousness altogether on the grounds that race is a destructive fictional construct. Others suggest that ending the dynamics of self-blindness and superiority requires developing race-consciousness based on a positive white identity. According to Haney López, the first recommendation, which essentially promotes race-blindness, is impossible to achieve without first taking account of race. The second is redundant and potentially harmful given that the dominant discourse on race already presents white people as superior to non-white people. Neither strategy can ameliorate racial inequity. All racial identities are relative to one another. Thus, lauding one race, including a non-white race, necessarily risks denigrating other racial identities.

Dismantling Whiteness

Haney López argues that racial justice can only come about with the development of a white race-consciousness that rejects whiteness (see Probing the Content of White Identity and Racial Justice in the US.) The content of whiteness is directly linked to non-whiteness. Maintaining a positive white identity depends on demonizing non-whiteness. Whiteness upholds notions of white purity and non-white impurity, and of white superiority and non-white inferiority.

Questioning racial myths is key to dismantling racial injustice. White identity can only remain positive if society continues to deny the inequities that whiteness engenders. Maintaining whiteness requires moral disengagement and a denial of the fact that race is socially constructed.

White self-consciousness calls on white people to reflect on their whiteness, their privilege, and their role in creating and maintaining societal injustice. Abandoning white identity is the only way white people can know themselves and others. Ending negative racial stereotypes about non-white people also depends on deconstructing whiteness. Currently, racial minorities function as “tropes of inferiority” that serve to measure whiteness and testify to its superiority (132). White people must participate in deconstructing whiteness. Even with their participation, however, whiteness is so deeply engrained that dismantling it completely may prove impossible.

Choosing the Future

Race is a social construct created and maintained by choice. Thus, making different choices can change the way race functions in American society. Choice provides a path forward for white people committed to ending whiteness. First, white people must strive to overcome transparency by paying attention to the daily acts that confirm their whiteness. Second, white people must accept the varied personal and social consequences of dismantling whiteness. Third, white people must consistently choose to combat whiteness. This process requires white people to confront how much of their identity is a function of race. White people must consider how their racial identity manifests itself in daily life. In addition, they must make choices to undermine this racialized identity. Only the participation of many white people can engender change. The kind of future that might emerge without whiteness is far from clear. Dismantling whiteness might end white superiority, but not all racial ideas.