Transparency, the tendency of Whites to remain blind to the racialized aspects of that identity, is omnipresent. A story about a recent legal feminist conference captures one manifestation of this phenomenon. At the conference, the participants were asked to pick two or three words to describe themselves. All of the women of color selected at least one racial term, but none of the White women selected a word referring to their race, prompting Angela Harris to comment that "[i]n this society, it is only white people who have the luxury of 'having no color.'" This anecdotal impression is borne out in an informal study recently conducted among students at Harvard Law School. A student interviewer asked ten African Americans and ten Whites: "How do you identify yourself?" Eight African Americans referred to race in their answers, but only two Whites did so. Interestingly, the two Whites who referred to their race were women. Perhaps among Whites, women-more often attuned to thinking in terms of subordinated identities-are more likely to be mindful of the significance of racial identity. Some recent legal writing by White women lends support to this hypothesis. This point serves as a reminder that aspects of White identity such as transparency vary among individuals as well as along all the social axes that run through the White community. Nevertheless, the tendency not to see oneself in racial terms is widespread among Whites. Transparency "may be a defining characteristic of whiteness: to be white is not to think about it."
Transparency is due in part to positional privilege. "White supremacy makes whiteness the normative model. Being the norm allows whites to ignore race, except when they perceive race (usually someone else's) as intruding on their lives." Existing at the center of racial relations, Whites very rarely find themselves burdened by race in a manner that draws this aspect of identity into view; their Whiteness therefore remains unexamined, shrouded in background shadows. Indeed, for many Whites their racial identity becomes uppermost in their mind only when they find themselves in the company of large numbers of non-Whites, and then it does so in the form of a supposed vulnerability to non-White violence, rendering Whiteness in the eyes of many Whites not a privileged status but a victimized one. Nevertheless, the infrequency with which Whites have to think about race is a direct result of how infrequently Whites in fact are racially victimized. Most often the beneficiaries of racial privilege rather than the subjects of racist offense, Whites rarely have cause to consider their own racial identity.
It should be noted, moreover, that at the same time that transparency results from positional privilege, it also adds to that privilege. The infrequency with which society forces Whites to think about their race confers upon Whites a great psychological benefit. "Many whites think that people of color are obsessed with race and find it hard to understand the emotional and intellectual energy that people of color devote to the subject. But whites are privileged in that they do not have to think about race, even though they have one." Never forced to experience or reflect upon the petty indignities and intentional slights of racism, most Whites are free to act in the world with energies undiminished by the anger and self-doubt engendered among racism's victims. A result of privilege, transparency also confers privilege.
Privilege, however, does not fully explain transparency. That Whites often do not see themselves in racial terms because they are constructed as the racial norm is at best only a partial explanation for transparency. Indeed, it might be equally plausible to suggest the contrary, that privilege should magnify White racial self-consciousness. The centrality of race in White lives would seem to make a consciousness of Whiteness unavoidable. Living at the center, experiencing the benefits of ideological superiority, and enjoying the advantages of material comfort arguably should make Whites acutely aware of their own Whiteness, rather than unconscious of it. Moreover, at a different level than transparency, Whites do possess an acute consciousness of their own racial identity. A concrete certainty among Whites regarding their own Whiteness both lies behind transparency and belies it. Whites may rarely think of themselves in racial terms, but when pushed, few experience even the slightest doubt about their own fundamental Whiteness. Thus, as Ruth Frankenberg argues, "by themselves, the material, daily relations of race cannot adequately explain whether, when, and in what terms white[s]… perceive race as structuring either their own or anyone else's experience." Privilege in daily race relations cannot serve as the sole explanation for the rise and maintenance of transparency. Instead, there must exist complementary maintaining technologies to White myopia regarding race. The prerequisite cases suggest the naturalization of Whiteness.
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