The frame of reference through which the author, who is white, approaches the topic is popular culture: “What role have film and television played in constructing cultural scripts that teach us whom and what to fear? And how is this tied to the rise of wh
I once had a friend who never understood the plethora of books in my library as if, reading one, an individual had devoured whatever any other said. Virtually every volume provides unique attributes and instruction. Responses to each are as vast as the firmament.
“Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in ‘Postracial' America” by Penelope Ingram is a thought-provoking tome. Voices in the country — not ones advocating civil rights — suggest that racial justice has been achieved and cases for building upon those accomplishments are closed. Other schools of thought, not so sweeping, argue that success is complete nonetheless.
There is sense of “how far we have come” even among citizens committed to pursue a colorblind society.
“Imperiled Whiteness” highlights the extent to which latent prejudice remains. A sad reality that is the legacy of an ignominious past is that the horrific history makes it easy for people seeing substantial progress over time to become insensitive to the significant issues remaining.
“Imperiled Whiteness” is a difficult read inasmuch as it contains endless information demanding reflection and reconciliation. I read the book over the winter holidays; doing so did not make the yuletide bright. Yet it is hard to imagine anyone who reads it not confronting the divergence remaining between American promise and American reality.
Ingram writes, “Alignment with one's party has produced a form of political identitarianism that shapes how we think about policy issues like military withdrawals, national debt, immigration, and gun control, but also about ethical questions like racism, unemployment, and human trafficking (and immigration and gun control) … [T]his form of political identitarianism has become aligned with racial identity, and a networked digital ecology has emerged as a central mobilizing tool for white supremacist actors on the right to consolidate and further their aims.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The birthmark of the past is pervasive and the extent to which there is an unbroken continuum is often overlooked because lives are lived from past to present rather than future to present.
The frame of reference through which the author, who is white, approaches the topic is popular culture: “What role have film and television played in constructing cultural scripts that teach us whom and what to fear? And how is this tied to the rise of white identity politics?”
It is not the case that while Mammy and Prissy were slaves in “Gone with the Wind,” America has now awakened to its past shortcomings and moved beyond its heinous history. “Imperiled Whiteness” emphasizes that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy simultaneous with European settlement of the New World that prioritized replacing supposed “heathens” with civilization, from the original thirteen colonies to the Pacific Ocean, is self-serving nonsense.
Trenchant analysis examines current excesses as backlash to the election of Barack Obama as President:
“Republicans under Obama used the ‘Ebola crisis' as an opportunity to rehearse their predictable talking points that the populace faced an imminent threat from Ebola due to the Democrats' ‘softness' on terrorism, and that Obama himself, his ‘foreignness', his ties to Africa and his ‘Muslimness,' posed an implicit risk to Americans …. ‘Africa, in the collective unconsciousness of the world, is a place of crisis and catastrophe.'”
Spinmeisters are adept at turning nonsense into non sequitur bearing no resemblance to reality. Such transformation can become insidiously convincing.
The achievement of “Imperiled Whiteness” is its reconsideration of received knowledge and its reinforcement of the status quo even where one cannot conceive of its continuing viability. One cannot imagine anyone not expanding intellectually after wrestling with the conceptual distortions detailed in “Imperiled Whiteness.”
— Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.