Lee Bebout - Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White

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Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White

Lee Bebout

Lee Bebout

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2016 by New York University

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ISBN : 978-1-4798-8534-3 (hardback)

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Also available as an ebook

For Michael Bebout-Vega

We actively struggle for a more just world

because the other alternatives

are simply not acceptable.

Social identity labels can be both elucidating and confusing. At the level of academic discourse, scholars often strive for simplicity and clarity. For example, Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, and Mexican Americans may be used to reference three distinct groups of people. However, beyond the pages of academe, the world and words are messier. Mexican may be a label of racial, ethnic, or national identification. And Mexican is not alone. Consider how American may refer not just to a U.S. citizen or someone from the Americas if we are to think hemispherically. Rather, in popular discourse American can be used to reference white U.S. citizens exclusively or non-Latinos more generally. Often this is not purposeful, for the unstated, normalized category of white occupies central positioning in the term American. This is not happenstance or inconsequential. In many ways, this slippage between national and ethnoracial categories is the central thread of this book. In the following pages, I strive for simplicity and clarity, marking the distinction between Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-Americans. At points, I deploy Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Mexican American to signal their historical and political differences, but at other times I use Chicana/o transhistorically as has become common in the field of Chicana/o studies. Readers will notice other moments in the text when there is slippage between Mexican and Mexican American as well as between American and Anglo-American. These are not moments of laziness or inadvertent mistakes. They are purposeful acts of signification, for the dynamic tension and play between ethnoracial and national categories is the very heart of the matter.

Perhaps, at some point, all scholarship has its root in the autobiographical. This book certainly feels so. I was born outside of Chicago, Illinois, two hundred years after the United States declared independence, over one hundred years after the end of slavery, approximately thirty years after the defeat of Nazi fascism in Europe, a few years after the end of mass protests that marked the freedom struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, at the cusp of neoliberalism, soft multiculturalism, and color blindness. All this to say, like many others, I was born into white supremacy in a time like today when many whites sought a clean break from the past, a chance to baptize themselves in dreams of innocence.

Raised by my mother, I was taught that racism is wrong. This is a value that is imparted by many white parents today. Knowing this is not enough. Knowing that racism is wrong does not account for what racism is or what it does. Knowing that racism is wrong does not arm oneself with strategies for combating injustice. These two gaps create significant challenges today as racism is popularly conflated with outward expressions of personal prejudice and the solution is simply to dont say things like that. Like many white families, mine rarely spoke of race and racial difference, and when it did, race was coded below the surface of politeness.

Growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago in the 1980s, my conscious introduction to the U.S. racial imagination was largely through television and racial comments by friends and adults outside my family. The targets of jokes would be Polish Americans or black people