The End of White America? The Rising Tide of Color?

DuBois Sociology Week 2
Mentioned in The Atlantic article “The End of White America,” the book reflected white anxiety in the 1920s about how to maintain white supremacy in the face of the “rising tide of color.”
Norman Mailer’s 1957 book on “the original hipster,” i.e. white youth disaffiliating from whiteness to adopt aspects of what was considered black culture.

 

 

The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

 

IF THEY’RE RIGHT—if white America is indeed “losing control,” and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.
For some, this renunciation can take a radical form. In 1994, a young graffiti artist and activist named William “Upski” Wimsatt, the son of a university professor, published Bomb the Suburbs, the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer’s celebratory 1957 essay, “The White Negro.” Wimsatt was deeply committed to hip-hop’s transformative powers, going so far as to embrace the status of the lowly “wigger,” a pejorative term popularized in the early 1990s to describe white kids who steep themselves in black culture. Wimsatt viewed the wigger’s immersion in two cultures as an engine for change. “If channeled in the right way,” he wrote, “the wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America.”

The  preceding quotes are taken from The Atlantic article The End of White America (an interesting read in its entirety that I recommend). Professor Bobo mentioned the article last class  in reference to the salient questions: “What is race?” and “What are the competing views of the deep structure of race?”

The article poses the questions: “What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?”

Considering what the end of whiteness might mean is inextricably linked to the meaning of  non-whiteness broadly and blackness, specifically, especially for our course as scholars thinking about the sociology of the black community. As many of you queried in class: what are the contours of  “the black community” as a sociological object of study?  And to go a step further, what are the contours of  “blackness” as an identity?