“Whiteness” as Social Value

WHILE most whites seem not to be conscious of their skin-color as a privilege that has continued to sustain a veneer of scientific discourse relating to racial equality and thereby ensuring political legitimacy of majority rule in the United States, for blacks, their situation is exactly the reverse; that is, the moral value of their skin color – their blackness – appears abnormal and therefore weighs upon them “…pervasively and unremittingly”. One conservative black talk-show host on 98.7 KISS FM in New York, for example, seemed aghast at a black father’s comment to his son: that he could never aspire to be president of the United States when he grows up. In other words, the black father told his son matter-of-factly: “No”. Even for whites that “fall to the bottom”, through corporate crimes (I have in mind C.E.O. Kenneth Lay of the Enron Corporation and Martha Stewart), being “white” continues to have worth. Their humanity remains intact. There is more to this. Most whites in America share this luxury because they never talk about being white; therefore, they live their entire lives in a “deep fog of misunderstanding”. The media, for example, sustains whites’ understanding of racial equality in a permanent fog.

When the media covered former president Bill Clinton’s Race Initiative, the major news media instinctively used words that separated “race” from “racism”. The Washington Post uses phrases such as “the country’s racial picture”, “the overall racial climate”, “relations between Americans of different races and ethnic backgrounds”, “racial matters”, “the race theme”, “an incendiary topic”, and “this most delicate and politically dangerous of subjects”. The New York Times uses such phrases as, “the state of race relations”, “the racial front”, and ‘the racial climate”. Then the mainstream media expresses their determination to “prod Americans to talk to one another and get beyond skin color and ethnicity”(italics mine). The newspaper and print media wants “to inspire Americans to appreciate its “racial diversity”; they want us to foster “racial healing” and to have us learn “how the races can get along on a day-to-day basis”.

Racial categories, however, are not fixed. In his 1920 essay “The souls of White Folk,” written for Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, the black sociologist Dr. Dubois described white supremacy as the belief that “every great soul the world ever saw as a white man’s soul; that every great deed was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream. Most whites fail to understand that a belief in a superior moral worth of whiteness depends on the degradation of blackness. Dr. Dubois stated the day-to-day experiences of blackness in his time and it rings true to this day: “Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they have no feelings, aspirations and loves. They are not simply dark white men. They are not ‘men’ in the sense that Europeans are men”.

Millions of white Americans remain detached -from the day-to-day realities of African-Americans; and yes, the media is to take the blame for not highlighting solutions to this issue. The mainstream media tells us that the lower life expectancies, high infant-mortality rates, high rates of hypertension, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, ad nauseam, are caused, by poor health habits and a so-called culture of poverty.

“The Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment,” writes one researcher. “No new drugs were tested; neither was any effort made to establish the efficacy of old forms of treatment. It was a non-therapeutic experiment, aimed at compiling data on the effects of the spontaneous evolution of syphilis on black males”. Millions of white Americans are not acutely aware that, for forty years, the United States Public Health Service “had been conducting a study of the effects of untreated syphilis on black men in Macon County, Alabama.”

If, perchance, whites were to extrapolate this case globally, through the experiences of blacks on the African continent, they will discover that black humanity, as a whole, has not yet been fully recognized.

The writer is a recent revert to Islam and can be contacted at: drummondhugh@verizon.net