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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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White Innocence
Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race
By Gloria Wekker
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7456-5
CHAPTER 1
"Suppose She Brings a Big Negro Home"
Case Studies of Everyday Racism
Psychoanalysis can ... be seen as a quite elaborate form of ethnography — as a writing of the ethnicity of the white Western psyche.
Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales
* * *
In this chapter, I embark on an oceanic journey that I have postponed for quite some time, daunted by the murkiness and coldness of the water. I am interested in the widespread but un(der)explored ways in which race has nestled itself in the Dutch cultural archive, that storehouse of what Edward Said (1993, 52), in a general European framework, described as "a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference ... [and], in Raymond Williams' seminal phrase, 'structures of feeling'" with regard to the racial ordering of the world. In the introduction, I summarized this notion of the cultural archive as a storehouse of ideas, practices, and affect, that which is in between our ears, in our hearts and minds, regarding race, based on four hundred years of imperial rule.
I want to explore the forcefulness, passion, and even aggression that race elicits in the Netherlands, while at the same time elusiveness, denial, and disavowal reign supreme. The concept of disavowal speaks of deep ambiguity with regard to race: repressed material can make its way into consciousness on the condition that it is immediately denied (Wright 1992, 90). Denial and disavowal, the simultaneous affirmation and denial of a thought or desire, are important modes the majority white population uses to deal with race. I am intrigued by the ways in which race pops up in unexpected places and moments, as the return of the repressed, while the dominant discourse stubbornly maintains that the Netherlands is and always has been color-blind and antiracist.
I focus on the ways in which black people, but especially black women, were and are envisioned in the Dutch cultural archive, by bringing various popular and literary representations of black women to the surface, together with some personal experiences with gendered and sexualized racism. Little research about these volatile concoctions, as part and parcel of the cultural text, has so far been done in the Netherlands, although some work needs to be mentioned: for instance, Nederveen Pieterse's 1990 study of images of blacks in Western popular culture, Allison Blakely's (1993) historical work on the role of race in the modern Dutch nation, and Elmer Kolfin and Esther Schreuder (2008), who traced black figurations in Dutch art. The journey before me is to explore the ways in which race became part of the Dutch cultural archive, how it acquired gendered, sexualized, and classed meanings during more than four hundred years, and how these complex configurations became intertwined with dominant regimes of truth, which keep on manifesting themselves to this day. I understand racial imaginations to be part of the Dutch psychological and cultural makeup; these imaginations are intertwined with the deepest desires and anxieties of many Dutch people. I seek to uncover some of the elements of the dominant discourse constructing black women in the Netherlands. bell hooks (1992a) argues that within U.S. racist discourse, black women are not exclusively depicted as inferior; also, and often simultaneously, jealousy and unspeakable yearning are involved. Is the oscillation between extreme attraction to black women and rejection, inferiorization, and relegation to an abject category — a dominant assemblage constructing black women in the United States — also pertinent in the Netherlands, or do we find a different configuration here?
Systemic and Virulent Psychic Residues of Race
It is necessary to explore the ways in which, in the Dutch context, shared, often unexamined fantasies with regard to race continue to shape the ways in which "we" and "they" are constructed and perceived, while dominant common sense has it that race is thoroughly absent in the Netherlands. By engaging with a few varied case studies, taken from TV, public and everyday life, and the literary imagination, I hope to show that race, given all its disparate manifestations, must have been firmly implanted in the cultural imagination in order to leave such systemic and virulent psychic residues.
Although the above sketch of the problem seems to call for a psychoanalytical approach, I am mainly interested in psychoanalysis as an ethnography of the white psyche — after all, the concepts of self and other that came into being in psychoanalysis were dependent on the politics of colonial relations. As a "scavenger theorist and methodologist" (Halberstam 1998, 13), I prefer to adopt an interdisciplinary framework, actively exploring alternative grand narratives in which race, class, gender, and sexuality are taken into account (Morrison ed. 1992b; Abel, Christian, and Moglen eds. 1997; Lane ed. 1998; Campbell 2000; Khanna 2003). I thus make use of insights from gender and sexuality studies, discourse and narrative analysis, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis.
Little research about everyday narratives representing black women has so far been done in the Netherlands (but see Essed 1984, 1990, 2002). In my own work on female black diasporic sexuality, I have started to look at the representation of black women in Dutch discourse (Wekker 2006). It is clear that representational regimes of the sexuality of different groups of women do not come into being independently from each other; they are relational (Wekker 2006, 250). In contemporary Dutch multiethnic society, Islamic women are represented as sexually backward and oppressed, but dominant representational regimes of Islamic women in the West have undergone radical changes, from hypersexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to current asexuality (Lutz 1991). Black, that is to say African diasporic, women are generally seen as "too liberated," with a rampant sexuality, doing it indiscriminately with men and with women, doing it for money, "going where their cunts lead them" (De Wit 1993). Asian sexualities, such as the representations of Indo and Thai women, different as they may be, have in common the construction of submissive and ultrafeminine femininities, with long-hair, and attractive in traditional ways. White female sexuality seems to be the neutral, normative variety. Thus we see not only a relational structuring of these representations but also a hierarchy operative.
All of the disparate sources that I use in this chapter point to what could realistically be designated as submerged knowledge, that is, knowledge that is not part of dominant regimes of truth. Just as Richard Dyer (1997, 1) maintains that race is never not in the picture in modern life, so sexuality is never not in play when it comes to representing black women, although other representations also vie for attention.
In the next section, I show three prevalent manifestations of contemporary racism directed at (mostly) black women in the Netherlands. I read the treatment of these variously classed black women, both fictional and real, in light of the repressed cultural archive. Next, I undertake a historical excursion into the Dutch colonial past and speculate about the ways that not only in the colonies, but also in the metropole, a subjectification took place in which sexualized race was centrally deposited in the collective unconscious. As Helen Moglen says, "To achieve a more adequate and more emancipatory understanding of difference ... we must insist upon the centrality of history in our analyses" (1997, 204). I subsequently present an analysis of the novel Negerjood in Moederland (Negro Jew in Motherland), by Surinamese Dutch author Ellen Ombre (2004). I read this novel as an illustration of the set of associations that, as I argue, frequently adhere to black women, no matter what their class background is.
Everyday Narratives of Race and Black Bodies in the Netherlands
NARRATIVE 1: "SUPPOSE SHE BRINGS A BIG NEGRO HOME"
In November 2008, I am watching a very popular Dutch daily TV show in prime time, De Wereld Draait Door. The white, male cohost, journalist Martin Bril, is lovingly talking about his two teenage daughters, expressing his expectation that one of these days the oldest one will bring a boyfriend home. To loud laughter and acclaim, he voices his biggest fear: "Suppose she brings a big negro home...."
While I do a double-take at the statement, there is no sign whatsoever, either among the audience in the studio or from the other host at the table, Mathijs van Nieuwkerk, of any inappropriateness in uttering this. I imagine that if someone made a remark about its racism, the response would have been to ridicule and summarily dismiss it and the claimant. In the first instance, I am struck by the way that humor and irony allow Bril to have his cake and eat it too: the — frankly, remote — possibility that he would be called on his racism is skillfully deflected by his humorous presentation. Irony is usually understood as saying one thing but meaning the opposite. In this case, the good listener would immediately understand that Bril cannot possibly mean what he is saying. He means the opposite: It does not matter to him who his daughter brings home. This is a self-flattering reading, which is in line with dominant self-representation: We are not racist. According to Linda Hutcheon (1994) in Irony's Edge, irony exists in a fragile equilibrium between the person who utters a statement, the audience who interprets the statement, and the context in which it takes place. In a context in which there is no consensus that "of course we are not racist" Bril's irony does not work for at least part of the audience.
One way to read the situation in a bit more complicated manner is the following. One could argue that the humor arises out of a paradox: The audience is bound by shared images about blacks, images that develop at a very early age. As we will see in chapter 5, children are exposed to derogatory images of Black Pete, the servant of Sinterklaas, the good-hearted bishop who comes to visit yearly, at very young ages, even before they can talk. At the talk show table, everyone seemingly is caught up in the collective denial of the hurtfulness and the damaging nature of those images, as shown by the collective laughter. The fragility of the cultural edifice — sharing negative images about blacks, but simultaneously denying and disavowing them — is shown up when all of a sudden, there is the cheekiness and audacity of the cohost speaking the unmentionable out loud. The fragment shows, in its simplicity, some important aspects of the everydayness of the gendered and racialized construction of sexuality and the sexual construction of race, with the figure of the mythical "big Negro" — and "big" surely does not pertain only to his height here — still largely intact.
Still other readings of this small event are possible. According to a Fanonian reading, what Bril, probably unconsciously, is playing on is "Negrophobia" on the part of white men and women. The phobia associated with blackness consists of sexual anxiety and fear revolving around the image of the overendowed black male who is envisaged as possessing an enormous penis. The white male's simultaneous fear and desire in relation to a sexual potency he can never achieve is for Fanon, following Freud, the inevitable by-product of cultural development (Fanon [1952] 1967; Doane 1991, 216). For both Freud and Fanon, civilization is achieved by the sublimation of sexuality, and since blacks (according to the nineteenth-century revision of the chain of being, where black people were placed closer to the pole of animality and sexuality) freely indulge in sexuality, they not only do not develop neuroses, but they become the canvas on which the civilized white man projects his fears and fantasies.
The episode, finally, also shows how limited and persistent the stock of images, scenarios, relations, and interpretations is, when it comes to representing black men and women. We need to consider the shared racial and sexual fantasies in the Dutch archive, based on four hundred years of colonial relations, to make sense of everyday, casual chains of signification like these.
NARRATIVE 2: "WHY DON'T YOU CALL HER MOTHER?"
Sandrine, a thirty-five-year-old black playwright and mother of two children in Amsterdam, tells the following story:
My children do not really look like me; they look like their father and are even lighter than him: white, blond, blue eyes. One day, I went to the playground with my four-year-old daughter. She fell off the swing. She was crying and screaming and I rushed forward. Another, white, mother got to Elleke before I did. While I tried to comfort Elleke, the other woman kept trying to push me out of the way. At first I did not pay attention to her or to what she was saying, but all of a sudden it sank in that she was shooing me away, saying, "Why don't you call her mother? Have her mother come here!" I started screaming at her. I could not believe this was happening to me. I was seen as the nanny of my own child, as the domestic worker.
In a similar scenario occurring in the United States, black professor Rhonda Williams (1998, 136), walking in the park with her white lesbian lover's child, was seen by the other white mothers as a nanny, not as the mother of the child. There are many variations to this tale of color differences in a nuclear family and the ways in which they are interpreted in the North American and Dutch archives, which do not show fundamental differences in this respect. A research project I undertook with colleagues shows that, depending on the age of the family members involved and the circumstances, a white father and his adopted daughter of color, or a white mother and her black adopted son, may be mistakenly seen as interracial lovers with an appreciable age difference, which is, of course, more acceptable in the case of the older white man and his Thai daughter than for the white mother with her Colombian son (Wekker et al. 2007, 50–51). There is a different, gendered, valence to the person of color in these configurations: the Thai daughter might easily be taken to be a call girl, semiprostitute, or import bride, while some agency and desire might be ascribed to the son. White women in this configuration, through their positioning at the intersection of age, gender, race, and sexuality, cannot generally claim much respectability. In any case, this research project suggests that the only person who does not get problematized is the white male.
What these various family narratives show is that the dominant regime of truth is that family members should have the same phenotypes, the same skin color. If they do not and the light-skinned or white child is small, the black mother is transformed into a nanny; when the child is an adult, sexuality inexorably enters the picture, and an interracial sexual relationship is constructed. A white child thus supposedly has a white, middle- or upper-class mother, who is working outside the home, and she has for the time being a black woman to look after her. When it comes to young, black children with white mothers, experiential evidence indicates that the dominant script is that the children are assumed to be adopted. It is noteworthy that the cognitive dissonance caused by these multiracial dyads is solved by assigning a dependent, subordinate role to the blacks, both to the children and to the mother: they are adopted and she is hired as a nanny. Thus, agency is granted to whites. In dyads where the blacks are adults, again agency is given to the whites, who, after all, choose to have an exotic lover.
Curiously, knowledge about the intense interracial mixing on which colonial societies like Suriname and the Indies were built, that is, the underlying sexual privileges that enabled white men to often have parallel white and black families (Wekker 2006), did not become part of the cultural archive of white Dutch people. I would conjecture that the self-flattering, white Dutch self cemented only those bodies of knowledge into the archive that were favorable to its own group and disavowed those facts that were unfavorable, that spoke of violence, of forced sexual contacts, and of injustice. What all these family narratives, finally, have in common is a silent, heteronormative contract.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from White Innocence by Gloria Wekker. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. "Suppose She Brings a Big Negro Home": Case Studies of Everyday Racism 30
2. The House That Race Built 50
3. The Coded Language of Hottentot Nymphae and the Discursive Presence of Race, 1917 81
4. Of Homo Nostalgia and (Post)Coloniality: Or, Where Did All the Critical White Gay Men Go? 108
5. "For Even Though I Am Black as Soot, My Intentions Are Good": The Case of Black Pete 139
Coda. "But What about the Captain?" 168
Notes 175
References 193
Index 215
What People are Saying About This
"Refreshingly innovative, conceptually sophisticated, and compellingly argued. . . . The outcome of a lifetime spent in the theoretical and political trenches, White Innocence breaks entirely new ground."
"White Innocence is a major contribution that provides us with new and distinct methods for investigating the cultural archives of colonialism, showing how they are at once national archives that include written documents and accumulated impressions, encounters, and experiences. Gloria Wekker takes the trouble of creating an itinerary of expressions of whiteness as innocence. It is a powerful itinerary. This book will reach out to readers, and draw them in."
"Gloria Wekker's patient anatomization of the Dutch racial order is a major contribution to the growing global conversation about whiteness and its overcoming. Her authoritative survey of the willful innocence that underpins racism in the Netherlands should be widely read and studied."