Because “black culture” is a term used to describe (what the describer alleges to be) actual behavior of real-life black people. It is very hard to discuss real life in such broadly defined terms without getting bogged down in stereotyping.
But “blackness as a cultural construct” refers to the ideas that constitute the stereotypes themselves. In short, what we’re talking about here is the difference between analyzing stereotypes and perpetuating stereotypes.
If you understand the difference between the terms “female behavior” and “femininity”, or between the terms “US policy” and “the American spirit”, or between the terms “children’s activity” and “childhood”, then you should be able to understand the difference between “black culture” and “blackness as a cultural construct”.
Whiteness doesn’t mean just being a white person in this context either.
If all black people in the US are part of blackness simply because they are black, then aren’t all white people in the US part of whiteness because they are white? That would have to be the case, if whiteness and blackness aren’t cultural constructs. If whiteness and blackness are cultural constructs, then it doesn’t have to be the case.
In this context, “blackness” refers to the cultural/societal determinations of who is black – that someone with 50% sub-Saharan African ancestry (like Obama) is “black”, and even someone with 25% or less sub-Saharan African ancestry is “black” (Trevor Noah or Ben Jealous, for example). There’s no logical reason for these classifications aside from their connections to white supremacy (and that all important concept of “whiteness” in America).
Many other cultural/societal phenomena stem from “blackness” and “whiteness” – colorism (“black” people being treated differently, and even treating each other differently, based on how light or dark skinned they are), “passing” (the phenomena of a light skinned “black” person trying to “pass” as “white” and thus accumulating the social benefits/privileges that accompany it), and much more.
Late edit: I think “blackness” in this context may also includes those qualities and characteristics assigned by society and culture at large to “black” people (i.e. that they are lazy, less intelligent, more aggressive, less trustworthy, etc.), which have changed over time in various ways.
Is the observation that most black children in the US are born out of wedlock analyzing a stereotype, or perpetuating it? Is that “black culture”? It is certainly based on the actual behavior of real-life black people.
This is not how I understand it in either case. No person is a part of “whiteness” or “blackness”. Rather, these are cultural/societal concepts that affect wide swaths of people – all or nearly all white people in America are affected by the phenomenon of whiteness, and all or nearly all black people are affected by the phenomenon of blackness.
I don’t think it’s necessarily either one. I think the interesting question (which Richard Parker got into a little bit in his most recent post) is why are various statistics like this?
I’m not an expert on American history. But it seems to me the fact that you have legislation like the Three Fifths Compromise that goes back to 1787 and slavery in North America being introduced in 1619, the concept that Blacks were not equal to Whites goes back at least to the early days of our country. So maybe I’m not clear as to how “Whiteness” was more of a thing in the 18th and 19th century than in the 16th. Because to me it sounds a bit like saying “anti-Semitism” wasn’t a thing until the Germans made it fashionable in 1938.
Which is not to say I disagree with you. I’m just not sure really what to do with that information.
As iiandyiiii says, it isn’t necessarily either one. One isolated fact about racial demographics isn’t necessarily either a criticism of “culture” or an examination of a “cultural construct”.
However, if somebody wants to talk about the fact that most black children in the US are born out of wedlock, and really doesn’t want to talk about the fact that most Hispanic children in the US are also born out of wedlock, and that nearly one-third of non-Hispanic white children in the US are also born out of wedlock, and that most white children in several Scandinavian countries are also born out of wedlock…
…then I think that person might be pursuing an agenda that is not entirely about neutral analysis of demographic facts.
This is partly why it’s so difficult to generalize accurately from particular instances of actual behavior of real-life people to broad pronouncements about “culture”. The actual behavior of real-life people tends to be very complicated and depend on a lot of factors besides a simple classification of racial identity.
Slavery changed an enormous amount between 1619 and the American Revolution. In parts of colonial America, slave families were kept intact by law, slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, baptize their children, and much more. Early slaves were often treated more like indentured servants than slaves. There were far more free black people, especially in the South, in the early and mid 17th century than the late 18th and 19th centuries – there were free and wealthy black families in 17th century Virginia, but by the end of the 17th century Virginia law expelled free black people.
But later, the laws and cultural practices changed. And they all changed for the worse of black people – interracial marriages, which often weren’t illegal before, became both illegal and cultural anathema (though widespread births of mixed children due to rape of slaves continued for centuries). It’s those changing laws and cultural practices which are considered, in this context, to be the “birth” of the concept of whiteness – that the powers that be put in place policies and practices designed to eliminate the possibility of poor white people finding common cause with poor black people (and posing a threat to the rich white people in power).
Well, of course 1787 is in the 18th century, right? And as for the 17th-century part, I don’t think anybody is saying that African slaves weren’t considered unequal to European colonizers. Just that it was more a “culture” thing than a “complexion/innate racial characteristics” thing.
For one thing, AFAICT, several of the first Africans brought to the North American colonies got the same deal as white indentured servants, and could buy their independence after a certain period of servitude. Some former indentured or enslaved Africans bought slaves of their own, besides acquiring other property. Black and white people could marry one another. It certainly wasn’t an egalitarian society, but it was different from the legally entrenched drastic racial discrimination that slaveholding society later became in America.
Perhaps a better analogy would be saying “Aryanness” wasn’t a thing until the Germans made it fashionable in, say, the 1920s. Certainly the term “Aryan” had been used in various linguistic and sociological/anthropological contexts for quite a while before that. And certainly there had been various types of prejudice among northern/western Europeans against members of other ethnic groups for a very long time.
But the concept of “Aryanness”, as a specific ethnic majority group that was defined against other ethnic groups and valorized as superior to them in ways that required segregation and domination of them, was definitely more of a thing in the early 20th century than in the early 19th.
Likewise, the concept of “whiteness”, as a specific ethnic majority group that was defined against other ethnic groups and valorized as superior to them in ways that required segregation and domination of them, was definitely more of a thing in the 18th and 19th century than in the 16th.
So if “whiteness” is an evil, apocalypstic, world threatening concept, why isn’t any concept of racial generalization?
IE Hispanic Americans are increasingly lumped together as being one group identity, despite being composed of many different ethnic subgroups. Why is that okay, but a white identity is not?
I will excuse a “Black Identity” because “blackness” is all people of African descent had after slavery; so, there I can be understanding.
But rather than characterizing simply “whiteness” as the bane of all existence, why doesn’t the author characterize how dangerous it is to take many different ethnic groups and roll them into one umbrella based on racial identity? Her thesis seems to be “whiteness = a threat to the world white people = mostly bad; Latinoness = good; Blackness = great”
If you want a truly equal society, then the same rules have to apply to everyone. Everyone has to get rid of their concepts of “(insert race)-ness”, or no one has to.
But if you keep demonizing the group which makes up 60% of the population, you will keep losing elections.
These people also are inadvertently creating a new white identity - by treating white men as the cause of all social ills, it will indeed cause white men (who might otherwise despise each other) to feel a kinship based on being perceived as the bad guy; “Us against those that hate us.” So, if that’s what they want, keep painting “white men” and “whiteness” as “apocalyptic.”
But you still don’t appear to be understanding the concept of “whiteness” as it’s being used here. The only people this concept might possibly demonize are the wealthy white slave-owners and politicians of the 17th and 18th centuries who functionally created the American concept of whiteness with various legal, cultural, and societal policies and practices that institutionalized brutality and extreme oppression, along with leaving open and acceptable the possibilities of mass rape, torture, and worse.
It doesn’t demonize 1% of the present population, much less 60%. This concept alone doesn’t demonize any living person. There are other parts of the article that are highly critical of Trump, many Trump voters, and others, but the concept of whiteness alone does not demonize white people. It’s a simple recognition of a series of facts related to law, culture, and society, that came together in the 17th and 18th centuries in colonial and early America.
Any fantasy-people who are “treating white men as the cause of all social ills” are indeed wrong.
Please let us know if you find any influential people (famous writers, politicians, etc.) who actually believe this, and we’ll join you in condemning them.
I think you’re confusing the basic notion of “lumping people together” with the particular set of ideals, biases, expectations, taboos, etc., that the cultural concept of “whiteness” lumps people together with.
Namely: What is evil and world-threatening isn’t the mere fact of saying that there can be vaguely defined “racial” categories based more or less on phenotype, or that one of those categories can be called “white”. The problem is that our culture has historically constructed the category of “whiteness” to include and stand for all those oppressive ideas that I mentioned upthread, such as “socially superior to non-white”, “not performing menial services for non-whites”, “sexual/racial purity of whites”, “white humanity as opposed to non-white animalism”, etc.
That shit’s bad. The fact that “whiteness” as a cultural construct has grown up totally enmeshed with the principle of white racial superiority is a real problem, not just for the rest of the world but for white people as well.
Notions of “pride” and “identity” for, say, blacks and Latinos are simply nowhere near as bound up with historical domination and oppression of others, at least not in US society. (However, that sort of “ethnic identity toxicity” absolutely can exist in some societies in, say, Latin America and Africa where one black or Hispanic ethnic group has historically dominated and oppressed another.)
Pointing out fundamental facts about the history and cultural impacts of race in America isn’t per se “demonizing” anybody.
Personally, as a white American, I would be rather embarrassed to have it supposed that I couldn’t discuss these important issues rationally without flying into a resentful tantrum and flatly refusing to vote for anybody who dared to talk about them. I mean, geez, surely we can at least be grownups about this?
If, as you suggest, a significant proportion of white American voters really have such a hard time being grownups about this that they would throw such tantrums, well, that’s a pity. But in such a situation, our only hope is to keep calmly and rationally facing the facts while the tantrum-throwers gradually develop the maturity to do the same.
I think that is because in the 16th century white people didn’t see themselves as a monolithic group. WASPs were very much valorized as superior to the Irish, for example. The change over the centuries to the concept of “whiteness” was an expansion of what counted as white, not any change in the superiority of whiteness.
The “expansion of what counted as white” occurred because of growing commitment to “the superiority of whiteness”. The notion of general white racial superiority was key to the formation of an inclusive racial category of “whiteness” in the first place, as opposed to just a bunch of different European ethnicities despising one another along with non-Europeans.
It gets really tiring hearing about ‘white’ this, ‘white’ that from every Liberal commentator. Sorry Trump won. Not my fault. Didn’t vote for him. Tired of hearing about ‘whites’, ‘white privilege’, ‘whiteness.’ Sorry Trump’s in office. Not my fault. He’s more orange than he is white, anyway. You can have him. Not gonna be punished for it.