Segregation, whiteness, and transformation.

• Author: Mahoney, Martha R.
• Position: Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor

Residential segregation is both cause and product in the processes that shape the construction of race in America. The concept of race has no natural truth, no core content or meaning other than those meanings created in a social system of white privilege and racist domination. Recent work in critical race theory helps understand residential segregation by analyzing race as a social construction and whiteness as a racial construction. Segregation is the product of notions of black inferiority and white superiority, manifested geographically through the exclusion of blacks from more privileged white neighborhoods and the concentration of blacks into subordinated neighborhoods stigmatized by both race and poverty. In turn, the segregated world we inhabit comes to define race for its inhabitants. The lived experience of people in a segregated society links the perceived natural quality of the world we inhabit with its racialized characteristics--giving the social construction of race a quality that seems both natural and inevitable. Segregation therefore reflects and reinforces socially created concepts of blackness and whiteness. Understanding that race is socially constructed, and that its social construction is made into a naturalized feature of the physical world through residential segregation, can help us understand how to transform the current allocation of privilege. In this Paper, I emphasize the relationships between concentration into segregated residential communities and access to or exclusion from work as central features in the process of the social construction of race.

Although America has a long history of racial subordination, social and legal fictions continue to equate formal legal equality with equality in fact. In the context of residential segregation, this formalism leads to de-emphasizing the ongoing existence and harms of segregation and to emphasizing legal and economic mechanisms that could theoretically correct it. Professor Johnson's article therefore rightly criticizes both the idea that the market will naturally end discrimination and the idea that the existence of antidiscrimination law in housing will be sufficient to end segregation.(1) Civil rights scholars necessarily put a great deal of energy into revealing past and present structures of subordination. We prove (again and again) that subordination has happened and does happen, that segregation reflects and creates inequality, and that white privilege is real. The metaphor of a "property right in whiteness"(2) helps emphasize that privilege exists and that law protects it. While necessarily repeated, the reiteration of the existence of subordination and privilege tends to take our eyes off the question of transformation. This Paper explores the links between residential segregation and white privilege and then addresses particular issues in transforming the social construction of whiteness and blackness.

1. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS

   As recent critical scholarship has shown, race is a social construction in which whiteness is a distinct, socially constructed identity.(3) Since race is a phenomenon always in formation, then whiteness--like other racial constructions--is subject to contest and change. Whiteness is historically located, malleable, contingent, and capable of being transformed. Arguments about the malleability and contingency of white privilege, and its dysfunctionality for white working people, seem counterintuitive in today's legal and social discourses. These discourses generally emphasize what whites gain--the existence and benefits of privilege--or what whites lose--the costs of change for whites--rather than looking at transformative interests for whites. Yet historical struggles characterized by antiracist, multiracial struggle in defense of shared class interests have historically won significant successes, even under the apparently impossible conditions of formal segregation, fomentation of race hatred, exploitation, and abuse.(4) One important goal in the transformative project is therefore to identify those points about whiteness that are most susceptible to working for change--especially those points that reveal potential for undermining the construction of privilege and subordination and for uniting whites, along with people of color, in opposition to privilege.

   Race is a social construction, not "a natural division of humankind."(5) As a concept or an ideology,(6) however, race derives much of its power from seeming to be a natural or biological phenomenon or, at the very least, a coherent social category. For whites, residential segregation is one of the forces giving race a "natural" appearance: "good" neighborhoods are equated with whiteness, and "black" neighborhoods are equated with joblessness. The construction of race in America today allows whiteness to remain a dominant background norm, associated with positive qualities, for white people, and it allows unemployment and underemployment to seem like natural features of black communities. As I tell my Property students, when you wake up in the morning and go to the kitchen for coffee, you do not feel as if you hold partial interests or particular sticks in a bundle of rights in the structure you inhabit, nor does it feel as if land-use regulation shaped your structure, street, and community. This is home, where you roll out of bed, smell the coffee, reach for clothing, and inhabit the "reality" of the house. The physicality of home and community--that apparently natural quality from which Property professors must detach students to teach legal concepts--tends to make our lived experience appear natural. The appearance that this is "the way things are" in turn tends to make prevailing patterns of race, ethnicity, power, and the distribution of privilege appear as features of the natural world.

   Race is a relational concept. It describes at least two social and cultural groups in relation to each other.(7) The concept of race acquires meaning only in the context of historical development and existing race relations.(8) Therefore, the construction of whiteness as "naturally" employed and employable, and blackness as "naturally" unemployed and unemployable, are both examples of the way in which concepts of whiteness and blackness imply whiteness as dominant and blackness as "other." Both become part of the way of thinking about race in America.

   Race is a powerful concept, even though it is neither natural nor fixed.(9) Social constructions acquire power because we inhabit their landscape and see through their lenses. Therefore, change cannot be achieved by a decision not to act racially, given the patterns of privilege and exclusion, dominance, and subordination that characterize individual and collective life in a racialized society. Large-scale patterns of urban development have shaped patterns of privilege for mostly white areas and subordination, including economic decline, for many mostly black areas and have made these patterns part of the space we inhabit.(10) In the context of residential segregation and urban/suburban development, therefore, the challenge of ending subordination involves changing widespread patterns of residence and economic development and changing the social meanings attached to these patterns.

   Recently, social and legal theorists have begun to "interrogate whiteness."(11) There are several parts to this project. The dominant norm, the transparency phenomenon,(12) must be made visible and cognizable to those within its sphere. Whiteness is historically and culturally specific. It has changed over time and continues to change. Whites need to find antiracist ways in which whiteness can be identified and changed. The point of inquiry is to identify how the concept "white" can be explored and understood, a project made difficult in part because explicit discussion of whiteness is usually associated only with white supremacists.(13) We especially need to identify those moments in time and points in social understanding at which shared social interests exist, rather than treat white privilege as a fixed and frozen artifact.

   Ruth Frankenberg divides whiteness into a set of "linked dimensions": a location of structural advantage and race privilege; a "standpoint" from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society; and a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.(14) Frankenberg explores the ways in which material existence and the way we understand and describe it are interconnected in the construction of whiteness.(15) The interaction of the material world and the ways we explain and understand it "generates experience" and, therefore, the "experience" of lived whiteness is something continuously constructed, reconstructed, and transformed for white people.(16) Frankenberg's description of the relationship between the material world and our understanding of our experience helps explain the ways in which urban segregation itself becomes a force in constructing social concepts of race. For whites, white neighborhoods become part of the "natural" world, helping to keep their whiteness unnoticed and undisturbed, and helping to equate whiteness with something that reflects positive values and feels like home.

   Whites have difficulty perceiving whiteness, both because of its cultural prevalence and because of its cultural dominance.(17) Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo describes "culture" as something perceived in someone else, something one does not perceive oneself as having.(18) "Culture" is a feature that marks a community in inverse proportion with power, so that the less full citizenship one possesses, the more "culture" one is likely to have. What we ourselves do and think does not appear to use to be "culture," but rather appears to be the definition of what is normal and neutral, like the air we breathe, transparent from our perspective.(19)

   Like culture, race is...