by Luca Fiora Dalton
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
- This quote is often credited to the Aboriginal activist and visual artist Lilla Watson. It is more accurately attributed to a collective process by Aboriginal activist groups in 1970s Queensland.
Whiteness is discussing our blessings at Thanksgiving without mentioning that our comfort is wholly and unequivocally stolen. Whiteness is my mother’s flavorless meatloaf. Whiteness is the comfort of a warm room, not making eye contact, and TV static lulling you to sleep.
When, recently, I placed myself in an inpatient mental health hospital, the pain there permeated the air like cold. The symptoms of white emptiness were everywhere. For example, in the white-dominated patient pool, the effect that white culture had on all of us was acute: We were united by a lack of identity, accountability, loving relationships, or knowledge of how to endure pain. Every day, a new person would come—a social, emotional, and cultural refugee. And every day our collective disorientation drove further toward a cultural reckoning.
The wound of cultural emptiness was reflected by the symptomatic mental health suffering in that institution. There, we needed to make a new choice, a choice which would build a fulfilling culture, in opposition to the lack of culture that is white emptiness. We needed to be pulled together, ask ourselves challenging questions, find respect for others, reach back to find old culture and simultaneously create critical culture together. In that hospital, we needed the bravery of a cultural revolution. But, unfortunately, it didn’t happen.
All we had in that hospital was a rattling sigh,
the sound of white culture
banging up against its own limits
My parents were never able to give me songs, stories, foods, or morals from their cultural heritage. We fully participated in white American culture where we celebrated entertainment, Christmas, patriarchy, consumerism, and sports. Sometimes we were happy, but the lack of accountability, tradition, or cultural substance began to gnaw at me and slowly open up a hole. A painful wound of isolation and surface interactions festered, grew, and began to stink. My family of immigrants erased its immigrant-ness within a few generations. It’s a relatively quick process, this emptiness. It makes like the echo of hollowness inside.
I have always had an inescapably intimate experience with the emptiness and violence that is white culture. I do not know the fulfilling cultures my European ancestors once had. I define culture as how a group of people meet their own needs. I define fulfilling culture as a type of culture where individual and community needs are met without violating others’ rights. Fulfilling culture accomplishes this task by giving common and individual identity, raising children with love, valuing accountability, and investing in the powers of story, dress, food, ritual, and art. A lack of fulfilling culture is cultural emptiness, and in this setting, white emptiness. White emptiness is a pervasive experience (which strengthens as one gets further from their family’s date of immigration) and values noise over dialogue, entertainment over lessons, novelty over ritual, and self-righteousness over accountability. This experience is a direct descendant of my immigrant ancestors’ choice to let go of their cultural heritage.
I write as a white person to encourage white people to critically struggle with their emptiness and to take steps to move against white supremacy. I seek to write against racism without taking space from people of color or believing that I could ever teach people of color anything about racism. I am humble to the exceeding complexity of this topic. One small example of this complexity is that recent white U.S. American immigrants still experience parts of their cultural heritage. Another example is that people who are white-passing experience white privilege but not necessarily white culture. Across this diversity, whiteness implicates all white identified people—in different ways–in the emptiness of American white culture. I am not implying that all mental health suffering can be explained by my theory of race. That would be hubristic and far too simple for a truly complex world. I do, however, believe there is a golden opportunity in recognizing the connection between mental health suffering and the emptiness of white culture.
In Mathew Jacobson’s work Whiteness of a Different Color they summarize the origins of U.S. whiteness in the 18th and 19th centuries in two separate theories: 1.) social control and 2.) citizenship. The social control theory of whiteness describes how capitalists exploit the working class through creating a divided hierarchy. This divide between white people and all other racial groups generally functions to weaken collective labor rights movements. However, there were many successful labor rights movements which were able to gain massive victories throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—either by ignoring this division or by organizing without the white laborer. In addition, the racial hierarchy paints over the exploitation white working-class people experience by giving them someone to feel better-off than (what W.E.B. DuBious calls the “psychological wage”). According to Jacobson on page 17, the racialization of the U.S. American labor class subdued explosive solidarity and allowed for continued racist exploitation by the ruling class.
The citizenship theory of whiteness pinpoints the characteristics and actions which only Anglo-American white men were able to fulfill. The radicalism of U.S. American democracy (truly republicanism) necessitated a man of certain characteristics—intelligence, piety, and purity—deemed exclusive qualities of the ruling class of Anglo-American males. People of color, people with disabilities, women, and immigrants were all dismissed as inherently more likely to be impulsive or unintelligent, and thus lacking in these qualities. In addition, the United States of America was built off the elimination of Indigenous people’s right to their land and Black people’s right to the profit of their labor. To be a citizen meant one must be able to quell uprisings of enslaved and colonized people, and thus believe in your own superiority. These two forces, of stereotype and exclusion, melded Anglo-American whiteness with citizenship— Jacobson discusses these topics on page 22-31.
The theories of capital and citizenship are but two small and important steps towards understanding how white people’s ancestors made the choice to take on the label of whiteness and devalue their heritage-based identities. To be sure, knowing that whiteness harms white people by taking away fulfilling culture and reducing the political power and humanity of the lower classes should never be used to erase or minimize the tangible privilege of whiteness and the moral necessity for accountable action from white people.
This invention of whiteness mostly occurred before my ancestors arrived, though they participated in it nonetheless. The specific catalysts for my ancestors’ immigration were the Irish Famine (1740s), German overpopulation and failed revolution (1840s), and Danish and Swedish economic sloughs (1920s). Once my ancestors arrived in America they battled within themselves and with society as a whole in a losing attempt to hold onto their fulfilling cultural heritage. This was partly motivated by the new American discrimination they faced once immigrating—a unique mixture of class, xenophobia, and racial oppression. Celts, for example, were a race of their own for much of the 18th century. In short, my ancestors chose to adopt a white identity that negated their cultural heritage in exchange for power.
This loss of cultural heritage weakened white people’s moral immune system so that we could host the disease of white supremacy. To be able to participate in whiteness, my ancestors had to first jettison the moral teachings of their cultures. Fulfilling culture reminds the individual that if anyone is oppressed around you, you are likely to be oppressed now or in the near future. That cultural knowledge needed to be erased in order for these U.S. American immigrants to accept whiteness and white supremacy.
Contemporary white U.S. American culture is broken and wounded in two ways. First, it instills a distinct sense of emptiness in the white oppressor. This sense of white cultural emptiness is a direct descendant of historical white immigrants choosing white culture and white supremacy instead of holding onto their cultural heritage. Second, it enacts and invisiblizes the violence of white supremacy. I will discuss this second theme in the next publication of “White Emptiness.”
This is the first one-third of a literature submission titled “White Emptiness.” Look out for the continuation of this series in the next edition of the Cooper Point Journal where Luca will discuss the root of white emptiness within white supremacy.
Luca Fiora Dalton is a current Evergreen undergraduate student who has studied political ecology, mass-incarceration, education, and writing during her time at Evergreen. Visit Luca’s short story and political theory blog at www.lucafioradalton.com. Feel free to reach Luca at dalluc28@evergreen.edu to submit your questions and comments.
