About Schmidt’s Whiteness

Abstract

Drawing on recent work in affect studies and on analyses of white masculinity in European American literature and other modes of cultural production, this essay explicates the depiction in Louis Begley’s novel About Schmidt (1996) of a contemporary white male psyche in crisis. Begley’s protagonist, 60-year old widower and recently retired lawyer Albert Schmidt, embodies and enacts the emotional atrophy and consequent “ugly feelings,” in Sianne Ngai’s terms, of a late-twentieth century, self-declared and self-sabotaging White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In this satiric, traditionally literary novel, the central character demonstrates that in part because, in Thandeka’s psychoanalytic terms, he has “learned to be white” via identity-forming imaginings of racialized others, he has yet to achieve a mature degree of compassionate humanity

Whiteness hurts society: How whiteness shapes mental, physical, and social health outcomes

“…Whiteness has evolved over time as an unfixed, unstable, complex, and rather invisible construct concerning its boundaries—who is/was considered White (or not), and how these distinctions map onto larger systems of power, political significance, and social benefit (Lewis, 2004). From this perspective, it is unsurprising that the study of whiteness emerged in tandem and as a complement to CRT, and that it draws inspiration from Karl Marx, Cedric Robinson, and other paradigms that position race as “a consciously constructed political, epistemological, legal, cultural and economic system” used to define white supremacy (Engles, 2006, p. 10). Other scholars have expanded the idea of race as a creation through social constructionist theory, highlighting how concepts of race emerged during the Enlightenment and continue to shape institutions, political conflict, and ideology (Mills, 1997; Omi & Winant, 2014).…”