Deflective Whiteness: Co-Opting Black and Latinx Identity Politics

Abstract

WHITE DEFLEC TION • 13 race from the experience of disadvantaged groups to white people, whiteness studies risks eclipsing the study of racial power, focusing solely on white identity, and analyzing 'whiteness' in the absence of the experience of people of color. "62 Recognizing this critique, I focus on the ways that the identity politics of historically marginalized groups are co-opted, decontextualized, and used by those invested in White supremacy to further their own racial project in seemingly benign, everyday cross-media discourse. Without acknowledging the speaker's own investment in White supremacy, such rhetoric emphasizes colorblind notions of common sense, democratic unity, patriotism, and law and order in efforts to disparage or discredit individuals linked with non-White identity-based social movements. Labeling and defining this social pattern can begin to make the ubiquitous influence of White racial rhetoric more discernible-particularly to Whites. This book is a study of the racial project of Whiteness. Michael Omi and Howard Winant ( 2015) propose a theoretical model of "racial formation" to better understand the dominant historically situated way racial ideologies are created, embodied, and changed in what they term as "racial projects. " For example, Steve Martinot (2010) studies the racial project of Whiteness, emphasizing that race is a construction designed by the European groups that became "White" to justify their supremacy over historically marginalized groups like Indigenous peoples, Blacks, and Latinxs. Whites created the system of racialization-to ascribe racial categorizations-to justify the colonial project, indigenous slavery, and African slavery. Martinot historicizes that the idea of a White identity was the resulting sense of unity and homogeneity [that] . . . first emerged among the [US] colonists. That is, out of the reduction of Africans to other-thanhuman by the slave codes, the English transformed their own cultural identity from being European to being White. It was this sense of being White that was "biologized" in the eighteenth century by European naturalists to form the modern concept of "race. " 63