I was very confused with this whole essay of Frankenberg’s Unmarked Whiteness. I really don’t understand what is being said about whiteness throughout this piece.
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It seems to focus mainly around the invisibility of whiteness; whether this notion can be true in the sense or not. It seemed to me that her answer right off the bat to this question was no. The rest of the essay seems to be the foundation to back why the invisibility of whiteness could never be. Talking about how it has only been until recently that we have gotten of the many extreme “whiteness” policies out of commission (non-interracial marriage, white’s only signs, etc). However, even after all the years with this perceived whiteness gone from the picture, white people still have this ideology cemented in their brain that because they’re white, that somehow they are inevitably more powerful than others not like them. I believe that’s where her discussion on the roots of “progressive and/or critical engagements with whiteness” explains how this arose’ along with the list of 6 false presumptions she list about whiteness. All of which I must say I never really thought about such as fact, until I read it. It was very surreal to think about. So, I apologize to those who read this if I seemed to be off the mark on this essay. It was tough.
2 comments:
I think that the main point that Ruth Frankenberg has made in her essay is that whiteness is invisible in today’s society. She talked to one woman who said that she was raised to believe that everyone who was like her was American and anyone different was not. This shows that white people raised in America are taught to believe that the people are only important if they are white, all others are inferior. She says that it is important to think of when the challenges to white be superior in America came about. For example interracial marriage wasn’t challenged in the courts until 1967. It was only a few years before that separate but equal became illegal and signs saying “whites only” along with that became illegal as well. This shows that people believe that whiteness has become invisible in very recent years. Whiteness has only recently begun to not matter in the last 40 years.
The line that I agree most with is when she says “one irony of writing about whiteness’s invisibility is that the late 1990s have witnessed intense debate over whiteness in academia, in the media, in classrooms, and in private worlds” (418). This statement just goes to show that whiteness is not as invisible in today’s world as many might believe it to be. Having more attention paid to whiteness in these places can relate to the movements led by the communities of color. I think that what she means by this is that whiteness is only becoming more in the spotlight because of what the color communities are doing in order to achieve the same privileges that whites have always had.
Frankenberg ends her essay with six statements that she says are false presumptions about whiteness and race relations. In these statements she talks about how white people used to be the oppressors of the colored community but are no longer because of the advances by the civil rights movement. The advance that the civil rights movement has made has created the possibility of there being racial equality. She also states that the government does not understand that whites have now become the oppressed so they continue to do things that are considered to be anti-white. White people should get the benefits of reverse racism to help their situations. People of color are still angry because they are stuck in the past. Whites are also angry because they are now the victims. I agree with the fact that these false statements show a world that would be like a nightmare.
It is very confusing what Frankenberg is trying to say at the beginning of this article. I do agree with the point she makes on pg 417 “whiteness remains quite visible to men and women of color even when ‘cultural micro-climates’ make it possible for the concept to disappear into false universality from the purview of some white people.” It is like the professor said in class on Tue., most white people do not go about their day thinking about what color they are, because their color does not affect them one way or another. I do not believe it is the same for a person of color. I get kind of a little of what Frankenberg is getting at when she talks about her own experiences of being amazed at how people ‘especially white’ can go from awareness of whiteness to non awareness, from race consciousness to unconsciousness, and from anti racism. She has gone from her own unconsciousness of her own whiteness to an awakening of it and says that we must become as educated about the history of colonialism “worldwide” as well as the history of racism here in the U.S. I can see what she is saying about things being different at the beginning of the 21st century on pg. 418 with whiteness being reasserted by white people with racism firing up towards legal and illegal immigrants and efforts to abolish bilingual education. These are a couple of examples the writer gives. I think what she is saying on 419 is if there is a goal we should be attaining, then it should be to find a way out of our historical legacy of whiteness and racism. To try to get rid of the old image of one race ruling over another and move toward a broader action of anti racism and a more equitable multiracial common ground. The writer feels that there are many good reasons to engage critically in the study of whiteness, if only to get rid of the false presumptions about whiteness and race relations.
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