538 MICHAEL KEITH

Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Feminity and the Histories if Art, Chapter 36
London: Routledge.
Race and Class ( 199 3) 'Black America: the Street and the Campus', 3 5 ( 1).
Rieff, D. (1991) Los Anaeles: Capital if The Third World, London: Phoenix.
Rignall, J. (1989) 'Benjamin's Flaneur and the Problem of Realism', in A. Benjamin
(ed.) The Problems if Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, London: Routledge.
Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field if Vision, London: Verso.
Sennett, R. (1977) The Fall if Public Man, London: Faber and Faber. Richard Dyer
Sinclair, I. (1995) DoW!lTiver, New York: Vintage.
--(1994) Radon Dauahters: a Voyaoe Between Art and Terror, from the Mound if
Whitechapel to the Limestone Pavements if the Burren, London: Cape. ,
Stallybrass, P. and A. Whyte (1986) The Politics and Poetics if Transaression, Lond<m: THE MATTER OF WHITENESS
Methuen.
Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History if the Senses, London:
Routledge.
----{ !987) Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Walkowitz, J. (1992) City ifDreaclful Deliaht: Narratives ifSexualDanaer in Late-Victorian
London, London: Virago.
Wilson, E. (1991) Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control if Disorder and Wome.r~,
London: Virago. AC IAL 1 I MAGER Y IS CENTRAL to the organisation of the modem
Wolff, J. (1989) 'The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity'~
in A. Benjamin (ed.) The Problems if Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, London: world. At what cost regions and countries export their goods, whose voices
jWe . .Ustened to at international gatherings, who bombs and who is bombed, who
Routledge.
Wright, P. (1991) Ajourney Throuah Ruins: The Last Days if London, London: RadiusJ ~ what jobs, housing, access to health care and education, what cultural activ•
Young, LM. (1990) 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference', in L.J. ities are subsidised and sold, in what terms they are validated- these are all largely
Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. ~extricable from racial imagery. The myriad minute decisions that constitute the
· praGtices of the world are at every point informed by judgements about people's
9lpacities and worth, judgements based on what they look like, where they come
{tom, how they speak, even what they eat, that is, racial judgements. Race is not
the only factor governing these things and people of goodwill everywhere struggle
tp overcome the prejudices and barriers of race, but it is never not a factor, never
in9t in play. And since race in itself- insofar as it is anything in itself- refers to
some intrinmcally insignificant geo~hical/physical differences between people,
it is the imagery of race that is in play
.There has been an enormous · ount of analysis of racial imagery in the past
decades, ranging from studies of images of, say, blacks or American Indians in the
media to the construction of the fetish of the racial Other in the texts of colo·
nialism and post-colonialism. Yet until recently a notable absence from such work
~s been the study of images of white people. Indeed, to say that one is interested
in race has come to mean that one is interested in any racial imagery other than
that of white people. Yet race is not only attributable to people who are not white,
is imagery Q[ non,white people the only racial imagery.
{.••} 'There is no more powerful position than that of being 'juse human.
claim to power· is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced
people can't do .that - they can only speak for their race. 1 But non-r,aced
people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. The point of
seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power.
540 RICHARD DYER T H E M AT T E R 0 F W H IT EN E S S 541

with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging the (white) point in space from whi<:h we tend to identify difference' (Carby 1992:
them/us by ·undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and 193).
on the world. The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say
The sense of whites as non-raced is most evident in the absence of reference dominant) discourse is of a pie<:e with its ubiquity. When I said above that this
to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of white people in the West. We book wasn't merely seeking to fill a gap in the analysis of racial imagery, 1 repro·
(whites) will speak of, say, the blackness or Chineseness of friends, neighbours, duced the idea that there is no dis.cussion of white people. In fact for most of the
colleagues, customers or clients, and it may be in the most genuinely friendly and time white people speak about nothing but white people, it's just that we wuch it
accepting manner, but we don't mention the whiteness of the white people we in terms of 'people' in general. Research- into books, museums, the press, adver:·
know. An old-style white comedian will often start a joke: 'There's this bloke tising, films,· television, software- repeatedly shows that in Western representatiQn
walking down the street and he meets this black geezer', never thinking to race whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central
the bloke as well as the geezer. Synopses in listings of films on TV, where wordage <UK~ elaborated roles, and above all are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the stan-
is tight, none the less squander words with things like: 'Comedy in which a cop dar<V Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and
and his black sidekick investigate a robbery', 'Skinhead Johnny and his Asian lover their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but
Omar set up a launderette', 'Feature film from a promising Native American as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled, At the level of
director' and so on. Since all white people in the West do this all the time, jt racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain ra<:e, they're just
would be individious to quote actual examples, and so I shall confine myself to the human race.
one from my own writing. In an article on lesbian and gay stereotypes (Dyer We are often told that we are living now in a world of multiple identities,
1993b), I discuss the fact that there can be variations on a type such as the queen (){' hybridity, ofdecentredness and fragmentation. The old illusory unified identi•
or dyke. In the illustrations which accompany this point, I compare a 'fashion ties of class, gender, race, sexuality are breaking up; someone may be black and
queen' from the film Irene with a 'black queen' from Car Wash - the former, wbit!7: gay and middle class and female; we may be bi-, poly- or non-sexual, of mixed
image is not raced, whereas all the variation of the latter is reduced to his rl!,~; race, indeterminate gender.and heaven knows what dass. Yet we have not yet
Moreover, this is the only non-white image referred to in the article, which do~s ../. reached a situation in which white people and white cultural agendas are no longer
not however point out that all the other images discussed are white. In this, as in in;the ascendant. The media, politics, education are still in the hands of white
the other white examples in this paragraph, the fashion queen is, racially speaking~ people, still speak for whites while claiming- and sometimes sincerely aiming-
tak~ being just human. .,~;;, to speak for humanity. Against the flowering of a myriad postmodern voices, we
@.is assumption that white people are just people, which is not far off sayin~ must: also see the countervailing tendency towards a homogenisation of world
that whites ~people whereas other colours are something else, is endemic to ...... ' culture, in the continued dominan<:e of US news dissemination, popular TV
white cultur_0ome of the sharpest criticism of it has been aimed at those whc:t pn>grammes and Hollywood movies. Postmodern multiculturalism may have
would think themselves the least racist or white supremacist. bell hooks, for ge._nuinely opened up a space for the voices of the other, challenging the authority
instance, has noted how amazed and angry white liberals become when attention ofthe white West (cf. Owens 1983), but it may also simultaneously function as
is drawn to their whiteness, when they are seen by non-white people as white. a• side.show for white people who look on with delight at all the differences that
surround them.• We may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking (white) hegemony, and it may be where we want to get to- but we aren't there
that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal suhjec-' Ytr,tl' and we won't get there until we see whiteness, see its power, its particu·
tivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. ! larity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule. This is why studying
They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of 'sameness', even whiteness matters.
as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing e.lt is studying whiteness qua whiteness. Attention is sometimes paid to 'white
who they are and how they think. et;bhlcity' (e.g. Alba 1990}, but this always means an identity based on cultural
(hooks 1992: 167) such as British, Italian or Polish, or Catholic or jewish, or Polish-American1
Catholic--American and so on. These however are variations on
Similarly, Hazel Carby discusses the use of black texts in white classrooms, under ethnicity (though, as I suggest below, some are more securely white than
the sign of multiculturalism, in a way that winds up focusing 'on the <:omplexity ··-•'-"·--' and the examination of them tends to lead away from a consideration of
of response in the (white) reader/student's construction of self in r~tion:t() itself. John lbson (1981), in a discussion of research on white US
(black) perceived "other"'. We should, she argues, recognise that 'everyone in ~thnicity, wncludes that being; say, Polish, Catholic OF Irish may not be as impor"
social order has been constructed in our political imagination as a racialised subiec~ to white Americans as some might wish. But being white is. {... J White
and thus that we should consider whiteness as well as blackness, in order ~to need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other
visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence: whiteness needs to be made strange.
542 RICHARD DYER T H E M A TT E R 0 F W H IT E N E S S 543

There is a political need to do this, but there are also problematic A political problem of a different order has to do with what term to use to
political feelings attendant on it, which need to be briefly signalled in order to be refer to (images of) people who are not white. In most contexts, one would not
guarded against. The first of these is the green light problem. Writing about want to make such sweeping reference to so generalised a category, but in the
whiteness gives white people the go-ahead to write and talk about what in any present context of trying to see the specificity of whiteness it is sometimes neces-
case we have always talked about: ourselves. In, at any rate, intellectual and sary. I have opted for the term non·white. This is problematic because of its
educational life in the West in recent years there have been challenges to the domi- negativity, as if people who are not white only have identity by virtue of what
nance of white concerns and a concomitant move towards inclusion of non-white they are not; it is not a term that I would want to see used in other contexts.
cultures and issues. Putting whiteness on the agenda now might permit a sigh of However, the two common alternatives pose greater problems for my purposes;
relief that we white people don't after all any longer have to take on all this 'Blade', the term preferred by many theorists and activists, has two drawbacks.
non-white stuff. 'f!irst, it excludes a huge range of people who are neither white nor black, Asians,
Related to this is the problem of 'me-too-ism', a feeling that; amid all this l;ative Americans (North and South), Chicanos, Jews and so on. Second, it rein·
(all this?) attention being given to non-white subjects, white people are being left f<n:ces the dichotomy of black : white that underpins racial thought but which
out. One version of this is simply the desire to have attention paid to one, which \t should be our aim to dislodge. Black is a privileged term in the construction
for whites is really only the wish to have all the attention once again. Another is (If white racial imagery and I shall examine it as such, but where I need to see
the sense that being white is no great advantage, what with being so uptight, out whiteness in relation to all peoples who are not white, 'black' will not do. The
of touch with our bodies, burdened with responsibilities we didn't ask for. Poor Qt:her opqon would be 'people of colour', the preferred US term (though with
us. A third variant is the notion of white men, specifically, as a new victim group, little currency in Britain). While I have always appreciated this term's generosity,
oppressed by the gigantic strides taken by affirmative action policies, .can't get jobst ~luding in it all those people that 'black' excludes, it none the less reiterates the
can't keep women, a view identified and thus hardened up by a Newsweek cover notion: that some people have colour and others, whites, do not. We need to
story on 5 September 1993 on white male paranoia. recognise white as a colour too, and just one among many, and we cannot do that
The green light and me-too-ism echo the reaction of some men to feminism~ if;we keep using a term that reserves colour for anyone other than white people.
There is a lesson here. My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about white;,. Reluctantly, I am forced back on 'non-white'.
ness could lead to the development of something called 'White Studies', that.. Politics also inform more evidently methodological questions. When I first
studying whiteness might become part of what Mike Phillips suspects is 'a ne'Y started thinking about studying the representation of whiteness, I soon realised
assertiveness ... amounting to a statement of "white ethnicity", the acceptable that what one could not do was the kind of taxonomy of typifications that had
face of white nationalism' (1993: 30) 5 or what Philip Norman (1992) identifies as been done for non-white peoples. One cannot come up with a limited range of
a 1990s fascist chic observable in Calvin Klein and Haagen-Dazs ads as well as the ~ndlessly repeated images, because the privilege of being white in white culture
rise of neo-fascist parties in Europe and North America. I dread to think that i$,not to be subjected to stereotyping in relation to one's whiteness. White people
paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people saying they need to get i!l'e ,stereotyped in terms of gender, nation, class, sexuality, ability and so on, but
in touch with their whiteness, that we might end up with the white equivalent of the overt point of such typification is gender, nation, etc. Whiteness generally
'Iron John' and co, the 'men's movement' embrace of hairiness replaced with colonises the stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of
strangled vowels and rigid salutes. The point of looking at whiteness is to dislodge To be normal, even to be normally deviant (queer, crippled), 8 is to be white.
it from its centrality and authority, not to reinstate it (and much less, to make: lit 'Wl¥te people in their whiteness, however, are imaged as individual and/or
show of reinstating it, when, like male power, it doesn't actually need reinstating). ~ndlesslydiverse, complex and changing. There are also gradations of whiten~s:
A third problem about talking about whiteness is guilt. The kind of white S9me'~ople are whiter than others. Latins, the Irish and Jews, for instance, are
people who are going to talk about being white, apart from conscious racists who kss securely white than Anglos, Teutons and Nordics; indeed, if Jews are
have always done so, are liable to be those sensitised to racism and the history of at all, it is only Ashkenazi Jews, since the Holocaust, in a few places.
what white people have done to non-white peoples. Accepting ourselves as white The individuated, multifarious and graded character of white representation
and knowing that history, we are likely to feel overwhelmed with guilt at what not mean that white culture has succeeded in imagining in white people the
we have done and are still doing. 6 Guilt tends to be a blocking emotion. Or1e l)ienitude of human potential and is only at fault for denying this representational
wants to acknowledge so much how awful white people have been that one may to non-white people. There is a specificity to white representation, but it
never get around to examining what exactly they have been, and in particular, tir."'~ ......... reside in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions,
how exactly their image has been constructed, its complexities and contradictiQns. tropes and habits of perception. The same is true of all representation
This problem -common to all 'images of' analyses- is a special temptat;ion '¥1'ttle,taxonomic study of stereotypes was only ever an initial step in the study of
white people. We may lacerate ourselves with admission of our guilt, but representation. However, stereotyping - complex and contradictory
bears witness to the fineness of a moral spirit that can feel such guilt - the itis (cf. Perkins 1979, Bhabha 1983, Dyer 1993a)- does characterise the
of our guilt is our calvary. 7 'representation of subordinated social groups and is one of the means by which
 544 RICHARD DYER THE MATTER OF WHITENESS 545

they are categorised and kept in their place, whereas white people in white culture the specificity of white and I do look at texts with implicit (the peplum) or explicit
are given the illusion of their own infinite variety. (The jewel in the Crown) colonial structures, since colonialism is one of the elements
[ ... } Equally, given the variety of whiteness, I have sometimes thought that that subtends the construction of white identity. But l have eschewed a focus on
what I am really writing about is the whiteness of the English, Anglo-Saxons or North non-white characters as projections of white imaginings, as the Other to the white
Europeans (and their descendants), that this whiteness would be unrecognisable to person who is really the latter's unknown or forbidden self. This function, as the
Southern or Eastern Europeans (and their descendants). For much of the past two work of ¥orrison and others makes abundantly clear, is indeed characteristic of
centuries, North European whiteness has been hegemonic within a whiteness that white culture, but it is not the whole story and may reinforce the notion that
has none the less been assumed to include Southern and Eastern European peoples whiteness is only racial when it is 'marked' by the presence of the truly raced,
(albeit sometimes grudgingly within Europe 9 and less assuredly without it, in, for that is, non-white subject.
instance, the Latin diaspora of the Americas). lt is this overarching hegemonic
whiteness which concerns me, one to which Northern Europeans most easily Jay J... } White identity is founded 01;1 compelling paradoxes: a vividly corporeal
claim but which is not to be conflated with distinctive North European identities. cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once
As others have found, it often seems that the only way to see the structures, a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commit-
tropes and perceptual habits of whiteness, to see past the illusion of infinite variety, ment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting
to recognise white qua white, is when non-white (and above all black) people are against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit
also represented. My initial stab at the topic of whiteness (Dyer 1988) approached while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be every-
it through three films which were centrally about white-black interactions, and thing and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both
my account [... } of how I may have got thinking about the topic at all also empha~ alive and dead. Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly dr:awing us back to them, either
sises the role of non-white people in my life. Similarly, Toni Morrison in her study in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a \\ish tp fathom them. Paradoxes
of whiteness in American literature, PlafinB in the Darlr. (1992), focuses on the provide the i.Qstabilities that generate stories, millions of engrossing attempts to
centrality, indeed inescapability, of black representation to the construction of find resolution. The dynanrism of white instability, especially in its claims to univer-
white identity, a perception shared by the very influential work of Edward Sald sality, is also what entices those outside to seek to cross its borders and those
(1978) on the West's construction of an 'Orient' by means of which to make inside to aspire ever upwards within it. Thus it is that the paradoxes and insta~
sense of itself. This is more than saying that one can only really see the specificity bilities of whiteness also constitute its flexibility and productivity, in short, its
of one's culture by realising that it could be otherwise, in itself an unobjection- representational power.
able human process. What the work of Morrison, Said et al. suggests is that white
discourse implacably reduces the non-white subject to being a .function of the white
subject, not allowing her /him space or autonomy, permitting neither the recog- Notes
nition of similarities nor the acceptance of differences except as a means for knowing
the white self. This cultural process justifies the emphasis, in work on the reprtF l use the terms 'race' and 'racial' in this opening section in the most common
sentation of white people, on the role of images of non-white people in it. though problematic sense, referring to supposedly visibly differentiable, suppos-
Yet this emphasis has also worried me, writing from a white position. lf I edly discrete social groupings.
2 In their discussion of the extraordinarily successful TV sitcom about a middle-
continue to see whiteness only in texts in which there are also non-white people~
class African-American family, The Cosby Show, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis note
am I not reproducing the relegation of non-white people to the function of enabling
the way that viewers repeatedly recognise the characters' blackness but also feel
me to understand myself? Do I not do analytically what the texts themselves do?
that 'you just think of them as people', in other words that they don't only
Moreover, while this is certainly the usual function of black images in white texts,HI
speak for their race. Jhally and Lewis argue that this is achieved by the· way the
to focus exclusively on those texts that are 'about' racial difference and interaC"t
family conforms to 'the everyday, generic world of white television' (1992:
tion risks giving the impression that whiteness is only white, or only matters, when ·100), an essentially middle-class world. The family is 'ordinary' despite be4lg
it is explicitly set against non-white, whereas whiteness reproduces itself as white., black; because it is upwardly mobile, it can be accepted as 'ordinary', in a way
ness in all texts all of the time. As a product of enterprise and imperialism; that marginalises most actual African-Americans. lf the realities of African·
whiteness is of course always already predicated on racial difference, interaction American experience were included, then the characters would not be perceived
and domination, but that is true of all texts, not just those that take such. matten> as 'just people'.
as their explicit subject matter. Similarly, (... } there is implicit racial resonance 3 See, for instance, Bogle 1973, Hartmann and Husband 1974, Troyna 1981,
to the idea, endemic to the representation of white heterosexuality, of sexual desire MacDonald 1983, Wilson and Gutierez 1985, van Dijk 1987, Jhally and Lewi~
as itself dark[ ... ). The point is to see the specificity of whiteness, even when the 1992 (58ff.), Ross 1995. The research findings are generally cast the other wa)
text itself is not trying to show it to you, doesn't even know that it is there to round, in terms of non-white under-representation, textual marginalisation and
be shown. 11 I do make reference to non-white in my analyses in order to clarify positioning as deviant or a problem. Recent research in the US does suggest tha1
546 RICHARD DYER T H E M A TT E R 0 F W H IT E N E S S 54 7

Mrican-Americans (but not other racially marginalised groups) have become References
more represented in the media, e'len in excess of their proportion of the popu-
lation. However, this number still falls off if one focuses on central characters. Alba, Richard D. ( 1990) Ethnic Identity: The Transformation if White America, New Haven:
4 The Cryinn Game (GB 1992) seems to me to be an example of this. It explores, Yale University Press.
with fascination and generosity, the hybrid and fluid nature of identity: gender, Bailey, Cameron (1988) 'Nigger/Lover: the Thin Sheen of Race in Somethinn Wild',
race, national belonging, sexuality. Yet all of this revolves around a bemused Screen 29(4): 28--40.
but ultimately unchallenged straight white man - it reinscribes the position of Bhabha, Homi (1983) 'The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse',
those at the intersection of heterosexuality, maleness and whiteness as that of Screen 24(6): 18-36.
the one group which does not need to be hybrid and fluid. Bogle, Donald (1973) Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History
5 He makes this point in the context of both a TV documentary about D. W. 1 Blacks in American Films, New York: Viking Press.
Griffith and an article by me on Lillian Gish; though I think it is inaccurate to Bonnett, Alistair (1996) "'White Studies~: The Problems and Projects of a New
call the latter a 'celebration' (as opposed to a recognition) of the whiteness of Research Agenda', Theory, Culture and Society 13(2): 145-55.
her stardom, the general tenor of his remarks is salutary. Carby, Hazel V. (1992) 'The Multicultural Wars' in Dent, Gina (ed.) Black Popular
6 Pascal Bruckner discusses liberal guilt and 'Third Worldism' in his Le sannlot de Culture, Seattle: Bay Press, 187-99.
I'homme blanc (The White Man's Tears) (1983). Cumberbatch, Guy and Negrine, Ralph (1992) /manes ?/Disability on Television, London:
7 Alastair Bonnett makes a related point about the discourse of blame in recent Routledge.
studies of whiteness by white people. Dyer, Richard (1988) 'White', Screen 29(4): 44-65. (Reprinted in Dyer 1993a:
141-63.)
[A]lthough whiteness is subjected to a barrage of unsentimental Dyer, Richard ( 1993a) The Matter if /manes: Essays on Representations, London: Routledge.
critique, it emerges from this process as an omnipresent and all- Dyer, Richard (1993b) 'Seen To Be Believed: Problems in the Representation of Gay
powerful historical force. Whiteness is seen to be responsible for the People as Typical' in Dyer 1993a: 19-51.
failure of socialism to develop in America, for racism, for the impov- Hart, Lynda (1994) Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark ifAanression, London:
erishment of humanity. With this 'blame' comes a new kind of Routledge.
centring: Whiteness, and White people, are turned into the key Hartmann, Paul and Husband, Charles (1974) Racism and the Mass Media, London:
agents of historical change, the shapers of contemporary America. Davis-Poynter.
(Bonnett 1996: 153) hooks, bell (1992) 'Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?' and 'Representations
of Whiteness in the Black imagination', in Black Looks: Race and Representation,
8 On the whiteness of queers see Hart 1994, and of disabled people see Boston: South End Press, 157-64, 165-78.
Cumberbatch and Negrine 1992: 74. Paul Darke argues (in a personal commu- Ibson, John (1981) 'Virgin Land or Virgin Mary? Studying the Ethnicity of White
nication) that the overwhelming prevalence of whites in the representation of Americans', American Qyarterly 33(3): 284-308.
disability is due not only to the assumption of white as a human norm but to jhally, Sut and Lewis, Justin (1992) Enlinhtened Racism: 'The Cosby Show', Audiences and
two other factors specific to disability - that it is to be imagined as 'the worst the Myth if the American Dream, Boulder: Westview Press.
quality of life on earth', which must be most tragic for the most privileged, and ,MacDonald, J. F. (1983) Blacks and White TV: .'!fro-Americans in Television since 1948,
that in the overriding representation of whites as individuals, the fact of the Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
social construction of disability is hidden. Morrison, Toni (1992) Playinn in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary lmanination,
9 A schoolboy phrase I remember being taught was that 'wogs begin at Calais'; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
even the French were not white enough for little Englanders. ('Wog' is British Norman, Philip (1992) 'The Shock of the Neo', Weekend Guardian 30-31 May:
slang for 'nigger'.) 4-6.
10 An insight explored in a film context in Cameron Bailey's analysis of Somethinn Owens, Craig (1983) 'The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism' in
Wild (USA 1986), where non-white culture is used as a marker of authenticity Foster, Hal (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodem Culture, Port Townsend
and wildness that will give vitality and essence to the garish emptiness of middle- WA: Bay Press, 57-82.
American mass culture, to the point that the 'wild' white woman (plaJed bJ Perkins, T. E. (1979) 'Rethinking Stereotypes' in Barrett, Michele, Corrigan, Philip,
Melanie Griffiths) who distracts the hero Qeff Daniels) from the straight and Kuhn, Annette and Wolff, Janet (eds) Jdeoloa.r and Cultural Production, London:
narrow is entirely coded in terms of black culture (Bailey 1988). Croom Helm, 135-59.
II Lynda Hart's discussion (1994: 104-23) of Attack ?Jthe 50-Ft Woman and Single Phillips, Mike (1993) 'White Heroes in the Hall of Fame', Black Film Bulletin 1(4):
White Female is an example of an analysis in these terms that I read too late to 30.
integrate into the discussion. Ross, Karen (1995) Black and White Media, Oxford: Polity.
Said, Edward ( 1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Troyna, Barry (1981) 'Images of Race and Racist Images in the British News Media'
548 RICHARD DYER

in Halloran, J.
D. (ed.) Mass Media and Mass Communicatioru, Leicester: Leicester Chapter 37
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van Dijk, T.A. (1987) Communicatmg Racism, London: Sage.
Wilson, C. J. and Gutierrez, F. (1985) MinMities and Media, Beverley Hills: Sage.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT

Transformation and legitimation in
antidiscrimination law

. I N 1 9 8 4, PRES I DENT R 0 N A L D REAGAN signed a bill that created

the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission. 1 The commission
was charged with the responsibility of issuing guidelines for states and localities to
follow in preparing their observances of King's birthday. The commission's task
would not be easy. Although King's birthday had come to symbolize the massive
social movement that grew out of African-Americans' efforts to end the longhistory
of racial oppression in America, 2 the first official observance of the holiday would
take place in the face of at least two disturbing obstacles: first, a constant, if not
increasing, socioeconomic disparity between the races, l and second, a· hostile
administration devoted to changing the path of civil rights reforms which. many
believe responsible for most of the movement's progress. 4
The commission, though, was presented with a more essential difficulty: .a
focus on the continuing disparities between blacks and whites might call not for
celebration but for strident criticism of America's failure to make good QP. its
promise of racial equality. Yet such criticism would overlook the progress that has
been made, progress that the holiday itself represents. The commission apparepdy
resolved this dilemma by calling for a celebration of progress toward racial equality
while urging continued commitment to this ideal. This effort to reconcile thecele·
bration of an. ideal with conditions that bespeak its continuing denial was given
the ironic, but altogether appropriate title "Living the Dream." 5 The "'Living the
Dream" directive aptly illustrates Derrick Bell's observation that "(m}ost Americans,
black and white, view the civil rights crusade as a long, slow, but always upward
pull that must, given the basic precepts of the country and the commitment of its
people to equality and Uberty, eventually end in the full enjoyment by blacks of
all rights and privileges of citizenship enjoyed by whites. " 6