In her 2015 article, “What is Whiteness?”, Nell Irvin Painter examines the history of white ethnic and racial identity, and highlights the foundational issues of our understanding of white identity, citing cultural symptoms like the attack on a black church in Charleston, S.C and Rachel Dolezal. For Painter, “An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.” She names Dylann Roof as being part of the history of “racist hatred”, tying his attack to events stemming from the Civil War, continued and evidenced through the Birth of a Nation film and the resurgence of hatred in the form of the Neo-Nazis.

Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane, Washington N.A.A.C.P chapter, fits into the “bland nothingness” side of the binary. One could speculate she masqueraded as a black women for years due to a genuine identity crisis and a deeply held belief that she is black. Painter sees it as a mistaken belief that you can’t stand against racism and be part of the group historically responsible for it (white people, in case you’re unsure), therefore, Dolezal opted out of whiteness. It seems the unifying principle between these two racially-charged news events is people’s reactions to and engagements with their white label, and how they behave within the proposed binary system of “blandness” or “racial hatred”.

In America, our discourse focuses on blackness for understanding race, and we understand through blackness that race is a social construct, but Painter argues that we should start examining whiteness as a construct, highlighting the “essential problem” as being the “inadequacy of whiteness”. We don’t know the history of whiteness or track the changes in it’s understandings of itself and through context. We have followed “negro” to “colored” to “Negro” to “Afro-American” to “African-American”, as Painter states, but she emphasizes the necessity of following the history of whiteness.

According to Painter, “Constructions of whiteness have changed over time, shifting to accommodate the demands of social change.” Central facets of racial identification, particularly whiteness, were temperament and color. Painter says “‘Temperament’ has been and still is a crucial facet of racial classification since its 18th-century Linnaean origins. Color has always been only one part of it (as the case of Ms. Dolezal shows).” Painter tracks the historical changes in the definitions of whiteness.

Before the mid-19th century, it was common to view whiteness as having multiple races within its larger classification. However, there were still stark divides between the different white races. In this time, there was a clear hierarchy, privileging the “intelligent, energetic, sober, Protestant and beautiful” Saxons over the “stupid, impulsive, drunken, Catholic, ugly” Celts.

The waves of immigrants that came — the Irish, coming to escape the Potato Famine, the Eastern and Southern Europeans — would create a frenzy within the white identity to try to measure and place the new immigrants within the identity of whiteness. New racial classifications included the “Northern Italian”, “Southern Italian” and “Eastern European Hebrew” races. Painter says “ Their heads were measured and I.Q.s assessed to quantify (and, later, to deny) racial difference. They were all white, members of white races. But, like the Irish before them, the Italians and Jews and Greeks were classified as inferior white races.” After around a century, the status of the Celts had elevated and become a part of the superior identity of Northern European. The end of World War I brought about a wave of anti-German sentiment, causing the Saxon identity to waver in superiority. The response was to shift toward a “Nordic” identity, and many German-Americans changed their surnames to avoid association with Saxon identity.

Findings by anthropologists in the 1940’s established the racial identity theory that we use today, excepting for minor changes. There were three classifications: white, Asian, and black. No category existed to categorize Hispanic people (even today, there seems to be little room for Latinx folk in racial logic which remains largely dichotic). According to Painter, “Each was unitary — no sub-races existed within each group. There was one Negroid race, one Mongoloid race, one Caucasoid race. Everyone considered white was the same as everyone else considered white. No Saxons. No Celts. No Southern Italians. No Eastern European Hebrews.”

Whiteness is now defined by vagueness and blandness. This obfuscation of white identity allows for the burden of race to be lightened and the supposed “blandness” of whiteness, in part, can help prevent scrutiny in the culture. If whiteness is boring, and held as the standard, then there is no reason to examine it. People don’t go to the doctor when they feel fine; they go when their health is abnormal. We only study race and identity that deviates from the standard. In our American, racially dichotic logic, Blackness, is held as the opposition, the deviation from whiteness. Painter says “...whiteness continued to be defined, as before, primarily by what it isn’t: blackness.”

In the 1970’s, around the time of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, some white groups worked to increase the association with their “ethnic” identity in order to “forge a more positive identity” and reduce the association with the racist implications of a white identity, as in the case of Italians, Irish, Greeks and Jews. Today, the lean towards “ethnic” whiteness has increased and taken new forms. (Linked is an article that helps explicate this trend.) There exists almost a desperation within “white” identified individuals to escape the blandness and to embrace the exotic and exciting “ethnic” identity. To claim Otherized racial and ethnic identities in order to add richness to their identity — but only insofar as the identity behooves them, they accept the colorful culture, but not the historical social and political implications and disadvantages associated. This is exemplified with phenomena like cultural appropriation.

To bring things back to Dolezal, it appears that she fell into that racial binary system, seeing her decision to fight racism as a point at which she had to choose between black or white. Painter says “Black was clearly more captivating than a whiteness characterized by hate.”

Painter deconstructs the false notion that one must be black to care about and work towards social change, citing abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown; Mary White Ovington, who helped found the N.A.A.C.P; and the white communists, priests and rabbis who stood by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr during the Civil Rights Movement. White allies have long been a part of the work black freedom fighters have done in the fight for civil rights in America. Painter recommends a Deconstructive solution to our current racial identity crisis. “Eliminating the binary definition of whiteness — the toggle between nothingness and awfulness — is essential for a new racial vision that ethical people can share across the color line.” Painter likewise doubts the erasure of identity as a cure for racism, saying that “The “abolition” of white privilege can be an additional component of identity (not a replacement for it), one that embeds social justice in its meaning. Even more, it unifies people of many races.”