Featured Reader Comment About the Boston Bombing, Chechens, and Racial Formation: "Whiteness" is a Measure of Community Norms and "Good Conduct"

I feature timely, insightful, and challenging readers comments from time to time here on WARN. I love the interaction and good sharing that takes place here. As such, "bumping up" an especially good and useful comment is of use to improving my thinking and learning, as well as sharing the range of smart thinking that the readers of WARN consistently bring to the table.

I am going to develop our conversation about race, Whiteness, media framing, and the Boston Marathon bombing a bit further this week. We have hit on something there which I think is always special when it occurs--oftentimes "academic" conversations and terminology can, and are, distant from events on the ground.

The discussion about the racial identity of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev is a moment straight out of the literature on critical race theory, racial formation, and comparative race studies. As such, it demands immediate comment.

My first obligation here on WARN is to truth-telling. When we can engage in that enterprise, and also learn something new, matters are always positive.

Commentator Larry Yates observed in response to my piece intervening against the mainstream media's consternation at how the Boston Bombing suspects can be both "white" and Muslim (what was an excellent example of race making in practice) how:

An 1857 South Carolina court decision on whether two men were white, quoted in Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South 1776-1860, illustrates racial formation at work at the individual level:

"The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. 

But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his character and conduct; and it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It will be a stimulus to the good conduct of these persons, and security for their fidelity as citizens."

This is a great conversation starter for the week given how Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are members of a "quasi-white" group in the United States, one that was just granted "full whiteness" five or so decades ago. Given the efforts by the mainstream media and the Right to "revoke" this status because they are Muslim, the logic of the above court would appear to still hold today.

Whiteness has value in the United States. Race is made by the law, circulated and enforced via common sense, day-to-day interactions, and reproduced by social norms and standards.

For example, the "one-drop rule" is just a folkism that explains how "black blood" flows from mother to child, and the rule of "hypo-descent," i.e. from the "lowest" racial group in a given society, determines one's racial group membership. A person can be 1/16th "black." However, they were still deemed a second class system and uniquely subject to the status of being a slave in America for at least three centuries.

Stated differently, the one-drop rule was just a way for white slave owners to impregnate and rape their human property, and then to not have to worry about questions of said progeny's freedom. A sick system is it not?

This is also a wonderful arrangement if one wants to ensure the creation of a permanent class of slaves, one that is self-reproducing and growing over time: Efficiency does not necessarily equal righteousness.

Likewise, European immigrants understood that the wages of Whiteness were valuable and worth compromising their own individual morals and values in order to attain. The price of freedom, and thus fully joining "white" society for European immigrants, was investing in White Supremacy and the power (as well as privileges for the in-group) of the color line.

The vast majority of white folks were active signatories to this contract; a few fought, and some died, resisting it; most, as people around the world do in every society, just wanted to be passive agents, getting along for the sake of it, choosing the path of least resistance. Free riders are a universal constant of the human condition.

Why rock the boat?

I have three or four examples of racial formation and race making that I am going to share this week. Please help me out if you would. If you have other lessons about how race is manufactured which are surprising, counter-intuitive, little known, or just particularly insightful, please do share them in the comments section.