“Around here,” a Ku Klux Klan member in good standing once told me, “The only thing worse than a nigger is a nigger-lover.”  That was a long time ago and deep in the heart of Dixie, but the sentiment remains pervasive, from Cliven Bundy (defending his welfare ranch in Nevada) to NBA owner Donald Sterling to all the people squealing and gnashing over remarks Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard made months ago.  

too_white_whiteLast September, at Western’s opening convocation, Shepard said, as he had been saying for the previous five years, that if Western is as white ten years from now as it is today, it will have failed.  If he had said that Western needs to be more diverse or even if he had said that Western needs to be more Black or more Brown, not a single dog would have barked.  It turns out that what scares some white people the most is not people of color, but rather the race traitors who call the whole idea of whiteness into question.  

When Shepard’s use of the word white pops up on their search engines, it makes the white blood race for fear-mongering publications and politicians.  Because nothing makes their constituents bolt their doors faster than the idea that something might be threatening the real or perceived advantages of being white.  

Whiteness as we know and love it was invented and codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by such Enlightenment titans as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.  The division of people into a hierarchy of races (with white always at the top) was very handy for someone like Thomas Jefferson as he tried to reconcile an emerging democratic political system with economic arrangements that demanded a free or cheap source of labor and bridge the intellectual gap between “all men were created equal” and the slave quarters at Monticello.  Demonizing people of color as subhuman makes it morally easier to steal the fruits of their labor and deny them rights and freedom. 

In the same way, creating a mythical exalted category of whiteness makes it easier to control the masses, especially the white masses.  Most white people in the antebellum south didn’t own slaves, and those below the overseer class lived generally brutal lives.  Convincing them that because they were White they had more in common with the bosses on the verandas than they did with the slaves in the fields was a powerful way to enforce economic inequality and stave off a multi-racial rebellion.  This was even more useful during reconstruction when a possessive investment in whiteness prevented working and underclass whites from making common cause with newly freed blacks and kept economic power in the hands of the few rather than the many.  White workers who thought of themselves as white first and workers second proved fatal to much of the American labor movement in the twentieth-century and dog whistle appeals to whiteness during the affirmative action era helped keep masses of white people in their place.  If you’re convinced meritocracy means that your enemy is the person of color who got your space at the state university or your job at the fire department and not the mediocre Bush or Gore who rides affirmative action for rich people effortlessly into the Ivy League and the United States Senate, then you’re unlikely to offer any serious threat to arrangements of inequality. 

This is the tradition that the far-right fringe taps into when they take Shepard to task.  Like that Klansman long ago, Campusreform.org, The Washington Times, Glenn Beck, and Jason “content of their character” Overstreet all aim to stoke the fears of their readers and constituents, especially those in the neglected regions of capital, by telling them that Bruce Shepard doesn’t like white people.  

These responses are no surprise, but it’s a little more disconcerting to watch the so-called mainstream media drink the white-baiting Kool Aid.  The Seattle Times, KOMO TV, and the CBS This Morning didn’t bring the fear and hate that Beck and Overstreet did, but their corporate coverage both engaged and dignified the fringe reaction to the word “white.”  It was Shepard’s rhetorical choice rather than any WWU policy or practice that set him apart from every other “diversity” mumbling college president in the country and made him national news.  Bruce Shepard has been saying “We’re too white” for six years and the racial/ethnic makeup of Western hasn’t changed much.  There wasn’t any real news here.  The whole point of Campus Reform’s shrill accusations was to tap into white fear and the whole effect of Charlie Rose’s purring repetition of those accusations was to bring that fear to a wider audience.  The continuing hegemony of whiteness leaves lots of people who wouldn’t pay any mind to Glenn Beck still willing to seriously consider crap like reverse racism and the idea that more people of color means lower standards.

And it’s this larger audience that President Shepard and his defenders leapt to reassure.  All of the damage control, from both Western and sympathetic liberal journalists, rushed to make it clear that while his bold choice of the word “white” (gasp) may have been provocative, the folks in the suburbs could just calm down and put the smelling salts away, because the Western president was only responding to changing demographics.  In his own response, Shepard straightforwardly announced that he had at least one eye on Western’s bottom line.  Growing populations of color in Washington and a dip in high school graduation rates means that Western will have to start getting blacker and browner just to keep the tuition dollars rolling in.  

Nowhere in the whole brouhaha did anybody talk about the structural racism that has kept people of color out of college, the way that color has been used to create and enforce economic inequality, the privilege that comes with being white and of a certain class, or the way that admitting larger numbers of people of color to college might change the foundations of higher education for the better.  The whole discussion was, well, pretty white.  If, at the same time that he was saying that Western needs to be less white, Shepard had also said that prisons need to be more white, then he might have been onto something really new.  

A couple of weeks before the whole white thing became news, Western announced that it had agreed with its two staff unions to raise the university’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.  This change was initiated by Bruce Shepard and Western will raise the wage even before the Seattle socialists do.  The raise will affect primarily custodians and grounds workers, jobs disproportionately filled by people of color.   

This announcement was not carried by Glenn Beck or CBS This Morning.  They were too busy reminding white people to stay white.