The ultimate consolidation of whiteness as a cultural identity, however, occurred through violence: the slave patrols. The patrols were composed of conscripted poor whites to form an intermediary control stratum between the colony and its black labor force. (Allen,251) Their task was to stop runaways, and disrupt any signs of association or social autonomy among the Africans. In short order, patrol suppression of anything that might signify black bond-laborer autonomy received the approbation of the colonial elite as a discovery of a threat. The poorer whites thus gained inclusion in the colonial society from which they had previously been marginalized. (Stampp, 214; Genovese, 135) Patrol violence made the colony’s original paranoia seem real, gave it assurance that its enslavement of the Africans was justified, and gave concrete expression to the white sense of threat.
In order to further enhance their social inclusion, the patrols soon engaged in gratuitous violence against the black bond-laborers, representing it as actual suppression of rebellion. The sense of social inclusion thus fostered, in the context of the indispensibility of a control stratum to control the African bond-laborers, marks the inception of a bargain between classes in the English settlements. It is here, at the beginning, that the historical tendency among US workers to prioritize white solidarity over class solidarity finds its inception. It emerged from the cycle of paranoia, enslavement, social categorization, and violence toward the Africans that unified the English around a sense of white identity; it would later emerge as a class collaboration in subsequent forms of racialization. (Martinot 2003a, 68)
Overall, violence, paranoia, and social solidarity constituted a self-generating cycle. Social paranoia necessitates defensive solidarity; defensive consensus requires violence to neutralize the perceived threat; the violence not only makes the original paranoia seem real, but creates more palpable resistance on the part of those it subjugates, and thus greater fear among the dominant, calling for greater solidarity and violence. Whiteness as a social identity emerged from this cycle. The culture of whiteness, the criminality of its oppressive violence, its psychology of fear and endless defensive solidarity then served to mitigate white society’s internal class contradictions and conflicts.
The operation of this cycle of threat (paranoia), a demand for social allegiance, and gratuitous violence is evident throughout US history. Jim Crow demonized black men as assault-prone, against which segregation was proclaimed a defense, and for which mob murder was ritualized to legitimize that paranoid assessment and provide a sense of white belonging. (Hale) In the present era, even as mild a corrective of past discrimination as “affirmative action” was greeted with “they want to take over everything” by a populist movement whose slogan about “reverse discrimination” did endless conceptual violence to the idea of equality, and whose harassment of black people on formerly “white” jobs made even partial programs ineffective. In the present invasion and occupation of Iraq, the first step was to invent a threat (WMDs) and, following the invasion, call for solidarity to “support the troops;” subsequently, the US military destroyed entire towns and decimated neighborhoods in Iraq because it could say that Iraqis who were attacking Americans.
What this culture of whiteness must seek to disguise from itself, however, is its dependence on black people, because it is through their continual racialization that whites racialize themselves as white. That is, early plantation capitalist dependence on black labor got transformed into a cultural and identity dependence (through the invention of “race”) that threads itself through all US history. White identity finds its center in black people, and not in itself. It obsessively suppresses black political autonomy and community economic self-determination in order to maintain control over that external source of its own identity. The continual impoverishment of black people to render them economically and politically dependent on white society is the first exigency of white racialized identity; hence, the white necessity to dismantle affirmative action.
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