From the heart (of Whiteness)

GROVE ICQI 2013 - FROM THE HEART (OF "WHITENESS") 1

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From the heart (of “Whiteness”)

A paper presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2013 by Jonathan Grove

of the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Original title as presented:

Unmarked and unheard: Voices of Working Class White Men in an Appalachian

Borderland

Abstract:

Much research has explored the application of intersectionality theory across marginalized racial

and gendered populations, and the intersections of a privileged and marginalized identity, such as

the masculinity of men of color and of gay men. Further, to a more limited degree there is some

literature regarding masculinity and marginalized religious groups and masculinity and class.

Literature on Appalachia focuses on class from a labor perspective, and whiteness and

stratification within whites. Yet, race, class and rurality, particularly white marginalized group

experience, has not yet been systemically analyzed using intersectionality theory. Using

participant observation and narrative analysis, I examine the confluence of whiteness,

masculinity, and (working) class experiences within rural Appalachia to gain a comprehensive

view of the mechanics of social power, to learn about the politics of advocacy, and to allow

coalition building across marginalization, which I believe would result in greater progress toward

equity.


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Because I am one among many who have known pain inflicted upon us for another's gain; yet I

am also one among many who has the power to change that for others.

Before my words arrived, everyone here knew significant portions of my experience - not

in the particular, but rather the abstract. Here before you stands a white man. Now that you hear

my voice, perhaps you’ve already begun searching the nuances of my pronunciation to discover

the source of this accent; certainly, but not quite, Southern. I can tell you that speaking about

“whiteness” with an accent identified as Southern presents at once, two very real feelings for me.

First, is terror. Terror that I might in some way visit pain on one of you - or myself, as the history

of voices like mine speaking about “race” is not a pleasant one. However, the second feeling is

one of great possibility as it is the challenge to “Whiteness,” which I will discuss here today, that

offers a different future. I submit to you that these two feelings, as well as the rest of my story

offers an example of what many may call ally development.

To be sure, the population named in the title of my presentation describes me and most of

those with whom I was raised1. Further, the work described here seeks not only to ensure those

voices are heard, but in doing so also present the ways in which we are - and desire to become -

partners in struggle, thus changing the culture more rapidly. Because we have known the pain of

inferiority, and especially because many of the systems that perpetuate such hierarchies claim us

as beneficiaries and supporters, we have tremendous power to interrupt it by rejecting these

systems. Even further, together we can usurp the forces that divide and conquer us all through

shame, self-hatred, fear, and violence by rejecting what Foucault calls “the kind of individuality

which has been imposed on us,” (see Sandoval p.164) and embracing what Sandoval in

1 Original title was Unmarked and unheard: Voices of Working Class White Men in an Appalachian Borderland


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Methodology of the Oppressed calls “revolutionary love” - or what I was raised to know as

Christian love, of a sort rarely practiced.

Certainly, no one should ever have to feel inferior and the great irony is treating another

as inferior infects you, such that no one can feel whole so long as the cycle continues. As

Sandoval quotes from Fanon’s discussion of the “Negro Problem” in Black Skin, White Mask, it

is not a,

“…’problem of Negros living among white men,’ but is, rather, the problem of ‘Negros

exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society’ that is ‘only accidentally

white’ – any race can utilize and inhabit the categories of supremacism. The race that

does so creates a rhetoric-for-being that binds (in varying forms) all citizen-subjects.

Such enslavement includes the white man in a white-man’s state, Fanon writes, for he has

become ‘enslaved’ by his own expressions of ‘superiority.’ Thus, the speakers and the

rhetoric of the dominant order must be transformed...” (p 129)

As described by Fanon, “whiteness” is the trap that too often creates within the subjects

of this study the schizophrenia Alice Walker described when she wrote “We are oppressor and

oppressed... To attempt to function as only one when you are really two, or three, leads, I

believe, to psychic illness: ‘white’ people have shown us the madness of that” (Sandoval, p 194).

This is at the heart of Lilla Watson’s well known quote, “If you have come to help me, you are

wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let

us work together.”

Moreover, the previous quote is critical to the aforementioned ally development, which is

important to create systemic change. Given that “white,” working-class, Appalachian men have

been socialized to experience their raced and gendered selves as their only hope of attaining


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social position, and thus personal value, they approach race and gender from a personal place.

While any “moral” person will be concerned with the struggle of an “other,” meeting them in

this same personal-validation space is critical to full investment in change that benefits all

involved. In contrast, power resides in perpetuating the conviction that what benefits the othered

raced or gendered group, produces the direct inversion for me; thus my personal validation is

lessened. However, by “interrogating whiteness” we cannot help but grapple with our

relationships to both power and the pain of marginalization. Thus the powerful “WIIFM” - the

“What’s in it for me” I learned working my way through college in sales - is here, what we all

long for; validation and love.

Before I proceed, let me explain a bit more about myself, which might illuminate why I

believe both voice and WIIFM are central to liberation. Coming from a family that I experienced

as apathetic at best about “higher” education, I did not readily accept that my path would lead

through college as this was not only an investment of finances (which is not insignificant in

itself), but signified a profound departure from everything I knew and which was valued in my

familial and social contexts. People like us do not go to college or move to the city, and doing

both was to express that “I’m better than ya’ll” and thereby ostracize myself from family and

friends at home. Clearly this demonstrates a significant internalization of class and rural

marginalization, which is then converted into an underdog pride that maintains this norm.

Indeed, when I started college in the Washington DC suburbs, my younger brothers (who have

never gone to college) started referring to me as “Yankee” though I never left the state. This was

said as a somewhat comical slight, but in that area the term connotes both despicability and when

used in reference to a Southerner, implies treason. While my childhood dream of “escape” came

true through great effort and courage, I can never go “home” again as I have crossed into a


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world apart from the solidarity that comes with rejecting the “elitism” of middle-class

intellectualism. My escape was more complete than I had anticipated.

Now liberation might be an odd concept to return to here, yet it is important to note that

the most profound experience of my college career was when I was introduced to the liberatory

potential of feminist deconstructions of masculinity. In retrospect that liberation was so

incredibly important to me because I had been seeking freedom from the constant pursuit of

validation on terms that were defined by others and changed based on the (cultural) context. Note

here that the structure that is defined for and by us simultaneously, is the very structure of

domination, both patriarchy and whiteness in this case. Through feminist critiques of masculinity

I found an intensely uncomfortable challenge to self-define, and thereby liberate, my gendered

self. Simultaneously, and critically also for the first time, I was offered language and solidarity

around my class experience. Later, I was challenged to consider how “othered” others might

experience the parts of myself which profit from systems of inequality. Perhaps most importantly

here, these readings helped me negotiate power and minimize my own pain. This in turn helped

me approximate an understanding of how I, along with those “othered” around me, experienced

power differently.

Although a white, heterosexual, former football (and tennis – shhh!) player, raised

working-poor in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, the eldest of my European

mother and Mennonite father’s three sons, it is because my liberation also resides there that I call

a college campus Women’s Center “home.” In addition, though I went to college with the

intention of becoming an FBI agent, the experiences above led me to decide that sexual and

intimate partner violence prevention and gender equity education was my calling. Both careers

were predicated on ensuring that there would be less pain in the lives of people around me, and


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in my present work, the power of how I am perceived is sadly a powerful tool to offer other

young men similar opportunities for liberation, and young women a safer world.

As alluded to at the outset, I am very aware that I present in a particular way and that as a

result others ascribe certain qualities to me. Further, I learned early that I could insulate myself

particularly because people will see me immediately as a white man, but know only of my

“place” if I speak, and my class of origin if I describe it. Thus I can easily “pass” in a way others

cannot. This is to say that while I did intentionally learn to minimize my accent so I could be

seen as “intelligent”, I have always had a degree of control. In fact, I have regularly used my

accent to offer a challenge to those in power who are unable to see how this “good ‘ol boy” in

front of them could possibly advocate for “those people.” I, and others like me, am afforded a

powerful strategic location. Indeed, as a dear friend put it, I have the potential to be “a spy.” We

can be the resistance that is not recognized and like a life-giving cancer within, corrupt the

infrastructure of domination.

However, in order to make positive use of this, those like me must grapple with our own

dialectical relationships with, in, and within power structures. Sandoval offers a description by

citing Foucault’s work on “refusing fascism,” or the ways in which the state’s apparatus of

power “...categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own

identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to

recognize in him” (p 163). Sandoval continues (p. 164):

"Before the citizen-subject's birth into the social world, the intersections of race,

culture, sex, gender, class and social powers are already locating in order to provide a

particular space to hold that individual, to pattern the kind of subjectivity it will be

permitted. From the moment of it's birth, the citizen-subject becomes regulated, branded,


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and shaped, the first world ideological apparatus imbricated through its subjectivity in a

novel, and, we might say, more total way than ever before. First world citizen-subjects

take pride in their "freedom" of movement and speech, their activities trusted as "good

citizens" - replicated the social order and its hierarchizations, usually without the

necessary imposition of directly brutal state force...."

Therefore, in the places in which we reside in power, we are entrusted to perpetuate that

power through our “freedom.” Yet it is exactly the opposite. This sense of self is exactly that

which traps us, and our un-critical identification with that category - as white and/or male -

reinforces the trap. Thus as James Baldwin said, ‘As long as you think you’re white, there’s no

hope for you.” This is not a simplistic call for empathy. While clearly hierarchies of power

negatively impact even those who benefit, and certainly those whom it seeks to eradicate from

the social landscape, even empathy can stand in the way of resistance. If the dialectical

relationship with power has not been grappled with, but the individual seeks to empathize with

those “othered” from their beneficial subjective location, their efforts will be thwarted by the

unavoidable shaping of their interaction in power.

If we are to assume that liberation implies an existing constraint, and that one’s embrace

of their subjectivity is a lock on the broader system, we must both accept our position and yet see

the system as unnatural and harmful, rather than beneficial. Further, having self-reflectively

accepted this, the security we previously felt becomes experienced not as our true “natural” self,

but rather the “straight-jacket” Katz described (Tough Guise, 1999). Thus, owning the

positionality given us, yet striving to exist outside those limits becomes our method of liberation

and both withdraws our support from and weakens the infrastructure of power. It is at this


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juncture that empathy and coalition building might start to occur, but only because we wrestle

with and embraced the dialectic of self within power.

Method

Therefore, when approaching this research topic, it is imperative to seek such

destabilizing stories of white men in the literature as well. The juxtaposition of situating white

men in Appalachian working-class experience is just such a potentially undermined site. As

Wray’s 2006 “Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness” title, and my

own experiences suggest, this space might offer promise, and initial reviews of the interviews

offer the complexity one might hope to see in such complicated positionalities. Given this, I

determined that listening to the voices of the complex human beings involved in this study would

be required in order to uncover the workings of power/oppression and more importantly the

opportunities for liberation in their lives.

The methods I chose do not lend themselves to generalizability. Generalizations to the

entire Appalachian region do not benefit individuals who wish to be heard, and has historically

been the source of problematic stereotypes about the region. As a result, the methods I chose

were highly reflexive participant observation and unstructured interviews, along with some

archival research.

Immediately upon my first foray into the field, the critical importance of participant

observation to this study became clear. Whether, a native of the area or not, and especially

having crossed over and become a “Yankee” college-boy, gaining trust as a researcher was next

to impossible. While my history and accent gained access to hours of conversation, at the

slightest whiff of motive - particularly academic - the conversations generally ended. Often this

abrupt end came with renewed questions about my family and place such as “what’d you say


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your name is?,” “Where are your people from?” Moreover, even requests to interview friends

and relatives were denied, though informal conversation over a beer followed such a denial in

several cases. Thus, I was quickly reminded of the centrality of both geographic and social

community, family reputation, trust, and the profound distrust of outsiders and “experts” in the

literature (Keefe, 2000; Russ, 2010; Walls & Billings, 1977) and in my experience. As noted, I

am very much aware that I am included in this demographic and this is also my story. Therefore

along with the fact that any study confers a great deal of power to the researcher, the reflexive

component to the participant observations is designed to address my participation in the

constructions of the research context. Further, doing research within the community in which I

was raised was an ethical choice as this location is not someone else’s “place,” and yet was a

strong empirical choice.

True to the central purpose, I specifically chose to conduct unstructured interviews to

provide both structure and freedom for subjects to tell their stories as they understand them. I

hope that as a result, the participant’s experience is more like the familiar community building

exercises of storytelling, which necessarily lack the power-differential inherent in an interview

setting. Further, being mindful of this power differential is important because the interviewee’s

reflections on who they are, the direction of the conversations, subtleties in the duration and

location of pauses and check-in phrases describe their view of the world. Therefore, being

conscious of my influence throughout the interviews was critical to ensure that the story was not

shaped by my expectations.

Conclusion

As I know that people continue to be harmed by those structures, and I see the

tremendous potential for change that would benefit entire communities - if not regions - I am

compelled to pursue the following goals in my work:


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1. Ensure that people's stories are heard and valued, particularly using my ability

to engage those who have a great deal of social, and therefore potentially political,

capital. In this case, white men.

2. Create a space for the exploration of our own stories, interrogation of the social

forces that delimit and shape our world experience, and be an example that personal

liberation and true community exist just beyond those strictures. Thus, the freedom to

whole-heartedly, and without restraint, share our selves, joys and challenges, find

validation and accountability with all those in the community - and thereby have

solidarity in struggle.

3. Do my best to ensure that there might come a time when children won't ever

have to learn how to negotiate shame, embarrassment, and the denial of self-love that

comes with it... So that they never know anything but that they are valuable and loved.

References

Jhally, S., Ericsson, S., Talreja, S., Katz, J., Earp, J., Rabinovitz, D., & Media Education Foundation.

(2002). Tough guise: Violence, media, and the crisis in masculinity. Northampton, MA: Media

Education Foundation.

Keefe, S. E. (2000). Mountain identity and the global society in a rural Appalachian county. Paper

Presented at the Center for Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia’s National

Conference, Huntington, WV, March 5, 2000. Huntington, WV.

Russ, K. A. (2010). Working with clients of Appalachian culture. Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved

4.29.12, from http://counselingoutfitters.com/vistas/vistas10/Article_69.pdf

Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Walls, D. S., & Billings, D. B. (1977). The sociology of southern Appalachia. Appalachian Journal, 5(1,

A Guide to Appalachian Studies), pp. 131-144. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40932198

Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Durham: Duke

University Press.

http://counselingoutfitters.com/vistas/vistas10/Article_69.pdf

http://counselingoutfitters.com/vistas/vistas10/Article_69.pdf




From the heart (of Whiteness)

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