White Law

What I really liked about this piece is how it focused on the way whiteness is socially constructed. I feel like I have read about the ways in which race for people of color has been socially constructed, but no one really writes about whiteness. For example Lopez writes,

White identity exists as the superior antonym to the identity of non-Whites, elaborating a positive White racial identity is a dangerous position. It ignores the reality that Whiteness is already defined almost exclusively in terms of positive attributes....Whites should attempt to dismantle Whiteness as it currently exist...not simply out of guilt or any sense of self deprecation. 

Lopez 548

It made me think further about how the positive attributes associated with whiteness is equally damaging for white people as for the negative attributes associated with blackness for black people. The way that whiteness is constructed serves as an identity that is only a "positive mirror image"(548).  It encourages a notion that the white race  is the superior race. This social construction of whiteness is also destructive to society in general. According to Lopez, this idea of the white race as the superior race is the real stem of racial inequality. He writes that we should dismantle it because it "stands at the vortex of racial inequality in America" (548). 


The way to really deconstruct racism is by talking about the way it is constructed in the first place. It's important to mention the way in which all races are socially constructed. When we recognize the way in which whiteness is constructed we understand more about the way this racial social hierarchy creates these racial injustices. 
 

"Outside the Law"

"The way a society distances itself from physical structures whose purpose is to hide uncomfortable truths or bury undesirable 'necessities' mirrors the way narratives of history and justice bury, evade and marginalize...Look at how beautifully colonial Williamsburg has been restored and how conveniently marginal or absent are the slave quarters, the amputating axes, the whips and nooses and hanging trees" Daniel J. Wideman, pg 180

I really enjoyed reading this article. As a student who did the Multicultural Summer Institute this past summer, this quote reminded me of something Chris Abani, author of the Virgin of Flames, said when he came to speak to our class. He said that out of the several places he has travelled to, the United States was the only country who had a particular behavior of forgetting it's own history by barely recognizing it. I immediately thought of this when I read this quote above.

I had always thought that the way in which we forget our history had to do mostly with not studying it in school. But this quote made me realize that much more went into it. We also choose not to restore or maintain the sites that remind us of our painful past. And as painful as these sites may be it is extremely important to keep them alive, because it is our history.  We need to be reminded of our all our history, we  can't just pick and choose which we want to recognize, because then we are lying to ourselves.

Another part of this article that stood out to me was the idea of free papers. Wideman wrote that in the past, we had free papers which "were documents obtained from either former masters or local magistrates that serve as legal testament to one's 'free status'"(182). What's interesting about these free papers is that Wideman implies that for some American citizens, we still have a form of "free papers" today. He explains that his Brown I.D. card was his "get out of jail free card" when the police went on wild searches to find the rapist who had scared the town (182).  His Brown ID card and his college credentials was his own form of "free papers".