appropriate such forms and use them to build a powerful challenge to “mainstream”
assumptions. One of the best known and most influential examples is Derrick Bell’s
(1990) “Chronicle of the Space Traders” which posits serious questions about how
the US would respond, as a nation, to a situation where substantial benefits accrue to
the white majority but at the cost of even the most basic rights for African Americans.
Even as Bell relays his fictional account, whereby the entire African American
population is sacrificed to alien Space Traders offering wealth, health and safety for
non-Blacks, there is clear sense in which similar “deals” have already been done in
history and will likely be done again in the future. Bell’s story, first told in 1990, has
already proven prophetic in terms of the USA PATRIOT ACT 2001 6 and other costs
to civil liberties enacted in the name of US national defence.
Interest convergence
Derrick Bell is generally credited with coining the concept of “interest convergence”
in a paper in the Harvard Law Review (Bell, 1980b). This notion proposes that “white
elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when such advances
also promote white self-interest” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000, p. xvii). It is a concept
that has been especially important, for example, in understanding the history of
Affirmative Action in the US; an approach that superficially privileges Black interests
but whose principal beneficaries have been white women, in terms of numbers
benefiting from affirmative action hiring policies (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 12).
Similarly, it has been argued that the Brown decision on the de-segregation of US
public schooling owed a great deal to Cold War politics and the need to protect the
US’s image overseas (Bell, 1980b; Dudziak, 2000). More recently, a Supreme Court
decision on Affirmative Action is widely thought to have been swayed by
representations that linked the policy to national security—arguing that without Black
Officers (promoted via AA) the US forces could become unmanageable.7
Critical White Studies
A poor rural Mississippi “white” man was asked by a New Orleans newspaper reporter,
“What is white?” After musing for a little while, the man responded, “Well, I don’t know
a lot about that. But, I’ll tell you one thing ... it’s not black!” (Hare, 2002, pp. 7-8)
As Rosa Hernandez Sheets (2000, 2003) has argued, focusing on white people (their
sense of self, their interests and concerns) has become such a fashionable past-time
within parts of the US academy that there is a danger of whiteness studies colonizing
and further de-radicalising multicultural education. However, the field is extremely
wide. If the guilt-ridden white introspection that Sheets fears is at one end of the
spectrum, at the other pole lie Marxist analyses that firmly identify whiteness as one
more “strategy for securing to some an advantage in a competitive society” (Ignatiev,
1997, p. 1).
The last two decades or so have seen a significant increase in the amount of
critical scholarship on the nature of “whiteness”, that is, work deconstructing the
taken-for-granted myths and assumptions that circulate about what it means to be, and
not be, a “white” person (see Bush, 2004; Delgado & Stefancic. 1997; Fine et al.,
1997). Critical scholarship on whiteness is not an assault on white people per se: it is
an assault on the socially constructed and constantly reinforced power of white
identifications and interests (see Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, pp. 58-60). “So-called
‘White’ people” (Bonnett, 1997, p. 189) do not necessarily reinforce whiteness any
more than heterosexual people are necessarily homophobic, or men are necessarily
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