Racial inequality is one of the most discussed and urgent problems in the USA. At first, non-white people fought for their freedom, for their human right to be equal with white people. And now, while other countries believe that in USA there are no racial discrimination, non-white people still suffer from unfair distribution of opportunities, powers, rights, and economic resources. Consequently, we can blame 300 years of physical, cultural, and political discrimination as a reason for current inequality. Different politicians, researchers, and writers are trying to come up with the theories, ideas, and historical background of racial identity of ‘white’ and its privileges in order to explain this problem. It is how Whiteness studies appeared.
Whiteness study is not an abusive study which attacks non-white people and proves the superiority of white. On the contrary, it tries to think critically and show how white skin color still regarded as being superior, and what leads to this. Why there are continuous prejudice against colored people. The main point of Whiteness studies are to ruin legitimated and widely accepted the policy of ‘white superiority’ and show the history of how this supremacy was built (Gregory Jay, 2016).
The pioneers in ‘whiteness’ as an ideology were James Baldwin with The Fire Next Time (1963), W. E. B. Du Bois and his Darkwater (1920). The Fire Next Time is a book which contains two essays. The first one is a letter to Baldwin’s nephew in which the author forms his opinion towards the role of the race in the history of the US. Actually, both letters deal with the problems African-American people experience. Baldwin tries to teach his nephew how to survive in these conditions when people ‘not yet really know that he exists’ (James Baldwin, 1963). He tells him that times have hardly changed and what looks black now looked black at his times as well, meaning that the ideological weight of ‘blackness’ didn’t really change.
What is strange about this full of love and anxiety letter is that Baldwin asks his nephew to accept white people and accept them with love. The reason for this is covered by history. Here Baldwin builds his notion of ‘whiteness’ and how to understand it. He shows that white people believe in their superiority because of innumerable reasons that were provided them by history. Baldwin believes that white people are innocent. They just haven’t understood it yet. And even those who did, do not know how to shot it.
He ends his letter saying that it will be a hard life of misunderstandings and suffering but at the end America will become truly free country, they just celebrate 100 years of freedom 100 years earlier (James Baldwin, 1963).
Another example, Ta-Nehisi Coates and his Between the World and Me chooses the same style of storytelling as the first part of The Fire Next Time. He writes a letter to his son. In the letter, Coates tries to explain to an adolescent what is race and racism. He says that race is not the father of racism, it is his son (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015).
There are some similar ideas in these two works. The most tangible is the idea of struggle. Both authors warn the boys that their life will be full of injustice and struggle, because of the lack of intelligence of whites and also, the lack of desire to understand their real history and show their understanding.
Both authors lives are full of fear, injustice, and violence. But their lessons to boys teach them different things. Baldwin asks his nephew to live in peace with white people and even love them. Still, he asks no to forget about his identity because he will be destroyed the moment he will believe that he is what whites used to call nigger (James Baldwin, 1963). He asks to neglect the ignorance of white people and wait for them to accept the truth.
Coates chooses slightly other way. He wants his son not to give up. He tells his son that he doesn’t oblige to live in constant fear. He has to fight because the struggle is a thing he bequeaths to his son. In Between the World and Me Coates tends to disagree with the optimism of Malcolm X toward nationalism. He sees no reason to believe that people will ever change their attitude towards white supremacy. That is why he has no reason to be even a little bit optimistic.
While analyzing these two works we can see a similar tendency and desire to teach future generations how to deal with the ideology of whiteness. That generally accepts the tendency to the supremacy of white people. We can see that both authors do not agree with common acceptance of so-called freedom and try to prove people that everything is not as it is shown to people. America still has well-grounded problems which deal with racial inequality. We can see this from the date of Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me publication year, it was published in 2015, not so long ago. And even nowadays we can read in the newspaper about the accident in which black man was killed because of race prejudice. The reason for this is the faulty notion of white people superiority and faulty impression concerning black people.
It is incorrect to judge the whole race by the actions of certain representatives. In a nutshell, we should accept that the progress, in which people believe all over the world, is not taking place in America. People should pay attention to the literature that tries to bring up the idea of whiteness and the way it influences society today. And only then we will forget about racial inequality and race distinction itself as it is the main purpose of all the books and researches that both black and white people do for such a long time.
Works cited
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between The World And Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Print.
Jay, Gregory. "Introduction To Whiteness Studies". Pantherfile.uwm.edu. N.p., 2016. Web. 7. Apr. 2016.
