The Essential Need for a Critical Consciousness of the White Hegemonic Alliance

• In Event: The Writing Was on the Wall: Dismantling the White Hegemonic Alliance in the Trump Era

Abstract

Abolitionist pedagogy is an emerging field the emanates from (neo-)abolitionist theory (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996). Like its dialectical counterpart antiracism, abolitionism believes that racism is structural and that white privilege is real, pervasive, and damaging. However, antiracist theory tends to believe that structural racism can be undone through the achievement of a racial egalitarianism predicated on making whiteness “positive” (e.g., Tatum, 2003) or humanizing. Conversely, abolitionist theory argues that whiteness is irredeemable since it was created during colonization for just one purpose: to oppress (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996). Intimately tied to a superiority complex (Fanon, 2008), whiteness was never positive, and never will be (Leonardo, 2009). Instead, abolitionists seek to abolish the white race as a form of social identity and human organization. They may even be focused on abolishing race as a social institution with the intent of collapsing the white supremacist social system.

Toward this end, abolitionist pedagogy engages in a number of tasks: 1) revealing the historical construction of the white race, 2) denaturalizing the racialization of humans as “whites” in our current context, 3) interpreting the psychodynamics and emotional effects of “becoming white,” 4) exposing how processes of racial Othering are also about white racial selfing, 5) understanding how the organization of humans into hierarchically arranged racial groups re/produces a system of white supremacy, 6) articulating the humanizing consciousness of color that will replace whiteness, and 7) applying intersectionality (Collins, 2000) to deconstruct the hegemonic alliances that form the white polity.

This theoretical paper focuses on the last point because it speaks to the urgent need to challenge whites’ belief that they are naturally, biologically white. After all, whiteness is a problem not only because whites collude in maintaining a system of white advantage but also because they collude in constructing themselves as natural racial group members to the point where it is taken as fact. Drawing on Weberian structuralism, Allen’s (2008) “White Hegemonic Alliance” is a political theory of intraracial group interests. In denaturalizing whiteness, he argues that the white race is a racialized polity held together through hierarchical coalitions, such as between poor and non-poor “whites” or “white” women and “white” men. The hierarchically subordinate ally in these relationships gives up humanization for participation in whiteness as an opportunity structure. Thinking intersectionally, the white race is a conglomerate of various gender, ethnic, sexual, phenotypic, and class hierarchies being perpetuated under the premise that conformity to the white polity will lead to more benefits than truly challenging intersecting oppressions that may do away with whiteness itself.

This paper seeks to expand the theory of White Hegemonic Alliances by considering the role of psychodynamics in the maintenance of group cohesion. In particular, I will use Fromm’s (1994) theory of power and sadomasochism to look at why the more powerful subgroup (e.g., non-poor whites) surveils the less powerful subgroup (e.g., poor whites), and why the less powerful subgroup conforms, in a psychic sense.

Author

• Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico