“We the people of the United States,” the opening words in the Preamble to the Constitution, are as powerful as “Let there be light,” because of their creative properties. Much like the words scribed in Genesis 1:3, “We the people” marks the beginning point of creation. By the pronouncement of both of these phrases, the old has become new. Formlessness took shape, and nature became tamed. These words literally created new worlds. More importantly, “we the people,” and the words that follow in both the Pre-amble and the Constitution, shed light on many of the beliefs, rituals, and symbols of the civil religion of the United States.
At fi rst glance, the Constitution signifi es that the nation was created as an inclusive one and would be attentive to the rights and desires of its people. This phrase sets the tone for what will be believed by Americans from the ratifi cation of the Constitution until this day. This is part of the reason that the sacred text, cultural symbols, and principles represented by the Constitution can evoke visceral responses from “people” at certain ritu-alized moments. Take for example, how many of the athletes that represent the United States, in the Olympic Games, often shed tears at medal ceremo-nies when they see the fl ag raised and the hear the national anthem play.
The emotion is present because they represent “the people” and themselves.
Although the words “we the people” invoke community and unity, from its foundation, the Constitution is exclusive in terms of race and gender, especially concerning the participation of citizens in political life and socio-political action. Exclusivity, here, not only represents the existence of geo-spatial boundaries for social interaction, but also alludes to the walling off or protection of white property and white bodies from invasion, incursion,
or intrusion by non-whites. Many who consider themselves white reveal their need to defend and protect these boundaries every time social prog-ress is seen as subordinating idealistic white interests. Because the Constitu-tion is designed for the protecConstitu-tion and inclusion of particular white bodies, whites often experience black uplift, political progress, or social activism, as an embodied invasion of physical and spatial boundaries. Their religious commitment to the Constitution as a sacred document and the experience of black uplift as a type of invasion causes white laborers to respond to perceived black progress and uplift viscerally and physically, by any means, in order to maintain the boundaries of their ideals, social space, economic environment, and bodies. From its foundation, the Constitution is exclu-sive in terms of race and class. Ultimately, white working-class people are casualties of the constitutional codex.
In this chapter, I contend that the Constitution not only establishes the birth of a nation, but it also establishes a particular type of whiteness that exceeds the intentional thoughts and actions of the average white American.
Despite the realities of American capitalism and white success, these ide-als live in the subconscious of white citizens, especially white males. Fail-ure to achieve this white-being is akin to a narcissistic disorder and is the cause for racist and violent responses to black progress. In the fi rst section of the chapter, I will outline the ways in which the Founding Fathers, the Constitutional Conventions and ratifi cation of the Constitution established white-being, a race classifi cation that accounts for class distinctions among early European settlers in the New World. I will demonstrate that the Con-stitution is an exclusive document, writing to protect particular social and political issues, especially wealthy, European colonists. Since the Constitu-tion is a document that protects the interests of this particular class group, I argue that the Constitution establishes white-being. In the second section, I describe how white-being, created by the Constitution and its writers, results in white rage toward black and brown progress in the United States.
White-being is a form of primary narcissism that cannot be maintained by the average working-class white. As a result, it leads to many variations of narcissistic rage.
Erasing Class Assumptions
Despite the religious fervor and the unshakable belief in these American ideas, the Constitution has always been an exclusive document in terms of race, gender, and class. It was formed by wealthy, white, aristocrats who intended to protect their own interests. They embraced the document
without critical refl ection on what is actually present in the United States.
It is clear that the Constitution excluded people of African descent in its defi nition of “citizen,” but there were more groups of people excluded from the inalienable rights written throughout the pages of the document.
In addition to the exclusion of black people, white women and indigenous populations were prevented from enjoying particular rights, such as land ownership and voting. The Constitution was never intended to protect the interests of black people (free or bondspersons), white women, Native Americans, or any other group of non-white people. Enslaved Africans, regardless of gender designation, enjoyed none of the freedoms and rights outlined in the original or mythical Constitution, the written Constitu-tion along with the tradiConstitu-tions, beliefs, and addiConstitu-tional rights ascribed to it.1 White women were not afforded the right to vote. A white woman’s ability to enjoy certain freedoms depended heavily on her marital relationship with a white man. Native Americans were considered part of nature and were removed from the land they possessed by force, signifying they had no civil rights that white immigrants had to respect.2
However, a closer examination of the sacred document and the events sur-rounding its development, especially in regards to class, will reveal that it did not extend these rights even to all white men. The Constitution also excluded poor white men. Many of the rights and privileges in the Constitution were reserved for property owners. This is a distinction of class. During the pen-ning of the Constitution, there were debates about whether those who did not own property should enjoy the right to vote or participate in the polis.3
Many of the ideas and principles that Americans hold dear are attrib-uted to the Constitution. Many of the large concepts believed to be part of the Constitution are not even mentioned at all. Eric Black argues that many people assume these concepts are part of the Constitution, but they were never mentioned in the original document when it was ratifi ed in 1776.4 They were added by amendments to the Bill of Rights, but have been extended back to the founding of the United States. He points out that many of these ideals have the power of law only because we believe they are part of the Constitution.5 They are actually part of what he labels the mythic Constitution. The mythic Constitution is the interpretations and traditions believed to be part of the Constitution, but really included in the Bill of Rights and also more than 200 years of U.S. Supreme Court interpretations.
If this is the case, we should examine the actual contents of the Constitu-tion. Through such an examination, we will see that the Constitution is a document that establishes particular rights to wealthy, white men.
Ideas such as free speech, freedom of religion, a free press, and the right to a fair trial were not included in the original document; however, many
believe these rights historically extend to the founding of the nation. The original document was ratifi ed in 1787 by ten states without a Bill of Rights for the citizens.6 The initial concern of the writers of the Constitution was not the rights of the citizens.
The Constitution also, in some ways, excluded poor white men. Those white men who did not own property could not vote or participate in the polis. The civilian and religious rights outlined in the Constitution were reserved for European settlers who had obtained a certain level of wealth which allowed them to live a life of leisure and possess personal property.
Because of the religious belief in the perceived right given to whites in the name of the Constitution, many white, working-class citizens ignore the reality that it is a document that never really extended rights to them.
Instead of facing this reality, many white, working-class people together become disenchanted with their own progress in comparison to the ever-increasing perceived progress of African Americans and other minorities in the United States. The weight of their failure as white, privileged citizens, is placed on the backs of non-whites, especially African Americans, and is expressed in the form of violence and hostility toward people of color. Criti-cism of the Constitution and its underlying, classed code(x) is ignored and white working-class people fail to evaluate the ways in which the Constitu-tion contributes to their failure to achieve the American dream.
The Founding Fathers, who were wealthy aristocrats, were concerned about forging a strong central government out of the thirteen territories that had the power to regulate commerce, settle interstate disputes through the judicial system, and pay off the bonds that many of them held as a result of fi nancing the Revolutionary War. The Constitution was written to insure the rights and secure the interests of the Founding Fathers themselves and people in their social and economic class. The most important right that the Constitution establishes for white, male citizens is the right to own prop-erty. The United States of America, at its core, was a British empire expan-sion project. Many of the explorers who came to the New World came with the hopes of building wealth.
By the time of the American Revolution, there was tremendous economic disparity within the developing American society, between white laborers and those who participated in the polis. The top 10 percent of the wealth holders controlled 50 percent of the nation’s wealth. Although the wealth gap may seem stunning in this early stage in the life of the nation, it was acceptable in comparison to the wealth disparity in European nations.7 Another reason this wealth gap was acceptable to early citizens of the colonies was in part due to the presence of both Native Americans and slaves, who, although present, were not considered part of the society.8 This is signifi cant to the mindset of
the white men who were considered lower class because they would see them-selves in comparison to both indigenous and slave communities in terms of wealth accumulation. Regardless of how poor they were in light of the Found-ers and the wealthy aristocrats, they would never be as poor as enslaved African people or as indigenous communities who did not yet practice the concept of personal property ownership.
Because the initial concerns of the Founding Fathers were to protect their own interests when they penned the Constitution, it is fair to say that the document was not made in the interests of all European immigrants, or early colonists. Regardless of the narratives of American exceptionalism and themes that borrow from Exodus and situate America as the new Prom-ised Land that give colonial immigrants the opportunity to succeed and build wealth regardless of their social status in Europe, America is a country that, from its very foundation, already inherently fostered a class divide among its immigrant population. This class divide, along with the concerns of the Founders, created white-being. I defi ne white-being as the standards and actions colonial immigrants and their descendants must follow in order to be considered truly white, and enjoy all of the benefi ts that whiteness offers, especially life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. White-being accounts for class and understands whiteness as a social construct that resides in the subconscious of white people, especially white males. Although whiteness, in a more tra-ditional understanding, is widely based on the color of the skin, there is an element of whiteness that we misunderstand when we only focus on it in this way.
Understanding whiteness on the basis of skin color dismisses the creation of whiteness in the context of both colonialization and immi-gration, especially in the United States. This approach also takes lightly the history of how particular European ethnic groups within the United States have become “white” over the course of decades and centuries. As Hebert Gans argues, there is an economic component to race that leaves African Americans remaining at the bottom of the economic scale in the United States because they can never be granted white status. Although many European ethnic groups have immigrated to the United States, Irish, Italian and Jewish people were not considered white, because of some of their physical features and social stereotypes.
In the context of the United States, race and class are closely related.
Gans argues that ideas of race and class have marked black bodies and laboring bodies since before the formation of the United States. According to Gans, during the settlement of the New World, white Anglo-Saxon Chris-tians were the holders of cultural and political power. They assumed that European whiteness marked the top of the class hierarchy. In contrast, the
body features of blacks (skin color, head size, size of nose, etc.) had been established as the markers of the lowest class at the bottom of the class hier-archy as evidenced by their involvement in slavery.9 Gans, in his argument, focuses on the phenomenon that continues to leave African Americans at the bottom of economic development today. Although slavery was ended in 1863, African American descendants of slavery still struggle to achieve the American dream. In post-slavery times, immigrants from various coun-tries have come to America and have surpassed African Americans economi-cally. Gans partially attributes the success of certain ethnic groups to their ability to become white.
As mentioned in Gans’s analysis, whiteness is not a stable racial cat-egory. The characteristics and qualities of one’s appearance are not always enough to account for who is or is not white. In White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, Ian Haney López documents the many of the legal tri-als where Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants appealed to the courts in order to become recognized in the United States as white citizens in the early to mid-twentieth century. Many of the decisions granting and deny-ing whiteness were subjective and arbitrary at best. The courts sometimes decided whether or not a person was white on the basis of either appear-ance (biological) or the local understanding of whiteness (social/political).
There were times that some people would be denied the status of whiteness, while others with similar appearances, immigrating from the same nation, would be ascribed its rights and privileges. 10 Today, however, people from Italian, Irish, or Jewish heritage who have immigrated to the United States since the 1960s do not have to appeal to the legal system in order to enjoy the rights and privileges of whiteness. Once viewed with suspicion, people from these ethnic backgrounds would not be excluded from whiteness in today’s social environment, in regards to their physical characteristics or appearance.
When we think further about Gans’s analysis of race as a factor of class, one must further consider the issue or fl ip the question . . . to what degree does class defi ne one’s race? If we consider class beyond economic prosperity and wealth accumulation, and instead think of class as the cultural symbols and practices in addition to the possession of economic capital, we may begin to have a more nuanced approach to the relationship between race and class.
White-Being and Being White
In the fi rst section of this chapter, I argued that the Constitution is an exclu-sive document that was created to protect the interests of white, wealthy aristocrats. In this section, through further class analysis, utilizing the works
of Pierre Bourdieu and Hannah Arendt, I will demonstrate how the Consti-tution also establishes a particular type of habitus that is embedded in the minds of white citizens. In addition to race being a class category in terms of economic status, or capital, we can conduct a deeper analysis of class as practice or habitus.11 The constitutional habitus establishes white-being.
By the time of the American Revolution, there was tremendous eco-nomic disparity within the developing American society, between white laborers and those who participated in the polis. Whether one is a laborer is also a factor in determining one’s class or class status, in addition to all the previously mentioned elements of class that have been utilized to criticize and abstain from granting African American people full citizenship within American society. Descendants of enslaved Africans have been heavily ridi-culed at various times throughout American history for behaviors such as speaking informal English, eating soul food, making genres of music such as the blues and rap, or wearing colorful clothing.
The factors that contribute to class can also be utilized in drawing a distinction within the category of whiteness. Pierre Bourdieu proposed that the cultural symbols and practices that make class include artistic taste, style in dress, eating habits, and language. These preferences and practices are largely embedded in the mind, unconsciously. Bourdieu named these pref-erences and practices habitus. Habitus is an internalized set of practices cre-ated by society and unconsciously imposed on its people. Bourdieu defi nes the habitus as a system of structured, structuring dispositions that are carried out in practice and always oriented toward practical functions.12 According to Hugh Urban, habitus explains the relationship between the human body and the larger social body. Bourdieu advanced the claim that all cultural symbols and practices including tastes, style, eating habits, religion, science, philosophy, and language embody interests and function to enhance social distinction.13 It is the way in which the structures of the social order are embedded into the individual body. The social inscriptions are visual in an individual’s gestures, accents, dress, hairstyle, eating, walking, and talking.14
If we think about the historical development of the United States, there were ways in which certain class cultural and social practices constituted a habitus for white identity—a class identity. In addition, the Constitution of the United States of America reveals some of the cultural practices and rights that serve as a litmus test for whiteness and, by extension, citizenship.
Those who fail to possess the status symbols held as necessary for full
Those who fail to possess the status symbols held as necessary for full