Abstract

Excerpted From: Steven Sacco, White Monsters: Understanding Whiteness as Social and Legal Monstrosity, 31 Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice 1 (Fall, 2024) (981 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Whiteness has been interpreted in many colorful ways, each illustrating its nuanced and dangerous functions as a complex social and legal phenomenon. Scholars have demonstrated that whiteness operates as a form of property, or the habit of possession, a wage that compensates poor whites for their domination by capital, a "racial contract," a psychological pathology, a civil religion or "death cult," a contamination, a form of terrorism, or even a kind of parasitism. It is all these things, but here, I hope to build on these insights and further our understanding with a new framework, because, as Michael Eric Dyson once argued, "[w]e need many metaphors, working in concert," for understanding race and racism. Here, I slide another lens into our collective metonymical microscope to better examine the phenomenon of ""whiteness."

In this Article, I explain "whiteness" as a form of socially and legally constructed monstrosity. A great deal has been written about the process by which whiteness makes monsters of non-white people, and that fact has even been used subversively. Some have even suggested that the idea of race itself can be traced back to early European belief in headless, dog-headed, or one-legged people living in Africa and Asia. This Article inverts that analysis without contradicting it, casting "white people" as the monsters. Others have certainly framed oppressors as monsters, and described whiteness in particular as monstrous, notably author James Baldwin, among others, but here I advance a more literal and deeper exploration of that framing. I use the popular vernacular of monster fiction and folklore, and their recurring themes and tropes, as a vehicle to explain the literal and figurative ways that whiteness is a destructive power produced by a disruption of the human category.

I choose monsters to talk about whiteness for multiple reasons. First, because as gender and queer theorist Jack Halberstam puts it, monsters are "meaning machines," in that a monster story is a "narrative technolog[y]," that lends itself to multiple interpretations and metaphors. Second, because all monster stories have something to say about power. They are the exploration of "our worst fears," as the subtitle of one book on the subject puts it, and a meditation on what is powerful enough to be dangerous. Therefore, below, I read monster fiction and folklore as a theory of the danger of power and apply this theory to whiteness. Third, monsters help us read contradictions intelligibly. I will explain how monsters help us understand whiteness as both a "fanciful conceit and a consequential reality," as W.E.B. Du Bois described it, and how monsters help us meet the challenge of "hold[ing] on to the unreality of race while adhering tenaciously to the recognition of its all-too-real effects," according to social scientist Ruth Frankenberg. "There are no 'white' people," just as there are no monsters, but our faith in the myth produces interminable violence. Fourth, monsters make the "normal" strange, allowing us to interrogate it. Explaining something mundane as monstrous allows us to "defamiliarize[] the familiar," to introduce "unsettlement or bafflement" into our "attempt to rethink whiteness," so that we can "make whiteness strange" and thereby "subvert[] its inevitability."

Finally, I chose monsters for this analysis because monsters can do justice to the expression of the fear, pain, and tragedy that is visited upon the world by whiteness in ways other discourse may be less capable of communicating. The monster narrative pellucidly articulates the ugliness of white supremacy. Gothic horror and science fiction, the common narrative vehicles for monsters, can capture the effect of the terror of power and the fear and disgust of violence against human bodies (i.e., "wound culture" with a verisimilitude that non-fiction descriptions of fact may lack. Some suggest that horror undermines hegemonic power even more than literal social criticism. This may be why so many have reached for monsterful language to describe white racism. James Baldwin, for example, once explained the centrality of white racism to all American discourse by analogizing it to this hypothetical scenario: a meeting with a friend whose mother's murdered corpse is in the closet, where both parties know it, but neither is willing to discuss it, and concludes "we can't talk about anything because we can't talk about that." He also compared the madness of the lynch mob to the maniacs who burned witches. With these, Baldwin captures something ineffably accurate about the brutality--and hysteria--of racist reality using decidedly gothic and monstrous metaphors. Monsters "express something for which there are no words," such that "[t]he term's imprecision ... is part of its usefulness." Thus, to talk about the violence of racism using monsters is to talk about it with clarity.

To explain whiteness as social monstrosity, I draw from Critical Whiteness and Critical Race Studies thinking, but also upon the field of cultural criticism known as "monster theory." This is an interdisciplinary effort to marry legal and non-legal scholarly traditions with the goal of opening legal discourse to new analysis. In an effort to be true to an interdisciplinary tradition, I also draw on a number of memoirs about whiteness, ethnographies of white populations, novels addressing whiteness, post-colonial literature, as well as monster folklore and fiction generally and old, modern and ancient. Where relevant, I draw also upon my own experience and history living as a cisgender man who is raced white. Where used, I mean commonly accepted definitions of white supremacy, race and racism. I use the terms "white" and "people of color," or "non-white," only for lack of better language, and put them in quotes often to stress their unreality. I use "white people" to refer to anyone raced white but also to anyone with proximity to whiteness or performing the same.

Let me clarify here any ambiguity about what this Article is and is not. It is not an essentialist claim that white people are monsters, such as, for example, the literal "white devils" of the Nation of Islam's religious doctrine it is certain to be misread that way by disingenuous critics. Rather, it is an anti-essentialist, anti-racist claim that whiteness, as a social intervention, performed or internalized as it can be by people of any color, is a form of socially constructed monstrosity. This Article is not a claim about any particular good or bad value attributable to white people or any white person. It is an effort to contend with the destructive power of their whiteness and an exploration of how to hold that power accountable. This Article is not an effort to solicit sympathy for white people. Despite there being a great deal of narrative fiction about sympathetic monsters, there is just as much, if not more, fiction and folklore about decidedly unsympathetic monsters. It is these that I want to invoke here. I focus on whiteness as it is practiced in the United States, and particularly as it is expressed in United States law, for no other reason than that is the space and law with which I am most familiar. This Article is written with the understanding of white supremacy as a "white problem" and aligns itself with the analysis that white people are responsible for fixing it. My arguments can also be used to explain other oppressive constructions (gender or maleness, for example) as social monstrosity, but that is beyond the scope of this Article and so I must leave that work to others. Ultimately, I hope that the concept of white monsters might be useful as a normative framework for interpreting and explaining white racism.

Finally, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that many of the authors of monster fiction referenced below are white men and women, but particularly white men. Some of them were unambiguously white supremacists, antisemitic, anti-Black racists, and eugenicists. These include authors with tremendous influence over the horror and science fiction genres, like Bram Stoker, Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft, to name just a few. I take this reality as but one reason that many of their tales can be read as a theory of the danger of power. What appears dangerous and powerful to people with power inevitably reflects their own strategies and weapons of choice for retaining power over others. I read their stories while considering that it may be impossible for any privileged author to write a monster without projecting onto it their own monstrosity.

Part II of this Article begins with a review of fiction and non-fiction work in which whiteness or white individuals are framed as monstrous or as monsters. Part III explains how whiteness functions literally as a form of socially constructed monstrosity. Part IV elaborates on how I reached this conclusion by using monster theory to explain whiteness as a fission of one human species into multiple fictional "races." I explain how this theory explains the crafting into monster of "white" people and "people of color" simultaneously but differently. In Part V, I use monster stories in fiction and folklore to explain figuratively how whiteness deploys political strategies to consolidate and retain power and repel threats to the same, to wit, through social invisibility, non-thinking, and socio-legal shapeshifting. I add here that the suffering of white people is one consequence of these political strategies. Finally, in Part VI, I explain the ways in which the law and monsters are mutually constitutive and term the legal construction of monsters--white monsters or otherwise--as "monster law." I again figuratively draw upon monster fiction and folklore, this time to reconsider some socio-legal strategies for ending whiteness and, indeed, the conception of race itself. I reach conclusions about which strategies are necessary, even if they are alone insufficient, for accomplishing this.

Throughout each of these sections, I will visit and revisit the 1982 United States Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe as an example of how the law and white monstrosity are mutually constitutive, even in the legal moments most worth celebrating. This case may suggest ways to mitigate, if not abolish, the monstrosity of whiteness. My hope is that monsters furnish us with another political compass to navigate through the fog of racialist nonsense that is crafted by, and crafting, our perceptions and laws. Below, I offer few original conclusions about whiteness, except perhaps that monstrosity can serve as its cipher.

[. . .]

Few monsters can rival the horror inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's infamous cosmic monster Cthulhu. A "thing [that] cannot be described," Cthulhu is a mountain of green slime with bat wings and a Kraken for a head, which sleeps at the deepest corner of the ocean waiting to destroy the world. Cthulhu is the embodiment of the most horrifying realizations imaginable: that the universe is a fundamentally unjust and meaningless place; that God is not looking out for us or interested in our wellbeing; and that the universe does not rest upon the pillars of reason and science, but of "madness and monstrosity." In his 2016 Lovecraftian novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, author Victor Lavalle's titular character, a Black man who has survived the worst brutality of whiteness, effectively chooses the end of the world over one where white supremacy dominates. Tom tells a white police officer, "I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day." In an afterword, Lavalle explained that he was trying to show that "weaponized white fear is a hell of a lot more frightening than some giant squid-headed being who's just taking a nap in the Pacific." What concept can possibly communicate the real horrors of whiteness more effectively than the worst imagined monsters?

I have argued that whiteness is a category crisis which socially cleaves the human race into categories and that from this (white) fission comes "white people" endowed with great destructive power. Persons to whom whiteness attaches therefore fit the definition of socially constructed monsters. I have read the stories about monsters in fiction and folklore as a theory of what human beings find threatening about power and used repeating themes in these stories about the danger of power as a metaphor that informs our understanding of whiteness as a social and legal danger. Looking at whiteness through a white monster lens reveals the extremely durable and barouche nature of whiteness's capacity for invisibility, for non-thinking, and for shapeshifting, which is to say its capacity for mass death. I have characterized law that constructs whiteness as a monstrous force that makes monsters and thus aptly termed it "monster law." I have noted how monster law sustains gross economic disparities between "white" people and everyone else. I conclude that whiteness--and the monster law that helps produce and sustain its evidence--will not end without the abolition of institutions which contribute to this status quo and an ambitious reparations program that centers the reduction of the white wealth, not just its redistribution to the descendants of those from whom whiteness has taken so much.

Many have framed the end of whiteness as a way for white people (and ultimately everyone else) to regain their humanity. What I have argued here is that this is more literally true than most of us have dared imagine.

Practicing immigration lawyer since 2014. Currently, a supervising attorney with the American Friends Service Committee's Immigrant Rights Program.