Priscila Dorella on Hannah Noel’s *Deflective Whiteness: Co-opting Black and Latinx Identity Politics*

Hannah Noel’s book explores the continuing durability of white privilege in the United States.  The author is a professor of interdisciplinary studies, whose work examines media representations for how competing groups of whites address questions of race.   Her interest in History takes place in dialogue with cultural, media and political issues in the United States and Latin America. She has a PH.D in American Culture from the University of Michigan and she is a member of the American Studies Association and the Latinx Studies Association. The author’s stated objective is to explore white racist expressions in national public life found across the political spectrum.  The first half of the book focuses on conservative and reactionary claims that whites have become the primary victims of racial discrimination in the United States.  The second half turns to liberal discourse in the media, which, often disparaging conservative arguments, nonetheless reinforces white privilege by assuming that the continuing centrality of white experience for national politics and culture is self-evident.

Contemporary rhetorics of race often are, in fact, as in the now-infamous neo-nazi demonstrations in Charlottesburg, Virginia, in 2017, explicit, open, and direct statements of hatred and racial resentment.  Nonetheless, contemporary white racial rhetoric in the United States is more likely to be subtle, ambiguous, and covert in veiling the place of white superiority in daily life.  Scholars, Noel claims, have not sufficiently addressed the diverse practices of whiteness necessary for sustaining white privilege as something ordinary, found everywhere but for the most part out of sight.  Noel assumes that few white people understand how they perpetuate racism.

Noel begins by exploring the demagoguery of conservative racial thought.  Noel notes that conservatives have deliberately appropriated concepts from contemporary black and Latinx political movements to express an understanding of national identity skewed by feelings of white victimhood.  The first three chapters follow these efforts to legitimate aggressive resistance to anti-racist campaigns.  Noel begins by examining heteronormative hate speech on social networks that promotes white male militancy.  Belittling black struggles against the “carceral state,” police violence, and schools that fail to educate black students, radical white militants dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement as racist.  They dismiss the violence people of color face as fake news, while promoting All Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, and Blue Lives Matter.  Relativizing arguments about discrimination and dismissing the violence people of color have faced serves to keep white privilege at the center of national life.  Conservative political leaders such as Donald Trump have valorized the distorted and emotional history that white militants have promoted, which have spread from social media in conservative media more generally.

Noel continues her discussion of contemporary conservative racial discourse by analyzing how conservative white women perpetuate patriarchy based on the performative rhetoric of fear and anger as fragile victims of movements they consider threatening, such as feminism. They justify patriarchy and patriotism, and defend gender and racial inequalities on the internet as natural and legitimate.  Noel follows the trajectories of conservative women like air force veteran Ashli Babbitt, killed while participating in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Noel traces the efforts of conservative women to downplay the extent of police violence against black women by questioning campaigns such as #sayhername.  Noel concludes her discussion of contemporary conservative representations of race and white privilege with a particularly thought-provoking reflection on the appropriation in country music of contributions from blacks and indigenous musicians without giving them due credit. A few country music artists have apologized, but most continue to justify the absence of minority performers in Nashville, while writing songs that objectify women and romanticize a nation that belong to white, poor, heterosexual men by right.  Artists who do not fit these standards because they are black or Latinx, or even because they are in dialogue with other musical styles, such as Lil Nas X (Old Town Road) and Cowboy Troy (I Play Chicken With The Train), despite the fame and money they achieve, are attacked as unrepresentative of North American country music. Instead, traditional country music can include performers such as Rednecker (Hardy), who support Trump and deliberately promote sexist, racist and xenophobic ideas in their songs.  Wouldn’t considering country music as “trash music” need to consider not only the class status of performers and their audiences, but also racial identity?

In the second part of the book, Noel shifts her analysis to liberal voices in the media.  Liberals empathetic to the problem of racism are able to argue that racism is the product of conservatives and poor working classes who have not received adequate education. She also looks at aspects of liberal corporate practice that conservatives have attacked as “woke” capitalism.  She opens this part of the book discussing the advertising of clothing brands; American Apparel, one of her examples, proclaims their products as “globally sourced,” ethically made,” and “sweatshop free.”  Sustainable production turns consumer purchases into ethical acts that help the companies’ suppliers, thus benefitting workers around the world. However, many workers at these companies work with minimal rights in a non-unionized informal economy.  This neoliberal business model reveals the inconsistency and superficiality of these company’s advertised concerns. Ethical consumption does not guarantee that workers are not exploited.

Noel then turns to NPR’s coverage of the Postville Raid, when in 2008, immigration officers raided a meat packing plant in Iowa and arrested nearly 400 undocumented workers at the plant, about one-fifth of the town of Postville’s population.  Noel argues that liberal reporters, such as those working for NPR’s news programs, reproduced racist and binary interpretation of Latinx immigrants as anti-citizens and potential criminals. The sensationalist strategy of telling the stories of criminalized Latinx immigrants, a majority from Mexico, without also reporting on the exploitative labor practices of large agricultural corporations that hire immigrant workers themselves, Noel concludes, reinforces a xenophobic vision of undocumented workers are working in the United States illegally, their rights are necessarily limited. Privileged white journalists do not understand that listening to immigrant workers is more important than publicly judging and condemning them.  In her concluding chapter, Noel examines how white supremacy can be present even when corporate leaders, such as the CEO of Chase bank, proclaim their support for anti-racist causes.  Noel considers the ability of Critical Whiteness Studies to explore how whites can become more effective allies in anti-racist struggles.  Certainly, not only being satisfied with speeches and demonstrations, but also with the integrity of actions.

The book is valuable for its case studies of how in the United States both liberal and conservative practices of whiteness sustain and reproduce structures of racial inequality and injustice, often by co-opting the political identity of marginalized groups. The parasitic rhetoric of whiteness flooding the media today, Noel argues, works against nascent antiracist social movements by appropriating their notoriety. Exposing this misuse of progressive ideas is a particularly important responsibility of anti-racist whites.