Friday, April 19, 2013

Are Chechens Really White? Racial Formation Theory and the Boston Marathon Bombing

The Boston Marathon bombing and the manhunt for Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev have provided a great lesson in how notions of racial identity and group membership are reproduced by the media and circulate through public discourse.

In trying to frame the narrative surrounding Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev's supposed actions in relation to the Boston Marathon bombing, the public and the mainstream media--both on the Left and the Right--are grappling with how Chechens are (or are not) in fact "white."

This conversation is evocative of the concept known as racial formation theory. As offered by the sociologists Omi and Winant, racial formation is a process which suggests that race is not natural but rather artificial. It is a category that does political work. There are multiple "political projects" related to race and the reproduction of racial ideologies. Race is contingent, dynamic, and changing where some groups move between the in-group and the out-group. Race is also a historical process that works across time. Race is real; race is also a social construct and a fiction.

Race has no scientific basis. But, it does a hell of a lot of social and political work in both the United States and elsewhere. Race has meaning. It is reproduced through "common sense" and accepted "truths" about society and peoples.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are "white" by definition. Nell Painter's great book A History of White People details how the very notion of Whiteness was manufactured from the myth of an idealized "Caucasian" past and people. Chechnya is quite literally in the Caucuses. However, because Whiteness is a historically contingent and manufactured identity, the Chechens, along with other Southern and Eastern Europeans, are among the most recent inductees as full members in the "white" race. Moreover, in the United States, Chechens did not "earn" their full Whiteness until the middle part of the 20th century.

I joked on Twitter that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are putting the status of Chechens as full members of the "white race" in jeopardy. I was only half-kidding. Conservatives and others are already trying to reconcile how Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev can be Muslim, "white," "terrorists," American, and from Chechnya.

As we have repeatedly seen in the United States as of late, when white folks do bad things the solution is to focus on how they are individuals who do not represent the group. As we are seeing in the Boston example, folks who are already marked and racialized by their religion can perhaps be kicked out of the category known as "white people."

One of the most powerful implications of racial formation theory is that racial group membership is contingent and can change to fit the dynamics of Power in a given social and political moment.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are reminders of the contingent status experienced by some white ethnics in America. Ultimately, if terrorism by white Chechens becomes a trend in the United States, they may find themselves traded away in a racial draft like the one featured on Chappelle's Show.

Who will Whiteness trade the Chechens away for? White Cubans? White Pacific Islanders and mixed race folks like Keanu Reeves? Some other group of people?

17 comments:

elle marie said...

I am so glad you posted this, because it is what I’ve been thinking all day, albeit in less eloquent terms. @aurabogado had a great set of tweets that captures the spirit of your post.

Every time I hear mention of the Tsarnaev brothers as “ethnic Chechens,” I’m asking myself, what the hell that has to do with anything. Lord knows that until you find out their names, they look like your average white people of European extraction. And honestly that doesn’t mean jacks@#!t because they could have those names and be third-generation Americans. The layers of racism, bigotry, xenophobia embedded in “ethnic Chechens” strictly within the context of this manhunt is unbelievable. They’re Chechen, so, you know, not really white (NOW; meanwhile the vast majority of people in this country have no idea where the hell Chechnya is. They just know it sounds ‘foreign’). Chechen immediately (somehow) gets translated into Muslim, which then gets translated into terrorist. Setting aside the constant calls to not conflate Muslim/Islamic/Arab/Arab-‘looking’ (those poor Sikhs) identity with terrorists, people obviously don’t Islam is culturally inflected. Islam in West Africa is not the same as Islam in East Africa, which is not the same as what’s in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, or the ‘oil states’ in the middle east. And let’s talk about how the religion still needs to be broken down by country within each of those regions.

I’d say this was a teachable moment about race and racial formation but today’s constant news commentary and sometimes analysis shows that folks are still not ready to listen.

Kemal said...

"Ethnic Chechyen" is not a term that was invented today. It's a classification that they themselves are proud to proclaim as they are ethnically different from the vast majority of Russians. Many peoples of Eastern Europe and Western Asia are an evolved mixture of Asian, White & Arab lineage.

Miles_Ellison said...

And everybody knows that white men are never involved in bombings.

elle marie said...

To be clear, my placing Ethnic Chechen in quotes was not
meant to be dismissive of that cultural identity. As someone who gets annoyed when people speak of Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, or pretty much any
nation-state on the African continent I can appreciate the notion that terms like “Russian” or “Eastern European” flatten the various cultures they comprise. (Don’t even get me started on referencing the entire African continent as a single whole.) I referenced the use of Ethnic Chechen because the way it has been deployed throughout coverage of this manhunt tries to cast the Tsarnaev brothers as “Others,” when they were considered, up until this point, to be White by everyone who knew them. By doing so, it makes it very easy to take their white identity out of the equation when discussing the possible motivations for the bombing. Basically I was cosigning the essence of the original post by our host.

Deb C. said...

"Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are "white" by definition." Yeah, just like "white Taliban," John Walker Lindh. {smdh}

j.ottopohl said...

I have lived in Ghana for over two years now and people use the term Ghana and even Africa quite frequently. The terms have meaning if they encompass much larger groups of people than do terms like Akan, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Mamprusi, Kusasi and other ethnic designations. Indeed the whole project of Nkrumah was to overcome these ethnic differences and create a unified Ghana and later a unified Africa. He largely succeeded in this first goal. The second one still remains distant.

Larry Yates said...

An 1857 South Carolina court decision on whether two men were white, quoted in Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South 1776-1860, illustrates racial formation at work at the individual level:

"The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his character and conduct; and it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It will be a stimulus to the good conduct of these persons, and security for their fidelity as citizens."

rikyrah said...

it's been fascinating and horrifying to watch the MSM try and de-WHITE these terrorists. they were shook after the FBI released the pics of two WHITE MEN.....


they didn't know what to do.

Ben W said...

The BBC's live rolling coverage of events, which often called on presenters to ad-lib and fill dead air with rambling pseudo-commentary, was very revealing on the racist inclinations of (at least) the anchors involved. In a moment where he ran out of prompts, one presenter said - and this is not verbatim, but I think I remember it pretty well, since it was so appalling - "and now that we've seen these images of the suspected bombers, now we know what they look like, well, you can drawn your own conclusions from that", swiftly followed by "and the FBI/Boston PD are saying that the man in the white cap, that they are hunting for, is caucasian!" [emphasis in original]. He was astounded by this idea, since he could see, even from the grainy CCTV image, that this suspect had the wrong skin tone and facial features to fit what he, the presenter, understood as 'caucasian'. Or perhaps he simply found it hard to believe that 'terrorist' might not be equivalent to 'brown person'. Either way, the shock in his voice was poorly masked. It is all the more ironic that the bomber is actually from the caucasus!

Sam Norte said...

The Boston Bombers are not white, nor are they Caucasian. They are both semitic mystery meat. Muslim slime! Islamic religion of hate!

Sam Norte said...

in other words, semitic mystery meat

Magda Kamenev said...

Ah, Dave Chappelle, where are you in our hour of need?

gooyers38 said...

Seriously, where is Dave Chappelle? He is in deriliction of duty. Black president, and he can't even suffer through the ordeal of earning tens of millions of dollars by restarting his show.

gooyers38 said...

To paraphrase a cheer from Not Another Teen Movie, "They ain't white, they ain't white, they definitely ain't white. Break it down chechen!"

jeni said...

Interesting. That reminds me of a Brazilian History and Culture class I took in college, where we discussed their cultural adage that "money (and status) whitens."

Nikolai said...

yes chechens are white.They aren't only white muslims.You also got albanians and bosnians who are real white and muslim.Chechens are the most violent and strong white people

Goeie Dag said...

They're not violent. They're friendly and peaceful. Every nation or tribe has some violent people and Russians are no exception. It's the controlled mass media who is "violent" and lying and the certain layers in the authorities, who stage events with fake blood, actors and false accusations.