Tag: White Americans

According to Jardina’s analysis, about thirty-eight per cent of white people who highly value their white identity are at or below the mean level of racial resentment, while forty-four per cent of white people who say their racial identity is less important are at or above that level. We don’t have good public-opinion data going back in time to indicate that levels of white identity in the population have changed, or that now more people are identifying with their racial group than in the past. There were people—mainly people who were interested in racial prejudice and racial resentment, some of whom were actually my advisers—who looked to see if white identity mattered in the mid-nineteen-nineties and in the early two-thousands, and this is a period in time in which the country was really different. How much of a connection is there between strongly identifying with whiteness and racist attitudes? It’s certainly the case that there are some people who identify as white and who are also racist. One is that there are a lot of white people who are more racially prejudiced who do not identify as being white, and the converse is true. One reason that we haven’t talked a lot about whiteness in the past is because whites don’t have to confront their racial identity the way that people of color in the United States traditionally have. I think we have an image in our minds of who this person who scores high on white identity probably is, like, a man from the South in a working-class job, and that’s not actually true. It’s not, “I dislike Latino people.” It’s, “I don’t like the idea that the country that I envision, the country that I grew up in, the place that is defined by this Anglo-Saxon culture, is somehow threatened by this new group. Even though some people might feel some attachment to a European heritage that at one point wasn’t considered white, the Anglo-Protestant sense of whiteness has been broadly painted as a “European” heritage.

Surely I must be mistaken. Nothing about me would indicate a steadfast interest in a niche collection of vintage boxing cards from the late 1800s and beyond. The trading cards on display are straightforward, commercial depictions of boxing champions from the 1880s. There are essentially two poses these boxers take: crossed arms or in the guard position. Otherwise, the artist has cropped the illustrated portrait below the collarbones of these oft-mustachioed men. Nearly a century before these trading cards were produced British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson created a series of prints called, “Six Stages of Marring a Face” (1792), which combined the visual motifs of a boxing beatdown (bruises, gashes, etc.) As Lady Archer squeezes, primps, and plumps, we see gestures strangely akin to the nearby boxer’s. In the corner of the Met’s exhibition are three nearly identical portraits from the 1780s, the first of which displays boxing champion Richard Humphreys while the last two showcase Daniel Mendoza. Depicting opposing black and white boxers, it is clear that Gericault is foregrounding an aesthetic decision to heighten the monochromatic qualities of his lithograph by exploiting the racial politics of boxing. On the Ropes: Vintage Boxing Cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection continues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through October 21.