LY #93 White or Black Studies?

My doctoral dissertation was an interrogation of whiteness through the lens of images of African-American history.  I wanted to discuss in part how a corporate liberal white identity was constructed during the WWII in part as a response to pictures and stories about black folk. It was a loose, baggy monster of a dissertation (though that dedication language, with love to my spouse, was cut out of the final draft). 

I thought about dragging it out and quoting it here but I think not. 

I wrote about images of African Americans in Life Magazine and other national and African-American periodicals partially as part of an unexpressed argument with my mother who told me about the Second World War that sometimes she missed those days because, "We all worked together back then."  She was possibly decrying the constant cultural disruption of the late sixties, early seventies.

Thus, there were three kinds of anger that gave me the motivating energy to complete all 388 pages of the darned thing.  One was my anger with my mother for either lying or being stupid enough to buy into the propaganda of the period.   The second was my anger with some of the history I'd been taught that left out both the continuing role of segregation in the American military as well as the African-American contribution to the war effort.  The third was my angry response to my own guilt for being white. 

Of course, I understand now, over twenty years since my Mom's death and just 13 years younger than she was at her death, I understand how sometimes it's just simpler to speak in cliches to people who could not possibly understand what a certain period of life was really like. 


For various reasons my dissertation did not become a book.  Mostly the cost of copyrighted material and the implausibility of Life magazine publishing a book of post-Marxist critical cultural studies.  I also was brought up short by a comment made by one of my colleagues in the early nineties.  While coming back home from a convention in Seattle, she questioned the validity of a white person focus on issues in Black Studies.  So after my first (and last) major academic publication I gave up doing very much more with my dissertation and turned my attention to other issues that interested me.