Whitewashing Kinship

For my blog post this week, I would like to discuss the intersection between two key concepts in David Eng’s book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy: the “racialization of intimacy” and “whiteness as property.” True to Eng’s book, the meeting of these two political ideas is staged within the private, domestic space of the family. In his introduction Eng concisely defines a key concept for his text: “The racialization of intimacy marks the collective ways by which race becomes occluded within the private domain of private family and kinship today” (10). But how exactly is race “collectively occluded”? Eng ties the “racialization of intimacy” to the “shrinking public sphere”: “the Reagan-Thatcher revolution obviated the possibility for national public debates about race, sex, and class by displacing them into the ‘intimate public sphere’ of privatized citizenship, normative family, and hetero-sexist morality” (6). What Eng fails to explicitly state, however, is the ironic fact that what really “occludes” race is whiteness. I would add to Eng’s characterization of the “intimate public sphere” as “privatized citizenship, normative family, and hetero-sexist morality” the term whiteness.

I believe that one of the ways that the “racialization of intimacy” is accomplished is by racing kinship and family as white. Eng’s book demonstrates how family/kinship relations can be conceived of as a form of property, I would argue that the prerequsite of possessing the property/right of/to intimacy/kinship/family is not just the erasure/forgetting of race, but also being raced as white. In his first chapter, Eng outlines some of the key ideas of Cheryl I. Harris’ article “ Whiteness as Property”: “Whiteness and property share a common premise in the right to exclude. . . .Whiteness was, and continues to be, a valuable and exclusive property essential to the self-possession oft the liberal individual, to the value of his or her reputation, and to the normative definitions of the enfranchised U.S. citizen-subject. Whiteness and property, liberty and freedom, are and continue to be inextricably intertwined” (46). In short, since the right to privacy/a family can be considered property, and since the pre-condition of owning such property is whiteness, the private family is coded as a form of white property. In order to forget about race, one has to be white.

Throughout the text, Eng discusses the melancholia of race/the burden of the “racialization of intimacy” by way of a metaphor of haunting, however, I think a better metaphor to describe how “the racialization of intimacy” operates would be that of whitewashing. From a distance a whitewashed wall appears white, but upon closer inspection one can make out the colors and shapes hidden under the surface.