Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (2016)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White by Lee Bebout Michael Jimenez (bio) Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White. New York University Press, 2016. Pp. 304. From the opening lines in the preface, the reader realizes the stakes in Bebout's book. He experienced what must be like every professor's nightmare: becoming infamous on Fox News because of his class at Arizona State University on whiteness. This experience informs his critical analysis, which takes a longue durée view of US imperialism and white supremacy, focusing specifically on its relation to Mexican American culture. He has no allusions that whiteness will cease to exist, but the role of a critical theorist is to expose invisibility. Bebout's study looks at US cultural subjects such as Cormac McCarthy's novel Cities of the Plain, Hollywood movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and country music lyrics. Chapter 1 investigates the way Mexican Americans are constantly seen as Other in US culture. This Mexican Other is juxtaposed with white Americans as a way to solidify white identity as the symbol of true citizenship. In short, whiteness is an identity that needs an Other to exist. Bebout surveys both Chicano/a studies and whiteness literature to analyze whiteness in relation to his conceptual paradigm of "whiteness on the border"; chapter 1 presents a genealogy of this literature, helping Bebout to produce a number of tropes about the Mexican Other that he uses to critique US culture. His argument is that these tropes are used to "reinforce the fantasy that the United States has always been and must remain a white nation" (71). Chapter 2 exposes the way white nativist literature and news reports utilized the Chicano/a literature about Aztlán as a potential threat of a Mexican takeover of the US Southwest. The conspiratorial idea, proposed by nativists like Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, that groups like MEChA (and the Mexican government) are supposedly organizing a massive Aztlán Plot appears like the wild ravings of the right-wing fringe. However, Bebout points out that various anti-immigrant laws recently passed in the Southwest expose white fears against invasion by the Mexican Other. Chapter 3 deals with the topic of white saviorism. This chapter does not deal with vocal, racist nativists but instead analyzes the white ally, searching for the subtle ways even benevolent liberal whites benefit from the white supremacist system, [End Page 207] especially in the way they rob Mexican Americans of agency. The very first example highlights the Latino Rebels criticism of one of Bill Maher's skits. In the process of trying to expose white American racism, Maher ends up reproducing racial tropes against Mexicans. Using the Latino Rebels here shows Mexican American agency just as it illustrates that Maher, even if he means well, still presents the Mexican Other as an object that needs saving. Bebout claims: "While white goodness relies on a savage Other and a binary relationship, it is formed through a rejection of the Other" (109). The Other escapes so-called savagery only with the help of the white savior. Bebout uses this lens to look at Giant and The Magnificent Seven, pointing out that these films portray the white ally protecting the helpless Mexican Other. Thus the white ally in movies becomes a paradigm for tolerant, white liberals in US culture, but Bebout thinks this is not far off from transforming the white cowboy heroes of movie westerns into the contemporary tales of heroic border patrol agents as "benevolent humanitarians of the state" rescuing the dying helpless migrant in the desert from heartless drug smugglers or coyotes (146). His analysis of border patrol agents covers evidence from media reports to Mexican American author Luis Alberto Urrea's humanizing portrayal in his novel The Devil's Highway. The choice of Urrea illustrates the way even Mexican American authors can continue elements of the white savior trope. The final chapter highlights white desire as heard specifically in American country music songs. Bebout continues his analysis by pointing out how white musicians sing about the...