Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

#1plus1plus1is3

2022; Wiley; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jpms.2022.34.2.5

1533-1598

De Angela L. Duff, Zachary Hoskins, Kamilah Cummings, Robert Loss,

Digital and Traditional Archives Management

In 2021, three landmark albums in the catalog of Prince Rogers Nelson celebrated milestone anniversaries: Controversy (1981) for 40 years, Diamonds & Pearls (1991) for 30 years, and The Rainbow Children (2001) for 20 years. In observance of this triple occasion, De Angela L. Duff of New York University convened a three-day symposium about these albums as polished solid. Held virtually in March 2021, the #1plus1plus1is3 virtual symposium included 20 presentations, four roundtable discussions, and three keynotes featuring people who worked with Prince.This gathering was the ninth Prince symposium or event organized by Duff in the past five years. At NYU, Spelman College, and virtually, she has gathered scholars, writers, and industry professionals to celebrate album anniversaries and posthumous releases. She also co-produced a virtual event with the PRN Alumni Foundation, #PRNAlumni5 (2021), celebrating the foundation’s five-year anniversary and the 2021 Record Store Day release of Prince’s The Truth.Reprinted here are three presentations (lightly edited for clarity) from #1plus1plus1is3, one corresponding to each album. For more information about the symposium including speaker bios, abstracts, and other video archives, visit the website: 1plus1plus1is3.polishedsolid.com. The Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson is not affiliated, associated, or connected with this symposium, nor has it endorsed or sponsored the event. Further, the Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson has not licensed any of its intellectual property to the producers, advertisers, or directors of the Prince #1plus1plus1is3 Virtual Symposium.YouTube Links:#1plus1plus1is3 Controversy Presentation: “I Wish We All Were Nude:Prince’s Controversy ‘Shower Poster’ as Aesthetic Linchpin and Artifact” by Zachary Hoskinshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFSZasOYv8M (25:19).#1plus1plus1is3 Diamonds and Pearls Presentation: “A Tale Of Two Princes: Diamonds & Pearls and the Myth of Colorblindness in the Work of Prince” by Kamilah Cummingshttps://youtu.be/Oib3jx-VuK8 (30:31).#1plus1plus1is3 The Rainbow Children Presentation: “Deconstruction: Work & Racial Capitalism in The Rainbow Children” by Robert Losshttps://youtu.be/QPPHLC6QZuo (27:00).The U.S. LP release of Prince’s 1981 album Controversy came with a fold-out color poster of a remarkable image, reportedly taken by bandmate Lisa Coleman.1 In the photo, Prince poses seductively in the shower, wearing only his black bikini briefs, a gold hip chain, and an insouciant stare. A vulgar stream of water trickles from the bulge in his crotch; mounted conspicuously beside the shower head is a crucifix.Four decades after its original release, the “shower poster” remains, for lack of a better word, controversial: the scourge of thousands of early-’80s parents, and (if my own home life is any indication) more than a few domestic partners.2 Search reactions to the poster on fan forum prince.org, and you’ll see everything from, “[P]rince looks like a…lil’ wet rat in it,” to the elegantly succinct, “gross.”3 That this 40-year-old image can still engender such division within the fan community is, in itself, worthy of a closer look.To understand why the poster was so divisive, it helps to put it in context with some of Prince’s earlier images and his evolution as a sex symbol. By 1981, Prince had released at least one pinup-style poster for each of his albums—though, it’s worth noting, the shower poster was the first to be sold with the album in question.First, the promo poster for Prince’s 1978 debut album, For You, depicts the 20-year-old artist well within the representative bounds of a young male R&B artist in the late 1970s: bare-chested and Afroed, with a leather jacket, a mustache and a choker in the shape of an Ankh.4 It’s sexy, but hardly provocative: Prince in this photo could almost be one of the more obscure Jackson brothers.By 1979, and the promo poster for his self-titled second album, things have changed.5 Prince now appears sans jacket, with some very revealing red shorts and white suspenders; his Afro has been replaced with a Farrah Fawcett blowout. Whereas his For You-era presentation was both comfortably heteronormative and very clearly Black, here Prince presents as both sexually and racially ambiguous. But it’s also a transitional image. By late 1979, Prince had famously decreed his intention to “portray pure sex”6; but one gets the sense that he hadn’t quite nailed down exactly the kind of “sex” he wanted to portray. The result is certainly daring and unique, but there isn’t much edge.On the other hand, a third poster for 1980’s Dirty Mind is all edge.7 Prince has cut his late-’70s disco hair into a choppy, punk-inspired style; he poses with a studded trench coat slung over his shoulder, sporting black bikinis—the same as, or similar to, the ones he’d wear in the shower a year later—and thigh-high legwarmers. The image is less camp than the one from 1979, but in a strange way, it’s also less shocking. Prince’s bikinis and thigh-highs would have been a familiar reference point for adventurous rock audiences in the early ’80s: both had been worn by Iggy Pop, for example, nearly a decade before. This is not to say that Prince’s Dirty Mind-era look was innocuous family entertainment—only that punk and New Wave provided a framework which made it less inherently provocative than what was to come.Which brings us, at last, to the Controversy poster. Prince still looks essentially like he did in the Dirty Mind era, but here he’s more exposed: The thigh-highs, coat and bandana are gone; his pose is less aggressive, more stereotypically “feminine” than in the Dirty Mind shot. Because of the hip chain, the parted legs, and the stream of water, our eyes are none-too-subtly drawn to his crotch. And, of course, there is the added provocation of the crucifix. To put it in anecdotal terms, the average Middle American parent in the late ’70s or early ’80s would likely have been okay with the 1978 poster hanging on their teenage son’s or daughter’s wall; they may have been less thrilled about the 1979 poster; and the 1980 poster may have given them genuine pause. The shower poster, however, would have been coming right down.The photo of Prince in the shower remains unsettling because it is so charged. A Freudian might call it overdetermined: In a single image, it dramatizes the constellation of racial, sexual and religious ambiguities that were at the core of Prince’s Controversy-era persona. And it does so through two particular aesthetic currents, which I’d like to spend the rest of this presentation unpacking.First, the poster is an example of porno chic. The release of Controversy in 1981 came toward the end of what is now referred to as the “Golden Age of Porn,” which began roughly with the 1969 release of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie—a descendent of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (both 1963), and the first sexually explicit film to receive wide theatrical release in the United States—and ended in the mid-1980s.8 This was a period, famously dramatized by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), when pornographic films such as Deep Throat (1972) were inching closer to the mainstream, being taken seriously by critics, and influencing legitimate cinema—including two films known to have been beloved by Prince, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1976) and Tinto Brass’s Caligula (1979).Specifically, 1981 saw the rise of home video pornography, which created a new boom in accessibility for sexually explicit motion pictures; audiences no longer had to go to a seedy movie theater to see pornography, but could instead watch it on their television in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Looking at issues of Video X, a magazine specifically designed to cater to the home video porn audience, one can see traces of Prince’s Controversy-era aesthetic: a mostly topless White woman in a strategically unbuttoned men’s dress shirt and skinny tie; a Black woman, wearing a proto–Vanity 6 lace teddy, reclining provocatively against a television set; and, of course, a fair amount of shower scenes.9 My personal favorite is a personal ad that I like to imagine was placed by Prince himself: “Minneapolis, Minn. single male (with girlfriend), swap VHS, mail or party. Send tape descriptions.”Prince, of course, was hardly the only artist of the 1980s to embrace a “porno chic” aesthetic; but I don’t think it’s controversial to argue that he was one of the earliest, most enthusiastic, and most explicit adopters. Even seemingly innocuous images from the Dirty Mind and Controversy period—like a 1980 publicity photo by Allen Beaulieu, with Prince posed on a strategically tousled bed—have the aesthetic of low-budget video porn.10 Key to this aesthetic is that most of these images were captured in Prince’s own home, on Kiowa Trail in Chanhassen: creating a kind of voyeuristic intimacy that, in the days before reality TV or YouTube, could only really be found in porn.The second aesthetic current in the shower poster is the iconography of punk and New Wave, which had something of a fixation on bathrooms, specifically toilets. We can actually trace this bathroom fixation back to the Dada movement: i.e., Marcel Duchamp’s infamous 1917 readymade “Fountain,” a public urinal contextualized as a sculpture. Dada would inspire similar bathroom imagery in the late-’60s rock era, such as Robert Davidson’s 1967 photo of Frank Zappa on the toilet (“Zappa Krappa”) and Barry Feinstein’s original cover photo for the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, which was considered too crude for record stores in 1968. Part of the appeal of bathroom imagery in the punk era was its intrinsic baseness: This was deliberate “low culture” imagery, rubbing the dirty detritus of late capitalism in society’s face. But it also came from lived experience: Punk venues—most famously CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village, but also 7th Street Entry in Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis—had some famously disgusting bathrooms.Prince, of course, was never uncouth enough to be photographed next to a dirty toilet, but he certainly flirted with punk bathroom imagery. For instance, in an early 1982 photo by Allen Beaulieu, he posed next to an industrial sink fixture. It’s telling that, when Prince appeared on the cover of New Wave magazine New York Rocker in June 1981, he was posed in the same shower as the one from the poster, albeit much more modestly dressed, in a tailored suit with de rigeur skinny tie. In marketing himself to a punk/New Wave audience, he put his own spin on the bathroom imagery that was rife throughout the subculture.We’ll end with one of the more interesting uses of the shower poster, a black-and-white advertisement for Controversy that ran in Interview magazine in August 1981. Interview arguably sits at the intersection of the two aesthetic currents we’ve been discussing: It was co-founded by Andy Warhol, whose Blue Movie, as mentioned earlier, opened the doors for pornographic films in mainstream theaters; he was also an early patron of New York City’s punk scene, through his connections with the Velvet Underground and Max’s Kansas City. The ad copy, similarly, ties together the various threads we’ve been discussing, selling Prince as both a punk-style iconoclast and a porn archetype. He’s “a photogenic child genius with one name and more music than modesty”; “old enough to drink in some states”—i.e., barely legal—and “famed for…assorted kinky outrage.”The Interview ad, like the shower poster it reproduces, encapsulates all of Prince’s aforementioned racial, sexual and religious ambiguities. I don’t want to belabor the point, since so much great work is being done by Black scholars to counteract the popular narrative of Prince “transcending race,” but in this blown-out, overexposed image, there seems to be a deliberate muddying of the waters of Prince’s ethnicity: He certainly doesn’t look white, but, especially to non-Black audiences of the time, he also doesn’t necessarily look Black. The racial ambiguity only adds to the exoticism.Perhaps less controversially, the image also presents Prince as sexually ambiguous. It’s easy to take for granted the endemic queerness of Prince’s aesthetic, but I think there’s more research to be done in how, especially in the first half of the 1980s, he was borrowing deliberately from gay male visual culture of the period. Even the ad’s appearance in Interview magazine offers a reasonably concrete example of Prince courting a queer audience: As Jeff Yarbrough wrote in The Advocate in 2018, Interview “was not specifically a gay magazine, but its sensibilities and staff certainly were.” If we look again at the ad copy—the “barely legal” framing, the “kinky outrage,” the specific reference to Prince’s “bikini”—we can see that he’s being constructed here as a gay male sex symbol.Finally, we have arguably the most provocative thing about the poster: the crucifix on the bathroom wall. Similar to his use of the Lord’s Prayer in the title track of Controversy, this appropriation of Christian iconography seems at once subversive and straightforward. Prince was of course genuinely devout, and his Christianity at this period in time was unorthodox in that it made little distinction between the spiritual and sexual; for him, there may not have been any contradiction between this highly sexualized pinup and an earnest expression of his faith. But I also think he was canny enough to realize that it is contradictory to more orthodox Christians, and thus in keeping with the subversive “Controversy” theme.What all of these threads have in common is that for Prince—always, but especially in 1981—identity is not fixed, but is indeterminate, constructed, and malleable. One of my favorite lines from the song “Controversy” is, “Was it good for you, was I what you wanted me to be?” This is a question that resonates throughout Prince’s work—even in the more seemingly rigid, well-ordered persona of later projects, such as 2001’s The Rainbow Children. And I think it’s central to why the poster continues to both resonate and infuriate: Prince made himself an icon by rendering himself inexplicable.Post-2016, it seems we’ve been viewing Hidden Figures Part Two: Prince’s Black Audience. However, Prince’s relationship with this audience should not be hidden. It should be honored for what it is, what it was, and what it continues to be in terms of how it has sustained Prince. That’s one part of it. But it’s twofold. The other issue is the near erasure of Black contributors from Prince’s musical legacy, as demonstrated in the recent Sign O’ the Times Super Deluxe release. There was much pushback when people were justifiably troubled by the lack of Black faces in that extravagant release, which followed the problematic 1999 Super Deluxe release. Again, Blackness faded to the background, being excluded in a lot of ways.When conversations about Prince, race, and excluding Black people or not really honoring their contributions to his narrative arise, there’s a common response from many fans: “Prince was colorblind; he didn’t see color; why are you talking about color?” I counter that with this presentation. I argue that Prince was very much aware of color. He was aware of race. More importantly, he was aware of racism, and he had to navigate a racist music industry along with a racist society to be successful. That is the purpose of this presentation: to look at Prince as a strategist and tactician who exploited race, racism, and colorism because he understood it. Diamonds and Pearls gives us a wonderful invitation to explore race and its influence in Prince’s work. So that is why I am happy to present as part of this panel.The first quote people tend to reference when they diminish Prince’s awareness of race and say he was colorblind is oddly not the song “Diamonds and Pearls,” where he sings that there will be a light that shines “so bright it makes you colorblind,” alluding to this higher level of love—this deeper, spiritual love that he is talking about in the song. Instead, they go back to 1985 to his first televised interview on MTV. People often quote the part of the interview where he says, “I, you know, was brought up in a Black-and-white world. Yes, Black and white; night and day; rich and poor. I listened to all kinds of music when I was young, and when I was younger, I always said that one day I will play all kinds of music, and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work, and, hopefully, I will continue.”So that’s the part that people keep referencing. I see it on message boards and YouTube videos, and in discussions. However, when I look at this quote, I don’t see a man who says he’s colorblind. What we’re seeing is a bit of a misinterpretation of the quote. If we revisit it with greater scrutiny, we gain an expanded understanding of its context and meaning.Prince agreed to do the interview at the last minute. MTV came up with a bunch of questions, and it materialized so fast an MTV interviewer didn’t even interview him. One of his managers actually read the questions. The perceived colorblind quote was in response to a question regarding how he felt about criticism from people who allegedly claimed he was “selling out to the white rock audience” and somehow “leaving [his] Black listeners behind.” The part that people overlook, which I think is very important, precedes the quote. He dons his Prince-as-Morris-Day voice, draws attention to his ornate cuff links, and quips, “Oh, come on, come on. Cufflinks like this cost money.” Continuing, “OK, let’s be frank. Can we be frank? If we can’t be nothing else, we might as well be frank, OK.”When I take Prince’s comment about the cufflinks and I situate the colorblind quote, in its entirety, within this context, my interpretation is that even in 1985, Prince understood the reality of economic inequity that is a direct result of structural racism in society and, specifically, the music business—the industry in which he worked. He also knew the power and independence that economic wealth could bring—the freedom, the freedom to be creative, the freedom to really live the life that he wanted to live. He understood that there was a need for Black artists to cross over to White audiences to earn that kind of money. So, even though it seems like it is said in jest when he remarks that his cufflinks are expensive, to me, it’s a statement on the reality that like so many other Black artists, Prince had to cross over to White audiences to amass the kind of wealth that would give him the freedom he needed, not only to explore his full self artistically but also to go on and do the work that he did later to liberate himself from the racist music industry.There’s another part of this quote that is never mentioned, where he ends it by saying, “There are a lot of people out there that understand this because they support me and my habits, and I support them.” This appears to be a nod to the Black audience, who understands the history of Black artists who have had to cross over to White mainstream audiences to obtain a certain kind of wealth. Frankie Beverly and Maze could keep the lights on with a Black audience, but in terms of the type of change that Prince was trying to effect and the type of freedom that he sought, he knew he was going to need more money, and that he had to appeal to White audiences to earn it. It’s evocative of Nile Rodgers, who spoke about how, for all his disco hits, he didn’t see “real money” until he started producing White pop artists. Because centuries of structural racism have resulted in wealth being disproportionately concentrated in the White community, Black artists have had to cross over to that community to achieve a certain level of wealth.Therefore, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Prince MTV interview is another example of people cherry-picking what they want and conflating it to suit an agenda that is focused more on prejudice as an individual act than on acknowledging systems of racism. As Ashley Doane has told us, contrary to its name, “colorblind racial ideology is not about the inability to see color or the lack of awareness of race. The point of colorblindness is how we see color/race.” So, even when people want to invoke this idea of colorblindness being the disregard of race, that is not colorblind ideology—at least not the rhetoric of it. However, the rhetoric, or theory, and the practice have clearly diverged. As George Lipsitz has pointed out, “Colorblindness pretends that racial recognition rather than racist rule is the problem to be solved. Colorblindness does not do away with color, but rather reinforces whiteness as the unmarked norm against which difference is measured.”We see—even in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 1990s when many people thought if we just stop focusing on color that’ll solve the problem of racism—it was the people who were the victims of racism who embraced colorblind ideology: Prince on “Diamonds and Pearls”; En Vogue with “Free your mind / be colorblind”; Janet Jackson singing, “With music by our side / to break the color line”; and Michael Jackson saying, “If you’re thinking about being my baby / it don’t matter if you’re Black or white.” Even with colorblind ideology, as problematic as it is, it’s Black people championing it as a means to ending racism. We don’t have Madonna and Bruce Springsteen singing about people not seeing their color. So again, the weight is on Black people to solve a problem we didn’t create.However, as we move forward to Kimberlé Crenshaw and critical race theory, we learn colorblindness and race-neutral ideologies that support ignoring race are flawed and insufficient. As Stephanie Lawrence expressed, “Critical race theory challenges the idea that we have achieved racial equality, and it seeks to analyze the effects of racism. Many critics argue colorblind ideology leads to a silencing of anti-racist viewpoints”—the backlash against those who advocate centering Blackness in Prince’s narrative, for instance. If we revisit yesterday’s album, The Rainbow Children, a lot of the visceral response was aimed at what were actually anti-racist viewpoints and historical facts. However, fans who view Prince as colorblind balked at such an unflinching exploration of race in his music. Colorblind ideology has created this space where we’re actually maintaining the system of racism and making it taboo to even mention racism. It encourages people to ignore the role of structural racism and look for everything else as a culprit.Pairing an understanding of critical race theory as a framework for examining racist structures with the Billboard charts, we can segue into Diamonds and Pearls. Researchers have demonstrated that race shades every part of society. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has observed, especially in his book, Racism Without Racists, nobody’s a racist, yet all these racist structures still exist. The music industry, for example, was a site of racism, and Prince had to learn how to navigate this racist system. With the Billboard charts, we see the racial division. We have a Hot 100 Singles chart and a Hot Black Singles chart. In his memoir The Beautiful Ones, Prince told editor Dan Piepenbring, “The music industry had siloed Black music from the start.…They’d promote Black artists for the ‘Black base,’ and then, if they captured that base, they would try to ‘cross over.’ Billboard had developed totally unnecessary charts to measure and quantify this division, and it continued to this day, even if the ‘Black charts’ now masqueraded under euphemisms like R&B/Hip-Hop.”Separate and unequal is the reality of it—the push and exposure White artists received were denied to Black artists until they crossed over. It’s a back-of-the-bus system where Black people occupy the space of second-class citizenry. The scene is two separate charts—Hot 100 Singles composed mostly of White artists and seen as the “norm” and Hot Black Singles, seen as the “other.” As such, the measure of success becomes the White charts. This is important because as many of the excellent speakers earlier today pointed out, Diamonds and Pearls was Prince’s commercial return. Critics judged the album a triumph based on Prince scoring a number one hit with “Cream” and the title track cracking the top five on the White charts. Again, it’s the idea of Whiteness as the standard by which all else is measured. The Billboard charts have been segregated since the 1940s. However, what is interesting is the only time there wasn’t a separate Black chart was when Motown was in its heyday, and Black music was essentially the only music (in America). So, for a short time of about one and a half to two years, there was no separate Black chart. That speaks to another space of race and economics. But that’s another presentation.There was much press around this project. This was going to be a commercial hit, so Prince did a lot of interviews. One that I found particularly problematic was with Chris Heath in Details magazine. It’s reflective of the kind of condescending, lightweight hating pieces that White male critics regularly wrote about Prince. Alongside disparaging Prince’s most recent projects, he wrote, “Nevertheless, it’s clear that Diamonds and Pearls is a crucial LP for Prince.” In The Beautiful Ones, Prince expressed his awareness that the White critical establishment was unfair to him. Rock music criticism has long been the domain of White men, and as Chris Daniels pointed out, there was definitely a difference in the way White and Black press covered Prince.In these articles, White critics proclaimed that Prince was in desperate need of a hit. Regarding recording new material, Randy Phillips told Rolling Stone, “[Prince] was in an odd creative space. It’s almost as if he lost his mojo for songwriting.” J.D. Considine of the Baltimore Sun added, “Ever since Purple Rain, the album and movie that made Prince a star, his fans have been waiting for the work that would take him (and them) to the next stage. But instead of a move forward—an album that would improve upon Purple Rain the way it refined the breakthroughs of Dirty Mind and 1999—all we got were missteps.”This is an interesting assessment because Prince had released five very successful albums and headlined four concert tours prior to the crossover success of Purple Rain, but according to Considine, he didn’t become a star until Purple Rain. It is also a curious choice of words to suggest that Purple Rain “refined” Dirty Mind and 1999. Considine’s disregard for Prince’s success on the Black charts and with Black audiences is not anomalous among White critics or audiences. He asserted, “All we got were missteps,” but it is important to acknowledge that Black hits matter.The White critical establishment judges Prince’s success by the White charts. However, when the topic of hits came up in a 1990 Rolling Stone interview with Neal Karlen, Prince quipped, “It’s not about hits. I knew how to make hits by my second album.” It is significant that he said this in Rolling Stone because his first number one was not “When Doves Cry” or “Let’s Go Crazy,” which people erroneously cite because both topped the White charts. He scored his first number one years earlier on the Black charts with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” from his sophomore album. This was Prince’s recognition—in the premier music magazine of the White critical establishment—that Black audiences and Black hits matter to him.As we look at the two years leading up to Diamonds and Pearls—where critics claimed he’d lost his mojo, needed a hit, and was in such a dire situation—Prince racked up seven top-ten songs on the Black charts. As much as Graffiti Bridge is panned as a cinematic flop, if we separate the film from the soundtrack, we see the single “Thieves in the Temple” topped the Black charts. The long version of the video featuring dancer Robin Power was given exclusively to BET and was in constant rotation on the network. “Batdance” hit number one, and “Partyman” and “Scandalous” both hit number five. The Prince penned-and-produced song “Jerk Out” by The Time was number one, “Round and Round” by Tevin Campbell, also from Graffiti Bridge, was number three, and “Yo Mister” by Patti LaBelle was number six. All the corresponding videos received constant play on BET. Therefore, despite claims to the contrary, Prince was not in desperate need of a hit. He knew there was an audience holding him down. When we return to the 1985 MTV quote about people understanding what he was doing, I believe it’s his acknowledgment of the Black audience understanding him having to secure the bag to achieve what he wanted.I like to call Diamonds and Pearls Prince’s “put some respect on my name” album. It’s him saying, “I’m not new to this; I’m true to this. Let me show you that I know how to do this.” Music critic and author Greg Tate called Prince a “pop music tactician and strategist” who “had to play shade games” to appear on MTV and cross over to a mainstream audience during the 1980s. Again, this was a highly segregated time. We know because of their initial unwillingness to show videos by Black artists, Prince didn’t even make it to MTV with the “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” videos until 1982—nearly two years after the network’s launch. However, he knew how to play the game by this point.One of the strategies that Prince employs is an appeal to Whiteness. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explains, “I use the terms white and whiteness to define the social process.” She quotes Ruth Frankenberg, who offered, “Whiteness is a location of structural advantage of race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a place from which white people look at ourselves and others and society. Third, whiteness refers to a set of cultural pra