White privilege through a prism...and then a blender: "The Whitest Girl" by Brenda Peynado

The most satisfying kind of story analyses for me are the ones where I feel like I've stated some kind of half-reasonable theme about a story. A theme, to wax pedantic for a second, is not the same as a subject. "Friendship" is not a theme. The story's attitude toward friendship is a theme, something like, "Friendship can be a solace, but also an anchor." While realizing that no statement of a theme is actually the theme itself--else, why would there be a need for a story?--it does feel more to me like I've done my work of analysis when I can at least arrive in the vicinity of some kind of thematic statement.

That's what makes Brenda Peynado's "The Whitest Girl" both such a joy and a frustration to work with. There's all kinds of mortar to build a thematic house from, but there seem to be eleven different blueprints within the story.

That's actually a good thing. This is an absolutely electric story; it's pulsing with raw power. I don't think the writer is even fully in control of the power of this story, which actually adds to its appeal. She's writing about the intersection of race, class, and gender in America, which is about as explosive a topic as we have today. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if all the powder kegs were kept away from the flames. Part of what made this story so instantly satisfying was watching the writer's Zippo get close to the barrels of dynamite over and over, wondering when things were finally going to blow.

But how to wrangle this explosiveness into some kind of statement of theme, some hint of "what it's really about"? You can't approach this story head-on; it will take a little bit of a roundabout approach. I think it might be good to start with why this story is enjoyable first, then extrapolate from what's enjoyable about it to what's meaningful.

Contrast to a similar idea that didn't work

The story is about a white girl who comes from a poor family and attends a majority Latino high school. She deals with prejudice, both the well-meaning and the not-so-well-meaning kinds, in a flip-the-script story about race. It called to mind a bad film from the 90s, one that had much higher ambitions than it achieved. The film was White Man's Burden. Essentially, it just took the familiar racial situation in America and flipped it--it was an alternate universe in which whites had historically been subjugated to blacks, and were now, although in some ways better off than they had been, still dealing with the legacy of racism.

The movie didn't really work for me. It has a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes, so apparently I'm not alone. It failed because flipping the script didn't really tell us anything new about racism. It told exactly the same story, just transcribed into a different color scheme. I think the point was to maybe shame white people into suddenly taking racism seriously, as though the sort of people who had stoutly resisted claims that black people still had it bad would suddenly, by seeing a white person have trouble finding a white doll for his kid, change their minds about everything. It was a little condescending and more than a little moralizing. 

Maybe it just needed a dash of Tarantino in it to make it work. 

What "Whitest Girl" did differently

"Whitest Girl" isn't an alternate universe. It's this world, just a corner of it where racism's logic operates a little differently. White privilege still exists, but this is about a place in the world where one white person is definitely at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It's tempting to be hasty and say the theme of the story is that if the world were reversed and privilege granted to another race, then that race would act much the same as whites do in their current role. But while that may be a tiny bit of what this story's about, it's way more complicated than that. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to make the story lie still long enough to pick out a consistent attitude about race in it.

One reason why is the incredibly effective use of the first-person plural ("we") narrator. "We" are the ones interacting with Terry, the white girl whose parents died and who heads home to a trailer to take care of her many siblings. While one part of "We" might by sympathetic toward Terry, there is always another voice that comes in to complicate what "We" collectively think about her.

The "we" narrator calls Terry a "Frankenstein cobbled together," but so is the narrator. That's why "We" can't really decide either what Terry means or what Terry teaches us. She is "made of what we hated, what hated us, the disinterest and disregard that bunched us together with these disgusting people, with their potatoes and bad music, bad manners, their self-satisfied boredom." From the moment "We" come in contact with Terry, "We" cannot decide what she signifies for us. "We" decide to follow her wherever she goes in order to make sense of her, but the project is doomed from the beginning:

We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz mel favor, how dare she?...Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.

The group cannot decide on the meaning of its surveillance or its aim right at the beginning, so it's no wonder they cannot agree on what they learn from the surveillance. There are a couple of notes the group keeps hitting, however. One is that they are resentful. Although it's clear Terry is poor--poorer than any of them--they still associate Terry with the people who "yelled at us in the grocery store, or assumed we couldn't speak English, or that we were somehow unintelligent." A second reoccurring idea is that Terry wants to be one of them. When they see her stop in the parking lot and almost look back at them, "We" think that "this meant that she wanted to be a part of our lives, that she regretted never inviting us over to her squalid trailer..."

"We" are torn between hating her for reminding us of other white people in society who have privileges we don't share. "We" also look down on her for having less than us, and, assuming she wishes she could be us, work to keep her excluded. Meanwhile, a few of us try to look at her with sympathy.

What's at stake

The notion of white privilege is a key concept in American culture right now. It's also a contentious one. Although most white people would probably concede that being white is, on the whole, more of an advantage than a disadvantage, if you happen to come across a white person who grew up poor or with shaky parents, they will likely bristle at the notion that they had it easy because they were white. They would say that yes, whiteness helps, but the benefits of whiteness can be offset by other things.

In this story, we have Terry's whiteness, which "We" go so far as to call "audacious" whiteness, pitted against her poverty. In society as a whole, being white brings privilege, but in the corner of society in this story, Terry is the other, Terry is the one with no privileges. So while "We" are figuring out what to do with Terry, the whole notion of white privilege is being interrogated by taking it out of its general context and putting it in a very specific exception.

How it resolves

"We" end up with a decision to make. Terry has started dating the janitor of the high school. "We" are all jealous. Ironically, "We" resent the janitor's refusal to treat us in the exotic and sexually stereotyped way Latina women are sometimes treated: "What magic did she have that none of us did? ...We were the color of smooth pecans, our eyes dark and full of mysteries, our plump lips deep purple and moistened." It's maddening to the girls that the janitor doesn't treat them as idealized abstractions, isn't impressed by their "stories about how our families had crossed this ocean or that desert or were pursued by an evil dictator." He has picked the plain white girl, and this shall not stand.

The girls decide to pry Terry away from the janitor in order to ruin their relationship by inviting her to one of the girls' quinceanera. But at the party, they learn a startling fact from one of the older boys there: the janitor was kicked out of his high school for raping a white girl at a party under circumstances almost exactly like the ones Terry is in at the moment. The girls have to figure out what to do. In that moment, it turns out that the nice thing to do and the mean thing to do coincide, so the divided "We" at last can agree on a plan. They finally manage to break the two up, although by the end it's not entirely clear the janitor was really justly accused.

What it all means

This is likely to be a story that everyone brings their pre-existing ideas of race to. Some people will say it proves that anyone can be a racist given the right conditions. Some will say it proves that white privilege is either a real thing or not such a real thing. Some will say that it merely shows that racial relations are more complicated than we think.

I think a large point of the underlying theme is related to the ever-shifting "We." Some parts of "We" seem to be kind. Some are obviously not kind. In the end, they get the janitor away from Terry, but it's not clear if they did it for good reasons, and it's not clear they even did the right thing. It will never be clear, because "We" is so riven, so full of contradictions, it's hard to figure out what is really motivating the group in power in this story.

And there's the theme. In the larger societal context, in which white people really do have some measure of privilege, white people often complain when blanket accusations are thrown at them. "Not all white people are racist!" they claim. They are, of course, right. But the problem is that "we" white people really are a "We." We may not think of ourselves as a group, but we seem that way to those outside our group. Within our "We," we're many voices, some good, some bad, and we can't even agree on what we all think. And many actions "We" take could conceivably have good or bad motives, such as putting drug offenders behind bars in record numbers. Is this to protect vulnerable black families, or to punish them?

When "We" are of so many different minds, it is impossible for outside groups to make judgments about our motives. While the dominant group watches outside groups to try to understand them, they are watching back. Like the reader in this story, every attempt of someone outside the group in power will be frustrated in an attempt to draw meaning by the sheer abundance of different meanings the "We" is constructing at any time.

Terry decides to go off and live as a cloistered at the end. I'm not sure that's a totally satisfying resolution to the story, but it is a reasonable resolution for outsiders to decide to withdraw from the society they can never hope to comprehend because it does not comprehend itself.