Domestic Orientalism Or Whites As Pariah
How Progressive Liberalism Made the White Male into its Object of Domination
In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, two eighteenth-century Persian travelers arrive in Paris and become objects of fascinated scrutiny. In one letter, Rica recounts how Parisians, filled with awe at encountering these exotic oriental subjects from faraway and mysterious lands, frozen in ancient worlds untouched by progress, crowd around him asking enthusiastically: “Oh! Oh! Is he a Persian? What a most extraordinary thing! How can one be a Persian?” The question captures the essence of the Enlightenment’s gaze, the Eastern subject as curiosity, as specimen, as problem requiring explanation—his very existence a puzzle to be solved by those whose own existence requires no justification. Two centuries later, if one were to translate the sentiments Montesquieu satirized into our contemporary idiom, the formulation would have to read differently: “Oh! Oh! Is he a straight white male? What a most extraordinary thing! How can one be a straight white male?”
The inversion is striking and deserves to be lingered over. For two centuries, the imperial gaze traveled outward, from the metropolitan centers of European civilization toward the peripheral worlds it sought to know, classify, administer, and improve. The Oriental was the object of this gaze, rendered as static where Europe was dynamic, irrational where Europe was rational, sensual where Europe was disciplined, despotic where Europe was free. Now the gaze has turned inward, and the figure who once stood at the center of this world—the white man, heir to the Enlightenment, bearer of civilizational triumph—finds himself repositioned as its object. He has become the pathology requiring diagnosis, the backward subject requiring the tutelage of those more advanced in consciousness than himself. How did this happen? As every good story of modern man-made horrors, we start from the university and its authorized representations of whiteness.
For the past three decades, within the academic ruling regime of progressive neoliberalism, whiteness has been constituted as a peculiar kind of object. It is not merely a demographic designation, racial or ethnic, or a marker of historical advantage but something closer to an ontological condition, an invisible structuring presence that explains outcomes, determines guilt, and requires perpetual examination, confession, and remediation. Whiteness is represented as simultaneously everywhere and nowhere—an unmarked norm that must be rendered visible, a pervasive complicity that cannot be escaped, a form of inheritance that burdens its bearers with obligations that can never be discharged. The white subject does not simply possess certain advantages that might be redistributed or certain histories that might be acknowledged; the white subject is a problem, a site of pathology requiring interminable therapeutic intervention.
I do not find it surprising that the critical vocabularies of “emancipation” were instrumentalized to legitimate the hierarchies and asymmetries of a globalized order in which cosmopolitan elites consolidated power while working populations fragmented along identity lines. Critical theory is its own form of domination. In this new order, a new moral economy took hold that recoded the historic sources of male identity—nation, craft, fatherhood, martial virtue, religious faith—primarily as problems to be managed, as sites of potential toxicity requiring therapeutic intervention and bureaucratic oversight. The figure of the young Western man, particularly the white working-class male, was reconstituted as a residual category, the embodiment of historical guilt, unearned privilege, and exclusionary power.
In a perverse inversion, the young Western male was normatively Orientalized within the dominant discourse of his own society: represented as backward, irrational, potentially violent, and requiring enlightenment by progressive elites. Muslims once had fanatical rage. The colonized were once children in need of management. Now it is the white working class that is irrational, stagnant, prone to fanaticism, incapable of self-rule, and therefore requiring the tutelage of rational administration. This discourse legitimates domination by casting it as a civilizing (de-civilizing?) mission: the backward white native would be elevated, modernized, brought into history by his enlightened masters. The managerial gaze transformed political subjugation into pedagogical benevolence.
