Language Games and the Invisibility of White Priviledge

I continue to ponder how Martin Luther King can now be embraced by white conservatives but I think we might find some insight from Vienna and Wittgenstein. He writes “I have wanted to show by means of language-games the vague way in which we use ‘language’, ‘proposition’, ‘sentence’.[1] The public square of language includes common language games that have one group decentering the power position of others.

When we notice the language game of George Wallace and the counter move by Martin Luther King we recognize that the pre-civil rights American language game included explicit expressions of white privilege. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” was the sound byte from Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address.  Martin Luther King on the other hand called to mind a ‘color blind” vision. His I Have a Dream Speech won the language game eventually. One can surmise that for King the shift in the language game from explicit white privilege to colorblind would mean the end of white privilege.

The language game played out like this. Explicit white privilege fell out of acceptable language games in the United States. The language game played out. Explicit white privilege fell out of acceptable language games in the United States. Michelle Alexander describes this in the racialization of the criminal justice system in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  A similar language game takes place in theology outlined in the book Race:A Theological Account by J. Cameron Carter. He makes an important observation of a similar move in European philosophical circles. For the early (1770s) Kant German exceptionalism was explicit but by the time you get to the Critiques it has given way to an implicit white exceptionalism.

“What is important for my argument is that the specific term “race” (Rasse), which Kant consistently applied to the Negroes, Huns, and Hindustanis to explain their origins, has for whites now dropped out.”

J. Kameron Carter. Race: A Theological Account (p. 88). Kindle Edition.

The explicit privilege becomes invisible. Likewise white privilege in the late twentieth century becomes invisible color blind language game. “Rendering race invisible in all of this, Kant calls this not the work of whiteness but the task of the species as such.”

J. Kameron Carter. Race: A Theological Account (p. 89). Kindle Edition.

The insights from Carter and Alexander may change the perspective of black biblical hermeneutics.


[1] Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius Free Press: New York, 1990. P. 331.