Dominant White Culture and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 29

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter there has been an increase in discussions around race within American cultural discourse. I am no expert on these issues, but I have increased my own reading and thinking about racial issues. I recently spotted within one of the books I have been studying a chapter that triggered a mental connection to A Confederacy of Dunces.

In 2021, the city of Winona, MN, had as its "Community Read" Debby Irving's Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Cambridge, MA: Elephant Room Press, 2014). Although I did not participate in community discussions, I decided to study that book. In chapter thirty-six of the book, Irving discusses what she calls "The Dominant White Culture." She claims that, as she has herself studied race, she has heard in many workshops and meetings the same list of traits that are attributed to the Dominant White Culture. Let's call it the DWC.

Here are the traits listed in her book that are behaviors of the DWC: 1) avoiding conflict, 2) valuing formal education over life experience, 3) feeling a right to comfort and entitlement, 4) feeling a sense of urgency, 5) being competitive, 6) practicing emotional restraint, 7) being prone to judgment, 8) engaging in "either / or" thinking, 9) believing in one right way to do things, 10) acting defensively, 11) being status-oriented. According to Irving, researchers from the Harvard Business School found that these cultural traits made it difficult to recruit and retain non-white employees.

This sort of characterization easily becomes a stereotype. Irving, to her credit, admits that people who culturally identify as white may come from one of a variety of cultures, not just this one, and that many people who are not white have adopted this culture. However, I still find her characterization bends one's thinking toward stereotyping. To me, the qualities in this list are not necessarily white nor necessarily dominant. I am not endorsing this summary of the DWC as an accurate description of American culture. Still, whether or not this DWC has sociological veritas, it is a way to interpret our society.

When I read the above list, it struck me that it is similar to the sort of list that Ignatius Reilly decries in A Confederacy of Dunces. When I initally got to the end of the list, I mentally said, "Someone with these traits would tell Ingatius to GO TO WORK!" Ignatius also characterizes Black culture as being different from this DWC. Confederacy's culture critique is not as simple as this dichotomy: the novel satirizes the corruption of money, but Ignatius is himself satirized by the author, forming a reverse satire and dialectic.

Thesis: Compare Debby Irving's characterization of the Dominant White Culture in her writings with Ignatius Reilly's characterization of the same. Make sure to situate this comparison by showing how the novel criticizes Ignatius's own attitudes (and possibly Irving's as well).