Whiteness studies

About: Whiteness studies is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 525 publications have been published within this topic receiving 25572 citations.

Whiteness as Property

Abstract: Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege - a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched power. Next, Professor Harris examines how the concept of whiteness as property persists in current perceptions of racial identity, in the law's misperception of group identity and in the Court's reasoning and decisions in the arena of affirmative action. Professor Harris concludes by arguing that distortions in affirmative action doctrine can only be addressed by confronting and exposing the property interest in whiteness and by acknowledging the distributive justification and function of affirmative action as central to that task.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Abstract: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature". Author of "Beloved", "The Bluest Eye", "Song of Solomon", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

Abstract: This chapter seeks to explain the invisibility and modes of visibility of racism, race difference, and whiteness. It discusses a feminist commitment to drawing on women’s daily lives as a resource for analyzing society. The chapter draws on both theoretical and substantive analyses of race, racism, and colonialism in the United States and beyond. It argues that the discourse against interracial relationships entails specifically racialized constructions of white femininity in relation to racialized masculinities. The chapter suggests that white women and men were placed, respectively, as victim and rescuer in the discourse against interracial sexuality, vis-a-vis the supposed sexual threat posed by men of color toward white women. It also argues that both heterosexual and lesbian white women’s strategies for coping with the burdens that racism placed on interracial couples seemed at times to be distinctively “female” ones.

The wages of whiteness : race and the making of the American working class

Abstract: This is the new, fully updated edition of this now-classic study of working-class racism. Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to blacks. In a lengthy new introduction, Roediger surveys recent scholarship on whiteness, and discusses the changing face of labor in the twenty-first century.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

Abstract: Introduction: Bill Moore's Body 1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness 2. Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege 3. Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics 4. Whiteness and War 5. White Fear: O.J. Simpson and the Greatest Story Ever Sold 6. White Desire: Remembering Robert Johnson 7. Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics 8. "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": Antiblack Racism and White Identity 9. "Frantic to Join...the Japanese Army": Beyond the Black-White Binary 10. California: The Mississippi of the 1990s Notes Acknowledgments Index