Whiteness

Associated with archaic terms such as Aryan, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, and Caucasian and often assumed to be an inherited biological reality, whiteness is in fact a socially, historically, and geographically constructed understanding of racial identity. Usually constructed against a perceived nonwhite other, there are multiple lived experiences of whiteness, varying across time and space and differing by scale. Understandings of whiteness shape both sparsely populated rural areas and multiracial urban locations, albeit in different ways, and there is no singular, essential white identity.

Whiteness is most commonly associated with pale, pinkish-colored skin and people of Northern European descent. European colonial and U.S. expansionist practices were central to the construction of modern racial whiteness. In the 19th century, U.S. national identities such as Irish and Italian were often envisaged by the elites of Northern European descent as a stepping stone between the inferior African black race and the superior white Anglo-Saxon. Strategies such as employers hiring European immigrants rather than African Americans, and the subsequent benefits of unionization, saw associations develop between whiteness and working-class identities in the United States. As a result, people of these formerly disparaged European nationalities achieved whiteness, so to speak, and gained the benefits of a white racial identity in a racially segregated society. In the 20th century, throughout the United States, associations between whiteness, wealth, and power were strengthened by the construction and maintenance of racialized landscapes such as sundown towns and whites-only suburbs.

In industrialized Western societies, a myth of color blindness developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, rendering whiteness largely unexamined. Consequently, discussing whiteness is, to some extent, a taboo subject, except among explicit racists whose appeals to white identities are often linked with hate groups such as neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. Recognizing the negative associations of overt appeals to whiteness, many white people avoid using the term white, instead articulating whiteness through discourses of normality, nature, nationality, culture, and landscape. For example, some espouse the need to preserve the “European” heritage or to protect specific cultures. In this manner, demands that whiteness be politically recognized are made using the language of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism and through rhetorical appeals to heritage, tradition, ethnicity, and genealogy.

An associated concept is that of white privilege. This refers to the everyday unearned structural advantages that accrue to people whom others identify as white. Often unconscious and unrecognized by the beneficiaries, arguably because of the taboo surrounding articulations of whiteness, white privilege structures Western societies in a manner that positions the values and beliefs of the white (and usually middle class) population as the norm against which the behaviors and practices of others are contrasted. Commonly associated with the practices of institutionalized racism, white privilege reconfigures understandings of racism to explain the advantages gained from whiteness. These advantages, however, vary with the shifting boundaries of whiteness and are reconfigured by class, gender, sexuality, age, and other demographic characteristics.