Whiteness

Whiteness, according to Ruth Frankenberg, can be understood to have three interrelated components. First, whiteness can be seen as a location of structural advantage that white people occupy in society. Second, whiteness is a standpoint from which white people understand the world and their position in it. Third, whiteness is a set of cultural practices that—in white settler societies such as the United States and Canada—usually are dominant but also unmarked and unnamed. Accordingly, in places such as the United States and Canada, whiteness is hidden as the normative “way of life” by which all other cultural ways of being are measured; it forms the taken-for-granted and hidden framework that gives meaning to events, social actions, and phenomena, and it privileges white people over all others in such spaces.

As a location of structural advantage, whiteness can be seen as a form of unacknowledged social privilege that confers advantage on white people. For social scientists generally and for critical geographers more specifically, then, it is the power to define the terms under which social reality is understood without ever needing to acknowledge its own cultural specificity that makes whiteness so problematic. In this sense, whiteness becomes a set of practices that confers advantage—or “white privilege”—on particular members of society, usually without their knowledge. Thus, it is through the banal practices of everyday life that whiteness is constituted and reconstituted, and in so doing it can be seen as a key component of what has been called the “racial formation” of places such as the United States and Canada.

Until very recently, whiteness had not been studied much by geographers in the United States for the very simple reason that academic geography in the United States is itself dominantly white and that whiteness has been, until very recently, a hidden category for white academics. Thus, white geographers have been unaware of the white privilege that structures their relations with colleagues of color. Studies of whiteness in geography developed as a result of a wider interest in place and the politics of identity that arose during the early 1990s as a part of the cultural turn in geography, where geographers began to critically analyze socially constructed categories of identity such as race, class, sexuality, gender, age, and ability. Within this context, critical human geographers began to investigate the social construction of dominant identity categories such as masculinity and heterosexuality. Studies of the dominant category of whiteness have developed only within the past 10 years in geography.

Now that geographers are moving beyond programmatic arguments (i.e., arguments about the need to study whiteness), we are starting to see substantive empirical studies of whiteness that help us to understand the complexities, contradictions, and nuances of white identities and their spatial configurations. Thus, geographers have begun to study phenomena such as the historical–geographic antecedents of some of the structural advantages conferred on white people in the context of dominantly (or hegemonically) white everyday life, historical geographies of the banal practices and taken-for-granted sociospatial relations that serve to constitute specific spaces of whiteness, and the complexities—and especially the contradictions—of whiteness as they are played out in particular places at specific times. Overall, such studies provide us with[Page 540] a better understanding of the social geographies of racialization that constitute society and space in the dominant white spaces of the United States and Canada.

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