Whiteness Studies

Origins and Early Advocates

Historical texts delineate how racial categories influenced early American ideology through justification of conquests, disenfranchisement, and unequal treatment of some for the sake of progress. Slavery was part of the structure of American life leading to wealth for the landowners that eventually legitimized the institutional order of American race relations. That the color line was the 20th century's principal challenge was established in W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk in the early 1900s, with his contention that race was both invisible and the “norm” to whites while people of color understood the “rules” of racism. Consequently, this invisibility allowed whites to see themselves as individuals rather than members of a race. Power more than skin color was at the core of the binary black/white construction, as evidenced by Jews, Italians, Irish, and others being considered nonwhite at specific times in history, Germans and Swedes were considered nonwhite in Benjamin Franklin's 18th-century classification.

Formally appearing in the 1980s as a recognized field, whiteness studies postulates that race is an ideological and/or social construct rather than a biological fact and seeks to explain how our understanding of race has been erroneously created, misunderstood, and used. Cornerstone texts like David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness and George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness each examine how whiteness intersects with socioeconomic issues and the resulting inequalities, as do hundreds of studies adding to the literature. More radical approaches, like the journal Race Traitor and its subsequent anthology by Noel Garvey and John Ignatiev, [Page 2180]point out the dysfunctional nature of whiteness and the necessity to abolish and disown it. Advocates emphasize that despite significant progress through the civil rights movement and antiapartheid rulings throughout the world, whiteness remains the power center of many cultures, resulting in continuing marginalization of nonwhites.

A 2010 study reports that undergraduate and graduate courses in whiteness studies have been instituted at more than 30 universities in the United States, more than 300 refereed articles have been published in academic journals, and the field has been explored and debated at numerous conferences. Unlike multicultural investigations of race that study the “problems” of racial/ethnic minorities, whiteness studies reverses the focus by offering a conceptually new approach to race relations. Instead, it challenges the established canon and calls attention to the construction of white identity and the impact of white dominance upon society. Through a variety of experiential techniques such as self-reflection, autobiography, analysis of history, and personal narratives, participants develop “race cognizance” to recognize the practices that have normalized whiteness and to disown the associated privileges of their whiteness. The intent is to benefit from an ideological critique of whiteness for an educated understanding of its global implications.

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