After Whiteness

Theoria, 2001

The call-in show on Wisconsin Public Radio in 1995 began with the host skilfully introducing me as an historian who tried to explain how a white identity had come to seem so important to so many working people in the United States. We talked about efforts to understand why such significant numbers of people came to see themselves not as workers, but as white workers; not as women but as white women, and so on. And then to the phones and eager callers: Why do African countries make so little progress? Aren't African Americans racist too? Isn't their "reverse racism" the biggest problem? Hasn't the welfare system enlarged a parasitic, amoral nonwhite underclass? The barrage of such questions, on public radio in a quite liberal city, took virtually the whole hour. The last caller, an African American worker at the University of Wisconsin, initially offered no question but a comment. All of the prior questions, she observed, focused on people of colour. Despite the subject of my work, she continued, and despite the moderator's unambiguous introduction, no caller had deigned to discuss whiteness at all. If I were an expert on race, the white callers had been certain that my role was to contest or to endorse accusations and generalisations concerning those who were not white. Why was it so hard to discuss whiteness? The talk show took me back to an incident which had occurred some time earlier at the University of Missouri. One day, during a break in an undergraduate seminar on slavery in the United States, I distributed a newspaper article summarising the results of a study on so-called "self-segregation" by college students of colour. The study sharply challenged the prevailing academic folklore that campuses are segregated in daily life because "they" (that is, students of colour) choose to sit by themselves in the cafeteria and otherwise to isolate themselves from the larger, largely white, student body. Instead, the researchers showed, students of colour were far more likely than white students to step across the colour line, whether in dining, studying, or dating. They, far more than white students, were experienced in intercultural exchanges. When I asked for reactions to the study, the sev

2017

THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness. Our attempt to revivify whiteness studies from its demise during the first decade of the twenty-first century is necessary because, in the words of one anonymous reviewer of this manuscript, whiteness studies had become "exhausted. Stagnant. Its momentum stalled in the wake of post-racial self-congratulations. Tedious. .. Critical Race Theory in whiteface. Insular and self-congratulatory. Mattering mostly only in the academy with little impact on or a relationship to social policy or to those outside of the academy." To counter such a demise, our collection offers broadly engaging analyses that inform academic readers interested in rhetoric, social media, whiteness studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, communication studies, and critical race theory in both upper division and graduate classes as well as general readers interested in social media, film, school testing, and technology. Provocative in tone and argument, our collection invites these audiences into further discussions and actions that interrupt racialized whiteness in twenty-first-century culture; as such, our collection promotes rhetorical analyses as a productive means of fostering such discussions and actions. We three coeditors of Rhetorics of Whiteness also coedited a 2004 special edition of Rhetoric Review that focused on whiteness studies as an important site for developing antiracist and antiwhiteness tactics. But our scholarly call resulted in only a few scholarly projects, such as Jennifer Trainor's Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School. One result of our collaboration, however, is that we periodically chat about the state of whiteness in U.S. culture. Recently we noted two seemingly contradictory cultural trends that intrigue us: the momentum of whiteness studies as an active research field has waned during the past decade even as the two elections of President Barack Obama have rendered white an operative term in mainstream discourses. Given this emergence of white in mainstream discourses, the need for whiteness studies as a means for theorizing, analyzing, interpreting, and challenging racialized whiteness seems more urgent than ever. So we decided to create this edited collection, Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in

2003

African American writers and theorists have represented and analyzed whiteness for over a century; such analysis has been necessary for social and physical survival. Only within the past decade have white scholars heeded the call to interrogate whiteness as an ethnicity and to come to terms with its accompanying benefits of power, privilege and cultural dominance. Whiteness studies examines race as performance, perception, ideological category and social reality, acknowledging that while race is a biological fiction, the lived experience of race is shaped by very real existing structural and institutional inequalities. From the inception of what is now the United States, race has been an organizer of power, although white colonizers did not think of themselves as raced. Colonists conceived of race as a quality of the other. Consequently, “whiteness” was defined by absence or negation, particularly of slavery, synonymous in the minds of 18th century U.S. whites with blackness. Following “Enlightenment” philosophies of humanity, the prevailing notion of whiteness came to mean universality and normality while refusing to acknowledge any racial character. By the twentieth century, whiteness was redefined and policed by court battles over segregation and immigration law. Changing census categories currently appear to offer more freedom to redefine one’s race, but nostalgia for an imagined white core of U.S. identity lingers. Whiteness theorists therefore argue for the abolition of the white race and its accompanying racial privilege and domination. They call for treason to whiteness through solidarity and anti-racist forms of white identity. Whiteness studies is crucial to contemporary understandings of “race,” as well as the inevitable intersections of race, ethnicity, social class, gender and sexuality.

Lingua Franca, 1996

Sociological Forum, 2001

Blauner (1995, Racism and Antiracism in World Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), Winant (1998, Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(4): 755–766) and Bonnett (1997, New Communities 22(1): 97–110) all express concern over the construction of “racism” as a white-only phenomenon and the corresponding degree to which whiteness is essentialized as a negative identity. This paper explores how white antiracism activists mediate between a static construction of “white racism” and a more contextual understanding of racism and possibilities for white activism. While whiteness is clearly hegemonic in the larger social world, within movements for racial justice, whiteness is often seen as suspect. Given this, white antiracism activists spend a fair amount of their activist hours negotiating a problematic identity. This paper explores the mechanisms by which such an identity is negotiated. I conclude that while white activism is complicated by a definition of racism that tends to essentialize whiteness, the activists have found ways to empower themselves and to conceptualize their relationship to racism and antiracism activism in a less rigid way. All of this contributes to our understanding of the complexity of white identity and efforts to demonstrate how it is an identity that, like other identities, is always in formation.

2016

Part of the African American Studies Commons, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Child Psychology Commons, Educational Sociology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Multicultural Psychology Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, School Psychology Commons, Social Psychology Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, and the Sociology of Culture Commons Author Manuscript This is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2022

In this essay, I reflect on and detail some of my experiences navigating the question of what it means for white scholars and white researchers to critically engage their own whiteness within the context of educational research. Considering my current academic role as a faculty member who works primarily with graduate students in educational leadership, students who include white people who are seeking to better understand racism and white supremacy, this reflective essay details my thoughts regarding white people who wish to use educational research to uncover, expose, and disrupt whiteness and white supremacy within schools and contexts that are school adjacent, such as education organizations and education non-profits. I walk the reader through various aspects of my own journey understanding my racialized self, how racism and white supremacy connect to Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) as a field of inquiry, and ending with my considerations for white scholars.

Men and Masculinities, 2012

Critical Whiteness Praxis in Higher Education : Considerations for the Pursuit of Racial Justice on Campus, 2022

Rhetoric Review, 2020