An Introduction to Whiteness Studies

Published by vegankid | Filed under Whiteness

This post was started by kevin at Slant Truth. The book list has been added to by Melissa and myself.
What is Whiteness Studies?

From Dr. Gregory Jay, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Critical multiculturalism concerns itself with analyzing the inequalities of power that both motivate and result from practices of racial, ethnic, gender, class, or sexual discrimination; it is antiracist, dedicated to social justice and structural change, and connects U. S. ethno-racial conflict to its global contexts (see the essays collected in May, Critical Multiculturalism). Whiteness Studies attempts to trace the economic and political history behind the invention of “whiteness,” to challenge the privileges given to so-called “whites,” and to analyze the cultural practices (in art, music, literature, and popular media) that create and perpetuate the fiction of “whiteness.”

“Whiteness Studies” is not an attack on people, whatever their skin color. Instead, “Whiteness Studies” is an attempt to think critically about how white skin preference has operated systematically, structurally, and sometimes unconsciously as a dominant force in American—and indeed in global—society and culture. Thus it includes examining how white skin preference insinuates itself into the culture of communities of color as well, where we may find everything from prejudice against darker skinned people within the community to commercial practices of white-body imitation and surgery (nose jobs, skin creams, eye-lid alteration, etc.). The transnational character of white privilege results from the legacy of European colonial imperialism, so that Whiteness Studies may be usefully articulated with theories of globalization and postcoloniality as well.

Important books:

• Allen, Theodore. The Invention of the White Race
• Babb, Valerie. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture
• Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
• Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
• Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks
• Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
• Morrison, Toni.Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
• Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White
• Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness.
• Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters.
• Curry, Renée. White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, And Whiteness.
  

I don’t necessarily agree with everything these books have to say. I have a particular beef with Paul Gilroy. Nonetheless, this is a good introduction to the field.

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