Critical Whiteness Studies

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew W. Hughey, ‘The Janus Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism’, Sociology Compass 3/6 (2009): 920–936, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2009.00244.x Author’s introduction Over the past 20 years, the study of white racial identity has received in‐depth, interdisciplinary attention. Under sociological scrutiny, the study of whiteness has traversed quite a few stages: from understandings of whiteness as a category replete with social privileges, as a mere reflection of non‐racial (often class‐based) dynamics, to its most recent turn that emphasizes the contextual and intersectional heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of the increased attention to context and political disputes, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum – from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist – is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white racial identity. Motivated by this academic milieu, this guide offers an overview of the major scholarship that address white nationalism & white antiracism, appropriate online materials, and examples from a sample syllabus. Together, these resources aim to assist in understanding the general processes and contexts that produce ‘whiteness’ and imbue it with meaning, the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity identities become embedded, and how whiteness simultaneously possesses material and symbolic privileges alongside diverse and seemingly antagonistic experiences. Author recommends The complexity of whiteness McDermott, Monica and Frank L. Samson 2005. ‘White Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States.’ Annual Review of Sociology 31 : 245–61. Any contemporary apprentice of the sociological study of white racial identity should read this essay. Monica McDermott and her student Frank Samson combine to provide a robust overview of the literature. They walk the tightrope of balancing both a broad coverage of the literature with the depth that key studies necessitate. In so doing, they put a finger on the key dilemma of studying white racial identity today: ‘Navigating between the long‐term staying power of white privilege and the multifarious manifestations of the experience of whiteness remains the task of the next era of research on white racial and ethnic identity’ (2005: 256). Duster, Troy 2001. ‘The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness.’ Pp. 113–33 in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness , edited by E. B. Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica and M. Wray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In this essay – part of a larger volume on whiteness that I also recommend – Duster synthesizes disparate approaches to the study of whiteness. Demonstrating how some scholars understand white racial identity as a contextual and cognitive category (‘fluid’), while some frame whiteness as a structural and fixed category of material privileges (‘frozen’), Duster asks ‘who is right?’ He answers via the metaphor of whiteness‐as‐water. In one moment, whiteness can morph into vapor as a contextual and unstable identity, while the next moment it can instantly transform into a harsh and unyielding form of ice‐like privilege. Duster’s essay is an excellent retort for those who argue that we should move ‘beyond’ race to the utopian realm of color‐blind individualism. Duster demonstrates, although the example of the supposedly egalitarian New Deal, that while race is socially constructed, the legacy of racism remains a historically reproduced and real social fact – denying the existence of race perpetuates racial inequality. Duster closes the chapter with a personal anecdote that grounds the historical example in modern, interactional, and everyday life. Perry, Pamela 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perry gives us two ethnographic studies in one – that of two northern California high schools: one located in a predominantly white, if economically diverse, suburb, the other situated in a multiracial urban community. Perry persistently and systematically probes the complexities of white racial identity in the practices and discourses of the youth attending these high schools. She finds that whites in the predominantly white, suburban high school do not see themselves as a unique race and take their racial identity for granted – they understand distinctly white practices as normative rather than as constitutive of a subjective worldview. In contrast, the whites at the multiracial, urban high school possess a more critical and comparative view of race and their own place in the racial order. In sum, Perry argues that whiteness is a set of complex, contradictory, and multiple subject positions. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matt Wray brings the tools of cultural sociology viz‐á‐viz ‘symbolic boundaries’ to the interrogation of the moniker White Trash . Wray problematizes this relatively normalized term to question its origins and how it persists. Drawing upon literary texts, folklore, diaries, medical articles, and social scientific analyses from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, Wray documents the multiple meanings that were projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Of particular import, Wray demonstrates how white supremacist ideas about class and region became dominant through public health campaigns and eugenic reformations. Impoverished whites found themselves the targets of officials and activists who framed them as ‘filthy’ or “feebleminded,” and thus a threat to the purity and supremacy of the white race. This text is particularly informative for its demonstration of how white supremacist logic was not only focused on racial ‘otherness’ but used the axes of class and location to directly demarcate and attack those seen as ‘white’ yet somehow racially deficient and unworthy. Winant, Howard 2004. ‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics.’ Pp. 3–16 in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society , edited by Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and April Burns. New York, NY: Routledge. In applying his now classic approach formulated in concert with Michael Omi ( Racial Formations , 1986), Howard Winant applies the ‘racial projects’ thesis to whites: ‘I think it would be beneficial to attempt to sort out alternative conceptions of whiteness, along with the politics that both flow from and inform these conceptions. … focusing on five key racial projects, which I term, far right, new right, neoconservative, neoliberal, and new abolitionist ’ (2004: 6). Hence, Winant maps a theory of white identity formation onto a bifurcated ‘culture war.’ Labeling this phenomenon ‘racial dualism as politics,’ Winant advances a paradigm in which whiteness is undergoing ‘a profound political crisis.’ Winant’s essay is especially important for those that wish to emphasize the heterogeneity of white racial identity, as he provides Weberian‐like ‘ideal types’ for the comprehension of the racial‐political landscape. Hughey, Matthew W. (forthcoming 2010). ‘Navigating the (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of “Hegemonic Whiteness.”’ Ethnic & Racial Studies. In this work, I build upon many of the aforementioned studies. Like Pamela Perry (2002) I dive into two ethnographic sites, but of much different breed. To interrogate how whiteness might be akin to ‘vapor and ice’ (Duster 2001) and to provide a robust answer to the dilemma of the ‘long‐term staying power of

Revolutionary Suicide

Hazing—a form of interpersonal and community violence often minimized and normalized as tradition—can negatively impact students, undercut university missions, and contribute to harmful campus environments. While student hazing is a problem, postsecondary leaders are also grappling with legacies of whiteness and white supremacy that have shaped campus culture, including taken-for-granted norms and traditions. Using Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) as a framework (Cabrera et al., 2017), this qualitative study explored how perceptions of campus hazing may reflect and contribute to perpetuating white supremacy in a sample of U.S. universities. Across 12 institutions, 7 public and 5 private, 345 individuals—169 staff members, 167 students, and nine alumni—were interviewed, primarily in focus groups, sharing perceptions of campus culture and hazing climate. Tradition, with themes of alumni involvement and influence, pride, and space, is discussed, illuminating how whiteness and white supremacy is reinscribed via campus hazing.

While critical whiteness studies have been a robust field of research for the last several decades, scholars have recently called for a refocus in critical whiteness studies to address the current cultural and political climate within educational spaces. The purpose of this article is to answer this call and highlight ways white teachers and teacher educators can begin to use racial reflexivity as a means of dismantling racism and white privilege in our society. Here, I utilize one model of white racial identity development to contemplate and interrogate my own teaching history within five vignettes. By placing these vignettes within the framework of critical whiteness studies and white racial identity development, I am able to re-present how I have counteracted my own race-evasiveness and to outline ways whites can seek to do the same.

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Using culturally sensitive language for race.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

This article examines the complex social production of white racial identity. Specifically, the author theorizes white people's fear of people of color and make a case for conceiving of white racial identities as profoundly ambivalent. Drawing from a larger ethnographic interview study conducted in a small, rural, white community in the Midwest of the United States, and grounded in critical whiteness studies, this article explores how Delores, an elementary school teacher, experienced being white, and how being white for Delores was very much intertwined with ways of thinking and feeling that she had learned growing up in this rural community. The purpose is to describe and theorize white identity and whiteness in ways that avoid essentializing them, but that also keep in view white privilege and a larger white supremacist context. A growing number of researchers and educators argue that our previous conceptions of white identity have too often hurt rather than helped our critical pedagogies with white students. This article, then, contributes to a more nuanced and helpful portrait of white racial identity that we might draw on in our social justice efforts.

As the field of critical whiteness studies (CWS) grows, some white scholars argue that only whites should undertake the study of whiteness. Other white scholars acknowledge the contributions of scholars of Color to the academy, yet rarely draw on the scholarship of authors of Color to push the field to grow. This commentary critiques these phenomena by tracing the scholarly lineage of CWS and highlighting Asian American scholars’ theorizing of whiteness. It concludes with a bilingual poem to illustrate how Asian American scholars can counter both the exclusion of their voices in CWS and the ongoing violence against the Asian Diasporas as escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence

Sport management classrooms prepare practitioners and decision makers to work in Sport for Development (SfD). A core issue within SfD is a lack of critical racial reflexivity, particularly with racially White professionals, which maintains inequitable power structures and keeps SfD programs from reaching their intended goal of facilitating positive outcomes. This study, informed by critical Whiteness studies, aimed to understand how White undergraduate sport management students critically reflected upon race while participating in an SfD service-learning course. Analyzing written reflections completed in the course, we found that students utilized Race Evasiveness and Race Explicitness, despite course content and SfD practice explicitly focused on race. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Critiquing how critical whiteness studies (CWS) in US education has strayed towards a predominant focus on how white people understand their relationship to whiteness and away from understanding how whiteness oppresses People of Colour, Matias and Boucher articulated a Black whiteness studies approach to the critical study of whiteness that eschews white epistemological standpoints, engages the works of Scholars of Colour and expands beyond a focus on developing white people’s racial consciousness. However, their articulation of a Black whiteness studies falls short of addressing Black communities’ specific racial positioning, the unique ways Black people suffer under whiteness and the situated knowledges of Black communities. In this paper, I theorise at the intersections of CWS, endarkened feminisms and afropessimsim to extend Matias and Boucher’s work to propose an endarkened paradigm for critical studies of whiteness.

Grounded in critical whiteness studies and informed by the practices and goals of autoethnography, this article narrates and analyses two stories for what they might teach us about problems of belonging for white anti-racists. In the first story, I recount a verbal attack by a white person against another white person during a conference. I interpret the attack as a scapegoating ritual meant to secure the attacker’s identity and belonging as an anti-racist, and then explore how this attack is a repetition of the kinds of scapegoating engaged in by white people against people of colour. In the second story, I narrate a heated argument I had with my mother during George W. Bush’s second term as president of the U.S. I use the story to consider white people’s fears of abandonment and how these fears might undermine anti-racist pedagogies.

This study examines the relationship among White antiracism, colorblind racial ideology (CBRI), and White privilege awareness. We use Critical Race Theory (CRT) to frame the historical context of racism in the U.S. and the emergence of racist ideologies. We examine the extent to which White privilege awareness mediates the relationship between CBRI and antiracist practices among White people. We found that (1) participants’ antiracist practices were increased the more they rejected power‐evasive forms of CBRI, (2) people who were more aware of their White privilege were also more driven toward antiracist practices, and (3) respondents’ awareness of their White privilege was enhanced as they rejected power evasive forms of CBRI. We also found that White people were more likely to participate in antiracist practices when they rejected power evasion CBRI partly because rejecting CBRI enhanced their awareness of White privilege. Our results suggest that the fight against racism requires White people to acknowledge and dismantle the privileges that come with being a member of a dominant group. We contend that CRT is a powerful framework for psychology because it helps resolve the problem of understanding how structural phenomena become ideologies that shape the way people believe and behave.

Despite extensive research on institutional racism in UK universities, major gaps remain in understanding the contrasting experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) and White staff across all levels of higher education. This study addresses that gap by exploring the lived experiences of 18 staff members at a post-1992 university, drawing on Braun and Clarke’s six-step thematic analysis alongside critical race theory. Four key themes emerged: ‘White privilege’, ‘Discrimination and exclusion’, ‘Impact on self-perception and behaviour’, and a striking, verbatim-titled theme from a White participant (also the title of this article): ‘I’m managed by a White man who’s managed by a White man who’s managed by a White woman who’s managed by a White man’. Findings expose the deeply embedded nature of racism within the institution, evident in exclusionary practices, unequal career progression and the persistence of White privilege. Both BAME and White participants emphasised the urgent need for real change, and they called for greater accountability, transparency, and diversification of leadership. This study contributes to a broader understanding of institutional inequality and aligns with several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It supports SDG 4 (Quality Education) by exposing the inequities embedded within academic environments; SDG 5 (Gender Equality) by addressing intersecting forms of discrimination; SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) through its critique of barriers to fair progression; SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by calling for systemic reform; and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) by promoting inclusive, accountable, and transparent institutional practices.