White anti-racists and belonging

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

In 1903, standing at the dawn of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the color line is the defining characteristic of American society. Well into the 21st century, Du Bois’s prescience sadly still rings true. Even when a society is built on a commitment to equality, and even with the election of its first black president, the United States has been unsuccessful in bringing about an end to the rampant and violent effects of racism, as numerous acts of racial violence in the media have shown. For generations, scholars of color, among them Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Franz Fanon, have maintained that whiteness lies at the center of the problem of racism. It is only relatively recently that the critical study of whiteness has become an academic field, committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness as a corrective to the traditional exclusive focus on the racialized “other.” Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is a growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege. CWS presumes a certain conception of racism that is connected to white supremacy. In advancing the importance of vigilance among white people, CWS examines the meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism. Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight will continue to ring true.

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.

Organizing out of mutual interest is a powerful anchor for rigorous, principled white antiracist struggle. The mutual interest approach emphasizes that everyone, including white people, has a stake in ending white supremacy. Yet there is much to learn about how grassroots activists understand and relate to mutual interest. To address this gap, the current study asks: How do white antiracists express their personal journeys of exploring and relating to their mutual interest? Using a participatory action research approach, interviews were conducted with 26 white antiracist organizers, and thematic analysis was used to create 5 themes presented in this paper. The themes reveal that: white antiracists do not first arrive to antiracist organizing space because of mutual interest; there are challenges that stand in the way of people identifying their mutual interest; disconnection from others and self is a steep cost of racism for white people; experiences and identities across class, ability, gender, and other salient identities are anchoring points for mutual interest; imagination and visioning a transformed world are intimately connected to shared stake. This study’s contributions include: the key role of organizations in fostering mutual interest, the importance of critical consciousness, and the holistic entry points to mutual interest.

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.

This chapter looks into the field of whiteness and one specific& theoretical framework: Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). It explores critiques of the framework while positing a different approach that better honors the contributions and connection to the liberation of Black, Indigenous, people of color. Since one of the critiques of CWS is that it rarely articulates a racial theory, this chapter explicates what racial theories undergird a Critical Study of Whiteness approach to race research& and how this approach can provide clearer theoretical framing for future practice and research in school psychology.

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.

Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop examines white American male literature for its social commentary on the construction of whiteness in the United States. Whiteness has always been a contested racial identity in the U.S., one in a state of construction and reconstruction throughout critical cultural and historical moments. This text examines how white American male writers have grappled with understanding themselves and their audiences as white beings. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop specifically brings a critical whiteness approach to American literary criticism and strengthens the growing interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies in the humanities. Critical whiteness studies shifts the attention from solely examining people and perspectives of color in race discourse to addressing whiteness as an essential component of race ideology. The primary contribution of this perspective is in how whites construct and see whiteness, for the larger purpose of exploring the possibilities of how they may come to no longer construct and see themselves through whiteness. Understanding this is at the heart of contemporary discussions of post-raciality. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop uses the following texts as canonical case studies: Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. Each underscores the dialectic of formation, deformation, and reformation of whiteness at specific socio-historical moments based upon anxieties about race possessed by whites and highlighted by white fictionists. The selected writers ultimately serve dually as co-constructors of whiteness and social critics of their times through their literature.

Critical media studies have long been interested in racial representations. One of the first articles in media studies to address whiteness explicitly was Richard Dyer's 1988 essay White, which appeared in Screen. Although questions about the politics of racial representation had certainly been on the table long before that-in the regulations of the motion picture industry, as well as critical writing, Dyer turned our attention to the study of whiteness and its representational power. Since that time, studies in whiteness have flourished in communication studies and beyond. While it might not be necessary to point out, but I still ijisist on doing so, that discussions about whiteness are not new. Whiteness and its conflation with nationality has long been reflected in legislative discourses about immigration and citizenship restrictions to popular discourses about who is American. People of color as well have long held practical knowledge about the workings of whiteness for their own survival in a white-dominated society. Knowledge about when to speak out and when to remain silent, when to look and when to avert gazes, have all played important roles in the ways that whiteness functions. Whiteness, however, is a slippery topic precisely because whiteness is not a fixed property per se. It does not inhere in bodies. Instead, whiteness serves a number of social functions that serve to reinforce a system of domination, not only in relation to race, but sexuality, gender, class, location, and, certainly, nationality. As Sarah Projansky and Kent Ono conclude in their analysis of films that appear to challenge whiteness, issue is not whiteness, but what whiteness is so often used to do (771). The two review essays here offer differing perspectives on the critical study of whiteness in the media. Raka Shome's essay, Outing Whiteness,focuses on the ways that whiteness serves as domination yet outs itself in the process of securing its social position. Her review of popular images demonstrates the ways that whiteness serves as the organizing principle yet remains dynamic in differing contexts to resecure its positionality. She argues that we need to study whiteness from a critical perspective despite the risk ofrecentering whiteness. In contrast, Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg's essay, Passing or Whiteness on the Edge of Town, takes the margin as her starting point and the role of passing in negotiating relations with whiteness.

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.

Based on interviews and participant observation of a white antiracist organization, this study asks: Can white people become antiracist? What role do white antiracist organizations play in this process? Bridging literature on whiteness and racialization with theories on habitus, I argue that white antiracist organizations act as incubators for white people to learn the “high culture” of the racial justice field, which is dominated by Black actors. White antiracist organizations provide a space for white people to emotionally process the white habitus and their own racist behaviors, colorblind or otherwise. White antiracists show a shift in behavior and ability to participate in the racial justice field with new-to-them forms of cultural capital but experience a rupture with the white habitus that isolates them as people who are white and antiracist in the larger racial field of the United States. White antiracists experience a cleft habitus that generates discomfort. I expand on the concept of the cleft habitus by including race as central to the process and highlighting the experience of the cleft habitus as it unfolds. These findings expand our understandings of whiteness, habitus, and antiracism as race and racism become more central to conversations about equity in society.

Revolutionary Suicide

This essay analyses how Australian postcolonial discourses, influenced by both Republicanism and Reconciliation, deploy the trope of woman to signify political change in both feminist and cultural debates about belonging, national legitimacy and sovereignty. I point out that white feminist rejection of the Queen in favour of embracing indigeneity is itself complicit with a history of ‘incorporating’ and assimilating indigeneity – a complicity that is sublimated in favour of a triumphant rejection of Imperial white womanhood. The essay looks at a contemporary Australian novel, media depictions of Paul Keating's ‘embrace’ of Queen Elizabeth II (as a kind of captivity narrative), critical whiteness studies’ ‘rejection’ of the Queen and the misrecognition of Australia's distinct characteristics as a ‘settler culture’ (that incorporates indigeneity) within Australian feminist debates and claims of ‘transgression’ that are made for interracial relationships in Australia.

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

Admissions of white privilege and/or racism are common among white anti-racists and others who want to combat their racism. In this article, I argue that because such admissions are conscious attempts to address unconscious habits, they are unhappy speech acts and contrary to their implied aims. Admissions of white privilege or racism can be conceptualized as Foucauldian confessions that are pleasurable to enact but ultimately reinforce white people’s feelings of goodness and allow them to avoid addressing this racism. I ground my argument in Shannon Sullivan’s analysis of white privilege and Sara Ahmed’s critique of confessions of racism/privilege to show that in addition to doing no anti-racist work at the moment of saying, these confessions actually reify white privilege deeper into the unconscious and make it harder to address. Sullivan’s work, I conclude, offers white people a more productive way forward than their unhappy performative declarations of privilege. A white person’s understanding of her confessing habit cannot break this habit, but it might orient her toward examining what sorts of anti-racist moves do work.