Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege; the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and within the context of systemic racism; and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the societal compositions, perceptions, and group behaviors of white people. It is an interdisciplinary arena of inquiry that has developed beginning in the United States from white trash studies and critical race studies, particularly since the late 20th century. It is focused on what proponents describe as the cultural, historical, and sociological aspects of people identified as white, and the social construction of "whiteness" as an ideology tied to social status.
Pioneers in the field include W. E. B. Du Bois ("Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization", 1890; Darkwater, 1920), James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time, 1963), Theodore W. Allen (The Invention of the White Race, 1976, expanded in 1995), historian David Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness, 1991), author and literary critic Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992), and Ruth Frankenberg (White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, 1993).
By the mid-1990s, numerous works across many disciplines analyzed whiteness, and it has since become a topic for academic courses, research and anthologies. Some syllabuses associate the dismantling of white supremacy as a stated aim in the understanding of whiteness, while other sources view the field of study as primarily educational and exploratory, such as in questioning the objectivity of generations of works produced in intellectual spheres dominated by white scholars.
A central tenet of whiteness studies is a reading of history and its effects on the present that is inspired by postmodernism and historicism. According to this reading, racial superiority was socially constructed in order to justify discrimination against non-whites. Since the 19th century, some writers have argued that the phenotypical significance attributed to specific races are without biological association, and that what is called "race" is therefore not a biological phenomenon. Many scientists have demonstrated that racial theories are based upon an arbitrary clustering of phenotypical categories and customs, and can overlook the problem of gradations between categories. Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek write about whiteness as a "strategic rhetoric", asserting, in the essay "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric", that whiteness is a product of "discursive formation" and a "rhetorical construction". Nakayama and Krizek write, "there is no 'true essence' to 'whiteness': there are only historically contingent constructions of that social location." Nakayama and Krizek also suggest that by naming whiteness, one calls out its centrality and reveals its invisible, central position. Whiteness is considered normal and neutral, therefore, to name whiteness means that one identifies whiteness as a rhetorical construction that can be dissected to unearth its values and beliefs.
Major areas of research in whiteness studies include the nature of white privilege and white identity, the historical process by which a white racial identity was created, the relation of culture to white identity, and possible processes of social change as they affect white identity.
Definitions of whiteness Zeus Leonardo defines whiteness as "a racial discourse, whereas the category 'white people' represents a socially constructed identity, usually based on skin color". Steve Garner notes that "whiteness has no stable consensual meaning" and that "the meanings attached to 'race' are always time- and place-specific, part of each national racial regime".
Development of the field Studies of whiteness as a unique identity could be said to begin among black people, who needed to understand whiteness to survive, particularly in slave societies such as the American colonies and United States.bell hooks, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination", Black Looks (1992); republished in Roediger, Black on White (1998). (Link to journal. ) An important theme in this literature is, beyond the general "invisibility" of blacks to whites, the unwillingness of white people to consider that black people study them anthropologically. American author James Weldon Johnson wrote in his 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man that "colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them".James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Boston: Sherman, French, and Co., 2012; Chapter 2.Roediger, Black on White (1998), p. 5. Author James Baldwin wrote and spoke extensively about whiteness, defining it as a central social problem and insisting that it was choice, not a biological identity.Roediger, Black on White (1998), pp. 20–21. "No thinker so fully brought together the many dimensions of African-American studies of whiteness as James Baldwin. [...] Adopting and treasuring a white identity is, he wrote, 'absolutely a moral choice' since 'there are no white people.'"James Baldwin, "On being 'white' and other lies", Essence, 1984; republished in Roediger, Black on White (1998). In The Fire Next Time (1963), a non-fiction book on race relations in the United States, Baldwin suggests that:James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, New York: Dial Press, 1963; republished in New York by Vintage International, 1993; p. 22. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.A major black theory of whiteness connects this identity group with acts of terrorism—i.e., slavery, rape, torture, and lynching—against black people, who were treated as sub-human.Roediger, Black on White (1998), pp. 15–16. "Equally compelling African–American studies treat whiteness as a species of terror. [...] Paul Gilroy's recent The Black Atlantic uncompromisingly calls upon the tradition of connecting the terrors of the trade in black bodies, the bloodiness of slave control, and the soul-killing violence of racial exploitation with the total experience of whiteness by people of colors. bell hooks makes much the same points regarding the circumstances under which African Americans encounter and represent whiteness. Other black thinkers have carried this insight still further. They contend that whiteness is also experienced through terror by whites, who find and reproduce unity by committing and more often by witnessing acts of violence. Slave tales and autobiographies, for example, at times insisted upon the centrality of stealing humans, breaking up families, 'patrolling' plantations, and committing rape to the growth of a white identity."
White academics in the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) began to study whiteness as early as 1983, creating a discipline called "whiteness studies". The "canon wars" of the late 1980s and 1990s, a term that refers to political controversy over the centrality of white authors and perspectives in United States culture, led the scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin to ask "how the imaginative construction of 'whiteness' had shaped American literature and American history". The field developed a large body of work during the early 1990s, which, according to Fishkin, extends across the disciplines of "literary criticism, history, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, communication studies, music history, art history, dance history, humor studies, philosophy, linguistics, and folklore".
As of 2004, according to The Washington Post, at least 30 institutions in the United States including Princeton University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico and University of Massachusetts Amherst offer, or have offered, courses in whiteness studies. Whiteness studies often overlaps with post-colonial theory, the study of orientalism, and anti-racist education.
One contribution to White Studies is Rich Benjamin's Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. The book examines white social beliefs and white anxiety in the contemporary United States, in the context of enormous demographic, cultural, and social change. The book explains how white privilege and segregation might flourish, even in the absence of explicit racial animus.
Another contribution to whiteness studies is Gloria Wekker's White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, which discusses the immutability and fluidity of white identity and its relationship to innocence in the context of post-colonial Netherlands in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Wekker's analysis, the process of separating Dutch from "Other" is facilitated through skin tone and non-Christian religious practices. According to Wekker, the process of racialization is reserved for mid-to-late twentieth century immigrant groups (Muslims, Black Surinamese, Black Antilleans), as a means of delineating groups outside the constructed immutable "norms" of Dutch society.
Sociologist Michael Eric Dyson contributed to the discussion of white identity in his 2017 book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. Dyson's book specifically addresses "five dysfunctional ways that those regarded as white respond when confronted with the reality that whiteness is simultaneously artificial and powerful" as well as "dysfunctional ways that black people sometimes respond to white racism."
Areas of study Whiteness Whiteness studies draws on research into the definition of race, originating with the United States but applying to racial stratification worldwide. This research emphasizes the historically recent social construction of white identity. As stated by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1920: "The discovery of a personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed."W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater (1920); republished in Roediger, Black on White (1998), p. 184. The discipline examines how white, Native, and African/black identities emerged in interaction with the institutions of slavery, colonial settlement, citizenship, and industrial labor. Scholars such as Winthrop Jordan have traced the evolution of the legally defined line between "blacks" and "whites" to colonial government efforts to prevent cross-racial revolts among unpaid laborers.