Whiteness

Description

The socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness: how it was created, how it changes, and how it protects and privileges people who are perceived as white. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness, tracing its creation, its changing formation, and its power to privilege and protect people who are perceived as white. Whiteness, author Martin Lund explains, is not one single idea but a shifting, overarching category, a flexible cluster of historically, culturally, and geographically contingent ideals and standards that enable systems of hierarchical classification. Lund discusses words used to talk about whiteness, from white privilege to white fragility; the intersections of whiteness with race, class, and gender; whiteness in popular culture; and such ideas as “colorblindness” and “reverse racism,” which, he argues, actually uphold whiteness.   Lund shows why it is important to keep talking and thinking about whiteness. The word “whiteness,” he writes, doesn’t describe; it conjures something into being. Drawing on decades of critical whiteness studies and citing a range of examples (primarily from the United States and Sweden), Lund argues that whiteness is continually manufactured and sustained through language, laws, policies, science, and representations in media and popular culture. It is often positioned as normative, even universal. And despite its innocuous-seeming manifestations in sitcoms and superheroes, whiteness is always in the service of racial domination.  Contents Series Foreword 1 Introduction Whiteness 101 Briefly about This Book Briefly about the Author 2 Whiteness and Its Discontents Whiteness and Racial Formation Origins of Whiteness Some Historical Formations of Whiteness Some Attempts to Understand Whiteness 3 White Words White Privilege White Guilt White Fragility White Rage and Racial Backlashes White Genocide and the Great Replacement White Supremacy Speaking Whiteness 4 It’s a White World after All Eugenics and the “Science” of Whiteness Whiteness and Class Whiteness and Gender Whiteness All the Way Down 5 Popular Whiteness “Gentle Doses of Racism”: White Children’s Literature “With Great Power”: White Superheroes Least Objectionable: White Sitcoms White’s Entertainment 6 Don’t Call Me White! Color Blindness, Hegemon of Our Age Color­blind and Reverse Racism Color Blindness and Reverse Racism: Scaffolding for White Supremacy 7 Whither Whiteness? Acknowledgments Glossary Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Bibliography Further Reading Index