Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States: The Politics of Remembering

Description

Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States, in order to account for the never ending discrimination toward racialized ethnic groups including First Nations, blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans, revisits the history of whiteness in the United States. It shows the difference between remembering a history of human indignities and recreating one that composes its own textual memory. More specifically, it reformulates how the historically reliant positionality of whiteness, as a part of the everyday practice and discourse of white supremacy, would later become institutionalized. Even though “whiteness studies,” with the intention of exposing white privilege, has entered the realm of academic research and is moving toward antiracist forms of whiteness or, at least, toward antiracist approaches for a different form of whiteness, it is not equipped to relinquish the privilege that comes with normalized whiteness. Hence, in order to construct a post white identity, whiteness would have to be denormalized and freed of it of its presumptive hegemony. Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States is the logical follow up of Pinder’s intellectual journey. Her scholarly style and lucid argumentation are fascinating. . . . Having taught Pinder in an upper level under-graduate Africana Studies class I can say that this book can be taught in undergraduate and graduate courses, including Africana Studies, Political Science, Multicultural and Gender Studies. (Thelma M. Pinto, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Former President, African Literature Association) Sherrow Pinder’s book is both interesting and timely, speaking to the organicism of whiteness as extant and experienced in the twentieth century, while relating to its eighteenth– and nineteenth–century antecedents. Her thorough research and solid grounding in United States history makes a nice contribution to the body of relatively diverse literature on whiteness studies, ethnic studies, and race theory. (Barbara Ballard, Marymount Manhattan College)