A Note on the Word White

Abstract

In my office, many of the finer works on are conveniently arranged on the same bookshelf: David R. Roediger's Wages of Whiteness', Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color, Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness; Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White; Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (subtitled Whiteness and the Literary Imagination); and George Lipsitz's Possessive Investment in Whiteness. l To write about whiteness is to write about an inchoate conglomeration of factors that give group advantage to white people, often without showing it explicitly factors that include old-fashioned, in-your-face racism but also supposedly colorblind things like the courts, the federal government, policy decisions, mass culture, and private institutions of all sorts. For historians interested in uncovering a usable past with which to understand the present, it is difficult to locate a long and simple narrative through-line of running from the starving time at Jamestown to the O. J. Simpson trial. Any reasonable survey of American history would find dozens of different schemes of racial classification, not all of them color-coded, and hundreds of local settings in which race had different meanings, a complexity of understanding that simply cannot be reduced to a story line in which