Object lessons in whiteness: Antiracism and the study of white folks

Abstract

This paper examines the convergence of antiracist politics and theorizing with the emergent ethnographic attention to cultural constructions of whiteness. The methodological, conceptual, and political crossing points between antiracist scholarship and cultural anthropologists’ burgeoning interest in the construction of white racial identity raise a host of provocative issues about the political stakes involved in studying whiteness. Drawing on my fieldwork on whites in Detroit, Michigan, I offer a critical reflection on the influence that antiracist projects have had on anthropologists’ efforts to analyze whiteness. The core of this discussion involves an evaluation of the centrality of “racism” in the analytical judgments of antiracist and ethnographic studies. Though it is perhaps more politically useful and appealing to develop emphatic assessments of how whites reproduce and imbibe racism, I argue that it is also critical to consider the highly contradictory and ambiguous aspects of white racial identification. Through a critique of the way antiracists analyze the stories white people tell, I delineate the comparative advantages that an ethnographic attention to the ambiguities of racial matters brings to the tasks of understanding whiteness.