Whiteness

Abstract

Whiteness as a conceptual framework—and whiteness studies, the interdisciplinary field it precipitated—largely developed from two overlapping scholarly strands that sought to “reverse the view” of how we think, and talk, about race. Though both activists and scholars had long described the insidious effects of racism and discrimination on people of color, and the pervasive disadvantages they faced in US society, in 1989 women’s studies scholar Peggy McIntosh flipped the script to interrogate the generally unseen, and unearned, advantages white people carry with them in every aspect of life. Her now classic article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” articulated the concept of “white privilege” for a broad audience, and it was quickly adopted for classroom use by many secondary and university instructors. What made the article particularly useful in the classroom was her inclusion of a list of privileges demonstrating the range of ways in which whiteness is constructed as a normative and neutral category, such as “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin.” Her article continues to be in heavy use in classrooms and anti-racist workshops, while McIntosh herself has revisited the concept of white privilege, as well as male privilege, in numerous publications. A similar trend of reversing the view emerged from historians and literary scholars beginning in the 1990s. Previously, scholarship on race was dominated by studies examining how Europeans and European Americans viewed black people in particular, and to a lesser extent groups from indigenous, Asian, or Latin American descent. This focus was exemplified by numerous foundational texts on racial thought, many of which emphasized the rise of scientific racism in the 19th century, including William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1959 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); John Haller Jr.’s Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971); and George Frederickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). In response, historians began to interrogate the changing meanings of whiteness over time, both politically and culturally. Within that new historiographic turn, some historians focused on the ways in which the parameters of whiteness were tied to patterns of immigration and assimilation, while others looked to the role of social class in the development of the nascent and often amorphous racial category, while still others even more literally reversed the view to examine how African Americans have viewed white people historically.