Power Of Whiteness Research Articles

‘Your experience is gonna be similar’: white habitus and college students’ discursive strategies

ABSTRACT Though more people of colour are entering higher education, significant barriers remain, with higher education remaining a culturally white institution. This paper adopts a framework consistent with Critical Whiteness Studies to understand the ways that the power of whiteness is reproduced on a diverse college campus. This research uses qualitative interviews to identify rhetorical strategies used by white students that reflect and reinforce a white habitus. Three main themes emerged: an understanding that diversity is ‘anything’, that commonalities in the student body are more important than differences, and that learning about diversity equates to learning about only the most visible aspects of culture. These themes are contrasted with counterthemes from students of colour, revealing the ways white students remain ignorant of their peers’ of colour experiences on campus.

Inside the ivory tower, the view from a “space invader”: An exploratory study into the ways racialized PhD students experience white ignorance in elite universities in the UK

AbstractThis paper examines the experiences of racialized PhD students in British elite universities. It is framed by Mills' (2007) conception of white ignorance and reflects on the power of whiteness that shapes everyday experiences in such places of privilege. For Mills, the production of racism relies on epistemological processes that produce ignorance, and which promote various ways of ignoring the histories and legacies of European colonialism. Research has shown that professors find it difficult to talk about racism and coloniality within higher education. Professors responses are important as they may affect the outcomes of conducting research for PhD students, yet there is less understanding of how racialized PhD students experience or address white ignorance. Using in‐depth interviews with 14 racialized PhD students, this paper critically examines the intertwined relationship between the coloniality of knowledge and white ignorance within elite universities in the United Kingdom. While universities have been regarded as “neutral” knowledge‐producing institutions, this study challenges the assumptions, interactions, and practices of higher education disciplines in the social sciences, namely anthropology and sociology. Based on the findings of this work, we argue that white ignorance is an epistemic strategy that justifies racial domination within and beyond the halls of academia.

Whiteness, marginalization, and exclusion: An analysis of Tongan students’ experiences in U.S. institutions of higher education

ABSTRACT Although approximately one-third of adults in the United States hold a bachelor’s degree or higher , these statistics fail to account for the vast discrepancies across racial and ethnic groups. For instance, Tongan students are among the least likely to earn a bachelor’s degree of all major ethnic groups in the United States. Despite entering colleges and universities in high numbers, Tongan students are disproportionality dropping out before earning a degree. As such, this study aimed to uncover how communicative practices within (and around) institutions of higher education marginalize Tongan students and hinder their degree attainment, with a particular focus on the communicative power of whiteness. This study utilized in-depth interviewing and grounded theory analysis. Findings revealed that the discourse of whiteness, and the exclusionary communicative practices that reinforce this discourse, foster a sense of un-belonging for Tongan students in institutions of higher education, which hinders their academic success.

Visualizing Black Telephone Users: Technological Whiteness and Racial Exclusion in Bell System Advertising.

This study considers the broad implications of white technological modernity as a mode of symbolic and systemic exclusion. The visual absence of Black telephone users in mass-market advertising-and the struggle to make them visible-underscores the exclusionary power of technological whiteness and its lasting effects on conceptions of Black technology users, communities, and innovation. In the first half of the twentieth century, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) tirelessly promoted its national telephone network as a model of technological progress and universal service, but this vision did not include African Americans. This article examines the historical exclusion of African Americans in Bell System advertising and the emergence of Black telephone users in advertising imagery during the 1950s and 1960s, drawing attention to the civil rights work of Ramon S. Scruggs, the first African American to rise to Bell System upper management.

Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives

Abstract This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016)—illustrates the imaginative function of Removal in the South. I slightly modify Bruyneel’s “absent/present dynamics” to show how the Cherokee persist as a constitutive Other used by these Black authors to expose the racial logic of the Plantationocene. I assert that the three novels imagine Black and Cherokee characters not where they are “supposed” to be in order to authorize Black fugitivity, demonstrating a triangulation of the power and racial formations of Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity in relation to the plantation.

Refugees Separated by the Global Color Line: The Power of Europeanness, Whiteness, and Sameness

It is often erroneously assumed that Russians and Ukrainians are the “same people.” This conviction of sameness partly drove the aggressive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with a determination to forcefully drag a sovereign nation onto an assumed similar destination with Russia and Belarus. Such an assault on a sovereign nation drew denunciations from organizations and people around the world. Nonetheless, by November 2022, the invasion had resulted in the tragic loss of numerous innocent Ukrainian lives and compelled an unprecedented number of people to seek sanctuary throughout Europe. The same event prompted a growing use of the language of imperialism to characterize Russia's supremacy, concurrently giving rise to the logic of Europeanness and whiteness. In this IMR Dispatch, I explore the impact of Europeanness, whiteness, and sameness on people of color fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. While it is crucial to examine the systematic racialization of these people, I argue that the racialized border enforcement witnessed during the conflict is better understood when viewed through the global color line embedded within migration and border management, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where racialized logics are still underplayed.

Critical Whiteness Studies and International Relations: disputing narratives and challenging epidermalized structures of power in teaching, research and extension

This paper aims to demonstrate that Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) may provide useful tools for interpreting epidermalized relations of power in the international system and for challenging the racial dynamics that cut across the teaching, research and extension dimensions in the field of International Relations. This study shows that CWS have potential to support the implementation of Law 11.645/2008, which requires the inclusion, in a cross-curricular manner, of education regarding ethnic-racial relations in higher education curricula in Brazil. 
 In this paper, I provide an introduction to the field of CWS, drawing primarily from the Brazilian afro-feminist contribution in pretuguês of Cida Bento, with her concept of narcissistic pacts of whiteness. Methodologically, this article makes use of a decolonial approach, based on bibliographic and documental research techniques. This paper stresses the importance of naming and historicizing the power of whiteness, to understand how it hegemonizes itself in space and time, and through which means it does so. It is a novel and original study, which innovates by introducing Black epistemologies and stating their applicability as regards teaching, research and extension, opening paths to destabilize the colonial support beams of the IR field.

White/white and/or the Absence of the Modifier

This essay encourages historians to employ the term white when writing about white people, a seemingly simple practice but one rarely employed. White is very often an absent modifier, and when we do not name it, we omit the power that racial thinking and racist actions provided to white people. In so doing, we unthinkingly replicate and give support to racist power structures. By reflecting on the simultaneous precarity and power of whiteness in the past, we can see how the history of the term has shaped our contemporary writing and how we might improve it.

Feeling More Black in Portland: Diversity and the Enregisterment of Livability

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between diversity and urban livability in Portland, Oregon, as ideological and pragmatic projects. I argue that diversity enregisters the city as livable, because the progressive ideals that diversity puts forth index one of many innovative approaches that Portland has taken to resolve the challenges of urban life. Black professional women are both rhetors and subjects of this enregisterment process. They are routinely called on to make public arguments about diversity. However, I show that diversity work just as routinely creates situations where the communicable power of whiteness in the city is both evident and maintained. Women describe navigating this dynamic as “feeling more Black in Portland” than anywhere else they have lived. I contend that this feeling of racialized affect is engendered by diversity's subordination to livability—a structural relation that indexes both the neoliberal underpinnings of local belonging and how narrowly the space is constructed to include Blackness and womanhood.

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” <i>You Must Remember This</i>

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Celebrating the East: The Contestation of Whiteness and Colored in John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians is regarded as one of the movies that successfully represented Asians, regardless of all the controversy. One of the topics clearly presented in the movie is the contestation between the west and east. The dichotomy is resulted from the social construction of the western culture to maintain its superiority over the east culture. Since the movie seems to celebrate the east by portraying the Asian-Asians differently from the old stereotypes or old images of the eastern culture, but at the same time, this research finds that this movie overtly portrays the west as loveable or likable culture. The movie depicts the contrast between east and west through the story. This article is intended to analyze the contestation between east and west which is depicted in the movie. The movie is examined in how it depicts America as the west and Asia as part of the east. Therefore, deconstruction is used as the reading method to see what is behind it, the things that are not seen, related to how the Asians are portrayed in the movie. The finding of this research shows that there are double roles in the movie. The power of whiteness in the American movie industry somehow still brings impacts toward the contestation of whiteness and color.

The South Carolina Commission and the Creation of Saskatchewan’s Liquor Dispensary, 1915

ABSTRACT In 1915, responding to significant prohibitionist agitation, the provincial government of Saskatchewan abolished private liquor sales and replaced them with a system of government-run dispensaries. Prior to Saskatchewan’s adoption of a state liquor dispensary system, the model had been tried only once on such a scale in North America, in South Carolina, which abandoned it in 1907. Drawing on the details of Saskatchewan’s commission that investigated the South Carolina system, this article argues that the adaptations made to the system in Saskatchewan were due to a combination of political expediency and a widespread belief in the civilizing power of whiteness and Canadian educational and legal institutions.

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray

Reviewed by: Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray Dana D. Nelson (bio) Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction hannah lauren murray Edinburgh University Press, 2021 208 pp. Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction capably synthesizes thirtyplus years of race and whiteness studies in and beyond literature, focusing specifically on works by a handful of what the author terms "dead white men"—Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—to examine the destabilizing fiction and dispossessing identity of whiteness in the early United States, and to demonstrate that these writers in various ways depicted white identity as a kind of living death. Hannah Murray argues that early national literature, read through this lens, offers "fictive spaces of possibility, where White loss can be imagined and allayed" (14). She identifies this pervasive feeling of loss in the perpetually unfulfillable promises of racial belonging proffered and policed by whiteness, and she is particularly interested in the liminal and [End Page 1007] spectral figures that proliferate in the literature of the early nation, figures authors use both to mark and challenge the boundaries of belonging supposedly ensured by whiteness. Such figures, in their "marginal mischief, expose … the fragility of … [the] ideal of White citizenship, where the senses will inevitably lead to 'good sense'" (41). Murray aims to study literature as literature and not simply a window into history; when careful readers study the literature of the early nation in this way, she argues, they can see that "Whiteness is on the surface of these texts; it is ingrained in descriptions of character gesture, voice, behaviours, reactions, emotions—all aspects that fit into the ideology of Whiteness as a constructed social identity and phenomenology" (14). She urges her readers to see in the ghostly plots of early national literature white fears similar to those she sees emerging in our contemporary moment: "Repeatedly the fear of being treated as a minority, whether in the nineteenth or twenty-first century, finds form in the language of White exclusion, subjugation and death" (17). Murray shows how writers like Brown, Irving, and Cooper use liminal white characters, often marked by what she terms a "spectral indigeneity," to "challenge and test the ideals of exclusionary rational White Citizenship" or to "speak against changes in early national conceptions of civic economic masculinity" (47). Irving and Cooper in particular engage in forms of "spectral nostalgia" to gesture backward to previous, more putatively satisfying forms of communal belonging and sociality. Importantly for Murray, these versions of a "White indigenised voice" (66) do not forward Indigenous interests but rather "praise a specific form of White masculinity" (67). Other writers take up the porous boundaries of racial belonging between whites and Blacks, like Bird and Poe. Here, quite differently from the efficaciously bonded manhood nostalgically proffered by Cooper and Irving, we have a far more fragile and vulnerable framing of white masculine selfpossession (see 92). These authors focus their readers on the possible loss of white "self-possession and autonomy" (97). For Poe, figures near death or resuscitated from death render the vulnerability of whites to forms of economic exploitation that "negates his personhood." Thus "treated as an object, but with an active mind," Poe suggestively frames whiteness as its own bondage (115). In this way he vividly "voices anxieties over White men being reduced purely to bodies and material resources" (118). [End Page 1008] All the authors whom Murry studies critique, in some form or fashion, the atomizing and abstracting power of whiteness, its relentless undermining of social relations all in the name of a powerful form of belonging. In the case of Melville, Murray concentrates on his characters who are proximate to death either literally or through their socioeconomic powerlessness, and who are somehow "between states of full citizenship and slavery" (121). Such characters on society's edges offer Melville the opportunity to flesh out an identity grounded in off-whiteness, one that remodels white citizenship through a "contagion of silence" (144). In Murray's analysis, through characters like Pierre's Isabella, Bartleby, and Babo, Melville proffers a mode of resistance precisely through a voicelessness that "resists...

The Case for Health Reparations.

The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racially marginalized communities has again raised the issue of what justice in healthcare looks like. Indeed, it is impossible to analyze the meaning of the word justice in the medical context without first discussing the central role of racism in the American scientific and healthcare systems. In summary, we argue that physicians and scientists were the architects and imagination of the racial taxonomy and oppressive machinations upon which this country was founded. This oppressive racial taxonomy reinforced and outlined the myth of biological superiority, which laid the foundation for the political, economic, and systemic power of Whiteness. Therefore, in order to achieve universal racial justice, the nation must first address science and medicine's historical role in scaffolding the structure of racism we bear witness of today. To achieve this objective, one of the first steps, we believe, is for there to be health reparations. More specifically, health reparations should be a central part of establishing racial justice in the United States and not relegated to a secondary status. While other scholars have focused on ways to alleviate healthcare inequities, few have addressed the need for health reparations and the forms they might take. This piece offers the ethical grounds for health reparations and various justice-focused solutions.

Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater

ABSTRACT In 1980, Baltimore Voices, a play written from the transcripts of 200 interviews with elderly working-class Baltimore residents taken as part of the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (BNHP), was seen by thousands of people in Baltimore and on public television. Created by left-leaning oral and public historians, the play was intended to center the voices of white and African American Baltimore residents. However, Baltimore Voices fumbled its opportunity to present a nuanced past to the public through a cascading series of decisions revolving around the ethical question of who had the authority to interpret the oral histories for the stage play and how to frame them for public audiences. Specifically, the play ignored the role of whiteness in shaping Baltimore’s neighborhood history. Instead, the creators saw individual prejudice as the key issue shaping race relations in the city. They forced the stories of Black Baltimore residents into a white ethnic immigrant narrative frame, eliding the privileges that allowed white immigrants to rise in social status and distorting Black history. And they imagined the oral histories and play as modular, with the goal of presenting the history most palatable to the audience. While the theater company practiced sharing authority by giving BNHP narrators multiple opportunities to give feedback during script development, the question remains: when certain community members are more vocal than others, who gets to represent the community? Using extensive archival material, this article discusses Baltimore Voices as a case study of an oral and public history project during a formative moment for both fields. I suggest that progressive oral and public historians at times abdicated their ethical responsibility to frame and contextualize oral history to present complicated histories to the public. Examining whiteness requires this interpretive perspective because the power of whiteness is in its invisibility.

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin

Reviewed by: Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin Xine Yao (bio) Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania, by Maile Arvin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Xi + 313 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0633-6. Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesians was prominently displayed alongside other works by Native Hawaiian scholars at the 2019 American Studies Association conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i. The conference included the celebration of legendary activist-scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, who received the Angela Y. Davis Prize, as well as panels featuring the kia’i (guardians) defending Mauna Kea against the threat of the Thirty Meter Telescope. The American Studies Association is another home to many fields of critical race and ethnic studies, Asian American studies included. I wondered about Asian Americanists and Asian diasporic scholars who might attend but not deign to go to any of the events centering Native Hawaiians. On the one hand, there are Asian settlers, like Candace Fujikane and Dean Saranillio, committed to working in coalition with Kānaka Maoli and Indigenous Pacific Islanders. On the other hand, what of those of us content not to engage settler colonialism and Indigeneity, content to be tourists or interpellated as “locals” (which Fujikane and Trask decry as a settler colonial ruse)—and content to unquestioningly use the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander”? Possessing Polynesians argues powerfully about the ways Polynesia and Polynesian peoples are claimed as contingently white, tracking the unsettled convergences of processes of racialization and imperial and colonial regimes writ large. Native Hawaiian feminist Maile Arvin’s monograph, like David Chang’s acclaimed The World and All the Things Upon It before it, foregrounds Hawai’i to reorient understandings of global modernity in contrast to the islands’ settler colonial image as an exotic, escapist fantasy. Using an Indigenous feminist methodology that engages an archive ranging from over two centuries of science to contemporary art, Arvin interrogates the construction of Polynesia and Polynesian peoples: feminized as the possessions of white [End Page 337] settler colonialism, structured by antiblackness, and with its Indigeneity further dispossessed by a “postracial” multiracialism that privileges Asianness. She writes, “The relation between the logics of possession through whiteness and antiblackness, and between anti-indigeneity and anti-immigration, is not merely one of analogy or comparison, even as they are distinct logics; rather, they are inextricable.” Sometimes these discourses have been leveraged by Native Hawaiians for self-determination—at the expense of other Kānaka Maoli and Pacific Islanders, thus enabling a settler colonial haunting within ostensible projects of decolonization. Nonetheless, as Arvin underlines through discussions of activism and cultural production, possession can be unsettled through “regenerative refusal” as Indigenous feminist analytic. Such Indigenous refusals across past and present point toward resurgent Pacific Islander futures, regenerating kinships between Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous peoples of Oceania, which include work that Arvin highlights for being in promising coalition with Black Lives Matter. “What is a Polynesian?” is Arvin’s central question. For Arvin, heteropatriarchy functions as the crux of whiteness that claims Polynesians as possessions without ever conceding the power of whiteness to them. She stresses “the logic of possession” over the more familiar framing “logic of elimination” in order to emphasize “the gendered aspects of settler colonialism” dependent upon heteropatriarchy that either implicates Native Hawaiian women as producers of mixed-race children toward a white futurity or requires them to be responsible for “race-saving” by only having children with men of high Native Hawaiian blood quantum. The global workings of antiblackness are central to her theorization: Melanesians were racialized as Black, while Polynesians could also be coded as such despite their conditional whiteness and tactics of Polynesian exceptionalism. Triangulated as non-Black and non-Indigenous, Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese, are co-opted by whiteness as evidence of a utopian multiracialism that erases Native Hawaiians, especially through intermarriage. Undergirding Arvin’s discussions is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of raciality and spirit via Hegel that deliberately departs from the Foucauldian model of biopolitics to account for spiritual investments in the logics of racism that haunt the present beyond...

Black theology in dialogue with LGBTQ+ persons in the Black Church: walking in the shoes of James Hal Cone and Katie Geneva Cannon

ABSTRACT The contributions of theologians like James Hal Cone and Katie Geneva Canon to the broader theological project of Black liberational theology allows for a rich discourse on what it means to be Black in the world, In doing this, memories of trauma must be engaged head on in ways that they become anamnetic moments for reimagining a new way of being human that is inclusive of all persons, Consequently, this work argues for the reimagination of the Black Church and its theologies that speak to Black experiences in ways that do not reinstate the hegemonic power of Whiteness as a mode of being in the world. Furthermore, the content and hermeneutic spaces shaping Black theology is critiqued with the intent to create a healthy space for the experiences of Black members of the LGBTQ+ community.