Invisibility Of Whiteness Research Articles

Australian Reconciliation and the Enduring Invisibility of Whiteness

ABSTRACT ∞Reconciliation has emerged as one of the key goals of transitional justice and a favoured policy approach to address the racism, inequality and historical injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial states. This article focuses on Australian reconciliation and argues that it has failed to critically engage with whiteness, limiting the potential of reconciliation to address the root causes of these issues. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of patriarchal white sovereignty, the article analyses the federal government’s push for constitutional recognition and demonstrates why reconciliation perpetuates the dispossession of Indigenous lands. The article also engages Michael Rothberg’s figure of the implicated subject to complicate the concept of whiteness and overcome the Indigenous/settler or victim/perpetrator binary. This article contributes to the field of transitional justice by advocating for a more explicit and critical examination of whiteness to advance justice in settler colonial contexts.

Exploring themes of racialization in “The Vanishing Half”: Is the term “white passing” a useful way for psychotherapists, counsellors and psychological therapists to conceptualise racial identity?

ABSTRACT This paper draws on themes from The Vanishing Half and intersectionality theory to evaluate the usefulness of the term ‘white passing’ for psychological therapists, counsellors and psychotherapists exploring racial identity phenomena in their practice. The context for ‘white passing’ as a historic method for surviving racial injustice is discussed. This will involve consideration of how the systematic invisibility of whiteness has been a cause for harmful racialization of individuals past and present. The conclusion is that ‘white passing’ as a flattened identity label contains dangerous rhetoric about how far racialized individuals are allowed to ‘fit’ into society by those that oppress them.

Correction to: “I don’t know what’s racist”: White Invisibility Among Explicitly Color-conscious Volunteers

Correction to: “I don’t know what’s racist”: White Invisibility Among Explicitly Color-conscious Volunteers

The Structural Challenge of Power and Whiteness in Planning: Evidence From Historic Black Cemetery Restoration

Historic Black cemeteries in the United States have been preserved and repaired by a range of philanthropic, community and government agencies. These efforts are fraught with disagreement over how to preserve sacred places. We consider the roles of white planners and organizations in Black spaces through a case examination of a cemetery restoration planning process. We engage questions of process and power to understand how outcomes-based approaches rationalize the reproduction of power relationships and the invisibility of whiteness. We find that limited engagement, inappropriate conceptual framing, and resistance to power sharing compromised the potential of Black power in Black spaces.

“I don’t know what’s racist”: White Invisibility Among Explicitly Color-conscious Volunteers

“I don’t know what’s racist”: White Invisibility Among Explicitly Color-conscious Volunteers

The “Sallow Mr. Freely”: Sugar, Appetite, and Unstable Forms of Whiteness in George Eliot's “Brother Jacob”

In this paper, I argue that George Eliot's “Brother Jacob” (1864) reveals a fluid system of racial production that is inextricably tied to sugar. “Brother Jacob” is one of Eliot's most unusual narratives. It is written in the tone of a fable, and it concerns confectioner David Faux, who immigrates to the colony of Jamaica. Twice, Faux's plans for fiscal gain are thwarted by his “idiot” brother, Jacob, and the latter's uncontrollable sweet tooth in ways that warn against the ungovernability of bodies—especially white ones—that desire sugar.My analysis employs the methodologies of critical race studies, as I examine how Eliot's text denaturalizes the frequent “invisibility of whiteness” (Richard Dyer). And if, as Sara Ahmed argues, we “do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given,” then Eliot's text reveals whiteness when it is in front of bodies, when its construction is rendered seeable. I analyze Eliot's examination of individual and collective white bodies that are ambivalently racialized through their desires for sugar. Throughout, I argue that the plasticity of racial forms connected to sugar suggests that bodies are unruly and cannot uphold coherent systems of racial meaning.

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.

Fear of blackness: Understanding white supremacy as an inverted relationship to oppression

How can psychoanalytic theory help make sense of the social and psychic dimensions of white supremacy? This paper seeks to make sense of the relationships between identity, privilege, and oppression among white Americans. Drawing on decades of social science and psychoanalytic work on race and racism, it argues that the normativity and invisibility of whiteness is integral to the ego identity of white Americans. The cohesion of this internal identity becomes threatened by any challenge to this invisibility, resulting in an inverted internal identification with oppression and privilege.

Mitigating White Invisibility through Intentional Reflective Practice

Mitigating White Invisibility through Intentional Reflective Practice

And Then I Stopped Trying to Fit

In this essay, I autoethnographically map my experience of pursuing and then denouncing the “religion” of merit into which I was indoctrinated in my white, second-generation immigrant household. I argue that my disabled body is marked as visible through medical discourse that originated within, and is in turn perpetuated by, white patriarchal discourse. This visibility interrupts the power of white invisibility, allowing a means of understanding how white normalness perpetuates a system of merit that rejects all visible, abnormal bodies while offering an unsuccessful pursuit of meritorious invisibility. The normal and invisible system of merit, when exposed, visible, and rejected, can be dismantled.

Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the “Whiteness” of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to show the influence of the black mammy stereotype on Melanie Klein’s theorization of the maternal object. It takes as its starting point the underrepresentation of black analysts and their negative experiences within psychoanalysis and links this to the wider cultural phenomenon of “whiteness,” defined as the denial of racialized experience. It then explores a symbol of this whiteness, the colonial stereotype of the black mammy, and demonstrates that she was a well-known figure in the interwar Britain in which Klein developed her ideas. It suggests that the colonial dynamics between the mammy and white people are repeated in Klein’s formulation of the maternal object and infant, and argues that we can see evidence of this in Klein’s analysis of Dick and in her theorization of the maternal object as split and as a combined parent figure. It then shows that a “negress” is central to the article used by Klein in her formulation of reparation, but that Klein transformed this article, replete with questions of racial identity, into a theory of “universal” psychic processes by reading the “negress” as mammy. It argues that the mammy may well have been a potent figure for Klein both professionally and personally due to the modernist trend of using “blackness” to break from tradition and due to a precedent of the mammy facilitating Jewish assimilation into whiteness. The Kleinian theory of the maternal object, inflected with the racial dynamics embodied by the mammy, can therefore be seen as contributing to psychoanalysis’ silence on race, perpetuating the invisibility of whiteness to white subjects and legitimating (psychic) violence toward the black other.

Resolving the Tensions Between White People's Active Investment in Racial Inequality and White Ignorance: A Response to Marzia Milazzo

AbstractThis article responds to Marzia Milazzo's article ‘On white ignorance, white shame, and other pitfalls in critical philosophy of race’ (2017), in which Milazzo argues that the concepts white shame, white guilt, white privilege, white habits, white invisibility and white ignorance are pitfalls in the process of decolonisation. Milazzo contends that the way these concepts are theorised in much critical philosophy of race minimises white people's active interest in reproducing the racial status quo. While I agree with Milazzo's critique of white shame and white guilt, I argue that these affective responses are fundamentally different to the remaining concepts. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and agnotology, I argue that white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance are valuable conceptual tools for revealing (as opposed to minimising) white people's active investment in maintaining racial inequality. Whereas Milazzo sees a contradiction between white people's active interest in maintaining racial inequality and concepts like white invisibility and white ignorance, I argue that, correctly theorised, these concepts resolve this apparent contradiction. I contest Milazzo's call to reject white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance, arguing that these concepts are useful tools in the project of decolonisation.

The Black Jesus, the Mestizo Jesus, and the Historical Jesus

This paper identifies a modern racial ideology prevalent not only in U.S. society and culture at large, but also one to which historical Jesus studies is susceptible: the ideology of white invisibility. In fact, so pervasive is this ideology that it can be detected even in the most constructive efforts to diversify contemporary biblical scholarship. My point of departure for this critique is an important essay published in Biblical Interpretation by Jeffrey Siker: “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus: Case Studies in the ‘Black Christ,’ the ‘Mestizo Christ,’ and White Critique” (2007). My aim is to show how the logic of white invisibility functions implicitly in the locations and relations of the four Jesuses invoked by Siker’s essay – namely, the black, mestizo, white, and historical Jesuses. Although I am critical of Siker’s analysis, my ultimate aim, like his, is to move the conversation forward in a constructive manner. Indeed, I have chosen to engage his essay because I believe it is a valuable contribution that helpfully frames the thorny problematic of competing representations of the white, black, brown, red, and yellow Jesuses. Iden­tifying the strengths and limitations of Siker’s analysis, then, not only renders visible the ideology of white invisibility, but also points to ways of moving beyond the impasse of competing representations.

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey: Alternative Bodies in Contemporary Circus

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey: Alternative Bodies in Contemporary Circus

The Invisibility of Whiteness in Clinical Practice: Case Commentary on “Becoming Visible: The Case of Colette”

My critical analysis of “Becoming Visible: The Case of Colette” is informed by Lee and Bhuyan’s (Soc Serv Rev 87:98–130, 2013) approach to analyze cross-cultural clinical practice. It examines “invisible” discursive moments that functionally reproduce sociocultural power dynamics of discrimination and oppression within the clinical encounter. I explored several threads of the therapy narrative to make visible privileged identities and ideologies, such as the normative performance of whiteness. In addition, my commentary demonstrates alternative narratives that resituate clinical practice to a more antidiscriminatory, antioppressive space through “de-centering” and making visible the discourse of whiteness (Lee and Bhuyan in Soc Serv Rev 87(1):98–130, 2013).

On White Ignorance, White Shame, and Other Pitfalls in Critical Philosophy of Race

AbstractThis article examines Samantha Vice's essay ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ (2010), which sparked a storm of controversy in South Africa, as a starting point for interrogating understandings of whiteness and racism that are dominant in critical philosophy of race. I argue that a significant body of philosophical scholarship on whiteness in general and by white scholars in particular obfuscates the structural dimension of racism. The moralisation of racism that often permeates philosophical scholarship reproduces colourblind logics, which provide individualistic explanations for structural problems, thereby sustaining white dominance. In the process, I show that notions of white guilt, white habits, white ignorance, white invisibility, white privilege, and white shame as they are theorised in much critical philosophy of race share a crucial limitation: they minimise white people's active interest in reproducing the racist status quo. Studies, such as Vice's, that frame racism as a moral dilemma while silencing its institutionalisation and the central cause for its existence and longevity – that is, white people's investment in maintaining economic, political, and symbolic power – further naturalise white supremacy.

Digital Storytelling as Racial Justice

Teacher education is replete with an overwhelming presence of Whiteness, a presence that if not explicitly interrogated indefinitely recycles hegemonic Whiteness. Needed are pedagogical strategies that expose the hegemonic invisibility of Whiteness. This critical reflection examines the utilization of digital storytelling by teacher educators of color to pedagogically deconstruct Whiteness in a predominately White, urban-focused teacher education course—a necessary deconstruction if these teacher candidates are to effectively teach urban students of color. Particularly, this article deconstructs four academic years of digital stories produced in a mandatory diversity course in an urban teacher education program and illustrates how digital storytelling itself promotes a critical self-revelation that confront Whiteness in White teacher candidates. The preliminary analyses suggest that digital storytelling is a racially just way of having White teacher candidates self-reflect on their own Whiteness in a multitude of ways, by (a) ending emotional distancing, (b) debunking colorblindness, (c) engaging emotions, and (d) sharing the burden of race.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being White

In this article I explore the relationship between feelings of superiority, White privilege, White guilt, and a denied White racial identity and how these dynamics are enacted in therapy between White therapist and client. I discuss the concepts of White privilege, White guilt, color-blind racial ideology, and the invisibility of Whiteness and their importance in understanding problems in White identity development. Throughout this discussion I draw implications for clinical practice and training. I conclude by suggesting a process for identifying the dynamics of privilege and power in cross-cultural interactions through the use of self-reflection.

Visibly White

The invisibility of whiteness has been a foundational concept in whiteness studies since the late 1980s. Invisibility refers to low levels of racial self-awareness among whites, who generally consider their race to be irrelevant to their actions and perspectives on the world. Scholars have examined how biographical experience limits or heightens white racial self-awareness, but little is known about how whites enact their whiteness in racially charged contexts or situations. The author reports findings from an ethnographic study of two “positive loitering” groups operating in multiracial Chicago neighborhoods. The members of these two groups negotiated their whiteness in systematically different ways. One group (the “Northtowners”) acknowledged positive loitering as a racially charged context, engaged critics, and successfully bridged black-white racial divides. A second group (the “Lakesiders”) seemed oblivious to the racially charged context, dismissed critics, and arguably deepened black-white racial divides. The author discusses implications for the study of white racial practice, racial self-awareness, and the racial dynamics of community policing.