LibGuides: Anti-Racism: a Learning Guide: Whiteness

How to Recognize your White Privilege l Peggy McIntosh

Why Talk About Whiteness?

The analytical category of “whiteness” is useful for probing numerous facets of American culture and politics as they intersect with transnational and global concerns, from historical and contemporary interactions among different communities within the United States, to political engagement between the United States and other nations. As an ideologically laden category that has defined the limits of citizenship and national belonging, attention to ideas about and performances of whiteness helps to explain the complicated ways in which American subjectivity is inextricably tied to racial formation. Important concepts within American nationalistic discourse—including democracy, modernity, and freedom—have developed in tandem with ideas about whiteness and racial difference. Seemingly straightforward, the term nonetheless has multifarious connotations, its definition further complicated by the way its meaning has changed over time. The historical development of American culture and society has led to shifts in the meaning of whiteness from the founding of the United States through the present day. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, ideas about whiteness have continued to change, demonstrating its capacity to conform to and redefine new ideas about identity, belonging, and difference at both the local and global levels.

Citation in APA 7th Edition

Dees, S. (2016). Whiteness. In E. J. Blum (Ed.), America in the World, 1776 to the Present: A Supplement to the Dictionary of American History (Vol. 2, pp. 1092-1097). Charles Scribner's Sons.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is one of the first instances in which white privilege was named and brought into serious academic conversation. Read Peggy McIntosh's contribution here.

Podcasts

Books

White Fragility: why it's so hard for White people to talk about racism by Robin DiAngelo
Call Number: HT1521 .D486 2018
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it...Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 95,000 people downloaded the supporting work The Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Updated and expanded from the original edition, Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism by Shannon Sullivan
Building on her book Revealing Whiteness, Shannon Sullivan identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as "white middle-class goodness," an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one's lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness--especially in the context of white childrearing--and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame, and betrayal. To move beyond these distancing strategies, Sullivan argues, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness in the pursuit of racial justice rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.
Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact by Derald Wing Sue (Editor)
ISBN: 1282772929
A landmark volume exploring covert bias, prejudice, and discrimination with hopeful solutions for their eventual dissolution. Exploring the psychological dynamics of unconscious and unintentional expressions of bias and prejudice toward socially devalued groups, Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact takes an unflinching look at the numerous manifestations of these subtle biases. It thoroughly deals with the harm engendered by everyday prejudice and discrimination, as well as the concept of microaggressions beyond that of race and expressions of racism.
Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male by Tim Wise
In this highly anticipated follow-up to White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, activist Tim Wise examines the way in which institutional racism continues to shape the contours of daily life in the United States, and the ways in which white Americans reap enormous privileges from it. The essays included in this collection span the last ten years of Wise's writing and cover all the hottest racial topics of the past decade: affirmative action, Hurricane Katrina, racial tension in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, white school shootings, racial profiling, phony racial unity in the wake of 9/11, and the political rise of Barack Obama.
White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness by Ruth Frankenberg
Traditional debates concerning racially hierarchical societies have tended to focus on the experience of being black. White Women, Race Matters breaks with this tradition by focusing on the particular experiences of white women in a racially hierarchical society. By considering the ways in which their experience not only contributes to but challenges the reproduction of racism, the work offers a rigorous examination of existing methodologies, practices and assumptions concerning racism and gender relations.
Witnessing Whiteness: The need to talk about race and how to do it by Shelly Tochluk
Witnessing Whiteness invites readers to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white people toward poor relationships with people of color. Questioning the implications our history has for personal lives and social institutions, the book considers political, economic, socio-cultural, and legal histories that shaped the meanings associated with whiteness. Drawing on dialogue with well-known figures within education, race, and multicultural work, the book offers intimate, personal stories of cross-race friendships that address both how a deep understanding of whiteness supports cross-race collaboration and the long-term nature of the work of excising racism from the deep psyche.
Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan M. Metzl
ISBN: 1541644972
Publication Date: not available in digital format at Pierce College library
Physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels across America's heartland seeking to better understand the politics of racial resentment and its impact on public health. Interviewing a range of Americans, he uncovers how racial anxieties led to the repeal of gun control laws in Missouri, stymied the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and fueled massive cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. Although such measures promised to restore greatness to white America, Metzl's systematic analysis of health data dramatically reveals they did just the opposite: these policies made life sicker, harder, and shorter in the very populations they purported to aid. Thus, white gun suicides soared, life expectancies fell, and school dropout rates rose. Powerful, searing, and sobering, Dying of Whiteness ultimately demonstrates just how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation, rather than chasing false promises of supremacy.
Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science by Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Editor)
Exploring the diverse terrain that makes up library and information science (LIS), this collection features the work of scholars, practitioners, and others who draw from a variety of theoretical approaches to name, problematize, and ultimately fissure whiteness at work. Contributors not only provide critical accounts of the histories of whiteness – particularly as they have shaped libraries and archives in higher education – but also interrogate current formations, from the policing of people of color in library spaces to imagined LIS futures. This volume also considers possibilities for challenging oppressive legacies and charting a new course towards anti-racist librarianship, whether in the classroom, at the reference desk, or elsewhere.
"White" Washing American Education: The New Culture Wars in Ethnic Studies by Marín, J., & Ratcliff, A. (2016)
In 2010, HB 2281--a law that bans ethnic studies in Arizona--was passed; in the same year, Texas whitewashed curriculum and textbook changes at the K-12 level. Since then, the nation has seen a rise in the legal and political war on Ethnic Studies, revisionist actions in curriculum content, and anti-immigrant policies, creating a new culture war in America. "White" Washing American Education demonstrates the value and necessity of Ethnic Studies in the 21st century by sharing the voices of those in the trenches--educators, students, community activists, and cultural workers--who are effectively using multidisciplinary approaches to education.
Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics by Sean Guynes, editor; Martin Lund, editor (2020)
In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund bring together a series of essays that contextualize the histories and stakes of whiteness studies, superhero comics, and superhero studies for academics, fans, and media-makers alike. The volume illustrates how the American comic book superhero is fundamentally a figure of white power and white supremacy and ultimately calls for diversity in superhero comics as well as a democratized media culture. Contributors not only examine superhero narratives but also delve into the production, distribution, audience, and reception of those narratives, highlighting the imbrication of forces that have helped to create, normalize, question, and sometimes even subvert American beliefs about whiteness and race. Unstable Masks considers the co-constitutive nature of identity, representation, narrative, production and consumption, and historical and cultural contexts in forging the stereotypes that decide who gets to be a superhero and who gets to be American on the four-color pages of comic books.