The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies

Lipsitz, George

doi:10.2307/2713291

Cited by 379 publications

(146 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…There are burgeoning corpuses on the construction of whiteness in the US context (Doane and Bonilla-Silva, 2003;Delgado and Stefancic, 1997;Frankenberg, 1994Frankenberg, , 1997Hill, 1997;Roediger, 1991;Barrett and Roediger, 1997;Lipsitz, 1995;Fine et al, 1996) but little yet on whiteness qua whiteness in contemporary Europe. Much of the work produced by academics based in Europe either focuses elsewhere (Bonnet, 1999;Back and Ware, 2001), or on a historical relationship (Ware, 1992;McClintock, 1995) without explicit engagement with the contemporary.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Uses of Whiteness: What Sociologists Working on Europe Can Draw from US Research on Whiteness

Garner

2006

Sociology

122

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Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematised are identified, elucidated and synthesised to provide a sociological take on the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, a set of norms, as resources and a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, some proposals are made regarding the whiteness problematic's degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualised in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism.Keywords; identities, racism, whiteness. This paper firstly reviews some of the burgeoning US literature on whiteness, identifies significant sociological threads running through it and synthesises them.i Secondly, Iargue that whiteness is a relevant paradigm for European social worlds by highlighting how it can be understood, and what use it is as a distinct sub-field within the study of racist phenomena. Whiteness is most effectively conceptualised as both a resource and a contingent hierarchy, and its utility is that it enables collective identities to be examined in a more nuanced way than is allowed for by the hegemonic black/white, or more accurately, white/non-white paradigms. This approach thus interrogates the assumed monolithic status of 'whites', allowing a more fluid picture of situational micro-level power relations to emerge.Whiteness: the story so farOstensibly, whiteness studies follow a time-honoured pattern: originating in the cultural orbit of black America, then being adopted by radical elements within the dominant culture. The corpus can be traced back through Du

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confidence: 99%

The Uses of Whiteness: What Sociologists Working on Europe Can Draw from US Research on Whiteness

Garner

2006

Sociology

122

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“…Drawing on recent postcolonial resistance theories, with the general trajectory towards what Sara Suleri (2003) calls "the intimacy of the colonial setting" (p. 112), presupposing the concept of cultural exchange between dominating and subjugated bodies rather than "the fixity of dividing lines" between them (Suleri, 2003, p. 112), this discussion addresses contemporary Indigenous Australian protest poetry. In particular, it examines how, in convening a cross-racial public, the rhetoric of social and political critique challenges what George Lipsitz (1995) describes as "the exclusionary concept of whiteness" (p. 370), held in place to preserve the racialised white supremacist notions of Australian identity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Aboriginal Intervention in Colonial Discourse: Challenging White Control of Cross-Racial Intersubjectivity

Čerče

2018

GEMA

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Written against the background of critical whiteness studies, the article deals with the poetry of Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor, two contemporary Aboriginal voices who are not yet widely recognised, although their work is powerful and compelling. They both use their medium to explore various aspects of indigeneity and to intervene in the public dynamics of racial separation. In their attempt to instil agency for the postcolonial Indigenous subject, they challenge what Sara Suleri (2003) calls "the static lines of demarcation" between colonial power and disempowered culture -the assumptions about such binary oppositions as domination and subordination, centre and margin, self and other, upon which the logic of coloniality often stands. In convening a cross-racial public, the rhetoric of the two poets' critique generates a discursive guilt in non-Indigenous readers and foregrounds the need for the intersubjectivity of race; that is, a zone of mutual respect and cooperation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

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“…The multitude of ways in which African Americans have been disadvantaged are outside the scope of this paper, but beyond the legacy of slavery, conditions that necessitated the civil rights movement persist (Alexander 2012;Bonilla-Silva 2018). For example, despite reversing legalized racism inherent in redlining and neighborhood covenants that barred the sale of homes to Black people in certain areas (Pietila 2012), the racial gap in wealth persists, rooted in historical disadvantage (Lipsitz 1995;Seah et al 2017). Furthermore, growing up in a society where the indignities of the infamous 40-year Tuskegee study went unchallenged (until 1972), and with significant white apathy regarding the Black Lives Matter movement (Carney 2016;Robertson and Dundes 2017), African Americans tend to be in touch with how historical oppression informs past and continued disadvantage, e.g., the typical Black household has just 6% of the wealth of the average White household (Shin 2015).…”

Section: In-group Racial Identity: Commonality As a Disadvantaged Racmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parsing the Gulf between Africans and African Americans

Nsangou

Dundes

2018

Social Sciences

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Abstract:The rise in African immigrants to the US provides an opportunity to assess relations between Africans and African Americans in college. An online survey of 322 current and recently-graduated college students (including 45 Africans, 160 African Americans, and 117 whites) assessed respondents' experiences of racism in US high schools and colleges. Semi-structured interviews of 30 students (10 African, 10 African American and 10 white students) supplemented these data. Even within a sociopolitical context of more visible racial intolerance, Black intra-racial cohesion was absent. Although more first-and second-generation Africans (73%) felt that they had been judged while living in the US compared to African Americans (34%) or whites (20%), for 70-80% of respondents, this had occurred only in high school. Despite experiencing these judgments, Africans' identity related more to their focus on education than their race, reflected in a higher proportion who felt intense family pressure to attend college (65%) compared to African Americans (37%) and whites (39%). Interview data confirmed previous reports in the literature that African Americans lack a sense of connection to Africans, attributed to Africans' purported sense of superiority and disregard for African Americans' ongoing struggle to end oppression. These mixed-methods data suggest that intermingling in the college environment has not resulted in first-and second-generation Africans and African Americans sharing a common in-group, race-based identity. We discuss the implications of overlooking ethnic distinctions due to presumptions of racial homogeneity that deprive Black individuals of their uniqueness.

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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies

Cited by 379 publications

References 11 publications

The Uses of Whiteness: What Sociologists Working on Europe Can Draw from US Research on Whiteness

The Uses of Whiteness: What Sociologists Working on Europe Can Draw from US Research on Whiteness

The Aboriginal Intervention in Colonial Discourse: Challenging White Control of Cross-Racial Intersubjectivity

Parsing the Gulf between Africans and African Americans

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