The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

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Edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray

Duke University Press

Due/Published October 2001, 360 pages, paper

ISBN 0822327406

Bringing together new articles and essays from the an April 1997 Berkeley conference of the same name, this collection presents a range of inquiries into the nature of whiteness. Representing academics, independent scholars, community organizers, and antiracist activists, the contributors collectively aim to combat the historical legacies of white supremacy and to inform those who seek to understand the changing nature of white identity, both in the United States and abroad.

With essays devoted to theories of racial domination, comparative global racisms, and transnational white identity, the geographical reach of the volume is significant and broad. Dalton Conley writes on "How I Learned to Be White." Allan Berube discusses the intersection of gay identity and whiteness, and Mab Segrest describes the spiritual price white people pay for living in a system of white supremacy. Other pieces examine the utility of whiteness as a critical term for social analysis and contextualize different attempts at antiracist activism. In their introduction, the editors not only raise questions about the intellectual, social, and political goals of those interested in the study of whiteness but assess several of the topic's major recurrent themes: the visibility of whiteness (or the lack thereof); the "emptiness" of whiteness as a category of identification; and conceptions of whiteness as a structural privilege, a harbinger of violence, or an institutionalization of European imperialism.

Contributors. William Aal, Allan Bérubé, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Dalton Conley, Troy Duster, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., Eric Klinenberg, Eric Lott, Irene J. Nexica, Michael Omi, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Mab Segrest, Vron Ware, Howard Winant, Matt Wray

Table of Contents

Introduction--Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray

1. Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to Be White--Dalton Conley
2 "The Souls of White Folks"--Mab Segrest
3. The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness--Ruth Frankenberg
4. White Racial Projects--Howard Winant
5. The "Morphing" Properties of Whiteness--Troy Duster
6. "White Devils" Talk Back: What Antiracists Can Learn from Whites in Detroit--John Hartigan Jr
7. Transnational Configurations of Desire: The Nation and its White Closets--Jasbir Kaur Puar
8. Perfidious Albion: Whitenss and the International Imagination--Vron Ware
9. The New Liberalism in America: Identity Politics in the "Vital Center"--Eric Lott
10. How Gays Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays--Allan Bérubé
11. (E)racism: Emerging Practices of Antiracist Organizations--Michael Omi
12. Moving from Guilt to Action: Antiracist Organizing and the Concept of "Whiteness" for Activism and the Academy--William Aal

Bibliography
Contributors
Index