white

A social, cultural, and political category that refers to the "dominant" culture of the U.S., a category primarily understood as a racial construction that expresses the legacies of Western European hegemony. Many critiques of "whiteness" exist. General analysis suggests that whiteness has functioned since the early Enlightenment period in Europe (the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) as an expression of increasingly dogmatic, or strict, white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and classed biases. Although since at least the 1960s critical racial and comparative ethnic frameworks, in addition to versions of feminist and queer theories, have challenged the privileges that have inhered in "whiteness," critical indigenous critiques comprise a burgeoning field of scholarship and activism that also challenge the colonial settler histories and contemporary practices associated with whiteness.

Photo Credit

 
"Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940" by Russell Lee is licensed under Public Domain.

Manuscript Occurrences
Term Type
References

 
Alexander, Michelle
     2010   The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New
         Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas
     1995   Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York:
         New Press.

Deloria, Vine
     1969   Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan
         Company.

Donaldson, Laura E.
     1992   Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire. London: Routledge.

Dyer, Richard
     1997   White. London: Routledge.

Ferguson, Roderick A.
     2004   Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of
         Minnesota Press.

Harris, Cheryl L.
     1993   Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review. 106(8): 1710-1791.

Lipsitz, George
     2006   The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
         Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade
     2003   Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham:
         Duke University Press.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant
     2015   Racial Formation in the United States. Third edition. New York: Routledge/Taylor &
         Francis Group.

Puar, Jasbir K.
     2007   Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University
         Press.