Abstract
In the context of my discussion, a historical perspective is taken into consideration and a sociopolitical understanding is necessary. However, I make use of Frantz Fanon’s remarkable insight of “cultural hierarchy,” which shows how the dominant group dictates the norms, values, and ethic of society to the masses. “The doctrine of cultural hierarchy,” as Fanon puts it, “is thus but one aspect of a systematized hierarchization implacably pursued.”1 To a greater extent, it organizes and strengthens the configuration of the normal (dominant) and the abnormal (subordinate) cultural practice, which is then locked in immutable conflict and structurally irresolvable differences; the main one being racialized difference as a preapproved allegory for culture and its signification.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a more detailed reading, see Carolyn Martindale’s The White Press and Black America (1986)
Clint Wilson and Felix Gutierrez’s Race, Multiculturalism and the Media: From Mass to Class Communication (1995)
Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki’s The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (2001)
Ian Law’s Race in the News (2002).
Gilroy 2000a, 12. In the end, he calls for a “deliberate and self-conscious renunciation of race as a means to categorize and divide humanity.” See Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000b, 17).
Also, see John Hartigan Jr., “Culture Against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis” (2005). In this study, Hartigan shows how and why race matters.
Some of the studies on white skin privilege include Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993)
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993)
David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (2007)
Michael Tonry’s Malign Neglect Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (1995).
On a different note, the liminality of whiteness is beginning to surface. See Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006)
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997). Cherríe Moraga points to the fact that being a lesbian or a gay man denies access to white skin privilege. See “La Güera,” in her book Loving in the War Years (1983).
Also, Paula M.L. Moya, in “Postmodernism, ‘Realism’, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism” (1997) has shown how whiteness functions as “contaminated privilege” for white women who are “reclaiming” their lesbianism. Homosexuals, as the unwelcome “others,” most of the time, fall outside the parameters of whiteness.
See Sanford F. Schram, “Putting a Black Face on Welfare: The Good and the Bad” (2003)
Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America’s Poor (2001)
Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (1994). Welfare racism is dated back to the implementation of mothers’ pensions.
For a more thorough reading on mothers’ pensions, see Mimi Abramovitz’s Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (1996).
Two interrelated problems faced Jews. They had the advantage of being white and not only white but Jewish. For a good discussion of how Jews became white, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (2006)
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1999).
For a good reading of how immigrants became white, see David R. Roediger’s Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005).
Also, Ruth Frankenberg, in White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, points out that in various times in United States history, Jews, Italians, and Latinos “have been viewed as both “white” and “nonwhite”(1993, 11).
Fanon 1964. Also, see Horace M. Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy (1956).
For good discussions of white racial identity, see Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (2003)
David Roediger’s Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (1994), and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991).
See Derrick A. Bell, “Property Rights in Whiteness—Their Legal Legacy, Their Economic Costs” (1995)
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1993).
Copyright information
© 2010 Sherrow O. Pinder
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pinder, S.O. (2010). Conceptual Framework. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-33140-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10669-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)