Abstract
Racialized ethnic groups including blacks, First Nations, and Chinese who were already in America were not expected to embrace the so-called cultural oneness and become a part of what the early twentieth-century Jewish poet and novelist Israel Zangwill called The Melting Pot, or what Will Kymlicka, the Canadian political theorist, has identified as the “Anglo-conformity model,” where the existence of a unitary majority culture was evident. I have argued in the preceding chapter that racialized ethnic groups in America were not looked on as Americans and most of all were considered as inferior, which has important consequences in determining their places in American society as a whole. Certainly, while the history and classification of nonwhiteness is at the center of discussions and scrutiny, whiteness, as I have shown, is the taken-for-granted category, the norm, and hence it is invisible. Its invisibility, for AnaLouise Keating, “is [its] most common mentioned attribute.”1
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Notes
For a good analysis of otherness, see Henry Louis Gates, “Race” Writing, and Difference (1985)
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Identities (1985).
Constance Perin, in her book Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines (1988), chooses to interview white women whom she kept referring to as “Americans.”
See Marcela Sanchez, “Demonizing Dual Citizenship” (2005).
Fields 2001, 49. Theorists of American political culture, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Louis Hartz, have perceived racism as an anomaly. See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997, 15–27).
See Aanerud, “The Legacy of White Supremacy and the Challenge of White Antiracist Mothering” (2007).
See Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask (1967).
Connerly 1998, 3. Also quoted in Samuel Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004, 6).
For a detailed reading of whiteness as property that one possesses, see also George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998)
Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (1999).
See Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002, 10).
See Moreton-Robinson, “Writing Off Treaties: White Possession in the United States Critical Whiteness Studies Literature” (2008)
Mills, “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness” (2004)
Outlaw, “Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?” (2004)
Baldwin, Collective Essays (1998)
Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993)
Mullen, “Optie White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness” (1994)
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1993)
Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992).
For further discussion, see Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002, 5).
Patterson 2000, 6. Also, see William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (1980)
Richard J. Payne, Getting Beyond Race: The Changing American Culture (1998).
See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982).
See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962, 108–10).
For a good discussion, see Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post Civil Rights Era (2001).
Wilson 1980. Also, see Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997)
Patterson, “Race Over” (2000).
See D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (1995).
The latest rendition of white superiority is propagated in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s bell curve theory. There are other similar studies that also generated similar notions of racial superiority and the “genetics” of intelligence. See Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1994, 345–63)
Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (1994, 156–85)
Rushton J. Philippe, Race Evaluation and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (1995).
For writings on the new racism, see Étienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992)
Penelope Ingram, “Racializing Babylon: Settlers’ Whiteness and the New Racism” (2001).
For various explanations of the new racism, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “This Is a White Country”: The Racial Ideology of the Western Nations of the World-System” (2000, 189–91). This new racism is also referred to as color-blind racism.
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© 2010 Sherrow O. Pinder
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Pinder, S.O. (2010). The Specter of Whiteness. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_4
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