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What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of "whiteness".
A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, Robyn Wiegman turns her attention in Object Lessons to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. In a series of case studies drawn from womens studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, she examines the unspoken belief that better theory will produce progressive social change in order to consider the political desire that fuels current scholarly debate. Her metacritical analysis is neither a defense nor a dismissal of such political commitment but a sustained inquiry into the hope it generates, the thinking it inspires, and the conformity it inadvertently demands.
How the government of Mississippi defended segregation and white privilege.
Drawing on over 600 incidents of racetalk among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, this book examines private racism. Using a dialectical analysis, this book examines the ways that everyday people help to reproduce racism through their common interactions. Visit out website for sample chapters!
This book explores representations of race and ethnicity in contemporary cinema and the ways in which these depictions all too often promulgate an important racial ideology: the myth of colorblindness. Colorblindness is a discursive framework employed by mainstream, neoliberal media to celebrate a multicultural society while simultaneously disregarding its systemic and institutionalized racism. This collection is unique in its examination of such films as Ex Machina, The Lone Ranger, The Blind Side, Zootopia, The Fast and the Furious franchise, and Dope, which celebrate the myth of colorblindness, yet perpetuate and entrench the racism and racial inequities that persist in contemporary society. While the #OscarsSoWhite movement has been essential to bringing about structural changes to media industries and offers the opportunity for a wide diversity of voices to alter and transform the dominant, colorblind narratives continue to proliferate. As this book demonstrates, Hollywood still has a long way to go.
The divide over race is usually framed as one over Black and White. Sociologist Eileen O’Brien is interested in that middle terrain, what sits in the ever-increasing gray area she dubbed the racial middle. The Racial Middle, tells the story of the other racial and ethnic groups in America, mainly Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the largest and fastest-growing minorities in the United States. Using dozens of in-depth interviews with people of various ethnic and generational backgrounds, Eileen O’Brien challenges the notion that, to fit into American culture, the only options available to Latinos and Asian Americans are either to become white or to become brown. Instead, she offers a w...
Race may dominate everyday speech, media headlines and public policy, yet still questions of racialized blackness and whiteness in Shakespeare are resisted. In his compelling new book Ian Smith addresses the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays. This far-reaching study shows that significant parts of Shakespeare's texts have been elided, misconstrued or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. Bringing the Black American intellectual tradition into fruitful dialogue with European thought, this urgent interdisciplinary work offers a deep, revealing and incisive analysis of individual plays, including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Demonstrating how racial illiteracy inhibits critical practice, Ian Smith provides a necessary anti-racist alternative that will transform the way you read Shakespeare.
Introduction: presumed white: race, gender, and modes of migration in the post-Soviet diaspora -- The post-Soviet diaspora on transnational reality TV -- Highly skilled and marriage migrants in Arizona -- Segmented assimilation and return migration -- The desire for adoptive invisibility -- Fictions of irregular post-Soviet migration -- The post-Soviet diaspora in comparative perspective -- Conclusion: immigrant whiteness today
Why do we know every gory crime scene detail about such victims as Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. and yet almost nothing about the vast majority of other hate crime victims? Now that federal anti-hate-crimes laws have been passed, why has the number of these crimes not declined significantly? To answer such questions, Clara S. Lewis challenges us to reconsider our understanding of hate crimes. In doing so, she raises startling issues about the trajectory of civil and minority rights. Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches—the book calls attention to a disturbing irony: the sympathetic attention paid to certain shocking hate crime murders further legitimizes an already pervasive unwillingness to act on the urgent civil rights issues of our time. Worse still, it reveals the widespread acceptance of ideas about difference, tolerance, and crime that work against future progress on behalf of historically marginalized communities.
Contemporary scholars who study race and racism have emphasized that white complicity plays a role in perpetuating systemic racial injustice. Being White, Being Good seeks to explain what scholars mean by white complicity, to explore the ethical and epistemological assumptions that white complicity entails, and to offer recommendations for how white complicity can be taught. The book highlights how well-intentioned white people who might even consider themselves as paragons of antiracism might be unwittingly sustaining an unjust system that they say they want to dismantle. What could it mean for white people 'to be good' when they can reproduce and maintain racist system even when, and espec...