Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies

Edited by Tim Engles

Contributors: Alison Bailey,  Melanie Bush, Kevin Dolan, Tim Engles, Dianne Harris, Helen A. Neville, Lisa Beth Spanierman, Audrey Thompson, Carmen Thompson, & Nathan Todd

Introduction

David R. Roediger

While it is the product of its editor and of the compilers of the bibliographies under its various disciplinary and topical headings, this publication is also the result of a remarkable ongoing and informal collaboration among a larger group of scholars and activists at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the past six years, a rotating core of perhaps fifteen participants has met monthly as the Critical Whiteness Studies Group (CWS) with a periphery of about four times that size attending sessions according to their interests, and hundreds more attending the larger lectures and conferences initiated by the group and its members.

CWS has carried flexibility and inter-disciplinarity to productive extremes. Leaderless, but built through the hard work and intellectual energy of such participants as Tim Engles, Suk Ja Kang Engles, Kevin Dolan, Lisa Spanierman, Dianne Harris, and Sharon Irish, the group has sometimes functioned as a writing workshop, brainstorming on works-in-progress by both faculty and graduate students. It has at other moments read provocative works from writers not at the University of Illinois or weighed the impacts, stated or implicit, of what James Baldwin called the “lie of whiteness” on popular film. Its activities, and the spin-offs from them, have produced art exhibitions, cross-disciplinary collaborations, university courses, discussions of race and pedagogy, interfaith conversations on racism, support for the immigrant workers’ freedom ride and for the movement against the anti-Indian mascot of the University of Illinois, a major conference on race and space, collective wisdom animating the revision of dozens of articles, books, research projects and films, and conversations over countless cups of coffee.

However unplanned, CWS has developed consistent directions worth considering by those seeking to nurture critical scholarship, not only on whiteness but also on other matters. Although — and more on this will come in the concluding paragraphs below — generously supported at crucial junctures by the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, the CWS group has mostly existed on a shoestring. At a time when getting grants can appear to writers and artists almost as a precondition to creating new knowledge and even to undertaking new forms of struggle, CWS has from the first just gone ahead with its work, delighted when a few dollars found it but functioning as a network not dependent on those dollars.

At a time when some initiatives for the study of whiteness begin as a conversation solely and deliberately among whites only, CWS has been interracial from its inception and has centrally involved faculty and students from the university’s ethnic studies programs. The influence of both history and ethnic studies has put CWS in an especially strong position regarding understanding that the critical study of whiteness is not, as it is too often portrayed in the press, a recent and university-based project undertaken mainly by white scholars. CWS discussions have instead consistently reflected the long roots of inquiries into when, how and why some people have, over the last centuries of human history, suddenly come to value what W.E.B. Du Bois long ago called “personal whiteness.” Not surprisingly, this knowledge developed most quickly and systematically among racialized, enslaved, conquered and colonized peoples for whom white power and white pretense were urgent problems. Both this long sweep of the study of whiteness and the key role of people of color in undertaking such study are represented in the bibliography published here.

Participants within CWS also have made attempts to bridge lines between disciplines and between the university and community. When an experimental film is screened at a CWS event, quantification-oriented psychologists are as likely as film scholars to be the first to respond to it. U.S. history, British studies, communications research, art, Asian American studies, literature, law, education, art history, African American studies, cinema studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, urban planning, theology and landscape architecture have all figured prominently in the group’s programming.

Within the community, CWS has drawn participation from those working in libraries, churches and schools as well as in movements challenging the massive imprisonment of young people of color in the United States. This diversity has encouraged plain-speaking, with even theoretical and statistical discussions necessarily conducted with a minimum of jargon. Much of the reach of this bibliography stems from the ways in which CWS has encouraged its participants and its guests to conceive of whiteness broadly, with its existence being a historical, aesthetic, political, educational, moral and practical problem at once.

It is fully fitting that this bibliography appears under the auspices of the University of Illinois’ Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society. From our earliest beginnings, CWS has met in the center’s building. Enabled by generous funding for the “After Whiteness: Race and the Visual Arts” conference (2003) and the Chicago art exhibition accompanying it, as well as for the “Constructing Race: The Built Environment, Minoritization and Racism in the United States” conference (2004), CWS members mounted impressive gatherings of leading scholars of whiteness, including Adrian Piper, Kymberly Pinder, and George Lipsitz. Direct grants to CWS have in the last two years enabled the campus to hear new work on whiteness from literary scholar Jeff Abernathy, philosopher Alison Bailey, theologian Thandeka, ethnographer Pem Buck, psychologist Michelle Fine, and student of media Robert Jensen.

The original online version of this bibliography has long been on the center’s Web site, where it has attracted considerable attention, and important additions, from the United States and abroad. This worldwide web presence has been especially important at a time when much of the most exciting scholarship on whiteness is comparative and transnational, examining both the peculiarities of the United States and what Ralph Bunche has termed “worlds of race,” as Melanie Bush’s excellent internationalist section of the bibliography reflects.

The center, especially under interim director Dr. Kent Ono and director Dr. Jorge Chapa, has generously funded graduate researchers who have worked on the bibliography, with Karen Rodríguez, Carmen Thompson, and Perzavia Praylow doing especially important work, along with permanent staff members at the center. The center’s assistant director, Dr. Julia Johnson Connor, has been a consistent supporter of our efforts. We thank the center, then, for significant support that has contributed to the making of this bibliography at every stage and that has particularly made possible its publication and distribution in this form.