Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies

Philosophy and Whiteness

Alison Bailey

 

Philosophical methods are well suited for unpacking the political, ontological, and epistemological conditions that foster racism and hold white supremacy in place. However, on the whole, philosophy as a discipline has remained relatively untouched by interdisciplinary work on race and whiteness. In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature. Perhaps this is because academic philosophy in the U.S. has been largely driven by analytic methods and the legacy of Classic Greek and European thinkers, or because philosophy departments are white social spaces where the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers are white men. In either case, it’s likely that most members of the discipline have avoided racial topics because they believe that philosophical thought transcends basic cultural, racial, ethnic, and social differences, and that these differences are best addressed by historians, cultural studies scholars, literary theorists, and social scientists. The absence of color talk in philosophy is a marker of its whiteness. As Arnold Farr argues, in philosophy “there is no white perspective but only the universal, impartial, disinterested view from nowhere. … Whiteness becomes visible in the very absence of a serious consideration of the problem of race in philosophy” (2004, 154). On this view, it is difficult, although not impossible, for white philosophers to judge the normative impact of white supremacy on the history of our discipline and its chosen methods of inquiry. White ways of knowing, being, seeing, ontologizing, evaluating, nation-building, and judging have been presented to us as ways of doing philosophy, pure and simple.

This is not to say that philosophy has ignored these questions altogether. Issues of race have to some extent always been present in philosophy. For example, although Immanuel Kant is best known today for his work in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, he made his living teaching anthropology, and his role in Enlightenment constructions of race was well respected in his day. Contemporary attention to questions of race and whiteness can be found in three strains of philosophy in particular: feminist philosophy, the recently emerging field of philosophy of race, and in philosophy of education.

The conversations philosophers have had about whiteness mirror and intersect with the dialogues feminists started on gender and class some thirty years ago when they set out to demonstrate the maleness of philosophy and the usefulness of philosophy as a tool for discussing gender inequalities. Feminist projects sought to recover women’s contributions to the canon, fashion criticisms and creative reinterpretations of the works of key thinkers, and glean feminist-friendly conceptual tools from canonical texts.

In a parallel development, philosophers of race have set out to demonstrate the whiteness of philosophy. Drawing their inspiration from the works of black intellectuals such as W.E.B DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Franz Fanon, they have begun to redefine the practice of doing philosophy so that race is seen as a philosophically important topic rather than a threat to the purity of the discipline. One project within the philosophy of race has been to define white supremacy as a consciously constructed political, epistemological, legal, cultural and economic system. As Charles Mills observes: “Just as Marx moved back and forth between the empirical and the philosophical for his analysis of capitalism, and just as feminists have moved back and forth between the theoretical and empirical in our analyses of patriarchy, so might philosophical work on race and white supremacy proceed” (2004, 32).

A very significant proportion of the work done exclusively on whiteness is being done in philosophy of education. Since this edited volume has a separate bibliography for education, I’ve confined my bibliography to the contributions feminists and philosophers of race have made to the discipline. I’ve included work by philosophers of education only in cases where these essays contributed significantly to larger conversations outside of education.

 

Alcoff, Linda Martín. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Overcoming Racism and Sexism Ed. Linda Bell and David Blumefield. Lantham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995, 229-255.

————. “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia 13.3 (1998), 6-26.

————. “The Whiteness Question.” Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. New York: Oxford, 2006. 205-227.

Allen, Ricky L. “The Globalization of White Supremacy: Toward a Critical Discourse on the Racialization of the World.” Educational Theory 51.4 (2001), 467-485.

Alston, Kal. “Knowing Blackness, Becoming Blackness, Valuing Blackness.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 297-308.

Anderson, Jami L. “The White Closet.” Social Ethics 18 (2003) Ed. Cheryl Hughes. Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation Center, 97-107.

Appiah, Anthony. “But Would That Still Be Me?: Notes on Gender, Race, Ethnicity as Sources of Identity.” The Journal of Philosophy 87:10 (1990): 493-507.

Applebaum, Barbara. “On the Meaning and Necessity of a White, Anti-Racist Identity.” Philosophy of Education 2000 Ed. Lynda Stone. Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2000: 306-317. 

————. “Social Justice Education, Moral Agency, and the Subject of Resistance” Educational Theory 54.1 (2004): 59-72.

Armour, Ellen T. “Writing/Reading Selves, Writing/Reading Race.” Philosophy Today 23.4 (1997): 110-117.

Asante, Molefi Kete. “Blackness as an Ethical Trope: Toward a Post-Western Assertion.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 203-216.

Babbit, Susan and Sue Campbell. Racism and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Bailey, Alison. “Strategic Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Eds. Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007.

————. “Despising an Identity They Taught Me to Claim: Exploring a Dilemma of White Privilege Awareness.” Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Narratives. Eds. Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 85-104.

————. “Locating Traitorous Identities: Towards a Theory of White Character Formation.” Hypatia 13.3 (1998): 27-42.

————. “Privilege.” Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance: Theoretical Perspectives on Racism, Sexism, and Heterosexism. Ed. Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1997. 301-317.

Bailey, Alison and Jacqueline N. Zita, eds. “The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body.” Hypatia 22.2 (Spring 2007): 1-13.

Bergo, Bettina G. “Circulez! Il n’ya a rien a voir,” Or, “ ‘Seeing White’: From Phenomenology to Psychoanalysis and Back.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 125-169.

Bernasconi, Robert. “Waking Up White and in Memphis.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 17-26.

Birt, Robert. “The Bad Faith of Whiteness.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004.

————. “Blackness and the Quest for Authenticity.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 265-273.

Cuomo, Chris. “White and Cracking Up.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
27-33.

Cuomo, Chris J. and Kim Q. Hall. Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Narratives. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Curry, Blanch Radford. “Whiteness and Feminism: Déjà Vu Discourses, What’s Next?” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 243-262.

Davion, Victoria. “Reflections on the Meaning of White.” Overcoming Racism and Sexism. Eds. Linda A. Bell and David Blumefield. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. 135-141.

Farr, Arnold. 2004. “Whiteness Visible: Enlightenment Racism and the structure of racialized consciousness.” White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 143-158.

Flynn, Thomas R. “ ‘Lyotard and History Without Whiteness’ in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime.” Continental Philosophy VIII. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York: Routledge, 2002. 151-163.

Frye, Marilyn. “On Being White: A Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy.” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1983. 110-127.

————. “White Woman Feminist.” Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism. Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1992. 147-169.

Gordon, Lewis. Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1995.

————. “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 173-194.

————. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995.

————. Her Majesty’s Other Children. Totowa, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

Hall, Kim. “Learning to Touch Honestly: A White Lesbian Responds to Racism.” Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures. Ed. Jeffner Allen. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990. 317-326.

Harding, Sandra. “Reinventing Ourselves as Other: More New Agents of History and Knowledge.” Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. 268-296.

————, ed. The Racial Economy of Science: Towards a More Democratic Future. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Haslanger, Sally. “Future Genders? Future Races?” Philosophic Exchange 34 (2003-4): 4-27.

Headley, Clevis R. “Delegitimaizing the Normativity of ‘Whiteness: A Critical Africana Philosophical Study of the Metaphoricity of ‘Whiteness.’ ” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 87-106.

Heldke, Lisa. “On Being a Responsible Traitor: A Primer.” Daring to be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethics—Politics. Eds. BatAmi Bar-On and Anne Ferguson. New York: Routledge, 1998. 87-99.

Henry, Paget. “Whiteness and Africana Phenomenology.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 195-210.

Hytten, Kathy and Amee Adkins. “Thinking Through a Pedagogy of Whiteness.” Educational Theory 51.4 (2001): 433-450.

James, Joy. “The Academic Addict: Mainlining (& Kicking) White Supremacy (WS)” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 263-268.

Johnson, Clarence Sholé. “(Re)Conceptualizing Blackness and Making Race Obsolecent.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 173-202.

Jones, Janine. “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 65-86.

————. “Tongue Smell Color Black.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 217-232.

Lugones, María. “On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism.” Feminist Ethics Ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

————. “Purity, Impurity and Separation.” Pilgrimages/ Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Lugones, María and Elizabeth Spelman. “Have We Got a Theory for You!: Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for the Woman’s Voice.” Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy. Ed. Asisah al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, 1990. 18-33.

Macmullan, Terrance. “Beyond the Pale: A Pragmatist Approach to Whiteness Studies.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31.3 (2005):
267-292.

Mayo, Cris. “Certain Privilege: Rethinking White Agency.” Philosophy of Education (2004), 308-316.

————. “Vertigo at the Heart of Whiteness.” Philosophy of Education 2000 Ed. Lynda Stone. Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2000. 317-320.

McClendon III, John H. 2004. “On the Nature of Whiteness and the Ontology of Race: Toward a Dialectial Materialist Analysis.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 211-226.

McWhorter, Ladelle. “The Revenge of the Gay Nihilist.” Hypatia 16.3 (2001): 115-125.

Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1997.

————. “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 25-54.

————. “White Supremacy as a Sociopolitical System: A Philosophical Perspective.” White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. Eds. Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. New York: Routledge, 2003. 35-48.

————. “Red Shift: Politically Embodied/Embodied Politics.” The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 155-175.

————. “Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy.” Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 97-119.

————. “White Right: The Idea of Herrenvolk Ethics.” Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 139-166.

Molina, Joanne. “Dis-Placing Whiteness.” Contemporary Philosophy 21.3-4 (1999): 7-16.

Moses, Greg. “Unmasking through Naming: Toward an Ethic and Africology of Whiteness.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 49-69.

Myser, Catherine. “Differences from Somewhere: The Normativity of Whiteness in Bioethics in the United States of America.” Journal of Bioethics 3.2 (2003): 1-11.

Narayan, Uma and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Olson, Joel. “Whiteness and the Participation-Inclusion Dilemma.” Political Theory 30.3 (2002): 384-409.

Outlaw, Lucius. Race and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996.

————. “Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 159-171.

Paris, Jeffrey. “Interrogating Whiteness: Dialogue as a Pragmatist Tool for Postmodern Identity Formation, or Breaking Bread with Bell Hooks and Cornel West.” International Studies in Philosophy 27.1 (1995): 73-84.

Richardson, William. “The Whiteness of Capitalism.” Dialectical Perspectives in Philosophy and Social Science. Eds. Pasquale Russo, et al. Amsterdam: Gruner, 1983. 249-252.

Roelofs, Monique. “Racialization as an Aesthetic Production: What Does the Aesthetic Do for Whiteness and Blackness and Vice Versa?” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 83-124.

Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on The Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002.

Sartwell, Crispin. “Wigger.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 35-48

Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. “Thinking Against Race.” Studies in Practical Philosophy: A Journal of Ethical and Political Philosophy 3.1 (2003): 137-152.

Shuford, John. “Four Du Boisian Contributions to Critical Race Theory.” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 37.3 (2001): 301-337.

Spelman, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” The Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon, 1988.

Stubblefield, Anna. Ethics Along the Color Line. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2003.

————. “Meditations on Postsupremacist Philosophy.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 71-82.

Taylor, Paul C. “Silence and Sympathy: Dewey’s Whiteness.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 227-242.

Tessman, Lisa and Bat Ami Bar-On. “Other Colors of Whiteness: A Travelogue.” Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Narratives. Ed. Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 105-115.

Thompson, Audrey. “Colortalk: Whiteness and Off White.” Educational Studies 30.2 (1999): 141-160.

————. “Tiffany, Friend of People of Color: White Investments in Antiracism.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 16.1 (2001): 7-29.

————. “What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question.” Review. Ed. George Yancy. American Philosophical Association Newsletters: Philosophy and the Black Experience 4.1 (2004): 22-28.

Ware, Vron. “Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire.” History and Theory 31.4 (1992): 116-137.

Warren, John T. “Performing Whiteness Differently: Rethinking the Abolitionist Project.” Educational Theory 51.4 (2001): 451-466.

Westley, Robert M. “White Normativity and the Rhetoric of Equal Protection.” Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy. Ed. Lewis R. Gordon. New York: Routledge, 1997. 91-98.

Williams, Rhonda M. “Consenting to Whiteness.” Marxism in the Postmodern Age. Ed. Antonio Callari. New York: Guilford, 1994. 301-308.

Winnubst, Shannon. “Is the Mirror Racist? Interrogating the Space of Whiteness.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 30.1(2004): 25-50.

————. “Is a Queer Always a Race Traitor? Disrupting Invisible Forms of Rationality in the Classroom.” Newsletter on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues, Ed. Carol Quinn. American Philosophical Association Newsletters 1.1 (2001): 151-156.

Yancy, George. “A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness: The production of the Black Body/Self and the Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. 107-142.

————. “Introduction: Fragments of a Social Ontology of Whiteness.” What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Ed. George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004.

————. “Lyotard and Irigaray: Challenging the (White) Male Philosophical Metanarrative Voice.” Journal of Social Philosophy 33.4 (2002): 563-580.

————. “ ‘Seeing Blackness’ from Within the Manichean Divide.” White on White/Black on Black. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 233-264.

————. “W.E.B. Du Bois on Whiteness and the Pathology of Black Double Consciousness.” Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, Eds. John McClendon and George Yancy American Philosophical Association Newsletters 4.1 (2004): 9-22.

————. What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Yancy, George, ed. White on White/Black on Black, Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Zack, Naomi. 1993. “White Family Identity.” Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 19-33.

————. “White Ideas” Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Narratives. Eds. Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 77-84.

————. “Whiteness.” Thinking about Race. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998. 58-66.