Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies

Qualitative Inquiry in Critical Whiteness Studies

Kevin Dolan

 

Because invisibility is often a major part of definitions and descriptions of whiteness, examining whiteness poses a unique challenge for scholars who take up Toni Morrison’s challenge to “to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject … from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers.” Scholars face tough questions when deciding how to investigate a phenomenon that, as Ruth Frankenberg points out, is not accustomed to “seeing itself seeing.” First and foremost are the many challenges and ethical concerns of scholars who try to get whites to talk about and/or see their unselfconscious performances of whiteness.

Although the question of white invisibility has been debated more in these times of identity politics, the way it works remains quite hidden. As a consequence, many scholars have found it more fruitful to study what whiteness does rather than trying to identify what whiteness is. Not only does this keep our eyes on the workings of whiteness, but it reminds us that it is always a process that is, as Frankenberg says, never complete, never uniform, and less stable in some locations than others. Yet the subject of invisibility brings up another important question posed by Frankenberg: Invisible to whom? One of the major concerns raised by scholars is that when trying to make whiteness visible, we can end up recentering whiteness, thereby turning it and white people into the key agents of historical change. This danger is especially imminent when white scholars do so without acknowledging the work that scholars of color have done long before the field of critical whiteness studies was ever imagined.

These are enduring questions that, like whiteness itself, are highly contextual and not given to easy solutions. Nevertheless, qualitative scholars believe these interdisciplinary approaches are best suited for studying an ongoing process such as whiteness because we co-construct whiteness as we study it. The following provide a number of insights for qualitative scholars using such approaches as interviewing people about what it means to be white, participating in whites’ discussions about race, observing race at work in schools or workplaces or doing research while working as anti-racist activists. Such methods have been used to examine a wide range of topics such as white identity construction, how race shapes white women’s lives, how high school students’ white identities differ in urban and suburban contexts, the differences in white identities among those of different classes in Detroit, the process of learning about racial identity for white mothers of children of color and the multiple layers of privilege in upper-middle-class white male college students.

 

Bailey, A. (1998). Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character. Hypatia, 13 (3), 27–42.

Best, A. L. (2003). Doing Race in the Context of Feminist Interviewing: Constructing Whiteness Through Talk. Qualitative Inquiry, 9 (6), 895–914.

Blee, K. M. (1991). Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press.

————. (2000). White on White: Interviewing Women in U.S. White Supremacist Groups. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (pp. 93–109). New York and London: New York University Press.

Brander Rasmussen, B., Klinenberg, E., Nexica, I. J., & Wray, M. (2001). The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bulmer, M., & Solomos, J. (2004). Researching Race and Racism. London; New York: Routledge.

Frankenberg, R. (1993). White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

————. (1997). Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (pp. 1–33). Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press.

————. (2001). The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness. In B. Brander Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica & M. Wray (Eds.), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (pp. 72–96). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

————. (2004). On Unsteady Ground: Crafting and Engaging in the Critical Study of Whiteness. In M. Bulmer & J. Solomos (Eds.), Researching Race and Racism (pp. 104–118). London; New York: Routledge.

Gallagher, C. A. (2000). White Like Me? Methods, Meaning, and Manipulation in the Field of White Studies. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (pp. 67–92). New York: New York University Press.

Hartigan, J. (1997a). Establishing the Fact of Whiteness. American Anthropologist, 99 (3), 495–505.

————. (1997b). Locating White Detroit. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (pp. 180–213). Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press.

————. (1999). Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Heider, D. (2000). White News: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover People of Color. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Jackson, R. L. (1999). White Space, White Privilege: Mapping Discursive Inquiry into the Self. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 85 (1), 38–54.

Kellington, S. (2002). Looking at the Invisible: Q-Methodological Investigation of Young White Women’s Constructions of Whiteness. In C. Levine-Rasky (Ed.), Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives (pp. 153–177). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kenny, L. D. (2000a). Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

————. (2000b). Doing My Homework: The Autoethnography of a White Teenage Girl. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (pp. 111–133). New York and London: New York University Press.

Levine-Rasky, C. (2002). Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lewis, A. E. (2004). “What Group?” Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of “Color Blindness.” Sociological Theory, 22 (4), 623–646.

Martin, J. N., Krizek, R. L., Nakayama, T. K., & Bradford, L. (1999). What Do White People Want to Be Called? A Study of Self-labels for White Americans. In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (pp. 27–50). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Mayer, V. (2005). Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography. Communication Theory, 15 (2), 148–167.

McIntosh, P. (1997). White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (pp. 291–299). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Moon, D., & Flores, L. A. (2000). Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination Among “Race Traitors.” Communication Studies, 51(2), 97–115.

Perry, P. (2002). Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School. Durham: Duke University Press.

Reich, J. A. (2002). Building a Home on a Border: How Single White Women Raising Multiracial Children Construct Racial Meaning. In C. Levine-Rasky (Ed.), Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives (pp. 179–208). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sacks, M. A., & Lindholm, M. (2002). A Room Without a View: Social Distance and the Structuring of Privileged Identity. In C. Levine-Rasky (Ed.), Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives (pp. 129–151). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Stoddart, K. (2002). Researching White Racial Identity: A Methodological Story. American Behavioral Scientist, 45 (8), 1254–1264.

Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, Friend of People of Color: White Investments in Antiracism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (1), 7–29.

Twine, F. W. (1997). Brown-skinned White Girls: Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (pp. 214–243). Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press.

————. (2000). Racial Ideologies and Racial Methodologies. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (pp. 1–34). New York: New York University Press.

Twine, F. W., & Warren, J. W. (2000). Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies. New York: New York University Press.

Warren, J. W. (2000). Masters in the Field: White Talk, White Privilege, White Biases. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (pp. 135–164). New York and London: New York University Press.

Yúdice, G. (1995). Neither Impugning nor Disavowing Whiteness Does a Viable Politics Make: The Limits of Identity Politics. In C. Newfield & R. Strickland (Eds.), After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s (pp. 255–285). Boulder: Westview Press.