Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States

The Politics of Remembering

By (author) Sherrow O. Pinder

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 December 2011

Length of book:

244 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739164914

Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States, in order to account for the never ending discrimination toward racialized ethnic groups including First Nations, blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans, revisits the history of whiteness in the United States. It shows the difference between remembering a history of human indignities and recreating one that composes its own textual memory. More specifically, it reformulates how the historically reliant positionality of whiteness, as a part of the everyday practice and discourse of white supremacy, would later become institutionalized. Even though “whiteness studies,” with the intention of exposing white privilege, has entered the realm of academic research and is moving toward antiracist forms of whiteness or, at least, toward antiracist approaches for a different form of whiteness, it is not equipped to relinquish the privilege that comes with normalized whiteness. Hence, in order to construct a post white identity, whiteness would have to be denormalized and freed of it of its presumptive hegemony.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Argument in Brief
Chapter 1: The Emergence of Whiteness in the United States
Chapter 2: Whiteness as Property and its Impact on Racialized Ethnic Groups
Chapter 3: Antidiscrimination Measures and Whiteness: The Case of Affirmative Action Programs
Chapter 4: Whiteness and the Problematics of Whiteness Studies
Chapter 5: The Quandary of Antiracist Whiteness
Conclusion: Reflections
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sherrow Pinder’s book is both interesting and timely, speaking to the organicism of whiteness as extant and experienced in the twentieth century, while relating to its eighteenth– and nineteenth–century antecedents. Her thorough research and solid grounding in United States history makes a nice contribution to the body of relatively diverse literature on whiteness studies, ethnic studies, and race theory.