11 Facts About Whiteness studies

Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege, the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and a source of systemic racism, and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the societal compositions, perceptions and group behaviors of white people.

Central tenet of whiteness studies is a reading of history and its effects on the present that is inspired by postmodernism and historicism.

Whiteness studies is considered normal and neutral, therefore, to name whiteness means that one identifies whiteness as a rhetorical construction that can be dissected to unearth its values and beliefs.

Major areas of research in whiteness studies include the nature of white privilege and white identity, the historical process by which a white racial identity was created, the relation of culture to white identity, and possible processes of social change as they affect white identity.

Whiteness studies challenged the Southern Manifesto and identified bias for funding white education, rather than universal funding, even within the reformist movement for desegregated schools.

In biological examination, whiteness studies has sought to expose how "white identity is neither pure nor unchanging – that its genealogy is mixed" in order to unearth biases within the white racial identity.

Whiteness studies argues that these advantages seem invisible to white people, but obvious to non-whites.

An offshoot of critical race theory, theorists of critical whiteness studies seek to examine the construction and moral implications of whiteness, in order to reveal and deconstruct its assumed links to white privilege and white supremacy.

Whiteness studies says that a type of "keyword literalism" persists in whiteness studies, where important words and phrases from primary sources are taken out of their historical context.

In 2002 historian Peter Kolchin offered a more positive assessment and declared that, at its best, whiteness studies has "unfulfilled potential" and offers a novel and valuable means of studying history.

Whiteness studies personally put "whiteness" in quotes because he shied away from using the term.