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Essay on White Privilege
A burgeoning discourse in academe loosely called "White studies" has added an important dimension to the continually developing conversations about and analyses of race. Indeed, challenging the assumption that the study and analysis of race means only examining "people of color," many scholars are now investigating the historical and social construction of whiteness in an attempt to understand its multiple meanings and to consider how white identity has changed and been constructed, shaped, and appropriated historically.
Within the context of White studies, even examining the phrase, "people of color," one soon happens upon a significant staple of thought within the field: Whiteness has historically been appropriated in unmarked ways by strategically maintaining as colorless its color (and hence its values, belief systems, privileges, histories, experiences and modes of operation) behind its constant constructions of otherness. In other words, everyone or everything else is "marked"; "whereas white is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularizing quality, because it is everything - white is no color because it is all colors". The focus, then, of examining the historical and social construction of whiteness, as well as the attendant effects of that construction process, is one of the major projects currently shaping the many emerging texts on whiteness that, rather quickly, are helping to define a new field of study and research agenda.
In addition to analyzing whiteness from a social and historical perspective, another project within White studies wants to move beyond analyses and deconstructions of whiteness to the abolition of it. The 'social construction of whiteness' has become something of a catchphrase in the academy, although few have taken the next step. Indeed, we might say that until now, philosophers have merely interpreted the white race; the point, however, is to abolish it. Whiteness and the Concept/Social Construction of RaceThe interest in examining the "centeredness of whiteness" has been partly fueled by the impact of deconstructionist theories upon the contemporary social sciences......
