Complex intersections of race and class: Among social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty.

Abstract. White people often experience unpleasant emotions in response to learning about White privilege ( Phillips & Lowery, 2015 ; Pinterits, Poteat, & Spanierman, 2009 ). Two studies (total N = 1,310) examined how race attitudes relate to White people’s desires to avoid or learn information about White privilege. White participants completed measures of their race attitudes, desire to change White privilege, and their desire to avoid learning information about White privilege. Study 1 showed that participants who preferred their racial in-group reported less desire to change White privilege and greater desire to avoid learning information about White privilege. Inconsistent with expectations, Study 2 showed that participants who anticipated negative affective responses to learning about White privilege reported greater desire to change White privilege.

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Making Whiteness Visible and Felt in Fairview

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h10020081 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 81

Author(s):

Michael Pearce

Keyword(s):

Public Sphere ◽

White Privilege ◽

Political Context ◽

White People ◽

The Public ◽

Black Lives Matter ◽

Audience Responses ◽

The Public Sphere

In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin by situating Fairview in the transatlantic cultural and political context of Black Lives Matter. I then discuss the theatrical devices Drury employs in Fairview in order to make whiteness felt before going on to analyse a range of white audience responses to the production at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2019/2020. I reflect on these responses in relation to how white people react to accusations of white privilege and power in the public sphere and identify shared strategies for sustaining whiteness. In conclusion, I consider Fairview as a model of affective antiracist activism.

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Pedagogies of Race: The Politics of Whiteness in an African American Studies Course

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2011.34.1.1 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 1-19 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Regina V. Jones

Keyword(s):

White Students ◽

White Privilege ◽

Primary Role ◽

Race And Racism ◽

White People ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Black And White ◽

Historical Texts ◽

And Gender ◽

American Society

This paper evaluates students' arguments for a color-blind society to avoid discussions related to the continued existence of racism in USA culture. Relatedly, this writer finds that as an black woman her status as facilitator in the classroom is directly challenged, on occasion, and that race and gender play a primary role in students' perception of classroom material and how she is perceived. Classroom discussions related to historical texts reveal that structures of domination have slanted perception of black and white people in U.S. culture. Finally, a key to open dialogue about race and racism, primarily for white students, is to explain and demonstrate the invisibility of whiteness or white privilege in American society.

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Critical Whiteness Studies

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.5 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Barbara Applebaum

Keyword(s):

White Privilege ◽

White Supremacy ◽

The United States ◽

Whiteness Studies ◽

Critical Study ◽

White People ◽

Critical Whiteness Studies ◽

Academic Field ◽

Critical Whiteness ◽

Black President

In 1903, standing at the dawn of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the color line is the defining characteristic of American society. Well into the 21st century, Du Bois’s prescience sadly still rings true. Even when a society is built on a commitment to equality, and even with the election of its first black president, the United States has been unsuccessful in bringing about an end to the rampant and violent effects of racism, as numerous acts of racial violence in the media have shown. For generations, scholars of color, among them Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Franz Fanon, have maintained that whiteness lies at the center of the problem of racism. It is only relatively recently that the critical study of whiteness has become an academic field, committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness as a corrective to the traditional exclusive focus on the racialized “other.” Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is a growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege. CWS presumes a certain conception of racism that is connected to white supremacy. In advancing the importance of vigilance among white people, CWS examines the meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism. Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight will continue to ring true.

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`White privilege': A mild critique1

Theory and Research in Education ◽

10.1177/1477878508095586 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 309-321 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Lawrence Blum

Keyword(s):

Health Education ◽

Ethnic Differences ◽

Racial Disparity ◽

White Privilege ◽

Philosophy Of Education ◽

Racial Groups ◽

Racial Justice ◽

White People ◽

Unjust Enrichment ◽

Normative Foundations

White privilege analysis has been influential in philosophy of education. I offer some mild criticisms of this largely salutary direction — its inadequate exploration of its own normative foundations, and failure to distinguish between `spared injustice', `unjust enrichment' and `non-injustice-related' privileges; its inadequate exploration of the actual structures of racial disparity in different domains (health, education, wealth); its tendency to deny or downplay differences in the historical and current experiences of the major racial groups; its failure to recognize important ethnic differences within racial groups; and its overly narrow implied political project that omits many ways that White people can contribute meaningfully to the cause of racial justice.

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Struggles in Cultural Construction by Ethnic Groups in the USA

Journal of Educational Method and Technology ◽

10.36412/jemtec.v1i2.777 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

Author(s):

I S Lolowang

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Ethnic Groups ◽

Asian American ◽

Mexican American ◽

Cultural Construction ◽

Dominant Culture ◽

White People ◽

Internal Factors ◽

Race And Class ◽

The Usa

This article discusses about the struggles in cultural construction by some ethnic groups. These groups are attributed to their race and class as well. Through blending and negotiation experiences, the ethnic groups struggle to invent their identity and power in facing the dominant culture, the white people. They have to face both the external and the internal factors of their coexistence in the society. The groups discussed are the Mexican-American or the brown people, the African-American or the black, and the Asian-American or the yellow one.Keywords: cultural construction, Mexican-American, AfricanAmerican, Asian-American, color people

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My Dear White Sister: Self-examining White Privilege and the Myth of America

James Baldwin Review ◽

10.7227/jbr.4.7 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 92-103

Author(s):

Keely Shinners

Keyword(s):

White Privilege ◽

James Baldwin ◽

White Americans ◽

Open Letter ◽

White People ◽

Racial Privilege ◽

Personal Level

James Baldwin, in his landmark essay “My Dungeon Shook,” says that white Americans are “still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” This open letter explores this history on a personal level. Taking notes from Baldwin’s indictments of whiteness in Another Country and The Fire Next Time, this essay explores how white people, despite claims of deniability, become culpable, complicit, and ensnared in their racial privilege. By reading Baldwin’s work through a personal lens, it implores fellow white readers and scholars of Baldwin to begin examining the myths of America by first examining themselves.

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The promise of political blackness? Contesting blackness, challenging whiteness and the silencing of racism: A review article

Ethnicities ◽

10.1177/1468796819834046 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 202-222 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Madeline-Sophie Abbas

Keyword(s):

Lived Experiences ◽

White Privilege ◽

Review Article ◽

White People ◽

Life Chances ◽

Politics Of Place ◽

Race Identity ◽

Marginalised Groups ◽

National Imaginary ◽

Negative Impacts

This article reviews three books that examine black discourses and perspectives on whiteness and delineate the negative impacts of structural, institutional and interpersonal racism on the life chances and inclusion of people of colour within the national imaginary through both epistemic and material violences. The books explore practices of silencing which surround racism, facilitated by post-racial and colour blind frames which deny people of colour’s lived experiences of racism: Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging and Andrews’ Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. The review focuses on the British context. It explores the politics of place and the journeys undertaken by those marked as racially Other to belong and the recuperative potential of a form of intersectional politics as a means of understanding and navigating how we might overcome divisions between differentially marginalised groups to challenge the system of racism premised on white privilege and dominance more effectively. It concludes with arguing that a politics of discomfort is required to dislodge white privilege from its seat of comfort.

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Peak TV and the Spreadability of Transatlantic Horrible White People

Horrible White People ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479885459.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 39-74

Author(s):

Taylor Nygaard ◽

Jorie Lagerwey

Keyword(s):

Business Models ◽

White Supremacy ◽

The United States ◽

National Identities ◽

White People ◽

Distribution Models ◽

Industry Studies ◽

Race And Class ◽

Production And Distribution ◽

Cultural Shifts

Expanding the sketch of the conjuncture of significant cultural shifts leading to the ideological centralization of white precarity outlined in the introduction, this chapter uses TV industry studies to map the correlated changes in TV production and distribution models. It illustrates how content providers prioritize race and class identities and shared affects over national identities, finding commonalities in revenue-driven definitions of “quality audiences” before commonalities of geography. The chapter focuses on the disruption to the TV industry created by internet-distributed portals like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Now, especially their increased production of a certain type of “quality” fictional programming meant to attract an “imagined community” of upscale transnational consumers. This chapter thus examines how changes in the technology and business models of transnational television distribution have played a huge role in the rapid spread of the Horrible White People programming cycle, thereby contributing to the continued invisibility or normalization of white supremacy in the United States and Britain and confirming that television is still a dominant cultural and ideological force in society, despite the surplus of content, fragmentation of audiences, and other industrial changes that may have appeared to diffuse its impact in the era of “Peak TV.”

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