Abolishing Whiteness

The power, privilege, and oppression paradigm that most schools of social work currently espouse to are often taught through an experiential approach to whiteness, privileging the majority of white students with the opportunity to explore their white identity at the expense of the learning of the Black/Brown, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students in the classroom. Many BIPOC students experience these courses as a hostile environment, finding themselves and their racial group identified in contrast to whiteness – oppressed, marginalized, silenced, and powerless. This paper presents an innovative course outline using Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies as theoretical frameworks to decenter whiteness and attend to the learning needs of BIPOC students. Using these two theoretical frameworks, students will learn the history of the racial hierarchy of humans; the social construction of whiteness, the evolution of anti-black racism and the extension to other people of color; and the relationship between white supremacy and racism.

Fairies and Fairness:

The traditional association of whiteness with fairies warrants a closer examination, as this mythological yearning for a specific childlike realm reveals an idealization of a white past. Indeed, the likening of women to a pure, infantile domain reveals an elevation of whiteness, which, by default, degrades people of color as lesser. While there has been considerable scholarship on the racialization of Charlotte Brontë’s Haitian character Bertha Mason, the construction of whiteness in conjunction with Jane Eyre’s character has remained largely unexplored. I explore these themes of the construction of whiteness through fairies and the romanticization of a white past through a close analysis of humanity in Jane Eyre. I first investigate Victorian and Edwardian fairy visuals, moving on to demonstrate how Jane’s individuality and feminism gains autonomy with her religious spiritualism. I also show, however, how the faerie language in the novel serves to override and disregard Jane’s position as a human being with agency due to Mr. Rochester’s aesthetic of white femininity. Through close readings of the supernatural in Jane Eyre, I scrutinize how the use of fairy language creates a power imbalance where the dehumanization of women and minorities creates a male fantasy directly opposed to the theme of the individual. I discuss how the sexualization and racialization of women as supernatural beings bolsters the self-serving, problematic construct of the ‘human’ which continuously labels women and minorities as less than. Therefore, to restructure this racism and misogynistic thought, I propose a decentering of humanity from a white male perspective, seeing women and minorities not as a monolithic “Other,” almost supernatural beings, but as equally human and worth of respect and dignity.

Exhibitionary Commerce, the Construction of Whiteness, and the Theological Sideshow

I will briefly recount the histories of three individuals who were exhibited for White audiences, to consider the role that the White spectator has in the construction of White supremacist ideology that casts Whiteness as norm and Blackness as deviant curiosity. Drawing from womanist scholarship, I will argue that the White theological canon and White-centric scholarship actively perpetuate this legacy. In conclusion I analyze the theology syllabi collected in the Wabash/AAR database to expose the ongoing construction of White supremacist ideologies within the theology classroom.

Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy in the United States

This essay applies an intersectional approach to the analysis of the history of anti-Catholicism and Islamophobia in the United States as manifestations of White supremacy. It offers a comparative analysis of these two phenomena in an attempt to suggest that a certain intersection exists between each and the social construction of Whiteness and the maintenance of White power and privilege in US American history. It concludes with observations on progress in the development of Catholic–Muslim relations through concerted efforts by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and various US Muslim organizations, noting that the majority of Catholics in the United States have benefited from White privilege.

Corps et blanchité au prisme de la Blackness

This article examines Whiteness from the perspective of the concept of Blackness and the production of Black gazes upon Whiteness. The goal is neither to reverse old schemes nor to establish a new asymmetric duality, but to come back to the first space in which political, social, and visual dynamics are formed—the body. In doing so, the article shows that the notions and tools developed by Blackness Studies and Critical Race Theories enable the analysis of the role of corporeality in the joint construction of Whiteness and Blackness.

Construction of Whiteness and Blackness in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno

Rather than resist slavery directly, the narrative world of Benito Cereno disperses the rejection of tyranny through the intricate construction of subject-object relations, the situational context, Benito Cereno’s stifled, semi-articulated statements, the imagery of the narrative and its complex narrative structure. Through silences, multiple viewpoints, innuendos, refusal to solve certain issues definitely while being explicit about this indeterminacy, Melville’s narrative not only inscribes itself in the Romantic questioning of historiography, but also gestures towards postmodernist inconclusiveness and the writerly text in which the reader is invited to be its co-author who fills out the gaps and silences with their own interpretation.

The imperative and promise of neo-abolitionism in social work

Summary Neo-abolitionism, the social movement to abolish whiteness, contends that whiteness—not white people—possesses no humane or redeemable quality, in and of itself, but functions solely as the keystone of racialization and systemic racial oppression. Neo-abolitionism has not garnered legitimacy or secured broad commitment from any profession or discipline in the United States. This is unsurprising given the existential anathema, to a society founded upon white supremacy, of such a direct ideological affront and material challenge to the reigning social and institutional order. Practically speaking, though, neo-abolitionism has failed to translate theoretical philosophy to a viable sociopolitical agenda comprised of actionable routes toward social change that might subvert the hegemony of whiteness and erode the social construction of race. As whiteness increasingly inflicts harm and sows division in the contemporary historical moment, social work faces the imperative to seriously consider the merits of neo-abolitionism. Findings Where neo-abolitionism has stalled in attempts to move beyond theorization and academic debate in disciplines such as history and sociology, the organizing capacity, praxis techniques, and advocacy expertise of social work—as much a profession as a discipline—offer means of real progress toward abolishing the ideological and material supports of the social construction of whiteness at large, which proliferates racial injustice and undergirds myriad inequities beyond race. Applications Neo-abolitionism addresses the imperative faced by social work, in research, practice, and pedagogy, to move beyond mediation and toward elimination of the structural injustices and manifest inhumanities in lived experience propagated by white hegemony.