Quotes for All
If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white – which his genes certainly entitled him to do – his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis. Eric Liu
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America. Eric Liu
Through the cold time she holds me with evergreen devotion she bears up my whiteness. Earle Birney
In a snowfall that covers the winter grass a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear. Dogen
Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites. David Roediger
In some ways Jews and the various largely Catholic and often poor European immigrant groups were white, as the historian Tom Guglielmo has recently put it, on arrival. Where naturalization law was concerned, for example, ample precedents recognized their ability to become citizens, a right explicitly resting on their whiteness. But they also remained, as … Read more
For radical white writers wishing to forge interracial movements of poor and working people, whiteness has also long been a problem, with Alexander Saxton and Ted Allen making especially full efforts to understand whiteness in order to disillusion whites unable to see past the value of their own skins. David Roediger
As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal – and one in which it succeeded – as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe … Read more
Instead of accepting what James Baldwin called the lie of whiteness, many people in lots of different fields and movement activities have tried to productively make it into a problem. When did (some) people come to define themselves as white? In what conditions? How does the lie of whiteness get reproduced? What are its costs … Read more
The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for … Read more