The socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness: how it was
created, how it changes, and how it protects and privileges people
who are perceived as white.
This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series
examines the socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness, tracing
its creation, its changing formation, and its power to privilege and
protect people who are perceived as white. Whiteness, author Martin
Lund explains, is not one single idea but a shifting, overarching
category, a flexible cluster of historically, culturally, and
geographically contingent ideals and standards that enable systems of
hierarchical classification. Lund discusses words used to talk about
whiteness, from white privilege to white fragility; the intersections
of whiteness with race, class, and gender; whiteness in popular
culture; and such ideas as "colorblindness" and "reverse
racism," which, he argues, actually uphold whiteness.
Lund shows why it is important to keep talking and thinking about
whiteness. The word "whiteness," he writes, doesn't
describe; it conjures something into being. Drawing on decades of
critical whiteness studies and citing a range of examples (primarily
from the United States and Sweden), Lund argues that whiteness is
continually manufactured and sustained through language, laws,
policies, science, and representations in media and popular culture.
It is often positioned as normative, even universal. And despite its
innocuous-seeming manifestations in sitcoms and superheroes,
whiteness is always in the service of racial domination.