ABSTRACT
The conditional damnability of whiteness is where this essay begins. At least potentially, renewed attention to whiteness, as dubious as that ought to sound, adds to identity politics the newly critical dimension of what could perhaps be called an "allo-identity politics. "4 In the case of the former, color marks a positive phylogenic difference which is inadvertently constituted by the unspoken category of whiteness. As a critical response to this, an alloidentity politics of white normativity would attempt, at the moment whiteness speaks, to return it to itself with a critical difference: whiteness as both marginally recognizable and different than it thought. Thus, among the risks of posing the question "can whiteness speak?" is the necessarily ambivalent response that it hails, or at least ought to hail, from white folks. The response is, well, "yes and no." For whether whiteness turns out to be "a thing to laugh or cry about"-whether, that is, the immanent whitening of critical race studies turns out to be progressively efficacious or just another conscientized "takeover"-depends partly, at least, on its eventual dis/articulation. In short, the whitening of critical race studies depends politically on how thoroughly whiteness is "trashed."
