ABSTRACT
The different varieties of identity politics—based on differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—generally thought of as progressive or leftist have come under criticism, if not outright attack, by many left intellectuals and activists. A politics of representation is viable only where there is a generalized consumer economy that can create the impression that citizenship is a function of buying power. The diversification of the ethnoracial order of the past decade and the changes in immigration, economics, and demographics that made this possible have not led to change in the understanding of white and black in the United States. Discussion of whiteness is almost always evaded by turning to its "other," blackness. "White," like "Latino," is evidently a construction whose overdetermination is not seriously explored, one most often impugned by critics as usurping the ground of normalcy, centrality, dominance.
