ABSTRACT
Dominative racism is more characteristic of the Old South, in which Whites blatantly oppressed Blacks but lived in proximity to them. When Whiteness does not come into focus as a particular racial category, it functions as an unmarked standard from which other racial categories can show up only as deviation, from which it is a short jump to deviance. For many Whites, Whiteness is a kind of baseline or standard; it does not refer to a particular ethnic or racial group. This meaning of Whiteness is implicit in the use of the color White to refer to people whose color is actually more like pink than White. In a recent study, Jacobson points out that Whiteness in the early history of the United States meant 'fit for self-government'; originally, only people of Anglo-Saxon origin were considered fit to govern themselves. Blackness in America gets constituted out of White projections.
