ABSTRACT
What does it mean to be white? This is the question being asked in the emergent field of whiteness studies, where scholars are probing how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate. Several ideas have developed from this new work about the social construction of race and the development of white identity and white privilege. Yet there is something fundamentally disturbing about the growth of whiteness studies. I write this essay with a deep sense of ambivalence. Many, including myself, have long argued that studies of racial, gender, and class stratification are inadequate as long as the focus is solely on people of color as victims. Indeed, progressive scholars have asserted that analyzing structures of white privilege must be part of the analysis of racial stratification (Andersen 1984, 1987, 1999; McIntosh 1988; Rothenberg 2002; Wilson 1973). But in shifting the subject of race from the experience of disadvantaged groups to white people, whiteness studies risks eclipsing the study of racial power, focusing solely on white identity, and analyzing “whiteness” in the absence of the experience of people of color.
