ABSTRACT
In most postmodern writing, whiteness is regarded as an identity, a performance, a mere cultural construct or, is framed as a moral problem. In sharp contrast, we anchored this volume on the idea that whiteness is the foundational category of “white supremacy” (Mills 1997). Whiteness, then, in all of its manifestations, is embodied racial power. Whether expressed in militant (e.g., the Klan) or tranquil fashion (e.g., most members of the white middle class) and whether actors deemed “white” are cognizant of it, whiteness is the visible uniform of the dominant racial group. Therefore all actors socially regarded as “white”—and, as I shall argue later, as “near white”—receive systemic privileges by virtue of wearing the white-or virtuallly white-outfit, whereas those regarded as nonwhite are denied those privileges.1 This explains, for instance, why “not-yet-white” ethnic immigrants (Roediger 2002) historically strove to become white as well as why immigrants of color always attempt to distance themselves from dark identities (blackness) when they enter the United States’ racial polity (Bonilla-Silva 1997, Bonilla-Silva and Lewis 1999).
