ABSTRACT
Twenty years of Whiteness Studies has produced a consensus about the core problem of whiteness: a kind of inattention to whiteness; an absence of identity for whites; an invisibility or unmarkedness; a privileged evasion of power and responsibility; and a kind of longing for racial innocence. One of the results of this conceptualization of the problem of whiteness has been to introduce a harsh scepticism toward white people’s accounts of their views about race. Whites, we have presumed, have an acute case of “false consciousness” regarding race. Exhibits A and B here are the concepts of white privilege and colour-blindness. This chapter argues for a different approach. The core problem of whiteness is not a shared set of privileges that must be dismantled. The core problem of whiteness and the major obstacle to racial justice is exactly the opposite: white privilege is not shared by all whites and not all whites are blind to the colour line. This chapter explores this alternative view of whiteness and posits that we can use the differences between whites – especially their political differences and differences in how they understand race – to construct Weberian “ideal types” of whites in twenty-first-century America.
