ABSTRACT
MY AIM IN THIS CHAPTER IS to explore three dominating themes of whiteness studies: (1) the notion of “white privilege,” (2) the notion of victimization as a characteristic of the relationship between whites and communities of color, and (3) the academically popular notion that the concept of race, divorced from the illuminating ascription of social constructivity, leads to consequences both epistemologically false and ethically misguided. More, this collection of tropes stimulates political responses that are contradictory to its goals in that whites are expected to respond to a situation for which they are claimed responsible while facing structural arguments that militate against the agency required for such responsibility. The result in such an aim-inhibiting situation is one, as Du Bois observed little more than half a century ago in his reflections on black petit-bourgeois consciousness, of standing still in many forms-a condition wrought, inevitably, with guilt.1
