ABSTRACT
In discussions of race and the recent rediscovery of the American preoccupation with whiteness, it is possible to isolate two overarching but sharply conflicting frameworks that run at cross-purposes. Especially in California there is certainly something deeply resonant to the critique that the black-white dialogue misses much of what is important about how “whiteness” plays itself out in different situations. A remarkable capacity for transmogrification or, perhaps better, morphing. In the last twenty-five years, cities in the United States have under gone the greatest racial transformation of their entire history. Writers Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, and David Roediger have discussed “the abolition of whiteness”. The alignment of corridors in the major cities was chosen so that the freeways almost universally cut through core areas of black settlements, while connecting the white suburbs to the central business districts of the cities.
