ABSTRACT
In recent years, popular attention has been focused on the problem of whiteness. Employing broad psychological themes, this literature contends that people inhabiting the position of whiteness reveal specific vulnerabilities to discussions perceived to implicate white conduct and white sensibilities, sometimes invoking powerfully hostile responses. “White fragility,” or “white panic” are described as defensive responses to critical incursions into a domain of long held white privilege. This chapter seeks to provide a theoretical backdrop to these discussions, and of the function to an implicit rhetoric of exposure that operates through this new racial critique. It is argued that the panic exhibited by some white people at the acknowledgement of their own racial positions derives from the unique sense of exposure directed at their habitual conducts, and an experience of shame that attends to the exposure before strangers of a relation of intimacy implied by habit itself. Moreover, this sense of shame is already implicit in a long tradition of western thinking on the distinction between public and private life, wherein exposure before strangers itself imposes a sense of shame and panic. This debasement is traced to what Freud described as the uncanny.
