ABSTRACT
Steve Garner’s concern is one of definition: how should whiteness be defined and could the idea of white studies be operationalized, moving from the abstract to the concrete. Whiteness studies or at least a discussion of white privilege is included in many standard sociology textbooks and readers. This chapter shows that the field of whiteness studies has not only grown exponentially, but the treatment of whiteness as a socio-political category linked to power and privilege, is a subfield within the broader category of critical race studies and racial and ethnic relations. The whiteness studies movement in the 1990s typically fused how whiteness, like all races, is a social construction with a type activism that explicitly challenged the invisibility of white privilege. The number of courses focusing solely on whites almost disappeared within a decade but the scholarship within this field exploded with hundreds of scholars examining every conceivable facet of whiteness.
