ABSTRACT

Although there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and/or enthnographers whose central critical project is the study of whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared with one another in conversations “special” knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people. Deemed special because it was not a way of knowing that has been recorded fully in written material, its purpose was to help black folks cope and survive in a white supremacist society. For years black domestic servants, working in white homes, acted as informants who brought knowledge back to segregated communities—details, facts, observations, psychoanalytic readings of the white “Other.”