A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2017 This volume collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. In truth, the need to examine whiteness as a problem has rarely been grasped outside academic circles. The ubiquity of whiteness--its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible--makes it the very epitome of the mainstream in America. And yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and inequality in this country necessitates a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. Essays here seek to do just that work. Editors and contributors interrogate whiteness as a social construct, revealing the underpinnings of narratives that foster white skin as an ideal of beauty, intelligence, and power. Contributors examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a refined introduction to the critical study of race for a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will appeal to scholars in African and African American studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, legal studies, and more. This collection delivers an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies in its multifaceted impact on American history and culture.

This book addresses the hidden dynamics of race within the European Union. Brexit supporters’ frequent targeting of European Union (EU) movers, especially those from Central and Eastern Europe, has been popularly assumed as at odds with the EU project’s foundations based on equality and inclusion. This book dispels that notion. By interrogating the history, wording, omissions, assumptions and applications of laws, policies and discourses pertinent to mobility and equality, the argument developed throughout the book is that the parameters of CEE nationals’ status within the EU have been closely circumscribed, in line with the entrenched historical positioning of the west as superior to the east. Engaging current legal, economic, political and moral issues--against the backdrop of Brexit and contestations over EU integration and globalisation--this work opens avenues of thought to better understand law’s role in producing and sustaining social stratifications. Europe is a postcolonial space, as this book demonstrates. By addressing fractures within the construct of whiteness that are based on ethnicity, class and migrant status, the book also provides a theoretically nuanced, and politically useful, understanding of contemporary European racisms. This book will appeal to scholars, students and others interested in migration, EU integration and EU citizenship, equality law, race and ethnicity, social policy, and postcolonialism.

Whiteness is a collection of essays that employ a range of approaches to understanding whiteness as a communication phenomenon. Contributors use analyses of media representations, social scientific data, poststructuralist theoretical discussions, and post-colonial critiques of whiteness. Also included are discussions of some of the ways whiteness is enacted through commemorations, white antiracist rhetoric, pedagogy, and personal narratives that highlight the cultural politics of whiteness.

Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance. In a new, original essay written specifically for the 10th anniversary edition, he explores this racial paradigm and explains how it contributes to a system of white racial privilege socially and legally defended by restrictive definitions of what counts as race and as racism, and what doesn't, in the eyes of the law. The book also includes a new preface, in which Haney López considers how his own personal experiences with white racial privilege helped engender White by Law.

DIVA collection of anti-racist, critical essays on the specific (localized) constructions of whiteness, white identities and white privilege edited by the author of the very successful White Women, Race Matters (U. Minn.)/div