Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Like water to the proverbial fish, whiteness has been largely invisible in the “modern world-system” of European creation. This invisibility is somewhat unique among the racial categories. The uniqueness does not consist of the “normalization” of whiteness: the idea that whiteness is the “default” racial status, that whites are “just people” who “don't have a race.” Nor does its uniqueness consist in the “transparency” of whiteness: the way in which whiteness is taken for granted in the world's powerful countries and thus not seen, like water by the fish. In many places, especially where one racially defined group predominates, that group's raciality is relatively invisible. Think of much of Africa, Han China, or Yamato Japan.No, the uniqueness of whiteness's invisibility lies in the contradictions therein: while whiteness partakes of normality and transparency, it is also dominant, insistently so. And it is also beleaguered, nervous, defensive. These qualities in turn belie claims for the “normality” of whiteness, the default status of the concept.Whiteness can hardly be hidden in a social system based on racial domination, one in which races are necessarily relational matters. White supremacy has never gone unresisted, for one thing, so whites (colonists, settlers, planters, etc.) have always had to “circle the wagons”: they had to theorize whiteness, defend its “purity,” and ... log in or subscribe to read full text