Something Else

Ruth Frankenburg’s 8-point definition of Whiteness

ghostarewe:

1- Whiteness is a location of structural advantage in societies structured in racial dominance.

2-Whiteness is a ‘standpoint,’ a location from which to see selves, others, and national and global orders.

3- Whiteness is a site of elaboration of a range of cultural practices and identities, often unmarked and unnamed, or named as national, or ‘normative’ rather than specifically racial.

4- Whiteness is renamed or displaced within ethnic or class namings.

5-Inclusion within the category of ‘white’ is often a matter of contestation, and in different times and places some kinds of whiteness are boundary markers of the category itself.

6-Whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather cross-cut by a range of other axes of relative advantage or subordination. These do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it.

7- Whiteness is a product of history, and is a relational category. Like other racial location, it has no inherent but only socially constructed meanings. as such, whiteness’s meanings may appear simultaneously malleable and intractable.

8-The relationality and socially constructed character of whiteness does not, it must be emphasized, mean that this and other racial locations are unreal in their material and discursive effects.

The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness as found in The New Social Theory Reader 2nd Ed.