Whiteness: An IntroductionWhat is whiteness? Why is it worth using as a tool in the social sciences? Making sociological sense of the idea of whiteness, this book skilfully argues how this concept can help us understand contemporary societies. If one of sociology's objectives is to make the familiar unfamiliar in order to gain heightened understanding, then whiteness offers a perfect opportunity to do so. Leaning firstly on the North American corpus, this key book critically engages with writings on the formation of white identities in Britain, Ireland and the Americas, using multidisciplinary sources. Empirical work done in the UK, including the author's own, is developed in order to suggest how whiteness functions in Britain. Bringing an emphasis on empirical work to a heavily theorized area, this important text synthesizes and reviews existing work, incorporates multidisciplinary sources of interest to those outside the sociology sphere, and features concise chapters which will engage undergraduates. Garner deftly argues that whiteness is a multifaceted, contingent and fluid identity, and that it must be incorporated into any contemporary understandings of racism as a system of power relationships in both its local and global forms. |
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An Introduction Steve Garner. Whiteness One of thekey areas of debate about race and ethnicity in recent yearshasbeen the question of the construction of whiteness. Much of this literature has focused on the situation in the USA but ...
An Introduction Steve Garner. A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s My fascinationwithwhitenessasastateofbeinghasalong genealogy, going back to experiences in England and the USA in the 1980s, France and Ireland in the 1990s and the early ...
An Introduction Steve Garner. are not the norm. In this book, I want to emphasise that these two assumptions have guided me so far and I have no reason to replace them. In fact, I am pushed to stress, first, that the bestway to understand ...
An Introduction Steve Garner. that she cannot overcome the collective institutionalised structures of oppression, and has a stake in not wanting to. Of course there are stakes in not wanting to, which I address below,but thisis merely a ...
An Introduction Steve Garner. let go of their racialised identities with the same consequences. This is clearly nonperformative in Sara Ahmed's terms, but it is an objective whose attainment necessitates passing through stages of ...