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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... minorities. Whiteness isanessential purchase forstudents of Sociology, History, Politics and Cultural Studies studying topics relating to Race and Ethnicity and Whiteness Studies. Steve GarnerisSenior Lecturer in Sociology atthe ...
... minority racialised group is invalid. One commentator expresses hisunderstanding thus: 'The essence ofthe discipline canbe summed up in two words: Hating Whitey'. 2This representation ofthethrust of whiteness studies wilfully displaces ...
... minorities'. The dominantpostwar 'race relations'paradigm (Miles1993, Jacobson 1998)constructed racialised communities whichit then placed in antagonistic relationships. A number ofstudies of minorities began to constitute the corpus.It ...
... minorities. Howevermuch you can disaggregate the populations covered by the location 'white'into classes, genders, regions, religions, and political identifications, the structure of discrimination means that the option of identifying ...
... minorities. It is not clear from statistical analysesofpoverty, educational achievement, health, etc., that minoritieshave made absoluterather thanrelative progress. Programmes such as affirmative actionare cited asunfair impositions on ...