Abstract

Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on “whiteness” in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of disciplines. A small number of philosophers, critical race theorists, postcolonial theorists, social historians, and cultural studies scholars have revisited and reexamined questions of race and identity with an analysis that now focuses on historical studies of racial formation and the deconstruction of whiteness as an unmarked privilege-granting category and system of dominance. Collectively, these writings identify whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical, economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and relations of white supremacy (Mills 2003). In this way, whiteness studies is a conscious attempt to think critically about how white supremacy continues to operate systemically, and sometimes unconsciously, as a global colonizing force. -/- We extended the notion of ‘reproduction’ to include practices of reading and cultural forms of reiteration, but shied away from making the special issue into a philosophically driven cultural studies volume. Our volume is interdisciplinary by necessity: it offers theoretical and philosophical perspectives grounded in a variety of disciplinary starting points, all of which illustrate how whiteness remains at the center of reproduction and social regulation. Our hope is that this volume will further open philosophical conversations on the ways white supremacy regulates gender by providing new ways of thinking through those histories and reproductive materialities that make whiteness simultaneously a centrally defining signifier of bodies, values, and meanings and a signifier coding the “normal,”“the pure” and “the real” in white supremacist thinking. -/- We have categorized the contributions to this collection into three major areas: Resistance, Genealogies, and Miscegenation and Purity. These serve as both a guide for the reader's pathway through the volume and as a way of interconnecting the essays, although the intertextuality of all these writings also provides a rich field of rhizomic offshoots and a deeper connectivity.