Whiteness, like every other racialized category, is not biologically inherited but socially constructed.
Whiteness as a concept is foundational to the history of the United States, actively shaping this country’s social, cultural, political, and economic structures. Beginning in the 1930s, scholars from W. E. B. Dubois and David Roediger to Cheryl Harris have studied the many ways whiteness operates as a system of power that normalizes and reproduces structures of inequality, exclusion, and violence. As a field, whiteness studies help us better understand how racial hierarchies are created and sustained in the United States and asks us to critically engage with concepts of race, privilege, and identity.
Creating a more just, sustainable, and equitable society requires an unflinching engagement with our past, including how historical injustices are reproduced and shape our present.
To learn more about the exhibition, visit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.
Selected reading
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. First published 1935 by Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–1791.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. “Whiteness,” Talking About Race. https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness.
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2007.