Analysts cannot both dismiss race’s biology and ignore skin-color salience in lived power.
Evidence
This discrepancy in perception and understanding is familiar to anyone who has been involved in trying to develop effective and challenging ways of thinking about raciology. It would be dishonest to deny that many writers and activists try to muddle through in one way or another, possibly without realizing the dangers of falling between the cracks in their conceptual frameworks. In other words, many writers want to have their racial cake and eat it too. While it may be relatively easy to conclude that “race” refers to an outdated system of classification based on imagined notions of biological difference, the salience of skin color in everyday life still has to be reckoned with - in some places more than others. What does it mean to propose the abolition of whiteness in a world in which, as George Lipsitz (1995) puts it, structures of power offer all racialized minorities, not simply black and white, a “possessive investment in whiteness”? Or, to put it another way, how do we separate the simple, descriptive term “white” from the ideologically charged “White”? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 773
Categorization
- XREF: Directly parlays the vault’s definitional work on racialization and the race-construction tension into a usable analytic puzzle about whiteness as both descriptive and ideological category. — connects to: Race has no genetic basis yet produces real material consequences. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1112; Racial identification is learned, not observed in skin color.
- QUESTION: The white/White typographic distinction proposes a genuinely usable definitional split worth chasing for the reference vault.
Broader Connections
- Race has no genetic basis yet produces real material consequences.
#complicates(0.75) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1112 - Racial identification is learned, not observed in skin color.
#complicates(0.72)