Critical whiteness scholarship risks reifying the very race concept it questions.

Evidence

It is vital that the impulse to identify, mark, and analyze whiteness does not lead into a trap of reifying the very concept of “race” that it is intended to question. The growing interest in theoretical whiteness risks producing an indifferent cultural pluralism which does little to engage with the changing formations of local and global racisms. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 776

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the whites-studies position as critique of a constructed fiction, not endorsement of race realism.
• XREF: Complements the vault’s CRT usage where whiteness studies is treated as a decolonial tool rather than a self-reifying trap. — connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 776