White critique faces a double bind that disaffiliation from whiteness cannot simply resolve

Evidence

Hill is particularly interested in the way that some feminists responded to these charges. Marilyn Frye, for example, faced what she saw as a double bind inherent in white critique - a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Her solution, as he reads it, is to call for disaffiliation from the structures of white privilege without losing sight of the way that gender and class compound identity and complicate the idea that individuals can simply choose to opt out of a category that they consider problematic: “It might indeed be said as a feminist lesson that ‘disaffiliation’ from the white race, its categorical disintegration, is perhaps a form of gendered interrogation already in progress” (Hill, 1997:7). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 781

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘disaffiliation’ strategy in white critique and the double bind it responds to.
• XREF: Connects to feminist standpoint theory debates and the question of who can critique a privileged identity from within or without. — connects to: Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 400; Scholars of whiteness divide between affirming a positive white identity and abolishing whiteness entirely — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 769