Whiteness becomes analytically visible only from positions outside its category.

Evidence

This experience of peering into the dark light, or the light dark, reminded me of the problems inherent in trying to speak about whiteness as a central feature of raciology — by which I mean the various discourses that bring and keep the idea of “race” alive. Richard Dyer, whose work on the representational power of whiteness has famously illustrated its all-or-nothing quality, was one of the first to draw attention to the way that whiteness can become invisible to those who are caught up in its glare (1988, 1997). From one angle whiteness appears as normality; in a white supremacist society those people and those ways of thinking, behaving, and talking that are deemed white, are the norm by which all else is measured. From another angle, to those who are placed outside this category, whether through birth or behavior, the parameters of whiteness are visible to a greater or lesser degree. Depending on experience and understanding, whiteness can be seen in many guises: as pure terror, as property, as “a desperate choice” (Roediger, 1998:23). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 743

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines raciology as the discourses that keep the idea of race alive, and articulates the optical all-or-nothing quality of whiteness.
• XREF: Connects to Dyer’s White and Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness; the definition of raciology parallels Goldberg’s earlier work on racist culture.