Whiteness critique predates the academic field in activist writers.

Evidence

Looking beyond the realm of scholarly activity, however, it is also important to connect this latest work to more accessible traditions of examining and challenging white racial attitudes and behavior that have accompanied black struggles for emancipation and justice. How new, radical, or subversive does this interrogation of whiteness look next to the hugely important work of earlier writers like Lillian Smith or John Howard Griffin who based their powerful deconstructions of Southern racism on their own experience as white Southerners; or the attempts of subsequent men and women who turned their attention to the history and psychology of white racism during the 1960s and 1970s - writers such as Joel Kovel, Winthrop Jordan, Dorothy Sterling, and David Wellman? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 750

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the forgotten activist genealogies behind academic critical whiteness studies — Lillian Smith and John Howard Griffin as origin points.