Problematic White Identities and a Search for Racial Justice

Blauner (1995, Racism and Antiracism in World Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), Winant (1998, Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(4): 755–766) and Bonnett (1997, New Communities 22(1): 97–110) all express concern over the construction of racism as a white-only phenomenon and the corresponding degree to which whiteness is essentialized as a negative identity. This paper explores how white antiracism activists mediate between a static construction of white racism and a more contextual understanding of racism and possibilities for white activism. While whiteness is clearly hegemonic in the larger social world, within movements for racial justice, whiteness is often seen as suspect. Given this, white antiracism activists spend a fair amount of their activist hours negotiating a problematic identity. This paper explores the mechanisms by which such an identity is negotiated. I conclude that while white activism is complicated by a definition of racism that tends to essentialize whiteness, the activists have found ways to empower themselves and to conceptualize their relationship to racism and antiracism activism in a less rigid way. All of this contributes to our understanding of the complexity of white identity and efforts to demonstrate how it is an identity that, like other identities, is always in formation.