White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book has been in the making for some time. As a result, family members, teachers, colleagues, readers, students, and friends in several parts of the world have been critical to its completion. I would like to thank Alison Frankenberg, Ronald Frankenberg, and Rose­Anna Frankenberg—those who have known me the longest—for their, love, encouragement, and support. By teach­ ing me in their very different ways to believe in human dignity and equality, my parents provide the bedrock of my own com­ mitment to the pursuit of social justice. I also thank my grand­ mother, Susan Sherratt, whose life provided me with key lessons about endurance, courage, and female self­determination. I began work on this project in Santa Cruz, California. My deep thanks to Nancy Chodorow, James Clifford, Donna Hara­ way, and David Wellman. All four provided encouragement, tools for intellectual work, theoretical insight, and careful, en­ gaged, and serious critique of my work. I could not have wished for a better Ph.D. committee. Also at the University of Cal­ ifornia, Santa Cruz, Vivek Dhareshwar, Mary John, Tejaswini Niranjana, and other members of the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse were crucial to my intellectual formation, as were Chela Sandoval, the late Rosa Maria Villafane­Sisolak, and others associated with the Board of Studies in History of Consciousness and the Santa Cruz campus. David Schneider pro­ vided me with a research assistantship at a critical moment, as well as reading and commenting on my work. Billie Harris kept me on track, as it were, infrastructurally. Rosamaria Zayas and bell hooks were the two women who, in 1980, challenged me to rethink very seriously my own position within the racial order and thus set this project in motion. Beyond Santa Cruz, I have been sustained intellectually, polit­ ically, and emotionally through this project by friends and col­ leagues old and new, including Susan Alexander, Scott Anderson, ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Terry Berman, Chetan Bhatt, Kum Kum Bhavnani, Reyna Cowan, Ali Ishtiaq, Katie King, Carol Lopes, Meera Mani, Sunita Mani, Eleanor Soto, Ted Swedenburg, Kamala Visweswaran, Yvonne Yarbro­Bejarano, and members of the Culture Studies Group at the University of Washington, Seattle. Toni Morrison, Michael Omi, Beth Schneider, and Sylvia Yanagisako commented in ex­ tremely helpful ways on the manuscript. Dana Collins typed the bibliography for the manuscript, thus saving me from the straw that might well have broken this particular camel's back. Janaki Bakhle and Robert Mosimann at the University of Minnesota Press have been generous in their enthusiasm and practical assis­ tance throughout our work on this project. My heartfelt thanks to Robert Zeiger for keeping my yin out of deficit. Finally, Lata Mani has played an especially significant role in my life, person­ ally and intellectually, through and beyond the research and writ­ ing of this text. Our intensive engagement with one another's work has generated an exciting and creative context that has nur­ tured this project and left its mark on this book. Thirty anonymous women interviewees are the sine qua non of this text. My deepest thanks to those I interviewed for this book. Whether or not you agree with what I have written here, please know that I have striven to treat your words with the care and thoughtfulness that they deserve. Material support is also, of course, vital. The Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz, provided grants in support of my research on two occasions. A Research Professorship from the University of Washington, Seattle, helped me to revise the manuscript. ...