The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body

Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on "whiteness" in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of disciplines. A small number of philosophers, critical race theorists, postcolonial theorists, social historians, and cultural studies scholars have revisited and reexamined questions of race and identity with an analysis that now focuses on historical studies of racial formation and the deconstruction of whiteness as an unmarked privilege-granting category and system of dominance. Collectively, these writings identify whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical, economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and relations of white supremacy (Mills 2003). In this way, whiteness studies is a conscious attempt to think critically about how white supremacy continues to operate systemically, and sometimes unconsciously, as a global colonizing force.

Philosophical methods are well suited for unpacking the conditions that hold whiteness in place, so why has the discipline remained relatively untouched by these conversations? One answer lies in the whiteness of philosophy itself. The absence of color talk in philosophy is a marker of the discipline's whiteness. As George Yancy notes: "A key feature of the social ontology of whiteness is that whites attempt to avoid discussing their own social, political, economic, and cultural investments in whiteness" (2004, 4). Academic philosophy in the United States has been largely driven by the legacy of Classic Greek and European thinkers. Philosophy departments are white social spaces and the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers in the United States are white men. It's likely that white philosophers have simply avoided racial topics because many believe that philosophical thought transcends those basic cultural, racial, and ethnic differences, and that these issues are more appropriately addressed by other humanities scholars or by social scientists. Conventional philosophical inquiry and method is thought to be color-blind and universally humanistic. White ways of knowing, seeing, ontologizing, evaluating, being, nation building, and judging have been presented to us as ways of doing philosophy pure and simple. As Arnold Farr observes, philosophy holds that "there is no white perspective but only the universal, impartial, disinterested view from nowhere. . . . Whiteness becomes visible in the very absence of a serious consideration of the problem of race in philosophy" (2004, 1540). The fact that white folks can only see whiteness and its attendant privileges with some difficulty may partially explain why we tend to position our white racialized experience as human experience.

We don't mean to suggest that philosophers have avoided questions of race altogether. The handful of conversations mirror and intersect with the dialogues feminists started on gender and class more than thirty years ago when we set out to demonstrate both the maleness of philosophy, and the usefulness of philosophy as a tool for discussing gender inequalities. Groundbreaking collections, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga's This Bridge Called My Back (1983), Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith's Allthe Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), Audre Lorde's works, along with endless difficult conversations with women of color, pushed white feminists philosophers to explore the intersections of race and gender. A decade later, some feminist theorists and philosophers turned their attention to interrogating white privilege and white supremacy. A few feminist works serve as milestones in the philosophical project of understanding whiteness (Alcoff 2000, 2006; Bailey 1998; Cuomo 1999; Davion 1995; Frye 1983, 1992; Harding 1991; Lugones 1991, 2003; Spelman 1988; Stubblefield 2005; Tessman and Bar-On 1999; Thompson 2001; Wiegman 1999; Zack 1993).

There exists a parallel development by philosophers of race who have set out to demonstrate the whiteness of philosophy (Mills 1997, 1998, 2003...