Whiteness

Whiteness refers to the construction of the 'white' race and the structural privileges afforded by 'white' people. Race as a social categorization is based on the production of racial differences on the body level such as – yet not limited to – skin colour and functions strongly on a social level. Hence, whiteness as a category of race refers to value and belief systems as well as habits and attitudes that are allocated in 'white' bodies. The particularity of whiteness within the social categorization of race is that it constitutes itself as the unmarked norm. In the book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison discusses how literature is neither universal nor race-free. She asks, “How is ‘literary whiteness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction?”. Once one starts to perceive that whiteness is there structuring the imagination of literature, then “it requires hard work not to see this”. Morrison continues: “It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by peebles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.” Another definition of whiteness by Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017, Why am I no longer talking to white people about race): “Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected. Those who are coded as a threat in our collective representation of humanity are not white.”