When Americans think about race, -white- is often the furthest thing from their minds. Yet whiteness colors so much of social life in the United States, from the organization and maintenance of social structures to an individual-s sense of self.
White has long been the invisible default category against which other racial and ethnic groups are silently compared and marked out as -different.- At the same time, whiteness is itself an active marker that many bitterly fight to keep distinctive, and the shifting boundaries of whiteness reflect the nation-s history of race relations, right back to the earliest period of European colonization. One thing that has remained consistent is that whiteness is a definitive mark of privilege. Yet, this privilege is differentially experienced across a broad and eclectic spectrum, as is white identity itself. In order to uncover the ways in which its rigid structures and complicated understandings permeate American life, this book examines
