“I view the taken-for-granted narratives and boundaries in everyday life as enabling people to interpret, represent, and explain social life in ways that rationalize a certain distribution of material and symbolic resources along particular racial lines.”
“These social relations play a critical role in perpetuating social inequality in the absence of formal laws and policies that stratify resources in ‘postracial’ america.”
“whites’ feelings of entitlement and trivialization are not racially neutral judgments and interpretations but help constitute white racial identities.”
“It is important to note that this race-place relationship is a co-constitutive process. That is, the meanings of racial identity and the meanings of the places those identities inhabit simultaneously inform one another.”
“Through members’ shared comfort in talking about suffering, victories, hard work, citizenship, music, and a plethora of ‘nonracial’ objects, ideas, and practices, these members demonstrated their own understandings of whiteness. It was during these discussions that I observed how, when, and why they became (un)conscious of their whiteness in relation to these things.”
“Institutions reveal much about themselves when under stress or in crisis, when they face the unexpected as well as the routine.” - Michael Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method”
“Talk of diversity without talk of power is hollow speech.”
“White racial identity formation is (re)produced and (re) articulated in relation to rationalizing and dictating where one lives, with whom one interacts, what job one holds, and what power one wields. these dimensions are not abstract or happenstance positions but are detailed practices that labor to defend white racial group privilege without any conscious or planned cognitive component.”
“I think of dominant racial meanings as powerful, implicit, and far-reaching scripts and expectations to which people are socially accountable as members of particular racial groups. . . the dimensions. . . enable whites to explain and justify their actions in ways that appear normal and even racially neutral but that preserve the privileges implicitly associated with whiteness and exploitive social relations that often benefit whites.”
“Polished and cleaned to near invisibility, lenses instead provide a specific way of seeing. Feelings of racial entitlement and judgment are not directly observable. They hide in plain sight.”
“When cultural objects coded nonwhite (especially black or Latino) function as autonomous, self-supportive, and unrelated to a seemingly white world, some may decode them as an alienating force and substance. . .When cultural objects and practices do not hail (interpellate) the white actor as an omniscient subject, a sense of frustration often builds. . . one can be offended only if one expects (or feels entitled) to be hailed as the “always-already” all-knowing subject of the discourse at hand.”
“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. . . fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that. . . exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.” -bell hooks
“The fact that white people sometimes feel uncomfortable and even fearful when in predominantly black spaces, such as black neighborhoods, does not necessarily indicate that white existence is constrained in a similar way that black existence is. Unlike black people, white people are seen by a white racist society as having the right or authority to enter freely any public space they wish. That they cannot do so comfortably in, for example, prominently black neighborhoods tends to be seen as a violation of the ‘natural’ order of things, as an ‘unjust’ limitation.” - Shannon Sullivan
“An unequal arrangement privileges the movement of white bodies across and between differently racialized spaces, while nonwhite movements are literally and figuratively policed, surveilled, and disciplined by whites who are understood as the natural owners and administrators of that space. Such an arrangement well demonstrates the claim that ‘space is fundamental in any exercise of power’.”
“When it comes to race, whites are increasingly competing to play the victim. Such talk of white victimhood and stigmatization persists in the face of mountains of evidence of white privilege and even after the most obvious acts of white racism.”
“White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.”
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