Whiteness and White Supremacy

Through this theme, the author explores whiteness as a social construct that is revered and aspired to in the United States, to the extent that its opposite—blackness—is reviled. In “liminal spaces i,” Rankine mentions that she is teaching a class at Yale University on whiteness and that she is often surprised at the historical ignorance of her students. She explains that the concept of “critical whiteness studies” gained traction in the 1980s-90s as a means “to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with 'normalcy' and 'universality' masked its omnipresent institutional power” (17). The notion of whiteness as the “norm” suggests that non-white people are abnormal and ultimately inferior. She explains that the U.S. has a long history of enshrining white supremacy into law, from the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted immigration to “free white person[s]” (15) to the...