Whiteness and culture

In this article, I argue that culture is the means through which whiteness (a state of normalized white racial domination) is accomplished. The scope of this article is on racism, race, and culture in a U.S. context. Within the racialized social system of the United States, culture develops in ways that secure racial interests and maintain racial hierarchy. The aim is to give readers an overview of how the concepts of culture and race have been addressed together in past scholarship and to offer new insights on how to address these concepts moving forward. First, some of the dominant themes in which culture is addressed in the scholarship on whiteness are located. These themes are (a) whiteness and material culture, (b) whiteness as discursive and ideological, and (c) the habitus and spaces of whiteness. Second, new directions for this line of research are offered. Future research can be directed towards (a) uncovering the common scripts of whiteness that pervade across different cultural arenas, (b) investigating how individuals are actively negotiating these ideologies and discourses of whiteness, and (c) understanding the fluidity of whiteness. Seeing culture as the means through which whiteness operates can expose the practices and mechanisms that produce and maintain a system of racial oppression in the United States.