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This body of work encourages white people1 to recognize that their histories, perspectives, and experiences are not those of humanity, but rather those of white humanity; while simultaneously exposing the falsity of inherent whiteness. In other words, the exhibit and web site provide a space for white people to perceive their whiteness in the contexts of socialization, material culture, and economic location; but to disavow it within their attitudes, behaviors, and identities. Recognizing and disavowing whiteness concurrently may appear contradictory. Both are strategies necessary for the creation of white identities capable of acknowledging the gross historical injustices carried out in their names and accepting ongoing culpability in the maintenance of historical inequalities, without becoming paralyzed by guilt.
I grew up in an overwhelmingly white American town, nonetheless aware of the guilt felt by my parents for being white people.2 I grappled with it myself. Though the northern part of my state is home to the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations, and their ideology flourished behind many closed doors, overt racism was never publicly tolerated. At eighteen, my father took an unusual step for a young man of the region, in driving across the country to the 1964 Democratic Party convention to cast a vote in support of the Civil Rights Movement. Years later, his mother uttered nigger in my presence. He rebuked her strongly.
However when puberty struck me, a fissure surfaced in my father's progressive façade. I could date boys with different skin colors than mine, yet was not to consider marrying them or having their children. "It's not fair to the kids." I sensed that something about this logic was suspect. I had already realized that past histories of genocide, slavery, and discrimination were related to present social and economic inequalities, but could not articulate why, or how they were, or my relation to it all, or for that matter, why my progressive father only accepted intimate white relationships for me. That was because I did not think of myself as white. Klu Klux Klansmen were white; I was American.
As just an American, I learned white history at school, read the classics of white literature, and sang white church hymns. I presumed my stories, myths, and songs were the bedrock of everyone's experience. I did not notice the white curriculum, nor did it occur to me that flesh colored bandages are white flesh colored or that nude nylons are not nude on most Africans.
Throughout the eighties and nineties—especially at university where multiculturalism and diversity were the order of the day—I continually heard and believed that divisions based on color did not matter. After all, "We are all the same color on the inside." Now I wonder if life's realities are ever that clear. I studied art history, which meant class after class of white art history, punctuated by special exotic classes such as Japanese art history. My colorblind world was divided into normal and special, or more accurately, white and everyone else.
Given that normality is defined by all that is white, am I actually presuming that everyone is white like me with the same opportunities and experiences, when I claim that I am normal and we are all the same? Colorblind rhetoric ultimately fails as a helpful construct because we do not all share the same histories and cultures, and their influences shape our lives differently.
In attempting to wrestle with these issues, I decided to concentrate my studies on histories and cultures not my own. I thought I could discover how to be antiracist and "help those people." Such reasoning functioned so long as I remained in a white environment and did not know any of them.
That changed markedly when I came to Australia to learn about Aboriginal land ethic. At the Indigenous Peoples and Racism conference3 in Sydney, I met many Aboriginal people. Though I had lived in Japan, Indonesia, Chile, and Taiwan, and was used to possessing one of the few white faces around, this was new territory. Never before had my skin color been in the minority, in a country where the majority of people look like me. No one was intrigued by my exoticness, or pleased about—yet another foreigner's—desire to "help." Aboriginal people instead asked, "Why don't you help your own culture and take a look at it?" I am indebted to people like Christian Thompson and Marcia Langton, both presenters at the conference, who later graciously gave me their personal time and so helped me redirect my gaze.
I look white to most people, and I am sure at times, I still act white. For the most part, I still enjoy the economic and social advantages whiteness confers on me. However, I am beginning not to think white.
For most, race is an inherent human attribute. Many people who denounce racism do so by asserting the equality of the races, rather than the equality of women and men (Crick xi–xii). This argument assumes as accurate the very idea of race. However, in the first scholarly history of the idea of race in the West, Ivan Hannaford demonstrates that the concept race is modern with few feeble precursors prior to the Enlightenment.
Having entered the Spanish, Italian, French, English, and Scottish languages between 1200 and 1500CE, the word race is of recent origins. Initially, it most often referred to the swift current of a river or a trial of speed. In the Middle Ages, it signified the lineage of families, particularly royal or noble ones. Not until the late seventeenth century, did it begin to expand from familial to ethnic groups. The idea of race was only fully elaborated in the following century. Conspicuously absent are etymological roots for race in Hebrew, Greek, or Roman (4-6).
Credited with the creation of Western Civilization, the Greeks deviated from familiar forms of governance dependent upon hierarchal rules of kinship, by introducing novel political ways of organizing society based upon civic relationships. This idea of politics called for human action, derived from reason created through public debate and persuasion. Hannaford notes:
The Greeks recognized that the theocratic and bureaucratic models of the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews could not handle the social and economic complexities they faced. Human settlements now involved larger numbers of diverse peoples in affairs no longer possible of regulation by kings, priests, tribal leaders, and heads of households. [. . .] The Greeks invented the ideal of citizenship and its accompanying demand for the discharge of a civic duty that was clearly differentiated from duty to family, clan, or tribe (11-12).
For the Greeks, and the Romans who emulated them, the peoples of the world were barbaric or civic rather than raced. We are so mesmerized by their slaveholding, subjugation of women, and failure to completely achieve the political ideal, that we overlook the great achievement of a political consciousness at all (11).
After the fall of the Roman Republic, the advance of faith and religion challenged the political ideal (89). The emergence of Christianity and reemergence of Judaism brought a return to aristocratic rule rooted in strict religious piety (92). A division between believer and unbeliever, not the "races," replaced civic and barbaric. Thus, faith contested the authority of the political state. Augustine of Hippo (354-430CE) reconciled the two by arguing that the vocation of the Church is to guide leaders of the State through debate and persuasion. He further asserts that through faith, all men regardless of origin, descent, politics, barbarity, blackness, or whiteness can be citizens of the city of God (93-96). The compromise between civics and faith endured a millennium, during which time the rise of Islam presented a complicating influence, in that, it merged the spiritual and the political into a social system that was entirely religious (99). Importantly, this reversion did not constitute the beginnings of the idea race.
Instead, the great Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides (b. 1135CE), laid the foundations for the idea of race, by amplifying previously existing intolerance of unbelievers. He contended that some unbelievers—Turks, Indians, and Kushites—were irrational beings and inhuman. Because it was possible for Spanish Moors, unbelievers of his region, to mislead the rational and faithful, he suggested that under certain circumstances slaying them would be necessary (112). Tragically, his conclusion was employed to justify the persecution of Jews and Moors in Western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (113-18).
To escape oppression, many Moors and Jews converted to Christianity. Fanatical Christians distrusted these conversions and developed an impossible blood test, to establish the purity of one's pedigree during the Spanish Inquisition (1492-1520CE). This blood test introduced to humanity the first concrete precursor of the idea of race (119-123).
During the sixteenth century race began to connote the blood lineages of kings and bishops. Concurrently, accounts of voyages to Guinea and the "discoveries" of North America painted indigenous peoples as lustful and barbaric. The Hamitic heresy: the belief that all humans descend from the three sons of Noah, one of whom (Ham) disgraced and was then cursed by his father; was also popularized. These developments kindled a search for the causes of human variation (182-83). However, the idea of race was not significantly altered until emerging scientific principles were deployed in efforts to interpret the Bible. Hannaford points out that:
[. . .] no fundamental amendment was made to the exclusive idea of a race of kings, bishops, and nobles, and nothing changed the multiplicity of meanings for the same word in a variety of other unrelated contexts, until after [Francis] Bacon's reasoned reconciliation of biblical exegesis with the advancement of knowledge about nature based on logical analysis of place and language (183).
Thus began the quest to scientifically observe, categorize, and demonstrate the superiority or inferiority of human "races."
The Greeks and Romans never thought of themselves as white. Neither did early European settlers of the Americas. They were Puritans, French, or free, not white. Ann Louise Keating reminds one that, "It was not until around 1680, with the racialization of slavery, that the term [white] was used to describe a specific group of people" (par. 31). The economic opportunities created by slavery, accelerated the generation of the "races." Red, black, yellow, and white do not accurately describe human skin. White and black do however, retain ancient associations with purity and evil which were appropriated for the purposes of wealth accumulation (Dyer 1997, 67; Keating par. 32).
Once established, the category white was not, and is still not, stable. People who fall within the bounds of whiteness today, previously did not. In his revealing How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev tells of the distinction between African slaves and Irish immigrants as so blurred that the former were often called "smoked Irish" (Ignatiev 41). According to Carl Wittke, the poorest of Irish laborers were labeled "Irish niggers" (qtd. in Ignatiev 214). Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine note in their examination of the "ever-expanding boundaries of whiteness" that nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Italian immigrants to the US were often considered "just as bad as the Negroes" (5).
How did these groups come to identify and be thought of as white? An answer can be found in the formlessness of whiteness. White people, when asked what it means to be white, often struggle with their responses. In revelatory contrast, people who are not white have little trouble with queries about their cultural identities and are usually able to illuminate aspects of white culture that white people fail to recognize (Wuker 19; Haggis, Schech, and Fitzgerald 169–70).
As a photographer, I am frequently asked about the images I construct. When discussing this project, I find that most white people understand me to be examining blackness, though I clearly state my subject is whiteness. This (evasive?) inversion is not limited to people who conceptualize race and racism superficially. Often my mention of whiteness elicits comments on "the condition of the blackfella" from people who possess sophisticated analytical tools, which they easily apply to other subjects.
It appears that a majority of white people—at least unconsciously—envisage white, as not black. Such a broad and ambiguous definition allows the entrance of people, who have historically not been white, into the flock of whiteness. However conditions do apply; they must be willing to conform to its norms. Warren and Winddance Twine write:
[. . .] because Blacks represent the 'other' against which Whiteness is constructed, the backdoor to Whiteness is open to non-blacks. Slipping through that opening is, then, a tactical matter for non-blacks of conforming to White standards, of distancing themselves from Blackness and of reproducing anti-black ideas and sentiments (8).
If substantive definitions of whiteness prove elusive, can the white norms that non-blacks conform to be delineated? Contemplating this question is problematic, unless one acknowledges that white standards are actually "the" standards.
Such fundamental invisibility provides a wide platform for the creation and maintenance of enormous societal power. It enables white people to assert their values, ethics, and aspirations as universal; and yet insist that their individuality supersedes any group affiliation. Those who fail to meet white standards are rarely considered primarily as individuals; rather they are imagined as representatives of their group. Their individuality is almost always secondary. In "White," a groundbreaking analysis of whiteness in film, Richard Dyer suggests:
It is the way that black people are marked as black (are not just 'people') in representation that has made it relatively easy to analyze their representation, whereas white people – not there as a category and everywhere everything as a fact – are difficult, if not impossible, to analyze qua white. The subject seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin. Any instance of white representation is always immediately something more specific – Brief Encounter is not about white people, it is about English middle-class people; The Godfather is not about white people, it is about Italian-American people; but The Color Purple is about black people, before it is about poor, southern US people (1988, 46).
Whiteness as norm creates tangible benefits. In an influential essay, Peggy McIntosh identified numerous white privileges accrued from its normalness. White people watch television, read magazines or look at billboards and see themselves widely represented. They easily purchase posters, picture books, dolls, and toys for their (white) children featuring people who look like them. When they are told about national heritage or "civilization," they are also told that people of their color made it what it is. If they wish, they can arrange to be in the company of other white people most of the time. Success in a challenging situation does not deem them a "credit to their race." Swearing or dressing shabbily does not discredit their "race." If they are experiencing a bad day, week, or year, they do not need to analyze each unpleasant episode to see if it has racial overtones (McIntosh par. 7).
Still other privileges result from the dominant position normalness bestows. White people can be fairly sure that if a traffic cop pulls them over, they have not been singled out because of their skin color. They can go shopping without worrying about being followed or harassed. If they buy something with a check or credit card, their whiteness will not cast doubt on their financial reliability. They can be fairly certain that when asking to speak to "the person in charge" she or he will be a white person. If they require medical or legal assistance, their skin color will not work against them. If they need to move, they can be reasonably sure of renting or purchasing a house they can afford, and in which they want to live. They can also be fairly certain that their neighbors will be neutral or pleasant to them. They can work for an affirmative action employer, without suspicions of having gotten the job because of their skin color, hanging over them. Most importantly, they can remain oblivious of the customs, languages, and situations of people who are not white (the majority of the peoples of the world) without penalty (McIntosh par. 7).
Some of these privileges grant substantial economic benefits, while others do not. W.E.B. Du Bois argues that even the "psychological" wages of whiteness are significant. Writing in 1935 as a Marxist and black nationalist, he suggests that white working class Americans chose to identify as "white" before "worker" to gain modest short-term economic benefits. He writes:
They were given public deference … because they were white. They were admitted freely, with all classes of white people, to public functions [and] public parks. … The police were drawn from their ranks and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with leniency. … Their votes selected public officials and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment (emphasis added, qtd. in Roediger 12).
He further asserts that these spurious psychological wages compensate for underlying exploitative class relations. White workers fail to see their commonalities with black workers, which in turn undermine democracy and their positions within it (qtd. in Roediger 13).
Care must be taken when considering whiteness—especially in relation to the white working class—that its multiple and nuanced forms are not all viewed as synonymous with domination and racism. White privilege is not distributed equally among white people. In arguing for a more complex understanding of whiteness, Joe L. Kincheloe states:
Historically, poor whites have undoubtedly reaped the psychological wages of whiteness, but talk of white economic privilege in the late twentieth century leaves them with a feeling of puzzlement increasingly expressed as anger. [. . .] It is difficult to convince a working class white student of the ubiquity of white privilege when he or she is going to school, accumulating school debts, working at McDonalds for minimum wage, unable to get married because of financial stress, and holds little hope of upward socioeconomic mobility (par. 12-13).
If the lived experiences and anxieties of white people are dismissed, and their white identities solely equated with privilege, attempts to forge new identities will stagnate in quagmires of guilt and resentment.
Please note: the following sections deal with specific images.
Whiteness as norm pervades Western, and in some cases global, material culture. Bandages have matched my skin, wherever I have lived. Many white people have become so habituated to such benefits, that they believe them to be rights. While discussing the roles white people should perform in antiracism, Jennifer R. Holladay writes:
What would happen, for example, if I went to a hotel and found a bottle of Pink Oil Conditioning Shampoo for African-American hair rather than the standard bottle of Suave to which I am accustomed? I would be shocked, and I might even think to my self, 'Those black folks and all their lobbying…this is so unfair.' As a white person, I think I am entitled to that bottle of shampoo—and to so many other perks I receive as a function of my skin color (par. 5).
In "Flesh Colored," I invert the normalization of whiteness in material culture.4 Interestingly, many viewers of this image ask me what is wrong with the bandage rather than accepting it as black flesh colored.
Imagery of a white person demonstrating correct color balance or exposure is commonly found in photography manuals. Less frequent, yet present are discussions that characterize the exposure of skin that is not white as a problem (Dyer 1997, 89). Technically, white skin is the most difficult to properly expose. The familiarity of working with white skin creates its facility. As a photographic lab technician, I lingered over my prints of African American gridiron players or Asian wedding portraits. If the photographer used professional portrait film, I found myself dancing between excess magenta in the flesh tones and green backgrounds. Even when not dealing with these films, I struggled. I did not know what color their faces were, as I do white ones.
With this image, I locate myself and present some of the advantages I have enjoyed because of my skin color. While researching this project, I thought of whiteness daily. Originally, I contemplated impersonal abstractions. I felt that I had only vaguely benefited from white privilege. Months into the project, I began to perceive my own whiteness and the surprising degree to which I have gained from it.
I reasoned that if it was difficult for me to scrutinize my "race," it might also be daunting for other white people. I have attempted to provide a space in which they can view part of another's personal examination in the hope that it will become a step toward their own personal examinations.
Many people view white identities as indivisible. A person of mixed heritage may be half Aboriginal or half black, but not half white. In this way, whiteness preserves its purity. While redness or brownness muddle, whiteness remains unadulterated.
People who live in a color-blind world often reconcile their beliefs that they are not racist, though interracial couples and their offspring are still transgressions. This constitutes color evasion. Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters includes many examples of color evasion. In her insightful and thorough account of the intersections of race and white women's lives, she argues that, "Confident assertions of common humanity stumble over the questions of marriage and procreation" (95). Color evasion reduces racism to overt actions and assumes as society's reference point, a world in which equality and justice have already been achieved. In such a world, skin color would not matter significantly and could be ignored. Pursuing color-blind policy is tantamount to pledging not to commit overtly racist acts in exchange for an acceptance of a status quo built on historical injustice and inequality.
This image, along with two others in the series, is derived from film and television. I am making an oblique reference to the popular media's role in creating normalized white identities. Generally, television and film are discounted as serious factors in the creation of cultural identities. "But, from the viewpoint of the emergent visual-aural culture of the twenty-first century," writes Annette Hamilton, "'what's on' creates the context for what is known and hence finally for what 'is'" (5).
Though a skillful actor and director, would anyone describe Alan Alda—or any white surgeon—as a credit to his race? Such color evasive sentiments belie a genuine acceptance of human equality. Holladay states:
For example, [. . .] I hear myself say to a co-worker of color: 'Ed, you are the best black trainer I have ever seen.' [. . .] My statement [. . .] implies that Ed is only a good trainer when compared to other black trainers—and not in comparison to white trainers. Second, my statement implies that Ed is not like other black trainers—thus there is something wrong with other black trainers (par. 24-25).
Marcia Langton in Well I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television contends that these paternalistic statements are in fact, "a denial of the racism against Aborigines. It is a way of saying that we are too backward to do it, not that we are denied the means to do it" (55). These implications are readily apparent when such declarations are made about white people.
Most Australians do not count any Aboriginal people among their inner circles of friends. They instead know images of Aboriginal people. I found this nostalgic postcard in a rack outside a Sydney café in February 2001. I had seen images such as this many times before, in history books however, not on street corners.
The image Miscegenation documents the politically motivated coinage of the word. Pointedly, D.G. Croly, one of its authors, was an Irish immigrant (Roediger 155-6). Though the Irish at home commiserated with other peoples of the world living in similarly oppressive conditions, many upon arriving in Anglo-Saxon colonies—former or otherwise—rapidly embraced white supremacy. Forceful writer and former slave, Frederick Douglass found the Irish to be "warm-hearted, generous and sympathizing with the oppressed everywhere when they stand on their own green island" (qtd. In Warren and Winddance Twine 8). However after alighting on American shores, he notes, they are "instantly taught…to hate and despise the colored people. They are taught to believe that we eat the bread which of right belongs to them. The cruel lie is told the Irish that our adversity is essential to their prosperity" (8). The inclusion of the Irish among the ranks of white people depended upon uprooting their societal positions proximate to slaves and other people who were not white. Distancing themselves proved difficult considering they often "were thrown together with black people on jobs and in neighborhoods" (Ignatiev 40). To reposition themselves as white, many became ardent racists (Warren and Winddance Twine 8).
Its disingenuous origin aside, miscegenation dominates conceptualizations of mixed heritage in most English speaking countries. In Mestizaje, I present an alternative Latin American construct. Writer and activist, Lucy R. Lippard discusses the cultural sources of these competing ideas:
Latin Americans are far more sophisticated about the mixing process than most North Americans. They have lived several centuries of it with more liberal (if not less cruel) attitudes towards "racial purity" than those imposed by Anglo-Saxons on the northern continent. [. . .] the Spanish in Latin America eventually saw miscegenation as a means of assimilation (first into, then over and above the Indian populations), while the English tended to enforce rigid segregation, resulting in U.S. laws that forbade even voluntary unions (152).
Mestizaje carries differently nuanced meanings throughout Latin America. Here, I refer to its Cuban understanding. In Cuban literary and political movements, the concept of cultural mestizaje challenges rigid racial categories (Keating par. 40). Nancy Morejon explains that it does so by emphasizing constant interaction between cultural components resulting in the creation of a new and independent identity. Though this identity is anchored in its preceding cultures, no one element superimposes itself over another. In fact, "each element changes into the other so that both can be transformed into a third" (qtd. in Keating par. 40).
In February 2001, the Journal Nature published the findings of the publicly funded Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, revealing that humans possess approximately 32,000 genes (Belsie par. 3). Within days, researchers at the privately funded Celera Genomics Corporation reported in the journal Science that the human genome contains between 26,000 and 39,000 genes (par. 3). Previously, scientists predicted that 50,000 to 140,000 genes are necessary to create humans.
This finding places humanity much closer to other orders of life and presents unforeseen philosophical questions. For example, what makes humans so different from Caenorhabditis elegans (a round worm) if we only possess 13,000 more genes? Arabidopsis thaliana (a plant) has a mere 6,000 fewer genes than humans ( par. 7).
More surprising was the suggestion that all individuals are 99.99% alike (par. 13). This effectively means that a white woman may be genetically closer to her Vietnamese neighbor than her white husband. The Western world's most revered analytical tool, science, which played a crucial role in the development of the idea of race, may be on the threshold of dismantling it.
In this body of work, I use the visual language of laundry to describe white people's relations to "race." Just as virtually no one is free from the chore of washing their clothing, no one is clear of the burdens of race, including and especially white people. Laundry is personal; race is intensely personal. Often both are subject to public scrutiny. Laundry is not completed once and never revisited. Nor is it possible to stop mid wash. It must be attended to regularly and thoroughly. I suggest that white people also must maintain an ongoing and comprehensive examination of their whiteness and related racism. Recognizing that essentialist racism is wrong does not relieve white people of the obligation to investigate and eradicate its more subtle forms. Much of whiteness is a method by which these forms are created and sustained.
The series begins with the putting of the washing out on the line. Several images then show laundry that has been erroneously left unattended on the line. The series concludes with a "white" person having finally brought the washing in.
Think: Quote James Baldwin (qtd. in Roediger 6)
Normal Color Balance: Center illustration (London and Upton 236)
Half White: Image of girl projected on shirt (14 Up)
Sorry: Image of couple (Zebrahead)
Credit: Image of Alan Alda as surgeon (M*A*S*H)
Drunks: Image of drinker projected on shorts (Barfly)
Magic Cleanser: Image projected on apron (Magic)
Stories: Quote (Langton 33)
Irish Niggers: Cartoon projected on shirt (Wells)
Miscegenation: Maps (World); Modified Quote (Roediger 155-6)
Mestizaje: Globe (Widdows, title page)
Genome: Image of Chromosomes (Heredity)
Contrary: Modified story (Frankenberg 164)
Mistake: Modified quote (Ignatiev, interview)
1. Nomenclature for groups of people has long been problematic (Lippard 19-20). Caucasian, is closely associated with delusive scientific ideas of "race". White implies an importance of skin color over personhood. European Canadian etc., ignores the presence of Europeans who are not white. Risking tediousness, I only use white people. I dislike non-white, because it sets white as its cornerstone. People of color suggests that white people lack color. Black excludes many Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous Peoples. Instead, I use the cumbersome yet more precise people who are not white. For an in-depth discussion, please see Bonnett 1993. back
2. Recently, scholars have acknowledged the importance of the author's location with in the structures being examined critically (Chambers 202; Dyer 1997, 4-8; Roediger 3-5). I write about my whiteness not as confession, but as a clarification of my background and experiences that have affected my thinking. back
3. Indigenous Peoples and Racism: Regional Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada and the United States-A Satellite Meeting to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Sydney, Australia. 20-22 Feb. 2001. back
4. For other inversions of whiteness as norm see the films White Man's Burden and Babakiueria. back
14 Up: South Africa. SBS Television. 20 May 2001.
Babakiueria. Dir. Don Featherstone. Videocassette. Moorabbin College of TAFE, 1986.
Barfly. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Writ. Charles Bukowski. Cannon Films, 1987.
Belsie, Laurent. "The Short, Simple Human Gene Map." Christian Science Monitor 13 Feb. 2001. Electronically accessed 10 Apr. 2001. <http://ptg.djnr.com>.
Bonnett, Alastair. "Forever 'White'? Challenges and Alternatives to a 'Racial' Monolith." New Community 20.1 (1993): 173-80.
Chambers, Ross. "The Unexamined." Whiteness: a Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York: New York UP, 1997. 187-203.
Crick, Bernard. Forward. Race: the History of an Idea in the West. By Ivan Hannaford. Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center P, 1996. xi-xvi.
Dyer, Richard. "White." Screen 29.3 (1988): 44-64.
---. White. London: Routledge, 1997.
Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Haggis, Jane, Susanne Schech, and Gabriele Fitzgerald. "Narrating Lives, Narrating Whiteness: a Research Note." Journal of Australian Studies 60 (1999): 168-73 and 217-21.
Hamilton, Annette. Forward. Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television. By Marcia Langton. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993. 5-6.
Hannaford, Ivan. Race: the History of an Idea in the West. Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center P, 1996.
Heredity in Pets and Humans. By Country Education Project H.S.C. Biology. Videocasstte. Box Hill TAFE.
Holladay, Jennifer R. "Challenging the Privilege in Our Lives — Whites in Antiracist Activism." Diversity Factor 8.3 (2000): 28-31. Electronically accessed 9 Aug. 2001. <http://proquest.umi.com>.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. London: Routledge, 1995.
---. Interview. Z Magazine. Mar. 1997.
Keating, Ann Louise. "Interrogating 'Whiteness,' (De)constructing 'Race.'" College English 57:8 (1995): 901-18. Electronically accessed 16 Mar. 2001. <http://proquest.umi.com>.
Kincheloe, Joe L. "The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: a Pedagogical Analysis." College Literature 26.3 (1999): 162-95. Electronically accessed 20 Mar. 2001. <http://infotrac.galegroup.com>.
Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.
Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
London, Barbara and John Upton. Photography. 5th ed. New York: Harper, 1994.
Magic Cleanser Soap. Advertisement. Reprinted as a postcard. Sydney: Post~Age pty. ltd.
M*A*S*H: Goodbye, Farewell and Amen. Dir. Alan Alda. Videocassette. CBS Television, 1983.
McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Whiteness Studies: Deconstructing (the) Race. Ed. Gregory S. Jay. U of Wisconsin Milwaukee. 26 Mar. 2001 <http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/mcintosh.htm>.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
Storey, John. Personal interview. 17 July 2001.
Warren, Jonathan W. and France Winddance Twine. "White Americans, the New Minority? Non–Blacks and the Ever–Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness." Journal of Black Studies 28.2 (1997): 200-18. Electronically accessed 19 Mar. 2001. <http://infotrac.galegroup.com>.
Wells, James A. "The Simian Irish Celt." Cartoon. White. By Richard Dyer. London: Routledge, 1997. p. 56.
White Man's Burden. Dir. Desmond Nakano. 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, 1995.
Widdows, Richard, comp. Philip's Encyclopedic World Atlas: Country by Country. 2nd ed. London: George Philip ltd., 1993.
World Map — Australia Centered. Map. Terrey Hills: Australian Geographic pty. ltd., 1998.
Wucker, Michele. "Americans: What We Lost, Who We Are." Tikkun Jan. – Feb. 2000: 17–20.
Zebrahead. Dir. Anthony Drazan. Triumph Releasing Corporation, 1992.
Bailey, Alison. "Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character." Hypatia 13.3 (1998): 27-42.
Baker, Ray Stannard. "The Tragedy of the Mulatto." American Magazine Apr. 1908: 582-98.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Great Britain: Tonbridge Printers ltd., 1964.
Belsie, Laurent. "The Short, Simple Human Gene Map." Christian Science Monitor 13 Feb. 2001. Electronically accessed 10 Apr. 2001. <http://ptg.djnr.com>.
Bonnett, Alastair. "Forever 'White'? Challenges and Alternatives to a 'Racial' Monolith." New Community 20.1 (1993): 173-80.
---. "Whiteness in Crisis." History Today 50.12 (2000): 38-40.
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