The Race

Introduction

There is the strong relationship between race and crime in the United States. This has been a topic for public controversy and debates for more than a century. The history of Afro-Americans is a respected and a constitutional field of American history. In order to show black participation in the nation's growth and development, to prove the inevitability of black equality, or to demonstrate the inexorable progress made by Afro-Americans. As an academic field, whiteness studies began in the 1990s for the purpose of critically examining what it means to be White in the United States. Black writers such as James Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about whiteness much earlier. Du Bois defined whiteness as ownership of the earth. David Roediger defined whiteness as a destructive ideology exercising political force despite its discrediting as a culture, meaning that though many White people do not recognize that they have a race, they been given profound systematic, advantages. In fact, Ruth Frankenberg found that her research participants experienced being White as unmarked and unnamed. Christine Sleeter wrote that characteristics of whiteness include ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity (Root, pp. 99).

Race in 21st Century America

The growing divides between whites and non-whites in economics, social mobility, and political voice make the seemingly semidiurnal nature of American racism and the material privileges of whiteness of importance to scholars of leadership and transformative political engagement. Because race has remained an obstacle to the at-large political participation of non-whites in America, it seems only fitting that this handbook address that reality. After all, the problem of race and the consequences of racism are what continue to impede the abilities of policy makers, political representatives, and government administrations to effective address the concerns of all Americans. This chapter will focus on three post-civil rights notions of race. First, I distinguish between our contemporary discourse of race and the material reality of racism. This distinction is of the utmost importance in moving beyond the ethics of racial compassion to an actionable antiracist philosophy (Madrid, pp. 311).

Racial eliminative understood being an effective strategy for thinking about racism, my next section will briefly address the disadvantages of looking at the rhetorical disempowerment of race as a viable solution to racism. Because naming White as a racial category with advantages was not previously included in the academic curriculum, whiteness studies considered a suppressed history. Though whiteness studies traced to the writings of Black intellectuals as early as David Walker's Whites as Heathens and Christians in 1830, its inclusion in the academic curriculum spurred by mostly White writers and intellectuals who study history, literature, labor movements, economics, popular culture, identity development, and communication. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, whiteness studies have no journals, professional associations, book series, or academic departments in the United States; though a professional association exists in Australia.

Nonetheless, the field has offered provocative scholarship exposing the problem of whiteness. There is an international whiteness ...