About This Unit

Whiteness is the racial position that most often goes unexamined — constructed, defended, and usually unmarked. This unit takes it as an explicit object of analysis. Its anchor is Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property," a foundational essay in critical race theory arguing that whiteness evolved from a racial identity into a form of property: a set of legally protected expectations and entitlements built on the twin foundations of slavery and conquest, and persisting after formal segregation ended. Around Harris, the unit gathers the sociology of whiteness as a field, the labor histories that traced the "wages of whiteness," and Stuart Hall's account of cultural identity as something produced rather than given.

The unit's second thread — hegemony and histories from below — asks how racial domination is sustained without constant force, and how it is contested by people who rarely appear in official records. Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels recovers the "infrapolitics" of Black working-class life: the everyday, unorganized acts through which subordinated people resist. In a filmed conversation, bell hooks models the dissenting voice within what she calls a culture of domination. One of the unit's case studies brings these threads into the present through the Supreme Court's April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply curtailed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — letting learners analyze a live contest over whether settled expectations of political power function, in Harris's terms, as a kind of property.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

Explain Harris's argument that whiteness has functioned as property in American law, identifying the rights of use, exclusion, and protected expectation she traces.
Summarize the major findings of whiteness studies as a sociological field, including the shift from treating whiteness as an invisible default to analyzing it as identity, privilege, and structure.
Define hegemony and infrapolitics, and apply "history from below" as a method for locating resistance outside formal politics and official archives.
Analyze a contemporary voting-rights controversy using the unit's frameworks, distinguishing legal, structural, and cultural defenses of racial advantage.

Keywords

Whiteness
Whiteness as property
Hegemony
Infrapolitics / histories from below
Wages of whiteness
Possessive investment in whiteness

Open Educational Resources

"The History of Whiteness and How We Teach About Race." Teaching Hard History (Learning for Justice / Southern Poverty Law Center), 2021. Listen to the episode.

Podcast episode (audio) · Open access.

An episode of the Teaching Hard History podcast on the history of whiteness and how race is taught. The historian Ed Baptist traces the construction and enforcement of the American racial binary and the long history of Black resistance to it, while the educator Aisha White discusses why adults' own racial learning shapes how they teach children, urging self-reflection before engaging young people on race. The episode offers learners an accessible audio entry into the unit's central question — how whiteness was constructed and maintained — and connects that history to the present-day work of teaching and learning about race.

McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." 1989. Hosted by the National SEED Project. Read the essay.

Essay (short) · Open access.

McIntosh's widely read short essay inventories the everyday, unearned advantages — the "invisible knapsack" — that white people can carry without noticing, listing concrete examples from daily life. The piece named "white privilege" for a broad audience and helped move the term into common use. It is useful here both as a document in its own right and as a marker of one stage in the study of whiteness: McDermott and Ferguson's field review describes the field moving beyond privilege-talk toward structural analysis, which lets learners place the essay within the development of the field rather than treat it as the final word.

"Speaking Freely: bell hooks." Interview with Ken Paulson, First Amendment Center, 2002. Watch the interview.

Recorded interview (video, ~27 min) · Open access.

In this filmed conversation with Ken Paulson, bell hooks reflects on living and writing within what she calls a culture of domination — the role of the dissenting voice, the anti-intellectualism she sees in American public life, and love as a practice that resists domination. hooks situates these themes within her broader analysis of what she termed "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy," a phrase she used to insist that systems of race, class, gender, and empire operate together. The interview gives learners a living example of counter-hegemonic speech and a bridge from the study of whiteness to a wider critique of intersecting structures of power.

Biewen, John, host. Seeing White. Scene on Radio, season 2, 2017. Listen to the series. See also Biewen's companion talk, "The Lie That Invented Racism" (TEDxCharlottesville).

Podcast series (audio, 14 episodes) and companion talk (video) · Open access.

Seeing White is a fourteen-part documentary podcast series, the second season of Scene on Radio, in which the journalist John Biewen — often in conversation with the scholar Chenjerai Kumanyika — investigates the history and meaning of whiteness: where the idea of a white race came from, how it was built and enforced, and how it operates today. The series was nominated for a Peabody Award. Biewen's short TEDxCharlottesville talk, "The Lie That Invented Racism," distills one of its central threads, drawing on Ibram X. Kendi's account of how race was invented in the fifteenth century to justify the Atlantic slave trade, and argues that racism functions to prop up systems of advantage. Together the talk and the series give learners a brief entry point and a sustained, in-depth treatment of the unit's central object.

Key Scholarship

McDermott, Monica, and Annie Ferguson. "Sociology of Whiteness." Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022): 257–276. Publisher page (DOI).Open-access preprint (SSRN).

Journal article (field review) · Open-access preprint available.

McDermott and Ferguson survey two decades of sociological research on whiteness, tracing the field's movement away from an earlier preoccupation with whiteness as an invisible, default category toward analyzing it as a complex identity, a basis of structural privilege, and a form of neocolonial dominance. They attend to how class, intersectionality, and social movements shape white identity, and to the field's methodological maturation from autobiography and theory toward systematic empirical study. For learners, the review provides the state of the field in a single document and a framework for situating the legal, historical, and cultural approaches that follow.

Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–1791. Read the article.

Journal article · Open access.

Opening from her grandmother's experience of passing as white to hold a job in 1930s Chicago, Harris argues that whiteness — at first a racial identity — was converted by American law into a form of property: something that could be used, enjoyed, and defended, and that carried legally protected expectations. She traces its dual origins in the enslavement of Black people, where whiteness served as a shield against being treated as property, and in the conquest of Native land, where whiteness operated as a form of title. Following "status property" through cases including Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, she argues that the same protected expectations persist into the present, surfacing in the law of affirmative action. The essay supplies the unit's central concept — whiteness as property — and a legal vocabulary for analyzing how racial advantage is defended as a settled entitlement.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2007 [1991]. Publisher page.

Book.

Roediger's labor history examines how Irish and other European immigrant workers in the nineteenth century came to understand themselves as white, and why. Building on W. E. B. Du Bois's argument in Black Reconstruction that whiteness paid white workers a "public and psychological wage" — a compensation in status that offset their exploitation as laborers — Roediger shows how a racial identity that brought white workers no material benefit nonetheless became something they defended. The book helped establish the historical study of whiteness and traces the unit's "wages of whiteness" keyword to its source in Du Bois. For learners, it connects the making of whiteness to the history of class and labor, complementing the legal and sociological approaches with a historical one.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press, 1994. Publisher page.

Book.

Kelley recovers dimensions of Black working-class politics that conventional histories — and even much labor history — overlook: the foot-dragging, sabotage, theft of time, styles of dress, music, and confrontations on segregated streetcars and buses through which working people resisted domination without formal organization. He calls these everyday, unorganized acts "infrapolitics," drawing on James C. Scott's notion of the "hidden transcript." The book's introduction lays out "history from below" as a method: reading resistance in places where no manifesto, organization, or archive announces it. For learners, Race Rebels supplies a vocabulary for resistance that operates beneath official politics, and offers a counterpart, from the bottom up, to the top-down legal and structural analyses of how racial power is maintained.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Publisher page (chapter).

Book chapter.

Hall argues that cultural identity is not a fixed essence waiting to be recovered but a production — "never complete, always in process" — that is constituted through representation rather than existing prior to it. Identity, in his account, is a matter of "becoming" as well as "being," positioned by the play of history, culture, and power. Though Hall develops the argument in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, the essay supplies a general theoretical account of how racial identities are made and remade — one that applies to whiteness as much as to any other racial position, and that underwrites the unit's treatment of whiteness as constructed rather than natural.

Case Studies

Settled Expectations on Trial: The Voting Rights Act after Louisiana v. Callais

NPR and Supreme Court primary sources · Policy-analysis activity (decided April 2026).

A policy-analysis activity centered on the Supreme Court's April 29, 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply curtailed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by making vote-dilution claims substantially harder to bring. Using NPR's reporting alongside the slip opinion and nonpartisan case explainers, learners analyze whether long-settled expectations of political power are being defended — in Harris's terms — as a form of property, and how legal, structural, and cultural arguments interact. Dated and written to be updated as the litigation and legislative responses continue.

The "Model Minority": Hegemony as Compliment

Pew Research Center, 2023 · Media-representation analysis.

A media-representation activity examining the "model minority" stereotype — the image of Asian Americans as uniformly successful and compliant. Drawing on Pew Research Center survey data and legal-scholarly commentary, learners analyze how an apparent compliment can function as a hegemonic device: praising one group in terms that discipline others, obscure inequality within and across racialized communities, and naturalize the existing racial order. The case study connects the unit's account of hegemony to a stereotype many learners will recognize from everyday life.

Questions for Reflection

On Harris: Harris argues that whiteness carries legally protected "settled expectations." Identify one contemporary policy controversy — in housing, education, voting, or employment — and analyze whether opposition to change in that controversy can be read as defending a property interest in whiteness. Where does the property metaphor illuminate, and where does it strain?
On McDermott and Ferguson: The field review describes whiteness studies moving beyond the claim that whiteness is "invisible." What does that earlier claim get right, and what does it miss? Use one example from your own observation of when whiteness is marked and when it goes unmarked.
On Kelley: Infrapolitics names resistance that never announces itself as politics. Describe one practice — historical or contemporary, from work, school, transit, or culture — that you would read as infrapolitical. What makes it resistance rather than ordinary behavior, and what are the limits of reading it that way?
On Hall: Hall says identity is "a 'production' which is never complete." Apply this to whiteness: if white identity is also produced and repositioned, what is producing it now — and who benefits from the idea that whiteness has no history?
Synthesis (with the case study): Du Bois wrote of a "public and psychological wage" of whiteness; Harris of a property interest; Kelley of hidden transcripts of resistance. Using two of the three, analyze the Callais controversy: what is being defended, what is being contested, and through what channels — courts, legislatures, or everyday action?

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