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-Beautifully written and rigorously argued, After Whiteness is the most important theoretical statement on white racial formation since 'whiteness studies' began its current academic sojourn. By reading debates about multiculturalism, ethnicity, and the desire for difference as part of the material practices of the U.S. university system, it engages questions of race, humanistic inquiry, intellectual labor, and the democratic function of critical thought. The result is a critically nuanced analysis that...

As each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place.

After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent...

For centuries, Whiteness has been the invisible norm in the West, a transparent, yet ubiquitous frame of reference so pervasive that most Whites consider themselves absolved from race matters. In recent years activists, scholars, and writers have been challenging this cultural and political monolith by investigating Whiteness in its many manifestations. Yet, once it is rendered visible, Whiteness proves to be perilous and paradoxical: we single out Whiteness to expose its status as an unexamined center, yet the more we single it out, the more attention we invariably draw to it, once again...