What is whiteness? Why is it worth using as a tool in the social sciences?

Making sociological sense of the idea of whiteness, this book skilfully argues how this concept can help us understand contemporary societies. If one of sociology's objectives is to make the familiar unfamiliar in order to gain heightened understanding, then whiteness offers a perfect opportunity to do so.

Leaning firstly on the North American corpus, this key book critically engages with writings on the formation of white identities in Britain, Ireland and the Americas, using multidisciplinary...

A Moral Economy of Whiteness presents a working model for understanding the main ways in which white UK people make `race' through talking about immigration in the twenty-first century. Based on extensive empirical interviews, Steve Garner establishes four overlapping frames through which white English people understand immigration. This comprises a narrative of unequal treatment, where `equality' is a `dirty word' because it is seen as an agenda for redistributing resources to `undeserving' ethnic minorities, `non-integrating' migrants and unproductive white people. Political correctness is...