White women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explain the invisibility and modes of visibility of racism, race difference, and whiteness. It discusses a feminist commitment to drawing on women’s daily lives as a resource for analyzing society. The chapter draws on both theoretical and substantive analyses of race, racism, and colonialism in the United States and beyond. It argues that the discourse against interracial relationships entails specifically racialized constructions of white femininity in relation to racialized masculinities. The chapter suggests that white women and men were placed, respectively, as victim and rescuer in the discourse against interracial sexuality, vis-a-vis the supposed sexual threat posed by men of color toward white women. It also argues that both heterosexual and lesbian white women’s strategies for coping with the burdens that racism placed on interracial couples seemed at times to be distinctively “female” ones.