The White Pages: A Meta-analysis of Journal Articles on Whiteness

• In Event: 338 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Shifting Focus, Rotating Lenses: Racism in the Discipline of Sociology

Abstract

Sociology has done well to operationalize and measure race in general, and whiteness in specific, as a quantifiable, confounding variable or independent cause of observed outcomes. Hence, research of this ilk views “whiteness” in two primary ways: as a predictor, focusing on how white group membership shapes patterns of adherence to various ideological beliefs and likelihood of resource attainment, and, as part of the content of ideologies, beliefs, and worldviews themselves. In considering the former, quantitative examines of the correlation of whiteness with a host of variables provide a basis for testing and refining ideas about racial inequality, group homogeneity, and resource mobilization. As for the latter, how sociologists systematically engage whiteness qualitatively, is unclear; sundry theories involving the qualitative creation and reproduction of “whiteness” compete for dominance in the field. Hence, the theoretical import of this literature remains unrealized because each study centers on a particular group or context, which seems to extend little generalizable knowledge. As a result, the field of sociology fails to possess a comprehensive and complete cartography of qualitative assessments of whiteness, while its understanding of how the very category is qualitative constructed as a meaningful and consequential “social fact” is opaque, at best. In this article we consolidate and plumb the extant qualitative sociological literature on whiteness in order to first, formalize the larger qualitative understanding of whiteness, and to second, derive a robust and sensitizing theory of the processes by which whiteness itself is formed and reproduced.

Authors

• Matthew W. Hughey, University of Connecticut

• Michael Rosino, University of Connecticut