Everyday Forms of Whiteness

Understanding Race in a 'Post-Racial' World

By (author) Melanie E. L. Bush Foreword by Joe R. Feagin

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 January 2011

Length of book:

330 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742599994

The second edition of Melanie Bush's acclaimed Everyday Forms of Whiteness looks at the often-unseen ways racism impacts our lives. The author has interviewed and surveyed hundreds of college students and reveals that even though we talk as though we live in a "post-racial" world after the election of Barack Obama, racism is still very much a factor in everyday life. The second edition incorporates new data and interviews to show how the everyday thinking of ordinary people contributes to the perpetuation of systemic racialized inequality. The book introduces key terms for the study for race and ethnicity, reveals the mechanisms that support the racial hierarchy in U.S. society, then outlines ways we can challenge long-standing patterns of racial inequality.
In the rapidly growing field of studies interrogating the construction of whiteness, relatively few are grounded in ethnographic methods examining the everyday experiences of people in real time. Melanie Bush's Breaking the Code of Good Intentions brilliantly explores the everyday dimensions of how white Americans maintain and reproduce the inequalities of race through common interaction. Well-written and effectively argued, this study provides critical new insights and makes an important contribution to the social science literature about race.