Linda Martin Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), viii + 223 Pps., $19.95.
Linda Martin Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College. She began teaching Hunter College in early 2009, after teaching for many years at Syracuse University. Alcoff has authored two books – Real Knowing: New Versions of Coherence Theory (1996) and Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (2006). She has also edited ten volumes. In this text, she notes that white identity is in state of ferment. It is a topic that most white people would rather avoid than confront, but whiteness is a social and cultural identity that we need to understand. The mainstream left, which has long been white-dominated, has made a frontal assault on identity politics for decades, and together with the academy’s skeptical disclaimers about the concept of race in general, many people have been left unable to analyze the coming demographic changes. She argues in this book that the repudiation of race-talk may itself be an indication of a basic discomfort with being white. The view developed herein contends that whiteness is not coterminous with dominance, but with a particular historical experience and relationship to certain historical events.
Thus whiteness is, as Alcoff argues in chapter 1, a fluid amalgam of sometimes contesting interpretations and practices. She first considers social identity categories in general in this chapter, and thereafter whiteness in particular. In chapter 2, Alcott considers the fatalism and pessimism about white racism that might engender the contradiction that many within the white race possess: being anti-racist, yet at the same time exemplifying it. In chapter 3, Alcoff argues that despite the fact that the concept of race is biologically baseless, it is unadvisable and not possible to dispense with category at this point in history. In fact, in rejecting group concepts, what people want, Alcoff argues, is control: being identified in a manner that lies beyond our individual control conflicts with our individualist ideas and illusions about our autonomy.
Alcoff notes that we too often focus upon the gap between whites and non-whites, and therefore miss the growing gap among whites. The nation is becoming increasingly politically polarized on a number of issues, and that polarization is mainly due to the differences between whites themselves. The Future of Whiteness makes no predictions about the future, but astutely analyzes the present reaction of whiteness and evaluates the current signs of turmoil within the concept. Written well and cogently argued, The Future of Whiteness will spark debate in the field and will illuminate racial politics.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary