White Race Discourse Preserving Racial Privilege in a Post-Racial Society [Paperback]

Foster (Univ. of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) offers a rigorous analysis of white racial discourse today, producing a study that is noteworthy for both its theoretical sophistication and its clarity and approachability. In a series of well-crafted chapters, the author unpacks the fundamental features of race talk, shining a bright light on those elements that explain away, justify, and otherwise facilitate the reproduction of racial inequality. More than just another study of whiteness, this is a penetrating account of dominant uses and understandings of race and power. . . . The study offers a nice complement to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's widely influential Racism without Racists (CH, Jan'04, 41-3121; 4th ed., CH, Jan'14, 51-2955). Summing Up: Highly Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.White Race Discourse exposes a race discourse displayed by a group of sixty-one white college students in the United States. Fosters discussion of racetalk bridges both the theoretical and methodological gaps between whiteness scholars and discourse analysts.The election of Barack Obama as president led some to suggest that not only has US society made significant strides toward racial equality, but it has moved beyond race or become post-racial. In fact, studies have exposed numerous contradictions between the ways white Americans answer questions on surveys and how they respond to similar questions during in-depth interviews. How do we make sense of these contradictions? In White Race Discourse: Preserving Racial Privilege in a Post-Racial Society, John D. Foster examines the numerous contradictions sixty-one white college students exhibit as they discuss a variety of race matters. Foster demonstrates that the whites interviewed possess a sophisticated method of communication to come across as ambivalent, tolerant, and innocent, while simultaneously expressing their intolerance, fear, and suspicion of nonwhite Americans. Whether intended or not, this ambivalence assislã"