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Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture. By Vron Ware and Les Back. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xii, 326 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-226-87341-2. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 0-226-87342-0.)
One of the more perverse outcomes of the new "whiteness studies" is the reorientation of the study of "race" to focus almost exclusively on "the ways of white folks." At its best, the recent exploration of whiteness has emphasized the frightening power of that idea across and beyond the color line. At its worst, it mimics the system of racial privileges it sets out to destabilize, giving fullest coverage to the role of race in the lives of pale-skinned people at the expense of people of color or the larger dialogic processes of racial formation.
In Out of Whiteness, their collection of individually written essays,...