The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

""I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar... the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought,"" writes Dalton Conley in his essay about growing up white in a mostly African-American housing project. In The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, editors Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray present numerous essays, some new, some from the 1997 academic and activist conference of the same name at UC Berkeley. ""If whiteness is a signifier of power and condition of access in U.S. culture, then women are less white than men, gay people less white than straight people, poor people less white than rich people, Jews than Christians, and so forth,"" observes Mab Segrest in ""The Souls of White Folks."" Thoughtful, astute and representing a wide range of perspectives, the contributors explore pressing questions of this emerging discipline. (Oct.)