Whiteness at the Table

Antiracist work in education has proceeded as if the only social relation at issue is the one between white people and people of color. But what if our antiracist efforts are being undermined by unexamined difficulties and struggles among white people?Whiteness at the Table examines whiteness in the lived experiences of young children, family members, students, teachers, and school administrators. It focuses on racism and antiracism within the context of relationships. Its authors argue that we cannot read or understand whiteness as a phenomenon without attending to the everyday complexities and conflicts of white people’s lives.This edited volume is entitled Whiteness at the Table, then, for at least three reasons. First, the title evokes the origins of this book in the ongoing storytelling and theorizing of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective—a small collective of antiracist educators, scholars, and activists who have been gathering at its founders’ dining room table for almost a decade.Second, the book’s authors are theorizing whiteness not just in terms of structural aspects of white power, but in terms of how whiteness is reproduced and challenged in the day-to-day interactions and relationships of white people. In this sense, whiteness is always already at the table, and this book seeks to illuminate how and why this is so.Finally, one of the primary aims of Whiteness at the Table is to persuade white people of their moral and political responsibility to bring whiteness—as an explicit topic, as perhaps the most important problem to be solved at this historical moment—to the table. This responsibility to theorize and combat whiteness cannot and should not fall only to people of color.

McManimon, Casey, and Berchini have produced a wonderfully original and very powerful set of essays that push Critical Whiteness Studies forward on multiple levels, ranging from the theoretical to the highly personal. As a scholar, I appreciate the messy complexity Whiteness at the Table brings to a structural analysis of white supremacy. As a white person engaged in antiracist work, I resonate with the quandaries and tensions the authors name and take seriously. I highly recommend this thoughtful and brave volume., This book documents more than a decade of conceptual-empirical work on whiteness and White identity studies carried out by the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective. Importantly, the Collective has consistently advanced what Tim Lensmire and I began calling "second-wave" whiteness or White identity studies back in 2010. In times when the salience of race and racialized understandings take on new meanings in the US and elsewhere with the return of openly racist identities along with both new race-visible and race-evasive meanings, this edited volume places the reader simultaneously within the most historicized and the most up-to-date work in existence on whiteness and White identities., It feels refreshing to read a book where white authors seem as committed to antiracist education as those who suffer directly from the brutalities of racial violence. It is refreshing not because these authors are in any ways more special than others, but because, as this book suggests, they understand how underwhelming Whites have been on questions of racism and their consequences.

Shannon K. McManimon is assistant professor of educational studies atState University of New York, New PaltzZachary A. Casey is assistant professor of educational studies at Rhodes CollegeChristina Berchini is assistant professor of educational studies University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire