Giroux places the study of Whiteness in a historical context, recognizing the various modes in which racial identity has been used by conservative ideologues and critical scholars who seek to expand the discussion of race and power.

The liberation of racial identity is as much a part of the struggle against racism as the elimination of racial discrimination and inequality. That liberation will involve a revisioning of racial politics and a transformation of racial difference. It will render democracy itself much more radically pluralistic, and will make identity much more a matter of choice than of ascription. As the struggles to achieve these objectives unfold, we shall gradually recognize that the racialization of democracy is as important as the democratization of race.l

Whiteness and the Conservative Backlash

Within the last decade, the debate over race took an intriguing turn as Whiteness became increasingly visible as a symbol of racial identity. Displaced from its widely understood status as an unnamed, universal moral referent, Whiteness as a category of racial identity was appropriated by diverse conservative and right-wing groups, as well as critical scholars, as part of a broader articulation of race and difference. For a disparate group of Whites, mobilized, in part, by the moral panic generated by right-wing attacks on immigration, race-referential policies, and the welfare state, Whiteness became a signifier for middle-class resistance to "taxation, to the expansion of state-furnished rights of all sorts, and to integration."2 Threatened by the call for minority rights, the rewriting of U.S. history from the bottom up, and the shifting racial demographics of the nations' cities, other Whites felt increasingly angry and resentful over what was viewed as an attack on the! ir sense of individual and collective consciousness.3

As Whiteness came under scrutiny by various social groups - such as Black and Latina feminists, radical multiculturalists, critical race theorists, and others - as an oppressive, invisible center against which all else is measured, many Whites began to identify with the "new racism" epitomized by right-wing conservatives, such as talk show host Rush Limbaugh.4 Winning over vast audiences with the roar of the "angry White male" bitter over imagined racial injuries committed against Whites, Limbaugh's popularity suggested that race had become one of the most significant social forces of the 1980s and 1990s. In an era of unprecedented unemployment, poverty, and diminishing opportunities for most Black Americans, right-wing Whites convinced themselves of their own loss of privilege. Thus, the discourse of race became a vehicle for appeasing White anxiety and undermining the forceful legacy of racial and "social justice." For example, as the Republican Party moved to the right d! uring the 1980s and 1990s, it capitalized on the racial fears of many Whites and launched an aggressive attack on affirmative action while successfully promoting retrograde policies designed to reduce social spending, dismantle the welfare state, and slow down the pace of racial integration.5 The progressive legacy of identity politics - with its emphasis on acknowledging the presence of new social actors who use their own social location as a resource to develop a politics that attempts to historicize and understand how identities are constructed and work as "a crucial movement to expand citizenship to people of color and other subordinated groups" was either trivialized or dismissed as conservatives appropriated the politics of identity as a defining principle of Whiteness.6 John Brenkman highlights this appropriation by claiming that "the constituency whose beliefs and fears have been most significantly molded to their racial identity in the 1980s are White."7

A siege mentality has arisen for policing cultural boundaries and reasserting national identity. The discourse of Whiteness signifies the resentment and confusion of many Whites who feel victimized and bitter, while it masks deep inequalities and exclusionary practices within the current social order. Shifting the politics of race from the discourse of White supremacy, the historical legacy of slavery and segregation, as well as the ongoing burden of racial injustice endured by African American and other minorities in the United States, politicians such as Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson mobilized a new populist discourse about family, nation, traditional values, and individualism as part of a broader resistance to multicultural democracy and diverse racial culture.

In the popular media, conservatives bash Blacks for many of the social and economic problems facing the country.' Conservative columnist Mickey Kaus exemplified this sensibility when he said that he wants "to live in a society where there is no alienated race and no racism, where I need not feel uncomfortable walking down the street because I'm White."9 As race became paramount in shaping U.S. politics and everyday life from the 1980s on, racial prejudice in its overt forms was considered a taboo. While the old racism maintained some cachet among the more vulgar, right-wing conservatives (i.e., New York City's radio talk show host Bob Grant), a new racist discourse emerged in the United States. The new racism was coded in the language of "welfare reform," "neighborhood schools," "toughness on crime," and "illegitimate births." Cleverly designed to mobilize White fears while relieving Whites of any semblance of social responsibility and commitment, the new racism served to r! ewrite the politics of Whiteness as a "besieged" racial identity. As the racial backlash intensified in the media and other public spheres, Whiteness assumed a new form of political agency that was visible in the rise of right-wing militia groups, White skinheads, and the anti-PC crusades of indignant White students and conservative academic organizations such as the National Association of Scholars and the Southern League."

Rather than being invisible, as critics from the left such as Richard Dyer and bell hooks have claimed, Whiteness was aggressively embraced in popular culture in order to rearticulate a sense of individual and collective identity for "besieged" Whites. Both Dyer and hooks have argued that Whites see themselves as racially transparent and reinscribe Whiteness as invisible; that is, it rarely occurs to White people that they are privileged because they are White. While this argument may have been true in the 1980s, it no longer makes sense as White youth, in particular, have become increasingly sensitive to their status as Whites because of the racial politics and media exposure of race in the last few years.11 Celebrated in the mass media in the 1990s, the new cartography of race has emerged as the result of an attempt to rewrite the racial legacy of the past, while recovering a mythic vision of Whiteness associated with purity and innocence. Immensely popular films such as ! Forrest Gump ( 1994) attempted to rewrite public memory by cleansing the American past of racial tensions and endorsing "a preferred understanding of racial relations that work on the behalf of the public mourning of the `victimized White male."12 Widely discussed books, such as The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza, revised and reaffirmed the basic principles of the eugenics debate of the 1920s and 1930s and provided a defense of racial hierarchies.13

In the popular press, the discourse of racial discrimination and social inequality gave way to lurid stories about Black crime, illegal aliens taking jobs, the threat to the deficit posed by government welfare payments to single teen mothers, and the assertion that Black "gangsta" rap artists such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Ice Cube corrupt the moral values of White suburban youth.14 While liberal academic journals such as the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly shunned the extremist discourses of David Duke, Ralph Reed, and Jerry Falwell, they produced editorials and stories legitimating the popular perception that Black culture is a culture of crime, pathology, and moral degeneracy. The New Republic devoted an entire issue to an analysis of The Bell Curve, justifying its decision in a shameful editorial statement that declared, "The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief."15 Of course, the ref! usal to acknowledge that such a position grew historically from a eugenics movement that legitimated diverse racial hatreds as well as some of the most barbarous and atrocious massacres of the twentieth century appeared irrelevant next to the editorial's self-congratulatory assertion of intellectual flexibility. The Atlantic Monthly echoed similar racial fears in a barrage of sensationalist cover stories and articles about how crime, disease, gangsta rap, and unwed (Black) mothers were about to wreak havoc on "everyone - even White people in Back Bay.16

The tawdry representations of Black experience that these magazines produced gained increasing currency in the dominant media. Racial coding, parading as commonsense populism, associated Blacks with a series of negative equivalencies that denied racial injustice while affirming the repressed, unspeakable racist unconscious of dominant White culture. Images of menacing Black youth, welfare mothers, and convicts, framed by the evocative rhetoric of fear-mongering journalists, helped to bolster the image of a besieged White middle-class suburban family threatened by "an alien culture and peoples who are less civilized than the native ones . . . a people who stand lower in the order of culture because they are somehow lower in the order of nature, defined by race, by color, and sometimes by genetic inheritance. "17

While the popular press was signaling the emergence of a politics of identity in which White men defined themselves as the victims of "reverse" racial prejudice, academics were digging in and producing a substantial amount of scholarship, exploring what it might mean to analyze Whiteness as a social, cultural, and historical construction. Such work was characterized by various attempts to locate Whiteness as a racial category and to analyze it as a site of privilege, power, and ideology. In addition, this work sought to examine critically how Whiteness as a racial identity is experienced, reproduced, and addressed by those diverse White men and women who identify with its commonsense assumptions and values.

In some quarters, the call to study Whiteness provoked scorn and indignation. For instance, Time magazine ridiculed a professor who named a standard American literature survey course she taught "White Male Writers."18 Newsweek took a more mainstream position, constructing an image of White men in the United States as undergoing an identity crisis over their changing public image. According to David Gates, writing in Newsweek, White males were no longer secure in an identity that had been ravaged by "feminists, multiculturalists, P.C. policepersons, affirmative-action employers, rap artists, Native Americans, Japanese tycoons, Islamic fundamentalists and Third World dictators."ie Newsweek further lamented the clobbering that White men were taking in the media, buttressing its argument with comments from a "rancorous" female employee as well as a prominent psychiatrist, who assured readers that, "For White men in their 30s and 40s, this is not a joke at all. Their whole futur! e is at stake, in their minds. They're scared."20 While the demise of the power of White men seemed a bit exaggerated to the editors and writers of Newsweek, they made it quite clear that the current White panic was not entirely unfounded, since Whites may find themselves in the next century living in a society consisting largely of "diverse racial and ethnic minorities."21

Whiteness Studies

Building upon the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, and speech communication, have put the "construction of 'Whiteness' on the table to be investigated, analyzed, punctured, and probed."22 Rejecting the assumption that an analysis of race means focusing primarily on people of color, scholars such as David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg, Theodore Allen, bell hooks, Noel Ignatiev, Toni Morrison, Howard Winant, Alexander Saxton, and Fred Pfeil address the historical and social construction of "Whiteness" across a wide spectrum of spheres, identities, and institutions, and redefine the necessity to make Whiteness central to the broader arena of racial politics.23 While it is impossible to analyze this large body of work in any great detail, I will comment briefly on some of the theoretical directions it has taken and assess the implications of such w! ork for those of us concerned with issues of representation, racial politics, and pedagogy.

Historians such as David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Theodore Allen, among others, build upon the work of previous historians of race by focusing less on the African American influences on mainstream White American culture -- Southern culture, colonial American agriculture, American music, theater, literature, etc. - than on the issue of how White racial identity has been taken up, appropriated, and shaped historically in terms of how Whites narrate and represent themselves, as well as the ways in which dominant White identity influences the construction and treatment of racial "others."24 Challenging both what it means to be White and the experience of Whiteness as an often unstable, shifting process of inclusion and exclusion, these historians have rearticulated and broadened the concept of racial identity while simultaneously challenging Whiteness as a site of racial, economic, and political privilege. More specifically, such work brings a revisionist history to the hig! hly charged debates about racial and national identity central to contemporary American politics. By focusing on how Whiteness, as the dominant racial identity, shaped the history of American labor at different intervals and configured historical and political relations among ethnic groups (such as the Irish), Roediger and others have thrown into sharp relief "the impact that the dominant racial identity in the United States has had not only on the treatment of racial 'others' but also on the ways that Whites think of themselves, of power, of pleasure, and of gender."25

Central to theoretical work on Whiteness is the attempt to confront "the issue of White racial identity [and to raise] the questions of when, why and with what results so-called `White people' have come to identify themselves as White."26 No longer the stable, self-evident, or pure essence central to modernity's self-definition, Whiteness is unmasked, in the work of such historians as David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev, as an attempt to arbitrarily categorize, position, and contain the "other" within racially ordered hierarchies. Dislodged from a self-legitimating discourse grounded in a set of fixed transcendental racial categories, Whiteness is analyzed as a lived, but rarely recognized, component of White racial identity and domination.

These scholars have done more than add a historical component to the discourse about Whiteness; they have expanded and deepened the relevance of politicizing the debates about the interrelationship between Whiteness and race. Roediger, for example, provides three reasons for urging cultural critics who are involved in the social construction of race to focus their political energies on "exposing, demystifying and demeaning the particular ideology of Whiteness":

The first is that, while neither Whiteness nor Blackness is a scientific (or natural) racial category, the former is infinitely more false, and precisely because of that falsity, more dangerous, than the latter. The second is that in attacking the notion that Whiteness and Blackness are "the same", we specifically undermine what has become, via the notion of "reverse racism", a major prop underpinning the popular refusal among Whites to face both racism and themselves. The last is that Whiteness is now a particularly brittle and fragile form of social identity and it can be fought.27

The notion that Whiteness can be demystified and reformulated is a theoretical motif that links historical analyses of the construction of Whiteness to the work of prominent theorists in a variety of other fields. For instance, Toni Morrison, in her landmark book Playing in the Dark, challenges critics to examine how Whiteness as a literary category functions to shape and legitimate a monolithic "American identity." Morrison frames her interrogation of the imaginative construction of Whiteness in the following way:

the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as White. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial "unconsciousness" or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? . . . What parts do the invention and development of Whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as "American"?28

In the field of cultural studies, Ruth Frankenberg, Richard Dyer, and bell hooks further probe the role of Whiteness as a site of privilege and exclusion, recognizing that Whiteness is produced differently within a variety of public spaces, as well as across the diverse categories of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Frankenberg, for example, explores how Whiteness as a site of racial privilege works to shape the lives and identities of a diverse group of White women.29 On the other hand, through an analysis of the racial pedagogies at work in popular culture, Dyer challenges the representational power of Whiteness "to be everything and nothing as the source of its representational power."30 He provides a theoretical service by analyzing Whiteness as a guarantor of beauty and truth within the representational politics of three Hollywood films.

One of the most trenchant criticisms of Whiteness comes from bell hooks, who argues that too many White scholars focus on certifiable "others" in their analysis of race, but they are doing very little "to investigate and justify all aspects of White culture from a standpoint of 'difference'.31 According to hooks, "It would be just so interesting for all those White folks who are giving Blacks their take on Blackness to let them know what's going on with Whiteness."32r hooks further extends her critique by arguing that while Whites are willing to analyze how Blacks are perceived by Whites, rarely are White critics attentive to how Blacks view Whites. According to hooks, Whites refuse to see Blacks as political agents. Nor do Whites, caught up in their own racial fantasies of murder and rape, recognize that, in the Black imagination, Whiteness is often associated with terror. But for hooks more is at stake than getting Whites to recognize that representations of Whiteness as ! pure, good, benevolent, and innocent are challenged by Black imaginations' representations of Whiteness as capricious, cruel, and unchecked. hooks also calls into question Whiteness as an ideology by exposing its privileged readings of history, art, and broader institutional power and its politically myopic forms of cultural criticism. hooks builds upon this criticism by calling for Whites to become self-critical about how Whiteness terrorizes, to "shift locations [in order] to see the world differently."33

In a decisive theoretical and somewhat paradoxical twist, hooks urges Whites not to go too far in focusing on Whiteness, particularly if it serves to downplay the effects of racism on Blacks. First, she argues that attempts to see racism as victimizing to Whites "in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy."34 Second, disavowing the discourse of White victimization as one that fails to distinguish between racial prejudice, as it is experienced by Blacks and Whites alike, and institutional racism, which victimizes people of color, hooks agrees with the Black theologian James Cone, who argues that the only way in which Whites can become anti-racist is "to destroy themselves and be born again as beautiful Black persons. "35

hooks's criticism is echoed in the field of speech communication by Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, who also argue that the primary task of Whites is to demystify and unveil Whiteness as a form of domination. In this case, Nakayama and Krizek go to great lengths to "deterritorialize the territory of `White,' to expose, examine, and disrupt . . . so that like other positions it may be placed under critical analysis. . . We seek an understanding of the ways that this rhetorical construction makes itself visible and invisible, eluding analysis yet exerting influence over everyday life."36

Heavily indebted to the assumption that Whiteness is synonymous with domination and oppression, the new scholarship on Whiteness focuses largely on the critical project of unveiling the rhetorical, political, cultural, and social mechanisms through which Whiteness is both invented and used to mask its power and privilege. The political thrust of such work seeks to abolish Whiteness as a racial category and marker of identity. That is, central to such an effort is the attempt to strip Whiteness of its historical and political power to produce, regulate, and constrain racialized others within the discursive and material relations of racial domination and subjugation. Roediger echoes this sentiment in his comment that "it is not merely that 'Whiteness' is oppressive and false; it is that 'Whiteness' is nothing but oppressive and false."37 This position is echoed by Noel Ignatiev, who provocatively writes in Race Traitor that "the key to solving the social problems of our age i! s to abolish the White race. . . . So long as the White race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail [and] treason to 'Whiteness' is loyalty to humanity."38 Similar arguments conflating 'Whiteness' with White racism can be found in the work of Derrick Bell and Andrew Hacker.39

In what follows, I will analyze some of the political and pedagogical problems that flow from a critique based on the assumptions that Whiteness is synonymous with domination and that the only alternative that progressive White youth have to constructing a racial identity is to, in fact, renounce their own Whiteness. I develop this critique by examining three considerations. First, I focus on some of the issues at stake in understanding the racial backlash that is taking place among many White students in the United States. Second, I address how representations of Whiteness in two films exemplify the limits and possibilities of analyzing its social construction. Third, I explore how these films might be used pedagogically to rearticulate a notion of Whiteness that builds upon, but also moves beyond, the view of Whiteness as simply a fixed position of domination. To do so, I attempt to fashion a tentative and strategic pedagogical approach to Whiteness that offers students a! possibility of rearticulating "Whiteness," rather than either simply accepting its dominant normative assumptions or rejecting it as a racist form of identity. While White students may well feel traumatized in putting their racial identities on trial, trauma in this case can become a useful pedagogical tool in helping them locate themselves within and against the discourse and practice of racism. As a potent pedagogical tool, trauma refers to the subjectively felt effects of classroom practices that baffle, reorient, and challenge students' commonsense assumptions about race, how it shapes their lives and affects their interactions with racially diverse groups of people. Trauma represents that pedagogical moment when identities become unsettled, provoking both anxiety and the opportunity to rethink the political nature and moral content of one's own racial identity, and the roles it plays in shaping one's relationship to those who are constituted as racially "other." In short! , White youth need a more critical and productive way of construing a sense of identity, agency, and race across a wide range of contexts and public spheres. However, linking Whiteness to the project of radical democratic change should not be a rationale for evading racial injustice, and the deep inequalities between Blacks and Whites. Youth and the Rearticulation of Whiteness

Race increasingly matters as a defining principle of identity and culture as much for White students in the 1990s as for youth of color in the 1970s and 1980s. As a marker of difference, race significantly frames how White youth experience themselves and their relationships to a variety of public spaces marked by the presence of people of color. Diverse racial identities have become more visible and more hybrid as a result of the changing demographics of urban space and the prominence of race in hip-hop culture, fanzine magazines, MTV, television sitcoms, Hollywood films, and the emergence of Black public intellectuals in the media. As culture becomes more racially diverse, White youth increasingly become more conscious of both the ways in which subordinate others struggle to represent themselves and the necessity to define themselves in racial terms that take into account their Whiteness as a marker of identity, a point of cultural attachment and historical location. In co! ntrast to the position popular among White educators who claim that "we [Whites] do not experience ourselves as defined by our skin color,"40 White youth have become increasingly aware of themselves as White. Two major forces affecting the racial divide have served to make Whiteness more visible and fragile as a site of privilege and power, while at the same time limiting opportunities for youth to be both White and oppositional.41 In other words, Whiteness has become more visible as a privileged signifier of racial identity and, consequently, has come under attack in many quarters. However, as Whiteness increasingly becomes an object of historical and critical analysis, there have been few attempts to provide a theoretical language in which White youth can refuse to reference their Whiteness only through the common experience of racism and oppression. Hence, it becomes difficult for White youth to view themselves as both White and antiracist at the same time.

The first force is the emergence of identity politics in the United States from the 1960s to the present. While contradictory and diverse in its manifestations, identity politics has largely resulted in the formation, consolidation, and visibility of new group racial identities. These include groups as diverse as White youth who identify with Black youth culture and label themselves "wiggers"; feminists whose identities have been rearticulated through the racial registers of being Black, Latina, Brown, or Mestizo; and political groups such as Black Nationalists, Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Nacionalistas, and Native Americans who assert their racial and hybrid identities as part of a new politics of difference, representation, and social justice. These identities have emerged within a highly charged public debate on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and have made it more difficult for White youth to either ignore Whiteness as a racial category or to "safely imagine t! hat they are invisible to Black people."42 White students may see themselves as nonracist, but they no longer view themselves as colorless. As Charles Gallagher points out, Whiteness has become "a salient category of self-definition emerging in response to the political and cultural challenges of other racialized groups."43

Unfortunately, for many White youth, whose imaginations have been left fallow, unfed by a larger society's vision or quest for social justice, identity politics engendered a defensive posture. White students assumed that the only role they could play in the struggle against racism was either to renounce their Whiteness and adopt the modalities of the subordinated group or to suffer the charge that any claim to White identity was tantamount to racism. Within this paradigm, racism has been configured through a politics of representation that has analyzed how Whites have constructed, stereotyped, and delegitimated racial others, but it has said practically nothing about how racial politics might address the construction of Whiteness as an oppositional racial category. Moreover, while the debate within identity politics has made important theoretical gains in rewriting what it means to be Black, it has not questioned the complexity of Whiteness with the same dialectical attenti! veness. Although Whiteness has become an object of critical scrutiny, its primary connotation appears to "signify the center which pushes out, excludes, appropriates and distorts the margins."44 Similarly, liberal ideology has provided only a one-item agenda for how Blacks and Whites might work together in the struggle for social and racial justice. It would replace their recognition of the importance of racial identities with calls for tolerance and a color-blind society.

Identity politics, in part, served as one means to undermine the possibilities for White youth to engage critically the liberal appeal to a color-blind society; it has also had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the divide between Blacks and Whites. Furthermore, the absence of an oppositional politics for anti-racist pedagogies and struggles between the discourse of separatism and a power-evasive liberalism provided an opportunity for conservatives and right-wing activists to step into the fray and appropriate Whiteness as part of a broader backlash against Blacks and people of color. In this case, conservatives and the far right actively engaged in the process of recovering Whiteness and redefining themselves as the victims of racial antagonism, while simultaneously waging a brutal and racially coded attack on urban youth, immigrants, and the poor. Seemingly unresponsive to the needs of White youth, the White working class, and the White underclass, the discourse of! Whiteness was easily appropriated as part of a broader reactionary cultural politics that in its most extreme manifestations fueled the rise of White militia groups, the growing skinhead movement among White youth, and a growing anti-political-correctness movement in both higher education and the mass media.

The second force at work in reconstructing Whiteness as a racial category among youth is the profound changes that have taken place regarding the visibility of Blacks in the media. While it would be foolish to equate the increased visibility of Blacks in the media with an increase in power, especially around issues of ownership, diverse representations of Black culture throughout the media have made issues of White identity inextricably more fragile and fluid. This is evident in the ways in which popular culture is increasingly being reconfigured through the music, dance, and language of hip-hop. Similarly, the emergence of Black Entertainment Television (BET), MTV, and cable television testifies to the ubiquitous presence of people of color in television dramas, sports, and music while the popular press touts the emergence of the "new" Black public intellectuals in academia. All of these changes in the media signal that Whites can no longer claim the privilege of not "seei! ng" Blacks and other people of color; White youth now have to confront cultural difference as a force that affects every aspect of their lives. Coupled with the rise of an incendiary racial politics, the racialization of the media culture, and growing economic fears about their future, a significant number of White American youth are increasingly experiencing a crisis of self-esteem. Similar to cultural critic Diana Jester's comment about British youth, they "do not feel that they have an 'ethnicity', or if they do, that it's not one they feel too good about."45

Jester further suggests that White youth have few resources for questioning and rearticulating Whiteness as an identity that productively narrates their everyday experiences. This seems to be borne out in the ways in which many White college students have reacted to the racial politics of the last decade. One indication of the way in which Whiteness is being negotiated among students is evident in the rising racist assaults on students of color on campuses across the United States in the last few years. As a resurgent racism becomes more respectable in the broader culture, racist acts and assaults have once again become a staple of college life.46 At the same time, large numbers of White students appear to support the ongoing assaults on affirmative action programs that have been waged by the courts and state legislatures. Moreover, White students increasingly express a general sense of angst over racial politics and an emphatic indifference to politics in general.

Gallagher's ethnographic study of White college students suggests that many of them view the emergence of multiculturalists, feminists, and other progressive groups as an attack on Whiteness and a form of reverse discrimination. For example, Gallagher writes:

It is commonly assumed among many White students that any class that addresses issues of race or racism must necessarily be anti-White. More specifically, students believe that the instructors of these classes will hold individual White students accountable for slavery, lynching, discrimination, and other heinous acts.47

Many of the White students that Gallagher interviewed did not see themselves as privileged by virtue of skin color; some went so far as to claim that, given the rise of racial preferences, Whites no longer had a fair chance when competing with minorities in the labor market. Gallagher asserts that White students are resentful over being blamed for racism and that "ignoring the ways in which Whites `get raced' has the making of something politically dangerous . . . [and that] [W]hiteness must be addressed because the politics of race, from campus clubs to issues of crime to representation in the statehouse, permeate almost every social exchange."48 Unfortunately, Gallagher offers little in the way of suggesting how Whiteness might be rearticulated in oppositional terms. In fact, he concludes by suggesting that as Whiteness becomes more visible, it will be further appropriated and mediated through a racist ideology, and any notion of White solidarity will result in a reaction! ary politics. Hence, Whiteness as a marker of identity is confined within a notion of domination and racism that leaves White youth no critical lens, vocabulary, or social imaginary through which they can see themselves as actors in creating an oppositional space to fight for equality and social jus

Central to any pedagogical approach to race and the politics of Whiteness is the recognition that race, as a set of attitudes, values, lived experiences, and affective identifications, has become a defining feature of American life. However arbitrary and mythic, dangerous and variable, the fact is that racial categories exist and shape the lives of people differently within existing inequalities of power and wealth.49 As a central form of difference, race will neither disappear, be wished out of existence, or become somehow irrelevant in the United States and the larger global context. Howard Winant insightfully argues:

Race is a condition of individual and collective identity, a permanent, though tremendously flexible, element of social structure. Race is a means of knowing and organizing the social world; it is subject to continual contestation and reinterpretation, but it is no more likely to disappear than any other forms of human inequality and difference.... To rethink race is not only to recognize its permanence, but also to understand the essential test that it poses for any diverse society seeking to achieve a modicum of freedom.50

Pedagogically, this implies providing the conditions for students to address not only how their Whiteness functions in society as marker of privilege and power, but also how it can be used as a condition for expanding the ideological and material realities of democratic public life. Moreover, it is imperative that all students understand how race functions systemically as it shapes various forms of representations, social relations, and institutional structures. Rather than proposing the eradication of the concept of race itself, educators and other cultural workers need to fashion pedagogical practices that take a detour through race in order to address how Whiteness might be renegotiated as a productive force within a politics of difference linked to a radical democratic project.

Analyzing Whiteness as a central element of racial politics becomes useful in exploring how Whiteness as a cultural practice promotes race-based hierarchies, how White racial identity structures the struggle over cultural and political resources, and how rights and responsibilities are defined, confirmed, or contested across diverse racial claims.51 Whiteness in this context becomes less a matter of creating a new form of identity politics than an attempt to rearticulate Whiteness as part of a broader project of cultural, social, and political citizenship.

All students need to feel that they have a personal stake in their racial identity (however fluid, unstable, and transitory), an identity that will allow them to assert a view of political agency in which they can join with diverse groups around a notion of democratic public life that affirms racial differences through a "rearticulation of cultural, social, and political citizenship."52 Linking identity, race, and difference to a broader vision of radical democracy suggests a number of important pedagogical considerations. First, students need to investigate the historical relationship between race and ethnicity. Historian David Roediger is right in warning against the conflation of race and ethnicity by critical theorists, especially in light of a history of ethnicity in which White immigrants saw themselves as White and ethnic. According to Roediger, the claim to ethnicity among White immigrants, especially those from Europe, did not prevent them from defining their racia! l identities through the discourse of White separatism and supremacy.53 In this case, White ethnicity was not ignored by such immigrants; it was affirmed and linked in some cases to the dominant relations of racism.

The issue of racial identity can be linked to what Stuart Hall has called the "new ethnicity."54 For Hall, racial identities can be understood through the notion of ethnicity, but not the old notion of ethnicity that depends in part on the suppression of cultural difference and a separatist notion of White identity. Within the discourse of the "old identity," identity was seen as fixed and self-contained as opposed to open, complex, and unfinished. Consequently, the "old ethnicity" was often defined as an essence that had to be protected against other forms of cultural differences in which it found itself embroiled. Hall's attempt to rewrite ethnicity as a progressive and critical concept does not fall into the theoretical trap described by Roediger. By removing ethnicity from the traditional moorings of nationalism, racism, colonialism, and the state, Hall posits the new ethnicity as a referent for acknowledging "the place of history, language, and culture in the construct! ion of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual."55

Extending Hall's insights about ethnicity, I suggest that the diverse subject positions, social experiences, and cultural identities that inform Whiteness as a political and social construct can be rearticulated in order for students to recognize that "we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of particular experience, a particular culture without being constrained by [such] positions.... We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are."56 In Hall's terms, Whiteness can be addressed not as a form of identity fashioned through a claim to purity or some universal essence, but as one that "lives with and through, not despite difference."57

Hall provides a theoretical language for racializing Whiteness without essentializing it. That is, he recognizes that Whiteness is a crucial form of self-identity, "a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories."58 In this case, Whiteness provides a shifting and complex set of attachments and identifications through which individuals and social groups understand who they are and how they are supposed to act within and across the diverse landscape of cultural difference. Hall also argues correctly that ethnicity must be defined and defended through a set of ethical and political referents that connect various democratic struggles while expanding the range and possibilities of democratic relations and practices. Within the theoretical parameters of a new ethnicity, Whiteness can be read as a complex register of identity and a theory of agency defined through a politics of differ! ence that is subject to the shifting currents of history, power, and culture. That is, Whiteness can no longer be taken up as fixed, naturally grounded in a tradition or ancestry, but, as Ien Ang claims in another context, must be understood as a form of postmodern ethnicity, "experienced as a provisional and partial site of identity which must be constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated."59

The new ethnicity defines racial identities as multiple, porous, complex, and shifting, and in doing so provides a theoretical opening for educators and students to move beyond framing Whiteness as either good or bad, racially innocent or intractably racist. Whiteness in this context can be addressed through its complex relationship with other determining factors that usurp any claim to racial purity or singularity. At the same time, Whiteness must be addressed within power relations that exploit its subversive potential, while not erasing the historical and political role it plays in shaping other racialized identities and social differences. Unlike the old ethnicity that posits difference in essentialist or separatist terms, Hall's notion of the new ethnicity defines identity as an ongoing act of cultural recovery, while acknowledging that any particular claim to racial identity offers no guarantees regarding political outcomes. At the same time, the new ethnicity provide! s a theory that allows White students to go beyond the paralysis inspired by guilt or the racism fueled by anxiety and the fear of difference. In this context, Whiteness gains its meaning only in conjunction with other identities such as those informed by class, gender, age, nationality, and citizenship. For progressive Whites, "crossing over does not mean crossing out,"60 or renouncing Whiteness as a form of racial identity. Whites have to learn to live with their Whiteness by rearticulating it in terms that help them to formulate what it means to develop viable political coalitions and social movements. They also have to learn to engage in a critical pedagogy of self-formation that allows them to cross racial lines not in order to become Black, but to begin to forge multiracial coalitions based on a critical engagement rather than a denial of "Whiteness." Whites have to unlearn those histories, ideologies, values, and social relations that allow them to "cast the Other prima! rily as the object of aesthetic, not moral evaluation; as a source of sensations, not responsibility . . . [forces] that tend to render human relations fragmentary and discontinuous."61

By positioning Whiteness within a notion of cultural citizenship that politically, culturally, and socially affirms difference, students can take notice of how their Whiteness functions as a racial identity. In addition, they can be critical of forms of Whiteness that are structured in dominance and aligned with exploitative interests and oppressive social relations. By rearticulating Whiteness as more than a form of domination, White students can construct narratives of Whiteness that both challenge and, hopefully, provide a basis for transforming the dominant relationship between racial identity and citizenship, a relationship informed by an oppositional politics.62 Such a political practice suggests new subject positions, alliances, commitments, and forms of solidarity between White students and others engaged in the struggle to expand the possibilities of democratic life through "a profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural co! mmunities."63 George Yudice argues that as part of a broader project for articulating Whiteness in oppositional terms, White youth must feel that they have a stake in racial politics that connects them to the struggles being waged by other groups. At the center of such struggles is both the battle over citizenship redefined through the discourse of rights and the problem of resource distribution. He writes:

This is where identity politics segues into other issues, such as tax deficits, budget cuts, lack of educational opportunities, lack of jobs, immigration policies, international trade agreements, environmental blight, lack of health care insurance, and so on. These are the areas in which middle- and working-class Whites historically have had an advantage over people of color. However, today that advantage has eroded in certain respects.64

As part of a wider attempt to engage these issues, Yudice suggests that White youth can form alliances with other social and racial groups who recognize the need for solidarity in addressing issues of public life that undermine the quality of democracy for all groups. As White youth struggle to find a cultural and political space from which to speak and act as transformative citizens, it is important that educators address what it means pedagogically and politically to help students rearticulate Whiteness as part of a democratic cultural politics. While it is imperative that a critical analysis of Whiteness address its historical legacy and existing complicity with racist exclusion and oppression, it is equally crucial that such work distinguish between Whiteness as a racial identity that is non-racist or anti-racist and those aspects of Whiteness that are racist.65 When Whiteness is discussed in educational settings, the emphasis is almost exclusively on revealing it as an! ideology of privilege mediated largely through the dynamics of racism.66 While such interventions are crucial in developing an anti-racist pedagogy, they do not go far enough.

Representations of Whiteness in the Media

I want to begin to take up this pedagogical challenge by building upon James Snead's pertinent observation that the emergence of mass visual productions in the United States requires new ways of seeing and making visible the racial structuring of White experience.67 The electronic media -- television, movies, music, and news - have become powerful pedagogical forces, veritable teaching machines in shaping the social imaginations of students in terms of how they view themselves, others, and the larger society.

Central to the formative influence of the media is a representational politics of race in which the portrayal of Black people abstracts them from their real histories while reinforcing all too familiar stereotypes ranging from lazy and shiftless to menacing and dangerous. Recent films from a variety of genres, such as Pulp Fiction (1995),Just Cause (1995), and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1996), offer no apologies for employing racist language, depicting Black men as rapists, or portraying Blacks as savage or subhuman. Antiracist readings of these films often position White students to define and critique racism as the product of dominant racist stereotypes that unfairly depict Black identities, experiences, histories, and social relations. As important as these critiques are in any anti-racist discourse or pedagogy, they are severely limited theoretically because they do not address how Whiteness as a racial identity and social construction is taught, learned, experienc! ed, and identified within certain forms of knowledge, values, and privileges. Hollywood films rarely position audiences to question the pleasures, identifications, desires, and fears they experience as Whites viewing dominant representational politics of race. More specifically, such films rarely make problematic either the structuring principles that mobilize particular pleasures in audiences or how pleasure as a response to certain representations functions as part of a broader public discourse. At worst, such films position Whites as racial tourists, distant observers to the racist images and narratives that fill Hollywood screens. At best, such films reinforce the liberal assumption that racism is something that gives rise to Black oppression but has little or nothing to do with promoting power, racial privilege, and a sense of moral agency in the lives of Whites.68

In what follows, I want to explore the pedagogical implications of examining representations of Whiteness in two seemingly disparate films, Dangerous Minds (1995) and Suture (1993). Though I will focus primarily on Dangerous Minds, it is through a juxtaposition and intertextual reading of these films that I hope to provide some pedagogical insights for examining how Whiteness as a cultural practice is learned through the representation of racialized identities; how it opens up the possibility of intellectual self-reflection; and how students might mediate critically the complex relations between Whiteness and racism not by repudiating their Whiteness, but by grappling with its racist legacy and its potential to be rearticulated in oppositional and transformative terms. I also want to stress that I am not suggesting that Dangerous Minds is a bad film and Suture is a good film, given their different approaches to "Whiteness." Both have weaknesses that are notable. What I am s! uggesting is that these films are exemplary in representing dominant readings of Whiteness and as cultural texts that can be used pedagogically for addressing the shortcomings of the recent scholarship on "Whiteness," particularly as ways to move beyond the jaundiced view of Whiteness as simply a trope of domination.

At first glance, these films appear to have nothing in common in terms of audience, genre, intention, or politics. Dangerous Minds, a Hollywood sleeper starring Michelle Pfeiffer, was produced for a mass audience and grossed millions for its producers within its first week. The film's popularity can be measured in part by the appearance of a pilot television series called Dangerous Minds that premiered in the fall of 1996. In contrast, Suture is an independent film that played primarily to highbrow audiences with a penchant for avant-garde cinema. While some may argue that Dangerous Minds is too popular and too unoriginal to be taken seriously as a pedagogical text, it is precisely because of its popularity and widespread appeal that it warrants an extended analysis. Like many Hollywood films, Dangerous Minds is offensive not only in terms of its racial politics, but also in its fundamentally debased depiction of teaching and education. The 1995 summer hit is also symptomat! ic of how seemingly "innocent" entertainment gains its popularity in taking part in a larger public discourse on race and Whiteness largely informed by a right-wing and conservative notion of politics, theory, and pedagogy.

Dangerous Minds and the Production of Whiteness

Dangerous Minds resembles a long tradition of Hollywood movies recounting the sorry state of education for dispossessed kids who bear the brunt of poverty, crime, violence, and despair in the inner cities of the United States. Unlike earlier films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir With Love (1967), and Stand and Deliver (1988), which also deal with the interface of schooling and the harsh realities of inner-city life, Dangerous Minds does more than simply narrate the story of an idealistic teacher who struggles to connect with her rowdy and disinterested students. Dangerous Minds functions as a dual chronicle. In the first instance, the film attempts to represent Whiteness as the archetype of rationality, "tough" authority, and cultural standards in the midst of the changing racial demographics of urban space and the emergence of a resurgent racism in the highly charged politics of the 1990s. In the second instance, the film offers viewers a mix of compassion and con! sumerism as a solution to motivating teenagers who have long since given up on schooling as meaningful to their lives. In both instances, Whiteness becomes a referent not only for rearticulating racially coded notions of teaching and learning, but also for redefining how citizenship can be constructed for students of color as a function of choice linked exclusively to the marketplace.

Providing an allegory for representing both the purpose of schooling and the politics of racial difference as they intersect within the contested space of the urban public schools, Dangerous Minds skillfully mobilizes race as an organizing principle to promote its narrative structure and ideological message. Black and Hispanic teenagers provide the major fault line for developing pedagogical classroom relations through which Whiteness, located in the authority of the teacher, privileges itself against the racially coded images of disorder, chaos, and fear. The opposition between teacher and student, White and non-White, is clearly established in the first few scenes of the film. The opening sequence, shot in grainy monochrome, depicts a rundown urban housing project teeming with poverty, drug dealing, and imminent danger. Against this backdrop, disaffected Black and Hispanic children board a school bus that will take them to Parkmont High School and out of their crime- and ! drug-infested neighborhoods. This is one of the few shots in the film that provides a context for the children's lives, and the message is clear: the inner city has become a site of pathology, moral decay, and delinquency synonymous with the culture of working-class Black life. The soundtrack, featuring hip-hop music by artists such as Coolio, Sista, and Aaron Hall, is present only as a backdrop to the film.

Since the beginning of the movie is framed by racial iconography and a musical score that constructs minority students as both the objects of fear and subjects in need of discipline and control, the audience is prepared for someone to take charge. Enter LouAnne Johnson, a new teacher thrust, like a lamb led to the slaughter, into the "Academy School," a euphemism for a warehouse for students who are considered unteachable.

Dressed in frowzy tweeds and white lace, LouAnne enters her class full of high hopes to meet a room filled with Hispanic and Black kids who have brought the "worst" aspects of their culture into the classroom. Music blares amidst the clatter of students shouting, rapping, dancing, presenting LouAnne with an apparently out of control classroom in an inner-city school. Leaving the safety of her White, middle-class culture in order to teach in a place teeming with potential danger, LouAnne Johnson is presented to the audience as an innocent border crosser. This image of innocence and goodwill is used to provide White America with the comforting belief that disorder, ignorance, and chaos are always somewhere else, in that strangely homogenized, racial space known as the urban ghetto.69 The students respond to LouAnne's attempt to greet them with the taunting epithet "White bread." Confused and unable to gain control of the class, LouAnne is accosted by a male student who makes ! a mockery of her authority by insulting her with a sexual innuendo. Frustrated, she leaves the class and tells Hal, a friend who teaches next door, that she has just met the "rejects from hell." He assures her that she can reach these students if she figures out how to get their attention.

These opening scenes work powerfully to link Black and Hispanic kids with the culture of criminality and danger. These scenes also make clear that Whiteness as a racial identity, embodied in LouAnne Johnson, is both vulnerable and under siege, as well as the only hope these kids have for moving beyond the context and character of their racial identities. In other words, these scenes construct Whiteness as a racial identity in contrast to the stereotypical portrayal of intellectually inferior, hostile, and childish Black and Hispanic kids. Whiteness is thus coded as a norm for authority, orderliness, rationality, and control.

The structuring principles at work in Dangerous Minds perform a distinct ideological function in their attempt to cater to White consumers of popular culture. Pedagogy performs a double operation as it is used in this film. As part of the overt project, the film focuses on teaching in an inner-city school and constructs a dominant view of race as embodied in the lives of urban Black and Hispanic children. On the other hand, the hidden project of the film works pedagogically to recover and name the ideological and cultural values that construct Whiteness as a dominant form of racial identity. Hollywood has been producing films about teaching for over forty years, but rarely do such films use the theme of teaching in order to legitimate a conservative view of Whiteness as a besieged social formation and subordinate racial identities as a threat to public order. Dangerous Minds stands as an exception to the rule. The conservative and ideological implications of how Whiteness i! s constructed in this film can be seen through a series of representations.

Dangerous Minds tells the audience nothing about the lives of the students themselves, their histories, or their experiences outside of the school. Decontextualized and dehistoricized, the cultural identities of these students appear marginal to the construction of race as an organizing principle of the film. Racial differences in this film are situated within the spatial metaphor of center and margins, with the children of color clearly occupying the margins. At the center of the film is the embellished "true story" of LouAnne Johnson, who not only overcomes her initial failure to motivate these students but also serves as a beacon of light by convincing them that who they are and what they know needs to be ditched if they are to become more civilized and cultured (and more White). Racial conflict in this context is resolved through a colonial educational model in which White paternalism and missionary zeal provide the inspiration for kids from deprived backgrounds to impr! ove their character and sense of responsibility by reading poetry. The kids in this movie appear simply as a backdrop for expanding LouAnne's own self-consciousness and self-education; the film shows no interest in their development and ignores the opportunities for understanding their coming of age and examining how racism works in the schools and larger society. Whenever these kids do face a crisis - an unwanted pregnancy, the threat of violence, or dropping out of school -- LouAnne invades their homes and private lives, using the opportunity to win the kids' allegiance or draw attention to her own divorce, physical abuse, or sense of despair. If any notion of identity occupies center stage, it is not that of the kids but that of a White woman trying to figure out how to live in a public space inhabited by racialized others.70

The notion of authority and agency in Dangerous Minds is framed within a pedagogy of "tough love" that serves to mask how racial hierarchies and structured inequality operate within the schools and connect them to the larger society. Authority in Dangerous Minds is asserted initially when LouAnne Johnson shows up on the second day of class wearing a leather jacket and jeans. Reinventing herself as a military officer on leave, she further qualifies her new "tough" no-nonsense look by informing her students she is an ex-Marine who knows karate. Suggesting that fear and danger are the only emotions her students recognize as important, LouAnne crosses a racial divide by rooting her sense of authority in a traditionally racist notion of discipline and control; that is, classroom authority for subordinate groups is often based less on persuasion and dialogue than on threats, manipulation, and punitive action. Once she gets the group's attention, she moves onto more lofty ground a! nd begins the arduous task of trying to develop a pedagogy that is both morally uplifting and pedagogically relevant. Choice becomes for LouAnne the theoretical axis that organizes her classroom approach. First, on the side of moral uplift (complete with a conservative nineties Whitewashing of history), she tells her students that there are no victims in her class. Presumably, this is meant as a plea to rouse their sense of agency and responsibility, but it rings entirely hollow since LouAnne has no understanding of the social and historical limits that shape their sense of agency on a daily basis. Of course, some students immediately recognize the bad faith implicit in her sermonizing call and urge her to test it with a dose of reality by living in their neighborhood for a week.

Moreover, LouAnne appears to confuse her own range of choices, predicated in part on her class and racial privileges, with those of her students, even though they lack the power and resources to negotiate their lives politically, geographically, or economically with the same ease or options. She has no sense that choice springs from power, and those who have limited power have fewer choices. The subtext here reinforces the currently popular right-wing assumption that character, merit, and self-help are the basis on which people take their place in society. Of course, within a hierarchical and social structure organized by race, as well as economic power, gender, and other key determinants, Whiteness emerges as the normative basis for success, responsibility, and legitimate authority. By suggesting that White educators can ignore how larger social considerations impact on racial groups, their interrogation of White privilege, experience, and culture denies complicity with, i! f not responsibility for, racist ideology and structural inequalities.

Choice is not only trivialized in LouAnne's classroom; it provides the basis for a pedagogy that is as indifferent to the lives of poor inner-city kids as it is demeaning. Relying on the logic of the market to motivate her kids, LouAnne rewards classroom cooperation with candy bars, a trip to an amusement park, and dinner at a fancy restaurant. Baiting students with gimmicks and bribes does more than cast a moral shadow on the pedagogical value of such an approach or the teacher as a kind of ethical exemplar, it also makes clear how little LouAnne knows about the realities of her students' lives. Indifferent to the skills they need to survive, LouAnne is unconcerned about their experiences, interests, or cultural resources. This becomes clear in three pivotal instances in the movie.

In the first instance, LouAnne attempts to motivate the students by giving them the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Mister Tambourine Man." Indifferent to the force of hip-hop culture (though marketing executives appeared to know the draw and impact of hip-hop on the films' audience in designing the soundtrack), her attempt to use popular culture appears as nothing less than an act of cultural ignorance and bad pedagogy. But more revealing is her attempt to relate Dylan's lyrics to one of the most cliched aspects of the students' culture, namely, violence and drugs. Not only does she ignore their cultural resources and interests, but she also frames her notion of popular culture in a text from the 1960s, almost twenty years before these kids were born. Rather than excavating the traditions, themes, and experiences that make up her students' lives in order to construct her curriculum, she simply avoids their voices altogether in shaping the content of what she teaches. Beneath this f! orm of pedagogical violence there is also the presupposition that Whites can come into such schools and teach without theory, ignore the histories and narratives that students bring to schools, and perform miracles in children's lives by mere acts of kindness.

LouAnne's teaching is in actuality a pedagogy of diversion, one that refuses to provide students with skills that will help them address the urgent and disturbing questions of a society and a culture that in many ways ignores their humanity and well-being. These students are not taught to question the intellectual and material resources they need to address the profoundly antihumane conditions they have to negotiate everyday. How to survive in a society, let alone remake it, is an important pedagogical question that cannot be separated from the larger issue of what it means to live in a country that is increasingly hostile to the existence of poor kids in the inner cities. But LouAnne ignores these issues and offers her students material incentives to learn, and in doing so constructs them as consuming subjects rather than social subjects eager and able to think critically in order to negotiate and transform the worlds in which they live.

LouAnne's sense of privilege also becomes evident in the boundless confidence she exhibits in her authority and moral superiority. She believes that somehow her students are answerable to her both in terms of their classroom performance and in terms of their personal lives; her role is to affirm or gently "correct" how they narrate their beliefs, experiences, and values. LouAnne takes for granted that she has a right to "save them" or run their lives without questioning her own authority and purity of intentions. Authority here functions as a way of making invisible LouAnne's own privileges as a White woman, while simultaneously allowing her to indulge in a type of moralizing commensurate with her colonizing role as a White teacher who extracts from her students love and loyalty in exchange for teaching them to be part of a system that oppresses them. Moreover, LouAnne's pedagogy does nothing to rupture her own liberalism, which shifts the focus from the real structures of ! oppression faced by her students to the moral dilemmas that racism and other issues raise for dominant groups. LouAnne ignores the social gravity of the problems her students face, and in doing so is largely impervious to issues regarding how racism and poverty are interwoven into the very structure and fabric of the school and dominant society. Instead, she focuses on the problems such students present to institutional authorities such as herself and how they can be mediated and resolved without having to call into question either her own racism or the ways in which schools systemically function to oppress inner-city youth.

Dangerous Minds mythically rewrites the decline of public schooling and the attack on poor, Black, and Hispanic students within a broader project that rearticulates Whiteness as a model of authority, rationality, and civilized behavior. The politics of representation at work in this film reproduces a dominant view of identity and difference that has a long legacy in Hollywood films, specifically Westerns and African adventure movies. As Robin Kelley points out, the popularity of many Hollywood films is as much about constructing Whiteness as it is about demonizing the alleged racialized other. He notes that within this racialized Hollywood legacy, "American Indians, Africans, and Asians represent a pre-civilized or anti-civilized existence, a threat to the hegemony of Western culture and proof that 'Whites' are superior, more noble, more intelligent."71 Dangerous Minds is an updated defense of White identity and racial hierarchies. The colonizing thrust of this narrative is! highlighted through the image of Michelle Pfeiffer as a visiting White beauty queen whose success is, in part, rendered possible by market incentives and missionary talents.

Against LouAnne Johnson's benevolence and insight is juxtaposed the personality and pedagogy of Mr. Grandy, the Black principal of Parkmont High. Grandy is portrayed as an uptight, bloodless bureaucrat, a professional "wannabe" whose only interest appears to be in enforcing school rules (Hollywood's favorite stereotype for Black principals). Grandy rigidly oversees school policy and is constantly berating Johnson for bypassing the standard curriculum, generating non-traditional forms of teaching, and taking the students on unauthorized trips. As a Black man in a position of leadership, he is depicted as an obstacle to the success of his charges and ruthlessly insensitive to their needs. When Emilio visits Grandy's office to report another student who is trying to kill him, Grandy orders him out because he failed to knock on the office door. After leaving the building, Emilio is shot and killed a few blocks from the school.

Racial politics in this film are such that Black professionals come off as the real threat to learning and civilized behavior, and Whites, of course, are simply there to lend support. In contrast to Grandy, Johnson's Whiteness provides the racialized referent for leadership, risk-taking, and compassion. This is borne out at the end of the film when the students tell her that they want her to remain their teacher because she represents their "light." In this context, Dangerous Minds reinforces the highly racialized, mainstream assumption that chaos reigns in inner-city public schools, and that White teachers alone are capable of bringing order, decency, and hope to the those on the margins of society.

Suturing Whiteness

Directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee, Suture explores the location of identity within a dominant racial politics. Central to the politics of the film is the way in which it organizes the unfolding of its plot around two narratives. On the one hand, the directors use the discursive narrative, which develops through character dialogue and adopts the conventional form of the crime thriller. On the other hand, they construct a visual narrative that introduces racial identity as a defining principle of the movie by casting one of the two central characters as Black and the other as White. Set within a plot about murder and framed identity, Suture presents the story of two brothers, Vincent Towers and Clay Arlington. Under police investigation for killing his father, the rich and ruthless Vincent sets up a scheme in which he plants his driver's license and credit cards in his working-class halfbrother's billfold. He then convinces Clay to drive his Rolls Royce to the airpor! t. Clay does not realize that Vincent has placed a bomb in the car that can be triggered by remote control through the car phone. Vincent waits until Clay leaves for the airport and then calls him, setting off the bomb. After the explosion, Vincent leaves town assuming that the police will mistake Clay for himself. Unfortunately for Vincent, Clay survives the explosion, though he has to undergo massive reconstructive surgery on his face. In fact, the damage to Clay is so extreme that the police and doctors who attend to Clay believe that he is Vincent.

Clay survives the ordeal, but is an amnesiac and believes that he is Vincent. In fact, everyone who comes in contact with Clay believes that he is Vincent. As Clay undergoes psychoanalysis and repeated bouts of surgery, he falls in love with Renee Descartes, a beautiful and renowned plastic surgeon. In the meantime, the real Vincent breaks into his old house to kill Clay, but Clay shoots him first and disposes of his body. By the time he kills Vincent, Clay has regained his memory but refuses to slip back into his old identity and give up the identity and life he has assumed.

What is so remarkable about Suture is that it is mediated by a visual narrative that is completely at odds with the discursive narrative and unsettles the audience's role as "passive" spectators. Clay does not look anything like Vincent. In fact, Clay is Black, but is treated throughout the film as if he is White. In a scene fraught with irony and tension, Renee Descartes takes off Clay's bandages and she tells him that he has a Greco-Roman nose, which allegedly proves that he "isn't inclined to deviant behavior, like killing people."

Memory and identity in this film are fluid and hybridized rather than fixed and sutured. Black identity is presented as a social construction that cannot be framed in essentialist terms. Clay assumes all the markings of White experience and culture, and it is only the audience that is able to mediate his newly assumed cultural capital by virtue of his Blackness.72 There is more at work in this film than a critique of Black essentialism; there is also the ironic representation of Whiteness as both invisible to itself and, at the same time, the norm by which everything else is measured. That is, Whiteness in Suture becomes the racial marker of identity, power, and privilege. Playing the visual narrative against the discursive narrative, Suture evokes a peculiar form of racial witnessing in which it exposes Whiteness as an ideology, a set of experiences, and a location of privilege. But it does so not by trading in binaristic oppositions in which bad Whites oppress good Blacks! , but by calling into question the racial tension between what is seen and what is heard by the audience. The discursive narrative in the film privileges language while denying the defining principle of race, but the visual narrative forces the audience to recognize the phenomenological rather than political implications of race, identity, and difference. As film critic Roy Grundmann notes, "We initially want to jump out of our seats to scream at the characters who (mis?)take Clay for Vincent, especially upon such comparative 'evidence' as videos, photos, and a police lineup with a witness who knew Vincent."73 Racial difference, in this case, is defined entirely through a representational politics of visual imagery that assails both the liberal appeal to color-blindness and a power-evading aesthetic of difference that reduces racial identities to lifestyles, marketing niches, or consumer products.

Rupturing the Hollywood cinematic tradition of presenting Whiteness as an "invisible" though determining discourse, Suture forces the audience to recognize Whiteness as a racial signifier, as an "index of social standing or rank."74 But in the end, Suture provides no means for framing Whiteness outside of the discursive and visual politics of domination. The film's attempt to develop a representational politics certainly forces the viewer to demystify and debunk Whiteness as invisible, abstracted from the modalities of power and identity, but it does nothing to develop a power strategic politics - a politics that attempts to transform both ideologies and material relations of power - that refuses to accept Whiteness as a racial category that has only one purpose, which is closely tied to if not defined by shifting narratives of domination and oppression. This might explain why Suture eventually engages in a reductionistic moralizing by suggesting that Clay should be condemn! ed for wanting to be White, but doing so without really engaging Whiteness in a more dialectical or critical fashion.

Cinema and the Pedagogy of Whiteness

Dangerous Minds and Suture offer contrasting narratives of race that can be used pedagogically to critically deconstruct both racial othering and Whiteness as part of a broader discourse on racial justice. The juxtaposition of these two films opens up a pedagogical space for reading contradictory representations of Whiteness as an ideology and site of power and privilege within the discourse of what Stuart Hall has labeled the "old ethnicity." Similarly, rupturing singular definitions of Whiteness provides educators with the opportunity to construct more complex models for theorizing Whiteness through a multiplicity of social relations, theoretical positions, and affective identifications. In this context, Whiteness can be taken up pedagogically and politically in order to enable both White and other students of color to address issues of racial identity within a new and expanded conception of ethnicity. This suggests highlighting the historical, political, and contextual n! ature of racial identities, not as distinct racial formations, but through their complex relationship to each other within specific relations of power. Once again, Stuart Hall elaborates on the democratic possibilities that a reconceptualized notion of ethnicity might enable students and others to analyze cultural identities as they are fashioned out of the complex web of history, power, and politics. He is worth quoting at length:

I have been arguing for new conceptions of ethnicities which recognize that people are placed in a history, in a culture, in a space, that they come from somewhere, that enunciation is always located. I have been asking whether ethnicity could be a term which would enable us to recognize that placing of enunciation in a very different way from the embattled, aggressive ethnicities that have rampaged through our world.75

Rather than being dismissed simply as a racist text by critical educators, Dangerous Minds should be read symptomatically for the ways in which it articulates and reproduces Whiteness as a form of racial domination within the public space of the inner-city classroom. Offering an unapologetic reading of Whiteness as a trope of order, rationality, insight, and beauty, Dangerous Minds is an important educational text for students to use in addressing how Whiteness and difference are portrayed in the film, and how race consciously or unconsciously shapes their everyday experiences, attitudes, and worldviews. Pedagogically the objective is not to force students into viewing Dangerous Minds as either a good or bad film, but to engage the broader social conditions through which the popularity of the film has to be understood. One pedagogical task is to get students to think about how Dangerous Minds bears witness to the ethical and racial dilemmas that animate the larger racial an! d social landscape.

Students may offer a number of responses to a film such as Dangerous Minds. But given the popularity of the film, and the large number of favorable reviews it received in newspapers across the country, it is reasonable to assume that the range of readings available to White students will fall within a mix of mainstream liberal to conservative interpretations that, while not differing from each other substantially, might uncover interesting contradictions to be explored in classroom analyses.76 Rather than stressing that students are diverse readers of culture, it is important pedagogically to recognize and understand how the ownership and control of the apparatuses of cultural production limit the readings made widely available to students and shape the popular context from which dominant notions of racism are understood. When racist difference does enter into classroom discussion, it more than likely will focus on the disruptive behavior that Black and Hispanic students ex! hibit in schools. That behavior that will often be seen as characteristic of an entire social group, or as a form of cultural pathology that suggests that minorities are largely to blame for the educational problems they experience. Similarly, when Whiteness is destabilized or critically addressed by students, it more than likely will be taken up within a powerevasive discourse in which White racism is often reduced to an act of individual prejudice that is neatly removed from the messy contexts of history, politics, and systemic oppression.77 This suggests that it is unlikely that White students will recognize LouAnne's teaching approach and insistence on the value of middle-class cultural capital as a racist attempt to teach Black and Hispanic students that their own narratives, histories, and experiences are uncivilized and crude. However popular such dominant readings might be, they offer educators a prime pedagogical opportunity to interrogate and rupture their codes and ! ideologies. For instance, the ideological link between the privileging of White cultural capital and the ongoing, degrading representation of the other in Hollywood films may not be evident to students on a first reading of the film, but can become an object of analysis as various students in the class are provided with alternative readings. At best, Dangerous Minds offers White students an opportunity to engage a popular text that embodies much of what they generally learn or (mis)learn about race without initially putting their own racial identities on trial.

A viewing and analysis of Suture reveals a different set of claims about Whiteness that raise alternative possibilities for interrogating the relationship between Whiteness, race, and racism. Suture presents a critical reading of Whiteness as a dominant social and cultural construction and attempts, through an unsettling visual narrative, to reveal how Whiteness wages symbolic violence through its refusal to name its defining mechanisms of power and privilege. In doing so, Suture forces students, especially White students, to consider problematizing the assumption that issues regarding race and racial politics are largely about non-Whites as a social group. The dominant defense of Whiteness as a universal norm is visibly thrown off balance in this film and makes Whiteness a racial category open to critique. In rupturing Whiteness as a racially and politically neutral code, Suture provides a pedagogical opportunity for educators to talk about how White experience is construc! ted differently within a variety of public spaces and mediated through the diverse, but related, lenses of class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Played off against each other, the two films engage in a representational politics that illuminates Whiteness as a shifting, political category whose meaning can be addressed within rather than outside of the interrelationships of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. In other words, the structuring principles that inform these films as they work intertextually provide a theoretical basis for challenging Whiteness as an ideological and historical construction. It is precisely the tension generated between these films that invites entrance into a pedagogy that commences with what Gayatri Spivak refers to as "moments of bafflement," that is, a pedagogy that focuses on demystifying the act and process of representing by revealing how meanings are produced within relations of power that narrate identities through history, social forms, and modes of ethical address that appear objective, universally valid, and consensual.78 Such a pedagogy attempts to open up questions "regarding ! the link between epistemology and morality: between how we get to know what we know and the moral life we aspire to lead."79 While such pedagogical tensions do not guarantee the possibility of decentering Whiteness in order to render "visible the historical and institutional structures from within which [White teachers and students] speak,"80 they do provide the pedagogical conditions for students and teachers alike to question and unlearn those aspects of Whiteness that position them with the space and privileged relations of racism.

While it is impossible to predict how students will actually react to a pedagogy of bafflement that takes Whiteness and race as an object of serious debate and analysis, it is important to recognize that White students will generally offer enormous resistance to analyzing critically the "normative-residual space [of] White cultural practice" - that is, those historical narratives of Whiteness that misrepresent the past in order to privilege a White racist view of the present and future.sl Resistance in this case should be examined for the knowledge it yields, and the possibilities for interrogating its silences and refusals. Pedagogically, this suggests allowing students to air their positions on Whiteness and race regardless of how messy or politically incorrect such positions might be. But there is more at stake here than providing a pedagogical space for students to narrate themselves and to speak without fear within the contexts of their own specific histories and exper! iences.

Rather than arguing that students simply be allowed to voice their racial politics, I am suggesting they be offered a space for dialogue and critique in which such positions can be engaged, challenged, and rearticulated through an ongoing analysis of the material realities and social relations of racism. In other words, teachers might begin such a dialogue with what students already know; they might question students' awareness of the racial and cultural differences between neighborhoods, spaces for recreation, schools, eating establishments, and other public places within their own communities. Issues can be raised about who can cross over into such spaces, how certain racial groups are excluded, under what circumstances, and why? Similarly, questions of cultural identity can be explored through a pedagogy of representation that analyzes how dominant and subordinate racial groups are portrayed and stereotyped in the media, press, and other aspects of the culture, and how s! uch groups are influenced and positioned by such stereotypes. In this instance, it is important for students to understand how power and privilege mediate how different racial groups are represented.82 Students can explore the relations between the ways in which racial identities are constructed and the broader social landscape that registers very different consequences regarding how racism actually [and differently] affects, for example, Whites and non-Whites within highly iniquitous relations of power. At the same time, teachers can point to strategies of intervention, exploring how students can exercise their sense of politics, power, and collective agency to engage and attempt to change dominant and oppressive relations of power as they affect both their everyday lives and the lives of others who struggle under the oppressive weight of racism.

The issue of making White students responsive to the politics of racial privilege is fraught with the fear and anger that accompany having to rethink one's identity. Engaging in forms of teaching that prompt White students to examine their social practices and belief systems in racial terms may work to reinforce the safe assumption that race is a stable category, a biological given, rather than a historical and cultural construction. For instance, AnnLouise Keating points out that when teaching her students to interrogate Whiteness critically, many of them come away believing that all Whites were colonialists, in spite of her attempts pedagogically to distinguish between Whiteness as the dominant racial and political ideology and the diverse, contingent racial positions White people take up.83

In spite of the tensions and contradictions that any pedagogy of Whiteness might face, it is imperative that teachers address the histories that have shaped the normative space, practices, and diverse relationships that White students have inherited through a legacy of racial privilege. Analyzing the historical legacy of Whiteness as an oppressive racial force requires that students engage in a critical form of memory work, while fostering less a sullen silence or paralyzing guilt and more a sense of outrage at historical oppression and a desire for racial justice in the present. Keating illuminates the problems she faced when attempting to get White students to think critically about racism and its systemic nature and to interrogate or reverse their taken-for-granted assumptions about Whiteness and racial privilege. She writes:

These reversals trigger a variety of unwelcome reactions in self-identified "White" students, reactions ranging from guilt to anger to withdrawal and despair. Instructors must be prepared to deal with these responses. The point is not to encourage feelings of personal responsibility for the slavery, decimation of indigenous peoples, land theft, and so on that occurred in the past. It is, rather, to enable students of all colors more fully to comprehend how these oppressive systems that began in the historical past continue misshaping contemporary conditions. Guilt-tripping plays no role in this process.84

However, Keating is not entirely clear on how educators can avoid guilt-tripping students or to what degree they are not to be held responsible for their present attitudes within this type of pedagogy. Making Whiteness rather than White racism the focus of study is an important pedagogical strategy. Analyzing Whiteness opens a theoretical space for teachers and students to articulate how their own racial identities have been shaped within a broader racist culture and what responsibilities they might assume for living in a present in which Whites are accorded privileges and opportunities (though in complex and different ways) largely at the expense of other racial groups. Yet, as insightful as this strategy may prove to be, more theoretical work needs to be done to enable students to critically engage and appropriate the tools necessary for them to politicize Whiteness as a racial category without closing down their own sense of identity and political agency.

While both Dangerous Minds and Suture provide an educational opportunity for students to see how dominant assumptions about Whiteness can be framed and challenged, neither film addresses what it means to rearticulate Whiteness in oppositional terms. Neither the portrayal of Whiteness as a form of racial privilege nor as a practice of domination necessarily establishes the basis for White students to rearticulate their own Whiteness in ways that go beyond their over-identification with or desire to be "Black" at the expense of their own racial identities.

I am concerned about what it means educationally for those of us who engage in an anti-racist pedagogy and politics to suggest to students that Whiteness can only be understood in terms of the common experience of White domination and racism. What subjectivities or points of identification become available to White students who can only imagine White experience as monolithic, self-contained, and deeply racist? What are the pedagogical and political stakes in rearticulating Whiteness in anti-essentialist terms as part of a broader new discourse of ethnicity, so that White youth can understand and struggle against the long legacy of White racism while using the particularities of "their own culture as a resource for resistance, reflection, and empowerment?"85

At the same time, there are too few attempts to develop a pedagogy of Whiteness that enables White students to move beyond positions of guilt or resentment. There is a curious absence in the work on Whiteness regarding how students might examine critically the construction of their own identities in order to rethink Whiteness as a discourse of both critique and possibility. Educators need to connect Whiteness with a new language of ethnicity, one that provides a space for White students to imagine how Whiteness as an ideology and social location can be progressively appropriated as part of a broader politics of social reform. Theorizing the relationship between ethnicity and identity enables students to both locate themselves in society and construct temporary points of belonging and orientation. Central to such a task is the political and pedagogical challenge of refashioning an anti-racist politics that informs a broader, radical, democratic project.86