O objetivo desta tese é compreender e analisar como a ideia de raça e os significados acerca da branquitude são apropriados e construídos por sujeitos brancos na cidade de São Paulo. A branquitude é entendida aqui como uma construção sócio-histórica produzida pela ideia falaciosa de superioridade racial branca, e que resulta, nas sociedades estruturadas pelo racismo, em uma posição em que os sujeitos identificados como brancos adquirem privilégios simbólicos e materiais em relação aos não brancos. Para a realização deste trabalho apresento uma abordagem conceitual dos estudos sobre branquitude dentro da psicologia social e das ciências humanas. Apresento também seus desdobramentos para o entendimento do racismo contemporâneo, bem como revisão teórica de como o conceito de raça foi produzido a partir do pensamento acadêmico europeu do século XIX e reproduzido no pensamento social paulistano. A pesquisa de campo foi desenvolvida por meio da realização de entrevistas e conversas informais com sujeitos que se auto identi\" caram como brancos de diferentes classes sociais, idade e sexo. Nosso intuito era compreender a heterogeneidade da branquitude nesta cidade. As análises demonstraram que há por parte destes sujeitos a insistência em discursos biológicos e culturais hierárquicos do branco sob outras construções racializadas, e, portanto, o racismo ainda faz parte de um dos traços uni\" cadores da identidade racial branca paulistana. Percebemos também que os significados construídos sobre a branquitude exercem poder sobre o próprio grupo de indivíduos brancos, marcando diferenças e hierarquias internas. Assim, a branquitude é deslocada dentro das diferenças de origem, regionalidade, gênero, fenótipo e classe, o que demonstra que a categoria branco é uma questão internamente controversa e que alguns tipos de branquitude são marcadores de hierarquias da própria categoria / The goal of this dissertation is to understand and analyze how the ideas of race and whiteness are constructed and given meaning by white inhabitants in the city of São Paulo. Whiteness is understood as a social-historical construction produced by the deceptive notion of white racial supremacy. In societies that are structured by racism, whiteness generates a situation in which individuals that are identified as white are given symbolic and material priviledge in relation to those individuals considered not white. I present a review of references in the field of critical whiteness studies connected to Social Psychology and Social Sciences, pointing out its implications to the understanding of contemporary racism. I also present the history of race as a concept formulated in 19th century European academic thought and its reflections in the paulistano social thought in the present. Field research was conducted through interviews and informal conversation with individuals from diverse social class, age and gender that self-identified themselves as white. Our aim was to understand the heterogen caracter of whiteness in São Paulo. Analyses demonstrated that, for these individuals, biological and hieraquic cultural discourses remain as explanation to racial diferences, and racism is still a structural element of paulistano white racial identity. We also noticed that the social meaning that derives from the notion of whiteness operates in white individuals, indicating internal hieraquical diferences. Whiteness is therefore dislocated and relocated in relation to social origin and class, regional, gender and fenotipical diferences, which demonstrates that the category White is internally controversial and that some kinds of whiteness are indicative of hierarquical power within it

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a representação das representações das relações raciais na telenovela brasileira. As tramas selecionadas para a realização deste estudo são: \"Da Cor do Pecado\", \"A lua me disse\" e \"Páginas da Vida\", todas exibidas pela Rede Globo de Televisão. Por meio de alguns recursos dos estudos de recepção, analisamos os diálogos das personagens envolvidas nos conflitos raciais, e a leitura desses diálogos realizada pelos estudantes universitários entrevistados no Brasil e em Angola. / This research has the intention to analyze the reception of racial relations presented in the brazilian soap opera. The soap operas chosen for supporting this research are \"Da Cor do Pecado\", \"A lua me disse\" and \"Páginas da Vida\". All of them broadcasted by Globo Channel. Using some resources of the study of reception, we analyze the dialogs of the characters involved in the racial conflicts, and the reading of those dialogs realized by university students interviewed in Brazil and Angola.

A presente pesquisa se baseia na teoria crítica da branquidade, especificamente no que concerne aos elementos mais evidenciados da formação da identidade Branca, para realizar uma análise, por amostra, da tendência das demandas judiciais e julgamentos jurisprudenciais acerca da conduta de discriminação racial, prevista na legislação brasileira. Tendo em vista que as decisões dos tribunais a respeito desse tema se mostram bastantes controversas, os elementos da branquidade são trazidos a esse trabalho com a finalidade de contribuir com a tarefa dos operadores do direito de realizar a interpretação sobre dúvidas, dubiedades, lacunas e questionamentos sobre a eficácia da implementação da norma em reduzir as manifestações do racismo. / This research is based on the critical theory of whiteness, especially on elements that compose the white identity formation, for the purpose of analyzing the judicial decisions selected from the Brazilians tribunals, concerned to racial discrimination conducts. The elements of whiteness theory is consider as a contribution to the work of the professionals of law in giving an interpretation about the racial conflicts trials, considering the doubt, dubiousness, lacuna and analyses about the discrimination law efficacy in reduce the racism manifestations.

ABSTRACT This study is based on two reportages from the program Uppdrag granskning that have received a lot of attention in 2018 and have led to the highest number of claims to the Ministry of press, radio and television in Sweden. The main theme of the two reportages is men ́s sexual violence against women, thus approached from two different perspectives. Through using a Critical Discourse Analysis and intersectional theory the thesis examines how different bodies are given different spaces, what kind of feelings they provoke and how identity is constructed. It becomes evident that the perspective and how the perpetrator is described in the program depend on whether or not he is part of norm of whiteness. The study shows that Uppdrag granskning uses its discursive power to effect feelings in a way that normalizes sexism and racism. Through the hegemonic discourse that Uppdrag granskning creates, things that are unthinkable to say today become possible to say tomorrow. Keywords: Media, Discourses, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Whiteness Studies, Racism, Sexism, Uppdrag granskning

Spurred by Richard Louv’s bestseller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit-Disorder (2005), a popular movement composed of parents, educators, and researchers has increasingly called for the reconnection of children and the natural environment. This thesis interrogates the cultural assumptions at work in this call to reconnect, specifically how an American frontier imagination structures Louv’s ideal form of connection. Drawing on scholarship from the fields of ecocriticism, environmental history, and American studies I assess the implications of Louv’s frontier framing for the project of reconnecting children to nature and for the broader field of environmental education. I argue that a frontier vision of connection with nature is at times exclusionary and escapist, and more troubling, has the potential to enforce social hierarchies invested in whiteness and the U.S. settler state. / 2020-01-11

This work traces the relationship of Jews to African-Americans in the process of Jews attaining whiteness in the 20th century. Specific attention is paid to blackface performance in The Jazz Singer and the process of identification with suffering. Theoretically this work brings together psychoanalytic theories of projection, repression and masochism with afro-pessimist notions of the libidinal economy of white supremacy. Ultimately, I argue that in its enjoyment and its masochism, The Jazz Singer empathizes with blackness both as a way to assimilate into white America and express doubt at this very act.

In my dissertation project, I engage in a discursive analysis of whiteness to examine how it influences postcolonial modes of self-styling. Critical whiteness studies often focuses on representations of whiteness in the West as well as on whiteness as physical—as white bodies and white people. I focus on representations and functions of whiteness outside of the West, particularly in relation to issues of belonging and modes of postcolonial identification. I examine Anglophone African literary representations of whiteness from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to query how whiteness both enables and undermines anticolonial consciousness. A central question I examine is, How does whiteness as a symbolic manifestation function to constitute postcolonial African identification? Scholarship on the topic of subjectivity and liberation needs to explicitly examine how whiteness intersects with key notions of modernity, such as race, class, progress, and self-determination. Through an examination of postcolonial African literary representations of whiteness, I aim to examine the aspirations, unpacked stereotypes, and fears that move us as readers and hail us as human subjects. Ultimately, through this work, I grapple with the question of identification, understood as the system of desires, judgments, images, and performances that constitute our experiences of being human. I begin by looking backward at the satirical play, “The Blinkards,” written in 1915 in the context of British colonization of the Gold Coast in West Africa (present-day Ghana), to develop an understanding of postcolonial identification that includes an examination of the artistic expression of a writer conceptualizing liberation through notions of cultural nationalism. I go on to examine a selection postcolonial African literatures to develop an understanding of how racialized socio-cultural realities constitute forms of self-hood in post-independence contexts. I hope to use my argument about representations of whiteness in African literatures to open up questions fundamental to contemporary theories of identification in postcolonial contexts, as well as to make a philosophical argument about the ethics of whiteness as it undergirds transnational modes of modernity. One main point I make in relation to postcolonial theories of subjectivity is that notions of identification are tied up in local, regional, and global circuits of capital and cultural production. In chapter 2, I look at an early (Grain of Wheat 1967) and recent novel (Wizard of the Crow 2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya), who locates African postcolonial subjectivity as deeply embedded in local traditions, myths, and storytelling circuits. By fluidly mixing the contexts of the local, the national, and the global, Ngũgĩ astutely challenges naturalized conventions that position black identities and blackness as always inferior to whiteness. Ngũgĩ represents postcolonial consciousness as a space whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics. Situating African postcolonial identification within global circuits of migration, capitalism, and colonialism, Ngũgĩ engages the pervasive significance of whiteness through representations of sickness and desire, suggesting that postcolonial identification is performed through beliefs and practices that are situated within a global racial hierarchy. From there I go on to analyze a contemporary short story cycle by post-apartheid generation South African writer Siphiwo Mahala. Through his work, I continue to explore the issue of performative identification constituted through desire and aspirational notions in which whiteness works as a moving signifier of cultural and social capital. The main question I address in this chapter is, What is the meaning of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa? Through this examination, I use my analysis of representations of whiteness to reflect on the politics of entanglement as a way to move beyond racialized and geographic modes of identification, to challenge conceptual boundaries that undergird modernity, and theoretical possibilities of a politics of entanglement in relation to broader issues of identification and belonging in postcolonial contexts.

In this dissertation, I conceptualize common sense racism as the material basis for the unconscious rhetorical processes that shape and normalize unsympathetic and uncritical public responses to racialized violence against black communities, and which thereby perpetuate racial structures of power and foment white innocence and indifference. This form of common sense is comprised of a set of deeply embedded logics and rationalities—fragmented forms of prepropositional knowledge—that have evolved over time through the shapeshifting ideologies of white supremacy and anti-blackness to partly determine how civil society understands and interprets ongoing legacies of violence. Rather than just thinking of common sense in how we discuss it in everyday talk, I conceptualize and critique it with regard to how it animates and informs some of the fundamental cultural constructs, such as language, time, and humanity, that "we" as a nation rely upon to orient ourselves to and make sense of the world around us. Through these frameworks, common sense racism structures rhetorically how civil society's institutions make meaning in moments of racial crisis, tension, and transformation, and how its dominant publics relate to ongoing histories of racial oppression and abuse, or rather, how they do not relate to them at all. Through three case studies, a theoretical chapter, and an introduction and conclusion, I offer a critical vocabulary for understanding the nation's inability to confront racialized violence while considering the means by which these systems of meaning-making can be disrupted by black vernacular rhetorical practices.

My dissertation is a foray into blues music's intricate web of racial taxonomies, an aspect that has been neglected by most existing studies of the genre. In particular, I am interested in significant changes that took place in the 1960s under which blues was reconfigured from "black" to "white" in its production and reception while simultaneously retaining a notion of authenticity that remained deeply connected with constructions of "blackness." In the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement and the burgeoning counterculture, audiences for blues music became increasingly "white" and European. In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music's class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present. Individual chapters focus on key figures, events and institutions that exemplify blues music's racial politics and transnational movements of the 1960s.

This thesis explores and seeks to unsettle the tenacity of white settler privilege in child and youth care (CYC). I first acknowledge the significant leadership of Indigenous and nonwhite activist-scholars to address the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous families across colonial systems in which CYC practitioners work. This qualitative study interrogates how white settler CYC practitioners approach issues of colonial and systemic racialized violence targeting Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities. Experienced, politicized frontline practitioners working in the CYC field were invited to examine how they understand, name, reproduce, contest, and struggle with white settler privilege in their practice. My study findings are organized along four themes that attend to systemic issues and the difficulty of challenging dominant white norms and conventions in the CYC field: (1) working in colonial violence and racism; (2) white settler fragility; (3) power and privilege; and (4) troubling allyship in the CYC field. The findings explore the complex individual and collective ethical responsibilities of white settler CYC practitioners and formulate responsive, embodied ethics rooted in solidarity and an anticolonial, antiracist, intersectional praxis. / Graduate / 2020-09-04