This essay critically reflects on challenges and dilemmas I encountered when interviewing white women about their experiences with gender, racialization, and practices of whiteness. These challenges and dilemmas in the research setting relate to the researcherparticipant relationship and, in particular, participants' use of 1) a "rhetorical ethic," in which their social justice narratives were contradicted by demonstrations of their own racist ideologies; and 2) how whiteness and femininity were sites of power and resources for "social desirability bias" and impression management in response to my positionality as a white woman with a Black spouse and two racially mixed children. Additionally, this essay grapples with the emotionally difficult journey of being a researcher with the feminist commitment of "giving voice" to women by developing a bond of mutual trust, while at the same time feeling compelled to conceal oneself in search of "honest" responses from the research participants.This reflection illuminates how a/symmetries of power between researcher and the researched are inscribed with race and gender dynamics that are not always discernible, yet have a tremendous influence on data gathering. These dynamics require recognizing the agency of the research participants to shape what are considered and interpreted as data. These dynamics also require treating the data with "critical skepticism" and subjecting the participants' responses to a "radical reflexivity" rooted in understanding how the larger social, political and historical "facts of whiteness" inform the microcosm of the researcher-participant relationship.

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I argue that compulsory “white” heterosexuality, the highly regulated and ritualized practice of channelling European women’s sexuality toward monogamous unions with men of the same race2, is one of the primary ways they are compelled to perform “white” feminine sexuality. Consistent with gender, ethnic and race expectations, and at times across class divisions, European women are expected to demonstrate their loyalty to whiteness and patriarchy. Animus toward interracial unions, particularly between European women and African men, reveal the hidden heteronormative expectations of compulsory “white” heterosexuality. If European women are perceived to challenge these expectations and are therefore seen as disloyal to whiteness and patriarchy, disciplinary regimes are employed to elicit and even coerce compliance. I do not argue that all European women in interracial unions are actively challenging European patriarchal power. Rather, their actions are perceived as a violation of whiteness regardless of the women’s intention or level of politicized consciousness.

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

This Special Issue—“Whiteness in the Age of White Rage”—names and interrogates what is implicit in anti-racist, Indigenous, and whiteness studies: white rage. Drawing on Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017), we invited scholars to explore empirical and theoretical inquiry of how rage is a defining characteristic of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy in Canada. In this Introduction we elaborate how contemporaneously, historically, and theoretically a vital dimension of the configuration of whiteness in Canada is the normalization of rage as a property right of whiteness. Presently, as fascism is once again a global phenomenon, there is an opportunity for critical scholarship on whiteness in Canada to name and explicate the social effects and quotidian mobilization of rage in conservative and liberal articulations of white supremacy. We offer a general outline to the theme of whiteness in the age of white rage to introduce nascent scholarship that builds on the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and critical whiteness scholars.