White femininity, black masculinity, and imperial sex/romance tourism: Resisting ‘whitestream' feminism's single story

Nice White Teacher: How Niceness and Whiteness Prevent Antiracist Pedagogy in the Classroom

“…"Du Bois argued that white supremacy undermined not just working-class unity but the very vision of many white workers" (as cited in Roediger, 2007, p. 13). White people (white working-class included) see themselves as the norm or the "universal," (Ahmed, 2007) but at the same time, white people do not see themselves as racialized bodies (Deliovsky, 2010). Removing this purposeful blind spot among white folks, or what Ahmed (2017) describes as coming up against a "brick wall," for many feminist and anti-racist scholars, can be tedious work.…”

“…Therefore, whiteness was at the center of creating racial and class hierarchies, and so was gender. Deliovsky (2010) states that "the crucial difference between 'white' womanhood and 'black' womanhood is that African women were 'sexually fictionalized'' for the purpose of wealth accumulation by robbing them of their 'very womanness as persons'" (p. 30). Meanwhile, "English women were imbued with a womanhood that was contingent on their sexual discretion and comportment,' which did not necessarily reside in being female per se but in their purity as 'white' English Christians (Deliovsky, 2010, p. 30).…”

“…Due to this earlier erasure, one must look outside of critical whiteness studies to examine the analyses conducted on white women and their participation in upholding white supremacy throughout U.S. history. For example, some of this work includes the classical works of Black feminist bell hooks (1981) Ain't I A Woman: Black women and feminism and Angela Davis's (2011) Women, Race, and Class, plus British-American sociologist scholar Ruth Frankenberg (1993) and sociologist professor Katerina Deliovsky (2010). These scholars provide the necessary background and foundation on how white women took part in the racial and class structuring that often only marks the white man as the "bad guy" and leaves our purity and innocence intact, which historically is untrue.…”

“…Now, there have been scholars before Castagno's (2014) ethnographic study on Niceness and whiteness that have pointed towards Niceness as an education and gendered issue, such as Ian E. Baptiste's (2008) Wages of Niceness with the conversation about how educators buy into "educational niceness" in adult education circles. Also, Deliovsky's (2010) book, White femininity: Race, Gender, and Power, describes the Niceness phenomenon without mentioning the word 'nice.' She examines how "a gendered 'white' identity is one that is engaged in daily and incessantly" in forms of language and rituals that create a sense of white unity (p. 72).…”

“…For Black women, their gender has always been connected to their race, it is literally in the name. However, white women have been allowed to oscillate between their race and gender, without recognizing their own white racial identity (Deliovsky, 2010;Hamad, 2020).…”