On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute

by Claudia Rankine (Introduction)

Writers and thinkers from Lauren Berlant to Jeff Chang explore the power structures, the “neutrality” and the frailty of whiteness Cofounded in 2017 by authors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) is an interdisciplinary collective of artists, writers, knowledge-producers and activists. The institute’s historic 2018 symposium “On Whiteness” convened a dazzling array of thinkers, artists and activists. The essays that resulted from the event, collected here, seek to examine whiteness as a source of often unquestioned or even unobserved power, and make visible variations of this dangerous ideology that has been intentionally positioned as neutral.
In our current moment, whiteness is freshly as a source of unquestioned power, and as a “bloc,” it feels itself endangered even as it retains its hold on power. Given that the concept of racial hierarchy is a strategy employed to support white dominance, whiteness is an important aspect of any conversation about race.
The essays in On Whiteness make visible what has been intentionally presented as inevitable to help the move forward into more revelatory conversations about race. They question what can be made when we investigate, evade, beset and call out “bloc whiteness.”
Contributors include : Linda Alcoff Martín, Lauren Berlant, Sadhana Bery, Daniel Borzutzky, Jane Caflisch, Jeff Chang, Aruna D'Souza, Lori Gruen, Saidiya Hartman, Nell Painter and Doreen St Félix.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction

187 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2022

About the author

Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
(source: Arizona State University)

Reviews

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking collection of essays. From this book I will keep a series of questions and ideas, very topical in a time where whiteness needs to be acknowledged, understood, and dealt with. The texts had varying levels of "immediacy" and some were maybe written in an unnecessarily complicated style (as an academic, I am also guilty of that!), but overall the contribution of the book is of high value.

[Mojeane]

The last part of this book, the part about the empathy conundrum is so poignant and illuminating I have been thinking about it all day. Something I will read over and over and over I think