"That Power and Privilege Thing": Securing Whiteness in Community Work

In this article, I draw upon written texts and discussions with white community organizers so as to explore how the discourse of community work secure whiteness not as an act of maintaining privilege but as an accepted, unnoticed, and even helpful way of seeing and acting in the world. This is probl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of progressive human services Vol. 22; no. 2; pp. 117 - 134
Main Author Todd, Sarah
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Taylor & Francis Group 01.07.2011
Subjects
community development
Community Services
community work
Discourse
feminism
Power
Privilege
Racism
whiteness
Whites
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Summary:In this article, I draw upon written texts and discussions with white community organizers so as to explore how the discourse of community work secure whiteness not as an act of maintaining privilege but as an accepted, unnoticed, and even helpful way of seeing and acting in the world. This is problematic because it creates a space in which there can be ethical white subjects who are able to understand themselves as outside of relations of racism. I suggest that it would be more useful to understand practices in which white people advocate with racialized communities as acts of ambivalence.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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content type line 23
ISSN:1042-8232
1540-7616
DOI:10.1080/10428232.2011.606528