The White Issue

Read the most by: boys and girls

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people will ever know and understand themselves. --James Weldon Johnson, 1912 Whiteness has become a critical keyword lately, as writers turn an eye to the last great preserve of identity politics--the unnamed, the unacknowledged, ethnicity of the white majority. Much of this work has been the domain of white writers exploring the dynamics of race and assimilation. Writers of color, on the other hand, have often been engaged in telling their own stories--writing from, and about, their own communities. In this issue of Transition a diverse assortment of nonwhite scholars, critics, journalists, and visual artists follow James Weldon Johnson's provocative suggestion and assay, in theory and practice, the meaning of white identity. Considering the creation, evolution, and culture of whiteness in the United States and across the globe, The White Issue explores a wide range of subjects and individuals, including Leni Reifenstahl, Norman Mailer, Martin Scorsese, Shirley Temple, and Richard Leakey; white mercenaries, race traitors, brown Aryans, black dandies, and gay skinheads; minstrelsy, gardening, passing, Caucasian dreaming; white literature by black authors, and black literature by white authors; the genealogy of white privilege and the invention of white trash. Contributors. Hilton Als, Don Belton, Rebecca Carroll, Michael Chege, Ann duCille, Howard French, bell hooks, Darius James, Susan Koshy, Adolph Reed, Ilan Stavans, France Winddance Twine, Armond White