Postcolonial studies have encouraged, in the USA, ‘white studies’ – the cultural history of whiteness. Based on the idea that whiteness constructs itself at the socio-economic costs of the minorities (especially Blacks), white studies foreground the ideological and political roots of white cultures. In the case of the USA, writers such as Theodore Allen (1994), Noel Ignatiev (1995), Valerie Babb (1998) and others document how ‘whiteness’ was used to group together various European migrants to the US. This ‘banding’, which sought to overcome differences of class, religion, and language, was constructed against Native Americans and blacks. Thus, although the working class European migrant has more in common with blacks, the whites did not establish solidarity with them; rather, they grouped themselves as whites. Whiteness, and its concomitant development, racism, enabled the poorer whites to see and project themselves as part of the dominant group. It gave them an identity in opposition to the ‘other’ – the Black. Whiteness studies argue that ‘white’ is an unmarked, invisible category because it is seen as natural and normal. All others are judged and categorized, but not white. Whiteness studies suggest that to deconstruct categories of ‘blackness’ it is necessary to highlight the construction of whiteness and to dismantle ‘white’ as a category.
