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Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit
John Hartigan Jr.
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Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative — privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods — an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city’s wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites’ determinations of when and how race matters.
In each community, the author charts a series of names — “hillbilly,” “gentrifier,” and “racist” — which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.
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Cover Page
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Dedication
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Contents
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List of Illustrations
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Acknowledgments
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Names and Transcriptions
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Abbreviations
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Introduction
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Detroit
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Three Neighborhoods
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The Localness of Race
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White People or Whiteness?
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Structure of the Book
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1. History of the ’Hood
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“Disgrace to the Race”
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The Color Line
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Riots and Race
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Franklin School
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2. “A Hundred Shades of White”
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“Hillbillies”
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“That White and Black Shit”
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The Wicker Chair and the Baseball Game
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3. Eluding the R-Word
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The “Fact” of Whiteness
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Encounters
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“Gentrifier”
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“History”
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4. Between “All Black” and “All White”
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Statements
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“White Enclave”
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“Racist”
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Curriculum
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Conclusion
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Notes
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 1999
Publisher: Princeton University Press
- 9780691219714 (ebook)
- 9780691028859 (paperback)