A01=John Hartigan Jr.
Affirmative action
African Americans
Afrocentrism
Ambiguity
Americans
Author_John Hartigan Jr.
Black nationalism
Black people
Black school
Board of education
Category=JBSL
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Census tract
Class conflict
Coleman Young
Color line (civil rights issue)
Conflation
Curriculum
Demography
Desegregation
Disadvantage
Donna Haraway
Dorothy Day
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erving Goffman
Etiquette
Everyday life
Exclusion
Gentrification
Grandparent
Hatred
Hillbilly
Insignificance
Looting
Maulana Karenga
Mexicans
Middle class
Milliken v. Bradley
Motherfucker
Mr.
Narrative
Politician
Politics
Poverty
Prejudice
Race (human categorization)
Race Matters
Racial integration
Racial segregation
Racialization
Racism
Residence
Residential area
Sensibility
Separatism
Slum
Social class
Social distance
Social relation
Sophistication
Suburb
Suggestion
Tax
The Other Hand
The Various
Thomas Sugrue
Uncertainty
Underclass
Urban renewal
White flight
White people
White Southerners
White supremacy
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691028859
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 24 Oct 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
John Hartigan Jr. is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Anthropology at the University of North Texas. His work on "white trash" and the "white underclass" has been published in a range of journals and edited volumes.
