Introduction: White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies

an overview of the theory and its developments).Scholars of whiteness use these same structuralist concepts to understand how the white racial category operates.As a cultural sign, whiteness works much like a linguistic sign, taking its meaning from those surrounding categories to which it is structurally opposed, such as blackness, indigenousness, and foreignness.As an element in each of these binaries, however, whiteness is not opposite and equal, but opposite and unequal.It is in its unmarked status that the power of whiteness lies.Ideologically, whiteness is usually absence, not presence: the absence of culture and color.Yet as numerous articles in this issue argue, in particular ethnographic contexts, whiteness can become unmoored from its unmarked position and float into seeing (and hearing) range.Alternatively, whiteness may cast itself ideologically as the only visible and audible racial category in a given situation, denying or erasing the presence of other racialized groups.This whiting out of other racialized subject positions is seen in the linguistic realm, for example, in assimilationist policies such as English Only, the eradication of Native American languages, and the demolition of bilingual education.Despite the structuralist analogy, then, whiteness is not a set of unchanging structures but a set of dynamic strategies that draw on available resources to achieve and maintain racialized power.In some ways, a more apt analogy from linguistics might therefore be optimally theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993).Instead of fixed binaries as the basis of analysis, this theory proposes a set of universal constraints that state some truth about language, but are not true necessarily within every language (see Archangeli 1999 for a summary).Certain linguistic forms are still more common in general (across contexts).Nevertheless, to capture the variability from language to language, context to context, universal constraints are ranked differently to obtain the structures of an individual language.Consequently, some languages yield or highlight some outputs that may be "marked" in a crosslinguistic comparison, but not outside the proposed parameters or constraints.Likewise, the strategies of whiteness are often local, temporary, and self-contradictory; indeed, the logical cohesiveness of whiteness operates through its seeming admittance of diversity (see both McElhinny and Hill, this issue).Whiteness maintains its hegemony in diverse historical, political, and cultural contexts precisely because of its incoherence as a single conceptual category and its ultimate coherence as an ideological norm or macroideology.As the articles in this issue demonstrate, certain tropes of whiteness "compete" and are reformed in context, and, depending on the contextual circumstances, "win out" or are highlighted in opposition to others.Thus, contextual, semiotic associations can index different concepts or identities of whiteness, which are "marked" to varying degrees, while not necessarily challenging its overall hegemony.