[citation needed] By the mid-1990s, numerous works across many disciplines analyzed whiteness, and it has since become a topic for academic courses, research and anthologies.
[6] A central tenet of whiteness studies is a reading of history and its effects on the present that is inspired by postmodernism and historicism.
[citation needed] Zeus Leonardo defines whiteness as "a racial discourse, whereas the category 'white people' represents a socially constructed identity, usually based on skin color".
[15][16] Author James Baldwin wrote and spoke extensively about whiteness, defining it as a central social problem and insisting that it was choice, not a biological identity.
"[25] Whiteness studies draws on research into the definition of race, originating with the United States but applying to racial stratification worldwide.
Du Bois in 1920: "The discovery of a personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.
"[26] The discipline examines how white, Native, and African/black identities emerged in interaction with the institutions of slavery, colonial settlement, citizenship, and industrial labor.
Scholars such as Winthrop Jordan[27] have traced the evolution of the legally defined line between "blacks" and "whites" to colonial government efforts to prevent cross-racial revolts among unpaid laborers.
[31][32] Likewise Stefanie Affeldt considers whiteness "a concept not yet fully developed at the time the first convicts and settlers arrived down under" [33] which, as a social relation, had to be negotiated and was driven forward in particular by the labour movement.
"[35] Political scientist Danielle Allen has analyzed the intersection of whiteness with North American demographic changes, stating how they can "provoke resistance from those whose well-being, status and self-esteem are connected to historical privileges of 'whiteness'".
[39][40] Horace Mann Bond was one of the early scholars to identify bias and privilege operating in white education systems.
[41] Whiteness and privilege have continued in US education after Jim Crow versions of the segregationist ideology have lost their legitimacy due to legal and political failures.
[42] Privacy and individualism discourses mask white fear and newer forms of exclusion in contemporary education according to scholar, Charles R. Lawrence III.
In exploring Ruth Frankenberg's works, and her interchanging use of the two concepts, the separation has been examined by scholars attempting to intellectually "disengtangle each from the other".
By June 15, 1969, The New York Times was reporting that the National Office of SDS was calling "for an all-out fight against 'white skin privileges'".
I suggest that historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege and have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.
I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious" (188).
They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects" (192).
[65] Academic Vron Ware has examined this fear-based element in the sociology of resentment, and its intersection with class and whiteness.
[68] Research suggests that white people are socialized to perceive race as a zero-sum game and a black-white binary and this informs the beliefs in reverse racism and prejudice plus power.
[69] For white youth, parents play a role in conversations around race and racism and this influences racial perceptions and biases into adulthood.
Studies have grappled with the exclusionary nature of the architectural profession, which erected barriers for nonwhite practitioners, the ways in which architects and designers have employed motifs, art programs, and color schemes that reflected the aspirations of European-Americans and, most recently, with the racialization of space.
[75][clarification needed] Conservative writers David Horowitz and Douglas Murray draw a distinction between whiteness studies and other analogous disciplines.
[80] Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, has sharply criticized whiteness studies, writing that it "points to a new low in moral vacuity and civilizational self-loathing" and is an example of "academic pusillanimity."
[81][83]In addition to such criticism in the mass media, whiteness studies has earned a mixed reception from academics in other fields.
In 2001, historian Eric Arnesen wrote that "whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings" and that the field "suffers from a number of potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws.
He notes that a particular datum almost entirely ignored by whiteness studies scholars is religion, which has played a prominent role in conflicts among various American classes.
He says that a type of "keyword literalism" persists in whiteness studies, where important words and phrases from primary sources are taken out of their historical context.
Without more accurate scholarship, Arnesen writes that "it is time to retire whiteness for more precise historical categories and analytical tools.
There is no consensus definition of whiteness, and thus the word is used in vague and contradictory ways, with some scholars even leaving the term undefined in their articles or essays.