Evidentiary whiteness: The re/production and re/formation of white praxis

This dissertation is a study of the production and reproduction and the re-formation and reformation of whiteness. The study of white praxis is based on an ethnography generated by a multi-year participant-observation study of a private elementary school that had initiated a "diversity program". The diversity program disrupted the class and racial order of the school causing whiteness to become more apparent, articulated, interrogated, and re/formed (made anew and made better). This process of the de-naturalization and nomination of whiteness revealed the continuities and discontinuities of white praxis.;The dissertation is grounded in my praxis of "embodied scholarship". I provide a through explication and scrutiny of the particularities of my embodied scholarship, especially the consequences of my postcolonial and racial positionality.;My study is driven by salient issues that emerge from social theory, critical studies of whiteness, and the specificity of the ethnography. I suggest that a useful theory of the raced, class-ed, and gender-ed nature of whiteness must move away from a theory of inter-sectionality and develop the concept of historically specific coinstantaneous constitutions of race, class, and gender. I focus my analysis on the politics of race, gender, and class and their constitution of and constitution by space; the variegated production of whiteness by white women and men; the phenomenology of classed whiteness and whitened class; white intra-race and inter-class struggles and alliances; and the linkages of race, class, nation and diaspora for white Irish women immigrants. The cultural praxis of whiteness became a primary arena for the struggle to determine the normative racial and class representation and configuration of the institution. I use my ethnographic observations to appraise the intra-white cultural practices through which a normative upper class white cultural formation retained its dominance at the school.;I conclude the study with a preliminary discussion of "core white values" and develop the concept of "socially constructed essentialism" as a productive explanation of how whiteness stays the same even as it changes.