Abstract

Current philosophical arguments and practical efforts to foster both anti-racism and diversity seem intractable in part due to the persistence of the concept of racial whiteness. This dissertation develops a pragmatic analysis of this concept using resources drawn from the work of John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois. Historically, whiteness begins as a negatively defined category connected with practices of exclusion and oppression. I argue that these early practices helped to establish whiteness in a way that it could support an era of legalized white supremacism and, even after the Civil Rights Movement effectively overturned legal discrimination, continue to function in ways that white folk largely do not notice. ;Using Du Bois's analysis of race and whiteness, I contend that races are best understood as evolving clusters of ideas and habits that are powerfully constitutive of lived, social realities and not apolitical or biologically defined groups. From this perspective, race is a meaningful cultural resource that is worth conserving. When applying this conception of race to whiteness, however, the results are problematic. In response, I use aspects of Dewey's theory of inquiry and conception of human nature to advance a conceptual reconstruction of whiteness directed at correcting its exclusionary and violent elements while fostering the kind of cultural value that Du Bois sees at the heart of race. ;The reconstruction of whiteness rests on an analysis of the relationship between the current habits of whiteness and the impulses behind them. These problematic habits can be reconstructed into patterns more compatible with diversity and democracy by organizing the impulses beneath them into new habits. This pragmatist reconstruction holds the promise that people who currently identify as white might develop new identities that are more amenable to fostering democratic community than the idea of whiteness and more compatible in light of America's increasingly multicultural composition