Plymouth Rock Landed on Us: Malcolm X's Whiteness Theory as a Basis for Alternative Literacy

Abstract

From the early 1990s to the present, Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, coauthors Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, and other academics have focused on race by uncovering, interrogating, and theorizing whiteness as a largely unacknowledged but vastly important rhetorical and epistemological system. Nakayama and Krizek consider whiteness "relatively unchartered territory" that "has remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without its domain" (291). Whiteness, they claim, "wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated position" (291). Further, they argue, "whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space" (293). Many whites, they argue, refuse to acknowledge their ethnicity, claiming simply to be human, thereby erasing from whiteness "its history and its social