White/white and/or the Absence of the Modifier

Abstract:This essay encourages historians to employ the term white when writing about white people, a seemingly simple practice but one rarely employed. White is very often an absent modifier, and when we do not name it, we omit the power that racial thinking and racist actions provided to white people. In so doing, we unthinkingly replicate and give support to racist power structures. By reflecting on the simultaneous precarity and power of whiteness in the past, we can see how the history of the term has shaped our contemporary writing and how we might improve it.