Brown Skinned White Girls: Class, culture and the construction of white identity in suburban communities

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Feminist scholars theorizing about whiteness and white identity have not examined the pivotal role that middle-class material privilege, residential segregation and US consumer culture play in the social construction of a racialized cultural identity among the African-descent daughters of Asian-American and European-American mothers. There is a dearth of empirical research by feminist scholars which interrogates the shifts in a racialized gender identity which follow from the interaction between class status, ideological communities and residentially segregated communities. The nascent body of social science scholarship on white identity has assumed that a 'white' identity is available only to individuals of exclusively European ancestry. This paper provides a specific case-study of African-descent girls, who have been culturally constructed as 'white' girls prior to puberty, only to later construct a non-white 'black' or 'biracial' identity after moving to a different residential, cultural and ideological community-the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Drawing upon transcripts from 16 taped interviews with African-descent university students, who were attending the University of California at Berkeley, this paper delineates the specific cultural conditions under which a racially neutral or 'white' identity is acquired, constructed, and then reconstructed by a segment of the African-descent community, the daughters of Asian and European-American women in economically privileged households in suburban communities.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: