Exposing the Spectrum of Whiteness

Abstract

This chapter continues a practice introduced by critical communication scholars to produce insightful analyses of whiteness. Specifically, this chapter synthesizes a body of rhetorical studies in which rhetors explicitly offered ideal white racial identities and cultural norms to establish and justify white supremacy in Western societies. I call this discourse “white absolutism,” which consists of absolutist religious and scientific appeals, tribalism, and scapegoating. White absolutism centers white masculinity and justifies restoring white patriarchal heterosexual control by negating black, nonwhite, and feminine archetypes that offer motives to conquer, control, and kill nonwhites. White absolutism still exists in coded and postmodern forms, and its scholarly analyses have generated four important areas of communication research: (1) cyberspace hate rhetoric, (2) cultural (re)productions of white superiority, (3) historical studies of whiteness, and (4) new, redemptive, and innocent white identity studies.