White by Law Quotes

“The civil rights movement worked a major change in U.S. society in making open expressions of White supremacy culturally unacceptable. This was a far cry, however, from actually ending White racial mobilization. Instead, this mobilization, often orchestrated by White politicians, has continued over the last several decades in the form of interlinked panics about criminals, welfare cheats, illegal immigrants, and, most recently, terrorists.”
― Ian Haney López, White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

“Much later in his book, Hacker acknowledges the implausibility of the hypothetical posed to the White college students, a question impossible to answer since few Whites can truly imagine themselves Black. Even this implausibility, however, confirms the importance of Whiteness to Whites. No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority. No matter what happens, they can never become “black.” White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence, which despite all its pain and problems, still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world.7”
― Ian Haney López, White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

“Winant, a leading proponent of the social constructionist theory of race, offers an extreme evaluation of the implications of a totally raceless future: The five-hundred year domination of the globe by Europe and its inheritors is the historical context in which racial concepts of difference have attained their present status as fundamental concepts of human identity and inequality. To imagine the end of race is thus to contemplate the liquidation of Western civilization.83”
― Ian Haney López, White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race