Professional Documents
Culture Documents
•Summary: Vermont is characteristically comprising 97% white people (article from 2006, and still correct),
and sometimes it is “imagined” as the last home for “authentic Yankee whiteness”. Studies now, however
question this, and beg to differ, saying that a ‘geographical reconfiguration of whiteness’ is needed to con
sider where “normal” American whiteness is supposed to reside. The study is important because it high
lights the need for future geographical research to concentrate on the differences between “territorialized
constructions of whiteness” as well as “contestations within whiteness”.
What is white? Especially for those who haven’t lived in California most of their lives.
•Imaginative Geographies of Whiteness
•All geographies of race are problematic: usually classify between “white” and “other”, or even “white” is
contested as an unfair amalgamation.
•Vermont is often left out of racial studies because its lack of diversity, but it has much to contribute to the
understanding of the evolving racialization in the US.
•racialism: emphasis on race not necessarily supremacy, like acknowledging “race and intelligence”
•Vanderbeck highlights two commonalities in studies on whiteness: the spatialization of whiteness and com
plexities of rendering whiteness specific. (connect to “Winlow” “all maps will always be subjective”)
•Spacialization of Whiteness
•Most frequent separation anywhere is “white” and “other”, white is the assumed neutral category, but
it’s not neutral to “blacks”, for instance. As the neutral category, it is considered “unmarked” they are
undistinguished from the “norm”, that is, other whites. But obviously, their affluence is not invisible
from the other racial groups. Whiteness presents itself as an “unmarked” norm, but clearly marks its
space.
•Imagination of geographies: particular landscapes are imagined as white even before whites arrive:
construction of nice suburbs and planned neighborhoods.
•Specificity of Whiteness
•The danger of making whiteness specific is that it does not account for variation across time and
space, and unilaterally gives privilege to those in it (rich and poor, for example, get all the same)
•Efforts have been made: Irish and other European immigrants often considered white; “white trash”
emphasizes how ‘privileges’ of whiteness shouldn’t be given to some people; Southern Whites aren’t
“natural”: these show that “white” should NOT be a category.
•Strangely, by making it an allencompassing category, it avoids being criticized as such. If it was
more specific, it would have to be somewhat racist: categorize only regionally (South, North, East), or
by ancestry: (Irish, Italian..).
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•Constructing White Territory and Identities
•Vermont’s racial homogeneity is a matter of both outside interpretation and active selfpresentation. They
may in fact be the “whitest state”, and they acknowledge it, but also in choosing certain individuals to rep
resent “Vermont’s face” involves exclusion and inclusion.
•Racialized Landscapes and Distinctive Whiteness
•Landscape imagery is used to describe sense of racialization: “sea of white faces”. Used to promote
Vermont’s “purity” white snow, white church steeples, white villages. (automatically gives you the
feeling that white people live there)
•Vermont is sometimes isolated from even “American white” as being an even more “pure” form of
whiteness Vanderbeck says “Vermont is not just white, but a special kind of white.”
•Constructing White Yankee Territory
•There was actually a Commission to “improve” the state’s racial stock: considering youth emigration,
discourage those who were “defective” from entering the gene pool, encourage new visitors of the
right kind by promoting the right kind of Vermonteer.
•Recruiting Swedish farmers: suggesting artificiality in population, although admits what is reality has
little effect on the image of Vermont character.
•Race, Regional Oppositions, and Vermont Identity
•They consider themselves unusually tolerant, with notions of equality, when compared to the violent
slavery of the South. Never consider that they oppress other races.
•Placing Liberal Whiteness in Vermont
•Where Liberal Whiteness Belongs
•2004 election, Howard Dean is a candidate from Vermont
•Commercial of elderly white couple
•“What do you think of Howard Dean’s plans to raise taxes on families?”
•“What do I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax hiking, governmentexpand
ing, lattedrinking, sushieating, NY Times reading, body piercing, Hollywoodloving, leftwing
freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs”
•Vanderbeck wonders why Vermont is the subject of this identity
•Hippie Migrations and a People’s Republic
•Vermont became a “geographical magnet for hippies”, referring to the migration to Vermont by
people looking for a “backtotheroots” kind of life.
•Turning into a leftwing state after being a solid Republican state. First to sanction civil unions. White
Liberal is different than the Vermont Yankee, traditional view. Outsiders use the (first to civil union) ar
gument to place Vermont outside of America
•Interesting here! So before, Vermont was kind of the epitome, and America was all the “other” so
now, Vermont is the “other?”
•Another geography at work here: Vermont is being “feminized”, that antiwar activism and social wel
fare are viewed as “soft” stances
•Vermont is a case study, along with “othering of various “redneck” and Southern identities” of why we
need to reconsider where “normal” whiteness is imagined to reside.
•Conclusion: Reconfigurations of Whiteness
•White liberals have become people of color, because they’re white, they are punished for not being like the
white image (Republican). “They have been stripped of their whiteness”
•Vanderbeck considers that now we aren’t worried about “racial racism”, the issue now is “political racism”,
where labels like “liberal” and “conservative” are used to discriminate automatically.
What do you think about this statement? For those that are politically charged, and even those who aren’t,
does the “opposite” word, automatically put an image in your head of that person’s ideals and views?
What’s difference between this and “racial racism”?
•Racist practices are not simply confined to those of Jim Crow south. The struggle against racism involves
“deterritorializing” whiteness: admitting that racialization of Vermont’s whiteness, for example, is a form of
racism. Vanderbeck encourages further geographies of whiteness to consider it on a global scale.