Racism continues to be an issue that causes a great deal of tension in the United States. While some believe that we are living in a post-racial society, others are aware that racism can take different forms in this day and age. In White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race, author Matthew Hughey tackles the topic of racism in a unique way. Hughey focuses on how the members of the two groups that he conducted the study on conceptualize their whiteness and how that relates to racism. Hughey spend a little over one year conducting his research for this project. He attended meetings that these two organizations held and interview individual members in order to gauge how they think about their whiteness in relation to other races. White Bound focuses less on how white people think of other races and more on how they think of themselves. Most studies that has been conducted on white people about race has found that white people tend to be less self aware about their own racial identity than those that fall under other racial categories (Hughey 9). This book argues that the lack of self awareness that white people tend to have is where the idea of superiority comes from. White people view themselves as the …show more content…
This was a move that made his study unique. Instead of focusing on the racist and why they think the way they did he focuses more on the anti-racist group. Hughey constantly reminded the readers of his thesis and how the ethnography was not about bashing the white nationalist group. The “Whites For Racial Justice” (WRJ) antiracist group had a goal “ to stop racism in [their] own lives ( Hughey 2).” Throughout the book I fely as though Hughey paid very close attention to the actions and motives of the WRJ in order to prove that his thesis is correct. However, in doing that he neglected to analyze the actions of the White nationalist