Introduction to the Handbook

This timely handbook responds to the international drive to know more about Whiteness – its origins, its impacts, and importantly, the means for diffusing it. Guided by critical Whiteness theory, the volume deconstructs, decodes, and disrupts Whiteness as it is constructed and employed in contemporary and diverse contexts. To do so, the international contributors of the Handbook discuss and critique the role of twenty-first-century Whiteness across a range of professions and disciplines relevant to the needs of contemporary global citizens. Failure to deconstruct Whiteness as an ideology and the power structure underlying national and global racial inequalities undermines the efforts to improve social, health, and economic outcomes for societies and nations on a grand scale.