Geography Reference
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mothers” (Kaplan 1997, 149). Other impoverished individuals worked to conceal their
stigmatized status by changing personal biographies (Kaplan 1997) or by withholding
key personal information (Reutter et al. 2009). For example, in Kaplan's study, black
teenage mothers often omitted their welfare dependency status or prior history. These
individuals frequently “used nondisclosure to protect themselves from overt discrim-
ination” (Reutter et al. 2009, 305). None of these research studies, however, critically
addressed the ways in which the intersection of race and social class status mitigated
welfare recipients' ability to pass as middle-class women and within which social, geo-
graphic contexts such passing or covering up strategies were employed.
Goffman and Whiteness Studies
Although Erving Goffman (1963) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984), in contrast to Franz Fan-
on and Albert Memmi, do not explicitly address race, racism, or postcoloniality, their
concepts can be applied to white women who are perceived as socially transgressive
(Twine 2010). Critical race scholars can employ Goffman's concept of covering to the-
orize the ways that white women who are poor negotiate respectability and stigma. In
theUnitedStates,blackwomen,regardlessofwelfaredependencystatus,alreadyhavea
“spoiled identity.” Due to their blackness, they occupy a discredited social position and
are often assumed to be welfare dependent by virtue of their blackness. Thus black wel-
fare dependent women are often unable to employ passing or concealment as a stigma
management strategy. White women, however, by virtue of their race privilege, are al-
ways creditable until they are proven otherwise. White welfare dependent women can
conceal their welfare dependency and pass for middle class, thereby obtaining social
mobility for their children, because their whiteness serves as a flexible form of capital.
Cheryl Harris (1993) theorizes that whiteness, as the basis of racialized privilege,
was constructed and legitimated in law as a type of property. Property and whiteness
share a common premise: “a right to exclude” (Harris 1993, 1714). Those who legally
qualified for whiteness were granted “the legal right to exclude others from the priv-
ileges inhering in whiteness; whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership
wascloselyandgrudginglyguarded”(1736).Drawingfromthelegalhistoryof Plessy v.
Ferguson 4 (1896)and Brown v. Board of Education 5 (1954),Harrisillustratesthetrans-
ition of whiteness as a form of status property to a form of modern property. One of the
primary property functions of whiteness is the right to use and enjoyment. Whiteness,
as the embodiment of white privilege, can be deployed as a resource or usable property,
maintainedbythelaw'sregardandprotection(1734).Thus,forwhitewomen,beingleg-
ally and socially classified as white “meant gaining access to a whole set of public and
private privileges that materially and permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs
and, therefore, survival” (1713).
 
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