One major but subtle manifestation of white racism is the failure to recognize whiteness as a cultural and racial category. Rather, whiteness silently functions as the ‘standard’ from which other racial and cultural groups deviate. In this way, non-white groups and people become ‘deviant’ in the very act of defining them. Recognizing whiteness as a category in every way correspondent to blackness opens the door to thinking about the particularity of the state of whiteness, and the ways in which people defined as white may benefit from the privileges, and suffer from the burdens, of whiteness. The disavowal of qualities defined as ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ or ‘non-white’ is shown to have a special distorting and limiting effect on people defined as white. Copyright © 2003 Whurr Publishers Ltd