As research for her 1993 text, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg interviewed a diverse group of white women in California and attempted to place their experiences in a complex framework of "race, racial dominance, and whiteness" (21).

One of the findings that Frankenberg examines is the unmarked nature of whiteness for most of the women she interviewed: "Many of the women shared the habit of turning to elements of white culture as the unspoken norm" (197). Reading this text as a white women, I think about how my perspective has been shaped by this unmarked status. I wonder how much my sense of self is intertwined in this sense of myself as a "norm" which can be opposed to "others" who do not fit this categorization, and how much it matters that this self is culturally validated as "normal". How are the ways I mark myself informed by my perceived ability to remain neutral in my stances on race and ethnicity? As a response to Frankenberg, the stories in this project represent an effort to maintain awareness of color as part of an effort to examine my relationship as a white woman to the experiences of individuals who fit into other categorizations.

I suppose that I must begin by attributing my awareness of my own particular categorizations at least in part to Frankenberg's efforts to highlight how the category of "white woman" can remain, in many cases, unmarked. However, when I so categorize myself, I am always aware that there are multiple other representations that influence the way I see and am seen in my interactions with others. Secondly, there are situations in which my whiteness is certainly not an unmarked category, and although I recognize my position with/in the dominant racial grouping in this country, I can also recognize moments when this dominance exists as part of particular situations where I am marked as white in an environment where "white" is not the norm.

Frankenberg's text makes the point that whiteness exists in a framework of dominance where it can be extracted and situated as a sort of "anti-color." She points out that, for many of the interviewed women, "discussions of race difference and cultural diversity at times revealed a view in which people of color actually embodied difference and whites stood for sameness." She goes on to explain, "This mode of thinking about 'difference' expresses clearly the double edged sword of what I have referred to as a color-and power-evasive repertoire, apparently valorizing cultural difference, but doing so in a way that leaves racial and cultural hierarchies intact" (197).

In this text my effort has been to present stories which connect in some way to the various relationships I bear towards issues of race and ethnicity. To see myself as marked in a culture where to be white means to be implicated in structures of racial inequality. At the same time I've tried to see how self-representations which explore my relationship to such labels as color/whiteness might be part of a movement which includes efforts to evaluate and change previously unquestioned stances.

While I valued Frankenberg's description of her subjects, and the various methods they used for dealing with notions of race in relation to their own status as "whites," I also found places in the text where Frankenberg's representations of her subjects became problematic as a source for building the type of self-representations I envision.