We consider “whiteness” as the subtle and explicit forms of “institutional, cultural, and individual practices [that] produce and reproduce racial injustice through systemic privilege” (Applebaum, 2013, p. 20). Whiteness includes the creation, support, and engagement in social, economic, and political systems that perpetuate racial oppression for people of color and privilege for white people. A psychology of whiteness includes one’s implicit (or explicit) beliefs that racial disparities exist due to whites’ psychological, cultural, and/or social superiority. These beliefs are ingrained through a lifetime of sociocultural messages that imply as much.

We refer to “white people” as individuals who have disproportionately benefited from the systematic exclusion of people deemed “non-white” into historic, cultural, social, economic, and/or political institutions of power. As such, “white people” may include individuals who self-identify as white and/or have generally benefited from whiteness. In the United States and other colonized nations, whiteness practices have historically and legally privileged individuals deemed “white” and have oppressed those not considered white. For example, in her book “Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869-1973,” Camille Walsh (2018) outlined the history of legal cases in the United States that set precedent for deciding which groups (usually recent immigrants) were determined “white” and would thus receive tax and other benefits provided to white citizens