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AbstractIn this article, I argue that culture is the means through which whiteness (a state of normalized white racial domination) is accomplished. The scope of this article is on racism, race, and culture in a U.S. context. Within the racialized social system of the United States, culture develops in ways that secure racial interests and maintain racial hierarchy. The aim is to give readers an overview of how the concepts of culture and race have been addressed together in past scholarship and to offer new insights on how to address these concepts moving forward. First, some of the dominant themes in which culture is addressed in the scholarship on whiteness are located. These themes are (a) whiteness and material culture, (b) whiteness as discursive and ideological, and (c) the habitus and spaces of whiteness. Second, new directions for this line of research are offered. Future research can be directed towards (a) uncovering the common "scripts" of whiteness that pervade across different cultural arenas, (b) investigating how individuals are actively negotiating these ideologies and discourses of whiteness, and (c) understanding the fluidity of whiteness. Seeing culture as the means through which whiteness operates can expose the practices and mechanisms that produce and maintain a system of racial oppression in the United States.

In this article, we argue for the importance of investigating cultural spaces in connection to social inequalities. Within cultural spaces, culture in both material and nonmaterial forms is used in ways that bolster privilege, provide means for people and groups to navigate inequalities, and offers avenues for contesting inequalities. We critically examine some of the past and present ways that culture and inequalities have been studied together. We identify three trends that have arisen from the current scholarship on culture and inequality in the United States: space and place, embodiment, and performativity. In addition to examining understudied contemporary cultural spaces, the articles in this special issue contribute to and expand on the identified trends of studying cultural spaces as sites of inequality maintenance and resistance.

This article focuses on processes of meaning making in White spaces as the glue that holds their social structures together. Understanding White spaces and how they operate necessitates theoretical development from a cultural perspective. The authors' research empirically engages with a wide range of White spaces—neighborhoods, subcultural scenes, craft breweries, online digital platforms, and academia, to name a few—and do so from a theoretical space where the two areas of sociology meet: race and culture. We engage with three key questions to theorize the culture of White space: (a) How do these White spaces work? (b) How are these White spaces challenged? (c) How do these White spaces change and/or reproduce themselves? From these engagements, this article develops a general approach to understanding White spaces through understanding their racialized processes of meaning making.