Co-founded in 2017 by authors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) is an interdisciplinary collective of artists, writers, knowledge-producers, and activists. The institute’s historic 2018 symposium ‘On Whiteness’ convened a dazzling array of thinkers, artists, and activists. The essays that resulted from the event, collected here, seek to examine whiteness as a source of often unquestioned or even unobserved power, and make visible variations of this dangerous ideology that has been intentionally positioned as neutral.

Texts by Lauren Berlant, Sadhana Bery, Daniel Borzutsky, Jane Caflisch, Jeff Chang, Aruna D’Souza, Lori Gruen, Saidiya Hartman, Linda Martín Alcoff, Nell Irvin Painter, and Doreen St. Félix

Artworks by Alexandra Bell, Mel Chin, Ken Gonzales-Day, Titus Kaphar, Charlotte Lagarde, Carla Liesching, Glenn Ligon, Nell Painter, and Hank Willis Thomas