The normalization of white people’s social norms and cultural practices as the natural and proper way of society, where ‘white’ is used as a synonym for people of European origin who have a light-coloured skin. Simply put, a higher cultural value has been attached to people who are classed as white, and S. Garner (2007) argues that the meanings attached to ‘race’ are always time- and place-specific (although there are certain overlapping truths). Berg (2012) PHG 36, 4, 508 argues that ‘white supremacy is invisible to most geographers, and especially so to critical geographers, because of the way that (neo) liberalism provides us white (critical) geographers (and others) with the means to disaffiliate ourselves from “racism”—to claim innocence—all the while benefiting in very real material ways from ongoing white supremacy’.

For anti-racists, whiteness is a problem because it works to discriminate against, either implicitly or explicitly, non-whites and to suppress other cultural forms. Garner stresses that the analysis of whiteness must contribute to anti-racist scholarship by emphasizing the social relationships referred to as racism, rather than slipping into an identity-based paradigm.

Geographies of whiteness consider that spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, and bodies are assumed to be white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness.