“Negotiating Whiteness” draws on the work of critical race studies scholars and whiteness studies scholars to present my book’s main argument and outline its core theoretical concept: the “intraracial color-line.” Shakespeare’s plays disrupt the common understanding of the Black/white racial binary in ways that have implications for modernity regarding the uncivilized, less-than-ideal white self. In Shakespearean drama, this figure serves two functions: The white other is an embankment that keeps “good” white people in check by demarcating the ever-shifting boundary between what the ideal white self should and should not be or do, by showing the costs of “bad” whiteness; and the white other figure embodies non-somatic blackness, constantly reifying anti-black and anti-Black discourse. By centering critiques of whiteness, I isolate the kinds of intraracial tensions that underscore the instability of racialized whiteness and that emphasize the need for understanding how that instability depends on upholding whiteness as superior.