The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies [1 ed.] 9781003120612, 9780367637699, 9780367637712

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF NEW CRITICAL RACE AND WHITENESS STUDIES

Since its foundation as an academic field in the 1990s, critical race theory has developed enormously and has, among others, been supplemented by and (dis)integrated with critical whiteness studies. At the same time, the field has moved beyond its origins in Anglo-Saxon environments, to be taken up and re-developed in various parts of the world – leading to not only new empirical material but also new theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches. Gathering these new and global perspectives, this book presents a much-needed collection of the various forms, sophisticated theoretical developments and nuanced analyses that the field of critical race and whiteness theories and studies offers today. Organized around the themes of emotions, technologies, consumption, institutions, crisis, identities and on the margin, this presentation of critical race and whiteness theories and studies in its true interdisciplinary and international form provides the latest empirical and theoretical research, as well as new analytical approaches. Illustrating the strength of the field and embodying its future research directions, The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and whiteness. Rikke Andreassen is Professor of Media and Culture in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is the author of Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays and Mediated Kinship: Gender, Race and Sexuality in Donor Families. Catrin Lundström is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University, Sweden. She is the author of White Migrations: Gender, Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration. Suvi Keskinen is Professor of Ethnic Relations at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Mobilising the Racialised ‘Others’: Postethnic Activism, Neoliberalisation and Racial Politics, and the co-editor of Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region and Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region: Migration, Difference and the Politics of Solidarity.

Shirley Anne Tate is Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Feminism and Intersectionality at the University of Alberta, Canada and Honorary Professor, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She is the author of From Post-Intersectionality to Black Decolonial Feminism: Black Skin Affections; Decolonizing Sambo: Transculturation, Fungibility and Black and People of Colour Futurity; The Governmentality of Black Beauty Shame: Discourse, Iconicity and Resistance; Black Women’s Bodies and the Nation: Race, Gender and Culture; and Skin Bleaching in Black Atlantic Zones: Shade Shifters.

ROUTLEDGE INTER NATIONA L H A N DBOOKS

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF NEW CRITICAL RACE AND WHITENESS STUDIES Edited by Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ASIAN PARLIAMENTS Edited by Po Jen Yap and Rehan Abeyratne THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS AND DISABILITY Edited by Angharad E. Beckett and Anne-Marie Callus ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MACROECONOMIC METHODOLOGY Edited by Jesper Jespersen, Victoria Chick and Bert Tieben THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL SOCIAL WORK Edited by Antonio López Peláez and Gloria Kirwan THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY Edited by Milan Zafirovski THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF INTERSECTIONALITY STUDIES Edited by Kathy Davis and Helma Lutz THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORALITY Edited by Naomi Ellemers, Stefano Pagliaro and Félice van Nunspeet

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF NEW CRITICAL RACE AND WHITENESS STUDIES

Edited by Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen and Shirley Anne Tate

Cover design credit: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367637699 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367637712 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003120612 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of tables List of figures Lists of contributors

xi xii xiv

1 Introduction: Writing a Handbook on critical race and whiteness theory in the time of Black Lives Matter and anti-racism backlash 1 Rikke Andreassen, Suvi Keskinen, Catrin Lundström and Shirley Anne Tate SECTION 1

Technologies 23 2 Introduction: Technologies 25 3 Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley France Winddance Twine

27

4 Artificialising whiteness? How AI normalises whiteness in theory, policy and practice Pauline Leonard

44

5 White time: The relationship between racial identity, contexts, interactions and temporality Matthew W. Hughey

59

vii

Contents SECTION 2

Consumption 73 6 Introduction: Consumption

75

7 Tourism, whiteness and colonial continuity Katarina Mattsson

78

8 Whiteness, wellness and gender: A transnational feminist approach Raka Shome

89

9 Racial reproductions and genetic imaginaries Rikke Andreassen, Daisy Deomampo and Jennifer A. Hamilton 10 Textiles, fashion and race: Technologies of whiteness in the British colonies and metropole, c. 1700–1820 Beverly Lemire

105

120

SECTION 3

Institutions 139 11 Introduction: Institutions

141

12 Walls can come tumbling down: Negotiating normative whiteness and racial micro-aggressions in the academy Jason Arday

143

13 ‘Talking about institutionalised racism or racism in institutions?’ A case study on Roma segregation Marta Araújo

155

14 Do Black lives really matter? Social closure, white privilege and the making of a Black underclass in higher education Deborah Gabriel

170

15 ‘If you were a white man they would have negotiated with you the minute you were approached’: Bodies of value in academic life Shirley Anne Tate

182

16 Division in economic integration: The effect of apartheid on white supremacy, white prosperity, and disunity in South Africa Victor Ojakorotu, Agunyai Samuel Chukwudi and Vincent Chukwukadibia Onwughalu viii

193

Contents SECTION 4

Crisis 207 17 Introduction: Crisis

209

18 Whiteness in the Trumpocene: Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political and the American race war to come Mike Hill

212

19 The future of whiteness Ashley (“Woody”) Doane

228

20 The Swedish racial formation: A critique of the sociology of absence Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard

240

21 Race, whiteness, Russianness and the discourses on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and Manizha Katharina Wiedlack and Iain Zabolotny

251

22 The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, far-right politics and entitlement to wealth Suvi Keskinen

265

SECTION 5

Emotions 279 23 Introduction: Emotions

281

24 The white habit of untrauma Shannon Sullivan

284

25 Racial habit Paul C. Taylor and Lisa Madura

295

26 White melancholia: A historicised analysis of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden 308 Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström 27 Whiteness, masculinity and the decolonising imperative Josephine Cornell, Nick Malherbe, Kopano Ratele and Shahnaaz Suffla

ix

321

Contents SECTION 6

Identities 335 28 Introduction: Identities

337

29 Whiteness in research on men, trans/masculine and non-binary people and reproduction: Two parallel stories Damien W. Riggs, Ruth Pearce, Sally Hines, Carla A. Pfeffer and Francis Ray White

339

30 Modern dating in a post-colonial city: Desire, race and identities of cosmopolitanism in Metro Manila Christianne France Collantes and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes

350

31 White European migrants in Japan – between an unmarked category and racialized subjects Miloš Debnár

364

32 To be or not to be ‘White’ in Japan: Japaneseness and racial whiteness through the lens of mixed Japanese people Yuna Sato, Adrijana Miladinović and Sayaka Osanami Törngren

376

SECTION 7

On the margins

391

33 Introduction: On the Margins

393

34 Coloniality and Europe at the margins Kristín Loftsdóttir

395

35 White settler colonialism, ‘chromanyms’ and the trouble with marginal whites Matt Wray and Catherine Wolfe

406

36 ‘You didn’t mention your own identity as a white man’. Ideological boundaries of whiteness Benjamin Teitlebaum

419

Index 431

x

TABLES

  3.1 Silicon Valley Pain Index: income and wealth inequality in Santa Clara County 32   5.1 Audit study vignettes and questions 62   5.2 Audit vignette questions 63   5.3 Administration of the audit study vignettes 64 32.1 Participant typology and basic information 380

xi

FIGURES

3.1 Google’s women workers by race, as a percentage of the overall United States workforce, 2020 31 3.2 Facebook versus Google workforce, by race, 2020 35 3.3 Racial demographics of employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter, 2016 36 4.1 White, Female Robot 47 5.1 Imagined time versus racial proxy (grouped by racial setting) 65 5.2 Perceived time versus racial proxy (grouped by racial setting) 67 5.3 Clock time (by setting) 69 5.4 Difference between perceived and clock time 70 8.1 Lone white woman against beautiful natural background 95 8.2 Lone white woman against beautiful natural background 95 8.3 Glowing white woman against a glowing natural light filled background 96 8.4 Shirodhara treatment 101 10.1 Ruff edged with needle lace in linen thread, likely Italian made, c. 1600–1620. 122 T.14–1965. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 10.2 Embroidered Indian muslin women’s sleeve ruffles, previously attached to a dress sleeve. 1730s. T.140&A-1959. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 122 10.3 Oil painting of an unknown man wearing starched ruff and cuffs, 124 seventeenth century, 28–1867. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 10.4 Miss White, Clear Starcher to the Queen, c. 1750–1800. 1902,1011.7360. © Trustees of the British Museum, London 125 10.5 Fable of the Blackamoor, by Thomas Bewick, book illustration, c. 1776–1777. 1882,0311.4584. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London 126 10.6 ‘Isaac Royall and his Family’, by Robert Feke, 1741. Family wealth began with Royall Sr’s investment in the slave trade and Antigua plantations. The family moved to Antigua in 1700 and back to Massachusetts in 1737. Wiki Commons 127 10.7 Mr. Bryan’s washerwomen, Dry River (Plantation?), Jamaica. Ink and graphite on ­paper, 1808–1815.  William Berryman. British. DRWG 1 – Berryman, no. 143. Library of C ­ ongress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 129 xii

Figures

10.8 ‘Lady Margaret Callander & Her Son James Kearney (in Naval Dress)’, 1795. Oil on c­ anvas. 253.4  × 167.6  cm. Jean Laurent Mosnier. Yale Center for British Art 10.9 Portrait of a lady in neo-classical dress, c. 1805. American. Oil on tin. 9.2 × 7.3 cm. Adolph Ulrich Wertmuller. 2003.191. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 10.10 Muslin dress made by Brown & Sharp of Paisley, Scotland, c. 1800. Purchased with the assistance of the Camphill Fund, 2013. E.2013.7, © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

xiii

132

133

134

CONTRIBUTORS

Rikke Andreassen is Professor of Communication at Roskilde University, Denmark. She works with Nordic whiteness, gender and sexuality. Her publications include Mediated Kinship: Gender, Race and Sexuality in Donor Families (2018), Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays (2015), and Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts (2015). Marta Araújo is a Principal Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, where she lectures in several doctoral programs. She has published internationally on Eurocentrism in knowledge production and dissemination; public history and the teaching of (anti-)colonialism; and institutional racism, public policy and education. Jason Arday is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. He is a Visiting Professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and an Honorary Professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology. Jason holds other Visiting Professorships at Coventry University, University of Northampton and Nelson Mandela University. He is a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading Race Equality Thinktank and the British Sociological Association (BSA). Jason sits on the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) National Advisory Panel and the NHS Race and Health Observatory Academic Reference Group. Jason is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Jason Vincent A. Cabañes, PhD, is Professor of Communication and Research Fellow at De La Salle University in the Philippines. He holds a PhD from the University of Leeds in the UK. He researches primarily on the mediation of cross-cultural intimacies and solidarities, but also on digital labor in the global South. He is co-editor of the book Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia: Reconfiguring Local Ties, Enacting Global Relationships (Springer 2020). Agunyai Samuel Chukwudi  is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political ­Studies & International Relations, North West University, Mafikeng South Africa. He teaches political science at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His primary areas of research interests include African politics and government, food security, human security, political theory, migration studies, and governance in comparative sub-Saharan xiv

Contributors

Africa contexts. Specifically, he specializes on how vote trading engenders governance crisis and leadership question in Sub-Saharan Africa. Christianne France Collantes  is an Associate Professor with the Political Science and Development Studies Department at De La Salle University-Manila. Her research interests include gender politics, intimacies and globalization in Asia. She obtained her PhD in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Some of her published works can be found in the International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, Critical Asian Studies and South East Asia Research. Her first book Reproductive Dilemmas in Metro Manila: Faith, Intimacies, and Globalization was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Josephine Cornell  is a Lecturer in the Psychology Department in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Her research interests include identity, higher ­education transformation, protests and visual methods. Miloš Debnár is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Ryukoku University in Kyoto. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from Kyoto University in 2014, and his research field includes migration, whiteness in the migration context, critical expatriate studies and international student mobility. He is the author of Migration, Whiteness, and Cosmopolitanism: Europeans in Japan and the chapter ‘Privileged, Highly Skilled and Unproblematic? White Europeans in Japan as Migrants’ in Expatriation and Migration: Two Faces of the Same Coin. Daisy Deomampo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University, USA. Her research interests encompass science and technology studies, critical race studies, and reproductive politics and technologies. She is the author of Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press 2016). Ashley (“Woody”) Doane is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hartford. His published work includes numerous articles and book chapters on white nationalism, c­ olor-blind racial ideology, racial discourse and whiteness as well as the co-edited (with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva) book White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (Routledge 2003). He is Past-President of the Association for Humanist Sociology and Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Deborah Gabriel is the Founder and Director of Black British Academics. Her work is centered on equity and social justice in higher education. Her research addresses the d­ ynamics of race, gender and culture and the relationships between race, power, privilege and inequality from a Black feminist standpoint. She served as co-editor of Inside the Ivory Tower (2017) with Shirley Anne Tate, and editor of Transforming the Ivory Tower (2020) on race and gender inequality in the academe. Jennifer A. Hamilton  is Visiting Professor of Sexuality, Women’s & Gender Studies at Amherst College, USA. She is the author of Indigeneity in the Courtroom: Law, Culture, and the Production of Difference in North American Courts (Routledge 2009) and is currently completing her second book, The Indian in the Freezer: The Genomic Quest for Indigeneity (University of Washington Press). xv

Contributors

Mike Hill  is Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he served for seven years as Department Chair. Hill has published widely and teaches regularly ­eighteenth-century studies, materialist theory, contemporary US race relations, and more recently, the philosophy of war. His books are The Other Adam Smith (Stanford 2015) (co-­ authored with Warren Montag), After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (2004), Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (2000; contributing ed.) and Whiteness: A Critical Reader (1997; contrib. ed.). Volume one of Ecologies of War: The Human Terrain (2020). Hill is also working on a historical study of literary realism called The Computational Origins of the Novel. Sally Hines is a Professor in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Transforming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity, Intimacy and Care (Routledge 2007) and Is Gender Fluid? A Primer for the 21st Century (Thames and Hudson 2018). Tobias Hübinette has a PhD in Korean studies and is an Associate Professor in Intercultural Education and a Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Studies at the Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. He is conducting research within the field of Swedish critical race and whiteness studies, and he is also engaged within the fields of critical adoption studies and Asian diaspora studies.’ Matthew W. Hughey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut (USA). He holds affiliate faculty positions at Nelson Mandela University (South Africa), the University of Barcelona (Spain) and the University of Cambridge (England). Professor Hughey’s research examines the forms and functions of race, media, organizations, science and religion. He has received numerous awards and support from sources such as the American Sociological Association, Fulbright Commission, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The author of nine scholarly books and over eighty peer-reviewed articles, he is a frequent voice in international media and a recurrent expert witness for legal disputes over racial discrimination Suvi Keskinen is a Professor in Ethnic Relations and leads The Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki in Finland. Her research interests include post/decolonial feminism, critical race and whiteness studies, politics of belonging, nationalism, political activism and Nordic colonial/racial histories. Beverly Lemire is Professor in History and Classics at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her work focuses on the period from 1600 to 1850 during the advent of the early global era and the first industrial era. She works with changes in material life and cultural practice in this period. Pauline Leonard is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Work Futures Research Centre and Co-Director of the Web Science Institute, University of Southampton, UK. She has longstanding research interests in diversity and work, particularly focusing on the role of whiteness as a route to enhanced job and career opportunities. She has published widely in this area including Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations (2010, Ashgate), Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa (with Conway, 2014, Palgrave), Destination China: Immigration to China in the Post-Reform Era (Ed with Lehmann 2018 ­Palgrave China) and British Migration: Privilege, Diversity and Vulnerability (Ed with Walsh, xvi

Contributors

2019, Routledge). She is currently researching diversity and bias in the use of new digital technologies in work and professional contexts. Kristín Loftsdóttir is professor of Social Anthropology at University of Iceland. Her research has focused on notions of exceptionalism, racialization of mobility, racism, gender, crisis-talk, globalization, nationalism, migration and postcolonial Europe. Her publications include We are all African Here: Race, Mobilities and West Africans in Europe (Berghahn, 2021); co-author of Exceptionalism (Routledge, 2021), Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland (Routledge, 2019). She is the PI of the project CERM (Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities). Catrin Lundström is Associate Professor of Sociology and a Professor Designate in Ethnicity and Migration at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Uppsala University and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Arizona and UC, Santa Barbara. Her research fields include transnational migration, critical race and whiteness studies, ethnography and gender studies. Lisa Madura is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research spans social and political philosophy, philosophy of race and critical phenomenology, and she is co-editor of the volume Refugees Now: Rethinking Boarders, Hospitality, and Citizenship. Nick Malherbe is a Researcher at Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa and affiliated with the South African Medical Research Council Masculinity & Health Research Unit. His research interests include culture, politics, community psychology and visual methods. Katarina Mattsson  holds a PhD in Human Geography and is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. With her research on the intersections of Swedishness, whiteness and femininity, she has contributed to the emergence of the field of critical whiteness studies in Swedish academia. In her work on whiteness and tourism, she has explored the consumption of otherness in ethnic tourism, the markering of family tourism and experiences of educational travel. Her present research deals with pleasure based ferry cruises in the Baltic Sea. Adrijana Miladinović is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the Ohio State University, USA. In her research, she focuses on race and ethnicity, whiteness, migration and integration, as well as culture and identity formation. Her latest publication is “The influence of Whiteness on social and professional integration: The case of highly skilled Europeans in Japan”, Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, 19(2) (2020). Diana Mulinari is a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, University of Lund Sweden. She works at the crossroads between gendered identities, politics and the the political. Among her publications are Keskinen, S. P. Stoltz and D. Mulinari (2020) Feminisms in the Nordic Region. Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Decolonial Critique. Palgrave Macmillan and Tzimoula, D. and D. Mulinari (2021) “Pain is hard to put on paper” Exploring the Silences of Migrant Scholars in Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality. Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism. Berg et al. (Eds) Macmillan. London. xvii

Contributors

Anders Neergaard is a Sociologist at REMESO, Linköping University. Neergaard’s ­research focuses on power, inequality, resistance, solidarities and social movements, linked to racism and anti-racism, and class and gender. His recent co-written publications include “Why are care workers from the global south disadvantaged?” ERS (2020); “Crisis of Solidarity? Changing Welfare and Migration Regimes in Sweden.” Critical Sociology (2019); “Theorising racism: exploring the Swedish racial regime.” NJMR (2017); and “Reimagineering the Nation: Crisis and Social Transformation in 21st Century Sweden” (2017, Peter Lang). Prof Victor Ojakorotu  is currently Deputy Director, School of Government Studies, Mafikeng at North West University, Mafikeng, South Africa. His research interests are African Politics, Nigeria, Conflict and Peace, Environmental Politics and Security. He is widely published in internationally accredited academic journals on the vexing subject of the Niger Delta. Some of the books he has published on the Niger Delta are Contending Issues in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, Checkmating the Resurgence of Oil Violence in the Niger Delta of Nigeria and Anatomy of the Niger Delta Crisis: Causes, Consequences and Opportunities for Peace. Vincent Chukwukadibia Onwughalu is a Senior lecturer at the Department of Public Administration, Federal Polytechnic, Oko, Anambra State, Nigeria and the Psychometrics Studies’ Desk Officer of the institution. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow from June 2019 to May 2022, at the Department of Politics and International Relations, North West University, Mafikeng Campus, South Africa. He research interests span through Development, Governance, Elections, Political Parties and Education. Ruth Pearce is a lecturer in community development at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Understanding trans health: Discourse, power and possibilities (Policy Press, 2018), and the co-editor of the collection TERF Wars: Feminism and the fight for transgender futures (Sage, 2020). Carla Pfeffer is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. She is the author of Queering families: The postmodern partnerships of cisgender women and transgender men (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kopano Ratele is Professor of Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and Head of the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. He has published extensively, and his books include There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009, co-authored with Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni), Liberating Masculinities (2016), Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race (2018, co-edited with Jeff Hearn, Tammy Shefer, and Floretta Boonzaier) and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019). Damien W. Riggs  is a professor in psychology at Flinders University. He is the author of over 200 publications on gender, family, and mental health, including (with Shoshana Rosenberg, Heather Fraser, and Nik Taylor) Queer entanglements: Gender, sexuality and animal companionship (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Yuna Sato is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Keio University, Japan, and the University of South Australia. She specializes in ethnic and racial studies, with a special focus on mixed xviii

Contributors

identity in Japan. Her latest publication is “‘Others’ among ‘Us’: Exploring Racial Misidentification of Japanese Youth”, Japanese Studies 41:3 (2021). Raka Shome is the author of the widely reviewed Diana and Beyond: White femininity, national identity and contemporary media culture (2014, U of Illinois Press). She is a Distinguished Scholar of National Communication Association (USA) and an Elected Fellow of International Communication Association. She has published widely on topics such as postcolonial media, the global south, race and whiteness, gender and nationalism. She is currently finishing a book titled Cleansing the Nation: Gender, Hindu Nationalism and the Clean India Campaign (under contract with Duke University Press). Shahnaaz Suffla is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa and is affiliated to the South African Medical Research Council Masculinity and Health Research Unit. Shahnaaz’s research interests draw from the intersections of critical African, community and peace psychologies, and public health and are located within liberatory philosophies and epistemologies. Her niche areas are conflict, violence and peace, decolonial psychologies and participatory methodologies. Specifically, her research interests include a focus on health and peace promotion interventions in contexts of structural violence; participatory engagement as a site of activism, resistance, healing and social change; and Africa-centered approaches to research and scholarship on violence, peace and psychology. Shannon Sullivan is Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA). She works in the intersections of American pragmatism/philosophy of the Americas, continental philosophy, feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race, especially critical whiteness studies. She is the author or editor of ten books, including most recently The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015), White Privilege (2019) and Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives (2021). Shirley Anne Tate is a Professor in the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada and Honorary Professor, Chair in Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Paul C. Taylor is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He received his undergraduate training at Morehouse College and his graduate training at the Kennedy School of Government and at Rutgers University. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, social and political theory, American philosophy, race theory and Africana philosophy. His books include On Obama and Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, which received the 2017 monograph prize from the American Society for Aesthetics. Benjamin Teitlebaum is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Lions of the North (Oxford University Press, 2017) and international bestseller War for Eternity (HarperCollins, Penguin, and Unicamp, 2020). Teitelbaum’s writing has appeared in major European and American media outlets in addition to scholarly venues, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Atlantic and the BBC. xix

Contributors

Sayaka Osanami Törngren is an Associate Professor in International Migration and Ethnic Relations with a focus on race and racialization at Malmö University. France Winddance Twine  is Professor of Sociology, a visual artist and documentary ­fi lmmaker at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author or editor of 11 books. Her areas of specialization include feminist studies, critical technology studies, comparative racial and ethnic studies, and sociology of discrimination. In 2020, the American Sociological Association awarded her the Distinguished Career Award. She is the author of Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley (2022). Francis Ray White is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the University of Westminster. Their research, writing and teaching are in the area of gender studies, particularly around questions of queer, trans and fat embodiment. Katharina Wiedlack is Assistant Professor for Anglophone Cultural Studies at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. Katharina works in the fields of queer and feminist theory, popular culture, post-socialist, decolonial, disability studies and transnational American studies. She is primary investigator for the arts-based research project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” (AR 567, 2020–2024), conducted in collaboration with Masha Godovannaya, Ruthia Jenrbekova and Iain Zabolotnaya, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Catherine Wolfe is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the Basser Center for BRCA. She is a Master of Public Health student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She was an undergraduate student studying Sociology at Temple University while researching the chapter. This is her first publication. Matt Wray is Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University. Wray is the author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke, 2006) and the editor of Cultural Sociology: An Introductory Reader (WW Norton 2013), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke, 2001), Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (New York University Press, 1998) and White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge, 1997). Iain Zabolotny  is an Activist and a Researcher. Coming from Novosibirsk, Russia, and currently living in Vienna, Austria, they are active in queer-feminist activism in both countries. Having a background in public relations and transcultural communications, they are currently studying interpreting at the University of Vienna. As a part of the arts-based research project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine,” they focus on questions of in/ visibility, queer ways of living and community building within the post-Soviet space.

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1 INTRODUCTION Writing a Handbook on critical race and whiteness theory in the time of Black Lives Matter and anti-racism backlash Rikke Andreassen, Suvi Keskinen, Catrin Lundström and Shirley Anne Tate1 Black Lives Matters (BLMs) and the renewed interest in critical race and whiteness theory In the Western hemisphere, May 2020 seems to have been a turning point for studies of anti-Blackness, critical race theory (CRT), whiteness and the ways in which we occupy the uneasy politics of anti-racism and white supremacy. At the specific moment that George Floyd breathed his last breath under police officer Derick Chauvin’s knee, while other police officers passively watched, the world saw Black extrajudicial killing in the United States replayed on a loop. George Floyd’s death was not the first murder of a Black man at police hands; neither will it be the last. Nor is Black death limited to the United States or to Black men. But it served to remind us, drawing on legal scholar Paul Butler’s (2017) concept of ‘the chokehold’, that Black masculinity, in all its complexity – and Blackness as a whole – is under threat within an anti-Black world (Sexton 2018). The chokehold, in the United States and elsewhere, means that Black women, children and men, as well as non-binary and trans people, must now demonstrate that they are not a threat to the public and the police, while facing the perpetual national, individual and communal threat of being placed under suspicion. When we began work on this Handbook, and when most authors began writing their chapters (in 2018 and 2019), the field of critical race and whiteness theory had not yet received much public attention. It was a theoretically advanced area that had contributed significantly to the study of discrimination, power and privileges, yet discussions in the field – of which there were many – were largely confined to the academic space. One initial aim of the Handbook was to focus on the important research that has come out of – and continues to come out of – the interdisciplinary area of critical race and whiteness studies. However, in the wake of BLM, there has been increased interest in the literature and theory that might help us comprehend our contemporary time and situation, highlighting a number of works: scholarly works by theorists such as Franz Fanon, bell hooks, Patricia Hills Collins and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as works by authors such as Audre Lorde, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. In particular, the new and widespread interest in critical race studies has re-emphasised the importance of older contributions (e.g. Fanon and Du Bois), also for contemporary society. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-1

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Alongside the BLM movement (which has spread transnationally), other anti-racist movements have also arisen over the past decade. The Rhodes Must Fall movements in South Africa and the United Kingdom have demanded a decolonisation of knowledge production, institutional responsibility for colonial and imperial legacies, and a break with neoliberal economic policies (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu 2018). Concomitantly, the campaigns ‘Why is My Curriculum White’ and ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black’ in the United Kingdom and Germany have brought attention to the racial disparities in higher education and the need to decolonise the disciplinary curricula. Anti-racist feminism, queer of colour mobilisation and the organising of minority women have been important forces in many European countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Nordic countries (Bacchetta, El-Tayeb and Haritaworn 2015; Bassel and Emejulu 2016; Keskinen 2021; Tuzcu 2016). Urban movements in racialised and marginalised neighbourhoods have brought questions of race and class onto the political agenda (Schierup, Ålund and Kings 2014), and Muslim activists have demanded actions against anti-terror policies and anti-Muslim racism (Massoumi 2015). This broad range of anti-racist organising may not be as visible in the mainstream media as the recent BLM mobilisations. Still, the long-term grassroots politics that support these movements are posing challenges to white hegemony and demanding institutional, cultural, economic and epistemological changes that could lead to racial justice.

Backlashes and attacks on critical race theory Simultaneously with the growing interest in racial issues – displayed by journalists, intellectuals, students and activists – a different interest in and political criticism of the field and scholarship of critical race and whiteness studies has emerged. On the one hand, the outrage, grief, trauma and public anti-racist statements of the global BLM movement that erupted in the wake of Floyd’s murder2 were expressed via public protest, athletes’ taking the knee, the tearing down of statues and reflection over institutional histories of enslavement and the need for reparations. On the other hand, politicians, media figures and intellectuals responded with clapbacks against anti-racist activism. In the face of the outpouring of grief (turned to grievance) over the continued ‘state lynching’ of Black people in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Australia, nation-state backlashes appeared. In the United States, Donald Trump led the political right against what he called ‘Anti-Fa’ (anti-fascists) and Black radicals, and laid the blame for the national foment on critical race studies and intersectionality, as taught in universities. As a response, critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (renowned for coining the term ‘intersectionality’) and the African American Policy Forum sent out an email on 13 May 2021 with the subject line, ‘We need your help: CRT under attack’: Dear Friends: Across the United States, dangerous attacks on racial justice are spreading like wildfire. These attacks seek to prohibit the teaching and use of vital frameworks like Critical Race Theory and intersectionality and aim to smother honest engagement with our nation’s history. On Tuesday over objections from business and education groups, the Texas House voted to pass a bill ‘that supporters describe as an effort to keep “critical race theory” from being taught in schools’. Within the last week the Governor of Oklahoma signed into law Bill 1775, which restricts the teaching of racism and sexism in Oklahoma state universities and public school system. (Crenshaw et al. 2021)

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In the United States, several states have introduced bills that prohibit or restrict the teaching of CRT and limit the ways in which teachers can teach and talk about racism, sexism and other topics related to oppression. In the United Kingdom, CRT and intersectionality were first discussed in Parliament in October 2020 as problems for the state education system by Kemi Badenoch, who is herself Black, and at the time serving as Equality Minister for the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government took up Trump’s mantle, lambasting BLM as a movement of so-called ‘woke radicals’, making the case that statues of slaveholders and property built from the profits accrued from slavery should remain untouched, unexcused and undebated; that reparations are not necessary for slavery, which should be forgotten; that the country’s colonial past should remain intact; and that the teaching of critical race studies in school should be illegal (Trilling 2020). In Denmark, the Parliament tabled a resolution in May 2020 demanding university leadership ensure that ‘the self-regulation of scientific practices is functioning’ (Folketingssamling 2020) to prevent ‘politics [from] being dressed up as science’. The resolution was passed under the title, ‘Excessive activism in certain research environments’, and the Parliamentary debate condemned specific research areas, such as critical race studies, whiteness studies, migration studies, post-colonial studies and gender studies. In France, clapback came in the form of racially politicised debates on the place of postcolonial theory in universities and society, more widely. A French debate on ‘Islamo-leftism’ emerged with the Minister of Higher Education warning about ‘radical’ academics who are (perceivably) seeking to divide the French nation through theories of race, gender and class structures (Fassin 2021). The Minister further declared that she would initiate an investigation into the ways in which universities are dealing with such research. Other politicians, academic communities and President Emmanuel Macron have framed critical research on race, colonialism, gender and intersectionality as a threat to the French republic, seeking to control the increasing and broad social criticism around racial inequalities and a lack of engagement with colonial legacies. These are examples of Western states’ backlash against critical research, which points towards and documents inequalities in liberal democracies. They are also expressions of backlash against BLM and Black-originated thought, which are vilified as unwarranted Black insurgencies against a denied white supremacy. Moreover, such conservative movements seek to counteract the broad mobilisations and intellectual commitment to decolonise knowledge and interrogate racist practices and structures in Western societies. Critical race and whiteness scholarship is a vital intellectual resource for anti-racist and decolonial social mobilisations, and this has made it the target of political and academic forces seeking to restore the challenged social order and power structures. Today (i.e. 2023), the field of critical race and whiteness studies has moved to the centre of political attention, where it holds an ambivalent charge: on the one hand, it is a ‘tool’ that can contribute to activism with a vocabulary that is capable of describing lived experiences; on the other hand, it simultaneously provides ‘ammunition’ for conservative and populist politicians who feel that anti-racist struggles have ‘gone too far’. As editors, we have experienced how our work, within a very short period of time, has become an intellectual inspiration for both social movements and students seeking more knowledge about racism, anti-racism and (de)coloniality. At the same time, we have witnessed how the field is being used in political agendas to attack research freedom. This development was difficult to foresee. However, it highlights the need for further critical research and underscores the importance of this Handbook.

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History: from racial taxonomies to critical studies of race and whiteness Ideas of racial hierarchies and dominance have circulated in the west since the Enlightenment, when European intellectuals and scientists3 began to formulate theories, hypotheses, models and taxonomies about race and whiteness (Painter 2010). The birth of race thinking coincided with the advent of the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons, the plantation economy (based on enslavement in the Caribbean and the Americas) and European colonialism across the globe. François Bernier was the first to present an idea of racial differentiation, in the 1680s. Yet it was the Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl von Linnaeus’s racial taxonomy that had the most significant impact on the idea of racial difference, and it continues to demonstrate this impact, even today. Linnaeus’s legacy has been targeted in contemporary BLM discussions about monuments, branding and statues. In his book Systema naturae (‘Nature’s system’ or ‘The order of nature’), which was first published in 1735, Linnaeus classified animals and plants, as well as humans. In doing so, he introduced the categorisation (division) of humans into distinct races and racial taxonomy, using the concept of varieties. Other researchers, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (who is often presented as the founder of anthropology and infamous for introducing so-called craniometry or cranial measurement), continued to develop Linnaeus’s racial division and taxonomy in the 1770s. Both of these researchers’ racial taxonomies effected a refined division of the imagined races. Following the creation of these taxonomies, a longstanding debate among anthropologists and other scientists emerged about the number of races of humans and how such races should be divided. In particular, the category of ‘white’ – and questions about which people belonged to it – stirred discussion well into the twentieth century. The category of white has, at various times and locations, been attributed to the Greeks, Vikings, Georgians, Germans, Caucasians, Circassians, Indo-Europeans, Aryans and Nordics. Over the centuries, it has also been defined in contrast to – and sometimes replaced by – other groups, such as Native Americans, Jews, Muslims, Sámi, Irish, Italians and, to some extent, other southern Europeans (Garner 2007). For example, the Irish were once categorised as Celts – considered a subordinate group to Anglo-Saxons or Germans within the British Empire – but they were eventually categorised among other white Europeans, in the context of their emigration to the United States and increasing racial segregation in the enlargement of whiteness (see also Andreassen 2015; Grosfoguel 2003; Ignatiev 1995; Painter 2010). The legitimisation of colonial power, displacement and slavery went hand in hand with ideas of whiteness, as linked to qualities such as strength, purity, morality, civilisation and beauty. In 1790, for example, the German philosopher and historian Christoph Meiners described the Germans as ‘the tallest and most beautiful men’ on earth with ‘the whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin’ and ‘a purity of blood’ (Painter 2010, pp. 89–90). At the time, European whiteness contained different shades, depending on a combination of, among other things, language, climate and history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the American economist William Z. Ripley worked out a model of European sub-races, on the basis of facial features, hair colour, eye colour, nose shape and body length, as well as other factors. Ripley particularly emphasised the shape of the skull, following Swedish anthropologist Anders Retzius’s ‘index of skulls’, which he linked to intelligence and beauty. Ideas about European whiteness were thus partly developed in the United States. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle spoke of Germans as ‘the only genuine European people, unmixed with strangers’ (Painter 2010, p. 160). Furthermore, Swedes and other Scandinavians were portrayed as superior representatives of hyper-whiteness and Nordic beauty – an idea that survived in the United States well into the twentieth century (Lunde 4

Introduction

2010). For example, in Carl C. Brigham’s estimate of the proportion of bloodstock in 1923, Swedes were classified as the whitest of all whites, attributed with 100 per cent Nordic white blood; Norwegians and Danes followed in second and third places, respectively. Even within the Nordic region, anthropologists and race biologists sought to identify the characteristics of the ‘superior’ Nordic race (Hübinette 2017), drawing distinctions to other groups in the Nordic region – notably the Indigenous Sámi people, the Finns and the Roma. These were categorised as inferior racial groups on a lower cultural level, and subjected to skull measuring and other physical scrutinisation (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 2003; Keskinen 2019). In nineteenth-century Europe, the concept of race became increasingly attached to nationalist imaginaries of homogeneous people, resulting in assimilatory, repressive and genocidal measures towards minorities and Indigenous people, including the Jews, the Sámi and the Roma (Keskinen, Skaptadóttir and Toivanen 2019a; Lentin 2004; van Baar 2011). Religious-based anti-Semitic beliefs came to merge with a new type of anti-Semitism based on race thinking, while Roma and Sámi people were ascribed to separate racial groups through the transformation of cultural stereotypes into racial characteristics. The Holocaust was detrimental to both the Jews and the Roma, while the Indigenous Sámi people largely suffered from cultural genocide, resulting in serious damage to their languages and culture (Kuokkanen 2020). Due to the expanded boundaries of American whiteness, during the twentieth century, various European immigrants in the United States became included in a common category of white. From the 1950s onwards, these ethnic groups, which had previously been perceived as ‘not quite white’ – among them Italians, Irish, Finns, Poles and other Slavic immigrant groups, and even Jews – were placed into a common white American majority population, based on a form of ‘white identity politics’ and a ‘possessive investment in whiteness’, supported by ‘both public policy and private prejudice’ (Guglielmo 2003; Lipsitz 2006, p. vii; Wray 2006). This homogenisation of a variety of European immigrant groups took place not least through economic policy, housing policy and the segregation of white American suburbs, which were predominantly populated by previously ethnic Europeans (Lipsitz 2006; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). As it assumed increasingly sharp racial segregation, the residential sector became highly influential in determining both racial and class affiliation (Hartigan 1999; Pred 2000). As this shows, the boundaries of whiteness have historically been intimately intertwined with the economic conditions of different groups – and thus social class (see also Andreassen 2015). Drawing on this intersection, North American researchers have noticed how other groups, such as fair-skinned Latin Americans and certain East Asian groups, have been included in American whiteness, in line with the continuously unstable and ‘ever-expanding boundaries of whiteness’ and ‘the Latin Americanisation’ of racial stratification in the United States (Bonilla-Silva 2002; Warren and Twine 1997). But whereas the expanding boundaries of whiteness may include some light-skinned Latinos, Asian Americans, Middle Eastern Americans and multi-racials as ‘honorary whites’, such dialectics continue to exclude those defined as ‘collective Blacks’ (Bonilla-Silva 2002). In Europe, questions about race, racism and whiteness have been addressed in connection with the horrors of the Holocaust (Goldberg 2009) and, increasingly, in the (post-)colonial context that makes European colonialism and its legacies central for understanding contemporary societies. Post–World War II migration from former colonies to many European countries – notably the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands – gradually changed both the demographics and the social relations in those countries, in ways that make it difficult to ignore the intertwining of race, ethnicity and social class. Even European countries with few or no colonies were confronted with questions of race, racism 5

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and white supremacy following the increasing migration from post-colonial countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. This made visible colonial representations and entanglements with the neo-colonial economic order, which these countries shared with their European neighbours (Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdottír and Jensen 2012; Lüthi, Falk and Purtschert 2015).

The birth of critical race and whiteness studies As the history of race and whiteness testifies, racial categories are historical constructions that developed within particular societal contexts. CRT in the United States (Delgado and Stefancic 2017), as well as the more global research field of race critical theories (Essed and Goldberg 2002), described new ways of understanding race as a socially constructed category, through the work of, for example: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Joe Feagin, Linda Martín Alcoff, Anne Anlin Cheng, bell hooks, David Theo Goldberg, Philomena Essed, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Gloria Wekker, Patricia Hill Collins, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Michael O. Hardimon and Charles W. Mills, to name only a few. Rather than abandoning the highly problematic concept of race, these scholars developed new ways of studying and analysing race, with regard to racial segregation, colonialism and ongoing racial inequalities, developing concepts such as ‘racial formation’, ‘intersectionality’, ‘white racial frame’, the ‘racial contract’, ‘racial grammar’, ‘everyday racism’ and the ‘white gaze’ (Ahmed 2007; Alcoff 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Cheng 2001; Crenshaw 1989; Essed 1991; Goldberg 2009; Mills 1997; Omi and Winant 1986; Yancy 2004). In parallel, during the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary research field of critical whiteness studies gradually emerged in the English-speaking world, through the writings of Marilyn Frye (1983), Audre Lorde (1984), Peggy McIntosh (1988), David R. Roediger (1991), Ruth Frankenberg (1993), Richard Dyer (1997), Ghassan Hage (1998), Alastair Bonnett (2004) and many others. This field promoted a new and conscious way of studying whiteness, from a perspective that was not based on supposed neutrality and normality (hence the prefix ‘critical’). The field grew alongside CRT and race critical research, notably in North American academia, focused mainly on Black and other non-white minorities, especially Latin Americans and Asians (Eng 2001; Eng and Han 2019). As the name implies, the aim was to shift focus in order to question the otherwise presumed and often invisible and normalised whiteness: ‘Whites must be seen to be white’, as Dyer (1997, p. 45) puts it. The field of critical whiteness studies, which today encompasses thousands of books and articles, not only examines the existence of an all-encompassing white hegemonic structure and norm, but also how whiteness reproduces itself as normalcy and privilege in a variety of ways, through a wide range of practices and in different historical and localised contexts (Andreassen and Vitus 2015; Garner 2007, 2014; Keskinen and Andreassen 2017; Leonard 2016; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Lundström 2014; Moreton-Robinson, Casey and Nicoll 2008; Shome 2014; Wekker 2016). Whiteness can thus be described as an idea of normalcy, combined with a hegemonic racialised structure, position or identity that is reproduced through a set of practices and boundaries that ‘render white privilege invisible’, yet are maintained socially, historically, culturally and politically over time and across national boundaries (Frankenberg 1993; McIntosh 1988; Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 6). Richard Dyer identifies whiteness as a process of racialisation based on a privileged position and perspective that defines people and practices racialised as white as normal and allows them to pass as invisible, ensuring ‘whiteness consists in invisible properties, and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen’ (Dyer 1997, p. 45). 6

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Black feminism, gender and intersectionality The notion of whiteness as an ‘invisible’ norm that perpetually defines difference explains why the histories of race and whiteness – and critical studies of these subjects – are intertwined. It further emphasises the importance of examining this normative structure from the perspectives of those who have experienced exclusion from it, by ‘not’ being white. To not be white ‘is to inhabit the negative: it is to be “not”. The pressure of this “not” is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism’ (Ahmed 2007, p. 161; see also Lorde 1984). Whiteness is particularly visible to those who are not included in it – that is, to people racialised as non-white. Or, as Audre Lorde (1984) phrases it, the production of whiteness works by assigning race and ethnicity to others, with those ‘others’ becoming aware of both whiteness and their own ‘otherness’. Focusing on the interconnection between race and whiteness means not taking the invisible claim of whiteness for granted as the normative point of view. As Sara Ahmed reminds us: Whiteness is only invisible to those who inhabit it. To those who don’t, the power of whiteness is maintained by being seen; we see it everywhere, in the casualness of white bodies in spaces, crowded in parks, meetings, in white bodies that are displayed in films and advertisements, in white laws that talk about white experiences, in ideas of the family made up of clean white bodies. I see those bodies as white, not human. (Ahmed 2004, p. 14) Sara Ahmed describes whiteness studies as a field that ‘begins with the Black critique of how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that privilege on the bodies of those who are recognised as black’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 2; cf. Lorde 1984). Fundamental texts, such as This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull et al. 1982), Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (hooks 1981), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Lorde 1984) and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa 1987), have laid the foundation of both Black feminist studies and critical whiteness studies. A number of scholars have documented the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in her article ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’ (1989) and further developed the term in the article ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’ (1991). Crenshaw argues that Black women’s experiences of oppression cannot simply be understood as racism experienced as a Black person or sexism experienced as a woman; rather, Black women’s experiences are multidimensional, as race and gender intersect and oppressions occur via the entanglement of gender and race. In other words, the categories of race and gender (in addition to class, sexuality, age and others) mutually influence and reinforce each other. As a legal scholar, Crenshaw points to how the law treats all people as equal only in theory, and how the lack of an intersectional approach to discrimination and oppression make Black women vulnerable. Black women’s treatment and experiences of racism are not equivalent to those of Black men, just as their experiences of sexism are not equivalent to those of white women. Uniquely, their oppression is shaped by their intersecting identities of race and gender. Crenshaw thus advocates for the inclusion of various categories of oppression when analysing social inequalities or providing support for individuals in need. Illustratively, she 7

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describes how actions against domestic violence (e.g. the provision of shelter) must address not only sexism and violence, but also race, social class and migration status (Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s development of intersectionality builds upon Black feminism in the United States. Here, theorists and activists such as Angela Davis (1981) have noted that issues of women’s rights are about not only gender and sexism, but also racism and racialisation. Davis, for instance, describes how white and Black women are united in the struggle for reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, but that they are positioned differently in the struggle, due to race. Unlike white women, Black women are subjected to forced sterilisation programmes; thus, their fight for reproductive rights also includes a fight against what we would today term ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe 2019). Another example of how both scholarship and activism require a focus on the intersections of gender, race and sexuality is the ‘Combahee River Collective statement’ (1977), written by a collective of Black feminists, addressing the particular oppression experienced by Black lesbian women. The statement describes how the (white) feminist movement and the (male-focused) civil rights movement at the time were not addressing the interlocked oppression faced by lesbians of colour. Another important scholar is Patricia Hill Collins, whose book Black Feminist Thought (1990) similarly underscores the intersections between race and gender, while also pointing to the rich archive of Black literature, music and poetry that express and embody Black feminist thought. bell hooks – a central figure within Black feminism – likewise advocates for the i nclusion of race in analyses of feminism and sexism. She points to how bodily differences, such as skin colour and hair texture, represent historical oppressions and inequalities that continue to influence contemporary lives. In the United States, the history of enslavement and ideas of Black women as hypersexual and promiscuous (which contributed to upholding slavery and perpetuating atrocities against Black women) influence sexism against Black women in contemporary society (hooks 1992). hooks also describes how historical constructions of Black masculinity as dangerous and violent influence contemporary discrimination against Black men in the United States (e.g. in relation to police violence and surveillance; cf. BLM). The police brutality exemplified by the killing of George Floyd has deep historical roots, dating back to slavery and Jim Crow laws. On the European continent, Frantz Fanon (2008/1952) described how – as a Black man in (white) Europe – he was perceived as a potential danger (by white people), while simultaneously being framed as exotic, due to a historical understanding of the Black body as hypersexual. Fanon illustrated how the Western myth about Black men’s lust for white women plays into the (white) fear of and fascination with the Black man. Another perspective on the intersections between CRT, gender and sexuality is provided by David Eng (2001), in his book Racial Castration. Here, he investigates the role of race in (white) perceptions of Asian American male sexuality and, vice versa, the role of sexuality in race formations of Asian American males. As the title emphasises, these race formations frame Asian American males as emasculated or homosexualised (i.e. castrated). Sara Ahmed’s extensive work on affect theory, race and whiteness reflects upon the ways in which racism and sexism are experienced and felt (2004, 2006). Drawing upon Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, Ahmed examines how larger structures of racism and racial privileges affect lives and everyday practices. In this way, Ahmed, Lorde and Fanon describe what we might discuss as the phenomenology or ‘lived experiences’ of being racialised as nonwhite in a society of white hegemony; that is, experiences of discrimination and ‘othering’ related to everyday life in ordinary places and spaces, including public transport, schools, dinner parties and so forth. Similarly, a number of scholars have examined the ways in which 8

Introduction

race and racialisation shape everyday lives via an analysis of emotions and affects (e.g. Ahmed 2013; Andreassen and Vitus 2015; Bonilla-Silva 2012, 2019). By the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies was flourishing. Developed in dialogue with CRT, post-colonial feminism and Black feminist research (hooks 1981, 1984; Gilroy 1987; Sandoval 1991; Trinh 1989), it was described as ‘the daughter’ of the research conducted by (primarily) Black American scholars since the early twentieth century (Twine 2011). Illustratively, the American sociologist Ruth Frankenberg effected a crucial turn within whiteness studies by empirically investigating the social and cultural aspects of growing up white as a white woman, thus foregrounding whiteness as ‘visible’, taking inspiration from Black feminist scholars. Frankenberg defined whiteness as ‘a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced, and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination’ (Frankenberg 1993, p. 6). In her ground-breaking book White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), Frankenberg laid out the intersectional location of white women and the ways in which white women are gendered and racialised as white. Her work was pioneering, in the sense that she empirically investigated ‘the possible ways of living whiteness’ (1993, p. 1), rather than focusing on whiteness as a hegemonic structure. Accordingly, she developed a theoretical framework for how the position of whiteness ‘is delimited by the relation of racism at that moment and in that place’ (Frankenberg 1993, p. 236).

Three waves of whiteness studies The tradition of critically examining whiteness stretches further back than the origins of what we today term ‘whiteness studies’. France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher (2008) propose a periodisation of whiteness studies, locating the foundations of contemporary critical whiteness studies in earlier studies of race and racism from (predominately) Black scholars – notably the historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois wrote about white privilege and double-consciousness as a veil for Black Americans. He argued that this double-consciousness defines the position of Black and non-white in a society dominated by whites as: ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ in a racist white society – ‘a world which yields him no true self-consciousness’ (cited in Gates and Oliver 1999, p. xxvii). Double-consciousness describes a state of being both inside and outside oneself and one’s body at the same time – something that all non-whites in the Western world, by and large, experience. Frantz Fanon’s autobiographical post-colonial classic Black Skin, White Masks (1952) also represents a foundational text for the field, in its treatment of the experience of being Black in a white majority society: ‘For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 2008/1952, p. 90). The second wave of whiteness studies included more recent critical scholars and writers, such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, ‘who continued on in the DuBoisian tradition of challenging and making white supremacy and institutional racism visible’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 10). It also consisted of the flourishing 1990s research tradition in legal studies, history and cultural studies that identified a wide array of white structures and examined representations of whiteness. Legal scholars such as Cheryl Harris (1993), who argued for whiteness as property, and Ian Haney López (1996), who examined the implications of legal definitions of white and non-white for citizenship, played a central role in this wave. Moreover, the work of the historian David R. Roediger – notably his book The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991) – was also influential. Roediger 9

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drew on Du Bois’s conceptualisation of ‘the wages of whiteness’ (1935) to study how the white working class in the United States gained from whiteness as a psychological resource, despite a lack of material means, and what it meant to be included in the category of ‘free Americans’. Roediger’s work was, thus, an important development of Marxist theory, in relation to critical race and whiteness studies. Finally, in his book White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997), the British film scholar Richard Dyer studied representations of whiteness in Western image, religion and popular culture, making an important contribution to contemporary understandings of the entanglement between whiteness and cultural production. The third (and current) wave of whiteness studies focuses on ‘cultural practices and discursive strategies’, including intersectional perspectives on race and other categories, such as class, gender and sexuality (Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 13). With this shift, whiteness studies has avoided ‘the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 6). Thus, third-wave perspectives, according to Twine and Gallagher (2008, p. 6), have the capacity to study ‘whiteness as a multiplicity of identities that are historically grounded, class specific, politically manipulated and gendered social locations that inhabit local custom and national sentiments within the context of the new “global village”’. With this new way of studying whiteness, the field has come to examine ‘the role whiteness and white identities play in framing and reworking racial categories, hierarchies and boundaries’, thus moving ‘beyond “voyeuristic ethnographic accounts” and personal narratives’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 5). Another important turn of the third wave of whiteness studies in the United States, Twine and Gallagher argue, is its shift from studying predominantly European immigrant groups to examining identity formations among groups originating in Latin America, the Caribbean and other non-European areas (in particular, the Hispanic/Latino population). Among these identity formations, some migrants and descendants identify as white, while others view themselves as persons of colour, Black or mixed race. The result of this research has been a more complex understanding of the construction and claiming of white identity. In the second and third waves of research, a broad, transdisciplinary and transnational field of critical whiteness studies has developed on several continents (e.g. Ware and Back 2002; Fine et al. 1997; Garner 2007, 2015; Hage 1998; Hill 1997; Hughey 2012; Twine 1998, 2011; Yancy 2004; Ware 2015). Almost a decade after Twine and Gallagher’s (2008) mapping of whiteness studies, Steve Garner (2017, p. 1590) argued that the third wave had ‘unfurled’ across the globe and, despite its many forms, shared a few starting points – notably a focus on power structures and ‘the delicate balance between micro and macro, and between structure and agency’. In his view, one of the strongest strands of third-wave whiteness studies is the analysis of white nationalism and the mainstreaming of white supremacy in Europe, the United States, Brazil and many other parts of the world. Today, ideas and positions that were previously associated with farright agendas have become increasingly understood as ‘ordinary’ politics and media discourses. Moreover, the third wave has produced nuanced analyses of multiple localities and national contexts, thus broadening the scope from the previous focus on the United States. Indeed, our Handbook builds on this history and seeks to expand analyses of race and whiteness to under theorised continents and countries. We envision that increased regional emphases (Goldberg 2009), which can draw out the complexities of global processes of race, racism and whiteness, will characterise what we might term the emerging fourth wave of whiteness studies. This will further shift the focus from (merely) the United States context to other parts of the world. We envision this fourth wave embodying a duality of local and regional focus and analysis on 10

Introduction

one hand, while, on the other hand, addressing the expanding global digital platforms and the increased (global) digitalisations of our cultural and social lives. While this anticipated fourth wave in many ways is directly linked to the third wave, we do believe that it might differ from the third wave by causing more political opposition; placing critical race and whiteness studies much more in the centre of debate and radical politics. At the same time, we foresee critical studies of race and whiteness studies increasingly being employed by activists, students and intellectuals, as well as anti-racist movements, in order to understand contemporary – local and global – situations and to provide vocabularies and tools to resist injustice.

The critique of the critical in critical whiteness studies The formation of a field of whiteness studies has been rightly contested. As Dyer expressed at the establishment of the field (1997, p. 10): ‘My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about whiteness could lead to the development of something called “White Studies” […] amounting to a statement of “white ethnicity”, the acceptable face of white nationalism”.’ Studies on whiteness, Ahmed argues, must not simply re-establish white people and white agency at the centre of the agenda, or ‘even produce the white subject as the origin of good feeling’ (Ahmed 2004, pp. 2, 33). Hence, the prefix ‘critical’ does not guarantee that the research is truly critical, ‘in the sense of challenging relations of power that remain concealed as institutional norms or givens’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 10). A number of scholars have critiqued the field of whiteness studies for turning whiteness into an ‘essential something’ (Fine et al. 1997, p. xi). In her essay ‘Whitewashing race: A critical perspective on whiteness’, Margaret L Andersen (2003, p. 21) warns that whiteness studies must not eclipse ‘the study of racial power, focusing solely on white identity, and analysing “whites” in the absence of the experience of people of color’. Similarly, in their recent Handbook on Critical Studies in Whiteness, Hunter and van der Westhuizen suggest that we must shift our perspective from writing about whiteness ‘to begin to speak, act, write, edit through whiteness’ (2022, emphasis in original). In a recent article, ‘From wave to tsunami: The growth of third wave whiteness’, Gallagher and Twine (2017) respond to Steve Garners’s ‘Surfing the third wave of whiteness studies’ (2017). In Garners’s commentary, he poses the question of whether whiteness studies has remained ‘true to the first wave origin: make white supremacy visible’ (Garner 2017). In their response, Gallagher and Twine (2017) identify some of the challenges associated with studies of whiteness and the field of critical whiteness studies, calling scholars to address the urgent issue of increasing right-wing political support among the white working class: How has Right wing politics (globally) managed the paradox of the diminishing returns of whiteness as a category of privilege, for the poor and working classes. A neoconservative ideological turn has decoupled, or separated whiteness from its location as a cultural, political and economic site of privilege. In other words, whiteness is discussed as if it is a politically neutral category that exists outside of a racial structure. Racial justice and racial inequality is eluded. […] The perception by a majority of whites that we now are colourblind is why the Black Lives Matter movement was so jarring for some whites; in a colourblind America ‘all lives’ should matter and to privilege black lives over others is, from a colourblind perspective a form of racism. (Gallagher and Twine 2017) While Gallagher and Twine draw attention to the ideology of colour-blindness in explaining the rise of the far right in the United States, others critically interrogate claims that the white 11

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working class is the main force behind the increase in white nationalism. Building on a broad literature review, Gurminder Bhambra (2017) argues that it was, in fact, the white middle class that both brought Donald Trump to power in 2016 and dominated among Brexit voters in the United Kingdom Referendum (also in 2016). According to her, many studies of these recent political events have been characterised by a methodological whiteness, eliding the fact that large sections of the working class consist of persons of colour, who predominantly voted against both Trump and Brexit. Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever (2018) argue that the United Kingdom ‘Leave’ campaign was successful due to its ability to draw upon a nostalgic longing for the golden days of the British colonial empire and a narrative of retreat from an unfamiliar ‘globalised’ world that has replaced familiar images of the nation. The analyses by Bhambra and Virdee and McGeever underscore the need to address the intersections of race, whiteness and class when seeking to understand major political changes, as well as when attempting to avoid an uncritical centring of white experiences and identities.

The critique of colour-blindness and white innocence One of the most important contributions of studies of race and whiteness is perhaps its rejection of the notions of colour-blindness and racial ignorance (Mueller 2020). As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others have shown in numerous books and articles, a colour-blind society is not anti-racist; rather, it approaches racial matters abstractly, by applying cultural explanations to minorities’ racialised experiences and positionings in society, neutralising racial phenomena in society and, last but not least, foregrounding the claim that racial discrimination has, in general, disappeared (Bonilla-Silva 2002, 2003; cf. Beeman 2015; Crenshaw et al. 2019; Gallagher 2003; Hughey 2012; Lipsitz 2006; Myong 2009). Many countries in continental Europe (e.g. Sweden, Germany and France) embrace colour-blindness, espousing that ‘race has no “meaning”’ anymore (Beaman and Petts 2020, p. 4). Colour-blindness here is ‘a cherished ideal—something aspirational and worth actively claiming as a central part of one’s identity and politics’ (Burke 2017, p. 859). These countries are thus both anti-racial – by rejecting the use of the word ‘race’ – and ‘non-racial’ – by denying ‘the reality of race’ (Beaman and Petts 2020, p. 4): ‘“We will not tolerate racism” […] quickly becomes “We cannot speak the language of race”. This is a coded way of saying “We cannot speak of race”’ (Goldberg 2006, p. 362). In Sweden and Finland, for example, official statistics only record country of birth; thus, non-white minorities who are citizens by birth are not identified. This practice maintains racial ignorance and reproduces the idea that racial and ethnic categories have no implications for society (Hübinette and Lundström 2011; Hübinette and Mählck 2015; Myong 2009). In this regard, critical studies on race and whiteness provide a language for what has been silenced in official colour-blind discourses. As Twine and Gallagher (2008, p. 5) attest, these ‘new empirical studies of whiteness and white identities pose novel questions that challenge existing historical and contemporary accounts of racial identity construction […] exposing the often invisible or masked power relations within existing racial hierarchies’. Colour-blindness is therefore not an answer to far-right movements and white identity politics, nor to racial segregation and hegemonic whiteness. Rather, as critical race and whiteness scholars have suggested, we need to develop methods and methodologies to understand the impact of race in society and to conceptualise its persistence (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). Researchers have shown that racists and anti-racists, as members of the white majority population, share similar meanings of race that reproduce hegemonic whiteness, in terms of white perspectives and white privileges (Hughey 2012). Hübinette and Lundström (2014) 12

Introduction

argue that the period of ‘white solidarity’ in Sweden – involving the construction of the Swedish nation as the most tolerant, anti-racist and progressive in the world – was not fundamentally different from the previous period of ‘white purity’, which was built on eugenics and scientific race thinking. This makes it possible to talk about a shift from one whiteness regime to another of hegemonic whiteness. Hübinette and Lundström’s argument echoes that of Gloria Wekker in her study of Dutch whiteness and the disidentification with the image of the Netherlands as an old colonial power. In her book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016), Wekker identifies a form of white innocence that she believes characterises Dutch whiteness – an innocence that strives to liberate itself from a colonial past. This interpretation could be extended to include the Swedish case and its moving away from the former period of race science and eugenics towards a national self-image as anti-racist and tolerant. These arguments build on the idea that there are interconnections between ‘good’ (anti-racist) whiteness and ‘bad’ (racist) whiteness, despite their diametrically opposed expressions: both emanate from a similar superior position of whiteness. Shannon Sullivan (2014) argues that disidentification with and distancing from the morally ‘bad’ white racist is a core component of the construction of the good, white (middle-class) anti-racist. The distinction between these two positions is made through the production of the morally superior, good, middle-class, white person, who is distinguished from the morally inferior, working-class, white (racist) person who is perceived to support right-wing populist politics. The connection between the lower classes and the ‘bad’ (and fundamentally different) whiteness is emblematic of the expression ‘white trash’, in which (working-class) whiteness – unlike middle-class whiteness – is marked and referred to as an inferior kind of whiteness. Sullivan holds that white anti-racism operates through an ‘othering’ of evil white historical figures, including American slaveholders, British colonial masters and German Nazis. These figures are demonised as a different kind of white person, with nothing to do with ‘us’. Thereby, they are made incomprehensible or even irrelevant, and disconnected from both historical and contemporary structures to support the ideas of individual anomalies and colour-blindness and a self-perception that ‘we’ do not ‘see’ race, and therefore racism is not a relevant issue for us. Ashley ‘Woody’ Doane (2003) critiques the colour-blind ideology, arguing that it permeates an idea that society is beyond race: What emerges is an image of a ‘postracial’ or ‘color-blind’ society, one in which race is no longer viewed as a significant obstacle to social and economic participation and where racism is no longer a structural phenomenon but is limited to hate crimes or other acts of discrimination committed by a small number of prejudiced individuals (who may be of any race). (Doane 2003, p. 13) In order to move beyond white supremacy and innocence, Sullivan (2014, p. 162) argues that white middle-class people must clean up their ‘unhealthy crap’ and move away from ‘the abjection of white trash, the othering of white ancestors, the distancing strategy of color-blindness, and the dominance of white guilt, shame, and betrayal’. Instead, they must develop ‘a critical form of self-love that helps transform whiteness’. As Alfred J. López (2005) puts it, white guilt has ‘been the prevalent condition blocking postcolonial studies from any careful examination of precisely how whiteness has managed all the damage it has inflicted on its others and what other forms a postcolonial whiteness might take’ (p. 23, emphasis in original). 13

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Sullivan argues that anti-racism is closely linked to gender, as white women seem particularly preoccupied with their moral position as ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’, and differentiated from the ‘dirty’ position of the white racist man. At the same time, white men are increasingly taking up the role of angry white man – in different shapes, through different actions and in different networks, as manifested in ‘incel’ movements and domestic terrorism (e.g. Anders Behring Breivik in Norway 2011) – and thereby expressing an increasingly toxic white masculinity. Such contemporary movements call for careful analysis, in consideration of social class, gender, race and marginalisation.

The crisis of white masculinity and the crisis of white hegemony Research on ‘the crisis of white masculinity’ has largely focused on the United States, even if insights from these studies have inspired analyses of other national settings (Carroll 2011; Frey 2014; Hartigan 2005). A core theoretical concept of this research is ‘aggrieved entitlement’, as coined by the American sociologist Michael Kimmel (2013). Kimmel uses this concept to describe the condition that arises when men’s expectations regarding economic advance, social prominence and authority in both the public and private spheres are not only challenged, but increasingly unfulfilled. Today, a number of countries – perhaps most obviously Eastern and Western white and semi-white nations – have particular versions of angry white men in politics (e.g. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin), as well as a rising number of angry white women (cf. Ware 2015). While studies have not been able to identify a decrease in the power and privileges related to white masculinity, there is a widespread assumption among certain groups of men – notably in Western societies – that they have been deprived of their rightful positions and benefits, due to a ‘feminism gone too far’ and politics aimed at enhancing gender equality and the non-discrimination of ethnic and racial minorities (Keskinen 2013; Norocel 2013; Norocel et al. 2020). This politicisation of gender links to ideas of ‘anti-feminism’ and ‘anti-gender’ that have been articulated within discourses about the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’. Such discourses portray especially Muslim males as sexual ‘others’ who threaten national and European values; they also frame feminists and queer movements as dangers to the existing social and gender orders (Eriksson 2013; Gutierréz Rodríguez, Tuzcu and Winkel 2018; Keskinen 2013; Lentin and Titley 2011; Verloo and Paternotte 2018). Widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, anti-genderism presents feminism and gender theories as alien to national traditions and harmful for the younger generations, who are argued to be in need of protection from these so-called radical ideologies. Anti-gender politics receives strong support from the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, while also being promoted by conservative politicians and right-wing populists in varying national contexts (Gutierréz Rodríguez, Tuzcu and Winkel 2018; Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). While some scholars, as well as public intellectuals, have ‘warned’ that the ethnic and racial minority population will soon outnumber the white majority population in the United States, Carroll (2011) and Frey (2014) describe how demographic developments are influencing the United States, especially among the younger generations. A similar ‘worry over the nation’ (Hage 1998) can be observed in several European countries – though here, the discourse is often framed around Muslims and Islam, rather than whites and non-whites. The effects of these changing demographics are not only about numbers, but also about racialised interpretations and the changing power balance between differently racialised groups. Suddenly, the status and privileges related to whiteness no longer appear as self-evident. Efforts to maintain or restore the unjust power structure defined by white privilege following this 14

Introduction

‘crisis of white hegemony’ (Keskinen 2018) have produced fierce political rhetoric and movements, such as the Alt-Right and anti-democratic mobilisations (i.e. the storming of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021 following the Presidential election of Joe Biden). Several chapters in this volume deal explicitly with the crisis of white masculinity and the crisis of white hegemony – most overtly expressed in the United Kingdom Brexit referendum and the elections of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Due to migration patterns to and from the post-colonial world, the very idea of the West is undergoing fundamental change, intimately linked to the idea of whiteness itself (Bonnett 2004; Hayes 2018; Le Renard 2021). This Handbook aims at uncovering how the boundaries of whiteness are shifting across geographies, following new migration patterns, mixed identities and relations (Ali 2003).

Future directions and questions for the field As illustrated above – and as exemplified in the chapters of this Handbook – the field of critical race and whiteness studies has now outgrown its original United States context. This outgrowth (or expansion) has included a number of attempts to re-work and re- develop the theories to suit different geographical contexts, each with their own historical specificity (Essed and Goldberg 2002). As we edited this Handbook, we were reminded of how vast the field of critical race and whiteness studies and theories has become, and how much it continues to grow. This growth is occurring in different arenas. First, there is a geographical expansion (as this Handbook shows), whereby critical race and whiteness theory is stretching into various countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Australia, while continuing to be relevant in its ‘birthplace’ of the United States. In all of these contexts, it is improving our understanding of contemporary societies and their tensions. Importantly, newer analyses are demonstrating skilled adaptation to the particular histories and societal conditions of their geographical field. Second, and centrally, critical race and whiteness theories have become more nuanced, illustrating the importance of studying whiteness not only in white-dominated societies, but also in societies dominated by people of colour (e.g. Asian societies), where the frameworks can provide useful theoretical tools for understanding the complexities of power and privilege. As mentioned above, we suggest that a fourth wave of whiteness studies is emerging from this broader range of research, which highlights the specificities of different regions and national contexts. Thus, we are moving beyond the United States and European focus of previous waves, while at the same time acknowledging the shared characteristics of whiteness as a power structure within a wide variety of geographical contexts (Lan 2022; Le Renard 2021). This Handbook aims at presenting a transnational perspective on different whitenesses, as they vary and shift across locations and continents. Although whiteness and nationalism are intimately linked in (racial) political projects, through notions of national ethnic identities, whiteness also intersects with processes of transnationalism. Furthermore, the imperial project of whiteness has undergone fundamental changes across time and place (MoretonRobinson, Casey and Nicoll 2008). Drawing on her study of transnational representations of white femininity, Raka Shome (2011) argues that it is crucial to link the national and the transnational in the formation of whiteness. Given that ‘national contexts, today are shaped by, as well as shaping, transnational relations of power, ignoring transnational linkages in the production of whiteness is limiting, for it can potentially perpetuate a view that power relations of whiteness within the nation are somehow disconnected from larger transnational struggles and flows’ (Shome 2011, p. 404). As this Handbook shows, a transnational analysis 15

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of racial logics deals with whiteness as lived and negotiated in relation to new and shifting social locations and boundaries, raising questions pertaining to identity, positionality, bodies, social relations and the processes of racialisation, as such. Furthermore, the Handbook aims at continuing the transdisciplinary dialogue between critical whiteness studies, or critical studies in whiteness (cf. Hunter and Van der Westhuizen 2022), and CRT by contributing theorisation and empirical research from many parts of the world, moving beyond the previous focus on Anglo-American perspectives on race and whiteness. Theoretically, this focus acknowledges that the ‘sociological significance of “whiteness” is closely connected to the meaning of “race”’ (Doane 2003, p. 8). Indeed, rather than seeing whiteness as a separate category from race, we argue that whiteness is located in a ‘racialised social system’ and a ‘historically contingent social identity’, always intertwined with the history of race and racism (Doane 2003, p. 9, italics in original; see also Bonilla-Silva 1997; Garner 2007). Over the years, CRT and critical whiteness studies have expanded into a number of disciplines, ranging from legal scholarship to the study of educational institutions, history, political science, sociology, arts and culture, philosophy and many other fields. This Handbook bears witness to this expansion, and we envision that this enlargement of critical race and whiteness studies will continue in the following years. At the same time, we do not necessarily predict that this expansion will arrive unnoticed, as there are serious attacks on this field of study, as described at the beginning of the chapter. Despite this, we do believe that there will be a development and expansion of the field, precisely because it is capable of supplying the tools, concepts and theories needed to understand and explain contemporary struggles and tensions related to race, discrimination, power and privilege. The theoretical frameworks and analyses presented in this Handbook seek to widen the horizons of research beyond the racial hierarchies, structured inequalities and racialised hostilities that are characteristic of our times. The politics of solidarity is essential for political struggles seeking to create social change and achieve social justice (Keskinen, Skaptadóttir and Toivanen 2019b). It is also the building block of activities that bring together differently positioned subjects and social movements to provide a counterforce to white, nationalist, conservative, anti-gender, anti-feminist, anti-queer, neoliberal policies and economic structures. Such policies and frameworks are creating increasingly precarious life circumstances across the globe and effecting hostile politics towards migrants, Blacks and other people of colour in the Western world. While such politics of solidarity is often fraught with controversy, contradiction and disagreement, based on varying social positions and ideological commitments, it is nevertheless the most hopeful trend we are witnessing emerging in different parts of the world. The spread of the BLM demonstrations and the upsurge in critical knowledge that followed, as well as the broad range of anti-racist and decolonial campaigns and movements that we identified at the beginning of this chapter, are just a few examples of the possibilities embedded in a politics of solidarity that takes demands of racial justice and intersectional power relations seriously. Knowledge production and collective organising are central for this; we hope that this Handbook will contribute to opening up new avenues for these ends.

Notes 1 All authors have contributed equally. 2 The Black Lives Matter movement (#BlackLivesMatter) began in 2013 as a response to the killing of the Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. With the killing of George Floyd going viral in 2020, the movement grew and spread globally, voicing criticism of racism in the United States as well as in various local and regional contexts.

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Andreassen, Keskinen, Lundström and Tale Crenshaw, K. W., Harris, L. C., Ho Sang, D. M. and Lipsitz, G., eds. (2019). Seeing race again: Countering colorblindness across the disciplines. Oakland: University of California Press. Davis, A. (1981). Women, race and class. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. Doane, W. (2003) Rethinking whiteness studies. In Doane, A. W. and Bonilla-Silva, E. (eds) White out: The continuing significance of racism. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 3–18. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York, NY: The Free Press. Dyer, R. (1997). White. Essays on Race and Culture. London: SAGE. Eng, D. (2001). Racial castration: Managing masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press. Eng, D. and Han, S. (2019). Racial melancholia, racial dissociation. On the social and psychic lives of Asian Americans. Durham: Duke University Press. Eriksson, M. (2013). Wronged white men: The performativity of hate in feminist narratives about anti-feminism in Sweden. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 21(4), pp. 249–263. Essed, P. (1991). Understanding everyday racism. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Essed, P. and Goldberg, D. T., eds. (2002) Race critical theories: text and context. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Fanon, F. (2008/1952). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press. Fassin, D. (2021). Are ‘woke’ academics a threat to the French republic? Ask Macron’s ministers. The Guardian. [Online] 12th March. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/academics-french-republic-macron-islamo-leftism [Accessed 20/12/2021]. Fine, M. E., Weis, L. E., Powell, L. C. and Wong, L. (1997). Off white: Readings on race, power, and society. London: Routledge. Folketingssamling (2020). https://www.ft.dk/samling/20201/vedtagelse/v137/index.htm. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. New York: Routledge. Frey, W. H. (2014). Diversity explosion: How new racial demographics are remaking America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. New York: Crossing Press. Gallagher, C. A. (2003). Color-blind privilege: The social and political functions of erasing the color line in post-race America. Race, Gender & Class, 10(4), pp. 22–37. Gallagher, C. and Twine, F. W. (2017). From wave to tsunami: the growth of third wave whiteness, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), pp. 1598–1603. Garner, S. (2007). Whiteness: An introduction. London: Routledge. Garner, S. (2014). Injured nations, racialising states and repressed histories: Making whiteness visible in the Nordic countries. Social Identities, 20(6), pp. 407–422. Garner, S. (2015). A moral economy of whiteness: Four frames of racializing discourse. London: Routledge. Garner, S. (2017). Surfing the third wave of whiteness studies: reflections on Twine and Gallagher. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), pp. 1582–1597. Gates, H. L. and Oliver, T. H. (1999). The souls of Black folk: WEB Du Bois. New York: WW Norton. Gilroy, P. (1992/1987). There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of nation and race. ­London: Routledge. Goldberg, T. (2006). Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(2), pp. 331–364. Goldberg, T. (2009). The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Grosfoguel, R. (2003). Colonial subjects: Puerto Ricans in a global perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guglielmo, T. (2003). White at arrival. Italians, race, color, and power in Chicago, 1890–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutierréz Rodríguez, E., Tuzcu, P. and Winkel, H. (2018) Introduction: Feminisms in times of antigenderism, racism and austerity. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68(May–June), pp. 139–141. Hage, G. (1998). White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. London: Routledge. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), pp. 1707–1791. Hartigan Jr., J. (1999). Racial situations: Class predicaments of whiteness in Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartigan, J. (2005). Odd tribes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayes, M. (2018). Gringolandia: Lifestyle migration under late capitalism. Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota Press.

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Introduction Hill Collins, P. (1997). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman? Black women and feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks. Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Hübinette, T., ed. (2017). Ras och vithet. Svenska rasrelationer igår och idag. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Hübinette, T. and Lundström, C. (2011). Sweden after the recent election: The double-binding power of Swedish whiteness through the mourning of the loss of “Old Sweden” and the passing of “Good Sweden”. NORA Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 19(1), pp. 42–52. Hübinette, T. and Lundström, C. (2014) Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: Understanding racial temporalities in Sweden. Social Identities, 20(6), pp. 423–437. Hübinette, T. and Mählck, P. (2015). ‘The racial grammar of Swedish higher education and research policy: The limits and conditions of researching race in a colour-blind context’, in Andreassen and Vitus (eds.) Affectivity and race: Studies from Nordic contexts. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 59–73. Hughey, M. (2012). White bound. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Hull, Gloria T., Bell-Scott, Patricia, and Smith, Barbara, eds. (1982). All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: black women’s studies. New York City, NY: Feminist Press. Hunter, S. and Van der Westhuizen, C., eds. (2022). Routledge handbook of critical studies in whiteness. London: Routledge. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge. Keskinen, S. (2013). Antifeminism and white identity politics: Political antagonisms in radical rightwing populist and anti-immigration rhetoric in Finland. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3(4), pp. 225–232. Keskinen, S. (2018). The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, neonationalist femininities and antiracist feminism. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68(May–June), pp. 157–163. Keskinen, S. (2019). Intra-Nordic differences, colonial/racial histories, and national narratives: rewriting Finnish history. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1–2), pp. 163–181. Keskinen, S. (2021). ‘Antiracist feminism and the politics of solidarity in neoliberal times’, in Keskinen, S., Stoltz, P. and Mulinari, D. (eds) Feminisms in the Nordic region: Neoliberalism, nationalism and decolonial critique. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–221. Keskinen, S. and Andreassen, R. (2017). Developing theoretical perspectives on racialisation and ­migration. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(2), pp. 64–69. Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. and Toivanen, M., eds. (2019a). Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region. Migration, difference, and the politics of solidarity. London: Routledge. Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. and Toivanen, M. (2019b). ‘Narrations of homogeneity, waning welfare states, and the politics of solidarity’, in Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. and Toivanen, M. (eds) Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region: Migration, difference, and the politics of solidarity. London: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Keskinen, S., Tuori, S., Irni, S. and Mulinari, D., eds. (2009). Complying with colonialism. Gender, race and ethnicity in the Nordic region. Farnham: Ashgate. Kimmel, M. S. (2013). Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York, NY: Nation Books. Kuokkanen, R. (2020). Reconciliation as a threat or structural change? The truth and reconciliation process and settler colonial policy making in Finland. Human Rights Revue, 21, pp. 293–312. Lan, S. (2022). The foreign bully, the guest and the low-income knowledge worker: Performing multiple versions of whiteness in China. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48, pp. 3544–3560. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2021.2021869 Lentin, A. (2004). Racism & anti-racism in Europe. London: Pluto Press. Lentin, A. and Titley, G. (2011). The crises of multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal age. London: Zed Books. Leonard, P. (2016). Expatriate identities in postcolonial organizations: Working whiteness. London: Routledge. Le Renard, A. (2021). Western privilege: Work, intimacy, and postcolonial hierarchies in Dubai. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Loftsdóttír, K. and Jensen, L., eds. (2012). Whiteness and postcolonialism in the Nordic region: Exceptionalism, migrant others and national identities. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Andreassen, Keskinen, Lundström and Tale López, A. J. (2005). Postcolonial whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire. New York: SUNY Press. López, I. H. (1996). White by law: The legal construction of race. New York: New York University Press. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lunde, A. (2010). Nordic exposures: Scandinavian identities in classical Hollywood cinema. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lundström, C. (2014). White migrations: Gender, whiteness and privilege in transnational migration. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lüthi, B., Falk, F. and Purtschert, P. (2015). Colonialism without colonies: Examining blank spaces in colonial studies. National Identities, 18(1), pp. 1–9. Massoumi, N. (2015). Muslim women, social movements and the ‘War on Terror’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McDowell, L. (2003). Redundant masculinities? Employment change and white working class youth. Malden: Blackwell. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moraga, C. and Anzaldúa, G. E., eds. (1981). This bridge called my back. New York, NY: Kitchen Table. Moreton-Robinson, A., Casey, M. and Nicoll, F., eds. (2008). Transnational whiteness matters. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Mueller, J. (2020). Racial ideology or racial ignorance? An alternative theory of racial cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), pp. 142–169. Myong, L. (2009). Adopteret – Fortællinger om transnational og racialiseret tilblivelse. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Norocel, O. C. (2013). “Give us back Sweden!” A feminist reading of the (re)interpretations of the Folkhem conceptual metaphor in Swedish radical right populist discourse. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 21(1), pp. 4–20. Norocel, O. C., Saresma, T., Lähdesmäki, T. and Ruotsalainen, M. (2020). Performing ‘us’ and ‘other’: Intersectional analyses of right-wing populist media. European Journal of Cultural Studies. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420980002 Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1986). Racial formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of white people. New York: W.W. Norton. Paternotte, D. and Kuhar, R. (2018). Disentangling and locating the ‘global right’: Anti-gender campaigns in Europe. Politics and Governance, 6(3), pp. 6–19. Pred, A. (2000). Even in Sweden. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roediger, D. R. (1991). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. New York: Verso. Sandoval, C. (1991). US Third World feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders 10 (Spring 1991), pp. 1–24. Schierup, C.-U., Ålund, A. and Kings, L. (2014). Reading the Stockholm riots: A moment for social justice? Race & Class, 55(3), pp. 1–21. Sexton, J. (2018). Black men, Black feminism: Lucifer’s nocturne. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Shome, R. (2011). “Global motherhood”: The transnational intimacies of white femininity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28(5): 388–406. Shome, R. (2014). Diana and beyond: White femininity, national identity, and contemporary media culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Sullivan, S. (2014). Good white people: the problem with middle-class white anti-racism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Trilling, D. (2020). Why is the UK government suddenly targeting ‘critical race theory’? The Guardian, 23rd October. Trinh, M. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tuzcu, P. (2016). ‘Allow access to location?’: Digital feminist geographies. Feminist Media Studies, 16(1), pp. 150–163. Twine, F. W. (1998). Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. Rutgers University Press. Twine, F. W. (2011). A white side of Black Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Introduction Twine, F. W. and Gallagher, C. (2008). The future of whiteness: A map of the ‘third wave’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), pp. 4–24. van Baar, H. (2011). The European Roma. Minority representation, memory and the limits of transnational governmentality. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. [Online]. Available from: http://www.huubvanbaar. nl/uploads/3/8/0/4/38045389/van_baar_2011_-_the_european_roma.pdf [Accessed 20/12/2021]. Verloo, M. and Paternotte, D. (2018). The feminist project under threat in Europe. Politics and Governance, 6(3), 1–5. Virdee, S. and McGeever, B. (2018). Racism, crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10), pp. 1802–1819. Ware, V. (2015). Beyond the pale: White women, racism, and history. Verso Books. Ware, V. and Back, L. (2002). Out of whiteness: Color, politics, and culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Warren, J. and Twine, F. W. (1997). White Americans, the new minority? Non-Blacks and the ever-expanding boundaries of whiteness. Journal of Black Studies, 28(2), pp. 200–218. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yancy, G., ed. (2004). What white looks like: African-American philosophers on the whiteness question. Routledge. Zuberi, T. and Bonilla-Silva, eds. (2008). White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology. Rowman & Littlefield.

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SECTION 1

Technologies

2 INTRODUCTION Technologies

Race has been analysed as a technology that creates inequalities (Benjamin 2016), sorts populations (e.g. Sheth 2009) and guides assisted reproduction (Andreassen 2018; Deomampo 2016; Russel 2018). Furthermore, digital technologies have also come under scrutiny, with scholars pointing to the ways in which they reproduce racism and sexism. Noble (2018) documents how traditional (prejudicial) understandings of race, sexuality and gender are integrated into Google programming, with the result that search data selections are rather biased. Noble compares Google searches to ‘the white, male gaze’ (p. 59) and describes Google’s performance as ‘algorithm oppression’ (Noble 2018, p. 4). In Automating Inequality (2017), Eubanks points to the unequal application of data surveillance technology within the population: George Orwell got one thing wrong. Big Brother is not watching you, he’s watching us. Most people are targeted for digital scrutiny as members of social groups, not as individuals. People of color, migrants, unpopular religions groups, sexual minorities, the poor, and other oppressed and exploited populations bear a much higher burden of monitoring and tracking than advanced groups. (2017, p. 6) The chapters in this section are aligned with these arguments, claiming that technologies are not neutral, but carriers of ideologies and values (Drucker 2011; Kannabiran and Petersen 2010). The section begins with France Winddance Twine’s chapter on ‘Silicon Valley’s caste system: Whiteness as a form of geek capital’. Here, Twine analyses the ways in which race privilege operates in the technology industry, focusing on the experiences of technically skilled women in Silicon Valley. Drawing upon critical race theory and employing an intersectional theoretical lens that illuminates the operation of caste, class, gender, race and ethnicity, she shows how white women from middle-class backgrounds are perceived as more desirable workers and members of the dominant group in Silicon Valley’s occupational caste system. Thus, whiteness serves as a form of ‘geek capital’ that grants white, university-educated women a structural advantage. Differently, university-educated and technically skilled Black and Latinx women who are first-generation technology workers from all class backgrounds encounter a ‘glass wall’ and struggle to convert their educational credentials and technical skills into fulltime jobs. Even a degree in computer science or engineering does not protect them from being DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-3

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rejected and excluded from jobs for which they qualify. Thus, their experiences demonstrate that merit is interpreted through a racialised lens and does not guarantee access to employment in the technology sector in California. Twine argues that the persistent ‘myth of meritocracy’ serves to rationalise and normalise the exclusion of Black, Latinx and Native American women in technically skilled positions. She also points to the social segregation of technology workers (by race, caste, class, national origin, religious faith and/or occupation) as an obstacle for the organisation of technology workers in pursuit of intersectional justice. Following a similar line, in the chapter ‘Artificialising whiteness? How AI normalises whiteness in theory, policy and practice’, Pauline Leonard analyses artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspectives of critical race and whiteness theory, socio-technical studies and governmentality. She shows how contemporary operationalisations of AI, such as automated decision-making processes, can be understood as tools for securing the privileges and power of whiteness, despite being positioned under the guise of neutral technology. Investigating the intersections of these processes with gender and social class, Leonard demonstrates how they consistently and routinely artificialise whiteness by disadvantaging members of marginalised groups. As a consequence, minorities – and particularly Black and ethnic minority women – become further marginalised and potentially subjected to unfair and biased (automated) decision-making. She concludes that many of the United States AI systems – as well as the AI industry, more broadly – collude in artificialising whiteness. She therefore advocates for a recognition of AI as a racial, gendered and classist system of governance that seeks to reassert, renew and normalise facets of white supremacy. The final chapter, ‘White time: The relationship between racial identity, contexts, interactions and temporality’, by Matthew Hughey, investigates time as a technology, and the relationship between time and race. Hughey nuances the normative understanding of time and temporal experience as constant, arguing that different social groups – and especially ethnic and racial collectives – are subject to different temporal constraints and hold varied perceptions of time. Simply put, time is racialised. While this insight could lead to a reductionist appraisal of people of colour, Hughey provides a corrective to this line of argumentation by claiming that temporal sensitivities contribute to experiences of racial belonging and identity. Analysing data from four all-white organisations, Hughey shows how particular understandings of time contribute to shaping white racial identity and white belonging, how white racial identity and various racialised settings shape perceptions of time and how such interpretations serve as mechanisms of a racialised social order.

References Andreassen, R. (2018). Mediated kinship. Gender, race and sexuality in donor families. London: Routledge. Benjamin, R. (2016). Innovating inequality: If race is a technology, postracialism is the Genius Bar. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), pp. 2227–2234. Deomampo, D. (2016). Transnational reproduction: Race, kinship and commercial surrogacy in India. New York: New York University Press. Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities approaches to interface theory. Culture Machine, 12(1), pp. 1–20. Eubanks, V. (2017). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police and punish the poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kannabiran, G. and Petersen, M. G. (2010). Politics at the interface: A Foucauldian power analysis. NordiCHI 2010, pp. 16–20. Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press. Russel, C. (2018). The assisted reproduction of race. Indiana University Press. Sheth, F. (2009). Toward a political philosophy of race. Albany: SUNY Press.

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3 WHITENESS AS A FORM OF GEEK CAPITAL IN SILICON VALLEY France Winddance Twine

Silicon Valley’s technology industry has generated vast wealth and numerous opportunities in a region of stark inequality. Black, Latina and Native American women remain virtually invisible in technical and leadership positions in Silicon Valley. In Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley, Emily Chang, a technology journalist for Bloomberg News, describes the experiential gap and various forms of discrimination that divide women in Silicon Valley: In Silicon Valley, if you’re not a white man, your identity is a ball and chain, from which you cannot escape. White women in tech have one kind of burden. Latina women have another. Black women, yet another. Asians are generally well-represented in the filed but underrepresented in leadership, adding another wrinkle to the story. […] And aside from race, there are so many other facets of one’s identity that can leave women feeling even more isolated. […] Simply hiring more white women isn’t going to solve Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. If the industry is supposed to represent the future, there must be room for talented people who are not young, straight, white, well established, childless, and male. (Chang 2018, p. 127) In this chapter, I draw on my research on technically-skilled women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds employed in Silicon Valley to illuminate how whiteness serves as a crucial form of geek capital. I focus on the ways in which racial privilege operates (for white women) in the technology sector. In Silicon Valley, the ‘myth of meritocracy’ serves to rationalise and normalise the exclusion of Blacks, Latinx and Native American women from technically-skilled positions. Drawing upon original data from 87 interviews, surveys and memoirs, I argue that white women – who must negotiate pregnancy discrimination, wage discrimination, sexual harassment and toxic workplaces – as members of the racially dominant group in Silicon Valley, also benefit from white privilege (Gee and Peck 2016; Mundy 2017; Paul 2021). In a study of inequality and opportunity in Silicon Valley

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-4

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(Twine, 2019; 2022), I found that white women were able to leverage this form of cultural and symbolic capital, along with their social, marital and familial proximity to white men, to secure technically-skilled jobs in Silicon Valley. My study differs from earlier research by way of its intersectionality, its attention to caste and class and its inclusion of cisgender, transgender and gender fluid women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. While gender discrimination continues to present barriers to upward mobility, white women from all class backgrounds, as members of one of the dominant groups in Silicon Valley’s occupational caste system, have greater access to gatekeepers and are perceived as more desirable workers. I argue that whiteness is a form of geek capital that gives universityeducated white women a structural advantage in their efforts to secure positions as software engineers, even when these women do not hold a relevant degree in engineering, computer science or mathematics.

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley takes its name from the main component in semiconductors. Before the silicon chips, software, cloud computing and information technologies replaced plums, prunes, apricots and other agricultural products as the dominant local industry, the region was called the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. Timothy Sturgeon argues that the Silicon Valley tech industry is ‘nearly [one] hundred years old and grew out of a historically and geographically specific context that cannot be re-created’ (p. 47), whose roots can be traced to the early electronics industry that emerged in San Francisco Bay in its ‘early days of experimentation and innovation’ (see Timothy Sturgeon, p. 16). Between 1909 and 1960, a series of innovations and commercial products in wireless communication technologies, military electronics, consumer electronics (microwave ovens) and commercial radios were developed in the larger San Francisco Bay Area. These innovations, as well as their associated networks and military financing, laid the foundation for many new industries, including those of radio, telegraph, telephone, film, hi-fi stereo, public broadcast and military radar technologies (Kenney 2000; Rao 2013; Saxenian 1994). Radio waves, telephone and telegraph, wireless communications, featuring, were the new technologies between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In 2010, the US Census reported that Silicon Valley’s ethnic composition was 35 per cent Asian, 33 per cent white, 25 per cent Hispanic/Latinx, 2 per cent Black and 5 per cent other/ multi-ethnic. Foreign-born residents made up 39.1 per cent of the population, of which 47 per cent were comprised immigrants from China (18 per cent), Mexico (16 per cent) and India (13 per cent), followed by Vietnam (10 per cent), the Philippines (10 per cent), Europe (8 per cent) and other parts of Asia (12 per cent). Among the residents, 25 per cent had a graduate or professional degree, 28 per cent had a bachelor’s degree, 22 per cent had completed some college, 14 per cent were high school graduates, and 11 per cent had completed some high school. On 10 January 1971, technology journalist Don Hoefler used the term ‘Silicon Valley’ in a three-part series of articles on the ‘men, money, and litigation’ behind the semiconductor business (Berlin 2017, p. 73). Published in the Electronic News, a now obscure industry trade journal, these articles popularised the term, which replaced earlier descriptions of the region as the Santa Clara Valley electronics industry (Berlin 2017, p. 406). Today, the Silicon Valley refers to a region extending 35 miles south from San Francisco, along the San Francisco

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Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

Peninsula. Metonymically, it also refers to the entire tech industry in northern California, adjacent to San Francisco.

The myth of meritocracy The ‘myth of meritocracy’ is one of the most powerful ideologies embraced by the technology workers who participated in this study. A belief in ‘pure merit’ remains dominant among technology workers in India and the United States. In the United States, this myth has existed alongside hiring practices that privilege non-meritocratic factors (e.g. academic prestige) that do not necessarily reflect the skills or abilities of job applicants. The myth of meritocracy asserts that everyone has access to the same opportunities and that the groups that dominate in corporate leadership have earned their status. In other words, they have not benefitted from cumulative advantages related to non-meritorious factors such as race, class, caste, cultural background and parental resources, but have achieved their positions on the basis of individual merit. This myth conceives of workers and job applicants as operating in a social vacuum, separated from networks, and views their ‘human capital’ – rather than their economic, cultural and social capital – as the primary cause of their situation. It places responsibility on underrepresented groups – primarily Blacks and Latinx – for their failure to get hired, rather than considering larger structures and the ways in which ‘skill is a social construct’ (Abbate 2012, p. 40). The meritocracy myth is enduring and resilient, even though it is undermined by observations that contradict it. For example, Ellen Pao recalls in her memoir: About four hundred employees were working there when I started, and the three cofounders were creative, smart, and professional. […] I don’t think I worked with a single Latinx or Black employee the whole time I was there. The three cofounders were white men; most of the managers were, too. My group – business development – had three women in it, including one manager. To me, at the entry level it was fine and fair enough. (Pao 2017, p. 44) Among the 87 technology workers who participated in my study, only a small minority (fewer than 10 per cent) directly challenged the myth of meritocracy, even after describing being passed over for promotion. The technologists who challenged this myth were Black women, gender queer women and people from working class backgrounds. Even women who reported experiences of discrimination and instances of men being promoted over equally qualified women adhered to a belief that these men had secured their positions through a meritocratic system. In her analysis of the discourse of ‘pure merit’ versus ‘caste merit’ in India, Marilyn Fernandez concludes that the information technology (IT) industry in India is an ‘ironic vehicle for the reproduction of caste hierarchies in the IT occupational world. The seemingly caste-neutral merit construction project has turned discriminatory of the lowest castes while privileged the dominant cases and classes’ (Fernandez 2018, p. 5). Fernandez explains how the notion of ‘merit-based’ hiring is compared to and perceived as the opposite of the ‘nepotism of old industries’, whereby personal ties come first, family comes second and caste comes third (Fernandez 2018, p. 9). In India, the Mandal Commission created a system that

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reserved a quota of positions in government and public industries for the ‘Scheduled Castes’ and the ‘Backward Castes’. Although the IT industry is perceived, in India, as an industry in which jobs are secured on the basis of merit, Fernandez argues that ‘merit’ is, in fact, the product of caste and class privilege. If ‘pure’ merit is primarily accessible to the dominant castes and classes, it stands to reason that caste privileges are reproduced in the new IT sector. Caste privileges percolated into the preparation of ‘pure’ merit and in its application in the recruitment and promotion structures in the IT workplace, set the stage for diffusion and replication of caste hierarchies in the IT workplace structure and practices. […] Pure merit, to many Indians from dominant castes and class backgrounds, is also the opposite of reservation merit. […] Caste, to them, stands for SC (Dalits) and for the reservation merit gained by Dalits and other minorities through the social justice programs. […] It is the caste-embedded merit, hidden and normalised, that offers clues into the caste diffusion and replicating potential in Indian IT. […] ‘Pure’ merit is just a ‘code’ word for caste advantage fiercely defended, to the point of turning the competition into a ‘blood sport’. (Fernandez 2018, pp. 16–17) In the contemporary context, in which IT workers belong to a global labour force, it is important to understand how the elites and dominant classes in the United States and India understand the meaning of ‘merit’ in ways that reinforce structural inequality. The dismantling of ‘affirmative action programmes’ in the United States and resistance by upper-caste Indians to the Mandal Commission in India demonstrate a transnational form of solidarity that disguises discriminatory policies as merit-based.

Being white in Silicon Valley In my analysis of the narratives of their occupational trajectories of the white women engineers in this study, non-meritocratic factors played a key role in their entrée into the technology industry. I found that opportunities for technically-skilled women to secure internships and full-time jobs as engineers were mediated by social, familial and friendship networks. The quantity and quality of geek capital that white women possessed, shaped the obstacles and opportunities they encountered as they launched their careers and pursued jobs in Silicon Valley. Cisgender and transgender white women, and their Asian American and Asian Indian peers, had social proximity to men embedded in the technology industry, with whom they shared a caste, class, racial, ethnic and/or familial relationship. These men provided them with privileged access to decision makers who could offer them entry- and mid-level jobs. The quantity and quality of women’s social relationships with people in the tech industry constituted a form of geek capital that linked them to other tech workers (i.e. friends, lovers, former classmates). These relationships provided them with access to information about jobs at start-ups and established technology firms, and introduced them to key gatekeepers. Half of the women in the study secured their first job through internships or social referrals. While these women may have possessed relevant educational credentials and basic technical skills, it was their proximity to company founders and cofounders that enabled them to learn about new positions, and secure interviews at publicly trade firms and small start-ups (Figure 3.1). 30

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

Google Women Workers by Race as a Percentage of Overall U.S. Workforce, 2020

White

Asian

Latinx

Black

Other

0.0%

Figure 3.1

2.0%

4.0%

6.0%

8.0%

10.0%

12.0%

14.0%

16.0%

Google’s women workers by race, as a percentage of the overall United States workforce, 2020

White supremacy in a region of stark inequality On 23 June 2020, the San José State University Human Rights Institute held a press conference outside the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown San José. It released a report authored by Scott Myers-Lipton, titled the ‘Silicon Valley Pain Index’, representing the first of several planned annual reports on racial discrimination and income inequality in Silicon Valley (Geha 2020). In the report, Myers-Lipton (2020), an activist and sociologist at San José State University, drew on 65 data points to analyse racial and income inequality in Silicon Valley, concluding that white supremacy was operating in most institutions and systems. In Silicon Valley, residents who earn less than USD 82,000 per year (or USD 117,000 for a family of four) are considered low income. The city’s minimum wage is USD 15.59 per hour, which means that a minimum wage earner working 40 hours per week with no vacations grosses USD 32,427.20 per year – far less than the median annual rent for a one-bedroom apartment. Many homeless (unhoused) residents in the San Francisco Bay Area who sleep in shelters are employed full-time during the day (see OpenDoors 2019). Since 1970, ‘real income’ (i.e. income adjusted for inflation) in the United States has been relatively flat. But the cost of major purchases (e.g. houses, cars, education) has increased ahead of inflation (Table 3.1).

Racial and gender inequality in Silicon Valley Since 2014, a steady stream of blogs, memoirs, lawsuits, annual diversity reports and investigative reports written by technology journalists has lifted the curtain on anti-Black racism, sexual harassment, systemic wage discrimination and pregnancy discrimination in Silicon 31

France Winddance Twine Table 3.1 Silicon Valley Pain Index: income and wealth inequality in Santa Clara County 0 1% 3% 3% 31% 46% 47%

6 5.6% 11.8% 12.7% 61% 74 USD 28,960 USD 40,886 USD 63,136 USD 82,810 USD 94,540 USD1,200,000

Number of Black women employed by ten large tech companies Percentage of venture capital (out of USD 19 billion) that went to Black startup firms Percentage of large tech firms with no Black employees Percentage of Black employees in the top 75 tech firms Percentage of large tech firms with no women of colour executives Percentage of employees at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo who are white (yet whites hold 80% of the executive positions) Percentage of employees at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo who are Asian and Asian American (yet Asian and Asian Americans hold 25% of the executive positions) County’s rank among all United States counties for income inequality Percentage of whites in the county living in poverty Percentage of Latinx in the county living in poverty Percentage of Blacks in the county living in poverty Percentage of the homeless population that is Black and Latinx Number of billionaires Average per capita income for Latinx Average per capita income for Blacks Average per capita income for Asian Americans Average per capita income for whites Annual income for a family of four to be considered low income Median home price

Source: San José State University Human Rights Institute 2021.

Valley (Broyles and Fenner 2010; Isaac 2016; Jacobson 2014; Kim and Rangarajan 2018; Kolhatkar 2017; Levin 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d, 2018a, 2018b; Luckie 2018; Varathan 2017). In particular, the rejection of domestic minorities – especially Blacks, Latinx people and Native Americans – remains entrenched in publicly traded tech firms in Silicon Valley, including both American and Indian multinationals with offices in Silicon Valley (Bhuiyan 2021; Dickey 2016a, 2016b; Fowler 2017; Gee and Peck 2016; Kamble 2020; Mundy 2017; Neate 2015; Pao 2017; Paul 2021; Sohrabji 2018). Summarising a 2016 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) report that concluded that the tech industry was underutilising a diverse talent pool, Megan Rose Dickey wrote: ‘Of the people graduating from top engineering programs, 9% are Black and Latinos but representation at tech firms typically falls around 5% according to the EEOC’s recent analysis of the EEOC data’ (Dickey 2018). Since 2015, millions of dollars have been spent on diversity initiatives, which have failed to increase the numbers of Black and Latinx employees in Silicon Valley firms. According to Google’s 2020 ‘Diversity Report’, the numbers of Black and Latinx employees have remained relatively flat for the past five years (Ashcraft, McLain and Eger 2016). Reporting for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Dean and Johana Bhuiyan wrote: The industry, which prides itself on agility, has failed to move the needle on workplace diversity. The net result of an entire sector of the economy – the sector that has created 32

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

the most wealth in California in the last 10 years, minted billionaires, and reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in its own image – that is functionally barely open to Black and Latino people. (Dean and Bhuiyan 2020) While white women have made modest gains in their efforts to move into management positions in Silicon Valley, the same cannot be said for Asian American, Black and Latinx women (Gee and Peck 2016). This is because, in Silicon Valley, a racial and ethnic caste system operates to shape ‘inequality regimes’ and opportunity structures for white women (Acker 2006). Inequality regimes, which are a durable feature of Silicon Valley tech firms, represent a central feature of ‘occupational caste systems’. I employ this term to refer to occupational structures in which individuals are rewarded, recruited and disciplined based – in part – on factors unrelated to merit, such as race, gender, caste, national origin and the prestige of their alma mater.1 Tech workers and journalists have identified and written about a pervasive pattern of sexist, racist and misogynistic behaviour, as well as the rejection of qualified Black job candidates, as a normative part of the ‘bro’ occupational culture. Erica Joy Baker is a Black engineer who co-founded Project Include with Ellen Pao, Tracy Chou and others.2 Joy spent more than a decade working in three of Google’s regional offices, in Atlanta, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. At each of these offices, she experienced the same forms of discrimination. Indeed, job- or office-hopping does not always resolve problems for Black women because, as gender and racial tokens, they tend to encounter the same labour conditions, ideologies and cultural practices that marginalise and disempower them in each environment. Joy was transferred to the New York office after she complained about what she called micro-aggressions (but I consider racial abuse) at the Atlanta office. She described encountering the same hostile climate at the New York office: On the team in New York, I was once again the only Black women. I did what I thought I had to do survive in the environment. I once again donned the uniform to fit in: jeans, ‘unisex’ T-shirt, Timbuk2 messenger bag. I stayed late playing multiplayer Battlefield; I quickly learned a bunch of classic rock songs so I could play Rock Band and Guitar Hero with the team. I don’t like beer, so I went out to beer taverns and drank water. […] We worked a lot then, so my team became my social life, and I never hung out with many others. What Joy describes here is what the sociologist Karyn Lacy refers to as ‘social unity’. Joy’s adoption and performance of a cultural style created a bond with her white and Asian peers. Her behaviour constitutes a form of ‘cultural literacy’ employed by Black professionals to negotiate and minimise the cultural distance between themselves and non-Black workers of a similar class status. Joy’s actions are also examples of ‘boundary work’ (Lacy 2007, p. 76). After leaving Google’s New York office and transferring to its Silicon Valley office, Joy once again found herself isolated in a racially homogeneous workplace. Although she liked her work, she was forced to continually manage the stress of having no co-ethnics in her work environment. Joy detailed the emotional cost of working in the tech industry as a Black woman for 13 years, describing the long-term impact on her mental, emotional and physical health. Here are just a few of the issues she mentioned: I feel alone every day I come to work despite being surrounded by people, which results in feelings of isolation. 33

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I am constantly making micro-evaluations about whether or not my actions will be attributed to my being ‘different’. I feel like there isn’t anyone who can identify with my story, so I don’t tell it. I feel like I have to walk a tightrope to avoid reinforcing stereotypes while still being heard. I feel a constant low level of stress every day, just by virtue of existing in my environment. In Joy’s blogs and other writings about the ideological variety among tech workers and the ways in which racism is allowed to thrive in Silicon Valley tech firms, she calls for racism to be a fireable offence (see Baker 2016). Black men have also reported feelings of isolation in these firms, comparing their experiences to being in a ‘parallel universe’. Mark Karake, Founder and CEO of Impact Africa, described the limits of diversity discourse as follows: Diversity was an academic concept, something they had encountered only on screen as part of a soon forgotten college lecture, an abstraction they would never have to deal with in their lives. […] So many arrived from Boston that at some point you could pick them out right away. […] San Francisco felt like an annex of Boston. […] The mono culture was suffocating, the social rejection painful, and the solation crushing. (Karake 2020) In my interviews, the isolation that Black technologists described also echoed the statistics and narratives published in media reports (Grant 2018).

Geek capital Geek capital comprises more than simply technical skills. It also includes networks – social relationships and/or membership in exclusive alumni-, ethnic-, status- and/or class-based networks with ties to the transnational tech industry. Importantly, geek capital allows job candidates to be perceived as possessing ‘merit-based’ qualifications. In my study, 40 per cent of the white women and 90 per cent of the Asian Indian women possessed forms of geek capital, as daughters, siblings, spouses, cousins, domestic partners, former classmates and/ or friends of men and women embedded in the tech ecosystem. In particular, the immigrant, Indian-born women were from a high caste and middle-class background, and were second-generation engineers. This type of social capital is called ‘bonding capital’ (Putnam 2000; Woolcock and Sweetser 2002), as it connects members of the same exclusive networks. Geek capital is a form of social currency that provides unequal access to tech jobs based on social and familial ties, rather than merit. In Silicon Valley, access to jobs is controlled by the ‘technocrati’ – members of the ruling classes in Silicon Valley, who have attended a small number of elite American schools and Indian Institutes of Technology. Thus, the technocrati comprise a narrow slice of all university-educated racial and ethnic demographics in the United States, and they effect a hiring bias in the industry. Indeed, in her study of hiring practices between the 1950s and the early 1970s, Janet Abbate found that ‘the most popular strategies for recruiting programmers […] produced contradictory constructions of skill’ (Abbate 2012, p. 41). Women who are the first in their family to pursue work in the tech industry face different challenges and barriers to entry than women whose parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins or other family members have established a well-worn pathway to the industry. Those who are following this well-worn pathway typically enjoy more family support and economic 34

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

Facebook vs Google Workforce by Race, 2020 Facebook

Google

Asian

White

Latinx

Black

Multiracial

Other 0.0%

10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

Figure 3.2 Facebook versus Google workforce, by race, 2020

capital – both of which prepare them for entering the industry. In my study, roughly 40 per cent of the white American women and 90 per cent of the Asian Indian women who were engineers identified as the daughters or sisters of engineers. In other words, they were the second or third generation in their family to pursue engineering as a career. Unlike their Asian and white counterparts, university-educated and technically-skilled Black women described having little or no access to mentors and money (funding) and few or no co-ethnics in management and leadership positions. They lacked social ties to the industry, in both quantity and quality. In other words, they did not have family members embedded in the tech ecosystem. Even a degree in computer science or engineering did not protect them from the patterns of rejection documented by tech journalists and sociologists (Alfrey and Twine 2017; Vara 2016; Figure 3.2).

Structural racism in Silicon Valley In 2014, Facebook reported that it had hired 7 Black people out of a total of 1,231 global hires in 2013 (see Facebook’s first annual ‘Diversity Report’, released in 2015). In 2013, Facebook’s global workforce included only 10 Black women and 28 Black men. Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of Black employees at Facebook grew from 1 to 3 per cent. However, as its United States employee base grew to 27,705, it hired fewer than 1,000 Black people, according to EEO-1 reports. Black employees’ share of the company’s workforce during its period of rapid expansion rose to only 3.7 percent. University-educated Black and Latinx women were hired at much lower rates than one would expect, given their relative proportion of the university-educated population. The narratives of women tech workers reveal a troubling pattern of racism and sexual harassment in Silicon Valley’s organisational culture (Chang 2018; Chou 2013; Fowler 2017; Isaac 2016, 20171, 2017b, 2017c; Joy 2015; Pao 2017; Shevinsky 2015a), with endemic racism 35

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and casteism. Tech journalists, in particular, have documented numerous instances of caste discrimination and anti-Black racism in Silicon Valley. Representation of Black employees in the tech industry varies by region in the United States. The 2016 American Community Survey found that tech hubs in Atlanta, Houston, Miami, New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC employed 1.5 to 3.3 times the number of Black and Latinx tech workers as Silicon Valley (US Census Bureau 2016). Most strikingly, in Atlanta, Blacks represented 20.6 per cent of the tech workforce; in Houston, the percentage was 11.9 per cent. Silicon Valley emerged as the region with the worst record for hiring Black tech workers. In a 2016 report, the Ascend Foundation – a pan-Asian organisation – analysed EEOC data for the period 2007 to 2015, finding that racial minorities had made no meaningful progress in their efforts to reach management and executive positions in the tech industry. The report concluded that diversity initiatives had produced measurable results for white women, while Asian women faced a ‘bamboo ceiling’ and Black women lost significant ground. At every level of the tech ladder, Black women were statistically almost invisible. The Ascend report found an 18 per cent decline in the number of Black managers and a 13 per cent decline in the number of Black professional women in Silicon Valley. Using an intersectional lens that addressed both race and gender, the report noted: In general, although minority women faced both racial and gender gaps, […] race, not gender, was increasingly the more important factor in limiting minority women in the pipeline. The data show that for Black women, the racial gap was 5.35x the gender gap in 2014; for Asian women, the racial gap was 2.91x the gender gap in 2015. (Gee and Peck 2016, p. 17) Due to the intersections between forms of discrimination and forms of capital (i.e. economic, residential, educational, social, marital), the Black women in my study experienced

Google Intersectional Leadership Representation, 2020 65.9% White 16.8% Women

49.1% Men

8.5% Women

21.1% Men

29.6% Asian

3.7% Latinx 1.5% Women 2.2% Men

2.6% Black 1.1% Women

0.5% Native American 0.3% Women 0.2% Men

Figure 3.3 Racial demographics of employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter, 2016

36

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

more ‘social closure’ than their Asian and white counterparts in the tech sector. Sociologists refer to this as ‘network distance’ – that is, one’s social distance from industry founders, decision makers and gatekeepers. In other words, the Black women typically lacked friends, family, spouses, siblings and former classmates in the industry (Figure 3.3).

Glass walls Glass walls are social and cultural barriers to employment that confront job applicants from underrepresented groups, even when those applicants possess the educational credentials and/or technical expertise to do the job well. Glass walls are produced by corporate recruitment policies and social referrals that privilege non-meritocratic factors. They block both access to entry-level positions and horizontal mobility into full-time permanent positions for employees on short-term contracts (i.e. maternity cover or project-based contracts). Similar to glass ceilings, glass walls are often invisible until they are hit; at that point, one is unable to move further into the industry. Glass walls stratify workers into a two-tier system in which some workers are hired on temporary contracts and treated as disposable, while others are offered permanent positions. They differ from glass ceilings, because glass ceilings only block upward mobility and advancement for those who are already employed. Glass walls illuminate how corporate hiring and recruitment practices create obstacles to employment for qualified job applicants, and reproduce the racial, gender and class status quo. Glass walls are produced by recruitment practices based on social referral and the restriction of information about jobs to gatekeepers. They reinforce social closure and enable dominant groups in the industry to hoard opportunities for their own group members (i.e. those of a similar age, race, ethnicity, caste and national origin; and those with similar cultural tastes and leisure interests). In the tech industry, recruitment often includes a series of interviews with members of work teams over a period of several months. This can also represent a barrier to employment for job applicants who cannot afford to wait months for a job offer that may not materialise. In this situation, Black and Latinx women who lack economic resources are unable to convert their educational credentials into employment as easily as their racially privileged peers.

Parents and siblings as a form of geek capital Joelle, is a 26-year-old white software engineer employed at a top technology firm in San Francisco, who was interviewed for this study. As the daughter of a white mechanical engineer and a geologist, she represents a pattern found among second-generation engineers. Her father and sister were mentors to her, and they had played a central role in her successful launch of her career. After completing an internship at the same company as her sister, Joelle was offered a position. Her sister had completed an internship at Google. Her sister had also interned at the same company, before taking an engineering job at Google. (Summer internships at technology firms, in which students learn skills and receive on-the-job training, are essential for securing entry-level position in Silicon Valley after college graduation.) When she was a child, Joelle’s father had encouraged and actively supported her interest in robotics. Her older sister had referred Joelle to her current position, having already built connections with the company through her previous internship. This is an example of the opportunity hoarding mechanism that Richard Reeves calls the ‘informal allocation of internships’ (Reeves 2017, p. 12). The mentoring Joelle received from her father is another form of geek capital that white women reported. Growing up, Joelle’s parents provided her with experiences that exposed 37

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her to the field of electrical engineering. As a very young child, she worked on electrical engineering projects with her father. When she was 6 years old, she and her father engaged in sauntering projects, creating computer circuit boards. Later, as a high school student, Joelle joined a robotics club, in which her father volunteered to serve as a mentor. Thus, similar to the other white women interviewed in my study, Joelle experienced her parents as supportive of her informal education in childhood, through play and coursework. In their study of women engineers, Judith McIlwee and J. Gregg Robinson found that the women often had a ‘built-in’ mentor (McIlwee and Robinson 1992), which I consider a form of geek capital. As the daughter and sister of engineers, Joelle had access to information, training, support and social referrals. Similar to the other second-generation Asian and white technology workers I interviewed, Joelle described an educational and social universe in which Black and Latinx people were completely absent. In other words, her childhood and educational environments were racially and culturally homogeneous. Similarly, her descriptions of her workplace revealed a stark absence of Black and Latinx co-workers, mirroring the dismal demographic data referring to Silicon Valley tech firms during the period from 2014 to 2019. Joelle’s father played a key role in cultivating her interest in engineering, and her older sister created a path for her into the industry. Both Joelle and her sister modelled themselves after their father, and this may have insulated them from feelings of isolation in male- dominated classrooms during their undergraduate and graduate studies in engineering. Similar to the Asian Indian women I interviewed, Joelle did not perceive of engineering as a ‘masculine’ profession. A similar sentiment also emerged in the narratives of my Anglo-American and Chinese American respondents.

Childhood friends as geek capital Natasha, one of the white engineers in my study, is the 24-year-old daughter of an Anglo-American mother and a Russian father. She grew up in a white, fundamentalist Christian community in rural Alaska, then earned a degree in computer science from an elite, all-women’s college in Massachusetts. Natasha had been employed as a software engineer for six months. Among the white women engineers in this study, she was the only one who had grown up in rural poverty and had grown up outside of the continental United States. Nonetheless, as her career trajectory illuminates, her whiteness and proximity to upper-middle-class white friends functioned as a form of geek capital. Although neither of her parents attended college, she was able to secure a scholarship to an elite educational institution in New England. A close friend had served as a peer mentor in her college application process, introducing her to the elite schools on the East Coast of the United States. Natasha described herself as a mediocre student who did not do well in school; even still, her whiteness and the symbolic capital of her degree from an elite educational institution provided her with significant geek capital. Although Natasha grew up without class privilege, her friendships with white, m iddle-class peers and her access to knowledge had allowed her to integrate into an upper-middleclass friendship network at school. Describing her childhood interest in computing, she recalled: I didn’t grow up with anyone who was a software engineer. I had literally never read a line of code, didn’t know what that meant. I thought computers were boring until a friend told me that our computer science classes were actually interesting. I would say 38

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

that since then, the department kind of lit a fire under me. And I thought: ‘This is really cool. I want to put a lot of effort into doing this.’ I ended up taking a lot of computer science classes each semester. As the daughter of divorced parents who survived on welfare and were not college educated, Natasha represented an outlier among white engineers in the tech industry. Nevertheless, her childhood friendship with a white, middle-class girl and her own whiteness and education at an elite East Coast school provided her with cultural and symbolic capital that allowed her to ‘pass’ as middle class. In my study, almost all of the white women engineers were from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Similarly, all of the technically-skilled Asian American and Asian Indian workers came from two-parent homes with university-educated parents; they received knowledge and direction about their academic choices from their familial and social networks, and this was a form of capital that was taken for granted. Natasha expressed a heightened awareness of the ways in which her full scholarship to an elite educational institution had allowed her access to experiences that were typically only available to women with greater class privilege. Describing her career trajectory, she recalled: I went to a liberal arts college in Boston that wasn’t mainly focused on tech but had a computer science department. […] And I started taking computer courses halfway through college – end of sophomore year. I’ll start there because that’s the first step I made in trying to get a job in tech. I still felt like that there as a big disconnect between trying to get a job in the industry and trying to […] succeed academically because we were a small school, and there wasn’t a huge focus on tech like there is, for example, at MIT – the pipeline wasn’t really there. Natasha was thus able to access the social, symbolic and network resources available to white women. Although her parents were not middle class, her degree – from an elite institution – bestowed her with symbolic capital. When asked why she had been successful in securing a job as a software engineer despite her limited technical skills, Natasha identified her gender, while not mentioning her race. Specifically, she identified her gender as a crucial form of capital, as companies were trying to recruit more women as software engineers in order to improve their diversity statistics among new hires. Natasha perceived that, as most women applicants did not have a computer science degree, her degree was an asset, even if – compared to the graduates of coding boot camps, her grades had been unremarkable (mediocre) and her technical skills were inferior. In her words: ‘[Be]cause I had a CS degree. I didn’t actually really realise how important or what a big deal having a CS degree was, until I started going into the industry.’ In Natasha’s analysis, the shortage of experienced women engineers created many opportunities for women with her specific educational credentials. Although her educational background in computer science did not provide her with the technical skills that some of the Black women in my study possessed, she was able to successfully secure a position as an entry-level software engineer. Unlike the Black women from working class or poor backgrounds in this study, Natasha had a close childhood friend from a white, upper-middle-class family who provided a critical link to elite educational opportunities. Furthermore, her status as a white woman with a computer science degree signalled a technical competence that she argued she lacked. Her racial status (i.e. her whiteness) and her educational credentials intersected with her perceived class status to grant her access to an internship, which served as a stepping stone to a lucrative job in San Francisco. Natasha’s career trajectory and successful job search reveal 39

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how, a symbolic system operates in Silicon Valley. Geek capital enhances the privileges of white women with a computer science degree, due to their relative rarity in the industry. Natasha’s lack of technical experience was not a liability in her job search, because many tech firms were trying to increase their number of women engineers to address genderies disparities in their workforce. These firms invested resources in training entry-level engineers, yet this offer was not extended university-educated Black and Latinx women, as reflected in a comparative analysis of the occupational narratives and white and Black women in this industry and the demographic data by race of women in technically-skilled positions.

Conclusion In my research, university-educated and technically-skilled Black women described having little or no access to career mentors, money (funding) and co-ethnics in management and leadership positions enjoyed by their Asian and white counterparts. This constitutes a significant barrier to their employment opportunities. In contrast, white women – even those without degrees in computer science or engineering – were able to quickly secure full-time jobs as software engineers by completing a 10- or 12-week accelerated engineering programme, mainly funded by their white partners or family members. Furthermore, white women recalled being assigned to and receiving support from gender diverse industry mentors, representing a form of social capital known as bonding (or bridging) capital. This capital provided the women – even those from non-technical backgrounds with weak ties to the industry – access to an integrated network of corporate actors interested in increasing their number of women engineers. The mentors also provided career and emotional support and technical advice. Finally, participation in accelerated, all-women coding boot camps introduced the white women to recruiters, managers and other decision makers with the power to offer them jobs – thereby opening doors to socially closed and, in some cases, ethnic-based networks. In this chapter, I have paid careful attention to the geek capital held by white women. Two-thirds of the white women interviewed did not report directly challenging sexism or racism in their industry. Only half reported witnessing or being told about racism and/or sexism in their work team. Among all of the women only a handful of those who claimed to have directly challenged racism were white; several were multi-racial (presenting as white) or queer. None of the immigrant Indian women described directly challenging anti-Black racism in their workplace. The social segregation of tech workers (by race, caste, class, national origin, religious faith and/or occupational role) is a primary obstacle to the organising of tech workers in pursuit of intersectional justice. Elissa Shevinsky, a white veteran of the tech industry, reflected on why gender inequality was not a priority for her during her early years in Silicon Valley. She recalled that the reason she did not initially challenge the ‘bro culture’ in her Silicon Valley networks is that she did not want to lose certain benefits. Her analysis demonstrates the ways in which both cisgender and LGBTQ women make calculated decisions to survive in the male-dominated industry. Often, to retain the jobs they experience as rewarding and pleasing, they do not directly challenge the status quo. Shevinsky described her change in perception: I’d also been in tech since 2001. I wasn’t seeing the problems clearly because I’d been part of the technology industry for too long. I also wanted to focus on getting things done rather than on feminist-inspired activism. So I made the bros-only atmosphere work for me. I overcompensated by picking a frat boy to cofound a company with me. 40

Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley

[…] I had the greatest time drinking Scotch at Google I/O with some of the best CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) in the media industry. They treated me like a bro. I didn’t want to lose those moments. […] My year living and working with younger Silicon Valley startup guys in the SoMA district of San Francisco was an onslaught of misogyny, penis jokes, porn references, and general lack of common courtesy. […] Despite all this, I continued to defend the status quo. I wanted to just drink Scotch with my guy friends and build software. […] I didn’t want to think about gender issues but the alternative is tits and dick jokes at our industry’s most respected events. (Shevinsky 2015b, pp. 64–65) The occupational trajectories of the white engineers I interviewed reveal many pathways to technically-skilled jobs in Silicon Valley. All of these opportunities and pathways were influenced by geek capital and factors unrelated to merit. Asian Indian, Asian American and Anglo-American women were able to convert their educational credentials into jobs due, in part, to their network connections (to and through, e.g., parents, spouses, siblings and others in the tech ecosystem). In contrast, first-generation Black and Latinx tech workers who were not from middle-class families faced glass walls and struggled to convert their educational credentials and technical skills into full-time jobs. White women with strong personal connections to industry engineers benefitted from their greater access to decision makers and gatekeepers. What distinguished these white women from the other women I interviewed was not their educational credentials or technical skills, but rather their economic resources, social capital, alumni networks and mentors (who were often family members and friends employed in the tech industry). Furthermore, their proximity to male engineers (via family connections or other close relationships) provided critical support in their efforts to secure software engineering positions.

Notes 1 In my interviews, a number of white women acknowledged that their firms failed to seriously consider highly qualified Black and Latinx applicants. In addition, job candidates were recruited and sorted into job categories on the basis of alumni networks, social capital, similarity (with respect to, e.g., age, race and alumni networks) and cultural ties to industry gatekeepers. 2 Erica Joy also writes under the name Erica Baker.

References Abbate, Janet. 2012. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Cambridge:MA: MIT Press. Acker, J. (2006). Inequality regimes: Gender, class and race in organizations. Gender & Society, 20(4), pp. 441–469. Alfrey, L. and Twine, F. W. (2017). Gender-fluid geek girls: Negotiating inequality regimes in the tech industry. Gender & Society, 31(1), pp. 5–27. Ashcraft, Catherine, Brad McLain, and Elizabeth Eger. 2016. “Women in Tech: The Facts.” National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). www.ncwit.org. Baker, Erica Joy. (2016. “It’s Time to Make Racism a Fireable Offense.” Quartz. Arpil 11, 2016. https://qz.com Berlin, L. (2017). Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s coming of age. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bhuiyan, J. (2021). Welcome to the party: Five past tech whistleblowers on the pitfalls of speaking out. The Guardian, 9th October. Broyles, Phillipo, and Weston Fenner. (2010). “Race, Human Capital, and Wage Discrimination in STEM Professions in the United States.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 30 (5–6): 251–66.

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France Winddance Twine Chang, E. (2018). Brotopia: Breaking the boys’ club of Silicon Valley. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. Chou, T. (2013). Where are the numbers? Medium, 11th October. Dean, Sam and Johana Bhuiyan. (2020). “Why Are Black and Latino People Still Kept Out of the Tech Industry?” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2020. Dickey, M. R. (2016a). Elephant in the valley: Survey sheds light on issues women face in tech. TechCrunch, 11th January. Dickey, M.R. (2016b). “Equal Employment Opportunity Commisions Syas Tech Indusrtry is Underutilizing Diverse Talent Pool.” TechCrunch, May 18, 2016. https://techcrunch.com. Fernandez, M. (2018). The new frontier: Merit vs. caste in the Indian IT sector. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowler, S. (2017). Reflecting on one very very strange year at Uber. Susan Fowler blog, 19th February. Available from: susanjfowler.com. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gee, B. and Peck, D. (2016). The illusion of Asian success: Scant progress for minorities in cracking the glass ceiling from 2007–2015. New York, NY: Ascend Foundation. Geha, J. (2020). Silicon Valley’s Pain Index shows ‘white supremacy’ prevalent. The Mercury News, 23rd June. Grant, Nico. (2018). “Very Lonely’: The Unsettling Hum of Silicon Valley’s Failure to Hire More Black Workers.” Bloomberg, June 8, 2018. www.bloomberg.com. Harkinson, J. (2014). Silicon Valley firms are even whiter and more male than you think. Mother Jones, 29th May. Hepler, L. (2018). Menial tasks, slurs and swastikas: Many Black workers at Tesla say they faced racism. New York Times, 13th November. Isaac, M. (2016). Women in the tech band together to track diversity after hours. New York Times, 3rd May. Isaac, M. (2017a). Inside Uber’s aggressive unrestrained workplace culture. New York Times, 22nd February. Isaac, M. (2017b). Uber fires 20 amid investigations into workplace culture. New York Times, 6th June. Isaac, M. (2017c). Uber releases diversity report and repudiates its hard-changing attitude. New York Times, 28th March. Jacobson, Murrey. (2014). “Google Finally Discloses Its’ Diversity Record, and It’s Not Good.” PBS NewsHour, May 28, 2014. www.pbs.org. Joy, Erica. (2015). “The Other Side of Diversity.” In Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture, edited by Elissa Shevinsky, 153–63. New York: OR Books. Kamble, Maya. (2020). “It’s Time to End Caste Discrimination in the Tech Industry.” Al Jazeera, July 27, 2020. Kenney, M. (2000). Understanding Silicon Valley the anatomy of an entrepreneuurial region. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kim, Cristina, and Sinduja Rangarajan. (2018). “What Women of Color in the Tech Industry Want.” Center for Investigative Reporting Blog, April 14, 2018. www.revealnews.org Kolhatkar, S. (2017). Letter from Silicon Valley: The disrupters: The women of tech call out workplace sexism. New Yorker, 20th November, pp. 52–63. Lacy, Karyn. (2007). Blue-Chip Blacks: Race, Class and Status in the New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, S. (2017a). Accused of underpaying women, Google says it’s too expensive to get wage data. The Guardian, 26th May. Levin, S. (2017b). Black and Latino representation in Silicon Valley has declined, new study shows. The Guardian, 3rd October. Levin, S. (2017c). Google accused of ‘extreme’ gender pay discrimination by US Labor Department. The Guardian, April. Levin, S. (2017d). Google ‘segregates’ women into lower-paying jobs, stifling careers, lawsuit says. The Guardian, 14th September. Levin, S. (2018a). Google gender pay gap: Women advance suit that could affect 8,300 workers. The Guardian, 26th October. Levin, S. (2018b). Google sees major claims of harassment and discrimination as lawsuits proceed. The Guardian, 28th March.

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Whiteness as a form of geek capital in Silicon Valley Luckie, M. (2018). Facebook is failing its Black employees. Facebook post, 1st November. Available from: www.facebook.com/notes/mark-s-luckie/facebook-is-faling-its-black-employees-and-its-blackusers/1931075116975013. McIlwee, J. S. and Robinson, J. G. (1992). Women in engineering: Gender, power and workplace culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Molla, R. (2018). How Facebook compares to other tech companies in diversity. Vox, 11th April. Mundy, L. (2017). Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women? Atlantic, April. Myers-Lipton, S. (2020). Silicon Valley Pain Index. San Jose State Human Rights Institute. Neate, R. (2015). Facebook only hired seven Black people last year despite diversity pledge. The Guardian, 25th June. OpenDoors. (2019). “2019 Fast Facts.” https://opendoorsdata.org. Pao, Ellen. (2017). Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Paul, K. (2021) Sue sued for pregnancy discrimination. Now she’s battling Google’s army of lawyers. The Guardian, 9th April. Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rao, A. (2013). A history of Silicon Valley: The greatest creation of wealth in the history of the planet, ­1900–2013. CreateSpace. Reed, V. (2016). Diversity in tech remains elusive due to racism, lack of representation and cultural differences. Model View Culture. Reeves, Richard. (2018). Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust. Why That is a Problem, and What to Do about It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Saxenian, A. (1994). Regional advantage: Culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shevinsky, Elissa., ed. (2015a). Lean out: The struggle for gender equality in Tech and Start-up culture. New York: OR Books. Shevinsky, Elissa, ed. (2015b). “The Pipeline Isn’t the Problem,” In Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality. pp. 203-216. New York: OR Books. Sohrabji, Sunita. (2018). “HCL Technologies Disproportionately Favors Indian Americans for ­Employment in U.S., Alleges Lawsuit.” India West, August 23, 2018. www.indiawest.com. Twine, F.W. (2019). Technology’s invisible women: Black geek girls in Silicon Valley and the limits of diversity initiatives. International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 1( January): pp. 58–79. Twine, F.W. (2022). Geek Girls: Inequality and opportunity in Silicon Valley. New York: New York University Press. US Census Bureau. (2016). American Community Survey. Accessed October 2017. www.census.gov. The term “Hispanic” in this data set refers to both White and non-White Hispanics. Vara, V. (2016). Why doesn’t Silicon Valley hire Black coders? Bloomberg Businessweek, 21st January. Varathan, Preeti. (2017). “Silicon Valley’s Gender Inequality is even Worse than Wall Street”, Quartz, Agusut 14, 2017. https://qz.com. Woolcock, Michael and Anne Sweetser. (2002). “Bright Ideas: Social Capital – the Bonds That ­Connect.” Asian Development Bank Review 34(2): 26–27.

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4 ARTIFICIALISING WHITENESS? HOW AI NORMALISES WHITENESS IN THEORY, POLICY AND PRACTICE Pauline Leonard A Google computer vision service that automatically labels images produced starkly different results depending on skin tone. An image of a dark-skinned individual holding a thermometer was labelled as ‘gun’ while a similar image with a light-skinned individual was labelled as ‘electrical device’. (Kayser-Bril 2020) As I write this chapter, populations across the world are in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its devastating and differentiating impacts hitting particularly hard on populations that are already systematically marginalised. Similar to many others across the world, I have been in ‘lockdown’ for months, unable to travel to my place of work or to see family and friends. Also, I have become completely reliant on technology to communicate with work colleagues, access the latest information on the virus and its calamitous consequences, and meet my family’s social, educational, health and well-being needs. In this context, ‘the future’ – so much prophesied in recent debates on the impact of new digital technologies such as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) – has whistle-stopped to the material now. Technology has not only rapidly become foundational to our personal, domestic and working lives but, at this point in time, it is also being positioned as critical to the ways in which nations manage their way out of the COVID-19 crisis. AI, in particular, has been identified as a flywheel to stabilise social activities: ‘test and trace’ apps, drones to monitor the number of people exercising in national parks, facial recognition software and automated temperature checking using hand-held thermometers (as described in the opening quotation) are among the many technologies that have been identified as key to enabling us to resume some approximation of our previous, ‘normal’ lives. Further, the pundits pronounce, this approximation may well become the long-term reality, as more and more of the functions we once enjoyed in person are switching over to the supposedly ‘safer’ terrain of the online world. As technology becomes swiftly embedded into our everyday life, work and mobility infrastructures and practices, questions that were already emerging on the role of technology in augmenting social inequalities, discrimination and injustice are ramping up significantly. Over recent years, critically compelling evidence has exposed the racism and sexism embedded in many contemporary applications of AI. In particular, research has problematised data-driven automated decision making (ADM) technologies, which make decisions 44

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-5

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through, for example, ‘algorithms’ or rules based on correlations between datasets (ICO 2020). In contrast to the futuristic, science fiction imaginaries of ‘general’ AI (Broussard 2019), what we have now is ‘narrow AI’ – machine learning techniques that use data to predict and determine outcomes across a range of service and governance contexts. ADM is now widely used in the United States (Benjamin 2019; Costanza-Chock 2020; Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018; Perez 2019), and it is beginning to be applied in the United Kingdom and Western Europe for the purposes of service delivery (Algorithm Watch 2020; Chiusi 2020). At the same time, a growing body of research from the United States is cataloguing the injustices built into the very design of ADM, showing that certain ADM systems: deny loans, mortgages and credit cards to minorities (Savchuk 2019); profile non-white faces as more likely to (re)commit crime (Cossins 2018); only recognise white skin (such that self-driving cars are more likely to drive into Black pedestrians and soap dispensers are more likely to release soap onto white hands) (Cuthbertson 2019; Morris 2020); preferentially select white candidates for recruitment (Dastin 2018) and disproportionally reject women with dark skin (represented as ‘not beautiful’) from beauty competitions (Levin 2016). As these examples of flawed applications show, the impact of ADM is life changing. In other words, many of the ADM systems that are currently deployed default human beings to a white-biased physiognomy; thus, they naturalise whiteness as a dominant social identity and, in the process, reinforce inequalities and oppressive social relationships (Noble 2018). At best, this renders Black and ethnic minorities invisible; at worst, it significantly entrenches their denial of resources and life opportunities, and amplifies processes of discrimination and criminalisation. Accordingly, I describe these AI designs as engaging in a project of ‘artificialising whiteness’, as their social outcomes are routinely constructed to artificially bolster white and, as I will proceed to demonstrate, also male and middle class privilege. In this chapter, I seek to advance a conceptual discussion of this topic, bringing to bear the theoretical perspectives of critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS), as well as those of socio-technical studies (STS) and governmentality. While CRT and CWS foreground the role and function of whiteness in everyday activities (Breen and Meer 2019), STS helps to illuminate the relationship between technology and the social order, whereby ‘technology, and the science that underpins it, is always done in particular locales, by distinctive assemblages of people, objects and processes’ (Dyb and Halford 2009, p. 233). Governmentality examines such processes critically, to expose the institutional practices and strategies that manage populations and constrain possibilities for action (Foucault 2003). In drawing upon these discourses, I argue that contemporary operationalisations of AI (e.g. ADM) are further weapons in the armoury serving to secure the privileges and power of whiteness: they artificialise whiteness, under the guise of ‘neutral’ technology. This chapter examines these processes and, in particular, the ways in which they work in intersection with gender and social background, such that Black and ethnic minority women become especially marginalised. I conclude by reflecting on some recommendations for the design of more trustworthy automated systems.

Theorising the artificialisation of whiteness Contemporary understandings of race emphasise that race is neither fixed or finished, but fluid and malleable – continuously and repetitively made in the practices of everyday life (Essed 1991). The cornerstone of CRT is the idea that, in this making of race, unequal power relations are constructed between people of different racialised backgrounds. Racism is thus understood as a normal, rather than aberrant, aspect of society: a business-as-usual form of 45

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active discrimination that Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people confront every day (Breen and Meer 2019; Delgado 1995). Breen and Meer (2019) argue that an embedded feature of ‘business-as-usual’ racism is ‘social desensitisation’, which increases the thresholds for what counts as ‘real racism’. As I write, for example, many parts of the world are joining with the United States in protesting the May 2020 murder of George Floyd – a victim of extreme (white) police violence – and expressing outrage towards acts of racism and prejudice and abuses of power. However, unambiguous forms of racism can lead to a ‘smokescreening’ (Breen and Meer 2019, p. 597) of the daily micro-aggressions that thoroughly embed racism and discrimination in the infrastructure of our lives, privileging whiteness in processes and practices. Understanding that studies of race and racism must focus on both those constructed as ‘others’ in systems of racial signification and those who operate from the centres of power and privilege (usually, but not necessarily, white people) brings CRT and CWS together to produce new illustrations of how racial formations and negotiations of race and privilege differ according to context (as this Handbook exemplifies). The identification of whiteness and the diverse identities, ideologies and cultural practices that buttress white supremacy has long been a central project for the sociology of race (DuBois 1970; Twine and Gallagher 2008), within a broader disciplinary and societal tendency to presume whiteness as the ‘natural’ or invisible cultural value (Ratcliffe 2006). In my previous work, I examined the processes through which white privilege is secured in white-minority post-colonial contexts marked by histories of politicised race segregation (Conway and Leonard 2014; Leonard 2010, 2019). In this chapter, I turn to investigate how whiteness functions as a ‘banal repository of white majority conceptions of the given identity of societies’ (Breen and Meer 2019, p. 597), in intersection with other social identities, such as gender and social class, and, crucially, technology. The effects of technology have been extensively debated in STS, primarily with the aim of developing more critical approaches than technological determinism to understand the role of technology in shaping socio-economic relations and futures (Howcraft and Taylor 2014). Technological determinism posits that technology develops according to an internal, neutral logic, independently of social context. Most technological determinists assume that revolutionary developments will bring about comprehensive change – almost inevitably for the public good (e.g. Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016; Daugherty and Wilson 2018; Microsoft 2018). Much of the current wave of ‘futures’ writing on the impact of AI affordances such as automation and robotics on the future of jobs falls within this approach. Often accompanied by images of white, ‘female’-looking and -sounding robots (Figure 4.1), the message is that a brighter and happier future is on the way – one in which work will be replaced by technology, bringing about a new age of leisure and escapism (e.g. Colvin 2016; Microsoft 2018; Susskind and Susskind 2015). Predominantly authored by white men (Wajcman 2017), this canon of work rarely addresses the uneven impact on the racialised and gendered structures of the labour market (Figure 4.1). In contrast, STS offers a more critical approach, arguing that it is important to acknowledge human agency in our relationship to technology. People are not completely subject to technology’s inevitable progress, but are able to respond to, negotiate, resist and modify technology’s constraints and affordances (Leonardi and Barley 2010). In this approach, technologies are conceptualised as ‘relational artefacts’: more than mere tools, but constitutive of social life, and both shaping and shaped by human culture (Wajcman 2006). This does not mean, however, that we all have an equal relationship to technology. As Baldry (2011) argues, technology is a ‘social product whose uses and direction of development reflect the priorities of the holders of social and economic power both in society and in 46

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Figure 4.1

White, Female Robot

the workplace’ (175, p. 1). Those with the power to design and build digital (ADM) systems are able to reflect their values and vision of the world in the decisions these systems make. Thus, while concepts such as ‘algorithms’ are ‘presented as benign, neutral and objective, they are anything but’ (Noble 2018, p. 1). As I go on to discuss in the following section, the evidence that American and other Western-designed algorithmic decisions are biased against BAME people and women is overwhelming. A key issue is that the majority of people in charge of ‘Big Tech’ (i.e. the large American technology corporations), as well as the majority of people designing new digital AI technologies within Big Tech, are white men. Evidence shows that, among these tech leaders and workers, traditional understandings of race and gender (i.e. racism and sexism), and false notions of meritocracy, dominate (Broussard 2019; Costanza-Chock 2020). These understandings become integrated into programmes, data selection algorithms and performance metrics. In her analysis of the development of American technology, Broussard (2019, p. 85) explains: We have a small, elite group of men who tend to overestimate their mathematical abilities, who have systematically excluded women and people of color in favor of machines for centuries, who tend to want to make science fiction real, who have little regard for social convention, who don’t believe that social norms or rules apply to them, who have unused piles of government money sitting around, and who have adopted the ideological rhetoric of far-right, libertarian anarch-capitalist. What could possibly go wrong? by Broussard Noble (2018) references the Google search engine as a good example of how ‘the white, male gaze’ (Noble 2018, p. 59) has become embedded into our interactions with technology, 47

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providing users not so much with ‘neutral’ access to information, but a white, male interpretation of it, entwined with advertising and corporate profit making. Following Foucault, we can understand such data ‘failures’ as exercises of disciplinary power that lend themselves to a system of governance that shapes, regulates and manages everyday activities, thoughts and lives, and constrain possibilities for action (Foucault 1980). Noble (2018) describes this type of governance as ‘algorithmic oppression’, and predicts that the use of technology as a key system of governance will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century. Zuboff (2019) also describes an emergent logic of ‘surveillance capitalism’ in computer-mediated architectures, which produces new expressions of power that effectively exile people from their own behaviour. Building on these claims, and focusing critically on operations of whiteness, I argue that, through the reification of data and the technologies that analyse it, such acts of oppression work to artificialise whiteness: they bolster white privilege, while obfuscating the ways in which outcomes are the result of ‘man-made’, rather than neutral, ‘rational’ decision making processes. I now turn to explore in more depth how the artificialisation of whiteness works in practice, drawing primarily on evidence from the United States.

Practices of artificial whiteness In my analysis, two issues emerge as key to the introduction and perpetuation of race-based discrimination that characterise many AI technologies. The first is the lack of diversity in Big Tech. The second, which is widely understood as a consequence of the first, is the artificialisation of whiteness (i.e. the assumption of white normativity, in intersection with gender and social class) within ADM technologies deployed by institutions of governance and representation.

Workplace diversity: the ‘white guy problem’ Despite its attempts to self-define as democratic and progressive (Alfrey and Twine 2017), the Western AI sector is marked by a systemic crisis in diversity (Collett and Dillon 2019; Snow 2018; West et al. 2019). Crawford (2016), in her online opinion piece for the New York Times, described the lack of diversity amongst AI designers, coders, engineers and programmers as ‘AI’s white guy problem’. She went on to demonstrate that ‘white guys’ dominate Big Tech, which includes a handful of technology companies in Silicon Valley (United States) that control the bulk of large-scale AI systems, as well as ‘a small set of elite university laboratories, spaces that in the West tend to be extremely white, technically oriented, and male’ (West et al. 2019, p. 6). According to Google’s organisational diversity reports, in 2018/2019, only 2.5 per cent of their workforce was Black and 3.6 per cent were Latinx (Google 2018). Similar reports from Facebook and Microsoft show that, respectively, 4 and 5 per cent of the workforce in recent years was Black, and 6 per cent was ‘Hispanic’ (Microsoft 2019; Williams 2018). The reported figures for Asian employees are somewhat higher (44 per cent at Google and 33.3 per cent at Microsoft), reflecting Asian Americans’ attainment levels across science professions in the United States. Challenging myths of the ‘model minority’, Lee and Zhou (2015) attribute these figures to the ‘hyper-selectivity’ of United States migration policies since the 1960s in favour of highly skilled Asians, based on stereotypes of Asians as industrious. The relatively higher employment levels of Asian Americans in the technology sector (and specifically AI) have resulted in their being categorised, along with whites, as ‘overrepresented’ (Lang 2017). However, Gee and Peck (2017) argue that this assumption is biased by 48

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an ‘illusion of success’, as people of Asian descent – especially Asian women – are among the least likely to be promoted to management positions in the tech industry. Gee and Peck’s (2017) qualification underlines how all data relating to BAME representation in the United States technology industry are compounded by gender. Indeed, much of the research on diversity in AI in the United States has focused on the poor representation of women in the wider sector: in academia, for example, less than 20 per cent of AI faculty hires and PhD recipients are women (AI Index 2019); in industry, the inequality is even more acute, with women comprising 15 per cent of Facebook’s staff and 10 per cent of Google’s (AI Index 2019). Furthermore, it can be particularly challenging for female founders to find financial backing for start-ups in Silicon Valley. In 2016, for instance, venture capitalists invested USD 64.9 billion into male-founded start-ups, but only USD 1.5 billion in female-founded start-ups (O’Brien and Segall 2016). All in all, the gender gap in computing is worse now than in the 1960s (Thompson 2019). Putting this together with the low numbers of BAME workers in the industry evokes experiences along the lines of those described by Timnit Gebru, Founder of Black in AI – a US-based but transcontinental initiative to increase the presence of Black people in the field of AI: it’s very difficult to be a black woman in this field. When I started Black in AI, I had a tiny mailing list where I literally would add any black person I saw in this field and be like, ‘Hi. I’m black person number two. Hi, black person number one. Let’s be friends’. (Quoted in Snow 2018) It therefore comes as no surprise that, in an analysis of 177 leading tech companies in Silicon Valley, nearly a third had no BAME women executives and six had no female executives at all. (Rangarajan 2018, in West et al. 2019)

Workplace culture The technology industry is renowned for acute cultural problems of discrimination, exclusion and harassment. In November 2018, for example, more than 20,000 Google employees across the world, from Tokyo to California, engaged in a historic worldwide walkout to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment allegations and what they agreed was ‘rampant’ sexism and racism. Of concern, the two women who organised the protest, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, were demoted or re-assigned, and are now struggling with what they describe as a hostile work environment (Campbell 2019). Further, during the course of writing this chapter, Timnit Gebru was forced out of Google in December 2020, supposedly due to conflict over a co-authored paper on which she was working (Hao 2020). A sexist and racist culture pervades the industry, with public performances of bullying and harassment remaining unchecked (Corbyn 2015). For BAME women, the inability to speak out may be even more severe: when Susan Ho, co-founder of an online travel service, decided to go public about her experiences of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, she discovered: ‘When you talk about sexual harassment in tech or in any other industry, it’s like dropping a nuclear bomb on your career’ (O’Brien and Segall 2016). The toxicity of AI workplaces may contribute to explaining why half of the women who enter the technology industry eventually leave the field: women’s rate of attrition is more than double that of men (Ashcraft et al. 2016), and Black workers have the highest attrition rate of all racial categories (Google 2018). Frustratingly, it is challenging to obtain accurate, 49

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robust data on hired and fired workers, as well as those who leave on their own accord: as West et al. (2019) note, the only source of such data remains the highly curated diversity reports produced by the Big Tech companies, themselves, which have been exposed for ‘massaging’ figures pertaining to (for example) pay gaps and failing to account for phenomena such as ‘under-levelling’, whereby BAME people and women are hired in roles that are lower (and less well-paid) than justified by their skills. The reports also hide ‘the day to day experiences of workers, the structural factors that may be shaping whether or not these workers can succeed and what work is and is not incentivized’ (West et al. 2019, p. 12). These include the social norms and organisational culture and practices through which men and women routinely engage in ‘doing race and gender’, which reproduce inequality, even if unconsciously (Alfrey and Twine 2017; West and Zimmerman 1987). Alfrey and Twine’s (2017) intersectional analysis of the ways in which race, class, gender and sexuality operate together to disadvantage Black and dark-skinned Latinx women in the computer sector develops this further. In their study of ‘geek girls’ – women employed as programmers, technical writers and engineers in Silicon Valley – the researchers found a gendered ‘spectrum of belonging’, whereby diverse intersections of race, sexuality and gender presentation led to different experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Women who belonged to racially dominant groups in the tech industry (i.e. white and Asian women) and presented as androgynous or gender fluid and identified as LGBTQ were found to be better able to manage their status on male-dominated teams. They were perceived by their male colleagues as more competent than conventionally feminine, heterosexual women, who experienced routine micro-aggressions in their interactions with male co-workers. Their feminine appearance was consistently greeted with explicitly sexual jokes and comments about their bodies, which sometimes escalated into overtly hostile behaviour. Thus, performance of femininity was a ‘liability’ in the male-dominated technology firms, where the culture was ‘a creation of nerdy masculinity’ (Alfrey and Twine 2017, p. 41). In response, some bisexual, non-binary and gender fluid women minimised their femininity and adopted the male dress code of black trousers, T-shirts and hoodies to render themselves invisible and/or as ‘one of the guys’. However, while this strategy was available to white and Asian women, Black women who identified as LGBTQ and adopted a non-feminine performance did not report the same inclusion and acceptance as a result of their gender fluidity. Rather, they were evaluated primarily by their racial status and, as such, positioned furthest away from the ‘idealised tech worker’, who is white, cis male and heterosexual. The daily grind of practices of artificialising whiteness, which combine everyday racism (Essed 1991) with sexism and homophobia, help to explain the lack of diversity hires and the low promotion and retention rates of BAME workers in the technology industry. Yet, as Wajcman (2017) argues, diverse experiences are needed to create diverse technologies. What are the consequences of having an artificially selected ‘bunch of young white guys’ (Wajcman 2017) designing technologies? It is to this question that I now turn.

The design of inequality The ‘white, male gaze’ (Noble 2018, p. 59) that oversees the design of AI systems can be understood as a second ‘white guy problem’. Recent years have witnessed manifold examples of emerging digital processes working to artificialise whiteness and thereby reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequalities (Benjamin 2019). Such designs work at multiple levels. The near ubiquitous use of algorithmically-driven software in the United States means that it now impacts almost every aspect of daily life. Additionally, ADM technology is 50

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becoming increasingly applied in the context of service delivery across the world. AI is now a key technology of governance, contributing to determining the (often life-changing) outcomes of mortgage, bank credit, job and welfare benefit applications, as well as the results of more ‘banal’, everyday activities, such as searching for information on Google, shopping, running through the park and using public conveniences. Within the United States, in particular, a growing literature is providing evidence of the unequal impacts of these high-tech sorting and monitoring systems (e.g. Benjamin 2019; Broussard 2019; Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016). While some social groups are profiting from the systems (mainly white, middle class, middle-aged men; but also white women within this demographic), many members of low-income communities are experiencing the effects as destructive or even deadly (Eubanks 2017). ‘Algorithms determine who gets housing loans and who doesn’t, who goes to jail and who doesn’t, who gets to go to what school’ explains Malkia Devich Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice in the United States. In short, ‘there is a real risk and real danger to people’s lives and people’s freedom’ (quoted in Levin 2019), through the ways in which white privilege is artificialised in both institutions and representations.

The institutionalisation of white privilege The denial of loans, mortgages and credit cards to BAME groups (as well as the charging of relatively higher rates to those who are successful in their applications), is far from a new practice (Savchuk 2019). But while machine-driven systems might be assumed to be objective and neutral – and thus instruments capable of correcting acts of bias and discrimination – the evidence is weighted against such optimism (Gillis and Spiess 2019). Theoretically, the application of algorithms in, for example, financial lending decisions, means that protected characteristics such as race and gender can be removed from the equation. However, Gillis and Spiess (2019) found that the ADMs they examined were limited in their ability to eliminate race-based disparities and, in some cases, even increased inequalities in pricing and predicted default rates for Black and Hispanic borrowers. O’Neil (2016) further observed that registrations of residence (captured through zip codes and surveillance of the locations of computers used for web browsing) were used as a proxy for race and the basis for ‘e-scores’, which predicted credit card defaulters and allocated (higher) interest rates accordingly. Problems thus arise from the fact that so much data is held about each individual, that it is possible for algorithm designers to reconstruct whether someone is part of a protected group, even if the variable of ‘race’ is supposedly excluded. Similar race-based discrepancies were found in Eubanks’s (2017) rigorous investigation of automated public welfare systems in the United States. In the context of a longstanding historical legacy of embedded racial discrimination, Eubanks found that shifts to automation had done little to eliminate bias in welfare calculations. Rather, these could be perceived as having ‘supercharged’ discrimination. For example, in the state of Indiana, gaps between white and Black families who were approved for support had widened, as: The ‘social specs’ for the automation were based on time-worn, race- and classmotivated assumptions about welfare recipients that were encoded into performance metrics and programmed into business processes: they are lazy and must be ‘prodded’ into contributing their own support, they are sneaky and prone to fraudulent claims, and their burdensome use of public resources must be repeatedly discouraged. Each of these assumptions relies on, and is bolstered by, race- and class-based stereotypes. (Eubanks 2017, p. 81) 51

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Eubanks (2017) illustrated how the algorithms that drive social services in the United States rely on a stratification of social groups, such that welfare systems predict an individual’s needs – or their level of risk – on the basis of data mining related to their race, gender, civil status, neighbourhood and other demographic factors. The result is that individuals are not impacted by their own actions, but by the assumed actions of ‘members’ of their categorical belonging. Intersectionality is critical here, as people who are multiply disadvantaged (e.g. Black, working class women) are subjected to manifold layers of bias. Evidence on the application of ADM in recruitment indicates that job applicants are similarly categorised. For example, in 2014, Amazon began using an AI recruitment tool with the aim of mechanising the search for talent (Dastin 2018). The machine reviewed software developer job applicants’ résumés, scoring them from 1 to 5 stars. After a year of operation, it became clear that the tool was not rating in a gender-neutral way, as any resume including the word ‘women’ was downgraded. Having learned from the male-dominated résumés of successful applicants over the prior ten years, the system rejected applicants who had been to a women’s-only college or who had excelled, for example, as a ‘women’s chess club champion’. The tool was ultimately scrapped, but similar acts of discrimination continue to manifest in other hiring tools: computer scientists at Princeton found that job application tools privileged ‘white-sounding’ names over ‘Black-sounding names’ (Caliskan et al. 2017); an automated assessment tool at St George’s Hospital in London was discovered to downgrade birthplaces in Africa and Pakistan (O’Neil 2016); and programmes filtering out anyone with a criminal record were shown to impact BAME people disproportionately, as such people had a higher likelihood – due to longstanding bias and discrimination – of arrest and conviction (Benjamin 2019). Facial analysis tools, which are also becoming increasingly widespread in job selection processes, compound these ‘weapons of math destruction’, to quote O’Neil (2016). Technology developed by the American company HireVue, which has been adopted at more than 700 global corporations, analyses the language and tone of a candidate’s voice and records their facial expressions as they answer identical interview questions. However, the software has been found to appoint candidates based on previous interviews of ‘successful hires’, thereby inherently replicating hiring biases (Manokha 2019) and compounding the ‘consolidation, perpetuation and potentially even amplification of existing beliefs and biases’ (Manokha 2019). Of key concern in this context is the rollout of facial recognition tools across a number of social functions, including the criminal justice system. Fears of bias and inaccuracy are certainly not alleviated by Buolamwini and Gebru’s (2018) findings that while three of the latest gender-recognition tools (from IBM, Microsoft and a Chinese system, Megvii) correctly identified white men’s gender 99 per cent of the time, their accuracy dropped to 35 per cent for dark-skinned women. Indeed, use of such tools might exacerbate the algorithmic inaccuracies and built-in prejudices that are already present within justice systems (Goddard and Myers 2017). For example, in some parts of the United States, the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool – and, in the United Kingdom, the Offender Assessment System – are used to predict recidivism. The tools rely on datasets comprising mainly the decision records of criminal justice officials (e.g. arrest decisions), which are known to be imbued with racial bias (Ugwudike 2020). COMPAS predicts that Black defendants pose a higher risk of recidivism, while the reverse is true for white defendants. Similarly, PredPol, an algorithm designed in the United States to predict when and where crimes will occur, was found to lead police in Los Angeles to unfairly target neighbourhoods with a high proportion of racial minorities (Cossins 2018). 52

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Thus, use of these systems to predict risk likely exposes racialised groups to higher risk scores than warranted, thereby reproducing stereotypes and systematic biases, and heightening the risk of more severe penal interventions for these groups (Ugwudike 2020). By training machines to automate decisions that reproduce systemic race-, genderand class-based inequalities, the white men who dominate the technology industry have, unconsciously or otherwise, artificialised white (male, middle class) privilege. However, the good news is that these practices are not going unnoticed or unchallenged. Internationally, social activists, academics and community groups are increasingly exposing injustices and arguing that the routine reliance of key institutions of governance on ADM systems in the distribution of essential services is a human rights issue (Algorithm Watch 2020; Benjamin 2019; Costanza-Chock 2020). Fundamental questions are being asked as to whether certain activities (e.g. social welfare) should be subject to automation, and whether certain technologies (e.g. live face recognition in public spaces) should be banned (Algorithm Watch 2020). These challenges are, in some cases, leading to U-turns by local authorities and police forces, and the call for effective policy making and legislation is growing ever louder (Wills and Chiusi 2020).

The representation of white privilege It is not only through interaction with institutions that algorithms work as systems of inequality and oppression. Representations of people by digital sense making processes such as search engines contribute further to the subjugation of people who are already systematically marginalised. Noble’s (2018) extensive analysis of Google search engines revealed how the primary representations of Black girls and women that surface on the first page of the search results are ‘hot’, ‘sugary’, ‘Black pussy’ sexualised images. Challenging the idea that digital platforms are ‘neutral technologies’, she catalogued the ways in which racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology. Drawing on examples of abusive images of African Americans as apes and animals (which have informed the racist attitudes of white supremacists), library and information classification systems and representations of Black-owned businesses on Yelp, Noble (2018) demonstrated how algorithmically-driven ‘information’ search platforms are situated in intersectional socio-historical contexts and embedded within social relations. Accordingly, technology can be said to act as a technology of governance that reinforces the racial and gender order. In fact, there are – and have been – multiple examples of technological practices that artificialise whiteness, including Beauty. AI. – an online beauty contest ‘judged by robots’ that excluded photographs of dark-skinned applicants (Levin 2016) – and abusive language detection technologies that identified higher rates of abuse within African-American English (Davidson et al. 2019); all of these serve to illustrate the racial bias machine, in action. With reference to both macro- and micro-level experiences, the call for effective policy making to challenge the artificialisation of whiteness online is loud and clear. Thus, in the concluding section of this chapter, I turn to discuss how we might move forward to achieve more trustworthy AI.

Conclusion: the development of trustworthy AI In this chapter, I have argued that ADM systems consistently and routinely artificialise whiteness by disadvantaging members of marginalised groups, with BAME women at particular risk of suffering from the unfair and biased decision making of these systems. It is clear 53

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that we are still at some distance from algorithms that are fair, trustworthy and explainable (Dastin 2018). Thus, it is becoming widely recognised that there is much work to be done before AI can be trusted to take over and improve the functions and decisions undertaken by humans, flawed as these (too) are. Consequently, a range of policies are being demanded in different international contexts to oversee the design and implementation of trustworthy AI systems (Algorithm Watch 2020). However, a key challenge is that the internet, as well as the databases, digital technologies, organisations and standard bodies it supports, ‘is not a monolithic architecture whose existence and form are guaranteed in perpetuity, but a fragile and contingent construction of hardware, software, standards and databases, governed by a wide range of private and public actors whose behavior is constrained only by voluntary protocols’ (O’Hara and Hall 2018, p. 1). Much of this chapter has focused on the operationalisation of ADM in the United States, which continues to maintain a disproportionate influence over the digital world. Consequently, there are calls for more international involvement in the development of standards of governance. The dominant Silicon Valley (i.e. white, male, American, technologist) view is that the internet should be open, with transparent standards, data and software that are extensible and interoperable, to facilitate exponential growth and scale. On the positive side, the aim is for liberty: a world in which all may enter, ‘without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth’ (Barlow 1996). At the same time, this also implies a world in which ‘anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’ (Barlow 1996). As I have discussed in this chapter, Silicon Valley’s ‘monoculture of white male nerds’ (The Economist 2018) means that openness does not guarantee equitable representation or outcomes. In some contrast, the British and European ‘bourgeois’ approach to the internet holds that bad behaviour should be minimised and privacy should be protected (O’Hara and Hall 2018). Here, the emphasis is on dignity, with, for example, the EU Ethics Advisory Group considering the risks of discrimination as a result of data processing a key concern (EDPS Ethics Advisory Group 2018; O’Hara and Hall 2018). The European answer to challenges to ethics and privacy is regulation, as exemplified by the General Data Protection Regulation. While the European prioritisation of social welfare may come at the cost of innovation in AI (and any private gain that would result from it), the establishment of a comprehensive and trustworthy system for the use of data in AI is seen as foundational for the future (O’Hara 2019). Some initial work is being conducted to achieve this. In their report on the development of the AI industry in the United Kingdom, for example, Hall and Pesenti (2017) recommend the establishment of ‘Data Trusts’: ‘proven and trusted frameworks and agreements’ that ‘ensure exchanges [of data] are secure and mutually beneficial’. In their conceptualisation, Data Trusts would work within the law to provide ethical, architectural and governance support for trustworthy data processing (O’Hara 2019). The aim would be for data controllers to be transparent about their processing and sharing; they would be held accountable for their actions, and – this is key – engage with the community whose trust is to be earned. For Data Trusts and AI governance to be ethical and accountable, they must also be representative and fully informed by diversity. The design of technologies frames and informs our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us, shaping ideas about not only the present, but also the future (Søndergaard and Hansen 2017). Innovative work is being done to critically reflect on design as an act of power and to unpack the ways in which unconscious values and belief systems and designers’ backgrounds influence the design practice. For example, in an attempt to challenge the norms governing contemporary design politics, Søndergaard and Hansen (2017) offered two 54

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speculative feminist design objects – Periodshare, which tracks users’ menstrual cycles, and Marcelle, an ‘internet of things’ sex toy – to open up a space for discussing agency and power in the technology industry. AI systems are truly socio-technical: ‘we cannot hive off the technical from the rest. Every design decision reflects and imposes […] a balance of power’ (O’Hara and Hall 2018, p. 1). The frameworks of CRT and CWS can expose the ways in which AI design decisions and the balance of power play out in the AI industry to collude in artificialising whiteness. The recognition of AI as a racial, gendered and classist system of governance that seeks to reassert, renew and normalise facets of white supremacy represents a first step towards a dismantling of this consensus between (white) ‘man’ and ‘machine’.

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Artificialising whiteness? Leonard, P. (2019). Reimagining racism: Understanding the whiteness and nationhood strategies of British-born South Africans. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 26(5), 579–594. Leonardi, P. and Barley, S. (2010). What’s under construction here? Social action, materiality, and power in constructivist studies of technology and organizing. The Academy of Management Annals, 4(1), 1–51. Levin, S. (2016). A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn’t like dark skin. The Guardian. [Online] 8th September. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/ artificial-intelligence-beauty-contest-doesnt-like-Black-people [Accessed 02/06/20]. Levin, S. (2019). ‘Bias deep inside the code’: The problem with AI ‘ethics’ in Silicon Valley. The Guardian. [Online] 29th March. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/ mar/28/big-tech-ai-ethics-boards-prejudice [Accessed 12/06/20]. Manokha, L. (2019). How using facial analysis in job interviews could reinforce inequality. The Conversation, 7th October. Available from: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/ how-using-facial-recognition-in-job-interviews-could-reinforce-inequality [Accessed 16/06/20]. Microsoft (2018). The future computed. Washington, Microsoft. Microsoft (2019). Diversity and Inclusion Report 2019. Available from: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4aqv1. Morris, N. (2020). The race problem with artificial intelligence: ‘Machines are learning to be racist’. Available from: https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/01/race-problem-artificial-intelligence-machineslearning-racist-12478025/ [Accessed 02/06/20]. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. New York, NY: New York University Press. O’Brien, S. and Segall, L. (2016). Money, power and sexual harassment. CNN Tech. Available from: https://money.cnn.com/technology/sexual-harassment-tech/ [Accessed 11/06/20]. O’Hara, K. (2019). Data trusts: Ethics, architecture and governance for trustworthy data stewardship. Web Science Institute White Paper. Available from: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/428276/1/WSI_ White_Paper_1.pdf [Accessed 17/06/20]. O’Hara, K. and Hall, W. (2018). Four internets: The geopolitics of digital governance. CIGI paper, no 206. Available from: https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/documents/Paper%20 no.206web.pdf [Accessed 17/06/20]. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. London: Penguin. Perez, C. C. (2019). Invisible women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. London: Chatto & Windus. Rangarajan, S. (2018). Here’s the clearest picture of Silicon Valley’s diversity yet: It’s bad. But some companies are doing less bad. The Center for Investigative Reporting. Available from: https://www. revealnews.org/article/heres-the-clearest-picture-of-silicon-valleys-diversity-yet/ [Accessed 11/06/20]. Ratcliffe, K. (2006). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Savchuk, K. (2019). Big data and racial bias: Can that ghost be removed from the machine? Stanford Business. Available from: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/big-data-racial-bias-can-ghostbe-removed-machine [Accessed 02/06/20]. Snow, J. (2018). “We’re in a diversity crisis”: Co-founder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives. MIT Technology Review. [Online] 14th February. Available from: https://www. technologyreview.com/2018/02/14/145462/were-in-a-diversity-crisis-Black-in-ais-founder-onwhats-poisoning-the-algorithms-in-our/ [Accessed 11/06/20]. Søndergaard, M. and Hansen, L. (2017). Designing with bias and privilege? Nordes 2017: Design + Power, 7. Susskind, R. and Susskind, D. (2015). The future of the professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Economist (2018). Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley. The Economist, 1st September. Thompson, C. (2019). The secret history of women in coding. New York Times Magazine, 14th February. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding- computerprogramming.html?linkId=65692573 [Accessed 11/06/20]. Twine, F. W. and Gallagher, C. (2008). The future of whiteness: A map of the ‘third wave’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), pp. 4–24.

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Pauline Leonard Ugwudike, P. (2020). Digital prediction technologies in the justice system: The implications of a ‘race-neutral’ agenda. Theoretical Criminology, 24(3): 482–501. Wajcman, J. (2006). TechnoCapitalism meets TechnoFeminism: Women and technology in a wireless world. Labour and Industry, 16(3), 7–20. Wajcman, J. (2017). Automation: Is it really different this time? The British Journal of Sociology, 68(1), 119–127. West, S. M., Whittaker, M. and Crawford, K. (2019). Discriminating systems: Gender, race and power in AI. AI Now Institute. Available from: https://ainowinstitute.org/discriminatingsystems.pdf [Accessed 11/06/20]. West C. and Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society, 1(2), pp. 125–151. Williams, M. (2018). Facebook 2018 diversity report: Reflecting on our journey. Available from https://newsroom.f b.com/news/2018/07/diversity-report/. Wills, T. and Chiusi, F. (2020). United Kingdom Automating Society report 2020. Algorithm Watch. Available from: https://automatingsociety.algorithmwatch.org/report2020/united-kingdom/. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

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5 WHITE TIME The relationship between racial identity, contexts, interactions and temporality Matthew W. Hughey

Introduction What is the relationship between race and time? While both time and temporal experience have long been assumed to be constant, contemporary insights from philosophy, literature, and the natural and social sciences are beginning to challenge this assertion. There is a common recognition that different social groups – especially ethnic and racial collectives – are subject to different temporal constraints and hold varied perceptions of time. Simply put, time is racialised. However, an overemphasis on the racial character of time can manifest in reductionist and racist appraisals of people of colour. And as long as scholarly voices fail to scrutinise these evaluations, the white understanding of time will remain unexamined, buttressing already-dominant racial ideologies and leaving white, normative practices invisible and implicitly accepted. In this chapter, I address this issue through a critical sociological framework. Specifically, I analyse data culled from four all-white organisations: (1) an all-white, mixed gender, young professionals group located in the United States Deep South, which I call the ­‘Mississippi-Alabama Young Educated Professionals’ (MAYEP); (2) an all-white, mixed gender, college alumni chapter of a major southern United States university, which I call ‘Big State Alumni’ (BSA); (3) an all-white, cis-woman, New England (United States) chapter of a patriotic lineage society, which I call ‘Daughters Of Patriots’ (DOP); and (4) an all-white, mixed gender (predominately cis-male), New England (United States) chapter of a civic association, which I call the ‘Loyal Order of Benevolent Americans’ (LOBA). The chapter is based on my ethnographic field observations at each organisation, as well as interviews I conducted with 149 members across all organisations; it also draws on my content analyses and experimental vignette audit studies (of which there were eight across all organisations). My research uncovered significant variations in the ways in which racialised settings and interactions shaped white people’s perceptions of time. More specifically, the vignette audit studies revealed three major differences, pertaining to: ‘imagined time’ (i.e. the amount of time estimated when white subjects imagined themselves in a specific, racialised situation); ‘perceived time’ (i.e. white subjects’ estimation of the time it took them to respond to the vignettes and complete a questionnaire); and ‘clock time’ (i.e. the actual time it took white subjects to respond to the vignettes and complete a questionnaire). DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-6

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Race and the sociology of time Bergmann’s 1992 claim that there is ‘neglect and marginality of the time problem in ­sociology’ (82) is no longer applicable. Three decades later, there is now sociological focus on how the stratification and variations in the social order will necessarily shape both how actors are constrained and enabled by social time, as well actors’ perceptions of time. Social time is not monolithic. After all, who has not experienced the sensation of time slowing or speeding relative to certain events, whether the banality of the everyday slows time to a snail’s pace or a certain unexpected threat makes one’s life flash before their eyes, or the perception that ‘time flies’ while having fun? This variation is neither natural nor individualistic. Rather, my approach is sociological, which ‘is not interested in the structure and the psychological functions of temporary perspectives as such, but in the relationship between temporal perspectives and social roles, social classes, certain other groups, specific cultural and social types, [etc.]’ (Bergmann 1992, p. 85). Much of the work at the intersection of social groups and time has drawn from gendered and classed activities. However, recent scholarship indicates a newfound interest in the ways in which ethnicised and racialised groups differently approach – and are otherwise organised by – ‘clock time’ (cf. Bastian 2013; Iddo and Eliasoph 2013). For instance, Michael Hanchard (1999, p. 253) addresses ‘racial time’ as the ‘inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups’, which produce ‘unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge’. In any racial order, laws and policies dictate different allocations of time to different racial groups – not only with respect to labour and leisure, but also with respect to time spent waiting, eating, sleeping and even living. For example, in the aftermath of the 2005 suicide bombings in London, Gunaratnam (2013) found that British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers negotiated time based on the marginality of their religious, gendered and ethno-nationalised positions. That is, the onus of their precarious life necessitated a different conceptualisation of time. Vij’s (2012) investigation of the Indo-Kei (a small, ethnic migrant community in Japan) showed that the migrants understood and felt time in relation to their specific positionality within employment, the nation (according to citizenship laws) and local civic organisations. Moreover, Anderson, Reis-Costa and Misanin (2007) found that experiences of time either lengthened or shortened according to viewing patterns of 9/11 news coverage, with those viewing racialised and xenophobic news reports reporting a prolonged experience of time. Also, based on data from differently racialised youth runaways, Mahadeo (2018) found that youth of colour often developed ‘feelings of temporal inequality and disparate life chances’ (p. 1), even though they viewed ‘their white counterparts as well as white culture as behind time, lame, or just plain “wack” (uncool)’ (p. 1). Mills (2014) asserts – extending Zerubavel (2003) – that scholars should examine the ways in which particular ‘mnemonic communities’ choose to remember the past, as these collections of memories are ‘part of the process of acquiring [contemporary] social identity’ (Zerubavel 2003, pp. 2–3). Modern philosophy is racialised, as evidenced by the negative appraisal of Native Americans’ inappropriate use of time in Locke’s (1988[1689]:301) statement that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’ and Hegel’s denial of African history (1956[1837], p. 92). Hence, Mills (2014) encourages social scientists to take up not only the observation and labelling of racial orientations to time (e.g. the stereotype of ‘coloured people’s time’; cf. Levine 2008; Pardlo 2016), but also the analysis of how specific intersections of dominant racial groups shape – and are shaped by – temporary imaginaries. More specifically, Mills (2014, p. 27) calls ‘for the recognition of a “White time”, a “sociomental” representation of temporality shaped by the interests and experience of the white “mnemonic community”’.1 60

White time

These recent perspectives, and the clarion call they issue, suggest some immediate next steps. First, while some attention is being paid to the ways in which different racial and ethnic communities of colour hold varied perceptions of time, less work has been done to uncover the temporal sensitivities within dominant (i.e. white) racial groups. Second, while research has shown that perceptions of time can shift from one interaction to the next, little is known about how the racialised setting and contextual meanings of particular locations serve as mechanisms for temporal variation. Attuned to these empirical and theoretical apertures, in this chapter, I ask: How do encounters with varied racialised characters and settings shape white perceptions of time?

Data and methodology As outlined in the preceding section, the data for this chapter were culled from a four-site ethnography, which included participant observation, in-depth interviews, content analysis and experimental audit vignettes within four all-white groups.2 While all of the groups were entirely white in membership, they had no official restrictions on racial membership, nor did they explicitly organise on a racial basis. The first two studies took place in the Deep South of the United States over the period 2010 to 2012. The first group I studied, the MAYEP, markets itself to young, career-minded people who wish to ‘meet and greet’ others in order to establish professional contacts. The second group I studied, BSA, is the specific alumni chapter of a large public university in the Deep South. In this group, members – who include both recent graduates and older alumni – gather to fundraise, engage in philanthropy, watch sporting events and socialise. The second two studies took place in the New England region of the United States, over the period 2015 to 2018. One of the groups I studied there, DOP, is a select group of women with ancestors who were actively involved in a specific American war. The members are tight-knit, dedicated and patriotic (and at times nationalistic), and they hold regular meetings and public events to support both scholarly and public study and remembrance of the war and its participants. The second group I studied in this region, the LOBA, is a fraternal order and social club that promotes charity, provides scholarships, offers community service and encourages civic engagement. In all four ethnographic contexts, I conducted interviews (N = 159) with members of each group (MAYEP: n = 35; BSA: n = 42; DOP: n = 38; LOBA: n = 44) and administered six different vignette scenarios concerning social conflict and time (see Appendix A and Table 5.1). Approximately 150 participants from the four groups engaged with each of the six vignettes (N = 900 vignette results in total). My data and findings are presented below. While the interview strategy was based on a semi-structured, in-depth process (cf. Campbell et al. 2013), the vignettes represent a novel methodology that requires further explanation. Over a period of three years, I employed these vignettes to measure what I call ‘imagined time’, ‘perceived time’ and ‘clock time’. First, I asked participants to read the six vignettes (A–F) and respond to a time-related question for each (see Table 5.1). Each vignette required participants to imagine themselves in the social situation posed by the vignette. I measured the answers to the questions 1A–1F as ‘imagined time’. Upon completing all six vignettes in this manner, participants completed a questionnaire comprised of seven items. The final item asked participants how long they believed it took them to read and respond to the vignettes and complete the questionnaire (see Table 5.2). I measured the answer to this question as ‘perceived time’. 61

Matthew W. Hughey Table 5.1  Audit study vignettes and questions Audit study vignettes (A–F)

Question 1 (A–F)

Vignette A Imagine you have been working at your job for many years. Years ago, the company started to experience difficult economic times. As a result, neither you nor any of your co-workers have received a raise or bonus in years. When you ask about a raise or bonus, you are told there is no money to pay employees raises or bonuses. Suddenly, the company announces they are hiring a new employee named [ John/Jamal/Juan]. [ John/Jamal/Juan] is hired with a salary and benefits that are greater than yours and most of your co-workers’.

Question 1A How long do you think it would take for you and your co-workers to accept the new employee?

Vignette B Imagine that you have a child who is 11 years old and is in the sixth grade. Your child is constantly teased and bullied by an older schoolmate named [ Jack/Jabari/Jago]. Your child frequently cries about their experiences. Their test scores are falling, and they are now making up excuses to skip school. You are very worried about the effect of the teasing and bullying on your child. After months of asking teachers and principals to do something to stop the teasing and bullying, [ Jack/ Jabari/Jago] is finally disciplined and stops bullying your child.

Question 1B How long do you think it would take your child to process the teasing and bullying and fully recover?

Vignette C [Susan Mayer/Shanice Washington/Sofía Orozco] is 49 years old. Until a year ago, she had been working full-time in the accounts receivable department of her company for three years. However, she was then laid off. She has been looking for work for the last year, but has not yet found a job. [Susan Mayer/Shanice Washington/Sofía Orozco] would like to apply for unemployment benefits. At the same time, the government is debating changes to unemployment benefits laws that would require applicants to work for a certain number of years at the same company before they can qualify.

Question 1C If it were up to you, how many years would someone need to work before they qualify for unemployment benefits?

Vignette D Imagine that the United States recently elected their first woman president. Shortly after taking office, President [Sarah Smith/Sherika Smith/Salvadora Smith] introduced controversial domestic and international policies that caused an economic devastation that is being called the ‘Second Great Depression’. The country now has a 20 per cent unemployment rate and the costs of basic goods have doubled, because of President [Sarah Smith/Sherika Smith/Salvadora Smith].

Question 1D How long do you think it would take for the country to rebound from the Second Great Depression and for the economy to return to its pre-depression state?

Vignette E You have decided to host a foreign exchange student in your home for a full semester (nearly four months). A student from [Sweden/Nigeria/ Guatemala] moves into your home. Weeks later, you find out that the student has been wearing some of your clothes without permission, sold some of your household items for cash and used your identification to open up a credit card that they have been using. You contact the police and they arrest the student. The student will remain in jail before being sent home to [Sweden/Nigeria/Guatemala], where they will be free.

Question 1E How long do you think the student should remain in jail?

62

White time Audit study vignettes (A–F)

Question 1 (A–F)

Vignette F Imagine that you fell in love with a person from [Canada/Ghana/ Mexico]. You dated for a long time and decided to get engaged. You are very excited to tell your family. However, after informing your family of your engagement, they tell you that they do not approve of your engagement or your fiancé’s family in [Canada/Ghana/Mexico]. You decide to get married anyway.

Question 1F How long do you think it will take your family to approve of your fiancé/ spouse and their family?

Table 5.2  Audit vignette questions Audit vignette questions 2–8 The following items were asked after participants responded to the audit study vignettes (A–F) Question 2 In [insert name of organisation], have you or anyone else you know had experiences similar to those described in the brief story you read? If yes, what are those experiences? Question 3 Has anyone you know, outside of [insert name of organisation], had experiences similar to those described in the brief story you read? If yes, what are those experiences? Question 4 What do you think could change the length of time in the story? If anything, how would this either shorten or lengthen the time, and why? Question 5 Overall, what did you think about the story? Question 6 Overall, how did the story make you feel? Question 7 Are there any additional things you would like to say? Question 8 How long do you think it took you to read this story, complete the survey and answer this question?

Finally, I recorded how long each participant actually took to read and respond to the vignettes and answer the seven-part questionnaire. I measured this as ‘clock time’. I stratified my implementation of the vignette and questionnaire in two ways. First, by racial proxy: as indicated above, I implemented the vignettes as an ‘audit study’, introducing variation in the racial proxies (e.g. names and countries), in keeping with recent conventions of evoking race through racialised names (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Fryer Jr and Levitt 2004; Gaddis 2014). 3 For instance, 50 participants read Vignette A with a white main character (‘John’); another 50 participants read Vignette A with a Black main character (‘Jamal’); and a further 50 participants read Vignette A with a Latinx main character (‘Juan’). Second, I stratified my implementation of the vignette and questionnaire by setting: ­approximately 50% (N = 453) of respondents were administered the vignettes and questionnaire immediately after they had spent at least one hour in a racially-diverse setting (RDS); the other half of the respondents (N = 447) were administered the vignettes and questionnaire immediately after spending at least one hour in an all-white setting (AWS). For instance, 77 participants read Vignette A after being in an RDS, whereas 73 participants read Vignette A after being in an AWS. Table 5.3 outlines the ways in which racial proxy and setting were administered with respect to the audit study vignettes. 63

Matthew W. Hughey Table 5.3  Administration of the audit study vignettes Racial proxy Vignette A

Vignette B

Vignette C

Vignette D

Vignette E

Vignette F

RDS (N)

John Jamal Juan Jack Jabari Jago Susan Mayer Shanice Washington Sofia Orozco Sarah Smith Sherika Smith Salvadora Smith Sweden Nigeria Guatemala Canada Ghana Mexico

25 26 26 25 25 25 25 25 26 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 453

Total

AWS (N) 25 24 24 25 25 25 25 25 24 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 447

Findings: ‘imagined time’ and ‘time thieves’ Figure 5.1 plots the ‘imagined time’ across all six vignettes, by both racial proxy (i.e. white, Black, Latinx) and setting (i.e. all settings, RDS, AWS). Examining the results across all settings, responses to the white proxies averaged 12.18 months. This figure nearly tripled to 35.47 months in response to the Black proxies and greatly increased to 29.74 months for the Latinx proxies. Thus, imagining racial ‘others’ dramatically increased ‘imagined time’. Looking at the RDS and AWS separately, it is evident that the average ‘imagined time’ moved closer to parity in the RDS, with the white proxies registering 14.51 months and the Black proxies registering 29.11 months. Conversely, in the AWS, the spread significantly widened, with the average ‘imagined time’ for the white proxies recorded as 9.85 months and that of the Black proxies recorded as 41.9 months. Further, the difference between the average ‘imagined time’ for Black and Latinx proxies dropped to only 2.36 months in the RDS, while it spread to 9.11 in the AWS. Thus, the racial diversity of the setting seemed to either mitigate or exacerbate differences in ‘imagined time’, with respect to different racial proxies. With respect to the white proxies, the average imagined time of 14.51 months in the RDS dropped to 9.85 in the AWS. However, with respect to proxies of colour, the change from an RDS to an AWS resulted in an increase in the average imagined time, from 29.11 to 41.89 for the Black proxies and 26.75 to 32.81 for the Latinx proxies. Compared to the RDS, the AWS promoted inequality in imagined time through an inverse relationship: it decreased the imagined time for the white proxies while increasing the imagined time for the Black and Latinx proxies. The shifts in imagined time observed in the vignettes were also reflected in the in-depth interviews.4 In particular, participants frequently conceptualised Black- and Latinx-racialised 64

White time White

All

Black RDS

Latino

AWS 41.9

40 35.47 32.81 29.74

Months

30

29.11 26.75

20 14.51

12.18

9.85

10

0 White

Black

Latino

White

Black

Racial Proxy

Latino

White

Black

Latino

Figure 5.1  Imagined time versus racial proxy (grouped by racial setting)

people and nations as ‘time thieves’. That is, compared to white people, Black and Latinx people were understood as needing or taking more time, often in an unjust manner. For example, Dahlia (20 years old, MAYEP) said: I’ve always noticed that Black people seem to need more time. […] It’s just acceptable that they are late, so if I’m meeting someone, I know that they are probably going to be late and I have to plan accordingly. If I don’t plan, then it’s like they are just stealing that time from me. I mean, it’s stolen regardless, so I have to either just waste that time, or plan to do something in that time when I would normally just be waiting around. Similarly, Jasmine (45 years old, DOP) stated: When I visit Mexico, or even in Spain, like, you know, it’s Europe but it’s Spanish, so it’s similar to Mexico in that regard, so when I’m there, I notice that time functions differently there […] and I feel taken advantage of. [MWH: ‘In what way?’] People are always late and that’s stealing my own time. Like, it just devalues my time as if I don’t have anything important to do but wait around. […] I suppose, because I know it’s cultural, that we all have our own values and norms, so I don’t want to impose my own, so I’m challenging myself to be sensitive here. I suppose Hispanics or Latinos, I don’t know the right term, but you know what I mean, so they just need more time to do things. I should be sensitive to that. Furthermore, Henry (40 years old, LOBA) told me bluntly: I know that if I don’t remind myself that Black people are just, I mean like culturally, not because it’s biological or something, but you know, maybe it is, so I don’t want to say one way or the other, because I don’t know, but sure, I think anyone who has to work with Black people in a professional setting realises that, when compared to white 65

Matthew W. Hughey

people, you know, on average, they just are slower. […] Black people need more time. … [long pause] They are late more often. … [long pause] I had to learn to adjust to this fact, otherwise, that time would be taken from me. […] my time is valuable and I began to feel that it was being stolen. In addition, time was conceptualised as a resource that implicitly belonged to whites and was frequently misused, abused, drained or even stolen by Black and Latinx people. For instance, Joseph (52 years old, BSA) said: I don’t want to get too controversial, […] when Black people run meetings it always [said with elongated emphasis] starts late and runs late. …[long pause] business doesn’t work like that. It’s a waste of my resources, it’s, it’s, look, frankly it’s abusive. You can’t do that to people. [MWH: ‘What people?’] People! Just people, I mean, okay, I guess it’s normal maybe among Black people, but in a business setting, because you know it’s mainly white, and that’s, that’s just how it is. I mean that’s white privilege, but that’s just how it is where white people are generally running businesses, so you can’t just drain the company resources like that. Time is a resource and so, yeah, again, I wouldn’t say this in public, but Black people waste company time. […] I think that’s like stealing from the bottom line. If time is money, then they’re stealing money. […] it’s irresponsible. … [long pause] You can’t have Black people running a company if you want to protect profits, shareholders and employees. […] on average, white people are more responsible with other people’s time. Also, so, Asians, right? They are like, super on time. They’re even early. They make good executives, but on average, Latinos? Nope. Blacks? Nope. Moreover, the white participants frequently failed to conceptualise time and their experience of time as unique to their racial group (i.e. white). However, they did often describe time as the ‘normal’ march or progression of linear events, which works in the interests of white people and often against the interests of people of colour. For instance, Bianca (38 years old, DOP) said: I notice that I don’t really think about time when I’m with my normal, I mean, white, uh, friends. […] And I guess, that … [long pause] okay, so, white people generally, so, we know how to use time to the fullest. [MWH: ‘I’m not sure I understand. Can you make this plain for me?’] Yeah, yeah, okay, so, it’s that white people know how to organise their life to how just time works, like the spin of the Earth and the calendar. There’s only so much time in the day. […] Black people have not made a real, I guess, time-sensitive culture, so they really have not progressed as much as white people over time. […] Just the way that the [Gregorian] calendar is set up is like normal, like I said, based on the seasons and how to get the most out of the time in the day. Furthermore, Drake (23 years old, BSA) told me: The work week is set up to disadvantage Black people, and yeah, umm Afro-Latino people too, because so, their cultures don’t often, at least this is just what I think, they uh, they don’t orient their life around the progression of time like white people are taught to do. […] So, I think, in the end, just the way workdays and professional expectations about time work, are like, set up to disadvantage people of colour. […] Maybe that’s why white people do so well, because we’re taught to orient ourselves to how time just naturally works. 66

White time

When these white participants were in an RDS and presented with scenarios that asked them to imagine time (see Table 5.1, questions 1A–F), they appeared to conceptualise Black and Latinx people as requiring or taking more time than their white counterparts. In other words, these people were imagined as ‘time thieves’. This dynamic was particularly exacerbated when the white participants in an AWS were asked to imagine time for Black and Latinx proxies; in this scenario, the imagined time for the white proxies dropped, while that of the Black and Latinx proxies significantly i­ ncreased. This inverse relationship suggests that participants imagined time as a resource that ­i mplicitly belongs to whites, and is stolen, abused and misused by Black and Latinx people. Moreover, these white participants did not seem to understand time as already racialised for their own dominant group; rather, they saw time as the normal march of events that worked best for white people. Hence, these participants seemed to understand time first as a resource belonging to white people and, second, as something that gains the most currency or value when circulating within the temporal racial economy of white people, which is administrated and controlled by white people.

Findings: perceived time and temporal drains In this section, I address the responses given to question 8 (see Table 5.2: ‘How long do you think it took you to read this story, complete the survey and answer this question?’) as a measure of perceived time. As shown in Figure 5.2, the overall average perceived time for the white proxies was 9.33 minutes. This increased by 1 minute for the Black proxies (10.33) and slightly more for the Latinx proxies (10.53). Thus, time seemed to quicken when participants were considering the white proxies, as opposed to the Black and Latinx proxies. Examining the RDS alone, we see that the average perceived time of 12.56 months for the white proxies dropped to 8.13 minutes for the Black proxies and decreased further to nearly 8.10 minutes for the Latinx proxies. The RDS appears to have slowed down time considerably for the white proxies, whereas it had the opposite effect for the Black and Latinx proxies. That White

All

Black RDS

Latino

AWS 12.57

12.56

10

10.33

13.08

10.53

9.33

Minutes

8.13

8.02

6.11

5

0 White

Black

Latino

White

Black

Racial Proxy

Latino

White

Figure 5.2  Perceived time versus racial proxy (grouped by racial setting)

67

Black

Latino

Matthew W. Hughey

is, after spending time in a racially-diverse environment, the white participants perceived themselves as taking longer to consider vignettes with white proxies than those with Black and Latinx proxies. However, this relationship dramatically flipped in the AWS, where the average perceived time for the white proxies dropped to 6.11 minutes and increased to 12.57 minutes for the Black proxies and 13.08 minutes for the Latinx proxies – representing the highest recorded perceived time. That is, after spending time in an all-white environment, participants perceived themselves as taking longer to consider vignettes featuring Black and Latinx proxies than those featuring white proxies. While perceptions of time in the RDS were unequal between racial proxies, this inequality was even worse in the AWS. Comparing the setting effects for the white proxies, the average perceived time in the RDS was 12.56 minutes, which dropped to 6.11 minutes in the AWS. However, as in question 1, when changing from the RDS to the AWS, the average perceived time increased for proxies of colour: from 8.13 to 12.57 minutes for the Black proxies and from 8.02 to 13.08 minutes for the Latinx proxies. Once again, these trends were also replicated in the in-depth interviews, which displayed a pronounced space/time interaction whereby participants in the RDS regularly conceptualised Black and Latinx people as ‘temporal drains’. Specifically, Black and Latinx people were perceived as slowing, stifling or draining away time that would otherwise be available for white people and white-dominated spaces. For example, Noel (33 years old, BSA) said: I’ve noticed that when I’m hanging out with some of my Black friends, that, well, you asked about how time passed, so you might think this is weird, but you asked, but it seems to slow down [laughter]. I’m serious! [laughter] It’s like things just slow down and things are easier. […] It’s not how time feels normally. […] I find myself having to adjust, even though it’s nice, but it’s at the same time, uh, it’s adjustment. I look at my watch all the time because it just doesn’t feel right [MWH: ‘What doesn’t feel right?’]. The flow of time. It slows down. Based on how I feel, so I look at my watch and I’m like ‘Hey, that can’t be right! Only an hour!’ But it feels like 2 or 3 [hours]. […] I notice that when I’m with my Black friends …[long pause] maybe time passes differently with them? Brooke (33 years old, DOP) told me, ‘the passage of time changes the most when I go to non-white countries […] It’s slower in the West Indies, Nigeria, South America. […] Europe is fast, quick-paced, go go go. […] I also just don’t think I think about time as much when I’m not in the US or Europe’. Finally, Caitlin (26 years old, MAYEP) said: Time is funny. It changes depending who you’re with and … [long pause] time always passes in the blink of an eye when I’m in white spaces. I remember, I went to the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] to renew my license and I for whatever reason was one of the only white people there, and time just dragged [said with elongated emphasis] on. [MWH: ‘Is that because of the DMV, or because you noticed so many people of colour?’] Great question. I guess I’ll never know, but all I can say is that my gut reaction is always, like I’m more conscious of every little thing when I’m in spaces where I’m the minority, and things like literally slow down. I watch the clock more. Things feel slower and the air is thicker, like I’m moving around in quicksand […] around white people, time flies. 68

White time

Combining the above analyses, we see a space/time interaction for perceived time that is opposite that of imagined time. When in an RDS and/or when considering Black and Latinx proxies, the white participants’ perceptions of the real passage of time slowed, whereas their estimation of the amount of time required increased. Conversely, when in an AWS and/ or when considering white proxies, the white participants’ perceptions of time quickened, while their estimation of the amount of time required decreased. In this sense, the influence of people of colour and RDS on participants’ perceptions of time was not conceptualised as ‘time theft’, as before, but ‘temporal drain’.

Findings: clock time and white ‘temporal investment’ In terms of objective ‘clock time’, Figure 5.3 presents the results, recording an average of 10.4 minutes for the white proxies, 9.92 minutes for the Black proxies and 9.19 for the Latinx proxies. In the RDS, the white participants took less time to consider the white proxies and the most time to consider the Black proxies (with the time needed to consider the Latinx proxies falling in between): consideration of the white proxies clocked in at 8.21 minutes, increasing to 12.05 minutes for the Black proxies and 10.83 minutes for the Latinx proxies. With respect to the AWS, a paradoxical effect emerged, whereby participants took more time to consider the white proxies (12.68 minutes) and significantly less time to consider the Black and Latinx proxies (7.86 and 7.62 minutes, respectively). Overall, this shows that first, participants took the most time when in a white context (AWS) and considering white proxies; and second, they took the least time when in a racially-diverse context (RDS) and considering white proxies, or in a white context (AWS) and considering Black and Latinx proxies. If clock time can be conceptualised as a resource that is spent or invested in thinking about a racialised scenario, then it is clear that the white participants did not invest time in thinking about either white names in a diverse context (RDS) or Black and Latinx names in a white context (AWS). However, they did invest time in considering white names in white spaces (AWS). Moreover, as was also observed for imagined time and perceived time, while White

All

Black RDS

Latino

12.68

11.96

10

10.4

AWS

10.73 9.92 9.19

Minutes

8.13

7.86

7.62

Black

Latino

5

0 White

Black

Latino

White

Black

Racial Proxy

Figure 5.3  Clock time (by setting)

69

Latino

White

Matthew W. Hughey

10

All

Difference in perceived time from clock time White Latino Black RDS

Subjects perceived that MORE time passed than actually did

5

Minutes

AWS

4.71

4.43

0.41

0

5.46

1.33

-1.07 -2.71

-5

-10

-3.83

Clock time (0)

Subjects perceived that LESS time passed than actually did

White

Black

Latino

-6.57

White Black Latino Racial proxy

White

Black

Latino

Figure 5.4  Difference between perceived and clock time

there was some inequality of clock time in the RDS across racial proxies, this inequality was even more pronounced in the AWS. Of interest, participants’ perceptions of how long they took to respond to the vignettes and questions show a complete reversal of the actual measures of time. Figure 5.4 plots this difference between clock time and perceived time (i.e. ‘perceived time’ minus ‘clock time’), such that positive values indicate that participants believed they took more time than they actually did, and negative values indicate that participants believed they took less time than they actually did. Values close to 0 indicate that participants’ perceptions of time were close to the actual measured time. Disaggregating the average difference between perception and reality shows that participants perceived themselves as taking more time than they actually did when considering both the white proxies in the RDS and proxies of colour in the AWS. In contrast, they perceived themselves as taking less time than they actually did when considering proxies of colour in the RDS and white proxies in the AWS. In fact, their perceptions of time were furthest from reality when considering white proxies in a white space (AWS): in this scenario, they invested an average of 6.57 more minutes than they thought they did. This difference between participants’ perceptions and reality shows that their perceived ‘temporal drain’ is, in fact, a myth.

Conclusion Time is racialised. The white participants in the present study imagined, perceived and ­engaged with actual clock time in a manner that was dependent on racialised people and spaces. This finding supports Mills’s (2014, p. 27) call for ‘the recognition of a “White time”’: Such a racialised mnemonic community takes three major forms. First, Black and Latino people are understood as ‘time thieves’ – needing, requiring, or taking more time than their White counterparts. Moreover, when White participants imagine time in AllWhite Settings for Black and Latino proxies, the ‘imagined time’ for White proxies 70

White time

actually drops even as it nearly doubles for proxies of color. This inverse relationship signals how ‘imagined time’ functions first, as a resource belonging to White people, and second, that time gains more value when administered by White people. In comparison to white people, people of colour were perceived as ‘temporal drains’ that slowed and stifled the seemingly natural progression of time. Thus, the space/time interaction for perceived time was opposite that of imagined time. When the white participants were in an RDS and/or considering Black and Latinx proxies, their perceptions of the passage of time slowed down, while their estimations of the amount of time required to respond to the vignettes and questions increased. In contrast, when white participants were in an AWS and/or considering white proxies, they perceived time to quicken, while their estimations of the amount of time required to respond to the vignettes and questions decreased. Therefore, the influence of people of colour and the RDS on their perceptions of time was conceptualised not as ‘time theft’, as before, but as a ‘temporal drain’. Third, the white participants displayed an uneven temporal investment: when in an RDS, they did not invest as much time thinking about white proxies, and when in the AWS, they did not invest as much time thinking about Black and Latinx proxies. In fact, their perceptions of time were the most divergent from actual clock time when considering white proxies in the AWS; thus, the largest gulf between perception and reality occurred in relation to whiteness. These findings are far from the final word on this subject. In fact, the possibilities for future research are abundant. For instance, one could employ the same methodology to explore whether ‘white time’ extends to – and/or varies significantly among – people of colour. Asian-racialised proxies and spaces could also be employed. Furthermore, alternative measures could be used to measure the robustness of the findings. Importantly, research must continue to illuminate the intersection of the sociology of time and racial and ethnic studies, so we can better understand the ways in which racialised perceptions of time function to reproduce inequalities, discrimination and racism, and ultimately make our social time together anything but just.

Notes 1 Mills (2014, p. 40) asserts that, without this turn, the discipline will merely reflect ‘the normative discourse of the non-enslaved, the non-expropriated, and the non-victims of genocide – the discourse of the racially privileged Euro- and white settler population, whose normative temporality need pay no attention in determining questions of justice to a deeply non-ideal (non-admitted, non-mapped, non-theorised and thus non-existent) past that has been altered not metaphysically but representationally, gated out of their moral consideration’. 2 In order to receive institutional review board (IRB) approval, all potentially identifying information regarding these four groups is either obscured or represented using pseudonyms in this chapter. 3 Some caution in using racialised proxy names is warranted. For example, one concern is that observed discrepancies between distinctively white, African American and Latinx names may actually measure differences in ethnicity and/or socio-economic status (cf. Baldassarri and Abascal 2017; Fryer Jr and Levitt 2004; Gaddis 2017a, 2017b). To mitigate this challenge, four of the audits used racialised names, while two others used racialised countries of origin (cf. Booth, Leigh and Varganova 2010 on the use of nationality for measures of ethnicity and race). Moreover, I used racialised white, Black, and Latinx forenames and surnames with high racial correspondence and high correspondence to high, rather than low, socio-economic status (e.g., forenames such as Jack (white), Jabari (Black) and Sofía (Latina); and surnames such as Mayer (white), Washington (Black) and Orozco (Latinx). Following Gaddis (2014, 2017a, 2017b), I used New York State Department of Health birth record data for all births in the period 1994 to 2012 to obtain information on the characteristics of names.

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Matthew W. Hughey 4 Verbiage cuts from the interviews are denoted by ‘[…]’, whereas natural pauses in the conversation are denoted by ‘…’. Also, italicised words and bracketed descriptions such as ‘[laughter]’, ‘[said with elongated emphasis]’ and ‘[long pause]’ are used to reflect the flow and tone of the interview.

References Anderson, M. J., Reis-Costa, K. and Misanin, J. (2007). Effects of September 11th terrorism stress on estimated duration. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 104(3), pp. 799–802. Baldassarri, D. and Abascal, M. (2017). Field experiments across the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, pp. 41–73. Bastian, M. (2013). Political apologies and the question of a ‘shared time’ in the Australian context. Theory, Culture, and Society, 30(5), pp. 94–121. Bergmann, W. (1992). The problem of time in sociology: An overview of the literature on the state of theory and research on the ‘sociology of time’, 1900–82. Time and Society, 1(1), pp. 81–134. Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), pp. 991–1013. Booth, A., Leigh, A. and Varganova, E. (2010). Does racial and ethnic discrimination vary across ­m inority groups? Evidence from a field experiment. Institute for the Study of Labor, Discussion Paper No. 4947. Available from: http://ftp.iza.org/dp4947.pdf. Campbell, J. L., Quincy, C., Osserman, J. and Pedersen, O. K. (2013). Coding in-depth semistructured interviews: Problems of unitization and intercoder reliability and agreement. Sociological Methods & Research, 42(3), pp. 294–320. Fryer Jr., R. G. and Levitt, S. D. (2004). Understanding the Black–white test score gap in the first two years of school. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(2), pp. 447–464. Gaddis, M. S. (2014). Discrimination in the credential society: An audit study of race and college ­selectivity in the labor market. Social Forces, 93(4), pp. 1451–1479. Gaddis, M. S. (2017a). How Black are Lakisha and Jamal? Racial perceptions from names used in correspondence audit studies. Sociological Science, 4, pp. 469–489. Gaddis, M. S. (2017b). Racial/ethnic perceptions from Hispanic NAMES: Selecting names to test for discrimination. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 3, pp. 1–11. Gunaratnam, Y. (2013). Roadworks: British Bangladeshi mothers, temporality and intimate citizenship in East London. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(3), pp. 249–263. Hanchard, M. (1999). Afro-modernity: Temporality, politics, and the African diaspora. Public Culture, 11(1), pp. 253, 256. Hegel, G. W. F. (1956[1837]). The philosophy of history. Translated by J. Sibree. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Iddo, T. and Eliasoph, N. (2013). Coordinating futures: Toward a theory of anticipation. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4), 908–942. Levine, R. N. (2008). A geography of time: The temporal misadventures of a social psychologist, or how every culture keeps time just a little bit differently. New York, NY: Basic Books. Locke, J. (1988[1689]). Two treatises of government. Edited by P. Laslett. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Mahadeo, Rahsaan. (2018). Why is the time always right for white and wrong for us? How racialized youth make sense of whiteness and temporal inequality. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 186–199. Mills, C. W. (2014). White time: The chronic injustice of ideal theory. Du Bois Review, 11(1), pp. 27–42. Pardlo, G. (2016). Colored people’s time. Callaloo, 39(2), 361–371. Vij, R. (2012). Temporality, civic engagement, and alterity: Indo-Kei in contemporary Japan. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37(1), pp. 3–29. Zerubavel, E. 2003. Time maps: Collective memory and the social shape of the past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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SECTION 2

Consumption

6 INTRODUCTION Consumption

This section focuses on the intersection between consumption, commodification and race. While some readers might associate consumption and race with the demographic trend of mapping patterns of consumption according to racial affiliation, the chapters in this section are more aligned with bell hooks’s (1992) description of how the ‘other’ becomes commodified for consumption. hooks writes: When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other. (1992, p. 23) The consumption of race (see also Pitcher 2014) and race as consumption occur in various contexts, from restaurants and dining (Andreassen 2015) to film and culture (Dyer 1997; Hall 1997) and dating (Caluya 2006, 2008; Owens and Bronwyn 2006; Riggs 2013). In all contexts, consumption is often related to mundane, daily practices and encounters that mediate and negotiate relations of race, ethnicity, age, gender and sexuality (see, e.g., Lorde 1984). As the chapters in this section demonstrate, consumption can function as a lens through which to view and understand how race is negotiated and valued, as well as how different understandings of race circulate. The section opens with Katarina Mattsson’s chapter, ‘The whiteness of tourism’, in which she describes the close relationship between international tourism and whiteness. Mattsson shows how whiteness plays a significant role as a silent norm that operates through a rhetorical silence in many transnational tourist contexts. Her chapter contributes the perspective of critical whiteness studies to the existing literature on post-colonial tourism, showing how a part of the contemporary tourism industry has an active colonial legacy, both structurally and ideologically. Mattsson sketches out the contours of an emerging research field that explicitly explores and theorises the importance of whiteness and race in contemporary tourism. Her chapter shows how different ways of travelling and holiday making entail varying logics of whiteness and race, and how race and whiteness interact with other social orders in the tourist sphere, including class, gender and sexuality. The chapter also demonstrates DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-8

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how whiteness works as a structuring principle in contemporary tourism, underlining that different logics of whiteness are prominent in different tourist segments. Theoretically, Mattsson frames the significance of whiteness in tourism as an underlying and integrated dimension of contemporary tourism, in order to explore different angles of the colonial continuity of tourism. In particular, she demonstrates how colonial spaces, discourses and subjectivities are reproduced, modified and adapted to prevailing conditions in their respective tourist segments. The second chapter, ‘Whiteness, wellness and gender: A transnational feminist approach’, by Raka Shome, follows Mattsson’s study of the contribution of leisure activities to race formations. Shome’s chapter focuses on wellness culture (which primarily targets affluent, modern, white women), in order to examine articulations of white femininity. In particular, the chapter addresses the ways in which contemporary logics of wellness constitute a modality through which a modern (i.e. cool, sophisticated and liberal) white womanhood is made and remade. Intersecting gender and critical whiteness theory, Shome’s analytical framework demonstrates that this modern white womanhood reflects a cosmopolitan and ‘woke’ white femininity that distances itself from insular expressions of whiteness. Shome uses the term ‘white femininity’ to reference an ideological and material structure – a network of relations, from economy to geopolitics – through which meanings and scripts about upper class, able-bodied (North Atlantic Western) white women and their place in society are constituted and reconstituted in particular times and contexts. White femininity is a relational category, and Shome illustrates how its structures of production and maintenance are linked to inequalities that disadvantage women of colour and women from the Global South. The chapter illustrates how the modern structure of white femininity in the North Atlantic West – and specifically the United States – seems, on the one hand, liberal, sophisticated and cosmopolitan; while on the other hand, it remains intimately situated in racial extractions and unequal transnational mobilities of labour, indigenous knowledge and healing practices. The third chapter, ‘Racial reproductions and genetic imaginaries’, co-written by Rikke Andreassen, Daisy Deomampo and Jennifer A. Hamilton, dwells on racialised consumption in assisted reproduction. The chapter analyses two empirical cases of Asian American egg donation and the global online sperm/egg bank Cryos International, to illustrate entangled ideas about race, reproduction and market value. The authors argue that reproductive medicine structures a commercial market in racialised gametes, underlining the importance of understanding the ways in which biogenetic and social ideas about race are (co-)constructed in the context of assisted reproduction, gamete donation, the purchase of gametes and neoliberalism. The chapter’s two empirical cases display how the idea of ‘racial purity’ becomes valuable and describe how particular racial boundaries and logics of whiteness are maintained and reinforced in commercial assisted reproduction. While both cases highlight racial purity as valuable for consumers, the Asian egg case seems to offer an alternative to this purity – one that eschews more familiar eugenic notions but nevertheless relies on the same racial logics. In both cases, however, race – and the imaginary of race as intertwined with heredity and genetics – is central to the organisation of family making. While race has been inherent to much reproduction and kinship making historically, this chapter illustrates how assisted reproduction makes race visible and explicit in particular ways, and how gametes become racialised in stereotypical ways, in the process of creating recognisable reproductive commodities with economic value. The final chapter, ‘Textiles, fashion and race: Technologies of whiteness in the British colonies and metropole, c. 1700–1820’, by Beverly Lemire, takes a more historical approach 76

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to race and consumption. In the chapter, Lemire describes how whiteness intersects with the material histories of textiles, fashion and slavery in her analysis of textiles as material culture in the long eighteenth century (i.e. 1660–1820). Dress, according to Lemire, is a particularly powerful medium to analyse, as it enacts, disputes and displays hierarchies. She shows how white fabrics and fashion in the Anglo Atlantic world effected a new racialised ordering of dress, aligned with the wider imperial project. In the imperial metropole, white garments became normalised within this schema, with racialised styles conceived as emerging from ‘classical’ heritage. In her analysis, Lemire combines material culture with critical whiteness theory and takes seriously the power of things, teasing out the meanings that arise from objects and object systems. Fashion, in the form of textiles and dress, is part of the ‘interconnected global system’. Thus, a contemporary challenge for scholars is to bring museum collections of textiles and current histories into conversation with this wider narrative, thereby illuminating the myriad roles played by the politicised commodities and the racialised strategies they served. This chapter is an example of how new approaches and perspectives are required to reckon with the politics of whiteness that flourished in the long eighteenth century. Indeed, racialised material culture figured in the calculus of the period, embodied in lovely white gowns and now stored in countless museums.

References Andreassen, R. (2015). The search for the white Nordic: Analysis of the contemporary New Nordic Kitchen and former race science. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. 20(6), pp. 438–451. https://doi.org10.1080/13504630.2014.1002599. Caluya, G. (2006). The (gay) scene of racism: Face, shame and gay Asian males. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association e-Journal, 2, pp. 1–4. Caluya, G. (2008). “The rice steamer”: Race, desire, and affect in Sydney’s gay scene. Australian Geographer, ­ 39(3), pp. 283–392. Dyer, R. (1997). White. Essays on race and culture. London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1997). Representation. Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: SAGE. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Owens, E. and Bronwyn, B. (2006). ‘Eating the Black body: Interracial desire, food metaphor and white fear’, in Waskul, I. D. and Vannini, P. (eds.) Body/embodiment. Symbolic interactions and the sociology of the body. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 201–212. Pitcher, B. (2014). Consuming race. New York and London: Routledge. Riggs, D. (2013). Anti-Asian sentiment amongst a sample of White Australian men on Gaydar. Sex Roles, 68, pp. 768–778.

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7 TOURISM, WHITENESS AND COLONIAL CONTINUITY Katarina Mattsson

Introduction In this chapter, I argue that there is a close relationship between international tourism and whiteness. The importance of whiteness in tourism should not be regarded as deterministic or all-encompassing. Rather, whiteness plays a significant role as a silent norm that operates through a rhetorical silence in many transnational tourist contexts (Crenshaw 1997). More specifically, the notion of the ‘tourist’ often entails a supposedly neutral position, which conceals the implicit assumption of whiteness. Being a tourist often means ‘never having to say that you are ethnic’ (Perry 2001). This is obvious when adventurous travellers describe their journeys to remote places ‘where no tourists have ever been’, implying that they have visited a place ‘where no white people have ever been’. Another example is the mutual association between the tourist and the white Westerner at many popular tourist destinations – for example in Thailand, where the word ‘farang’ alternately translates as ‘foreigner’, ‘white Westerner’ and ‘tourist’ (Teo and Leong 2006, p. 118). As a result of this, the issue of the whiteness of tourism could be reasonably perceived as a tautology. Despite the close relationship between tourism and whiteness, research that explicitly addresses the importance of whiteness in the tourist sphere has only recently appeared. Indeed, post-colonial tourism research has emphasised that, in a substantial part of the contemporary tourism industry, there is a direct and active colonial legacy that is both structural and ideological (Hall and Tucker 2004; Tucker and Akama 2009). Historical studies of white women’s travel have shown that the imperial history of travelling is characterised by gendered notions of masculinity and whiteness (Blunt 1994; Ghose 1999; Mills 1991). Further, feminist research has offered an analysis of how race relations structure the field of romance and sex tourism (Frohlick 2008, 2010, 2013; Taylor 2001, 2006). However, as an effect of the increased interest in critical whiteness studies, we can now distinguish the contours of an emerging research field that explicitly explores and theorises the importance of whiteness and race in contemporary tourism (Bandyopadhyay 2019; Bandyopadhyay & Patil, 2017; Erickson 2018; Jamerson 2016; Mattsson 2016a; Saldanha 2007; Spracklen 2013; Wilkes 2014, 2016). In this chapter, I trace some of the nuances of the logics of whiteness in contemporary tourism by analytically reviewing research exploring constructions of whiteness in different 78

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tourist contexts, including enclave tourism (Kothari 2015; Wilkes 2014, 2016), romance and sex tourism (Frohlick 2008, 2010, 2013; Taylor 2001, 2006; Wilkes 2014, 2016), backpacking (Elsrud 2005; Lozanski 2010; Muzaini 2006; Teo and Leong 2006), ethnic tourism (Mattsson 2016a, 2016b; Saldanha 2007) and volunteer tourism (Bandyopadhyay 2019; Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017; Mostafanezhad 2013). The chapter shows how different ways of travelling and holiday making entail different logics of whiteness and race formations, and how race and whiteness interact with other social orders in the tourist sphere, including class, gender and sexuality. Thus, the chapter demonstrates how whiteness works as a structuring principle in contemporary tourism, underlining that different logics of whiteness are prominent in different tourist segments. In this chapter, I demonstrate the potential of exploring and theorising contemporary tourism from a critical whiteness perspective. Theoretically, I frame the significance of whiteness in tourism as an underlying and integrated dimension of contemporary tourism (Owen 2007). I also explore different dimensions of the colonial continuity of tourism – in particular, how colonial spaces, discourses and subjectivities are reproduced, modified and adapted to the prevailing conditions in their tourist segments (Hebron 2007). From this perspective, I analytically approach how a variety of neo-colonial logics of whiteness structure different touristic spaces, practices, discourses, desires and encounters. In order to explore the co-construction of tourism and whiteness in the global sphere, I further develop the concept of touristic whiteness from previous work (Mattsson 2016a) and suggest that we explore the intertwining of tourism and whiteness as a performative effect of different ways of doing whiteness in tourism, rather than a straightforward consequence of the fact that many – but indeed not all – tourists are white Westerners.

Whiteness as a structuring principle in tourism In the following, I wish to emphasise the structural dimensions of whiteness in tourism. In the article ‘Towards a critical theory of whiteness’, philosopher David Owen suggests that whiteness should be theorised as ‘a structuring property’ of the normal functioning of modern social systems (Owen 2007, p. 204). Owen further proposes that different dimensions of whiteness be regarded as interacting aspects of an integrated social order, arguing that whiteness shapes the underlying circumstances of a range of social practices, cultural representations and identity positions. Owen’s theoretical framework underlines the twosidedness of whiteness, emphasising that whiteness both signifies a specific subject position occupied by white people and ‘functions behind the scenes, so to speak, to shape the world to the advantage of those racialized as white’ (Owen 2007, p. 208). In line with Owen, I understand whiteness as part of the normal functioning of the international tourist scene, in its practices, cultural representations and identity positions. Thus, the whiteness of tourism is not equivalent to the social identity and lived experience of white tourists. This theoretical framework allows for an analytical exploration of the logics of whiteness in different aspects of contemporary tourism, without falling into the trap of equating whiteness with the often-undefined group of white Westerners. To this end, I propose the concept of ‘touristic whiteness’ to explore the co-construction of tourism and whiteness (Mattsson 2016a). With this concept, I aim at analysing different tourist subjectivities as formed in close interaction with different ways of doing whiteness (Best 2003; Warren 2001), underlining that whiteness is neither a stable nor a natural identity position, but something that is continuously constructed as an effect of a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler 1988, p. 519). I also wish to underline the importance of exploring the 79

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ways in which different tourist spaces and environments, as well as practices, discourses and subjectivities, are characterised by different logics of whiteness. As I will show, this duality of touristic whiteness emerges from an interwoven performance of travel styles and embodied ways of doing whiteness (Mattsson 2016a). In my exploration of tourist contexts, I emphasise that different ways of doing whiteness in tourism interact with other structuring orders, including gender, class and sexuality, in ways that can both alter and shift the meaning of whiteness (Byrne 2006; Frankenberg 1993; Lundström 2014). In particular, I focus on how the structural whiteness of contemporary tourism can be understood as an effect of colonial continuity in tourism. The term ‘colonial continuity’ was coined by Hebron (2007) in a research project on white Canadian development workers, in order to analytically capture the ways in which colonial discourses and subject positions are reproduced over time; in this process, they are also modified and adapted to the prevailing contextual conditions, but still ‘recognizable for the similarity to their original colonial manifestations and effects’ (Hebron 2007, p. 7). In the tourism sphere, colonial continuity can manifest in a direct historical connection to a tourist destination or environment (Bandyopadhyay 2018; Jørgensen 2013), or a more indirect reproduction of colonial discourses and narratives of otherness (Echtner and Prasard 2003; Grinell 2004; Huggan 2001). Colonial continuity in tourism may also be expressed through the stylistic continuity of travel styles (Adler 1989), particularly when different ways of travelling reproduce – but also modify and alter – travel styles that were formed during the colonial era (Mattsson 2016a, 2021). Thus, colonial continuity does not imply a stable touristic performance of whiteness over time. Rather, it emerges as a result of a historically situated and continuous connectivity between contemporary tourist flows and travel styles and the existence of a colonial past.

The logics of whiteness in contemporary tourism I will now move on to the analytical review of research that sheds light on how different segments of contemporary tourism are characterised by different logics of whiteness and racial formations. The review focuses on: enclave tourism, sex and romance tourism to tropical destinations, as well as backpacking, ethnic tourism and volunteer tourism. Of necessity, the review is somewhat schematic, but I hope it will provide insight into the nuanced and shifting role played by whiteness in structuring contemporary tourism.

White spaces of luxury The colonial legacy of tourism is prominent in the luxury segment of enclave tourism, which has become widespread in global tourism. Enclave tourism destinations range from gated holiday resorts and cruise ships to private beaches and islands (Saarinen and WallReinius 2019). In travel magazines, tourist enclaves are frequently marketed as white spaces for post-colonial luxury (Wilkes 2014), targeting wealthy Westerners and burgeoning elites in other parts of the world who are looking for holidays filled with ‘luxury, tropical heat and the “exotic” ’ (Kothari 2015, p. 248). Often, hotel enclaves are located in previously colonised countries, where poverty and difficult life conditions prevail for large sections of the population. In these locations, tourist enclaves constitute white islands of privilege, security and comfort, isolated from the surrounding community (Sheller 2009; Weaver 2005). In addition, access to these tourist enclaves is heavily regulated, both through direct control and surveillance and through various forms of informal and internalised soft control measures, including the careful screening of people, activities and behaviours (Edensor 80

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2000). Local residents are often considered ‘undesirable elements’, whose access to the tourism enclaves is only granted through employment as low-paid service workers (Edensor 2000, p. 328). Moreover, tourist enclaves often limit tourists’ access to the surrounding environment, generating a captive consumer market that forces tourists (whether they like it or not) to spend most of their time and money inside the enclaves (Weaver 2005). In many tourist enclaves, tourists are offered a nostalgic return to the colonial period and an opportunity to imagine the lives of former white colonisers and plantation owners (Simmons 2004). In an analysis of the architecture and spatial environment of Sugar Beach Resort in Mauritius, Kothari reveals how colonial imaginings prevail in this tourism sector. Through the reproduction of colonial imagery, enclave tourism celebrates and romanticises the colonial lifestyle while, at the same time, masking its violent past. For example, Sugar Beach Resort has a pronounced plantation theme, and explicitly promises visitors an experience of ‘(t)imeless plantation style elegance’ (quoted in Kothari 2015, p. 256). According to Kothari, this romanticisation of the colonial period is also reflected in the architecture of the resort, which is dominated by a colonial aesthetic, featuring large entrance halls, white painted walls against dark wood, polished dark wooden floors and colonial furniture and furnishings. Colonial nostalgia also appears in tourist enclaves’ reproduction of hierarchical race relations. In the promotion of enclave tourism, images of smiling Black waiters carrying silver trays are common. The underlying promise of these images is that enclave tourism includes friendly, compliant and attentive service, which, in turn, is constructed around an assumed naturalness of Black servitude (Wilkes 2016, p. 31). In this respect, enclave tourism promises an embodied experience of colonial whiteness, in which being served and cared for by Black waiters is part of a staged experience of authority and subordination. Hence, enclave tourism not only entails naive nostalgia for a bygone era, but it also represents a concrete and material continuity of colonial race relations.

Tropical desires The idea of a tropical paradise as a setting for erotic escapades and sexual adventure plays a central role in sex and romance tourism. Research on sex tourism has mainly focused on white Western men engaging in cash-for-sex relationships with local women in tourist destinations; in contrast, it has typically interpreted the intimate relationships of white women in tourist destinations in terms of romance (Taylor 2001, 2006). In fact, the figure of the female sex tourist has been perceived as ‘a contradiction in terms’ (Taylor 2006). However, by highlighting the importance of race in transnational sex tourism, Taylor shows that notions of gender, race and sexuality interact in female sex tourism, particularly with respect to the stereotypical image of Black men as hypersexual (Taylor 2001, 2006). In Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel, Frohlick (2013) argues for a nuanced analysis of sexual encounters in the tourist sphere, underlining that white women are involved in both short- and long-term relationships, which sometimes lead to them settling down in the tourist destination and, at other times, lead to their partner emigrating to join them in their home country (see also Frohlick 2008, 2010). Frohlick underlines that cross-boundary sexual desires and encounters in tourism occur within local and global political economies of desire, which are informed by racial and gendered discourses of (hetero)sexuality on both sides (Frohlick 2008, 2010). For example, white, Western, women tourists in Costa Rica describe feeling ‘more sexy’ in the tropical destination, reflecting a cultural fantasy of Costa Rica as a sexual and erotic paradise where untamed female sexuality is brought to life (Frohlick 2008). 81

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Romance tourism may also take the form of the destination wedding, which constitutes a ‘niche product’ within the larger consumer culture surrounding weddings in the Western world (Wilkes 2014, 2016). In Whiteness, Weddings and Tourism in the Caribbean: Paradise for Sale, Wilkes (2016) shows how the growing demand for weddings in a tropical paradise has led to an increasing number of tour operators and hotels offering pre-arranged ‘all-inclusive’ wedding packages to the Caribbean (Wilkes 2014, 2016). Wilkes explores the romantic fantasies and myths underpinning the trope of the ‘tropical paradise’ in the marketing of destination weddings. In promotion material, the classic image of the paradise beach – located somewhere on the edge of the world – plays a central role, evoking associations of heat and strong feelings in a scenic environment of sparkling sunrises and romantic sunsets (Wilkes 2016). As Wilkes points out, the colour white also features prominently in these images, heightening the fantasy of the paradise wedding, as conveyed through images of white heterosexual couples in white clothes on empty white beaches. In romantic discourse, the wedding day is treated as the most important day of a (white) woman’s life, and representations of white femininity and white beauty are emphasised. Accordingly, in the promotion of destination weddings, white female bodies are repeatedly portrayed as deserving recipients of privileges, services and luxuries (Wilkes 2014, 2016). Thus, this specific segment of romance tourism is constructed around a gendered notion of a spoiled and ‘elevated whiteness’, associated with prosperity, success and independence (Wilkes 2016, p. 5). This shows how the whiteness of tourism interacts with notions of bodies, intimacy and emotions, as well as discourses of eroticism and romance.

The whiteness of backpacking In their emphasis on self-organised, low-budget travelling, backpackers may be considered among the most explicit and dedicated critics of the tourism industry (Lozanski 2010). Practising an ‘anti-tourist’ travel style, backpackers highly value the encounter with authentic places and people and aim at avoiding spaces of mass tourism and upholding a distance to other white groups of tourists (Mattsson 2016a). Backpackers and solo travellers often describe their travel to remote destinations in terms of personal development, reflecting a liberal discourse of self-realisation (Lozanski 2010; Noy 2004). Moreover, the notion of ‘a more adventurous way of travelling’ is associated with a certain social prestige and status (Harrison 2003). With the imperial explorer and adventurous traveller in mind, it is easy to trace the idea of travelling off the beaten track to the notion of the great expedition beyond the borders of civilisation, and its underlying associations with bravery, courage and risk-taking and constructions of white masculinity (Blunt 1994). Today, when the proportion of female backpackers often equals – or even exceeds – that of male backpackers, the notion of the adventurous traveller still holds racialised and gendered connotations. As Elsrud (2005) shows, male backpackers are often assumed to be naturally adventurous, brave and risktaking. Female backpackers, on the other hand, must attain these qualities; accordingly, the adventurous female backpacker is still described as exceptional (Elsrud 2005). This shows that the adventurous travel style of backpacking is implicitly associated with constructions of white masculinity, rendering it unevenly accessible for white travellers of different genders. Despite backpackers’ anti-tourist ideology, they have become increasingly targeted as a consumer segment in the wider tourist market. In many popular backpacker destinations – particularly in Southeast Asia – hostels, shuttle services, internet cafes and tour operators constitute a distinct backpacker culture (Sörensson 2008; Teo and Leong 2006). For this 82

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reason, researchers have claimed that the backpacker culture has turned into a tourist bubble of its own, and it is now reasonable to refer to ‘backpacker enclaves’ (Howard 2007). Similar to other spaces of enclave tourism, backpacker enclaves are primarily designed for white travellers, with cafes and restaurants targeting middle class travellers from the United States, Europe and Australia (Teo and Leong 2006). At the same time, research on the growing presence of Asian backpackers has revealed the complexity of underlying constructions of gender and race of backpacker areas. Asian backpackers testify that they experience a lack of interest from vendors and hostel representatives, who generally do not consider them tourists/consumers, but instead regard them as locals (Muzaini 2006). Female backpackers with a pan-Asian appearance experience this dilemma with an additional twist, as they are typically viewed through the stereotypical lenses of exoticism and eroticism, inherent in the label of ‘Thai prostitute’ (Teo and Leong 2006). As a result, Asian backpackers adopt different strategies to clarify their position as travellers, such as wearing certain styles of clothing, carrying a camera and surrounding themselves with white Western friends (Muzaini 2006). This demonstrates how the backpacking travel style is constructed around a performance of whiteness, which makes it difficult – but not impossible – for non-white people to claim the position of backpacker or traveller.

Transcending whiteness One important distinction in contemporary tourism pertains to the ways in which different groups of tourists relate to difference. Some tourists prefer to avoid cultural difference by travelling to well-known and homogeneous tourist environments, while others prefer to visit destinations and places that radically differ from their home environment ( Jaakson 2004). The active quest for cultural difference and otherness is evident in ethnic tourism – a niche of the tourism market that is marketed with the logic of exoticism and primitivism and exclusively oriented towards non-Western destinations in the Global South (Mattsson 2016a, 2016b; van den Berghe 1994; Yea 2002). In Touristic Whiteness and the Desire for the Other, I demonstrate how the notion of a close encounter with the ‘other’ plays a significant role in ethnic tourism. In the tourist imagination, the primitive other is attributed with authentic values and a primitive lifestyle, which are perceived as lost in the modern lives of white tourists. At the same time, the primitive difference of the other becomes a tool for the white tourist to re-establish a relationship with an imagined self-authenticity (Mattsson 2016a). In this respect, the quest for difference reproduces the colonial tradition of praising primitive cultures as bearers of a nobler way of life, which overdeveloped Westerners can turn to for spiritual salvation (Eriksson Baaz 2001, p. 8f ). It reflects an underlying desire for the ‘other’ (hooks, 1992) and a longing for a transformative encounter that will provide answers to existential questions, such as what it means to be human (Mattsson 2016a; Torgovnick 1990). Hence, the touristic quest for difference can be understood as a desire to transcend the limits of whiteness and enter a world in which white modernity and capitalism do not define existence. In other words, it is understood as an opportunity to temporarily cross the confined borders of whiteness (Bonnett 2000, p. 78ff ). The tourist desire for the ‘other’ can also take on a spiritual form. In the innovative book Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Saldanha (2007) explores the village of Anjuna in Goa, India, as the setting for a hedonistic white subculture with roots in the hippie movement. Elaborating on the ‘viscosity of race’, Saldanha presents a materialistic theory of race that stresses how white bodies in Goa have become associated with each other through material processes and relationships. Saldanha underlines that the beaches of Goa attract a 83

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variety of groups: charter tourists, backpackers, domestic tourists and so-called ‘hardcore ravers’, who often stay in Goa for months – or even years. Hardcore ravers are characterised by their heterogeneous appropriation of clothing, artefacts and symbols from a variety of nonwhite cultural spheres (Saldanha 2007). Ironically, the group’s principle of anti-style has given rise to an eclectic but uniform style combining ethnic symbols, tie-dyed clothing, dreadlocks and piercings, driven by a desire to redefine what it means to be white and middle class; yet it is not exclusive to white visitors. Rather, the cultural meaning of this ‘freaky style’ can only be understood by its stated difference in relation to whiteness (Saldanha 2007, p. 91ff ). The focus of Saldanhas’ analysis is Goa’s 24-hour dance parties and endless dance sessions to rhythmic music under the influence of psychedelic substances. The trance dance party manifests as a ritual for transcending white modernity, staging the tribal dances of primitive cultures, through which dancers hope to come into contact with a more profound awareness of themselves, humanity and the planet (Saldanha 2007, p. 70ff ). The movement reflects a desire for a primitive otherness, which does not necessarily include an encounter with the ‘other’ and an attempt to escape whiteness that re-establishes another logic of whiteness. Indeed, according to Saldana, the collective of sweating bodies dancing in the morning sun can be understood as a condensed form of whiteness, rather than a transgression of the same (Saldanha 2007, p. 182).

White saviourism Over the past 20 to 30 years, the institutionalisation of the volunteer journey has made international charity work accessible to a wider group of people – not least young, white, middle class women filling a ‘gap year’ after high school (Simpson 2004). Often, volunteer tourism is enacted with altruistic ambitions, and volunteers describe their commitment in positive terms of ‘making a difference’ (Simpson 2004, p. 683). This idea of contributing to the positive development of a particular destination is interwoven with personal motives, such as the desire to have an exciting journey, to gain new experiences and to acquire language skills (Simpson 2004). In addition, such volunteer work is considered to ‘look good on your CV’ (McGloin and Georgeou 2016). Often, ‘voluntourism’ involves working in orphanages or schools in which Brown and Black children are the primary objects of volunteers’ desire to ‘make a difference’ (Mostafanezhad 2013). Hence, voluntourism may be understood in terms of traditional female values, such as caring and nursing, and is often described as preparation for maternity. For many volunteers, it provides an opportunity for self-representation as someone who helps others – for example by posting photographs with poor Brown and Black children on social media and travel blogs. In this respect, voluntourism is inspired by the emergence of what Mostafanezhad (2013) calls ‘female celebrity humanitarianism’, in which globally mediated images of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Madonna represent role models (Shome 2011, 2014). Recently, this widespread cultural phenomenon has been exposed to public criticism. For example, the Instagram account ‘Barbie Savior’ uses humour and parody to spur critical reflection on the ‘white saviourism’ of voluntourism (Wearing et al. 2018). Voluntourism is typically motivated by an explicit ambition to help and support a vulnerable community or restore the environment of a particular destination (Wearing 2001). However, the discourse on voluntourism rarely mentions the words ‘development’ or ‘aid’ (Simpson 2004). Similar to development aid, voluntourism is characterised by a ‘helping imperative’, based on an understanding of volunteer work as inherently good (Hebron 2007). Voluntourism also reproduces a simplistic image of the ‘Third World’ as one of poverty and 84

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despair. In the discourse on development work, the ‘Third World’ is imagined as a region that is not only poor, but also have a lower capacity for development and therefore in need of external assistance (Kothari 2006). At the same time, white volunteers and organisations are depicted as active agents of change (McGloin and Georgeou 2016) who are assumed to be more capable of understanding and meeting local development needs than local residents, themselves (Simpson 2004). In this discourse, whiteness and development are constructed as intimately interconnected and whiteness is associated with a variety of qualities that are perceived necessary for development, including ‘authority, expertise and knowledge’ (Kothari 2006, p. 10). Thus, despite their good intentions, voluntarists enact a paternalistic relationship that positions the ‘others’ as children in need of guidance and education by white volunteers, in order to develop independence (Baaz 2005). In this way, voluntourism reflects a modern version of the ‘civilising mission’, which understood the prospects of other people and places as the burden of the white man or woman (Bandyopadhyay 2019; Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017).

Conclusions This chapter has presented the argument that whiteness is an integral part of the tourism sector; nonetheless, the whiteness of tourism should not be equated with an assumption that all tourists are white. To some extent, it is fair to say that contemporary tourism is formed around a ‘white sense of expansiveness’ (Henry 2019, p. 2) whereby places, cultures and people from across the world are perceived as being at the disposal of white people for the purposes of relaxation, enjoyment and entertainment (Strain 2003). However, this sense of expansiveness and entitlement is not exclusive to white tourists – or tourists who embody whiteness. Rather, it should be understood as an underlying dimension and organising logic of contemporary tourism (Erickson 2018). In this chapter, I have demonstrated how whiteness is a crucial category for understanding a number of tourist segments, and how constructions of whiteness often operate through other discursive concepts (Gunaratnam 2003), such as notions of luxury and security, tropes of eroticism and romance, narratives of adventure, ideas of self-transformation and discourses of development and charity. Moreover, I would like to emphasise that the different logics of whiteness that I have mapped in this chapter also involve specific ways of approaching and engaging in a relationship with the ‘other’. In enclave tourism, for instance, the tourist logic of whiteness is characterised by an enclosed and delimited white spatiality that maintains some distance from the ‘other’. In sex and romance tourism, the notion of whiteness is manifested in sexual desire and romantic dreams that are nurtured by an underlying allure of erotic encounters with the ‘other’. In backpacker culture, tourist whiteness is constructed around a desire to be distanced from ‘other’ white tourists. In ethnic tourism, the logic of whiteness is formed around a desire for the ‘other’ and otherness and a will to transcend the boundaries of white modernity. Finally, in volunteer tourism, the tourist subjectivity is constructed around a white desire to help and ultimately change the ‘other’. These different ways of doing whiteness by relating to the ‘other’, I argue, reflect a structural and inherent logic of whiteness in different forms of tourism, rather than attitudes or behaviours of individual tourists. Finally, the various forms of touristic whiteness that I have outlined in this chapter are also marked by colonial continuity. In the tourism sphere, this colonial continuity takes different shapes, both as the historical tradition to travel and visit former colonies as well as the indirect reproduction of colonial discourses, subjectivities and travel styles. In many ways, it is impossible to understand the specific shapes and forms of contemporary tourism without 85

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first taking into account tourism’s colonial legacy (Hall and Tucker 2004; Tucker and Akama 2009). At the same time, tourism research is increasingly being accused of modernist explanatory models based on a Eurocentric worldview, which is unable to accommodate tourism that does not originate from countries in the Western hemisphere (Cohen and Cohen 2015a, 2015b). This criticism has highlighted the fact that tourism studies often prioritise white, Western tourists, while constructing people from the rest of the world as hosts or tourist objects. As a result, tourism movements outside the dominant north-to-south and west-toeast flows tend to be neglected (Cohen and Cohen 2015b). Therefore, I wish to conclude by pointing to the fact that my analysis of the various logics of whiteness in tourism offer only a starting point for more in-depth explorations of the role of whiteness and coloniality in tourism, which are needed to draw out the many nuances, complexities and contradictions. It is important to counteract the complicity of tourism research in the rhetorical silence of whiteness (Crenshaw 1997) by researching and theorising the significance of race and whiteness in the tourist sphere. At the same time, the assumed whiteness of the tourist must come under careful academic scrutiny, and the tourism experiences of non-white tourist groups must be better understood. I hope that this chapter has demonstrated the value of exploring and theorising contemporary tourism from a critical whiteness perspective, by showing that research into the whiteness of tourism can provide valuable insights into global race relations and global logics of whiteness, in both historical and contemporary context.

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Katarina Mattsson Mostafanezhad, M. (2013). ‘Getting in touch with your inner Angelina’: Celebrity humanitarianism and the cultural politics of gendered generosity in volunteer tourism. Third World Quarterly, 34(3), pp. 485–499. Muzaini, H. (2006). Backpacking Southeast Asia: Strategies of “looking local.” Annals of Tourism ­Research, 33(1), pp. 144–161. Noy, C. (2004). This trip really changed me: Backpackers’ narratives of self-change. Annals of Tourism Research, 31(1), pp. 78–102. Owen, D. S. (2007). Towards a critical theory of whiteness. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 33(2), pp. 203–222. Perry, P. (2001). White means never having to say you’re ethnic: White youth and the construction of ‘cultureless’ identities. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30(1), pp. 56–91. Saarinen, J. and Wall-Reinius, S. (2019). Enclaves in tourism: Producing and governing exclusive spaces for tourism. Tourism Geographies, 21(5), pp. 739–748. Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sheller, M. (2009). Infrastructures of the imagined island: Software, mobilities, and the architecture of Caribbean paradise. Environment and Planning A, 41, pp. 1386–1403. Shome, R. (2011). Global motherhood: The transnational intimacies of white femininity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28(5), pp. 388–406. Shome, R. (2014). Diana and beyond: White femininity, national identity, and contemporary media culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Simmons, A. B. (2004). ‘Saying the same old things: A contemporary travel discourse and the popular magazine’, in Hall, M. C. and Tucker, H. (eds.) Tourism and postcolonialism: Contested discourses, identities and representations. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 43–56. Simpson, K. (2004). Doing development: The gap year, volunteer-tourists and a popular practice of development. Journal of International Development, 16(5), pp. 681–692. Sörensson, E. (2008). ‘Making a living in the world of tourism: Livelihoods in backpacker tourism in urban Indonesia’, PhD thesis, Kulturgeografi, Umeå, Sweden. Spracklen, K. (2013). Whiteness and leisure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Strain, E. (2003). Public places, private journeys: Ethnography, entertainment, and the tourist gaze. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Taylor, J. S. (2001). Dollars are a girl’s best friend? Female tourists’ sexual behaviour in the Caribbean. Sociology, 35(3), pp. 749–764. Taylor, J. S. (2006). Female sex tourism: A contradiction in terms? Feminist Review, 83(1), pp. 42–59. Teo, P. and Leong, S. (2006). A postcolonial analysis of backpacking. Annals of Tourism Research, 33(1), pp. 109–131. Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone primitive: Savage intellects, modern lives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tucker, H. and Akama, J. (2009). ‘Tourism as postcolonialism’, in Jamal, T. and Robinson, M. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies. Los Angeles: SAGE. Van den Berghe, P. L. (1994). The quest for the other: Ethnic tourism in San Cristóbal, Mexico. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Warren, J. T. (2001). Doing whiteness: On the performative dimensions of race in the classroom. Communication Education, 50(2), pp. 91–108. Wearing, S. (2001). Volunteer tourism: Experiences that make a difference. New York, NY: Cabi Publishing. Wearing, S., Mostafanezhad, M., Nguyen, N., Nguyen, T. H. T. and McDonald, M. (2018). ‘Poor children on Tinder’ and their Barbie saviours: Towards a feminist political economy of volunteer tourism. Leisure Studies, 37(5), pp. 500–514. Weaver, A. (2005). Spaces of containment and revenue capture: “Super-sized” cruise ships as mobile tourism enclaves. Tourism Geographies, 7(2), pp. 165–184. Wilkes, K. (2014). ‘Whiteness and postcolonial luxury: Representations of the white female body in contemporary tourism visual texts’, in Michael, L. and Schulz, S. (eds.) Unsettling whiteness. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 45–58. Wilkes, K. (2016). Whiteness, weddings, and tourism in the Caribbean paradise for sale. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Yea, S. (2002). On and off the ethnic tourism map in Southeast Asia: The case of Iban longhouse tourism, Sarawak, Malaysia. Tourism Geographies, 4(2), pp. 173–194.

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8 WHITENESS, WELLNESS AND GENDER A transnational feminist approach Raka Shome Introduction This chapter examines contemporary articulations of white femininity within wellness culture. In particular, the chapter addresses how logics of wellness today constitute a modality through which a modern (i.e. ‘cool’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘multicultural’, ‘liberal’) white womanhood is made and remade. I focus on this cool, sophisticated, liberal expression of white femininity because it signifies a modern, white, female identity in contrast to nativist regressive expressions of whiteness (e.g. representations of the white women who may have supported Donald Trump as a US presidential candidate). This modern, white womanhood often reflects a cosmopolitan and ‘woke’ white femininity that distances itself from insular expressions of whiteness and positions itself as modern, global and sophisticated (Hage 2000; Kaplan 2001, Lundström 2019; Shome 2014). While it is possible that regressive and nativist expressions of white femininity are also articulated by wellness structures (as surely the kinds of white women these expressions describe also purchase wellness products), my focus in this chapter is on the way in which wellness culture primarily targets white women who are affluent and see themselves as modern. Expressions of such modern, white femininity are frequently found in Hollywood celebrity culture (e.g. Jane Fonda and others as yoga advocates), global humanitarian discourses (e.g. Angelina Jolie’s and Nicole Kidman’s reproduction of the well-known ‘global motherhood’ complex; Shome, 2014) and larger popular culture. As an example of the latter, the international bestselling book (later adapted into a Hollywood film) Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert 2007) narrates the journey of a distressed/depressed liberal, white woman who travels from New York to Italy, India and Bali to find healing and inner peace; in other words, a woman whose cosmopolitan orientation occurs through her engagement with global/cultural border crossings. Before proceeding further, I must unpack my use of the term ‘white femininity’. I use the term less to signify a physical body ‘with some ontological origin’ (Shome 2001, p. 323) or an individual white woman/identity, and more to refer to an ideological and material structure – a network of relations, from economy to geopolitics – through which meanings and scripts about upper-class, able-bodied, (North Atlantic Western) white women and their place in society are constituted and reconstituted in a particular time and context (see Shome 2014). I distinguish between the terms ‘white woman’, which refers to a subject position, and ‘white DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-10

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femininity’, which refers to a material and ideological structure that is deeply rooted in the histories and spatialities of Anglo/Euro colonialism. White femininity is a relational category. First, it’s very structures of production and maintenance are linked to the inequalities that position women of colour and women from the Global South unequally in global society (Shome 2011, 2014). Second, it represents a site through which the relations of culture, economy, geopolitics and more are articulated. Thus, its ideological content and meaning is never fixed, but arises as a result of these particular articulations, in a specific context and time. One may reasonably ask: What is wrong with modern, white women seeking cultural connections – for instance white women pursuing yoga or meditation or consuming herbal products, diets and plants common to non-Anglo contexts? This is precisely where the neoliberal spin enters, for this cultural engagement has been made possible within a neoliberal context that seeks culture (and cultural difference) in order to expand its global market. Thus, white women’s gestures of connecting to culture through wellness practices (e.g. yoga and non-Western healing therapies) can easily lend themselves to articulations of neoliberal cultural logics, which desire – rather than deny – multiculturalism (Melamed 2006). For instance, it is white women’s representations of yoga and meditation that now define and dominate knowledge about yoga; as a result, yoga (and allied practices) have become a kind of capital that secures new subject positions of whiteness. A study published on the US National Institute of Health website reported that, in 2014, almost 85 per cent of US American US yoga practitioners were female and approximately 89 per cent were white; overall, they tended to be highly educated (and hence more liberal and modern, one might assume).1 Yoga has clearly become a ‘white thing’ through which a modern and cosmopolitan white femininity is often signified (Shome 2014). Studies have also pointed to yoga’s association with gentrification, whereby lower class people and populations of colour have been forced out of areas when (white) wealthy people have moved in. Yoga studios, coffee shops, juice bars and natural food markets have come up in these areas to cater to such populations (Coley and Adelman 2020). Weinbaum et al. (2008) use the heuristic of the ‘modern girl’ to address the emergence of a cosmopolitan orientated femininity in different nations at different times. In particular, Weinbaum (2008) notes that, in Anglo national contexts such as the United States, cosmopolitanism is constitutive of the modern girl’s modernity. Today, we see one rendition of the modern girl – or, I would prefer, the ‘modern woman’ – in wellness practices due to the cool, hip, liberal and worldly ambience within which wellness acquires meaning and offers new modern subject positions of white womanhood.

The wellness industry As Self (2018) – a magazine focused on self-care – recently proclaimed, wellness has a race problem.2 The wellness industry, now worth more than four trillion dollars, markets itself (including in non-Western nations, which host numerous wellness retreats for Western clients) through images of glowing, upper-class, abled-bodied, white females, who represent its main clientele.3 However, this is not to suggest that upper-class, non-white bodies are not also prevalent in the industry. For instance, many upper-class women from Asia (particularly within India, Singapore, Hong Kong and even China) consume wellness in large volumes. However, when looking at the larger global picture, including popular representations of wellness and wellness programmes, one finds that the population of non-white women is disproportionately smaller than that of the upper-/upper-middle-class, North atlantic situated white women or white-looking women. 90

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The wellness industry has not been sufficiently examined as an arena through which to understand the perpetual manufacture, maintenance and renewal of modern white femininity. In particular, the North American wellness industry attracts a similar clientele to that of expensive organic food stores and alternative medicine. For this reason, wellness culture represents an important site for examining the production of modern, liberal, woke, white women. Wellness culture offers such women a cosmopolitan, worldly, new age ethos that makes it easier for them to ignore the racial and global contradictions that inform such an ethos. By embracing the kind of cosmopolitanism and sophistication that wellness culture offers, it becomes easy for the modern woman to frame encounters with wellness culture as a matter of individual choice – reflective of the neoliberal logics of individualism and self-empowerment. But to do so is to occlude the ways in which global racialised structures of capitalist inequalities and consumerist orientations enable privileged (white) women from the Global North to enter the various cultural spaces offered by wellness culture. Thus, by entering such spaces, these women claim a cosmopolitan, multicultural outlook that conceals the structural racial advantages that enable them to consume those very cross-cultural wellness products and services.

On wellness and race The wellness industry arose out of the logics of neoliberalism, which emerged as a dominant economic and social frame in the 1990s. Broadly speaking, the industry includes everything from self-care products (e.g. supplements and clean diets) to health resorts and health tourism, to practices such as yoga and meditation. As discussed by several scholars, neoliberal cultural, economic and political rationalities prop up self-care as a moral logic through which individuals remake and care for themselves, while diminishing the role of public services (e.g. public healthcare) in this process; as a result, the state is increasingly retreating from the concept of a public committed to community care (Gill and Orgad 2018; McGee 2005; McRobbie 2004, 2015; Rose 1999; Shome 2014, among others). The implication of this is that, if one is stressed, if one wants to be more productive, if one wants to renew oneself and become a ‘new woman’ (a tag used by many wellness products and resorts), one should not look to the state or collective for support, as doing so would imply that one is a failed subject who is unable to face life’s challenges. In the wellness industry, where white women are often promised a new self (as in becoming a ‘new woman’), the project of the self becomes labour; hence, the self is produced as a ‘belabored self ’ (McGee 2005, p. 199), perennially at work on itself. The wellness industry provides one example of the material labour of whiteness, indicating that whiteness is not static, but constantly seeks renewal. This also suggests that one can easily fall out of whiteness (and that whiteness is fragile), since ideal whiteness – as scholars of working class whiteness have noted – is a bourgeois category, and poor white people often fall short of its standards (Moon 1999; Newitz and Wray 1997). Wellness culture is one arena in which we see the work of whiteness – and, in particular, white femininity – and its intersection with class, as it involves the tremendous labour of producing a ‘well’ subject reflecting bourgeois criteria for whiteness (i.e. fit, self-help–orientated, fitness conscious, civil, empowered and modern). The industry goal of producing a well subject assumes a universal understanding of wellness, manifested in fit, lithe, glowing, calm, happy bodies; such bodies find their ideal expression in the upper-class, able-bodied, white women. However, this imagining denies the ‘emotional colorline’ (Cvetkovic 2012, p. 116) that separates groups and identities of women who have struggled under different histories and cultural relations, which produce different understandings and expressions of wellness. Furthermore, given the abominable price tags of the 91

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wellness industry, wellness is frequently more accessible to upper- and upper-middle-class, white women (at least in Western contexts); thus, the standards of wellness that become commodified and naturalised in popular culture primarily derive from such bodies. In their promotional materials, wellness resorts typically advertise themselves as safe and relaxing spaces in which to renew one’s self. However, the dominance of upper- and middle-class, able-bodied, white women clientele (including in Asia and Africa, where ‘exotic’ wellness spaces attract affluent, white customers) prevents wellness culture from being a safe space for all women, including women of colour, transgender women, disabled women and women whose bodies are ‘out of shape’. A 2014 article in The Atlantic noted that, in the United States, ‘about one in every fifteen Americans practices yoga and according to a 2012 Yoga Journal study, and more than four-fifths of them are white’.4 Women of colour often note that they feel unsafe in wellness spaces dominated or led by white women. Rachel Ricketts, a wellness and spiritual activist in the United States committed to dismantling racist heteropatriarchy, wrote in her blog that: There also aren’t sufficiently safe spaces for us as a lot of wellness is whitewashed. Many things we could deem in 2020 to be ‘wellness’ are practices and offerings that were created by and for communities of color that have been co-opted by white communities.5 Ricketts is one of only a handful of emerging Black and non-white female entrepreneurs who are trying to change the face of wellness in the United States. There are two particular logics promoted by mainstream wellness culture that merit further discussion in terms of their racial implications: (1) the production of political complacency and (2) the production of non-critical self-care.

Political complacency The turn to the self as a project that the wellness industry encourages reflects Wendy Brown’s argument that neoliberalism ‘reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency’ (2005, p. 43). The diktats of the wellness industry offer a model of wellness that promises to produce a subject who is so healed of negative emotions, as to be emptied of rage – an emotion that is important for social resistance. Goop, the wellness company headed by Hollywood celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow, has become a wellness empire, and many of its products (e.g. bath soaps) promise ‘emotional detox’.6 In addition to publishing wellness advice, Goop sells numerous products that are variously marketed as ‘anger detox’, ‘detox for heartache’, ‘energetic detox’, ‘emotional balance’ and more. Similarly, a wellness website called Queen of Retreat recommends retreats focused on emotional well-being, claiming that these retreats offer an ‘emotional detox [that will] clear your emotional fog, declutter your brain, calm your emotions and rid yourself of negative energy…’.7 By this logic, experiences of rage and other negative feelings are antithetical to wellness. This understanding dominates our time, seeking to give every horror, disaster and trauma a positive spin. Alenka Zupancic (2008, p. 5) refers to this as the rise of bio-morality: There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (emphasis mine) […] which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person […]. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to—or, worse, doesn’t even care to—transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience 92

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While I do not wish to diminish the value of wellness practices such as mindfulness, yoga and meditation, the deployment of these practices in many Western nations (e.g. the United States and United Kingdom) – as well as, due to consumerism, many non-Western nations (e.g. several Asian countries) – is ensconced within a neoliberal framework that is highly individualised and often lacking in a clinical or philosophical basis. By emphasising emotional management, these practices encourage the production of a politically detached or managed subject as the end goal. By this logic, a politically charged subject – full of anger and passion against a racist system – cannot simultaneously be well. A troubled citizen is always an undesirable citizen. S/he/they remind us of national betrayals and national failures, which are difficult and unpleasant to face. By promising positive energy, wellness culture promotes the pathologisation of certain emotions. However, as Cvetkovich (2012) notes, it is important to ‘depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis’ (p. 2). Similarly, Eng and Han (2000, p. 695) discuss racism and melancholia in the context of Asian Americans, noting how racism has affected this community: ‘Ambivalence, rage, and anger are the internalized refractions of an ecology of whiteness bent on the obliteration of cherished minoritarian subjectivities.’ They argue that such feelings are not expressions of the ‘ontological tendency’ (p. 695) of a melancholic racial subject, but indicative of the ‘social threat’ (p. 695) that minority subjects experience in the racial order. Eng and Han, as well as other scholars, emphasise that negative feelings, including emotional states such as depression and unhappiness, are often products of an unequal public culture that suppresses or delegitimises feelings that trouble the normative boundaries of the social order.8 Indeed, such emotional states often haunt minority cultures and are frequently the conditions through which minorities navigate their everyday lives. The magic wand of wellness and related practices cannot do away with them. As Eng and Han (2000, p. 695) note, ‘It is the melancholic who helps us come face-to-face with this social truth’ (see also Ahmed 2010).

Non-critical self-care The ethos of (self-)care that currently dominates the ever-expanding wellness regime is not new, although its articulation to the neoliberal logics (of commodification, depoliticisation, individualisation and dehistoricisation) certainly is. Scholars such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and other feminists of colour have noted the historical importance of self-care for non-white subjects, particularly with respect to building collectives and social movements. Audre Lorde (2017[1988]) famously stated that ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence’, but ‘self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’. Self-care, grounded in a spiritual ethos, has been important in many anti-colonial practices throughout the world.9 Indeed, its genealogy is rooted in social justice movements and histories of oppression. A recent special issue of Social Text (2020) published a volume on radical self-care. Tamara Kneese, a guest editor of this issue, noted – citing the work of Inna Michaeli – that radical self-care is not ‘the kind of self-care that has been co-opted by neoliberal imperatives to “treat yourself ” but is a way of understanding a “self which is grounded in particular histories and present situations of violence and vulnerability”’ (p. 5). It ‘is a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds’ and thus ‘inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures’ (p. 2). In contrast, the wellness industry understands self-care as facile, rather than radical or critical, reflecting an individualised logic that teaches clients to connect to the universe with love and positive energy in order to heal and renew themselves. The promise of constant 93

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renewal gives rise to the question: Who cannot be renewed, because they have for so long been violated by dispossession, abject racism and continuing colonial structures? In this light, wellness can be seen as a form of ‘world making’ (Ahmed 2010). Exploring happiness as a form of world making, Ahmed argues that the important question is not what happiness is, but what happiness – as a modern regime – does. In fact, happiness functions as a kind of capital that is often used to ‘justify oppression’ (p. 8). Its logics are already informed by ‘categories that are value laden’ (p. 8), and ‘what is at stake […] is a belief that we can know “in advance” what will improve people’s lives’ (p. 8). Importing the spirit of Ahmed’s questions to this chapter, we might ask: What does wellness do, and what (and who) does it secure? One way to address these questions is to examine the subjectivities that wellness culture makes available and validates through the ‘promise’ of wellness, and the persons for whom the promise potentially functions as a form of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011, p. 1). Berlant describes cruel optimism as a relation that ‘exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing […] when the object that draws your attachment actually impedes the aim that brought you to it initially (p. 1)’. Examples of cruel optimism range from love and food to fantasies of a good life. Similarly, wellness can function as cruel optimism for people who desire wellness, yet whose structural positioning – as lower class, people of colour or physically challenged people – may prohibit them from attaining the kind of wellness that the industry promises. This is because the dominant culture of wellness is highly individualistic and reliant on an affluent clientele who are prepared to spend significant money in pursuit of their wellness goals. It also assumes a glowing, white, able-bodied female as the ideal figure of wellness, which is impossible for women of colour and physically challenged people to attain. Thus, the promise of wellness is ultimately very narrow and caters, for the most part, to the upper-class, (white) able-bodied population.

White women’s wellness: representational logics Individuation One prominent representation of many wellness resorts features the figure of a lone woman – typically an able-bodied, white woman with a slim, tight, glowing body – doing yoga or meditation amidst the backdrop of beautiful nature (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). In Figures 8.1 and 8.2, no part of the women’s bodies seems to suggest any stress or damage – there are no dark eye bags, no dull skin and no lines or wrinkles to suggest age or stress. Instead, what is evident is the production of a well subject who articulates a highly individualised self – a subject who achieves wellness through disconnection from the social. While it is natural and healthy to disconnect from society from time to time, in wellness representations – and especially those of resorts and spas – the disconnected, white, upper- and upper-middleclass, able-bodied female serves as an ideal, the supreme representation of a well body.

Disconnect In the promotional material for wellness resorts, the lack of representation of ‘disabled’ women is remarkable, underlining the strong tendency to equate wellness with an able body. The fact that many wellness practices, including yoga and clean eating, do not serve those with visible or invisible disabilities, is never acknowledged. Rather, wellness discourses reproduce neoliberalism’s demands for bodily capacity (Puar 2017, p. 13) and the logic of 94

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Figure 8.1

Lone white woman against beautiful natural background

Source: https://www.kearsleys.com/blog-post/disconnect-our-top-5-wellness-resorts-in-tanzania.

Figure 8.2 Lone white woman against beautiful natural background Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/521362094358753889/.

what McRuer (2006) terms ‘compulsory able bodied-ness’ (p. 2). Accordingly, to be well is to be able-bodied, white, slim and, primarily, young. Images of white women looking out into – or connecting with – nature also perpetuate some age-old colonial logics. Recast in a neoliberal setting that celebrates heightened individuality, such logics romanticise the experience of white women rediscovering their agency within a beautiful, natural, exotic or faraway locale (Ware 1992). However, far-flung travel is no longer necessary for this experience today, since the ambience of many faraway lands are now recreated within wellness retreats in the West. Images of the lone white woman 95

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in a pristine natural environment mirror the colonial imaginary of virgin lands (i.e. pure and empty), which has been discussed by scholars including Mary Louis Pratt (1992). Such images perform what Pratt (1992) terms ‘textual apartheid’ (p. 60), representing a textual or visual logic that ‘separates the landscape from people’ (p. 60) when, in fact, the lands are ‘saturated with local history and meaning’ (p. 60) as well as the local labour – often paid minimally – that has gone into producing the pristine habitat for wellness tourists. An important point about white privilege in wellness culture is: Who is privileged enough (upper-class, white and able-bodied) to practice wellness as an apolitical activity, and for whom is this not always a luxury or even an option?

To be well is to glow In wellness resort advertisements, ‘glow’ – which has historically represented white womanhood in visual structures (Dyer 1997) – is a recurrent motif. Women’s bodies are often placed against a beautiful, natural background through which light flows softly (Figure 8.3). The white and able-bodied females glow as the light frames or washes over their bodies, reinforcing Richard Dyer’s (1997, p. 122) point that ‘Idealised white women are bathed in and permeated by light […]. In short they glow’. The visual trope of glow is also used to market other wellness products, such as ‘healthy’ or ‘clean’ eating products. Madeline Shaw is a nutritional therapist with many celebrity clients, who published a book titled Get the Glow (2015).She has a website called Glow Space that functions as a wellness hub to which one can subscribe monthly in order to join and be exposed to nutritional recipes, mediations, yoga and more. She invites her clients to “find your flow and get the glow at home.”10 We are made to understand that, unless one has a glow, one has not achieved wellness. Similarly, the blog of an online wellness journal The Lab advises readers to ‘get the glow’ and recommends particular wellness resorts that

Figure 8.3 Glowing white woman against a glowing natural light filled background Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/493284965410912412/ (1).

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will deliver just that: ‘Get that inside-out glow at these [recommended] wellness retreats.’11 Another wellness studio in the United States is simply called Glow.12 But if glow is a trope that has long been used to represent white women (Dyer 1997), then what is the difference between historical and contemporary framings of the glow of white womanhood? What purpose does the glow serve now, within neoliberal times? When we look at modern promotional materials for wellness products and retreats, we find that white women are invited to ‘get’ the glow; in the past, however, white women were thought to already possess and naturally radiate the glow. Thus, modern women must now ‘get the glow’ (which has seemingly been lost in our fast-paced society) by renewing herself and her body, and thereby reviving the pure glowing look of white womanhood. In this way, modern glow is a commodity available for purchase. Furthermore, wellness culture frequently applies a multicultural component to the work of ‘getting the glow’. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, for instance, advertises a chakra-based diet (chakra is a Hindi word for an energy centre in the body). Goop exposes readers to clean eating practices such as the ‘Ayurvedic cleanse’, which promises to ‘reset’ the dieter (typically a white, upper-class woman) each season.13 Furthermore, other non-Western practices that promise to give white women a glow include the popular healing therapies of shirodhara and tai chi, and energy-balancing techniques such as chakra realignment.

Facile transnational literacy and the erasure of history The frequent employment of non-Western and indigenous materials and practices in the design and representation of wellness therapies has produced a facile transnational literacy. In many cases, these materials and practices have been translated and transplanted into privileged wellness regimes without any attention being given to history and geopolitics. This is the opposite of what Gayatri Spivak discusses as transnational literacy.14 An ahistorical superficial translation of knowledge from one culture to another (particularly when those cultures are unequally positioned) represents knowledge extraction when there is no ethical, geopolitically aware and historically responsible engagement with the other culture. The wellness industry, at large, is situated in historical erasures and inequalities informing the cultural translation of wellness knowledge from different parts of the world. In its constant commodification of products based on ‘other’ raw materials and ‘exotic’ practices, wellness culture has engaged in an ongoing act of translation, which is tantamount to ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1988). One recent (2018) example of this violence is the commodification of sage leaves by wellness companies, which has met with protests from some Native American communities. To date, stores such as Sephora, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Free People and Goop have marketed and sold these indigenous plants – although as I understand it, many of these companies have since halted their sale, due to resistance from the affected communities. Sage, for instance, is an important ingredient in Lakota medicine, and many (though not all) Native Americans burn sage for prayer and spiritual cleansing; the practice of smudging is also tied to their prayers. In this context, the Native Americans were challenging not simply the appropriation of sage, but also the erasure of the ethos and cultural protocols – and thus the history – of their spiritual and medicinal practices. One might say that the production of the modern white female subject in wellness culture, through transnational engagement with ‘other’ cultural products of healing, is often a production of epistemic violence. Accordingly, what might it mean to think of white femininity as a structure of such violence? 97

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Production of the ‘new woman’ One wellness marketing site identifies wellness retreats that promise to produce a ‘new woman’ – or, in particular, to leave clients ‘feeling’ like a new woman.15 This theme of renewal is fairly widespread across wellness platforms. The logic of cleansing (or ‘detoxing’) the body to feel ‘new’ again that wellness resorts promise reinforces a racialised morality of cleansing with which whiteness – and particularly white womanhood – has been historically associated. Here, McClintock’s (1995) influential essay on soap and the British empire is instructive. McClintock argues that the use of soap in the empire did not emerge at the height of British imperialism, but when there was a crisis in imperialism – for instance, when it was threatened by anti-colonial resistance and other social upheavals. At these times, when the white imperial body felt threatened by the influx of ‘others’, cleansing the body with soap became a prominent practice to advertise the superiority and purity of the white race. As McClintock (1995) notes: ‘Soap did not flourish when imperial ebullience was at its peak’ (p. 211); rather, it emerged when there was an ‘impending crisis’ of the ‘uncertain boundaries of class gender and race identity in a social order’ (p. 211) that felt threatened by social upheavals. ‘Soap offered the promise’ of cleansing that ‘could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body politic and race’ (p. 211). Many wellness resorts and products promise purification to a target market of North Atlantic white women (even wellness resorts in India, Thailand, Bali and other non-Western locations quote their services in US dollars, clearly revealing the dominance of a Western clientele). One wonders whether such wellness resorts end up functioning as sites to which liberal, upper-class, white women escape, in order to purify themselves in the face of growing racial otherness in their everyday metropolitan lives. Many wellness programmes literally use the word ‘purification’ in their marketing materials. For example, Core Wellness Center in New Jersey offers a ‘purification cleanse’ as part of their 10- and 21-day ‘purification detox programmes’.16 Jas Medical and Wellness Center sells a bottle of wellness supplements labelled as 21 day organic purification program for USD 184. Its website states that ‘our 21-day purification program helps patients purify, nourish and maintain a healthy body and weight. We offer eight different purification product kits…17 Clearly, more research is needed on this link between the desire for white purification and the growth of the wellness industry. In the meantime, it may be worthwhile to ask: To what extent are the changing racial demographics in Western nations connected to the increasing consumption of wellness resorts by white women? Are these women seduced by the promise of purification and renewal (of their whiteness – as in getting their “glow” back)? Is wellness the new soap (as in McClintock’s ‘soft soaping the empire’) of our times?

Energy flows A common refrain of many wellness resorts and programmes is that they enable clients to nourish their souls and attend to their energy flows. Carillon Wellness Resort in Miami promises to ‘stimulate energy flow in the human body to restore balance and enable the physical body to heal itself ’.18 The Discover blog showcases five retreats for the reader that will “spring clean your soul.” 19 Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop features a number of articles aimed at educating customers about energy healing and flows. One article notes: The goal of energy work—indeed of any spiritual work—is both to align you with the wisdom of your individual soul and to connect you with the divine, God, or the supreme being depending on how you refer to the source energy present around and within us.20 98

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As in the above quote, in wellness culture, the soul is frequently addressed as a frontier in need of cleaning. Names such as ‘soul centred wellness’ and ‘well soul’ are used by many wellness companies and programmes.21 A 2019 issue of O magazine (the Oprah magazine), for example, recommended, ‘The best wellness retreats to restore your mind, body, and soul: We bet you could use a little zen’.22 Indeed, it is striking how wellness culture promises a cleansing of one’s soul through the consumption of products, thus making the soul something tangible that can be purified through consumerism. In contemporary wellness programmes, the soul has become one more frontier to be managed and made well by capitalism (Rose 1999). Franklin et al. (2000, p. 114) argue that such trends ‘offer a transcendent fantasy which reaches beyond national and […] physical boundaries towards [securing] a new universal subject informed by wisdom and knowledge’ (typically appropriated from the Global South).

Extraction and the making of white femininity Wellness culture is intimately linked to biopiracy and bioprospecting. The Coalition Against Biopiracy – an informal civil society group – regularly hosts the Captain Hooks Awards (with a sarcastic understanding of the term ‘award’) for companies engaging in biopiracy. In 2016, Clarins received one such (dishonourable) award for patenting knowledge about the native African harungana tree and selling harungana products for $7,000/kilogram while compensating African farmers only $2/kg. On its website, Clarins notes that, ‘In keeping with Clarins’s commitment to responsible beauty, harungana extract is purchased from local communities through Fair Trade agreements’.23 Also on its website, Clarins identifies numerous products they sell in which harungana extract can be found. The prices of these products (as of August 2020) range from USD 49 to 187. Turmeric (India), neem (India), hoodia (San community, southern Africa) and lucuma (Peru) are other indigenous products that have been embroiled in biopiracy. In some cases – as with turmeric and neem – India, after a long struggle, was able to overturn the patents held by Western companies. Now, turmeric is an ingredient in many wellness supplements, such as Prana, which is marketed by Leefy Organics (of California); turmeric lattes, which are popular for their various wellness and immunity benefits; and turmeric face masks and facial treatments, which can easily be purchased online. Because traditional herbal knowledge is passed down orally and not officially recorded, it is relatively easy for non-indigenous companies to be granted patents for indigenous products, despite the existence of ‘prior use’ and ‘prior art’ criteria in patenting laws, which hold that no patent should be granted when there is prior use of the product.24 The inequality of benefits sharing between patenting corporations and local communities, even when the patents seem fair and reasonable, is typically great. This was certainly the case with hoodia, which stems from the San community in southern Africa. Recently, hoodia has been sold in the form of capsules, powder, liquid and tea in many health foods stores, due to its potential to suppress hunger. It is also included in the diet pill Trimpsa. For the patenting of hoodia, the San community was awarded a one-time benefit and thenceforth prohibited from using their knowledge of the herb for any commercial purpose (Wynber, 2010). I offer these details to demonstrate how such instances frequently remain outside the frames of recognition in the Global North. Nonetheless, wellness and health are frequently situated in an extractive logic that continues the ‘colonial paradigm, worldview and technologies that mark out regions of “high biodiversity” in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion’ (Gomez-Barris 2017, p. xvi). Given that wellness cultures often market 99

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their therapies through products relying on indigenous plants, materials and knowledge, and given that upper- and upper-middle-class, white women are the prime consumers of these products (at least in the North Atlantic West), we might conclude that many of the contemporary structures of white femininity are situated in logics of extraction. The theft of indigenous knowledge and the making of white femininity through wellness and body care products whose materials come from elsewhere reinforce my argument that white femininity has long been shaped by the extraction and commodification of an ‘elsewhere’. This also recalls Bell Hooks’ influential essay, “Eating the Other,” in Race and Representations (1992), in which she discusses the commodification of otherness or difference in contemporary mass culture. Hooks argues that when race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, gender and sexual practices affirm their power over in intimate relations with the Other. (p. 23) She further suggests that ‘Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’ (p. 21). Thus, in wellness culture, the theft or appropriation of indigenous practices functions like a ‘spice’ that enlivens – or offers pleasure to – the bodies of upper-class white women. However, within the bodily glow of cool, modern, wellness seeking, liberal, white women are the shadows of dispossession, arising from the theft of indigenous knowledge and labour. Other extractive logics are also at play in this context. In particular, wellness resorts are often situated in grand hotels in ‘exotic’ locales, such as Bali/Indonesia, Thailand, India and parts of Africa. Because tourism development is a huge initiative in these parts of the world, land grab initiatives to accommodate new tourism sites have resulted in the displacement of local Indigenous residents from their lands of origin. As argued above, these tourism and wellness sites then reproduce the landscape as pristine and empty, reiterating the colonial understanding of virgin lands whose purity was historically associated with upper-class, white women. Because Indigenous and local populations often lack formal paperwork proving their claim to the land, they are easily evicted. Bali represents an egregious case of such dispossession, as do particular sites in Thailand. Furthermore, land grabbing to develop new wellness resorts and retreats also impacts water conditions. One report on Bali noted that ‘It is estimated that 65% of the island’s water reserves are used to supply tourism facilities, and that the asymmetry of hydrological scarcity in Bali corresponds to the presence of heavy tourism development’ (Colorni 2018). Both the theft or unfair patenting of indigenous herbal knowledge and tourism-driven land grabs make visible the connection between wellness/luxury health tourism and dispossession in the Global South. They also reveal the connections between the highly unequally situated bodies of upper-class, white (female) people and Indigenous people, as the latter are evicted from their own land in the service of wellness tourism. While wellness promises a renewal of the (white) self, the other side of this promise is the dispossession of Indigenous groups and locals, whose knowledges and lands are stolen to promote the “well” bodies of people in predominantly North Atlantic and Western nations. Finally, there is an extraction of care in the wellness industry – particularly within wellness resorts and spas. Hochschild (2003) describes how care has become the new gold. Similar to the imperial extraction of resources and minerals from the Global South, care is now 100

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Figure 8.4 Shirodhara treatment Source: https://vedix.com/blogs/articles/shirodhara-treatment.

extracted to serve upper-class, white bodies in the Global North. It is difficult to find data on the earnings of service workers in wellness spas in Asia, Africa and Latin America – let alone the United States – as that information is strictly protected. However, in light of the larger global trend of the extraction of care from the Global South (with respect to, e.g., domestic helpers such as maids and nannies), we might reasonably speculate that the local employees of wellness retreats are compensated far less than the investment each client makes in their stay at the retreat. In 2014, a former editor of the Australian newspaper Fremantle Herald published an article about his visit to Bali. He reported that a young local masseuse with three children ‘earns 10 per cent commission so she gets 60,000 (Indonesian) rupiah for every 90-minute massage’ (Mitchell 2014). He went on to note that although the work is ‘intensely physical’, the masseuse made what any reasonable person would consider sweatshop rates (Mitchell 2014, p. xxviii). Wellness spas in Asian hotels are packed with white Europeans and North Americans seeking ‘exotic’ therapy (i.e. local wellness practices). There is something disturbing about Brown (usually female) bodies working to renew upper-class, white, female bodies. The image above captures the practice of shirodhara – an Ayurvedic procedure in which hot oil is poured on the client’s forehead to induce an extremely calming and nourishing effect. In this image (Figure 8.4), we see racial fragmentation at work, as the Brown body is reduced to simply arms, and thus dehumanised. This heightened extraction of care, which is increasingly informing wellness tourism, is part of a larger ‘global care chain’ (Hochschild 2003) through which wellness flows from the South to the North (also, Parrenas 2003), through unequal relations of economy and culture.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to highlight the ways in which contemporary expressions of white femininity often manifest in wellness practices. My focus has been on a particular modern structure of white femininity in the North Atlantic West – and specifically the United States – that, on the one hand, is perceived as liberal, sophisticated and cosmopolitan; and on the other hand, remains intimately situated in racial extractions and unequal transnational mobilities 101

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of labour, indigenous knowledge and healing practices. To understand the simultaneous gendering, racialisation and ableisation of wellness is to situate it within transnational linkages of culture, geopolitics and economy. Wellness culture must be continually examined as an arena in which contemporary remakings of modern, cosmopolitan, upper-class, able-bodied, white womanhood occur. The contours of ‘being well’ are defined by representations of the body as glowing, happy, white (or white passing or white scripted), upper-class, female and primarily from the North Atlantic West (and, more specifically, the United States). In analysing these representations, the chapter has posed some important questions: What does being well mean in contemporary neoliberal culture? Which racial and transnational omissions underlie contemporary wellness culture? And how does the promise of wellness secure new forms of whiteness and, in particular, white femininity?

Notes 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3721070/. 2 https://www.self.com/story/wellness-has-a-race-problem. 3 This figure (four trillion dollars) is from the Global Wellness Institute, 2018. https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/press-releases/wellness-now-a-4-2-trillion-global-industry. 4 https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/why-your-yoga-class-is-so-white/374002/. 5 https://www.wellandgood.com/rachel-ricketts-spiritual-activism/. 6 https://goop.com/search?q=emotional+detox&country=USA&filterAndSort=%257B%2522filte rs%2522%253A%255B%255D%252C%2522sortBy%2522%253A%2522score%2522%252C%2522 sortDirection%2522%253A%2522DESCENDING%2522%257D. 7 https://queenofretreats.com/experiences/heal/emotional-healing-retreats/ 8 See also Ahmed (2010). 9 See Iseke (2013); Iseke and Desmoulins (2012). Also, in anti-colonial movements in India against the British, thinkers such as Aurobindo and Gandhi grounded their political practices on a spiritual orientation to the world. 10 https://www.madeleineshaw.com/the-glow-space 11 https://blog.eighteenb.com/destination-spas/. 12 https://mobile.twitter.com/GLOWbodywork/photo 13 https://goop.com/food/tutorials/3-day-ayurvedic-cleanse/. 14 See especially Spivak (1999, p. 399). 15 https://www.prevention.com/life/a20509270/wellness-retreats. 16 https://www.corewellnesscenters.org/purification-cleanse/. 17 https://www.drscottperlman.com/product-page/21-day-organic-purification-program 18 https://www.carillonhotel.com/en/wellness/offerings/energy-healing/ 19 https://www.thediscoverer.com/blog/5-wellness-retreats-that-will-spring-clean-your-soul/ XvHyVpKgiwAG5anE?ST=RF_A 20 https://goop.com/wellness/spirituality/clearing-out-old-energy. 21 https://wellsoulworkshops.com/ and https://soulcenteredwellness.org/ 22 https://www.oprahmag.com/life/g26836639/best-wellness-retreats. 23 https://www.clarinsusa.com/en/explore-beauty-trip/harungana.html. 24 See for instance, Shiva (1999). See also https://www.iatp.org/news/biopiracy-us-patent-lawmust-change.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays in knowledge and politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coley, J. and Adelman, R. (2020). Gentrification in the ‘city of good neighbors’: Race, class and the neighborhoods in Buffalo. Sociological Inquiry, 91(7), pp. 824–848. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12387.

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Whiteness, wellness and gender Colorni, R. (2018). Tourism and land grabbing in Bali: A research brief. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Cvetkovic, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dyer, R. (1997). White. New York, NY: Routledge. Eng, D. and Han, S. (2000). A dialogue on racial melancholia. Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives, 10(4), pp. 667–700. Franklin, S, Lury, C. & Stacey J. (2000). Global nature, global culture. UK: Sage Publications. Gilbert, E. (2007). Eat, pray, love. London, Berlin and New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Gill, R. and Orgad, S. (2018). The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), pp. 477–495. Gomez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hage, G. (2000). White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annendale: Pluto Press. Hobert, H. and Kneese, T. (2020). Radical care: Survival strategies for uncertain times. Social Text, 38(1), pp. 1–16. Hochschild, A. (2003). ‘Love and gold’, in Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A. (eds.) Global woman. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, pp. 15–30. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. New York, NY: Routledge. Iseke, J. (2013). Spirituality as decolonizing: Elders Albert Desjarlais, George McDermott, and Tom McCallum share understandings of life in healing practices. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), pp. 35–54. Iseke, J. and Desmoulins, L. (2012), Spiritual beginnings of Indigenous women’s activism: The life and work of the Honourable Thelma Chalifoux, White Standing Buffalo. Canadian Woman Studies, 29(1/2), pp. 24–34. Kaplan, C. (1995). “A world without boundaries”: The Body Shop’s trans/national geographics. Social Text, 43(Autumn), pp. 45–66. Kaplan, C. (2001). Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Orient: Cosmopolitan travel and global feminist subjects. Meridians, 2(1), pp. 219–240. Lorde, A. (2017[1988]). A burst of light. New York, NY: Ixia Press. Lundström, C. (2019). White women. White nation. White cosmopolitanism: Swedish migration between the national and the global. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 27(2), 96–111. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather. New York, NY: Routledge. McGee, M. (2005). Self help, Inc. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McRobbie, A. (2004). Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3), pp. 255–265. McRobbie, A. (2015). Notes on the perfect: Competitive femininity in neoliberal times. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83), pp. 3–20. McRuer, R. (2006). Crip theory. Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York, NY: New York University Press. Melamed, J. (2006). The spirit of neoliberalism. Social Text, 24(4), pp. 1–24. Mitchell, B. (2014). Behind the smiles of Bali. Fremantle Herald. [Online] 24th April. Available from: https://heraldonlinejournal.com/2014/04/24/behind-the-smiles-of-bali/. Moon, D. (1999). ‘White enculturation and bourgeois ideology’, in Nakayama, T. and Martin, J. (eds.) Whiteness: The communication of social identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 177–197. Newitz, A. and Wray, M. (1997). ‘Introduction’, in Newitz, A. and Wray, M. (eds.) White trash: Race and class in America. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Parrenas, R. (2003). ‘Care crisis in the Philippines: Children and transnational families in the new global economy’, in Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A. (eds.) Global woman. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, pp. 39–54. Pratt, M. (1992). Imperial eyes. New York, NY: Routledge. Puar, J. (2017). The right to maim. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Shaw, M. (2005). Get the glow. UK: Orion Publishing Company. Shiva, V. (1999). Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. Berkeley, CA: South End Press. Shome, R. (2001). White femininity and the discourse of the nation: Re/membering Princess Diana. Feminist Media Studies, 1(3), pp. 323–342. Shome, R. (2011). Global motherhood: The transnational intimacies of white femininity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28(5), pp. 388–406.

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9 RACIAL REPRODUCTIONS AND GENETIC IMAGINARIES Rikke Andreassen, Daisy Deomampo and Jennifer A. Hamilton

Introduction In this chapter, we explore the ways in which race animates the production and consumption of human gametes (sperm and eggs) in global markets, especially in the online context. We draw attention to colonial histories and hierarchical divisions of populations, illustrating how these continue to circulate in contemporary reproduction and how they are challenged in contemporary kinship making. Additionally, we position existing scholarship about race and assisted reproduction with respect to the question of how intersecting genetic and racial imaginaries influence the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). While online media, kinship and social scientific studies of genes are often examined in isolation, we draw attention to how the intersection between these areas reinscribes racial categories in surprisingly similar ways. We further illustrate how technologies of race in the production and consumption of gametes continue to reproduce recognisable categories in the global marketplace. The increased importance attributed to genes in human development and assisted reproduction calls for critical investigations into the ways in which genetic imaginaries and categorical racial divisions reinscribe ‘race’ as a fixed and hierarchical phenomenon – one that can be commoditised within catalogues and drop-down menus. The discussion explores the production and consumption of race in assisted reproduction through a comparative analysis of transnational gamete markets. In particular, we examine the racialisation of gametes through two case studies: (1) egg donation among Asian Americans in the United States and (2) sperm exportation from Cryos International, the world’s largest sperm bank. Cryos International is located in Denmark, which is globally known as a source of sperm from white, Scandinavian men. We explicate how the racialisation of eggs and sperm commodifies race as a resource for family making, and ask: (1) How does race function as a technology in the global market for gametes? (2) How are race, ethnicity and genetics conflated in the global gamete markets? and (3) How do histories and imaginaries of race and genetics persist in assisted reproduction? In what follows, we first outline the theoretical framing and analytical approach, before discussing the empirical material and method.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-11

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Theoretical framing and analytical approach Previous scholarship on sperm and egg donation has examined the gendered expectations of donors within medical and social communities. For instance, egg donors are expected to have altruistic motivations for donating, while sperm donors are assumed to have financial motivations (Almeling 2015; Ikemoto 2010). However, since our focus is the commercialisation of gametes, we first analyse donor eggs and sperm together, as both represent a commodification of the body and illustrate the commercialisation of bodily tissues (Almeling 2011). We then shift our focus from donor motivation to the racialisation of genetics in the commodified global market for ARTs. We contend that processes of commercialisation cannot be separated from processes of racialisation in the context of assisted reproduction. We analyse racial formations in the empirical material and examine how race functions as a technology (Chun 2009; Coleman 2009; Sheth 2004). Importantly, we demonstrate that race is a category that is historically and socially constructed through representations (e.g. Andreassen 2015; Horsti 2016; Smedegaard 2015), practices (e.g. Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Svendsen 2014), experiences (e.g. Andreassen and Ahmed 2014; Kennedy-Macfoy and Pristed Nielsen 2012) and socioeconomic legacies of history (e.g. Keskinen et al. 2009). We draw on Omi and Winant’s (2015) concept of ‘racial formation’ to outline the ways in which ‘racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed’ (p. 109). We then show how these formations serve to create ever-shifting social boundaries and argue that it is within these racial formations that users of ARTs make sense of their reproductive decision making. Race, too, can be understood as a technology (Coleman 2009; Foucault 1997; Sheth 2004) – one that sorts populations (e.g. Sheth 2009), creates inequalities (Benjamin 2016), shapes kinship (Russell 2015, 2018) and guides assisted reproduction (Deomampo 2016a). This perspective facilitates our investigation into the nuanced and complex interlinkages between the ways in which medical ARTs (re)configure race and the ways in which race (as a technology) simultaneously influences paths to reproduction and kinship making. Analytically, we examine how gametes are racialised as commodities. Commodification contributes to particular forms of racialisation and highlights the ways in which diverse racial identities are differentially valued. Scholars have examined the roles played by race, ethnicity and skin tone in the context of ARTs (Bell 2014; Deomampo 2016b; Harrison 2016; Speier 2016; Thompson 2009), finding that race is not only a reproductive resource (Roberts 2016), but also a marketed resource that drives the fertility industry, as well as the supply and demand of human gametes. While third-party reproduction clearly affects labour markets and reproductive labour (Cooper and Waldby 2014; Pande 2014; Rudrappa 2014; Teman 2010), gamete donation represents a unique case study for understanding the ways in which bodies and gametes are racialised, commodified and given value. Put differently: gamete donation illuminates the intertwined processes of racialisation and commodification, revealing the ways in which race functions as a resource for both family making and the generation of value in the private fertility industry. Treating the intersection of racial formation and reproductive commodification as central, we argue that race materialises in surprising and sometimes opposing ways in the commodification of eggs and sperm.

Empirical material and method Our two empirical cases exemplify the commodification of race in gamete markets and the flexibility of racial categories to reflect different ideological investments. In both cases, 106

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gametes are racialised in seemingly oppositional or antagonistic ways – either as ‘pure’ or as ‘hybrid’, reflecting the diverse contexts in which imaginaries of race and genetics circulate. Taken together, the cases comprise a complex empirical source that allows for a nuanced theorisation of the role of race in family making. One of the empirical cases draws on research on egg donation among Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. More specifically, the research refers to a project that Deomampo began in 2016, which examines the ways in which diverse Asian Americans experience social and cultural issues related to egg provision in the United States. The project relies on ethnographic research methods, including in-depth interviews with doctors, psychologists, nurses, donor coordinators and egg donors based in New York (NY), Los Angeles (CA) and Honolulu (HI) – three cities with significant Asian populations. Field research in each of these sites has highlighted the ways in which cost, availability and ideas about genetic inheritance and identity shape understandings of race in the context of egg donation. In addition, the project incorporates analysis of textual sources, including organisational websites, marketing materials and online blogs and forums. Taken together, these broad sources have shed light on the ways in which race and ‘Asianness’ are constructed, categorised and marketed by fertility clinics and their clients. The second empirical case draws on Andreassen’s research on the design of online sperm banks, highlighting the ways in which interface design plays into constructions of race and racial imaginaries. This research is part of a larger research project, in which Andreassen focuses on the intersection between reproduction, kinship and media technology. Here, she investigates how families with donor-conceived children use online media to find ‘donor siblings’, create community with other families with donor-conceived children and buy reproductive gametes (2018). Regarding the latter, she shows how access to reproductive gametes is now an online shopping practice for consumers with resources and knowledge (see also Mamo 2010; Moore and Grady 2014). Thus, online media can be understood as a reproductive technology, contributing to family and kinship making. Furthermore, Andreassen has previously analysed how Danish sperm is perceived in the United Kingdom, where it is termed ‘Viking sperm’, and how Danish sperm is accompanied by imaginaries of masculinity and racial whiteness (Andreassen 2017). In doing so, she has analysed the Cryos International sperm bank and its online interface, in addition to British media reports (on television and radio, as well as in newspapers and magazines) describing Danish sperm.

Race as a technology and the global market for gametes As Chun notes, understanding race as a technology ‘shifts the focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race’ (Chun 2009, p. 8; emphasis in original). In this chapter, the empirical cases demonstrate how consumers do race in the context of ARTs, with a specific focus on how racial categories are actively deployed in family making through the purchase of gametes. We argue that racial categories in the global market for gametes are not simply transparent reflections of biological realities or cultural norms; rather, they are deployed as a crucial technology to negotiate and establish ‘historically variable definitions of biology and culture’ (Chun 2009, p. 8) that are made to appear commonsensical within the larger context of family making. Benjamin reminds us that ‘technoscience is one of the most effective conduits for reproducing racial inequality’, and challenges us to ‘reexamine the default settings’ that ‘embed racism deep in the operating system’ (Benjamin 2016, p. 2,227). With respect to the production and consumption of gametes for use in ARTs, race as a technology intersects with neoliberal subjectivities, which are themselves central to processes of racial formation. 107

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Contemporary assisted reproduction fragments conception, pregnancy and parenthood. As a result, gametes used for conception are not always genetically connected to the person who gestates the foetus or to the intended parents (Franklin 2013; Payne 2016). A central dimension of this fragmentation is the movement of gametes and babies across national borders (DasGupta and DasGupta 2014; Pande 2016; Twine 2015). While the (re)production of race is inherent to all kinship making, assisted reproduction – and especially the sale and purchase of gametes – renders such processes explicit. The fragmentation brings race into focus, and the commercialisation of gametes further highlights the different values ascribed to race and racial purity in various contexts around the globe. In assisted reproduction, gametes are racialised to create key commodities and to generate economic value in the global fertility market. This racialisation repackages categories from earlier race science and eugenic movements, reinscribing them with neoliberal market logics and conflating them with race, ethnicity and genetics. The technological and social innovations of the Web 2.0 have shaped contemporary ARTs, rendering them – as well as gametes – increasingly available and commercialised online. In this context, online shopping for gametes may be understood to affect the consumption and construction of race in donor sperm and eggs. Thus, the market for gametes can be appropriately examined through a ‘race as technology’ framework, as the market positions race as both legible and commonsensical to consumers in ways that emphasise the illusion of individual choice.

The purchase of race in American egg donation For most Americans, decision making in the context of egg donation is influenced by stereotypes about race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. However, with the exception of Bell’s study of infertility among poor women and women of colour (Bell 2014) and Quiroga’s study of ART experiences among ethnically diverse couples (Quiroga 2007), ethnic and racial minorities’ experiences of infertility and their attempts to access ARTs in the United States are largely absent from the social scientific literature. While Asian American and Pacific Islander women have very high rates of ART utilisation in the United States (Dieke et al. 2017), little is known about their experiences with these technologies. Research focused on Asian Americans, who represent the fastest growing minority group in America (Hoeffel et al. 2012) and the group most likely to pursue egg donation in the United States (Shapiro et al. 2016), could contribute to filling this gap in the literature by providing a critical perspective on the intersection of race and commercialisation in assisted reproduction. While our focus in this chapter is on Asian Americans’ experiences of assisted reproduction, we do not take for granted the concept of ‘Asian American’ as a racial category. While Asian Americans are racialised as different from – and other than – Euro Americans, they nonetheless represent a heterogeneous and diverse group: their cultural background may range from Chinese to Japanese, Filipino, Indian and Korean; they may have been born in the United States or born in Asia; they may descend from mixed-race or Asian parents; and they may be educated or working class. Rather than reinforce stereotypes about Asian American ‘model minorities’ who are materially and educationally advantaged, we seek to emphasise their heterogeneity and multiplicity, in order to destabilise dominant constructions of Asian Americans as a homogenous group (Lee and Bean 2012; Lee and Zhou 2014, 2015). Moreover, our conceptualisation of Asian Americans as heterogeneous allows us to achieve an analysis that is ‘both ethnically specific, yet simultaneously uneven and unclosed’ (Lowe 2016, p. 537), and thereby to rethink ethnic identity in terms of cultural, class and gender 108

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differences (rather than adopting an essentialist binary opposition between Asian Americans and Euro Americans). Furthermore, this view of Asian Americans enables us to highlight their crucial alliances with other groups – based on ethnicity, class, gender or sexuality – in order to better address inequalities in medical practice and healthcare provision. During the previous decade, an increasing number of intended parents in the United States have been demanding Asian eggs. These parents self-identify as Asian, Asian American or multiple-race Asian, representing a wide range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Their demand for eggs reveals diverse understandings of race and identity in the context of egg donation in the United States. By highlighting the intersection between ideas of race, reproduction and identity, we hope to show how egg donation among Asian Americans illustrates the importance of understanding ideas about race and skin colour in the context of assisted reproduction. More specifically, we aim at showing how socio-cultural beliefs about race influence Asian Americans’ experiences of infertility and ARTs, revealing normative assumptions about race and assisted reproduction. For most Americans, human eggs represent enduring substances in the cultural imagination through which people construct and inherit racial and social identities (Thompson 2009). However, they also reflect distinct cultural, social and biological meanings, as evidenced by intended parents’ wide range of motivations for selecting a particular egg donor, linked to ideas about race. Eggs illustrate the importance of racial preferences in reproductive science and medicine, as prospective parents often prioritise race and ethnicity in their search for egg donors. Indeed, nearly all of the egg donor coordinators and medical providers who were interviewed for this research stated that racial/ethnic matching between the donor and client(s) is a main priority (followed by the matching of other characteristics, including skin colour, height, weight, eye colour and hair colour). As Nina, an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) coordinator based in Honolulu, explained: ‘Most of the recipients I deal with are looking for somebody that resembles either them or their husband or has some sort of ethnic mix that matches’. Yet although clinics might avoid any explicit articulation of race, they do not shy away from emphasising the heritability of racially associated physical characteristics, such as eye colour, height and skin tone. In doing so, they bolster consumers’ desire for matches in order to reproduce particular understandings of race and kinship (Moll 2019) – and ultimately to create single-race families. Of particular relevance are the naturalised assumptions about race in American culture, particularly in the context of histories in which racialised peoples were commodified. Indeed, the early American economy was organised around the principle of racial commodification: Atlantic slavery was based on a process of racialised reproduction, which ensured the availability of forced labour to develop the agricultural economy of the United States (Morgan 2018). Likewise, Asian and Latino workers were racialised so that their labour could be exploited and undervalued (Hernandez-Lopez 2008). The subjection of racialised populations to commodifying and exploitative forces has long played a significant role in the formation of American histories and economies. However, the racial commodification that currently exists in gamete markets is proceeding unchallenged. Currently, no clear law or regulation prohibits individuals from selling or acquiring racially marked material for the purposes of reproduction. Within this context, the practices of clinics, gamete vendors and ART consumers are central, as these parties participate in market exchanges involving racialised reproductive substances, with no limit on the compensation paid to egg providers. As a result, the United States egg market is thriving, driven by notions of race and ethnicity that structure scarcity and therefore demand. While egg agencies strive for diversity in race, ethnicity and other characteristics, many find it difficult to recruit Asian American 109

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donors. As a consequence, such donors are perceived as scarce and valuable, and typically offered greater compensation. Several of the Asian American women who were interviewed for this research reported receiving upwards of USD 50,000 to 75,000 per cycle. Clearly, the market value of eggs depends on the differential valuation of race and class. As ethicist Laurie Zoloth, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, notes: ‘(t)he fact that we think of these gametes as having particular worth depending on race and class is really one of the starkest examples of how capitalism has entered the market in human parts’ (Li 2012, n.p.). The processes through which ‘Asian’ eggs become racialised commodities are intertwined and simultaneous. First, race is reified as genetic. Although many ART clinicians acknowledge that the eggs they sell do not possess particular biological or genetic racial qualities, they nonetheless aim at offering clients eggs and sperm that are significantly likely to pass on specific racialised characteristics. One reproductive endocrinologist interviewed in Honolulu, for example, explicitly referenced the importance of commodity value and exchange, arguing that eggs must be sellable and that eggs from certain ‘full Asian’ or ‘100 per cent Japanese’ donors are more highly valued than ‘racially mixed’ eggs (interview, 2 August 2017). Here, notions of blood purity (i.e. racial purity) overlap with the market value of commodified eggs. Another egg donation coordinator acknowledged that a preference for a racially ‘pure’ egg donor may reflect a desire for similarity, as some egg recipients look for a similar blood type or physical features, in an effort to reproduce the assumed cultural norm of the single-race family. Indeed, resemblance and similarity may serve as clear proxies for race (Rich 2020). Second, egg donation (and assisted reproduction, more broadly) is framed as a tool for family formation. The goal of family formation provides a sympathetic justification for the use of ARTs, as there is an assumed human need and expectation to nurture and form a family (Thompson 2005). However, the frame of family formation conceals the troubling commercial aspects of the use of ARTs by emphasising individual choice, rather than limitations to choice (Andreassen 2018; Ikemoto 2009a). In other words, the focus on individual decision making and consumption as a means of fulfilling natural desires (e.g. that of family formation) (Mamo 2010) invokes public sympathy; however, this makes it difficult to critically engage in the pursuit of family formation through assisted reproduction, even when certain practices raise concerns around justice, inequality and compensation – particularly with respect to the treatment of egg donors and surrogates. Indeed, human eggs are racialised in diverse ways in order to create key commodities in the fertility industry. In the United States, Asian identity is reified as biological to attract egg recipients seeking this kind of racialised child. Although many medical doctors and IVF coordinators understand that race has no clear biological or genetic basis, they nonetheless reinforce notions of race or ethnicity as biological by recruiting egg donors who identify as, for instance, ‘full Japanese’ or ‘100 per cent Chinese’. By doing so, they are able to offer clients a selection of donors that relies on a logic of blood and racial purity. Indeed, an egg donor coordinator in Los Angeles explained that, given the higher prices they command, ‘racially pure’ Asian egg donors are increasingly spotlighted in donor databases. Yet while many ART consumers believe that racialised human traits can be transmitted genetically through human eggs, such beliefs are a historical relic of the eugenics movement and reinforced by consumer demand and fertility industry practices (Homanen 2018). ARTs, as a result, represent selective reproductive technologies that reinforce genetic determinist ideologies and the wish to create a particular kind of offspring (Martin 2017). Racialised human eggs – the very substance through which people imagine racial inheritance – are at the centre of this neo-eugenics. 110

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Race in the sperm bank: Web 2.0 The second case study examined here is that of the Danish sperm bank Cryos International, which is known as the world’s largest sperm bank.1 Though based in Denmark, where most of its donors are situated, Cryos International exports sperm and eggs globally to fertility clinics and to intended parents, via an online shop. The bank is especially famous for its ‘Viking sperm’ – the colloquial name for the sperm of white, Scandinavian sperm donors (Andreassen 2017, 2018; Blaagaard 2009; Kroløkke 2009). Here, we focus our analytical lens on the Cryos International online shop, in order to understand how its commercialisation contributes to ideas of race, including the idea of discrete racial categories. Over the past decade, online media and technology have become intertwined with people’s intimate lives and paths to parenthood (Andreassen et al. 2017; Chayko 2017; Hobbs, Owen and Gerber 2017). The Web 2.0, and the commercialisation that has accompanied it, has made almost all consumable items available online. Sperm, eggs and wombs for surrogacy are no exception to this trend, and, as a result, online shopping for gametes has become widespread (Moore and Grady 2014). While kinship scholars have previously documented racial constructions in ARTs (Deomampo 2016a; Ikemoto 1995; Quiroga 2007; Russell 2018), the online sale of gametes adds to the racialisation and genetic imaginary of assisted kinship making. Nakamura argues that online racial categories ‘are often structured in ways that reaffirm stereotypical racial categories rather than challenge them’ (2002, p. 103). In the context of online sperm banks, the media affordances that accompany the online shopping ‘drive’ race in particular ways, because race operates as a consumer category (Andreassen 2018). Boyd (2010) argues in favour of viewing media affordances as architectural structures. Such affordances do not determine users’ online interactions, but they direct and guide users towards particular online practices. Critical data studies have emphasised that online platforms are not neutral, but dynamic spaces for interactions that carry cultural values (Drucker 2011; Kannabiran and Petersen 2010; Sun and Hart-Davidson 2014). As online users become subjectified in particular ways via their interactions on and with user interfaces, the design of such interfaces is significant (Sun and Hart-Davidson 2014). In an analysis of online gamete donation sites, the spectre of eugenics – what Subramaniam calls the ‘ghost stories’ of the sciences of variation – becomes apparent (Subramaniam 2014). When shopping for gametes (sperm or eggs) online, intended parents fill out a multiple-choice form to indicate their donor preferences, with respect to race, blood type, eye and hair colour, and height. The shopping interface is similar to that of other shopping sites, on which consumers filter items according to pre-selected options such as size, type and colour. However, when applied to gametes, such sorting contributes in particular ways to the formation of race. At Cryos International, intended parents are asked to select from a ‘race menu’ that divides race into the categories of ‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘Caucasian’, ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ – categories that play upon stereotypes of racial belonging and division. While categories such as ‘African’ and ‘Asian’ signal geography, they also align with older ‘biological’ understandings of race (Fujimura et al. 2010; Fullwiley 2007; Hamilton 2008). Furthermore, in this context, ‘African’ does not indicate that the donor is geographically from Africa; rather, it merely indicates that the donor is racialised as Black. Accordingly, it includes donors of African descent who might be generations removed from ancestors who actually lived in Africa. Furthermore, ‘African’ does not refer to all of the African continent, as it does not include donors of Northern African descent. In other words, the geographical categories that are indicated in the race menu are not actually geographical, but rather geographical labels of racialities. 111

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In the menu, ‘Caucasian’ is equated with whiteness. ‘Caucasian’ is an older term that stems from the race science of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which understood race as biological and the white race as superior (Mukhopadhyay 2008). The category ‘Hispanic’ further complicates the picture, as Hispanic is seldom considered a race, in itself. Rather, it is a label used to describe people living in (or descending from those living in) Central and South America. Indeed, Hispanics can be racialised as Black, Brown, white, Native American or mixed race; however, at Cryos International, Hispanic is most likely interpreted as ‘Brown’. Similarly, ‘Middle Eastern’ represents a heterogeneous group, with members often identifying very differently in terms of racial belonging (Burton 2021). While the larger context in which biological materials are collected and data are produced to drive the seemingly commonsensical racial selection of ARTs is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is nevertheless worth noting that the process of creating such drop-down menus is largely opaque, and requires intensive creative and cultural labour. Previous critiques of the molecularisation of race (e.g. Fullwiley 2007) seem not to have penetrated the online global market for gametes, in which consumers can shop according to racial categories or phenotypic traits associated with racial identities. The drop-down menu of Cryos International makes race both legible and commonsensical, as it reflects five continental ancestral populations that are both fixed (for legibility) and flexible (allowing for a culturally appropriate set of choices). Following Kofoed-Hansen and Søndergaard 2017, who argue that design and technology are penetrated by the designer’s political or ideological values, one could argue that the race categories in the drop-menu function to sort and divide the population. In particular, the formation and naming of the categories – which appear as rather peculiar – illustrate how older racial ideas of people and geographical areas as racial are reinscribed in commercial ARTs (Andreassen 2015; 2018). Furthermore, power (in the Foucauldian sense) circulates in all digital media (including the online purchase of gametes), and subjectifies users (Kannabiran and Pedersen 2010). In the online market for gametes, both users and gametes are racially subjectified. In order to choose a donor that mirrors one’s own family, one needs to subscribe oneself and one’s future child to stereotypical racial categories. Nakamura, who has warned about racism on the internet since the birth of the Web 2.0 (Nakamura 1995, 2002; Nakamura, Kolko and Rodman 2000), highlights selection menus as particularly problematic. According to Nakamura, online racial categories are designed in ways that often reaffirm stereotypical racial divisions. More importantly, she warns that many people cannot recognise themselves in the categories offered online; rather, they identify with races that are not available, with multiple identities or as mixed raced. Accordingly, these people experience their racial subject positions as narrowed or eliminated. Nakamura argues that ‘menus “drive” race on the web in particular directions and configurations, permitting some categories while entirely eliding or ignoring others’ (Nakamura 2002, p. 119). Cryos International’s drop-down race menu is characterised by ‘old’ understandings of race as biological and geographical, involving hierarchical markers. This race formation presents race as pure and prioritises single-race families by eliminating options for interracial or mixed-race gametes – as if such categories would be undesirable or do not exist. The actual practice of online shopping also contributes to particular understandings of race, as the media affordances (of selection menus dividing humans into distinct racial categories) form and frame race as fixed, material and easily divisible. While such framing (of race as fixed and material) eases the process of shopping for gametes by creating accessible categories for purchase, it has vital consequences for the representations and imaginaries of race and racialisation. While nineteenth-century European race science aimed at dividing humans into 112

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distinct (biological) races, contemporary scholarship has often argued that race is a fluid (and socially and historically constructed) category. In contrast, the online market for gametes seems to present race as a fixed and material category. Hamilton shows how categories of difference (i.e. race) often emerge and are operationalised in ways that mirror earlier scientific inquiry in contemporary genomics research (Hamilton 2008, 2009, 2012; Hamilton, Subramaniam and Willey 2017). Furthermore, Hamilton illustrates how the genealogies of racial science enable racial categories to appear commonsensical in contemporary technology (Hamilton 2018, 2020). Indeed, the categories presented in Cryos International’s dropdown race menu appear commonsensical, as they correspond to well-known tropes of racial purity, despite the lack of any pure representation in the actual population.

Conflation of race, ethnicity and genetics in the global market for gametes While Cryos International’s online gamete shop presents race as pure and material, many of the ART consumers interviewed by Deomampo expressed conflicting ideas about class, race and nation. Additionally, the interviewees often conflated race with ancestry and inheritance of tradition. However, in both of the cases discussed in this chapter, as well as in the global fertility market in general, racial identity figures prominently. While some intended parents, for instance, seek gametes from people of a similar racial background, others pursue egg/sperm providers from donors with a distinct racial background. In one such example, a white American father opted for an Indian egg donor because of his abiding interest in Hinduism – a religious identity he anticipated that his child might adopt (Deomampo 2016a). This father’s racial preferences assumed that cultural and religious identities were transmitted genetically. In contrast to Cryos International, this example frames racial hybridity as attractive, conflating culture and religion with genes and racial appearance. Such an imaginary also influences international market demand, further turning race into a commodity to select, acquire and purchase. However, in the context of assisted reproduction, the ability to choose race normalises other preferences, making them seem both natural and justifiable, ‘thus clouding what might otherwise seem to be obvious genetic preferences’ (Ikemoto 2009b, p. 308). In Hawaii, for instance, where nearly one in four residents identifies as mixed race, Deomampo (2019) found that prospective parents often sought donors with a different background than their own in order to create a particular kind of mixed-race child that might ‘fit in’ with the family. In other words, the process of normalising racial preferences because they enable the resulting family to appear biologically related (i.e. of the same racial background) naturalises other preferences (pertaining to, e.g., height and athletic ability) that are assumed to ‘stack the deck’ in the child’s favour (Tober 2019). Racial preferences in assisted reproduction reflect a conflation of genetics and race, as intended parents search for a particular blood type or physical feature in order to create a particular kind of family. The goal of forming a single-race family, for instance, expands the understanding of race to include genetic features, thereby making race genetic. In other words, although definitions of race and racial categories are unstable and shifting, with no clear biological or genetic basis, ART clinics increasingly invite gamete recipients to invest in the ideas of a fixed category of biological race and the genetic heritability of racialized characteristics. As one IVF doctor explained, ‘you have to be able to sell a commodity’, and eggs from certain racialised bodies (e.g. ‘full Asian’, ‘100 per cent Chinese’) are valuable. As a result, this doctor focused on offering clients a gene pool with the strongest chances of passing on specific racialised characteristics, such as facial structure and hair colour. 113

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Relatedly, gametes from Cryos International are often imagined to embody race, ethnicity and history. In particular, Danish sperm is known as ‘Viking sperm’, carrying particular imaginaries of race and gender, including purity, whiteness, hypermasculinity, vigour and potency (Adrian 2010; Blaagaard 2009; Kroløkke 2009). Illustratively, the Viking metaphor is used in Britain as a general description of the sperm imported from Denmark (half of all British donor sperm is imported from Denmark; BBC Radio, 2018). The British media has covered the import of ‘Viking sperm’ and the resulting ‘Viking babies’ extensively (Andreassen 2017; 2018). In this coverage, interviews with British mothers who have conceived via Danish donor sperm have confirmed the imagined connection between Danish sperm and Vikings, as well as between race, ethnicity and genes, as illustrated in the below citation from a lesbian mother, whose son was conceived with Danish donor sperm: For Sara [my wife] and I, it will be very important to explain to [our son] Euan [how he is conceived] and to take him to Denmark. To see the Viking boats. It is part of who he is. And we have to celebrate that, and to explain and educate him about that. I was in Denmark a little while ago, and I brought back a little Viking hat to celebrate his Viking heritage. (BBC Radio 2014) This comment illustrates a social imaginary of genes (Franklin 2000), unfolding as a narrative of genetic connection to Vikings. In this narrative, the donor-conceived Euan becomes a descendant of Vikings; the Viking past ‘is part of who he is’. Simpson coined the term ‘imagined genetic communities’ (2000) (drawing upon Anderson’s (1991) ‘imagined community’) in a warning about conflating ethnic and genetic identities via framing ethnic identities as imagined genetic communities. Imaginaries of ‘Viking babies’ illustrate how Danish/Scandinavian ethnicity and history have become imagined as a genetic community. To Euan’s mothers, there is conflation of race (when choosing Caucasian (i.e. Danish, white) sperm from the sperm bank), ethnicity (symbolised by historical artefacts such as Viking boats) and genes. The genes carry a historical heritage to the donor-conceived child, regardless of the context in which he is born and the mothers by which he is raised. Genes are imagined as transmitters of a certain heritage, which contributes to an imaginary of pure and authentic whiteness. In the narrative, sperm carries genes imagined to be racially, ethnically and historically defined as fixed and transmittable through time and space (Andreassen 2018).

History and imaginaries of race and genes How is it that categories such as Caucasian or Asian become legible and meaningful – sufficient to stand on their own to consumers as selections in a drop-down menu? How are these historically situated categories simultaneously legible as choices and sufficiently flexible to enable a range of imaginaries about race, genes, heredity and kinship? It is essential to remember that the imaginaries of race and reproduction that animate these empirical examples precede any of the technological innovations that enabled contemporary assisted reproduction. Indeed, the techno-scientific apparatus that undergirds ARTs is part of a much longer story of how race and heredity have become linked in ways that can manifest in drop-down menus, without much – if any – explication. In ART, race may be understood as a technology that sorts gametes and populations in preparation for consumption, and these categories are always in the process of becoming commonsensical. Our ability to see race – and thus choose it in a drop-down menu – is a deeply cultural preoccupation that is embedded in the science that made ARTs possible. The naturalisation 114

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of this preoccupation further occludes the histories of racial science, which, in the most general of terms, sought difference in the biology of diverse groups (Andreassen 2015; Roberts 2011). Colonisation, imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade lay the foundation for the development of modern science and the search for biological difference between human populations, as they made particular bodies available for study and positioned others as capable of studying them (Hamilton, Subramaniam and Willey 2017). The ability to manifest the race of one’s offspring by selecting categories such as Asian or Caucasian – or indeed racialised traits such as eye colour, skin pigmentation and hair texture – has the effect of further naturalising these assumptions of racial difference. The rationale seems to be that, if one can locate these traits at the genomic level, they must be natural, obvious and discoverable. However, the genealogies of racial science demonstrate that all of these traits have their own complex histories (Braun 2014; Nelson 2016), leaving us to continue to explore the role played by race in ARTs, as articulated in the following questions: How does the imaginary of race as a genomic (hereditary) quality or trait work in this context? How are racial categories naturalised – made obvious or transparent – to such a degree that they can be selected by consumers? How have ideas of natural selection – and neoliberal choice – been built into the technological infrastructure, articulated through genetic imaginaries of race? And how have notions of natural and sexual selection been, in some ways, operationalised as a series of drop-down menus that make choices such as Caucasian eye colour and height appear transparent?

Conclusion In this chapter, we have examined processes of racialisation in the context of assisted reproduction. Drawing on two empirical cases – that of Asian American egg donation and that of the online sperm and egg bank Cryos International – we have highlighted the entanglement of ideas about race, reproduction and market value, arguing that reproductive medicine has structured a commercial market in racialised gametes. In doing so, we have illustrated the importance of understanding how biogenetic and social ideas about race have been – and continue to be – constructed in the context of assisted reproduction, gamete donation, the purchase of gametes and neoliberalism. The cases have demonstrated the value of the idea of racial purity. While Almeling (2015) has shown that, in the global fertility market, physical characteristics associated with whiteness (e.g. height, blond hair and blue eyes) are valued by sperm/egg banks for commercial reasons, this chapter has illustrated how particular racial boundaries and the logics of whiteness are maintained and reinforced. Both cases highlighted the value consumers place on racial purity. However, the Asian American egg donation case offered a seeming alternative to this purity, eschewing familiar eugenic notions but nevertheless relying on the same racial logic. While the case of Cryos International underlined an ‘old school’ imaginary of racial formations relying on ideas of white superiority and tropes of purity and clear categories of race, the Asian American egg donation case drew upon competing notions of hybridity and purity, which might be interpreted as a counter-narrative to that of pure (Viking) sperm. In both cases, however, race – and the imaginary of race as intertwined with heredity and genetics – was presented as central to the organisation of family making. Both cases also displayed a deep and abiding faith in race, as manifested as phenotypical imaginaries and operationalised for consumption. While race has always played a significant role in reproduction and kinship making, contemporary assisted reproduction makes race visible and explicit in particular ways. 115

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Furthermore, it has made gametes racialised in stereotypical ways, in order to create recognisable commodities with economic value. The online commercialisation of gametes has exacerbated racial stereotypes through the operationalisation of discrete racial categories, contributing to an understanding of race as material and divisible into discrete consumption categories. By revealing the orientation of the neoliberal illusion of choice in assisted reproduction (Ahmed 2006), we have aimed at contributing to the development of new critical race and whiteness theories. Clearly, assisted reproduction is a particularly fruitful context for an analysis of contemporary race formations. In this chapter, we have illustrated the ways in which race can be understood as a technology that sorts gametes, drives imaginaries and attributes economic value to ‘purity’. This technology functions partly by drawing upon older histories of colonialism, slavery and ‘race science’ that divided populations in order to exploit and consume. It is this old trace of race as commonsensical that enables the continued consumption of race.

Note 1 While known as a ‘sperm bank’, Cryos International also sells eggs.

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Racial reproductions and genetic imaginaries Nelson, A. (2016). The social life of DNA: Race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Omi, M. and Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Pande, A. (2014). Wombs in labor: Transnational commercial surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Pande, A. (2016). Global reproductive inequalities, neo-eugenics and commercial surrogacy in India. Current Sociology, 64(2), pp. 244–258. Payne, J. G. (2016). Grammars of kinship. Biological motherhood and assisted reproduction in the age of epigenetics. Signs, 41(3), pp. 483–506. Quiroga, S. S. (2007). Blood is thicker than water. Hypatia, 22(2), pp. 143–161. Rich, C. G. (2020). Contracting our way to inequality: Race, reproductive freedom and the quest for the perfect child. Minnesota Law Review, 104(5), pp. 2,375–2,469. Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal invention: How science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. New York: The New Press. Roberts, E. F. S. (2016). Resources and race: Assisted reproduction in Ecuador. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online, 2, pp. 47–53. Rudrappa, S. (2014). ‘Mother India: Outsourcing labor to Indian surrogates’, in DasGupta, S. and DasGupta, S. D. (eds.) Globalization and transnational surrogacy in India: Outsourcing life. New York: Lexington Books, pp. 240–271. Russell, C. (2015). The race idea in reproductive technologies. Beyond epistemic scientism and technological mastery. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 12(4), pp. 601–612. Russell, C. (2018). The assisted reproduction of race. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Shapiro, A., Barad, D. H., Darmon, S.,Albertini, D. F., Gleicher, N. and Kushnir, V. A. (2016). Racial and ethnic disparities in the use of third-party ART in the U.S. Fertility and Sterility, 106(3), pp. e108–e109. Sheth, F. (2004). The technology of race. Radical Philosophy Review, 7(1), pp. 77–98. Sheth, F. (2009). Toward a political philosophy of race. Albany: State University of New York Press. Simpson, B. (2000). Imagined genetic communities. Ethnicity and essentialism in the twenty-first century. Anthropology Today, 16(3), pp. 3–6. Smedegaard, A. (2015). ‘If it had been a Muslim: Affectivity and race in Danish journalists’ reflection on making news on terror’, in Andreassen, R. and Vitus, K. (eds.) Affectivity and race. Studies from Nordic contexts. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 43–58. Speier, A. (2016). Fertility holidays: IVF tourism and the reproduction of whiteness. New York: New York University Press. Subramaniam, B. (2014), Ghost stories for Darwin: The science of variation and the politics of diversity. Urbana: ­ University of Illinois Press. Sun, H. and Hart-Davidson, W. F. (2014). Binding the material and the discursive with a relational approach of affordances. CHI 2014, 26 April–1 May, Toronto. Svendsen, S. H. B. (2014). Learning racism in the absence of ‘race’. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21(1), pp. 9–14. Teman, E. (2010). Birthing a mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, C. (2005). Making parents: The ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, C. (2009). ‘Skin tone and the persistence of biological race in egg donation for assisted reproduction’, in Glenn, E. N. (ed.) Shades of difference: Why skin color matters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 131–147. Tober, D. (2019). Romancing the sperm: Shifting biopolitics and the making of modern families. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Twine, F. W. (2015). Outsourcing the womb: Race, class and gestational surrogacy in a global market. New York and London: Routledge.

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10 TEXTILES, FASHION AND RACE Technologies of whiteness in the British colonies and metropole, c. 1700–1820 Beverly Lemire

Western imperial systems built their economies and cultures on the commodification of African enslavement and the production that emerged from it – processes that shaped habits and material culture in metropoles and colonies. As Catherine Hall observes, relations between colonies and metropoles ‘were mutually constitutive, in which both coloniser and colonised were made’ (Hall 2002, p. 8). Additionally, Anne McClintock argues that ‘imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity’ (McClintock 1995, p. 5). Indeed, imperialism was a long-run project featuring many stages; and while both McClintock and Hall focus on nineteenth-century expressions, I attend here to the generative ‘long eighteenth century’ (i.e. 1660–1820). The ethos of race was being established in the 1500s, and it evolved over time as cultural norms and gender and racial power relations were reshaped in tandem with the commercialised traffic in African bodies (Fowkes Tobin 1999; Morgan 1997, 2021). Alongside this evolution, material culture was also reshaped – and I address this history here, drawing on ‘extralingual’ evidence, beyond written records. Object study takes seriously the power of things, teasing out the meanings that arise from objects and object systems (Gosden 2005). Historic material culture reveals the ways in which evolving concepts of race have shaped gender and rank, as materialised within embodied cultural forms, such as societal routines, fashions and fads. Dress is a particularly powerful medium through which hierarchies are enacted, disputed and displayed, with tangible distinctions that shape the human environment. As Leora Auslander notes, objects that are ‘felt and touched’ and involved in embodied routines ‘are not simply functional, they are always also modes of communication, or memory cues, or […] extensions of the body, as well as sites of aesthetic investment’ (2005, p. 1016). Further, Auslander emphasises that the materials of everyday life are ‘not only the product of history, they are also active agents in history. In their communicative, performative, emotive, and expressive capacities, they act, have effects in the world’ (2005, p. 1017). During the long eighteenth century, the material modes of whiteness expanded as the repetitive requirements of laundering dramatically augmented the consumption of textiles at all levels of society. Garments instilled meaning through their use, for

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-12

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it was investiture, the putting on of clothes, that quite literally constituted a person as a monarch or a freeman of a guild or a household servant. Investiture was, in other words, the means by which a person was given a form, a shape, a social function, a “depth”. ( Jones and Stallybrass 2000, p. 2) In the early modern era, the potency of apparel is well known, with respect to its ‘ability to “pick up” subjects, to mold and shape them’ ( Jones and Stallybrass 2000, p. 2). Such meanings were also maintained and diversified through the long eighteenth century, as attention to rank and race intensified and was manifested in creations of dress. At this time, light, white fabrics (e.g. linens and cottons) significantly increased in popularity, comprising a larger proportion of everyday wardrobes and representing a profound material and imperial transformation in the West (Lemire 1991, 2011; Riello 2013). The interaction between (potentially) white fabrics and fashion in the Anglo Atlantic world effected a new racialised ordering of dress, aligned with the wider imperial project. Fashionability was predicated on ‘white washing’ – part of what Anne McClintock terms ‘the soap saga [that] captured the hidden affinity between domesticity and empire’ (1995, pp. 207– 208). In this chapter, I explore the ways in which the white washing of garments – or the lack thereof – generated a visible hierarchy that defined race, gender and rank. In so doing, I trace the ways in which this system evolved over generations. My second focus is on neo-classical dress, which represented the apogee of white fashion and thus an aesthetic movement infused with racial meanings. Western elites embraced neo-classicalism as a form of dress carrying significant political weight, through references to ancient empires and claims to this heritage of power. Material whiteness figures throughout these histories as an ephemeral condition sustained by the gendered and racialised labours that marked this age.

A question of colour Beginning in the 1600s, European-made linens of all qualities poured into local and imperial markets. This material was used for a variety of purposes, from apparel for middling and elite clientele to military garments and slave clothing. Alongside this, East Indian companies shunted cargoes of cottons to Europe, swelling the tide of lighter fabrics and remaking the material ecology (Lemire 1991, 2010, 2018). Museum artefacts from this era – including neck ruffs and sleeve ruffles (Figures 10.1 and 10.2) – immediately problematise the seeming neutrality of the white textiles, which encapsulate generations of political, economic and cultural ambitions (Brown 2009; Lemire 2020). The whiteness in these textiles represents a key ingredient of their materiality, evoking social position. Historically, whiteness in material form was not neutral, but something to be achieved and sustained for defined purposes, and something that required the purposeful attention of those with resources and access to labour; thus, it provided a material frame for the wearer. Generations of entrepreneurs, retailers, housewives and launderers struggled over the technical processes that produced these ephemeral benchmarks. In contrast, never-white garments were similarly defined by this trait. Whiteness was not simply an absence of colour, but a dynamic characteristic of the fibre and cloth, defining place and position. Little wonder, then, that a handkerchief betrayed a rogue posing as a member of Parliament in the spring of 1692. As this fellow dried his damp handkerchief before the fire, the landlady’s daughter saw the fraud: ‘because it was course [sic] and dirty, and not fit for his Quality (as she thought) it being made of ordinary Indian [cotton] stuff, like her Mothers Maids Apron’ (Old Bailey Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, April 1692, trial of Henry Harrison, t16920406-1). Indeed, textiles could create 121

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Figure 10.1

Ruff edged with needle lace in linen thread, likely Italian made, c. 1600–1620. T.14– 1965. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Figure 10.2 Embroidered Indian muslin women’s sleeve ruffles, previously attached to a dress sleeve. 1730s. T.140&A-1959. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

certainties or reveal ambiguities. The fad for lightweight white clothing grew alongside the rise in colonial plantations and the vast enslavement of millions of Africans – a seeming coincidence that was not incidental. In 1657, the Englishman Richard Ligon proposed that planters in the Caribbean colony of Barbados spend GBP 100 annually for slave clothes made of coarse, drab canvas and ‘kenting’ (Ligon 1657, p. 109). These cheap fabrics were marked by their dull hue and coarse checks or stripes. Daniel Roche defines what he calls the ‘invention of linen’ at that time, focused on France, small linen garments and the gros linge that dressed beds, tables and windows: the higher one’s rank, the greater one’s access to goods deemed essential. This was a phenomenon that was sweeping over Europe and its colonies. Roche emphasises the ways in which white linen ‘truly differentiated … [defining] the means and sphere of influence of the norms of clean, white linen, testimony to the cleanliness and whiteness of bodies and soul’ (Roche 1994, p. 169). Roche’s analogy is set within a Christian context, and I doubt his reference to ‘white bodies’ is meant as a commentary on race. Perhaps it is a simple reflection of the essentialist early modern assumption that ‘pure’ bodies were necessarily white – a view that was widespread in Europe at the time. The juxtaposition of white garments, cleanliness and the ‘whiteness of bodies and souls’ invariably recalls the people of colour both within and without the kingdom and empire. Western Europe cannot be fully understood without reference to this population 122

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and the evolving racialised belief systems that shaped intellectual and material life, whether or not this was acknowledged at the time (Dobie 2010; Peabody 1996, pp. 3–10). Just as linens served as a ‘social skin’ (Turner 2012), whiteness became reified as essential for Europeans of a particular kind, representing a precarious material quality that was increasingly defined by distorted paradigms of race. The identification of white fabrics from this perspective allows for a reassessment of material systems within the Atlantic world, including those of fashion. Robert DuPlessis recently calculated the precise flows of cloth in Atlantic world communities and the priorities of plantation locales. Cloth and clothing intended for colonised Africans were uniformly cheap, coarse, hardwearing and not white (2015, p. 65). Thus, cloth categories carried value. A British Royal Navy captain denounced the garments shipped from Britain to the sailors in the Mediterranean fleet, claiming that the garments were only fit to dress African slaves and wholly unacceptable for ‘free’ British sailors (Walker 2020, p. 106). Despite their sometimes troubling ambiguity, textiles brought hierarchical precepts to life, representing ‘affective, communicative, symbolic, and expressive aspects of human life that are central to the historical project’ (Auslander 2005, p. 1,016). I urge the reader to bear this in mind as I trace the shifting priorities of style, placements of white garments and role played by laundry during the long eighteenth century.

Washing and wearing Both investors and inventors spent time, intellect and capital to ensure that (where appropriate) the desired state of whiteness could be achieved. Cleanliness and purity were only some of the principles driving this fad. Definitions of beauty, including characterisations of race, also played an important role in the evolving schema, coming more sharply into focus over time. Laundering developed into a core technology and the whiteness of linens (or the lack thereof ) became a preoccupation of metropolitan and colonial households and institutions (Brown 2009; North 2020; Roche 1994). Among the elites, the finest techniques were exercised, including subtle starching processes that allowed white ruffs and ruffles to seemingly defy gravity, bedecking noble bodies with balletic precision, as displayed in the seventeenth century portrait of an unknown gentleman (Korda 2010; Korda and Lowe 2016) (Figure 10.3). Such ephemeral moments of triumph were remade at every wash, underlining the constant intercessions required for the cloth to realise its purpose. Laundering evolved over the seventeenth century from an elite privilege to a matter of concern for the middling and labouring ranks (North 2020; Vincent 2003, pp. 27–29, 38–42). Family laundry lists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literally document this trajectory,1 as do written documents, such as the 1709 letter from an Englishman in the Hague bemoaning the fact that he cannot send his linen to ‘Lord Portland’s people [as] he goes away before it can be got from the bleachers’ (Shropshire Archives 112/2/192). Indeed, the surviving linen and cotton artefacts in museum collections speak to the hidden chronicle of care that defined their histories (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). This was never a neutral process; rather, skill, dexterity and resources were required to support the finest laundering, and the activity was shaped by both gendered and racialised labour. There was always a hierarchy of laundering, defined by rank, race and opportunity. Beyond noble households, generations of housewives across the middling and labouring ranks managed their textile resources personally, for textiles often represented their most significant household investment (Lemire 2005, pp. 82–140; Lemire 2011). Such housewives managed the buying, making, mending and recycling of clothes, as well as the imperative of laundering, expressing the gendered nature of this work. Yet if most women were tasked 123

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Figure 10.3

Oil painting of an unknown man wearing starched ruff and cuffs, seventeenth century, 28–1867. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

with managing fabric resources, sweating over washtubs was reserved for lower ranked or racialised women. Washing might be sent out or managed within the household, with routine interactions between housewives and washerwomen leaving few records. However, over the seventeenth century, washing became more formalised, with household manuals such as Hannah Woolley’s 1677 opus offering general instructions. Washing, Woolley wrote, should not ‘lye [in the water] and stink and grow yellow’ (p. 164). Advice became more precise over time, including guidance on the treatment of delicate fabrics. Publications also increased in number over the eighteenth century, aimed at literate female readers. In the mid-century, the laundry maid was established as a strategic household servant who had been ‘brought up to it’ (Glasse 1760, p. vi). However, it was also considered that ‘any young woman of tolerable abilities may soon learn it, as all women are more or less acquainted with washing’ (Barker 1770, p. 40). Gendered education defined this system: ‘Where linen is either badly washed, or not properly got-up, it soon wears; and … [one] bad washing does it more hurt than ten times using it’ (Complete Man and Maid Servant 1767, p. 62). Indeed, imperfect measures were evident to discerning eyes, and discerning eyes policed standards. Laundry maids sustained material and imperial ideals, thereby eradicating evidence of earthly vagaries and upholding standards of whiteness – material expectations that were carried to colonial settlements. Their deft selection of soaps, their preparation of various washing waters and their correct use of blueing, starch and other treatments (including smoothing irons of all shapes) were integral to this textile maintenance (Complete Man and Maid Servant 1767, pp. 61–65; Frugal House-Keeper 1778, pp. 72–76). The reams of instructions published in Britain over the decades make clear that top quality results required skill and diligence, 124

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especially when fine light fabrics (e.g. gauzes, chintzes, muslins and lace) were at stake. One eighteenth-century author listed more than 12 steps involved in the washing, blueing and starching of goods – a sequence of interventions to make things ‘white as Snow’ (Glasse 1760, p. 13). The image of ‘Miss White, Clear Starcher to the Queen’ exemplifies the apex of starching skill, with Miss White patting Her Majesty’s frill into shape (Figure 10.4). However, the need for starching and skilled laundering extended far beyond royalty, as routine budgeting for disciplined whiteness was a critical requirement for respectable families (Davidson 2019, pp. 96–97; North 2020). Beyond the idealised Miss White, tensions teemed around laundering supplies and processes. The satirist Jonathan Swift turned his sharp pen to the failures of servants, including laundresses who singed linens with the iron, washed items until ‘torn to Rags’ and left garments half washed (1745, pp. 20, 92). Modern readers may be unfamiliar with these laundry routines and their corresponding politics, reflecting the significant transformations of these laborious practices over time. However, in the long eighteenth century, the politics of laundry extended far beyond rank and gender, and also intersected with empire and race. This is well represented in a long-run

Figure 10.4 M iss White, Clear Starcher to the Queen, c. 1750–1800. 1902,1011.7360. © Trustees of the British Museum, London

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racialised satire in which an African man seated in a laundry tub is washed of his skin colour by a laundress using a scrub brush. This trope emerged in the seventeenth century, as hierarchies of race were legally and culturally reinforced and enslavement accelerated. The scenario was then reiterated for centuries in Anglophone regions, both in stage and print productions – including the book illustration by Thomas Bewick (c. 1776), representing a domestic iteration that brought race directly into the home (Figure 10.5). This was one of several versions of this scene by this artist, alone. The derogation of dark skin, through metaphors of the imperative of laundering, was reiterated by advertisers for generations (McClintock 1995, p. 213; Mehaffy 1997, p. 136; Neederveen Pieterse 1992; Nussbaum, 2004, p. 80). Thus, histories of skin colour and laundering became deeply entangled, contiguous with the normalisation of Black enslavement, which flourished with the cultural assertion of white beauty. Sophie White and Kathleen M. Brown, historians of colonial America, confirm the importance of clean, white garments in the definition of race and status in the North American colonial territories (Brown 2009; White 2012). They open key conversations about the politics of laundering, noting the greater frequency of washdays in the eighteenth century among the colonial middle class and elite populations. The washing regimes in metropoles and colonies shared many elements. Figure 10.6 displays the ideals of patriarchal portraiture, with Isaac Royall Jr and his sister Penelope (far left) bookending the group, which also includes Royall’s wife, Elizabeth McIntosh, and daughter, Elizabeth, as well as his wife’s sister, Elizabeth McIntosh Palmer. All are fashionably arrayed, with the whiteness of their skin and accessories representing a signature feature; their affluence is on display after decades of slave trading and plantation profits from Antigua (prior to moving to New England). Material whiteness is showcased, as are critical accoutrements to their lineage; the child’s dress and the adults’ shifts, shirts, ruffled cuffs, stockings and neck stock are juxtaposed against their skin, representing emphatic components of the assemblage. The Royall family brought several

Figure 10.5

Fable of the Blackamoor, by Thomas Bewick, book illustration, c. 1776–1777. 1882,0311.4584. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

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Figure 10.6

‘Isaac Royall and his Family’, by Robert Feke, 1741. Family wealth began with Royall Sr’s investment in the slave trade and Antigua plantations. The family moved to Antigua in 1700 and back to Massachusetts in 1737. Wiki Commons

dozen enslaved people to their Massachusetts estate, including women named Hagar, Mira and Betsy, in addition to Betsy’s daughter, Nancy. Doubtless, some of these women toiled at fine and heavy laundering. In fact, Royall later instructed that Nancy be rented out by the year so he could profit from her skills (Halley 2008, pp. 119–122; http://royallhouse.org/ the-royalls/). Enslaved labour offered the potential for whiter washes, as women of colour were bound to this laborious task. As an indentured Scot working as a tutor on a Virginia plantation discovered in 1774, white garments and white skin had a particular resonance. He wrote to his wife about his linens: ‘They wash here the whitest that ever I seed […] and I may put on clean linen every day if I please’ (Brown 2009, p. 133). The tutor enjoyed a material display otherwise beyond his means, reinforcing his racial status. This represents a critical lens through which to assess other reports of laundering in colonial regions – with some accounts revealing greater tensions than those evident in the Royall family portrait or acknowledged by the Scots tutor.

Imperial whiteness: power, purpose and resistance British women travellers, in particular, held high expectations of imperial whiteness and were deeply unhappy when these expectations were not met. Colonial white women elided white skin and white linen in a politicised stew and routinely policed their standards ( Jones 2016, H-net). Scotswoman Janet Schaw travelled to the West Indies and North Carolina between 1774 and 1776, sending letters home to record her thoughts. Schaw’s family was invested in the colonial enterprise: her brother Robert was a plantation owner in North Carolina and her brother Alexander had travelled to the Caribbean to work as a customs 127

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officer in St Kitts. As Margot Finn explains, ‘family was a central force that propelled and maintained the upsurge of British imperialism that marked the century’ (Ford Lectures 2020). Schaw saluted the local (white) creole women who shielded themselves from ‘the sun who bestows such rich taints on every other flower, [but] gives none to his lovely daughters; […] whose skin is as pure as the lily’ (Schaw 1923, p. 114). Skin colour was a recurring theme in her travel narratives, as was the issue of white textiles. Such refrains were also repeated in the accounts of a later female travel writer, discussed in turn. On Shaw’s arrival at Antigua, among her many points of interest was her hosts’ extensive use of linens for entertainment: ‘They wash and change napkins between the Courses’ (p. 97), she observed – luxury, indeed! Material protocols were a topic of note and, unhappily, Schaw did not find all local habits up to her standards. Bear in mind that she understood the well-developed techniques of white washing that were common in British middle ranked households, and she was emphatic in her commitment to these techniques, as domestic chores materialised an imperial purpose in everyday routines. At her brother’s property in North Carolina, Schaw described the enslaved females as ‘the worst washers of linen I ever saw’. She was shocked that ‘All the cloaths coarse and fine, bed and table linen, lawns, cambricks and muslins, chints [sic], check, all are promiscuously thrown into a copper with a quantity of water and a large piece of soap’ (p. 204). This indifferent practice brought disappointing results – perhaps anticipated by the washerwomen – that were nonetheless pursued. Resistance by the enslaved took various forms, including deliberate failure to achieve the standards assigned by their overseer: ‘the allocation of tasks determined patterns of resistance among [enslaved] women’ (Moitt 1995, p. 169). These demonstrations of autonomy were (psychic) survival strategies and ‘an integral part of slave society’ (Buckridge 2004, p. 70). In contrast, Schaw’s Scottish servant, Mrs. Miller, was pleased to demonstrate the highest benchmark of washing. Schaw applauded this ‘British method of treating linens’, which ‘charmed’ her brother, as he ‘has not seen a bleaching-washing since a boy’ (p. 204). Thus, imperial regimens worked to fix hierarchies through technical processes and material display, linking Britain to colonial realms through racialised material culture. Colonial laundry standards were contentious, as Mary Prince (1788–1833?) recounted after securing her freedom. Prince lived most of her life in the Caribbean, navigating the traps and trials of enslavement, including a capricious and demanding mistress in Antigua who was preoccupied with laundering. This woman assigned Prince a weekly wash of ‘two bundles of clothes, as much as a boy could help me lift; but I could give no satisfaction’ (2017 [1831], p. 29). Prince illuminated the pervasive politics surrounding laundering from a subaltern perspective, emphasising that the grinding labour was meant to instil exhausted obedience, while achieving the owner’s specifications. The sketch of ‘Mr. Bryan’s Washerwomen’ in Dry River, Jamaica (Figure 10.7) reflects the embodied drudgery of this endless routine, though the collective nature of the work might offer some support. Washing was fraught in ways that defined the racial divide. I note Schaw’s denunciation of ‘promiscuous’ laundering, perhaps implying fears of pollution or cultural transgression. As anthropologist Mary Douglas proposes, ‘some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view of the social order’ (Douglas 2002[1966], p. 4). Prince was vulnerable to every indignity, as Western rationalisations of slavery were fully developed (Morgan 2004; Troulliot 1995). Notably, her mistress issued a prohibition against Prince’s husband – a free man of colour: he could not be ‘about the yard’ and his clothes were never to be ‘washed in the same tub’ as that used for the owners’ garments (p. 33). The fear of pollution underlying this dictum reiterated the ‘general view of the social order’. Ironically, the laundry skills Prince acquired so painfully became a means by which she earned extra money when her owners were away – a tactic 128

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widely employed by women of colour throughout the Caribbean (p. 30; Matos-Rodríquez 1995, pp. 184–187). Struggles with white washing were part of the colonial dynamic that defined households and communities – struggles with a long cultural shadow. Mrs. Carmichael, another genteel Scottish colonist, provided a vivid counterpoint to Prince’s narrative. Carmichael scorned what she saw as the imperfect standards of colonial laundering – a scourge she ‘endured’ during her six years in the Caribbean, from 1820 to 1826 (Williamson 2008). Carmichael’s first sight upon reaching St Vincent was the ubiquitous scene of women of colour washing clothes by a stream – a routine this colonist deplored. She reckoned that: ‘the mode of washing in the West Indies greatly adds to the domestic labours of the planter’s wife’, lamenting: It is utterly impossible for those who have not gone through such scenes, to comprehend the unnecessary accumulation of work thus thrown upon the mistress of the family, who must begin to button and string the whole wardrobe every time it returns from the wash… the patching and mending of a West India [settler] family is, consequently, ‘never ending – still beginning:’ all this a planter’s wife must see done. (Carmichael 1833, pp. 10, 22) By her account, laundering deficiencies made Carmichael’s life ‘unbearable’, as washing represented a repetitive trial exemplifying imperial expectations and resistance. Perhaps the ‘unbearable’ features of this routine were intended by the women she owned, as ‘occupational sabotage’ was a subtle feature of slave defiance, whereby ‘fabric [was] roughly treated and torn during the laundering process’ (Weaver 2012, p. 54). Carmichael railed against these colonial circumstances, as she had expected so much more of her colonial sojourn: ‘Let those who talk of the luxuries of a West India life, judge whether they would exchange their home in Britain […] to undergo all this’ (p. 23). The struggle of colonial white women to achieve disciplined textile whiteness reflects their parallel efforts to enforce racial hierarchies.

Figure 10.7 M r. Bryan’s washerwomen, Dry River (Plantation?), Jamaica. Ink and graphite on paper, 1808–1815. William Berryman. British. DRWG 1 – Berryman, no. 143. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

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Simultaneously, the unrelenting labour demanded of enslaved women emphasises how white washing figured in systems of power. Looking again at the white apparel of the seasoned slave owners in Figure 10.6, we see the idealised incarnation of race and class structures. The history of laundry is entangled with economic and political forces, as British housewives and washerwomen, manufacturers and colonial surrogates focused on the importance of material whiteness – with some reacting against their stringent assignments. Such issues intensified as the British expanded their manufacture of cotton and cotton/linen cloth, generating accelerating textile abundance. The value of British cotton exports soared from GBP 300,000 in 1780 to GBP 30.7 million in 1825, aimed at imperial and world markets (Riello 2013, p. 268). The demand for finer and less costly fabrics was met by surging industrial production with higher quality and cheaper cottons; this, in turn, drove demand for both basic and specialist laundering. Think again about linen and cotton garments from museum collections and consider the contemporary cultural priorities that defined these things. The mountains of materials issuing from industrial centres depended on persistent care to realise their full promise, providing ever more extensive staging for imperial fashions.

Fashioning race: neo-classical forms How did Western fashions interact with imperial aims, beyond ideas of textile whiteness? Fashion (as a cultural and economic force) is best addressed in a broad comparative manner, as a component of Western aesthetic and artistic movements. As Charmaine Nelson (2000, p. 88) observes of this era, ‘the practice of western art generally was colonial’. Definitions of beauty were idealised in parallel with the development of race science and expressed in the emerging discipline of art history (as discussed below). Eighteenth-century science and philosophy aligned, as each devised a rationale for a human catalogue of what they termed ‘race’. These endeavours were commonly influenced by neo-classical scholarship (Bindman 2002, p. 62). The neo-classical construct emerged over the eighteenth century as another powerful organising schema, culminating a long-term European passion for selectively interpreted classical elements of archaeology, architecture, textiles and art. Elites celebrated ancient Greece (as they understood it) and reinforced a singular whiteness (DuBois 2003, p. 112). Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768), a passionate neo-classical scholar, set art historical paradigms founded on his misunderstanding of classical arts – a subject seminally important in the intellectual construction of ‘Europeanness’. These foundations were the basis upon which Winckelmann organised his classifications of beauty, which denigrated any human appearance that showed deviation from the narrow European norm (Potts 1994, pp. 160–163). As Winckelmann himself wrote: ‘a beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is’ (2006[1764], p. 194). White marble Greek statuary served as the archetype for this white beauty. Scholars now recognise that, through the classical archaeology and art history of the neo-classical movement, Enlightenment thinkers set standards that reified whiteness (Painter 2010, pp. 43–72). Europeans’ celebration of white marble sculptures (and erasure of colour on surviving artworks) fit with earlier Renaissance ideas of Greek statues as manifestations of perfection. These beliefs emphasised the presumed whiteness of the classical era and the purity and power of ancient Greek society (Brinkmann et al. 2017; Panzanelli 2008). Neo-classical thinkers emphatically rejected the possibility that classical statuary was anything but white, considering polychrome sculpture or architecture an anathema; thus, traces of paint were scrubbed from the recovered artefacts with all the vigour of the determined washerwomen. A French contemporary opined that, with just a glimpse of colour on marble, 130

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‘The man of taste will be disgusted’ (Boyer 2018, p. 78). This disparagement of colour on classical sculptures fit with the principles of racial essentialism, setting up singular binaries (Brinkmann et al. 2017; Panzanelli 2008). In this period, ‘the term classical was not neutral’, as Nelson explains, ‘but a racialized term which activated the marginalization of blackness as its antithesis’ (Nelson 2000, p. 88). Neo-classicism was distilled in the imperial politics of the age, which involved the erasure of colour from classical artworks and the expunging of evidence of ethnic diversity from classical histories. Curator Emerson Boyer observes how the ‘bleaching of color afforded by white marble, combined with the deployment of the ideal classical form, displaced racial difference in a way that was comfortable for Western audiences’ (Boyer 2018, p. 78). Thus, protocols of whiteness were consolidated within core aesthetic hierarchies, which expressed themselves as ‘style’.

Material racial hierarchies in dress Fashionable dress in the long eighteenth century mirrored this neo-classical craze, as elite European women claimed the spirit of Greek goddesses in portraiture and street dress from the 1770s through the early decades of the 1800s (Kauffmann 1780–1785, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelica_Kauffman#/media). This obsession transcended borders, manifesting in Europe as well as its colonies. All types of media promoted the proposition that Western society was the new apotheosis of culture, rooted in a classical lineage (Combs 2012; Kiilerich 2016). Dress styles displayed this conceit. In the later 1770s, individual works of classical statuary, such as Aphrodite Kallipygos, inspired specific modes and were publicised in journals like the influential Journal des Dames et des Modes (Bissonnette and Nash 2015). Painters and neo-classical acolytes encouraged the use of everyday neo-classical dress, so the embodiment of whiteness could be performed on a wider stage. The reading public was inundated with all things Greek, including in fashion journals directed at middling and elite women readers and dressmakers. One popular publication exemplified this trend, reprinting the Mediterranean travels of a French neo-classical scholar, supplemented with tales of Greek and Roman goddesses (La Belle Assemblée, Dec 1811, pp. 345–554; Jan 1807, pp. 16–19; July 1812, pp. 9–11). Detailed instructions for gowns à la mode were welcomed by respectable and genteel readers, and the August 1808 issue even provided recommendations for fabrics: muslin, gauze and other lightweight cloths in white or pastel hues. Fashion plates aided the realisation of these styles and circulated throughout the Atlantic world. In an 1808 journal, modish young ladies were described as ‘Goddesses’ and swains their ‘fair votaries’ – a fictive precept in pursuit of classical equivalency, reinforcing a singular white status through repeated classical allusions (La Belle Assemblée, Aug 1808, pp. 45–47). Whiteness in dress became powerfully essential for all who could afford this standard. The industrialisation of British cotton manufacturing facilitated this trend, driving a surge in US cotton plantations powered by enslaved Black workers. Masses of low- quality cottons poured forth, plus British-made fine white muslin (Lemire 1991, pp. 161–200; ­Riello 2013). This style held imperial purpose, with evocations of a superior white race at its centre. It was also a long-run fashion, which left extensive material legacies in the forms of portraits and wardrobes, which are now housed in museums and galleries. Likewise, this trend was adopted across the political spectrum, as all regimes – from revolutionary French and tsarist Russian to American republican and imperial British – sought to reinforce their ancestral claims to a classic white lineage. The magisterial rendering of the Scottish Lady Margaret Callander reflects this fashion, as does a small 1805 portrait of an unknown 131

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American woman (Figures 10.8 and 10.9). Alongside this, the ‘marginalization of blackness’ was thorough (Nelson 2000, p. 88), as emphasised by the occasional appearance of young African pages in exotic costume, or blackamoor jewellery and ebony furnishings sculpted with A frican figures.2 Fashionable workshops throughout Europe provided furnishings and notions employing these racialised forms. Shirley Anne Tate explains that blackamoor figures reflect ‘fantasies of racial conquest, ownership of Black bodies with figures as proxies and possibly contempt for the African enslaved’ (Tate 2019, p. 113). These were transnational Western styles. Similarly, in France, the ‘chain of slaves’ (collier en esclavage) was a popular style of necklace in pre- and post-revolutionary times, worn over a simple, white, neo-classical gown (Lubrich 2015, pp. 289–291). Perhaps this served as an eroticisation of classical slavery, even as the Haitian revolution and abolitionism roiled. Social power permitted ironic references to be made to shackles and enslavement – in fact, this was a game for those in elite white circles. Overall, the power of the neo-classical style was enormous, as the privileged fashion soon became streetwear.

Figure 10.8 ‘Lady Margaret Callander & Her Son James Kearney (in Naval Dress)’, 1795. Oil on canvas. 253.4 × 167.6 cm. Jean Laurent Mosnier. Yale Center for British Art

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Figure 10.9 Portrait of a lady in neo-classical dress, c. 1805. American. Oil on tin. 9.2 × 7.3 cm. Adolph Ulrich Wertmuller. 2003.191. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Chintz and muslin gowns materialised this look, intended to model a ‘natural’ classical guise; however, the garments’ ‘naturalness’ required special care to prevent them from appearing shapeless. Instructions for the finishing of garments included the deft use of starch on ‘Muslin, and very thin or old Cambrick and Lawn’. Without such attention ‘they will look like Rags and not last clean for a Moment’ (Haywood 1743, pp. 71–73). Standards were high and the aesthetic dangers were many. Plain washing would not do. A nineteenth-century guidebook advocated techniques in ‘the oriental manner’, using rice water (conjee), ‘which at the same time stiffens the chintz’. Treated fabrics were then dried and smoothed – not with a hot iron but with ‘a smooth stone’ (Servants’ Guide 1830, p. 136; Compete servant 1825, p. 249). Anglophone readers adopted Asian technologies for their efficacy, reflecting another imperial entanglement. Washing, stiffening, smoothing and manipulating cloth remained an essential discipline for this fashion, which had clear aesthetic aims, and was a labour enacted by legions of subaltern women. Western museum collections are rife with fine white linen and cotton gowns that required these calculated interventions to fully celebrate the neo-classical turn. Figure 10.10, depicting a gown of Scottish-made muslin, showcases this style, while the use of fine cotton demonstrates the prowess of British producers – who, by 1800, could finally rival the finest cotton producers in India (Parthasarathi 2011). At the same time, the gown references the racialisation of popular fashions, even though the seeming simplicity of the garment may at first cloud this political intent. 133

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Figure 10.10

Muslin dress made by Brown & Sharp of Paisley, Scotland, c. 1800. Purchased with the assistance of the Camphill Fund, 2013. E.2013.7, © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Conclusion Fashion can normalise systems of power and inequity. The increased focus on white apparel during the long eighteenth century must not be detached from the pervasive paradigms of the age – for, in addition to reinforcing status and rank, white fabrics were also infused with racialised tenets. The drive to achieve material whiteness cannot be isolated from the widespread enslavement of Africans at the core of European policy, economy and culture. All regions of Europe were shaped by this system, whether or not all polities or families were directly invested in slavery. As Catherine Hall observes: ‘This was a global business, never confined to the triangle of the New World, Britain and France and Africa […] [and] the forgetting of these connections […] has been both a conscious and an unconscious process’ (Hall 2016, pp. 213–214). Generations lived within this racialised environment, in which race, gender and class were inflected by the material imperatives of the empire (McClintock 1995, pp. 4–9). Equally, the business of slavery embodied principles that infused commodities, which in turn confirmed the role of Western consumers in the politics of race (Lemire 2018, pp. 233–247). Too little attention has been given to the ‘why’ of textile whiteness, accompanied by too ready an essentialised acceptance of partial answers. Why did the importance of white fabric persist and evolve from ruffs and ruffles to myriad forms at the core of fashion during a burgeoning imperial age? In seeking answers to these questions, historians have returned to the themes opened in the mid-twentieth century by Eric Williams (1944). Joseph Inikori calculates the role of Africans in Britain’s economic genesis, arguing that: ‘The labor of enslaved Africans did not only make possible large-scale commodity production for Atlantic 134

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commerce in the Americas. It also made possible the expansion of European consumption of these products’ (Inikori 2002, p. 481). Williams’s analysis underpins this material study. New thinking is now required to reckon with the politics of whiteness that flourished in the long eighteenth century, for racialised material culture figured in that calculus, embodied in the lovely white gowns that are now stored in countless museums. Nell Irvin Painter notes: ‘Rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness, we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of the black/white dichotomy’ (Painter 2010, p. 201). Vron Ware likewise emphasises: ‘the importance of thinking about whiteness on many different scales. […] [including] as an interconnected global system, having different inflections and implications depending on where and when it has been produced’ (Ware 2001, p. 185). As I have shown, in this era, whiteness intersected with the material histories of textiles, fashion and slavery. Laundering was a vital allied technology – one that was embodied and disciplined and that sustained metropolitan and colonial aesthetics. Fashions in textile and dress were part of an ‘interconnected global system’. Our modern challenge is to bring museum collections and current histories in conversation with this wider narrative, illuminating the myriad roles of politicised commodities and the racialised strategies they served. The metropolitan dependence on and defence of slavery took many forms. White garments became normalised within this schema, which conceived racialised styles as emerging from ‘classical’ heritage. Indeed, systems of enslavement – and the cultural production that ensued from them – materialised the fashions of whiteness.

Notes 1 England: British Library, Add. MS. Blenheim Papers, vol. CCXLVII; Bills for Marlborough’s expenditures, 1680–1719: Add. MS. 61348, (1680 laundry payments); 61346, f, 29 1678; BL, Add Ms 61679, D, ‘The Gentleman’s England: Washing Book’ 1807? Blenheim Papers, vol. 579, A-D. Scotland: National Records of Scotland NRAS3273, Inventory of furniture of Sir Alexander Macdonald, 1736, including the laundry; NRAS2177, Bundle 5389, household receipts of the Duke of Hamilton in London and Hamilton, including July 1791. ‘Elizabeth Aitchison and S Wills, £61.17s.9d for  laundry  work’; bundle 3246, Accounts and receipts of Lord Archibald Hamilton, including laundry…. April 1794–November 1795. Colonial New York: New York Historical Society, Mss Collection, AHMC – Ten Broeck, Abraham, account book 1750–1752. 2 Blackamoor jewelry remains a staple (https://www.ebay.ca/b/Blackamoor-jewelry/262024/ bn_7023261995 accessed 2 March 2023); other luxury accoutrements include a French-made clock (c. 1784), embellished with a bust of an African prince: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 58.75.127; note also a suite of ebony furniture in the salon of the Ca’Rezzonico (Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice), with all pedestals carved in the shape of African males chained in gold – a racialised style of ebony furnishings fashionable in the 1700s and beyond.

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Beverly Lemire Roche, D. (1994). The culture of clothing in ‘ancien regime’ France. Translated by J. Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schaw, J. (1923). The journal of a lady of quality: Being a narrative of a journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776. Edited by E. W. Andrews and C. M. Andrews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Swift, J. (1745). Directions to servants in general…. London: R. Dodsley and M. Cooper. Tate, S. A. (2019). Decolonising Sambo: Transculturation, fungibility and Black and people of colour futurity. Bingley: Emerald. Troulliot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon Books. Turner, T. S. (2012). The social skin. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), pp. 486–504. Vincent, S. (2003). Dressing the elite. Clothes in early modern England. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Walker, M. (2020). ‘Mobilizing clothes at sea: Naval dress culture and economy during the French Wars, 1793–1815’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Alberta. Ware, V. (2001). ‘Perfidious Albion: Whiteness and the international imagination’, in Brander Rasmussen, B., Klinenberg, E., Nexica, I. J. and Wray, M. (eds.) The making and unmaking of whiteness. Salem, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 184–213. Weaver, K. K. (2012). Fashioning freedom: Slave seamstresses in the Atlantic world. Journal of Women’s History, 24(1), pp. 44–59. White, S. (2012). Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material culture and race in colonial Louisiana. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Williamson, K. (2008). Mrs Carmichael: A Scotswoman in the West Indies, 1820–1826. International Journal of Scottish Literature, 4. Available from: www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk [Accessed 02/11/18]. Winckelmann, J. J. (2006[1764]). History of the art of antiquity. Translated by H. F. Mallgrave. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust. Woolley, H. (1677). Compleat servant-maid; Or, The young maidens tutor…. London: T. Passinger.

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SECTION 3

Institutions

11 INTRODUCTION Institutions

Institutions are not just bricks and mortar but come into being through human activities and interactions. As such, institutions are not race neutral but race and its intersections are important in the development and maintenance of institutions as systems and structures of white power, domination, and privilege. Education systems, whether schools or universities, are one such location of institutional whiteness where racism leads to racialized others having unliveable lives, as the chapters in this section show. Institutional whiteness works through everyday racial micro-aggressions, overt and subtle racist exclusions, and material inequalities, for example, which produce deleterious effects and debilitating affects for/within racialized others whether Roma children in Portuguese schools or Black UK university faculty or students. The chapters in this section use Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black feminist anti-racist approaches to examine the operation of regimes of institutional whiteness in educational settings and its protection of white privilege at the expense of racialized others in Europe. Jason Arday’s ‘Walls can come tumbling down: Negotiating normative whiteness, racial micro-aggressions and Black and minority ethnic (BME) mental health within the academy’, analyses the nature of whiteness within the academy that depicts faculty of colour as deficient or incapable. A CRT storytelling method operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualize Arday’s own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, racial micro-aggression, and the impact of racism on mental health and well-being. The analysis demonstrates the subtle but powerful ways racism unfolds within the academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of whiteness and their impact on the mental health of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff and students. Arday reflects upon how these experiences have impacted understandings of anti-racist scholarship and activism. These are timely considerations as we begin to observe a nationalist and populist resistance towards embracing multi-cultural and ethnic difference in the UK. Deborah Gabriel’s ‘Racial inequality, social closure and white privilege in the academe: How faculty regimes contribute to a Black underclass in higher education’, asserts that there will be no racial equity in higher education (HE) while discriminatory practices that confer white privilege and create material inequalities for Black staff remain unchallenged and unaddressed. In the context of HE, sector schemes that purport to address gender and racial inequality merely serve to mask white privilege. Therefore, while universities profess commitment to equality, racial disparities persist, most pronounced in the access to academic DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-14

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jobs, experiences, pay, and progression of people of African descent. The consumer-oriented paradigm of HE reinforces and maintains the racial hierarchy that exists within society, creating a Black underclass in HE. Faculty regimes dominate the upper and middle management strata across the HE sector, controlling research and development funding, the curriculum, recruitment, and progression. This chapter focuses on examining the role faculty regimes play in maintaining social closure that results in a Black underclass within the academy. Approached conceptually from a critical race and Black feminist standpoint, this chapter defines and deconstructs the principal social actors within faculty regimes to demonstrate how their actions maintain HE’s Black underclass. Marta Araújo’s, ‘Talking about institutionalised racism or racism in institutions? The educational segregation of the Roma’, engages with different notions of racism, from the understanding proposed in the so-called UNESCO tradition in the early 1950s to the critiques by Black intellectuals, decolonial thought, and postcolonial studies – as well as their reverberations in the European context over the last decades. Highlighting conceptual advances brought by the notion of institutional racism in different contexts, and the challenges it continues to pose, the chapter presents and analyses a paradigmatic case study of the perpetuation of racism in democratic societies. The case relates to the segregation of the Roma population in Portugal and reveals how the normal functioning of institutions continues to legitimate racial injustice despite anti-discrimination legislation. Grounding the reflection in empirical research (archival work, media analysis, interviews with institutional representatives, decision-makers, and professionals), the chapter challenges common notions in public debate (e.g. ‘racist subject’, ‘isolated event’, or ‘intent to discriminate’), pointing to the limits of a liberal, positivist, Eurocentric approach to racism, which evades both its historicity and routine expressions in contemporary Western democratic contexts. Shirley Anne Tate’s, ‘If you were a white man, they would have negotiated with you the minute you were approached: Bodies of value in academic life’, examines institutional anti-Black woman racism. The main title words reflect the everyday institutional anti-Black woman racism that enacts the violence through and against which Black women work at the intersections of gender. These words reveal the ‘white racial liberalism’ at the heart of ‘post-race’ white supremacy. ‘If you were a white man’ brings white supremacy’s continuing colonial bodily and epistemological coordinates into view in terms of bodies of value. These coordinates continue misogynoir and deny the place of Black feminist decolonial theory in academic life. ‘If you were a white man’ is interpreted as hate speech, the source of Black woman shaming. It is also seen as white empathetic racist hate speech which speaks to white fragility and ‘white innocence making’, rather than a transformation of academia through unsuturing from white privilege. The final chapter, Victor Ojakorotu’s, Samuel Chukwudi Agunyai’s, and Vincent Chukwukadibia Onwughalu’s, ‘Division in economic integration: The effect of apartheid on white supremacy, white prosperity, and disunity in South Africa’, analyses so-called economic apartheid in South Africa. Where apartheid traditionally has been understood as a set of legal racial policies and ideologies in South Africa, the increased movement of Africans into the white urban areas and their vast employment in semi-skilled jobs have challenged apartheid. However, the chapter argues, the reality of South Africa shows that whites have more power and influence over the economy than Black Africans. This white dominance is now known as economic apartheid. Economic apartheid continues segregation, and a segregated African population experiences feelings of hatred, resentment, and inferiority, which they sometimes oppose through protests and demonstrations. The article contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the characteristics of white-African relations and ways for developing positive, equal relations in South Africa. 142

12 WALLS CAN COME TUMBLING DOWN Negotiating normative whiteness and racial micro-aggressions in the academy Jason Arday Introduction History has proven that disrupting the normativity and fluidity of whiteness is significantly challenging. This observation is particularly pertinent when considering the types of scholarship that have come to constitute disciplinary canons, as the prevailing narrative has been continuously framed within a cycle of white privilege and power. This chapter engages with the question of how academics of colour encounter, endure and negotiate dominant white spaces. Many critical scholars attempting to dismantle the cycle of white normativity have observed that a legacy of colonialism continues to frame the practices and characteristics of many societal institutions, including educational institutions, the judicial system, the government and mass media. This colonial legacy continues to be an instrument for oppressive dominance, normative whiteness and white supremacy, in conflict with egalitarian ideals (Cordova 1998). Ironically, universities have always been framed as sites of egalitarianism. Nonetheless, a landscape of oppression and inequality continues to impact educational, socio-economic and political discourses, reinforcing normative hierarchies that disadvantage people of colour (Aguirre 2000; Ansley 1997). To dismantle the cycle of inequality that permeates society, we must challenge normative ideas of whiteness. Those of us who remain at the periphery of white power and privilege have journeys of oppression chartered through critical reflexivity. Such reflexivity allows those in marginalised positions to challenge and reveal both overt and covert pervasive inequalities (Freire 1968; Mirza 2008; Schon 1987). The work of analysing and reflecting upon discriminatory experiences provides a backdrop for understanding racialised plights and how such discriminatory experiences continue to disrupt the upward societal trajectories of marginalised populations. In light of this, in this chapter, I apply a retrospective approach and anti-racist discourses to disrupt ideas of normative whiteness (Bergerson 2003; Delgado and Stefancic 2001). Specifically, I reflect upon the fluctuating nature of whiteness and how this impacts people of colour within the academy, drawing on the instrument of auto-ethnography. Autoethnography provides a vehicle for people of colour to conceptualise their racialised experiences. Race theorists have utilised this instrument of empowerment to highlight the complexity of experiences faced by marginalised people. In particular, scholar-activists such as Shirley Anne Tate, Bell Hooks and Heidi Safia Mirza have used storytelling as a form of resistance, DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-15

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emancipation and empowerment. Representing a multifaceted and intersectional approach, auto-ethnography is particularly useful for those immersed within intersectional activism, as it considers the complexities underpinning the changing landscapes of class and gender, which are particularly experienced by women of colour (Arday 2019; Stovall 2006). Such considerations are timely, as we begin to observe a gradual nationalist and populist resistance to multicultural and ethnic differences within society. In this chapter, I take a fundamentally anti-racist approach to demonstrating the extent to which normative whiteness and racism are insidious in the academy, at the expense of faculty of colour. Within academia, there is a shared experience of resistance amongst faculty of colour – many of whom have attempted to disrupt the violent, racialised environment. Importantly, this chapter stands on the shoulders of scholars who have previously conceptualised and traced the contours of racism, in all of its overt and salient forms, within academic and societal spaces. The attempt to reclaim power within the academy requires the continual dismantling of racism to reveal the extensive, cumulative and debilitating effects of racism on ethnic minority members of faculty and staff (Arday 2019). Thus, the presence of academics of colour has the potential to powerfully threaten and disrupt normativity by challenging the elitist binaries of the academy while developing broader debates concerning what we consider ‘legitimate’ knowledge (Stovall 2006). Frequently, my own experiences have pointed towards a canvasing of race-related issues, configured against patterns of social history portraying people of colour as deficient or incapable (Delgado 1995; Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2008; Toyosaki 2007b). This narrative undermines the idea that the scholarship of race-related research by scholars of colour is hypersensitive, non-rigorous and biased (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2016; Leonardo 2002). My attempts to challenge the types of pedagogy that we, as scholars, advance in the academy have proven difficult, partly due to a reluctance to acknowledge that racism within society is a tense site for marginalisation, inequity, victimisation, isolation and exclusion. Often, this difficulty has been compounded by students who, for many reasons, cannot comprehend, acknowledge or understand the extent to which racism permeates every facet of our society, and the impact that racialised experiences have on non-white individuals. This particular juncture in the learning process invariably provides an opportunity to utilise conceptual models that reveal – to academics and students alike – the types of privileges that are consciously or unconsciously held over marginalised or subordinated communities (Bell 1987; Ladson-Billings 1998). Models such as critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies are often applied to conceptualise narratives of racial inequality and how the cycles of inequality are reinforced and maintained (Leonardo 2002; McIntosh 1992). These models place race at the forefront of the inequality discourse and challenge the ways in which the normativity of whiteness pervades, advantages and disadvantages (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996; McIntosh 1992). Critical pedagogy was developed with the aim of disrupting educational orthodoxy and challenging the relations of power that compromise emancipation and perpetuate normative whiteness (Freire 1968; Giroux 1992; Hooks 2000; McIntosh 1990). The tradition is particularly pertinent to the context of academia, given its normative and hegemonic orthodoxy. The persistence of whiteness as an enduring strand of privilege and oppression represents a barrier to attempts to unpack race politics. Challenging this normativity is of the utmost importance, given the ever-increasing, super-diverse societal population (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997; Lipsitz 1998; McIntosh 1992). This legitimisation and devaluation of knowledge support Delgado Bernal and Villalpando’s (2016) notion that knowledge resides within an ‘apartheid’ that selectively marginalises 144

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and devalues. Shilliam (2015) contends that pedagogical interventions should provide learners with a broad cultural landscape that canvases all types of knowledge. The critique of traditional pedagogy has become a conduit for advancing more critical forms of pedagogy that challenge both normative orthodoxies and the overwhelmingly white bodies that are centred through normative production (Freire 1968). An important and overt distinction to assert is that, typically, the white bodies at the centre of traditional (normative) pedagogy are those with sufficient social, cultural and economic capital to assume the position of a ‘distributor’ or ‘gatekeeper’ of knowledge (Fanon 1967; Kidder 1997).

Understanding normative whiteness: dominance, power and privilege Normative whiteness is maintained through many vehicles, including the media, government, racial ascriptions and stereotypes, to name only a few. Within the context of education – and particularly higher education (HE) – it is maintained through Eurocentric curricula, founded upon the advancement of white privilege and supremacy (McIntosh 1992; Wise 2008). McIntosh describes that the omnipresent yet unnamed nature of normative whiteness has been utilised to infiltrate and permeate ideals of meritocracy, egalitarianism and emancipation. The epistemological framing of knowledge essentially asserts a prescribed view of knowing and a narrow understanding of how we have come to reside within a global society (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2008). Within academia, normativity ensures that the subject of race – when hesitantly touched upon – is proffered through a constrained lens that does not necessarily acknowledge the nuances, complexities and dynamics of race discourse and race’s impact on societal constructs (Ahmed 2012; Mirza 2008). Race remains a problematic issue for white academics to confront, particularly when it comes to acknowledging that their privilege significantly contributes to maintaining cycles of inequality and limiting diversification within the academy (Gillborn 2008; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997; Roediger 1994). Therefore, learning about race entails learning about ‘difficult knowledge’ – namely, knowledge that staff and students find emotionally charged and controversial – including knowledge of the ways in which power and privilege maintain normativity and hegemony at the expense of ethnic minorities (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2016; Leonardo 2016). As an academic of colour, I have often found myself as the sole or designated flagbearer for the diversification of academic and pedagogical content. This has required a bespoke focus on the politics of race within society, with the penetrative objective of disrupting dominant racial ideologies and hegemonies. My experiences resonate with Henry and Tator’s (2009) claim that race is a subject that is frequently silenced in the HE setting and the production of knowledge. Typically, the silencing of this discourse is encased within a Eurocentric vernacular, which positions the teaching of race as challenging and a potential source of political and analytical friction (Henry and Tator 2009). The centralisation and prioritisation of student satisfaction require careful negotiation of the factors and subjects that might unsettle the student experience (Equality Challenge Unit [ECU], 2015), and race has long been considered a subject that could cause tensions amongst the majority white students and academics. Recently, however, there has been a tectonic shift amongst Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) student bodies within the United Kingdom. Anti-racist student activism in this country has been instrumental and integral to challenging dominant Eurocentric curricula, through campaigns such as ‘Decolonising our Curriculum’; ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ and ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black?’. These campaigns have emanated from a need to decolonise the academy and develop curricula that acknowledge the contribution of 145

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people of colour, both historically and within the modern, global societal context (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2016). This is an onerous task, considering the dearth of diversification within the academy (Shilliam 2015). Indeed, it is challenging to ensure exposure to different types of historical and cultural knowledge, given the pervasive authority structure that governs the dissemination of knowledge. In this vein, Pitt and Britzman (2003, p. 756) raise pedagogical questions about ‘authority’ over knowledge, the conditions for representing multiple narratives and the inadequacy and inaccuracy of language used to capture marginalised experiences from a historical perspective. In my own experience, I have found the stranglehold over the types of knowledge that are advanced and prioritised within reading lists to be difficult to disrupt, due to colleagues’ reluctance to critically reflect upon the concepts of whiteness and white privilege. In many cases, colleagues have been oblivious to the privilege and power that their skin colour ascribes to them, which creates tensions (Wise 2008). This resonates with Pitt and Britzman’s (2003) conception that challenging traditional pedagogies situated within a dominant Eurocentric context can create anxiety towards learning. Such anxiety becomes particularly apparent when the disruptive knowledge is perceived as incommensurable and traumatic. Thus, challenges to whiteness and hegemonic normativity can be problematic for learners (Pitt and Britzman 2003). The academy maintains a dubious legacy of exploiting racialised plights for the purposes of marketing and fundraising (Ahmed 2012; Amico 2015). The authenticity of interventions around diversification remains questionable, particularly when external funding streams are attached to sector-wide benchmarks. Student activist movements – and particularly those led by BME students – continue to place pressure on senior university stakeholders to recognise that diverse student bodies must see themselves reflected in the production and dissemination of knowledge (Andrews and Palmer 2016; Shilliam 2015). Importantly, the impact of any educational decolonising movement is entirely dependent on policy makers, as only they have the power to ensure that the recommendations are made compulsory and penetrative (Arday 2019). Student movements, alone, cannot be tasked with holding universities accountable, as they do not have decision making power. Rather, policy makers and senior stakeholders within the academy have a responsibility to develop inclusive spaces that recognise the teaching of race and anti-racism as a political project from which broader understandings of multiculturalism and ethnic differences can be developed; additionally, they must acknowledge the historical contributions and exploitations of people of colour, globally (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997; Lensmire 2017). The concept of white privilege refers to the ‘invisible package of unearned assets’ and a plethora of opportunities and benefits that are granted to white people, simply on the basis of their whiteness (McIntosh 1992, p. 48). This provides a platform for us to understand the landscape of normativity and hegemony considered within this chapter, especially with respect to the links between whiteness and notions of entitlement. Importantly, white entitlement facilitates the design and dissemination of curricula. Consequently, within academia, there is a packaging and dissemination of idiosyncratic ‘legitimate knowledge’ that does not accurately construct or portray the realities of oppressed and marginalised communities  – particularly those of colour (Ladson-Billings 2005). Delgado Bernal and Villalpando (2016) state that the centrality of the Eurocentric epistemological perspective disregards other forms of knowing and fails to acknowledge the importance of varying narratives of how we have come to view and understand the world. The lived and racialised experiences of faculty of colour recognise the importance of encompassing this variance 146

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within curricula and centralising a curriculum that embeds principles of diversification and recognises ethnic difference as a globally evolving dialogue (Mirza 2008). An important rationale for advancing a different conversation within the overwhelming and normative rhetoric that is commonplace in the ivory towers of academia is the significant potential for empowerment. Within HE, Frankenberg (1993) explains that empowerment, when couched within a racialised discourse, represents ethnic minority academics’ emancipation from racial discrimination, marginalisation and oppression. Such emancipation enables students and staff – particularly those of colour – to thrive, both academically and pedagogically, as they become exposed to positive anecdotes, new ways of knowing and new images of people of colour that reflect liberation, rather than oppression (Andrews and Palmer 2016; Shilliam 2015). Shilliam (2015) contends that such empowerment might result in a greater sense of belonging, as learners emerge from the margins of exclusionary knowledge to become active participants who are able to observe themselves reflected within the curriculum. This narrative significantly differs from that of the normative system, which benefits individuals simply because they are white (McIntosh 1990). Delgado Bernal and Villalpando’s notion of the ‘apartheid of knowledge’ pivots our attention to the importance of integrating and initiating cultural knowledge. Such knowledge is essential in developing cultural cognisance, which moves learners beyond their own cultural or geographical norms (Lander 2011; Mirza 2008). The dearth of diversification within academia facilitates the cycle and production of an apartheid of knowledge by ignoring and excluding the cultural capital that many faculty of colour contribute. This separation of cultural knowledge and the prioritisation of mainstream Eurocentric scholarship recognise a hierarchy of knowledge, whereby rhetoric situated within a dominant Eurocentric approach – considered ‘legitimate knowledge’ – assumes the superior position (Amico 2015). Such a ranking exercise typically transpires at the expense of the research and teaching of faculty of colour (Mirza 2008). The importance of developing cultural cognisance and diversifying curricula within the academy is submerged in a need to develop students with progressive thinking who are knowledgeable and accepting of differences within our multicultural and ethnically diverse society (Amico 2015). By developing values and belief systems derived from culturally specific experiences, students may cultivate a better understanding of subordination and the ways in which oppression transpires and is maintained by dominant social groups through major societal institutions (Frankenberg 1993; Leonardo 2002). Critiques of mainstream traditions within HE illuminate the sustained and enduring legacy of racial segregation in this context, which has invariably caused an apartheid of knowledge that marginalises the contributions of faculty of colour (Amico 2015; Andrews and Palmer 2016). Attempts to disrupt the centrality of normativity and whiteness come at a debilitating cost for many faculty of colour, in the form of racial micro-aggressions that amount to a cumulative, continuous and sustained undermining of professional capabilities (Rollock 2012).

Conceptualising and dealing with racial micro-aggressions Attempts to challenge normative whiteness can produce assertions regarding professional capabilities and competencies. This is particularly important to acknowledge, as the longevity of white supremacy (as a sustained instrument for oppression) depends on a wide range of ideological, emotional and performative mechanisms that maintain hegemonic discourses. Such mechanisms may be referred to as ‘tools of Whiteness’ (Picower 2009). The role of 147

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whiteness and the pervasiveness of racism in maintaining the ‘historical and cultural fabric’ means that the work of disrupting white spaces in academia can be emotionally and mentally taxing (Pérez Huber and Solórzano 2015; Puwar 2004). The multifaceted extent of power and domination that constitutes whiteness is palpable. It can create tense and hostile environments for faculty of colour, evoking feelings of isolation and marginalisation (Gillborn 2008; Rollock 2012). My own experiences of racial micro-aggressions in academia have involved feelings of being undermined and enduring a continuous questioning of my professional capabilities, while being publicly scrutinised by my white colleagues. Ultimately, this history has positioned me as a segregated and isolated figure within the university. The micro-aggressions have included subtle acts of being treated inequitably (particularly around workloads), a lack of recognition for impactful scholarly endeavours, being overlooked for promotion opportunities and having outstanding academic and research efforts minimised to simply ‘meeting professional expectations’. Comparatively, my white colleagues have experienced overzealous acknowledgement of their efforts and widespread recognition and acknowledgement. Such experiences are common to faculty of colour working in dominant white spaces. While each incident might resemble only a tiny drop, these accumulate into a mighty ocean; in other words, the infliction of such lacerations is cumulative, causing long-term and residual damage to the psychological state and professional confidence of people of colour within the academy (Amico 2015; Rollock 2012). These experiences resonate with Sue’s (2010) notion that people of colour are generally perceived as less legitimate scholars. Importantly, this reminds us of the insidious and covert legacy of white supremacy and how this dominance is continuously asserted (Ansley 1997). Primarily, this form of prejudice is more challenging to unveil than overt racism, in its many visual and physical forms. Within professional settings, Rollock (2012) asserts that micro-aggressions manifest in a variety of subtle acts of suppression, such as interrupting, ignoring or questioning the validity of the contributions of BME individuals while accepting the same suggestions or ideas from their white counterparts. Professional validation from white colleagues in academia remains problematic, emphasising the operant nature of the power of these colleagues over faculty of colour (Picower 2009; Sue 2010; Wise 2008). Indeed, my own experiences of completing administrative tasks and diligently overseeing large student cohorts at the university have been characterised by constant surveillance. The structures that encompass this context mean that, sadly, one survival mechanism within the academy is gaining the professional validation and endorsement of white colleagues, in order to ‘authenticate’ one’s capabilities (Rollock 2012). In my tenure at the academy, there has often been a questioning of my experience and credentials by both staff and students, as my presence as an academic of colour disrupts the centrality of whiteness and the perception that the gatekeepers to education and knowledge must be solely white (Rollock 2012). Experiences of racial micro-aggressions suggest that overt and traditional forms of racism have been replaced with thinly veiled racialised barbs that are interwoven into the fabric of modern society. Ironically, such veiled insults proclaim that we have moved beyond racism and are currently operating in a post-racial era and egalitarian utopia (Alexander 2012). Racial micro-aggressions tend to be masqueraded in a state of blissful ignorance that does not consciously recognise the enduring impact of questioning and ‘othering’ faculty of colour (Leonardo 2016; Sue 2010). In my personal encounters with this kind of racism, I have noted a mechanical resistance that vehemently proclaims and asserts a liberalist stance and objects to the possibility of engaging in any form of racism – be it overt, covert or unconscious 148

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(Gillborn 2008; Lensmire 2017). Default approaches for deflecting blame ensue, resulting in a perceived logical and rationalised understanding of the behaviour of the aggrieved Black academic by the white academic. These often depict hypersensitivity and irrationality on the part of the Black academic, based on unfounded, subjective claims of racism (Alexander 2012; Pérez Huber and Solórzano 2015). Such reactions expose a white fragility when confronting overt or covert racism (Amico 2015; Levine-Rasky 2000). Commonly, white fragility is associated with the emotive responses of white individuals to accusations of racism or discrimination (Amico 2015), which, as DiAngelo (2011) explains, frequently include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt, argumentation and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the pressure on academics of colour to avoid directly addressing and confronting racism). Interestingly, DiAngelo (2011) suggests that, while so-called progressive whites may not respond to accusations with anger, they may still attempt to insulate themselves via claims that they are beyond the need to engage with racial awareness interventions. This is a powerful narrative, when we consider the predominantly white majority of HE. Faculty of colour not only exist as a minority presence (often in a solitary capacity), but their racialised experiences tend to be confronted with a wall of fragility, which subsequently involves antagonism and white people adopting the role of the victim (DiAngelo 2011). Inevitably, this prompts feelings of isolation, exclusion and marginalisation among ethnic minority academics, ensuring that the unforgiving terrain of the academy becomes even harder to circumnavigate. Such experiences remind us how racial micro-aggressions are used to maintain the normative and dominant white cultures that constrain and denigrate people of colour within educational and societal contexts (Gillborn 2008; Mirza 2008; Pérez Huber and Solórzano 2015). In particular, this domination is secured by those in a position to advance acts, decisions and policies that ensure that white subjects are able to maintain their power and privilege over people of colour (Leonardo 2016). Similar to all oppressive instruments, racism has evolved and is continuously refined through societal and political instances of inequality and discrimination, which ensure a total penetration of its ignominious and demining intentions. Unfortunately, the refinement of this instrument of oppression will ensure that racial micro-aggressions remain prominent within both the academy and broader society. However, there is room for optimism when considering the efforts being made to loosen the stranglehold of privilege and fairly redistribute power within the academy. During these times of inequality, inequity and exclusion, the counter-narrative (storytelling) of racialised experiences can serve as a weapon of defiance in the slaying of racial oppression and the conscientisation of people to the racialised plights of people of colour (Bell, 1995; Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2016). This is particularly pertinent in the context of the gradual uprising and resistance by faculty of colour, worldwide. In particular, such resistance is gaining traction within the United Kingdom, where academics of colour are continuing to challenge and disrupt the monopoly of power, privilege and ‘knowledge’ within the academy, which has become a metaphor for white supremacy and normative whiteness (Ahmed 2012; Sue 2010). In doing so, faculty of colour are challenging the centrality and fluidity of racism within the academy, while pushing against notions of society and its institutions (educational and other) as post-racial and lacking in racism. In fact, the stubborn and persistent nature of racism and the insistence of certain individuals on maintaining racial inequity mean that collective endeavour is required from all individuals who do not endorse the leveraging of power and privilege over marginalised and oppressed minority groups (Gillborn 2010; Lensmire 2017). 149

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Reclaiming power: counter-narrative as a form of anti-racist resistance The counter-narrative has become a highly effective instrument for disrupting racism in its many manifestations (Baldwin 1998[1965]; Britzman 2000; LaCapra 2001; Pitt and Britzman 2003; Sarigianides 2017), by illuminating and disrupting dominant oppressive behaviours (e.g. micro-aggressions) and cultures (e.g. whiteness). Counter-narratives – and their application within educational contexts – emerged from an earlier movement in legal scholarship and practice: critical legal studies (CLS; CRT also developed out of this tradition) (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). In their ground-breaking work on CRT and the power of the counter-narrative in education, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) define counter-narratives as ‘naming one’s own reality’ or ‘voice’ through ‘parables, chronicles, stories, counter-stories, poetry, fiction and revisionist histories to illustrate the false necessity and irony of much of current civil rights doctrine’ (p. 56). Delgado (1995) further describes a counter-narrative as a ‘counter-reality that is experienced by subordinate groups, as opposed to those experiences of those in power’ (p. 194). As demonstrated in my reflections, the confrontation and countering of covert racism is challenging, as it requires the tedious documentation of occurrences of daily racial micro-aggressions. However, despite the difficulty involved, the identification of these patterns of discrimination is important. Wise (2008) suggests that the simplification of racial discrimination has created cultures of resistance, in which the highlighting of racist occurrences is often considered evidence of hypersensitivity. Unfortunately, racism has always been viewed as a subjective, irrational reaction to perceived discrimination that is not always quantifiable (Arday 2019). Many critical theorists and educators have acknowledged this, defining counter-narratives as ‘a means of exposing and critiquing normalised dialogues that perpetuate racial stereotypes’ (DeCuir and Dixson 2004, p. 27), stories that challenge widespread beliefs and discourses and ‘perspectives that run opposite or counter to the presumed order and control’ (Stanley 2007, p. 14). Thus, counter-narratives represent important means of documenting the persistent nature of racism and the ways in which race influences the experiences of people of colour, whose stories counter those of the privileged groups that are considered normal and ‘neutral’. However, counter-narratives underline that in racially violent times, we must remain vigilant. Articulations and performances of racism can be seemingly slight, but persistent, reminding people of colour that they are judged to be different, less trustworthy, less intelligent and inferior, relative to their white counterparts (Sue, Capodilupo and Holder 2008). Subtle acts that undermine professional capabilities, such as interrupting, ignoring or questioning the validity of the professional contributions of BME individuals, are all too familiar experiences (Rollock 2012). Rollock (2012) explains that the prevalence of these racial micro-aggressions is a crucial marker of the continuing power and privilege of whiteness within educational contexts. Further, she asserts that this also impacts wider society, as individuals of colour are devalued and denigrated, and their presence remains under continuous surveillance. Further exploration along these lines is paramount to dismantling the language of subtle racism, particularly within the United Kingdom, where there has always been a reluctance to unpack the subtle nuances of racism, both individually and societally. The lack of understanding of racial micro-aggressions within the United Kingdom is confirmed by my own experiences of challenging racism and the subsequent denial and resistance that came from my oppressor (Lensmire 2017; Mirza 2008). The continuous challenging of racial discrimination

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will provide faculty of colour with opportunities to pivot the dominant racialised narrative and thereby disrupt the ‘tools of whiteness’ (Picower 2009; Wise 2008). Such activism promises to empower faculty of colour by toppling the oppressive control mechanism of whiteness that compromises their liberties and freedoms (Arday 2019; Miller, 2016). Notably, attempts to challenge racism and reclaim power have ignited a critical mass of anti-racist activists, illuminating the unequal nature of the academy. Sadly, despite the urgent need for wholesale changes, progress continues to be slowed by a lack of targeted interventions. This is not an unfamiliar problem, and it points to a legacy of universities trivialising racism and its impact on individuals.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to reveal some of the instruments used to oppress faculty of colour within the academy, highlighting the ways in which normative whiteness is sustained through dominant Eurocentric curricula and racial micro-aggressions. The omission of diverse histories encompassing ethnic minorities at the hands of primarily white, middle-class, male academics, and the institutional failure of HE to decolonise the dominant Eurocentric curriculum, is highly problematic. Additionally, the pervasive, racialised micro-aggressions against faculty of colour who are attempting to decolonise and disrupt Eurocentric epistemologies of knowledge represent an enduring epidemic in academia (Rollock 2012). It is undeniable that normative whiteness has been complicit in reproducing this epidemic: white people have failed to acknowledge the power and privilege their skin colour ascribes to them, they have refused to acknowledge the need for curricula representing all types of knowledge and they have yet to recognise race politics as a legitimate form of knowledge (Leonardo 2002). The CRT counter-narrative storytelling method (auto-ethnography) is both a cathartic process and a critical pedagogical and reflexive instrument for situating racism (e.g. within the academy). Applied to the HE context, its acknowledgement of personal experiences has contributed to illustrating the ways in which racial oppression has transpired in covert forms and examining how the apartheid of knowledge continues to exist at the expense of faculty of colour (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2016; Hooks 1990). Accordingly, the counter-narrative is a potent instrument for interrogating racism, the operant and sustained nature of whiteness and the inherited power and privilege that accompany whiteness within the academy. The cultural capital derived from the lived experiences of faculty of colour is an essential contribution to the diversifying student population. To this end, faculty of colour are still poorly underrepresented within HE in the United Kingdom, and this is a significant factor contributing to the maintenance of normative cultures and racialised barriers (Alexander and Arday 2015; Arday 2019). Efforts to challenge and disrupt the dominant discourse must recognise that normative whiteness is sustained on dreams of a supremacist renaissance that embraces notions of entitlement, power and privilege at the expense of ethnic minorities. The establishment of professional legitimacy for faculty of colour under the guise of normative whiteness will always remain problematic, due to the subordinated view of people of colour. By voicing experiences of discrimination via storytelling, faculty of colour might disrupt the normativity of racism within the academy, while simultaneously challenging the evangelism of proclaimed egalitarianism (Gillborn 2014; Ladson-Billings 1998).

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As we, as faculty of colour, are forced to operate within the margins of academia, platforms are emerging that allow us to illuminate our experiences and thereby attempt to destabilise the centrality of hegemonic whiteness. The causal complacency that accompanies overt and covert forms of racism reinforces the cycle of discrimination that people of colour experience on a daily basis (Williams 1991). Until there is recognition that faculty of colour continue to be blighted and subordinated by racial oppression, the struggle for equality and acceptance in HE will continue.

References Aguirre, A. (2000). Academic storytelling: A critical race story of affirmative action. Sociological ­Perspectives, 43(2), pp. 319–321. Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Alexander, C., and Arday, J. (2015). Aiming higher: Race, inequality and diversity in the academy. Runnymede Perspectives. London: AHRC, Runnymede Trust. Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Amico, R. P. (2015). Anti-racist teaching. USA: Routledge. Andrews, K., and Palmer, L. (2016). Blackness in Britain. London: Routledge. Ansley, F. L. (1997). ‘White supremacy (and what we should do about it)’, in Delgado, R., and Stefancic, J. (eds.) Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Arday, J. (2019). Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: Negotiating normative whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the academy. Whiteness and Education, 3(2), pp. 141–161. Baldwin, J. (1998[1965]). ‘The white man’s guilt’, in Morrison, T. (ed.) Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York, NY: The Library of America, pp. 722–727. Bell, D. A. (1987). And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bell, D. A. (1995). Who’s afraid of critical race theory? University of Illinois Law Review, 3, pp. 893–910. Bergerson, A. A. (2003). Critical race theory and white racism: Is there room for white scholars in fighting racism in education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(1), pp. 51–63. identities in everyday life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Britzman, D. P. (2000). Teacher education in the confusion of our times. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(3), pp. 200–205. Cordova, T. (1998). ‘Power and knowledge: Colonialism in the academy’, in Trujillo, C. (ed.) Living Chicana theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Decuir, J., and Dixson, A. (2004). ‘So when it comes out, they aren’t that surprised that it is there’: Using critical race theory as a tool of analysis of race and racism in education. Educational Researcher, 33, pp. 26–31. Delgado Bernal, D., and Villalpando, O. (2016). ‘An apartheid of knowledge in academia’, in Taylor, E., Gillborn, D., and Ladson-Billings, G. (eds.) Foundations of critical race theory in education. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Delgado, R. (1995). Critical race theory: The cutting edge. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Delgado, R., and Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York, NY and London: New York University Press. DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), pp. 1–17. Equality Challenge Unit. (2015). Equality in higher education: Statistical report, staff and students. Available from: http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2015/. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. UK: Penguin Education. Gillborn, D. (2008). Racism and education: Coincidence or conspiracy? London: Routledge. Gillborn, D. (2010). The white working class, racism and respectability: Victims, degenerates and interest-convergence. British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(1), pp. 2–25.

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Walls can come tumbling down Gillborn, D. (2014). Racism as policy: A critical race analysis of education reforms in the United States and England. The Educational Forum, 78(1), pp. 26–41. Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border crossings. New York, NY: Routledge. Henry, F., and Tator, C. (2009). Contributions and challenges of addressing discursive racism in the Canadian media. Canadian Journal of Communication, 34(4), pp. 35–57. Hooks, B. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender and culture politics. Boston, MA: South End. hooks, B. (2000) Feminist theory: From margin to center. USA: Pluto Press. Ignatiev, N., and Garvey, J. (1996). ‘Abolish the white race’, in Ignatiev, N., and Garvey, J. (eds.) Race traitor. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Kidder, L. (1997). ‘Colonial remnants: Assumptions of privilege’, in Fine, M., Weis, L., Powell, L., and Wong, L. (eds.) Off white. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Kincheloe, J., and Steinberg, S. (1997). ‘Addressing the crisis of whiteness: Reconfiguring white identity in a pedagogy of whiteness’, in Kincheloe, J., Steinberg, S., Rodriguez, N., and Chennault, R. (eds.) White reign. New York, NY and London: Routledge. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing trauma, writing history. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), pp. 7–24. Ladson-Billings, G. (2005). The evolving role of critical race theory in educational scholarship. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), pp. 115–119. Ladson-Billings, G., and Donnor, J. (2008). ‘The moral activist role of critical race theory scholarship’, in Denzin, N. K., and Lincoln, Y. S. (eds.) The landscape of qualitative research. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Ladson-Billings, G., and Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), pp. 47–68. Lander, V. (2011). Race, culture and all that: An exploration of the perspectives of white secondary student teachers about race equality issues in their initial teacher education. Race Ethnicity and ­Education, 14(3), pp. 351–364. Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White anti-racists and belonging. Whiteness and Education, 10(6), pp. 1–11. Leonardo, Z. (2002). The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), pp. 29–50. Leonardo, Z. (2016). ‘The color of supremacy’, in Taylor, E. Gillborn, D., and Ladson-Billings, G. (eds.) Foundations of critical race theory in education. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Levine-Rasky, C. (2000). Framing whiteness: Working through the tensions in introducing whiteness to educators. Race Ethnicity and Education, 3(3), pp. 271–292. Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McIntosh, P. (1990). ‘White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack’, in Schinder, B. (ed.) An anthology: Race in the first person. New York, NY: Crown. McIntosh, P. (1992). ‘White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work’, in Delgado, R., and Stefancic, J. (eds.) Women’s studies, in critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Miller, P. (2016). White sanction’, institutional, group and individual interaction in the promotion and progression of Black and minority ethnic academics and teachers in England. Power and Education, 8(3), pp. 205–221. Mirza, H. S. (2008). Race, gender and educational desire: Why Black women succeed and fail. London: Routledge. Pérez Huber, L., and Solórzano, D. G. (2015). Racial microaggressions as a tool for critical race research. ­ Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(3), pp. 297–320. Picower, B. (2009). The unexamined whiteness of teaching: How white teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity & Education, 12(2), pp. 197–215. Pitt, A., and Britzman, D. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), pp. 755–776. Puwar, N. (2004). ‘Fish in and out of water: A theoretical framework for race and the space of academia’, in Law, I., Phillips, D., and Turney, L. (eds.) Institutional racism in higher education. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Rollock, N. (2012). Unspoken rules of engagement: Navigating racial micro-aggressions in the academic terrain. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), pp. 517–532.

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Jason Arday Sarigianides, S. T. (2017). Coerced loss and ambivalent preservation: Racial melancholia in American born Chinese. Educational Theory, 67(1), pp. 37–49. Schon, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Shilliam, R. (2015). Black academia in Britain. The disorder of things. Available from: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/07/28/black-academia-in-britain/. Stanley, C. A. (2007). When counter narratives meet master narratives in the journal editorial-review process. Educational Researcher, 36(1), pp. 14–24. Stovall, D. (2006). Forging community in race and class: Critical race theory and the quest for social justice in education, Race Ethnicity & Education, 9(3), pp. 243–259. Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., and Holder, A. M. B. (2008). Racial micro-aggressions in the life experience of Black Americans. Professional Psychology, Research and Practice, 39(3), pp. 329–336. Toyosaki, S. (2007b). Toward de/postcolonial auto-ethnography: Critical relationality with the academic second persona. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), pp. 32–42. Williams, P. J. (1991). The alchemy of race and rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wise, T. (2008). White like me: Reflections on race from a privileged son. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press.

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13 ‘TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONALISED RACISM OR RACISM IN INSTITUTIONS?’ A CASE STUDY ON ROMA SEGREGATION Marta Araújo Introduction In this chapter, I engage with key contemporary debates contributing to critical approaches to race, by considering anti-Roma racism in Europe. In so doing, I attempt to make evident the state’s role in racialised governmentalities. Furthermore, by addressing the workings of institutional racism, I aim at disentangling the dominant culturalist academic and policy approaches that support unexamined notions of whiteness. I start by outlining my conceptual approach to the study of institutionalised racism and highlighting the (often ignored) proposals to move the debate out of the dead-end hunt for the racist subject. I then address the historicity of anti-Roma racism in Europe and focus closely on the Portuguese context, pointing to the structural disadvantage of the Roma population in this country. Presenting a case study on school segregation, I unravel the ways in which institutional racism operates in contemporary democratic contexts that are formally committed to equality. Ultimately, my research empirically demonstrates that racism amounts to more than the mere actions of individuals who happen to be in institutional contexts; rather, it permeates institutions through their ethos, design and administrative procedures. The case of segregation presented here1 took place approximately five years ago in a town I name Pedras Brancas, in southern Portugal. There, a state primary school established (by way of constitution) a form of exclusively Roma students. Rather than representing an anomaly, the case is paradigmatic, in the sense that it highlights the ‘more general characteristics of the society in question’ (Flyvbjerg 2006, p. 232). The school and the wider educational system were operating normally (Gillborn 2008), and the actors involved were not simply prototypes of the ‘racist subject’ (Henriques 1998[1984]). Instead, racism was perpetuated and legitimised through the school’s institution, legal framework, organisational processes and everyday practices (Essed 1991; Goldberg 1993). Data were collected through various methods, including (1) archival research of official documents regarding the case, national legislation and political initiatives concerning the ‘integration’ of Roma communities and European monitoring reports and recommendations; (2) media analysis of relevant online content, namely news reports from the national DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-16

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and local press; and (3) empirical work, including field trips and semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in or knowledgeable about the case. Interviews involved representatives of European bodies and organisations (EU), political representatives and decision-makers at the local and national levels (POL), school headteachers and teachers (EDU), social workers and cultural mediators (SOC) and journalists (MED).2 In this chapter, I present empirical evidence that political and professional authorities interpret institutional racism as interpersonal racism that coincidentally occurs in institutions, rather than racism that is inherent in the conception, operation and effects of institutionalised structures, processes and practices. As a result of this misapprehension, proposed solutions fail to disassemble systems of racial oppression and exploitation. I conclude by calling for an interdisciplinary dialogue on the facets and layers of racism and the continued protection of whiteness, despite increased political mobilisation and contestation.

Institutional racism: a concept in context Recently, there has been an unprecedented international protest against racism. Mobilisation in solidarity with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) movement and against racism and police violence took place in nearly 4,500 cities worldwide during the six-month period following the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd in the United States city of Minneapolis on 25 May 2020.3 In the context of increased right-wing populism and extremism, as well as COVID-19 – exacerbated inequalities, these Black-led demonstrations received support from other racialised populations (e.g. Aboriginal peoples in Australia, Indigenous communities in Brazil), for their efforts to denounce institutionalised racism. In Portugal, the participation of Roma activists was particularly noticeable in the demonstrations that took place in Lisbon and Coimbra. This wave of global protests helped to refocus the debate on the role of public institutions in perpetuating racism in democratic contexts, grounded on a critique of the liberal and Eurocentric understanding of racism (see Henriques 1998[1984]; Hesse 2004). This understanding is a legacy of the ‘UNESCO tradition’ (Lentin 2004), enshrined in the Four Statements on ‘Race’ (1950–1967), published in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Aimed at revoking the political and scientific legitimacy of the concept of race, the declarations within this publication nonetheless helped to reify certain notions that continue to influence both political and academic debate: racism as residing ‘in the minds of men’, a matter of ‘ignorance and prejudice’, a ‘social evil’ and a ‘denial of the democratic principles’ (UNESCO 1950, pp. 1–2). This approach to racism – centred on ignorant, biased attitudes and ‘racist individuals’ (see Essed 1991) – hindered its recognition beyond exceptional and deliberate situations, disconnected from the historical processes and contexts of their emergence. Black intellectuals, in particular, have contested this conception, pointing to the power arrangements maintained by racial classifications and hierarchies that have generated an unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources. For instance, Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Turé) and Charles Hamilton, in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), distinguished between individual and institutional expressions of racism: while the former is usually easily identifiable in an individual’s actions and words, the latter is more insidious, because it is entangled with the normal functioning of public bodies and organisations, in their rules, procedures and practices. The authors emphasised the role of political authorities and institutions in perpetuating an unjust racial order in the United States – particularly in areas such as employment, housing, health and education – and challenged the normalisation of this phenomenon in the political culture of democratic societies (Carmichael and Hamilton 1969[1967]). 156

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The work of these authors continues to be relevant in at least three interrelated ways. First, when analysing the key problems affecting Black Americans, they noted not only the slow pace of political reform but also the lasting patterns of structural inequalities: [a] brief scan of history clearly indicates that the disturbances in our cities are not just isolated reactions to the cry of “Black Power”, but part of a pattern. The problems of Harlem in the 1960s are not much different from those of Harlem in the 1920s. (Carmichael and Hamilton 1969[1967], p. 160) Despite the ever-adjusting dynamics of racism, we might identify the continuities that affect the lives of racialised populations by examining the patterns of racism in their historicity (see Fanon 1986[1952]; Hesse 2004). Accordingly, the study of the embedded nature of racism in contemporary, Western societies – particularly those with a colonial past in which racial discrimination was codified into legal arrangements and pervasive in socio-political routines – requires a consideration of racism’s structural and institutional facets, as well as an attentiveness to the limits of political reform. Second, the authors formulated a notion of racism as a political, rather than a moral, issue  – indicating a gesture against the ascent of studies on ‘racial prejudice’, with their characteristic emphasis on cognitive structures, rather than power structures – and hence a deviation from the normal functioning of democratic societies (see Henriques 1998[1984]). Accordingly, the study of racism must focus on the centre of social and political relations (Gilroy 1992), shifting attention away from eccentric individuals and their deeds (e.g. Trump or Bolsonaro) towards the ordinary policies and discourse at the centre of the political compass (e.g. integration policies and debates on ‘free school choice’). Third, the authors’ proposal helps to un-imbricate racism as the effect of an intent to discriminate, drawing attention to its perpetuation not only by intent and commission but also by omission and inertia (see Ahmed 2012; Back 2004; Gillborn 2008). While these ideas acquired greater purchase in the American context than in Europe, they became specifically relevant in Britain following the publication of the official report of the inquiry into the London Metropolitan Police’s handling of the racist murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence on the night of 22 April 1993 in Eltham, London (Macpherson 1999). The knife attack by a group of young, white men in a racist-motivated crime near the spot where Stephen and his friend Dwaine Brooks were awaiting the bus was mishandled by the police. In the context of the forthcoming 1997 election of the New Labour Party, the Lawrence family mobilised significant political and financial resources and managed to see the opening of an official inquiry. The inquiry focused not so much on the murder, but on the Metropolitan Police, which was deemed ‘institutionally racist’ and judged to have failed to collect crucial criminal evidence at the scene. As a result, all court charges against Stephen Lawrence’s murderers were dropped (see Gillborn 2008).4 Placing the problem at the level of policy implementation and the daily practices of Metropolitan police officers (Macpherson 1999, para. 6.24), the ‘Macpherson Report’ defined institutional racism as: The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (Macpherson 1999, para. 6.34) 157

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The report accounted for Carmichael and Hamilton’s formulation of institutional racism, while highlighting racism’s increasingly elusive nature. Yet the definition proposed in the Macpherson report was subjected to several interrelated critiques. First, as Barnor Hesse (2004) argued: The concept of institutional racism had entered a public domain that had no specification of a history or cultural formation in which it could be located: consequently, there was no institutional policy and political discourse with which it could be shown to be associated. (p. 131) Assuming that racism was a ‘disease [that] cannot be attacked by the organisation involved in isolation’ and that the infestation of racism in the police required a systemic approach (Macpherson 1999, para. 6.35), the report disconnected this ‘disease’ from the historical context of its production: in its 389 pages, it made no mention of colonialism, imperialism or enslavement, or their contemporary legacy in terms of the embeddedness of racism. Second, the notion of ‘unwitting prejudice’ was perceived as an unhelpful label for the ways in which institutions operate, as it absolved responsibility from individuals under ‘blanket assertions of institutional racism that [are] somehow comforting for its speakers’ (Back 2004, pp. 3–4). The notion that racism is everywhere (else) and hence cannot be prevented or tackled was not new, echoing earlier academic debates disputing the notion as a ‘conceptual inflation’. Third, although the report proposed an idea of racism as an effect or an outcome, rather than a mere intent (see Gillborn 2008, p. 123), its publication gave rise to a political debate that often reduced ‘institutional racism’ to a matter of mere semantics – or an ‘eye-rolling reaction’, implicating that enough action had been undertaken to tackle racial inequalities (p. 133): ‘The mood of agreement and a desire for change […] did not last long’ (p. 125). As David Gillborn observed, this was particularly visible in the field of education, where defensive public statements about how much had been achieved in Britain towards valuing tolerance and diversity in schools proliferated (pp. 123, ff.). Although the reverberation of the Lawrence case in continental Europe was not particularly significant, the 1990s was a period of intense racially motivated extremist attacks in several European countries, from Austria to Portugal. In this context, the so-called European Directive on Racial Equality (2000) was published and transposed to EU Member States. The Directive addressed indirect discrimination within institutional contexts,5 which was defined as occurring where an apparently neutral provision, criterion or practice would put persons of a racial or ethnic origin at a particular disadvantage compared with other persons, unless that provision, criterion or practice is objectively justified by a legitimate aim and the means of achieving that aim are appropriate and necessary. (Art. 2, para. 2b 2000/43/EC, 29 June 2000) This understanding relinquished the need to determine intent to discriminate. An earlier Portuguese law (Law 134/1999, 28 August 1999) specifically ruled against discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, nationality or ethnic origin, alluding to discrimination ‘aiming at or resulting in’ differential treatment (Art. 3, No. 1). Later, Law 18/2004, which transposed to Portugal the European Directive and distinguished between in/direct discrimination (Art. 3, No. 3b), explicitly problematised the constitution of school forms according 158

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to racial criteria (Art. 3, No. 1g). In these legal initiatives, the (mis)equation of institutional racism and indirect discrimination is apparent – resulting in a diminished examination of how racism pervades specific institutions, as noted by Jenny Bourne (2001) in the aftermath of the Macpherson Report: Organisations are not examining their own specificity. Nowhere is it asked how racism has become sclerosed over a long period of time, in different ways in different institutions in terms of the specific policies, practices and procedures of a specific institution and its specific function in society. So that even when an organisation does light upon an area which it is crucial to tackle, it falls down in the execution. (p. 17) In the wake of the BLM protests, the European Union urged Member States to draw up National Plans for combatting racism, acknowledging that, despite existing legal frameworks, racism persists as a significant reality. Although it has not been seamlessly incorporated into legislation across EU Member States,6 the notion of ‘indirect discrimination’ is becoming increasingly accepted, while institutional racism continues to be evaded in any meaningful way in official discourse, public policy and academic frameworks, at both European and national levels.

Anti-Roma racism: historical background, academic research and structural disadvantage Traditionally, academic approaches to ethno-racial discrimination against populations racialised as Black and Roma have diverged. With respect to the Black population, higher levels of politicisation since the 1960s (Bourne 2001) have contributed to addressing issues of structural and institutionalised racism, albeit only marginally. The Roma population, in contrast, has been relatively more absent from politics, policy making and academic scholarship and continues to be subjected to culturist explanations that elude the socio-political structures that shape Roma life trajectories and expectations (see Lauritzen and Nodeland 2018; Mirga-Kruszelnicka 2018). This has largely contributed to unexamined notions of whiteness and Europeanness (see Hesse 2007). To overcome dominant understandings of racism disconnected from historical context, we must consider the crucial role played by processes of racialisation within state and nation formation and (post-)colonial projects (see Fotta 2020; Lucassen 2008), with which the history of the Roma7 is entangled. Most noticeably, a considerable amount of legislation was passed, beginning in the sixteenth century, aimed at their forced assimilation. Such legislation served to regulate the terms of Roma presence, exile from the metropolitan territory to the colonies (degredo) and even extermination8 – legal efforts that emphasised the metropole-periphery relationship (Fotta 2020). In Portugal, F. Adolpho Coelho’s work on the Roma, presented at the 10th International Congress of Orientalists in Geneva in 1894, was a landmark endeavour. Coelho (1892) mapped the legal documents that had been produced by Portuguese authorities since the 1500s (i.e. permits, laws and ordinances) that testified to the centuries-old persecution of the Roma people (see also Bastos, Correia and Rodrigues 2007; Costa 1998). In these legal frameworks, the Roma – as well as ‘those who lived like them’ (i.e. Travellers, vagrants, those without stable jobs) – were constructed as socially deviant and ‘undesirable’ in the nation (Menini 2014). The fate of those who rejected assimilation (by giving up their language, dress codes and customs) was often mandatory work in the galleys and exile to the colonies of Angola, Cape Verde and Brazil. In this 159

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way, the Metropole freed itself from irredeemable people (Costa 1998). As historical research on colonial exile in Brazil indicates, the Roma population – which is diverse in its origins, traditions and appearance (in any case, perceived as darker-skinned than ‘the Portuguese’) – was progressively constituted as an ‘ethnic group’ and criminalised (Fotta 2020; Moonen 2013; Toma 2002). In metropolitan Portugal, rules and regulations aimed at controlling the presence of the Roma population in the national territory culminated in the criminalisation of being a Gypsy, as manifested in customs, language and attire (Bastos, Correia and Rodrigues 2007; Coelho 1892; Costa 1998). Such processes began to take place across Europe in early modernity (Fraser 1995[1992]), with variations according to socio-political context. Lucassen (2008), for instance, analysed state formation processes in England and Germany from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Specifically, he addressed the changing legal dispositions towards the ‘Gypsies’ as reflecting the interaction between central and local levels of governance and differences in the political management of issues such as poor relief, vagrancy, population movement and migration. Shifting attitudes to the Roma could be found in the church and secular authorities, as well as amongst local populations (Brearley 2001), as evidenced in productions of fine art, literature and theatre (Fraser 1995[1992]). Significantly, alongside their criminalisation and racialisation, the Roma people became romanticised as ‘noble savages’ in national imaginaries (Brearley 2001). Helleiner (1995), for example, highlights how, in the British academic context of the nineteenth century, ‘The discourses of Gypsiology were then linked to the colonial discourses of Orientalism as scholars searched for congruences between the racial, linguistic and cultural attributes of Gypsies on the one hand, and various populations of India on the other’ (p. 540). Paradoxically, such ambivalence attests to the construction of the Roma population as a homogenous group that, while lacking a stable definition, faced ‘genocidal persecution’ across much of Europe (Brearley 2001, p. 589). The Roma people are diverse in their geographical origins, traditions and phenotypes (Fraser 1995[1992]). They do not fall into a neatly defined ‘ethnic group’ (Mirga-Kruszelnicka 2018), but they have been marked by difference through processes of racialisation. The reification of the Roma population as an ‘ethnic group’ – a culturalist legacy of the ‘UNESCO tradition’ (Lentin 2004) – constitutes an important discursive device for legitimising racism. This culturalisation of politics evades any acknowledgement of the role of power in making the Roma population the most vulnerable to disadvantage and the most discriminated against in Europe (CoE, FRA, OSCE/ ODIHR 2011; ECRI 2011). Moreover, by shifting focus to the specificities of Roma culture that could underlie situations of discrimination, it provides a framework in which discrimination is rationalised, legitimated and naturalised. In the contemporary Portuguese context, academic research on the Roma population has been implicated by the constitution of this population as culturally and ontologically different (see Araújo 2016). Due to the official refusal to publish (rather than collect) disaggregated ethno-racial data – even when anonymity and voluntary participation are ensured (Araújo 2019b) – quantitative studies of racism drawing on systematic data in different institutional spheres remain a challenge.9 Nonetheless, over the last decade, research has increasingly documented discrimination against the Roma population in different contexts. For instance, in the context of housing, Castro (2016) and Alves (2019) noted the occurrence of spatial segregation, forced territorial mobilisation and inequalities in access to social housing, related to persistent processes of racialisation. In relation to employment, findings from the National Study on the Roma Communities (Mendes, Magano and Candeias 2014; see also Pereira 2016) identified poor educational qualifications and professional training, compounded by 160

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high unemployment rates; additionally, Maeso’s analysis (2015) suggests that social policies have contributed to naturalising Roma discrimination, in the name of integration. Regarding imprisonment (another area of concern due to Roma overrepresentation in police detentions, court hearings and imprisonments), Gomes and Silva (2014) pointed to the cumulative effects faced by Roma people, who suffer from significant socio-economic exclusion and institutional racism in everyday life. With respect to education, the 2014 National Study on the Roma Communities (Mendes, Magano and Candeias 2014, p. 184) reported significant structural disadvantage: a 27.1 per cent rate of illiteracy, a 53 per cent rate of failure in primary education, a 2.8 per cent rate of success in secondary schooling and a 0.1 per cent rate of success in university or college education. More recent findings from a survey by the Ministry of Education (DGEEC 2018) show that approximately half of all Roma students are retained in a school grade at least once during their education. Research has also examined situations of ‘white flight’ and segregation in state schooling (Abrantes et al. 2016; Araújo 2016, 2019a). Despite this dismal picture, it is important to note the increasing leadership of Roma activists in education. For instance, the Opré Chavalé (‘Rise Up, Roma Youth’) initiative – resulting from a partnership between Plataforma Portuguesa para os Direitos das ­Mulheres (´Portuguese Platform for Women’s Rights’) and the Roma association Letras ­Nómadas (‘Nomadic Letters’) – received state sponsorship in 2016 to provide scholarships to students in higher education.

School segregation and the institutionalisation of anti-Roma racism: a case study The school segregation of the Roma [Segregation is] a product of administrative practice – multiple individual decisions of school administrators, teachers, parents and psychologists. (Goldston 2017, p. 182) In 2011, increasing acknowledgement of Roma discrimination led to a call for ‘National Strategies for Roma Inclusion’ across European Union Member States. The report on their implementation highlights the question of ‘school and class segregation’ as a challenge within the education sector (EC-DG-JUST 2019). However, this concern has not been expressed by Portuguese authorities: the first National Strategy (2013–2020) made no mention of ‘segregation’ with regards to schooling (PORTUGAL 2013). When the strategy was redrawn following two European Commission assessments recommending that ‘Desegregation measures need to be reinforced [in education]’ (EC 2014, p. 1) and Roma Civil Monitor reports pointed to the persistence of the issue (e.g. RCM 2017), reference to ‘segregation’ continued to be absent.10 Official reports from EU agencies and advisory bodies reveal that school segregation is often attendant on spatial exclusion and the phenomenon of white flight. For instance, the 2011 Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) report suggests that de facto segregation in education may be the result of residential segregation and (white) parental strategies to avoid integrated education. The report claimed that ‘Avoidance strategies are most common in mainstream population families’, with 30 per cent of children in this group attending schools outside of their catchment area (pp. 56–57). It further documented that 41 per cent of all European respondents agree ‘somewhat or strongly’ that they would not send their child to a school in which the majority of the pupils were immigrants (‘In Portugal the figure is one in four’) (p. 57). The report also noted that the problem of school segregation is relevant to 161

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many European contexts, but the extent of the phenomenon is not easy to assess, due to a lack of reliable data. Drawing on the EU-MIDIS II (survey), the FRA concluded that: ‘The proportion of Roma children attending classes where “all classmates are Roma” ranges from 29% in Bulgaria to 4% in Spain. If classes in which “most” classmates are Roma are considered as segregated, the share of children attending education in segregated classes ranges from 63% in Slovakia to 19% in Portugal. (pp. 27–28) In 2017, the Europe situation was again noted: ‘Segregation in education remains a problem. EU-MIDIS II results show that almost half (46 per cent) of Roma children aged 6–15 attend schools where all or most of their schoolmates are Roma’ (FRA 2017, p. 104).11 The periodic European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) reports on Portugal have similarly noted ‘problems relating to the reception of Roma children in certain schools’ (ECRI 2013, p. 20) and ‘hostile reactions from the parents of non-Roma children’ (p. 21): ECRI notes that there continue to be instances of non-Roma parents objecting to the enrolment of Roma pupils in schools. In addition, ECRI has heard that there have been cases of pre-school establishments refusing to accept Roma children. This suggests that intolerance towards Roma exists in the general population and in the education environment. (p. 22) Segregation has also been suggested, albeit without direct reference: ‘ECRI is aware of a small number of Roma-only classes that have been established in certain municipalities. Sometimes such classes are located outside the school premises’ (ECRI 2013, p. 22). Only the most recent ECRI report (2018) noted the persistence of school segregation in Portugal, drawing on this precise terminology: According to a study conducted on a national scale and published in 2016, only 42% of Roma children (31% of girls and 51% of boys) were in pre-school education. Segregation at school was still substantial, with 11% of Roma children schooled in classes of entirely Roma pupils. (p. 32) Despite this official acknowledgement, the problem of de facto segregation has not been perceived as a public issue. The ‘National Plan to Combat Racism and Discrimination’ (2021– 2025) eschews any initiative in this area, unambitiously proposing to observe it by ‘reinforcing the mechanisms for monitoring situations of intra- and inter-school segregation’ (Council of Ministers’ Resolution 101/2021, 28 July 2021, p. 34) and ‘Sampling monitoring of the constitution of school forms, to control any segregation processes’ (p. 35). Thus, the longidentified phenomenon across Europe of Roma children being placed in separate schools or forms, legitimised via a ‘special needs’ rationale (see Goldston 2017), remains unaddressed.

Racism as happenstance: underachieving by design, Roma by chance? It is said that there is a lot of school dropout among Roma families. The problem is that when these children come to school, no one wants to teach them. (EDU1) 162

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Pedras Brancas, a town of approximately 40,000 people, was presented by our research participants as cultured and elitist. Selection processes permeated everyday life, and the primary school studied, St John’s Major, was traditionally attended by children from the ‘oldest families’ in town – those ‘with long [family] names’ (SOC 1). Close to the school, by the river, a Roma community had set up camp in the 1980s and resided there ever since. The town’s political promise to overturn the decades-old ‘temporary residence’ and grant access to social housing had been successively postponed, and the camp persisted in marked precariousness. The families who lived there sent their children to the school in their catchment area – St John’s Major. St John’s, a traditional primary school with a declining status, was attended by just over a hundred students, across six forms (grades 1–4). Approximately 25 per cent of the student body was comprised of children from the local Roma community. This was a disproportionately high figure, suggesting the phenomenon of white flight (see Araújo 2016). Five years prior, a class had been formed with only Roma students. The students were in grades 1, 3 and 4, and ranged in age from 6 to 16 years.12 Amongst this group of children, many demonstrated high absenteeism and four were categorised as having special educational needs (SEN). The Roma parents had not been informed of the school’s decision to constitute a separate form for their children. At the beginning of the school year, the segregation was denounced by community activists, who registered their discontent with the media, the National Parliament and the Ombudsman. In the press, the Roma parents (of whom some had previously attended the school, themselves) complained of discrimination, and one father asked whether a single non-Roma child had been categorised as having SEN. The school’s district director, in his first public statement, argued that the segregated Roma students had a ‘similar level of learning’ and ‘no place in regular classes’, where there were also some Roma students. He added that the class had been approved by the General Directorate of School Establishments of the Ministry of Education, as required by law (Order No. 5048B/2013, 12 April 2013). Thus, the segregation was initially justified by school district authorities as a ‘technical, administrative issue’, rather than a ‘deliberate’ act. Their statements in the press suggested that the Roma students had been taken out of the regular forms, as ‘there was no continuity for them in education’: ‘Students have situations of retention due to little interest and high absenteeism when they were in classes together with non-Roma students’. The information submitted to the Ministry of Education’s platform for schools read: ‘This class is made up of Roma students only. […] Due to absenteeism it is difficult to integrate them in the other classes because of the ages presented (students up to 16 years of age)’. As public controversy escalated, the school’s justification became increasingly grounded in pedagogical aspects. In the media, the school district director emphasised that, in addition to the class being ‘very small’, the teacher had ‘great experience’ with Roma children and children with SEN. The director also declared that the school’s ‘differentiated strategies’ aimed at fostering school interest amongst students who felt ‘out of step with the normal way of teaching’. During the research, no evidence was found that the decision was motivated by pedagogical concerns or a commitment to the success of the segregated students. Weeks after classes started, there was no teaching plan. A public request for information from the Ombudsman about ‘the specific plan’ for these children went unanswered, as stated at the parliamentary hearing. The media noted that the school never specified which activities were being carried out with the selected students. In a research interview, we were informed that the academic expectations had been lowered for this class, and the students did not have access to the full curriculum (‘in the beginning, all they did was drawings’, SOC1). Finally, in our interview with the class teacher, she never referred to the pedagogical plan; when we asked her for 163

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the document, she claimed a ‘change of residence’ to justify its ‘loss’ (EDU2). Hence, the evidence suggests that ad hoc solutions were in place, and that the pedagogical project was an alibi mobilised a posteriori, after the public charge of segregation.

Legitimating segregation: a ‘well-meant’ chain of institutional decisions [T]he other school district in town didn’t have Roma students, normally the Roma were in this school district, it’s important to say that. Previously. Now it’s not so strict, there’s the so-called ‘school area of influence’, and the area of this school was the area of influence where the Roma are settled. (POL1) In Portugal, research agendas have neglected the study of racism and school choice, despite abundant anecdotal evidence of a relationship between them. In Lisbon, for instance, a former policy maker (POL2) described the situation of de facto school segregation resulting from white flight as a ‘ticking bomb’. The constitution of segregated school forms is often an invisible aspect of this process. In the research, several participants with professional responsibilities addressed the hidden process of intra-school selection, whereby the most experienced teachers were disproportionately allocated ‘better’ school cohorts (i.e. those comprised of children from privileged families). This meant that greater public resources were attributed to those in the best socio-economic positions. Racism permeated these processes, often in a way that protected and privileged white families from the effects (real or imagined) of integration. That is, schools prioritised the racial concerns of white families that their children would be educated alongside peers from cultural traditions they perceived as ‘primitive’ and ‘unfit’ for modern schooling (i.e. Roma). The white families viewed these ‘other’ students as not Portuguese and distant to notions of Europeanness and feared they would lower the ‘standards’ of their white child’s education (see Araújo 2016). In the present case, independently of the original intention, the decision to create the segregated form was successively validated at a number of stages: (1) initially, it was approved by the school district director, the Ministry of Education services and the Inspectorate of Education; (2) the National Parliament hearing had no effect, despite issuing a general condemnation; (3) complaints sent to the Ombudsman were equally inconsequential, with his office declaring that there had been ‘good will’ and subsequently archiving the case that same year; (4) the media tried to rationalise some situations of segregation as legitimate; and (5) neither the Ministry of Education nor the High Commissioner for Migration (chairing the Commission for Equality and Against Racial Discrimination) identified an ‘intention to discriminate’ nor ‘racist motivation’. Thus, the segregated form continued until the end of the school year, when the situation was treated as a ‘misunderstanding’.13 An opposition MP who followed the public complaint drew attention to this formal allowance of the situation: Those who, at the school board and at the Ministry of Education, have approved, cannot symbolically give the image that there is a form there for the Roma, as there could be for other communities or for other ethnic origins. This criterion would nullify any social or pedagogical good will from the start. It is an absolutely indefensible criterion. The Ministry comes to defend it technocratically, saying that pedagogically, socially it was the best for the school, that it does not discriminate against Roma students, because there were even Roma in the other forms, etc. The worst thing is that the Ministry of Education has taken refuge in the position of the High Commissioner for Migration 164

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[…]. And that he thought that was all very well, he thought that there was no discriminatory intent, that there was no organisational complacency. It was just an attempt to improve the educational standards of those students. And, in a way, it validated the decision of the Ministry of Education. This is what I find regrettable, that the High Commissioner has validated the decision. And I find it regrettable that the Ministry of Education has placed itself in the shadow of the High Commissioner’s opinion to validate the decisions that the Ministry itself had already taken. (POL3) As this quote makes evident, the state failed to act in the interest of Roma students and, instead, condoned the situation of ethno-racial segregation in order to protect the interests of white, privileged families. Following our fieldwork at the school, the new school district director drew our attention to the unequal distribution of Roma students between the local school districts: [We] [the town of Pedras Brancas] have two extra-large school districts. But the district which has, I can say, almost 100% of the [Roma] students is ours. It’s not quite right, some students aren’t even in this set of tents here at the camp. Some are already starting to be lodged throughout the municipality, because this Town Council has started to destroy some shacks and is giving them social housing in other areas of the town, which actually allows them access to other schools. But they end up here. For several reasons, we know. (EDU3) At the end of the interview, the director showed us a registration form with the note: ‘The student does not fit into this school’. He hid the name of the school, but said that the student was a Roma girl, and that notes such as those were regularly received. This finding signals that segregated forms are not exceptional, and that the case studied constituted only an instance made visible within a system that regularly segregates – typically without public scrutiny or complaint. Hence, any attempt to tackle processes of segregation must not lose sight of the wider socio-political context, the relevant institutional structures and the everyday practices at play, in which whiteness is typically protected (see Ahmed 2012). Over the past decades, the neoliberal education agenda – with its ‘free school choice’ motto that enables privileged families to select the ‘most successful’ schools outside their catchment area – has contributed to establishing a context in which school segregation goes unchallenged. In Portugal, as in other European contexts, this agenda has not been reversed by mainstream political parties on the left. As a representative of a European organisation on Roma equality stated: [O]nce free [school] choice is put, it can never be taken back. I mean, a liberal politician sets… they granted it. So, it’s not something… Once that free choice has begun, who’s the politician who’s going to take it away from the people? When it comes to white flight, every specific flight of white people is contextual. But, again, as a general thing, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate it. (EU1) In sum, this case of Roma school segregation documents institutional racism, as enacted through a series of classificatory practices and administrative decisions within a wider neoliberal education context. It is an example of both the discriminatory practices that are continuing to render the Roma population vulnerable and how authorities turned a blind eye to racism. Roma students are still struggling to access the full curriculum, are disproportionately 165

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allocated to special needs forms and alternative (i.e. technical) educational trajectories, face situations of intra- and inter-school segregation and see their historical presence in the country practically obliterated from the curriculum and textbooks. Considering the school-towork transition, it is not surprising that this population suffers from a disproportionately high unemployment rate, due to these structural patterns of social exclusion.

Conclusion The recognition of institutional racism within the Macpherson Report reproduces the whiteness of institutions by seeing racism simply as the failure ‘to provide’ for non-white others because of their difference. (Ahmed 2012, p. 45) This chapter has illustrated the ongoing difficulty of discussing institutional racism in Europe, or even mainstreaming the notion of indirect discrimination (doing so could trigger an uncomfortable debate over racial justice and privilege). In Central and Eastern Europe, there is a growing number of court cases condemning the educational discrimination of Roma children (European Court of Human Rights and domestic courts). D.H. v. Czech Republic was a landmark case, addressing not only specific acts but also systemic practices of discrimination. Later, in Horváth and Kiss v. Hungary, the court argued that ‘absent an objective and reasonable justification, the overrepresentation due to misdiagnosis of Roma children in special primary schools for persons with “mental disabilities” constituted “indirect discrimination” ’ (Goldston 2017, p. 170). Although raising the profile of the debate and promising jurisprudence in terms of racial discrimination, such cases have been met with indifference or resistance, and political reform has had limited effects (Goldston 2017, p. 172, ff.). European institutions have condemned the practice of segregation in the educational context, but they lack enforcement power over Member States (regarding the European Court, see Goldston 2017, pp. 178–179). In Portugal, no case of school segregation has ever been brought to court. As illustrated above, despite more than two decades of legislation targeting segregation, cases have been dismissed as ‘misunderstandings’ or in the ‘best interest’ of the Roma – who are often deemed ‘unfit’ for modern schooling (Araújo 2016). The official refusal to address indirect discrimination curtails the possibility of a debate over institutional racism. There is ample data on the striking educational disadvantage of the Roma people – often leading to dismal job prospects and facing arbitrary decisions determining access to social housing. However, rather than identifying longstanding patterns of systemic and structural racism that are associated with segregation, our interviewees often understood this case as a hunt for the ‘racist subject’ (Henriques 1998[1984]) within institutions (Ahmed 2012; see Araújo 2019a). This unwillingness to shift from an interpersonal to an institutional approach to racism was particularly well illustrated in an interview with a representative of a European agency on discrimination: [Y]ou have to be careful, like the terminology [of some] […] if you’re talking about institutionalised racism or racism in institutions, they’re not necessarily the same […] again, let’s be careful with the term institutional racism… Institutionalised and institutional racism, where? It might be racism in the institutions, but it doesn’t mean that the institution is [all racist][…]. Probably not. I mean, if you look at it, all of the various types of diversity charters, equality commitments and all of that that there are, for most of the police forces are… you, I mean, can I really say that there is institutional racism or institutionalised discrimination? They’re doing something ab… They’re trying to do something about it. And the fact that they’re actually addressing it, I mean, that… There are police 166

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complaints commissions where people can bring that case and then the police… actually investigates it and the police officers who are found guilty of it might lose their jobs or might get a [penalty]. It shows that there is… something is being done. (EU2) These words were uttered regarding the specific case in Pedras Brancas, following our mention of the term ‘institutional racism’, in reference to the Lawrence case in Britain. Thus, the quotation illustrates the difficulty involved in moving forward with the debate over racism’s embeddedness in institutions and the state, through its laws, codes and regulations (Goldberg 2002). As Bourne (2001) argues: the fight against institutional racism is part of the larger fight against state racism – against asylum laws, against deportations, against stop and search, against deaths in custody, against school exclusions, against miscarriages of justice. You cannot combat popular racism without combating the state racism which gives popular racism its fillip. (p. 20) However important a task, focusing on the ‘prejudice’ of ‘common people’ (still the focus of positivist approaches in psychology and sociology) or the extreme right and their racist utterances and threats (which have renewed the interest of political scientists) directs the enquiry away from the role of democratic states, thereby indirectly protecting whiteness and contributing to the perpetuation of racism. Public debate is continuing to gloss over the ways in which white families are privileged through the allocation of social housing and the rising autonomy of schools to accept or dismiss students (associated with segregation) (Goldston 2017). Hence, this chapter calls for an interdisciplinary dialogue on the facets and layers of racism, through which whiteness continues to be protected despite increasing political mobilisation and contestation. Critical race and Romani studies can play a key role in this dialogue, given the racialised constructions of the Roma and the ways in which these make visible the role of the state in perpetuating racist perceptions, continuing to position the Roma as a challenge for national governance.

Notes 1 The empirical research was undertaken within the project ‘Combating racism in Portugal: an analysis of public policies and anti-discrimination law’, coordinated at the Centre for Social Studies by Silvia Maeso, sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and co-funded by the European Fund for Regional Development (COMPETE 2020: PTDC/IVCSOC/1209/2014 – POCI-01–0145-FEDER-016806). Case study research on education was carried out by Marta Araújo (coordination), Pedro Varela and Sara Fernandes. 2 The codes in capital letters are referenced in the interview quotations in this chapter. 3 https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/. 4 Almost 20 years later, in 2012, two of the five suspects were brought to justice and charged with murder (see https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/03/stephen-lawrence-verdict-guilty-murder, accessed 1/9/2021). 5 In Britain, the notion of indirect discrimination was deployed in the 1976 Race Relations Act (Bourne 2001). 6 Member States’ ambiguity with regards to indirect discrimination was addressed in the 2014 Commission report on the implementation of the European Directive (para. 4.1). 7 Socio-political categories such as ‘Gypsy’ are highly unstable (see Scott 1967) and have been often imposed on the population that has self-designated internationally as Roma since the 1971 First World Roma Congress in London (see Fraser 1995[1992], pp. 1–9). Traditionally, the Portuguese

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8 9 10 11 12

13

Roma/Gypsy population has used the term Cigano to assert national belonging, while younger activists are pushing for the term ‘Roma’ – an option I follow in this text. Beginning in 1538, exile to the colonies was deployed by the Portuguese crown as punishment. In 1592 and 1694, the death penalty was imposed in Portugal (Costa 1998, pp. 37–39). The Roma/Gypsy population, overwhelmingly comprised of Portuguese citizens, has an estimated size of 50,000, amounting to approximately 0.5 per cent of the total population in Portugal. Resolution of the Council of Ministers No. 154/2018, 8 November. Reports published after the events of the case studied here are not included in the text. In Portugal, it is still possible to retain a student in a school grade due to underachievement (though this is being discouraged by making it increasingly difficult in terms of bureaucratic procedures). Still, it is uncommon to mix students of different ages. In this particular case, the student cohort changed throughout the year, as one child left the school and a new (non-Roma) pupil was added to the class. A detailed analysis of this case, exploring the role of different, mostly local actors in perpetuating, denying and challenging racism, is presented in Araújo (2019a).

References Abrantes, P., Seabra, T., Caeiro, T., Almeida, S., and Costa, R. (2016). ‘A escola dos ciganos’: contributos para a compreensão do insucesso e da segregação escolar a partir de um estudo de caso. Configurações, 18, pp. 47–66. Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alves, A. R. (2019). ‘Para eles, nós não somos humanos!’: Habitação, território e a monitorização de violências racializadas em Portugal. Revista Direito e Práxis, 10(3), pp. 2068–2096. Araújo, M. (2016). A very ‘prudent integration’: White flight, school segregation and the depoliticization of (anti-)racism. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 19(2), pp. 300–323. Araújo, M. (2019a). À procura do ‘sujeito racista’: A segregação da população cigana como caso paradigmático. Cadernos do Lepaarq, XVI(31), pp. 147–162. Araújo, M. (2019b). ’Raça’, enterrada viva (‘Questão étnica nos Censos’). Revista Manifesto: Temas Sociais e Políticos, 4(2), pp. 71–75. Back, L. (2004). ‘Ivory towers: The academy and racism’, in Law, I., Philips, D., and Turney, L. (eds.) Institutional racism in higher education. Stoke-on-Trent: Tretham Books, pp. 1–6. Bastos, J. P., Correia, A., and Rodrigues, E. (2007). Sintrenses Ciganos: Uma Abordagem Estrutural-Dinâmica. Sintra: CMS, mimeo. Bourne, J. (2001). The life and times of institutional racism. Race & Class, 43(2), pp. 7–22. Brearley, M. (2001). The persecution of Gypsies in Europe. American Behavioral Scientist, 45(4), pp. 588–599. Carmichael, S., and Hamilton, C. (1969[1967]). Black power: The politics of liberation in America. Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin Books. Castro, A. (2016). Na Luta pelos Bons Lugares: Ciganos, Visibilidade Social e Controvérsias Espaciais. Lisbon: ACM. CoE, FRA, and OSCE/ODIHR. (2011). Joint statement on International Day for the Elimination of R acial Discrimination, 21 March. Available from: https://rm.coe.int/joint-statement-on-internationalday-for-the-elimination-of-racial-dis/16808b3da4 [accessed 2/9/2021]. Coelho, F. A. (1892). Os ciganos de Portugal: Com um estudo sobre o calão. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional. Costa, E. (1998). O Povo Cigano e o Degredo: Contributo povoador para o Brasil colónia. Revista Textos de História, 6(1–2), pp. 35–56. DGEEC. (2018). Perfil Escolar das Comunidades Ciganas. Lisbon: MEC. EC. (2014). The European Union and Roma: Factsheet on Portugal. Available from: https://ec.europa. eu/info/sites/info/files/factsheet_portugal_en.pdf [accessed 2/9/2021]. EC-DG-JUST (2019) Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council - Report on the implementation of national Roma integration strategies (COM[2019] 406). Brussels: European Commission. Available from: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52019DC0406 [accessed 2/9/2021]. ECRI. (2011). General policy recommendation No.13 on combating anti-Gypsyism and discrimination against Roma. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. ECRI. (2013). Fourth report on Portugal. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.

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14 DO BLACK LIVES REALLY MATTER? SOCIAL CLOSURE, WHITE PRIVILEGE AND THE MAKING OF A BLACK UNDERCLASS IN HIGHER EDUCATION Deborah Gabriel Introduction In 2020, global events led to profound and significant changes in perceptions of race and racism, and evolutionary turns in white supremacy and Black resistance. The coronavirus pandemic swept rapidly and ferociously around the world like a tsunami, ‘wreaking death and destruction across the globe, crippling economies’ (Gabriel 2020a). However, instead of levelling damage indiscriminately, COVID-19 laid bare the extent of entrenched racism in public health systems, as evidenced by the disproportionate rates of illness and death among people of colour (Devakumar et al. 2020; Hooper et al. 2020; McClure et al. 2020; Shah et al. 2020; Tai et al. 2020). In particular, those of African descent were (and continue to be) more severely impacted by racial injustices in housing, employment and criminality, compounded by poverty and limited access to healthcare (Laurencin and McClinton 2020). Moreover, while Black and Brown people disproportionally served their nations as human shields on the frontline of the healthcare, transport, retail and service workers, risking greater exposure to COVID-19, they continued to be victims of police brutality – as was tragically exposed by the public killing of George Floyd in the United States. Floyd’s life was extinguished in May at the hands of a white police officer, who bore his knee down on Floyd’s neck for 8.5 minutes while Floyd – and shocked onlookers – pleaded that he ‘can’t breathe’ (Cobb 2020). Floyd’s death – which occurred in the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead in her home by police officers in March (Ballard 2020), and Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot dead by two white men while jogging in his neighbourhood in February (Fausset 2020) – became a societal tipping point. The swift and uncompromising global resistance to these injustices through the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests was an inevitable response. However, the participation of thousands of white protestors in the toppling of statues and chants of ‘Black Lives Matter’ was unprecedented, leading to intense media interest. While news coverage initially centred on social unrest, public sentiment appeared to support the protestors, and it seemed as if white people were finally facing up to their complicity 170

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in systemic racism. Across the world, headlines on ‘white privilege’ dominated television, radio, print and online news. Clamouring to disassociate from this white privilege, governments, local councils, retailers and public and private sector organisations (including football clubs) took the knee, both physically and figuratively, to position themselves as allies in the fight against anti-Black racism, and not complicit. Many were swift to release statements in support of Black Lives Matter, including universities: As staff and students of Bournemouth University, we join in the grief and outrage of black people who are subjected to racism, harassment and violence. We join in the worldwide demands for accountability and justice when our neighbours are harmed and in pain. We want our staff, students and the wider community to know that we are deeply committed to social justice and are working towards becoming a more inclusive university. (Bournemouth University, June 2020) The global events in 2020, as briefly summarised above, led to evolutionary turns in the socio-political trajectories of white supremacy and Black resistance. In this chapter, I present a critical race and Black feminist analysis of anti-Black racism in the higher education (HE) sector of the United Kingdom and the United States, and discuss the implications for racial equity in the Black Lives Matter era.

Anti-Black racism and white supremacy Anti-Black racism is ‘a derivative of white privilege, sustained by hegemonic whiteness’ (Gabriel 2020b). It does not exist independently of white supremacy and the role played by Europeans in dehumanising people of African descent for ‘enslavement and economic exploitation’ (Gabriel 2007, p. 12). Dehumanisation was an inevitable outcome of the transatlantic slave trade, since people of African descent were used as slave labour by Europeans because they constructed Africans as the absolute lowest point of humanity. Consequently, ‘the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist subject represents the standard for human, or the figure of a whole person, and everyone else is a fragment’ (Leonardo 2004, p. 139). Negative connotations of Blackness pre-date slavery and scientific racism, taking their origins in religion. Thus, it is not only Europeans but also other ethnic groups that have positioned people of African descent at the bottom of the racial hierarchy (Gabriel 2007). In early Europe, Christians categorised people of African descent as godless, soulless and sub-human and used such descriptions to justify the enslavement of these people (Garner and Selod 2015). Within Islam, certain scriptures in the Qur’an equate ideologies of Blackness with evil, again serving to justify Arab enslavement of Black Africans (Gabriel 2007). Finally, in India, the Hindu scriptures relegate Dalits (descendants of Africans) to the caste of untouchables, who are despised and condemned for their Black skin and: forbidden to worship in the same temples as other castes, from using the same wells, and drinking from the same cups, they are denied land that is legally theirs, made to perform degrading tasks and are often subjected to violence, including the rape of Dalit women. (Gabriel 2006) In HE, anti-Blackness has been conceptualised as having ‘one’s very existence as Black constructed as [the] problem’ and characterised by ‘a concern with the bodies of Black people’ 171

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(Dumas 2016, p. 12). Raced and gendered discrimination in academia ranges from subtle micro-aggressions to overt abuse in everyday experiences of invisibility, hyper-surveillance, exclusion, marginalisation, objectification and dehumanisation (Gabriel and Tate 2017). Black students in HE do not fit the idealised, dominant cultural Eurocentric identity and, as such, are treated as a problem: ‘inherently uneducable, or at the very least, unworthy of education’ (Dumas 2016, p. 16). Black resistance can be seen in the political activism of student campaigns that demand answers to the questions: ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ and ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black?’ But for both students and staff, ‘the ideological and philosophical assumptions that underpin higher education and shape the institutional culture within it – including mainstream curricula, are largely drawn from the socio-historical experiences of white middle and upper class males’ (Gabriel 2018, p. 36). Consequently, Black bodies have ‘no place in the most privileged and highly regarded school places’ (Dumas 2016, p. 17). This is evidenced by the persistence of racial disparities, which are especially pronounced in the experiences and outcomes of Black students and staff. For example, in the United Kingdom in 2017, only 57 per cent of Black students achieved a first- or upper-second-class degree, compared with 71 per cent of Asian students and 81 per cent of white students (Universities UK 2019). In the 2017/2018 academic year, Black academics comprised the smallest ethnic group in the United Kingdom HE sector, with 3,725 members of staff (1.755 per cent of the total number of academics); in contrast, academics with an Asian background comprised 8.9 per cent of the academic workforce (though this figure included Indian, Chinese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups) (HESA 2020). Further racial disparities have been reported by studies showing that Black academics are less likely to be professors than other ethnic groups. In the United Kingdom in the 2017/2018 academic year, 0.6 per cent of professors were Black, compared to 91.2 per cent white, 3.5 per cent Asian, 2.2 per cent Chinese, 1.2 per cent mixed and 1.3 per cent other (Advance HE 2019). In the United States in 2017, 81 per cent of full-time professors in degree-granting post-secondary institutions were white, 11 per cent were Asian/Pacific Islanders, 4 per cent were Black and 4 per cent were Hispanic (NCES 2019). Black academics are also the victims of the largest pay gap in the United Kingdom, earning 14 per cent less per annum than their white, male peers with similar qualifications (UCEA 2018). In the United States, a 2017 study on pay at 40 select public universities found that Black and Hispanic faculty earned $10,000–$15,000 less per year than their white counterparts (Li and Koedel 2017). These inequalities speak to the existence of a Black underclass in HE, which has been largely ignored.

How the language of ‘equality and diversity’ masks anti-Black racism Despite the prevalence of anti-Black racism in HE, racial disparities that disproportionately impact Black people often remain hidden due to the homogenisation of racialised identity. Such homogenisation is effected through the terminology of diversity discourses, typified by language that avoids any engagement with white supremacy and white privilege. Use of the terms ‘Black and minority ethnic’ (BME) and ‘Black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME) in the United Kingdom reproduce unequal power relations whereby ‘white’ is not a visible marker of identity but treated as normative. As a result, people of colour only exist in a marginalised position that is de-centred by whiteness. In recent years, the marketisation and corporatisation of HE have been discussed as central to the sector’s underlying neoliberal philosophy (Garland 2008; Osei-Kofi 2012). This has profound implications for racial equity in HE, since, ‘Within this market-driven perspective, the exchange of capital takes precedence over social justice, the making of socially responsible citizens, and the building 172

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of democratic communities’ (Giroux 2003, p. 196). The dominant neoliberal culture that pervades HE both appropriates and commodifies race, so that equality and diversity initiatives serve corporate objectives ‘in an era “free” of racism, [where] race becomes a matter of taste, lifestyle, or heritage but has nothing to do with politics, legal rights, educational access, or economic opportunities’ (Giroux 2003, p. 199). Through these neoliberal ideologies, which promote the myth of meritocracy, racial disparities are attributed to deficiencies within Black communities, while ‘success is attributed to thriftiness and entrepreneurial genius’ (Giroux 2003, p. 195). Stuart Hall’s (2000) theory of ‘multiculturalism’ holds that the corporate agenda seeks to ‘manage’ the differences of racialised minorities in the interests of the white majority. Conservative multiculturalism is concerned with the assimilation of racialised minority cultures into white, European culture; liberal multiculturalism seeks the rapid integration of minorities into mainstream culture; while commercial multiculturalism assumes that the ‘problems’ of cultural difference can be resolved through consumption (Burton 2002). Each of these ideologies is embedded within the conceptualisation of race and racism in HE that characterises the neoliberal equality and diversity agenda. In using the ideological language of diversity, university leaders and managers fail to hold themselves responsible for the ‘race problem’, while endeavouring to tackle racial disparities through initiatives like ‘widening participation’ (i.e. conservative multiculturalism) and ‘promoting inclusion’ (i.e. corporate multiculturalism), because they value ‘diversity’ (i.e. liberal multiculturalism). Through this discourse, white social actors in leadership and management roles express commitment to anti-racist values while continuing to benefit from and perpetuate white privilege (i.e. commercial multiculturalism). Thus, Bournemouth University’s statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement claimed to be ‘deeply committed to social justice and […] working towards becoming a more inclusive university’. There is a distinct difference between ‘equality’, which represents the neoliberal language of diversity, and ‘equity’, which represents the language of social justice. I argue that the former should be conceptualised as ‘goodwill’ and the latter should be conceptualised as ‘payback’ (Gabriel and McDougall 2020). Furthermore, equality must be predicated on equity: Equity requires recognition of the social, cultural, political, and economic benefits that White privilege has brought people racialised as White for centuries, through systemic racism. Equity necessitates that positive actions are taken to redress the racial advantage of whiteness before equality can be achieved. Racial equality cannot be achieved without racial equity. (Gabriel 2020b)

Black Lives Matter and the evolutionary turns in Black resistance and white supremacy While a key feature of white supremacy is the invisibility of whiteness (which serves to mask white privilege), the ‘events of 2020 have muddied the waters where “race” is concerned, so that it is increasingly difficult to claim ignorance of structural racism or to be ignorant of structural racism, as this implies complicity’ (Gabriel and McDougall 2020). Evolutionary turns occur in Black resistance because ‘the meaning of race and the challenges of racism change for each generation’ (Giroux 2003, p. 192). Patrice Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi’s Black Lives Matter movement forces engagement with anti-Blackness, since 173

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the “Black” in “Black Lives Matter” calls our attention to a related, but distinct, force […] [that] is not simply about hating or penalising black people. It is about the debasement of black humanity, utter indifference to black suffering, and the denial of black people’s right to exist. ( Jeffries 2014) With no place for whiteness and white privilege to hide, the media’s response has been to appropriate Black Lives Matter to serve the mainstream agenda, which is concerned with the preservation of white supremacy. Consequently: When White people joined the Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the mainstream media took an intense interest and the news became saturated with stories about civic unrest, with White journalists attaching their own meanings to the term in a manner that misrepresents the cause. Black Lives Matter […] represents an evolutionary turn in the longstanding resistance of Black people against White supremacy and racial oppression, over hundreds of years. Problematically, the mainstream media detaches it from this historic significance, contextualising it to events in 2020 and reducing it to simplistic soundbites. This serves to limit public focus to the present, disconnecting it from the past – which is important to understand how we arrived at this juncture. (Gabriel 2020b, p. 2) Paradoxically, the thousands of white people who joined the Black Lives Matter protests and the mainstream media’s evocation of social justice language in headlines, news stories and debates about ‘white privilege’ represented an evolutionary turn in white supremacy, towards naming itself for the purpose of self-preservation. When we, as Black people, use the term ‘white privilege’, we are naming people racialised as white as chief beneficiaries of racial advantage and complicit in racial oppression. When whites use the term ‘white privilege’, they seek a different position and meaning: instead of being complicit in anti-Black racism, they become anti-racist heroes who ‘join in the grief and outrage of black people who are subjected to racism, harassment and violence’ (Bournemouth University). This evolutionary turn in white supremacy in response to the evolutionary turn in Black resistance was predictable, since racism is a dynamic process that constantly evolves, reinventing itself according to the prevailing social, political and economic conditions (Garner and Selod 2015). The concluding part of this chapter will advance recommendations for the next evolutionary turn in Black resistance, with the aim of bringing us closer to the goal of racial equity. However, before I get to this discussion, I will draw on critical ethnography and autoethnography to analyse the ways in which social closure operates in academia to maintain a Black underclass in HE. Critical ethnography is an emancipatory approach, involving ‘everyday lived cultural reality’ (Foley 2002, p. 472), while autoethnography ‘privileges neutrality and objectivity to legitimise alternative epistemologies that employ varied forms of inquiry and knowledge production’ (Wall 2008).

Social closure and white privilege in the neoliberal academy Neoliberal ideology individualises racial inequality in HE through a deficit model that attributes disparities not to the racial advantage of whiteness but to lower levels of human capital within Black communities. In relation to the student attainment gap in the United 174

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Kingdom, equality and diversity discourses have centred on measures to raise Black performance to match that of white, Chinese and Indian students. Furthermore, references to inequality have been linked to racial disadvantage within Black communities, themselves. For example, lower attainment levels in secondary education, later attendance at university relative to students from other ethnic groups and higher enrolment at ‘post-1992’ universities rather than elite institutions among the Black student population have all been posited as causes of Black underachievement in United Kingdom HE (HEFCE 2015). This is problematic, because focusing: on human capital simply overlooks the role of inequality in institutional processes generally, and social closure enacted by institutional and dominant group actors that reifies existing stratification hierarchies – factors beyond the control of any given individual. (Roscigno et al. 2007, p. 18) Social closure is defined as the process by which groups with collective identities maximise rewards by restricting access to others deemed ineligible for inclusion (Fenton et al. 2000). In relation to the Black underclass in HE, social closure must be examined as a contributory factor to the racial disparities that disproportionately punish Black academics. One of the features of social closure in the academy is patronage, whereby gatekeepers identify and nurture future power holders through a selective process whereby ‘members of certain groups are promoted and others marginalised and excluded’ (Heward et al. 1997, p. 214). Social closure recognises ‘agency on the part of gatekeeping actors within institutional and organisational contexts, as well as that often exercised by those victimised by inequality’ (Roscigno et al. 2007, p. 21). It is therefore important to examine the principal social actors within the neoliberal academic culture, to understand how their institutional policies and academic practice maintain disparate outcomes and experiences that limit the career progression of Black academics. Within this patriarchal, capitalist, tertiary education marketplace, key performance indicators serve to drive efficiency and standardisation at the faculty level. In the relentless pursuit of profitability, intellectual freedoms are curtailed by faculty regimes that are predominantly white and male. Such regimes oversee increasingly militarised, prescriptive, academic practices that value and reward conformity, assimilation and preservation of the status quo. This consumer-oriented paradigm both reinforces and maintains the racial hierarchy within society, creating a Black underclass in HE. Faculty regimes dominate the upper and middle management strata in the United Kingdom HE sector, controlling research and development funding, curriculum design and recruitment and career progression. Here, Henry Giroux’s conceptualisation of the ‘military-industrialised-academic complex’ is relevant, characterised by bureaucratisation, ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘all-pervasive corporate power’ (Mayo 2012, p. 602). Social closure can be difficult to detect within HE institutions, especially at the faculty level, because the neoliberal academic culture is adept at maintaining a façade of equality. However, the power to nurture, develop, support and progress academics is held by (predominantly white, male) faculty regimes. Given the increased disparities that emerge when gender is factored into racial inequality, it is necessary to examine the complex relationship between white males within faculty regimes and Black women. In fact, white males frequently act as both allies and enemies to Black women, assuming a paradoxical position I define as ‘ally-enemy’, which sometimes involves white female complicity. I identify four expressions of this position, as follows: 175

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1

2

3

Frequent ally–occasional enemy (FAOE) FAOE white men usually act as allies, but when they feel threatened by the achievements of Black women, they seek to undermine their efforts. They also become defensive when their white, male privilege is challenged, but they usually recover and resume supportive behaviour. They are relatively harmless, but – due to their fickle nature – cannot be fully trusted or relied upon to speak up for Black women. Occasional ally–frequent enemy (OAFE) OAFE white men are extremely dangerous – both because they tend to hold positions of power in middle management (and therefore may contribute to blocking the career paths of those below them who are perceived as threatening) and because they mask their enmity through a discourse of colour-blindness. Their smiles conceal their frustration at not having risen to the rank of senior management and their ruthless indifference to gender equality, which allows them to discriminate with impunity. They do not perceive themselves as misogynists and are generally regarded in positive terms by colleagues, as their convivial persona masks their rugged determination to achieve corporate success. They undermine institutional efforts to deliver gender equality, frequently acting collectively with other white males to block the progress of women in their department. They do not perceive themselves as racist; but while ambitious white women annoy them, they have an intense dislike of assertive Black women and will go to any length to derail their progress and block their career progression. They have a history of blocking the career progress of women of all ethnic backgrounds in their department. As a result, some of these women leave the institution or department, which helps to maintain the status quo. Passive ally (PA) PA men are usually found at the senior management level. They do not display signs of enmity, as they are not threatened by Black women (they are situated too far above such women within the hierarchy to view them as competitors). They often display outward signs of support, and they perceive themselves as progressive and in genuine pursuit of equality within their institutions. However, these men are potentially dangerous, for different reasons than those attached to OAFEs: they are either cognisant of raced and gendered discrimination and turn a blind eye to it (because they feel this is OAFEs’ responsibility) or they are too far removed from the day-to-day operations within departments and remain ignorant of the entrenched system of inequality that gives OAFEs free reign to discriminate and maintain the system of white, male patriarchy that plagues the academy. The lack of a critical consciousness around race and gendered discrimination and the complex ways in which micro-aggressions play out only serves to compound the problem. Ironically, while PAs are mostly concerned with the reputation, standing, sustainability and profitability of their institutions, the OAFEs who dominate middle management do much to diminish all four objectives. Not only do they constructively remove talented Black women from their institutions who would otherwise contribute towards its success, but their relentless, oppressive and discriminatory practices (often fuelled by low self-esteem and petty jealousy) also serve to stifle creativity and productivity. Thus, their behaviour has a direct impact on their institutions’ financial success. In fact, studies have suggested that organisations with greater ethnic and cultural diversity among employees – especially at the senior management level – are more productive and profitable (Gompers and Kovvali 2018; Herring 2009). Therefore, OAFEs undermine strategic goals and act contrary to the values their institutions profess to hold dear. 176

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Complicit white females (CWF) Both FAOEs and OAFEs are sometimes facilitated by complicit white females (CWFs), who also perpetuate raced and gendered discrimination. I differentiate between two types of CWF. First, some CFWs are motivated by ruthless individualism and a pressing desire for career progression, whatever the cost. They become defensive if challenged over their duplicitous behaviour and hypocrisy (i.e. professing gender equality but ignoring race) and feel threatened by Black women. They often resort to subtle methods to mask the achievements of Black women and limit their progression, including occasionally colluding with OAFEs. The second type of CWF perceive themselves as victims of gender discrimination, but they fear reprisal and are unconcerned about race, so they do not speak up about the behaviour of OAFEs. CWFs benefit sufficiently from white privilege (though not to the same degree as white males) to support the status quo, and they are not willing to risk losing their place to Black women in the racialised hierarchy. Historically, such duplicitous behaviour has undermined the cause of gender equality (hooks 2000). The complex and dynamic nature of white male/female ally/enemy behaviour as a distinct form of raced and gendered discrimination – and a feature of social closure – is difficult to detect, given the various social actors involved, with competing personal agendas and priorities. This is one reason why Black women continue to be marginalised even within the Black underclass, since gendered racism is subtle, entrenched, pervasive, persistent and ignored within gender equality initiatives (Gabriel and Tate 2017). The neoliberal academic culture is characterised by ‘an increasingly marketised, bureaucratised environment where social justice is not the primary driver’ (Gabriel 2020c, p. 5). Consequently, university leaders adopt a laissez-faire approach to racial inequality, leaving Black academics at the mercy of faculty regimes that are charged with maintaining the status quo, meeting corporate objectives and ensuring the profitability and economic sustainability of their faculties. Social justice and racial equity are deemed incompatible with corporate objectives, which exist to preserve white supremacy and white privilege through a process of social closure. This is because white, middleclass males are deemed more capable of leadership and management within capitalist structures, with the goal of economic and social empowerment for the white majority. Osei-Kofi (2012) advances powerful arguments to describe how neoliberal culture within the corporate academic environment in the United States stifles the career advancement of academics of colour, on the basis of teaching, research and academic service criteria. Her descriptions bear a striking resemblance to the experiences of Black academics in the United Kingdom, within predominantly white faculty regimes. For example, she notes that career advancement is often contingent upon external research funding, which is always shaped by white privilege, since ‘junior faculty of color have fewer points of entry to long-standing, typically white, typically male, historical relationships and networks often tied to critical funding sources and with the power to shape academic careers in significant ways’ (Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 234). Furthermore, while ‘junior faculty of color are frequently over-extended […] because of the limited ways in which merit is understood, politically significant work that many faculty of color engage in fails to count’ (Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 237). This is an important argument, which recalls the reason given for the rejection of my own academic promotion: ‘Having reviewed your application against the Academic Career Framework, my view is that you do not evidence an established research profile and trajectory, and with education, it is not clear what outcomes/impacts you have 177

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achieved’ (Gabriel 2020c, p. 13). This was the official response to my appeal against the rejection of my promotion, despite my having earned student and community awards and praise from an external examiner and student representatives for my critical pedagogy, and my role in leading both the university’s race equality strategy and Black British Academics – a global network of scholars working collaboratively to enhance racial equity in HE. Social closure, as practiced by the predominantly white faculty regimes in the neoliberal academy, serves to commodify Black bodies, which ‘are made hyper-visible through excessive service demands, enabling institutions to market themselves as valuing diversity’ (Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 237), while ‘the choice to work against the grain, to challenge the status quo, often has negative consequences’ (Hooks 1994, p. 203). Epistemological racism is entrenched in the academic environment of the United States and the United Kingdom, operating through neoliberal values within faculty regimes ‘which restrict the type of knowledge deemed legitimate in the academy’. In this system, research is judged based on market principles of “productivity” and “output” [that] create a context wherein knowledge production based on anything other than dominant epistemological perspectives, which is disproportionately produced by faculty of color is discredited because it fails to fit neatly within notions of “objectivity, meritocracy and individuality”.

(Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 237) Indeed, I experienced this first-hand, as I recalled during a theoretical discussion with Professor Shirley Anne Tate: I found myself defending my research on my unsuccessful promotion panel interview where a male academic of colour commented: ‘your research… race this, race that… but what is your research profile?’ I could not have made it clearer that my research is centred on social justice and critical race pedagogy, media, culture social and political communication and draws heavily on Black feminism and critical race theory.

(Gabriel 2020c, p. 100) As Osei-Kofi (2012, p. 238) argues, ‘this type of scholarship is frequently deemed illegitimate and trivialised in the contemporary academy as it is viewed to be without market value’. Social closure within a neoliberal, corporatised and marketised culture perpetuates white privilege and maintains a Black underclass in the academy. However, the evolutionary turn in white supremacy in the Black Lives Matter era means that university leaders must now, at the very least, acknowledge white privilege, and they are facing increasing pressure from students – and a more critically conscious public – to address it. Therefore, what should the evolutionary turn in Black resistance be, going forward, to expedite racial equity?

Payback: the radical shift required for racial equity A strategic focus is needed to drive racial equity in HE away from the neoliberal discourses of equality and diversity, with their implicit emphasis on goodwill gestures. There needs to be a radical shift that engages the predominantly white university leadership in social justice through equity, with an emphasis on payback. A key feature of neoliberal diversity discourse is the erasure of the past and white people’s complicity in the formation, maintenance and 178

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perpetuation of white supremacy. As argued above, the appropriation of the Black Lives Matter movement has led to its distortion from a Black-led movement against anti-Black racism to a broader anti-racist movement for equality. To counter this evolutionary turn in white supremacy, it is crucial that the history of slavery, civil rights, racial politics, and ongoing modes of struggle at the level of everyday life be remembered and used pedagogically to challenge the historical amnesia that feeds neoliberalism’s ahistorical claim to power. (Giroux 2003, p. 207) Critical observers have drawn important distinctions between Black resistance and anti-racism, highlighting some of the pitfalls of the latter. For example, ‘antiracist work among whites even with the knowledge of institutional racism and in viewing the world in color-conscious ways, still allows for—and maybe even facilitates—the reproduction of racism’ (Hughey 2007, p. 96). And, as Ibram X. Kendi (cited in Scharfenberg 2020) argues: ‘When some white people enter into spaces, they seek to basically take over, and take up space, and take up the oxygen, and create a scenario in which everything is revolving around them’. This has profound implications for academia, since ‘the White antiracist movement shows all the signs of continuing to grow exponentially, not least after substantial growth in the corporate diversity sector’ and ‘White antiracist work often slips into a myopic narrative of inclusion’ (Hughey 2007, p. 96). As scholar-activists in the Black resistance, we must keep talking to white people about race and draw their attention to the distinction between equity and equality: I feel as if the goal for you – and White academics in general, is not dismantling White privilege but offering ‘gestures’ as if this is about goodwill, you doing something to ‘assist’ us, rather than payback. (Gabriel and McDougall 2020, p. 167) Furthermore, as white anti-racists tend to focus on critique (rather than positive action) as a form of reparation, we must help them understand their complicity in anti-Black racism and direct their attention to addressing the racial advantage of whiteness, since ‘any viable antiracist pedagogy needs to draw attention between critique and social transformation’ (Giroux 2003, p. 209). In so doing, we may reach mutual consensus and promote agency: The work of understanding how ‘our’ epistemology dominates and excludes in universities needs to be extended to a radical acceptance, and desire to change, the methodological violence that pervades in research discourse […] It is about taking your approaches to transformational social justice pedagogy into research practices at every stage, every level and matching good intentions for social justice research with actions that instil social justice in every conversation about research, from what gets to happen to what gets funded and what gets published. (Gabriel and McDougall 2020, p. 168)

Conclusion As Black feminists, we must challenge our colleagues to move beyond critiquing their own white privilege to ‘undertaking actions […] that make some form of redress’, and we must defiantly ‘refuse to engage with tokenistic gestures that make no real contribution to challenging the status quo’ (Gabriel 2020c, p. 123). We must accept the reality that ‘history suggests that developments in higher education will continue to be 179

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predominantly shaped by the changing nature of capital, rather than values of equity, social justice and economic democracy’ (Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 240). But in so doing, we must not lose sight of the primary aim of Black resistance, which is not to seek affirmation from our oppressors, to internalise their anti-Blackness or to focus on surviving and thriving within a Eurocentric culture that was built for our failure, unless we assimilate. Rather, Black resistance is about ‘our emotional and spiritual growth and development, our endurance, determination and perseverance in our ambition to be agents of change in our various roles within and beyond our institutions’ (Gabriel 2017, p. 148). It is about harnessing our intellectual, social and cultural capital to empower and enrich our communities. Finally, it is about being bold enough ‘to affirm academe as a place where students come to be intellectually challenged and to engage with difficult questions that challenge their very core’ (Osei-Kofi 2012, p. 239), because Black Lives Do Really Matter, especially within higher education.

References Advance HE. (2019). Equality in higher education statistical reports. Available from: https://www. advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2019. Ballard, A. (2020). Local Breonna Taylor protest ties national issues to Wilmington. Wilmington Star News, Sept 24. starnewsonline.com Burton, D. (2002). Towards a critical multicultural marketing theory. Marketing Theory, 2(2), pp. 207–236. Cobb, J. (2020). The death of George Floyd in context. The New Yorker. [Online] 28th May. Available from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-death-of-george-floyd-in-context. Devakumar, D., Shannon, G., Bhopal, S. S. and Abubakar, I. (2020). Racism and discrimination in COVID-19 responses. The Lancet, 395(10231), p. 1194. Dumas, M. J. (2016). Against the dark: Antiblackness in education policy and discourse. Theory into Practice, 55(1), pp. 11–19. Fausset, R. (2020). What we know about the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. New York Times. [Online] 24th June. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georgia.html. Fenton, S., Carter, J., and Modood, T. (2000). Ethnicity and academia: Closure models, racism models and market models. Sociological Research Online, 5(2), pp. 116–134. Foley, D. E. (2002). Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), pp. 469–490. Gabriel, D. (2006). Caste discrimination a worldwide problem for Black people and collective resistance is needed to defeat it. Available from: https://deborahgabriel.com/journalism/. Gabriel, D. (2007). Layers of Blackness: Colourism in the African Diaspora. London: Imani Media. Gabriel, D. (2017). Conclusion. In Gabriel, D. and Tate, S.A. (eds.) Inside the Ivory Tower: narratives of Women of Colour surviving and thriving in British academia. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 148–149. Gabriel, D. (2018). Pedagogies of social justice and cultural democracy in media higher education. The Media Higher Education Journal, 8(1), pp. 35–48. Gabriel, D. (2020a). Battling COVID-19: Road to recovery tinged with guilt and sadness. Available from: https://deborahgabriel.com/2020/04/11/battling-covid-19-road-to-recovery-tinged-with-guiltand-sadness/. Gabriel, D. (2020b). Race, racism and resistance: Why Black lives matter in higher education and the role of media education as a catalyst for change. Three-D MeCCSA Newsletter (34). Gabriel, D. (2020c). ‘Teaching to transgress through 3D Pedagogy: Decolonizing, democratising and diversifying the higher education curriculum’, in Gabriel, D. (ed.) Transforming the ivory tower: Models for gender equality and social justice. London: University College London Press. Gabriel, D. and McDougall, J. (2020). Can we talk? A white, middle class male’s perspective on transforming the ivory tower: Models for gender equality and social justice. Media Practice & Education, 21(3), pp. 165–170. Gabriel, D. and Tate, S.A. (2017). (eds.) Inside the Ivory Tower: narratives of Women of Colour surviving and thriving in British academia. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

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Do Black lives really matter? Garland, C. (2008). The McDonaldization of higher education: Notes on the UK experience. Fast Capitalism, 4(1), pp. 107–110. Garner, S. and Selod, S. (2015). The racialization of Muslims: Empirical studies of Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), pp. 9–19. Giroux, H. A. (2003). Spectacles of race and pedagogies of denial: Anti-Black racist pedagogy under the reign of neoliberalism. Communication Education, 52(3–4), pp. 191–211. Gompers, P. and Kovvali, S. (2018). Diversity dividend. Harvard Business Review. Hall, S. (2000). ‘Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities’, in Hall, S. and Held, D. (eds.) Modernity and its failure. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 273–325. HEFCE. (2015). Causes of differences in student outcomes. London: HEFCE. Herring, C. (2009). Does diversity pay? Race, gender, and the business case for diversity. American Sociological Review, 74(2), pp. 208–224. HESA. (2020). Table 4 HE academic staff by ethnicity and academic employment function years 2014/15 to 2017/18. HESA. UK. Heward, C., Taylor, P., and Vickers, R. (1997). Gender, race and career success in the academic profession. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 21(2), pp. 205–218. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center. London: Pluto Press. Hooper, M. W., Nápoles, A. M., and Pérez-Stable, E. J. (2020). COVID-19 and racial/ethnic disparities. JAMA, 323 (24), June 23, pp. 2466–2467. Hughey, M. W. (2007). Racism with antiracists: Color-conscious racism and the unintentional persistence of inequality. Social Thought & Research, 28, pp. 67–108. Jeffries, M. P. (2014). Ferguson must force us to face anti-Blackness. The Boston Globe. [Online] 28th November. Available from: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/11/28/ferguson-mustforce-face-anti-blackness/pKVMpGxwUYpMDyHRWPln2M/story.html. Laurencin, C. T. and McClinton, A. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: A call to action to identify and address racial and ethnic disparities. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 7 (3) June, pp. 1–5. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), pp. 137–152. Li, D. and Koedel, C. (2017). Representation and salary gaps by race-ethnicity and gender at selective public universities. Educational Researcher, 46(7), pp. 343–354. McClure, E.S., Vasudevan, P., Bailey, Z., Patel, S. and Robinson, W. (2020). Racial capitalism within Public Health- How occupational settings drive Covid-19 disparities. American Journal of Epidemiology, 189 (11) Nov 2, pp. 1244–1253. Mayo, P. (2012). Recuperating democratic spaces in an age of militarisation and a ‘new fascism’. Policy Futures in Education, 10(6), pp. 601–615. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2019). Fast facts: Race/ethnicity of college faculty. Available from: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61 Osei-Kofi, N. (2012). Junior faculty of color in the corporate university: Implications of neoliberalism and neoconservatism on research, teaching and service. Critical Studies in Education, 53(2), pp. 229–244. Roscigno, V. J., Garcia, L. M., and Bobbitt-Zeher, D. (2007). Social closure and processes of race/sex employment discrimination. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 609(1), pp. 16–48. Scharfenberg, D. (2020). Here comes the white people: A new antiracist movement takes flight. Boston Globe. [Online] 12th June. Available from: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/12/opinion/ white-anti-racist-movement-has-arrived/. Shah, M., Sachdeva, M., and Dodiuk-Gad, R. P. (2020). COVID-19 and racial disparities. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 83(1), p. e35. Tai, D. B. G., Shah, A., Doubeni, C. A., Sia, I. G., and Wieland, M. L. (2020). The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Clinical Infectious Diseases. 72 (4) February, pp. 703–706. UCEA. (2018). Caught at the crossroads: An intersectional analysis of gender and ethnicity pay gaps in higher education. London, UK: UCEA. Universities UK. (2019). Universities acting to close BAME attainment gap. Available from: https://www. universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/Pages/Universities-acting-to-close-BAME-student-attainment-gap.aspx#:~:text=While%20there%20was%20an%20increase, to%2081%25%20of%20white%20students. Wall, S. (2008). An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography. International Journal of ­Qualitative Methods, 5(2), pp. 146–160.

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15 ‘IF YOU WERE A WHITE MAN THEY WOULD HAVE NEGOTIATED WITH YOU THE MINUTE YOU WERE APPROACHED’ Bodies of value in academic life Shirley Anne Tate Introduction ‘If you were a white man they would have negotiated with you the minute you were approached’ were the words that were said to me while I was negotiating a pay increase from my current employer after having received a job offer from a competing university. The words may have been ‘management speak’ to salve my perceived ‘hurt’ or ‘anger’. Alternatively, they may have expressed white, anti-racist empathy, acknowledging the inherent white supremacy of the academy, while distancing the white speaker from being party to this racist system. In fact, the words reveal the ‘white racial liberalism’ (Mills 2017) within ‘post-race’ white supremacy in academia. These words, which I will reduce to ‘If…’ in the discussion, reflect the institutionalised anti-Black woman racism-misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy 2018)- that enacts violence through and against which Black women work at the intersections of race and gender. ‘If…’ brings white supremacy’s colonial skin affective and epistemological coordinates into view, in terms of its perspective on which bodies are valuable. These coordinates continue misogynoir and deny the place of Black feminist decolonial theory in academia, because it is ‘too particularistic’. In the academy, white supremacist epistemology denies this theory its place in the canon. ‘If…’ is racist hate speech. It wounds. It slashes the body open. It is viscerally felt. These words are a source of Black woman shaming, even if their intention is to be empathetic – to show white understanding that an injustice has occurred. White, empathetic, racist hate speech such as this speaks to ‘white fragility’ (Di Angelo 2018) and ‘white innocence making’ (Wekker 2016) – not a transformation of academia through an unsuturing from white privilege (Yancy 2015). For Black women, working at the intersections of race and gender entails working with and through the (in)visibility of misogynoir that resists the touch of Black feminist decolonial theory and Black women’s bodies. ‘If…’ positions them/us as 182

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-18

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institutionally valueless, as both subjects and producers of knowledge, because of their/our race and gender. These words carry white supremacist, anti-Black woman hatred, contempt and disgust. This chapter discusses Black women working at the intersections of race and gender in academia, with respect to racial branding, shame, hate speech and ‘racism’s touch’, as well as the politics of unsuturing (Hall 2012) from whiteliness (Tate and Page 2018; Yancy 2015), which is necessary for social justice transformation. Let us now move to looking at the Black woman and racial branding.

Working at the intersections of race and gender while the Black woman: racial branding ‘If…’ hung in the air between us, as it hangs in the air between us now, because of the visceral shock of white supremacy’s race and gender institutional truth and the impossibilities this conjures up. ‘If you’, juxtaposed with ‘white man’, underscores in its moment of utterance the dominant white, male, master signifier body in the institution, as opposed to that of the subjugated racialised presence – the Black woman. The Black woman – the white construction that refuses its subject any individual sensibility, subjectivity and humanness – already dictates the inferiorisation by which Black women are reduced to mere ‘flesh’ (Spillers 1987; Tate 2015). ‘If ’ is also just a conjunction – only a grammatical item in the English language. However, in this case, it surrounds its object with negation and interpellates her as negation itself – specifically as the Black woman problem (Gordon 1997a, 1997b). ‘If ’ makes her invisible, because it sets up a condition that she cannot fulfil. It is not an ‘if ’ relevant for ‘despite the possibility that’, but an ‘if ’ that calls up a condition or an event that is an impossibility. This ‘If…’ sets up an impossible condition for something else to happen. ‘If…’ contains performative force, by bringing into being the Black woman of institutional white supremacy. It enforces homogeneity, as the Black woman emerges as valueless – or as valuable only in certain contexts, such as in marketing the institution as diverse (Ahmed 2012). ‘If…’ is the symbol of neoliberal meritocracy’s failure. ‘If…’ also does something else, through its instantiation of impossibility. Remember, these words emerged in response to an event, not as a complaint. The event was the institution’s refusal to negotiate a pay increase. ‘If…’ suggests that the institutional decision was unjust, but it cannot and does not name it as racist. Indeed, it illustrates the white refusal to name institutional misogynoir. As a reading of racialised gender injustice, ‘If…’ is also non-performative (Ahmed 2006), because it cannot and does not bring racialised gender equity into effect. Instead, ‘If…’ becomes an alibi for neoliberal, ‘post-race’ sensibilities – a staging for the emergence of ‘white fragility’ (Di Angelo 2018). ‘If…’ serves to keep racism alive through the accompanying shrug of the shoulder, the shamed look away from the Black woman’s direct gaze and the strained, tight, white male smile as her dismissal as a human and valuable is accomplished. ‘If…’ made her (in)visible in that moment, through its attempt to placate – to pour salve on the wound yet to come. It did not salve or placate, however, because it illustrated: 1 2

how institutional misogynoir works insidiously by constructing barriers that are impossible to overcome; how the possibility of a complaint can be stopped by showing that one understands the problem as a white member of the institution; 183

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how a white understanding of unnamed institutional misogynoir can be used to attempt to suture Black women into racist complicity, in the vein of ‘we knew that would be the case, so nothing new here’; and how misogynoir continues to live institutionally through its very (un)speakability – its refusal to be breathed into the air, even though it already surrounds us, whether as ‘ghosts’ or ‘brick walls’ (Ahmed 2012).

Ghosts or brick walls. ‘If…’ brings into view the (in)tangibility of Black women’s valuelessness and the necropolitical (Mbembe 2003) and biopolitical (Foucault 1997) power of white male supremacy and whiteliness (Tate and Page 2018; Yancy 2015) within institutions. ‘If…’ interpellates Black women as racialised, gendered ‘others’ and asserts its normative white male subject. That is, that which Black women cannot be without surgical and/or other technological interventions to produce second skins or racialised, gender performativities (Tate 2017). ‘If…’ calls Black women into being as ‘non-HuMan’ (Wynter 2003) – as the HuMan position can only be occupied by bodies recognised as white and male. The performative power of ‘If…’ also illustrates the racialised, gendered power relations at work within institutions which claim that racism no longer matters, because they are meritocracies after all. Anyone can succeed. However, ‘If…’ denies this claim and brings us back to Black women’s un-freedom, as it determines who is a body recognised as valued in institutional life. As Sylvia Wynter (2003) reminds us, the HuMan as white male was established during colonialism, enslavement (and indenture) in the Western hemisphere – at the same time that infra-humanity was conferred onto the Black woman, who was: ideologically constructed as essentially ‘non-feminine’ in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness. Pro-slavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped. (Beckles 1999, p. 10) Enslavement’s ‘visual practices of domination, composed of both biopolitical and necropolitical techniques of value extraction’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010; Snorton 2014, p. 40) inflect the HuMan (Wynter 2003) and bodies of value. What the United Kingdom (UK) believes is valuable, privileged and superior is figured by anti-Black racism, as the Black body was once the scene of value extraction, capital accumulation and reproduction for the white nation within the ‘death worlds’ (Mbembe 2003) of plantation enslavement societies. In these death worlds, Black and ‘mixed race’ bodies were configured through discourse, the whip, rape and concubinage for the service of white, UK citizens, irrespective of class, gender, age, sexuality or ability. Institutional misogynoir means that Black women are branded by the interpellating gaze of ‘If…’ as racialised ‘others’ and ‘other-others’ (Ahmed 2000). For Sara Ahmed (2000), ‘others’ are those whom the nation can incorporate into its economy, culture and kinship to become multicultural, whereas ‘other-others’ are beyond this possibility. The bodies of ‘others’ and ‘other-others’ are central in defining the national white body. ‘Other-others’ represent an infra-human threat to the nation (Gilroy 2004; Wingard 2013), while ‘others’ are liminal, at its margins. By effacing imbalances of power from the national racial landscape, the viscerality of disgust/contempt/hatred for the nation’s intolerable ‘other-others’ is sublimated. The racial branding of Black women’s bodies existed in colonial/enslavement discourses, just as it lives on in representations of ‘others’/‘other-others’. Knowledge of racially branded 184

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bodies circulates and turns ‘others’ and ‘other-others’ into products for affective (dis)identification, similar to products in advertising (Wingard 2013). In this process, affective (dis) identification uses images and language to create visceral responses based on racist ideology (Wingard 2013). Racial branding intensifies identification, moving us to construct national and individual identities. As racially branded bodies, Black women become parts of corporate and state ideological machinery, evading pervasive white power and sublimating it within neoliberal, ‘post-race’ rhetoric. They become objects of capital, producing economic, cultural, political and affective surplus value, both nationally and globally (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010, 2016; Wingard 2013). Black women’s bodies are positioned as negative/positive in relation to national/institutional identities, which deny the continuing racialisation of ‘others’, that whiteness is a racial category of domination, and that white skin still equates with privilege within a continuing colonial skin trade stretching back to plantation enslavement and imperial conquest. In this colonial skin trade, differential corporeal value calls forth a range of affects, enabling identification/disidentification. Affect, allied with differential corporeal values, accounts for the anti-Black woman racist resonance of ‘If…’, which replays the plantation’s disgust/contempt/hatred in institutional life (Tate, 2013). Contempt is more palatable than disgust (Ngai 2005) for institutions that assert themselves as spaces of equity, racial diversity and tolerance, where class and gender are the only differences that impact individual lives. Of course, class and gender are not occupied by Black women’s bodies – only race – leaving them/us within the relationalities of disgust/contempt/ hatred, and without the possibility of tolerance extended to the HuMan. Relationalities of disgust/contempt/hatred allow misogynoir to bubble beneath the surface of university life amidst a wilful ignorance of white supremacy, so as to maintain ‘postrace’ racism, with its negation of anti-racist critique and denial that the HuMan equates to whiteness. Wilful ignorance produces ‘race’ melancholia (Cheng 2001; Gilroy 2004; Khanna 2003; Tate 2010), because white individuals/institutions selectively forget white supremacy, swallowing whole their part in institutional misogynoir because it contradicts their view of themselves as tolerant/anti-racist. ‘Post-race’ sensibilities such as these, produced by white, anti-Black woman affect, lead to the institutional silencing of misogynoir and white supremacy, thereby producing ‘the plantation’ (Hartman 2019) within twenty-first-century institutions. The plantation, remade as the internal racial colony, haunts the institution’s white supremacist, racial imaginings of itself (Cheng 2001; Gilroy 2004; Khanna 2003; Tate 2013). This haunting continues because the white psyche can have no absolution for its historical and contemporary domination and terror, as long as the white supremacy and privilege of the racial contract and its epistemologies of ignorance (Mills 1997, 2007) remain unquestioned. As Hortense Spillers’ (1987) ‘mere flesh’, Black women remain unfree, subject to the discipline of racism’s touch through hate speech.

Working at the intersection of race and gender through shame: hate speech and racism’s touch It is important to revisit George Yancy’s (2008, p. xvi) assertions about the objectification of the Black body by the white gaze. This is a precarious interpellation because: the current and historical epistemic and habituated embodied orders […] configure and sustain the white gaze and function to objectify the black body as an entity to be feared, disciplined, and relegated to those marginalized, imprisoned and segregated spaces that restrict black bodies from ‘disturbing’ the tranquility of white life, white comfort, white embodiment and white being. 185

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Historically, the Black body is linked to the history of normative whiteness – for example, through fear, desire and fantasy – leading to the ‘distortional seeing’ of whiteliness, which, as a result of affect and discourse, objectifies the Black body as ‘other’ (Yancy 2008, p. xviii) and subjects it to Fanonian (1967) racial dissection. As the white gaze of racial dissection can be denied, misogynoir’s denial abounds in white institutional life. White racial liberalism results in the sublimation of misogynoir in institutions. Indeed, Lewis Gordon’s (1997a, 1997b) view is that institutional racism disappears into thin air, even though it can still be sensed. ‘If…’ brings misogynoir to the surface; but even when it is not spoken – when attempts are made to make it (in)visible – it still touches the senses. Misogynoir is still felt. It still impacts the psyche. This is so because, for Jacques Derrida (1993, p. 136), touch is a pathway into the self: to touch so one believes, is touching what one touches to let oneself be touched by the touched, by the touch of the thing, whether objective or not, or by the flesh that one touches and that then becomes touching as well as touched. This is not true for all the other senses: one may, to be sure, let oneself be ‘touched’ as well by what one hears or sees, but not necessarily heard or seen by what one hears and sees, whence the initial privilege of what is called touch. As ‘other-others’, Black women can be invaded by the touch of white supremacy, without their/our permission. This occurs from the unheard and unseen position of white privilege, because touch always ‘concerns the other’ (Derrida 1993, p. 122). This is the touch of misogynoir that must be engaged with to understand its effects and affects in ‘racism’s erotic life’ (Holland 2012) in institutions. The touch of anti-Black woman racism carries the potential to affect and to be affected and, as such, is integral to their/our perpetual becoming. Affect laden, the touch of ‘If…’ marks Black women’s (un)belonging, as they/we are made to view their/our bodies at a distance (Tate, 2013). Through the touch of racist dissection, their/our bodies are made ‘other’ to themselves/ourselves. Alien. They/we are made to be as much outside as inside their/our bodies, caught within a web of intertwined deficiencies produced by whiteliness, which are institutionalised and impact Black women’s psyches, careers and world views. Thus, the white consciousness of the inferiorised, racialised ‘other’ has significance beyond just the visual (Fanon 1967). Notwithstanding that, the visual is implicated in the touch of the white eye on Black skin, distorted in that very touching to eradicate individual uniqueness and replace it with homology. ‘His [her] flesh becomes “black flesh”, his [her] thoughts “black thoughts”, his [her] “presence” a form of absence-white absence’ (Gordon 1997a, p. 71). The white ‘terror’ of being contaminated by Black touch as body and epistemology is maintained by the refusal to feel with and for the racialised ‘other’, as manifested in the white disgust of, contempt for and hatred of Black women. However, these feelings of disgust, contempt and hatred are deniable, due to the ways in which race operates institutionally. For Paul Gilroy (2004), the racial nomos is a legal, governmental and spatial order in which race does not necessarily signify open affirmations of biological difference. However, the psychic life of race remains, accepting physical variation within white supremacist notions of racial difference. The psychic life of race points to the impersonal, discursive, imperial ordering (Gilroy 2004) of the coloniality of white supremacy, through which the racialised ‘other’ is always already known as the ‘native’, ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’ and ‘abject’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010, 2016). Thus, Black presence is absence, while white absence – as the invisible norm – is the only presence. In the racial affective economies of hatred, disgust, contempt and melancholia within the racial nomos, the continuing coloniality of power ensures that white, racist touch does not exist. It is only imagined by the febrile 186

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minds of Black women, who seek to apportion blame for racism where there is none. However, the physicality of touch is replaced with sensing the dispersed intensity of racist affect. Sharon Patricia Holland (2012, p. 39) calls this ‘racial feeling’. Racial feeling articulates the effects of racism’s touch where racism can never be named but still circulates through ‘the transmission of affects’ (Brennan 2004; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010), and their intensity. The intensity of racial affect (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010, 2016; Massumi 2002) is sensed when racism attempts to hide its material, corporeal, carnal and psychic effects: through making its noxious values so familiar and frequent that they cease to function as objects of observation and reflection; they, in short, become unreflective and so steeped in familiarity that they become invisible […]. Racist institutions are designed so as to facilitate racism with the grace of walking through the air on a calm summer’s day. (Gordon 1997b pp. 38–39) Familiarity, invisibility and lack of reflection produce a psychic life of racism in institutions, which ‘glues a particular social order’ (Holland 2012, p. 32) of ‘post-race’ sensibilities, which aver that ‘racism exists only within far/alt right or neo-Nazi perspectives’. The mantra ‘race is a social construction’ allows white academics to place themselves above such irrationality (Warmington 2009). However, Charles Mills’s (1997) racial contract ‘transforms the singularity of rationality at the center of the Western episteme, and as a consequence redefines racism as a very rational act. Racist action makes the system of racial differentiation work’ (Holland 2012, p. 37). The racist inaction in ‘If…’ makes the system of racial differentiation work, because collusion keeps white supremacy, privilege and entitlement in place. Thus, it is anti-Black racism that has been made to disappear, because: Anti-black racism problematizes blackness so as to evade black problems. For black problems are difficult for everybody. Four hundred plus years of super exploitation are difficult to erase overnight. So, denial emerges on levels that are almost magical […] Blacks disappear and so does responsibility for blackness. (Gordon 1997a, p. 74) In ‘If…’, said without guilt or shame, Black people disappear, and only whiteliness remains. For Sally Munt (2007, p. 3), ‘guilt and shame […] are often confused. [Simply, ] the distinction is an epistemological/ontological one, that in the former one knows one has committed a wrong (guilt) and, because of it, one has entered a state of disgrace (shame)’. When an institution or an individual denies racism (Pilkington 2011), knowledge of wrongdoing is repressed, and guilt and shame are never felt, except as ‘race melancholia’ (Khanna, 2003; Tate, 2013). Shame is avoided because it admits to guilt and generates disgrace, due to the breaching of the social conventions of ‘post-race’ political correctness. In turn, the disgrace that stems from shame can ‘provoke a separation between the social convention demarcated within hegemonic ideals, enabling a re-inscription of social intelligibility’ (Munt 2007, p. 14). This means that shame can ignite anti-racism, which is a threat to white supremacy. Thus, to maintain ‘post-race’ white supremacy, shame at racist acts must not be examined, in order to avoid the incitement of: a wilful disintegration of collectivity, [that] can cause fragmentation, splitting and, dissolution in all levels of the social body, the community and within the psyche itself. Unexamined shame can also fall like a mist, obscuring vital political connections, sourced from injury it unwittingly seeks to 187

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reproduce injury to others, as a positive energy through direct attack or a more negativising denial and obliviousness. (Munt 2007, p. 26) This provides an apt description of the shame contained in ‘If…’ as the active force behind Black women’s psychic injury within institutions, where a lack of relationality ensures that the racialised ‘other’ feels racism’s touch quite viscerally. Their/our feeling – their/our sensing – resists racist guilt and shame’s attempt to melt into thin air. Racism cannot melt into thin air, because shame is related to Black women’s experiences of themselves within the social relationality of white supremacy. This relationality makes Black women aware of white rejection (Mokros 1995, p. 1095). Additionally, for Black women, white-induced shame ‘brings the fear of abandonment by society […] of being left to starve outside the boundaries of human kind’ (Probyn 2005, p. 3). They/we feel shame because they/we are affected by what they/we come into contact with (Ahmed 2004). ‘Coming into contact’ regulates the relationality of self-awareness within ‘the phenomenological experience of shame [in which] the self is both participant and watcher in its own fantasy of shame’ (Mokros 1995, p. 1,095). As a participant, one is affected by shame; but as an observer, the impact of shame is affecting. This affected/affecting doubling intensifies white-induced shame, whereby ‘I feel myself to be bad, and hence to expel the badness, I have to expel myself from myself ’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 104). That is, I have to expel the abject, racialised ‘other’ from the self (Kristeva 1982) in order to not feel guilt and to maintain an identity devoid of the stigma (Goffman 1963) of racist shame. However, as Julia Kristeva (1982) shows, the abject can never be totally expelled, so it will continue to exert its psychic force. If we turn from this scene of shame, guilt and abjection to look at whiteliness, we see something else. ‘If…’ is located within the ‘post-race’ racist myth that, because we live in a racist society, ‘we are all equally affected by racism, and Black people can be racist, too’. Such thinking perpetuates Black invisibility and anti-Black racism in the twenty-first-century plantation of academia. The (in)visibility of Black humanity as classed, gendered, sexualised, abled and aged is a common experience (Puwar 2004). Rendering another human (in)visible is a peculiar technology of racist distancing and non-relationality. ‘There are many ways to look without seeing, and for those caught in the web of oppression, not being seen is so familiar that it, too, ceases to function as a seen circumstance. Invisibility loses its extraordinary dimensions’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 13). What is replayed repeatedly through (in)visibility’s distancing proximity to the Black woman’s body is ‘a violent namelessness committed against blacks whose familiarity is so familiar that it transforms the protective dynamics of anonymity itself ’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 13). For anti-Black women racists, violent namelessness does not equate with the anonymity of the social world. Instead, the violence of ‘If…’ reproduces Black women as that very familiar nothing (Gordon 1997b, p. 28), as established by the white settler colonial psyche during colonialism, enslavement and indenture. As non-things, negations and non-whites, Black women are imagined in relation to whiteliness. They/we continue to be (in)visible, as they/we are heard, smelled, touched and sensed only as white constructions. Thus, the ‘black is invisible because of how the black is “seen”. The black is not heard because of how the black is “heard”. The black is not felt because of how the black “feels”. For the black, there is the perversity of “seen invisibility”, a form of “absent presence”’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 37). Here, Lewis Gordon pinpoints what is needed in Derridean (1993) ‘touch’ to encapsulate

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anti-Black racism and, misogynoir more specifically. Black women as absent presence – as invisible – are not extended the white touch of relationality, which seeks to reduce distance. This white distancing is a quotidian experience that surfaces in ‘If…’. The capacity of touch to reduce distance means that proximity is key in anti-racist theory and practice. However, proximity does not guarantee relation, as is evident in the ‘post-race’ UK, because ‘racism orders some of the most intimate practices of everyday life, in that racist practice is foundational to making race matter’ (Holland 2012, p. 20). Proximity – even with skin-to-skin touching of the other – does not lead to them/us being touched. Thus, even proximity can keep racism in place. For example, think about the ‘traumatic intimacies’ of rape and torture in the ‘plantation romance’ (Sharpe 2010), in which proximity did not erase distance but highlighted the race, gender and class/caste hierarchies of Black women’s subjection. The horrors of the past continue to structure the present, because of the past, present and future of race and racism in which anonymity means that one is never – nor can one be – touched, in the sense of being felt, heard or seen (Gordon 1997a,b). We see this ‘If…’ in Fanon’s (1967, p. 420) description of the psychic and material toll of being hailed into place as Black – being touched by the words ‘Mama see the Negro! I am frightened’. These words reduced him to white constructions of primitiveness and violence and made him representative of ‘his/their race’. The normative white, male expectation inherent in ‘If…’ is an institutional racial epidermal schema, touching Black skin – materially and psychically – to create distance. This is necessary because: touch can alter the very idea as well as the actuality of relationships, morphing friends into enemies and strangers into intimates. For touch can encompass empathy as well as violation, passivity as well as active aggression. It can be safely dangerous, or dangerously safe. It also carries a message about the immediate present, the possible future, and the problematic past. Finally, touch crosses boundaries, in fact and imagination. (Holland 2012, p. 100) The destabilising potential of touch necessitates the ongoing colonial game of opposites that constitutes racism. The racist touch relationalities of distance and proximity attached to Black bodies also extend to Black feminist decolonial theory.

Working at the intersections of race and gender as (un)suturing: thinking freedom and decolonisation Theory fixes Black/white opposition through sociogenesis. ‘Sociogenesis [is] the role of human institutions in the constitution of phenomena that human beings have come to regard as “natural” in the physicalist sense of depending on physical nature. Sociogenic dimensions are meaning constituting dimensions of social life’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 33). If society continues to see Black people as no-things, or negations, then society will continue to deny that there is a Black perspective on the world – a Black ‘worlding of the world’ (Yancy 2008). In the white worlding of the world, in which the academy generates the study of race and ethnicity, Blackness and whiteness are constructed as opposites in social, institutional and psychic life, through a racialised ‘existential socio-diagnostics [which is] a convergence of individual involvement in social processes and the imposition of social processes on individualization’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 41).

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Edóuard Glissant (1997, p. 17) describes the relationality of opposition in the colonial period as one where: The conquered or visited peoples are […] forced into a long and painful quest after an identity whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the conqueror. A tragic variation of the search for identity. For more than two centuries whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders. Whereas the Western nation is first of all an ‘opposite’ for colonized peoples identity will be primarily ‘opposed to’ – that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit. Decolonisation will have done its work when whiteliness as an institutional norm is overcome and, with it, ‘the phobogenic dimension’ of institutional misogynoir in ‘If…’ (Gordon 1997b, p. 36). As a Black anti-racist feminist project, decolonisation entails actively unsuturing from the opposites produced through colonial domination. White institutional culture is a zone of ‘suturing’ (Yancy 2015) to white supremacy’s privilege, as we see instantiated in ‘If…’. Thus, white supremacy remains stubbornly in place, as it is not challenged by the beneficiaries of Mills’s (1997) racial contract, who also include Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC). In practice, the racial contract entails that anti-Black woman racism (i.e. ‘If…’) is the norm and does not require further investigation, because institutional white supremacy is non-problematic. Therefore, as indicated above, ‘everyone can be racist’ is the common understanding. This is one ‘post-race’ myth that must be unsutured from, because it is from this vantage point of ‘everyone can be’ that we lose sight of what anti-IBPOC racism is, and what it means to live in societies structured by racial dominance for IBPOC people. Losing sight of this means ignoring the systemic nature of racism’s ‘racializing assemblages’ (Weheliye 2014). White institutions/individuals continue to seek solace in ‘unconscious bias’ as the problem, because admitting to institutional/individual racism is a step too far for a white civility that still wishes to claim it ‘did not know’. Bias is not unconscious (Tate and Page 2018), as it is an action based on knowing and is best bracketed as (un)conscious. Claiming otherwise is a gesture of bad faith that limits our understanding of the extent of white racism through its epistemologies of ignorance (i.e. the ignorance of ‘If…’) (Mills 1997). (Un)conscious bias protects whiteness from discomfort by preventing normative white disruption, felt as guilt and shame. However, the guilt and shame of normative white disruption is necessary to dismantle the white supremacy of institutional culture. To read ‘If…’ for the misogynoir that it contains is to go beyond colonial opposites. Unsuturing means thinking against the grain. In other words, rupturing white fragility (Di Angelo 2018) and opening the white self and the IBPOC co-opted self to the alterity that it has itself created, to epistemology not seen as knowledge and to affects that are seen as irrelevant for institutional life. Unsuturing from institutional white supremacy means, to paraphrase Yancy (2014), deliberately losing our way and refusing ‘If…’ as a normative expectation. From this space of criticality that is created by unsuturing, we can see ourselves – as if from a distance – in our complicity with and involvement in maintaining a white anti-IBPOC ‘racist second skin’ (Tate 2015), implicating individuals, institutions and society in racism’s bad faith. ‘If…’ is a marker of this white, racist, second skin that circulates and must be dismantled, as it underlies the white epistemologies of ignorance of/about anti-IBPOC racism and white vulnerability, which are so entrenched in institutional life. Institutional whiteliness is white supremacy – a site of the coloniality of power, being, knowledge and affect inimical to everyone, both IBPOC 190

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and white. As we unsuture from white supremacy, we must refuse the return of whiteliness as the norm. We must instead engage in meditating on the uneasy affects, sensations, practices and processes that result from anti-IBPOC racism.

Conclusion In Look, A White! George Yancy (2012) reminds us that the white self is opaque with respect to its own racism. White racism sets the boundaries of who white people are and what they can become through their complicity with and implication in white supremacy and its privileges (Mills 1997; Yancy 2012). Choosing to dwell in discomfort means acknowledging the uneasy truth that the relationality between the white self and anti-IBPOC racism cannot be seen as if from a distance – as something other people do. Here, there is no position of ‘not me’. The unease of shame and guilt might enable us to challenge twenty-first-century ‘postrace’ racism. If we see ‘If…’ and other hate speech for what it is – an alibi for anti-IBPOC racism and misogynoir – we might begin to move past the myths of the ‘one bad apple’ of racism and equity, diversity and inclusion. We must think through the urgent need to foreground and critique the racial contract and the erotic life of racism that define institutional life, who lives and who dies, and who succeeds and who does not, as seen in the 2020 #Black Lives Matter Movement. We must move past the racial contract’s denial and institutional bad faith of ‘If …’. We cannot continue to live with its ghost. We must liberate ourselves from the mental slavery of racism. We must begin to breathe.

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16 DIVISION IN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION The effect of apartheid on white supremacy, white prosperity, and disunity in South Africa Victor Ojakorotu, Agunyai Samuel Chukwudi and Vincent Chukwukadibia Onwughalu Introduction The apartheid policy was an instrument of segregation used by the colonial government to maintain their domination on their colonies. While this policy had favoured and benefited white colonial masters than citizens of these colonies, it has continually fanned the embers of disunity, racism, inequality, and hostilities in contemporary Africa, especially in South Africa. Today, the reality is that South Africa still bears the brunt of racism among its citizens, bequeathed to it by the apartheid policy of the colonial government. It is the contention of this article that division and disunity among South Africans, especially between white and Black South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa, are some of the fallouts of the apartheid system. It was a system that promoted racism, inequality, division, and identity, purposively skewed to favour white’ colonial masters over native indigenes of African colonies. It reserved the best public utilities and social services (housing, health, education, and job opportunities, among others) for white and forced indigenes, majority of whom are Black South Africans, to accept and settle for shabby residential areas. This, in itself, was de-humanizing and constituted a major reason for the demand for self-governance or independent at the time. While Black South Africans, during apartheid, are construed and continually felt that they are second-class citizens, white believed that they are supreme and infallible. However, this feeling has changed from both perspectives in post-apartheid period, as white continually nurse feelings of being at disadvantaged, compared to the apartheid period, especially in respect of the dynamics of continual attacks on them and their properties during protests. Relatedly, Black South Africans felt no improvement in their lives, despite their political domination in the new South Africa. It accounts for why there is tension within the Black identity in contemporary South Africa. The case of the ouster of the former president Zuma, from office, by the African National Congress (ANC), that is heavily dominated by Black South Africans is a pointer to the fact that all is not well with the Black identity in South Africa. They have remained on the corridor of power since 1994 and the same racial problem associated with the apartheid regime, still repeatedly provoke havocs in contemporary South Africa (Puttick, 2011). DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-19

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Today, this policy (apartheid), even though, South Africa has gained independent, still defines and shapes relationships between white and Black South Africans. For example, aspects of the past apartheid system, which manifest in forms of segregation in residential areas, educational institutions, medical centres, and inequality in job opportunities, where whites get higher paying jobs than the Black South Africans, are still currently shaping lives and serves as basis of identity in South Africa. It is a fact that white and Black South Africans hardly live in the same residential areas, or attend the same campus of a university, or have equal access to healthcare or job opportunity. In South Africa, the “White” includes Afrikaans speakers of Dutch, German, and French Huguenot ancestry and native English-speakers” (Cook, 2020:10). While white seem to have higher access to healthcare and paid job, Black South Africans, who are in the majority, have minimal access to public utilities in South Africa. For instance, from the reign of Mbeki through Zuma to Ramaphosa, the issues of inequality gaps, divisions, and economic integration among South Africans appear to not have recorded significant disparate results, “while racial relations have improved, divisions remain” (Cook, 2020:8). Under Mbeki’s administration, unemployment was estimated at about 25 per cent, a little change was recorded in income inequality “from the level in 1995”. Only about 20 per cent of the country’s population earned more than 60 per cent of the country’s income, and about 50 per cent of the country’s population lived below the poverty line (Coulibaly & Logan, 2009:4). Zuma’s administration introduced the National Development Plan (NDP) – a 20-year plan – to address these issues. Cook (2020:24) notes that it failed because of “policy inconsistency and poor governance under Zuma, the i ntractability and extensive scope of the country’s challenges, and financing limitations”. This is akin to the view of Agunyai (2018) that governance crisis is a potential threat to peace and stability in a country. Two critical issues: land reform and Black Economic Empowerment policies that have the potential to address important areas in the issues under contention featured in all the administration. In spite of these, the process to increase the Black South Africans’ access and ownership of land through redistribution and restitution are slow compared to the projection in 1994. The Institute of Race Relations (2018) and the AgriSA (2018) cited in Cook (2020:9) note, “as a result, the small minority white population continues to own over 70 per cent of land nationally”. In a similar vein, “the average per capita incomes of most black South Africans are roughly one fifth those of the historically privileged white minority” (Statistics South Africa in Cook, 2020:9). This division was a strategy designed by the colonial government to promote white supremacy in their respective African colony, as majority of the colonial masters are white. The struggle then is, why is the apartheid system or some of the policies of colonial government still have their ways in contemporary Africa? The answer to the foregoing lies within the negotiation exit of the colonial government, which was conducted in ways and manner that the indigenous leadership that emerged immediately after their departure, and successive leadership thereafter, have continued to maintain and sustain the skewed structure and relations instituted by the foreign powers, several years after independence with untoward consequences. In Africa for instance, the agitation for self-determination in Nigeria and Cameroon has heightened the case of insecurity in the countries. Self-determination, in some cases, requires some African countries to openly confront and use weapons to fight the colonial masters to leave their country. In the process, many Africans never returned their weapons to the state after gaining independence, thus heightening tendency of insecurity. And the Sudanese years of protracted war that led to the splitting of the country, are to mention but a few, cases that point to the dire need to renegotiate and restructure the existing socio-economic and political arrangements in many 194

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African countries to reduce the existing inequality gaps and divisions, which promote exclusion and disintegration. South Africa is among the countries faced with the above challenges. Given the nature of apartheid regime in the country, the case of South Africa can be regarded to be a peculiar one. The white who were the regime’s masters remained in post-apartheid South Africa and adopted it as their country of choice. In the case of other African countries, when they gained independence, the colonial masters returned to their respective countries. This probably explains why it was easier to introduce the Nationalization and Indigenization policies1 by some governments, irrespective of the levels of successes recorded, to close the existing gaps and divisions in some countries. The uniqueness of the South Africa’s case shaped and influenced the negotiation process for post-apartheid South Africa. It determined what was brought to the negotiation table and by whom, which “centred mainly on the need for a non-racial political system and its possible characteristics” (Terreblanche, 1991:1). The idea may have been popular at that time because of the notion of politics and economic nexus, and the theory or position that the former determines the latter in a superstructure and sub-structure relationship. After almost 30 years in post-apartheid South Africa, the country is still characterized by the “legacy of exclusion, wealth inequality, and intergenerational immobility” (World Bank, 2021). No doubt, politics through political leadership can determine the nature and dynamics of the economy, and facilitates the re-order of existing structures that can re-pattern the welfare of the citizens for the good of the country and the citizenry. However, the system of governance in practice, the level of development in a country, and the scale of global advancement interact to create the conditions (Agunyai & Olawoyin, 2019; Onwughalu et al., 2020; Onwughalu & Ojakorotu, 2020) that make it either possible or difficult for a leadership to tinker with the existing structure to redress perceived anomalies. The negotiation for post-apartheid South Africa was done during the apartheid regime. Democracy in post-apartheid South Africa threw up its dynamic, and the activities in the global system were not constant, both interact and impact each other. Chua (2004:124) explains, it is assumed, “overnight democracy will empower the poor, indigenous majority. What happens is that under those circumstances, democracy doesn’t do what we expect it to do”. She argues, “democracy leads to the emergence of manipulative politicians and demagogues…” and “As markets enrich the market-dominant minority, democratization increases the political voice and power of the frustrated majority”. The African National Congress (ANC) after more than 20 years of governance appears to not have demonstrated enough manifest political will and sagacity to bridging the inequality gaps and divisions towards integrating all the racial groups in the country, to the satisfaction of the Black South Africans. This accounted partly for the historic defeat the political party suffered in the local government election of August, 2016, which was affirmed in the number of seats it lost in the May 2019 general elections when “it earned 57.5 per cent of the vote— its lowest margin ever” (Cook, 2020:1). The Covid-19 pandemic caused disruptions that affected economies across the globe in different ways. South Africa is one of the countries that was the worst affected in Africa. The hardship it caused appears to have reopened the old wound of inequality and divisions among the racial groups inflicted by the apartheid regime. This brings to the fore the rationale for this research, which examines the effect of apartheid on white supremacy and Black oppression in South Africa. The article holds the strong view that racism, racialized, or racial categorizations as well as the resurgence of economic apartheid that currently define and shape the lives of South Africans in this contemporary time is deeply rooted in the apartheid ideology of the nationalist party government. While 195

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studies have glossed over the connection between the past apartheid policy and current racism problem in South Africa, this article deepens knowledge on such connectivity. The article also argues that if deep-seated measures are not taken to address ugly legacies of the apartheid regime, the country would one day lose all its relevance and ‘big brother’ hegemony in Africa, especially, in areas of economies, peacekeeping, nation-building, and sustainable development. This article aims to contribute to this need, through the analysis of socio-economic conditions, especially at the societal level and identity (more on individual level) in post-apartheid South Africa. It places in perspective a historical account of efforts to deal with the challenges of the apartheid regime in a democratic South Africa. It leverages the critical race theory (CRT) to analyse how white supremacy and prosperity thrive in South African economy because of the influence of apartheid, and the implications for unity in the integration process of the country. Using the CRT lens, this article questions orthodox interpretations of ‘race’ and racism and thereby disrupts the status quo. The CRT method was utilized in this article to explain root causes of racism and inequalities among South Africans, especially, between white and Black South Africans from perspectives of socio-economic and identity levels. It specifically traced the problem of race, disunity, and divisions in contemporary South Africa to the apartheid system.

Problematizing the effects of apartheid on white-Black South Africans relations in South Africa Before its independent in 1994, South Africa was a racially ravaged state built on the apartheid system of government that divided the country socially and economically, making it very difficult for economic integration to thrive (Stevens et al., 2006). In 1948, the National Party government introduced the apartheid policy, which was strongly rooted along the axis of race, separateness, and purity that gave more supremacy to the white over the African Black South Africans in South Africa (Terre Blanche, 2006). It was an ideology that favours the white and places them well above Black South Africans in all sphere of life including job opportunities, better improved residential areas, education, healthcare services, and other basic essential services. It was a situation where the white enjoy the most fruitful yielding benefits from the government and Black South Africans scramble for dregs only permitted by the white who dominated the apartheid government. This uniquely earned and distinguished South Africa among other African states as a state that was legally structured along ‘race’ (Stevens et al., 2006). For example, one notable law of the apartheid government, which further showed that South Africa was not one and united prior 1994, was the Population Registration Act of 1950, which stipulated different privileges and rights on the basis of race (Clark & Worger, 2004; Osterhammel, 2005). It is imperative to note that during apartheid, race, and social stratification arose as central elements of identity in South Africa. This in a way, imposed and forced a particular identity upon people and limits the alternative identity choices available to them. In the past, the classification of Black South Africans as poor and marginalized race, even though, not all Black South Africans are poor and marginalized, is a function of one of the ugly legacies bequeathed to South Africans by the apartheid. However, despite the rigidity of identity during apartheid, it was slightly liable to change for all the race, as many South African white rejected certain imposed identities (Steyn, 2001). This partly could have been easy because the white dominated the apartheid government, it was not the same with Black South Africans, who continue with their prescribed identities forced on them through social stratification by apartheid. 196

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With the fall of the apartheid and the emergence of democratic government, a new political era with significant changes was ushered into South Africa. With this change, there were great expectations and hope that ugly legacies (social stratifications, disunity, whiteBlack division, imposed identity, inequality, disparity in rights and privileges, among others) introduced by the apartheid government dominated by the white would be a thing of the past and South Africans, especially, Black South Africans would enjoy equal rights and privileges. This is required to boost the country’s social and economic integration as well as re-position and appease the aggrieved and marginalized group in the country. Across the international system, especially in Africa, it was hoped that once the apartheid colonial government has been defeated, all inherent problems associated with it would give way for development, equality, and economic and social integration in South Africa. However, reverse is the case as the country is still laden with racism and racial categorization both in private and public life (McKinney, 2007; Smedley, 1998). Today, even though in principle, there seems to be stability in white and non-white racial relations in South Africa, the country still suffers from deep-rooted divisions, inequality, white supremacy, marginalized poor Black South Africans, social stratification, racialization, racism, and racial categorization in the country (Fisher, 2007; Stevens et al., 2006). Measures were taken to address this ugly circumstance and ensure that white and nonwhite South Africans live harmoniously and socially and economically integrated. One of such measures is ensuring that non-white South Africans occupy political power and ruling government (Rabaka, 2007). Others include public enlightenment of South Africans to embrace one another and shun racism and see themselves as Africans Stevens et al. (2006), and policies that promote nationhood and citizenship through consensus, equality, and commonality (Clark & Worger, 2004).  Although these measures have had substantial impacts on individual and group identities as well as the perceptions of power relations among various racial groups; racism, white hegemony, and other vestiges of apartheid still significantly affect people and their identities. For example, despite the occupation of political power by Black South Africans and macro-level institutional changes, unequal balance of power and deprivation still continues as radicalized ideologies of the apartheid regime still exist to some extent. This has severe social, political, and economic implications. Socially, there are still cases where the White South Africans enjoy more social services in terms of accessibility than the Black South Africans, there are still instances of social segregation in such areas as education, healthcare, housing, and residential areas among others. It is a fact that in some South African universities with different campuses, South Africans, White and Black are segregated along these campuses (Goga, 2010). Even in some universities that consist both Black South Africans and white, evidence shows that white South Africans have been caught on video oppressing the Black South Africans. For example, the case of how Black cleaners were forced to eat foods that have been urinated upon in a university in Free State aptly described the extent of racism in South Africa (Evans, 2010; Soudien, 2010). This ugly condition is replicated on issues such as housing, residential areas or locations, and healthcare. In South Africa, it is difficult to see the white and non-white residing in the same area or location, there are choice areas reserved for only the white. This partly provoked feelings of discrimination and oppression among the Black South Africans, who most often, see the white as their oppressors. This feeling of discrimination especially by Black South Africans pushes them to attack white, at slightest provocation. This attack is made easy due to segregation in residential areas as White and Black South Africans hardly live in the same environment. Economically, unequal access to job opportunities between white and non-white South Africans, 197

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which is skewed to favour more white than Black South Africans, is the leading cause of violent protests, opportunistic crimes, and xenophobic hatred in South Africa (Ansell, 2004; Bornman, 2006; Trepagnier, 2006). Politically, the Black South Africans have been having sway in government with very little outcomes in terms of economic integration and sustainable development, this, in turn, has raised serious concerns among the white South Africans about the competency and integrity of the Black South Africans in controlling the government. It has the effect of growing distrust in government and increases tendencies of racism, especially from the white against the ruling Black South Africans in government. This feeling of hate or racism has continued to exert great influence over the identities and daily living of South Africans and therefore requires urgent scientific research and change (Puttick, 2011). Research in this direction contributes to knowledge in the possibility of understanding everyday experiences of racism (Evans, 2010; Puttick, 2011; Soudien, 2010). It enhances understanding that past oppressive experiences will continually strive to re-establish themselves in the present-day if they are left unexamined. It exposes the fact that daily repetitions and practices of racism enable it to sustain social salience as it currently occupies every facet of South African society (Goga, 2010). It is hoped that re-tracing the current racism problem in South Africa to the apartheid regime will help a great deal in reviewing the past and enables South Africans, especially the youths to understand and navigate inherent problems of racism in South Africa.

Mapping the critical race theory in white supremacy and marginalized Blacks in South Africa The CRT was used to analyse the prevalence of racism and segregation between white and Black South Africans in South Africa. It was specifically used to describe and analyse implications of racism from socio-economic and identity segments of the CRT and how white, who were former colonial masters, in South Africa, construed race as a divisive mechanism that has, over the years, been seen as an everyday occurrence. CRT argues that the understanding of racial dynamics largely depends on effective comprehension of past occurrences of racial exclusion and oppression. Undeniably, South Africa had suffered from problems of racial discrimination, exclusion, and oppression during the apartheid regime. It was a period where Black South Africans and white were unequal in terms of privileges or opportunities for jobs, access to social services, education, and economic integration. It was so pronounced among South Africans, skewing the pendulum against Black South Africans. This ugly circumstance, rather than ending, when South Africa got the independent, continues in the post-apartheid era. The cause of the continuity in race and racism has been well documented by the CRT, which argues that race and racism are occurrences in the society that are socially constructed on the basis of social thoughts and that solutions to racism begins with the tracing or identification of past happenings or events leading to the new dimensions of the phenomenon. Thus, for South Africans to effectively address their problem of division, disunity, and racial hegemony, there is a need for a revisitation analysis of how racism played out during the apartheid regime, this will provide the needed insight into the genesis of the cause of racism and possible solution for transformation and reformation (Taylor, 1998). Elaborating on South African version of the CRT, applications and explanations were based on socio-economic and identity levels of analysis. 198

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Socio-economic level of the critical race theory CRT specifically reveals that race and racism are typical occurrences that are entrenched in systems (legal, social, economic, political systems, which stimulate racial inequality) and institutions within society. It argues that it is codified in law, deep-rooted in structures, and laced in public policy as well as the economic system. The foregoing are common features of the past apartheid regime, which still rear their ugly heads at the societal level in contemporary South Africa. For example, Black South Africans and other Africans are still subjected to socio-economic deprivation in forms of lack of equitable access to land, healthcare, and social amenities compared to their white counterparts. While white South Africans have more access to land for food production, the Black South Africans work on the farms owned by white. This is a distinctive feature of the apartheid policy that still finds its way in post-apartheid South Africa. The apartheid regime in South Africa was notorious for its discriminatory policies, especially against the Black South Africans and other Africans. In terms of economic structure, Terreblanche (1991:9) observes, “the very unequal distribution of income, property and income power is the most serious abnormality”. He further notes, “almost 70 per cent of the black people earn a subminimum income”, “the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936 prohibited black people from owning land in 87 per cent of South Africa”, and “White people are almost in total control of trade, industry and mining”. The level of obnoxious practices by the regime created segregation and deep divisions in almost every facet of life in apartheid South Africa, such that it attracted numerous sanctions from various countries. The immediate post-apartheid South Africa faced certain challenges inherited from the apartheid regime and operated within a peculiar circumstance. According to Nowak (2005:1): It was faced with a large pool of unskilled and unemployed labor, acute and widespread poverty, and poor access to education, health, and other basic public amenities for a large majority of the population. A battery of capital controls imposed from within and the impact of economic sanctions and political isolation from overseas had essentially cut the economy off from the rest of the world. It was within the above context that the process of economic reform and transformation were shaped and pursued, at least for the first ten years of post-apartheid South Africa. Thus, within the stated period, attention was focused mainly on the removal of sanctions, re-integrating the country into the global economy, reduction of debt burden, inflation control, financial system stabilization, poverty reduction, improved access to education, basic healthcare, other social amenities, and containing the HIV/AIDS scourge. Aside the focus on macroeconomic environment stability, “the land reform initiative that encourages the subdivision of large-scale farms, and the Black Economic Empowerment program that seeks to encourage the transfer of assets and promotion of black participation business management and operations Nowak, (2005:9–10) targeted at social cohesion were voluntary”. Arrangements predicated on such a basis rarely facilitate the redistribution of income that can bridge inequality gaps and divisions. Appraising the performance within the period, Bio-Tchane (2005: vii) points out that the “macroeconomic policies led to economic growth, diversification of the economy, opening up of the economy to foreign trade, privatization of some public enterprises, the improvement of basic social services delivery, gains in welfare, combating the incidence of HIV/AIDS”. However, he observes that these were yet to be translated into “significant expansion in job opportunities” to reduce unemployment and poverty. 199

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The above outcomes may not be out of place in practice. When macroeconomic policies are emphasized, “pressing domestic needs” (Coulibaly & Logan, 2009:2) are likely to suffer. Based on South Africa’s history, a social issue that was necessary and has been recognized to fast-track economic integration in the country is injustice. Wildschut (2007:2–3) notes, “historical injustice” was inevitable for “national reconciliation” as “one of the minimum requirements for the strengthening of social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa”. While “the Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented crimes and human rights abuses by the apartheid regime and anti-apartheid forces from 1960 until 1994, and oversaw processes of restorative justice, accountability, and assistance for victims” (Cook, 2020:8); Clark (2019) cited in Cook (2020:8) argues, “observers have criticized the government’s arguably lacklustre efforts to prosecute apartheid-era human rights offenders and provide TRC-endorsed reparations”. Appraising the South African economy in recent times, Cook (2020:1) points out that amid being “diversified and industrialized”, it is characterized by low growth, policy uncertainty, rigid local labor markets, high rates of poverty, social inequality, unemployment, public service access disparities—problems that disproportionately affect black South Africans, unequal access to land, violent crime, periodic anti-immigrant violence, labor unrest, protests over public service delivery, and corruption. In the introductory section, we recognized the interaction of democracy and governance in South Africa and global politics and pointed out that the outcomes can facilitate or impede the process of economic integration in the country. For instance, Cook (2020:18) articulates external and internal reactions to Ramaphosa’s administration approach to the land reforms: “This effort is highly controversial, both domestically and abroad. … and might damage the banking system and prompt international investors to question the security of private property ownership in South Africa. … the proposed change would be ‘disastrous’ for South Africa’s economy”.

Racial identity level of critical race theory From the identity perspective, CRT argues that race and racism in South Africa are socially constructed phenomena that steadily shape and define relationships between white and Black South Africans since the apartheid regime. Consequently, while each individual’s racial identity is exceptionally unique, the realities of a person are all linked to the level of race and racism at the society level and that identities do not differ in all ways. Given this, it can be inferred that race and racism are beyond the mere classification of white and Black identity socially construed by the apartheid system. Thus, race and racism in South Africa are systemic fabrications that have been used to segregate and classify South Africans, especially white and Black South Africans differently into separate identities. For example, today, according to the CRT, Black South Africans are largely described as poor, marginalized, and classified as the-not-have-group, while white are seen or identified as more superior, privileged, and the-have-group in South Africa. These identities have over the years defined citizens of South Africa at the individual level. While white belong to the white identity, Black South Africans belong to the Black identity. Although, both identities are socially construed, they have been used as instruments of divisions, disunity, exclusion, and identification. 200

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Black and white identities that currently shape lives of South Africans are rooted in the past policy of the apartheid regime, which differentiates between white and Black South Africans. The major argument of the CRT centres on the fact that the recurrent problems of identity construction, which tend to place white over Black South Africans or label Black South Africans as unintelligent, poor, and less privilege in South Africa were upshots of societal constructions or systemic thoughts during the apartheid regime. The description and labelling of Black South Africans as poor, highly marginalized, discriminated, and thehave-not segment of the country is a racial abuse construed by the apartheid system that have gradually become everyday occurrence in South Africa. This is the same with the labelling of white identity as the-have, privileged, and superior group of the country. Presently, South Africa still bears and suffers from ugly legacies inherent in the apartheid system. One of such fallouts of the past apartheid regime is the residential segregation, between Black and white South Africans. In contemporary South Africa, hardly can you see white and Black South Africans reside in the same area, attend the same campus, or use the same public transport system. This threatens the unity and national integration of the country. According to the CRT, racial identity enhances tendencies of oppression and intimidation. This goes to show that it has severe implications for easy attacks of one race by the other in South Africa, especially during protest. For example, in most of the protests, evidence shows that, because of the colour identity and segregated residential areas, it has been very easy for one race to attack the other. Since Black South Africans and white hardly live in the same environment, it was easy for either of them to attack the other. The attack and looting of properties, majority of which, are owned by white and foreigners by Black South Africans succinctly buttressed the argument of the CRT, that the oppression and prescribed identities such as the use of ‘not-have’, looters, or poverty-stricken people or second-class citizenship to describe Black South Africans and coloured people have persistently pervaded the social fabric of society, including that of South Africa. It is because the assumptions of white superiority identity are so ingrained in the socio-political structures as to be almost distorted. Besides, identity according to CRT are endemic and core feature of social life. It argues that racism is often disguised in a shared normative values and ‘neutral’ social scientific practices and that victims of racism only lend their voice and learn to make arguments to defend themselves when racist injuries have been named. One other area, racial identity has selectively been used and constituted a problem is in the area job opportunity. The white identity, where most white belong, accords them access to job opportunity than Black South Africans. It is a fact that in contemporary South Africa, unemployment among white is reduced and very high among black South Africans. This is partly due to the white hegemony on the corridor of the country’s economy since the demise of apartheid. Besides, racial identity is also selectively used in areas of access to healthcare and education. Today, students in tertiary institutions are easily identified and segregated along campus divide of a university system, thus, intensifying the racial discrimination and identity of the apartheid regime. Furthermore, race and racism according to CRT are permanent, endemic, and core feature of social life. It argues that racism is often disguised in a shared normative values and ‘neutral’ social scientific practices and that victims of racism only lend their voice and learn to make arguments to defend themselves when racist injuries have been named. It critiques constructs such as equal opportunity, race neutrality on the basis that they stimulate the ignorance of the more racialized constructs that promotes the privileged and oppressive position of whiteness. While blackness is construed as different, other, and marginalized, whiteness maintains the normative standard (Gillborn, 2005; Sonn, 2006; Yosso, 2005). CRT provides the needed insights, methods, strategies, and approaches 201

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that guide efforts to recognize, analyse, and transform cultural and structural aspects which maintain systemic racism. It specifically argues that once such standards are chosen, since they are not inevitable, they should be widely debated and reformed to benefit all and not just the privileged white alone (Cole, 2009; Mills, 2009). It critiques the idea of limiting race or racism to the prism of white-Black divide and recognizes the ways in which struggles for social justice is limited by debates or intellectual discussions that exclude and show no concerns for experiences of Black South Africans. CRT argues that race and racism are manifolds and diverse and advocates for the theorizing of the radicalized identity in a more complex approach (Nash, 2008). For example, CRT specifically focuses on the marginalized group through adequate commitment to social justice, which enhances a transformative response to problems of racism, poverty, and sexism as well as the uplifting of the marginalized groups. CRT is also of the view that experiential knowledge of the marginalized other is key to the understanding, analysis, and tackling of racial subordination. For instance, having access to counter stories of the marginalized other (that is, the lived experiences of stories of those on the margin of the society) offers a unique opportunity to verify and challenge the stories of those in power, whose stories have always been the neutral part of race and racism. CRT specifically explains that radicalized identities and categories as well as fixity of race are fluid and characterized by diversity in South Africa. It specifically challenges the ways race and racism affects discourses, social structures, and practices in South Africa and offers the liberatory and transformation strategies of always identifying the fact that race and racism are normal occurrence of the bygone era of apartheid but can be managed or address by accepting and including the stories of lived experiences of the marginalized other or groups than just relying on the stories and experiences of the privileged in power. This is partly the way according to CRT, race and racism that impact on white supremacy can be address in South Africa. However, the CRT is criticized on the following grounds. First, Taylor (1998) blamed the CRT claim that racism is permanence and the prediction of continued subordination of Black South Africans is far excessively being too negative and anti-Black. Besides, CRT was criticized for believing that as educational institutions become rapidly racially diverse, the self-interests no longer represent that of a single racial group (Wray, 2006). Lastly, its argument that blackness and whiteness are recognized and understood in a predictable and homogeneous ways is not absolutely correct. For instance, it makes no sense to describe group interests as monolithic, this accounts for why it was blamed for being too cynical and nihilistic (Puttick, 2011). However, despite these criticisms, positive attributes of the CRT can be found in its assumption that same practices, structures, and policies that oppress and marginalized people can be used to uplift and liberate them from race and racism.

Black and white identities in South Africa It is imperative to note that within societies that have existed or that still exist, white have been supreme in some countries like Zimbabwe, US, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Europe, among others, but today, while the notion of white invisibility still hold grounds among white, it is no more fixed and revered among the coloured people (Puttick, 2011). Whiteness is generally perceived as natural and invisible, which often exist outside of cultural, social, and political forces, which shape and racialize the identities of the marginalized other. However, the notion of invisible of whiteness has been criticized on the ground that people of colour see and notice white people and, on that basis, have continually disregard 202

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the supremacy of white. It is a fact that due to democratic change, leading to expiration of colonialism, whiteness is no longer fixed or undeviating, but rather a site of change and struggle. Thus, whiteness is both constructing and being constructed by changing narratives which describe and provide the meaning of whiteness (Puttick, 2011). Although, this notion was evidenced in pre-1994 South Africa, where white identity was largely considered absolute, unique stable, and supreme (Green & Sonn, 2005; Kinloch, 2003). However, with the demise of the apartheid, the coloured people have been exposed to information and now have knowledge of the fact that white identity is a social construction occasioned by occurrences in the past (Puttick, 2011). Frankenberg (1993) argues that whiteness is often considered to be a location which offers racialized structural advantage and privilege. A critical look at Frankenberg submission shows that whiteness accords one certain racialized opportunity in society. This is akin to privileges enjoy by white South Africans at the expense of others. Similarly, it is an identity, where white see first themselves, then others, and society generally. Whiteness or white identity is usually the unmarked class, against which difference is constructed. It is usually an unblemished, unnamed, and unseen cultural practices (Lipsitz, 1995). The description of whiteness as leading position in society is a colonial mentality, which ensures that white are supreme. This construction helped in the institutionalization of racism in most of the colonized states in Africa (Kinloch, 2003). For example, laws were made in support of the construction of white identity. In pre-1994 South Africa apartheid, Acts and laws were made to subject South Africans to separate rights and privileges based on race, majority of which favours the white race than the Black. During the apartheid, this construction placed white South Africans well above and supreme over Black South Africans, their positions and privileges were never challenged or questioned, and they were dominant in all sphere of activities. However, some of them felt guilty of the racist and the idea of oppressing the Black South Africans, this goes to show that white identity pre-1994 was not homogeneous. Evidence shows that some of the white South Africans were politically involved and engaged in the process to alter their identity (Sennett & Foster, 1996). This construction of white identity was however not the same since the end of South Africa’s apartheid. It has been destabilized and unalterably transformed (Puttick, 2011). Although the extent of these alterations has generated contradictory reactions, white identity is no longer undeviating or inert but a position of struggle and change (Puttick, 2011). Democratic changes in South Africa have largely made whiteness less supreme and homogeneous, it is now more heterogeneous, unbalanced and reduced assumed domination, especially in political positions. However, evidence shows that despite significant alterations in whiteness, white South Africans are still largely privileged. Closely connected to the white identity is the Black identity, as white identity was seen to be supreme, unseen, and normative, pre-1994 South Africa, Black identity was constructed as poor, uncivilized, anomalous, lacking, mediocre, treacherous, sexually avid, and free. The goal of this construction by the colonial government was to make their oppressive and mistreatment of the Black other legitimate. This led to the description of Black South Africans during apartheid as everything dangerous (foolish, wicked, conceited, and inferior) (Pattman, 2007). This construction, blackness, even though was an extension of colonial policy in South Africa, it relegated Black South Africans into the lowest rungs of social and political hierarchy (Wale & Foster, 2007). Black South Africans, during the apartheid, succumbed to the master-servant story that labelled them as mediocre, deficient, and poor. For example, Black South Africans resorted into the belief that their lack of education and self-worth or dignity made them prone to oppression and exclusion from the white elites. This raises feelings of regrets, shame, and 203

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self-blame in Black South Africans and made them settled for the notion inferiority complex (Hook, 2004b). However, the Black identity is also not completely homogeneous as there are Black South Africans (Late Nelson Mandela), who questioned and fought against oppression and exclusionist policy of the apartheid government (Stevens & Lockhat, 1997). This fight against the apartheid nationalist government was successfully based on the Black identity, which relies heavily on collectivism. However, with post-apartheid democratic changes, the collectivism known with the Black identity gradually changed to individualism, this was caused by changes in role models, globalization, changes in economic structures, and too much reliance on western ideologies (Puttick, 2011). The usual collective sense of belonging to blackness disappeared for individualism, competition, and individualistic aspirations. This shift from political activists largely based on collectivism to individualistic aspirations made many Black South Africans embrace some of the globalized identities of white for more integration. It alienated them from their traditional families and social affinity (Hook, 2004a). Today, many Black South Africans desire the white in almost everything, forgetting that such desire is largely unobtainable and not feasible. In contemporary South Africa, blackness has lost the vigour, sense of belonging, and collectiveness to stand as an identity due to inordinate desire to look like the white. This can be interpreted to mean that many Black South Africans only have the colour, but their thinking and ways of life is tailored according to white identity. They act and behave like their white counterparts but cannot exactly be like them. While the white South Africans have maintained their collectiveness and never dreamt to become Black, the Black South Africans have repeatedly struggle to have one voice. This is really the leading problem of blackness which in the long is contributory to their marginalization in the new South Africa. The breakdown in the cohesiveness of the Black identity, especially among the Black South Africans, is further battered by poor governance and political leadership headed by Black South Africans.

Conclusion White supremacy and prosperity are functions of the apartheid policy of the colonial government in South Africa. This policy according to the CRT laid the foundation for the division and disunity between white and Black South Africans in contemporary South Africa. Although, with the demise of apartheid in 1994, there are landmark changes in political, social, and economic systems of South Africa, especially in areas of whittling down the supremacy of the white over the Black and reserving the political arena for Black South Africans; however, evidence shows that these changes have largely been ideological and noticeable at the national level, they have failed to contribute to the material well-being and the psychological lives of South Africans significantly (Eichstedt, 2001). Today, South Africans continue to suffer racialized patterns of privilege and deprivation and ‘race’ remains as a strong factor influencing the lives and existence of South Africans and they still suffer from racism despite integral tensions in South Africa against it. These tensions arise as result of internalizing the master-servant construction of the apartheid on the one hand, and the quest to negotiate and reject it on the other hand. In a bid to address inherent problem of apartheid’s construction of identity, the idea of rainbow nation was coined, this allows racial tolerance. It advocates that dialogue about race and racism should be made public to enhance collective healing. However, despite this laudable initiative race is still impacting on contemporary South Africans identity. This goes to confirm the assumption of CRT, which sees ‘race’ as normal occurrence that impact on society. It will be difficult to completely eradicate race and racism in South Africa, without collective healing that should begin with deconstruction of racial identity. 204

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Note 1 Nationalization is ensuring that countries assets and industries formerly controlled by colonial government are under the control of government, while indigenization is ensuring that local indigens are at the helm of affairs in these companies, industries, or the country’s assets suit local culture and in the hands of indigens.

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SECTION 4

Crisis

17 INTRODUCTION Crisis

Whiteness has gone through several crises since it was first developed into an ideology to support the power structures of settler colonialism, colonialism and racialised nationalism. At the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, an international and transnational crisis of whiteness took place, as notions of white supremacy and ‘white civilisation’ were met with the challenge of rebellious working classes and poor white people, who were not seen as living up to the imperial notions of white superiority (Bonnett 2005). More recently, the changing demographics in the United States and Europe as a result of increasing migration and shifts in reproductive patterns have led to discussions of the ‘crisis of whiteness’, with narratives of threat and decline becoming especially popular among the far right. While no clear changes in power structures or economic advantages have been identified, and racial and class structures in the Western world have continued to largely benefit white people at the cost of groups racialised as non-white, narratives of resentment and ‘line cutting’ (Bhambra 2017) have nonetheless been widely spread in far-right rhetoric and circulated and normalised by mainstream media and prominent politicians. As a result, these messages have extended into the wider public consciousness. The chapters in this section investigate the current crisis of whiteness, drawing on concepts such as ‘warfare’, the ‘complexity of whiteness’, ‘racial formation’, the ‘myth of a racism-free nation’ and ‘racial capitalism’. In the first chapter, ‘Whiteness in the Trumpocene’, Mike Hill discusses a fundamental shift in American social organisation and governmental practice in the Trump era. He examines the presumption that civil society can reliably exclude popular violence and the state’s response to movements of violence in the form of domestic military intervention, finding that ‘civilian’ life is no longer foundational to liberal democracy. Thus, the democratic principles of government are rendered inoperable in the name of governability, itself. Specifically, the chapter seeks to explain the weaponisation of United States social relations during the Trump presidency, in the post-whiteness context. While whiteness lost numerical superiority in this era, it gained political significance, as liberalism became increasingly focused on warfare, rather than welfare. Accordingly, Hill argues that white decline led to civil war under the guise of securing civility – or, in the slogan of the Trump campaign, ‘Making America Great Again’.

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The second chapter, ‘The future of whiteness’, by Ashley (“Woody”) Doane, focuses on whiteness as an ideology – a collection of beliefs and understandings about what race is and how social arrangements and practices can be racially structured. The chapter presents a theoretical overview of discussions about whiteness, emphasising the connection between whiteness, national identity and nationalism. It further examines the contours of the current crisis of whiteness, including the ways in which it is both similar to and different from past crises. Doane argues for the complexity of whiteness – its internal variability – and investigates how this influences the present situation. The chapter ends with a discussion about the future of whiteness, both as an ideology and as a system of domination. Doane asks whether white supremacy can be eliminated without capitalism being challenged, given the profound interconnections between these ideologies and contends that an attempt to abolish whiteness by necessity will require a larger project of human liberation. In the third chapter, ‘The Swedish racial formation’, Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard argue for the use of the concept of ‘racial formation’ in analyses that seek to grasp both historical continuity and change. The racial formation perspective combines structural analysis with an analysis of human agency, thereby not only connecting the process of racialisation with multiple inequalities but also with struggles for social justice. In their view, the concept also provides a framework for thinking through the challenges of knowledge production for the purposes of social justice, within the tradition of intellectual activism. Using Sweden as a case study, Mulinari and Neergaard explore the role of silence, denial and the forgetting of imperialism, colonialism and racism in mainstream Swedish academia and society. They further identify the central contribution of the racial formation concept and elaborate it with the help of post-colonial feminist/queer scholarship. The chapter ends with an examination of how the Swedish racial classification system is constructed and changed – by particular institutions and through specific discourses and social struggles. The fourth chapter, ‘Race, whiteness, Russianness and the discourses on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and Manizha’ by Katharina Wiedlack and Iain Zabolotny, analyses the ways in which race and whiteness are discussed within contemporary Russian public discourses – particularly in political commentaries and popular media – as well as the ways in which these concepts are connected to nationalism. The chapter analyses online media discourses in Russia in the context of two case studies: one on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the United States and another on Russia’s entry in the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, featuring Manizha, a singer of Tajik descent, and her song, ‘Russian Woman’. The chapter argues that both events were framed through discussions about ‘Russianness’, which has notions of whiteness at its core. Moreover, the public debates evoked a myth of Russian society as not only historically free of anti-Black racism but also an anti-racist ally of Black people. In the fifth chapter, ‘The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, far-right politics and entitlement to wealth’, Suvi Keskinen examines the successful capitalisation of racialised notions of welfare, nation and gender by far-right parties in Europe, particularly in the Nordic region. The chapter analyses political projects that have combined heteropatriarchal structures with racialised (b)ordering practices when seeking to safeguard white entitlement to wealth and benefits within global racial capitalism. It investigates the subject positions and personal rewards that these racial projects have provided for their supporters, in order to understand the appeal of such political movements in societal contexts where whiteness is taken for granted as part of the national identity and the welfare state is becoming increasingly subjected to economic and moral criticism. The chapter elaborates a theoretical perspective that emphasises the role of politics and political economy for the (re)production of racial structures, ideologies and practices. 210

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References Bhambra, G. (2017). Brexit, Trump and ‘methodological whiteness’: On the misrecognition of race and class. The British Journal of Sociology, 68(S1), pp. S214–S232. Bonnett, A. (2005). From the crises of whiteness to western supremacism. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 1(1), pp. 8–20.

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18 WHITENESS IN THE TRUMPOCENE Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political and the American race war to come Mike Hill We’re doing it in Washington DC. We’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. —President Donald J. Trump

The United States in its Weimar phase In the above quotation, the ‘it’ in question, as Donald Trump goes on to elaborate, is the ‘dispatch [of ] thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and wanton destruction of property’ (2020). Triggered by the death of George Floyd – an unarmed Black man who was killed by a white police officer who knelt on his neck during an arrest for the alleged use of counterfeit currency – during the ‘American Spring’ of 2020 has been recognised as the largest and most persistent display of anti-racist demonstrations in the United States since the 1960s. While Trump emphasised a relatively small number of opportunistic criminal acts associated with the protests, using the sweeping term ‘domestic terror’, Attorney General William Barr imagined an affiliation – which was nowhere to be found – between the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement and ‘foreign actors playing all sides to exacerbate violence’ (Dunleavy 2020).1 Trump’s exhortation for ‘weak’ governors to turn their public spaces into ‘battlespaces’ was an exceptional event, to be sure. Yet Defense Secretary Mark Esper encouraged Trump’s appeal for ‘total domination’ as the ‘quickest way […] we get back to normal’ (Myers 2020). This version of normalcy supports Noam Chomsky’s reference to President Trump as ‘the most dangerous figure in human history’ (2020). In the pages that follow, I will focus on aspects of the ‘Trump era’ that marks a fundamental shift in American social organisation and governmental practice: ‘civilian’ life is no longer fundamentally attached to liberal democracy. The presumption that civil society can reliably exclude popular violence no longer holds. This is clear in not only in the infamous exhibition of Trumpian insurgency on January 6, 2021 but also in the state’s militarised response to popular movements.On the right-wing side of the political spectrum, domestic military intervention mirrors the largely imagined threat of an American race war to come. The quotation that opened this chapter underlines a grim irony in twenty-first century United States 212

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-22

Whiteness in the Trumpocene

politics: the democratic principles of government have been rendered inoperable in the name of governability, itself. But this is not the whole story of whiteness in the ‘Trumpocene’.2 In 1790, the first United States statute to codify naturalisation law restricted citizenship to ‘any alien, being a free white person’ who had resided in the United States for two or more years. The ‘Nationality Act’, also known as the ‘Naturalization Act’, thus sutured the modern ideals of constitutional rights to what was once – but is no longer – the normative status of American whiteness (1790). (In fact, the contradiction of juridical norms applied to a minority population of white subjects way was already apparent, insofar as ‘freedom’s’ limitation to ‘white persons’ excluded the majority – comprised of Indigenous people, indentured servants, slaves and women.) Accordingly, how can we explain the correspondence between the paradoxical degeneration of liberalism into ‘domestic terror’, launched in democracy’s name? How might we understand the end of the white race as the unmarked, ubiquitous and largely fictional stand-in for American identity at large? This chapter seeks to explain the weaponisation of United States social relations during the Trump presidency in the context of what we might call, hesitatingly, ‘post-whiteness’. The hesitation is rooted in the incipient and paradoxical minoritisation of white identity (or, recalling 1790, its re-minoritisation): although whiteness lost numerical superiority during the twenty first century, it gained political significance. At the same time,the US government further shifted its orientation from being a welfare to warfare state. To reduce my argument to a single proposition: white population decline generates civil war under the guise of securing civility – or, in the jingoistic propaganda of the Trump campaign, white ‘ America’s’ disappreance corresponds with a frenzied desire to ‘Make America Great Again’. However, the ‘greatness’ of whiteness is caught in an irrepreable conflict between‘greatness’ of value and‘greatness’ of size. The minoritization of US white identity motivates a war within the population, a civil war in which the state itself promotes the citizen’s turn to violence. Within the cycles of hostility leading up to the Trump-incited riots in Washington, DC in the early weeks of January 2021 – and, reciprocally, the state’s militarised preparation for armed protest in all 50 capital cities on the day of President Biden’s inauguration – pundits wondered: ‘Is America entering its Weimar stage?’ (Ferguson 2020). The reciprocation between popular violence and the use of military troops is important. Their common cause designates what we might call the ‘autogenic’ nature of war within US civil society. Here war is perpetuated (and is internal to the state): war is fought at home in the name of securing the peace. Taking Weimar as a cue, and the coming white minority as its focus, the first section of what follows brings the political theory of Carl Schmitt to bear on the vexing issues of racial representation, as connected to the United States Census. The focus here is on the 2000 count, followed by Trump’s proposal for the Census count to enumerate only ‘citizens’, rather than ‘the whole people’. William Connolly’s reminder that ‘the coldness of classical liberalism and individualism’ can ‘foster the temptation for many to support fascism during a crisis’ (2017) invites us to imagine an American Weimar. Schmitt, a German philosopher and jurist who saw the collapse of the German republic, joined the Nazi Party in the same year as Martin Heidegger, and infamously advised Hindenburg to invoke temporary dictatorial powers. This context allows me to propose, as a kind of Schmittian politics 2.0, a further analysis of ‘cold liberal’Census taking in the hot context of authoritarian governmental power. But this chapter is not merely a primer on Schmitt’s critique of classical liberalism.3 His preoccupation with such erms as ‘multitudes’, ‘masses’, ‘mathematics’, ‘technology’ and ‘numbers’ reveals a complex philosophical problem overlooked by even seasoned scholars of his work: quantifiable manifestations of collective struggle have collided with qualified expressions of the 213

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law. This problem reveals why the United States Census is important, in addition to elucidating the problem of a US whiteminority, more generally. In the same way that the ‘greatness’ of white ‘America’ signals a contradiction between the normative value (a qualitative matter) and the declining numbers (a qualitative matter) of whiteness, the American masses have become disharmonised with the nation’s juridical ideals. As Census takers projecting ‘white decline’ have noted, ‘our nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people’ (Tavernise 2018). ‘Hell’, here, represents a state of social unrest commensurate with the loss of white normativity – in short, the Trumpocene. In reference to the US Census through the lense ofSchmitt’s critique of Western liberalism, part one of this chapter proposes to explain demography’s contribution to shifting the role of the liberal state: In the Trumposcene, we move from a juridical objective ofthat protecting civil rights to and escalation of social and governmental violence that suspends civilian status. In the context of what I call a ‘mass-minority’ condition, the loss of white normativity erases the lines separating war from peace.4 In the second part of the chapter, I connect Schmitt’s insights on America’s racial reversal to a more developed analysis of President Trump’s use of federal troops to shut down anti-racist protests in the summer of 2020 – protests he dubbed as a terrorist threat. Here, I will link such civil emergency programmes as the ‘GARDEN PLOT’ (and its more recent iterations, ‘CONPLAN 3501’ and ‘CONPLAN 3502’) to a change in national security policy post-9/11.. In the so-called ‘Global War on Terror,’ as much as in the reactionary forces of Trump’s white-minority seekers of ‘greatness’, popular violence and the repressive arm of the state replace such civil-society activities as public debate. Throughout his administration, Trump’s embrace of the Confederate flag, civil-war monuments and generals, as well as his incitement of the January 6th insurrection,, are understood as audible overtures to a white nationalist base. In the context of the ‘great replacement’, whiteness loses its presumptively normative status, putting Trump’s white base on edge: Communitive reason becomes masculinst rage. This is the age of a new American ‘partisan,’ a term used by Schmitt to explain the perpetual tension between political force and representative democracy. In the Trumpscene, white ‘greatness’ is discplaced by a rising senseof universal marginalisation. Here, the strange form of amass-minority identity emerges within the US population, and connects to a state of war within civil society where the state also takes an active role. In The Information Bomb, Paul Virilio poses a question about war and epistemology, linking power and knowledge to the theme of ‘total domination’: ‘[Is it] the civilianization or [the] militarization of science?’ (2006, p. 1). While President Trump’s disregard for scientific consensus and evidence-based reason is well-known, for the general purposes of this chapter, we might rephrase Virilio’s question in a Schmittian way: Is it the preservation of civil society or its de-civilianisation?5 The word ‘de-civilianisation’ is used here to designate post-white autogenic violence, as synonymous with the Trumposcene. Attorney General Barr’s inducement to couple foreign agents with domestic public activism was, in this way, consistent with the comingling of military violence with social relations in the post-9/11 context. The ‘shadowy networks’, ‘elusive enemies’, ‘multiple fronts’ and ‘asymmetric battle lines’ of national security discourse from 2001 onward mark a shift in war doctrine, whereby omnipresent, invisible foes are positioned within civil society, and phantom terrors invade peaceable social norms (Bush 2002, p. 5). The 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States reports that ‘rogue powers exploit ambiguity, and deliberately blur the lines between civil and military goals’ (Trump 2017, p. 2). Twenty years after war entered the territorial boundaries of the United States, former Defense Department leaders agonize over the ‘hijacking of Homeland Security’, lamenting the transformation of citizens into unwitting paramilitary rogues (Chertoff 2020). Such 214

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sentiments extend beyond Agamben’s well-known reference to Carl Schmitt describing a permanent state of emergency in which the exception is the rule (2005). There is no return to normal in the Trumpocene, for the same reason Mbembe pronounced that the presumption of peace at the centre of empire was always necro-politics in civilian disguise: state violence was inseparable from the civilian life, even if war was officially partitioned from civil society by some invisible territorial remove (2019). In a post-9/11 twist on this historical legacy and as an extension of Agamben’s elaboration of Schmitt, I would argue that each attempt to re-civilianise the never-really-civilianised activities of civil society – each iteration of loss and failed recovery attempting to ‘make American great again’ – has accelerated the removal of an already permeable divide between war and peace. President Trump, whose requests for large-scale military parades were rebuffed by the Pentagon, anointed himself a ‘wartime president’ early in his tenure as commander-in-chief (Oprysko and Luthi 2020). Appropriate to the Trumpocene, the myriad indeterminate wars he seemed to imagine (against the Democratic Party, terror, COVID-19, ‘radical left-wing groups’, climate scientists, Chinese state capitalism, fake news, and so on) were said to be both on the verge of being defeated and representative of an enemy whose threat is near by and never ending. The President also suggested that politics would erupt into ‘violence’ if the Republicans lost the 2018 election (Shear 2018). In reality, such violence did not occur until the election of Joe Biden as President in 2021. However, Trump’s penchant for hard power was already evident in his desire to militarise the United States–Mexico border and to divert military funds to this signature project. This desire for the Southern wall was redoubled by a ‘surge’ of troops in Democrat-run cities with protracted racial unrest.6 Notably, Trump comprised his domestically deployed Homeland Security agents and ‘specialised border patrol groups’ (selected from Immigration and Customs Enforcement), who were presumed to be loyal to the executive branch ( Johnson 2020). Given this focus of border enforcement on US public activism, the body politic becamedivided by foreign forces lurking within the populace. National boundaries were both multiplied and inwardly directed. As BLM protests were addressed by the US government as a matter of immigration policing, anti-racist activists became internationalised and actions of protest became untethered from a constitutional protection.7 Here, Mbembe’s colonialist necro-politics emerges with strange historical echoes: ‘all the manifestations of war and hostility that a European legal imaginary relegated to the margins finds a place to reemerge [within] the colonies’ (2019, p. 78). The usual dividing lines between foreign, violent and ‘out there’, and domestic, peaceful and ‘in here’, became dotted and redrawn. As local officials decried Trump’s descent into ‘flat-out urban warfare, gun violence spiked in metropolitan areas’ (Dimanno 2020). Even before the large-scale anti-racist protests that defined the summer of 2020, a poll of United States citizens (nearly two-thirds of whom were registered voters) reflected the popular belief that ‘racial and class divisions are getting worse in America’, and ‘the country is on the edge of civil war’ (Axelrod 2019). Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff from 2007 to 2011, suggests that Trump ‘laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest this country’ and, equally offensively, ‘risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces’ (2020). But Mullen’s attempt to keep politics from democracy’s forbidden zones raises key questions about the overlap between war and what were once presumed to be peaceful social activities. The broader notions of risk, politicisation, the military, and civil protest call for further explanation of de-civilianised civil society in the never-more-vexed context of white decline. As the twenty-first century ushers in the so-called ‘great replacement’, United States citizens are reminded time and again: white identity is no longer conceivable as the 215

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unspoken, unexamined and unmarked racial norm.8 Whiteness on edge is criss-crossed by new lines of divisions; it is marginalised, and now poised to defend the indefensible, seeking security only to be made less secure. Put simply, the rise of the ‘minority white’ is another ‘never-seen-before’ event that we can place alongside the domestic deployment of soldiers. But how exactly is the minoritisation of whiteness related to the de-civilianisation of civil society within American democracy at large, and what does this mean for our understanding of collective agency in an era of social violence and political revolt?

Masses versus people A commonwealth exists as a res publica, as a public sphere, and is challenged if a non-public sphere develops within it, which actually repudiates this public sphere. (Schmitt 1988, p. 56) As Schmitt theorises in the above quotation, the public sphere contains within it more than the sum of its parts: there are always groups, individuals and even non-human entities that are both present and essential to the public sphere but nowhere recognized to be within it. Balibar describes this public versus non-public relation in the following terms: when ‘a “social” state excludes rebels, abnormals, deviants, and foreigners […] in a latent and sometimes open way, extremism is found not only at the margins, but also exists at the center’ (2017, p. 41). In this immanent – or, we could say, absent-present – manner, the nonpublic sphere is depicted as part of the social grouping that society, itself, repudiates. Thus as Schmitt claims,the ‘bourgeois class’ is eventually ‘displaced by the partisan’, whose ‘goal is the destruction of the existing social order’ in a ‘revolutionary civil war’ (2007a, p. 72). For reasons that will become evident below, the opposite of a people in Schmitt’s sense is not simply the people’s enemy. The other of the people designates a special kind of political conflict made possible by the intra-state divisions outlined by the masses. For now, and by way of introducing Schmitt’s concept of the political to non-experts of his vast and varied corpus, we can simply note some key terms: ‘public sphere’, ‘partisan’ and ‘war’. At stake in Schmitt’s affirmation of the non-public sphere is a critique of what he refers to as ‘legal positivism’, whereby individuals, civil society and the state are institutionally separate but ideologically connected in a consensual and unified way. In this Hobbesian version of the social contract, protection and obedience, as well as individual identity and the law, are balanced: citizens forgo their natural right of political redress through force and surrender to the sovereign the exclusive ability to distinguish friend from foe. In exchange for political neutrality, the ‘indifferent concept of equality’ apropos the liberal state allows the citizen-subject to be free. But this freedom us only available to the extent the citizen is also governable (1988, p. 13). Schmitt describes the concept of the majority in the natural law tradition as a precarious political arrangement subject to non-public forms of expression, as determined by scaling up (or, more likely, the failure to scale up) the correlation between the individual, the state and society. He argues that the myth of the majority in classical liberalism’s integration of individuals within a public sphere means the denial, rather than the expression, of politics, rendering ‘unity’ a god-like abstraction unavailable to reason (2005, p. 45). Indeed, the political determination of friend–enemy groupings is neutralised and negated as it pertains to citizens, because the sovereign’s recognition of citizenship means rejecting ‘might’ for ‘rights’. Within the liberal model, the citizen limits politics to the normative procedures of ‘openness and discussion alone’ (1988, p. 29). For Schmitt, sovereignty is established by the state’s unique ability to ‘distinguish between war 216

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and peace’, ‘bracket war from civility’ and ‘forge decisive [social] entities which transcend the mere societal associational groupings’ (2007b, p. 73). Schmitt therefore asks: ‘Does the British Empire rest on universal and equal voting rights for all of its inhabitants? It could not survive for a week on this foundation; with their terrible majority, the colored would dominate the whites’ (1988, p. 10). With the term ‘terrible majority’, Schmitt refers to the ‘masses’ of women, servants, slaves, and indentured workers, who threaten pluralist democracy because while they are materially essential to its existence they are not officially accounted for. This is how the few who are officially tabulated as citizens maintain control of the represented multitide whose work produces ant given nation’s wealth. Classical liberalism is founded not on reason and equality, Schmitt would say, but on a numerical sleight-of-hand that maintains the invisibility of whiteness as the racial norm. Parliamentary representation may well claim to hold forth from ‘a circle of equals’, but the scale of representation is carefully limited, so as ‘not to exceed the equality of universal and equal suffrage’ (1988, p. 10). ‘A democracy of mankind, or a mass democracy’, Schmitt continues, ‘is what the liberal state cannot realize’ (1988, p. 11, emphases mine). Similarly, from Balibar, ‘the political unification that makes a people out of a multitude can never entirely reduce multiplicity’ (2017, p. 63). The words ‘mass’, ‘multitude’ and ‘multiplicity’ challenge the sovereign’s assumed capability to represent and preserve social coherence. Thus in the struggle betweenstate power and popular contention the public sphere is periodically subject to collapse. Similar to the other’s relation ­ to the individual, the masses are both absent from and essential for the liberal myth of political representation. This is because the reduction of multiplicity can never be fully reductive. The people as a ‘political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all humanity and the entire world’ (1988, p. 56). Rather, ‘momentum [for universality] must come from the masses themselves’ (1988, p. 71). Schmitt’s idea that ‘communism would be the first true democracy’ (1988, p. 29) reveals the proximity between his concept of the political not only to Hobbes’s idea of the multitudes but also Lenin and Mao’s concept of ‘creative proletarian forces’ (1988, p. 72). In a characteristic inversion of the apolitical citizen as surreptitiously complicit in state violence, Schmitt writes: ‘the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism [wherein] war can be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’; or, paraphrasing Proudhon, ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’ (1988, p. 54). For Schmitt, humanity at large is being cheated from real political agency. Ironically, legal pluralism writ in too narrow a conceot of the human is the legal means by which ‘the state encompasses and relativizes all [communal] antitheses’ (1988, p. 33). According to this line, which is strongly associated with Hegel, the ‘state is qualitatively distinct from society and higher than it’ (1988, p. 24). Here, Schmitt’s continued critique of the integrationist ideals of legal positivism advances in the form of a conflict between ‘qualitative abstraction’ and ‘quantitative reality’. ‘Quality of being’, as determined by the state’s friendly relation to the citizen, ‘makes it possible for him to avoid any definitive position’, in accordance with the pure individualism of the ‘political romantic’ (1985, p. 73). As Schmitt further suggests,‘the identity of sovereign and subject, the identity of subject and object of state of authority, [and] the identity of state and law’ rest on ‘the identity of the quantitative (numerical majority) with the qualitative ( justice of law)’ (1988, pp. 26, 31). For individual particularity to be subsumed by legal sameness, the numbers of different identities and the number of values enforced by the state must match. This matching is what Schmitt overturns by pointing out legal pluralism’s inability to scale up to ‘real’ equality in the ‘all-embracing’ sense of ‘great masses of peoples’ (1988, p. 95). 217

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The quantitative excess of subjects-as-masses threatens to overturn the categorical presumption of the citizen as belonging to the state, despite the state’s need for the rediction of ‘real’ multiplicity and the regimentation of the masses. In focusing on the non-public sphere within the public sphere, Schmitt demonstrates a ratcheting up of ‘the inescapable contradiction [between] liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity’ (1988, p. 17). Schmitt’s ‘masses’ are not ‘really’ reducible to political passivity by way of a pluralist legal solution or the citizen’s integration into the Leviathan as a mere discussant in the realm of rational communication; rather, they are the foundation of partisan political unrest. When the numbers contradict category – as when the state’s equation with civil society becomes imbalanced or the friend–enemy grouping is redrawn – the state becomes a ‘form of democracy fated […] to destroy itself in the problem of a formation of will’ (1988, p. 28). Schmitt offers no guarantee for Hegelian continuity between ‘the identity of the governed and the governing’ (1988, p. 15). Rather, he foreshadows ‘a decisive transfer of the concept of minority from the quantitative into the qualitative’ as a precondition of the ‘crisis of parliamentary democracy’ and a precursor to ‘the shaping of the popular will’ (1988, p. 26). Before transitioning to the return of Schmitt’s partisan apropos popular will, I will offer a brief account of multi-racialism in the United States Census 2000. This is meant to provide a clear example of a Schmittian conflict between the ‘quantitative’challenges of ‘mass democracy’ and the ‘qualitative’ abstractions of parliamentary representation’. In the case of the multi-racial Census, the legal recognition of difference disintegrates civil rights–based claims to legal justice, ironically, and in a way Schmitt would recognize, by evoking liberal forms of racial pluralism. In this way, the state diminishes progressive racial politics by extending – not ending – the classical line of representative neutrality. Put in the terms introduced by Schmitt, by affirming a check-all-that-applies option the United States Census 2000 used a ‘qualitative’ recognition of ‘quantitative’ difference that resulted in a politically vacuous form of ontological relativism. Leading up to the US Census 2000, multi-racial activists spoke enthusiastically of undoing the Office of Management and Budget’s ‘official five’ race and ethnic categories as a ‘strategy of resistance.’ Their goal was to complete America’s ‘integrationist’ dream by providing a more capacious way to include more races and combinations of races beyond existing Census options (Daniel 2002, p. 3). This was designed to ‘challenge the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness that originates in Eurocentric thinking’ (Daniel 2002, p. 13). However, the connection between the United States civil rights struggle and multi-racial legal positivism ends there. Despite limiting Census respondents to a choice of two combinations, the check-all-that-apply option increased the tabulation of state-recognised racial identities from 5 to 128 possibilities (O’Hare, 1998, p. 44). Categorical speculation on this order is something that traditional American civil rights organisations find understandably disquieting.9 As La Raza and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were quick to point out, the expansion of identity-based claims for civil rights can be manipulated, such that the expansion of minority recognition by the state reduces the state’s ability to enforce anti-racist jurisprudence. Thus, the undoing of the ‘official five’ of the Office of Management and Budget allowed civil rights law to be undermined in the name of perfecting civil society. This occurred by increasing the number of minorities tallied by the state rather than suppressing such recognition. In this sense, Schmitt’s transference of the ‘quantitative’ minority (of individuals) into ‘qualitative’ state recognition (by the law) decoupled legal positivism’s equation between the individual, the society and the state. Moreover, paradoxically, the state effectively ended its ability to enforce racial justice in the name of liberal pluralism. 218

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This action had two consequences: first, the state’s multiplication of minority identities serves to subvert longstanding minority–majority relations; second, the demographic recognition of racial multutudes puts the remnants of a white majority into an edgy state of defence. The majority race is threatened by the self-recognition of its coming disappearance within the shadowy network of yet greater numbers. In this crafting of a new minoritymajority, the concept the neutral citizens is replaced by the new ‘American partisan.’ Once the minority en masse reaches a point of numerical superiority – as in the case of ‘minority whiteness’, and as exemplified by the multi-racial multitudes – the state is compelled to move the majority, replacing white identity’s quantitative (i.e. individual numerical) status with one that is qualitative (i.e. normative juridical). But in the epoch of the Trumpocene, efforts toward this minority–majority inversion have both ignited white ethno-nationalism and invited the cancellation of civil rights in the name of their further protection: hence, exception become the rule, apropos Agamben: the state of emergency is new normal. In a political feedback loop whose only outcome is force and the increase of force, the pursuit of white normativity as the default settting for American identity is intensified because of itsinthinkable absence. Bringing whiteness back again only intensifies the political loop: the more Trump’s white nationalist base seeks its ‘greatness’, the surely going back ‘again’ to old political norms disappear. According to this self-cancelling logic, more equals different, and difference is increased as the once legally defensible racial categories of the civil rights era are summarily erased. The State’s recognition of all multi-racial combinations thus opens up the possibility to cease all identification of race. In the crisis of liberalism exemplified here, the ‘quantitative’ reality of the masses collided with the ‘qualitative’ abstraction of their legal representation. This demographic bait-and-switch portends a new body of civil rights law that could potentially end the civil rights era. The political mathematics at work in the US Census 2000 is commensurate with Hobbes’s definition of scientific reason as ‘nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of general names agreed upon’ (1651). Only in this instance, ‘general’ names exceed the ability for the state to make racial generalizations. Another example of the quantitative crisis within legal positivism is captured by the Trump administration’s attempt to include a ‘citizenship’ category in the US Census, some 20 years after the older categories of identity were expanded to the point of their collapse. In the US system of Census enumeration, both ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens’ are counted, bodies matter whether or not they are recognised by the state as being legal. Section two of the fourteenth amendment of the United States Constitution holds that the federal government must count ‘the whole number’ of people in a given voting district –citizens as well as foreigners, the so-called people as well as the masses. This ‘whole number’ is counted every ten years; as it fluctuates, the political representation within a given voting district changes, and Congressional members apportioned accordingly. Thus, racial categories and their demographic indices are forever in flux. But tallying the numbers by narrowing the pool from ‘people’ to ‘citizens’, as per Trump’s directive, would have had especially profound ramifications following the 2020 Census ( Jackson 2020). This is because ‘the whole number’ of people – and not merely the number of legally recognised citizens – determines the allocation of billions of dollars of federal funding for social programming. Counting bodies as well as identites is fundamental to the maintenance – or the dismantling – of the social welfare state. Counting is also fundamental to the replacement of the welfare state with a body politic whose raison d’etre is war. The desire to enumerate only legally recognized ‘citizens’ exemplifies a stark attempt at a Hobbesian political ‘reckoning’, whereby ‘adding and subtracting’ individual identities would result in the collapse of a ‘generality of names’, because as with the 219

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Census 2000, the ‘qualitative notion of the ‘general’ would no longer be in harmony with its ‘quantitative’ status as a ‘whole’. Trump’s attempt to frighten undocumented immigrants into ignoring the Census is said to have erased an estimated 6.5 million people (Brown 2019, p. 2). Worse still, the Trump administration’s decision to end the 2020 count four weeks early was decried by Census Bureau officials as disadvantaging the nation’s hardest residents to enumerate, leaving nearly four out of ten households uncounted. This assault on the United States Constitution in mathematical form represents another example of Schmitt’s politics of numbers, whereby a de facto situation of ‘wholeness’ (i.e. quantity, as in the counting of all people) is diminished through its de jure affirmation (i.e. quality, as in the suturing of identity to law). As discussed above, the state’s tally of residents regardless of legal status determines the number of senators representing a given state in the United States House of Representatives. Ironically, the greater the focus on citizenship, the smaller the number of senators to represent a larger proportion of the ‘whole’ people, whose numbers are both large and real, but remain unrecognizable in a politically viable way. The ‘whole number’ of people, rather than the legally parsed number of ‘citizens’, also determines the number of votes each state is granted in the electoral college. Thus, the manipulation of those numbers could have helped Trump to escape the results of the popular vote in the 2020 election, much as he did in 2016. The addition of a citizenship category on the 2020 Census would have also likely expanded right-wing political control of certain districts. Falling short of this drastic step, the President sought to remove undocumented residents from the count by ordering the Census Bureau to produce a state-by-state tally of citizens independent of the 2020 count, so that non-citizens could be manually subtracted from the population’s whole. As with the multi-racial Census in 2000, this collapse of political representation hinged on widening the focus on the citizens’ ‘qualitative’ legal status. At the same time, this widening serves to narrow the ‘quantitative’ representation of the ‘whole’ number of people. White House communication on this issue reported that ‘our current immigration system jeopardises our national security and puts American communities at risk’ (2018). Schmitt would have recognised the political contours of this ‘security risk’ inherent within positivist forms of racial demography.. of the primacy of ‘security’ a formative element of ‘American community’ depends on the sovereign’s right to redraw friend–enemy groupings and suspend peace in the exceptional event of state sanctioned political violence. As Schmitt claims, ‘no technical invention can ever calculate its objective political results’, save by ‘the means of domination of the masses on a large scale’ (2007b, p. 92). He goes on to describe early modern media technologies as a means of domination – namely ‘the printing press [as] the basis of freedom’ (1988, p. 38). Schmitt traces the liberal myth of political force from the public sphere to the history of communication technology. In the political context of white-minority America, where ‘quantitative’ realities collide with ‘qualitative’ ideals and science recombines with fake news, the connection between media change and war is important. As Schmitt elaborates, ‘technology appears to be the domain of peace’. But he curiously adds, ‘the neutrality of technology is something other than the neutrality of former domains. Technology is always only an instrument and a weapon; precisely because it serves all it is not neutral’ (emphasis mine, 2007b, p. 91). In this vein, he portends the return of Hobbesian ‘multitudes’, or what I have called in the context of whiteness in the US, a coming mass minority, reaching again for a numerically expansive term. His version of a non-neutral, re-politicised and re-militarised form of technologically inspired ‘allness’ subverts the integrationist ideals of political representation. The technologies of surveillance, upibuitous data harvesting, the omnipresence of the screen and myriad other modern war applications eliminate old notions 220

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of the private-public split. The easy networking of political extremists are part of a vast computational war asenal allowing no normative centre for social relations where peace can be reliably secured.10 Schmitt’s ‘allness’ begins where civility ends – with an autogenic self-cancellation of legal and social ideals. When he writes ‘mathematical relativism and nominalism operate concurrently’ (2005, p. 34), he is not suggesting that politics themselves will end when mass minorities are released from state security and civil rights–based forms of legal redress, as we saw with US Census 2000. Rather, the concept of politics limited to discussion, mutual respect, and social moderation gives over to militancy, at any number of ideological extremes. ‘The bourgeois era’, Schmitt suggests, ‘is at an end’ (1988, p. 63), and the future calls for ‘new friend-enemy distinctions’ (2007b, p. 95). What comes next is more difficult set of ‘distinctions’ to surmise.

A new kind of enemy A new kind of enemy requires a new concept for defending the US homeland. (‘Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support’ 2005) In closing this chapter, I wish to apply Schmitt’s concept of the political to a new ‘kind of enemy’, consistent with his displacement of classical liberalism’s individual–civil society– state equation with his definition of the partisan. I also wish to extend the lesson above about the autogenic collapse of classical liberalism – or, in Balibar’s terms, the ‘terror at the heart of civility’ (2017, p. 58). Characteristic of the United States national security strategy after 9/11, the above quotation designates the ‘new enemy’ as ‘fundamentally different from those faced during the Cold War’ (Department of Defense [DOD] 2005, pp. 13, 40). ‘Civil support’ is offered in a context of ‘war whose length and scope may be unprecedented’ (DOD 2005, p. 1). The term ‘new enemy’ expands the scope of national security strategy to ‘encompass forward-reaching preventative activities, including pre-emption’ (DOD 2005, p. 8). Accordingly, war has come to exist in formerly peaceful zones. Past security doctrine ‘must change its conceptual approach to Homeland defense [and] no longer think in terms of the “home” game and the “away” game […] there is only one game […] [the] new enemy’ (DOD 2005, p. 40). This belies a state of emergency in which, despite the desire for retrospective American ‘greatness’, there is no civil society ideal left to secure ‘again’ – no standard of social correction, no integration and no unconflicted national scenario to guide our safe return. Political enmity escalates and expands, but not in strictly oppositional terms. Instead, the ‘new enemy uses asymmetric means to penetrate our defenses and exploit the openness of our society’ (DOD 2005, p. 1). As Schmitt notes, ‘war is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever-present possibility it is the leading presupposition which creates […] specifically political behavior’ (2007b, p. 34). In contemporary security doctrine, the ‘ever-present possibility’ of war turns into its omnipresence. Moreover, by replacing civil society’s ‘abstractions and normative ideals’ with ‘the real possibility’ of recognizing new ‘friend-enemy distinctions’ (2007b, p. 33), the post-liberal state ‘brings about the worst enmities, finally a war of all against all’ (2007b, p. 67). In this weaponised version of ‘allness’ recalled by Schmitt (once again in reference to Hobbes), the citizen reverts in status to the multitude, and partisan politics emerge anew. In the American tradition of dividing the planet into sectors of military dominance known as ‘commands’, the ‘new enemy’ documents in American war archive emphasises the key role played by the United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM). This Command has 221

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initiated a permanent state of war within the so-called ‘homeland’. NORTHCOM is the most recently devised of 11 globally unified combatant commands, established in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Its stated purpose is to ‘execute Homeland defenses and civil support missions within the continental US’ (DOD 2005, p. 8), as well as to deploy military activity in response to ‘domestic complex catastrophes’ (Office of Secretary of Defense [OSD] 2012, p. 1). At this level of ‘domestic complexity’, the ‘immediate life-saving capacities’ needed to respond to natural disaster ‘incidents’ are thought to fall within military parameters; but politically-orientated public events are also deemed national security threats (OSD 2012, p. 4). The Domestic Operations Law Handbook associated with CONPLAN 3502 (i.e. the latest ‘concept plan’ for the applying military action to civil disturbance and a guiding document for NORTHCOM) states: ‘Military authorities have the authority to detain rioters, looters, or other civilians committing criminal offenses’ (Domestic Operational Law Handbook 2015). Furthermore, in the event of a national security emergency involving public disorder, state boundaries would be redrawn into ten sectors, with NORTHCOM operating to enforce the newly created borders. A ‘terrorist attack or threat of terrorist attack’, ‘civil disturbance’ and danger posed by undocumented immigrants converge into a common security threat, calling for what the Department of Defense calls an ‘all hazard response’ (US Northern Command 2008, pp. v, xi, 3). In the NORTHCOM military model, immigration – and, by direct link, the minoritisation of whiteness– is implicitly connected to state security. President Trump’s use of military forces in response to anti-racist activism in 2020 operated to further securitise whiteness. His response called for military support, as outlined by CONPLAN 3502; however, the origins of whiteness as a military matter extend further back to the military suppression of racial unrest in the 1960s, the ‘Posse Comitatus Act’ of 1878, the US civil war, the ‘Insurrection Act’ of 1807 and the history of settler colonialism in the form of Puritan immigration. The Insurrection Act, which does not require Congressional authorisation, allows the President to ‘call into federal service such of the militia of other States, in the number requested by that State, the use of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to suppress and insurrection’ (10 US Code, § 252). The specifically racial nature of military responses to civilian unrest goes back to the ‘Suppression of Rebellion Act’ declared on the eve of the United States Civil War in 1861, which also informed the United States ‘Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan’. This plan, also known by its cryptonym, GARDEN PLOT, was drafted in response to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and demonstrations against the unpopular war in Vietnam. It was last activated by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 to restore order in response to the Los Angeles riots following the jury acquittal of officers involved in the brutal beating of Rodney King.11 The 1871 Insurrection Act, which has garnered praise and support from United States Republican Congressmen and President Trump alike, authorises ‘the use of militia and armed forces […] whenever the President considers [certain] obstructions, combinations, or assemblages […] rebellious or unlawful’ (10 US Code, § 252). The fully expansive – and generic – sweep of this legal-bureaucratic discourse is worth pausing over. It allows us to ask how citizens are assembled, dis- and re-assembled in the legal sense, and how they combine and re-combine as political entities that either obstruct or uphold the law. Schmitt’s emphasis on the collision of ‘quantitative’ realities (i.e. real numbers of people) and ‘qualitative’ ideals (i.e. a people’s legally recognised form) continues to be applicable here. When the people’s number conflicts with a person’s individual juridical value – as seen in the ‘mathematical relativism’ of the United States Census – they are released from legal protection. More radically, this political arithmetic opens the door to Schmitt’s explicitly war-based concerns, pertaining to the state’s ability to target its enemies and, more broadly, engage in war against 222

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its very citizenry in the very name of protecting them. The GARDEN PLOT document lists six ‘indicators of potential violence’ that adjoin the twin political flashpoints of ‘minority whiteness’ and the ‘asymmetric enemy’ at the core of weaponised ‘mathematical relativism’ (US Department of the Army 1968). Items (1) through (3) highlight conflicts over wealth and property, such as ‘unemployment’, ‘income disparity’ and ‘increased crime’; and items (4) and (6) focus on ‘declining rapport’ between officials and law enforcement, specifically ‘protests by minority groups’ concerning ‘police brutality’. Each of these indicators could be applied to the Trumpocene as accurate descriptions of the social justice movements emerging in the early 2020s. However, item (5), ‘migrations of large numbers of minority groups’, is the most relevant for our understanding of the current contours of racial complexity in the United States as uniquely techno-quantitative. Without naming the ‘great displacement’ explicitly, United States national security strategy refers to changes in racial demography within a white-minority setting. The alignment of ‘large numbers’ with ‘minority groups’ foreshadows a condition that was not explicitly named by the civil rights preoccupations of the 1960s, but featured centrally in the ‘all hazard’ national security strategies after 9/11. ‘Large numbers’ can be taken to mean the scaling up of minority status as both an extension and a hollowing out of civil rights–based legal positivism in the name of civil rights. In the context of the abandonment of the Black/white racial binary claimed by multiracial Census activists, the rise in ‘minority whiteness’ and the ‘asymmetrical’ slippage of friend–enemy groupings, national fragmentation and nationalist fervour are mutually constitutive. Schmitt defines civil war as ‘the dissolution of the state as an organised political entity, internally peaceful, territorially closed, and impenetrable to aliens’ (2007b, p. 47). By focusing on the quantitative repositioning of minority identity on the leading edge of the nation’s forthcoming mass-minority event, and recalling legal positivism’s integrationist charge to acquire the state’s ‘qualitative’ valuation, we can see how the politics of classical liberalism are being supplanted on their own terms. The National Security Strategy of the United States, signed by President Trump in 2017, uses Schmitt’s foundational term ‘sovereignty’ three times on only the first page, before embarking on the protection-fragmentation of national identity as a central security theme. The word ‘sovereignty’ is used in an unusually explicit way in this document, performing Schmitt’s definition of the state as the only entity legally allowed to designate friend from foe. But the ‘defense of our borders, and protection of our sovereignty’ that the strategy describes also extends to a ‘new enemy’ within. Borders abound intra-nationally, and the nation’s people are put on notice: peace and enmity may, at any moment, comingle, if so determined by the sovereign. Thus, ‘an extraordinarily dangerous world’ calls for security to penetrate all quarters of civil society, because ‘a wide range of threats have intensified in recent years’ (Trump 2017, p. 1). This expansion of scale (war’s ‘wideness’) again raises the spectre of a collision between ‘quantitative’ individual difference and ‘qualitative’ legal value. We are reminded of the ‘defeat of Fascism’ in World War II and told ‘the immigration system is central to national security’ (Trump 2017, p. 9). The ‘anti-Western views creating divisions among ourselves’ are decried as ‘a discredit to democracy’ (Trump 2017, p. 3), while ‘the non-state actor’ riddles the public sphere with permanent and indeterminable risk. According to this version of national security, it is not only the threat of the foe, but, more importantly, the foe’s ‘wide range’ and occulted position within civil society that most ‘intensifies’ the all-encompassing immanence of danger. The ‘divisions among ourselves’ run in multiple directions, depending on the precise construal of ‘us’ and ‘them’: definitions of Western identity as the opposite of ‘anti-Western’ are removed. 223

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America enters a state of national ‘crises at this expanded scale’ (Trump 2017, p. 7). Because a secure sense of national identity, similar to Schmitt’s friend–enemy grouping, is as ‘intensely’ desired as it is unattainable, society must not only ‘be defended’ (as Foucault famously wrote), but in its defebse society is also subsumed by military violence. The word ‘intensity’ in Trump’s iteration of the National Security Strategy of the United States works in cooperation with Schmitt’s use of the same term – especially in his abandonment of traditional war oppositions of state-on-state political violence in order to attend to the enemy’s shadowy networks within. While the ‘classical laws of war […] recognized clear distinctions, above all between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, enemy and criminals, the partisan could only be a marginal phenomenon’ (Schmitt 2007a, p. 9). The classical distinctions of war no longer hold, because the lost ideal of American ‘greatness’ has been detached from the ‘greatness’ of its real (as apposed to its legally identifiable) numbers. This ‘all hazard’ threat is how the ‘irregularity of the partisan’ becomes paradoxically endorsed by ‘the regularity he challenges’ (Schmitt 2007a, pp. 3, 88). Schmitt is clear that the ‘distinction of friend-enemy’ does not depend on fixed ideological or biological absolutes (contra to those who would link him to racism).12 Rather, the partisan enemy within US civil society ‘denote[s] the utmost degree of intensity [as] a union of separation, an association of dissociation’ (Schmitt 2007b, p. 27). Politics is not simply the sovereign’s monopoly on legal violence, but also ‘the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings’ (2007b, p. 38). Schmitt adds, ‘technical-industrial progress will create only a new intensity of new appropriations, distributions, and productions, and thereby only intensify the old questions’ (2007a, p. 80). His repeated reference to the ‘new intensity’ for ‘old questions’ beckons the return of the partisan on the order of Lenin and Mao: a uniquely volatile form of political alterity whereby the ‘other [exists] in an especially intense way’ (2007b, p. 27). To complicate this statement and apply it to the context of the ‘great displacement’ of both whiteness and the neutral citizen-subject of classical liberalism: political ‘intensity’ occurs when the ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ forms of ‘greatness’ collide. The US white minority edges toward civil war when the ideals of the state no longer reconcile with its real numbers. Perhaps this is the condition Foucault was referring to when he mentioned – and then retracted – his ‘praise of race war’ in his well-known lectures on society and civil defence (Foucault 2003). With this phrase, he was speaking to a sixteenth century notion of race, connected with the regicide of England’s Charles I by the partisan Levellers, who declared civil war against the sovereign on the basis of what could only appear to be, in retrospect, white-on-white political violence. However, Foucault’s point was that we cannot look at whiteness in this way, because the Levellers’ war against aristocratic primogeniture did not recognise race on biologically determinate grounds; nor, more importantly, did the Levellers conceive of a connection between the ‘quantitative’ realities of racial difference in our modern sense and its integrationist ‘qualitative’ ideals. As Foucault assured his audience, he was not talking about ‘race war’ in the Black-versus-white sense of racial difference, or in any pre-constituted ontological terms. Rather, the terms of opposition emerged in the course of a struggle that resulted within a particular kind—the violent kind—of political ‘intensity’. Foucault’s ‘praise of race war’ was meant to affirm a historical moment – one that is either long past or is too close to recognise – in which the ‘identification of people with monarch and nation with sovereign no longer binds everything; but is replaced by a principle of heterogeneity’ (2003, p. 69). This chapter has attempted to show how the unbinding of whiteness from United States majority status is inseparable from the de-civilianisation of civil society. Schmitt’s theory of 224

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politics, and his astute critique of classical liberalism as portending a violent contradiction between the ‘qualitative’ matter of legal representation by the state (i.e. the people) and the ‘quantitative’ matter of forceful political conflict within the public sphere(i.e. the multitides), has contributed to explaining how unprecedented shifts in United States racial demography are connected with the expansion of war. ‘The people’, to repeat Foucault’s line at a moment of historical return he may not have imagined, are no longer bound to the dictates of sovereignty as the classical liberal model would have it. What remains to be seen after liberalism – and after whiteness – is not merely whether the nation’s emergent ‘heterogeneity’ will eventuate in an American race war, but, more to the point of the Trumpocene, what kind of government such partisan violence will bring.

Notes 1 In fact, Facebook reported no evidence of coordinated foreign involvement targeting United States racial protests or the BLM movement. 2 On the provocative term ‘Trumpocene’, see Cohen (2017). 3 Schmitt is well known for his critique of ‘the inebriating consensus which surrounds the big issues [of liberal democracy] today’. For a comprehensive overview of his position, in addition to an excellent introduction to his works, see Balakrishan (2001, p. 261). 4 Notably, between 2000 and 2018, the white population share in the United States fell below 50 per cent in 109 counties across 22 states (see Wines and Fausset 2020). Census projections show that the nation will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, and this projected date moves closer as each new Census is tallied (see Frey 2018). 5 On the relationship between Trump’s authoritarian leanings and his denial of climate science, see Connolly (2019). 6 Ironically – and justifiably – the Trump administration’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic led Mexico to seal itself off from United States ‘intruders’, instead of the other way around. 7 The American Society for Civil Liberties called the surge of armed federal agents within United States cities a constitutional crisis, pointing to the Tenth Amendment, which prohibits federal forces from subsuming the role of state and municipal police (see American Civil Liberties Union 2020). 8 For a full analysis of the demographic shifts around whiteness, and related matters, see Hill (2004). 9 In a letter presented at the congressional hearings in 1993, America’s top civil rights leaders expressed ‘extreme concerned that [the] new [multiracial] category will inadvertently cause confusion and inconsistent reporting’ (see Byrd 2000). Byrd blamed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for maintaining ‘the one drop rule’ and discouraging multi-racial Census reclassification. 10 See Hill (2022). 11 Since World War II, the National Guard has been federalised ten times under the ‘Insurrection Act’. However, from 1969 to 1970, individual National Guard units were called in by state governors 92 times across 31 states and the District of Columbia. Congress amended the Insurrection Act in 2006 with a new statute: ‘Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order’. The revised Act represented an unwarranted expansion of presidential power, making it easier for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act in a wider category of cases. This amendment was repealed in 2008, thereby restoring the original Act of 1871. 12 According to Balibar, Schmitt’s embrace of anti-Semitism is ‘philosophically […] the opposite of biological racism’ (2017, p. 45).

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Whiteness in the Trumpocene Myers, M. (2020). Esper encourages governors to ‘dominate the battlespace’ to put down nationwide protests. Military Times. [Online], 1st June. Available from: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/ ­ your-military/2020/06/01/secdef-encourages-governors-to-dominate-the-battlespace-to-putdown-nationwide-protests/ [Accessed 15/01/21]. Office of Secretary of Defense [OSD]. (2012). Implementation of the defense support of complex catastrophes initiative. [Online]. Available from: https://publicintelligence.net/dod-complex-catastrophesinitiative/ Available from: https://publicintelligence.net/dod-complex-catastrophes-initiative/ [Accessed 14/3/23]. O’Hare, W. (1998). Managing multiple-race data. American Demographics, April, pp. 42–44. Oprysko, C. and Luthi, S. (2020). Trump labels himself ‘a wartime president’ combating coronavirus. Politico. [Online], 18th March. Available from: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/18/ trump-administration-self-swab-coronavirus-tests-135590 [Accessed 15/08/20]. Schmitt, C. (1985). Political romanticism. Baltimore, MD: MIT Press. Schmitt, C. (1988). The crisis of parliamentary democracy. Baltimore, MD: MIT Press. Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (2007a). Theory of the partisan. Candor, NY: Telos Press. Schmitt, C. (2007b). The concept of the political. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shear, M. (2018). If GOP loses hold on Congress, Trump warns, Democrats will enact change ‘quickly and violently’. New York Times. [Online], 28th August. Available from: https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/28/us/politics/trump-evangelical-pastors-election.html [Accessed 15/08/20]. Tavernise, S. (2018). Why the announcement of a looming white minority makes demographers nervous. New York Times. [Online], 22nd November. Available from: https://www.nytimes. com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.html [Accessed / 15/3/2023]. The White House. (2018). National security threats: Chain migration and the visa lottery system. [Online], 1st February. Available from: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/national- securitythreats-chain-migration-visa-lottery-system/ [Accessed 14/5/2023]. Trump, D. (2017). The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC: The White House. Trump, D. (2020). Remarks by President Trump in press conference. The White House. [Online], 14th July. Available from: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarkspresident-trump-press-conference-071420/ [Accessed 13/3/23]. United States Congress. (1790). Naturalization Act of 1790. First US Congress, Second Session. [Online]. Available from: https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/h-r-40-naturalization-bill-march-4-1790 [Accessed 14/3/23]. US Department of the Army. (1968). Civil disturbance plan ‘GARDEN PLOT’. [Online], 10th December. Available from: https://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/DA-CivilDisturbPlanGardenPlot_1968. pdf [Accessed 14/3/23]. US Northern Command. (2008). CONPLAN 3501–08, Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA). [Online], 16th May. Available from: https://info.publicintelligence.net/USNORTHCOM-DSCA. pdf [Accessed 15/08/20]. Virilio, P. (2006). The information bomb. London: Verso. Wines, M. and Fausset, R. (2020). With census count finishing early, fears of a skewed tally rise. New York Times. [Online], 4th August. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/ us/2020-census-ending-early.html [Accessed 14/3/2023].

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19 THE FUTURE OF WHITENESS Ashley (“Woody”) Doane

Introduction Whiteness has afflicted humankind for more than half a millennium. In recent decades, considerable attention has been devoted to both past and present formations of whiteness, mapping its ongoing role in creating and reproducing the political, economic and social supremacy of people socially defined as ‘white’. Less clear, however, is the road ahead, particularly in the wake of the global anti-racism protests that emerged in the spring of 2020. In this chapter, I begin with an overview of whiteness, emphasising the connection between whiteness, national identity and nationalism. I then outline the contours of the current crisis of whiteness, including the ways in which it is both similar to and different from past crises. This includes what I refer to as the ‘complexity of whiteness’ – referring to its internal variability – and how this influences the present situation. Finally, I offer some ideas on the future direction of whiteness, both as an ideology and as a system of domination.

Whiteness and nationalism To be clear, whiteness represents not only an individual and group identity, but also an ideology – a collection of beliefs and understandings about what race is and how social arrangements and practices should be racially structured. Historically, whiteness was created to legitimise practices such as colonisation, dispossession, enslavement and genocide, aimed at European domination. As whiteness became an organising logic for racialised social systems (Bonilla-Silva 1997), it developed from a mere claim into a locus of power. It is important to emphasise that white ‘identity’ has no meaning apart from whiteness within a racialised social system. Rather, ‘white’ is a socially constructed identity – or, in the words of James Baldwin (1998 [1984]), a ‘lie’ – that embodies a political claim to a position in a social hierarchy, and therefore unearned ‘privilege’. More specifically, following France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher (2008), we can describe whiteness as a system of identities, ideologies and practices that simultaneously exist on a range of levels – that of the individual, that of the institution and that of the nation-state. We know that whiteness is historically and spatially contingent, and that it continually evolves in response to social change and (especially) challenges from racially 228

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-23

The future of whiteness

oppressed groups (Doane 2007, 2017). However, whiteness has some relatively unique properties – particularly its normative nature, which is manifested in its often hidden or obscured claim to represent the political and cultural centre (as Steve Garner (2017) characterised as ‘informal mobilisation’). The overall effect of whiteness is the production, reproduction and defence of a social and political structure in which ‘people defined as white’ are group and individual beneficiaries. As Michelle Christian (2019) emphasises, this dynamic of whiteness operates simultaneously on both societal and global levels.1 In a consideration of whiteness, it is important to discuss the relationship between whiteness and nationalism. Significant work has been done on white nationalist movements (e.g. Hughey 2012; Swain 2002), but these have mainly been viewed as extremist groups (set apart from the ‘mainstream’ of society), espousing a programme of white supremacy and racial separation. This is not my focus. Instead, in this chapter, I examine the connection between whiteness and the idea of the nation, both as the state in an inter-state system and as the people who populate the state. The modern idea of the nation is grounded in white European epistemology, global capitalist expansion and racialised colonial projects. As the modern world system emerged and expanded, the nation-state lent stability for capitalist accumulation, while also providing space for economic manoeuvring. In addition, the idea of the nation could be deployed to arouse popular support for imperial colonial projects. These concepts of the nation and the state have lasted into the post-colonial world of the twenty-first century, shaping both state structures and inter-state organisations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Building upon this base, I theorise that nationality is a socially constructed, contested and flexible group identity – one that is connected to the politics of both the state and the inter-state system. Given the multi-ethnic and multi-racial nature of most nation-states, national identities rely on processes of inclusion and exclusion, determining who is French, Hungarian, Argentine, Brazilian and so forth. In many cases, a dominant racial/ethnic group (Doane 1997; Smith 1991 [1986]) asserts a claim to the centre of the nation – that is, to ownership of the symbols, culture, history and territory that define it. For our purpose, what is important is that, throughout history, when whiteness has been involved, it has been inscribed upon the nation. Consequently, words such as European, American, German, Dutch, French and Australian carry an assumption of whiteness. And in many post-colonial societies, even when nationalism has been used to combat colonialism and achieve national liberation, whiteness and practices of whitening (e.g. blanqueamiento) remain embedded in cultural understandings, political discourses and social structures, as well as practices such as ‘white’ immigration policies and the toleration of interracial intimacies (Christian 2019; van Dijk 2009). An integral aspect of national identity involves the cultural and historical narratives that support and legitimise the idea and existence of the nation. In white-dominated racialised societies, these narratives reinforce whiteness. Within societies that have been shaped by settler-colonialism, histories have been created to erase indigeneity and buttress the claim of white settlers to the physical and political space of the nation (Moreton-Robinson 2015). For example, in the United States, histories have been created to narrate white European origin myths (e.g. those of the ‘Pilgrims’ and the First Thanksgiving, or the Western ‘frontier’), the erasure of Native Americans (Loewen 1995; O’Brien 2010) and the minimisation of the role of enslavement in the economic development of the nation (Baptist 2014; Farrow, Lang and Frank 2005). In the case of colonising metropoles (e.g. the Netherlands), historical and cultural narratives have been formed to downplay the role of colonialism and enslavement in the nation’s economic and political development and to create an image of the ‘innocent’ 229

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Dutch (Nimako and Willemsen 2011; Weiner 2016; Wekker 2016). In both cases, the created narratives have perpetuated a sanitised idea of the nation, in contrast to the racialised ‘other’. Without such narratives, white European and American identities could not exist.2 This process is foundational to the modern racialised state. In a racialised society, the state is not only (following Marx and Engels 1964 [1848]) ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’, but it is also an instrument for carrying out the policies of the dominant racial group. While the claim of civic nationalism, in which the state purportedly represents all citizens, is at the core of a discourse working to obscure the underlying dynamics, the reality is that, in white-dominated societies, both the nation and the state are ‘implicitly white’ (Omi and Winant 2015). This thin veil of mystification enables the dominant white group to cast legislation, make court decisions, enact bureaucratic policies, restrict immigration and distribute social benefits that promote the interests of whites, and to portray these actions as neutral or democratic decisions that reflect ‘national’ interest (Doane 1997; Katznelson 2005). This is not to overlook or downplay certain state actions (e.g. apartheid in South Africa, legal segregation in the United States and the ‘White Australia’ policy) that have explicitly advanced white interests by defining them as isomorphic with the ‘national’ interest. Rather, the underlying point is that any understanding of whiteness must recognise it as inextricably linked to the state and its policies and to constructions of the nation.

Crises of whiteness and the politics of white defensiveness As I have asserted elsewhere (Doane 2017), whiteness – or systemic white supremacy – has always been buttressed by racial ideologies that rationalise and legitimise white social, political and economic domination. White racial ideologies represent a set of understandings – or a lens – through which social structures can be explained, in order to create acquiescence among whites – and, ideally, members of oppressed groups – to white supremacy. For centuries, the dominant white racial ideology was ‘classical racism’, which claimed that humanity can be divided into distinct ‘races’, that ‘race’ is determinative of other traits (e.g. intelligence) and that the ‘white race’ is superior to all other races (cf. Smedley 2007). This provided a political and moral base for the justification of enslavement, colonisation and genocide, which reshaped the world beginning in the 1400s. Specifically, colonial and racial domination were portrayed as, variously, manifest destiny, the ‘white man’s burden’ and ‘God’s will’, which obscured the immoral and criminal nature of these practices. Of note, whites also weaponised Christianity to support their efforts towards colonisation and racial domination (see, e.g., Bernard Magubane’s (1979) discussion on missionaries in South Africa). Ideologies are not static, and they do not exist in a vacuum. Proponents of dominant racial ideologies have always had to confront counter-ideologies – for example, abolition and anti-colonialism – and, accordingly, to adapt racist discourses in an attempt to neutralise opponents. Similarly, changing social contexts due to, among other things, immigration, territorial/imperial expansion and anti-racist/anti-colonial resistance have dramatically altered the social and political terrain. Thus, racialised social systems always face some degree of ideological struggle, and, over the years, whiteness has evolved as a result of these various struggles against it (Doane 2007, 2020). One major development over the past century has been the challenge to whiteness contained in the widespread discrediting of classical racism, colonial ideology and more overt forms of institutional racism, such as de jure segregation and apartheid. While these elements of whiteness have not yet been fully eradicated, they have been diminished. But as many 230

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scholars have noted, in this process, overt racist practices have been replaced by more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion that are incorporated into institutional practices, cultural understandings and even technology and computer algorithms (Benjamin 2019; Feagin 2006; Noble 2018; van Cleve 2016). And with the increasing condemnation of more overt forms of racist discourse, white supremacy has been defended by what has been described as ‘colour-blind racial ideology’, which claims that racism is no longer a meaningful barrier to the social and economic progress of historically oppressed racialised groups (Doane 2003). To be clear, colour-blindness does not refer to a lack of awareness of race, but to the idea that race does not ‘matter’ in social interaction. As detailed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2018 [2003]), colour-blind racial ideology contains a wide range of cultural understandings and discursive practices that enable whites to deny, dismiss and downplay claims of racism and shift explanations for racial inequality to the actions and inactions of oppressed racialised groups. Such notions include ‘naturalisation’, which claims that racial inequality is an outcome of ‘natural’ processes (e.g. individual choice or market forces), and ‘cultural racism’, which claims that the lower status of peoples of colour is due to such factors as poor family values and a lack of work ethic (Bonilla-Silva 2018 [2003]). Over the past decades, colour-blindness and similar strategies for the denial of racism have proven to be effective political weapons that deflect demands for racial justice while retaining a facade of ‘non-racism’, and thereby maintain white support for – and complicity with – the racialised social system that benefits whites (hence Bonilla-Silva’s ‘racism without racists’). And, as I have noted elsewhere (Doane 2014, 2017), colour-blindness has proven to be remarkably flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances and political challenges. For example, racist actions can be explained away as the actions of racist individuals or small groups, which can then be condemned by the white majority as evidence of the post-racial nature of society. Similarly, the quest for ‘diversity and inclusion’, however superficial, is sometimes cited as evidence that society as a whole has moved beyond its racist history ­(Doane 2014).

The crisis of whiteness and the rise of the new white nationalism Whiteness is in crisis. During the summer of 2020, we saw the emergence of global ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests challenging white supremacy and calling for the dismantling of systemic racism. Statues of enslavers and colonisers were toppled or removed from public places. In response, there was a dramatic surge in white nationalism and overt displays of racism. This increase, which had been growing for a decade, caught the attention of scholars of white racism, resulting in a wave of scholarship on white ‘backlash’ and ‘white identity politics’ (see, e.g., Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Fording and Schram 2020; Jardina 2019; Lippard, Carter, and Embrick 2020; McVeigh and Estep 2019). Such concepts pertain to the mobilisation of whites under the guise of protecting the (white) nation against outgroups – and against marginalisation and displacement. But whiteness has always been in crisis. It is entirely predictable that a social formation based upon domination and oppression would engender opposition and require constant adaptation to changing circumstances. Over centuries, white supremacy has had to confront resistance from Indigenous peoples, revolts by enslaved persons, anti-colonial rebellions, abolitionist and anti-racist social movements, global migration and an ever-changing world order. In response, whites have engaged in identity politics, launched reactionary counter-movements and pursued a range of political programmes to protect their dominant group interests. White defensiveness or backlash is an ongoing process, though it varies in 231

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shape and intensity amidst a range of social and historical contexts. In other words, more overt forms of white social and political mobilisation occur when the ‘normal’ functioning of the white racial state (aimed at reproducing systemic racism/white supremacy) is perceived by a significant number of whites as insufficient. In the United States, for example, roots of the current backlash can be traced back to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. White Americans have consistently mobilised to defend their racial privilege and interests against challenges from oppressed groups, as manifested in the White Citizens’ Councils, movements against busing and affirmative action, the ‘Silent Majority’ and ‘Reagan Revolution’, the Tea Party, ‘English only’ and anti-immigration movements, and the growth (later fuelled by the internet) of extreme white supremacist movements (Doane 2020; Omi and Winant 2015). Even the 1950s represent an arbitrary dividing line, as previous decades and centuries saw a continuous chain of anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Indigenous movements (Anderson 2016; Du Bois 1998 [1935]; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Higham 1963). Similar claims can be made about other white-dominated countries around the world, with European nations, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand demonstrating lengthy histories of colonialism, anti-immigrant and anti-guest worker mobilisation, anti-Muslim agitation and anti-Black racism (Fredrickson 1981; Hine, Keaton, and Small 2009; Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014; MacMaster 2001; Nimako and Willemsen 2011). If we view the current ‘crisis’ as manifest in the Tea Party/‘Trumpist’ movement in the United States, the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom and Euroscepticism and the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movements across Europe, then – as already noted – its roots run deep. Over the past decades, attacks on ‘big government’, as well as the ‘liberal media’, out-of-touch elites (‘pointy headed intellectuals’), crime and immorality, and the welfare state (at times racially coded) have planted seeds that have been fertilised by conservative politicians (e.g. Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’, ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganism’), conservative foundations and think tanks (Stefancic and Delgado 1996), and opportunistic ‘religious’ leaders, along with the ‘Christian’ right (Stewart 2019). Following electoral defeats, liberal political parties have often moved to the centre (e.g. New Labour and New Democrats) and stepped back from or watered down policies promoting racial justice (Steinberg 1996). As more and more rural and working class whites have felt left behind by globalisation and rising inequality, displaced by de-industrialisation and agricultural decline and threatened by immigration, demographic shifts (especially in urban areas) and demands for change from racially oppressed groups, many have become supportive of white nationalist and populist movements and politicians (Bergmann 2020; Fording and Schram 2020). Consequently, slogans such as Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’, Brexiteers’ ‘Take Back Control’ and European conservatives’ ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Remigration’ have resonated with whites who feel burdened by greater political, economic and cultural threat (Ganley 2019; Harris 2015). With respect to the ideologies that maintain white supremacy, I have argued elsewhere that colour-blindness and racism denial are being challenged by another ideology, which I call the ‘new white nationalism’ (Doane 2019, 2020).3 This is not to claim that the new white nationalism is replacing colour-blindness, but instead to observe that it reflects the worldview of a growing number of whites – including conservatives, rural dwellers and evangelical ‘Christians’ – that colour-blindness is less effective at defending their status. While the most prominent feature of the new white nationalism is its surprising degree of overt racial discourse and its increased tolerance for racist acts, at its core is an enhanced support for both economic nationalism and a racialised political nationalism that is antiimmigrant, anti-Muslim and opposed to the demands of racialised domestic groups. A key element that binds this ideology is its overarching emphasis on ‘threats’ – both external (e.g. 232

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immigrants, other nations and Muslims) and internal (e.g. cultural elites, ‘socialists’, criminal minorities and conspiracies, including the fixation on the ‘deep state’ by white nationalists in the United States). Finally, it is also important to emphasise that ideological formations are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes incorporate each other’s frames. The new white nationalism is certainly able to include elements of colour-blindness, such as the denial of the existence of racism as an obstacle to social mobility and the claim that ‘white’ citizens are the true ‘victims’ of current social arrangements – a claim that connects nicely to narratives of threat. Given the assertion made above that whiteness has always been in crisis and that white backlash has been a recurring dynamic, it is appropriate to question what is indeed unique about the current crisis of whiteness and the nature of white defensiveness. While there is a cyclical element to history, it is not truly circular. The ‘new white nationalism’ is not a defence of biological racial theories or overt segregation, but a response to perceived threats to economic, political and social status in the colour-blind era, alongside a continuing denial of racism. In the contemporary context, the emphasis is more on ‘cultural nationalism’, via a claimed need to protect what is valuable and distinctive about American, British, Dutch (and so forth) society, which is tacitly defined as white. The outcome, then, is a ‘white populism’ that melds with religious conservative movements to mobilise against both the threat posed by immigrants and racially oppressed groups and the ‘indifference’ of ‘elites’ in such places as Washington, DC and Brussels. One unique element of the current moment involves the global interconnections among white nationalists, which tie such figures as Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and other leaders of alt-right movements across borders. Such connections are also facilitated by the internet, which has served as a major recruiting ground (Daniels 2009) and, more recently, has facilitated connections between white nationalists and conspiracy groups (e.g. QAnon and anti-vaxxers). Thus, we see an Australian white nationalist commit mass murder at a mosque in New Zealand, an online rant citing the ‘great replacement/white genocide’ theories of a French racist, and a Danish far-right politician stopped at the Swedish border while on his way to an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant protest. These dynamics give the current white backlash a decidedly different form than its predecessors. Another important consideration when analysing contemporary whiteness is the relationship between extremist groups and the white ‘mainstream’. Over the years, both scholars and political analysts have studied extremist groups as separate from whiteness in general. From a colour-blind or racism denial perspective, this division is useful, inasmuch as individuals and political parties can denounce extremists in order to burnish their own ‘anti-racist’ credentials. Over the past two decades, it has become increasingly evident that there is no clear dividing line. As John Gabriel (1998) notes, the racialised language of extremists on the far right has routinely made its way into mainstream discourse. Politically, conservative parties have moved to accommodate white nativist populism – accepting more extreme racialised agendas – in order to gain power and pursue other conservative goals (Bergmann 2020; Doane 2020; Fording and Schram 2020), such as deregulation, judicial appointments and tax cuts. The extent to which the United States Republican Party is captive to Trumpism and white nationalism became evident in the waning days of the Trump administration, as large numbers of Republicans continued to defend President Trump, even after his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his role in fomenting the attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021. Racialised societies have always shown a tendency to tolerate racist extremism: as W.E.B. Du Bois (quoted by McVeigh and Estep 2019, p. 227) observed in 1926, ‘the Ku Klux Klan is doing a job which the American people, or certainly a considerable portion of them, want done’. 233

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The complexity of whiteness and the current crisis One element of whiteness that is undertheorised is its complexity. Although scholars have focused upon the significance of class differences (Hartigan 1999; McDermott 2006; Wray and Newitz 1997) and the processes through which European immigrants became ‘wh ite Americans’ in racialised societies (Roediger 2005), such insights have not made their way into general views of whiteness. Rather, discussions of whiteness tend to speak of it in monolithic terms or to subsume variation under an idea of ‘hegemonic whiteness’ (Hughey 2012; Lewis 2004). While there are certainly hegemonic elements of whiteness and we can speak of dominant white racial ideologies, it is imperative to do more to account for its variation. I contend that it is useful to view whiteness as a coalition – that is, a fluid alliance that is held together by racist and nationalist ideologies, racialised benefits and a perceived convergence of interests. This is particularly significant with respect to class divisions. Historically, in the United States, we can find examples of moments when expanding the benefits of whiteness solidified the racial coalition by reducing potential class conflict – for example, following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when landed planters expanded chattel enslavement and increased opportunities for landless whites; Jacksonian populism; Indigenous removal and westward expansion post-1830, in order to increase white land ownership and the post-Reconstruction (1877–1890) creation of the Jim Crow racial order, which aimed at counteracting economic populism. In each case, racial oppression was expanded to increase benefits to a larger segment of the white population and to cement loyalty to the white racial project – what Charles Mills (1997) calls the ‘racial contract’. This is not to claim, as Marxists have been accused of doing, that race is essentially a capitalist stratagem to divide the working class (although capitalists and colonisers have historically been willing to exploit ethnic and racial divisions), but that benefits are essential to maintaining an alliance. While the ‘public and psychological wage’ described by Du Bois (1998 [1935], p. 700) and nationalist patriotic appeals have a certain efficacy, more tangible material rewards are also necessary. And working class whites have certainly been willing to use racism to preserve their own interests, as is evident in the racialised exclusion of Blacks, Mexicans and Asians from the labour movement in the United States (Fletcher and Gaspasin 2008). This extends to the current moment. Certainly, there has been increased economic pressure on the middle and working classes from de-industrialisation/globalisation, stagnant real wages and neoliberal social policies, while capitalist elites have benefitted from global trade and cheap immigrant labour. The result has been strains on the ‘white a lliance’, which is seemingly not working for an increasing number of whites. Votes for Trump, Brexit and right-wing Eurosceptic parties can be seen as attempts at shaking up the system (or ‘draining the swamp’).4 While history demonstrates that it is doubtful (to say the least) that working class and rural voters will benefit from Trumpism, Brexit or right-wing governments (see Jonathan Metzl’s [2019] analysis in Dying of Whiteness), the voting patterns of these groups have been shaped by desperation and racism. And white elites have been willing to accommodate more extreme forms of white nationalism, on the condition that economically conservative policies are followed – as evidenced by mainstream Republican and corporate support for Trumpism. Ultimately, as Bonilla-Silva (2019) reminds us, whiteness trumps everything, as a majority of white voters in all economic categories supported Trump in 2016 (and again in 2020), and the white working class were clearly not the most left-behind workers. If nationalist populism were truly the rebellion of the dispossessed, then it would be revolutionary, rather than reactionary, and it would encompass a multi-racial coalition. 234

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Conclusion: the future of whiteness What forms will whiteness take in the future? While it is always a challenge to forecast social change, I will offer a few thoughts. White supremacy will continue for the foreseeable future. It is simply too embedded in social, political and economic institutions to be overthrown easily. At the same time, the crisis of whiteness will continue in its current manifestation, given, as noted above, that whiteness has always included a strong measure of defensiveness. The forces driving the present crisis – demographic change, immigration flows, the resistance of oppressed groups – will persist, following cycles shaped by events such as war/conflict, economic expansion/recession and unknowns such as the COVID-19 pandemic. From a political and ideological perspective, I believe that we will see a bifurcation of whiteness between colour-blindness /racism denial and the ‘new white nationalism’. White nationalism will continue to be a potent dynamic, as the current crisis of whiteness remains an important social force. Its impact will be enhanced by political opportunism, the ability of right-wing politicians to play the ‘white race card’ and the ‘business’ of white nationalism – that is, the ability of individuals and institutions (e.g. Fox ‘News’) to build careers and amass profits by fearmongering, which has an outsized effect on the most vulnerable sectors of the white population. In addition to more overtly racist and nationalist political discourse, we may also see violence in the shape of individual and group acts of white terrorism, increased anti-immigrant activity and the (ab)use of state power (when white nationalists have control over governments). Events such as the 6 January 2021 white nationalist assault on the United States Capitol may be a harbinger of things to come. At the same time, I expect to see the persistence of colour-blindness and racism denial as meaningful social forces. As I have argued elsewhere (Doane 2014, 2017), colour-blindness has proven to be remarkably flexible and adaptable in the face of a variety of challenges, including recurring acts of racism and increasing emphases upon diversity. Even when ‘whites’ become aware of systemic racism and the structural obstacles that confront peoples of colour, meaningful social change remains difficult – as shown by survey research (Croll 2013) and the response of many ‘whites’ to the global Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. As Mills (1997) and Jennifer Mueller (2017, 2020) have demonstrated, repertoires of ‘racial ignorance’, referring to the conscious and wilful evasion of the realities of racism, can extend beyond the denial inherent in colour-blindness to provide additional mechanisms for reinforcing and reproducing white supremacy. And even awareness of systemic racism may be diminished by claimed powerlessness, racial ‘apathy’ (Forman and Lewis 2006) and performative anti-racism that offers symbolic, rather than social, action. Ultimately, a Black Lives Matter yard sign or an anti-racist reading list will not undermine white supremacy in the absence of movements for social change. The result of this, in the near term, will be a ‘mash-up’ of contending forms of whiteness, with violence, overt racism and anti-immigrant agitation co-existing with the denial of racism at the core of colour-blindness. Differing forms of whiteness can exist in a symbiotic relationship. The denial of racism can be a useful strategy for white nationalism, while the existence of white nationalism can serve as a point of contrast for colour-blindness, thus enabling individuals and organisations to claim that they oppose or condemn white nationalism and are therefore not racist. And the boundaries of whiteness will remain flexible. Historically, white racist and colonial projects have always been willing to accept collaborators from oppressed groups (e.g. comprador classes). Similarly, the boundaries of whiteness have been expanded over time to include groups that were not previously part of the ethnic ‘core’ of the nation, and this has helped to maintain white domination (Doane 1997). Such expansion could continue, perhaps 235

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along the lines suggested by Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) ‘Latin Americanization thesis’, whereby ‘assimilated’ lighter skinned or multi-racial peoples of colour become ‘honorary whites’. As has long been evident to scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean, whiteness as a system of domination can persist with increasingly flexible racial boundaries. Within individual nations, it is possible to foresee a range of outcomes. Will extreme white nationalism continue to permeate racialised social systems and perhaps even expand its influence? To what extent will proponents of more mainstream (covert) forms of whiteness tolerate or collaborate with overt white nationalism (as has been evident in many of the actions of the United States Republican Party)? Will there be pushback (not resistance)? Many of the answers to these questions will be determined by the changing nature of the crisis of whiteness within specific national contexts. And of course, resistance and mobilisation on the part of oppressed groups (and white allies) will play an important role in shaping political discourse and state action. If I may hazard a guess, I do not see whiteness becoming less defensive in the coming years. Globally, the future portends increased change and conflict. While the white logic of the capitalist world order remains potent, here, too, we may see – as in individual nations – an expansion of the boundaries of whiteness. One could argue that, within the world order, Japan has been ‘white’ for some time. I find it quite likely that emerging powers that have not been historically considered white (e.g. China, India, Turkey and Brazil) will employ the tactics of nationalism to improve their standing in the global order without challenging the overall white political and economic logic of the system. This is already evident in the practices of nationalist leaders such as Xi, Modi, Erdogan and Bolsonaro, which include the suppression of ethnic/religious minorities, attempts at territorial expansion and actions to extend regional and international influence. One matter of concern is the potential for conflict between different nationalist projects. Despite the collaboration between the ultranationalists mentioned above, it is difficult to imagine long-term stable political and economic relationships between movements espousing ‘America First’, ‘Britain First’, ‘China First’ and so on. Thus, it seems inevitable that a period of enhanced political, economic and possibly military conflict lies ahead. But what of alternatives? How can oppressed groups and allies challenge whiteness? Given the embedded and systemic nature of whiteness, meaningful social change will not be attained through movements seeking assimilation, inclusion or multiculturalism. Such movements will, at best, produce limited reform and a slight reshuffling of political and economic hierarchies. In the United States, the celebrated election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 did not fundamentally challenge the system of white supremacy. This raises the larger question of whether white supremacy can be eliminated without a challenge to capitalism – for whiteness, after all, was created and shaped by the logic of capitalist accumulation. And what would a ‘non-racial’ capitalist system look like – racially/ethnically proportionate representation among the elite, the middle classes and the poor? Is this the goal of anti-racist struggle? Clearly, any attempt to abolish whiteness must be part of a larger project of human liberation.

Notes 1 Christian’s (2019, pp. 178–180) discussion is worth reading in its entirety. It includes a conceptualisation of a global world system that operates with a white logic, with countries employing a ‘whitening’ process to achieve upward mobility within the global hierarchy. 2 In the United States, there are ongoing debates (which have been present for more than two decades) about the teaching of history, with conservatives criticising materials taking a critical approach to the country’s racist history. This is highlighted in Trump’s 4 July 2020 speech, in

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The future of whiteness which he described a ‘merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children’ (Trump 2020). Similar debates have arisen in other countries, including the Netherlands, where the country’s colonial past and Zwarte Piet are the subjects of ongoing discussion (de Abreu 2018; Holwerda-Williams 2018; Weiner and Baez 2018). 3 This is somewhat problematic, inasmuch as the phrase ‘white nationalism’ has been used to describe more extreme groups (Hughey 2012; Swain 2002). My rationale for selecting it is to capture what I see as more extreme forms of whiteness merging with the mainstream. 4 ‘Drain the swamp’ is a historical phrase used in the United States – one that was popularised by Donald Trump as part of his promise to remove the ‘Washington elites’.

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Ashley (“Woody”) Doane Farrow, A., Lang, J., and Frank, J. (2005). Complicity: How the North promoted, prolonged, and profited from slavery. New York, NY: Ballantine. Feagin, J. (2006). Systemic racism: A theory of oppression. New York, NY: Routledge. Fletcher, B. and Gaspasin, F. (2008). Solidarity divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fording, R. and Schram, S. (2020). Hard white: The mainstreaming of racism in American politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forman, T. and Lewis, A. (2006). Racial apathy and Hurricane Katrina: The social anatomy of prejudice in the post-Civil Rights era. Du Bois Review 3, pp. 175–202. Fredrickson, G. (1981). White supremacy: A comparative study in American and South African history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabriel, J. (1998). Whitewash: Racialized politics and the media. London: Routledge. Ganley, E. (2019). Far-right EU candidates fan the flames of anti-immigration rhetoric. Christian Science Monitor. [Online] 16th May. Available from: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/ Europe/2019/0516/Far-right-EU-candidates-fan-the-f lames-of-anti-immigration-rhetoric [Accessed 13/01/21]. Garner, S. (2017). Surfing the third wave of whiteness studies: Reflections on Twine and Gallagher. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), pp. 1582–1597. Harris, C. (2015). Five of Europe’s most contentious anti-immigration posters. Euronews. [Online] 12th December. Available from: https://www.euronews.com/2015/06/12/five-of-the-mostcontroversial-anti-immigration-posters [Accessed 13/01/21]. Hartigan, J. (1999). Racial situations: Class predicaments of whiteness in Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Higham, J. (1963). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hine, D., Keaton, T., and Small, S., eds. (2009). Black Europe and the African diaspora. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Holwerda-Williams, G. (2018). ‘InterNational Anti-Racism Group versus the Netherlands: Sesame Street, twenty-first century blackface, and public television’, in Weiner, M. and Baez, A. C. (eds.) Smash the pillars: Decoloniality and the imaginary of color in the Dutch kingdom. Lanham, MD: Lexington, pp. 55–61. Hughey, M. (2012). White bound: Nationalists, antiracists, and the shared meanings of race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jardina, A. (2019). White identity politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentiethcentury America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Korteweg, A. and Yurdakul, G. (2014). The headscarf debates: Conflicts of national belonging. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lewis, A. (2004). What group? Studying whites and whiteness in the era of ‘color-blindness’. Sociological Theory, 22(4), pp. 623–626. Lippard, C., Carter, J. S., and Embrick, D., eds. (2020). Protecting whiteness: Whitelash and the rejection of racial equality. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Loewen, J. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York, NY: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. MacMaster, N. (2001). Racism in Europe, 1870–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Magubane, B. (1979). The political economy of race and class in South Africa. New York, NY: Monthly Review. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1964 [1848]). The communist manifesto. New York, NY: Modern Reader. McDermott, M. (2006). Working-class white: The making and unmaking of race relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McVeigh, R. and Estep, K. (2019). The politics of losing: Trump, the Klan, and the mainstreaming of resentment. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Metzl, J. (2019). Dying of whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland. New York: Basic Books. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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The future of whiteness Mueller, J. (2017). Producing colorblindness: Everyday mechanisms of white ignorance. Social ­Problems, 64(2), pp. 219–238. Mueller, J. (2020). Racial ideology or racial ignorance? An alternative theory of racial cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), pp. 142–169. Nimako, K. and Willemsen, G. (2011). The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, abolition, and emancipation. London: Pluto. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York, NY: New York University Press. O’Brien, J. (2010). Firsting and lasting: Writing Indians out of existence in New England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Omi, M. and Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Roediger, D. (2005). Working toward whiteness: How America’s immigrants became white. New York, NY: Basic. Smedley, A. (2007). Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview. Smith, A. (1986). The ethnic origins of nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, A. (1991). National identity. London: Penguin. Stefancic, J. and Delgado, R. (1996). No mercy: How conservative think tanks and foundations changed America’s social agenda. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Steinberg, S. (1996). Turning back: The retreat from racial justice in American Thought and policy. Boston, MA: Beacon. Stewart, K. (2019). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Swain, C. (2002). The new white nationalism in America: Its challenge to integration. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Trump, D. (2020). Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore fireworks celebration, Keystone, South Dakota. The White House. [Online] 4th July. Available from: https:// trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas­ 2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/ [Accessed 07/03/23]. Twine, F. W. and Gallagher, C. (2008). The future of whiteness: A map of the ‘third wave’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), pp. 4–24. Van Cleve, N. G. (2016). Crook county: Racism and injustice in America’s largest criminal court. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Van Dijk, T., ed. (2009). Racism and discourse in Latin America. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Weiner, M. (2016). Colonized curriculum: Racializing discourses of Africa and Africans in Dutch primary school history textbooks. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2, pp. 450–465. Weiner, M. and Baez, A. C., eds. (2018). Smash the pillars: Decoloniality and the imaginary of color in the Dutch kingdom. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wray, M. and Newitz, A., eds. (1997). White trash: Race and class in America. New York, NY: Routledge.

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20 THE SWEDISH RACIAL FORMATION A critique of the sociology of absence Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard Introduction While there are several ways to think about and analyse diverse forms of racism, the concept of ‘racial formation’ (Omi and Winant 2014) provides an analytically productive point of departure, as it conceives the category of race in terms of historical continuity and change, bridges racial structures with human agency and connects the process of racialisation with multiple inequalities. The concept also offers a way of thinking through the challenges of knowledge production for the purposes of social justice, within a tradition of intellectual activism (Collins 2013). Finally, from our location and positionality, racialised as nonSwedish, working within Swedish/Nordic academia (Keskinen and Andreassen 2017; Temi 2019), the concept provides an arena for transnational collective intellectual labour, a doing theory in the flesh (Moya 2002). The United States context in which racial formation theory developed does, however, pose challenges for its translation to a Swedish setting. Exploring the ways in which theories and concepts travel is at the core of the post-colonial project of provincialising Europe (Chakrabarty 2000), as is understanding the resistance to analysing racial formations in a Europe inscribed within a necro-political (Selasi et al. 2017) migration regime and shaped by ethno-nationalist worldviews of blood and territory. Here, we use the concept of racial formation to explore the role of the category of race – emphasising the dialectics between racial capitalism (Gilmore 2020; Robinson 1983), the state and its institutions, social movements for social struggle and the denial of humanity. We argue for the need to develop bridges between social theory, Black Marxism (Robinson 1983) and Black feminism (Olufemi 2020), among other perspectives, while maintaining the conceptual integrity of these frameworks through a synthesis of their strengths and critical reflection on their shortcomings. The concept of racial formation is fundamental for this aim, as it situates race, racialisation and racism at the core of the social. This chapter explores the relevance of racial formation for an analysis of Swedish society and institutions. First, we explore the role of silence, denial and the forgetting of imperialism, colonialism and racism in mainstream Swedish academia and society. Second, we identify the fundamental contribution of the concept of racial formation, focusing on its elaboration by post-colonial feminist/queer scholars. Finally, we briefly explore the 240

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Swedish race formation, addressing how the race classification system was constructed and how it has changed.

The sociology of absence and the denial of racism We take our point of departure from the notion of ‘the sociology of absences’, as developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (de Oliveria 2017; Quijano 2018), which highlights the silence around particular experiences and the ways in which these silences are crafted through the construction and reproduction of social theory (Lentin 2014). The concept focuses on what is ‘marginalised’ and ‘suppressed’, including what has not been allowed to exist and what has been created as non-existent in the first place. The sociology of absence is at the core of what de Sousa Santos conceptualises as ‘epistemicide’, and what Grosfoguel (2004) captures through the concept of ‘epistemic racism’, referring to the destruction of knowledge linked to the destruction of people. ‘It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have’, wrote James Baldwin (1972)1, articulating the ways in which privilege is embodied and acted upon, and how ignorance articulated through (white) supremacy is at the heart of classification systems regulating whose life is liveable (Butler 2004), and on what terms. Feminist post-colonial scholar Gayatri Spivak (1985) applies the term ‘sanctioned ignorance’ to describe how colonial ideologies are produced and reproduced in academia. Spivak argues that any critical understanding of imperialism must consider the ways in which Western knowledge has acted upon global relations of power to advance a deeply selective and narrow reading of the social. Sanctioned ignorance represents an institutionalised way of thinking about the world, through purposeful exclusion of the exploitation and oppression experiences of diverse groups of people, in order to protect the privileges of specific groups. Latino philosopher José Medina (2013) has further developed theories of epistemic justice, identifying how the superiority of privileged categories of people (i.e. epistemic authority) can give rise to epistemic vices of arrogance, laziness and closed-mindedness, which the author conceptualises as meta-blindness and emotional numbness. An increasing number of scholars have explored the continuity between popular and elite forms of racism, and how the category of race and the phenomenon of racism are marginalised in social theory (Bhambra 2016; Boatcă 2015). Why is racism frequently denied, or otherwise undertheorised, in the social sciences and humanities? One answer is provided by de-colonial scholars, who speak of the forms of epistemological racism at the centre of the production of Western science, whereby ‘cogito ergo conquistus’ (‘I conquer, therefore I am’) preceded Europe’s self-representation of cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am.’), thus subordinating non-European knowledge production to European colonialism (Dussel 2013). Racism continues to be fundamental to this sociology of absence, as it is considered ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ but also unnecessary (Gilborn 2006). In continental Europe, including the Nordic region, scholars and activists analysing racism and social injustice are often confronted with academic discourses that challenge systemic understandings of racism. Such discourses often argue that critical race theory (CRT) (Delgado and Stefancic 2017), with its focus on racial formation, is an ‘imported’ perspective that is highly problematic and does not reflect the realities of Europe. The strategies of sanctioned ignorance, epistemic injustice and the sociology of absence in the study of racism and racial formation in continental Europe, including the Nordic countries, continues to be hegemonic among the mainstream social sciences and humanities. 241

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Thus, there is an urgent need to identify and explore these phenomena as systematic forms of knowledge reproduction that promote white privilege. While such thinking has dominated in Sweden, the past decades have seen a bifurcation between scholars maintaining this tradition, which is narrowly framed in the discourses and practices of Eurocentric universalism, and a growing group of scholars who have been inspired by CRT and contributed to its theoretical development.

Racial formation The concept of racial formation, referring to ‘The sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed’, was coined by the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in their book Racial Formation (2014: p. 109). In this work, the authors identify the modern state as a fundamental actor in the organisation of social relations, based on racial meanings and representations. Of note, the authors never consider race a taken-for-granted descriptive category; rather, they systematically pose the questions: How is the race classification system constructed and changed, and which institutions, discourses, social struggles and key actors play a significant role in this process? In other words, they contend that it is impossible to understand racism without holding a prior understanding of how race is constructed (Golash-Boza 2013; Virdee 2019). Thus, the concept of racial formation allows for a more analytical and empirically based understanding of racial categorisation, aimed at transcending hegemonic, bipolar race models of white versus Black. The conceptual framework also analyses the role played by people negatively racialised in changing and challenging classification systems based on the category of race. Building on Omi and Winant’s ground-breaking work, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the material basis of racial formation is comprised of ‘societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races’ (Bonilla-Silva 1997, p. 469). A central point here is ‘that whites form a social collectivity and that, as such, they develop a racial interest to preserve the racial status quo’ (2015, p. 75). A strength of this perspective is its emphasis on agency (Omi and Winant 2013). and thus the changing frames through which racial categories are enacted, whilst acknowledging the centrality of socio-political struggles in contesting racial/ethnic hierarchies. Through the concept of ‘racial projects’, representing ‘the interpretation, representation or explanation of racial dynamics and efforts to reorganise and redistribute resources along particular racial lines’, Omi and Winant (2014, p. 56) also explore the possible visions and agendas of diverse social movements that challenge, resist and transform the link between the construction of racial categories and political-economic systems in which categories of race are at the core of social inequalities.

The gendering and queering of racial formation In May 2016, Marielle Franco was assassinated by paramilitary groups while driving home from a Black feminist event in Brazil (The Guardian 2018). Marielle was a member of the ‘Partido Socialismo e Liberdade’ working against police violence in the racialised neighbourhoods of Sao Paolo. While her death was mourned by many and her legacy was globally celebrated, the public remembrance of her life reflected a fragmentation of analytical categories, theoretical traditions and social identities (as well as political projects) 242

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within concepts of race, gender, sexuality and nation. (White) Feminists emphasised that Marielle was a feminist woman. The LGBTIQ+ movement focussed on her as a lesbian. The African diaspora referred to her as a Black activist. International white leftists labelled her a socialist. And white liberals remembered her as a human rights activist. The work of feminist scholars in Brazil has shown that Marielle embodied many (sometimes tension filled) social identities, and it was the intersection between these identities, alongside her refusal to reduce herself and her struggle, that made her voice so powerful (Loureiro 2020). For decades, Black, post-colonial feminist and queer of colour scholars (Lewis 2020) have argued for the need to explore the intersections, the relationality and the multiplicity of inequalities and identity formations. They have also inscribed gender and sexuality within analyses of racial capitalism. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Bhattacharyya 2018) bridges the Marxist concept of racial capitalism with a feminist exploration of gender and sexuality regimes. The author analyses the connections between socio-economic analyses of racial capitalism and feminist and queer conceptualisations of affect, exploring the role and place of reproductive labour, the creation of supposedly surplus populations and the marketing of diversity as a consumer pleasure. A similar effort to elaborate from a plurality of theoretical perspectives (including indigenous and feminist traditions) is visible in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (HoSang et al. 2012) – an anthology celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States. In this volume, the authors expand on the concept of racial formation through an analysis of race in settler colonialism, or the ‘warfare state’. Importantly, they challenge the lack of gender and sexuality frameworks (Kandaswamy 2012), which carry the potential to widen and deepen current conceptions of race formation. The expansion and success of anti-gender social movements and networks in the Nordic countries (Martinsson 2020) illustrate the ways in which gender and sexuality – as symbols and social identities – function to articulate an agenda of re-patriarchisation. The success of these movements, as well as the success of ethno-nationalist parties in the region, reveals not only that previously secured (i.e. historical) rights can be reversed, but also that heteropatriarchy is often framed within white supremacist and ethno-nationalist agendas. The concepts of racial formation, racial capitalism and intersectionality are located at the crossroads between academic knowledge and political praxis, and between theory and emancipatory social struggles. This shared epistemological genealogy allows for productive and much-needed dialogue, both between and within these concepts and traditions.

The Swedish racial formation The concept of racial formation, which originated in the work of Black American scholars, is not limited to the United States context. For instance, Creolizing Europe (Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate 2015) explores the utility, transferability and limitations of Caribbean and Latin America notions of ‘Creolisation’ in an analysis of Europe, through the lens of transnational dislocation. The theory and political practice of race formation illuminate an analytical trajectory between intellectual labour and the political struggles of diverse forms of southern theory (Connell et al. 2016). However, a key question is: Can theories travel and still maintain analytical rigour in new settings? If so, how should one engage in the challenging labour of translation? This is the question to which we now turn, with reference to Sweden and its racial formation. 243

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The article ‘Anything but racism: How sociologists limit the significance of racism’ (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2001) explores the sociological methods that have reinforced what the authors label as ‘white racial common sense’. Similar methods have been applied in the Swedish context, within academic mainstream arguments (Mattsson 2001). For example, migrant women’s sick leave in the 1990s has been explained with culturalized discourses, and not the overexploitation of the women’s bodies; studies of police racism have blamed minority youth’s lack of institutional trust; and children born in Sweden to migrant parents have been conceptualised as ‘second-generation migrants’ – a code word for being located outside the nation. In this final section of the chapter, drawing on the concept of racial formation, we hope to contribute to the unfinished endeavour of analysing Sweden – a country in which more than 25 per cent of the population is foreign born or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents (Statistics Sweden). Through this analysis, we hope to also situate Sweden within the broader context of global racial capitalism (Melamed 2015).

The sociology of absence: colonialism and imperialism I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself […]. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know […]. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolisation of English identity—I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon—Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history. (Hall 2020, pp. 48–49) The above description from Stuart Hall could easily apply to the Swedish context, given that Finland is a leader in coffee consumption and the Swedish organisational culture could barely survive without the tradition of the coffee fika. At the heart of states’ racial formations is their inclusion in the global frame of colonialism. In this vein, Sweden could, on the one hand, be described as a failed colonial power; on the other hand, it could be described as an iron and shipping brokerage agent for trans-Atlantic slavery (Naum and Nordin 2013), due to its position as a small, imperialist power, centrally embedded in transnational and commodity chain capitalism (Muhr and Salem 2013). Most perspectives on racial capitalism display an inherent methodological nationalism, which the concepts mentioned above exemplify, as they are generally applied to (nation) states. However, it is fundamental to recognise the racialisation and exploitative racism outside Swedish frontiers as constitutive of not only the Swedish national state, but also its welfare state model. Thus, it is vital to consider the role of Sweden in the ‘racialisation of global labour’ (Christian 2019), if banal nationalistic historical narratives representing the nation as generous and in solidarity with more vulnerable populations are to be challenged (Berg and Lundahl 2016). While CRT and racial formation theory underline the international and global dynamics of racialisation, these aspects are still underresearched and rarely applied to the racial formations of national states. We argue that national states, together with transnational corporations, are crucial actors in the process of mediating the global racial order. Sweden’s participation in the global process of racialisation through the ‘international adoption’ of foreign babies/children should also be noted, as this is an arena of ‘caring racism’ in which Sweden stands out on the international stage (Mignot 2019). Finally, despite representations 244

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of Sweden as a country with a strong human rights agenda, it is relevant to document the importance of arms export for the country’s economy; some of these arms are used in the conflicts that produce international refugees1 (Åkerström 2016). It is rarely recognised that, in 2002, Swedish corporations had more industrial workers based in Sao Paolo, Brazil than in any other city worldwide, including Gothenburg – considered the ‘industrial engine’ of Sweden (Forsberg 2002). Exploitative racism can be measured at a global level, in terms of the imports that are produced through an ‘exploitative global racial formation’ (whereby ‘far away’ workers are paid very low wages to produce commodities); importantly, such exploitative racism should be recognised as part of the Swedish racial formation. Research into this form of exploitative racism, based on a political economy of profit and the search for cheap labour (Räthzel et al. 2009), is important and requires further attention, particularly with regards to the ways in which such racism intersects with other forms of racism and heteropatriarchy within the Swedish national state.

The sociology of absence: internal colonialism and the construction of the migrant threat Council of Europe’s (1994) ‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’ allows us to capture another aspect of the tension between the silencing of Sweden’s role in internal colonialism and with what are today legally defined as national minorities. Swedish law defines the Jews, the Roma, the Sami, the Swedish Finns and the Tornedalers as national minorities. All of these groups have in different ways resisted practices of internal colonialism and assimilation within Swedish racial formation, they still suffer from discrimination, racialisation and racism: for the Sami combined with new forms of settler colonialism embedded in the mining industry in Sapmi territory (Kuokkanen 2019); for the Roma, especially Roma EU citizens working as beggars (Barker 2017), exclusionary – and often violent – racism is being directed towards the; and for the Jews, antisemitic worldviews are targeting Sweden’s Jewish communities (BRÅ 2019). Racial imaginaries lie at the core of the dehumanisation process, and dehumanisation is a necessary condition of super-exploitation and genocide (Steizinger 2018). Thus, racial formations and racialisation create the conditions for an unliveable life. During the last decades, the Sweden Democrats (SD) – an ethno-nationalist political party that successfully increased its electoral support from 5 to 18 per cent over the past ten years, and is now Sweden’s third largest party – applies a sliding scale between animals, savages and humans to the Swedish population. A representative of this party in the southern part of Sweden (where the party enjoys the most support) commented, upon visiting refugee accommodation: ‘On safari in Ljungbyhed with (NN), but we did not see any new animals; they seem to be shy’.2 At the same time as the SD acts upon the boundary between humans and animals by painting refugees as non-humans, it often represents itself as a party that advocates for animals and nature; though it certainly does not advocate for refugees and more generally migrants. In the contemporary Swedish racial formation, migration and migrants have become the central terms in which racialisation is discussed and racism is acted upon, especially through the invocation of anti-Muslim (Mulinari and Neergaard 2014) and ‘closed’ border interpellations (Sager et al. 2016). Thus, any analysis of this racial formation must carefully identify the plurality of racial classifications, to better understand the experiences of diverse groups, heterogeneity within groups and the changing social relations that are framed through diverse forms of racialisation. While there are many categories of people constructed as not 245

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belonging to the nation, the form and content of these constructions vary across time and space. What follows are some short illustrations regarding gender, class and whiteness. Migrant women and men occupy different positions within the Swedish racial formation. In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, women who were racialised as non-Swedish found employment in the lower ranks of industrial workplaces that, with few exceptions, were dominated by men. Since the 1990s, however, men who are racialised as non-Swedish have begun to join women, especially migrant women, in lower-paid private and public service sector jobs, characterised by increasingly precarious working conditions. Swedish demand for labour in the 1960s induced a significant number of Finns to m igrate. Finnish migrants were racialised as non-white (and non-Swedish) for many years; however, over the past decades, they have become re-racialised as ‘white’ and ‘Nordic siblings’. In some cases, such processes of re-racialisation have gone hand-in-hand with political strategies (Mulinari and Neergaard 20182017), as evidenced by the high electoral support of Nordic-born naturalised citizens (of which the Finns are by far the largest group) for the SD in the 2018 national election (Sveriges Televisions 2018). A relevant consequence of silencing practices in the mainstream social sciences and humanities is that the experiences of groups that have been racialised as ‘other’ are read through ethno-centric perspectives that hide the centrality of racism; this has held true in Sweden, where the overrepresentation of racialised residents affected by COVID-19 has been widely understood to have resulted from their cultural behaviour, rather than their position and material reality in racial capitalism. Such thinking is quite paradoxical, considering the fact that migrants have comprised many of the frontline workers in healthcare, public transport and childcare during the pandemic. Following the sociology of silence, scholarship has also argued for the impossibility of maintaining the welfare state within a multicultural society (Boräng 2015). However, this amounts to a systematic denial that Swedish society, including the welfare state, is dependent on racialised workers. As some sections of the white working class in Sweden have suffered from the effects of class polarisation (Therborn 2020). One of the most present sociologies of absence in Sweden portrays the white working class as victims of globalisation – hiding the fact that class is racialised and gendered, with women and racialised workers still occupying the most precarious positions in the labour market.

The sociology of absence: gender equality as a boundary against the ‘other’ Swedish political discourse has a history of juxtaposing Swedish migrant women with Swedish women. While it espouses gender equality as a cultural value, its representation of gender has become increasingly racialised (Mulinari and Lundqvist 2017). Concerns about the undermining of shared values and a common culture anchored in the so-called ‘crisis of migration’ in Sweden have assumed a strong gendered form, and gender equality has been established as the fundamental boundary between those who belong to the nation and those who should be excluded, punished, ‘educated’ or ‘saved’. The diffusion of ethno-nationalist ideas and rhetoric is increasingly portraying Muslim men as a violent threat to women, and to society in general. Another popular narrative, linked to the representation of Sweden as a caring mother (i.e. ‘Mother Svea’), threatened by migrant women, particularly Muslim and/ or Black women emphasise tropes combining welfare scroungers with child breeders. This trope was especially manifest in a video framing the 2010 SD election campaign, in which the central conflict is represented as a race between women wearing burqas and pushing baby 246

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strollers and an elderly, ‘Swedish’ lady struggling with a walker. The finish line is marked by a table with two signs – one indicating ‘Pension Administrator’ and one indicating ‘Immigration Administrator’, each with an emergency break handle. In 2010, this election video was considered racist in the mainstream media (SD 2010). Eight years later, the fourth largest daily newspaper, Independent Liberal, published an op-ed article titled ‘Immigration has fundamentally changed Sweden’s population’, alongside a picture likening the Swedish national territory to a woman wearing a niqab (Nylund 2018).

Swedish racial formation: the gendered political economy of racialised labour In earlier research, we analysed the Swedish racial formation, as determined through the framework of subordinated inclusion, and in terms of the racialisation and experiences of labour migrants and political refugees in Sweden – both women and men – in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (Mulinari and Neergaard (2014). This racial project, among others, intersected with the period of Keynesian social democracy, but was framed through a multicultural policy and visions of institutions and civil society (Ålund and Schierup 1991). The oft-repeated phrase ‘We and our migrants’ within the Swedish labour movement illustrates how powerful Swedish trade unions considered the dilemma of migrant labour – a dilemma that highlighted the tension between organisational inclusion and the right to stay, and access to a steady stream of workers in a ‘natural’ subordinated position within the labour market, able to take on ‘surplus’ work. While some central Keynesian institutions were dismantled by social democratic governments in the late 1980s, it was the government’s shift from full employment to price stability as the overarching goal of economic policy that inaugurated the neoliberal transition (Ålund et al. 2017). After this change, the relatively minimal inequalities of the Keynesian period of inclusionary subordination converted into rapidly expanding economic inequalities – accentuated by the economic crisis in the early 1990s – and rapidly increasing unemployment, which especially affected racialised workers (Neergaard 2017). This neoliberal transition represented a radical shift from forms of included subordination to forms of exclusionary racism, resulting in a combination of both exploitative and exclusionary racism. This shift was best expressed in the creation of a reserve army of racialised workers, mediated through the racist representation of migrant workers as a burden to the welfare state. At the same time, there was a policy shift towards welfare retrenchment, stimulating low-wage occupations, and the presence of the racialised ‘other’ motivated and legitimised an increasingly restrictive refugee and asylum policy (Ålund et al. 2017). However, the shift from the subordinated inclusion of a racial state to the subordinated exclusion of a racist state (Lentin 2006; Gardell 2015; Mulinari and Neergaard 2017) was contested in diverse forms, including anti-racist mobilisations, local and national refugee welcome movements, challenges to systematic discrimination in working life and urban social justice movements in segregated neighbourhoods, all framed through inclusive, anti-racist agendas. These mobilisations, while heterogeneous and emergent, nonetheless played a vital role in resisting and modifying the Swedish racial formation.

Concluding remarks Writing in Sweden in a context in which racism – often in the vernacular of migrants and Muslims (Erel et al. 2016) – has come to dominate political and societal debate, this chapter has positioned CRT and post-colonial perspectives, especially the concept of racial formation in a Swedish context. 247

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We have argued for the advantages of applying a racial formation framework to challenge the absences at the core of knowledge production in academia. Drawing inspiration from theoretical perspectives based mainly in the United States context, we have explored the relevance of translating these perspectives to the Swedish societal landscape. This has not been merely an academic endeavour. Rather, by recognising that knowledge production and academia reflect and reproduce balances of power in society – on local, national, continental and global levels – we have learned from the theorisation and analysis of experiences (and the sufferings) of diverse groups that have collectively organised to understand and challenge racism and promote other futures. We hope that these pages reflect a small part of the extensive knowledge produced by the anti-racist struggles of many generations – including the important diversity in political subjectivities – on both the continuity and the transformation of the Swedish racial formation.

Notes 1 https://quotepark.com/quotes/1446347-james-baldwin-it-is-certain-in-any-case-thatignorance-allied/. Acccesed 20220101 2 https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/helsingborg/sd-politiker-liknar-flyktingar-vid-djur. Accessed 20221001 /Sweden Democrat speak of migrants as animals in a zoo/.

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21 RACE, WHITENESS, RUSSIANNESS AND THE DISCOURSES ON THE ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ MOVEMENT AND MANIZHA Katharina Wiedlack and Iain Zabolotny1 Introduction In this chapter, we focus on the ways in which issues of race and whiteness are discussed within contemporary Russian public discourse – particularly political commentaries and the popular media – and how such discourses are connected to nationalism. In doing so, we analyse online media discourses around two recent events that surfaced issues of race, racialisation and whiteness in Russia: the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) movement in the United States; and the Russian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 2021, involving Manizha, a singer of Tajik descent, and her song, ‘Russian Woman’. The mediatised reactions to these events provide a window through which to glimpse and better understand public perspectives on race and structural racism in Russian society. We argue that both events were framed through a discussion about ‘Russianness’, which has notions of whiteness at its core. Moreover, we connect the ideas that emerged in these heated debates to the myth of Russian society as not only historically free of anti-Black racism, but also an active anti-racist ally of Black people; and we show that, ironically, this myth functions to support the nationalism present within the same discourses. In 2020, when street protests and marches in solidarity with the American BLM movement (but in support of oppressed Black people everywhere) erupted in many cities around the world, no significant public action emerged in Russia. What did appear as a reaction to this flaring up of international attention, however, was a social media phenomenon called ‘Russian Lives Matter’ (Meduza 2020a), which quickly gained widespread support across Russian-speaking Internet users. The movement was based on the idea that police brutality in Russia against (white) citizens is worse than police brutality in the United States against Black people. It denied the existence of structural racism within American society (which is the focus of the BLM movement) – and particularly its existence within Russia – shifting attention from the oppression of Black and Indigenous people of colour (BIPoC) to the oppression of (white) Russians, instead. In this chapter, by analysing the public discourse around Russian Lives Matter in online news and social media, we seek to address the intersection of white nationalism within seemingly democratic Russian discourses DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-25

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addressing institutional violence and state authoritarianism. We aim at showing that these nationalistic discourses by the political opposition support the construction of whiteness as a basis for what it means to be Russian, as endorsed by Orthodox fundamentalists and other state loyalists. However, by presenting the counter-voices of Black and Indigenous Russians,2 Russians of colour and their allies, we hope to also show that there are people and discourses working to deconstruct white Russian nationalism, though their criticism is mainly marginalised within the public sphere. The pop singer Manizha is one of the few public figures who has deconstructed Russian whiteness publicly and is (or at least was, for a brief historic moment) supported by public and even state figures. Manizha’s family fled Tajikistan in 1994, when she was only a child. Thus, she grew up in Russia and identifies as both Russian and Tajik. Manizha sings about both of her cultural identities, and her songs and media statements further address topics of race, nationality and ethnicity. She supports refugee organisations in Russia and creates awareness through her Instagram account; in recognition of this, she was the first Russian to have been appointed as a Good Will Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, within the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR 2020). Manizha is an outspoken feminist who addresses issues such as domestic violence (Wonderzine 2019) and LGBTIQ+ rights (Открытые 2019). With this background, her selection3 as the Russian representative at the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest was highly unexpected, considering the conservative cultural politics of the Russian government. The decision furthermore polarised audiences: some welcomed the progressive face of Russia, but most rejected the choice. The latter argued that Manizha’s politics do not align with ‘traditional Russian values’4; moreover, her song, ‘Russian Woman’, which explicitly presents her as such, was harshly criticised, because people argued she is not ethnically ‘Russian’, and some even questioned her citizenship. Manizha’s case is highly interesting for our focus on whiteness, national identity and nationalism, since it reveals the ways in which current political discourses in Russia proliferate and centre on racialised ‘othering’, the intersection of racism and ‘migrantism’ (Tudor 2017) and a fantasy of Russian (Orthodox) whiteness. The corpus of texts that we analyse consists of articles from various online media, including national news media such as the (last) independent news sites Meduza, Новая Газета (Novaya Gazeta) and Lenta.ru; as well as sources close to the state, such as the news channels Россия 1 (Rossia Odin) and Russia Today, and the info-agency Interfax. We also reviewed international media such as the BBC, The Guardian, Open Democracy and Human Rights Watch. Sources were collected from the Google News and Yandex News search engines between May 2020 and September 2021, using the key words ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Russian Lives Matter’, ‘Manizha’ and ‘Russian Woman’, in both the Russian and the English language. Moreover, we consulted specific (maga)zines such as Wonderzine, Agassin and Kvir Sibir, as well as the Instagram accounts of individual activists, to gain an overview of less mainstream public reactions. This broad search and analysis, which included independent and social media as well as sources connected to the state, enabled us to capture both hegemonic and marginalised public discourses. In our analysis of the media corpus and findings, we followed Ruth Wodak’s discoursehistorical approach (DHA). DHA is a trans- and interdisciplinary approach that understands social phenomena such as racist sentiments and actions as complex constructions embedded in discourses, which are brought about by (and entangled with) intersecting power(s) and ideologies. The agents or subjects of discourses are understood as having been structured through a variety of variables, including age, gender, class and race or ethnicity. Moreover, DHA considers the historic context of discourse, as well as the intersections with other social 252

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and political discourses. This inclusion of a historic perspective enables an analysis of ‘power relations and power shifts, the negotiation or stabilising of social opportunities through the continuation or transformation of meanings’ (Wodak 2020, p. 22).

Anti-Black racism, Russian nationalism and political opposition While there has been some research on racism in Russia over the past two decades, most of this body of work has concentrated on violence against Indigenous people and people of colour from Central Asia and the Caucasus; in contrast, research on racism against people of African descent has been treated as secondary (Zakharov 2015, p. 62). The idea of Russia as a country free of anti-Black racism, especially when compared to the United States, originated prior to the first Russian revolution. Russia has a long history of ethnic and racial mixing, and it has never practised the kind of racial segregation along colour lines that was seen in the United States (Rutland and Kazantsev 2020). Moreover, during the late nineteenth century, African Americans began to migrate to Russia to escape anti-Black racism, and this continued during the Soviet period (St. Julian-Varnon 2020). The social, economic and political successes that Black people enjoyed in Russia – and later the Soviet Union – supported the idea that Russia was free of anti-Black racism. This belief that, unlike Europe or the United States, Russia was not prejudiced against people of African descent was further supported by the Soviet Union’s official support of the African American struggle against racism in the United States (especially the American south) and, later, the decolonisation of Africa. Russian discourses frequently call upon Lenin’s historic 1920 declaration that communist internationalism must fight for racial equality (Haas 2007, p. 113). The young Soviet Union’s self-idealisation as an ally of victims of Western racism – particularly African Americans and Central Asians – throughout the 1920s and 1930s (Haas 2007; Wiedlack 2020) is also equally frequently cited, as are proclamations that Russia served as a decolonial force during the 1960s and 1970s, fighting in support of African independence (Telepneva 2018). The idea of Russia as a country free of anti-Black racism was propagated by the Soviets as well as internationalists, who saw Soviet Russia as a strong ally in their efforts towards global decolonisation (Baldwin 2002; McDuffie 2011; Peters Hasty 2006; Robinson 2000). Famous African American poets such as Langston Hughes and Dorothy West, political activists such as Louise Patterson and Eslanda Goode Robeson, and scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who visited the Soviet Union during the 1930s, served as enthusiastic eyewitnesses to the Sovietled industrialisation and women’s liberation in Central Asia (Wiedlack 2020), and proliferated discourses that compared American racism to Soviet racial equality. Although these discourses accounted for the general absence of anti-Black racism within the Soviet Union at the time, the enthusiastic celebration of Soviet anti-racist politics and the lack of a legacy of prejudice against any racialised minority must be viewed critically. While a closer look into the actual scale of anti-racist support within the vast territory that was once the Soviet Union would extend beyond the scope of this chapter, it is safe to acknowledge that certain racist ideologies (e.g. skin head racism) proliferated from at least the early 1990s onwards (Arnold 2015, p. 245). Further, not only have historical prejudices (e.g. anti-Muslim sentiment) strengthened in Russia over the past three decades, but this trend has also had an increasingly negative impact on the Russian population of African descent and Black migrants in Russia. To further complicate the view of Russia as free of anti-Black Racism, in the Russianlanguage context, ‘Black’ does not primarily refer to skin colour, but to a racialised cultural and religion-based ‘otherness’ with regard to Muslim minorities from the North Caucasus region, among others (Zakharov 2015, p. 62; see also Roman 2002). This leads to the 253

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problematic conclusion that, in Russia, anti-Black racism does not primarily address people of African descent. In fact, the daily lived experiences of people of African descent show that they are indeed targeted by Russian racism no less than people from Central Asia and the Caucasus (Zatari 2020; see also Arnold 2015, p. 244). This provides an important context for our analysis of the Russian reaction to the international BLM movement. As already noted, when BLM protests emerged in many cities across the world between the end of May and mid-June 2020, in support of the African American Movement – and, by extension, oppressed BIPoC everywhere – no significant support action or movement emerged in Russia. Interestingly, however, both pro-state media and the so-called ‘liberal opposition’ provided public reactions to the BLM movement, in surprisingly similar fashions: both emphasised that, unlike the United States, Russia (or, more correctly, its predecessor, the USSR) had always supported African Americans in their struggle for equality and against racism (Россия 1 2020; RT Documentary 2020; Rutland and Kazantsev 2020). In doing so, they located racism exclusively within the United States, successfully avoiding any acknowledgement or discussion of racism in Russia. Russian state officials interpreted the BLM protests as proof that the United States went too far in ‘exporting democracy’ worldwide, while overlooking the problems this very democracy caused in their homeland (Rutland and Kazantsev 2020). Although some commentators argued that the BLM cause deserved sympathy, they condemned any associated ‘rioting’ (Россия 1 2020); other commentators dismissed both the protesters and their cause (Россия 1 2020b; for a meta-analysis of these discourses, see Rutland and Kazantsev 2020). In a surprisingly similar vein, the so-called liberal opposition, as well as many public figures and popular social media bloggers, refrained from voicing solidarity with the millions of peaceful BLM activists, and instead focused on occurrences of violence and looting, which they denounced (Budraitskis 2020; Rutland and Kazantsev 2020; Латынина 2020). The social media posts of prominent public figures and journalists criticised the protesters and spread racist jokes about them (Luxmoore 2020; Meduza 2020b; Rutland and Kazantsev 2020). Other ‘oppositional’ and pro-democracy journalists wrote at length about the West giving too much freedom to minorities, using racist terms and the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the street actions and civil disobedience in the United States, for which they blamed ‘the left’5 (Budraitskis 2020; Латынина 2020). It is not surprising that state officials and pro-government media condemned the BLM protests, as this is their typical response to pro-democratic demonstrations. However, the so-called ‘liberal’ opposition is usually supportive of civil protesters abroad, since demonstrations and civil disobedience are the tools by which they, too, voice disagreement with (Russian) politics. Therefore, the extensive focus of oppositional actors on the violence of the protesters can be explained only by the fact that public discourse in Russia is structured around whiteness and an implicit denial of the existence of racism – or at least the idea that racism is a secondary problem (in Russia and, therefore, anywhere else). Any acknowledgement of the existence of structural racism in Russia by the liberal opposition would require them to face their own white privilege and ignorance, and thus agitate their self-fashioning as the ultimate victims. It would furthermore harm their self-mythologisation as martyrheroes fighting the oppressive state in the name of (white, cis-heteronormative) justice. In this climate, the Russian Lives Matter movement emerged in June 2020 and gained widespread support within Russian-language internet spaces. Mikhail Svetov, a member of the Russian Libertarian Party, came up with the ‘#RussianLivesMatter’ hashtag, which he launched on 1 June in connection to a story of Russian police officers killing an unarmed man while in his apartment in Yekaterinburg. Svetov’s intent was to use the international 254

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attention towards the BLM movement to gain publicity for the interests of Russian Libertarians. His strategy succeeded: by the morning of 2 June 2020, #RussianLivesMatter was the top trending hashtag on Twitter in Russia (Meduza 2020a). It is important to reiterate that the hashtag was not an invitation for Russians to join the global movement against racism and police brutality but merely a claim that the police brutality against (white) Russians is far worse than the police violence against BIPoC in the United States. Implicitly, the movement denied structural racism within both the United States and Russia, shifting attention from the oppression of ethnic minorities to the plight of the (white) Russian opposition. Since the hashtag was in English, there was a certain ambiguity about its translation into Russian. The word ‘Russian’ has at least two semantically different translations into the Russian language: russkie, which refers mostly to white Russians who identify with the ‘Russian nation’ or ‘Russian culture’; and rossiiskie, which encompasses all Russian citizens, irrespective of their nationality, ethnicity and cultural belonging. While some liberal media (e.g. Novaya Gazeta) that gave a platform to Svetlov to talk about #RussianLivesMatter understood ‘Russian’ as referring to anyone living in Russia and experiencing police brutality, the libertarian activist made clear that his understanding was more along the lines of russkie, excluding anyone who did not identify with the Russian culture or nationality (Meduza 2020a). Svetlov’s insistence on the use of russkie aligns with Russian cultural politics that equate Russianness and Russian national belonging with whiteness and Slavic heritage. Interestingly, Russian leadership does not unambiguously use russkie in the manner described above; rather, its use of the term emphasises Russian citizenship and shared Russian language, rather than Russian (Slavic) ethnicity (Laruelle 2017, p. 95). In this way, the leadership avoids the explicit proliferation of white nationalism, which would alienate the country’s many ethnic and religious minorities. Nonetheless, their use of russkie to refer to members of a russkaia kul’tura (‘ethno-cultural totality’ (Turoma and Aitamurto 2019, p. 11), with Russian Orthodox Christianity at its heart – and distinguished from the rossiiskie or ‘transnational rossiiskii community’ (Turoma and Aitamurto 2019, p. 11) living in the Russian territory – elicits notions of white Slavic ethnicity as the legitimate bearer of Russian (russkie) citizenship and culture. In this sense, nationality does not mean citizenship, but ethnicity or race. The (white, Slavic) Russians (russkie), sometimes together with the (white, Slavic) Ukrainians (who comprise the largest ethnic minority grouping in Russia) and (white, Slavic) Belarusians, are accordingly the prioritised members of the Russian nation or ‘transnational rossiiskii community’ (Turoma and Aitamurto 2019, p. 11), whose other 84 nationalities – including Jewish, Tatar, Bashkir, Chechen, Buryat, Nenets, Roma and Komi – are considered nonwhite ‘others’ within the nation. In many cases, this othering is connected to religion, with non-Orthodox Christian faith employed as a marker. Not coincidentally, within Russian nationalistic discourses, non-Slavic Russian ‘national’ minorities are becoming increasingly racialised as non-Russian; this is particularly true of people from the Caucasus regions, who are frequently signified as members of a ‘criminal black race’ (Roman 2002, p. 8). While state proponents tend to alternate between alignment with white Slavic supremacy discourses and support for nostalgic Soviet notions of Russia as the nation of nations (comprising different ethnicities and religious groups), a significant proportion of the opposition – including the liberal opposition – is popularising Russian whiteness. Returning to #RussianLivesMatter, while Svetlov and his Libertarian Party were the first oppositional actors to use this hashtag, and while they definitely imprinted it with notions of white Russian nationalism, other political and civil movements appropriated it after it trended on Twitter. One of these appropriations occurred during the protests against the 255

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arrest of Governor Sergei Furgal in Khabarovsk in July 2020. One of the demonstrators was recorded wearing a prison robe and carrying a balloon with ‘Russian Lives Matter’ written on it (Петрашевич 2020), allegedly in an attempt to attract the attention of the Western media to the lack of democratic freedom in Russia (Петрашевич 2020). The hashtag was also sighted during the mass demonstrations in support of the detained oppositional politician Alexey Navalny, which took place across Russia in January 2021. During these protests, many demonstrators were detained – some quite brutally. A number of Twitter users reported about police violence using the hashtag, and in their coverage of the events, online media included these tweets (Esquire 2021). Use of the hashtag by these oppositional groups did not intentionally or purposefully erase Black bodies and their lives from the political demands, in the way that Svetlov’s initial usage did. However, structural and institutional racism – and particularly anti-Black racism and racially motivated violence – were omitted from the conversation. Thus, the fight against Russian state authoritarianism, police brutality and the Russian prison complex made it seem as if racism and racialised violence were not issues in Russia – in the state apparatus, in institutions or in civil society. This is not only far from the truth, but it also makes criticism of the white nationalism and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism displayed by many oppositional leaders – for example Navalny’s fellow campaigner Ksenia Sobchak (Meduza 2020b) – if not impossible, then seemingly irrelevant in the Russian context.

Russian BIPoC in support of BLM At the same time, there were many voices in support of the BLM movement in Russianspeaking Internet spaces, mainly belonging to younger people and individuals who did not identify with the imaginary white Russian majority. One such individual, a Russian-Malian blogger named Maria Tunkara, challenged the idea that there is no racism in Russia by posting a video on TikTok about racist hate crimes in Russia since the early 2000s that no one had been held accountable for. As background music for the video, Maria featured a remix of Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’, called ‘This is Russia’ (Petkova 2020). Not only did she receive threats and online bullying as a result of the video, but she was also warned by officials that they might open an investigation into her because she was ‘spreading extremist materials’ (Aitkhozhina 2020). Despite countless evidence of everyday racism against BIPoC in Russia (Zatari 2020; Дашиева 2020), state officials consider the idea of addressing the issue far more dangerous than the racist violence, itself. Blogger and researcher Anna also challenged Russia’s systemic racism against the Indigenous peoples of Siberia by sharing her experiences of growing up as a child of a Yakut mother and a Buryat father in Novosibirsk and analysing historic and contemporary texts on her Instagram account. In May 2020, Anna posted about Russian chauvinism and the Russian supremacy myth (i.e. the popular belief that the Indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far East are less intelligent than their white, Russian counterparts) (annachickensaredinos 2020). She discussed the popular trope about the Chukchi (Indigenous peoples from the Chukchi Peninsula) that portrays them as slow and unintelligent, and unable to navigate situations that are crystal clear to non-Chukchi audiences (who are expected to laugh); and she connected this trope and its influence on public discourse to her own experience in primary school, when her teacher assumed – based purely on Anna’s looks – that Anna’s Russian would not be good enough to allow her to recite a poem in class. Anna emphasised that this was proof of systemic racism in Russia against people who look ‘non-Russian’. Such racism aims at convincing them that they are not bright enough and results in self-esteem problems 256

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and limited opportunities to achieve career goals. While the post went viral, many of the responses unfortunately fell in the category of: ‘I have a non-Russian friend and they have never experienced racism’. Armen Aramyan, one of the editors of the online journal DOXA, has been under investigation since April 2021 for the ‘Involvement of minors in hazardous activities’.6 In an interview for Agassin – a beauty-zine exploring the life of BIPoC in modern Russia – he shared his experiences of growing up in Moscow as an Armenian (Agassin 2021). Armen described his experience of having won a district Russian-language competition: the teachers would not put his picture on the board of honour, as would normally be the case, arguing, ‘It’s a shame that Armen Aramyan [an obviously non-Russian name] is the person who knows Russian best’ (Agassin 2021). Armen also emphasised the intersection of different oppressive identities as a critical factor for school bullying: ‘You could get away with not being Russian and avoid being bullied if you were cooler or older than everyone else’ (Agassin 2021). Since Armen was ethnically Armenian, two years younger than his peers and from a low-income family, he was ‘othered’ based on his ethnicity, in intersection with other factors, which led to constant conflicts with his classmates.

Manizha The pop singer Manizha, while not publicly criticising the government, perpetually contests the whiteness of Russianness and what it means to represent the nation. She identifies as a multinational person, and she mixes three languages (Russian, Tajik and English) in her daily communication and music (Ильясова 2021). Manizha is outspoken about topics that are considered controversial in Russia, such as racism, xenophobia and refugee rights, sexism, violence against women and LGBTIQ+ rights, both in her music and in her media statements. Manizha fled Tajikistan – her country of birth – as a child, due to war. Following that, she was raised in Moscow. Manizha’s mother, Nadezhda Usmanova, struggled to survive in post-Soviet Russia without Russian citizenship. She worked as a cleaner, despite having a degree in nuclear physics and fluency in the Russian language (Аглиуллина 2021). Being a refugee, herself – and having experienced xenophobia for not looking white enough and having a non-Russian sounding name – Manizha supports multiple projects for refugees in Russia, such as Гражданское содействие (the Civic Assistance Committee) (2021) and Такие же дети (Same Children) (2019). She is outspoken about violence against women, and she has released both a music video for her song ‘Mama’ (Manizha 2019), which deals with domestic violence, and a mobile app called Silsila (Khamraeva 2021), which aims at helping survivors of domestic abuse. Manizha also openly supports the LGBTIQ+ community: she was featured in a Pride video by the queer magazine Открытые (2019), she posted rainbow flag pictures on her Instagram account (Manizha 2020) and she performed at ‘Queerfest’ (2020) – the largest queer culture festival in Russia. Manizha’s song contribution to the Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Russian Woman’, is a feminist manifesto that directly addresses problems shared by many women in the country: from the pressure to be skinny and have children at a certain age to the denial of women’s subjectivity and expectations that women should be obedient to men and to society at large. Moreover, the song aims at empowering women to love themselves and live their lives in the ways they wish, emphasising: ‘You’re strong enough, you’re gonna break the wall’ (Manizha 2021a). The song has resonated with wide audiences and 40 per cent of national TV viewers voted for it to represent Russia at the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest (Milton 2021). However, 257

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this decision was followed by a strong racist and sexist backlash. Social media users were convinced that a Tajikistan-born singer could not legitimately sing about being a Russian woman, let alone represent the country in an international contest. Manizha replied to these haters by releasing a mockery video titled ‘Can this represent Russia at the Eurovision?’ (Manizha 2021b). In the video, she plays the role of a journalist (wearing a blonde wig) conducting an investigation into who Manizha actually is, finding that she is actually not even human. In contrast to the commentators from civil society, conservative officials and institutions did not publicly take issue with Manizha’s ethnicity; rather, they expressed outrage due to the blunt manner in which the singer addressed sexism in the country. Veteranskie Vesti, a news portal dedicated to war veterans, sent a request to the Investigative Committee to initiate criminal proceedings into the song, which allegedly ‘aims to seriously insult and humiliate the human dignity of Russian women’ (Agence France Presse 2021). The Investigative Committee confirmed that they received this request to probe the song’s lyrics for ‘possible illegal statements’ (Agence France Presse 2021) and reassured the journalists that the procedure would be implemented according to the law. At the same time, the Russian Union of Orthodox Women published an open letter to forbid Manizha from representing Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, as her music spread ‘hatred towards men, which undermines the foundations of a traditional family’ (Agence France Presse 2021). ‘Russian Woman’ nevertheless made it to the Eurovision Song Contest, where it drew in an even wider international audience and finished in ninth place. ‘I feel this song is empowering the Russian woman in me. And I am an Italian man’ (Manizha 2021c), commented a fan under the video of Manizha’s Eurovision performance. The singer then quoted this comment in her Instagram post, as it resonated with the message of the song: anyone can be a strong Russian woman, since Russia is a multinational (Ильясова 2021) and, implicitly, immigrant country. Indeed, to represent the diversity of Russian women* 7, 400 women and non-binary people of different ages, ethnicities, body types, professions and (dis)abilities recorded themselves singing the song together with Manizha. Their videos were then integrated into the final Eurovision performance, where they made a powerful statement. These videos and the opinions of the subjects they capture on what a Russian woman is can be found on the project’s Instagram account, which has more than 13,000 followers (Manizha 2021d). Although Manizha’s performance widened her fan base in both Russia and abroad, many Russians were still critical. Vladimir Solovyov, a journalist and host on the state TV channel Россия 1, which broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest and managed all Eurovision-related communication for Manizha, accused the singer of ‘betraying national culture’ (Кривотулова 2021). Solovyev also claimed that she was promoting ‘all this gender bullshit’ and added that the women*’s videos shown during the performance ‘have nothing to do with the image of a Russian woman’ (Кривотулова 2021). Rather, the women* were only shown because ‘there is something wrong with them’ (Кривотулова 2021). On the other side of political spectrum, Yulia Taratuta, Editor-in-Chief of Wonderzine – an online feminist lifestyle magazine that supported Manizha and her music prior to the Eurovision Song Contest – wrote a critical piece after the performance. She argued that the empowering feminist message of Manizha’s song did not represent the lived realities of Russian women and was being used by the government to gain positive publicity without effecting any real change (Таратута 2021). Taratuta also accused the singer of having influential patrons close to the state allegedly help her win the public vote to represent Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest (Таратута 2021). 258

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It is not surprising that conservative actors criticised Manizha, since her values are so different from those reinforced by the state. However, criticism from the liberal media seemed to appear only in relation to Manizha’s collaboration with the state. In particular, Taratuta’s critical piece implied that Manizha and her empowering feminist messages were being used to shift attention away from the state’s human rights violations and persecution of political activists (such as the DOXA editor, Alla Gutnikova, who was one of the women* singing on video during the Eurovision performance). While Taratuta’s suspicions of the state’s support of or tolerance of Manizha as a national representative seem reasonable, rather than criticising the state and the oppressive structures, she placed responsibility on an individual person, who was coincidentally the first non-white feminist to gain such publicity and support from the state media. Opinions on Manizha’s music in Tajikistan, where the singer was born, were no less polarised than in Russia, with some claiming the singer was a ‘wretched creature’ whose song was ‘just a bunch of words’ (Ibragimova 2021). At the same time, President Emomali Rahmon acknowledged that, while many people could not come to terms with a Tajik woman representing Russia, Manizha deserved credit for not only refusing to hide the fact that she was Tajik, but even announcing it out loud (Ibragimova 2021). Women could relate to the empowering message of ‘Russian Woman’, which extended beyond national borders. Journalist Kamila Ibragimova quoted one of her female interviewees: ‘Switch the word “Russian” for “Tajik”, and the sense of the song would remain the same’ (Ibragimova 2021). Rahim Safarzoda, head of Mukhochir – an online radio station targeting migrant labourers living in Russia – said that Manizha was helping to deconstruct the Russian stereotype of Tajiks, which views them as nothing more than street cleaners and bricklayers: ‘I mean, Russians might still hate migrants, but they will still understand that there are talented people among migrants’, he argued (Ibragimova 2021).

Appropriation of ‘non-Russianness’ as an identity category Importantly, while artists and activists such as Manizha, Tunkara and others have made a strong claim to Russian belongingness and Russianness, not all Russian anti-racist activists and scholars have done the same. Indeed, a number of activists and researchers have rejected the imaginary all-encompassing multinational idea of Russianness, due to its colonial connotations and erasure of ethnicities other than Russian. For some white-passing activists, it is important to not be referred to as ‘Russian’ (russkii), but to be acknowledged as holding an ethnic identity that is different from ‘the Russian majority’. Some others who do not pass as white choose to reclaim their identity as explicitly ‘non-Russian’ (нерусская, nerusskaya) – a label frequently used as a derogatory term or slur – in order to escape the Western racerelated terminology of white versus non-white (i.e. BIPoC), which does not encompass the complexity of the dynamics across the Russian-speaking space. The two examples discussed in this chapter have illustrated how the Western, binary understanding of race must be nuanced in the Russian context, since many of the targets of racism in Russia – for example, Manizha or Armen Aramyan – would be considered white in the United States. Researcher and activist Anna Dashieva argues that the term nerusskaya encompasses the complexity of the large Eurasian space, where race has never been the most important category for segregation, but social hierarchies have instead been built along the simple boundary line between Russian and non-Russian (Дашиева 2020, p. 27). Dashieva explains that the dichotomy between a white coloniser and colonised BIPoC within many empires cannot be applied to the Russian context, due to the country’s long history of continuously 259

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oppressing very different ethnicities identified as non-Russian, including Ukrainian, Polish, Chechen and Indigenous Siberian (Дашиева 2020, p. 26). This form of Russian settlercolonialism and imperial expansion began prior to the eighteenth century, under czarist rule (Sunderland 2004), and continued under the banner of Soviet modernisation into the twentieth century (Etkind 2011). Importantly, Russian’s oppression of peoples has also targeted Jews, who are equally understood as non-Russian and have frequently suffered at the hands of Russian programmes and anti-Semitic campaigns (Roi 1995). Dashieva further emphasises that, together with displacement, the expansion of Russian culture has played a crucial role in the oppression of non-Russian minorities. In particular, ‘Russianisation’, which aimed at reducing language and cultural diversity, removed traditional writing systems and exchanged various alphabets with Cyrillic (Дашиева 2020, pp. 26–27). Dashieva encourages a wider public discussion about racism and xenophobia across the Russian-speaking space, in order to develop new terminologies to cover all the nuances of Russian’s history of oppressions. In this discussion, she proposes that the term ‘non-Russian’ be used as a starting point (Дашиева 2020, p. 27).

Preliminary conclusions To summarise our brief analysis of the discourses on race, whiteness and Russianness within media reports and public voices addressing the American BLM movement and Manizha’s performance at the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, we conclude that the relationship between nationalism, migrantism and racism are complicated and, contrary to some Western beliefs, do not run neatly along the lines of the so-called liberal opposition or the conservative Russian government. Moreover, although white nationalism, racism, homophobia and anti-feminist sentiment are frequently strongly connected, they do not necessarily appear together. While the case studies explored in this chapter differ in several respects, they both point to similar structures of racism embedded in daily life and media and political discourses in Russia. The cases show that Russianness is imagined as whiteness, whiteness is connected to ideas of a privileged claim on Russianness, and non-white people are constructed as ‘others’. At the same time, the cases show that there is growing resistance against structural racism and racist violence in Russia, with BIPoC becoming more visible and challenging white hegemony and white nationalism. Manizha and her music – and particularly the reactions she and her music evoked – suggest that the idea of Russia as a multinational (i.e. multi-ethnic and multicultural) country is simultaneously rejected by many Russian citizens and supported by others. Her case also shows that migrantism, racism, homophobia and anti-feminism are closely intertwined within Russian discourse. Finally, her case suggests that Russian society is broadly divided into those who support the idea of a multi-ethnic, homo-tolerant and liberal Russia and those who centre whiteness and Orthodoxy at the heart of Russianness and support antiliberal, conservative, anti-feminist and racist politics. However, the Russian Lives Matter movement and the discourse on it propagated by the pro-Western liberal opposition indicate that migrantism and racism are equally widespread among oppositional and anti-government actors. On the other hand, the state discourse shows that it does not explicitly position whiteness (and Orthodoxy) at the centre of Russianness and Russian citizenship (Laruelle 2017). The results of our investigation strongly support Anna Dashieva’s suggestion and analytical gaze, showing that discussions about racism and whiteness in Russia are mostly framed by a notion of (non-)Russianness. Russian reactions to the BLM movement shifted 260

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attention from structural racism and police brutality against BIPoC to the oppression of (white) Russians by the government and police. In this way, they dismissed the message of the BLM protests and demonised the peaceful protesters. The discussion around Manizha and her song, ‘Russian Woman’, focused on her (non-)Russianness and, in light of this, her (non-)right to represent the country in an international song contest. Manizha re-signified Russia as a multinational and multi-ethnic country that she was proud to represent, being both Tajik and Russian. In this regard, Anna Dashieva’s proposition that the term ‘nonRussian’ be used as a starting point for a discussion specific to racism in Russia and across the post-Soviet space appears promising, considering her argument that Russianness has always been an important measure for the differentiation, separation and oppression of people in the Russian context, over and above race.

Notes 1 The research for this article was developed by the authors within the framework of the project ‘The magic closet and the dream machine: Post-Soviet queerness, archiving, and the art of resistance’ (AR 567), conducted by Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Ruthia Jenrbekova and Iain Zabolotny, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (2020–2023). 2 There are currently more than 100 ethnic groups in Russia. According to statistics from April 2021, there are 47 Indigenous peoples in north Russia, Siberia and the Far East (TACC 2021) that, individually, have fewer than 50,000 members. The largest Indigenous peoples are the Sakha (Yakuts) (478,085 members), the Buryat (461,389 members), the Komi (228,235 members) and the Khakas (72,959 members), according to national statistics from 2010 (Rosstat 2010). Some Indigenous Siberian peoples are closely related to Indigenous American peoples (Zimmer 2019). 3 Manizha won a television competition to be selected as Russia’s representative for the Eurovision Song Contest, as determined by a popular vote of the viewers. Although such a vote may be understood to reflect public choice, it is worth bearing in mind that the TV channel on which the competition aired, Russia 1, is not independent, but closely linked to the state, which selects all candidates. In previous years, Russian representatives for the Eurovision Song Content were chosen by the network, itself, without the involvement of an audience or professional music experts (Interfax 2021). 4 Since the end of the 1990s, Russia has increasingly presented itself domestically and globally as a protector of so-called ‘traditional values’, which the state mostly understands as conservative values, in alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church (Curanović 2015). Over time, these values have influenced legal changes in Russia, most significantly with respect to laws making it harder for women to take legal action against domestic abusers, and the Russian federal law ‘For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values’ – frequently referred to in English-language media as the ‘gay propaganda law’ or ‘anti-homosexual propaganda law’ of June 2013. The law argues that minors must be protected from any content presenting homosexuality as normal, as such content contradicts traditional family values and, accordingly, would harm the health and well-being of children. Importantly, discourse around ‘traditional values’ presents both homosexuality and feminism as un-Russian imports from the West. 5 The article does not specify who exactly is imagined as ‘the left’, but it offers several examples from very different positions on the political spectrum: an Antifa supporter, a Democrat and a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (Латынина 2020). 6 The editors of this online student journal, Armen Aramyan, Natalia Tyshkevich, Vladimir Metelkin and Alla Gutnikova, face a potential prison sentence of three years for posting a video in January 2021. The video emphasises the unlawful nature of the expulsion threats that students faced prior to protests in support of the detained oppositional politician Alexey Navalny (DOXA 2021). 7 Asterisk is used to signify the multitude of gender identities that people who are read as women can have. This particular use of asterisk was first implemented in transgender studies (https://read. dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/1/1-2/26/91872/Asterisk). In this particular case of Manizha’s Eurovision performance there was at least one openly non-binary person among those who contributed their videos to be screened in the background during the singer’s performance.

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References Agassin. (2021). Во второй части интервью редактор @doxa_ journal рассказал нам про школьную травлю за любую «инаковость», включая этническую принадлежность, и рефлексию этого опыта. Agassin Instagram account. [Online] 4th October. Available from: https://www.instagram. com/p/CUnG4gesiFb/?utm_medium=copy_link [Accessed 06/10/21]. Agence France Presse. (2021). Russia’s Eurovision entry to be investigated for ‘illegal’ lyrics. The Guardian. [Online] 18th March. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ mar/18/russias-eurovision-entry-to-be-investigated-for-lyrcs [Accessed 13/09/21]. Aitkhozhina, D. (2020). Blogger targeted by Russian authorities for anti-racism posts. Human Rights Watch. [Online] 19th June. Available from: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/19/bloggertargeted-russian-authorities-anti-racism-posts [Accessed 13/09/21]. Annachickensaredinos. (2020). Еще раз про то, что в России нет расизма. Annachickensaredinos Instagram account. [Online] 31st May. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/CA2HV4DjEf0hie-GLp6EMRmhRpFnLerIu5uCDM0/?utm_medium=copy_link [Accessed 05/10/21]. Arnold, R. (2015). Systematic racist violence in Russia between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’. Theoretical Criminology, 19(2), pp. 239–256. doi:10.1177/1362480615581102. Baldwin, K. A. (2002). Beyond the color line and the iron curtain: Reading encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Budraitskis, I. (2020). Russia, George Floyd, and the end of the imaginary West. OpenDemocracy. [Online] 12th June. Available from: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-floydimaginary-west/ [Accessed 13/09/21]. Curanović, A. (2015). The guardians of traditional values: Russia and the Russian Orthodox church in the quest for status. Transatlantic Academy Paper Series, 1. [Online]. Available from: https://www. academia.edu/12689336/The_Guardians_of_Traditional_Values_Russia_and_the_Russian_ Orthodox_Church_in_the_Quest_for_Status [Accessed 13/09/21]. DOXA. (2021). Statement of DOXA editorial board. DOXA. [Online] 22nd April. Available from: https://doxajournal.ru/statement [Accessed 06/10/21]. Esquire. (2021). Акции в поддержку Навального 31 января: на митингах задержали более 4,8 тысячи человек. Полиция применила электрошокеры. Esquire. [Online] 23rd January. ­Available from: https://esquire.ru/articles/238813-akcii-v-podderzhku-navalnogo-31-yanvarya­ na-mitingah-zaderzhali-bolee-48-tysyachi-chelovek-policiya-primenila-elektroshokery/?utm _ source=y x news& ut m _ med iu m=desktop& ut m _ refer rer=ht t ps%3A%2F %2F ya ndex. com%2Fnews%2Fsearch%3Ftext%3D#part0 [Accessed 13/09/21]. Etkind, A. (2011). Internal colonization: Russia’s imperial experience. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Haas, A. (2007). ‘ “To Russia and myself ”: Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and the Soviet Union’, in Buschendorf, C. and Franke, A. (eds.) Transatlantic negotiations. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, pp. 111–131. Ibragimova, K. (2021). Tajikistan: Eurovision act strikes a chord in her native land. Eurasianet. [Online] 13th May. Available from: https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-eurovision-act-strikes-a-chord-in-hernative-land [Accessed 13/09/21]. Interfax. (2021). Представителя РФ на ‘Евровидении-2021’ выберут телезрители 8 марта. Interfax. [Online] 2nd March. Available from: https://www.interfax.ru/culture/754089 [Accessed 05/10/21]. Khamraeva, M. (2021). Silsila. App Store. [Online]. Available from: https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/ silsila/id1453519207 [Accessed 13/09/21]. Laruelle, M. (2017). Is nationalism a force for change in Russia? Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 146(2), pp. 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00437. Luxmoore, M. (2020). After Russian taxi driver is fired for refusing Black customer, right-wing backlash fuels a national debate. RadioFreeEurope. [Online] 12th June. Available from: https://www. rferl.org/a/30667655.html [Accessed 13/09/21]. Manizha. (2019). Manizha – mama. Manizha YouTube channel. [Online] 28th February. Available from: https://youtu.be/iCwuW3yClO4 [Accessed 13/09/21]. Manizha. (2020). Единство взглядов. Manizha Instagram account. [Online] 25th July. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDEOXmPj__2/ [Accessed 13/09/21]. Manizha. (2021a). Manizha – Russian woman – Russia – Official video – Eurovision 2021. Eurovision Song Contest YouTube channel. [Online] 10th March. Available from: https://youtu.be/ l01wa2ChX64 [Accessed 13/09/21].

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‘Black Lives Matter’ movement Manizha. (2021b). Может ли это... представлять Россию на Евровидении? Manizha YouTube channel. [Online] 17th March. Available from: https://youtu.be/g7J4lAGeFKo [Accessed 13/09/21]. Manizha. (2021c). More than 6.6 million views. Manizha Instagram account. [Online] 20th May. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPG-X4Cnti0/?utm_medium=copy_link g7J4lAGeFKo [Accessed 13/09/21]. Manizha. (2021d). Manizha_russianwoman. [Online]. Available from: https://instagram.com/ manizha_russianwoman?utm_medium=copy_link g7J4lAGeFKo [Accessed 13/09/21]. McDuffie, E. S. (2011). Sojourning for freedom: Black women, American communism, and the making of Black left feminism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Meduza. (2020a). BLM à la russe. Meduza. [Online] 3rd June. Available from: https://meduza.io/en/ feature/2020/06/03/blm-a-la-russe [Accessed 13/09/21]. Meduza. (2020b). Russian TV celeb Ksenia Sobchak vows to sue ‘Business Insider’ for headline that says she insulted Black people. Meduza. [Online] 25th June. Available from: https://meduza.io/en/ news/2020/06/25/russian-tv-celeb-ksenia-sobchak-sues-business-insider-for-headline-that-saysshe-insulted-black-people [Accessed 13/09/21]. Milton, J. (2021). Russia’s Eurovision act is a fearless feminist and LGBT+ rights campaigner and – shock – Russian bigots are mad. PinkNews. [Online] 15th March. Available from: https://www.pinknews. co.uk/2021/03/15/russia-eurovision-2021-manizha-sangin-2021-lgbt/ [Accessed 13/09/21]. Peters Hasty, O. (2006). Beyond the color line and the Iron Curtain: Reading encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (review). Comparative Literature Studies, 43(1–2), pp. 174–175. Petkova, M. (2020). Does Russia need a Black Lives Matter movement? Aljazeera. [Online] 26th June. Available from: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/6/26/does-russia-need-a-black-livesmatter-movement [Accessed 13/09/21]. Queerfest. (2020). 17/10 Closing of the festival. [Online]. Available from: https://2020.queerfest.org/ en/line-up/456-zakrytie.html [Accessed 13/09/21]. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Roi, Y., ed. (1995). Jews and Jewish life in Russia and the Soviet Union. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Roman, M. L. (2002). Making Caucasians Black: Moscow since the fall of communism and the racialization of non-Russians. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18(2), pp. 1–27. https:// doi.org/10.1080/714003604. Rosstat. (2010). Информационные материалы об окончательных итогах Всероссийской переписи населения 2010 года. [Online]. Available from: https://rosstat.gov.ru/storage/mediabank/Tom5_tab1_VPN-2020.xlsx [Accessed 05/10/21]. RT Documentary. (2020). Stories of Black Americans, who fled to the USSR to escape race discrimination. RT Documentary YouTube channel. [Online] 16th November. Available from: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220312-youtube-blocks-russian-state-funded-mediaincluding-rt-and-sputnik-around-the-world [Accessed 13/09/21]. RT Documentary. (2020). Stories of Black Americans, who fled to the USSR to escape race discrimination. Pink Closet News Facebook page. [Online] 9th December. Available https://www. facebook.com/pinkclosetnews/videos/stories-of-black-americans-who-f led-to-the-ussr-toescape-race-discrimination-rt/2807925732816255/ [Accessed 04/03/23]. Rutland, P. and Kazantsev, A. (2020). Do Black Lives Matter in Russia? Russia Matters. [Online] 13th July. Available from: https://russiamatters.org/analysis/do-black-lives-matter-russia [Accessed 13/09/21]. St. Julian-Varnon, K. (2020). Black skin in the red land: African Americans and the Soviet experiment. The Russian File: A blog of the Kennan Institute. [Online] 28th February. Available from: https:// www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/black-skin-red-land-african-americans-and-soviet-experiment [Accessed 07/10/21]. Sunderland, W. (2004). Taming the wild field: Colonization and empire on the Russian steppe. Taming the wild field. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501703256. Telepneva, N. (2018). Saving Ghana’s revolution: The demise of Kwame Nkrumah and the evolution of soviet policy in Africa, 1966–1972. Journal of Cold War Studies, 20(4), pp. 4–25. Tudor, A. (2017). Queering migration discourse: Differentiating racism and migratism in postcolonial Europe. Lambda Nordica, 2–3, pp. 21–40. Turoma, S. and Aitamurto, K. (2019). ‘Contesting cultural and religious identities in Russia: An introduction’, in Turoma, S., Aitamurto, K. and Vladiv-Glover, S. (eds.) Religion, expression, and patriotism in Russia. Stuttgart: Ibidem, pp. 7–24.

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Katharina Wiedlack and Iain Zabolotny UNHCR. (2020). Музыкант Манижа стала первым российским послом доброй воли Агентства ООН по делам беженцев. UNHCR. [Online] 14th December. Available from: https://www. unhcr.org/ru/24633-manizha-good-will-ambassador.html [Accessed 13/09/21]. Wiedlack, K. (2020). A feminist becoming? Louise Thompson Patterson’s and Dorothy West’s sojourn in the Soviet Union. Feminismo/s, 36, pp. 103–128. https://doi.org/10.14198/fem.2020.36.05. Wodak, R. (2020). ‘Analysing the politics of denial: Critical discourse studies and the discourse historical approach’, in Krippendorff, K. and Halabi, N. (eds.) Discourses in action: What language enables us to do. London: Routledge, pp. 19–36. Wonderzine. (2019). Manizha выпустила приложение против домашнего насилия. [Online] 28th February. Available from: https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/news/241551-m anizhasilsila [Accessed 13/09/21]. Zakharov, N. (2015). Race and racism in Russia. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Zatari, A. (2020). Racism in Russia: Stories of prejudice. BBC Russian. [Online] 18th June. Available from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53055857 [Accessed 13/09/21]. Zimmer, C. (2019). Who were the ancestors of Native Americans? A lost people in Siberia, scientists say. New York Times. [Online] 5th June. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/ science/native-americans-genetics-siberia.html [Accessed 05/10/21]. Аглиуллина, М. (2021). Почему участие Манижи в «Евровидении» полезно для России. Wonderzine. [Online] 11th March. Available from: https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/entertainment/entertainment/255461-manizha [Accessed 13/09/21]. Гражданское содействие. (2021). Комитет «Гражданское содействие» помогает беженцам и мигрантам. [Online]. Available from: https://refugee.ru [Accessed 13/09/21]. Дашиева, А. (2020). Самоцензура, или почему мы стесняемся говорить о расизме. Квирь Сибирь, [Online], pp. 23–27. Available from: https://www.academia.edu/44546783/%D0%9A% D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%8C_%D0%A1%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%8C_ %D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B7_%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81 %D1%82%D1%8C_%D0%B8_%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B0_%D0% BE_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%B5 [Accessed 13/09/21]. Ильясова, К. (2021). «Женщина может создать новый Вавилон, а может устроить конец света своей энергией». Певица Manizha—о русском духе и борьбе с устоями. Buro. [Online] 20th August. Available from: https://www.buro247.ru/culture/music/20-aug-2021-manizhainterview.html?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F% 2Fyandex.com%2Fnews%2Fsearch%3Ftext%3D [Accessed 13/09/21]. Кривотулова, К. (2021). Соловьев раскритиковал Manizha и нашел в ее песне «гендерные хрени». Lenta.ru. [Online] 25th May. Available from: https://lenta.ru/news/2021/05/25/soloviev/?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fyandex. com%2Fnews%2Fsearch%3Ftext%3D [Accessed 13/09/21]. Латынина, Ю. (2020). ‘Донбасс в Нью-Йорке’, Новая Газета. [Online] 4th June. Available from: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/06/03/85679-donbass-v-nyu-yorke [Accessed 13/09/21]. Открытые. (2019). Равенство – это. Журнал Открытые YouTube channel. [Online]. Available from: https://youtu.be/rWq0UyNXrKM [Accessed 13/09/21]. Петрашевич, И. (2020). Хабаровск устает от митингов: меньше трех тысяч участников, много приезжих, фриков и детей. Федеральное агентство новостей. [Online] 1st August. Available from: https://riafan.ru/1298420-khabarovsk-ustaet-ot-mitingov-menshe-trekh-tysyachuchastnikov-mnogo-priezzhikh-frikov-i-detei [Accessed 13/09/21]. Россия 1. (2020a). Россия. Кремль. Путин. Smotrim.ru. [Online] 21st June. Available from: https://smotrim.ru/video/2198622?utm_source=player&utm_campaign=blocked_embed [Accessed 04/03/23]. Россия 1. (2020b). Воскресный вечер с Владимиром Соловьевым от 07.06.2020. Yapolitik.ru. [Online] 7th June. Available from: https://yapolitic.ru/10089-voskresnyy-vecher-s-vladimiromsolovevym-070620 [Accessed 04/03/23]. Такие же дети. (2019). Интеграционный центр ‘Такие же дети’. vk.com. [Online]. Available from: https://vk.com/kids.refugee [Accessed 13/09/21]. Таратута, Ю. (2021). Почему выступление Манижи на «Евровидении» не радует. Wonderzine. [Online] 26th May. Available from: https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/lifeopinion/256725-manizha [Accessed 13/09/21]. ТАСС. (2021). Численность коренных малочисленных народов в России выросла более чем на 20% за 30 лет. [Online], 6th April. Available from: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/11076891 [Accessed 05/10/21].

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22 THE ‘CRISIS’ OF WHITE HEGEMONY, FAR-RIGHT POLITICS AND ENTITLEMENT TO WEALTH Suvi Keskinen Introduction Racial capitalism works globally through several kinds of bordering and ordering processes. In particular, borders are central for the creation of the precarious and exploitable labour that drives capitalist accumulation, facilitating both the immobilisation of low-wage workers in the Global South and the creation of racialised labour in the Global North, including hyper-exploitable groups such as undocumented migrants (Danewid 2021; Walia 2021). The racially ordered labour force is distributed along a continuum ranging from secure labour market positions conjoined with full citizenship rights (predominantly enjoyed by white nationals) to precarious positions that are excluded from waged labour (which disproportionately target migrants and racialised minorities). As Arun Kundnani (2021, p. 53) argues, ‘race provides a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and “unexploitable”, bearers of entitlements and bare life’ (Kundnani 2021, p. 53). States play a central role in upholding such racial and class orders through their border policies, definitions of national belonging and policing of racialised ‘others’. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which notions of racialised labour, excluded ‘surplus’ populations and reproductions of the nation are articulated in the far-right rhetoric that places the welfare state at the centre of its political agenda. The welfare state, which is constantly under threat due to neoliberal policies and restructuration processes, has proven to be a topic that far-right parties can effectively capitalise on. This is especially true in the Nordic countries, where the welfare state is not only a system for arranging services but also an ideological project aimed at ensuring citizens’ security and well-being. While support for far-right parties has been rising in continental Europe and throughout the world, this trend has been particularly pronounced in the Nordic region since the turn of the millennium. Currently, the far-right parties in Norway and Finland rank among those with the largest electoral support; and the far-right party in Denmark has acted as the government support party on two occasions. The far-right party in Sweden emerged as the second largest party in the 2022 parliamentary elections and became the support party of the ruling ­conservative-liberal government.1 Overall, the far-right parties yield considerable power in the Nordic countries, and their impact on the political agenda in these countries has extended DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-26

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far beyond their own political programmes. In this chapter, I analyse the Finnish context as an example of how a political project combining heteropatriarchal structures with racialised (b)ordering practices has been developed to safeguard white entitlement to wealth and benefits within global racial capitalism. I further discuss the subject positions and personal rewards this racial project has provided for its supporters, in order to understand the appeal of such political projects and movements in societal contexts in which whiteness is a takenfor-granted component of the national identity and welfare state is increasingly subjected to economic and moral criticism. Outlining the strategy for the forthcoming municipal elections in 2021, Jussi Halla-aho, the leader of the far-right True Finns2 party, stated: ‘In Finland, the task of the municipalities and the state is to defend the wellbeing and safety of Finns, not to […] act as the whole world’s social office’ (Ristamäki 2020). In recent years, the slogan of Finland as the ‘whole world’s social office’ has been repeated not only by the party leader, but also by a number of politicians and party supporters. It was even written into the party’s electoral programme – published prior to the 2015 parliamentary elections – in the statement of their main political claims (Perussuomalaiset 2015a). As this formulation suggests, the party’s white nationalism is not only built around a welfare chauvinist ideology that emphasises the rights of white nationals to welfare benefits and services (e.g. Careja et al. 2016; Keskinen, Norocel and Jørgensen 2016), but also on global raciality and the unequal division of wealth that results from racial capitalism. I argue that the analytical focus on the division of welfare and services within a nation-state frame in far-right rhetoric, achieved through a juxtaposition of ‘deserving’ white nationals and ‘undeserving’ migrants and racialised minorities, must be combined with an analysis of global power relations and the world order of racial capitalism. Echoing similar views but adopting an anticipatory tone, Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the far-right party Sweden Democrats, claimed in 2019 that Sweden’s great political struggle of tomorrow will be the redistribution and division of welfare resources. He proposed that the main political issue is a lack of funding for welfare, while ‘tens of thousands of people from all over the world are welcomed here every year to live at the cost of the tax payers’ (Davidson and Wallberg 2019). This apocalyptic vision of the racialised fight for resources and welfare was also visualised in the electoral campaign video of the Sweden Democrats in 2010, which featured women in Black burqas pushing baby trolleys, overrunning fragile white pensioners in a race to the welfare desk.3 In Denmark, the far-right Danish People’s Party and the former centre-right governments have restricted access to and reduced the level of welfare benefits through regulations that have, in effect, targeted migrants and racialised minorities; alongside this, most parties in parliament have adopted a welfare chauvinist rhetoric ( Jørgensen and Thomsen 2016). As a result of this consensus, even the Social Democratic government that gained power in 2019 has largely maintained these politics. As these examples show, such rhetoric is central to far-right parties, and it has broad resonance among voters and politicians in the Nordic welfare states. The current moment must be understood in relation to shifts in the politics of race. Although this politics has long roots, it has intensified since the 2008 financial crisis, both within and beyond the Nordic region (see, e.g., Gutierréz Rodríguez, Tuzcu and Winkel 2018; for an analysis of the Swedish context, see Hübinette and Lundström, this volume). Simultaneously, its focus has shifted from ‘racial hegemony’ towards ‘racial domination’, as suggested by the recent Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the United States. In an analysis of racial politics in Finland following the 2015 asylum migration, I discussed the ‘crisis of white hegemony’ when the taken-for-granted nature of whiteness as a characteristic of the Finnish self-image was 266

The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony

challenged both by the visible presence of citizens and migrants racialised as non-white and by white nationalism that aimed for racial domination (Keskinen 2018). In contrast to the idea of hegemonic whiteness (Hübinette and Lundström 2014; Hughey 2010) as a relatively monolithic entity, my analysis sought to differentiate between racial politics as unquestioned ‘white hegemony’ – building on consent, common sense and a taken-for-granted notions (Agustín and Jørgensen 2015; Gramsci 1978) – and racial politics as ‘white domination’ – emphasising coercion, segregation and expulsion – in order to better understand recent shifts in the politics of race. While a shift towards racial domination is evident in many parts of the world, we are also witnessing a return to hegemonic ways of upholding racial hierarchies and resistance to racial domination. Importantly, social movements such as Black Lives Matter, which seek to dismantle racial structures, are spreading transnationally, not least in the Nordic region. The analysis in this chapter builds on and continues the work of three previous studies (Keskinen 2013, 2016, 2018), using material from the political programmes of the far-right True Finns party, published statements from leading ideologues and intellectuals within the Finnish far-right, and content from far-right social media accounts.4 References are made to the political programmes of the True Finns party, including their electoral programmes (as published in advance of parliamentary and municipal elections) and their immigration programme, which outlines the party’s main agenda in regards to immigration and the integration of migrants. I examine the empirical material from the perspective of entitlement to welfare and wealth, as well as the racialised and gendered dimensions of national belonging.

The racial project of (b)ordering in global capitalism In this chapter, I build on and elaborate critical race perspectives, emphasising the role of politics and political economy for the (re)production of racial structures, ideologies and practices. In racial formation theory, racial politics is a key factor in the shaping of the ‘socio-historical processes by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed and deployed’ (Omi and Winant 2015, p. 109). Racial politics refers to actions taken at both the macro (e.g. state policies, legislation and the organisation of civil society) and the micro level (e.g. everyday interactions, embodied lives and resistances), in which group formation and identity processes are central. Different actors develop and engage in racial projects, which combine racialised meanings and the creation of identities to determine the organisation and distribution of resources. While economic resources are central for racial projects, political, cultural and social resources also play a role. Thus, racial projects combine and articulate the linkages between structures, meanings and group formations. Not only do they involve large-scale political and economic agendas, but they are also practiced in the everyday lives of workers, professionals, students and activists, among others. As a second theoretical framework, I draw on the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ (Bhattacharyya 2018; Burden-Stelly 2020; Gutierréz Rodríguez 2018; Kundnani 2021; Robinson 2000). In his seminal work on this subject, Cedric Robinson (2000) demonstrates that capitalism did not break with the feudal order, as Marx argued, but in many ways maintained its coercive and violent processes in the production of a modern world order built on slavery, colonialism and genocide (Kelley 2000, p. xiii). The racial capitalism framework allows us to determine how racism shapes capitalist development and how the differentiating processes of capitalism become racialised. The racialisation of labour works to divide the working class and thereby secure the existing power hierarchies of the social order (Roediger 2017). If capitalism is characterised by the dehumanisation of labour for the purposes of profit 267

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making, then racialisation and the projection of dehumanising processes onto certain groups defined as less ‘worthy’ may be understood as a method to ‘safeguard the interests of those deemed dominant or “unraced”’ (Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 21). Throughout history, capitalist exploitation, expropriation and dispossession have built on and been legitimised by colonial difference and racial demarcations. An understanding of race as a ‘mode of classifying, ordering, creating and destroying people, labour power, land, environment and capital’ (Tilley and Shilliam 2018, p. 537) may uncover examples of both continuity and change within the histories of colonialism, imperialism, fascism and (neo)liberalism. Here, I examine the racial project articulated by the far-right – related to access to welfare and wealth – through the lens of (b)ordering in global racial capitalism. I use the term ‘(b)ordering’ to refer to the intertwinement of two central logics of racial capitalism today: the logic of bordering and the logic of ordering into racial and class hierarchies. The (b)ordering of Europe and its individual nation-states has been central to the control of mobility to and settlement within the region, and thus the security of its existing racial order. Maintaining wealth in the Global North and ensuring its continuous accumulation has in part been achieved through the management of, and restrictions to migration, as well as expulsions. (B)ordering can be understood as a logic that divides inside – as ‘a space of order, privilege and entitlement’ – and outside – as a space in which economic insecurity, deprivation and violence shape the conditions of everyday life (El-Enany 2020, p. 6). Furthermore, (b)ordering logic is made visible in the control and policing of racialised ‘others’ and migrants, who are faced with the risk of deportation. As such, (b)ordering logic is not restricted to the racial projects of the far right, but practiced also by leading politicians from other parties, as well as legislators and authorities. However, the far right is a leading force in the creation of racial projects, based on the logics of (b)ordering and an attempt to expand their impact across the political field.

Welfare ‘for our own people’: welfare chauvinism as a (b)ordering practice One of the central demands of the True Finns party is that welfare should be granted to – and benefit only – ‘our own people’. By this, they mean citizens with a self-evident right to belong, who can be included in the racialised category of ‘Finn’. In such usage, a juxtaposition between white Finns and non-white ‘immigrants’ is created. The party rhetoric treats nonwhite ‘immigrants’ as non-deserving – partly referring to their relatively higher level of unemployment (and thus their non-contribution to welfare), but more so because of their perceived position outside of national belongingness. Entitlement to welfare is based on the premise that the wealth that is distributed has been accumulated over time; thus, those with an ‘origin’ in the country (or their ‘descendants’) deserve it, irrespective of whether they participated in the creation of this wealth, themselves. Children or young adults of ‘Finnish origin’ are seen as deserving of the resources provided by the welfare state, in the form of schooling, child benefit, unemployment allowance5 and income support. It is extremely hard – if not impossible, as some of the citations below will show for people to move from the category of undeserving non-white ‘immigrant’ to that of deserving ‘Finn’, due to its coding in whiteness. This simultaneously renders many groups living in Finland invisible or less relevant to the far-right political project – most notably individuals within the largest immigrant groups in Finland (i.e. Russians and Estonians, who are located at the margins of whiteness), and the Roma minority and Indigenous Sámi people, whose national belonging cannot be denied. The following quote from the True Finns electoral programme in 2015 highlights the party’s racialised definition of ‘Finns’, which bypasses the fact that minorities racialised 268

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as non-white are overrepresented among the poorest populations in Finland (Laitinen, Jukarainen and Broberg 2016). Instead, it appeals to white Finns’ right to be cared for over and above poor people from the ‘whole world’. A million Finns are living at or below the poverty rate. Low income affects the whole life and life choices. […] We need to start taking care of the Finns. We should not be the whole world’s health care centre or social office. (Perussuomalaiset 2015a) The racial project that is evident in this quotation is built on a (b)ordering logic that identifies those who are deserving of welfare and care according to their perceived national belonging in a bordered world. It also (re)produces this racial order within Finnish society. The accumulated welfare that is distributed by the state is considered reserved for white citizens only, while non-white ‘others’ within the national borders are ordered to take their (lower) place in the racial and economic hierarchies. The (b)ordering practiced by the True Finns party is not only symbolic, but it also involves active demands to reduce welfare benefits and exclude those perceived as non-white ‘others’ from basic rights of citizenship. The measures put forth include the cutting of income benefits for asylum seekers who have received a residence permit to a maximum of 50 per cent of the general income benefit level; the restriction of places in which migrants receiving income and housing benefits can live; and the requirement for self-support and the non-use of social benefits as criteria for family reunification (Perussuomalaiset 2011, 2015b, 2019b; see also Keskinen 2016).6 Moreover, the party presents citizenship as a ‘reward’ dependent on the level of ‘integration’, which is evaluated on the basis of language skills, ability to support oneself without recourse to social benefits and an evident desire to live according to the rules of Finnish society (Perussuomalaiset 2015b, p. 5). This racial project, built around an ideology of welfare chauvinism, gains strength from its resonance with the larger welfare nationalist project, which is promoted by most parties in the Finnish parliament (Keskinen 2016). Analysing the Swedish welfare state, Barker (2018, p. 33) argues that, from its beginning, the welfare state has been intimately tied to nationalism: the welfare state was part and parcel of a national project that attached individuals to the fate of the nation, as their sense of belonging, sense of national identity was wrapped around the welfare state and its success, contributing to a kind of ontological investment in the welfare state. In other words, the welfare state in the Nordic countries is not only designed to distribute benefits or services, but it is also conceived as a comprehensive national project that connects collective self-images and economic resources into notions of individual security and life prospects. In Finland, the welfare state has wide backing among citizens, and even the parties that promote privatisation and the outsourcing of public services acknowledge the benefits of public education and the social stability provided by the welfare state. (B)ordering logic, however, means that security and wealth for those on the ‘inside’ is achieved through ‘the imposition of insecurity and hardship for those on the outside’ (Barker 2018, p. 45). In welfare nationalism, citizenship and legal residence are the criteria for access to the rights of the ‘inside’. In the far-right racial project, the ‘inside’ is even more narrowly defined by the use of the logics of bordering and the logics of racial and economic 269

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ordering. Not only are foreign nationals considered on the ‘outside’, but so are non-white, disproportionately poor minorities living within the nation, who are accordingly targeted by welfare exclusions and (threats of ) expulsion. In the far-right racial project, welfare chauvinism is presented as the solution to the decreasing level of public funding and the narrowing economic scope for welfare services that Finland (similar to other Nordic states) is currently facing. In the age of hegemonic neoliberalism, austerity politics and the ‘waning welfare state’ (Keskinen, Skaptadóttir and Toivanen 2019), restricted access to welfare benefits and services through racially differentiated hierarchies and the expulsion of racialised ‘others’ serves to protect the privileges of white citizens. Nevertheless, the demands of austerity politics and the reduced scope of public spending suggest that even poor and working class white people will suffer from the welfare cuts – a fact that is not addressed in the far-right party programmes but, at times, made explicit in the social media messaging of party supporters (Mäkinen 2017). Under the heading ‘Vote Finland Back’ (inspired by the Trump presidential campaign slogan in the United States), the True Finns party programme for the 2019 parliamentary elections argues that welfare expenditure should be cut and the age of living in debt must end. It juxtaposes the costs of immigration with those of welfare services, ultimately claiming that immigration prevents all kinds of positive societal developments: Immigration to Finland makes it impossible to maintain good social security and working conditions, good wage levels, good schools, equality, social tranquility – the good Finland. (Perussuomalaiset 2019a) Furthermore, the (b)ordering logic that creates racial hierarchies within the nation is combined with demands to widen the expulsion possibilities for migrants who are both recently arrived and legal residents: The access of asylum seekers and other foreigners to permanent residence permit needs to be severely restricted. […] International protection should also be temporary. When the conditions in the country of origin become better, the direction of migration needs to take a turn back from Finland. (Perussuomalaiset 2019b, p. 5)

(B)ordering as the management of wealth accumulation in racial capitalism The (b)ordering logic of the True Finns party rhetoric is not only connected to the welfare state and the benefits it provides, but more broadly to the safeguarding of wealth and its continued accumulation within national boundaries, as embedded in the structures of global racial capitalism. The biggest fear in such rhetoric is discussed as the ‘never ending flow’ of people who, in Frantz Fanon’s (2004[1961]) words, could be called les damnés de la terre. Such people make visible the darker side of modernity (Mignolo 2011), and include nonwhite people from the former European colonies who bear the burden of the expropriation, exploitation and violence created by the colonial matrix of power. Even Finland’s future looks a lot less Finnish than it does today. After 2013, the most rapidly increasing group has been the Iraqis. So just for demographic reasons, it is necessary to restrict immigration considerably, because the arrivals will never end. (Perussuomalaiset 2019b, p. 3)

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The party programmes describe the political aim as maintaining Finland as a space of high technology. In this space, there is no use for non-white migrants, who are presumed to be uneducated and unfit to meet the demands of hyper-modern society. Building on a (b)ordering logic, this far-right rhetoric presents technological development and the concomitant capital accumulation as characteristics that can only be achieved by well-educated and productive white people. Strict immigration control and repatriation are seen as the only ways to ensure a ‘good’ development of Finland, because guidance, education and integration measures are not viewed as adequate to create productive labour among the non-white ‘underclass’. Racial capitalism creates ‘redundant and surplus populations’ of people who have lost their previous livelihoods but not been given the chance to participate fairly in the workforce (Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 15). The True Finns party rhetoric draws upon the logic of racial capitalism to claim the unassimilability of non-white migrants from former European colonies. It further claims that a demographic shift is occurring due to the emigration of well-educated white Finns – presumably those who are most likely to fare well in the global capitalist competition – to other countries.7 Policy makers and educational actors are more interested in integration [of non-white immigrants] than getting native skilled labour to the Finnish labour market. At the same time, highly educated Finns are moving abroad with an increasing tempo. In place of them, we receive uneducated immigrants, a large part of whom are illiterate. (Perussuomalaiset 2019a) In these images of a society characterised by technological development and high expertise, poor, non-white migrants do not have a place – not even as low-paid, exploitable and precarious labour in the service, cleaning and healthcare sectors that they are usually granted access to in racial capitalism. Instead, high technology is envisioned to create a self-supplying, segregated white national space that will further ensure Finland’s favourable positioning in the global capitalist hierarchy of nations. According to this logic, borders that keep undesired non-white migrants away will allow for the restoration of the racialised and classed hierarchies that the party regards as threatened. Robotisation, artificial intelligence and automatisation will revolutionise the Finnish labour market in the near future. Driverless transport, automatic cash desks in shops, robots that take care of cleaning and care work, and other high technology applications will reduce the number of jobs with low qualifications. When a revolutionary change in the economic structure is dawning, it is irresponsible to ladle low skilled immigrants to Finland, because these people will most certainly be excluded from the labour market with time. (Perussuomalaiset 2019b, p. 7) I interpret the above citation in light of the ‘biopolitics of disposability’ (Giroux 2007) that turns groups of people made redundant and devoid of value in racial capitalism into human ‘waste’ to be dealt with through means ranging from exclusion and segregation to the stripping of human rights, expulsion and (ultimately) annihilation. The state is a central site for the biopolitics of disposability; hence, the centring of the welfare state in far-right rhetoric also builds on its capacity to decide over ‘life’ and ‘death’. The history of the Nordic welfare state also provides evidence for this biopolitical element, in the form of eugenics and stateled sterilisation programmes (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996).

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Scholars have underlined the importance of the racialisation of labour and the management of migration for global capitalism and the continued accumulation of capital in the Global North (e.g. De Genova 2010; Gutierréz Rodríguez 2018; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012). The production of precarious migrant labour and the downward pressure this exerts on wages are central elements of many European economies, which have been developed in tandem with (and partly as a result of ) increased European border control and deportation regimes. Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard (2017, pp. 92–93) discuss this as a division between exploitative racism, which produces ‘a usable (exploitable) racialised labour force through discursive and institutional practices’, and exclusionary racism, built on views of the ‘other’ as a ‘threat to normative order and to social cohesion’. My analysis indicates that such neat divisions may not be sufficient to capture the complexity of the far-right rhetoric and its impact on the broader political sphere. In addition to analysing the production of a precarious and exploitable migrant labour force, we must also attend to the ways in which ‘surplus populations’ are produced by racial capitalism both materially, in the processes of racial capitalism, and symbolically, in the attempt to use differentiating processes to reproduce racial and class hierarchies. Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever (2018) note that de-industrialisation and working class political defeats in the neoliberal period have become increasingly interpreted in a racialised frame. This has resulted in the adoption of racialised nationalism by certain parts of the white working class, despite the fact that these processes also affect non-white working class populations. These authors argue that the explicit racism we witness in the public sphere ‘resonates with the cultural and political logic of our time’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018, p. 1,811). This may explain (parts of ) the popular support for far-right agendas even in Finland, but as the above citations show, such agendas also make a clear appeal to white, middle class voters who identify with the notion of Finns as ‘highly educated’, resourceful and the ‘winners of globalisation’. The white working class has no self-evident role in these imaginaries or political futures, and they are likely to be targeted by processes creating ‘surplus populations’, in the hierarchical manner characteristic of racial capitalism. My analysis points to the fact that the creation of welfare and wealth is not now, nor was it ever (i.e. during the heyday of the welfare state), a national matter. Rather, the welfare state must be examined in connection to the world order of racial capitalism, with its colonial and racial roots (Bhambra 2017; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018). As Gurminder Bhambra (2017, p. 227) notes, ‘race has been fundamental to the configuration of the modern world and is integral to the very configuration of socio-economic inequalities in the present’. The Nordic countries offer no exception to this general rule. The wealth produced within racial capitalist structures – which contributes to the wealth distributed within the Nordic welfare states – is created through the exploitative and extractivist processes that Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam (2018) call ‘raced markets’. This understanding of the welfare state as economically embedded in, and benefitting from, global racial capitalism seriously challenges the notion of who has the right to welfare and to what extent it can be legitimately tied to ‘origin’ or ‘ descent’ of those nationals who developed the Nordic welfare states.

(B)ordering and empowerment in the heteropatriarchal nation Finally, far-right politics builds on a specific combination of a complementary gender order and a racialised application of the gender equality discourse (see also Mulinari and Neergaard 2014; Norocel 2013). I interpret this combination as an articulation that allows for a racialised heteropatriarchal order to be reproduced in contexts where both the hegemony 272

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of whiteness and the gender order have been challenged. Heteropatriarchy here refers to the upholding of heterosexuality and patriarchy as a normal state of affairs, despite it resting on the marginalisation and abnormalisation of other kinds of gender and sexual arrangements (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2013). Far-right parties and social movements have provided space for new political identities that both capture the nostalgic longing for the perceived ‘golden days’ that predated the 1960s liberationist movements and create future visions that empower groups benefitting from the racialised heteropatriarchal order. In this vein, far-right politics mobilises what I call ‘white border guard masculinities’ (Keskinen 2013), aimed at reinstalling white masculine power through the policing of gendered, sexualised and racialised borders. Characteristic of such masculinities is a fixation on borders, border control, cultural boundary work and exclusions, which are treated as necessities in the context of a questioned white hegemony. Such masculinities play upon notions of the ‘homeliness’ of the nation, defined by its racial and sexualised nature, which is portrayed as being under threat and in need of defending. Only certain groups can claim governmental belonging and harbour ambitions to participate in the management of the nation, including the treatment of ‘others’ as objects to be managed (Hage 2000). (B)ordering ensures that this governmental belonging and the power that is attached to it stays within the groups that are privileged by the current racial and gender order. The central themes of the politics espoused by the intellectual leaders and ideologists of the far right in Finland overlap with many of those promoted by the anti-feminist movement (Keskinen 2013). Both are concerned with the reproduction of the nation, driven by fears that white Finns will become outnumbered by racialised ‘others’. Support for complementary gender identities and the heterosexual family is presented in an attempt to ensure that Finland is the home of white people into the future. Gender equality is used in a racialising manner to portray migrants and racialised minorities as patriarchal and deviant from the (assumed) gender equal, white Finnish society (see also Andreassen 2012). Simultaneously, the far-right ideologists and politicians harshly attack white women who hold (relatively) powerful positions, accusing them of allying with racialised ‘other’ men. These white women, who are active in eco-leftist political parties or the public sector (particularly with respect to immigration and integration), are presented as ‘traitors’ of the white Finnish nation. Moreover, the anti-feminist and far-right groups voice the interests of (some) white men in sexually exploiting women of colour, articulating hedonist pleasures pertaining to cross-racial intimate relationships and commercial sex (Keskinen 2013). The (b)ordering logic is thus used to justify the need to both close the borders to some migrants (i.e. non-white men) and let other migrants in (i.e. non-white women, who are expected to fulfil the relational and sexual needs of white male citizens). While white nationalism and right-wing populism were once male dominated, today, we are witnessing an upsurge in ‘white border guard femininities’. White women are increasingly mobilising on social media, in far-right groups and in far-right parties to argue for the closing of borders, as well as to disseminate anti-Muslim and anti-Black racist material (Keskinen 2018). Furthermore, as broadly covered by the news media, white women are also actively participating in the unofficial border patrols that formed after the large-scale asylum migration in 2015. For example, the national broadcasting company and several newspapers photographed and interviewed women taking part in demonstrations in Northern Finland, where migrants were crossing the Swedish–Finnish border. The news portrayed middle-aged women and their teenage daughters, carrying the Finnish flag and dressed in T-shirts with nationalist symbols. These women spoke as mothers who sought to defend their daughters’ bodily integrity, referring to the sexual otherness of the non-white men who were arriving in the country (Keskinen 2018). Along similar lines, in a Facebook group titled ‘Close the 273

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borders’, in which women post comments on many anti-immigration matters, one of the most widely discussed topics pertains to Islam and its perceived threats to white women and gender equality (Keskinen 2018). White border guard femininities are best understood as political subjectivities that claim gender equality in an overwhelmingly masculine, white nationalist context, allowing women to take their place in the movement through the performance of empowered femininities. Such femininities draw on both traditional definitions of femininity (connected to motherhood, children and family) and liberal understandings of gender equality, alongside the performance of racist acts. This re-articulation of gender equality only opposes male power when it pertains to Muslims and non-white men. Its power to mobilise white women lies in the fact that this racist appropriation allows them to erase the gender conflict with white men, yet to feel empowered by the gender equality discourse and the positions it opens up for women. Through claiming knowledge of and demanding actions in relation to immigration, the women who embody white border guard femininities are, similar to their male counterparts, exercising their governmental belonging and laying claims to all its benefits.

Conclusion This chapter has examined (b)ordering – defined as the intertwinement of bordering and ordering to racial, class and gender hierarchies – as a central logic of far-right politics seeking to restore the racial and heteropatriarchal orders that have been challenged since the mid-twentieth century. I have identified this far-right racial project within the contemporary Nordic region – and especially Finland – and explored the basis for its wide appeal among white male and white female voters in the context of racial capitalism and the ‘crisis of white hegemony’. My analysis has emphasised: (b)ordering practices in relation to the welfare state; the creation and maintenance of wealth within the white national space in the Global North; and empowerment through the racialised reproduction of the heteropatriarchal nation. I have argued that the driving motor of the far-right racial project is not so much a passive nostalgia, but an active framing of a future for which to mobilise. This project combines racialised meanings and the creation of identities to determine the organisation and distribution of economic, political, cultural and social resources. White nationalism and far-right politics are capitalising on white fears of the redistribution of wealth and welfare in a double-move that both draws upon and hides the inherent inequalities of global racial capitalism. It builds and deploys its political agenda upon the differentiating processes of racial capitalism and the racialised hierarchies between waged labour workers, precariously employed persons and ‘surplus people’, granting them different entitlements to wealth and security. However, the far-right rhetoric does not identify racial capitalism as the locus of such differentiating processes and insecurities. Rather, it projects these processes onto groups racialised as non-white ‘others’ within the nation and to les damnés de la terre (Fanon 2004[1961]), who bear the brunt of the violent effects of global racial capitalism, in its efforts to re-install the racial order that is being challenged.

Notes 1 Iceland represents an exception, as the only Nordic country without a far-right party in parliament. 2 The Finnish name of the party, Perussuomalaiset, was translated as ‘True Finns’ prior to 2011, when the party began to use the English name ‘Finns Party’. I use the original translation here, as it reflects better the original name of the party and use of the name Finns Party could be understood to legitimate the party’s claim to represent all Finnish people.

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Suvi Keskinen Gutierréz Rodríguez, E. (2018). The coloniality of migration and the ‘refugee crisis’: On the asylum-migration nexus, the transatlantic white European settler colonialism-migration and racial capitalism. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 34(1), pp. 16–28. Gutierréz Rodríguez, E., Tuzcu, P. and Winkel, H. (2018). Introduction: Feminisms in times of anti-genderism, racism and austerity. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68(3), pp. 139–141. Hage, G. (2000). White nation. New York, NY: Routledge. Hübinette, T. and Lundström, C. (2014). Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: Understanding racial temporalities in Sweden. Social Identities: Journal of the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 20(6), pp. 423–437. Hughey, M. (2010). The (dis)similarities of white racial identities: The conceptual framework of ‘hegemonic whiteness’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(8), pp. 1289–1309. Jørgensen, M. and Thomsen, T. (2016). Deservingness in the Danish context: Welfare chauvinism in times of crisis. Critical Social Policy, 36(3), pp. 330–351. Kelley, R. (2000). ‘Foreword’, in Robinson, C. (ed.) Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. xi–xxvi. Keskinen, S. (2013). Anti-feminism and white identity politics: Political antagonisms in radical rightwing populist and anti-immigration rhetoric in Finland. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3(4), pp. 225–232. Keskinen, S. (2016). From welfare nationalism to welfare chauvinism: Economic rhetoric, welfare state and the changing policies of asylum in Finland. Critical Social Policy, 36(3), pp. 352–370. Keskinen, S. (2018). The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, neonationalist femininities and antiracist feminism. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68(3), pp. 157–163. Keskinen, S., Norocel, C. and Jørgensen, M. (2016). The politics and policies of welfare chauvinism under the economic crisis. Critical Social Policy, 36(3), pp. 321–329. Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. and Toivanen, M. (2019). ‘Narrations of homogeneity, waning welfare states, and the politics of solidarity’, in Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U. and Toivanen, M. (eds.) Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region: Migration, difference, and the politics of solidarity. London: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Kundnani, A. (2021). The racial constitution of neoliberalism. Race & Class, 63(1), pp. 51–69. Laitinen, K., Jukarainen, P. and Broberg, H. (2016). Maahanmuutto & turvallisuus – arvioita nykytilasta ja ennusteita tulevaisuudelle. Government’s Analysis, Assessment and Research Activities Series 7/2016. [Online]. Available from: https://tietokayttoon.fi/documents/10616/2009122/7_Maahanmuutto+ja+turvallisuus.pdf/f436c89f-beff-4c65-b814-f4c1a44f6e46 [Accessed 27/12/21]. Mäkinen, K. (2017). Struggles of citizenship and class: Anti-immigration activism in Finland. The Sociological Review, 65(2), pp. 218–234. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2012). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mulinari, D. and Neergaard, A. (2014). We are Sweden Democrats because we care for others: Exploring racisms in the Swedish extreme right. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21(1), pp. 43–56. Mulinari, D. and Neergaard, A. (2017). Theorising racism: Exploring the Swedish racial regime. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(2), pp. 88–96. Norocel, C. (2013). Our People: A tight-knit family under the same protective roof: A critical study of gendered conceptual metaphors at work in radical right populism. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Omi, M. and Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Perussuomalaiset. (2011). Suomalaiselle sopivin. Eduskuntavaaliohjelma. Perussuomalaiset. (2015a). Perussuomalaisten eduskuntavaaliohjelma. Pääteemat. Available from: https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/pohtiva/ohjelmalistat/PS/1260 [Accessed 11/02/21]. Perussuomalaiset. (2015b). Perussuomalaisten maahanmuuttopoliittinen ohjelma 2015. Available from: https://www.perussuomalaiset.fi/tietoa-meista/puolueohjelma/ [Accessed 11/02/21]. Perussuomalaiset. (2019a). Perussuomalaisten eduskuntavaaliohjelma 2019. Available from: https:// www.perussuomalaiset.fi/tietoa-meista/puolueohjelma/ [Accessed 11/02/21].

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SECTION 5

Emotions

23 INTRODUCTION Emotions

Throughout history, emotions have been gendered through a perceived link to women, motivated by associations between the feminine and softness, nature and embodiment. In studies of race and whiteness, emotions have become an important lens through which to understand individual and collective feelings, including fear, guilt, anger and shame (Ahmed 2004; Watson, Howard-Wagner and Spanierman 2015). Through their linkage to social, political and economic structures, emotions organise our social reality. In her influential book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed (2004, p. 1) explores the ways in which emotions ‘work to shape the “surfaces” of individual and collective bodies’, and thereby construct the nation and the national. Indeed, it is important to ask: How do emotions (or a lack thereof ) shape the very existence of racial subjects? Or, in Ahmed’s terms, how is ‘being’ constructed through ‘feeling’? Accordingly, the chapters in this section analyse the emotional aspects of trauma, habits, melancholia and violence, in relation to race and whiteness. The section begins with a chapter from Shannon Sullivan, titled ‘The white habit of untrauma’, which provides a critical phenomenological account of this unconscious white habit. Phenomenology is a philosophical method that aims at uncovering the familiar, taken-for-granted assumptions, habits and norms that structure human experience. Understood phenomenologically, habits may be considered constitutive of the self, as they reflect predispositions to transact with the world in particular ways, often unconsciously (as habits typically resist conscious attempts at detection and examination). Drawing on the epistemology of ignorance developed by Charles Mills (1997, 2007), Sullivan suggests that not seeing the suffering, pain, trauma and death of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of colour is a crucial component of the racialised ignorance that is required to be white. This state of ‘untrauma’ supports white people’s habit of erasing the suffering of people of colour. Sullivan’s approach is multi-scalar, addressing the ways in which traumas at local, national and global levels feed into and structure each other. The second chapter extends this theme by addressing the topic of racial habits. ‘White habit’, written by Paul C. Taylor and Lisa Madura, discusses the role that habits play in sustaining and contesting systems of racial meaning. Taylor and Madura show how a critical phenomenology of racial habits can deepen research on racial phenomena, and how the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-28

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lived experiences of racial habits represent a productive starting point for race-theoretic analysis. In the chapter, they link whiteness to habitual modes of perception and embodied interaction, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of orientation and the body-schema (2012), Dewey’s transactionalist account of experience (1987; 1988) and Du Bois’s approach to critical race theory (1996/1940). Their critical phenomenological analysis combines a socio-historical understanding of race, a structural understanding of racism and a socio-genic account of racial formation with a bi-level and revisionist account of habit. They argue that, on one level, habits reflect the record and product of transactions with and within social environments, rather than self-contained individual dispositions; and on a second level, they are the building blocks of subject-formation, not simply addenda to our ready-made selves. The chapter ‘White melancholia: A historicised analysis of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden’, by Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström, analyses the phenomenon of ‘white melancholia’ in Sweden after the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. In this context, white melancholia denotes how the loss of the homogeneous and ‘good, anti-racist’ Sweden produces contradictory and complex feelings among both ‘racists’ and ‘anti-racists’. Since the 1970s, Sweden has perceived itself as something of a post-racial utopia; however, the country is now facing a new reality of super-diversity, marking the end of two different – but interrelated – hegemonic whiteness regimes. Nonetheless, colour-blindness is still hegemonic and issues of race and whiteness remain taboo. The authors regard contemporary Sweden as a white nation in crisis and diagnose Swedish whiteness as suffering from white melancholy. In their analysis, they offer a historicised account of three principal phases of Swedish nation-building and Swedish whiteness: the white purity period (1905–1968), the white solidarity period (1968–2001) and the white melancholy period (2001 onwards). The analysis also considers the ways in which these three hegemonic whiteness and racial grammar regimes have interrelated and intersected with different gender and class relations, racial formations and minority discourses; and embraced particular political ideologies and affective structures. The section ends with the chapter ‘Whiteness, masculinity and the decolonising imperative’, by Josephine Cornell, Nick Malherbe, Kopano Ratele and Shahnaaz Suffla. This chapter focuses on two protests – that of school-going protesters in South Africa and that of naked female protesters in Nigeria – situating them within their respective national traditions of resistance to decolonisation. The authors analyse how both protests harnessed gender and race in ways that spoke to the multifaceted nature of colonial violence, offering a universalising mode of humanising insurgency within a globalised project of decolonial future-building. They interpret and enunciate these oppressions through an interlocking matrix materialised by structural violence (imposed through dominant systems, ideologies and discourses), direct violence (i.e. physical and psychological aggression) and epistemic violence (i.e. discourses implicated in the practice of othering). Specifically, they draw on this triadic matrix of violence to analyse contemporary enactments of whiteness and masculinity. Coloniality is never a closed system, irrespective of the depth of its entrenchment; it is always met with resistance. Although such resistance can assume numerous forms, it always proceeds from a critical consciousness of how whiteness and patriarchal masculinity inform coloniality’s interlocking forms of violence. Accordingly, the authors examine the ways in which individuals, groups and organised movements have challenged, disrupted and destabilised coloniality. They ultimately demonstrate that, through a myriad of resistance strategies and tactics (e.g. re-representation, radical solidarity and even direct violence), alternative, humanising and decolonising ways of being can be engendered.

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References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1996 [1940]). ‘Dusk of dawn’, in Writings. New York, NY: Penguin. Dewey, J. (1988). The middle works of John Dewey, vol. 14: 1922, Human Nature and Conduct. Edited by J. Boydston and L. Hickman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1987). The later works of John Dewey, vol. 10: 1934, art as experience. Edited by J. Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Translated by D. Landes. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Mills, C. (1997). The Racial Contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. (2007). White Ignorance. In Sullivan, S. Tuana, N. (eds.). Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 11–38. Watson, V. T., Howard-Wagner, D. and Spanierman, L., eds. (2015). Unveiling whiteness in the twenty-first century: Global manifestations, transdisciplinary interventions. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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24 THE WHITE HABIT OF UNTRAUMA Shannon Sullivan

Introduction On 30 April 2019, the university in the United States where I teach was terrorised by an active shooter who killed two students and injured four others. That traumatic event was soon layered with other local, national and international traumas: The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread globally in 2020 and, in the United States, disproportionately killed higher numbers of Black, Latinx and Indigenous people than it did white people (Ford et al. 2020); the subsequent COVID-19 quarantines, which were lifted across the United States, once it became publicly known which communities were getting hit hardest by the virus, even though COVID-19 infections and deaths were increasing dramatically; and the 25 May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, which ignited both worldwide protests for racial justice and white supremacist pushback against those protests.1 I call these events traumatic, but we must stop to ask: Traumatic for whom? Were they traumatic for all who were affected? To sharpen the question: Were they traumatic for white people in the same way that they were traumatic for Black people?2 I believe the answer to this latter question is generally ‘No’. In the case of the 30 April shooting, although it was a horrific event for everyone associated with the university, I know anecdotally that some white people and Black people at UNC Charlotte experienced the shooting differently. That is to say, it was traumatic for Black people in ways that it was not traumatic for white people.3 (I will explain later the distinction between horror and trauma.) Although race apparently did not play a role in the white shooter’s motivation or selection of targets, the shooting contributed to racialised trauma, by reanimating individual and collective memories of other shootings that did target Black people, and involved militarised police officers in frightening, chaotic and violent interactions with (Black) civilians.4 Likewise, the United States’ dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd (and countless other Black Americans) contributed to the racialised trauma experienced by Black people. Democrats and Republicans bickered about the severity – and even the reality – of the virus, thereby distinguishing the United States from European countries such as Sweden, whose (white) political left and right were in overwhelming agreement about how to respond to the pandemic. But that difference should not mask the similar prioritisations of white people’s interests across party lines, as well as 284

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the shared disregard for people of colour, in various COVID-19 responses. To many white Americans, it might seem irrelevant that the national will to self-quarantine ‘happened’ to collapse when the demographics of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality became widely known; however, it does not strike many Black Americans as a coincidence. Once the nation realised who was primarily dying from the virus, American political and business leaders began to consider the virus more a social inconvenience and economic threat than a national health emergency (Serwer 2020). It is not an exaggeration to call the United States’ handling of COVID-19 a racially traumatic event, similar to George Floyd’s murder. ‘Stop killing us’ is the demand of many Black people in the United States, referring to both slow death due to racist disparities in health and fast death due to police violence (Kang 2015). Without minimising the significance of the trauma that these events inflicted on Black people, my focus, here, is on a different phenomenon. Using these events as a touchpoint, my aim is to use critical phenomenology to analyse what I call the white habit of ‘untrauma’. My goal is not to attempt to prove (quantitively or otherwise) that white people have been less traumatised than Black people by events such as terrorist shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic or police brutality. Instead, I assume, for heuristic purposes, that white people are not traumatised in the same ways – or to the same degree – as Black people are by anti-Black racism. This assumption allows me to examine a white privileged habit related to racial trauma whereby the trauma is often overlooked, as if it does not exist.5 After briefly explaining critical phenomenology and the challenge of identifying and describing something that is ‘invisible’, I will draw on existing emotional trauma literature to analyse three features of the white habit of untrauma: • • •

its ontological dimension, involving an effortless belief that events are real; its cognitive dimension, involving a smooth congruence of the world and self; and its temporal dimension, involving a comfortable orientation in time.

I will close by connecting the white habit of untrauma with white ignorance and white affective numbness towards people of colour.

Methodology: critical phenomenology Phenomenology is a philosophical method that aims at uncovering the familiar, takenfor-granted assumptions, habits and norms that structure human experience (Dewey 1988; Merleau-Ponty 1962). It sets aside a person’s (or society’s) ‘natural attitude’, as manifested in their commonly accepted perceptions, to reveal uncommon or lesser understood aspects. Habit is a particularly important concept in this method. Understood phenomenologically, habits are not superficial, nor are all habits necessarily ‘bad’ (e.g. slumping or interrupting others). Instead, habits are constitutive of the self, reflecting a person’s predisposition to engage with the world in a particular way. As habitual engagement is often unconscious, habits tend to resist conscious attempts at detection and examination (Sullivan 2006). They can also be collective, found in society’s tendency to understand and engage with the world in a distinctive pattern or style. Individual and societal habits are related: They exist in a dynamic feedback loop through which they reinforce (and sometimes also modify) each other. In general, phenomenological analysis is richly descriptive. This makes it a very useful methodology. However, because a descriptive approach to a topic is sometimes inadequate, the sub-field of critical phenomenology emerged to promote deeper analysis. Critical phenomenology, which includes feminist and critical race analysis, highlights experiences of 285

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power and marginalisation to demonstrate how familiar habits and ‘invisible’ norms can be oppressive (and often very visible) to many people of colour, women and other marginalised groups (Weiss et al. 2019). Critical phenomenology explicitly employs phenomenologically rich descriptions to investigate the ways in which individual and societal habits may be changed for the better. It also pays close attention to the related issue of what counts as ‘better’, and for whom. It is a methodological challenge to critically analyse something so ubiquitous and quotidian that it goes without conscious notice and seems not to even exist. This is certainly true for the habit of white privilege (Ahmed 2007; Sullivan 2006). In the case of untrauma, the challenge is doubled. Not only is the racial state of untrauma so ubiquitous and quotidian for white people that there does not seem to be anything to analyse, but it is also a state of lived experience that is built on a negative. In other words, it is a state of not being a particular way. How do we reckon with something that is not? How do we see what is supposed to remain invisible? How do we hear what is supposed to be ignored? How do we say what is supposed to remain unsaid? ‘Supposed to’, here, implies that seeing, hearing or speaking the trauma would challenge the violent status quo of global white supremacy and the dominance of white privilege. Thus, ‘supposed to’ carries a great deal of moral, political, epistemological and economic force. Under the umbrella of critical phenomenology, my approach to addressing this challenge is to use an existing scholarship on the phenomenology of trauma as something like a camera negative (see Gusich 2012; Kelly 2015; McDonald 2019; Stolorow 2007). If the phenomenology of trauma describes the ‘positive’ experience of trauma as something present and identifiable, then its negative should help to reveal the experience of untrauma. ‘Negative’, here, does not mean a mere absence. In fact, by reversing the original image, a camera negative can reveal the significance and power of what is otherwise hidden and seemingly non-existent. Similarly, by reversing existing scholarly frames, my aim is not to seek the opposite of ‘positive’ analyses of trauma but to use the ‘positive’, recognisable features of trauma (e.g. disbelief that the traumatic event has actually occurred, a felt unthinkability around the traumatic experience and temporal disorganisation in the wake of the traumatic experience) as levers with which to pry open the ‘negative’, hidden experience of untrauma. The result, I hope, will be an increased understanding of one of the many unconscious habits of whiteness. In this chapter, I focus on emotional trauma, rather than blunt force trauma (e.g. a blow to the head). I deliberately do not call the latter type of trauma ‘physical’, because emotional trauma is no less physical and embodied than blunt force trauma. An emotionally traumatic event is one that produces an experience of unbearable affect or emotion (Stolorow 2007, p. 9). What makes it unbearable is that there is no ‘holding context’ for the painful emotions. Holding contexts are often provided by intersubjective relationships, whereby support from friends, therapists and others serves as a relational home for the painful emotions (2007, p. 10). In addition, holding contexts can be more abstractly (but no less crucially) provided by impersonal features of the world (i.e. ontological, cognitive and temporal features) that render coherence to the world and self. Absent a responsive milieu provided by a holding context, intense emotional pain tends to become traumatic. In other words, intense pain and horrific events do not necessarily produce trauma. Here, it will be helpful for me to differentiate between my use of the terms ‘trauma’ and ‘horror’. I use the term ‘horror’ to acknowledge the terribleness of an event, distinguishing it from minor negative events in life. Without such a distinction, to avoid inadvertently equating a terrible event with a minor one, we might be tempted to use the word ‘trauma’ to mark the difference. But people can experience genuine horror at events in the world 286

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without that experience becoming emotionally unbearable and thus felt as traumatic. This means that, when trauma does not occur after a painful or horrific event, we should ask: What are the holding contexts that prevented trauma in this case? How do they function, and what is their cost? The question of cost is especially important. The state of untrauma tends to be considered positive. A common goal of therapy, for example, is to prevent trauma and/or to transition a person out of a traumatised state as quickly as possible. This makes good sense, in that the experience of trauma is excruciating and impedes life functioning. However, the fact that trauma is painful and debilitating does not mean that the state of untrauma is always positive or that the holding contexts that prevent trauma are worthy of affirmation or cultivation. Without disregarding the unbearableness of trauma, we can learn something important about whiteness and racial trauma if we temporarily suspend this belief. What we can see is that, in the context of race and racism, untrauma is not necessarily a state of being that white people should strive for. Furthermore, the high costs of maintaining the holding contexts that prevent white people’s racial traumatisation are unacceptable.

Ontology: an effortless belief that events happen Ontology concerns reality. It asks fundamental questions about what is real and what exists, to which answers are not always simple or immediately evident, to the eye or other senses. Trauma is ontological, because it impacts the reality of those who are traumatised. A common effect of the experience of trauma is disbelief that the traumatic event actually happened. After her beloved nephew died from an accidental house fire, for example, philosopher Gretchen Gusich (2012) described her disbelief in the new reality that her nephew was gone. She saw the deceased body, she attended the funeral, and she mourned with her sister, who was the parent of the child. Yet simultaneously, she could not believe that her nephew was dead. Her everyday activities with her family based on the knowledge of the boy’s death did not fit with her sense of reality, resulting in a paradoxical clash of knowledge and practical behaviour. While confusing, this clash provided an emotional buffer between Gusich and the world. What we can learn from Gusich’s analysis is that, for at least some time after a traumatic event, disbelief in the event functions as a kind of defence mechanism, protecting the traumatised person emotionally until they are better able to seamlessly believe that the event happened. In contrast, what happens when a person undergoes an ‘untrauma’? I use this term to designate a non-traumatic event and, in particular, to make visible the non-traumatic nature of so-called regular life events, which often go unrecognised. Persons who are untraumatised generally do not experience ruptures in reality, as they are not subjected to clashes between their practical behaviour and their knowledge about real-life events. Things happen, and untraumatized people can easily go about their day, period. They experience no question or internal struggle about what exists in the world – and how it exists – and that lack of struggle is so taken for granted that it can seem strange even to note it. Such people require no emotional buffer or defence mechanism to face the reality of events. Thus, they experience reality as simply there, with seemingly nothing of interest or import. In other words, untraumatised people are open to and accepting of what is happening or what has happened in the world. Given white people’s habit of untrauma, they do not experience a clash between their everyday behaviours and actions and the events that are occurring in the world. To them, things simply happen (e.g. Black people like George Floyd die) as part of the regular – if 287

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sometimes unfortunate – stream of events. In the wake of these events, they continue to go about their day; it is not shattered. White people might find an event such as the death of George Floyd horrific – especially when watching a police officer kneel on Floyd’s neck with a callous expression on his face; but that is different from experiencing it as a trauma. They do not experience a felt sense of ‘this isn’t real, this isn’t happening’. Nor do they react with denial or another psychological defence mechanism in order to buffer themselves from the reality of the event. Instead, they fairly quickly and easily experience the event as real – as something that happens all the time, even if that is unfortunate or shameful. This is an easy cognitive-affective state of belief for them, which is so ‘normal’ a feeling that they do not even notice it until/unless it is ripped apart. It can be difficult to provide concrete examples of the ontological dimension of being racially untraumatised, because it seems so ‘normal’ and uneventful. There does not seem to be any ‘there’, there. However, the seeming absence of a ‘there’ marks a site that merits closer examination. Take the example of going to the grocery store sometime after learning about George Floyd’s murder. White untraumatisation is experienced in the ‘everydayness’ of going to the store, which exists simultaneous with the reality of Floyd’s death. Floyd’s death does not make the grocery store trip seem unreal or surreal, even if one is sad or horrified or angry about Floyd’s murder. At some point, even in the midst of those emotions, food must still be purchased, so that one can eat. Of course, this is also true for a person who is traumatised by Floyd’s death. At some point, that person also needs to obtain food, perhaps even by going to the grocery store. But for the traumatised person, going to the store is like walking in an altered state or shredded reality. It is not easy to experience the regular things that are happening – people putting vegetables in their carts, clerks scanning groceries and announcing the charge, and so on. In contrast, the world that white people move in tends to be intact, and if/when it is fragmented or shattered, it is generally not due to race. Whiteness allows untraumatised people to experience the world as real, whole and unbroken.

Cognition: smooth congruence of the world and self Trauma’s cognitive effects, alluded to above, are a subset of the ontological dimension of trauma. Traumatised people no longer experience reality in the same way (i.e. the ontological dimension), and their shredded reality interferes with their ability to think (i.e. the cognitive dimension). This impaired ability to think should not be confused with intellectual failure (e.g. the misbalancing of one’s cheque book or the miscalculation of a doubled cookie recipe due to exhaustion), as such failures in thinking occur without any changes to reality. In contrast, traumatised people’s ability to understand things is disrupted because their reality is no longer the same. People who have experienced emotional trauma frequently find it difficult to form ideas and draw connections. After a traumatic event, various parts of the world no longer fit together into a coherent whole, and traumatised people often struggle to synthesise aspects of their life and connect themselves to the world. Such difficulties are typically most pronounced with respect to the traumatic event, itself. As Gusich (2012, p. 512) explained, she could recognise her nephew in the hospital and recognise the patterns on his skin as severe burns, but she could not put the two together in a way that allowed her to think of her nephew as severely burned. The cognitive difficulties caused by trauma may also concern the world, in general, whereby the entire world is experienced as disjointed and jarring, because it inexplicably includes a situation that is incongruent with one’s understanding of it. On a wider level, collective trauma can lead the entire world to stop making sense. 288

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In contrast, the functioning cognitive abilities of untraumatised people have a great deal to do with the fact that they are untraumatised. Untraumatised people are generally able to form ideas about events and draw coherent connections between them. They can align their sense of self with the world, understanding both what is happening and how they personally relate to those events. The relationship between untraumatised people and the world tends to be smooth, without vicious rips and tears that make the world confusing and unthinkable. As racially untraumatised, white people generally experience this smooth cognitive relationship with the world. They are able to think about events in the world because, to them, parts of the world fit together into a comprehensible whole. As their minds tend to feel at ease, they can avoid cognitive dissonance, along with the psychological and emotional agony that typically accompanies such dissonance. Although white people might experience specific events (e.g. George Floyd’s murder or the racialised death rate of the COVID-19 pandemic) as horrifying, they do not react in a cognitive crisis. Floyd was pinned to the ground with a white officer’s knee on his neck, saying that he could not breathe, and he died as a result of this brutality. Many Black people with heart conditions and diabetes are dying from COVID-19. White people can think about these events without jeopardising their cognitive understanding and sense of belonging in the world. To them, the world makes sense, even if it is – at times – ugly and brutal. This state of cognitive coherence enables untraumatised white people to perform everyday activities without experiencing any cognitive malfunction. Even when distressed about the news of George Floyd’s murder, for example, their bodily memory of pulling out a grocery cart still engages at the appropriate time. Signs in stores announcing sales still make sense, and they can match the newly discounted items in store flyers with items on the shelf. They hear the checkout clerk’s polite ‘How are you today?’ as a routine social nicety rather than an incomprehensible, absurd inquiry. Their world is knowable and fits together coherently, in large part because of their whiteness.

Temporality: comfortable orientation in time Trauma causes temporal disorientation, leading traumatised people to experience time as simultaneously slowing down and speeding up. This phenomenon tends to result from traumatised people’s intense focus on and preoccupation with the traumatic event. The event consumes all of their attention, energy and emotion, as if it is the only thing in the world that exists. Traumatised people often have difficulty imagining or remembering what life was like prior to the traumatic event. For example, Gusich experienced the three-plus weeks that she spent in the hospital with her nephew before he died as an eternity (2012, p. 513). At the same time, she felt that the phone call from her sister with the bad news about the fire had just happened. The fire felt immediate and newly inserted into Gusich’s life, even though it had occurred almost a month prior. In a similar fashion, the fixity of traumatised peoples’ attention makes it difficult for them to form new memories during their period of temporal disorientation. Things other than the trauma do not seem to carry much meaning, and thus there are often strange gaps in their memory after the event. Just as reality and cognitive ability are out of joint for traumatised people, so too do time and memory tend to be experienced as unhinged. Untraumatised people, in contrast, typically enjoy a temporal experience in which time flows smoothly. This allows their self to also flow smoothly, so to speak. They are not stuck in a particular period of time that feels simultaneously eternal and recent, forever ago and just now. Rather, they have a well-coordinated past, present and sense of future. They are also 289

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multi-minded, rather than single-minded, benefitting from a variety of events in the world that have meaning for them and are thus memorable. They can go to the grocery store and not have a surreal sense of it being simultaneously long ago and only yesterday that George Floyd was murdered. In addition, their memories fortify their sense of self as something coherent and meaningful. They are particular persons with particular experiences, which hang together to form a being that exists because it can be experienced and located temporally. They can remember to consult their grocery list, for example, and easily identify with the person who composed the list earlier in the week, before Floyd died. White people tend to have a different relationship with time, due to their racially untraumatised existence. They are able to have a felt sense of a coherently distinct past, present and future because of their white privilege. They do not appear to be existentially frozen in a particular moment in time, fixated on a single event that takes over their entire lives. Their untraumatised existence allows them to achieve a complex mindfulness about numerous aspects of the world. They flow, move and have a sense of existential freedom due to their temporal existence. They can form memories that help secure their sense of self, and their whiteness allows their self to be grounded and at ease. This phenomenological description of white people’s relationship with time differs from – but complements – political descriptions of white people’s relationship with time. Charles Mills (2014), for example, describes ‘white time’ as a representation of temporality shaped by the interests, experiences and memories of the dominant white community. In particular, white time supports an idealised account of history abstracted from the white European and Euro-American domination of people of colour. In white time, colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade are located on a linear timeline of progress in the far distant past – that is, if they show up on the timeline at all. White time allows white people to categorise colonialism, racism and other systemic forms of oppression against non-Europeans as irrelevant historical details. In a similar fashion, ‘white temporality’ conceives of time as a linear arrow of racial progression (Sullivan 2020). Unlike ‘white time’, the concept of ‘white temporality’ emphasises the experiential aspect of white people’s relationship with time. In white temporality, time is felt as segregated into distinct time periods – past, present and future – much like pop beads on a child’s necklace. The past is experienced as ancient history, unrelated to the present and future. This kind of temporality contrasts with a more archaeological or ‘vertical’ experience of time, in which past, present and future are co-existent – layered on top of each other in the same space. For example, the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott – an unarmed Black man waiting in his car for his daughter’s school bus to arrive – in Charlotte, NC, in 2016 is generally said to have taken place four years prior to George Floyd’s murder. In contrast, many Black people experience 2020 and 2016 as co-temporal. Scott’s death, much as Floyd’s death, is in the present. In addition, these moments in time are co-present with a multitude of other times, such as 1857 – the year of the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that Black people had no rights that white people must respect. Thus, the simultaneity of time for Black people and communities differs significantly from white temporality. The idea of experiencing 2020, 2016 and 1857 as co-temporal might seem to suggest that Black people are frozen in time, unable to let go of a fixation on past events. We might call such people traumatised, and, from a particular (i.e. white dominant) perspective, such a description would not be inaccurate. However, a white dominant perspective understands the events of 1857 and 2016 (and many others) as actually past, and, in doing so, assumes the normality of white temporality. This understanding lies at the foundation of white people’s 290

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habit of untrauma. Their ‘normal’ sense of time and their ability to remember past events ‘normally’ – that is, as past – is a feature of their white untrauma. They can be existentially comfortable in the racially violent present, even if they find it emotionally upsetting and horrifying. Recognising the terribleness of racial violence (i.e. experiencing racialised horror) does not tend to upend their lives, as the temporal aspect of untrauma helps to stabilise and ground them.

The upshot: white people’s affective numbness ‘Effortless’, ‘smooth’ and ‘comfortable’: These words describe the racially privileged habits of white people due to their racial untrauma. Indeed, racial untrauma is one of the manifestations of white privilege, reflecting an unearned and unjust benefit that cushions white people’s lives in various ontological, cognitive and temporal ways. Their untrauma contributes to forming who they are qua white and how they respond to and engage with the world, often unconsciously. White people generally know how to live and to be racially untraumatised ‘without thinking’, as the cliché about habit says. Although their racial untrauma is cultivated, white people tend to experience it as natural and ordinary; accordingly, they tend to perceive the racial trauma of Black people as excessive or unnatural. The above descriptions of untraumatised white people evoke affective states, rather than typical emotions (e.g. sadness, anger or joy). Indeed, the ontological, cognitive and temporal features of white untrauma operate via emotions and other felt relationships with the world. Untraumatised people experience a smooth and easy relationship with the world. At the same time, untrauma is characterised by a lack of certain emotions. When a person is untraumatised by racial violence, we could say that they lack the affective strength that can be bestowed by a traumatising experience (Gusich 2012, p. 506). Racially violent situations do not have much of an impact on white people. As racially untraumatised, they tend to be affectively numb and unable to feel with people of colour because of a cultivated lack of interest in them (Medina 2012). The fact of white people’s affective numbness addresses an important question. Here, I have assumed that white people are generally untraumatised by racial violence against Black people and other events, in order to analyse their state of untrauma. But why are they untraumatised? Why do most white people remain untraumatised after learning about George Floyd’s death or the slow-motion killing of Black people via COVID-19? One potential answer is that, from the perspective of white people, nothing alarming has happened and thus nothing has been experienced that would, or could, cause trauma. As Claudia Rankine (2015) argues, white people are used to seeing corpses all over the place. As long as they see Black people as sub-persons, rather than full persons, they will never experience anything particularly traumatic about Black people’s deaths (Mills 1997). Not recognising or feeling the suffering, pain and trauma of Black people, as well as that of Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of colour, is a key component of the racialised ignorance that is required to be white (Mills 1997, 2007).6 This ignorance is not an accidental gap in knowledge, but a carefully (albeit often unconsciously) cultivated unknowing about how the world is racially structured to perpetuate white privilege and white supremacy. Thus, white untrauma complements white people’s habit of erasing the suffering of people of colour (Moore and Sullivan 2018; Sullivan 2019). Like opposite sides of the same coin, the white erasure of non-white suffering and the white experience of untrauma are structurally related. To be white, one must not know, cognitively or affectively, the racialised trauma – current and past, near and far – that feeds into and sustains one’s existence. 291

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At first glance, the state of untrauma may seem psychologically and emotionally healthy. Does not everyone want to live in a state of untraumatised openness and receptiveness to the world, rather than one in which barriers must be erected to defend against reality? Does not everyone hope for a stable cognitive and temporal relationship to their self and the world? Assuming that the answer to both of these questions is ‘Yes’, overcoming the disbelief involved in traumatisation should represent an important step on the road to recovery. Moving beyond the paradoxical clash between the reality of past events and what one is emotionally capable of believing, is important. However, the particular case of white untrauma demonstrates that the effortless, smooth and comfortable relationship to the world that characterises untrauma should not always be affirmed or desired. In particular, to affirm it would be to endorse a destructive state of existence made possible by white privilege, white supremacy and anti-Black racism. A great proportion of white people’s psychological and emotional ‘well-being’ is built on those oppressive foundations. For this reason, white ontological, cognitive and temporal ‘wellbeing’ should not be used as a yard stick with which to measure human health. Nor should it be embraced as an existential norm to which Black and other people of colour should aspire. Finally, it should not sit unchallenged as a supposedly racially neutral, healthy state of being. Rather, it is a racially privileged existential state that is only available to white people and is not healthy. Put another way, both medical and lay understandings of trauma’s role in existential and psychological health must be reconceptualised through a critical whiteness lens.

Conclusion This chapter has analysed some of the ontological, cognitive, temporal and affective work that white people perform to remain untraumatised by racial violence. It takes a good deal of this work to remain untraumatised by events such as George Floyd’s murder and the United States’ dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and to terrorist shootings (which have unleashed militarised police officers in full force). By calling this ‘work’, I mean to highlight that it is not an accident that many white people remain in a state of untrauma following these events. Their untrauma is not effortless, though it might not be the result of conscious exertion. In fact, a great deal of the emotional labour that white people undertake to remain affectively numb towards people of colour is performed unconsciously (Sullivan 2006). Similar to white privilege, racial untrauma is a racialised performance of white people that is manifest in a set of habits aimed at maintaining their whiteness. To counter these habits, white people must become part of the same world that Black people inhabit. They must become ‘unsutured’, as George Yancy (2016) argues. No longer stitched together as coherent selves by the threads of disregard for Black pain, unsutured white people would experience discomfort and suffering as they tarried with the meaning and effects of their whiteness. The result of this would likely be trauma in the face of both historical and present-day racist violence.7 How would such a transformation be relevant to achieving racial justice? Why does the psychological and emotional state of white people matter? More pointedly, how would their transformation not be merely a project of white self-absorption and white self-indulgence? The answer is: Changing the white habit of untrauma could help to reduce Black deaths as a result of racial injustice – both the fast deaths of police shootings and the slow deaths of the negative health effects caused by Black fatigue (Winters 2020). If these deaths mattered to white people, white people would be traumatised by them; and if white people were traumatised, they would be more likely to take genuine steps to eliminate the violence that 292

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produced their trauma. It is simultaneously that simple, and that difficult. No one enjoys being traumatised. In a twisted way, this perhaps explains why some white people hold on so tightly to their affective numbness. The pain of feeling with Black people would be devastating. (White people’s affective numbness is also devastating to their own humanity, and most white people do not recognise the existential damage that they do to themselves through their racialised numbness, but these are topics that must be treated in a separate outlet.8) The white habit of untrauma is certainly not the only target in work for racial justice. However, until white people feel with Black people (and Indigenous and other people of colour) – until they experience the effects of racial violence as traumatic – they will not be effective partners in racial justice movements.9

Notes 1 I refer here to United States President Donald Trump’s call for police ‘domination’ and ‘overwhelming force’ on the streets as police forces engaged with protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as well as Trump’s threat to deploy the federal military to cities and states that refused to activate the National Guard to squash racial justice protests (Mangan 2020). 2 I, unfortunately, do not have space in this essay to examine the different ways in which the white habit of untrauma impacts Latinx Americans and Indigenous people in relation to and/or in contrast to Black Americans. I would surmise that white people’s untrauma is relevant to most Indigenous peoples and people of colour in the United States and that, due to the asymmetry of distinctive histories, their traumas have different relationships to the white habit of untrauma. However, due to space constraints, my focus here is on the white habit of untrauma regarding violence done to Black lives. 3 My claim is not that race is the only relevant fault line or that people of colour are the only ones who experienced the horrific shooting at UNC Charlotte as a trauma. The shooting was also experienced differently by people of all races, revealing gendered and other salient fault lines (i.e. between those who had been victims of domestic violence – generally women – and those who had not) around the privilege of untrauma. In this chapter, I focus on the particular fault line of race. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of the chapter to analyse other fault lines and their complex intersections in depth. 4 While the 1 June 2020 police corralling and tear gassing of protesters of George Floyd’s death in Philadelphia, PA, occurred after the UNC Charlotte shooting, it powerfully showcased police brutality against people of colour and others fighting for racial justice in the United States. See the (9:47 minute) video ‘How the Philadelphia Police tear-gassed a group of trapped protesters’ at nytimes.com. Similar violence has occurred during racial justice protests in other United States cities (e.g. Charlotte, NC, 2 June 2020), but these were not captured on phone and helicopter cameras as completely as the events of the Philadelphia tear gassing. 5 This assumption allows for the possibility that some white people may be genuinely traumatised by racial violence against Black people and other people of colour. The possibility that a (small) number of such white people might exist is not a sustainable objection to this chapter’s main thesis and analyses. 6 The lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of colour cannot be reduced to pain, suffering, death and trauma. The erasure of these aspects of their lives is a significant component of white supremacy and white privilege. 7 See note 2, above. White people also need to become part of the same world that Indigenous people and other people of colour inhabit, in connection with both racist and settler colonial violence. However, I have not had the space to adequately address these issues here. 8 See Baldwin (1963) for an account of white people’s self-inflicted damage due to anti-Black racism. Baldwin, of course, was fundamentally concerned with the damage that racism did to Black people, but he saw the fates of Black and white Americans as intertwined. For Baldwin, while the types of damage might differ, the devastating impact of anti-Black racism on both white and Black America was relevant to the overall health of America. 9 My thanks go to Catrin Lundström, Shirley Anne Tate and the United States Western Political Science Association Critical Whiteness Studies group for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.

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References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), pp. 149–168. Baldwin, J. (1963). The fire next time. New York, NY: Dell Publishing. Dewey, J. (1988). Human nature and conduct. Boydston, J. A. (ed.) The middle works, 1899–1924, vol. 14. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Ford, T., Reber, S. and Reeves, R. V. (2020). ‘Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear’. Brookings Institute. [Online] 16th June. Available from: https://www.brookings.edu/ blog/up-front/2020/06/16/race-gaps-in-covid-19-deaths-are-even-bigger-than-they-appear/. Gusich, G. (2012). A phenomenology of emotional trauma: Around and about the things themselves. Human Studies, 35(4), pp. 505–518. Kang, J. C. (2015). ‘Our demand is simple: Stop killing us’. New York Times. [Online] 4th May. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/magazine/our-demand-is-simple-stopkilling-us.html. Kelly, M. (2015). ‘A critical phenomenology of trauma’, master’s thesis, George Washington University. Mangan, D. (2020). ‘“Domination”: Trump thanks self in Tweet, takes credit for curbing DC, Minnesota protests over George Floyd death’. CNBC. [Online] 2nd June. Available from: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/george-f loyd-protests-trump-takes-credit-for-stif lingdemonstration-in-washington-dc.html. McDonald, M. C. (2019). Merleau-Ponty and a phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden ghosts of traumatic memory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Medina, J. (2012). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. Translated by C. Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. (2007). ‘White ignorance’, in Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds.) Race and the epistemologies of ignorance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mills, C. (2014). White time: The chronic injustice of ideal theory. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(1), pp. 27–42. Moore, J. R. and Sullivan, S. (2018). Rituals of white privilege: Keith Lamont Scott and the erasure of Black suffering. American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 39(1), pp. 34–52. Rankine, C. (2015). ‘The condition of Black life is one of mourning’. New York Times. [Online] 22nd June. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-blacklife-is-one-of-mourning.html. Serwer, A. (2020). ‘The Coronavirus was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying’. The Atlantic. [Online] 8th May. Available from: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/ americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/. Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. New York, NY: Routledge. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: Unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Sullivan, S. (2019). ‘Becoming white: White children and the erasure of Black suffering’, in Lee, E. (ed.) Race as phenomena: Between phenomenology and philosophy of race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sullivan, S. (2020). Community as a political and temporal construct: A response to Patricia Hill ­Collins. The Pluralist, 15(1), pp. 83–89. Weiss, G., Salamon, G. and Murphy, A. V., eds. (2019). 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Winters, M.-F. (2020). Black fatigue: How racism erodes the mind, body, and spirit. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Yancy, G. (2016). Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race in America. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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25 RACIAL HABIT Paul C. Taylor and Lisa Madura

Introduction Race theorists have recently come to understand the notion of ‘habit’ as a useful resource. In this chapter, we explore what it means to analyse race in terms of habit and consider the benefits of this approach for the study of whiteness. In particular, the habits we are concerned with go beyond simple routine. Here, ‘habit’ is used to refer to a learned and unconscious disposition to transact with one’s environment in a patterned way and thus a fundamental organising principle of social life. Thinking about race through the concept of habit helps to resolve some of the standard problems of critical race theory. These problems include sorting out the complex relationship between racial ideation (i.e. beliefs, attitudes and imaginaries), bodily existence and affect (i.e. the visible body and the lived experience of racialisation) and social practices and institutions (i.e. cultural formations and the political structures that sustain racial inequities). An analysis of racial habit brings these elements together to show how mental, physical and socio-cultural domains shape – and are shaped by – racial phenomena. In addition to providing a way forward for critical race theory, a phenomenologically informed conception of habit calls attention to certain aspects of racial phenomena – and whiteness, in particular – that are easy to overlook. Any investigation of racial habit will necessarily lead to a study of white habits by revealing a phenomenological asymmetry that tracks racially dominant and subordinated subject positions. It is not only the kinds of habits that differently racialised subjects acquire that determine their positions within the socially and politically hierarchised landscape but also their very ability to be oriented by and within certain material and symbolic spaces. Put differently, ‘white habits’ represent more than the typical habits of white people; they also indicate white people’s unique orientation to the social environment. This orientation constitutes a privileged social position of whiteness, which can be productively understood as a function of habit. In the following two sections, we will define the key concepts of ‘race’ and ‘habit’ and introduce the theoretical frames that we bring to these notions. Subsequently, in the ‘A critical phenomenology of racial habit’ section, we will develop a critical phenomenology of racial habit (or, hereafter, ‘CPRH’) and consider its advantages. Finally, in the ‘White habit(s)’ section, we will conclude by exploring the role of habit in the experience and study of whiteness. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-30

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Critical racialism There are, of course, many different ways to think about race. For this reason, it is imperative that we begin by clarifying our basic orientation. Our approach is rooted in the later work of W. E. B. Du Bois, but it also incorporates some widely shared commitments from a variety of other theoretical sources. First, we are ‘racialists’. This is not to be understood in terms of racism or crude biological race-thinking but in the repudiation of these classical forms of racialism in favour of a critical form. By ‘classical racialism’, we refer to modes of race-thinking that sort and rank human populations in ways that mark them for differential treatment. This is the approach that openly defined Europe’s orientation to social difference (and much else) from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century and that underwrote the scramble for Africa, the attempted genocide of America’s native peoples and the Holocaust. Critical racialism, by contrast, accepts race-thinking while declining to employ it in the classical ways. Racialism becomes critical when, for example, it uses the concept of race to track the effects of structural racism or to organise resistance among the victims of racial oppression. We insist on this classical–critical distinction in order to make clear that criticisms of race-thinking, as such, are premature and require further elaboration to avoid being ill-formed.1 We accept that ‘race’ is a useful theoretical concept and that critical race-thinking can evade and contest the errors and dangers of invidious, classical race-thinking. It is not obvious to us that the ultimate aim of critical race theory is to abolish race or that the elimination of all references to race in public, political or scholarly discourse – either immediately or in the near term – is necessary to fight racial oppression.2 More precisely, we are racialists in the spirit of what Jeffers calls ‘political constructionism’, which uses critical race-thinking to track manifest patterns of, among other things, social advantage and disadvantage ( Jeffers 2019, p. 50). Second, we insist on context sensitivity. Taking race seriously means different things in different places, due to variations in practices across social contexts. Consequently, race theory must attend to the workings of race in particular settings. Sometimes, the relevant settings are narrowly confined to particular regions or nation-states, as when we distinguish Brazilian racial politics from its analogues in Norway or the United Kingdom.3 But often, the relevant context is the geographically dispersed, transnational and international socio-cultural formation that shaped and was shaped by European exploits, settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This formation continues to shape North Atlantic societies that think of themselves as the ‘developed world’ or the West, and it has worked through these societies to mould a contemporary world order that, in many ways, bears an uncanny resemblance to the world of colonial and imperial arrangements that it mostly claims to have repudiated. This neo-imperial world – still importantly divided between the ‘white world’ and the ‘darker nations’ that Du Bois studied and engaged with – sets the main context for the current study. Third, we insist on intersectional analysis. Given the space constraints of the present chapter, this commitment predominantly implies writing a blank cheque for the multi-factor analyses that we do not have room to provide. Nonetheless, we reiterate the need for this sort of analysis, and we accept that single-factor analyses of racial phenomena are inevitably incomplete. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, race is a modality through which class, gender, sexuality, age, ability status and other human features are lived (Hall 1980). In this chapter, we aim at capturing this to the greatest extent possible; our failure to speak to it directly is a concession to space, not a denial of the need to do so. 296

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The fourth commitment embraces a kind of dynamic historicism and is really a cluster of related commitments. One of us has referred to this as the ‘CAMPS consensus’ in race theory, to signal the widespread conviction that race-thinking is a resource for critically engaging with the artefacts of human activities that became most influential during the modern period, with important political and social implications (Taylor 2013). This perspective is opposed to views that, for example, eschew critical engagement, depict race as a deliverance of nature, see no difference between modern and pre-modern approaches to human difference, ignore racial politics and reduce racial phenomena to individual choices and traits. In this chapter, we will signal this commitment through references to racialisation and racial formation, while setting aside the ongoing and important debates about the limits of these theoretical vocabularies and about which one enables the more productive encounter with racial phenomena. The commitments noted above define the mode of critical racialist analysis that informs this chapter. In addition, they unite theorists who disagree about much else – from the value of studying vernacular conceptions of race to the prospects of abolishing race altogether. We hope that, in what follows, we will succeed in showing that the notion of habit should be a part of the shared toolkit for ecumenically minded critical race theorists.

Phenomenology and habit Similar to race, the concept of ‘habit’ is subject to many different conceptualisations.4 Some core elements are nevertheless common across the various approaches. A standard social science account is as follows: habits are learned, recurrent patterns of behavior that are enacted with minimal reliance on conscious resources or effort. They typically are tied to an environment or another action that historically has co-occurred with the habit and thereby has come to serve as a stimulus, or cue, for its automatic performance. (Neal 2008, p. 402) This idea of a relatively unconscious disposition to behave in a patterned way tracks with lay understandings. Commonly, we think of stress eating as a ‘bad habit’ and always putting one’s house keys in the same place as a ‘good habit’. But references to learning, the environment and history, as foregrounded in the work of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, highlight the phenomenological dimensions of habit. In referring to the phenomenological dimensions of habit, we point to aspects that stand out when an ‘attunement to lived experience and its structuring conditions’ organises the inquiry (Weiss et al. 2019, p. xiii). Phenomenological inquiry explores the basic ‘structures that make the lived experience of consciousness possible and meaningful’ (Guenther 2019, p. 11). Such exploration aims ‘not to abstract from the complexity of ordinary experience but rather to lead back […] from an uncritical absorption in the world toward a rigorous understanding of the conditions for the possibility of any world whatsoever’ (Guenther 2019, p. 11). Habits are crucial for this basic structuring activity, and they enable the uncritical absorption that necessitates phenomenological analysis (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 84). The general definition of habit noted above highlights several considerations that invite deeper phenomenological analysis. If habits are acquired, relatively unconscious dispositions tied to specific histories and environments, they are also much more. Indeed, they are immediate, temporally extended and embodied transactions between meaning making organisms 297

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and their social worlds. To understand habits as transactional is to imply that they are not only located in particular environments but also shaped by mutually transforming interactions within those environments. Indeed, as actors, we are not isolated but engaged with a social world that demands reflection and response. We build habits from socially approved repertoires of behaviour and manage them by reference to what society allows and refuses. In other words, we develop and deploy our habits as social beings embedded in worlds of meaning. The work of navigating such worlds of meaning involves the navigation of histories. This casts habits as unavoidably temporal phenomena. However, temporality extends beyond simple historical precedent by pointing to both forward- and backward-looking dimensions of experience. Habits anchor us in time by activating ways of being and doing that were formed in past circumstances yet counsel future adherence. The field of action mapped by our historically formed habits guide our forays into the future, until circumstances and reflection force a change in course. To say that habits are relatively unconscious is to say that they are immediate. Most obviously, they work beneath or behind conscious awareness, without the mediation of conscious planning, reflection and goal setting. This brings to mind the familiar idea of ‘rapid cognition’, representing the reflexive (i.e. non-reflective) side of human cognition that animates our biases and heuristics. Understanding this function as a mode of cognition, though, underrepresents a second aspect of immediacy. Habits are also immediately felt or embodied. The pattern of behaviour is activated because it feels right: the lived, bodily experience at a particular space-time coordinate seems, at a deep level, to require a certain response. This notion of embodiment is worth separating out as a distinct aspect of habit, due to the well-chronicled dangers of mind–body dualism and mentalistic or rationalist reductionism. Habits are interestingly related to the lived body, which is neither separate from nor subordinate to the mind. As patterned dispositions to act, they can be predominantly physical or mental. Unconsciously falling into a familiar gait while walking is one kind of habit, but reflexively falling into a cycle of self-recrimination after a challenging social encounter is another. In either case, the physical and the mental are intertwined. Physical habits involve mental payoffs such as feelings of satisfaction or comfort, while mental habits have somatic accompaniments such as altered neural structures, neurochemical spikes and accelerated heartbeats. Dewey and Merleau-Ponty examined habit from these and other angles, reaching similar conclusions – albeit with different emphases. Dewey argued most eloquently that habits ‘are functions of the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done by the environment by means of […] acquired dispositions’ (Dewey 1988, p. 15). This leads him to recommend genealogical criticism, public education and democratic culture as resources for cultivating more intelligent and critical relationships to our historically formed selves. Merleau-Ponty most clearly highlighted the role of habit in perception and orientation, noting that what and how one perceives – as well as what one fails to notice – is a function of the learned perceptual habits that comprise one’s unique orientation to social environments. This immediate orientation creates the possibility of habituation, which he described as the ‘experience of the accord between what we aim at and what is given’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 146). To be habituated is to be calibrated with one’s environment, and this includes not only physical surroundings but also social, political and cultural institutions and practices. When one’s habitual intentions are routinely fulfilled, one inhabits the world as one inhabits a home – with familiarity and affordance. 298

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Dewey and Merleau-Ponty shared a broadly phenomenological orientation to habit, but they also shared a limitation that pointed beyond their pioneering work. As noted above, phenomenological analyses aim at examining the basic structures of experience, bearing in mind that these structures are both natural (i.e. dependent on our organic capacities) and cultural (i.e. dependent on how our social life uses and affects our organic capacities). Until recently, though, the heirs of these pioneers paid too little attention to the ways in which ‘contingent historical and social structures also shape our experience […]. Structures like patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity’ (Guenther 2019, p. 12). Taking seriously the ways in which structures systematically interact with more traditionally recognised basic structures, such as perception and habit, allows for what Weiss, Guenther and others refer to as critical phenomenology, which ‘draws attention to the ways in which power moves through our bodies and our lives’ (Guenther 2019, p. 12).

A critical phenomenology of racial habit How can a phenomenological theory of habit contribute to critical race theory? If Du Bois was right to say that race involves ‘contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies’ that go well beyond ‘ignorance and deliberate ill-will’, then a study of racial habit is very much in order (Du Bois 1940, pp. 651, 761). Approaching this study from the perspective of critical phenomenology – with the aim of producing a CPRH – may avoid standard problems of race theory and clarify key features of racialisation that are easy to overlook and sometimes difficult to explain. One of the common problems of race theory involves the conceptualisation of race as simply a cognitive matter. This approach reduces racism, racial identity and racialisation to prejudices, conceptions of the self and discourses or ideologies.5 Confining race to the mind also makes it difficult to account for its immediacy, persistence and reach. Importantly, racial attitudes and practices are affective, involving immediately felt aversions and desires. They sink deep into our engagements with the world, including our perceptions, in ways that resist persuasion and rational accounting. In addition, they shape the organisation of bodies and objects in space, thereby contributing to the sense of ease or unease that attaches to everyday experience. An approach rooted in habit – that is, our disposition to respond to and engage with our surroundings in space and time – is useful for a holistic exploration of race. To see the benefits of replacing a cognitivist or ideational approach with a study of habit, consider the meanings that attach to segregated spaces. These meanings involve more than simply rights of access or exit and privileges of use; they also involve affect (e.g. the immediately felt satisfaction of owning a space and fully inhabiting it or the anxiety of being out of place and feeling constricted in one’s movements). In order to capture these aspects of racialisation, it is important to focus on habits – habits of perception, spatial orientation, mobility and more – as well as beliefs and ideas. Another difficulty in race theory involves the challenge of striking the right balance between dynamism and stability. Classical racialism based on the nineteenth-century model often depicts race as fixed and immutable. When this crudely essentialist approach runs aground on the complexities of historical change and social contingency, some critics respond with anti-racialist arguments about race being ephemeral or illusory.6 However, this reflexive racial scepticism struggles to acknowledge the persistence of stratifying, unjust and oppressive racial structures. Think here of the racial wealth gaps that grow over generations and persist beyond near-term corrective efforts; or the surveillance and security apparatuses that gather resources and influence in race-stratified societies, also over generations, while 299

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resisting attempts to rein in (or even track) their racially asymmetric outcomes. Time and again, overeager racial sceptics have – whether out of cynicism or naiveté – given cover to these unjust racial patterns by refusing the social theoretic lens of critical race-thinking, which most clearly brings them into view. A CPRH approach offers a middle ground between essentialism and scepticism. Habits are stable but not static acts. They underwrite the sedimented routines and reflexes that keep social life running along familiar channels, and keep unthinking agents attached to the practices and institutions that make them feel at ease and at home. This helps to explain the dogged persistence of our racial structures. Societies that predispose some of their members to respond to others as ‘problem people’ – societies that immediately perceive certain people as unruly or threatening and react to such people with negative affect (e.g. fear or contempt) – remain deeply attached to the institutions that promise to contain these problems. A third problem of race theory pertains to the difficulty involved in specifying the relationship between self and society. This relationship animates an idea that, in recent years, has become widespread in public discourse: the idea that racialised social distributions – gaps in wealth, opportunity, surveillance and so on – can persist without anyone of ill-will working purposively to maintain them. This is surely correct and motivates appeals to structural and institutional racism. However, taken too swiftly, these appeals threaten to relieve individuals of any stake in the wider situation. The states of affairs that people countenance (i.e. the conditions they regard, respond to and affectively register as acceptable, even if they do not actively work to create or maintain them) are as relevant to ethics and social theory as those that are explicitly avowed and acted against. A CPRH approach, with its insistence on racial habits of perception, attention, interpretation and orientation, offers a way of linking racialised selves to social structures without losing track of individual targets of ethical criticism. It does this in part by enriching another widespread idea in public discourse: the idea that racism (similar to sexism and other mechanisms of othering and oppression) shapes every member of a racist culture. Even people of good will, and even people who ‘know better’, must continually monitor and manage their perceptions, judgements and assumptions in order to identify and uproot this ideology’s attempts to work through them. We hear this all the time from diversity consultants, implicit bias experts, cultural critics and others, but rarely in terms of the rich and intuitively accessible vocabulary of habit. A theory of racial habit provides what is required for this widespread idea and its advocates: a bridge between structural accounts of race and racism and the lower-level forces that produce and sustain these structures. A fourth standard problem of race theory echoes a familiar concern about liberatory social theory (which is, in itself, an echo of the old philosophical problem of free will). If social forces position individuals in the way that social theory claims, then why should we assume that there is any way out? How can the conditioned or determined individual escape this cultural conditioning and determination? For Marx, this was the problem of revolutionary consciousness; for Foucault, it was the problem of resistance; and for critical race theorists, it is the problem of promoting anti-racism in a structurally racist society. Generally speaking, this worry is not as frightening as it is often made out to be, in part due to reasons that a CPRH approach makes clear. Cultural conditioning is (apparently) inescapable if social forces cause behaviours in the same way that physical forces cause physical reactions. However, as Dewey took great pains to point out, social forces differ from physical forces, and the failure to note these differences has caused all kinds of problems for the study of humanity. Specifically, social forces work less by causation than by enculturation, prompting individuals to adopt patterns of behaviour – patterns that individuals, unlike protons and reagents, can 300

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interrogate, reflect on and revise. People form, re-form and break habits all the time. Such processes are often quite difficult, but not impossible, especially when society (or some portion of it) recognises this possibility and furnishes its members with more and better resources for ongoing self-scrutiny. This is key to solving the problem of resistance in liberatory race theory – provided that one takes seriously the connection between racialisation and habituation. A fifth standard problem of critical race theory – less a problem, really, than a nagging tension – involves the discernment and attribution of the role of perception. The classical racialism of modernity tied racial identity tightly to the body, but critical race theory has shown this way of thinking to be misguided and obsolete. We now know that race involves the apparently arbitrary assignment of meaning to superficial traits. If physiognomy means very little by itself, what can justify the critical racialist’s continued emphasis on racial morphology? What justifies it, of course, is precisely this manner in which race ‘works’: the assignment of deeper meaning to superficial traits such as hair texture, skin colour and accented speech is what distinguishes race from other axes of social differentiation, such as ethnicity and caste. But this answer is oddly unsatisfying. The grudging concession to obsolete ideas about human physical variation seems somehow unworthy of the attention it still commands. A CPRH approach provides a deeper analysis of the ties between race and perception, thereby helping to clarify exactly why this aspect of racialisation remains salient. Here, two of phenomenology’s central insights are vital. The first is that perception is always interpretation, which means that what and how we perceive is not neutral but value laden. The second is that perceptual interpretations involve mediated immediacy: they deploy socially provided meanings (i.e. cultural mediation), but they do so in the rapid cognitive mode that informs our biases and heuristics (i.e. phenomenological immediacy). Perception, in other words, involves habits that operate behind the scenes of consciousness to infuse the surrounding world with immediately experienced social meanings. When these habits become sedimented, they form a bodily understanding that interprets and articulates future encounters (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 84). This produces an orienting affect, which Merleau-Ponty called the ‘habit body’ and Dewey described in his later work as ‘esthetic quality’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012; Dewey 1987). Race is not only amenable to this sort of phenomenological analysis; in some ways, it presents a paradigm case. As Alcoff notes with respect to visuality, racial consciousness ‘works through learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visible marks on the body’ (Alcoff 2006, p. 196). Focusing on the visible is eminently sensible in a world that treats race and ‘colour’ as synonyms. But the point easily generalises to other sensory pathways. Accented speech and unusual sounding names are also markers of racial difference, as, in some contexts, are the flavours and odours of food in domestic settings. Invidious race-thinking works by infusing these modes of human appearance with layers of additional meaning. Habits aid this work by giving these perceived meanings the feeling of unmediated access to truth. (Merleau-Ponty 2012) For people who have been habituated by (and to) invidiously racialist conditions, seeing a person who ‘looks Muslim’, whatever this means, is the same as seeing a potential terrorist; and hearing Spanish spoken is the same as hearing the approach of the advance guard of an immigrant swarm. This is one of racialisation’s central mechanisms, and it is difficult to make sense of it without some reference to a theory of habit. 301

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White habit(s) The benefits of a critical phenomenology of racial habit are particularly apparent when applied to whiteness. Whiteness is one node in a network of racial positions that, similar to other nodes, defines individual identities, social populations, cultural imaginaries and political ideologies.7 As with all racial positions, it relies on the structuring role of habits. In ways we hope to make clear below, whiteness is in particular need of a CPRH analysis, thanks to its heavy reliance on pre-reflective and affective concealment mechanisms. The CPRH approach holds that the way in which the world manifests for white people is a problematic part of whiteness, itself. Four elements of this ‘white worlding’ are particularly relevant to this discussion. The first is a mode of othering perception that sees and responds to non-white people in terms of the objectification of racial tropes. Racialising perception is pregnant with notions (e.g. lazy, dirty, sexually depraved, parasitic, criminal and threat) that appear to white people as naturally and necessarily non-white. The second element is a mode of self-perception and self-directed worldly orientation that encourages dominant racial subjects to take their own being as normative. This white normativity has two primary manifestations: ontological expansiveness and ethical solipsism. We will return to ethical solipsism shortly, but for now, we will define ontological expansiveness as a sense of proprietary entitlement to all spaces, positions and goods. Such entitlement is typical of white people but withheld from – or not recognised as appropriately belonging to – non-whites (Sullivan 2006, p. 144). The third element of white worlding is a manufactured failure of perception that conceals white domination from ‘whitely’ consciousness, effectively rendering whiteness invisible. Finally, the fourth element is a form of phenomenological ease in the world – call this ‘dwelling’ or ‘being at home’ – that is more accessible to white subjects than to people who are differently racialised. Two terminological matters require attention before we proceed. First, we use ethicopolitical notions such as ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ quite broadly, mindful of the many questions that surround the probity of these concepts but, for reasons of space, bracketing these questions all the same. Second, we follow Marilyn Frye in using notions such as ‘whitely’ and ‘whiteliness’ to distinguish the modes of perception recommended by hegemonic forms of whiteness from the empirical individuals who may or may not heed these recommendations (Frye 1992). Individuals can see the world in whitely ways irrespective of the racial identities for which their appearance and ancestry qualify them. Furthermore, as we will explore below, a person who is racialised as white may aspire to a resistant form of white subjectivity that refuses whiteliness.

Dwelling and home Whiteness involves privileged access to the experience of dwelling or being at home. As Sara Ahmed puts it, this involves being ‘so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins’ (Ahmed 2007, p. 158). The basic idea here is one that Levinas described in terms of ‘a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome’ (Levinas 1971, cited in Dekkers 2011, p. 297). Asymmetric access to the experience of dwelling or being at home is constitutive of whiteness and intimately bound up with a structure of racialised habits that enables this orientation to the world. White voices have been amplified, white bodies have been protected and white interests have been prioritised; all other things being equal, this has made the world a more welcoming place for 302

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white people – a place they can unthinkingly approach as a resource rather than an obstacle, in ways that others cannot. Interestingly, this aspect of whiteness remains largely hidden from those who benefit most from it. Ahmed notes that this mutual adequation of white selves and their surroundings leads to a kind of invisibility or anonymity. ‘One fits’, she writes, ‘and by fitting the surface of one’s body disappears’ (Ahmed 2007, p. 158). Whiteness proceeds anonymously for the white body: the white subject is not confronted by whiteness in the same way that Du Bois, Fanon and others described being confronted by Blackness. Fanon famously made this point in the following passage: In the white world, the [person] of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person […]. I was unable to discover the feverish coordinates of the world. I existed in triple. (Fanon 2008, pp. 90–92) Similarly, while a Latina in an Anglo environment may experience the world incongruously, with a persistent, haunting awareness of how others are reading her as ‘other’, a white person can occupy and move seamlessly through environments that reflect white needs, experiences and interests. Dwelling, rather than alienation, is the default mode of experience.

Invisibility The idea of white anonymity or invisibility has been central to the recent study of whiteness in ways that warrant independent discussion.8 Scholars have tended to explain this invisibility using epistemic terms. From this perspective, white privilege remains invisible to the white subject because it involves a particularly recalcitrant form of manufactured ignorance that actively thwarts attempts to reveal its existence (Sullivan 2006, p. 3). These epistemologies of ignorance highlight the active dimensions of epistemic failure, pointing to psychological factors such as unconscious desires and interests.9 In this understanding, white ignorance is not a naïve lack of information that can be corrected through education, but a motivated ignorance driven by white interests that works to benefit and support hegemonic racial orders. An account of habit complements the epistemic account of racial ignorance by supplying a richer picture of the naturalised knower. Habit economises our daily goings-on by making it possible to act without attending to every movement. But this enabling force also allows destructive habits, such as those that make up white privilege, to go undetected. As Sullivan puts it, white ignorance involves a resistant unconscious formed out of customs and attitudes acquired through transactions with racist environments (Sullivan 2006, pp. 21–23). Turning to habit in this way effectively naturalises the knower as more than a knower: the epistemic agent becomes a socially constituted habit body for whom belief formation is not a simple rational function, but a function of affectively charged experience forged from prior experience. Persons constituted by habits of white privilege are unlikely to see their privilege, not only because society shields them from salient evidence and encourages them to take deliberative short-cuts, but also because their pre-reflective, deeply felt senses of self and the world are bound up with these shields and short-cuts in ways that DiAngelo’s account of white fragility and Baldwin’s discussions of white American innocence draw out (Baldwin 1998; DiAngelo 2018). 303

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Normativity White invisibility points to a broader normative orientation that also defines whitely ways of being in the world. Whiteness is often invisible to itself because privilege can easily position itself as normal. The normal then passes, often enough, beneath notice and without comment, for good phenomenological reasons: only deviations from the norm upset the habits that take root in routines of normalcy; thus, only deviations provoke reflection and require conscious attention. It is a short step from here to reading deviations as deviant and reading the normal as normative. One obvious manifestation of white normativity involves a kind of ‘ethical solipsism’. Sullivan borrows this expression from Adrienne Rich to name an orientation to the world through which ‘only white values, interests, and needs are considered important and worthy of attention’ (Sullivan 2006, p. 17, citing Rich 1979, p. 306). A CPRH approach makes clear that this is not simply a matter of priority in ethical deliberation, but a lived experience of attending and feeling compelled to attend to some things and not others, on racial grounds. United States drug policy provides several examples of this phenomenon. While we are unable to do justice to the fuller policy issues, we will here register simply how this drug policy has been received by a racialised counter-public that is not shaped by whitely ideology. The legalisation of marijuana was a non-starter in United States politics until white people decided to make money from it. Similarly, it might be argued that the only difference between the current crisis of opioid addiction, which is a public health issue, and the crisis of addiction that inspired a multi-decade war on drugs, is that the former is perceived as a problem for white people and the latter was perceived as a threat for dark, problem people. In these and other cases, whiteness has used its reflexive frames of reference to define actionable criminality and blameworthy viciousness and to distinguish these from regrettable suffering and remediable pain. A second manifestation of white normativity involves what Sullivan calls ‘ontological expansiveness’, representing a sense of proprietary entitlement that is typical of white people but withheld from – or not recognised as appropriately belonging to – non-whites (Sullivan 2006, p. 144). This sense of expansiveness leads white people ‘to act and think as if all spaces – whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily or otherwise – are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish’. In the grip of this habitual orientation, ‘the self assumes that it can and should have total mastery over its environment’ (Sullivan 2006, p. 10). A CPRH reading of this phenomenon helps to make sense of the peculiar affective gap that separates the policy from the politics of issues such as gentrification and residential segregation. Standard liberal political philosophy has plenty of resources to explore resource hoarding and asymmetric access to social goods such as space and home mortgages. But this analysis leaves an affective remainder, involving, for example, the dismay that comes from feeling a sense of entitlement seep into gentrifying neighbourhoods, or perceiving the ease of the new residents, facilitated by their sense of entitlement. It is difficult to register this remainder without considering the phenomenology of racial habit.

Abolition or redemption? CPRH represents a useful resource for considering the prospects of liberatory conceptions of whiteness. Scholars and activists have long puzzled over whether anti-racist whiteness is possible. Individuals racialised as white can oppose racism, to be sure. But it is not clear whether this ethical stance involves an inherent opposition to whiteness, as such, or whether it instead seeks to recruit whiteness to the cause of fighting white supremacy. Some think 304

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it is possible to refurbish white identities and inhabit them critically and ethically.10 Others think that whiteness is suited only for racist uses and is therefore irredeemable and fit only for abolition.11 A CRPH approach offers some help in navigating these options. To say that all white people are racist, as clumsy as that sounds, is to speak some truth. As noted earlier in this chapter, if we are constituted through our transactions with our environment, and if we are brought up in a society marked by white domination, we are constituted by its culturally embedded ways of being and doing. Races are historical formations, and the particular history that has produced the white race is one of supremacy and domination. This is not to say that environments determine us once and for all; of course, we are capable of responding differently to the same environment. Nor is our subjective constitution fixed for all eternity. But whiteness has acquired its primary meanings through oppression and conquest; and in a largely white-privileged world, the current meanings of whiteness are inseparable from that history. White people brought up in a world in which whiteness means privilege necessarily inherit some of that privilege. Notwithstanding this unavoidable immersion in white supremacist culture, several theorists of racial habit suggest that transformation is possible. Helen Ngo notes that the lived body is constituted by its porosity: the adequation between oneself and one’s surroundings never achieves perfect alignment but leaves space to cultivate counter-hegemonic modes of being (Ngo 2017, p. 113). Sullivan argues that the transactional nature of human habituation imbues every encounter with the possibility of reconfiguration and reorientation. Similarly, Alcoff points out that perceptual practices are dynamic, even when congealed into habit, and that dynamism can be activated by the existence of multiple forms of the gaze in various cultural productions and by the challenge of contradictory perceptions. To put it simply, people are capable of change. (Alcoff 2006, p. 189) In addition to suggesting that change is possible, a CPRH approach suggests that habit can be a resource for counter-hegemonic self-reconstruction. In this spirit, Alia Al-Saji encourages the cultivation of a habit of hesitation as a way of remaining open to reconfiguration. She distinguishes between affective hesitation, which is made possible by the anonymous temporal structure that sustains habit, and hesitation, which results from trauma or the internalisation of the objectifying gaze of others. She argues that the disruption of the body schema that worried Fanon can actually be productive by opening a space for self-reflection and self-criticism, inciting one to question the structures of habituation and socialisation that are taken for granted. She explains, ‘hesitation does not only delay, it also opens onto elaboration and becoming otherwise. Since all is not given, what happens in the interval is becoming’ (Al-Saji 2014, p. 143).

Conclusion This chapter has aimed at clarifying the role played by habits in sustaining and contesting systems of racial meaning. We have suggested that a CPRH approach may deepen the study of racial phenomena by illuminating the lived experience of these phenomena and helpfully supplementing the work of race-theoretic analysis. We have argued that whiteness is particularly well suited to CPRH analysis, as, by linking whiteness to habitual modes of perception and embodied interaction, it is able to capture aspects of whiteness that can otherwise be puzzling. 305

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Humans are habituated beings, comprised of dispositions to transact that take shape through active engagement with particular environments. Because these dispositions – these habits – necessarily implicate not only ourselves but also the material and cultural world in which our actions unfold, they are as much a part of the environment as they are a part of us. Through them, we reinforce the environment, just as the environment reinforces us. Thus, social environments shot through with white privilege and organised around white supremacy will call white habits into being and depend on the working of those habits. White privilege, then, is not only something that happens to befall people in those environments, nor is it only something they consciously work to create and maintain. It is, instead, part of who and what they are, and part of the environments that contribute to making them what they are. Fortunately, and in part because of this environmental connection, it is not who and what they have to be. Personality, character and identity are functions of contingent relationships with mutable social worlds, and, as such, they can undergo change along with those worlds. We are not encapsulated atoms sealed off from our environment, with moral fates that are predestined by the contents of our hearts and minds. Nor is our environment a brooding omnipresence, impervious to transformations in individual personalities. Self and world are intertwined, each dependent on the other and each subject to transformation in light of transformation in the other.

Notes 1 See Taylor, P. C. (2022). Race: A philosophical introduction. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity, Chapter 2. 2 Abolition and eliminativism might be appropriate strategies, but they are – at minimum – not obviously appropriate, and this is not the place to debate this point. 3 We do not mean for these references to draw attention to any particular racial dynamic. The point is merely that race does not translate seamlessly across contexts, but appears uniquely in each context – though the forms of different contexts may partially overlap. Think, for example, about the partly overlapping but importantly distinguishable meanings, weights, denotations and uses of Blackness, Indigeneity, immigration and Islamophobia in these three settings. 4 For a particularly influential alternative to the approach we adopt here, see Bourdieu (1994). 5 See Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 11: ‘I use the term “postwar racial liberalism” to capture the historically grounded understanding of the American race “problem” as psychological in nature, with “solutions” of teaching tolerance and creating colorblind institutions’. For a more fine-grained mapping of the concept of racism that distinguishes psychologistic accounts (either doxastic or affective) from alternatives, see Faucher, L. (2018) ‘Racism’, in Taylor, P. C., Alcoff, L. M. and Anderson, L. (eds.) The Routledge companion to philosophy of race. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 405–422, 416. 6 For early examples of racial eliminativism, see Zack, N. (1993) Race and mixed race. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; and Appiah, K. A. (1985). The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), pp. 21–37. Both authors have moderated their views and adopted more complicated positions over time. Recent studies of South African non-racialism provide more current and politically responsible approaches to something like eliminativism. See Erasmus, Z. (2017). Rearranging the furniture of history: Non-racialism as anticolonial praxis. Critical Philosophy of Race, 5(2), pp. 198–222. 7 For a related but distinct view, see Alcoff (2015, p. 74). 8 The use of invisibility as a metonym for a broader perceptual phenomenon raises concerns about ocularcentrism and encourages some commentators to describe it instead as camouflage. However, the metaphor is sufficiently central to longstanding debates that it remains in wide use. 9 See, for example, Mills (2007) and Medina (2013). 10 See Alcoff, M. A. (2015). The future of whiteness. Cambridge: Polity. For perhaps the best version of this approach in action, see Berry, W. (1970). The hidden wound. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 11 Roediger, D. (1994). Towards the abolition of whiteness. New York, NY: Verso; Ignatiev, N. and Garvey, J. (1996). Race traitor. New York, NY: Routledge.

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References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), pp. 149–168. Alcoff, L. (2006). Visible identities: Race, gender, and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alcoff, L. (2015). The future of whiteness. Cambridge: Polity Press. Al-Saji, A. (2014). ‘A phenomenology of hesitation: Interrupting racializing habits of seeing’, in Lee, E. (ed.) Living alterities: Phenomenology, embodiment, and race. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 133–172. Baldwin, J. (1998). ‘My dungeon shook (1963)’, in Collected essays. New York, NY: Library of America. Bourdieu, P. (1994). ‘Structures, habitus, power: Basis for a theory for symbolic power’, in Dirks, N., Eley, G. and Ortner, S. (eds.) Culture/power/history: A reader in contemporary social theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 155–199. Dekkers, W. (2011). Dwelling, house and home: Towards a home-led perspective on dementia care. Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 14(3), pp. 291–300, 297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-011-9307-2. Dewey, J. (1988). The middle works of John Dewey, vol. 14: 1922, Human Nature and Conduct. Edited by J. Boydston and L. Hickman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1987). The later works of John Dewey, vol. 10: 1934, art as experience. Edited by J. Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1996 [1940]). ‘Dusk of dawn’, in Writings. New York, NY: Penguin. Fanon, F. (2008 [1952]). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Faucher, L. (2018). ‘Racism’, in Taylor, P., Alcoff, L. and Anderson, L. (eds.) The Routledge companion to philosophy of race. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 405–422. Frye, M. (1992). Willful virgin : Essays in feminism, 1976-1992. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Guenther, L. (2019). ‘Critical phenomenology’, in Weiss, G., Salamon, G. and Murphy, A. (eds.) 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 11–16. Hall, S. (1980). ‘Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance’, in United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (ed.) Sociological theories: Race and colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 305–345. Jeffers, C. (2019). ‘Cultural constructionism’, in Glasgow, J., Haslanger, S., Jeffers, C. and Spencer, Q. (eds.) What is race? Four philosophical views. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 38–72. Levinas, E. (1971). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. The Hague, Boston, MA and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Medina, J. (2013). Color blindness, meta-ignorance, and the racial imagination. Critical Philosophy of Race, Special Issue: Critical Philosophy of Race Beyond the Black/White Binary, 1(1), pp. 38–67. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Translated by D. Landes. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Mills, C. (2007). ‘White ignorance’, in Sullivan S. and Tuana, N. (eds.) Race and epistemologies of ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 13–38. Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Neal, D. (2008). ‘Habits’, in Darity Jr., W. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the social sciences. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan, pp. 402–404. Available from: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/ CX3045300983/GVRL?u=nash87800&sid=GVRL&xid=60906853 [Accessed 19/12/20]. Ngo, H. (2017). The habits of racism: A phenomenology of racialized embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rich, A. (1979). On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose, 1966–1978. New York, NY: Norton. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Bloomington, IN: Indianan University Press. Taylor, P. (2013). Race: A philosophical introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity. Weiss, G., Salamon, G. and Murphy, A. (2019). ‘Introduction: Transformative descriptions’, in Weiss, G., Salamon, G. and Murphy, A. (eds.) 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. xiii–xiv. Zack, N. (1993). Race and mixed race. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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26 WHITE MELANCHOLIA A historicised analysis of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström

Introduction The events of recent years – including the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ that culminated in autumn 2015, the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump for president of the United States in 2016 – call for new analyses of the paradoxical aspects of contemporary whiteness in the Western world. In 2015, Sweden received 163,000 applications for asylum, of which almost 35,000 were by unaccompanied children. Initially, a strong collective response was mobilised to support the huge number of refugees who were literally walking through Europe, organised under the umbrella slogan ‘Refugees Welcome’. However, parallel to this positive public reception, the far-right party of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna – henceforth referred to as ‘SD’) grew to become the second largest party in the opinion polls, receiving almost 18 per cent of the votes in the 2018 parliamentary election. SD entered the Swedish parliament in 2010, with 20 elected MPs and almost 6 per cent of the electorate. The party was founded in 1988 and has historical roots in the Swedish Nazi movement – a fact that makes the party different from other right-wing populist parties in Nordic countries (Ekman and Poohl 2010). Although SD – at least on the surface – has tried to transform itself into a more typical European right-wing populist party, its historical background arguably casts a different light on its parliamentary breakthrough and subsequent exponential growth. The initial reaction to SD’s entrance into the Swedish parliament in 2010 was as massive as the response to the wave of refugees in 2015 and could be likened to a kind of eruption of anti-racism within the establishment, academia, the media, the cultural sphere and the creative classes, in general. Several anti-racist demonstrations, protesting against the election result, took place in Sweden’s larger cities. The general and widespread feeling that stemmed from, in particular, the white, left-liberal establishment invested in colour-blind anti-racism, was that the party’s new presence in parliament was an insult to Sweden, and to Swedishness, itself – one that disturbed, tarnished and possibly even destroyed the global image and position of Sweden as humankind’s avant-garde for anti-racism and progressive politics ( Jansson 2018). The anti-racist anger and campaigns that followed the 2010 election can be connected to Sara Ahmed’s critique of white anti-racism, which she claims ‘allows people to relax and 308

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feel less threatened, as if we have already “solved it” and there is nothing else to do’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 121). Ahmed’s analysis of the proud, white anti-racist and ‘the self-perception of being good’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 111) is, in our view, particularly relevant within the Swedish context, since white Swedes generally see themselves as the most genuine and authentic anti-racists (or non-racists) in the world. This self-image is not unique to the Swedish context, as various versions of it also apply to other Western countries. Nonetheless, the sudden presence of SD in the Swedish parliament was perceived as an abomination and an outrageous source of shame for Sweden. Twelve years later, in 2022, SD became the second largest party in Sweden receiving over 20 per cent of the votes. The continuously growing support for SD is thought to have resulted from feelings of dissatisfaction and alienation within a diversifying Sweden among certain demographic segments of voters – particularly male working-class and lower-middleclass voters from both native and foreign backgrounds, who previously supported the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party (Rydgren and Ruth 2011).

A white nation in crisis Against this background, this chapter explores current paradoxes in Sweden from a critical race and whiteness studies perspective, showing that the country, which imagines itself to have almost accomplished a post-racial utopia and hegemonic colour-blindness, also harbours the technically largest former Nazi party in the world. We believe that such a perspective is necessary to understand what is happening in contemporary Sweden, and possibly many other Western countries, where right-wing populism dominates the political agenda. Specifically, the chapter addresses the ‘paradoxical presence’ of a right-wing, ethnonationalist party in Sweden – a country that, since World War II, has been globally renowned for its anti-racism, humanism and refugee-friendly policies. We aim at analysing how white hegemony can be maintained in this country, which is ruled by a progressive social welfare system, a strong gender equality policy and a deeply cherished anti-racist ideology. The purpose of the chapter is to provide a locally contextualised and specific understanding of whiteness as a form of power that is ‘defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented’ through a multiplicity of practices – in our case in Sweden (Twine and Gallagher 2008, p. 7). To begin, we regard contemporary Sweden as a white nation in crisis, holding on to a phantasmatic self-image as white – always and forever. As a result, contemporary Sweden is continuously – and perhaps even desperately – struggling to find ways to accommodate its growing non-white population, both within its territory and (perhaps even more so) within its national psyche. Thus, the Swedish situation is analogous to Ghassan Hage’s analysis of Australia as a white nation harbouring fantasies of white supremacy: ‘[a] white nation fantasy is where white racists and tolerant, white multiculturalists both see their nation structured around a white culture which they control, with Aboriginal people and migrants as exotic objects’ (Hage 1998, p. 48). To unpack and shed light upon what is perceived in Sweden to be threatened and on the verge of being lost forever, we start by introducing the concept of ‘hegemonic whiteness’ in the Swedish setting, then continue by offering a historicised account of what we consider to be the three principal phases of Swedish whiteness: the white purity period (1905–1968), the white solidarity period (1968–2001) and the white melancholy period (2001 onwards).1 Throughout these periods, Sweden has shifted its policies from those espousing overt racism and race hygiene to those encouraging multiculturalism and colour-blindness, the abolishment of race as a concept and the melancholic mourning of the recent past. In our analysis, we strive 309

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to understand the similarities and parallels between these apparently different periods, in order to better understand what is being mourned today. Finally, we consider how Swedish whiteness has intersected with the different racial formation and minoritisation processes, class structures and gender relations that have characterised these periods.

Hegemonic whiteness in Sweden In our attempt to unpack Sweden as a white nation in crisis, we draw on Matthew Hughey’s (2012) concept of ‘hegemonic whiteness’. Hughey interviewed white anti-racists and white racists in the United States, finding more similarities than differences between the two groups in terms of white identities, white perspectives and white privileges – ultimately reproducing a hegemonic whiteness of white supremacy. We argue that, in contemporary Sweden, hegemonic whiteness is upheld through a colour-blind ideology that constantly reinscribes whiteness as the normative – yet unmarked – position, effectively foreclosing, silencing and excluding experiences of everyday racism among non-white Swedes, as well as any public debate on Swedish race relations. Although colour-blindness is not unique to Sweden, the Swedish case is of particular interest, due to the country’s historical position as the leading nation for race science, race biology and eugenics in the democratic Western world. In fact, we argue that this colour-blind ideology has hampered attempts to highlight the continuities between Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century and Sweden post-1968. According to our understanding of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden, Swedish whiteness is a structure, ideology and system that includes both anti-racists and racists, as well as, ultimately, all Swedes, regardless of their background and political views. Even minorities can identify with and strive to perform whiteness. With this understanding, we argue that two primary images of Sweden – that of Sweden as a homogenous, white nation (which SD serves to protect) and that of Sweden as a progressive society defined by its solidarity with the ‘Third World’ (which many anti-racists are anxious to keep alive) – can be interpreted as a concern for Swedish whiteness, itself. A central component of hegemonic whiteness in contemporary Sweden is the idea that whiteness constitutes the core and master signifier of Swedishness (Lundström 2007). Thus, a Swede is a white person, and a non-white person is therefore not a Swede (nor can they ever fully become a Swede). This is not to suggest that all whites are equal, but merely to point to the interchangeability of the concepts of whiteness and Swedishness (Lundström 2017, cf. Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen 2014). To understand the origin of this conflation of terms, it is necessary to go back in history to the time of the foundation of Swedish whiteness. By periodising the history of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden, we can uncover unexpected similarities between otherwise different time periods.

White purity: the foundations of Swedish whiteness (1905–1968) The equation of Swedishness with whiteness can be traced back to the absolutely privileged position of Swedes in the historical hierarchy of race as the whitest of all whites and, as a consequence, the elite among homo sapiens (Hagerman 2006). This ‘scientific truth’, today commonly known as the discourse of scientific racism and the myth of the Germanic, ‘Aryan’ and Nordic race, was hegemonic for almost 200 years (Painter 2011). The myth of the Nordic race is arguably still very much part of the popular image of Swedes, as well as the Swedish self-image, as evidenced by beauty ideals and body aesthetics that regard Swedes as among the most beautiful people on earth. 310

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This idea of the superiority of Swedish whiteness is tied to the cult of the Nordic (central within Sweden’s national imaginary), which dates back to at least the early modern period (Schough 2008). At this time, the country’s scientific and scholarly community excelled in and contributed substantially to race science and race thinking. For example, the Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus created the first modern scientific system for race classification in the 1730s, and in the 1950s, the anatomy professor Anders Retzius invented the skull or cephalic index, which became the principal empirical method of scientific racism (Andreassen 2015; Broberg 1995). Sweden’s shift from an early modern state to a nation-state took place predominantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Sweden transformed from a Baltic empire and the dominant seat of power in Northern Europe to a post-imperial state, following the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809 and the dissolution of a personal union with Norway in 1905. Prior to that time, Sweden was inherently multicultural, multi-lingual and even multireligious, despite its militant Lutheran stance against anything considered ‘papist’. Sweden was also multi-racial, due to its overseas colonies, settlements and trade stations in Asia, the Americas and Africa, as well as the presence of Sámi, Roma, Finns and other minorities within the Swedish territory, itself. Sweden’s final overseas colony, Saint-Barthélemy in the Caribbean, was sold to France in 1878. Minorities were not seen as a problem during this period, as long as they remained or became Lutheran Christians, and the Swedish army was multi-national. We locate the first phase of Swedish whiteness in the years 1905–1968. This period began with the dissolution of the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, and thus the final demise of Sweden as a Northern European empire. Even still, the northern half of the country was inhabited by the Indigenous and semi-nomadic Sámi people, whose territory comprised well over 50 per cent of the national state. We call this phase of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden the ‘white purity period’, and we generally regard the period as that of a white nation-building project. Beyond the Swedish context, the period was associated with high imperialism and, thereafter, late colonialism and decolonisation, as well as early and high modernity. In Sweden, it was connected to the construction of the Swedish welfare state (in its social democratic golden age version) and the legendary – and almost mythical – ­nationalist and socialist concept of folkhemmet (i.e. ‘the home of the people’ or ‘the people’s nation’) (Björck 2000). As the concept was claimed by both reactionary and nationalist conservatives such as Rudolf Kjellén (a political scientist known mainly as one of the founders of geopolitics) and socialists such as Per Albin Hansson (leader of the Swedish Social Democrats, who was prime minister from 1932 to 1946 and is widely regarded as the founding father of the Swedish welfare state), it symbolically captures the specific Swedish amalgamation of a racialised nationalism and a reformist socialism (Dahlqvist 2002). For us, the free-floating signifier of folkhemmet can be translated as both the home of the people and, in practice, the home of the white majority Swedes, regardless of class, gender and regional background, as both the Sámi and the Roma were initially excluded from receiving certain welfare services (Mohtadi 2012). This understanding of folkhemmet unravels why the word now evokes a powerful nostalgia in contemporary Sweden, playing a vital role in the third and current phase of Swedish whiteness, the ‘white melancholy period’.

Eugenics and sterilisation in the ‘people’s home’ In 1909, some of Sweden’s most internationally well-known and influential scientists and intellectuals founded the Swedish society for race hygiene (Svenska sällskapet för rashygien), with the backing of the philanthropist Alice Wallenberg, who belonged to the powerful 311

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Swedish industrialist and banking family of the same name (Broberg 1995; Ljungström 2004). The society lobbied for what was then considered progressive public health and biopolitical reforms to protect the Swedish nation from social degeneracy and proletarianisation, race mixture and immigration, mass emigration to the United States and a decreasing birth rate among the middle and upper classes. Several of the key members of the society, including Herman Lundborg, later became chief ideologists of Swedish race thinking – which proclaimed Swedes as the purest and most noble and illustrious of all white people – spreading its gospel through exhibitions, lectures and publications. Lundborg was appointed the first director of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology in 1922 – the world’s first race science state institute – which was founded with the full support of all political parties. In relation to the opening of the institute, the Swedish government stated that ‘the betterment of the human race is of course an important state interest’ and that ‘the existence of physically and mentally inferior individuals in great numbers is for society a burden in many ways’ (Regeringskansliet 2014, p. 113). During the first half of the twentieth century, as a result of the successful lobbying of race biologists and the backing of the Social Democrats, an array of laws and regulations were passed and enacted to create and uphold a perceived uniquely pure and valuable white Swedish nation: an anti-contraceptive law; a restrictive abortion law; an adoption law characterised by strong genetic thinking; a marriage law restricting those with inherited diseases and disabilities from marrying; a restrictive immigration law, which became even stricter in the lead-in to World War II, in order to prevent an influx of Roma and Jewish immigrants and refugees; a law to introduce race biology teaching in school and in the army; and, above all, a sterilisation law to hinder the reproduction of the lower classes and to ‘exterminate’ those who were considered biologically and socially ‘inferior’ while simultaneously increasing the birth rate among those considered ‘fit’ and of ‘better lineage’ (Hirdman 1989; Johannisson 1991). This state-sanctioned control of women’s bodies and reproduction mainly targeted the white majority population, and especially those in the lower strata and working class, who were deemed less white than those in the middle and upper classes, as the number of racialised minorities living in Sweden was still small. The Swedish sterilisation programme was in effect between 1934 and 1975 and one of the most effective in the world per capita, resulting in the sterilisation of 63,000 Swedes. The programme was inherently racialised, gendered, classed and heteronormative: minorities such as the Roma and Travelers2 were proportionally more targeted, and over 90 per cent of the recipients were women – mostly belonging to the lower and working classes and including many who were deemed sexual transgressors by the prevailing patriarchal order (Broberg and Tydén 1991). As homogenisation was the governing principle in the creation of the modern Swedish nation-state and folkhemmet, racialised minorities were also affected. Emigration from other parts of Europe was strongly restricted, and forced assimilation was used against the Sámi and the Finnish minority living in Northern Sweden, aimed at cultural and linguistic extermination (Catomeris 2017; Lundmark 1998). These Swedish ‘racial formations’, to borrow Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) classical concept, included such ingredients as the use of race as a category in the Swedish population register, the dissemination of racist ‘educational’ material to schools and the creation of separate census lists of Swedish Jews, Roma and Travellers (Lindgren 2002). Simultaneously, Swedes also harboured general Western colonial and racist fantasies of the non-Western world and non-white people, in general (Catomeris 2017; Keskinen et al. 2009; Larsson 2016). 312

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White solidarity: the construction of a ‘good Sweden’ (1968–2001) We claim that the second phase of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden began in the late 1960s. At this time, Sweden became a leading, internationally recognised Western voice for decolonisation and anti-racism, and a political, economic and moral supporter of anticolonial, anti-segregation and anti-apartheid movements across the world (Eriksson Baaz 2002). Thus, we call this phase of Swedish whiteness the ‘white solidarity period’, to highlight the idea of a ‘good’ (i.e. anti-racist) Sweden.3 Just as Swedish civil society had previously been deeply engaged with race thinking and eugenics, in this period, the labour movement, the women’s movement, the Christian movement and other social movements – alongside their leaders, intellectuals and activists – contributed to the emergence of Sweden as the world’s most radical proponent of anti-racism, social justice and gender equality. Slowly, Sweden was constructing itself as a colour-blind country and thereby steadily transforming racism into an issue that mainly concerned other Western countries (Hübinette 2021). At the same time, Sweden became the world’s largest donor of development aid and dispatcher of aid workers (in the form of professionals and consultants) to newly independent countries in the so-called ‘Third World’ (Eriksson Baaz 2002). Indeed, ‘Third World’ solidarity combined with colour-blindness as the governing norm when Sweden pioneered the transnational adoption of non-white children in the 1960s. The idea was that Sweden had not had any overseas colonies and therefore had not been a racist oppressor of others; consequently, the nation saw itself as the most welcoming and suitable country in the West to adopt children of colour (Hübinette 2012). At first glance, this transformation from a nation that cultivated and endorsed one of the most racialised and homogenising nation-building projects in the democratic Western world to one that elevated anti-racism and multiculturalism as guiding principles may appear contradictory and paradoxical, if not absurd and surreal. However, it is precisely this enormously successful left-liberal nation-building and nation-branding project of constructing and promoting the ‘good Swedes’ and ‘good Sweden’ as the most tolerant and progressive of all white nations that allows us to recognise this transformation as a shift from one regime of hegemonic whiteness to another. This is not to suggest that the various solidarity projects at that time had no positive or real consequences for international relations, immigrants, adoptees and post-colonial nations. Rather, from an analytical standpoint, our argument is that these two regimes of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden were not fundamentally different projects before and after the ‘turning point’ of 1968. The radical and progressive political and social movements of the second phase created a moral and anti-racist regime of white supremacy. ‘Good whiteness’ was, in fact, possibly the ultimate white position in this era of idealism and left-liberalism – and without a doubt, Sweden was superior at playing this part. This new whiteness regime can be regarded as a form of post-colonial or post-imperial whiteness, which was updated to fit the new global setting following the dismantling of European colonial empires and the successes of civil rights movements in the West. By creating a new kind of anti-racist whiteness during the oftentimes bloody and violent end of Europe’s overseas empires, Sweden played an equal – if not more critical – role in the reformulation and recalibration of whiteness in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the end of European colonialism and the civil rights movements in the West resulted in a fundamental crisis regarding the centuries-old belief in white supremacy, and white supremacy became globally challenged. Sweden thus contributed to preserving a sense of white moral superiority in the new post-colonial order and new multicultural West, claiming that whiteness was still fit to rule and guide the planet (and humanity, itself ). 313

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One result of this second phase of Swedish whiteness is that Sweden received a similar number of refugees and migrants from the non-Western world as that received by much larger European countries (e.g. the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France) that had once ruled over a vast global empire (Byström and Frohnert 2017). In 1975, Sweden declared itself a multicultural society through the introduction of new legislation and policies, replacing assimilation with integration as the governing mode of interaction between the majority population and immigrants and minorities (Wickström 2015). Another central aspect of the construction of ‘good Sweden’ was the country’s achievements in gender equality. The end of the white purity period saw the birth of a new system of gender relations, closely related to the welfare state. Due to Sweden’s mass expansion of public childcare in the 1960s and 1970s, the housewife gradually and steadily disappeared in high modernity (Berggren and Trägårdh 2006). From 1972 onwards, gender equality became firmly incorporated within Swedish society through the introduction of progressive laws and regulations – many of which were the first of their kind in the world. Sweden began exporting its progressive gender equality ideal to other (so-called ‘Third World’) countries, through its international development aid. The state-sanctioned and institutionalised gender equality discourse that emerged from these developments came to be integral to the national identity, which some scholars argued was intimately intertwined with whiteness, as it excluded (especially), or rather targeted, migrants of colour, who were imagined and marked through an inherently and essentially patriarchal lens (Keskinen et al. 2009). Finally, perhaps the most significant component of this second period of hegemonic whiteness was the abolishment of race as a concept and category within government, law and academia (McEachrane 2018). As a result, Sweden now considers itself the epicentre of human rights, democracy, social justice, gender equality and anti-racism. However, it is precisely this hubristic image of a non-racist and post-racial ‘good Sweden’ with no colonial past that is beginning to wane and fall apart.

White melancholy: a white nation in crisis (2001 onwards) We establish the beginning of the third (and current) phase of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden in the year 2001. In this year, the ‘War on Terror’ broke out as a result of 9/11 in the United States, and Sweden became a full and operative member of the European border control and migration regime Frontex. Thus, 2001 marked the beginning of the current phase of Swedish whiteness, which we characterise as the ‘white melancholy period’. Our choice of 2001 as a watershed year also aligns with American scholars’ discussion of the transnational impact of 9/11, through which histories of colonialism and governmentality were brought together in a new shape (Grewal 2005). Our current time period is generally characterised by a neo-conservative culture, a gradual dismantling of the welfare state, a crisis of multiculturalism, cultural racism and Islamophobia, as well as an ever-increasing fear and anxiety concerning anything regarded as foreign, alien, non-white and non-Christian – and especially Muslim (cf. Lentin and Titley 2011). In post-9/11 Sweden, fear of terrorism has been institutionalised through stricter asylum laws, extended militarisation (e.g. within the domain of research), communication surveillance and intensified collaboration with NATO and United States intelligence agencies. At the same time, the liberal establishment has continued to adhere to an anti-racist stance. In the 2010 parliament election, older class boundaries were blurred by whiteness. To understand this development, it is important to remember that the boundaries of whiteness have always been under negotiation. Irish Americans (Ignatiev 1995) and Italian Americans 314

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(Guglielmo 2003) are good examples of historically racialised minorities who were later recruited to expand American whiteness and who today are included within the structure of American whiteness, as ‘Caucasians’. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) and David Theo Goldberg (2009) argue that the United States racial taxonomy has become ‘Latin Americanised’, as the breakdown of the previously overarching white and Black divide has resulted in new formations of ‘American whiteness’, including white Latinos, multi-racial Americans and some East Asians. Through this process, new groups have been able to unite around the powerful category and ideology of whiteness; but for those who have always been defined as non-white, these expanding boundaries have had the opposite result, maintaining them as ‘the defining other’ (Warren and Twine 1997, p. 215). The consequences of this shift in racial taxonomy are significant, as some groups have been able to reposition themselves as white and claim a common destiny by distinguishing themselves from those designated as nonwhite, and they have also been embraced by those who have always been considered white. This phenomenon may explain why SD has been able to rally support from members of previously racialised groups, such as the Finns and Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Christian minorities from the Middle East, Latin Americans and multi-racial and adopted Swedes of colour, as such groups are joining together with native working and lower-middle class white Swedes to form a new notion of Swedish whiteness. SD is offering these new white groups ‘the wages of whiteness’, to paraphrase David Roediger and his use of the concept, which was first theorised by W. E. B. Du Bois in his analysis of the white working class in post-slavery United States. Du Bois wrote about the white workers ‘that even when they received a low wage’ they were ‘compensated in part by a […] public and psychological wage’ (Roediger 1991, p. 12). Likewise, instead of identifying Black and other non-white workers as allies, white workers may unite around the ideology of white supremacy, which undermines class unity and clouds ‘the very vision of many white workers’ (Roediger 1991, p. 13). Roediger’s argument gives us a tool for understanding the strong force of white privilege, not least in the experience of not having been discriminated against on the basis of race and having an unquestionable identification with the nation. Applied to the Swedish context, the wages of whiteness complicate the traditional Swedish alliance between the working and the middle classes, centred on the belief that social equality, economic redistribution and the welfare state benefit both groups. Indeed, due in part to the high poverty rate among non-whites, the former working and middle class alliance on which the expansion and maintenance of the welfare state were built is gradually being replaced by an alliance of whiteness. Because the working class has become increasingly non-white and the middle and upper-middle classes are heavily white, this alliance around whiteness strives to defend so-called ‘Swedish values’, rather than class solidarity. In the rhetoric of this new class coalition built on whiteness, pensioners’ needs for welfare services are, for example, contrasted with migrants’ (ab)uses of welfare, thus revealing the institutionalised value of whiteness in welfare politics (Keskinen et al. 2016). This analysis also highlights that racism is more than simply the effect of social inequalities, and it would not disappear in a classless society (as implied by the idea and ideal of the previous time period). In fact, economic politics are not solely governed by class positions. In the words of George Lipsitz (1998, p. 16), ‘even seemingly race-neutral policies […] have increased the absolute value of being white’. The idea that economic politics are also racial politics sheds light upon the dramatically increasing economic disparities between white and non-white Swedes, whereby white Swedes have recently become owners and investors (through the support of financial policies), while non-white Swedes and migrants have been locked into tenancy and irregular wage work, all too often in a highly exploitative, precarious and informal labour market. 315

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The Swedish discourse on gender equality also constituted an important aspect of the 2010 election, as SD portrayed itself as the ‘sworn enemy’ of Islam and its ‘patriarchal excesses’ and the protector of Swedish women (i.e. white women) (Mulinari and Neergaard 2014; Norocel 2013). In order to maintain the Swedish ideal of gender equality (representing a key marker of the previous historical phase), non-whites (and particularly Muslims) were depicted as non-compliant with gender equality. Thus, the Swedish discourse on gender equality was dependent on an imagining of an ‘other’ with opposite values – somebody that was not Swedish, not white and not gender equal (Andreassen 2012; Horsti 2017). SD’s electoral breakthrough may also be interpreted as a symbolic re-installation of a certain iteration of white masculinity. The Swedish ideal of gender equality is embodied in the white, heterosexual nuclear family, which normalises and naturalises notions of citizenship, race and nation. In Sweden, this family ideal has long been upheld by an array of practices and methods such as sterilisation and segregation. Following Patricia Hill Collins’s (1998, p. 65) analysis of the family as a primary site for understanding race, gender, class and nation, we agree that ‘White men and White women enjoy shared racial privileges provided by Whiteness’, even though they inhabit different positions within white hegemonic structures. This heavily racialised bifurcation and stratification of the Swedish gender equality discourse reflects the ideological role played by the white family in constructing the white nation as a site for naturalising gendered and national boundaries. Family values thus nurture nationalistic ideals and, in the end, reproduce Swedish whiteness, itself.

White mourning and white melancholia We diagnose Swedish whiteness as suffering from what we conceptualise as a ‘white melancholia’, representing an affective structure brought on by the double bind that characterises Swedish whiteness. On the one hand, Swedes sense the disappearance of an ‘old Sweden’ that is perceived to have been racially homogeneous; on the other hand, they are concerned that the politically progressive ‘good Sweden’ might wane away. In both scenarios, Sweden is understood to be under threat – and even under siege – by the presence of people of colour, who are considered to have destroyed the nation’s homogeneity and, indirectly (as a consequence of their presence within the Swedish national territory), allowed the SD to become one of the country’s most influential political parties. Paul Gilroy (2005) argues that a post-colonial melancholy characterises many white British people who cannot accommodate the fact that Britain is no longer a world power. Within American critical race studies, racial melancholia is mainly attributed to minorities as a result of an ever-deferred assimilation process stemming from non-white people’s inability to be fully accepted as American (Eng and Han 2000). For example, Ann Anlin Cheng (2001) uses the concept of racial melancholy to analyse the mental effects of racism among non-white minorities in the United States. For us, it is useful to speak about a specific Swedish white melancholia that is obsessively and anxiously invested in both maintaining a self-image of Sweden as an anti-racist country and preserving Sweden as a white nation. Both the SD camp and the anti-racist camp are, in other words, deeply affected by Sweden’s contemporary crisis, as they wish to resurrect the first and second phases of Swedish whiteness, respectively. According to our hypothesis, during the 2010 election campaign, SD’s mourning of the homogenous folkhemmet – expressed in the slogan ‘Give Us Sweden Back!’ (‘Ge oss Sverige tillbaka!’) – was something that progressives also identified with, given the rage and sadness that erupted within the anti-racist camp after SD’s electoral success. When Sweden closed its borders in January 2016, the social media hashtag #WeCannotStandIt 316

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(#ViStårInteUt) was created. It is important to mention that the anti-racist movement in Sweden (as well as both the labour movement and the feminist movement) has traditionally been dominated by white Swedes, contrary to the situation in, for example, the United Kingdom and North America. This tendency further risks locating both racism and sexism outside of normative Swedishness, and thereby naturalising white Swedes as both feminists and anti-racists simply by virtue of their being white Swedes – as if anti-racism and feminism were Swedish national values and traits, in and of themselves. The 2010 election took place at a time when Sweden was wracked by white grief over the loss of its role as the whitest of all white nations, and by white anxieties about not being in full control. Many white Swedes nostalgically yearned for the safe days of ‘old Sweden’ and ‘good Sweden’, when it was easier to believe in the supremacy of whiteness while simultaneously being anti-racist – simply because there were very few people of colour living in Sweden at that time. What characterises this white melancholia is the idealisation and romanticisation of a homogenous past, combining the white purity and white solidarity periods of Swedish whiteness. In other words, images of white Sweden and anti-racist Sweden go hand in hand – and even coalesce – during this third period of Swedish whiteness. It is the double bind of having been perceived as both the most racially homogenous and pure of all white nations and morally superior as a progressive and anti-racist country that has produced these seemingly contradictory sentiments and reactions. The current state of melancholy makes it almost impossible to deconstruct Swedish whiteness and transform Swedishness into something that people of colour can also achieve. When the object of love – in this case both ‘old (white) Sweden’ and ‘good (anti-racist) Sweden’ – is threatened, under siege or even on its way to being lost forever, white melancholia floods in, filled with limitless pain and linked to a desperate but futile yearning for the past, which, in turn, results in a complete inability to imagine any constructive future. This specific Swedish white melancholia constitutes the psychological state of the nation, tied to both Swedes’ and the world’s image of Sweden. It is thus related to both the sentimental mourning of the loss of Sweden’s identity as the most homogenous and white of all white nations and the painful mourning of the loss of Sweden’s identity as the most humanitarian and anti-racist country in the world. Our analysis of the three phases of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden and our white melancholia diagnosis of the psychological state of contemporary Sweden might be usefully applied to other white nations in crisis. It may, for instance, contribute to explaining the drive behind the Brexit campaign and referendum and the popularity of Donald Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again!’; it may also provide a key to understanding why right-wing populists have been so successful in activating certain affective structures among different strata of the electorate in many countries. Furthermore, our approach might contribute to a deeper understanding of the present crises of white anti-racism and white feminism (and white progressive politics, in general) in the context of a world that is rapidly becoming more diversified, less white and perhaps truly post-colonial, in the sense that the centuries-long global domination by the West seems to be coming to an end. Finally, it is our conviction that a disentanglement between Swedishness and whiteness is absolutely necessary to deconstruct the notion of Swedishness that prohibits non-white Swedes from becoming fully Swedish and traps white Swedes in a melancholic longing for ‘old Sweden’ and ‘good Sweden’. We hope that a transformative moment will unlock this regressive closure, which we diagnose as a white melancholia that, ultimately, is trapped within itself. However, to achieve this transformation, Swedes must collectively acknowledge that their objects of love have been irretrievably and irrevocably lost, however painful that may be to accept and accommodate. 317

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Notes 1 Previous versions of our analysis of white melancholia have been published in NORA (Hübinette and Lundström 2011) and Social Identities (Hübinette and Lundström 2014), and in the edited volume Unveiling whiteness in the twenty-first century (Hübinette and Lundström 2015). This chapter develops the analysis of hegemonic whiteness after the paradoxical turn of 2015. 2 Travelers and Roma were demographic sub-groups defined as vagrant and nomadic. Travelers were considered to have mixed origin and to speak a ‘secret’ language, while Roma were considered to have a north Indian origin and to speak the Romani language. 3 This project did not start in the iconic year of 1968, but in the first half of the 1960s, when a general radicalisation of left-wing politics took place, affecting both the Social Democrats and the Liberals, inspired by ‘Third World’ liberation and Maoism.

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27 WHITENESS, MASCULINITY AND THE DECOLONISING IMPERATIVE Josephine Cornell, Nick Malherbe, Kopano Ratele and Shahnaaz Suffla Introduction Whiteness and masculinity have no biological basis, yet the constitution of their respective but related social constructions is far from arbitrary. Together, whiteness as an ideology and the patriarchal enactments of masculinity work to establish oppressive social hierarchies that artificially divide populations, while justifying imperial and colonial violence and conquest through mechanisms of dehumanisation. Indeed, both whiteness and masculinity were central features of the colonial project, and the legacy of this project lives on through systems of coloniality. By examining two recent instances of decolonising insurgency, one in South Africa and one in Nigeria, this chapter seeks to provide both a historical and a theoretical account of the ways in which whiteness and masculinity attend to and bolster coloniality, resulting in colonial forms of being white and being (a) man/woman. As part of our analysis, we explore some of the ways in which colonial whiteness and masculinity have been resisted, and how decolonising projects and campaigns have thereby prevented the achievement of an absolute colonial, (hetero)patriarchal masculine order. We consider these modes of resistance and the insurgent, decolonising traditions within which they work – hence referred to as ‘decolonising resistance’ – as pockets of radical hope upon which to draw inspiration and to build and mobilise towards a broader project of emancipatory future-building. We begin by describing the orienting frame for our chapter. This frame, which employs the decolonial attitude informed by critical race theory (CRT), runs throughout the chapter and structures its analyses, conclusions and ethical valances. Following this, and informed by our own enunciative and bodily positionings in the world – writing as raced and gendered subjects from the Global South – we briefly consider the ways in which whiteness and masculinity historically informed the colonial project. From there, we reflect on how decolonising movements have acted to resist whiteness and masculinity. To animate the ways in which these traditions of decolonising insurgency live on in the present, we reference two contemporary examples – that of a naked protest in Nigeria and that of school protests in South Africa. In both of these cases, those engaged in the collective struggle sought to reject the structural, direct and epistemic violence of coloniality, and the associated systems of whiteness and masculinity. We conclude by reflecting on what these two examples, and others like them, are able to teach us about the necessarily ambitious nature of the decolonising imperative. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-32

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Critical race theory and the decolonial attitude Although the provocations offered in this chapter are lodged within what Maldonado-Torres (2017) refers to as the ‘decolonial attitude’, the theoretical coordinates of CRT shaped our adoption of this attitude (e.g. Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Thus, in this section, we provide a brief outline of decoloniality and discuss how the central tenets of CRT informed the ways in which we epistemically situate ourselves in the decolonial option – that is to say, how decoloniality informed our political and epistemological positioning. The theoretical approach of CRT can assist us in examining the relationships between race, racism and power, for the ultimate purpose of social change (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Without being reductionist, we consider subjectivity, gender categories, bodies, cultural norms, political institutions, struggles, sexual violence, love, economy and race as social phenomena. Thus, social structures – or their opposite, social restructurings – can enable or thwart, speed or slow down social change. Rather than a singular theory in and of itself, CRT is a trans-disciplinary ‘theorizing counter-space’ (Cabrera 2018, p. 213). As such, it is not guided by a singular theoretical position; however, it does maintain some common assumptions and key tenets (Flores 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Firstly, CRT contends that race has no biological basis. Instead, race – as a site of difference – is socially constructed through societal discourses and relations (Cabrera 2018; Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Regarding race as difference, du Bois (ca. 1900, para 1), addressing the Pan-African Conference, said: The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race – which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair – will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization. Race, then, is the ideological basis used to privilege one group over others and to create inequality between people. The socially constructed nature of race notwithstanding, CRT scholars also acknowledge the material reality connected to the lived experience of racial categorisation (Flores 2017). Secondly, CRT contends that racism is deeply ingrained within modern society (Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Thirdly, CRT underscores the need to consider the power and fantasies of white supremacy in the creation and maintenance of systems of racial oppression and white privilege (Rollock and Gillborn 2011). White supremacy is taken to refer to not only the racist psychologies of hate groups but also (and perhaps even more so) the political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. (Ansley 1997, p. 592) Relatedly, CRT takes seriously the ‘interest convergence’ of whiteness, whereby, because whiteness as a system offers material benefits to white people – benefits that are reinforced and upheld through racism – white people are incentivised to maintain and reproduce systemic racism (Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). 322

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Fourthly, CRT stresses the need to foreground the voices and experiences of ‘people of ­colour’1 in order to understand racism (Cabrera 2018; Delgado and Stefancic 2017; Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Finally, CRT emphasises the importance of intersectionality in understanding racism. Influenced by the work of feminist scholars (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Crenshaw et al. 1995), critical race theorists hold that race should be examined alongside other categories of identity that contextualise lived experiences such as gender, sexuality, class and ability (Cabrera 2018; Flores 2017). Indeed, while CRT is ‘centrally concerned with the structures and relations that maintain racial inequality, it does not operate to the exclusion or disregard of other forms of injustice’ (Rollock and Gillborn 2011, p. 3). These overarching tenets of CRT act as ‘epistemological and ontological premises, which inform the ways that CRT scholarship is conducted, especially as it relates to its activist orientation’ (Cabrera 2018, p. 213). Turning now to coloniality, we understand it to be comprised of the present-day oppressive matrices of power that were forged during fifteenth-century colonialism (Maldonado-Torres 2007). As much as CRT’s conception of race is intersectional, coloniality similarly considers both symbolic and material valances of (primarily racially defined) identity, in addition to the ways in which these valances take root in our day-to-day lives. Linking with the du Boisian ‘colour line’ thesis, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) argues that this line is wound together with the epistemic line, whereby coloniality denies the humanity and knowledge of racialised colonial subjects. Thus, as stressed by CRT, the violences of coloniality are multifarious and interlocking: racial oppression is, under coloniality, always a question of classed, gendered, epistemological and bodied oppression. Coloniality looks to institutionalise and reproduce relations between coloniser and colonised, which construct the world through a prism of white, male, cisgendered, hetero-patriarchal, able-bodied, capitalist supremacy (see Veronelli 2015). Decolonising resistance, therefore, seeks to ‘destitute’ coloniality and its supremacist ideologies – whereby the verb ‘destitute’ represents a conscious action taken to confront and destabilise a dehumanising yet powerful ideology. Departing from the tenets of CRT and its orientation towards social change, we now take up what Maldonado-Torres (2017) refers to as a ‘decolonial attitude’, signifying both an orientation and a praxis aimed at extinguishing systems of coloniality and centring the voices, knowledges and experiences of those living under coloniality – particularly those at the receiving end of coloniality, including the descendants of the formerly enslaved, excolonised, exploited, marginalised and wretched of the modern/colonial world. The decolonial attitude rejects the notion that coloniality is a complete project that has irrevocably stained knowledges, power and being. Instead, the attitude embraces decoloniality as an expansive project that represents ‘not only a long-standing political and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex-)colonised peoples from global coloniality but also a way of thinking, knowing, and doing’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, p. 485). This attitude, similar to the activist thrust of CRT, looks to break from an identification with whiteness, along with the perceived and real benefits thereof, by deconstructing and delegitimising whiteness as the standard of knowledge and living well.

Colonial histories of whiteness and masculinity Although forms of oppressive social relations have existed globally for millennia, the construction of race as a fixed, hierarchical, biologically determined identity category is associated with European colonial expansion (Dunn 2008; Garner 2007; Gould 1996; Steyn 2005). Within colonial discourses, the concept of race was organised around phenotypes – and particularly skin colour – which worked to naturalise oppressive and unequal political 323

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and economic dynamics (Steyn 2005). These colonial discourses of race were constituted through traveller’s tales, missionary reports and ‘race science’ (Gould 1996; Wale and Foster 2007) and served the ideological function of binding a range of differences to inform racial and cultural hierarchisation and oppression (Garner 2007; Steyn 2005). Bodies were ‘invested’ with race and difference in order to legitimise the dehumanising practices of colonial nations (Oyěwùmí 1997; Riggs and Augoustinos 2005; Steyn 2005). Stuart Hall (1992) refers to the colonial discourse of race as the discourse of ‘the west and the rest’, through which Western European peoples and nations were constructed as superior to ‘the rest’ (i.e. non-European nations and people). Whiteness was the position from which such comparison, categorisation and classification were carried out. In other words, it was a ‘fulcrum of domination’ (Garner 2007, p. 175). Within this colonial discourse of race, whiteness became an ‘ideologically supported social positionality that has accrued to people of European descent as a consequence of the economic and political advantage gained during and subsequent to European colonial expansion’ (Steyn 2005, p. 121). Accordingly, modern whiteness is a shared social space that has been historically, culturally, socially and politically produced and linked to particular privileges and dominance (Frankenberg 1993; Steyn 2005). Ratele (2021) notes that the colonial discourse did not consider colonised and enslaved peoples as full people (see also Fanon 1963). He goes on to argue that, at best, these notquite-people were simply not afforded the same rights as the colonial masters; at worst, they were considered and treated as the dehumanised, ‘thingified’ property of the colonisers. The co-constitution of masculinity and colonial/racial identification still exists, serving to (in)form contemporary modern/colonial racist societies. The construction of race and the dominance of the system of whiteness are deeply connected to contemporary constructions of masculinity (Connell 2005; Dunn 2008). As Nagel (1998) suggests, ‘state power, citizenship, nationalism, militarism, revolution, political violence, dictatorship, and democracy – are all best understood as masculinist projects, involving masculine institutions, masculine processes and masculine activities’ (p. 243). Within the project of colonial expansion, hetero-sexist patriarchal gender ideologies became linked with racial hierarchies (Connell 2005). Indeed, the ‘imperial social order created a scale of masculinities as it created a scale of communities and races’ (Connell 2005, p. 75). In the British Empire, for example, colonies were ruled along the same hierarchical arrangements that structured Britain at the time, with norms dictated by the ruling class, represented by the landed gentry. While these norms morphed and developed over the centuries, they nonetheless remained in the imperial service of monopoly capital (Connell 2005). As Connell (2005) avers, the ‘imperial state thus became a transnational arena for the production and circulation of masculinities based on gentry customs and ideology, although these were increasingly modified by military and bureaucratic needs’ (p. 75). Indigenous gender relations, practices and structures were thus disrupted by the patriarchal hierarchising and dominant masculinity of the colonisers (Connell 2005; Oyěwùmí 1997). Such disruption was often advanced by Christian missionaries, whose colonising mandate functioned under the guise of ‘civilising’ colonised peoples (Césaire 1972). Thus, the colonised were called not to God, but to the white oppressor (Fanon 1963). In the colonies (e.g. South Africa), laws and norms ascertained that white people – and specifically white men – were ensconced at the top of the racist hetero-patriarchal social architecture, with the rest of the racialised sexes/genders arrayed below. Indeed, as Ratele (2021, p. 769) notes, in the wake of colonialism and slavery, masculinity (as well as other ways of being and relating, which could pertain to anatomical distinctions between individuals but were not limited to sex, sexuality 324

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and gender) was ‘given a particular colour, a specific organisation and a certain desire, among which is the patterning of relations – social, economic, [gender], and sexual – between the colonized and colonizer groups, and later the former colonized and former colonizer’. Once again, it was often the Christian missionaries who were tasked with enforcing such monogamous, heteropatriarchal and essentialising gendered relations (see, e.g., Oyěwùmí 1997).

Resisting colonial (hetero)patriarchal masculinity, whiteness and violence In a well-known statement, Foucault (1978, p. 95) claimed that ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’. Certainly, coloniality – and its attendant ideologies of whiteness and masculinity – is never foreclosed but rather contains ruptures that can be seized upon by resistance efforts. Coloniality is thus always challenged by decolonising resistance, informed by decolonising attitudes, with the consequence that it is forced to re-form itself in response. Decolonising resistance can assume various forms across numerous spaces, be they institutional, quotidian or public. We can, in this respect, understand decolonising resistance as constituting the contextually embedded actions and voices of the oppressed and exploited. These actions and voices assume their most effective formation when they are arranged from below – that is, by those at the sharpest end of the coloniality of power, gender, being and knowledge (see Maldonado-Torres 2007, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, 2018). At the same time, decolonising resistance cannot but draw from those solidarity-building efforts that disinvest from the symbolic and material benefits (both real and perceived) that accrue from structures supporting colonial whiteness and hetero-patriarchal masculinity (see Davis 1983). It is within, but also beyond, the contexts of these struggles that people are able to work together to foster the kinds of critical consciousness that are so central to decolonising resistance. Decolonising resistance is not immune to the forces of oppression it seeks to combat. History presents us with many examples of decolonising resistance efforts that were plagued by oppression from within. Kelley (2002), for instance, recounts that throughout the midtwentieth century, anti-colonial movements across Africa were often intensely masculinised and sought to reinstate patriarchal manhood under the guise of African freedom. During the apartheid struggle in South Africa, the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko (1978) warned against white allies within anti-apartheid resistance movements who supported the struggle for their own purposes and on their own (essentially liberal) political terms. In 2015, many activists who participated in South Africa’s student-led Fallist movement – which called for the decolonisation of higher education institutions – noted instances of hetero-sexism, homophobia and transphobia within the movement (Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell 2017). Considering the ways in which currents of oppression can operate within resistance movements is not to announce the inevitability of coloniality. Neither is it to diminish the achievements of those who have fought to destabilise colonial whiteness and hetero-patriarchal masculinity within these movements. Rather, reflection of this sort points towards decoloniality as an emancipatory ideal that must be continually replenished, reimagined and struggled towards. It is crucial that any decolonising effort reflects on its internal structures and external relations so that it may guard against reproducing the sorts of oppression it seeks to combat. When we consider decolonising resistance to whiteness and masculinity, both within and beyond Africa, we should not understand the present-day iterations of such resistance as lacking in precedent. Historical consciousness is imperative for building a new historical community (Ratele and Malherbe 2022). That is to say, today’s local and transnational 325

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decolonising movements build upon, speak to, take inspiration from and reformate centuries-long struggles against colonialism, which include uprisings, protests, revolts, campaigns, strikes, civil disobedience, armed struggle and escapes (see James 2012). At the grassroots level, Angela Davis (1983) notes that women living in the slavocratic and colonial eras – of whom many experienced appalling sexual violence – engaged in various acts of resistance, such as the poisoning of white slaveholders. Additionally, among anti-apartheid resistance efforts in South Africa, the armed wings of the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress trained many female cadres who resisted systems of whiteness and masculinity in a variety of interesting – sometimes conflicting – ways (Cornell et al. 2022). It is crucial that, today, when seeking to resist and decompose whiteness and masculinity within a decolonising frame, we do so in conversation with the histories of decolonising struggle – histories that are repeatedly ignored, muted and repressed.

Resisting the violence of coloniality: two case examples Decolonising resistance to colonial whiteness and masculinity is difficult as it requires a break from and a remaking of a dehumanising world order that has already been broken apart and remade in the image of coloniality. It requires such a radical destitution of coloniality’s accepted norms that, as Frantz Fanon (1963) argued, colonial powers are likely to consider it a kind of violence. In drawing out this point, Fanon added nuance to the ways in which violence and resistance to violence are conventionally understood. Indeed, the violence of coloniality is pervasive, inhering in structures, representations and subjectivities, and is not simply confined to discrete bodily assaults. Decolonising resistance is, accordingly, ambitious and yet possible, everywhere. Coloniality can and has been resisted in both formalised decolonising social movements and day-to-day interactions in knowledge making, teaching, spiritual practices, labour relations, culture, language, intimate relations, architecture, healthcare provision and many other spheres of life. Motivated by the Fanonian provocation, and drawing on peace and critical psychology (e.g. Galtung 1990; Teo 2010), we understand violence as constituting three interlocking formations: direct, structural and epistemic. All of these formations cohere with coloniality in particular ways. Structural violence, in Galtung’s (1969) well-known formulation, speaks to the dominant social systems, ideologies and discourses that cause and perpetuate harm and harmful practice. Direct violence, on the other hand, pertains to physical and psychological aggression and harm (see Galtung 1990). Finally, epistemic violence denotes harmful depictions that ‘other’ and dehumanise (see Teo 2010). These violences do not operate separately. Instead, they work together, informing and re-forming one another and the broader system of coloniality. A number of decolonising resistance efforts have sought to foil these forms of violence inscribed within coloniality (which include the ideologies of whiteness and masculinity) through a myriad of strategies and tactics. Such movements provide examples of alternative, (re)humanising and decolonising ways of being and knowing. In what follows, we recount two recent examples of such resistance efforts and seek to unpack how they addressed whiteness, masculinity and the interlocking forms of violence that comprise coloniality.

Decoloniality and the insurgent body It is estimated that, since 1980, 10,000–to 20,000 people have died as a direct result of the ethno-religious conflict in Nigeria’s Kaduna State (Hoffmann 2017). Those living in the northern region of Kaduna are mostly Muslim and represent a majority, while those living 326

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in the southern region are predominantly Christian and constitute a regional minority. The segregation of Kaduna was facilitated by the British colonisers (Campbell 2021). Over the past three decades, the two groups have been locked into violent conflict over political power, land, economic opportunities and resources – particularly agricultural resources (e.g. water). This has contributed to social deterioration and high levels of human displacement throughout Kaduna (see Hoffmann 2017). On 23 July 2020, hundreds of women in Kaduna – most of whom were mothers – staged a protest against the conflict. The women claimed that many of them were widows due to the conflict and had lost land, in addition to family members (Alabelewe 2020). The protesters demanded that both the Nigerian state and the international community intervene (Alozie 2020a). Optically, what was most striking about the protest was that most of the women were naked. Naked protest has long been used as a political tactic and mode of collective resistance in Nigeria, typically among Igbo and Yoruba women. It is understood as a method by which to curse and shame political targets, and indicates that the protesters are willing to die for the cause to which they are politically committed (Alozie 2020b; Fallon and Moreau 2016). Naked protests draw on older forms of feminist insurgency, such as the pre-colonial Igbo tradition of ‘making war with a man’, wherein groups of women would target a man who had harmed or disrespected a woman, and dance and sing insulting songs that questioned the male offender’s manhood, until he repented (Van Allen 1972). Similar to naked protest, making war with a man came to signify female political agency, and later informed the ways in which women protested against the British colonisers. Indeed, women played a central role in some of the country’s largest anti-colonial protest movements (see Fallon and Moreau 2016). In 1929, for instance, hundreds of nearnaked women catalysed what became known as the ‘Aba Women’s War’, protesting colonial authorities’ racialised notions of the body (Abaraonye 1998). We can see the legacy of such episodes of female insurgency in Nigeria’s most powerful contemporary protest movements, of which many have been organised by either individual women or feminist organisations (e.g. the Feminist Coalition). Although naked protest in Nigeria has been described as a potent weapon, due to its ability to generate relatively swift responses from state authorities (Fallon and Moreau 2016), it tends to remain a last resort for feminist activists, as it comes with tremendous risk (Abonga et al. 2020). Indeed, the Aba Women’s War resulted in many deaths and was instigated only after the petitioning of colonial authorities failed (Abaraonye 1998). Alozie (2020a) recounts a number of other, more recent, naked protests that carried significant risk for the protesters, including a women’s union-based insurgency, female-led activism against Nigeria’s military, and a female protest that was successful in shutting down a terminal of an oil company that had ignored the needs of local residents – a political victory that male protesters had previously failed to achieve. In addition to the risks such protests carry, they are also repeatedly represented through dominant colonial frames (e.g. within global mainstream media) that enact epistemic violence by debasing their political nature and focusing instead on the female body as an exotic site upon which to gaze (Fallon and Moreau 2016). Looking critically at the 2020 protest in Kaduna, we can understand how modes of collective insurgency harnessed decolonising traditions to challenge violent currents of whiteness and masculinity. The naked protesters rejected the epistemologically violent scripts upon which coloniality drew (and draws) when constructing Black and feminised bodies. Their female bodies, in other words, became the site from which to resist mechanisms of biopolitical control and male possessiveness that seek to render such bodies passive, exotic 327

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objects of sexual gratification, or functional only insofar as they advance colonial interests (see Abonga et al. 2020; Alozie 2020a, 2020b; Davis 1983). Nakedness, therefore, served as an insurgent spectacle that disrupted the infrastructure of public space, all the while disturbing socio-cultural norms (see Abonga et al. 2020) in order to highlight how the lives of ordinary people are continually made disposable when such ‘normality’ remains intact. Visually, the protesters ‘reclaimed’ the female body and, through their ‘visual spectacle’, highlighted the Black female body’s often stereotyped or dismissed existence. It is through the action-orientation of the naked protesters that colonial epistemologies of the Black female body-object were disregarded, as their bodies instead emerged as a collective form through which humanising and decolonising political activity was enacted. Thus, in addition to reconstituting epistemologically violent images of the Black female body, the protesters’ call to the wider community (as well as the Nigerian state) to intervene in Kaduna’s conflict acted to connect instances of direct violence to the broader, structurally violent socio-historical context within which the conflict was embedded. In other words, the shameful silence and neglect of the Nigerian state, as well as the national and international communities, was made salient by the protesters, who used their bodies to make clear both the psychological and the material consequences of the conflict. Whiteness and masculinity were not rejected in the abstract, but in the very ways in which they are used to support and feed an overarching global system of coloniality that manifests in everyday, physical, hermeneutic and psychological experiences.

Disrupting whiteness and patriarchy in South African schools As in most colonial nations, the education system in South Africa was central to advancing colonialism and, later, apartheid. The apartheid schooling system – through the Bantu Education Policy – was imbedded within a culture of white, hetero-patriarchal Christianity and served to uphold and maintain the white supremacist and patriarchal masculine principles upon which the country’s societal structure was established. The apartheid government sought to use education as a form through which to structurally enact the violent subjugation of Black people, promoting ‘explicit and hidden curricula’ in which ‘black students and teachers were coerced to become docile supporters and transmitters of the state ideology of social inequality’ (Ndimande 2013, p. 23). The racial segregation of South African schools – and indeed educational institutions, more broadly – reflected the colonial discourses of race as a biological and fixed natural entity and of racial hierarchies (Soudien 2010; Vandeyar 2008). In the four-tiered race system, students racially classified as African, Native, Bantu or Black had access to only the least resourced schools and were prohibited from learning in their native languages. Students classified as ‘white’, in contrast, attended well-resourced schools. Those who were classified as ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’ attended schools that tended to be more degraded than schools designated for white learners, but less so than those designated for Black learners (Soudien 2010). The oppressive and hierarchical state of apartheid education did not exist without resistance (Ndimande 2013). When Afrikaans was made a compulsory language of instruction in 1974, Black students collectively mobilised against both the language policy and the Bantu Education Policy, more broadly. This culminated in the ‘Soweto Youth Uprising’ on 16 June 1976, in which students in Soweto marched peacefully in protest. Police fired into the crowds of these marching students, killing and injuring thousands of young people and children. In response, a widespread student revolt spread across the country, lasting into the following year (Ndimande 2013; South African History Online [SAHO] 2020). With the 328

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dawn of the democratic dispensation in 1994, the transformation of the education system was a key priority of the new national government. Through the South African Schools Act, schools were desegregated and educational policies were introduced to allow students from all backgrounds to access high-quality education. A single national school system was instituted, founded on the principles of non-discrimination and equality (Christie and McKinney 2017; Vandeyar 2008). As Vandeyar (2008) suggests, ‘it was hoped that in creating this opportunity, students would become integrated into the whole school environment and the seed of a new society will be sown’ (p. 287). However, although schools were no longer formally segregated, the colonial divisions, inequalities and violences of the past persisted, and hope for an equitable, socially just education system in contemporary South Africa was not yet fully realised (Christie and McKinney 2017; Soudien 2010; Vandeyar 2008). Williams (2011) describes the private and former ‘Model C’ schools as ‘islands of privilege’ in which hetero-patriarchal whiteness remained dominant (Christie and McKinney 2017; Vandeyar 2008). Model C schools were former white schools that tended to be better resourced than schools previously designated for Black, Indian, or ‘coloured’ students. The schools originated as a result of the steps taken by the National Party to protect the privileged position of white state schools towards the end of the apartheid regime in 1990. Schools could opt to become Model A, B or C schools: Model A schools were private, Model B schools were state schools and Model C schools were state-aided and semi-private. Thus, Model C schools received a state subsidy, but the school’s governing body was responsible for the general administration and management, with substantial decision-making power (Christie and McKinney 2017). Although a diverse range of students now attends former Model C schools, research shows that Black students are expected to assimilate to the dominant institutional cultures of these schools, and thereby ‘act white’ (see Vally and Dalamba 1999; Vandeyar 2008). Indeed, ‘the development and operation of “Model C” schools, and in particular their language and associated cultural practices, may be explained as forms of coloniality’ (Christie and McKinney 2017, p. 8). For instance, in most schools, English is taught as a first language, whereas African languages are rarely granted this position. Moreover, the study of history still privileges a colonial, Eurocentric lens. Thus, various traditions inherited from the British school system, which characterised colonial and apartheid schooling, are still dominant in most schools, even after the dismantling of apartheid. A notable example of the coloniality of education in South Africa is offered by the Pretoria High School for Girls – a former Model C school in Gauteng Province (Christie and McKinney 2017). In 2016, the students at this school problematised the regulations around ‘appropriate’ ways of styling hair, which privileged whiteness and marginalised Blackness, thus promoting coloniality’s epistemologically violent racial discourses. According to a Department of Education report, the school’s official code of conduct maintained that afros and braids could only be grown to a certain length, whereas similar regulations were not applied to ‘white’ (i.e. straight, long) hairstyles (see Hendersen 2016; Maromo 2016; Ngoepe 2016). Students also reported that they were reprimanded by teachers for speaking African languages at school (see Giokos 2016; Hendersen 2016). The behaviour of Black students (e.g. wearing their hair in a particular way or speaking an African language) was therefore scrutinised and policed. Epistemologically violent regulations of this kind bolster coloniality’s dehumanising, structurally violent social mechanisms by sending messages to students about who is a ‘legitimate student’ and who is not, within schools’ officially sanctioned diversity codes. These notions of ontological legitimacy feed into coloniality’s directly violent notions of humanity, which are premised on whiteness (see Fanon 1963). As Christie and McKinney (2017, p. 17) suggest, ‘relationships of coloniality pervade these and other schools in an 329

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education system that is fundamentally unequal in the experiences and opportunities which it offers to students’. The students at Pretoria High School for Girls followed in the long tradition of decolonising resistance to oppressive education systems by protesting the institutional culture of their school. They registered their discontent by styling their hair in ways that defied school regulations, dressing in black and gathering together in silent protest at a school event, and sharing their experiences on social media, generating widespread news coverage in South Africa (see Nicolson 2016; Parker 2019). Their actions were influential in encouraging students from other formerly ‘white-only’ schools to challenge exclusionary and epistemologically violent policies at their own schools, as pertaining to race and gender (Goba 2017). For example, Westerford High School – another former Model C school in Cape Town – mandated student uniform options that were rooted in essentialist understandings of gender. Male students were prohibited from having long hair or wearing jewellery, as these were gendered as ‘female’. The institutional culture of the school relied on a fixed, binary understanding of gender, assuming that all students were male or female and thus failed to serve the needs of transgender and gender non-binary students. Additionally, the code of conduct drew artificial assumptions about the ways in which ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ should be enacted. Prompted by debates around student appearance that the Pretoria High School for Girls protests elicited, the principal of Westerford High School, in discussion with the students, revised the code of conduct to allow students of all genders to wear their hair as they wished (provided the style was ‘neat’) and to also wear jewellery (Goba 2017; News24 2016). Although the Pretoria school protests focused mainly on disrupting whiteness, and the Westerford policy change was concerned with gender binaries, the Pretoria protests against the dominant and marginalising status quo arguably contributed to the development of critical consciousness among other South African high school students, thereby fostering their resistance to structural forms of marginalisation in their own environments (Goba 2017). It should be noted, however, that the Westerford High School code of conduct relating to uniforms still designates skirts as ‘female’ and shorts as ‘male’ (see WHS 2019). Nonetheless, the Pretoria protests ‘brought the power relations of coloniality into visibility’ (Christie and McKinney 2017, p. 16), which encouraged students at schools across the country to challenge the oppressive parameters of their own codes of conduct.

Conclusion Informed by CRT and decolonial thought, this chapter has offered an account of decolonising resistance against colonial impositions of whiteness and masculinity/femininity. Our basic goal was to surface localised acts of resistance informed by decolonising attitudes – either implicitly or explicitly – as instantiations of hope, voice and action against coloniality. We focused on two protests – each of which was led by African women and girls: one in Nigeria and the other in South Africa. Protests such as these, we argue, inform our understanding of how we might ‘destitute’ colonial forms of masculinity and whiteness. Although the protests were set in vastly different contexts, and ranged in scope and political tactics, each worked within their respective national tradition of decolonising resistance to reject the stifling premises of coloniality, particularly with respect to whiteness and masculinity. In both cases, gender and race were harnessed in ways that spoke to the multifaceted nature of colonial violence, thereby resisting this violence on direct, structural and epistemic levels. In each instance, the contextual particularities were addressed in ways that spoke to coloniality’s globally oppressive project. Thus, a universalising mode of humanising insurgency was evident – an insurgency to which those 330

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who are engaged in the decolonising struggle must lend their solidarity in order to develop it into a globalising project of decolonial future-building.

Note 1 Although the phrase ‘people of colour’ is frequently used by critical race theorists, we limit its use in this chapter, as we feel that it risks absolving whiteness of the responsibility of recognising whiteness as a ‘colour’, or race. In other words, a dislodging of whiteness from understandings of colour – socially constructed as they may be – may unintentionally reinforce notions of whiteness as a non-identity or universal standard, and thereby free from complicity with oppression.

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SECTION 6

Identities

28 INTRODUCTION Identities

As Stuart Hall’s work (1997; 2000; 2012) has shown, identities are never fixed in a once-and-forall-way. Identities are intersectional reflections of race, gender, class and sexuality, for example. Therefore, we can best describe identities as identifications, positionings as this-or-that rather than fixed entities. This understanding of identifications as mobile highlights the important link between the psyche, the corporeal and socio-political life in the formation, maintenance and evolution of identifications. The unending flux of identification is of course also constrained by the borders of the body itself and its psychic, political and societal location. There is not endless slippage although we need to see the corporeal as malleable and to think through race performativity’s role in bringing whiteness into being in identifications as lived. The chapters that follow focus on identities as corporeal, with bodies being fixed in space and time through race, gender and class even whilst whiteness, intimate connections with whiteness, and being mixed race, can allow for movement across these highly socially regulated boundaries. Damien W. Riggs, Sally Hines, Ruth Pearce, Carla A. Pfeffer and Francis Ray White’s chapter, ‘Whiteness in research on men, trans/masculine and non-binary people and reproduction’, looks at transmasculine people’s racialized experiences. It draws on Sara Ahmed’s elaboration of the phenomenology of whiteness. It explores how the extension or limiting of ‘reach’ afforded by whiteness as a form of cultural capital shaped the experiences of a racially diverse sample of 50 transmasculine people who had been pregnant. For many transmasculine people, cisgenderism (i.e., the ideology that delegitimizes people’s own understandings of their genders and bodies) fixes their bodies in place, marking them as bodies whose movement may be highly regulated. Whiteness, however, at least for white transmasculine people, may facilitate their movement in space, to at least a degree offsetting the limiting and regulatory effects of cisgenderism. For transmasculine people marked as not white, by contrast, their bodies may be doubly regulated. Using Ahmed’s framework and drawing on research on mixed-race families and the experiences of pregnant people marked as not white, this chapter explores how transmasculine people oriented towards or away from discourses of whiteness, and further how whiteness normatively shaped their interactions in healthcare and parenting spaces. The chapter concludes by suggesting that an intersectional focus on transmasculine people’s experiences of pregnancy is vital for ensuring that gender, bodies, ability, whiteness and class are all viewed as mutually functioning to produce bodies as more or less acceptable in particular spaces, and that this has implications for transmasculine people’s experiences of pregnancy. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-34

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Christianne France Collantes and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes’s chapter, ‘Modern dating in a postcolonial city: Desire, race, and identities of cosmopolitanism in Metro Manila’, discusses dating in a global South postcolonial city. Specifically, it looks at the lives of middle- and upper-class women who date foreigners, providing insights into the ways that performances of cosmopolitanism are entwined with colonial ideas about white and non-white bodies. It focuses on the case of Metropolitan (Metro) Manila, the Philippine capital that has served as a key site for the country’s long colonial history of racial tensions between Filipinos and Westerners. Of particular interest is how these tensions have been expressed around intimate and marital relationships between Filipino women and foreign men. Scholars have long problematized the concept of Filipino women as the postcolonial other through their studies on women participating as ‘mail-order brides’, participants in sex tourism and in marriage migration. But in rapidly globalizing Metro Manila, middleand upper-class Filipino women engage in intimate relationships with foreigners in ways that can subvert the racial and sexual stereotypes often ascribed to them. They fashion themselves as the exception, precisely because their elite education, career-orientation, worldliness and feelings of sexual empowerment allow them to participate in and perform upper-class and cosmopolitan lifestyles even whilst problematic dynamics and tensions around race and class differences persist. Miloš Debnár’s chapter, ‘White European migrants in Japan – between an unmarked category and racialized subjects’, contributes to what has been named the third way of whiteness studies. Debnár analyses whiteness from an intersectional perspective in his focus on whiteness in the context of migration in Japan. He is particularly occupied with the intersections of whiteness and migration, class and gender. The chapter analyses the varied and complex ways in which whiteness affects the experience of white Europeans in Japan, where white privilege is mediated by class and gender. He looks at how whiteness is being reproduced, and simultaneously limited, as a position of power in the context of migration to a non-Western, highly developed country ( Japan). Through analyses of semi-structured interviews with firstgeneration migrants from diverse European countries, Debnár shows how whiteness becomes a privileging and alienating identity. As such, the chapter further develops previous arguments on the reproduction and limits of white privilege in the context of migration and Japan. The final chapter, Yuna Sato, Adrijana Miladinović and Sayaka Osanami Törngren’s, To be or not to be “white” in Japan: Japaneseness and racial whiteness through the lens of mixed Japanese people, analyses what race and whiteness mean in the context of Japan, a non-white country occupying the same socioeconomic status and privilege as the racially white West. In this chapter, they explore the two parallel mechanisms of race-based privileges in Japan. One is the idea of nihonjin ( Japaneseness), an unmarked racializing category embedded with privilege and invisible dominant culture equivalent to whiteness in the West. The other is whiteness as a white racial category from the Western dominant perspective, a concept that privileges the white-Western phenotypes and cultures associated with admiration and positive images in Japan. The chapter explores these two parallel yet not mutually exclusive constructions of race, through the experiences and identities of hāfu (ハーフ), i.e., individuals of multiethnic and multiracial background living in Japan.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Borderlands, 3(2), pp. 1–15. Hall, S. (1997). Representation. Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: SAGE. Hall, S. (2000). ‘Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities’, in Hall, S. and Held, D. (eds.) Modernity and its failure. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 273–325. Hall, S. (2012). Introduction: Who needs identity?, in du Gay, P. and Hall, S. (eds.) Questions of culture and identity. London: SAGE.

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29 WHITENESS IN RESEARCH ON MEN, TRANS/MASCULINE AND NON-BINARY PEOPLE AND REPRODUCTION Two parallel stories Damien W. Riggs, Ruth Pearce, Sally Hines, Carla A. Pfeffer and Francis Ray White Introduction In this chapter, we share two parallel stories. Both stories speak to the operations of whiteness in academic research – specifically research on the pregnancy-related experiences of men, trans/masculine and non-binary people. It is arguably the case that the stories we share are likely endemic to a great majority of research undertaken by all-white research teams. As we elaborate further below, it is precisely our whiteness as a project team that underlines the very necessity of this chapter, as our primary focus on the topic led us to overlook, in many ways, the issue of whiteness in our planning of the research project. Thus, the stories we share in this chapter are useful examples of the operation of whiteness in academic research, due to their comment on the relationship between whiteness and the research topic. To begin, we will provide a bit more information on our research project, which sought to explore the ways in which men, trans/masculine and non-binary people navigate pregnancy in European countries, as well as the settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States.1 Specifically, the research aimed at highlighting the challenges faced by these populations when trying to become pregnant, as well as their experiences of pregnancy and birthing and the responses they received from healthcare professionals, family and society, more broadly. As such, the project focused on both challenges and joys. This dual focus was purposive: we wanted to highlight the operation of cisgenderism (i.e. the ideology that delegitimises an individual’s own understanding of their body and identity) in the context of male, trans/masculine and non-binary reproduction, and to explore how, in the face of cisgenderism, men, trans/masculine and non-binary people create kinship and (potentially) happiness. Given the above, in designing the project, we were very mindful of the need to collect a diversity of experiences of gender (and not, for example, solely those of trans men), reproduction and embodiment, as well as relationships to cisgenderism. Our project team was DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-35

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comprised of people of a diversity of genders, complemented by an advisory committee that was also diverse in terms of gender. This focus on gender and diversity was understandable, given our awareness of the fraught nature of transgender studies as a distinct field of study that has historically been dominated by cisgender people. Additionally, we were conscious that the field has traditionally adopted a pathologising approach to gender diversity and, by dint of laws (i.e. those mandating the sterilisation of transgender people) and cisgenderism, has often failed to focus on reproductive justice for transgender and non-binary people. The two parallel stories told in this chapter, however, speak to a gap in our thinking, in relation to the planning of the project interviews – a gap that pertains to whiteness. Following scholars such as Moreton-Robinson (2000) and Lipsitz (2006), we understand whiteness as a form of cultural capital that accrues privileges to those racialised as white. As such, whiteness is not simply a referent for white skin, but a systematised process of racialisation whereby those situated as approximating a norm of whiteness, according to histories of colonisation and scientific racism, benefit from those histories (Richards 1997). Such benefits are, of course, differentially distributed, according to gender, sexuality, ability, class and religion. Yet even such uneven distributions of privilege sit in a relationship to their corollary: the systematic disadvantage experienced by people not racialised as white. One effect of the systematisation of whiteness as a form of cultural capital is that it is often unseen or unacknowledged by people racialised as white (Frankenburg 1993). In other words, people racialised as white are, in a sense, like fish in water. In many ways, as a project team, we were very much fish unable to see the water of whiteness. Certainly, we were conscious of the need to recruit participants who were not racialised as white, and we were successful in this to some degree. Yet this focus really only served to address part of the legacy of whiteness (i.e. the ongoing marginalisation of people not racialised as white in academic research). When planning the project, we did not adequately respond to: (1) our theorisations of whiteness in the project and (2) our engagement with participants racialised as white, in terms of their (and our) whiteness. These two shortcomings constitute the two parallel stories that we share in this chapter. Further, our reflections on whiteness in our project (as explored in the conclusion to this chapter) have significant implications for the future study of the pregnancy experiences of men, trans/masculine and non-binary people, as well as the lived experiences of male, trans/masculine and non-binary gestational parents.

Whiteness, the project and the project team As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the primary focus of our project on male, trans/ masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents was their narratives of conception, pregnancy and childbirth, especially in relation to aspects of gendered embodiment and navigation in the social world. Changing understandings of gender have led to the increased possibility for – and indeed the intelligibility of – people who are not women becoming gestational parents. Accordingly, we focused on the ways in which people in these diverse groups negotiate, come up against and persist in the face of social norms about gender and reproduction, as shaped by cisgenderism. Specifically, we were interested in understanding what it means to be a gestational parent who is male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary in interpersonal, societal and healthcare contexts in which gestational parents are presumed to be women. In developing our interview schedule, we were acutely aware of the complexities of current understandings of gender. Thus, we sought to make our interview schedule inclusive of a diversity of genders, just as we wanted our pool of participants to reflect a diversity of populations (even if our central focus was on experiences of reproduction amongst men, trans/ 340

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masculine and non-binary people). We spent significant time talking about the terminology we would employ, given our awareness of the shifting terrain of language. Even the project language, itself, shifted from an initial focus on ‘pregnant men’ to a subsequent focus on ‘trans pregnancy’, followed by a revised focus on ‘trans/masculine individuals and pregnancy’ and, finally, a focus on ‘men, trans/masculine and non-binary people and pregnancy’. In contrast to the close and concerted attention we paid to gender, we did not actively orient ourselves with respect to whiteness in our preparation of the interview schedules, our definition of the project language and our recruitment of the project’s advisory committee. Certainly, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, we did implicitly orient to whiteness in our focus on ensuring racial diversity in the research sample. However, we failed to uphold Ahmed’s (2004) ‘double turn’, which requires people racialised as white to first critically engage with their own whiteness before turning towards those who are disenfranchised by whiteness. In contrast, our actions turned towards the racialised ‘other’ without first turning towards ourselves as a research team racialised as white. Our focus on gendered embodiment meant that we did not engage with the literature on race, including the literature on whiteness in interviewing (which would have been important, given that the majority of our participants were racialised as white within European nations and predominantly white settler colonies). Engaging with the literature on whiteness in interviewing would have pointed us to the need to situate ourselves as racialised subjects within our interview process, and indeed to acknowledge that gender diversity does not sit outside of processes of racialisation (Haggis, Schech and Fitzgerald 1999). As suggested by Haggis and Schech (2000), engagement with the literature on whiteness in interviewing would have not only reminded us to acknowledge our situatedness as gendered, classed and racialised (which we certainly did in our team conversations), but it would have also underlined our need to analyse ourselves as racialised subjects and ensure that whiteness (as well as gender) was a salient topic in our interviews with participants racialised as white. This is not to say that, on the fly, we did not try to discuss whiteness in the interviews. In the interviews we conducted in Germany, for example, questions pertaining to race and ethnicity were at times less (or not) intelligible to our interview participants racialised as white. This may indicate a translation failure for the words ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ outside of English-speaking contexts, which again highlights the need to recognise a diversity of understandings of how whiteness operates in differing contexts. In the German cases, the second author attempted to use her own racialisation as white British as a reference point through which to explain the interview question. While at times this approach did function to generate a response to the interview question (and thus helped us to generate demographic data about the sample), it potentially did little to destabilise the whiteness of the interaction. By contrast, an interview schedule with a framework for speaking about racialisation – including with regard to whiteness – would have supported interviewers in their work of exploring participants’ responses to, and queries about, ethnicity. More broadly, it would have allowed processes of racialisation to be a point of reference throughout the interview, facilitating the collection of a more explicitly intersectional corpus of data. This point about intersectionality is important (Crenshaw 1990), as intersectionality does not pertain solely to people who are not racialised as white (or who are not cisgender, not heterosexual, not middle class and so forth). Rather, intersectional analyses are applicable to all people (Levine-Rasky 2011). As we have argued elsewhere (Riggs 2010, 2018), in order to recognise intersectionality in the lives of people racialised as white who are otherwise marginalised on the basis of gender, sexuality, class or ability, one must ask appropriate 341

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ethnicity. As it happens, this very question highlights the problem of whiteness associated with our interview schedule. Historically, the term ‘race’ has pertained to discrete groupings of people, as determined by practices of scientific racism (Richards 1997) for the purposes of regulation and control. Ethnicity, by contrast, refers to cultural groupings determined by a shared set of cultural practices or beliefs (in other words, it is self- or interpersonallydefined, rather than necessarily externally imposed). Yet as Gunew (1997) argues, the terms are increasingly treated as interchangeable, as is evident in the proliferation of academic work using the phrase ‘race/ethnicity’. Treating the two as interchangeable is problematic, as it potentially exchanges ethnicity – a more ‘polite’ marker of difference – for a term (‘race’) with a highly problematic and contested history. Accordingly, such misuse of the terms is a problem of whiteness, as the simple substitution fails to acknowledge the ways in which ongoing histories of racialisation are components of broader histories of colonisation and scientific racism, and hence not reduceable to ethnicity. As we shall see in the conclusion to this chapter, the insights gained from our focus on participants racialised as white and their answers to an interview question about race (or, in some cases, also ethnicity) has implications for our sample, more widely, and for male, trans/masculine and non-binary parents, in general. In this chapter, we focus solely on participants racialised as white who were interviewed in the United Kingdom. There are a number of reasons for this. First, in Australia, participants completed a demographic form that included a question about ethnicity, and this was not then repeated as an interview question. This was an unfortunate decision made by the first author, which meant that potential conversations about racial or ethnic identity were largely foreclosed. In the United States and Canada, i nterviewees were asked about their ethnicity, and every single participant racialised as white described themselves simply as ‘white’. We do not mean to imply that this response, in and of itself, is not interesting. Indeed, it is an exceptionally powerful statement that speaks to the operations of whiteness. When a group of people (i.e. our sample of men, trans/masculine and non-binary people from the United States and Canada) has 15 ways to talk about their gender and only one word to speak about race, that is telling. However, as noted above, it would appear that our participants often oriented to the category of race, rather than ethnicity; this suggests that a more complex interview schedule might have helped to unpack this issue. It also suggests the need for a deeper look at racialisation processes in the comprehensive coding and analysis of the interview data, which is our current focus. Importantly, not all participants racialised as white living in the United Kingdom gave extended responses to our question about ethnicity, beyond: ‘I am white’. However, five participants (out of a total of 14) provided more detail, and it is these five participants whom we focus on in this section. In doing so, our aim is to be illustrative, rather than accusatory. That is, we do not seek to ‘excuse’ these participants for their location within whiteness. Rather, we acknowledge that their comments form but one part of a larger whole with respect to the operations of whiteness in our project, which we were entirely too complicit in, as elaborated above. In the first extract, we examine the participant Charlie. Charlie used the term ‘human’ to describe his ethnicity, while acknowledging that other people called him ‘white’: RUTH: How would you describe your ethnicity? CHARLIE: Again, human. RUTH: Yeah? CHARLIE: I guess, people call me white but I don’t really.

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As Gunew (2007) argues, whiteness operates in part through the universalisation of the views and values of people racialised as white. Accordingly, whiteness becomes the basis of what constitutes humanity, and people who are not racialised as white are positioned as less than human, or not human at all. Thus, Charlie’s description of his ethnicity as ‘human’ evokes not only the universalising effects of whiteness, but also a logic of ‘colour-blindness’ (Bonilla-Silva 2006). As Frankenburg (1993) has explored extensively in her work on white women, claims to colour-blindness function as a form of anti-racist praxis, suggesting that individual people racialised as white do not ‘see’ race. Charlie acknowledged that other people called him white; but perhaps this claim was meant to imply that other people ‘see’ race, whereas Charlie viewed race (or ethnicity) as a moot point, and instead drew recourse to the universal position of ‘human’. The following extract shows that Rowen, too, made a universalising claim about ethnicity: RUTH: Okay. What about your ethnicity? ROWEN: I usually say ‘Terran’ ‘cause I’m from Earth. RUTH: Yeah? ROWEN: But, yeah. As I said, born in [city], and then lived here all my life so I’m definitely

white British. RUTH: Yeah. ROWEN: English if you want to get specific. But I’ve got Welsh ancestry.

When asked to describe xir2 ethnicity, Rowen stated that xie was ‘Terran’. This is an interesting claim, and, while similar to the claim made by Charlie, offers a slightly different take on the universal. While ‘human’ evokes a sense of categorisation (perhaps in contrast to the category of ‘animal’), ‘Terran’ resists comparative categorisation. To be Terran is to be of the Earth, which potentially encompasses all living beings on the planet. As such, the category ‘Terran’ is potentially even more universalising than the category ‘human’. Importantly, however, Rowen did not just sit with the category ‘Terran’. After receiving only a minimally encouraging response from Ruth (‘Yeah?’), xie elaborated a place-based understanding of ethnicity, starting with the city in which xie was born, then claiming a life-long relationship to that city, then claiming an identity as ‘white British’ and finally claiming English ethnicity with Welsh ancestry. This chain of claims is important. While the universal ‘Terran’ potentially positioned Rowen within a logic of whiteness, the minimal response from Ruth appears to have elicited a further claim to whiteness: that having lived in a particular English city for xir’s entire life made Rowen ‘definitely’ white British, evoking a logic in which birth and length of residency defined ethnicity. Rowen then amplified this by reference to ancestry, incorporating genetics and history into xie’s previous logic of birthplace and length of habitation. Whiteness is worked up in multiple ways in response to the interview question. Similar to Rowen, Moddy appealed to ancestry to respond to the interview question about ethnicity: RUTH: How would you describe your ethnicity? MODDY: White Scottish. Or I’d go as far as to say white British because where I have some

of my blood genetic family who was born in England. I like to distance myself from the UK government as much as I possibly can. RUTH: I think that’s reasonable. MODDY: And yeah, so I’m white Scots. 344

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In their response, and different to Charlie and Rowen, Moddy oriented immediately to a racialised category (rather than a category of ethnicity, given the interview question) and explained this through both a claim to situatedness (first Scottish, then British and finally again Scottish) and a claim to genetics. As Moreton-Robinson (2000) notes, claims to ‘blood’ or ‘genetics’ serve to essentialise whiteness, leaving it beyond question or examination. It is potentially the case that interviewees responded to the interview question about ethnicity in terms of race because doing so allowed them to make a clearer claim to genetics, which provided a substantive basis for their responses – albeit a basis that situated the categories provided as beyond reproach. Further, and as Moddy’s response demonstrates, the ambiguity of descriptors of whiteness allowed them to function as descriptors of choice: Moddy could claim white Scottish or white British ethnicity – or both or neither – precisely because there is typically no social cost to claiming (or not) differing affiliations to whiteness and ancestry.3 Interestingly, Moddy’s response also revealed a desire to distance themselves from the ‘UK government’, despite having claimed a nationalised ethnic identity. This capacity to claim national affiliation on the one hand, while on the other hand distancing oneself from identification with the national government, is itself a function of whiteness. That is, people racialised as white can both benefit from the privilege they accrue from living in countries where racialisation is a practice of governmentality (Moreton-Robinson 2006) and refuse a relationship with the government that serves to regulate practices of racialisation. In contrast to the three extracts presented above, the final two extracts routinise and render whiteness mundane. Jonathan stated that he was white British, only to dismiss this as an interesting ethnic category: RUTH: How do you describe your race or ethnicity? JONATHAN: I’m white British. RUTH: Yeah, cool, didn’t want to assume. JONATHAN: Yeah, no there’s nothing interesting going on here ethnicity-wise.

This response potentially served two purposes: first, treating whiteness as mundane, to the point that ‘there’s nothing interesting going on’; and second, signalling to the interviewer that there was nothing more to be made – and that nothing more would be made – of the response. As Castagno (2014) notes in the context of schools, discussion about whiteness is often framed in terms of social niceties: to enquire about race (and to insist upon a conversation about it) is often perceived by people racialised as white as impolite (indeed, we might reflect on whether our interview question, put in the language of ‘race or ethnicity’, was an unconscious attempt to ask ‘politely’ about race). To insist on a conversation about whiteness, then, is not only to be impolite, but also to risk being read as essentialist or ignorant. As Best (2003) discusses in regard to her attempt, as a person racialised as white, to speak with a person racialised as white about whiteness, focusing on whiteness can be read as a failure to uphold the mandate of colour-blindness, and hence a failure to perform anti-racism. While we cannot know what exactly Jonathan meant by stating that ‘there’s nothing interesting going on here’, his statement certainly functioned to shut down the conversation, rendering any further discussion redundant (because ‘there’s nothing interesting’). Lewis also rendered whiteness mundane, through his use of the word ‘just’: RUTH: Cool. So I don’t want to assume, how would you describe your ethnicity? LEWIS: I’m just white British.

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Similar to Jonathan and his use of the phrase ‘nothing interesting’, Lewis’s use of the word ‘just’ suggests that nothing more should be made of his statement that he was white British. Being white British was ‘just’ what it was: beyond comment, beyond the need for explanation, beyond question. Yet again, a minimally encouraging response from Ruth appears to have elicited a further comment from Lewis – one that, in many ways, bolstered the ‘just’ claim, making his statement of ethnicity further beyond question. By evoking a three-part list of descriptors (‘fat, boring, old’), and by using descriptors that are typically attributed with negative valance, Lewis implicitly challenged Ruth to frame white-Britishness as an interactionally salient topic. In other words, his negative descriptors did not invite critical commentary about whiteness. Rather, they potentially functioned to foreclose this discussion by shifting focus to other identity categories that would certainly not be open to ‘polite’ conversation in a research interview. Framing whiteness as boring stands in contrast to the common framing of people not racialised as white as ‘exotic’ (Torgovnick 1991). Again, while we cannot know why Lewis made this follow-up statement, when situated in a relationship to the response ‘just white British’, he appears to have been shaping (or limiting) any further conversation about whiteness.

Discussion and conclusions In this chapter, we have explored two parallel stories. One story told of how our primary focus on gender and narratives of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in a research project on male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents meant that we did not attend sufficiently to whiteness. The other spoke to what it meant to talk about whiteness with participants racialised as white, and how such conversations were limited both by broader narratives about race and whiteness and by our framing (or lack thereof ) of whiteness as an interview topic. As we suggested in the introduction to this chapter, both stories have implications for our research, as well as for the lives of male, trans/masculine and non-binary gestational parents, more broadly. As the literature on gestational parents shows, whiteness shapes experiences of reproduction, birth and healthcare. Cisgender women racialised as not white consistently report less than positive experiences of reproduction, often with highly negative implications for their experiences of birth and parenting (Davis 2019). The experiences of transgender men not racialised as white are shaped by ideologies of both whiteness and cisgenderism. Ware (2015), for example, describes that he ‘spent so much time trying to be prepared for being a pregnant man and then a trans dad. I didn’t think to prepare for being a black man raising a baby who reads to many as white’ (p. 67). Echoing the literature on mixed-raced families (Phoenix and Tizard 2005), Ware’s comment is a testament to how whiteness shapes the ways in which parents and families racialised as not white are viewed, engaged with and responded to. The multiple forms of marginalisation that men such as Ware face require ongoing attention in research on men, trans/masculine and non-binary gestational parents. Importantly, and returning to Ahmed’s (2004) concept of the double turn, it does not suffice to focus solely on people racialised as not white when it comes to gestational parents who are men, trans/masculine and/or non-binary. Certainly this focus is important, as it serves to combat the whiteness that is often inherent in transgender studies. At the same time, however, we must turn first to focus on – and critically analyse – the role played by 346

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whiteness in transgender studies. The materials we have presented in this chapter suggest the central importance of theorising, thinking about and applying this focus within research in the field of transgender studies. It is not enough (though it is certainly important) to simply ensure that research samples are racially diverse. Nor is it sufficient (though it has utility) to examine whiteness post hoc, as we have done in this chapter. Instead, what is needed is an approach to transgender studies that speaks to intersectionality from the onset, including when it is intended or assumed that a research sample will be entirely comprised of people racialised as white. Returning to the example of Ware (2015), many of his experiences echo those of other trans/masculine gestational parents. Importantly, the ideology of cisgenderism negatively impacts the lives of all people – especially people viewed as situated outside of normative gender categories (i.e. pregnant men). Yet cisgenderism does not operate in a vacuum. Rather, it operates in relationship to other ideologies, including whiteness. Further, with regard to cisgenderism, the work of Ansara and colleagues (Ansara and Hegarty 2014; Riggs, Ansara and Treharne 2015) underlines the central role played by ethno-centrism in shaping cisgenderism. The authors suggest that the category of ‘transgender’, treated as the paired opposite of ‘cisgender’, is culturally bounded, and does not hold true across cultures (or indeed across time within a given culture). They thus caution against the universalisation of the category of transgender, highlighting the importance of cultural differences in understandings. In this chapter, we have built on the work of Ansara and colleagues by highlighting the importance of examining whiteness in our study of male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents. Specifically, and with regard to ethno-centrism, we have suggested that there is a need to think beyond cross-cultural differences in experiences of gender and gendered categories, by performing the first part of Ahmed’s (2004) double turn and critically examining the omnipresence of whiteness in transgender studies. This involves both naming and talking about whiteness in transgender studies (Vidal-Ortiz 2014) and shifting away from the often exclusive focus on people racialised as white (Snorton 2017). The above points about whiteness, transgender studies and the lives of male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents bring us to the question of prevalence. As noted above, we actively sought to recruit a racially diverse sample. However, this intention was potentially hampered by our whiteness as a research team, our recruitment tools and the subsequent reach of our call for participants. These are all matters that a focus on whiteness might have helped to address, as such a focus would have encouraged us to recruit a more racially diverse project team and advisory committee and to consult with a diversity of people about the project design. Yet all of these strategies might still have failed. This is because we do not actually know the true racial diversity of the population of male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents. In a way, this represents a chicken and egg paradox: we do not know how racially diverse the population is until we undertake the research; but the research, itself, no matter how well-planned, may not capture racial diversity, in either a real or a representative fashion. In other words, is it a side effect of whiteness that we imagine all population groups to be racially diverse? Are some population groups primarily white because the group, itself, is formatively shaped by whiteness? We do not mean to suggest that people racialised as not white (including men, trans/masculine and non-binary people) do not wish to become gestational parents, but to recognise the impact of whiteness and racism on people’s reproductive decisions and options. Certainly whiteness is not omnipotent, much as it might appear as such. However, whiteness as an organising logic, a form of power and a form of cultural capital (and the corollary marginalisation represented by non-whiteness) does shape the ways 347

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in which people live, move in and experience the world. Thus, a focus on whiteness in the study of male, trans/masculine and/or non-binary gestational parents could help us identify factors that could potentially assist people racialised as white in their efforts to become gestational parents in the face of cisgenderism, as well as factors that could potentially limit people racialised as not white in their efforts along the same path. In other words, while it is vitally important to listen to the stories of male, trans/masculine and non-binary gestational parents racialised as not white, this does not represent the only approach to examining the effects of racialised marginalisation. Additionally, we might look at the ways in which whiteness facilitates movement and the enactment of rights – how it, in differing ways, smooths a pathway through cisgenderism (Ahmed 2007).

Acknowledgements The first author would like to acknowledge that they live on the lands of the Kaurna people, and to acknowledge the Kaurnas’ sovereignty as a First Nations people. All authors thank their participants, for sharing their experiences; the attendees of the conference ‘States of parenthood: Race and nation in contemporary queer and trans reproduction’, for their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter; and Ulrika Dahl and Doris Leibetseder, for inviting the first author to present project findings at this conference.

Notes 1 The research reported in this chapter was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council grant, ES/N019067/1. Interviews were undertaken between June 2018 and October 2019. 2 Xir and xie are pronouns that some non-binary people use to refer to themselves. 3 This is complicated in the context of Ireland and Britain by the racialisation of Irish Catholics (historically positioned as non-white) in the development of racialised capitalism under British colonialism (Virdee 2019). Moreover, as Bhopal (2017) observes, ‘white’ Roma people and Traveller communities in Britain continue to experience severe racism.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Borderlands, 3(2), pp. 1–15. Ansara, Y. G. and Hegarty, P. (2014). Methodologies of misgendering: Recommendations for reducing cisgenderism in psychological research. Feminism & Psychology, 24(2), pp. 259–270. Best, A. L. (2003). Doing race in the context of feminist interviewing: Constructing whiteness through talk. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(6), pp. 895–914. Bhopal, K. (2017). White privilege: The myth of a post-racial society. Bristol: Policy Press. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. cárdenas, m. (2016). Pregnancy: Reproductive futures in trans of color feminism. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3, pp. 48–57. Castagno, A. E. (2014). Educated in whiteness: Good intentions and diversity in schools. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, pp. 1241–1281. Davis, D. A. (2019). Reproductive injustice: Racism, pregnancy, and premature birth. New York, NY: New York University Press. Frankenburg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Whiteness, reproduction and men, trans/masculine and non-binary people Gunew, S. (1997). Postcolonialism and multiculturalism: Between race and ethnicity. The Yearbook of English Studies, 27, pp. 22–39. Gunew, S. (2007). Rethinking whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8, pp. 141–148. Haggis, J. and Schech, S. (2000). Meaning well and global good manners: Reflections on white Western feminist cross–cultural praxis. Australian Feminist Studies, 15(33), pp. 387–399. Haggis, J., Schech, S. and Fitzgerald, G. (1999). Narrating lives, narrating whiteness: A research note. Journal of Australian Studies, 23, pp. 168–173. Levine-Rasky, C. (2011). Intersectionality theory applied to whiteness and middle-classness. Social Identities, 17(2), pp. 239–253. Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Minnesota, MN: Temple University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000). Talkin’ up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2006). Towards a new research agenda? Foucault, whiteness and indigenous sovereignty. Journal of Sociology, 42(4), pp. 383–395. Phoenix, A. and Tizard, B. (2005). Black, white or mixed race? Race and racism in the lives of young people of mixed parentage. London: Routledge. Richards, G. (1997). Race, racism, and psychology: Towards a reflexive history. New York, NY: Routledge. Riggs, D. W. (2010). On accountability: Towards a white middle-class queer ‘post identity politics identity politics’. Ethnicities, 10(3), pp. 344–357. Riggs, D. W. (2018). ‘Exploring the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the clinical setting’, in Anderson, S. and Middleton, V. (eds.) Explorations in diversity: Examining the complexities of privilege, discrimination, and oppression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 74–84. Riggs, D. W., Ansara, Y. G. and Treharne, G. J. (2015). An evidence-based model for understanding transgender mental health in Australia. Australian Psychologist, 50, pp. 32–39. Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Torgovnick, M. (1991). Gone primitive: Savage intellects, modern lives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vidal-Ortiz, S. (2014). Whiteness. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(1), pp. 264–266. Virdee, S. (2019). Racialized capitalism: An account of its contested origins and consolidation. The Sociological Review, 67(1), pp. 3–27. Ware, S. M. (2015). ‘Confessions of a Black pregnant dad’, in Chinyere Oparah, J. and Bonaparte, A. D. (eds.) Birth justice: Black women, pregnancy, and childbirth. London: Paradigm Publishers, pp. 63–71.

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30 MODERN DATING IN A POST-COLONIAL CITY Desire, race and identities of cosmopolitanism in Metro Manila Christianne France Collantes and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes Introduction This chapter explores a subset of Filipino women in post-colonial Metropolitan Manila (henceforth ‘Metro’ Manila) who assert a cosmopolitan identity and prefer to date foreign and expatriate white men. As middle- and upper-class women in the globalising city, they relate more to men who are ‘non-Filipino’, because they view themselves as worldly, well-travelled and sexually liberated, and members of an elite and cosmopolitan social class. Simultaneously, they present themselves as different from ‘other’ Filipino women who have traditionally been considered ‘gold diggers’ in their relationships with white foreigners. Nevertheless, these women still experience racialisation and exoticisation by foreign men. Here, we reveal the complicated dynamics that undergird the attempts of middle- and upper-class women from the post-colonial capital to subvert racial and gendered stereotypes. In their performances of a cosmopolitan ideal in their dating lives, they seek to position themselves on a level footing with foreign men. However, their self-fashioning inadvertently perpetuates Filipino class divides, which have been ingrained and embedded since the colonial occupation of the Spanish (1565–1898) and the Americans (1898–1946). They also maintain longstanding racial hierarchies which bestow Western and European whites with the greatest power and status. Thus, the cosmopolitan identities that are performed in these Filipino women’s relationships with white foreigners uphold privileges of whiteness, even though the women do not express any explicit desire to be white.

Filipino women and foreign men: a complicated history around desire, sex and race Many scholars have sought to locate the structural and economic impacts that led to the emergence of markets and industries geared towards facilitating the availability of Filipino women to foreign men, including the markets for international marriage migration, mailorder brides and sex tourism. During the Marcos administration (1965–1986), in particular, the sex tourism industry thrived and was part of a purposeful government strategy to offset national debt and attract foreign capital. Marcos sought to maximise the sexual and racialised 350

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-36

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desirability of Filipino women to Western customers and clients – particularly foreign men on the numerous United States military bases that were established during the American occupation (1898–1946) (Tadiar 2004). He pitted ‘images of exotic “beautiful Filipino girls” against “emancipated” Western (white) women’ and ‘sold Filipino women as “natural resources” to foreign men who believed that “Oriental” women were more available and subservient than women in their own countries’ (Ignacio 2000, p. 557; see also Chang and Groves 2000; Enloe 1989). The sex tourism and prostitution industries that prospered under Marcos’s leadership can be linked to larger projects of ‘fantasy production’ (Tadiar 2004). Specifically, by offering the sexualised and labouring bodies of Filipino women to Western powers, the government participated in global economic restructuring, positioning the Philippines amidst the new world order. During this era, economic development was especially reliant upon export labour, free-trade zones and sex tourism. Still, these economic projects can be viewed as structural echoes of longstanding ‘colonial desires’ for racialised, colonial bodies that are sexually subservient to ‘white culture’ and dominance (Fanon 1967). Such problematic stereotypes are still prevalent, as the social and economic dynamics connecting Filipino women to foreigners have persisted. Several scholars have revealed how digital technologies, in particular, have perpetuated these stereotypes in an increasingly globalising space. For instance, online platforms that serve as an interface between Western men and Asian women (e.g. intermarriage websites and dating apps) show how these men’s desire for Asian women is commonly rooted in processes of ‘othering’ due to the women’s ‘exotic’ appeal (Cabañes and Collantes 2020; Pananakhonsab 2016; Saroca 2012): they serve as a ‘space where Western men’s subjectivity is exercised while Asian women are reduced to “exotic love” or the “desirable Other”, the “otherisation” of Asian women is grounded on the basis of their gender, nationality, youth, and race’ (Angeles and Sunanta 2007, p. 15). Importantly, stereotypes of Filipino women are not limited to those painting a subservient and sexually available ‘other’. They also perpetuate a ‘good girl’–‘bad girl’ dichotomy that positions them as either a ‘bar girl’ or ‘gold digger’ in the sex industry, or a ‘decent’, ‘traditional’ and ‘docile’ companion to a Western man: ‘Hence, the promiscuous bar girls and prostitutes are placed in opposition to the “traditional” and “family-oriented” women on the marriage market who observe conservative and moral codes of sexual conduct’ (Angeles and Sunanta 2007, p. 15). Indeed, the opposite of the ‘bad girl’ stereotype of Filipino women is that of Maria Clara, who represents the ideal of a ‘proper, marriage-minded, Filipino Catholic woman with “good morals” ’ (Ignacio 2000, p. 558; see also West 1992), based on a character from a novel written by Jose Rízal. This image of Rízal’s heroine accommodates the symbol of the Virgin Mary within the Madonna–whore dichotomy that is often projected onto Filipino women (Peracullo 2017). The Maria Clara trope thus perpetuates a gendered and colonial ideology that promotes moral purity, martyrdom and domestic traditionalism – virtues that are still imposed on women in the Philippines. With all of these tropes in circulation, Filipino women have had to continually contest the race, class and sexual stereotypes that are projected upon them within interracial intimacies, sexual transactions and marriage. While the relationships and power dynamics between Filipino women and foreigners have long been fraught with power imbalances, exoticisation and negative stereotyping, Filipino women have not been simply passive participants in these dynamics. In fact, the literature contains several interrogations of this assumption. In particular, scholars have shown that these interracial and intercultural relationships can be complex and humane, as well as empowering to women, despite the problematic dynamics involved. This invites us to 351

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question assumptions of ‘the desperation, passivity, or lack of agency of Asian and other foreign brides when they engage in cross-border or transnational marriages’ (Angeles and Sunanta 2007, p. 4; see also Constable 2003, 2010) and to challenge the ‘simplistic binaries of authentic or inauthentic relationships’ that surround the intimate and marital dynamics between Filipino women and Western men (Meszaros 2018, p. 15). We delve into these points later in this chapter, as we explore the narratives of upper- and middle-class Filipino women who seek out and engage in both casual and serious relationships with foreign men in Metro Manila. On the one hand, these women consciously attempt to counteract both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ labels that have persisted throughout the Philippines’ social, cultural and economic histories, involving sex, marriage and intimacies between Filipino women and foreigners. On the other hand, they actively participate in and seek out relationships with Western men, acting as empowered agents in this process. In their simultaneous enactment of these behaviours, they are aware of and affirming of their cosmopolitan identities, which allow them to separate themselves from previously held racial, sexual and class assumptions about ‘Third World’ women. In relation to both Western men and other Filipino women, however, their cosmopolitan projections uphold certain entitlements and privileges granted to elite and foreign statuses that are still deeply associated with whiteness in the Philippines.

Colonial mentality and whiteness in the Philippines A key social dynamic underpinning the interest of upper- and middle-class millennial Filipino women in dating foreign and expatriate men is the power associated with whiteness in the Philippines. To better understand this dynamic, we must critically examine the country’s colonial history with the Spanish and the Americans. Both colonising parties granted land titles and governing power to elite families, most of whom were mestizo or mestiza – that is, of mixed Spanish and Chinese descent. This influenced the structure of political systems and created class divides that are still deeply embedded in the contemporary social, political and economic landscape of the Philippines (Kusaka 2017). The prevalence of Western culture and the integration of the English language within higher education, government and business are also legacies of the country’s colonial relationship with the United States (Singson 2017, p. 4). American colonisation, especially, ‘made a lasting impression on the Filipino cultural taste in favor of the foreign and specifically American’ (Montefrio 2020, p. 490). Today, those who are considered mestizo or mestiza are often assumed to be members of an elite social class. Within the Philippines, there is a post-colonial skin tone–based racial hierarchy that is ‘often unarticulated but deeply embedded’ (Cabañes 2014, p. 631), which places lighter-skinned Filipinos such as mestizos and mestizas ‘in prime position in contrast to other kinds of racialised identities’ (Laforteza 2015, p. 6). This hierarchy, and its connection to class and socio-economic status, is discussed by Lasco and Hardon (2019), whose informants reported that lighter skin made individuals ‘look rich’ (‘mayaman tingnan’) and more professional, while darker skin made individuals look ‘dirty’, and was associated with manual labour (p. 9). Moreover, the authors posit that ‘those with more precarious social positions seek whiteness as a validation – or as a proxy – of the socio-economic status they aspire to, while those who are already secure in their positions need not worry about what skin may signify’ (Lasco and Hardon 2019, p. 9). Within this context, whiteness in the Philippines not only refers to Caucasian foreigners and expatriates who travel, live or invest in the country; rather, it is also – and especially – affiliated with the prevailing remnants of colonial histories that have granted cultural, economic and political entitlements to individuals and families of European or American descent (however far removed). 352

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One can see two glaring manifestations of this hierarchy in Filipino popular culture. The first is the high consumption of skin whitening products (Lasco and Hardon 2019; Mendoza 2014; Singson 2017), which is a key indicator that ‘Filipinos also have an overwhelming preference for light skin’ and ‘consider their own culture and appearance inferior to that of their European and American counterparts’ (Singson 2017, p. 4). The second is the predominance of mestizos and mestizas in the country’s entertainment business (Cabañes 2014). While an increasingly strong counter-current is valorising brown-skinned Filipinos on screen, it is typically only lighter-skinned celebrities who become film and television superstars (see Lo 2008; Tiongson 1984). In The Somatechnics of Whiteness and Race: Colonialism and Mestiza Privilege (2015), Elaine Laforteza engages with whiteness studies to reveal the ways in which racial bias and hierarchies operate in the Philippines. In particular, she acknowledges that the colonial underpinnings that elevate white and mestizo/mestiza aesthetics, culture and status are inherently tied to other prejudices, such as those based on class and religion (Laforteza 2015, p. 9). She claims that such biases ‘demonstrate […] how Filipinos activate racialised hierarchies that materialise through religious and class distinctions, as well as gradations of ­ skin-colour, whether tisayin/tisoyin (light-coloured), kayumanggi (brown), or itim (black)’ (Laforteza 2015, p. 9). Here, we offer an extension of Laforteza’s framework by examining how a sample of Filipino women dated Western foreigners and subscribed to cosmopolitan identities. While our research participants did not explicitly claim a desire to be or look white or mestiza, they conceptualised themselves as cosmopolitan, and this made them feel more on par with their foreign counterparts, and even superior to Filipino men. Later in the chapter, we will explore how their cosmopolitan self-fashioning acted to separate them from the problematic stereotypes that reduce Filipino women in interracial relationships to ‘bar girls’, ‘gold diggers’ or Maria Clara types. We will also explore how the women’s cosmopolitan identifiers – while seemingly associated with more worldly, cultured, travelled and sexually modern lifestyles – still participated in and engaged with social, economic and cultural hierarchies that have long provided more privilege to colonial whiteness and mestizo/mestiza people in the Philippines.

Cosmopolitanism, class and culture in the Philippines Following on from the above section, a second dynamic that underpins the preference of some upper- and middle-class millennial Filipino women (i.e. those born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s) to date foreign and expatriate men is cosmopolitanism in the Philippines. Broadly understood, cosmopolitanism refers to ‘place-derived identities, new learning, new perceptions of class and status, as well as exposure to more urban ways of life’ (Soco 2008, p. 2). It usually involves exposure to other traditions and aesthetics, as well as the adoption of a global lifestyle through the consumption and absorption of foreign practices and products. Weenink (2008) captures the tangible practices of cosmopolitan individuals, describing how such people: accumulate, deploy and display cosmopolitan capital while living abroad for some time, visit and host friends from different nationalities, attend meetings frequently for an international audience, maintain a globally dispersed circle of friends or relatives, read books, magazines, and journals that reach a global audience and possess a near-native mastery of English and at least one other language. (p. 1,092) 353

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Clearly, there is a kind of ‘self-conscious cosmopolitanism’ that can be seen as a project of ‘self-fashioning’ (Conradson and Latham 2005). This involves the practice of purposefully cultivating a global sensibility by embracing cultural diversity in social and professional relationships, consuming foreign music and food, and participating in certain lifestyles (e.g. practicing environmentalism and eating an organic diet) that are characteristic of a cosmopolitan sensibility (Ho 2011, p. 730). The construction of a cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle seems to rely on a calculated process of becoming (Thompson and Tambyah 1999, p. 217), through deliberate cultural consumption and global mobility and movement. Indeed, in the literature, expatriates frequently claim that travel provides them with ‘a sophisticated, worldly outlook’ (Belk 1997; Morris 1988). From the above, we can glean that the term ‘cosmopolitan’, as it is commonly used, is associated with a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Ho 2011) comprised of individuals with ‘power and privilege’, who consider themselves citizens of the world (Sklair 2001). Crucially, the entitlements that accompany this kind of cosmopolitanism include ‘social standing within the bourgeois circles of the global economy’ and ‘an aesthetic frame of reference that transcends parochial tastes and value systems’ (Thompson and Tambyah 1999, p. 219). In the Philippines, cosmopolitan self-fashionings align with this notion. As Weenink (2008) showed, many Filipinos consider cosmopolitanism a form of social capital (p. 1,092). In his study, he surveyed parents in the Netherlands who consciously exposed their children to international education and study abroad opportunities in order to prepare them for success in the global economy, which values cosmopolitan ideals. Recognising that cosmopolitan training and living is a form of ‘capital’, Weenink argued that desire for cosmopolitanism often involves a struggle to obtain privileged positions in multinational companies, non-governmental organisations, academia and the civil service at the European level (2008, p. 1,092). Thus, cosmopolitanism still requires access and is not entirely available to individuals who (as briefly aforementioned) are exposed to global sensibilities, aesthetics or knowledge through consumption, learning and transnational work. This is largely due to the fact that global and local economies and societies are shaped by rigid class hierarchies, in which cosmopolitan identities are more readily obtained by the middle, upper and elite classes (Lamont and Aksartova 2002; Uy-Tioco 2019). Accordingly, in the Philippines, class stratification dictates who can or cannot achieve a cosmopolitan identity, even if the country itself has become a major export market for migrant workers, and therefore more global in terms of economic gain and cultural consumption (Hau and Tejapira 2011). Since the ideals of cosmopolitanism are affiliated with elite class standing in the Philippines (often dependent on whether one is a light-skinned mestizo or mestizo), there are intimate linkages between cosmopolitan identity and whiteness in this context. Scholars have drawn out these critical connections in their explorations of ‘white cosmopolitanism’ (Hübinette and Arvanitakis 2012; Lundström 2019; Shome 2014). Lundström’s study (2019), in particular, examined the ways in which Swedish women who worked and lived abroad were able to gain ‘cosmopolitan capital’ and become ‘worldly’ citizens due to the power of their whiteness in global locales. Again, in differentiating between cosmopolitan identity making and the simpler acts of travelling or cultural consumption, Lundström recognised that cosmopolitanism is ‘structured by both class and whiteness’ (2019, p. 105). Cosmopolitanism, as we will show later in the chapter, is thus attached to both class and racial hierarchies and their associated privileges (or lack thereof ) in the post-colonial backdrop of Metro Manila. Soco’s (2008) study also provided insights into the ways in which class and cosmopolitanism are negotiated and perceived in the society of the Philippines. She explored the 354

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narratives of domestic workers who were employed overseas in cosmopolitan locales, who gained a sense of cosmopolitanism through their experiences abroad. Soco wrote, as part of the mobile non-elite, these migrant workers gain, not only the means to raise their level of consumption, but also cultural skills and a kind of awareness generated from a particular engagement with the world. They become in some way, cosmopolitan. (Soco 2008. p. 3) Yet, upon returning to the Philippines, the same migrant workers were treated with resentment or jealousy by their local communities (particularly if they returned home to less urban areas, such as the provinces). While they viewed themselves as having become more cosmopolitan through their experiences working abroad, they were denied the ability to present themselves as such in their home communities. Instead, they were recategorised into their previously held positions within the class system, even if, in practice, the women felt they had elevated themselves through their global mobility. In the Philippines, then, cosmopolitanism is undeniably embedded within the social, economic and political landscape and imaginaries, and often reserved for the upper and elite classes. Returning our focus to the country’s capital, Metro Manila, we can see how cosmopolitan tastes, identities and performances are also linked to preferences for Western or American aesthetics (Montefrio 2020). This can be considered yet another side-effect of colonialism, since cosmopolitanism – similar to white and mestizo/mestiza privilege – is closely tied to and reserved for the upper classes. In the following sections, we show how cosmopolitanism and the ways in which it was adopted and claimed by our female interlocutors maintained racial hierarchies, even though the women did not explicitly claim a desire to be white or mestiza. Rather, cosmopolitanism featured in the women’s dating narratives, influencing their preferences to be romantically and sexually linked to Western foreigners. Yet, in enacting their cosmopolitan identities and dating preferences, the women simultaneously negotiated their race, culture and ethnicity in relation to foreign men, and demonstrated how cosmopolitanism contributes to upholding class and racial hierarchies in the Philippines.

Methodology In our study, we took an ethnographic approach to understanding the ways in which upperand middle-class Filipino women in Metro Manila dated foreign and expatriate men, especially through the mediation of online apps such as Tinder and Bumble. In a previous study, we focused on the role played by mobile technologies in this context (Cabañes and Collantes 2020). Here, we focus more on how the women asserted their cosmopolitan identities in their dating lives with white foreigners in such online spaces. Our research spanned 18 months, from August 2017 to April 2019. During this period, we conducted life story interviews and follow-up conversations with a total of 15 participants – all of whom resided either on their own or with their family in Metro Manila. When we first met the women, their ages spanned from mid-20s to early 30s. We selected this age range, in particular, because we wanted to study women who were likely to have experienced dating both before and after the tremendous growth in mobile dating apps in the 2010s. In our attempts to draw the contours of participants’ social standing in Filipino society, we considered both the material and the symbolic dimensions of class. As regards the 355

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material dimensions, we selected participants who belonged to what the Philippine Institute of Development Studies defines as the ‘upper middle’ to ‘upper income’ clusters of Filipino society (see Albert et al. 2018). This meant that they lived in households with a family income in the range of PHP 66,640.00 (USD 1376.00) to PHP 190,400.00 (USD 3932.00), in 2017 prices. As regards the symbolic dimension, our snowball sampling was particularly attentive to participants’ socio-economic status and self-ascriptions. With regard to the former, we recruited participants from the upper and middle classes, with ‘class’ understood as representing a ‘a social category pertaining to individuals or groups sharing comparable behaviours, characteristics, and way of life’ (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017, p. 891). In relation to self-ascriptions, which we understood as participants’ performances of ‘social divisions [through their] individual practices, subjectivities, and perceptions’ (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017, p. 891), we looked for specific indicators of status: (1) an undergraduate (or higher) degree from one of Manila’s top-tier universities, (2) a professional salaried post, (3) strong social connections to middle-class Manila society and (4) a cosmopolitan sensibility borne from living and/or travelling abroad (Pinches 1999). Finally, as our informants identified as heterosexual, we must acknowledge that the study was limited in scope to heterosexual intimate and romantic relationships between Filipino women and foreign men. We recognise that cosmopolitan intimacies and practices also apply to non-heteronormative relationships (Cornelio and Dagle 2019). However, the experiences and perspectives of the Filipino women in this work also reflect prominent heteronormative discourses around relationships in both popular and legal discourse (UNDP, USAID 2014), which are products of colonial ideas around romantic unions in the Philippines. As such, we considered them most relevant for our analysis.

The women’s careers and travels abroad (and dating in the Philippines and abroad) Each of the women who participated in the study asserted their upper- and middle-class status in several ways. To be sure, they discussed their elite academic backgrounds and highflying careers and businesses; but above all else, they emphasised their exposure to foreigners (whether through work, study or travel) and their resulting sense of worldliness. The women valued travelling for leisure, and either worked (or planned to work) and/or attended school abroad, mostly in a Western locale. For instance, Grace shared with us that, during her third year of college, she embarked on a life-changing and extensive 6-month trip to Australia. Reflecting on this important time in her life, she said: ‘That trip changed who I am. That’s the one thing that shifted everything about me because they say you never come back the same person’. Additionally, Karla, a 26-year-old physician, had travelled and worked overseas, mainly through an internship in Europe. However, similar to some of the other women, she did not develop her cosmopolitanism through her international experiences, only; she also socialised with foreigners within the Philippines: first she befriended a Japanese exchange student during her college years, then her social network expanded to include other foreigners of different nationalities, whom she met at parties and social events. Clearly, the women had distinct access to travel and international professional and educational opportunities; they also tended to have high-level careers and exposure to foreign cultures through their social circles. Nevertheless, they still felt limited by the gendered, classed and racial expectations of Filipino women. In particular, they felt encumbered by gendered 356

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prescriptions. As Queenie shared, her parents once told her: ‘No matter how progressive the times are, the woman should always keep the household together’. In their own ways, the women felt that their choices around marital unions and reproduction allowed them to break away from traditional stereotypes. Camille, for example, felt that marriage was ‘not a big priority’. To her, a relationship could be meaningful and committed, even without the ‘legality and the papers’. She also said that she did not desire to have children – something that is often considered an important aspect of being a ‘good’ Filipino woman. Such understandings about Filipino women – especially expectations that those in the upper and middle classes should enact a Maria Clara trope – also affected the ways in which these women related to local and foreign romantic partners. The value they placed on their independent and cosmopolitan lifestyles created tensions not only at home and in society, but also in their dating lives in Metro Manila. They disclosed several instances of feeling stereotyped or labelled by both Filipino and Western men, due to their class, gender, sexuality (including sexual histories) and preference (and ability) to speak English. Many of them were concerned about being viewed as either too submissive and/or dependent, or too sexually empowered and/or financially independent. As a result, our interlocutors compared dating Filipino men to dating Westerners, despite Filipino discourses presenting such interracial relationships as problematic. Even when the women experienced racism in their interactions with foreign men, their sense of cosmopolitanism and worldliness made them comfortable engaging in romantic relationships with them. From this lens, we might conclude that the women preferred white men due to the privileges and power that whiteness shares with cosmopolitanism. Still, colonial power imbalances emerged in these intimate connections, which the women had to negotiate in their dating lives.

Social class, English and sexuality: dating Filipino versus foreign men As previously discussed, Filipino society is highly stratified by class. As a result, most individuals socialise, attend school and date within their own socio-economic brackets. Due to these norms, many of our women interlocutors had met previous romantic partners in college or via mutual friends, and they experienced their social circles in Metro Manila as small, and shrinking. Discontent with the classed dating scene in Metro Manila was one of the key factors that led several of the women to explore dating foreign men. Grace, for instance, felt bored during her dates with Filipino men in Metro Manila: The conversations would be limited to “Who do you know?”, “Do you know this person?”. And it would just be about finding [something in] common […] I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about culture, about your family – like something more than our college lives. Grace’s trip to Australia changed the way she viewed foreign men and ‘white guys’. Prior to leaving the Philippines, she had assumed that many of these men only dated for ‘sex, money and other benefits’. Flo, a 27-year-old marketing professional, told us that, ‘you need to have a connection or the background needs to be the same, such as the same school or crowd, because the social classes in the Philippines are very different’. She claimed that it was difficult for her 357

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to date outside her own class, as the men ‘find [her] intimidating’. While she shared in the common experience of repetitive conversations with Filipino men, she was less conscious of socio-economic class during her dates with foreigners. Thus, she felt she could have more fulfilling interactions with them. As she put it: whatever [Filipino men] say, I won’t care because I already know about it and it’s not adding value. I like to date foreigners because I never stop learning […] there’s always something new I can get out of the conversation. If you’re dating a foreigner, they’re just total strangers and you do not know anything about them and everything is just fresh. The women’s use of the English language seemed to provoke different reactions or responses from Filipino versus foreign men. As mentioned, use of English in different social and corporate sectors of the Philippines is often a marker of higher class, higher education and more cosmopolitan sensibilities. Flo and Bea (Flo’s co-worker at their marketing firm) felt more comfortable speaking in English rather than Filipino, yet they found that the Filipino men they dated were intimidated by this. ‘Just because I speak English, it’s hard for me to get a guy’, Flo ranted. When Annika shed light on this topic in relation to foreign men, she revealed that there were still assumptions made about women who grow up in the Philippines. Describing her encounters with foreign men while dating in the United Kingdom, she said that several British men seemed ‘surprised’ at her English fluency. In relaying her experiences to us, she felt the need to assert the difference between herself and ‘other’ Filipino women who speak English while abroad: I asked my aunt why [the men] were surprised and then she said something I found offensive but understandable. She said that Filipinos in the UK are more blue collar. Their blue collar jobs meant they aren’t trained to speak English well and that those who have grown up there are fluent because they are British. The men told me it was tricky for them to navigate because I don’t have a British accent. They even thought that I grew up in America […] Learning more about it, they just don’t meet a lot of Filipinos from Manila. Most of them have met Filipinos from the province […] It was hard from their perspective because they got used to accents that sounded like Filipinos were having a hard time speaking English. Thus, while the women felt more at ease speaking English, they either experienced judgement from other Filipino men (for being too ‘intimidating’) or felt the need to explain to Western men why their English was different from that of other Filipino women (who spoke with an accent). This spurred them to use the English language as part of their cosmopolitan self-fashioning, which allowed them to feel more connected to the world, beyond the confines of Metro Manila.

Mediating between being mahinhin and being ‘liberated’ A common theme relayed by the women about the difference between dating Filipino versus foreign men was that the latter were experienced as more ‘straightforward’. According to the women, Filipino men tended to be less aggressive in their approach, yet dominant later in the relationship. This may be associated with the social and gendered expectation that Filipino women should wait for men to make the first move, even within the modern 358

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dating scene in Metro Manila. Lec described this dynamic in her own account of dating in Manila, narrating that she could not see herself ‘working out’ with a Filipino man. She felt that, although she saw herself with someone who was ‘dominant’, she also felt he should be someone ‘yung kaya ako i-handle’ (i.e. ‘someone who could handle her’). At times, when she caught herself waiting for a Filipino man to make the first move, she worried that she was representing the ‘mahinhin Filipina’ (i.e. ‘passive Filipina’), reminiscent of the Maria Clara trope of the traditional and ‘good’ Filipino woman. Foreign men, according to her, have ‘a different way of handling you’. During a dinner interview in Bonifacio Global City (BGC) – one of the central business districts within Metro Manila – Flo elaborated on this idea of foreign men ‘handling’ women differently. She told us: ‘I think [foreigners] are just more liberal and upfront. If they want something they just go for it […] I don’t know, the culture is probably different’. The women felt that Filipino men not only expected them to be mahinhin in the early stages of dating, but that they were also uncomfortable with the women’s careers and fi nancial independence, which subverted the widespread stereotype of the passive Filipino woman. Bea (Flo’s co-worker at their marketing firm in BGC) explained that Filipino men – even those in the upper class – tend to be more ‘sheltered and insecure’, especially in their interactions with women who are financially independent. She compared this to her experiences with foreign men, who she claimed were actually impressed when you can pay for yourself or own a place. It’s more empowering to date foreigners because you get to be whoever you want […] you have to be more than who you are but not feel less than where you are at. Additionally, the women felt their sexual histories and practices were judged by Filipino men, regardless of whether they were part of the same social class and circle. Lec discussed feeling that Filipino men were more ‘judgemental’ about women’s sexuality (as women were expected to be traditional and sexually ‘pure’). She explained that, whenever she relayed her number of previous sexual partners to the Filipino men she dated, they would initially believe she was ‘interesting’ for having the same level of sexual experience as them. However, soon after, they would express to her that they ‘can’t be with a girl who has been with that many guys’. ‘I’m only okay for fun’, she told us, ‘but for serious relationships, [the men] think I’m too liberated’. Experiences of being labelled and stereotyped by Filipino men in their dating lives – in connection with the social and cultural perceptions of what Filipino women should or should not be like – led many of the women to explore and enjoy dating foreign men as an alternative. This romantic preference presented a particular racial hierarchy formulated by the women, themselves. At the top of this hierarchy was Western men, because they were more acceptable and ‘actually impressed’ by the women’s financial independence, interest in other cultures and liberal sexual expressions. Through this lens, the privileges of whiteness were upheld within the complicated post-colonial setting of Metro Manila. Yet although the women faced being ‘judged’ by other Filipinos of the same socio-economic class, they also experienced stereotyping from foreigners, as a result of their race.

The limitations of whiteness: navigating racial tensions with foreign men For many of the women, the criticism they received for dating white men dictated their approach to dating foreigners. While several expressed that they felt more ‘liberated’ and 359

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accepted by foreigners, some also felt that dating Western men could confine them within another set of negative stereotypes. Annika, for instance, discussed her initial fears and reservations about dating foreigners due to these racial and cultural assumptions: I guess the stigma in the Philippines is that when we see females in relationships with non-Filipinos, they’re labelled as ‘gold diggers’ and that they are not independent of themselves. So for me, I was strict about that because I’ve always wanted to be independent, self-reliant and by that I was shying away from the idea of dating a foreigner […] because of that stigma. The possibility of being labelled a ‘gold digger’, which was described by Angeles and Sunanta (2007) as being part of the binary between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Filipino women, led Annika to avoid pursuing romantic relationships with Western men. ‘Yes, I wasn’t open to it’, she told us. ‘For example, I would encounter foreigners at a bar when I’m out with my friends and realise that I would rather lean towards Filipinos because I might be labelled as someone [who is] not independent’. Yet, as she continued to narrate her experiences with modern dating, Annika began to discuss her eventual trajectory towards meeting her current partner – a British man whom she met while travelling in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, while Flo and Bea expressed their personal inclinations towards dating foreigners, they also recognised and tried to navigate the racial tensions they experienced when they perceived displays of white privilege in their dating partners. Flo lamented how some of the men she dated would assume that she ‘wanted [them] just because [they’re] white’, and she hated ‘the feeling or idea of white supremacy and prejudice against [her] race’. She reflected on instances in which the men would ‘humbly brag’ about their own travel and global exposure, despite her being well-travelled, herself. According to her, the men assumed she was not similarly cosmopolitan or that she did not have her own set of international experiences. When Bea joined in to elaborate on this point, she noted that the men ‘feel that when they [come] here, they feel like they’re a treasure or are special because they’re white in a different culture’. Regardless of these frictions with white men, Flo and Bea still expressed their partiality towards dating foreign men over Filipino men, precisely because they valued their cosmopolitan lifestyles and tendencies too highly to allow themselves to feel limited by the social and cultural constructions of Filipino women in Metro Manila. Despite acknowledging the ‘white supremacy’ that tended to surface in their romantic encounters with foreigners, they could not compromise their global sensibilities and cosmopolitan practices. Flo felt ‘exhausted’ at having to defend her sexuality, financial independence and worldliness to Filipino men: It gets really exhausting that since most of your experiences end up like that, you just veer away from it. And since it’s never been that case with foreigners, it just becomes a safer outlet. I do not want to explain myself on why I am driven or I do not want to be a housewife, why I travel so much […] I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t live a life similar to mine. And Bea, finally, asserted: I don’t think I can ever be with a guy who has never travelled, at the very least. If he doesn’t know how to drink, or how to party or travel on his own, he doesn’t value

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meeting strangers or making friends with random people – it’s going to make it hard because it’s just who I am.

Conclusion The women in this study pushed to assert their independence and cosmopolitan identities in relation to either Filipino or foreign men in the dating scene. In doing so, they were forced to persistently navigate around labels attached to Filipino women; at times, they were seen as too mahinhin, and thus placed within a binary of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’. And while many of them found relief from these social and cultural expectations (which were usually placed on them by their Filipino counterparts) by dating foreigners, they still confronted racial tensions and imbalances in their interactions with Western men. Their cosmopolitanism and global sensibilities and experiences allowed them to feel more romantically aligned with white men, but not without certain racial limitations. Cosmopolitanism not only manifest in the women’s choice of lifestyles, social networks and romantic relationships, but it also operated within the larger social and cultural context. This is because the intimate lives of Filipino women are shaped by class, gender and race – especially in relation to the privileging of whiteness and Western ideals in the post-colonial setting of Metro Manila. Moreover, while the women’s narratives focused on comparing Filipino with foreign men in the Metro Manila dating scene, they also revealed broader insights into the complexities around race that have existed in the Philippines since the colonial period. The women viewed white men as more relatable and therefore more suitable romantic partners, due to their own cosmopolitan assertions. Thus, cosmopolitanism offered these women a particular status – one of financial and sexual independence, English proficiency, international mobility and cultural exposure – that has long been associated with the elite, mestizo/mestiza and white colonial privilege in the Philippines. In presenting the personal and intimate experiences of Filipino women and thereby foregrounding the role of post-colonial subjects in constructing cosmopolitanism, this work has expanded the scope and critical discussion of ‘white cosmopolitanism’ (Hübinette and Arvanitakis 2012; Lundström 2019; Shome 2014). In alignment with the studies mentioned above, the cosmopolitan self-fashionings of the Filipino women studied here were shaped by the parameters of white privilege. However, the women who were engaged in this cosmopolitanism were non-white. In this chapter, we have shown the ways in which cosmopolitanism operates within a postcolonial city. We have also identified the continuum of racial and sexualised ideas about Filipino women – especially in relation to interracial intimacies and Western perspectives on women in the Global South. Filipino women must constantly navigate these ideas in order to enact cosmopolitan performances. Linked to this point, we have also spotlighted how cosmopolitan identities, practices and sensibilities in certain regions of the developing world are inextricably linked to colonial hierarchies of race and class. The legacies of whiteness are embedded in cosmopolitan projects, even where intentions exist to disrupt the stereotypes attached to post-colonial bodies. The women studied here did not explicitly articulate a desire to be white. And they recognised the problems inherent in whiteness, even in their romantic partnerships with foreign men. However, their narratives and experiences with modern dating in Metro Manila show how ideas of whiteness and cosmopolitanism work in tandem to reproduce and validate racial and class hierarchies in the Philippines.

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31 WHITE EUROPEAN MIGRANTS IN JAPAN – BETWEEN AN UNMARKED CATEGORY AND RACIALIZED SUBJECTS Miloš Debnár Introduction This chapter examines how whiteness is being reproduced, and simultaneously limited, as a position of power in the context of migration to a non-Western, highly developed destination. The chapter draws on the third wave of whiteness studies as discussed by Gallagher and Twine in recent years (Gallagher and Twine 2017; Garner 2017; Twine and Gallagher 2008) and particularly focuses on the intersections of whiteness with migrant, class, and gender categories. Following these approaches, the chapter accounts for the “long-term staying power of white privilege” (McDermott and Samson 2005:256) and the hegemony of Western racial hierarchies as well as it aims to identify “the multifarious manifestations of the experience of whiteness” (ibid.) and how such global hierarchies are contested (Fechter and Walsh 2010:1,198) in the context of migration to Japan. By analyzing contemporary white European migrants’ experiences in Japan, this chapter’s aim is two-fold. First, the chapter aims to examine “the nuanced and locally specific” character of the “white inflection, … in which whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed, and reinvented” (Twine and Gallagher 2008:5) by white migrants. Second, the chapter accounts for the equally important argument raised by the third wave of whiteness studies that “whiteness no longer equals unchallenged privilege” (Garner 2017:1,590). The chapter focuses on the intersections of whiteness with other identities – particularly that of migrant, class, and gender – and analyzes how whiteness can lead to “contradictory social location transnationally” (Levine-Rasky 2019:xv). Thus, the chapter seeks to examine the following questions: How does Japan’s complicated relationship with whiteness and race, as well as the global hegemony of the normative representations of whiteness, affect the experiences of whiteness by migrants? How is the experience of whiteness and white privilege mediated by class and gender? How is whiteness experienced in social locations that contradict imagined ones? By examining these questions and the complexity of white migrants’ experiences that they imply, the chapter aims to account for “whiteness as a multiplicity of identities that are historically grounded, class- specific, politically manipulated, and gendered social locations that inhabit local custom and national sentiments within the context of the new ‘global village’” (Twine and Gallagher 2008:6). 364

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Whiteness in Japan: normative representations and complicated relationships The existing academic work on whiteness in Japan illustrates the “centrality” of global whiteness and its “identification with power, domination and control” (Russell 2017:43) in Japan’s racial imagination. Russell (2017) argued that whiteness continues to represent cultural and beauty norms, as well as an aspiration for Japanese, and in the case of whiteness, the “perceived cultural differences [are] ultimately obscuring racial ones” (p. 27). His article on representations of whiteness in popular culture in contemporary Japan emphasizes that whiteness and the physical traits associated with it “are generally presented as positive and attractive, empowering those who possess them in ways substantially different from those who have ‘non-white’ characteristics” (Russell 2017:26). Thus, whiteness serves as a “template” for constructing an ideal “Other,” and contrary to “Others” constructed as non-white, whites are ascribed “the status of gaijin,1 a geo-cultural outlier whose physiognomy and culture Japanese deem largely desirable and worthy of envious emulation” (2017:28).2 Simultaneously, multiple authors problematize the view of Western conceptualization of race and racism as a universal phenomenon and draw attention to the particularities of race and racism in Japan. Early modern Japan became one of the most prominent adopters and further elaborators of the Western idea of race and eugenics (Kowner 2018). Reflecting pre-modern, local notions of race (Takezawa 2020) and “not simply accept[ing] Western racial knowledge” (Kawai 2015:29), but both “assimilating” and “refusing” whiteness at the same time (Bonnett 2000:49), a complex, localized notion of race and racism developed in Japan (Kawai 2015). Such an understanding of race allowed Japan “to differentiate itself from its significant discursive Others: Asia and the West” (ibid.:25) and eventually justify its own colonial rule over other Asian nations, as well as seek much-desired recognition from the West as a peer (Majima 2014). Explicitly racial discourse on Japaneseness and the “Other” was replaced by a discourse on culturally centered national identity in postwar Japan (Oguma 2002). Nevertheless, such ethnic nationalism and popular views of Japanese identity maintained strong “racial tenets” (Kowner and Befu 2015) by conflating race, culture, and nation in the discourse on Japanese homogeneity and exceptionalism. Self-perceptions of Japan as a sui generis culture are one of the central assumptions in popular and academic discourses on Japaneseness (ibid.) and are well-demonstrated in preoccupation with one’s place within racial hierarchy. Whereas hierarchies are definitive for any racial discourse, the discourse on Japaneseness “focus[es] on the Japanese position within an imagined international hierarchy, rather than on the Other” (Kowner and Befu 2015:400, italics added). Thus, racism in imperial Japan that was “extolling” the Japanese rather than aimed to “denigrate others” (Brecher 2017:41), continues to follow the same principle redressed in discourse emphasizing cultural differences. The West invariably remains the main object of comparison in modern discourse on Japaneseness (Befu 2001; Kowner and Befu 2015), illustrating its dominant place in the imagined hierarchies of races. However, the position of whiteness in relation to Japan is at least more nuanced. The position and perceptions of whiteness in Japan are ambiguous, oscillating between symbolizing a norm of progress, modernization, or beauty and being rejected or contested as a governing principle of the global hierarchy (Bonnett 2000). While this does not contradict arguments on positive associations of whiteness, particularly when compared with other groups racialized as non-white, the assumption of the superiority of whiteness in the context of Japan has been questioned (Bonnett 2000; Kowner 2018). The complexity of local understandings and representations of whiteness can be illustrated further through the perceptions of white skin complexion being associated both with Japaneseness and the West 365

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(Ashikari 2005; De Vos and Wagatsuma 1966). This further questions the “superiority” of Western whiteness (Ashikari 2005:89) and demonstrates the “complex and tense” (Bonnett 2000:75) relationship between perceptions of whiteness as being “simultaneously ‘like us’ and ‘not like us,’ both foreign and not foreign” (ibid.:71). Finally, research that critically assesses discourse on Japanese national identity has drawn attention to the widely believed myth of Japan’s ethnic and racial homogeneity, which renders the Japanese as autochthonous and the only inhabitants of the archipelago. As a recent study on multiracial and multiethnic individuals in Japan suggests, visible differences continue to play a crucial role in ascribing “a foreign identity,” and this shows “the resilience of the process of racialisation based on Japanese/gaijin binary” in present-day Japan (Törngren and Sato 2021:817). Thus, Japanese identity continues to be understood as highly exclusive and “the ‘foreignness’ of all immigrants overwrites all other identities” (Liu-Farrer 2020:149). Despite the lack of extant research on migrant whiteness in academic works on Japan, existing works suggest a need to acknowledge and further examine the role of the global hegemony of whiteness, as well as to account for local nuances of race, racial hierarchies, and racism and consider whether and how such nuances challenge such hegemony locally. Several extant studies have examined white migrants within more general frameworks of foreigners or Westerners, but they do not explicitly discuss the issue of whiteness ( Komisarof 2012; Liu-Farrer 2020; Willis 2008). Some recent studies have examined the issue of whiteness by attempting to deconstruct the image of white European migrants in Japan as highly skilled, highly mobile, and unequivocally privileged cosmopolitans (Debnár 2016), arguing that while “whiteness still enjoys a dominant position in the racial hierarchies” (Hof 2018:49), it is often “a symbol of status yet void of meaning” (Hof 2021:2128), and its impact on European migrants’ experiences is “complex, and even sometimes negative” (Hof 2018:57). This chapter aims to develop these studies’ arguments further and deepen the discussion on the reproduction and limits of white privilege in the context of Japan by utilizing critical whiteness studies’ potential. The chapter draws on semi-structured interviews with 63 first-generation migrants from 23 European countries gathered over the past ten years.3 Rather than aiming for a representative sample of the European population in Japan, the aim was to examine the diversity of migration patterns and positions that these migrants occupy and “map more clearly the intersectional complexities” (Garner 2017:1,591) of whiteness that migrants have experienced. Overall, the participants comprised 39 men and 24 women residing mostly in the two largest metropolitan areas of Tokyo/Kanto and Osaka/Kansai. The sample includes migrants working in different fields (ranging from university faculty to a factory worker) who have lived in Japan for periods ranging from 1 to 61 years (nine years on average) and moved there for various reasons, including professional, student, trailing, marriage, or lifestyle migrants. Self-identifying as a white (Central) European who has lived in Japan for a relatively long period allowed me to establish a mutual rapport with the interviewees, as well as access social events and networks, and gather additional data from informal interviews.

Whiteness as privileging and alienating: the paradox of in/visibility Examining Europeans from a perspective other than as Westerners reveals how whiteness operates as a perceived identity that, to a certain degree, mutes differentiation based on nationality or ethnicity. Pre-war “Japanese rhetoric failed to distinguish between ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’” (Brecher 2017:10), and arguably, such “an imprecise amalgamation” (ibid.) of ethnicity, nationality, and race is present in general perceptions until today (see also, 366

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Kawai 2015; Kowner and Befu 2015). However, this is not meant to purport the existence of the “idea of a common, culturally homogeneous European identity” (Lundström 2019), but to emphasize that contrary to other contexts in which ethnicity, nationality, and whiteness interact in a complex way,4 the dynamics are different in Japan. Whiteness is perceived as a category associated with a vaguely defined West geographically and, thus, non-Western Europeans largely are undifferentiated, as Zdenek suggests: Zdenek: I think that on first sight, when a Japanese [person] sees a [white] foreigner … he doesn’t, … I don’t think they distinguish between the East and the West Europe.… I never experienced that. For example, that the conversation or their attitude change because I’m not an American, Canadian, or French. (Man, 40s, Czech Republic, first arrived in Japan in 2005) Conflating whiteness with Europe and the West in Japan confers phenotypically white individuals with positive symbolic images of desirable foreigners that contrast with negative perceptions of non-Western ones (Iwata and Nemoto 2018). Geopolitical and cultural differentiations between East and West (or South and North) Europe that render some being “ labelled as not ‘fully’ European” (Krivonos 2020:389) become largely irrelevant in the context of Japan. Whereas the interviewees did not embrace homogenous identification as white or European foreigners without some hesitation, they did not avidly contest such descriptions either. Being perceived as a European conveys particular semiotics that contrast with those of problematically perceived, non-Western migrants. Whiteness in this context is associated with mobility, cosmopolitanism (Russell 2017), or highly skilled workers (Hof 2021), and white foreigners in Japan consequently are viewed as desirable and unproblematic migrants (Debnár 2016; Iwata and Nemoto 2018). These positive nuances associated with whiteness allowed the interviewees in most cases to avoid feeling of being “excluded” (Darina, woman, Ukraine) and felt “welcomed” (John, man, UK), “allowed” (Ignacio, man, Spain), or accepted in Japanese society, at least to some extent. As argued later, views on what is the expected place of someone in Japanese society as a white European are complex, as well as dependent on class, gender, and other factors. Nevertheless, understanding that certain expectations, inter alia, are placed on these migrants’ abilities, skills, or cultural traits as white foreigners in Japan, and that these expectations are often positive, was shared among interviewees from different social locations. Thus, while being a visible minority and migrants – an Otherness that is often viewed as “troublesome, annoying, unwanted” or “inadmissible” (Bauman 2016) – white individuals’ Otherness, in this case, is constructed positively in a way that is “substantially different” from that of non-whites (Russell 2017:26). What allowed the interviewees to “liberate themselves from the (negative) migration discourse” (Lundström 2019:805, parentheses in original) was often the narrative of experiencing little discrimination and juxtaposing themselves and their experiences with other non-white minorities. Whereas whiteness does not ‘immunize’ one from various forms of discrimination, which still is embedded deeply, yet often flagrantly ignored, in Japanese society (Kawai 2015), most interviewees who mentioned discrimination as an issue found it important to elaborate more on its meaning. For example, George argued that he is subjected to discrimination in a specific, less-harmful way: GEORGE: I don’t feel any formal discrimination ever, to my face. Of course, there is discrimination here, but not open, not – it’s there in the background; I know that. That’s the same in every country. But to my face, I’ve never felt any discrimination.

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Miloš Debnár MILOŠ: Do you think it applies to all foreigners? GEORGE: No. Not at all. I think Chinese and Koreans have a terrible time here.

(Man, 60s, UK, first arrived in Japan in 1985) Some interviewees argued that the discrimination they face is even “positive” ( John, UK) or a source of “power” (Darina, Ukraine), differentiating themselves from the negative, discriminatory image of the “migrant” often associated with Asian foreign residents. Moreover, the study participants believed that they had better chances of being hired in certain occupations. Hof recently demonstrated that “whiteness bestows on their bearers a credential that raises their value for some companies particularly because this whiteness cannot be acquired by the majority of Japanese and the minority of ethnically East Asian employees” (Hof 2021:2127). While such racialized credentials are not limited to English language capabilities, being perceived a priori as an English speaker based on one’s whiteness is one of the often-seen patterns that allowed the interviewees to capitalize on their whiteness (Debnár 2016). Many cases illustrated how an inexperienced or even unqualified white Westerner can land a job relatively easily as an English teacher in Japan, a tendency that was identified elsewhere in Asia (Lan 2011; Leonard 2019) and represents the global hegemony of whiteness in several aspects. When George moved to Japan with his wife, teaching English was his first choice despite his training and experience in management. However, he suggests that what he understands as being “more successful here than if I stayed in (the) UK” depends on what Hof (2021) called “credentials” based on whiteness: GEORGE: You know, I couldn’t do my job in Norway. I couldn’t do my job in Slovakia. I couldn’t

do it. What George suggests here is that being perceived as phenotypically white often does not necessitate possession of particular competencies, credentials, or merits that would be required to conduct similar jobs in other contexts. Studies on Western English teachers in Taiwan (Lan 2011) or China (Leonard 2019) indicate similar findings and demonstrate the symbolic meanings of whiteness and how whiteness is privileging Westerners in the English teacher job market. However, an English teacher’s whiteness simultaneously “functions as a double-edged sword that places white foreigners in lucrative, privileged, yet segregated, ghettoised job niches” (Lan 2011:1,690), representing a set of different and often contradictory “identities and resources to be negotiated by the … migrants” (Leonard 2019:154). Discourse on non-discrimination and acceptance by the interviewees in this study reveals the complexity of whiteness as privileging while simultaneously constraining and alienating identity. When the interviewees expressed a sense of belonging or inclusion in the receiving society (e.g., being “accepted” or “welcomed”), they also limited such inclusion to particular social spaces, including “  ‘cosmopolitan islets’ of [sic] Whiteness” (Miladinović 2020:96), their Japanese relatives and families, friendship networks, or workplaces. In relation to the wider society, many expressed a nagging feeling that “we don’t belong here” (Victor) and, thus, identified their “foreignness” as an ascribed identity governing their everyday lives (Liu-Farrer 2020), contradicting the understanding of whiteness as an ineluctably privileging and static identity: VASIL: As long as you act like a foreigner in Japan, it’s OK, you are accepted. But as soon as you are trying to, you know, to become Japanese yourself or to act like Japanese, you are rejected.… As long as you act like a foreigner, you are not only accepted, but you have that image of cool foreigners.

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White European migrants in Japan VASIL: You can be in Japan and be a foreigner, but you cannot take the same roles. You cannot take exactly (the) same roles as Japanese. (Man, 30s, Ukraine, first arrived in Japan in 2004)

Vasil later clarifies that being perceived as a “cool foreigner” is associated with “white foreigners” and emphasizes the double-edged-sword effect of being perceived this way. “Coolness” represents cultural traits or global standards that are worth emulation (Bonnett 2000; Russell 2017), as well as symbolic values, or “credentials,” that those racialized as non-white cannot possess (Hof 2021). As such, coolness can be privileging. However, such coolness simultaneously is appreciated only in the context of foreignness, and attempting to assimilate (“become Japanese”) not only strips one of his or her coolness, but also leads to alienation and exclusion (being “rejected”). The “racial tenets” of the popular belief in Japanese identity conflate race and culture, thereby creating two possibilities for migrants: either being perceived “as permanent outsiders, or forces them to blend with the mainstream society without a trace of their previous identity” (Kowner and Befu 2015:404). These migrants’ whiteness, in the Japanese context, becomes a marked and visible identity that precludes the possibility of assimilation or passing, rendering its bearers “permanent outsiders.” As Dyer (1997) argued, “whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen,” and “whiteness is the sign that makes white people visible as white, while simultaneously signifying the true character of white people, which is invisible” (1997:45). The paradox of the visibility/ invisibility of whiteness that Dyer identifies here gets paradoxical and complicated further through migration. White European migrants in Japan, indeed, continue being “unseen” in the sense of representing cultural practices, global standards, or assets that are not marked as unwanted or possibly harmful (as in the case of non-white migrants). However, their whiteness simultaneously becomes a visible and marked category of foreignness that is incompatible with the idea of inclusion, as racially defined Japanese are viewed as the sole rightful inhabitants of Japan. In other words, Europeans in Japan “enjoy” positive connotations of their whiteness or relative lack of overt discrimination, demonstrating how white migrants are “not perceived as standing out in their whiteness“ (Cervulle 2017:xviii). However, being a white foreigner in Japan simultaneously is often an alienating experience that emphasizes whiteness as a visible identity. Thus, the invisibility of their whiteness is contradicted by the everyday experience of irreversibly standing out as a visible minority. Consequently, despite arguing that they view their position in Japan as better than that of other migrants, being perceived as white in Japan raises awareness of racialized identification by the majority – rather than based on nationality or ethnicity – as well as feelings of constrained possibilities for socioeconomic integration by culturally essentialist expectations on their skills and abilities. Representations of global whiteness as hegemonic are internalized deeply before migration to Japan and are reinvigorated further through representations of whiteness that construct images of and expectations concerning white migrants’ social positions in Japan. As the following section demonstrates further, many white migrants’ actual social positions contradict such normative representations.

Intersectional perspectives on third-wave whiteness As Garner recently argued in his review of third-wave whiteness studies, there is “still a blind spot around class and gender” (Garner 2017:1,591). Discourse on the intersection of whiteness and foreignness serves not only to illustrate the limits of white privilege in the 369

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local context, but also exemplifies the first of the “two operational racialized ‘borders’”, namely “the one separating ‘whites’ from people not racialized as white,” (ibid.) which, Garner reminds us, we should not lose sight of when further developing the critical study of whiteness. Below, I examine the second racialized border constructed around the “plethora of internal localized social hierarchies in formation between those notionally categorized as white” (Garner 2017:1,591), with a particular emphasis on the intersections of whiteness with class and gender. The interviewees in this study represent various migrants, yet the most common denominator in the sample is the middle class. In contrast to relatively wealthy lifestyle migrants or expats occupying privileged, cosmopolitan spaces, middle-class Europeans need to negotiate their place in the labor market vis-à-vis other minorities and the Japanese (Hof 2019). The following section discusses some of the cases that illustrate the variety of social positions in which Europeans negotiate their whiteness at the nexus of class and gender with different and sometimes contradictory results.

Negotiating class: “respectable” professors and the precarity of “trailing spouses” Jozef (man, Slovakia) taught classical languages at one of the most prestigious universities in Japan for 12 years. He was headhunted by the university for the position because he was viewed as the perfect candidate – a white, European man with a doctorate in classical studies from Oxford who was fluent in Japanese. It can be argued that in addition to his qualifications, his race matched the expectations of who would be a suitable candidate for such a position. However, the point that I want to emphasize here is that a lack of discrepancies between the representations of whiteness in terms of occupation or class and his actual social position allowed him to experience his stay in Japan in a positive way: Jozef: [I feel like] a foreign element [here in Japan], and I like it a lot. (Man, 40s, Slovakia, first arrived in Japan in 1995) Jozef echoed the alienating experience of foreignness in Japan when elaborating further on how he feels that he is not “perceived as equal to Japanese” and sometimes feels “invisible or ignored” as a foreigner. On the other hand, such feelings of alienation did not seem to play a role in his decision to leave his prestigious job and Japan,5 arguing that despite feeling like “a foreign element,” he enjoyed it. Darina (Ukraine, woman), who occupied a very similar position,6 argued that the Japanese “expect me to be different, and I can be different.” What allowed Jozef and Darina to interpret their experiences as alienating and positive at the same time, was the paradoxical power of the invisibility of whiteness in their niches where their position as tenured university faculty teaching European languages was not questioned. Such cases illustrate how white privilege can be reinvigorated through migration as a position of power. However, as further demonstrated in comparisons with other cases, this is possible when class, whiteness, and gender7 intersect in a non-conflicting constellation when the majority’s expectations and representations of whiteness are met with the actual position that white Europeans, such as Jozef or Darina, occupy. As already suggested, many European migrants do not meet popular expectations of the socioeconomic and symbolic position of a white foreigner in Japan. One example is

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European men who marry Japanese women and move to Japan. Such “trailing migrants” often occupy less-prestigious socioeconomic positions, as their qualifications do not match expectations on white foreigners and their place in the labor market. Jobs such as teaching English at low(er)-paying language schools or as a freelancer (as in George’s case) are becoming increasingly precarious and represent “a pool of muddy water” in which workers often are exploited (Lan 2011:1,678). Rather than critically assess the extent of white privilege in these and similar niches that carry socioeconomic ramifications and connotations that differ significantly from “expat”-like occupations,8 I want to further “account for the complexities of whiteness as it is practiced by social actors” (Levine-Rasky 2019:xv) by focusing on more diverse intersections of whiteness with class and gender. The case of Marko (man, Croatia), who moved with his wife to a rural area of Japan in 2016, illustrates the complexity of how whiteness is done in “contradictory social locations.” Marko started working in agriculture and more recently in a nearby factory on an assembly line. As a low-skilled worker, he had to negotiate his position with other migrants who work in the factory, as well as with Japanese employees. Marko explained in his interview that if he, as a white European, works as a low-skilled worker in a factory, it should not be the “very hard work” that the Asians do, but that he should work on a “section where I can be myself, where I can do more.” He also insisted that his employers, particularly those “under (the) influence of European culture,” understand the difference between him and other Asian workers. He expressed his views on racial hierarchies, placing “Europeans” on top, a view that he expressed eloquently and explicitly throughout the interview. His narrative can be understood as a reflection of how he negotiates his contradictory social location, representing a strategy of compensating for the imagined loss of power that is expected based on his own projections of whiteness as a privileged category, as well as representations of whiteness in Japan discussed above. The representations of whiteness render his actual position as contradictory or, paraphrasing Bonilla-Silva’s (2011) concept of racial grammar, as grammatically incorrect. Being white and a migrant worker simultaneously represent an “oxymoron” (Lundström 2014), not only in academic conceptualizations, but also as a flagrant violation of grammatical rules in the context of Japan that must be navigated in everyday interactions. Whereas Marko is an isolated case in terms of using explicit racial discourse, as well as a still relatively rare example of a low-skilled manual worker from Europe, many interviewees struggled to meet the standards dictated by local semiotics of whiteness, rendering white foreigners as highly skilled, privileged workers. Questioning white privilege was one of the common strategies among those who did not view their socioeconomic position as satisfactory. Class position alters how European migrants in Japan perceive their whiteness, evaluate their place within the society, and gauge success. Reconciling expectations on socioeconomic location that still tend to be imagined or defined rather rigidly and the reality that tends to be more diverse, represents an issue with which they need to cope.

Whiteness, foreignness, and femininity Representations of whiteness also are gendered ones, and factoring in gender reveals the further complexity of how whiteness is practiced and experienced. The gendered character of the representations of whiteness in Japan (see, e.g., Appleby 2014; Kelsky 2001; Russell 2017) carries complex consequences for white Europeans’ lived experience. Generally, in contrast to the hegemonic, normative character of white masculinity, white women often are

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While being “respected,” her position also is constrained by inextricably interconnected racial and gender identities. As a white foreigner, she has something valuable to teach to her Japanese colleagues (as an English teacher), yet as a cultural outsider, she cannot become a full-fledged senior or tutor (sempai) to the junior (kohai) members of the laboratory. Moreover, her gender strips her of the possibility of being taken “very seriously.” Hille’s case is just one of the possible intersections of whiteness and gender that reveal the complex dynamics that can render whiteness as both a privileging and disempowering identity. Hille and Valerie’s cases indicate how such dynamics are situational and at the same time, these cases vividly illustrate how white femininity can become “useful in a local symbolic exchange,” while “not being symbolically dominant” (Lundström 2014:16, italics in original).

Conclusion This chapter attempted to further develop previous arguments on the reproduction and limits of white privilege in the context of Japan by accounting for recent important studies, analyzing empirical data, and positioning the analytical focus firmly within the context of whiteness studies. By adopting the intersectionality approach to whiteness, this chapter discussed “how the effects of whiteness are made complex by its own intersections with other social positions” (Levine-Rasky 2016:8). The chapter demonstrates how hegemonic global representations of whiteness intersect with migrant, class, or gender identities and lead to a “complex set of experiences that reflect the multifaced nature of multiple power structures” (Lundström 2014:18). The analysis of white European migrants’ experiences in Japan also demonstrates the complex and ambivalent outcomes of whiteness and how white privilege is exerted and simultaneously contested. I argued that despite the positive connotations of whiteness and its empowering effects on these migrants’ everyday lives, their global whiteness is juxtaposed vis-à-vis the racialized and locally hegemonical Japaneseness what renders them inescapably as “foreigners” or “Others”. This chapter’s analysis echoes Hof ’s (2021) argument that whiteness in such a context is often “passive” or “a token, a trophy” that cannot be readily “activated” as a form of capital (2021: 2123). The limits of white privilege and the alienating aspects of whiteness are particularly visible at the intersections of gender, class, and migrant identities that diverge from the hegemonic representations of whiteness and result in contradictory social locations. Thus, whiteness oscillates between the apexes of visible and invisible identity, and between a “colorless, racially unmarked” (Russell 2017:27) category of difference and the racialized subject of a white migrant. Whereas intersectionality has been associated mainly with the study of the oppressed, the purpose of adopting it within the context of whiteness is not meant “to undermine anti-racist discourse and practice by evading the connection of whiteness and privilege and supremacy,” but rather that “intersectionality offers a more precise means to point out under which circumstances and in which contexts whiteness can become hegemonic” (Kindinger and Schmitt 2019:6). As this chapter demonstrates, adopting intersectionality lenses in the context of migration allows us to deconstruct the perception of the concept of “white migration” as an apparent oxymoron (Lundström 2014) and helps increase understanding of the nuances of whiteness as a privileging identity reproduced through migration in various contexts. At the same time, it (re)racializes the concept of a migrant by acknowledging how unmarked whiteness might become a color or a form of racialized identification that, despite its positive connotations and privileges, also is associated with disprivileges and alienation.

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Acknowledgement This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K13895

Notes 1 Gaijin and gaikokujin are Japanese words for foreigner. ­ 2 Although there are cases of emulating other non-white cultures, such as ganguro (blackface), Russell (2017) argued that in these instances, the Japanese are “disparage[d]” for “rejecting whiteness – their own as well as that of [sic] caucasians” (ibid.:40). 3 The data comprise mainly interviews conducted in two waves: 2011–2012 and 2018–2020. The second wave of interviews is part of an ongoing project, and this chapter includes analysis of data that have been collected until September 2020. 4 See, for example, Levine-Rasky’s (2016) discussion of Roma or Gypsy ethnicities and whiteness; the East-West division within Europe illustrated by the racialized discourse on Central and Eastern European migrants in the UK, particularly after the Brexit vote (Drnovšek Zorko 2019); or the intra-European racial division along the South-North line discussed in the context of Swedish lifestyle migrants in Spain (Lundström 2019). 5 Jozef was about to leave Japan at the time of the interview. The discussion about his reasons for leaving preceded the discussion related to his position in Japan, and he did not relate the two, either during the interview or other informal conversations the author had with him before. 6 Darina worked as tenured faculty teaching mainly Russian language at a relatively well-known private university in central Japan. 7 While the proportion of women in academia in Japan is relatively low, women are relatively more represented in fields such as humanities or social sciences. Thus, Darina’s case does not contradict gendered representations of her particular position. 8 I have discussed this aspect earlier in my book (2016), particularly in Chapter 5.

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32 TO BE OR NOT TO BE ‘WHITE’ IN JAPAN Japaneseness and racial whiteness through the lens of mixed Japanese people Yuna Sato, Adrijana Miladinović and Sayaka Osanami Törngren Introduction Despite being a non-Western and racially non-white colonial power, Japan shares the same socioeconomic privileges as Western nations. It is a country with growing racial diversity, yet it continues to live with a myth of homogeneity. This chapter discusses the Japanese context and how ideas of race as a structure of privilege have developed throughout its history, in relation to the contemporary globalised context in which whiteness matters. Although visibility is often associated with race, it is not its most important marker. Here, we define race as a socially constructed category that is often falsely understood to be inherited through the body and unchangeable (Takezawa 2005). Race, as a technology of power (Lentin 2020), functions as a means of ‘creating and enforcing social order’ (Smedley and Smedley 2005, p. 24), and thereby structuring hierarchies of privilege and oppression in a given context and society. Whiteness, as developed in the Western context, refers not only to the phenotypical, but also to the power that accompanies being visibly white: whiteness can, in this sense, be seen as ‘a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others’ (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2012, p. 99). We understand racialisation as a process that connects race to structures of privilege and oppression (Omi and Winant 1994). This understanding of race, whiteness and racialisation is particularly helpful for an analysis of the Japanese context (as well as others), where phenotype is not the only element that determines one’s place in the hierarchy of privilege. Scholars have argued that the mechanisms by which the power of Japanese people in Japan are maintained are equivalent to those used to maintain the power of the white majority in Western societies (Kawai 2015a; Matsuo 2010; Myslinska 2014). The idea of nihonjin (‘Japaneseness’) is one such mechanism, which structures Japanese society, institutions and lives similarly to the way in which ideas of whiteness structure the same aspects in the West. The idea of Japaneseness in Japan is equivalent to racial whiteness in a white-dominant Western context, where one component of white privilege is being ‘normal’ and invisible (McIntosh 1989). Japan maintains structural privileges for Japanese nationals while discriminating against all foreign nationals – independently of how long they, or their ancestors, have 376

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lived in the country – and excluding them from accessing rights such as social security and education. In Japan, the dichotomy between the Japanese and the gaijin (a derogatory term for foreigner, which can be translated literally as ‘people from outside’) is deeply embedded in the racial structure (Hirano 2020; Kashiwazaki 2009; Shimoji 2018; Shiobara 2020). At the same time, in globalised Japan, racial whiteness – as established historically in the global racial order – is also important. Among those who are racialised as non-Japanese, those racialised as white, Black and Asian experience different kinds of privilege and inequity (Lie 2001). As whiteness is a symbol of privilege anchored in the (Western dominant) global hierarchy of race, the Japanese prescribe white, Western cultures with power and privileges, admiration and positive associations (Miladinović 2020). Such benefits are not enjoyed by those racialised as Black or Asian. However, this white privilege is only exercised in exchange for racialisation as a foreigner, and not as a full member of Japanese society (Miladinović 2020). Japaneseness works to create a dichotomy between who is Japanese and who is foreign. Racialisation as white works to create hierarchies within those excluded from Japaneseness and provides relative privileges to those racialised as white-Western. In this chapter, we explore the ways in which these parallel and intersecting mechanisms of privilege in Japan affect the identities and experiences of mixed Japanese individuals, who are often called hāfu (ハーフ). Hāfu typically describes all people born to one Japanese and one foreign parent. In 2018, 1.9 per cent of all new births in Japan were attributed to Japanese national–foreign national couples (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare 2019).1 Historically, there has been a dominant image of hāfu as people with a white-Western heritage (Iwabuchi 2014; Okamura 2017) – a racial background that continues to be celebrated as the standard for beauty and a reflection of cosmopolitan cultural capital (Kō 2014). Here, we focus on both white and nonwhite mixed Japanese, showing how they experience differential privileges and oppressions according to their background and/or the (in)visibility of their background, as determined by the racial hierarchy that privileges Japaneseness and racial whiteness.

Race and whiteness in the context of Japan In any society with structural hierarchies, both individuals and social groups acquire and are ascribed with power and privilege. Race – together with ethnicity, gender and class – has long contributed to determining individuals’ positions in Japanese society. To explore the ways in which Japaneseness and racial whiteness came to marginalise and exclude groups not belonging to the dominant category in Japan, we must first understand how the country has engaged in the so-called ‘co-construction of racial categories’ (Kawai 2015a, 2015b), exercising its power as a former coloniser in Asia while, at the same time, being positioned hierarchically in the globalised racial order (in which the white-Western race is superior). Although the concept of ‘beautiful white skin’ existed in Japan before race as a concept was introduced by the Europeans (Wagatsuma 1967), admiration of the white phenotype was reaffirmed with the arrival of Western ideas of racial hierarchies (Keevak 2011; Kowner 2014). Since its first contact with Europe, Japan has adopted and adapted the Western idea of race and its global racial hierarchy (Fukuzawa 2008[1875]). It has struggled to model itself according to the West and attempted to be the ‘model race’ of the East, in order to escape the ambiguity of being racially ‘beige’ (Majima 2014). The idea of Black individuals’ inferiority and white racial privilege and status became deeply embedded during the Meiji period (1868–1912) (Debnár 2016; Lie 2001; Wagatsuma 1967). During this time, Japan experienced intense exposure to the West and realised what it means to be racially inferior – not 377

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only through witnessing (and later adopting) racial stereotypes concerning Blacks, but also by being categorised as an inferior ‘Yellow’ race (Keevak 2011; Majima 2014). Since that time, Japan has lived with a feeling of inferiority to the White West. The country’s racial ambivalence and paradox initially led to the creation of two concepts – jinshu and minzoku – which continue to be embedded in the idea of race in Japan, maintaining the structural hierarchy of privilege (Kawai 2015a, 2015b). The former, jinshu, is a Japanese translation of the Western word for ‘race’; it denotes the imported Western view of Japan as part of the ‘Yellow’, Asian race, which is attributed a lower status than the white race. Due to this inferiority, Japanese intellectuals attempted to differentiate the Japanese race from other racialised Asians, using the concept of jinshu. In particular, they applied it to distinguish themselves from the Burakumin (believed to be a former outcast group in Japan) and Indigenous peoples such as the Ainu and Okinawans (Kawai 2015a, 2015b; Tomiyama 1994). However, jinshu, ‘made it unfeasible to thoroughly differentiate the Japanese from other Asian people’ (Kawai 2015a, p. 372), since both Japanese and Asians were the ‘same race’, according to the Western perspective. In the face of this dilemma, the concepts of minzoku (meaning ‘nation’, ‘ethnic group’ or ‘race’, depending on the context) and bunka (‘culture’) were introduced, in a bid to once again separate the Japanese from other Asian peoples (Kawai 2015a, 2015b; see more in Oguma 2014[1998]). Influenced by the German concept of volk, which racialised the German language and culture by recognising them as biological traits (Kawai 2015a, 2015b), minzoku first appeared around the year 1890, referring to nationality based on culture and tradition and advocating a blood tie of the Japanese people (Yasuda 1992). In other words, minzoku was used as a proxy for race, associating culture and tradition with blood. When Japan colonised other parts of Asia, the country emphasised the similarity between the Japanese and other Asians in order to promote assimilation; at the same time, Japan was attempting to differentiate its colonial subjects from the Japanese in order to maintain power structures. Japanese intellectuals insisted that their Asian neighbours had a historical blood tie with the Japanese and, therefore, could be considered quasi-Japanese (Oguma 1995). By dividing Japanese into ‘pure’ Japanese minzoku and the rest, a hierarchy between the Japanese and the colonised was established (Kawai 2015a, 2015b). In the process of re-establishing Japan as a country and people after World War II, nihonjinron (‘theories about the Japanese’) (Dale 2012[1986]) flourished, becoming especially popular in the 1970s and 1980s (Oguma 1995). Foreigners such as Koreans and Taiwanese (i.e. former colonial subjects who were once considered ‘quasi-Japanese’) were placed in a legal and social category of ‘foreigner’ (Kashiwazaki 2009), as nihonjinron narratives emphasised the uniqueness and homogeneity of Japanese society (Kowner and Befu 2015). According to Kowner and Befu (2015, p. 400), ‘Japanese’ came to refer not only to the Japanese nationality, but, more importantly, to Japanese blood, with its ‘unique physical features’. Incorporating elements of bunka, to be Japanese meant to reflect the country’s cultural norms and behaviour and to speak the language flawlessly. In other words, visibility, ethnicity, nation and culture all combined in the concept of nihonjin ( Japanese) (Sugimoto 1999). Even today, this idea of nihonjin, or Japaneseness, maintains the hierarchy of power that structures contemporary Japan and racialises not only foreign nationals, but also Japanese nationals with a foreign background (including mixed Japanese) (Fish 2009; Kowner and Befu 2015; McVeigh 2014; Shimoji 2018). Japaneseness, which is visible in varying forms, establishes an unmarked norm in Japanese society (Matsuo 2010; Shiobara 2012). Hate speech targeting Koreans, Chinese and Ainu people is prevalent in Japanese society (Park-Kim 2019; Winchester 2019), and there is profound housing discrimination against individuals 378

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with foreign-sounding names or foreign nationalities (Center for Human Rights Education and Training 2016). Phenotypes such as black straight hair are considered ‘natural’, and many schools require – and indeed force – students lacking in this genetic marker to dye their hair black (British Broadcasting Corporation 2017). Studies on hāfu in Japan consistently show that the visibility of mixedness through phenotypes or other characteristics (e.g. names) constrains the claims of mixed Japanese people that they are Japanese (Osanami Törngren 2018; Osanami Törngren and Sato 2021; Shimoji 2018; Takeshita 2020; Takezawa 2016). Those who phenotypically pass as Japanese are often accepted as Japanese; however, their mixedness is often not acknowledged, due to the invisibility of their ‘differences’ and popular images of hāfu as racially white (Keane 2019; Osanami Törngren 2018; Osanami Törngren and Sato 2021; Takeshita 2020; Takezawa 2016). Independent of whether they can pass as Japanese, many mixed Japanese experience a gap between their identity claims and the ways in which they are seen by others; they contest existing categorisations and redefine what it means to be hāfu and Japanese by consciously and unconsciously asserting either their Japaneseness or their mixed identity (Kimura 2021; Osanami Törngren 2018; Osanami Törngren and Sato 2021; Takeshita 2020).

Material and positions Interviews with mixed Japanese Between 2015 and 2021, as part of her Master’s programme and ongoing doctoral project, Sato conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 34 young, mixed Japanese people. Interviewees were mainly recruited using snowball sampling, based on their selfidentification as having been born to one Japanese and one foreign parent. Sato also recruited some interviewees at a ‘hāfu meet-up’ (‘hāfu-kai’) in Tokyo, where some mixed Japanese shared their experiences. Up to three interviews, each ranging in length from one to three hours, were conducted with each participant, in cafés, the interviewer’s home or online. Interview questions explored participants’ positive and negative experiences as mixed Japanese and the consequences of the visibility or invisibility of their backgrounds. Interviews that were conducted after 2020 also included questions about racial whiteness in Japan. All interviews were conducted in Japanese and were translated into English. This chapter focuses on eight of the interviewees, who were purposefully selected on the basis of the typology created by the authors (see Table 32.1).

Our positions The three authors collectively analysed the selected material collected by Sato. Our positionality in relation to the existing racial hierarchies inside and outside Japanese society helped us to understand the complexity of race, Japaneseness and whiteness in Japan that our interviewees spoke to. We are all differently racialised in ways that accord us relative privileges and experiences of oppression. Sato grew up in Japan, with a South Korean mother and a Japanese father. She can effectively pass as Japanese, due to her phenotype and name. For this reason, she has never experienced direct discrimination; however, she embodies race and history, and she experiences oppression through hate speech directed at Korea and Koreans, especially online. Such hate speech is prevalent in Japanese society. Although she values both her Japanese and her Korean heritage, she does not self-identify as hāfu. Due to the stereotypical images attached 379

Yuna Sato et al. Table 32.1 Participant typology and basic information

Name

Year of Sex birth

Visibility/ Non-Japanese invisibility of Racial ethnicity ‘difference’ background

Hino Chris Takuma Fukunaga Julia Ueda Yoshitaka Daniel

M

1992

F

1992

M

1996

Yamashita Christine Misa

F

1994

Mix of indigenous Brazilian and Italian Brazilian Nigerian

Okada Haruka

F

2002

Filipina

Kawanaka Ai

F

1995

Hongkonger

Sawata Lin

F

1995

Chinese

Mishima Reo

M

1994

South Korean

White and/ or Western mixed background

French American Norwegian Unable to pass as ‘Japanese’

Non-white and/or nonWestern mixed background

Able to pass as ‘Japanese’

Forms of passing

Date of interview

Actively passes as hāfu Passively passes as hāfu Able to pass as ‘white’

2017/09/22

Unable to pass as ‘white’; actively passes as hāfu Unable to pass as ‘white’; passively passes as hāfu Actively passes as Japanese Does not claim a Japanese identity Actively claims a hāfu identity

2017/09/21

2016/10/16 2018/01/08 2020/03/14

2017/12/22

2016/01/30 2021/01/11 2017/09/06 2020/12/05

2015/06/19 2020/11/07 2020/11/24

to hāfu (e.g. ‘half-white’ and ‘beautiful’), she has always felt that she does not measure up. Her background helped her to successfully recruit interviewees, not only by enabling her to participate in hāfu meet-ups, but also by facilitating her identification of interviewees with an Asian mixed background. Although Sato’s positionality helped her to gain the trust of the interviewees, some participants did not consider her experience similar to theirs, owing to her privilege of passing as Japanese. The privilege and cost of passing as Japanese will be closely examined in the following analysis. Miladinović comes from Serbia, where she was part of the white majority. During her life there, she had no need to question or even think about her racial identity, as the privileges that were accorded to her came automatically. Once she moved to Japan, however, she began to actively identify as white, as she was positioned as a member of a non-dominant minority group and forced to underline her roots. Miladinović has spent four and a half years in Japan, first as an exchange student and then as a Master’s student. The Japanese have always seen her as a gaijin, due to her white appearance. This has allowed her to behave outside of Japanese 380

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norms, but left no doubt in her mind about the impossibility of her ever fully belonging to the Japanese collective. While the majority of Osanami Törngren’s upbringing was filled with the unquestionable privileges of being Japanese and a bilingual ‘returnee’ with Western cultural competence in Japan, her adult life in Sweden is filled with an awareness and daily experiences of being racialised as Asian. However, she is also aware of the privileges that she continues to enjoy compared to other immigrants in Sweden, because she is Japanese. Her identification has shifted many times during her life, but today she identifies as a first-generation immigrant, Japanese/Nikkei and Asian. When she returns to Japan, she gets asked, ‘Where are you from?’ because her behaviour and speech do not reflect Japaneseness.

Analysis The privilege and cost of passing as Japanese Ai (Hongkonger and Japanese), Lin (Chinese and Japanese) and Reo (South Korean and Japanese) are ascribed as Japanese and can phenotypically pass as such; however, their experience of this privilege differs. For Ai, passing as Japanese has always been a choice. She says: ‘I have a choice whether or not to tell people about my mixed roots but those who are visibly mixed have almost no choice [not to tell]’ (interview 2021). In other words, Ai is aware that her claim to Japaneseness is validated because she ‘looks’ Japanese, while others are denied that option to claim their ethnic identity (Song 2003; Waters 1990). She is also fully aware of her position in the racial hierarchy: her ability to pass as Japanese comes with the risk of being racialised as ‘Asian’ or, more specifically, ‘Chinese’. One of the reasons why she is cautious about revealing her Hongkongese background is because she believes that there are prejudices against Chinese people and a lack of understanding of Hong Kong in Japanese society. She explained: Probably, since I was a child, I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to have a ‘normal’ life. I prefer kind of a stable, ‘normal’ life. […] It might be a bit wrong if I say that being ‘Japanese’ is normal but, as I live in Japan, I have tried not to be deviant [ from being normal]. I have lived my entire life this way and, as a result, I might have become used to this way of thinking. (Interview 2021) Clearly, Ai has always aspired to be Japanese, because she recognises it as a norm (Matsuo 2010; Shiobara 2012) – or because she wants a ‘stable normal life’ and she fears that the disclosure of her mixed-heritage might create an ‘instable and not normal life’. Thus, Ai sees Japaneseness as affording privileges to those belonging to the seemingly ‘pure’ racial category of ‘Japanese’. Moreover, she mentions that she sometimes envies white hāfu people for their ‘Caucasian beauty’ and the fact that they fit the stereotypes of being hāfu. By not disclosing her background, Ai is potentially perpetuating the idea of Japaneseness as an unquestioned norm and internalising a hierarchy that positions racial whiteness as more desirable than her Chinese background. Similar to Ai, Lin compares herself with mixed-white people and admits to occasionally being envious of Caucasian hāfu, because they can assert their mixed identity without facing the same kind of racial oppression. She explains: I’m living as Japanese but I’m a bit different; however, I don’t claim that [I am different] because it would cause me some trouble. But they [white hāfu] don’t have to insist on it [difference], because 381

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they are simply treated as special [in a positive way]. […] It is true that I have felt a little jealous at some point [not because of their beauty but because] of them being acknowledged and treated as someone special. (Interview 2020) Lin also chooses to pass as Japanese in order to be ‘normal’. She equates being treated as Japanese with being treated as an individual ‘human being’. She also thinks that, if she were to assert her Chinese background, she might suffer negative consequences. For Lin, the risk of racialisation is real: when people find out about her background, they sometimes respond by saying: ‘Why didn’t you tell me [about your background] before?’, as if being hāfu and having a Chinese background makes Lin different from them. Lin is conflicted about passing as Japanese because she believes that her uniqueness and her hāfu identity are not acknowledged by others. She does not want to actively claim that she is Japanese, because she does not want to push aside her mixed background, which she sees as something unique and positive. Moreover, she says that people impose images and stereotypes associated with Japanese people on her: an ‘ordinary Japanese’ would vote for the existing government (which continuously makes statements about homogenous Japan and the ‘pure’ Japanese people); an ‘ordinary Japanese’ would consider shrines sacred places; and an ‘ordinary Japanese girl’ would cook a lunch box for her boyfriend. In fact, these aspects of Japanese society uphold the oppression of racialised persons, including mixed and Chinese people, groups that Lin can potentially be racialised as. Reo thinks that, when he was growing up, people around him ascribed him with the same jinshu (race) as the Japanese. It was only through interactions that his mixed background became subtly visible to him and others: The education and upbringing that I had is different from other kids. […] I visited Korea every year. When such things are embedded in your life, you start to be different from others. Then others start to think ‘You are weird’. (Interview 2020) During his education, Reo perceived a gap between others’ expectations of him as Japanese and the subtle differences he embodied (i.e. ‘non–Japanese-like’ behaviour and ways of thinking), such as being bad at the teamwork that the ‘Japanese’ are supposed to be good at. He explained that he ‘failed to become Japanese’, despite his desire to do so. In other words, while he could visibly and phenotypically pass as Japanese, he was excluded from the idea of Japaneseness due to his behaviour. Reo now introduces himself as hāfu in Japan and as ‘half-Japanese, half-Korean’ in the United States, where he was living at the time of our interview in 2020. He has also started to identify as ‘Korean-Japanese’ and to use a Korean middle name on social media in the United States, which he did not do in 2015, when Sato first interviewed him in Japan. Reo wants others to identify and appreciate both his Japanese and his Korean heritage. His claim to be a mixed Korean-Japanese person challenges both the monolithic idea of hāfu as visibly distinguishable and predominantly racially white, as well as the idea that a person who ‘looks’ and speaks fluent Japanese and who has a Japanese passport should identify himself simply as ‘Japanese’. Ai, Lin and Reo’s experiences show how the idea of Japaneseness enforces a racial hierarchy (with associated privileges) in which ‘pure’ Japanese is considered the norm, while other Asian backgrounds, though they may phenotypically resemble and pass as Japanese, risk exclusion and discrimination. Some features, including phenotypes and mannerisms, 382

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are considered ‘natural’ for Japanese people to have (Kowner and Befu 2015; Sugimoto 1999); however, these features – particularly those regarding aspects of behaviour – are not necessarily ‘normal’ for mixed Japanese such as Lin and Reo. The idea of Japaneseness in Japanese society is very similar to McIntosh’s (1989) idea of white privilege in the context of the United States; in their respective contexts, both represent the privilege of being ‘normal’ and invisible – a privilege that is typically taken for granted (McIntosh 1989). Failing to be Japanese means losing the privilege of being seen as ‘normal’ and part of the community in Japanese society (Matsuo 2010; Shiobara 2012). Instead, one is labelled as ‘different’ or ‘weird’, and subsequently denied the benefits of the majority. For this reason, many mixed Japanese individuals, such as Ai, attempt to pass as Japanese. Ai does not want to be excluded or denied the opportunities that are granted to her ‘pure’ Japanese peers. In Lin and Reo’s stories, the psychological burden of passing is also observable. There is a complexity in Lin’s decision to not disclose her background in order to avoid ‘trouble’ (i.e. interrogation by others) and to not assert her Japaneseness in order to hold on to her mixed identity. On the other hand, Reo claims his mixed identity because he cannot afford certain aspects of culture and behaviour through which the boundaries of Japaneseness are drawn and policed. Reo articulated this feeling by saying that all hāfu people are out of place, irrespective of their racial category. It is clear that mixed Japanese have internalised aspects of racial hierarchies and norms (David et al. 2019), especially because they embody racial differences that may put them in an oppressed position. Due to the established structure of privilege and the strong tendency in Japanese society to separate ‘Japanese’ from ‘foreigner’, hāfu are pushed towards the ‘foreigner’ category, whether or not they racially pass as Japanese. Their stories reveal the ways in which mixed Japanese whose mixed status is invisible are pressured to conform to what is normalised as ‘Japanese’, in order to avoid racialisation.

Asserting and being ascribed as racially white Owing to their names and/or physical appearance, Chris Takuma (American and Japanese) and Julia (Norwegian and Japanese) are ascribed as white hāfu or gaijin (‘foreigner’). When they were teenagers, both wished to be seen as Japanese and to have the privilege of being the ‘same’, ‘normal’ and not ‘different’. For example, although Julia now acknowledges her hāfu identity, when she was in middle and high school, she constantly claimed: ‘My face looks different but I am Japanese inside’. She emphasised her Japaneseness through her mentality/ behaviour, while internalising the dichotomy of Japanese/foreigner. She reflected on this as follows: I have inevitably been aware of the fact that I am hāfu. […] Even though I have never experienced anything negative, I am always told that I am hāfu [by other people]. I was lucky because I am a European hāfu and people have envied my hair colour since I was little. I was also tall from a young age, so I had it better [than other hāfu], but, for me, those words [of admiration] meant that [I was] a gaijin and, for me, it was the same as being told that I was not Japanese. As the above quote shows, Julia recognises her relative privilege among hāfu, as derived from her racial whiteness. However, for her, hāfu is associated with exclusion due to not being seen as Japanese. She explained that such feelings of exclusion led to her study Korean and participate in exchange programmes between Japan and South Korea. She said: ‘Japan–Korea exchange means that there is only Japan and Korea. Then I’m inevitably Japanese. Well, I 383

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mean, I am Japanese.’ The Japanese/Korean dichotomy in such activities drew Julia deeper into a Japanese identity and allowed her to escape from the Japanese racial structure in which she was forced to be gaijin. Japaneseness is signalled not only through phenotypes, but also through names. For those who cannot phenotypically pass as Japanese, masking one’s non-Japanese identity can be a strategy for fitting in (Osanami Törngren 2018; Osanami Törngren and Sato 2021; Takeshita 2020). For various reasons, Chris Takuma decided to use only ‘Takuma’ as his name up until high school. Then, during a one-year exchange programme in Italy, he realised that being ‘different’ was not something to hide. Like Julia in the Korea–Japan exchange programmes, Chris found an escape from the Japanese racial structure in Italy, where his claim to Japanese identity was validated and acknowledged. Being in Italy with the ensured status that he was ‘from Japan’ made him realise that he could be ‘different’ in a way that benefitted him. This experience helped him realise that he could ‘make use of his difference’ in Japan by exercising his relative privilege of being racially white. He reported: Even in a situation where you normally need to be serious and humble, I don’t have to. People think ‘Well, he is a foreigner, whatever’. At work many people care about who is older and younger, who is the boss, all these things […] but I’ve decided that I want to be cool in a genuine way, so now I start with a handshake [rather than bowing to each other when greeting new people]. That never offends others, right? I am Chris, so I might as well stop being shy about it. In the above quote, Chris compares Japanese culture (e.g. bowing) with Western culture (e.g. handshakes) and shows his preference for the latter because, in his opinion, the Western way is ‘cooler’. At the same time, he thinks that he is not a ‘normal person’ and that he is perceived as a ‘foreigner’. Here we see Chris’s negotiation and internalisation of intersecting race-based privileges in Japanese society: because his access to Japaneseness is constrained, he has chosen another category – racial whiteness – that will grant him a privileged status. His strategy of exercising racial whiteness both challenges and reinforces the Japanese racial structure, regardless of his intentions. He challenges the narrow way of being ‘Japanese’ by openly being ‘Chris’ and adopting Western behaviour while speaking in Japanese. He calls his choice ‘a genuine way’, which can be interpreted as a response to not only his appreciation of his Western background but also the expectations of others. Therefore, we could argue that he simultaneously reinforces – whether intentionally or not – images of hāfu as non– Japanese-like, white and Western, and perpetuates the idea that being white is a privilege.

Internalising and interrogating the racial hierarchy Yoshitaka Daniel (Brazilian and Japanese), Christine Misa (Nigerian and Japanese) and Haruka (Filipina and Japanese) do not have Western/white backgrounds but are seen as gaijin or hāfu by people they meet for the first time, due to their physical appearance and/or name. Daniel believes that his physical appearance often connotes ‘Westerner’. Haruka, owing to her ‘big eyes’ and distinct facial features, is often told ‘You cannot be Japanese!’ or ‘You must have different blood [not Japanese]’ – comments she detests. Misa is asked ‘Can you speak Japanese?’ at every part-time job interview, and was once even told, in a condescending way, ‘Hāfu kids tend to slack off at work’. Despite them all being ascribed as foreigners, their responses to this categorisation differ. Yoshitaka Daniel told us that his Japanese mother and his teacher decided not to refer to him as ‘Daniel’ in school, in order to prevent potential bullying. Being unable to phenotypically 384

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pass as Japanese, he masked his ‘differences’ not only by using his Japanese name, but also by hiding any aspects of ‘Brazilianness’, such as the language that he and his father used. He said: ‘I identified myself as Japanese and acted and lived as Japanese and I felt like [my father] was ruining that’ (interview 2018). Nonetheless, he started to identify as hāfu in middle school, due to the ‘hāfu celebrity boom’ of the time (Iwabuchi 2014; Okamura 2017), which led to increased exposure of mixed celebrities on TV shows and magazines. Daniel also went through a period when he ‘envied’ white people. He still admits to envying them to some extent, having internalised a racial hierarchy that privileges whiteness: If you are mixed Latin American, to be honest, there are people with brown skin colour and there are people who are white. […] I envied people who have a light hair colour and who were less hairy. I hated that my hair did not look [light] like that and, until recently, I bleached my hair. […] I haven’t told this to many people but I tried to look and be [racially] white through, for example, dying my hair blonde. I thought they [white people] were cool. (Interview 2020) Although Daniel does not agree with this hierarchy, he describes his previous strategy as a ‘way to survive’ in Japanese society. In other words, Daniel is seemingly aware that he has perpetuated the Japanese racial hierarchy in order to gain relative privilege. More recently, Daniel has started to consciously challenge hāfuness and whiteness. Back in 2018, when Sato first interviewed him, he said that he introduced himself as hāfu to others. In the follow-up interview in 2020, he explained that his identity had shifted many times, as he had studied hāfuness while writing his thesis and he had met with many mixed Japanese people. Today, he introduces himself as having a Brazilian father and a Japanese mother, while avoiding the term hāfu. He explains: I think hāfu emphasises whiteness and there are some people who do not fit that image, such as Asian or African [mixed people]. I want to resist that image, so I [a person who fits in the stereotypical image of hāfu] express myself differently, more descriptively. Misa, who is of Nigerian mix, cannot pass as Japanese or white. She told us, ‘It can’t be helped, right? Can you change your physical appearance? Can you change how you were born?’ She has decided to actively pass as hāfu and has internalised stereotypical images of hāfu as ‘pretty’, as established through the hāfu celebrity boom: ‘I wanted to look Japanese [before] but I got over that idea. I was, like, let’s not be Japanese. I’d rather live my life as hāfu. I thought hāfu sounded prettier.’ Her assertion of hāfu identity has not resulted from a simple internalisation of hāfu images, because she is not white. She is critical of the fact that the hāfu boom was ‘only led by Caucasians’ and she contests the racial hierarchy that puts Caucasians at the top. As she told us: ‘White hāfu people get a lot of attention, but we [Black hāfu] don’t get anything out of it [being hāfu].’ Misa also believes that within the category of hāfu, Black hāfus are considered more ‘non-Japanese’ and placed lower down in the hierarchy. Misa’s access to the privileges of whiteness and Japaneseness is extremely limited. Her story is complicated not only because she is Black – and therefore racialised lower in the hierarchy in both the Japanese and the global context – but also because she is Nigerian – representing an African background that is not part of Western culture. To cope with these layers of complex ethno-racial hierarchies, she has ‘Americanised’ herself in order to capitalise on the admiration of Western culture in Japan. Her remarks manifest not only the hierarchy between white and Black in Japanese society, but also her limited access to the relative 385

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privileges of hāfu, as a result of her being a ‘Black African’ mix. Her story is a clear testament to not only the hierarchy that exists within the hāfu category, but also the internalisation of this hierarchy by hāfu people. While Misa claimed that her hāfu identity highlights her ‘differences’, Haruka’s hāfu identity is aimed more at inclusion in the idea of Japaneseness. She attended elementary school in the Philippines for three years, and when she returned to Japan for middle school, her skin had taken on a darker tone, having been tanned from the sun. Because of this, her feeling of ‘not being Japanese’ was conspicuous and, for fear of being discriminated against, she decided to ‘stay quiet until my skin turns white’ and not to talk to her classmates. Similar to Daniel, who articulated the differences between light-skinned and dark-skinned Latinos, Haruka experienced the ways in which shades of skin colour can violate the boundaries of Japaneseness. After meeting a ‘Thai hāfu’ in middle school (who later became her best friend), Haruka said she stopped hiding her hāfu identity. The friend told Haruka, ‘“You are not Japanese” does not equal to “You are a foreigner”’. While she perpetuates the dichotomy of Japanese versus foreigner by emphasising an idea of Japaneseness through upbringing and love for the country, she also rebuts the idea of a hierarchical structure based on differences. In response to her assertion of Japaneseness, people tell her ‘I’ll do my best, but sometimes I may look at you differently because you look different.’ She reasoned: I am different but I’m not really a foreigner like everyone thinks I am and I grew up in Japan, so I like Japan. I want to blend in and I tell people that I want to be treated as Japanese and I want to be treated as an individual. […] There are people who remind me of the differences between the Japanese and foreigners but there are occasions when I am told ‘There are differences but that’s a positive thing’. Haruka’s assertion of hāfu identity calls for an expansion of the borders of Japaneseness. However, hāfu identities also represent differences. In fact, some interviewees who were racialised as non-Japanese differentiated themselves from other physically invisible hāfus who possess privileges of passing as Japanese. For example, Misa once attended a hāfu meet-up (hāfu-kai) at which she met a ‘Taiwanese hāfu’. She thought: ‘You [the Taiwanese hāfu] don’t understand [us physically visible hāfus] because you are not judged by your appearance’ and ‘Those two cultures [ Japanese and Taiwanese] are also close, so how are you so different?’ The interpretation of and desire for racial whiteness differs among the interviewees as well. Haruka told us that she wishes she were a ‘Russian hāfu’ or a ‘European hāfu’, because a different hair colour or appearance might have allowed her to accept both of her backgrounds, rather than simply wanting to look Japanese. While Daniel and Misa interpret racial whiteness as an unfair beauty standard in Japanese society, Haruka thinks that whiteness can help hāfu accept their mixed background. This suggests that Haruka has internalised the stereotypes of hāfu as predominantly white mixes in Japan (Iwabuchi 2014; Okamura 2017). Yoshitaka Daniel, Christine Misa and Haruka all experience exclusion from the idea of Japaneseness. Their hāfu identities allow them to both claim inclusion in the idea of Japaneseness, and assert their differences from the idea of Japaneseness. In other words, mixed individuals seeking inclusion in Japan may perpetuate the boundaries of Japaneseness. Hāfu identity, in this sense, involves both the internalisation and the contestation of racial hierarchies in Japan.

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Conclusion We started this chapter by discussing the two race-based privileges in Japan: Japaneseness, which embodies the same principles of dominance and power as does racial whiteness in the West (Kawai 2015a; Matsuo 2010; Myslinska 2014); and racial whiteness, which privileges white, Western cultures (Miladinović 2020). Drawing on interviews with eight mixed individuals, including both racially white and non-white mixed persons, this chapter has addressed the idea of Japaneseness and whiteness in light of a global racial hierarchy, which both admires and desires whiteness and Western cultures. Since whiteness in Japan is mostly conceptualised from a Western perspective (associated with white privilege), Japan represents a unique case, wherein whiteness is manifested as both a conceptual and a racial category. The idea of Japaneseness is equivalent to that of white privilege in the Western context, as those who are racialised as Japanese in Japan enjoy greater privileges than other racialised groups, including Asians who are phenotypically indistinguishable. This racial structure situates white, Western immigrants in a disadvantaged and oppressed position. At the same time, as Japan is part of the globalised world, it has always seen the Western, white population as superior and desirable. This generates a hierarchical racial and ethnic understanding of foreigners, giving relative privilege to those who are racialised as white and less privilege to those who are racialised as Asian or Black. In other words, Japaneseness works to create a dichotomy between Japanese and foreign; but racialisation as white-Western affords one a position at the top of the hierarchy within the ‘foreign’ category, and grants one associated privileges. Thus, in Japan, Japaneseness and racial whiteness intersect and form different layers of oppression and privileges for mixed Japanese people. Owing to this complex historical formation of Japaneseness and racial whiteness in Japan, mixed Japanese people experience differential racial privileges and oppressions, depending on their background and/or whether or not this background is visible. They negotiate their privileged and oppressed positions by asserting their identity as Japanese, gaijin, white or hāfu, according to different criteria. Their identifications and self-awareness of their racial position in society are changeable and contextual, as several of the interviewees, on different occasions, reflected on the evolution of their identity choices. In their responses to people who question their Japaneseness or impose on them a narrow idea of Japaneseness, mixed Japanese people both perpetuate and challenge the racial structure in Japanese society. Some consciously participate in this process, while others do so unconsciously. Within the mixed Japanese population, there are varying opportunities to contest this racial structure. Mixed Japanese who are phenotypically ‘different’ or ‘white’ may resist the racial hierarchy with less fear of being racialised, because they are not only already racialised but also positively racialised. On the other hand, ‘invisible’ mixed Japanese might avoid such a contestation due to their awareness of the possibility of negative racialisation. Immigration to Japan will likely continue, and people identifying as Japanese will continue to diversify. As currently one in 50 babies born in Japan are hāfu, we are already witnessing changes in personal identification, as evidenced by the experiences of the mixed Japanese people presented in this chapter. Moving forward, we must continue to attend to the racial structure in Japan and question how the idea of Japaneseness – together with the global privileging of racial whiteness and Western cultures – will be maintained, challenged and contested. We must also examine closely how these racial structures are institutionalised, communicated and internalised, and how mixed Japanese identify themselves (and how their identities are contested by others).

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Acknowledgement The interview materials that were analysed in this chapter were gathered through research funded by the Keio University Doctoral Student Grant-in-Aid Programme 2019 and, from 27 April 2020 onwards, a JSPS KAKENHI grant (grant number JP20J12555).

Note 1 However, the number of mixed Japanese is likely far greater if we consider that the Japanese census is based only on nationality and not race/ethnicity. Furthermore, the census omits mixed Japanese who were born outside of Japanese territory. Therefore, the exact number of mixed Japanese is unknown.

References British Broadcasting Corporation. (2017). Japan teen ‘forced to dye hair black’ for school. BBC News. [Online], 27th October. Available from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41776203. Center for Human Rights Education and Training. (2016). Gaikokujin Jūmin Chōsa Hōkokusho: Teisei Ban [Survey report on foreign residents: Revised version]. Available from: http://www.moj.go.jp/ content/001226182.pdf. Dale, P. N. (2012[1986]). The myth of Japanese uniqueness. Abingdon: Routledge. David, E. J. R., Schroeder, T. M. and Fernandez, J. (2019). Internalized racism: A systematic review of the psychological literature on racism’s most insidious consequence. Journal of Social Issues, 75(4), pp. 1,057–1,086. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12350. Debnár, M. (2016). Migration, whiteness, and cosmopolitanism: Europeans in Japan. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Fish, R. A. (2009). ‘ “Mixed-bood” Japanese: A reconsideration of race and purity in Japan’, in Weiner, M. (ed.) Japan’s minorities: The illusion of homogeneity. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 40–58. Fukuzawa, Y. (2008[1875]). An outline of a theory of civilization. Translated by D. A. Dilworth and G. C. Hurst. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hirano, H. (2020). Social citizenship guarantee for minorities in Japan: Present and future. International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 29(1), pp. 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijjs.12111. Iwabuchi, K., ed. (2014). ‘Hāfu’ Toha Dareka: Jinshu Konkō, Media Hyōshō, Kōshō Jissen [Who is ‘hāfu’?: Racial mixture, media representation, practices of negotiation]. Tokyo: Seikyūsha . Kashiwazaki, C. (2009). ‘The foreigner category for Koreans in Japan’, in Sonia Ryang, J. L. (ed.) Diaspora without homeland: Being Korean in Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 121–146. Kawai, Y. (2015a). ‘Japanese as both a “race” and a “non-race”: The politics of jinshu and minzoku and the depoliticization of Japaneseness’, in Kowner, R. and Demel, W. (eds.) Race and racism in modern East Asia, vol.II: Interactions, nationalism, gender and lineage. New Milford, CT: Brill, pp. 368–388. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004292932_017. Kawai, Y. (2015b). Deracialised race, obscured racism: Japaneseness, Western and Japanese concepts of race, and modalities of racism. Japanese Studies, 35(1), pp. 23–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371 397.2015.1006598. Keane, J. (2019). ‘Nicchū hāfu’ to media no kenryoku: ‘Nicchū hāfu aruaru’ dōga no tagisei [The power of the media and ‘hafu’ in the case of Japanese-Chinese heritage: The ambiguity of social media practices]. Shinshakaigakukenkyū, 4, pp. 180–201. Keevak, M. (2011). Becoming yellow: A short history of racial thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kimura, K. (2021). Voices of in/visible minority: Homogenizing discourse of Japaneseness in hafu: The mixed-race experience in Japan. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 50(3), pp. 254–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2020.1841017. Kō, M. (2014). ‘Sengo nihon eiga ni okeru “konketsu-ji”, “hafu” hyōshō no keifu’ [Geneologies of the “mixed-blood” and “hāfu” representations in the post-war Japanese movies], in Iwabuchi, K. (ed.) ‘Hāfu’ Toha Dareka: Jinshu Konkō, Media Hyōshō, Kōshō Jissen [Who is ‘hāfu’?: Racial mixture, media representation, practices of negotiation]. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, pp. 80–113.

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SECTION 7

On the margins

33 INTRODUCTION On the Margins

While whiteness is a hegemonic structure and normative position, certain forms of whiteness and some white people (individuals, groups and categories) are labelled ‘marginal’. The pejorative term ‘white trash’ is perhaps the most commonly used to distinguish marked and marginal whiteness from normalised – and often middle-class – expressions of whiteness (Isenberg 2016; Wray 2006). Just as some masculinities are marginal (or marginalised) to hegemonic masculinity, some forms of whiteness can be seen as marginal to the norm, in terms of their intersecting positionality in relation to, notably, class, religion, caste, disability, nationality and/or regionality. Not least, class, regionality and rurality have been identified as significant contributing factors to marginality (Hartigan 1999). A central aspect of marginal whiteness is the lack of structural normative invisibility, as such whiteness becomes ‘visible’, rather than ‘normal’ and ‘taken for granted’. The first chapter in this section, ‘Coloniality and Europe at the margins’, by Kristín Loftsdóttir, addresses the issue of marginality by discussing the racism that is present in the ‘blank spaces in colonial history’; suggesting that decolonial theory – especially the concept coloniality – can be useful to tease out forgotten or hidden colonial engagements. Loftsdóttir pays special attention to European countries that have historically perceived themselves as located on the margins of Europe. In these places, claims of colonial innocence – or, as in the case of the Nordic countries, claims of a non-existent or irrelevant colonial past – work towards refuting the existence of racism. Loftsdóttir asks how racism is justified or rendered meaningful in such contexts, and in what ways the plurality of Europe must be recognised in discussions of racism. The second chapter, ‘White settler colonialism, ‘chromanyms’ and the trouble with marginal whites’, focuses on marginal whiteness in different national and historical contexts. In this chapter, Matt Wray and Catherine Wolfe provide an overview of research on various ‘marginal white populations’ throughout history, focusing on ‘white trash’, ‘rednecks’, ‘hillbillies’, ‘chavs’, ‘bogans’, ‘redlegs’ and ‘poor whites’. They ask: What, if anything, can the study of marginal whites teach us about both the boundaries and the limits of whiteness in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Are they exceptions to the rule of whiteness that prove that rule, or rebukes to the very concept of white supremacy itself? How do marginal whites fit (or not) into the growing body of research called critical whiteness studies and the study of race and class, more generally? The authors adopt the theoretical DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-40

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framework of white settler colonialism to ask and answer these and other questions about whiteness on the margins. The third and final chapter in this section, ‘‘You didn’t mention your own identity as a white man’. Ideological boundaries of whiteness’, is written by Benjamin Teitlebaum. Drawing on his ethnographic work with the far right, Teitlebaum offers a methodological perspective on the shifting ideological and geographical boundaries of whiteness, and the transitions between regimes of whiteness. The chapter compares differing conceptions of whiteness in three settings: the American mainstream, the Swedish mainstream and the global white nationalism context. In conclusion, Teitlebaum examines the prospects for American ethno-centrism in understandings of global white identity and the ways in which common academic understandings of whiteness struggle to understand organised racism.

References Hartigan, J. (1999). Racial situations: Class predicaments of whiteness in Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Isenberg, N. (2016). White trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America. New York, NY: Viking. Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press.

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34 COLONIALITY AND EUROPE AT THE MARGINS Kristín Loftsdóttir

Introduction The roles played by colonialism and imperialism in the shaping of European identities have been well documented (Dirks 1992; Stoler 2002). Recently, scholars have focused on the colonial engagements of European countries with no formal colonial possessions, as well as those that perceive their national history as falling outside of colonial histories. Barbara Lüthi, Francesca Falk and Patricia Purtschert (2016) speak of such countries as ‘blank spaces in colonial history’ (p. 1). This draws attention to the need for a more extensive analysis of the intersection between contemporary racism and the denial of colonial history. This chapter focuses on racism in these ‘blank spaces’ in colonial history, paying special attention to European countries that perceive themselves – in one way or another – as on the margins of Europe. Recognising that the ‘margins’ are constantly ‘dislodged and recreated’ (Fur 2006), the chapter emphasises how decolonial perspectives can illuminate hidden colonial engagements, focusing especially on the utility of the concept of ‘coloniality’, as theorised by Aníbal Quijano (2000). Decolonial scholars have drawn attention to the intrinsic embeddedness of colonialism within modernity, and the lingering effects of coloniality, which have extended far beyond the end of formal colonial administration (Escobar 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2011). In various parts of Europe, claims of colonial innocence – or claims that the colonial past is non-existent or irrelevant – work towards refuting the existence of racism (Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012a). In the Nordic region, complicity in overseas colonial enterprises (Keskinen et al. 2009) and histories of colonial violence inflicted upon Indigenous people in the region (Fur 2006) have been largely ignored. However, persistent claims of innocence from colonial histories are not unique to the Nordic context, but are also documented in Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland (Andreassen 2014; Loftsdóttir 2019b; Lundström 2014; Lüthi, Falk and Purtschert 2016; Wekker 2016), where such claims of innocence are often extended into claims of innocence from racism. Simultaneously, some European countries have attempted to insert themselves within colonial narratives in an attempt to achieve greater ‘Europeanness’ (Dzenovska 2013; Loftsdóttir 2019a; Peralta and Frangella 2012). This indicates the close relationship between being a ‘proper European nation’ and having a history as a colonial ruler.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-41

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The chapter explores the ways in which racism is articulated in countries that perceive themselves as outside of colonial histories and/or on the margins of Europe. It asks how racism is justified or rendered meaningful in such contexts, in what ways the plurality of Europe should be recognised in discussions of racism as well as emphasising the relevance of lens of decolonial theory for an analysis of Europe at the margins.

Decoloniality and racism In the twenty-first century, racism has become more openly expressed, while also continuing to be entangled with candid references to culture and religion. The optimistic, post-war idea that racism can be ‘taught’ away – that is, eliminated through education – is long gone. To complicate research on racism, it is difficult to precisely delimit what racism is. This is reflected, for instance, in debates over when racism emerged historically (Wade 2015, pp. 3–4). Some U.S. scholars have criticised their European peers for not taking racism seriously enough (e.g. Parvulescu 2016). In contrast, many European scholars have questioned whether U.S. definitions and understandings of race can be adopted wholesale to the European context (Balkenhol and Schramm 2019; Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2011), as well as stressing a more nuanced analyses of how people make sense of race in different localities within the United States (Hartigan 1999, p. 4). In the following section, I will briefly explain some of the main components of decolonial theory and utility for understanding racism and the unevenness that is intrinsic to racism, as well as to draw attention to the wider global and structural dimensions of racism. As shown in the next section, these components of decolonial theory help us to tease out the racism present in ‘irregular’ colonial situations, such as the situations of European states that lacked formal overseas colonial possessions and were, in some instances, themselves under the rule of other European states. Such situations do not fit easily into the boxes of coloniser–colonised (Stoler 1989), and they have been undertheorised until recently (Loftsdóttir 2019b; Lüthi, Falk and Purtschert 2016). Decolonial theory emphasises global historical inequalities that continue to be reproduced in the present (Harrison 2002). Some of these inequalities are entangled with knowledge production – that is, how certain knowledge comes to be seen as better or more universal (Restrepo and Escobar 2005). To produce alternate knowledge or to decolonise hegemonic knowledge, dos Santos Soares (2019, p. 3) argues, one must be ‘critical of the regimes of authority and regulation that determine […] the hegemonic places of its production – Europe and the U.S. – as they determine the conditions of its production in the Global South’. Decolonial theory both draws on and supplements other critical theoretical frameworks, such as post-colonial, feminist and critical race studies (Allen and Jobson 2016; Harrison 2016). It also intersects with the critical theory of memory and history (Trouillot 1995). In addressing racism through the lens of decolonial theory, which I see as particularly relevant for an analysis of Europe at the margins, I draw on the work of Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007), who has inspired many other decolonial scholars. Quijano emphasises the need to understand racism in a broad historical perspective, in order to contextualise modern understandings of racism within the massive transformations that took place in the aftermath of the European colonialisation of the ‘New World’, interlinked with notions of modernity and the formation of capitalist systems. At that time, a new world order was imposed and global resources were brought under the control of a small European elite (Quijano 2007). Extensive wealth through the appropriation of land and resources became constitutive of capitalism as we know it (Mignolo 2010, p. 331).

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As described above, a key question for Quijano and other decolonial writers is how the particular cultural knowledge of colonisers became the only significant knowledge (i.e. universal knowledge and ‘right’ way of knowing) (see Mignolo 2007). Quijano (2007, pp. 169–170) notes that this cultural coloniality assumed different forms, in different places and times. In some places, such as Latin America, it took the form of genocide, resulting in a near-complete destruction of native societies and the mass slaughter of native populations. In other places, like Asia, societies and their forms of knowledge production were more often placed in a subordinate position. The general subordination of so-called non-Western knowledge went, furthermore, hand in hand with the utilisation of this same knowledge to facilitate the resource extraction from the native people (2007). In all contexts, the process led to massive social transformations. As stated by Quijano (2007, p. 169): Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration. It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as the Europeans: viz, to conquer nature – in short for “development”. European culture became a universal cultural model. As European elites gained domination over various parts of the world, ideas of modernity and rationality took shape in European thought. Ideas of modernity are critical components of the coloniality of power (Quijano 2007, p. 171). Thus, Quijano (2007, p. 169) argues, while direct political colonialism ended in many places after World War II, the relationship between Europe (or the Global North) and the rest of the world continues to be one of colonial domination, in terms of ways of knowing and understanding the world. The social classification of people around the idea of race became fundamental to this new model of power (Quijano 2000, p. 533). As described by Quijano (2000, p. 535), ‘race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power’. The idea of race was a part of an axis to this new model of power, alongside new methods for controlling labour and resources (Quijano 2000, p. 534). Intermixed with these new ‘modernising’ technologies to exploit labour, labour became associated with race, whereby particular racially-defined groups were assigned different placements within global structures of labour (Quijano 2000, p. 537). In European colonies, wage labour was reserved for those seen as white (p. 538). Similar to many other decolonial writers, Quijano (2007) understands ideas of modernity to have consolidated alongside colonial domination (see also Escobar 2007), furthermore as being associated with Europe and European bodies. Racialised understandings continue to be embedded in modern social and global structures and worldviews, reflecting how coloniality persists with continued salience (see Escobar 2010; Grosfoguel 2011). Furthermore, racist classifications have become globalised, as ‘the entire globe is responding in one way or another to Western racial classification’ (Mignolo 2010, p. 334). When discussing globalisation today, Quijano (2000) argues, we must understand it as a culmination of processes that started with the colonialisation of the Americas. This means that decolonial perspectives draw attention to racism as a historically constituted phenomenon integrated with the rise of modernity and the reshaping of the world in accordance with modernising theories, which devalued certain knowledge while celebrating Eurocentric ways of knowing. The framework is useful for analysing and understanding racism as a system that is flexible and mutating, while simultaneously grounded in history that is both particular and shared. This makes it possible to capture the ways in which racism

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is made meaningful in local circumstances (as I will return to later), while also recognising that no local perspectives exist in isolation. Faye Harrison (2016), who has written on decolonisation, emphasises such a flexible approach to racism, which highlights an analysis of how racism becomes meaningful, while understanding different racist regimes. Working from decolonial perspectives, Ramon Grosfoguel, Laura Oso and Anastasia Christou (2015, p. 636) similarly provide an analytical frame for research on racism, which they describe as a ‘global hierarchy of human superiority and inferiority’ that is made and recreated politically, culturally and economically. This definition is fairly elastic and emphasises, as Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou (2015) note, a key dualistic separation between those who are seen as superior and those who are seen as inferior (p. 636). Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou (2015) emphasise that we can see these distinctions as two zones of being (i.e. being and non-being), where the intersections between different identifications are articulated in diverse ways, creating further stratifications based on racism.

Coloniality and the margins An in-depth understanding of racism in Europe can benefit from two aspects, inspired by the critical decolonial perspective: First the concept of coloniality and secondly the rejection of the idea of a single universal narrative, in embrace of a greater acknowledgement of different localities and histories. The concept of coloniality draws attention to that we are not only talking about the formal administration of states but also particular ways of thinking and acting. The analytical use of the concept coloniality allows, furthermore, for broader temporality i.e. the continued practices and ways of conceptualising the world after the era of formal European colonialism. Additionally, using coloniality allows for the involvement of those who were not key players such as in terms of formal administration and conquest, or were ‘complicit’ (to use a phrase from Suvi Keskinen et al. 2009), in colonialism. Recapturing colonial and imperial histories through the use of the concept coloniality is particularly important, as these histories – or their denial – represent the foundation of some European countries’ claims of innocence, which filters into their rejection of racism in the present. Turning to the second aspect, the recognizion of different imperial and colonial histories draw attention to the fragility of Europe as a coherent space, as Europe is characterised by different geopolitical dimensions, and histories of subjectification and inequalities (see, e.g., Loftsdóttir 2019b; Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2011). Notably, due to that Europe is constantly in flux and renegotiated (Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2011), we must recognise Europe’s margins as in no way stable or fixed (Fur 2006). Here, margins constitute historically dynamic boundaries, rather than lines in space (Salazar 2018, p. 2). Decolonial theory’s emphasis on local histories and rejection of the United States and Europe as universal histories can be used to draw attention to the mutability of racism as a system, highlighting the ways in which, across Europe, racism has engaged with different localised histories and positions. In addition, various populations within Europe have been historically racialised in different ways, and this racialisation should be understood in conjunction with the racialisation of populations that have historically been associated with spaces outside of Europe. Thus, as I will show in this chapter, the racialisation of different populations within Europe should not be seen as separate forms of racialisation, but as phenomena that engage with and draw on ideas of modernity and coloniality.

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Coloniality and racial innocence As indicated above, engagement in colonial history is important for understanding the contemporary discussions about racism, as it is the basis upon which some European countries disassociate themselves from racism (Bangstad 2015, 2016; Loftsdóttir 2019b; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012b; Naum and Nordin 2013). While twenty-first-century claims that ‘we’ are living in a world of post-racism have echoed widely across Europe, rendering critical perspectives on racism irrelevant (Lentin and Titley 2011), some European countries have constructed their national narratives and images as if they were never a part of this history. The Nordic countries, in particular, have successfully emphasised their colonial exceptionalism; but so have several other European countries. While some of these countries can be said to have an irregular colonial history, in the sense that they never held colonial possessions, this is certainly not the case for all countries that have tried to separate themselves from histories of colonialism. Denmark, for example, was an imperial power prior to the twentieth century, holding various colonial possessions ( Jensen 2015); and Belgium had formal involvement in colonial rule, as the Belgian state took over King Leopold’s colony in the Congo in 1908 (Buettner 2016). The Netherlands was an imperial power in the East Indies (Schär 2019) and the Caribbean, and it still has colonies in this region (see Tate 2019, p. 17). Thus, a lack of formal engagement with colonialism and imperialism whereby the main actor is the state, is in no way a prerequisite for claims of innocence. As Catherine Baker (2018) stresses, we must view these racial exceptionalisms in conjunction; when we recognise race as ‘a systematically global structure’, it becomes clear that these refusals of racism are not parallel developments, but connected (Baker 2018, pp. 11–12). Here it is important to avoid assumptions of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), as the direct actions or effects of colonialism and imperialism outside of Europe did not always revolve around particular nationalities (Horning 2013; Schär 2019). Individual subjects and enterprises participated in colonial and imperialist endeavours in multiple ways, such as through settler colonialism in the Americas and the Caribbean (as was important in most of the Nordic countries; see, e.g., Eyþórsdóttir and Loftsdóttir 2016). Claims of a non-colonial history have muddled or overlooked different strands of this larger history. Bernhard C. Schär’s (2019) discussion of the Dutch East Indies draws attention to the fluidity of people across different national boundaries, as approximately 40 per cent of the soldiers in the Dutch colonies were from other European countries (p. 9). Similarly, Erlend Edsvik (2012) has shown that Norwegian entrepreneurs were major players in international shipping, related to imperialism and colonialism, and in fact benefitted from their marginalised position as state actors in the process. The key issue here is not only the amnesia in terms of involvement, but coloniality in a much broader sense, wherein European subjects were educated and brought under the logic of coloniality as a way of understanding the world and its diversity. This was conducted through textual means, direct actions and various performances, both abroad and at ‘home’. While Iceland was, for example, under Danish rule prior to 1944 (when it received full independence), its discourse was shaped by coloniality, both through the reproduction of racist materials and through a deep aspiration to be recognised as an important and non-colonial subject in Europe. While Icelanders were at times subjugated by European imaginations of them as exotic and primitive, Icelandic aspirations to transcend these imaginations were deeply engaged in coloniality (Loftsdóttir 2019a).

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Thinking in the terms of coloniality, rather than simply colonialism, is also useful for the analysis of countries that were previously ruled by neighbouring states e.g. Eastern European and Balkan states. In the Soviet Union, modernisation was introduced under the label ‘socialism’, but socialism based on a similar sense of coloniality as modernisation that effectively worked towards erasing the memories and histories of those inside its realm (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009, p. 137).

Attention to local experiences European states’ differing historical engagements with colonialism and the ruling of other European countries reflect Europe as a hierarchical space. Accordingly, there are various power dynamics at play, some of which intersect with racialisation. The division of Europe according to the axes of south, north, east and west is particularly relevant. For example, with the enlargement of the EU in the 2000s, many people from Eastern European countries experienced intense racialisation (Fox, Moraşanu and Szilassy 2012) based on their historical relationship on the axes east and west (Buchowski 2006). In the aftermath of the economic crisis in 2008, depictions of populations in Greece and other southern European countries as lazy, greedy and unreliable surfaced (Bickes, Otten and Weymann 2014; Chalániová 2014; Frois 2012) – images that can be linked with longstanding racialised depictions of southern Europeans as ‘darker’ and more African than northern Europeans (Muehlebach 2018, p.  139; Persánch 2018). In the intra-Nordic context, some Nordic countries have been marginalised due to having been ruled by neighbouring countries during a period of their history (Keskinen 2019; Loftsdóttir 2019b; Vuorela 2009). Furthermore, Maisa Martin (2012) observes how an emphasis on skandinaviska (Scandinavian languages) in Nordic collaboration has effectively marginalised Nordic populations who do not speak Norwegian, Swedish or Danish. To capture these different positionalities, Manuela Boatcă (2013) suggests three main areas of Europe with ‘different and unequal roles in shaping the hegemonic definitions of modernity and in ensuring its propagation’. Boatcă provides prototypes for these multiple ‘Europes’, exemplifying how each translates into coloniality: semi-peripheries (Spain and Portugal) had a founding role in coloniality, but their investment today is shaped by nostalgia; core countries (e.g. France and England) are hegemonic and had a central role in coloniality; and finally other semi-peripheral countries (e.g. Balkan countries) had aspirations towards coloniality. Boatcă (2013) stresses that while this classification is incomplete, it helps to understand Europe’s differing levels of national involvement in coloniality. Furthermore, it makes the attempts of marginal countries to insert themselves into colonial histories more understandable within the wider logic of coloniality, which treats a country’s history as a colonial empire as an indicator of its ‘Europeanness’. This is supported by Dace Dzenovska’s (2013) discussion of Latvia. Similarly, in Iceland, economic growth in the early 2000s was often spoken about favourably as a form of colonisation (Loftsdóttir 2016). This complicated history means that the national identities of, for example, some Nordic and Eastern European countries have been shaped by coloniality in multiple senses – through both a desire to claim Europeanness and a sense that they must ‘prove themselves’ as European subjects (Baker 2018, p. 15; Loftsdóttir 2019b). What is important here is that a refusal to acknowledge complicity in Europe’s colonial past, as well as a sense of victimhood due to a history of subjection under foreign rule, work jointly to refute racism in both the past and the present. This point is especially drawn out by Catherine Baker (2018) in her analysis of the former Yugoslavia, in which she notes how, in the Eastern context, post-colonialism is 400

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often used to stress dynamics of power, while racism is ignored or rendered irrelevant. Here, again, it is significant that Quijano’s term ‘coloniality’ avoids reducing imperialism and colonialism to only state-executed control, and has to do with practices and particular ways of understanding the world and acting in it. Furthermore, decolonial theory makes it easier to analyse the hierarchal relationships between different areas of the world, including the relationship between the Global South and Global North, and relationships within Europe. This, however, draws attention to the importance of recognising the ways in which racism has manifested in different contexts, by engaging with localised meanings and histories (sometimes national, but other times not) that are still a part of global geopolitics. Insights from decolonial theorists on the power disparities in academic knowledge production along the Global South/Global North axis (Mignolo 2011; see also Harrison 2016) can be applied within Europe, where certain areas (e.g. the Nordic region, Central Europe and Eastern Europe), are more often positioned as case examples or particularities. Other parts of Europe (e.g. the United Kingdom and France) are, however, more likely to represent a more universal ‘European’ history. Applied to racism, this means that we cannot take histories of racism in countries like the United Kingdom and United States as universal models, in spite of their hegemonic power to become part of a wider global discourse of/on race (Loftsdóttir 2019b; Nowicka 2017). While racism is not a ‘national phenomenon’, in the sense that it is contained within the borders of a nation (Nowicka 2017), a decolonial approach can provide stronger acknowledgement of the ‘specificity of each particular historical experience’ (Kalnačs 2016, p. 19). There are, however, several potential pitfalls to this approach. First, it is important to avoid the reproduction of methodological nationalism. While recognising the fluidity of Europe’s borders and people, we must simultaneously take into account the state’s role in reproducing particular national narratives that delimit the nation and the histories of particular localities. Second, we must consider how to account for the power dynamics within European without reproducing persistent narratives of racist exceptionalism – that is, without diminishing various historical engagements, as well as the fluidity that always characterises borders and identity markers. As stated above, it is important to bear in mind how claims of racial innocence often revolve around things that are simply different ‘here’.

Europe and the shifting margins While the Nordic countries are often positioned as isolated and outside the history of colonialism, an emphasis on coloniality, rather than colonialism, makes the transnationalism of the Nordic countries prior to modern times evident (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012b; Naum and Nordin 2013). Similar to other European countries, Nordic countries were not shaped in isolation, but within the complex dynamics of Europe, which extended beyond the North Atlantic to the wider world. The term ‘coloniality’ is useful for capturing the multiple engagements of different Nordic countries and their investment in particular understandings of the world and their role within it. Racialisation can be better understood in Iceland if we recognise Iceland’s self-understanding as marginal within the European context. Through this lens, racism in early nineteenth century Iceland clearly demonstrated anxieties around belonging in the European context, which have become reanimated in the present (Loftsdóttir 2020). This echoes Boatcă’s (2013) discussion of ‘aspiration’ as important to understanding Eastern European engagement with Europe and coloniality. In the early twentieth century, racism was often expressed through attempts to disassociate Iceland from other subjugated countries. Also in the early twenty-first century, racism manifested in attempts 401

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to insert Iceland within narratives of exploration and imperialism (Loftsdóttir 2019a). While these shifting and continuing streams of racism and racialisation in Iceland are relevant, they are always embedded in a globalised discourse of race. Scholars focusing on the Nordic countries have explored the meaning of whiteness in localised context, while not losing sight of its global dimensions (e.g. Andreassen 2014; Hübinette and Lundström 2014; Keskinen 2014). Steve Garner (2014), in his review article on whiteness studies, notes that, since 2008, there has been increased interest in the ways in which whiteness ‘functions in different national contexts’. He identifies this as part of a third wave of whiteness studies, and stresses that we should develop a more nuanced view of the normalisation of whiteness and the maintenance of white supremacy (Garner 2014). The goal of these studies is not to dismiss that these countries are a part of globalised racism, but to capture the ways in which racism has taken on different meanings in different contexts e.g. the United States versus Europe, within Europe and within the Nordic countries. We see, for example, that the association between Nordic areas and whiteness has not always been self-evident, and it is not always analytically useful to think about the Nordic countries as one whole. With the strengthening of ideas of race as biology, the association between ‘whiteness’ and ‘Nordic’ became stronger, even as it played out differently in different Nordic contexts (Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017). For example, in the early twentieth century, Swedish people were considered the ‘whitest of all whites’ (Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017, p. 153), while other subjects in Sweden (e.g. the Sami and Finns) were racialised as inferior (see Keskinen 2019). In recent nation branding and the branding of the idea of the Nordic, this association with whiteness has been reanimated – particularly with respect to the association between whiteness and images of Nordic ‘purity’ and ‘safety’ which in some cases centre on the idea of the ‘Nordic’ and in other cases centre around narrations of particular Nordic nations (Loftsdóttir 2019a; Pitcher 2014). In Iceland, a massive branding exercise after the 2008 economic crash by the Icelandic government and stakeholders in tourism positioned Iceland within an image of the ‘white’ North, while also seeking to demonstrate Iceland’s exotic nature and people (Loftsdóttir 2015).

Conclusion This chapter has explored the utility of decolonial theory in analysing the racism that is manifested in ‘marginal’ European countries. Such analysis serves to improve our understanding of how racism ‘endures’ in the present, to use Amin’s phrasing (Amin 2010, p. 4). Here, I have focused on two key aspects that I see as useful in this regard, i.e. the concept of coloniality how decolonial theory helps to recognize racism as both historical and fluid, as a phenomenon that we have to theorize as global, while recognizing that racism intersects with local dynamics and histories. Importantly, we must understand not only hegemonic (or universal) forms of racism, but also the ways in which racism, as a globalised system of classification and entitlements, is made meaningful in different contexts and historical conditions, which are structurally connected in various ways. Analysis of the localised meanings of racism and the power dynamics within Europe must always rest upon the assertion that racism does exist and has existed in all European countries (Loftsdóttir 2019b). We are thus not endorsing racist exceptionalism or claims to innocence, but rather emphasising the ways in which actions, systems of thought and structures of racism are rendered meaningful within different contexts.

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35 WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM, ‘CHROMANYMS’ AND THE TROUBLE WITH MARGINAL WHITES Matt Wray and Catherine Wolfe Introduction In societies in which non-whites have been dominated and subordinated by whites, there nevertheless exist certain groups of whites who have themselves been dominated and marginalised. Theirs is a somewhat complicated social position. To paraphrase Bourdieu (1984), they represent the dominated fraction of the dominant race. For this chapter, we reviewed some of the scholarship on this ambiguous interstitiality, as it exists in different societies. In the United States, such groups have been designated as ‘white trash’, ‘rednecks’ and ‘brass ankles’; in the Caribbean, as ‘red bones’ and ‘redlegs’; in France, as pied noirs; in Argentina, as cabecitas negras; and in the Netherlands, as Indos and blauwes. (Besides occupying puzzling and ambiguous positions in their respective social hierarchies, marginal white groups often share very colourful names.) Despite the different historical and geographic settings of these many groups, in this chapter, we lump them together under the label of ‘marginal whites’. What do these marginal whites have in common? And how do they differ from one society to the next, if at all? Why do some of these designations persist, while others fade into oblivion and disuse? And why might answers to these questions matter? Answering these questions has proven difficult, for two reasons: First, marginal whites have been understudied by contemporary historians and social scientists, who have often regarded them as relatively inconsequential or odious social actors, compared to other whites and people of colour (Cecil-Fronsman 1992). This is not to say that no relevant scholarship exists. Quite the opposite: We found thousands of articles describing marginal whites from across the world. But a great deal of that work was written in the early- and mid-twentieth century, and the analyses reflect the classist and racist ideologies of their time. A second reason, related to the first, is that, to our knowledge, no one has yet tried to put these various groups of marginal whites into any kind of comparative analytical frame. Our research attempts to address both gaps in the literature, first by assembling a bibliographic database of extant literature on marginal whites and, second, by searching for a theoretical framework that will allow for comparison across different spaces and places, as well as different historical timeframes. We then aim at demonstrating the utility of this theoretical framework through a comparison of a small number of cases of marginal whites from across the globe. 406

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-42

White settler colonialism

What, then, is a suitable theoretical framework? In our view, the approach of critical whiteness studies, which emerged in the United States, is not fully up to the task. With few exceptions, first-wave scholarship in critical whiteness studies focused on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century antebellum dynamics of slavery, race, class and white immigrant struggles for inclusion (Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991; Saxton 1990; for a notable exception, see Allen 1997/2014). Owing in part to their academic specialties, researchers in this wave paid less attention to the legacies of white settler colonialism (WSC) that were established in the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our critique here is inspired by the work of Dunbar-Ortiz (1997a, 1997b), E llinghaus, Carey and Boucher (2009), Moreton-Robinson (2015) and others who have offered compelling arguments – both theoretical and empirical – that bringing critical whiteness studies into dialogue with colonial, post-colonial and decolonial studies can expand our understanding of the historical emergence and contemporary persistence of systems of domination and subordination based on identity and belonging. Colonialism was (and remains) a process encompassing racial and gender formations, patriarchal and heteronormative structures of class and caste, ethnicity and nationalism, and territorialisation as key principles and practices of social division and hierarchy in the modern era (Stoler 2010). Understanding this allows us to view whiteness as the product of colonialism as a world-historical system. In what follows, we assume that WSC is the crucial social structure that granted (and continues to grant) whiteness its historical and global power. We contend that this allows us to place seemingly dissimilar marginal white populations into a comparative frame, and to do so in a fashion that brings issues of intersectionality to the fore. We follow Glenn (2015) in defining settler colonialism as ‘an ongoing structure rather than an historical event’ and ‘a distinct transnational formation whose political and economic projects have shaped and continue to shape race relations in first world nations that were established through settler colonialism’ (p. 52). Of note, we limit our discussion to settler colonialism, and not colonialism writ large. Settler colonialism is just one of several historical and contemporary modalities of colonial intervention, and historians have long debated what makes settler colonialism distinctive (see Veracini 2010 for a comprehensive review). For our purposes, we follow Wolfe’s (1999) definition: The primary object of settler-colonisation is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labor with it. Though, in practice, Indigenous labor was indispensable to Europeans, settler-colonisation is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct – invasion is a structure not an event. (p. 163) As we demonstrate in the case studies below, marginal whites in settler colonies played key roles in these structures of invasion. Whether seeking to establish profits and markets as trappers and traders, or agricultural independence as farmers, they regularly pushed the boundaries of settlement, expanding the frontier lines well beyond those of the original colony. They sought to control the land and thereby eliminate competition, and this territorial imperative afforded them close contact with Indigenous and native populations. While the nature of much of this contact was initially genocidal and lethal, subsequent 407

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waves of marginal whites sometimes made common cause with Indigenous people, as well as with exogenous ‘others’, such as escaped slaves and indentured servants. They sometimes cooperated in matters of trade and marriage, starting families and even some fragile communities. Occasionally, they joined together in their resistance to the colonial elites. It is precisely this complex situation we are seeking to understand, and it is made most visible through the lens of WSC theory. Based on our review of the literature, we argue that wherever Europeans colonised in settler mode, marginal whites could be found in significant number. Their presence disrupted the usual binary of exogenous coloniser and Indigenous colonised, introducing a third category. Our claim is that a WSC framework uniquely illuminates some of the socio-historical peculiarities associated with marginal whites living in interstitial spaces and places in settler societies, and that this framework offers greater explanatory power than a critical whiteness studies framework, which does not account for the historical forces of WSC. A WSC framework can help us see that, despite colonisers’ desire to create a totalising system of domination, some groups posed problems of categorisation that effectively caused emergent social classification systems to glitch. Within the logic of white supremacy that organised these social classifications, marginal whites constituted an anomaly or aporia: How can members of the superior race be – or become – destitute, degraded, degenerate and debased? Because they raise the question of what it means to be authentically (or wholly or purely) white, the presence of marginal whites troubles or destabilises not only the official category of ‘white’, but also other racial classifications, a point that has been repeatedly argued by scholars over two decades (Wray and Newitz, 1996; Hartigan, 2003, 2005; Alba, 2005; Wray, 2006; and Reilly 2019). As we demonstrate below, in white settler colonies, this trouble was especially acute. Troublesome groups of marginal whites threatened to unsettle the orderly imposition of new systems of social differentiation. Dominant whites, recognising this threat, organised themselves to stigmatise, criminalise, segregate and legally discriminate against these groups. In what follows, we ask how concepts from critical whiteness studies and settler colonialism studies can be fruitfully combined to guide our inquiries into marginal white populations that resisted, rebuffed or repelled the logic of social categorisation and taxonomy that dominant white groups sought to impose in colonial settings. To our knowledge, no one has yet proposed a theoretical framework to bring these groups into shared historical focus. What we offer in this chapter is only an outline of what such a comparative approach and theoretical framework could look like. We first discuss our method for searching and reviewing the relevant literature, before turning to the cases we selected for analysis. We describe each case according to our analytical framework, then note important similarities and differences. We have two main goals. The first goal is to document that the long history of European settler colonisation regularly produced groups of marginal whites as a by-product of common practices of domination and subordination, aimed primarily at other groups. The second goal is to show that, despite important differences in colonial contexts and regions, marginal whites had (and still have) common experiences, in terms of their representation and treatment by others. To be clear: We are not claiming that the experiences of marginal whites are comparable to the experiences of other subordinated, colonised groups in their shared locales. Instead, we are suggesting that the experiences and representations of marginal whites from different regions and historical periods are more alike than they are different. 408

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Literature search and review Because of our initial interest in comparing marginal white populations in Anglophone settings, we began our systematic database search with the goal of ascertaining the global reach of the term ‘poor whites’. We queried the Proquest Social Sciences Premium Collection, EBSCO Academic Search Complete and WorldCat, using this term, limiting our results to English-only articles, books and newspapers. Even with these constraints, our initial search yielded hundreds of thousands of results. We found substantial bodies of research on ‘poor whites’ in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Barbados and India – all Anglo-colonial settings. We next restricted our query to publications from the period 1990 to 2020, in order to capture scholarship most likely to have been directly influenced by critical whiteness studies, which became a school of thought in the early 1990s (Brander Rasmussen et al. 2001). These search constraints produced a manageable sample of 153 sources for initial review. Encountering multiple references in our literature review (mostly buried in footnotes and bibliographies) to scholarship on pied noirs, ‘trekkers’, retornados, ‘bogans’, ‘chavs’ ‘bluegums’ and others convinced us to extend our search to include non-Anglophone colonial histories. Curiosity led us to investigate these new terms, and we expanded our search accordingly. This yielded an additional 182 sources, resulting in a total of 335 books, articles and book chapters – only a fraction of which we cite in this chapter. Of note, while we reference many scholarly sources published prior to 1990, the bulk of the research we relied upon was published in the 1990 to 2020 period mentioned above. We also used Google Ngram Viewer to plot the rise and fall (in print) of some of the more unusual names for marginal whites. The Viewer allows researchers to query a very large corpus of digitised texts in order to, among other things, quantitatively chart the origins and evolution of cultural naming practices of interest – at least as they appear in printed sources (Michel et al. 2011).

Limitations We wish to draw attention to two limitations in our research. First, we constructed our cases from secondary sources, of which most were written by historians and social scientists. Primary sources were available for some but not all groups of interest, and even where primary sources were available and could have been used to build our cases, we stuck with secondary sources in order to achieve comparably constructed cases. The result is that the voices and lived experiences of the people in our study are not first-hand, but second- and third-hand representations. A second limitation – related to the first – is that restricting our literature review to English-only sources forced us to construct our case studies relatively narrowly and to bias Anglophone perspectives and accounts over others.

Three cases In this section, we sketch brief histories and offer a few relevant observations about three populations from three different regions that illustrate and embody marginal whites in colonial settings. We selected these cases because, in our view, they offer the best opportunities for comparison and contrast. In the final part of the chapter, we dwell on these similarities and differences; but here, we want to mention one interesting similarity, which we allude to in our title and in the opening of this chapter: One of the most striking similarities across our selected cases is the explicit reference to colour in the invented names for the groups, despite 409

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a lack of explicit reference to race. The terms ‘redskin’, ‘brownie’ and ‘bluegum’ also illustrate this naming practice, though they refer to marginal groups that are not discussed here. We call terms that employ this naming convention ‘chromanyms’, which we define as stigmatising exonyms or endonyms that reference a colour, but not an official ethno-racial designation or category. For example, in the United States, ‘Black’ is not a chromanym, but ‘redskin’ is. As classificatory terms, they comprise different but no less visible spectrums of colour lines than those derived from the European and American scientific racial taxonomies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In our view, they play a special role in ‘covert racialising discourses’, which, as linguistic anthropologists have noted, ‘racialize without being denotationally explicit about race’ (Dick and Wirtz 2011, p. E2). We understand this to mean that the terms do some of the work of racial domination, while simultaneously supplying plausible deniability that racial domination is intended. We return to our discussion of the significance and cultural power of chromanyms, below.

‘Crackers’ and ‘rednecks’ in colonial America The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed European settler colonialism’s slow, creeping conquest of the North American continent and its Native peoples. Early proponents of colonisation (e.g. Richard Hakluyt, in his Principall Navigations of 1589) evangelised rhapsodically about the vast, empty continent waiting to be both commercialised for agriculture and trade and Christianised for the salvation of the ‘barbaric savages’ who occupied (but, as Hakluyt insisted, did not own) the land. As Isenberg (2017) has written, Hakluyt and his peers envisioned the continent as a vast waste of land that could become a ‘giant workhouse’ for England’s growing class of unskilled workers and impoverished debtors (p. 21). And indeed, by the early 1600s, this population was one of the primary sources of British and European settlers, mostly in the form of white indentured servants, along with skilled trappers, planters, soldiers and mercenaries of one form or another – nearly all of whom were drawn from the British and French lower classes (Taylor 2002). By the mid-1600s, the British colonial elite and yeomanry of the Chesapeake Tidewater region frequently characterised formerly indentured white servants as a distinct social group sharing a common antipathy towards the emerging colonial order. ‘Lubbers’ and ‘crackers’, as these white settlers were called, were distinctive because they did not fit the cultural mould that elite white planters sought to impose and uphold. These marginal, settler whites were commonly disparaged as disrespecting the dominant moral imperatives regarding property, work, gender arrangements and colour lines (Allen 1997; Wray 2006). Whether this disrespect should be characterised as primarily a failure to assimilate or an act of collective cultural resistance is difficult to say, as these groups did not leave documentary evidence of their attitudes and sensibilities. For their refusals and resistance, these poor whites were mostly viewed as odd, backcountry, colonial curiosities. In moments of political and economic crisis, however, they were stigmatised as criminal savages – dangerous for the threat they posed as potential allies of rebellious slaves and perpetrators of violence against Native people. For example, during the colonial insurrection known as Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676), thousands of marginal whites (a mix of indentured servants and frontiersmen) made common cause with hundreds of Blacks (a mix of enslaved, indentured and free men) in the Virginia Colony. They were rebelling against the colonial Governor Berkeley for what they considered to be his unwillingness to push out local Native tribes and take the land, and for his unfair monopolisation of the beaver trade. The rebellion lasted months, culminating in their attack on 410

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Jamestown – the colony’s capital – which they pillaged and burned to the ground, forcing Berkeley’s retreat. One of the results of this uprising, many historians agree, was the hardening of racial lines between whites, Blacks and Native peoples (Allen 1997/2014; Rice 2014). Within a few decades, the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 – one of the more tangible outcomes of the rebellion – codified whiteness as a set of legal and political advantages and privileges granted to whites and denied to Blacks and Native peoples (Morgan 1975). Another tangible result was the systematic dispossession of Native American land. The insurrection (and several others like it throughout the colonies) forced elite whites to recognise that keeping peace with non-elite whites meant fighting and funding wars to kill Native Americans and rob them of their territory. As Taylor noted: ‘To give [white] servants greater hope for the future, in 1705 the assembly revived the headright system by promising each freedman fifty acres of land, a promise that obliged the government to continue taking land from the Indians’ (2002, p. 152). As the American Revolution approached, these low-status, landless whites increasingly became the target of violent colonial repression along the frontier. Mathews (1959) documented an example from 1766 involving the complex relationship between Native Americans, ‘crackers’ and colonial authorities on the Carolina frontier. He quoted from a letter from a colonial governor to the Earl of Dartmouth: I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. They steal horses in the southern provinces and sell them in the northern and those from Northern provinces they sell in the southern. They get Merchants by degrees to trust them with more and more goods to trade with the Indians and at first make returns till they have established some credit, then leave those that trusted them in the lurch, return no more but go to some other place to follow the same practice. Some of them stay in the Indian country and are perpetually endeavoring to stir up a war by propagating idle stories then join them and share in the plunder. They delight in cruelty which they often practice even to one another. (p. 127) What is most noteworthy about this historical excerpt is that it not only provides textual evidence of the etymological origins of ‘cracker’ as a salient social – but still novel – category in the colonies, but it also offers insight into the extent to which white settlers and Native people both fought and, at times, also cooperated to fleece and rob white elites of their wealth and property. This suggests a complexity to Native–‘cracker’ relations that is elided by a lack of attention to the power struggles between whites in the colonies. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, marginal whites were widely regarded as a problem social group – one whose place in the newly independent republic was both ambiguous and precarious. In the minds of dominant whites, they raised puzzling questions: Could these rough and uncouth white indentured servants, unruly settlers and violent frontiersmen one day be legitimate bearers of the white Republic of the newly United States? Were they capable of the self-restraint and discipline required for suffrage, citizenship and democratic self-governance? In the eyes of many dominant colonial whites, the answer was clearly no. While much of what we would like to know about the attitudes, behaviours and sentiments of early white settlers remains murky, what these examples (and many others not discussed here) make clear is that violent conflicts over the control of land, private property and natural resources were key drivers of the creation and subsequent transformation of stigmatised social categories, just as a WSC framework would predict. 411

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By the 1820s, a new term for these marginal whites arose: ‘white trash’. The semantic association with garbage, filth and waste was not coincidental; rather, it reflected the perception of these whites as useless and tainted. By the 1850s, once suffrage had been extended to nearly all white males in the United States, regardless of income or property, a new chromanym began to circulate: ‘redneck’. As Harkins (2003), Hartigan (2005) and others have shown, the stigmatisation of poor whites has been a central mechanism in their ongoing subjectification. Labelled ‘lubbers’, ‘crackers’, ‘white trash’ and ‘rednecks’, this population continues to be surrounded by stigma, suspicion and fear, particularly in Appalachia (Stoll 2017).

‘Redlegs’ of Barbados In the 1800s, the derogatory term ‘redlegs’ was frequently applied to poor whites in Barbados. According to one account, the term is derived from ‘redshanks’ – a sixteenth century nickname for Scottish Highlanders, whose habitual wearing of kilts left their legs and ankles red and ruddy. Whatever its etymology, there is broad consensus among historians and anthropologists that, in Barbados, the term ‘redlegs’ was reserved for the descendants of the white indentured servants of the seventeenth century. These servants were the outcasts and castoffs of Cromwell’s England that, as Mintz (1979, p. 415) noted, included debtors, prisoners of war, troublesome Irish rebels and priests, and the unlucky kidnapped (who, in the terminology of the day, got ‘Barbadoed’). The number of ‘redlegs’, if any, who came freely to the island during this period is impossible to know; but, unlike the arrival of British settler elites, theirs was a brutal, forced migration (Sheppard 1977; Jones, 2007). Prior to the mass importation of enslaved Africans in the 1700s, these marginal whites were the principal labourers on the island’s vast plantations. As the enslaved population grew to outnumber the free and indentured Europeans on the island, some of the free but impoverished whites were granted small plots of land in exchange for serving as a reserve militia in the event of a slave uprising or other hostility. Despite having a foothold on the land, they remained conspicuous for their poverty and dependency. As one observer noted in 1790, scattered across the island were numerous: cottages of a poorer order of white people-of obscure individuals, remote from the great class of merchants and planters, and who obtain a scanty livelihood by cultivating a small patch of earth, and breeding-up poultry, or what they term stock for the markets. They are descended from European settlers, but from misfortune, or misconduct, in some of the race, are reduced to a state far removed from independence. (Cited in Beckles 1988, p. 6) A second traveller, writing in 1798, reported seeing ‘a few descendants of a race of people, transported in the time of Cromwell, […] called Redlegs. I saw some of them’. He noted with disdain, ‘tall, awkward made, and ill-looking fellows, much of a quadroon color, unmeaning, yet vain of ancestry, as degenerate and useless a race as can be imagined’ (cited in Lambert 2001, p. 346). This appears to be the first occurrence in print of the term ‘redlegs’, and the observer took special note of the filthy conditions and squalor in which they lived. Beginning with the formal cessation of the slave trade in 1807 – and especially following the abolition of British slavery in 1834 (Barbados was the only Caribbean colony to support abolition) – the social situation of the ‘redlegs’ changed dramatically. Emancipation flooded the wage labour market, and free Blacks and poor whites competed for the same jobs. More

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importantly, ‘redlegs’ in this period were dispossessed of their small holdings and pushed off the sugar estates by the Act of 1839, which re-organised the militias. This formal, statesanctioned act of dispossession threw an estimated 2,000 or more poor whites into ever more desperate circumstances. They formed tightly knit squatter communities on the rural, eastern coastlines, where the steep, rocky land and lack of ready access to labour markets earned them a lasting reputation as an idle and inherently lazy people (Beckles 1988; Reilly 2019; Sheppard 1977). By the 1840s, the situation of the ‘redlegs’ was commonly described as the ‘poor-white problem’, and several prominent politicians and community leaders stepped forward, either to denounce the ‘redlegs’ as irredeemably indolent and ignorant, beyond recuperation, or conversely, to propose various solutions to their shared plight. Chief among these solutions were numerous charitable organisations formed for poor relief, ambitious efforts at smallscale industrialisation and legislated incentives for planters to hire more poor whites – none of which seems to have made much material difference for the segregated, dispossessed whites (Beckles 1988). Since at least the late eighteenth century, then, the terms ‘redlegs’ and ‘poor whites’ have functioned as powerful ‘stigmatypes’ (i.e. stereotypes that carry stigma) in Barbadian society, even as their descendants have dwindled to the point where only two remnant communities remain (Reilly 2019). Just as a WSC framework makes apparent the contradictions of the anomalous race-class situation of the ‘redlegs’, it also reveals the significant – albeit less immediately discernible – impact of gender on this community. Historians who have focused on gender and sex in Barbadian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have documented how the differential treatment of ‘poor white’ women became the focus of colonial projects to impose white supremacy. Of course, all women in colonial settings, regardless of colour or class, were subjected to patriarchal authoritarian rule and discipline. But as historian Cecily Forde-Jones notes, these ‘regulatory measures [were] struggles to construct and police the boundaries of an emerging white identity. These regulations included efforts to produce and maintain white purity by controlling the sexuality of poor white women in particular’ (1998, p. 9). The permanent prohibition against charity to ‘poor white’ women cohabitating with Black men and/or those who had given birth to mixed-race children is an example of their targeted discrimination. This and other punishments, which included public shaming and shunning, represent the enforcement of colonial gender and sexual norms, which were entangled with colonial boundaries of race. It also suggests that marginal white women were subjected to a degree of scrutiny and surveillance from which white male planters – who frequently fathered mixed-race children – were exempt. The case of the ‘redlegs’ of Barbados shares many similarities with the other cases considered here, but it is the similarity to ‘white trash’ that is most striking. Like their ‘white trash’ counterparts in the early United States, ‘redlegs’ were both socially and geographically marginalised, and subject to contempt and scorn from colonial elites and free Blacks, alike. In both historical settings, poor whites were relegated to the periphery of slave society, subsisting on non-arable lands and the poorest of soils, with only precarious and unpredictable access to land and wage labour markets. Because of this, both groups were stigmatyped as idle and indolent, and reduced to beggars. Whenever a few individuals inevitably resorted to theft or robbery to survive, the whole group was further vilified as criminal and violent, which only cemented their stained reputation as undeserving of social inclusion, or even charity (Lambert 2001).

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Pied noirs in Algeria and France Now we turn to a case of European colonial settlers in North Africa. The people who eventually came to be known as pied noir (French for ‘black foot’) originally came from Italy, Spain and Malta as settlers to the Algerian coast (namely Algiers, Oran and Constantine), between the 1830s to the end of the century (Eldridge 2016; Smith 2006). Under French colonial rule, these settlers became French citizens through the naturalisation laws of 1889 and 1893, but were labelled algérianiste, and therefore semantically positioned as connected primarily to the colony, and not the metropole (Eldridge 2016). In French metropolitan thinking, they were variously categorised as néo-français or ‘colonists of foreign origin’, or simply ‘not’ French (cited in Smith 2006, p. 108. See also Stoler 2011). As Algerian resistance to colonial rule began to gain power in the early 1950s – eventually culminating in independence in 1962 – hundreds of thousands of Algérianiste (most of whom had been born in colonial Algeria) were evacuated to France and relocated in and around the port of Marseille. Locals began to refer to these wartime refugees as pied noirs. Upon arrival in France, these former white settlers encountered hostility and ostracism from their French compatriots. French media depicted the pied noirs as ‘savages’ who wrought harrowing violence against Arabic Algerians, blaming them for inciting colonial uprisings and effectively absolving the metropole from any responsibility for the ongoing war (Smith 2006, p. 180). Media reports circulated that some of the refugees were in fact Algerian terrorists posing as French citizens ( Jordi 2003). Péril étranger gripped the French public. The government claimed it was prepared to absorb the incoming repatriates, yet it employed few measures to do so. Jordi (2003) examined immigration data, government records and media to illustrate the mismanagement of the resettlement effort. His findings make clear that the state’s ‘systematic underestimation of repatriates’ (p. 66) led to myriad problems that beset pied noirs for years – key among them discrimination in housing and employment, violence from neighbours, and extensive surveillance by police. The south-eastern city of Marseilles was supposed to act as a ‘temporary transit point’ from which repatriated settlers would be redirected to regions in need of labourers. Yet, as Jordi notes, Marseilles became a permanent residence for nearly 75 per cent of all repatriates and ‘quickly found itself on the verge of collapse’ (2003, p. 65). The media commented extensively on the overcrowding and rampant homelessness, and intentionally mischaracterised the violence that characterised the city at that time. As a result, metropolitan opinion formed against pied noirs long before they relocated to the rest of the country. All told, the migration of more than a million Algérianiste to metropolitan France created a collision of national myths, colonial hierarchies and interpretations of race. Both metropolitan French and Mediterranean immigrants were Europeans in the colonised African state, but not all were ethnically French. Ethnic diversity within the citizenry contradicted the cherished French Republican myth ‘of primordial continuous Frenchness disrupted only occasionally by external invasions’ (Smith 2006, p. 9). Though French citizens, Algerian settlers were typically depicted as African immigrants who would destroy the myth of a coherent definition of French people and a continuous, uninterrupted national identity. Unencumbered by geography, colonisers and settlers were residing together for the first time, and this introduced new pressures to reassert and defend a pure French identity (Prochaska, 1990). Once again, we see stigmatisation as a key mechanism for recategorisation. The name pied noir (‘black foot’) subtly tied the shame of the failed empire to Blackness, operating as a shibboleth with which to identify imposters who might appear to be white (French), but 414

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whose soles would betray them as Black. It also functioned as an index of the degree to which white settlers were polluted or stained by their ‘dirty’ African origins (Smith 2006. See also Douglas, 2003). Yet the burdens of displacement felt by settlers were not allocated equally. As a WSC framework would predict, women faced different types and levels of violence than men. Families were frequently separated for periods of time during decolonisation, as male heads of household repatriated to France to establish new homes ( Jordi 2003). Women remained in Algeria, keeping families together and attempting to maintain their households, businesses and whatever material wealth they held. They also faced sexual violence that was unexperienced by men. These details were largely unspoken in the wake of the Republic’s declaration of military success in the War of Independence, followed by the ‘state of silence’, wherein the war was not named (Eldridge 2016, p. 6). To assimilate successfully into French cultural citizenship, pied noirs – particularly women – had to be silent about their experiences. Much like the term ‘redleg’, the term pied noir does not carry the same social salience or stigma as it once held. Each subsequent generation has become further removed from Algeria, its culture and its traditions, and has identified with the term less and less.

Case comparison We observed some important differences between our cases, as well as among others that are not discussed here. For example, while some populations of marginal whites faced episodes and instances of official dispossession and organised discrimination, they were not uniformly subjected to state-sanctioned violence, nor were they all targeted by specific legislation designed to limit or diminish their rights. Another difference is that, while some groups (pied noirs and ‘rednecks’) reclaimed the stigmatising labels that majority whites affixed to them, others (‘redlegs’ and ‘crackers’) did not. Consequently, the latter groups did not successfully organise into movements to celebrate or revalue their identities as positive. For us, the value of the WSC framework is that it can reveal key similarities between groups that have not been previously compared. One similarity we observed across our cases is that marginal whites were defined not just as distinctive, but as problem populations. This was particularly true during periods of decolonisation, when questions about their fitness for inclusion in the newly independent nation became acute. That is, while the groups and populations were products of European colonial encounters, they were targeted and tagged with the stigma and prejudice of a chromanym only after political independence was gained. We propose that one explanation for this pattern is that these groups were perceived as somehow bearing the taint of colonisation. They were viewed with suspicion, disgust and contempt by those who had come to see the former colonial situation – or, by extension or projection, the conduct and behaviours of low-status colonisers – as shameful and blameworthy. This was especially the case for ‘white trash’ and ‘rednecks’, and for pied noirs, as well; all were seen as atavistic throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive and backward era. A second explanation for this pattern is one that has been frequently observed by post-colonial scholars: The political and geographic redrawing of the boundaries of empire necessitated and provoked a redrawing of the symbolic and social boundaries of citizenship and national belonging. A second similarity we observed across all cases – one that relates to the similarity noted above – is that all shared a common association with filth, squalor and pollution, which served as a key mechanism of their stigmatyping (Wray 2006). As McClintock notes about British imperialism, a ‘poetics of contagion justified a politics of exclusion’ (1995, pp. 46–47). Sometimes, the pollution and contagion were sexual in nature – a record of a disqualifying, 415

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miscegenated past. In other cases, the pollution was associated with disease or hereditary defect. A third similarity we observed across all cases is that these marginalised groups were perceived as threatening in part because their blurred, liminal identities challenged nationalist ideologies rooted in blood and soil narratives of purity and belonging. The hybridity and blurred identities of these marginal groups challenged ethnic fantasies about autochthony. This suggests that what was most menacing about these groups was their perceived rootlessness. They appeared as deracinated collectives not grounded in the blood and soil of an imagined past, and therefore a threat to any imagined future. Their liminality – living on the threshold between white and non-white – necessitated new naming conventions (hence the invention of the chromanyms we describe above) to quasi-racialise, without making explicit references to race. These groups were all key protagonists in a shared story of troubled taxonomies – linguistic experiments in social classification and categorisation. They highlight the fact that the colonial impulse to manage and reproduce social difference and inequality did not just target Indigenous and non-white others.

Conclusion In short, we find that these populations, when viewed through a WSC lens, were (and are) more alike than different and are therefore highly comparable. Colonial systems of categorisation both reflected and enabled the establishment and development of stigma, prejudice, intolerance and unequal treatment directed against populations colonisers sought to subordinate, while simultaneously supplying a rationale for doing so (Anderson 2006; Wacquant 1997). The extent to which these categories persist in the twenty-first century is both a measure of their lasting power and an indicator of how much work remains to decolonise the prevailing logics of social classification and social differentiation, which are so deeply embedded in modernity (Bhambra 2007; Mignolo 2007; Getachew, 2019). We contend that there are two major theoretical implications of adopting a WSC framework as a starting point for inquiries into these modern systems of domination. First, a WSC framework allows researchers to recognise and document the inherently intersectional nature of modern domination and exploitation. Recent scholarship has fruitfully explored the ways in which bringing theories of intersectionality into dialogue with critical whiteness studies can help ‘account for the complexities of whiteness as it is practiced by social actors’ (Kindinger and Schmitt 2019, p. xv). A WSC framework that incorporates intersectional theory enables researchers to view systems of gender, race and sexual domination not as parallel processes acting along separate axes of pre-determined identities, but as convergent boundary lines that produce simultaneous and overlapping identities. In our above survey of historical examples, a WSC framework was applied as an intersectional project to reveal the role of not only race, but also gender, sex, class, ethnicity, citizenship and nationalism, in the shaping of ideologies and identities. It is not organised solely – or even principally – around the concept of race, but race is never absent from the calculus. WSC aims at highlighting white male settlers’ imposition or redrawing of multiple social boundaries to gain advantages, privileges and power. As Glenn notes, WSC is a ‘framework that is amenable to intersectional understanding because it is widely understood that colonial projects simultaneously structure race, gender, class, and sexual relations within and between colonists and the colonized’ (2015, p. 55). Second, a WSC framework centres critical attention on the material relationships between land, land-based resources and human bodies. LaFleur advocates for greater attention to 416

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be paid to ‘the power of place in the colonial formation of social categorisations’ (2020, p. 1). We find that the WSC framework provides one way to focus directly on those power relations of place. Thus, in our historical survey, we noted how ties to the land – or a lack thereof – shaped perceptions and treatment of marginal whites on different continents and in different regions. Many of the key techniques and mechanisms of colonisation pertained to the command and control of bodies and places. Common among these were invasion, occupation, displacement, dispossession, segregation, confinement and genocidal extermination. It is our contention that these colonial practices regularly and consistently produced marginal whites (i.e. social groups or populations that posed problems and puzzles for colonial systems of categorisation and classification). They were therefore not consistently and unambiguously subjected to the same kind and intensity of subordinating tactics of territorial control as those applied to Indigenous populations and undesirable immigrants. Yet their close geographic and social proximity to white colonial elites remained troublesome and threatening. How should such marginal whites be contained? They were neither fully assimilable nor comfortably situated in the colonial hierarchy. This quality of lacking a fixed or certain place made them problematic not only in the eyes of past colonisers, but also in the analysis of contemporary researchers. We have attempted to both demonstrate the utility of a WSC framework for understanding the positioning of marginal whites, and to confirm the utility of this approach for empirical case analysis.

References Alba, R. (2005). Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1), pp. 20–49. Allen, T. W. (1997/2014). The invention of the white race, vol. 2: The origin of racial oppression in ­Anglo-America. London: Verso Books. Anderson, W. (2006). The cultivation of whiteness: Science, health, and racial destiny in Australia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beckles, H. M. (1988). Black over white: The ‘poor-white’ problem in Barbados slave society. Immigrants & Minorities, 7(1), pp. 1–15. Bhambra, G., 2007.  Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. New York: Palgrave. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 287–318. Brander Rasmussen, B., Klinenberg, E., Nexica, I. J. and Wray, M., eds. (2001). The making and unmaking of whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cecil-Fronsman, B. (1992). Common whites: Class and culture in antebellum North Carolina. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Dick, H. P. and Wirtz, K. (2011). Racializing discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21(S1), pp. E2–E10. Douglas, M. (2003). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (1997a). ‘Bloody footprints: Reflections on growing up poor white’, in Wray, M. and Newitz, A. (eds.) White trash: Race and class in America. New York: Routledge. Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (1997b). Red dirt: Growing up Okie. New York: Verso. Eldridge, C. (2016). From empire to exile: History and memory within the pied noir and harki communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ellinghaus, K., Carey, J. and Boucher, L., eds. (2009). Re-orienting whiteness. New York: Palgrave. Forde-Jones, C. (1998). Mapping racial boundaries: Gender, race, and poor relief in Barbadian plantation society. Journal of Women’s History, 10(3), pp. 9–31. Getachew, A. (2019). Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glenn, E. N. (2015). Settler colonialism as structure: A framework for comparative studies of U.S. race and gender formation. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), pp. 52–72.

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Matt Wray and Catherine Wolfe Harkins, A. (2003). Hillbilly: A cultural history of an American icon. New York: Oxford University Press. Hartigan Jr., J. (2003). ‘Who are these white people? “Rednecks,” “hillbillies,” and “white trash” as marked racial subjects’, in Doane, A and Bonilla-Silva, E., eds. White out: The continuing significance of racism, New York: Routledge, pp. 95–111. Hartigan Jr., J. (2005). Odd tribes: Toward a cultural analysis of white people. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge. Isenberg, N. (2017). White trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America. New York: Penguin. Jones, C. (2007). Engendering whiteness: White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jordi, J. J. (2003). ‘The creation of the pied-noirs: Arrival and settlement in Marseilles, 1962’, in Smith, A., ed. Europe’s invisible migrants, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. pp. 61–74. Kindinger, E. and Schmitt, M. eds., 2019. The intersections of whiteness. New York: Routledge. Lafleur, J. (2020). The race that space makes: The power of place in the colonial formation of social categorizations. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, September, pp. 1–15. Lambert, D. (2001). Liminal figures: Poor whites, freedmen, and racial re-inscription in colonial ­Barbados. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19(3), pp. 335–350. Mathews, M. M. (1959). Of matters lexicographical. American Speech, 34(2), pp. 126–130. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York, NY: Routledge. Michel, J. B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., Pickett, J. P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J. and Pinker, S. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014), pp. 176–182. Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 449–514. Mintz, S. (1979). Review of “the ‘redlegs’ of Barbados.” The Americas, 35(3), pp. 414–416. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morgan, E. S. (1975). American slavery, American freedom: The ordeal of colonial Virginia. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Prochaska, D. (1990). Making Algeria French and unmaking French Algeria. Journal of Historical ­Sociology, 3(4), pp. 305–328. Reilly, M. C. (2019). Archaeology below the cliff: Race, class, and redlegs in Barbadian sugar society. Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press. Rice, J. D. (2014). Bacon’s rebellion in Indian country. The Journal of American History, 101(3), pp. 726–750. Roediger, D. R. (1991). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. New York: Verso. Saxton, A. (1990). The rise and fall of the white republic: Class politics and mass culture in nineteenth-century America. New York: Verso. Sheppard J. (1977). The ‘redlegs’ of Barbados: Their origins and history. Millwood, NY: K. T. O. Press. Smith, A. L. (2006). Colonial memory and postcolonial Europe: Maltese settlers in Algeria and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stoler, A. L. (2011). Colonial aphasia: Race and disabled histories in France. Public Culture, 23(1), pp. 121–156. Stoll, S. (2017). Ramp hollow: The ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang. Taylor, A. (2002). American colonies: The settling of North America. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Veracini, L. (2010). Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Wacquant, L. (1997). For an analytic of racial domination. Political Power and Social Theory, 11(1), pp. 221–234. Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology. London: Cassell. Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wray, M. and Newitz, A., eds. (1996). White trash: Race and class in America. New York, NY: Routledge.

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36 ‘YOU DIDN’T MENTION YOUR OWN IDENTITY AS A WHITE MAN’. IDEOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES OF WHITENESS Benjamin Teitlebaum Introduction It was a question-and-answer session following a colloquium presentation I gave to the Department of Anthropology at my home university in Colorado (United States). I had just delivered a paper that would later become an article (Teitelbaum 2019), describing my ethnographic research among organised white nationalists and radical nationalists. For nearly a decade, I had been observing, interviewing and even living with the people I studied so I could learn about their agendas and expressive cultures. I had conducted research in Germany and Hungary, as well as Arizona and Virginia in the United States. However, Sweden was my primary fieldwork site, and, since 2010, I had been tracing the transition of the country’s radical right from skinhead hooliganism to party politics and high-brow reactionary intellectualism. But my presentation in Colorado focused on methodology and ethics, reflecting on the ways in which I had gained and maintained access to insiders, and how my experiences had shaped my writing. Afterwards, an audience member pointed out the fact that I had not included a standard position statement in my talk. That is, I had not described my identity, how it related to those of the people I studied and, crucially, what opportunities and privileges it afforded. But the audience member was not merely asking for such a statement – they offered to help: I was a white man, and my discussion ought to have considered the ways in which my white masculinity shaped my access to and ability to study male-dominated organised racist groups. A fine point. Certainly my being a young, able-bodied man placed me closer to some of my informants’ ideals, and with that surely came rapport. And yet there was a reason I had avoided the topic while speaking. For while I stood in front of that audience as unequivocally white, I was something else to the population I studied. My relatively dark phenotype and Ashkenazi-Jewish last name were hardly markers of socially significant racial otherness in Colorado, but they were in Sweden and in the context of organised white nationalism, at large. As I explained this, the atmosphere in the room felt tense. Perhaps I was mistaken, but I imagined sirens sounding in the minds of those listening: How predictable, a white man denying his privilege. Was I self-exoticising to escape a compromising affiliation and to claim that my research opportunities had derived from my own industry and genius? DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-43

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This chapter is about transitions among regimes of whiteness. Secondarily, it is about the prospects for American ethno-centrism in understandings of global white identity and the ways in which common academic understandings of whiteness struggle to understand organised racism. My experiences allow for a small-scale comparison of whiteness in three settings: the American mainstream, the Swedish mainstream and global white nationalism. That differing conceptions of whiteness occur across these settings should come as no surprise. Inquiry into the contextual variability of white identities is, according to Twine and Gallagher, a centre piece of third-wave whiteness studies, which is distinguished by its attention to ‘the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented’ (2008, p. 5; see also Garner 2017). Notable comparative analyses of whiteness include Salter (2013), Wanhalla (2009) and Jung (2015) in post-colonial contexts; Goldberg (2006) and Dzenovska (2016) in Europe; and theoretical comparative analyses born out of interest in the intersection between race and ethnicity (Suzuki 2017). Yet despite this literature and its occasional framing as a discrete paradigm, scholars continue to observe a prevailing United States centrism in research. This appears both in the location of case studies and in explicit theorisation (Christian 2019). At times, the focus seems justified by observations of the ways that discourses on race seem globally integrated, in general (Marable 2008; Pierre 2012), and emanating from the United States, in particular (Brännström 2016; Chin et al. 2009). Nevertheless, even this literature should prohibit scholars from assuming a passive, unidirectional assimilation of American racial categories throughout the world. For as Virginia Dominguez showed in her study of early racial classification in Hawaii, local populations adjust and redefine even legally imposed racial taxonomies (1998), resulting in distinct conceptual frameworks. Indeed, the micro-level story I tell in this chapter reveals variations of racial taxonomies and intersections at the global, national and sub-national levels. The story tells of an experience of the contingent and the fleeting in whiteness, by virtue of movement (in this case, my own); thereby, it has affinities with the literature on whiteness and race in migration and globalisation (e.g. Purkayastha 2010), which Christian characterises as showing the transformation of racism: ‘as individuals and groups cross the globe and their racial positions shift; marginalized here, privileged there; white there, “othered” here’ (2019, p. 172). Theoretical consequences emerge from the fact that I am exploring movements into, on the one hand, an ethnicity with exceptional relationships with race and, on the other hand, an oppositional (rather than hegemonic) whiteness that manifests few of the qualities that scholars typically ascribe to white identity. Swedish ethnicity ought to qualify as one of many nation-based group identities that Brubaker (2009) sees as folding into the general analytical category of ‘groupness’, together with race and nationality. However, as Hübinette and Lundström (2020) notably argue, being Swedish in Sweden requires a manifestation of unparalleled, unquestionable whiteness, and thus the ethnicity represents a hyper-race ideology in disguise. Meanwhile, organised white nationalist societies maintain definitions of whiteness that are more explicitly concerned with ancestry, and thereby potentially less malleable, than others. Accordingly, this study adds to the variables that we assume can attend comparative analysis, showing both transformations in ideologies of white identity and its relationship with parallel social designations, such as ethnicity, nationality and religion.

Basically white I am a man from Colorado (United States), born in 1983 to a Swedish-American mother and an Ashkenazi-Jewish–American father. I grew intensely interested in this background as 420

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an adolescent; obsessed, I think it is fair to say, with my Swedish roots. I began to study the Swedish language and history, I learned to perform Swedish folk music and I made trips to Sweden to discover historic sites tied to my heritage, meet distant relatives and play music. At the time, I was religiously inclined towards Christianity, though this too may have been a by-product of my campaign to showcase my ethnic identity. Whether I was doing all this to find particularity in what felt like a soulless, culturally vapid world of white, middle class America, or whether I was alternately attempting to escape affiliation with Jewishness, I faced a hurdle. I did not look like a white Swede. And that was not just my opinion – it was also the conclusion of others around me. ‘You could pass for almost any ethnicity’, my best friend told me, referring to my phenotype of swarthy skin, dark hair and dark eyes. I’ve been told I look Mexican, Spanish or Turkish: ‘something else’, said a white college friend, which I took to mean something other than white. Earlier, during high school, I was occasionally bullied – always in the context of sports – for being a Jew; in one instance, I was told I should have a star put on my baseball uniform. Despite exchanges that left me uncomfortable or upset, I never really questioned my status as white. I am not alone among generations of Americans with Jewish roots in identifying this way. While seventeenth century racial discourses in Europe placed Jews in the category of non-white – comparable in some instances to the category of Black – Jews later experienced something quite different in the United States. As early as the nineteenth century, Jews understood themselves and were understood by non-Jews as constituting a racial, rather than an ethic, community – one distinct from others primarily due to ‘biology, shared ancestry, and blood’, in the words of historian Eric Goldstein. But as a race, Jews were still often seen as belonging to the wider ‘white family of races’, due as much to their European ancestry as to their economic success and affiliation with European high culture (Goldstein 2006, pp. 11–12). Correspondingly, Jews enjoyed opportunities for social integration in the United States that were unavailable in Europe, and which persisted despite occasional expressions of anti-Semitism and internal opposition to intermarriage. This legacy left many Jews feeling ‘nearly’, ‘basically’ or ‘conditionally’ white in the United States – not akin to the standard-bearers like Anglo-Saxons or, later, Scandinavians, but nonetheless numbered among the whites from the first wave of Jewish immigrants (Schraub 2019; see also Sacks 1998). As an adolescent, I may have laboured to forge a new ethnic consciousness and identity consisting of one side of my ancestry over the other, but the game was one of accentuating and de-accentuating different whitenesses. Never in the United States have I experienced myself as limited professionally or socially by my race, nor has my racial identity ever been a matter of extended conversation, aside from instances when my interest in my Swedish roots has drawn attention to it. And when I have stopped foregrounding my Jewishness socially, it has not come back on its own. Why? Because I am white, and with that comes the ability to transition in and out of markedness, according to my own initiative (Meadows 2017; Slootman 2015; Terzano 2014; Waters 1990). It is perhaps easier for me to identify my status as normative in the United States because I began experiencing an alternative in Sweden from a young age. Sweden, as other contributors to this volume explain, occupies a paradoxical position in global whiteness. It is, on the one hand, a beacon of post-racial society – one whose citizens profess anti-racism at some of the highest levels in the world and whose government is attempting to banish race as a biological and social reality by refusing to invoke it in official documents (Lundström and Hübinette 2020). On the other hand, Sweden is the birthplace of pseudoscientific race biology (Broberg and Tydén 2005; Rastas 2019) and its majority white population has been framed – at home and abroad ( Jackson 2019; Lundström 2014) – as typifying whiteness for 421

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all. People excluded from this ultra-whiteness include not only populations with origins in Asia, Africa and the Americas but also Europeans who, for political, historical, economic or phenotypical reasons, appear distinct from the Scandinavian standard, such as Eastern and Southern Europeans (Andreassen 2015; Dzenovska 2016; Lapiņa and Vertelytė 2020) and even Finns (Keskinen 2019; Leinonen 2017). Put differently, large portions of the world’s self-identified white population could find themselves on the racial outs when in Sweden, or when compared with Swedes. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that despite official discourses of colour-blindness, Swedes appear to observe and discriminate on the basis of race, implicitly (Marcińczak et al. 2015; Östh, Clark and Malmberg 2015). I experienced the exceptionalism of Swedish whiteness well before conducting research as an ethnographer. During one of my pilgrimages to the ostensible ethnic homeland as a teenager, my newly found Swedish relatives mentioned casually that I stand out in public – that my phenotype made me visible as a foreigner. Later, I heard others say that I had a ‘foreign’ look to me. It was deflating. I was in Sweden, and I had studied the country’s history, culture and language in order to place myself within it. I was there for ethnic belonging. However, the ethnicity I was courting had exceptional racial qualifications attached to it: being Swedish entailed being unquestionably white. While at first I sensed unspoken, implicit or subdued indications that I lacked a full white status, the message became loud and unequivocal when I returned to Sweden in the 2010s as an ethnographer of the radical right and white nationalism.

White nationalism Initially, my fieldwork among the Swedish radical right consisted of formal interviews and observations of public events. Later, it came to encompass more informal interactions and relationships, as is common for cultural anthropology and ethno-musicology. Expansive contact and the formation of deep relationships with insiders became distinguishing features of my work, though such access was not equally available to me in all branches and factions within the broader ‘radical right’. This was especially true among explicitly race-ideological factions. White nationalists formally fight on behalf of a global white population whose integrity, distinctiveness and power they consider besieged. But defining that population has never been a straightforward task. Racial identity among organised white nationalists is no less malleable, contingent, shifting and inconsistent than it is among other communities. This is true at the most material levels: as sociologists Ware and Back showed, in a study of body art, a white body, alone, is not sufficient to qualify a person as fully white according to white nationalist insiders – many of whom regard corporeal modification via tattoos necessary to fully belong to the movement (2002). Yet even at a more theoretical level, insiders vary in their understandings of the boundaries and centres of whiteness. Some, like Irish-American white nationalist David Lane, proclaim a primary ‘Nordish’ race, encompassing historical populations of Scandinavia and the British Isles. Ideologues following the tradition of Italian race theorist Julius Evola recognise a Nordic race stretching along a north–south axis from Scandinavia to Italy, while National Socialists see a wellspring of whiteness in Germany and Scandinavia. For these race theorists, affiliation with Scandinavia appears to be a key authenticating claim to whiteness – a trend that appears stable save for more recent interest among the Hungarian far right to find a new eastern, anti-liberal, ethno-racial community stretching from Eastern Europe into Central Asia (Akçalı and Korkut 2012). 422

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If some ethno-geographic boundaries are blurred in the white nationalist imaginary, others are not. As leading American white nationalist ideologue, Greg Johnson explains: Jews are not Europeans […] White Nationalists can debate endlessly on the relative responsibility of Jews for the perilous state of white humanity, there should be no debate on the fact that the organized Jewish community is the principal enemy – not the sole enemy, but the principal enemy – of every attempt to halt and reverse white extinction. One cannot defeat an enemy one will not name. Therefore, White Nationalism is inescapably anti-Semitic. ( Johnson 2014) Jews may have achieved whiteness in the past by occasionally identifying with dominant majority populations, but these transformations have not appreciably altered their position in organised white nationalism. Despite serving as symbols of non-whiteness in many white nationalist racial imaginaries, self-identified Jews nonetheless participate in contemporary organised white nationalism (American astrophysicist Michael Hardt is a notable contemporary example). And Jews have often served in leadership roles in the adjacent world of right-wing populism, anti-immigrant activism and paleoconservatism (e.g. the Trump administration official Stephen Miller and the conservative philosopher Paul Gottfried). Yet this participation does not necessarily signal a change in race ideology. Even prominent white nationalists open to collaboration with Jews, such as American Renaissance frontman Jared Taylor, tend to describe Jews as potential allies of whites, but seldom white, themselves (Taylor 2006). Jews’ outsider status does not always carry negative social consequences. Chang Frick, a half-Jewish, half-Romani, far-right media figure and former politician in Sweden, recalls how, as a teenager in southern Sweden, local skinheads and neo-Nazis were hostile towards him in public, but warmed to him in private settings, where it seemed commonalities in class and gender supplanted differences in race (meanwhile, other classmates would publicly proclaim their anti-racism but tell him to ‘go home to Poland’ in private; described in Norman (2018)). In my case, however, recognition of my lacking white credentials among informants could be both socially benign and otherwise. An example of the former is indicated by an informant of mine who, in writing, I refer to as ‘Mr X’. His commentary on my identity was contextualised within a broader description of a concert he attended – a concert whose primary appeal to him was the seemingly random assemblage of white Swedes in multi-racial Stockholm: I was very surprised. There was free admission, true, but I was still very surprised by ‘the turn out’. As it was, this very concert had the public attendance record. There were 6,000 people there. And there was an unbelievable, ah, it’s kind of a political term, but, feeling of a people’s community [Sw.: folkgemenskap; Grm: volksgemeinschaft]. There were 6,000. I struggled to get pictures, there were people everywhere, absolutely everywhere. […] But of those 6,000, who were really engaged in the concert – there was a lot of Swedish music – and of those 6,000 there wasn’t one, not one from Somalia. There might have been one who looked like you [referring to author]. Six thousand, and unbelievable fellowship, and enthusiasm, and people sang along at times, and it was quite telling in a way. (Interview, Mr X, 4 March 2011) With the phrase ‘looked like you’, Mr X was describing me as racially beyond the bounds of Swedishness – a visible ‘other’ – while not occupying the position of a discrete non-white, like a Somali. Similar commentary on my physical appearance emerged elsewhere in my fieldwork. In the now-defunct or deleted message boards of online far-right hubs such as 423

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Flashback.se and Nationell.nu, I frequently saw references to myself – due to either media commentary or insiders commenting on my requests for interviews – as ‘racially suspect [rassuspekt]’ and ‘kosher’. Knowledge of my physical appearance or the origins of my last name led these actors to define me as something other than obviously white (‘racially suspect’) or specifically Jewish (‘kosher’). Such commentary revealed a typology not only of racial ‘others’, but more specifically racial enemies, whereby my Jewishness made me suspicious but not explicitly hostile. Discourses that placed me and Jews in a less racially and politically ambiguous – and more plainly demonised – position appeared in sensational form on 23 March 2017. Famed American neo-Nazi Harold Covington offered this commentary when responding to a review of my first book, Lions of the North (2017), by another guest on his podcast Radio Aryan. The review focused on my interactions with the Swedish white nationalist singer Saga, whose music figured prominently in the 2011 manifesto of the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. I interviewed Saga extensively for my book and also traced her exit from white nationalist music making after Breivik’s attacks and the subsequent publicity fallout – to which I contributed. Covington’s comments centred on not only my Jewishness, but also on the need for insiders to reject contact with people like me. Though I haven’t read this book by this Jew Teitelbaum, I think I can read between the lines […] Anders Breivik does his thing in Norway […] after this happens all of a sudden it appears we’ve got this Swedish Jew, Teitelbaum, running around shouting the odds to the media, just ‘splainin’ it all to everybody. All of a sudden acting as a self-appointed public spokesman for us. Which status the media, of course, were quite ready to accord to him. And of course he made sure that Saga’s name was dragged squarely into the middle of it all, right when she was about to release her latest album. Odd how little coincidences like that just keep happening when there’s Jews around. And my guess is it wasn’t guilt – she was probably forced into silence by threats of left-wing violence. And arrests and prosecution under some hate law due to all the publicity […] I’m not clear from the review whether Saga had allowed this kike actually to talk to her or interview her in his guise as a ‘academic researcher’ or ‘author’ or ‘freelance journalist,’ or whatever excuse he was using to get close and satisfy his weird Jewish urges to hang around Nazis and racialists, and get whatever thrill he got out of having us acknowledge his wretched existence. And if so, she was very foolish to do so. And when the Breivik incident occurred he turned on her, and even if it wasn’t maliciously intended he did her harm by involving himself when and where he had no business doing so. What was a Jew doing that close to her? Why in God’s name do we let these creatures anywhere near us under any excuse? Why are we so anxious to be validated by the enemy that we let the enemy close enough to us to do harm – terrible harm as in Saga’s case it would seem? Now we’ve lost her.1 Covington’s commentary on me not only reveals that some insiders understood me as racially different from them – a racial opponent, to paraphrase Greg Johnson – but it also carries the claim that white nationalist insiders should avoid me for that reason. This warning was manifest in behaviour, as well as words. In early 2011, for example, I was studying a man from northern Sweden who went by the alias ‘Erik Alhem’ – a figure well-known for frequenting traditional Swedish folk music circles and writing about music in far-right publications. Given his visibility in Sweden’s music scene and the controversy he stirred, it felt vital for me to contact him, and so I began sending queries. He did not respond. Then I began asking for introductions from those I assumed were in his social circle. Still nothing. Finally, I arranged to cross his path at a folk music gathering. We met on the dance floor at Umeå Folk Music Festival, and I introduced myself. He nodded and then made sure to keep 424

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busy and clear of me for the rest of the night. Only by continuing in this fashion was I able to convince him to let me interview him without an audio recording device. Our conversation was strained: he refused to answer most questions, and that – along with the lack of a recording of our conversation – made the exchange of limited use for me. I resolved to focus on other informants, and commented on Alhem only to the extent that I could follow his activities in far-right publications. As the years went by, my network of informants grew and Alhem and I continued to see each other at nationalist gatherings. He became increasingly comfortable with me until, eventually, in 2013, he agreed to join me for lunch at Jensen’s Bøf hus near Stockholm’s Central Station. This was not an interview, of course, just an off-the-record conversation. But in the midst of it all I asked him why he had been so reluctant to speak with me. He turned to look at the busy street to his right, smiled and said, ‘You have an interesting last name, you know’. A Jewish last name, that is. And apparently it was this Jewishness, rather than any of my other identity features, that was the primary cause of his hesitation to engage with me. Not seeing any value in pushing back then and there against his assumptions (about me, about Jews), and striving as I often do to maintain a light air to the exchange, I pivoted to talking about my commitment to substantive research, my scepticism towards activist scholarship,2 and so on. He complimented me on those instincts, and our conversation and meal went along with a general bonhomie. We parted on good terms, and later I inquired about the potential for an interview. No response. The only justification I ever received was that one sentence, during lunch that day in Stockholm. And Alhem stands out among the many farright insiders who have rebuked my requests for interviews. He is one of the few with whom I have had a chance to seek an explanation. Given that I always solicited interviews by presenting myself as an academic and using my full name, I assume that the anti-Semitism Alhem subtly admitted to animated the responses of other insiders who declined contact with me.

Of Another Kind If white people are those who can escape ethnic and racial particularity in the eyes of each other to become unmarked individuals, those whose normative identities provide social capital to unlock interpersonal and professional opportunities, and those whose life paths are facilitated by pre-existing regimes of racial hierarchy, was I white across these settings? Phenotype, names and ancestry are not everything, of course. I possess markers of classbased privilege relative to many of my research informants. I have not only had access to higher education, but I also have economic resources (personal and institutional) to conduct extended ethnographic fieldwork away from my home. Additionally, I focus my research on immaterial and aesthetic cultural behaviour, which can signal a lack of concern with economic pursuits, born of some kind of surplus capital. The opportunities afforded by this background have not been dormant, but I have exercised them in my narration and interpretation of the lives of others in arenas of knowledge production deemed elite and authoritative. Such economic security distinguishes whites from non-whites in certain settings, enabling what Tanya Golash-Boza calls the ‘social whitening’ of otherwise tenuously white bodies (2010; see also Viveros Vigoya 2015; Weismantel 2001). Likewise, my economic resources align me with certain values and social standards – if not of the white community I have studied, then of the dominant mainstream white values of Nordic and European society. And yet it is not just potential, but actual transformation of opportunity that defines whiteness; thus, in the same breadth, I must consider alternative indicators. In moving from 425

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the United States to Sweden and then into explicitly race-ideological circles, my ancestry transitioned from being mere ‘symbolic ethnicity’ (Gans 1979) – a social curiosity, if I volunteered it – to an involuntary product of my body and name, which limited both mundane and consequential opportunities. Crucially, even as I strained to leverage aspects of myself (e.g. my language, cultural and social activities and family ties) to enter Swedish whiteness, I could not overcome other facts of my identity in certain settings and with certain people. The primacies of my body and ancestry were consistent across all of the settings I inhabited, but they differed in their expression. In the United States, Jewishness entered my identity if I wanted it to, but when I sought distance from it, I could transition away from it. In Sweden, however – and in race-ideological circles, in particular – my racial otherness was instead a foundation from which I could only make brief, strained excursions, conditionally. This was hardly enough for me to feel comfortable calling myself non-white in Sweden or among white nationalists (though the latter would seldom hesitate to categorise me as such). While I lost certain markers of whiteness travelling across the Atlantic or from the mainstream to the race-ideological underground, other markers – of institutional backing, the capital displayed as I conducted activities for limited material reward, and my ability to gaze at and define others with academic authority – I maintained. But as I ponder the ways that my experiences might have differed had I had another identity, I envision sharper contrasts had I been a woman, rather than a man. While some female journalists and ethnographers (e.g. Blee 2002; Ebner 2020) gain access to radical right-wing circles, they predominantly do so under different premises than men. Often, their access centres on white nationalist women, and, in many cases, they have to contend with ultra-conservative patriarchal ideologies that limit their ability to maintain productive journalistic and ethnographic relationships involving mutual respect and honesty. Meanwhile, a male, African American ethnographer might have struggled to gain and maintain access to white nationalists, and those struggles might have differed from those I experienced by degree, rather than kind. Being unequivocally racially ‘other’ in the eyes of potential informants (as opposed to merely ‘racially suspect’) may further limit access, especially in initial encounters. On the other hand, various far-right ideologies popularised during the late twentieth century frame Jews as the ultimate ethnic ‘other’ to true whites: doctrines such as ethnopluralism and identitarianism, emanating from the French New Right and spreading across Europe, officially condemn racial hierarchies that are the cornerstones of anti-Black agendas in the far right. Rather than racial supremacy, a right to racial difference born of a rigid separatism is the new ideal for such actors – a stance that has prompted some to celebrate Black nationalism in manifold ways – from event planning to social and professional partnerships, even to the production of white nationalist reggae. It is not uncommon for such voices, however, to find in Jews a singular embodiment of the cosmopolitan forces that oppose their vision of a segregated and siloed world. And although these ideas seldom appear in public populist rhetoric or among grassroots followers – it is far more common to hear plain Islamophobia or economic or cultural nationalism in those settings – they have considerable influence in elite, far-right circles. The ideas were developed by some of the most prominent contemporary far-right intellectuals, such as the French philosopher Alain de Benoist and the American alt-right leader Richard Spencer, and they have been embraced by ideologues supporting major populist leaders, including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro (Teitelbaum 2020). Already during the late 1990s, Hans-Georg Betz was calling ethnopluralism ‘by far the most important and influential new right concept’ (1999, p. 309); indeed, it dominated in the circles I studied in Sweden.

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Conclusion Experiences and observations such as mine align with the literature showing global whiteness to be not only transforming and dynamic, but also internally stratified and hierarchical. Someone can be white in New Jersey, Lisbon, Prague or Pretoria, but not in Oslo (and since the mid-1900s, at least, white Scandinavians have seemed unquestionably white everywhere). This account is at variance with those that casually or deliberately see worldwide integration in terms of race relations. And if scholars hesitate to characterise whiteness as graded – if they prefer depictions of consistency, rather than variation, in global regimes of racism – I wonder if activism and politics are not contributing factors. Accounts like mine (e.g. Lapiņa and Vertelytė 2020) highlight hierarchies and inconsistencies in whiteness in order to expose lack of privilege in a setting – not the opposite. These may be accounts of struggle and frustration, but they also portray social actors like myself as not having access to as much racial opportunity and resources as others. What is the appeal of doing that – of absolving some of the guilt of privilege – when whiteness studies has, as its core constitution, an activist imperative to undermine the phenomenon it investigates (Garner 2017)? Would additional demonstrations of the constructed nature of whiteness offered by such analyses serve as compensatory insights for politically engaged scholars? Consider me sceptical. And yet, it is not attention to global stratification and variation that I anticipate most conflicts with paradigms of whiteness studies, but rather attention to race ideology in organised white nationalism. Explicit counter-cultural understandings of race differ from the implicit mainstream understandings that whiteness studies and critical race theory often investigate. The common manifestation of whiteness in high social capital, social freedom and racial unmarkedness in the eyes of other whites recedes in communities that assert the importance of blood and body over other identity markers – challenging Dyer’s canonic claims that ‘true whiteness resides in the non-corporeal’ (1997, p. 45). The conception of white identity maintained in those groups – the same conception that excluded me, despite my exhibiting many white traits – may therefore not be a ‘true whiteness’, in Dyer’s sense. What matters is not how we label differing conceptions of white identity, but that we interrogate staid assumptions about the boundaries between whitenesses and recognise that patterns of inclusion and exclusion – of closure or accessibility of whiteness to those at its margins – do not follow the hierarchies of power that so often shape social analysis. If it is United States centrism that leads us to assume that the holders of whiteness in the economic and political global centre are white everywhere, and if this, in turn, feeds beliefs about an inseparable link between white identity and social capital, then more comparative study is just what is needed.

Notes 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20190712213926/https://www.radioaryan.com/2017/03/radiofree-northwest-if-they-dont-name.html. 2 I believe scholarly insight into the far right is hampered by research paradigms whose preconceived objective is to undermine the people under investigation. As I have argued (Teitelbaum 2017, 2019), while striking a relativist tone in the study of these populations can be morally and politically bankrupt, there is no place for curiosity and inquiry when the conclusions are narrowly prescribed at the research outset.

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INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aba Women’s War 327 Abbate, J. 34 abolition 304–305 abortion, right to 8 Academic Career Framework 177–178 academy 143–152, 182, 189; academia 6, 49, 142, 144–148, 151, 152, 172, 174, 179, 182, 183, 188, 210, 240, 241, 248, 308, 314, 354, 372; neoliberal 174–178 activism 3, 8, 151, 215, 327, 427; antiimmigrant 423; anti-racist 2, 141, 145, 222; feminist-inspired 40; intellectual 210, 240; intersectional 144; political 172 ADM see automated decision making (ADM) affect theory 8 Africa 15; service workers in wellness spas, earnings of 101 African 60, 99, 111, 120, 122, 123, 126, 132, 134, 142, 170, 171, 193–204, 243, 253, 254, 325, 329, 330, 385, 386, 400, 412, 414, 415 African American Policy Forum 2 African National Congress (ANC) 193, 195, 326 Agamben, G. 215, 219 aggrieved entitlement 14 AgriSA 194 Agunyai, S. C. 142, 194 Ahmed, S. 7, 8, 94, 184, 302–303, 341, 346, 347; Cultural Politics of Emotion, The 281; white anti-racism, critique of 308–309 AI see artificial intelligence (AI) Åkesson, J. 266 Alcoff, L. M. 6, 305 Alfrey, L. 50 Algeria, pied noirs in 414–415

algorithmic oppression 25, 48 Alozie, B. 327 alt-right movements 15, 233 Alves, A. R. 160 American Society for Civil Liberties 225n7 ANC see African National Congress (ANC) Andersen, M. L.: ‘Whitewashing race: A critical perspective on whiteness’ 11 Anderson, M. J. 60 Andreassen, R. 76, 107 Angeles, L. 360 Angola, anti-Roma racism in 159 Anthropologie 97 anti-Black racism 31, 171–173, 179, 184, 232, 253–256, 293n8; language of ‘equality and diversity’ and 172–173 anti-democratic mobilisations 15 anti-discrimination 142; legislation 167n1 anti-feminism 14 anti-gender: anti-genderism 14; politics 14 anti-homosexual propaganda law 263n4 anti-Muslim: agitation 232; racism 2 anti-racism 1, 3, 146, 179, 187, 313, 317 anti-racist pedagogy 179 anti-Roma racism: academic research of 159–161; historical background of 159–161; institutionalisation of 164–166; school segregation 161–162, 165–166; structural disadvantage of 159–161 anti-Semitism 5, 421 anti-terror policies 2 anti-vaxxers 233 Anzaldúa, G. E.: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 7; This Bridge Called My Back 7

431

Index apartheid 144, 230, 328, 329; economic 142, 195; effect on white supremacy 142; effects on white-Black South Africans relations, problematizing 196–198; of knowledge 147, 151; policy 193–205; struggle 325; textual 96 Aphrodite Kallipygos 131 Aramyan, A. 261n6 Araújo, M. 142, 168n13 Arday, J. 142 artificial intelligence (AI) 26, 44–55; trustworthy, development of 53–55 artificialisation of whiteness 44–55, 47; inequality, design of 50–51; theorising 45–48; white guy problem 48–49; white privilege, institutionalisation of 51–53; white privilege, representation of 53; workplace culture 49–50 ARTs see assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) Asia 15; service workers in wellness spas, earnings of 101 Asian Americans 5, 8, 30, 33, 39, 41, 48, 76, 93, 105, 107–110, 115 assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) 105–115 Atlantic 109, 123, 131, 134, 426 Auslander, L. 120 Australia 2, 15, 339; ‘White Australia’ policy 230 Austrian Science Fund 261n1 authoritarianism 175 autoethnography 174 automated decision making (ADM) 44, 45, 47, 50–54 Back, L. 422 backpacker enclaves 83 backpacking, whiteness of 79, 82–83 Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) 410 Badenoch, K. 3 Baker, C. 399–401 Baker, E. J. 33 Balakrishan, G. 225n3 Baldry, C. 46–47 Baldwin, J. 1, 9, 228, 242, 293n8, 303 Balibar, E. 216, 217, 221, 225n12 Bannon, S. 233 Barbados, ‘redlegs’ of 412–413 Barr, W. 212 being at home 302–303 belabored self 91 Belgium 5 Bell, A. V. 108 Benjamin, R. 107 Bergmann, W. 60 Berlant, L. 94 Bernier, F. 4 Berryman, W. 129

Best, A. L. 345 Bewick, T. 126; Fable of the Blackamoor 126 Bhambra, G. 12, 272 Bhattacharyya, G.: Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival 243 Bhuiyan, J. 32–33 Biden, J. 15, 213 Big State Alumni (BSA) 59, 66, 68 Big Tech 47 Biko, S. 325 biogenetic 76, 115 bio-morality 92 biopolitics of disposability 271 Bio-Tchane, A. 199 Black: feminism 7–9, 240; feminists 7–9, 141, 142, 171, 179, 182, 189, 242; identity, in South Africa 202–204; Latinx 26, 27, 64, 284; Marxism 240; masculinity 1, 8; nationalism 426; resistance 173–174, 179, 180; servitude 81; underclass 141, 142, 170–180 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 1–4, 11, 16, 16n1, 156, 170–171, 191, 210, 212, 215, 235, 251–261; white supremacy in 173–174, 178, 179, 231 Blackness 1, 189; pre-date slavery 171 BLM see Black Lives Matters (BLM) blood purity 110 Blumenbach, J. F. 4 Boatc! 401 Boatcă, M. 400 bodies: bodied oppression 323; body schema 282, 303, 305; of value, in academic life 182–191 Bolsonaro, J. 14, 15, 426 bonding capital 34 Bonilla-Silva, E. 6, 12, 231, 234, 242, 315, 371; ‘Latin Americanization thesis’ 236 Bonnett, A. 6 (b)ordering: in global capitalism, racial project of 267–268; in heteropatriarchal nation 272– 274; as management of wealth accumulation in racial capitalism 270–272; practice, welfare chauvinism as 268–270 Boucher, L. 407 Bourne, J. 159, 167 Boyd, D. 111 Boyer, E. 131 Brazil: anti-Roma racism 159, 160; racial politics in 296; white supremacy in 10 Breen, D. 46 Brigham, C. C. 5 British Empire 217, 324 Britzman, D. 146 Broussard, M. 47 Brown, K. M. 126 Brubaker, R. 420 BSA see Big State Alumni (BSA)

432

Index Bumble 355 bureaucratisation 175 ‘business-as-usual’ racism 45–46 Butler, P. 1 Cameroon 194 ‘CAMPS consensus,’ in race theory 297 Canada 339, 343 Cape Verde: anti-Roma racism 159 capital: accumulation 272; bonding 34; cultural 147, 151, 180, 337, 340, 347, 377; geek 27–41; human 29; monopoly 324; social 41n1, 354; symbolic 39 capitalism: racial 209, 243, 266, 275; surveillance 48 capitalist exploitation 268 Carey, J. 407 Caribbean: Creolisation 243; whiteness studies in 10 Carillon Wellness Resort, Miami 98 caring racism 244 Carmichael, S. 156–158; Black Power: The Politics of Liberation 156 Carroll, H. 14 Castagno, A. E. 345 caste 34, 171, 407; discrimination 36; hierarchies 29, 30, 189; merit 29; privilege 30; system 25, 28, 33 Castro, A. 160 Central Europe: anti-genderism 14 Chang, E.: Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley 27 Charles I 224, 324 Cheng, A. A. 6, 316 childhood friends, as geek capital 38–40 China: wellness industry 90 chokehold 1 Chomsky, N. 212 Chou, T. 33 Christian, M. 229, 236n1 Christie, P. 329–330 Christou, A. 398 Chua, A. 195 cisgenderism 337, 339, 340, 342, 346–348 civic nationalism 230 civilisation 4, 82; white 210 civilising mission 85 civil society 99, 209, 212–216, 218, 221, 223, 224, 247, 256, 258, 267, 313 Clark, N. 200 class: classist 26, 55, 406; middle 12, 13, 25, 34, 38, 39, 41, 45, 51, 53, 83, 84, 90, 92, 100, 126, 151, 177, 236, 272, 309, 315, 341, 352, 353, 355–357, 370, 393, 421; in Philippines 353–355; polarisation 246; segregation 161; social 357–358; status 33, 37, 39, 356; stratification 354; structures 209

clock time 59–62, 69–70, 69; perceived time versus 70 CLS see critical legal studies (CLS) Coalition Against Biopiracy 99 Coates, T.-N. 1 Coelho, A. F. 159 cogito ergo sum 241 cognition 288–289 Collins, P. H. 1, 6; Black Feminist Thought 8 colonialism/colonisation/coloniality 210, 228, 229, 240, 243–245, 395–402; continuity, in tourism 78–86; destitute 323; European 4; (hetero)patriarchal masculinity, resisting 325–326; innocence 395; internal 245–246; and margins 398; mentality, in Philippines 352–353; nostalgia 81; and racial innocence 399–400; settler 209; white settler 406–417 colour, question of 121–123, 122 colour-blindness 11, 231, 235, 282, 309; critique of 12–14 ‘Combahee River Collective statement’ 8 commercial multiculturalism 173 commodity 97, 105, 106, 108, 110, 113, 116, 134, 244, 245; culture 100; politicised 77, 135; reproductive 76 communism 217 COMPAS see Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) complicit white females (CWF) 177–178 compulsory able bodied-ness 95 Connell, R. W. 324 Connolly, W. 213 ‘CONPLAN 3501’ 214 ‘CONPLAN 3502’ 214, 222 conservative multiculturalism 173 consumer 76, 82, 83, 100, 107–115, 134, 243; culture 82; demand 108; market 81 consumerism 93, 99 consumption: of human gametes 105, 107; of race 75–77 Cook, N. 194, 200 Core Wellness Center, New Jersey 98 Cornell, J. 282 corporate multiculturalism 173 Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) 52 cosmopolitan 76, 89–91, 101, 102, 338, 350, 352–358, 360, 361, 368, 370, 377, 426 cosmopolitanism 90, 91, 338, 350–361, 367; in Philippines 353–355; white 354, 361 Costa Rica: cultural fantasy of 81 Council of Europe: ‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’ 245 counter-narrative 115, 141, 149; as form of antiracist resistance 150–151 Covington, H.: Lions of the North 424

433

Index CPRH see critical phenomenology of racial habit (CPRH) craniometry 4 Crawford, K. 48 cream 425–426 creative proletarian forces 217 Crenshaw, K. 2, 6; on intersectionality 7 Creolisation 243 crisis of whiteness 209–210 critical ethnography 174 critical legal studies (CLS) 150 critical phenomenology 285–287 critical phenomenology of racial habit (CPRH) 295, 299–302, 304, 305 critical race studies 3; birth of 6; future directions and questions 15–16; history of 4–6 critical race theory (CRT) 1–2, 6, 8, 9, 16, 45, 46, 55, 141, 144, 150, 151, 196, 204, 241, 244, 247, 321; backlashes and attacks on 2–3; and decolonial attitude 322–323; racial identity level of 200–202; socio-economic level of 199– 200; in white supremacy and marginalized Blacks in South Africa, mapping 198 critical racialism 296–297 critical whiteness studies (CWS) 10, 45, 46, 55, 78; critique of critical in 11–12 critical whiteness theory 76 CRT see critical race theory (CRT) Cryos International 105, 107, 111–115, 116n1 culture: commodity 100; cultural capital 147, 151, 180, 337, 340, 347, 377; cultural diversity 260; cultural genocide 5; cultural hierarchisation 324; cultural oppression 324; material 120; neoliberal academic 177; in Philippines 353–355; wellness 76, 91, 99–100; white institutional 190; workplace 49–50 Cvetkovic, A. 93 CWF see complicit white females (CWF) CWS see critical whiteness studies (CWS) Cyril, M. D. 51 Dashieva, A. 259–261 Data Trusts 54 dating, in Metro Manila 350–361; being mahinhin and being ‘liberated,’mediating between 358–358; English and 357–358; Filipino women and foreign men 350–352; methodology 355–356; racial tensions with foreign men, navigating 359–361; sexuality and 357–358; social class and 357–358 Daughters Of Patriots (DOP) 59, 61, 65, 66 Davis, A. 8, 93, 326 Dean, S. 32–33 decolonisation/decoloniality 189–191, 253, 313, 321–331; critical race theory and 322–323; decolonial thought 142, 330; racism and 396–398

‘Decolonising our Curriculum’ campaign 145 dehumanisation 171, 172, 267–268, 324, 329 Delgado Bernal, D. 144–147 denial of racism 235, 241–242 Denmark: CRT, backlashes and attacks on 3; far-right parties in 265, 266 Deomampo, D. 76, 113 Derrida, J. 186 de Sousa Santos, B. 241 Dewey, J. 297–300 DHA see discourse-historical approach (DHA) DiAngelo, R. 149, 303 Dickey, M. R. 32 Directive on Racial Equality 158 direct violence 282, 326 disconnect 94–96 discourse-historical approach (DHA) 252–253 discrimination 8, 29, 49, 149; caste 36; forms of 27, 231; gender 172; housing 378; indirect 159, 166; intersectional approach to 7; pregnancy 27, 31; racial 12, 31, 51, 147, 150, 151, 157, 159, 164, 166, 172, 198, 201; Roma 161; wage 27, 31 displacement 231 dispossession 228, 268 diversity 191, 231; cultural 260; ethnic 414; gender 340, 341; neoliberal 173, 175, 178– 179; super-diversity 282; workplace 48–49 Doane, A. W. 13, 210, 228 Domestic Operations Law Handbook 222 domestic terror 212, 213 dominant: dominance/domination 145–147, 231; systems 282 donor siblings 107 DOP see Daughters Of Patriots (DOP) dos Santos Soares, M. A. 396 double-consciousness 9 double turn 341, 346, 347 dress 77, 120, 121; material racial hierarchies in 131–134, 132–134 Du Bois, W. E. B. 1, 9, 233, 253, 296, 299, 315; on wages of whiteness 10 Dunbar-Ortiz, R. 407 DuPlessis, R. 123 dwelling 302–303 Dyer, R. 6, 10, 11, 96, 369, 427 Dzenovska, D. 400, 420 Eastern Europe: anti-genderism 14 Eat, Pray, Love 89 economic: imperialism 217; inequality 247; nationalism 232 ECRI see European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) Edsvik, E. 399 EEOC see Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) egalitarianism 151

434

Index egg donation 107 Ellinghaus, K. 407 Ellison, R. 9 Elsrud, T. 82 embodied interaction 282, 305 embodiment 298 emotions 281–282 empowerment, in heteropatriarchal nation 272–274 enclave tourism 79, 81, 85 enemy, new kind of 221–225 energy flows 98–99 Eng, D. 93; Racial Castration 8 enslavement 184, 228, 229 epistemic: authority 241; injustice 241; justice, theories of 241; racism 241; violence 282, 326 epistemicide 241 epistemological oppression 323 epistemological racism 178 epistemology of ignorance 281 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) 32, 36 equality 179, 329; gender 14, 176, 246–247, 274, 275, 313, 316; neoliberal 173, 175; race 178 equity 173, 179, 180, 191; racial 178–179 erasure of history 97 eroticism 82, 83, 85, 132 Essed, P. 6 esthetic quality 300 ethnicity 71n3, 341, 343–345; ethnic diversity 414; ethnic identity 381; ethnic tourism 79, 83, 85; ethno-centrism 347, 420; ethnopluralism 426; symbolic 426; white 11 Eubanks, V. 51–52; Automating Inequality 25 eugenics 13, 111; in ‘people’s home’ 311–312 EU-MIDIS II survey 162 Europe 2, 15, 253; anti-Black racism 171; attention to local experiences 400–401; colour-blindness in 12; Creolisation 243; Eurocentric 86, 142, 145–147, 151, 156, 172, 180, 218, 242, 329, 397; European whiteness 4; racial formation in 240; and shifting margins 401–402; white supremacy in 10 European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) 162 Europeanness 159, 395 European Union 159 Euroscepticism 232 evangelism 151 everyday racism 6 exclusion 49, 50, 172, 195, 203, 229 exclusionary racism 247, 272 exoticism 83, 97, 101 exploitative racism 245, 247 expropriation 268, 270 extermination: cultural 312; linguistic 312 extremism 216

Facebook: ‘Close the borders’ 274–275; ‘Diversity Report’ 35; racial demographics of employees 36; structural racism in 35; workforce by race 35 facial analysis tools 52 facile transnational literacy 97 faculty regime 141, 142, 175, 177, 178 Fanon, F. 1, 8, 189, 270, 303, 305, 326; Black Skin, White Masks 9 FAOE see frequent ally–occasional enemy (FAOE) Farage, N. 233 far-right 12, 47, 209, 210, 233, 265–274, 308, 423–426 fashion 76–77, 120–135 fashioning race 130–131 Feagin, J. 6 Feke, R. 127 female celebrity humanitarianism 84 femininity: in Japan 371–373; white 15, 76, 89, 90, 99–101, 101; white border guard 274, 275 feminism: Black 7–9, 240; post-colonial 9; white 317 Feminist Coalition 327 Fernandez, M. 29–30 Finland: far-right parties in 265 Finn, M. 128 folkhemmet 311, 312, 316 Fonda, J. 89 forced territorial mobilisation 160 foreignness 371–373 Foucault, M. 48, 224, 225 France 2, 5, 314; colour-blindness in 12; CRT, backlashes and attacks on 3; Islamo-leftism 3; pied noirs in 414–415 Franco, M. 242 FRA see Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) Frankenberg, R. 6, 147, 203; White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness 9 Frankenburg, R. 344 freedom 189–191 Free People 97 free school choice 157 frequent ally–occasional enemy (FAOE) 176, 177 Frey, W. H. 14 Frick, C. 423 Frohlick, S.: Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel 81 Frye, M. 6, 302 Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) 161, 162 future 228–237 Gabriel, D. 141–142 Gabriel, J. 233 Gaddis, M. S. 71n3 gaijin 380, 383, 384, 387

435

Index Gallagher, C. 9–12, 228, 364 Galtung, J. 326 gametes, global market for 107–108; conflation of race, ethnicity and genetics in 113–114 ‘GARDEN PLOT’ 214, 222, 223 Garner, S. 11, 369–370, 402 Garza, A. 173 gay propaganda law 263n4 Gebru, T. 49, 52 Gee, B. 48–49 geek capital 34–35; childhood friends as 38–40; parents and siblings as form of 37–38 gender 7–9; discrimination 172; diversity 340, 341; education 124; equality 14, 176, 246–247, 274, 275, 313, 316; inequality, in Silicon Valley 31–34; oppression 323; politicisation of 14; race and 183–185; and racial formation 242–243; studies 3 General Data Protection Regulation 54 genes, history and imaginaries of 114–115 genocidal persecution 160 genocide 228, 245, 296, 397; cultural 5 gentrification 90 Germany: colour-blindness in 12; state formation processes in 160; ‘Why is My Curriculum White’ campaign 2, 145, 172; ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black’ campaign 2, 145, 172 Gilroy, P. 6, 186, 316 Giroux, H. 175 glass walls 37 Glenn, E. N. 416 Glissant, E. 190 Global North: decoloniality in 397; and Global South, relationship between 401; maintenance of wealth in 268, 275; racialised labour, creation of 265; wellness industry 91; white femininity in 99, 101 Global South: and Global North, relationship between 401; low-wage workers, immobilisation of 265; wellness/luxury health tourism and dispossession in 100; white femininity in 76 Global War on Terror 214 global white nationalism 394, 420 glow 96–97, 96 Godovannaya, M. 261n1 Golash-Boza, T. 425 Goldberg, D. T. 6, 420 Gomes, S. 161 Google: 2020 ‘Diversity Report’ 32; racial demographics of employees 36; workforce by race 31, 35 Goop 97, 98 Gordon, L. 188–189 Gottfried, P. 423

governance 26, 45, 48, 51, 53–55, 160, 167, 193–195, 200, 204, 411 governmentality 45 Grosfoguel, R. 241, 398 Gunaratnam, Y. 60 Gunew, S. 343, 344 Gusich, G. 287–289 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E.: Creolizing Europe 243 Gutnikova, A. 261n6 Gypsiology 160 habit: body 300; definition of 297; racial 281– 282, 295–306; white 284–293, 301–305 habituation 298 hāfu 379–380, 382–387 Hage, G. 6 Hakluyt, R. 410 Hall, C. 120, 134 Hall, S. 6, 244, 296, 324, 337; theory of ‘multiculturalism’ 173 Hall, W. 54 Hamilton, C. 156–158; Black Power: The Politics of Liberation 156 Hamilton, J. A. 76, 113 Han, S. 93 Hanchard, M. 60 Hansen, L. 54–55 harassment 49 Hardimon, M. O. 6 Hardt, M. 423 Harkins, A. 412 Harris, C. 9 Harrison, F. 398 Hartigan Jr., J. 412 hate speech 185–189 HE see higher education (HE) Hebron, B. 80 Hegel, G. W. F. 60 hegemonic masculinity 393 hegemonic whiteness 12, 13, 234, 308–318 Helleiner, J. 160 Henry, F. 145 Hesse, B. 158 heteropatriarchal nation, (b)ordering and empowerment in 272–274 heteropatriarchal structures 210, 266 heteropatriarchy 243 hetero-sexism 325 heterosexuality 81, 273 hierarchisation: cultural 324; patriarchal 324; racial 324 higher education (HE) 145, 147, 151; anti-Black racism 171–172; Black underclass in 170–180, 175; racial inequality in 174–175 Hill, M. 225n8, 225n10 Ho, S. 49 Hobbes, T. 219

436

Index Hochschild, A. 100–101 Hof, H. 368, 372, 373 Holland, P. 187 homogenisation 312 homophobia 325 Hong Kong: wellness industry 90 hooks, b. 1, 6, 8, 75; Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism 7; Race and Representations 100 HoSang, D.: Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century 243 Hübinette, T. 12–13, 420 Hughey, M. 26 Hull, G. T.: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave 7 human capital 29 humanity 217 Human Rights Watch 252 Hunter, S.: Handbook on Critical Studies in Whiteness 11 hyper-surveillance 172 hyper-whiteness 4 IBM 52 identity 337–338; politics 231 ideology 25, 29, 33, 34, 46, 47, 75, 76, 78, 89, 112, 142, 171, 172, 196, 210, 216, 217, 221, 224, 228, 232, 233, 235, 242, 252, 300, 304, 315, 316, 321–326, 328, 337, 339, 346, 347, 416, 423, 426; anti-racist 309; anti-tourist 82; apartheid 195; boundaries 419–427; colonial 230, 241, 351; of colour-blindness 11, 13, 310; commitments 16; content 90; determinist 110; far-right 273; gender 324; hyper-race 420; investment 106; neoliberal 173, 174; political 282, 302; racial 14, 59, 145, 197, 230, 231, 234; racist 185, 253, 406; structure 90; welfare chauvinist 266, 269; western 204 imagined time 59, 61, 64–67; racial proxy versus 65 imperialism 210, 240, 244–245, 399; economic 217 imperial whiteness 127–130 inclusion 50, 191, 229, 231, 247 income inequality 31, 194 India: anti-Black racism 171; Mandal Commission 29–30; meritocracy, myth of 29–30; wellness industry 90; wellness resorts 98, 100 Indian Institutes of Technology 34 indigenization 205n1 indigenous knowledge 76, 100, 102 indirect discrimination 159 individuation 94, 95 Indonesia: wellness resorts 98, 100

inequality 27–28, 149, 160; cycles of 143–145; design of 50–51; economic 247; gender 31–34; income 31, 194; racial 31–34, 174–175, 199, 231; systemic 93 inferiority 142, 204, 377, 378, 398 infertility 109 Inikori, J. 134–135 injustice: epistemic 241 Institute of Race Relations 194 institutional misogynoir 185, 186, 190 institutional racism 9, 155–168, 186, 256; context of 156–159; definition of 157; as happenstance 162–164 institutional review board (IRB) 71n2 institutions 141–142 insurgent body 326–328 interlocking matrix 282 internal colonialism 245–246 International Monetary Fund 229 international tourism 75, 78 intersection 5, 7, 45, 46, 48, 60, 71, 75, 91, 105–109, 185–191, 243, 251, 252, 257, 369, 395, 420; intersectionality 2, 3, 6–9, 52, 243, 341, 342, 347; intersectional justice 26 invisibility 172, 173, 187, 188, 202, 217, 303, 306n8, 366–369 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) 109, 110, 113 IRB see institutional review board (IRB) Isenberg, N. 410 Islamo-leftism 3 IVF see in vitro fertilisation (IVF) Japan 236; asserting and being ascribed as racially white 383–384; complicated relationships 365–366; femininity in 371–373; foreignness in 371–373; in/visibility, paradox of 366–369; nihonjin ( Japaneseness) 338, 376, 377; normative representations of whiteness 365–366; passing as Japanese, privilege and cost of 381–383; race in 377–379; racial hierarchy, internalising and interrogating 384–386; racial whiteness, in mixed Japanese people 376–387, 380; “respectable” professors 370–371; third-wave whiteness, intersectional perspectives on 369–370; “trailing spouses,” precarity of 370–371; white European migrants in 338, 364–374; whiteness in 338, 365–366, 376–387 Jas Medical and Wellness Center 98 Jeffers, C. 296 Jenrbekova, R. 261n1 Jim Crow laws 8 Jim Crow racial order 234 jinshu 378 Johnson, B. 3 Johnson, G. 423, 424 Jolie, A. 84, 89

437

Index Jordi, J. J. 414 Jung, M.-K. 420 justice: epistemic 241; intersectional 26; of law 217; racial 2, 16, 292; social 173, 180, 183, 240, 313

Loyal Order of Benevolent Americans (LOBA) 59, 61, 65–66 Lundborg, H. 312 Lundström, C. 12–13, 420 luxury, white spaces of 80–81

Karake, M. 34 Kendi, I. X. 179 Keskinen, S. 210 Khan-Cullors, P. 173 Kidman, N. 89 Kimmel, M. 14 Kneese, T. 93 knowledge production 2, 16, 174, 178, 210, 240, 241, 248, 396, 397, 401, 425 Kofoed-Hansen, L. 112 Ku Klux Klan 233 Kundnani, A. 265

McClintock, A. 98, 120, 121, 415 McGeever, B. 12, 272 McIlwee, J. 38 McIntosh, E. 126 McIntosh, P. 6 McKinney, C. 329–330 Macpherson Report 157, 159 Macron, E. 3 McRuer, R. 95 Madonna 84 Madura, L. 281–282 Maeso, S. 161 Mahadeo, R. 60 mail-order brides 338, 350 Maldonado-Torres, N. 322, 323 Malherbe, N. 282 Manila 338, 350–361 Manizha 257–259, 261n3, 261n7 Mao Zedong 217, 224 Marcos administration (1965–1986) 350–351 marginal 224, 393, 400–402, 406–417 marginalisation 147, 172, 231, 273; of blackness 132 market 61, 80–82, 96, 98, 99, 110, 350, 368; commercial 76; food 90; gamete 105–109, 112–115; imperial 121; labour 46, 106, 246, 247, 265, 271, 315, 370, 371, 412, 413; marriage 351; raced 272; tourism 82, 83; value 76, 115, 178 Marx, K. 267, 300 masculinity: Black 1, 8; colonial histories of 323–325; hegemonic 393; hetero-patriarchal 325–326; patriarchal 282; trans 340–348; white 14–15, 82, 316 masses versus people 216–221 ‘mass-minority’ condition 214 material: culture 77, 120, 128, 135; history 77, 135; inequality 141; materialistic theory of race 83; racial hierarchies, in dress 131–134, 132–134; whiteness 130 Mathews, M. M. 411 Mattsson, K. 75, 78; Touristic Whiteness and the Desire for the Other 83 MAYEP see Mississippi-Alabama Young Educated Professionals (MAYEP) Mbeki, T. 194 Mbembe, A. 215 Medina, J. 241 meditation 93 Meer, N. 46 Megvii 52

Lacy, K. 33 Laforteza, E.: Somatechnics of Whiteness and Race: Colonialism and Mestiza Privilege, The 353 Lane, D. 422 La Raza 218 Latin America 2, 15; Creolisation 243; decoloniality in 397; service workers in wellness spas, earnings of 101; whiteness studies in 10 laundering 123–126, 135 ‘Leave’ campaign 12 Leefy Organics 99 legal pluralism 217 legal positivism 218, 219 legitimate knowledge 144, 146, 147 Lemire, B. 76–77 Lenin, V. 217, 224 Leonard, P. 26 Le Pen, M. 233 Letras Nómadas (‘Nomadic Letters’) 161 Levine-Rasky, C. 374n4 liberal democracy 3, 209, 212, 225n3 liberalism 209, 213; classical 213–214, 217, 224, 225; crisis of 219; white racial 142, 182, 186 liberal multiculturalism 173 liberal pluralism 218 Ligon, R. 122 Linen 122–124, 122 Linnaeus, C. von 311; Systema naturae 4 Lipsitz, G. 315, 340 LOBA see Loyal Order of Benevolent Americans (LOBA) Locke, J. 60 Loftsdottir, K. 393 López, A. J. 13 López, I. H. 9 Lorde, A. 1, 6–8, 93; Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches 7

438

Index Meiners, C. 4 mental health 141 meritocracy: myth of 29–30; neoliberal 183 Merleau-Ponty, M. 282, 297–300 Metelkin, V. 261n6 Metropolitan Manila (‘Metro’ Manila), dating in 350–361; being mahinhin and being ‘liberated,’ mediating between 357–358; English and 357–358; Filipino women and foreign men 350–352; methodology 355–356; racial tensions with foreign men, navigating 359–361; sexuality and 357–358; social class and 357–358 Michaeli, I. 93 Microsoft 52 migrantism 252 migration 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 48, 160, 209, 240, 245, 314, 364, 369, 370, 373, 414, 420; asylum 266, 273; crisis of 246; forced 412; global 231; management of 272; marriage 338, 350; migrant threat, construction of 245–246; patterns 366; studies 3 military-industrialised-academic complex 175 Miller, S. 423 Mills, C. W. 6, 60, 70–71, 71n1, 187, 234, 235, 281, 290 mindfulness 93 Mintz, S. 412 minzoku 378 Misanin, J. 60 misogynoir: institutional 185, 186, 190; racismmisogynoir 182 Mississippi-Alabama Young Educated Professionals (MAYEP) 59, 61, 65, 68 mnemonic community 60 mobilisation 231, 247; forced territorial 160; informal 229 mobility 268, 299, 354, 355, 361, 367; horizontal 37; infrastructures 44; of labour, transnational 76, 120; social 233; upward 28, 37, 236n1 Moraga, C.: This Bridge Called My Back 7 Moreton-Robinson, A. 340, 345, 407 Morrison, T. 1 Mostafanezhad, M. 84 movements: alt-right 15, 233; Fallist 325; Rhodes Must Fall 2; Tea Party/‘Trumpist’ 232 mperialism 120 Mueller, J. 235 Mulinari, D. 210, 272 Mullen, M. 215 multiculturalism 90, 146, 309; commercial 173; conservative 173; corporate 173; crisis of 14; liberal 173; theory of 173 Munt, S. 187 Myers-Lipton, S. 31 myth: of meritocracy 29–30; of racism-free nation 209

Nagel, J. 324 Nakamura, L. 111 national: identity 210, 223, 224, 228, 229, 252, 266, 269, 314, 365, 366, 400, 414; origin 26, 33, 37, 40 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 218, 225n9 nationalism/nationalization 205n1, 210; civic 230; economic 232; racialised 209; whiteness and 228–230 National Study on the Roma Communities 160 Native Americans 4, 26, 27, 32, 60, 97, 112, 229, 411 NATO 314 naturalisation 231 Navalny, A. 256, 261n6 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 323 necropolitics 8, 215 Neergaard, A. 210, 272 Nelson, C. 130 neo-classicalism 121 neo-colonial economic order 6 neo-eugenics 110 neoliberal 91, 93, 95, 97, 107, 108, 115, 116, 165, 172, 173, 185, 234, 247, 265, 272; academic culture 177; academy, social closure and white privilege in 174–178; cultural logics 90; meritocracy 183; neoliberalism 76, 91, 92, 94, 115, 179, 265, 270; policies 2, 16 Netherlands, the 5, 314; metropoles, colonising 229; white settler colonialism 406 new white nationalism, rise of 231–233 ‘new woman,’ production of 98 Ngo, H. 305 Nigeria 194; decoloniality 326–328; naked female protesters in 282 Nixon, R.: ‘Southern strategy’ 232 Noble, S. 25, 47, 48, 53 non-binary peoples 340–348 non-critical self-care 93–94 non-discrimination 329 norm 6, 7, 11, 54, 65, 75, 78, 122, 130, 147, 186, 190, 191, 213, 216, 217, 219, 281, 285, 286, 292, 304, 313, 324, 326, 381–383, 393, 413; beauty 365; cultural 107, 110, 120, 322, 378; social 47, 50, 214, 340; socio-cultural 328 normative whiteness 143–152; dominance 145–147; power 145–147; privilege 145–147 normativity 303–304 North America 317; wellness industry 91 North Atlantic West: white femininity in 76, 100–102 Norway: far-right parties in 265; Nordic 2, 4, 5, 210, 240, 241, 243, 246, 265–267, 269–272, 274, 308, 310, 311, 393, 395, 399–402, 422, 425; racial politics in 296 Nowak, M. 199

439

Index OAFE see occasional ally–frequent enemy (OAFE) Obama, B. 236 objectification 172 occasional ally–frequent enemy (OAFE) 176, 177 Offender Assessment System 52 Ojakorotu, V. 142 Omi, M. 106; Racial Formation in the United States 242, 243 O’Neil, C. 51, 52 ontological expansiveness 304 ontological tendency 93 ontology 287–288 Onwughalu, V. C. 142 oppression 3, 94, 147, 149, 195, 203, 231, 236, 260, 305, 325; algorithmic 25, 48; bodied 323; classed 323; cultural 324; epistemological 323; inintersectional approach to 7; racial 149, 151, 152, 156, 174, 234, 296, 322, 323, 324, 381 Opré Chavalé (‘Rise Up, Roma Youth’) 161 Orbán, V. 14 Orientalism 160 Orwell, G. 25 Osei-Kofi 177, 178 Oso, L. 398 othering/otherness: boundary against 246–247; racial 8, 13, 80, 83–85, 184–186, 188, 230, 253, 268, 270, 273, 365, 367; sexual 273 overt racism 235 Owen, D. 79 PA see passive ally (PA) Painter, N. I. 135 Palmer, E. I. 126 Paltrow, G. 92; Goop 97, 98 Pan-African Conference 322, 326 Pao, E. 29, 33 parents, as form of geek capital 37–38 passive ally (PA) 176 patriarchal masculinity 282 patriarchy 273 payback 178–179 Peck, D. 48–49 people of colour 15, 16, 26, 59, 66, 68, 69, 71, 94, 122, 143, 144, 146–152, 170, 172, 190, 202, 251, 253, 281, 285, 286, 290–293, 316, 317, 331n1, 342, 406 perceived time 61, 67–69; clock time versus 70; racial proxy versus 67 Pesenti J. 54 Philippines: class and culture in 353–355; colonial mentality and whiteness in 352–353; cosmopolitanism in 353–355; dating, in Metro Manila 350–361; travels abroad 356–357; women’s careers in 356–357 Pitt, A. 146

Plataforma Portuguesa para os Direitos das Mulheres (‘Portuguese Platform for Women’s Rights’) 161 police violence 285 politics: anti-gender 14; biopolitics of disposability 271; identity 231; necropolitics 8, 215; political complacency 92–93; political constructionism 296; political economy 81, 210, 242, 245, 247, 267, 322; racial 296; theory of 224–225; of white defensiveness 230–231; white identity 5, 12 Portugal: institutional racism in 156; school segregation in 161, 162; segregation, legitimating 164 post-colonial 6, 15, 46, 229, 247, 317, 400–401, 420; city 350–361; feminism 9, 210, 240, 241, 243, 396; luxury 80; melancholy 316; order 313; studies 3, 407; theory 3; tourism 75, 78 postwar racial liberalism 306n5 power 145–147, 150–151; relations 197 Pratt, M. L. 96 PredPol 52 pregnancy: trans 341 pregnancy discrimination 27, 31 prejudice 5, 167; racial 157; unwitting 158 Pretoria High School for Girls 329, 330 primitivism 83 privilege 145–147, 203, 228; racial 7, 8, 27, 232, 316, 317, 377, 387; white 12, 14, 27, 48, 51–53, 146, 174–178, 190, 242, 322 Project Include 33 prostitution industries 351 protest 2, 46, 49, 97, 142, 156, 159, 170, 174, 193, 198, 201, 212–215, 222, 223, 228, 231, 233, 251, 254–256, 261, 282, 284, 308, 321, 326–328, 330 pseudo-scientists 17n3 purification detox programmes 98 Putin, V. 14, 426 QAnon 233 queer 2, 14, 16, 29, 40, 210, 240, 242–243, 257, 348 Quijano, A. 395–397, 401 Quiroga, S. S. 108 race 3, 8–10, 25, 47, 71n3; in American egg donation, purchase of 108–110; caring 244; classical 230; consumption of 75–78; critical race see critical race studies; critical race theory (CRT); denial of 235, 241–242; equality 178; ethos of 120; everyday 6; exclusionary 247, 272; exploitative 245, 247; fashioning 130–131; history and imaginaries of 114–115; markets 272; materialistic theory of 83; menu 111; overt 235; pervasiveness of 148; post-race 142, 182, 187–188;

440

Index race-theoretic analysis 282–305; relations 78; science 13, 116, 324; in sperm bank 111–113; as technology 107–108; touch 185–189; wellness and 91–92; without racists 231 racial: affect 186, 187; apathy 235; belonging 26, 111, 112; branding 183–185; classification system 210, 241, 242; coalition 234; collectives 26, 59; commodification 109; complexity 223; contract 6, 185, 187, 190, 191, 234; demarcations 268; discrimination 12, 31, 51, 147, 150, 151, 157, 159, 164, 166, 172, 198, 201; dissection 186; diversity 64, 185, 341, 347, 376; dominance 190, 266, 410; equity 141, 171–174, 177–179; essentialism 131; exceptionalism 399; feeling 187; grammar 6, 282, 371; hegemony 198, 266; hybridity 113; ideation 295; ideology 59, 145, 230, 231, 234; ignorance 12, 235, 303; injustice 142, 170, 192; justice 2, 11, 16, 166, 218, 231, 232, 284, 292, 293; meaning 121, 242, 281, 305; melancholia 316; micro-aggressions 141, 147–151; nomos 186; oppression 149, 151, 152, 156, 174, 234, 296, 322, 323, 324, 381; phenomena 12, 281, 295–297, 305; policies 142; prejudice 157; privilege 7, 8, 27, 232, 316, 317, 377, 387; purity 76, 110, 115; segregation 4–6, 12, 147, 165, 253, 328; taxonomies 4–6, 315, 410, 420; time 60–61; violence 291–293 racial capitalism 209, 243, 267, 275; (b)ordering as management of wealth accumulation in 270–272; global 266 racial formation 6, 106, 209, 210, 240–248, 312; gendering of 242–243; queering of 242–243 racial habits 281–282, 295–306; critical racialism 296–297; phenomenology and 297–299 racial hierarchies 12, 17n3, 171, 177, 324, 365; internalising and interrogating 384–386; material, in dress 131–134, 132–134 racial identity 12, 26, 59–72, 106, 112, 113, 242, 267, 299, 301, 302, 380, 421, 422; deconstruction of 204; level of critical race theory 200–202; state-recognised 218 racial inequality 231; in higher education 174–175; in Silicon Valley 31–34; in South Africa 199 racial innocence 401; coloniality and 399–400 racialisation 8, 9, 160, 247, 297, 341, 400, 401; forms of 245, 398; of global labour 244; of labour works 267; racialised belief systems 123; racialised consumption 76; racialised gametes 76, 115; racialised ignorance 281, 291; racialised labour, gendered political economy of 247; racialised nationalism 209; racialised numbness 291–292; racialised social order 26 racial projects 210, 234, 242, 266, 269, 270, 274; of (b)ordering in global capitalism 267–268

racial proxy 63; imagined time versus 65; perceived time versus 67 racial reproductions 105–116, 179; American egg donation, purchase of race in 108–110; empirical material and method 106–107; gametes, global market for 107–108, 113–114; theoretical framing and analytical approach 106; Web 2.0 111–113 racism: anti-Black 31, 171–173, 184, 232, 253–256, 293n8; anti-Muslim 2; anti-Roma 159–164; ‘business-as-usual’ 45–46; colourblind 11–14, 231, 235, 282, 309; epistemic 241; epistemological 178; institutional 9, 155–168, 186, 256; racism-misogynoir 182; scientific 171, 340, 343; structural 35–37, 36, 256; systemic 232, 235 racism-free nation, myth of 209 radical solidarity 282 Rankine, C. 291 rape: ‘traumatic intimacies’ of 189 Ratele, K. 282, 324–325 Reaganism 232 ‘Reagan Revolution’ 232 redemption 304–305 Reeves, R. 37 refugee crisis 282, 308 Reis-Costa, K. 60 relational artefacts 46 relational category 76, 90 religious faith 26, 40 reproduction: assisted 25, 76, 105, 106, 108–110, 113–116; reproductive medicine 76, 115 reproductive rights 8 residential segregation 201 resistance: anti-racist resistance, counternarrative as form of: 150-151; Black 173–174, 179, 180 Retzius, A. 4 Rhodes Must Fall movements 2 Rich, A. 304 right to abortion 8 rime: racial 60–61 Ripley, W. Z. 4 Rízal, J. 351 Robinson, C. 267 Robinson, J. G. 38 Roche, D. 122 Roediger, D. R. 6; Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, The 9–10; White: Essays on Race and Culture 10 Rollock, N. 148, 150 Roma 5, 141, 142, 245, 255, 268, 311, 312, 318n2, 348n3, 374n4; anti-Roma racism see anti-Roma racism; discrimination 161; Roma Civil Monitor 161; school segregation of 161–162, 165–166; segregation 155–168 romance tourism 78, 79, 81, 82, 85

441

Index Royall, I., Jr 126 Russell, J. G. 365, 374n2 Russia: anti-genderism 14; BIPoC in support of BLM 256–257; Civic Assistance Committee 257; modernisation 400; nationalism 253–256; ‘non-Russianness’ as identity category, appropriation of 259–260; political opposition 253–256; Russian Lives Matter (#RussianLivesMatter) 251–252, 254–256 Russia, M. 254–255 Russian Orthodox Christianity 255 Saldanha, A.: Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race 83–84 Salter, C. 420 sanctioned ignorance 241 San José State University Human Rights Institute: ‘Silicon Valley Pain Index’ 31, 32 Schär, B. C. 399 Schaw, J. 127, 128 Schmitt, C. 212–218, 220, 221; classical liberalism, critique of 213–214; and new kind of enemy 221–225; theory of politics 224–225 Schmittian politics 2.0 213 school segregation, of Roma 161–162, 165–166 scientific racism 171, 340, 343 segregation: class 161; legitimating 164–166; racial 4–6, 12, 147, 165, 253, 328; residential 201; school 161–162, 165–166; segregated 142, 148, 162–165, 185, 197, 201, 247, 271, 290, 299, 329, 368, 413, 426; social 197; spatial 160 Self 90 self-determination 194 self-fashioning 354 SEN see special educational needs (SEN) Sephora 97 settler colonialism 209; definition of 407; white 406–417 sexism 7, 8, 25, 47, 49; hetero-sexism 325 sex tourism 78, 79, 81, 85, 350, 351 sexual harassment 27, 31 sexuality 7, 8, 10, 25, 26, 50, 75, 79, 80, 109, 184, 243, 296, 323, 324, 337, 340, 341, 359, 360, 413; heterosexuality 81, 273; homosexuality 261n4; in Philippines 357–358 shame 187–188 Shaw, M.: Get the Glow 96 Shevinsky, E. 40–41 Shilliam, R. 145, 147, 272 Shome, R. 15, 76 siblings, as form of geek capital 37–38 ‘Silent Majority’ 232 Silicon Valley: being white in 30, 31; childhood friends, as geek capital 38–40; ethnic composition 28; glass walls 37; meritocracy, myth of 29–30; occupational

caste system 25; parents and siblings, as form of geek capital 37–38; racial and gender inequality in 31–34; structural racism in 35– 37, 36; technically-skilled jobs in 28; white male nerds, monoculture of 54; whiteness, as form of geek capital 27–41; white supremacy in 31 ‘Silicon Valley Pain Index’ 31, 32 Silva, M. C. 161 Singapore: wellness industry 90 slavery 3, 4, 8, 77, 109, 116, 128, 132, 134, 135, 171, 179, 184, 191, 244, 267, 315, 324, 407, 412 Sobchak, K. 256 social capital 41n1, 354 social class 357–358 social closure: definition of 175; in neoliberal academy 174–178 social justice 173, 180, 183, 240, 313 social unity 33 social whitening 425 sociogenesis 189 sociogenic 189 sociology of absence 241–242, 244–247 sociology of time 60–61 socio-technical studies (STS) 45, 46 Soco, A. 353–354 solidarity: white 13, 282, 309, 313–314, 317 Søndergaard, M. L. J. 54–55, 112 South Africa: apartheid effects on white-Black South Africans relations, problematizing 196–198; apartheid policy in 193–205; apartheid struggle in 325; Bantu Education Policy 328; Black and white identities in 202–204; Black Economic Empowerment policies 194; Black Economic Empowerment program 199; critical race theory in white supremacy and marginalized Blacks, mapping 198; economic apartheid in 142; Fallist movement 325; Land Act of 1913 199; Land Act of 1936 199; land reform 194; missionaries in 230; National Development Plan (NDP) 194; Population Registration Act of 1950 196; racial identity level of critical race theory 200–202; Rhodes Must Fall movements 2; school-going protesters in 282; socio-economic level of critical race theory 199–200; South African Schools Act 329; ‘Soweto Youth Uprising’ (16 June 1976) 328; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 200; whiteness and patriarchy in schools, disrupting 328–330 Southeast Asia: backpacking, whiteness of 82 sovereignty 216–217, 223 spatial segregation 160 special educational needs (SEN) 163

442

Index Spencer, R. 426 sperm bank, race in 111–113 Spillers, H. 185 Spivak, G. 241 Stapleton, C. 49 sterilisation, in ‘people’s home’ 311–312 Stevens, G. 197 stigmatisation 414 structural advantage 25, 28, 203 structural racism 256; in Silicon Valley 35–37, 36 structural violence 282 STS see socio-technical studies (STS) Subramaniam, B. 111 Suffla, S. 282 Sullivan, S. 13, 14, 281, 304, 305 Sunanta, S. 360 super-diversity 282 super-exploitation 245 surveillance capitalism 48 sustainable development 198 Sweden 5; 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ 282; colourblindness in 12; in crisis 309–310, 314–316; denial of racism 241–242; eugenics and sterilisation, in ‘people’s home’ 311–312; far-right parties in 265; hegemonic whiteness in 308–318; national imaginary 311; racial formation 210, 240–248, 312; racialised labour, gendered political economy of 247; sociology of absence 241–242, 244–247; white melancholy period (2001 onwards) 309, 314–317; white mourning 316–317; white purity period (1905–1968) 309–312; white solidarity period (1968–2001) 13, 309, 313–314 Swedish society for race hygiene (Svenska sällskapet för rashygien) 311 Swedish State Institute for Race Biology 312 Swift, J. 125 symbolic capital 39 symbolic ethnicity 426 systemic inequality 93 systemic racism 232, 235 Tate, S. A. 132, 178; Creolizing Europe 243 Tator, C. 145 Taylor, A. 411 Taylor, E. 202 Taylor, J. S. 81, 423 Taylor, P. C. 281–282 Tea Party 232 tech industry 28–30, 32–34, 36, 37, 39–41, 49, 50 technological determinism 46 technology 25–31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44–53, 55, 105–108, 111–114, 116, 123, 135, 167, 188,

213, 220, 231, 271, 376; neutral 26, 45; race as 107–108 technoscience 107 Teitlebaum, B. 394 temporal drains 67–69, 71 Terreblanche, S. 199 textiles 76–77, 120–135; colour, question of 121–123, 122; washing 123–127; wearing 123–127, 124–127 textual apartheid 96 Thailand: tourism in 78; wellness resorts 98, 100 Thatcherism 232 third-wave whiteness, intersectional perspectives on 369–370 Third World 84–85 ‘Third World’ solidarity 313 Tilley, L. 272 time: clock 59–62, 69–70, 69; imagined 59, 61, 64–67, 65; perceived 61, 67–69, 67, 70; sociology of 60–61; theft 69, 71; thieves 64–67, 70; white see white time Tinder 355 Tometi, O. 173 torture, ‘traumatic intimacies’ of 189 tourism: backpacking 79, 82–83; sex 78, 79, 81, 85; structuring principle 79–80; touristic whiteness 79; transcending whiteness 83–84; tropical desires 81–82; whiteness of 75–76, 78–86; white saviourism 84–85; white spaces of luxury 80–81 toxic workplaces 27 “trailing spouses,” precarity of 370–371 transcending whiteness 83–84; ‘new woman,’ production of 98 transgender 347 transmasculine 337–338; transmasculinity 340–348 transnational feminist approach 89–102; energy flows 98–99; erasure of hist 97; facile transnational literacy 97; non-critical selfcare 93–94; political complacency 92–93; white femininity, extraction and making of 99–101, 101 transnationalism 15–16 transphobia 325 trans pregnancy 341 trauma 2, 92, 281, 284–289, 291–293, 305 tropical desires 81–82 Trump, D. 2, 12, 14, 15, 89, 219, 220, 225n6, 233, 234, 236–237n2, 237n4, 266, 270, 426; ‘Making America Great Again’ 209, 213, 232, 317; military forces, use of 222, 293n1; National Security Strategy of the United States 214, 223 Twine, F. W. 9–12, 25–26, 50, 228, 364 Twitter: racial demographics of employees 36 Tyshkevich, N. 261n6

443

Index unconscious bias 190 unemployment 194 UNHCR see United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) United Kingdom 5, 314, 317, 343; Brexit Referendum 12, 232, 234; CRT, backlashes and attacks on 3; epistemological racism in 178; ‘Leave’ campaign 12; Offender Assessment System 52; political complacency 93; racial inequality in HE 174–175; racial micro-aggressions in 150; racial politics in 296; Rhodes Must Fall movements 2; state formation processes in 160; ‘Why is My Curriculum White’ campaign 2, 145, 172; ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black’ campaign 2, 145, 172 United Nations 229 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 252 United Nations Refugee Agency 252 United States (US) 2, 11, 15, 248, 253, 314, 339; American 4–6, 8–10, 13, 14, 26, 27, 30, 32–36, 38, 39, 41, 47, 48, 52–54, 60, 61, 76, 90–93, 97, 101, 105, 107–110, 112, 113, 115, 126, 131, 132, 157, 209, 212–225, 229, 230, 232–234, 236, 243, 251, 253, 254, 260, 284, 285, 290, 303, 314–316, 350–353, 355, 383, 385, 394, 410, 411, 420–424, 426; artificial intelligence 26; automated decision making in 44, 45, 47, 50–54; automated public welfare systems in 51; backpacking, whiteness of 83; Black extrajudicial killing in 1; Black feminism 8; Census 28, 214, 218, 220–222, 225n4; Census Bureau 220; chokehold 1; Civil War 222; COMPAS tool 52; Constitution 219, 220; ‘crackers’ and ‘rednecks’ in 410–412; CRT, backlashes and attacks on 2–3; Department of Defense 222; Department of the Army 223; dominant responses to COVID-19 pandemic 284–285; drug policy 304; egg donation, purchase of race in 108–110; egg donation in 107; epistemological racism in 178; European immigrants in 5; immigration 312; ‘Insurrection Act’ of 1807 222, 225n11; legal segregation in 230; meritocracy, myth of 29–30; National Institute of Health 90; Nationality Act (aka Naturalization Act) 213; National Security Strategy of the United States 214, 223; neoliberal academic culture in 177; new white nationalism, rise of 232; political complacency 93; ‘Posse Comitatus Act’ of 1878 222; racial complexity in 223; racial formation in 240; racial stratification, Latin Americanisation of 5; racial taxonomies 4, 315; Republican Party 233, 236; service

workers in wellness spas, earnings of 101; structural racism in 35; Tea Party/‘Trumpist’ movement in 232; Tenth Amendment of the Constitution 225n7; United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM) 221–222; in Weimar phase 212–216; white femininity in 76; white settler colonialism 406, 407, 410; white supremacy in 10, 14; white working class in 10 untrauma, white habit of 284–293; affective numbness 291–292; cognition 288–289; critical phenomenology 285–287; ontology 287–288; temporality 289–291 unwitting prejudice 158 Urban Outfitters 97 US see United States (US) value: bodies of, in academic life 182–191; market 76, 115, 178 Van der Westhuizen, C.: Handbook on Critical Studies in Whiteness 11 Vij, R. 60 Viking sperm 111, 114 Villalpando, O. 144–147 violence: of coloniality, resisting 325–326; direct 282, 326; epistemic 282, 326; police 285; racial 291; structural 282 Virdee, S. 12 Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 411 Virilio, P.: Information Bomb, The 214 volk 378 volunteer tourism 79, 85 voluntourism 84–85 wage discrimination 27, 31 Wallenberg, A. 311–312 Wanhalla, A. 420 Ware, S. M. 346, 347 Ware, V. 422 warfare state 243 washing 123–127 wealth accumulation in racial capitalism, (b) ordering as management of 270–272 wearing 123–127, 124–127 Web 2.0 108, 111–113 #WeCannotStandIt (#ViStårInteUt) 316–317 Weenink, D. 353, 354 Weinbaum, E. 90 Wekker, G. 6; White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race 13 welfare: chauvinism, as (b)ordering practice 268–270; state 246, 265, 269, 270 wellbeing 266 wellness 89–102; culture 76, 91, 99–100; industry 90–92; and race 91–92; white women’s 94–97

444

Index West, S. M. 50 Westerford High School 330 Western democratic 142 Western Europe 122 white: -African relations 142; bodies 122; border guard femininities 274, 275; civilisation 209; decline 209, 214, 215; domination 235, 267, 302, 305; ethnicity 11; feminism 317; flight 161, 163–165; fragility 142, 149, 182, 183, 190, 303; gaze 6, 185–186; guy problem 48–49; hegemony, crisis of 14–15, 265–275; immigration policies 229; innocence 12–14, 142, 182; institutional culture 190; marginal 393, 406–417; melancholia 282, 308–318; melancholic state 93; migration 373; modern womanhood 76; mourning 316–317; nonwhite 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 45, 68, 83, 86, 90, 92, 93, 144, 166, 188, 197, 209, 246, 259, 260, 267–274, 291, 302, 304, 309, 310, 312–317, 322, 338, 347, 348n3, 361, 365, 367, 369, 376, 377, 387, 406, 416, 421, 423, 425, 426; purity 13, 282, 309–311, 314, 317, 413; race card 235; racial category 338; racial common sense 244; racial frame 6; racial identity 26; racial liberalism 142, 182, 186; racial state 232; saviourism 84–85; solidarity 13, 282, 309, 313–314, 317; spaces of luxury 80–81; temporality 289–291; trash 393; womanhood 76, 89, 90, 96–98, 102 White, S. 126 White Citizens’ Councils 232 white defensiveness 231–233; politics of 230–231 white femininity 15, 76, 89, 90; extraction and making of 99–101, 101 white habits 301–305; abolition 304–305; affective numbness 291–292; being at home 302–303; cognition 288–289; critical phenomenology 285–287; dwelling 302–303; invisibility 303; normativity 303–304; ontology 287–288; redemption 304–305; temporality 289–291; of untrauma 284–293 white identity: politics 5, 12; in South Africa 202–204 white masculinity 82, 316; crisis of 14–15 white nationalism 422–425; new, rise of 231–233 whiteness: artificialisation of 44–55; of backpacking 79, 82–83; bad 13; colonial histories of 323–325; complexity of 209, 234; crisis of 209–210, 230–234; critical whiteness studies 45, 46, 55; critical whiteness theory 76; definition of 9; Dutch 13; European 4; as form of geek capital 25, 27–41; future of 228–237; good 13; hegemonic 12, 13, 234, 308–318; as hegemonic structure 9; hyper-whiteness 4; ideological boundaries

of 419–427; imperial 127–130; as ‘invisible’ norm 7; logics 75, 76, 78–86, 115, 344; material 130; as multiplicity of identities 10; and nationalism 228–230; normative 143– 152; phenomenology of 337; post-whiteness 209–213; power 127–130; sociological significance of 16; system of domination 210, 228, 236, 248; theory 1–2; of tourism 75–76, 78–86; transcending 83–84; in Trumpocene 212–225; wages of 10 whiteness studies 3, 7; birth of 6; critical 10–12; future directions and questions 15–16; history of 4–6; mapping of 10; periodisation of 9; three waves of 9–11 whitening 229, 236n1, 353, 425 white privilege 12, 14, 27, 48, 146, 171, 174, 242, 302, 322; institutionalisation of 51–53; in neoliberal academy 174–178; representation of 53 white settler colonialism (WSC) 406–417; Algeria and France, pied noirs in 414–415; Barbados, ‘redlegs’ of 412–413; case comparison 415–416; colonial America, ‘crackers’ and ‘rednecks’ in 410–412; limitations of 409; literature search and review 409 white supremacy 1, 6, 9–11, 148, 171–174, 185, 195, 203, 209, 229, 302, 304; in BLM 173–174, 178, 179, 231; institutional 183, 190–191; longevity of 147; post-race 142, 182, 187–188; power and fantasies of 322; in Silicon Valley 31; social relationality of 188; systemic 230, 232 white time 59–72, 289–291; data and methodology 61–64, 62–63, 63, 64; finings 64–70, 65, 67, 69, 70 white women’s wellness: disconnect 94–96; glow 96–97, 96; individuation 94, 95 Whittaker, M. 49 ‘Why is My Curriculum White’ campaign 2, 145, 172 ‘Why isn’t My Professor Black’ campaign 2, 145, 172 Wiedlack, K. 210, 261n1 Wilkes, K.: Whiteness, Weddings and Tourism in the Caribbean: Paradise for Sale 82 Williams, E. 134, 135 Williams, M. 329 Winant, H. 106; Racial Formation in the United States 242, 243 Winckelmann, J. 130 Wise, T. 150 Wodak, R.: discourse-historical approach 252–253 woke 3, 76, 89, 91 woke radicals 3

445

Index Wolfe, P. 407 women of colour 76, 90, 92, 94, 108, 127, 129, 144, 273 Woolley, H. 124 workplace culture 49–50 workplace diversity 48–49 World Bank 229 WSC see white settler colonialism (WSC) Wynter, S. 184

Yancy, G. 185; Look, A White! 191 yoga 93 Yugoslavia: post-colonialism 400–401 Zabolotnaya, T. 210, 261n1 Zerubavel, E. 60 Zuboff, S. 48 Zuma, J. 193 Zupancic, A. 92

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