Page 11 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

4 Knowing ‘whiteness’
women were encountered at a particular time in their lives when they were
engaged in specific practices of mothering young children. This led them to
interact with their local areas in particular ways. While much of their focus
was on the domestic and their family, they were also forming local friend-
ships with other mothers and engaged in sometimes fraught negotiations
with public institutions, particularly schools.
The next chapter, ‘Troubling “race”’, will explore the question of iden-
tity, identification and ‘race’. This chapter introduces the study by placing
it in the context of its intellectual roots/routes – that of a response to black
feminist calls for the need to examine white racism. The chapter then goes
on to examine other work carried out in what might (problematically) be
called the field of ‘white studies’. Thus, it begins to address the question of
the politics and problematics of studying whiteness.

Why look at whiteness? Critiquing white feminism
Examination of whiteness from within the study of ‘race’ has come from
different perspectives, as will be explored below, but the particular entry
point for this research was the critical interventions of black feminists whose
work draws out both the classed and the gendered nature of processes of
2
racialisation. From the 1970s to 1980s, black feminists in both Britain and
the US voiced critiques of white feminists who lacked an analysis of racism.
They pointed to the acute irony of a movement such as feminism, which
claimed to stand for inclusivity and universal sisterhood but, in fact, was
making black women invisible. The central position given to experience
within feminism did not include an awareness of different racialised experi-
ences. The struggle for the right to have a voice (like that of political repre-
sentation) often did not include consideration of who was being silenced in
the process. Black feminists contested the agenda set, and approach taken,
3
by white feminists on a variety of issues, including motherhood, abortion,
childcare, rape, sexuality, equality, family, contraception and welfare rights
(Amos and Parmar 1984; Mohanty 1988). White feminist campaigns were
criticised for failing to examine or account for different experiences of, and
interests in, these issues. For instance, calls for sexual liberation had a very
different significance for black women who had historically, and in current
popular culture, been constructed as promiscuous and already sexualised.
White feminists also failed to examine how white women’s supposed sexual
‘purity’ was often constructed through contrast with the sexualisation of
black women. Or how white women’s vulnerability was constructed through
the representation of black men as violent and threatening. It was also ar-
gued that, when white feminists did write about black women, it was in
a stereotyped and patronising way, presenting them as passive victims and
voiceless Third World subjects (see Amos and Parmar 1984; Mohanty 1988;
Carby 1992: 222).
Similar critiques were also made by lesbian and working-class women
who felt that their experiences and positions had been ignored by white