Page 13 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

6 Knowing ‘whiteness’
To ‘see’ deviance instead of difference means to take the experience of
the dominant group as the implicitly or explicitly universal standard or
norm.
(Aziz 1995)

Thus, black feminists pushed white feminists to explore their relation-
ship to, and complicity in, racism. They also asked white people to regard
themselves not as in the position of the unmarked norm, but as racialised
and classed. While much black feminist work examined hitherto ignored
and unexplored aspects of black experience and identity, there was also the
suggestion of the need to examine white experience and identities as racial-
ised rather than normative. These challenges raised the need for an increas-
ingly complex conceptualisation of identity. ‘Identity politics’ proved to be
an uneasy and often unproductive terrain, often characterised by reductive
analysis. But the question of identity and identification would not go away
so easily.
The calls by black feminists for the examination of whiteness and white
racism fed into a wider ‘turn’ to whiteness within academia. The following
section gives a broad overview of this heterogeneous body of work.

White studies?

What Mike Hill calls the ‘critical rush to whiteness’ (Hill 1997: 3) has re-
sulted in a range of different research projects that are now being clustered
into something which is sometimes called ‘white studies’. This has inevitably
led to different approaches to the characterisation and categorisation of this
newly emerging ‘field’. Hill, echoing feminist periodisation, identifies first
and second ‘waves’ in work on whiteness. The first wave is that which identi-
fies whiteness as something that is both invisible and impermanent. The sec-
ond wave is, according to Hill, characterised by ‘epistemological stickiness
and ontological wiggling immanent in whiteness’ where whiteness becomes
something identified and singled out for critique, but also avoided – by those
who critique whiteness and yet are also ‘identifiably white’ (Hill 1997: 3).
Ruth Frankenberg divides work in the field into four different, albeit over-
lapping, approaches: historical approaches, which map out the ‘salience of
whiteness to the formation of nationhood, class and empire’; sociological
and cultural studies, which ‘examine the place of whiteness in the contem-
porary body politic in Europe and the US’; those who study the performance
of whiteness by subjects ‘whether in daily life, in film, in literature or in the
academic corpus’; and, finally, those which examine racism in movements
for social change (Frankenberg 1997: 2–3). Frankenberg’s account stresses
the interconnected nature of the different areas she outlines but therefore
tends to downplay the theoretical differences that may be implicated in the
different approaches.