Page 14 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Knowing ‘whiteness’ 7
In contrast, Alastair Bonnett identifies two broad and potentially conflict-
ing tendencies within the new area of ‘white studies’. The first tendency
incorporates the analysis of whiteness within a class analysis of racialisa-
tion, while the second ‘stresses the plural constitution, and multiple lived
experiences of whiteness’ (Bonnett 2000a: 139). Bonnett points out that the
former position, of which Theodore Allen and David Roediger (Allen 1994;
Roediger 1994) are prime examples, has tended to focus on the development
of whiteness within American capitalism. They, along with the contributors
to the journal Race Traitor (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996), call for the ‘aboli-
tion’ of whiteness: ‘The journal takes its stand on two points: first, that the
“white race” is not a natural but a social category and, second, that what
was historically constructed can be undone’ (Garvey and Ignatiev 1997:
346). This places them within Hill’s ‘second wave’ of white studies, which
critiques and seeks to avoid (or abolish) whiteness. There are, however, seri-
ous limitations with the exclusively class-focused analysis that is unable to
develop the links between racialised formations and modernity, rather than
simply capitalism (Bonnett 2000a: 141; see also Gilroy 1992a; Goldberg
1993). It also leads to reductionist accounts of subjectivity where individu-
al’s ‘loyalty’ to the ‘white club’ (Garvey and Ignatiev 1997) is bought solely
through mechanisms of class privilege. This approach rules out more com-
plex psychological processes of formation of identity and the self. These are
more likely to be explored within what Bonnett characterises as the second
tendency within white studies.
It is interesting that all these different characterisations of ‘white studies’
tend to include works that were written no earlier than the 1970s and are
generally concentrated in the late 1980s and 1990s. The majority of the writ-
ers included within this body of work would also appear to be white. This
demarcation of a ‘field’ is problematic and, I would argue, to be avoided,
serving as it does to erase a considerable body of black writing on whiteness.
bell hooks has written of the extensive knowledge that black people build up
about whiteness and white people (hooks 1997: 165). David Roediger has
collected several contributions by black writers on whiteness, ranging from
1854 to the 1990s, into an edited book (Roediger 1998). Yet those who
seek to review the literature within ‘white studies’ tend to ignore much of
this work, apart from obligatory references to, and quotations from, James
Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. The editors of Off White: Readings on Race,
Power and Society respond to the risk that ‘understanding whiteness could
surface as the new intellectual fetish’ by arguing:

we (arrogantly? narcissistically? greedily? responsibly?) believe that
maybe this should be the last book on whiteness, that we should get back
to the work of understanding and dismantling the stratified construction
of race/colors, rather than one group at a time.
(Fine et al. 1997: xii)