Page 17 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

10 Knowing ‘whiteness’
The imperative became to ‘explain the complexities of young white men’s
experience without reducing them to caricatures of violent thuggery’ (Back
1998: 60).
Phil Cohen has done extensive empirical research on racism within a pol-
icy framework of trying to improve anti-racist initiatives. In 1997, he argued
for ‘rethinking racism and the way racism speaks the body’ (Cohen 1997a:
246). Cohen places his analysis of ‘race’ within a history of labour. Positing
‘race’ as ‘labour’s “other scene”’, he argues against economically reductionist
accounts of ‘race’, bringing in psychoanalytic perspectives. Nonetheless, his
analysis is confined to white working-class masculinity and, despite recogni-
tion of ‘non-class – i.e. gender or generational – positions’ (Cohen 1997a:
258), class remains the main motor of his analysis. His focus on labour poses
problems for an attempt to think through the inter-relations of gender and
‘race’, as well as class.
Because of the predominance of men as perpetrators of racist violence,
the analysis of racism and racists is often confined to young men. As the
following explanation of Cohen’s decision to focus on boys shows, it is clear
that it is also relevant that the majority of those who have published work
in this field are men: 5

We considered whether to try to involve girls in the group. We decided
against it for several reasons. Firstly, as is evident from the tape, the girls
on the estate had been cast in the role of passive supporters rather than
activists. We neither wanted to reproduce this position in the group,
nor as men did we feel adequately equipped to explore the connection
between these girls’ subordination and their racist views. Secondly, it
was the boys who were responsible for the racial harassment and we
were under considerable pressure to do what we could about that. So
although we were not entirely happy about it, we decided to opt for all
boy groups, with a mental footnote to the effect that we would keep an
eye and ear open for the sexual dynamics of working-class racism.
(Cohen 1997b: 148–9)

Other researchers have examined white girls’ racialised identities and
relationships to racism when undertaking research on white youth racism.
Back, for example, in New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Mul-
ticulture in Young Lives, acknowledges some of the problems faced by a man
undertaking research with adolescent girls (Back 1996: 24–5). Nonetheless,
his work does deal with both male and female identities in some depth.
However, when he comes to writing more exclusively about racism using the
material from his book and another research project, masculinity becomes
the sole focus, as his footnote explains: ‘Both of these ethnographic projects
have involved discussion of the position of young women, class and gender
relations. The focus here is on male youth because of their involvement
in overt forms of racist action and violence’ (Back 1998: 60). In contrast,