Page 177 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

170 Conclusion
The material presented in this book has shown not only that the collective
identity of Britain remains raced, but also how processes of racialisation are
deeply embedded within everyday practices and imaginaries. In this way, it
has argued that it is unsustainable to argue that ‘race’ has nothing to do with
even the most well-intentioned ‘non-racist’ white people. The white met-
ropolitan subject is produced at least partly through racialised imaginaries
and practices. Whiteness is not an identity that is often spoken of. However,
this book has shown the ways in which whiteness is lived in the everyday.
The ways in which white women’s seeing, doing, talking and imagining per-
formatively reinscribe racialised discourses. Through mothering practices,
it is possible to see some of the ways in which children are constructed as
racialised, classed and gendered. I have also shown how the women’s sense
of self was sometimes built around a racialised (and also classed) other.
It is a potentially dangerous political moment when white researchers
start to ‘discover’ their own (and others’) whiteness and capture grants, pub-
lish books and generally make careers out of writing about ‘race’ and white-
ness. The danger comes, in part, from the creation of a ‘field of studies’ that
is, yet again, dominated by white researchers and makes white experience
central. There is also a risk that there emerges a notion of a unified ‘white
culture’, in contrast to ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ cultures. Or, yet more problemati-
cally, the idea of a ‘white race’ is somehow confirmed. However, this latter
problem is a risk that is inherent in any discussions of ‘race’. David Goldberg
argues that what is at issue in discussions of ‘race’ is a field of discourse made
up of all racialised expressions. This would include the analysis involved in
examining the historical formation or logic of racial thinking from a critical
perspective, as well as different racisms: ‘racism turns out to be one such
object among possible others in the emergence and elaboration of racialised
discourse’ (Goldberg 1993: 42). Thus, he argues that ‘race is a discursive
object of racialised discourses that differs from racism. Race nevertheless
creates the conceptual conditions of possibility, in some conjunctural condi-
tions, for racist expression to be formulated’ (Goldberg 1993: 43, emphasis
in the original). It is this point – that any analysis of, or even opposition
to, concepts of ‘race’ involves utilisation or engagement with racialised dis-
courses – that leads Alistair Bonnet to argue that:

anti-racism cannot be adequately understood as the inverse of racism.
[. . .] anti-racists have frequently deployed racism to secure and develop
their project. The most characteristic form of this incorporation is anti-
racists’ adherence to categories of ‘race’, categories which, even when
politically or ‘strategically’ employed, lend themselves to the racialisa-
tion process.
(Bonnett 2000a: 3)

The continuing risks of engaging in racialised or racialising discourse,
coupled with what he sees as a ‘crisis in raciology’, have led Paul Gilroy to