Page 178 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Conclusion 171
call for ‘the renunciation of “race” as a critical concept’ (Gilroy 1998: 838).
According to Gilroy, the crisis exists

because the idea of ‘race’ has lost much of its common-sense credibility,
because the elaborate cultural and ideological work that goes into pro-
ducing and reproducing it is more visible than ever before, because it has
been stripped of its moral and intellectual integrity, and because there is
a chance to prevent its rehabilitation.
(Gilroy 2000: 28–9)

For Gilroy, this offers the possibility of developing a radical ‘non-racial
humanism’, which is also ‘wilfully ungendered’ (Gilroy 2000: 16). The pros-
pect of being able to move beyond ‘race’ is not only attractive but must also
be kept constantly in mind in writing about ‘race’ in general and whiteness in
particular. However, I have suggested in this book that I do not believe that
this moment has arrived. We are still too implicated in racialising processes
simply to declare the end of ‘race’ as a category of analysis. Rather, I have
argued that we need to attend to ‘race’ as a ‘troubled’ category in a way that
denies its ontological status.
‘Race’ needs to be understood as produced within different formulations
of power. I argued that ‘race’ can be fruitfully understood as ‘performative’
– existing only where it is reproduced through discursive recitation. ‘Race’
is, following Judith Butler’s rendering of gender, ‘constituted by the very
“expressions” which are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 25). One ‘ex-
pression’ that I argued was particularly important was a range of perceptual
practices which construct concepts of difference that are then incorporated
into discourses of ‘race’. These perceptual schema are, as Gilroy makes clear,
neither ‘natural’ nor inevitable, but are the product of a whole range of
potentially conflicting discursive formations and practices (for example, see
Goldberg’s (1993: 149) discussions of western science and racial thinking).
Questions of power, therefore, lie at the heart of the continual circulation
and reformulation of racialising discourses. ‘Race’ is not the result of visual
practices alone, but is conditioned by who is seeing and who has the ability
to assert what is seen and how it is seen. Whiteness, occupying the position
of the norm in racialised schemas, is therefore often asserted (particularly by
white people) as invisible or as unmarked by ‘race’. It is defined by what is
excluded, by those who are racially ‘marked’ (visually and symbolically) and
form whiteness’s ‘constitutive outside’.
The interviews have shown some of the anxieties that circulate around
these acts of seeing, perhaps particularly for white subjects. As discussed
in Chapter 5, mothers talked with some degree of trepidation about what
they thought their children saw. As far as ‘race’ was concerned, there was no
consensus about what children did see and what levels of racialised looking
were ‘innocent’ or ‘natural’. Some children were thought to ‘see’ neither
race nor class, whereas others were expected to be relatively attuned to