Page 182 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Conclusion 175
(and often male) expressions of racism and prejudice. Middle-class and fe-
male performances of race are equally in need of scrutiny. If there is need for
identities to feel positive about, the aim should be to find non-racialised (or
at least less racialised) identities to affirm, while at the same time acknowl-
edging the powerful impact of racialisation in the production of experience
and identity. These more positive identities might revolve around different
forms of locatedness, such as those of being a Londoner or even a radically
revised idea of Britishness or Englishness. They are also likely to come from
a recognition of the multiplicity and evolving nature of identities.
Nor is this work a ‘me too’ (or a ‘we too’) claim. It is not concerned with
arguing that white people can do ‘race’ (and therefore somehow experience
racism) just like black or Asian people. Rather than a call for ‘we too’, the
objective is the critical examination of the ‘we’. How is white experience
constructed as white – what practices and imaginaries depend on its repeti-
tion? How is it that dominant ideas of the commonsense and normal come
to be overlaid with racialised conceptions that centre around whiteness. This
can be seen in the Conservative electoral slogan of ‘Are you thinking what
we’re thinking?’. It can also be seen in the discussions of the reasonableness
of looking for the right ‘mix’ in schools.
Finally, this examination on whiteness has not set the terms for a call for
action. There is no anti-racist 12-step plan appended to this work. The book
has focused on how things are done as a preliminary move towards working
out how they might be undone. This hesitancy about action is frustrating,
but perhaps a necessary pause for thought for the white subject who has for
too long taken the power to define (rather than be defined) and to act (rather
than be acted upon). There is no easy ‘escape’ from whiteness; rather, as Sara
Ahmed argues

race, like sex, is sticky; it sticks to us, or we become “us” as an effect of
how it sticks, even when we think we are beyond it. Beginning to live
with that stickiness, to think it, feel it, do it, is about creating a space to
deal with the effects of racism. We need to deal with the effects of racism
in a way that is better.
(Ahmed 2004: 49)

Yet often the task of dealing with the effects of racism is left to those who
suffer its impact most brutally. What I have argued in this book is that white
people cannot evade ‘race’ by thinking that it has nothing to do with them.
The white self is constructed through racialising practices and discourses, just
as it is also constructed as classed and gendered. To return to the discussions
with which I opened the book, I would argue that whiteness, and therefore
‘race’ and racism, are not only ‘out there’ in former colonial societies or in
the minds of BNP activists. They are also ‘in here’ in the ways that white
people talk and see, the ways they interact with others, their aspirations for
their children and their sense of who they are, both as part of collectivities
and as individuals.