Page 183 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Notes

1 Knowing ‘whiteness’
1 The use of apostrophes or ‘scare quotes’ around ‘race’ in this book is to highlight
its problematic and constructed nature. While I recognise that the same argu-
ment could be employed in the case of class and gender, in this book, it will be
used only for ‘race’.
2 There is a problem of language and terminology here. Although I recognise that
it is not without problems and contestation (for a discussion, see Brah 1996:
98), I am adopting here the political usage of ‘black’ as employed for instance
by Heidi Safia Mirza, writing in the British context: ‘What defines us as Pacific,
Asian, Eastern, African, Caribbean, Latina, Native and “mixed race” “others”
is not our imposed minority status, but our self-defining presence as peoples of
the post-colonial diaspora. At only 5.5 per cent of the population we still stand
out, we are visibly different and that is what makes us “black”’ (Mirza 1997:
3). The question of the notion of ‘visible’ differences will be taken up in the fol-
lowing chapter. In addition, I am aware that some black women thinkers would
have reservations about the label ‘feminist’ (see Walker 1984; (charles) 1997).
This points to the importance of not assuming that the category of either black
feminists or white feminists is as homogeneous as it may appear for the sake of
brevity in this discussion.
3 See Ware (1992) for a discussion of the sometimes difficult relationship between
campaigns for female suffrage and abolitionism.
4 For a review of this literature, see Alexander (1996).
5 They are also mainly white, which has obvious significance. Anoop Nayak is an
important exception (see his discussion in Nayak (1999)).
6 See for example Husband (1982), van Dijk (1991), Rattansi (1992), Goulbourne
(1993), Cohen (1994), Macey (1995), Hesse (1997), Paul (1997), Waters (1997),
Gabriel (1998), Carter et al. (2000).
7 See for example Morrison (1992), Wetherell and Potter (1992), Goldberg
(1993), Dyson (1995), Gabriel (1994), Gabriel (1996), Aanerud (1997), Dyer
(1997), Goldberg (1997), Muraleedharan (1997) and Neal (1999).

2 Troubling ‘race’
1 It is now generally agreed by scientists that race has no biological meaning.
Genotypical differences (differences in genetic make-up) do not map onto
so-called racial groups, largely defined by phenotypical differences. As Steve
Jones (1993: 247) argues: ‘Modern genetics does in fact show that there are
no separate groups within humanity’. However, as argued above, this does not