Page 22 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

2 Troubling ‘race’

Introduction

Despite longstanding academic and activist insistence that ‘race’ is a social
construction devoid of any inherent or essential meaning, the ontological
status of ‘race’ remains in question. As Howard Winant (2000: 185) writes:
‘contemporary racial theory . . . is often “objectivistic” about its funda-
mental category. Although abstractly acknowledged to be a sociohistorical
construct, race in practice is often treated as an objective fact: one simply
is one’s race’. Paul Gilroy (2000: 37) argues that ‘we have entered a pe-
riod where “race” and raciology are in crisis and ripe for abolition and that
“race” should be approached as an afterimage – a lingering effect of looking
too casually into the damaging glare emanating from colonial conflicts at
home and abroad’. Both Gilroy and Winant raise important questions for
those who seek to analyse processes of racialisation, including the construc-
tion of ‘whiteness’. At what point are racism and raciologies to be opposed
or countered, not by examining their impact on people’s lives but, rather,
by finding new ways of seeing and speaking about the body and the self?
When will ‘colour blindness’ not mean evasion of processes of exclusion in
which one is positioned as privileged, but instead be a reflection of a new era
of seeing and visualising the body? Gilroy makes a timely call for the need
to radically question and even perhaps move ‘beyond’ race. Yet this book
argues that there remains a need to analyse the powerful impact of ‘race’
on the construction of identity and experience in everyday life, particularly
in the hitherto often neglected area of white lives. This chapter suggests an
alternative route towards the objective of fundamentally unsettling ‘race’ as
an ontological category through attention to the performativity of ‘race’.
That is, the examination of the production of the concept of ‘race’ through
discursive practice and, in particular, ways of seeing difference.
The concept of ‘race’ has a long and controversial history. The central
contention in this book is that ‘race’ as an idea and as a lived experience is
socially and discursively constructed. That is to say that ‘race’ has no biologi-
cal basis – it is not a ‘natural’ or inevitable way of categorising or regarding
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human beings. This does not mean, however, that ‘race’ does not have a real