Page 28 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Troubling ‘race’ 21
Pratt writes of the need to expand her ‘constricted eye’, ‘an eye that has only
let in what I have been taught to see’ (Pratt 1984: 17). This account of the
‘constricted eye’ is key here because it alerts us to the importance of what is
seen and not seen in racialised visual schema. It could be argued that visual
differences are to ‘race’ as Butler argues that sex is to gender. Butler argues
that sexual difference is never simply a function of material differences, but
is marked and formed by the discursive practices of gender: ‘gender is not
to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means
by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as
“prediscursive”, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which cul-
ture acts’ (Butler 1990: 7). So, for ‘race’, racial discourses serve to construct
the visible differences on which they themselves are based. It is through
raced categories that visual differences become apprehended. In this way,
seeing or perceiving of visual differences is constructed as ‘prediscursive’,
neutral or inevitable. Thus, ‘race’ has to be understood as produced through
a particular discursive history – a history that is specifically western, linked
to both imperialism and notions of modernity: ‘Racist culture has been one
of the central ways modern social subjects make sense of and express them-
selves about the world they inhabit and invent (Goldberg 1993: 9). Above
all, ‘race’ is a particular way of seeing, and then categorising, difference. It
requires both that differences are defined and that a particular kind of seeing
the human body is learnt, and then that those differences are placed in a
hierarchy of power and value.
This way of placing humankind into different groups first emerged in
the sixteenth century and was systematised in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, coinciding with the rise of western colonialism and
imperialism as well as the development of western science (Goldberg, 1993:
255). It is important to note this particular trajectory of western concepts
of ‘race’, in order to understand what distinguishes this way of marking and
seeing difference from other ways of grouping humans in different socie-
ties. Even where a language of ‘race’ is being deployed in non-western or in
non-modern contexts, caution should be exercised in directly translating the
concept. Alastair Bonnett (2000b: 8) argues that ‘the modern idea of “race”
is distinctive because it emerged from modern attitudes towards nature and
politics. In other words, it is the product of European naturalist science and
European colonial and imperial power’. While there may have been ideas of
‘colour-coded’ identity and discrimination in premodern contexts (Bonnett
draws on examples from China and the Middle East), these identities were
not ‘reified into a natural attribute.

Modern European white identity is historically unique. People in other
societies may be seen to have valued whiteness and to have employed
the concept to define, at least in part, who and what they were. But
they did not treat being white as a natural category nor did they invest
so much of their sense of identity within it. Europeans racialised, which