Page 29 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

22 Troubling ‘race’
is to say naturalised, the concept of whiteness, and entrusted it with the
essence of their community. Europeans turned whiteness into a fetish
object, a talisman of the natural whose power appeared to enable them
to impose their will on the world.
(Bonnett 2000a: 20–1, original emphasis)

Western science proceeded through processes of categorisation of the
‘natural’ and reliance on visual evidence. So, in the 1700s when Linnaeus
established practices of classifying animals and plants, this process was ex-
tended to humans, and the idea was introduced that there were different
species or races of humans, established by visible criteria. These different
races were increasingly placed in a hierarchy of value, with visible physi-
cal differences linked to different innate characteristics of personality and
ability. Western ideas of ‘race’ are a product of these perceptual practices,
coupled with an imperial imperative to establish superiority over others as
critical to rule.
Racial imagery involves the identification and separation of various visu-
ally identified somatic features: skin tone; hair colour and texture; nose,
eye, ear and hand shape; genitalia; body shape, etc. These multiple (and
flexible) visual signs are then characterised into types and inserted into ra-
cialised hierarchies, with the category white invariably placed at the top of
the ‘racial family tree’. Yet at the same time, ‘race’ is about more than visible
differences. Howard Winant writes of ‘the slow inscription of phenotypical
signification [which] took place upon the human body in and through con-
quest and enslavement, to be sure, but also as an enormous act of expression,
of narration’ (Winant 2000: 188). The narrations that produce racial dif-
ference are not solely confined to the visual. Racial differences may also be
constructed by other practices of perception and embodiment (for instance,
aural and vocal practices) (see Cohen 1988: 15). Nonetheless, it is clear that
the visual plays a key role in racial narrations. Despite the discrediting of
racial science, racist structures and the discourse of ‘race’ with its shifting
perceptual practices remain in contemporary society. Richard Dyer argues
not only that ‘sight has been a privileged sense in Western culture since the
middle ages’, but also that racial imagery is central to the modern world and
is never ‘not in play’ (Dyer 1997: xiii and 1).
However, ‘race’, although the product of European naturalist science, has
never been fixed as a discourse or observational practice. There has rarely
been agreement between ‘racial’ scientists about the number or definition of
the different racial groups. The signification of, and even visual sensitivity
to, different types is historically and geographically contextual. Few people
would be able to identify the ‘Irish ear’ or ‘Irish pug nose’, which was once
a marker of the ‘primitive nature’ of the Irish. Indeed, for most people, ‘the
Irish’ would not constitute a group who were anything other than unprob-
lematically white, although this has not always been the case (Ignatiev 1995;
see Dyer 1997: 12). As Sander L. Gilman notes, in America of the 1880s,