Page 30 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Troubling ‘race’ 23
‘Looking Irish was one further category of difference that was written on the
body and signified a poor character and bad temperament’ (Gilman 2001:
97). Equally, the process of identification of ‘race’ may be uncertain – lead-
ing to a need to ‘fix’ a person’s ‘race’. Despite the function of the visible as
a key signifier of ‘race’, the visibility of ‘race’ is not always clear or evident.
5
There are unsettling and unclear borderlands between racial identifications,
as the quote from Linda Martin Alcoff above illustrates. 6
Nonetheless, the link between the ‘Irish ear’ and the alleged Irish ‘primi-
tive nature’ points to the functioning and efficacy of racialised perceptual
practices. Racialised seeing involves not only the observation and identifica-
tion of visible somatic differences, but also the attachment of significations
to those differences. The visual becomes embedded in the symbolic. The
flexibility and malleability of the practices and significations account for
their durability and efficacy. Gilman describes how, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, as Jews in Europe shed their different clothing and dif-
ferent ways of wearing their hair, the discourse of science created new ways
of visually identifying and understanding their difference. New bodies for
the Jewish man and women were created that marked their difference. New
practices of observing the body identified Jews as having differently shaped
eyes and eyelids, which in turn were seen to signify how they saw the world
differently from non-Jews, and large hands were discovered as an irrefutable
demonstration of alleged grasping, material attitudes. The more the Jews
came to look like their neighbours, the greater the impetus to identify them
7
as physically, biologically different (Gilman 2000). The different meanings
attached to visible differences depend on how they are inserted into racial-
ised ideologies. Therefore, Matthew F. Jacobson argues that we need to trace
the ‘complex process of social value become perception’ (Jacobson 2000:
238).
Racialised discourse has long been concerned with reading into the ‘black
body’ traits of the primitive and symbolic associations with darkness, which
in turn constructs white bodies as ‘pure’, ‘enlightened’ and ‘civilised’. Signs
of blackness or non-whiteness have long been studied and categorised. David
Goldberg writes of the role modernity and science have played in producing
‘racial knowledge’, particularly in the fields of anthropology, natural his-
tory and biology (Goldberg 1993). The rule of law in nation states has also
been instrumental in identifying who is black or non-white (for example see
Domínguez 1986). Yet whiteness itself has often seemed to evade categorisa-
tion. This is partly a result of the difficulties in actually pinning down the no-
tion of ‘race’. As mentioned above, even the most highly racialised discursive
formations have difficulties in deciding how many ‘races’ there actually are
(see Gilroy 2000). As a consequence, whiteness is difficult to contain within
a single ‘race’ defined in any other way than it not being some other ‘race’
(or more commonly by it somehow not being racialised). Certainly, the idea
of the ‘Aryan race’ cannot include all who are generally considered ‘white’.
So whiteness becomes an absence – an absence of colour or of other signs