Page 31 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

24 Troubling ‘race’
of racial degeneracy. White people are those who do not have ‘one drop’ of
black blood, or who do not fail the apartheid ‘pencil test’. As a result of this
gap between whiteness and its physical attributes, Richard Dyer argues that,
within racialised discourse, white people are not reducible to their bodies in
the same way as black people are: ‘white people are something else that is
realised in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or racial’ (Dyer 1997:
14). The meaning of whiteness for Dyer is contained in that which is beyond
the body. This means that whiteness has a complex relationship with the
visible: ‘whites must be seen to be white, yet whiteness as race resides in
invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen’
(Dyer 1997: 45). However, the question of being seen or unseen relates
closely, as Dyer suggests, to questions of power.
The power plays involved in seeing race and racialised positioning also
encompassed class and gender differences. Alastair Bonnett (2000b) argues
that, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Victorian
bourgeoisie imaginatively aligned the working class with non-whites as well
as, at times, positing them as a distinct racial group. Bonnett argues that, as
the nature of capitalism changed, so too did the racial status of the working
class, who could then be included in, and assert their inclusion in, whiteness.
The extent to which women were truly included within whiteness has also
varied historically. The racial tree of superiority was frequently imagined
as a male one, with white, heterosexual European man at the pinnacle of
civilisation and racialised privilege and culture. Yet white women were also
essential for reproducing this superiority and had therefore to be assigned a
place. This was particularly true in colonial contexts where racialised divi-
sions were particularly critical to the social and political ordering of soci-
ety. Ann Laura Stoler argues that ‘the very categories of “colonizer” and
“colonized” were secured through forms of sexual control that defined the
domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which
they identified themselves’ (Stoler 1997: 345). At times, white women might
be regarded as vulnerable to intellectual and moral weaknesses and in need
of protection and direction and, in particular, protection from black sexual
8
aggression. At other times, women were given a more central role in the
protection and reproduction of civilisation, particularly with regard to the
maintenance and regulation of domestic space (see C. Hall, 1992; Ware,
1992; McClintock, 1995).
The question of visibility and invisibility is crucial to an understanding of
perceptual practices of ‘race’, as it raises the question of power and relation-
ality. Perceptual practices involve both seeing and being seen – or not being
seen. The fields of the visual and visibility function in different ways accord-
ing to how and where subjects are positioned. Above all, as David Goldberg
discusses in his elaboration of Fanon’s writings on visibility and invisibility,
these are dynamic, ever-changing processes of power: ‘visibility and invis-
ibility are not simply states or conditions of being. Rather they characterise,
express, reflect, or they are the effects of strategic relations’ (Goldberg 1997: