Page 33 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

26 Troubling ‘race’
we need to expose the actual construction of these differences themselves,
which serve to make categories of ‘race’ somehow prediscursive. At the same
time, there needs to be vigilant reflexivity to ensure that the study of ‘race’
does not result in the confirmation and reification of the concept. ‘Race’
cannot be dismissed as merely ideological and nor does the simple statement
that it is ‘socially constructed’ suffice. The nature of the construction needs
to be examined more closely.
I have argued that perceptual practices lie at the heart of the construction
of ‘race’. Racialised discourses are dependent on the construction of vis-
ible differences and perceptual practices, which make the apprehension of
‘racial’ differences seem inevitable and prediscursive. These discourses and
practices also work to render racialised subjects visibilised or invisibilised in
different ways. The challenge raised in this book is to acknowledge the sali-
ence of ‘race’ in people’s lives without re-endowing the concept itself with
‘respectability’ and essential meaning. Indeed, at one level, this study is try-
ing to argue for further examination of the impact of ‘race’ on lives that are
often considered to be untouched or ‘unblemished’ by ‘race’ – that of people
positioned as white. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s narration of her life provided an
example of the power of the performativity of whiteness in constructing
subjectivity and identity with her vivid portrayal of compelled and repeated
enactments and internalisations of both gendered and racialised discourses.
In this chapter, I have suggested ways in which ‘race’ might be more seri-
ously ‘troubled’ or destabilised than has been achieved by more orthodox
social constructionist approaches. By emphasising the constructed nature of
‘race’, examining how its various meanings are created historically through
discourse and practice and by suggesting its contradictory, ambivalent na-
ture, I have tried to set up an approach that will make it possible to examine
racialised lives and experience in such a way that does not merely serve
to reinstate or reify the concept of ‘race’. But the question remains as to
how ‘whiteness’ should be conceptualised. I take ‘whiteness’ here to mean
that which is constructed as the racialised norm (but is paradoxically often
perceived to be non-racialised or unmarked). It is therefore a relational posi-
tion, constructed through opposition to that which is ‘other’, rather than a
fixed set of physical attributes. It should be clear that whiteness needs to be
approached as a historicised and contextualised construction. It is produced
in a series of instances where discursive and psychic processes lead to identi-
fications with subject positions that are constructed as the norm, the neutral,
the centre, which is defined by and through a construction of a racialised
other. These moments of construction are at the same time gendered and
classed.
People are positioned as white through a range of discourses and prac-
tices. They also identify as white, responding to the ways in which they
are positioned discursively and within racialised performativity. They ‘see’
themselves as white. These practices are never fixed, but are constantly rein-
voked with shifting definitions. Nonetheless, the focus of this research is on