Page 48 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Talk, tea and tape recorders 41
be so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their
take on blackness to let them know what’s going on with whiteness.
...First of all, let’s acknowledge that few nonwhite scholars are being
awarded grants to investigate and study all aspects of white culture from
a standpoint of ‘difference’.
(hooks 1990: 54–5)

I do not wish to labour the point of mea culpa and take up the role of the
anguished white academic, but I raise it here to highlight the position from
which this work is written. Nor do I propose to give what has become known
as a ‘reflexive account’ of the self of the researcher. Beverly Skeggs (2002:
360) critiques the ‘tendency to think that the problems of power, privilege
and perspective can be dissolved by inserting one’s self into the account
and proclaiming that reflexivity has occurred in practice’. Skeggs (2002) and
Adkins (2002) also caution against the ways in which writing the self into
research accounts can rely on the fixing of others. As Sara Ahmed writes:
‘Studying whiteness can involve the claiming of a privileged white identity
as the subject who knows . . . we cannot simply unlearn privilege when the
cultures in which learning take place are shaped by privilege’ (Ahmed 2004:
40). Readers need to take account of the limitations of the position and
adjust their reading accordingly.