Page 9 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

2 Knowing ‘whiteness’
experiences, sense of selves, ways of thinking, speaking and doing shaped
by ideas of race and racist structures and relations. Thus, it requires hearing
and seeing ‘race’ in contexts where it is not explicitly felt as present. When
one white woman (interviewee) talks to another white women (interviewer)
about schooling or national identity or living in London, the ways in which
they are ‘doing’ ‘race’, just as they are doing class, sexuality and gender,
will not necessarily be referred to or even understood. But this book tries to
trace some of the ways in which this talk is shaped by racist processes that
produce raced bodies, imaginaries and ways of being and relating to others.
Those who have been positioned as non-white are more likely to have their
lives scrutinised for the effects of ‘race’, but this book asserts the importance
of applying similar attention to the lives and identities of those who are
positioned as white. As Ruth Frankenberg argues:

To speak of whiteness is, I think, to assign everyone a place in the rela-
tions of racism. It is to emphasize that dealing with racism is not merely
an option for white people – that, rather, racism shapes white people’s
lives and identities in a way that is inseparable from other facets of daily
life.
(Frankenberg 1993: 6)

However, it is also important to heed Sara Ahmed’s warning that merely
marking whiteness (which is itself an act that is only new to white people)
does not achieve anti-racist aims: ‘putting whiteness into speech, as an object
to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and it
does not necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action
that we could describe as anti-racist’ (Ahmed 2004: 12). Rather than making
claims for moving ‘beyond race’ or for successful anti-racism, Ahmed argues
that work on whiteness should ‘be about attending to forms of white racism
and white privilege that are not undone, and may even be repeated and
intensified, through declarations of whiteness, or through the recognition of
privilege as privilege’ (Ahmed 2004: 58).
Nonetheless, I argue that to mark what is frequently (at least to white
eyes) unmarked – the racialised nature of white experience – is part of a
process of decentring whiteness. It is a crucial counter to racism, or at least
a condition for better understanding its workings. The intention is not to
reify – or essentialise – something called whiteness, but to show how the
practices, subject construction and identities of people positioned as ‘white’
are racialised. An important way to avoid essentialising whiteness is to ac-
knowledge that it is not a singular experience and to examine the different
ways in which whiteness or ‘white’ people are produced. In particular, I am
interested in exploring how class and gender intersect with whiteness and
how identities are produced in specific times and places.
To examine whiteness requires going beyond questions of white con-
sciousness or as Helen (charles) (1993: 99) puts it, whether white people