The Body, Authenticity and Racism

Lindsey Garratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138644878
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317241348
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The modern world may believe that authenticity empowers us to be our true selves. However, is this really true for all people? Would authenticity be accepted by others if it does not fit within the conceptions of those who embody "nationally authorised" attributes?

Drawing upon an in-depth study of young children in Dublin's North inner city, The Body, Authenticity and Racism offers detailed insight into how racism is created and perpetuated within 7–9-year-old boys' interactions with one another. Indeed, through unique empirical data, this enlightening title demonstrates the importance of discussing the body when examining racism – not only in how the body is judged and racialised by other people, but how it is an apparent medium through which racism operates and disappears into. Garratt also explores how masculinity, belonging to a local area and being accepted as 'Irish' is intricately interwoven within gendered and racist assumptions; which comes not only from wider discourses but are actively constructed and reconstructed by children themselves.

Using a Bourdieusian method of analysis and phenomenological philosophy, this book ultimately highlights the role of authenticity in hiding racism amongst children. A timely volume, it will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Irish Studies and Masculinities Studies.

1
Introduction

In 1987 novelist Roddy Doyle penned a famous line about north inner city Dublin, or the ‘Northside’, in The Commitments. A fictional band manager reassures a group of white Northside musicians they have the right to play soul music, a genre created and made famous by black Americans. He argues the history of marginalisation experienced by Irish people in Europe, of Dublin people within Ireland and of ‘Northside’ Dubliners within Dublin is analogous to the struggles of black Americans, or more succinctly that these white Irish musicians should proudly declare ‘I’m black an’ I’m proud’ (Doyle 2013 [1987], 13). Thirty years on from this line, made even more well known by Alan Parker’s subsequent 1991 movie, one third of the population of Dublin’s Northside were born outside of the Republic of Ireland [hereafter Ireland]. This book tells the story of some of these migrants, contemporary outsiders who live among historic outsiders, inside a country which still stands internationally as a nation constructed as white but somehow as not white enough. This fresh research context will act as a prism through which the international literature within ethnic and racial studies, which has largely developed in the U.S.A. and the U.K. can be analysed. The objective, however, is to go beyond the simple point that understanding racism is contextual, but to use this case study site to examine key concepts in the field, namely racism, racialisation, acculturation and integration. The aim of this book is to make three overarching contentions; firstly, that the body has been unintentionally written out of analysis; secondly, without meaningfully engaging with embodiment the ways in which racism is embedded into ‘common sense’, ‘rational’ perspectives of whom and what can be said to belong cannot be fully exposed; and thirdly, that racism is interwoven into moralising perspectives of ‘authenticity’ and ‘honesty’ which seriously undermines policy that focuses on adaptation. These core claims will be made through the stories of 59 primary school children aged 7–9 years growing up in Dublin City’s Northside.

Currently, to even bring up the body in ethnic and racial studies brings a tension to debate, a held breath, arguments silently rehearsed on how regressive this is, how the body only has meaning through its interpretation. In other words it matters merely if discussed through racialisation, a concept that has become central to analysis of racism. A core contention of this monograph is that the ways in which dominant academic work has framed interpretation is incomplete, as it heavily focuses on language but does not give as in-depth an account of somatic perception. Indeed while the term ‘racialisation’ has importantly provided the field with a vocabulary to dismantle essentialised notions of race, it is vocabulary and language which remain the focal point of analyses of racism. How ‘others’ are created and interpreted has been squarely placed within the linguistic realm and to bring the body into analysis provokes instant retorts that it is false to distinguish the linguistic from the embodied (Butler 1997). The contention of this monograph though, is that while this may be true, to date the implication of this approach has been to prioritise words and language, reducing the body to linguistic schemas. This book takes the next steps to understand the relationship between these schemas and their embodiment within habit and practice.

A paucity of work since Frantz Fanon’s (1982 [1952]) which sustains a focus on the body in racism is surprising given the phenomenological approach he draws on has become increasingly popular within Sociology of the Body. Within this field of study, far from turning back to biological determinism, when the body is engaged with, it is to consider how practice emerges through the incorporation of habit into one’s corporeality, yet this approach has made little impact on studies of racism. This book examines these fields together with the aim of bridging scholarship that may be mutually beneficial. The need to consider other possible frames of analysis is timely as Miri Song (2014) has argued that ‘what’ and ‘whom’ is considered racist is suffering from conceptual inflation, where any mention of ethnicity is open to accusations of racism. It is the contention of this book that the lack of clarity on what can be considered racist is partially the legacy of the propensity to focus on iterations at the expense of analysing practice. In other words the difficulty of talking about racism that Song (2014) identifies is hampered by a constant focus on how we talk about racism. This monograph will contend that considering how practice and habit is inculcated in the body allows for a definition of racism which is not only based on what one says, but on what one does and what one perceives. The body then is not simply an object which is judged in a racist society but is considered here as a concurrent filter for these judgements. It is the contention of this book that one important aspect of the interweaving of perception and racism comes through notions of authenticity.

A crucial aspect of examining racism is in examining how it does not simply exist in extreme behaviour and articulations, but is often constructed by considerations of what is rational and often articulated in banality (Billig 1995, Goldberg 2002). This book will introduce authenticity as a significant aspect of how racism is disguised, denied, perpetuated and rationalised. It will contend that minority populations are at greater risk of being misrecognised as ‘inauthentic’, and this designation is used to justify their marginalisation. Drawing on the empirical evidence ‘authenticity’ will be shown to be bound within racist and gendered conceptions of whom can be said to legitimately embody nationally and locally authorised dispositions and identity markers. Examining the construction of authenticity within perception and how this relates to racism breaks new ground, as it both theorises a phenomenon Rollock et al. (2013) and Archer (2012) have identified in recent journal articles and contributes to the burgeoning sociological work on authenticity, which contends being authentic has become a major axiological principal of late modernity, through which individuals examine their lives and the lives and worth of others (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, Weigert 2009). A focus on authenticity offers a critique to dominant theories within integration and acculturation studies as these approaches are based on an assumption that if migrants acquire enough ‘capital’ they will have adapted to their new society. However, the evaluation of shared characteristics between migrant and majority groups as adaptations creates a power dynamic, as dispositions are implicitly and sometimes explicitly placed as an inherent aspect of one group and an accumulation by another (Hage 1998). This book will argue that by focusing on adaptation, the behaviour and embodied dispositions of migrant groups risk being perceived as mimetic and inauthentic, which allows racism to be recast as simply punishing ‘inauthentic’ behaviour and moralising exclusion as something minority groups bring on themselves.

At the heart of this book is the story of 59 primary school children aged 7 to 9 years in north inner city Dublin. The above theoretical extensions will be made through focusing on data collected over two academic years. Reconsidering international literature in relation to the case study of North Dublin allows a nuanced point to be made. It illuminates the fact that much theory in ethnic and racial studies has developed in countries of long standing immigration, with colonial pathways and a legacy of slavery which cannot be uncritically applied to other contexts, but resists the temptation to be so introspective that the insights from international literature are ignored. Rather this book argues that looking at ethnic and racial studies through empirical data from Ireland allows a fresh perspective on theory, as the canonical texts of the field need not be immediately deferred to and can be reappraised from another perspective. This is necessary for the growth of the field as a whole. Where the particular locale of North Dublin has a distinct role to play by drawing specifically on its history is alluded to by the opening quote.

While one doesn’t need the perspective of time to see errors in Doyle’s assessment of the ‘blackness’ of white Irish people (which of course is a comic interaction), this statement encapsulates something of the odd position Dublin and north Dublin especially has had with the national narrative of what Ireland is. The cultural nationalism of any state relies on a story about who we are (van Dijk 1993), and much recent work has begun to focus on who gets left out of this construction on several overlapping and mutually constructed levels of inequality (Virdee 2014). Indeed one of the biggest stumbling blocks in writing about racism recently has been the recognition that ‘white privilege’ is not evenly distributed throughout ‘white’ populations and there is more complexity than a neat duality of victim and perpetrator. So far the trend in scholarship has been to focus on the political affiliations of these so called ‘white and angry’ groups (Ford and Goodwin 2014) but there is serious tension in this scholarship. As Virdee (2014) argues some attempts to look at underprivileged ‘white’ communities have skirted dangerously close to contending socio-economic disadvantage is equivalent or indeed worse than racist discrimination. In contrast, there is also a trend to dismiss some groups as endemically racist; adding to what Skeggs (2004) has called ‘class contempt’ where communities are constructed as worthless. Ireland is an interesting case in point in relation to these debates. The ‘Irish’ have historically had trouble being recognised as legitimately ‘white’ and European (Ignatiev 1995) and the cultural nationalism which constructed the modern Republic of Ireland has in many ways made the urban a ‘foreign’ space and urban poverty a secondary consideration to rural hegemony (Kiberd 1995). Dublin’s Northside, which is historically the most deprived area not only of Dublin but of the State, is well placed to reassess the complexity of these dynamics. This book will argue that disadvantage may be spread along many mutually constructing axes but this does not supersede racism, but in fact makes it harder to tackle and perceive as racism. That class matters, but not simplistically as the master root of all disadvantage but in how it can compound racism, making it seem inauthentic in comparison to an overarching narrative of class and delegitimising the right to focus on racism as a distinct but intertwined experience.

Finally, a key advantage of this book is its focus on these phenomena through the stories of young children, which allows this monograph to examine these processes through their experiences and perspectives. One of the difficulties of examining adults is that it is hard to unpick that which is already so entrenched. By examining children the process of embodiment and incorporation of habit is somewhat magnified allowing a window into their origins. Indeed, Allison James (2000) has argued the process of growing up places the body at the heart of a child’s identity, a focus on children then brings into even sharper relief the need to deal with the body in theories of racism. Another key advantage of the empirical data used in this book is that it draws on the stories of the 1.5¹ and 2nd generation in a country which has a relatively recent history of significant immigration. This allows a thorough examination of the processes of how racism is currently being constructed, justified and embedded within the first significant generation to migrate to a country. In countries of historic immigration where there are established paths for minority groups to follow and the marginalisation of groups, has increasingly been blamed on models of cultural deficit (Yosso 2005). Examining these issues in another context where construction can be more easily highlighted and assessed is crucial to prevent the slip into a decontextualised discussion of complicity.

The present study

Qualitative research does not attempt to test assumptions or refute theories, but is interpretive and focused on discovering meaning; as such an inductive grounded theory approach was adopted for this study, from its conception throughout fieldwork and at the analysis stages (Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]). Data for this study comes from three 2nd class² groups of 7- to 8-year-old children from three primary schools in north inner city Dublin. Two of these schools are single sex boys’ schools and one is a mixed primary school. Collected over two phases, the initial fieldwork took place as part of the Trinity Immigration Initiative,³ Children Youth and Community Relations Project [CYCR] (Curry et al. 2011). The CYCR project collected demographic data from all primary schools within north inner city Dublin over two academic years; seven schools were selected using maximum variation sampling (Patton 2001). Individual and diode interviews with 343 children were conducted along with hundreds of observation hours. This book focuses on the experiences of the youngest boys aged 7 to 8 years from three of these schools; school 1 and 3 are single sex boys’ schools and school 2 is a co-educational.⁴ Just under 30% of student body in each school was comprised of students with two migrant parents; the numbers were as high as 60% for those under seven years and as low as 20% for those over nine years; and the 7 to 8 year cohort was chosen as it was reflective of the average demographic, with between 28% and 31% in each class group (Curry et al. 2011). Class group 3 was revisited one year later for the author’s work alone, at which point the respondents were 8 to 9 years; all the pupils had been retained from the previous year and two students who had migrated to Ireland in the previous four years had joined the class. A total number of 42 interviews, from 59 participates, 51 boys and 8 girls, 39 children from the majority group and 20 from minority backgrounds are drawn here. Additionally the data consists of approximately 150 hours of in-classroom observation notes and children’s social interactions outside of the formal classroom setting (The methodological complexity of this study is the subject of Garratt, forthcoming).

Underlying the formal methodological approach, this research was conducted with Trinity College Dublin’s Children’s Research Centre [CRC]. Within the ethos of the CRC, children are understood as persons in their own right; all research conducted in the CRC draws on their competencies and capacities to engage in research and promotes the right of children to be considered persons of value with rights and responsibilities (Greene and Hogan 2005). Indeed, over the last 20 years, the way in which children and childhood is viewed has shifted dramatically. This change can be seen through legislation such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (notably Article 12) and within Ireland through the National Children’s Strategy (2000) which focused on understanding the ‘whole’ child and supporting research which facilitates the voice of children to be heard in matters which affect them. The interdisciplinary field of childhood studies now understands children in the research process as the primary source of expertise on their own childhoods, and the perception of children in research as passive, dependent and incompetent has shifted to understanding them as actively involved in constructing their lives, possessing an amount of autonomy and resilience and with a voice and perspective worthy of examination (Gilligan 2008, Greene and Hogan 2005, James and Prout 1990, Mayall 2002, Woodhead 2003). In light of the child centred ethos of the CRC, the first aim of this project and the CYCR project it draws on was to chiefly focus on the inter-ethnic relationships between children from their perspectives. Hence primary schools were accessed as sites in which interaction between migrant and dominant group children could be explored. This decision was made due to anecdotal evidence before the commencement of fieldwork that suggested that very little interaction between groups occurred outside of schools in the North-Inner City area; this was later confirmed by CYCR (Curry et al. 2011). Therefore, primary schools were chosen as fieldwork sites as they were the only locations in which interaction between groups could be guaranteed to be observed. This research then is not educational research per se.

There is a small but excellent body of work which has examined the Irish education system in relation to ethnicity and racism; of particular note is Dympna Devine’s body of work and excellent monograph focused on primary schools Immigration and Schooling in the Republic of Ireland: Making a Difference? (Devine 2011a), and Karl Kitching’s scholarship and examination of secondary schools in The Politics of Compulsive Education: Racism and Learner-Citizenship (Kitching 2014). The objective in this book is to compliment these pieces of work by looking at micro practices within schools, but it is by no means a dissection of school policies, curriculum or institutional racism. While the focus of this book is not to explicitly analyse the institution of the school, it is acknowledged that research conducted in an educational setting will always be tempered by that institution: from the structure of the children’s days and their free time, the creation of class groups and therefore many friendship groups, the development of children’s reputations in relation to their educational success or failure in the classroom, and teacher’s relationships with individual children and how this is perceived by their peers (Christensen and James 2000, Thorne 1993). Yet within the childhood studies tradition, rather than educational research, it has long been held that children tend to have their own worlds within schools, which are both of paramount importance to them and extremely hard to access (Fine and Sandstrom 1988, Opie and Opie 1959). Indeed the CYCR project quickly real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rationalising immigration
• 3 The importance of embodiment
• 4 Emotions, affect and interaction ritual
• 5 Authentically a Northside boy
• 6 The child world field: micro interactions and deference
• 7 Symbolic violence in the child world
• 8 Double estrangement, affect and reflexivity
• 9 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index