Race and Ethnicity

Culture, Identity and Representation

Stephen Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134086665
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Broad-ranging and comprehensive, this completely revised and updated textbook is a critical guide to issues and theories of 'race' and ethnicity. It shows how these concepts came into being during colonial domination and how they became central – and until recently, unquestioned – aspects of social identity and division. This book provides students with a detailed understanding of colonial and post-colonial constructions, changes and challenges to race as a source of social division and inequality.

Drawing upon rich international case studies from Australia, Guyana, Canada, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Mexico, Ireland and the UK, the book clearly explains the different strands of theory which have been used to explain the dynamics of race. These are critically scrutinised, from biological-based ideas to those of critical race theory. This key text includes new material on changing multiculturalism, immigration and fears about terrorism, all of which are critically assessed.

Incorporating summaries, chapter-by-chapter questions, illustrations, exercises and a glossary of terms, this student-friendly text also puts forward suggestions for further project work. Broad in scope, interactive and accessible, this book is a key resource for undergraduate students of 'race' and ethnicity across the social sciences.

CHAPTER 1

Representation

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

(Nietzsche 1954: 46–7)

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts’, I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…

(Nietzsche 1954: 458)

‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are terms which appear confusingly unstable: hedged about with sensitivities and mirroring the shifting social and cultural contexts in which they are encountered. This book began life as a series of images, with the notion that images convey immediacy about the complex issues of race and ethnicity in ways that written texts cannot always deliver. However, while images may seem to communicate in a direct and less abstracted way, their interpretation is often more problematic. As the above quotes by Nietzsche convey, the expressive resources of a culture can become well worn, a hackneyed currency, not fully capable of capturing the complex fluidity of changing identities. Meaning is not implicit in signs, images, words and other cultural codes; rather, it is based on shared conventions, and these vary between and within cultures. Some meanings are recorded in dictionaries; others, such as subtle non-verbal signs or pictorial forms, are more ambiguous and difficult to pin down.

Two key aspects of race and ethnicity need to be highlighted here: first, neither ‘race’ nor ‘ethnicity’ have simple referents ‘out there’; they are not stable definitions of some static social reality – rather, as central concepts of identity, they are constantly changing and being adapted to fluid social contexts. Second, following from this, race and ethnicity are constructs defined through the circulation of social meanings. The vast array of popular representations, advertising, films, news from television and newspapers, tweets and blogs, policy documents, organisational culture, everyday conversations – indeed, every social act of communication – operates to implicitly or explicitly reaffirm these meanings in context. These representations are not fixed and eternal but the mediated products of social and historical circumstances.

How can images, words and media representations of ‘others’ assist in the task of unravelling the construction of race? This process inevitably depends on the social, cultural and political contexts in which such representations are employed. Relevant here is the concept of the ‘cultural imaginary’, which suggests that a collective sense of how the culture is defined emerges from representations: interlinked stories, portrayals of people, issues and events. Lykke suggests that such an imaginary ‘refers to the intersection of fantasy images and discursive forms in which cultural communities mirror and articulate themselves and which act as points of reference for their collective identity formations’ (Lykke 2000).

Portrayals of difference are clearly one important aspect of the imaginary, presenting the reader with cultural narratives about identity and often denoting the norms of belonging and exclusion. One clear example involves the representation of colour. Several authors have demonstrated the significance of whiteness to our understanding of race. Stuart Hall (1997) has been especially influential in illustrating how race and ethnicity are interlinked with ideas about sexuality and gender identity. In addition to illustrating the process of ‘racialising the other’ through the popular imagery of colonial domination, Hall suggested counter-strategies through which representation could contest, parody, reverse or confront the ‘dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality’ (ibid.: 274, emphasis in the original).

Dyer’s seminal text White recognised the naturalised invisibility of ‘whiteness’: ‘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). Dyer’s emphasis exposes the march of white iconography from classical painting to films such as Alien and Falling Down, imagery that serves to legitimise and maintain white dominance as the ‘default race’ in western culture (Wang 2006). Knowles (2004: 188) criticised Dyer’s claims to have exposed the ‘mechanisms of race making’ through a lexicon of images as flawed and unsustained. Furthermore, she refutes the claim made by Dyer and others that racist discourses and imagery of the past are still active and influential. Instead she suggests that ‘If the past lives on in the present – it most certainly does so in new social forms’ (ibid.: 189). However, while Knowles quite correctly points out the dangers of conflating the complexities of ‘race making’ with images of white domination and the domestication of empire, it is by re-evaluating the historical imagery of racial superiority that the deeply embedded and tacit acceptance of whiteness might be exposed. It also seems clear that stereotypes of race can endure over long periods of time and that, while their articulation in each era may be nuanced rather differently, the core values may remain starkly preserved.

In addition, there has been a trend to make whiteness an academic field of study with, perhaps, the attractive though misguided aim of attempting ‘to displace the normativity of the white position by seeing it as a strategy of authority rather than an authentic or essential “identity”’ (Bhabha 1998: 21). Roediger argues:

to the extent that those studying whiteness see themselves as involved in a distinct and novel enterprise … the charge that new work recentres whiteness and takes the edge off oppression has considerable force. Indeed even when those are not the intentions, the risk that scholarship on whiteness will be read in such a way is real. The lamentable terms ‘White Studies’ and ‘Whiteness Studies’ lend themselves to such readings.

(Roediger 2001: 78)

Undoubtedly, simply enumerating images of colonialism and whiteness (or blackness) will not reveal the construction of race. A model known as the ‘circuit of culture’ (Du Gay et al. 1997) offers a fluid and holistic view of the practices involved in the production of culture. In this model ‘representation’ is one position in a matrix alongside processes of identity, production, consumption and regulation. This focus on the circulation of shared meanings shows that meanings and ideas have material consequences. For example, the racial thinking that led to ideas about eugenics and racial purity, and to paternalistic views on the part of whites towards indigenous peoples, had consequences for millions of people under colonial rule in Australia. For instance, up to the 1970s, ‘half-caste’ children were removed from their Aboriginal families and adopted out to white families in a clear attempt to ‘breed out’ mixed individuals. Similarly, images and notions of whiteness or blackness are also converted into items for consumption, television programmes, hair products, toys and so on. Products are often purchased because we feel some affinity to their style or to the brand image and identity being communicated much more than for their utility or material value. It appears that the underlying values and beliefs in a society are bound up with forms of representation that mediate our experience of the social world and constitute elements with which the individual identifies.

This internal process could be considered to be the effect of ideologies. The traditional Marxist understanding of ideology was a form of false consciousness: the individual experiences social reality through a distorting mirror, disguising the exploitation implicit in class-based societies. For example, we might suppress the knowledge that purchasing a discounted product is possible because of the exploitation of workers. By contrast, for Althusser, ‘ideology does not “reflect” the real world but “represents” the “imaginary relationship of individuals” to the real world; the thing ideology (mis)represents is itself already at one remove from the real’ (Felluga 2011).

Furthermore, ideology always has a material existence: ‘an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices’ (Althusser 2001: 112) and always manifests itself through actions, which are ‘inserted into practices’ (ibid: 114): for example, rituals, conventional behaviour and so on. Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to adopt Pascal’s formula for belief: ‘Pascal says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”’ (ibid.). It is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that continually instantiates us as subjects (Felluga 2011).

This system underpins our social and cultural life and mediates between people and their relationship to society as well as their social identities. These representations operate at the level of unconscious desires as well as through an individual’s rationality. For Althusser, the material objective of ideology is in ‘“constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’ (Althusser 2001: 116). This is achieved through ‘interpellation’, a process by which people are hailed as a particular subject. Althusser uses the example of a policeman, teacher or priest calling to a person on the street: ‘Hey you!’ As the person turns around, they have become the subject. This hailing takes place in reality at many levels (conscious as well as unconscious callings) and aligning with specific identities or cultural roles. Consider the invitation to be constituted as a particular (perhaps aspira-tional) identity in advertising or in the pointing finger of a recruitment poster – ‘Your country needs you!’ Ideology in this way constitutes the person’s ‘lived’ relation to the real. One constant and authoritative source for ideologies which could be said to perform this interpellation individually and culturally is the national news. Take one particular day –

AND NOW THE NEWS …

Headlining stories on Saturday 31 March 2012 (The Guardian)

• ‘Police face racism scandal after black man records abuse’

Scotland Yard is facing a racism scandal after a black man used his mobile phone to record police officers subjecting him to a tirade of abuse in which he was told: ‘The problem with you is you will always be a nigger.’

The recording, obtained by The Guardian, was made by the 21-year-old after he was stopped in his car, arrested and placed in a police van the day after last summer’s riots.

The man, from Beckton, east London, said he was made to feel ‘like an animal’ by police. He has also accused one officer of kneeling on his chest and strangling him.

In the recording, a police officer can be heard admitting he strangled the man because he was ‘a cunt’. Moments later, another officer – identified by investigators as PC Alex MacFarlane – subjects the man to a succession of racist insults and adds: ‘You’ll always have black skin. Don’t hide behind your colour’ (Lewis 2012).

• ‘George Galloway hails Bradford spring as Labour licks its wounds’

• ‘Anger over plan to X-ray young asylum seekers to check age’

• ‘Tombstone on grave of Adolf Hitler’s parents removed’

• Tibetan grief – A Tibetan exile weeps as the body of Jamphel Yoshi who burned himself to death on Monday is cremated in the Northern Indian town of Dharmsala (image p. 26)

• Afghanistan – Policeman kills 9 officers at command post

• ‘Trayvon Martin and how racism is still destroying lives in the US’ (by Jesse Jackson)

• Protest at death of Trayvon in Washington. The youth was shot dead in Florida by a neighbourhood watch captain after an altercation (image p. 26)

• French police arrest 19 in anti-terrorism crackdown on radical Islamists in areas of France; suggestion that this crackdown provides collateral for Marie Le Pen of Front National in the midst of the French election

It is quite apparent that these headlining stories ‘hail’ us as particular types of subject and embody the pre-existing ideological values implicit in our society. There are implicit ‘others’ here: asylum seekers, Tibetan exiles, Afghan police, black youth in London and Florida, radical Islamists, Hitler’s parents, racist police; they are not being addressed by this liberal news channel while we are implicitly embodied in the narrative point of these stories and their reporting. This news demonstrates the way that race, racism and difference permeate society, being accepted and central to the way social and cultural boundaries are drawn and events are expressed. Sometimes the story is especially shocking (and hence newsworthy), perhaps because it presents a stark reminder of the continued material existence of apparatus and practices which are not supposed to be recorded. The headlining story came to media attention only because the victim was able to record the incident on his mobile phone. The IPC had dismissed the case initially, suggesting that there was no case for the officers to answer. Since the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, (murdered in a racist attack 22 April 1993) ninety-six Black Minority Ethnic (BME) people have been killed, a fact that is not very often publicised ‘other’ than through the efforts of groups such as the Institute for Racial Relations (Institute for Racial Relations (IRR) (2012)), which has reported these race-related killings (about five a year). This is a stark reminder that, although on the surface British society has turned away from a culture of overt racism in which racist epithets were commonplace in public or in the media, racism and racist violence are still everyday experiences, with the overall number of racist incidents recorded by the police standing at 47,678 in 2011/12 (Home Office 2012).¹

The notion of George Galloway’s by-election victory in Bradford for the Respect Party as a ‘Bradford Spring’ refers to the ‘Arab Spring’, the series of revolutions against the old dictatorships in the Middle East from 2010 which affected Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria (the last of which has slipped into a protracted and bl...