![]()
Chapter 1
Introduction
Race doesnât go away
A longstanding and still very common belief that people hold about race is that it is something that will eventually go away. For some, this belief is based on the anti-racist conviction that assigning people to different races is simply not a valid thing to do, and that through education and understanding we will get to the point where we no longer categorize one another in these terms. For others, it is based on the more commonsense feeling that the significance of race fades away once we have an understanding of someoneâs personality; that once we get to know what they are âreally likeâ then their racial identity doesnât matter any more and we stop thinking of them in those terms. Because in both cases it is felt that ideas about race â and particularly the negative and destructive ideas associated with racism â stem from ignorance and unfamiliarity, the suggestion is that race is something we can overcome, get around or see beyond. We can, it is thought, get to the point where it is not something we care about, or even notice. âI donât see race, I just see another personâ, someone might say; or, âIt makes no difference if youâre black or white, or red or blue or greenâ, or âItâs not the colour of someoneâs skin, but whatâs inside that mattersâ. While these sentiments are in many respects admirable as attempts to avoid or speak out against prejudice or discrimination, they are also patently untrue. They are attempts to pretend something that deep down we all know is not the case. Race doesnât disappear. We can fool ourselves that itâs not there, but we all know that it is.
If race doesnât go away, then perhaps itâs not quite right to think of race as necessarily the product of ignorance and unfamiliarity. What if greater knowledge and understanding of others actually increases, rather than diminishes, the significance of race? This seems to be borne out by our experience of life in the twenty-first century: wherever we live in the world, planes and trains and new media technologies make our social and cultural formations more diverse than ever before. We seem to know more and more about each other than we ever did. Living with difference is normal, and is becoming ever more so, and yet as we all know race hasnât evaporated into thin air. Our multicultural realities donât mean the end of race. On the contrary, race is everywhere. We canât get away from it, even if we try to, because trying to get rid of race is like trying to dig a hole out of existence. For the time being at least, race seems to be very much here to stay.
It is my argument in this book that the recognition that race doesnât go away is not, or need not be, a pessimistic one. As this chapter will go on to suggest, once we are able to acknowledge that race is about more than just racism â which will necessitate some critical thinking about the position of racism in a lot of existing race theory â then we are better placed to think in a less judgmental sense about the profound ways in which weâre all mixed up with race. This involvement we all have with race does not necessarily result in racism and inequality, and indeed may provide ways of challenging and undermining it.
Consuming race
So why doesnât race just go away? The answer is fairly simple: because weâre all deeply invested in it. This is the case whether or not weâre black or white, racist or anti-racist, Chilean or Chinese. It doesnât matter. Our lives are saturated with racial meanings, and often â as this book hopes to reveal â in ways that we do not always fully recognize or understand. Race doesnât just form a backdrop to our lives, it is a medium through which we live our lives. We are all of us actively involved in producing and reproducing ideas about race. The generation of racial meanings cannot simply be reduced to the things we explicitly say about race and how we behave towards those marked out as racially similar or different. Race is made and unmade in countless other ways as we go about the practice of being a human being: the books we read, the food we eat, the TV we watch, the toys we play with, the clothes we wear: all these things (and many others) can and frequently do have racial meanings, even if race is not explicitly marked out in them as a theme. We might use these objects and activities to say something about ourselves and our own racial identity; we might use them to say something about other people and our relationship to them; they might be used to express ideas about racial superiority, aptitude and intelligence, or to challenge and undermine those ideas; they might express our hatreds, our fears, our pleasures, our desires; they might provide ways of communicating with or connecting to others, or of refusing those connections; they might serve as a mechanism to find out about other people beyond our immediate social locations; we might engage with them as a way of pursuing particular interests, or as a way of exploring new realms of human experience.
This is where consumption comes in, as a way of thinking about some of the many different aspects of human life in which race is implicated. While clearly the circulation of racial meanings does not always need to involve acts of consumption, I want to suggest in this book that consumer culture is an immensely important and rather underexamined site for the making and remaking of those meanings. I use the idea of consumption in this book to refer â in a rather general way that will annoy some theorists of consumption â to a wide variety of practices that involve our engagement with a range of objects, products, services, stories, images, texts, styles, spaces and places. The important thing about the idea of consumption here is its openness as a concept. I donât, for example, want to limit consumption to the activity of commercial exchange; consumption can involve practices where no money ever changes hands, or where money is the least interesting aspect of what is going on. Likewise, consumption is not a passive process, as compared to the activity of production, because consumption produces too. It does not just exhaust or use things up, it creates, reworks and connects. Consumption also describes ways of engaging, understanding and âreadingâ the cultures we inhabit. My understanding of consumer culture has quite a lot in common with âmaterial cultureâ â a term often used to explore the social value of objects â but in my reading it does not necessarily depend or focus on the materiality of race. Whatâs important about the idea of âconsumingâ race is that there is no practice that is off-limits, to be considered too trivial or inconsequential for our critical attention. Consuming Race sets out to think about how race is caught up in all the âsmallâ things, as well as all the âbigâ things, that we think and do (and in the process of examining the âsmallâ things it prompts us to consider that they might actually be quite âbigâ things after all).
The idea of consumption helps us to open up our thinking about the generation and circulation of racial meanings. This book is invested in the idea that racial meanings are not the property or possession of certain groups and individuals, but rather that they belong to the realm of culture within which we all operate. This book accordingly sets itself against some approaches (admittedly now rather old-fashioned, but still very dominant) that are committed to thinking about race primarily as an identity that people âhaveâ: that we are either born with it, or that it is given to us (willingly, or otherwise) by others. These kinds of approach do not always rule out thinking about the racial meanings of things like music and clothes, but they tend to think of music and clothes as expressing or commenting upon those pre-existing racial identities. In other words, while in these approaches there is a relationship between race and aspects of consumer culture, racial meanings are necessarily thought to come before consumer culture. In these approaches, consumer culture is understood to represent raced people in particular ways, but it is not itself considered to be a place where race itself âhappensâ. While this book is interested in ideas about representation, it is very much committed to challenging the notion that race is something that precedes acts of consumption. Rather, Iâm interested here in the ways in which racial meanings are generated through practices of consumption. We often define and redefine our own racial identities, our relationship to others and so on, in social and cultural practices that take place within consumer culture. There arenât necessarily any more âimportantâ sites of racial meaning outside of consuming practices that underpin the generation of racial meaning. What race is or means in any particular instance can be untangled in the ensemble of relations mediated by consumer culture. Sometimes racial meanings are brief, transient and ephemeral, but they are no less significant for that. This does not mean that race is a shallow or surface phenomenon, but rather (and I will return to this in my conclusion), that its âdepthâ is to be found in that ensemble of relations, and not guaranteed by blood, history or some other fetishized marker of racial meaning.
This kind of critical perspective therefore represents a move away from the commonsense but actually fallacious idea that race is somehow âattachedâ to people and their bodies, which in turn provides them with or represents a racial identity. When I use the term âraceâ throughout this book, I am referring to a site of meaning: variously a category, a concept, a symbol, an idea or a resource through which we describe, understand, produce and contest notions of human difference. The meanings of race are diverse, sometimes unstable, and will often contradict one another. They are to be found in the dynamics of human culture, a product of the infinitely complex processes by which we define and understand ourselves and others. Race is not something we âhaveâ, it is always something we âdoâ. Because of the strong tendency in our cultures to think of race as expressing innate characteristics or some kind of inner truth, it used to be customary to highlight raceâs social constructedness by bracketing it in âscare quotesâ. Yet critical attention to how culture works (particularly in the tradition of poststructuralist theory) demonstrates that pretty much all categories of meaning can be thought of in these same contingent and dynamic terms. Just as the meanings of the words in a dictionary change as the culture that uses them changes, it is an illusion to think that the meaning of any concept (from race to gender to class to cupboard to computer to love to kindness) remains static across time and space. Rather than select and single out an especially politicized and controversial concept like race for scare quotes treatment, it should be taken as read that its meaning is thoroughly cultural, and that it does not and cannot exist outside of this. This does not mean, as the facetious and anti-intellectual riposte typically has it, that we can just purposely invent racial meanings willy-nilly, changing the meaning of race simply by deciding to use the concept differently, for this is not how culture works. In the same way that the languages we speak and write are collective and collaborative affairs, the meanings of race involve collective and collaborative processes. While we can work to change those meanings by intentional means, such struggles necessitate a complicated negotiation with existing meanings: this is what we mean by cultural politics.
What I am suggesting, then, is that we think about race as part of a âlanguageâ of cultural meaning, and of particular practices of consumption as instances of language use: we consume race to âsayâ something about ourselves and others. Sometimes we are in control of what we are saying through acts of racial consumption, at other times we are not. While we may think we are consuming race in a particular way, there may be other meanings being generated, other things that race is saying that we are not always fully aware of. And so by thinking critically about practices of racial consumption we can interrogate some of these meanings. We can, by reading these practices, try to figure out what race is saying in any particular circumstance, at any particular moment. This book accordingly shares some common ground with the idea of âeveryday multiculturalismâ as âa grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and places of encounterâ (Wise and Velayutham, 2009: 3). Though approaches of this kind are a useful attempt to understand and engage with the âbottom upâ experience of cultural difference, there is no reason why we should confine our understanding of how race is âlivedâ in âeveryday practiceâ to an embodied or face-to-face encounter with difference. As Gail Lewis has argued, cultural practices of race, involving transnational circuits of representation, âstand right at the heart of contemporary everyday life and mediate individual experiences and the social relations of âraceâ, gender, class, sexuality, and ageâ (Lewis, 2007: 873; see also Gray, 2013). As I will go on to suggest, practices of consuming race can involve forms of meaning-making where racialized others do not have to be physically present, or can be figured by or substituted for objects, images and ideas, even animals, plants and landscapes.
A Bob Marley T-shirt
To introduce some of the ways in which racial meanings get produced and reproduced in acts of consumption, I want to take as an example a particular object in consumer culture, an object with which we are all probably quite familiar, and present some ways of reading it (an object can be âreadâ in a way thatâs analogous to the way we might read a book or a newspaper, that is, as a âtextâ that can serve as the focus of acts of interpretation). Over the next few pages there are seven images taken in a number of different places in the world â Jamaica, the East and West coasts of the United States, Spain and Hungary â of people wearing T-shirts featuring the famous musician Bob Marley. The T-shirt is a particularly good object to examine if weâre interested in thinking about the intended meanings of its wearer, because T-shirts have of course become a cultural form that we intentionally use to make a statement or convey a message. Because they are relatively cheap and easy to print images, slogans and other text onto, T-shirts have become a conventional means of saying who we are and what we believe in. Frequently customized by their wearers, T-shirts, like many other objects in consumer culture, are inherently social items. T-shirts quickly and clearly express what we care about and what weâre into, regardless of wealth (they can be bought cheaply), sex (theyâre worn by men and women) and other social categories and distinctions. Nobody intentionally puts on a T-shirt without being very conscious of what it might be saying, because a T-shirt is like a label we have chosen for ourselves. Now of course itâs not possible on the evidence of a photographic image to really tell what the people wearing these T-shirts may have wanted to say by wearing them, any more than itâs possible to tell what somebody means to say with their T-shirt when they pass us in the street. What Iâm going to do here is speculate in a more general sense about some of the meanings that may be activated or produced by this particular object in consumer culture. My reading certainly wonât be exhaustive of the possible range of racial meanings, but it will give an indication of some of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas that are communicated through acts of racial consumption.
Figure 1.1 © Donald OâClair
Maybe the first and most obvious thing that anybody says by wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt is that theyâre into his music. Marley remains the most famous reggae musician, and it almost goes without saying that reggae music is in no small part to do with race. Reggae has its geographical origins in Jamaica, and like other forms of Caribbean popular culture it has played a part in expressing and exploring a complicated social and cultural history that includes the experience of European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and related struggles for freedom and independence. Although it is a musical form that was developed post-independence, reggae makes sense of and comments on this history and its contemporary legacies, and includes among its subject matter themes like racial inequality, black nationalism, rebellion and revolution. As everybody knows, reggae is in some sense âaboutâ all this, and the wearer of a Bob Marley T-shirt is accordingly in one way or another associating her or himself with it. The wearer does not have to be particularly invested in this association â their interest in reggae might ostensibly be focused very specifically on the sound of the music and how it makes them feel â but it is an association that they are making nonetheless. (It is easy to test the validity of this idea: could a white supremacist intentionally wear a Bob Marley T-shirt and not feel as if they were somehow contradicting themselves?)
Figure 1.2 © Marie Noëlle Delgado
If reggae music foregrounds a tumultuous history and politics in which race has a particularly significant place, it is important to recognize that what all this means is very much dependent on both who is wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt, and where itâs being worn. Take, for example, someone wearing the shirt in Kingston, the capital city of Jamaica, who thinks of themselves as having family connections to Africa. To them, the act of wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt might be a way of drawing on the sense in which Bob Marley and his music have come to stand for a link between Africa and the Caribbean, and a way of communicating a feeling of connectedness with the history and culture of that continent. This particular T-shirt wearer could be intentionally drawing on the association between Bob Marley and pan-African unity, the powerful cultural and political project that developed in the twentieth century to make sense of the relationship between Africaâs past and present, and its connections to a wi...
