Whitewash

Racialized Politics and the Media

John Gabriel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415149693
• eBook ISBN: 9781134750153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

By putting the language used in television, the radio, the internet and press, as well as that spoken by key leaders, under the spotlight, what is ultimately revealed is the existence of a 'white' language, both coded and overt.Taking specific examples and presenting new factual evidence, John Gabriel studies the racial politics that lie behind much of the communication in the public arena. Case studies draw on contemporary political controversies and are used to explore the relationship between racialised forms of media discourse and political and economic change.

1
GLOBALISATION, ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND THE MEDIA

June Jordan has described how her understanding of whiteness changed from associating it with extremist groups like The Aryan Nation or the British National Party to something much more mundane and everyday (1995). She wrote, ‘I came to recognise media constructions such as “The Heartland” or “Politically Correct” or “The Welfare Queen” or “Illegal Alien” or “Terrorist” or “The Bell Curve” for what they were: multiplying scattershots intended to defend one unifying desire to establish and preserve white supremacy as our bottom line’ (1995:21). The difference here is that the ‘whiteness’ found in mundane, everyday culture is less obvious and visible. In fact, as Dyer argues, its power lies in its unspokenness and/or its deployment through code. This interest in whiteness from a left or an academic perspective is part of wider acknowledgement that white English are, indeed, just another ethnic group (Hall 1991:21).

Taking the categorisation of white pride and normative, ontological, progressive and subaltern whiteness as its starting.point, this section will explore some of the ways in which whiteness has been theorised. This will begin to provide what Stephen Small refers to as a paradigm of (white) racialisation that is explored in subsequent chapters. The second section will begin to develop an account of the shift in consciousness, referred to above, and, in particular, of those global conditions which have brought whiteness into sharper relief. The media’s integral role in the formation of new ethnic identities and, relatedly, political alignments, has fractured old identities built around the nation and the locality. Not surprisingly, therefore, nationalism, nation states and national identities have proved important ideological and political sites for the formation and re-affirmation of whiteness. I will explore this with reference to both economic and political theories of nationalism and with reference to everyday mobilisations of national sentiment witnessed in the European Football Championships 1996, in section three. Theories which emphasise dominant culture, including media culture, often pay undue regard to complex, contradictory and dynamic forces at work and hence overlook, sometimes preclude, the analysis of contestation and counter-mobilisation. With this in mind, section four explores different forms of resistance, with particular reference to the campaign against the use of sweatshop labour in New York’s designer fashion industry.

The invisible whiteness of being

As I suggested above, the general focus on whiteness re-directs our gaze away from those groups invariably problematised in race relations discourses. The concepts of race relations, racism, discrimination, prejudice etc., although not inevitably, have invariably encouraged the production of a sociological knowledge of the ‘victim’. Whiteness, on the contrary, problematises the perpetrators and related processes. Toni Morrison makes this point when she says rather than look at the impact of racism on blacks it is important to examine the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it (1992:11). However, according to Jordan, white supremacy goes beyond racism: ‘it means that God put you on the planet to rule, to dominate, and occupy the center of the national and international universe—because you’re white’ (1995:21).¹ But if, as is widely acknowledged, black identity cannot be reduced to the impact of racism, then neither can whiteness be reduced to perpetuating it. So what is whiteness? To address this, I will review some of the recent and not so recent attempts to theorise whiteness. I have organised this section around ten key themes in the discourse of whiteness, loosely based on John Fiske’s helpful discussion (1994). The aim is both to raise questions as well as to set the parameters for the analysis which follows.

Theme 1 Whiteness does not refer to a fixed set of ethnic characteristics, but to strategic deployment of power or the space from which a variety of positions can be taken (Fiske 1994:42). Such ‘positions’ are inevitably relational, so that in Ruth Frankenberg’s terms, whiteness is constructed precisely by the way in which it positions others at its borders. In this sense, it is ‘fundamentally a relational category’ (1993:231). Moreover, positionality is constructed through discourse which shapes personal identity. The power to both define and regulate subjectivity and how this is accomplished through institutions lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s work on prisons and asylums for the mentally ill (1971; 1979). Surveillance, therefore, that is the ability to turn individuals into objects of information and thus amenable to constant scrutiny, is an integral aspect of whiteness. The latter cannot be understood outside of the discursive, regulatory and technological means at its disposal to position itself through others.

New media technologies and the proliferation of ever-sophisticated interrelated systems of communication thus provide potential mechanisms for the regulation, dissemination and contestation for whiteness. We might ask as a preliminary question, do such technologies enhance democratic processes, including greater accountability and scope for resistance or do they merely provide the means for greater surveillance, this time on a global scale? A sceptical or at least cautious response is not unreasonable at this point, particularly given the military’s role in the development of many of these new technologies and their subsequent use as interconnected databases for both surveillance and the storing of information on personal finance or debt, criminal records, etc. (Thompson 1995:134).

The use of such technology is implied in legislation on immigration and asylum both in the US and the UK. How else will employers and public sector workers be able to track the citizenship status of their employees or clients other than with a click of the mouse and by accessing growing data banks of personal records? And who will arouse the suspicions of this growing army of information gatherers, if not those already under suspicion thanks to processes of racialisation? Such legislative trends provide an example of new, racialised forms of surveillance, to which information technologies are currently harnessed. Anthony Giddens introduces the idea of moral totalism to describe attempts to associate authoritarian values with the essential characteristics of a culture. Information flows (or rather restricted and selective information flows including, notably, hostility to out-groups) are a prerequisite for the formation of such values. The success of the media in forging continuities between marginal (e.g. white pride) and mainstream (e.g. neo-conservative or liberal) values is an important theme running through subsequent chapters.

But, we might ask, how do white, other than dominant white, ethnicities fit into this problematic of whiteness? In his study, Ethnic Identity: the transformation of white America, Richard Alba argues that attachment to ethnic origins has become increasingly symbolic for all European ethnic groups, partly as a result of education and intermarriage (1990:291), so that now just the symbols of ethnicity (e.g. religious festivals, customs and discourses of family origins) remain. Allegiances have correspondingly shifted from the community to ethnic identity which was more privatised, individualistic and subject to personal choice. (Although Alba did recognise that there were important differences in ethnic salience between groups, so that northern Europeans (e.g. English, French, Germans) showed less ‘ethnicity’ than those from southern and eastern Europe (e.g. Italians, Jews and Poles).) In the place of old ethnic ties, what Alba refers to as ‘European ethnicity’ emerged. This occurred during the period of the Civil Rights movement, i.e. precisely at a time when hitherto allegedly universal notions of fairness were being called into question (1990:317). By way of re-enforcing this point Alba argued that Asian, Latin American and Caribbean immigration also encouraged whites to define themselves in ethnic terms (ibid.: 318). Alba’s conclusions thus coincide with one of this book’s key arguments regarding the growing salience of ethnicity to whiteness.

Theme 2 The power of whiteness lies in a set of discursive techniques, including: examination, that is the power not to be named; naturalization, through which whiteness establishes itself as the norm by defining ‘others’ and not itself; and universalization, where whiteness alone can make sense of a problem and its understanding becomes the understanding (Fiske 1994:43). It is possible to think of numerous instances of events, customs, traditions, which somehow do not count as expressions of national and/or ethnic culture, whilst others invariably do. For example, one of Ruth Frankenberg’s interviewees revealingly described St Patrick’s day as a national celebration but not Thanksgiving (1993:191). In her examination of whiteness in American’ literature, Toni Morrison observes that in South Africa to call someone a South African means little without white, black or coloured to prefix it. In the US (and in England for that matter) quite the reverse holds. She goes on, ‘American means white and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen’ (1992:47). W.E.B.Dubois, writing some sixty years prior to this develops a similar critique of the notion of Americanisation when he writes,

What the powerful and privileged mean by Americanization is the determination to make the English New England stock dominant in the United States…it is but a renewal of the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem, the disfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea islander—the world rule of the Nordic white through brute force.

(in Sundquist 1996:384)

Richard Dyer was amongst the first British writers to make explicit reference to ‘white’ in an article about film (1988). His main argument is that to ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by denying it. This invisibility, which closely relates to techniques of exnomination and naturalisation, is a key discursive mechanism in the construction of whiteness. In Dyer’s words, ‘whiteness is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial or even a kind of death’ (ibid.: 44). In the first of her Reith lectures, Patricia Williams put it another way when she said that one of the privileges of whiteness was to appear ‘unraced’ (1997).

Theme 3 One of the reasons why whiteness keeps itself so well hidden is because it works through other discourses. Fiske makes particular reference to sexuality (1994:45). One of the analytical advantages of whiteness is the scope it provides to explore how subjects are simultaneously gendered and racialised. Heterosexuality, too, is constituted through discourses of whiteness, as I shall argue with reference to anti-Semitism and to the homophobic politics of Oregon’s Christian Alliance. At a more subliminal level, however, it has been argued that sexuality is integrally bound up with the discourse of whiteness both in terms of language and practice. David Sibley (1995), for instance, has made some persuasive connections between the ‘body sexual’ and the ‘body politic’ in which terms of images of defilement, degeneration and contamination dominate the discourses of both. Likewise, Barnor Hesse analyses the ‘white’ underpinnings of racial harassment with reference to the significance of body imagery in racialised constructions of city spaces. He writes, ‘in the context of racial harassment the body of the other is viewed as a surface of inscription for the shrunken visibility of a white appropriation of the city’ (1997:98). Threats of city spaces being overrun, that is (of being) ‘violated’ and ‘penetrated’, make racial harassment the ‘inevitable paranoiac anticipation of those events’ (ibid.: 99). Psychoanalytic discourse (with its focus on the conscious/unconscious and the mechanisms of projection, displacement and denial) has thus become an important site for analysing and exploring the origins and forms of whiteness.

Theme 4 Taking this last point further, the psychological basis of whiteness has been attributed to deep-seated insecurities, anxieties and fears. These are then expressed in numerous, neurosis-driven expressions of whiteness, of which one example, taken from above, would be surveillance. The aim of racialised forms of surveillance would be to allay white fears through the ability to know without being known (Hesse 1997). But whiteness is not just based on fear but elicits it too. This is powerfully evoked in the writings of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B.Dubois who both have much to say about whiteness through their own consciousness of blackness.² In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes his reaction to being shouted at by a young white boy with the words, ‘Look at the nigger…Mama a Negro’ and how such comments ‘imprisoned him’ and ‘sealed him into that crushing objecthood’ (1986:113ff.). As a result, he argued, ‘the white world, the only honourable one, barred me from all participation’ (ibid.). For Fanon whiteness meant subjectivities defined both through and by others as well as the internalisation of guilt.³ However, whiteness is more than induced guilt, according to Fanon. It is also corrupt and de-humanising, as he implies when he writes, ‘when whites feel they have become too mechanised they turn to men of colour for human sustenance’ (ibid.: 129). Writing earlier in the century, Dubois also noted that whiteness not only positioned blacks but positioned whites in constraining ways. The latter were thus forced to live out their racist subjectivities and in so doing they were imprisoned in their own whiteness.

Theme 5 There is a complex relationship between being ‘white’ and acting ‘white’. Whilst whiteness is defined more by what it does than what it is, Fiske also recognises that white skin has brought ‘disproportionate access to that power base’ (Fiske 1994:49). However, the problem of defining whiteness both in physical terms, i.e. skin colour, and as a socially constructed identity, has encouraged Marylin Frye (1995) to coin the term ‘whiteliness’ to distinguish the constructed from the physical aspect of whiteness. In doing so she draws the analogy between maleness and masculinity, the former referring to physical differences, the latter to a social (or gendered) construct. Whiteness thus refers to some physical state, whiteliness to the ideology of white domination. The advantage of Frye’s distinction is that it makes it easier to talk about racialised whiteness in non-essential terms, whilst at the same time acknowledging the existence of pigment differences.⁴ However, whilst few would deny the physical category of maleness,⁵ white skin pigment is a more elusive property not only because allegedly white ethnic groups, notably the Irish and the Jews have, in some historical circumstances, been defined as black, but also because many who might pass for ‘white’ see themselves as physically black. Moreover, ‘racialised’ marks have not just used skin, but other alleged physical and cultural differences. Both anti-Irish racism and anti-Semitism again testify to these complexities. Victoria Davion’s reservations about the use of the term whiteliness are relevant here. As a Jewish woman, she has written about how she associated whiteliness not with herself but with the other. Anti-Semitism encouraged her to succumb to whiteliness but not to benefit from its mechanisms of oppression which, on the contrary, worked to deny or fracture her sense of Jewishness (Davion 1995:137).

Theme 6 Following this last point, whiteness is not a monolith, as work around gender and politics has demonstrated. For example, Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter have persuasively shown how social scientists have eschewed anti-Irish racism whilst simultaneously developing their analysis of gendered forms of such racism (1995). Vron Ware (1992) too, has explored the ways in which ideas and meanings became historically associated with white womanhood and its related sense of superiority. Contemporary examples include media representations of women in Muslim countries which implicitly contrast the backwardness of Islamic countries with western freedom. Such ideas which also circulate in popular films like Michael Radford’s White Mischief (1987) can be traced back to the colonial era. During this period white women were seen as conduits of the race (Ware 1992:37), an idea which complemented those of pure stock and racial contamination espoused by eugenicists. White women were thus seen as particularly vulnerable and hence in need of protection (ibid.: 8–9). This reached fever pitch, according to Ware, in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 with the fear of sexual assault becoming a powerful indicator of wider control of the colonies (ibid.: 38). Nevertheless, alongside these dominant versions of white...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 GLOBALISATION, ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND THE MEDIA
• 2 GENEALOGIES OF WHITENESS
• 3 BACKLASH CULTURE AND THE DEFENCE OF WHITENESS
• 4 BORDER GUARDS, BODYGUARDS, LIFEGUARDS
• 5 POLICING WHITENESS
• 6 THE FRINGE AND THE FABRIC THE POLITICS OF WHITE PRIDE
• CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX