A Moral Economy of Whiteness

Four Frames of Racializing Discourse

Steve Garner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138851726
• eBook ISBN: 9781317529446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Moral Economy of Whiteness presents a working model for understanding the main ways in which white UK people make 'race' through talking about immigration in the twenty-first century. Based on extensive empirical interviews, Steve Garner establishes four overlapping frames through which white English people understand immigration. This comprises a narrative of unequal treatment, where 'equality' is a 'dirty word' because it is seen as an agenda for redistributing resources to 'undeserving' ethnic minorities, 'non-integrating' migrants and unproductive white people. Political correctness is seen as the ideological glue binding this unfair system. People are thus retreating from Britishness into a more exclusive Englishness.

Garner explores the context of these understandings: the dominance of neoliberal market rationales, in which the State deprioritises anti-discrimination work. He concludes that these frames only make sense in a social world where Britain's imperial past has no bearing on the present, and where 'racism' in popular and media culture becomes purely a story of individual deviancy. This book generates numerous international points of comparison that deepen our understanding of the backlash against multiculturalism in the West. It will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social policy, anthropology, political science, (im)migration, multiculturalism, nationalism and British studies.

1 Four frames of racialising discourse

DOI: 10.4324/9781315723938-1

I begin with a question: what sort of moment is this in which to pose the question of black popular culture? These moments are always conjunctural. They have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with the other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never the same moment. And the combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only the specificity of the moment, but the specificity of the question.

(Hall, 1993: 104)

If yous belonged here you’d be pink-skinned, blonde-haired, blue eyes, green eyes.

(Jacqueline Woodhouse, October 2011)

My Britain is fuck all now.

(Emma West, November 2011)

Societies are shaped by fears as well as giving shape to fears.

(Hoggett, 2000: 10)

In British public culture, discussions of racism are so impoverished that they only get any prominence if they involve famous, or at least nearly-famous people. I say this with the proviso that nowadays you can become famous simply by going on a racist rant in public, not, as in previous generations, anonymously and cravenly bellowing abuse at footballers from the safety of the terraces, but shouting at strangers on public transport, as the cases of Emma West (google: ‘racist woman on tram’) and Jacqueline Woodhouse (google her name plus ‘rant’), both of whom are quoted above, demonstrate.

Our public culture's obsession with how individuals behave unsurprisingly also prioritises the individual when it focuses on racism. Yet this is a debilitating way of understanding how racism functions and impacts on people's lives. Patterns of discrimination in access to a variety of resources like housing, employment and health services, coupled with a criminal justice system that now imprisons a higher proportion of its black and minority ethnic (BME) population than the USA¹ and produces discriminatory outcomes – as a matter of practice – against that population in a range of ways (Ministry of Justice, 2013), are indicators that in Britain, social forces are at play whose consequences are more devastating than verbal abuse.

I first began explicitly researching the racialisation of white identities in England at the end of 2004, and this book is aimed at drawing a line underneath that series of studies, covering sites in Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham, Runcorn/Widnes, Thetford and Milton Keynes. I have two points of departure; my version of Stuart Hall's question, ‘what sort of a moment is this to pose the question of white identities in England?’, and Paul Hoggett's warning not to omit the emotional dimension from the equation by abandoning analysis entirely to one that presupposes that the data exclusively reflects rational thought.

I will define the two main concepts I use as analytical tools in this book; racism and racialisation, before sketching what I think the ‘moment’ consists of, and then outlining the four frames in the book's title.

Definitions

I study the ways in which we collectively make ‘race’ by imbuing a range of physical and/or cultural variations with social meaning; how this process structures and/or interferes with majority understandings of the nation, their place(s) in it; and, how power is distributed accordingly. My primary focus is on the construction of particular kinds of difference that might give rise to division in the first place. At its core, this distinction addresses the ambiguity of ‘race’, which is constructed at once as both part of the social world that is the object of democratic politics, and part of the natural world that transcends the arena of democratic politics, to use Eric Fassin's (2006) distinction. In order to follow the argument throughout, the key concepts of racism and racialisation that I will be using here require definition and explanation.

Racism

Popular understandings of racism still rely heavily on longstanding and influential individual and psychological models of prejudice and deviance (Adorno et al., 1950; Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1982; Tajfel, 1982). These studies theorise prejudice as irrational and individual responses to difference, or in-group/out-group perspectives. According to the understandings drawn from these studies, prejudices, among them racism, are basically throwbacks to a distant, tribal past that has been progressively eliminated. However, some deviant individuals hold residual racist ideas, which could be countered and corrected by education and training. Lower levels of education for example are often a statistically significant variable in studies of opinions and hostility toward minority groups, or support for Far-right politics (Fetzer, 2000; Card et al., 2005; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2007).

The set of assumptions about racism as a deviant psychological aberration closely related to low intelligence is widely shared and is easily presented to the public in a variety of settings ranging from Hollywood films containing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white characters (Dyer, 1997), or ‘white saviours’ (Vera and Gordon, 2003) to spats between sports personalities, and television scenarios: the racist comments made by other housemates about actress Shilpa Shetty in the UK Celebrity Big Brother House in 2007, an incident that involved the then Chancellor Gordon Brown apologising to the Indian nation (Higginson, 2007). According to the Football Association investigation (Football Association, 2011), Liverpool striker Luis Suarez racially abused Manchester United defender, Patrice Evra in October 2011. The 110-page document produced by the FA contains no definition of racism to use as a guideline, so obvious is it presumed to be, despite the rather more nuanced and interesting exposition on colloquial Latin American Spanish in the report. Emma West subjected her fellow passengers to a racist monologue captured on film and uploaded by a number of passengers to YouTube (YouTube, 2011), where its various versions received tens of millions of hits. West ‘pleaded guilty to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence’ (Rush, 2013) in June 2012, after numerous court appearance cancellations due to her poor mental health.

Moreover, only excessive examples of violence and abuse seem to constitute ‘proper’ racism; Apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, the segregated Southern states of the USA, crowds in many countries making monkey noises in a stadium when black footballers touch the ball, etc. This is easy enough to follow, and these examples are indeed rightfully categorised as racism in practice, but it leaves far too much out of the equation.

My understanding of racism (Garner, 2004; 2009) is that it is systemic, that is, that there are patterns produced by racial discrimination across place and time, and that it entails far more than an individual's psychological baggage. The public consensus is that race is a natural division: it is what you do with that natural division that counts (racial equality or inequality). A sociological understanding says that the idea of ‘race’ being natural is itself a racist foundation. Thus the forced removal of Roma from France in 2010, the police targeting of Hispanics for stop-and-search in Arizona from 2011 (and even the category ‘Hispanic’), and the differential policing of Muslim communities in Britain (and the US) for example, can be passed off as not racist: they are instead examples of defending territory and nation. I half agree: they are examples of the State defending territory. Yet they are simultaneously racist actions. The interesting element of this discourse is the exculpatory work performed by the idea of ‘defence’. How does defending territory preclude racism, especially given that the concept of institutional racism in the 1960s and 1970s made intentionality irrelevant as a criterion for judging whether something is racist? A growing strain of scholarship (Goldberg, 2000; Lentin and Lentin, 2006; Jung et al., 2011) identifies the multiple agencies of the State as significant actors, not only in the legislative fight against racism, but, much more importantly, in the sustenance and evolution of racism. We shall look at this more closely in Chapter 3, but bear in mind that what is constructed in mainstream media as racism² is merely one or two shards of the whole pane of glass, and particularly those that connect to well-known people.

Since the interpretation of racism as systemic is my departure point, I will begin with the proviso that I do not have a definition of racism as a single body of ideas and practices, rather, as I explain elsewhere (Garner et al., 2009: 1–20), there is a good argument for using the term in the plural to recognise the variety of forms and contexts that characterise it across place and time. My approach is similar to Wittgenstein's (1953) concept of family resemblance.³ Here, elements are connected to each other by overlapping features rather than one common feature, like the physical characteristics of the individuals comprising a family. No single characteristic is common to all members. So in the case of racism(s), my suggestion is the following. Whatever else your definition of racism includes it must reflect the following three elements:

1. i A historical power relationship in which, over time, groups are racialised (that is, treated as if specific characteristics were natural and innate to each member of the group).
2. ii A set of ideas [ideology] in which the human race is divisible into distinct ‘races’, each with specific natural characteristics.
3. iii Forms of discrimination flowing from this [practices] ranging from denial of access to resources through to mass murder.

(Garner 2009: 11)

I try to emphasise the distinction between the social and the biological in this relationship. What is at stake in this formulation is that if a social pattern is merely the natural/biological order of things made flesh, then it cannot be meaningfully challenged in the realm of the social. However, if it is understood as a social idea, with material consequences, it becomes at least a viable object for dismantling (Fassin's (2006) ‘democratic politics’). The dismantling however is another story, and this book is an attempt to pull another thin slice of timber off the structure.

What does the structure look like? To begin with, the application of immigration rules per se; disproportionate numbers of BME people in the UK prison population; high percentages of African-Caribbean men ending up in mental health institutions (Fernando and Keating, 2008); the under-representation of ethnic minority people in virtually every profession; or the statistics that continue to show an enduring ‘ethnic penalty’ in terms of income and poverty (Hills et al., 2010; Dustmann and Theodoropoulos, 2010).

Before we move on to defining ‘racialisation’, I should note that the two are not equivalent concepts that stand in for one another, but are tightly related. Racism can be thought of as the engine that produces unequal outcomes of all kinds, while racialisation is the ideological fuel that keeps the engine going.

Racialisation

It is nearly a cliché in the social sciences to assert that identities are ‘socially constructed’, and this means that in the case of the continuing racialisation of society, physical bodies can be discursively separated from bodies of ideas. Men have to be socialised into forms of masculinity (Connell, 1995), as women are socialised into forms of femininity. People are socialised into being part of whatever racialised group they belong to. The process is neither natural nor genetic. The scholarship on mixed ‘race’/‘biracial’/‘dual heritage’ children shows that there is no single identity outcome or exclusive pathway to reaching identity for them (Rockquemore, 2002): context is everything. The momentum of racist ideas however, pulls in the other direction, incessantly amalgamating bodies with putative characteristics. People who look this way behave this way, not that way; they think this, and don't think that, etc.

In the 1980s, UK social scientists interested in ‘race’ began questioning the dominant ‘race relations’ paradigm (CCCS, 1982; Miles, 1982), which had developed out of work undertaken in the USA since the 1940s (Banton, 1967; Jacobson, 1998; Rex, 1970). It framed the issue as a set of groups constructed as ‘races’, which compete, in weberian terms, for resources on a number of markets, such as employment, education and housing (Rex and Moore, 1967). Critics argued that race relations reified ‘race’, assumed that it was necessarily ‘race’ that dominated people's identities (rather than also class, gender, nationality, etc.), and that it was also incapable of addressing historical change. In other words it saw ‘race’ as a given rather than a contingent process. Miles (1982), Solomos (1986) (and later, Small 1994) all maintain instead that racialisation should replace ‘race relations’. This approach involves trying to understand how and why ‘race’ is injected into social relationships over time, rather than assuming that ‘race’ is an ever-present part of the natural order. So the use of racialisation necessitates identifying an historical process.

Researchers have identified points on the spectrum of this process between the imposition of racialised identity by a dominant onto a subordinate group at one end, and at the other, forms of self-racialisation, whether ‘reflexive’ (Parker and Song, 2006) or not, as a means of constituting membership of minority groups and establishing solidarity. These accounts cover processes such as the collapsing of diverse people into a single imagined group, e.g. all Latin Americans in Atlanta being perceived as ‘Mexicans’ (Yarborough, 2010), and the inscription of ‘race’ onto space (Durrheim and Dixon, 2001) by constructing one group as encroaching into a space where its ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Front Other
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Four frames of racialising discourse
• 2 ‘Hey White boy!’: identifications, dis-identifications, representations
• 3 The ‘neoliberal postracial’ state
• 4 Classed understandings
• 5 Unfairness: why ‘equality’ is a ‘dirty word’
• 6 Political correctness gone mad
• 7 From repressed Englishness to the (un)finished business of Empire
• 8 Impossible integration
• 9 Political uses of whiteness in an international context
• 10 Analysis and conclusion: a moral economy of whiteness and its doxic waste
• Appendices
• References
• Index