Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness

Shona Hunter, Christi van der Westhuizen, Shona Hunter, Christi van der Westhuizen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367403799
• eBook ISBN: 9781000486711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This handbook offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by rehistoricising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality.

Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly based project for racial and social justice, the volume understands whiteness as elaborated in global coloniality through epistemology, ideology and governmentality at the intersections with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The diverse contributions present Black and other racially diverse scholarship as crucial to the field. The focus of inquiry is expanded beyond Northern Anglophone contexts to challenge centre/margin relations, examining whiteness in the Caribbean, South Africa and the African continent, Asia, the Middle East as well as in the United States and parts of Europe. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place, and culture in coloniality.

This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, advanced students, and scholars in the fields of Education, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, and African, Latin American, Asian, American, British and European Studies.

1 Viral whiteness: Twenty-first century global colonialities

Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen

DOI: 10.4324/9780429355769-1

While the Coronavirus pandemic prompted some to stress its levelling effect as it felled even denialist presidents, cumulative mortality figures, and unequal vaccine access laid bare the cold and crude facts of the global order of coloniality. It works as a division of life in which race, class, gender, and geographical location still largely determine who is to live, and who is to die. African-Americans and racialised minorities elsewhere in the Global North suffered the most deaths, while poor communities in the Global South were especially hard hit. In most African states, infection numbers could give no indication of the actual extent of the virus’ spread, due to low testing, and tracking capacity. Figures for excess mortality would be the only way to measure the real impact. Vaccine nationalism, bolstered by deadly capitalism, reared its head as states raced to be the first to scoop up millions of doses from pharmaceutical companies. Soon states in the Global North started with the process of vaccinating populations, the only sustainable way to save lives, while the majority of states in the Global South looked on. Global health care inequalities were proffered as a boon in a morbid echo of colonial medical abuses, as French doctors suggested that vaccine trials be conducted in Africa ‘where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation’ (BBC 2020). Meanwhile, health protocols aimed at containing the virus provoked the drawing of political lines, with White Right supporters shunning the wearing of masks and social distancing, despite these being the only measures that could slow down the virus. The Yellow Peril was reconjured as Sinophobic politicians sought to capitalise on the virus's apparent origin in China. Spikes in racist hate crime followed.

Taking these observations together in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, liveability was afforded to some and not others, based on race, class, and gender hierarchies of humanisation and dehumanisation. The global crisis of health was exposed as borne from systemic, multilevel convergences of white supremacy, necro-capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Within this, whiteness on a global scale again designated an ordering of life, which redirected the crisis to its Others to bear the brunt: Those racialised and gendered, the poor, the older, the disabled, the medically sick, and others who are rendered vulnerable and disposable within a broader biopolitics of global colonial debility (Puar 2017).

In this opening essay, we situate the critical study of whiteness at this current global colonial juncture. We offer a decolonial analysis true to the praxis as well as the title by way of first showing how the deconstructionist impulse must translate into an onto-epistemic struggle which recognises and refuses race as the way of organising and defining the human. This refusal is in concurrence with Mbembe's opposition to the mythologisation of whiteness that all racialised subjects can get lured into:

Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside.

(Mbembe 2015: 3)

We proceed by developing a layered argument to show how whiteness works as a formation, a logic, and an assemblage through which global coloniality is enacted relationally in the interconnection between material, symbolic, and affective (Hunter 2015a, 2015b; Hunter et al. 2010). From this point of view, there is no such thing as white people, but there are people racialised as white, humans caught up in the racialising logics of global colonial forms of subjectification and who are constantly called to the many material, cultural and affective lures of whiteness. Whiteness falsely promises self-understanding and certainty in existence. But this self-understanding can only ever be achieved through the perpetuation of violence on the self and the other because of the mastery which is demanded through a commitment to the idea of race.

The Global North has maintained race thinking through the institutionalisation of whiteness as a (neo)liberal ideal to naturalise distinctions of life, creating disposable victims outside of whiteness and powerful oppressors inside. We reference the pandemic context to show how these distinctions work along the long-established colonial lines of innocence and guilt, and the way these lines are sustained in the contemporary moment through neoliberal processes of individualisation. These processes in turn work to frame diversity as a public good and whiteness as its guardian and arbiter. We then consider how this inside/outside whiteness dynamic translates into the study of whiteness itself, as well as into anti-racist politics and the contemporary public debate on whiteness. This binary dynamic is what this volume speaks back to. Critical studies in whiteness need to do better in pushing understanding beyond liberalism's terms because these terms are what create whiteness as a bureaucratic formation of coloniality. Neoliberalism's mix of necro-biopolitics depends on whiteness.

In this chapter, we trace key epistemologies from critical whiteness studies, shorthanded here as the ‘invisibility–ignorance–innocence triad’. As the global war against racism gains momentum in the twenty-first century, these (neo)liberal mainstays of whiteness are augmented with explicit white supremacist re-instantiations, with Radical Right populisms rising to defend coloniality. South Africa serves here as an exemplar of global settler coloniality to consider how differentiations within whiteness work globally, connecting the Global South and Global North in complex ways (see also the chapter by Thobani in this volume). Rather than the oft-stated aim to visibilise and ‘know’ whiteness, we show how whiteness shifts between visibility and invisibility. Its self-proclamation to innocence is always under threat. The hyper-visibilisation of whiteness is key to how contemporary global colonial whiteness works through commodification: Through ‘knowing’ itself, declaring itself to be problematic and then ‘cleaning up’ itself to re-achieve innocence. But this relies on the same possessive, narcissistic mastery logic of coloniality, whereby the white subject knows and controls, mind over matter. We trace how hyper-visibilisation fits with the contemporary anti-racist focus on ‘white fragility’ as a form of white denial. Identifying ‘white fragility’ is purported to lead out of whiteness. For this to happen, it is suggested that the claim to white fragility be dislodged through deconstructive knowledge of the privilege and power that the white self asserts over the point of view and experience of the other. The counterargument made here, is that there is no way out of whiteness without deconstructing the binary terms of liberalism's lived dynamic.

This volume, as a whole, is curated to move beyond the deconstruction of colonial mastery internal to critical whiteness studies by bringing to bear a different way of thinking about whiteness as an onto-epistemic phenomenon. The goal is not to ‘cleanse’ white people and restore innocence to them, but to disestablish whiteness. Adapting Puar's concept of ‘queer assemblage’ to ‘race-resistant assemblage’ assists in this work, as it

… moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition … underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. This foregrounding of assemblage enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with representational economies, within which bodies interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to each other. (Puar 2007: 205)

The focus shifts therefore to understanding the materialisation of race. How does whiteness come to be as a process of historical violence which is repeated when race is lived in contemporary, supposedly non-violent neoliberal forms? The bodies of race manifest practices of history; the present-day relationships between bodies convey history. Materialised through their connections to other things, ideas and affects, white bodies come to be through intersecting relations of domination and possession. This analysis throws into relief the complicated matter of denial and accountability, which is so contested in critical whiteness studies. Whiteness traumatises and retraumatises. In the present moment, this gains a new form in neoliberal demands to show the trauma. Whiteness now comes to rely on the dualism of white saviour/traumatised victim, because what white subjects can ‘save’, they can contain and control. Pluralism and incompleteness are the basic threats to whiteness. Therefore, with this non-binary, or binary-resistant, analysis we propose rethinking whiteness in two related senses. First, as a deeply material matter which must be worked through. Second, as a matter of human practices which produce the deathly effects of whiteness.

The politics of (white) crisis

Writing together apart in Britain and South Africa, as editors, due to a global pandemic and lockdowns, with a crisis of health curtailing our differently experienced everyday in both mundane and far-reaching ways, this unpredictable situation makes obvious again the nature of whiteness. Whiteness is a dynamic, shifting, but durable system of domination through, under, against and within which people live, work, and relate (Hunter 2015b; Van der Westhuizen 2007). Whiteness is fundamental to the reproduction of global coloniality, systematised through the intersection of racial capitalism and what is left of liberal humanism after its neoliberalisation. It is a whiteness which feeds off and into the crisis discourse. Capitalism needs crisis. This current one must be read as another one of the many, ongoing ‘flashpoints where capitalist crisis becomes racialised and where that racialisation seems to become a fix or an amplification in response’ (Bhattacharyya 2018: 9). Grasping the nettle of whiteness becomes all the more urgent given the politics of the moment, as racial populisms of different hues surge at global and also national levels, seeking to augment or even supplant the neoliberal order. Therefore, unpredictable as it may be, this situation has a precedent in the context of the global racial order's reproduction and reinstation of whiteness, with echoes a century ago from the Spanish Flu pandemic followed by the rise of fascism. Interrogating the global racial order as magnified by whiteness is at the heart of the endeavour in this Handbook. This pursuit has an activist dimension, as part of an overall intellectual project of anti-racism, shared with Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Theory. It builds on the work of black thinkers, concurring that there can be no racial justice without attention to white supremacy and the contributions of white people to its historical and current structures of domination.

Whilst this situation of a global pandemic was not what we imagined as editors setting out on this project in 2018, it brutally confirms the starting point for this volume which recognises that a ‘racial attack on black people sits at the heart of global affairs and the emergence of social science; this attack has used analytics that disavow racial suffering and allegedly provide analytics for understanding its costs’ (Willoughby-Herard 2015: 167).¹ Like Willoughby-Herard, we are concerned with processes of knowledge production as constituted by the ‘axis of difference’ central to the Western imaginary (Grosfoguel 2002): As first asserted by Edward Said (1978), the Western subject is contingent upon defining itself against an other, for example, its Oriental other or its African other (Baderoon 2014: 33). With the neo-conservative notion of the ‘axis of evil’, George W Bush's USA shifted the colonial global colour line further east with the figure of ‘the Muslim terrorist’: Abjected and therefore suitable for murder by drone attack, with civilian deaths mere ‘collateral’; being under suspicion in any case, except when performing ‘good Muslim’ as per Western white requirements (Mamdani 2004). Inspired by historically and spatially expansionist approaches from black studies, decolonial, feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial scholarship (Gilroy 2000; Hall 1996; Lewis 2017; Mbembe 2000, 2019; Moton and Harney 2013; Weheliye 2014; West 1993), we critically interrogate global whiteness (Willoughby-Herard 2015) produced through intersecting colonialities, transnational linkages, practices, philosophies whereby western subjectivity is produced through a hierarchy of human liveability. The valuation and hence validation of some lives over others, through a hierarchisation of grievability and precarisation (Butler 2004, 2009), is a global enactment of whiteness. This is most starkly demonstrated by the global inequality in the procurement of vaccines against the Coronavirus, with resources obtained as a result of colonialities of power determining who are to live, and who to die. Elaborated through modernity and Western European colonial ‘worlding’ (Wynter 1994) race is the defining idea through which categories of human value and levels of disposability are measured for the purposes of resource extraction and profit exploitation, and for justifying the subjugation and control of racialised people. As Morning (2011) has powerfully shown in the US context, this raciology continues to be naturalised through the transmission of essentialist notions of race across disciplines and at all levels of education. While, as Goldberg (2009) argues, the idea of race is not naturally violating, we regard the meanings and practices attached to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Viral whiteness: Twenty-first century global colonialities
• Part I: Onto-epistemologies: Theory against whiteness
• Part II: Conspiracies: Ideologies reinforcing whiteness
• Part III: Colonialities: Permutations of whiteness over time
• Part IV: Intersectionalities: Differences (de)stabilising whiteness
• Part V: Governmentalities: Formations, reproductions, and refusals of whiteness
• Part VI: Provocations: Debates and dilemmas
• Epilogue: Reflections
• Index