Racism and Everyday Life

Social Theory, History and 'Race'

Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137493552
• eBook ISBN: 9781137493569
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to talk about everyday racism, and why should we do so? Racism and Everyday Life brings together the sociologies of racism and everyday life in a new way in order to reflect on these questions. Smith argues that racism and everyday life are not just 'act' and 'context' respectively, but rather they are part of the making of each other. Using a variety of historical and contemporary examples, this book draws on the pioneering insights of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in order to explore the interwoven relationship between racism and the everyday.

1

Weapon and Alibi

Abstract: This chapter reviews a series of important accounts which consider racism as an everyday phenomenon. It looks especially at the work of Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg and Karen and Barbara Fields. It draws a series of lessons from these pioneering accounts arguing, in conclusion, that they push us to reflect not only on racism as an everyday occurrence, but on the concept of the everyday itself.

Keywords: Barbara Fields; David Theo Goldberg; Everyday life; Karen Fields; Philomena Essed; Racecraft; Racism

Smith, Andrew. Racism and Everyday Life: Social Theory, History and ‘Race’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137493569.0003.

One. This is an essay about racism and the everyday. In one sense, the conjunction is a very familiar one. There has been a significant body of empirical and theoretical work exploring the mundane perpetuation of racist ideas and the ways in which racial identities are presumed, attributed or resisted in everyday contexts and encounters. In this first chapter, I start off by briefly considering some of that work and the lessons which we can take from it. At the same time, I want to argue, this conjunction could bear further consideration. As a phrase ‘everyday racism’ has been consigned to its own sociological ‘everyday’ status; to that self-evident condition which is characteristic of everyday phenomena more generally. I want to suggest that there may still be things to be asked about the relationship between racism and everyday life, and in what follows I will try to sketch out in a preliminary way why this might be the case, and what some of those unasked questions might be.

In a subsequent chapter I will consider the work of W.E.B. Du Bois which, it seems to me, offers us a crucially important account of racism and everyday life. In the recent sociological past, however, the first key point of reference is the pathbreaking work of Philomena Essed whose 1991 study, Understanding Everyday Racism, emerged, as she explains, from a desire to contest a view of racism which understood it either in merely subjective terms (as a problem of prejudiced individuals) or in abstractly objective terms (as something which could be studied only at the level of social or institutional structures). Essed’s research, in contrast, concentrated on the lived experiences of racism and was characterized by careful attention to the hard-won understandings of those who had to routinely navigate and respond to such experiences. A key insight of her respondents, in this respect, was that acts of racism in everyday situations were neither arbitrary nor happenstance, but were part of a wider pattern and had to be named as such: ‘Specific instances acquire meaning only in relation to the sum total of other experiences of everyday racism’ (1991: 288). It is in this sense, then, that she describes racism as ‘a process [ ... ] routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices’ (2). Racism has effect, at least in part, through its ‘cumulative instantiation’ (3) day after day, its repetition and reproduction in mundane ways of speaking and acting. Essed urges us to think of it, then, as something which happens not only in overtly political contexts, or in professional situations, but in those spaces and times which appear to be, or are construed as being, most distant from politics and economics (canteens, cloakrooms, the bus journey home) and through quotidian acts and practices (jokes, gossip, queuing and so forth). The everyday matters for the simple reason that it is a crucial site at which ‘the interweaving of racism in the fabric of the social system’ (37) takes place.

In one sense, Essed’s account, with its emphasis on everyday practices, might seem to fit well with a general move in sociology away from a model of racism as an ‘ideology’. David Theo Goldberg’s Racist Culture (1993), more or less contemporaneous with Essed’s study, offers one particularly influential attempt to rebut such a model – or, at least, central aspects of such a model – associated historically, for example, with Eric Williams (1944) and contemporarily with Immanuel Wallerstein, amongst others (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: chapter 2). Goldberg rejects, in particular, any suggestion that racism should be seen as serving a primarily ‘explanatory’ purpose – that it involves a set of ideas or accounts of human life which we should think of as emerging in post hoc justification for economic inequality. He, by contrast and following Foucault, understands racial culture as a discourse rooted and reproduced in the very ways in which, in Western societies, being and personhood are constituted. It is, thus, not something ‘superstructural’, it is not something which can be explained in terms of some other set of prior relationships which precede it and for which it simply provides a rationalization. Neither should it be thought of as merely a tactic wielded by the powerful in defence of their power. Rather, the making of ‘racial’ subjects is in and of itself a part of how power works, shaping at a ‘pre-conceptual’ level what individuals feel themselves to be, and how they think and feel about others. This account implies a concern to conceive of ‘race’ not as something imposed on daily life from above, nor something to be explored only in relation to the actions of elites, but as a ‘discursive formation’ written through and continually interacting ‘with the material experience of daily life’ (1993: 46).

In this way Goldberg’s model emphasizes, importantly, the extent to which the everyday is the site, not simply of racism, but of what is sometimes called ‘race-making’: the formation and perpetuation of racialized identities as such. Yet the overall effect of his account is a despairing one, leaving us with little sense that the processes by which communities are racialized might be contested or resisted: ‘What is traditionally marked as resistance is probably impossible’, he writes (9). Indicatively, in his subsequent account of the ‘racial state’, he describes the state’s ‘racial reach and expression’ as being at once ‘super-visible, in form and force’, and yet also ‘thoroughly invisible in its osmotic infusion into the everyday’ (2002: 98). As Carter and Virdee note (2008), the political consequences of such an analysis are bleak, leaving us with a view of the world in which ‘racialized’ subjectivity is so completely all-pervading, so saturating of the contexts of everyday life, as to be beyond contest or critical reflection.

It is, of course, perfectly possible to conceive of the construction of ‘race’ as ideological without, on the one hand, reducing it to a set of ideas and without, on the other, presuming that processes of race-making are beyond the reach of critical knowledge. A final example, in this respect, is the work of Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The authors’ central concern in their recent study Racecraft (2012) is to urge ‘fellow Americans to explore how the falsehoods of racecraft are made in everyday life’ (2012: 74). Racecraft, by analogy with witchcraft, describes the way in which everyday racist practices serve to reproduce belief in the reality of ‘race’ by generating social effects (inequalities in health, unequal access to the best education, disproportionate rates of arrest and so on) which are then themselves read as evidence of supposed racial differences. In this respect, K.E. Fields and B.J. Fields argue, racecraft (like witchcraft) ‘has no moving parts of its own, and needs none. It acquires perfectly adequate moving parts when a person acts upon the reality of the imagined thing; the real action creates evidence for the imagined thing’ (22).

This argument rests, then, on an understanding of racism as an ideology, but – following accounts developed in their individual historical and anthropological writings (Barbara J. Fields 1990; Karen E. Fields 1982) – as an ideology which entails not only theories, conceptions or representations, but those ongoing processes and practices by which we interpret and navigate daily life. Ideology, they suggest, should be understood as the ‘descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live [ ... ] It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and recreate their collective being’ (2012: 134). In this respect, central to their account is the insistence that ‘race’ has no autonomous, free-floating existence apart from the practices and relations by which it is made real: ‘ideologies do not have lives of their own’ (146). To some extent, this is Goldberg’s point as well, but the Fields’ account emphasizes the extent to which these practices and relations are the product of self-conscious strategies and choices on the part of those who stand to benefit from the social arrangements which result: in this respect, they use the term ideology, in part, to emphasize the extent to which the powerful are disproportionately able to ‘shape the terrain of social life’ (139). Conversely, their account also recognizes a much greater leeway for both resistance to racism and for self-awareness as regards the processes by which ‘racialization’ happens. And this is precisely because (to paraphrase E.P. Thompson) ‘race’ is a happening: insofar as ‘racecraft’ implies practice it implies the contingencies of practice. A ‘trick’ continuously made and remade it is, by the same token, never triumphantly concluded. ‘Racecraft’ can never fully rid itself of the possibility of moments of potential crisis, disconcertion or contestation.

Hence, then, they open their study with a ‘tour’ of racecraft in contemporary America, exploring the ways in which everyday practices serve to perpetuate the belief in ‘racial’ difference. These practices are subtle and routine but also profoundly unstable. When, for example, a busload of mostly black and Hispanic children turn up, by prior arrangement, to make use of the swimming pool at a leisure club in a largely white middle class neighbourhood in Pennsylvania, and are kicked out on the grounds that their presence would change the ‘complexion’ of the facility, what is thrown into sudden and stark relief is the otherwise unspoken demarcation of space in suburban America, racist and racializing at once: ‘the everyday routines that organize racism do not always, but always can, explode’ (37), the Fields note. Everyday life is thus a core site of ‘racecraft’, but by the same token, a site at which the practices of ‘racecraft’ may become subject to critical attention and, indeed, to more or less organized forms of resistance.

Two. From these initial examples, then, we might draw a series of lessons about racism and the everyday, some of which I will return to at various points in what follows. The first of these concerns the straightforward necessity of understanding racism as something which is enacted in and through everyday situations including, of course, the ‘backstages’ of formally public contexts such as workplaces and political institutions. ‘Racist concepts’, write the Fields, ‘do considerable work in political and economic life; but, if they are merely an appendage of politics and economics, without intimate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness would diminish accordingly’ (11). It is the concern with ‘persuasiveness’ which is crucial here. The Fields point out that unequal social relations are always under-written by the use of violence but are not liable to remain stable for long if that violence has to be continuously called upon. Recognizing this should not lead us to imagine that people are simply ‘duped’ by the powerful, or that they give a merely ‘intellectual’ consent to the world as they encounter it: ‘It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and minds of the less powerful, inducing them to “internalize” the ruling ideology’ (138). Rather it is a question of understanding the making and remaking of social reality through mundane practices and habits: consent is a matter of our ‘doing’, not just of our ‘thinking’, of our enmeshment in day-to-day actions and relationships which shape what we understand to be real. Everyday forms of racism help create and sustain inequalities but in doing so they are themselves constitutive of the conditions for a sociologically plausible belief in ‘race’, especially on the part of those who stand to benefit from such conditions. The point is that – although such belief is always also, of course, a matter of wilful propaganda or elaboration – it is at the level of the everyday, not at the level of abstract structure, that much of the ‘persuasiveness’ of ‘race’ happens, socially speaking.

It is for this reason that it was vital for Essed’s respondents to recognize that repeated, day-to-day acts of racism – some ‘so miniscule that I can’t put them into words’, one of her informants says (1991: 152) – were not just ad hoc or isolated ‘incidents’, but involved the making real, in local and face-to-face situations, of wider power relations: ‘Each instantiation of everyday racism has meaning only in relation to the whole complex of relations and practices [ ... ] expressions of racism in one particular social relation are related to all other racist practices’ (52). In this respect, a focus on everyday racism ought to imply a concern with recognizing the continuity of racism. It is important to say this, not least because the term ‘everyday racism’, as Bethan Harries (2015) notes in a valuable and cautionary account, might easily appear to assume or support a distinction between ‘real’ or ‘serious’ racism, as opposed to that which is ‘mundane’, ‘unthinking’ or ‘incidental’: merely everyday. This distinction is, in a sense, reflected in the way in which racism has been studied by social scientists, and accounts of the history of racist theory have often insisted on the importance of separating, analytically, the ‘scientific’ or ‘theoretical’ elaboration of ‘race’ from ‘lay’ or ‘common sense’ understandings (e.g. Banton 1998). Given this danger, it is important to properly reckon with Essed’s point. Everyday racism demonstrates precisely the continuous traffic between forms and expressions of racism not just at the level of ideas but in the sense just described: everyday practices and activities both reflect and reinforce the social conditions in which ‘race’ is believed in. This relationship, between everyday racism, on the one hand, and structures and histories of racism, on the other, is effective in both directions. For Essed’s informants, seemingly disconnected or ‘trivial’ incidents in everyday situations had the force they did, they were felt as they were, because each one was continuous with, and tacitly brought to bear, longer histories of racism and wider traditions of racializing representation. If unequal structures are at least partly reproduced in and through everyday racism, it is also the case that everyday acts of racism carry with them, in each instance, all of the weight and apparent given-ness of those structures.

In this respect, we also need to recognize – as both Essed’s concern with experience and Goldberg’s concern with the formation of racialized identities suggest – that race-making is not just as a matter of conceptualizations, but is something which happens through those aspects of our lives which are more personal, including our feelings and our bodies. It is in something like this sense, for example, that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2012) describes a ‘racial grammar’ structuring everyday life and relationships in America and effective, at least in part, because of the extent to which it is affective; because of the ways in which whiteness comes to define ideals of aesthetic beauty and the fact that European bodies are taken as normative standards in formal scientific contexts, as also in many aspects of popular culture: the fashion industry, film-making and elsewhere (compare, in the British context, Swanton 2008). Such concerns, of course, were at the heart of Frantz Fanon’s account of the experience of being seen as ‘black’ more than half a century ago, and it was on the basis of such concerns that he famously critiqued Jean-Paul Sartre for imagining that racialized identities were historically fungible, and would be easily superseded by class identities in due course (1986 [1952]: 134–40): ‘Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man’ (138). Much of Fanon’s phenomenological account, tellingly, focuses on the way in which ‘blackness’ is imposed in mundane situations and encounters. A concern with the everyday thus points us to the extent to which racism shapes lives in ways that are intimate and inward. Racialization is a matter of the subjective as well as of the structural; or, more accurately, perhaps, an emphasis on everyday life reminds us of the impossibility, in real experience, of simply separating out the latter from the former.

Yet, crucially, these processes remain knowable and nameable. Essed’s account is very careful to recognize that the way in which individuals responded and understood everyday racism was necessarily conditioned by the extent to which they had ‘a framework in which to place their experiences’ (1991: 98). Her respondents in America, thus, tended to situate their individual experiences within the wider histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Weapon and Alibi
• 2  The Bloody Riddle
• 3  Order and Disorder
• 4  A Thousand and One Little Actions
• 5  The Everyday Denial of Everydayness
• References
• Index