Judith Butlerâs work is variously regarded as radical, liberating, complex, controversial, inaccessible and all of these. She is considered an academic celebrity (Hey 2006). Her work contributes to the fields of Philosophy, Gender Studies, Politics, Sociology, Religion, Literary Theory, Ethics, Cultural Studies, Education and others, although has probably had the most impact in the field of Gender Studies. Many however have argued for its wider applicability and she herself has written that her work wanders between âliterary theory, philosophy and social theoryâ (Butler 2010, 148).
Judith Butler tends to be best known for her work on gender and sexuality . However, her work is also more broadly about power and the workings of power (Loizidou 2007; Chambers and Carver 2008). Many of her arguments and ideas are in fact very relevant to debates around race and racism, and a small number of race theorists have demonstrated the usefulness of a Butlerian framework in theorising the complexities of race, although this has not yet been widely taken up, particularly not in the field of education (for example Kondo 1997; Warren 2001; Rich 2004; Alexander 2004; Warren and Fassett 2004; Youdell 2006a, b; Nayak 2006a; Byrne 2000, 2011; Chadderton 2013; Kitching 2011, 2014). Equally many of Butlerâs readers remain unaware of the aspects of her work which address issues around race directly (for example Butler 2004, 2010).
Race still matters, and racial inequality persists. Despite the US having elected a black president, and resulting claims that we are now in an age where race no longer plays a role in society, race still matters. Even as president of the US, Barack Obama , could not escape being defined by his race. The doubts raised about his âAmericannessâ would not have been raised had he been white. At the time of writing, a new US president, Donald Trump , has been elected at least in part based on his appeals to restore what is regarded as a lost white privilege . Equally across Europe, right-wing populism is on the rise. The outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, the 2017 electoral successes of parties such as Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany and the Front National in France are in part based on the appeal of narratives of perceived threats to (white) natives by refugees, migrant workers from Eastern Europe, and workers in countries such as India and China who work for lower wages. These narratives, even those around Eastern Europeans, who are generally pale-skinned, are racialised, and contain messages about ethnic threat . The narratives mask the complex structural, political and economic arrangements which have created the real threats to the lives of British, German, French and North American workers: late capitalism and neoliberal politics: the gradual removal of the protection of the state of the populationsâ welfare systems and workersâ rights, and the marketisation of public services. Such ethnic threat narratives also fuel individual acts of racial violence: it was recently argued that race crimes involving racial or religious hatred rose by 23% in the eleven months following the Brexit vote (see for example, Bulman 2017). Despite the gains made by the Civil Rights movement and the introduction of anti-discrimination laws in many countries, racial inequalities have not disappeared, neither in the US, nor in the UK or Europe. On the contrary, in some areas they have increased, fuelled by the neoliberal politics of the last 40â50 years (Omi and Winant 2015). Wealth and success continue to be concentrated in white families and individuals . Notions of race continue to shape social structures, identities, institutions, attitudes, interaction and policy.
Little contemporary scholarly work is explicitly based on biological notions of race, in which individuals are seen in terms of essential characteristics believed to be natural properties of certain bodies, as such notions have now been scientifically disproved (Gates 1985; Solomos 1993; Winant 2000). However these notions still carry some currency. Some of the more recent examples of work underpinned by biological theories of race include Herrnstein and Murrayâs work The Bell Curve (1994), in which it was claimed that African American children attain low grades at schools because they are naturally less intelligent, and geneticist James Watsonâs 2007 comments about people of African descent allegedly being less intelligent than whites (McKie and Harris 2007).
Most recent academic research on race is instead underpinned by the idea of race as a social construction , by which I mean that race is seen as not inherently present, rather it is considered to be âan arbitrary sign used to divide up the human populationâ (Nayak 2006a, 415). Much of this work is based on the pioneering work of people such as sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois , who saw race not as biological fact, but an artificially constructed notion through social and historical conditions, without inherent or essential meaning, historically and geographically contingent and changing over time. Work which takes a social constructionist approach includes various different theorisations of race, such as the Marxist theory -informed racialisation (for example, Miles 1993; Cole 2009), which argues that all social relations are historically specific and therefore socially constructed, and will reflect the economic system of the time. It also includes Critical Race Theory , which argues that race is socially constructed (for example Haney Lopez 1995) and that society and social and political arrangements are racially structured. However, it has been argued that much social constructionist work, while abstractly claiming to be socially constructionist, is still underpinned by the notion that culture is tied to ethnic group, that race is attached to bodies: whiteness is enacted by white bodies and blackness by black ones (Ali 2005; Nayak 2006a, 420; Byrne 2006). This seems to reify a kind of racial or cultural specificity. As Ali (2005) argues, â[s]ocial constructionism still holds to the idea of race as some kind of ontological category, a real foundation for what one âisââ (p. 324). Partly, the reason for this is that this work focuses on illustrating the effects of racial stratification, discrimination and racialised thinking, and does not pay much attention to how race is constructed, or how people come to be located in racialised spaces. On the other hand, there are those who argue that if race is socially constructed, perhaps even just an illusion, why is racial inequality real and why is race still experienced as real by so many (see for example Winant 2000; Warmington 2009; Murji 2015)?
Race continues to be an unstable concept and there is confusion over what it actually is (Byrne 2011; Omi and Winant 2015). Is it real and natural , or constructed? If it is not real, why does it seem real and have real consequences, and how should we understand that racial inequalities persist? If it is constructed, who is doing the constructing? What is the relationship between bodies and race, as the existence of different phenotypes cannot be denied? What are racial categories based on and who can be included and excluded in the different categories?
Butlerâs writings can be said to belong to a body of work which calls into question the ontological status of race . The approach of these scholars has been described by Nayak (2006a) as âtentatively anti-foundationalist â or âdecipherable as an emergent post-race paradigmâ, and includes the work of Butler, as well as, for example, Frantz Fanon , Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy . These scholars the...