Race and Social Analysis

Caroline Knowles

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761961260, 9780761961253
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?This book is well researched and highly accessible. It is both a useful and much needed addition to the literature on race and social research? - Ethnic and Racial Studies

?The book is well laid out with glossaries of significant new terms and summaries of key points at the end of each chapter, extensive notes and a very useful bibliography. Knowle?s book is a welcome contribution to our understanding, and its emphasis on social analysis helps to bridge what sometimes appears to be a widening gap between the academic and policy/practitioner communities. She provides some significant insights into the inter-relationships between everyday race/ethnicity making and contemporary political and theoretical understandings?

- Runnymede?s Quarterly Bulletin

?Knowles writes eloquently about how we can challenge and change racist ideas, and ideas about race…this is an important and enjoyable book, which would be valuable to academics or students of any discipline? - Sociological Research Online

In Race and Social Analysis, Caroline Knowles combines biographical and spatial analysis to provide an up-to-date account of the ways race and ethnicity operate in a global context.

The author argues that race and ethnicity is intricately woven into the social landscapes in which we live - encompassing both the mundane interactions of daily life and the ways in which the contemporary world is organized. Through social analysis, the book shows the ways in which we all contribute to race making and the forms of social inequality it produces.

Drawing on the work of other authors in the field and extending it to provide some avenues into conceptualizing and researching race, Caroline Knowles examines:

· how race and ethnicity operate in the social world

· the making of race and ethnicity by the connections between people, spaces and places

· the ways race and ethnicity articulate current analytical themes in social science such as space, movement and global networks

· the ways in which broader structures of racial orders are apparent in everyday lives and the stories people tell about them

· the ways in which places and spaces are raced and ethnicised

· the ways in which race is significant in the operation of globalization and global migration

· the making of whiteness

Race and Social Analysis offers a grounded theoretical examination of race & ethnicity that draws upon examples in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. It offers a unique take on the available literature by adding a missing British account of `whiteness?.

Chapter One

People and Race Making

Mini Contents

• Introduction
• People and race making: some practical lessons
• Understanding race through structure
• Understanding race through the cultural turn
• People and social categories
• Subjectivities
• Understanding subjectivities
• Subjectivities as capacities
• Subjectivities as positions
• Compositional and relational aspects of subjectivities
• Agency
• Making ethnicity
• Corporeality and comportment
• People and regimes
• Looking forward
• Summary

Introduction

Race is about race making just as ethnicity, too is about its own production. Everything is made and race and ethnicity are not exceptions. In understanding how things are made we can understand, too, their operation in the world; their grammar – the forms of social practice to which they give rise. Understanding how things are made is an important part of a materialist analysis. It is important to distinguish the understanding of how things are made from the understanding that things are made. The understanding that we have come to lean on, that race and ethnicity are socially produced, has not always offered, as it should, descriptions of the mechanisms of their production; of the ways in which they are made. Obviously race making is a complicated business and a concern that runs throughout this volume. In this chapter I make a modest start on the project of understanding race making. I refer to race making but in fact some of the best insights into these processes are worked out in relation to ethnicity, so race making in this context is shorthand for both.

Race making is about people. I don’t mean that it has something to do with people. No one would disagree with that. I mean that it is centrally about people, enough to put people in the centre of the analytic frame so that the nature of the world and the means of its analysis are brought into alignment. My purpose in this chapter is to make the argument that race making is highly significant in understanding what social scientists refer to as race; and to show that race making is crucially about people. The centrality of people to understanding the operation of race and key aspects of race making are unravelled together in this chapter, which also points to some of the practical and analytical benefits of seeing things in this way.

We will begin with the argument that people are the central element in attempts at understanding race, and, in the process of developing this argument, uncover some of the social processes or mechanisms involved in race making. Let me begin by telling you how I came to this practical understanding of the centrality of people while I was ‘in the field’ as anthropologists refer to their research.

People and race making: some practical lessons

I was trained as a student of social categories and structures, wielding the kind of macro-analytic tool kit in which the actual people living in racial orders took on a hollow, puppet like quality. This was a conceptual tool bag I’d assembled in order to think about race in Britain, where I had a broad understanding of what went on under the banner of ‘race’. I took this with me when I moved to Toronto, and then to Vancouver. In each place I’d open my tool kit, re-arrange things a bit and then put it all back. Defeated. Do conceptual tools work across nation state and provincial boundaries? Maybe. Certainly race in these places meant something other than it did in Britain and I was not sure what. Living long term in a particular place we develop our conceptual understanding as social researchers almost by social osmosis and don’t realise the benefits of this kind of first hand practical understanding until it is gone, and, although anthropologists have ways of making themselves familiar with the unfamiliar, other kinds of social researchers do not. Anyway, no one in Canada even said ‘race’, they said ‘ethnicity’, the ethnic mosaic was the state sponsored image, an aspiration, race was too close to racism. By the time I’d decided to get back to researching race I was living in Montreal and teaching in a local university. The conceptual tool kit was looking a bit travel weary and I had even less idea what race and ethnicity meant, or how they worked, in a place where, in language terms alone, I struggled to understand everything. Being forced to start again from the beginning there was nothing lost in working from the opposite direction and seeing what I could learn from the kinds of anthropological methods, that render the unfamiliar familiar. I traded ‘big picture’ elements like categories and structure for lives, and tried to build a picture of the local racial order from the bottom up. I would, I decided, examine individual lives for their connections to other lives and by these means work the micro to make the macro, and back to the familiar territories of social categories and structures. At least that was the plan.

Operating on the fringes of transcultural psychiatry¹ out of interest and because of contacts I’d developed in Vancouver, I was interviewing psychiatric nurses of Caribbean origin about what it was like for them living and working in Montreal. These were highly qualified and educated professionals, and I was struck by how their lives could not be more different than those of their (black) clients whom I was also interviewing in informal community settings. Racial categories, I had started to see, obscure hugely divergent social positions, which could be unpacked and mapped onto (an interpretation of) the social fabric as something composed of different kinds of racialised lives. That there are differences within social categories is a banal and unsurprising insight; that difference can offer a starting point in a more detailed account of the operation of race and the racial texture of society is actually rather exciting. These differences between professionals and their clients were magnified when it came to strategies for dealing with racism. Psychiatric clients often developed accounts of madness structured by conspiracies generated through their interface with a range of agencies dealing with their affairs: immigration, child welfare, juvenile justice, education, the police and court system, and psychiatry (Knowles, 2000a). Psychiatric nurses dealt with a quite different range of agencies in different capacities: another highly significant difference between racialised subjects. They also dealt with employers, others in authority over them at work and a different range of neighbourhood and social networks. I talked to people who rebutted racism with expensive designer clothes, which made them feel good about themselves, and with people who went on taking courses to educate themselves well beyond the others in their workplace as a means of personal security in a hostile world. These were all ways of coping with racism in various manifestations. More mapping!

The differences between lives, which had seemed trivial when I had approached things from the opposite, macro structural direction now showed up in magnified form and demanded to be taken into account. I began to see not just that there were differences, but what they consisted of and how they might be categorised. If I wanted to understand how the things we refer to as race – primarily in this case manifestations of racism as forms of exclusion presaged on an account of differences explained by race – worked in this place then these individual differences mattered. Or, rather, if I did not take them into account then my picture of things would lack subtlety and detail because it had missed out on people as anything other than an aggregated category of puppets dancing in the formation of social structures. The details of racial orders operate in individual lives, and this was my first lesson in the importance of people. Racial orders are very uneven and racial categories like ‘Caribbean Canadian’ do not show up the contours of the racial landscape very well. Taking a closer look at them, conversely, exposed the racial texture of things rather starkly.

I was to learn of still more subtle distinctions from a different direction. Eager to learn about the local political, organisational dimensions of race and ethnicity in Montreal I had made contact with some of the black and community association activists funded by the provincial government as part of its ethnic pluralism². It was through meeting another kind of more practical black activist who had been excluded from this professional ethnic circuit that I was told about William Kafe. William Kafe was a Ghanaian teacher who was in jail because he had threatened to shoot the Mayor of Verdun, the key municipal dignitary of a suburb of Montreal. He had made this threat out of frustration. A secondary school teacher working for the Deux Montaine School Board just outside of Montreal, he was the victim of fifteen years worth of racial taunts and harassment at the hands of his students. The students acted with the tacit collusion of his managers and the education authority, both of whom insisted that his problems arose from his inability to manage his students’ behaviour and not from their racism. He fought back. He amassed documents, he took his employers to the Quebec Human Rights Commission and won, but he lost his job and his will to live in the process as his ‘case’ took over all other aspects of his life. People inevitably turn themselves into categories and cases in order to be able to fight this kind of battle, and, while these are important political campaigns, they also squeeze the lifeblood out of those who fight them, and they end up feeling as hollowed out as the social categories to which they are assigned.

By the time Kafe had got out of jail and I met him he wanted to talk: he wanted to be heard, and saw me as a sympathetic female scribe. His ‘case’ was extensively documented: his house full of papers and tapes detailing his dealings with the school, the school board, his union, the medical insurance agencies managing the teachers’ employment insurance scheme, the psychiatric agencies to whom he had been referred as part of his employment/ unemployment insurance, and the psychiatrist he consulted for himself as a way of managing the stress all of this caused him. It was a researcher’s dream. If I wanted to understand in detail the micro processes composing race through forms of racial exclusion and harassment – race making, making race matter – then here was my chance.

I learned two important lessons through William Kafe and his documents. The first built on the lessons about differentiation within racial categories I had learned from the psychiatric nurses and their clients. It was this. I learned late in our interview sessions that there was another black teacher teaching at the same school as Kafe. Did he have the same problems with the students? No. He didn’t! Why was that? I had many theories about the differences between the two men who operated in the very same racial landscape and, on the face of it, as identical members of the same racial category almost down to the last detail. Was the other man a more commanding teacher the students would not dare annoy? Did he just duck the issues raised by his students’ behaviour whereas Kafe challenged them? In the end I decided that the crucial difference had to be this: Kafe, but not his colleague, fought back against what he rightly perceived as injustice. His model – he had earlier trained as a Catholic priest – was David and Goliath. The crucial differences between them had to be matters of bearing, command, character and personal philosophy. Biography. If I was to understand the operation of race through the details of racism then I would have to have a framework that operated at this level of detail or, again, I would be missing crucial elements of its texture.

The second lesson I learned was that racial orders are in fact composed of myriad and ordinary everyday social processes and mechanisms with which people interface in no predictable way. Racism it seemed was nothing special but the drip, drip, drip of endless banality, which accumulates to something more sinister. It was about cumulative, incremental detail of the sorts of things that could happen to anyone – mix ups over time-tabling, being forced to operate across two campuses (which annoyed Kafe’s students), the failure to constitute his probationary committee at the appropriate time and so on that had suspiciously converged on one – but not another – African man living in Quebec. Here, neither of them could be other than exotic. But one – and not the other – had publicly unleashed local fears of the meaning of blackness as servility and dirt; matter out of place³. If I was to understand how racial orders worked then I needed to grapple with these processes and the people involved in them. I had learned that race making centrally involved people and their decisions and their actions; their ways of being who they are in the world in which they live. And race making involved myriad rather ordinary social processes and activities. These were to be important practical lessons in race. People are the motor of race making and hence deserve a central place in the analytical frameworks through which the operation of race is understood.

There are other lessons to be learned from the published work of others about the centrality of people in making racial orders. It is not just school children and education bureaucrats who make distinctions between racialised subjects; entire regimes do this, even ones that ostensibly have the most uniform and systematic approach to racialising their citizens and sub-citizens. Mark Roseman’s (2000) biography of Marianne Strauss who survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany until after the war while her family were exterminated makes just this point. Strauss survives the final solution through a combination of privilege, resources, suitable networks, well-placed contacts, audacity, disposition, courage, ambivalence about her Jewishness, ambivalent connection with certain versions of Germanness, mobility, youth, attractiveness, femininity and sheer strength of character. In the same regime six million other Jews are systematically exterminated. Not only does she survive, she manages to make the lives of those who are about to perish more comfortable through sending letters and parcels to the ghettos and camps in the East. One of the mechanisms by which she achieves this is a German army officer who risks death to play postman. Regimes are assembled through myriad social processes, mechanisms and routine activities: there are bound to be moments of inattention, unevenness and difference that matter. People at the point of their interface with regimes hold the key to these things, and the ways in which they pan out.

This takes us to a second and still more crucial point about the relationship between people and racialised regimes underscored in the work of Primo Levi (2000) in The Drowned and the Saved, and still on the issue of the holocaust, the iconic instance of racial classification through the mechanism of death. Levi quite rightly argues that it was people who staffed the genocidal regime of the holocaust. People made decisions, did their jobs, filled forms, maintained gas supplies, ran trains, enabled other people to do other jobs (social processes) all of which ended in the systematic racialised regimes of death implemented in the concentration camps. Regimes are about people as well as systems and structures, which would lie inert without their agency, their volition, their ability to make things happen. Levi’s (2000: 40–2) startling honesty conveys the layers of complicity this demanded and secured, not just among Germans, like the soldier in the Strauss story who defied the regime’s demanded complicity and worked against it, but even among Jews. The regime’s prime victims, argues Levi, operated ‘within the gray band, that zone of ambiguity which irradiates around regimes based on terror and obsequiousness … nobody can know for how long and under what trials his soul can resist before yielding or breaking’. Levi’s point about regimes of death and terror is no less true of any other regime that ‘… degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities’ (2000: 49).

Levi identifies a raw but insightful moment in the operation of human agency, the subjectivities⁴ of which it is capable and the operation and articulation of regimes over people’s lives. The unpalatable truth is that we are all complicit in our own (literal and metaphoric) annihilation and in that of others. The regime is both of us and wields power over us⁵. People (and their actions) compose (racialised) regimes. How we compose them is not a straightforward matter to understand, for we are both, as Levi contends, complicit in our own and others’ annihilation and, sometimes, work against the regime like the German soldier who smuggled parcels into the camp.

A second less dramatic and systematically violent example of the complicity between people and regimes is offered in Braman’s (1999) account of the mechanisms sustaining the segregation laws in the United States in the 1890s. A light skinned black man, Plessy, who was counted as white in some states and black in others because they had different definitions of blackness, was prosecuted for violating the segregation laws of the State of Louisiana by riding in a whites only railway carriage (Braman, 1999: 1394). This example shows, although the author does not make a point of this, that implementing the social boundaries of whiteness and blackness was only possible because of the actions of Plessy’s fellow passengers, the guard who reported it, and those staffing the legal apparatus that were prepared to pursue segregation by juridical means. The point here is that racial segregation was as much the achievement of human agency as the structural imperatives of the regime’s arbitrary and iniquitous forms of racial classification. This goes beyond complicity. There is reflexivity and conviction here. Volition. It is the people who compose regimes that make them work. People are a part of the operation of the apparatus of racial classification, exclusion and death. The detailed manner of this interface between regimes and people is something we need to understand. We will return to this later.

So far I have been trying to convince you that race is about race making and centrally concerned with people. By looking at people we can begin to understand the complicated and uneven nature of racial orders and their regimes. I have suggested that human action – how people operate – in racial orders is vitally important in understanding how race works. That people are the key to understanding race making. And race making is a series of small processes and mechanisms that overall add up to the making of people and the regimes administering them, in certain terms. People are the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 People and Race Making
• Chapter 2 Lives and Auto/Biography
• Chapter 3 The Place of Space
• Chapter 4 Globalisation
• Chapter 5 Migration, Displacement and Belonging
• Chapter 6 The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
• Concluding Comments
• Bibliography
• Index