Steve Garner - Whiteness

What is whiteness exactly, and what is the point of using it as a separate problematic in the social sciences? Isnt this exactly the kind of American cultural imposition that Bourdieu and Wacquant (1998) rail against? How could American debates have relevance in Britain, Latin America, Australia, for example? The first thing to establish is that whiteness has no stable consensual meaning, and has been conceptualised in a number of different yet not mutually exclusive forms. As much as anything, it is a lens through which particular aspects of social relationships can be apprehended.

When, in early 2004, I began the task of grappling with whiteness as it had been deployed by academics in the USA, I did so with two assumptions. The first was that whatever was specific about one countrys historical experience and the ways that the fiction of race are managed collectively, it could not be specific to anothers. The meanings attached to race are always time- and place-specific, part of each national racial regime. Whiteness is no exception. The second was that whatever I was studying had to be part of the endeavour to contribute to anti-racist scholarship, by emphasising the social relationships referred to as racism. Since then, after conducting qualitative research, and through reading through and talking around issues that using whiteness throws up, I have realised that when we talk about this topic we do so from points of knowledge and experience in which such assumptions are not the norm. In this book, I want to emphasise that these two assumptions have guided me so far and I have no reason to replace them. In fact, I am pushed to stress, first, that the best way to understand whiteness is to think both relationally and comparatively, and second, that if what we are doing is not a contribution to anti-racist scholarship then we should stop doing it immediately.

There are two main problems that this position generates. First of all, not everyone yet agrees as to how best to combat racism. This would be true even if the academic study of whiteness did not exist. As it does, the debate about whether using whiteness actually contributes anything will go on. Sara Ahmeds (2004) influential article, for example, declares whiteness as non-performative (i.e. unable to actually be anti-racist given the structural racism that surrounds production of texts on whiteness). Howard (2004) criticises the use of racist ideas within the whiteness paradigm, and Eric Kaufman (2006b) calls the whiteness paradigm a blunt instrument, and likens it to a training bicycle with stabilisers in the developmental sequence of studies of ethnicity. Clearly, these critiques require responses, which shall be attempted on the back of the arguments presented here, and expressed in the final chapter. Moreover, many social scientists are squeamish about using the term whiteness. Wendy Shaw notes that... research on whiteness has tended to suffer from guilt by discursive association with the bulk of