What We Do

‘White people have not always been “white,” nor will they always be “white.” It is a political alliance. Things will change.’ Amoja Three Rivers, Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned, 1991)

‘I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’ W. E. B. Du Bois Darkwater (1920)

‘I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”. Audre Lorde nd (in Roedigger, Black on White, p. 253)

‘My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about whiteness could lead to the development of something called ‘White Studies’. (Richard Dyer, White, 1997:10).

Critical whiteness studies is a highly contested and debated area of critical race studies which aims to consider whiteness as an ethnic identification and as a site of social power and domination. As such, whiteness is not a property of any one person or social group, but it is actively produced, materially (for example through immigration laws, or systems of property ownership like Slavery, or land ownership as in Australia Terra Nullus), symbolically (through film, writing and art) and affectively (through everyday experience and encounter; like the dynamics between agents of the states, such as police officers or social workers and citizens accessing services, seeking help, support or protection). It is these latter affective aspects which are often difficult to identify, but to crucial to the enactment and reproduction of the material and the social.

At the heart of debates over the efficacy of critical whiteness studies is a fear that the field has the very power it purports to challenge, that focusing on whiteness as a nexus of racialised power reinstates the privilege and power of whiteness and white people. From White Spaces’ perspective this on-going ambivalence and tension in scholarship and debate on whiteness is important to hold on to. This is because such tension serves as a reminder that engagement with critical whiteness studies must always be more than ‘about’ whiteness, it must always begin from the Black critique of how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege and domination. As such critical whiteness studies must connect the dimensions through which whiteness enacts contemporary institutional power within contexts of global capitalism, neoliberalism and neoimperialisms. In this way it can become part of the means to connect the complex historical struggles over racialised power and agency to these contemporary processes. Engagement with critical whiteness scholarship must always be anchored in broader work for social justice, which considers the intersections between multiple forms of oppression and domination. This is because, as Sara Ahmed notes in her important article on ‘Declarations of Whiteness’, whiteness studies could even become ‘a spectacle of pure self reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness ‘is an identity too’ (2004:5).

References

• Sara Ahmed (2004), ‘Declarations of whiteness: the non-performativity of anti-racism’ borderlands 3(2)
• Amoja Three Rivers (1991), Cultural etiquette: a guide for the well-intentioned
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1920), Darkwater: voices from within the veil
• Audre Lorde in David Roediger (1998), Black on white: black writers on what it means to be white Random House: New York
• Richard Dyer (1997), White: essays on race and culture