The Intersections of Whiteness 1351112791, 9781351112796

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The future of Critical Whiteness Studies
Hegemonic whiteness – privilege, entitlement or advantage?
The “buzzword” intersectionality
The book
Notes
Bibliography
PART I: White epistemologies
1. For the common good: Re-inscribing white normalcy into the American body politic
Introduction
Southern Civil Religion and the Original Nation
After Brown: White alienation and polarization
The new Herrenvolk democracy: Trump’s America and the 2016 GOP
Platform
Notes
Bibliography
2. A typology of white people in America
Variations in white privilege and colour-blindness
Constructing a white typology
Some surprising features of the typology
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
3. “I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist”: Whiteness, “post-feminism,” and the American cultural imaginary
Feminism: A troubled past
Whiteness as rhetorical device
The cultural imaginary and colonizing discourses
Gender as colonized by whiteness: The example of the 2016 election
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
PART II: Whiteness and global politics
4. A journey through Europe’s heart of whiteness
Introduction
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Notes
Bibliography
5. Liquid racism, possessive investments in whiteness and academic freedom at a post-apartheid university
Notes
Bibliography
6. White supremacy in the Trump era: University students and alt-right activism on college campuses
The Ku Klux Klan: Restoring white supremacy after the Civil War
1970s–1980s: The fourth wave of the Klan and the rise of men’s groups
Conservative and right-wing movements
An intersectional analysis of right-wing movements: Race, masculinity, and immigrant status
“College Conservatives”: A site for right-wing activism
James: The use of humor by a closeted alt-right activist
Michael: The role of minorities advancing white supremacist ideologies
“Front-stage femininity” and gendered social contracts in the College
Conservatives
Sheila: A white anti-feminist female member of the College Conservatives
Chloe: A Black liaison and moderate voice for the College Conservatives
Conclusion: Digital culture and the afterlife of white supremacist movements
Notes
Bibliography
PART III: White affects
7. “Anyone foreign?”: Whiteness, passing, and deportability in Brexit Britain
Placing whiteness in(to) the Brexit debate
Infrastructural whiteness
Whiteness and deportability
How the British working class became white, again
Conclusion: The problem with white liberalism
Notes
Bibliography
8. ‘Afrikaner women’ and strategies of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa: Shame and the ethnicised respectability of ordentlikheid
Ordentlikheid, an ethnicised form of respectability
Pre-apartheid and postapartheid, shame upon shame
The transformative potential of acknowledged shame
Notes
Bibliography
PART IV: White(ning) spaces
9. Exploring white German masculinity in Wilhelmine adventure novels
Race and crisis in Wilhelmine Germany
The colonial Bildungsroman
Work and racial hierarchy in adventure novels
German colonial innocence
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
10. Homemaking practices and white ideals in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
Doing whiteness: Whiteness as practice
Doing home: The politics and ideals of home practices
Ideal homes and whitely practices in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Unhomely homes and the visibility of whiteness in Purple Hibiscus
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
11. Fifty shades of white: Benidorm and the joys of all-inclusiveness
Going on a summer holiday
Variations of British whiteness
Tan and tobacco
Coats and Coolio
Pub quiz champions, photographs and parasites
Spanish others
Classifications and disqualifications
Nostalgic conviviality
The other Spain
Queer spaces
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

“In 1860, the African American essayist William J. Wilson asked, ‘What Shall We Do with White People?’ More than 150 years later, scholars continue to debate the antecedents, meanings, and implications of whiteness. In bringing clarity to a kaleidoscope field, editors Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt provide a tour-de-force that explains how knowledge, politics, emotions, and space intersect to both refract and bind what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘the souls of white folk’. For novice and veteran alike, The Intersections of Whiteness provides both utility and inspiration.” Matthew W. Hughey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and author of White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race

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The Intersections of Whiteness

Trumpism and the racially implied Islamophobia of the “travel ban”; Brexit and the yearning for Britain’s past imperial grandeur; Black Lives Matter; the public backlash against Merkel’s refugee policies in Germany. These seemingly national responses to the changing demographics in a multitude of Western nations need to be understood as effects of a global/transnational crisis of whiteness. The Intersections of Whiteness brings together scholars from different disciplines to shed light on these manifestations in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Applying methodology stemming from critical race theory’s investment in intersectionality, the contributions of this edited collection focus on specific intersections of whiteness with gender, class, space, affect and nationality. Offering valuable insights into the contours of whiteness and its instrumentalisation across different nations, societies and cultures, this incisive volume creates transnational dialogue and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as critical whiteness and race studies, gender studies, cultural studies and social policy. Evangelia Kindinger is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Mark Schmitt is Assistant Professor of British Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany.

Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ sociology/series/RRRE

22 Mixed Race in Asia Past, Present and Future Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar 23 Lived Experiences of Multiculture The New Social and Spatial Relations of Diversity Sarah Neal, Katy Bennett, Allan Cochrane and Giles Mohan 24 The Body, Authenticity and Racism Lindsey Garratt 25 Australia’s New Migrants International Students’ Affective Encounters with the Border Maria Elena Indelicato 26 Talking Race in Young Adulthood Race and Everyday Life in Contemporary Britain Bethan Harries 27 Gypsy Feminism Intersectional Politics, Alliances, Gender and Queer Activism Laura Corradi 28 The Intersections of Whiteness Edited by Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt 29 A Nation Apart The African-American Experience and White Nationalism Arnold Birenbaum 30 Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins Creating Exotic Iceland Kristín Loftsdóttir

The Intersections of Whiteness

Edited by Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-8153-6227-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-11279-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of contributors Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi xxiii 1

EVANGELIA KINDINGER AND MARK SCHMITT

PART I

White epistemologies 1 For the common good: Re-inscribing white normalcy into the American body politic

17 19

TONNIA L. ANDERSON

2 A typology of white people in America

38

MATT WRAY

3 “I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist”: Whiteness, “post-feminism,” and the American cultural imaginary

53

MELISSA R. SANDE

PART II

Whiteness and global politics 4 A journey through Europe’s heart of whiteness

69 71

VRON WARE

5 Liquid racism, possessive investments in whiteness and academic freedom at a post-apartheid university ADAM HAUPT

87

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Contents

6 White supremacy in the Trump era: University students and alt-right activism on college campuses

105

ADAM BURSTON AND FRANCE WINDDANCE TWINE

PART III

White affects 7 “Anyone foreign?”: Whiteness, passing, and deportability in Brexit Britain

125 127

ARIANE DE WAAL

8 ‘Afrikaner women’ and strategies of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa: Shame and the ethnicised respectability of ordentlikheid

146

CHRISTI VAN DER WESTHUIZEN

PART IV

White(ning) spaces 9 Exploring white German masculinity in Wilhelmine adventure novels

163 165

MAUREEN O. GALLAGHER

10 Homemaking practices and white ideals in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

182

SARAH HEINZ

11 Fifty shades of white: Benidorm and the joys of all-inclusiveness

200

ANETTE PANKRATZ

Index

219

Contributors

Tonnia L. Anderson is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies and an affiliate instructor within the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, USA. Adam Burston is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. Ariane de Waal is a post-doctoral researcher in English Literature and Culture at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Maureen O. Gallagher is Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Adam Haupt is Associate Professor in the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Sarah Heinz is Professor for English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna, Austria. Evangelia Kindinger is Assistant Professor of American Studies at RuhrUniversity Bochum, Germany. Cynthia Levine-Rasky is Associate Professor for Sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Anette Pankratz is Professor for British Cultural Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Melissa R. Sande is Assistant Professor of English at Union County College in New Jersey, USA. Mark Schmitt is Assistant Professor of British Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Christi van der Westhuizen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

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Contributors

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. Vron Ware is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Kingston University, UK. Matt Wray is Professor of Sociology at Temple University in Pennsylvania, USA.

Foreword Cynthia Levine-Rasky

When, in the 1990s, whites who wished to fight racism alongside their racialized1 friends were admonished to do our own work, the unprepared among us reeled from the ego injury. With their earnest attempt at allyship rebuffed and their desire to affirm their good character unfulfilled, they likely turned away from the interaction, faulting their friends for their lack of gratitude. Those somewhat more prepared to examine their behaviours and assumptions reeled from the shock of facing racism’s source for the first time. That we whites have made so little progress in doing our own work over the intervening years is testament to the implacability of a racism better understood as everyday white supremacy. From hopeful blogs on how to be a better white person to the triumph of whiteness fervently heralded by proto-fascist groups today, it is abundantly evident that there is urgent work to be done. But these disparate voices also demonstrate the contortions and distortions through which whiteness can be put. Whiteness is now worked by everyone situated everywhere on the political spectrum. Whiteness was discerned and abundantly theorized by white scholars in the 1990s. That decade saw perhaps two dozen published and edited books by international white scholars. But to call this inquiry new occludes the epistemic privilege of black and other racialized writers whose knowledge of whiteness was a necessary component of their well-being and survival. A Canadian example is indigenous scholar Patricia Monture-Angus (1958– 2010), a renowned expert in constitutional law and advocate for Indigenous peoples in Canada. In 1988, she successfully sued the Attorney General of Ontario and the Law Society of Upper Canada for requiring lawyers to pledge allegiance to the Queen before being called to the bar. Having just graduated from law school, Monture-Angus argued that as a member of a sovereign people, the Haudenosaunee Nation, oath-taking was offensive to her: “In my culture, we do not distrust people and make them swear to tell the truth. My people carry an eagle’s feather to symbolize that they will tell the truth” (quoted in Csillag). In her book Thunder in My Soul, she writes: The study of law for me is the study of that which is outside of myself and my community. It requires that I be expert at both the ways in which

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Foreword “White” people do things, as well as continuing to learn as an Aboriginal woman. In fact, my survival of the law school depends on my intimate knowledge of who and what White people are. The same does not hold true in the reverse. White people have the opportunity to fully discard my reality and this is at least one of the significant sources of my marginalization. (Monture-Angus 64)

Knowledge of racism is an embodied knowledge, the capacity of bringing “a deep passion and commitment to seek knowledge and using these things to transform existing conditions as a noble cause that emanates from within the self” (Seifa Dei and Singh Johal 8). It is tempting to assert that whites are disqualified from having an authentic knowledge of racism because they do not have the capacity of embodiment. To be ‘woke’ connotes a depth of subjectivity that whites simply do not have. Or do they? Is it true that everyone who is racialized as white has no embodied knowledge of racism? Are they ultimately incapable of changing, or even reflecting on, their exercise of whiteness?2 What about white persons who are poor, or who are lesbians, gay, or trans, or who have disabilities? What about those who may appear to be white, but whose religion summons a differentiation that can parallel racialization as it does for some groups of Muslims and Jews? What about those with ambiguous or mixed ethnicity or race, or those whose ethnicity has historical restrictions on its claim to whiteness? Exploration of these questions invites the application of intersectionality to whiteness. How can we do so while preserving the specific criticality of whiteness studies that is aimed not at discovering and rediscovering the nuances of white identities, but at participating in confrontation, denouncement, and subversion, of what whiteness does?

Why whiteness and intersectionality? Coinage of the term ‘intersectionality’ is attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw,3 whose essay drew attention to the law’s unresponsiveness to black women’s dual discrimination on the basis of gender and race, particularly in legal cases of race discrimination, but also in legal and social provisions for women experiencing domestic violence, and in the incarceration of women. Black women “are caught between ideological and political currents that combine first to create and then to bury Black women’s experiences” (Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing” 160). For an effective definition of intersectionality, we may turn to Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix: We regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis [sic] of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts. The concept

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emphasizes that different dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands. (Brah and Phoenix 76) Brah and Phoenix look at the effects of differentiation, not at the categories produced by differentiation as though they are theoretically independent. Identity is transformed from static and independent object to dynamic and interdependent process. The definition makes no reference to groups in relation to oppression or domination; it only identifies the outcomes of differentiation arising in “historically specific contexts.” “[D]ifferent dimensions of social life” operate simultaneously for all groups whether dominant or subdominant. Arguably, this includes whites, and it includes whiteness as one outcome of the process of intersectionality. Since intersectionality first emerged among black feminists, it has been tethered to discourses of otherness. However, Crenshaw did not conceptualize intersectionality as the exclusive reserve of black women. Well after her first essays, she wrote: Intersectionality applies to everyone – no one exists outside the matrix of power […] I made no attempt to articulate each and every intersection either specifically or generally, nor to foreclose or anticipate how intersectionality might unfold across time and space […] this is a piece that I can see. What other clips of social power might be part of this collection? (Crenshaw, “Postscript” 221–234) Keenly interested in “what scholars, activists and policymakers have done under its rubric” (222), Crenshaw implies that the application of intersectionality to new questions, new frames for problematizing inequality, is an appropriate trajectory for inquiry. Other scholars have promoted the mobility of intersectionality as a theory that “can and does move” (Carbado et al. 306) and is readily applied to other groups and circumstances (see Davis and Zarkov). Writers such as Floya Anthias, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Kimberlé Crenshaw remark that intersectionality is not limited to exploring disadvantage. When intersectionality is associated exclusively with positions of oppression, its relationality to power drops out. This is problematic because when intersections are understood as mutually constitutive of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, ability and other “axes of differentiation” (Hill Collins 93) they operate as modes for the exercise of power (cf. Anthias, “Hierarchies” 126). Intersections are imbued with the inequities of power. The question of how intersections host the exercise of power is more fruitful than ones that restrict investigation to the ‘content’ of intersections. Anthias puts it this way: I concur with those writers who are not so much concerned with pointing to the space of an intersection but focus on the dynamic and located dimensions of inequality and division in terms of relationships with each

xiv Foreword other. Therefore the intersection does not denote specific places occupied by individuals or groups (e.g. working-class black women). It is a process […] Moreover, the notion of intersection says nothing about the ways in which the production and reproduction of discrimination/subordination take place. One example here is that you need to look at the operations of inequality and violence through the state and other institutional frameworks in which power and economic interest are exercised, and not just at the categories and practices of gender, race and so on. (Anthias, “Intersectional What?” 13) If, as Crenshaw advocates, “[i]ntersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power” (“Why Intersectionality”), then it behoves critical whiteness scholars to elaborate on whiteness as a vehicle through which power is practiced, not singularly, but multiply and heterogeneously. We need to analyse the ways that whiteness, as the practice of power, induces all forms of differentiation, including racialization, in historically specific contexts. If we recall that the purpose of intersectionality theorizing is not just to describe and explain dynamics of power, but to disrupt those dynamics (cf. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye), this direction is further justified. Accounting for domination in the form of whiteness enables a truly relational approach necessary for a fuller analysis of enduring patterns of inequalities.

What happens at the intersections of whiteness In this project, more can be learned from what happens at intersections, and with what impacts and on whom, than we can learn from who occupies intersections. Predictably, observation reveals a complex picture. Depending on the particular context in which social relations are played out, intersectionality may be either reinforcing or contradictory in its effects. To take one example, in power relations, class and ethnicity will reinforce each other in some circumstances while they will contradict each other in different circumstances. Anthias explains the dynamic in this way: Certainly, the articulation (intersection, interlocking or whatever term is preferred) of social divisions at the more concrete level of analysis can be mutually reinforcing (e.g. as in the case of particular racialized migrant women), in terms of subordination. However, the intersections may construct multiple and uneven social patterns of domination and subordination, i.e. produce contradictory locations […] as in the case of racialized men or dominant women who inhabit a different location in terms of the parameters of race and gender. A person might be in a position of dominance and subordination simultaneously on the one hand or at different times or spaces on the other. (Anthias, “Hierarchies” 131–132, emphasis in original)

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Anthias provides the example of a migrant woman who may occupy a subordinate status on the basis of her race, but she may also have a university degree that conveys some advantages to her despite her subalternity in the country of migration. These circumstances place her in a contradictory social location transnationally. If we wish to turn the lens on whiteness, we may consider the example of a white woman applying for rental housing. Her dominance is reinforced by her race. But if she is poor, her whiteness is in contradiction with her class position as manifest in the segregated and relatively poor quality of housing to which she is restricted. If she is differentiated on the basis of sexuality or ability, further contradictions intersect and take effect. An intersectional approach can account for the complexities of whiteness as it is practiced by social actors. To take a salient and simple example, whiteness and middle-classness are reinforcing. In the most general sense, they intersect so as to expedite access to resources. Members of white middleclass groups are positioned and are involved in positioning themselves such that choices are possible and positive outcomes maximized. However, outcomes may be contradictory when ethnicity intersects with middle-classness since ethnicity deviates from the norm of whiteness. Historically, the dilemmas of whiteness for Jews, Irish, Italians, Slavs, Turks, and Greeks are known, but ethnicity has renewed meaning in current times and is inflected by other factors such as religion, accent, immigrant status, and political leaning. Designations of foreign, minority, immigrant, refugee, and categories such as Arab, Latinx, mixed, indigenous, and Asian, often signal an essentialized difference that intersects with social class in unique ways and with material significance. These social positions contradict the effects of middle-classness. Historical and contemporary political contexts, deployment in social policy, and positioning in social institutions all affect the conditions of treatment for ethnicized or racialized groups who may have social class and even gender in common. In these contexts, social actors can present ethnicity differently or can resist it altogether. What happens at the intersection is contradictory, its nuances depending on the context and on an individual’s agency. The chapters in this book serve as vital illustrations. Whether descriptive of the intersections of whiteness in popular cultural forms, in the current political moment, in literature, in local gendered language, or coextensive with other moments of power, authors observe whiteness as a dynamic practice in complex relation with its own “axes of differentiation.” Recent Canadian examples stand against a backdrop of research on racism in historical and current Canadian policies and practices, some of which specifies the workings of Canadian whiteness.4 Corrie Scott describes the historical racialization of French Canadians when, for example, Quebecers were exhorted to ‘speak white,’ and nationalism was stoked by Pierre Vallières’s book White Niggers of America. Today, Quebecers identify with whiteness and have access to white privilege. The provincial legislature makes regular attempts to suppress Muslim religious observance. Bill 62, prohibiting Muslim women from wearing a hijab in public, is the most recent example.

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Edward Hon-Sing Wong reveals the intersections of whiteness and physical disability in his historical analysis of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene in the early twentieth century. In the service of Canadian nation-building, immigrants were assessed for their suitability not only on the basis of their ethnicity, but on the basis of their mental competency. This “pathologization of racialized people” (Wong 9) was to prevent a “decadent stock” (Fernald quoted in Wong 19) of prospective citizens, and found backing in the eugenicist movement and the scientific racism of the day. Peter Thompson reports on the popular TV series The Trailer Park Boys, set in rural Nova Scotia. The characters represent ‘white trash’ culture with their grotesque lifestyle, poverty, drug use, and participation in the underground economy. Thompson suggests that this situates them as ethnically distinct. The whiteness of these characters – and the social category they are intended to represent – finds few reinforcements in their social class. As for gender, Thompson describes them as “men left behind.” Their backwoods location is yet another axis of differentiation that thoroughly contradicts the entitlements of whiteness. Yet in this place there is “hipster racism” and a general neglect of black and Acadian characters.

Intersections of whiteness in the time of Trump Discourse on the intersections of whiteness irrupted in 2017. Arguments about culpability for Trump’s success were expressed as ratios of white to black voters, of middle-class to working-class voters, of men to women voters, and of rural to urban voters. Intersectionality was the unnamed currency in which popular theories traded. Narratives are one of two kinds. First, there is the account that highlights the disaffection of the white working class, attributing the seismic political shifts to their disdain for politics-as-usual on the one hand, and to their having nothing left to lose on the other hand. Journalists trekked to rural towns in search of the working-class story, giving voice to those voters – presumably Trump’s iconic ‘base’ – whose alienation, poverty, drug addiction, lack of work, and lack of hope were said to be to blame for the election of a man in whom they vested a fervent hope for rescue. Commiserating about their diminishing economic and social advantages to which they feel entitled, whites coalesced around their racialization. It is evident that solidarity around a shared whiteness outranked their differentiated class and gender positions since the only thing that such voters have in common with Trump is their whiteness. Their racism is notorious. The strategy of designating a racialized foe is anything but new. The US ruling classes have successfully exploited racial distinctions since Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. They do so to weaken the solidarity of workers of all races whose shared class interest threatens the social order.5 Somewhat more sophisticated is the second account that blends white middle- and working-classness together with gender to show the unpredictable and complex impacts of voters’ motivations. Critics parse the ways that

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analyses of the election outcome were framed. Questions arise, for example, around what it meant to foreground labour precarity as the reason for Trump’s win, when the more severe and specific precarity of women, racialized and immigrant workers was overlooked (cf. Bhambra). As bad as things may be for many whites, they are certainly worse for blacks and others. Refusing to see this, many whites see only their quickly eroding white privilege. Matthew Hughey refers to whites’ perceived racial victimization as a loss of their “ontological birthright” (17–18) as they seize on racialized others as the reason for their failure to achieve the American Dream. As this narrative of calamity rolls out, US federal policies target migrants, blacks, Muslims, transgender persons, women, the precariously employed, the poor, workers, activists, scientists, users of healthcare, and users of mass media. For a nation that purports to be post-racial, it is striking how race and racism occupied, and continues to occupy, the centre stage in Trump’s election drama. Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked that Trump’s win could be summed up in two words: white supremacy. With growing vulnerabilities for Muslims and Jews, asylum-seekers and new immigrants, indigenous peoples and black and brown peoples, racialized groups became both the cause and the effect of Trumpism. The cause: voter suppression plus voter apathy (including the apathy elicited by Hillary Clinton) equals insufficient voting turnouts for them to have made a difference. The effect: they are the scapegoat in a renewed zeal for white racism. Charlottesville was a watershed moment when the public vividly realized that organized hate could mobilize the closeted racists whose addiction to their online worlds had been restricted to their basements, safely away from the rest of us. But the event reverberated around the world and racists enjoy new legitimacy with Trump’s indirect support. In Canada, at least 100 white supremacist groups may be operating (cf. Perry and Scrivens 824), their numbers, names, and loyalties fluid and impossible to determine with precision. They can be divided into white nationalist neo-Nazi organizations such as Generation Identity Canada (now ID Canada), the Canadian Nationalist Party, and Atalante Québec; and the larger, more numerous, and more violent anti-Muslim organizations such as the Northern Guard, Storm Alliance, Three Percenters, Le Meute, the Proud Boys, and Pegida. Recent signs point to a merging of their activities. Their tenets can be gleaned from their Facebook posts. These groups believe in exclusionary whiteness as grounds for Canadian citizenship, hatred of women, transgender persons, Marxists, trade unionists, indigenous peoples, Muslims, and Jews, and violent masculinity as an essential component of a Western civilization they believe is threatened by internal outsiders. Many promote a reactionary moral conservatism and express anxiety about the alleged degeneracy of traditional white masculinity. They wish to strip citizenship rights from Muslims, restrict immigration and refugees, institutionalize racial segregation, and ban abortion. White nationalists openly reject democracy, while many in the anti-Muslim groups believe that Christianity and Islam are on the cusp of a holy war that will bring

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about the Rapture. Some celebrate Hitler and the Holocaust. They delight at the prospect of global nuclear war. If not full-fledged fascists due to their weak mobilization, these groups clearly qualify as proto-fascists on the basis of their politics. Against these forms of hard racism, there is a surge of white alliance organizations such as Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ), and countless bloggers seeking appropriate roles for whites who sympathize with the antiracism cause. Some encourage call-out culture and other individualistic forms of shaming, whereas others seek to build intersectoral coordination of activities across politicized groups. In Toronto, I am aware of inspiring collaborations between transgender activists, anti-fascists, socialists, trade unionists, Muslims, and Jews. The Native Community Centre offers popular training sessions in social justice activism. While these diffuse efforts may not amount to a bona fide social movement, their influence on public opinion, their claiming of public space, and their re-setting of the social climate against racism cannot be dismissed. At least for a segment of whites, white innocence has been punctured. But this notion also fuels the white supremacist groups who rally around their panic that white power is at risk of imminent dissolution. Sara Ahmed explains the relationality of white racism and the hate that such organizations command: The passion of these negative attachments to others is redefined simultaneously as a positive attachment to the imagined subjects brought together through the capitalization of the signifier, ‘White’ is the love of White, or those that are recognizable as White, which supposedly explains this shared ‘communal’ visceral response of hate. Because we love, we hate, and this hate is what brings us together. (Ahmed 43, emphasis in original) In relation to whiteness and intersectionality, what we are observing in the extremists is an admixture of the most rabid form of white racism and ultraconservative masculinity. The social class of the leaders and rank-and-file members is diverse. Additional factors are their proto-fascist politics and the volatile affect evoked in the pleasure of belonging to a community of likeminded men. This is what is happening at this particular intersection. Its impacts on others are made deliberately public.

Risks and steps Hasn’t whiteness already done too much damage to the world? Why embellish it with intersections that may draw as much attention as the harm it has done? Does it really matter whether the racists are working class or middle class, or that they are nearly all men? Of what significance is the intersectionality of the liberal do-good white allies if they restrict their support to Facebook likes? Applying intersectionality to whiteness could err in implying

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parallel vulnerabilities. With claims that difference matters, even for whiteness, what happens to the question, ‘matters to whom?’ Concentrating on the intersections of whiteness could result in losing sight of a critical perspective, one that foregrounds the problem of systemic racism, and overlooks power, inequalities, and social injustice. Getting derailed on the intersections means depoliticizing the objective to disavow everyday white supremacy. It can obscure the fact that whiteness studies is, at its heart, the study of racism. In Canada, we must face our wilful denial of black slavery despite the historical record (cf. Nelson; Black Canadian Studies Association; Cooper; and Trudel), police killings of black people (cf. Maynard), and mass murders by white men.6 If racism is a permanent feature in our society and requires only the right outlet to gush from the floorboards, we have to probe more deeply into its causes and conditions, and we have to take more personal and political risks in acting against it. As many racialized activists have said, white allies are not needed nearly as much as white accomplices in collective action. Due to the way whiteness works,7 it is naïve to claim that these risks can be entirely avoided. How may we prepare for such risks? If such projects are done in strict relation to power – that is, if they are consistent with a critical perspective focused not on identity positions but on how differentiation is exercised, and with what advantages and consequences, and for whom and where and how8 – we may be able to diminish the trade-offs involved in working intersectionality into critical studies of whiteness. There is everything to gain in standing together, even if strategically and temporarily, to fight the uneven effects of austerity measures, the growing gaps between rich and poor, the dismantling of the welfare state, the countless affronts to democracies, the rise of proto-fascism and white nationalism, and racism on local and global scales. Coalition-building has to be done without defending white innocence, without letting universalisms take centre stage, and without alleging that ‘identity politics’ splits class solidarity. Strategic alliances needn’t be contingent on peace or on sameness or on identification with each other. One approach may be adapted from the theory of ‘agonistic pluralism’ commended by Chantal Mouffe. Agonism (struggle between adversaries) not antagonism (struggle between enemies) emerges from the conflictive nature of democratic societies and the incommensurabilities over interpretations of democratic values. Derived from the same theoretical home (cf. Mouffe and Laclau) is the concept of ‘articulation’ in which, simply put, social movements are comprised of a plurality of linked struggles having no dominant discourse or uniform principle. The point is that conflict and difference needn’t be a roadblock to working together. We all have a stake in the disruption of power. Efforts to challenge it need to be informed by the embodied knowledge of those directly affected by its impacts. Whether radical engagement with this massively written social justice project can be conducted in good faith and, for those who traditionally wield disproportionate power, with sustained humility and circumspection, is to be seen.

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Notes 1 By ‘racialized,’ I refer to Robert Miles’s idea denoting a process of differentiation, essentialization, determination, and evaluation of groups on the basis of physical features as they are perceived and understood to evince fundamental meaning in human relations (cf. racism). Whiteness, however, typically exempts itself from the process of racialization, creating a conceptual hole into which the language of race invariably falls. 2 This sets aside the issue of their refusal to know about these matters (after Charles Mills’s “epistemology of ignorance”) that I attempt to capture in Chapter 4 of Whiteness Fractured. 3 For a discussion of the partiality of this time-honoured claim, see Hill Collins and Bilge. 4 For examples of the former see Walker; Thobani; Hier and Singh Bolaria; and Wallis and Fleras. For examples of the latter see Francis; Baldwin, Cameron and Kobayashi; the two editions of Carr and Lund; and Razack, Race, Space, and the Law. 5 This thesis was introduced by early US white writers on whiteness and labour history and now enjoys consensus, see Roediger. For a recent perspective, see Tatum. The theory is, of course, founded on W.E.B. Du Bois’s crucial observation of “the wages of whiteness.” 6 On January 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette, an admirer of white supremacist leaders and organizations in North America and Europe, entered a Quebec City mosque and murdered six Muslim men as they prayed. 7 On this question, see Chapter 2 in Levine-Rasky. 8 Steve Garner urges whiteness scholars to keep the question, “What’s the point [of our work]?” (1585) in the ascendant.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Anthias, Floya. “Hierarchies of Social Location, Class and Intersectionality: Towards a Translocational Frame.” International Sociology, vol. 28, no. 1, 2012, pp. 121–138. Anthias, Floya. “Intersectional What? Social Divisions, Intersectionality, and Levels of Analysis.” Ethnicities, vol. 13, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–9. Baldwin, Andrew, Laura Cameron and Audrey Kobayashi, editors. Rethinking the Great White North. UBC Press, 2011. Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 68, no. 1, 2017, pp. 214–232. Black Canadian Studies Association. “Special Events: Legacies Denied: Unearthing the Visual Culture of Canadian Slavery.” McGill University. http://www.blackcana dianstudies.com/special_events/Legacies-Denied-Unearthing-the-Visual-Cultureof-Canadian-Slavery-e1/. Accessed 20 March 2018. Brah, Avtar and Ann Phoenix. “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2004, pp. 75–86. Byrne, Bridget. “Rethinking Intersectionality and Whiteness at the Borders of Citizenship.” Sociological Research Online, vol. 20, no. 3, 2015, pp. 16–27. Carbado, Devon W., Kimberlé Crenshaw, Vickie McMays, and Barbara Tomlinson. “Editorial Introduction. Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory.” Du Bois Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, pp. 302–312.

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Carr, Paul R. and Darren E. Lund, editors. The Great White North? Exploring Whiteness, Privilege and Identity in Education. Sense, 2007 and 2015. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Full Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlottesville, Trump, the Confederacy, Reparations and More.” Democracy Now, 15 August 2017. https:// www.democracynow.org/2017/8/15/full_interview_ta_nehisi_coates_on. Accessed 20 March 2018. Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal. HarperCollins, 2006. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140, 1989, pp. 139–167. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and Social Control.” UCLA Law Review, vol. 59, 2012, pp. 1418–1472. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Postscript.” Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multifaceted Concept in Gender Studies, edited by Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik. Ashgate, 2011, pp. 221–235. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait.” The Washington Post, 24 September 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/ why-intersectionality-cant-wait/?utm_term=.7009cd9967df. Accessed 20 March 2018. Csillag, Ron. “Aboriginal, Indigenous, Native? She Preferred Haudenosaunee, or ‘People of the Longhouse.’” Obituary. The Globe and Mail, 2 December 2010. Davis, Kathy and Dubravka Zarkov. “Retrospective on Intersectionality.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 2017, pp. 313–320. Francis, Margot. Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary. UBC Press, 2011. Garner, Steve. “Surfing the Third Wave of Whiteness Studies: Reflections on Twine and Gallagher.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 1582–1597. Hier, Sean P. and B. Singh Bolaria, editors. Race and Racism in 21st Century Canada. Broadview, 2007. Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought. Harper Collins, 1990. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Polity, 2016. Hughey, Matthew W. “White Lives Matter?” Contexts, vol. 16, no. 2, 2017, pp. 17–18. Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. Whiteness Fractured. Ashgate, 2013. Maynard, Robin. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Fernwood, 2016. Miles, Robert. Racism. Routledge, 1989. Monture-Angus, Patricia. Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks. Fernwood, 1995. Mouffe, Chantal. “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?” Social Research, vol. 66, no. 3, 1999, pp. 745–758. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso, 2013. Mouffe, Chantal. “Democratic Politics and Conflict: An Agonistic Approach.” Política Común, vol. 9, 2016. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0009.011?view= text;rgn=main. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.

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Mouffe, Chantal and Ernesto Laclau. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Verso, 1985. Nelson, Charmaine. Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica. Routledge, 2016. Perry, Barbara. “Barbara Perry on the Far Right in Canada.” Canadian Dimension, vol. 51, no. 4, 2017, pp. 13–21. Perry, Barbara and Ryan Scrivens. “Uneasy Alliances: A Look at the Right-Wing Extremist Movement in Canada.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 39, no. 9, 2016, pp. 819–841. Razack, Sherene H. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. University of Toronto Press, 1998. Razack, Sherene H. Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Between the Lines, 2002. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1991. Scott, Corrie. “How French Canadians Became White Folks, or Doing Things with Race in Quebec.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 39, no. 7, 2016, pp. 1280–1297. Sefa Dei, George J. and Gurpreet Singh Johal, editors. Critical Issues in Anti-racist Research Methodologies. Peter Lang, 2005. Tatum, Dale Craig. “Donald Trump and the Legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 48, no. 7, 2017, pp. 641–674. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2007. Thompson, Peter. “The Mississippi of the North: Trailer Park Boys and Race in Contemporary Nova Scotia.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2015, pp. 180–204. Trudel, Marcel. Canada’s Forgotten Slaves. Translated by George Tombs. Véhicule Press, 2013. Vallières, Pierre. White Niggers of America. Translated by Joan Pinkham. McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Walker, Barrington, editor. The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada. Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2008. Wallis, Maria and Augie Fleras, editors. The Politics of Race in Canada. Oxford University Press, 2009. Wong, Edward Hon-Sing. “‘The Brains of a Nation’: The Eugenicist Roots of Canada’s Mental Health Field and the Building of a White Non-Disabled Nation.” Canadian Review of Social Policy, vol. 75, 2016, pp. 1–29.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have come together without the great support from colleagues and friends. First of all, a sincere thanks to all contributors who have shared their research and insights with us, and now with the readers of this publication. We would also like to thank Cynthia Levine-Rasky for agreeing to contribute a Foreword to our collection. Solvejg Nitzke, Vron Ware, and Matt Wray gave us valuable feedback and advice during different stages of the project, for which we are very grateful. We would also like to extend our thanks to Sina Hellwing for helping us with the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Elena Chiu and Emily Briggs at Routledge for their assistance throughout this project. Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt

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Introduction Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt

The future of Critical Whiteness Studies In January 2016, we first sat together to talk about organizing an international conference that would shed light on the ways in which whiteness intersects with other socio-cultural categories such as gender, class, and sexuality (to name only three). We were interested in seeking the valuable contributions intersectionality theory can offer to the future of Critical Whiteness Studies. Although we were sure we were dealing with a timely matter, we could not have foreseen the developments of the following two years that would shift global politics and reaffirm white supremacy as one of the most pressing issues of our time. Donald Trump had not yet received the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, and the Brexit Referendum was still months ahead. As 2016 progressed, we realized that the need for the practice of Critical Whiteness Studies was more urgent than ever, and the conference, carrying the same title as this book, was overshadowed by the newly elected president of the United States, and the UK’s vote to withdraw from the European Union. As scholars working and living in Germany, we were concerned about the so-called Rechtsruck (the political shift to the right), most visibly embodied by the emergence and popularity of Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), a political party that spread hateful anti-immigrant messages under the cloak of patriotism and the preservation of supposedly German values. Writing this introduction in 2018, the worrying national and nationalist politics of whiteness, as attested by the diverse contributions in this book, demanded our attention and, consequently, our collective action. Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address from 30 January 2018 testified to the national(ist) politics of whiteness that have characterized his presidency. These range from his attempts to pass Executive Order 13769 (the so-called travel ban for people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), to his unsettling remarks after the violence that occurred when white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia were met by counter-protesters and a white woman, Heather Heyer, was killed. Trump decided to not openly and rigorously condemn the white supremacists, and instead spoke of “blame on

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both sides” (quoted in Shear and Haberman), as well as “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” (quoted in Merica). In his State of the Union Address, he reaffirmed the myth of American exceptionalism when speaking of “no people on Earth [that] are so fearless, or daring, or determined as Americans” (White House). In this speech, he also stressed the “America First” attitude he propagated throughout his campaign. Journalists and socio-political commentators quickly exposed the implications of such a slogan, which, in addition to “Make America Great Again,” uses “America” as a code for “whiteness.” Reflecting on Trump’s early decisions for his cabinet, as well as his repeated remarks on women and people of colour that he dismissed as “locker-room banter” (Trump quoted in Fahrenthold), Charles M. Blow wrote in The New York Times, “[t]he America he envisions, and is now constructing from his perch of power, is not an inclusive America. It is a society driven by a racial Orwellianism that seeks to defend, elevate and enshrine the primacy of white men and is hostile to all ‘others.’” Trump’s ‘vision’ of the United States led to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s estimation of him as “[t]he first white president” whom he considered “the most dangerous president – […] made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it” (Coates). While “his essential nature” can be debated, what is obvious is that Trump redrew the lines of the category “American.” The hostility Blow mentioned (and Coates regarded as dangerous) is hardly hidden in Trump’s remarks aimed to explain his unstable position towards DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and the so-called Dreamers:1 “My duty […] is to defend Americans – to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American Dream. Because Americans are dreamers too” (White House). Americans without documentation are not Americans, he claims, and they do not deserve to profit from the American Dream; they are not worthy of the president’s protection, because it is not their birth right or their heritage. His populist policies resonated with a lot of Americans. Ever since he entered the political sphere, Trump based his campaign on feeding into his voters’ “aggrieved entitlement,” explained by Michael Kimmel as that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it. (Kimmel 18, emphasis in original) According to Kimmel, these “very people” are “middle- and upper-class white men” (17) who, “although they have most of the power and control in the world, […] feel like victims” (17). Trump certainly ‘cashed in’ on the feeling that the great promise of whiteness, namely “ownership of the earth forever and ever” as W.E.B. Du Bois so

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pointedly put it in 1920 (454), was forfeited for the sake of ‘others.’ The claim to “ownership” functions as a “form of inheritance” as George Yancy (8) has explained. It is readily accepted by whites: whiteness is an “unearned asset […] that they (white people) can rely upon” (ibid.). These assets are often embraced instead of questioned, something we as white scholars witness and cannot acquit ourselves from. The demands for racial justice and the consequent renunciation of the ownership, assets, and privileges that trail whiteness – whether seen or unseen – are perceived as a threat by whites. Trump took advantage of this sentiment and perception of threat. His white voters, following Robin DiAngelo’s argument, were constructed as fragile. DiAngelo has defined “White Fragility” as the “state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress,” for instance the mere acknowledgement of white privileges, “becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” which include “emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt” (57). Well before Trump profited from feelings of “White Fragility,” Matthew W. Hughey identified “affective whiteness” (1302) as a set of dominant feelings according to which different groups of whites relate to their whiteness. In his study of a white nationalist organization, Hughey identified “righteous anger” and white victimhood as the dominant emotional ideals for performing a specific form of hegemonic whiteness (1302). Similar performances of white victimhood seem to have become endemic and constitutive of the political climate in the U.S., but also elsewhere. In a comment on the situation in Britain, Akwugo Emejulu pointed out the “hideous whiteness of Brexit” behind the turmoil in the UK and Europe in a “seemingly ‘post-race’ era”: “Brexit shows us how whiteness, as a power relation, operates in ways to cast itself as both a ‘victim’ and an ‘innocent’ simultaneously.” These kinds of affects can also be related to what Paul Gilroy has famously labelled as Britain’s “postcolonial melancholia.” It seems, then, that in the Anglophone world the “post-racial” status quo of the Obama years has been challenged by new forms of white affective expression that ultimately cannot be explained exclusively by referring to white privilege alone. Feelings of white injury and victimhood are dramatically evident in the aforementioned examples. They support Sara Ahmed’s claim that to voice injury is a privileged practice not available to all: “Given that subjects have an unequal relation to entitlement, then more privileged subjects will have a greater recourse to narratives of injury” (33). These racialized affects also complicate previous dominant explanatory models in the study of whiteness – white privilege and white supremacy. While white privilege (a category of analysis which is in itself not without its problems) is a set of benefits attached to one’s racial and social position that one does not necessarily have to be consciously aware of for it to be effective, and that inadvertently comes with being born into and raised in a specific socio-cultural context, the feelings of white injury, victimhood, and even “beleagueredness” (Garner, “Moral Economy” 460) witnessed in the context of Trumpism and Brexit are in fact emotional conditions of which those affected are quite conscious. Hughey’s

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conception of white hegemony, we propose, is helpful when trying to assess the affective relations to whiteness.

Hegemonic whiteness – privilege, entitlement or advantage? Tonnia Anderson (Chapter 1 in this volume) chooses “entitlement” instead of “privilege” to describe the merits of ‘living while white.’ She taps into discussions of the future of Critical Whiteness Studies, which has predominantly used “privilege” to describe the extraordinary position of the (formerly) invisible power in which whiteness is grounded and upon which it was founded. She names feelings of entitlement as the reason for “white alienation” that, as she argues, led to the results of the 2016 presidential election. David Roediger, in his publication Class, Race, and Marxism (2017) – a book that is surprisingly hesitant in naming its intersectional approach – calls for a reconsideration of “white privilege” and asks whether it “serves us well in naming patterns of white advantage inside a system in which most people are miserable” (20). He rather suggests using “white advantage” (21). In a 2015 radio interview, Roediger explained that white privilege “sounds too grand” (Dawson). Privilege as such can be inaccessible for those who are “intersectionally disadvantaged” (Hancock 10), whether white or not: disadvantaged due to other factors that intersect with whiteness and its so-called privileges. As a “magic wand to address problems,” Roediger further claimed, white privilege is “too easily invoked by relatively prosperous liberals in society” and fails to be effective of broader political coalitions he sees united under the term “white advantage” (Dawson). Matt Wray (Chapter 2 in this volume) goes a step further and argues that “the concepts of white privilege and colour-blindness […] are not capable of advancing the field of whiteness studies any further” because “white privilege is not shared by all whites and not all whites are blind to the colour line.” Wray and Roediger emphasize class as a category that obscures the system of privilege: both pay attention to working-class whites in the United States, and Wray particularly to “white trash” (cf. Roediger; Wray). Their works are part of the “variety of responses” to the “realization that whiteness no longer equals unchallenged privilege,” as Steve Garner holds (“Surfing the Third Wave” 1590).2 He explicitly claims that “an obsessive focus on white privilege, the lives and mental worlds of people racialized as white, etc., without sufficient connection to the larger social relations that these form part of is not a desirable direction of travel” (1584). This is not meant to suggest that whites do not profit from being white. Interpersonally, culturally, and economically they certainly do. Yet, “whiteness is a system of privileges accorded to those with white skin” (Babb 9), and as a system it sets up and follows specific rules of membership that – if not adhered to – exclude or subdue even those with white skin. Thus, it is not sufficient to assume a generalized white privilege that all whites enjoy equally to account for whiteness as a hegemonic racial formation. As Hughey has suggested, it is necessary to clearly identify

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the specific contexts in which certain forms of whiteness are being performed as hegemonic and in which “practices of ‘being white’ that fail to exemplify dominant ideals” are being marginalized (1290). In other words, whiteness as a racially marked position is never hegemonic in and of itself alone, but will become hegemonic in its intersections and in specific contexts – and this hegemony has to be maintained by being constantly reproduced, reperformed and readapted across various social and cultural levels. While Hughey and others who have put forth the idea of hegemonic whiteness3 have emphasized the analogies to R.W. Connell’s (1995) concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” it is worth returning to the Gramscian definition of hegemony to understand precisely how whiteness (or, rather, certain whitenesses) can become dominant. Amanda Lewis stresses the consensual aspect that is necessary for any formation or idea to become hegemonic: “Ideologies become hegemonic to the extent that they enable people to understand and to accept their positions within a stratified society. They gain consent from those on various rungs of the social ladder to a system that secures the positions of both the dominated and the dominating” (632). Power relations (and thus hegemonic formations) must thus be understood in their intricate complexity and as products of intersectional identity relations and “mutual construction” (26), as Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge have demonstrated in their book Intersectionality (2016). As they explain, “power relations are to be analysed both via their intersections, for example, of racism and sexism, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. The framework of domains of power provides a heuristic device or thinking tool for examining power relations” (27, emphasis in original). To analyse these intersections and to name these contexts thus helps to understand race-based power relations and situations of inequality. Focusing on white intra-group distinctions from an intersectional perspective is, in that respect, a necessary and central step in the analysis of white hegemony. Hughey has linked the production of different notions of white affect to concepts of racial hegemony: By building upon the concept of ‘hegemonic whiteness’, I argue that meaningful racial identity for whites is produced vis-à-vis the reproduction of, and appeal to, racist, essentialist, and reactionary inter- and intradistinctions: (1) through positioning those marked as ‘white’ as essentially different from and superior to those marked as ‘non-white’, and (2) through marginalizing practices of being white that fail to exemplify dominant ideals. (Hughey 1292) It is clear, then, that dominant forms of whiteness – as the product of interand intra-group distinctions – have an inherently intersectional dimension. However, claiming that whiteness is a racial identity position that is shaped by intersectionality does not mean to undermine anti-racist discourse and practice by evading the connection of whiteness and privilege and supremacy.

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Rather, focusing on racial hegemony (rather than supremacy) and intersectionality offers a more precise means to point out under which circumstances and in which contexts whiteness can become hegemonic. It might also help to scrutinize certain forms of white intra-group distinction-making as complicit in the project of hegemonic whiteness. For instance, Coates’s polemic in The Atlantic challenged the dominant explanation of Trump’s victory as the result of the angry votes of working-class whites from deprived areas of the country – an accusation, as Coates pointed out, that is the product of a predominantly white liberal journalism: Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. […] From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. […] The focus on one subsector of Trump voters – the white working class – is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony – even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president – is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. (Coates) With reference to Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s call to confront, denounce, and subvert “what whiteness does,” as she formulates it in the Foreword to this book, making the intersections between Trump’s voters, class, and racism visible is relevant and necessary. We agree with Garner’s call for seeking the connections between whiteness and “larger social relations.” The “direction of travel” he asks for is towards intersectionality. This direction is not aimed at adding to what he calls the “‘whataboutery of discourse,” the idea that “white people are oppressed as white people” (Garner, “Surfing the Third Wave” 1587, emphasis in original). It is rather based on the conviction that the “new ways of thinking about complexity and multiplicity in power relations” (Brah and Phoenix 82) generated by intersectionality theory will help scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to disrupt whiteness as “the practice of power” (cf. Levine-Rasky’s Foreword). While the advantages that follow whiteness might not be a given to poor whites, whites with a disability, or whites whose sexuality departs from heteronormativity, their sense of entitlement might still structure their lives, albeit in more complex ways. Whiteness is always a “practice of power,” yet it is performed through intersections with other categories of identity. Nobody is ‘just white:’ history, nationality, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, religion, place – under the umbrella of context – paint whitenesses whose expression of power varies. Only by

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understanding and unearthing these variations can alliances be created, and pluralism prevail.

The “buzzword” intersectionality As we indicated at the beginning of this introductory chapter, the conjuncture of the 2010s lends itself to an intersectional analysis of white hegemony across national borders. This has become visible not only in the realm of politics, with the rise of a new right in many countries and new kinds of white supremacist thinking. It is also plainly visible in the realm of cultural representation. The intersectional study of white hegemony thus must equally address material as well as symbolic factors which mutually influence each other. The entertainment industries are one of the most prominent spheres in which questions of intersectionality are being raised and traditional modes of representation are openly being challenged. While debates and controversies on the eve of the annual Academy Awards ceremony were not necessarily a new phenomenon, the 2018 ceremony put issues of identity to the fore more urgently. In their “New Voices” segment presentation, actors Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, and Salma Hayek – three of the leading figures who were instrumental in the 2017 uncovering of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse and intimidation of actresses in Hollywood – addressed the importance of representational politics in the arts. In their joint speech, Judd emphasized the “possibilities of equality, diversity, inclusion and intersectionality” as a promising outcome of the 2017 debates (Dailymotion 2018). In the prerecorded segment, Pakistan-born actor and screenwriter Kumail Nanjiani ironically greeted the representational shift from the hegemonic formation epitomized by the “straight white dude:” “Some of my favourite movies are movies by straight white dudes about straight white dudes. Now straight white dudes can watch movies starring me and you relate to that. It’s not that hard – I’ve done it my whole life!” ( Dailymotion 2018). Despite an audience decline of 16%, and ‘only’ 26.5 million viewers around the world (cf. Mumford), viewers were unexpectedly exposed to the term “intersectionality” and the faulty logics of white hegemony while watching a show that celebrates mainstream entertainment. Scholars tend to defer concrete definitions for concepts and processes they deem too complex to define, and often rightly so. Intersectionality is no exception. Most publications are dedicated to the assessment of the current state of intersectionality, all arguing on a meta-level, instead of offering precise intersectional analyses. Hill Collins and Bilge’s Intersectionality (2016) is one rare exception. While claiming that a definition is difficult to offer, they formulate a comprehensive one that deserves a full quotation: Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood

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E. Kindinger and M. Schmitt as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves. (Hill Collins and Bilge 2)

Their definition starts off seemingly neutral, referencing “human experiences,” “events and conditions.” Hill Collins and Bilge then turn to intersectionality’s main focus, namely how “social inequality” is manifested and played out, claiming that inequality is created via the interplay of many “axes” that go beyond identity categories such as race, gender, and class; the authors also list citizenship, dis/ability, nation, religion, and age to show along which lines divisions are created. The ways in which “multiple axis [sic] of differentiation” (Brah and Phoenix 76) create divisions is the core interest of intersectionality. As an intellectual effort that highlights “the complexity in the world” and attempts to undo social inequalities, the formulation “intersectionality” is specifically rooted in black feminism in the United States, in Hill Collins’s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s works (cf. Carastathis; Lutz et al.; May; Hancock). As Crenshaw formulates it in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989): “I will center Black women in this analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” (139). In this seminal text for intersectionality, she opposes thinking of “subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis,” taking “Black women as the starting point” (140). This starting point needs to be traced back to the history of enslavement and colonialism, and the experiences of black women in nineteenth-century America. To Sojourner Truth asking “Ain’t I a Woman?” in 1851, and to Harriet Jacobs’s wish “to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage” (xvii–xviii) – the condition being black, female, and in the South. Place, gender, race, and law intersect here, supporting white supremacy to secure its hegemony. This “historical centrality of American Black women and Black feminism as subjects of intersectionality theory grounds reservations about intersectionality’s usefulness as an analytic tool in addressing other marginalized communities and other manifestations of power” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 788). Scholars of intersectionality rightfully call for caution when ‘using’ intersectionality to address disadvantages not experienced by black women. Anna Carastathis, tracing the development of intersectionality since the 2000s, fears its de-politicization when declaring that “‘intersectionality’ appears to have become a cliché, a commonplace, or a ‘buzzword’” (Carastathis 1). She refers to a mainstreaming of intersectionality, which implies a whitening of this

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intellectual project, and to its appropriation by “the white-dominated mainstream of feminist thought” (2) that eventually reproduces the oppressive power relations intersectionality tries to dismantle. The appropriation of the term by Hollywood actresses certainly attests to the ‘buzziness’ of the term. This is valuable criticism shared by other scholars (cf. Jordan-Zachery; Bilge; Alexander-Floyd), and if intersectionality is to be meaningfully utilized in Critical Whiteness Studies, we must be careful with whitewashing practices that re-create hierarchies based on the premise that some experiences of marginalization and oppression are more valuable than others. Hancock summarizes the contemporary challenges within intersectionality as a conversation concerned with “whether the visibility project for Black women or women of color must necessarily be one that when seeking to make women of color visible simultaneously keeps others out of sight” (Hancock 18). We are convinced this is not the case. In her publication, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (2016), Hancock makes a strong and convincing claim that “intersectionality’s intellectual history is more racially and ethnically diverse, making it unlikely to be a ‘mere’ product of Black feminism” (28), referencing the work of Chicana feminists such as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. The valuable intellectual work by women of colour, we propose, always keeps whiteness ‘in sight.’ If intersectionality is concerned with “inequality, relationality, power, social context, complexity, and social justice” (Hill Collins and Bilge 25), it almost imposes itself as an analytical tool for critical whiteness scholars. As Levine-Rasky argues in her Foreword in this volume, with reference to Crenshaw, “[w]hen intersectionality is associated exclusively with positions of oppression, its relationality to power drops out.” This corresponds with her declaration in Whiteness Fractured (2013) that “to complete the project of social justice and anti-racism to which critical whiteness is dedicated, it is appropriate to add ‘power/domination/supremacy’ in critical relation to oppression/exploitation/liberation” (Levine-Rasky 106). Feminist scholarship that paid special attention to the interplay of whiteness and gender addressed this critical relation from the start, the works of Adrienne Rich; Ruth Frankenberg; Vron Ware; and Bettina Aptheker are exemplary for this. This relates to Devon W. Carbado’s assessment that “[f]raming intersectionality as only about women of color gives masculinity, whiteness, and maleness an intersectional pass” (Carbado 841) and further normalizes whiteness as that which is not visible. As the ‘oppressor,’ whiteness seemingly needs no dissection, which is a faulty logic. The oppressor cannot be taken out of the equation by only focusing on the oppressed. This oppressor – this has always been the primary thesis in Critical Whiteness Studies – needs to become visible: “framing whiteness outside intersectionality legitimizes a broader epistemic universe in which the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of white people travel invisibly and undisturbed as race-neutral phenomena over and against the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of people of color” (823–824). Intersectionality

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is thus not only about the divisions and inequalities created for people of colour by the system of white supremacy, it rather makes visible “systemic patterns of asymmetrical life opportunities and harms” (May 3), and “approaches privilege and oppression as concurrent and relational and attends to within-group differences and inequities, not just between-group power asymmetries” (4). As critical whiteness scholars, we, and the authors featured here, are invested in the study of both between-group and withingroup power asymmetries to offer a more cohesive understanding of power and hegemony. The “straight white dude” phenomenon that Nanjiani mentioned during the Academy Awards ceremony is a powerful example for the ways power asymmetries can play out when possible intersectionalities are factored in. While in the U.S. entertainment industry the intersection of “straight white male” might be an easily identifiable constellation within the matrix of symbolic and material power, things become more complicated when compared with different cultural contexts. In early 2018, almost a month before the Academy Awards, the Irish Film & Television Academy (IFTA) held its own annual awards ceremony and gave its award for best actor to John Connors for his role in the film Cardboard Gangsters (2016). In his acceptance speech, Connors, a member of the Irish Traveller community, addressed the persistent marginalization of the Travellers in the Irish film industry (and in his country in general) and the alarmingly high rate of mental illness and suicide among Travellers. Elaborating on his speech (deemed to be “controversial” according to The Guardian) in an interview with the newspaper, Connors highlighted his situation as a member of the Travellers – a community that had been granted official legal status as a distinct ethnic group by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, less than a year before Connors’s acceptance speech – within the paradoxical context of international whiteness. When talking about the “industry bias” against Travellers in the Irish film industry, he acknowledged the relationality of his own intersectional subject position: “like this whole thing of ‘straight white male’ […] I think in America you can definitely have an advantage for being white […] I’m a straight white male […] but I come from the most oppressed and discriminated against group in Ireland” (The Guardian). Connors’s statement throws into relief the complicated, relational, and contingent nature of whiteness. If phenotypically classified based on skin colour alone, Connors’s argument implies, he as a Traveller might pass as white in a cultural setting that is oblivious to the status of Travellers in Ireland or Britain. In Ireland and Britain, however, Connors’s status as “white” is compromised by the intersections of class and cultural heritage. In the not unproblematic words of the Taoiseach during his declaration of ethnic status for Travellers, the Traveller community represents “a people within our people”4 (O’Halloran and O’Regan) – and thus is at once recognized as a distinct ethnic minority and incorporated into a (new) narrative of Irishness. Returning to the privileges experienced by whites, and the unquestioned entitlements whites naturally expect, attending to within-group

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differences paves the way for solidarity and coalitions between groups of people who, despite other differences, experience similar asymmetries. As Carbado et al. argue with reference to Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason, differences can be acknowledged “while promoting commonalities,” because “structures of oppression are related and […] struggles are linked” (306).

The book The present volume wants to exemplify the links between different experiences of oppression and of white hegemony. It is divided into four sections that represent the current scope of Critical Whiteness Studies and its potential for intersectional analysis of the present conjuncture. The sections are intended to focus on the four levels on which whiteness, its intersections, and its resulting hegemonic potential are realized most acutely. They thus address questions of epistemology (how does whiteness shape the perception of the social world?), contemporary global politics (how does hegemonic whiteness manifest in different cultural and national contexts and how does it contribute to a global white hegemonic style of politics?), affect (how do the systemic patterns of white supremacy translate into subjective feelings of whiteness?), and space (where and how is whiteness practised and reproduced?). Part I, titled “White Epistemologies,” addresses fundamental questions of how whiteness shapes the way cultures of white hegemony perceive, construct, and think about its social realities and structures. In Chapter 1, “For the common good: Re-inscribing white normalcy into the American body politic,” Tonnia Anderson employs a historical perspective to identify the narratives that inform current American politics that reinstate whiteness as a normalized, invisible paradigm. Matt Wray looks at different white populations in the U.S. in the wake of the election of Trump, and categorizes them according to their attitudes towards race in Chapter 2, “A typology of white people in America.” In “‘I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist’: Whiteness, ‘postfeminism,’ and the American cultural imaginary” (Chapter 3), Melissa R. Sande examines how questions of feminism and post-feminism inform a renewed sense of universal whiteness in the light of Donal Trump’s “inclusive” rhetoric (“I’m for everyone”) that negates the necessity of feminist action, while at the same time feminist issues have resurfaced in the Women’s March as well as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Anderson’s and Sande’s analyses demonstrate how a normalization of whiteness in America ultimately fosters a hegemonic notion of (American) whiteness that has repercussions for how whiteness is perceived and lived in other Western and predominantly white cultures. Part II, “Whiteness and Global Politics,” comprises three chapters focusing on the current centrality of whiteness in politics in the U.S., the UK, and South Africa, respectively. The different manifestations of white hegemony, their often-repressed histories, and their global repercussions are the subject of Vron Ware’s Chapter 4, “A journey through Europe’s heart of whiteness.”

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Ware examines how Europe’s histories of whiteness feed into events such as the Brexit process and European countries’ involvement in the global sphere. Adam Haupt shares a similar focus on whiteness and historicity in Chapter 5, “Liquid racism, possessive investments in whiteness, and academic freedom at the University of Cape Town,” which examines the way a South African university deals with the European heritage of white supremacy while at the same time defining itself in its home country’s postapartheid era. In Chapter 6, “White supremacy in the Trump era: University students and alt-right activism on college campuses,” Adam Burston and France Winddance Twine also focus on the university campus as a site of political and racial conflict. In an intersectional analysis of qualitative interviews with a number of representative students involved in alt-right campus activism, they trace the consistencies and novelties of extreme right political and racist activism of American whites from the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan to the present. In line with our previous examination of the role of affect in the way white identities are being performed, defined, and negotiated in the present conjuncture, the contributions in Part III are devoted to “White Affects.” In Chapter 7, “‘Anyone foreign?’: Whiteness, passing, and deportability in Brexit Britain,” Ariane de Waal examines the surge in incidents of hate speech and crime in the days after the Brexit vote. She argues that the affective register of aversion is central in the construction and performance of nationalist whiteness, which sets itself apart from the “foreigner” as the paradigmatic (and almost always non-white) figure of the Other. In “‘Afrikaner women’ and strategies of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa: Shame and the ethnicized respectability of Ordentlikheid” (Chapter 8), Christi van der Westhuizen regards shame as a central affect in the re-definition of postapartheid white Afrikaner identity. This formerly hegemonic white identity in times of South African apartheid has held a paradoxical relationship to global whiteness as on the one hand being considered inferior to dominant Anglo-whiteness and on the other hand being a morally defective form of whiteness for having introduced and benefited from the apartheid system. Finally, Part IV, “White(ning) Spaces,” addresses the spatial dimension of whiteness to show how intersectionally produced racial hegemony is also tied to particular spaces and can – especially in colonial and neo-colonial practices – entail acts of symbolic and material spatial expansion. White hegemony is thus secured through practices of marking spaces as white. The contributions to this section also highlight the relevance of fictional literary and media representations of whiteness and its intersections in both maintaining and potentially challenging its hegemony. In Chapter 9, “Exploring white German masculinity in Wilhelmine adventure novels,” Maureen Gallagher analyses literary representations of white male German colonizers in novels for adolescents during the heyday of German colonialism in Africa. Gallagher argues that these literary imaginations served an educational function in offering idealized intersectional role models for performing male whiteness in support of the expansive colonial project. That some of the

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writers discussed in Gallagher’s chapter have remained popular with a German readership is especially noteworthy given the fact that Germany (and Europe in general) still has some way to go in coming to terms with its colonial past. Sarah Heinz’s reading of two early twentieth-century novels in Chapter 10, “Home-making practices and white ideals in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus,” proceeds from the notion that the domestic sphere must be considered as a spatial manifestation of hegemonic forms of identity and, very much like whiteness itself, relies on continuous performances. Thus, the domestic is produced in acts of “doing home” – practices that can often follow whitely scripts that support the hegemonic status of whiteness. Heinz shows how literary representations can offer challenging perspectives on the political implications of these practices. The section concludes with Anette Pankratz’s Chapter 11 on the representation of the intersection of whiteness and British working-classness in the TV comedy show Benidorm. In “50 shades of white: Benidorm and the joys of all-inclusiveness,” Pankratz takes her cue from the notion of whiteness as a concept travelling across national borders. In that respect, the Spanish tourist town Benidorm is considered as a carnivalesque heterotopia of British working-class whiteness within Southern Europe. Pankratz challenges the assumption that this carnivalesque space is viewed (and condemned) from a predominantly middle-class perspective and extrapolates the elements in the show that challenge and subvert dominant notions of whiteness, class, and heteronormativity. The contributions in this book are located in specific cultural and national contexts, yet they are united in their efforts to explore new possibilities of intersectional analysis for the field of Critical Whiteness Studies. The cultural, social, and political shifts of the early twenty-first century have shown that whiteness has remained a powerful identity formation whose hegemonic status continues to pervade different spheres of cultural and political life in many countries, despite or maybe because of its predicted future as merely one ethnic group among many others, as Linda Martín Alcoff has suggested (24–25). In order to understand how white hegemony is maintained and constantly recreated in the light of such developments, it is vital to analyse the intersections through which whiteness is constantly reconfigured as such a powerful formation, and to make visible the ways it continues to impress itself on the ways of life of non-white communities. Such a project also requires interdisciplinary work. The chapters in this book offer intersectional analyses of whiteness ranging from cultural studies, sociology, gender studies, and history, to media and literary studies. While all of them focus on the role of whiteness in the cultural moment of the 2010s and work towards the future potentials of intersectional analyses and Critical Whiteness Studies, they all firmly situate their analyses in a historical context and draw on early pioneering work in intersectional scholarship. We as editors hope that this book will be a contribution to keeping Critical Whiteness Studies a vital area of academic analysis as well as a tool of intervention.

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Notes 1 DACA was passed on June 15, 2012 and admitted “certain people who came to the United States as children and meet several guidelines [to] request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal. They are also eligible for work authorization” (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services). 2 For a detailed bibliographical survey of the varieties of Critical Whiteness Studies and their foundational publications, see Tim Engles’s Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies (2006). 3 Hughey draws on Amanda Lewis’s work on hegemonic whiteness (2004). 4 Considering this statement, one is also reminded of Noel Ignatiev’s study of antiIrish racism in nineteenth-century America, How the Irish Became White (1995).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Alcoff, Linda Martín. The Future of Whiteness. Polity, 2015. Alexander-Floyd, Nikol. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp 1–25. Aptheker, Bettina. Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History. University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Babb, Valerie. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness. New York University Press, 1989. Bilge, Sirma. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies.” Du Bois Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, pp. 405–424. Blow, Charles M. “Trump: Making America White Again.” The New York Times, 21 November 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/opinion/trump-making-am erica-white-again.html. Accessed 7 March 2018. Brah, Avtar and Ann Phoenix. “Ain’t I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2004, pp. 75–86. Carastathis, Anna. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Carbado, Devon W. “Colorblind Intersectionality.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 811–845. Carbado, Devon W. et al. “Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory.” Du Bois Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, pp. 303–312. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 785–810. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The First White President.” The Atlantic, October 2017. www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/ 537909/. Accessed 4 March 2018. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Polity, 1995. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1, 1989, pp. 137–167. Dailymotion. “Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, & Salma Hayek Introduce New Voices.” dailymotion, 5 March 2018. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6fpbeo. Accessed 25 October 2018.

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Dawson, Evan. “Connections: ‘White Advantage’ with David Roediger.” Interview. WXXI AM News, 20 April 2015. http://wxxinews.org/post/connections-white-adva ntage-david-roediger. Accessed 7 March 2018. DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 54–70. Du Bois, W.E.B. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Emejulu, Akwugo. “On the Hideous Whiteness Of Brexit: ‘Let us be honest about our past and our present if we truly seek to dismantle white supremacy.’” Verso blog, 28 June 2016. www.versobooks.com/blogs/2733-on-the-hideous-whiteness-of-brexit-let-usbe-honest-about-our-past-and-our-present-if-we-truly-seek-to-dismantle-white-suprema cy. Accessed 15 March 2018. Engles, Tim, editor. Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies. Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, 2006. https://works.bepress.com/tim_engles/5/. Accessed 11 June 2018. Fahrenthold, David A. “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005.” The Washington Post, 8 October 2016. www.washingtonp ost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-womenin-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=. 35c54d97376e. Accessed 7 March 2018. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Garner, Steve. “A Moral Economy of Whiteness: Behaviours, Belonging and Britishness.” Ethnicities, vol. 12, no. 4, 2012, pp. 445–464. Garner, Steve. “Surfing the Third Wave of Whiteness Studies: Reflections on Twine and Gallagher.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 40, no. 9, 2017, pp. 1582–1597. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, 2006. Hancock, Ange-Marie. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Polity, 2016. Hughey, Matthew W. “The (Dis)Similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of ‘Hegemonic Whiteness.’” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 33, no. 8, 2010, pp. 1289–1309. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. Signet Classic, 2000. Jordan-Zachery, Julia. “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: My Political Fight against the Invisibility of Black Women in Intersectionality Research.” Politics, Gender and Identities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 101–109. Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Nation Books, 2013. Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. Whiteness Fractured. Ashgate, 2016. Lewis, Amanda E. “‘What Group?’ Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of ‘Color-Blindness.’” Sociological Theory, vol. 22, no. 4, 2004, pp. 623–646. Lutz, Helma et al. Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies. Ashgate, 2011. May, Vivian M. Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. Routledge, 2015. Merica, Dan. “Trump Condemns ‘Hatred, Bigotry, and Violence on Many Sides in Charlottesville.’” CNN, 13 August 2017. edition.cnn.com/2017/08/12/politics/trump -statement-alt-right-protests/index.html. Accessed 7 March 2018.

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Mumford, Gwylim. “Trump Mocks Oscars as Ratings Fall to Record Low.” The Guardian, 6 March 2018. www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/06/oscars-2018-vie wing-figures-for-ceremony-lowest-ever-recorded. Accessed 7 March 2018. O’Halloran, Marie and Michael O’Regan. “Travellers Formally Recognised as an Ethnic Minority.” The Irish Times, 1 March 2017. www.irishtimes.com/news/poli tics/oireachtas/travellers-formally-recognised-as-an-ethnic-minority-1.2994309. Accessed 5 March 2018. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton, 1976. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1991, 2007. Roediger, David. Class, Race, and Marxism. Verso, 2017. Shear, Michael D. and Maggie Haberman. “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides.’” The New York Times, 15 August 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.htm l. Accessed 7 March 2018. The Guardian. “‘People Listen to Me.’ John Connors on His Controversial IFTA Speech – Extended Version.” YouTube, 27 February 2018. www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=V_CGudfzLlA. Accessed 5 March 2018. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).” https://www.uscis.gov/archive/consideration-de ferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca. Accessed 18 June 2018. Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. Verso, 1992. White House. “President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address.”. 30 January 2018. www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-u nion-address/. Accessed 7 March 2018. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006. Yancy, George. “Introduction: Fragments of a Social Ontology of Whiteness.” What White Looks Like: African American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, edited by George Yancy. Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–23.

Part I

White epistemologies

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1

For the common good Re-inscribing white normalcy into the American body politic Tonnia L. Anderson

It is normalcy all over our country which leaves the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. It is normalcy all over Alabama that prevents the Negro from becoming a registered voter. No, we will not allow Alabama to return to normalcy. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgement to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice. (King, Jr. 1965)

Introduction Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid and the 2016 Grand Old Party (GOP) Platform offer useful insights into the concept of whiteness in America. They demonstrate how easily ethno-racial distinctions can be called upon and harnessed to politically mobilize disenchanted whites, certainly dismissing the idea that American society has finally entered a post-racial era signified by the Obama administration. They also challenge Toni Morrison’s powerful fishbowl metaphor that describes whiteness as an invisible structure within society that orders everything within it (1992: 17). White racial normalcy or white privilege – perhaps better understood by the older term ‘white supremacy’ – still holds currency as a visible and viable presence. From Tennessee Congressional candidate Rick Tyler’s infamous billboard “Let’s Make America White Again” (Bever 2016) to Representative Steve King’s (Republican, Iowa) comments about the inferiority of non-white groups (Benen 2017), a discourse about ethnicity and race has opened up, seldom heard in the public sphere since the era of Jim Crow segregation. The 2016 election cycle pulled the alt-right from the fringes into the mainstream and legitimized it through neoconservative appeals to white victimology, the erosion of traditional values, and the crisis of fragmentation allegedly posed by cultural pluralism and liberal democracy. The ideological apparatuses of whiteness and

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evangelical religion were summoned to deal with the perceived problems of postmodernity and globalization through retrenchment into the past before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when majority culture was perceived to occupy an unproblematic position of dominance within the public sphere. This chapter explores the role that the loss of entitlement plays in white alienation, and why Trump’s populist appeals of bigotry garnered widespread support. It takes the position that the root of the culture war symbolized by Trump’s presidential campaign and by the 2016 GOP Platform stems from an ideology of white racial normalcy and a race-based nationalism that emerges out of Southern Civil Religion. It argues that Southern Civil Religion, based upon the conservative concepts of moral virtue, adherence to authority, and social order, exists as a prescription for a good society that protects whiteness as a form of social and cultural capital against the perceived onslaught of multiculturalism and liberal democracy. The Southern Civil Religion that had emerged out of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy is relevant to understanding the crisis of identity inherent within whiteness. It helps to explain why the expansion of civil liberties to marginalized groups stimulates identity crises, and why racial taxonomies continue to persist as mechanisms for legitimizing ‘authentic’ whiteness as a positive social good. But most importantly, it helps to better understand how whiteness – as a resource (capital) – became and continues to be a site of struggle over social standing. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) argued that capital informs the basis of the social world, and that different forms of capital exist outside of the realm of market exchange (economic capital). Cultural capital shapes an individual’s social position in life through the symbolic realm of culture and is particularly useful in examining how structures of inequality are reproduced through cultural practices that translate into social assets, which promote or hinder social mobility. Within Southern Civil Religion, whiteness exists as a social asset through which “the relationship of domination is expressed [and] the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds” (Bourdieu 1984: 470–471) as normal and legitimate through intersectionality with those institutional structures that govern everyday life. The viability of whiteness-as-social asset has depended upon the maintenance of those cultural practices (de jure and/or de facto) that reinforce it as a protected caste and through the extension of that protection to whites who had been historically outside of the pale of whiteness. Civil War and the civil religion that grew out of the Lost Cause created a new habitus based upon Confederate ideals through which whites, regardless of class, could share equal status through their common experiences of war and loss. The rituals, memorials, and celebrations perpetuated a collective memory of the past that served as a mechanism of socialization connecting individual and group identity to Confederate values. This new habitus was different from that which had characterized antebellum southern society. Within the Old South, two competing visions of society existed: a seigneurial society centred on the plantation elite and a Herrenvolk democracy based

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upon the egalitarianism of all white males (Fredrickson 1971: 61). White male egalitarianism, however, existed more in theory than in fact. As historian Kenneth P. Vickery indicates, Herrenvolk equality in the South was a myth (1974: 310). Citizenship symbolized and embodied the manifestation of egalitarianism through white racial status because of the existence of a class of “inferior beings” (Wilentz 2002: 75), but the general political impotence of the non-slaveholding class reduced its ability to reap the same level of benefit as was accorded to the elite class. Economically, non-elite native whites were often unable or unwilling to compete with either slave, free black, or white immigrant labour, which served to undermine their material interests (cf. Berlin and Gutman 1983; Tillery 2009: 645–647). Also, black slaves, even though they were not citizens, were a manifestation of planter interests (capital), and in varying degrees could mobilize abstractly white entitlement (capital) both for themselves and their owners in ways that yeoman whites could not do. Southern Civil Religion transformed whites’ access to social capital in which white identity and its protection were central features. However, in order for white identity to have value based upon antebellum and Confederate models, blackness (a catch phrase for all ‘deficient’ groups) had to be maintained as a negative value (cf. Fredrickson 1971; Shklar 1991). Prior to Brown and the tumultuous 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established a pattern of race relations at the close of the nineteenth century that not only helped to re-establish the national reunion of whites through the repudiation of Reconstruction policies and white acceptance of black inferiority through affirming the concept of “separate but equal,” but also, as Cheryl Harris argues, extended legal protection to whiteness as a form of property (1993: 1746). “According whiteness actual legal status,” Harris suggests, “converted an aspect of identity into an external object of property, moving whiteness from privileged identity to a vested interest” (1725). The distinction between “privilege” and “vested interest” is an important one. White privilege confers certain benefits based upon status (cf. McIntosh 1990). These benefits may be tangible or symbolic; they may be perceived or go unrecognized by the beneficiary. However, vested interest or entitlement is predicated upon the legal status of whiteness as property. The Plessy decision, then, affirmed whiteness as a fundamental right central to personhood with inherent value and privileges that carried with it the expected obligation of state and federal protection. Also, the rejection of Homer Plessy’s claim that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been infringed was framed in regard to the protection of whiteness and to the sovereignty of states’ rights. In writing the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Brown indicated that the Louisiana legislature “is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order” (United States Supreme Court 1896: 550). In so doing, Plessy nationally affirmed the basic premises of white supremacy and racial entitlement that had shaped the caste system of the Old

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South, establishing this type of racial consciousness for the twentieth century that has lingered long after the case was overturned in 1954. As historian David Brion Davis asserted (2001), the “Confederacy failed militarily, but won ideologically;” it inscribed Confederate ideologies about race into the national consciousness that have persisted into the twenty-first century. Controversies have arisen periodically, reminding the general public that these ideologies still exist, such as Dylann Roof ’s deadly 2015 attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (Costa et al. 2015), or when the husband of the mayor for Lahoma, Oklahoma, along with a group of other men, donned Klan robes as a Halloween prank (Boroff 2015). However, these old ideologies extend much deeper into the social fabric than the public displays of the Confederate flag, monuments to heroes of the Confederacy, numerous consumer goods that sport the Confederate logo, or domestic terrorism. While these things may carry ideological significance as ‘race pride,’ ‘heritage,’ or hate, or simply exist as objects of material culture, arguably the most enduring element from the Confederacy is its vision of what constitutes a good society, and how values derived from this vision should shape the national character. Trump’s brand of populism, too, reflects this vision; his populism touched upon many of the ‘hot button’ issues that characterized the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which centred on American national identity and what values constitute a good society. Towards this end, the framework of Southern Civil Religion is used to examine whiteness as ideology and as a property right; furthermore, it offers insight into the effects of political polarization that characterized the 2016 presidential election, and into the underlying ideological implications of the 2016 GOP Platform.

Southern Civil Religion and the Original Nation Southern Civil Religion, a concept developed by historian Charles Reagan Wilson (1980), examines how groups construct ideal visions of society through mediating lived experiences and political reality with a moral ethos shaped by the region’s history and its religious traditions. The concept was influenced by Robert N. Bellah’s seminal essay, “Civil Religion in America.” Written in 1967 against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, the essay calls attention to the moral heritage – “the religious dimension” – institutionalized in American public life through powerful symbols and rituals that promote “national solidarity […] to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals” (Bellah 1967: 13). Like American Civil Religion, Southern Civil Religion, too, describes the moral heritage and cultural identity of the region. It emerged from Confederate defeat and the memorializing rituals of the Lost Cause. Though the South has never been homogeneous, and as Arthur Remillard (2011) demonstrates, different social groups possessed their own versions of a good society. White evangelical Protestants, who comprised the elite, exerted

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dominant influence over the public and political life of the region both before and after the Civil War. Consequently, it is their vision of society that carries the most direct relevance here. For white southern adherents to the Confederate cause, defeat and federal military occupation after the War created an existential crisis. “The South faced problems after the Civil War,” Wilson argues, “which were cultural but also religious – the problems of providing meaning to life and society amid the baffling failure of fundamental beliefs, offering comfort to those suffering poverty and disillusionment, and encouraging a sense of belonging in the shattered southern community” (Wilson 1980: 220–221). The crisis was of an imperilled identity, both religious and secular. The religious culture that had developed during the antebellum period was intimately connected to the region’s defence of slavery. Slaveholders and the clerics who supported them viewed criticism of slavery as evidence of the growing secularization of American society due to industrialization. This secularization, it was argued, sought to displace traditional relationships based upon subordination – man to God, wives to husbands, slaves to masters – as established by Christian principles (Crowther 1992: 627). The proslavery argument had at its disposal a primary source, the Bible, which provided the South with a sense of moral legitimacy and moral authority to pursue severance from a heretical government. The tenacious belief that antebellum southern society had represented God’s ideal for humanity justified southern secession and war on moral grounds, and loss was not compatible with the self-image of being God’s Chosen People (Wilson 1980 [2009]: 7–8). The secular crisis stemmed from a loss of status and “humiliation.” Black Codes addressed the problem of formally ending slavery by essentially leaving the old master–slave relationship intact. However, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution infringed upon the protection of whiteness by extending the rights of citizenship to people who had been defined as property. Such an act conflicted with the antebellum view that American democracy and whiteness were interchangeable: The American “ethnological” self-image, whether described as Anglican, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic-Anglo-Saxon, or simply Caucasian, was being formulated and popularized at the very time when the slavery controversy focused interest on the Negro character. No longer were Americans in general being characterized primarily by their adherence to a set of political and social ideas allegedly representing the universal aspirations of all humanity, but democracy itself was beginning to be defined as racial in origin and thus realizable perhaps only by people with certain hereditary traits. (Fredrickson 1971: 100–101) Within the antebellum South, however, the construction of whiteness as an object of perfectionism reflected the self-perceptions of the elite slaveholding class and not the social realities of whites as a whole.

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Slavery had not only underdeveloped the region economically, but also had served as a mechanism for subordinating the non-slaveholding class of whites. Manisha Sinha’s (2000) examination of political ideology within antebellum South Carolina demonstrates how white entitlements of citizenship were selfconsciously designed through public policies to protect the minority interests of the elite against the majority interests of the non-slaveholding class. Although whites as a group had the franchise, true political power was consolidated within the planter class. Nineteenth-century writer and southern abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper observed in 1857 that slavery was harmful to whites in three ways: 1) political marginalization of the white non-slaveholding majority; 2) economic marginalization of white labour that prohibited it from competing with black slave labour; and 3) social obstacle that prohibited the realization of white egalitarianism. He wrote: The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the “poor white trash,” the great majority of the Southern people, know the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing. (Quoted in Harvey 1960: 179) Even for those non-slaveholding whites, who had a degree of financial security, Helper suggests that their ability to cash in on the value of whiteness afforded to the planter elite was conditioned by recognition of slavery as a social good, quite often at the expense of white labour. “Black slave labor,” he wrote, “though far less valuable, is almost invariably better paid than free white labor” (ibid.: 233). Helper argued that non-slaveholding whites or “lickspittles” felt that hiring slave labour as opposed to white labour created the impression of high social standing and the appearance of wealth (233). Helper’s narrative of slavery’s ills illustrates how the system of slavery was alienating to non-slaveholding whites. If whiteness signified property, as argued by Harris, the vast majority of white southerners were unable to lay substantive claim to what planter elites deemed as a birth right. The privileges associated with whiteness intersected with class and social standing, not simply skin colour. In other words, the possession of ‘white skin’ did not automatically translate into the possession of ‘whiteness.’ Ironically, Confederate defeat and Reconstruction helped to mediate class tensions that had existed during the antebellum period. The Lost Cause, through its rituals of memorialization of the Confederacy and its fallen heroes, reaffirmed both the sacrifices of the War and the social system at the heart of the conflict as righteous, a holy war of values. Religion, white alienation, and the ideology of white supremacy formed a trinity through which whiteness transformed, making it more accessible to those whites who

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dutifully believed in this civil religion. Although it did not dissolve all of the differences that had existed before the War between different subgroups of whites, it did provide a cultural lens through which to interpret their postbellum experiences as a collective. The worldview forged through this civil religion differed little from those formed during the antebellum period, which centred on religious fundamentalism, strict adherence to patriarchal authority, and a grudging disdain for the concept of universal egalitarianism. Additionally, the idea of protecting whiteness (Harvey 1960: 95), too, represented a continuation of antebellum concerns into the post-bellum era, but the object of protection changed. Whiteness based upon property ownership in slaves and land transformed to incorporate the white majority that had been alienated by the planter class. Whiteness within the antebellum South had existed as an exclusive terrain through which the elite represented ‘authentic whiteness,’ signified by their ability to mobilize social, economic, and political power as citizens. The extension of freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to blacks during Reconstruction alienated whites across class divisions by eroding the very concept of whiteness as an object of entitlement and authenticity. In order to cope with the changes to southern society, preservation of culture became a weapon of defence through which white southerners “made a religion out of their history” (Wilson 1980 [2009]: 36). Consequently, Southern Civil Religion perpetuated the Confederate belief that social stability depended on the protection of whiteness-as-culture. By using South Carolina as a case study, W. Scott Poole (2004) demonstrates, perhaps more directly than Wilson, how the South viewed itself as the standard bearer for authentic white American values based on conservatism. For Poole, the Lost Cause was less about theodicy than it was a defiance against modernity (17). He argues that southern conservatism was greatly influenced by continental romantic conservatism, particularly the ideas of Edmund Burke, which envisioned the political good as an ordered society that drew meaning and purpose from tradition and custom: “The idea of ‘natural rights,’ rights abstracted from the tissue of custom and tradition rooted in the glorious past, had no meaning for romantic conservatives” (4). While Burke’s influence on shaping the political philosophy of the South is unmistakable, it fails to address the role that tradition and custom played in protecting hegemonic interests that had resulted in the alienation of those outside of the elite before the Civil War. Southern Civil Religion did not solve the inequalities that existed between whites, but it did strengthen the cultural and ideological frameworks for solidarity based upon white nationalism. As a result of Reconstruction, whites had to reassert their group position via race and racial taxonomies in order to reclaim and protect entitlement (citizenship) as whiteness. By the time America entered into World War I, Southern Civil Religion had become part of the national consciousness (Wilson 1980 [2009]: 173–179; cf. Connelly and Bellows 1982; Gallagher 2008). Historian Frances B. Simkins summed up the extent to which Confederate ideals permeated early twentieth century America:

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T.L. Anderson The South was able to contribute much to the reactionary nationalism that influenced the United States in the twentieth century. The prejudices of its native multitudes gave unadulterated strength to restrictive immigration laws; its pure Anglo-Saxon racial and political ideals were rallying points for the unification of a nation of diverse origins; its Protestantism and its Puritanism gave shape and strength to the peculiarities of the national religion and morals. A symbol of this strident nationalism was the second Ku Klux Klan, an organization southern in origin and in ideals but national in influence. (Simkins 1947: 320–321)

White anxiety during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting from rapid northern industrialization and immigration, created a crisis of national identity as much as it had for the South. Historian and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard (1920) put the central concern of Southern Civil Religion – the protection of whiteness – into the international post-World War I arena by articulating his growing concern that white world hegemony was in crisis: “If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption” (303). He identifies four fundamental issues, which are virtually identical to antebellum and post-bellum concerns: 1) racial minorities erode the moral standards that degrade the national character; 2) the white working class cannot compete with “colored” workers; 3) minorities take available resources away from whites; and 4) homogeneity is necessary for stability and social progress (271–276). For Stoddard, the idea of the American melting pot was particularly onerous, and he felt that “social ‘uplifters’” were essentially irresponsible and short-sighted (264). Their agenda to elevate the degraded races, he believed, promoted economic disturbance and social degradation for whites. Stoddard did not perceive his ideas as a form of race-hatred, but as racial self-interest and preservation: “To love one’s cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pass that heritage unimpaired to one’s children; to fight, and, if need be, to die in its defence: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth” (275). Stoddard’s solution for a potential racial crisis centred on reinforcing the “inner-dikes.” Within American society, for Stoddard, strengthening the inner-dikes constituted strict immigration policies and the expansion of segregation, replicating the racial caste system within the South.

After Brown: White alienation and polarization As long as white supremacy existed as an incorporated part of the nation’s civil religion, whiteness remained a protected property, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) removed the longstanding protection yielded by Plessy, and ushered in a second Reconstruction

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upon the South, and to a lesser extent upon the nation. The antebellum question about the appropriate role of the federal government in relation to the states was resurrected. The legitimacy of unlawful nonviolent protest was debated. However, the most pressing issue concerned the nature and rights of citizenship, itself; it was a concern raised in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent of the Plessy decision, who stated that “arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race […] is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedoms and equality before the law” (Harlan 1896: 562). The battle over desegregation created a collision over opposing political philosophies and civil religions that carried separate interpretations of the American Creed1 and of what constituted a good society. Public figures such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Joshua Heschel served as counter-points to Governor George Wallace and Sheriff Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor in the struggle over competing visions of a just society. This idea is illustrated by comparing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” (1963) speech with George Wallace’s “Gubernatorial Inauguration Address” (1963) at the Alabama state capitol. King invokes Lincoln and the Enlightenment ideas embedded in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. From these, he references the concepts of liberty and freedom “to which every American was to fall heir” (King 1963: 1). Wallace draws directly from the Confederacy as his national frame of reference. Jefferson Davis, “the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” and federal tyranny frame his address (Wallace 1963: 1–12). Both men express dismay over federal disregard of citizenship rights: King appeals for the rights of black people to be realized as full citizens, and Wallace appeals for the rights of white citizens to be protected. Andrew M. Mantis (2002) argues that the Civil Rights Movement was essentially a clash between two Southern Civil Religions, one white and the other black, in which each possessed its own version of a good society. While Mantis’s observation is correct, it was more than that. King’s ability to form an interfaith, interracial coalition from across the nation signalled, at least for a time, that Confederate ideology was losing its grip on American Civil Religion. King’s invocation of Walter Rauschenbusch’s theology of the social gospel, Henry David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience, biblical passages out of Exodus, and the U.S. Constitution re-created a narrative of inclusivity within American Civil Religion. The civil religion that predominated within the white South scarcely differed from that which had emerged during the post-bellum era. Media representation of police officials rigorously attempting to preserve the rights of southern white citizenship through brutality exposed “the Southern Way” as un-American. According to political scientist Joel Olsen (2008), the success of the Civil Rights Movement created a “loss of individualized standing” for whites that fostered alienation, and in so doing provided an opportunity for Republican strategists to appeal to that sense of alienation (704, 708). Overt Confederate ideologies, which had held currency within the public sphere prior to Brown,

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were not appropriate after the Civil Rights Movement. Olsen contends that GOP strategists created a new racialized narrative in which the Republican Party represented the “virtuous middle” and the Democrats consisted of a coalition of liberal elites and riff-raff, setting the stage for national polarization (704). This racialized narrative simply modernized Confederate ideologies for the post-civil rights era through the GOP’s Southern Strategy, which was targeted to whites across the nation. In describing Southern Strategy, Republican strategist Lee Atwater indicates: You start out in 1954 by saying “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. […] But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around, saying “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” (quoted in Perlstein 2012; cf. Lamis 1999) As Atwater indicates, overt race-baiting became problematic after the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Tackling the ‘race problem’ – the problem of desegregation and affirmative action policies – could be ‘abstractly’ addressed to galvanize disenchanted whites around issues perceived to imperil personal liberty, such as forced busing, or that put an economic strain on the nation, such as welfare programs. ‘Code’ became a way of appearing to be ‘colour-blind’ by omitting overt racial references rendering whiteness invisible. In this regard the GOP not only established itself as the ‘white man’s party,’ but also presented itself as the conservator of America’s true national character in which whiteness is central. According to philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Feher (1996), “the spokespeople of the new populist Right endeavor[ed] […] to bolster the self-esteem of the white middle class by enticing its members to reclaim their allegedly threatened heritage” (88). Wallace’s assertion that centralized federal government attempted to replace God and establish itself as the new Almighty under the guise of ‘human rights’ at the expense of individual rights (Wallace 1963: 4–5) foreshadowed the political arena in which the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s were fought. American culture, and more specifically American morality, provided a vehicle to reframe Confederate ideals as truly American ideals that reinvigorated the idea of whiteness and the need to protect it. ‘Middle America’ became a euphemism for white America. It possessed reverence for God, believed in the sacred institution of the family, carried the

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pride of national patriotism, and dutifully observed the authority of law. These features operated in stark contrast to so-called purveyors of human rights that permitted legal abortion, welfare, homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviance, and lastly affirmative action (Olsen 2008: 710). James Davidson Hunter (1991) described the eruption of political polemics over cultural identity as “culture war.” He categorizes these divisions within the public sphere into those who possessed “impulses of orthodoxy” and “impulses of progressivism,” with each side attempting to lay claim to a moral truth about the meaning of the nation and what features determined a good society (43, 51). Expressed in another way, this conflict revolved around competing notions of civil religion by presenting how Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics joined forces to exert their vision of a good society. Even if the only culture war that existed was between political pundits, intellectuals, politicians, and interest groups peddling a cause (cf. Wolfe 1998; Fiorina 2011), mobilization of this religious coalition provided the ideological matrix for which GOP agendas could claim moral authority and moral legitimacy that authentically represented the American nation.

The new Herrenvolk democracy: Trump’s America and the 2016 GOP Platform Twentieth-century southern author Wilbur J. Cash made the observation that “Satan had seized the Democratic party [sic], and the oriflamme of God, as witnessed by all the holy men, had passed to the keeping of the Republicans. […] Whichever party best combines causes and monsters and clinches its claim to the banner of God will win” (Cash 1929: 191). Although Cash was making reference to the presidential election of 1928, his comments can be easily applied to the presidential campaign of 2016. However, in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the ‘monster’ was not Catholicism as it had been in 1928. The new ‘monsters’ were many: illegal Mexican immigrants, Muslims, the LGBT community, racial minorities (in general), President Barak Obama and his ‘reckless’ policies, and of course, Hillary Clinton. Throughout Trump’s campaign he successfully wove a narrative addressing how these ‘monsters’ existed as a threat to the life-blood of white Americans. His direct appeals to the anxieties and prejudices of whites caused Republican elites to reject him as an interloper who did not represent the values of the GOP (cf. The Hill Staff 2016; Easley 2016). However, far from being a blight on the GOP, his rhetoric and tactics were simply the latest reinvention of the GOP’s Southern Strategy. Trump’s use of this strategy to appeal to white alienation represented “the natural evolutionary product of Republican platforms and strategies that stretch back to the very origins of modern conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s” (Heer 2016). Within the GOP’s racialized narrative, whites – not minorities – are the real victims of discrimination.

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Trump’s campaign “To Make America Great Again” mirrored Stoddard’s caution to strengthen the “inner-dikes” by appealing to whites’ concerns and fears about the future of America. Reverse discrimination, discrimination against Christians, and the belief that American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s reflect long-simmering issues particularly among the white working-class and white evangelical Protestants. The true crisis signified by the cultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s – and during the 2016 presidential campaign – stems from the fear of losing white cultural hegemony. White alienation found expression within post-Civil-Rights-era America through the culture wars. Outrage over issues such as abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, school prayer, welfare, and crime carried legitimacy that direct appeals to racism did not have. However, the uninhibited appeals of xenophobia and race-baiting used by Donald Trump gave oxygen to longfestering resentments. Such sentiment can be seen in an article titled “Waking Up from the American Dream” by white nationalist Gregory Hood. He writes: Everything you loved about what used to be your country came from one group of people. It’s the group you belong to. It’s the white race. And it’s not an accident that the same people who hate your country, your religion, and your family hate your race more than anything. […] You’re a white man. “American” doesn’t mean anything anymore. If anything, citizenship is actually a burden. As a white American, you are a secondclass citizen in jobs, education, and government benefits. No one cares about you, and no one ever will. Those in power will deny that your suffering even exists. (Hood 2012) Whether viewed as an epic struggle between moral orthodoxy and secular progressivism, or between the authentic Americans and their ambiguous counterparts, it does come down to what James Davison Hunter argued as a struggle for determining the meaning of American identity. But unlike Hunter’s premise, the real struggle existed over the terrain of whiteness – what it has historically meant within the nation and how, through the expansion of civil rights agendas forwarded by Democrats, Southern Civil Religion with its traditional values was losing ground (cf. Balmer 2014). According to a 2016 study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, reverse discrimination is a major concern for white Americans. The study found that 57% of white Americans and roughly 66% of working-class whites agree that discrimination against whites is a major problem (Jones et al. 2016: 2). Seventy-four percent of Republicans and 83% of Trump supporters believe that the American way of life needs protection against foreign influence (1). Republicans (65%) and Trump supporters (80%) generally feel that immigrants are a social burden because they take jobs, housing, strain the healthcare system, and increase crime in local communities (45–46).

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Finally, approximately 75% of Republicans and 77% of white evangelical Protestants believe discrimination against Christians is a major issue, comparable to discrimination faced by historically marginalized groups (17). In spite of the fact that many disparities continue to exist between whites and people of colour, especially for blacks and Hispanics, “racial progress is a threat to status hierarchy, which causes [w]hites who support that hierarchy to perceive more anti-[w]hite discrimination” (Wilkins and Kaiser 2014: 445). In Arlie R. Hochschild’s study Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), she identifies four common elements among white Trump supporters that account for his popularity on the campaign trail: 1) economic strain; 2) feelings of cultural marginalization; 3) perceptions of demographic decline; and 4) detachment from marginalized groups (221–222). She writes: “All of this was part of the ‘deep story.’ In that story strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. […] Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land” (222). Trump was successful in tapping into that emotional reservoir of alienation and resentment. Long notorious for race-baiting (cf. Hutchinson 2016), he employed similar tactics during his rallies, creating “a clear dividing line between Christians […] and Muslims and protesters holding Black Lives Matter signs on the other” (Hochschild 2016: 224). He went so far as to encourage violence against so-called “disrupters” (224; cf. Tiefenthaler 2016; Sinclair 2017), which offered the emotional catharsis that Hochschild (2016) suggests created a sense of bonding and unity among his supporters (225). Like Confederate relics, Trump became a “totem” – the new “Great White Hope” – reinvigorating social and cultural capital for alienated whites (226). Out of this bastion of resentment, the carrots of white solidary and protection of whiteness were offered as part of Trump’s vision for America, which encouraged the growth of white nationalism. Whether wittingly or not, Trump echoed Robert D. Putnam’s findings2 that racial and ethnic diversity stifled trust and civic engagement causing alienation, and that progressive political agendas enhanced the problem (2007: 137–174). While this stance is not new (cf. Goodhart 2004; Alesina and La Ferrera 2005), Trump used it to heighten division within the polity through race-baiting, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. White tribalism was encouraged through his blatant disregard of anything construed as ‘politically correct.’ His brand of populism arguably has more in common with George Wallace’s than with the Tea Party Movement that helped pave the way for him. Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute (a white nationalist think tank), indicated, “Trump has unleashed forces – forces much bigger than he is – that simply can’t be put back into the bottle” (quoted in Liebelson and Ferner 2016). Speaking at the 2016 Freedom Congress sponsored by Europa Terra Nostra, in Wismar, Germany, white nationalists from the United States joined with their European counterparts to discuss the crisis of white hegemony posed by diversity and multiculturalism. Trump, as one conference attendee explained, will make

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white nationalism more acceptable to mainstream white Americans whether he wins or loses (cf. Liebelson and Ferner 2016). While Trump used the rhetoric of Southern Civil Religion to successfully catapult himself into the White House, the 2016 GOP Platform institutionalizes it by using Confederate ideologies as policy agendas paving the way for a new Herrenvolk democracy, which is “democratic for the master race but tyrannical for subordinate groups” (van den Berghe 1967: 18). As a New York Times editorial suggests, the GOP Platform is not conservative, but reactionary (Editorial Board 2016). It advocates for the wall along the border of the U.S. and Mexico, the abolition of abortion, the requirement that public high schools offer courses on the Bible, the requirement that legislators use Christianity as a guiding source for the creation of laws, absolute protection of the right to bear arms, a ban on Muslim immigration, and the promotion of policies and practices that deny basic civil rights to the LGBT community. Republican Platform 2016 identifies affirmative action policies for minority groups as reverse discrimination (Republican National Committee 2016) and advocates for the supremacy of states’ rights. Such planks demonstrate a radical departure from the Democrats’ agenda of extending civil rights to historically marginalized groups and of looking at the realities of American diversity as a strength as opposed to a weakness. In spite of the assertion that the Platform presents a mechanism for creating unity in America, it reinforces the perception of the GOP as being hostile to minorities and generally intolerant of differences that impinge upon the values of the Christian Right (Barbour et al. 2013: 4). Just as Trump’s campaign lifted the “cloak of invisibility” off of whiteness, the 2016 GOP Platform exists as an artefact of whiteness that specifies what goods/values/identities confer entitlements, thereby reasserting “social standing” and reproducing cultural capital for the privileged group. It uses citizenship as a social position of dominance to reaffirm historical constructions of whiteness as a property-right by creating intersectionality with the institutions of family, religion, law, and education. Simultaneously, its stance on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, multiculturalism, immigration, and gay rights creates an ‘Othering’ of those whose identities fall outside of the construct of ‘citizen.’ As sociologist Cynthia Levine-Rasky indicates, “[i]ntersecting social positions clash against institutions and policies that insist on difference and exacerbate inequities” (2011: 242). Although it uses ‘colourblind’ language, the Platform codifies the normalcy of whiteness, rhetorically legitimizing it through references to “God’s Law,” “Law of Nature,” and “Nature’s God.” According to the GOP Platform, “[m]an-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights; and that if God-given, natural, inalienable rights come in conflict with government, court, or human-granted rights, God-given, natural, inalienable rights always prevail” (Republican National Committee 2016). This position adheres to Burkean principles of conservatism in which state power and authority are predicated upon Christian morality and natural law. Inequality, discrimination, and prejudice are

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understood as natural features within society. Attempts by the government to ameliorate these features are perceived to jeopardize liberty. Political scientist Wendy Brown argues, “[w]hen the pastoral model becomes the political model, inequality – not merely submission toward authority, but also legitimate stratification and subordination takes shape as a political norm rather than a political challenge” (Brown 2006: 708). However, that is ultimately the point. Certain identities are privileged at the expense of others in order to restore a good society by transforming the habitus established by liberal democracy through Southern Civil Religion.

Notes 1 The American Creed, first formulated by Thomas Jefferson, emerged from eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals that rationalized the Revolutionary War. These ideals are liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire. Seymour Martin Lipset (1996) identifies the American Creed as a central component of American exceptionalism. 2 For a thoughtful critique that incorporates intersectionality, see Sturgis et al. (2011).

Bibliography Alesina, Alberto and Eliana La Ferrera. “‘Who Trusts Others?’” European Sociological Review, vol. 21, 2005, pp. 311–327. Balmer, Randall. “The Real Origins of the Religious Right.” Politico, 27 November 2014. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins107133?o=0. Accessed 4 April 2017. Barbour, Henry et al. “Republican National Committee.” Growth and Opportunity Project, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/RNCreport03182013. pdf. Accessed 25 October 2018. Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus, vol. 96, no. 1, 1967, pp. 1–21. Berlin, Ira and Herbert G. Gutman. “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South.” American Historical Review, vol. 88, no. 5, 1983, pp. 1175–1200. Benen, Steve. “Steve King Raises Eyebrows with Racially Charged Comments.” Rachel Maddow Show/Maddow Blog, MSNBC, 19 July 2017. http://www.msnbc. com/rachel-maddow-show/steve-king-raises-eyebrows-racially-charged-comments. Accessed 20 July 2017. van den Berghe, Pierre L. Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective. John Wiley, 1967. Bever, Lindsey. “‘Make America White Again’: A Politician’s Billboard Ignites Uproar.” The Washington Post, 23 June 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/23/make-america-white-again-a-politicians-billboard-igni tes-uproar/?utm_term=.9c3ab32a3cb1. Accessed 13 November 2016. Boroff, David. “Outrage in Oklahoma Town after Mayor’s Husband and other Residents Dress Up as Members of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween.” New York Daily News, 2 November 2015. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/okla-mayorhusband-dresses-kkk-member-halloween-article-1.2420665. Accessed 11 March 2016.

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Heer, Jeet. “How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible.” New Republic, 18 February 2016. https://newrepublic.com/article/130039/southern-strategy-madedonald-trump-possible. Accessed 23 April 2018. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016. Hood, Gregory. “Waking Up from the American Dream: A White Nationalist Memo to White Male Republicans.” Counter-Current.com, North American New Right and Counter-Currents Publishing, 9 November 2012. http://www.counter-currents. com/2012/11/a-white-nationalist-memo-to-white-male-republicans/. Accessed 23 April 2018. Hunter, James Davidson. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Basic Books, 1991. Hutchinson, Earl Ofari. “Trump Race Baits with the Central Park Five Case – Yet Again.” The Blog, Huffington Post, 7 October 2016. https://www.huffingtonpost. com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/trump-race-baits-with-the_b_12392112.html. Accessed 10 December 2016. Johnson, Ben. “2016 Republican Party Platform Hailed as Most Pro-Life, Pro-Family Ever.” Life Site, 20 July 2016. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/2016-republica n-party-platform-the-most-pro-life-ever. Accessed 23 April 2018. Jones, Robert P. et al. “How Immigration and Concerns about Cultural Changes are Shaping the 2016 Election: Findings from the 2016 PRRI/Brookings Immigration Survey.” Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings Institute, 2016. https://www. brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20160623_prri_jones_presentation.pdf. Accessed 24 April 2018. King Jr., Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream.” 1963. https://www.archives.gov/files/press/ exhibits/dream-speech.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2018. King Jr., Martin Luther. “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March.” 25 March 1965. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ address-conclusion-selma-montgomery-march. Accessed 25 October 2018. Lamis, Alexander P. Southern Politics in the 1990s. Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. “Intersectionality Theory Applied to Whiteness and MiddleClassness.” Social Identities, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011, pp. 239–253. Liebelson, Dana and Matt Ferner. “Even If Trump Loses, White Nationalists Say They’ve Won.” Huffington Post, 2 November 2016. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/donald-trump-white-nationalists_us_581a103be4b0a76e174c51bb. Accessed 3 November 2016. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. Norton, 1996. Mantis, Andrew M. Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars. Mercer University Press, 2002. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Independent School, vol. 49, no. 2, 1990, pp. 31. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1992. Olsen, Joel. “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, 2008, pp. 704–718. Perlstein, Rick. “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on Southern Strategy.” The Nation, 13 November 2012. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusi ve-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/. Accessed 23 April 2018.

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Poole, W. Scott. Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry. University of Georgia Press, 2004. Putnam, Robert D. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture.” Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 30, 2007, pp. 137–174. Remillard, Arthur. Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the PostReconstruction Era. University of Georgia Press, 2011. Republican National Committee. Republican Platform 2016. Consolidated Solutions, 2016. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-republican-party-platform. Accessed 25 October 2018. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Harvard University Press, 1991. Simkins, Frances B. “The Everlasting South.” Journal of Southern History, vol. 13, no. 3, 1947, pp. 320–321. Sinclair, Harriet. “Trump Told White Supremacists to Attack Protesters, So They Did.” Newsweek, 14 August 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-told-white-sup remacists-attack-protesters-so-they-did-650622. Accessed 23 April 2018. Sinha, Manisha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920, 1924. Sturgis, Patrick et al. “Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered.” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 41, no. 1, 2011, pp. 57–82. The Hill Staff. “Republicans Vowing to Never Back Trump.” The Hill, 29 April 2016. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/278141-republicans-who-vowto-never-back-trump. Accessed 23 April 2018. Tiefenthaler, Aninara. “Trump’s History of Encouraging Violence,” Video. The New York Times, 14 March 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004269364/ trump-and-violence.html. Accessed 23 April 2018. Tillery Jr., Alvin B. “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 4, 2009, pp. 639–652. United States Supreme Court. Plessy v. Ferguson. 18 May 1896. Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/ text/163/537. Accessed 24 April 2018. Vickery, Kenneth P. “‘Herrenvolk’ Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the U.S. South.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 16, no. 3, 1974, pp. 309–328. Wallace, George. “Inaugural Address.” State of Alabama. January 14, 1963. http:// web.utk.edu/~mfitzge1/docs/374/wallace_seg63.pdf. Accessed 24 April 2018. Wilentz, Sean. “America’s Lost Egalitarian Tradition.” Daedalus, vol. 131, no. 1, 2002, pp. 66–80. Wilkins, Clara L. and Cheryl R. Kaiser. “Racial Progress as Threat to the Status Hierarchy: Implications for Perceptions of Anti-White Bias.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 2, 2014, pp. 439–446. Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865– 1920. University of Georgia Press, 1980, 2009.

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Wilson, Charles Reagan. “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the Southern Civil Religion, 1865–1920.” Journal of Southern History, vol. 46, no. 2, 1980, pp. 219–238. Wish, Harvey, editor. Ante-bellum Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery. C.P. Putnam’s, 1960. Wolfe, Alan. One Nation, After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other. Viking, 1998.

2

A typology of white people in America Matt Wray

Twenty years of Critical Whiteness Studies has produced a general consensus about the core problem of whiteness in America. The problem has been variously characterized as: blindness about white privilege (cf. Frankenberg 1993, 1997); an absence of cultural identity (Roediger 1992, 1994, 1995, 2006); the invisibility or unmarkedness of whiteness (McIntosh 1988; Morrison 1993; Dyer 1997; Hill 1997, 2004); an evasion of power and responsibility by whites (Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003); and a kind of longing for racial innocence (Wiegman 1995; and Twine 2008). What binds these rather different ideas of whiteness together is that each of these critiques of whiteness identifies a lack, a deficit, or a void at the core of white identity. Whiteness is, paradoxically, both full of power and empty of substantive meaning. It is an illusion, a false idol, an ideology whose power will diminish only when white people stop believing in it. Critiques of this way of thinking about the core problem of whiteness within Critical Whiteness Studies have been voiced over the years (Brander Rasmussen et al. 2001; Hartigan 2005), but they have gained little traction (Garner 2007). One of the results of this conceptualization of the problem of whiteness as a deficit or lack has been to foster harsh scepticism toward white people’s accounts of their own views about race. Whites’ actions are interpreted through a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (cf. Ricoeur 1970), and whites are routinely regarded by whiteness scholars as unreliable narrators about their own racial subjectivity and the racial subjectivity of others. Whites, we have presumed, have an acute case of ‘false consciousness’ regarding race. One of the results of that presumption is that much of Whiteness Studies has oriented itself toward confronting the false consciousness – presumed to be endemic – among whites. Scholars of whiteness have become adept at describing and decrying the hypocrisies and self-delusions of whites. This may make scholars of whiteness feel virtuous, but it does little to enhance our ability to confront the problem at hand. If the goal is to change the hearts and minds of privileged, colour-blind white people, is it wise to begin by telling them they are fooling themselves, or that they are in denial? Should we not instead begin by listening to what white people themselves are trying to say?

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The concepts of white privilege and colour-blindness, as we currently conceive of them, are not capable of advancing the field of whiteness studies any further. This is because whiteness scholars are misapprehending the core problem of contemporary whiteness. The problem is not a shared set of privileges that must be dismantled, nor is it the blindness of whites to the continuing significance of the colour line. The core problem of whiteness and the major obstacle to racial justice is exactly the opposite: white privilege is not shared by all whites and not all whites are blind to the colour line. The reasons for this variation are clear: social identity is both relational (I depend on Others to form my identity) and intersectional (I am not just a raced being. I’m also categorizable by gender, class, and a long list of biosocial characteristics, phenotypical traits, and a particular set of values, norms, and political beliefs). Capturing and analysing this variation among whites requires careful thinking about how theories of intersectionality – usually deployed in order to study mechanisms of oppression and minoritization – may be applied to whiteness studies. This is, of course, the task that the present volume has set for itself.1 Variation in white attitudes and experiences about the meaning and significance of race, class, and gender, combined with growing political polarization among whites, sets up struggles between whites about the meanings of whiteness and race. Because racial progress cannot be achieved without significant social and political support from whites, these intraracial struggles among whites are blocking racial progress by ethnoracial minorities and recent immigrants, while simultaneously providing new opportunities and avenues for racial change. It is important that we understand the nature of these struggles, how they are likely to resolve, and what the social and political consequences will be.

Variations in white privilege and colour-blindness For evidence that white privilege is much more variable than key tenets of Whiteness Studies presume, we can look at studies that document the situation of whites in impoverished communities and in socially disorganized neighbourhoods. Historical studies (e.g., Harkins 2005; Wray 2006) show how stigma and symbolic violence spoiled the identities of poor whites in ways that are quite similar to the operations of exclusion visited upon other minorities. Field research across a wide range of communities and time periods (Gitlin and Hollander 1970; Howell 1973; McCleod 1987; Hartigan 1999; Moss 2003; Morris 2006; Rhodes 2011) give ample evidence that the benefits of white skin privilege are scarce to non-existent for whites on the lower rungs of the social ladder. And the ranks of impoverished whites are growing. According to research by Paul Jargowsky (undated), white census tracts had the fastest-growing concentrated poverty rate between 2000 and 2010. Tens of millions of whites now find themselves in extreme poverty. We have overgeneralized the concept of white skin privilege. It is not a constant. It is a variable.

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For evidence that colour-blindness has been overgeneralized in its application to whites, we can look to a series of articles by sociologists (Croll 2007; Hartmann et al. 2003, 2009, 2011; Torkelson and Hartmann 2010). Using data from a nationally representative survey, they test some of the core assumptions of Critical Whiteness Studies; namely, that 1) white identity is less salient for whites than for non-whites; 2) that whites lack awareness of white privilege compared with other racial groups; and 3) that whites are much more likely than non-whites to adhere to ideologies of colour-blind, meritocratic individualism. They tested these claims empirically by conducting a nationally representative phone survey of over 2000 respondents called The American Mosaic Project. What Hartmann et al. found was far from decisively in support of Critical Whiteness Studies. Whites in their sample “are both more connected to white identity and culture as well as more aware of the advantages of their race than many theoretical discussions suggest” (Hartmann et al. 2009: 403). Seventy-four percent of whites reported that their racial identity was important, with more than a third (38%) saying it was “very important.” Additionally, while the percentage of whites endorsing ideals of colour-blindness was higher than the percentage of non-whites, “the empirical evidence suggests that colour-blindness is a distinctive aspect of ideology and identity not only for whites but for all Americans generally” (416). If we believe the results from the survey, we have to conclude that current characterizations of white privilege and colour-blindness, while not exactly wrong, are clearly not right either. Whiteness scholars should reject these concepts and find a new framework, one that focuses on the intersections of whiteness with other categories of social difference, like region, culture, politics, and class, for example.

Constructing a white typology As Howard Winant (1997) has argued, in the post-civil rights era in the U.S., whiteness is being radically reconfigured in ways that echo the post-war reconfiguration (236). In the wake of Ferguson, Missouri (2014) and several other high-profile cases of police violence against African Americans, a contentious discourse about racial equity is now ascendant. This is happening at a time when other racial identities are on the cusp of reconfiguration. As Leland Saito (1998) has argued, the fast growth of Asian and Latino immigrant populations and the sharp rise in intermarried and mixed-race populations has contributed to a rapid shuffling of the deck of white identities, particularly in major cities like Los Angeles. New white fault lines and fissures have appeared, new white types have emerged, and, as a result of these reconfigurations, Mike Hill (1997, 2004) has pointed out, new possibilities for (and limits to) racial change exist. How do whites typically vary? As we learned from the presidential election of 2016, one thing that divides whites most sharply today is their political

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point of view. The literature, both academic and popular, on political polarization is now quite large and diverse, but the consensus is that political party polarization between liberals and non-liberals (i.e., conservatives) has increased significantly in the past few decades (Fiorina and Abrams 2008). This is a starting point: political orientation is a highly salient variable among contemporary whites (Pew Research Center 2017). Whites are also sharply divided about the meaning and significance of race as a factor in American life. Does race matter, and if so, how? Are race boundaries fluid or flexible, or are they firm or fixed? Should they be avoided or minimized, or should they be engaged and crossed? This variable is related to, but not identical with, the concept of colour-blindness. We can therefore identify beliefs about ‘colour-blindness’ and its opposite, ‘race consciousness,’ as a second salient source of variation among whites. In both cases, we are modelling white variation by acknowledging that these two salient features are not uniformly or randomly distributed among different white Americans. Given these two theoretically indicated variables, we can use a contingency table to construct a typology – a simple classification grid – which we can use to sort white people, theoretically, into different modes of whiteness, depending on their relationship to the two variables. Figure 1 illustrates these two variables in a 2  2 table, with political orientation on the horizontal axis and colour-blindness on the vertical axis. That is, the horizontal axis plots the liberal-not liberal contingency and the vertical the colour-blind-not colour-blind contingency. The resulting four cells indicate four different types of white people in the U.S. It should be noted that typologies such as these are best suited for analytically isolating the outliers – the extreme, exaggerated cases that are ideal types. Most white Americans are not easily categorized as simply liberal or conservative or simply colour-blind or race conscious. But, nonetheless, what this method for sorting suggests is that the extreme types can help us visualize and understand different modalities of being white, if only in crude fashion. In reality, as theories of intersectionality remind us, social identities are much messier amalgams of social differences. As Cynthia Levine-Rasky has noted,

Figure 2.1 Typology of whites

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M. Wray in intersectionality theory, identity is experienced not as composed of discrete attributes but as a subjective, even fragmented, set of dynamics. Identity and exclusion are therefore multiple and complex, contingent upon social, political, and ideological contexts that produce and sustain them. Moreover, who one ‘is’ is not static; it is wholly relational to others, to culture, and to organizations in which one moves. (Levine-Rasky 2011: 242)

Which whites belong in which cells? We can begin to populate the cells by relying on ethnographic research on whites. There is now a significant amount of scholarship on white people qua white people that is based on direct and systematic observation. Much of this research, cited below, devotes itself to examining differences between whites with respect to how they think about politics and race. However, scholars of whiteness have yet to develop an analytical framework that takes into account the complex racial dynamics occurring between whites, as they negotiate their racial beliefs and racial behaviours in relation to non-whites, but also in relation to white Others – those whites whom they define themselves in opposition to and seek to distance themselves from. This is precisely what intersectionality theory enables us to do: to situate research on whites in a field of relationality, in order to observe whiteness as a dynamic system of interrelations among different groups of white people. This field of relations exhibits clear lines of solidarity and agreement, but it also has clear lines of separation and disagreement. Of course, the latter should be the primary lines of attack for those seeking racial justice, but we should also take note of the lines of solidarity that may also lead to greater racial justice and we should identify strategies to strengthen those lines. We can now return to the issue of colour-blindness. As indicated above, this concept as currently formulated does not do justice to the complexity of white attitudes about race. The concept overgeneralizes, but more importantly, it misidentifies where the action is. The clearest distinction between whites is not whether they take race into account or not, since, if we accept whites at their word, most whites do appear to take race into account. Instead, the distinction is really about how whites think about racial boundaries. Are they firm and functional, providing order and structure to a social system that requires both to be stable and secure, or are they fluid and fictional, illusory barriers that may be crossed at will and that are destined to eventually fall under the weight of cross-racial traffic and rising racial equality? In this contingency modelling, what is meant by ‘colour-blind’ or ‘race-conscious’ has to do with whether whites think of racial boundaries as fluid or as firm. The four labels I have provided are provisional and offer a starting point for making informed guesses. Certainly, we can think of representative members for each group, as well as iconic figures that stand in metonymic relation to the larger group. We can offer conjectures about their demographic composition (generational status, regions, socio-economic status) and their

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relative size in numbers. We can speculate about how they tend to view their social situations vis-à-vis both non-whites and other whites, and advance some hunches about the sorts of emotional reactions these self-definitions foster and provoke. Finally, we can venture a few educated guesses about the kinds of remedies for racial injustice each type is likely to endorse, as well as who their allies and enemies might be in such a fight. These hypotheses are summarized in Figure 2. Type I: Identifiers This cell is reserved for ‘colour-blind’ liberal or progressive whites. As noted above, their ‘colour-blindness’ tends to take the form of sharp awareness of race, coupled with a tendency to see racial boundaries as more fluid than firm. As a result, whites in this group are more likely than any of the other types to engage in racial borrowing or cultural appropriation. These whites cross racial borders with ease. The iconic figure here is the white hipster, whose cultivated appreciation of all things non-white was so deftly skewered in Christian Lander’s (2008, 2010) mock-sociological musings on Stuff White People Like. Hypothetically, these whites comprise smaller numbers compared with Deniers (discussed below) but are more numerous than either of the other two types. They tend to cluster in metro areas, blue states, and affluent suburbs. There is a substantial presence among them of the so-called millennials –

Figure 2.2 Sample hypotheses

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those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s – and this skews the type younger than conservative types. Identifiers are likely to express sympathy and appreciation for the struggles of non-whites and to sometimes allow that sympathy to express itself as a romanticized fantasy about a kind of cultural authenticity born of struggle that is unavailable to them as whites. White guilt is sometimes a driving emotion as well, resulting in a restless quest for racial innocence, which manifests in a desire to be black, or at least, not white. We might think about these identifiers as embodying a new kind of white flight, which is a symbolic reversal of the flight into suburban whiteness of the mid-twentieth century. In this sense, Identifiers may be fleeing whiteness itself.2 The other dominant emotion that drives this group’s behaviour is contempt, which is directed primarily at two groups: ‘colour-blind’ conservative (type II) and race conscious conservative (type IV) whites. Identifiers seek to symbolically distance themselves as far as possible from these whites, while simultaneously seeking to identify with non-white cultures. When asked about the best strategies for overcoming racism or racial inequality, Identifiers are likely to endorse the idea that symbolic border crossing and other forms of cultural hybridization (e.g., hip-hop and other cultural practices of interracialism, such as cosmopolitanism; Anderson 2011) are our best strategies, coupled with educating people of all races to be personally tolerant and accepting of other races. Ethnographic studies of Identifiers are few. However, there is a literature on the cultural precursors to this type that can serve as a useful starting point, for example, Ned Polsky’s (1967) portraits of white deviants of the 1950s and 1960s, and journalistic treatments such as Norman Mailer’s (1957) musings about ‘white negroes.’ In an important sense, Identifiers have a very long cultural lineage, stretching all the way back to Dan Rice, the famous blackface performer of the 1840s. Yet the nature of racial boundaries has changed since the 1840s and the 1950s, and thus the self-fashionings of the white hipster have been restyled and reconfigured as well. For Mailer, the white hipster styled himself after black males, but today’s white hipster is much more likely to eschew signs of blackness and to instead style himself in relation to other whites. We need fresh, thick descriptions of this group. David Grazian’s ethnographies of blues aficionados in Chicago (2003) and nightclubs in Philadelphia (2007) provide a solid foundation for further research. And one might profitably begin with the not-so-sociological Stuff White People Like by Lander. Type II: Deniers Here we encounter colour-blind conservatives, whom I designate as Deniers because of their steadfast denial that racial boundaries limit non-white social advancement and mobility. For them, life in a post-discrimination society means that racial boundaries have become fluid and no longer present barriers to assimilation and success.

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My conjectures about this group are as follows: Compared with the other three types, this is a large group. It comprises largely middle-class and elite whites and tends to cluster in rural areas and affluent suburbs. Members likely view themselves as racially enlightened and view race-conscious liberals as racists who hold non-whites to a lower standard of achievement. Middle-aged whites and Boomers are well-represented in this group, but age is not a strong predictor of belonging as it is for some of the other types. They are likely to be the children of white ethnics – particularly those morally and socially conservative Irish and Jews and who strongly endorse the notion of the bootstrap society (cf. Reider 1987). Their iconic figure is the Neocon. If this group has a spokesperson, it is Bill O’Reilly. The more educated among this group press the claim that racial boundaries are not only fluid, they are entirely fictional. They have repurposed to conservative ends the social constructionist arguments about race that were traditionally promulgated by the Left. This is Chief Justice John Roberts’ position; namely, that if race is a pernicious social fiction with no basis in science, why continue to insist that it is worthy of consideration in issues of social advancement like hiring and admissions? Deniers have, over the years, accommodated themselves to the fact that the U.S. is a multicultural society, but they remain uneasy about further racial change. Disavowal of white responsibility for racial inequality is a core emotion, as is a deep contempt both for liberals and for their less educated conservative counterparts. Because of their relative affluence and wealth, this group of whites is likely to be the most segregated, not only from non-whites, but also from the other three types of whites. Their demographic homogeneity and cultural isolation strongly reinforces group cohesion and their own sense of symbolic boundedness. Their prescriptions for ending racial inequality follows quite predictably from their beliefs that racial boundaries are no longer structural barriers to non-white mobility. Like their liberal counterparts, they are big proponents of personal tolerance and prejudice reduction efforts that embody the idea that racism exists, yes, but is largely found in deviant, backward whites (i.e., Type IV Resenters, discussed below). Accordingly, they see public shaming and stigmatyping3 of racist whites as a necessary anti-racist practice and they share with other whites a sense of moral outrage when instances of racial discrimination do occur. Most members of this group view affirmative action as de jure racial discrimination against whites, and seek to end it. This is an anti-racist strategy they share with Type IV Resenters. Empirical research about this type takes two major forms: research on white ethnics who turn conservative in the face of neighbourhood change (Reider 1987; Sanjek 1988; Kefalas 2003), and research on powerful white elites who have embraced the letter of multiculturalism, but not the spirit of racial inclusion (Feagin and O’Brien 2003; Lamont 2002). Type III: Resisters Here, the iconic figure is the white ‘social justice warrior.’ The American author and activist Tim Wise is a representative figure. Less militant examples

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would include academics and other professionals working for racial justice within existing systems and institutions. Racial boundaries for this group are recognized as having a firmness and fixity that, they believe, must not be overlooked. They follow and rehearse shared narratives about the differences that race has made and continues to make in creating and maintaining inequality, and they are more cautious than Identifiers about crossing racial boundaries in search of racial innocence or romance, in part because racial crossings often result in cultural appropriation, which they disavow. About this group, we can propose the following hypotheses. They are smaller in number than Type II whites (Deniers), and like Type I whites they tend to cluster geographically in metropolitan areas and blue states. They are more educated than Type IV whites (Resenters), and tend to come from middle- and working-class backgrounds, although the children of white elites sometimes find themselves at home with this group. While it is important to note that white activists may be found in all of the cells, I think it is fair to say that for most Americans, the image of the white activist is as a progressive or radical firebrand of the Left fighting for racial, economic, or social justice. The most commonly expressed emotions among the more militant members of this type are indignation and outrage at the extent and persistence of racial inequality. Among less militant members, sympathy and compassion for non-whites prevails. However, all are united in their contempt for Deniers and anyone else they regard as ‘colour-blind,’ regardless of their political orientation. They stand with Identifiers and Deniers in believing in the virtues of personal tolerance as a remedy for racism, but would endorse much more strongly than any other type the notion that ending racial inequality will require significant structural changes in society. This distinctiveness leads me to designate them Resisters. These whites are resisting what they perceive as the ongoing operations of white supremacy through consciousness-raising and education, grass-roots mobilization, and social media advocacy for policies aimed at, for instance, reducing the racial wealth gap, ending the war on drugs, and curtailing policies of mass incarceration. Ethnographies focused on this group are a fast-growing genre. For example, see Mark Warren’s (2010) illuminating research on white racial justice activists, as well as the work of Matthew Hughey (2010). Type IV: Resenters Perhaps the most visible and controversial type of white is the race-conscious conservative. Richard Spencer, known as the spokesman for the so-called altright, is representative of this group, but the iconic figure is the redneck – the self-professed political conservative who believes racial separation is natural and desirable. We can hypothesize that this group is relatively small in number, that it skews both young and older, and that members are less well educated and poorer than the other three types. Geographically, they cluster in rural and suburban areas, in the South, West, and Southwest. They would

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likely prefer the segregated lifestyles and homogeneously white neighbourhoods of Deniers, but they do not have the economic or political capital to insulate themselves from threatening racial others. As a consequence, they experience a kind of forced integration of their workplaces and communities that only amplifies their feelings of resentment and alienation. As a group, how are these whites defining their racial situation and how are they responding to it? In a word, they feel besieged. I designate them as Resenters because their political resentment is volatile (witness the considerable energies of the Tea Partiers and the alt-right). Marginal whites populate the Resenters type more than any of the other three. It is they who have borne the brunt of racial change most directly. They have been the ones facing the most competition from non-white immigrants in unskilled labour markets. They have been the ones facing economic disinvestment and sharply declining social capital in rural areas (Davidson Buck 2001; Carr and Kefalas 2009). They have been the ones dealing with rising mortality rates and so-called deaths of despair due to suicide and lethal addictions to alcohol and opioids. And they have been the ones most consistently stigmatized and held in contempt for their racism. It is reasonable to expect them to be resentful of this state of affairs. Other common guiding emotions experienced among this type are anger and hatred born of perceived social exclusion and derogation and a strong sense of victimhood. These powerful emotions potentiate into a stirring contempt for all other whites. Having defined their racial situation as one where they are the victims of liberal attacks on their way of life and the losers in the state’s system of racial preferences, Resenters channel their anti-racism into efforts to restrict illegal immigration and to allow for more forms of self-segregation (for instance, through home-schooling); and, most importantly, into efforts to end racial preferences for non-whites. Their conservatism is typical of the dominated sectors of the dominating group. They are the petit-bourgeoisie of whiteness. Empirical research on this group is growing. The most authoritative accounts of white racial extremists have been offered by Robert Futrell and Pete Simi. In a series of articles (Futrell 2003, 2004) and a book (Futrell and Simi 2010), they document both the extent of anger and despair among this group, and the organized efforts to build a movement based on perceived white disenfranchisement.

Some surprising features of the typology The typology is premised upon the idea that white political attitudes and orientations vary independently from their attitudes about racial boundaries. Surprisingly, whites who have opposing political viewpoints can be unified with respect to their racial viewpoints. For examples, Resisters and Resenters – who on the surface look like strange bedfellows – are alike because they both tend to think of racial boundaries as strong (non-fluid, firm, or fixed).

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Whiteness (and race more generally) has a strong meaning for both of these types. They also share, to varying degrees, an anti-establishment viewpoint and discontentment with the status quo (cf. Hughey 2010). It is these two types that likely contain the energy required to shake up the system, yet at the present moment, neither group is large enough or sufficiently mobilized to bring about that change. This may be changing with the rise of the Tea Party and the emergence of the so-called alt-right in the wake of the election of Donald Trump (Skocpol and Williamson 2016; Lyons 2017). Surprisingly, Identifiers and Deniers are also alike, because they both tend to think of racial boundaries as weak and fluid, as easily crossed. Identifiers are avid boundary crossers for whom the styles and products of racialized cultures are treated more or less as community property, to which they are freely entitled. Deniers agree that race is imagined – that it should not be considered a particularly salient feature of American life – but they are not transgressive in this way that Identifiers are. Their conservatism and cultural isolationism mitigates against any such hybridizing impulses. In general, Identifiers and Deniers are resistant to Trumpism, and denounce his politics as divisive and racist. Resisters and Resenters seek more radical social change. It is these latter groups that are the most likely to spearhead change, as indicated above. A second important dynamic here is that individual whites may traverse the typology during their life course, starting out in one cell and ending up in another, due to educational attainment, class mobility, or a change in political beliefs, for example. Also, whites are often free to occupy different cells in different domains of their lives, acting in ways that accord with Type II whiteness (‘colour-blind’ conservatives) while working at their day jobs, but switching to Type I whiteness (‘colour-blind’ liberals) when out bowling with friends. This ‘type-switching’ among whites deserves more attention, as several researchers have already observed this (Perry 2002; Bush 2004; Bucholtz 2010).

Conclusions There are four major implications of this model for Critical Whiteness Studies. The first implication is that, with respect to white self-fashioning and the social identities of whites, regional, political, and lifestyle boundaries between whites have as much or more salience than interracial boundaries with non-whites. Whites construct their social identities primarily in relation to other whites. If we want to grasp the complexities of whiteness and understand its machinations, we must develop ways of observing, capturing, and analysing these intraracial dynamics. Interracial dynamics can be equally important, but for most whites in most places, the key determining forces are now intraracial. The second implication is that whites’ acute focus on intraracial differences undermines both the idea of shared white privilege and the possibility of

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shared ‘groupness.’ Many whites reject the notion of white privilege precisely because it strikes them as an overgeneralization – it applies to some whites, but not to them. This may reflect a belief among whites that, when it comes to many different kinds of privilege, there is as much or more variation among whites as there is between whites and non-whites. This is not an unreasonable thing to believe. Whites’ steady gaze on the lines that divide them from other whites likewise undermines the idea that they are somehow all part of the same group. The third implication is that political and cultural fractures and lines of solidarity among whites are the most likely sources and avenues for racial change. My approach here is actually quite similar to the approach that Lacey Ford takes in his work on the slavery question in the Old South (2009). Understanding the qualities and characteristics of internal divisions among dominant groups is crucial to understanding the course of history. Whiteness is a loose agreement among different status groups of whites about how the spoils of the system of racial domination will be distributed among them. Understanding how whites draw boundaries and lines of distinction between themselves and other whites in order to decide ‘who deserves what’ is crucial for understanding not only how that system works, but also how it can change. Such an understanding may give social justice activists a better idea of where to throw the monkey wrench or the wooden shoe, or it may offer strategies for how to build the kinds of alliances between whites and people of colour that can lead to racial progress.

Notes 1 For important statements on intersectionality that use an expansive definition of the concept – one that can more readily be applied to whiteness studies – see Glenn (2002); McCall (2005); Levine-Rasky (2011). 2 In the 1990s, whiteness scholars focused attention on the so-called “wigger” as a potentially subversive form of whiteness, and this figure, as described by David Roediger (1995), among others, corresponds to the Identifiers I describe here. 3 Stigmatyping refers to the process of marking out Others not just as different, but as socially undesirable. I prefer it to the term stereotype, since stereotypes can be based on positive attributes (Asians are good at math; Blacks are superior athletes), and since there have been compelling arguments that stereotypes are both an unavoidable consequence of social learning and an efficient way to think statistically about human difference (cf. Schauer 2006). For a more complete discussion of stigmatyping, see my book Not Quite White (Wray 2006).

Bibliography Anderson, Elijah. The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. Norton, 2011. Brander Rasmussen, Birgit, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, editors. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2001. Bucholtz, Mary. White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Bush, Melanie. Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Carr, Patrick and Maria Kefalas. Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. Beacon Press, 2009. Croll, Paul. “Modeling Determinants of White Racial Identity: Results from a New National Survey.” Social Forces, vol. 86, no. 2, 2007, pp. 613–664. Davidson Buck, Pem. Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky. Monthly Review Press, 2001. Doane, A. W. and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. Routledge, 2003. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Feagin, Joe R. and Eileen O’Brien. White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness. Beacon Press, 2003. Fiorina, Morris and Samuel Abrams. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 11, 2008, pp. 563–588. Flint, Colin. Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S. A. Routledge, 2003. Ford, Lacy. Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. Oxford University Press, 2009. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Frankenberg, Ruth. Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Duke University Press, 1997. Futrell, Robert. “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene.” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 2, 2003, pp. 275–304. Futrell, Robert. “Free Spaces, Collective Identity, and the Persistence of U.S. White Power Activism.” Social Problems, vol. 51, no. 1, 2004, pp. 16–42. Futrell, Robert and Pete Simi. American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Gallagher, Charles and France Winddance Twine, editors. “The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the ‘Third Wave’” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 4–24. Garner, Stephen. Whiteness: An Introduction. Routledge, 2007. Gitlin, Todd and Nancy Hollander. Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago. Harper & Row, 1970. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Freedom and Labor. Harvard University Press, 2002. Grazian, David. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Grazian, David. On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford University Press, 2005. Hartigan, John. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton University Press, 1999. Hartigan, John. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Duke University Press, 2005. Hartmann, Douglas, Joe Gerteis, and Penny Edgell. American Mosaic Project-Survey. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2003.

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Hartmann, Douglas, Joe Gerteis, and Paul Croll. “An Empirical Assessment of Whiteness Theory: Hidden from how Many?” Social Problems, vol. 56, no. 3, 2009, pp. 403–424. Hartmann, Douglas, David Winchester, Penny Edgell, and Joe Gerteis. “How Americans Understand Racial and Religious Differences: A Test of Parallel Items from a National Survey.” Sociological Quarterly vol. 52, no. 3, 2011, pp. 323–345. Hill, Mike, editor. Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York University Press, 1997. Hill, Mike. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York University Press, 2004. Howell, Joseph. Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families. Anchor Press, 1973. Hughey, Matthew. White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists and the Shared Meanings of Race. Stanford University Press, 2010. Jargowsky, Paul. “The Reconcentration of Poverty in the 21st Century.” Talk given at the Department of Sociology Colloquium Series. Temple University, undated. Kefalas, Maria. Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood. University of California Press, 2003. Lamont, Michèle. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Harvard University Press, 2002. Lander, Christian. Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. Random House, 2008. Lander, Christian. Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews. Random House, 2010. Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. “Intersectionality Theory Applied to Whiteness and MiddleClassness.” Social Identities, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011. Lyons, Matthew. Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right. Political Research Associates, 2017. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent. Fall, 1957. McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005. McCleod, Jay. Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Westview Press, 1987. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Excerpted from White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies, Working Paper 189. Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988. Morris, Edward W. An Unexpected Minority: White Kids in an Urban School. Rutgers University Press, 2006. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Moss, Kirby. The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of White Privilege. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Perry, Pamela. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School. Duke University Press, 2002. Pew Research Center. “Political Typology Reveals Deep Fissures on the Right and Left,” October 2017. Polsky, Ned. Hustlers, Beats, and Others. Aldine Publishing Company, 1967.

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Reider, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Harvard University Press, 1987. Rhodes, J. “‘It’s Not Just Them: It’s Whites as Well:’ Whiteness, Class and BNP Support.” Sociology, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Yale University Press, 1970. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1992. Roediger, David. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. Verso, 1994. Roediger, David. “Guineas, Wiggers, and the Dramas of Racialized Culture.” American Literary History, vol. 7, no. 4, 1995, pp. 654–668. Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Basic Books, 2006. Saito, Leland T. Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb. University of Illinois Press, 1998. Sanjek, Roger. The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. Cornell University Press, 1988. Schauer, Frederick. Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes. Harvard University Press, 2006. Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2016. Torkelson, James and Douglas Hartmann. “White Ethnicity in Twenty-First-Century America: Findings from a New National Survey.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 33, no. 8, 2010, pp. 1310–1331. Warren, Mark. Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice. Oxford University Press, 2010. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Duke University Press, 1995. Winant, Howard. “Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics.” New Left Review, vol. 225, no. 1, 1997, pp. 73–89. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006.

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“I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist” Whiteness, “post-feminism,” and the American cultural imaginary Melissa R. Sande

[Feminist scholars need to interrogate] what contexts, under what kinds of race and class situations, gender is used as what sort of signifier to cover over what kinds of things. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1990: 52)

Feminism and whiteness share a tangled and oft conflated history. In 1978, Audre Lorde wrote that feminism “refus[es] to recognize” the “very real differences between us of race, age, and sex” (Lorde 1978 [2005]: 339) and thus relensed the purported concerns of all women in the venture of feminism as a sort of masquerade for the particular interests of its middle-class and white constituency. It is, of course, no revelation to observe that this problem endures. In her 2008 essay, Claire Snyder remarks that third-wavers, inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Lorde’s work, distinguish their version of feminism from that of the second wave along these lines, and she asserts their revision is “more inclusive and diverse” (Snyder 2008: 180). In rebuttal, many second-wave feminists have claimed that the new narrative makes the second wave seem “whiter than it was” (180). In turn, and amid a chorus of challengers, Chela Sandoval argued against this defence in 2000, contending that U.S. thirdworld feminist scholarship had indeed been included in the mainstream feminism project but has been “underanalyzed” as a “demographic constituency only (women of color), and not as a theoretical or methodological approach in its own right” (Sandoval 2000: 171). M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1997) make a similar point: the larger feminist narrative has extended only “token inclusions of our texts without reconceptualizing the whole whiter, middle class, gendered knowledge base” (xvi). Such a conflicted history about race and its role in feminist criticism reflects and refracts back upon mainstream culture and hegemonic political discourse, as evidenced recently by the intersection of whiteness and gender in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. This chapter explores the deployment of whiteness as a rhetorical and ontological device in the election, and specifically the impact it had on discussions of gender and women’s rights. It examines how political imagery continues to displace women of colour and their experiences through the use of bait and switch, the universalizing tendency, and the post-racial narrative,

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or what Rebecca Clark Mane calls the “flattening […] of difference through a long list of interchangeable elements” (2012: 72). This leveraging of whiteness can be implicated in the proliferation of “post-feminism” in that it collapses the opportunity for a more productive race and gender intersectionality within the cultural imaginary and thus clears the field for descriptors such as “beyond feminism” to promulgate. As Spivak (1990) calls for attention to how gender may be used to cover up various issues, this chapter outlines how gender may conceal whiteness as a dominant discourse that asserts a specific way of being in the world, and stymies deeper progress. Earlier this year, Donald Trump told British journalist Piers Morgan: “No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far. I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone” (quoted in Kenny 2018). Such a statement appears to ignore, if not openly combat, the primacy of the moment. Discussions at the World Economic Forum in January, co-chaired by seven women, brought pay inequality, sexual harassment, and other women’s issues to the top of the agenda. Echoing this priority, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently addressed the global issue of entrenched gender inequality and discrimination in urgent terms: “MeToo, TimesUp, the Women’s March – these movements tell us that we need to have a critical discussion on women’s rights” (quoted in Bayoumy and Barkin 2018). Yet often the imperative for “women’s rights” glosses over the differing impacts on and visibilities of specific groups of women, such as those of colour. At the intersection of whiteness and women’s rights, a narrative of progress and success and the prospect for the extension of same co-opts the lived experiences of women of colour. Those who propel the idea of being situated beyond feminism do so with a reliance on this false and flattening story of triumph, bringing us to comments like Trump’s: that feminism now goes “too far” – that feminism has achieved its aim and has no legitimate boundaries left to push. While the current “post-feminism” fascination can be seen as a centrepiece element of Trumpist rhetorical hijacking, it is more productive to note the sameness with which such a mechanism also licenses progressives to usurp voices from women of colour through whiteness.1 “Postfeminism” dual-purposes the limited success of the feminist project to capitalize on division within the constituency and yet wax victorious more broadly, positioning the latter to dampen real concerns surrounding the former. It also presents a perilous narrative across the political spectrum and, in its efficacy, points to a fulcrum of more systemic hegemony. It is therefore a mistake to attribute “post-feminism” solely to the political right’s dismissal of marginalized groups and for that, this chapter traces a fuller and deeper genealogy of significant images and slogans from the 2016 election that may unmask a more foundational containment of women of colour and the use of whiteness as a rhetorical device in doing so. We will see that intersectionality, a concept upon which third-wavers pride themselves vigorously, is effectively colonized by hegemonic narrative production across the discourse through rhetorical reinforcement and the function of whiteness as an ontology.

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Feminism: A troubled past Responding to the second and third wave’s shared narrative of overemphasis on middle-class white women, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” re-centres on the critical concept of intersectionality: the ways in which gender, race, nationality, sexuality, and other social categories interface to reinforce each other and compound the disadvantage of subjects. In Ann duCille’s 1996 essay, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood,” examining the political and cultural implications of a then newfound interest in black women as subjects of academic inquiry, she suggests, in re her title, that this boom reached “occult status” and that ultimately this exoticism constituted a contemporary commodification of black women. The pumping of interest, she surmises, denigrates exactly what it means to “honor” by “treating it not like a discipline with a history […] but like an anybody-can-play pickup game played on an open field” (95). In other words, the study of black feminism was expropriated by a benevolent but pervasive oversimplification of the intersectionality at play. Rebecca L. Clark Mane’s essay “Transmuting Grammars of Whiteness in Third-Wave Feminism” (2012) argues that, despite diversity’s place as a named priority for third-wave feminism, the project has not shifted enough for the “inclusion of racial difference [to be] fundamentally transformative” (72), and she attributes this failing to unexamined whiteness, employing the frame Chela Sandoval calls a “presence-absence” of diversity in the third wave (Sandoval 2000: 95). In “presence-absence,” the welcoming of difference demonstrates inclusivity as representation without activating inclusion as revision, the potential and necessity of doing so sublimated by a dominant narrative that is unchanged, white and middle-class in its structure, irrespective of any expansion in its field of interest. In her essay, Clark Mane examines four “syntaxes of whiteness” responsible for this marginalization: the “post-racial” historical narrative, the “postmodern abstraction of women-ofcolor,” irreconcilable contradiction, and “the flattening and proliferation of difference through a long list of interchangeable elements” (2012: 72). All of these, she asserts, allow for the presence of racial diversity while undermining active inclusion as they “simultaneously enact a containment or functional absence” and therefore “garrison feminism from a full epistemological reorganization that serious engagement with the intersectionality of gender and race would necessitate” (72). Taking for context the treatment of gender in the 2016 election, I use Clark Mane’s “flattening and proliferation of difference” as a method for rhetorical analysis after first, to return to Crenshaw, identifying the repeated uses of bait and switch and universalizing in the foreclosure of a more intersectional understanding of social categorization. However, some critics seek to demonstrate the progress made by intersectionality. Lola Okolosie’s 2014 essay cites the term’s increased currency in feminism, and quotes a 2013 article in The Guardian in which journalist Kira

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Cochrane writes, “[t]he majority of activists I speak to define themselves as intersectional feminists.” Okolosie is particularly interested in how those who have been historically marginalized engage social media to address a larger audience. Through various outlets, she suggests, “black feminists have been able to seek redress when and where privileged voices within the movement have sought to speak on our behalf” (108). Okolosie’s essay falls short in that it merely lists examples of feminists incorporating the term in their work, or instances in which race has become more visible as it intersects with gender (e.g., the proliferation of “I live it” on social media or #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen). In closing, she quotes Jennifer C. Nash: “Ultimately, this plea for increased intersectionality suggests that ‘attending to’ or naming difference will undo hegemony and exclusivity within our own ranks” (Nash 2013: 4). Okolosie then diverges slightly from Nash, noting that “[t]he listing of difference does not in and of itself create the possibility of systemic change” but, she claims, it “serves to highlight those who are absent from feminist discourse” (Okolosie 2014: 94) Attending to that absence, in her view, provides a better understanding of what bell hooks (1994) calls an “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (24). I would argue that Okolosie’s assessment of progress loses traction in light of the 2016 election and that the rhetoric therein instead tells us that intersectionality is often rendered inoperative within mainstream discussions of gender. The rhetorical reaffirmation of whiteness muddies the space for intersectional nuance, even as the rendering of whiteness as a discourse aids its potency by obscuring its metaphysical basis: to erase women of colour from conversations about gender and women’s rights. While Clark Mane (2012) characterizes the “post-racial” historical narrative as a syntax of whiteness, I offer that it more accurately describes the outcome of whiteness as an ontological state. Simply, the potency of whiteness enjoys an even distribution at the level of being prior to the variance of rhetorical choice.

Whiteness as rhetorical device Whiteness Studies proffers a variety of definitions for its subject: as a construct, phenomenon, site, discursive formation, etc. In Racial Formations in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) describe whiteness as a structural racial formation, “extending from the shaping of individual racial identities to the structuring of collective political action on the terrain of the state” (66). For them, racial categories are intrinsically determined by various social and political forces. Whiteness has also been labelled a location of unidentified privilege (e.g., Frankenberg 1993; Hurtado 1996) or a constructed racial identity (Roediger 1994). Lately, it has been presented as a “structuring ideology,” or “epistemology that produces, secures, and maintains material inequalities” (Clark Mane 2012: 74).2 Building from the same, this chapter treats whiteness as an epistemology, a way of knowing, but further conceptualizes it as an ontology, a way of knowing and being in the

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world. Whiteness, captured henceforth as a rhetorical image in the 2016 election, creates meaning and being in the world by co-opting racial identities, squelching opposition to racial inequality, and creating wide distraction from intersectionality as a practice. The term rhetorical image denotes selective withholding and the shaping of visual messaging; while this definition may stress the conveyance of meaning, it is important in the context of the recent presidential election to note whiteness’s ontological function, or the recall of meaning, and accordingly its rhetorical force as an echo of implicit, preexisting, and preconditional validities within being. Only by sequencing whiteness prior to elective formation (rhetoric, syntax, et al.) at the point of pre-knowledge or the assumption of core ontological postulation may we account for its “potential to infiltrate and colonize even progressive discourses” (ibid.: 75) and the overwhelming prerogative of its power to shape and maintain the American cultural imaginary. Where intersectionality attempts to bring attention to the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories crisscross, allowing for a forensic trail whereby the hegemon may be better understood and perhaps marshalled away from the subjugation of the Other, whiteness mutes these intricacies and thus embosses the crude and binary narrative of itself as colonizer of the non-white. William Spanos frames this “reductive ontological drive” (2000: 19) through the work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. This drive, Spanos maintains, is to “reduce the recalcitrant and threatening Other to” what Heidegger calls “standing [disposable] reserve”. Thus, the Other is understood to have assumed its proper place in a process Spanos calls the “colonization of physis” (19, emphasis in original) whereby, in Foucault’s estimation, the force of Otherness may be transformed into a “useful and docile body” (Foucault 1977: 135). When the Other is reconstituted as useful and docile, the truth of its being may be warped in the service of whiteness. To further expand upon this understanding of whiteness and its function, Raka Shome explains that whiteness defies interrogation in that the “rhetoric of deflection and evasiveness are a manifestation of the very problem of whiteness” and “the problem of how whiteness refuses to name itself […] how it deters from acknowledging the larger issues of how the everyday organization of social and cultural relations function to confer benefits and systemic advantages to whites” (Shome 2000: 367). Peter McLaren and his co-authors explain, “labeling whiteness provides a sociopolitical optic through which the practices that produce structural privilege […] can be examined and addressed” (McLaren et al. 2001: 204). In this we can see that whiteness is an ontological device; it creates a richly defended way of being in the world where difference and visibility are tightly mediated or, as Charles W. Mills (2008) explains, because whiteness is strategic in what it includes and excludes: exclusion of, for example, evidence of the experiences of the nonwhite world is necessarily for the purpose of serving white interests. Such mediation not only precedes and thus positions itself to determine syntactical questions of articulation and argument but, crucially, predetermines the

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reception of same. It is in the inevitabilities that comprise the receiver where the re-distillation of whiteness from an epistemological site to an ontological one provides a critical advantage; the being of the practitioner necessarily informs the nature of the method; the ontological pre-emption provides to whiteness as a colonizing discourse its force. This ordering (and pre-ordering) can be observed, in my analysis of the 2016 campaign cycle, along three modes: the bait and switch, the universalizing tendency, and the flattening and proliferation of difference through a long list of interchangeable elements. As I will demonstrate, the bait and switch, most common among the three, focuses on women of colour, but does so only to “make visible white female suffering” (Alexander-Floyd 2012: 9). In a similar act of selectivity, the universalizing tendency occurs when political actors take an issue specific to women of colour and suggest that the experience is “relevant to a broader community of women, the effect of which is to typically highlight the plight of white women and not that of black women” (8). Lastly and most finely, the tactic of flattening and proliferating difference deprives and negates history, thereby enabling what Clark Mane (2012) calls “a syntax of equivalences” in which “all differences and marginalizations become theoretically equivalent and thus interchangeable” (81). This is the third angle by which the rhetorical mechanism of disappearing difference may be viewed and, taken with the prior two within the context of the most recent presidential election, I will present a rhetorical push toward the post-feminism narrative that emanates from and effects a reinforcement of the ontology of whiteness.

The cultural imaginary and colonizing discourses The impact of whiteness as a colonizing discourse must be addressed in three phases: the rise of “post-feminism” as a means to further silence women of colour; its attendant relationship with other colonizing discourses; and “postfeminism” in the cultural imaginary. Misha Kavka’s essay “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the ‘Post’ in Post-Feminism?” (2002) begins by exploring the particular aspects of feminism that have risen and receded to shape the rise of the “post-feminism” debate. She discusses the anger, grief, and nostalgia surrounding the term “post-feminism” and surmises that “feminism may not be dead, but something of it has passed away, something that the ‘post’ marks as being sorely missed or loftily dismissed” (31). Part of that “post” or past is a collectivity of the feminist project in which the “we” pronoun might be credibly used but, as the examples in this chapter will show, the supposed first-person plural tends to subsume the experiences of particular groups under the discursive colonization of whiteness. Kavka additionally suggests “post” to be indicative of “feminism [erasing] itself out of existence by its very success” (32), yet this “success” is, as I argue throughout, limited by and predicated on the reinforcement of whiteness. Kavka argues that any definition of “post-feminism” is “about securing a feminist history,” or, more accurately, a white feminist history (32).

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This leads to post-feminism’s intersection with other colonizing discourses. Using Kavka’s line, the feminist history to observe, produced jointly by second- and third-wave shortcomings, is secured as a paradoxical schism: feminism may be retired for both the apparent completion of its aim and the abnegation of its most vulnerable constituents. It has succeeded in its failure and failed in its success. Therefore, the notion of a position where one may now exist beyond feminism finds voice in both liberal and conservative reprisals. Compounding this trouble, the disrepair and instability of the feminist narratives provides an opening to attack it for its perceived nuisance alone. By way of example, Trump has equated feminism with other movements he labels chaotic and in need of containment, like Black Lives Matter.

Gender as colonized by whiteness: The example of the 2016 election The terminology of colonization serves to cast whiteness as a usurpation of the experiences of women of colour from discussions about gender and gender rights. As previously explored, feminism’s narrative space remains a fundamentally white zone. The nature of the real but limited progress of the feminist project invites the rise of discourses like “post-feminism” and the further silencing of women of colour in that such gains, while enjoyed unevenly along racial lines, are distorted, wittingly or no, as total victory by both a reductive opposition and the middle-class foibles of some number of supporters. Totality of victory, as so espoused, carries political utility in eschewing more difficult particularity for the happy success of universalization. For example, Hillary Clinton’s “Mirrors” ad from September 2016 opens with Clinton and a young girl on stage; Clinton is embracing and comforting the girl in front of a large crowd. The ad then shows a series of other young girls in which we see each look at herself in a mirror for a few seconds before cutting to the next girl. Several races and ethnicities are represented: African American, Hispanic, Asian (though most of the girls are white). Donald Trump is overlaid in voiceover: “I’d look her right in that fat ugly face of hers […] she’s a slob […] she ate like a pig […] a person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a ten” (Clinton 2016). The ad closes with the text: “Is this the president we want for our daughters?” The tidy use of “our daughters” promotes a sense of sameness among the young girls and the notion of shared experience. This ad thus exemplifies Crenshaw’s bait and switch. Women of colour are plagued not only by impossible ideals about the shapes and sizes of their figures, but also by the white aesthetic that underlines those standards. Conversely, white women can only suffer from cultural images of beauty while retaining some systemic advantage by virtue of their whiteness. In the plastering of a common denominator onto a cultural field fraught with racial history, the ad includes black women “only to make visible white female suffering” and “black women stand as proxy for would-be white victims” (Alexander-Floyd 2012: 9). The ad includes women of colour in what Crenshaw decries as side-lining or inclusion in a “tokenistic manner”

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(1991: 1260). In this way, Clinton’s embrace of the white girl in the first image of the ad can be seen, perhaps, as fitting and surely indicative of the broader rhetorical error in which a rightful focus on gender discrimination is allowed, by dint of lazy, sloppy, and neglectful narrativizing, to reify the racial status quo. This is to say that, in the balancing of gender and race, implicit rhetorical priority must matter more than stated principle if, as a body politic, we are ever to tend away from easy and hazardous internalization. In a longer Clinton ad that barely saw any air time, 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan-American, discusses the verbal abuse she received from Trump. The focus of this ad, like “Mirrors,” is on Trump’s preoccupation with Machado’s weight in the months following her pageant victory and as such amounts to a careful selection. While there is a fleeting mention of Trump having called Machado “Miss Housekeeping,” in a coded reference to the stereotyping of Hispanics with this kind of labour, the ad immediately turns attention back to his comments about her weight. Here is an example of the universalizing tendency: the affront at hand, roughly as racist as it is misogynistic, becomes misconstrued as going “beyond the experience of women of color” and “relevant to a broader community of women, the effect of which is to typically highlight the plight of white women” (Alexander-Floyd 2012: 8). The image of Hillary Clinton’s literal shattering of the glass ceiling at the Democratic National Convention provides the final encapsulation from her campaign of the rhetorical/ontological presence of whiteness. In the culminating presentation, photos of past presidents flash in historical order to form a mosaic glass ceiling that is animated to shatter as Clinton herself appears to accept the nomination from the DNC. This, of course, physicalizes the linear thrust of history as a singular vector of progress. In her brief speech, she says, “this is your victory […] this is your night” and “we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet” (CBS News 26 July 2016). Here, again, is the universalizing tendency. Clinton’s use of “we,” “our,” and “your” throughout the speech, combined with the camera cutting to women of various age groups and ethnicities in the audience, attempts the inclusion of all women in her accomplishment. Colour, class, and sexual orientation are not considered here. Women of colour and their double oppression are effectively erased from what would otherwise be a more problematic narrative. Clinton, a white woman from a privileged class, has received the nomination, and so we all have. And what do we need feminism for if the ceiling has been shattered for all on a state-of-the-art jumbotron? Viewers witness in this triumphalism the flattening and proliferation of difference. As described by Patricia Hill Collins, “socially constructed differences emerging from historical patterns of oppression” are “submerged within a host of more trivial differences” (2000: 63). The reductive image of the shattered ceiling isolates gender as the sole issue at hand, making a triviality of the diverse audience and insisting, as the camera pans to women of various races and ethnicities celebrating the moment, that any woman can achieve what Clinton has and that not only her

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political accomplishment but, more troublingly, her potentiality is shared by all. This feel-good moment, set, ironically, to the tune of Alicia’s Keys’s “This Girl Is on Fire,” concludes with Clinton saying: “If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say, I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next” (CBS News 26 July 2016). With this, she ignores the reality of systemic privilege, whiteness included, that allows for such a moment to exist for her specifically. Donald Trump’s rhetorical manipulations reinforce whiteness more baldly. They are less a question of flawed selectivity than active projection and so their analysis calls for a different vocabulary and approach. Articulations of gender and race rarely intersect within Trumpist rhetoric by design: in useful isolation, both catalyse a bait and switch toward the assertion of white primacy. Trump and members of his campaign often employ the universalizing tendency – the discussion of “struggling Americans” and “those left behind” by the previous administration – in their assumptive advocacy of non-white and lower-class citizens. This professed inclusivity, of course, consistently precedes a pivot where his concern for struggling Americans reveals itself as premised upon a perpetuation of whiteness: he assured voters that as the “law and order” candidate, he would protect them against the Mexican “rapists” that had infiltrated their country; his denunciation of the David Duke endorsement was grudging and belated; his Muslim travel ban was enacted by executive order a week after his inauguration. In another incidence of white credentialing, Trump frequently and brusquely interjected with the same line when asked specific questions about allegations of assault or sexist comments in the final presidential debate: “Nobody has more respect for women than I do” (Bloomberg News 2016). In a racial context that extrapolates the gendered implication, Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe observes that the practice of whiteness “maintain[s] and advance[s] racist ideologies not only through what is not said, but also what remains absent,” or absence as a syntax (2000: 66). By this, Clark Mane (2012) takes Rowe to mean that “locating whiteness requires reading absences” and “privileging syntax (how something is said) over content (what is said)” (74, emphasis in original). In the case of Trump, the absence of the what is total and enunciates the force and bluster of the how as syntax for a jarringly explicit articulation of white licence by which a non-response may be abided. Through this lens and amid this maladroit whitewashing, Trump’s broad categorization of “all Americans” – “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be a president for all Americans, and this is so important to me” – wholesales “those left behind” as Americans without aspect, erasing the variance of systemic oppression. This overbearing unification ignores the disproportion of disenfranchisement in order to claim demagogic ground for white victimhood, and it presents to the hegemon a renewed opportunity for “re-codification” or “re-colonization” as described by Foucault (1977: 86). In his January 30, 2018 State of the Union Address, Trump declared,

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In this Trump provides a listing connoting a sameness effecting a flattening of difference. To refer back to the Trumpist proclivity for rhetorical sequestering of social elements cultivating an anti-intersectionality, I would note here that in spite of, or, one ventures, due to the women’s march that took place on his inauguration day, gender has not made the list. Earlier, in Trump’s eleventh hour electoral attempts to speak and appeal directly to African American voters, he said, “[n]o group has been more economically harmed by decades of illegal immigration than low-income African American workers” (Bloomberg Politics 2016), offering a visibility (and a brazen example of the bait and switch) that Delia Aguilar rejects in that it has the “paradoxical effect of ostensibly recognizing the ‘other’ at the same time that it conceals the material conditions underpinning that marginality” (1997: 154). Trump acknowledges difference, but neatly contains it, and, by this prerogative, demonstrates that whiteness is the norm of being in the world and the arbiter of what is possible. When asked about female Black Lives Matter protestors who interrupted Bernie Sanders at a rally, Trump said, “I thought it was terrible that Bernie Sanders allowed that microphone to be ripped out of his hand, because that’s essentially what happened” (CBS News 18 July 2016). In a common rhetorical practice of his campaign, Trump thus draws an association between lawlessness or chaos and people of colour. In another interview, when pressed about whether Black Lives Matter was dangerous, he said, “I don’t know that, I can’t answer that question, nobody can. All I know is that the police are tremendous people […] they do, overall, a tremendous job, and they have to be allowed to do their job” (CNN News 1 September 2015). Again, he links blackness with disobedience and criminality, thereby reserving law, order, and stability for whiteness. Trump would go on to exclaim, “[w]e want law and order” and “[y]ou see them marching […] you see them calling death to the police […] and that’s not acceptable” (ibid.). “I’ve seen them marching down the street, essentially calling death to the police!” he said in another interview (CBS News 18 July 2016). In Mythologies (1972), Roland Barthes identifies rhetorical modes that establish and validate hegemonic systems of power, like that of whiteness. These, he suggests, constitute “a rhetoric of supremacy” that “calls up possibilities and prohibitions for thought and behavior” portrayed as “the most seemingly innocuous forms of personal and everyday life” (quoted in Sandoval 2000: 117). Trump inverts this cultural leverage as terror: the image

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of angry protestors walking down one’s very own street and the notion of violent insurrection threaten the comfort and banality of everyday life, itself a well established site of hegemonic racial messaging and no coincidental target for Trumpist manipulation. Thusly may we search out whiteness if we privilege the nature of the audience captured by the how over the nature of the audience stipulated within the what. Similar coding undergirds Trump’s rhetorical forays into post-feminism: his stated concern for “everyone” (what) gives way to the notion of feminism having gone “too far” (how). In both cases, the privation of particularity undermines intersectionality. Formlessness abets invisibility. As mentioned, and as testament to anti-intersectionality, gender was regularly set apart from other social considerations within the Trump campaign, yet its treatment in isolation covered rhetorical terrain similar to that of Hillary Clinton. At Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2017, Kellyanne Conway said: “It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly is very proabortion” (Business Insider 2017). She went on, “I look at myself as a product of my choices and not a victim of my circumstances.” Conway explained that her single mother was left without child support or alimony at a young age and with only a high school education; she didn’t “rely upon government,” (read: she rejected the perceived stigma of food stamps or other assistance programs); instead, she relied upon her family and her faith, a circumstance Conway characterizes as a “timeless opportunity.” Again, the universalizing tendency points to systemic issues overwhelmingly plaguing the non-white and, in response, decontextualizes as unqualified panacea a bootstraps argument that owes heavily to white privilege. Ivanka Trump’s discussions of gender follow a similar line. In late 2016 and early 2017, corporate media attempted to frame Ivanka as feminism’s best hope vis-à-vis her father’s incoming administration. The Boston Herald wrote “Ivanka lead[s] the way on new feminist agenda” (2017); The New York Times asked, “Will Ivanka Trump Be the Most Powerful First Daughter in History?” (Stanley and Bernstein 2016) and The Washington Post noted that “Ivanka Trump plans to focus primarily on issues related to women and families” (Eilperin and Tumulty 2016). In an interview about her father’s run for the presidency, Ivanka remarked: “Hopefully I can be a small part of changing the narrative around what it looks like to be a woman who works today […] I want to enable and support women in architecting this ideal life for themselves” (CNN News 2015). Yet in practice, much of Ivanka’s advocacy neglects the interests of underprivileged women of colour. Her proposal on maternity leave, for example, is limited to married women. Her proposal for a tax deduction on the cost of child care would impact only those who have something to deduct from, meaning the deduction would disregard the poorest women who, naturally, need it most. While these examples both contain the universalizing tendency – attention paid to issues that impact most women (and women of colour most keenly) but framed to redress the

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concerns of white women only – they must first attest to whiteness as the dominant mode of being in the world if, putting policy aside, we are to reconcile Ivanka Trump’s progressivist conviction. To wit, seeing whiteness as an ontological device in this manner may help us to account for the whitened well-meaning across spectra of ability, background, and political persuasion. In the aforementioned interview with Piers Morgan (quoted in Kenny 2018), Donald Trump assesses, “[n]o, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist […] that would be going too far,” calling back to Conway’s rationale that she is not a feminist because contemporary feminism presents itself, in her estimation, as anti-man. Central to these protestations is the false dilemma, the Manichean worldview wherein difference is reduced to a singularity robbed of intersectional nuance and ripe for hegemonic “re-codification.” Pressingly though, in the parlance of Clark Mane (2012), this confused regression amounts to the what, a rhetorical formation. It is within the how, the ontological commonality between Trump’s how and Clinton’s, that I discern a whitening whereby gender itself may be whitened by the benevolent and the demagogic alike.

Conclusion Drilling past the political arena to our larger cultural imaginary, there are other implications for feminism more broadly here. In a July 2017 article in The Atlantic, “Everyday Sexism in a ‘Post-Feminist’ World,” Hayley Krischer (2017) discusses the disconnect between popular rhetoric and the lived experience of girls and young women. She juxtaposes the use of terms such as “girl power,” a third-wave slogan, and “alpha girls” in media against interviews from a recent book, Smart Girls: Success, School and the Myth of PostFeminism (Pomerantz and Raby 2017), in which the interviewees describe cruel jokes about gender, constant mockery from boys their own age, and sexist remarks reminiscent of 1950s culture. Damningly, many of the girls between ages twelve and eighteen interviewed for the book didn’t always see the insults and remarks as sexism: “They thought it was something they shouldn’t take too seriously” (Raby quoted in Krischer 2017). At issue is victorious cultural messaging divorced from persistent (perhaps resurgent) sexism and gender discrimination: in politics, in school systems, in the workforce, etc. Smart Girls authors Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby theorize that girls receive a false assurance of gender equality from “post-feminism,” a picture of a world run by women stemming not from lived experience “but through the media and pop culture,” and they use this misconception to deescalate the real threat of sexism around them. Krischer concurs in quoting Rosalind Gill’s analysis, which surmises that “post-feminism” is a “sensibility” derived from cultural and political portrayals, not “girls’ own experiences” (quoted in Krischer). Krischer further writes: “girls have been so inundated with messages in popular culture about girl empowerment […] that it’s hard for them not to believe that they’re living in a post-feminism society” (Krischer 2017).

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I return to Kavka in closing for her mining of another, more promising irony from the prevalence of “post” in feminism: “the ‘post’ indicates both an end to feminism and a platform for new feminist debate precisely because it provides a focal point for articulating the meaning, usage, and constituencies of feminism today” (2002: 32). Pursuant to such a project, Clark Mane maintains that a truly “inclusive, intersectional, and antiracist feminism” would need to recognize “the importance of race as a historically specific, structural, and relational category that is coconstitutive with gender” (2012: 89). As indexed in this chapter, whiteness as a hegemonic discourse pre-emptively empowered by its colonizing ontology (i.e. as a colonizing discourse) perfidiously resists Clark Mane’s prescription by canny selection, reduction, and revision. Whether subtextual and irresponsible, or outright and coercive, to include women of colour in order to serve the interests of whiteness by containing or diluting their experiences is to abandon intersectional dialogue in the public imaginary and risk atavism. As Nikol Alexander-Floyd summarizes, “visibility does not translate into authority to retain voice or serve as a shield from appropriation” (2012: 13). In order to pursue truly progressive feminism or run as a president for all Americans, it is necessary to afford the experiences of women of colour their proper weight of being and not manipulate the portrayal of those experiences or fall for such through the rhetorical and ontological trap of whiteness.

Notes 1 “Post-feminism” can be understood in several ways: as “beyond feminism” or as a revision of feminism. This chapter works with the former because the primary concern is about how popular rhetoric and imagery promote the idea of being done with, and beyond, the work of feminism. See, for example, Angela McRobbie’s essay “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture” (2004). 2 See also Charles W. Mills’s 2008 book chapter “White Ignorance” on this topic.

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hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994. Hurtado, Aida. The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. University of Michigan Press, 1996. Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 29–44. Kenny, Caroline. “Trump: ‘I Wouldn’t Say I’m a Feminist.’” CNN Politics, 29 January 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/28/politics/president-trump-not-feminist-piers-m organ-interview/index.html. Krischer, Hayley. “Everyday Sexism in a ‘Post-Feminist World.” The Atlantic, 12 July 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/everyday-sexism- in-a -post-feminist-world/533241/. Accessed 25 October 2018. Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Sex and Class: Women Redefining Difference.” Feminist Theory: A Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Wendy K. Kolmer and Frances Bartkowski. McGraw-Hill, 2005, pp. 338–342. McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, pp. 1771–1800. McLaren, Peter, Aimee M. Carrillo-Rowe, Rebecca L. Clark, and Phillip A. Craft. “Labeling Whiteness: Decentering Strategies of White Racial Domination.” Labeling: Pedagogy and Politics, edited by Glenn M. Hudak and Paul Kihn. Routledge, 2001, pp. 203–224. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 255–264. Mills, Charles W. “White Ignorance.” Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger. Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 230–249. Nash, Jennifer C. “On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor.” The Scholar and Feminist Online, vol. 8, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1–4. Okolosie, Lola. “Beyond ‘Talking’ and ‘Owning’ Intersectionality.” Feminist Review, vol. 108, 2014, pp. 90–96. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Routledge, 1994. Pomerantz, Shauna and Rebecca Raby. Smart Girls: Success, School, and the Myth of Post-Feminism. University of California Press, 2017. Roediger, David R. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. Verso, 1994. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Shome, Raka. “Outing Whiteness.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 17, no. 3, 2000, pp. 366–371. Snyder, Claire R. “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, vol. 34, no. 1, 2008, pp. 175–196. Spanos, William. America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym. Routledge, 1990. Stanley, Alessandra and Jacob Bernstein. “Will Ivamka Trump Be the Most Powerful First Daughter in Hostory?” The New York Times, 3 December 2016. https://www. nytimes.com/2016/12/03/fashion/ivanka-trump-first-daughter.html. Accessed 25 October 2018.

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Part II

Whiteness and global politics

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4

A journey through Europe’s heart of whiteness Vron Ware

Introduction Every journey involves departing from a fixed point in order to arrive at another, and an expedition anticipated in advance is no different. In homage to Adrienne Rich, whose “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” (written in 1984, published in 1994) emphasises how important it is to keep moving, I feel bound to declare that, although I was originally intending to speak these words in Dortmund, Germany, it was in London, England that I began searching for them. I was honoured to receive the invitation to speak at the conference that inspired this book. I welcomed the opportunity to leave my own country to go to Germany, to think together with colleagues from many different places and from different disciplinary backgrounds, about the problems and possibilities that emerge from making whiteness a topic for study; particularly when asked to scrutinise “the intricacies of whiteness in western society and culture from a decidedly transnational/global perspective,” as the editors put it in their call for papers. I liked the fact that the conference organisers wanted us to reject from the outset an abstract version of whiteness, divorced from the specificities of time, place and history. Instead, they directed the conference to explore how the fissile properties of whiteness are deeply enmeshed with, and calibrated by, other social, political and cultural categories, both within and without their national contexts and local situations. But as 2016 wore on, this prospect became more and more daunting and pressing. At least I was sure about how I was going to travel, knowing that I would rather spend the whole morning on the train, taking a route that required two changes, than take a plane. With tickets booked, teaching commitments rearranged, the only issue was the pressure to write this talk on the intersections of whiteness.

I In all our countries, we have seen a resurgence of the ways in which the adjective ‘white’ is used to add explanatory force, often taking centre stage whether it is a matter of supremacy, guilt or fragility; whether applied to

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identity, in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, appearance, geographical location; or privilege, indicating myopia, silence, ignorance and/or complicity; or politics – feminist, working-class, ethno-nationalist, exclusionary, angry and/ or murderous. It was once a radical move to draw attention to whiteness as a social construct that was invisible yet normative, absolutely relational, deeply rooted in historical processes and everyday discourse. To name whiteness was to reveal the foundation stone of all racial categories, the pedestal that holds the scales determining whose lives are worth more than others based on the colour of their skin. Yet it has been hard to define since, as Roger Hewitt (2007) pointed out, ‘whiteness’ itself (i.e. physically being ‘white’) is not the issue. As an analytical tool, he argued, whiteness has been usefully conceived through the historicised and gendered notion of citizenship, whether this is achieved through the status of becoming settlers or identifying as natives: either way, whiteness could be used to open up ways that some groups were endowed with a sense of being ‘born to rule’ or setting the ‘standard by which all others are judged’, or erecting a “grid through which all things should be perceived” (Hewitt 2007: 42; cf. also Jacobson 1989, 2006). In the 1990s, when new transatlantic conversations on whiteness emerged, there was a readiness to ground research within the framework of specific places – cities, regions and countries – and to make the effort to speak from somewhere, even if that was mostly the US. This was partly connected to a desire to be politically accountable, to intervene in social movements in which we were participants as much as addressing others in academia. I believe there is now a danger that we have lost sight of the radical power of naming whiteness as a move to denature racism, to expose the processes through which the very notion of ‘race’ and racial hierarchy acquires its formidable grip. I worry that it has simply become another way to entrench the idea of unbridgeable, incommensurable difference, contributing to the hardening of individual and collective arteries at a time when we desperately need new imaginative forms of solidarity that reach across the permutations of lived experience. We are all familiar with the problems of ontologising whiteness as a homogeneous category, unmoored from any connection to time and place, or as an abstraction. As poet Adrienne Rich might have said: “severed from the doings of living people, fed back to people as slogans” (1994: 213). Linda Martín Alcoff begins her reflexive work, The Future of Whiteness by claiming: This is a book about a topic many would rather avoid. That topic is white identity, its difficult past, complicated present, and uncertain future. Before we can consider its future […], we need to understand what whiteness is as a social and historical identity. (2015: 1) Despite the timeliness of her topic, however, nowhere in the first couple of pages does she mention where she is speaking from, or who the ‘we’ is whose

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‘white identity’ she is addressing. But it quickly becomes clear that she is situated within the US and it is mainly this context that she is addressing. Perhaps it is easier to be more sensitive to this problem living outside the US, particularly when trying to factor in the many national contexts in Europe. But in this era of media saturation, the cultural power of the US global empire dominates academic publishing as well as entertainment. The fuzziness of the ‘we’ invites a one-size-fits-all formula of race theory, devised in the context of one society, but often applied directly to others, where it might well resonate, but not fit exactly. The danger is that readers end up with a generic, ahistorical sense of whiteness as a category of ‘race’ that appears both natural and essential. This is a very long way from James Baldwin’s observation, “[t] he American situation is very peculiar and it may be without precedent in the world” (1985: 412).

II This is connected to another problem in which whiteness is evoked not as a placeless abstraction, but as an entity that has acquired a volatile life of its own in recent political discourse: that is, ‘the white working class.’ We have certainly seen this epithet tossed to and fro in the past decade in the UK, and especially where it has been used as the driving force of the EU referendum result in June 2016. It re-emerged with new vigour in the aftermath of the US election, providing an explanation for both Clinton’s defeat and Trump’s ascendancy. In the UK, the Leave vote was initially blamed on this section of the population, who were cast as resentful, injured, ignored and ignorant. Writing against this trend, sociologist Emma Jackson (2016) protested at the way that Sunderland was being used to create a narrative “about Brexit as a protest vote by deindustrialised white working-class people – who are then set in contrast to a metropolitan multicultured elite”. The reality, she argued, was that things were far more complicated than that. She quoted journalist Gary Younge (2016), who pointed out that journalists struck out for the North of England and “anthropologised the British working class as though they were a lesser evolved breed from distant parts, all too often portraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them”. She also cited two news articles that portrayed Sunderland in this vein. In the first, a New York Times article quoted a young man called John: “‘We’re segregated from the south, and the north is a barren wasteland’, he said, wearing a heavy black leather jacket with metal studs despite the summer heat. ‘It’s us against them’” (de Freitas-Tamura quoted in Jackson 2016). In the second, The Irish Times ran a piece that began: “This depressed northern city is like ground zero for the Brexit movement” (Geoghegan quoted in Jackson 2016). Jackson’s own analysis was that this “tight focus on the de-industrialised white working class as the Brexit story missed the proliferation of state, elite and middle-class forms of racism which may be institutionalised, more polite, or less visible” (emphasis in original).

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Another problem was that it echoed vocal expressions of xenophobia without probing the local conditions that might have shaped those views: in particular the concept of postimperial melancholia (cf. Gilroy 2004), which she summarises as “a longing for the glory days of prosperity and shipbuilding that are tied up with histories of empire” (Jackson 2016). The exclusive focus on the “de-industrialised white working class” reaffirmed a key argument of the Leave campaign that promoted a story of “white victimhood” rather than challenging the wider impact of austerity endured by a population already impoverished by a long drawn-out process of economic restructuring. But as Anoop Nayak observed well over a decade earlier, “even in the mainly white de-industrial landscapes of Northeast England, globalization is as uneven as it is contradictory” (2003b: 320). His research into how young people in the area were imbricated in the making of a post-industrial whiteness illustrated the extent to which “contemporary generations can dismantle whiteness to forge transnational new ethnicities, befitting of global times” (305). This supports Jackson’s final point that this obsession with “the white working class” missed complex stories both of racism and resistance that exist in places like Sunderland. As she emphasises, “the far right has tried many times to gain ground in Sunderland, and the North East more widely. Racism is a real and continuing problem in the city”. In short, the point was not that racism was irrelevant in determining how the population of towns like Sunderland cast their vote. The analysis required a far more sophisticated understanding of what we might call ‘racial situations’, conceived by John Hartigan Jr (1999) in his early work in different communities in Detroit. When and where did people turn to a ready-made repertoire of racist explanations for their own circumstances, and why was this referendum such an explosive way for them to express their fury at a host of political decisions made without their knowledge, participation or consent? The quotes from US and Irish papers indicate that there is increasingly a common language that accepts a ‘white working class’ not just as a homogeneous politicized construct, but also an explanatory factor that resonates across national borders. Whether it is used in the US or in the UK, the term provides a coded and apparently safe way to talk about the intersection of race and class; safe because it immediately projects on to working-class people a particular set of attitudes, resentments and feelings associated with their class position. It makes this grouping into victims of something beyond their control, the word ‘white’ providing both an explanation and an excuse for racist sentiments and actions. It often conveys the idea that working-class people and communities that are predominantly white – that is, in areas that have not seen significant immigration – have been overlooked, neglected or harmed by social and economic developments that have, at the same time, been advantageous for minorities, particularly migrants. The trouble with the term ‘the white working class’ is that the category becomes reified as a political actor without taking due account of politics, place, regional differences, local economies and the end of certain industries,

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educational policies and, in short, the onward march of global capitalism. It rests on the supposition that the middle class cannot be so easily coded in racial terms, despite the evidence provided by electoral analyses that showed significant middle-class support for either for Trump or Brexit in 2016. Thus, we are faced with a new problem that, partly as a result of new forms of social media, the concept of whiteness is acquiring an even blander sense of ‘sameness’ across local, national and regional distinctions. How much this is also an outcome of the growth of a US-centric Critical Whiteness Studies, compounded by the dearth of comparative analysis produced from within European contexts, is hard to say, but I want to think through how we might avoid that in our own work – at this valuable opportunity to speak from different places.

III To point to complexity and nuance in these times is to risk losing the argument before you have begun it. However, the response to the work by another US sociologist, Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) has been nominated for prizes and widely reviewed, indicates that it is possible to investigate what we might call ‘racial situations’ by stealth, without ever mentioning the word ‘whiteness’. Her ethnography of Tea Party supporters living around the noxious petrochemical industries in Louisiana points to an alternative way of understanding the visceral forms of bitterness and xenophobia that we see expressed today. But this is not just the exercise of anthropological craft: she invites her readers to join her in scaling what she calls the empathy wall so that they too can gain insight into ‘the great paradox’: what is it that propels working-class and dispossessed communities to vote against their own interests, and especially against those agencies that would protect their ecological and biopolitical wellbeing? Thus, we see the value in showing how deeply felt injuries are articulated often, but not invariably, in racialised terms. This kind of investigation requires familiarity with place, introductions from real people with names and families, a readiness to listen for contradictions, and acceptance that there are no easy explanations. Ghassan Hage’s White Nation (1999) was particularly successful at capturing the perception of ‘Anglo-decline’ in the context of Australia, and at showing how this provided fertile ground for what he calls the growth of White neo-fascism. While rooted in locally specific but nationally and culturally shaped dynamics of power and exploitation, these studies show that it is possible to produce locally specific analyses that can resonate across geographical and political boundaries. This is important because of the common problems facing our countries: not least an increasingly organised and rapidly mobilising far right, which if not actually represented in mainstream political institutions, has shown its power to influence agendas. Widespread violence towards minorities, particularly Muslims, continues in North America and all over Europe, accompanied

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by ever-tightening state surveillance and rapid militarisation of police forces – distrust and hatred of migrants and asylum seekers manipulated by organisations using fear as a political weapon. I suggest in our search for better comprehension, more effective actions, we need to think more deeply about how we utilise the concept of whiteness. When and where does the work that we do, whether in the name of Critical Whiteness Studies or not, enable us to stand up to the processes that structure inequality and hatred in a deeply divided world? Guided by these two familiar principles – the politics of location, once famously articulated by Adrienne Rich (1994), and Hartigan’s (1999) concept of ‘racial situations’ – I take a journey that is overshadowed by evidence of war, colonialism, forced migration, sexual politics and ultra-nationalism. On the way, I will reflect on how we might usefully expand our horizons on whiteness, not just to accommodate the many perspectives from which we speak but also to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the problems we face today.

IV I am to speak these words in Dortmund, Germany, but I have been searching for them in London, England. When I booked my train tickets, I was relieved to think I would avoid the stressful, heavily securitised ordeal that air travel has become. But now I think about how many borders I have to cross between my home and my destination. In 2008, I was invited to a symposium in Utrecht that brought together feminist scholars to explore issues of anti-racism, whiteness, global identities and nationalism in a European postcolonial context. We spent the day listening to participants talking from different disciplinary perspectives, focusing on literature, music, art and film as well as the politics of migration and asylum, national identity and indigenous epistemology. But more impressive than the range of subject matter was the sense of Europe as a vast geographical space with no common language or culture, stretching from the thawing permafrost in the Arctic Circle to the scorching heat of the southern Mediterranean; from the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the anoxic waters of the Black Sea in the east. Not all countries were represented in this conversation by any means: But the effect of listening to all those voices and perspectives left me feeling dazed from travelling in so many directions, towards horizons shaped by the imprint of European colonialisms. The value of trying to make connections, borrowing concepts from each other and examining each other’s vocabularies was immense, but also uneven. It inevitably posed the question: how does Critical Whiteness Studies – or rather the disparate analyses of whiteness as identity, culture, politics or privilege – survive the journey from one place to another? Perhaps more importantly, when, where and how does an awareness of the workings of whiteness in different locations offer effective strategies for anti-racist solidarities, critique and resistance?

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After checking into Schengen territory in St Pancras, I can take it for granted I will sail through those intervening countries with few or no security checks because, with my red passport, I will not be made to feel like an intruder or an outsider – not yet, anyway. When it first opened in 1994, the channel tunnel allowed Brits to think differently about the country’s relationship to mainland Europe, no longer separated by an expanse of cold, grey water. At the same time, the subsequent rise of low-cost airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair led to a huge increase in flights to European holiday destinations: “Between 1996 and 2015 – the most recent figures available – passenger numbers at UK airports increased by 85%, from 135m to 251m” (Allen 2017). Although the EU referendum result had a notable effect on the value of the British pound, making it more expensive for British people to travel to Europe, there seems to be no contradiction between popular mistrust of faceless bureaucrats in Brussels and the year-round pull of the mini-break in other people’s countries (cf. ONS 2017). But, although it may be easier to move around inside continental Europe with the right credentials, this does not tell us anything about the quality and value of any crosscultural communication that might emerge as a result. While a focus on political economy can tell us about the impact of Airbnb or Game of Thrones on particular locations, there is surprisingly little research exploring the cultural dimensions of mass tourism in Europe (cf. Pons, Crang and Travlou 2016). As I imagine myself passing under the white cliffs of Dover, I wonder where is the border with France exactly? Under the bilateral Le Touquet treaty signed in 2003, British officials are permitted to check passports in Calais, meaning the UK border is effectively in France. In August 2016, it was reported that about 200 migrants from the encampment known as ‘the Jungle’ were being smuggled into Britain in lorries each week, according to French officials and security sources. In September, work began on a controversial UK-funded fourmetre (thirteen-foot) wall that runs for one kilometre along both sides of the main road to the port in Calais. The camp was then bulldozed in October and the inhabitants dispersed to holding centres across France. I will not be able to see the new wall from the train, or the grounds that once held the camp, but at least the plight of the child migrants has kept the crisis in the headlines for a while. After the camp was destroyed, the UK government was forced – by the action of campaigning groups – to honour its commitment to take a certain number of ‘unaccompanied minors’ under eighteen. That process has repeatedly stalled. In The Threat of Race, David Goldberg echoes Michel Foucault’s analysis of racial discourse as “a principle of exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society” (Foucault 2003: 61). “Race has continued,” Goldberg writes, silently as much as explicitly, to empower modes of embrace and enclosure, in renewed and indeed sometimes novel ways, as much shaping the contours and geographies of neoliberal political economy globally as modulated by them. (Goldberg 2009: 372)

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As if by illustration, when the first batch of male unaccompanied migrants arrived in November 2015, sections of the media portrayed them as grown men masquerading as teenagers, and David Davies, the new Minister for Brexit, called for dental checks or X-rays to establish their ages. Although the Home Office responded by saying that this would be “inaccurate, inappropriate and unethical” (Travis 2016), the episode was reminiscent of the socalled virginity tests carried out on young South Asian women entering the UK 35 years earlier (Wilson 2006; Smith and Marmo 2014). While these types of accusations and policies take root as part of the general demonisation of migrants, their power derives from deep-rooted intersections of racism and sexism that are animated by notions of an endangered whiteness. The fantasy that brown women will outbreed their white counterparts is intrinsically connected to the conviction that Muslim men are sexual predators who target vulnerable white women. Seeing the hateful tabloid images and headlines reminded me of Richard Dyer’s book White, in which he explains how racial imagery is central to the organisation of the modern world: At what cost regions and countries export their goods, whose voices are listened to at international gatherings, who bombs and who is bombed, who gets what jobs, housing, access to health care and education, what cultural activities are subsidised and sold, in what terms they are validated – these are all largely inextricable from racial imagery. The myriad minute decisions that constitute the practices of the world are at every point informed by judgements about people’s capacities and worth, judgements based on what they look like, where they come from, how they speak, even what they eat, that is, racial judgements. (Dyer 1997: 1) How is that racial imagery to be challenged? Often out of sight, numerous migrant action groups and citizens alliances up and down the country have been organising hospitality as well as protesting against detention, such as the campaign These Walls Must Fall.1 Together these actions represent a thriving network that spans Europe, which does not simply repudiate the pulsing nativism that views migrants as an invading swarm, but is also prepared to challenge the state head on (cf. Tazzioli 2017). But how soon will governments that claim to uphold Western values capitulate to the xenophobic demands of nervous electorates, as they have done in Denmark and Sweden? As Lisbeth Zornig Andersen (2016), former chair of Denmark’s National Council for Children, found after giving a Syrian family a lift in her car, generosity, compassion and kindness can now be interpreted as criminal acts in these countries: “Refusing to help the people standing right in front of us, needing care and assistance, corrupts our moral values and perceptions about decency and common humanity. It is a dangerous path to choose.”

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V As the train continues its journey through France, it will pass through the killing fields of the 1914–1918 war. The Western Front, conceivably a great linear city, with ghettoes and slums, a vast infrastructure and numerous technological innovations, and an incredibly heterogeneous workforce. Historians estimate that by 1918 it comprised about 25,000 miles of trenches, dug out by hand and maintained by millions of soldiers and labourers on both sides, many of whom were shipped in from Africa, South and East Asia and the Pacific. Historian David Olusoga (2014) goes so far as to argue that in its astonishing diversity the Western Front was a precursor of today’s cosmopolitan metropolis, which after 1918 was not to be seen again until the second half of the twentieth century. We will speed less than twenty kilometres away from Neuve Chapelle, where there is a memorial to over 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who lost their lives there in March 1915. Recruited into the British Indian Army and brought to Europe as part of the British Expeditionary Force, these were men who have no known graves. This is not just a nod to history, to the interweaving of peoples and empires whose legacies have shaped our contemporary postcolonial societies. Revisiting that blood-drenched terrain provides one route for ethnic and faith-based groups to locate themselves within wider European histories. Thanks to the centenary of World War I, British schoolchildren – and hopefully others in Europe – might get an inkling that the ‘war to end all wars’ was not fought by white European men on their own. But as the train rattles through the monochrome landscape towards Brussels, I will reflect on the “integrated culture of militarism” (Rogers 2016: 198) that connects the glorification of past wars to the security strategies of the present. Former Prime Minister David Cameron, who famously boasted that the UK would continue to ‘punch above its weight’ to retain its position as a global power, claimed that multiculturalism was not only invented by the Brits, but also born in the course of war. Endorsing an educational project to highlight the contribution of Commonwealth soldiers, he said: “They fought together, they fell together and together they defended the freedoms that we enjoy today” (Curzon Institute 2013). With a straight face, he hailed the exploitation of imperial manpower in the course of savage European wars, in which millions died, as a cornerstone of the country’s diverse postcolonial citizenry in the present. He reaffirmed that military service in support of the British cause, the preparedness to shed blood on ‘our’ behalf, was part of Britain’s national heritage all along. Meanwhile his (former) government is deploying its special forces in seven different countries, including Yemen, where Britain has been involved through arming the Saudi regime. On 13 October 2016 the government disclosed that the Saudis had used five types of British bombs and missiles in Yemen. On the same day, it lied to Parliament that Britain was “not a party” to the war there (Curtis 2016).

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VI As I alight in Brussels, relieved to stretch my legs and ‘feel’ that I have actually left home, I will still have history and colonial warfare on my mind, as I think of the large statue of Leopold II on horseback, adjacent to the royal palace. At the base of this horrible effigy there is a small plaque announcing that the statue was made entirely from Congolese copper. According to Idesbald Goddeeris, who has written about colonial statues, memorials and street names in Belgium, the country has been “one of the most criticised colonial metropoles: both the exploitation of the Congo Free State and the Congo crisis of 1960–1961 isolated Belgium on the international scene” (2015: 397). At the same time, he argues, it has been “one of the least critical postcolonial nations” (397). Goddeeris maintains that, while there have been sporadic attempts to protest against or erase the numerous traces of that genocidal past in public spaces throughout the country, “the monopoly of white monuments keeps the colonial view intact and smothers postcolonial criticism” (403). But is Belgium so different from any of its neighbours, from the UK and the Netherlands in the north, France to the west and Germany to the south? The historian Sven Lindqvist has written extensively on the origins of European genocide. His book Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide is a philosophical exploration of the phrase in Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness: “exterminate all the brutes”. First published in Swedish in 1992, and translated into English in 1996, Exterminate All the Brutes offers an excellent guide for anyone curious about the origins of and links between European genealogies of white supremacy. It is written in part like a diary as he recounts his journey travelling by bus through the Sahara desert. But it is interspersed with historical research on European colonial warfare in Africa from the late eighteenth century onwards, full of detail – drawn from contemporary writings by explorers, priests, politicians, soldiers, philosophers – about the technologies of killing as well as the ideological foundations for subduing and destroying indigenous cultures. It is that historical landscape in which he locates the roots of the Holocaust. But this is not where it ends. In the final pages of the book he describes the Central African Expedition in 1898, undertaken by the French in Saharan Africa (using a contingent of Senegalese troops). He concludes: Eventually the facts trickled out. Of course educated Frenchmen knew roughly, or even quite precisely, by what means their colonies were captured and administered. Just as educated Frenchmen in the 1950s and 1960s knew what their troops were up to in Vietnam and Algeria. Just as educated Russians in the 1980s knew what their troops did in Afghanistan, and educated South Africans and Americans during the same period knew what their “auxiliaries” were doing in Mozambique and

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Central America respectively. Just as educated Europeans today know how children die when the whip of debt whistles over poor countries. (Lindqvist 1996: 170–171) At an institutional level, Europe’s former colonial powers are at last starting to come to terms with this knowledge, if only at the insistence of the descendants of those regimes. But it is at a tempo that is uneven and often cautious. One example was the recently opened exhibit on “German Colonialism. Fragments Past and Present” in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Among the numerous cultural artefacts and relics, the display features letters from missionaries expressing their concerns about concentration camps and killings in Germany’s south-west African colony. In 1904 the first genocide of the twentieth century took place in what is now called Namibia, when tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, starved and tortured to death by German troops. As many as 3,000 Herero skulls were sent to Berlin for German scientists to use as evidence that the Herero and Namaqua belonged near the bottom of the racial hierarchy that they had devised. A mere twenty of those skulls were returned in 2011, but it wasn’t until July 2015 that the word genocide could be officially applied to this episode. In 2018, negotiations between the German and Namibian governments over possible reparation payments are expected to be completed and to result in an official apology. This falls far short of the demands made by campaigners in Namibia. It was widely reported that Vekuii Rukoro, the paramount chief of the Herero, reacted angrily to the prospect of an apology without reparations from the German government: “If that is the case, it would constitute a phenomenal insult to the intelligence not only of Namibians and the descendants of the victim communities, but Africans in general, and in fact to humanity (Burke and Oltermann 2016). An anti-racist politics that takes the genocidal violence conducted in the name of white supremacy into account today does not flinch from acknowledging this past. As Lindqvist continues: “Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves – everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted” (1996: 172).

VII In Brussels I will board a train for Cologne, where I will remember another journey I made a long time ago. In 1971 I took a bus from Ankara to Cologne in the company of men seeking work in Austria and Germany. I had watched them saying goodbye to their wives at the bus station in Turkey, only to witness equally painful scenes at the Austrian border when most of them were turned back. They were left at the roadside with their belongings, having been denied entry into the citadel that would later become known as Fortress Europe.

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This was more than ten years before Enver S¸ims¸ek, a shepherd’s son from the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey, would successfully cross the border into Germany to start a new life as a ‘guestworker’ selling flowers. In 2000 the 39-year-old was gunned down in the back of his delivery van in Nuremberg. The group responsible for his execution, the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU),2 would not be held to account for another thirteen years, when Beate Zschäpe, the surviving member of the cell that murdered S¸ims¸ek and nine others, would face trial along with some of her accomplices. Prosecutors in one of Germany’s most closely watched trials – which began in May 2013 and ended in late 2017 – demanded that Zschäpe should serve a life sentence for her alleged part in ten murders, two bombings and fifteen robberies, all carried out by the NSU between 2000 and 2007. Media commentators suggested that the significance of the trial was far greater than what Zschäpe did or did not know about the killing spree: Germany’s sense of itself is also on trial. The findings of the prosecution suggest that Germany, a nation that prides itself on having confronted the dark recesses of its past with unique diligence, has left a thriving underground culture of rightwing extremism untouched. (Meaney and Schäfer 2016). But what does this word, ‘extremism’, signify in relation to the pathologies of white terror in Europe? Nitzan Shoshan, in his study of the governance of the far right, The Management of Hate (2016), argues that the loosely applied term ‘rightwing extremism’ must be examined within distinct national contexts if we are to understand the growth of fascist organisations in each country. This returns us to the question of how we deliberate about whiteness, with its appeals to purity, injury, victimization, across national European narratives, particularly those shaped by twentieth-century histories of global wars and the ending of those empires.

VIII And as I change trains in Cologne station, ready for the final stretch to Dortmund, I am aware that this journey has taken me back to familiar ground. I started my own investigations as an anti-fascist journalist in 1970s Britain, noting how the propaganda of the far right insisted that the safety of white women was threatened by marauding black men (Ware 1978; 2015 [1992]). We may never know exactly what happened in Cologne on the night of 31 December 20153 but we can be sure of this: both the horrible crimes of violence against women and the surge in self-righteous xenophobia that the episode unleashed demonstrate the centrality of gender and sexuality to the way in which whiteness is conceived, constructed, produced and defended – across all our locations. Whether it is the figure of the downtrodden, veiled Muslim woman demonstrating Islam’s intransigent backwardness, or the

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vulnerable white woman threatened by lustful black and brown men, these tropes are able to stir the deadly passions of racism, ultra-nationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries, xenophobia and homophobia. Throughout all our nationally specific histories and narratives of what it takes to become a fully integrated citizen, it is those who utter the shrill cry that ‘our womenfolk must be protected’ who clamour most loudly for the closure of borders and building of walls, the separation of cultures and faiths, the expulsion of the vulnerable and homeless; who concede most quickly to the militarisation of public space, the increasing surveillance of all citizens, the hysteria produced by fear and loathing of strangers, and the covert deployment of military force in the name of fighting Islamist foes abroad. And it is in this turmoil that those who would want to exploit these conflicts by plotting and executing random acts of terrifying violence are able to do so with such devastating effects.

IX These notes on my prospective journey have no hard and fast conclusions. As Lindqvist might say, “this is a story, not a contribution to historical research” (1996: ix). His quest to find the historical roots of genocide in Europe’s colonial crimes begins and ends with this advice to his readers: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions” (2). Borrowing once more from the wisdom of Adrienne Rich, I might also add, “[t]his is not a sign of loss of faith or hope. These notes are the marks of a struggle to keep moving, a struggle for accountability” (1994: 211). Earlier I suggested that in our search for more effective anti-racist resistance, we need to think more deeply about how we utilise the concept of whiteness. I asked: when and where does the analytical, theoretical work carried out under the heading of Critical Whiteness Studies make us better equipped to comprehend the deepening chasms of inequality and hatred that structure our world? Some years ago, I tried to argue that a genealogical approach was helpful in situating the new wave of academic attention to whiteness in the 1990s (Ware and Back 2002: ch. 1). It is notable that radical explorations of whiteness have emerged in the wake of historical periods when there was most concerted resistance to racial oppression: for example, during the transatlantic abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century; anti-colonial struggles and the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s; and the anti-racist movement in the UK in the late 1970s. And it is important to recognise that those movements also entailed conducting transnational conversations and creating activist networks on the understanding that insights into the working of white supremacism developed in one place might be usefully adapted and applied to altogether different situations. My journey from the UK to Germany will pass through a relatively small area of Europe, traversing only two other countries. Moving from ‘here’ to

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‘there’ will demand a constant shift in perspective, looking back as well as forward, without losing track of the direction of travel. By developing an awareness of motion – in relation to location – I have tried to emphasise the point that whiteness cannot or should not be examined in isolation, carried as it were in a suitcase whose contents survive the journey unchanged. The critical study of whiteness has to be driven by a curiosity about how racism intersects with other local and global axes of power and powerlessness produced by forces such as war, forced migration, colonial legacies, sexual politics, nationalism, neoliberalism or de-industrialisation. Those of us who work on whiteness today face a daunting task that is familiar, yet unprecedented. Our challenge here is to focus our collective understanding on the exigencies of the present crisis, educating ourselves on what happened in the past, and being accountable for what happens in our name, whoever ‘we’ are. But this means defying the logic of identity politics that dictates who is allowed to speak on matters of race and culture, and what they are allowed to say. That, too, demands courage. After all, it is partly this insistence on identity that provides the fertile soil on which white ultranationalists plant their flag (cf. Haider 2017).

Notes 1 http://detention.org.uk 2 Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground) was an extreme-right terror group formed in 1999 and uncovered in 2011. 3 On New Year’s Eve 2015, it was reported that a large crowd of men, many assumed to be migrants, assaulted and robbed women in the centre of Cologne. The situation seemed to have escalated when police failed to act to prevent overcrowding in the area or to apprehend perpetrators early on. The attacks were reported worldwide as evidence of the political consequences of Germany’s decision to receive a large number of refugees. The word ‘Cologne’ became synonymous with the image of the ‘Middle Eastern migrant’ as a sexual predator who presented a danger to German women, and therefore to European civilization as a whole. Thousands of members of Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes – Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), a German anti-immigration movement, took part in rallies in Cologne and Leipzig, many waving banners with the word Rapeugees, an epithet that was swiftly appropriated by far-right groups elsewhere. A state parliamentary inquiry subsequently found that police did not intervene quickly enough. Over 1,200 criminal charges were subsequently made, around 500 of which related to sexual assault. The incident led to a revision of Germany’s rape laws, broadening the definition of sex crimes by tightening the rules on consent and making it easier to deport foreign nationals who are convicted of committing sex crimes.

Bibliography Alcoff, Linda M. The Future of Whiteness. Polity, 2015. Allen, Katie. “Britons Shunning Two-week Holidays in Favour of Short Breaks”. The Guardian, 7 August 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/07/britonsholidays-short-breaks-ons-booze-cruises. Accessed 15 October 2017.

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Andersen, Lisbeth Zornig. “I Was Prosecuted for Helping Syrian Refugees”. The Guardian, 20 December 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/20/p rosecuted-helping-syrian-refugees-denmark-people-smuggling?CMP=share_btn_tw. Accessed 15 October 2017. Baldwin, James. “White Man’s Guilt”. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction 1948–1985. Michael Joseph, 1985, pp. 409–414. Burke, Jason and Philip Oltermann. “Germany Moves to Atone for ‘Forgotten Genocide’ in Namibia”. The Guardian, 25 December 2016. Curtis, Mark. “Britain’s Seven Covert Wars”. Huffington Post, 18 October 2016. http:// www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mark-curtis/britains-seven-covert-war_b_12332368.html. Accessed 15 October 2017. Curzon Institute. “Welcome to the First World War. The Commonwealth Contribution”. The Commonwealth Contribution, 2013. http://www.ww1commonwealthcon tribution.org/index.html. Accessed 24 April 2014. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Foucault, Michel. ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Picador, 2003. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Routledge, 2004. Goddeeris, Idesbald. “Colonial Statues and Streets: Postcolonial Belgium in the Public Space”. Postcolonial Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, 2015, pp. 397–409. Goldberg, David Theo. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Pluto Press, 1999. Haider, Shuja. “Safety Pins and Swastikas: The Frameworks of Liberal Identity Politics and ‘Alt-right’ White Nationalism Are Proving Curiously Compatible”. Jacobin, 5 January 2017. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/safety-pin-box-richard-spencerneo-nazis-alt-right-identity-politics/. Accessed 15 October 2017. Hartigan Jr., John. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton University Press, 1999. Hewitt, Roger. “Seeing Whiteness through the Blizzard: Issues on Research in White Communities”. White Matters: Il Bianco in Questione, edited by S. Petrilli. Meltemi, 2007, pp. 41–51. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the America Right. The New Press, 2016. Jackson, Emma. “Brexit Response 1: On the Mis/uses of Sunderland as Brexit symbol”. Mapping Immigration Controversy, 29 June 2016. https://mappingimmigra tioncontroversy.com/2016/06/29/on-the-misuses-of-sunderland-as-brexit-symbol/. Accessed 16 October 2017. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, 1989. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-civil Rights America. Harvard University Press, 2006. Lindqvist, Sven. Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. The New Press, 1996. Meaney, Thomas and Saskia Schäfer. “The Neo-Nazi Murder Trial Revealing Germany’s Darkest Secrets”. The Guardian, 15 December 2016. https://www.theguardia n.com/world/2016/dec/15/neo-nazi-murders-revealing-germanys-darkest-secrets. Accessed 16 October 2017.

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Nayak, Anoop. “‘Ivory Lives’ Economic Restructuring and the Making of Whiteness in a Post-industrial Youth Community”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003b, pp. 305–325. Olusoga, David. The World’s War. Head of Zeus, 2014. ONS. “Holidays in the 1990s and Now”. Office for National Statistics, 2017. https:// visual.ons.gov.uk/holidays-in-the-1990s-and-now/. Accessed 15 October 2017. Pons, Pau Obrador, Mike Crang, and Penny Travlou, editors. Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities. Routledge, 2016. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Towards a Politics of Location”. Bread, Blood and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. Norton, 1994, pp. 201–231. Rogers, Paul. Irregular War: The New Threat from the Margins. I.B. Tauris, 2016. Shoshan, Nitzan. The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect and the Governance of Right-wing Extremism in Germany. Princeton University Press, 2016. Smith, Evan and Marinella Marmo. Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination. Palgrave, 2014. Social Identities, “Postcolonial Europe: Transcultural and Multidisciplinary Perspectives”, vol. 17, no. 1, 2011. Tazzioli, Martina. “Calais after the Jungle: Migrant Dispersal and the Expulsion of Humanitarianism”. OpenDemocracy, 20 July 2017. http://www.opendemocracy.net/ beyondslavery/martina-tazzioli/calais-after-jungle-migrant-dispersal-and-expulsionof-humanitarianis. Accessed 17 October 2017. Travis, Alan. “Home Office Rules out ‘Unethical’ Dental Checks for Calais Refugees”. The Guardian, 16 October 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/ 19/home-office-rules-out-unethical-dental-checks-for-calais-refugees. Accessed 26 November 2017. Ware, Vron. Women and the National Front. Searchlight, 1978. Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. Verso, [1992] 2015. Ware, Vron and Les Back. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wilson, Amrit. Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain. Pluto Press, 2006. Younge, Gary. “After this Vote the UK is Diminished, Our Politics Poisoned”. The Guardian, 24 June 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/ eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned-racism. Accessed 15 October 2017.

5

Liquid racism, possessive investments in whiteness and academic freedom at a post-apartheid university Adam Haupt

In 2015, University of Cape Town (UCT)’s vice chancellor, Max Price, withdrew an invitation to Jyllands Poston cultural editor, Flemming Rose. Rose became the focus of global media attention after he commissioned cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammed, despite the religion’s taboos on visual depictions of this revered religious figure. The invitation was initially extended to Rose by the university’s Academic Freedom Committee, which was chaired by Jacques Rousseau at the time and has since been reconstituted after its term expired. Rose was invited to conduct the 2016 TB Davie Memorial Lecture1 on academic freedom, an honour which is bestowed upon “distinguished speakers who are invited to speak on a theme related to academic and human freedom” (University of Cape Town undated). Price then decided to withdraw the invitation to Rose. This decision set off some critical responses, particularly from scholars who raised concerns about academic freedom. Some also raised procedural concerns, pointing out that Price had effectively made a unilateral decision that undermined the position of an academic committee constituted in accordance with university rules. This chapter examines some of the responses to Price’s decision to withdraw the invitation to Rose, and argues that some of the op-eds addressing this issue offer meaningful insights into possessive investments in whiteness and liquid racism. Specifically, I analyse “Jacques Rousseau on UCT’s Disinvitation of Flemming Rose” (Rousseau 2015) and “UCT: Capitulation Isn’t Working” (Benatar 2016) to contend that arguments about blows to academic freedom mask the vested interests behind inviting Rose. I relate this to Rose’s commission of the controversial Jyllands Poston cartoons and his argument in defence of his decision to publish the contentious cartoons in “Why I Published Those Cartoons” (Rose 2006). Poston’s Muhammed cartoons are a form of liquid racism, which Simon Weaver describes as a racism generated by ambiguous cultural signs that encourages the development of entrenched socio-discursive positioning, alongside reactions to racism, when reading these signs. The images are ambiguous because they combine the signs of older racisms alongside those of political and social issues that are not necessarily racist. (Weaver 2010: 678)

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This resonates with Melissa Steyn and Don Foster’s argument that “a characteristic of White Talk in post-apartheid South Africa is the interdiscursivity of old and new forms of race talk, providing […] continuity and inventiveness” (Steyn and Foster 2008: 45; emphasis in original). Old and new forms of racism are articulated with valid concerns about free speech and academic freedom. One can thus see how white male privilege is defended and liquid forms of racism and Islamophobia are articulated. The concept of liquid racism is apt precisely because concerns about academic freedom are important in the South African context, in which constitutionally enshrined rights to free speech have been under threat. It is also important because concerns about the vice-chancellor vetoing the decisions of an academic committee are founded. At the same time, questions remain about arguments in this regard serving possessive investments in whiteness. I return to the above quotations by Weaver, Steyn and Foster later to unpack the ambiguous ways in which racism is entangled with concerns, such as academic freedom, that may be recognised as valid or, at least, worthy of serious consideration. Ultimately, this chapter provides significant insights into the context in which calls for the decolonisation of UCT, as well as higher education as a whole, are being made. Essentially, universities in South Africa are facing the challenges of dealing with inequalities that were produced by apartheid and, since the transition to democracy, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. Both the Rhodes Must Fall (#RMF) and Fees Must Fall (#FMF) movements2 as well as the debates about academic freedom have helped to draw attention to the extent to which approaches to university curricula, research, staff appointments and retention, student recruitment and throughput, elite alumni and university donors have reinforced what Anibal Quijano (2000) calls the coloniality of power. I employ George Lipsitz’s concept of possessive investments in whiteness as a point of entry to suggest that certain positions that are critical of the decision to withdraw the invitation to Rose have less to do with the principles of academic freedom and more to do with protecting racialised privilege; the concept of academic freedom is utilised to mask possessive investments in whiteness. Writing in the US context about the ways in which laws and policies extended and maintained white supremacist interests at the expense of people of colour, Lipsitz (1995) argues “that Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and identity” (vii). Explaining that race is socially constructed, he contends that a great deal is at stake in being possessively invested in whiteness: I use the adjective “possessive” to stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society, to connect attitudes to interests, to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for

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asset accumulation and upward mobility. Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. While one can possess one’s investments, one can also be possessed by them. I contend that the artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy. (ibid.: viii) White subjects thus employ whiteness to secure privileges, such as securing property rights (that is, possessing tangible and intangible property),3 or to possess institutions and systems that benefit them exclusively. The idea of being possessed by the system that benefits you is significant because beneficiaries need to support the basic premises of white supremacy in order to legitimate it and, thereby, ensure its continued operation. I contend that the debate about academic freedom in the context of the Rose invitation provides meaningful insights into the ways in which racialised privilege is justified. Questions about whose interests are served and who is marginalised by arguments in favour of Rose’s invitation surface in the op-eds under examination here. Apartheid ensured that access to prestigious public institutions was available to white citizens, with a particular focus upon white men.4 The op-eds help one to make sense of the ways in which whiteness intersects with class, educational and gendered privilege to the exclusion of South Africa’s diverse communities. A particular set of privileges is therefore associated with whiteness and comes to be taken as given, uncontested and permanent. The op-eds help us to make sense of the extent to which elite interest groups are possessively invested in whiteness and the privilege with which it is associated. This helps one to make sense of the assertion that race is socially and politically constructed (cf. Erasmus 2001, 2017) and offers meaningful insights into the ways in which colonial relations of power are sustained in the institution. The former chair of UCT’s Academic Freedom Committee, which invited Rose during his term as chair, offered his views on Rose’s disinvitation in an op-ed available to the university community. Rousseau (2015) writes “that some of those who support his dis-invitation are confusing arguments about whether he should have been invited in the first place with arguments for disinviting him”. The second point he makes is that “some arguments regarding whether he was an appropriate invitee or not depend on a false, or at least caricatured, impression of his views and the possible content of his talk” (my emphasis). The distinction that Rousseau makes between the issue of whether Rose should have been invited in the first place, and the issue of whether it was appropriate for the vice-chancellor of UCT to veto the decision of a legally constituted committee at the university, is worth noting. This potentially points to a procedural problem. However, it is debatable whether critics of the committee’s invitation possess a “false, or at least caricatured, impression of his views”. Rousseau goes on to say that while he is “not convinced of the

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threat posed to ‘positive interfaith relations’, in that I believe it to misrepresent and inflate a perceived intolerance in the Muslim community, I do think the security threats were real, and that Mr Rose’s appearance would have led to protests and perhaps even violence” (my emphasis). Here, he gets to the heart of the point that he is making: The problems with acceding to the heckler’s veto are well-rehearsed in countless books and essays on free speech – in short, those who are most threatening get to win arguments they should not, and space for debate and dissent shrinks. It is true that more of us need to stand up against this, and show that it’s possible and desirable for uncomfortable ideas to be aired. Yet, it can sometimes be difficult to do so when you are in charge of the safety and security of a lecture audience, and the reputation of an institution like a university. Simply labelling such decisions as cowardly, or attacking those who make such decisions, can be premised on an uninformed and simplistic version of the dilemma being faced. (ibid.; my emphasis) The context within which this debate was taking place is an important factor to take into account. By 2016, the #RMF and #FMF movements had already taken centre stage (Nyamnjoh 2016; Ndlovu 2017), and interest groups that were opposed to these movements were vocal about student activists’ strategies of disruption of the university’s daily operations to draw attention to their cause; they were also critical of activists’ calls for the decolonisation of universities (cf. Crowe 2015, 2016). The #RMF movement gained momentum in 2015 when student activists took issue with the presence of colonial-era statues and artworks that celebrated colonial historical figures while marginalising representations of African historical figures and African narratives of struggle against injustice and dehumanisation. Making a statue of British coloniser Cecil John Rhodes the focus of their campaign, students argued that the presence of colonial symbols on UCT’s campus represented the ways in which black students continued to be marginalised and alienated at the university (cf. Pillay 2016; Nyamnjoh 2016; Ndlovu 2017; Naicker 2016). The issue of colonial symbolism aside, student activists drew attention to the ways in which institutionalised racism and sexism, as well as the racialised class divide in South African society, made it difficult for black students to access universities and succeed academically once they are at these institutions. These issues resonated with the experiences of black students at universities across the country, and the #FMF movement set off a number of interventions, first at Wits University, and then nationally. #FMF’s focus on all students’ access to free education was a galvanising issue that drew attention to the failures of the post-apartheid government’s economic policy (cf. Gumede 2008; MacDonald 2006) and its neoliberal economic policy placed a low premium on public spending, including on education. The call for free higher education created room for critical reflection on how committed the

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African National Congress (ANC)-led government, which was in a tripartite alliance with leading trade unions and the South African Communist Party, was to social democratic principles. The protest movement also came at a time when the position of then president of the ANC and country, Jacob Zuma, was tenuous due to ongoing and mounting allegations of corruption against him and his allies. #FMF was thus framed as a ‘security threat’ or a ‘regime-change plot’ in order to justify the use of state security apparatuses to monitor activists around the country, as well as to infiltrate the movement, effectively raising concerns about violations of the constitutionally protected right to protest, particularly at universities where principles of academic freedom are valued (Pauw 2017; Duncan 2016). Protests at a number of universities in South Africa, including UCT, turned violent in certain instances, many in confrontations with the South African Police Service’s Public Order Police, or with private security hired by university management. The use of private security has been a source of contention on the grounds of expense, and because their conduct has been called into question by peace monitors, students and some staff members (Chabalala 2016; Smith 2017). Questions have also been raised about the dangers of inviting a heavy police presence on campuses (Haupt 2015). The security threats to which Rousseau refers are therefore not from the Capetonian Muslim community, in his view. He believes that the perception of this community as intolerant is inflated. He thus rejects a racist stereotype of Muslims as inherently intolerant and given to violence. As he sees it, the real ‘security threat’ comes from the student activists (as opposed to the state’s security cluster) and this is where he mobilises the discourse of fear and racial stereotyping that is in line with hegemonic representations of black protesters and activists. Some of the keywords and phrases from his discussion of the student activists include:     

heckler’s veto those who are most threatening get to win arguments they should not, and space for debate and dissent shrinks more of us need to stand up against this safety and security of a lecture I do think the security threats were real, and that Mr Rose’s appearance would have led to protests and perhaps even violence. (Rousseau 2015)

Student activists are therefore framed as bullies and hecklers who shrink the space for debate and dissent through disruptions that may involve violence. Rousseau implies that they create a climate of fear that makes it difficult for “more of us” to speak up. This characterisation collocates with David Benatar’s portrayal of student activists: Once again, marauding thugs have disrupted normal activities at the University of Cape Town (and other universities in South Africa).

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A. Haupt Although they are fond of presenting themselves as victims and as a progressive vanguard, they are in fact the very opposite. They are perpetrators who violate the rights of others, and they are the agents of destruction, which, in the long run, is not good for anybody, least of all those whose interests they purport to represent. […] [C]apitulation encourages those who seek to hold the University hostage to its growing list of demands. One reason we are facing disruptions in 2016 is that the University surrendered in 2015. Had it conveyed a firm message last year that illegal behaviour would not be tolerated, it would have removed one incentive to the present (and potential future) disruptions. (Benatar 2016; my emphasis)

Benatar’s description of students as “marauding thugs” and “agents of destruction” to whom the university has ‘capitulated’ is in line with Rosseau’s characterisation of the students as hecklers who use threats or violence to win arguments, although it is more explicit in drawing on racialised stereotypes of black people. Benatar’s characterisation of the student activists calls to mind images of ‘barbarians’ clamouring at the gate of a walled city in feudal times, or of the laager mentality5 of colonial settlers on a frontier, anxiously awaiting retaliatory attacks from ‘natives’/barbarians (cf. Reckwitz 1993, on J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, for example). As Homi Bhabha argues in the opening passages of “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism”, [a]n important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated […] as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse be proved. (Bhabha 1994: 94) Here, Bhabha echoes Frantz Fanon’s description of racial interpellation and internalisation in Black Skin, White Masks, specifically in chapter 5, “The Fact of Blackness” (1967). Fanon writes about the experience of walking the streets of Paris and being fixed by racist appellations to the extent that he has no agency in the way in which he is represented. In other words, he is not in a position to challenge the terms upon which he is represented and is subsequently “burst apart” and put “together again by another self” (ibid.: 109). His inability to exercise agency in that context speaks to the systemic nature

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of racism. Racism goes beyond acts of interpersonal prejudice; it is reinforced by structural mechanisms that disempower people of colour via political, economic and institutional means. In other words, discursive practices that are enabled by unequal relations of power disempower interlocutors and create very limited subject-positions from which they may engage in communicative exchanges. Benatar’s (2016) and Rousseau’s (2015) characterisations of the student activists fix the notion of the activists as forceful and destructive. Effectively, they demonstrate Fanon’s description of racial interpellation by limiting the activists’ subject positions through framing them as being incapable of articulating their political stance persuasively, or as unwilling or unable to engage in debates about decolonisation and the reimagining of the higher education, notwithstanding the fact that this issue has been debated by students and staff at public events and via op-eds.6 For example, Brian Kamanzi writes, [t]he series of protests, demonstrations and conversations that have been re-invoked with vigour allowing a revitalization of post-colonial thought and discourse into the popular public domain across South Africa, and more broadly across many countries at this moment, illustrate the fading dreams of miraculous peaceful transitions from colonies to independent states. (Kamanzi 2015) #RMF and #FMF therefore set off a great deal of debate and reflection about how far South Africa has progressed since becoming a democracy, and created space to reflect upon the limitations that the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics placed upon its ability to effect distributive and restorative justice (Haupt 2012; MacDonald 2006). Much of what Kamanzi reflects upon here resonates with Fanon’s (1968) writing in The Wretched of the Earth about the failure of African states to make distributive and restorative justice a reality after becoming independent, particularly “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (ch. 3). In this regard, Michael MacDonald explains, [t]he [South African] economy is developing a black middle class, which reflects the economy’s demand for labour and the black middle class’s initiative, and the state is cultivating a black bourgeoisie, yet the share of wealth going to blacks, including Africans, is not changing much. Meanwhile, poverty and inequality are continuing more or less unabated. (MacDonald 2006: 158) As a student activist, Kamanzi clearly has a good grasp of the issues that are at stake. This contradicts pejorative claims about the student activists or Fallists, as they often dub themselves.

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It is also helpful to consider the disruptions to which Benatar objects in relation to scholarship by Nancy Fraser (1992). She critiques Jürgen Habermas’s work on the structural transformation of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe as a blueprint for actually existing democracy. For Habermas, deliberation and rational-critical debate were essential to the functioning of the public sphere. However, Fraser creates room for us to think critically about who is excluded from the Habermasian model. From Fraser’s perspective, the model excludes women, but it also excludes slaves and a large number of people of colour who were negotiating the violence of colonial dispossession during the eighteenth century. For Fraser, the criteria of deliberative processes and rational-critical debate are too narrow and elitist. Instead, she advocates contestation as opposed to deliberation, and contends that not all forms of debate need to be rational-critical. Writing about publics and counterpublics, Michael Warner contends, “[i]n the dominant tradition of the public sphere, address to a public is ideologized as rational-critical dialogue” (2002: 82). On the poetic nature of public discourse, he takes issue with a reductionist approach to public discourse by arguing, “[t]his constitutive misrecognition of publics relies on a particular ideology of language. Discourse is understood to be propositionally summarizable; the poetic or textual qualities of any utterance are disregarded in favor of sense” (83; emphasis in original). If one considers the fact that scholars have dedicated a great deal of attention towards the study of protest literature, poetry, theatre, music and visual art, as well as protest and social movements, it is clear that not all forms of debate that challenge hegemony need be deliberative or rationalcritical. From this perspective, poetics, the expression of pain or anger (as captured in Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness”, chapter 5 in Black Skin, White Masks, 1967, for example), and the politics of disruption also need to be recognised as essential to functional public spheres. In fact, Fraser argues that the Habermasian model becomes useful when we depart from the idea that one needs a single public sphere – which invariably will marginalise diverse interest groups in favour of common and inevitably dominant interests or needs – in favour of subaltern counterpublics. That is, subaltern polities create multiple publics to contest for attention to ensure that their concerns are addressed. They do so by engaging in contestation on their own terms, and not by criteria for deliberative modes of engagement (for example, parliamentary protocols or the conventions formulated by colonial-era debating societies). Disruptions and interventions led by student activists at South African universities therefore speak to Fraser’s critique of Habermas in meaningful ways, particularly when considering Dick Hebdige’s work on subculture. Writing about certain youth cultures’ challenge to hegemony, Hebdige writes that subcultures represent “noise” by causing “interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media” (1979: 90). Subculture’s opposition to hegemony thus happens at the level of representational politics by challenging both substantive issues as well as the terms upon which these

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issues are represented – this opposition is far from a rational-critical debate, but no less politically significant. Likewise, student activists elect to speak on their own terms by generating noise/interference/disruption in the everyday, orderly routines of universities. Many conversations between students and educators drew on the work of Fanon. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967) allowed activists to reflect on the extent to which racist interpellation of black subjects continues to function in historically white institutions. And “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (Fanon 1968: ch. 3), about the failure of African states to make distributive and restorative justice a reality after becoming independent, was often used as a point of entry into discussions about how postcolonial African states’ potential to serve the interests of marginalised citizens was redirected to serve the interests of colonial corporate interest groups and black elites at the expense of civil society. The call for decolonisation of higher education as well as the call for free education should thus be read in relation to these conversations, which were not merely about decolonising curricula and scholarly practices, but also about addressing disparities produced by neoliberal economics that place a low premium on public spending (including education). At the same time, activists were able to draw on the scholarship of Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leslie McCall (2013), Pumla Gqola (2015) and bell hooks (1981) to articulate the intersectional ways in which oppression works, thereby rejecting a single focus on race as a way of making sense of the ways in which subjects are marginalised, as well as understanding the differential ways in which they are either oppressed or privileged. This was best captured by the protest slogan communicated on placards by gender activists: “The revolution will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.” In fact, there was a measure of contestation between cis heterosexual males in the movements on one hand, and on the other hand the transgender and queer activists who drew attention to the tendency of cis heterosexual males to reduce student struggles to race and effectively exclude transgender and queer activists (Centre for African Studies 2016; Ramji 2016). Rousseau’s and Benatar’s characterisation of the activists is therefore at odds with the complexity of positions in the movement. Rousseau makes the link between stereotypes of the students and those of Muslims clear when he explains: “In March 2015, when the decision to invite Mr Rose was taken, it was in part because of threats to education posed by ISIS and Boko Haram, as well as emerging debates on visual representation (the Rhodes statue), that the committee considered him to be the strongest candidate of those nominated” (Rousseau 2015; my emphasis). Rousseau appears to be comparing the debates about “visual representation (the Rhodes statue)” to the intolerance of ISIS and Boko Haram, whose name means ‘books are forbidden’ (presumably except for the Quran and related Islamic texts themselves), a statement that goes against the Islamic imperative to ‘seek knowledge’. He is therefore reducing the complexity of debates about social justice and the celebration of colonial-era figures such as Rhodes to

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stereotypical comparisons with Islamophobic stereotypes and threats to academic freedom. He also does not acknowledge the disservice that the celebration of colonial history at the expense of the histories of colonised people does to academic freedom. Selective accounts of South Africa’s past can hardly be seen as advancing scholarly excellence. What activists have been engaging critically is the “coloniality of power,” which Anibal Quijano says is based upon ‘racial’ social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of ‘racist’ social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power. (Quijano 2007: 171) This form of power is thus central to modernity as we know it, and forms the cornerstone of social relations and the operation of institutions as well as discursive practices. Calls for decolonisation therefore amount to the contestation of the coloniality of power. Nelson Maldonado-Torres explains how decolonisation critiques the ways in which colonial relations of power shape modern relations of power and identities: Decolonization not only refers to the critique of and effort to dismantle neocolonial relations that continued and renewed in different ways dependency and vertical relations of power between northern and southern countries, but also to radical transformation of the modern/colonial matrix of power which continues to define modern identities as well as the relations of power and epistemic forms that go along with them. (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 115) Calls for the decolonisation of the university thus challenge the ways in which colonial relations of power and discursive practices continue to shape how such institutions position themselves in relation to scholarship, pedagogical approaches, and relations with patrons, staff and students. Such calls therefore make a fundamental reimagining of the university an important point of entry into debates about the decolonisation of scholarship in higher education institutions. If it is true that critics of the Academic Freedom Committee’s decision to invite Rose depend on “a false, or at least caricatured, impression of his views and the possible content of his talk” (Rousseau 2015; my emphasis), Rose’s views on Muslims in the European context would be illuminating. In a 2006 op-ed, Rose explains why he commissioned the controversial cartoons: I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic

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that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously – and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter. (Rose 2006, my emphasis) Rose characterises Muslims in much the same way as the student activists are characterised by Rousseau and Benatar. The discourse of fear is invoked to create the impression that (white) Europeans are being bullied and intimidated by Muslims, who are implicitly positioned as outsiders to Europe who are encroaching on Europeans’ free speech rights. As discussed above, Weaver contends that Rose’s decision to commission the cartoons is an example of liquid racism, which is created by cultural signs that are ambiguous and entrench “socio-discursive positioning” (2010: 678). Older signs of racism combine with “political and social issues that are not necessarily racist”, thereby making the images ambiguous: The development of entrenched positioning occurs because […| the ambiguity of the images create and encourage fundamentalist reactions. Reactions to the images as racism occur as the reader connects primarily with the signs of older racisms. (ibid.: 678) The ambiguity of the racism in the cartoons as well as Rose’s explanation lies in the fact that they draw on existing stereotypes about the Orient (cf. Said 1978) and point to current concerns about terrorism after the 9/11 attacks in the US and media attention directed at the rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram. However, Rose does not acknowledge the nuances of geopolitics in the Middle East in relation to neoliberal economic interests in the region (for example, corporate interests in oil and gas), or the continuities in corporate interests from the colonial to the postcolonial era, and the rise of US imperialism (see Ali 2003; Mamdani 2005). Weaver’s explanation that the “images create and encourage fundamentalist reactions” (2010: 678) speaks to Bhabha’s paradoxical concept of fixity in the “construction of otherness” (1994: 94). This resonates with Steyn and Foster’s argument that “a characteristic of White Talk in post-apartheid South Africa is the interdiscursivity of old and new forms of race talk, providing […] continuity and inventiveness” (2008: 45; emphasis in original). White talk is often nostalgic for the efficiency of the apartheid state, whilst overlooking the fact that the majority of citizens – that is, black citizens – were not beneficiaries of that state’s assumed efficiency. Old and new forms of racism are articulated with valid concerns about free speech. One can thus see how white male privilege is defended and liquid forms of racism and Islamophobia are articulated. In the UCT context, liquid

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racism applies to valid concerns about violence on campus as well as on other campuses around the country, regardless of whether this violence is instigated or escalated by student activists, the police, private security or operatives employed by the state security cluster. Of course, Rousseau and Benatar are implying that it is merely the students who are the drivers of violence and intimidation. This selective reading of the context therefore makes the concerns about violence ambiguous – liquid. Steyn and Foster’s description of white talk is particularly poignant in relation to Benatar’s call for the force of law to be brought against activists: What is lost on all of them is the fact that law is ultimately backed up by force. Many people comply with the law without the need for force to be used. However, the threat of force always lurks in the background and sometimes has to be exercised. For example, if one refuses to pay fines, one may be summoned to court. If one refuses to present oneself or to comply with the court’s verdict, one may be arrested. If one resists arrest, force will be used to effect the arrest. If one uses force in return, then greater force will need to be used. That is the way it has to be, for otherwise there would be no sanction attached to breaking the law. Laws without teeth are not laws. (Benatar 2016, my emphasis) This call for force is blind to context and is reminiscent of white talk’s nostalgia for the assumed efficiency of the apartheid state when it only really protected white minority interests, which were placed at the top of a racial hierarchy. Given that apartheid was both legal and unethical, citizens engaged in acts of civil disobedience to oppose an unjust legal system. Likewise, social movements in post-apartheid South Africa have employed their constitutionally protected right to stage protests and to engage in acts of civil disobedience in their efforts to challenge poor service delivery and the failure of both the local and national government to make distributive and restorative justice a reality. As indicated earlier, evidence has emerged that the state security cluster has been monitoring university protests and has also infiltrated social movements. The government has treated the call for state subsidisation of university fees as a security threat, as opposed to engaging with student activists directly to resolve the problem that has been identified. This raises serious questions about the autonomy of universities and academic freedom, issues that neither Benatar nor Rousseau identify in their writing. In fact, the decision to invite a divisive editor to present a lecture on academic freedom is not merely ill-advised on the grounds of Rose’s racism, but he is not a scholar and could hardly be expected to address the challenges that universities face. Direct threats to academic freedom are to be found in contexts that are not democratic (for example, Turkey’s arrest of scholars, journalists and teachers alike) as well as democratic contexts that have to contend with neoliberal economics’ threats to universities. As Mark Olssen and Michael Peters argue,

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[i]n the age of knowledge capitalism, we can expect governments in the west to further ease themselves out of the public provision of education as they begin in earnest to privatize the means of knowledge production and experiment with new ways of designing and promoting a permeable interface between knowledge businesses and public education at all levels. (2005: 339–340) The commodification of knowledge has serious consequences for public institutions (and therefore academic freedom), particularly in South Africa, which has adopted an economic policy that does not adequately address the racialised and gendered class inequalities produced by legislated apartheid.7 The mobilisation of force, via either the South African Police Services or the state security cluster, will not solve this problem, but will only serve to further erode trust in South Africa’s democratically elected government where the ruling party’s ethics and competence have already been called into question (cf. Gumede 2008; MacDonald 2006; Pauw 2017). Benatar’s call for the force of the law to be used against activists therefore stands to undermine principles of academic freedom and constitutionally protected rights to peaceful protest. Benatar was one of a number of UCT scholars who called on Mahmood Mamdani to decline the newly constituted Academic Freedom Committee’s invitation to deliver the 2017 TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture as a gesture of solidarity with Rose (Davis 2017). However, Mamdani declined to take up this call by Benatar and his colleagues. At the lecture, Mamdani “asked whether the UCT academics who were vocal in support of Rose’s invitation would feel as warmly towards an address by the publishers of anti-Semitic cartoons in Nazi Germany, or those artists who incited the Rwandan genocide” (ibid.). Davis explains that Mamdani recognised Rose’s free speech rights, but argued that he was not automatically entitled to deliver the lecture in question: Terming Rose “Islamophobic”, Mamdani affirmed Rose’s right to free speech. […] “But there is no democratic right to give the academic freedom lecture at UCT,” Mamdani said. “It’s not a right; it’s an honour, and Mr Rose does not deserve that honour.” (ibid.) Of course, under South African law, Rose’s free speech rights are not limitless. Any individual’s right to free speech has to be balanced with the public interest. Hate speech and incitement to violence are not in the public interest. Therefore, racist speech or representations would not be protected as free speech by Section 16 of the South African Constitution (Haupt 2012). Writing that Rose’s disinvitation was deplorable, but that he should not have been invited in the first place, constitutional law scholar Pierre De Vos contends that the publication of the cartoons […] in Denmark, was the act of the powerful and dominant group (seeing themselves as representing the

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An element of cultural racism is therefore at work. Writing about racism in Denmark, Karen Wren contends that cultural racism evolved from modernization theory, and the associated assumption that nearly all significant cultural innovations emanate from Europe […] thus relying on history rather than biology or religion to explain the “superiority” of Europeans, who could be defined as “modern” and “progressive”, in contrast to non-Europeans as “traditional” and “backward”, an idea which has become particularly popular in Scandinavia. The essence of cultural racism therefore is that Europeans are not racially, but culturally superior. (Wren 2001: 143; emphasis in original) The publication of the cartoons was thus an expression of assumed cultural superiority in contrast to stereotypical constructions of Muslims as intolerant, poorly educated fundamentalists. For De Vos, a form of cultural racism is also at work at UCT when he states that these ideas – also about freedom of expression – dovetail neatly with the socially and culturally dominant ideas at UCT of what freedom of speech and academic freedom are all about: the freedom to offend the less powerful, the marginalised, the vulnerable, in order to put them in their place and to assert your own view of how the world ought to be. (De Vos 2016) The decision to invite Rose is therefore both an expression of power and enabled by power; in essence it offers an example of the coloniality of power at work. The invitation served as a mechanism of control under the guise of tolerance and a respect for academic freedom, notwithstanding the fact that calls for decolonisation at UCT have been met with criticism and the fact that activists have been characterised as “marauding thugs,” for example. It is in this sense that Rousseau’s and Benatar’s op-eds offer meaningful insights into possessive investments in whiteness at UCT. The fact that some of the concerns about academic freedom, safety on campus or criticisms of religious intolerance are worth debating seriously offers important insights into the ways in which liquid racism works, largely because these issues are used to characterise attempts at contestation in ways that invoke colonial tropes about the racial ‘other’. Effectively, the invitation and the characterisation of student activism serves as an example of the ways in which privileged subjects

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lay claim to the institution at the expense of diverse, marginalised subjects who are seeking to challenge hegemonic practices and investments in this public university. The act of framing criticism of the invitation to Rose as a threat to academic freedom essentially points to the ways in which the coloniality of power seeks to justify itself. This justification is significant at this political juncture, given that activists have drawn attention to the intersectional ways in which higher education institutions fail to address the ways in which racialised, gendered and class-based forms of marginalisation undermine diverse citizens’ attempts to access these institutions and see themselves reflected in them. More than two decades after the fall of legislated apartheid, racialised and gendered privilege continue to prevail at universities such as UCT – but not without contestation.

Notes 1 TB Davie was the third vice-chancellor of UCT. He served the university in this role from 1948 to 1955. 2 The Rhodes Must Fall movement (#RMF) started in 2015 when student activists led protests against the presence of colonial-era statues (specifically that of British coloniser Cecil John Rhodes) and artworks on the campus of UCT. Later that year, the Fees Must Fall movement (#FMF) gained momentum. #FMF called for the introduction of free higher education (that is, higher education that is fully subsidised by the government). This call took place in a political context where the Jacob Zuma-led African National Congress government was mired in scandals related to corruption, poor governance and wasteful public expenditure. Both movements have made calls for the decolonisation of universities a key focus of their message. For a sound analysis of these issues, see Nyamnjoh 2016; Ndlovu 2017. 3 For a critique of property rights and racialised privilege, see Haupt (2014). 4 For an in-depth analysis of the ways in which the apartheid state constructed whiteness by affording exclusive privileges to citizens who were classified as white, see van der Westhuizen (2007) and the chapters “The Logic of White Supremacy” and “The White Man’s Burden” in MacDonald (2006). 5 Colonial-era white settlers in southern Africa created laagers as a form of defence by creating a circle with their ox wagons (Giliomee and Mbenga 2007). The term laager mentality refers to the tendencies of often ethnocentric communities adopting close-minded and inward-looking strategies as a form of defence against perceived threats. Such strategies make meaningful dialogue difficult. 6 For example, Kamanzi (2015) and a selection of comments and op-eds on UCT’s news website at https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2015-05-19-how-do-we-decoloni se-ucta. Scholarly articles and books on the topic have also been written (Nyamnjoh 2016; Ndlovu 2017; Qambela 2016; Heleta 2016; Naidoo 2015; Mamdani 2016; Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell 2017). 7 For critical scholarship on the dangers of commodifying of scholarly research, see Gray (2009/10, 2016); Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon (2015).

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White supremacy in the Trump era University students and alt-right activism on college campuses Adam Burston and France Winddance Twine

On 19 November 2008, Barack Obama was elected by a multiracial coalition to be the first Black President of the United States. The son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama’s election was widely interpreted as evidence that the U.S. had entered a post-racial era. And at least by one metric, white supremacist political movements were irrelevant to mainstream politics. Journalists, politicians, pundits and anti-racists celebrated Obama as a symbol of a multiracial United States. The rage and indignation of white conservative Americans was drowned out by a celebratory, post-racial rhetoric. Eight years later, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States by the Electoral College, without winning the popular vote. His election inspired a surge of white supremacist, anti-feminist, xenophobic, nationalist activism from a movement known as the alt-right. Since Trump’s election, the United States has witnessed a dramatic increase in hate group activity in every region of the mainland. Within a year after the election, the number of documented hate organizations in the U.S. grew to over 1,000 – an unprecedented number in the twenty-first century. While the vast majority of racial hate crimes are not committed by hate group members, these groups were responsible for killing or injuring more than 100 people (Hankes and Amend 2018), and included anti-immigrant activists, white supremacists, anti-government militias, and the “alt-right” (Potok 2010, 2017; Beirich and Buchanan 2018). Supporters of Donald Trump vehemently deny that he is a white supremacist. Yet, white nationalists and neo-Nazis celebrated his victory and claim him as their supporter. The election of Trump, whose motto was “Make America Great Again,” was celebrated by white nationalists and white supremacists raising their arms in a Hitler salute (Maqbool 2016). Six weeks after Trump’s election, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members incited violence in a “White Lives Matter” rally that they organized in Anaheim, California (Queally 2016). On August 12, 2017, a number of white supremacist and neoNazi groups organized a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which culminated in violent clashes between the Klan and anti-racist protestors. This rally, which was attended by white nationalists carrying weapons and provoking violence, resulted in the murder of one woman. Despite

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numerous attempts at rebranding, the Klan no longer dominates the sphere of organized racism. However, the ideologies and racial logics of the Klan endure and continue to be recycled in the newer organized racist movements (Daniels 2009). Donald Trump’s response to the violence initiated by the Klan was to equate neo-Nazis with anti-racist activists. In an interview David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, explained the goals and significance of this white nationalist march: “This is a turning point. We are determined to take our country back. We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump because he said he would take our country back” (Duke quoted in Manchester 2017). Although the Klan is no longer the dominant force among organized racist groups and white supremacist groups, Klan members continue to appear at organized public events on college campuses and participate in white supremacist events like the “White Lives Matter” rally that was held in Charlottesville. In this chapter, we will draw upon a qualitative study of conservative campus student groups at a public university to examine the role of the altright in translating and transforming ideologies and rhetoric from earlier waves of the KKK. We will examine ruptures and innovations in the ideologies, racial logics, rhetoric, and goals of organized white supremacist groups. We will draw upon qualitative data from participant observation and interviews with a conservative, politically engaged student group on an American college campus. We make two arguments based on our data: First, student participation in politically conservative campus organizations can serve as a gateway to membership in white nationalism and right-wing organizations. Second, the members of these campus groups intentionally and inadvertently disseminate white nationalist and white supremacist ideologies in online discussion forums and offline campus discussions. Third, alt-right students conceal their identities and membership in white supremacist groups from their peers. White male students, who identified as white supremacists, reported participating in secret chatrooms with alt-right members. Their online behaviour followed them offline into student meetings, where they cultivated a toxic culture that threatened to marginalize and silence those students who did not embrace or support their ideological positions. They actively created relationships with students who were not white supremacists, but who could be invited to participate in online alt-right communities before they became aware of the political nature of the communities. Scholars of organized hate movements and right-wing movements have undertheorized the relationship between online and offline activism. In this chapter we present data from a pilot study of members of a conservative student group. Some of these student members were technically savvy and participated in toxic online white supremacist discussion forums. We begin by situating the alt-right movement within a larger history of organized racist, white supremacist, and right extremist politics in the United

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States. After reviewing these histories, we turn to four case studies of student activists who are advancing white nationalist ideologies in chatrooms and on college campuses through student organizations in the Trump era.

The Ku Klux Klan: Restoring white supremacy after the Civil War After the Civil War, during the period historians refer to as Reconstruction, white Southerners feared the recently freed slaves who had been granted citizenship rights. Black men, in contrast to white women, now had the legal right to vote. The civil rights of recently freed slaves threatened the political domination of whites. What followed was the establishment of Black Codes and other laws that essentially stripped Blacks of their rights for another 100 years (Fredrickson 1982; Cell 1982). The Klan was founded in 1866 by six white male veterans of the Confederate Army. Utilizing costumes that masked their identities and attacking after dark, they coordinated attacks on Black communities that gave their small, local branches the appearance of a pan-Southern, anti-Black movement. The KKK inspired a wave of extremist violence throughout the Reconstruction era (Parsons 2015; Perry 2004). This resulted in a wave of domestic terrorism by whites against Blacks that continued until the Civil Rights Movement. In order to sustain socio-political dominance, whites carried out thousands of murders, formed small anti-Black vigilante groups, and participated in lynchings, torture, and anti-Black, murderous riots. White leaders understood that if they wanted to sustain this violence without intervention from the North, it had to appear unplanned and sporadic. However, the disjointed nature of their attacks was inefficient and lessened their political impact. By the 1920s, the Klan had become a mainstream organization with European immigrants joining as a vehicle for upward social mobility (Blee 1991), with an estimated 5 million members, the majority of them being in the North and Midwest. Linda Gordon describes the differences between the “first Klan,” which was a Southern-based ‘secret society,’ and its renaissance as the “second Klan” in the aftermath of World War I to become a national organization: It was stronger in the North than in the South. It spread above the Mason–Dixon line by adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs, in part, because African Americans were less numerous in the North. Unlike the first Klan, which operated at night, meeting in hard-to-find locations, the second operated in daylight and organized mass public events. Never a secret organization, it published recruiting ads in newspapers, its members boasted their affiliation and it elected hundreds of its members to public office. It was vastly bigger than the first Klan, claiming in what was most certainly no exaggeration, four to six million members. (Gordon 2017: 3)

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Social movement scholars identify the Klan’s rebirth in the 1920s as the first extremist movement to resemble contemporary white supremacist movements (Blee 1991, 2002). This iteration of the Klan masked its violent nature by becoming a part of mainstream, respectable culture. Immigrant and lowerclass individuals joined the KKK in order to be assimilated into dominant, white culture; the Klan published numerous popular newsletters that garnered mainstream attention, and it hosted social events widely accessible to white Protestant families. A third wave of hate groups formed in the 1950s through 1970s, in response to American counterculture and socio-economic conditions that impacted white veterans and agricultural workers. Throughout the 1950s, militant white supremacist communities formed and adopted the name and costumes of the KKK. Many white working-class American agricultural workers suffered as their employers’ farms were appropriated and mechanized by big agriculture (Ferber 2004). After the election of Ronald Reagan, resentment of the US government and the Civil Rights Movement continued, and white power and paramilitary groups were formed in the early 1980s (Ferber 2004). During the Reagan administration, membership in white power groups reached 5 million. White power activists were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, the largest mass casualty event in the United States until the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City by Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.

1970s–1980s: The fourth wave of the Klan and the rise of men’s groups Two male-centred political movements preceded the emergence of the altright. Men’s liberation in the 1970s and men’s rights activism in the 1980s emerged after the second wave of the feminist movement and the Civil Rights movement. Michael Kimmel (2017) notes that both of these movements were focused exclusively on white men, and neither considered the unique experiences of non-white men in the United States. Men’s liberation appropriated feminist rhetoric and terminology, suggesting that an unfair cultural burden was placed on men to be hypermasculine breadwinners, detached from their children. After the rupture of a tenuous alliance between men’s liberation activists and feminists, men’s liberation began to focus on workplace discrimination against men. Men’s rights activism emerged in reaction to men’s liberation and moderate conservatism. Men’s rights activists oppose an ostensible feminization of society heralded by feminism, LGBTQ activism, and an influx of racial and ethnic minorities perceived as taking work away from deserving native-born white men (ibid.: 413). Rhetoric and ideology of men’s liberation and men’s rights activism can also be found within alt-right communities. The term “alt-right” was coined by Richard Spencer in 2008 in an attempt to rebrand white supremacy (Nagle 2017).1 Unlike previous white power movements, the alt-right’s movement leaders wear suit jackets and sport clean haircuts. They frequent campus debates, make regular appearances on

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mainstream news media to support their movement, and shroud their racism in humor or the rhetoric of liberalism and egalitarianism. However, the movement’s violent character became evident during the 2016 presidential election, when hundreds of thousands of anonymous social media users threw their support behind presidential candidate Donald Trump (Hawley 2017). Using anonymous online forums, these activists generated pro-Trump content which they circulated to mainstream social media. Throughout Trump’s candidacy, they initiated hundreds of harassment campaigns, circulating their propaganda on mainstream news, disseminating racist and heteropatriarchal content to the general public, and targeting racial minorities and political enemies (Barrouquere 2017). While many still believe the alt-right relied exclusively on digital and rhetorical activism, it was also responsible for multiple violent riots and a series of deadly attacks against racial, gender-based, sexual, and religious minorities (Hankes and Amend 2018). An analysis of their posts on anonymous discussion boards demonstrates that the alt-right admires Reconstruction-era right-wing movements. Alt-right activists firmly believe that they are entitled to advocate for their racial interests using political influence, economic privilege, and violence. They believe that mainstream political movements such as neo-conservatism and new conservativism yielded too much ground in the culture wars. However, they also recognize and fear that the American Nazi Party, the KKK, and other white supremacist groups alienated too many of the U.S. populace. Therefore, many alt-right activists and movement leaders identify strongly with Pat Buchanan’s paleo-conservativism, which sought to abolish affirmative action, promote isolationist foreign policy, and bring anti-immigration reform to the forefront of American politics (Hawley 2017; Nagle 2017). Members of the alt-right frequent neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites such as The Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, and Alt Right.biz, and content from these websites on anonymous chat forums (Hawley 2017). Members of the alt-right are also familiar with neo-reactionary (NRx) thinkers, and reference NRx concepts such as “race realism,” a synonym for biological essentialism (ibid.). However, although they share the same basic goals and ideology, the alt-right’s style of communication is qualitatively different from the abrasive, menacing propaganda of white supremacists and the essays written by NRx activists. On non-anonymous social media platforms and in daily life, members of the alt-right make their beliefs ambiguous with the use of humor or rhetorical frames of liberal and egalitarian discourse (Bonilla-Silva 2017 [2006]; Milner 2013). The alt-right effectively uses the internet and social media to communicate, indoctrinate, recruit, and police members while disseminating white nationalist and masculinist ideologies. It has been successful in modifying their message depending upon the audience. It thus shapes policies that directly impact the lives of racial, sexual, and religious minorities. Its members effectively coordinate online and offline activism. We found that the use of jokes, in the form of memes, is one way that alt-right activists normalize hate speech.

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Conservative and right-wing movements Digital technology provides the current alt-right with unprecedented possibilities to broaden and diversify their memberships beyond the more traditional demographic of previous right-wing movements. Contemporary conservative social movements are more diverse in membership, ideologies, and tactics, including student organizations and grassroots activists, in contrast to earlier waves of the KKK, mainstream political, religious, and media campaigns (Andrew 1997; Berlet 2004; Blee and Creasap 2010; Klatch 1994). Communities of violent extremists are willing to use terrorism in order to achieve movement goals (Belew 2018; Blee and Creasap 2010; Simi and Futrell 2015). Classifying these movements has been a challenge for sociologists and historians. As Abby Ferber rightly points out, “the term white supremacist may obscure the fact that American society is itself white-supremacist” (2004: 15). Indeed, categorizing social movements according to their participants’ shared beliefs and collective actions is a tricky business. Kathleen Blee and Kimberly Creasap distinguish between “conservative movements” and “right-wing movements” (2010: 270). Conservative movements tend to support “patriotism, free enterprise capitalism, and/or a traditional moral order” but do not support violence as a tactic or goal (271). Right-wing movements are characterized by racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic beliefs and regularly make use of violence to achieve movement goals (275). “Right-wing movements” combines the “dissident right” and the “extreme right,” as both groups hold deeply racist beliefs and act violently towards racial minorities. Conservative and right-wing movements share a number of important characteristics. Blee and Creasap suggest that participants in these movements frequently occupy a privileged place in society, but believe they are receiving unfair treatment compared to other social groups. This results in the identification or social construction of racial, religious, gender-based, and or political movement enemies (Blee and Creasap 2010; McVeigh 2016). Similarly, Rory McVeigh’s power devaluation model suggests that rightist movements are oriented toward preserving, restoring, or expanding their constituents’ privileged status (17). Social movement scholars believe that rightist movement participants tend to have binary understandings of morality and gender as well as essentialist understandings of race (Berlet 2004; Ferber 1998). Additionally, rightist groups tend to share cognitive frames that inform their rhetoric and collective action (Berlet 2004; Bonilla-Silva 2017 [2006]; Frankenberg 1993, 2001). Finally, rightist movement rhetoric tends to be apocalyptic, suggesting that time is running out and drastic action is needed (Berlet 2004; Simi and Futrell 2015).

An intersectional analysis of right-wing movements: Race, masculinity, and immigrant status Definitions and dominant understandings of whiteness are not static and have expanded during the twentieth century to include the Irish, Jews, and other groups previously perceived as “not quite white” (Wray 2006) or outside of

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popular understandings of whiteness (Warren and Twine 1997). Today, not all white supremacist groups believe that race is immutable. In other words, whiteness has expanded to include groups that were previously perceived as non-white. In her study of the 1920s women’s auxiliary of the Klan, Blee (1991) found that European immigrant women viewed the KKK as a mainstream political organization that would facilitate their social mobility and their integration into Anglo American society. Catholics and Jews were not welcome. Today, neo-Nazis and white nationalists no longer formally exclude or target white Catholics. The racial and religious characteristics of “whites” in the white power movement now includes those Hispanics who are physically qualified for inclusion based upon skin colour and who self-identify as white, for example Italians, Jews, and Catholics, with the exception of Blacks. Whiteness is more inclusive of racial and ethnic difference. In previous eras, Black Christians, Catholics, and Jews once bore the brunt of white supremacist violence. Today, in addition to Black Christians, Mexicans, Muslims, feminists, LGBTQ, and brown-skinned non-European immigrants are the targets of white supremacist action. After men of the first two Klan cohorts asserted their white masculinity and sustained their power after the abolition of slavery by murdering thousands of Black individuals, raping Black women, and castrating Black men, they feared retaliation in the post-Civil-War era (Blee 1991; Perry 2004; Lerner 1972). Blee argues that rape is a form of power-based domination with material and symbolic ramifications for its victims (2002: 55). Retaliation would traumatize white women, but more importantly, it would undermine the masculinity of white men and remind them of the “rape” they endured when defeated in the Civil War (Blee 1991). This fear led to the development of a white masculine identity that revolved around protecting virtuous, vulnerable white women and asserting the superiority of white men. Research on white supremacist masculinity in the United States has shown that white men feel entitled to economic, cultural, and physical dominance over white women as well as racial and ethnic minorities (Blee 1991; Kimmel 2017). White men have been taught to believe that they are responsible for protecting the genetic purity of the white race. They fear interracial relationships between men from racial minority groups and white women (Perry 2004). Violence is frequently perceived as a legitimate means of preserving domination. All versions of white supremacist male identity ignore the violence and injustice faced by the communities that ostensibly threaten them, while suggesting that white men are victims and the only deserving recipients of national wealth and social welfare programs (Kimmel 2017). Through analysing white supremacist newsletters and publications published between 1969 and 1993, Abby Ferber (1998) found that, despite varying goals, all racist organizations aspire to disseminate essentialist, hierarchical racist rhetoric which is inextricably bound to reductive, static understandings of gender. Barbara Perry suggests that these rigid boundaries also apply to sexual minority groups. According to Blee (1991), this reductive

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worldview is a holdover from the antebellum era before slavery was abolished. This belief system allowed white Christian men to rationalize the enslavement, genocide, rape, and exploitation of Blacks and Native Americans. White supremacists believed that racial and gender-based hierarchies are “rooted in nature and immutable” (ibid.: 54). White supremacist movements’ internal organization reflects these beliefs. Within white religious and KKK or white supremacist communities, women are relegated to domestic work or positions in auxiliary organizations. Within militant and nationalist white supremacist communities, women are generally allowed to occupy leadership roles. As of now, the gender dynamics within the alt-right are largely unknown. However, most participants and movement leaders are men.

“College Conservatives”: A site for right-wing activism We found that university campus organizations are educational spaces where students can learn how to recycle and translate white nationalist, white supremacist, and politically reactionary beliefs into a language that resonates with a diverse student body. One of the authors regularly attended meetings of a politically conservative student group that we will call “College Conservatives,”2 a national organization that sponsors conservative political activism and community-building efforts on college campuses across the United States. Traditionally, the College Conservatives have been characterized as new conservatives, adherents of Ronald Reagan’s strand of moderate Republicanism. However, student conservative groups tend to be ideologically diverse as members have competing beliefs about the content and goals of modern conservatism. Our group is no exception; libertarians vehemently disagree with populists about the morality of government intervention, populists argue with neoliberal capitalists about the merits of foreign trade, and secular members argue with Christian members about the circumstances in which abortion should be legal. However, there is a disturbing trend among movement participants: a rejection of moderate conservatism in favour of reactionary ideologies. “College Conservatives” is open to all students and has a multi-ethnic membership. This is made possible by the allure of populism, nationalism, and libertarianism. White supremacist organizations are neither static nor uniform, but are developing new ways to recruit young people into their organization in a way that enables them not only to blend in but also to secure university funding that is available to student organizations. In the next section we will introduce four members of the College Conservatives (two white, one Black, and one Latino), who regularly attend the meetings and are actively involved in campus politics.

James: The use of humor by a closeted alt-right activist James, a young white man in his early 20s, is a very popular and outspoken member of the College Conservatives. He uses humor effectively to introduce

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and distribute racist ideologies. His preferred style of communication is through memes. Internet memes have been described as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by internet users, creating a shared cultural experience (Milner 2013: 65). Limor Shifman details how the term “meme” is used: In the vernacular discourse of netizens the phrase “Internet meme” is commonly applied to describe the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumors, videos or websites from one person to others via the Internet. According to this popular notion, an Internet mem may spread in its original form, but it often also spawns user-created derivatives. (Shifman 2013: 362) Although James refused to provide specific examples of his memes for fear of being caught, he described the content of the memes he disseminated, which included killing all members of an ethnic group or political group – including Blacks, Jews, and feminists.3 The sharing and distribution of memes, like jokes, can generate pleasure. In an analysis of the link between humor and hatred, Michael Billig argues that jokes should be analysed as a meta-discourse. He argues that [i]f jokes are a means of breaking social taboos, then careful attention should also be paid to the language of ethnic and racial jokes. […] [T]he actual structure of the jokes may be less important than the shared activity of the joking itself. This points to the need to examine the language of the joking as well as that of the meta-discourse used to indicate enjoyment and to justify the joking. (Billig 2011: 271) During a discussion of Candace Owens, a Black female conservative commentator at one of the club meetings, he replied: “I’ve had enough of that bitch. Take her to the camps!”4 While some of his fellow club members were quick to chastise him, most laughed at his joke. They described his humor as an “edgy meme” or a “hot take,” a type of humor that uses racist, sexist, or bigoted humor to scandalize its intended audience. Not all of his peers realized that James is a member of the alt-right and a self-described white supremacist. Prior to disclosing his status during an interview with one of the authors,5 he had masked his racism with liberal and egalitarian rhetoric. Upon revealing his identity in an interview,6 he became candid about his racism and his intention to disseminate his beliefs to his peers. He shared his perspective on the current state of American politics: I think we’re headed towards large-scale civil disobedience or – dare I say it – civil war. […] The thing about civil war is that no-one thinks that they’re going to happen until they do happen. We already saw how bad

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A. Burston and F. Winddance Twine the 2016 election was. The 2020 election is going to be wild. Dare I say it, we are even more divided now than we were prior to the Civil War. […] The issue of slavery was the main issue. So, if you compare these families from completely different places and they might disagree on slavery, but in other respects, they are more similar than different. But compare a liberal family from California to a conservative family from Arkansas. Those two groups are way more different than one another.

James perceives white people as a culturally homogeneous and united group. He does not acknowledge or recognize that ‘whites’ and ‘whiteness’ are political and social products. In detailing what he perceives as the “values” that differentiate between “liberals” and “conservatives,” he echoes the Republican Party platform: [A] lot of liberal families are less religious, more open to ideas about homosexuality and abortion […] More generally, liberal families see liberal progress as “Of course it’s going to happen” and conservatives have an existential crisis about where our country is going. They see this. And think “What the hell is going on?” A lot of liberal families – particularly white ones, will push policy that they don’t even see the effect of. They don’t really benefit from these policies. They’re in favor of bringing in immigrants, refugees, non-discriminatory policies. […] They still have overwhelmingly white friends. They live in a very white community […]. Generally, the country will divide into Red State, Blue State. A lot of people would die. It would be terrible. When James discusses white families in Arkansas, he embraces a belief held by contemporary and earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century white supremacist groups: the fantasy of a singular white culture. White supremacists, in an extension of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific racism, believe that different racial groups are characterized by genetically determined characteristics and static cultures that preclude the possibility of pluralistic societies (Blee 2002; Ferber 1998). James further suggests that openness to immigration, racial equality, women’s rights, and gay rights undermines white cultural unity. After revealing that he is a member of the alt-right, James summarized his beliefs on race: “The alt-right disagrees with the notion that all men are created equal. And it’s within the alt-right that you have anti-enlightenment ideas. The alt-right recognizes how different groups of people operate and function.” When asked about the role of racial minorities within a democracy, he replied: It’s not going to function. A lot of people think of America as an experiment. We’re not an experiment. We are a nation with a people and a culture and a history. Multiracial and multi-ethnic nations in the past? Most of the time, they were empires. Necessarily authoritarian. We

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[whites] think that we’ll all come together around a civic identity. But non-whites get that America was founded for and by white people. The majority of them view it as a white thing, and they’re not white. Especially whites are not willing to admit this: in the long run, we’re going to have tribalism based on race, not ideas. What are people taught these days? The past was evil, and whites are the cause of your problems. Even if you vote Democrat and you make all the sacraments of liberalism, you’re still a problem. [Our emphasis] The belief in the racial superiority of whites represents a continuity in the racial logics of the contemporary alt-right and earlier waves of the KKK. Embracing eugenics, or scientific racism, James believes in biological essentialism with whites at the top of a racial hierarchy. He also expresses a feeling of white male victimhood, which reflects continuities in racial logics and links him to earlier movements. He rejects the idea that members of racial and ethnic minorities should be respected or that brutal history of racial slavery and the economic exploitation of Blacks was wrong.

Michael: The role of minorities advancing white supremacist ideologies The College Conservatives are a racially diverse student organization. While whites and white Latinos comprise the majority of members, there are also Black and brown members of the organization. What role do students who are not physically qualified for inclusion in the socio-political category of ‘whiteness’ play in this organization? Michael is a politically engaged, brown-skinned, Nicaraguan American teenager. When one of the authors first met him, he wore a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with “Meninist,” a popular phrase from “The Red Pill” online forum. Michael identifies as an anti-feminist and a “moderate nationalist.” Although he doesn’t identify as a member of the alt-right, he advances the movement’s causes in several ways: he frequents alt-right websites and discussion forums and shares alt-right propaganda. Describing himself and his fellow club members, he argued: We like to make jokes. […] Very edgy, like, kill all of group X. Like Armenians or Jews or whatever. It’s all mostly jokes. But there’s a kernel of truth. So making Donald Trump president started off as kind of a joke. But when it got more serious, it was like “Cool! Let’s have some fun with this.” There was already backing for this kind of thing. There was already a lot of online infrastructure for it – online commentators that started with Gamergate. Because feminism was starting to permeate everything. There were groups on anonymous forums like 4chan and 8chan who were like, “this is terrible. We are the silent majority.” I met some guys holding a sign that said: “Even Nazis deserve free speech.” And I thought it was funny, so I started coming to the meetings and I got

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The ‘edgy memes’ or racist jokes Michael references originate on alt-right anonymous chatrooms such as Reddit’s “r/The Donald” and 4chan’s “/pol/.” Without realizing it, Michael is facilitating the alt-right’s effort to reintroduce overt racism into public discourse. He shares the perspective of white American conservative activists, who present whites as now marginalized victims in the contemporary United States. Michael’s online and offline practices support the alt-right claim that mainstream American culture has gone too far and must be vigorously repudiated. Michael shares many of the views of his peer James. One example is the belief that “[l]ike differences between men and women, and differences between cultures – those need to be recognized. From gender to culture, we are all different. We shouldn’t all be treated the same way.” Finally, Michael suggests that in an ideal America, people would accept beliefs that echo the ideas of eugenics and biological essentialism.

“Front-stage femininity” and gendered social contracts in the College Conservatives Matthew W. Hughey (2012) found that white female members of white supremacist organizations were engaged in what he termed “front-stage femininity” which differed from their backstage role (86). White women played an important role in impression management with the media. When white male members of a racist organization could not handle scrutiny, combinative interviews, and public rejection, female members were better able to advocate for their cause. White women sanitized the symbolic, material, and political violence associated with their organized hate groups by offering a “strategic display of front-stage femininity in which female members stood as the temporary public face of an organization needing a softer and gentler edge” (86) when the organization was faced with public rejection. Meanwhile, “[i]n the back stage, the women bore the burden of nurturing the bruised and disappointed NEA [National Equality for All] male egos not accustomed to being told “no” by a non-white service class or being questioned by aggressive reporters” (86). The gendered division of labor was “entrenched in a patriarchal worldview” (87) and women performed the required scripts. Women were expected to perform emotional labor, and this corresponded to collective agreements about the innate abilities of women. Jessie Daniels (2009) has shown that many white supremacist websites have discussion forums dedicated to women. While men’s screen names are often related to aggression or honour, women’s names are often related to their white beauty, flowers, or city names. Discussions on these forums frequently pertain to health, beauty, marriage, and weight loss (74).

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Furthermore, white women on these blogs often endorse feminism – so long as it pertains to and benefits white women. In the next section, we address the gendered expectations and social contract that guide the digital practices of the female members of College Conservatives. Like earlier research on white supremacist social movements, we found that the College. Conservatives online community, in contrast to the offline spaces, was maledominated and women were excluded from all male chatrooms. The secret online forums operate in ways similar to earlier waves of the KKK, as a secret society for men. Women served an auxiliary role. We found that among alt-right members, women’s roles were expected to conform to gendered expectations that required them to perform “emotional labor” and what Hughey calls “front-stage femininity.”

Sheila: A white anti-feminist female member of the College Conservatives Sheila is a twenty-something, white, blond university student. Speaking in a soft voice that grows gradually more confident and outspoken as the interview progresses, she is staunchly pro-life. Since joining the College Conservatives as a first-year student, Sheila has not missed a single meeting because “it was just like the first place that I felt understood and welcomed for having different ideas.” In addition to attending weekly meetings, Sheila reports that members of College Conservatives socialize and communicate in secret Facebook chatrooms. There are strict rules for participating in these chats: entry is permitted only for “verified” individuals, or club members who regularly attend meetings and have a track record of conservative beliefs. Content posted in these groups is so offensive that many club members fear being rejected by future employers if they are “doxed,” meaning if their personal information is leaked online, or if their name is tied to the content posted in the groups: People are super paranoid about getting doxed and having their posts show up and then never being able to be hired ever. Their [Facebook chats] are super-secret mostly just for that purpose. It’s 99% a joke. I would say there’s definitely those couple of people that mean it […] but […] basically, it’s all just fun and games. And the second you take it too seriously, it’s not fun and games. But [member name] took it way too seriously, one of these posts. And she responded [angrily]. So anytime someone posts something that remotely shows that they actually are getting too touchy with something, we wreck them. So the goal is to be as edgy as possible and offend as many people as possible. It’s considered a win if you get someone to leave the group because of a meme. What is interesting here is the way that Sheila presents an interpretative framework that minimizes the seriousness of the racist, xenophobic, and violent

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discourse by framing it as “jokes” – not to be taken seriously. This is a way of softening hate speech and making it more acceptable. Participation in these chats is regulated through harassment and self-policing; expression of genuine offense is a sign of weakness and an invitation for collective ridicule. Sheila also reflects upon being marginalized as a woman in a group that imposes gender-segregated chats due to the overtly misogynist discursive culture of these discussion groups: Some guys also just don’t like women in meme groups. This is actually a problem that people […] we face, where it’s like they feel like women are more reactionary and more irrational, so they don’t feel comfortable with women in the more edgy groups because they’re afraid that the women have a bigger chance of screen-shotting and that kind of thing. There was a lot of anti-women memes. And it’s not […] They don’t even go as hard on women as a lot of other people. […] They would call me out on it for not being that edgy. But […] well, I also think that it probably is edgy, and they just don’t wanna admit the fact that a woman can meme just as hard as them. I’m not a feminist. I don’t give a shit. Make fun of women. I make fun of women. You should be able to make fun of women, too; they’re hilarious. We can see from the above quote that Sheila is struggling with her role in these groups. She does not embrace or identify with the stereotype of women as overly sensitive, unable to make offensive jokes, and likely to betray the group. On the other hand, her anti-feminist alignment makes her feel compelled to accept these stereotypes, condone a steady stream of anti-feminist content, and participate in making jokes about women. Like her peers, Sheila employs vitriolic, racist, sexist, anti-feminist content to further shock. While she is not a member of an organized hate group, she regularly posts, consumes, and disseminates content that is identical to that found on alt-right discussion forums. She often copies “memes,” as well as images or quotes, from one forum to another. Alt-right discussion forums and the private chats of College Conservatives rely on a type of humor that desensitizes members to racial stereotypes, gradually making them more accepting of racist and sexist beliefs (Milner 2013). Furthermore, the challenges that Sheila negotiates regarding sexism are not unique to the alt-right. Her struggles resemble those of women in earlier white supremacist organizations (Blee 2002). Her participation in discussion forums is restricted by the sexist beliefs of her male peers, who embrace biological essentialism and force women to adhere to their view of women’s’ role in their organizations.

Chloe: A Black liaison and moderate voice for the College Conservatives Chloe is a twenty-something Black student. A respected member of the College Conservatives, Chloe has chosen to serve the group by embracing the

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role of a public liaison. Like white women in organized hate groups studied by Hughey (2012), Chloe softens the group’s message and manages public impressions of the group by actively concealing statements that reveal the antiMuslim and religious bigotry of some group members. The issue of stigma is one that she has to manage as a Black member of a conservative campus organization. Chloe works for several student publications and often connects student journalists with members of the College Conservatives for interviews: I definitely have had people say, “Oh, Republicans, why would you wanna hang out with them?” They’ve seen me mad, they’ve seen me cry, I eat with them, I crash on their couches, they crash on mine. Those are my people. And now I’ve realized that people actually want in, and not only do they want in, but they wanna hear what they have to say. They wanna interview them for the newspaper, they wanna interview them for the magazine I work for, and I’m the in. And they’re like, “Okay, well, I wanna talk to them, but I don’t really know how. But you can help me do that.” It’s like, “Okay.” It’s like, I’m fulfilling a role, almost. I can be kind of a bridge, since I do write on campus a lot. I’m involved in a few different publications. I can be that connector. But also, they’ll be like, “Oh hey – [name], when are the Republican meetings?” or like, “Oh hey […] Who’s the new president?” Or whatever. They’ll ask me that stuff. Or if I had an opinion about a situation, they’ll ask me, and I feel like I can give my opinion, but they also trust me, because they know who I am. Like many women associated with right-wing communities, Chloe plays an important role in managing the public image of the College Conservatives. She minimizes the offensive aspects of the organization while emphasizing community and friendship. Chloe carefully omits the use of homophobic and anti-Islamic slurs, vitriolic humor, and extreme rhetoric by the members from her description of the organization. She is very aware of this language because on multiple occasions one of the authors has observed her reprimanding members who have “gone too far” in meetings. However, she deliberately avoids these interactions when describing her involvement. When asked about the use of “edgy memes” by the male members of the group, Chloe’ replies: “I feel like the men are […] I don’t wanna generalize, but I feel like their identities are a little bit more heavily tied to the club. I feel like they might feel like they’re more outsiders on campus than the women.” Although Chloe acknowledges that the male group members make comments that are in bad taste, she rationalizes it by suggesting that it is because they feel marginalized on campus. In providing this explanation, Chloe appeals for sympathy and diverts attention away from the racist, homophobic, and religiously intolerant speech of these same male group members. Chloe has established genuine friendships with white group members. However, one dimension of these relationships is that they are based, in part, on her accepting a gendered role and restricting her participation in the online discussion forums.

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When asked directly if any of the men in her organization identify as altright, Chloe claims no knowledge: No […] I don’t know. I don’t know. I genuinely don’t even know what that word means anymore. It’s been bastardized by the media. There are people who do things I don’t like. And they have opinions I don’t like, but I don’t think I would ever characterize somebody as “alt-right.” That’s just such a meme. It’s just a stupid buzz word. I know that there’s a lot of things online, like by people from the “alt-right” targeting Jewish people. Drawing caricatures of them with really big noses and making jokes about money or whatever. That’s not okay, that’s not cool. It is possible that Chloe is not aware that fellow members are associated with the alt-right and involved in organized white supremacist activity both offline and on the internet. In interviews, club members who identify as “alt-right” reported that they keep their identity a secret. However, it is more problematic when Chloe refuses to categorize her peers as alt-right for semantic reasons when she is aware of their anti-Semitic speech. She identifies anti-Semitic cartoons as evidence of alt-right membership. Nonetheless, she prioritizes preserving the club’s image over expressing her personal outrage at the content in group chats. Multiple club members frequently post offensive caricatures of Jews in private chats, but this does not influence Chloe’s refusal to classify them as racist. Other participants have identified Chloe as a member who left the group chats because she found their content too offensive. The decisions that Chloe and Sheila make as they negotiate a discursive culture that is overtly sexist, misogynistic, racist, and intolerant reflects continuities in the content and ideologies of earlier waves of organized hate groups like the KKK. Both women either voluntarily leave group chats or are excluded from all male group chats due to the misogynistic content and the belief that women have specific roles.

Conclusion: Digital culture and the afterlife of white supremacist movements In the twenty-first century, digital culture and internet chatrooms have replaced the print-only era of earlier movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The alt-right movement is distinguished from earlier movements in its use of memes, private online chatrooms, and other digital spaces. Interviews with white and Latinx members of the College Conservatives demonstrate continuity in the racial and gender logics in the content of rightwing and alt-right online discussion forums and offline campus meetings. Beliefs in the superiority of white men, the fragility of white women, fear and hatred of Blacks, Jews, and sexual minorities are consistent with the discourses of earlier waves of the KKK and other organized hate groups.

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White male members of the College Conservatives frequented what have been called media collectives – online forums on 4chan, Facebook, Reddit, and other internet sites that provide anonymous chatroom spaces. In these digital spaces, white and male supremacy is reinscribed. However, the men who participate in these discussions may conceal their identity as white supremacists when offline, and participate in campus organizations that are open to women and racial minorities. In these groups, they strategically employ humor and establish friendships with racial and ethnic minorities, while guiding the discourses and offline culture of these campus organizations. While women and racial minorities are allowed to participate in the “public” forums organized by the College Conservatives, they reported being excluded or asked to leave male-dominated chatrooms. They also often concealed their participation in white supremacist organizations. Like white women, men who were not white – South Asians and dark-skinned Latinos – are expected to prove themselves by regularly posting racist, misogynistic content and participating in discourses that some female members found offensive. For example, Chloe voluntarily left the site while she continued to socialize and interact offline with members whom she did not know were alt-right members. Among the white and Latinx female and male members of the College Conservatives interviewed, we found a pattern in which female and male members participated in online forums that disseminated and reproduced familiar racist stereotypes about Blacks, Jews, Muslims, feminists, and sexual minorities. Latinx and Black student members participated to varying degrees in these digital spaces and occasionally supported rhetoric and ideologies that advanced white nationalism and minimized the racism. White male members of the College Conservatives, who self-identified as members of the “alt-right,” concealed aspects of their identity and engaged in male-only chatrooms. There is one significant distinction between earlier waves of right-wing organizations and the alt-right. The alt-right has recruited university students who participate in campus organizations that are not perceived as white supremacist, but where white nationalist discourses circulate. White male members of that group can recruit from the College Conservatives and engage with them on secret male-only chatrooms where members engage in white supremacist activism. These online spaces could accommodate men who are not white, but who are willing to disseminate racist and misogynistic discourses. The content of the memes that circulate in these chatrooms has been described in ways that suggest they share the racial logics and racist stereotypes of the earlier print-era propaganda material (pamphlets, posters, cartoons, films) from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century KKK. The ideological content in the memes recycles familiar racist stereotypes and violence against Blacks, who continue to bear the brunt of white supremacist violence.

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Notes 1 Two online right-wing movements immediately precede the alt-right. The NeoReactionary Movement (NRx), also known as the Dark Enlightenment, began in 2009. At its core, the NRx movement advocates for anti-egalitarian policy mixed with libertarian economic practices. Movement activists reject the Enlightenmentera notion that all men are created equal, citing eugenic and scientific-racist literature such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994). They express these views in lengthy essays posted to anonymous discussion boards or obscure websites. 2 We are using a pseudonym and not the actual name of the group. 3 As Ryan Milner has shown in his analysis of the participatory media collectives 4chan and reddit, memes can be employed by a polyvocal or diverse public. The “ironic tone” of memes “can quickly be employed for political or social debate” (2013: 65–66). 4 Adam Burston was present at that meeting, which he observed and during which he took detailed notes. 5 All of the interviews were conducted by Adam Burston. 6 He revealed his identity to Adam Burston during a recorded interview.

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Ferber, Abby. “Constructing Whiteness: The Intersections of Race and Gender in US White Supremacist Discourse.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 48–63. Ferber, Abby, editor. “Introduction.” Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism. Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–18. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Frankenberg, Ruth. “The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness.” The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen et al. Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 72–96. Fredrickson, George. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History. Oxford University Press, 1982. Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. W.W. Norton, 2017. Hankes, Keegan and Alex Amend. “The Alt-Right is Killing People.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 5 February 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/20180205/alt-right-kil ling-people. Accessed 24 June 2018. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia University Press, 2017. Hughey, Matthew W. White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meaning of Race. Stanford University Press, 2012. Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Nation Books, 2017. Klatch, Rebecca E. “The Counterculture, the New Left, and the New Right.” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 17, no. 3, 1994, pp. 199–214. Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. Vintage Books, 1972. Manchester, Julia. “David Duke: Charlottesville Protests About ‘Fulfilling Promises of Donald Trump.” The Hill, 12 August 2017. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefin g-room/news/346326-david-duke-charlottesville-protests-about-fulfilling-promises. Accessed 16 June 2018. Marwick, Alice and Rebecca Lewis. 2017. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute. https://datasociety.net/output/media-ma nipulation-and-disinfo-online/. Accessed 24 June 2018. Massanari, Adrienne. 2017. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society, vol. 19, no. 3, 2017, pp. 329–346. Maqbool, Aleem. “Hail Trump: White Nationalists Mark Trump Win with Nazi Salute.” BBC News, 22 November 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada38057104/hail-trump-white-nationalists-mark-trump-win-with-nazi-salute. Accessed 16 June 2018. McVeigh, Rory. “What’s New About the Tea Party Movement?” Understanding the Tea Party Movement, edited by Nella Van Dyke. Routledge, 2016, pp. 15–35. Milner, Ryan M. “FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz.” Fibreculture Journal, vol. 22, 2013, n.p. http://twentytwo. fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-156-hacking-the-social-internet-memes-identity-antagonismand-the-logic-of-lulz/. Accessed 24 June 2018. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. John Hunt Publishing, 2017. Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

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Perry, Barbara. “‘White Genocide’: White Supremacists and the Politics of Reproduction.” Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism, edited by Abby Ferber. Routledge, 2004, pp. 75–96. Potok, Mark. “Rage on the Right.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2 March 2010. https:// www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2010/rage-right. Accessed 24 June 2018. Potok, Mark. “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 15 February 2017. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/yea r-hate-and-extremism. Accessed 24 June 2018. Queally, James. “Ku Klux Klan Rally in Anaheim Erupts in Violence; 3 Are Stabbed and 13 Arrested.” Los Angeles Times, 29 February 2016. https://www.latimes.com/ local/lanow/la-me-ln-klan-rally-in-anaheim-erupts-in-violence-one-man-sta bbed-20160227-story.html. Accessed 17 June 2018. Shifman, Limor. “Memes in the Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 18, 2013, pp. 362–377. Simi, Pete and Robert Futrell. American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Warren, Jonathan and France Winddance Twine. “Whites, the Next Minority: The Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 1997, pp. 200–218. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006.

Part III

White affects

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“Anyone foreign?” Whiteness, passing, and deportability in Brexit Britain Ariane de Waal

After the UK voted to leave the European Union in the June 2016 referendum, there was an instant increase in racist incidents and hate crimes. One of the most cited figures, released by the Home Office, testifies to a 41% surge in violence by July 2016, including racially and religiously motivated as well as homophobic offences (Weaver 2016). Over 6,000 racist assaults were reported in the first four weeks after the referendum (Virdee and McGeever 2017: 7). The immediate connection between the debate surrounding the referendum, particularly the toxic rhetoric of the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns, and the perceived legitimacy with which hate crimes have been committed can hardly be disputed. Although “any non-white British person who has lived in the UK will already know [that] these […] incidents are sadly nothing new”, as Tshepo Mokoena commented in Vice Magazine, many British Asians and black Britons have spoken out about a level of racist remarks not personally witnessed since the 1980s. This chapter takes its cue from one of the hate-speech acts that was widely reported across social and national media. On the day after the referendum, Max Fras tweeted about his experience in a Tesco supermarket in Gloucester where, as The Guardian relays his account, a white man became agitated in the queue for the checkout and began yelling: “This is England, foreigners have 48 hours to fuck right off. Who is foreign here? Anyone foreign?” (quoted in Lyons 2016). Fras added that the man began quizzing people in the queue about their country of origin: “He pointed at another gentleman in front of him and said: ‘Where are you from, are you Spanish? Are you Italian? Are you Romanian?’ And he said ‘No, I’m English’” (ibid.). I depart from this episode at Tesco’s in Gloucester to examine the performative formation of a white nationalist subject who polices urban infrastructures in order to seek out and expel the non-white, not-quite-white, or non-national Other. What links the incident reported by Fras to similar occurrences in the post-referendum climate are at least two aspects, which this chapter will seek to elucidate and contextualize. First, common to the racist incidents that have been recorded since the referendum is the assumption of an explicit consensus on the fact that so-called foreigners are no longer welcome in Britain. This misinterpretation of the Vote Leave campaign slogan

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substitutes the motion to leave the European Union (EU) with the obligation for ‘foreigners’ to leave the UK. What is remarkable is the extent to which these statements borrow from bureaucratic and penal language in their claim to official authority. This is particularly evident in the Tesco customer’s issuing of the entirely arbitrary ultimatum of 48 hours. I will draw on Imogen Tyler’s concept of deportability in order to illuminate the white nationalist’s cooperation in a wider governmental project that renders parts of the population disposable, framing them for forceful removal. Second, the episode at Tesco’s lays bare the unstable foundations of a white nationalism that depends on the willingness of the interpellated ‘foreigner’ to recognize the hail and identify as such. As the white customer’s reiterated enquiry evidences, the unofficial form of racial profiling that finds application here requires the sought-after foreigners to come forward, to publicly profess to their lack of belonging to an exclusive white English identity. In order to disentangle the imbrications of whiteness and nationalism that collude in current formations of post-referendum Britishness – and, specifically, Englishness – I will apply an intersectional lens to the hate crimes and the discourse surrounding them. The first part of this chapter enquires into the whiteness of Brexit and, building on Sara Ahmed’s account of passing, it proposes a reading of postreferendum hate crimes as strange encounters, in which the nationalist subject passes as white while passing the stranger as non-white. The hate speech incidents will then be discussed against the backdrop of anti-terror campaigns and the culture of suspicion that took hold in the UK after the 2005 London bombings, leaning on Joseph Pugliese’s notion of infrastructural whiteness. The third section will place the racist speech witnessed after the referendum in the wider context of governmental and legislative manoeuvres that have led to the formation of British citizenship as implicitly white and highly exclusive on the one hand, and to the creation of disposable and deportable populations within the nation on the other hand. In the final section, I will reverse the lens from hate crime episodes to the white liberals reporting them, commenting on them, and combating them. The chapter will conclude by problematizing white liberal and anti-racist positions in the current political climate.

Placing whiteness in(to) the Brexit debate Since Richard Dyer’s seminal study White (1997), scholars engaged in the field of Critical Whiteness Studies have been concerned with uncovering the “unmarked, unspecific, universal” components of whiteness, and with rendering visible those structures of privilege and entitlement that are “maintained by being unseen” (ibid.: 45). One of the challenges faced by such critical endeavours is the slippage between whiteness and other axes of differentiation. It is because “whiteness never exists separately from specific class, gender or other socio-cultural inflections” (xv) that it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint where whiteness resides in such interactions, especially in

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political scenarios where other structures of oppression appear more dominant or acute. Yet letting whiteness slip from analysis reinforces the normative position of that which remains unnoticed, unchecked, unworthy of comment. This is why an intersectional analysis is of particular merit to Critical Whiteness Studies, as it examines how the collusion of whiteness with particular national, classed, gendered, or other subject positions strengthens white privilege precisely by concealing the white components of power. When it comes to the 2016 EU membership referendum and the ensuing Brexit talks, the issues of racism (Burnett 2017; Virdee and McGeever 2017), national identity and neoliberalism (cf. Browne 2017), postindustrialism and far-right politics (cf. Evans 2017) instantly moved to the foreground of the unfolding critical debate. How whiteness intersects and interacts with these phenomena has, however, not been the subject of extensive scrutiny. As Steve Garner has recently pointed out, the central concern of the so-called third wave of Critical Whiteness Studies with uncovering nationally and locally specific iterations of white supremacy appears all the more pressing “in a moment characterized by the white nationalist projects expressed through Trumpism and BREXIT” (Garner 2017: 1586). So how white is Brexit? A first and most obvious thing to note would be the whiteness of the negotiating table. As Tania Branigan (2017) fittingly summarized in her headline for The Guardian, “All White and Just One Woman”, not a single person of colour was included in the nine-person team compiled to support Brexit Secretary David Davis in the negotiations. The fact that governmental institutions and boards are far from representative of Britain’s ethnic diversity and female population hardly comes as a surprise. What is more telling is that most media outlets apparently considered the allwhite and nearly all-male Brexit panel entirely unremarkable. The BBC, for instance, neglected to specify that those subsumed under the headline “Brexit: The People Who Are Negotiating” were solely ‘white people’, which points to the common ontological normalization of whiteness as “being ‘just’ human” (Dyer 1997: 2). What is more, the article accompanied by this headline highlighted the role of “Germany’s Angela Merkel and the UK’s Theresa May [as] the two most important people in the Brexit negotiations”, alongside deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand’s rank among the “most influential women in Brussels”, and Sarah Healey’s position as “in effect, second-in-command of the civil service machine tasked with delivering Brexit” (Branford, Kirby and Wheeler 2017). This placing of emphasis on the few female negotiators’ political weight could be seen as a tacit acknowledgement of the gender imbalance of the negotiating table and Western governments more generally. The predominance of white politicians and civil servants, in contrast, does not seem to raise comparable concerns. The whiteness of the Brexit team is indicative not only of the underrepresentation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME)1 groups in Britain’s institutions – particularly the higher levels of governance – but more specifically points to the marginalization of non-white voices (if there can be

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such a thing) in the official Brexit debate. Especially as immigration has been one of the touchstones of the discourse surrounding the referendum and one of the most contentious issues in the formal talks, the fact that there is not one person on the British side of the table with their own family history of migration appears as a serious shortcoming. Not only have BAME people been barred from sharing their expertise, but their concerns were also ignored in the campaign leading up to the referendum, leaving people from minority ethnic backgrounds multiply disenfranchised. “The issues that are likely to have a particularly significant effect on BAME communities have not been adequately addressed by campaigners”, as Toni Haastrup (2016) concludes for the UK in a Changing Europe research initiative based at King’s College London. When non-white Britons have cropped up in media representations of Brexit, they have overwhelmingly been framed as the victims of racial abuse or in the context of speculations about ‘their’ likely vote. The complex and diverse positions within BAME communities, which evidently comprise all kinds of class backgrounds and political persuasions, including people in favour of the Leave vote, could not be acknowledged within these frames. While clearly marginalized, non-white racial positions have not been invisible at any point in the debate. Whether represented in terms of the “figurative scapegoats” that Imogen Tyler examines as “national abjects” – “‘the bogus asylum seeker’, ‘the illegal immigrant’, […] and ‘the Gypsy’” (2013: 9) – or portrayed as targets of racially and religiously aggravated offences, the position of people of colour in the Brexit context is perennially problematized. Either their claims to belonging to the nation are called into question by the terms of the debate, particularly surrounding the reach of the welfare state and alleged deviations from the white cultural norm; or the racist minority that initiates hate crimes is depicted as denying them their share in the nation. In both cases, their non-whiteness marks them as citizens whose belonging to post-referendum Britain must either be scrutinized or specifically protected, irrespective of their actual immigration or citizenship status. Conversely, the racial position of the white majority has not been disclosed or pondered on a comparable scale. Beyond the caricature vision of face-offs between former Bullingdon Club members David Cameron and Boris Johnson or Boris Johnson vs. George Osborne as “a conversation between two white middle-aged gentlemen” (Shirley Williams quoted in Benson 2016), the glaring whiteness (or masculinity) of the leading campaigners is rarely considered worthy of deeper exploration. In the formation of the negotiating team, and the attendant media discussion, whiteness remains, as has been critiqued in the field of Critical Whiteness Studies since its inception, largely invisible, naturalized, normalized. This perpetuation of whiteness as unremarkable conceals the subtle operations by means of which a particular version of white Englishness currently crystallizes into the hegemonic norm. In consolidating the right of white, British-born citizens to a number of symbolic and economic resources, the Leave campaign considerably curbed access to hegemonic whiteness. Even though their whiteness has always been unstable,

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it is especially the group of Eastern European migrants that finds itself newly excluded from the white national norm. As Garner explains, “ostensibly ‘white’ groups can also be racialized by reference to cultural rather than phenotypical difference. In the British context, this has historically applied to Jews […], Gypsy-Travellers […], Irish Catholics […] and Eastern European migrants” (2016: 5). The Brexit vote seems to have added fuel to such processes of racialization by suggesting to a violent minority that non-white and not-quite-white citizens or residents do not belong to the nation. The post-referendum hate-speech incidents and racist attacks on white EU citizens living in the UK, specifically those from Eastern Europe, are the most pointed manifestation of tightening definitions of whiteness. I propose to read encounters between the authors of hate speech and those targeted by it as moments of passing, in which the nationalist subject passes as white while passing the non-national Other as non-white. In Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed suggests a reconsideration of passing as “tak[ing] place through strange encounters with embodied others” (2000: 128). These encounters are determined by the “economy of desire ‘to tell the difference’”, that is, to locate difference “somewhere on (or in) the bodies of strangers” (125–126). The inability to detect difference may lead to the Other passing as white, may guarantee the Other’s mobility, however tenuously. The desire ‘to tell the difference’ is in evidence in the Tesco customer’s desperate call on ‘foreigners’ to come forward. The speaker’s reliance on a set of ethnic categories (Spanish, Italian, Romanian) that have, in his understanding, become excluded from the nation-state testifies to the script of the new, post-referendum scene of passing: leaning on a set of keywords from the Leave campaign, the authors of hate speech warn ‘foreigners’ to leave the country or enact their expulsion through physical violence. In these strange encounters, the difference of the stranger is often difficult to decipher. It can be an accent, a mode of dress, or a slightly ‘darker’ complexion that triggers the ostracizing speech. It can also be the case that the stranger is hiding in the midst of the white body of the nation, necessitating the call on ‘anyone foreign’ to come forward. The moment of interpellation hails the stranger into non-whiteness, into the position of a subject whose difference can be detected and will henceforth mark them as non-white. It is highly suggestive that “olgatoja” (2017), who uses her YouTube channel “to share [her] thoughts on living in the UK as an EU immigrant at the eventful Brexit time”, has observed how “there’s almost like a stigma on everyone from Eastern Europe”. If the moment of passing produces a stigma, if it marks or brands the skin of the Other, it violently excludes EU nationals from the group of normatively white citizens, whose privileged whiteness holds the “capacity to occlude and so mystify its status as a racial category” (Pugliese 2007: 107). White Englishness is, in this context, the only version of whiteness that remains unmarked. It is in the moment of passing, of being passed, that the non-national Other becomes non-white. As this logic of passing suggests, normative whiteness has entered into an alliance with the trope of belonging, from which its iterations have

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become almost inseparable. Neither the unproblematic whiteness of the author of hate speech nor the problematized non-whiteness of its recipient can be isolated from their close affiliation with notions of national identity, specifically (non-)Englishness, and (the lack of) white citizenship. The type of intersectional analysis that the present political moment calls for is, therefore, one that acknowledges whiteness in its intersections, rather than in addition to other axes of differentiation. The original metaphor of the road intersection coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw has been criticized for failing to capture the interdependency of vectors of discrimination, which appear separate before and after the point of junction (Walgenbach 2007: 49). One way out of this conceptual problem might be to shift the terminology or iconography of intersectionality towards a notion of multiple nodal points, as conceptualized in Rosi Braidotti’s writing on the nomadic subject. In visualizing social vectors as “zigzag[ging] in and out of one another, triggering all kinds of combinations” (2006: 62), Braidotti postulates that “[n]omadic subjectivities are not quantitative pluralities, but rather qualitative multiplicities” (94). Following this line of thought, the social identity of the white nationalist subject in post-referendum Britain cannot easily be disassembled or quantified along racial, class or gender categories. While the perpetrators of reported assaults have been male and female, of all age groups, and from various regions, what seems to unify them is their whiteness. Yet one cannot separate out their whiteness from its intersection with national identity and discourses of belonging. Whiteness constitutes no single axis of identity that can be considered irrespectively of its claims to (policing) the nation. What is important is that most hate-speech incidents have been logged in England (Burnett 2017: 87) and that many of them make explicit reference to Englishness, rather than Britishness. This is indicative of the current mobilization of “resentful English nationalism” through appeals to “Euroscepticism and concern about ‘immigration’” (Virdee and McGeever 2017: 10). But while Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever identify English nationalism, or political Englishness, as “the invisible driver” (8) of the Brexit vote, one needs to add that this invisible driver cannot be dissociated from the naturalized whiteness, or white citizenship, that enters into alliance with Englishness. If the man harassed while standing in line at the Tesco supermarket in Gloucester attempted to ward off the assault on his presumed non-whiteness by asserting “No, I’m English”, this suggests that what is negotiated in strange encounters is precisely white Englishness, rather than a singular racial or a national identity. The post-referendum instances of passing are, I would like to suggest, iconic scenes that put the contemporary, nationally and locally specific iterations of whiteness in the UK into sharpest focus. In departing from the hate speech episode at Tesco’s in Gloucester, this chapter launches the white nationalist subject as an exemplary figure to illuminate the political present. Whereas, in the Brexit debate at large, whiteness has rarely been openly negotiated as a social category – much less so than, say, questions of nation/

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nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, age, even gender – whiteness becomes visible and tangible for the briefest of moments in hate-speech incidents. These events therefore provide a good entry point into analyses aimed at uncovering the intersectional interactions between whiteness and Englishness in the current political climate. At the same time, placing the focus on these strange encounters is problematic, because it might tend to stress the individual, rather than institutional, dimensions of current racisms. It should be stressed that my discussion of particular episodes is not interested in pinpointing personal agency, in specific racist subjects or utterances. Instead, I propose to see these scenarios as emblematic of, leaning on, and reinforcing wider conjunctions of whiteness, national identity, citizenship and racism, which remain obscure in the elite and governmental domains of British society. Therefore, this chapter seeks to posit these episodes as paradigmatic, yet concomitantly shift the focus from the white nationalist subject to the state racism on which its enunciations feed.

Infrastructural whiteness While the legacy of long-standing racism and what Paul Gilroy has deemed “[p]ost-imperial melancholia” (2005: 434) are evident in current xenophobic articulations, the white nationalist subject that is constructed in hate-speech acts can productively be mapped against a more recent socio-historical context, the climate of suspicion and Islamophobia in the wake of the 2005 London bombings. Both cultural moments, the London bombings and the Brexit campaign, have served to erect and maintain what Joseph Pugliese has called an “infrastructural whiteness” (2006: 21), which regulates urban access and mobility. Pugliese derives his discussion of infrastructural whiteness in post-7/7 Britain from a photograph that circulated widely on the internet in the days after the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was falsely identified as a suicide bomber and shot dead at Stockwell Tube Station in the aftermath of the 2005 attacks. The photographed service information board, supposedly captured at Notting Hill Station, displays the following “NOTICE TO ALL PASSENGERS: Please do not run on the platforms or concourses. Especially if you are carrying a rucksack, wearing a big coat or look a bit foreign” (quoted in Pugliese 2006: 6). Although Pugliese fails to note that the photograph was a spoof, he nevertheless develops a remarkable reflection on the spatialization of race while pondering the depicted safety notice: What would otherwise operate at the level of implicit racialised knowledge is here serviceably broached […]. The myth of a liberal, colour-blind society is momentarily ruptured through the naming of the coloured subject marked as a ‘bit foreign’ in contradistinction to the normative white corpus of the English nation. In other words, what is exposed here is the presupposed whiteness of the British subject. This […] must be seen

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By suggesting that whiteness inscribes and inflects social infrastructures, Pugliese highlights its spatio-visual dimension. If whiteness is infrastructurally presupposed, all routes and locations are deemed accessible and traversable for the white British subject. In other words, passing as white is built into urban infrastructures and technologies of identification (racial profiling, CCTV surveillance, biometrics) as the normative mode/code of being and moving in the city. Conversely, the ‘foreign’ subject must heed a number of implicit and serviceably broached security announcements in order to pass urban spaces without accruing attention or violence to his or her body. A subject that is not passing as white encounters a number of difficulties when attempting to cross the symbolic and spatial thresholds of the urban landscape. This is the case because Western technologies of representation operate with white templates, although this taxonomic determination remains imperceptible. If, for instance, a subject “fails to conform to predetermined white standards that set the operating limits of particular biometric technologies”, this subject simply cannot pass (Pugliese 2007: 106). In the aftermath of the London bombings, urban space became significantly more difficult to traverse for racialized subjects – especially those presumed to be Muslim – now at risk of extended police powers to stop and search, and vulnerable to fellow passengers’ anxious stares or derogatory comments. An article published on the BBC website in July 2005 recorded the strategies employed by men perceived to be of Asian descent in response to the “atmosphere of suspicion between Tube travellers”: among these were traveling without rucksacks, pushing out corporate ID cards “like the open page of a passport”, wearing Make Poverty History wristbands and reading The Economist, or carrying bottles of wine as if going home for dinner (Coughlan 2005). The deployment of such strategies – and the BBC’s casual reporting of them as if they were sad, yet unavoidable consequences of heightened terror alerts – point to non-white travellers’ difficulties in navigating the infrastructures of an international megacity. If infrastructural whiteness relies on configuring the dominant racial position as the invisible norm, explicit urban manifestations of white supremacy appear in the form of racist graffiti at bus stops and train stations, or the distribution of neo-fascist stickers that declare various British neighbourhoods a ‘white zone’, which have been spotted with some frequency since the referendum. Here, what Pugliese terms the ‘normative white corpus of the English nation’ (2006: 21) proudly and defiantly asserts itself against the subject who can be positioned as not, or no longer, belonging to the nation. It is particularly noteworthy that a large number of the reported hate crimes took place on the public transport system.2 To quote from iStreetWatch, a website set up by the Migrants’ Rights Network that allows users to lodge incidents

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or pledge their support to combat street racism, the following incident took place in the borough of Camden: “In proximity to a Chinese individual and an Indian family, a group of British young men shouted on the escalator ‘all non Brits standing on the left move to your right your deportation awaits you’” (iStreetWatch, 24 June 2016). At Gatwick airport, someone “[w]itnessed a woman at [the] border yell to [a] worker ‘Well YOU don’t sound very English!’” (iStreetWatch, 26 June 2016). Another user reported an episode that happened to her on the Tube, when a woman turned to her and proclaimed, “‘you’re not English are you’. […] Then she proceeded to say ‘no one on this tube is English’” (iStreetWatch, 26 November 2016). Reports about travellers on public transport and at transit points who explicitly enquire after their fellow passengers’ ethnic background contain echoes of post-7/7 antiterrorism discourses. The citizen who self-confidently calls on presumed foreigners to come forward as ‘not [very] English’ can be seen as a more vigilant return of the white, anxious commuter subject addressed by counter-terror campaigns. Among the official publicity campaigns designed to combat terror is the British Transport Police’s “Project Servator.” As part of their self-proclaimed “innovative new tactics […] to deter, detect and disrupt crime on the rail network”, the BTP distributed a range of posters on the London Underground that display the message: “We love rush hour. It gives us 300,000 extra pairs of eyes” (Counter Terror Business n. d.). These posters interpellate citizens into the state’s extended “police ‘family’” (Burnett 2004: 14), literally positioning them as the eyes and ears of the police. In the context of counterterror campaigns, commuters have routinely been asked to cooperate in the supervisory gaze of the security apparatus that sifts through the urban environment to identify could-be terrorists. Citizens thus take a share in the burden of community policing and assume responsibility for identifying hidden terrorist agency. It is in this context that Ahmed has pointed out how citizenship has effectively been “translated into a form of Neighbourhood Watch” (2004: 78). The alert citizen who has, for over a decade, been trained to read particular racialized bodies as associated with terrorism might now, in the aftermath of the referendum, feel prompted to ‘detect’ those EU nationals who presumably have to leave the UK. If one wonders about the impunity with which the hypervigilant subjects whose utterances have been archived on iStreetWatch speak and act, it might help to look back to the punitive gaze politics of the post-7/7 moment. Visual practices, however, cannot fully account for the racial schemas that organize urban life. While predicated on ousting the bearers of ostensibly visible markers such as phenotypical indices and religious styles of dress and grooming, infrastructural whiteness is also implemented as an affective relation. Writing on Audre Lorde’s recollection of a childhood encounter with a white woman who shied away from her on the New York subway, Ahmed notes how “fear does something; it re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface […]. Fear involves relationships of

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proximity, which are crucial to establishing the ‘apartness’ of white bodies” (2004: 63). Fear does something. In the case of passengers moving away from suspicious bodies on public transport, the collective affect of aversion produces whiteness. The anxious orientation of the white traveller towards the racialized Other establishes a spatial relationship between bodies, securing both the ‘apartness’ of white bodies and the restrictions imposed on the mobility of those whose difference can be ‘read off the surface’. What follows from this is that infrastructural whiteness regulates and is regulated by the affective register and habitus of subjects who traverse city space. While whiteness per se remains unremarkable, as that racial category which can always pass, it crystallizes in the moment of aversion. The white commuter becomes manifestly white in the act of turning away from non-white passengers; in the movement away from the abject body, the white subject secures their inviolable skin as that which remains ‘apart’. The traveller of colour, by contrast, cannot cross any urban thresholds without accruing attention to their racialized position. He or she needs to prove their adherence to Western items of consumption (wine, The Economist) and concomitantly disidentify from terrorist agency – or, in the post-referendum context, abstain from audibly speaking a foreign language or with a non-British accent.

Whiteness and deportability If, after the London bombings, the fearful white citizen constituted him or herself as a white subject by means of an affective relationship of aversion, the apartness of white bodies in post-referendum Britain is more often than not achieved through performative speech acts. This works by calling on ‘foreigners’ to come forward, for the difference of EU nationals cannot always be as easily ‘read off the surface’. A noteworthy feature of the racist speech acts is the issuing of an ultimatum to leave the country, as seen in the episode at Tesco’s. The customer’s self-appointed task to issue the government’s call to leave the country is mirrored in a number of comparable hate-speech acts collected on iStreetWatch. In Cambridge, a Polish 41-year-old was heckled by a group of men in a pub on the day after the referendum and informed that “Farage says you’ve got two years to fuck off back to Poland” (iStreetWatch, 24 June 2016). In Devon, on the same day, a man who was on holiday to the UK and went out for a walk was looked up and down by another rambler and advised to “fuck right off out of his country” because “all people in the UK don’t want foreigners here, and the government agrees” (iStreetWatch, 24 June 2016). Two days later, a Londoner reported that they were told to “fuck off back to where you came from, the country has spoken and doesn’t want all you immigrants here” (iStreetWatch, 26 June 2016). At the end of the same month, Trish Adudu told the BBC about a man in Coventry city centre who “cycled over to what looked like an Asian student and was basically saying ‘Get out of here. Go back home. Haven’t you heard the vote?’” (BBC News 2016).

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The wording of the hate speech is strikingly similar in these instances, which is already a fair indicator that the speakers are reiterating racist slurs picked up in the wider social climate, rather than voicing a private opinion. It is evident that they feel entitled to be acting as the mouthpieces of Nigel Farage, ‘the government’, ‘the country’, or ‘the vote’. The slippage between these personal or abstract entities indicates the sentiment that there is a diffuse, widespread agreement on the need for foreign-looking or foreignsounding people to ‘go home’. The speakers feel aligned with a consensus position, which emboldens and enables them to enunciate the racist statements. They openly assume a mandate with which the Leave campaigners, the government or the majority of the British people have awarded them, at least in their perception. These incidents are, therefore, no extreme aberrations or unusual occurrences in an otherwise tolerant and peaceful multicultural society. It is important to point out, as Jon Burnett does, that “there is a parallel between a racist violence that is practically carried out as some perverse form of public duty and state policies which place legal demands on a variety of agencies to racially profile ‘service-users’, and track down irregular migrants” (2017: 89–90). The idiom of ‘tracking down’ migrants recurs in the speakers’ single-handed policing of the streets, pubs, trains and countryside of the nation. Even the faulty technology of racially profiling ‘foreigners’, epitomized by the arbitrary call on ‘anyone foreign’ to come forward, mimics the haphazard nature of governmental schemes. Here, one only needs to point to the Home Office’s sending of text messages to a large number of people suspected of staying in the UK illegally, many of whom factually had a right to remain (Tyler 2017). In the run-up to the referendum, anti-immigrant rhetoric came to a head with Farage’s unveiling of the “Breaking Point” poster, which was immediately criticized for its resemblance to Nazi propaganda. The caption to this image, which urges the British people to “take back control of our borders”, is indicative of the isolationist ideology which also finds expression in hate-speech acts that virtually serve to ‘take back control’ of the country’s public spaces, purging them of perceived difference. In consequence, the overt forms of racism encountered on British streets after the referendum are closely affiliated with public campaigns, a point which the Institute of Race Relations has been able to prove with vehemence and accuracy (Burnett 2017; see also Virdee and McGeever 2017). This is particularly evident in the case of the Operation Vaken vans used in the government’s controversial advertising campaign, which coursed through London in 2013, telling undocumented immigrants to “Go Home or Face Arrest”, or in the Home Office’s distribution of placards at airports, announcing that “Going home is as easy as 1, 2, 3” (Tyler 2017). The frequently expressed demands that those suspected to be foreigners ‘go home’ immediately – or within 48 hours, or two years – thus blatantly take up cues from public discourse. Among the steps by means of which the state itself has paved the way for the strange encounters between non-nationals and white nationalists to take

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place is the reconfiguration of British citizenship in the neoliberal era. As Tyler (2013) elucidates, the 1981 Nationality Act, though not directly naming race and ethnicity in its wording, “redesigned British citizenship so as to exclude black and Asian populations in the Commonwealth while leaving ‘routes home’ for white nationals born within the territorial boundaries of the British Empire” (54). The implicit redesignation of British citizenship as white, nativist and highly exclusive took a more explicit turn in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the conflict in Syria when the government began to make increasing use of its powers to revoke citizenship, leaving a number of individuals and entire families stateless. More recently, the deportation (or threat thereof) of the Windrush generation and their children has once again exposed the close alliances between whiteness, state racism and citizenship legislation. In light of the attempted and achieved deportations of non-white Commonwealth citizens and terror suspects, commentators have drawn awareness to the irony of removing “long-term British residents to countries from which they have fled or have no attachment to, […] and to where the foreign office typically advices (white) British citizens against travel” (Kapoor 2018). While the right of white Britons to citizenship remains naturalized and taken for granted, the precarious citizenship of those with no claims to the “racially coded concept of patriality” (ibid.) has been officially redesigned as a privilege, to be withdrawn at any time. The Windrush scandal is thus indicative of a wider nationalist discourse in which “‘immigrant’ is intertwined with ‘minority’, which is intertwined with ‘non-white’, which is then intertwined with […] not quite British” (Moore 2018) – a chain of association that renders ever new sections of British society deportable. The notion that British citizenship is a highly contingent status that needs to be ‘earned’ and ‘deserved’ has also been enshrined by the introduction of the “Life in the United Kingdom” test, launched by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which suggests that those aspiring to British citizenship must be proven worthy of their leave to remain. Evidently, the white subject born in the UK is innately considered worthy of British citizenship. These legislative developments conceal the equation of citizenship with whiteness, effectively realized through inhibiting access to citizenship for non-white residents under the cloak of supposedly shared cultural and civic values. This becomes acutely visible in the desperate attempts by white nationalists to detect difference, which seize indiscriminately on items of dress, accents, skin colour or other features that appear to deviate from the normative model of the white, native British citizen. In passing the Other as non-white and concomitantly performing their own whiteness, the speakers of hate speech enact an exclusive British citizenship while depriving the Other of their aspirations or rights to the same. Again, this sense of entitlement is not due to individual racist extremism but indicative of the larger legislative and political manoeuvres by means of which, as Tyler elaborates,

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British citizenship has been designed to abject specific groups and populations, producing paralysed, dejected and ‘deportable’ populations of non-citizens within the internal borders of the nation […]. Abjection […] is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out and disqualify from juridical modes of belonging populations that are at the same time contained within the state. (2013: 48) The ambivalences and uncertainties arising from the state’s right to strip British citizens of their citizenship translate into the diffuse sense, perpetuated in hate crimes, that people who appear to look or speak differently from the normatively white Briton no longer have a right to remain. It is arguable that the pointed populist terminology of the Leave campaigners, and the straightforward yes-or-no framing that pertains to any referendum, helped reduce these more complex legislative procedures to a simple question of ‘in’ or ‘out’, which left a number of people inclined to believe that ‘foreigners’ now have to ‘go home’. In assuming the public duty of relaying this message to ‘anyone foreign’, white nationalists enforce the governmentally induced deportability of abject populations in face-to-face, street-racist interactions. In this manner, the nationalist subject assists in implementing the project of ‘whitening’ British citizenship and national identity on a practical level. In heeding the call to ‘take back control’ of the nation’s borders, the white nationalist – standing in for the nation at large – secures the borders of citizenship against incursion from non-white citizens, EU nationals and illegal immigrants. Accordingly, whiteness converges with the ideology of nativism to form a highly exclusive national identity that only those born in the UK and visibly identifiable as white can access. Even if the extreme manifestations of hate speech and racist violence stem from the actions of an aggressive minority, and even if the vast majority who voted “Leave” in the referendum should not be dismissed wholesale as holding racist views, it is evident that the overall discourse surrounding the campaign has emboldened this violent minority. It is in the aggressive attitude towards immigration that individual racist acts and state racism collide and converge. Recruiting its vocabulary from anti-immigration rhetoric and the ideology of nativism, the author of hate speech is one whose whiteness is, on the one hand, naturalized by claims to a British national identity. Their whiteness never needs to be proven, their entitlement to citizenship and welfare never needs to be asserted. On the other hand, by actively defining and policing the borders of this national whiteness, the author of hate speech also creates one of the rare instances in which whiteness becomes visible. It is a whiteness camouflaged and contained by a number of claims and categories – nationalism, nativism, citizenship – yet, in offering a glimpse of its operations in moments of passing, white privilege also opens itself up for scrutiny and attack.

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This is the case because, in conjunction with the invisible driver of Englishness, the hate crime episodes testify to whiteness as the invisible driver of the referendum outcome. Whereas whiteness is notoriously difficult to identify in many scenarios of dominance and oppression due to its normative status, it is in the moment of racist enunciation that whiteness becomes visible, detectable and therefore debatable. The anecdotal evidence collected on iStreetWatch, Twitter and other social networking sites supports the view that nearly all of the hate speech recorded since the referendum has been uttered by white speakers. White privilege becomes instantly legible in the sense of entitlement that produces the nationalist speaking position. While infrastructural whiteness enables the subject to pass in a way that gives little occasion for reflection on its racial identity, for the movement through city space happens without obstructions, the moment of openly assuming the mandate of ostracizing speech highlights its structural operations. It is because the speaker can selfidentify as white and English that he or she can issue an ultimatum or call on ‘foreigners’ to come forward. It is when such statements are made that white Englishness, figuratively speaking, shows its colour, that whiteness becomes denaturalized as the invisible norm and highly visible in its violent and extreme manifestations. It is, however, intensely problematic that this visibility accrues to whiteness only in instances that can easily be dismissed as the desperate acting out of the resentful white working class. I have deliberately omitted references to the class status of the authors of hate speech in the previous sections, for two reasons. First of all, while the gender and often also the age of the perpetrators of hate speech are explicitly mentioned in the emerging archives, one can often only speculate on their socio-economic position based on the reproduced linguistic and habitual registers that could be construed as markers of class. Apart from the fact that such inferences from the perspective of middle-class academics are inherently problematic, the class factor is precisely that element which has all too frequently been subtracted from racist incidents in the post-referendum context. In other words, pinpointing the working- or lower-class position of vocal white nationalists deflects attention from the wider alliances between whiteness and nationalism that permeate the legislative and state level, above and beyond “the racialized frame of white working class victimhood” (Virdee and McGeever 2017: 13) that has gained traction in the present context. This is why the intersections between white Englishness and class will only be considered in the following, comparatively brief section.

How the British working class became white, again Alastair Bonnett, in a chapter from White Identities (2000) entitled “How the British Working Class Became White”, manages to show the slow inclusion of the British working class in symbolic formations of whiteness. He argues that it was only due to the shifts in the organization of capitalism in the late

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nineteenth century, particularly the links between imperialism and the rise of the welfare state, that whiteness became more inclusive. As a result of the narrowing chasm between class identities at the end of that century, whiteness became “cast as the identity of the ordinary”, creating “a racialised community of solidarity” (ibid.: 40–41). Contrary to popular belief, then, the British working class had not always been white. That its inclusion in the symbolic capital and privilege of whiteness is closely bound up with the integration of welfare into the national imaginary is no coincidence. It is precisely the positioning of welfare structures “as ‘ours’; […] as symbolic and material rationales for working-class identification with the national-racial unit” (41), that finds violent expression in current acts of hate speech. There is evidence that the speakers share the awareness that they are rehearsing a Powellite myth that has long been debunked when they deprive the ‘stranger’ of their rights to residence – and, crucially, to benefits – in the UK. This can be seen in a clip released via the Vice magazine’s YouTube news channel on 1 July 2016, which had over 2.5 million followers at the time of writing. The news clip, published with the investigative title “Why Did England’s North Vote to Leave the European Union?”, follows a white journalist who, like his nineteenth-century predecessors whom Bonnett discusses as colonial “urban explorers” (36) of the ‘dark’ working-class neighbourhoods of Victorian London, descends into the dreary town of “Wigan, England”, as the first caption indicates in bold, white print. There, he speaks to a number of inhabitants of said town, seeking out statements that confirm the narrative at which the video’s title hints: that educated young Londoners (in particular) have disenfranchised working-class communities in England’s North to thank for the Brexit vote. Notably, while the journalist’s questions, articulated in an only slightly Midlands-tinged Received Pronunciation accent, are not subtitled, those of his interview partners in “Wigan, England” are. In the town centre, the journalist speaks to a man in tracksuit who says he voted ‘out’ “’cause all the foreigners [points indistinctly in the direction of shops] are taking our jobs […]. There’s lots of Muslims, lots of people around here which are taking our jobs, and we’ve no money”. When another passer-by comments jokingly, “who’s gonna take your job? What fucking job?”, the interviewee smirks. In that brief moment, the man inadvertently steps out of the role of ‘white male working-class Leave voter’ and lays bare its construction as stereotype in media representations of Brexit. That brief smirk betrays the man’s awareness of the fictitiousness of the narrative that the working class have been sold from Powell to Farage to Cameron to May, namely that ‘foreigners are taking our jobs’. This is not the same as suggesting that this narrative has therefore lost its appeal. If the British working class first became white through an inclusion in advanced capitalist and welfare structures, their second becoming-white, in the “postindustrial political vacuum” of the late twentieth century, took place through the “racialization of a formerly class-based solidarity” (Evans 2017: 217, 216). In the neoliberal erosion of the institutional and interpersonal

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frameworks needed to uphold class-based solidarity, working-class belonging became an ethnic affiliation (218). Within the discourse of cultural nationalism pursued by the British National Party (BNP) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the British working class became white, again. The Leave discourse seized on the racism, xenophobia and imperial nostalgia that began to flourish in the absence of class-based, multi-ethnic alliances. Couching racist ideologies in a “coded language about immigration”, the Leave campaigners managed to signal to their “intended public that the Brexit project was precisely about keeping the nation Christian and white” (Virdee and McGeever 2017: 6). As an outcome of these developments, the only classed subjects who appear glaringly white in the current socio-political context are disenfranchised English working-class Leave voters. While their position can comfortably be associated with white pride and supremacy movements from the viewpoint of the liberal middle classes and the establishment, hegemonic whiteness at large persists in going unnoticed and unchecked. When we think of the whiteness of Brexit, we might easily picture white nationalists acting out in racist assaults, whereas the alliances between whiteness and citizenship, as well as whiteness and neoliberalism, as well as whiteness and austerity measures, continue to remain occluded from view.

Conclusion: The problem with white liberalism Several problems adhere to discussing post-referendum hate crimes from a position of anti-racism and white liberalism. When wondering with Garner if, and how, Critical Whiteness Studies can contribute to challenging the white nationalist projects expressed through Trumpism and Brexit (2017: 1586), it seems clear that acknowledging whiteness as a racialized position and uncovering its naturalization does not suffice. In other words, unpacking the invisible knapsack of white privilege, as Peggy McIntosh had demanded in 1990, is no longer enough in the current heated climate. What many of the responses to the surge in hate crimes and racist offences in the post-referendum context do, however, is no more than reproduce the subject position of the “saintly white person” (Judith Butler quoted in Applebaum 2011: 19). To come back to the incident in Coventry city centre reported to the BBC by Trish Adudu (BBC News 2016), which the radio presenter had originally publicized in a Tweet, a number of Twitter users reacted by professing their solidarity and outrage. “KagsyToo”, for instance, used the hashtag #notinmyname to distance herself from this shocking incident. While understandable, the attempts by white people to disassociate themselves from street racism are fraught with inconsistencies. It is easy to denounce hate crime offenders as bigots – as is regularly done in social networks – but these distancing mechanisms produce a split that serves to allocate blame firmly to a small, problematic section of the white majority. The slogan “not in my name” was widely used in the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003. Just as white middle-class liberals did not prevent the war,

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disavowing responsibility for racism does not alleviate white privilege either. To publicly pronounce that racist acts are not carried out “in my name” suggests that I acknowledge that I am white, too, yet not making use of or benefitting from my privileges. Divesting oneself of responsibility for street racism does not hold if one also acknowledges to what extent the originators of hate crime are acting as the advance guard of white supremacy, doing the ‘dirty work’ at the underbelly of anti-immigration, anti-terror and citizenship legislation, thereby maintaining a power structure from which all white British citizens profit. Another common anti-racist strategy is encapsulated by the hashtag #safetypin. Inspired by the “I’ll ride with you” hashtag, which was popularized in Australia by white people offering to synchronize their commute with travellers of colour, some British people began wearing a safety pin in order to signal that they were providing a safe space to those at risk of harassment. While there is nothing wrong with this practice so long as it is translated into real civic action, the creation of small pockets of protection in the white city and the performative declaration of oneself as non-racist can do little to contest entrenched racism. One could also regard the wearing of the safety pin as a mockery of the pressing need for travellers of colour to resort to certain tricks of camouflage in order to safely navigate white infrastructures. By wearing the safety pin, the white traveller marks their otherwise unmarked, unremarkable rights-bearing body, endorsing this body’s propensity to pass, to go unnoticed. Yet by volunteering to extend their protective cloak of whiteness, they affirm the workings of infrastructural whiteness. Utilizing the visible signal of the safety pin reinforces, rather than contests, the racial gaze politics that trains commuters to read each others’ difference off the surface. The wearers of safety pins may wish to enact their own difference from the white racist minority and the uncaring white majority, but in doing so they still maintain the practice of the colour-coded reading of bodies in city space as a viable strategy. To conclude, anti-racist approaches tend to give fuel to the narrative that reduces hate crimes to individual incidents committed by a small section of working-class nationalists, while stylizing white liberals as benign allies. In order to disentangle the operations of whiteness, nativism, nationalism and racism, one must always also shift the perspective from individual crimes to the more systemic, institutional racisms that are the root causes of these occurrences. Instead of white liberals’ individual unpacking of their knapsacks of privilege or clipping on of safety pins, the white majority must acknowledge their joint access to infrastructural whiteness and consider their own implication in a highly exclusive white Englishness.

Notes 1 BAME is a common abbreviation used in contradistinction to the white majority. It came to replace the term BME (black and minority ethnic) due to the perception

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that British Asians, who constitute the largest non-white group, usually do not identify as black. Although it is a widely adopted term in scholarly literature, both its apparent suggestion that there are black, Asian and minority ethnic groups (implying that black Britons or British Asians do not form ethnic minorities) and its elision of diverse ethnic subject positions within a single denominator (implying a unified black, Asian and minority ethnic identity) are evident shortcomings. 2 Burnett points out that, within the two weeks after the referendum, “British Transport Police (BTP) received 119 allegations of racist abuse or violence taking place on British railways” (2017: 87).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Applebaum, Barbara. Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy. Lexington Books, 2011. BBC News. “Police Probe Coventry Race Abuse of BBC’s Trish Adudu.” 30 June 2016. www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-36670691/. Accessed 13 May 2018. Benson, Daisy. “The EU Referendum Debate Is Still Dominated by Middle-Aged, White Men – and That Must Change.” The Independent, 24 May 2016. www.indep endent.co.uk/voices/eu-referendum-brexit-debate-dominated-middle-aged-white-m en-must-change-women-bme-voters-a7046701.html/. Accessed 14 May 2018. Bonnett, Alastair. White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives. Pearson Education, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Polity Press, 2006. Branford, Becky, Paul Kirby and Brian Wheeler. “Brexit: The People Who Are Negotiating.” BBC News, 16 June 2017. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39236683/. Accessed 14 May 2018. Branigan, Tania. “All White and Just One Woman: Why is Our Brexit Team Like This?” The Guardian, 22 June 2017. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/ 22/all-white-one-female-uk-brexit-team-negotiating-eu-diversity/. Accessed 14 May 2018. Browne, Ian. “Neo-Liberalism, Identity and Brexit.” Romanian Review of Political Sciences & International Relations, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, pp. 89–110. Burnett, Jon. “Community, Cohesion and the State.” Race & Class, vol. 45, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1–18. Burnett, Jon. “Racial Violence and the Brexit State.” Race & Class, vol. 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 85–97. Coughlan, Sean. “The Discomfort of Strangers.” BBC News, 26 July 2005. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4717251.stm. Accessed 14 May 2018. Counter Terror Business. “Detecting and Deterring Crime on the Rail Network.” Counter Terror Business, n. d. http://www.counterterrorbusiness.com/features/detec ting-and-deterring-crime-rail-network. Accessed 29 October 2018. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Evans, Gillian. “Brexit Britain: Why We Are All Postindustrial Now.” American Ethnologist, vol. 44, no. 2, 2017, pp. 215–219. Garner, Steve. A Moral Economy of Whiteness: Four Frames of Racialising Discourse. Routledge, 2016.

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Garner, Steve. “Surfing the Third Wave of Whiteness Studies: Reflections on Twine and Gallagher.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 40, no. 9, 2017, pp. 1582–1597. Gilroy, Paul. “Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘War on Terror’.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 4, 2005, pp. 431–443. Haastrup, Toni. “How Do Britain’s Ethnic Minorities View the EU Referendum?” The UK in a Changing Europe, 22 June 2016. http://ukandeu.ac.uk/how-do-britains-eth nic-minorities-view-the-eu-referendum/. Accessed 14 May 2018. Kapoor, Nisha. “On Windrush, Citizenship and its Others.” Verso Blog, 1 May 2018. www.versobooks.com/blogs/3774-on-windrush-citizenship-and-its-others/. Accessed 11 June 2018. Lyons, Kate. “Racist Incidents Feared to Be Linked to Brexit Result.” The Guardian, 26 June 2016. www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/26/racist-incidents-fearedto-be-linked-to-brexit-result-reported-in-england-and-wales/. Accessed 14 May 2018. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Independent School, vol. 49, no. 2, 1990, pp. 31. Mokoena, Tshepo. “Post-Brexit, Britain’s Still as Racist as it’s Ever Been.” Vice Magazine, 27 June 2016. www.vice.com/en_uk/article/exk4wn/british-racism-postbrexit/. Accessed 14 May 2018. Moore, James. “The Windrush Scandal Hasn’t Come About by Accident – This Is What Happens When You Let Dog Whistle Racism Go Mainstream.” The Independent, 18 April 2018. www.independent.co.uk/voices/windrush-scandal-britishcitizens-commonwealth-racism-home-office-immigration-a8310481.html/. Accessed 11 June 2018. olgatoja. “Being Polish in Brexit Britain – My Experiences.” YouTube, 27 March 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=G84HnXLaqzQ. Pugliese, Joseph. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” borderlands, vol. 5, no. 1, 2006. www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/pugliese.htm. Accessed 14 May 2018. Pugliese, Joseph. “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation.” boundary, vol. 34, no. 2, 2007, pp. 105–133. Tyler, Imogen. “Deportable and Disposable Lives: ‘Mayism’, Brexit and the Expulsive Power of the Illiberal State.” Keynote lecture, Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures, Technical University Dortmund, 24 November 2017. Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books, 2013. Virdee, Satnam and Brendan McGeever. “Racism, Crisis, Brexit.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017, doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544. Walgenbach, Katharina. “Gender als interdependente Kategorie.” Gender als Interdependente Kategorie: Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität, edited by Katharina Walgenbach, Gabriele Dietze, Antje Hornscheidt and Kerstin Palm. Barbara Budrich, 2007, pp. 23–64. Weaver, Matthew. “Hate Crimes Soared after EU Referendum, Home Office Figures Confirm.” The Guardian, 13 October 2016. www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/ 13/hate-crimes-eu-referendum-home-office-figures-confirm/. Accessed 14 May 2018.

8

‘Afrikaner women’ and strategies of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa Shame and the ethnicised respectability of ordentlikheid Christi van der Westhuizen

“The Afrikaner”, arguably the hegemonic identity in the “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: 559) that was apartheid in South Africa, finds itself troubled and contested in a country in the throes of democratisation and a proliferation of identities. Subjects can no longer resort to that regime of social inequalities for verification in the wake of its de-legitimisation as a resource for identification. In postapartheid South Africa, Afrikaner identity suffers from a double-marked whiteness.1 First, it occupies a suspect position of lesser whiteness in relation to dominant Anglo whiteness. Second, it is experienced as being ‘judged’ as morally defective by global whiteness because of the Afrikaner ‘invention’ of apartheid, the material advantage that Afrikaners drew from that system, and the great human cost of apartheid to black, poor, gender- and sexually non-conforming people and women. When apartheid finally lost its hold as a social imaginary in the 1990s, Afrikanerness collapsed into disarray – to the extent that some subjects altogether disavow the identity of ‘Afrikaner’. A plethora of discursive strategies is deployed in response to the dislocation of the ‘Afrikaner’, some of which show longevities in the apartheid logic that provide a new lease on life for colonial and apartheid permutations of Afrikaner identity. Therefore, the end of official apartheid does not signal the end of the power effects of the discourse, as these continue to reverberate even as its normative categories are displaced. Subjects either attempt to recuperate these markers, or reconstruct themselves in opposition to them by reworking old discourses into new-fangled ones. This chapter is a post-structuralist discourse analysis (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Jørgensen and Philips 2002) of texts generated in focus group and individual in-depth interviews with respondents who self-identified as women, Afrikaans-speaking, white, middle-class and heterosexual.2 The entry point is the recognition that accounts of apartheid violations tend to underestimate Afrikaner women’s political agency, which was significant enough to render this subject position “a site for reparation” (Du Plessis 2010: 60–61). These subjects occupied the dual position of both oppressors and oppressed: they were advantaged by Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, but simultaneously radically undermined by gender subjugation. In investigating the

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mutually productive relationalities among social asymmetries, the concept of intersectionality, grown from black feminist theory, proves particularly useful (cf. Crenshaw 1995). Intersectionality assists in taking apart intertwined formations of inequality, in this case ‘Afrikaner’ identity as a minority or ‘subaltern’ whiteness (Steyn 2004; Gabriel 1998), pursuing a patriarchal and bourgeois agenda (Du Pisani 2001; Vincent 1999; Hyslop 1995). This study turns the dissection knife to the less analysed categories of normativity – whiteness, heterosexuality and middle-classness – that hold the hegemonic power to construct the social in their image, with a view to problematising and counteracting their oppressive effects. Including femininity alongside these normative modalities, as one of the objects of this study, allows an unpicking of the strands of othering internal to Afrikaner identity through the analysis of the dynamically co-constituting positions of dissidence and conformism. In Afrikaner nationalism, ‘women’s work’ was politicised in the home as a space for the induction of children into Afrikaner nationalist culture and apartheid race relations with domestic workers (Du Plessis 2010: 163–167, 188). The apartheid Afrikaner family was the location for the production of racialised, classed and sexualised femininities and masculinities in service of the volk (people or nation). As engaged but marginalised producers of Afrikaner identity, Afrikaner women “were complicit in deploying the power of motherhood in the exercise and legitimation of white domination” (McClintock 1993: 72). This understanding subverts the attempted insulation of the ‘feminine domestic’ from the political ‘masculine domain’. The ‘Afrikaner woman’ was the apartheid regime’s weapon in the home, especially when the regime entered its defensive phase of militarisation between the 1960s and 1980s. This chapter discusses findings that contradict Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle’s assertion that Afrikaners reproduce “the worst colonial and apartheid ideologies without hedging or shame” (2012: 573). Indeed, it is argued that postapartheid uncertainties involve affective practices, particularly around shame, that necessarily unsettle, if not radically undermine, whiteness. Of specific concern to postapartheid white Afrikaans subjects is to cleanse themselves of the stain of apartheid and re-attain moral viability. This is also true for white Afrikaans female subjectivity as a site for reparation. I argue that this moral viability is sought in the reinstatement of a historical identity configuration that can be called ordentlikheid. Ordentlikheid serves as a panacea to current Afrikaner identity woes; indeed, it is the glue that holds the identity together as it adapts to changing historical conditions. Ordentlikheid is difficult to translate: its meanings are embodied and include presentability, good manners, decency, politeness and humility with a Calvinist tenor. These terms collectively all speak to the idea of respectability, which is therefore the primary English translation I use in this chapter. In the postapartheid context where Afrikaner nationalism is in disarray, this identity is (re)crafted at the intersectional nexus of ordentlikheid, which is here understood as both normative and analytical. Ordentlikheid recruits subjects, newly

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absconded from Afrikaner nationalism, for a particular ethnic project that aims at making a white, bourgeois, heteropatriarchal power formation respectable again. I explore the generative possibilities of shame as the emotion most associated with intersubjective sociality (cf. Scheff 1990, 2000) for subjects who seek moral verification through ordentlikheid.

Ordentlikheid, an ethnicised form of respectability Respectability is a nineteenth-century bourgeois European mode of control invented in response to the turmoil brought about by industrialisation and revolution (Mosse 1982: 222). Demarcating the bourgeoisie as the dominant class (Hull 1982: 248–249), it exhibits longevity partly as a result of its absorption by nationalism (cf. Mosse 1982) – later also by twentieth-century South African nationalisms, in reaction to British imperialism as nationalism writ large (cf. van der Westhuizen 2007). Respectability was imported to South Africa amid intense contestations between metropolitan, Dutch and British settlers’ concepts, on the one hand, with African and slave knowledges about race and sexuality, on the other, unleashed by the need to transform a slave society into one based on free wage labour after 1838 (Scully 1995: 338). George L. Mosse describes respectability and nationalism as converging in a joint delineation of the normal from the abnormal, with specific sexual, gender and racial features, for example that homosexuality was associated with the abnormal, and masculinity and whiteness with the normal (1982: 221, 222, 236, 242). Before the South African War (1899–1902), the Boers, as Afrikaners were then mostly known, lived “on the margins of respectability”, a cultural nonconformity posing the danger of racial degeneration (Keegan 2001: 464). After the war, ordentlikheid became mobilised as a nationalist project incorporating gender, sexuality, class and race to manufacture the ‘Afrikaner’ volk. It was an attempt to set apart, to differentiate and craft an identity in counter-position to the contending positions of white English speakers and black people. As is the case with nationalisms generally, women served as the bearers of respectability, imprinted on their bodies through comportment and dress. Their bodies demarcated the nation. Especially, female subjects were interpellated to “save” them from the “uncertain edges of whiteness” in multiracial urban slums (Du Toit 2003: 173). Ordentlikheid, hinging on class and infused with a sexual charge, worked as a mode of whitening, and therefore as a generator of Afrikaner identity. Therefore, ordentlikheid is here understood as working normatively as a disciplinary and generative identity dynamo, demarcating a space at the intersections of gender, sexuality, class and race to recruit subjects for an ethnic political project, adapted from its former permutation as purveyed by Afrikaner nationalism. It is here examined as a nodal category to examine the discourses at specific intersections of identity where white, Afrikaans-speaking subjectivities are produced. The affective dimension of ordentlikheid,

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particularly in the form of shame in relation to a ruined ordentlikheid, is foregrounded in the analysis in the next section.

Pre-apartheid and postapartheid, shame upon shame The shame that is elicited about apartheid contains traces of an earlier shame. This earlier shame is about occupying a lesser whiteness in relation to ‘the English’, or white English-speaking South Africans (WESSAs). These are sedimented remnants of affect with regard to the South African War and British imperialist Anglicisation campaigns in the early decades of the 1900s. Even in twenty-first-century South Africa, it translates into an existential angst about whether Afrikaners have ‘a right to be here’, which leads to contradictory practices: Pieta (35): When we go to a restaurant, I will order in English and then [my mom] says, “Speak Afrikaans to the people.” When she phones [companies], she insists on speaking Afrikaans […] It’s not that I am ashamed of Afrikaans […] I can speak English. Those people can most likely not speak Afrikaans. Nerina (32): I also speak just about only English also in my profession […] for the sake of convenience […] My mom [says,] “Afrikaans is our language and […] if somebody can’t help you, they should go and find someone that’s Afrikaans because we have a right to be here.” In a contradictory move, some subjects opt for an acquiescence of social space to ‘the English’ as they aim for a subjectivity without shame. ‘Speaking English’ serves as a rebuttal of inferiority in relation to English whiteness. Nerina (32): If you go into a shop in Johannesburg you automatically speak English. Willemien (33): It is […] the effort we make with other people, not so? Nita (62): The accommodation […] Willemien: Yes, we are now going to speak English to you because you are English. Pieta: Because it is polite [English word used] to do that. Leah: The Calvinism shines through, it is the politeness [English word used]. Willemien: You will get one English person and five Afrikaans people […] Nita: But […] it gives me a kind of “I can” [feeling]. If you can’t, I can. […] I struggle with my English, but I can. Sandra (43): From my side it is just polite […] Johannesburg is essentially an English settlement, poor whites, rich English in the 1920s […] I just get angry when people knowingly in a group [speak English when most are Afrikaans].

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Out of the slight, the injury of denial, ‘the Afrikaner’ is conjured in a complex interplay of appropriation and repudiation. Ceding social space allows appropriation of an element constitutive of English whiteness: politeness (cf. Njovane 2015). The temporary abandonment of Afrikaans as the linguistic bedrock for identity is covered over with an articulation of Afrikaans identity as ‘politeness’ and ‘accommodation’, resonant of ‘manners’ as a key element in nationalist discourses on ‘Britishness’ (Thomas 2006: 466–7). This appropriation extends to a conflation of ‘politeness’ with the trope of how ‘Calvinist’ Afrikaners are. In yielding to Anglo culture as a sign of ‘manners’, politeness becomes ordentlikheid. In subjects’ discourses, Afrikaner identity is articulated with racism, colonial and apartheid practices, guilt and attempted rehabilitation: Leah (49): Don’t you think that the Afrikaans people are under pressure after 1994 because […] we are to blame for everything? […] The Afrikaner is the baddie in everything. Pieta (35): People perceive us as racist. Leah: We [introduced] the tot system – we are the baddies and nobody likes [us].3 Sandra (43): I don’t agree with that. Leah: You get English people [who go] “Eeeugh”. Willemien (33): No, I don’t agree. Nita (62): One doesn’t agree with that. Leah: Don’t you think we are under pressure and that’s why we’re trying to be the best? Nita: I wouldn’t say we’re under pressure, but sometimes it seems like […] Willemien: Like guilt. Nita: That the Afrikaners, if we now talk about progressive and liberal, then we’re definitely not in the top ten […] And I think there’s something, jeez, I think this ‘bare feet across the mountains’ is stuck half deep in us. In this excerpt, respondents deflect questioning about Afrikaner identity in relation to apartheid. For those listeners who seek the reason for the “blame” and the “pressure”, they will not find an explicit reference and therefore recognition of apartheid in the narrative. Rather, a discourse is crafted in which apartheid is elided. It is present in its absence, substituted and therefore obfuscated by the word “everything”, while the phrase “after 1994” takes the listener on an even longer route by hinting at apartheid through the suggestion of a “before 1994”. A 62-year-old respondent representing a dissident position references an Afrikaner nationalist ‘Great Trek’ myth, about traversing the towering South African mountain range called the Drakensberg with bare feet, which usually serves as a metaphor for Afrikaner commitment to political autonomy, irrespective of the cost. This Afrikaner nationalist identification remains “stuck half deep” – even for this particular subjectivity – and

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thus hinders alternative interpellation by discourses of progressiveness or liberalism. Afrikaner identity failed to shift with global hegemonic whiteness when the latter shifted away from on-the-ground colonialism towards more intricate, but less visible forms of neocolonialism in the mid-twentieth century. The genesis of apartheid was driven by a “hankering for order” (Posel 2001: 52, emphasis in original) in which race was the primary ordering principle and category for the defence of the social and moral order. Afrikanerdom reeled from the moral blow when official apartheid ended under a cloud of condemnation. Especially the international move against apartheid from the 1960s onwards exposed Afrikaans white identity as again ‘not good enough’ and morally suspect. Andriette (56): In Europe […] it was terrible to be taken on by school friends […] and suddenly realising it is a very wrong system. Katrien (42): Sanctions were a huge factor, that we couldn’t compete in sport […] It was] as if you start looking outside and realising […] what we are doing is actually not right […] Internally you can justify it but externally […] ‘Afrikaners’ were increasingly an object of ‘global rejection’ until their jettisoning of apartheid. As Willemien (33) explains, “after 1994 the world accepted us”. The shift from official apartheid to democracy in South Africa uprooted subjects’ sense of themselves as ‘moral’. Democratisation, combined with “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000: 137), created a sense of being catapulted into moral ambiguity. In the tumult of postapartheid times, subjects intensified their quest for identity moorings: Daleen (65): When was that earthquaking speech made by [the last apartheid president] F.W. [de Klerk]? […] The whole playing field changed. Katrien (42): What was presented as morality, as true and right, was suddenly swept off the table. A sense of ‘collapsing morals’ and ‘confusion’ about ‘right and wrong’ emerged: Lindie (43): It made us very confused […] there is also more of an openness and a religious collapse in the world because people rebel against everything, against rules and regulations […] Antoinette (36): What happened after 1994 in South Africa, but also in the rest of the world, [is] people’s moral values dove into the ground […] We can’t distinguish any more between what is really right or wrong.

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The discourse that emerges in these excerpts confirms the “horror of indetermination” (Norval 1996: 133) brought about by the fracturing of apartheid’s lines of exclusion and inclusion that constructed the identity of the social. As the purchase of social categories is disarticulated and relations of subordination are rendered illegitimate, structural positions become sites of struggle (Chipkin 2007: 191). Dissident and conformist subjects adopt different strategies to recoup ordentlikheid. In the following excerpt a dissident subject claims greater space for self-production by rejecting Afrikaner identity and its basis as ‘groupthink’. She associates Afrikaner nationalist thinking with the thinking that produced the Holocaust. Her attempts are refused by a conforming subject’s assertion that Afrikanerhood must continue intact, even if its project failed: Katrien (42): I am much more expansive and larger than [Afrikaner identity] because I believe you figure out for yourself what you believe in, what your religion is, whatever your view is and the dilemma for me comes in the moment when you find those things within a group and you no longer think for yourself. That’s when a country can justify certain things […] and that for me is scary because that is what happened with Hitler, that’s what happened with apartheid. Daleen (65): But that doesn’t make those people less German, even though Hitler did disgraceful things. Katrien: But why does something like that happen? Because people find their identity within a group and they don’t think for themselves any more. Some conformist subjects therefore retain their investment in ‘the Afrikaner’, recalibrating it to remove racism, ‘badness’ and guilt. An oft-heard colloquial observation is that ‘there are no apartheid supporters left in South Africa’ after apartheid. To rescue ordentlikheid, discourses emerge that still organise subjects behind race as a frontier and in accordance with the colonial logic of racial binarism, but adapted as various dichotomous combinations of good whites, good blacks, bad whites and bad blacks. Such a language game is explored in more detail below. Colonial racisms contained “racially cued comportments, moral sentiments and desires [that] were invariably ‘about’ bourgeois respectability and culture and less explicitly ‘about’ race” (Stoler 2002: 381). This is also true for ordentlikheid, positioned as inherently moral to produce worthy subjects. Ansie (57): It is about integrity, honesty, punctuality. You get up for an older person, you greet someone who enters your house. I have friends who […] teach their children it is no longer necessary to greet older people.

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Yvonne (47): Those basic things that we learnt at home, of you say ‘please’ […] and ‘thank you’ and you call an older person oom [uncle] and tannie [aunt]. I come from a stalwart Afrikaans family […] You greeted everybody with a kiss, whether you knew the people or not. Katrien (42): But is that about moral standards? Yvonne: It’s where your moral standards start […] Katrien: Don’t you think moral standards are really very subjective to a particular culture and group? In the excerpt above, previous Afrikaner nationalist age- and gender-based hierarchies and social norms are equated with morality, which is linked in a discursive chain with integrity, honesty and punctuality. A dissident intervention problematises the discourse and hints at what it might be hiding. Implicit is a re-encoding of white superiority, which emerges more explicitly as a discourse of ‘good white/bad black’ in the next excerpt, in which a moral reversal of the apartheid and postapartheid orders is effected. A moral reattribution of apartheid injustice is juxtaposed with these ‘moral standards’ to shift culpability from white to black South Africans in a bid to achieve “cultural blamelessness” (Steyn 2001: 107) for Afrikaners. Antoinette (36): I think what also happened a lot after 1994 in South Africa, but also a lot in the rest of the world, is that people’s moral values nosedived […] We can’t distinguish between what is really right and what is wrong. Lindie (43): We were brought up with this is right and this is totally wrong. […] Daleen (65): It has to do with struggle history, responsibility shifted from your personal responsibility [to] that you blame the […] apartheid dispensation, for everything […] Remember, at the time it was liberation before education. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for their actions. It is always placed outside […] [Nowadays] even if you’re in an executive post, you’ve been caught for stealing, you’re corrupt […] always, structures get blamed […] Lindie: The people who were oppressed in that era, in their fight […] they were indoctrinated to be lawless and to do many wrong things. And when the new government took over I think many of them struggled to adjust, to become right again […] maybe people are starting to realise […] the people will have to almost be re-indoctrinated […] because […] they […] indoctrinate[d] the children […] to be lawless and cause chaos […] even the new government struggles […] all these strikes and marches […] ‘Apartheid’ is explicitly mentioned only once in this discussion and ‘democracy’ not at all, with the temporal reference ‘after 1994’ serving as the dividing line between moral/immoral. These manoeuvres include a calculated

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acknowledgement that apartheid amounted to ‘oppression’, but then use this admission as springboard to rework ‘oppression’ as not ‘wrong’. The struggle against apartheid is rewritten as an outcome of ‘indoctrination’ that compels black people to do ‘wrong things’ and as linked with criminality in postapartheid South Africa. These tactics of delegitimisation therefore reinvent anti-apartheid opposition as the opposite of justice. Rather, blackness is equated with irresponsibility, chaos and lawlessness, perennially. Whiteness derives its content from its co-constructive opposition to ‘irresponsible, corrupt, thieving’ blackness. These manoeuvres not only refute the basis of the anti-apartheid struggle as being about resistance against injustice, but also reassert a blackness that is unchangingly inferior and, because of its irresponsibility, ultimately immoral. The result is total erasure of white culpability. The above excerpt exposes a rhetoric resuscitating colonial binaries of white/black, right/wrong, order/disorder, advancement/degeneration and responsibility/irresponsibility. To conclude this section, I have discussed some strategic attempts to recuperate ordentlikheid but without an ethical reckoning with the historical conditions of its development as a nexus at which inequalities were reinforced. I now move to investigate shame as the emotional shadow haunting ordentlikheid, with a view to exploring its possibly redemptive value.

The transformative potential of acknowledged shame This section draws on a growing body of work seeking to fill a lacuna in the understanding of emotion in social relations, approaching emotions as the ‘glue’ that binds people together and inspires commitment to social and cultural structures (Turner and Stets 2005: 1).4 Margaret Wetherell describes affective practice as referring to the domain of the emotional and the psychological. Emotion is a culturally constructed form of everyday meaningmaking that, among others, is situated, involves practical activity and is infused with “sedimented social and personal history” (2012: 96). Affect is here approached as a generative element in the formation of subjectivities, following Laclau: “something belonging to the order of affect has a primary role in discursively constructing the social […]. And affect […] is not something added to signification, but something consubstantial with it” (2004: 326, emphasis in original). It is argued here that, among emotions, shame most presents opportunities for transformation, because it is the primary social emotion (cf. Scheff 1990, 2000) and it makes available disruptive moments in processes of identity formation (cf. Sedgwick 2003). Shame is understood as a collection of related emotions, such as embarrassment, humiliation and feelings of failure and inadequacy (cf. Scheff). Pertinently, shame works in both inter- and intra-subjective modes, with the subject for a moment regarding herself in relation to others but also being “formed by the look and the presence of others” (Shotwell 2007: 128). Shame is “recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I

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am for the Other […] I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am” (Sartre quoted in Ellison 1996: 357). Hence Thomas J. Scheff’s (2000) argument that shame is the emotion that situates the self in relation to the social is, in contrast to guilt, an individualist emotion. Shame is about the preservation of social bonds, as individuals fear disconnection from and misunderstanding by others. Guilt is less about self and is more about specific acts done that harmed another (cf. Lansky 1999). Therefore shame holds more potential for transformation of social relations than guilt does. Of particular significance for this study is the differentiation between acknowledged and unacknowledged shame, first made by Helen B. Lewis (1971) and further developed by Scheff. Unacknowledged shame activates a repetitive loop of feelings, including socially destructive anger, which can in turn re-trigger shame, while acknowledged shame averts anger and even allows the mending of the social bond. Related to this differentiation is Melvin R. Lansky’s understanding of shame as a “disturbance to the status of the self within the social order” (1999: 347), pertaining to one’s standing in the social order and how one is seen before the eye of the other. The next two excerpts contain the self-reflection of a dissident subject about historical and contemporary shame. The first story took place during apartheid, while the second references contemporary South Africa: Andriette (56): In shame I have to admit the woman who worked for me had a three-year-old child [and] she couldn’t get enough money together to go home to see the child […] She had to wait a year to see her threeyear-old. I said I didn’t have money but then I arrived home with plants and I know she saw them. In retrospect I feel terrible that I didn’t help her.5 Andriette: [A black man] said to me ‘you have humiliated me terribly’ and I realised I had to ask his forgiveness. I was so angry I hadn’t realised how much I was hurting him in front of other people. These emotion-infused stories are examples of affective practice as “something personally significant [that] has occurred that someone wants to mark” (Wetherell 97). The narrator raises accounts that feature shame in relation to shifts over time in her subject position. For Alexis Shotwell, shame permits changeability in seemingly static identities: “Because one has just been something one does not want to be, the possibilities and actualities of being otherwise are manifest and foreshadowed” (2007: 128). In the narratives, the subject experiences shame when she becomes aware of her degraded self – the psychosocial corrosion of coloniality referred to above – before the eye of the black other (‘she saw them’, ‘in front of other people’). Her acknowledgement of shame opens the door to change over time in relation to the other, as she is moved to ask forgiveness in the second story. This suggests what Shotwell (135) calls racialised shame, referring to both a refusal of a racist self, with the potential for re-identification, and the recognition of the

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racialised other as “capable of shaming, hence of seeing and being seen as a person” (135). These dissident accounts trace a changing relationality between the subject and the social, as shame opens the door to the recognition of the black other and thus to overcoming apartheid whiteness and introducing the self into a new social bond of expansive humanness. But if shame is unacknowledged, it is untransformative because it traps subjects into the repetitive loop described above. In opposition to the acknowledged shame of a dissident subject expanding the social bond beyond racial strictures, as described above, the following narrative from the vantage point of the dominant white Afrikaans subject position describes shame that is refused and thus unacknowledged: Ansie (57): We Afrikaners are really under pressure postapartheid. We were really the skunks for a long time. I was a member of [Afrikaner nationalist organizations] […] and how it really just fell apart […] It was as if one [felt] not shameful but that one was half under pressure because one could not live out the Afrikaans cultural values freely like it was done previously […] It is still enjoyable to attend Afrikaans festivals and [eat] boerewors [farmer sausage] rolls and koeksisters [sweet pastries associated with Afrikaners] and those things that define us but I think there has also been a bit of alienation, one can’t deny it […] Many things changed in our country […] There are different angles in our culture nowadays. In this narrative, the word ‘skunks’ indicates which social bond the subject fears may be lost: it is the tie with whiteness as a global order, instead of the black other. ‘Skunks’ references an expression used by white South Africans during the 1980s: that international sanctions and other forms of opprobrium turned apartheid South Africa into ‘the skunk of the world’, with the world here understood as ‘the West’. This account extends the notion of ‘skunk’ beyond the country to Afrikaners becoming ‘skunks’, communicating a sense of the Afrikaans white self being shamed before its global reference point, the ‘Western white’. The affective charge is deepened as Afrikaners are shamed amid feeling the enjoyment of nationalist pride – pride being the opposite of shame (cf. Scheff 1990, 2000). The identitary purchase of nationalism (a particular set of bonds, in this case Afrikaner nationalism) rests on a phantasm or promised fullness of enjoyment, what Jacques Lacan called jouissance, a pleasure of being (Stavrakakis 2010: 13). Racism can be implicated in this fullness of enjoyment, as it can be read as the disavowal of the way in which the other ‘takes’ their jouissance, i.e. in a way radically different to ‘ours’ (Miller 1994: 79). Nationalist enjoyment occurs through official institutions and in everyday practices, such as the culinary (Stavrakakis 2010: 13), hence the above references to food and organisations associated with Afrikaner identity. Regarding institutions, from the normative subject position’s vantage point, the apartheid state is lost and Afrikaner nationalist organisations are

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‘irrelevant and half ridiculous’. Hence the subject’s identification is experienced as ‘irrelevant’. With racism under pressure in postapartheid South Africa, the subject feels ‘half ashamed and half culpable for not really thinking much about things’ during apartheid. Shame is therefore also due to the global white other’s withdrawal of moral verification, thereby interrupting the promise of Afrikaner fullness and precipitating the loss of the racism-infused jouissance of Afrikaner nationalist belonging. The dissident position acknowledges the loss of the pleasurable togetherness of the nationalist home: Andriette (56): I am actually very guilty of certain things […] like last night it was [an] Afrikaans [evening] at [X high school] […] I felt so pleasurably at home because there were many Afrikaans people, we spoke Afrikaans and many of them, because I know them, don’t fit in or slot in with the Afrikaans community any more but it makes you comfortable to speak in your own language […] Nevertheless, while enjoying the pleasure of speaking Afrikaans, the dissenters no longer ‘fit in’ or ‘slot in’. The phrase ‘slot in’ suggests even greater intimacy in belonging, which is lost. The loss of Afrikaner whiteness opens the possibility of what Afrikaans author and poet Antjie Krog’s writing calls for: a metamorphosis “of tongue, of voice, of being, of identity” (West 2009: 71). It is notable that the dissident subject invokes guilt rather than shame. While guilt is much less pertinent than shame in this study, and also possesses less transformatory potential (as explained above), the guilty self possesses a sense of agency focusing on ways of doing, or praxis. The metamorphosis of Afrikaner whiteness contains the potential of anti-racist praxis for dislocated subjects: Andriette: The way domestic workers were treated […] You would think being a woman you’ll understand another woman’s position […] That is why I raise colonialism […] I don’t have another language to explain it […] You have a superiority […] I see it not only with Afrikaners but with white people and it sits inside me too […] I also have to re-evaluate myself in terms of all my actions [and ask myself] “am I not now thinking that I’m better, know better?” While grief is not specifically mentioned by subjects, it is an emotion associated with the loss of a person, community or place, leading to “the very ‘I’ [being] called into question by its relation to the Other […] My narrative falters, as it must. […] We’re undone by each other” (Butler 2004: 23). Through this “disorientation and loss”, the possibility arises for the “I” to gain the “you” (49), which is the potential opened by Andriette’s radical questioning of herself: “I also have to re-evaluate myself in terms of all my actions [and ask myself] ‘am I not now thinking that I’m better, know better?’”

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The dissident position in this study resonates with the narrative of ‘Under African Skies (or, white but not quite)’ identified in Melissa Steyn’s study of shifting whitenesses in postapartheid South Africa. These subjects are conscious of their whiteness and engaged in self-reflective practice. They do “not deny personal implication in social processes of racialisation” (Steyn 2001: 115). Rather, they are engaged in a radical resignification of the term ‘Afrikaner’ (82), which this study finds enabled by an acknowledgment of racialised shame that involves breaking with apartheid whiteness by seeing the black other as a human being capable of shaming (van der Westhuizen 2017b). Simultaneously, working with the emotions of shame and (to a much lesser extent) guilt and grief, they let go of faltering narratives of belonging circumscribed by whiteness. Instead, they pursue a metamorphosis in identity that engages in a continual self-reflective praxis of anti-racism. These narratives all reference the domestic space where Afrikaner women were increasingly corralled, especially after the advent of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century.6 These stories confirm that the white apartheid household was politicised not only as a site for the induction of children into oppressive relations, but also for a particular class, race, gender and sexual positioning of the black women and men who worked in intimate proximity to Afrikaner families inside and around their homes. Afrikaner women assumed responsibility for these processes, also through the management of black workers in the house. The everyday, mundane practices of domesticity were shot through with micro-hostilities and micro-injustices that reinforced inequalities. From the discussion in the section above, one can glean that the affective was a primary mode for the production of unequal relations in the home as one of the institutions from where apartheid relations were extrapolated into the wider social sphere. White Afrikaans-speaking women, as the ‘responsible whites’ in the home, acted in ways that were hurtful to black people and that worked, therefore, at the affective level to assert white and middle-class superiority. One can surmise then that the domestic situation of everyday intimacy within a macro-context of oppression would lend itself to inter-racial micro-cruelties of which white women were primary perpetrators, and which secured the home – rather than any other institution – as a significant terrain for the affective perpetuation of racial and class asymmetries and exclusions. This was further enabled by the Afrikaner patriarchal public/ private separation of spheres with its division of affective labour in white Afrikaans heterosexual relationships, in that women were tasked with the private, home-based emotional replenishment of men as the active public representatives of the family in the public realm (cf. van der Westhuizen 2017a). Apartheid’s domestic concentration of intimacy and cruelty would explain why affect in the postapartheid context becomes a mode through which those subjects previously domestically cloistered – white Afrikaans women – can reflect, re-think and re-position themselves at the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender. The prominence of shame as a notably social emotion through which this subjective recalibration can be done, rather

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than the more individualistic emotion of guilt, verifies the home as site of the production of social relations, and therefore as an optimal site for the subversion of apartheid continuities through the deployment of affect and of shame in particular. This opens particular possibilities for white Afrikaans women, who continued after the fall of official apartheid to bear the bulk of the burden of social reproduction (cf. van der Westhuizen 2017a), for a reimagining of ordentlikheid as an ethical position of recognition of racial, sexual, gendered and classed others, with a view to mutual humanisation. To conclude, we have seen how ordentlikheid is employed through various discursive strategies to reassert respectability as the mainstay of white Afrikaans femininity in the face of recurring bouts of shame. These strategies are detected at two frontiers of identification: the racialised other and the WESSA other. Pre-apartheid and postapartheid shame meets at the frontier with English whiteness. White Afrikaans speakers tread a contradictory path in relation to WESSAs, as they routinely cede social space to white English speakers, despite laying vociferous claim to ethnic difference through Afrikaans as a language. This relinquishing is simultaneously construed as a confirmation of whiteness. The temporary abandonment of Afrikaans as the linguistic bedrock of the identity is covered over with its articulation with ‘politeness’ to demonstrate equality with white English speakers. Ordentlikheid is therefore revealed as resonating with English middle-class politeness while showing white Afrikaans speakers’ aspirational position in relation to white English speakers. Turning from the frontier with the WESSA other to that with the black other, the white Afrikaans disposition turns from aspirational to disparaging. Discourses that organise subjects behind race as frontier adapt the colonial logic of racial binarism. White Afrikaans subjects disavow the shame caused by their implication in apartheid iniquity with dichotomous moralisations in pursuit of ordentlikheid. Pairings of ‘good whites’ and ‘bad blacks’ make available positions that allow white Afrikaans speakers to hide white supremacy behind ordentlikheid. Ordentlikheid consists of Afrikaner nationalist age- and gender-based hierarchies and social norms that are exculpated as inherently moral and good. In contradistinction, the apartheid and postapartheid orders are morally reversed in order to cast aspersions over both the struggle against apartheid and the democratic era. Normative subjects reinstate ordentlikheid through oppressive and exclusionary racial and class binarisms, which is paradoxical in that white Afrikaans speakers get to occupy ordentlikheid as a complex intersectional position of intrinsic moral worth, as opposed to a reduction of black people to colonial stereotypes. Acknowledged shame provides a way out. White subjects’ shame before the eyes of black subjects opens the possibility of restoring and creating social ties in ways that breach apartheid categorisations, as dissident white subjects work against the psychosocial degradation of whiteness. Acknowledged shame provides the possibility for an ordentlikheid that refuses oppressive racial,

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gender and class discourses. Ironically, due to the strict Afrikaner patriarchal public/private and reason/emotion divide of apartheid, white Afrikaansspeaking women are particularly well placed in this regard. Tasked previously with the affective maintenance of the family within a larger social context of institutionalised injustice, they were primary perpetrators of micro-hostilities and micro-injustices against black workers in the home that served to affirm racial and class inequalities at large. Given their continuing disproportionate responsibilisation for social reproduction, along with black women, in postapartheid homes, they are in an optimal position to reflect and re-work their subjectivities through acknowledged shame. The findings show subjects are transforming domestic and larger relations in humanising ways that may end whiteness.

Notes 1 ‘Postapartheid’ is not hyphenated, to serve as an alert that the end of official apartheid does not signal the end of its effects. 2 Focus group interviews were conducted in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011 and 2012 with 25 respondents (30–65 years old), and individual indepth interviews with six respondents selected from the focus groups. Texts are the author’s own translations from the original Afrikaans. 3 The ‘tot system’ on farms has persisted since colonial times. ‘Coloured’ labourers are ‘paid’ with alcohol, with widespread alcoholism and foetal alcohol syndrome as present-day consequences. 4 A version of this section first appeared in “Race, Intersectionality and Affect in Postapartheid Productions of ‘the Afrikaans White Woman,’” Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 221–38. Copyright ©The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. It is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. 5 Apartheid spatial arrangements meant urban black workers’ families frequently lived in remote rural Bantustans or ‘homelands’. 6 For an explication of the counterintuitive shift of Afrikaner women from active participation in the public sphere in the first half of the twentieth century, to a disappearance into the domestic sphere in the second half of the twentieth century, see van der Westhuizen (2017a: 103–113, 123).

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity, 2000. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Chipkin, Ivor. Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy, and the Identity of “the People.” Wits University Press, 2007. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, edited by T.E. Ore. Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 557–570. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color.” Critical Race Theory. The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller and Kendall Thomas. The New Press, 1995, pp. 357–383.

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Du Pisani, Kobus. “Puritanism Transformed: Afrikaner Masculinities in the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Period.” Changing Men in Southern Africa, edited by R. Morrell. University of Natal Press/Zed Books, 2001, pp. 157–175. Du Plessis, Irma. Die Familiesage as Volksverhaal: Afrikanernasionalisme en die Politiek van Reproduksie in Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat [The Family Saga as Volk Narrative: Afrikaner Nationalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat]. Litnet Akademies, 2010. http://www.litnet.co.za/die-familiesage-a s- volksverhaal-afrikanernasionalisme-en-die-politiek-van-reproduksie-in/. Accessed 15 March 2012. Du Toit, Maryke. “The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904–1929.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp. 155–176. Ellison, Julie. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, pp. 344–371. Gabriel, John. Whitewash: Racialised Politics and the Media. Routledge, 1998. Hull, Isabel V. “The Bourgeoisie and its Discontents: Reflections on Nationalism and Respectability.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 17, no. 2, 1982, pp. 247–268. Hyslop, John. “White Working-class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: Purified Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation against Mixed Marriages, 1934– 1939.” Journal of African History, vol. 36, 1995, pp. 57–81. Jørgensen, Marianne W. and Louise Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. Sage, 2002. Keegan, Timothy. “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 459–477. Laclau, Ernesto. “Glimpsing the Future.” Laclau: A Critical Reader, edited by Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart. Routledge, 2004, pp. 279–328. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985. Lansky, Melvin R. “Shame and the Idea of a Central Affect.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, vol. 19, 1999, pp. 347–361. Lewis, Helen B. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. International Universities Press, 1971. McClintock, Anne. “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review, vol. 44, 1993, pp. 61–80. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Extimité.” Lacanian Theory of Discourse. Subject, Structure, and Society, edited by Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr, Ronald J. Corthell and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. New York University Press, 1994, pp. 74–87. Mosse, George L. “Nationalism and Respectability: Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 17, no. 2, 1982, pp. 221–246. Njovane, Thando. “The Violence beneath the Veil of Politeness: Reflections on Race and Power in the Academy.” Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions, edited by P. Tabensky and S. Matthews. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015, pp. 116–129. Norval, Aletta. Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse. Verso, 1996. Posel, Deborah. “What’s in a Name? Racial Categorisations under Apartheid and Their Afterlife.” Transformation, vol. 47, 2001, pp. 50–74. Scheff, Thomas J. Microsociology: Emotion, Discourse, and Social Structure. University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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Scheff, Thomas J. “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory.” Sociological Theory, vol. 18, no. 1, 2000, pp. 84–99. Scully, Pamela. “Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa.” American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 2, 1995, pp. 335–359. Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Shotwell, Alexis. “Shame in Alterities: Adrian Piper, Intersubjectivity and the Racial Formation of Identity.” The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities, edited by Silke Hortskotte and Ester Peeren. Rodopi, 2007, pp. 127–136. Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Discourse, Affect, Jouissance: Psychoanalysis, Political Theory and Artistic Practices.” Paper presented at Art and Desire Seminars, Istanbul, June 2010. Steyn, Melissa. ‘Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used to Be’: White Identity in a Changing South Africa. State University of New York Press, 2001. Steyn, Melissa. “Rehybridising the Creole: New South African Afrikaners.” Under Construction: ‘Race’ and Identity in South Africa Today, edited by Natasha Distiller and Melissa Steyn. Heinemann, 2004, pp. 70–85. Stoler, Anne. “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.” Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, edited by P. Essed and D.T. Goldberg. Blackwell, 2002, pp. 369–391. Thomas, Lynn M. “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa.” Journal of African History, vol. 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 460–490. Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets. The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Verwey, Cornel and Michael Quayle. “Whiteness, Racism and Afrikaner Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” African Affairs, vol. 111, no. 445, 2012, pp. 551–575. Vincent, Louise. “The Power Behind the Scenes: The Afrikaner Nationalist Women’s Parties, 1915 to 1931.” South African Historical Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 51–73. West, Mary. White Women Writing White: Identity and Representation in (Post-) Apartheid Literatures of South Africa. David Philip, 2009. van der Westhuizen, Christi. White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party. Zebra Press, 2007. van der Westhuizen, Christi. Sitting Pretty. White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa. University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2017a. van der Westhuizen, Christi. “Rejuvenating Reconciliation with Transformation.” Rethinking Reconciliation: Evidence from South Africa, edited by Kate Lefko-Everett, Rajen Govender and Don Foster. HSRC Press, 2017b, pp. 168–192. Wetherell, Margaret. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Sage, 2012.

Part IV

White(ning) spaces

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Exploring white German masculinity in Wilhelmine adventure novels Maureen O. Gallagher

In 1912, Wilhelm Heinrich Solf, secretary of the German Colonial Office, declared in a speech on the floor of the German parliament: “We are Germans, we are whites, and we want to remain whites” (quoted in Grentrup 1914: 42).1 Although Solf ’s declaration of the synonymy of Germanness and whiteness was confident, the context of the speech – a debate about whether or not interracial marriages should be outlawed in Germany’s colonies – reveals the deeper uncertainty about whether whiteness and Germanness had to coexist. The existence of non-white and biracial Germans in the settler colony of Namibia (then known as German Southwest Africa) threatened the self-conceptions of Germans like Solf in the metropole that to be German necessarily meant to be white. Behind Solf ’s words also lies unspeakable violence committed against Black bodies in the name of preserving whiteness. Between 1904 and 1907, 60,000 or more Herero and approximately 10,000 Nama people lost their lives at the hands of German soldiers and colonial authorities, and to this day they are still fighting for recognition and reparations.2 This essay will examine the construction of German whiteness in the colonial context of Wilhelmine Germany (1870–1918) as seen in the bourgeoning adventure literature genre from the turn of the century, geared toward young men. The achievement of near universal literacy by 1900 and advances in print technology ensured supply and demand of inexpensive literature (Schenda 1976: 38). Here I will focus on four authors of adventure novels – Sophie Wörishöffer (1838–1890), Friedrich Pajeken (1855–1920), Carl Falkenhorst (1853–1913), and Karl May (1842–1912) – and novels set on three continents – South America, North America, and Africa – that show similar conceptions of white German masculinity embedded in the colonial hierarchy and tied to understandings of gender and nationalism. This essay will also seek to intervene and engage with German colonial memory and the troubling afterlife of colonialism in modern Germany. With Germany’s colonies officially redistributed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, the post-colonial history of Germany does not resemble that of many other European nations. In contrast to the process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and

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memorializing the Holocaust, there has been relatively little public engagement or reckoning with Germany’s colonial legacy. In recent years this has prompted more frequent controversies and public debates, for example regarding the grassroots movement to rename the streets in Berlin’s ‘African Quarter,’ replacing the names of colonialists with those of famous Africans from Germany’s colonial history, and the Humboldt Forum, a partial reconstruction of the Hohenzollern city palace built to house the collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s Museum for Asian Art and Ethnological Museum. The choice to rebuild an imperial palace to house artefacts from the Americas, the South Pacific, and colonial Africa has been particularly controversial, with many accusing the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation of failing to adequately research the provenance of the collections, particularly the colonial acquisition contexts of many of the objects, and some even going so far as to refer to the objects as ‘looted art’ (Raubkunst), a loaded term most often used in German contexts to refer to art stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis.3 These debates show the relevance and resonance of colonialism and colonial racial hierarchies in modern Germany and underscore the need to engage with the art, literature, and culture of German imperialism.4 Relatively few authors from Wilhelmine Germany, particularly those who wrote for children and young adults, are still read today, and young adult novels from that period are considered out-of-fashion but still relatively harmless, and are thus not the subject of much serious scholarly attention. Adventure novels from this period spread ideas about colonial hierarchy and white supremacy and helped shape the self-understanding of Germans as white. The persistence of these hierarchies reinforces the importance of studying and understanding the ways that whiteness is constructed and perpetuated. The choice of authors for this essay is based on their popularity and breadth of work. All wrote many best-selling adventure novels, set in the Americas and elsewhere in the world, and came to be identified with the genre. Heinrich Wolgast, for example, discusses Wörishöffer, Pajeken, and May in a chapter critical of present-day German Indianergeschichten (Indian stories), showing that those three authors quickly came to be identified as representative of the genre (1905 [1896]: 146–163). Falkenhorst’s oeuvre, in particular his book series Jung Deutschland in Afrika (Young Germany in Africa), shares many characteristics with the novels of May, Wörishöffer, and Pajeken. Wörishöffer, one of the few female authors of adventure novels in Wilhelmine Germany, earned the nickname Bloody Sophie for her violent, swashbuckling adventure tales. Her novel Die Diamanten des Peruaners (The Peruvian’s Diamonds, 1889) tells the story of a disobedient German boy Benno Zurheiden who travels through the Amazonian rain forest hunting for lost diamonds. Pajeken trained as a merchant and travelled first to Venezuela and later to Montana in that capacity, travelling widely and spending time among the indigenous populations of those territories. He began writing adventure novels set in the Americas in 1890 after returning to Germany and

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settling in Hamburg as a merchant. His novel Martin Forster (1898) follows an orphaned boy left alone on the American frontier. Falkenhorst is a pseudonym for Stanislaus Jezewski, who worked as an editor of Die Gartenlaube, nineteenth-century Germany’s most popular magazine. Under his pen name he wrote dozens of colonial adventure novels set in Africa. His novel Der Baumtöter (Treekiller, 1895) follows a young German man named Hans Ruhl who is an apprentice on a cocoa plantation in Cameroon. Karl May is the most well-known author of German stories set in the American West. He was born in Saxony and trained as a teacher but lost his licence after being convicted of theft. He spent time in jail for fraud in the 1860s and turned to writing to make his livelihood in the 1870s. Though his novels set in the American West and the Middle East were very popular, May’s later years were plagued by lawsuits and scandals. His novel Winnetou (1893) features a first-person narrator who travels to the United States as a railroad surveyor and befriends Apache chief Intschu tschuna and his son Winnetou.

Race and crisis in Wilhelmine Germany Around the turn of the previous century, youth was seen as a particular social problem in need of fixing. At the time, Germany had its largest teenage generation of the twentieth century. Much ink was spilled by teachers and pedagogues, reformers, clergy, politicians, and writers about how best to control this population and stem the perceived rising tide of juvenile delinquency through efforts to, for example, extend formal schooling and offer young people better reading material (cf. Linton 1991; Peukert 1986). Pedagogical societies and teachers’ organizations in particular devoted entire journals to debates about what constituted appropriate reading material for young people that could best shape them into proper Germans (Bowersox 2013: 120–121). In short, young people and what they read truly mattered. This focus on youth as a social problem coincided with viewing race and German citizenship as a social problem, as Solf ’s speech quoted above illustrates. Germany’s colonial empire was outshone by those of France and Britain, but it nonetheless encompassed 1 million square miles and 12 million inhabitants in territories in Africa, China’s Shandong Peninsula, and the South Pacific. The settler colony Namibia posed a particular problem when white German men married or had children with native women and wished to pass their citizenship on to their biracial children. Successive legal moves to define the difference between native and non-native, white and Black, show an increasingly essentialized definition of Germanness (Reagin 2005: 245). Although the German Parliament disregarded Solf ’s words and failed to take action on mixed race marriages, many colonial governors, who legally were considered stand-ins for the Kaiser, acted independently.5 In 1905 Namibia was the first German colony to ban not only interracial marriages but all interracial sexual relationships, and in 1907 pre-existing interracial marriages were declared invalid. In 1910 colonial authorities went a step further and

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declared the entire mixed-race population – and anyone with any non-white background – to be native (Eingeborene), entitling them to fewer legal rights and protections (Aitken 2007: 140). The beginning of the twentieth century is also a time noted for a crisis of masculinity. Michael Kimmel and Warwick Anderson have made this argument for the United States. While Eva Giloi (2011) argues that Germany did not suffer from the same crisis of masculinity, with a confident martial masculinity, others credit Otto Weininger’s publication of 1903, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), as indicating a similar predicament in Germany (Davies 2008: 4). Of course, these crises were intersectional and interdependent. German colonial historian Lora Wildenthal, for example, persuasively argues that German debates about mixed marriage and citizenship in the colonies demonstrate a conflict between masculine/patriarchal and feminized racial models of citizenship – briefly, the right of a man to pass his citizenship on to his children comes into conflict with the need to preserve racial purity, which is more often centred on female bodies. As Wildenthal notes, “women’s ability to sustain racial purity was the basis for their political participation in colonialism” (2001: 6). The ascension of this feminine model can be seen in the efforts of German colonial organizations to send wives or marriageable women to the colonies to prevent interracial marriages and mixed-race offspring (Aitken 2007: 182). This nexus of concerns is what makes adventure novels for boys fruitful material for a study of German whiteness. Literature for adults and historical scholarship often highlight the problems of colonialism – violence, crises of governance, illness, and degeneration. Scholars such as Wildenthal, Marcia Klotz, and Eva Bischoff have noted the prevalence of weak and sick masculine characters in the work of foremost German colonial author Frieda von Bülow.6 Colonial literature thematizes white men who ‘go native’ (indicated by the German words vernegern and verkaffern – literally, negroization and kaffirization) and thereby threaten the colonial project. Young adult literature, by contrast, projects confident assertions of white German masculinity and boys who grow into men who understand their role in the colonial racial hierarchy. Whiteness holds a paradoxical place in the colonial context of Germany. As Maureen Maisha Eggers notes in the 2005 book Mythen, Masken, Subjekte, one of the first German contributions to Critical Whiteness Studies, whiteness is associated with “mildness, goodness, the rescue of naïve Black people, white innocence, purity, and white heroism” (18, emphasis in original). The connection of whiteness to virtue, benevolence, and human rights is what gives white people their place atop the colonial racial hierarchy. At the same time, whiteness is constantly presented as under threat in the colonial context. I equate this with Robin DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility, which she defines as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” (2011: 54). DiAngelo’s use

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of the term refers to the contemporary United States, but it can also serve as a lens for thinking about whiteness historically. The entire genre of colonial adventure novels for German boys can be read as a defensive move against the uncertainty engendered by the forces of globalization, colonialization, and racialization at the turn of the previous century. These writings were an effort to declare that Germans were white when that fact was far from certain. Young people’s reading material was seen as important in shaping them into better Germans, and therefore within the oeuvre of young adult literature, whiteness becomes a sort of pedagogical project. Adolescent characters are liminal – positioned between childhood and adulthood – and are therefore able to mediate between natives and white settlers to learn their place within the racial and cultural hierarchy of colonialism and to learn to function as white German men.

The colonial Bildungsroman Adventure novels relocate the traditional Bildungsroman to foreign spaces, presenting Germany’s colonies or other far-flung territories as proving grounds of masculinity, places where boys go to become men. They further portray white German masculinity as uniquely suited to life on the frontier. Martin Forster, from Pajeken’s novel of the same name, is an orphan alone on the frontier who earns his place in a tribe because of his German work ethic. Hans Ruhl of Der Baumtöter is a bright young man whose wanderlust sends him to a Cameroonian plantation; in his quest for exciting adventures in Africa he concocts an ambitious plan to harvest India rubber from trees surrounding the settlement. Hero Benno of Wörishöffer’s Die Diamanten des Peruaners is sent to South America when his uncle tires of his disobedience, but he slips away from his guardian to trek through the Amazon rainforest on a quest for lost diamonds. In all three cases the young men undergo physical trials away from patriarchal authority in spaces outside of Germany’s European borders and emerge as healthier, stronger, more mature men at the end, like in a typical Bildungsroman. Their time abroad proves their fitness in a physical, racialized fashion. These heroes master the external markers of frontier identity – hunting, trapping, horseback riding, and fighting – but eschew the drunkenness, brutality, and senseless killing that men of other national backgrounds engage in. Their German sense of diligence, patience, and prudence, as well as a willingness to work hard, allows them to tame the frontier and make it a German space. The adventurous lives these heroes lead is proscribed, and by the end of the novel they renounce it to return to the bounds of patriarchal authority. Martin Forster and Benno Zurheiden are both miraculously reunited with their biological fathers who had long been believed dead, and Hans Ruhl listens to the advice of a father figure known as Graubart (Gray Beard) and gives up his get-rich-quick scheme. In her comparative study of British and German colonial adventure novels, Kara Getrost (2008) notes that young

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male heroes of these novels undergo what she terms “rites of passage” – hunting, climbing trees, interacting with the natives, and exploring caves – on their journeys from boyhood to manhood, serving along the way as intermediaries between the adult colonizers and the childlike native others. Their adventures last as long as they are needed in this intermediary role, and thus, after a time of wildness and adventure, they accede to their proper places in the patriarchal colonial order at the end of the novel. This process of renunciation and acceptance of patriarchal authority can be read as the white male heroes coming to accept the white man’s burden, though it is not referred to in those words. This is seen clearly in the case of Hans Rule of Der Baumtöter, who abandons his plan to make money with India rubber when he realizes it has led only to a desire for weapons and alcohol by the native population, and to competition and bloodshed. He has seemingly misunderstood the purpose of the German colonial mission in Africa; the explorers and adventurers belong to a past era of colonial exploration, and get-rich-quick schemes only serve to do harm. As his mentor Graubart explains to him, “[w]hat it comes down to now is to join the long, long neglected Africa to the rest of the cultural world as a useful limb” (Falkenhorst 1915: 10). Falkenhorst’s novels celebrate German colonial efforts in Africa, and Der Baumtöter consequently ends with an idyllic portrait of flourishing farms and industry, and the beginnings of a colonial civilization in Cameroon: “The better among the Blacks allied themselves with the Germans, and the German flag now wafts over this vast land, auguring protection for everyone who behaves uprightly and wants to work. Cameroon blooms and grows” (162–163). Hans has settled down to the quiet life of a planter, working with these “better among the Blacks” in the valley to spread the colonial mission, but hopes that one day the “wild men of the mountains” can also be civilized. As part of his journey to adulthood, Hans Ruhl thus must learn to listen to his elders and embrace a disinterested view of German colonialism. Initially, Hans was optimistic that his plan to harvest India rubber would not only enrich himself but would benefit the natives by providing them with an income. His mentor Graubart discouraged him from this plan because it would fail to properly instil a work ethic in the natives: The Negro will earn money, it’s true, but in what way? Will he become accustomed to regular work? Absolutely not! He will lead a life of loafing about the forest and squandering his wages; he will be introduced to new necessities and become even more demanding, looking down with arrogance upon the worker who cultivates the land by the sweat of his brow. (Falkenhorst 1915: 84–85) Graubart’s words present a fantasy of virtuous Germans who are driven by a genuine desire to better the lives of the natives, rather than mercenary motives, and also illustrate the importance of work in the German colonial imaginary.

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Work and racial hierarchy in adventure novels Work is a central theme in these German adventure novels and serves as a structuring principle that shapes the narratives and the protagonists’ journeys to manhood. The hard work required of life in the colonies forces young, immature men to transform into adults and take their place in the colonial racial hierarchy. While work helps shape German boys into men, it also helps transform the natives into docile colonial subjects. The need to train African natives into a workforce was often offered as a justification for German colonial efforts, and it forms a key part of German colonial discourse as reflected in literature (cf. Conrad 2004; Markmiller 1995). Work thus also becomes a way to portray the colonial experience as mutually transformative, where both colonizer and colonized grow, change, and benefit. Alongside exciting stories about a hunt for the source of the Nile in the legendary Mondgebirge (the Rwenzori Mountains which lie on the border of present-day Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), or a heroic attempt to defend rubber trees from greedy speculators, Falkenhorst’s oeuvre is full of similar stories of training or raising the native population to work (Erziehung zur Arbeit) by missionaries and responsible colonists. These Germans engaged in a civilizing mission attempting to instil in natives a respect for the Kaiser and colonial authority and offer them responsible models of economic development. Rather than resource extraction, these model colonists focus on incremental growth and development for the benefit of everyone. Graubart from Der Baumtöter is generally presented in the novel as a virtuous colonist who is interested above all in bettering the natives to further German colonial goals. He notes the importance of creating a native workforce to the colonial mission and the ability of Germans to survive as colonial authorities in Africa: Africa is different than America. Over there in North America the European could settle and work the land without the help of the “Redskins.” In Africa we can’t work by the sweat of our brows, digging and plowing; we can’t handle that in this climate. We need the Negro and must learn to get along with them. Perhaps one day our Fatherland will support us in this by sending warships and troops to scare respect into the arrogant Negro kings. (Falkenhorst 1915: 46–47) This passage shows the connection between work and the racial hierarchy. Here, Falkenhorst draws on classic racial rhetoric of climate to describe Germany’s mission in Africa to groom a native workforce. The climate theory of racial development held that the various races of men were uniquely adapted to their environments.7 This short excerpt reveals the potential difficulty with mapping this onto the landscape of colonialism. Whites like Graubart and the other colonialist characters from Falkenhorst’s novels stand

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atop the racial hierarchy, their superior development making them able to manage, enslave, raise, or train the natives (erziehen) and colonize other peoples and places. However, in noting the inability of whites to perform manual labour, Falkenhorst points to both the need for a native workforce and the potential vulnerability and fragility of whites in the colonies. Graubart’s invocation of Germany as the fatherland underscores the importance of German patriarchal authority in constructing the colonial racial hierarchy. The protagonists of colonial novels are expected to serve the national father (the German nation and the German Kaiser) and teach the childlike natives not only to work but to understand their place in the colonial hierarchy. However, while the boy heroes will eventually grow into men and colonial rulers, the natives will remain in a dependent and subservient position, expected to show deference to their German fathers. The development of the hero in progressing from an adventure-seeking young man to a proper colonial master in some ways resembles that of the native who transforms from a lazy or rebellious person into a proper colonial subject. Tom, the protagonist of another novel in Falkenhorst’s series, Tabakbauer von Usambara (Tobacco Farmer from Usambara, 1895), for example, struggles with greed and pride but eventually submits to German colonial authority and abandons his desire to become a great, wealthy planter, opting to grow cotton rather than the cash crop tobacco: “But above all I will be able to be a good role model for my fellow countrymen. Farming in Waschamba is already worth something, and it will bear rich fruit if someone improves it. That will be my task” (172). In moderating his expectations and settling for incremental development and serving as a positive influence to those around him, the story of Tom’s development strongly resembles that of Hans Ruhl. To underscore the fitness of Germans for colonial rule, native subjects as portrayed in colonial novels consent to and even endorse German colonial authority. Graubart admits that training a native workforce is necessary to enable German colonial rule, but this is still presented and accepted as a benevolent act, rather than a self-interested one. Characters like Tom from Tabakbauer and the workers on Ernesto’s plantation in Wörishöffer’s Die Diamanten des Peruaners explain how they have benefited from contact with German settlers and colonizers. Tom, as the son of a native ruler, believes he deserves more than to be the servant of white authorities. Over the course of the novel Tom learns the error of his ways and cedes his desire for power to those that he acknowledges as the superior and rightful rulers, the German colonial authorities, noting, “My Usambara already has a king that is as powerful, good and just as he could wish. His lord is the German Kaiser” (Falkenhorst 1895: 180). The novel ends with Tom vowing to serve as the Kaiser’s steward and not seek power in his own right.

German colonial innocence Tom’s acceptance of German colonial authority serves to portray Germans in imperial situations as virtuous and blameless. Getrost notes these positive

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portrayals of Germans are a common trope of German adventure novels (2008: 59–60). They serve to propagate a fiction of German innocence and colonial superiority. These fictional German colonizers have disinterested motives and a genuine desire to improve the lives of the natives, rather than a desire to improve their financial situation. Pajeken’s novels are full of these disinterested heroes who show financial responsibility and eschew drinking, unlike the other white populations on the frontier. Benno of Wörishöffer’s Die Diamanten des Peruaners has a similar experience when he travels through the Amazonian rainforest and arrives at the Peruvian border to encounter a man known as Ernesto, who has not only created a useful, productive settlement, but has undertaken to civilize the natives: He is the good Father Ernesto, a great wizard who knows and can do all. He showed us how to build sturdy houses and make leather suits and boots; he brought us in connection with other white men so that we can profitably sell our pelts. Before we knew no iron tools and had no fruit fields; now each of us has a garden with grapes and oranges, a field with corn, melons, cherimoya, and legumes, also a chicken coop and a pigsty. For all of this we poor redskins thank Father Ernesto. (Wörishöffer 1889: 386–387). Ernesto represents benevolent German patriarchal authority, and when he is reunited with his long-lost son Benno he can serve as a proper colonial role model to him and teach him how to be a man. In Die Diamanten des Peruaners Ernesto thus serves as the representative of German civilization. In spite of the Hispanicization of his name, Benno recognizes in him his longmissing German father Ernst. Ernesto has managed, almost literally, to lift the natives out of the Stone Age and into the modern era, motivated not by a desire to enrich himself but by a genuine wish to improve the lives of the native people and provide them a respite from the cruelties of Spanish colonial rule (423). Wörishöffer’s text is an inversion of the common colonial adventure novel trope. Wörishöffer seems to be intentionally playing off a popular British adventure novel, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which was published in 1885 and translated in 1888, the year before Die Diamanten des Peruaners was published. Hero Allan Quatermain penetrates the feminized African landscape and flees with his pockets full of diamonds, the lost treasure of King Solomon.8 Benno, on the other hand, turns it down when he is offered a share of the treasure by his friend Ramiro. Because he was reunited with his long-lost father and now has the means to attend a university in Germany, he considers it not only unnecessary but distasteful to accept a portion of the proceeds: “I would have to be insatiably greedy to take a penny from your children’s inheritance. No, no, my father and I will bring the treasure untouched to Europe and when that is achieved, will tell your wife and give her the whole sum, every dollar and penny” (Wörishöffer 1889: 536).

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Benno distances himself from the portrayals of greedy colonizers, instead renouncing his share of diamonds to ensure it remains with its rightful indigenous owner. In this way German colonial novels perpetuate a hierarchy among white colonizers. Authors consciously position Germans in opposition to British or Spanish colonial authorities to show Germans as more moral and the superior colonizers. Germans like Benno’s father and Graubart are presented as uninterested in economic exploitation; their efforts to train a native workforce are instead presented as part of a greater civilizing mission. While German colonizers, explorers, and imperialists as portrayed in adventure literature often show compassion for native subjects, this rarely extends so far as recognition of true equality. While travelling through the Amazon rain forest, Benno laments at how much produce is wasted and thinks about how much more efficiently Germans would make use of the country’s abundant natural resources. Pajeken’s Martin Forster lives peaceably among a Native American tribe and earns their respect through his German work ethic, but he holds himself apart and maintains a sense of racial and cultural superiority. The turning point comes when two white men are brought into the camp as prisoners. Even though Martin recognizes the men as two highwaymen who stole from his father before his death, he still considers it his “human duty” (Menschenpflicht) to help his fellow white men (Pajeken 1989: 81). Antilopenauge, the young woman who works as Martin’s servant, explains they have not had their pleasure (Vergnügen) in torturing anyone since the previous summer and are therefore looking forward to slowly torturing Billy Clark and James Morgan to death (70). While Martin admits that the men are “very bad people,” he is not convinced they have earned death. When he thinks back on the cruelty he has witnessed in the Native American camp, such as children being allowed to torture animals to death and grown men brutally mistreating horses, he wonders “How will these people, who have no pity for innocent creatures, treat their white, mortal enemies tomorrow?” (73–74). At this thought Martin’s path is clear and he chooses racial unity: No! His human duty was to attempt to save the two prisoners. But – if he achieved this, he could no longer stay among the redskins. – Good! That was okay with him. He had his gun and ammunition again; he was also warmly clothed now, and he was not lacking any blankets and pelts for open air camping. – Forward! (ibid.: 74) The “human duty” Martin feels extends only toward his fellow white men. Human seemingly means “white,” in contrast to the not-fully-human “redskins.” He does not consider the natives he has lived among for months to be equals toward whom he must exert this “human duty.” Though they welcomed him as an equal and offered him membership in the tribe, he held himself aloof and rejected many of their offers. Seemingly, he does not

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recognize Native Americans as fully human. When he chooses to rescue the ruthless white men and leave the tribe, he thinks not of repaying the generosity and hospitality of the tribe who essentially rescued him from death alone on the frontier, but instead thinks only of his physical needs – his gun and blankets – before leaving. Though whiteness is not explicit in this scene, it is implicit in the choices Martin makes. Martin instinctively identifies with his fellow white men, even though those men were bad, unscrupulous people who indirectly caused the death of his own father. He feels compelled to free them and save their lives because he considers them racial equals, distinct from the racially inferior natives among whom he lives. Pajeken’s character shows how whiteness and Germanness work together – Katharina Walgenbach refers to them as “historical interdependencies” (2005: 377) – to create a kind of dual superiority. These German characters are constructed as racially superior to indigenous peoples and as culturally and morally superior to other white colonizers. This dual superiority is what colonial adventure novels use to show Germans are uniquely positioned to tame the frontier and bring culture and work ethic to the native populations. One of the best examples of this kind of dual superiority can be found in the Wild West novels of Karl May. They feature a German who travels to the western United States to work for the railroad. He protests the unjust seizure of Native American land by the American railroad company and befriends Apache chief Intschu tschuna and his son Winnetou. The German earns the nickname Old Shatterhand because of his powerful punch, and even though he is a ‘greenhorn’ he can soon out-ride, out-hunt, out-fight, and out-shoot even experienced cowboys. May’s novels differ from those of Wörishöffer, Pajeken, and Falkenhorst because they were produced for and popular among both young people and adults. Unlike the other authors under consideration, May’s novels have had an enduring cultural appeal. With the publication of more than 200 million copies of his works, May is arguably the most successful German author of all time, and May’s works were the source material for a successful series of West German westerns in the 1960s that are credited with saving the German film industry (Goral 2014: 59). They were also the source of a recent big-budget television event, evidence of their continuing popularity and relevance. May’s writings about North America show a clear racial and cultural hierarchy, and he deploys negative and racist portrayals of Native American characters alongside negative portrayals of white Americans as a way to reinforce German characters’ dual racial and cultural superiority as both white and German. Karl May’s indigenous characters, like nearly every depiction of Native Americans of this time, are violent people, constantly carting away prisoners in order to hatchet, scalp, burn, or bury them alive, or kill them in some other horrific way. Sam Hawkens, the narrator’s first Wild West mentor, has been scalped by a band of Pawnees, leaving a ghastly wound: “The sight of his hairless, blood-red scalp was truly frightful” (May 1893: 31). When Old Shatterhand first meets the Kiowas, they are on the way

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to fight the Apaches in retribution for killing four of their warriors, but it soon emerges that the Apaches had only killed the four Kiowa warriors for attempting to steal Apache horses and exchange them for alcohol from white traders. In this and many other instances, Native Americans are shown to be murderers, thieves, and liars. In the introduction to Winnetou I, May informs the reader that Indians have become “a furtive, sneaking, mistrustful, lying people” (3–4). Old Shatterhand chides Winnetou, “the redskins tear each other apart instead of standing by each other against the mutual enemy of their race” (548). All Native Americans, even those like Winnetou who are presented as noble, engage in petty fighting and mutual slaughter among themselves rather than uniting to fight their shared enemy, the white settlers. This places the responsibility for the defence of the frontier on Native tribes who failed to unite and fight their enemy, rather than on the white Americans who slaughtered them.9 Further, May’s portrayal of Native Americans serves to construct a sense of white superiority by showing how these characters acknowledge the supremacy of white characters and white European civilization. When Old Shatterhand first visits Winnetou in his village, for example, he is clad only in a light linen robe, carries no weapons and holds a book in his hand, on which the word ‘Hiawatha’ is visible. Old Shatterhand is shocked that “[t]his Indian, this son of a people considered ‘wild,’ could not only read but possessed sense and taste for finer things. Longfellow’s famous poem in the hands of an Apache! I never would have dreamt it” (304). Winnetou, dressed in westernstyle clothing and reading an American author, both implicitly and explicitly accepts the superiority of white civilization. He admits, “[t]he whites have more knowledge and skills than we do. They are superior to us in almost every way” (549). Winnetou becomes a figure that absolves his white readers of guilt for the Native American genocide by embodying the inevitability of Native American decline and endorsing colonization by a superior people.10 Not only does Winnetou accept the trappings of European and American culture, he actively assists in the colonization of his people. In helping Old Shatterhand claim land in Apache territory for the railroad, Winnetou “accepts the manifest destiny of white (German, Saxon) superiority” (Lutz 1985: 176). Much to the surprise of Old Shatterhand, Winnetou convinces his father, Apache chief Intschu tschuna, not only to give Old Shatterhand official approval for his surveying work, but to provide him with warriors to aid and protect him in his work. Intschu tschuna’s reasoning for giving permission to measure his land for the railroad is that there is nothing he can do to stop the inevitable encroachment of white men. He tells Old Shatterhand, “[y]ou are right. We can’t stop them from robbing us over and over again” (May 1893: 456). In having Native American characters acknowledge, enact, and voice the superiority of Europeans in general, and the German Old Shatterhand in particular, May offers his readers a lesson in the power and importance not only of whiteness but of Germanness.

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With the exception of Winnetou and his family, all intelligent, honourable and upstanding characters – such as Old Shatterhand, Sam Hawkens, Klekihpetra – are German. Other white settlers are greedy, money-grubbing opportunists. That Germans such as Klekih-petra and Old Shatterhand ally themselves with Native Americans is evidence not of their racial degeneration, but rather of the racial isolation of noble natives such as Winnetou. Winnetou, certainly modelled after James Fenimore Cooper’s Uncas, embodies everything that is good in the native, but he is rendered unthreatening to German superiority precisely because he is the last of his race.11 In the homosocial environments of May’s novels, there is no danger of anyone marrying and procreating, and thus the future demise of the Indian is secure: the ‘bad’ American Indian tribes will be driven out by the Americans, while the ‘good’ natives such as Winnetou will take their downfall as a given and make way for the future heirs of the west, German settlers in the mould of Old Shatterhand.

Conclusion Whiteness often remains unacknowledged and unmarked. However, in the colonial context of Wilhelmine Germany, anxieties about race and nation make whiteness visible. Mass emigration to the Americas and colonial rule in Africa resulted in an understanding of Germanness as under threat. Heroes like Old Shatterhand, Benno Zurheiden, Hans Ruhl, and Martin Forster – only four examples among hundreds – demonstrate confident assertions of white German identity, including moral rectitude and a strong work ethic. Examining the representation of Germans in turn-of-the-century adventure novels shows how race and culture are intertwined. White German characters are constructed as racially superior to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa, and culturally superior to other colonizers. The heroes of these adventure novels perform white German masculinity through their dominance over native peoples and their demonstration of German cultural values. The performance of cultural values was so important to German colonial rule that Robbie Aitken has documented mixed-race families who were able to regain their legal status by proving themselves sufficiently German in their domestic habits (2007: 140–142). This racialization of culture creates a German identity that is durable, flexible, and portable, and an antidote to the crisis of white fragility in colonial contexts.

Notes 1 All quotes from the German are translated by the author unless otherwise indicated. 2 Germany has agreed to formally recognize and apologize for the genocide, but it is not clear what, if any, form reparations might take. Descendants of those killed by German colonial authorities have sued in the U.S. district court in Manhattan.

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3 The simmering controversy surrounding the Humboldt Forum boiled over in July 2017 when prominent art historian Bénédicte Savoy publicly resigned from the expert commission and cited the lack of openness and provenance research, telling Süddeutsche Zeitung in an interview, “I want to know how much blood is dripping from an artwork, how much scholarly ambition is hidden inside it” (Häntzschel 2017). The organization “No Humboldt 21” has been active against the museum since 2013. Lorenz Rollhäuser produced a radio documentary about the accusations that the objects are looted art in 2017 (Rollhäuser 2017). 4 This topic is particularly current in Germany given the recent election of far-right political party “Alternative for Germany” to the German parliament after a campaign that involved racially loaded campaign posters that featured an image of a white pregnant woman and the slogan “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” 5 Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) served as Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia from 1888 to 1918. During his imperial career he presided over the expansion of Germany’s navy and colonial possessions. Though he was praised during his life for his foreign policy abilities, historians consider him bellicose, impatient, and ineffective. He abdicated in November 1918 and lived the rest of his life in exile. 6 Frieda von Bülow (1857–1909) came from a noble family and spent her childhood in Smyrna (Turkey), where her father was a Prussian consul. Her brother Albrecht eventually settled in German East Africa. Bülow was an active member of colonial organizations, founding the Deutscher Frauenbund für Krankenpflege in den Kolonien (German Women’s League for Nursing in the Colonies) before travelling to German East Africa herself in 1887. She began writing colonial novels in the late 1880s after returning from abroad (Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Novellen, 1892; Tropenkoller: Episode aus dem deutschen Kolonialleben, 1896; Im Lande der Verheißung, 1899). Her novels feature the “commonplace,” showcasing aspects of domestic life in the colonies such as dinner parties and household management rather than military campaigns, lion hunts, or other classical markers of African adventure narratives. 7 For more on theories of racial development, see Eigen and Larrimore 2006; Grosse 2000. 8 There is a wealth of secondary literature on imperialism in King Solomon’s Mines, for example Katz 1987; McClintock 1990; Chrisman 1997. 9 There is a bizarre vein of scholarship on Karl May that insists the author’s writings are anti-racist. Jeffrey Sammons, for example, makes the observation that “there seems to be little trace of [racism] in May’s writings,” based on a definition of racism as “a systematic doctrine attempting to discover, define, and, in some cases, evaluate differences among human races” (1998: 238). This understanding of racism as a politically neutral system avoids any discussion of power and dominance: how systems of knowledge of human difference are used to oppress the peoples deemed less worthy and justify colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of domination. In his essay “Karl May: The Wild West as Seen in Germany,” Heribert Feilitzsch makes note of this point but dismisses what he terms May’s “ethnocentricity,” explaining that “simple ethnic and nationalist stereotyping” (1993: 185) was necessary in order for the novels to be commercially successful. 10 It is possible to read Old Shatterhand as an early prototype for the “white saviour” figure, a white person who identifies with and “saves” a member of a minority group or a number of non-white or disadvantaged people in some way, as seen in films such as Dances with Wolves (1990), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007), The Blind Side (2009), and Avatar (2009). For more on the white saviour trope see Bernardi (2007); Moore and Pierce (2007). 11 James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales were translated and published in Germany immediately following their US publication and were very influential on

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Karl May and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century German authors of Wild West stories (see Kuester 1988; Egger 1991; Löser 1998).

Bibliography Aitken, Robbie. Exclusion and Inclusion: Gradations of Whiteness and Socio-Economic Engineering in German Southwest Africa, 1884–1914. Peter Lang, 2007. Anderson, Warwick. “The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown.” American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1343–1370. Bernardi, Daniel. The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Routledge, 2007. Bischoff, Eva. “Tropenkoller: Male Self-Control and the Loss of Colonial Rule.” Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear and Radicalization, edited by Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, pp. 116–135. Bowersox, Jeff. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914. Oxford University Press, 2013. Chrisman, Laura. “Gendering Imperial Culture: King Solomon’s Mines and Feminist Criticism.” Cultural Readings of Imperialism, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires. Lawrence & Wishart, 1997, pp. 290–304. Conrad, Sebastian. “‘Eingeborenenpolitik’ in Kolonie und Metropole: ‘Erziehung zur Arbeit’ in Ostafrika und Ostwestfalen.” Das Kaiserreich Transnational, edited by Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, pp. 107–128. Davies, Peter. “Introduction: ‘Crisis’ or ‘Hegemony’? Approaches to Masculinity.” Edinburgh German Yearbook Volume 2: Masculinities in German Culture, edited by Sarah Colvin and Peter Davies. Camden House, 2008, pp. 1–19. DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 54–70. Egger, Irmgard. Lederstrumpf: ein Deutsches Jugendbuch. VWGO, 1991. Eggers, Maureen Maisha. “Ein Schwarzes Wissensarchiv.” Mythen, Masken, Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers et al. Unrast, 2005, pp. 18–21. Eigen, Sara and Mark Larrimore, editors. The German Invention of Race. State University of New York Press, 2006. Falkenhorst, Carl. Der Baumtöter: Kameruner Pflanzergeschichte. 1895. Köhler, 1915. Falkenhorst, Carl. Die Tabakbauer von Usambara. 1895. Köhler, n.d. Feilitzsch, Heribert. “Karl May: The ‘Wild West’ as Seen in Germany.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 27, no. 3, 1993, pp. 173–189. Getrost, Kara. “From Innocent Play to Imperial Survey: Adolescent Rites of Passage in the British and German Adventure Novels of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1870–1905.” PhD thesis, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2008. Giloi, Eva. Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Goral, Pawel. Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Grentrup, Theodor. Die Rassenmischehen in den deutschen Kolonien. Schöningh, 1914. Grosse, Pascal. Kolonialismus, Eugenik und Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918. Campus, 2000.

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Häntzschel, Jörg. “Bénédicte Savoy über das Humboldt-Forum: ‘Das HumboldtForum ist wie Tschernobyl’.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 July 2017. http://sz.de/1. 3596423. Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. The Free Press, 1996. Klotz, Marcia. “White Women and the Dark Continent: Gender and Sexuality in German Colonial Discourse from the Sentimental Novel to the Fascist Film.” PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1994. Kuester, Martin. “American Indians and German Indians: Perspectives of Doom in Cooper and May.” Western American Literature, vol. 23, no. 3, 1988, pp. 117–122. Linton, Derek. ‘Who Has the Youth Has the Future’: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Löser, Philipp. “Chingachgook zwischen Indianerspiel und Klassenkampf: Amerikas Ureinwohner in den Leatherstocking Tales und ihren deutschen Bearbeitungen.” Übersetzung als Kultureller Prozeß: Rezeption, Projektion und Konstruktion des Fremden, edited by Beata Hammerschmid and Hermann Krapoth. Schmidt, 1998, pp. 150–176. Lutz, Hartmut. “Indianer” und “Native Americans”: Zur sozial- und literarhistorischen Vermittlung eines Stereotyps. Olms, 1985. Markmiller, Anton. “Die Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit”: Wie die koloniale Pädagogik afrikanische Gesellschaften in die Abhängigkeit führte. Reimer, 1995. May, Karl. Winnetou. Fehsenfeld, 1893. McClintock, Anne. “Maidens, Maps and Mines: King Solomon’s Mines and the Reinvention of Patriarchy in Colonial South Africa.” Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, edited by Cherryl Walker. Philip, 1990, pp. 97–124. Moore, Wendy L. and Jennifer Pierce. “Still Killing Mockingbirds: Narratives of Race and Innocence in Hollywood’s Depiction of the White Messiah Lawyer.” Qualitative Sociology Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2007, pp. 171–187. Pajeken, Friedrich. Martin Forster: Erlebnisse eines Knaben im wilden Westen. Loewe, 1898. Peukert, Detlev. Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis 1932. Bund-Verlag, 1986. Reagin, Nancy. “German Brigadoon? Domesticity and Metropolitan Germans’ Perceptions of Auslandsdeutschen in Southwest Africa and Eastern Europe.” The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, edited by Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin. University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 248–265. Rollhäuser, Lorenz. “Haus der Weißen Herren: Raubkunst im Humboldt-Forum?” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 23 September 2017. http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/ raubkunst-im-humboldt-forum-haus-der-weissen-herren.958.de.html?dram:article_ id=391520. Accessed 29 October 2018. Sammons, Jeffrey L. Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May and Other German Novelists of America. University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Schenda, Rudolf. Die Lesestoffe der kleinen Leute: Studien zur populären Literatur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Beck, 1976. Walgenbach, Katharina. “‘Weißsein und ‘Deutschsein’ – historische Interdependenzen.” Mythen, Masken, Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers et al. Unrast, 2005, pp. 377–393.

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Wildenthal, Lora. “‘When Men Are Weak’: The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow.” Gender & History, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 53–77. Wildenthal, Lora. ‘When Men Are Weak’: The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. Duke University Press, 2001. Wolgast, Heinrich. Das Elend unserer Jugendliteratur. Teubner, 1896, 1905. Wörishöffer, Sophie. Die Diamanten des Peruaners: Fahrten durch Brasilien und Peru. Velhagen & Klasing, 1889.

10 Homemaking practices and white ideals in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Sarah Heinz While thinking about ideals of homemaking and how they are communicated in contemporary cultures, I came across an interesting internet blog community: people who share ideas about ‘window treatments.’ With a curtain, you seem to be able to say so much about yourself, as for example the blog Windows by Melissa claims: “Decorating is about expressing yourself. Express your own unique personality in your decorating in every detail, right down to the curtain rod” (Laymon 2012). Here, windows and curtains are more than just architectural elements of your house or apartment; they are part of a home that is an externalization of your self. Accordingly, with a subtitle like “Clothing your Naked Window,” for example, the blog uses body metaphors to talk about such design details, morphing the house into a living organism that is close to (if not identical with) the inhabitant’s own body (Laymon n.d.). The same goes for using colour in your home. The journal House Beautiful provides a pull-out tab that guides users toward finding the right ‘colour personality’ for home improvement: “Whether you want to add energy to a dull room or calm to a hectic one, our guide can help you decide which color suits you best” (Bernhardt 2015). This type of advice maps house, home, and the inhabitant’s self onto each other. Readers are given a sense of home as a space that not only gives shelter to a person, but that is also an extension of a person’s moods, personality, and – implicitly – their self-presentation, self-regulation, and relations with the outward world. Thus, “interior design [can be seen] as a paradigm for subjectivity and homemaking” (Butter 2016: 266). Such an apparently mundane issue as our choice of curtains or paint makes tangible the fact that houses or dwellings are imbued with specific functions, values, and emotions, making them expressions and externalizations of our selves and turning them into a home. As Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling stress, this connection between house and home should not simply be taken for granted, in spite of its wide cultural currency. Exactly because connections between house and home are made rather than simply existing, an analysis of the underpinnings of this connection should focus on how and why built forms become identified as or associated with home (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 88). I want to extend this important proposition to question how and why built forms turn into homes that are then an expression of, or even a

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stand-in for, a self. One answer to this question lies in the activities performed within the home. For any dwelling to turn into a home and a place of self, multiple and often daily practices are needed that are only seemingly banal. Home therefore is not merely “a place/site, a set of feelings/cultural meanings, and the relations between the two” (ibid.: 2–3), but it is also a doing and an ongoing process. However, the concrete practices that turn a house into a home are heavily inflected by normative ideals and evaluations of our homes and our selves. These practices are then “materialized in the form of dwelling structures” (88). Such normative ideals again crystallize in the guides to window treatments quoted above. As the inhabitants and creators of our home spaces, we are supposed to clothe the implicitly unacceptable nakedness of our windows and ‘bring balance’ to our rooms through our choice of colours. In this chapter, I analyse the practices that turn houses into homes, focusing specifically on the connection between practices of homemaking, and the cultural norms and ideas of the self and its (self-)regulation implicit in these practices. In my reading, the home is not an individual space in which I express myself as different from all other people and their sense of home. It is rather crisscrossed by intersecting power structures and identity categories, some of which are gender, ethnicity, age, class, and education. These identities are acted out in shared practices of doing home, and they are shaped by the hegemonic position that notions of middle-class whiteness have taken up in Western discourses. Thus, home spaces and our ways of living (in) them are themselves an intersection where discourses of identity, community, society, and their normalization overlap. In this context of home as a space of identity politics (both of conformity and of potential resistance), I am concerned with the elusive normativity of many homemaking practices and their connection to whiteness as an invisible ideal. I proceed from the assumption that whiteness is not a fixed identity, but rather something we do and perform. It is what Alison Bailey has called a “whitely script” (1998: 36). In its performative character, whiteness is like home: a process in flux that does not simply exist but is provisional and always (necessarily) in the making. However, concrete practices connected to home do not necessarily have to accept and reiterate norms of whiteness or homemaking. Through acts of doing home, hegemonic ideals like that of the heteronormative nuclear family, or of gender relations within the home, can also be resisted: “Whereas the spatial layout and perception of many forms of dwelling correspond to dominant ideologies of home, these ideas are constantly resisted and recast, often through home-making practices” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 89). As bell hooks stresses: “When we renew our concerns with homeplace, we can address political issues that most affect our daily lives” (1990: 389). In tune with such a politics of home, literary texts can similarly affirm or question whitely practices of doing home, as I will show below, and they can unveil the contingency of idealized home spaces. I will therefore compare two

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literary examples. The British novel Saturday by Ian McEwan (2005) presents one day in the life of an upper-middle-class white male protagonist whose home is violently invaded and in need of protection. The Nigerian novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003) deals with a black girl from a privileged family who experiences domestic violence within her home. Both texts are about practices and whitely ideals of doing home, I claim, but their effect is completely opposite. While McEwan’s novel ultimately corroborates the white privilege and idealized home space of its central protagonist, Henry Perowne, Adichie’s text points out the damaging effects of white homemaking ideals.

Doing whiteness: Whiteness as practice In order to outline the connection between norms and ideas of whiteness and practices of home, I first want to discuss how whiteness can be theorized as a doing. Similarly to gender, whiteness can be understood as a “situational accomplishment” (Messerschmidt 2004: 55; cf. Butler 1990) and an “interactional accomplishment” (West and Fenstermaker 1995: 21). In this sense, it is an identification which has to be performed incessantly. Whiteness operates according to the rules and conventions of “whiteliness” or “whitely scripts” which govern recognizably “white” (inter)personal behavior.1 This accomplishment has to be repeated and enforced in a multiplicity of concrete social situations over time and involves “a complex of perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities” (ibid.: 9) that combine to present specific actions or behavioral cues as an expression of innate qualities and natures. However, looking white and acting white are two different things; they can complement, but also contradict, each other. The relationship between physical characteristics and the situational, interactional accomplishment of whiteness is therefore a contingent one. To be accepted as white, skin colour is by no means enough. What is needed is rather to follow cultural scripts of whiteliness that sustain and justify white privilege (Bailey 1998: 36). Matt Wray’s definition of whiteness as “a flexible set of social and symbolic boundaries that give shape, meaning and power to the social category white” (2006: 6) reflects the relevance of regulatory regimes and specifically applies to behaviour, taste, and decorum. Apart from overtly regulated areas of life such as sexuality and reproduction, the performative scripts of whitely behaviour include such mundane issues as table manners, food, dietary rules, and the resulting body, as well as aspects like language, dialect, and politeness, hygiene, clothes, living arrangements, and how you tend to your garden. Here, the connection between whitely scripts and homemaking practices already emerges as crucial to normalized ideals of home and, by extension, homeland and national belonging. Just as individual homemaking practices and preferences for specific housing structures are implicated in national politics and nationalist discourses (Morley 2001: 432–433), so too do performative scripts of whiteness affect more than ‘just’ individual lives and life

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chances. The ideal homemaker (for women) and homeowner (for men) is also the ideal citizen implicitly racialized as white (cf. McElroy 2008; Tyler 2012). As I will discuss in more detail below, this ideal also includes middle-classness, notions of the nuclear family, and heterosexuality. Home is thus an intersection of power relations and identity categories and can be read as the nodal point of a domopolitics, “the aspiration to govern the state like a home” (Walters 2004: 237). Performances of whiteness and of home are institutionalized in social discourses, in the scientific production of knowledge, or in political structures. Questions of conduct, taste, and decorum, or what John Hartigan Jr. calls “etiquette” (2005: 19), are more than superficial manners or mere cultural conventions. In performing such etiquette, normative subject-positions and home spaces are created, maintained, and enforced. In that sense, whiteness is a form of what Michel Foucault has termed biopolitics, “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practices by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race” (2010 [2004]: 317). The white body and the home are both made governable through internalized regulatory regimes of biopolitics. These regimes have become invisible because we accept them as expressions of our allegedly natural, genetic characteristics, as well as our own individual desires. We seem to want an ordered home space or an upright, controlled posture, and we identify with the norms and social relations that come with these ideals. Judith Butler has called this our “passionate attachments” to subject positions like heterosexuality that render our desires and ourselves controllable, stable, and, ultimately, ‘normal’ (1997: 6–10). Veronica Vasterling writes: “Originating in the need to survive psychically and socially, these attachments are the linchpin of the psychic life of power” (2010: 176). Such a performative approach to whiteness and race has been highly productive, adopted by scholars in the social sciences and history, as well as in literary, film, and cultural studies (see for example Byrne 2006; Hartigan 2005; Aanerud 1997; Clarke and Garner 2010; Negra 2001; Bernardi 2001; Foster 2003). It has also shaped my own approach to questioning how whiteness is embodied, enforced, and maintained in gendered, racialized, and classed practices and their literary representations. The focus on whiteness as performance explains how a person identifies with whiteness by acting and looking white, and how we form passionate attachments to this position and the social recognition it confers. At the same time, the analysis of this passionate attachment can help to deconstruct the invisibility and normativity of these multiple, performative practices and their role in our daily lives and cultural representations. The shift from accepting whiteness as a given state of being to seeing it as a becoming, acting, and doing can therefore be seen as what Robyn Wiegman calls “the foundational gesture of whiteness studies” (1999: 123). In this vein, Steve Garner talks about the critical study of whiteness as a crowbar: “What we are trying to do when we use whiteness as a conceptual

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tool is insert an intellectual crowbar between whiteness as ‘looking white,’ and whiteness as the performance of culture and the enactment of power, then pull the crowbar down” (2007: 6).

Doing home: The politics and ideals of home practices Discourses of power and their material effects literally find a home in our houses, apartments, and other dwellings, and they do so in the practices that are part of our homemaking routines. Returning to the example of interior design that I began with, in our choices of curtains or paint we partake in communities of taste and preferences; and while visiting someone else’s home, I am easily able to recognize who shares them. In addition, preferences in taste will seem both the norm and the ideal; a sign of both perfection and achievement; both unique and shared with others. Thus, home is not a neutral or private space; rather it is “intensely political both in its internal relationships and through its interfaces with the wider world over domestic, national and imperial scales” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 142). These politics of home include norms, roles, and expectations that govern which behaviours and practices are condoned and which are penalized; which spaces are used how and by whom; who is invited into our home and by whom. This exclusionary and disciplinary aspect has been noted in several discussions of home, as in Mary Douglas’s idea that “home starts by bringing some space under control” (2012: 51) or in the definition of “home [as] the place where one is in because an Other(s) is kept out” (George 1999: 27; emphasis in original; see also Morley 2000: 31–41). Even the language roots of the word ‘home’ reflect this disciplinary force of the notion: The Latin word domus means house or home. It is closely related to the verb domo which can be literally translated as “to tame” or “break in” (today we would say domesticate). However, it was also possible to use the word domo more metaphorically: to speak of the act of conquering or “subduing men or communities.” (Walters 2004: 241; emphasis in original) Notions of home are therefore implicated in ideologies and power relations, containing spatial, symbolic, and political dimensions that can reinforce each other. The politics of home are all the more important to scrutinize when we consider the evaluations and imaginaries of home in many Western cultures. Home is an auratic term that conjures up a host of associations such as warmth or safety.2 Many people still associate home with family, comfort, a retreat, or a sanctuary, and with sociability and community. In such imaginaries, home becomes the equivalent of the ideal home as a “locale of human warmth and material sustenance, moral probity and spiritual comfort” (Tuan 2012: 227).

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Of course, meanings of home are dependent upon concrete social, cultural, and historical contexts and can differ widely in individual experiences as well. In addition, home can be a site of negative feelings, a loss of self, or even violence, especially for women (cf. Madigan Munro and Smith 1990; Morley 2000: 56–85). Nevertheless, across many Western cultures and historical periods since the eighteenth century, home has remained an often idealized, even romanticized setting for the self and communal ties, for nostalgia, Heimat, and Heimweh (cf. Tuan 2012; Morley 2000: 31–33). Home may refer to a physical structure (e.g. a house), to a social unit, a place of origins, or the “site of everyday lived experience” (Brah 1996: 4). But in all its meanings and on all scales, it carries an affective and emotional weight that has been surprisingly enduring. But how do practices of home come into play in such (critical and nostalgic) politics of home? How are our senses of self, our social and political contexts, or our cultural imaginaries of home connected to our ways of doing home? And where and how does whiteness as a doing fit into this? A first answer to these questions can be found in examining what cultures imagine home to look like. Contemporary Western cultures have surprisingly similar conceptions of what a home is: mostly, a large, detached residential building, made for one nuclear family, ideally including a garden or at least a yard. In the German-speaking context, the idea of the Einfamilienhaus im Grünen (a detached family home surrounded by a garden) as an ideal setting for family life and a ‘good’ childhood has dominated previous decades of city planning and political debates (cf. Hnilica and Timm 2017). This has been a prevailing ideal and consistent preference in most Western cultures for decades (cf. Mallett 2004: 67). Such an ideal home is not just some architectural form. It already implies who typically lives (or can afford to live) in such buildings; and many people have an implicit sense of whom they would not expect to be able to do so: “Public discourse […] presents a dominant or ideal version of house-as-home, which typically portrays belonging and intimacy amongst members of a heterosexual nuclear family, living in a detached, owner-occupied dwelling, in a suburban location” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 100–101). A second answer to the questions raised above connects to this image of the owner-occupied family home in a leafy suburb. How such idealized houses are lived in plays a crucial role in a culture’s sense of what a good and ideal home is. Houses turn into ‘real’ homes when they are used as settings for selfactualization and social relations, primarily those of family. Thus, practices of homemaking are vital for houses to turn into homes in the first place, and these practices start with the choice of “design, spatial organization, and furnishings of domestic dwellings [that] influence and inflect concepts and/or ideologies of the home” (Mallett 2004: 66). However, what is seen as ‘good’ design, ‘proper’ ways of living, and ‘properly’ relating to other people within a home is intensely regulated by what I have described above as normative terms of decorum and etiquette.3 For a biopolitics that needs ideal citizens to

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regulate and normalize themselves, the house-as-home becomes the central arena for practising (i.e. performing) normative modes of identity and community: “In other words, household designs, furnishings and technologies constrain or facilitate cultural and historical modes of relating between the people who share these spaces” (Mallett 2004: 66). In this context, it is specifically salient that many (if not most) homemaking practices seen as good, normal, and proper in contemporary Western society are connected to the whitely scripts outlined above. As a normalized and invisible regime of self-regulation and empowerment, whiteness shapes the mundane daily expressions of a biopolitics of home and its connection to the body: A hard, lean body, a dieted or trained one, an upright, shoulders back, unrelaxed posture, tight rather than loose movement, tidiness in domestic arrangements and eating manners, privacy in relation to bowels, abstinence or at any rate planning in relation to appetites, all of these are the ways the white body and its handling display the fact of the white spirit within. (Dyer 1997: 23–24) From the way I am expected to park my car, arrange my flower beds, shop for groceries, prepare and consume food, to the more complex matters of caring for my child, personal hygiene, and sexual relations, or more social matters like entertaining guests in my home, whitely scripts configure the practices that turn a house into a ‘good’ or ‘ideal’ home. Thus, homemaking practices are intimately tied to “an imaginary of home that casts the social relations of middle-class, white, heterosexual, nuclear families, and its material manifestation in the form of the detached suburban house, as an ideal, or homely, home” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 131–132). In this connection of home spaces and practices, the whitely self is both an agent and a product: “A house is perceived as an ideal home once it is transformed into a realm of aesthetic experience for its inhabitants and visitors. Home is not only a site forged by the creative self but it is also constitutive of the creative self. Practices of homemaking or ‘doing home’ are equally practices of the self” (Butter 2016: 251). In sum, home is something that we do, but this practice is intimately tied to material forms like buildings, social conventions of taste and decorum, economic class (cf. Blunt and Dowling 2006: 94), and a notion of identity within distinct social and national locales (cf. McElroy 2008: 43). Like whiteness, our ideas of home are thus culturally contingent and created through performances, but within our cultural discourses these contingent performances tend to take on a self-explanatory and natural quality. In other words, they are taken as a default or a given. Scripts of whiteness heavily inflect home arrangements: if my home is an exclusive space for the enactment of whitely family ideals, then it needs to be protected from alternative practices of doing

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family, doing parenting, or doing intimacy. In short, it is in need of defence, a motif that interlaces the homemaking practices represented in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday.

Ideal homes and whitely practices in Ian McEwan’s Saturday McEwan’s novel presents one day in the life of the successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. It is February 15, 2003, the day of the huge demonstration against the Iraq war in London. As an account of one individual day, the novel presents us with sometimes minute descriptions of how Perowne does home: from getting up, to relating to his family; from cooking, to listening to music or the news in his kitchen; and, finally, to going to bed again after he has defended his home and his family against the invasion of the social Other in the form of the thug Baxter.4 The novel starts before dawn, as Henry Perowne wakes up in the bedroom of his owner-occupied family home on Fitzroy Square, a Georgian square first intended to provide London homes for aristocratic families. In later years, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and Ford Madox Ford were residents here. In its choice of setting, the novel already, therefore, presents a home space connected to privilege, class, and the creative, self-actualizing white subject. Immediately after waking up, Perowne becomes aware of his body, his self, and his consciousness as pleasurable and strong. In the scene’s description and specific location within the house, we can already see how Perowne’s practices of doing home create an idealized sense of identity. The bedroom is one of the most private rooms of the house, and Henry is naked and close to his sleeping wife. Thus, we have the impression that we get to see his ‘real me’ in his exposed body, his most private thoughts, and his most intimate, even sexual relations. In this experience of Perowne’s home space, positive feelings and experiences dominate, mapping house, ideal home, and self onto each other: [T]he movement [of getting up] is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed – he always sleeps naked – feeling his full height, aware of his wife’s patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. […] It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialised out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered. […] And he’s entirely himself, he is certain of it, and he knows that sleep is behind him: to know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity. (McEwan 2006 [2005]: 3–4) Right on the first two pages, a connection is made between this experience of being clearheaded, alert, and “entirely himself,” on the one hand, and the design of the bedroom, “large and uncluttered” (4), on the other.

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Interestingly, the text actually spends time on the window treatments. Perowne opens the wooden shutters and raises the sash window: “It is many feet taller than him, but it slides easily upwards” (4). Later on, the curtains of the brown and cream-coloured living room are described as “heavy […], closed by pulling on a cord weighted with a fat brass knob” which “have a way of cleanly eliminating the square and the wintry world beyond it” (181). What may seem a mere addition of some details for a realistic novel in fact suggests how Perowne’s identity is tied to economic comfort. These amenities shape the private and tastefully furnished space of his ideal home and the practices performed within. Yet, the curtains and their clean elimination of the world outside indicate more than a certain taste in interior design and the money paid for it. In Perowne’s life, home is a space brought under control. It is based on the maintenance of boundaries in every sense. The clear separation of things that are seen as binary oppositions is for Perowne “the essence of sanity” (4). Accordingly, the privacy, safety, and comfort of this home is secured through a variety of measures that keep the public and the other outside – from heavy curtains over soundproof windows, to a complicated burglar alarm system – all of which are recounted in obsessive detail. The private home space thus both externalizes and produces Perowne’s subjectivity, whose boundary work is based on exclusion and essentialization. Much like his telling name, which connects the protagonist to property and ownership (both of the home and a self-regulating subjectivity), the novel continues the representation of Perowne and his world as whole, smooth, pleasurable, bounded, and important for others. His patients and colleagues profit from his mastery and extreme professionalism and hard work; his wife and children profit from his reliable and faithful love and material achievements; and the general public profits from his staunch citizenship as a “dutiful, conventional” man (26). In addition, his body is tall, reliable, and healthy. Accordingly, Perowne is shown in spaces that are home or homely and private – spaces that he can control and whose design underline and express his wholeness: his bedroom, his kitchen, his living room, the imposing library at his house, the operating theatre, or his office in the hospital (246), his silver Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery (75), or the privately rented squash court. In all these spaces, Perowne encounters the exterior world filtered and kept at a distance (76), often accompanied by classical music or the news. This is typical for imaginaries of home that hinge “on the idea of a strict division between inside and outside, between those who belong, those whom we invite inside, and those who must stay outside” (Birke and Butter 2016: 33). To borrow the title metaphor of E. M. Forster’s second Italian novel, Perowne’s world is A Room with a View, a window that stands for an epistemological system of thought along the lines of his white privilege. From the vantage point of his home spaces and intricate homemaking practices, he creates the world in his own image and, at the same time, a homely and privileged image of himself (cf. Winterhalter

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2010: 228–229). The world is expected to be comfortable and at his service, and should not inhibit his pleasure and safety. The novel thus presents a character who is unaware or dismissive of his white, male privilege, instead idealizing himself as a perfect being materializing out of nothing into a world and a home that are his rightful property. This property includes his house, his car, his own body, his wife and children, and – overall – his way of life. In tune with Perowne’s own normalization of this white, upper-middle-class sense of ‘life in general,’ McEwan’s representation of Perowne’s day has been interpreted as “the most observant, responsive, comprehending account of what life in London is like right now” (Evening Standard, publicity in McEwan 2006 [2005]). What becomes obvious in both Henry’s thoughts, and such reviews of the novel, is that the protagonist enjoys what Peggy McIntosh has called “an invisible knapsack of special provisions” and “unearned advantage and conferred dominance” (2013: 49, 52; emphasis in original), but the novel (and such reviews) never really acknowledge it. In her reading of the novel, Monika Shafi therefore states that “Saturday come[s] dangerously close to smug self-righteousness” (2012: 191). Perowne’s thoughts on genetics and differing life chances underline this unearned but invisible advantage. At the end of the novel, he thinks about Fitzroy Square, the office people who eat their lunch there, and the drunks and junkies who also roam the place: “it’s down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules. […] No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. So, what then?” (McEwan 2006 [2005]: 272). In this logic, people’s fate comes down to good or bad genetic material and the chance of cell division; it has nothing to do with inequality or discrimination. Social and cultural hierarchies are presented as natural and therefore immutable effects of biology (cf. Hartigan 2005: 3). The vocabulary of this passage accordingly echoes the language of Social Darwinism, the racial sciences of nineteenthcentury evolutionary thought, and “Arnoldian-inspired liberalism” (Hadley 2005: 93; see also Schmitt 2018: 25–26). The novel as a whole does little to create a distance from such ideas and the hierarchies they entail, and it is difficult to detect traces of irony or criticism in the presentation of these thoughts. Perowne as the story’s only focalizer, as well as the use of free indirect discourse, play a decisive role here: this world is his world, and it is shaped and created by his experiences, practices, and points of view. However, this extreme concentration onto one single perspective makes Perowne’s egocentrism not more but less obvious and visible for the reader. Just as whiteness remains invisible in a world that sets up whitely practices as the human norm (cf. Dyer 1997: 1), Saturday sets up Perowne, his home, and his world as the ‘way we live now.’ The novel is thus part of a possessive investment in whiteness: “As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations” (Lipsitz 1995: 369). This world and its whitely values are only

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momentarily shaken by the events presented in the novel, first and foremost in the climactic scene of Baxter invading the Perowne home.5 In the logic of the Perowne family, such invasions by the genetically and socially poor must be fended off, but they do not “undermine their faith in the validity of their views and way of life” (Shafi 2012: 170–171). White privilege and whitely practices again turn into the norm and the ideal, from which people like Baxter are more-or-less tragic exceptions or genetic aberrations in an otherwise healthy, self-regulating population. In the restrained, even reluctant prose of the novel, with its figural narration, Perowne is presented as understated, even modest, sure of his achievements, yet not vain or snobbish. Even his moments of doubt and fear – mostly connected to the changed world after 9/11 and a new sense of threat within a multicultural city – do not in fact weaken this impression.6 Although some critics have highlighted “fissures in its narrative surface” and the “subtle nuances of McEwan’s use of free indirect discourse” as signs that the novel does not endorse Perowne’s vision of the world (Winterhalter 2010: 339, 340; see also Butler 2011; Amiel-Houser 2011–12), they can nevertheless also be read as indications of the protagonist’s troubled (but ultimately heroic) white masculinity. In their extreme subtleness, the fissures and contradictions in Perowne’s narrative hide or even justify, rather than uncover, his invisible privilege. His musings may seem overly self-absorbed at times but are not meant to estrange the reader. Rather, in Perowne’s tormented yet privileged whiteness we are “invited to identify with him” (Shafi 2012: 183). Perowne and his practices of doing home thus embody the ideal of white middle-class masculinity, but they do not question it. He has the enterprise, control, and prowess of the white male; he has sexual drives but controls and contains them within a legal marriage; and his story is full of images of suffering and pain, but also of his mastery of these bodily signs. As Richard Dyer formulates: “The spectacle of white male bodily suffering typically conveys a sense of the dignity and transcendence in such pain” (1997: 28). In spite of his well-being, prosperity, and comfort, Perowne is thus paradoxically turned into “the bearer of agony” and a “universal subject” (28). He is a sign of a changed world’s “new order, this narrowing of mental freedom, of his right to roam” (McEwan 2006 [2005]: 180) as Perowne perceives it, all while drinking wine and cooking an expensive fish stew in his spacious kitchen. In this manner, Saturday represents whitely practices of doing home in minute detail. However, this representation ultimately affirms these practices as though they are the proper way of life for good citizens in a modern democracy. The novel might address the difficulty of maintaining the boundaries of enclosed private spaces, but it nevertheless resorts to an idealized notion of the white middle-class home and its right to shut out a threatening public. As Lynn Wells has suggested about the ending of Saturday: “[L]ife can happily go on for the English middle class” (2010: 123). It is no surprise then that the novel ends on the same note as it began, with Perowne again taking possession of the world in his bedroom at night: “He

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feels his body, the size of a continent, stretching away from him down the bed – he’s a king, he’s vast, accommodating, immune” (McEwan 2006 [2005]: 269). Although he shortly felt “timid, vulnerable, […] drawing his dressing gown more tightly around him” (277), he regains his sense of self on the novel’s final page: “He closes the shutters […], then goes towards the bed and lets the dressing gown fall to his feet as he gets in” (279). The home space is secured and closed off from the public, a fact that is performed in Perowne again being naked and fully himself. This circular structure stresses both the dominance and the normativity of white, middle-class masculinity: it starts with a sense of security and control, then goes through moments of crisis and potential loss of control, only to regain it and close the circle. Through practices of doing home, Perowne can regain control over himself and his family and re-establish a home space that is an intersection of white, male, and middle-class privilege without acknowledging it.

Unhomely homes and the visibility of whiteness in Purple Hibiscus Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus differs from McEwan’s text in several respects, although it is equally occupied with practices of doing home. Both texts use the family home – its design, practices, and relations – as a microcosm in which larger issues of a community and nation are acted out. However, Adichie’s novel presents the whitely practices of its black male protagonist, Papa Eugene, with a critical eye. It is a postcolonial novel set in 1990s Nigeria, and it uses the fictional home space to unsettle notions of home and homeland. Here, home is not a positive space of privacy, and it does not offer the comforts of freedom, safety, and trustful intimate relations. On the contrary, it is a space of violence, severe personal constraints, and constant surveillance. In this home, external issues of the postcolonial nation’s history are acted out, linking “home and homeland in cruelties perpetrated in the name of protecting settled spaces and national values” (Strehle 2008: 3; cf. Sandwith 2016; Toivanen 2013). At the same time, the internalization of ‘whitely’ scripts by a black protagonist outlines the performative character of idealized whiteness and separates it from phenotypical markers such as skin colour. In a postcolonial setting like Nigeria, whitely home practices turn into one decisive manifestation of an “internalized sense of inferiority, and a colonized mind or soul” that buys into “what Said calls the ‘flexible positional superiority’ of Europeans” (Strehle 2008: 104, quoting Said 1979: 7). This holds true for both the public sphere of politics and homeland and the home sphere of personal relations and self-realization: “Nigerians, then, are twice colonized and doubly unhomed, for both public and private spheres are given over to the Western voices that condemn the African” (Strehle 2008: 106). Framed by Nigeria’s political instability, the novel’s central character is Kambili, aged fifteen for much of the period covered by the book. She is a member of a wealthy Igbo family, and Kambili’s devoutly Catholic father Eugene rules her life, as well as that of her brother Jaja and her mother

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Beatrice, like a military dictator (cf. Toivanen 2013: 106). Kambili is acutely aware of how this desire to rule is linked to her father’s need to control the “boundaries of the permissible” (Strehle 2008: 107): “Papa liked order” (Adichie 2013 [2003]: 23). Accordingly, Eugene’s patriarchal control shapes every homemaking practice in his house: its extreme cleanliness, its décor and design, its sheer size, the way and time in which food is taken, the restricted speaking of Igbo, or the high walls and restricted social interactions. The novel makes clear that these practices of doing home express and produce an internalization of colonial stereotypes of blackness. Eugene’s hatred of the body and its ‘unclean’ impulses, his need to control everything and everyone in his house, his ambition for his children’s academic success, and his preference for European objects and products all underlie his aspiration to be as white as possible. He is, as his sister Ifeoma comments, “too much of a colonial product” (13). Following whitely scripts and homemaking practices is thus his way towards achieving whiteness as a social, interactional accomplishment – something he has accepted as an absolute ideal to which he must aspire. For Papa Eugene, blackness symbolizes being wild, out of control – the body not the mind. As a consequence, he has developed excessive self-hatred that he projects onto his family, leading to domestic violence that is described in graphic detail (cf. Strehle 2008: 108–112). I want to look in more detail at two passages that deal with homemaking practices in Eugene’s household. Both show his aspiration towards an idealized whiteness and how this whiteness is not a comfort (as in Perowne’s case), but a source of terror and fear. The first passage describes Kambili waiting in her father’s bedroom. She has come second in her class, not first, and so she is awaiting punishment. In this situation, she describes the design and colour scheme of the room in detail, and her childhood memories of the room combine the comfort of an idealized home with the terror and fear of paternal punishment: The cream décor in Papa’s bedroom was changed every year but always to a slightly different shade of cream. The plush rug that sank in when you stepped on it was plain cream; the curtains had only a little brown embroidery at the edges; the cream leather armchairs were placed close together as if two people were sitting in an intimate conversation. All that cream blended and made the room seem wider, as if it never ended, as if you could not run even if you wanted to, because there was nowhere to run to. When I had thought of heaven as a child, I visualized Papa’s room, the softness, the creaminess, the endlessness. […] I slipped off my slippers and sank my feet into the rug and decided to keep them sunk in so that my toes would feel cushioned. So that part of me would feel safe. (Adichie 2013 [2003]: 41) In terms of frequency, two words in this passage stick out: the colour “cream” and the possessive form “Papa’s.” These two words are a key to an analysis of

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homemaking practices and whiteness in the novel: Eugene’s aspiration toward white ideals is expressed through the room’s brightness and newness. White and off-white tones dominate the interior design of the whole house and that of his second house in his village of origin – an impressive villa that Kambili describes as “four-storey white majesty” (55). The redecoration of the bedroom does not change this colour scheme; it just keeps the overall lightness of the décor as new as possible. It is this lightness and newness that Eugene wants to possess, but, for his family, this possessive aspiration only creates the pressure and fear that characterizes their experience of home throughout the novel. In the very first chapter, Kambili states: “Although our spacious dining room gave way to an even wider living room, I felt suffocated. The off-white walls […] were narrowing, bearing down on me” (7). Accordingly, the verbs ‘sink,’ ‘run,’ and ‘feel’ are the most frequent in the longer passage quoted above: Kambili feels like sinking and she wants to run, but the creamy whiteness of the room leaves no space to run to. In this room, everything that a comfortable and safe home includes is there, but without actually providing the family with comfort and safety. This home space is not private, in spite of high walls. Rather, it is a space in which colonial ideas of right or wrong, moral behaviour, and the position of men, women, and children, white and black people, are played out in performances of whitely scripts. The second passage reworks this idea of the home as a space of ever-sosubtle acts of violence and subordination. Here, we find the homemaking practice of sharing food. In the family, Papa Eugene has introduced a ritual that he calls “love sips”: Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved. Have a love sip, he would say, and Jaja would go first. Then I would hold the cup with both hands and raise it to my lips. One sip. The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue, and if lunch was something peppery, my raw tongue suffered. But it didn’t matter, because I knew that when the tea burned my tongue, it burned Papa’s love into me. (ibid.: 8) In these love sips, as well as in other instances in the novel, father–child relations are an “ambiguous mixture of suffering and affection” (Toivanen 2013: 108) that specifically characterize Kambili’s feelings for her father. Ambivalence is at the heart of this father–daughter relationship, an ambivalence that Homi Bhabha also sees at play in colonizer–colonized relations: “What threatens the authority of colonial command is the ambivalence of its address – father and oppressor or, alternatively, the ruled and reviled” (2004: 138). In the depiction of Eugene’s home, its décor, behaviour, food, and personal relations, the novel thus presents an image of Nigeria as homeland and

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its connection to the former mother country. People are children to be controlled and exploited, home is a space of hidden, domestic violence, and there is no potential of self-expression for the individual. In both Kambili’s and Eugene’s ambivalence towards their subjectivity and relations, all the practices intended to make the home become more like idealized whiteness as civilization, control, or the norm end up as an endless torture mechanism. In this sense, the novel not only demystifies patriarchal authority and masculinity (cf. Udumukwu 2011: 184), but it also makes idealized notions of whiteness and whitely practices visible. At the novel’s end, Papa Eugene’s wife Beatrice slowly poisons his tea and finally kills her husband in an inversion of his own “love sips,” thereby externalizing the invisible but poisonous effects that white ideals have had on Eugene and his family.

Conclusion To conclude, I have worked with a notion of home as a multidimensional concept that includes space, feelings, material practices, and economic positions, as well as imaginaries and discourses that shape the social interactions of individuals and groups. Home is often idealized, setting up what is proper, good, and desirable. Homemaking practices and the invisible normativity of whiteness are therefore connected and acted out in everyday routines, creating a microcosm of larger structures like homeland. Home and whiteness are practices shaped by multiple vectors of power and identity that create and maintain a sense of a self-regulating subjectivity aspiring to be both unremarkably normal and remarkably ideal. Saturday and Purple Hibiscus are novels about such normalizing practices and whitely ideals of doing home, but their effect is completely opposite. McEwan’s novel presents Henry Perowne’s home as a comfortable, idealized space that needs protection without uncovering the invisible white privilege it is based upon. Adichie’s text, however, points out the damaging effects of white homemaking ideals in Papa Eugene’s failed attempts at imitating the kind of life that people like Perowne are able to lead. Papa Eugene’s and Henry Perowne’s domopolitics show how the self, the home, and the nation intersect: the state may want to govern the state like a home, but these patriarchs also want to govern their home like a state. To return to the curtains that I started with, one could say that in Saturday Perowne’s curtains shut out the public and safeguard the sanctity of the idealized white family within. In Purple Hibiscus, on the other hand, the creamy curtains of Papa Eugene’s home hide the violence of white ideals and the poisonous internalization of colonial stereotypes. While Saturday complacently closes the curtains, Purple Hibiscus tears them open

Notes 1 For “whiteliness” see Frye (1992); for “whitely scripts” see Bailey (1998); for a combination of Frye’s and Bailey’s arguments see Gray (2002).

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2 For a discussion of ideal homes and home as haven, see Mallett 2004: 67–69, 70–73. 3 For the connection between propriety, whiteness, and property see also Heinz 2016. 4 For a comparison of Saturday with Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway in the context of this one-day structure, see Tew 2016. 5 For a detailed analysis of this incident, see Shafi (2012: 184–188); Alderson (2011: 232–233). 6 For a postcolonial reading of the novel in the context of global events see Wallace (2007); Alderson (2011); Gauthier (2013).

Bibliography Aanerud, Rebecca. “Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature.” Displacing Whiteness. Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg. Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 35–59. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Fourth Estate, 2003, 2013. Alderson, David. “Saturday’s Enlightenment.” End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945, edited by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz. Manchester University Press, 2011, pp. 218–237. Amiel-Houser, Tammy. “The Ethics of Otherness in McEwan’s Saturday.” Connotations, vol. 21, no. 1, 2011–2012, pp. 128–157. Bailey, Alison. “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 3, 1998, pp. 27–42. Bernardi, Daniel. “Introduction: Race and the Hollywood Style.” Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, edited by Daniel Bernardi. University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. xiii–xxvi. Bernhardt, Michele. “12 Color Meanings.” House Beautiful, 28 April 2015. www.house beautiful.com/room-decorating/colors/g757/color-meaning/. Accessed 29 May 2018. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Birke, Dorothee and Stella Butter. “Un/Making Homes in Anglophone Cultures.” Anglistentag 2015 Paderborn: Proceedings, edited by Christoph Ehland, Ilka Mindt, and Merle Tönnies. WVT, 2016, pp. 31–35. Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling. Home. Routledge, 2006. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge, 1996. Butler, Heidi. “The Master’s Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 101–113. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford University Press, 1997. Butter, Stella. “Representations of Ideal Homes in English Culture: Gracious Living and the Creative Self in Matthew Reynolds’ Designs for a Happy Home.” Subject Cultures: The English Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century, edited by Nora Kuster, Stella Butter, and Sarah Heinz. Narr, 2016, pp. 251–268. Byrne, Bridget. White Lives: The Interplay of ‘Race’, Class and Gender in Everyday Life. Routledge, 2006. Clarke, Simon and Steve Garner. White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach. Pluto Press, 2010. Douglas, Mary. “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space.” The Domestic Space Reader, edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei. University of Toronto Press, 2012, pp. 50–54.

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Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema. State University of New York Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978– 1979. 2004. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Frankenberg, Ruth. The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Frye, Marilyn. Wilful Virgin: Essays in Feminist Theory. Crossing Press, 1992. Garner, Steve. Whiteness: An Introduction. Routledge, 2007. Gauthier, Tim. “‘Selective in your Mercies’: Privilege, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Empathy in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” College Literature, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 7–30. George, Rosemary Marangoly. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. University of California Press, 1999. Gray, Breda. “‘Whitely Scripts’ and Irish Women’s Racialized Belonging(s) in England.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2002, pp. 257–274. Hadley, Elaine. “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency.” Victorian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2005, pp. 92–102. Hartigan Jr., John. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Duke University Press, 2005. Heinz, Sarah. “Unhomely Spaces and Improper Houses: Representations of Whiteness and Class on British Television.” Anglistentag 2015 Paderborn: Proceedings, edited by Christoph Ehland, Ilka Mindt, and Merle Tönnies. WVT, 2016, pp. 77–88. Hnilica, Sonja, and Elisabeth Timm, editors. Das Einfamilienhaus, special issue of Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 1, June 2017. hooks, bell. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” yearning: race, gender and cultural politics. South End Press, 1990, pp. 382–390. Laymon, Melissa. “About Us.” Windows by Melissa, n.d. http://windowsbymelissa. blogspot.co.at/p/about-us.html. Accessed 25 April 2018. Laymon, Melissa. “Decorating is about Expressing Yourself.” Windows by Melissa, 11 January 2012. http://windowsbymelissa.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/decorating-is-aboutexpressing-yourself.html. Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly, vol. 473, 1995, pp. 369–387. Madigan, Ruth, Moira Munro and Susan J. Smith. “Gender and the Meaning of the Home.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 14, no. 4, 1990, pp. 625–647. Mallett, Shelley. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” Sociological Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2004, pp. 62–89. McElroy, Ruth. “Property TV: The (Re)making of Home on National Screens.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2008, pp. 43–61. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Vintage, 2005, 2006. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, edited by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins. Wadsworth, 2013, pp. 49–53. Messerschmidt, James W. Flesh and Blood: Adolescent Gender Diversity and Violence. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

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Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. Routledge, 2000. Morley, David. “Belongings: Place, Space and Identity in a Mediated World.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 4, 2001, pp. 425–448. Negra, Diane. Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom. Routledge, 2001. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979. Sandwith, Corinne. “Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 47, no. 1, 2016, pp. 95–108. Schmitt, Mark. British White Trash: Figurations of Tainted Whiteness in the Novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King. Transcript, 2018. Shafi, Monika. Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction. Camden House, 2012. Strehle, Susan. Transnational Women’s Fiction: Unsettling Home and Homeland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Tew, Philip. “Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood.” London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City, edited by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew. Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 17–34. Toivanen, Anna-Leena. “Daddy’s Girls?: Father-Daughter Relations and the Failures of the Postcolonial Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 99–126. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Epilogue: Home as Elsewhere.” Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space, edited by Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele. De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 226–239. Tyler, Katharine. Whiteness, Class and the Legacies of Empire: On Home Ground. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Udumukwu, Onyemaechi. “Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Issues of Ideology in the Constitution of the Nigerian Novel.” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011, pp. 184–204. Vasterling, Veronica. “The Psyche and the Social – Judith Butler’s Politicizing of Psychoanalytical Theory.” Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms, edited by Jens de Vleminck and Eran Dorman. Leuven University Press, 2010, pp. 171–182. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 39, no. 4, 2007, pp. 465–480. Walters, William. “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.” Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2004, pp. 237–260. Wells, Lynn. Ian McEwan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. “Doing Difference.” Gender & Society, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995, pp. 8–37. Wiegman, Robyn. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity.” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, Autumn 1999, pp. 115–150. Winterhalter, Teresa. “‘Plastic Fork in Hand’: Reading as a Tool of Ethical Repair in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 40, no. 3, 2010, pp. 338–363. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White:White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006.

11 Fifty shades of white Benidorm and the joys of all-inclusiveness Anette Pankratz

“[W]hiteness travels across national borders in contingent ways, and the same white body can be lived differently in various locations as intersections of race and gender flux” (Rasmussen et al. 2001: 8–9); going abroad in order to get a tan offers a very special version of temporal, volatile and often carnivalesque intersectionality. The more so when it is combined with a comic and popular TV format, as can be seen in the British sitcom Benidorm (created by Derren Litten, broadcast by ITV). The show gets great mileage out of bringing British people to the Spanish tourist hotspot Benidorm on the Costa Blanca. One series of the sitcom covers one week at the all-inclusive Solana Hotel, featuring regular guests, staff and locals.1 In Benidorm, whiteness becomes marked and classed. The holidaymakers are shown as pale and pasty, lacking something that especially the residents already have. This intersects with the status of Benidorm as “Blackpool with sun” (Mick Garvey, series 1, passim), a place for the members of the (white) working class to enjoy themselves. And enjoy themselves they do, from the full English breakfast by the pool in the morning until the karaoke in Neptune’s bar at night. At first sight, Benidorm seems to operate with a middle-class viewing position, laughing at mass tourism and the antics of the lower classes. It teems with fat bodies, faeces, flatulence and eructation, often associated with nonnormative versions of whiteness covering stereotypical figurations such as ladettes or chavs.2 All this could be read as ingredients of an aesthetics of disgust and part of the “abjectifying logics of neoliberal governmentality” (Tyler 2013: 2). But middle-class critics, who usually subscribe to and perpetuate these logics, are not amused. In 2014, Terry Ramsay in The Telegraph criticises “stereotyped characters, over-acting, ridiculous plots and seasidepostcard humour.” Sam Wollaston’s (2016) review of the eighth series already claims in the headline: “It’s like an embarrassing uncle who’s stuck in the 1970s. Farts, innuendo and a little light racism … it’s an all-inclusive mess.” Jasper Rees (2017) relates the ninth series with the central recent political event attributed to the supposedly uninformed masses: “a bit like Brexit, Benidorm is a cheap-as-chips fantasyland of which a quiet majority have expressed a preference”. Grudgingly, the critics admit that many viewers like the series. It has fair ratings, won quite a few awards based on audience votes3

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and in 2016 came in at number 19 in a Radio Times online poll of the 20 best British sitcoms of the twenty-first century (cf. Jackson 2016). What can one make of Benidorm? Does it cater to the lowest common denominator, as the critics maintain? Do farts, broad humour and stereotypes equal racism and sexism? Does popularity equal populism? I argue that Benidorm deserves a closer look at its comic strategies of representing whiteness, Britishness, gender, sexuality and class, which are more complex than the critics claim. In the following, the aim is not to salvage a neglected masterpiece of British sitcoms for academia, but to use a popular series in order to gauge the potential of intersectional representations in the mass media. The chapter will show how the series deconstructs notions of white privilege and power by relating them to usually marginalised groups in terms of class, gender and sexuality. The productive faultlines and irritations created by these intersections construct all-inclusiveness with a clear preference for a nostalgic (white) working-class lifestyle, unruly femininity and queerness. After a brief discussion of the meanings produced by setting the sitcom in a Spanish holiday resort, the focus of the analysis will be on examples of non-normative whiteness, before having a look at the broader picture of the Solana and Benidorm as spaces of classed, gendered and queered conviviality.

Going on a summer holiday Sitcoms about class in general, and particularly about the white working class, are frequently set at home: Only Fools and Horses (BBC 1981–2003) thrives on the local colour of Peckham; The Royle Family (BBC 1998–2000) takes place in the Royles’ living room in Manchester. Benidorm uses a different approach, shipping all the characters off to a holiday resort in Spain. First, this ensures social and regional mixing and avoids the “dominant ideologies of home” (Heinz 2016: 78), which almost automatically position the characters and implicitly evaluate them: “Even before a character speaks in an English domestic sitcom, their class belonging is usually disclosed by their wallpaper or their choice of evening meal” (Medhurst 2007: 145). Moreover, while the other sitcoms confront their characters with everyday problems and – by means of their comic catastrophes – often mark them as socially inept and lazy,4 Benidorm sets an alternative frame of normative hedonism. The aim of everyone is to forget their life at home and to enjoy the holidays, which basically means to intentionally indulge in laziness and inertia. Potentially, the hotel is a “non-place” (cf. Augé 1995), devoid of history, a product of the neoliberal market, commodified and uniform, open for all classes (Pons 2009: 93). In contrast to the rules of middle-class domesticity and controlled privacy (Heinz 2016: 82), life at a holiday resort is spent outside together with the other guests, “promoting and producing convivial economies and a sense of being together” (Pons 2009: 192). This suspends middle-class work ethic and foregrounds bodily needs and pleasures. On holiday, the classic distinction between “industry and idleness”, “abject and

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aspirational” lives (Tyler, 2013: 170, 186) does not really work; neither does the difference between deserving and undeserving holidaymakers – whoever can pay for a week at the Solana has earned the right to stay and to partake of the all-inclusive offers. But this is where questions of taste and respectability come in after all. Despite the potential non-place of the hotel, setting the show in Benidorm carries with it strong connotations of class. For a long time, mass tourism in the Mediterranean and its “four Ss” – “sun, sea, sand and sex” (Wright 2002: 181) – were seen as inauthentic, cheap and “a sign of moral decline” (Pons 2009: 95). Benidorm, with its high-rise hotels mainly catering for middle- and working-class tourists from Britain, Germany, France and the Benelux countries, assumes a position as especially inauthentic and commercialised. Pedro Zaragoza, Benidorm mayor from 1950 to 1967, tried to profit from the European post-war affluence. He instigated the building of tower-block hotels in order to provide cheap accommodation for the greatest possible number of customers (Berghoff 2002: 174–175). In its advertising campaigns, Benidorm foregoes claims of essentialised authenticity, and instead offers sunny beaches plus affordable prices and entertainment geared towards an international audience (Wright 2002: 190–191).5 This brings with it economic success on the one hand and a low reputation on the other. The resort is known as a “‘chaotic’, ‘massified’, ‘tacky’ place where ‘you can smell the beach in the summer, you smell the suntan oil’, ‘the status of the people is so low’, ‘people hang their laundry in the windows’, a place in the sun, which ‘honestly, I really think is unbearable’” (interviewees quoted in Caletrio 2009: 118).

Variations of British whiteness The title sequence of Benidorm evokes this ambivalent image: upbeat ska music accompanies images of a crowded beach with the skyline of Benidorm, followed by close-ups of people lying in the sun, eating, drinking, playing volleyball or swimming in the Mediterranean. Between these images of sunny Southernness, the Union Jack appears on clothes, shop signs and advertisements. We see huge beer bellies, arse cracks and tattoos. The title sequence already constructs a space of not-quite Britishness. Accordingly, only a few characters represent hegemonic Britishness or normative whiteness associated with “purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity” (Dyer 1997: 72). Most of the guests at the Solana expect physicality, opulence and a little sex. They sweat and smoke, drink and defecate, feast and fornicate. In the first three series, Kate and Martin Weedon (Abigail Cruttenden, Nicholas Burns), a couple from Crawley, personify middle-class normativity, with Kate often voicing her outrage about and disgust of other guests. One of her favourite targets are the Garveys, a family from Manchester with Janice and Mick Garvey (Siobhan Finneran, Steve Pemberton), their two children, Chantelle and Michael (Hannah Hobley, Oliver Stokes), and Janice’s mother Madge Barron (Sheila Reid). The hotel manager

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characterises them as “rough like a dog’s arse” (series 1, passim), another guest attacks them as “pikey bastards” (series 2, episode 5), a racist slur relating them to Irish or Romany travellers. In other words, the Garveys present varieties of “white trash” (cf. Wray 2006) or “contaminated whiteness” (Tyler 2013: 187). In the following, they serve as point of entry into the world of Benidorm with its different shades of white.

Tan and tobacco Madge arrives at the Solana with a rather developed tan and works on it very hard during her stay. With her skin colour identified by other guests as “burnt Sienna” from the Dulux colour chart (series 1, episode 2), and her chain smoking, she represents a precarious and contested form of whiteness. Her family constantly taunts her about her supposed blackness, but she insists that “I’m not black, I just got a healthy tan” (series 3, episode 5). Indeed, with her slim figure, blue eyes and (dyed) blond hair, Madge would come close to Western beauty ideals (if it were not for her age) and her “healthy tan” ties in with the notions of traditional tourism. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, getting a decent suntan served as sign of distinction, beauty and health. When the working class worked in factories and in urban areas, having a tan stood for glamour and having the leisure to spend time in nature (Fiske 2004: 46). When holidays abroad became affordable for almost everyone, a suntan that lasted longer than the summer season became a new sign of distinction, hence the boom of sunbeds in the 1980s and the still ongoing popularity of self-tanning products (Wiseman 2010; Dyer 1997: 49). As the example of Donald Trump proves, having a tan does not undermine claims to proper whiteness. On the contrary, “the point about tanning is that the white person never does become black” (Dyer 1997: 49). But the racialised terms the family uses to mock Madge indicate that her form of tanning and her lifestyle in general have become suspect. They violate the norms of neoliberal self-care, in Benidorm personified by health advisor Kelly (Niky Wardley): Kelly: Can I talk to you about melanoma? Madge: No, I don’t know her, darling. […] Kelly: No, melanoma. It’s a form of skin cancer. Madge: Oh, I’m sorry, darling. Still, if she’s on holiday, it’ll take her mind off it, don’t it? Kelly: Take whose mind off what? Madge: Your friend who’s got cancer. Kelly: No, my friend hasn’t got cancer. Madge: What’s all the fuss about, then? (series 1, episode 3) Kelly leaves a brochure, but Madge is still not willing or able to enter the same plane of reality, remarking that the young woman will never find her

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friend, because “the only picture they’ve got is of her spotty back” (series 1, episode 3). Undeterred by the health campaign, she adamantly stays in the sun. Sunbathing may not be counted as utter recklessness; smoking, however, is, and happens to be another one of Madge’s favourite pastimes. Kate finds this scandalous behaviour and shares her indignation with her neighbour at the pool bar: How can someone in that condition possibly smoke? […] It’s people like that who end up hogging hospital beds for months on end, squandering valuable NHS resources. […] Look at the colour of her. How can someone who chain-smokes stay in the sun so long? She’s a human time bomb. (series 1, episode 2) Kate is not aware that she is talking to Madge’s daughter Janice, who on the one hand agrees with the critical assessment, but on the other hand condones her mother’s behaviour and is just as oblivious to current health discourses. When Kate asks whether Madge is not afraid of the “C-word”, Janice replies that “she’s been called far worse than that” and that her mother will probably outlive them all (series 1, episode 2). On the meta-level, the dialogue makes fun of the trend for euphemisms. The slang term denoting the female sexual organ (and connoting a broad range of negativity irrespective of one’s gender) and the neutral word for a potentially lethal illness happen to share the same initial, and both violate rules of polite middle-class conversation, albeit for different reasons. The former term can be read as sexist and offensive. Avoiding the latter seems to be connected to a belief in the magic of words: openly talking about cancer or pronouncing Lord Voldemort’s name could import the dreaded and excluded. In the eyes of Kate, the chain-smoking adds to Madge’s status as “not quite white” (cf. Wray 2006). In contemporary Western culture, smokers are seen as dirty, smelly, lazy and uneducated (Graham 2012: 87), a stigmatisation which usually intersects with prejudice against the lower class. “Squandering valuable NHS resources” replicates the neoliberal discourses about “making choices”, differentiating between the “deserving” and “undeserving”, and marginalising people as members of a “parasitical ‘feckless underclass’” (Tyler 2013: 186). Benidorm, however, does not support this stance, but equates tanning, smoking and free alcohol with the good life and a state of contentment. As Janice summarises her perfect day: “I’ve got an ice-cold beer in one hand and a ciggie in the other and the sun is shining” (series 1, episode 6). This echoes the traditional working-class lifestyle described by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy: “cigarettes and beer […] are part of life; without them, life would not be life; there are rarely any other major interests to make these pleasures less relevant and worth forgoing” (2009 [1957]): 43). Tanning, smoking and nostalgia gain even more prominence in series two and three when Madge gets romantically attached to, and later marries, Mel

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Harvey (Geoffrey Hutchings), a self-made millionaire who does not tire of mentioning that he owns “five sunbed shops in Manchester” (series 2, passim). Madge and Mel bring back the style of the pre-Thatcher and preReaganite 1970s and 1980s: at one point she gets cornrows, made famous by Bo Derek in 10 (1979), and he loves to wear white suits and black shirts like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977). The style seems hopelessly outdated and appropriates non-white culture for the Western mainstream. The couple ignore the jeers from the rest of the family and shows themselves blissfully unaware of the implicit racism. With her third hobby, “irritating people” (series 1, episode 2), Madge comes close to the stereotype of the monstrous, old, working-class harridan (Mortimer 2015: 72): she swears and always has an unkind word for people who cross her path. Thus, when Kate helps her in a coughing fit, puts out her cigarette and offers her some water, Madge complains about her saviour’s rudeness, because “I was smoking that. […] [T]hey don’t grow on trees, you know” (series 1, episode 5). But tanned, slim and self-centred Madge does not conform to the stereotype of the rotund and robust “mam” (ibid.: 77–78). In her self-fashioning, she comes closer to “unruly women” like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous (BBC 1992–1996; 2001–2004), albeit with a clear working-class background. Madge here leads a cast representing different versions of female unruliness, ranging from Janice Garvey, who does not shy away from headbutting a con-artist (series 1, episode 5), to Trudy (Michelle Butterly), who intentionally loses a bet on whether she can behave like a real lady for a day in order to knock out an old-school sexist (series 5, episode 4).

Coats and Coolio With her pallor and the refusal to get rid of her warm jacket, Chantelle Garvey seems to be the direct opposite of her grandmother, but she also represents a specific figuration of tainted whiteness: the so-called chav. The sixteen-year-old is pregnant in the first series; series two and three present her as occasionally absent-minded teenage mother of mixed-race baby Coolio. In 2007, when the first series of Benidorm was aired, the figure of the chav was ubiquitous in the British mass media, not least due to Vicky Pollard, a character from the sketch show Little Britain (BBC 2003–2006). As Imogen Tyler has shown, the discourse around chavs evokes disapproval and disgust. The moral panic about teenage mothers betrays anxieties about class, sexuality and “racial mixing” (2008: 18). Especially the latter can be found in Benidorm as well. Almost like a textbook case, the story of Chantelle’s pregnancy and motherhood is intercut with the marital crisis of the Weedons. Kate would like to have a baby, but Martin has problems with his fertility. Hence, Kate volunteers to babysit for Chantelle with a yearning look at the cute child. This combination seems to reiterate the dialectic between the aversion to chavs and the “social angst about infertility amongst middle-class women” (30).

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But Chantelle Garvey is not a replica of Vicky Pollard. From the outset, the sitcom presents Chantelle as not knowable and definitely not explainable by stereotypes (Tyler 2013: 165). She is introduced as a normal, slightly overweight teenager who does not enjoy going on holiday with the family. While the rest of the Garveys lounge in bikinis and shorts, Chantelle sulks on her sunbed and insists on wearing her coat. The poor kid wearing his or her coat at all occasions, made famous by Kenny in South Park (Comedy Central 1997–), indicates both a lower-class status and self-consciousness about one’s body. Chantelle thus does not appear as recklessly sexualised. In contrast to Vicky Pollard and her over-the-top deviancy, she oscillates between being a child and an adult. Despite her stroppiness and foul moods, she is also allowed moments of tenderness. At the karaoke, she chooses the romantic song “You Raise Me Up”6 and performs it beautifully, mesmerising the guests in Neptune’s bar. When she faints during her act, people remove her coat and discover her bump. In the later episodes, the Garveys treat the pregnancy like an accident – not an act of irresponsibility – triggering solidarity. As Chantelle herself puts it pointedly in the second series: “Just because I’m a teenage single mum, don’t mean I’m a slag” (episode 8). Benidorm here undercuts stereotypes about teenage mothers by special strategies of storytelling and representation, first providing a narrative frame that emphasises ambivalence and openness, before manoeuvring the characters into potentially stereotypical situations.

Pub quiz champions, photographs and parasites Similar strategies apply for the depiction of male characters who belong to what might be considered ‘the underclass’. The guests at the Solana can be roughly positioned by way of their habitus, their accents and their behaviour. (Especially in the later series, this can be misleading, though.) But, apart from Mel ‘five sunbed shops’ Harvey, no-one talks about their job at home or about not having a job at all. Thus, it transpires only at the end of the first series that Geoff Maltby (Johnny Vegas) and Mick Garvey receive social benefits. In the first five episodes, for both the audience and the other guests, Geoff is ‘The Oracle’, the long-standing Lancashire pub quiz champion with aspiration and ambition. He constantly tries to improve his knowledge with the help of his mother Noreen (Elsie Kelly), who has to test him on everything from Greek mythology and world literature to international capitals. His boasts about TV quiz shows and lucrative contracts seem slightly exaggerated, but not completely fantastic. Geoff’s self-presentation as a rising star clashes with his clumsiness, often connected with his massive body and awkward behaviour. He appears as childish, co-dependent on his mother, ridiculously competitive and a boaster, but a parasite he definitely ain’t. The information that he has to ‘sign on’ is given in passing, when his mother suggests that they “should have come for two weeks” (series 1, episode 6). And like Chantelle, the character is bestowed with some depth, for instance,

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when he shyly and haltingly admits to her that he is still a virgin (series 2, episode 7), or when he is trapped in an elevator with his mother and learns that he was adopted (series 7, episode 6). For most of the first series, Mick Garvey assumes the role of male breadwinner who excuses his refusals to run errands or fetch drinks with the catchphrase “I’m on holiday”. This implies that the rest of the year he works hard for his family, and now he deserves a little break. Indulging in eating, drinking and dirty jokes during the stay, he tries to make the most of his last day in the same vein. Mick poses in the pool for the other guests and flirts with a woman who takes pictures of him. Little does he know that the photographer is “Miss Mahey” from the “Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety” who flew to Benidorm together with a male colleague in order to collect evidence against him. She later confronts the Garveys in Neptune’s and informs them that Mick received incapacity benefit for over two years, the payment will stop, and he will have to face prosecution for benefit fraud (series 1, episode 6). In the categories of neoliberal governmentality, both Geoff and Mick would belong to the “undeserving” and “parasitical” underclass (Tyler 2013: 185). The series, however, does not follow this logic and presents them as rounded characters, slightly idiosyncratic, definitely ridiculous, but not as hateful social stereotypes (also thanks to the casting of Steve Pemberton and Johnny Vegas, both well-known as versatile comic actors). The audience learns about their status at the end of the series; this does not serve to frame the overall perception and evaluation of the characters but adds just another (minor) facet of them.

Spanish others With the exception of pre-tanned Madge, the British holidaymakers appear ghostly white when compared to the Spanish characters, first and foremost barman Mateo Castellanos (Jake Canuso). He considers the British “pale, weak, pathetic” (series 5, episode 1) and thereby makes British whiteness “strange” (Dyer 1997: 10). At the same time, the contrast with the guests establishes his “suspect whiteness” (Fra-Molinero 2009: 147; cf. Dyer 1997: 12) with all its traditional ideological ramifications: “Europe sees in Spaniards, a lesser form of its own” (Fra-Molinero 2009: 151; cf. Bonnett 2000: 22–23). This contradictory combination produces a dialectic of stereotypes. Mateo both represents clichés about Spanishness and undermines myths of British superiority. By way of Mateo, Benidorm replicates most of the orientalising stereotypes of Spaniards as hot-blooded, temperamental, not very intellectual and lazy. At the Solana, the barman exudes unfettered sexuality, promising passion and romance to the guests. With his muscular, toned body and cool macho posture, he personifies the ever-potent Latin lover. Compared to him, the British appear erotically challenged, too inhibited like Martin or too gross and

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clumsy like Geoff. Mateo also stands for all the clichés of “Gypsy-style or ‘folklórica’” Spain (Fra-Molinero 2009: 149). On one of the coach trips for the guests, he appears as a torero (series 2, episode 4) and, of course, he is an expert in Flamenco. A Flamenco guitar riff accompanied by a loud wail even serves as his musical leitmotif. Benidorm both repeats and undermines these clichés. Mateo’s cool contrasts with his malapropisms and his bumbling ineptitude in the tradition of Manuel from Fawlty Towers (BBC 1975, 1979). The bullfight takes place in the middle of nowhere, and after a sales demonstration for overpriced juicers. Furthermore, the bull has been replaced by a black dog with plastic horns for safety reasons. As the series continues, Mateo’s masculinity gets more and more into crisis, fighting with age, withering looks and his family life. In series three, the audience first learns about his wife and three (or four?) children. In series seven, his mother-in-law holds him prisoner at gunpoint and he is only rescued at the last minute by his colleagues from the Solana. The deconstruction of national stereotypes often runs parallel to undermining class positions. Mateo’s overdetermined Spanishness here serves as a catalyst for debunking notions about British middle-class taste, self-control and rationality. The supposedly respectable characters actually fall for Mateo’s charm. While Janice Garvey rudely rejects his advances, both Kate and Kelly have affairs with him. The character of Mateo also deflates snobbery. Martin’s mother Diana (Una Stubbs) claims to know everything about the ‘real’ Spain. She resides in a villa on the Costa Brava and sneers at the Benidorm crowd. When meeting Martin, she refuses to partake of the Solana entertainment and instead visits an intimate venue that offers Flamenco, a supposedly ‘authentic’ piece of Spanish culture, where she falls for Mateo who, according to her, “moves like an animal” (series 3, episode 5). Unbeknownst to her, daughter-in-law Kate had the same sexual experience at the ‘inauthentic’ Solana, and Mateo has only taken on the job as dancer to increase his meagre earnings, not because he yearns for celebrating his true Spanish self after work.

Classifications and disqualifications Life at the Solana revolves around doing nothing. In the words of Mateo: “People do not come here to make business. They come to get drunk, eat too much and burn their piggy skin in the Spanish sun” (series 7, episode 2). As has been shown by way of the Garveys, these pastimes carry connotations of tainted whiteness and a lower-class lifestyle. Again, Kate and Martin set the interpretive frame for this. While Kate indicates that she hates every minute of her holidays – “[t]he room is disgusting, the food is atrocious, the people are revolting” – Martin points out that everything is adequate and, more importantly, “at least the people are enjoying themselves” (series 1, episode 3).

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Nostalgic conviviality “Enjoying oneself” involves drinking and eating a lot, and joining in the community activities from karaoke to pub quizzes and coach trips. Although the families and couples usually stay among themselves by the pool, they develop a short-lived conviviality when there are problems or during the entertainment programme. The series implicitly relates these situations to a nostalgic (working-class) Britishness. When a thunderstorm hits Benidorm and the Solana suffers from severe flooding, Noreen cherishes that “everyone [is] pulling together. […] It’s got a lovely wartime feel about it” (series 4, episode 4). Singing together has a similar effect. More often than not, the karaoke songs at Neptune’s hark back to the 1970s and 1980s. Occasionally, reallife former celebrities like Bananarama (by now so unknown that Microsoft Word indicates a spelling mistake) or Madness make cameo appearances and remind both the Solana guests and the audience of the complexities of time and cultural memory: time flies and people age, but with the right song, one’s youth can return in an instant (series 4, episode 5; series 9, episode 9). The ability to enjoy oneself correlates with being aware of one’s privileged position. Donald Stewart (Kenny Ireland) does not tire of reminding his wife Jacqueline (Janine Duvitsky) each morning with a happy sigh that “another day in paradise” has just begun. The more prosaic Mick Garvey turns this into the imperative “we’re on holiday”, “[f]ill your boots”, often adding: “[W] a-hey! It’s free.” Benidorm implicitly relates this position of privilege to the characters’ living in the affluent West and the (still) existing British Welfare State. Their whiteness, however, does not figure in this respect. Instead, the series explicitly advocates a spirit of ‘carpe diem’, enforced by means of comic intimations of mortality. In the second series, Mel has several near-death experiences: he almost drowns in the pool, is electrocuted by a juicer and knocked into unconsciousness by Geoff Maltby on a parachute. This only strengthens his resolve to marry Madge and start a new life with her in Benidorm. Likewise, when Madge thinks that she has only one month to live, she stops complaining, treats everyone with respect, and decides to make the most of the remaining holidays and her life (series 6, episodes 5 and 6). This attitude gets more serious when actors die, and the series adjusts the narrative accordingly. Especially after the unexpected deaths of Kenny Ireland (Donald) and Geoffrey Hutchings (Mel), Benidorm’s plotlines pay homage to them, the gist always being the admonition: “enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think” (The Specials, soundtrack in series 9, episode 8). Although marked as part of working-class culture, the community at the Solana cuts across class boundaries and invites all-inclusiveness. Not everyone is as easy to classify as the Weedons or the Garveys. The large ensemble cast represents a broad variety of lifestyles. The gay couple Gavin and Troy Ramsbottom (Hugh Sachs, Paul Bazely), for example, cannot afford more than a week at the Solana, but Gavin’s references to Renaissance paintings and museums in Florence as well as his snide remarks about the other guests

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indicate that his tastes are definitely above average. Despite their demonstrations of superiority, Troy and Gavin actively join in the communal fun. So do Jacqueline and Donald Stewart, who exude lower middle-class respectability. Unlike the Garveys, Jacqueline does not go to the “loo”, she “has to spend a penny” (series 1, episode 1). In contrast to the belligerent Janice, Jacqueline accepts her husband’s guidance, usually only adding terms of agreement to the conversation, with “oh, yes” as her catchphrase. The Dykes from Watford (Perry Benson, Hannah Waddingham, Danny Walters) sound and behave as working-class as the Garveys, but it transpires that Clive Dyke has made a fortune with his building company. One might read the success of Clive Dyke and Mel Harvey as a celebration of the (in)famous classless society and its neoliberal agenda associated with Thatcher and a “rhetoric of individuation, choice, freedom, mobility and national security” (Tyler 2013: 7). The series undercuts this ideology through its long-term plots, though. In Benidorm, characters rise by chance and a good dose of luck. Unlike white privilege, this is not disguised as the effects of merit, hard work, individualism and making the right choices (Levine-Rasky 2013: 150–151). The Garveys at first marry into Mel’s wealth and later come into a vast fortune in Las Vegas. In series four, Troy inherits from his father, who is said to be one of the “most successful landlords in Derby” (episode 6), and buys his own hair salon at the Solana. Quite as easily, characters become bankrupt: Madge loses everything after Mel’s death and Mick’s sunbed shops burn down without insurance cover. The important thing about this economic roller-coaster is that everyone returns to the Solana and still knows how to enjoy themself, irrespective of affluence or austerity. This equation foregrounds a working-class habitus, which cuts across economic and ethnic positions and positionings. Occasional mixed-race or black characters like Joey Ellis (Nathan Bryon) or Natalie (Kathryn Drysdale) are paired off with white friends and adapt effortlessly to the Solana version of the “four Ss” (Wright 2002: 181). One could read this as a convivial version of colour blindness and white ignorance (Levine-Rasky 2013: 153–160), embracing and appropriating nonwhite others as versions of oneself. But, I would argue, that there are too many shades of white to construct one uniform British self. Moreover, although perceiving the characters as white (and British) appears as the default viewing position, the series destabilises this by sudden shifts in perspective similar to the strategies used to deconstruct social stereotypes about non-normative whiteness. Noreen Maltby tells Chantelle that her husband was “mixed race” like baby Coolio, because part of his family came from Ireland (series 2, episode 6). It gradually transpires that Troy is a Muslim and probably mixed race. The audience first learns about this when his father is buried according to Muslim rites (series 4, episode 5); later, Kenneth Du Beke (Tony Maudsley) waspishly refers to Troy and Gavin as the “Diana and Dodi of the East Midlands” (series 8, episode 6).

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The other Spain Troy is not the only character who changes from tourist to resident and thereby gradually shifts the sitcom’s focus. Kenneth, Les/Lesley Conroy (Tim Healy) and his son Liam (Adam Gillen), as well as Sam (Shelley Longworth), are introduced as tourists and later stay on as staff. The stories around the crew become an integral part of the sitcom and give a backstage view of life at a hotel. Parallel to this, the other plot-lines venture outside of the Solana and feature British expats, often emphasising their precarious class positions. Both Madge and dancing coach Cyril Babcock (Matthew Kelly) lose all their money and become homeless, soon to be rescued by family and friends. Estate agent Monty Evans (John Challis) assumes a middle-class habitus, but constantly lives close to bankruptcy and develops more and more shady schemes to lure in affluent tourists. These economic troubles serve as reminders that the colourful and leisurely world of holidays exists in a sort of suspended reality (starting with series four, the plots also become more self-reflexive, parodying movie genres such as Westerns, Mafia sagas or Hollywood romances). Widening the focus and presenting expats also highlights the intersections between the habitus of normative whiteness, class and national identity. This carries more than just a whiff of colonialism with it. The British seem to make the place their own, importing their products, tastes and norms. Benidorm here takes up an existing trend among the (affluent) British. Karen O’Reilly estimates that about 1.8 million live in Spain as “residential tourists” (2009: 129), either as pensioners or catering for other English-speaking tourists. Unlike the straight Spanish characters who serve as normative (European) framework, the sitcom represents this British enclave by way of comic deconstructions. The whiteness of the characters is often foregrounded by relating them to British colonial types. Monty Evans not only evokes the exploits of Second World War hero Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, his beige blouson, tie and toothbrush moustache take up stereotypes of British officers abroad. Likewise, the British consul (Michael Fenton Stevens) cultivates a habitus of Oxbridge and clubland. In series nine, Nigel Havers, famous from heritage movies like Chariots of Fire (1981) and A Passage to India (1985), plays the arrogant upper-class dentist Stanley Keen. The series deflates all of these versions of traditional British pomp. The consul is bureaucratic, inept and not able to speak Spanish. Evans is a seedy petty criminal whose attempts at old-fashioned gentlemanly charm consist of inviting his love interests to Mr Wu’s All-You-Can-Eat Chinese buffet. Keen tries to wheedle Kenneth out of his inheritance. In the case of the regular staff members, there are overlaps with the guests at the Solana and their aim of “enjoying themselves”. Kenneth Du Beke nominally runs Troy’s salon, but he usually sends potential clients away or leaves them to his assistant Liam, in order to go clubbing or to relieve his hangover with a cigarette, a drink and a lie-down on the sunbed. All in all,

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the sub-plots around British residents undermine the classical colonialist ideology: none of the British intends to ‘civilise’ the Spanish or to bring the Western spirit of enterprise to the ‘natives’ (Dyer 1997: 33). On the contrary, the lazing, bumbling or scheming British contrast with the Spanish authorities, who try to control and contain them. This highlights the status of the Solana as carnivalesque (almost) heterotopia and it comically explodes assumed notions about British privilege. Implicitly, it also installs a Common European Market version of respectability. While Benidorm projects most aspects of tourist Spanishness onto Mateo,7 the rest of the Spanish crew and the residents of Benidorm appear more or less unmarked. Apart from their accents, they are indistinguishable from the British, which occasionally leads to comic confusions (e.g. series 8, episode 6). Often, it is the Spanish minor characters – policemen, doctors, restaurant owners and hotel managers – who stick to the white middle-class norms of rational self-control (Dyer 1997: 30–31; Levine-Rasky 2013: 12). Extratextually, this ties in with the supposedly irrefutable rules of a neoliberal economy and a globalised, de-nationalised version of whiteness. Starting with series five, neoliberalism and its precept to keep improving also enter the Solana. The new manager Joyce Temple-Savage (Sherrie Hewson) tries to raise the tone of her establishment and to earn the Solana a fourth star. Her attempts resemble those of Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. Like him, Temple-Savage wants to “eradicate this riff-raff element” (series 6, episode 1) from her hotel and fails miserably: first, because the idiosyncratic staff undermine her attempts; second, because her superiors check her snobbery. The CEO of the Solana Leisure Group, the equally double-barrelled Crystal Hennessy-Vass, makes clear that improving the standard of the hotel runs counter to her policies: When people book the three-star Solana Benidorm, they expect a certain level of service, absolute crap. So when they get here, and they get more than that, they’re pleasantly surprised. […] We are budget and we’re proud. And the last thing that we need is some toffee-nosed social climber trying to drag us into the twenty-first century. […] I want to see good, honest working-class people enjoying a basic three-star holiday. (series 6, episode 7) Hennessy-Vass is played by Dynasty star Joan Collins. Her cameo appearance ties in with the nostalgic tone of the series and adds connotations of trash, camp and queerness.

Queer spaces The ostentatious presentation of the Solana as a space permeated by workingclass culture intersects with constructions of non-normative sexualities. This fits in with the carnivalesque setting. The series goes beyond the holiday spirit

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of the “four Ss” (Wright 2002: 181), however, and presents the Solana as a queer space. This is not only thanks to the gay characters Kenneth, Gavin and Troy. Donald and Jacqueline Stewart turn out to be devoted swingers and the audience gets glimpses into a variety of intriguing sexual scenarios involving regularly breaking down beds or, in one rather extreme example, a hospital role-play, in which Donald plays a nurse in stockings and suspenders and Jacqueline ends up temporarily incapacitated in a wheelchair (series 5, episode 4). The other guests do not usually mix with the openly queer characters. With their habitus of respectability, Donald and Jacqueline manage to make friends with new guests. But as soon as the conversations turn to sex-change operations, the size of genitalia or the activities of the Middlesbrough Swingers Association, with Donald making subtle or not so subtle propositions supported by Jacqueline’s “oh, yes”, the couple are given a wide berth by most. Only Troy and Gavin still socialise with the Stewarts and join them at their table in Neptune’s. Likewise, the other tourists tend to friendlily ignore “them queer fellas” (the Garveys, passim). The series juxtaposes this subtle divide between heterosexuals and homoor bisexuals with a series of queerings that undermine the more conventional binaries. Series three introduces the character of Les/Lesley, a drag queen/ crossdresser. Despite his predilection for female clothes, he represents the stereotype of the Northern working-class male with a heart of gold hidden beneath his rough exterior. Donning a wig and wearing a dress and high-heels do not diminish his performance of masculinity with a gravelly voice, phlegmy laugh and angular movements. Although his whiteness is usually unmarked, Lesley’s make-up occasionally veers on the pasty and very white side. He resembles a horror clown, “the scary look making the little children cry” (series 4, episode 1), according to Mateo. Lesley is complemented by his effeminate son Liam, who conforms to every gay stereotype, but who happens to be heterosexual, much to the chagrin of Kenneth: Kenneth: You’re camper than a Brighton bus queue. Liam: How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not gay? Kenneth: Oooh, the lady doth protest too much. Liam: I’m not gay. I just don’t like football. […] Kenneth: All right then, what is your all-time favourite TV programme? Liam: Oh, Dynasty, but only because I like the fashion […] Kenneth: Oooh, we all know fashion’s not gay. What’s your favourite song? Liam: [Thinks hard. Finds a song. Realises that it fits Kenneth’s category of ‘gay.’ Angry] I’m not playing this game! […] You should learn to accept people for who they are. Just because I don’t fit into your

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At the end, Liam not only quotes the lines of one of the most famous LGBTI anthems, he also pirouettes his way out of the salon. Conversely, Mateo has quick sex behind the bar with Troy in series one, flirts with Kenneth and agrees to accompany Lesley on a double date in drag in series four. Series three celebrates Geoff’s supposed homosexuality. Confusing his willingness to “come out” of the bathroom with his admission to be gay, Noreen stages his public coming out at Neptune’s. In an act of maternal support, she announces how proud she is of her son and joins in a performance of “YMCA” by Jacqueline, Donald, Gavin, Troy and Mateo (episode 2). The next day, Gavin and Troy admit that “of course” they did not believe Maureen’s declaration, but “[i]t was a laugh, though, wasn’t it?” (episode 3). In the same series, Steve Pemberton makes a brief appearance as drag queen, flirting with Mel (episode 4).8 Just when Mel declares his disgust and demands that “men should be men, not prancing around like nancies”, grandson Michael sings “Hey, Big Spender” wearing a red feather boa for the karaoke. Benidorm likewise appears as a queer space. Again, it is not so much the gay bars and beaches, but the queering crossovers that undermine notions of white heteronormativity. At Madge and Mel’s wedding, all the guests wear rainbow garlands and the lavish buffet follows a Hawaiian theme. The priest officiates in high heels, with painted fingernails and heavy make-up, explaining “I’m between shows” (series 2, episode 8). When asked by Jaqueline what Troy and Gavin’s wedding was like, Gavin answers: “Oddly enough, nowhere near as camp as this.” By means of a camp style and comic reversals, the series deconstructs the heterosexual matrix and creates queer spaces, not so much for the guests at the Solana, but on the meta-level for the viewers of the show. Especially in the case of Kenneth and Lesley/Les, queerness intersects with class positions and non-normative versions of whiteness. This is reinforced and related to the special position of the Solana as space of eternal holiday in series seven. Liam’s mother Gloria (Denise Black) flies in from Britain and wants Liam to come back with her to have “the life and career he deserves” (series 7, episode 4), £30,000 a year, a pension scheme and a company car. Staying in Benidorm, she implies, equals ignoring the facts of adult life and shirking responsibility for oneself. Gloria behaves as if she embodies the voice of reason, considering all of the British in Benidorm, especially her ex-husband and her son, failures. “Deserving” could stand for white British privilege as opposed to a precarious existence in Spain and its “suspect whiteness”. But the ‘career’ she envisions would consist of working as debt collector for her lover “Mad Dog” in Oldham. Furthermore, the self-exploiting neoliberal work ethic she promotes equals a straight, heteronormative lifestyle. Making Liam leave Benidorm mainly aims at separating him from

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his transgender father Les/Lesley, “a freak of nature”, and educating him out of his queer behaviour. Of course, Liam declines.

Conclusion Like all successful comedy formats, Benidorm creates “ambiguity, contradictions and interpretive diversity” (Lockyer 2010: 101) and works with a dialectics of normativity and subversion. The series does indeed use stereotypes about hot-blooded Spaniards and working-class life. It confronts its audience with grotesque bodies and their products from piss to shit. Nevertheless, it foregoes an aesthetics of disgust. The holiday setting instigates solidarity and a feeling of togetherness offset by comic reversals and ruptures: one moment we feel empathy for Geoff Maltby and his clumsy efforts to communicate his tender feelings to Chantelle, the other we laugh when he falls drunkenly from his chair. The all-inclusive working-class culture is part of a holiday enclave, removed in both space and time. Benidorm exudes nostalgia on several levels: in the diegetic world, the celebration of beer and cigarettes, of chips and eggs, and an evening at the pub harks back to a Fordist working-class culture and a time before Thatcher and neoliberalism. On the level of production, many of the representative strategies – the broad humour and the stereotypes about effeminate gay men, linguistically challenged Spaniards and unruly working-class women – can be traced back to sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s like Are You Being Served? (BBC 1973– 1985) and Fawlty Towers. The filming and the dramaturgy, however, forgo the traditional sitcom aesthetics. There is neither a studio audience nor a laugh track; the style is firmly televisual, with sporadic meta-referential frames. Series eight, for example, features seedy entertainer Sammy Valentino (Shane Richie) who greets Mateo with an incompetent impression of Manuel (“Meester Fawlty, I no understand Eengleesh”, episode 7) and regales the Solana staff with a rendition of Basil Fawlty’s “Don’t mention the war”, which is met with silence and icy glares. Benidorm here indicates that it represents a different type of comedy. Even if the series appears less experimental than mockumentaries like The Office (BBC 2001–2002) or Twenty-Twelve (BBC 2011–2012), it also operates with a hybrid merging of genres. Its combination of short-term and long-term plots veers away from the typical sitcom format and – especially in the sudden reversals of fortune and (melo-)dramatic cliffhangers – comes close to soap opera, a genre that also accentuates (working-class) community and conviviality (further emphasised by the casting of soap opera stars like Joan Collins, Sherrie Hewson and Denise Black). Instead of the high-cultural strategies of kitchen-sink drama and its serious representations of (white working-class) masculinities in crisis, Benidorm foregrounds the cheap, queer and female and assumes a self-ironic stance. Maybe the cosy lost world of working-class conviviality celebrated by Benidorm always only existed in a vaguely distant past: Hoggart’s The Uses of

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Literacy (2009 [1957]) celebrates the time of his childhood and youth in the 1930s, bemoaning the loss of a genuine working class in the 1940s and 1950s, a time that the older characters in Benidorm fondly remember, whereas the middle-aged guests cherish Europop, ska and a world before the pervasive neoliberal governmentality. The Solana – and Benidorm – offer self-conscious approximations of resistant and subversive communities, framed as volatile and often comically surreal. Just as the authentic (working-class) community appears as unattainable, so do the authentic Spain and authentic whiteness. The series plays with ascriptions of whiteness and makes it relational and situational. Although the Solana appears as predominantly white, the different versions of whiteness are seldom normative or unmarked and intersect with marginalised class positions, gender constructions and dissident sexualities. What does this suggest about British whiteness in general?9 Rather obviously, that the “silent majority” evoked by Jasper Rees in his review of Benidorm (2017) is neither silent nor a homogeneous mass. All in all, the mainstream British seem to be relaxed about class, ethnicity and gender, but they are also apolitical, if not disenfranchised. Although the personal is shown as political in Benidorm, politics proper do not figure. ‘Them’ who run the country are far away and completely different from ‘us’ in Benidorm. In contrast to this, the European Union is a circus, albeit an entertaining one. Literally so in episode nine of series nine, when Temple-Savage and Mateo convince French, German, Italian and Irish artists to stage a show for the guests of the Solana. The British and Irish lead the way, but they would be lost without Mateo’s language skills and the cooperation of the international performers. Before the show, the guests reminisce about their first encounter with the magic of the circus. Later, everyone joins in the communal spirit: nostalgia and conviviality here even work across nationalities. The series offers a broad range of viewing positions, from the acceptance of traditional stereotypes to the resistant and queer meta-level. On the whole, irrespective of the individual viewing position, the series denies its audience the simple “‘delicious release’ afforded by class disgust” (Tyler 2008: 23). The “imagined community” created by the sitcom excludes gleeful middle-class snobbery and an attitude of ‘Britain First’ enhanced by Brexiteers (and the owners of genuine white privilege) like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Theresa May. It indicates that the racist and xenophobic clowns responsible for Brexit would not get a laugh in Benidorm.

Notes 1 Containing from six to nine episodes; in the first two series, the episodes last 30 minutes, starting with series three, they last 45 minutes. 2 Ladettes are mainly associated with undermining norms of mainstream femininity, chavs with clichés related to the so-called underclass.

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3 For example, National Television Award for Best Comedy Programme in 2008; National Television Award for Most Popular Comedy Programme in 2011; TV Choice Awards for Best Comedy Show in 2014 and 2015. 4 Significantly, the theme song of Only Fools and Horses claims: “Only fools and horses work” (Berman 1999: 44). 5 Consequently, Benidorm was not affected by the protests against the detrimental effects of mass tourism in 2017 (Temsch 2017). A place built for tourists cannot lose its authenticity because of tourists. 6 A big hit for Secret Garden in 2001 and later for Westlife in 2005. Since then considered a classic hymn for all occasions from weddings to funerals. 7 In series five, Carmen, who works in the hair salon, seems to be the female equivalent of Mateo, not very bright, not very diligent and unable to speak English. At the end, however, it turns out that she is in fact British and was sent to spy on the Solana for her mother, the former manager. 8 Briefly reprising his much more elaborate performances in The League of Gentlemen (BBC 1999–2002). 9 Thanks to the editors for asking.

Bibliography Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, 1995. Benidorm, created by Derren Litten, written by Derren Litten and Steve Pemberton, ITV, 2007–2017. Berghoff, Hartmut. “From Privilege to Commodity? Modern Tourism and the Rise of the Consumer Society.” The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, edited by Hartmut Berghoff et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 159–179. Berman, Garry. Best of the Britcoms. Taylor, 1999. Bonnett, Alastair. White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives. Prentice Hall, 2000. Caletrio, Javier. “‘De Veraneo en la Playa’: Belonging and the Familiar in Mediterranean Mass Tourism.” Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited by Pau Obrador Pons, Mike Crang and Penny Travlou. Ashgate, 2009, pp. 111–127. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. 1989. Routledge, 2004. Fra-Molinero, Baltasar. “The Suspect Whiteness of Spain.” At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, edited by La Vinia Delois Jennings. University of Tennessee Press, 2009, pp. 147–169. Graham, Hilary. “Smoking, Stigma and Social Class.” Journal of Social Policy, vol. 41, 2012, pp. 83–99. Heinz, Sarah. “Unhomely Spaces and Improper Houses: Representations of Whiteness and Class on British Television.” Anglistentag Paderborn 2015: Proceedings, edited by Christoph Ehland, Ilka Mind and Merle Tönnies. WVT, 2016, pp. 77–88. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. 1957. Penguin, 2009. Jackson, Jasper. “Mrs Brown’s Boys Voted Best Sitcom of Century.” The Guardian, 23 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/aug/23/mrs-brownsboys-voted-best-sitcom-of-century. Accessed 11 October 2017.

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Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. Whiteness Fractured. Ashgate, 2013. Lockyer, Sharon. “Chavs and Chav-nots: Social Class in Little Britain.” Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary Television, edited by Sharon Lockyer. I.B. Tauris, 2010, pp. 95–109. Medhurst, Andy. A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. Routledge, 2007. Mortimer, Claire. “Angry Old Women: Peggy Mount and the Performance of Female Ageing in the British Sitcom.” Critical Studies in Television, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 71–86. O’Reilly, Karen. “Hosts and Guests, Guests and Hosts: British Residential Tourism in the Costa del Sol.” Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited by Pau Obrador Pons, Mike Crang and Penny Travlou. Ashgate, 2009, pp. 129–142. Pons, Pau Obrador. “The Mediterranean Pool: Cultivating Hospitality in the Coastal Hotel.” Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited by Pau Obrador Pons, Mike Crang and Penny Travlou. Ashgate, 2009, pp. 91–109. Ramsay, Terry. “Benidorm: Series 6 Episode 4, ITV, Review.” The Telegraph, 23 January 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10593247/ Benidorm-series-6-episode-4-ITV-review.html. Accessed 11 October 2017. Rasmussen, Birgit Brander, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray, editors. “Introduction.” The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1–24. Rees, Jasper. “Benidorm: A Cheap-as-Chips Fantasyland that’s Loved by the Quiet Majority – Review.” The Telegraph, 1 March 2017. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/ 2017/03/01/benidorm-cheap-as-chips-fantasyland-loved-quiet-majority-review/. Accessed 11 October 2017. Temsch, Jochen. “Geht nach Hause!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2/3 September 2017, p. 2. Tyler, Imogen. “‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 17–34. Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books, 2013. Wiseman, Eva. “Tanning Trends: Beyond the Pale.” The Guardian, 8 August 2010. https:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/08/fake-tan-pale-skin-celebrities. Accessed 11 October 2017. Wollaston, Sam. “Benidorm Review: It’s Like an Embarrassing Uncle Who’s Stuck in the 1970s. Farts, Innuendo and a Little Light Racism … It’s an All-Inclusive Mess.” The Guardian, 26 January 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/ja n/26/benidorm-review-silent-witness. Accessed 11 October 2017. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006. Wright, Sue. “Sun, Sea, Sand and Self-Expression: Mass Tourism as an Individual Experience.” The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, edited by Hartmut Berghoff et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 181–202.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. academic freedom 87, 88, 89, 98–99, 101 Academy Awards ceremony, 2018 7 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus 184, 193–196, 196 Adudu, Trish 136, 142 adventure novels, Wilhelmine Germany 165–177; choice of authors 166–167; colonial Bildungsroman 169–170; colonial hierarchy 166; colonial innocence 172–177; cultural background 167–169; and German morality 173–175; heroes 169–170; and human duty 174–175; and masculinity 169; portrayal of Native Americans 174–177; positive portrayals of Germans 172–173; and racial hierarchy 171–172, 174–177; settings 165; and work 169–172 affective practice 154 African Americans, of police violence against 40 African National Congress 91 Afrikaner identity 156–157 Afrikaner nationalism 148 Afrikaner women 146–160; and apartheid 149–160; domestic space 158–159; grief 157; ordentlikheid 147–148, 148–149, 152–153, 158; political agency 146–147; respectability 148–149; responsibility 158; shame 149–160; status 147 aggrieved entitlement 2 agonistic pluralism xix Aguilar, Delia 62 Ahmed, Sara xvii–xix, 3, 128, 131 Aitken, Robbie 177 Alcoff, Linda Martín 13, 72–73

Alexander-Floyd, Nikol 65 Alexander, M. Jacqui 53 Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) 1, 178n4 alt-right movement 106–107; beliefs 112–120; emergence of 48, 108–109; presidential election, 2016 109; role of minorities 115–116; social media 109; websites 109 American Civil Religion 22 American Creed 33n1 American exceptionalism 2 American Mosaic Project 40 American Nazi Party 109 Andersen, Lisbeth Zornig 78 Anderson, Tonnia 4, 11 Anglo-decline, perception of 75 Anthias, Floya xiii–xv anti-intersectionality 63 anti-Muslim groups xvii anti-racist resistance 83, 142–143 anti-Semitism 120 Anzaldúa, Gloria 9 apartheid 88, 89, 98, 146; culpability 153–154; end of 151; shame of 149–160 Are You Being Served? (TV sitcom) 215 articulation xix Atalante Québec xvii Atlantic, The 6 Atwater, Lee 28 Australia 75, 143 Bailey, Alison 183 Baldwin, James 73 Barthes, Roland 62–63 BBC 129, 134

220

Index

beauty, ideals of 203 beleagueredness 3–4 Belgium 80 Bellah, Robert N. 22 Benatar, David 91–92, 94, 98, 99 Benidorm (TV sitcom) 200–216; ambiguity, 215; approach 201; British whiteness 202–203; characters 200, 201; expats 211; female characters 202–206; holidaymakers 200; hotel 201–202; hotel manager 202–203; male characters 206–207; and masculinity 208, 213; middle-class normativity 202; neoliberalism 212; nostalgic conviviality 209–210; popularity 200–201; queer spaces 212–215; representative strategies 215; and respectability 212, 213; reviews 200–201, 216; Spanish characters 202–203, 207–208, 212, 215; staff members 211–212; stereotypes 202–208, 215, 216; tainted whiteness 205–206, 208; tanning 203–204; title sequence 202; white trash 202–203, 203–205, 206–207, 208 Berghe, Pierre L. van den 32 Bhabha, Homi 92–93 Bilge, Sirma 5, 7–8 Billig, Michael 113 biological essentialism 109, 115, 116 biopolitics 185, 187–188 Bischoff, Eva 168 Black Codes 23, 107 Black Lives Matter 62 blackness 21, 154, 194 black women: commodification of 55; dual discrimination xii; plight of 58; silencing 59; visibility project 8–9 Blee, Kathleen 110, 111 Blow, Charles M. 2 Blunt, Alison 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 Boko Haram 95–96 Bonnett, Alastair 140–141 Boston Herald, The 63 Bourdieu, Pierre 20 Brah, Avtar xii–xiii Braidotti, Rosa 132 Branigan, Tania 129 Brexit Referendum and negotiations 1, 3, 73–75, 77, 216: Breaking Point poster 137; hate crimes and hate speech 127, 131, 136–137, 142–143; and immigration 130; Leave discourse 142; marginalization of non-white voices

129–130; negotiating team 129–130; populist terminology 139; whiteness in 128–133; whiteness of 127–143 British Indian Army 79 British National Party 142 Britishness 126, 150, 201, 209–210 British Transport Police, Project Servator 135 British whiteness, variations of 202–203 Brown, Wendy 33 Brussels 79, 80 Buchanan, Pat 109 Bülow, Frieda von 168, 178n6 Burke, Edmund 25 Burnett, Jon 137 Burston, Adam 12 Butler, Judith 142, 185 call-out culture xvii Cambridge 136 Cameron, David 79, 130 Canada xvi–xvi Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene xv Canadian Nationalist Party xvii capitalism 75, 140–141 Carastathis, Anna 8–9 Carbado, Devon W. 11 Cash, Wilbur J. 29 Catholics 111 Central African Expedition, 1898 80–81 channel tunnel 77 Charlottesville, Virginia xvi–xvii, 1–2, 105–106 chatrooms 116, 117–118, 121 chavs 205 Chicago 44 citizenship 23, 72, 133, 138–139, 168 Civil Rights Movement 27, 107, 108 Clark Mane, Rebecca 54, 55, 58, 61, 64, 65 class: working class xv–xvi, xviii, 4, 6, 26, 30, 46, 73–74, 140–142, 200–216; middle class xv, 28, 45, 55, 73–75, 93, 140, 146–147, 192–193, 200–216; upper-middle class 184, 191 Clinton, Hillary 59–60, 60–61, 63 Coates, Ta-Nehisi xvi, 2, 6 Cochrane, Kira 55–56 Coetzee, J.M. 92 cognitive frames 110 Cologne 81–82, 84n3 colonial hierarchy 166 colonial imaginary 170

Index colonial innocence 172–177 colonialism 80–81, 151, 166, 171–172 colonial statues 80, 90 colonizing discourses 58–59; gender 59–64 colour-blind conservatives 44, 44–45 colour-blindness 39, 42; identifiers 43–44; variations in 40 community policing 135 conferred dominance 191 Connell, R.W 5 Connors, John 10 Connor, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” 27 conservative social movements 110 contestation 94 contexts xv Conway, Kellyanne 63, 64 counterculture 108 Creasap, Kimberly 110 Crenshaw, Kimberlé xii, xiii, 8, 55, 59, 132 critical studies xix Critical Whiteness Studies 1–3, 4, 6, 9, 9–10, 11, 13, 38; challenge 84; core assumptions 40; genealogical approach 83; German contributions to 168–169; role of 142; third wave 129; US-centric 75 cultural authenticity 44 cultural blamelessness 153 cultural capital 20 cultural hybridization 44 cultural identity 22, 38 cultural imaginary 57, 58, 64 cultural racism 100 cultural signs, ambiguous 87 cultural unity 114 cultural values 177 Daniels, Jessie 116 Dark Enlightenment 121n1 Davis, David Brion 22, 99, 129 decolonisation 96 de-industrialisation 73–75 deliberative processes 94 deniers 43, 43, 44–45, 48 Denmark 78, 99–100 deportability 128, 136–140 Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin 81 Devon 136 De Vos, Pierre 99–100 de Waal, Ariane 12 DiAngelo, Robin 3, 168–169

221

difference, within-group 10–11 differentiation xiv; effects of xiii; multiple axis of 8 digital culture 120–121 discrimination 29; reverse 30–31; vectors of 132 disempowerment 93 distributive justice 95 Dortmund, Germany 82–83 double-marked whiteness 146 Douglas, Mary 186 Dowling, Robyn 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 dual superiority 175 Du Bois, W.E.B. 2–3 duCille, Ann 55 Duke, David 106 Dyer, Richard 78, 128, 188, 192, 202, 212 Eggers, Maureen Maisha 168 egocentrism 189–193 ego injury xi embodied knowledge xii Emejulu, Akwugo 3 emotion 154 emotional labor 116–120 Englishness 128, 132, 140 entitlement 4 ethnicity xv; mixed xii eugenics 116 Europe, mass tourism in 77 European whiteness: extremism 82; former colonial powers 80–81; France 79; and genocide 80–81; Germany 81, 81–83; journey through 71–84; United Kingdom 73–75 evangelical religion 20 Evans, Gillian 141 exclusion 77 extremism 82 Facebook 117 Falkenhorst, Carl 165, 167; Der Baumtöter (Treekiller) 167, 169, 170, 171–172; Jung-Deutschland in Afrika (Young Germany in Africa) 166; Tabakbauer von Usambara (Tobacco Farmer from Usambara) 172 false consciousness 38 family 185, 186, 187, 188 Fanon, Frantz 92–93, 94, 95 Farage, Nigel 216; Breaking Point poster 137 far right 74

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Index

Fawlty Towers (TV sitcom) 208, 212, 215 fear 135–136; discourse of 97 Fees Must Fall (#FMF) movement 88, 90–91, 93, 101n2 Feher, Michel 28 Feilitzsch, Heribert 178n9 feminism 53, 55–56, 108; narrative space 59; and post-feminism 58; Trump and 54, 59, 64 Fenstermaker, Sarah 184 Ferber, Abby 110, 111 Ferguson, Missouri 40 Ford, Lacey 49 former colonial powers 80–81 Fortress Europe 81 Foster, Don 88, 97, 98 Foucault, Michel 57, 61, 77, 185 France 79; Central African Expedition, 1898 80–81 Fraser, Nancy 94 Fras, Max 127 Fredrickson, George M. 23 Freedom Congress, 2016 31–32 free speech 88, 97 French Canadians xv–xvi front-stage femininity 116–117 Futrell, Robert 47 Gallagher, Maureen 12 Garner, Steve 4, 6, 129, 131, 185–186 gay rights 114 gender: colonization of 59–64; insults 64; and whiteness 9 gender activists 95 gender-based hierarchies 112 gender discrimination 60 gender equality 64 gender inequality 54 gender relations 183 genealogical approach 83 Generation Identity Canada xvii genetic purity 111 genocide 80–81 George, Rosemary Marangoly 186 Germany 81–83; colonial hierarchy 166; colonialism 81; colonial legacy 165–166; contributions to Critical Whiteness Studies 168–169; guestworkers 82; Wilhelmine masculinity 165–177 Germany, Wilhelmine: adventure novels 165–177; citizenship 168; colonial Bildungsroman 169–170; colonial empire 167; colonial imaginary 170;

colonial innocence 172–177; crisis of masculinity 168; dual superiority 175; mixed race marriages 167–168; non-white and biracial Germans 165, 167–168; patriarchal authority 172; place of whiteness 168–169; race and crisis in 167–169; teenage generation 167 Getrost, Kara 169–170, 172–173 Gill, Rosalind 64 Giloi, Eva 168 Gilroy, Paul 3, 133 glass ceilings 60–61 Gloucester, Tesco supermarket 127–128, 136 Goddeeris, Idesbald 80 Goldberg, David 77 Gordon, Linda 107 graffiti 134 Grazian, David 44 groupthink 152 Guardian, The 129 guestworkers 82 Haastrup, Toni 130 Habermas, Jürgen 94 Hadley, Elaine 191 Hage, Ghassan 75 Haggard, H. Rider, King Solomon’s Mines 173 Hancock, Ange-Marie 9 Harlan, John Marshall 27 Harris, Cheryl 21, 24 Hartigan, John, Jr 74, 76, 185 Hartmann, Douglas 40 hate crimes and hate speech 127, 131, 136–137, 142–143 hate group activity, USA 105 hatred 76 Haupt, Adam 12 Healey, Sarah 129 Hebdige, Dick 94–95 hegemonic formations 5 hegemonic ideals 183 hegemonic masculinity 5 hegemonic whiteness 3, 4–7, 151 hegemony 4–11, 30, 54, 56, 94 Heidegger, Martin 57 Heinz, Sarah 13, 201 Helper, Hinton Rowan 24 Herrenvolk democracy 32 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 27 heterosexuality 185, 188, 213 Hewitt, Roger 72

Index Heyer, Heather 1–2 Hill, Mike 40 Hill Collins, Patricia 5, 7–8, 60 Hispanics 111 Hochschild, Arlie R. 31, 75 Hoggart, Richard 204, 215–216 holidays 201–202 Holocaust, the 80, 152, 166 homemaking practices 182–196; egocentrism 189–193; etiquette 185; and family 186; hegemonic ideals 183; ideals of 182, 183, 186–189, 189–193; and identity 189–190; identity categories 183; negative feelings 187; performative character 183, 184–185; politics of 186–189; process of 183; Purple Hibiscus (Adichie) 184, 193–196, 196; Saturday (McEwan) 184, 189–193, 196; unhomely 193–196; whitely practices 189–193; and whiteness 184–186 homosexuality 213–215, 215 Hood, Gregory 30 House Beautiful 182 Hughey, Matthew W. xvi, 3–5, 46, 116, 117, 119 Humboldt Forum 166, 178n3 humor 112–113, 118 Hunter, James Davidson 29, 30 hybridization, cultural 44 ID Canada xvii identifiers 43–44, 43, 48 identity 21; Afrikaner 146–147, 148, 150–151, 156–157; formation 13; and homemaking 183, 189–190; imperilled 23; social 39, 41–42, 48; white English 128 identity politics xix, 183 immigration 114 impoverished whites 40 Indigenous peoples, Canada xi–xii inequality 76 infrastructural whiteness 128, 133–136 injury, narratives of 3 interactional accomplishment 184 internet memes 113, 118 interpersonal prejudice 92–93 interracial dynamics 48 interracial relationships 111 intersectional analysis 129 intersectionality xvi, 5–6, 7–11, 13, 54, 57, 147; definition xii–xiii; progress

223

made by 55–56; significance xviii; and whiteness xii–xiv, xviii intersectionality theory 1, 6 intersections: content of xiii–xiv; of whiteness xiv–xviii intra-group distinctions 5 intraracial differences, focus on 48–49 invisibility 38 Irish Film & Television Academy 10 Irish Times, The 73 ISIS 95–96 Islamophobia 31, 88, 97–98, 133 Islamophobic stereotypes 96 iStreetWatch 134–135, 136, 140 Jackson, Emma 73, 74 Jargowsky, Paul 40 Jefferson, Thomas 33n1 Jews xii, xv, 111, 120 Johnson, Boris 130, 216 jokes 118; as meta-discourse 113 jouissance 156–157 Jyllands Poston cartoons 87–88 Kamanzi, Brian 93 Kapoor, Nisha 138 Kavka, Misha 58, 65 Kennedy, John F. 27 Kennedy, Robert 28 Kenny, Enda 10 Kimmel, Michael 2, 108 King Jr., Martin Luther 27, 28 Klotz, Marcia 168 knowledge capitalism 99 Krischer, Hayley 64 Krog, Antjie 157 Ku Klux Klan 109; rise of 107–109; role of women 112, 116–117; Trump’s response to 106; violence 107–108, 111; White Lives Matter rally 105, 106; women’s auxiliary 111 Lacan, Jacques 156–157 Lander, Christian 43, 44 language, ideology of 94 Lansky, Melvin R. 155 Le Touquet treaty 77 Levine-Rasky, Cynthia 6, 9, 32, 41–42 Lewis, Amanda 5 Lewis, Helen B. 155 LGBTQ activism 108 liberal democracy 20 Lindqvist, Sven 80–81, 83 Lipsitz, George 88–89, 191

224

Index

liquid racism 87–101 Little Britain (TV show) 205 location, politics of 76 Lockyer, Sharon 215 London bombings, 2005 133–134 Lorde, Audre 53, 135 MacDonald, Michael 93 Machado, Alicia 60 Mailer, Norman 44; white negroes 44 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 96 Mallett, Shelley 188 Mamdani, Mahmood 99 Mantis, Andrew M. 27 masculinity xviii, 5; Benidorm (TV sitcom) 208, 213; crisis of 168; white supremacist 111; Wilhelmine Germany 165–177 mass tourism, in Europe 77 May, Karl 165, 166, 167, 175–176; anti-racist scholarship 178n9; Winnetou 167; Winnetou I 176–177 May, Theresa 216 McClintock, Anne 147 McEwan, Ian: Saturday 184, 189–193, 196 McGeever, Brendan 132 McIntosh, Peggy 142, 191 McLaren, Peter 57 McVeigh, Rory 110 Medhurst, Andy 201 media collectives 121 Menezes, Jean Charles de 133 men’s liberation 108 men’s rights activism 108 Messerschmidt, James W. 184 middle class xv, 28, 45, 55, 73–75, 93, 140, 146–147, 192–193, 200–216 migrants 77–78; as sexual predator 84n3 Migrants’ Rights Network 134–135 millennials 43–44 Mills, Charles W. 57 minoritization, mechanisms of 39 missionaries 171 mixed race marriages 167–168 modernity 96 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 53 Mokoena, Tshepo 127 Monture-Angus, Patricia xi–xii Moraga, Cherríe 9 moral heritage 22 moral legitimacy 23 moral standards 26 Morrison, Toni 19

Mosse, George L. 148 motion, awareness of 84 Mouffe, Chantal xix Muhammed, the Prophet, cartoons 87–88, 96–97, 99–100 multiculturalism 20, 45, 79 Muslims xii; perceived intolerance 90, 91; religious observance xv; violence towards 75 Namibia 81, 165, 167 Nanjiani, Kumail 7, 10 Nash, Jennifer C. 56 nationalism 143; Afrikaner 148; race-based 20; and respectability 148; white 25 nationalist politics, of whiteness 1 Nationality Act, UK 1981 138 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act UK 2002 138 Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund 82 Native Americans 174–177 nativism 139, 143 natural rights 25 Nayak, Anoop 74 neocolonialism 151 Neocon, the 45 neo-fascism 75 neoliberal governmentality 207 neoliberalism 212 neo-Nazis xvii, 111 Neo-Reactionary Movement 121n1 New York Times, The 32, 63, 73 Nigeria 193–196 nostalgia 204–205 nuclear family, the 185, 187, 188 Obama, Barack 29, 105 Oklahoma City bombing 108 Okolosie, Lola 55–56 olgatoja 131 Olsen, Joel 27–28 Olssen, Mark 98–99 Olusoga, David 79 Omi, Michael 56 online forums 116–117 ontological birthright, loss of xvi Operation Vaken 137 oppression 6; mechanisms of 39; structures of 11 ordentlikheid 147–148, 148–149, 152–153, 158 Other, the 57 Owens, Candace 113

Index Pajeken, Friedrich 165, 166, 166–167; Die Diamanten des Peruaners (The Peruvian’s Diamonds) 173–174; Martin Forster 167, 169, 174–175 Pankratz, Anette 13 passing 128, 131–133, 134 patriarchal authority 172 patriotism 1 Pegida 84n3 performative approach 185 Peters, Michael 98–99 Philadelphia 44 Phoenix, Ann xii–xiii polarization 26–29 police forces, militarisation of 76 political imagery 53 political orientation 40–41 political polarization 40–41 Polsky, Ned 44 Pomerantz, Shauna 64 Pons, Pau Obrador 201, 202 Poole, W. Scott 25 popular culture 64 possessive investments, in whiteness 88–89 postcolonial melancholia 3 post-discrimination society 44–45 post-feminism 53–65; background 53–56; and colonizing discourses 59; and feminism 58; proliferation of 54; Trump and 63 postimperial melancholia 74 poverty rate 40 power: coloniality of 88, 96; domains of 5; exercise of xiii–xiv, 6 power-based domination 111 power devaluation model 110 power relations 5, 96 Price, Max 87 privilege 4, 10–11 progressive whites 43–44 Project Servator 135 property rights 89 public discourse 94 Public Religion Research Institute 30–31 public space, militarisation of 83 public sphere 94 Pugliese, Joseph 128, 133–134 Purple Hibiscus (Adichie) 184, 193–196, 196 Putnam, Robert D. 31 Quayle, Michael 147 Quijano, Anibal 88, 96

225

Raby, Rebecca 64 race 72; role of 41 race-baiting 30, 31 race-conscious conservatives 44, 46–47 race-conscious liberals 45 race pride 22 race realism 109 racial boundaries 42; categories 56; change 40; crisis 26; deniers 44, 45, 48; discourse 77; dynamics 42; equality 114; equity 40; hegemony 5–6; hierarchy 72, 112, 115, 168, 171–172, 174–177; identifiers 43, 48; identity 40, 56; imagery 78; inequality, white responsibility for 45; innocence 38; interpellation 92–93; justice 3; minorities, role of 114–115; profiling 128, 137; progress 39; purity 168; resisters 46, 47–48; separation 47; situations 74, 75–76; strong 47–48; superiority, belief in 115; victimization, whites xvi; weak 48 racialization 131, 158 racism xviii, 45; cultural 100; facing xi; hard xvi–xvii; implacability of xi; and jouissance 156–157; knowledge of xii; liquid 87–101; relationality xvii–xviii; scientific 114; structural mechanisms 92–93; white working class xvi Ramsay, Terry 200 rape 111 Rasmussen 200 rational-critical debate 94 Reagan, Ronald 108 Rechtsruck, the 1 Rees, Jasper 200, 216 relationality 42 religious bigotry 119 religious fundamentalism 25 Remillard, Arthur 22 representation, technologies of 134 resenters 43, 46–47, 47–48 resisters 43, 45–46, 47–48 respectability 148–149, 202, 212, 213 restorative justice 95 reverse discrimination 30–31 rhetorical image, whiteness as 57–58 rhetorical modes 62–63 Rhodes, Cecil John 90 Rhodes Must Fall (#RMF) movement 88, 90, 93, 101n2 Rice, Dan 44 Rich, Adrienne 71, 72, 76, 83 right-wing movements 110

226

Index

risks xviii–xix Roberts, John 45 Roediger, David 4, 49n3 Rogers, Paul 79 Rose, Flemming 87–88, 89, 96–97, 99–100, 101 Rousseau, Jacques 87, 89–90, 91, 95–96, 98 S¸ims¸ek, Enver 82 Saito, Leland 40 sameness 75 Sammons, Jeffrey 178n9 Sande, Melissa R. 11 Sanders, Bernie 62 Sandoval, Chela 53, 55 Saturday (McEwan) 184, 189–193, 196 Scheff, Thomas J. 155 scientific racism 114 Scott, C. xv segregation 19, 26, 77 self-delusions 38 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks 108 sexism 64, 118 Shafi, Monika 192 shame 149–160; acknowledged 154–160; definition 154–155; racialised 155–156; unacknowledged 155–156 shaming xvii, 45 Shifman, Limor 113 Shome, Raka 57 Shoshan, Nitzan 82 Shotwell, Alexis 154, 155–156 Showing Up For Racial Justice xvii Simi, Pete 47 Simkins, Frances B. 25–26 single mothers 205 Sinha, Manisha 24 situational accomplishment 184 slaves and slavery xviii, 8, 21, 23–24 smoking 204–205 Snyder, Claire 53 social capital 21; categories, interface 55; classification 96; construction 72, 88–89, 110; degradation 26; identities 39, 41–42, 48; inequality 8; justice activism xvii, 45–46, 49; locations, contradictory xv; media 55–56, 75, 109; mobility 20; standing 32; uplifters 26 socially constructed differences 60 social movements: classification 110; plurality xix Solf, Wilhelm Heinrich 165, 167

South Africa: academic freedom 87, 88; Afrikaner identity 146–147, 148, 150; Afrikaner nationalism 148; Afrikaner women 146–160; apartheid 88, 89, 98, 146, 149–160; colonial statues 90; decolonisation of higher education 95–96; democratisation 151; domestic space 158–159; end of apartheid 151; grief 157; hegemonic whiteness 151; inequalities 88; liquid racism 87–101; moral standards 152; ordentlikheid 147–148, 148–149, 152, 158; postapartheid 146–160; privileges 89; public spending 90–91; racialisation 158; rehabilitation 150; respectability 148–149; shame 149–160; transition to democracy 88; white English-speaking South Africans 149; women’s work 147 South African Communist Party 91 South African Police Service, Public Order Police 91 Southern Civil Religion 20–22, 22–26, 30, 32 South Park (TV show) 206 Spain, Benidorm (TV sitcom) 200–216 Spanos, William 57 Spencer, Richard 31, 108 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 54 stereotypes 49n4, 91–92, 96, 97, 118, 194, 196, 202–208, 215, 216 Steyn, Melissa 88, 97, 98, 158 stigma 119 stigmatisation 204 stigmatyping 45, 49n4 Stoddard, Lothrop 26, 30 straight white dude phenomenon 7, 10 strategic alliances xix Strehle, Susan 193, 194 structuring ideology 56 subaltern polities 94 subcultures 94–95 sunbathing 203–204 Sunderland, UK 73 supremacy, rhetoric of 62–63 surveillance 76, 134 suspect whiteness 207 Sweden 78 Syrian Civil war 138 systemic privilege 61 tainted whiteness 205–206, 208 tanning 203 Tea Party, the 48, 75

Index terrorism 110 Tesco supermarket, Gloucester 127–128, 136 These Walls Must Fall campaign 78 Toivanen, Anna-Leena 195 Traveller community 10 Trudeau, Justin 54 Trump, Donald xv–xvi, 1; America First attitude 2; and Black Lives Matter 62; and difference 62; electoral campaign 29–33, 109; electoral victory 6, 19, 105; and feminism 54, 59, 64; populism 22, 31; post-feminism 63; presidency 1–3; reinforcement of whiteness 61–63; rhetoric 61, 62–63; State of the Union Address, 2018 1–2, 61–62; supporters 31; treatment of women 60, 61 Trump, Ivanka 63–64 Twine, France Winddance 12 Tyler, Imogen 128, 130, 138, 138–139, 200, 201, 210 Tyler, Rick 19 type-switching 48 unearned advantage 191 United Kingdom: BAME communities 129–130; Benidorm (TV sitcom) 200–216; Brexit Referendum and negotiations 73–75, 77, 127–143; deportability 136–140; exploitation of imperial manpower 79; hate crimes and hate speech 127, 130, 131, 136–137, 142–143; and immigration 130; infrastructural whiteness 133–136; marginalization of non-white voices 129–130; Nationality Act, 1981 138; Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 138; nativism 139; non-whiteness 131–132; normative whiteness 131–132; Northern England 141; Operation Vaken 137; Project Servator 135; racialization 131; redesignation of citizenship 138–139; relationship to mainland Europe 77–78; so-called foreigners no longer welcome 127–128; Sunderland 73–75; variations of whiteness 202–203; white English identity 128; whiteness of Brexit 127–143; white working class 73–75, 140, 140–142; Windrush scandal 138 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 142

227

United States of America: alt-right movement 106–109, 112–121; American Civil Religion 22, 27; American Creed 33n1; Black Codes 23, 107; citizenship rights 23; Civil Rights Movement 27–29, 107, 108; Confederate ideals 25–26, 27–28, 28–29; Confederate values 20–21; conservative movements 110; Conservative Political Action Conference 63; core problem of whiteness 38; counterculture 108; cultural power 73; DACA 2, 14n1; Democratic National Convention 60; deniers 43, 43, 44–45, 48; desegregation 27, 28; evangelical religion 20; Grand Old Party (GOP) Platform 19, 20, 28, 29, 29–33; hate group activity 105; Herrenvolk democracy 32; identifiers 43–44, 43, 48; investment in whiteness 88–89; Lost Cause of the Confederacy 20–22, 22–23, 24–25, 25; multicultural society 45; nationally representative survey 40; non-slaveholding whites 24; the Old South 20–21; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 21–22; polarization 26–29; post-racial era 19; presidential election, 2016 4, 19, 29–33, 40–41, 56, 57, 58, 59–64, 109; race-based nationalism 20; race relations 21; religious fundamentalism 25; resenters 43, 46–47, 47–48; resisters 43, 45–46, 47–48; reverse discrimination 30–31; right-wing movements 110; rise of white supremacy 107–109; secular crisis 23; secularization 23; segregation 19, 26; September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks 108; slaves and slavery 21, 23–24; Southern Civil Religion 20–22, 22–26, 30, 32; Southern Strategy 28; Trump era xvi–xviii, 1–3, 105–121; variations in colour-blindness 40; variations in white privilege 40; white alienation 26–29; white nationalism 25; white normalcy 19–33; white privilege 19; white supremacy xvi–xvii, 24–25, 105–121; white trash 4; white typology 38–49, 41, 43 University of Cape Town 87; Academic Freedom Committee 87, 89–90, 96, 99; decolonisation 88; student activists 91–96, 100–101 unmarkedness 38 Utrecht 76

228

Index

Vallières, Pierre xv values 114 van der Westhuizen, Christi 12 Verwey, Cornel 147 vested interest 21 Vice Magazine 127 Vickery, Kenneth P. 21 victimhood, sense of 47 Virdee, Satnam 132 visibility 65, 140, 193–196 vulnerabilities xviii Walgenbach, Katharina 175 Wallace, George 27, 28–29 Walters, William 186 Ware, Vron 11–12 Warner, Michael 94 war on terror 138 Warren, Mark 46 Washington Post, The 63 Weaver, Simon 87, 97 websites: alt-right movement 109; white supremacy 116–117 Weininger, Otto 168 Weinstein, Harvey 7 West, Candace 184 Wetherell, Margaret 154 Weyand, Sabine 129 white advantage 4 white alienation 4, 26–29, 31 white alliance organizations xvii white attitudes, variation in 39 white culture 114 white English identity 128 white English-speaking South Africans 149, 158 white fragility 3, 168–169 white hegemony 3–4, 7, 11–12, 31–32 white identity 38, 72–73 white liberalism, problem with 142–143 whiteliness 184 whitely practices 189–193 whitely scripts 183, 184, 188 white monuments 80 white nationalism xvii, 25 white negroes 44; see also Mailer, Norman whiteness xi–xii; affective whiteness 3; aspiration to 194–195; authentic whiteness 20, 25, 216; complexities of xvi; core problem 38–39; definition 56–58, 110–111, 128–129, 184; dominant forms of 5–6; and

intersectionality xii, xviii; intersections of xiv–xviii; possessive investments in 88–89; resurgence of 71–72; as rhetorical device 56–58 whiteness-as-social asset 20 white normalcy, American 19–33 white privilege 2–3, 4, 19, 21, 39, 89, 97–98, 140, 190–191; blindness about 38; nostalgic conviviality 209–210; rejection of 48–49; systemic 61; variations in 39, 40, 49 white supremacist masculinity 111 white supremacy and supremacists xvi–xvii, 1, 19, 24–25; conservative movements 110; front-stage femininity 116–117; goals 111–112; male students 106; masculinity 111; membership 108; public image 119; right-wing movements 110; rise of 107–109; role of minorities 115–116; role of women 112; Trump era 105–121; Trump’s response to 106; understandings of whiteness 110–111; urban manifestations 134–135; values 114; websites 116–117; worldview 111–112 white trash 4, 202–203, 203–205, 206–207, 208 white typology 38–49; categories 41–42, 41; constructing 40–47, 41, 43; deniers 43, 44–45, 48; ethnographic research 42; identifiers 43–44, 43, 48; implications 48–49; internal divisions 49; resenters 43, 46–47, 47–48; resisters 43, 45–46, 47–48; type-switching 48; variables 40–41; variations in colour-blindness 40; variations in white privilege 40 white victimhood 3, 61, 74, 115 Wiegman, Robyn 185 wiggers 49n3 Wildenthal, Lora 168 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 178n5 Wilson, Charles Reagan 22–23, 25 Winant, Howard 40, 56 within-group differences 10–11 Wolgast, Heinrich 166 Wollaston, Sam 200 women: Afrikaner 146–160; black 8–9; of colour 59–60, 63, 65; exclusion 121; glass ceiling 60–61; images of beauty 59; plight of 58; political agency 146–147; and racial purity 168; respectability 148–149; role of 112,

Index 116–120; status 147; stereotypes 118; visibility project 8–9 women’s rights 54, 114 Wörishöffer, Sophie 165, 166; Die Diamanten des Peruaners (The Peruvian’s Diamonds) 166, 169, 172 work, and racial hierarchy 171–172 working class, white: de-industrialised 73–75; disaffection of xvi; problem of 74–75; racism xvi; UK 73–75, 140, 140–142 World Economic Forum 54

World War One 79, 107 Wray, Matt 4, 11, 184 xenophobia 30, 74, 82–83, 133 Yancy, George 3 Yemen 79 Younge, Gary 73 Yuval-Davis, Nira xiii Zschäpe, Beate 82 Zuma, Jacob 91

229