The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid childhoods and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance

Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.     

Intersectionality theory applied to whiteness and middle-classness

Despite the ubiquity of intersectionality in feminism and allied methodologies, it is typically associated with the elaboration of oppression. A consideration of intersectionality theory as applied to the ‘other side’ of power relations – that is to the intersections of whiteness and middle-classness (and the complications arising from ethnicity) – enables the exploration of power in relation to the enduring inequities between groups. Dominant positionality is embedded in intersectionality theory in two ways: (1) as part of a complex, postmodern identity formation in which – even at the individual level – oppression co-exists alongside domination; (2) in the emphasis on relationality in which oppression and domination are co-conditional. Building on an essay by Floya Anthias, the intersections of whiteness and middle-classness are further elaborated by showing that, along with ethnicity and gender, these positions (and positionings) reinforce each other in some circumstances and contradict each other in different circumstances. This inquiry introduces a complexity into intersectionality theory that enables a truly relational approach to the analysis of power often neglected in writing on the topic.     

‘Why is our love an issue?’: same-sex marriage and the racial politics of the ordinary

This article analyzes the implicit white racial normativity underpinning the socio-legal struggle for same-sex marriage in Canada. I argue that discursive representations of ‘ordinary lives’ require alignment with terms of neoliberal citizenship – the privacy of property and intimacy – that hold whiteness as the unspoken yet aspirational ideal. As a contestation of heteronormative citizenship, same-sex marriage is not simply a politics of sexuality but also a politics of race.     

The Gent-rification of English masculinities: class,race and nation in contemporary consumption

The figure of the English gentleman is regaining traction in British society. This retrograde celebration of a type of masculinity articulating various intersections in class, racial and national identity provides not just a reliable identity-complex for contemporary British males but also imaginative solutions to the current cultural predicaments – notably, how to be English/British in the era of globalisation. This article will unpack this reformation of the gentleman and its paradoxical appearance and position at present through two consumer objects: clothing and cars. By first conceptually outlining the national, class and racialised background of the ‘gentleman’ for the British cultural imagination, the article will proceed to analyse Jack Wills' clothing aesthetic and the recent Jaguar F-Type coupe, ‘Good to be Bad’, adverts. The article draws upon Lévi-Strauss and Jameson to conceptualise this paradoxical, mythical resurgence of gentry/gentlemanliness. By focusing on how two artefacts utilise an Americanised mythical narrative of Britishness, I claim the contemporary landscape sees the oxymoronic return of an archaic character-type refigured in a manner appropriate for an increasingly plural, multi-cultural global landscape.     

Explicating race privilege: examining symbolic barriers to Aboriginal and non-indigenous partnership

Processes of racialisation and patterns of privilege continue to structure relations between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australia. This study explored the everyday ways race is reinscribed and unequal relations of power expressed, constituted and legitimised in a context marked by a history of oppressive colonisation. Conceptualising barriers to partnership as ideologically reproduced through discourse, critical discourse analysis was utilised to examine non-Indigenous and Aboriginal participants' understandings of the history of poor relations between groups. Participants were four male and three female non-Indigenous local government representatives and five female and four male Aboriginal community members, recruited for semi-structured interviews or a focus group. We focus the first part of our analysis on the discourse of ‘abstract liberalism’, which was identified in local government representatives' talk. Arguably, this hegemonic discourse, which reflects a monological conception of the world, is indicative of the circuits and consequences of dispossession within this particular local context. The discourse of ‘disregard’, mobilised by Aboriginal participants, demonstrates the continuity of coloniality and offers a counter story to the dominant ideological narrative. Explicating the reproduction of race privilege, while engaging with Indigenous knowledge as a space of critique and resistance is discussed as central to decolonisation and anti-racism praxis.     

A kinder,gentler gentrification: racial identity,social mix and multiculturalism in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood

This paper intervenes on the contemporary Canadian discourse that equates bourgeois self-making practices of progressive urban subjects with moves towards genuine spatial justice. Emerging from a three-year project assessing gentrification Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, the author probes the dissonance between the triumphalist rhetoric circulated by an anti-gentrification elite and the lived realities of displacement and violence in poor, racialized and mad communities. Using ethnographic observation and analysis of extensive interview data, this paper suggests that the ideas of inclusive urban development often rely on the ejection of intolerable bodies from the sphere of urban life and the simultaneous exaltation of ‘enlightened’ middle-class subjects as the authors and protagonists of social change. Yearning for a better future, this paper functions as a cautionary tale, a warning that so long as race and gender remain secondary sites of investigation and action, work for urban emancipation will reinforce those systems of domination it hopes to oppose.     

The (em)bodiment of blackness in a visceral anti-black racism and ableism context

Over the years, many scholarly publications have extensively discussed disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. These publications argue that racism and classism rather than clinically predetermined factors appear to influence the disability diagnosis and placement practices in special education. The present essay is contributing to the debate by critically exploring the relationship(s) between race, class, and disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in Toronto, Canada. The core ideas noted in the essay are drawn from a personal story of an African-Canadian parent – a story of a daughter with a diagnosed disability and her mother’s struggle to resist the disability ‘diagnosis’ as well as her battle rejecting her daughter’s placement in the special education program in a Toronto public school. Using this personal account, other literature, and anti-black racism theory, I argue that special education programming in Toronto, Canada helps white middle/upper class Canadians achieve a de facto race/class-based segregation in the Toronto public school system. Whereas the Supreme Courts’ rulings on Brown vs. the Board of Education in the United States and Washington vs. the Trustees of Charlottesville in Canada have insisted that whites and non-whites attend the same school, special education identification practices ensure that whites and non-whites do not have to belong to the same classroom. I conclude that when educational practices move into spaces of pathologization, blacks and working-class students are continually at risk of facing exclusionary practices. One thing is clear: the significance of skin color in the mind of the racist cannot easily be dismissed.     

Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.     

The House of Osama Bin Laden

In October 2002, Langlands and Bell spent two weeks traveling in Afghanistan researching the commission The Aftermath of September 11 and the War in Afghanistan for the Imperial War Museum, London.

Using a still and a digital video camera, Langlands and Bell recorded visits to numerous locations, including after a long and dangerous journey, the former home of Osama bin Laden at Daruntah, where he lived for a period in the late 1990s.     

NEITHER ‘NON–’NOR ‘BECOMING’

The concept of whiteness is seductive; it strikes a chord and resonates, highlighting what was long ignored in the history of immigrants in America. However, in reading the literature, one cannot help but be troubled by the reduction of a plethora of relations to a singular binary, as important as that binary may be. This paper examines the experience of Polonia (the Polish Diaspora) in America, drawing on broad historical evidence as well as a particular ritual of identification (the Pulaski Day Parade in Philadelphia), in order to highlight the follies of reducing the immigrant experience to one of ‘becoming white.’ This paper challenges three major assumptions in whiteness studies: the particular relationship between ethnicity and race found therein; the assumptions regarding the assimilation of immigrant groups; and the centrality of the white/black binary in processes of identification. Ultimately, the argument presented here posits that to maintain whiteness as an analytically useful concept, it needs to be placed within the complex multitude of relations in which it occurs in the actual experiences of immigrants.