Conclusion

In the act of converting to a religion that is so regularly racialized as non-white, all white converts jeopardize their whiteness but appear to be unfazed by this due to their awareness that whiteness is not paramount to success, at least not in relation to the lifestyle they want to live. They may be imagined as similar to the ‘white negroes’ that emerged throughout the twentieth century, who imitated blacks in music, fashion, language, hairstyle and lifestyle because that was what was valuable in the context that they lived in (Mailer 1957; Mercer 1994). They sought to become what we might call ‘honorary blacks’ (Jackson 1998, 102; Twine 2010, 304) by glorifying nonwhiteness and seeking to embody a black identity in a way that is ongoing in Britain today, as has been captured by Anoop Nayak (2004, 106-134) in his discussion of ‘B-Boyz, Wiggers, Wannabes and White Negroes’, and as has been recently confirmed by Lisa McKenzie (2013) who has shown that there are significant numbers of white men and women in contemporary Britain who see prestige in blackness, seek to embody ‘black culture’ and distance themselves from their whiteness. While it is true to say that whiteness offers many privileges, blackness also offers cultural capital and therefore privilege in some contexts (Reddie 2009, 7677). This may be why mixed-race people are reluctant to only be read as white, preferring to also have their non-white identity acknowledged (Song and Aspinall 2012, 740). Although Modood (2005) has argued that South Asians, including Muslims, are not venerated in the same way that blacks are, there appears to be an increasing tendency for ‘Muslimness’ to be considered as part of a desirable nonwhite corpus, which has been referred to as ‘Muslim chic’ (Reddie 2009, 194-195). Those who have claimed that whiteness is always desired by non-whites because of white privilege (Seshadri-Crooks 2000) have overlooked the significant ways in which whiteness is not always privileged, and by implication, not always desired, even by whites. Thus, we start to appreciate ‘a more fluid picture of situational microlevel power relations’ (Garner 2006, 257) and we begin ‘to think more contextually about some forms of racialized power relationships’ (Garner 2006, 265). White converts discover that whiteness is not always prestigious in the local context in which they find themselves, and that localness is what matters most to them, meaning that they have to negotiate their whiteness in a way that other white people never do.

In this article I have offered new insights into the complexity of whiteness and white privilege in contemporary Britain by showing how whiteness operates in the lives of Muslim converts. Due to white privilege, white converts are often treated with more respect and admiration than non-white converts. Future research could consider whether white converts indulge in and reinforce this racial hierarchy. I have also highlighted the limits of white privilege by exploring how white converts can lose some degree of their white privilege because of being ‘re-racialized’. Finally, I have considered how converts’ whiteness can cause difficulties for them due to whiteness being marked out as unusual and problematic in the specific milieu in which converts find themselves. This article has sought to contribute to what France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher (2008) have called ‘Third Wave Whiteness Studies’, which is defined by the use of empirical research to showcase the complexity of