ABSTRACT
Despite longstanding academic and activist insistence that ‘race’ is a social construction devoid of any inherent or essential meaning, the ontological status of ‘race’ remains in question. As Howard Winant (2000: 185) writes: ‘contemporary racial theory . . . is often “objectivistic” about its fundamental category. Although abstractly acknowledged to be a sociohistorical construct, race in practice is often treated as an objective fact: one simply is one’s race’. Paul Gilroy (2000: 37) argues that ‘we have entered a period where “race” and raciology are in crisis and ripe for abolition and that “race” should be approached as an afterimage – a lingering effect of looking too casually into the damaging glare emanating from colonial conflicts at home and abroad’. Both Gilroy and Winant raise important questions for those who seek to analyse processes of racialisation, including the construction of ‘whiteness’. At what point are racism and raciologies to be opposed or countered, not by examining their impact on people’s lives but, rather, by finding new ways of seeing and speaking about the body and the self? When will ‘colour blindness’ not mean evasion of processes of exclusion in which one is positioned as privileged, but instead be a reflection of a new era of seeing and visualising the body? Gilroy makes a timely call for the need to radically question and even perhaps move ‘beyond’ race. Yet this book argues that there remains a need to analyse the powerful impact of ‘race’ on the construction of identity and experience in everyday life, particularly in the hitherto often neglected area of white lives. This chapter suggests an alternative route towards the objective of fundamentally unsettling ‘race’ as an ontological category through attention to the performativity of ‘race’. That is, the examination of the production of the concept of ‘race’ through discursive practice and, in particular, ways of seeing difference.
