ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three sections: 'identifications', where it examines ways in which researcher and researched identify with each other; 'dis-identification', where the opposite is the case; and 'representations', where the real power of the researcher is usually expressed, in the specific formal representations of the research process that academics engage in. When white people research other white people, the difference is regarded as relating to class and gender, but when black people research other black people, it's somehow only about 'race' or ethnicity. Anti-racist position is of course the ideal, but from where people racialised as white start, perhaps the neutral position is the one to aim for first. Whiteness is confirmed as the universal standard against which everything else is measured. The collective representations of working-class whiteness has involved identifying it as backward, stupid, racist and abject, and are inaccurate and in fact demonstrate an effect of power on the part of the middle-class commentators whose representations they are.
