Response to Review of Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments. Vol 14, No.1 (2004) ISSN 1546-2250 Response to Review of Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World Anoop Nayak University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England Citation: Nayak, Anoop. (2004). “Response to Review of Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1). Around a decade ago, I worked on a collaborative research project investigating the perpetrators of racist violence (Nayak 1999; Back and Nayak 1999). A primary element of the study involved observing and interviewing a group of young, white men who adopted a Skinhead subcultural style and were implicated in explicit forms of racial intolerance and criminal violence. Needless to say, this work was mentally taxing and politically charged. Yet amidst the numbing banality of race terror that was reported were found more hopeful accounts delivered by white youth. This included young people who were opposed to racism but feared speaking out, white youth who also felt oppressed by the masculine “pale warrior” stance exerted by the Skins, and a few individuals who had formed friendships or relationships with ethnic minority youth and risked violence and name-calling. These silenced voices led to me consider, what does it mean to be white? What positive subject positions are available to young people who wish to forego the privilege of whiteness? And what are the lived consequences of such race-conscious decisions? Arising from this challenge, Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World brings whiteness into focus and pries open the lid on the diversity of white ethnicities. The book seeks to document change and transition in young lives by focusing upon post-industrial change and the impact of globalization upon local areas in the Tyneside district of Northeast England. Thus, the volume is woven through three strands– Passing Times, Changing 262 Times and Coming Times– which each demonstrate how places and communities are responding to change. A feature of the work is its multi-textured ethnographic method. I didn’t just want to discuss transition in dry theoretical abstraction, but set out to provide intimate, “real life” portraits of how young people think, feel and act– however pleasurable or painful these experiences may appear. Taking the views, observations and interactions of young people seriously was thereby an attempt to understand their daily life-worlds from personal perspectives and first-hand experiences. It is through these lived accounts that a multi-layered narrative is composed, drawing upon local histories and new cultural theory. A main theme in the volume is the manner in which race and class are mutually constitutive formations that come to articulate one another. Since completing the study, national press attention has further highlighted the plight of the Charver Kids and a series of web-links now capture the fear and loathing that surround their bodies.1 While the reviewer is most attentive in describing the outline of the book, I would maintain that the study debunks the black/white racial binary by distinguishing between whiteness and white people, between being white and acting white. By demonstrating how the Real Geordies choose to hang on tooth and claw to the last vestiges afforded by white masculine labor, how unemployed Charvers are seen as criminalized, impoverished, “notquite -white” subjects, and how the Wiggers are represented as culturally hybrid, global youth who are occasionally accused of “acting black,” or at least transgressing whiteness, the message for critical multiculturalism is self-evident. It’s not who you are that matters, it’s what you do. Endnote 1. For example, see http://www.chavscum.com and other Charver links at http://www.newcastlestuff.com. References Nayak, Anoop (1999). “’Pale Warriors’: Skinhead Culture and the Embodiment of White Masculinities.” In Brah, Avtar. Mary J. 263 Hickman, and M. Mac an Ghaill, eds. Thinking Identities: Ethnicity, Racism and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 71-99. Back, L. and Anoop Nayak (1999). “Signs of the Times? Violence, Graffiti and Racism in the English Suburbs.” In Allen, Tim and John Eade, eds. Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict. The Hague/ Boston: Kluwer Law International, 243-283. Anoop Nayak lecturers in the School of Geography, Politics...