‘The Feeling in my Chest’: Unblocking space for people of colour in critical whiteness studies

Abstract

This chapter considers some of the contradictions associated with labelling ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’ (CWS) a ‘critical’ discipline. Making a distinction between theorists who belong to different disciplines, but write about whiteness, and theorists who align themselves with CWS itself, this article explores some of the dangers of writing about whiteness from a ‘substantialist’ perspective; often associated with normative social science. If, as a critical discipline, CWS is to be relevant to the project of social progress, racial equality, or social justice, contributions must enable conversations based on the lived complexities, ambiguities and contradictions inherent in living and labouring towards racial justice. Throughout this chapter, I use my own lived experience as a British woman of colour, and a social justice practitioner to dream new potentialities for the discipline. One aspect in particular that I explore is how people of colour might use ‘complicatedness’ (Gordon 2008) as an analytic, coupling it with our own bodily experience to make space in CWS for a more complex analytic, in a way which holds and can carry the multiplicity of experience and complex ways in which we are both caught in, and perpetuate the violences of whiteness, therefore contributing to an important shift in the discipline.