The ‘trouble’ with the ‘white working class’: whiteness, class and ‘groupism’

Abstract

Over the course of the last two decades, ‘whiteness’ has exploded as an area of academic inquiry bringing together scholars from an array of academic disciplines and generating significant new insights that have contributed to a more complex understanding of a racialised positioning often taken for granted as a normative, unmarked, even invisible system of privilege. Within this field, the ‘white working class’ has come to assume an integral position. This category has offered an analytic object through which notions of enduring white privilege, white victimhood, multicultural politics and white racism have all been explored. While there are clear and striking political problems within all of these dominant accounts, this article instead focuses on a more foundational and related issue: that of the invocation of the ‘white working class’ itself.