Why Critical Whiteness Studies needs to think about warfare

Abstract

The history of whiteness is intrinsic to the concept of race itself, in all its changing formulations and fatal outcomes . Despite the continuing and careless use of racial terms to refer to skin colour and ethnic origin, one of the benefits of subjecting the term to political analysis has been to draw attention away from whiteness as a physical set of attributes, and to investigate and undermine its discursive power and symbolic currency within different national contexts . The uneven geographical spread of Critical Whiteness Studies, as it rapidly became known, was inevitably rooted in US perspectives, definitions and theoretical insights, or at least those of Anglophone countries such as the UK and more recently Canada and Australia . This hampered – as well as influenced – the ways that whiteness has been conceived within Europe . Charting the discursive production of whiteness as a racial construct demands a reckoning with the national past: colonial history, patterns of postcolonial migration, the development of multiculturalism as policy and practice . For all these reasons it has been difficult to produce definitions of whiteness that apply within and across multiple locations . Roger Hewitt, who has written extensively about racial conflict and perceptions of multiculturalism among working class communities in the UK, argues that whiteness is usefully conceived through the historicised and gendered notion of citizenship, whether this is achieved through the status of settlers or natives . Whiteness does not necessarily arise from a conception of the ethnic majority or the dominant ethnicity, he suggests, but is ‘augmented with the idea of ‘born to rule’ or ‘standard by which all others are judged’ or ‘grid through which all things should be perceived’ . This is the realm of the long history through which a cultural hegemony of ‘whiteness’ was achieved . 1 Hewitt is particularly concerned with the way in which particular groups of ‘migrant whites’ are considered more or less threatening than others . Since the influx of economic migrants into the UK from new EU countries in 2004, new hierarchies have been established: attitudes to Poles, Kosovans, Bulgarians and Lithuanians, for example, reflect the degree to which they are considered useful, threatening, needy, or hard-working . Within the new Europe, he argues, ‘Our conscious as well as tacit knowledge of racial discourse construction is immense – we have seen so much of it – and in truth many of its contradictions and putative ironies are very simple matters: