Race Ends Where? Race,Racism and Contemporary Sociology

Revisiting Race in Sociology

In 2006, a group of US sociologists led a successful campaign to rename the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) highest honour, the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, after W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Some interpreted this as a welcome – if belated – recognition of Du Bois’ contribution to core elements of what would became the discipline of sociology. It was a justified accolade. Few sociologists pioneered as much as Du Bois, including, in amongst many other places, both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, especially social statistics and urban ethnography (Zuckerman, 2004), reconciling questions of political economy with social movements (not least in charting the suppression of Atlantic slavery) (Young Jr et al., 2007), as well as foregrounding relationships between the self and society – in ways that prefigured later questions of identity and recognition (Meer, 2010a). No less prolific outside the academy in the USA and far beyond (in China, 13 February 1959 was ‘Du Bois day’), he has been crowned ‘perhaps the greatest public sociologist of the twentieth century’ (Burawoy, 2005: 417). ¹ To those who know Du Bois broke new ground in the study of race, especially in terms of the ‘colour line’, the scope of his wider corpus may be unfamiliar, but his delayed induction into the canon as a ‘founding figure’ of sociology is broadly illustrative of a wider difficulty in the relationship between the study of race and the development of sociology as a discipline (Gilroy, 1993).

Such an account may seem an odd place to commence this special collection of articles exploring race as discussed in the house journal of the British Sociological Association (BSA). But Du Bois’ story is instructive. British sociology has no C.L.R. James or Stuart Hall prizes, or equivalent commendations; and there is a perception that there is less sociology dedicated to the study of race today than there was two decades ago. In several cases, race appears to have been traded downwards for sociologies of nation (these were not always understood as incommensurate intellectual activities), or traded outwards for sociologies of ‘development’ or ‘global sociology’ (as though race were not central to each). Such observations are partly why Bhattacharyya and Murji (2013: 3–4) have come to the view that race has become marginalised ‘as an epiphenomenon to class, or subsumed under ethnicity, or collapsed within what, for some, are wider projects such as cosmopolitanism or social justice and human rights’. ²

An interesting development here is that this does not mean race is not being pursued sociologically outside sociology departments: in social policy, education, geography, politics, anthropology and criminology. This is a reflection of the intellectual vitality of these subject clusters, but also of something deeper explained in Holmwood’s (2011) description of sociology as an ‘exporter’ subject where core (sociological) epistemological and methodological concerns are typically and easily ‘imported’ by other subjects. This is not an entirely unidirectional activity (sociology is most certainly not without influence from those it ‘exports’ to). The challenge that it raises for sociology is that sociological perspectives cannot be the preserve of the discipline of sociology. This is ‘sociology’s misfortune’ (Holmwood, 2010). Criminology is a good illustration; as a growing discipline that frequently now exceeds sociology in terms of student recruitment, it is able to pursue sociological concerns with race through its own learned societies, conferences and allied journals.

These are just some of the reasons why this opportunity to revisit race in Sociology is so valuable. As the then comprehensive overview from John Solomos and Les Back (1994) illustrates (reproduced here), Sociology has over the years been a disciplinary wide platform from which to engage such concerns; facilitating critical treatments of race across British sociology and providing opportunity to ‘radically evaluate these [competing] conceptual critiques’ (1994: 143).

Archiving Race

As editors, one of the tasks that faced us concerned how we would search for and select appropriate articles for a Special Issue on race. We made an early decision to narrow the field by foregrounding articles that engaged directly with race – conceptually, theoretically, or empirically. This meant that papers that were more concerned with multiculturalism, ethnicity or migration were less likely to feature in our shortlist. In the archiving process we also came to recognise that the proliferation of journals across the academic sector in the last two decades has meant articles which might once have appeared in Sociology are more likely to be found in specialist race journals. For example, we were surprised by a paucity of papers in Sociology on race and ethnicity following the London bombings of 7 July 2005 though we are aware of detailed discussion elsewhere.

We began our search by working through the archives of Sociology from its earliest editions to the present. This task was relatively straightforward as Sociology has an extensive online catalogue of back issues. We each took responsibility for exploring particular decades from which possible material could be extrapolated. In an effort not to miss any recent developments we further asked the editors of Sociology if there were any papers on race in the pipeline awaiting publication. Different approaches to the study of race have included Marxist analyses of race structures and colonial authority; accounts indebted to a ‘race relations’ paradigm; work which has sought to complicate understandings of race by drawing upon intersections with gender, sexuality and class among other dimensions; forms of postcolonial theorisation; an engagement with critical whiteness studies; and a more recent return to new understandings of social class and post-race forms of thinking.

We had initially considered a type of historical ordering of race debates where it was envisaged each of the essays would exemplify a specific sociological approach or paradigm. It soon became clear that such an organising principle was in danger of over-simplification and could produce a flattened out, linear narrative. Moreover, we became increasingly conscious that while some essays were of historical interest to ourselves as race scholars, they could appear superfluous and out of date to many readers. When it came to short-listing our final 10 articles therefore our principal aim was to consider if the pieces were likely to be read and if the collection as a whole would be used by students, lecturers and researchers. To this end this collection has an intellectual and practical purpose. The figures in this collection are renowned experts in their field and the Special Issue offers an opportunity for further dissemination and discussion.

Another challenge that arose concerned the issue of representation. Our reading and interpretation of these papers is inevitably partial, contested and subjective. We were also aware that in many cases authors have refined their arguments and were writing at a particular moment in time. With this in mind we decided to set up a dialogue with contributors where we asked them to critically reflect upon their work. For consistency we asked each of the authors if there was a core debate they intended to engage with; the extent to which there been an intellectual development in their area; and, more broadly, how do they see the sociology of race unfolding. We are delighted that each of the contributors responded to our brief, often furnishing us with detailed and thoughtful lines of inquiry. Although space does not allow for extended reflections we have included some of these authorial remarks in the Introduction by way of both context and update. In archiving the past we are then cognisant of making it relevant to the present and pushing the boundaries of the sociology of race more generally.

The Challenge for Sociology

We offer this essay as an intervention. It is not intended as a comprehensive account but instead as an opportunity to encourage readers to reflect on where we are today with the benefit of previously published articles, and to expressly consider whether the discipline of sociology in Britain has reconstructed itself to meaningfully include race.

That Errol Lawrence posed a similar question over 30 years ago is instructive (Lawrence, 1982), and our sense of deja vu might partly be explained by Gurminder Bhambra’s (2007) compelling discussion reproduced here. Drawing on Holmwood (2000, in Bhambra), she distinguishes between the ‘social’ and the ‘system’ to argue that while for sociology the former is an intellectual terrain that has been receptive to particular critical readings, it has left intact entrenched conventions and systems of thought. This might help explain how sociology has protected ‘core categories of analysis from any reconstruction of what such recognition would entail’ (2007: 873). For Bhambra moreover, ‘race is not only a field of study but something that is at issue in the fundamental structure of social knowledge(s)’ (personal correspondence with authors, 23 February 2013). While her paper is focused on the ‘missing revolution’ prompted by the postcolonial challenge, one implication we may take from her and others is that ‘social theory elaborated within the confines of Western modernity’ (Venn, 2003: 3) retains its ethnocentric anchorage, even while this knowledge is increasingly being rendered provincial on a global stage where alternative modernities can be traced (Chakrabarti, 2007; Gaonkar, 2001).

Note that while Du Bois was labouring away in North America and continental Europe, British sociology was enthralled by Herbert Spencer and others who sought to give the idea of race a deeper content by mixing science with a revisionist theology, something that especially found expression in the work of Robert Knox’s (1850) Races of Men and Comte Arthur de Gobineau’s (1853) Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Others from this period, such as Pieter Camper and Franz Joseph Gall, measured facial angles as indications of what they perceived to be stature, beauty and intelligence. While seemingly absurd from contemporary perspectives, this racial science was far from benign and would later give rise to racial engineering in the eugenics movement, the selective ‘breeding’ of some humans and ‘out-breeding’ of others. Such racial science went hand in hand with 19th-century social Darwinism, what Herbert Spencer (2002[1864]: 444) termed ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. Much of this discourse informed and provided intellectual justification for the scramble for Africa and other exploitation by European powers. Even while colonial authority could be tinged with an ambivalence that hinted at the porcelain fragility of whiteness, ³ any tremors of uncertainty did not dispel the fixed belief that Europeans were superior in almost every facet. As a theme it continued and adopted different guises and new cultural inflections at a global level. With this ‘inflated self-worth’ and ‘arrogant sense of being’, the affirmation of ‘white Europeans meant also affirming the non-value of non-white Europeans’ (Back, personal correspondence with authors). Many of the horrors of the later Nazi death camps, for example, had already been trialled in Germany’s African colonies with little objection from other western powers.

In re-stating this it is valuable to note that while ‘white’ and ‘western’ are often conflated in contemporary discussion, according to Bonnett (2008) the idea that the ‘West’ has a coherent unity, something resembling an ‘ethno-cultural repertoire’ of whiteness, is a relatively novel conception that owes much (though not necessarily in a straightforward manner) to late 19th-century writers who anxiously debated the ‘decline’ of white dominance (2008: 23). Amongst others, Bonnett identifies Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894) and Principles of Western Civilisation (1902), each of which prefigures the current theorists of ‘Eurabia’ and European decline (Meer, 2012). Of course Kidd was writing at a time when the British Empire reigned over nearly a quarter of the planet’s land surface (and nearly 500 million people), and other European powers dominated the colonies they had taken. Nonetheless, pointing to the thesis of Charles Pearson (1984) in particular, Bonnett (2008: 18) describes some recurring strands of a decline which spans several presumed features of culture and civilisation (intertwined in biology and environment), but which is principally underwritten by the ways in which whiteness served as a form of substantive rationality that fashioned geopolitics in its own image. In this mode of thinking, Empire and Colonialism are understood as natural states of international relations and indicative of human progress, serving to illustrate how in such formulations the world was ‘imaginatively seized, its parts compared and its centre and periphery established’ (2008: 17).

For these reasons Virdee (2012: 1144) does not recoil from reminding us that sociology did not stand outside a racialised modernity that ‘endowed some Europeans with privilege along with the power to occupy the centre of world history, and shape it according to its own image’. The objective of this complaint is not to devalue British sociology. On the contrary. It is to make the argument for sociology, for ‘self scrutiny rather than sheer defensiveness’ (McLennan, 2006: 97), to encourage ‘without guarantees’ (Hall, 1986) inquiry on the ways in which race and sociology ‘are already deeply implicated within each other’ (Young, 1992: 243). Sociologies of race therefore require ‘being attentive to the specificities of the current situation but also historical linkages through time’ (Back, personal correspondence with authors). This means going beyond surface level reconstructions, and challenging sociologists to reflect on how their discipline is organised across sociology departments, ‘just as sociologists have criticized other disciplines on these matters’ (Murji, 2007: 853). As Claire Alexander (2011) has put it:

I think that sociology has at best failed to engage these discourses and positions and at worse been complicit with them – within the academy, discussions of ‘race’ have largely fallen from the agenda, and there is very little work that deals with issues of racism explicitly.

Such an activity would include a ‘critique of sociology’s reformism and its neglect of the historical conditions in which sociological ideas about race and racism developed’ (Murji, 2007: 853). Each of these concerns has implications for the kinds of research and teaching programs sociology departments are currently promoting (and indeed ignoring). Drawing on Murji’s (2007) timely article reproduced here, we might take seriously the concept of institutional racism as something that is not only relevant in criticising the Metropolitan police.

Past Race

There is an inherent paradox in the use of race that sociologists constantly grapple with. Many tend to portray the term under erasure by presenting it in inverted commas so as to indicate that we are referring to a socially constructed category, based upon a problematic idea, instead of something that is self-evidently real in the world (see Nayak, 2006 for discussion). ⁴ Even those who do not repeat this practice agree with the thrust of the argument (Modood, 2005). Perhaps the simplest way to frame this is to say that sociologists tend to be interested in the dynamic and relational properties of race as both a historical idea and social category. Miles (quoted in Ashe and McGeever, 2011: 2017) describes this activity as differentiating between ‘the idea of “race” and “race” as an analytical concept’. It is a sign of his continuing and profound influence that we invoke Bob Miles in these debates even though he has not published new scholarship on this topic for many years (cf. Virdee, 2000; Kyriakides, 2008; Meer, 2013a). Indeed, in recent years Paul Gilroy (1998: 842) too has come to settle on ‘an antipathy towards “race” beyond the unstable equilibrium represented by liberal use of scare quotes’. In a challenging intervention he maintains that renouncing race ‘for analytical purposes is not to judge all appeals to it in the profane world of political cultures formally equivalent. I am not Robert Miles’. So although the two authors are now in agreement, Gilroy’s defensiveness continues to illustrate how when it comes to race in Britain, ‘political strategies are encoded within … academic debates’ (Solomos and Back, 1994: 143). While this is perhaps not unique to race, it does require some explanation.

In the decades after the war, and inspired by the Chicago sociologists, a very British take on ‘race-relations’ flourished through the work of Michael Banton (1955, 1959, 1967), Ruth Glass (1960), Shelia Patterson (1965, 1969), John Rex and Robert Moore (1979[1967]) and E.J.B. Rose (1969), most of whom were involved in the then government-sponsored Institute for Race Relations (IRR). Their immediate impact was evident when the Labour government introduced measures to prevent discrimination against settled Commonwealth migrants; it proceeded through the introduction of a Race Relations Act (1965). ⁵ Why it was not, for example, called the ‘Anti-Racism Act’ is instructive, for it partly reflected the continuing influence of Robert Park’s (1950: 82) view that the relations within which such discrimination occurs must be those of race relations. This is a familiar account that does not need to be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that Michael Banton’s (1967) book, simply called Race Relations, is indicative of this way of thinking and serves as a useful illustration of how approaches in this period were being framed.

What is noteworthy is the charge put forward by Miles and colleagues that the above authors did not offer sustained analyses of questions of power, and were consequently ‘atheoretical’ and ‘ahistorical’, ‘concerned with ‘attitudes’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’ [and were] ‘remarkably uninformative’ (Zubaida, 1972: 141). While John Rex’s (1973) work most certainly eschewed a narrow focus by pointing to the importance of social and economic marginalisation, his detractors argued that he failed to integrate these sociological concerns into ‘wider conceptual debates about the theory of racism or into the analysis of processes of racialization in contemporary Britain’ (Solomos, 1993: 22). ⁶ What is especially interesting is that Miles (quoted in Ashe and McGeever, 2011: 2011) claims this did not entail as much a rejection of what preceded him as may have previously been thought. In relation to Banton, he reflects on how he ‘“hijacked” his [Banton’s] concept of racialization because to me it spoke to a process. And what he was good at researching and writing about was historical processes by which the idea of “race” took meanings in different contexts’ (Miles, quoted in Ashe and McGeever, 2011: 2011). Nonetheless, Miles critiqued the race-relations problematic (adopted, in their different ways, by Banton and Rex) by first rejecting race. What we should actually be studying, according to Miles (1989: 75), is how ‘material inequalities’ and ‘signifying processes’ interact to racialise groups as ‘races’ in ‘those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the significance of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities’. In turn, this process of ‘racialization’ would also help sustain structures of class inequality and the exploitation of migrant workers. These two issues are inter-related for Miles since there is a contradiction between:

… on the one hand the need of the capitalist world economy for the mobility of human beings, and on the other, the drawing of territorial boundaries and the construction of citizenship as a legal category which sets boundaries for human mobility. (1988: 438)

An important strand of this work was trying to engage with working-class racism. ‘That is to say’, argued Miles (quoted in Ashe and McGeever, 2011: 2010), ‘we weren’t writing it off as some false ideology that had been imposed upon the working class. We argued that racism was grounded in the material, political and cultural realities of working-class life in different locations.’ This activity shares some of the concerns of James Rhodes’ (2011) later study that is reproduced here. In the latter’s analyses, ‘white working class’ has come to assume an inherent analytic function, based on popular characterisations of intrinsic and endemic racism. This allows the commentariat to ‘isolate racism as anomalous within English society, rather than a central component of its mechanics’ (personal correspondence with authors, 17 February 2013). ⁷

All of this is relevant because, within British sociological debates on race, Miles was met with trenchant responses not least by Gilroy, who complained of a class reductionism which subsumed other social relations, limited the scope of theory, and silenced racial ‘subjects’ (Gilroy, 1987: 23). Earlier still, the Race and Politics Group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, 1982) established an account of race that viewed it as something greater than a means to regulate and racialise ethnic minorities (Meer, 2014). Looking back to the 1970s and forward to what Thatcherism was beginning to herald for race in the inner cities, CCCS authors shared the critique of an overly functionalist race relations; they believed that as an analytical category race was socially constructed, and accepted that racialisation had been integral to modern nation-states, particularly during times of ‘crisis’ (CCCS, 1982: 277–8; cf. Hall et al., 1978). However, they deviated in pointing to the way in which collective identities spoken through race and group struggle were a powerful form of resistance, often in the absence of white working-class solidarity. In these conditions, they elaborated, ‘the British left has been reluctant to approach the Pandora’s box of racial politics […] The simplistic reduction of race to class, which has guided their practice has been thrown into confusion by intense and visible black struggles’ (CCCS, 1982: 277). Satnam Virdee (2000, reproduced here) offers a forceful rejoinder to this account, in a manner that seeks to ‘navigate between the Scylla of reducing race to class (as Marxists were, and are prone to do) and the Charybdis of studying race in isolation from class (as so many in sociology continue to do)’ (Virdee, personal correspondence with authors, 2 April 2013). Specifically taking issue with Gilroy’s account, Virdee redirects us to the ways in which the ‘working class did emerge episodically as an anti-racist agent as the events at Grunwick in the workplace, and, the establishment of the ANL (Anti-Nazi League) in the community demonstrated’ (Virdee, 2 April 2013). In his account, therefore:

… racial formation (built around the identity of political blackness) was not an alternative to working-class formation as both had claimed, but rather its essential precursor. That is, racialised minorities through a consciousness of their colour had arrived at a consciousness of class; and the working class in recovering its class instinct had arrived at a consciousness of racial oppression. (Virdee, 2 April 2013)

A thread running through this broad tapestry of British race narratives is how to view black communities as active partners in the creation of political subjectivities and what is meant and understood by this collective identity (cf. Nayak, 2012). According to Solomos (1993: 30), ‘a multiplicity of political identities’ could fall into ‘an inclusive notion of black identity’, while allowing ‘heterogeneity of national and cultural origins within this constituency’. So the notion of a ‘black’ identity was taken to incorporate racialised minorities and a dominant strand of anti-racism emerged which sought to mobilise through a politicised colour-based ethnicity. The rationale was that the terms of protest against discrimination should both refuse and accept the group identities upon which discrimination is based, and that demands for inclusion necessarily invoke and repudiate the differences that have been denied inclusion in the first place.

Overcoming Modes of Oppression

This calibration was stress tested in Muslim reactions to the Rushdie affair, revealing a profound disjuncture between prevailing anti-racist discourse cataloguing Muslims as politically ‘black’ and emerging self-definitions amongst Muslim communities – or ‘Muslim consciousness’ (Meer, 2010a) – more broadly. Modood illustrated this with the example of anti-racist campaigners who opposed those Muslim protestors who agitated against Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. He recalls, ‘“Fight racism, not Rushdie” stickers bearing this slogan were worn by many who wanted to be on the same side as the Muslims. It was well meant but betrayed a poverty of understanding’ (1992: 272). As Modood’s (1994) paper reproduced here shows, the Rushdie affair was a turning point for race in Britain for it interminably ruptured whatever consensus, contested as it clearly was, of race relations and anti-racism that existed. Banton’s thesis, following Park, was a prescription for assimilation since it is only in an integrated order of race relations where differences lose their significance that social consensus can be achieved. As the episode highlighted, Muslims in Britain did not want to assimilate if this required surrendering re-imagined identities, and instead contested their allocated civic status by mobilising for an accommodation of their ‘difference’ by the state. Although Rex’s account is less prescriptive, he similarly held that Muslims should accept the reality of assimilation into a political culture where objections to Rushdie’s text on the grounds of religious offence should not be entertained (1996). Their collective sense of grievance would do little to help alleviate the position of Muslims caught – in Rex’s words – in some kind of ‘underclass’; for the presence of a sizable population who are not only religious but who practise their faith publicly, and the further marginalisation of these communities through the disparity between state recognition of faiths, escaped Rex’s account. The racialisation thesis presented by Miles, meanwhile, offered little space to understand the cultural dimension of British Muslim protests. They were not passive victims of racism; on the contrary, their obvious agency in speaking out and mobilising against an assault on sources of group identity was self-evident. More broadly, as Modood predicted, Miles and those on the Left had underestimated the powerful role that religious identification might play for migrant communities in an increasingly secular society. ‘Even as I was writing,’ states Modood (personal correspondence with authors, 18 March 2013), ‘a new claimant was emerging … and so issues of recognition have had to be more broadly confronted’. He thus argued:

The root of the problem is that contemporary anti-racism defines people in terms of their colour; Muslims – suffering all the problems that anti-racists identify – hardly ever think of themselves in terms of their colour. […] We need concepts of race and racism that can critique socio-cultural environments which devalue people because of the physical differences but also because of the membership of a cultural minority and, critically, where the two overlap and create a double disadvantage. (1992: 272)

Looking back, Modood’s concern to distinguish between people’s ‘mode of being’ from their ‘mode of oppression’, and Gilroy’s (1992: 60–1) argument that ‘there can be no single or homogeneous strategy against racism because racism itself is never homogeneous’, were quite consistent. In their different ways both feed into the emergence of the ‘new ethnicities’ problematic. This sought to engage the shifting complexities of ethnic identities, specifically their processes of formation and change, and was given an authoritative voice in the work of Stuart Hall (1991, 1996[1988]). From a race perspective, new ethnicities captured the way in which ‘identities had broken free of their anchorage in singular histories of race and nation’ (Cohen, 2000: 5), and so challenged both anthropological and political essentialism.

At an earlier stage, maintained Hall, ‘ethnicity was the enemy’ (1991: 55) because it was conceived in the form of ‘a particularly closed, exclusive, and regressive form of English national identity [which] is one of the core characteristics of British racism today’ (Hall, 1996[1988]: 168). In many respects Daniel Burdsey (2006), reproduced here, works through the new ethnicities problematic to weave together his account of post-migration, diaspora and transnationalism in 21st-century Britain. He expressly makes the case for relationships between sport and race; and challenges the assumption that, with some very notable exceptions, ‘sport is still not seen widely as a legitimate or valued area of critical enquiry’ (personal correspondence with authors, 19 February 2013). Moreover, the new ethnicities project has been highly influential in seeking to heal rifts and propel ways forward from theoretical standpoints that might once have seemed irreconcilable. For example, Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley’s article, reproduced for this collection, explores how hybridized ethnic identities … have major consequences for how we define citizenship sociologically’ (2005: 410). It is a question that is raised in a political climate refracted through often intense Islamophobic discourse, and which sociology is struggling to give a conceptual language to (Meer, 2013b). As they elaborate:

… the complex matrix of issues around citizenship, national identity, religious identity, racialisation, racism, ethnic identity and Islamophobia has generated a lot of work, but our feeling is that there is often something of a gulf between the empirical work and the theoretical developments in the area. (personal correspondence with authors, 20 February 2013)

There are two parts to their observation and in the next section we would like to discuss the empirical issue through articles reproduced here. Before doing so we expressly consider how British approaches to race have come to rest in multiple registers.

Race at the Intersections

One way in which the study of race has developed in recent years has been through intersectional approaches. Intersectionality describes a cluster of theoretical positions which seek to revise the view that identity categories, and the web of social relations in which they are located, are experienced as ‘separate roads’ (Roth, 2004). While this necessarily takes in more than race, the provenance of the concept may be traced to black feminist critique of the ways in which mainstream (white) feminism had historically ignored the intersections of race and patriarchy (Carby, 1982; cf. Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983). In one reading therefore, intersectionality encourages researchers to explore how their ‘moral positions as survivors of one expression of systemic violence become eroded in the absence of accepting responsibility of other expressions of systemic violence’ (Collins, 2000: 247). From its origins in this critical mode, however, and despite the suggestion that ‘it has not become a key concern for the many sociologists not directly working on gender issues’ (Choo and Ferree, 2010: 129), important features of intersectionalist thought have been extraordinarily successful in becoming ‘mainstreamed’, e.g. incorporated into public policy equality agendas and forming a basis for human rights. This is especially the case with the designing of anti-discrimination policies that can simultaneously tackle more than gender and race intersections on their own, but include categories of age, disability, sexuality and religion as well (Meer, 2010b). ⁸

Several papers included here deepen our understanding of race through intersectional analyses. Bridget Byrne’s (2006) contribution in particular focuses on parental school choice to illustrate how conventionally understood classed practices of choosing schools are also profoundly raced practices, and so co-produced and mutually constitutive. She elaborates:

I was attempting to show how race, class and gender were not only inter-related but also at times can be produced through each other. […] I think there is continuing recognition of the intertwining nature of experiences and concepts such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, but it remains an empirical challenge to fully examine them in specific sites. (personal correspondence with authors, 25 February 2013)

Sociological analyses could do more following Byrne to chart the role of race ‘in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity’ (Ritzer, 2007: 204). This would be consistent with how intersectionality was pioneered, in so far as it corresponds to the argument that ‘systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization’ (Collins, 2000: 299). There is of course a methodological task that cuts across empirical work on intersectionality (Chang and Culp, 2002: 485), and asks us to reflect on which points of the intersection to focus on and whether this implies a hierarchy of any kind (cf. Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 68). This works within intersectional categories as much as between them (Nayak, 2011). In a related manner, Diane Reay (2008: 1072), reproduced here, relates ‘white middle-class relationships to their classed and ethnic “other”’ to explore ‘white middle-class identities and identifications within predominantly working-class, multi-ethnic schooling’. Her broader objective is to challenge ‘the taken for granted normativity … in which middle-class whiteness is taken as the universal’ (personal correspondence with authors, 19 February 2013). In so doing, Reay reminds us that the whiteness debate has been central in making whiteness visible as a racialised identity.

The study of whiteness is of course a relatively recent area of scholarship, even though many of the questions it addresses are inherently intertwined with foundational issues of race and racialisation. The sub-field that comprises ‘critical whiteness studies’ (Nayak, 2007) has not only spawned a proliferation of different approaches to the topic but has helped displace what was becoming a steadfast gaze upon visible minorities as the symbolic occupants of race categories. The turn to whiteness then follows previous sociological interventions that have held ascendant identities such as masculinity or heterosexuality open to scrutiny. However, and perhaps peculiarly within the fields of race, whiteness as a concept sits at an intersection between historical privilege and identity, something that has a contemporary dynamic but which is not universally shared in (or can be very distant to) how many white people experience their identities. That is to say that ‘whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather cross-cut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it’ (Frankenberg, 2001: 76). Moreover, in thinking about whiteness there is often a tension between its study from contexts marked by historical segregation (e.g. the USA and South Africa) and elsewhere where whiteness has either (1) functioned (at least formally) as a banal repository of white majority conceptions of the given identity of societies (Hage, 1998; Hewitt, 2005), or (2) ordered social relations in colonial states occupied overseas. We could add to this (3) how whiteness has become globally desirable as a ‘way of life’ routed through forms of capital accumulation and mass consumerism. In countries as far afield as China, Japan, India and Taiwan the globalisation of whiteness can be seen where fair-skinned actors are used to advertise products and market commodities through occidentalist imaginings of western lifestyles. These ideas are premised on the touchstone of modernity pursued through the alchemy of beauty, hedonism, choice, freedom and individuality. Where processes of globalisation are often imagined to invoke ideas of multiculturalism and difference, all too often this can result in neoliberal forms of mass consumerism calibrated to white western aesthetics.

To a large extent, much of the discussion of whiteness has attributed a conscious or unwitting white dominance which under-recognises how ‘[t]he economic and psychological wages of whiteness may be more meagre (and thus more precious) the lower down the social hierarchy the white subject is located’ (Garner, 2006: 262). The liminal status of whiteness as a precarious and contingent formation has the potential to move us beyond more rudimentary intersectional accounts that treat race, class, gender or sexuality as ‘proper objects’ from which other social relations derive. An early excavation into destabilising race objects can been seen in the writings of Frantz Fanon (1965[1959], 1968[1961], 1970[1952]) where whiteness is not simply something that is anchored to white bodies, but may be internalised and enacted by ‘black subjects’. For Fanon, race signs are inhabited as deeply psychic processes, neatly illustrated in the title of his critically acclaimed volume, Black Skin, White Masks, where – in carefully side-stepping the more obvious strap-line, Black Skin, White Skin – we witness instead a conscious and effective rupturing of the racial binary. The appendage speaks then to the splitting of race ‘objects’ and complex and ambiguous postcolonial relations. Thus, we learn how, ‘The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the tool that language is’ (1970[1952]: 29). Fanon’s poignant critique of western modernity (see especially Fanon, 1968[1961]) reminds us of the traumatic and scarring effect that race encounters have, ‘All this whiteness that burns me …’ (1970[1952]: 81).

The imprint of these scorched ‘race relations’ are relevant today, being seared into what Derek Gregory (2004) has termed ‘the colonial present’. Seeing others as less than human has sanctioned the spectacle of torture and humiliation: enacted on the bodies of Iraqi soldiers in Abu Ghraib, in US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, or the where the practice of ‘water boarding’ and robotic drone warfare used by western military personal on Afghan soldiers and civilians is made morally justifiable (Bhatt, 2012). In these violent encounters the spectre of race and the authority of whiteness are once again brought to bear upon racialised subjects and given legitimacy. Orbiting alongside such visceral examples of neocolonial racial ordering is the qualification of habeas corpus, the rise of dual legal systems and spaces of exception where human rights are suspended in animation as judicial acrobatics are keenly observed by those who choose to look (Kapoor, 2012).

Conclusions: ‘Scavenger Ideologies’

Informed readers may have noted that the title of our Introduction is a rejoinder to Gilroy’s (1988) previous declaration, ‘race ends here’. While Gilroy is largely concerned with the fossilising aspects of much race terminology, his essay and subsequent work has agitated for the viability of living in a post-race world. Yet, as Les Back’s opening caveat to this piece discloses, race is very much installed in the here and now. It remains ever present in late-modernity and strangely solid in liquid times. What the suite of papers in this collection shows is both the resilience of race as a construct for organising social relations and also the slippery fashion in which ideas of race have shifted, transmuted and pluralised. Working through a matrix of relations including gender, class, age, ethnicity, sexuality and locality, the algebra of race can be refigured across time and space. ‘In this sense’, argues Back (personal correspondence), ‘racism is a scavenger ideology’ that draws selectively upon the past, present and imagined future, distilling complex fears and anxieties (see also Solomos and Back, 1996: 213).

It is in this spirit of recognising continuity and change that we present this Special Issue. Some of the articles already stand as landmark essays, while others exemplify key moments in the broader teleology of race and ethnic studies. This includes articles that explore the ontological ground on which ideas of race, citizenship and black identity are fostered (Solomos and Back, Hussain and Bagguley, Modood) and the need to develop a global sociology that is critically reflexive of its western orientation (Bhambra). The theme of continuity and change can be seen in papers that showcase intersectional approaches to race, where gender, nationality, generation and class are seen to offer nuanced readings of everyday life (Burdsey, Byrne, Reay), alongside the persistence of institutional forms of discrimination (Murji, Virdee). As this work demonstrates, middle-class forms of whiteness often go ‘hiding in the light’ yet can be made visible if we consider how parental school choice (Byrne, Reay), or selecting where to live are also recognised as racially informed decisions. For working-class people whose choices are more limited, residential concerns may lie as much with neighbouring ‘scruffy whites’ (Rhodes) as with migrant families. The range and complexity of these debates not only reflect the vitality of race in the contemporary period but lead us to ask not so much if race ends here, but where?