We Need to Talk about Race

Introduction

This article examines the relationship between the understanding that race has been ‘silenced’ and the possibilities of naming and resisting racism in everyday life. Much of the recent literature that considers how race is silenced has been in response to a political climate that ‘claims that racism has finally been transcended and that the “illusion” of race has finally been eliminated’ (Winant, 2004: 214). In particular, recent work has paid attention to neoliberal political machineries that seek to manage difference by deferring the responsibility of racism away from political structural arrangements and outside of imagined normative boundaries (e.g Amin, 2012; Goldberg, 2009; Lentin and Titley, 2011; Winant, 2006). The charge made within this body of work is that a post-racial society is imagined as a means to conceal and legitimise racism and protect white privilege. In this way, the political rhetoric of being post-race has been met with prudent scepticism. However, in spite of the fervour around the significance of silencing, little has been done to explore the everyday effects of living with these processes, including how they might be resisted. This is important to address since the notion that race is being silenced points not only to a public disavowal of race, but also to the potential to silence resistance to racism.

The use of the term silencing here refers to the denial of the meanings and effects of race. Silencing can therefore be understood as ignoring the problems of race. This article explores the relationship between the processes of silencing that occur at a macro level and the ways in which people talk race and can(not) name racism in the everyday. It highlights how it is not easy to name racism when race is almost entirely denied in public discourses. The article draws from a study carried out in 2010 with young adults aged 20–30 years old. This age group was of particular interest because young adults are often called upon to represent the multicultural or post-racial future (Harries, 2012). The research constituted photo diaries, ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with 32 people in Manchester. Together this data aimed to capture grounded accounts of people’s day-to-day lives.

This article examines some of the ways that discourses that silence race have become embedded in stories about Manchester and the UK. It focuses on sections of narratives that relate to describing personal experiences of racism and explores how this is difficult for respondents to do when they also situate themselves in a broader context of tolerance and post-racialism. In doing so, it considers a series of dilemmas that form part of the struggle to reconcile multiple and often contradictory levels of experience and situates these within the broader political context. The relationship between processes that silence race and the possibilities of talking about racism are then explored to reveal the difficulties faced if we want to undo these processes and challenge racism.

Methods

The methods employed in this study proved crucial for revealing the very embeddedness of race, making it possible to consider how race emerges and is dealt with in everyday life. The study explored how people talk about living in Manchester, paying particular attention to the reproduction and experience of race. Respondents were asked to photograph their life over a week and these photos were then used as a tool to open up discussion in the interview, with an emphasis on relationships to places and people featured. Photo diaries can have a number of roles in interviews. Here they were primarily chosen to make it more feasible for respondents to externalise their experiences because they (and I) were oriented towards their content, rather than exclusively towards themselves. This can be particularly useful when addressing potentially controversial topics. It is important to note that the broad questions around which the interviews were loosely structured did not directly ask the respondents to address the subject of race. The city, however, was a useful avenue through which to explore the reproduction and effects of multiple and often contradictory discursive practices. It acts as a location in which race is imagined in conflicting ways: simultaneously as a site of racism and conflict and cosmopolitanism and ‘mixing’.

The respondents included a roughly even number of women (17) and men (15) and all had a relationship to one of three Manchester neighbourhoods in which the research took place (Gorton, Longsight or Moss Side) through residence, work or leisure. These three neighbourhoods are characterised locally as ‘inner city’ and are typically articulated with working classness and deprivation. They are, however, represented quite differently in terms of ethnicity, as ‘Asian’, ‘black’ and ‘white’. These ‘differences’ are imagined as discrete, because the areas are often represented as homogeneous. Longsight, for example, is understood as ‘a South Asian’ neighbourhood, although only 50 per cent of people living in Longsight describe themselves as South Asian. Moss Side is understood as ‘black’ and typically as ‘Caribbean’, but only 34 per cent of the local population describe themselves as ‘black’ and only 10 per cent as ‘Black-Caribbean’. Gorton is divided into two wards and is typically described by respondents as ‘white (and implicitly British)’, whilst only 50 per cent in Gorton South and 60 per cent in Gorton North describe as white-British. ¹ Respondents included people read crudely as ‘black’, ‘Asian’, ‘white (British)’ and ‘Eastern-European (white)’. ² They can also be differentiated in the ways that they are oriented towards certain social experiences. For example, the respondents included people who talked about being married, single, unemployed, in a career, in education, had children and so on. Significantly, they share a common historical location and one that is spatially located within Manchester and all were alert to discourses that centred on the neighbourhoods in which the research was based.

The Silencing of Race

In an interview, Mina, a 28-year-old woman who described herself as British-Asian, began to talk about several different neighbourhoods in Manchester in which she had lived while growing up. She recalled how in each of these predominantly white areas she and her siblings were repeatedly the targets of racism. She told me this as part of an explanation for her decision to live and socialise in areas where there is a more visible ethnic minority population and especially a more visible ‘Asian’ population. She says of the area she currently lives, ‘it feels safe because there’s a lot of Asians round here’. It is in this telling that she becomes concerned that she might be interpreted as racist:

Please don’t think I’m racist, I’m not racist. It’s just what I’ve experienced when I was younger … You’re going to think that I’m racist. Honest to God, please don’t think I’m racist, I’m not racist.

Mina is concerned that by naming racism, she will herself be constructed as racist. To name racism, it is suggested, could itself be interpreted as racism. This is a troubling paradox and sets us quite particular challenges when seeking to reveal and resist racism. To understand how Mina’s concern has developed it is necessary to put her story into the context of the interview itself, and also into the broader context of narratives about living with diversity in Manchester and the UK. In doing so, this conversation fragment becomes a useful device with which to start to try to understand the (im)possibilities of naming racism when race itself is denied. There has been recognition for the need to retain race because it is a key means through which to organise grievances (Gilroy, 2002). Yet Mina’s story suggests that we need to first understand how this might be made possible when race is silenced. We need to examine what happens when the absence of race has become a ‘familiar reality’ (Collins, 2000).

In the UK, the absence of the words race and racism in policy-making have become increasingly conspicuous and of increasing concern (Kapoor, 2011). The parameters of discussions about living with diversity have instead been reframed through suggesting ‘benign’ or ‘de-racialised’ discourses. Race has been replaced by terms of ambiguity that permit confusion and obscure the relations of power. Most obviously this has been documented through the move towards ethnicist and culturalist discourses, which have been interrogated in particular through representations of certain ethnic ‘groups’. In the UK, Muslim Asian women, for example, have been represented as an ‘oppressed’ and ‘powerless’ group (Dwyer, 2000), because issues such as ‘in-group’ marriage practices and the proposed age limits for spousal visas have become a dominant culturalist paradigm through which Muslim Asian women are understood (Brah and Minhas, 1985; Chantler et al., 2009). By imagining Muslim women as oppressed within their own ‘group’, the responsibility for oppression is contained and disassociated from broader structural processes. The inclusion of gender in these representations reinforces the culturalist stereotype rather than, as is demanded, challenges the ways that gender and ethnicity are used as mutually enforcing axes of subordination. Indeed, together they are employed as a ‘morally acceptable’ means of fixing ‘difference’. By foregrounding ethnicity and culture rather than race, a ‘morally acceptable’ means of reproducing race emerges. This, crucially, disavows the role of privilege and subordination. Recent criticisms of policies of multiculturalism have encouraged these paradigms when they reproduce ‘morally acceptable’ discourses that construct ‘groups’ and claim that it is precisely the recognition of difference that has brought about its failure. In doing so, they attempt to appeal to liberal concerns (Phillips, 2007) through the politicisation of cultural difference, or ‘racialisation of ethnicity’ (Hall, 2000). In this way it is then possible to blame cultural ‘difference’, for example, for enabling British citizens to become terrorists, as David Cameron did in 2011. These kinds of discursive mechanisms will be of particular relevance to Mina’s story.

In the first place, the difficulties Mina encounters when articulating her experiences are part of a broader challenge to be heard within a white dominant space. My position as a white woman interviewer is relevant here since my presence represents the white position from which the demand to ‘explain’ oneself originates. Although Mina can at least identify whiteness when in conversation she identifies me as part of ‘you lot’, ³ she must respond to how she is positioned by drawing on certain understood narratives of what it is to be Asian and implicitly as Other, because she is at least ‘recognised’ through this narrative (Butler, 2005). This point will become crucial to revealing the salience of race to the way that Mina and the other respondents are positioned and position themselves. First, however, it is worth reflecting on where Mina’s concern arose. In other words, how it emerged when Mina was asked a broad question about her day-to-day life in Manchester. This requires thinking about the specifics of her interview and how she chooses to direct the conversation, but also how she situates this within the broader narrative of her description of the city. Mina was not asked in the interview to justify her choice to live in an area often described locally as an ‘Asian’ neighbourhood. There are things, however, that we can draw from her decision to direct the conversation in this particular way. The way in which she does so suggests that Mina is concerned with defending this decision, which is perhaps particularly important for her to do in light of the discourses around self-segregated communities of Asian Muslims, which have gathered pace since 9/11 and the riots in 2001.

Mina has ‘chosen’ to live in this neighbourhood, whilst policies of multiculturalism and community cohesion have demanded that ethnic minorities reflect on the way in which they relate to different communities and choose allegiances to one group over another (Solomos and Back, 1996). This was encouraged under New Labour’s community cohesion agenda and has since been taken up by the present coalition government via its Big Society initiative. These policies reproduce a form of racial historicism, which Goldberg (2001) otherwise describes on a global level, when some ‘communities’, typically inner-city neighbourhoods with a proportionately high ethnic minority population, are represented as ‘backwards’ and out of step with the ‘liberal’ and ‘tolerant’ narrative of nation. This has encouraged an ‘acceptable’ means of exclusion and marginalisation (Fortier, 2008). Ethnic ‘communities’ are not, in this way, solely constructed as different, but more pertinently always as Other. As Jodi Melamed (2006) notes, this means that people who are not read as white (and British) can only fall within one of two groups, the ‘healthy’ or ‘pathologised’ Other. This distinction was revealed in recent criticisms of policies of multiculturalism when they were accused of allowing for some ethnic minorities to be too different, by encouraging people to adopt values that are not part of an imagined ‘common’ national identity. ⁴

Ash Amin (2010) argues that it is not the ‘healthy Other’, or what he calls the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’, that is subjected to new forms of racism, but rather the ‘most visible, vulnerable, needy, ill-equipped stranger’. However, this idea is a simplification, because its assertion relies on passing for a ‘cosmopolitan stranger’, which is itself reliant on being in or of the right place and being able to perform and invoke ideas associated with ‘acceptable’ difference in representations of the self. This is difficult, because black bodies are always made visible in predominantly white spaces. This is compounded in inner-city neighbourhoods, such as those that Mina was describing in her interview, because they are not constructed in a way that allows for the accommodation of a ‘cosmopolitan stranger’ and are instead scrutinised in terms of levels of interaction between different so-called ethnic and cultural ‘communities’. For Mina, passing as the ‘healthy Other’ is difficult. Yet, even in the absence of recognition she is ‘under assimilative pressure to conform to the behavioural norm’ (Puwar, 2004: 150). This involves adhering (at least within the narrative she gives me) to the illusion of a tolerant nation and, when difference is marked, to an ‘illusory cosmopolitanism’ (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010). This entails the disavowal of the meanings and effects of race. Hence, Mina can equate her discomfort about living in a white neighbourhood with the racism she has experienced, because the denial allows for the imagining of an experience devoid of relations to power and subordination.

Neutralised Narratives and the Disavowal of Racism

The reproduction of race and the subordination of racialised bodies have become inherent tools of everyday practice and allow for the reproduction of ‘folk summaries’ (Amin, 2010). These processes are deeply entrenched in a collective history. This means it is possible to think about how we ‘talk’ and ‘do’ race in relation to the way discourses are (re)produced through ‘the repetition of conventions and prior acts of authorisation’ (Ahmed, 2004: 11, my emphasis). Respondents’ narratives help reveal discursive practices that are embedded in the everyday and are built around cultural symbols and repertoires that echo broader public narratives (Lawler, 2002). These kinds of narratives can therefore alert us to the way that race is articulated via acts of silencing and through coded references (Frankenberg, 1993), as well as more explicit practices. Focusing the study on the social, cultural and historical conditions of the city of Manchester helped to draw out repertoires of race that are embedded within the narrative of the city. Manchester is typically constructed as a tolerant multicultural city. The City Council, for example, describes Manchester in the following way:

A passionately local and global city, its diversity and tolerance will be reflected in the richness of the city’s experience, economy and the warmth of its welcome. ⁵

The respondents in the study echoed these ideas of Manchester as a ‘tolerant’, ‘accessible’ and ‘open-minded’ city. They did this using the following kind of description:

That’s what I love about Manchester cos you can go anywhere and just feel comfortable, it’s like home. You know, you don’t find many problems here in terms of like racism and stuff like that, it’s quite open, everyone gets along with everyone. (Maz, ‘Asian’)

In addition to stories of tolerance about the city itself, the respondents were keen to emphasise how they socialised with people from different (ethnic) ‘backgrounds’. These forms of narration were particularly pertinent amongst the respondents when they sought to distinguish themselves as a ‘post-race’ age group in contrast to their parents and grandparents (see Harries, 2012). Stories about Manchester were thus produced in such a way as to suggest that ‘spaces, languages, positions or structures are neutral’ (Puwar, 2004: 135). Paradoxically, however, whilst multiculture or ‘mixing’ was invoked to suggest the meaninglessness of race, respondents’ narratives drew attention to the significance of race through these explanations. As a consequence, the respondents who are not read as white-British become caught up in a series of contradictory processes as they talk about multiple levels of experience. These respondents are faced with a particular challenge. They all experience racism and recognise it as such, but in light of ‘deracialised’ narratives of the city there is a difficulty in naming it. This is revealed when explicit forms of racism emerge in narratives through personal experience and are simultaneously downplayed or denied. In interviews with black and Asian respondents this denial is often in response to the potential to be read as ‘victim’, but also forms part of the grander narrative about tolerance within the UK and Manchester context in which they are a part.

Hamid

Hamid describes himself as Black-British and the experiences he describes are ones in which he is marked, in spite of his Muslim name, as Black ‘Caribbean’, because of his appearance, location and accent. When asked if there are any parts of Manchester that he avoids, Hamid explains that he avoids Salford, ⁶ because of his experience of racism there. However, he is at the same time compelled to reiterate that he could go there but chooses not to, because otherwise he would contradict his prior claim that Manchester is an ‘accessible’ city:

[I avoid] certain parts of Salford, but that’s because it’s pure and utter racist. It’s not that I’m afraid of certain people; it’s just that you just don’t want to be the one to go there; it’s not worth the hassle.

What becomes interesting is that as soon as Hamid has raised the subject of racism, he then begins a hasty retreat. Following from his initial description of Salford, I asked him if he had similar experiences in other parts of Manchester. He begins by downplaying racism when he says the following in a jocular manner:

It’s not as blatant and as predominant [in Gorton] as it is Salford … you’d get one or two gangs that’ll give you dirty looks or shout out, ‘You black bastard’, but it won’t be like, they won’t chase you down the street like in Salford. It is not as predominant and it’s not as blatant and in your face.

Finally, he appears to change his mind about the way he understands these experiences altogether:

I think most people who say they’re racist ain’t racist. Especially in Salford, I don’t think Salford’s a racist area.

When asked why some people were described as racist, he says that people are just ‘confused’. He then suggests that it’s not really their fault and proffers an explanation for why some people in Salford act the way they do:

There might be one or two people that are that they’re afraid of or look up to that are out and out racist and just to be in their good people’s good books, they act racist.

Within this altered narrative he is keen to convey that when racism ‘appears’ to emerge he is not subjected to it, because of his ability to pass as ‘normal’:

The fact is, they’ll be racist to you, but if you’re from the area, or you know someone that they know then they won’t see you as a black person but just as a friend, or someone they know. It’s when they don’t know you, is when the racism comes into it. I know a friend he’s got racist family members but cos I’m friends with him, they treat me like they must be colour-blind and like I’m just normal, another one of his white friends, but when I’m not with him and they see another black person in the street, you see the racism in them, they’re hating him and that proves they’re not being racist it’s just a thingy for them innit.

Hamid’s narrative reflects the difficulty that acknowledging racism entails, because this also requires the recognition of a structure of inequality in which dominant and subordinated positions are ascribed. Bev Skeggs (1997) argues that marginalised people attempt to escape marginalised positionings by taking care not to resemble the ‘real’ thing. In doing so, people attempt to pass instead as ‘neutral’. Hamid does this when he develops a location within his narrative as the non-victim and as someone with the knowledge that can explain how racism works locally. In doing so, he describes himself as ‘normal’ and does not challenge the racism he has named.

Wendy Brown (2006) has argued that the normatively inscribed language of values and tolerance is mobilised in order to define who is and who is not a legitimate subject, by defining those who ‘mix’ and those who do not. Consequently, it can be understood as a euphemism for assimilation (Fortier, 2008). In many ways, Hamid claims to epitomise the very notion of the ‘healthy Other’ through his ability to mix. In the interview, he describes relationships and interactions that cross ethnic and class differences, often cultivated through people he has met at work and since leaving school. He talks often about how he is able to talk to anyone and describes himself as ‘classless’ to explain how he can fit in to any situation. He emphasises his ability to transcend social structures through his own geographical mobility, from growing up in east Manchester close to an Irish traveller community to Longsight and Moss Side and now with friends in affluent white suburban neighbourhoods. Like Mina (above) he is keen to distinguish himself from those who do not ‘mix’. He constructs himself in this way partly as a means to state his right to the city and the right to call himself British. This is a sentiment echoed by other respondents, such as here by Tony:

You’ll get some people who think they can’t go some places, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no place that I can’t go, I was born in this country, do you know what I mean? (Tony, ‘Black’)

These statements are, however, often contradicted because the city is not as ‘open’ as imagined. Tony for example, like Hamid, explains how he would not go to Salford because ‘they are nuts’ and beat black people up there. These conflicting statements are important because they point to the right people have to go anywhere, even if this is not always made possible.

Carina

Like Hamid, Carina who is read as black but refuses to describe herself using any racialised or ethnic label also attempts to explain away racism. In this example, Carina reverses the status of ‘victim’ from the person at whom racism is directed onto the perpetrator who knows no better. She argues that failure to understand why someone is racist signifies closed-mindedness. This needs to be read within the broader context of Carina’s interview in which, like Hamid, she disregards the significance of race in her interactions with others. She echoes the tendency instead to emphasise a notion of convivial relations, articulated through tolerance and multiculture:

[My friend] was saying that her gran was quite racist, but it’s not intentional racism, it’s just because it’s what she knows and the generation she’s come from and the experiences she’s had with different cultures. And so we started talking about, you know, how privileged we are and how open-minded we are, but at the same time we’re as close-minded as the next person who doesn’t like black people because they’ve had a different experience to us, so you know, ok it would be better if they accepted, you know, people for who they were not because of the colour of their skin or whatever. But if we can’t accept that they find it challenging to think openly then we’re not giving them credit in a sense.

Although Carina does not articulate the same concern as Mina, she likewise indicates a reluctance to name racism when she reverses responsibility for it. This suggests again that understandings of racism, when they do arise, disavow the meanings of race and associated relationships to structures of power.

Part of the problem with acknowledging racism relates to the construction of a set of neutralising narratives (i.e. those which suggest an absence of meaning) about people and places that have become so embedded that they are difficult to challenge. This is illustrated by another respondent, Petra, who remarks on how she often follows the staple narrative in which racism is denied. It is only later in her interview and on reflection that she acknowledges that, as a Czech woman, she regularly comes up against racism within her own peer group:

I don’t know anyone from [my age group], well no that’s not true actually. Some of my uni friends have problems with Eastern-European people, even though I’m Eastern European, they have no problems with me [laughs].

The reinscription of stereotypes and the denial of racism by respondents reflect the pressure to ‘conform’. Partly as a consequence of the force of these pressures, Omi and Winant (2002) argue that the effects of race cannot be exposed in the ‘popular imagination’, because they are too essential and too integral to social order. Given the opportunity for reflection during the interview, several respondents remarked on their own contradictory narratives and in doing so pointed to these pressures. One respondent, when talking about policing in Moss Side, for example, notes that it is not always possible to lay claim to the effect and significance of race, because it is taken for granted that the area is worse and the policing is justified, in spite of unequal policing practices. In doing so, he points to the embeddedness of race and suggests this makes it difficult to unmake, because the currency of race is denied.

The Salience of Race

The respondents’ narratives allow us to explore the different ways in which ‘certain subject positions are discursively available for individuals to occupy’ (Byrne, 2003: 31). This can indicate the different ways in which race is managed in normative discourses and how people are positioned in relation to them. Since this discourse relies on denying structures of power, it does nothing to challenge processes of exclusion and subordination. Through her research in schools, Suki Ali suggests that challenges to ‘normative’ (white) discourses are difficult to make, because they are typically being negotiated in white hegemonic spaces and do not therefore usually engage the support of ‘enough disruptive “Others”’ (2003: 177). Ali’s study is relevant here because the space of the interview and the spaces talked about reflect white dominant discursive spaces. Some people are denied access to parts of the city when they become subjected to racism and struggle with competing discourses when they attempt to explain these experiences. They struggle to be both part of a unifying narrative, as competent multicultural citizens, and guard against being positioned as one of the ‘pathologised’ Others. The way in which individuals are positioned is therefore entwined with how they can engage with discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance.

Nasreen

Nasreen’s story is used here to demonstrate how aspects of her identity, beyond being ‘an Asian-Muslim-woman’, are typically denied. Nasreen does make use of these labels and she is not making a claim against them as such, but rather she is making a claim against what being an Asian-Muslim-woman means in the spaces she occupies. Nasreen’s story illustrates how respondents who are subjected to racialised positionings must then claim other identifications, because they are not otherwise assumed. ⁷ Nasreen grew up in a middle-class white neighbourhood, but this identity is denied her and she is often instead assumed to be from Longsight:

If I speak to white people, they might assume, ‘Oh yeah, she’s Longsight, a lot of Asians there’.

Her association with Longsight is more than certainly exacerbated because Nasreen wears a hijab. Her scarf complements the image of the ‘traditional’ Asian woman living in the ‘traditional’ Asian neighbourhood (Dwyer, 1999). In this way, Nasreen represents the ‘quintessential Other’ (Brah, 1996: 135). To resist this identification, she relies on a representation that exemplifies not only her everyday life as a woman constructed as ‘Asian’ and ‘Muslim’ in Manchester, but also her identity as British. She uses her photo diary to construct a narrative by including people, practices and objects to illustrate this multi-faceted identity. In doing so, she must take on ‘recognisable forms’ (hooks, 1992: 26) of difference that relate to how she is positioned in normative discourses. For example, Nasreen emphasises the importance of her faith as a central component to her life by including photographs of herself teaching children how to read the Qur’an and working as a volunteer for a Muslim charity. She also draws attention to things that might be considered typical of a British family, by including photos of Scrabble and PlayStation. She is also keen to draw attention to the ‘pride’ of her husband in being Scottish through the purposeful inclusion of a bottle of Irn Bru in a photograph taken in their living room. These objects are not only ‘things’, but are carriers of meaning which resonate with ‘broader public narratives and symbolic systems’ (Lawler, 2002: 252–3). They work because both she and I inhabit the same cultural space where these meanings are produced. In other parts of the interview she talks about the way she met her husband through friends, in what she describes as a ‘non-traditional’ manner. She explains that they are ‘non-traditional’, because they represent a ‘mixed’ marriage, since she is of Bangladeshi heritage and he is of Pakistani heritage. This reflects how she understands her marriage to be ‘mixed’. However, these formulations also rely on our shared knowledge of how Asianness is typically constructed within the UK, as some ‘thing’ which is static. Nasreen talks against these representations as a means to both disrupt the stereotype and to carve out her own identity. By emphasising a multi-faceted identity through her ‘non-traditional’ or non-essentialised Asianness and Britishness, Nasreen is also acting to legitimate her account and claim citizenship. This is made necessary because Nasreen explains how she is never assumed to be British, but demands recognition ‘cos I’ve got a British passport’.

The story so far suggests that Nasreen is challenging dominant representations of Asianness. Whilst this is still true, Nasreen herself does not articulate this claim in this way. Indeed, when asked whether people make assumptions about her, she only associates this practice to other Asians, such as here when she talks about an interview she had for a job in a shop:

By allocating racist practices to other ‘Asians’ as she seeks to challenge her own positioning as an ‘Asian wearing a scarf’, Nasreen is able to query the way she is positioned without disturbing the ‘regime of truth’ (Butler, 2005). Indeed, by placing the burden of responsibility for the way she is read onto other ‘Asians’, Nasreen simultaneously claims an ‘insider’ narrative. She goes further when she equates this experience to racism and iterates that she cannot think of any racist experience from white or black people. This is despite her recollection in an earlier part of the interview of two separate incidents of racism. In the first she talks about visiting a friend and describes people throwing stones at her car and shouting ‘Paki’. In the second she talks about house hunting. After visiting one property on her own she found the front door graffitied with the words, ‘No Pakis’. She explained how she returned the next day with her husband to meet the estate agent to discover the agent had removed the graffiti and did not inform them about it. Nasreen does not talk about these incidents as examples of racism in the way that she does about the job interview with the Asian shopkeeper. Instead, she downplays these moments. She adds to the story about having stones thrown at her that, ‘I suppose a couple of times over what, six years is not really … like when I started going there a lot, I suppose is not that bad’. It may be that, like Mina, she struggles to talk about racism amongst white people, because she is talking to someone who is white. If this is the case, however, the matter is no less significant.

Nasreen’s account draws attention to the difficulty of articulating racism, but, like Mina’s, also to a disparity in the way that the racism of white people can be articulated, because of the way she is positioned. This becomes increasingly evident in the following two extracts from Nasreen. Both come as a response to a question at the end of the interview, ‘Do you think some people hold these kinds of things [ethnic identifications] as more important than others?’. In the first extract, Nasreen equates a ‘strong’ Muslim and Caribbean ‘community’ identity with an unwillingness to mix with people of different ethnicities and is quite disparaging of this kind of attitude. In the second, she talks about a TV documentary about and called BNP Wives, in which a woman refuses treatment from a black midwife. Here, whilst she says she cannot understand the attitude, she says she recognises that it is something important to the woman in question:

I know people who hold their ideas of being Muslim very strong and they don’t want to mix and things and I don’t agree with that. I am aware of that and I know with the Caribbean community, one of my friends, she’s Caribbean and she put some henna on her hand and her dad was like, ‘You’re not Somalian, what are you putting that on for?’ So it must be in that kind of community as well kind of thing.

You’ve got the people like the BNPs as well, they’re very much white English aren’t they? With their identity being white and that probably affects who they interact with and their opinion of things, yeah, cos I was watching this programme about BNP wives and she was saying that in her birth plan that she wrote down that she wanted a white lady to deliver her baby and when it came to labour, a black woman went and she was very very angry about it and I didn’t see what … to me it doesn’t make sense, what difference does it make? But that clearly is something that mattered to her, why I don’t know, but I suppose it’s just something that’s important to her.

In both extracts, Nasreen is conscious of the difficulty in engaging in a discussion about whiteness and racism in the same way that Mina was (above) and she is compelled, like Mina, to distinguish herself from the stereotype of the self-segregating minority. When Nasreen talks about being called ‘a Paki’, she risks reproducing herself in a subordinated position; by not labelling this as racism, this becomes less likely. Nasreen’s attempt to explain racism and understand prejudiced views can, therefore, also be interpreted as a form of resistance to the way she is positioned. She is aware of how she is read and wants to disidentify with those meanings. This brings her into contact with conflicting tensions. She moves to position herself in a non-subordinated position and away from her positionings as ‘Asian-Muslim-woman’. She wants to claim legitimacy and attempts to do this by reiterating dominant discourses about ‘strong’ Muslims and a homogeneous ethnic community, which Nasreen herself describes as ‘narrow-minded’. This also requires being complicit in negating differentiated experiences, hence why it is then difficult to name racism.

In their interviews, respondents attempt to claim a neutral location, rather than challenge the hierarchies that subordinate and regulate. They reproduce racialised forms of representation in order to work against them and construct themselves as ‘tolerant’, or ‘healthy’ Others. In doing so, they reinscribe the structures they wish to disassociate from and consequently this process ‘assumes a fit between the reality of one group and the naturalising of its definition’ (Skeggs, 1997: 91). Respondents claim that competencies of tolerance are learned through growing up and living in multicultural urban spaces. However, these are inherently bound up with ideas about nationhood and the construction of ‘legitimate’ subjects, which is only in part recognised through adherence to ‘normative’ discourses of tolerance and liberalism.

Conclusion

This article draws attention to the impact of the silencing of race in people’s everyday lives. It raises a number of important concerns that surround the possibilities of naming racism, which form part of people’s everyday experiences. This is made particularly audible when respondents disavow the racism that they experience and struggle to name racism when to do so is somewhat counter-intuitively understood to be racist and intolerant. Recent literature has been useful in broadening our understanding of how race is managed through processes of silencing employed at a macro level, but does not offer significant insight into how this is experienced by people in their everyday lives, or how people struggle with, or against living with, these processes. This article attempts to close this gap by examining how silencing impacts people’s lives and how, within this context, racism can be resisted at a mundane and personal level. Importantly, it reveals how the process of silencing extends to stifling possibilities to talk about experiences of racism. In short, it demonstrates that without talking race, racism is difficult to name.

Through their narratives the respondents in this study imply that, as one respondent states clearly, ‘we are all the same’. This is intended as an anti-racist claim, but does not work as such because it fails to acknowledge difference in experience. In emphasising sameness, a sense of universal humanism is intended. However, what emerges instead is the denial of difference in experience and the reality of racism. Crucial in this is that the reproduction of race is not understood in relation to the operation of power. This is made apparent when we see how racism is denied in the accounts presented here, which simultaneously reveal racist practices, including very explicit forms of racism. It is particularly apparent when respondents suggest that to name racism is itself racist or intolerant. The respondents deny racism in order to make claims to a neutralised (i.e. absent of racialised meanings) and tolerant positioning, even when this is denied them. In doing so, they reproduce an understanding of racism that is devoid of relations to power. That is not to say that they are not aware of these relations, only that they are working within the parameters of race talk that are available through understood acceptable narratives. This is indicative of the ways in which the silencing of race has affected the way that racism is understood.

The narratives presented here demand that we ask the question, why is racism denied? Or, why is it so difficult to articulate? This study not only demonstrates how the silencing of race makes it difficult for people subjected to racism to name it as such, but also suggests that they are under pressure to actively deny these processes in order to be conceived as part of the behavioural ‘norm’. Naming racism conflicts with the imagined notion of a ‘post-race’ liberal nation of which respondents saw themselves a part. People must, therefore, struggle to be part of a unifying narrative, by constructing themselves as competent multicultural citizens and struggle against being positioned as the ‘pathological’ Other (Melamed, 2006). Structural hierarchies of power that are instrumental in maintaining processes of subordination through racialisation therefore typically remain unchecked. People are under pressure to deny their experience, rather than challenge the hierarchies that regulate and subordinate. This has significant implications for how racism and inequalities can be named and acknowledged and sets us quite particular challenges if we wish to redress the problems of race.

Race and the subordination of racialised bodies are sustained through a ‘racial etiquette’ that has become an inherent tool of everyday practice (Omi and Winant, 2002). Consequently, as this study demonstrates, we need to pay as much attention to the reproduction of liberal ideas of ‘mixing’ and ‘tolerating’ difference as we pay to explicit renderings of racialised difference. Indeed, this article shows how we need to think about how they are articulated in everyday life as part of the same package of processes of subordination, rather than as separate projects. This requires us to think carefully about the ways in which discourses are encouraged and reproduced. This in turn requires accessing talk in quite particular ways. The research methods employed here proved vital in this respect. Allowing for race to emerge through narratives of the everyday was important in helping reveal those multiple and contradictory levels of experience when race and racism are named and simultaneously denied. The narratives elicited in this way demonstrated how the inherent nature of everyday tools of subordination means that they are deeply embedded in the mundane and not only often go unrecognised (by white people), but are hard to draw recognition to. The article argues then that, in order to suitably address this, we must bring attention back to the meanings and effects of race in everyday life in order to effectively challenge racism and the fact of white privilege.