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.
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Mapping changing identities: new directions in uncertain times |
| Editors | Claire Alexander, Raminder Kaur, Brett St. Louis |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-0415726047 |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Oct 2013 |