Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Critics have challenged several untenable claims in the treatment of
whiteness in critical race studies. Anderson (1998), looking back self-
critically on her own research in Vancouver's Chinatown noted the limita-
tions of the binary us/them categorization of Europe and not Europe, white
and non-white. For one thing, such 'grand systems and tidy totalities' (1998:
205) are in danger of reifying culture, and ironically undermine social con-
structionism itself that argues for the dismantling of such monolithic enti-
ties into their constituent social processes. But even in its own terms
whiteness is not a fixed and constant target, for as American social histori-
ans have shown, a nineteenth century Yankee essence of American white-
ness consecutively absorbed the Irish, Jews, Southern Europeans and
perhaps before too long the 'model minorities' of Japanese, Chinese,
Koreans and Filipinos (Ong 2003). The historical elasticity of the concept
contradicts any allusion to some fixed race content.
Then there is the significant danger of marginalizing other important
lines of stratification such as class and gender in any account that fixes upon
race as a total explanatory system, for alternate social locations then tend to
be 'uncritically assimilated into a hegemonic narrative whole' (Anderson
1998: 205). The need for attention to the intersections of various subject
positions - race, class, gender, age, religion, etc. - in understanding the
actions and experiences of marginalized (or privileged) groups requires a
complex and grounded methodology that most likely will avoid grand expla-
nations (Winders 2003; Housel 2009). Dua (2007: 192) goes on to state
that 'since researchers continue to employ singular categories such as
gender, race, ability, or sexual orientation to analyse questions of inequality,
experiences, and identity, our current ways of conceptualizing inequality,
lived experience and identity are significantly limited'.
A third limitation of critical race studies is the compression of human
subjectivity that follows from the privileging of race in identity formation, a
failing that has both conceptual and moral difficulties. The 'complexly dif-
ferentiated and positioned subject' (Anderson 1998: 220) disappears
entirely from view, to be replaced by a flimsy mannequin sustaining a binary
view of society, populated by vulnerable victims and demonized oppressors.
So the anti-racist is in danger of inverting the categories of the racist while
retaining their logical structure. It is precisely this inversion that retains the
dualisms it rejects that has attracted criticism from Alastair Bonnett: 'anti-
racists have often placed a myth of whiteness at the centre of their discourse.
The myth views 'being white' as an immutable condition with clear and
distinct moral attributes. These attributes often include: being racist; not
experiencing racism; being an oppressor; not experiencing oppression;
silencing; not being silenced' (Bonnett 1996).
Accusations of racism are not only conceptual but also establish moral
and political advantage. Particularly in a society valuing multicultural
