TASA 2003 Conference, University of New England, 46 December 2003

The Turn to Whiteness: Race, Nation

and Cultural Sociology
Ben Wadham
School of Education
Flinders University
South Australia
GPO Box 2100 SA 5001

Abstract
Critical research into whiteness has articulated the fashion in which racial
identity can become experienced and seen as normal or just human. The
invisibility of whiteness is a marker of its naturalization and dominance.
Similarly, studies of masculine identities as a site of cultural domination describe the ability to represent the natural as implicated in masculine dominance. In this paper I describe a framework for understanding the relations
of whiteness. I describe differentiation within whiteness in relation to discourses of Aboriginal Reconciliation and Australian national identity. I describe the idea of the logic of identity as used by writers like Theodor
Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall and describe the different subjectivities that inhabit the discursive economy of Australian race relations. In
particular I focus upon the impulse for certainty and authenticity within the
logic of Australian national identity commenting upon the ways in which
discourse and practice reduce or widen the opportunities for conceiving and
accepting cultural difference.

Australias place within global relations is undergoing rapid change. As a nation we are intensely engaged with questions of cultural and national identity. These questions include our changing relationship with countries in the
Asia-pacific region and with our traditional allies, reactions to the social
movements of the 1970s and the liberalisation of the nation-state, strategies
of managing 20th and 21st century immigrants and multiculturalism; the legitimacy of our presence on this landmass and our engagement with the Indigenous peoples; and more recently with the threat of global terrorism the
second Gulf War and our implication in the US led project of world democratisation.
British sociologist Stuart Hall remarked in the early 1990s: as sociologists
we must return to the question of identity, for the question of identity has

Wadham The Turn to Whiteness

returned to us (2000: 144). Hall is commenting upon the way in which the
questions of race and racial identity have re-emerged as central to the construction of an authentic organic national identity, on being British or in our
context, Australian. It seems to me that the question of identity, and identification, is central to understanding the many tensions and social changes
that shape contemporary global cultural relations and Australian national
identity.
My principle aim in this paper is to discuss the growth of interest in whiteness as a concept to describe the process and practices of racialisation. It is
also to begin to establish a cultural sociological approach to understanding
race, nation and identity. The concern with ideas of race and racial identity,
as significant shapers of Australian identity, scaffolds this approach. Critical
whiteness studies, I argue, is a culturally and historically relevant theoretical approach for illuminating the racial terrain of Australian cultural relations. In this paper I begin by briefly charting the move from studies of race
and racism to the critical study of whiteness. I then discuss the contribution
of cultural studies to theories of identity. I draw upon Theodor Adornos notion of identitarian thinking and logic of disintegration to outline the operation of dominance and the racialisation of whiteness.

A Sociology of Race and the Turn to Whiteness

Questions of race and racism emerged strongly in western sociology after the
cultural turn of late 1960s. The social upheavals of this time represented a
widespread cynicism in the project of modernity as it manifested in the apparatus and ideal of the nation-state. Feminism, student protest, gay liberation and struggles for indigenous and black rights were some of the new social movements that emerged in alliance to challenge the hegemony of western systems of governance. Sociological analysis of race and racism emerged
alongside to explain these cultural dynamics focusing predominantly on the
disadvantage of the Other. Critical theory, encompassing feminist and postcolonial critiques also grew in stature and influence.
The racism of these times, and before, in Britain, America and Australia, for
example, was seen as a raw form of racism that focused upon the physiological characteristics of the Other. Anthias & Yuval-Davis (1992: 14) explain
that it is problematic to presume that contemporary racism is endemically
tied to the notion of race. By this they mean that racism is not always based
upon distinct racial typologies or stereotypes today. Tucker (1987) describes
this as the new racism. Tucker (1987:18) explains the new racism in Britain
as appealing to a homogenous society [which] is seen as the essential ingredient for social harmony. The new racism thus appeals to different
meanings and conditions than the old racism. The old racism being the belief and practice that perceived groups possess distinctive characteristics
which determine their capacities and behaviour, traits graded as inferior or
superior (Tucker, 1987:16). Stratton (1998: 13-14) argues that this new racism, in the Australian context, is most voraciously deployed by the One Nation leader Pauline Hanson as a form of culturalism where some cultures are
seen to be incompatible with the Australian national culture.

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Gale (1999: 2-4) draws upon the British experience of the new racism in the
1980s under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher to describe the link between racism and nationalism. Gordon and Klug (1986) argue that the new
racism seeks to generate a sense of the nationalist as natural, as the rightful
possessor of land and nation. Within this discourse the nationalist is seen as
losing their culture to the immigrant. Cultural sameness within the nation is
exhorted, and the white nationalist is seen as the victim of reverse racism
(Gale, 1999: 2-3). Tucker argues that this form of racism has adopted a way
of describing difference in racial terms, but avoiding the vocabularies of biological racism that immediately identify the subject as using racism to articulate their point.
Andrew Lattas describes this racialisation of Others based upon their relationship to the same of White Australia as egalitarian racism (2001: 108).
Slavoj Zizek, writing of similar concern within Eastern Europe describes this
desire with homogeneity and cultural sameness as postmodern racism (1995:
226). Zizek argues that:
what we must be particularly attentive to is the difference between
this postmodern racism which now rages around Europe and the
traditional form of racism. The old racism was direct and raw they
(Jews, blacks, Arabs, Eastern Europeans) are lazy, violent, plotting,
eroding our national substance, etc., whereas the new racism is reflected, as it were squared racism, which is why it can well assume
the form of its opposite, of the fight against racism (1995: 226).
Lattas (2001: 106) argues that this squared racism is a principal theme in
contemporary Australian racism. This theme emerges in the voice of its subjects who deny that they are engaging in racism. Lattas (2001: 107) describes the new racism in Australia as articulating hostility toward the Other
while refusing to inferiorise the body of the Other. In other words, previous
forms of racism have explicitly inferiorised the Aboriginal body in relation to
the white body, however the new disembodied racism refuses to draw upon
such discursive techniques. Hence, appeals to difference are made through
appeals to equality, that we are all the same. Indeed, the claim is made that
those others who have been constructed as the victims of racism are now
racist, seeking special treatment when we should all be seeking to live
equally and to be treated equally.
The turn to whiteness follows this trajectory also attempting to explain this
shift in racism and racialisation from a preoccupation with the inferiority of
the Other to a preoccupation with equality and sameness. The sociological
concern with race that emerged previous to, and during, the 70s and 80s
has thus become an anachronism. New discussions of race and racism, and
the development of critical approaches to race and racism have developed
alongside these cultural changes. Whiteness studies is one contemporary attempt to makes sense of these changes.

Cultural Sociology: Nation, Power, Identity

The ideal of the nation is constantly shifting and changing (Bhabha, 1990: 1).
In Australia, ideas of whiteness have pervaded ideas of the nation and the
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Wadham The Turn to Whiteness

Australian. White Australian cultural policy officially ended its term in 1972
when the White Australia Policy was officially renounced. Writers like Ghassan Hage describe the racial context in Australia as shaped by an intense
national desire for a white nation (2000). Moreton-Robinson (2001) talks of
the Australian nation being established upon a possessive investment in patriarchal whiteness. Schech and Haggis (2001) describe the contemporary
turn to a monocultural white national identity. Moreover, the phenomena
described as postmodern, new or cultural racism scaffolds these accounts
they all reflect this cultural turn to refocus the accommodation of Self within
the national space.
Whiteness studies analyse these cultural practices in terms of a reversal of
the focus on the Other to a focus upon the Self as well. Mainstream sociology
has been criticised for the tendency to focus upon the victims of racism
rather than the perpetrators. Richard Dyer explains that race is usually attributed to Others: to the oppressed, violated and disadvantaged (1997:4).
Dyer (1997) suggests that race has become a label signifying simply difference, in many contexts leaving the attributes of the commentator unquestioned. The invisibility of whiteness, or the capacity of whiteness to contribute to a representation of sameness, is thus a fortress of white race privilege
(Frankenburg, 1993, 1997). Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson
notes that, as long as whiteness remains invisible in analyses race is the
prison reserved for the Other (2000: xix).
Whiteness studies, with its practice of reversing the gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers
and imaginers; the serving to the served (Morrison, 1992:90) is employed to
disrupt the integrated character of whiteness: to defamiliarise its naturalisation and its rendering as invisible and taken-for granted.
However, there is little theoretical work that uncovers the construction and
operation of dominance. The literature on whiteness more often than not
stops at this claim of reversal. This focus upon the relations of dominance
however is central to critical theory, namely postcolonialism and global feminism, but also the work of the Frankfurt School, in particular Theodor
Adorno, and Stuart Hall of British Cultural Studies.

Critical Theory, Identity and the Construction of

Dominance
Concerns with identity and identification help to elaborate the concept of
whiteness. These questions have always preoccupied sociologists and social
theorists. The notion of Self and Other is a common distinction articulated
by critical theorists like Spivak (1988), Said (1995), and Adorno (1996). The
distinction between Self and Other is understood as the fundamental distinction that constitutes consciousness - a sense of Self and by implication a
sense of Other (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1973). After the cultural turn this distinction has become a basis for understanding how subjects are shaped by
language, and how subjects shape their environment and self through lan-

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Wadham The Turn to Whiteness

guage (Torfing, 1999). Language for critical theorists is the primary medium
of cultural production. Language is organised through discourse.
Discourses construct the objects of which they speak, that is language develops around particular objects of concern working to describe and actualise the object. Discourses are central to the different ways that objects of
concern are represented. Language is always only an attempt to represent
the object of concern, or the Self or the Other. In other words the concept (or
the signified) never fully corresponds to the object; there is always lack and
over-determination (Hall, 1996, Rose, 1996).
These ideas have quite particular implications for cultural sociology. Firstly,
the focus of analysis has moved from the constitutive subject to language or
discourse. The focus upon language or discourse is a focus upon systems of
representation or discursive economies. This also means that cultural relations are always being produced and reproduced, represented, regulated and
consumed through language and practice. The focus upon language effectively reorients our analysis of power as operating through discursive regimes patterns and relations of knowing and acting. The language and cultural logics drawn upon by governments in the management of Aboriginal
Reconciliation, for example, are intimately connected with broader and more
generalisable discourses of race and national identity. It is important to describe the cultural contexts in which particular discursive economies of race
and nation emerge. It is also important to describe the links between individual narrative and collective discourses of race and nation.
There are two points of note here: firstly that identity is considered relational
and hierarchical, there are multiple forms of cultural relations, for example,
gender is differentiated (see Connell, 1995), as is race or class (see Frankenburg, 1993, 1997). Secondly it is also useful to consider the logics of identity, that is, the ways that particular identities position themselves within
cultural relations (see Hall, 1992). Adorno and Horkheimer describe the
hegemonic logic of identity within Western philosophy, and Western cultures
more generally, as a dialectic of enlightenment. This dialectic refers to the
way that the Self valorises identity and the Other is marginalised as an assertion of difference. This reification of self and other occludes incommensurability, that is, this subject can only conceive others on his terms. In
some way everything must be commensurable, able to be rationalised on the
terms of the hegemonic subject. In the context of Australian racialisation
whiteness has become that cocoon where an exclusive national identity has
developed.
This dialectic of enlightenment, alternatively described as identitarian thinking, is where the Self articulates the Other as a threat to cultural and individual security, where the destabilisation of the hegemonic order is experienced as disorder, and where multiplicity is dangerous and commensurability paramount (ONeill, 1999: 9). This striving for unity and coherence
marks the hegemonic subject, it is, I argue, the hallmark of the white, masculinist, bourgeois Self (Adorno, 1996, 1973, Becker-Schmidt, 1999). It can
be described as manifesting a closed subjectivity (Jameson, 1990:9). I am
arguing that we can think about the logic of identity as relational, that is,

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identitarian thinking presents the hegemonic logic of identification while

others logics of identity sit in relations of subordination, complicity or radical
alterity to this logic and its associated identities, discursive regimes and cultural practices. In other words, there are different ways of thinking and identifying and different logics of identity. Bhabhas (1990a) work on the third
space, Adornos logic of disintegration (1973), or Derridas (1982) deconstruction are different ways of talking about the potential for critical and reflexive
thought. It is argued that a logic of disintegration would generate open, radical and inclusive subjectivities.
Studies of whiteness focus upon the relations of dominance by articulating
the authority of the invisible. Richard Dyer explains that there is no more
powerful position than that of being just human. The claim to power is the
claim to speak for the commonality of humanity (1997:2). The ability to present oneself as a representation of the norm, as the standard by which all
Others should be determined, is an instrument of authority and privilege. It
is part of the tradition of critical theory to work at the denaturalisation of the
taken-for-granted. Although not articulated through the theoretical ideas of
critical theory and cultural studies whiteness studies attempts to uncover
identitarian thinking and to think itself through non-identity.
There are criticisms of whiteness studies also. A common criticism levelled at
whiteness studies is that it articulates whiteness in unitary terms. To speak
of whiteness as a singular, unified, coherent notion without considering the
way this idea operates in practice as well as language, the way subjects are
constructed through race relations, the logics of identification within different empirical contexts is to reify them and reinforce their claim to represent
humanity (Bhabha, 1995).
The question of differentiation within the relations of whiteness is important.
Bhabha argues that a preoccupation with singularity in race or gender
analysis is a significant caveat (1995). It is significant because to think of
whiteness in unitary terms neglects the reality that people are located differentially and hierarchically within the relations of race and whiteness. It is
important to consider whiteness as relational, which the focus upon discourse and practice supports. Whiteness is hierarchical and multiple and
there are those who are white, not white-enough and not-white. A relational
understanding of whiteness contributes to the disruption of the ubiquitous
naturalisation of whiteness. Arguing for differentiated notions of whiteness is
a key strategy in achieving an awareness of the contingency of these discourses and relations
Another significant reason for adopting the concept of whiteness is the effect
that this concept has upon the traditional notion of racism and anti-racism.
To focus upon whiteness is to acknowledge that racial domination is a system that positions or constructs everyone that falls within its orbit (Ware,
1996:143). Whiteness describes different relations of identification and
domination: Whiteness is a way of describing the predominant and racialised
axes of meaning and differentiation within the Australian context. All Australian subjects are in some way positioned within, or represented by, the
relations of whiteness

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Wadham The Turn to Whiteness

To speak of whiteness then is to recognise that all subjects are raced and
gendered. Concentrating on whiteness obstructs the potential for people to
stand outside of racism by placing it as a moral problem for whites and a political problem for blacks (Ware, 1996: 143). Moreover, when one identifies
another as racist one is also defining who or what is anti-racist. This dichotomy obfuscates a relational understanding of race and gender, adopting
highly reified notions of the racist and the anti-racist. The concept of
whiteness seeks to understand how the discourses of race and gender are
instruments for organising social reality, as opposed to categorisations of
particular behaviours and identities.

Conclusion
In this paper I have discussed the sociological problem of how to think about
and understand contemporary concerns with national identity and the effects of global change. I have argued that the question of identity has returned to sociology as a principle concern. Studies of race and gender, as
they emerged in the mainstream sociology of the 60s and 70s, used theoretical instruments which best represented the concerns of the time. Cultural
sociology, including the discrete fields of global feminism and postcolonial
studies, has reoriented studies of race and recognises the highly contingent
character of identity and identification. In this paper I have outlined a number of concerns with traditional sociological theories of race and gender and
have articulated the benefits of looking more specifically at the relations of
dominance within a given cultural context. I have used the work of cultural
studies and radical social theorists to bolster the recent turn within social
theory toward whiteness studies. Whiteness studies, supported and elaborated through the ideas of cultural sociology, provide an effective and historically relevant approach to consider questions of nation, race and identity.

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