Although Race has been a dominant feature of social construction since the late eighteenth century it is significant that whiteness as a defining racial category has only recently emerged in the range of chromatic ideas of human difference. Since European and later American races occupied the dominant pole in the binaries of race in the post-slavery era and African, Asian and Amerindian peoples were the majority constituents of the subaltern pole, the category white was effectively occluded, naturalized as an always already-given category against which other races could be distinguished and so not needing to be constituted in a specific way as a separate race grouping. In fact, of course, like all chromatic typologies the terms employed in these racist discourses: black, brown, red, yellow and so forth were designed to homogenize the complexities of difference which exist within the single human species.But the category of white has a special force,since it is un-stated, set apart by its force as the normative. Recent critical accounts have sought to expose this false naturalizing of the category by investigating the different ways whiteness has been employed as a social discriminator. These vary greatly in different places and times, though all seek to construct a unified grouping to oppose against those others which the ‘whites’ seek to exclude and control. Mike Hill has summarized this ‘first wave of work on the topic [as an attempt]

to break what Frantz Fanon referred to as the ‘ontogenic’ seal of white normativity’. The most formal modern recognitions of the category include the use of the term white within the discriminatory legislation associated with apartheid. But US scholarship has also pointed to the growth of the term in multicultural societies such as the US, where racialist groups defending the possibility of ‘whites’ becoming a minority swamped by racial admixture have employed the term whiteness as a rallying call. Early commentators on this phenomenon, such as Roederer and Hill himself, have always been cautious of the term ‘whiteness studies’,feeling that ‘a critical rush to whiteness would be symptomatic of the very problem of hegemony [such studies] sought to demolish’ (Hill 2004a). For this reason Hill, for example, has emphasized that the task is to uncover the power of the term in a world where official and unofficial typologies of racial and ethnic identity are moving rapidly to a position where isolated racial categories are being dismantled, for example in crucial instruments where social control and self-ascription collide,such as the National Census.While this may seem to be a development progressive thinkers might applaud,Hill shows how in practice it can lead to the diminishing of the power of such racial groups as African Americans or Latinos as effective social forces and political lobbyists. Beyond these practical issues lie the more crucial epistemological issues which haunt all such categories. As Hill has summarized this: The ambivalent prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of white-collar racists on the other side of the ethnographic looking-glass. For both groups, ironically, whiteness is both gone and still very much here. And if such a body of discourse called whiteness studies actually exists,there is a sense that the blind proliferation of this work creeps towards an ugly metamorphosis that will keep it from progressive goals. (Hill 2004a: 9) Hill concludes,‘Perhaps whiteness studies might better be dubbed afterwhiteness studies, thus keeping the temporary irony of its absent presence at the forefront and in play.’ (ibid.).

It’s a manner of inquiry I find revealing,one that secretly knows that critical knowledge sustains the phantasmagoric form of the very thing it wants to deconstruct. That we feel shame about such knowledge and try to hide rather than mobilize its contradictions, and that folks exploit such shame across the political spectrum, is the worse part of the whiteness studies game.What people who continue to write on whiteness tend not to realize is that they too are writing from a position that’s inherently self-effacing, since their object of study disappears the moment they start working, then comes back, but in ways that are unwanted or unexpected. It’s that ghostly encounter with absence I alluded to before. Rather than just scary or impolitic, I find in this hour of ruin a little bit of hope. That white folk are at last in an epistemologically fatal position goes to the very root of the concept of potential. (Hill 2004b)

In this respect whiteness studies faces a problem similar to that which haunts many contemporary academic fields, including post-colonial studies itself,that is that its existence as a field of study preserves the very concept (colonialism) it seeks to dismantle. Although whiteness is a category which is grounded in racist discourses and practices it also impinges on discourses of class and gender (see feminism and postcolonialism and transcultural feminism). Whiteness has frequently been employed in territories as diverse as South Africa, Australia and the US as a means of recruiting the economically disadvantaged segments of the so-called white population to support national or social programmes which are to their disadvantage in that they divert their attention from the actual causes of their poverty in the broader economic practices of capital.

Parties which emphasize ‘family values’and thus the need to protect the ‘traditional’roles of the genders have also embraced racist discourses which emphasize the threat changes to gender patterns pose to so-called ‘core national values’, which values they identity with those of the cultural groupings which have embraced the signifier of ‘whiteness’, e.g. the emergence of just such an alliance of practices in groupings such as One Nation in Australia,which enjoyed a brief electoral success in many areas in the late 1990s. In the US the recently emerged fundamentalist Christian groups, while asserting their lack of political or racial bias (‘It’s not a black thing, or a white thing, it’s a Jesus thing’) have often been racially discriminatory as well as politically conservative in their actual practice. They have often shown little regard for the alleviation of minority-group poverty, manifested in their overt opposition to ‘welfare’ or support for programmes of reform of the ongoing effects of racial bias in educational and training opportunities, employment patterns, etc. In this regard they have moved away from earlier Christian traditions of anti-slavery advocacy and social reformism. Religion has re-emerged in recent times as a force which may create new forms of discrimination against groups such as Muslims, though these are often masked as attacks only on fundamentalist minorities. The identification of ‘white’ national values with Christianity by those who peddle these simplistic models of religion and its role in the formation of national cultural identities poses a threat of further social divisions along lines which collapse religion and race into new discriminatory signifiers of difference.