Cultural Geography

to recast their gaze from cosmopolitan locales

such as Kilburn High Road to ‘Middle England’

and other less marked zones of ethnic enquiry.

Others have used the method of ethnography to

examine whiteness and the geography of racist

violence in English suburbs such as ‘Kempton

Dene’ in the west midlands (Back and Nayak,

1999). This work demonstrates how a skinhead

gang were able to transform their neighbourhood

into a ‘white space’. At a macro level this was

partially achieved through economic transforma-

tions in the region, ‘white flight’ from the city

and the city council housing policies aimed at

dispersing ethnic minorities throughout the

conurbation. However, the constitution of the

Kempton Dene estate as ‘white’ was further

secured at a local micro-political level through

intimidation, harassment and the perpetuation of

racist graffiti. The geographical analysis of sub-

urban whiteness is also a feature of some of

Frances Widdance Twine’s recent work. In one

study she examines the lives of 16 female univer-

sitystudents of African American descent who

were ‘raised white’ on the suburban outskirts

of America. For these ‘brown skinned white

girls’, as Twine describes her respondents, the

suburban privileges of whiteness are seen to act

as a type of ‘comfort zone’ (1996: 215) which

enables their ethnic inclusion into mainstream

practices at material, cultural and even psychic

levels. ‘Currently, some contemporary social

geographers are deploying an analysis of white-

ness to re-think how race, class and gender are

mutually constituting categories, articulated

through and against one another in complex, and

at times contradictory ways’ (Haylett, 2001;

Nayak, 2002).

There is much to learn from such small-scale,

empirically grounded studies about the theoreti-

cal complexity of ethnicity in people’s everyday

lives. However, it is a concern that geographers

have combined this focus with a parochial

geographical horizon, rarely lifting their sights

above the familiar terrain of Britain, North

America and Australia.^1 The narrow geographical

limits of ‘white studies’ act to reinforce the

tendency towards insularity that has character-

ized much recent work within ethnic and racial

studies in the west. The notion that this area of

enquiry should have global ambitions may, to

some, have a peculiar colonial ring to it. After all,

from the 1950s onwards, ethnic and racial stud-

ies have travelled in precisely the opposite direc-

tion, rejecting imperialist anthropology for the

dissection of racism in western nations. Whilst

we are in agreement with the political motiva-

tions behind this project, it has had the effect of

making debates on race in the west highly confined

and claustrophobic. Moreover, the coherence of

abstracting particular national narratives from

the world economy – of studying ‘French

racism’ or ‘British anti-racism’ – is increasingly

questionable. White identities are, if nothing

else, global phenomena, with global impacts.

Indeed, the nature and implications of their local

manifestations only come into view when they

are understood as global. This approach has led

Bonnett (2000a; 2000b) to develop a historical

and geographical analysis of whiteness. A key

concern of this work is to show how the history

of how whiteness became racialized is also the

history of how groups previously identified as

white (such as the Chinese) began to call them-

selves something else and how Europeans began

to believe that they were the world’s only true

whites. Bonnett approaches this issue with refer-

ence to material largely from the Middle East,

China and Japan, societies where white identifi-

cation amongst elite groups existed well into the

nineteenth century. Bonnett (2000a; 2000b)

also traces more recent associations between

Europeans, white skin and neoliberal, consumer-

based cultural globalization. Drawing on popular

culture from Latin America and Japan, he inter-

rogates the way the ‘fun, free and flexible’

lifestyles of neoliberalism have been connoted as

white and western. This process has ensured

the reproduction and reformation of the role of

the white as a key symbol of success, modernity

and wealth. Thus despite the almost universal

abandonment of explicit doctrines of white

supremacy, and the adoption of anti-racist

rhetoric as the lexicon of legitimacy by institu-

tions the world over, whiteness continues to be

reified as a racial and cultural norm. The patterns

and paths of resistance to this process are

diverse, yet if any one attribute of the white

racial norm stands out from the last century it is

its capacity for adaptation and survival.

CONCLUSIONS

We have argued in this chapter that it is only by

understanding such normative terms as ‘white’

and ‘western’ – the ones against which others are

defined as exotic – that wider systems of racial

privilege can be brought into view. By making it

clear that categories such as whiteness are also

the products of racialization, that they too have a

history and a geography and, hence, are change-

able, we can help transform the critique of race

and ethnicity from a ‘subfield’ into an essential

theme running throughout a rigorous geographical

education. This transformation provides a

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIALIZATION 309

3029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 309