stories’ ... He shows that black male identity is forged out
of a set of identifications that are inherently anxious –
simultaneously fearful and desiring. These identifica-
tions smuggle senses of self – black and white – across
a fictional, though foundational, black/white border.
The black/white epidermal schema is not just imposed
from the outside, but ... also inscribed in the move-
ments of people, in their actions, thoughts and feelings.
But it is the black who moves under the constant
scrutiny of the fearful/fear-full master’s ‘blue’ eyes.
(2000: 264)Pile’s interpretation pushes the geographical
imagination to go beyond naive observations of
the ways in which places are the result of politi-
cal processes, to engage social change itself. As
a result, nothing will ever be normal again.
Geography’s ocularcentric vision has been
shattered in favour of one that is multifocal.
At the centre of the constructivist position is
the repudiation of any essential status for what
have been constructed as racialized bodies, that
is, the rejection of the belief that ‘race’ deter-
mines essential human traits that define moral,
intellectual or cultural values or abilities, or any-
thing else. The constructivist approach to ‘race’
is consistent with poststructuralist theory and
particularly with feminist theory, which recog-
nizes that essentialized notions act normatively
to provide the basic template for structuring
human relations through their discursive inscrip-
tion of every human action and, thus, act to con-
tour relations of power.
One of the most serious issues faced by ‘race’
theorists is to get beyond the assumption that it is
human difference itself that needs to be
explained, rather than the human tendency to
create difference. As Banton points out, the idea of
‘race’ is so firmly fixed in modern thinking, and
so profoundly validated through scientific, social
and cultural means, that ‘physical differences
catch people’s attention so readily that they are
less quick to appreciate that the validity of “race”
as a concept depends upon its value as an aid in
explanation’ (2000: 51–2). The theorist operates
in a world in which taken-for-granted, essential-
ist notions of ‘race’ continue to dominate, and
are difficult to overcome even for those who hold
constructionist views. To do so has required a
shift from the study of the racialized to those who
have perpetuated the idea of ‘race’; in other
words, to shift from ‘race’ to racism (Jackson,
1987a). This shift recasts the ‘problem’ not as
people of colour but as those responsible for
historical discrimination. In so doing, it is impor-
tant to recognize not only historical forms of
racism, which are self-evident to many contem-
porary observers, but also the subtle and often
unobserved – even by the most critical ofobservers – discursive forms that continue to
script the process of racialization today through
socially taken-for-granted means.
For many recent writers, this challenge means
going beyond the study of racism to the study of
‘whiteness’ as a historical form of racialization.
Whiteness involves not only depicting those who
are non-white in prejudicial terms, but also rein-
forcing the centrality and superiority of white
cultural, social or aesthetic forms. It can be as
much about the absence as the presence of
people of colour, and it works independently of
their existence. This recognition has led some
researchers to declare that nothing short of ‘abol-
ishing the white race’ (Ignatiev and Garvey,
1996) will solve the problem of racism.
Nonetheless, the concept of whiteness is contra-
dictory. Studies of whiteness run the risk of
themselves ignoring non-white people (Bonnett,
1993; 1996a; 1996b), maintaining white privi-
lege even from a critical perspective. The project
of whiteness can be translated into myriad forms;
indeed, recognition of its adaptability, flexibility
and variability is essential to understanding its
power. Those forms need to be understood, how-
ever, not only in their own terms but also accord-
ing to their impact, and their susceptibility to
resistance, among non-white people.
Geographers have been actively engaged in
both constructivist and ‘whiteness’ studies for
the past decade and a half, particularly in Britain
where the work of Peter Jackson (1987b; 1989;
1992; 1993) has strengthened geographers’ grasp
of the importance of understanding ‘race’ as a
historical construction, and has extended the
notion of ‘race’ as an ideational construction to
analyses of how it is constructed spatially.
Whiteness works at its most powerful level when
it is hegemonic, creating landscapes in which
people of colour do not even figure (Kobayashi
and Peake, 2000). In Canada, there is an espe-
cially rich understanding of how the city of
Vancouver has been racialized through a domi-
nant discourse of whiteness (see Anderson, 1987;
1991) and of how the state creates a national
ideology of whiteness (Peake and Ray, 2000).^3
According to Anderson:the insight that race identities are constructed out of
specific historical and political contexts prompted a
radical revision of theorizing about racial segregation
in cities. It required geographers to adopt a more
rigorous approach that critically examined the discur-
sive leap made in Western cultures from visible differ-
ences to something more fundamental which has been
called ‘race’. It was a move that went beyond describ-
ing the spatial forms produced by commonsense
notions of difference to deconstructing the processes
of exclusion and inclusion out of which segregated550 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 550