The White Terrorist

Re-articulating whiteness in contemporary Europe

James Bradbury

ty and landscape directly responsible for multiple wars, genocide, and the oppression and enslavement of millions of peoples throughout the world.

The White Terrorist

By Jamie Bradbury I write this as an attempt to provide an analytical approach of the growing instability within Western European cultural identity and one of the possible reasons for increased anti-immigration policies beginning to be enBut what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, amen! (Bois) The discovery of personal whiteness among the worlds people is a very modern thing, - A nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The middle age regarded skin colour with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great universal man, with fine frenzy which ignored colour and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful! (Bois) W.E.B Du Bois- The Souls of White Folk, Darkwater 1920 Whiteness as a social construct has been at the heart of Western European cultural identity for over 250 years. During this time Race and Ethnicity have been a socio-political conundrum that has fostered a social anxieforced by Neo-Right wing conservative governments. The re-emergence of trans-national scapegoat racism in Europe that has infiltrated mainstream politics has not been seen on such a scale since the dawn of the twentieth century where Anti-Semitism in Europe, along with Imperialist Capitalist strategies throughout Africa and Asia would drastically reach its apex. Whiteness as a political ideology is directly at the heart of these growing concerns, yet remains an often un-discussed and crucial point within the larger framework of the Western European economic and cultural crisis. If Globalization is a political pressure to conform, than the further Globalization of Capitalist strategies such as cultural standardization, coupled along with Race relations creates an antagonistic relationship challenging the contemporary European states willingness to fully embrace and integrate policies of Multiculturalism or inter-culturalism while maintaining Transnational Euro-centric white privilege through economic superiority. I believe that in order to promote a greater understanding of cultural diversity, accountability and social equality, a critical pedagogy of whiteness within the European context and further re-articulation of it needs to be discussed.

ethnicity, became real scientific concepts that continue to To be clear, when using the terminology Race I do not elude to a postenlightenment era pseudo-scientific notion based on biologically fixed taxonomies such as genetics (Morphology, Pigmentation), but rather a social construction although not genetic constituting a legitimate way through which subjects maintain control over their lives and their image. It is the process or experience of subjection which people are transformed into signs of culturally pre-constructed subject positions. (gonzalez 3) John Jeffries states: Therefore, it is important for us to understand that the scientific construction of race] [is itself a social construction, in two senses: First, because the impetus for the verification of the term race cannot be divorced from debates concerning the future of African slavery][Second, the presumed scientific verification of the term by the American school led to the popular and regular use of the word within the United States and across the globe. The analytic construct race was reified by American culture, popular and otherwise. Even after later methods of scientific inquiry unequivocally discredited the methods and conclusions of the nineteenth century American school, the reified notion of race as a verifiable analytic construct remained deeply ingrained in U.S (and Western) culture. As a result, race, and is twentieth-century counterpart, It has very real implications through socialization, our life perspectives and cultural historical links. Or in the words of Stuart Hall, A sliding signifier with equivalencies outside of discourse, that cannot be fixed. Race discourse can best be understood as a visual technology comprising a complex web of intertextual mechanisms that tie the present to the past through familiar representational tropes. (gonzalez) Paul Gilroy argues that the concept of Race signals a regressive, colonialist taxonomy that masquerades as a progressive multiculturalism. He envisions a political future beyond the entrenched camps of racial, national, cultural and religious difference, or Planetary Humanism. Taking point from Gilroy among other theorists I propose to discuss how European leaders have engendered essentialist notions of a pure cultural identity through employing the use of whiteness as a divisive methodology amongst the population most effected by the economic crisis, that being, the working class. I also to propose to create a dialogue between Du Bois famous essay Conservation of the Races, Nicolas Bouriauds Altermodernity and Terrance MacMullans reconstruction of Whiteness. When speaking of whiteness in particular I do not speak of people of European decent but rather as a political ideology that was developed by Europeans for socio-economic and political gains during the first large scale phase of colonial expansion, but which is continuously used and now synonymous haunt our discussions of the social and the cultural.

with people of European decent. Thus, it can be said that whiteness is also a racial perspective or a worldview, a view that can be re-inscribed and constructed by people of colour (an Identity) who may see the world through the lens of white supremacy- internalized Racism and live out their lives. I suggest that a proper investigation and subsequent re-articulation of whiteness and Multiculturalism in Western Europe can re-direct antiimmigration sentiments and address the much larger issue within this current debate, that being mass economic hardship, irrational socio-political government policies and White Privilege. When using the terminology Western Europe I should also clarify that this is used in reference to those states defined as Politically Western during the 20 century and not specifically geographically. This definition includes many Nordic, Central, Southern and geographically western European nations. If the current cultural crisis in Western Europe is in reaction to an everincreasing multi-ethnic population, this should be placed into context with the cultural and economic Imperialism along with overt exploitation of populations throughout the globe, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The imposed restrictions on citizenship within ones own homeland, destruction of indigenous languages, religion, social customs and natural resources, along with the enslavement of millions of people over centuries has formed habits of identification and recognition of those deemed other in many European nations that creates a naturalized cultural and racial superiority complex, which continues to this day. The creation of whiteth

ness directly informs the political policies, and basic forms of recognition along with identification processes present today in Europe. Whiteness as a social construction was created through the negation of the rights of others and must be rearticulated in Europe to foster an atmosphere of greater understanding, social unity and solidarity instead of antipathy towards each other. As a racial category, whiteness is different from white culture but connected to it through historical association. The assertion of the white race or identity and ideology of racial hierarchy is intimate with slavery, segregation, along with discrimination. (Harris) White culture, on the other hand, is an amalgamation of various white ethnic practices. The contemporary meaning of Whiteness is not necessarily stable or permanent but, rather a site of change and struggle. With this stated the white racial identity has become both increasingly ubiquitous and narrowly defined, a static and uncritical understanding of whiteness has permeated anti-racist discourse and is addressed as an unproblematic category. A category which is not subject to the constant processes of challenge and change that have characterised the history of other racial names. This process enables white people to occupy a privilaged location in anti-racist debate- they are allowed the luxury of being passive observers, knowing that their racial identity may never be made slippery, torn open or abolished. (Bonnett)

By placing Whiteness at the centre of discourse surrounding race it becomes an oppressor, not experiencing oppression, silencing, not being

silenced. Minority groups are defined by their relation to this. They are defined, then as non-whites: as people who are acted upon by whites; people whose identity is formed through their resistance to others oppressive, silencing agency. (Bonnett) It can be argued that whiteness is the attempt to homogenize diverse white ethnics into a single category (much like it attempts with various other ethnicities) for purposes of racial domination. (Leonardo) This homogenization process becomes more apparent when reviewing recent comments from many of Europes most powerful leaders, such as British P.M David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Multiculturalism has failed, while simultaneously conjuring essentialist notions of cultural identity. Nicolas Bouriaud states that a Cultural identity is a collage of texts, forms, signs and acquired behavioural patterns that permit an individual to define himself or herself as part of a group or national community. It is, therefore, nothing but a fiction derived from history. Today it is all the more dangerous and virulent because the violence of the general economic globalisation movement leads to a tendency to bind individuals and nations back onto this type of fetish in order to defend themselves against the deterritorialisation of the MacWorld. One story stands against another.

While Stuart Hall suggests that the partnership between the past and the present is an imaginary reconstruction. What these leaders fail to acknowledge is, their own respective countries lack of accountability and desire to embrace difference. The failing attempts to hold on to a mythologized cultural legacy that privileges, creates hierarchies, and one that is increasingly under attack from standardization through globalization rather than immigration. Jean-Paul Satre writes Not surprisingly, the more that social ritualism come to lack real foundations, [the more exacerbated and frenetic it becomes. [This spurs pride as a defensive reaction, and an unhealthy tightening of social bonds] This understandable but inadequate response to the prospect of losing ones identity reduces cultural traditions to the simple process of invariant repetition. It has helped to secure deeply conservative notion that supply real comfort in dismal timesand negates the complexities of contemporary cultural life. (Gilroy) It is not simply enough to state that Multiculturalism has been an utter failure pushing the blame on minority populations who have supposedly failed to integrate. This is a direct attack on all minority groups who do not subscribe to the essentialist ideal in this reclaimed mythology. The threat of them once again becoming invisible is very real. It also does not recognise the various histories of struggle against oppression. This form of government creates a hierarchy of privilege amongst some native born citizens and those deemed foreign. This is not a true democratic government and assumes that one group of native born citizens have nothing to gain from the other. This hierarchy is further perpet-

uated when migrants have been able to establish multi-generational roots within their new country and are further disenfranchised by the blatant paternalism shown to them and their cultural differences, such as the Jamaican population who arrived on the Empire Windrush in the United Kingdom. The homogenizing effect of whiteness does not take into account that various ethnic groups have been settled longer than others and their differences may have become part of the larger cultural framework of the nation. Hundreds of millions of people are not living where they were born, and yet we still want culture to be surrounded by borders? Immigration, and mass tourism as well, and intermittent nomadism bring about new relations between cultural signs: they are less and less the expression of a territory and more and more a movement, a trajectory, a rebound. Cultures are becoming portable. They put down roots far away from their home. They produce new crosses and fertilise the soil that takes them up. (Bouriaud)

cestral homeland or how these practices are integrated and become a part of new European cultural practices. A key example is the integration of Jamaican Patois in the linguistic practices of Londons inner city youth. Patois is a re-importation of the English vocabulary that went through a process of creolization when adopted by West African slaves and developed during the colonial era. It is this resistance to difference and paternalism that is partially to blame for the current cultural disenfranchisement that is taking place throughout Europe today and apparent failure of the Multikulti model. It is far too late to attempt to return to an essentialist notion of a pure cultural identity as the global cultural landscape has changed dramatically during the past quarter century, ushering in standardization of languages and cultures through Globalization. These governments must embrace a new social model that does not place European cultures at the centre while placing Other cultures at the margins. It must embrace a truly integrated critical social model, where there is an equal transaction or ex-

The far right in Europe has enjoyed a renaissance driven by resentment of the growing powers of the European Union and rejection of the Multiculturalism that has accompanied rapid immigration from the developing world. (Lister) Creating new policies prohibiting specific cultural markers will not produce a population that will want to integrate, but rather a population that feels further marginalized. These new policies also fail to recognize the native born population that continue cultural practices that originated from an an-

change of cultural differences, but one that does not function to fix and reduce people to assigned cultural identities that also become a form of Essentialism or perpetuates colonial taxonomies.

W.E.B Du Bois describes Democracy in Darkwater (1920) as A method of realizing the broadest measure of justice to all human beings. If Democracy alone is the method of showing the whole experience of the race for the benefit of the fu-

ture and if Democracy tries to exclude [any ethnic group] or the poor or any class because of innate characteristics which do not interfere with intelligence, than that Democracy cripples itself and belies its name.

greater knowledge of the non-European world to do so. European Christians rejected the notion that they carried the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity, instead embracing an extremely different cultural, economic and political context- that of Israel, the Hebrews and the early Church. (Eisenman) Stephan F. Eisenman writes:

Whiteness in Western EuropeDuring the Renaissance, these duel legacies- one GrecoThe European Union is an economic strategy to consolidate money currency and trade relations between friendly nations. It is this economic development married with the evolution of whiteness that represents late Capitalisms partnership with multi-national Whiteness. (Leonardo) It is this partnership that creates an antagonistic and paradoxical relationship between critical formations of Multicultural models in Europe and late Capitalist ideologies, between economic exploitation and racial oppression. Historically, Europe has always been poly-culturala mixture of various cultures such as Latin and Germanic, etc, influenced by the importation of Hebraic, Hellenic and Muslim belief systems; The notion of Europe in terms of a continental entity is only a few centuries. The ancient Greeks were by no means certain that they were part of Europe. (They did not even have a clear sense of being Greek; they identified more as Athenians, Spartans or Thebans.) (Eisenman)The peoples and cultures of the Christian Middle Ages in Northern and Central Europe did not consider themselves European either, as they would have had to have a much The whiteness in contemporary European political policies has become exacerbated within the current financial crisis while minority populations and migrant workers whose markers of difference become the target of these undemocratic government policies. In the essay White men on Race by Joe Feagin and Eileen Obrien they discuss the effects that social isolaRoman and polytheistic, and the other Middle Eastern and monotheistic- were brought together. The union required lots of ideological cement, and for the first time established some bases for the creation of the idea of Europe and the West. The embrace of the culture and geography of both ancient Rome and Israel demanded for the removal of Islam from the world of the Middle East and North Africa][In fact many of the greatest Renaissance artists and writers continued to accept and record their indebtedness to the knowledge preserved and created beneath the banner of the star and crescent of Islam.]

tion have on whites. Although this article is within an American context, I feel that the current leaders when speaking of creating stronger national identities exacerbate this notion of isolation in contemporary Europe. They state: Many people, who identify as white, including many men in high positions of power, have few truly sustained and close equal status contact with minorities or people of colour and this indicates substantial racial isolation, individually and as a group. Living within the white bubble many of them admit that they have received their information about important matters from generally white controlled media sources like television and the newspaper. (Feagin and Obrien)

tries, as is the case in France and Italy with their controversial campaigns to deport Roma communities accused of raising the crime rate. This political pandering is contradicted by an actual economic need for foreign workers to fill positions. Throughout Europe, migrants are vilified, abused, and confined to the margins of societies: Societies that at the same time, accept without question the services that they provide. (Amnesty) In essence, there is an impulse to treat migrant workers as commodities, or units of labor. A pedagogical critique of whiteness must transcend its national articulations and link knowledge of whiteness to global processes of (Neo) colonialism whereby apparently separate white nations share common histories of domination over non-white peoples. (Leonardo)These collective histories of domination directly inform the political policies by the various European governments that declare specific ethnic groups as alien or foreign through habits of recognition. Cheryl Harris states in Whiteness

It is often the Racist and Xenophobic attitudes exacerbated by politicians and the populist media that disrupt and unsettle the integration of migrants into societies in which they live. With that said recent migrants do have a civic responsibility to become full citizens. Mass media coverage of racial matters usually focuses on conflict and divisive issues with little attention to instances of cooperation and coalition, especially cooperation and coalition in the service of major social change. (Harris) European nations are beginning the process of passing policies that prohibit the use of specific cultural markers, symbols of worship, and have in some cases taken steps to banish specific populations from citizenship within their respective coun-

as Property that Although the laws determination of any fact, including that of group identity, is not infinitely flexible, its studied ignorance of the issue of racial group identity ensures wrong results by assuming a pseudo-objective posture that does not permit it to hear the complex dialogue concerning identity questions, particularly as they pertain to historically dominated groups. Instead, the law holds to the basics premise that definition from above can be fair to those below, that beneficiaries of racially

conferred privilege have the right to establish norms for those who have historically been oppressed pursuant to those norms, and that race is not historically contingent..[Although dominant societal norms have embraced the ideas of fairness and nondiscrimination, removal of privilege and anti-

der to construct the other as abstract, rather than concrete, as enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization of the other work most efficiently when they are constructed as an idea rather than a people. The proposed Anti-immigration, Anti-multicultural policies increasingly become divisive in that they abstract the minority populations pitting them as antipathetic to the desired essentialist cultural practices, thus allowing and justifying the possible negation of full citizenship. The goal of these divisive tactics is simply to prevent solidarity amongst the working class who are the most directly affected by government policy. This perpetuates the belief that any fight for equality is an affront on European cultures. It places the re-

subordination principles are actively rejected or at best ambiguously received, because expectations of white privilege are bound up with what is considered essential for selfrealization. Although, various ethnic groups may enjoy more legal equality today than previously, the fundamental ways of recognizing these groups has changed very little. Therefore, the supposed criminality of young black men ensures heavier surveillance in their neighborhoods that in turn leads to higher crime rates and incarceration levels, further perpetuating ous stereotypes. Paul Gilroy argues that Race as a framework of social understanding maps bio-politics on to an essentialized body of colour and is used to support either clockwork forms of racial solidarity or marketing strategies for advanced capitalism. Gilroys argument clearly demonstrates the inter-connectedness of the current debate of Europes cultural crisis, and how each government is using cultural identity as a sticking point to further advance their policies that will clearly entitle specific populations while continuing to marginalize others. Whiteness is necessarily idealist in orvari-

sponsibility solely on the minority groups to create the solution by either assimilating into the mainstream culture, or adhere to the like it or leave it mentality. There is no accountability taken to acknowledge that minority citizens also have a stake in the country. These divisive tactics date back to working class movements of the early industrial revolution, colonial expansion period and were fought against by unionization as well as the agricultural movements or Chartist movements.

Recognition Alberto Melucci argues that The reawakening of primary identities, this need to anchor oneself to something essential which is permanent and has visible confines, lies at the basis of many contemporary collective phenomena. Ethnic or geographical identification, the at-

tachment to tradition culture, express the attempt to resist dissolution of identity as an essence and the difficulty of accepting it in the form of a relation.

ness counteracts the ontopological tendency. The imagined community of nationhood is rooted first of all in the memory or anxiety of a displaced- or displaceable- population. (Bhabha) Audre Lorde emphasis on the difficulty of recognition however, brings the-

He also states that the boundaries of identity can be conceived of as the recognition of constraints and the interplay between their open and closure and that In order to counteract this dissolution we must begin to conceive identity as a field comprising of freedoms and constraints. The politics of recognising the other (Charles Taylor) as argued by Bouriaud turns out to be a machine for making others inferior, it implies the submission of the individuals who come from peripheral countries submission to their folklore and their history, denying the autonomy It is a matter of fighting against the concept of origins and against every form of identity allocation, the categorisation of society. (Bouriaud) This point deserves particular attention, as it highlights a particular whiteness that is present within the ideological philosophy of Bouriaud. This idea was articulated by Jacques Derrida in The spectres of Marx. Derrida discusses the idea of a national ontopology: that is, [the specific binding of identity, location and locution/language that most commonly defines the particularity of an ethnic culture.] [Historical culture and ethnic affiliation must now be thought through a problematic break in the indigenous, even endogenous, link between the ontological value of present-being- the presentable determination of locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city] (Bhabha) He suggests that the displacement anterior to the imaginary of national rooted-

se theories into the current relationship between those deemed naturalized citizens and those not. She emphasizes the separateness within interdependence because it assumes that that the identity of the ego is neither fixed nor omnipotent. In place of the master/slave dialectic of the sovereign self, it implies an ethics that begins with awareness of the always incomplete character of self that can alter the story of who it was before. (Mercer) As stated previously, modes of identification and recognition has a profound influence on many of the anti-immigration government policies being proposed throughout Europe today and are based on archaic systems engendered by earlier historical capitalist strategies, that are founded in whiteness. The desire for recognition via; through evoking essentialist ritualistic practices of a pseudo cultural identity as well as recognizing the people who fail to prescribe to this cultural ideal. Recognition also constitutes various ways of seeing. One may recognize specific cultural markers that are not considered native to a specific region as mentioned by Derrida, but also that, specific morphological markers constitute symbols that have become habitually naturalized through a form of what Franz Fanon called Epidermalization or the inscription of race on the skin. Thus, the body is the site where race discourse is played out, because it is seen

where race is presumed to reside. (gonzalez) He later described this process as the alternative corporeal schema insisting that it was cultural and discursive, not genetic or physiological. Recognition is further articulated by the act of looking. In Black skin, White masks Fanon articulates and establishes connections between racism and what has come to be called the scopic drive- the eroticization of the pleasure of looking or in Fanons text the look from the place of the other-race in the field of vision, which fixes or places minority groups from the outside by the fantasmatic binary of absolute difference (Hall) or subject that is Over-determined from without. This over-determination is problematized and further explored by Judith Butler, as race and culture are not the determining factors of how one begins the inscription process of creating an identity. For Butler, the notion of identity has been supplanted by that of actions performed, by the concept of staging the self, which implies the perpetual mobility of the subject. Cultural life is thus formed of tensions between the reification, presupposed by self-assignment to a ready-made category and the idea of activating or risking identities. This implies a struggle against all attachments and the assertion that the consumption of cultural signs does not imply any durable connotation of identity. But how does Epidermalization fit within this? How can one fully engage in this democratic process of staging the self, when so much symbolic meaning is articulated and attached to their morphology or pigmentation, an over-determination of representation from without? The economist and race theorist Glenn Loury states:

A field of human subjects characterized by morphological variability comes through concrete historical experience to be partitioned into subgroups defined by some cluster of physical markers. Information hungry agents hang expectations around these markers, beliefs that can become self-confirming meaning- Hungry agents invest these markers with social, psychological, and even spiritual significance. Lourys statement clearly identifies the power that Edipermalization can have on people. Franz Fanon further articulates this point by describing the double alienation inherent in the subjective experience of racism and scopic drive. He describes part of the alienation inherent in oppression is that those who are disempowered find themselves in a world not of their own making He further argues that while it is true that we all come into a world that pre-exists us, it is by arriving too late into a white world, in which one is defined as a brute being who does not mean and therefore is not fully human. Responsibility for meaning, and particularly for the meaning of ones own body and self, has been usurped by the white other. Fanon states: I came into the world with the will to find meaning but then I found that I was an object. Sealed into that crushing objecthood. (Fannon, Black skin, White masks) This was first articulated clearly in Du Bois philosophy of Double Consciousness or the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, and further addresses the complexity of Epidermalization. For Judith Butler, it is a given that there

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is no self-identical subject. Recognition is often accompanied by visibility as its political partner. Demands for recognition are also demands for visibility. Marginalization and enfranchisement are discussed in terms of visibility and invisibility. (Oliver) Judith Butler once more claims however that recognition is not conferred on a subject but is constitutive of its very being. She states that is not simply that one requires the recognition of the other and that a form of recognition is conferred through subordination but rather that one is dependent on power for ones very formation, that this formation is impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the adult subject consists precisely in the denial and reenactment of this dependency. (Oliver) Butlers subject does not mean the self, the individual, or the active agent. She calls the subject the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency Kelly Oliver argues that, by insisting that the structure of subjectivity is one of subjection and subordination, Butler builds oppression and abuse into the foundations of subjectivity. She maintains that subjective identity is the result of a logic of exclusion or repudiation of otherness. Stephen F. Eisenman extends this when he speaks of the Pathosformel (pathos formula) that is, the physiognomic traces of internalized subordination. He states that it is the mark of reification in extremis because it represents the body as something willingly alienated by the victim (even to the point of death) for the sake of the pleasure and aggrandizement of the oppressor. It can be said that photographs of a murdered colonel Gaddafi on the front page of the news

or a booking photograph of a man of African descent can be seen as the product of a heritage stored in the memory and that this is an expression of a malevolent vision in which military victors are not just powerful, but omnipotent, and the conquered are not just subordinate, but abject and even inhuman. He continues to state that the presence of the latter, according to this brutal perspective, gives justification to the former; the supposed bestiality of the victim justifies the crushing violence of the oppressor. In his article Identity as Subordination Kelly Oliver argues that

such statements by Butler work to normalize hate speech and subordination. If subordination, pain, trauma, subjugation, visibility, susceptibility, violence, and so forth are all part of the normal and normalizing process of becoming a subject, then how can we distinguish between a subject and being oppressed, abused, or tormented? This question is better understood when asked within the context of the fragmented formation and subsequent relationship that whiteness has created for itself. Diana Fuss reconstructs the inter-play of racial identification/disidentification as a narrative that addresses the complexity regarding the projective powers of whiteness. Fuss discusses the historical staging of whiteness as outside of itself, or simultaneously being self-governing and a spectator caught in a moment of dis-identification. This relationship or disjuncture renders whiteness incapable of assuming responsibility of its own projections, and in order to be projectively (and politically) powerful, it has to enter into a discourse of whiter-than-whiteness: a form of excessive or over-identification. (Bhabha) This notion of being outside of

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ones self or being self-governing while also being a spectator to ones very desire becomes more apparent in the rhetoric being espoused by the current leaders. These governments that are evoking essentialist cultural identities are preaching to a choir who already has the majority of power within their respective countries. The question then is why? Why would conjuring these essentialist notions of cultural identity be of any benefit to these governments? Revisiting Cheryl Harris article Whiteness as property she contends that whiteness fits the broad historical concept of property. In the words of James Madison [property], embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right. Speaking of all legal rights a person may have. Harris contends that it is crucial to recognize the dynamic and multifaceted relationship amongst custom, command, and law as well as the extent to which each positionality determines how each may be experienced and understood. The concept of whiteness- established by centuries of custom (illegitimate custom, but custom nonetheless) and codified by law- may be understood as a property of interest. (Harris) Further in Harris essay she contends that property has traditionally been conceptualized as including the exclusive right of use, disposition, and possession, with possession embracing the absolute right to exclude. This is important in white identity, as whiteness is as mentioned characterized not by an inherent unifying characteristic but the exclusion of others deemed to be Not white.

governments to use these divisive measures, Du Bois noted that, for the evolving working class, race identification or in this case cultural identification which includes some notion of race became crucial to the ways it thought of itself and conceived its interests. This sense of privilege or in this case cultural hegemony could ameliorate and assist in evading rather than confronting class exploitation. In The souls of White folk Du Bois is just short of prophetic in articulating economic exploitations close relationship with how Racism becomes institutionalized, how white privilege today is largely continuing unchecked as an integral part of Capitalism, while also clearly articulating the socio-economic ramifications felt with increased globalization today. High wages in the United States and England might be the skillfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and peonage in Asia][There is a chance for exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit not simply for the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance lies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the golden hand beckons][In these darker lands industrial development may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and maiming, with only one test of

Returning to Du Bois for a moment to further articulate the benefit for the

success,- dividends!] [Thus the world market most wildly

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and desperately sought today is the market where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is most abundant. This labor is kept cheap and helpless because the white world despises darkies.]

The White Terrorist- Trans-national Whiteness: Zeus Leonardo states [whiteness is guilty of a certain Hidalguismo or son of God status, in its quest to exert its brand of civilization on non-white nations.] it also [stamps its claim to superiority, both morally and aesthetically speaking, on its infantilized other by claiming to speak for people who apparently speak in gibberish][Hidalguismo blinds whiteness to its own position in the world by projecting its specific rationalizations onto the general population] (pg 34) In her book Black Looks: Race and Representations Bell Hooks describes early memories where Black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing. She describes how white people were described as Terrorists. Whiteness as a sight of terror is often too unimaginable for White people. Richard Dyer describes in his essay White a fantasy that makes whiteness synonymous with goodness.

While the contextual conditions Du Bois wrote these passages have changed significantly, it does however highlight the current trends in an increasingly globalized world economy. With major shifts occurring in world markets after the 1973 oil crisis, the global economy has sought to end its dependence on the exploitation of raw materials-the transition from industrial production to an economy of postproduction leaving the exploitation of raw materials to so-called emerging countries that become regarded as pools of cheap labor. (Bouriaud) Is it this post-industrialization or shifting of manufacturing to so-called developing nations a greater threat to cultural singularity and autonomy rather than levels of migration? The amalgamation of various European cultures into a European Union in praise of a monoculture facilitates an oppositional definition of the other. Through the continued racialization of minority groups in part to the populist media, these governments are able to evoke a relational model in contrast to which masses or Europeans can establish a positive and superior sense of identity. This is evident in the actions of growing hostilities and attacks against minority groups throughout Europe.

Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume this is the way Black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in Black life, most often as a terrorizing imposition, a pow-

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er that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness. (Dyer) The Heterophobia or fear of difference evoked by Western European governments clearly demonstrates the fragmented tendencies of whiteness. As a perspective whiteness is historically fractured in its apprehension of racial formations. In order to see the formation in full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis. (Leonardo) This ultimately means that whites would have to confront as Leonardo describes it How they came to be through a historical understanding, in positions of power, many whites resists instead focusing on individual merit, exceptionalism, or hard work. (Leonardo) In an American context, many people could argue that the election of President Obama provides evidence that Afro-American have finally gained equal status in the U.S., without taking into account how institutional racism is masked in places such as the Prison Industrial Complex. Where 39.4% of those incarcerated where Black non-Hispanic men, or on average over four times higher than those identified as White. (Correctional Populations in the United States, 2009. By Lauren Glaze. December 21, 2010.) (Glaze) The P.I.C along with other increasingly privatized institutions continues to create major socio-economic disparities between Afro-American and white Americans. Bell Hooks later describes being stripped searched by French officials at an airport, who

were stopping Black people to make sure they were not illegal immigrants or terrorists. She states: I think one fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening other is always a terrorist. This projection enables white people to imagine there are no representations of whiteness as terror, or terrorizing. One of the troubling issues with highlighting whiteness as a sight of terror is the tendency by populist media and governments to place radical rightwing white supremacist groups in the margins of society. Groups such as the BNP, the National Front Party the English Defense League, the Italian Northern League, the French National Front, or in an American context the Ku Klux Klan, become irrational whites. This also suggests that multinational racism sits at the margins of society, whereas racial democracy exists at the centre. (Leonardo)This becomes problematic because it in turn fails to highlight the significant threat that these groups pose to society as they are dismissed as old fashioned or out of touch, while simultaneous singling out those minority groups they feel are evoking radical perspectives. The media along with various governments fail to recognize how white normativity remains at the centre of development in both European nations and throughout various parts of the world. This is in large part the residues remaining from the colonial era, but is also perpetuated by Neocolonial capitalist strategies such as globalization, or the standardization of languages and cultures. What is more commonly portrayed in the media is the binary generalization along with demonization of minority groups who

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despise freedom and democracy. An abstract vision of some sinister plotting villain verses the disenfranchised or clinically insane white who shouldnt be given the time of day because their marginal ideas are crazy and dont reflect the values or attitudes of the greater population. The difficulty with this scenario is that these so called Fringe groups or individuals such as Anders Breivik are considered sick and out of the ordinary where as other minority groups who may also have essentialist or extremist viewpoints are treated as just acting out against freedom and Democracy with the clearest of intentions. This scenario privileges the Nationalists, while neither group is ideologically conscious of the true ramifications of their views. The Nationalist temperature is rising in Western Europe. The call for the end of open societies is gaining steam as rising unemployment, higher personal debt and increased economic uncertainty is throwing gasoline on the fire of Nationalism in Europe. When governments such as David Camerons, Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozys evoked these outdated Nationalist calls they are simultaneously re-affirming the cause of such acts carried out by the BNP or by Norwegian Terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who is responsible for the massacre of 76 people. Of course they do not agree with the actual method or ideology, but they do agree that Europe should remain European or White in its political and cultural sense. People who are now identified by others and identify themselves as white doubtlessly inherit rich cultural traditions. However, these valuable cultural traditions are not originally white, but stem from the heterogeneous milieu of European peoples. (Macmullan) It is not simply a

case of who is White but rather, who should be considered White. This is reflected in the polling throughout Europe during the recent elections. NeoNazi parties are seeing an increase in popularity in countries such as Norway, while Belgium, France, Italy and England have seen growing support for white supremacist parties

The Dutch Freedom Party with its central anti-Islam doctrine of Geert Wilders, is the third largest party in Netherlands parliament, the French National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pens daughter - Marin Le Pen, has won 15% of the votes in recent regional election the far right Danish Peoples Party has 25 seats in the Danish parliament; the Swedish Democrats took 5.7% of the vote in 2010; in Finland the True Finns party gained 1 in every 5 votes in Aprils elections. The True Finns' manifesto indicates they have much in common with right-wing populist parties elsewhere in Europe. They believe that a low birth rate is not solved by immigration, as that results in problems and foreigners do not fit into Finnish culture. Instead, young women should study less and spend more time giving birth to pure Finnish children. (BBC April 15, 2011) In a recent poll, 13% of German people stated that they would welcome a new fuher.

So how can whiteness and multiculturalism be re-articulated in the climate that Europe now finds itself in. The seeds of Nationalism along with whiteness are growing rapidly and spreading throughout Western and

15

Northern Europe. A white washing of European monoculture is increasing becoming more desirable as masses of people are being seduced by government pandering that allows them to place the blame on an abstract other who apparently wishes to steel their identity from them, replacing it with a plurality of non-difference. Perhaps, it is fair to state that Western Europes current understanding of what facilitates Multiculturalism is quite different than that of newer settler nations that were created as the result of old Europes colonial expansion. The nations in the Americas that were created during European colonial expansion, excluding the indigenous populations, African and Indian slaves, along with indentured Irish workers from this argument have historically grown their populations through mass immigration or through bondage. This system of population growth has created a double consciousness amongst many of its populations. In Canada and the United States it is common to identify using multiple geographic signifiers such as French-Canadian, African-American, or Latino/a. Such signification always places emphasis on both an initial point of origin and a point of destination. This is not to argue that there are not also significant issues within these countries related to Multiculturalism, Neocolonialism, and mythologies surrounding the white settler narrative, but rather that the historical identification resulting through immigration is based on an affiliation of ancestry of sorts. This fluctuation in identity in many cases is the result of cross cultural mixing created either by choice or through bondage and creates a new sense of self that becomes a

bridge between these various dichotomies that these populations are forced to live, that being (black/white, straight/queer, Indige-

nous/Canadian) etc. This fluctuation will be discussed later while discussing ways to re-articulate whiteness. In many countries throughout Europe one must choose their identification as a binary and hierarchical opposition. Can one not be both Jamaican-British or Afro-Italian, or British and Muslim? This is a very difficult and contentious question to answer within the Western European context. Is Western Europe trying to hold onto a glorified colonial past by evoking notions of cultural hegemony? Have Western European nations now become the victims of the very systems of cross-cultural mixing they implemented during the colonial era? Is engendering a completely new way of thinking about identity the answer to the Western European Cultural crisis? What role does Eastern Europe play in the formation of a broader and more critical European identity? Can a critical form of dialogue between people of various ethnic practices and Racial backgrounds do more than co-exist throughout Western Europe? If so, is it possible for these various groups who inhabit the same space to cross-pollinate or transgress their social boundaries, in the process being transformed by these new experiences? This is already the excepted norm for migrants and many minority groups. Has multiculturalism run its course in Western Europe, or is it time to re-address how it is conceived in the first place. One of the ways these questions must be answered is by decentralizing white perspectives on racial matters from the

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public discourse.

One suggested by a global imagination in the process of mutation. (Bouriaud) Although Bouriaud makes a valid argument for a process of

Recognition: Multiculturalism rearticulated- Can it work?

mutation or creolization creating a neutral zone of translation of culture, he fundamentally fails to recognize the privilege of whiteness, of being able to

Nicolas Bouriaud argues that one-way Multiculturalism works is through a system of membership, thus, a persons beliefs or actions may be inevitably explained by the condition, or status of its author. He states that a persons behavior may be read through the bio-political framework and locked into the tradition in which he or she was born. Bouriaud argues that Multiculturalist theories have reinforced the very powers they struggled to oppose through an act of symbolic house arrest by continuing to promote colonial taxonomies of hierarchical categorization. [The world is becoming creolized][That is to say that the cultures of the world are furiously and knowingly coming into contact with each other, changing by exchanging, through irremediable collisions and ruthless wars- but also through breakthroughs of moral conscience and hope]. (Bouriaud) It is this creolization that Bouriaud makes an argument for Altermodernity in favor of hybridization that is categorized as involving the process of grafting onto the trunk of a popular culture. Professional nomadism is placed in favor, as it is roots that make an individual suffer, especially in our globalized world. Bouriaud argues that instead of setting one fixed root against another, a mythologized origin against an integrating and homogenizing soil, that it would make more sense to assign them to other conceptual categories.

speak for humanity in such a context. Contemporary representations of those deemed foreign or non native they are often caught as Fanon would state as transfixed, emptied and exploded in the fetishistic and stereotypical dialectics of the look from the place of the Other; or as Homi Bhabha states, not self and Other but the Otherness of the self-inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. This double sense of alienation as mentioned earlier is perpetuated by advanced marketing strategies within global cultural dissemination such as the marketing of Pop icons, which unwittingly become the sign to recall the heritage stored in the historical memory, We are living in a situation much like that described by Fanon in Black skin, White masks, that of a colonial relationship, where the minority must have a relationship to the self, to give a performance of the self, which is scripted by the population considered native. As stated by Fanon [The Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has to place himselfFor not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.] The shooting of Mark Duggan by London police perfectly articulates the positionality of minority groups in relation to police policy. Specific minority groups such as people of African descent are often targeted or the victims of high levels of surveil-

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lance. Racial Profiling, along with Stop-and-Search programs of specific groups artificially creates more crime in the context that if one group has a disproportionate amount of surveillance than another group, crime levels will inevitably be much higher. This in turn gives cause to further perpetuate even higher amounts of surveillance and tougher penalties for specific crimes. White privilege allows those who are identified as White to not have to think about things such high levels of surveillance in their community, because they are not often suspected. For every person who is targeted by racial profiling or Institutional discrimination someone else is elevated, or privileged by the fact that they are not. What are the ramifications for a White person if they dont know the daily reality for a minority? What are the ramifications for minority groups if they fail to understand the reality of those identified as White? White people dont need to know the daily reality of minorities, nothing happens to them. This is a privilege, an advantage. A further critical pedagogy of whiteness and its relationship to Multiculturalism is needed to fully understand how far reaching this notion of privilege is, and how ingrained it is within our society that it is mistaken for the cultural norm. A further understanding of the notion of privilege will also highlight why government bodies evoke essentialist notions of identity during these troubling economic times and how this privilege works to divide the working underclass, various minority groups and whites alike.

It must be re-iterated that when defining white privilege in the context of the current economic climate that it is not only material or economic advantages being discussed. It is also important to understand that many people who are identified as white, that being of European ancestry may personally benefit very little from the privileges that whiteness affords, in an economic sense. However, if taking these privileges they are afforded into account, that being the ability to have an undeserved advantage over many minority groups due to institutional legacies such as discrimination in the housing and job markets, multi-generational inheritance, personal assets or the stigma of overcoming stereotypes regarding academic competence, a much different story emerges. One of the major issues when discussing white privilege is that white people fail to recognize it, as it acts like an invisible knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank cheques. (McIntosh) Many of the participants joining the Oc-

cupation movements mainly concentrated in Western countries with the slogan We are the 99% or Democracy now do not have the privilege of having a large amount of savings or the notion that they have a blatant sense of entitlement, or job security, along with a number of other benefits afforded to high-level executives. Anger and frustration directed towards those who are responsible for the current global economic meltdown should be rightly exercised. There are also a number of considerations

Whiteness as privilege

that should be addressed with this movement that are problematic in re-

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gards to engaging minority groups. The serious threat of a decreased standard of living or lack of future opportunities is one of the fundamental motivating factors behind the occupy movement. The slogan We are the 99% or Democracy now incites that an attack has been made on the very living conditions that unions and labor movements have fought long and hard for, which is true. What this message fails to take into account though, is that for many minority groups these economic disadvantages have been a reality for years and because of this, these protestors dont acknowledge that they cannot speak for everyone, as is common within whiteness, to speak for humanity. For many of the Occupy movement, this was not supposed to happen to them as they did everything they were told to do. It fails to acknowledge and engage with the fact that some minority groups that have traditionally had an antagonistic relationship with police are not willing to be arrested, for they know what that means to their potential future. The whiteness of this movement fails to acknowledge that many of the attacks on the standard of living that these protestors are fighting for, have not even traditionally been an option for various minority groups because of institutionalized discrimination. Ultimately this movement fails to acknowledge the drastic unemployment disparities amongst the various ethnic groups and that in order to allow for this movement to grow these issues need to be articulated and addressed in a way that allows for minority groups to also share their hopes and desires for the future.

White Amnesia, Fragmentations, Victimization, Privilege cont Many White people remain ignorant of white privilege because of the fact that all aspects of our lives-our institutions, practices, ideals, and lawswere defined and tailored to fit the needs, wants, and concerns of white folk. (Macmullan)

As stated previously, there are often attempts to construct and position white supremacist groups as outside mainstream society, it is more common to acknowledge white crimes against humanity as an ugly part of the past (Leonardo) Instead of acknowledging how the continuity and interconnectedness between the globalization of capitalist strategies and whiteness as far reaching systems that are still centered in the greater political discourse, a deep seated denial exists in whiteness that is so ingrained, that systematic domination increasingly becomes justifiable as whiteness is blind to its own position in the world by projecting its own rationalizations onto the general public. An excellent example demonstrating the rationality of whiteness was used by Malcolm X in an interview given at UC Berkeley in 1963, Malcolm states: Accusing a man who is being lynched, being hung on a tree, simply because he struggles vigorously against his lyncher, the victim is accused of violence, but the lyncher is never ac-

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cused of violence

government during the 1980s moved for what was called an interpretation of the British experience that is expedient to our present leaders rather than faithful to the historical record. They wanted school history to be patriotic. They wanted to return to as Peter fryer states: The days when British history was a chronicle of kings and queens, national saviours, heroes and heroines, great leaders in peace and war They wanted to revive the bad old practice of teaching British history as a long series of at best apologetics for, at worst glorification of, British imperial conquest. (Fryer)

He later explains the dichotomy between the various racist white groups who have actually practiced violence for centuries against minorities who are never synonymous with violence yet at the same time addressing how minorities such as people of African descent are always synonymous with violence. White epistemology can be characterized as fragmentary and fleeting. It is fragmentary because for whiteness to maintain its invisibility, or its unmarked status, it must by necessity mistake the world as nonrelational or partitioned. (Dwyer and Jones III) Whiteness encourages a form of amnesia that clouds our vision of crucial historical moments and collective experiences that, if remembered would lead us to act differently. (Macmullan)This allows the white psyche to downplay the continued residues that are present which remain from slavery and (Neo)/Colonialism along with minimizing racism towards various minority groups. It is also fleeting because it must deny the history through erasure of its own beginnings and the creation of the other. It can only be concerned with how things are and not how they go to be that way. (Leonardo) This fragmented history being promoted by European governments creates a victimization of the majority by the minority. This victimization that is founded without any statistical evidence to support it is not new in the socio-political arena but can be traced back centuries in Europe as already discussed with the formation of European Christian identities. In Britain the Thatcher

Whiteness: re-articulation, Inter-culturalism,

It is important for those identified as white to know at least something about the historical contributions that minority populations have made to their respective countries within Europe. It provides a new version of history that challenges the national sense of smugness, self-righteousness and avowal of fair play. These histories provide a way to fill in those fragmented areas in the white psyche, providing a history that is more complete, and providing evidence to the contrary of white victimization as promoted by many of the current political leaders. Anti-Racist author/lecturer Tim Wise uses an example that relates perfectly to the Occupy movement along with

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the slippery pervasiveness of white privilege. Wise uses the example of a brand new CEO of a major corporation asking to see all the files related to the company but then asks to leave out the files regarding debt because; the company did not employ him/her when the debt was accumulated. Wise continues stating that the CEO would be escorted out of the building, and yet countries in Western Europe usually excluding Germany until recently have little reservation when glorifying their often empirical past, simultaneously erasing how they got there. This fragmentation of whiteness is no more clearly articulated than in W.E.B Du Bois essay The souls of white folks. This essay demonstrates the white epistemology of creating a worldview that is non-relational and fragmented in relation to historical memory. Du Bois puts the Great War into context. [Behold little Belgium and her pitable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo?] [Harris declares that King Leopolds regime meant the death of twelve million natives] [Yet the fields of Belgium laughed, the cities were gay, art and science flourished; the groans that helped to nourish this civilization fell on deaf ears because the world around about was doing the same sort of thing elsewhere on its own account.]

through institutional or societal bodies, mass genocide, continuing to function as a Universalist yet divisive tool bringing cultural standardization while pitting the working classes against each other, why should it then be rearticulated?

In W.E.B Du Bois essay Conservation of the Races he asks to conserve racial practices, identities and histories as he saw them as gifts that could be shared with other races. Du Bois believed that the races could strive together instead of in isolation for a national ideal while using each unique historical experience as a sort of teaching tool. Current philosophical theories within cultural studies would problematize this point by arguing that various sub-communities have different lived experiences within their larger community. A Gay Black man from France may not have the same relationship to historical modes of Patriarchal practices as a straight Black man along with possibly being the target of Homophobic rhetoric within larger Black communities. Yet these two men may share a common history regarding the negative representations of Black communities within public spaces such as the News within France. Taking Du Bois point from this position allows the discussion to address historical group experiences, while continuing to acknowledge the individual experiences that counter a hegemonic reading or perspective of each community. Du Bois was how-

Why then if the creation of whiteness, a political system of negation that is responsible for both historical along with current modes of oppression

ever, very critical of whiteness as he stated it was unlike any of the other races, as it was founded on systems of negation and oppression of the

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other races. It is the lack of criticality of whiteness within the greater public discourse that allows it to blossom, and further perpetuate itself in the guise of Globalization, Universalism, and Standardization. Perhaps a greater critical framework of how whiteness operates as a Socio-political ideology would create an opportunity for reconciliation, fostering a more robust sense of citizenship amongst marginalized groups. Exploring and understanding the trappings of this taxonomy and how it harms even those who use it to their benefit could promote an abandoning of the need to perpetuate these current colonial racial taxonomies, resulting in the greater public engaging in a form of cultural translation based in the singularity of their own experience. An enhanced understanding of how whiteness used in this socio-political context could also enable educators, to focus on nonhierarchal methodologies in addressing alternative teaching strategies that counter current modes of linear universalist dissemination of information. A Rhizomatic or Alter-Modern approach to education would allow for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretations. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in there book A Thousand Plateaus state that:

or conclusion of those "things." "A rhizome, on the other hand, "ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles" (Deleuze and Guattari).Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a "rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (Deleuze and Guattari)

Nicolas Bouriaud would argue for Alter-Modernity which intends to define the specific modernity according to the specific context we live in globalization, and its economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix alter means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization. The core of this new modernity is the experience of wandering in time, space and mediums. There are a few aspects in the whiteness of Bouriauds theory that I find troubling, Although I would agree that Multi-

As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the originary source of "things" and looks towards the pinnacle

culturalism and identity are evolving into a form of creolization, I would argue that it is doing so within a racialized paradigm where whiteness is left intact. Bell Hooks points to the fact many people who identify as white have traditionally been drawn to blackness as a form of trans-

22

gression. She argues that this has more often been through a form of commodified blackness that can then be possessed, controlled, shaped and then owned by the consumer, instead of an engagement that might require one to be a participant, therefore somehow transformed by what they are comsuming. She continues, remarking that the disjunction between actual material aspirations and cultural and social interests, allows for these young liberal white people to drop their interest in blackness at any time to be able to enforce their class interests and interests in white supremacy, or the interests of Capitalism and Imperialism. (Hooks) Tim Wise uses the term Illuminated Individualism to incite a methodology similar to that being proposed. He discusses the importance of not abstracting the individual away from the group identities in which they come from, as their experiences within said groups will ultimately affect their perception of life. This brings the argument back to how education is perceived and re-imagined through new paradigms or methodologies that focus on not just inclusion but rather become a vehicle for a more complete understanding of the world we inhabit through various perspectives. Drawing emphasis on these approaches to education challenges the liberal humanist idea of tolerance, which itself implies that the otherness of the other people is assumed to be intolerable. It also challenges colourblind liberal policies currently used by the government to limit any discussion about race as being racist. These policies engender the use of Universalist projects that fail to address specific historical along with current

disparities amongst predominantly white Europeans and selected marginalized groups, such as employment opportunities, access to higher education or as mentioned earlier increased levels of surveillance. This more often than not creates a sense of resentment from even the most liberal minded white youth as these policies seem to be tailored to marginalized groups through media coverage or government statements, further adding blame to the victim of historically disempowering policy making. The Rhizomatic or Alter-Modern approach to education has the potential to promote a new and profound understanding of recognition of each other. Audre Lorde emphasis on the difficulty of recognition allows for separateness within interdependence because it assumes that the identity of the ego is neither fixed nor omnipotent. It implies an awareness of the always incomplete character of a self that can alter the story of who it was before, (Mercer) thus decentering and denaturalizing fixed notions of identification/recognition formation.

A political intervention: Concluding remarks

Kwame Nkrume once stated that as long as capitalism and imperialism go unchecked there will always be exploitation, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. As a political philosophy Liberalism which is the most dominant outlook of our time, grants individual rights and freedoms in law but fails to take historical infringements of the-

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se rights into account. In his essay Liberalism and the Racial State Charles Mills provides his insight on the hypocrisy of Liberal moral and political theory as not challenging and asserting that it has failed to analyze and condemn racial injustice and facilitate it as a priority to correct racial oppression. Since Liberalism and Racism developed in the same historical period, Mills points out that contrary to a principled opposition to racism as a blatant infringement of individual rights and freedoms, Liberalism has too often been complicit with it.

current governments are clearly aimed at privileging those citizens deemed European or native. By acknowledging this fact white liberals who actively are engaged in creating true equality will be faced with their own privilege. The attack on Multiculturalism by these current government bodies further articulates the hypocrisy of their governance while simultaneously suggesting a preference for a colour-blind Liberalism that actually ignores any challenge to the status quo. Mills further states in his essay: At its most basic level, liberalism is a political theory about the equitable treatment of individuals conceptualized as morally equal, whos basic rights and freedoms should be respected. The problem is that these individuals were conceived of as white, and as justifiably positioned above people of colour. Thus the apparatus has been shaped from the start by these relations of domination, a shaping which has affected both the mapping of the polity and the normative orientation towards determining justice in the polity. (Mills)

In drawing connections between Cheryl Harris research regarding individual property rights and Charles Mills critique of Liberalism as an ideology that has been manifested more in symbiosis than contradiction, and with the liberal individual being so conceptualized that whiteness is a prerequisite of individuality, it becomes more evident that historical and contemporary Liberal laws are a result of whiteness as being a central tenet to life itself. [The Liberal state, correspondingly, has historically functioned as a racial state,] [Denying self-ownership to people of colour,] [ and treating non-whites as sub-persons incapable of self-rule.] (Mills)

If the Multicultural model is to succeed in Europe, the current Liberal philosophy will have to be acknowledged as one that was founded by racial hierarchy in order to re-address how new policies being implemented by

Post-racial Liberalism as coined by Tim Wise has created an environment that makes any meaningful discussion about race, or how it continues to function in both political and social spheres problematic. The universal col-

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our-blindness and blatantly prejudice public discourse regarding the future of Europe can be read as a continuation of a form of recognition that is so far embedded in white consciousness that it may take generations for any change to occur and one that continues to place whiteness at the centre of the discussion. The ability or amnesia caused by whiteness that makes it possible for it to function outside its own fantastical reality continues to create a scenario where apparent victimization and a conscious obsession with its own preservation becomes a road block to any meaningful progress in critically engaging anti-racist, anti-colonist methodologies. An increasingly large number of white liberals agree that there should be equality for all citizens, yet reject policies that could provide the very means to do so. This means that any public discourse with aims to specifically target public policies at groups who have historically and still are discriminated against become a source of animosity amongst the larger general white population who see this targeting as a form of privilege instead of as an equalizing force. Whiteness must also be de-centred in the discussion of how Multiculturalism can function in the future, in doing so, the discussion of weather it has failed changes quite drastically to one of how can Multiculturalism engage those who identify as white, especially in the working class? Many minority groups have had no choice but to live within multicultural communities due to discriminatory housing practices. It has never been a major issue for the mass majority of these groups. It has traditionally only been an issue when placed in relation to white occupation of

space, and culture. One of the major obstacles in this debate is whether Multicultural policies that espouse notions of equality will be rejected by whites as being in opposition to their way of life. The current global economic situation, responsible for some of the most drastic government measures since the end of World War II does not seem to have an end in sight. The economic challenges that Europe now finds itself faced with, along with what seems to be an attack on the natural way of life or standards of living may be the new norm to be expected in the future for many. While this may be true for some, it is important to remember that those same cuts to public spending such as education, or health care are making a near hopeless situation even graver for others. It is not only the near criminal management of public funds by government bodies for the sake of commercial free market enterprise that has created such economic hardship but also the reinvestment from manufacturing based economies, to almost exclusively service based ones that has forced a whole underclass of people into a perpetual state of limbo. It is not that during a time of economic downturn that population increases should be monitored and controlled; this is one way of ensuring that competition for labour is met with adequate opportunities for employment. It is rather that the increased influence of multi-national companies on government bodies through a neocorporatism that takes bottom lines instead of negotiating social interests as its final measure of success. The outsourcing of local jobs to emerging economies for increased wealth is the new standard that citizens of Europe

25

can expect. As stated by Du Bois: The world market most wildly and desperately sought today is the market where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is most abundant. The rich have a simple objective, to make more money. Solidarity amongst the people most affected by the economic crisis will enable a point of resistance to policies that are obviously aimed at making a select few wealthier while making the majority fight for the scraps. Multiculturalism is nothing more than a scapegoat for these governments, as it creates the fodder needed to ignite a fire that will destroy any solid resistance or dissent to the continued economic exploitation of the general public. Colour-blind liberalism along with post-racial rhetoric continues to ensure that whites maintain a privileged status that is always seemingly under attack from outside forces. Shannon Sullivan comments on the effects of colour-blindness:

up their race and become race-free (=white). The colourblindness that that results in turn fuels habits of white privilege by creating a social, political, and psychological atmosphere of racial invisibility in which white privilege can thrive. (Macmullan)

From this position whites have a lot to lose. What those who identify as white must now realize is that these large institutions no longer need their labour, or care to share the privileges that went along with their spoils within the context of society building. Their whiteness in not under attack from immigrants or minority groups, but rather the culture they live within is undergoing a form of increased standardization as a result of globalized capitalist strategies practiced by the corporations that they support through daily consumption of consumer goods. Ironically, an intentional disinvestment in the privilege of whiteness, countered with an investment in translation

Even though colourblindess ususally is intended as a strategy for the elimination of racism and white domination, it actually tends to fuel and be fueled by white privileged habits. Colour-blindness attempts to erase all race and make it invisible: I dont see race, I just see people Habits of white privilege support these attempts by making the invisibility of race seem like the goal that all people should aim for. Whiteness and its concomitant privileges tend to operate as invisible, and since whiteness is the standard to which all should aspire, then people of colour too should aspire to give

of singular experience as discussed by Bouriaud and Butler will actually be more beneficial to whites as it will enable true solidarity with those who they have more in common with in their day to day lives. Finally, Stuart Hall suggests a principal counter-strategy that needs to be brought to the surface- into representation- that which has sustained the regimes of representation unacknowledged: to subvert the structures of othering in language and representation, image, sound and discourse, and thus to turn to the mechanisms of fixed racial signification against themselves, in order to begin to constitute new subjectivities, new positions of enunciation and

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identification. This economic crisis has exposed the pathology of white privilege and exemplifies how uniquely ill prepared many white people, especially men, are for living in this new climate. The rhetoric provided by these current governments, underscores a philosophy of entitlement, provided by a historical legacy of white supremacy and privilege. White is not a colour, but rather an attitude, it is time to foster a greater sense of understanding, accountability and social equality, a critical pedagogy of whiteness within the European context and further Re-articulation of it needs to be discussed openly and honestly.

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