Table Of Contentw hiteness and class in education
Whiteness and Class
in Education
By
John Preston
University of East London
United Kingdom
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank members of the CREATE (Communities, Resistance,
Education, Activity and Traditions) research group at the University of East
London for their critical and helpful comments in the writing of this book. In
particular, Namita Chakrabarty provided much advice on issues of Critical
Race Theory. I would also thank Kimani Nehusi and Patricia Walker who
helped me to consider the issues raised here in their wider contexts. Many
thanks also to Tony Green at the Institute of Education for hosting sabbatical
time there in early 2006 which helped enormously in the writing of this book
and to Lorna Roberts who hosted a superb seminar on the relevance of
Critical Race Theory in the UK at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Kevin Hall provided useful assistance in completing some of my factual
knowledge of civil defence in the 1980s. Any errors and omissions in this
volume are, though, exclusively my own.
Some of the chapters in this book have in part or whole been published
previously in journals. Chapter 2 is largely based on an article ‘White Trash
Vocationalism: Formations of Class and Race in an Essex Further Education
College’ which was originally published in The Journal of Widening
Participation and Lifelong Learning in 2003 (Volume 5, Number 2, pp. 235–
248). Chapter 3 is based on the article ‘Class Strategies and Stealth Policies
in Adult Education’ which was originally published in the International
Journal of Lifelong Education (Volume 25, Number 4, pp. 335–350).
Chapter 5 is based on the article ‘Can adult education change extremist
attitudes?’ which was originally published in the London Review of
Education (Volume 3, Number 3, pp. 289–309). The articles which
comprised Chapters 3 and 5 can be found at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.
Thanks to the publishers of these journals for giving permission for the use
of these articles.
Additional thanks to the Headmaster and archivist of Gordonstoun
School for permission to use the cartoon ‘They Called Him Digby…The
Late Developer ‘. Thanks also to the Central Office of Information (COI) for
permission to use the ‘Protect and Survive’ logo.
Finally thanks to Liz, Isobel and Nina without whose patience and love
the writing of this book would not have been possible.
v
PREFACE
Like many of my friends I didn’t really realise that I was working class until
I went to university. Suddenly, what I thought as normal became subtly and
not so subtly differentiated as I came into close contact with the middle
classes. I had not known a time, though, when I hadn’t been white, but I didn’t
really realise that I was white until I read David Roediger’s (1991) book ‘The
Wages of Whiteness’. Through reading this work and others on the topic of
whiteness the sense of my own whiteness became palpable to me. Namely,
that what I naively thought to be a timeless property of my skin was a social
construction that had acquired so much symbolic weight over time that it had
become seemingly real: a racial formation and project. This was with
consequences, in that a good part of my actual and psychological labour
market and other employment benefits were not part of a meritocratic system,
but due to the oppression of people of colour. This might be part of a system
that I at the time associated only with the far-right, a system of white
supremacy. Fundamentally, my skin was property and the gains that I had
made through it were at the expense of others. I was a ‘so called white’
(Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996) who everyday made a political decision to not
commit ‘treason’ to whiteness. I learnt that my Irish immigrant roots were part
of an accommodation to whiteness - that the Irish were not always accepted as
being white. Moreover, it made me consider the political responses that I
should make to these social facts. Strangely, none of these things made me feel
guilty about being white. Indeed, I am critical of the dubious merits of ‘guilty’
autobiographies of whiteness (see chapter 7) and beyond this opening insight I
will keep auto-ethnographic insights into my own whiteness brief. White
writers sometimes implicitly or explicitly dismiss the ‘guilt’ associated with
writing about whiteness in terms of their own auto-critique of whiteness. Their
acknowledgement and guilt about their whiteness appears to be a political
stance, but is purely a rhetorical one. Displaying guilt does not make one any
less complicit in white supremacy any more so than any one individual can
become a ‘race traitor’ alone against whiteness. Writing against whiteness, and
casting this academic labour as a practice, a doing of whiteness rather than a
being of whiteness is not wholly satisfactory when white writers seem to
monopolise the field. So inevitably writing on whiteness in education is a
controversial area of activity. Some may even call it racist and this is a
possibility which we should always be aware of. However, there seem to be
radical possibilities beyond writing on whiteness in terms of offering the
potential to dismantle white supremacy and the institutionally and structurally
racist structures that derive from it.
vii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................v
PREFACE...................................................................................................vii
1. FROM TROUBLING WHITENESS TO TREASON
TO WHITENESS .....................................................................................1
Whiteness studies, class and education
PART ONE: WHITE IDENTITIES, PRACTICES
AND PRIVILEGES IN EDUCATION
2. HOW THE WHITE WORKING CLASS BECAME ‘CHAV’..........35
The making of whiteness in an Essex FE College
3. CLASS AND RACE STRATEGIES IN ADULT EDUCATION.......59
‘I think it was a diverse group of people, which I don’t think helped’
4. SMELLS LIKE WHITE SPIRIT..........................................................81
Pre-modern and ‘Prosthetic’ whiteness in the education of the white
English ruling classes
PART TWO: POLICY, PEDAGOGY AND ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’
IN EDUCATION
5. TAKE THE SKINHEADS BOWLING?............................................107
What should educators do about white supremacists in the classroom?
6. HOMELAND INSECURITY..............................................................141
The Eugenics of ‘civil defence pedagogy’ from the Cold War
to the War on Terror
7. TOWARDS A ‘TRASH CRIT’...........................................................167
Getting over guilt in using whiteness in the classroom
ix
x Contents
8. CONCLUDING REMARKS...............................................................189
White supremacy and the challenge to ‘critical whiteness
studies’ in education
REFERENCES.........................................................................................199
INDEX.......................................................................................................213
Chapter 1
FROM TROUBLING WHITENESS TO TREASON
TO WHITENESS
Whiteness studies, class and education
1. WHITE NOISE
Writing in critical whiteness studies is a precarious activity, not only in
terms of the ways in which white writers on whiteness attempt to destabilize
and decentre their own whiteness, but also as it does not have discrete
disciplinary foundations. There are many works published on whiteness and
there is exponential growth in terms of recent interrogations of whiteness. It
is no longer enough to make whiteness strange, it has almost become
normalized as the standard way of ‘doing’ race within a number of fields of
endeavor including education. Even despite this sudden explosion in
whiteness studies, it can not be considered to be a unitary discipline. It is a
series of archipelagos around fields of cultural studies, post-colonial
theories, sociology, political economy and literary theories. This means that
writing on whiteness is inter-disciplinary and in this book I use a number of
theoretical approaches, primarily from sociology and political economy, but
also from cultural and media studies, law (primarily critical legal theory) as
well as (obviously) from education studies. As a controversial endeavor,
writing on whiteness often feels to be fueled on internal critique. Studies on
whiteness reveal that it has burned itself out (‘this is the last book that should
be published on whiteness’), that it is racist (re-centering discourses on
whites) and that it appropriates the work of black scholars. As to the last
point, whiteness studies can be seen to be the latest attempt by whites to
forge an academic version of what Cashmore (1997) calls the ‘Black Culture
1
2 Chapter 1
Industry’. Just as Elvis ripped off black musical forms and practices, so too
the ‘great whites’ of critical whiteness studies can be said to appropriate Du
Bois or Fanon in order to sell black analysis in a palatable form to white
readers. It is therefore a precarious activity writing in whiteness studies both
in terms of shifting around disciplinary perspectives and in terms of the self
examination and scrutiny that white writers are put under when they turn
their attention to their ‘so-called’ white skin.
2. WHAT IS WHITENESS?
A number of terms are used within texts on whiteness. As a designation of
ethnicity, white and White (The title of Dyer’s seminal 1997 book) are used
but to show the social and political construction of whiteness, others refer to
‘so-called whites’ (Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996). The ambiguity of whiteness
in certain contexts is demonstrated through terms such as ‘intermediate
whiteness’, ‘situationally white’, ‘not quite white’, ‘semi-racialised’ and
‘conditionally white’ (Roediger, 2005). Whiteness is linked with class in that
some individuals are pathologised as poor ‘white trash’ (Wray and Newitz,
1997) or even ‘rich white trash’. The ways in which whiteness works as a
system of oppression are revealed in discussions of ‘white privilege’
(McIntosh, 1997) which depends upon the legal status of ‘whiteness as
property’. These are reinforced by ‘white practices’ of white ethnic solidarity
and racism and systemically by a system of ‘white supremacy’ (Allen, 2001,
2004; hooks, 1999; Mills, 2004). Some authors speak of whiteness whereas
others contend that there are multiple forms of whiteness(es) (Bonnett,
2000). Even the name of the field of enquiry is disputed with some
considering that ‘white studies’ is a collective name for those who work in
the area whereas others consider that ‘critical white studies’ is a better term.
More extremely, authors consider that the study of whiteness is a politically
naïve project and it would be better to ‘abolish whiteness’ in a form of ‘neo-
abolitionism’ (Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996).
As this lexicon of whiteness shows it is not fully accurate to describe
whiteness as a contested term. Rather it is a combative term across which a
number of disputes are gathered regarding the nature of race in general, as
well as the specifics of the white race and whether or not such a thing
meaningfully exists, in particular. One of the key themes in this book is the
importance of distinguishing between the category white, whiteness, white
practices, white privilege and white supremacy. Following Ignatiev and
Garvey (1996) I consider the category white to represent a political category
which is historically and socially reproduced. Moreover, the decision to
occupy the category white is one which collectives and states make political
