Recognising British Bodies: The Significance of Race and Whiteness in ‘Post-Racial’ Britain

Abstract

This article examines the significance of race in how nation is articulated by the white middle-classes in ‘post-racial’ Britain. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of bodies and informal markers of difference within processes of national recognition and reveals a normative expectation for British bodies racialised as non-white to perform or inhabit (particular kinds of) whiteness. Bringing insights from post-race theory and advocating a broad conceptualisation of whiteness as a set of relational ideas and codes, the article demonstrates that whiteness continues to shape and underpin dominant conceptions of Britishness – articulated by middle-class white Britons – even as they recognise people of colour individually, and to some extent collectively, as British. Since the role and symbolic power of the white middle-classes is often overlooked in discussions of Britishness, the article makes an important contribution to debates on race and nation, illustrating how whiteness continues to function in alledgedly ‘post-race’ societies. It concludes that narrow definitions of race and whiteness allow their continued significance to be under-estimated and ultimately enable the perpetuation of racialised hierarchies of belonging.

Visualising Africa at diaspora expense? How and why humanitarian organisations ignore diaspora audiences in their ‘ethical’ communications

“…A number of important speculative questions sprout from this reflection not least whether interviewees' ‘unraced’ conceptualisation of African diasporic communities is the inherited condition and concomitant of Britain's alleged post‐racialism. Authors have documented the theoretical and mythologised environment in which a utopian ‘post‐race’ Britain and Britishness are free from the anxieties of racial inequalities, racism and even the ‘colouring’ of ‘race’ itself (see, Clarke, 2021; Garner, 2016; Patel & Connelly, 2019). Others have highlighted the requirement and dilemmas of political correctness that accompanies this post‐racialised vision (Garner, 2016).…”

Changes in mixed ethnicity households and neighbourhood transitions in England and Wales

“…Whiteness and its associated privileges has been subject to growing attention in the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to its complexifying and diversifying identities and hierarchies preceding and in the aftermath of Brexit (Botterill & Burrell, 2019; Clarke, 2023; Hickman & Ryan, 2020; Sime et al, 2022). Exploring the ‘Whitening’ thesis, with its origins in US studies of intermarriage, Song (2021, p. 947) questions in relation to multiracial people in Britain ‘the empirical basis of arguments that Asian/White individuals are effectively joining the White category…Whiteness and its attendant social privileges have historically gone together, and in many ways, still do.…”

The (in)significance of citizenship in white British citizens’ narratives of national belonging

“…Distinguishing between citizenship and national belonging thus enabled Megan to challenge formal exclusions, while still drawing informal boundaries around the nation in relation to qualities of 'good' citizenship, including attitude and values. Although in practice such informal boundaries can be racialised and exclusionary (Anderson 2013;Clarke, forthcoming), they are generally more fluid and attainable than fixed markers of ancestry or birthplace.…”