Behind White Picket Fences
Young white women positioning themselves in discourses on multiculturalism in contemporary Dutch society
Rozanne Drost Research-Master ‘Gender and Ethnicity’ No. 0010618 Universiteit Utrecht June 2006 Supervisor: prof. dr. Gloria Wekker Second Reader: dr. Sandra Ponzanesi
1 1. I ntroduction 3 Tolerance 3 Research questions 8 Theoretical positioning 10 Methodologies 16 Behind White Picket Fences 16 2. E thnocentrism in Women’s Studies, the Netherlands 20 Feminist epistemology 21 Women’s Studies and the critique of universal sisterhood 24 Debate in the Netherlands 26 3. Wh iteness 37 Critical White Studies 37 What is white? 43 4. N ew Realism, ‘thinking through race’ and culturalist racism 51 ‘Is multiculturalism bad for white women?’ 52 New Realism 55 Women’s position in new realism 57 Thinking Through Race 59 Culturalist Racism 62 5. B ehind White Picket Fences 65 White Women 65 The Netherlands 66 Interviewing as a feminist methodology 68 Interviewing on whiteness and racism: controversial questions 69 Behind White Picket Fences 73 Ordinary White 76 ‘Autochtoon’ or ‘allochtoon’ 81 The other women: friends with headscarves? 89 The other men: the law of the father 93 Bowien and Rachid 96 White privilege and racism 99 6. C onclusion 107 L iterature 111 A ppendix I 119 A ppendix II 121
2 The tales we, as Dutch persons, like to tell ourselves about who we are, turn out to be too self-flattering, they need to be questioned and complicated. Gloria Wekker,( 2004)
1. I ntroduction
Tolerance In his book Blacks in the Dutch World African-American historian Alison Blakely states:
‘While the themes of pluralism and toleration by no means encompass all aspects of Dutch culture, they have bearing on so many that a consideration of them may serve as a convenient avenue for gaining an instructive impression of Dutch society.’ (1993: 8)
According to Blakely pluralism and toleration are inextricably bound up with the history of the Dutch nation. In the era of empire, the Netherlands had been ruled by other countries, but it had also and simultaneously been an active colonizer which makes ‘(t)he Netherlands (…) so much a land of immigrants that the very definition of “Dutch” is problematic.’ (3) There are ‘… few present Dutch families without at least one ancestor from abroad.’ (8) In dominant discourses, the Netherlands were long considered an especially tolerant and hospitable country. Michel Foucault defines ‘discourse’ as folows:
‘the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.’ (Michel Foucault [1972] quoted in Mills, 2003: 53)
The Netherlands were constructed through dominant discourses as a multicultural society, a country of immigrants, and for a long time the dominant discourses in the country would have that as something positive, something to be proud of. These notions have been one of our successful export-products, as can be argued with the help of Alison Blakeley: he takes Dutch tolerance as a marker of Dutchness. However, at the end of the eighties, beginning of the nineties, the notion of tolerance was an important feature in a
3 backlash against cultural pluralism in the Netherlands. Tolerance was at this moment constructed as something other than broadmindedness or acceptance. Tolerance is now deeply imbedded in hierarchal power structures. Baukje Prins:
‘(T)he problem of how to organize life in a multi-cultural society becomes the problem of the limits of tolerance: to what extent can ethnic minorities be allowed to hold on to their own beliefs and practices?’ (Prins, 1997: 122)
At the beginning of the twentieth first century, in the context of the end of the ‘fat years’ of economic growth and capitalist revival and the uprising of populist voices from the political right, the statement by social-liberal politician Roger van Boxtel that ‘The Netherlands are a country of immigrants. This is not a choice, it is a given. The consequences have been reflected upon too late, formally not until 1998.’ (Van Boxtel, [2000] 2004: 13 translation RD), was met with scornful laughter. The multicultural society that Van Boxtel takes as a ‘given’, as a starting point from which societal issues should be regulated, is an illusion1 according to others. Paul Scheffer, one of the actors in the debate about ‘the multicultural illusion’ ended his argument on the multicultural drama in the Netherlands by stating:
‘The present policy of ample admission and limited integration increases inequality and contributes to a feeling of alienation in society. Tolerance groans under the weight of overdue repairs.’ (Scheffer, [2000] 2004: 10, translation, RD).
Why is it, that in the present, the Netherlands has become a country which seems so blind to these former traits of pluralism and tolerance? Philomena Essed makes a connection between the trait of tolerance embedded in the construction of Dutch culture and the denial of racism.
‘Because the Dutch have strongly internalized the idea that they are a tolerant people, which they probably translate as a tendency not to discriminate, they are more reluctant
1 Here I am referring to another key actor in this debate, and the title of his essay: Paul Schnabel ‘The multicultural society is and illusion’ (2000)
4 than Whites in the United States to acknowledge that racism is a Dutch problem as well.’ (Essed, 1991: 274)
At the beginning of the new century, tolerance is a complex concept. While anti-racism discourses tell us that the notion of tolerance is a cover-up for denying problems of racism, dominant discourses claim tolerance has gone too far.
In this introduction to my thesis ‘Behind white picket fences’ I will sketch the background context of this research, I will formulate the research questions that I aim to answer, and give insight into the main theories and methodologies utilized to get towards the main theses proposed. Finally, I will give an overview of the chapters that will follow. In the next section I will draw a background of political and media events that represent the attention that is giving to multicultural society, especially when ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ are represented as a dichotomy. This thesis is about young white women and their position in the multicultural society of the Netherlands. One of the complexities of this research is that the political background against which it is conducted is changing by the day. The world seemed to need a redefinition after the 2001 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, New York. The Netherlands were re-awakened by the murder of Pim Fortuyn, in May 2002. Fortress Europe was not a safe place either after the train-bombings in Madrid, 2003. In the Netherlands the murder on filmmaker and columnist Theo van Gogh on November 2nd, 2004 was a deeply disturbing moment in society. In July 2005 the bombings in the London Subway took place. The words in which these crimes have been described in the (Dutch) media are immense. New terminologies are created to articulate the recent events. ‘Fearful and without our innocence2 our nation seems to live on.’ ‘Are we in a war?3’ If we analyze the political statements and the accounts in the media we might believe so, because politicians for example do not shy away from polarizing terminology about ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘war on terror’.
2 ‘The Netherlands have lost their innocence’, was stated by the leader of the Labour Party (PVDA) Ad Melkert after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, and again by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende (Christian Democrat Party, CDA) after the murder of Theo van Gogh. (www.nos.nl/archief ) 3 Liberal politician and Minister of Finances Gerrit Zalm (VVD) assented to the question if the Netherlands were at War. The parliament would ‘fight a war on muslimextremism and fundamentalism’. Quoted on television program NOVA, November 5th, 2004. (www.novatv.nl )
5 In politics and in the media citizens’ civil rights are redefined. Politicians demand different implementations of the law and the constitution towards citizens with double nationalities. Suddenly, especially Moroccan- and Turkish-Netherlanders who have two passports are en public asked to choose between the countries. Living in the Netherlands nowadays demands full loyalty. Artificial concepts as the distinction ‘autochtoon’ and ‘allochtoon’4 are misused by the media. Although as officially defined by the Central Bureau of Statistics, an ‘allochtoon’ is a person living in the Netherlands, with at least one parent who is born in a foreign country. (CBS)5, firstly there is a distinction made between western and non western ‘allochtonen’ and second, ‘allochtoon’ is linked to Muslim citizens, and problems of integration. Here the dichotomy in representation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is clearly visible. Fanatical Muslims are defined as terrorists and as dangers to society, white extreme-right youth claiming their racial superiority are cast as rebelling adolescents with a minor identity crisis. In the aftermath of the murder on Theo van Gogh, young white adolescents set fire to Mosques and Islamic primary schools. The comparison in media attention and juridical resolution of the actions of young Muslim men and young white men promises to be an interesting research topic. The media speak of the failure of multicultural society. In 2004, the Committee- Blok, devoted to the evaluation of thirty years of governmental integration processes concluded its final report by stating:
‘The committee states that integration of many allochtonen has completely or partially been successful and that is an achievement of great magnitude, both of the allochtonen concerned as well as of the hosting society.’ (Final Report Committee Blok, 2004: 520, translation RD)6
The next day’s headlines in the major newspapers showed how tendentious media reacted to these findings. NRC Handelsblad opens with ‘Commissie Blok: Integration successful’
4 In this thesis I use the terminology of ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’. However, I will use these terms when I refer to respondents using it. Whenever possible I will use the term within brackets or use the terms migrant. 5 www.cbs.nl 6 ‘De commissie constateert dat integratie van veel allochtonen geheel of gedeeltelijk geslaagd is en dat is een prestatie van formaat, zowel voor de betreffende allochtone burgers als van de hen ontvangende samenleving.’ (Eindrapport Commisie Blok, 2004: 520)
6 (January 19th, 2004), while De Volkskrant states ‘Commissie Blok: Integration failed’ (January 19th, 2004).7 The debate that followed the final report ended the uncertainty: politicians and experts of multiculturalism concluded that the failure had happened. The discourse in which these political accounts of redefining society take place can be called New Realism. (Prins: 2000, 2002) The main theme around which regulating practices are produced consists of statements on multicultural society, with an emphasis on Muslim communities. The multicultural debate is represented in the media in a dichotomous way. Was the world for a long time divided into Capitalist and Communist; nowadays the clash between the ‘West and the Rest’ is symbolized by ‘the war on terror’ (president George W. Bush) between (former) Judeo-Christian nations and the Muslim world (see for instance Fortuyn, 2001). In the many debates and discussions on multicultural society in New Realism, little attention has been giving to what it means to be a member of the ethnic majority group in society. Is it time for the white ‘community’ in the Netherlands to rethink their own ethnic or racial position? What does it mean to be Dutch? What does it mean to be white? How is whiteness constructed in contemporary Dutch society? Naturally, ‘white people’ are no homogeneous group of human beings. Whiteness may seem undefined and therefore neutral, but this is not to say that there are no rules. Not everybody has access to this white group of people, and it is not only skin color that can give you a ticket in. (Roediger, 1991; Karen Brodkin, 2004) Intersectional theory argues that subjectivity is constructed on different axes, of which race/ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender are the most frequently mentioned. This research is about young women, being white in the Netherlands. Traditionally, the battlefields over which issues of racial power structures are being fought are women’s bodies. National(istic) identities are often represented through images of women. ‘Women are thus placed in a vulnerable and precarious position. As bearers of nationalistic cultures, they become attackable as such.’ (Griffin with Braidotti, 2002: 239) Although ‘bearers of nationalistic cultures’ might provoke images of French Marianne or Greek Europa, white women in the Netherlands are also represented as bearers of Dutch culture when multicultural society is discussed. White men suddenly want to protect the
7 Links to newspapers on and summary of the results of the Committee Blok on www.gelijkebehandeling.nl
7 ‘rights’ of feminism, now able to use feminism right opposite to the position of Muslim women. How do young white women position themselves within this location? How are white women embedded in (white) power structures, and do they see themselves as privileged in being white? How do white women construct themselves in racial power relations, and (how) do they try to escape them? With this research on the discursive construction of whiteness in contemporary Dutch society, I intend to contribute to the analyses of multiculturalism and racism by investigating a blind spot in the Netherlands.
Research questions In this research project, I want to look at whiteness as a social and discursive construction. I am specially interested in the question of how young white women position themselves in the contemporary multicultural society of the Netherlands, and use discourses of new realism, that I just briefly mentioned, culturalist racism (Essed, 1991), and the four ‘thinking through race’ discourses, essentialist racism, power- and color- evasive discourse, race cognizance and power-evasive race cognizance, as defined by Ruth Frankenberg (1993 and 2001). These are the three sub-questions which I will employ in my search for the construction of whiteness:
1. What does being white in the Netherlands mean to these young, white women? And what does it mean to be Dutch, to be ‘autochthonous’? What is ‘Dutch/White’ as positioned in multicultural society, according to young white women? 2. How is white identity constructed through comparison with the non-white category? How do young ‘Dutch/White’ women deal with racism and do the women see themselves as being in a privileged position because of their whiteness? 3. Which part of this whiteness or Dutchness relates to the history of the Netherlands as a colonizing country and a country of migrants? Before locating these questions into a theoretical and methodological framework, I will locate myself in the research. The politics of location (Adrienne Rich, 1986) argue that
8 positioning oneself is not about naming all the axes you are situated on. However, I will take these axes as a starting-point. I am a young white woman in academia, researching young white women (not from academia) in the Netherlands. As a student in the faculty of arts, (or humanities) I came across the discipline of Women’s Studies. I was drawn to this discipline because of its interdisciplinarity, and the way it analyzed power relations. Because I studied Women’s Studies with different scholars (either as teachers, students or as authors) I came to realize that ethnicity was to some of those scholars inextricably bound up with gender, however, to some this was not, or more precisely, for ‘Blackness’ ethnicity was an important feature, for ‘whiteness’ it wasn’t. Therefore, I could start my own studies without realizing that as a white woman I have an ethnicity that is part of multicultural society. And when I became aware of my position as a white woman, it was a disappointment to realize that so many whites had no interest in deconstructing their whiteness, because it might effect their ‘racial status quo’ (Wellman, 1975). Multicultural society is the other location that is important to me in this research. Firstly, through history, nonwhites have overwhelmingly been the objects of study by whites. In this research I have made a conscious choice to study white women, as a white woman. I am interested in ‘common sense’ knowledge, not only on how ‘common white women’ talk about ‘un-common’ others, but also how they relate to themselves. I want to highlight this ‘commonality’ to look at its privileges, its taken-for-granted-ness, to work against racism. Secondly, it is fascinating to study whiteness from the position of Women’s Studies. The dominant discourses on multicultural society in which we all take a position and are positioned does not coincide with the knowledge produced in the discipline of Women’s Studies, but it neither leaves it uninfluenced, politically corrected or free of bias. There is still a possibility for whites to study gender without relating it to ethnicity. And finally, the context of polarization in society, where we do not, as once ‘promised’8, automatically work to a less divided world in terms of gender and ethnicity (and class and sexuality), but even deal with major backlashes against gender and ethnic equality.
8 In the rhetoric of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie: We are the world, We are the children, We are the ones who make a brighter day, So let's start giving. There's a choice we're making, We're saving our own lives, It's true we'll make a better day just you and me. (USA for Africa, 1986)
9 Theoretical positioning The theoretical framework of this research is mainly an interdisciplinary framework. Both Women’s Studies and (Critical) Whiteness Studies are critically assessed on the way to the final analyses of statements on multicultural society and being white in this society by the six young white women. The community of Women’s Studies in the Netherlands participates in the academic debate on ethnicity in Women’s Studies, however some of those participants voices are included and some or excluded from the disciplines discourse. Dominant discourses influence the community of Women’s Studies, because this community is not detached from society and narratives of ‘common sense’ told by society. The same can be argued for (Critical) Whiteness Studies; however, this discipline has not taken such form as an academic community as has Women’s Studies in the Netherlands. The disciplines of Women’s Studies and that of (Critical) Whiteness Studies produce and articulate a certain representation of reality. These disciplinary frameworks and the different theoretical frameworks construct knowledge on race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are given meaning in society, dominant meanings become part of ‘common sense’. White people are in ‘common sense’ not socially constructed by ethnicity; additionally they are constructed as neutral. Through analyses of interviews with six young white women I research the dominant discourses through which they construct themselves in terms of ethnicity in multicultural Netherlands.
From the beginning of the nineties on, a dominant discourse that in retrospect has been called ‘New Realism’ by Baukje Prins (1997), took hold over dominant thought patterns in the Netherlands as a multicultural society. Within this discourse, old- and newcomers9 to Dutch society are most importantly defined as ‘ethnic’ others. This is not new in itself, however the manner in which this happens is. Prins: ‘Especially in the new realist discourse, members of the minority groups are under discussion, rather than perceived as participant in the discussion.’ (Prins, 1997: 122) It is not the difference in ethnicity that is defined through the dominant discourse; it is ethnicity of the ethic minority group itself. The ethnicity of the majority population in the Netherlands, either ‘Dutch’ or ‘white’, is
9 Oldcomers are migrants who are legal citizens of the Netherlands; newcomers are migrants who have just arrived in the Netherlands. (www.monitorinburgering.nl)
10 not acknowledged as an ethnic construction. ‘Dutch’ or ‘white’ is a neutral and normative position in the Netherlands as constructed in new realism. Prins:
‘For by assuming that Dutchness is an unmarked category, a subject position that does not strike the eye because it does not differ from modern culture in general, it turns out to coincide with what is considered the norm or normal.’ (Prins, 1997: 122)
Within her research on everyday racism in the Netherlands and the United States, Philomena Essed argues that the Netherlands has changed from an essentialist brand of racism, part of a no longer accepted biological discourse on races, to culturalist racism. This culturalist racism classifies others in hierarchies not on the basis of biological traits, but on essentialist cultural aspects and stereotypes. There is a dominant white culture in the Netherlands that should be conformed to by others. The ‘Dutch’ notion of tolerance is here defined within a power structure. The dominant cultural group is in a position to be tolerant towards the subordinated group, and at the same time demands integration or assimilation in Dutch society. Within this discourse of ‘tolerance’, the notion that the Dutch are not racist is strongly defended. However, as Essed argues, the Netherlands are tolerant towards racism which is evident through a denial of racism in public opinion. The denial of racism is a form of ethnicism, which is a term Essed uses to define
‘an ideology that explicitly proclaims the existence of “multiethnic” equality but implicitly presupposes an ethnic or cultural hierarchical order.’ (Essed, 1991: 6)
An example is the denial of the majority group in the Netherlands, meaning whites, that racism is an issue that needs to be taken seriously in this country. Accusations of racism are cast off with the argumentation that equality has been reached. Therefore the struggle and resistance against racism not legitimatized in dominant discourse. (idem: 15)
Can we even say that the Netherlands are a multicultural nation? First I want to look at the question of what multiculturalism is. I find the definition by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam useful here. In Unthinking Eurocentrism they present a small North-American historiography of multiculturalism in the last decades, to argue how different parties have
11 used the concept in their own favor, either to embrace or to dismiss multiculturalism. (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 46-47). They conclude:
‘(t)he concept of “multiculturalism,” then, is polysemically open to various interpretations and the subject to diverse political force-fields; it has become an empty signifier on to which diverse groups project their hopes and fears.’ (Idem, 47)
During the interviews with young white women, it became evident that they automatically connected multicultural society to problems of integration and fear for terrorist actions. Multiculturalism signified fear and also anger towards especially Muslim citizens who in their opinions did not live up to the neutral, ‘normal’ white norms and values. The words ‘normal’ and ‘just’ (in Dutch ‘gewoon’) in combination to their own lifestyles were used remarkably often throughout all interviews. The ethnic construction of the dominant culture is unmarked through dominant discourses, and within the interviews, the word ‘normal’ or ‘just’ was a signifier of this unmarkedness. This indicated that multicultural society defined through these conversations is a society in which dominant culture is hard to describe, and old- and newcomers to this society need to integrate or assimilate to adapt to these hard to define, invisible but omnipresent, and crucially important standards. Is multiculturalism defined by being a society in which different cultures take their positions, the ethnic minority as well as the ethnic majority? Or, should we be looking at the power relations between different ethnic positions within the Netherlands? It should be taken into account that the dominant discourses in the Netherlands have always been ‘neutrally’ white discourses; Eurocentric discourses. We have consistently constructed whiteness as a non-ethnic position. I want to argue that we are a hegemonic multicultural society. Whiteness is never questioned, while other ethnicities, at this moment especially Muslim ethnicities are. Attention towards the ‘ethnic other’ in seventies and eighties has had its emphasis on migrants from the Antilles and Suriname. Throughout the analyses of the interviews in chapter 5 of this thesis it becomes evident that when the young white women talk about the ethnic other, or in Dutch ‘allochtonen’, they often talk about the Muslim other, either Turkish or Moroccan in origin.
12 Martine, one of the six young white women I interviewed, is positioned in a discourse that constructs multicultural society as hegemonic. She sums up ethnic groups in the Netherlands which she considers to be ‘allochtoon’: ‘Moroccan people, and Turkish, people from the Antilles, Suriname.’ ‘And Indonesia as well?’, I ask her.
‘No, they are somewhere in between [‘autochtoon’ and ‘allochtoon’], because they do not attract attention in society. You hear about fights and stuff in relation to Moroccans, Turkish people. Not about Indonesians.’ (Martine). 10
Not only does it matter in dominant discourse on multicultural society whether the person is white or nonwhite, the significance attached to nonwhite ethnicities is unstable and up for change. This is why the Netherlands are a hegemonic multicultural society.
The terms race and ethnicity are often use interchangeably, although both concepts differ. I have chosen to use the term race without putting it into quotation marks. The latter convention is rightful in the sense that race is actually a not existing entity. However, as David Roediger puts it in an article on ‘postrace-ists’ who believe that in a short amount of time everybody will be a hybrid:
‘(…) so sure are some advocates of hybridity (…) that they put “race” inside wary quotation marks that (rightly) signal its scientifically spurious status but abandon all wariness when “multiracial” is invoked as a category. Inattention to history leaves discussion of the transcendence of race fully saddled with the very preoccupation with biological explanations that it declares to be liquidated.’(Roediger, 2002: 8)
In the Netherlands, the term race (ras in Dutch translation) is not used in dominant discourse. The word ras is connected to biological differences between groups of people, but moreover to flora and fauna: for animal and plant species. Ethnicity has taken the place and partly the meaning of race in dominant discourse. Ethnicity can refer to what is described by Wekker and Lutz (2001) as the ‘personal, social and symbolic meanings that are given to the ‘racial’ and ethnic difference between people (translation RD)’. In this
10 All the interviews were conducted in Dutch. The transcripts of the interviews have been translated by me.
13 thesis I argue that ethnicity should not only be conceptualized as difference between people. Ethnicity is also inherent among people of the same ethnic group, in levels of nationalism, etc. Ethnicity is part of the fluid and unstable identity construction of everybody. Although white young women do not consciously represent themselves as white or as constructed through ethnicity, I argue that on a subconscious level they are. As ethnicity gives meaning to society and its people, so the denial of having an ethnicity by claiming to be neutral or the norm gives meaning to young white women’s identity. To be neutral of ethnicity in multicultural Netherlands gives meaning, and creates (racial) power relations. Ethnicity of the ‘other’, in dominant discourse constructed as the only bearers of ethnicity itself, becomes more than ethnicity, it becomes racialized and grounds for (cultural) racism. In the context of the Netherlands and Europe and the neo-liberalism or neo- conservatism of the present time, Brah argues that we must consider the use and meaning of ethnicity. Brah claims it is:
‘imperative that, as we rethink the concept of ethnicity we consider its affirmative inscriptive possibilities as well as its susceptibilities to potential recuperation in racism and nationalism. Under what circumstances does ethnicity become racialized?’ (Brah, 1993: 10).
In dominant new realism discourse, white people are not constructed as ethnic, nor do they become racialized. However, the ‘ethnic other’ is racialized in its aftermath. How do young white women racialize others? In chapter 5 I will argue that young white women racialize the ethnic other by emphasizing that they themselves are ‘just normal’ and prejudiced against Muslim others with good cause.
The definition of white racism as described by David T. Wellman will be used, because it links white people to racism. ‘White racism is what white people do to protect the special benefits they gain by virtue of their skin color.’ (Wellman, 1977/1993: 222) Although coming from a sociologist point of view, I argue that this is very well translatable to
14 discourse analyses. His emphasis on the conscious and unconscious decision of white people to act according to their desire to maintain the racial status quo gives insight in the power structures of racism. His definition is related to an underlying desire of white people to maintain the racial status quo. This maintenance is present in discourse through regulating practices that involve statements about race, ethnicity and racism. Race is connected to both gender and class. Racism is more than a socio- economic issue. (Roediger, 1999: 7) Philomena Essed defines racism on an individual and institutional level, which are deeply interwoven:
‘Racism must be understood as ideology, structure, and process in which inequalities inherent in the wider social structure are related, in a deterministic way, to biological and cultural factors attributed to those who are seen as a different “race” or “ethnic” group.’(Essed, 1991: 43)
The connection of race towards gender and of racism and gender is eloquently described by Avtar Brah.
‘While many analysts treat racism as a gender-neutral concept, it must be borne in mind that racism constructs the female gender differently from the male gender.’ (Brah, 1993: 12)
In relation to this interrelatedness I argue that whiteness - and white racism and privilege are part of that whiteness -, constructs male and female differently as well. In this research I will emphasis whiteness in relation to the female gender.
Methodologies Methodologies from Women’s Studies and (Critical) Whiteness Studies are used within this research. First I have drawn the theoretical framework, connecting the small amount of attention given to whiteness in Dutch society back to the introduction of new realism as a now dominant discourse in the Netherlands, connecting this discourse to the structural power position of racism, and the (un)conscious desire of white people to maintain the racial status quo. Being aware of the intersections of ethnicity with gender, I
15 will especially look at the position white women have in this debate. The interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks of Women’s Studies and (Critical) Whiteness Studies are critically assessed. The research itself is located at the intersection of the disciplines Women’s Studies and (Critical) Whiteness Studies. Next to literature research, I have chosen the methodology of empirical research, conducting interviews with six young, white women on the discursive construction of their ethnic position. There has not been a research project in the Netherlands that used interviews with young white women to complicate the multicultural debate. In this context, my interviews are exploratory. However, the results and conclusions can give information on the significance of this methodology for research on constructions of whiteness, racism and multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Through discourse analyses I attempt to understand the epistemology of whiteness in the New Realist discourse in the Netherlands. Whether the women are situated within the New Realist discourse or whether they see multicultural society and their own position within it ‘against the grain’ of dominant discourse is something that must be explored. In the conclusion the different knowledge threads will come together and the research gaze will look at the future possibilities of adding whiteness to Dutch knowledge production. More on the methodologies, their complexities in relation to feminism and racism is considered in chapter 5.
Behind White Picket Fences The thesis ‘Behind white picket fences’ is organized in six chapters, including the introduction and conclusion chapters. In this introductory chapter I have described the research questions that I want to answer, the main theoretical movements that my research is situated in, discussed the definitions of terminologies that will be central in the thesis, formulated methodological complexities involving the discourse analyses of the interviews, and situated myself as researcher in the research. In the second chapter, Ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies, the Netherlands I will discuss the position of whiteness in Women’s Studies, by giving a summary of the main debates on ethnocentrism and racism within the discipline between 1982 and now. Whiteness is an issue that only recently started to be addressed. Therefore the following
16 landmark is even more interesting. To celebrate the 25th year anniversary of the Dutch Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (Journal of Gender studies, 2004), the editors asked teachers in national Women’s Studies departments which article published in the journal they found most important. The number one answer was ‘The white tower of Women’s Studies’, a 1984 article written by Troetje Loewenthal. The article forcefully puts the neutrality of white women in Women’s Studies and the blindness of the discipline towards racism on the agenda. What does it mean that this particular article has been chosen to be most inspiring and influential? What was its significance then and now? Why is it that the attention given to whiteness as an ethnic position in the Netherlands, or more so a dominant ethnic construction, has not been accepted as ‘common sense’ in the discourse? In Chapter 3, Whiteness, the newly defined discipline (Critical) Whiteness Studies is central. This field of study is complex, because of its complex topic. Whiteness is often considered to be invisible, neutral and normative in relation to ethnic positions that are racialized and ‘othered’ through history. Therefore, I first offer a critique on the construction of the discipline itself, at both the invisibility claim and the universality claim of whiteness. (Frankenberg, 2001 and Wiegman, 1999). Next, I will look at the meaning of whiteness in an especially Dutch context. Finally I will briefly discuss white privilege in relationship to the maintenance of the ‘racial status quo’ (Wellman, 1975). Chapter 4, New Realism, Culturalist Racism and ‘Thinking Through Race’, focuses on the new realism discourse, ‘thinking through race’ discourses and cultural racism, which illustrate the discursive and social context in which my interviews with white women take place. I will argue that New Realism is the dominant discursive construction on multicultural society in the Netherlands. As discourse and society itself are neither fixed nor homogeneous, I will pay attention to strategies of collaboration, (apparent) neutrality and resistance towards New Realism. I will start in this introduction by sketching the context of the discussions on multiculturalism in the Netherlands. The interrelations of race/ethnicity with gender, class, sexuality and age is critical in this project. Different intersections are utilized in an analysis of the new realism discourse. The whiteness produced through the New Realism discourse in the Netherlands will be discussed in this research as not standing on its own, but as connected to another category in the
17 construction of subject positions: gender. New realism discourse has strong affinities with a (neo) colonial discourse which constructs white women as the bearer of national identity and therefore in need of protection. The black man has historically been constructed as the object that the white women need protection from; in New Realism this has become the Muslim man. New realism is also related to a socio-economic discourse in which class is conflated with race. The problematic of racism is through this socio-economic discourse quickly rejected and turned into problems of class. Ruth Frankenberg argues that ‘race shapes white women’s lives’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 1). Frankenberg noted that white women utilize three different discursive repertoires in their ‘thinking through race’ (188): essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance. Later she would add a fourth discourse to the repetoires: power-evasive race cognizance. Both color- and power-evasive discourse and the power- evasive race cognizance are ‘thinking through race’ constructions that are situated within New Realist discourse. Philomena Essed argues in Understanding Everyday Racism (1991) that essentialist racism has changed into culturalist racism, a more subtle form of racism but no less part of a racist power structure. The discourse of culturalist racism holds the idea that racism is no (longer a) major issue in Dutch society. The dominant cultural group, white people, is in a position to be tolerant towards the subordinated group, and at the same time demanding integration or assimilation in Dutch society. Within this discourse of tolerance, the notion that the Dutch are not racist is established. In Chapter 4, these six discourses will be summarized and positioned towards each other. I will illustrate the discourse with examples from the interviews. Chapter 5, Behind White Picket Fences, contains the analyses of the six interviews that I had with young white women. The methodological implications of interviewing white women on subjects of ethnicity, whiteness and racism in multicultural society are discussed in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, the interviews are analyzed through the six discourses in thematic paragraphs. The importance of the word ‘just’ or ‘normal’ is discussed in relation to white identity in a multicultural Netherlands, as are the relationships of white women towards Muslim women and Muslim men.
18 In Chapter 6, the different research questions come together and will be combined in conclusions.
19 The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. Verbal (Kevin Spacey) in the Usual Suspects (1995)
2. Eth nocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands
In this chapter I will draw a framework of the discipline of Women’s Studies, as it has been the context of the feminist debate on ethnocentrism, racism and the invisibility of whiteness, during the eighties and nineties in the Netherlands. I start from theories of feminist epistemology to point out the critique on the white subject of the women’s movement and Women’s Studies. This argument will be introduced through the use of feminist texts by Anglo-Saxon authors11, however where possible I will use Netherlands based sources. I continue on this topic by analyzing the ‘state of the art’ on articles published in the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands. Ethnocentrism is ‘(l)ooking at things from the point of view of one social group or as they apply to one social group.’ (Andermahr et all. 2000: 83). In the context of Women’s Studies, ethnocentrism has been the accusation expressed by nonwhite feminists towards the universal whiteness evident in the discipline. The ethnocentric norm in Women’s Studies was and often still is the white woman, and therefore theories that were constructed to empower women politically as well as personally could not automatically relate to nonwhite women, or women who otherwise deviate from the norm. This chapter also looks at who was included and excluded in the debate. The complexity of this analysis is that while I am part of the discipline, I am criticizing it as well. The issue of whiteness in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands has only recently caught some scholarly attention. Furthermore, analyzing the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands is complex and even delicate because it discusses the conscious and unconscious racism of Women’s Studies practitioners, members of a discipline that are entangled in the struggle of feminism. To be able to make distinctions between dominant discourse on multiculturalism in the Netherlands, the Women’s Studies community and her knowledge production, in my argumentation I build upon a
11 Rosi Braidotti argues that because of the dynamic role Black women played in USA Women’s Studies and feminism, they have more of a tradition with debates on racism and ethnocentrism. (Braidotti, 1996: 16). This is a reason why I will use texts by Francis Beale and bell hooks to illustrate the debate on ethnocentrism in the USA and only then continue with Netherlands based texts.
20 theory by Gloria Wekker who analyzed the practice of Women’s Studies in the Netherlands as a ‘situated knowledge system’. (Wekker, 1996: 58). The aim of the chapter is to give an account of the debate on whiteness in Women’s Studies, the Netherland. By doing so, I will explore the intersections of feminist and whiteness critique. Finally I conclude with an analysis on how racism and whiteness is (not) dealt with in Women’s Studies Netherlands.
Feminist epistemology Philosopher Sandra Harding is the cartographer of feminist epistemologies. The positivist research-claim to produce objective truth is scrutinized by feminist epistemologies as a specific way of looking at knowledge. Epistemology asks the question of ‘(w)ho can be subjects, agents, of socially legitimate knowledge? (Only men in the dominant races and classes?)’ (Harding, 1991: 109) Consequently, epistemology is strongly related to power. Who knows? is a question that refers to inclusion and exclusion with regard to knowledge systems. Feminist epistemologies are the processes of awareness of the fact that science is not objective but that knowledge is produced, that researchers have a position in their research of choice and that they have to be accountable for this position. Objective knowledge, frequently claimed by (male) hard scientists, can be interpreted as knowledge produced from a certain worldview, a (Western, masculine, academic) standpoint. The use of feminist epistemology in the discipline of Women’s Studies has made it into a critical and dynamic study. It gives the researcher the obligation not only to thoroughly study her subject, but also to look at the validation of knowledge. How does she know? Who or what has brought her to insights and most importantly, what power position is behind this knowledge? For instance, by studying whiteness in the context of Women’s Studies, one must be aware of power relations. As a woman I can find myself being subject in the study of women, analyzing power relations in relation to men or masculinity. Being a white woman makes me accountable for the fact that too often white women are the subject in and of Women’s Studies. The danger of this is articulated by bell hooks:
21 ‘(r)acism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries.’ (hooks, [1984] 1995: 272, italics mine).
Feminism or Women’s Studies can actually reinforce racism when it does not pay attention to its ethnocentrism. Women are diverse; the oppression of white women is different from the oppression of Black women. Claiming ‘oppression’ as the basis of (white) feminist struggle was ‘an appropriation by conservative and liberal women of a radical political vocabulary that masked the extent to which they shaped the movement so that it addressed and promoted their class interest.’ (idem, 274) Feminism or Women’s Studies therefore can work as an exclusionary practice when it is claimed by white women. Today in the Netherlands Women’s Studies departments do offer course-material on non-white women, although they do tend to engage in the ‘add-Black-women-and- stirr’ method. (Wekker, 1996). Some universities that offer Women’s Studies courses only mention the names of white authors in a ‘feminist classics’ course12, others do offer theories by nonwhite authors, but specifically place them in a ‘Black feminist’ category, while leaving ‘general’ or ‘neutral’ topics to white authors13. Peggy McIntosh’ 46 accounts on what it means to be white (in the 1980’s USA) still vibrates reality to white women’s privileged position in Western worlds. ‘I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race’ (McIntosh, 1997 (1988): 294)
Sandra Harding distinguished the feminist search for different objectivities of knowledge in three categories: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism (idem: 106). In line with my argumentation on the inclusion and exclusion of knowledge in the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands I place my emphasis in this chapter and more specifically the analyzes of the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands, on feminist standpoint theory, as it has been used in Black feminist theory. Patricia Hill Collins states: ‘Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women’s reality by
12 Universiteit Nijmegen, Gender Studies. 13 Universiteit Utrecht, Vrouwenstudies.
22 those who live it.’ (Hill Collins, 1991: 22) Because of shared experience, Black women can be said to have a Black feminist standpoint. However, the ‘diversity among Black women produces different concrete experiences’ (idem 23). Sandra Harding:
‘The understanding that they [oppressed people] are oppressed, exploited and dominated – not just made miserable by inevitable natural or social causes – reveals aspects of the social order that are difficult to see from the perspectives of their oppressors’ lives.’ (Harding, 1991: 126)
So, the margin can offer knowledge that is not available at the centre. Feminist standpoint theory relates to the category of representation of reality, of experience. Some authors, like Braidotti (1996), argue that this experience that feminist standpoint is based upon is not problematized and is therefore suspicious. The notion of shared experience that foregrounds the basis of common struggle is often referred to, or even put aside, as identity politics. And identity politics is said to make political liaisons between identity groups impossible. Essentialism is never far away, and identities are often defined as static. This does not correspond with the fluid, unstable and fragmented subject from post-modernist theory. The notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ has been coined to facilitate theorizing around ‘women’ as a group, while simultaneously criticizing and deconstructing ‘women’ into diverse axes of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. The debate around identity politics and standpoint theory versus post-modern or post-structuralist theory are complex, and it is not my purpose to reconstruct this debate here. (See for instance Braidotti (1996) for a discussion of transatlantic theories on feminism and multiculturalism) However, the reason why I do mention (Black) feminist standpoint theory at this moment is because the debate on ethnocentrism that I discuss in the next section is remarkable in the light of this academic discussion. I argue that the accusation of identity politics is sometimes implicitly made to avoid discussing issues that matter, such as racism within Women’s Studies.
23 Women’s studies and critique of universal sisterhood Women’s Studies have not been ‘safeguarded’ from (racial) power struggles within its own institution. The name of the discipline would implicate that all women are subject of study. Women’s Studies resulted from the second wave of feminism. The women’s movement has been critiqued by women (of color) because of the dominant white, heterosexual, middle class women it represented as being the quintessential women. Women’s Studies have not always convinced her scholars and readers of a thorough critique on this ‘universal sisterhood’ it once tried to represent. The ideology of ‘universal sisterhood’ was first scrutinized by African-American Frances Beale in 1970 when she published the article ‘Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female’. ‘Universal Sisterhood’ is the term that was used (in the Netherlands as well) to indicate the common experience and goals that women had in the struggle towards emancipation. Beale uncovers the dominant white discourse of femininity in the United States:
‘The ideal model that is projected for a woman is to be surrounded by hypocritical homage and estranged from all real work, spending idle hours primping and preening, obsessed with conspicuous consumption and limiting life’s functions to simply a sex role.’ (Beale, [1970] 1995: 147)
This critique was also heard in the beginning of the eighties in the Netherlands. The notion of ‘we women’ derives from the feminist-historical essay by Joke Kool-Smit, Het onbehagen bij de vrouw (‘the discomfort of women’). Pamela Pattynama argues that this discomfort was related to a ‘Western, white, heterosexual femininity proceeding from the conventional middle class’ (Pattynama, 1995: 221, translation RD) Like the ideal model of a woman that Beale describes, this representation does not in any way resemble the life of women outside the above mentioned categories; for instance that of Black women. Beale points out the dominant norm that is white, and expresses the need of the women’s movement to be not only fighting patriarchy but racism (and capitalism) as well. While white women want the rights to have abortions, black women want the right to resist forced sterilizations. (Beale: 150-152) In the Netherlands the second feminist wave, starting at the end of the sixties, was for white women from a certain class and education a movement to struggle out of an
24 isolated existence of housekeeping and motherhood. This never resembled the lifestyles and needs of black women and the wives of guest workers or migrants. (Pattynama, 1995)
Looking at the way that ethnicity is situated in Women’s Studies practices, Gloria Wekker analyzes the relationship between ‘common sense views’ from outside the practice of Women’s Studies; ‘the social structure of the Women’s Studies community in the Netherlands’; and the ‘special representation of reality that Women’s Studies offer’. (Wekker, 1996: 58) Ethnicity is given meaning in society, and dominant representations of ethnicity are adopted as ‘common sense’. The claim that ethnicity is something nonwhite people are constructed through, as ‘others’ in the Netherlands, is part of dominant discourse. On the other side, white people are in ‘common sense’ not socially constructed by ethnicity; moreover they are constructed as neutral. This ‘common sense’ is constructed, changed and repeated through dominant discourses on ethnicity, like new realist discourse. How is this related to the discourse analyses of the interviews with young white women? Through analyses of the interviews I research the dominant discourses through which the women construct themselves in terms of ethnicity in multicultural Netherlands. The community of Women’s Studies in the Netherlands consists of scholars who are included and excluded in the academic debate on ethnicity in Women’s Studies. Isabel Hoving argues in an article on the self-positioning of white feminist researchers in academia that she:
‘would want her story [her self-positoning as white woman, RD] to be part of a public conversation which, in the Netherlands, is made too fragmented, too private: a conversation on the backgrounds and the research-strategies of white Dutch academics who study cultural expressions from the south (or from migrants from the South).’ (Hoving, 1996: 100, translation RD)
This conversation is what is missing in Women’s Studies, argues Hoving, Women’s Studies is not ready to go beyond a white self-reflection. (idem, 106) In this chapter I will analyze inclusion and exclusion in the ‘state of the art’ of the debate on ethnocentrism in
25 the Netherlands. Dominant discourses influence the community of Women’s Studies, because this community is not separate from society and stories of ‘common sense’ told by society. The discipline of Women’s Studies creates and articulates a certain representation of reality. This is the disciplinary framework and the theoretical frameworks that construct the study of women in the Netherlands. This disciplinary framework and the different theoretical frameworks construct knowledge on ethnicity. I will now summarize the public discussion on ethnocentrism, whiteness and racism in Women’s Studies, to argue that whiteness is still normative in the discipline.
Debate in the Netherlands In the context of the Netherlands and the Dutch women’s movement and Women’s Studies, there has been a debate on the whiteness of Women’s Studies.14 In the 25th anniversary edition of the Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (2004) (Journal of Gender Studies), Garjan Sterk published an article that gives an overview of the discussion on gender and ethnicity that has taken place in this journal. In this chapter on the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands I focus on feminism and whiteness, not only articulated in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies15 but also in other publications, including the European Journal of Women’s Studies. The aim of this chapter is to give an account of the debate on whiteness in Women’s Studies. Therefore I will summarize the essays that built the debate, but I focus in these summaries frequently on the subject matter of whiteness and gender. The article that I start this ‘state of the art’ on ethnocentrism critique in Women’s Studies is ‘Racism and Feminism’ by Philomena Essed, published in 1982. Essed wanted to acquire ‘feminist clarity on the relationship between white and black-colored women’ (Essed, 1982: 9, translation RD) Combining theory and personal accounts (the personal is political), Essed argues that the feminist movement in the Netherlands does not make itself accountable for the racism among its white members. On the one hand, white
14 In the seventies and eighties Women’s Studies was the academic arm of the women’s movement, in the nineties and today when the women’s movement has lost visibility, the link between Women’s Studies and active feminism is no longer self-evident. 15 In 1998 Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies (Journal of Womenstudies changed her name to Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (Journal of Genderstudies).
26 feminists claim to automatically be anti-racist since they are anti-sexist. This makes it easy to deny the importance of working on racism within the women’s movement. On the other hand, racism is seen as a black problem and therefore the issue of the Black women in the movement (idem: 12). The white women’s movement could therefore quite easily ignore the influence that ethnicity had on the movement, as well as the racism within the movement. Calling attention to ethnocentrism as an ideology that is present in the Dutch women’s movement is useful in this article. Whiteness is the norm, while everybody nonwhite is ‘othered’ and can at anytime be called on to account for this otherness. The women’s movement does not deal with the specific oppression and empowerment of Black women; it deals with their main subjects which are white women. This is supported by Essed’s argument that white women are often more interested in ‘ancient western foremothers’ than they are in their ‘living black-colored sisters’ (idem: 24). Ethnocentrism and racism should first be abolished within the feminist movement before women together can counter patriarchy. Furthermore, Black women can offer ‘indispensable experiences’ to the (white) women’s movement. (40) Anthropologists Annelies Moors and Mariël Otten react to Essed’s article in Lova, the periodical of feminist anthropology. They state that as white women they don’t feel at home in a white feminism; and they argue for the use of the plural of feminisms. They point at other forms of discrimination that Essed apparently does not take into account, like heterosexism. Essed’s clear attempt to put racism within feminist movements on the agenda is mitigated by pointing out multiple differences among women. By emphasizing the multiplicity of feminists - racist and anti-racist - Moors and Otten do not go into the problematic raised in Essed’s article. They state that they can not answer ‘as white feminists’ to the article of Essed. With this they evade exactly what is asked by Essed: to take into account their own power position as white women and feminists. Moors and Otten state that they want to work on their own internalized racism, but ask Essed to give them the methods to do this (Moors and Otten, 1982: 43). This is an example of white feminists who do not make themselves accountable for racism in the Dutch women’s movement.
27 In 1984 Troetje Loewenthal raised awareness on ethnocentrism of the women’s movement with her lecture ‘De witte toren van Vrouwenstudies’ (The ivory tower of Women’s Studies): ‘The women’s movement in the Netherlands is a white women’s movement.’ (Loewenthal, 1984: 5, translation RD). With this statement, Loewenthal started her lecture for the winteruniversity Women’s Studies of 1983. The winteruniversity was a week long conference in which different visions of Women’s Studies were brought together. (Loewenthal, 2001: 55) After this week’s period of studying and discussing different women’s issues in an environment that was supposed to be inclusive of all women, Loewenthal pointed out that the winteruniversity was not an open space to all women. Although (or because) the winteruniversity discussed topics on ‘ethnic’ women, the fact that the main issues involved women (neutral, hence white) was excluding a specific group of Black women. The organization of the winteruniversity chose a thematic division. One of the themes was called non-western cultures. Loewenthal asks if this means Black women are not represented in other themes like motherhood, art, politics or religion. Are these themes white? Loewenthal asks the women of the discipline to choose: racism or anti-racism; and no possibility in between. (Loewenthal, 1984: 5) She had before recognized the structural mechanism of racism, and argues that not being openly racist didn’t meant that somebody was actively fighting exclusionary principles. In her lecture, Loewenthal compares issues of racism to those of sexism, in an attempt to make her white feminist audience aware of the double standard they use themselves. The (contemporary) context of negative discourses on multiculturalism and more specifically the citizenship of Muslims in the Netherlands are addressed by Loewenthal in the concluding remarks. Feminists need to be aware of the negative attention given to Muslims, she says. ‘The anti-Islam feelings are presented as in a feminist way’ (idem: 15, translation RD) In the context of chapter 4 were I look into the ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women’ debate, this is very important. Loewenthal was quick to recognize how Muslim women were constructed in dominant discourse as oppressed by their Muslim men. Being anti-Islam could therefore be hidden under a layer of so-called feminism.
28 In 2004, the article by Troetje Loewenthal was selected by women’s studies scholars and teachers to be the most influential and pioneering article in 25 years of the journal. What does it mean that this article on the ‘ivory tower of women’s studies’ has been chosen? Has it been added to a women’s studies canon? I would answer this question negatively. The article and the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies Netherlands is not one of these must-reads in the discipline as Beauvoir and Haraway are. Garjan Sterk argues in her cartography of the debate on gender and ethnicity:
‘The white ethnicity is the norm within Women’s Studies and ethnicity is no significant factor within research, but precedes it.’ (Sterk, 2004: 56. Translation RD)
So, why is this article chosen as pioneering and influential? Possibly because after re- reading it remains pioneering, since it is still resembles the necessity of taking it into account that whiteness should be problematized and racism brought up to the discussion.
In 1985, in the same ‘Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies’, Yvonne Leeman and Sawitri Saharso address questions concerning ‘the color of Women’s Studies’. They start off their arguments by stating that Black women think that their experiences are not an object of concern in the women’s movement, and that racism would not be a main concern in feminism. Leeman and Saharso take the question of how the women’s movement should handle these issues as their topic.
‘Would it be enough when the women’s movement is aware of different positions between women, and takes these differences into account in its political struggle? Or should the women’s movement explicitly fight against racism, whether organized separately or in coalition with others?’ (Leeman and Saharso, 1985: 281, translation RD).
I place the ‘the’ before women’s movement in italics because the authors explain how lesbian, lower class and younger women have criticized the movement like Black women do. However, it remains unexpressed who the women’s movement consist of, when it is neither Black, young, working-class and lesbian women.
29 The authors continue by questioning if thinking in the binary of Black and white women is the answer to the unsatisfying terminology of universal sisterhood. (idem, 283) Within the category of Black women many different standpoints can be found, which makes the dichotomy between Black and white women untenable. Leeman and Saharso do not agree with the theory that claims racism to be a personal characteristic of white persons, which is a critique16 of the work of Philomena Essed (Alledaags Racism) (286) and Lida van den Broek.17 The thinking about racism as a system of victims and perpetrators is rejected. Leeman and Saharso argue that this is not a useful perspective to fight against racism together; instead it could lead to segregation between Black and white women. However, the authors do consider the Netherlands a racist culture, for reasons they don’t further explain. Their concern is how we women should live in this society. (288). To Leeman and Saharso, it is not a matter of ‘adding up different forms of oppression’ (289). All women in this society suffer from exclusion (black women) or inclusion (white). It remains a question how white women suffer from inclusion. The authors argue that experience will not lead directly to knowledge production. Black women are ‘not by definition superior ‘racism-experts’ than whites’ (290), which can be interpreted as an dismissal of (Black) feminist standpoint epistemology. Leeman and Saharso acknowledge the claim by Black women who want to receive attention for racist oppression within the women’s movement, although standpoint can not lead to special knowledge. However, they fail to touch upon the whiteness of the women’s movement itself. The authors do not question the apparent neutral position of white women in this discussion. They reject the option of looking at white women as perpetrators in and of a racist ideology. They refuse to make a dichotomy between Black and white women, arguing all women are touched by racism in society. The strategic essentialism opted for at the beginning of this chapter is not taken
16 I find the critique of Leeman and Sharso on Esseds ‘Everyday racism’ problematic. They use a quotation from the 1984 edition ‘Alledaags racsime’, in which Essed states that Black people potentially experience racism on a daily basis. They gain understanding of the white supremacy of people who define Black people as inferior. Leeman and Saharso draw the conclusion that Essed would argue that racism is a personal trait of white people, and not something that is inherent in society. My reading of ‘Everyday racism’ and ‘Understanding everyday racism’ (1991) would be that Essed emphasized on the combination of racism as individual and institutional problem. 17 Van den Broek starts her practical anti-racism workshops from the perspective that she is racist, as are all white people. This is traced back to socialization of racism in a white Western society. From this acknowledgement, white people can start to be actively anti-racist. (Van den Broek, 1982 and 1987)
30 into account. The experience of Black women is therefore not a special source of knowledge and should be criticized, since the differences among Black women are major. What white women’s role in this struggle against racism and sexism can be is not elaborated on, which is a missed opportunity.
A response to the article by Leeman and Saharso soon followed. Troetje Loewenthal and Kamala Kempadoo replied in the next edition of ‘Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies’ (1986). Their critique concerns a number of issues dealt with in the article by Leeman and Saharso. Firstly, Loewenthal and Kempadoo state that the discussion should acknowledge that ‘Women’s Studies produces racist knowledge, whenever generalization to all women becomes self-evident’ (Loewenthal and Kempadoo, 1986: 76, translation RD) The ideologies of racism and sexism have apparent similarities, this could be the basis of a common ground of struggle, however racism is not the same as sexism. Racism should not be detached from it specific ideological characteristics (idem: 77), in order to generalize the women’s struggle. Leeman and Saharso’s claim that racism ‘touches’ all women’s lives, is therefore considered too vague, because the authors have not defined racism itself. Secondly, the ‘misapprehension’ of Leeman and Saharso of the Black women’s standpoint as being too diverse to theorize is disapproved of. Loewenthal and Kempadoo point to the similarities that are emphasized when discussing all women, and the emphasis on differences or diversities when discussing nonwhite women. The authors are therefore repeating their critique on the neutrality of the white woman in the women’s movement. This critique is followed by a reaction by Leeman and Saharso in the next edition of the journal. The authors claim to be (malevolently?) misunderstood. (Leeman and Saharso, 1986) They argue that ‘the women’s movement in her central questions, in her choice of object, do not (have to) seek for a response to the reality of racism’ (idem, 1986). This again brings up the question of who the women in ‘women’s movement’ are.
Garjan Sterk divides the conceptions on feminism and racism of Loewenthal and Leeman and Saharso in two different ‘camps’: practice and discourse. (Sterk, 2004: 51). She
31 defines Loewenthal as the theoretician who ‘starts from the position of existing women who experience repressing and exclusive situations and practices.’ (51, translation RD). Racism is an ideology based on structural, racist power relations. In feminist theory we now call this position Black standpoint epistemology, and therefore I would like to propose to use this term instead of the more confusing term ‘practice’. The position of Leeman and Saharso argues that (ethnic) power-relations in society give meaning to racism. And these power-relations are not pre-given but change depending on the social context. Discourses on differences among people (especially of different ethnic backgrounds) can lead to racism. This position is what Sterk tries to catch with the term ‘discourse’.
The next account in this debate is published eight years later in the same journal, in 1994. In this year a special is devoted to the topic. Garjan Sterk asks the sound question: was it all quiet on the gender and ethnicity front? Sterk recalls that there was movement going on. Within the discipline of Women’s Studies, new research programs were developed in which ethnicity has strong input. The idea of the Netherlands as a multicultural society has a firm grip on research. (Sterk: 2004: 52) In 1994, the ‘Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies’ edition was entirely devoted to the topic gender and ethnicity. The group of editors that was especially assigned discussed their reservations about the theme. The two issues that concerned them most were (1) the opinion that only dark-skinned women were allowed into the discussion concerning gender and ethnicity and (2) the necessity of white women (‘not disagreed with by Black women’ translation RD) to first express guilt toward black women before being allowed into the discussion (Hermes, Aerts etc. 1994). The opinions they caution for come from moralistic ‘progressives’. The editors do not further explain these two concerns to the reader, this is questionable since it is arguably relevant in the context of the special edition. The concept of guilt is very relevant in relation to the construction of whiteness. Guilt could be related to history and privilege white people have because of their white skin. In my interviews, guilt is not a conscious part of white identity and therefore not further explored in this thesis.
32 Interestingly, Hermes, Aerts et. all. take for granted the idea that gender or ethnicity can never directly explain a certain view on the world. The definition of standpoint theory has been ruled out by the majority of Women’s Studies practitioners as useful theory. However, I argue that (Black) feminist standpoint theory does have a conflict with the ‘multiple subjectivities’ women have. I argue that although the six young white women construct their identity in multiple, fragmented and unstable ways, their whiteness does influence their thinking and use of dominant discourse in multicultural Netherlands.
The article that is situated in the discussion on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies from this special edition is the theoretical analysis ‘Gender as ethnicity’ by Mieke Aerts and Sawitri Saharso. The article is the published version of a lecture given in 1993. At the lecture the title and the content of the article were critiqued by the audience.
‘By naming gender as ethnicity Aerts and Saharso would make ethnic diversity among women invisible. The explicit rejection of the oppression-model was interpreted as denial of oppression itself.’ (Sterk, 2004: 53, translation RD)
The article itself starts from the statement that
‘the central discussions in Women’s Studies on the conceptualization of sex (‘gender’ or ‘difference’) are until this day not significantly influenced by matters as racism and ethnicity.’ (Aerts and Saharso, 1994 translation RD)
Aerts and Saharso propose a model in which ethnicity, in a historical and fluid definition can be used to re-conceptualize gender. With this theoretical shift they envision to create a discussion in which gender and ethnicity (and class) are no longer seen as the three separate pillars of oppression. Gender and ethnicity should be conceptualized within one framework, and not as opposed to each other, or different from each other, or even as working together. They situate themselves in poststructuralist theory. This might explain their interest in using the concept of ethnicity as gender. Ethnicity has the characteristic of being in process, fluid and unstable. Also, ethnicity has all different shades of black
33 and white which could be used to unclose the fixed binary of men and women, male and female. What does this input in the discussion on ethnocentrism and whiteness in Women’s Studies say about exactly that same whiteness? Aerts and Saharso do not give explicit insight in the position of white women in this model. However, they do argue that the reason why gender and ethnicity are not yet brought together in one model that can analyze oppression in one context is ‘not to be blamed on ‘white self- opinionatedness’, unwillingness or racism.’ (Aerts and Saharso, 1994: ??) However, why this is not part of for instance racism is not elucidated. Moreover, looking at racism or ethnocentrism as a reason for the lack of theory that binds gender and ethnicity is most important here. With this statement Aerts and Saharso close off the option of looking at power-relations constructed through racism or whiteness in the process of theorizing on gender and ethnicity. And it is (ethnic) power relations that they seem to ignore in this new theory of gender as ethnicity. Using the concept of ethnicity and its fluidity and its shades of grey does not foreclose the social construction of ethnicities as being unequal. When the authors conclude their argument by stating that ‘history and politics’ should resolve the issue of social inequality (between the sexes or ethnicities?) this question is left unanswered.
In ‘Praten in het Donker’ (Talking in the Dark, RD) (1996), Gloria Wekker analyzed student handbooks on Women Studies in the Netherlands. She used the analytical tool of situated knowledges (Haraway) to identify the power- and color-evasive discourse (after Frankenberg, 1993) in Women’s Studies. Only one author in the different handbooks made an attempt to situate herself in terms of ethnicity within the text. Is race and ethnicity not a relevant issue in these parts of the book, and therefore not necessary to be named? Is the rest of the book is invisibly devoted to white women? Wekker states:
‘Women’s Studies forms a domain, where a certain regulation is imposed on reality, and to the researcher a specific way to talk about this (cf. Foucault 1971). It is extraordinarily important to look at the question which elements of dominant racial and representation- relations, social ‘common sense’ in relation to ethnic differences, tacitly survive in the discipline.’ (Wekker, 1996: 81, translation RD)
34 In the tenth anniversary edition of the European Journal of Women’s Studies (2004), Gloria Wekker reflects on the institutionalization of the discipline. An academic discipline has arisen out of a social movement. Apart from congratulations, Wekker argues for a self-criticalness towards ‘serious shortcomings that plague the discipline’ (Wekker, 2004: 489) Being a discipline situated in the Netherlands connects Women’s Studies and its knowledge production to the specific knowledge (or lack of), on Dutch colonial history. Wekker:
‘in the Dutch case, the colonial archive, the unexamined and unproblematized assumptions about ‘race’, must have been operative: whiteness is no ‘race’ or ethnic positioning but stands for the universal and the general; ‘race’ supposedly only pertains to people of colour; women of colour are evaluated depending on their proximity to the white ‘model’. (idem, 494)
Women’s Studies has set up different interdisciplinary methodologies on analyzing and opposing sexism and racism. However, the white women in Women’s Studies keep struggling with the knowledge Black women have about experiencing and fighting racism. Or, like Hoving suggests going a step further, towards ‘developing a way to critically relate to Black theories, but at the same time to postcolonial and feminist theories and literary texts.’ (Hoving, 1996: 107). In other words: to be able to use all applicable knowledge to deconstruct, and construct new ‘multicultural’ knowledge. Analyzing the debate that I reproduced through a choice of articles, I come to the conclusion that the ‘community of Women’s Studies’ is not so much trying to look at racism and the position of whiteness within its discipline from the perspective of experiences, but is mystifying this discussion by making it deal with theoretical articulations. Leeman and Saharso and later Aerts and Saharso actually present the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands as if it were a discussion about post-structuralism versus (Black) standpoint theory. It is rather remarkable that none of the speakers in this debate is of a Muslim background. The colors of the discussion are Black and White (to some extent, because never really considered as ethnic position by white authors), and not something in between. I would argue that in this time and place we need a revival of this debate, not
35 only because whiteness is still not indefinite on the feminist agenda, but also to consider the situated knowledge of Muslim or migrant women.
The knowledge on racism is repeatedly connected exclusively to experience of black people, while the experience of (white) women is thoroughly translated into analyses of the structure of sexism, embedded in dominant power relations and discourse. To answer the question posed by Heloise Brown in the introduction of White?Women; ‘Does the study of whiteness represent a return to the blinkered assertion of sisterhood and global feminism?’ (Brown, 1999: 5) I will now continue to look at interdisciplinary frameworks: (Critical) Whiteness Studies.
36 I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking. (Peggy McIntosh, 1988)
3. Wh iteness
In this chapter I will look at the second discipline in which I situate my research: (Critical) Whiteness Studies. The first time the term Whiteness Studies was coined was arguably around 1991, when David R. Roediger published his influential book ‘Wages of Whiteness’. However, many authors before 1991 wrote about the subject of whiteness. The 1997 anthology Critical White Studies by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic added the ‘critical’ to the study of whiteness. In their brief introduction to the articles and essays collected however, they do not position themselves in the field of Critical Whiteness Studies, but more in that of Critical Race Theory. (Delgado and Stefanic, 1997: xvii) In the 2001 introduction to the edition of articles from the California conference The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, the authors start using the term Critical Whiteness Studies, ‘to mark the explicitly analytical nature of this inquiry’ (Rasmussen et. al, 2001: 17). I situate my research in the field of Critical Whiteness Studies, on which I further elaborate in this chapter. After an introduction to the discipline and a critical look at this new field of study I turn to the question of ‘what is whiteness’, and situate the profoundly Anglo-Saxon view on whiteness in a European and Dutch perspective. I end this chapter by looking at white privilege, a key topic in the study of whiteness.
(Critical) Whiteness Studies Apart from the interdisciplinary discipline of Women’s Studies (see Chapter 2), my research is situated in the newly defined discipline of (Critical) Whiteness Studies. With newly defined I refer to the fact that although the study of whiteness (as an identity, as a privilege, as an unmarked racialized power position) has caught the attention of (white) scholars from different disciplines at the end of the eighties/the beginning of the nineties and has led to bookshelves of studies on whiteness, the critical look at whiteness is not
37 new. From W.E.B. Du Bois to Hazel Carby, Toni Morrison and bell hooks, many (black) intellectuals have raised questions on the dominance of whiteness in the western world. The discipline of (Critical) Whiteness Studies is interdisciplinary, fluidly situated in both the Humanities and Social Sciences. It studies power in its social and linguistic contexts and it is profoundly based on the theory of the social construction of race. (Critical) Whiteness Studies is a discipline that researches the construction of whiteness in the context of historical and geographical racial hierarchies. Ruth Frankenberg elaborates on four areas were the discipline has taken its space: historical studies; social and cultural studies; humanism (‘how whiteness is performed by subjects, whether in daily life, in film, in literature, or in the academic corpus’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 3)); and in anti-racism movements. (idem, 2-3) I situate my research in the second and third categories, which are strongly connected. The interdisciplinary field of Women’s Studies, that studies power relations in different appearances, had the expertise to study whiteness as a powerful axis within its struggles for equality. This however has not been fully developed in the Netherlands, as argued in chapter 2. A significant part of the foundational literature in (Critical) Whiteness Studies originates from the discipline of Women’s Studies in the USA and UK, both from Black feminist theory and standpoint epistemology. By presenting (Critical) Whiteness Studies as something new, the discipline would be failing to acknowledge the amount of work on whiteness done by black writers, critics and academics. Many (white) authors from the discipline name these Black authors in their introductions. Toni Morrison and W.E.B. Du Bois are most frequently used in citations18. In Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison writes about the Africanist presence in white American literature. Morrison argues that the presence of African(-American) people in American literature can be analyzed as a necessary component in the social construction of a white American self. ‘What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”?’, she asks. (Morrison, 1992: 9) In the attention that scholars give to the problem of racism, the objects of research are non-whites: the (passive) victims. Morrison turns the scope of the objects of racism to the perpetuators. 18 To name a view: W.E.B. Du Bois is citated in David Roediger ‘Wages of Whiteness’ (1991). Toni Morrison is citated in Richard Dyer ‘White’ (1997). Both W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison are citated in Ruth Frankenberg ‘White Women, Race Matters’ (1993), Melanie Bush ‘Breaking the code of good intentions’ (2004) and Les Back and Vron Ware ‘Out of Whiteness’ (2002).
38 ‘What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions.’ (idem: 11)
Before I turn to nonblacks and their relation to racism, I want to pay attention to what whiteness has meant to nonwhites in the Anglo-Saxon world. bell hooks as a critical feminist and anti-racist scholar has written on the meaning of whiteness for Blacks in the United States of America. In her essay “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, another favorite of whiteness scholars, she argues:
‘Although there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and/or ethnographers to study whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversations with one another “special” knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people.’ (hooks, 1995: 31)
This special knowledge did not simply develop out of interest; it was a necessary way of surviving in a white supremacist society. Their ‘Black gaze’ was supposedly under control of whites, however many strategies were developed to produce knowledge about their ‘masters’. In contemporary society, this knowledge is sometimes buried underneath layers of internalized racism. (idem: 32). However, the notion of white people remains that they are not visible to black people; the ‘Black gaze’ is still subordinated through systems of white racism. When the position is taken in (Critical) whiteness Studies, as often is the case, that whiteness is invisible, a statement only possible from a white positioning, this therefore becomes complex. Black people do see whiteness. Apart from stereotypes of whiteness, hooks looks at her own childhood for representations of whiteness. She remembers: “I reinhabit a location where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing.” (39) But also in the here and now, traveling places invokes the relation of whiteness with terror for hooks. This is contrasted by the “the eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality” (47).
39 The aim of (Critical) Whiteness Studies is, in Richard Dyers words, making whiteness visible:
‘The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.’ (Dyer, 1997: 2)
Together with the social construction of race, Dyers starting point that whiteness is as universal as it is invisible has been adopted as a basic assumption of (Critical) Whiteness Studies. Although I find these assumptions very useful as a starting point for the study of whiteness, a closer look illustrates a more complex picture of whiteness. When one of my respondents in the interview (Ingrid) says: ‘I am rather clear in that, not that I am a racist or anything, but to me autochthonous people are the real Netherlanders’, she is using different constructions of whiteness. Autochthonous people in the Netherlands are real Netherlanders, however she already makes a distinction between racist and non-racist Netherlanders. She, for instance, claims not to be part of the group that she designates as racist. She is part of another group that ‘is clear about certain things’, a position that I interpret as new realist (see chapter 4 and 5). The whiteness implied in this statement is not universal, it is particular. This particularity, which complicated the basic assumption of (Critical) Whiteness Studies, is eloquently put into words by Frankenberg and hooks (invisibility) and Robyn Wiegman (universality), on which I will now elaborate.
In the above section I looked at the critique on the invisibility of whiteness formulated by hooks. In relation to this same article (Representing whiteness in the Black imagination) Frankenberg re-interprets the unmarkedness of whiteness. Both question the invisibility of whiteness, because who does not see whiteness, and where is this invisibility positioned? Not in Black communities, hooks argues, to whom seeing whites was a way of survival. However, it is not only nonwhites to whom the invisibility of whiteness does not hold up. Frankenberg:
40 ‘The more one scrutinizes it, the more the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage, or at least a phenomenon delimited in time and space. For I suggest that it is only in those times and places where white supremacism has achieved hegemony that whiteness attains (usually unstable) unmarkedness.’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 5)
In the small cities that the white, female respondents of my interviews live, whiteness is still unmarked. When some of the young women attended college in cities with a more multiethnic setting, the ‘other’ became located in their white spaces. This did not automatically mean that their whiteness became marked as such. The six young white women simply never thought about themselves as being white, or ethnicized in any way. So I would argue that also in times and places where dominant discourse constructs a story about ‘others’, but leaves the white selves neutral, whiteness can remain unmarked to most white people.
Robyn Wiegman denounces the universality of whiteness in the essay ‘Whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity’ (1999). Although her articles and arguments are firmly based in an USA context (she used the example of the movie ‘Forrest Gump’) they do hold ground in a European situation as well. By analyzing the construction of whiteness in the context of universality, scholars have failed to look at particularities within whiteness. One particularity of whiteness is for instance white supremacist ideology. Wiegman argues that whites who do not feel affiliated with these white supremacist notions can easily protest against this part of whiteness. However, the privileges white people get from being white are not protested against, and affirmative action can be fought against in court on account of civil rights legislation,
‘which means that many white Americans can now join efforts to undo civil rights reform without recognizing their activities or opinions as participation in the contemporary reconfiguration of white power and privilege.’ (Wiegman, 1999: 120)
In the context of my interviews, I argue that the young white women have manufactured a racist in their minds, a person that crosses the lines of the politically correct in term of
41 white and nonwhite. Since they do not see themselves as belonging to this group of marked whiteness they can be free in speaking their minds: ‘I am not a racist, but…’. At the same time, and this I have not discovered in the interviews with my respondents, but is apparent in Northern American based studies, Wiegman states that ‘the language of civil rights is mobilized to protect whiteness, which is cast not only as a minority identity but as one injured by the denial of public representation.’ (idem 116). In the inaugural lecture of Ann Phoenix with the telling subtitle: ‘Are we all marginal now?’ she argues by using interview data from young white women and men:
‘Bemoaning of marginal status by white men can, thus, serve to reinscribe the centre- margins binary by attempting to re-place white people (particularly white men) at the centre through claims of marginality and the reinscription of identity politics on the political agenda.’ (Phoenix, 1998a)
This injury of the white self is a point that needs attention in (Critical) Whiteness Studies. It is one of the perils of this discipline that a bigger awareness of whiteness could inadvertently lead to a feeling of white superiority. Why emphasize whiteness as an ethnic position when the power relations in western society are already on the side of the white majority, with the institutional and individual racism that comes with it? Critics of the study of whiteness argue that the attention given to white ethnic positions is a form of identity politics that leads to an ethnocentric ‘me-too-ism’. Following the epistemological work of ‘women of color’ who responded to the whiteness of ‘sisterhood’ in the second feminist wave, white women now need to take time and space to deconstruct their ethnic group in terms of race: ‘as an organizing tool to build cohesive and vocal political communities.’ (Andermahr, 2000: 125-126)
The organizers of the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness conference, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, verbalized their concerns: ‘is “critical whiteness studies” the Trojan horse through which the study and perspective of whites will be recentered in studies of race and ethnicity?’ (Rasmussen, 2001: 1). If the practitioners of this discipline fail to recognize and research the power relations involved
42 in the study of whiteness, the concern of the organizers might be realistic. The next concern is if the scholars of whiteness are able to demonstrate the white privileges and the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ (idem: 7, originally George Lipsitz 1998) that take place in order to maintain the racial status quo.
What is whiteness?
Whiteness is the sign that makes white people visible as white, while simultaneously signifying the true character of white people, which is invisible. (Richard Dyer, 1997)
When the color of the skin of members of the Caucasians race (or: racial construction) is discussed the term white is used. It is very clear that by white, we don’t mean the color of snow. So what is white? ‘White is a flesh colored band aid’ (Sandy Huffaker quoted in Dyer, 1997: 41). White is ‘skin color’, when you purchase beige-pinkish lingerie.19 Skin – color. The advertisement television program Tell Sell Holland airs a ‘natural bra’ commercial (self-adhesive silicones, placed on the breast) on television in which you can buy your ‘natural bra’ in two colors: skin color and black.20 White is located in understandings and practices around make-up powder and foundation. Dutch drugstore Etos offers its clients some basic make-up suggestions for choosing the right foundation on its website. Etos informs the reader about the very different colors the skin can have, from pink to yellow!21 Other skin tones are not even mentioned, although a look around in the drugstore tells you that the bigger beauty companies do offer foundations and powders for ‘people of color’. But the grouping of the make up corner makes it very clear whose color is the norm. Moreover, Etos tells its clients that this year’s (2005) summer fashion is a non-tanned white skin. White is this year’s fashion. Etos advises a good sun crème and some white-pearly foundation. The
19 Hunkemöller has the website-option to choose the color of your lingerie. In the section ‘bra’, you can choose between for instance red, green, pink and… skin color. The examples given by the last category are beige-pinkish. (www.hunkemoller.nl ) Livera simply calls this same color skin. (www.livera.nl ) 20 In the Dutch version of the commercial the male voice literally says: ‘Kies voor huidskleur of zwart’ (Choose skin color or black). Thanks to my mother who saw the commercial and called me up to say she now understood what my research-project was all about). 21 ‘Wanneer je je eigen huid vergelijkt met die van je vriendin of moeder, valt het direct op dat jullie alledrie een andere huidtint hebben. De ene huid neigt meer naar roze, de andere is geler.’ (www.etos.nl/beauty )
43 customers addressed by Etos are situated in the white group; Etos does not have to mention on its website that the make up advise it offers are for whites only. It is assumed that the customers are white, white is the unmarked norm. White is the color of a hearing aid, or prosthesis. White is universal. I could continue the list. What about white beauty ideals, constructed through nose-jobs and other facial surgery that proceeds from this ‘neutral standard’22? Paul Gilroy argues in Against Race (2000) that although some ‘perfect faces on billboards and screens’ are nonwhite, this could be argued as
‘the signature of a corporate multiculturalism in which some degree of visible difference from an implicit white norm may be highly prized as a sign of timeliness, vitality, inclusivity, and global reach.’ (Gilroy, 2000: 21)
In the examples mentioned, white means very different things. Richard Dyer develops three classifications of white in his book White. ‘White people are neither literally nor symbolically white’. (Dyer, 1997: 42) Whiteness is a hue, a skin color and a symbol. And the three categories might seem distinct, but a closer look at the apparent neutrality of white skin color shows a complex intermingling of the three. White is first of all a hue, a color as any other color. Or is it? White is present in nature as other colors are, but it has some special qualities. White is a color, and is no color at the same time. At elementary school children learn that white and black are no real colors. The latter holds no color in itself, the former holds all color in it. White is not colorless; it is colorful! And we only have to look at art to see that what we call white is often white with a little tone of color in it. White is an ambivalent color, and this is further constructed into meaning. Dyer:
‘The slippage between white as a colour and white as colourless forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent.’ (47)
22 See also Kathy Davis on surgical passing.
44 The relation that white has to black is essential. Dyer argues that white (and therefore black as well) is the only color that has an oppositional color: black. (48) This characteristic might seem a natural given, but the historical context of this opposition is too complicated to take for granted. Secondly, white is the color of the skin of a part of the world’s inhabitants. Or actually, white is the term which we use to describe people with a pinkish-beige tone of skin. The category of white is not unambiguous. Who is white and who is not is in some cases up for discussion. But who ultimately defines who is white is the one in control. Whiteness is not only natural skin tone; it is also a construction of power relations. Frankenberg:
‘whiteness turns out on closer inspection to be more about the power to include and exclude groups and individuals than about the actual practices of those who are to be let in or kept out.’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 13)
Who is white does not only rely on the color of the skin. Dyer points out that in comparison, the skin-color of a person from China, often referred to as ‘yellow’ is not that different from a person included in the white category.
‘A person is deemed visibly white because of a quite complicated interaction of elements, of which flesh tones within the pink to beige range are only one: the shape of nose, eyes and lips, the colour and set of hair, even body shape may all be mobilized to determine someone’s ‘colour’’(Dyer, 1997: 42)
But also to persons who do meet these ‘obligations’, real whiteness is a social construction. Different scholars have showed how a number of (pinkish-beige) ethnic groups have gained ‘whiteness’ through history. David Roediger explores how the Irish migrants coming to the United States were initially upon their arrival not included into the category of white. Roediger: ‘Some [writers] suggested that the Irish were part of a separate caste or a ‘dark’ race, possibly originally African.’23 (Roediger, 1999: 133) Another group that confronted difficulties with the status of whiteness is Jewish people.
23 Roediger is here refering to the period around the 1830s in the USA.
45 Karen Brodkin has written extensively on the issue of ‘How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America’. In this book Brodkin argues that both the middle-class status of Jews and the ‘expanded version of whiteness’ (Brodkin, 2004: 23) that came into being after World War 2 are factors that made the ‘whitening’ of the Jewish community in the USA possible. Since most research on whiteness comes from the Anglo-Saxon world, I have used theories and analyzing tools developed and contemplated in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, the issue of whiteness has quite a different meaning on the European mainland. The genealogy of whiteness differs in Europe from the US. Europe for example has a whole different history of dealing with race, culture and ‘the other’ as has the US. The colonial system and the inconceivable impact of scientific Eugenics developed in he colonies and further ‘perfected’ in Hitler’s Third Reich (Griffin and Braidotti, 2002: 226) need to be taken into careful consideration when studying whiteness in Europe. In Postcolonial Whiteness Alfred J. López claims to be one of the first to make the link between whiteness and postcolonialism. With the positive exceptions of Dyer and Morisson, López argues:
‘relatively little scholarship has moved beyond representations of whiteness in Anglo- American culture to the more salient question of how the representational power of whiteness has historically operated in the service of colonial and neocolonial regimes, and has specifically served such regimes in the domination of their nonwhite others.’ (López, 2005: 4)
López seeks attention for postcolonial whiteness that has to co-exist with subjects that they have dominated in the past, and ‘reckon with its own history of aggression and hegemony’ (idem: 14). Although this theme has been recognized by the important works of Laura Ann Stoler and Ann McClintock, (whick López fails to mention) it is definitely a topic that European Whiteness Studies can not leave unattended. The Second World War has shown that being white does not place a white person in the ‘safe’, privileged category. Diversity within the ‘white group’ gives insight into the complexity of whiteness in Europe. Therefore, Griffin and Braidotti argue that:
46 ‘(i)n Europe that racialized position needs to be revisited to take full account of intra- group differences, to understand that identifying with one colour does not automatically and on its own determine your socio-cultural position.’ (idem, 231)
Ann Phoenix elaborates on the ‘variety of forms of ‘whiteness’’ (Phoenix, 1998: 110) in the New Europe. The struggle in Eastern Europe and the ethnic war in Yugoslavia with its consequential migration of white Europeans to other part of Europe made it clear that there are different shades of pinkish in Europe.
The last category of white is the symbolic meaning of white. Western (Christian) culture is full of symbolism connected to whiteness, in visual culture and in linguistics. White equals purity, innocence, virginity, truth, cleanliness. White is connected to God and heaven. Angels are white; when you die you are told you will see the (white) light at the end of the tunnel; and God is often portrayed as a white, old man in a white dress. Weddings and baptisms go together with white clothing. Daily language is still full of symbolical references to white as good and, contrasting, black as evil. Telling little white lies; the prince on the white horse; white smoke, are all examples of how white is used in language in a positive manner. In the Dutch language you can receive a white foot (een wit voetje halen), which means you want to curry favor with someone. Every crow thinks his eggs are the whitest (iedere kraai denk dat zijn eieren de witste zijn) means being conceited. White horses demand a lot of straw (Witte paarden eisen veel stro) means that the most beautiful women are demanding. Who has the whitest buttocks (Wie heeft de blankste billen) is the one that gets the least critique. A halfwhite gentlemen (Een halfblanks heer) is a person that pretends to be a gentleman but really isn’t. 24 To make the same list with proverbs that contain black is impossible; sayings about black things are usually negative. If you want to wash a black moor white (een moor wit willen wassen) then you are trying to accomplish an impossible task. The terminologies used in the Netherlands to refer to people with pinkish-beige skin tone are diverse. White Netherlanders are referred to, and call themselves: Dutch, ‘autochtoon’ and ‘blank’. The last term is typically for the skin color of white people. It would translate into English as ‘white’ or ‘fair’. But the dictionary also indicates 24 www.spreekwoord.nl
47 meanings like: clean, pure, immaculate, bare, precise, chaste, and it also refers to the best quality of silver. The use of the word ‘blank’ to refer to white skin tone is complex, because it has symbolic connotations of pureness, superiority and the tabula rasa (a clean slate in Latin). ‘Blank’ however is not a color. When a child wants to paint its white parents in a picture, there is no ‘blank’ pencil. To avoid the complexity of the word ‘blank’ I initially used ‘white’ in conversation with the respondents. However, frequently I had to refer to ‘blank’ because ‘white’ did not relate to them in terms of ethnicity.
These three categories of whiteness, hue; skin color; and symbol, are strongly related categories which in their union are the starting points of white ideology. Looking at contemporary culture, denying the interrelatedness of the different categories of whiteness is not plausible. The deeply interwoven visual and linguistic representations of white and black as good and bad are too much within Dutch social and political representations to be clearly distinguished. Dyer first tried to resist this conflation but then has to conclude that:
‘Yet I am now persuaded that the slippage between the three is more pervasive than I thought at first, to the extent that it does probably underlie all representation of white people. For a white person who is bad is failing to be ‘white’, whereas a black person who is good is a surprise, and one who is bad merely fulfils expectations.’ (Dyer, 1997: 63)
These ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ of the conflation of white with good and black with evil are identifiable in Dutch society. The emphases in the media on for instance the percentage of ‘allochtonen’ involved in criminal activities, or imprisoned in the Netherlands reinforce existing stereotypes. When presenting an individual or representing a group in the media, the ethnic position of white people is not named or claimed. When a news-item involves people from the ‘Moroccan community’, their ethnicity is named. This leads to the construction of fixed identity positions for minority ethnic groups. The constant conflation of Dutch-Moroccan men with criminality and terrorism in the ‘serious’ media leads to the apparent conclusion that these two belong together. Therefore it is rather interesting that Dutch television programs that pay attention to
48 criminality and request information of the viewer about the whereabouts of the criminals nowadays use descriptions that also mark white persons, which according to Gloria Wekker is related to the pervasiveness of the Moroccan criminals in these programs.25 The fact that there is so much attention to nonwhite criminals in the program makes it necessary to mark whiteness in relation to criminality as special. Vron Ware points out that ‘certain ideas’ we receive and develop on ‘race, class and gender’ will gain a place in ‘the realm of common sense’ (Ware, 1992: 10). The connection of Moroccan men and terrorism is therefore rarely challenged. The idea of common sense is one characteristic that can be found in the new realism discourse. (See Chapter 4). New realism invites the common man to speak the true reality of what is going on in the everyday world. It is brave to dare tell it like it is. It is no longer valid to take into consideration aspects of the daily lives of Moroccan men that could lead to a more complex explanation of the fixed criminality statistics. One of the aspects of new realism discourse is the aversion against cultural relativism and political correctness. This is evident in the treatment of the political left contribution to the multiculturalism debate in Dutch media. Lily, one of the young white women whom I interviewed adapts the ‘tell it like it is’ way of speech when we talk about government policy towards terrorist networks:
‘I think the government should have a bigger say in this, by just arresting somebody who is involved. I am very clear on that: just send them back to their own countries, and don’t keep them here while we have to pay for them.’ (Lily)
It is apparent in this example that Lily does not talk about white terrorists, although she does not mention the ethnicity of the people she discussed, by stating that they need to be sent back to their own countries, it is evident that the imagined terrorists are not Dutch. By emphasizing that ‘she is very clear’, Lily locates herself within a dichotomy of us and them, of Dutch and non-Dutch, and she is always located in the first categories. The Dutch and their government can send the non-Dutch away, not owing them anything. Lily continues:
25 Written remark on thesis, May 2006.
49 ‘Maybe they are raised in the Netherlands but I think like, if you can not assimilate to the normal things in the Netherlands, if you turn things into chaos, then yes, do that in your own country and don’t bother us with it!
The interest in the negative aspects of the ‘other’ gives little space to take an introspective look at the white self. The non-white category is marked with negativity, and in the meantime whiteness remains the normative center. The interrelatedness of hue, skin color and symbolism leads to the ideology of whiteness:
‘As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.’ (Dyer, 1997: 1)
50 And don’t we, as Dutch feminists, use a double standard when we, on the one hand, are always ready to scold Dutch society for still not being friendly enough to women, while on the other hand we are amongst the first to draw attention to the woman-friendly aspects of cultures that seem much more sexist and patriarchal than our own? (Prins, 1997: 134)
4. N ew Realism, ‘Thinking Through Race’ and Culturalist Racism
In chapter 5, I analyze the 6 interviews with young white respondents on their ethnic position in multicultural Netherlands. The discourses that I construe their statements in are discussed in this chapter: Prins’ new realism, Frankenberg’s ‘thinking through race’ discourses (essentialist racism, color and power evasion, race cognizance and power- evasive race cognizance) and Essed’s culturalist racism. These discourses are thoroughly interrelated. I indicate this relation in table 1.
New realism Essentialist racism Color and power evasion Race cognizance Culturalist racism Power-evasive race cognizance. Table 1
The table reads from left to right, chronologically in time, meaning that ‘essentialist racism’ is a discourse that has started in the public realm before ‘new realism’. However when ‘new realism’ begins to circulate, this does not automatically mean that the discourse before disappears. In the left column is essentialist racism positioned. This ‘thinking through race’ discourse by Frankenberg is no longer part of modern dominant discourses on race and ethnicity. It has become marginalized to use an openly racist language in which the practitioners use superior and inferior in relation to ethnic groups in connection to biology. On the right of the table, Frankenberg’s race cognizance is placed. This discourse is in resistance towards new realist discourse because the former discourse holds ideas in which power relations are visible in connection to race and ethnic positions. On top of the middle columns I have positioned new realism discourse. This dominant discourse on multiculturalism co-ordinates the color- and power-evasion
51 discourse, power-evasive race cognizance discourse and culturalist racism discourse. All three deal with the domain of statements on ethnic identity within multicultural society. So, within the new realism discourse, the color and power evasion discourse and the power-evasive race cognizance discourse of Frankenberg are present. Essed’s culturalist racism discourse formulated for the Dutch relation towards (the denial of) racism is also present within new realism. The ‘thinking through race’ discourses of Ruth Frankenberg are situated in the USA of the nineties. This can not be translated directly to a European and Dutch location. Therefore I start of with the terminology of ‘ethnic’ instead of ‘racial’ in this introduction. In chapters 1 and 3 I have paid attention to the complexities of translating theory on whiteness positioned in the USA into a European or Dutch context.
‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for White Women?’ What Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations26 has been and still is for neo-liberalism in the Western world, is Susan Moller Okin’s Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, as the key neo-liberal text, in the feminist debates on the (in)compatibility of feminism and multiculturalism. Okin’s article was published in 1997 in Boston Review, and was followed by a stream of reactions. Until this day, the article is quoted in many contributions to the Dutch debate on women’s position in multiculturalism. Starting by defining her main subjects Okin argued her way to a firm ‘yes’ to her own question. Multiculturalism is, according to Okin’s definition, the way that minority groups in a society are ‘protected through special group rights or privileges’ (Okin, 1999: 10-11, emphasis in original).27 These special group rights will inevitably become problematic when women within the group claim their right as females, since (we are asked to suppose) the ‘male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests’ (idem, 12). In order to survive as a minority group in Western society, feminism is not seen as an instrument
26 In 1993 ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ by Huntington (published in Foreign Affairs) was posed as a question. In the book that was published 3 years later, the question mark had disappeared. ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women?’ was first published in the Boston Review in 1997. 27 Liberal politician Bolkestein defines multiculturalism as ‘the ideology of which affirmative action is the instrument of policy, which has done much wrong to the cause of minorities in the Netherlands.’ Translation RD (Bolkestein, 2004: 64)
52 that can be used by the women in the minority group. In theory, multiculturalism and feminism might relate to one another, but in practice they are often not attuned (Okin, 1999: 131) Okin sketched a society in which Europe and the USA are the epitome of civilization; the places where women would want to live. She acknowledges that western cultures are not done fighting patriarchy. However, new cultures from non Western nations are more patriarchal and therefore a threat to women. What I see as a characteristic of the dominant discourse utilized in this text, a discourse that I will later argue is new realism, is the non-defining of the category of women. Instead of looking at the women who might be disadvantaged from the multiculturalism that Okin described, women in the so-called ethnic minority of a western country, I wonder what would happen if we take the white women from the ethnic majority group as the subject of her article. If we look at her criticism of multicultural, ritual, patriarchal society, what would we find? Is multiculturalism bad for white women? By referring to rituals that the ‘other’ imposes on its members, and especially the treatment by the ‘other man’ of the ‘other woman’, Okin gives an account of what white people supposedly don’t do. Living in a society that is still full of patriarchy, yet the best of the worst, white women do not have to fear ‘clitoridectomy, polygamy, the marriage of children or marriages that are otherwise coerced’ (Okin, 1999: 14) The apparent ethnic neutrality of the white citizens in Okin’s article is restricted to the analyses of feminism in connection to multiculturalism. White women and to a minor extent men are constructed as emancipated, against the less or not emancipated nonwhites. According to Okin, emancipation is a condition for multiculturalism28. And for emancipation, Susan Moller Okin imposes the adaptation to Western norms. Emancipation of women within this discourse is constructed as something inherent in Western identity. What happens in this discourse on multiculturalism is that the white man stands up to protect white women’s feminism. Politicians as Bolkestein and Fortuyn use the specter of suppressed Muslim women as a result of ‘soft’ multicultural policies. White women are portrayed as opposite to these Muslim women: emancipated and able to make the right choices. Multiculturalism in their view might lead to oppression of white women
28 See Gloria Wekker in her 2005 lecture on emancipation and multiculturalism, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
53 ‘in their own country’. Sarah Bracke refers to this phenomenon as the ‘instrumentalisation of women’s emancipation’ (Bracke, 2005: 133).
Communities are often represented by a female symbol. Avtar Brah:
Women may serve as the symbolic figuration of a nation. They are seen as embodiment of male honour, and as such become a site of contestation for this honour. Hence, the defence of women and children becomes a rallying slogan of men going to war, as woman from opposing factions fall victim to rape and other sexual atrocities.’ (Brah, 1993: 16)
Griffin and Braidotti argue that this position as ‘bearers of nationalistic [or religious or cultural, RD] ideology’ (Griffin with Braidotti, 2002: 229) is a vulnerable place for women:
‘Subsumed by the nexus of the social relations which continue to be primary signifiers of their identity as daughters, wives and mothers, women’s identities – always in relation – are predominantly structured around their relations to men. In consequence the politics which aim to regulate identities and migration, for example, tend to police males, and men in turn are expected to, and expect to, regulate women.’ (Griffin with Braidotti, 2002: 229-230)
In the Netherlands this is illustrated by the representation of the emancipation of women as ‘part of a bigger arsenal of means to control the Islam in Dutch society in favor of an ‘integration’ policy’ (Bracke, 2005: 137, translation RD). However, is multiculturalism bad for white women? To answer this question I want to lay out the discourse of new realism first.
54 New Realism The ‘instrumentalisation of women’s emancipation’ is a characteristic of the new realism discourse. New Realism is the dominant discourse in which the debate on multiculturalism takes place in the Netherlands. The new realism discourse has been defined by philosopher Baukje Prins in her dissertation The Standpoint in Question29 and her book Beyond Innocence. Prins traced the commencement of new realism back to the end of the eighties, beginning of the nineties. A backlash was taking place against the former governmental integration policy that had allegedly been ‘too soft’. Prins situated this backlash in a context of an economic recession, involving unemployment and economizing on subsidies. The idea that migrants “occupied a marginal socioeconomic position and were in need of support” (Prins, 2002: 367) seemed no longer valid in this context. When the former leader of the Liberal party, Frits Bolkestein, started a debate on the approach to the problem of ‘ethnic minorities’ in 1991, he argued that it was time to show some courage and tell migrants to adapt to the norms and values of Enlightenment. (Prins, 1997: 114)30 The ‘courage’ of which Bolkestein speaks, necessary to dare tell the ‘truth’ is the first of five characteristics of new realism, as defined by Prins. New realism consists of a politics in which the practitioners (1) present statements as truth and seem to be ‘honestly facing the facts’ on issues that the political left has for so long been aiming to cover up; (2) represent the voice of the ordinary autochtonous people: ‘the Dutch indigenous population’ (Prins, 1997: 117), ‘minority groups are under discussion, rather than perceived as participants in the discussion’ (1997, 122); (3) suggest that autochthonous persons are realistic in character, realism being ‘a characteristic feature of national Dutch identity’ (2002: 369), combined with realism, indigenous Dutch are innocent on the three levels of culture, morality and politics (1997: 121);
29 Dissertation was finished in 1997 and later translated (revised version) into Dutch in 2004. In this thesis I start from the 2004 version and the article ‘The Nerve to break taboos’, the English translations are from the 1997 dissertation. 30 Bolkenstein repeats his opinion as European Commissioner in 2002. In an article he states: ‘Aren’t the violent threats at the critics of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali the consequences of a too soft politics?’ Translation RD (Bolkestein, 2004: 64)
55 (4) resist the politically-correct left, including foremost cultural relativism (Prins, 2000: 36, Prins, 2002: 368), because the cultural relativist ‘advocates a weak, effeminate, overcaring and ultimately inefficient state’ (1997: 123) and (5)31 present themselves as emancipated by standing up for migrant (Muslim) women (Prins, 2004: 36).
I argue that at the basis of New Realism lies white privilege: the denial of institutionalized racism and the relation this has to the maintaining of the racial status quo. In the many debates and discussions on multicultural society in New Realism, little attention has been giving to what it means to be a member of the ethnic majority group in society. This can be explained by the fact that whiteness as an ethnic position is hardly ever defined. It is apparently neutral, ‘just human’. (Dyer, 1997) This neutrality is a powerful position for the white people in multicultural society who have an interest in maintaining the racial status quo (Wellman, 1977). Within the new realism discourse, the ethnic majority group is not tempted to have an introspective standpoint towards their own ethnicity. If we would ask epistemological questions about this new realism discourse, the answers clarify to whom this discourse belongs. First, considering the speakers on behalf of new realism, one can easily draw the conclusion that new realism as a discourse is mainly white and masculine. In the Netherlands, the only permanent practitioner of this discourse that is nonwhite and female is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Secondly, in the new realism discourse a lot of attention is paid to describing and defining the ethnic and cultural ‘other’, however without describing the own (white) Dutch identity. This might seem paradoxical because one of the main characteristics of new realism that I just described is the representation of realism as a typical national Dutch identity feature. But it is only with empty features that this identity is described: tolerance, respect, and down-to-earth-ness seem to be the basic characteristics of the Netherlanders. What is missing in this description is the power position that white Netherlanders hold because of their invisible yet omnipresent ethnical position. Therefore
31 The characteristics of new realism have been described in Prins 1997, 2002 and 2004. The fifth argument on emancipation is only addressed in Prins 1997 and 2002.
56 the critique on the Netherlands as a racist society cannot have a place in the new realism discourse.
Women’s position in new realism Prins argues that the new realism discourse is gendered. She compares the discourse to the image of ‘a demanding father’. The challengers of the new realist discourse are represented as feminine (Prins, 1997: 123). And not only the discourse itself is gendered, new realism’s point of focus in the multicultural debate is on gender too. New realism makes statements on nonwhite and on white women. The nonwhite women in new realism are often the Muslim women. She is attributed a specific position. Muslima’s are objectified as being oppressed by the men of their culture and or religion. The debate on the headscarf is an interesting example. Whenever a Muslim woman makes a choice in lifestyle, this choice is distrusted. Decisions that go against new realist discourse, for instance the choice to wear a headscarf, indicate that the Muslim woman is oppressed and backward, and not able to make conscious decisions for her individual life. Prins: ‘Turkish and Moroccan women, (…), are depicted as victims of their ‘own’ culture, and as having a self-evident interest in integration into Dutch society’ (Prins, 1997:127). Hence, integration policies are for migrant women’s own good. I already stated that the main speakers in the new realist discourse on multiculturalism are white men. In presenting an interest in the emancipation of Muslim women, these men seem to position themselves as feminist. But however feminist their statements may be; the specific strand of feminism they invoke here is a white feminism. Cultural values like liberation of religious oppression, independence and sexual freedom; they are all culturally specific feminist ideas. There is no space for an emancipation of Muslim women that starts from their own background. In contrast, white women are represented by the new realist discourse as emancipated and civilized. However, on the other hand they are also objectified as being in need of help. They are constructed as being in danger of losing their long fought for feminist rights in contemporary society. The danger comes from nonwhite men who next to oppressing ‘their own’ women also object to white women’s behavior. White males are required to protect white women from this possible loss of freedom, by using
57 emancipation as a natural position in ‘our’ culture as rhetoric. In this discourse, multiculturalism is indeed bad for white women!
Within the European Mageeq project, Researcher Mieke Verloo analyzed the emancipation policies in the Netherlands. Since 1977, the Dutch government has developed and implemented policy that would give special focus to the position of women in society. Verloo describes the policy of the seventies as a two-track approach: the development of ‘specific measures to improve women’s positions and participation in different policy sectors’ (Verloo, 2003: 4) on the one hand, and the integration of gender in different policies or ‘gender mainstreaming’ on the other. In the eighties women’s economic position was central in government policy, in the nineties attention was paid to ‘women’s participation in public decision-making, the redistribution of unpaid labour, and the breaking of prevailing images on femininity and masculinity in society’ (idem: 5). Director of E-Quality (knowledge centre on emancipation in the multicultural society) Joan Ferrier emphasizes another shift: the ethnicizing of emancipation policy. In policy, women are no longer a universal category: there is a distinction between ‘autochtoon’ and ‘allochtoon’. White ethnicity is not discussed, and the policy focuses solely on the arrears of nonwhite migrant women, which ethnicizes the policy. Ferrier argues that this emphasis leads to stigmatization of nonwhite women (Ferrier, 2006: 20- 21). An example of ethnicizing of emancipation policy occurred only recently. In March 2003, Minister of Social Affairs De Geus claimed that (white) Dutch women have now accomplished emancipation and should turn their attention towards helping their ‘allochtonous’ sisters. Why can De Geus claim that the emancipation of white women is fulfilled, while worrying about nonwhite migrant women? His statement raises questions on what emancipation is, and how it can be accomplished. It reaffirms differences between white and nonwhite women. Gloria Wekker states:
58 ‘The Directorate of the Ministry of Social Affairs, responsible for emancipation policy, understands its task quite literally as being accountable for gender, not ethnicity or class, thus naturalizing whiteness and middle-class status.’(Wekker, 2004: 490)
It makes white women into acting subjects (the helper) and nonwhite women into passive objects (in need of help). Most of all the statement ethnicizes nonwhite women while reestablishing the normativety of whiteness.
Thinking Through Race One of the most important scholarly works on white women comes from the United States. Ruth Frankenberg published her White Women Race Matters in 1993. Through life story interviews with white women, Frankenberg argues that ‘race shapes white women’s lives’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 1). Frankenberg discovers that the white women utilize three different discursive repertoires in their ‘thinking through race’ (188): essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance. People in societies use existing discourses and formulate new ones to position themselves in respect to different topics. When dealing with the issue of race and racism, the white women that were asked to formulate their thoughts on racial power structures could fall back on certain modes of thinking about race/racism in the Western world that were available to them at that period of time. Race, for Frankenberg, ‘is above all a marker of difference, an axis of differentiation’ (138). Race is also a social construction that was created to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘other’ from the moment that different cultures started to meet through imperialism. The discourse that theorizes about race as if racial differences are determined in biology has a long history in the Western world. This discourse is referred to by Frankenberg as essentialist racism. Although essentialist racism is no longer an accepted manner of speaking about the self (as superior) or the other (as inferior), its long and firm roots are still to be detected in everyday ‘thinking through race’. Within society, beliefs about certain qualities belonging more to one group or the other are still part of the discourse. Frankenberg: ‘precisely because it proposed race as a significant axis of difference, essentialist racism remains the benchmark against which other discourses on
59 race are articulated.’(139) These ideas can be found in attributed characteristics as intelligence, entertaining and sportive qualities, ambition, sexuality, cleanliness. Television commercials can be named as one of the institutions that keep reaffirming qualities in connection to race or ethnicity. Color and power evasiveness discourses are directly related to essentialist racism. Frankenberg argues that this ‘color blind’ discourse is dominant in race-thinking in the United States. Color evasiveness is the ideology not to see difference. Everybody is the same; black, white, blue or green. However, rather than not seeing difference, there is always a “selective engagement with difference” (143). The colorblindness comes together with a power-blindness, trying not to see difference in color is also not wanting to see power differentials. Frankenberg:
‘within this discursive repertoire, people of color are “good” only insofar as their “coloredness” can be bracketed and ignored, and this bracketing is contingent on the ability or the decision – in fact, the virtue – of a “noncolored” – or white – self.’ (147)
Being color- and powerblind is therefore a feature of white identity: only whites can claim that we are all the same. Although the persons talking through this color- and power-evasive discourse frequently present their statements as it is an effort to distinguish from racism, for example the famous saying that ‘it doesn’t matter whether you are green, purple, white or Black, we are all the same’, Frankenberg argues that:
‘the outcome of this attempt, however, was frequently a lack of attention to the areas of power imbalance that in fact generate hostility, social distance, and “bad feelings” in general.’(157)
The last discourse that Frankenberg distinguished is that of race cognizance.
‘Race cognizance articulates explicitly the contradiction that racism represents: on the one hand, it acknowledges the existence of racial inequality and white privilege and, on the other, does not lean on ontological or essential difference in order to justify inequality or explain it away.’ (160)
60 Race cognizance discourse has a strong tie with anti-racism, and therefore Frankenberg could speak about its emerging with optimism. Placing the respondents within the different discourses, Frankenberg realized that the complexities of the life stories involved the use of different discourses in one life time. In this study, Frankenberg concluded that whiteness has the ‘unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance’ (6). A few years later, at ‘The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” conference in 1997, Frankenberg returns to the unmarked status of whiteness in the conference paper “The mirage of unmarked whiteness”. Here she complicates the so called unmarkedness of whiteness. She situates this notion in history, and argues that only in the late twentieth century this unmarked whiteness has came into being, after a period in which colonization constructed notions as race and whiteness. (Frankenberg, 2001: 74) On the invisibility of whiteness Frankenberg attaches the question ‘to whom?’, considering that neutrality or normativity are assumed only by those in racial power positions. In the second part of the article, which she actually wrote a couple of years later, she returns to her own work on whiteness, White Women, Race Matters. Having studied the work of researchers who have interviewed white (wo)men some years after Frankenberg herself, she feels obliged to slightly alter her definition of race cognizance discourse.
‘Perhaps too optimistically, I implied that moves towards race cognizance on the part of white people could only correlate with a move toward greater antiracist consciousness.’ (idem, 91)
Looking at the data of my own interviews, this alteration is highly important. In the interviews that Frankenberg studied, she finds respondents talking through race in a race cognizant and a color- and power evasive manner. The respondents are more aware of their own racial position as whites, however this does not relate to antiracism as suggested before. On the contrary, the white respondents confess a feeling of victimhood, suffering from of reverse discrimination.
61 ‘As far as these papers suggested, research subjects did not have a sense of the structural forces and multiple processes in play (…). Rather, bad luck, and hard work to overcome that bad luck, were the twin motors of human advancement that seemed to rule the day in the minds of white interviewees.’ (idem, 89)
Frankenberg talks about a new discourse: ‘power-evasive race cognizance’ (91). This discourse finds its roots in for instance the backlash against equality based instruments as affirmative action. This is also evident in USA based research of Melanie Bush (2004) and Karin McKinney (2005). The Netherlands based interviews conducted in this research do to a minor extent express a tendency toward this ‘power-evasive race cognizance’ discourse. For example Lily, who claims affirmative action would not bring the best candidate to the job opening:
Because I am Dutch, and my background is here in the Netherlands and you don’t know that about her [the nonwhite candidate], I think that I would be better integrated in the whole Dutch surroundings and the Dutch social security system. (Lily)
Culturalist Racism Understanding Everyday Racism (1991) is Philomena Essed’s elaboration on the theory of everyday racism which she started to construct in the eighties. In this work, Essed makes analyses of everyday racism out of the collected life stories of highly educated black women in the Netherlands and the United States (California). Her definition of racism is based on the interrelatedness of micro and macro levels of racism. The individual and the institutional levels are deeply interwoven.
“Racism must be understood as ideology, structure, and process in which inequalities inherent in the wider social structure are related, in a deterministic way, to biological and cultural factors attributed to those who are seen as a different “race” or “ethnic” group.”(Essed, 1991: 43)
62 In the Netherlands, the dominant and nonracialized group are white people. Racism is therefore a white problem. However, in discourses this is not evident. Racism is often constructed as a problem of either small groups of extreme racist whites, or of nonwhites that take the position of the victim. Essed recognized the different historical context in which racism took place in the United States and the Netherlands. For the latter, she distinguishes between two major ideologies; the ideology of the “Dutch burden” and the ideology of cultural pluralism. (16-17) The “Dutch burden” refers to Dutch colonial history, and the ‘“good intentions” to “help” Blacks cope with “modern” Dutch society.’ (16). After the eighties this led to a backlash against black people for whom it apparently had been made too easy to refuse integration into Dutch society. This backlash is also part of the new realism discourse. Cultural pluralism was the more accepted ideology of difference after biological racism had been eradicated from dominant discourse. As Frankenberg argues, with the end of essentialist racism, which was signaled by the fact that it was no longer accepted in mainstream discourses to use a racialized language in which superiority and inferiority is explicitly claimed. However, underneath the idea of cultural pluralism, there is a ‘hierarchical order of cultures’ (17). There is a dominant white culture in the Netherlands, which however is not openly defined, but that should be conformed to by others. Culturalist racism seems to be the new form of essentialist racism. The discourse of culturalist racism holds the idea that racism is no (longer a) major issue in Dutch society. Once again, the ‘Dutch’ notion of tolerance comes up. Tolerance is here defined within a power structure. The dominant cultural group is in position to be tolerant towards the subordinated group, while at the same time demanding integration or assimilation into Dutch society. Within this discourse of tolerance, the notion that the Dutch are not racist is established. The Netherlands are tolerant towards racism, constructed through a denial of it. This denial of racism is a form of ethnicism, which is a term Essed uses to define ‘an ideology that explicitly proclaims the existence of “multiethnic” equality but implicitly presupposes an ethnic or cultural hierarchical order.’ (6) Racism is denied, since equality has been reached, and therefore the struggle and resistance against racism is not legitimatized. (15)
63 Lily is part of this culturalist racism discourse when I ask her what she understands by integration. She explains that migrants should take courses in Dutch language and also need to learn about Dutch habits, like which festivities we have in the Netherlands. Migrants need to learn to behave Dutch, she claims. She gives the following example: ‘Our shops do not close for siesta, so do not protest and say you want siesta. We just don’t do that here.’ (Lily) She continues her argument with Dutch Christian holidays that should be respected. I ask her if 1 million Muslims in the Netherlands (with a total of 16 million citizens) do not change that opinion. Lily answers that ‘it has always been this way’, and ‘otherwise it would be a chaos in about one hundred years from now, everybody wants a holiday. They should hold on to these things that belong to the Netherlands’. Although different ethnic groups can live together in the Netherlands, Lily makes it clear that there is a dominant (ethnic) group: the Dutch. They can be tolerant toward the ethnic other, however it should not become ‘too crazy’.
In this chapter I have discussed the total of six discourses on ethnicity, whiteness and racism that will be analyzed within the statement of the six young white women in the next chapter. Essentialist racism (Frankenberg) is a discourse on race that is situated in the past, when biological references about inferior and superior races was deemed ‘acceptable’, however chapter 5 will show some example were this ghost of the past is still lingering. Race cognizance discourse is Frankenberg’s optimistic conclusion about the way multiculturalism and whiteness will be conceptualized in the future. However, as I also argue in the next chapter, the power-evasive race cognizance discourse that she formulates a couple of years later is more evident in the women’s statements. Within new realist discourse (Prins), culturalist racism (Essed) and color- and power-evasive discourse (Frankenberg) are intertwined. These three discourses are dominant in the Netherlands thinking about multicultural society.
64 The terrorist Muslim; the asexual Asian man; his always-sexually-available female counterpart; the inherently dangerous young African American man; the overtly ferticle African American woman, Native American woman, Chicana or Mexicana, are all-too-familiar tropes. Stereotypes would be banal were they not so lethal, so apt to wound psychically, emotionally, spiritually. (Frankenberg, 2001: 73)
5. Be hind White Picket Fences
In this thesis I aim to make a connection between the state of the art in researching ethnicity and racism in Women’s Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies, the influence of the dominant new realism discourse and the ‘common sense’ statements of the young white women whom I have interviewed. In this chapter I concentrate on the statements of the six young white women on ethnicity, racism and whiteness in the Netherlands. I start by contextualizing the practice of interviewing white women: as a feminist methodology (women) and as a problematic and controversial practice (white women).
White Women Although I have found no studies that employ interviews of white women on their ethnic position in a European framework, there is a growing interest and scholarship on the narratives of white (wo)men in an Anglo-Saxon context. In my own interviews with six young, white Dutch women I have been influenced by these works. I have chosen texts that have used empirical data drawn from interviews with white persons to start or underline their analyses of whiteness in the Anglo-Saxon context. I already focused on the texts by Ruth Frankenberg, David Wellman, Karyn McKinney and Ann Phoenix. Two interesting studies on white identity construction in the lives of young people in the United Kingdom appeared at the end of the nineties. The first study is conducted by Ann Phoenix and was published in 1998. In the article ‘Representing New Identities: ‘Whiteness’ as Contested Identity in Young People’s Accounts’, Phoenix analyzes interviews she conducted with young Londoners (14-18 years), women and men from different ethnic backgrounds. Based on empirical data from the United Kingdom, Phoenix acknowledges the social construction of European whiteness. She considers the different migrations in what she calls the ‘New Europe’. White people (from former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) migrate to the UK and meet white
65 and black citizens. This complicates the matter of whiteness in the UK. Phoenix: ‘In the context of various newly emerging social identities in Europe, however, more white people have been shifted into devalued categories of ‘whiteness’.’ (Phoenix, 1998: 110) The category of white is once again proven to be a social construction, and a heterogeneous one. White identity is differently constructed for white persons born in the UK and those that immigrate into the country. For the first whiteness can be an invisible privileged category in this time and space (see Frankenberg, 1997: 5), the latter group will have a different awareness of being white. (Phoenix, 1998: 110). The young white people interviewed in Phoenix’ research are mostly born in the UK and have not immigrated, therefore the difference within the first white category is not further explored through the data. The conclusions that are drawn from this research are nevertheless interesting. For instance: “the reluctance of many white young people to think of themselves as ‘white’ or to view ‘whiteness’ as having any social meaning.” (121). The white young people expressed a disinclination to see the power relations between different racial positions by claiming the unimportance of color (114). This could be analyzed as Frankenberg’s power and color evasive discourse.
The second study on white identity construction in the lives of young people in the United Kingdom was published in 1999. In ‘Not Guilty, Not Proud, Just White: Women’s Accounts of Their Whiteness’ Brenda Lewis and Caroline Ramazanoglu present part of their unfinished research project on whiteness in London. With quotations from the interviews with white women they illustrate the “contradictory strategies for articulating their whiteness” (Lewis and Ramazanoglu, 1999: 23) these women use. Different strategies of ‘speaking the unspeakable’ as Lewis and Ramazanoglu refer to the articulation of whiteness in connection to racism, are explored by the white women to allow themselves to be seen “as existing outside any racialised hierarchy and isolated from racialised and exclusionary practices.” (idem, 44)
The Netherlands There has not been a research project in the Netherlands that used interviews with young white women to complicate the multicultural debate. In this context, my interviews are
66 exploratory. However, the results and conclusions can give information on the significance of this methodology for research on constructions of whiteness, racism and multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Through analysis of the interviews the different discourses on multicultural society that the young white women use are disclosed. The main sub-questions that I want to be able to answer after the analyses of the interviews with white women are:
1. What does being white in the Netherlands mean to these young, white women? And what does it mean to be Dutch, to be ‘autochthonous’? What is ‘Dutch/White’ as positioned in multicultural society, according to young white women? 2. How is white identity constructed through comparison with the non-white category? How do young ‘Dutch/White’ women deal with racism and do the women see themselves as being in a privileged position because of their whiteness? 3. Which part of this whiteness or Dutchness relates to the history of the Netherlands as a colonizing country and a country of migrants?
In semi-structured, open-ended interviews32 I discussed these themes with white young women. To be able to analyze the interview data, I decided to interview six women around the same age, although the small number of interviews would not provide for being representative. The age, between 18 and 20 years, was chosen because I wanted to interview women who were facing life questions. The women I interviewed (see also appendix 1) were in the midst of deciding upon their futures. Some of them were having relationships, were starting to live on their own, and finishing education. And in the midst of all these difficult questions, they also had to deal with the overload of media-attention on ‘allochtonen’ in relation to Islam, terrorism and national norms and values. To be able to openly discuss these issues with the women but still have control over the themes discussed, I decided to use semi-structured interviews. I developed a list of questions (appendix 2), divided into different thematic sub-groups, which I used to
32 Interview schedule in Appendix 1 and 2.
67 organize the interviews. However, within these thematic sub-groups I have tried to let the women speak as freely as possible, creating a space of confidence in which they could talk about the issues most related to themselves. The questions I asked were merely open- ended questions. Because I interviewed six women in depth, the technique can be called qualitative rather than quantitative. The analytic results are not meant to be representative; they are exploratory and tended to touch upon a new theme in the Netherlands.
Interviewing as a feminist methodology Feminist methodology can be defined as the research methods that criticized the objectivity of knowledge for being inherently masculine, and emphasized the importance of gender as social construction in research. (Ramazanoglu with Holland, 2002: 15) However, there is no such thing as one feminist methodology, because there are different (political) positions within feminism. Feminist methodology therefore does not carry with it a number of methods that are purely feminist. Feminist methodology is a position within academia that questions epistemology. Different feminists utilizing feminist methodology in their journey to (understanding) knowledge production have been forced to argue for their methods in response to the critiques offered by so-called hard scientific method practitioners. Longstanding debates on objective and subjective knowledge are key features of Women’s Studies. Although not specifically a condition of feminist methodology (since it should be a requirement to all research), ‘feminist research (should) reflect critically on the place of the researcher in the process of knowledge production’ (Ramazanoglu with Holland, 2002: 16) In my search for knowledge on the issue of whiteness in contemporary multicultural society in the Netherlands, I will not claim to seek for truth. My knowledge production is subjective; however this does not mean that it is less valuable than objective knowledge. The topic of the social and discursive construction of whiteness asks for a methodology that will lead to qualitative data. The methodology of semi-structured, open-ended interviews is utilized by feminist researchers. Shulamit Reinharz argues that this methodology has been inspiring for feminists because it gives ‘access to people’s ideas, thoughts, and memories’ (Reinharz, 1992: 19). Reinharz points out to theorists,
68 who said that this way of communicating leaves the ability to the researcher to ask the interviewee how they feel about certain issues, which is an ‘activity females are socialized to perform’ (20). Frankenbergs research methodology of interviewing white women was part of standpoint epistemology, or as she calls it ‘theorizing “from experience”’(Frankenberg, 1993: 8). Black women have used this methodology, especially during the eighties, to point out the problematics of ‘universal sisterhood’ as a feminist strategy. The privileges of whiteness, and especially of white women, was pointed out in relation to gendered power relations, class and sexuality. To Frankenberg, the answer was not just “to add” the stories of Black women to those of white women to create a complete picture.
‘(I)t became clear that white feminist women accounting for our experience were missing its “racialness” and that we were not seeing what was going on around us: in other words, we lacked an awareness of how our positions in society were constructed in relation to those of women – and men – of color.’ (idem: 9)
Why was the “racialness” of whiteness missing in the interviews?33, Frankenberg asked. One of the answers is that intersectional theory has been used by Black feminists to analyze and interpret there lives not only in terms of gender, but also in relation to race, class and sexuality.
‘(W)hile increasingly theorists of color speak from concrete conceptualizations of what (…) multiplicity means to them, for white women visions of “difference” and “multiplicity” may remain abstract.’ (idem 10)
Interviewing on whiteness and racism: controversial questions Les Back argues that writing ethnographies of whiteness is peculiar. ‘The ethnography of whiteness needs to avoid the construction of simplified and hermetic distinctions between the empirical objects of research and the recondite position of the ethnographer.’ (Back, 2002: 40). Other than with ethnographies on inhabitants of different parts of the world, while researching whiteness in the own living context, the researcher has to make explicit
33 Frankenberg started interviewing in 1983.
69 her position towards her object. Mainly because she is part of the object of research herself. Furthermore, Back argues ‘for the importance of examining the complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences within the demotic whitenesses registered in everyday life.’ (idem: 40). The implications of interviewing white on white, as Frankenberg calls it, are important to take into account. She describes two sets of power relations between researcher and researched. The first is the ‘power imbalance’ between the person who initiates the interview, asks the questions and will ultimately analyze and interpret, and the interviewee herself. As an introduction to the interviews I told the young women that I was a university student, writing my master thesis on white women in multicultural society. I did not provide them with more information on my research; however I did encourage them to ask me questions at any part of the interview. On the use of their interviews in the written thesis itself I explained that I would use quotations, and would provide their statements with pseudonyms. I offered them the opportunity to either get a transcript of the interview, or to be informed about the final version of my thesis. None of the women expressed interest in this. ‘Oh no, that will be okay’ (Ingrid), was one of the reactions. The second set of power relations according to Frankenberg is racism itself. With her interviews in San Francisco in the eighties it was ‘specifically the effects of the color- and power-evasive discourse on race that (…) was the dominant public language of race at the time the interviews took place.’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 30) My own interviews were effected by the new realist discourse on racism as not being part of and influencing the lives of the respondents. Furthermore, the normality of whiteness in the Netherlands made it difficult to discuss issues of race and ethnicity, since the respondents did not agree to be socially constructed as white. In the interviews that Phoenix analyzed in her study on white identity in the UK she states:
‘In looking at some of the young people’s answers34, it is evident that young white people are uncertain about how to answer questions about ‘race’ and racism because they have given less thought to such issues and are fearful of giving the ‘wrong’ answer.’ (Phoenix, 1998: 112) 34 Phoenix interviewed male and female respondent is the age of 14-18.
70 In my interviews in 2005, I witnessed difficulty among the women to formulate their replies to my questions on ethnicity and whiteness. They themselves argue to never have given these issues any thoughts. However, what was not evident was a fear of ‘giving the wrong answer’. Moreover, the respondents were ‘open’ and ‘honest’ about for instance their prejudice against nonwhites. Like Saskia who tells me that she is prejudiced. I ask her what the difference is with being racist.
‘Being racist is different. It is when you really belittle someone because of his religion, or his appearance or his being foreign, that is racist. But if you just keep your distance from them, and sometimes make a remark like “of course, it’s them again”, well maybe that is a little racist, but it is more prejudice’. (Saskia)
This apparent ‘honesty’ with which she tells me this, is part of new realist discourse in which ‘telling it like it is’ gives one special value of speaking with truth and candor.
The interviewees and I had our sex in common. We were all women. We were also all white, which however did not mean we considered ourselves of the same racial position. Within the scope of my interviews I tried to create a space in which the women could feel secure enough to share experiences and feelings around the theme of race and ethnicity without fearing the accusation of being racist. In retrospect I argue that through the discourse of new realism, the women seemed not to be afraid to speak about ‘others’ in terms that could be placed into a racist ideology. The notion of ‘telling it like it is’ was very powerful when we discussed persons from ethnic minority groups. Saskia, for example, states: ‘I think they just should not bring so many people here: that has no use because it is full [the Netherlands, RD]. That’s it!’ Especially the adding of the words ‘that’s it’ at the end of the sentence fits into new realist representation of truth. On the other hand, the interviewer can be viewed as using a racist ideology while asking the respondents to talk about themselves as white. On this issue Lewis and Ramazanoglu state:
71 ‘(i)n asking women to discuss their whiteness Brenda [Lewis, the white interviewer] could be seen as crossing, or threatening to cross, the fine line between exploring identity and expressing racism, thus breaching the tacit agreement between polite strangers that racist sentiments should not be openly expressed’ (Lewis and Ramazanoglu, 1999: 26)
Although I did came across statements that expressed the discomfort and confusion of respondents when I initiated the idea of whiteness, none of the interviewees openly expressed the suggestion of me crossing some un-written line of good behavior
The dominant actors in the debate on multiculturalism: politicians, journalists, and other media figures, have power in communicating their ideas. Certain ethnocentric ideas ‘become shared and may form the cognitive basis of ethnic or racial discrimination in inter-group interaction.’ (Van Dijk: 1987: 11). The constant re-production of prejudice connected to this idea of truth is what makes society change the boundaries of what is accepted as racism. In the interviews, white women talk about their own ethnic background, pertaining to different levels like family, friends, individually and in relation to society. In analyzing the interviews I especially look for those statements, earlier defined as new realist, culturalist racist either/or ‘thinking through race discourses. They are expressed towards me, the interviewer, within a dynamic in which I am considered part of the in- group that is supposed to be sharing some of the ideas. When Bowien is talking about difference in the upbringing of children in ‘Dutch culture’ and ‘foreign culture’ she involves me into this binary situation:
‘There are certain rules, right? Look, they [the children] need to be home on time and say where they are and I will bring them to school, of course, and don’t let them go alone. Look, at a certain age you don’t have to bring them to school, that was the same with myself, and with you and everybody, right? These are just the ordinary things.’ (Bowien)
72 Bowien is explaining how she wants to raise her future children, who will have a white mother and a Moroccan father. She wants to give her children an ‘ordinary Dutch’ upbringing and expresses concern about the lack of responsibility by foreign parents she claims to be witnessing in her surroundings. By explaining what is normal to ‘us’ Dutch people, she explicitly puts me into the Dutch position of a future mother who will not let her children play on the street late at night. During these topics, I ask specific questions on their ideas about (who are) ‘allochtonen’, and their vision on multicultural Netherlands. I also introduce them to the question of being white, asking them to formulate what is specific about being white and Dutch. How do these women talk about themselves and ethnic others? What comes first into their minds when asked to think about the possibility of dating an ‘allochtoon’? I want to know what their knowledge, which is brought to me as ‘common sense’, consists of.
Behind White Picket Fences In the next part of this chapter I analyze and interpret the statements of six young white women. The aim of the interviews was to research how these six young white women construct their own (white) ethnicity in contemporary Dutch multicultural society. I have divided this part of the chapter thematically. After the introduction I focus on the use of the words ‘normal’ and ‘just’ as part of the (white) identity constructions of the young women. I look at the use of the terminology ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ in relation to different discourses on multicultural society. Statements on nonwhite men and nonwhite women are discussed separately and besides this I give special attention to Bowien and her relationship to her Moroccan partner Rachid. I end this chapter by looking at white racism and privilege. The interviews took place at the interviewees’ homes, or at their schools. I started the conversations by asking the respondents to describe themselves: to tell me their names, their age, the composition of their family. I asked them to talk about their friendships, their studies and their hobbies. These questions were designed to make them feel comfortable and at ease during the interview. I elaborated on these introductory
73 questions by asking them to draw me a picture of their lives in about 10 years from now. Ingrid answers:
Well just like, ‘huisje boompje beestje’. (Ingrid)
‘Huisje, boompje, beestje’ is a Dutch expression that refers to the dominant idea of an ideal future: having a family and a house with a tree and a pet. In the English language it resembles the notion of a house with a white picket fence around it. Lily uses this same expression to indicate that she wants an ‘ordinary’ lifestyle that involves a husband, some kids, and a nice home. And Bowien said:
Me in ten years: I want to keep working. (..) And then we would have a house of our own, together with my boyfriend, and I am married and happy and have children. (Bowien)
None of the young women expressed a desire to “become” something other than a heterosexual wife and mother with possibly a part-time job. This could be related to factors as class and education. Except for Ingrid and Martine, the women were in the middle of their vocational training, all of them in the service industry. Ingrid and Martine were in college studying to become a primary school teacher and a physiotherapist. Although none of the women discussed their family background in terms of class, I got the impression from the interviews and visiting the homes of three of the women, that especially Bowien could be considered working class, while the other women were coming from middle-class families. None of the women came out of ‘broken families’; although Bowien herself had been in and out of contact with her parents. The women did not express a specific feminist interest, neither did they call themselves feminist. It is also relevant to notice that none of the women used ethnic terminologies to introduce themselves. It was not noteworthy to mention this as a white woman in front of a white interviewer. Richard Dyer observed: ‘In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general.’ (Dyer, 1997: 3)
74 During this introduction, the women expressed uncertainties about the relevance of their ‘ordinary’ lifestyles to me as a researcher, sometimes referring to themselves as boring. Ingrid explains: ‘I do not have such a fascinating life, actually’. This ‘ordinary lifestyle’ discourse will become interesting when it is linked to ‘ordinary ethnicity’. This will become evident during this chapter.
After this brief introduction I initiated using the terminology of ethnicity to the respondents. The term ‘ethnicity’ was considered a difficult one. In their memories it referred to high school classes, knowledge that had sunken away in their minds. It is interesting to see that they do not connect ethnicity to something that concerns them. My use of ‘ethnicity’ here refers to what is described by Wekker and Lutz (2001) as the ‘personal, social and symbolic meanings that are given to the ‘racial’ and ethnic difference between people’ (Wekker and Lutz, 2001: 37, translation RD). When the respondents asked for clarification on the term ethnicity, I answered that I was interested in how they defined their living space, friends/ family and themselves in terms of culture, religion, skin-color, nationality, ‘regionality’ and language. None of the respondents used the term ‘white’ in their answers. Lily started to define ethnicity in her family and group of friends by referring to the protestant religion of a special girlfriend. I asked her if all her friends and relatives have been born in the Netherlands.
Yes. I do have an, my mom has an aunt and she has moved to South-Africa, but she was from the Netherlands. So my family is ordinary Dutch. (On the aunt): She is married to a Dutch man and then they moved there. And her children have married South-Africans but also ordinary white South-Africans. (Lily)
Referring to a family member who had immigrated to a different country was used as a tool to ‘spice up’ the story of ethnic backgrounds. Not only Lily referred to relatives abroad. Ingrid mentioned an uncle in Thailand and Martine talked about a nephew who was adopted from Columbia. In relation to their ‘boring’ selves, and in contradiction to being ‘ordinary’, these relatives were marked by being in a foreign location. In these particular situations, that did not necessarily mean that these relatives were ethnically
75 marked. The family members remained ‘just white’; their new homelands were ethnically marked. In Frankenberg’s research White Women, Race Matters, she relates the whitenesses as expressed by her respondents as seemingly ‘boring’. (Frankenberg, 1993: 197). She states:
‘For a seemingly formless entity, then, white culture has a great deal of power, difficult to dislodge from its place in white consciousness as a point of reference for the measuring of others.’ (idem, 197)
The color- and power-evasive discourse that for instance constructs everybody as equal, ‘either black, white, green or purple’, but at the same time ignores power differences between people of majority and minority ethnicities, is the representational surrounding in which the ‘boring’ white identity can be spiced up with relatives abroad or ‘ethnic’ relatives.
Ordinary White One of the latest publications that concerns research based on empirical data of white people’s accounts of ethnicity and racism is Karyn D. McKinney’s ‘Being White’ (2005). The author is Assistant Professor of Sociology and has taught a course on race and ethnicity at different Universities in the United States. One of the assignments to finish this course is to write an autobiography in which the students are required to describe and analyze their racial or ethnical position. Between 1998 and 2003, McKinney collected 138 autobiographies of white students. The outcomes are remarkable and frequently underline Frankenbergs power-evasive race cognizance discourse. Joe Feagin states in the foreword to the book:
‘There is a clear suggestion in McKinney’s research that young whites appear liberal because they have learned to be socially correct to strangers (such as opinion pollsters) in the “frontstage” of their lives while still harboring deep racist imagery, stereotyping, and proclivities in their minds and everyday orientations to the world, especially as they interact with other whites in the “backstage” of their lives.’(Feagin, 2005: xiii)
76 This argument is expressed throughout the thematic chapters of the book. Reading the autobiographies of the students on issues as white identity, race consciousness or color blindness (with a strong link to the three/four distinguished discourses of Frankenberg) and the reverse discrimination that students feel is taking place through for instance affirmative action policies, is illuminating. McKinney’s shows that for the students ‘whiteness’ as such is an empty identity. It becomes something only in relation to other races or ethnicities. It is interesting that most students do not write about white privilege as an inherent and deeply imbedded aspect of their position in a nation that is built on white racism. In contrast, white students display a deep frustration with anti-racist actions as affirmative action and with the special attention paid to ‘Black History Month’ or biographical accounts of Black leaders in class. To a lot of the students, who claim to be color blind, this stimulates inequality and even is unfair towards (hard working) whites. Exemplary is Caitlin, who writes:
‘For example, if whites went around saying things about black people and demanding organizations that were all white and for the advancement of whites (i.e. NAACP for black) blacks would say that we are discriminating against them by doing so’. (in McKinney, 2005: 127)
While McKinney does not make this connection herself, I would argue that the respondents’ statements are located in a power-evasive race cognizance discourse, which Frankenberg formulates in 2001. Not antiracism is the connection to which this race cognizance is made, but a feeling of being misunderstood and even mistreated. Karyn McKinney distinguishes the stories her young white respondents tell her about ethnicity in four categories of white identity construction: the respondents use ‘usable (symbolic) ethnicity’, ‘tourist ethnicity’35, ‘mirrored whiteness’ and ‘supplanted whiteness’. (McKinney, 2005: 82 and further). The respondents articulated a usable symbolic ethnicity through telling their life stories by referring to symbolic aspects like special holidays or specific food. In the American context of McKinney’s interviews, this could refer to Italian-American or Irish-American students who celebrated ‘traditional’
35 Cultural tourism was first described by bell hooks. McKinney used this idea to formulate her ‘tourist ethnicity’ identity construction.
77 national holidays with the family, while otherwise constructing themselves as unmarked by their ethnicity. Some of the women I interviewed state that their families (not themselves) are either Catholic or Protestant. They also use a specific regional connection to their being Dutch, like Bowien who feels really at home in her small city.
‘I see myself as Dutch, because I am just Dutch, but I also see myself as, well, yeah, someone from [small city]. I am pretty much crazy about [small city], I always lived here and don’t want to leave it, ever. I want to get married here.’ (Bowien)
Tourist ethnicities were used to ‘create a sense of identity (…) by appropriating elements of other cultures, or by finding ethnic Others to teach them about “culture”.’ (McKinney, 91). In practice this could go from adopting a hiphop lifestyle to appreciating Black culture. Tourist ethnicity is about white people using a bit of ‘Black culture’ to spice up their life stories. However, it does not touch upon the dilemma that Frankenberg has pointed out in relation to the unmarkedness of whiteness. White culture could be seen as empty, where ethnic others have marked cultures. McKinney testifies that many of her respondents construct the ethnicity in their life stories by ‘mov(ing) though encounters from one person of color to the next.’ (95) In a minor way this happens in my interviews when the respondents link ‘ethnicity’ not to themselves as being white, but do connect it to family members that live abroad. However, it can be concluded that the respondents in my interviews do not use ‘tourist ethnicities’ as happens more frequently in the USA. This will become evident in the paragraph when (the lack of) friendships between the white women and their Muslim classmates is discussed. Here the white women do not claim to adopt any part of the lifestyles of the Muslim women. Moreover, they argue that their Muslim classmates are hypocritical. Mirrored whiteness is a way of contrasting the own ethnic position with the ethnicity of nonwhites and through this contrast a sense of ‘whiteness’ is constructed. Respondents are not capable of expressing the meaning of being white without contrasting it to meanings of nonwhite. Moreover, non of the six white women consider themselves white, only in reference to being normal: ordinary Dutch. Ethnicity relates to
78 nonwhite ‘others’. Interviewing the women on whiteness was difficult. Ingrid has never thought about being white. She can be situated in a color/power evasive discourse when she claims:
It is not about how you look. It is about how you act in society. (Ingrid)
However, she contradicts this claim when I ask her to think through whiteness. I ask her if she was ever in a situation where she suddenly was aware of her whiteness, simply because of the fact that she was in a minority position as a white. She relates to this.
Yes in Amsterdam. At those moments, yes. When I am with my boyfriend, and we go into the subway and there in the subway we see only, well, allochtonen, or at least dark colored people sitting, then I think its weird that I am the only. (…) It is weird because, well, Dutch people are white, the ones that are from here originally. (…) And then, it is not that ‘cozy’ for me as a girl. And then I also have this thing that the darker they are, the worse it is. (Ingrid)
This statement is complex, there even is an essentialist racism discourse situated in the statement. Colonial discourse awakens when Ingrid mentioned the dark colored people in the subway, that make her feel un-‘cozy’, or even afraid. This statement will be further analyzed in the paragraph on nonwhite men. Here it is important that only through comparison with nonwhites, Ingrid can give some account of feeling white. McKinney argues that in her interviews, whiteness is usually contrasted with African Americans. In comparison, the six young white women contrast themselves, but only when explicitly asked, with Muslim others. The last category McKinney uses is supplanted whiteness; this category is in place for all respondents in my interviews. It refers to the idea that race does not matter, and especially whiteness does not matter. It is not a part of their identities that is discussed. Instead of talking about whiteness, the women talk about being Dutch. Anna states, when I ask her if she would describe herself as white:
79 ‘Yes, well not especially white but Dutch, or, yeah (…)I have never thought about that, but you are just used to this, yes indeed I came into the world as white and as Dutch and you are raised that way, and yes why that is so, well’.
All women argue they never thought about themselves as being white, some of them claim to think of themselves as Dutch, as Anna does. However, when it comes to ethnicity, all women have thought about those being nonwhite, and ‘other’ in Dutch society. In retrospect, they have constructed a white identity, and represent to me those parts that are not nonwhite. The use of the term ordinary or just (gewoon/normaal) in connection to their nationality and their (lack) of ethnicity is most interesting throughout all of the interviews. It is a word that all of the women use in combination with whiteness, and Dutchness. This word reinforces the unmarkedness of white identity. As Frankenberg argues that this unmarkedness can only happen in certain times and places, I would argue that a distinct discourse of new realism and cultural racism must be active in society for people to argue that they are nonmarked as whites. It is actually a position in which you take your white self to be normal and neutral, while the nonwhite ‘other’ is not. An example: Lily has a friend whose family took in a foster-child from Curacao. She refers to this person when she has explained to me that she barely is in contact with nonwhites.
A friend of mine has a foster-sister, I suddenly have to think about that, and she is from Curacao, so she is just a very dark girl but I know her from the age of 6 months, so I just grew up with that, and well, toward her it’s different than, well, if you were just walking in the city and you see someone like that. That, yes that is strange but that is because she is just, because I just know her very well and I just know who she is and you know about her that she is just totally Dutch-raised (…). So you see actually just a typical Dutch girl with a skin-color. (Lily)
The use of the word just, which comes up on eight occasions in this quotation, is to emphasize the fact that although the sister is black, she is in fact part of the unmarked white category by being like them. There are more things going on in this statement, for
80 instance, not all the ‘justs’ stand for the same thing. Lily tells me that her friend’s sister is like a typical Dutch girl. She is ‘safe’ because she knows her to be totally Dutch-raised. She is not like the other (black) people who she sees in the city. What is different about the others is not made explicit, except that they have ‘skin-color’ (implicitly she claims that whiteness is no skin-color). Lily’s statements are part of culturalist racism, since she can be interpreted as claiming that the Dutch upbringing of the foster sister brings the girl closer to Dutchness or whiteness, which presupposes a hierarchical order in ethnicities. Where can we place Lily’s ‘thinking through race’ in Frankenberg’s four discourses? I argue that Lily is race cognizant because she does realize that this sister is situated in a dominantly white society, where she has the ‘fortune’ to be raised by whites. Therefore, Lily is not power- evasive. However, the link with racism and white privilege that is often traceable in statements of race cognizance discourse is not made by Lily. She explains how this sister is not marked by a non-white ethnicity other than her skin-color. Lily has given herself the power and the questionable privilege to ‘whiten’ the black sister.
‘Autochthoon’ or ‘allochtoon’ Part of the New Realist discourse in the Netherlands is the distinction between ‘autochtoon’ and ‘allochtoon’. Officially defined by the Central Bureau of Statistics, an ‘allochtoon’ is: ‘Person that resides in the Netherlands and who has a least one parent who is born in a foreign country. Those who are born abroad themselves belong to the first generation, those who are born in the Netherlands belong to the second generation.’ (CBS)36. There is a distinction made between western and non western ‘allochtonen’. Non western ‘allochtonen’ come from Turkey, Africa, Latin-America and Asia except for Japan and Indonesia. On January 1st, 2006 the Netherlands counted 13.184.007 autochthonous citizens, 1.722.534 non western ‘allochtonen’ (687.880 from Turkey and Morocco, which is 40% of non western ‘allochtonen’) and 1.428.968 western ‘allochtonen’. However, the semi-official and ‘common sense’ definition of an ‘allochtoon’ is that of a non-Western citizen, often from an Islamic background. Ingrid states:
36 www.cbs.nl
81 ‘I am rather clear about that, not that I am racist or something, but I think autochtonen, yes I think they are the real Netherlanders.’ (Ingrid)
To Ingrid, ‘everybody else’, everyone who is not a Real Netherlander is ‘allochtoon’. In this category, she does not make a distinction between Western and non-Western immigrants. Nevertheless, she does understand the racialized content of the terminology, because she immediately wants to make sure I don’t see her as racist. She is situated in new realist discourse. She represents the complex distinction of ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’, a distinction that in itself is an illustration of cultural racist discourse, as a clear binary. There are two categories to which you either belong or you don’t belong. Martine constructs the difference between ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ in terms of inhabiting western culture or not:
‘Autochtonen I see as the persons that are actually born and have grown up in the Netherlands, but also, say other Europeans, like French and English.’ (Martine)
However, nonwhite persons born in the Netherlands, the second and third generations ‘allochtonen’ are not defined as ‘autochtoon’ by Martine. ‘Born and having grown up’ is only related to white citizens. Martine goes on by distinguishing the ethnicities that she thinks are ‘allochtonen’ in the Netherlands. When she leaves out people born in Indonesia I asked her if this ethnicity is different form the others. She confirms:
Because they themselves, they attract less attention in society. You hear about Moroccans, Turkish people, you hear more often about fights or things, and actually not about Indonesian people, I think. (Martine)
Martine makes a connection between ‘allochtoon’ and negativity, and she relates this back to the negative attention or representation ‘allochtonen’ receive in the media. When later in the interview I talk with her about racism she returns to the issue of negative attention and connects this to a huge amount of responsibility on the side of immigrants.
82 I think it gradually sneaked in to it. [Certain stereotypes about Moroccans, related to criminality] How that came to be, I think that if they would have acted properly and nothing ever happened, then they would not have caught the attention. (…) They have to clear their own names now. (…) If others [migrant groups] had come to the Netherlands who did not ruin it for the other people, then there would be a whole different image [of ‘allochtonen’].(Martine)
This statement suggests that negative attention (she does not call it racism, which can be interpreted through Essed’s theory of the denial of racism in the Netherlands) is the responsibility of nonwhite citizens. Only bad behavior on the part of nonwhites leads to xenophobia. Martine denies my suggestion of racism being in play here. She views white immigrants who have not caught (negative) media attention as proof for the fact that everybody is able to integrate in Dutch society without issues (of racism). Martine therefore denies allegations of racial power struggles being at play. Together with the denial of racism, this is part of cultural racism. The dominant white group has no responsibility in solving the negative stereotyping of certain nonwhite groups in the Netherlands, and furthermore, she implies without using the term, racism is no responsibility of whites either.
Lily’s definition of ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ is again slightly different from the definition of the other young white women:
Autochtoon are ordinary white people from the Netherlands and also light skinned people from the Netherlands who have lived here for a very long time and were born here. Allochtoon are just foreigners. (Lily)
Again a normative claim is connected to being ‘autochtoon’, but also to ‘just’ being foreign. The use of the word ‘just’ before the word foreigners suggests a power-evasive tool. ‘Just foreigners’ is apparently free of judgment. The statement that also light skinned people from the Netherlands are ‘autochtoon’ is complicated by Lily in the next quote. I ask her where she would situate an English person that lives in the Netherlands
83 for twenty years. This person can be white or light skinned, but has not been born in the Netherlands. Lily:
I would say an ‘autochtoon’ because, maybe it is stupid, but because he is white and has lived here for a long time, so I would say he is reasonably integrated in the Netherlands.
I continue by asking if somebody from Suriname, with a black skin color, but also living in the Netherlands for the last twenty years would also be positioned in the ‘autochtoon’ category. Lily:
I would see that one as ‘allochtoon’. That may be discriminating, but I have a lot with skin-color, because oh, he is dark so he must be from abroad.
Although she is not able (or willing) to elaborate on her ‘thing’ with skin-color, it is clear that to Lily being black is not compatible with being Dutch. Being white means you can melt into Dutch society. Although she makes the assumption with the imagined English person that he would be ‘reasonably integrated’, she does not do this with the Surinamese person with the same imagined twenty years of living in the Netherlands. Secondly, my example of the Surinamese person in the Netherlands was not solely based on the fact that Lily could identify a person from Suriname as black, which would not fit into her ‘white or light skinned’ definition. I also chose Suriname as example because of the specific (post)colonial position of Suriname in relation to the Netherlands. In terms of integrating into Dutch society, it could be argued that the person from Suriname has an advantage because of language, culture and history. To Lily it only counts that this person is recognizable as other, because of the difference in skin-color. Furthermore, I interpret her being not embarrassed to share this with me as a trait of New Realism. Although ‘this may be discriminating’, Lily does tell me her illogical distinction between ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’. As I argued in chapter 4, one of the characteristics of the New Realism discourse on multicultural society is the intention of telling the blunt but honest truth. The arguments that Lily and the other respondents use
84 to distinguish between ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ are not based on the official definition but on what they claim to be ‘common sense’.
Saskia answers my question as to where she would place an American (I intentionally did not mention the ethnicity of the person) living in the Netherlands, according to her definition of ‘allochtoon’ (‘a person from a foreign country’).
It is an allochtoon but he is more often seen as, well not as a Netherlander but there is less emphasis on the fact that he is from abroad. At the moment that you are from Morocco or Turkey, than you have a name, so to say, but there are also many Spanish or German, or at least Americans and English here, and you don’t hear about them a lot. (…) Well a Spanish person you could possibly recognize, but you don’t see from the appearance of an American, like gosh he’s American, when with a Moroccan you often recognize them, because of specific features, or the way they talk or just their looks. (Saskia)
Note that Saskia connects American and English people as white, although significant numbers of people from America and the United Kingdom are nonwhite.
Bowien has difficulties describing ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’. She first turns the two around. Bowien also connects negative connotations to the term ‘allochtoon’, however she is more strict in who is who:
Autochtoon is Netherlanders and allochtoon is foreigners. (…) I think if you say ‘allochtoon’ then it is negative. That is my feeling right now. I never use the word allochtoon, I always just say foreigners. (Bowien)
Bowien has a four-year relationship with a Moroccan man. Her parents have great difficulty with this, and last year she ran away from home to live together with Rachid. When I asked her how she sees her boyfriend in the ‘allochtoon-autochtoon’ distinction she replies:
85 As a foreign guy. That is very weird. Because you should think of him as your boyfriend, and I do, but on the other side I see him as a foreigner. (Bowien)
From the definitions of the terms ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ I direct the conversation to the subject of multicultural society and its specific issues and problems, as the respondents see them in ‘real life’ and in the media. Ingrid lives in a small town in the middle of the Netherlands. She is in the middle of an internship in a primary school in this town. She complains about Moroccan boys who ‘gather around the school’. They cause problems by throwing stones at the windows, and they ‘don’t listen’. I asked her to look at the multicultural society at large. Are things different, or even worse than before the murder on Theo van Gogh?
Yes, I think it is, but I think that it is a kind of interaction because the Moroccan community or the Turkish community or whatever cause trouble in some people’s eyes, and those people go and do something back like setting schools or mosques on fire, that is a kind of interaction and that only gets worse. (Ingrid)
In this statement Ingrid expressed a precarious power-evasive discourse. To her, incidents of aggression between ‘allochtonen’ and ‘autochtonen’ are equal ‘interactions’, without acknowledging a power struggle. Ingrid continues:
I think that primarily the problem is that some allochtone communities, let’s say, they just have a whole different, because of the religion they just have an entirely different opinion, an entirely different look at, at the family and towards women. To give some of the standard examples. And I think that that is just in the nature of these people, there is not something you can do about it, you can not say to someone you have to leave your religion… You can come to live here, but you have to leave your religion behind. That is not possible. (Ingrid)
From a power-evasive discourse Ingrid moves into a discourse which Essed calls ‘culturalist racism’. This discourse is somewhat different from an essentialist racist
86 discourse because it is based not on biological aspects (although by referring to the ‘nature of these people’ she comes close) but on cultural aspects. The complexity of this statement lies in the fact that Ingrid is situated in new realist discourse and in culturalist racism discourse; however, new realism is in opposition with cultural relativism. In this statement Ingrid plays with the notion of cultural relativism while considering the fact that you (Dutch society) cannot ask ‘these people’ to leave their culture behind. While Martine expresses that negativity surrounding ethnic minorities is the responsibility of the ethnic group itself, since they apparently started the negativity themselves, Ingrid uses more essentialist terminology. ‘These people’ cannot help themselves, it is their fate to be this way and we cannot ask them to be any different. However, later in the interview she contradicts herself when stating that the ‘allochtone’ communities ‘should adjust to society’. To Anna integration means:
They can keep their own things, but they do have to adjust to what is normal here, I mean when we would go to another country then we have to adjust as well. (Anna)
Bowien tells me that although her boyfriend is a Moroccan himself, he does not want her to hang around with other Moroccans.
My boyfriend has something like, rather Netherlanders than Moroccans. He is not very fond of Moroccans. (…) Maybe because he knows Moroccans better than we do, and he knows what they are up to. (Bowien)
By making her Moroccan partner the reason why she should not hang out with Moroccans, Bowien argues that a Moroccan knows best about other Moroccans. This statement is culturalist racist because she is saying that you must be a Moroccan to understand other Moroccans. That means that a Moroccan is a fixed identity, only to be known by other Moroccans. At the same time, Bowien puts all her own responsibilities to the side because she does not have to think about Moroccans as fluid and unstable
87 subjects, but can go along with her Moroccan partner in being ethnicist: and who would know better than he?
Lily is afraid that the problems in the Netherlands will continue to grow. She relates the problems to networks of terror. ‘I am very clear: just send them back to their own countries.’ Her fear for the other is expressed through a story she shares with me, which has taken place two weeks before the interview, on November 1st, a day before the murder on Theo van Gogh took place a year ago.
We got a message that on November 1st there would be a terrorist attack in Utrecht, and then we said to my sister, who works in Utrecht, you better stay at home. (…) A friend of a friend of my sister heard it from his friend who was in a bus and in that bus there was this Arab, an Arab man and an Arab girl. The girl also spoke Dutch but was talking Arabic to the man. And when she got of the bus, that man told her not to come to Utrecht on November 1st, because strange things would happen. (Lily)
These stories about terrorist acts and possible attacks return in the other interviews. It is not a question of whether it will happen, it is a question of when will it happen. Anna:
When there have just been attacks then I do think, just don’t let it happen here. It is scary that it comes closer to home, but I don’t have the idea that it has to come from the Muslims. (Anna)
At many moments during the interview Anna is using power evasive discourse. On the murder of Theo van Gogh she states:
‘I think you should never just kill somebody, not somebody who is black, or white or yellow or green. Yes it was indeed a foreigner who killed Pim, uhm Theo van Gogh, yes that is just not done, but it is never right because if it was a Dutch person who murdered a foreigner than it was equally not done.’
88 The statement that everybody is equal: either black, white green or purple is a known example of color and power evasiveness. Anna states that ‘allochtonen’ or foreigners should adjust to Dutch society. She explicitly does not mention power relations, and even religion is not considered a special position: Anna conflates wearing of the veil with wearing baseball caps in class, and states that a burqa is like a balaclava: it’s not allowed. During the different interviews, it was evident that ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ had different meanings in relation to gender. In the next two sections I look at two issues involving nonwhite men and women. Nonwhite women of around the same age as the respondents were defined as hypocritical and pitiful. Young nonwhite men were presented by the young white women as oppressors.
The ‘Other’ women: friends with headscarves? Discussing multicultural society and its problems, the respondents quickly start using the masculine pronoun. During part of the interviews in which older nonwhite (Muslim) women were discussed, the young white women made assumptions about the women being suppressed and illiterate, which constructed a sense of feeling sorry for these women in combination with irritation. The white women expressed they would want to speak the language of the country if they would migrate, and did not sympathize with older migrant women who couldn’t speak Dutch. This gendered group (elderly migrant women) stayed in this stereotypical representation. I focused on the young women’s contemporaries to question them about friendships with nonwhite women. Saskia is the only woman that has at one point befriended nonwhite, Muslim women. Although all young white women come into daily contact (mostly at school) with nonwhite or Muslim women, they do not make friendships across the ‘ethnic’-line. Saskia has started her study in the city of Utrecht, however the large numbers of ‘allochtonen’ in her college has influenced her decision to continue her study in a smaller town.
In Utrecht you had a lot (of ‘allochtonen’), and that was often negative because they were sitting with each other in large groups, and when you passed as a Dutch girl, than they started to whisper and try to evoke a reaction. (Saskia)
89 At one point she gets involved in some kind of friendship with two girls who wore a veil.
They were very nice girls, but at a sudden moment we could…, they told a lot about their faith when we asked about this, but always in a somewhat defensive manner. Once we had a discussion on asylum seekers and how that is handled in the Netherlands and well, I think, well, they just should not bring so many people in, because that has no function, it is full here, that’s it. And then they were suddenly very fierce and then they pitched into it, and then you saw two very different girls, no longer those nice and shy girls, it just changed. Very strange. (Saskia)
The image of the nice and shy veiled women is something that can be analyzed in comparable terms as bell hooks analyzed the stereotyping of black women in her article “Madonna: plantation mistress or soul sister”.
‘For we have always known that the socially constructed image of innocent white womanhood relies on the continued production of the sexual myth that black women are not innocent and never will be.’ (hooks, 1998: 310)
In contrast, the Muslim woman is stereotyped as suppressed, yielding and non-critical. In the interviews the notion that Muslim girls are hypocritical came up several times. This apparent hypocrisy was connected to the veil. Ingrid states:
In principle, I don’t mind. [wearing of headscarf], the only thing I do mind is that it is a bit hypocritical. In their own country it is forbidden to wear a headscarf, in Universities and stuff, but here you are not even allowed to say something about it. Well, then something must be wrong. (Ingrid)
Anna believes wearing the veil in class is the same as wearing a baseball cap. And the latter is forbidden, so should the first. Saskia mentioned the debate on the headscarf in
90 France. She does not understand the ‘fuss’ that Muslim women make about it. Lily thinks Muslim girls in the Netherlands misuse their veils.
‘You have these Muslim girls and they have their headscarf hanging in such a way that it really is wobbly, that you don’t really see the eyes and then I think, you wear them properly, or you don’t wear them at all.’
Lily, who presents herself as not being interested in Muslim women or men for friendships, claims here to know how a headscarf should be worn. Lily also argues that talking Arabic in public places in the Netherlands should be banned.
I don’t know if it is their way of talking, or that it is really the case, but it sounds like gossiping to me, that they are talking about you. (…) They talk very loudly and try to drown each other’s voices, and then they look at you and laugh very loudly. (Lily)
Because of Bowien’s relation with a Moroccan man, I asked her specifically if she had made friendships with Dutch-Moroccan girls. She claims not to see these girls a lot.
Because, these women don’t go out a lot, right? I don’t know what it is, you always think, at least I always thought that women were treated badly, or bad, I don’t know, but just subordinated, sitting at home, not allowed to do anything. But actually they are just very hypocritical. They do everything, at least that is what I begin to notice. (Bowien)
Later in the interview she adds:
They wear a veil, and act like they don’t go out and don’t have boyfriends, but in the end they all have boyfriends. (Bowien)
91 Ingrid has had Muslim girls as classmates. If I ask her if they were different from her she states that ‘they were actually the same as we were’. Then I ask her if she would want to change places with them. She says no. In a later part of the interview she gives a statement that might holds the reason to this answer:
I often feel a little sorry for them. [Muslim girls]. But if you grow up like that than you probably don’t know any better. (Ingrid)
At first it seems like a paradox that the white women stereotype Muslim classmates as nice, shy, pitiful, but also hypocritical. I would argue that at second glance this is not that much of a paradox, since it is the deconstruction of the stereotype that leave the white women with a unsettling feeling which they describe as hypocrisy among Muslim women. Saskia states that she was surprised when her Muslim classmates turned out to be defensive about her statements about Dutch immigration policy. What happened to the nice and shy girls? To Saskia, these Muslim classmates are static and fixed persons that represent her stereotypical ideas about Muslim women. Hence the fact that these women stepped out of this stereotype and acted as agents by giving their opinions in resistance to Saskia is claimed to be hypocritical, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I would locate the hypocrisy in relation to young Muslim women there where the latter is an active subject with a headscarf, which is not a part of these young white women’s fixed frameworks of them. This is also deeply integrated in new realism discourse where Muslim women who make a choice in lifestyle that goes against new realist discourse, for instance the choice to wear a headscarf, are indicated as being oppressed and backward, and not able to make conscious decisions for her individual lives.37 Evidently this is not the case and the white women can only understand this as hypocrisy.
The ‘Other’ men: the law of the father The ‘interracial’ relationship between white women and nonwhite men is historically complex. Frankenberg:
37 Ethnic minority groups are often blamed for the negative representations in dominant discourse.
92 ‘White women are viewed both as objects of white male protection and as people unable to control their own sexuality. In either case, white women and nonwhite men are to be kept apart, by white men.’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 81).
Here I will return to the statement made by Ingrid, which was briefly discussed earlier. When I ask Ingrid if she has ever identified herself as white she remembers and occasion:
Yes in Amsterdam. At those moments, yes. When I am with my boyfriend, and we go into the subway and there in the subway we see only, well, allochtonen, or at least dark colored people sitting, then I think its weird that I am the only. (…) It is weird because, well, Dutch people are white, the ones that are from here originally. (…) And then, it is not that ‘cozy’ for me as a girl. And then I also have this thing that the darker they are, the worse it is. (Ingrid)
The discourse is almost colonial. Ingrid de-humanizes the ‘dark colored people’ by emphasizing that they do not belong in the Netherlands were the people are ‘originally’ white. Furthermore she claims that the darker Black persons are the worse her fear, her not feeling ‘cozy’ as a girl, gets. She constructs the Black men almost as unnatural monsters. She also situates herself in a more mainstream discourse on gender by relating her sense of safety as a girl among strange men to her fear of dark skinned people. It is accepted in dominant discourse that women, often victims of sexual assault, protect themselves from situations that might be dangerous. Stating that you would rather not want to be in a subway among strange men becomes acceptable in terms of gender. Stating that you don’t want to be near Black persons is less acceptable when it is not directly related to your safety as a (white) woman. (Multiculturalism as bad for white women.) Most of the examples about nonwhite men are those related to young Muslim men. Throughout the interviews it was evident that there is a double standard relating to Muslim men and women. As argued in the previous paragraph, Muslim girls are perceived as being hypocritical. This does not come up while discussing Muslim boys. Muslim men are not considered for friendships, either. In the interviews I ask each
93 woman if she would consider or has actually been dating a nonwhite man, and again the conversation turned to Muslim men. While Frankenbergs respondents deal with constructions and representations of Black men as hypersexual and possible rapists (idem, 80-83), the connotation of Muslim men in these interviews is with oppression. Ingrid tells me that she has had boyfriends from different ethnicities. One was a Bosnian refugee; the other one had a Surinamese background. She tells that both boys spoke Dutch very well. This made her ‘respect’ them. There was no difference between dating them and dating a Dutch boy. When I ask her what her parents thought about their relationships Ingrid says:
My father, he thinks, he was not that happy about it. (…) My father is not really in favor of allochtonen, let’s put it that way. He’d rather see their backside than their frontside, so to speak. (…) And in principle, I can imagine, I was 14 or 15, so that didn’t really matter, but I can imagine that when I would come home with a Moroccan man now, that they would not be happy. (Ingrid)
I ask her why she thinks her parents (note the shift from her father to both her parents) would not be ‘too happy’.
If you listen to the stories, if you hear them all. (…) They are afraid the man gets the upper hand. That he would treat me as inferior. And my father would not accept that. (…) He would say, just wait until you get married, when it will go wrong he’ll take your children to Morocco. (Ingrid)
Karyn McKinney analyses the statements on ‘interracial relationships’ of her respondents in the USA:
‘[Respondent’s] mother insists she has no problem with her dating interracially, but that “society” would, and on these grounds she disapproves. Many white parents claim that their opposition to interractial dating is based in fears of how society will treat their children or potential grandchildren.’ (McKinney, 2004: 38)
94 The disapproval of ‘interracial relationships’ during my interviews, again interpreted as referring to relationships between themselves and Muslim men, was not based on what society might think about it. The disapproval was based on the culturalist racist notion that Muslim men would oppress their (white) women. Like Ingrid, Martine has a white Dutch boyfriend. She has never considered dating somebody with a different ethnicity.
I don’t have them in my surroundings, so that you can come into contact with somebody. But, I would not really be interested, either. (…) I don’t know why, it is just a feeling. (…) I think that maybe the culture plays a part in it, that you have to adjust to one another. (Martine)
What would her parents say?
My father would not think it so…, to my mother it wouldn’t matter, I think. (…) I think my father would want to protect me. (…) Maybe he would think that I would be underestimated. (…) As a woman in that culture you are different, let’s say less than in the Netherlands. (…) It depends on how Dutch he has become. (Martine)
Lily never considered dating a nonwhite person. If she would come home with a Muslim man, her parent would ‘have to swallow that at first’. It is most interesting that the women relate to their parents’ (dis)approval when the possibility of dating Muslim men comes up. They find some safety in referring to their parents (especially the father) as the reason why they had better not date a migrant man. The parents are sketched as protective towards their adult children: you never know if the Muslim partner turns against you. The reason for this protection is plain culturalist racism, and although the young women present themselves as fairly independent of their parents, they take comfort in not resisting this.
95 Bowien and Rachid Bowien stands out in the interviews because she is the only young woman that I spoke with who has a relationship with a migrant man. Although the other five women express that they will not date nonwhite, especially Muslim men, Bowien is romantically involved with a Moroccan. My younger sister had befriended her and once told me about her relationship to Rachid. The relationship was complicated because the parents of Bowien never approved of the relationship. Because I thought that a young white woman dating a nonwhite man could add to my research on whiteness I arranged with my sister to meet her. I met Bowien in her small apartment. Right from my first question on, Bowien started talking about her relationship with Rachid, and more specifically what that relationship has done to change her life. After four years of secret dating, Bowien decided to leave her family home and move in with Rachid. Since last year they moved into sublet apartments (three), because the housing association does not evaluate their situation as urgent. As we go into the reasons why here parents resist this partner Bowien claims it is out of fear that she would end up an oppressed woman, with a headscarf.
They always told me not to drink, not to smoke, and not to come home with a foreigner. I drink when I go out, I smoke and I have a foreign boyfriend; against all their principals. (…) My mother says he is a Muslim, which is the point, he is a Muslim. If he would turn Dutch for me, my mother could consider it. (Bowien)
I asked her how Rachid would go about becoming Dutch. Bowien doesn’t know. “Maybe that he wouldn’t go to the Mosque, but he never does.” However, when we discuss the issue of having children and how to raise them, the idea of Dutchness comes up again.
I want to give them a Dutch upbringing. Rachid also lives as a Netherlander, except he does not eat pork. Well, he speaks Moroccan. (…) I just want a Dutch upbringing. Just give these children a good upbringing. Ordinary Dutch, just like we do here in the Netherlands. (Bowien)
96 Bowien is rather simplistic in what Dutchness is. For instance she would allow her children to eat pork, unlike Muslims. After a month of non-communication with her parents, Bowien contacted them.
Actually, it is going all right now. They do not approve of my boyfriend, as a matter of fact, but yes, I do come home. They don’t come here and they don’t want to see my boyfriend, they don’t want to hear anything about him, but I do come home and it is all right.
Bowien does not express a negative judgment about the non-approval of her parents. While I analyzed the transcript of the interview I noticed that she expresses guilt and shame over ‘deserting your family’ as she refers to her decision. Her mother called her a Moroccan-whore.
There are more girls in this town that hang out with foreigners, and they are seen as Moroccan-whores. I used to see them as Moroccan-whores, too, as a matter of fact.
The decision to see her parents and have a boyfriend that is not welcome in their home makes Bowiens situation complex. She tells me that she does not have many friends left, that is, not many white friends. She does have foreign friends (as I mentioned earlier, Bowien consistently calls nonwhite citizens of the Netherlands foreigners). However, Rachid prefers for her to have Dutch friends.
‘I don’t know why he prefers Dutch… maybe that he knows Moroccan people better than we do, and knows what they are made of. Yes, sometimes they are not such good people, if I must be honest.’
I continue the interview by bringing up the subject of whiteness, and I mention that I find that especially interesting in relationship to her nonwhite boyfriend. Bowien interprets this topic as a question about cultural differences, and she mentions all kinds of examples
97 and characteristics in which the Dutch and Moroccan may differ. In this, she is moving in a culturalist racism discourse, because although she presents the differences as simplistic and rigid (as in new realism discourse) there is always an (implicit) value connected to the differences, in which Dutchness is frequently positive. Bowien uses the terminology of ‘they’ and ‘we’ to express the differences:
‘We have different manners for some things. They stay up until very late at night. (…) for us it is ten, eleven o’clock; time to go to bed for people with jobs. They go to bed after twelve. And they do what they please. (…) They are more hospitable. (…) They shout and stuff. We think they argue, but they just talk so loud, it’s normal to them.’
I asked Bowien if she came across racism in her life, being involved with a migrant man. Bowien answered ‘no’. This is typical for the way Bowien handles her relationship with a nonwhite person in her white world. Her parents don’t allow him in their home and family, her best friend has ended their friendship stating ‘Bowien, what are you doing with this Moroccan’, and she herself wants her future to be Dutch. Despite these factors, Bowien identifies racism as something only happening in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The denial of racism being part of your own life, as Essed argues in connection with culturalist racism, is evident in Bowiens life.
White privilege and racism Paula Rothenberg argues that ‘white privilege is the other side of racism.’ (Rothenberg, 2005: 1) In 1977 sociologist David T. Wellman published Portraits of White Racism. Through analyses of five oral histories with an emphasis on race and racism, Wellman developed a theory of white racism. This theory distinguishes itself by undoing the connection of racism with mere prejudice. By placing the emphasis of racism in the United States on the power structure of the division of cultural, political and economic assets, Wellman reached the conclusion that the system of racism is not particularly what white people do to undermine black people, but what white people do to maintain their racial status quo. Wellman:
98 ‘The essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but rather the defense of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race.’ (Wellman, 1993 (1977): 210).
Although not willing to accept their position of advantage in ‘the system of racial injustice’ (206), it is prejudice that his respondents seem to want to work on. They admit their prejudice against blacks, and acknowledge the inequality caused by prejudice. However, by claiming their own prejudice they avoid the whole concept of structural, institutionalized racism. This avoidance is important in the maintaining of the racial status quo. Their duty is complex: ‘Somehow white Americans must simultaneously attend to black demands and avoid the institutional reorganization that might cause them to lose ground’ (206) The defense of the status quo is becoming more complex through the changes in society that occurred in the sixties and seventies, which made racial equality a governmental goal, with measures like affirmative action. Biological argumentation to justify the subordination of non-white people was no longer accepted in mainstream discourse. To keep the defense somehow acceptable for themselves, white people “neutralize” (207) the influence of racism on the lives of black people.
Saskia is the only respondent that immediately links whiteness to privilege. ‘I think that I do have an advantage because I’m white’. However, she slips into a power evasive discourse when she directly moves the subject of whiteness into an African context.
But I would be afraid, like in Africa there are a lot of dark people and a lot of white farmers have been murdered there. I think if there were a lot more foreigners here, dark people, that you would feel uncomfortable with your skin color. (Saskia)
With this statement she links privilege to the majority position in society. Being white in Africa is the same as being Black in for instance the Netherlands. White privilege itself is
99 not evident. Saskia remembers one occasion in which she felt uncomfortable as white person.
Once in high school we went to a party and when the door opened and we came in, then there were only little black heads and then I thought: I must stand out, you know, because I am white. (…) That was very strange, like, it is very dark in here. (Saskia)
Here, darkness and even fear is connected to Black people. This conflation is situated in essentialist discourse, similar to Ingrids statement about Black people in the Amsterdam subway. To Lily to be white means to be “just a real Dutch person”. Since the concept of being Dutch, a Netherlander, comes up in the interviews in contradiction to what it means to be ‘other’, I am interested in the meaning of ‘Dutchness’. I raise the issue what typical Dutch norms and values are to them, referring to prime-minister Balkenende. Balkenende is somewhat famous for his speeches on norms and values. After the murder of Theo van Gogh he referred to the situation as un-Dutch. Ingrid thinks that norms and values that are typical for the Netherlands are:
I think the way that you associate with each other, or at least that is what I hope, that you have respect for each other and leave each other be the way one is and those kind of things. (Ingrid)
Is that something non-Dutch people or ‘allochtonen’ have less of, these norms and values, I ask her. Ingrid answers:
I think primarily respect for others. (Ingrid)
Having respect for others, is a classification used by the other young women as well as talking about Dutch characteristics. What ‘respect’ means in those instances remains unclear, however I would like to draw a connection to the empty signifier of tolerance
100 here. Like the notion of tolerance, that has different meanings over time, but is used as a central concept for Dutchness, respecting others, or lack of respect falls under new realist discourse. Ingrid is able to claim having respect, while at the same time stating that this is something nonwhites do not have. Lily has an opinion about what is Dutch and what migrant should do to fit in:
You should just follow these Dutch courses, and speak Dutch and learn about Dutch habits, our national holidays. I don’t mean to say that they have to celebrate them, but they need to know what we celebrate and respect that. So that they can behave as a Dutch person in society, and take over some of our habits. Our shops do not close for siesta, so do not protest and say you want siesta. Those kind of things, I mean, that just is not the case here, and that will not change. (Lily)
Lily addresses here the issue of the maintenance of the racial status quo. Migrants can come to the Netherlands and then they should assimilate to the things we find normal and natural. She clearly uses the dichotomy of ‘we’ and ‘they’. It is interesting that to make herself clear, Lily uses the example of people wanting to have siesta, while ‘our’ shops do not close during these hours. Since the climate in the Netherlands does not ask for a pause during the day to avoid the heavy sunshine, there is no public request for a siesta by anyone. It is apparent that Lily uses a non-existing example to avoid using a more ‘common’ example that might represent her as racist, like for instance disagreeing with the building of mosques.
Just because so many people think the Netherlands is such a nice little country and want to come here, alright but don’t complain that we have all these national holidays and you have none. (Lily)
Again, Lily uses examples that do not fit into reality; however this time it does fit in to dominant discourse. While most migration to the Netherlands involves asylum seekers and marriage with second generation ‘allochtonen’, Lily states migrants come to the Netherlands because it ‘is such a nice little country’. Dominant, new realist discourse
101 does represent migrants as mostly economic, fortune-hunters. This representation of migration makes it easier to argue for the closing of borders to protect economic welfare of Dutch citizens, since it does not acknowledge humanitarian reasons for open borders.
When I talk with Bowien about racism she complains it is not fair.
You cannot say everybody is the same and be against foreigners, I mean these people got to live, too, and they did help us in the past as slaves or at least, yes they were slaves. (Bowien)
Bowien has a relationship with a migrant man, and when I reply that she must be referring to guest-workers being invited to the Netherlands in the sixties and seventies she agrees. However, her mistake is interesting, and might give an account of dominant discourse and its knowledge production on migrants and history.
Lily thinks there is a lot more racism in the Netherlands lately. As explanation she says: “Because there are just very many people that came to the Netherlands, with different cultures.” She gives “Mohammed B.”, the murderer of Theo van Gogh, as the example of a ‘real racist’. Martine relates my question of racism to an incident in Amsterdam, where a homosexual American editor and his male partner were attacked by homophobic adolescents. Since the perpetrators of both violent attacks have a Muslim background, it is striking that they are remembered as ‘real racists’.
Saskia does not hesitate to tell me about the racist jokes they make in her group of friends. When they go to a bigger city they might say to each other ‘it is just like we are in a foreign country’. Or: ‘we can go and count headscarves here’. She does not think this has to do with extreme right ideas, since ‘it is about the way you say it’. Lily also makes racist jokes with her friends. Her father ‘has something like: foreigners, I don’t like them’. And she thinks she might have taken on some of his opinions herself. But her father is not a racist, she says. Again, a strong new realist discourse is evident in these statements of both Saskia and Lily. Ingrid admits that she is
102 prejudiced too, but quickly adds that she is judgmental towards Dutch people as well. With the second part of the statement she moves from a new realist discourse into a power-evasive discourse. Her being prejudiced can not be connected with skin color or ethnicity because she is not only prejudiced towards nonwhites, but towards Dutch people too.
In 2004 and 2005, the fashion brand ‘Lonsdale’ and the (extreme) right wing youngsters that adopt this brand to represent their political ideas, was a favorite topic in the media. This attention is interesting because it conflates with the media attention on young Muslim fundamentalists. In the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh, both groups receive media attention for setting Mosques and Muslim schools (Lonsdale-youth) and churches (Muslim youth) on fire. While politicians and experts warn the population about the latter, the first group is set aside as a bunch of adolescents who are (rightfully?) discontented with the state of multicultural society. When I ask Ingrid if she knows the fashion-brand Lonsdale she answers that her brother has a couple of ‘skinhead friends’. She adds that clothing is not a marker of racism. And she doesn’t feel unsafe around these people. This is remarkable in relation to her fear for black people in the subway in Amsterdam.
To introduce the concept of privilege I talk with my respondents about affirmative action. They are not familiar with the concept. In my explanation I give an example in which gender is the main focus. This might have influenced them when I turn the question to ethnicity. Lily answers:
I don’t think there is something wrong with it. [Affirmative action] But it would be annoying if I would be the one to lose. (Lily)
Martine acknowledges the fact that for ‘allochtonen’ it might be more difficult to find a job.
I think that because of prejudice people would pick a Dutch person. (Martine)
103 However, she is firmly against the idea of affirmative action. Everybody should be judged on their qualities alone, she believes.
Ingrid strongly disagrees with the notion of affirmative action:
Firstly, it is unfair and secondly I don’t think that you do these people any good if you favor them. (Ingrid)
In contrast to their lack of enthusiasm for affirmative action, the women do feel that they have an advantage on nonwhite people.
I think the society is still like, that it [ethnicity] influences the decision of hiring somebody. (Lily)
However, Lily can understand the favoring of whites in the labor market.
Because I am Dutch, and my background is here in the Netherlands and you don’t know that about her [the nonwhite candidate], I think that I would be better integrated in the whole Dutch surroundings and the Dutch social security system. (Lily)
Ingrid thinks it is only a matter of time before racism and privilege will be gone:
I think that when I was born 30 years ago, or 40 years ago that it was different, but Moroccans they are in higher education, this generation is totally different. (…) Youth of my age has no more difficulty with it than me. (…) When I am 30 years old in 10 years it will actually be kind of equal. (Ingrid)
Saskia sees it as an advantage to be white in the Netherlands. She has done an internship in a psychiatric hospital:
104 There was this woman on our section who didn’t speak Dutch very well, and then there was this elderly woman in bed who yelled: hey, there is that black face [roetmop] again, go and wash you arms!, because she had black skin. That is very hurtful, but these people are just, they had a lot to go through when a lot of foreigners came here, and they lost their jobs because of that. (Saskia)
It is not clear what Saskia is referring to when she states that elderly people have ‘had a lot to go through’. She could be referring to the migration of Surinamese and Indonesians from the former Dutch colonies, or to the migration of guest workers to the Netherlands. Either way, she thinks this can explain and even appreciate the elderly woman’s racism towards the Black nurse.
In the second part of this chapter I have analyzed the interviews I conducted with six young white women in the Netherlands with the help of the discourses on multiculturalism and ethnicity new realism, culturalist racism, color- and power-evasive discourse and power-evasive race cognizance. I argued that essentialist racism only pops up when Ingrid talked about her fear of Black men in the Amsterdam subway. Race cognizance, Frankenbergs more positive discourse in ‘thinking through race’ has not appeared in the interviews in the Netherlands. New realist discourse was apparent in all statements; there was minimal resistance towards these dominant notions about multiculturalism and the representation of ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ within this discourse. New realism was present in the statements of the white women on hypocritical Muslim classmates, on the distinction they made between ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’, and their thinking about their ethnic position in the Netherlands: just normal Dutch. Many statements were positioned as culturalist racism, in the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the ready stereotyping that came along with this dichotomy. Despite the culturalist racist discourse, the women could still claim that it doesn’t matter whether you are white or Black in the Netherlands, however this was definitely not that strongly present within these interviews as within Frankenbergs 1993 USA based research. This can be explained by the strong new realist tension to ‘tell it like it is’. The women were not afraid to claim they were prejudiced.
105 Despite this claim and the statements that Muslim classmates might have it a little more difficult to find internships and jobs, the idea of affirmative action was not welcomed with open arms. Sympathy for employees to choose the best assimilated candidate, hence Dutch was evident in some of the women’s statements. This can be placed in the power- evasive race cognizance discourse, however it does not resemble the trend in the USA discussed by McKinney. In comparison to the USA based study of McKinney, in which students display a deep frustration with anti-racist actions as affirmative action and with the special attention paid to events that center Black people in class, the young white women from the Netherlands do not express a sense of anger towards attention paid to nonwhites. To a lot of the USA students, who claim to be color blind, affirmative action stimulates inequality and even is unfair towards (hard working) whites. Although the Dutch women are not in favor of affirmative action they sometimes acknowledge privilege. However, they often tend to erase this again by stating that the situation is better than in the past, or that they understand an employer who wants a white person that is allegedly accustomed to Dutch norms and values. The respondents do not see grounds for what Tim Wise calls ‘challenging whiteness’ (Wise, [2000] 2005, 120).
106 6. C onclusion
In this thesis I have made a connection between the state of the art in researching ethnicity and racism in Women’s Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies and the representations of whiteness constructed through either the dominant new realism discourse (Prins, 2002), culturalist racism (Essed, 1991) and ‘thinking through race’ as defined by Ruth Frankenberg (1993 and 2001), of the ‘common sense’ statements of the young white women whom I have interviewed. In this research project, I have analyzed interview statements by six young white women from the Netherlands, about ethnicity, whiteness and racism. How do young white women position themselves in the contemporary multicultural society of the Netherlands, and do they use discourses of new realism, culturalist racism, and the four ‘thinking through race’ discourses? I have started this thesis by looking at two disciplinary frameworks in which whiteness is studied, Women’s Studies and (Critical) Whiteness Studies. Women’s Studies in the Netherlands has not been shielded from racial power struggles. I have analyzed the debate on ethnocentrism that has taken place irregularly between 1982 and present. White women consciously or unconsciously frequently remain the norm in the discipline. Furthermore, the notion that by struggling against sexism, racism would automatically be taken along is not critically assessed. Although the practice of self- situating has become an important feature in the discipline, the self-positioning of whiteness remained problematic, because often rendered invisible. Analyzing the debate that I reproduced through a choice of articles, I came to the conclusion that the ‘community of Women’s Studies’ is not so much trying to look at racism and the position of whiteness within its discipline from the perspective of experiences, but is mystifying this discussion by making it deal with theoretical articulations. Leeman and Saharso and later Aerts and Saharso actually present the debate on ethnocentrism in Women’s Studies in the Netherlands as if it were a discussion about post-structuralism versus (Black) standpoint theory. The absence of Muslim authors is no longer sustainable in the present. I argued that we need a revival of this debate, not only because whiteness is still not permanently on the feminist agenda, but also to consider the situated knowledge of Muslim or migrant women.
107 Within the discipline of Women’s Studies, whiteness is an issue that only recently started to be addressed. The aim of (Critical) Whiteness Studies is, in Richard Dyers words, making whiteness visible:
‘The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.’ (Dyer, 1997: 2)
Together with the social construction of race, Dyers starting point that whiteness is as universal as invisible has been adopted as a basic assumption of (Critical) Whiteness Studies. Frankenberg re-interprets the unmarkedness of whiteness. She questions the invisibility of whiteness, because who does not see whiteness, and where is this invisibility positioned? Not in Black communities, as bell hooks argues, to whom seeing whites was a way of survival. However, whites have also paradoxically been aware of their whiteness through time and space, often in relation to white terror. Frankenberg suggests:
‘that it is only in those times and places where white supremacism has achieved hegemony that whiteness attains (usually unstable) unmarkedness.’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 5)
In the small cities that the white, female respondents of my interviews live, whiteness is still unmarked. When some of the young women attended college in cities with a more multicultural setting, the ‘other’ became located in their white spaces. This did not automatically mean that their whiteness became marked as such. The six young white women never thought about themselves as being white, or ethnicized in any way. So I would argue that also in times and places where dominant discourse constructs a story about ‘others’, but leaves the white selves neutral, whiteness can remain unmarked to some white people.
108 In this research project I questioned how young white women position themselves in the contemporary multicultural society of the Netherlands, and how they use discourses of new realism, culturalist racism (Essed, 1991), and the four ‘thinking through race’ discourses, essentialist racism, power- and color-evasive discourse, race cognizance and power-evasive race cognizance, as defined by Ruth Frankenberg (1993 and 2001). The three sub-questions I asked in relation to being white in the Netherlands: 1. What does being white in the Netherlands mean to these young, white women? And what does it mean to be Dutch, to be ‘autochthonous’? What is ‘Dutch/White’ as positioned in multicultural society, according to young white women? 2. How is white identity constructed through comparison with the non-white category? How do young ‘Dutch/White’ women deal with racism and do the women see themselves as being in a privileged position because of their whiteness? 3. Which part of this whiteness or Dutchness relates to the history of the Netherlands as a colonizing country and a country of migrants?
The young white women do not consciously connect meaning to being white in the Netherlands, they argue that it is ‘easy’ and acknowledge a certain amount of privilege that comes with being white in the Netherlands. However, they see themselves as ‘normal’, and ‘just, ordinary Dutch’. Being white in the Netherlands gets its meaning in relation to ‘ethnic others’ and their position in the Netherlands. On this subconscious level, the white women do construct whiteness, but in comparison to non-whiteness. They have constructed a supplanted whiteness (McKinney, 2004) Whiteness does not matter in the women’s lives, so they argue. It is no part of their identity because they are the norm. The new realism discourse on multiculturalism is the umbrella under which discourses on ethnicity and whiteness are produced. Culturalist racism, color- and power- evasive discourse and power-evasive race cognizance discourse are frequently represented by the six young women. Prins argues that the new realism discourse is
109 gendered, and the point of focus in the multicultural debate is on gender as well. Muslima’s are objectified as being oppressed by the men of their culture and or religion. In the last chapter I have analyzed the interviews I conducted with Ingird, Bowien, Saskia, Anna, Martine and Lily: six young white women in the multicultural Netherlands. I used new realism discourse, culturalist racism discourse, color- and power- evasive discourse and power-evasive race cognizance discourse. The other two discourse I placed in time in history: essentialist racism, and on the other side: race cognizance. Neither discourse is present in the interviews in the Netherlands, except for one instance when Ingrid discussed her feelings of fear in the Amsterdam subway. New realist discourse was noticeable in all statements, it was present in the way they represented their statements: ‘telling it like it is’, honest and blunt. The women are positioned in a discourse in which they can openly state that they are prejudiced against ‘ethnic others’. It was also present in their statements about being white in multicultural Netherlands; their thinking about their ethnic position is defined as ‘just normal Dutch’. Statements positioned as culturalist racism dealt with the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the ready stereotyping that came along with this dichotomy. The women were not afraid to claim they were prejudiced, which is part of power evasive race cognizance. It became evident that the USA based researches on white women were not to be copied one of one to the Dutch situation. The genealogy of whiteness differs in the Netherlands (and Europe) from that in the USA. Europe has a different history of dealing with race, ethnicity, culture and ‘the other’ than the US. Colonial and migration history for instance should be considered differently in the Netherlands. The respondents were proof of the fact that there is a lack on knowledge about this history in dominant discourse in the Netherlands.
With this research I intended to investigate a ‘blind spot’ in the Netherlands: whiteness. I am looking forward to seeing not only Anglo-Saxon theories of whiteness (especially including those written by Black authors) being translated to the Netherlands, but mostly to see more research undertaking on the theme of whiteness within multicultural society in the Netherlands of the present that relates to racism and ethnocentrism. So that in the near future whiteness can no longer be claimed to be ‘just normal’, ‘just Dutch’.
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118 Appendix I
Ingrid The first interview took place on March 31st, 2005 at Ingrid’s family home. In this small town in the South of the Netherlands, she lived with her parents and brother. Ingrid was twenty years old, and was studying to become a teacher in primary school. She had a steady relationship with a white man. Ingrid expressed a desire to move abroad with her partner in a couple of years from now.
Martine This interview took place on May 12th, 2005 in a student complex in one of the larger cities in the Netherlands. Martine was twenty years old, and had just got her degree in physiology. She was thinking about continuing college in a different area of study. Martine had a relationship with a white man. She has two sisters, one of whom is her twin.
Bowien I interviewed Bowien on June 10th, 2005. Bowien was twenty years old. The interview took place in a small apartment in a Dutch town. Bowien had a relationship with a Dutch- Moroccan man, and she had run away from home to live with him. The apartment she was now living in was her fourth in half a year. Bowien went to school learn to work with disabled people. Of all the interviews my conversation with Bowien took the most time. She interpreted my questions about ethnicity as a request for cultural differences between herself as a white person and the Moroccan culture were her partner was brought up in.
Saskia Saskia was eighteen years old during the interview. Her interview took place on November 11th, 2005 at her school. She was taking classes to become a nurse in psychiatry. She had no partner and lived with her family: her parents and two siblings.
119 Lily I talked to Lily on November 17th, 2005 at her school in a smaller town in the Netherlands. She was eighteen years old, and studied health care. She had a relationship with a white man who was going abroad for some time. She lived at home with her parents and had one sister.
Anna The last interview was with Anna, an eighteen year old female. This interview took place on the same day as the interview with Lily. Anna studied health care in her third year and wanted to specialize in ambulance care. She lived at home with her parents and two siblings.
120 Appendix II Interviewing young, white women How do white women articulate their ethnicity?
Aim: I want to know how these young white women think about themselves in terms of race and/or ethnicity. I want to know how they feel about the multicultural society and their own place as white women in this society.
Introducing questions: Short biography, age, school, education, job, relationship. Group of friends, music, idols, television shows, social activities. Want to marry, have kids? Plans for the future. How do you think your life will look like in about 10 years from now?
Ethnic environment How does their environment look like in terms of ethnicity? Do you have neighbors born elsewhere? Ask if they have relatives from different ethnic background.
Introduction to multicultural discourse the other Who do they consider ‘allochtoon’, who is ‘autochtoon’? Do you see multicultural problems in your own neighborhood? How does this make you feel? How do they feel multicultural problems should be solved? How would the Netherlands look like in about 10 years from now? Do you consider emigrating, and to where?
Friendship Would they consider dating somebody from another ethnic background? How do they compare themselves with Muslim girls? Are they different and why? What do you think when Muslim women your age wear headscarves?
121 Introduction to whiteness self description Then ask them to describe their own ethnic background. Do they use religious, racial, regional themes to describe themselves?
Dutchness When do they feel most Dutch, if ever? Koninginnedag, voetbal, or something else?
Privileges. Ask if they feel as though they can shop without being afraid of being accused of shoplifting etc. Do they feel this privileged.
Racism Do you or your friends make fun or joke about Moroccans (Muslims/ non-whites). What would you/they say? What do you think about this? Do you ever try to go against this? Have you ever been accused of being racist? How did that make you feel? Do you think you may sometimes be racist? And could you describe a racist person? Do you know a racist person in your environment? What do you think a bout that? Do you ever react to this person’s racism? Should you? What do you think of affirmative action, would that be a good idea to change the white status quo or is it unfair?
122