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Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media/John Gabriel

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Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media/John Gabriel WHITEWASH This book puts the language used in popular film, TV, press, radio, popular music and the Internet, as well as that spoken by key leaders, under the spotlight. It questions how these various mediums construct and normalise a language and order of white privilege which may appear universal but which is actually highly selective and exclusionary in its effects. Taking specific examples and presenting new factual evidence, it studies the racial politics that lie behind much of the communication in the public arena. John Gabriel also describes and re-values the larger questions and debates surrounding the relationship between media communication and more general economic and political developments. Under chapter headings such as ‘Genealogies of whiteness’ and ‘The fringe and the fabric: the politics of white pride’ comparative case studies in both England and the US draw on contemporary political controversies and are used to explore the specific dynamics of the relationship between racialised forms of media discourse and political and economic change. He also explores the use made of the media by oppositional community and campaign organisations. What is ultimately revealed is the existence of a ‘white’ language, both coded and overt, which re-casts and re-invents dominant representations of whiteness. Whitewash is a timely and controversial addition to a growing area of interest in sociological studies. It will therefore be essential reading to all media and racial politics students, as well as those wishing to know more about the hidden languages that seem to be increasingly invading the discourse of politics and the media. John Gabriel is Head of the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Racism, Culture, Markets and is highly regarded as an expert on racial politics and its place in society and the media. WHITEWASH Racialized politics and the media John Gabriel London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1998 John Gabriel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Gabriel, John, 1951– Whitewash: racialized politics and the media/John Gabriel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Mass media and race relations – United States. 2. Mass media – Political aspects – United States. 3. United States – Politics and government – 1993– 4. Mass media and race relations – Great Britain. 5. Mass media – Political aspects – Great Britain. 6. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1979– I. Title. P94.5.M552U634 1998 302.23’0973–dc21 97–42943 CIP ISBN 0-415-14969-x (hbk) ISBN 0-415-14970-3 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-01537-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17519-0 (Glassbook Format) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Globalisation, ethnic identities and the media 11 2 Genealogies of whiteness 39 3 Backlash culture and the defence of whiteness 65 4 Border guards, bodyguards, lifeguards 97 5 Policing whiteness 129 6 The fringe and the fabric: the politics of white pride 155 Conclusions 184 Notes 192 Bibliography203 Index214 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Mari Shullaw and Jo Mattingly at Routledge for their support and efficiency shown throughout the duration of this project. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers at Routledge for their very helpful comments on my proposal and manuscript and to Stephen Small, in particular, whose extremely detailed comments on the manuscript were invaluable. I am very fortunate to have had the support of colleagues and friends in the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology; Ann Gray, Michael Green, Stuart Hanson, Jo Van Every, Mark Erickson, Yvonne Jacobs, Jorge Larrain, Malika Mehdid, David Parker and Marie Walsh. Many of the ideas for this book came as a result of teaching courses with my close friend and colleague, Gargi Bhattacharyya and I would like to give her special thanks. I would also like to thank other friends and colleagues who have inspired and encouraged me over the years: Floya Anthias, Gideon Ben-Tovim, Dave Mills, Janet Morgan, Hugh Wisdom and Thelma Flores. I am very grateful indeed to those library staff and archivists at Columbia University and to Rebecca Hankins and Katherine G. Wilkins at the Amistad Center, Tulane, LA. Thanks also, to Teresa Garcia at the Audio Video Reporting Services, Los Angeles, for all her help. I am also indebted to those community activists who gave up their valuable time to be interviewed. Thanks to all those at: WBAI community radio; Pacifica Radio; Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting; the Race Relations Unit, Birmingham City Council; Newham Monitoring Project; the Campaign agaisnt the Asylum Bill; the Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism; the local California Campaigns against Propositions 209 and 187; and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I would like to thank Jim and Joan Linkogle for their warm hospitality during my countless trips to the US and to Jim, in particular, for helping me to gain access to material on the Oregon Citizen’s Association. I would like to pay special thanks to my mother, Pauline, and to my sister, Sally Townsley, for their love, support and encouragement throughout my life. And finally, a very big thank you to Stephanie Linkogle for her support, innumerable insights, friendly criticisms and help in the preparation of the manuscript. vii INTRODUCTION Over the past thirty years, both academic and common-sense definitions of ‘race’ and ethnicity have suffered from a certain myopia. In the 1960s, for example, the term ‘race music’ meant ‘black music’. In the 1980s in Birmingham, England, an ex-university student wrote a guide to the City’s ‘ethnic’ restaurants which assiduously avoided any food which might conceivably be described as English and/or American – hence no reference to fish and chips and certainly no McDonald’s! In the 1990s the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnic’ and even ‘multiculturalism’ continue to be used as if they only apply to anyone but ‘whites’ and anything other than ‘white’ culture. However, it is not just that some groups or cultures or identities have been ethnically or racially marked whilst others have not. Terms like ‘racism’ and processes of ‘racialisation’ have so monopolised debate that black identities are seen in unitary terms and equated with or restricted to the negative impact of racism. This reductionism has had two important consequences, one of which has been to compartmentalise being racialised from becoming other things, including being gendered and/or sexed. The other consequence of defining terms such as ‘race’, ‘ethnic’, etc., so narrowly has been to hide the ethnic characteristics of ‘whiteness’ and (to think about) its racial formation. A number of research strategies have addressed this myopia. One has been to acknowledge the variety of racisms beyond those most widely discussed. For example, whilst a brief glance through Lewis Curtis’s Apes and Angels (1971) quickly confirms the historical significance of anti-Irish racism, more contemporary forms have been largely hidden from the academic and public sphere. Mary Hickman’s research project for the Commission for Racial Equality has been a welcome, if overdue, acknowledgement of the need to conduct research and develop policy agendas with respect to diasporic Irish communities in England in the late twentieth century. However, to extend the definition of racism to include some white ethnicities might only compound the view that racial groups, for all their diversity, are no more than the sum of the effects of racism. Another approach, therefore, working with a revived concept of ethnicity, has been to look at the more dynamic, proactive, forms of cultural expression and diversity. Cross-cultural fertilisation provides an important source of ethnic identity rather than simply hanging on to and reproducing old ethnic divisions. The analysis of ‘routes’ rather than roots becomes 1 INTRODUCTION a more effective way of understanding new ethnic configurations. Such work, invoking concepts of diaspora and hybridity, has begun to dislodge hermetically sealed versions of ethnic origin and difference, and to recognise the reciprocal and symbiotic relationships between cultures (Hall 1991; Gilroy 1993a, 1993b; Brah 1996). The idea of ‘hybridity’ has acquired particular resonance for those of mixed ethnic background illustrated by the golfer Tiger Woods, who, rather than be thought of as the first black to win the US Masters golf tournament, preferred to describe himself as a ‘Cablinaisian’. This was a term of his own invention to describe his Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian background (Guardian 24 April 1997). This idea of hybridity, however, simply acknowledges the complexity of background rather than thinking about the formation of identity through ongoing inter- and trans-cultural influences and the significance of symbolic and fluid, rather than fixed, boundaries. Avtar Brah’s use of the idea of ‘diasporic space’ is an attempt to capture the contingency and complexity of such identities which also have a gender and class dimension to them (Brah 1996: 208ff.). In 1988 Richard Dyer wrote an article about whiteness in popular culture. Whiteness? The very idea of talking about whiteness as an ethnicity in its own right initially caused eyebrows to furrow, followed by long, sometimes stupefied, sometimes uncomfortable, silences. Such an occasion springs to mind when, in 1994, a colleague and I showed a video of the ‘Britpop’ band, Blur, and asked students to comment on who or what was ‘racially marked’, how and why.
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