Racism as a moral economy

• In Event: 455 - Regular Session. Racism and Anti-Racism: International Perspectives

Abstract

The systemic and material patterns of racism are clearly ongoing and measurable, but the ways in which whiteness is discursively made and re-made are also subject to wide-ranging analysis. US scholars have put forward the color-blind paradigm, while Europeans have worked with 'new racism' and cultural racism' for example. These are means to analyse the trend toward a flexible set of techniques that embed racist hierarchies into the ways collective identities are involved: the micro-level glue that links individuals to systems.

In this paper, based on fieldwork done in urban England over the last decade, I put forward an analysis of the frames my white interviewees use to discuss nation and immigration, and suggest that the patterns emerging constitute a ‘moral economy’ by which the hegemonic form of whiteness is one in which the speaker contrasts him/herself as an ethical agent with unethical Others to express loss and abandonment in a ‘rhetoric of victimage’ (Engels, 2010).

I explore the ways in which discourse on immigration functions to associate social change and a perceived degradation of social conditions with racialised others. I end by making some links with moral economies elsewhere, particularly over the significance of political messages that portray white people as losing out to ethic and racial minorities.

Author

• Steve Garner, Open University