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What does it mean to state "The critique of #Whiteness is structural."


In the theoretical work of the culture-centered approach (CCA), the critique of #Whiteness foregrounds and interrogates the hegemonic norms that privilege White culture structurally while undermining the imaginaries, lived experiences, and narrative capacities of colonized, enslaved, migrant, and refugee cultures. This critique attends carefully to the notion that the hegemonic cultural arrangements of #Whiteness circulate specific pathways of mobility for individuals born into a certain race (White and model minority Asian) while undermining the possibilities of such pathways for individuals born into other races (Indigenous, Blacks, Hispanics in the U.S. for instance). 

This analysis of the movement from the critique of the structure to the exploration of individual pathways is embedded in the interrogations of the interplays between race, class, gender, and nationality in the production of marginalization. 

A culture-centered reading foregrounds the ways in which structures of #Whiteness produce sites of marginalization in communities of colour as well as in White communities. For instance, large cross-sections of White working class U.S. have been structurally and symbolically marginalized because of almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberal reforms. In the work of the "Voices of hunger" project in Indiana between 2008 and 2012, our research team collaborated closely with White working class advisory group members who had been expelled out of their livelihoods by the relentless pursuit of deep neoliberalism. In my conversations with many White working class community members, expelled by the grotesque financial crisis, the sense of dispossession was reflected in an overarching feeling of "not having a say in politics." This was also tied to actual struggles with living and livelihood, paying rent, getting food, and having access to basic utilities (fuel, gas, heat).

In culture-centered theorizing, the disenfranchisement of White working class America through systematic neoliberal attacks on spaces of grassroots democracy forms the backdrop of the rise of neo-fascism in the U.S. In other words, #Whiteness both produces certain sets of privileges while at the same time producing spaces of disenfranchisement and marginalization. Understanding this interplay is critical to the work of co-creating dialogic infrastructures for radical democracy. 

The work of dismantling #Whiteness therefore has to move beyond shallow identity-based theorizing to exploring through everyday labour the possibilities for co-creating voice infrastructures at the disenfranchised margins. Unfortunately, much of the critique of #Whiteness when performed by well established scholars from postcolonies (me included) in secure jobs with privilege and protection, fail to reflexively interrogate the privileges of class tied to neoliberal mobility. That I have moved into the structures of U.S. capital and benefitted personally from its neoliberal multiculturalism by positioning myself as the profitable "other"  has to be the starting point for imagining a different kind of politics of solidarity, one that works through everyday labour of connecting and caring to seek to co-create infrastructures of voice at the margins, including at the White margins of settler colonial societies pursuing #Whiteness as a neoliberal mode of governance. I have no patience for the Chanel-wearing, whisky-sipping, Calcutta Club-going fat cat Bengali academic in New York that climbs their way through #Whiteness by cozying up to #White structures, while castigating the "red neck" and denigrating the rural, the working class, and the struggling precarious classes.  This typology of the postcolonial academic in the U.S. (as the heart of Empire) embodies and profits from peak #Whiteness by performing it in everyday life.

The CCA invites us to critically interrogate any critique of #Whiteness that reduces itself to shallow identity politics or some performance of Oppression Olympics (none of us postcolonial academics in tenured positions are oppressed, so let's get off that bandwagon). It rejects the seductions of postcolonial opportunism and performance of the grievance games (What with the six-figure salaried postcolonial Full Professor with a Chair position crying hoarse about being oppressed).

Instead, it calls for us to recognize and study closely the ways in which #Whiteness perpetuates the consolidation of power in the hands of political and economic elites globally. This recognition forms the basis of the labour of co-creating voice infrastructures at the margins. The recognition that the very spaces of dignity and right to make claims to dignity for a large cross-section of the working classes (indigenous, migrant, coloured and White) across the global margins is orchestrated by the relenless pursuit of neoliberalism ought to be our registers for actively building and imagining just societies that dismantle the pernicious effects of #Whiteness.

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