The Matter of Race

By Nasar Meer, Anoop Nayak and Raksha Pande

Ideas of race seem as salient today as they have ever been, even when we are not directly talking about issues of race. In our new themed section on The Matter of Race, and with contributions from Les Back, Paul Bagguley, Daniel Burdsey, Sarah Burton, Bridget Byrne, Yasmin Hussein and Maggie Tate, we show that because of the slippery fashion in which ideas of race have shifted, transmuted and pluralised, race continues to matter even if it is presented as non-race concern.  What we describe might be understood as a trend in new directions in racial formation.  As Paul Gilroy (2004: 111) accepted over a decade ago, ‘it is impossible to deny that we are living through a profound transformation in the way the idea of ‘race’ is understood and acted upon’. We can see this if we reflect for moment on how debates about the European Union and sovereignty proceed with a firm view of the ‘migrant’ in mind, or how debates about ‘British values’ quickly become entrenched in ethnic hierarchies, or indeed how race is more broadly translated into a mode of ‘resentment as 'a political idea'’ (Ware, 2008). Each of these moves a little beyond Atlantocentric (black-white) notions of race, something that is further illustrated in issue of Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Roma discourse.

In our themed section the papers by Daniel Burdsey, and Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussein respectively, take up this focus to span issues of representation and sport, and the ways in which ethnicities encounter crisis, diversity and re-composition in post-imperial settings. Burdsey focuses on a case study of England cricketer Moeen Ali in order to explore how race, religion and citizenship are configured in the sporting arena and made sense of in the wider popular press and national media. The implications are that we might ‘think differently about the relationship between sport, politics and the sporting hero, and to reconsider conventional analyses of agency, activism and the use of sport as a platform from which to “speak” in the public sphere’ (Burdsey, themed section).  Bagguley and Hussein meanwhile present an analysis of how people present and negotiate their ethnicity reflexively in relation to nation, citizenship and processes of racialization. Using qualitative interview study (N=140) on how different ethnic groups in West Yorkshire were affected the 7/7 London bombings, they show how these different forms of reflexivity – meta-reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity, communicative reflexivity and fractured reflexivity – become operable amongst different ethnic groups. ‘The re-composition of ethnicised identity claims, and increased reflexivity of identity that this is demanding of people’, they maintain, ‘is seen to be rooted in the political and identity crises generated by Britain’s role in and response to the war on terror’. In their analysis these differentiated expressions are rooted in the specific politics and histories of migration and racialization in relation to dominant discourses of whiteness and the state.

In her contribution meanwhile, Bridget Byrne shows how campaigns around citizenship rights in Britain rely on the production of whiteness in a way that has profound implications for ideas of citizens and non-citizens in Britain, whilst also highlighting the need for a complex range of vocabularies to enable the analysis of different exclusions, not least through intersectional registers.  These different exclusions are, in her account, ‘clustered around these imaginations are notions of integration, language and love which rely on shared and interwoven assumptions about race, gender and religion as well as class and sexuality’ (Byrne, themed section).

These sets of argument may however encounter the charge that we are witnessing a ‘growing culture of racial equivalence’ (Song, 2014: 109).  In this view ‘the concept of racism has suffered from conceptual inflation, resulting in the declining utility of this important concept’ (ibid. 108).  While the recognition of racism’s plural character (and its many possible incarnations) is not unequivocally welcomed, it remains necessary if we are to capture the changing status of race concept over a longue durée, and grasp ‘what race does and what is done in the name of race’ (Murji and Solomos, 2-15: 276). 

The challenge for the discipline of Sociology is that race presents a paradox that sociologists constantly grapple with. Many tend to portray the term under erasure by presenting it in inverted commas so as to indicate that we are referring to a socially constructed category, based upon a problem­atic idea, instead of something that is self-evidently real in the world.  Even those who do not repeat this practice agree with the thrust of the argument. Perhaps the simplest way to frame this is to say that sociolo­gists tend to be interested in the dynamic and relational properties of race as both a his­torical idea and social category.  Yet is this insufficient?

Virdee (2012: 1144), for example, reminds us that sociol­ogy did not stand outside a racialised modernity that ‘endowed some Europeans with privilege along with the power to occupy the centre of world history, and shape it accord­ing to its own image’.  The objective of this complaint is not to devalue British sociology. On the contrary. it is to make the argument for sociology, for ‘self scrutiny rather than sheer defensiveness’ (McLennan, 2006: 97), to encourage ‘without guarantees’ (Hall, 1986) inquiry on the ways in which race and sociology are already deeply implicated.  Sociologies of race therefore require ‘being atten­tive to the specificities of the current situation but also historical linkages through time’ (Back, personal correspondence with authors). This means going beyond surface level reconstructions, and challenging sociologists to reflect on how their discipline is organ­ised across sociology departments, ‘just as sociologists have criticized other disciplines on these matters’ (Murji, 2007: 853). As Claire Alexander (2011) has put it:

I think that sociology has at best failed to engage these discourses and positions and at worse been complicit with them – within the academy, discussions of ‘race’ have largely fallen from the agenda, and there is very little work that deals with issues of racism explicitly.

Such an activity would include a ‘critique of sociology’s reformism and its neglect of the historical conditions in which sociological ideas about race and racism developed’ (Murji, 2007: 853). Each of these concerns has implications for the kinds of research and teaching programs sociology departments are currently promoting (and indeed ignor­ing).  In our themed section the interventions here from Sarah Burton, and Les Back and Maggie Tate respectively, are instructive. For Burton, a focus on the figure of the ‘white theory boy’, or ‘dead white man’ and his relationship to knowledge production, serves as a means to probe the pedagogy of social theory teaching in the UK.  In one classical social theory module, for example, she observes that of the 43 authors listed as ‘essential’ reading, 37 were white men and 6 were white women, and that ‘no authors of colour appeared on the ‘essential’ reading lists in this course’ (Burton, themed section). The trend in her account is generalizable and falls not only along lines of inclusion and exclusion into the ‘canon’, but in terms of thematic range, in as far as minority sociologists are restricted to what are deemed minority topics, rather than the story of sociology more broadly.  This inevitably reflects how the ‘privileging of white, male, Western, and middle-class identities are ingrained into the very fabric of sociology’s ontological foundations’ (ibid).  The task of rediscovering alternative histories in social theory is therefore ripe and persuasively developed in Back and Tate’s contribution, and which challenges us to consider what an account of race and the intellectual heralds for the wider sociological tradition.  They point in their paper to two overlapping issues. One maintains that the white sociological mainstream has historically ignored the contribution of black sociologists, and the other that the discussion of racism is demoted to a specialist sub-field.  Black sociologists by contrast, they argue, have long been attentive to a white sociology that has set the prevailing agenda. Through a detailed exposition of the writings of W.E.B Du Bois and Stuart Hall in particular, and their respective dialogues with figures like Max Weber and C Wright Mills, Back and Tate make an argument for reconstructing sociology at the levels both of analysis and of form – each of which changes the ways in which sociology can talk about racism. ‘What is at stake’, they maintain, ‘is the possibility of sociological reconstruction that produces an alternative understanding of what sociology can include, starting with augmented modes of telling and writing that attract a broader and more inclusive audience’ (Back and Tate, themed section).  Our themed section on the Matter of Race therefore brings together a set of original argument authored by scholars who try to explore some of the present and future oriented ways in which race matters, and help us to plot out new directions in racial formation.

References

Alexander C (2011) Sociology’s Jurisdiction: Sociology’s Identities and Futures for the Discipline. British Sociological Association address, 7 April

Gilroy, P. (2004) Between Camps. London: Routledge.

Hall S (1986) The problem of ideology – Marxism without guarantees. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 28–44.

McLennan G (2006) Sociological Cultural Studies. London: Palgrave.

Murji, K. and Solomos, J. (2o15) Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge: CUP.

Murji, K. (2007) ‘Sociological engagements: institutional racism and beyond’, Sociology, 41(5), 843-55.

Song, M. (2014) ‘Challenging a culture of racial equivalence’, British Journal of Sociology, 65 (1), 107-125

Virdee S (2012) Forward to the past: Race, the colour scale and Michael Banton. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(7): 1143–50.

Ware, V. (2008) ‘Towards a Sociology of Resentment: A Debate on Class and Whiteness’, Sociological Research Online, 13 (5), <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/9.html> doi:10.5153/sro.1802

 

   

 

Talking the Talk and Fitting In: Troubling the Practices of Speaking 'What You Are Worth' in Higher Education in the UK

By Michelle Addison and Victoria, G. Mountford, Newcastle University

This blog is based on a more in-depth article in Sociological Research Online, published in May 2015. We are both interested in how ways of talking, and accent, have taken on symbolic meaning in higher education (HE). We wrote this piece together because we are becoming increasingly concerned that in a climate of uncertainty in HE we are seeing that the importance of demonstrating one's impact, value and worth comes down to more than just productivity, qualifications and experience. It’s becoming more about who you are as a person – the ‘personality package’ (Brown et al., 2003). Yet distinctions operate to ascribe (classed) value and some people occupy a privileged position where their body and their voice are read as valued whereas others are not so lucky and cannot adapt or escape how they are seen and heard by others, regardless of other work or achievements. We base our discussions upon data from two qualitative research studies with employees (Addison) and undergraduate students (Mountford) in a traditional Higher Education Institution (HEI) in the north of England (Mountford’s also included students from a nearby post-1992 HEI), which are contextualised within this climate of marketization of HE in the UK. Whilst market logic and discourse pervade the field of HE, situating meritocracy and hard work as the key driver for success, our data tell a slightly different story of persistently reactivated cultural classed codes forming distinctions of worth and value within these educational spaces.

How we talk says a lot about us and what kind of person we wish to be. Talking matters, but why do we think that talking about talking matters here, why now? Talking the talk is a valuable currency, our accents and specifically the way we talk, the words we choose and how we say them (for example, local phrases, swearing and slang), are resurfacing as conductors of value in HE and beyond. The way we talk is part of our person, our self and our own personal histories and circumstances; our bodies are vehicles from which classed value judgments are constantly read and reactivated in everyday exchanges and interactions. Knowing how to speak ‘worth’ in HE is important, tricky to get right, and can help or hinder the person in terms of getting ahead, depending on whether they know how to play the game. Particular ways of talking then, affect feelings of 'fitting in' or 'standing out' which can provoke strong emotions including shame or defiance to the affective judgements of ‘deficiency’ assigned to our voices (Loveday, 2015; Reay et al 2009; Abraham and Ingram 2013; Taylor 2012). In our article (2015) we focus our attention on practices of fitting in and belonging, and how this relates to ways of 'talking the talk'. What we do know is that talking a certain way shapes belonging in HE, and talking the right or wrong talk is connected to social judgements about class. Many people working and studying in higher education are classed because of the way they talk, and this can often be painful for some, while conferring advantage on others.

I still feel like these people are clever[er] than us, probably more wealthy – and I don't know…why I think that…when I'm listening to them other people speak it just […] so easy to understand and I think I imagine them trying to understand me…now I'm so concerned about you know, fully pronunciating […] – you know what I mean, you're like kind of trying harder but because you're trying so hard you get really nervous and you kind of clam up and everything.
(Craig, 23, Working-class student, Mountford’s study)

It's not changing what you know, erm, if you speak with a so called 'Queen's English' that's how all the people who are professional or who are higher up life, that's how they speak, it's almost like that's what you should be like, but it's not really is it?
(Simon, Surveyor, 31, lower middle class, Addison’s study)

I'm like trying to so hard to speak, you know, quite poshly - and I've not got a really strong accent anyway but like I find myself like trying really hard but most of the time they can tell I'm from like Manchester (laughs)[…] but they just assume that you're more […] I suppose, common in a way and that you're not as well educated and you're poorer
(Faye, 18, middle-class, student, Mountford’s study)

Alan, he is still here, he has a very, very, very broad [northern] accent and they used to laugh at him! Behind his back, which is worse of course, he was very able and very good at what he did […] it is interesting there is this assumption that if you have this posh accent then you should be a lawyer, or a judge, and it comes with it that you are clever.
(Linsey, Temporary Lecturer, 51, unsure of class position, Addison’s study)

Accents and ways of talking are part of embodied class identities; whilst some ways of talking, for instance, via accent, carry connotations of intelligence, other regionalised accents are positioned as lacking value, as well as other cultural meanings (Lawler 1999). A classificatory system operates to organise and codify language, accent, and ways of talking according to class. Whilst the ‘Geordie’ (north east English) accent was associated with the locale of the research sites and no doubt therefore part of a broader notion of ‘fitting in’ to the locale, this prominent accent within the walls of HE had an alternative effect of ‘standing out’ within the classed space of the university. In certain social spaces and around certain people, talking a certain way can take on, or lose, value.

The game that is being played in HE is about knowing how and when to 'talk the talk': that is knowing when to put on ‘poshness’, or dial down dialect (if that option is available of course!). The ‘Geordie’ will always be a Geordie as they say, with all of the historically working-class idioms and cultural connotations that are attached to this accent: so being able to play the game and get ahead by sounding ‘posh’ is just not an option for either of us authors, or many of our participants that we spoke to. Knowing how talk and accent are codified and laden with value is a vital resource in getting ahead of the pack in times of increased competition; recent reports on employers using a ‘poshness test’ (see Weaver, 2015; Ashley et al., 2015) reinforces these data and the claims we make. Mobilizing whatever capital is available in order to secure one's social position is not a new concept (Skeggs 1997, Adkins 1995; McDowell 1997) but what we highlight is that, perhaps more than ever, talking matters. This is a particularly interesting social and political time to be using accent and ways of talking to get ahead to present a particular kind of classed image. As Watson (2010) discusses too, the impetus to cement a strong and valuable image via elite status in these austere times, and beat the competition, is affecting everyone who works and studies in an educational establishment, from academics and students to cleaners (see also Chapelo 2010; Addison 2012; Taylor 2012).

References

Abraham, J. and Ingram, N. (2013) 'The Chameleon Habitus: Exploring Local Students' Negotiations of Multiple Fields' in Sociological Research Online, 18(4) 21 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/4/21.html

Addison , M. (2013) 'Knowing you way within and across classed spaces: The (Re)making and (Un)doing of identities of value within Higher Education in the UK' in TAYLOR, Y (ed.) Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects' Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire Palgrave Macmillan. p. 236-256
Ashley, L.; Duberley, J.; Sommerlad, H. & Scolarious, D. (2015) A qualitative evaluation of non-educational barriers to the elite professios’. London: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission

Brown, P.; Hesketh, P. and Williams, S. (2002) 'Employability in a Knowledge Driven Economy' in Journal of Education and Work 16 (2): 107-126.

Chapelo, C . (2010) 'What defines 'successful' university brands?' in International Journal of Public Sector Management', 23(2)

Lawler, S . (1999) 'Getting Out and Getting Away': Women's Narratives of Class Mobility' in Feminist Review 63(3): p.3-24

Loveday, V. (2015) ‘Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education’ Sociology 49 (3): 1-16

Reay, D; Crozier, G. and Clayton, J. (2009) '"Strangers in Paradise" - Working-class Students in Elite Universities' in Sociology, 43(6): p. 1103-1121.

Taylor, Y . (2012) Fitting into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities. Surrey: Ashgate

Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage.

Watson, C. (2010) 'Accountability, transparency, redundancy: academic identities in an era of 'excellence'' in British Educational Research Journal, First.Weaver, M. (2015) 'Poshness tests' block working-class applicants at top companies.’ The Guardian. Monday 15th June 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/15/poshness-tests-block-working-class-applicants-at-top-companies [Last accessed 14th July 2015]