Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.     

The Language of Race

The 1991 Census form for households in Great Britain included, for the first time, a question about ethnic group. The question had nine boxes, eight for named ethnic groups and one for 'any other'. One box had to be ticked for each member of the household. Brian Klug discusses his own reaction to the (so-called) ethnic question, and explains why, as a Jew of European extraction, he did not tick the box marked White. He examines several issues raised by the ethnic question, including the following: why this question is different from other questions on the form; the definition and use of the words 'racial' and 'ethnic'; the vocabulary of colour ('black', 'white' etc.) in the language of race; the idea that 'white' is an ethnic category; the claim that the ethnic question is an instrument for combatting racism; one proposal for improving the question by removing the 'racial' components in the categories.     

Race and Assisted Housing

This article explores racial disparities between assisted housing outcomes of black and white and white households with children. We compare the assisted housing occupied by black and white households with children, and examine whether young adult education, employment, and earnings outcomes in 2011 differ between blacks and whites who spent part of their childhood in assisted housing in the 2000s. We use a special version of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that has been address-matched to federally assisted housing, and the PSID’s Transition to Adulthood supplement, along with geocode-matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), CoreLogic real estate data, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Statistical methods include difference in means, logit and general linear models. We find no evidence of racial disparities in the type of assisted housing program, the physical quality of project-based developments, or the management of public housing developments in the 2000 decade. But black households with children are more likely to live in assisted housing that is located in poorer quality neighborhoods. Multivariate tests reveal that the worse outcomes of black young adults compared with whites disappear once socioeconomic differences are taken into account. The discrepancy in assisted housing neighborhood quality experienced by black and white children makes no additional contribution to predicting young adult outcomes. Nonetheless, black children living in relatively better assisted housing neighborhoods tend to have better outcomes in young adulthood than those who live in poorer quality assisted housing neighborhoods. We discuss sources of racial disparity in neighborhood quality, and the policies enacted and proposed to address it.     

Race Equality after Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell's infamous speech casts a long shadow over race equality in the UK. Looking back to the 1968 Race Relations Bill and then forwards to the present social and political landscape this article explores how an uneven race equality story has been characteristic of the UK approach since Powell's intervention. If the intended objective of the initial and later race equality bills was to reduce ethnic and racial disparities to a marginal or ‘negligible’ level, then we are a great distance from success. If the objective was slightly different, but not unrelated, and sought to reshape public conventions on racism (and ethnic and racial diversity more broadly), then the answer is more complicated but also unfinished.     

Race,gender, and jobs

In his influential indictment of the Great Society, Charles Murray focused upon young black males being unemployed as the result of government programs. He is correct in stating that the employment problems of young black males have worsened since 1965 but wrong in asserting that older black males and white males had no employment problems. Labor force participation for all males has dropped since 1965. The employment problems of young black males resulted from sweeping changes in the job market and, secondarily, the revolution in female employment. Blue-collar jobs and full-time jobs are a smaller portion of the job market, while white collar and part-time jobs have increased substantially. Women have obtained a far higher proportion of all jobs than ever before, and sometimes in occupational categories dominated by males. Both the restructured job market and the competition of men and women for jobs, issues ignored by, Murray, raise painful policy dilemmas. To what extent should a politically powerless group like young black males be directly assisted in their employment struggles? To what extent should they be encouraged to migrate or secure further education? To what extent should women's employment be publicly supported through programs such as day care?