Exploring Racism(s) through the Politic of Fairness

Abstract

John Hodge (1990: 90) explained rather simplistically that ‘when a group is identified by race and its members are oppressed because of their race, we have racism’. However, the groups we come to know as ‘races’ are not formed exclusively by the power of racial discourses (Gilroy 1990: 265). The confounding difficulties of theorizing about race cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that ‘the play of difference in which racial categorization appears has extra-discursive referents’ (Gilroy 1990: 264). Thus, races are not the simple expression of either biological or ‘cultural’ sameness or simple constructions of the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ (see Hodge 1990). Paul Gilroy, among many others (see, e.g., Memmi 2000: 18; Outlaw 1990: 77; Werbner 1997b: 230) has argued that races are imagined, socially and politically constructed, thus contributing to other socially constructed factors such as ‘class’ and ‘capitalism’ (broadly speaking) (see Gilroy 1990: 264). Therefore, Gilroy (1990) proposed that ‘races’ be seen as ideological constructions. While ideas about race may ‘articulate political and economic relations in a particular group or “society” that go beyond the distinct experiences or interests of racial groups to symbolize wider identities and conflicts’ (Gilroy 1990: 264), I argue here that the experiences of ‘races’ and racism in Halleigh, by every individual (Frankenberg 2005 [1993]: 6), are defined within particular historical and social contexts where past racial ideologies can be used alongside new elements (Fanon 1967; Hall 1992)¹; thus, there is not one type of racism but numerous historically situated racisms that allow for ‘new ways of being political’ (Gilroy 1991: 133; see also Back 1996: 9; Hall 1978: 35).