Race GPS_ No Right Turn Ahead _ Media Diversified

8/13/2019 Race GPS_ No Right Turn Ahead _ Media Diversified

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Race GPS? No Right Turn Ahead

August 20, 2013by Yasmin Gunaratnam

The recent exchanges here and @WritersofColour show the continuing emotional charge of racesemiotics. And thats not to forget the generous doses of hurt innocence from those called out abouttheir use of language.Whats wrong with that?the baffled MEP Godfrey Bloom asked when it waspointed out that his comments about British Foreign Aid going to bongo bongo land might be racist.

Most recently there have been contentions about whether being anti-immigrant or an Islamophobe isracist because migrants and Muslims are not a racial group.

As the currents of race and race sensibility ebb and flow some of you have been clear that it is not theob of those who are subject to racism to educate the racially privileged, to act like an anti-racist sat

nav, guiding and steering people through the hazardous and shifting terrain of race politics and

terminology. Its a good point, but that job seems to already have been taken. There are nowburgeoning on-line resources and tips about racial sensitivity and those clever people at Apple havean app. Not a race app exactly, but CultureGPS.CultureGPS claims to help those in business toanalyze visible behavior differences in intercultural encounters and to predict to a certain degree,which interactions evolve when people from different nationalities meet.

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CultureGPS is an ironic, if disturbing homonym. The app does notactually use GPS (Global Positioning System) technology. Its fivedimensional model of national cultures is based upon survey researchand not satellite navigation. But how much the inventing and naming ofthis lile app says about the menace of cultural and racialised differenceand the appetite to make things easier, with minimal thought and effort.If it isnt in the pipeline already, a race version cant be that far off. But

would you use one? Might you recommend it to people like GodfreyBloom,Jessica Simpson or Luis Surez? Would you buy one for acolleague or perhaps a relative? There may be a market opening up, butthe latest commercialisation of race awareness worries me. It takesaway responsibility for difficult thinking, listening and dialogue. Dontuse up your energy freing and worrying, or worse still, geing caughtup in those heated discussions with touchy, angry people. Just reach foryour phone or the internet and everything will be OK.

Race terms will always be troublesome and emotional. They remind me of what my colleague,SaraAhmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studiesat Goldsmiths, calls sweaty concepts difficult ideasand words that are full of hard work . I dont think it can be otherwise. Language has a pulse. Its aliveand symbiotic, drawing from and shaping social life. The meanings of a word cant always be tabulatedand predicted in the abstract. Every time I argue, hesitate, or am forced to rethink identity monikers Iam reminded of this volatility and liveliness. Sometimes the debates about language are frustrating.Like a political Groundhog Day, they can drain the will to live with the same points circulating overand over again. But sometimes sparks fly, new insights emerge, something shifts.

An important development in the last thirty or so years has been whiteness studieswhich has

investigated the ways in which whiteness is naturalized and passed of as normal. This scholarship hasshown that historically, whiteness is skiish and contingent. It has never been a socially neutralsignifier of skin colour. In Victorian England, for example, class was very much wrapped up with beingwhite. The English upper class was seen as being more white than the working classes and those whowere Irish. In other parts of the world, racial hierarchies are sculptured out of ethnicity, religion and


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caste. The point is that all race sign systems are confected around an invisible norm that producesoutliers. As outliers we are marked. We continually have to account for ourselves.

This is where particular histories of racism, colonialism and nationalism also leave their dirtyfingerprints all over language. It makes sense that North Americans have their own terms and we haveothers. Different contexts are at play. One of the objections that my mum had to us being called Pakiswas that we were Sri Lankan, from a completely different geographical place and linguistic and culturalheritage to people from Pakistan. I say Sri Lankan, but my mum was Singhalese and my father wasTamil. My maternal grandfather was of Indonesian descent and my great grandfather was from the Isleof Skye, in Scotland. Try navigating through that with CultureGPS. Of course these intricacies had noconsequence whatsoever for the people who smashed our windows, or for us as we cleaned up thebroken glass.

Collectivising terms such as South Asian, Black or ofcolour all of which I have used to describe myself atsome time or another can capture commonalities andcreate potential for mobilising. But we also losesomething in the process. I might be a Paki in England,

but for Sri Lankans my multiple heritages maer deeply.The tone of conversations can change in a heartbeatwhen people hear my surname. And somewhere alongthe line there is always racism because race typologiesand nomenclature were birthed by racist hierarchies. So

although the footballer Luis Surez may have had a point in trying to argue that El Negrois a commonaddress in Uruguay, without the freight that it carries in the UK, can such words be entirely free oftheir racist genealogy ? When flung out against a black person in a heated situation, latent meaningscan be stoked and reinvigorated. New semiotic layers accrue and it is the ambiguities that can makethem all the more potent.

In the theatre of racism the audience invariably want rational and conclusive proof. Those of us whohave experienced its slippery artifice know that the mathematics of racism in the modern worlddoesnt always add up. In her book Arabs and Muslims in the Media, Evelyn Alsultany makes aconvincing argument for how aempts to balance the stereotypical representation of the Arab/Muslimwith positive portrayals in news reporting and TV dramas such asWest Wing, The PracticeandSleeperCell results in simplified complex representations that are far from progressive. This does not meanaccepting all accusations of racism at face value, neither should we discourage aempts to rearrangerace representations. What it does mean is recognising that racism and its histories are contorted anduneven. We can never assume a level playing field.

This recognition of racisms long shadows is often behind moves toprohibit or to reclaim denigrating terms. For some, experimentalincursions into the depths of the cultural lexicon are necessary to breaknew ground. For others, certain terminology is too stained to ever berehabilitated. Talking about the N word recently when promoting TheButler, Oprah Winfrey made it clear that there was nothing redeemablein the term;

You cannot be my friend and use that word around me. It shows my age, but I feel strongly about

it. I always think of the millions of people who heard that as their last word as they were hangingfrom a tree.

Oprah Winfrey Refuses To Befriend People Who Use The N-WordAs well as reactivating the past through our use of language, a more mundane danger that most of us


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are trying to avoid is what Roland Barthes,a grand master of semiotics, called the disease of thinkingin essences . Essentialism traps a person/group into a cage of unchanging characterisations fromwhich they cannot escape if you like opera you are notreallyblack or Indian Muslim women canthave enjoyable, playful sex lives. Racism and other isms work by sloing us into preconceptions wherewe must stay put, pinned down and unable to move like one of those poor lifeless insects suspended inamber. The paradox is that while we are immobilised, racisms are constantly morphing.

Race used to be thought of as connoting immutable biological difference, but in what has been calledneo, cultural or second degree racisms, identities such as those related to immigration or religion,are the fodder of contemporary race thinking. In these cases it is a fundamental incommensurability oflifestyles that substitutes for, or perhaps augments, notions of biological difference. This is racismwithout race as the writersEtienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallersteinhave put it . Like an inventive

but fickle Casting Director, racism is always open to new lead characters and plotlines. It could bereligion today, who knows what will be centre stage next? But whatever is mobilised in race thinking,be it biology, culture or immigration status, what we lose sight of is our common humanity. One of themost powerful descriptions of racism comes from the British novelist Doris Lessing. For Lessing, racismis atrophyof theimagination.

So how do we negotiate the risks of essentialism and this withering away of the imagination? I used toget het up about this in my writing and teaching. I have tried various strategies in the past such asherding terms into scare quotation marks when I write or using language that is deliberating jarringsuch as minoritised to problematize the word minority and to show it as an active racialisation (Ididnt want the term to roll off the tongue without thought in the way that the facile BME does).

The excruciating bind is that without race terms and categories it is difficult, if not impossible, tochallenge racism or to name and share experiences. I still remember the knot of anxiety and confusionin my stomach as a child when I heard or witnessed banal racism in the playground or on TV and Ididnt have the words to decode and to name what was happening. Regardless of the political and

academic debates about language, whether we are talking to each other or writing, racial signifierscontinue to have currency and traction. And good people do amazing things with bad language. Acouple of weeks ago I listened to doctors and nurses talking about an initiative to increase access tohospice care for BAME groups. I may have been wincing inwardly throughout, but it was a wonderfulproject, skilling local people and demystifying illness, disease and death. It will make more of ameaningful difference to lives than I ever will.

The work of writers such as Avtar Brah, Fran Fanon, Audre Lorde andStuart Hall are the coordinates that guide my political GPS, helping meto navigate ways through the treacherous bind of racial language, a

term first used by the postcolonial writer Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan.For Radhakrishnan as soon as we use race terms we are trapped. Wefind ourselves in a classic Nieschean double bind Radhakrishnaninsists, arguing that

Race has been the history of an untruth, of an untruth thatunfortunately is our historyThe challenge here is to generate, fromsuch a past and a present, a future where race will have been put to restforever.

This is an onerous challenge. Rather than being a frightened rabbitcaught in front of the headlights of racial semantics, I use what I call adoubled practice of working with and against race terms andthinking. I use race categories in order to begin conversations or to start a research project but I try toshow their inadequacy and limitations. In his writing on race, culture and representation, the Cultural


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Studies pioneer, Stuart Hall, argues that race and related concepts such as ethnicity are soentangled with histories of colonialism and nationalism that they are incapable of innocent, descriptivemeaning. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Hall believes that raceconcepts are best thought of as being under erasure. Think of a word or phrase such as PEOPLE OFCOLOUR. Now think of it with a strike-through PEOPLE OF COLOUR. Its there and not there.Language that operates under-erasure is like food that has passed its sell-by date; its no longer good tothink with but loiters stale on our linguistic shelves because we dont have anything adequate to

replace it with.A doubled approach holds this tension in sight, recognising that although we need race concepts andwords to challenge racism, our use of language is provisional and faulty, at best ambivalent andpragmatic. I grudgingly use phrases such as minority ethnic with some of the organisations that Iwork with because these are the terms that they use and we have work to do. I choose my bales andcontext is everything. In academic writing, I have used subaltern, racialised others or thecumbersome racialised as being minority ethnic. And there are the words that I will not use.Non-white should be torched. It centres whiteness as a sun around which we are condemned toorbit, forever defined by a deficit.

Whatever words flow out of my mouth or fingers, I try my best to show the low-key humanity that islost or smothered by race epithets. The more hospitable thought and language are to what lies on themargins of categories the beer. Any anthropologist will tell you that cross-culturally what is mostdangerous are those things on the borders of a category. If you are able to show even a sliver ofordinary humanness outside of race you are doing something truly subversive. Apply an amendedShukhla test to your writing and research. Do a) characters who are people of colour b) do and saythings without c) needing racial or culturalist references?

In her oft-quoted essay The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters Housethe poet andactivist Audre Lorde urged us to nurture our differences and interdependence whilst all the time

keeping our eyes on the moving target: racism/sexism/homophobia. Lorde didnt want the bickering totake energy away from the day-to-day realities of opposing violence and injustice. I know what Lordemeans, and as a poet she knew more than most about the power of language. Words do things. Withthe right conditions, they create and support change.


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So for me, there is vitality and hope in the recurring arguments and squabbles over language that wehave been having. They stop us becoming too complacent about ourselves, the alliances we mightassume, and that shape-shifter that is racism. Most important of all, they revivify the vital role oflanguage as a part of critical thinking and adventure.

On a good day, count me in. And without the GPS.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a writer and academic, interested in illness, death, migration, the body andfeminism.

She teaches in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College on research methods, culture, representationand difference and feminist theory. Yasmin is the curator of Media Diversifieds academic space. Her latestbook Death & the Migrant (Bloomsbury Academic) is a bout transnational dying and ca re in British cities.Buy booksShes on twier@YasminGun

.

Category : Academics, Language, Literature, Media, Racism, Yasmin GunaratnamTags : Audre Lorde, Black Skin, CultureGPS, Etienne Balibar, Fran Fanon, Global Positioning System,

Godfrey Bloom, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jessica Simpson, Luis Surez, Sara Ahmed, Sri Lanka, SriLankan, White Masks

2 thoughts on Race GPS? No Right Turn Ahead

lesreveriesderowena on August 21, 2013 at 1:58 am said:Excellent article!

Reply Rose-Anna on August 20, 2013 at 6:20 am said:Thank you so much. I think Im going to keep coming back to this essay again and again.

Reply

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