The ‘trouble’ with the ‘white working class’: whiteness, class and ‘groupism’

Abstract

Over the course of the last two decades, ‘whiteness’ has exploded as an area of academic inquiry bringing together scholars from an array of academic disciplines and generating significant new insights that have contributed to a more complex understanding of a racialised positioning often taken for granted as a normative, unmarked, even invisible system of privilege. Within this field, the ‘white working class’ has come to assume an integral position. This category has offered an analytic object through which notions of enduring white privilege, white victimhood, multicultural politics and white racism have all been explored. While there are clear and striking political problems within all of these dominant accounts, this article instead focuses on a more foundational and related issue: that of the invocation of the ‘white working class’ itself.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• class
• groups
• social analysis

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Claire Alexander and the reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right electoral political party, formed in 1982, that has experienced a degree of relative political success over the course of the last decade across England, particularly at the local level. It has also seen candidates elected to the European Parliament and the London Assembly. The party subscribes to a form of populist racial nationalism and displays strong anti-immigration, anti-Islamic strands of thought.

2. The English Defence League (EDL) is a far-right movement that engages in street protests. It was formed in 2009 and coheres principally around issues of English nationalism and Islamophobia. The EDL has recruited members from the ranks of football hooligan subcultures and ultra-nationalist groups. It also has links to the BNP.