Decolonizing White Care: Relational Reckoning with the Violence of Coloniality in Welfare

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to debates on potential connections between care ethics and decoloniality from within Global North West European whiteness. It adopts a feminist psychosocial position which understands everyday lived realities as shifting dynamic entanglements, produced relationally though complicated spatially and temporally expansive material, discursive and affective practices. First, it situates the liberal welfare state as part of a global project of North Western European colonisation which violently establishes a fantasy of whiteness as the human ideal rooted in individual sovereignty and rights to possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Next it unpacks how the historical institutionalisation of care via state welfare sustains ‘white ignorance’; (Mills, 2007) in the face of the contemporary reality of ongoing systematised racial violence of coloniality. Finally, it offers the idea of ‘relational choreography’ (Hunter, 2015a; 2015b) as a way into resisting binary liberal individualist self-understanding underpinning this possessive logic of whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• whiteness
• race
• relationality
• institutionalisation

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the reviewers and editors for help in better articulating buried ideas and lines. More to articulate yet, but this has moved the paper forward in important ways which I hope honours their insight, even where we may not agree.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am reflecting here out of the British context specifically. Whilst there are national and local specificities in liberal state formations, the globally universalising nature of the Western European colonial project exported its liberal basis to the white settler colonial contexts like the USA, New Zealand, Australia and Canada as well as to its colonised dominions.

2 In the English context as early as April 2020 there was significant and growing evidence of disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on racialised minority groups (see Becares and Nazroo 2020; Qureshi et al. 2020) in terms of morbidity, mortality and socioeconomic impact. By early 2020 official figures recognised Black and minority ethnic people as making up a third of critically ill patients with confirmed COVID-19 in the context of their making up 14% of the general population; the risk of hospital death is twice as high for people racialised as mixed ethnicity, nearly three times as high for British Asians and four times higher for black people as for those racialised as white British. This disproportionality relates to broader racialised social asymmetries in terms of the greater prevalence of pre-existing chronic ill health experienced by racialised minority groups; their unequal access to health care; their disproportionate viral exposure in the context of their employment in a range of ‘front line’ services less able to isolate; including in health and social care services working directly with the virus. See Hunter and van der Westhuizen (2021) for a global summary. See Gunaratnam (2021) for elaboration of the patterns in the roll out of COVAX in 2021.

3 This interview was undertaken as part of the research project ‘Integrating Diversity? Gender, Race and Leadership in the Learning and Skills Sector’ (2003-2006). PIs Sara Ahmed and Elaine Swan. The findings of this broader study have been extensively reported. For example Ahmed, et al 2006; Ahmed 2012; Swan 2010; Hunter 2015a. All participant names and details are changed.

4 Here Anne is referring to the racist murder of the London teenager which prompted the Macpherson Inquiry into the conduct of the police in the investigation of Stephen’s murder and the subsequent Macpherson Report’s pronouncement of institutional racism in the London Metropolitan police service. Leading to an Amendment of the Race Relations Act.

5 I draw inspiration from a wide range of critical cultural theorising on subjectivity Black feminist thinking on intersectionality, psychodynamically informed psychosocial theorising, queer and feminist postmaterialist scholarship. See Hunter, (2012 and Chapters One and Two of Hunter 2015a).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shona Hunter

Shona Hunter is Reader in the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality (CRED), Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her publications include Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance (2015), the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2021) Co-edited with Christi van der Westhuizen, and various special editions and articles in Social Politics, Critical Social Policy, Critical Arts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, Policy Futures in Education. She has held posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster, Leeds University in the UK and visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney Australia, Mannheim Germany, Cape Town, Rhodes and Johannesburg South Africa. Her scholarly interests are framed through an engagement with feminist anti-racist decolonial critique and include all aspects of welfare politics and governance, state practices, identities and the broader material-cultural-affective politics through which ‘the’ state(s) is enacted nationally and globally as a global colonial formation.