Producing whiteness through urban space: the socio-spatial construction of white identities in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

This article argues for an approach to the formation of whiteness that includes an explicit focus on urban neighbourhood spaces. Extending literature that mainly focuses on whiteness at the national scale, I propose an understanding of the construction of white identities as a co-constitutive process between space and race. My analysis is based on ethnographic research in a diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, that included observations as well as narrative and go-along interviews with people racialised as white and of colour. By identifying four socio-spatial practices, I show how the construction of white identities is a socio-spatial process.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• urban space
• national identity
• the Netherlands
• geographies of race
• racialization

Acknowledgements

I thank Rivke Jaffe for her feedback and guidance in developing this article, James Steijger for his feedback on previous drafts, the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions, as well as the interlocutors for their participation and openness.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Interlocutors were assured that their name and any identifying information would be protected in this study. Accordingly, names and any identifiable information have been changed in this article.

2. Names of places and the neighbourhood are pseudonyms.

3. Although I have used the more simplified terms ‘white people’ and ‘people of colour’ throughout this article as a shorthand to describe people racialised as white and colour respectively, I would like to stress that I see racialisation as a continuous process in which race is given significance. I am aware there are no single, coherent groups of ‘white’ people and people ‘of colour’, and that there is a wide variety in how groups experience their racial identities and social life. Moreover, many scholars point to the importance of paying attention to the intersectionality of race and class in the Dutch context (Çankaya and Mepschen 2019; Wekker 2016), as well as the intersectionality between race and other factors such as gender and age. For my purpose here, I analytically separate race from these other social relations, although I see race as entangled with these other relations in virtually all levels of social life. The separation is imposed here to allow greater clarity as I develop my arguments.

4. The term ‘blank’ is often used as a synonym for ‘white’ and is associated with neutrality and ‘unblemished’. The use of the term is increasingly critiqued by anti-racist and racial equality activists, demanding that the word be replaced with the term ‘white’ as a racial and political identity.