Journal
SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE
Volume 28, Issue 1, Pages 279-295Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/13607804211032232
Keywords
Britishness; middle-class; nation; race; recognition; whiteness
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This article examines how race influences the expression of national identity by the white middle-classes in 'post-racial' Britain, emphasizing the importance of bodies and informal markers. It argues that whiteness continues to shape and support dominant conceptions of Britishness, even as white middle-class Britons recognize individuals and to some extent collectively acknowledge people of color as British.
This article examines the significance of race in how nation is articulated by the white middle-classes in 'post-racial' Britain. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of bodies and informal markers of difference within processes of national recognition and reveals a normative expectation for British bodies racialised as non-white to perform or inhabit (particular kinds of) whiteness. Bringing insights from post-race theory and advocating a broad conceptualisation of whiteness as a set of relational ideas and codes, the article demonstrates that whiteness continues to shape and underpin dominant conceptions of Britishness - articulated by middle-class white Britons - even as they recognise people of colour individually, and to some extent collectively, as British. Since the role and symbolic power of the white middle-classes is often overlooked in discussions of Britishness, the article makes an important contribution to debates on race and nation, illustrating how whiteness continues to function in alledgedly 'post-race' societies. It concludes that narrow definitions of race and whiteness allow their continued significance to be under-estimated and ultimately enable the perpetuation of racialised hierarchies of belonging.
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