Race Class and Imagined Community

This text explores the history and forms of working class racism in Britain  since the beginning of the Industrial revolution  up to the present. It examines the way the English working class was positioned as a both a ‘backbone of the nation’ and a ‘race apart’ in the dominant discourse and how this shaped  the internal development of its culture and politics, … [Read more...] about Labouring Under Whiteness

This text was written for a course  developed for the Open University by Ali Rattansi and James Donald on ‘Race, Culture and Society’ in the 1990’s. The course  sought to bring to bear  some of the new ‘post structuralist thinking  about  discourse, power and culture  on issues of ethnicity  and identity politics  that were then dominated by essentialist and reductive  concepts … [Read more...] about Its Racism Wot Dunnit – Some Notes on Theory’s Other Scene

I was asked by John Solomos to write a chapter for his ‘Blackwell Companion on Race and Ethnic Studies’ giving a critical survey of psychoanalytic theories  of race and racism. These theories were viewed with great suspicion, some of it justified, by the Anti Racist Left, although much of their dismissive attitude  was based on ignorance or misunderstanding. I wrote an essay … [Read more...] about Psychoanalysis and Racism – Reading the Other Scene

Transracial adoption was one of the most fraught and contest areas of social welfare policy in the 1990’s in Britain. In this essay commissioned for a book about  adoption policy I survey the history of the debate  about adoption  and about race, focussing on their critical points of intersection. The discussion deconstructs essentialised notions of ethnic identity and the … [Read more...] about Yesterday’s Words, Tomorrow’s World: Issues in Transracial Adoption