Download The Bright Light of Science: Critical whiteness studies in a European

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Position paper on studies of critical whiteness for the ATHENA work group Postcolonial Europe
The Bright Light of Science: Critical whiteness studies in a European context
Bolette B. Blaagaard, University of Utrecht
Summary
Critical whiteness studies can be characterized as having been dealing with two distinct paradigms:
the scientific paradigm, which posited human beings in different racial categories and supported
that categorization through eugenics and racialized population control. This paradigm was
succeeded by the second paradigm, a social constructivist paradigm, which sees race
discriminations as socially and culturally enforced strategies. This paper argues that a new
paradigm, the paradigm of the gene or of DNA, is emerging and is drawing simultaneously on the
old paradigm of the eugenics and on the paradigm of social constructionism. This argument will be
developed through an analysis of a genetic research firm in Iceland, deCODE Genetics.
Introduction to the field of critical whiteness studies
Critical whiteness studies as it is presented and studied today grew out of African-American
criticisms based on historical analyses (Baldwin 1984, Roediger 2002), cultural studies and
sociology (hooks 1990), literary studies (Morrison 1993), and Anglo-American feminist criticisms
(Rich 1979) and have become an extended field of critical studies particularly in the United States
(US). Moreover, within the field also American migration studies (Allen 1994, Ignatiev 1995) and
legal studies (Delgado and Stefancic 1997) are represented. Historically within studies on racial or
ethnic whiteness1 two paradigms have been dominant. Firstly, the scientific paradigm: which is
connected to a historical period in time when the definition of race was sustained through the
science of eugenics and population control. This paradigm is particularly analysed in historical
scholarships either by looking at the black/African American view of whiteness and the inequalities
and discriminations at stake (Roediger 2002) or by looking at the intra-group shades of whiteness in
emigrants coming from Europe to the Americas (Ignatiev 1995, Allen 1994, Guglielmo 2003). This
paradigm saw race as a biological determined fact complete with mental and physical qualities. The
second paradigm was born with the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement in the
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Much of the scholarship is overlapping with critical race theory. For the purpose of this paper what makes a
scholarship of critical whiteness is when it critically focuses on the category of white people and/or ethnic diversities
with the group of white people
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nineteen sixties and marks a major shift in the studies of race and white hegemony. The paradigm
rejects the biological determinism and argues for a social construction sustaining the political,
cultural, social, legal, economical hegemony and supremacy of whiteness (Baldwin 1984, hooks
1990, Roediger 2002). This is the paradigm, which reigns today and from where the studies of
historical racism and discrimination through biological determinism are made. I want to argue in
this paper that a third paradigm is making its way onto the stage of critical whiteness studies. It is
the paradigm of the DNA and the genome. The paradigm draws on the knowledge of the DNA and
the structure of the genome and argues that this knowledge produces a new way of viewing race
(Gilroy 2000). Still withholding that racial discriminations and inequalities are indeed social
constructions the paradigm discusses the implications of the emergence of the genetic knowledge.
In Europe the field of critical studies of whiteness is just starting to take shape primarily from the
field of postcolonial studies, but also with hefty emphases on the US paradigms. Within the
postcolonial field Sandra Ponzanesi (2002) identifies the differences between the American model
of “the melting pot” and the European quilt of immigrants and emigrants, colonies and refugees.
The American model and ways of dealing with migration cannot be easily applied to the European
situation, Ponzanesi argues. The same is true for the theories on whiteness, and for much of the
same reasons. As the American idea of the self-made man “often erases the violent forms of internal
colonization” (Ponzanesi 2002: 211) it similarly erases the internal differences among people. Thus,
the Irish, who were deemed black by the British in the nineteenth century, were whitened upon
entering “the New World” (Dyer 1997: 53). This assimilation process has sustained the white
hegemony in the US, but it has also forced the critical studies in whiteness into a white/black
dichotomy. What seems to count in the American discourse on whiteness is dominantly the visual
division of skin colours: black or white, which is founded and expressed through the history of
slavery and segregation laws (Braidotti and Griffin 2002: 225). However, being black or white is
not always a matter of colour, and this becomes even clearer when critical studies of whiteness are
moved into a European context where scholarships in linguistic (Linke 2003) and religious
(Goldberg 2006) exclusion and inclusions are discussed.
Within media studies the critical whiteness studies gained respect with professor in media studies
Richard Dyer’s (1997) landmark book White. Dyer (1997) identifies three senses of whiteness as
colour: hue, skin and symbol. Whiteness as a hue is an unstable category, Dyer tells us, since it is
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both defined as a colour and colourless. What makes the white hue significant is that it is the only
hue with a complete opposite, and as such it is laying the groundwork for the dichotomy of
white/black. Skin is likewise an unstable category. In this category white ceases to be a colour, but
rather becomes a social, psychological and privileged marker. The notion of white skin signifies
exclusions and inclusions in power relations. White as a symbol seems more stable than the two
preceding categories. Though we may ridicule the predictable use by the movie industry of villains
in black cars and heroes in white, the symbolism never fails and it is still found throughout
religious, political and media representations, Dyer argues. These three senses of the colour white
open up for the possibilities of defining whiteness not only in opposition to black but also as a hue
with internal implications and variations; skin colour as an always-moving category of inclusions
and exclusions; and a symbol, which saturates the self-imaging of white people today. And such
considerations are pivotal to the critical whiteness studies in a European context. Not just within the
field of visual – and media studies, but also in a broader cultural scope.
Of course the paradigms and the US and European fields of investigation overlap and draw on each
other. Thus this paper will be analysing how the new paradigm of the DNA is represented in the
journalistic and public discourse on Nordic culture and history. Moreover I will argue that the
representation draws on both the historically determined paradigm and the social constructionist
paradigm. This paper will try to give an account of how white as a skin colour has been and is used
in defining power structures, representations and myth making in European – and in particular
Northern European – culture. Presenting the case of Icelandic DNA research I will show how
scientifically defined and socially constructed whiteness is working within cultural and media
representations today through a paradigm of the DNA.
Decoding Iceland
Dyer’s three senses of white, their implications, and the slippages among them are all represented in
scientific DNA discourse. In the following I will present the case of Icelandic DNA research, which
will illuminate how the scientific discourse still works within the parameters of skin colour and
shades of white.
In 1996 Kári Stefánsson, Dr. Med., co-founded the company deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik,
Iceland. deCODE Genetics is tracking genes, which are – partly – the causes of hereditary diseases,
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in order to develop drugs to prevent or limit the occurrences of those diseases. The company uses a
“population approach”, which enables it “to isolate key genes contributing to major public health
challenges from cardiovascular disease to cancer, genes that are providing [deCODE Genetics] with
drug targets rooted in the basic biology of disease.”2 The “population approach”, which have made
deCODE and half the Icelandic population (which is participating in the research project) famous
worldwide, is based on three sets of data collected from volunteers in the projects; the genetic, the
medical, and the genealogical set of data. These data are within reach because of Iceland’s short but
very well recorded history.
deCODE Genetics has been presented in several journalistic productions.3 In an episode of the
programme Scientific American Frontiers (1998) made for the public broadcasting company in the
US, Dr. Stefánsson says to actor Alan Alda, who was hosting the programme: “We know [the
Icelanders’] names. We know who were their fathers and mothers and daughters and sons, we know
where they lived …”4. This “obsession with genealogy”, as Alda calls the Icelandic registration of
its inhabitants, is founded in the Icelandic Sagas: myths and tales of heroic fights and killings of the
first settlers in Iceland in the eighth and ninth centuries. The particular knowledge makes it easier to
identify certain genes that are supposedly causing certain diseases. The diseases can in this way be
traced through generations of Icelanders.
In order for such a trace to be successful, contamination of the gene pool has to be limited. The
isolation, which Iceland and its inhabitants supposedly have been kept in, is seen as the reason for
the population’s genetic homogeneity, which in turn makes the tracing of genes and genetic
diseases possible. And the homogeneity seems to be a fact of Icelandic discourse. Most of the
Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to the sagas and the original Viking settlers – “and they
look it too” Alda adds taking a view over a sunny café in Reykjavik filled with blond and blue-eyed
Icelanders. The settlers referred to here are the Vikings. A civilization out of the present-day
Denmark and Norway, which plundered, raped and killed, but also did trading with most of
Northern Europe in the seventh to the tenth centuries. They were a seafaring people with an
astonishing engineering ability in boat building, and so they went as far as down the coast to
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www.decode.com
PBS Scientific American Frontiers 1998, BBC The Blood of the Vikings 2001, New York Times Spreading the Viking
Genes – Without Boats 2004, NBC The Today Show 6/2005
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http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript803.htm
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Northern France and crossing the ocean as far as to Greenland, and the Americas. Their genes were
spread quite thoroughly through rapes and settlements throughout the world. And so genetic
research is also carried out in the United Kingdom (UK) in studies tracing Viking blood in
contemporary Britons’ veins. This tracing was done by the BBC and a team of researchers, who
tested the blood of people from the UK and compared it to that of Danish and Norwegian people in
order to find similarities in the DNA5, and the Vikings’ genes are still being spread worldwide
through IVF and sperm banks6.
Above, I have recited the common view of the Icelandic people the way it is presented to us through
journalistically edited representations of genetic research. The case of the Icelandic DNA research
and other productions about the Vikings using the knowledge of deCODE Genetics presents us with
both 1) a notion of tracing a certain origin, that is, a conflation of genes and genealogies and 2) a
notion of visual representation converged with certain personality traits.
Gene-alogies
These are of course not unknown notions in the field of critical whiteness studies. In the field of
eugenics in the nineteenth century, scientists, working within the scientific paradigm, tended to
conflate physical appearances with personality traits and specific racial qualities (Gilman 1985,
Gould [1981] in Harding ed. 1993, Sturken and Cartwright 2001). What was visual on the body was
thought to mirror the mind and character of people, and, what would seem as arbitrary,
characteristics were linked to black or white skin, flat or pointed noses, brown or blue eyes etc. This
gave rise to a number of “scientific” studies where craniums were measured and assessed and the
races were ranked (Gould [1981] in Harding ed. 1993, Stepan and Gilman [1991] in Harding ed.
1993). The ranking was done in two modes: the monogeistic and the polygeistic (Gould [1981] in
Harding ed. 1993). The first argued that the human kind descended from one single creation; from
there it was believed that the races had degenerated into different variants in a more or less
fortunate way. The latter separated the races into different species with different origins. Developed
“The Blood of the Vikings” were a series of programmes hosted by Julian Richards exploring “Viking Britain, from
the first raids to their settlement of the British Isles and traces their legacy through a genetics survey”
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/bloodofthevikings/index.shtml)
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The New York Times published an article about the successful Danish sperm bank, Cryos International, under the
heading “Spreading Viking Genes, Without Boats”. According to the article “Danish sperm has led to 10.000
pregnancies around the world” through the hard work of this one sperm bank. Due to the liberal donor anonymity laws
in Denmark the sperm bank is spreading the Viking genes to places as far as “Paraguay, Kenya, Hong Kong and New
York”. People in those cities could not find “pure Scandinavian spare parts” anywhere else, the managing director Ole
Schou states (The New York Times, 9.10.2004)
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in the States this mode was referred to as the “American school” and supported the justification of
slavery in the States. Not surprisingly, the white “scientists” ranked themselves – the white race – at
the top of the list no matter what argument they held.
The linking of genes to a certain story of origin is reproduced in the genetic discourse of the
Icelandic people. The validity of the tales and myths collected in the Icelandic Sagas and used as a
tool of genetic research is never questioned, though they were written more than 1.000 years ago
and by writers known to mix the “real life” characters with Nordic gods and mythical figures. In
addition it was often monks – that is to say Christians – who were able to write and so the tales of
the heathen Vikings draw on a Christian mythology as well.
The perceived homogeneity of the Icelandic population also rests on unstable grounds. The
Scandinavians were considered to belong to the Teuton race7 in the nineteenth century (Marshall
[1969] in Harding ed. 1993). The “Teutons”, in the discourse of Icelandic genes, have changed its
name to the better-known and more heroic “Vikings”. Nevertheless, the Celts, who were brought to
Iceland as slaves or simply incorporated into the Vikings settlements8, are still a distinct Other with
a set of less desirable and more effeminate genome of their own. The Icelandic women at the
settler-era, according to genetic research, were 60% Celtic9, however the all male reproduction in
the media productions such as BBC’s The Blood of the Vikings (2001) uses genetic tracing done
only with the male Y-chromosome10. Thus, it is not surprising that the actual heterogeneity seems
inconsequential. The Celtic genes did not vanish, they are just not interesting to scientists, and so
they are not accounted for in constructions of the Viking myth and the myth of the homogenic white
population of Iceland. Furthermore, the fact that Iceland had many contacts with sailors and
fishermen throughout the times, and as such was not particularly isolated from the rest of Europe, is
not taken into account in the “homogeneity-discourse” either.
When the Icelandic gene pool in deCODE Genetics’ is described as “pure” by the managing
director in an article by the New York Times (9.10 2004) it means uncontaminated by other “races”.
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Ironically the thefreeonlinedictionary.com and The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth
Edition, 2000 among others state that “teuton” is a member of an ancient people, probably of Germanic or Celtic origin
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It is not known for sure, however the BBC’s The Blood of the Vikings emphasises the killings of the Celts by the
Vikings
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Wikipedia
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According to www.decode.com and www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/bloodofthevikings/index.shtml
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This assumption of a stable gene pool is not only – as mentioned – highly questionable, it also
evokes suspect racial categories and relations to Nazi eugenics. Historically, fascism and the Nazi’s
“final solution” and experimental medicine followed eugenics and racial discrimination. Robert
Proctor points out in his text “Nazi Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge” (Proctor [1988] in
Harding ed., 1993) that Germany was not alone in praising the “science” of eugenics and racial
hygiene when the Nazi’s were elected into power in 1932. Roll-Hansen and Broberg (1997) testify
to that assertion in their book on the eugenics and the welfare states in the Nordic countries. Proctor
suggests that the reason for the Nazi’s to support the “science” of eugenics were quite similar to that
of the colonial powers as laid out by Stoler (1991): the Nazi’s saw their race as degenerating after
World War I and used medicine and racial hygiene to secure its survival and supremacy. Though
the Nazi’s deployed the art of science to maintain power of procreation, a less sophisticated method
was also used. Susan Brownmiller (1975) writes on one of the most violent forms of controlling
reproduction: rape in war, that it is an act of the conqueror where the enemy is feminized (Ibid; 3537). “Rape for the Germans,” she writes, “played a serious and logical role in the achievement of
what they saw as their ultimate objective: the total humiliation and destruction of “inferior peoples”
and the establishment of their own master race.” (Ibid. 49). The same argument might have been
used in the Balkan war, where Serbian men in order to generate an alienation of the women from
their Muslim communities and to force them to give birth to Serbian children raped Muslim women
(Price 2002). It is not a new notion, but, in fact, a notion with a violent history.
The tropes and symbols brought forth by journalism in the discourse of the Vikings in scientific
genetic research can be said to draw on a conflation of genetic design and genealogy. The genes in
the DNA testing are linked to “historical” ancestors, sagas and myths of a certain region’s peoples.
However, the homogeneity of the Icelandic people – but also more broadly the Scandinavians in
general – is based mainly on “the blue eyes and blond hair”: the visual markers of the people.
Visual representation
The second feature of the media representation is the visualisation of whiteness. In the tropes
connected to the Vikings (to whom living persons in the BBC and PBS productions aspire) the
genetic markers are connected to a personality which sets “out on voyages of discovery” and
inhabits “robust health and brute strength”.11 This representation of brute, masculine physicality
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www.scandinaviancryobank.com
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converges with the visual markers of blondness and whiteness in Alda’s remark on the blondness of
the Icelanders as well as in the graphics of BBC’s The Blood of the Vikings. And so the outside of
the body becomes identified with the inside, both in the sense of genetics and in the sense of
personality traits. Recently, deCODE Genetics was charged with some critique as well as law suits
claiming the company invades the privacy of its clients as well as the relations to the clients, since
they share DNA. This claim points to a discussion on who owns a person’s genetic make-up, but it
moreover makes clear the claim to identity through the DNA – not only a genetic, but a personal or
qualitative, identity.
Besides the convergence of genetics and personality, the visual representation of the Vikings also
points towards a physicality and health. Notably, the white Viking body is perceived as strong and
healthy, which places him in stark contrast to the black female body, as in for instance the case of
Saartje Baartman, who (in the tradition of eugenics) was perceived as pathologically diseased and
degenerate. Of all the physical features on the black body especially the female genitalia and
buttocks caught the attention of the white “scientists” (Gilman 1985). In his text on “Difference and
Pathology. Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness” Gilman outlines the connections and
associations between Africans and (white female) sexuality in European art history and “scientific”
discourse. The case of Saartje Baartman, an African woman who between 1810 and 1815, when she
died, was exhibited in London and Parisian museums as the “Hottentot Venus”, illustrates this.
During her life in Europe she was displayed as an example of the abnormal sexuality of Africans
due mainly to her perceived large buttocks. After her death she was autopsied as were many other
African women, whose genitalia were shown as proof of the different human species. The
polygeistic argument was thereby sustained through metonymic representation of the African
female supported by “science”. By the means of medical handbooks and studies the link between
the African and the (white) prostitute was made using physical characteristics. The prostitute was
perceived as fat, had asymmetrical facial features, and the labia were seen to be “throwbacks to the
Hottentot, if not the chimpanzee” (Gilman 1985; 98), and so she was classified as a “subclass of
woman” (Ibid.). As often the case, sexuality was not only a site of passion and reproduction but also
a site of disease and degeneracy (Gilman 1985, Stoler 1991). The interracial reproduction would
cause degeneracy or contamination of the white race, and so it is the innate fear of Otherness
visualized in anatomy that lies behind the conflation of the prostitute and the African woman
(Gilman 1985). In this way the eugenics and white “scientific” work done to disclose differences
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between races were invoked primarily by controlling reproduction. In the European colonies power
was upheld through this control of who got to reproduce and with whom (Stoler 1991). Fear of
degeneracy was linked to a notion of purity of the genes and the races, and in this sense the
“enemy” became the uncontrollable reproductive sexuality, which in turn was placed with firstly the
Other; the female body, moreover, the black body and finally the non-human; the animal. Hence,
the purity of the Viking genes presented and argued in the medical and genetic discourse of the
Icelandic people resonance with the old paradigm of the eugenics12.
Beyond the skin?
Whiteness is, thus, much more than colours and shades. Whiteness is very much about power;
defining the powerful, and remaining in power by degrading the Other. The Other in turn is seen as
a threat – a threat based on the white man’s fear of degeneracy. When the most significant of the
white race has been named to be control through purity of race and genes, the fear of losing control
and losing regent over reproduction becomes the pivotal to the survival of the white race. Black
skin and white skin comes to correspond to “bad” and “good” through the use of whiteness as
symbol (Dyer 1997: 58). “The high moral value attached to white as symbol permits a slippage
associating white hue and skin with such value” (Ibid. 68). But it might also be referred to as black:
incontrollable, and white: control. It would seem that the new genetic paradigm reinforces the racial
determinism in the journalistic discourse on the Icelandic DNA research and the Vikings. Both on a
visual and a discursive level the old scientific paradigm and stereotypes are evoked.
However, in Paul Gilroy’s works within the poststructural/postmodern field (2000) he argues for a
“postracial” stance through the field of genetics and DNA science. The bio-molecular science offers
a new vision and a new site of the body beyond the skin and in which there is no colour coding.
Today skin is no longer privileged as the threshold of either identity or particularity.
There are good reasons to suppose that the line between inside and out now falls
elsewhere. The boundaries of “race” have moved across the threshold of skin. They
are cellular and molecular, not dermal. If “race” is to endure, it will be in a new form,
estranged from the scales respectively associated with political anatomy and
epidermalization. (Gilroy 2000; 47)
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See Blaagaard (forthcoming November) for elaboration on the connections between Viking and fascist imaginary
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On the one hand science has given the possibility of a new view of the human race breaking it down
to molecular and cellular products, and on the other hand these technologies prompt new
imaginaries of the body, which, Gilroy argues, no longer care about “race”. However, these two
new developments point towards what Dyer calls the categories of hue and skin related to science
and technology in the way I have been arguing in this paper. The technology might be able to break
down the hue of a human being’s skin to six pairs of genes (Ibid; 49), and the new visual reality
might make new views on race and differences possible, but if the power of racial symbolic, in the
sense used by Dyer and argued in this paper, is still intact, will those possibilities be used and
realized? The reality is still that the symbolic structures govern the social-economic structures from
the academia (Wekker 2002) to the women shelters (Crenshaw 1995). Race is still visible in
everyday life, so to speak. I believe that genetic research has added a new form to the many
representations of race through the scientific molecular discourse, but the symbolism of colour
persists and is still very connected to skin colour.
Knowing the importance of vision to racial categories and the linking to innate personality traits, the
argument about the technological vision’s influence seem very idealistic. Gilroy himself suggests
that the idealist attitude proclaimed with the colour-blind DNA research and other molecular
science might be asking too much (Gilroy 2000; 51). But he remains focussed on an attempt to
liberate race in the intellectual discourse by giving room and possibility to activism and politics.
The importance of the “postracial” stance lies in the argument that “the histories of suffering should
not be allocated exclusively to their victims. If they were, the memory of the trauma would
disappear as the living memory of it died away” (Ibid. 114). As Morrison (1993) Gilroy also sees
potential in telling the story of the beneficiaries of the racial oppressions and colonialism. This
breaking-up of foundations for knowledge as based on specific identities and the linking of those
identities to certain nationalities and geographies are done in order to make apparent the
mechanisms of tropes and stereotypes in everyday life, but also in order to challenge the majority –
of whiteness – to see their/our own identity differently. In effect, Gilroy argues both for the
invisibility of “race” through new technology and for the visibility of whiteness in the racial
discourse. However, with the use of the concept of “diaspora” (Gilroy 2000; 123) in unsettling the
notion of cultural essentialist approach and national identities, Gilroy seems to place whiteness in a
un-diversified category of its own, whereas diasporic identities are multiple – and perhaps non-
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white? In this way Gilroy can be said to re-enact the binary of white/non-white, which so forcefully
remains in the symbolism of our Western society (Dyer 1997).
Whitenesses
This analysis has been located in a particular grounded experience of media represented genetic
discourse. The Scandinavian discourse on genetic Viking heritage provides a slippage between the
categories of hue, skin and symbolic white, which allows the Viking to stand out as an ultimate
Scandinavian representation. But a representation, which is reachable in “real life” through the
reconstruction of (lost) genealogy or through sperm bank donations from a Danish college student.
It is an “among-men” discourse in the sense that the female line is not counted. The genetic research
is done with samples of Y-chromosomes, and the sperm bank delivers, well, sperm. The women in
these narratives are perceived as Other in the sense that their genes are not specific enough to be
counted, and in the sense that they are possibly Celtic of origin and thereby do not posses the same
purity as their male counterparts.
In European history, who is white and who is not has been defined and redefined continually by
whites – meaning those in power. The European definition of whiteness is not entirely about skin
colour, but about identification through exclusions of the Other. The notion of class in an economic
sense played a strong role for instance in the colonies. This is connected to the eugenics and is reenacted in the Nazi “science” researching biological deterministic classifications (Braidotti and
Griffin 2002: 227), and it is the legacy of this “research”, which fuelled the war in the Balkans and
the tragedies of ethnic cleansing13, argues Braidotti and Griffin. I would add, perhaps this research
lays the groundwork for a particular Scandinavian invisibility of whiteness, which seems to have
blinded much discourse on the meaning of colour and “racial” thinking in the region. The scientific
discourse also constructs a men-among-men fight for power of procreation, in which female bodies
are the battlegrounds. The invisibility of whiteness is structured in several ways: through the use of
the concept “Vikings” instead of for instance “Teuton” or “Caucasian” or even “Aryan”, and
through the notion of purity as well as the use of stereotypes and binary positions of white/black,
male/female and healthy/diseased etc. The colour of genes was decided long before genetics were a
reality. As argued in this paper biological determinism was replaced by social constructionist view,
but in the public discourse perhaps by a cultural determinism, which categorizes individuals in
Furthermore, the term “ethnic cleansing” can be said to draw on the symbol of cleanliness and whiteness as
interchangeable concepts (Gilroy 2000, Braidotti and Griffin 2002)
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terms of belonging to a certain nation-state or a certain territory. “Territory and indeed nature itself
are being engaged as a means to define citizenship and the forms of rootedness that compose
national solidarity and cohesion” (Gilroy 2000: 111), and so, the construction of women as the
bearers of national identity (Braidotti and Griffin 2002: 229), as bodily degenerates (Gilman 1985)
and as symbols of the nation-state is not far behind. From mock-science, eugenics, and biological
determinism to the debates on (national) identity, the notion of whiteness (defined as hue, skin
and/or symbol) has and still plays a great part in racializing difference in Europe and Scandinavia.
But, it is important not to look at whiteness merely as another ethnic or racial group, but to
emphasise the power structures and the desire for keeping control, which makes this colour what it
is (hooks 1990). In this way critical whiteness studies in a European context become, what Toni
Morrison has called, “the impact of racism on those who perpetuated it” (Morrison 1992). I want to
underline the importance of social reality and racism in the work on whiteness. Work on whiteness
should, in my opinion, bring to the fore the social, economic and racial challenges lying in wait on
this issue in Europe. Braidotti and Griffin note that it is somewhat easier to deal with racial
problems, when they occur elsewhere (2002; 226)14. But the naming of our own, European,
historical, cultural, and in the case recaptured here: scientific representation of whiteness is the only
way to move forward and to create “antiracist strategies to rework whiteness” (Ibid. 234). This is
achieved by working “through the histories of extremity associated with raciology’s brutal
reasoning” Gilroy concurs (2000; 7). I want to add: and by working through and outlining the
extremity – and perhaps more so, the normativity – of whiteness, and how power relations are
working within this norm. And not forgetting that the whiteness of this norm is re-produced within
the way we see ourselves - inside or out – in the Nordic and white representation.
References:
Allen, Theodore W: The Invention of the White Race (N.Y., Verso, 1994)
Andermahr, Sonja, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz: A Glossary of Feminist Theory (London,
Arnold, 2000)
Baldwin, James: “On Being White … And Other Lies” in Black on White ed. Roediger, David
(N.Y., Schocken Books, 1998)
Blaagaard, Bolette: “Relocating Whiteness in Nordic Media Discourse” in Rethinking Nordic
Colonialism (Copenhagen & Berlin, Kuratorisk Aktion for Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art
Forthcoming November 2006)
14
In relation to this it is interesting to see how for instance a filmmaker like Lars von Trier chooses the United States as
the location for his anti-racist and critical account of racial segregation in the film ”Mandalay” – and not his own native
country Denmark
13
Broberg, Gunnar and Roll-Hansen, Nils: Eugenics and the Welfare State (East Lansing, Michigan
State University Press, 1997)
Brownmiller, Susan: Against Our Will. (N.Y., Fawcett Books, 1975)
Crenshaw, Kimberlé: “Mapping the Margins” in Critical Race Theory. The Key Writings that
Formed the Movement ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw (N.Y., The New Press, 1995)
Delgado, Richard and Stefancic, Jean (eds.): Critical White Studies (Philadelphia, Temple
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