Abstract
Studies of ‘race’, racism, ethnicity, identities and migration historically have tended to focus on black people and those from other minority ethnic groups. Over the last decade, however, there has been increasing recognition, largely inspired by debates within feminist scholarship, that ‘whiteness’ is as much a social construction as is ‘blackness’. As such, it has always constituted a central part of the context within which black and other minority peoples are racialized (C. Hall, 1992; Ware, 1992). The absence of focus on ‘whiteness’ coupled with implicit constructions of white people as ‘the norm’ (Phoenix, 1987) serves to maintain the privileged position of ‘whiteness’, but also to obscure the ways in which it is implicated in power relations (Pajaczkowska and Young, 1992; Trepagnier, 1994; Wong, 1994).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Phoenix, A. (1998). Representing New Identities: ‘Whiteness’ as Contested Identity in Young People’s Accounts. In: Koser, K., Lutz, H. (eds) The New Migration in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26258-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26258-8_6
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