Whitening Intersectionality

Evanescence of Race in Intersectionality Scholarship

Sirma Bilge

Abstract: Taking issue with the erasure of the race in much of the contemporary (feminist)
intersectionality scholarship, this essay examines a number of troubling patterns and trends which
contribute to whiten, discipline and dilute an initially insurgent knowledge firmly rooted in black feminist
thought and activism. The analysis reads these makeover efforts of intersectionality against the backdrop
of the broader incorporation of various progressive struggles into the neoliberal governance of diversity
and minority difference, to which the questions of knowledge production and dissemination are integral.
Special attention is given to sociology, as sociology stands out by its disciplinary defensiveness against
minority generated counter-hegemonic knowledges, by its eagerness to restate the adequacy of its
disciplinary structure and fundamental categories.

It would be a tremendous loss, a distinct irony,

if some version of black feminist inquiry exists in the academy
to which Black women are not major contributors
(Barbara Christian)

The black feminist intersectionality analytic is dominantly narrated, particularly in North-

American academia, as having emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s
and 70s out of a double critique that of racism in white-dominated feminism and that of
sexism in male-dominated black nationalism. This narrative leaves out the critique of
capitalism and heterosexism, which were yet covered in intersectionalitys foundational
texts such as Frances Beals Double Jeopardy or Combahee River Collective
Statement. Other narratives prevail in other contexts: in European academic feminist
circles, intersectionality is seen as the brainchild of feminism and gender studies. This
narrative puts gender at the core of the intersectional project and leaves out the
constitutive role of race. Fully implicated in the politics of the present, concurrent
narratives of intersectionalitys advent achieve a certain kind of political work in terms of
authenticating particular schools of thought, privileging specific genealogies and national
stakes, defining what counts as intersectional knowledge at the expense of others.
Instead of settling intersectionality as a speciality field, this chapter pleads for un-
disciplinary critical intersectionality viewed as an epistemic potentiality to disrupt
Eurocentric knowledge-production politics and its attendant (inter)disciplinary formations.

1
Opening intersectionality up to decoloniality entails grasping the present-day neutralizing
of intersectionality within the neoliberal knowledge governance in an era deemed
postracial, a time in which racial neoliberalism expands by building silently on the
structural conditions of racism while evaporating the very categories of their
recognizability.1 Of particular concern to me is the obliteration of race in the bulk of the
contemporary literature on intersectionality and the specific contribution of sociology to
this.
My argument unfolds in three parts. First, I depict the backdrop against which
intersectionalitys depoliticising needs to be read, i.e. neoliberal cultural politics and its
rationalities and techniques for governing difference. Next, I tackle the academic
disciplining of minority knowledges, including intersectionality, by taking the case of
sociologys troubled conversation with them. And last, I discuss three whitening
techniques observed in current intersectionality scholarship: genealogical and
disciplinary whitening and the erasure of race through denial, reductionism and
dissociation.

Cultural politics of neoliberalism

Tackling intersectionalitys depoliticising requires us to comprehend how insurgent forms

of knowledges have been incorporated and institutionalized within academia, state
agencies, NGOs and activist circles in the post-civil rights era marked by post-1970
neoliberalism. This poses a key political and epistemological dilemma, which has been
often couched, in the case of the United States (one of two key sites in which
intersectionality originated the other being Britain), as how to grasp persistent and
growing social inequalities when society has become or is perceived to have become
more integrated across racial and gendered lines as a result of the opportunities brought
about by the rights revolution especially when the latter also complicated the
distribution of inequalities and increased in-group heterogeneity of both marginalized
and privileged groups.2 This dilemma poses a fundamental challenge to theories of race

1
David T. Goldberg: Racisms without Racism, p. 1716.
2
Lisa Bedolla: Intersections of Inequality, p. 233.

2
and racism, which are wrestling with how to attend to the persistence of racial
classification and stratification in an era officially committed to racial equality and
multiculturalism.3 While for many scholars, frameworks like ethnicity theory and
theories of class and nation are inadequate to the task of explaining the complexities
inherent in racializing processes in the post-civil rights world [] [and] the intersections
literature is useful in this regard,4 I contend that intersectionality, as a knowledge
project oriented toward social justice, is also deeply mired in the complexities and
contradictions of racializing processes in neoliberal times. Intersectionality is doubly
entangled with neoliberalism. On the one hand, cultural politics of neoliberalism
incorporate difference in ways that do not make any difference intersectionality is
divested from its disruptive/transformative potential through its institutionalisation. On the
other hand, liberal and neoliberal categories of intelligibility organising human life
obstruct our capacity to grasp the interconnectedness of power relations, in other words
intersectionality. While neoliberalism organizes material and political life in terms of
race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and
religion[,] the categories through which [] [it] classifies human activity and
relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms.5
Grasping how intersectionality is being neutralised and whitened in present-day
academia lends valuable insight into racial neoliberalism and its rationalities and
techniques of racial management within contemporary configurations of global capital.
This entails viewing neoliberalism not as a coherent theory, a unitary system, but a
complex, contradictory cultural and political project created within specific institutions,
with an agenda of reshaping the everyday life of contemporary global capitalism. It
demands going beyond the thin economic conceptions of neoliberalism as market rule
and tackling its cultural rationales, developing a thick social and cultural account of
neoliberalism as a form of governance6 that would attend to its heterogeneity,
contradictions and messiness. For the political neutralising of intersectionality, of its
transformative potentials for social-justice, rests not merely on neoliberalisms economic

3
Howard Winant: Race and Race Theory, p. 180.
4
Lisa Bedolla: Intersections of Inequality, p. 233 f.
5
Lisa Duggan: The Twilight of Equality?, p. 3 (italic original); for the following quote see p. 70 (unitary).
6
Loc Wacquant: Crafting the Neoliberal State, p. 197 (thin conceptions), Imogen Tyler: Revolting
Subjects, p. 5 (thick account).

3
logics, but is deeply intertwined with its cultural politics, with the complex and ambiguous
diversity language it speaks.
The achievements of neoliberalism ensuring its longevity turning the state into a
firm, breeding the responsibilised self-governing citizen, and converting human precarity
and risk into entrepreneurial/developmental/funding opportunity,7 are not merely
economic, but replete with social identities and categories. Implemented in and through
culture and politics, neoliberal policies have unpredictable outcomes reinforcing or
contesting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion or nationality.8
This volatility is partly due to the fact that neoliberal political alliances to assist the flow of
money up the economic hierarchy are complex, flexible, and shifting, and the contexts of
their concretion are always forged by the meanings and effects of race, gender,
sexuality, and other markers of difference, which are far from being immutable.
Stressing how the economic goals have been (must be) formulated in terms of the
range of political and cultural meanings that shape the social body in a particular time
and place, Duggan cautions us against disengaging neoliberalism from race and
gender relations, or other cultural aspects of the body politic to the extent that its
legitimating discourse, social relations, and ideology are saturated with race, with
gender, with sex, with religion, with ethnicity, and nationality. Intersectionality is part
and parcel of both the legitimating discourses of neoliberalism and those contesting it.
The extension of economic rationale beyond the economic sphere to irrigate all
aspects of life is a key feature of neoliberalism. A case in point is the profound
transformation of radical politics, which have turned, under the hegemonic standards of
public managerialism merging neoliberal business values with equality rights discourses,
into corporatized diversity tools leveraged by dominant groups to attain various
ideological and institutional goals.9 The development of auditing, accounting and
management techniques, enabling a market for public services to be established
autonomously from central (state) control, has been of key importance to neoliberalism.
This culture has become ubiquitous in an increasingly professionalized, bureaucratized

7
Oishik Sircar, Dipika Jain: Editors Introduction, pp. 11 f.
8
Lisa Duggan: The Twilight of Equality?, p. xiv; for the following quotes see ibid. (meanings) and p. xvi
(economic goals etc.).
9
Jane Ward: Respectably Queer.

4
and technologized field of rights activism, in which expertise has come to play a major
role, allowing the government at a distance without direct intervention or repression
from the State.10 For instance, to develop equity tools such as gender-based monitoring,
feminists and gender experts routinely use self-surveillance and performance
evaluation practices promoted by the new public managerialism.11 As such,
neoliberalism implies less a retreat from governmental intervention than a re-
inscription of the techniques and the forms of expertise required for the exercise of
government.12 This neoliberal dogma and its attendant corporate multiculturalism have
led to the advent of new formations, new forms of minority struggles more consistent
with the agentic, individuating, rights-based approaches to difference and diversity,
which have largely accepted the privatisation, both of racial [or other] grievances and of
the mechanisms of their amelioration exercises which have usually been facilitated by
the managerial and public relations expertise of specialist consultancies.13
It is crucial in this context not to reduce the work of neoliberalism to top-down
impositions by the state and capital onto social movements,14 but grasp its incorporated
structures (habitus) and how it is activated through our own practices. There is a
substantial literature on the waning of the social justice ethos that marked the insurgent
decades of the 1960s and 70s and its replacement by assimilationist reformism in the
post-1970 neoliberal era. The normalising forces of the neoliberal governance of
minority difference have been acute in the (re)shaping of sexual citizenship through the
professionalization of sexual politics15 and the rule of a liberal legalist framework
whose exclusive focus on equal rights for sexual minorities does not bother with
broader issues of social and economic justice. We hence transited from the radical
critique made by the gay pride movement in the late 1960s and 70s to a new dawn of
homonormativity a neoliberal sexual politics that sustains dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions, instead of contesting them, and promotes a demobilized
gay constituency and privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and

10
Bruno Latour: Visualization and Cognition (distance) and Peter Miller, Nikolas Rose: Governing
Economic Life (repression).
11
Carol Bacchi, Joan Eveline: Mainstreaming and Neoliberalism.
12
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose: Introduction, p. 14.
13
Paul Gilroy: My Britain is Fuck All, p. 381.
14
Alana Lentin, Gavan Titley: The Crises of Multiculturalism.
15
Diane Richardson: Desiring Sameness?

5
consumption16. The prevailing reading of this confluence of some mainstream gay-
lesbian advocacy groups and feminist organisations with neoliberal governance as a
shift to the right exempts the liberal left of any liability with regard to the neoliberal
neutralising of dissent and corporatising of progressive social movements. The latter are
not less replete with neoliberal values and techniques, and collude, often unknowingly,
in their integrationism with neoliberal governmentality, which ironically expands through
progressive politics.17
The neutralising of intersectionality thus takes place within the broader context of the
incorporation of various progressive struggles into market-driven and state-sanctioned
diversity governmentality, to which the question of knowledge production and
institutionalization and the building of new disciplines are integral. Social researchers are
in many ways the enablers of neoliberal governance and its hegemonic alignments. The
categories they build out of messy and ambiguous experiences of everyday life often
reflect prevailing political arrangements, and the causal relations they assign to people
and social relations in these categories, [] enable institutions to govern our everyday
lives in ways that fulfil the interests and desires of the institutions, and of the social
groups that design and manage them, but not the interests and desires of our societies
most socioeconomically, socially, and politically vulnerable groups. Thus social
sciences, while claiming to do impartial research, construct the conceptual practices of
power.18
Even counter-hegemonic knowledge production cannot escape the operations of
power. Viewing minority studies as unencumbered by power gravely eschews important
links between the rise of minority knowledge projects and the neoliberal reconfiguration
of power alignments between state, capital and academia, which have converted these
unprecedented forms of minority visibility into a non-redistributive appreciation of
difference, so that minority perspectives could be incorporated into an ever adaptive
hegemony without altering its structure.19 Indeed, western cultural archive operates in
ways allowing shifts and mutations to happen, sometimes quite radically, while keeping

16
Lisa Duggan: The Twilight of Equality?, p. 50; for the following see ibid.
17
Dean Spade: Normal Life.
18
Sandra Harding, Kathryn Norberg: New Feminist Approaches, p. 2009.
19
Roderick Ferguson: The Reorder of Things, p. 8.

6
its epistemological structure, modes of classifications and representations in place.20
This ability of western knowledge to diversify its content without changing its frame is
exactly where the rubber hits the road a key problem decolonial scholars confront.
One way of tackling the persisting hegemony of western knowledge and its ability to
expand itself by successfully absorbing and neutralising insurgent knowledges is by
looking at the historical concomitance between the rise of an array of new identity-based
social movements articulated by disenfranchised groups around race, indigeneity,
gender, sexuality, etc., and global capitals new attentiveness to and interest in
local/minority difference.21 As early as the mid 1940s, we find in Frederick Hayeks
writings, which would greatly influence the later forms of neoliberalism, the traces of the
superiority he bestows, in his economic and social philosophy, to particularity, to local
knowledge he views as always more valid and effective than the forms of codified
text-book-type knowledge that it is possible to introduce through planning.22 Stuart Hall
convincingly relates capitals new interest in particularity to the fact that globalized
neoliberalism cannot ensue without learning to work with and through difference: in
order to maintain its global position, capital has had to negotiate [...] incorporate and
partly reflect the differences it was trying to overcome. It had to try to get hold of, and
neutralize, to some degree, the differences. It is trying to constitute a world in which
things are different [] but the differences do not matter.23 Crucially, this new form of
economic power lives culturally through difference and [...] is constantly teasing itself
with the pleasures of transgressive Other, while at the same time absorbing and
neutralising, at least partially, disruptive difference. A major new contradiction is thereby
introduced into society: minority affirmation making substantial criticism of hegemonic
authority now also provides through its incorporation unprecedented opportunities to
power to rearticulate its hegemony.24
Notably, the academic institutionalisation of previously excluded minority knowledges
has given rise to new power relations within these fields, with new marginalisations.
This has been the case through the institutionalisation of intersectionality where

20
Linda Tuhiwai Smith: Decolonizing Methodologies.
21
Stuart Hall: The Local and the Global, Rod Ferguson: The Reorder of Things.
22
Mark Olssen, Michael Peters: Neoliberalism, Higher Education p. 317.
23
Stuart, Hall: The Local and the Global, p. 32; for the following quote see p. 31 (Other).
24
Roderick Ferguson: The Reorder of Things, p. 42.

7
racialized knowers women and queers of colour, have been marginalised in the very
spaces of knowledge and activism they have built through struggle.25 Other examples
are evidenced in indigenous and decolonial critiques of postcolonial studies.
Commenting on the distrust towards postcolonial studies among indigenous academics,
Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that the fashion of postcolonialism has become a strategy
for reinscribing or reauthorizing the privileges of non-indigenous academics because the
field of post-colonial discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out
indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns.26 Similarly, wary of
the politics of establishing colonial and postcolonial studies as a field, Walter Mignolo
stresses new forms of academic colonialism enabled by the opening up of new areas of
inquiry, which were initially a liminal and critical locus of enunciation for subaltern self-
representation.27 Threatened by the cultural empowerment of the marginal and the local
that these newly acquired, through struggle, speaking positions have generated,
discourses of power fought back with a double move of diversification and absorption.28
It comes hence as no surprise that counter-hegemonic knowledges might sustain
hegemonic operations through their incorporation. There is enough historical evidence
that counter-hegemony does not come with greater guarantees than does hegemony,
that it is not stable and secured.29 Admitting, as Ferguson urges us to do, the fact that
counter-hegemony is not merely a challenge to power but is also constitutive of it (given
its appropriation by and containment in the established circuits of power),30 does not
imply the impossibility for counter-hegemonic knowledges to unsettle hegemony, but the
impossibility of a seamless and stable distinction between what serves for hegemonic
and what serves for counter-hegemonic purposes.
Such understanding of counter-hegemonic as a counter-politic that does not come
with any built-in guarantee seems decisive for realistically practicing an un-disciplinary
critical intersectionality. Expanding intersectionality beyond the prevailing disciplinary

25
Cf. Umut Erel et al.: Depoliticisation of lntersectionality; Encarnacin Rodriguez: Decolonizing
Postcolonial Rhetoric; Jennifer Petzen: Queer Trouble; Fatima At Ben Lmadani, Nasima Moujoud: Peut-
on faire de lintersectionnalit; Sirma Bilge: Intersectionality Undone.
26
Linda Tuhiwai Smith: Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 24.
27
Walter Mignolo: Local Histories, p. 5.
28
Stuart Hall: The Local and the Global, p. 34.
29
Stuart Hall: The West and the Rest.
30
Roderick Ferguson: The Reorder of Things.

8
knowledge structures and opening it up to decolonial epistemologies must not overlook
the risks for these post-disciplinary efforts of, in turn, being absorbed and disciplined.
Post-disciplinarity might be a viable avenue, though one without guarantees, for
rearticulating a radical critique in the face of an ever expanding and adaptive hegemony
and rekindling a critical suspicion of institutionalisation.31 As the effects of
institutionalisation are neither total nor univocal, counter-hegemonic knowledge builders
must work the incoherencies and interstices of institutionalising processes and practices,
and remember that what is at stake is not a thematic inclusion, a content diversification
the add-and-stir approach incorporating minority issues as subject matter to extant
disciplines in their conventional frames, but an epistemic disobedience that would
change the terms of the conversation.32 In the context of the US, it is through epistemic
insurgency that academic space for racialized professors and for non-Western
epistemologies in areas hitherto monopolized by white professors and Eurocentric
epistemologies has been opened up. Founded in response to the demands of people
of colour, women and gay/lesbian movements, Ethnic/Women/Queer Studies, etc.
aimed not to produce a particular knowledge that will be added on in order to
supplement the social sciences and humanities today, but to produce a pluriversal
decolonial social science and humanities.33 Yet, once incorporated, it is not easy for
these programs to keep sight of their goal of decolonising social sciences; once the
aspiration for scientific recognition and legitimacy begins to spread, the risk of colluding
with the rationalities, goals and mechanisms of the neoliberal knowledge industry is real.

Sociologys troubled conversation with minority knowledges

Before addressing the double entanglement involved in the institutionalisation of

intersectionality (alongside other minority knowledges) hailing and failing, including and
neutralising in the same breath, a rapid glance at sociologys belated conversation with
minority knowledges brings valuable insight. While sociology is certainly not alone in
trading in counter-hegemonic knowledges in ways that politically neutralise them, a

31
Roderick Ferguson: The Reorder of Things, p. 37.
32
Lisa Lowe: Immigrant Acts (effects of institutionalisation), Walter Mignolo: Epistemic Disobedience.
33
Ramon Grosfoguel: Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies p. 84 (italic original).

9
specific focus on sociology is worthy for at least two reasons: because of sociologys
tenacity against knowledges from the margins (ethnic/postcolonial/women/gender/queer
studies) and zeal to reinstate the adequacy of its disciplinary structure and fundamental
categories; and because of the weight of the disciplinary work achieved on
intersectionality by some feminist sociologists, which effectively contributes to its
whitening.
The irruption of minority knowledges within western academia from the late 1960s
onward has given rise to disciplinary concerns and existential anxieties in several
established fields of knowledge. While these are not specific to sociology, because of
the latters mostly defensive and hermetic stance vis--vis minority generated
knowledges often derided as the studies,34 attending to sociologys conversation
with them offers valuable insight. As we shall see, what is at stake is rescuing sociology
in the face of minority knowledge production and incorporating difference in a way that
does not make any difference. More concerned by governing (in the Foucauldian sense
of conducting the conduct) critical knowledges from the margins and their producers
rather than taking seriously their critique, sociology seems impervious vis--vis its own
institutional location and fails to challenge the limits of its epistemic horizons of what it
can admit as sociological knowledge.35
A western invention, sociologys breakthrough occurred between the 1880s and
World War I an era which was also, as Seidman reminds us, the pinnacle of western
imperialism: the nations behind sociologys advent were also those forging colonial
empires of unparalleled scope and power. By World War I, 85 percent of the planet was
under western control. Curiously, empire, or the dynamics of colonialism and
imperialism, were untheorized by classical sociologists, [] were not incorporated into
[their] basic categories, models of explanation, and narratives of social development.36
In light of these historical facts, the current attempts by feminist sociologists to render
intersectionality more properly sociological, to recast it through classical sociology
should alert us.

34
Franois Dubet: quoi sert vraiment un sociologue?.
35
Les Back: Global Attentiveness.
36
Steven Seidman: Empire and Knowledge, p. 313 (italic original).

10
 The engagement of sociology with minority knowledges has mostly operated in terms
of content diversification without challenging its theoretical and conceptual architecture
or epistemic structure. The discipline has enriched the content of its discourse on the
social, following an add-on template assigning subfields to newly integrated minority
issues and transforming them into speciality areas within the existent structure (e.g. the
sociology of ethnicity/gender/sexuality/disability, etc.), without questioning its own
frames, foundational categories and core premises. An eloquent example is the
emergence of a sociology of sexuality in the post world war II, when the changes of the
1950s and the public turmoil of the 1960s forced sociologists to take sex into account.
This sociology approached sex as a speciality area like organizations, crime, or
demography and constructed it as a property of the individual, whose personal
expression was shaped by social norms and attitudes. [] The idea of a sexual
regime, of a field of sexual meanings, discourses and practices that are interlaced with
social institutions and movements, was absent.37 Not only has classical sociology
never examined the social formation of modern regimes of bodies and sexualities, but
its science of society contributed [] to the making of this regime whose center is the
hetero/homo binary and the heterosexualization of society. This means that both the
initial silence of sociology on minority issues and their later annexation as sub-field
specialities are part and parcel, in different ways, of an epistemic system which
produces and sustains minority oppression and marginalisation.
In an example rife with white paternalism, French sociologist Franois Dubet accuses
minority knowledge fields of invading French universities, after having disfigured the
scientific architecture of knowledge in American social science departments. He is
quick to reinstate the suitable boundaries of sociology: even if the sociologist manifests
the greatest empathy towards those he [sic] studies, his work obviously moves away
from indigenous analyses.38 This does not mean that indigenous people cannot
become sociologists; but to be accepted as sociologists they must abide by the white
standards of science, hence move away from alternative ways of generating knowledge.
They must engage in the legitimate idioms of various disciplines, speak their

37
Steven Seidman: Queer-ing Sociology, p. 169; for the following quotes see p. 167.
38
Franois Dubet: quoi sert vraiment un sociologue?, p. 88 (my translation); for the preceding pp. 78 f.

11
language, not just the dialects but also the theoretical paradigms.39 This obvious
moving away of the sociologist from indigenous analyses suggests that the latter
cannot be properly analytical, for they unscientifically voice emotion from the inside,
while the external empathy of the sociologist does not tamper with his science. The
affects, as well as the hierarchy between right and wrong affects are often deployed in
establishing knowledge hierarchies. Accused time and again of evoking feelings rather
than explaining the facts, ethnic studies is also undermined because of the types of
feelings it is believed to foster: minority resentment and blaming white people. Its
disavowal, along with other critical minority knowledges, as grievance-oriented identity
politics or victimhood discourses conceals what lies at the heart of white anxieties
about counter-hegemonic politics of knowledge production: non-white empowerment.40
This partly explains the weak commitment of critical white scholars to relinquishing
power. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson forcefully posits the real challenge for white
feminists is to theorise the relinquishment of power,41 which Fiona Probyn
complements by arguing that power can be given up in ways that end up being a taking
up of power.42 Tellingly, this devaluation of a radical minority perspective on the basis of
generating wrong affects can be observed tangentially in the influential work of race
scholars such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant. These authors blame the central
place given to structural racism in critical race scholarship, precisely in their critique of
Joe Feagins systemic racism approach and Eduardo Bonilla-Silvas colorblind racism,
for being politically self-defeating, for engendering unsuitable feelings such as deep
pessimism,43 without ever asking who they are unsuitable for. It can hardly be
maintained that due recognition of enduring forms of systemic racism is pessimistic for
racialized minorities suffering discrimination. This claim can be held only from the
perspective of white liberal antiracists anxious to build a viable position to inhabit without
disempowerment and guilt a white identity dissociated from white supremacy.

39
Nirmal Puwar: Fish in and out of water, p. 55.
40
Lisa Cacho: But Some of Us Are Wise (feelings/facts); Sirma Bilge: Why Do Critical Ethnic Studies
Matter? (non-white empowerment).
41
Aileen Moreton-Robinson: Talkin Up to the White Woman, p. 186.
42
Fiona Probyn: Playing Chicken at the Intersection.
43
Michael Omi, Howard Winant: Thinking through Race and Racism, p. 123; Howard Winant: Racism
Today, p. 759. I thank Xavier Robillard-Martel for drawing my attention to these writings.

12
 Interestingly, while academia increasingly thrives on difference, driven by
multicultural hunger,44 assimilationist pressure on different bodies entering the
academy is here to stay. As already argued, knowledge capitalism under neoliberalism
does not exclude or obliterate differences, but operates through them, while absorbing
and neutralising them. Academia incorporates black women and intersectionality as
material (bringing a new flavour to research projects, course material and publications),
and as actors joining academic ranks, without altering its structure. This incorporation
implies conformity, through pressures, incentives and sanctions, to disciplinary
conventions both in a theoretical and embodied sense: [t]hose who fail to conform and
defer to the authorities are considered too stubborn and radical because they refuse to
play the game of trying to be one of us through the silent manoeuvres of social
cloning.45
Sociologys interest in minority knowledges has been mostly self-serving, primarily
concerned with saving the universality of its core concepts in light of a postcolonial
(and other) politics of knowledge production.46 A case in point is the call made by
British sociologists Bob Carter and Steve Fenton for abandoning the concept of
ethnicity, which they equate with a dimension of social identity, and locate it outside the
power domains that matter to sociology, its so-called staples. In their critique of the
ethnicity paradigm in an over-ethnicised sociology, Carter and Fenton, who ironically
developed their international career by studying ethnicity, argue: But if we once
inhabited a sociology which understated social identities based on notions of ethnicity,
or underestimated nationalism, subordinating these things to class analysis, we now
have a class-free sociology in which ethnic and other social identities dominate our
thinking. [] We are seeking a sociology of power, the state, class relations and
inequalities, economic change and social institutions, which are the staples of sociology.
We want to show how this kind of classical sociology can be restated in a way that
incorporates the uses of social identities [], and how in some circumstances, the
ethnic categorisation of people becomes deeply embedded.47

44
Gayatri Spivak: In Other Words.
45
Nirmal Puwar: Fish in and out of water, p. 55.
46
Gurminder Bhambra: Sociology and Postcolonialism, p. 871.
47
Bob Carter, Steve Fenton: Not Thinking Ethnicity, p. 1.

13
 This excerpt exemplifies one way of sustaining the ascendancy of sociologys
Eurocentric epistemology and fundamental categories. By dissociating ethnicity (or any
attribute deemed particular) from structure and assigning it to merely cultural (social
identities), Carter and Fenton effectuate a key sociological division between structure
and culture (or system and social), which in turn allows them to proclaim critical
concepts such as ethnicity, race and gender obsolete for a sociological power analytics.
Confining critical theories and epistemologies to the particular, the non-systemic, keeps
the terms of the sociological inquiry intact, while the inclusion of hitherto overlooked
minority knowledges as material diversifies its content. These knowledges opened up
fecund roads to think about ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., but they could not initiate a
radical overhaul of sociology's general categories, as the discipline managed these
concepts (ethnicity, gender) to be viewed within mainstream sociology as being
constitutive of the social, not the system, as merely inflecting processes of the
system. Their critique has been assimilated into mainstream sociology, albeit
compartmentalised and reduced: ethnicity/gender/sexuality, etc. qua particulars to be
confined to the social, which is conflated with identity, thereby closing the loop of
essentialism. Accordingly, it can be argued that the accommodation of minority
knowledges within sociology also contributed to reducing the social to identity and the
challenge of gender and sexuality (and race) to issues of identity.48
This is all the more true for intersectionality as its normative understanding conflates it
with multiple identities. Critical of the dismissal of minority knowledges as identity
politics, Grosfoguel pinpoints the identity politics concealed behind universal
knowledge, and views minority knowledge projects as struggles against (white) identity
politics: The kinds of knowledges Ethnic Studies, Women Studies and Queer Studies
have produced challenge the racist/sexist/capitalist/patriarchal Western canon of thought
and epistemology. In opposition to white male hegemonic identity politics, which are
hidden as the norm within the process of knowledge production, these subalternized
subjects developed via a struggle against identity politics.49 If the significant criticism
made by feminist, queer, ethnicity and critical race scholars has irrefutably opened up

48
Gurminder Bhambra: Sociology and Postcolonialism, pp. 881 (inflecting processes, italics mine), 877
(issues of identity).
49
Ramon Grosfoguel: Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies, p. 84.

14
the social, it couldnt alter sociology's epistemic apparatus. To the extent that minority
knowledges do not challenge the accepted structure of sociology, they are liable to be
assimilated within its dominant categories thereby diminishing the force of any critique.
Yet, all minority knowledges did not go through an identical assimilation process. Unlike
feminist and queer theory, argues Bhambra, postcolonial critique appears harder to
absorb into the sociological mainstream as it is cast outside the usual conceptions of
modernity: its external location to a dominant understanding of the modern social
enables it to resist assimilation into the domain of the socio-cultural [] and open up
discussion of general categories. For her, the promise of postcolonialism to bring
about a revolution in thought so far missing from other challenges50 resides precisely in
this externality an argument dovetailing with the decolonial option, precisely the case
for political and epistemic de-linking made by Mignolo.51
Following in their footsteps, I contend that the political neutralising, co-optation and
disciplinary assimilation of intersectionality can be confronted by de-linking and
externality. The call for decolonising intersectionality through border epistemologies,
which subvert hegemonic perspectives from the cosmologies and ways of knowing of
the subaltern52 may seem pointless for some. Decolonial epistemological claims are
easier to make for knowledge fields that do not embrace post-positivist epistemologies
as explicitly as intersectionality scholarship does. For example, migration studies largely
eschew standpoint epistemologies and tend to sustain one of the most pervasive
myths of eurocentric social sciences: the myth of a neutral, universalist, objective point
of view.53 The decolonial challenge is hence trickier for intersectionality studies, for the
latter adheres to post-positivist epistemologies such as feminist standpoint theory and
poststructuralism (or at least claims to do so). It bears reminding that standpoint
epistemologies and methodologies were constructed in opposition to the all-powerful
dictates of rationalist/empiricist epistemologies and methodologies (positivism) in the
natural and social sciences and in public institutions such as the law, medicine, state

50
Gurminder Bhambra: Sociology and Postcolonialism, pp. 881 (critique), 880 (general categories),
877 (revolution in thought).
51
Walter Mignolo: Epistemic Disobedience.
52
Id.: Local Histories; Ramon Grosfoguel, Eric Mielants: Introduction.
53
Id.: Introduction, p. 187.

15
economic policy, and so forth,54 while poststructuralist strands provide a better grasp of
the power/knowledge nexus with regard to scientific knowledge production. A major
hurdle in the way of a decolonial intersectionality is how to persuade critical scholars
genuinely engaged in transformative knowledge that their work might serve, unwittingly,
hegemonic ends diversifying critically the content without troubling the rules of the
game. It is my hope that a greater comprehension of how initially counter-hegemonic
knowledge projects and practices actually collude with hegemonic goals will advance the
decolonising of knowledge. Next, I uncover some of these collusions and discuss an
array of whitening techniques that are absorbing intersectionality into Eurocentric
scientific archive.

Techniques of whitening

Whitening intersectionality does not refer to the race of intersectionality practitioners,

but to the ways of doing intersectionality that rearticulate it around Eurocentric
epistemologies. One does not need to be white to whiten intersectionality,55 as non-
white and colonial immigrant scholars who are ideologically co-opted by dominant
epistemologies also contribute to reproducing hegemonic knowledge.56 Disciplinarity is a
key tool for taming unruly knowledges and their producers from the margins, making
them fit into the established structures of western academia. Disciplines contain and
conduct intersectionality, yet they are not the unique source of whitening. As we shall
see below, ownership claims and revised genealogies also whiten intersectionality.
There is a widely accepted feminist truth claim on intersectionality, which is a
significant source of whitening. It asserts that feminists have theorized intersectionality
from many perspectives, that it was all in the air, in the inner effervescence of feminism
or gender studies.57 This claim operates two important shifts. First, by establishing as an
irrefutable truth that intersectionality has been theorized by feminists, that it is the
brainchild of feminism and by extension gender studies, it bypasses a foundational

54
Sandra Harding: Comment on Hekmans, p. 383.
55
Sirma Bilge: Intersectionality Undone, p. 413.
56
Ramon Grosfoguel, Eric Mielants: Introduction, p. 188.
57
Nina Lykke: Feminist Studies, p. 78 (perspectives), Kathy Davis: Intersectionality as Buzzword, and
Helma, Lutz: Coexisting Inequalities (in the air).

16
antagonism, the historical fact that intersectionality was developed by black women
activists and intellectuals against white-dominated feminism, as much as against the
male-dominated black liberation movement, against capitalism and heterosexism.
Branding intersectionality as the product of womens studies, without also situating it in
overlapping (Black) race discourse is a failure of intersectional historiography.58
Disturbingly, this claim has become normative feminist practice, pervading publications,
symposia, and course programs in feminist intersectionality studies or intersectional
gender studies. Examples of this appropriation, this common knowledge that
intersectionality has been theorised by feminists of all stripes, abound. Suffice it to cite
the recent comment of renowned feminist Nancy Fraser, that [S]econd-wave feminists
expanded the number of axes that could harbour injustice. Rejecting the primacy of
class, socialist-feminists, black-feminists, and anti-imperialists feminists also opposed
radical-feminist efforts to install gender in the same position of categorical privilege.
Focusing not only on gender, but also on class, race, sexuality and nationality, they
pioneered an intersectionist alternative that is widely accepted today.59
Second, by tying intersectionality genealogically to feminism and gender studies, this
truth claim facilitates eschewing race analyses in present-day intersectionality studies.
Whitened genealogies not only misrepresent the importance of race in the original
architecture of intersectional thought and activism, by minimizing it, but also contribute to
making race analysis optional in current scholarship. Many European academic feminist
circles interested in intersectionality seem to value a purified version of intersectionality
recovered from its exposure to race.60 Practicing intersectionality in ways that
foreground certain categories of analysis and intersections such as (white) gender and
class, and recently sexuality,61 while at the same time avoiding race, results in concrete
material opportunities for some. Indeed, tying intersectionality to gender studies, rather
than to postcolonial or critical race studies may operate a quasi monopolistic closure in
some contexts, serving academic careers of feminist and gender scholars in mostly
white-dominated fields, and restricting the access of non-white scholars from the less

58
Rachel Luft, Jane Ward: Toward an Intersectionality, p. 13.
59
Nancy Fraser: Fortunes of Feminism, p. 214.
60
Barbara Tomlinson: Colonizing Intersectionality.
61
Jennifer Petzen: Queer Trouble, p. 296.

17
white fields of postcolonialism, immigration, ethnicity and race. The expeditious ingestion
of intersectionality by white-dominated fields such as gender studies seems hence to
normalize a race-optional, even race-free, intersectionality, which ends up silencing
feminists of colour those who cannot avoid knowing they are raced subjects,62 while
securing white feminist appropriations of intersectionality.
The whitened genealogies of intersectionality tend to over emphasize the work of
white women, even when they acknowledge Black feminist founders, thereby blurring
the racial habitus that produced th[is] theoretical innovation.63 The devaluing of black
feminist contributions often borrows a language of scientificity and disciplinarity, which
brings to the fore the complicity of dominant ways of doing science in sustaining racist
exclusion and marginalization.
Disciplinarity contains, constrains and conducts intersectionality. Its horizons and
politics are structurally bound up and identified with Eurocentric knowledge, the modern
science. Despite substantial criticism made by critical race and decolonial scholars,
Eurocentric models of knowledge still rule social sciences,64 while the standard accounts
of the growth of modern science and its disciplines avoid asking questions from the
lives of peoples who suffered from that growth and from the associated European
expansion that made it possible and benefited from it.65 As such, modern science
cannot be dissociated from race, as [r]acism is inherent to modernity, both in the sense
that there is no modernity without colonialism and in the sense that modern states
become modern, are drawn into the modern systems of states, through race.66
It can be argued that social sciences continue the coloniality of power67 not only by
producing complicit knowledge with white/Euro-American hegemony by, for example,

62
Gail Lewis: Unsafe Travel, p. 883.
63
Rachel Luft, Jane Ward: Toward an Intersectionality, p. 13.
64
As Grosfoguel and Mielants point out: The production and subsequent dissemination of parochial
social scientific truths as universalist forms of knowledge throughout the rest of the world [] is
intrinsically interlinked with our western perspective, methodology, units of analysis, concepts,
abstractions or visualizations of national unity and social cohesion and (muted) self interests, in
nationalistic or personal (academic) form (Introduction, p. 186).
65
Sandra Harding: Comment on Hekmans, p. 385.
66
David T. Goldberg, Ramon Grosfoguel, Eric Mielants: Fields of Dreams, p. 271.
67
Developed by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the concept of coloniality of power captures the
historical continuities between the colonial and the colonially prompted conditions and lingerings of
ethnoracial hierarchies and domination (David T. Goldberg, Ramon Grosfoguel, Eric Mielants: Fields of
Dreams, p. 270).

18
furnishing ever more models and theories to global capital and states to govern minority
difference,68 but also by regulating and containing counter-hegemonic minority
knowledge production and dissemination. Hence, the geopolitics and body-politics of
knowledge that has shaped Western imperial expansion throughout five centuries69
continue to determine to a large extent the frames within which minority knowledges
contesting this supremacy are understood and consumed. Despite being called into
vigorous question by the anti-establishment movements of the 1960s and 70s, Western
man continues to persist as the archetypal figure for attaching agency to regulation
and lays the foundation for disciplining minority difference making its activation
concomitant with its regulation. This aspect of the discipline [] would find its most
sublime consummation in and around the U.S. ethnic and womens movements.70
If disciplinary division and confinement is inadequate to the task of representing and
comprehending intersectional identities, the nodal points [] marking the confluence of
ethnorace, class, gender, ability, and age,71 what about the interdisciplinary fields such
as women/gender studies and ethnic studies? Do they manage to avoid the pitfalls of
disciplinarity, its taming of insurgent knowledges? Alas, interdisciplinary fields do not
come with built-in immunity against neoliberal dilutions of radical knowledge politics;
their institutionalisation is subject to the same risks: institutionalizing such fields as
Ethnic Studies still contains an inevitable paradox: institutionalization provides a material
base within the university for a transformative critique of traditional disciplines and their
tradition separations, and yet the institutionalization of any field and curriculum that
establishes orthodox objects and methods submits in part to the demands of the
university and its educative function of socializing subjects into the state.72 Comparing
disciplinary boundaries to national borders, Golberg argues that normative commitment
to transdisciplinarity, advanced in the name and for the sake of the multicultural, can be
made analogous to the commitment to transnationality, the breaking down of national
borders. But just as transnationality may be prompted and harnessed in the interest of
the global capital and flexible accumulation, so multi- and transdisciplinarity may be

68
Ramon, Grosfoguel, Eric, Mielants: Introduction.
69
Walter, Mignolo, Madina, Tlostanova: Theorizing from the Borders, p. 209.
70
Roderick Ferguson: The Reorder of Things, p. 31.
71
David T. Goldberg: Introduction, p. 28.
72
Lisa Lowe: Immigrant Acts, p. 41.

19
licenced and muzzled by the academy seeking to rationalize costs, minimize operational
expenses, and control labor conditions.73 The decolonial path to intersectionality needs
to remain suspicious vis--vis interdisciplinary impulse and counter-hegemonic
knowledge claims, as they do not come with guarantees and can be harnessed and put
at the service of hegemony. The crucial point to keep in mind is that whitening forces
operate both through disciplines and interdisciplines.
One of the ways in which Eurocentric knowledge maintains its authority is by
assigning non-white bodies to particular, less theoretical, less universalisable forms of
knowledge. In the new order, non-whites are no longer reduced to a mere object of
knowledge produced by white scholars. Their knowledge production is now recognized,
if regulated by the principles of white science, though of lesser value and severely
limited to their own kind. While whites still have the authority to produce knowledge on
non-whites, the opposite is less valid. As Gayatri Spivak points out: If a [non-white]
person such as me de-anthropologises herself and reads the great texts of European
tradition in a way that does not resemble the general rational expectations way of
reading then she is punished.74 The current devaluing of black feminist intersectionality
for its assumed lack of theoretical maturity, proper methodology, generalizability, etc., is
a relevant example of this on-going white control of knowledge production and
validation.
A case in point is Sylvia Walbys ambitious intervention to develop intersectionality
theoretically an intervention encapsulating several problematic tendencies that
contribute to the academic whitening of intersectionality. For Walby, there is a dire need
to theorize [intersectionality] more fully which can be achieved through her own
synthesis of classical sociology with complexity theory. She believes there is a
challenge of intersectionality that must be addressed, but fails to explain what this
challenge is. Instead, she offers her own hybridization of complexity theory with social
theory [] to address the challenge of intersectionality. What she does is to position
canonical sociology, the tradition of social theory inspired by Marx and Weber rather
than that of Durkheim and Parsons, the forerunners of Luhmann at the centre of

73
David T. Goldberg: Introduction, p. 27.
74
Gayatri Spivak: Mapping the Present, p. 22.

20
intersectionality.75 This might be read as a modus operandi for how to do
intersectionality without black feminists. Reading Walbys lengthy considerations, one
cannot but wonder about the intended recipient of this theoretical elevation.
Intersectionality seems to have become here a pretext for correcting Luhmann and the
like, taken captive in a conversation among sociologists about grand social theory.
Despite Walbys claim that her task is to attend to intersectionality, time and again her
article suggests that her primary concern is disciplinary: to revise and refine sociology.
Her article aims to amend the concept of system in social theory using complexity
theory, and the route she takes is the tradition of social theory inspired by Marx,
Weber, and Simmel. Walby trades in intersectionality while pursuing the mission of
restoring sociologys grandeur, its all-encompassing explanatory frameworks.
Intersectionality merely channels the need for a paradigmatic shift in sociology. The
sociological inquiry supposed to tackle intersectionality proves in fact to be a dialogue
between social systems theory and complexity theory. What legitimizes such a
displacement and positions Walbys theoretical intervention as significant is the casting
of existent theory on intersectionality as void: Without any in-depth engagement with
black feminist theorisations of intersectionality, Walby does not hesitate to claim that
[w]hile there is a wealth of empirical material on these intersections in sociology and
other social sciences, their theorization remains difficult and contested.
Indeed, scarce black feminist sources referred to in Walbys article are only there for
genealogical purposes; they dont contribute in any way to the theoretical development
of intersectionality she lays out. Once the existent knowledge is conveniently deposited
to the inferior stratum of empirical material, there is ample room for the theoretical
whitening of intersectionality through mainstream sociology or other disciplines for that
matter. Her intervention typifies Tomlinsons argument that European social scientists
and philosophers dealing with the feminist concept of intersectionality deploy rhetorics of
racial hierarchy that depict a gulf between what they present as their own perspicacious
thinking and the collectivized and caricatured thinking that they attribute to
intersectionalitys originating black feminist scholars in the US. The undervaluing of

75
Sylvia Walby: Complexity Theory, pp. 466 (synthesis), 458 (Marx etc.); for the following quotes see
pp. 449 (Simmel), 450 (empirical material, italic mine).

21
black feminist theorisations of intersectionality is achieved by routinely disqualifying their
production as parochial, race-bound, poorly theorised, which then validates extracting
from them the valuable tool of intersectionality.76
Black feminist intersectionality is also dismissed by denying it any innovative
character, by constantly reminding that this is hardly a new idea,77 just a new jacket
for an age-old sociological theory: Intersectionality is a relatively new term to describe
an old question in theorization of the relationship between different forms of social
inequality. [] This is not a new issue in social theory [], since it lay at the heart of the
debates on the intersection of gender and class [] especially in dual systems theory
[], as well as other analyses of gender, ethnicity, and class [], but it has been given
a new inflection under the auspices of the concept of intersectionality.78 These
assertions achieve several things: first, they erase intersectionalitys insurgent roots and
embodied political positionalities, as articulated for example in the Combahee River
Collective Statement79 making it all about theory. Secondly, they obscure
intersectionalitys disruptiveness vis--vis disciplines and bound it tightly to established
social theory, making it all about sociology. Once intersectionality has been consumed
and regurgitated as the quintessential concern of social theory since the dawn of
sociology, it then becomes much easier to do intersectionality without any recourse to
black feminist thought. Walbys concern with rescuing sociology under the guise of
theoretical improvement of intersectionality dovetails with the disciplinary concerns and
endeavours of other sociologists and social scientists, such as German feminist
sociologist Axeli Knapp, who strives to transfer intersectionality into a broader
sociotheorical horizon which encompasses (white) feminist revisions of Adorno and
Horkheimer, and the theories of societalisation of Weber and Foucault.80
Given that ideological makeover and absorption techniques routinely speak the
language of scientificity, we need to be careful when minority knowledge fields, such as

76
Barbara Tomlinson: Colonizing Intersectionality, pp. 255 (European), 266 (extracting).
77
Kathy Davis: Intersectionality as Buzzword, p. 72.
78
Sylvia Walby: Complexity Theory, pp. 450 f.
79
Combahee River Collective : The Combahee River Collective Statement.
80
Gudrun Knapp: Intersectional Invisibility, p. 193. Other examples include, Kathy Davis: Intersectionality
as Buzzword; Nina Lykke: Feminist Studies; Hae Choo, Myra Ferree: Practicing Intersectionality in
Sociological Research. The latter call for practicing intersectionality sociologically. There are grounds
for wondering which epistemic horizons might be opened up by reversing the frame and calling for
practicing sociology intersectionally.

22
ethnic, postcolonial, women/gender/gay-lesbian/queer studies in which intersectionality
is increasing used to tackle interlocking power inequalities and domination, are charged
with lacking scientific rigor and having politicized curricula. The argument of deficient
scientificity is often bundled up with the question of methodology, which is entrenched in
disciplinarity. Kimberl Crenshaw pinpoints this with sharp humour: One question that
has been asked is whether intersectionality will develop a methodology. I sometimes
call this the will intersectionality settle down and get a real job? question. Implicit in this
query is the assumption that intersectionality as currently understood is a good
candidate on paper but without a usable methodology it has no ready-to-work skills.81
In the following, I discuss three other whitening tendencies that contribute to the
erasure or trivialization of race in intersectionality scholarship: denial, reductionism and
dissociation. These discursive strategies are not mutually exclusive and can overlap or
interact.
In the first strategy, the relevance of race is denied. As already mentioned, this
strategy is particularly pervasive in European scholarship on intersectionality, which
shows adherence to Europes prevailing denial of race and racisms and replicates it in
its propensity to declare that the category of race does not have any real traction in
European contexts, except Britain.82 In their efforts to establish a European-inflected
intersectionality, these scholars aspire to free intersectionality from the race-bound
frameworks forged by US scholars of colour and repackage it for universal
consumption, which is in tune with the current hegemony of post-identity politics
feeding on the political myths of posts (post-raciality, post-feminism).83
Declaring race an irrelevant category also leads to the elision of structural power and
reduces racism to a problem of personal deviance of a few bad apples, when it does
not eschew racism altogether, blaming subordinated groups for their internal cultural
defects. This is the case for instance with the academic paradigms such as cultural
pluralism and culture of poverty, which have been instrumental in concealing racism,
blaming the victims and producing perverse public policies that emphasize the problem

81
Kimberl Crenshaw: Postscript, p. 223.
82
Barbara Tomlinson: Colonizing Intersectionality, p. 256.
83
Gail Lewis: Celebrating Intersectionality?, pp. 256 f. (race-bound); Kimberl Crenshaw: Postscript, p.
224 (consumption).

23
with transforming the culture and behaviour inside the discriminated communities rather
than on changing the racist structures and culture of the society.84
In the second strategy, race is equated with non-whiteness and whiteness is left out.
Indeed, the prevailing theorisation of intersectionality considers only non-whiteness as
the racial modifier of gender, sexuality, class, and so on.85 Different axes of power
under consideration, such as gender and class, or sexuality and disability, etc. are seen
as inflected by race only when the latter signifies non-whiteness. This removal of
whiteness from the scope of the race component of intersectionality enables race-free
analyses to claim intersectionality, in which gender and class function as structures and
experiences unfettered by race (whiteness). Not accounting for how whiteness inflects
gender, sexuality, class, and so on also reinforces the impression that race is optional in
intersectional analytics.86 Such a removal is not inconsequential in epistemological
terms: framing whiteness outside intersectionality legitimizes a broader epistemic
universe in which the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of white
people travel invisible and undisturbed as race-neutral phenomena over and against the
racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of people of color.87
In the third strategy, whiteness is taken into account but only as an identity
dissociated from white racial power structures. To understand how whiteness is taken
into account in a way that does not help dismantle white supremacy, a turn to critical
whiteness studies (hereafter CWS) is useful, as the field is replete with inopportune
dissociations of whiteness from structural racial privilege, as evidenced by the following
excerpt: Social problems like unequally distributed resources, class privilege, irrational
prejudice, and tyrannical bureaucracy which we associate with whiteness are just that
associated with whiteness []. They are not essential to whiteness itself, any more than
laziness and enslavement are essential to blackness.88 Although the contemporary
archive of scholarship studying white racial formation is voluminous and heteroclite, the
field of CWS tends to describe its project as being devoted to studying and dismantling
whiteness from a white standpoint, thereby emphasizing the self-conscious analysis of

84
Ramon Grosfoguel, Eric Mielants: Introduction, p. 184.
85
Devon Carbado: Colorblind Intersectionality, p. 823.
86
Sirma Bilge: Intersectionality Undone.
87
Devon Carbado: Colorblind Intersectionality, pp. 823 f.
88
Annalee Newitz: White Savagery and Humiliation, pp. 149 f.

24
whiteness from an antiracist white perspective. By stressing the white outlook, CWS
troublingly excludes from its archive and genealogies the longstanding contribution of
non-white scholars to knowledge production on whiteness. By articulating the CWS
project around the idea of epistemological reversal, i.e. studying whites in their
particulars in a way minorities have been studied, dominant genealogies of CWS duck
the long history of studying white racial identity and power in Ethnic Studies,89
particularly the knowledge on whiteness and white power produced by non-white
scholars. Disturbingly, this disaffiliation is achieved while various texts deemed
foundational to the new field of whiteness studies coalesce as a kind of ethnic studies
formulation.90 The ways the scholarly archive establishes CSW as a discrete academic
field are indicative of the appropriation of minority tools without due recognition, which is
also manifest, as we have seen, in intersectionality.
Deeply implicated in the CWSs formulations of whiteness, whether as a shifting class
identity or internal minority, intersectionality is also bound up with the fields elisions and
erasures. Praised for offering vital explorations of the intersectionalities of whiteness,
its disaggregation, and particularization with the aim of breaking down the
monolith,91 CWS uses intersectionality to analyse whiteness in its internal diversity. Yet
it does so in ways that do not trouble prevalent disaffiliations of white identities from
white-dominated power structures, from the practices and institutions maintaining white
supremacy, which then informs the ways whiteness gets articulated in intersectionality
scholarship. Of course, the onus of this dissociation does not rest solely on the
(mis)uses of intersectionality and has been supported by some influential race scholars
such as Howard Winant who does not hesitate to ask: is it possible to view white
identities more positively, to see whiteness in terms of difference perhaps, but not in
terms of racial domination, supremacy or hierarchy? or to affirm that understanding the
present racial system requires us to move beyond concepts of white supremacy.92
The use of intersectionality to disaffiliate white identity from white power also
establishes troublesome equivalences between oppressions. In their claim to look at the

89
Robyn Wiegman: Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity, p. 300 (In: Futures of).
90
Robyn Wiegman: Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity, p. 123 (In: Boundary).
91
Melissa Steyn, Daniel Conway: Introduction, p. 285, italic mine.
92
Howard Winant: Behind Blue Eyes, p. 73, and id.: The New Politics of Race, p. xii.

25
intra-categorical diversity of whiteness through an intersectional lens, CWS scholars
often end up endorsing a paradigm of inter-categorical equivalence which flattens
differences and treats the axes of power as inter-changeable. These problematic
tendencies are rife in the analyses of white trash a coveted object of inquiry in the
field of CWS. A case in point is White Thrash: Race and Class in America.93
While it is easy to adhere to the argument that in a country so steeped in the myth of
classlessness, the term white trash is a useful tool to unpack the ways in which [r]ace
is used to explain class, but class stands out as the principle term here, precisely
because whiteness is so rarely connected to poverty in the U.S. imaginary, their claim
that class oppression of poor whites is also a racial oppression is problematic. By
asserting that white trash is not just a classist slur its also a racial epithet that marks
out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves, Wray and Newitz
(re)articulate white trash as being not only classist but also racist, thereby undoing their
own claim that in a society dominantly viewed as classless, white trash, as allegory,
speaks the unspeakable class domination through a language of race. The reframing of
white trash as being also about racial oppression draws legitimacy and authority from
intersectional thinking, all the while collapsing some of its central tenets: namely,
attending to the structural underpinnings of the racial order, and not treating them as
analogous or inter-changeable. Vaguely gesturing to the potentially problematic nature
of their comparison, Wray and Newitz nonetheless end up by erasing structural
differences constitutive of blackness and whiteness and treat them as analogous
positions: Because white trash is a classed and racialized identity degraded by
dominant whiteness, a white trash position vis--vis whiteness might be compared to a
racial minority position vis--vis whiteness. The laudable task of particularising
whiteness, exploring its internal intersectionalities might, hence, work clearly against the
dismantling of structures sustaining white racial privilege one of the stated objectives
of critical whiteness studies, by trivializing them.

Conclusion

93
Matt Wray, Annalee Newitz: Introduction; for the following quotes see pp. 1 (myth), 8 (U.S.
imaginary), 1 f. (racial epithet), 5 (white trash).

26
Counter-hegemonic knowledge projects do not come with built-in guarantees against
hegemonic recuperation; they can sustain hegemonys operations through their
incorporation. Intersectionality is currently undergoing a process of academic
incorporation and disciplining, which makes it collude with neoliberal knowledge
governance and the management of neutralized difference in our postracial times. Once
a subjugated knowledge, in the sense defined by Foucault as a whole series of
knowledges that have been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently
elaborated knowledges: nave knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges,
knowledges that are below the required level of erudition and scientificity,
intersectionality is now being valued by the institutions of science. What depoliticises
intersectionality, above all, are scholarly aspirations to get intersectionality consecrated,
entrenched in the Euro-American scientific archive. The pursuit of scientific recognition,
authority and legitimacy, is at odds with the pursuit of social justice, as Foucault
cautions, we should be asking the question, asking ourselves, about the aspiration to
power that is inherent in the claim to being a science.94

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