Citation

Vautier E. Patterns Prejudice 2009; 43(2): 122-141.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00313220902793880

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Vautier's article is a case study of a particular moment in the 1997 election campaign in the United Kingdom when a Conservative politician, Nicholas Budgen, was accused of 'playing the race card' during a House of Commons debate in the run-up to the May general election. Here, as in other moments when this political game is discussed, the term ‘race card’ appears in both political commentary and in academic analysis as a taken-for-granted term. Its use as an unquestioned general descriptor overlooks how these moments of scandalous politics work to replay and reinforce, albeit with contemporary adjustments, longstanding ideas of national belonging and so-called racial truths. Commonsense understandings and representations of racial difference work to sustain racialized anxieties, addressed here as white anxieties. White anxiety refers to the (often implicit and routine) fear, resentment and indignation that people can experience within white-dominated societies, such as Britain, in response to imagined displacement by those identified as racially or ethnically different. Election campaigns are important moments when issues of national identity, nation and belonging are invoked as voters are asked to think about how, and by whom, the nation should be managed. Politicians, with the complicity and the separate efforts of the media, often marshal white anxieties by reinforcing notions of difference in speeches and debates over multiculturalism, immigration and scarcity with regard to resources such as jobs, housing and health services. These themes also sustain whiteness as the naturalized cultural capital of belonging and citizenship. Election campaigns, in terms of both official and unofficial politics and media participation are discursive spaces that operate to sustain commonsense notions of racialized difference and otherness. Taken-for-granted entitlements are posited by some as under threat with Whites as potential losers of material and symbolic resources. The aim is to bring the discourses that marshal and sustain such anxieties into sharper view. The analysis of this case study illustrates racialized discourses that are relevant to a range of contexts, not least to more recent events and campaigns in British politics in which similar narrative tropes are deployed, including, for example, the frequent references to so-called bogus asylum-seekers, post-7/7 attempts to link terror to cultural difference, and the intermittent calls for further immigration limits by both the press and politicians in recent years.