The White Man's World

"Schwarz basically picks up the story of decolonisation. He and Hall have worked together very closely as historians. The new imperial historians are part of a collective and their work intersects with each other’s. What Schwarz does in White Man’s World is explore the concept of white masculinity and what it meant to be a white man, from the middle of the 19th century. He’s almost beginning where Hall’s ends, but he goes right through to decolonisation. He starts his analysis with Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, and then goes back in time and works back to it. He talks about Powell as having a particular identity of racial whiteness that he’s invoking in that speech and through his invocation of “a quite ordinary man”, who can only be understood as white by the audience. Schwarz argues that even though Powell himself is not really a supporter of Empire – he’s a Little Englander who basically wants decolonisation to happen – he can only really exist as a politician because of this century of imperialism that’s come before him. Schwarz looks at the settler colonies as spaces in which whiteness is particularly forged: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa. He argues that whiteness as an identity became particularly solidified and coherent in those spaces: settler-colonialists really do have that colonial ‘other’ very close to them. Schwarz argues that this is imported back to Britain. By the 1960s, whiteness becomes a defensive identity. It starts to be seen as something under attack, with politicians commonly using language like ‘swarms’ of migrants or invoking the idea of Britain being “deluged” or “swamped”. A lot of humanities academics approach the idea of racial identity as a construction. I’ve had conversations with students, who are initially quite clear that races are biologically specific. When you start to talk to them, it’s easy to get them to see this isn’t true at all. There’s no way of definitively sorting people into racial categories, because race is constructed. It’s interesting. When I was working on my book, I capitalised “Black”. I had a conversation with the publisher about whether I should capitalise “white” as well, because I would be talking about it as an identity, and in some ways that makes sense. There’s a whole conversation in America about whether this is appropriate. But on the other hand, I always feel like it looks a bit white supremacist to put “White” with a capital W. In the end, I’ve got “Black” with a capital B and “white” with a lower-case w. I’m sure no-one reading the book will notice. But it’s a funny thing. if you accept that one of these identities is constantly constructed and questioned and talked about you do have to accept the other one is too. It’s logical."