Consuming Race

by Ben Pitcher

From the rise of Nordic noir to a taste for street food, from practices of natural gardening to the aesthetics of children's TV, contemporary culture is saturated with racial meanings. By consuming race we make sense of other groups and cultures, communicate our own identities, express our needs and desires, and discover new ways of thinking and being. This book explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption. Ranging across the terrain of popular culture, and finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, it offers fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives. Consuming Race provides an accessible and highly readable overview of the latest research and a detailed reading of a diverse range of objects, sites and practices. It gives students of sociology, media and cultural studies the opportunity to make connections between academic debates and their own everyday practices of consumption.

Genres: Society

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Antonomasia]

PART II, Topic-specific chapters

3) Ethnic appropriateness: white nostalgia and Nordic noir
How I read the book in the first place, starting with this and chapter 4: I had searched Sainsburys Ebooks for "Nordic Noir" hoping to find some special offer on crime novels, and this book was in the results about half way down the page. It was a while since I impulse-purchased an interesting-looking academic text, something I often want to do but usually refrain from - and went off to find where it was cheapest. The chapter has 3 major themes.

- "Against cosmopolitan consumption". It used to be cool and right for white middle class people to have lots of Indian jewellery and fabrics, African art and so on - I remember shops full of it. Then at some point it started looking a bit bad taste. I started to be aware of this shift via discussions I didn't then fully grasp about Paul Simon's Graceland album, and later criticisms of other dadrock stars going to Africa. I didn't trouble myself with this because my tastes gravitated of their own accord to things that were very British and Northern or Eastern European. Given that I had rather enjoyed the sound of reggae, but never even tried to get into it - so this gravitation wasn't 100% aesthetic - I now wonder how much my taste was subtly influenced in other directions. I've always had a preference for culture from colder places; 80s reggae I enjoyed as a kid I saw as a London thing. In the last couple of years I became aware of the wide use of the term 'cultural appropriation' in online discussions, especially American ones. Pitcher pulls all these bits and pieces together into a trend along with impact of environmental concerns, shop local etc. I enjoy the stuff I like, and it's usually only out of a sense of duty that I, for instance, read a book from a country I wouldn't want to go to if I could. But I still think Pitcher makes a good and important case for 'cosmopolitan consumption' and being open to other cultures/races/ add preferred term, via cultural products as part of an open mindedness towards people and ideas in general. (I've realised I am tired of immigrant fiction about America but interested when it's about Britain - local diversity appeals. The way I've always had enough of America has this year forced me to accept people saying they've had enough of writing etc by white men. To those people, the white men, with a few exceptions, seem excessively ubiquitous and out of tune with their concerns in the way American culture, opinion, internet posts are for my personal experience.) Different corners of the internet appear to have different attitudes: cultural appropriation is commonly decried in some places, but in the most right-on corners of Goodreads, reading African literature is de rigueur - among people who wouldn't dream of wearing a war bonnet to a fancy dress party. This indicates that the balance may be shifting back towards the author's suggested 'cosmopolitan consumption' as regards literature and the arts, although people have to be careful to say the right thing. Whereas in terms of many material products environmental concerns, such as buying local and/or second hand remain. (Pitcher is a bit too down on environmental causes as being anti-diversity, as seen again in chapter 7 - he's failed to separate things that could be separated.)

- 'Chromatic nostalgia' This is one of the most potentially wanky sections of the book. Does more 'culturally appropriate' monochrome clothing (as contrast with the hippy era) and a trend for minimalist white interiors - with particular reference to The White Company - imply that its consumers on some level want to escape cultural diversity in the street? At some point - can't remember if it's this chapter, Pitcher notes that those who most frequently cry 'cultural appropriation' are white rather than the 'owners' of the culture. I've certainly seen exceptions online: Asian Indian American criticisms of commercialised white-girl-dominated yoga; Native American criticisms of fancy dress outfits; Saami tired of Finns using their costumes inaccurately in tourist displays - but can recall more examples of people making the accusation on behalf of other cultures, nearly always in a US context.
I find white furniture and carpets silly because they're hard to keep clean, but at some point certainly bought into the (perhaps 90s and later) Mitfordian snobbery that white bathroom fittings and textiles were good whereas coloured towels etc were a taste faux-pas. That may be part of the trend Pitcher describes, but for me (and no doubt other contemporaries) it's also a differentiation-from-parents thing - escaping all those odd shades of 70s and 80s bathroom fittings. I found the idea that white fabrics represented nostalgia for a whiter society fundamentally odd, because they suit people with darker skin best. Though I wonder if some readers will find themselves quietly thinking, 'um, actually, yeah', or 'I know someone like that'. The absence of technology in the described vintage-styled photos of 'aspirational' catalogues struck a loud chord with me, however. Pitcher adds vintage trends to this mooted 'retreat to whiteness'.
My own idea of the mid-century past includes immigrant people because my grandparents were immigrants. And my daydream picture of a longer-ago past isn't entirely white either, probably thanks to two 1980s British Robin Hood TV series. For me the absence of technology and its ever-faster changes is a huge part of an interest in vintage things (as for several other people I've known who share those tastes and a certain luddism) - but I've only knowingly met one vintage fan who had racist tendencies, for whom it was possible to see a taste for all aspects of the past, bad ones included. I do agree with the theory that for some women, vintage implies a simpler, less stressful (albeit less powerful) role - but it's not like that for all individuals. You may, for instance, have female ancestors who ran successful businesses as widows, or were pioneering career women. Obviously these are only personal anecdotes, demonstrating exceptions, not a full refutation of the theory.

- Nordic noir
I think Pitcher may be making a significant error in bracketing Nordic Noir with a nostalgia for [ethnic] whiteness. The casual impression, including that I've seen repeatedly from right wing commenters on UK newpaper websites, is that the Scandinavian countries are very accepting of immigration and are anti-racist. The most enthusiastic viewers of Scandinavian TV dramas - which are in any case shown on BBC Four - appear to be Guardian reader types. And putting a few show names into the new YouGov consumer profiler supports this general impression. It is only when one gets more closely acquainted with Nordic cultural products that the societies' higher degree of casual racism than in urban Britain becomes apparent - and even then the books and shows are made from a viewpoint that's highly critical of it.
Like the way Japan was cool in the 80s and 90s, Nordic in the 2010s is one of those media things. There's no logic in a statement quoted from a Mariella Frostrup article than Scandinavian produce is more local to Britain than the formerly trendy Tuscan stuff. Similar geographical distance. Although for her it's an ancestral culture. Though I do think the Nordic trend is a retreat from the hardship and mistakes of the financial crisis and austerity - welfare states and public services that work, even if they aren't as secure as they once were.
For me personally, having been interested in it 12+ years ago, before it was a trend outside Ikea, it was about a feeling of being partly foreign, from somewhere 'over there', but rejecting the specific culture of relatives I didn't get on with. (Personal family factors are, I think, underrated in understandings of why people reject an ancestral culture; I've met quite a few other people who've done it.)
The author also refers to snow scenes on the covers of crime novels set in spring and summer, as a selling point - and mentions that Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, an academic whose opinions on those novels I've a lot of time for, says not enough has been made of this in analysis.
To me this seems more obviously a nostalgia for pre-climate change weather ('proper' winters - albeit we've had a few snowy winters in the UK recently) than a tenuous symbolism about race. Neglect of this idea would also be in keeping with the author's relative negativity about environmental concerns.


4) Engaging whiteness: black nerds
I don’t know the topic even a quarter so well as the previous one but the discussion felt kind of superficial apart from a few useful ideas. A significant theme is about “appropriateness” in pop culture being policed, and a belief that enjoying products from a different culture shouldn’t have to be any kind of betrayal. (Since reading this chapter I watched several trailers for the film Dear White People, and the characters’ taste-policing about TV shows in those is just what the author is getting at. The movie/trailers also seemed particularly American, angrier and more separatist, nothing to do with the British melting-pot experience above.) The UK black nerd subculture briefly described here includes a fusion of things, especially vintage stuff from the late 70s to early 90s, that are typically labelled ‘white’ and ‘black’. I find other people’s nostalgia sources fascinating - here especially the realisation that for someone my age with black heritage, things that were relatively peripheral for me, like Five Star or Desmond’s may be a lot more significant.

5) The taste of race: authenticity and food cultures
This was a bit blah, though it reminded me that I was secondary school age before I noticed that [Associated British Foods brand] Blue Dragon products weren’t actually from China. Sociology-wank appeared when too much store was set by the idea of physically swallowing food from another culture – which clearly doesn’t trouble people who are a bit racist but will eat Indian or Chinese takeaways. The discussion of food as a service industry was on more solid ground: as employment for people finding it hard to get a job elsewhere due to discrimination and/or language barriers, as something which can economically provide advancement , or a way of being stuck on the lowest rungs - some discriminatory well-off white people are more than happy to be served food by an immigrant, but wouldn’t like them as a colleague or neighbour. The successive trends around ‘Indian’ restaurants were interesting to see gathered in one place: to see the currently visible urban ones described, such as the push to more country or region specific cuisine (where once a Bangladeshi restaurant would have called itself Indian), and polished interiors, whilst some vintage enthusiasts are knowingly nostalgic for the old-style flock wallpaper, tandoori and madras menus, which could be a market especially in large cities. Some of the most interesting ideas: 'Authenticity' as a necessary idea for many people to organise culture around, but the definition of which in any particular form or subculture frequently changes. Why do critiques always assume the consumer is white? [IMO: Very valid question in some large cities with mixed populations. But in smaller towns, they most likely are.]


6) Race and children: from anthropomorphism to zoomorphism
There are plenty of things one can find to be glad about re. not having kids - but not having to be subjected to irritating children's TV programmes wasn't high on the list before I read this chapter.
The author must be around my age, and also had a pair of dungarees with a gollywog on the front as a toddler - not really taboo in late 70s Britain, and like me he didn't know it was offensive, nor were our parents racist. (I always assumed it was a kind of teddy bear, and being from a sheltered environment - and a school that was so tough on racism I only heard any racist epithet used twice in my entire time there, one of those being followed by a rare immediate suspension for the culprit, and the other as a reclaiming by a kid from the relevant background - didn't know it was anything to do with people until I was well into secondary school and found out via some broadsheet newspaper feature.)
The first half of the chapter, though, is about Red Indians / Native Americans in kids' toys and stories through the twentieth century. A lot of it's fairly obvious stuff, and very evidently written in and about a country where it doesn't relate back to a resident population, a context the author unfortunately doesn't comment on, nor on the import of American racist stereotypes via toys (also of course relevant to golliwogs) and any similarities or differences from British Imperialism. The chapter would need a bit of rewriting for the North American market. Interesting to see it noted that the hippies of the 60s and 70s, who embraced American Indian influenced spirituality, would have grown up playing cowboys and indians.
The second half is about recent kids' preschool-age TV programmes, the only one of which I knew of before was Teletubbies. Basically these shows feature small mixed groups of anthropomorphised creatures, in which a character voiced or played by an Afro-Caribbean man tends to be a shorthand for ethnic diversity, and is given positive-stereotyped personality traits such as being laid-back and a good dancer. Someone from a relevant background would be better placed to comment on whether these bothered or constrained them or their kids - but worse role stereotyping in these shows appears to be in terms of gender. Is it because of American media influence that the sole non-white character in these shows is almost always coded as black, whilst there are many more South Asian people in the UK as a whole? Or perhaps it reflects the mix in the London neighbourhoods where people involved in the productions live.
(A favourite book of mine in childhood was Richard Scarry's Busy Busy World, which those who don't still love it tend to condemn for its national stereotyping. Many of these are harmless silly things, where the British equivalent would be being reserved, drinking tea and wearing bowler hats. The constant use of national costumes for most of the animal characters placed them at a historical distance in a way that current TV series don't - people from those places on the news etc clearly didn't wear those old-fashioned clothes - and at least for a child with a clear sense of history, separated them from expectations of real people now. I just remember thinking that people from those countries might have the relevant animal as a pet (eg that Canadians might have pet raccoons because there was a Mountie raccoon).


7) Animals and plants: natural gardening and non-native species
Ooh, this was an annoying one. The author basically argues that we should chuck out the idea of invasive flora and fauna species because it creates a corollary for racists who don’t want immigrants or their immediate descendants here. He quotes a couple of idiots from far right forums and blogs who use red squirrels as an analogy for white people. Not all academic disciplines have to follow identical principles just because a few extremists misuse ideas. I don’t think he has any background in the environment or ecology because he fundamentally doesn’t get some concepts, such as the destructiveness of certain introduced plants – and he’s one of those people who sees the environment as something for humans, rather than humans as bad for the environment. The latter is simply one of those great big unbridgeable intellectual / aesthetic divides, and I’m on the other side from him. One of the ideas most important to me personally about the environment and population is about letting go of the idea of who will be here after you, that it doesn’t matter what background or culture or colour or whatever they are from. Which perhaps feels natural given that I am not all 'from here' myself. And I don’t see why that can’t coexist – as I’m sure it does for plenty of other lefties - with a love of the natural environment and its historical roots. Bracketing that love of historic nature as partly mystical makes it possible to enjoy it more on a personal level but understand the realistic limits for others; for instance, I don’t think rewilding would be fair on farmers in most parts of a crowded island, although it appeals to me individually.


8) Stories about race: knowledge and form
- Brief discussion of new media anti-racism which says it's mostly about individual celebrities' conduct rather than structural racism. Sounds like he has only been reading certain obvious Twitterstorms rather than Tumblr and blogs.
- Highlights hit novels such as White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island as a way for readers to feel more comfortable with other cultures who live alongside them, and fill in the gaps for those of us whose late-twentieth-century schooling dealt with the problem of British imperialism by never mentioning it. Half obvious, but a good point, and a trend I've participated in.
- Elsewhere, in the true stories section, he posits memoirs by women from Muslim countries as a publishing trend which "reinforces Orientalist stories about Eastern patriarchy", and where women's stories become an instrument of foreign policy. However, to quote British political theorist Bhiku Parekh from an interview in Balti Britain, 'multiculturalism doesn't mean tolerating obnoxious cultural practices'. It's one of those issues where you're probably always stepping on someone's toes, and so the best solution is for these women to be able to define what they want and for the culture to adapt.
- An issue Pitcher mentions, which is dealt with in more detail in Balti Britain is the idea of a profound disconnection between Muslim and Western cultures over the interpretation of images and texts and what are appropriate responses to them, and the question over how real this is - and that the actions of extremists are popularly taken to represent all Muslims.
- Finally, there's a critique of The Wire which I daresay has been hashed out many times by fans. Whether certain characters - especially Omar - are progressive representations, whether they're only called that because it's what viewers want to find. And if the show is regressive and stereotypical because it still shows African American criminals and poor neighbourhoods. Pitcher considers that the show has set itself up as a state of the nation novel-equivalent, but that doesn't mean it is profound or insightful or all-encompassing. I've never watched it - or wanted to - so can't quite comment. However there's a slightly peevish tone here which seems to delight in contrarianism for its own sake, and which doesn't cite relevant others - okay in blogs, but one expects a little more of academics writing referenced books. This was still a very interesting text for a reader who doesn't follow academic sociology closely.

[Antonomasia]

PART I
This is a book with some amazingly refreshing ideas in its general chapters, but weaknesses in the sections about specific themes. The ideas may not be so novel to a recent sociology graduate as they are to me, but they - and the approachable, non-aggressive tone of writing - are a hugely welcome change from the blog and online newspaper dichotomy of SJW identity-politics-by-numbers v. right-wing reactionaries.

Whilst conscious of a post a few months ago by a GR friend who found a sociology book too jargonised, it's hard for me to say how others might find this book. I've used sociology theory in other subjects, but never formally studied it, and found this an easy read but obviously not popular non-fiction. At any rate, Ben Pitcher is no Judith Butler - and unlike a Paul Gilroy book I've had for a while and never got more than 5 pages into, this was something I could pick up casually (I could have read it in 2 or 3 days but didn't as I knew I'd want to write lots about it... I figured I'd write a two-post review one day, but still didn't expect it to be this.)

I'm not sure this book could have come from anywhere but London. This year I've read a handful of British books related to multiculturalism, written mostly 2000-2010, and the consensus between them is that nowhere is great at multiculturalism, but Britain is probably better at it than any other Western country; grade C perhaps, at least for some cities. The author mentions he got the ideas for this book whilst looking after his kids at playgrounds in South London - he's perhaps too embedded to realise how unusual it is, to describe what the location means for his writing: this is the intense melting pot of Zadie Smith novels, Attack the Block, the Peter Grant series, majority mixed-race schools. When Wikipedia says "half of all British African-Caribbean men in a relationship have partners of a different ethnic background, as do one-third of all British African-Caribbean women," this is where a lot of those families live. This is a world away from those American blogs that advocate a kind of activist separatism. There are things in this book to which it's easy to imagine one of those US commenters, or someone from a more divided area of the UK saying, “But we’re far from post-racial yet”. There are a few occasions when Pitcher perhaps isn’t sensitive enough to those different places and experiences, to a Britain, never mind an international context, that’s multi-speed.

Main ideas:
- "Race" is used in this book in lieu of a better term, to mean things that we might also classify as ethnicity, culture (the word I'm in the habit of using), international region or nationality and how they are reflected in cultural and consumer products. It's noted that "race" is a highly charged word, and that "ethnicity" is coming to be used as "race" once was - it was supposed to be a non-essentialist term based on culture, not biology but has ended up being used on forms where people tick things like Black African, British Asian, Chinese, White British - and of course the word "ethnics" can now be used in a snide manner.

- Race in this sense, whilst socially constructed, is about a lot more than racism and shouldn't have to be a pejorative. The essence of it is that people have historically divided themselves into groups and created cultures and sets of characteristics. Pitcher opens with the point that "race isn't going away"; which pithily makes an interesting point I'd been thinking about; at various times I've been that kind of 'Imagine' liberal who on some level feels and hopes it will. But even without racism people would define themselves by cultures. There isn't a whole lot of racism here about the Spanish or Italians, say, but they have distinct histories, art, attributes, and are happy with that, and most other people wouldn't want those cultures to be lost.

-'Race' / culture is everybody's business and whilst it's good to be aware of the backgrounds we are bringing to a discussion, people shouldn't feel forbidden - as they sometimes do in left-wing and academic circles - from discussing something which isn't their own culture (cf the author's discussion of representations of African American characters in The Wire at the end of the book).

- A controversial one: we can't escape the idea of stereotypes. Although stereotypes themselves can change. (Including to become less harmful.) Stereotypes are a kind of mental shorthand, in the same way as we have mental pictures of everyone's appearances as a sort of caricature; it's a matter of information storage.
It's such a relief to hear some common sense on this. You can spend a few months in a town and conclude from your experiences, for example, these people are loud and cheeky - it doesn't mean all of them are, but you expect more banter in the street than in some other place. It's daft when some book from abroad shows contemporary Scots wearing kilts all the time, but if you've got any kind of sense of humour, you can see that's not a harmful stereotype. The main thing is not to assume that any one individual is going to conform to any stereotype.

- The book is all about how aspects of race/culture/nationality are reflected in consumer and cultural products, and what they mean to the consumers. (A lot of critical material concentrates on the production side.) But it's consumers as theorised, generalised groups, rather than via field interviews - a notable weakness.
I've always had a fascination with the behind the scenes business of marketing and segmentation, even whilst I can't be bothered with ads as a viewer, so I enjoyed this guilty-pleasure focus on consumption. I don't approve of it as much as the author, even though I enjoy hearing about it. Some potential readers may find its fairly uncritical focus on the products of capitalism depressing or annoying.

-Pitcher is not anti-capitalist; I'd guess more of a liberal social democrat. Whilst in favour of critical engagements with consumer culture, he doesn't believe that consumer products inevitably debase or devalue a culture, and are instead one of the contemporary ways of expressing and learning about it. He references the work of J&J Comaroff [personally not read]. It tallies with the idea that in Millenial pop culture there's no longer such a thing as 'selling out'.
He just really likes modernity, and is critical of the idea of trying to find an earlier version of something, because of the naive assumption that it's 'purer'. I doubt he's someone who loves history for it's own sake.


It's hard to communicate the complexity and balance of this book without quoting entire pages – I can see a lot of people missing its nuances and subtleties, and I still don't think I've conveyed them adequately here.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

...and all races should make peace, because no matter what they want, they all have to work, to pay taxes, so Pitcher and the other leaches would live the good life just for pushing papers.