Overview

Like many of my friends I didn’t really realise that I was working class until I went to university. Suddenly, what I thought as normal became subtly and not so subtly differentiated as I came into close contact with the middle classes. I had not known a time, though, when I hadn’t been white, but I didn’t really realise that I was white until I read David Roediger’s (1991) book ‘The Wages of Whiteness’. Through reading this work and others on the topic of whiteness the sense of my own whiteness became palpable to me. Namely, that what I naively thought to be a timeless property of my skin was a social construction that had acquired so much symbolic weight over time that it had become seemingly real: a racial formation and project. This was with consequences, in that a good part of my actual and psychological labour market and other employment benefits were not part of a meritocratic system, but due to the oppression of people of colour. This might be part of a system that I at the time associated only with the far-right, a system of white supremacy. Fundamentally, my skin was property and the gains that I had made through it were at the expense of others. I was a ‘so called white’ (Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996) who everyday made a political decision to not commit ‘treason’ to whiteness.

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9781402061073

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Reviews

From the reviews: Preston is a serious academic. The book ... is ambitious in scope (including new empirical data as well as wide ranging reviews of the contemporary theoretical literature) and written with a clear voice that does not flinch from critiquing some of the key figures in the field. ... In the field of race and class inequities in UK education, this is one of the most important books of the decade. It deserves a wide readership ... . (David Gillborn, Studies in the Education of Adults, Vol. 41 (2), 2009)

From the reviews: Preston is a serious academic. The book ! is ambitious in scope (including new empirical data as well as wide ranging reviews of the contemporary theoretical literature) and written with a clear voice that does not flinch from critiquing some of the key figures in the field. ! In the field of race and class inequities in UK education, this is one of the most important books of the decade. It deserves a wide readership ! . (David Gillborn, Studies in the Education of Adults, Vol. 41 (2), 2009)

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