Obituary
Ruth Frankenberg
Sociologist whose work on race helped define a new field of 'whiteness studies'
The Guardian, Sunday 8 July 2007
The British-born sociologist Ruth Frankenberg, who has died aged 49 of lung cancer, did groundbreaking research on how race shapes people's lives in the US. Her first book,
The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (1993), focused on the advantages that whiteness carries for women rather than just the disadvantages suffered by non-white women, and so changed the approach of American social scientists to the ways racial inequalities endure even when white people regard themselves as anti-racist.
Perhaps most importantly, Ruth illuminated how white women sometimes change their racial consciousness and action in promising individual and collective directions.
Her study was based on 30 in-depth interviews, begun in the early 1980s. Ruth explored how race, sexuality and gender intersect with class in daily life. Responding to stories of race and cultural difference in US white women's lives, she sought to draw out and reflect on the "whiteness" of these experiences. Ruth explored her subjects' stories about growing up white, being in lesbian and heterosexual interracial relationships, and participating in civil rights struggles. Most tellingly, Ruth paid attention to what and whom white women actually see, and remember seeing, symbolically and physically.
While anti-racism was a strong component of feminism, Ruth's interviewees showed how an evasion of colour and power consciousness permeated daily life for white women, including feminists. Ruth's subjects narrated elaborate efforts not to see race, to be or become colour-blind, both in their childhoods and their adult lives. At the same time, whiteness seemed empty to them, the realm of Wonder Bread, Heinz salad cream or Kleenex, and racial others seemed full of culture, good food, lots of history, and, of course, racial problems.
Whiteness was a self-invisible norm that many of the women could not identify with; to identify as white in any concrete way seemed racist to most of them. None the less, they benefited structurally from the unspeakable norm, as "difference" was cast as either culturally enriching or pathological and dangerous, but not fundamentally about power. Drawing from a popular humanism that could not recognise itself as a "white" perspective, some women would insist that they did not care whether someone were "green, striped or purple," because we are all "human".
Women viewing others as "different" and themselves as "same" inhabited a category that was simultaneously the dominant culture and no culture at all. From that foundation, a historical consciousness became almost impossible and one's own privileges invisible, merely there, even while others' disadvantages could be cast as social problems. In that way, race becomes the preserve and the problem of people of colour, while whiteness remains unexaminable and potent.
Ruth also heard other kinds of stories, which she called "race cognisant". Nurturing awareness of how structural and institutional racial inequities work in the big and little things of life, these white women discussed race and racism personally and critically. Ruth asked how and why some women responded to experiences such as travelling to Guatemala, or remembering a childhood maid, or learning about prison statistics with sustained effort to understand their own racial situation and others did not. She showed how the dominant idioms of power and colour evasion make explicit white race cognisance full of contradictions and prone to depleted vocabularies.
For example, one woman narrated how becoming more conscious of taking whiteness for granted had made her life easier now made her hypersensitive around people of colour, unable any longer to feel "natural". She longed to forget all about race and just be human again. The desire to end the tension made it hard to tolerate the difference between ending racism and ending one's own racial discomfort. In Ruth's interviews, women working through this process tended to become more involved in movements for structural change, often affiliated with anti-racist organisations and actions led by people of colour rather than those in which white people were numerically dominant.
Ruth's work helped define a new field called "whiteness studies", evident in the essays in social and cultural criticism that she edited, called Displacing Whiteness (1997). Her work shaped a strong scholarly and activist agenda to explore how white racial power continues to operate: she insisted on thinking about race as a question of how power is exercised when those who have it can see only others as different.
Ruth's writing turned next to the stories of people in the US who integrate religious experience with commitments to progressive ethical, personal, and political change. Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology (2004) brims with the vital stories of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus.
Ruth's last publication, Cracks in the Facade: Whiteness and the Construction of 9/11, returned to her concern with how American assumptions about power relationships and about what counts as rational, which she called "whiteness", distorted US discourse from both the left and the right on the causes and consequences of the traumatic events of 9/11. This essay had been due to be part of an unfinished book, Fluent in Whiteness.
A native of Cardiff, raised in Manchester, Ruth gained a degree in social and political sciences from New Hall, Cambridge. Moving to the US in 1979, she obtained her PhD in the interdisciplinary history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1988. There, she was a founding member of the group for the critical study of colonial discourse. With her partner and fellow graduate student, Lata Mani, Ruth also published on how the popularity of analyses of "post-coloniality" in much scholarly work obscures the historical and contemporary practices of US racial positioning.
Ruth held faculty positions in women's studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, and then in American studies at the University of California at Davis, from 1988 to 2004. In 2004, she moved to Bangalore in south-west India with Lata to continue their work in a non-academic context. They practised a form of joint meditation that resulted in a text of 43 teachings, which will soon be available on the internet at
www.thetantrachronicles.com.
Ruth is survived by Lata, her parents, Ronald and Alison, and her sister Rose.
· Ruth Alice Emma Frankenberg, sociologist, born September 17 1957; died April 22 2007