Book Review: Care and Capitalism by Kathleen Lynch

Abstract

Black authors and the Global South into the epistemological centre of scholarship that describes and resists coloniality. In section four, the authors address how different identities may be deployed to support or challenge the workings of whiteness in various international contexts, including the U.S., Caribbean, UK, and South Africa. In the fifth section, the authors analyze the practice of whiteness in everyday life, and its operation within institutional structures and the state. Finally, the last section opens up the space to discuss challenges, tensions and debates among scholars on their understanding of whiteness. This book provides a good start at circumventing the common pitfalls of whiteness studies (such as favoring scholarship from the Global North, and essentializing Black, White, Indigenous, other racialized people back into the orbit of whiteness) and interrupting the binary ways in which the idea of whiteness is taken up in the popular imagination. Indeed, much of the decolonizing literature remains trapped in the black-white/oppressor-oppressed binary and locked within Eurocentric ways of thinking. Hence, the core strength of this collection is to bring a global perspective through voices and locations other than Western Europe, the UK and US, and to deliberately link scholarship on whiteness back to the broader debate on how race, power, politics and oppression operate. It does this by putting, at front and centre, not only past colonizing processes, but present forms of neocolonialism, and political and social justice struggles around the globe, including the emergence (or re-emergence) of popularist politics and other forms of polarization. The extent to which the authors in this volume achieve this varies, which is not surprising because whiteness and white supremacy are monoliths of such longstanding that even scholars and activists who resist it struggle, in the words of Cross and Fine who wrote the book’s Epilogue, that it is ‘hard to see where the fugitive pathways to radical transformation might be carved’ (p. 353). Notwithstanding these difficulties, this text is an invaluable help on that journey.