Illegitimate subjects?: abject whites, neoliberal modernisation, and middle-class multiculturalism

Political attention to the plight of the ʹsocially excludedʹ in contemporary Britain suggests a renewed interest in issues of class and inequality at government level. This paper addresses the nature of that engagement by analysing the dominant discourse of welfare reform as a cultural reconstruction project which references goals of modernisation and multiculturalism. The centrality of the white working-class poor to the realisation of these goals is examined as a racialised positioning, a stage in the reconstruction of nation through the reconstruction of white working-class identities. The shift from naming the working-class poor as ʹunderclassʹ, a racialised and irredeemable ʹotherʹ, to naming them ʹthe excludedʹ, a culturally determined but recuperable ʹotherʹ, is pivotal to the recasting of Britain as a postimperial, modern nation. Analysis of the modes of modernisation and multiculturalism through which new definitions of nation are being established shows the constitutive role of neoliberal and class-based interests. The use of the white working-class poor as symbols of a generalised ʹbackwardnessʹ and specifically a culturally burdensome whiteness, is examined as a form of class racism, the product of a dominant class-based anglocentrism. The paper concludes with a consideration of class as an illegitimate discourse within the dominant representational fields of media, politics, and academia and the author argues the need for a politics of representation that can recognise difference where it may not be visibly marked, that can see class through whiteness.