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Book Review: Kalwant Bhopal, White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society

Kalwant Bhopal’s book, White Privilege, offers a captivating rebuttal to the logics of post-racialism in public discourse that shore up whiteness as a hegemonic force on both sides of the Atlantic. Highlighting aggressive racial and class inequalities in primary, secondary and higher education, wealth resources, the labour market, along with neighbourhood and housing arrangements primarily in Britain, White Privilege is a sobering treatment of the historical legacy and contemporary influence of whiteness and racial domination. White privilege, Bhopal contends, is fundamentally a structural arrangement that affords undue advantages to ‘the expression[s] of whiteness through the maintenance of power, resources, accolades and systems of support through formal and informal structures and procedures’ (p. 19). The continuation of a Eurocentric curriculum in secondary and higher education, the prolonged stereotyping of ethno-racial minorities in the media and the range of exclusionary hiring practices in key industries, despite decades of critical resistance from Black and minority ethnic parents, pupils, staff and civil society organisations (Sivanandan, 2001, 2008), all yield economic extras, cultural rewards and other unnamed advantages for white people that are largely doxic, even in a purportedly post-racial era (Bourdieu, 1977; Wallace, 2017, 2018). Bhopal advances three salient arguments worth spotlighting in public discourse. The first is that white privilege is not homogenous or static, but heterogeneous, ‘highly uneven, contingent and situational’ (p. 26). Drawing on Gypsy and Traveller communities’ experiences of discrimination, segregation and social exclusion in England, Bhopal makes the case that the policy, political and media infrastructure in British society renders Gypsy and Traveller identities ‘non-acceptable forms of whiteness’ (p. 31), and the white middle classes an acceptable form that is highly regarded and rewarded. Bhopal also argues that critical consideration of how white privilege is mediated by gender and class is necessary for understanding wider racialised power inequities, especially in elite universities in the USA and the UK. Writing in the tradition of Black feminist scholarship, Bhopal strategically deploys intersectionality to assess the limits of equalities legislation for universities such as the Athena SWAN Charter aimed to address gender inequality, the primary beneficiaries of which are white middle class women. Bhopal 837177 SOC0010.1177/0038038519837177SociologyBook Reviews book-review2019