Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: on the misrecognition of race and class
2017/11/01 by Gurminder K. Bhambra · 498 citations
Social Sciences · #Action (physics) #Brexit #Economics #European union #Gender studies #Law #Linguistics #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Race (biology) #Rhetoric #Social and Cultural Dynamics #Sociology #Victory #White (mutation)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12317
published in British Journal of Sociology 68(S1), S214-S232 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2017/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract
The rhetoric of both the Brexit and Trump campaigns was grounded in conceptions of the past as the basis for political claims in the present. Both established the past as constituted by nations that were represented as 'white' into which racialized others had insinuated themselves and gained disproportionate advantage. Hence, the resonant claim that was broadcast primarily to white audiences in each place 'to take our country back'. The politics of both campaigns was also echoed in those social scientific analyses that sought to focus on the 'legitimate' claims of the 'left behind' or those who had come to see themselves as 'strangers in their own land'. The skewing of white majority political action as the action of a more narrowly defined white working class served to legitimize analyses that might otherwise have been regarded as racist. In effect, I argue that a pervasive 'methodological whiteness' has distorted social scientific accounts of both Brexit and Trump's election victory and that this needs to be taken account of in our discussion of both phenomena.
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