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Racialization is frequently deployed but seldom defined precisely. The agent(s) and mechanisms of the process are often not analysed. Such processes have multiple agents, mechanisms and rationales, all of which may change over time. The key agents of the racialization of Gypsy/Travellers in England have historically been the State and the media. This article claims that a key mechanism in the racialization of Gypsy-Travellers in the twenty-first century is the English planning system. There has been a long-term racialization of Gypsy-Travellers based around criminality, dirt and various threats to order. Gypsy-Travellers respond to the State’s criminalization of their cultures by both adjusting their degree of mobility, and engaging with the discriminatory planning system to procure more advantageous outcomes. Gypsy-Travellers’ “cultural adaptations” end up further embedding the existing racist frame, in which they unfairly gain advantage over sedentary people by simultaneously infringing rules and claiming they are discriminated against.

The influential special issue and overview essay co-edited and co-authored respectively, by Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, set out their interpretation of whiteness studies’ genealogy, development and future. In this essay I identify their arguments and critique them in the light of a further eight years’ work on the racialization of white identities produced by the global academy. Particular attention is paid to the proliferation of micro studies about an ever-increasing array of sites, both in thematic and international terms, and to the corpus’ addressing of power relations. Moreover, I underscore Twine and Gallagher’s prescience on the strand of the work they review that bears on the racial project of recuperating white supremacy in a variety of ways, a project that is enjoying heightened visibility in 2016.

Book review: Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (eds.), STATE OF WHITE SUPREMACY: RACISM, GOVERNANCE AND THE UNITED STATES, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, 340 pp., $24.95 (paper) Scholarly critiques of the State that explicitly position ‘race’ at their heart are few and far between. Apart from Omi and Winant, and Goldberg's Racial State, as well as Angela Davis’ assault on the US prison-industrial complex, there is (in the European context) the multinational work of Ronit and Alana Lentin, and Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh on Ireland. We could also include Harold Wolpe's work on South Africa, as well as that of Anthony Marx. States of White Supremacy (SoWS) sits comfortably alongside these studies, while clearly occupying a different space. SoWS confidently affirms that the contemporary US ‘racial’ State, in its numerous guises, is a valid object of analysis. A combination of established stellar voices and newer scholars provide a multidisciplinary frame of critical engagement with the US state's practices across a broad spectrum of arenas; from a fundamental critique of the idea of the USA as a ‘nation-state’ at all, through racial profiling of Muslims and Latinos, to racialized patterns of educational provision and welfare sanctions via supreme court decisions on affirmative action. In a collection with a uniformly high standard, there are a number of exemplary sections. Charles Mills’ customary economy of style and precision make his contribution on the white underpinnings of the state readable and rigorous; Lipstiz's forensic deconstruction of the bias of supreme court decisions around affirmative action; Romero's very accessible narrative style hides the sophisticated endeavour of portraying the impacts of state actions on real people's lives (in this case, racially profiled Latinos in Phoenix) and gives us an insight into the precise interactions between state representatives and people that racialize the latter; Andrea Smith's emphasis on the paradox of the State's historical monopoly of violence whilst portraying itself as women's protector against gendered violence enables us to see that the State constructs itself as post-racist while simultaneously re-producing racism. This collection is engaging because it is not only about different groups of people (Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, etc.), but also about particular functions of State (education, welfare, security, etc.), and contains both theoretical and empirical work. There are many positives in this collection. The US state's position as a nation-state according to contemporary understandings of that term is queried: it is problematized instead as an imperial state producing multiple oppressions. The normative notion of citizenship as the point at which discrimination ends and equality begins is critiqued. The racial profiling of Muslims (moving between the USA and other countries) is, by juxtaposition, linked to that of other groups, such as Latinos (subject to border control more than 100 miles from the geographical border). Racial profiling then emerges as a technology of power, operationalized differently to procure similar results. Above all, the contributions suggest there are contours and patterns that need more scrutiny, research and precision to be worked through. In short, the collection opens a portal, making connections that were not always obvious. My feeling is that ideally, there should be a short and explicit overview essay that does only that work, but we are intelligent enough readers to join the dotted lines. Is there too much variety? It is always hard to juggle that, as an editor, while still keeping the contributors interested in writing about what they feel is important. However, the discursive linking of violence, genocide, border policy, racial profiling and the activation of ‘race’ as an ideological ‘depth charge’ (in James’ account of the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial election) apposes topics that are habitually addressed in a more fragmented way, enabling the reader to access a more complex map of the State than any one of these chapters could do alone. I found the radical scholarship and framing of the issues stimulating and thought-provoking. It is in some ways a redundant exercise to say what is missing: there are only a certain number of topics that can be covered. However, maybe the next volume could also deal with state surveillance and its interaction with radical social movements; more explicitly with Asian-Americans in the contemporary USA (although Rodriguez's historical development of the Philippines is appreciated); state responses to Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans; science and the genome; and possibly contemporary cultural representations of the US state (there is a proliferation of these, identified in recent work by Hamilton Carroll, for example). SoWS promises to be an agenda-setting work, establishing a base for radical scholarship concerned with ‘race’ and the state for decades.

BOOK REVIEW: Mathew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks (eds), BLACK GREEK-LETTER ORGANIZATIONS 20: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2011, 320 pp., $50.00 (hb). Hamilton Carroll's reading of various forms of American media is that in response to a perceived current ‘crisis of masculinity’, white masculinities are being reformulated in specific ways suggesting that redemption is possible. This crisis positions white males as the victims of the turn toward public discourses of civil rights, equality and affirmative action since the 1960s. The book develops Carroll's interpretation of how these alternative versions of masculinity are articulated, in the ‘representational politics of identity’ (6). Here, white masculinity becomes plural, demonstrating its ‘multiple locations’ (7). Carroll argues that white masculinity makes itself marginal (e.g. queer, Irish, working-class, etc.) by turning to ‘a reactive strategy under which it redefines the normative by citing itself as a marginal identity’ (6), to re-position itself. The key term to describe the representations that Carroll identifies and analyses is ‘labile’, which embraces both mutability and mobility. The multiple locations are explored in the six essays comprising the three main chapters. These deal with heroes, popular television, music and film. The character Jack Bauer from the series 24 serves as the starting point for this analysis of mutability, introducing the threads of individualism, duty and redemption through family values that reappear throughout the analysis. Presentations of heroism in illustrated stories and magazines follows: these representations are now dominated by firefighters, as white ethnic working-class heroes. Leading on from this is a discussion of working-class men at work, using the television series American Choppers. Here the values of production deadlines and creative craftwork are locked in tension, as two brothers embody the ‘bottom-line’ vs creative prongs of the world of labour and their importance within masculinity. Eminem's recuperation of ‘white trash’ in 8 Mile involves what Carroll sees as an ultimately reactionary embrace of individualism, as he makes temporary class alliances with black Detroiters in order to recreate himself as unconnected to the negative aspects of white working-classness. While Eminem seeks to distance himself from his family and make a new one with kindred spirits, the protection of family (or of surrogate family) resurfaces as a theme in the essay on film: Michael Douglas's character in Traffic, Matt Damon's in Syriana and Clint Eastwood's in Million Dollar Baby all stabilize themselves by (re-)assuming a patriarchal position. I found Carroll's reading coherent, convincing and resonant in many respects with the ethnographies and qualitative interviewing projects on American whiteness with which I am more familiar. Addressing whiteness as contingent, heterogeneous and rooted in cultural, political and economic shifts is a project in which a number of scholars are already engaged, and Carroll's text is a very welcome contribution to this field. Both American studies and whiteness studies are multi- rather than interdisciplinary fields. While I am sure cultural studies scholars’ would benefit from reading the social science research such as Lois Weis and Michelle Fine's many studies of working-class masculinities, and John Hartigan's ethnographies of ‘white trash’, so too would sociologists get something out of Carroll's study. Unfortunately, cross-over work with a foot in both empirical social science and cultural studies is still minimal in this field, although Hartigan's Odd Tribes (Duke University Press, 2005) is cited here. Carroll's central argument illustrated in these essays is a stand-alone piece of work, however, I would like to have seen some representations of the past as points of comparison in this mainly ahistorical development. If the underlying themes of representations are mutability and mobility, what are the starting points against which the movement and transformations of the current formations are to be charted? What makes Michael Douglas's character in Traffic different from the ones that he and Robert Duvall play in Falling Down, a film with both a redeemed and a doomed white male, for example? How do representations of white men's twenty-first century relationships to the emotional craft of labour, business imperatives, class, African Americans, service to the flag, family, etc. compare to those of the 1980s and 1990s? We get a glimpse of this possibility from Carroll's treatment of Clint Eastwood's career (chapter 5). Eastwood's development represents almost a microcosm of the author's whole argument, moving as it does from the Man with No Name and Dirty Harry versions of aggressive masculinity, via the transitional man-with-a-name in Unforgiven, to the sacrificial protagonist of Gran Torino to Frankie Dunn. For me, this historicization, although limited in this particular monograph, is a necessary element of this project: hopefully to be continued?