Approximating Whiteness: Race,Class, and Empire in the Making of Modern Elite/White Subjects

This essay takes up the messy relationship between whiteness and eliteness at the site of elite schools under conditions of global racial capitalism and empire. Rubén Gaztambide‐Fernández and Leila Angod theorize this relationship by describing the slippery ways in which whiteness and eliteness co‐constitute each other and by tracing how the relationship between eliteness and whiteness is both historical and spatial. They argue that, in the twenty‐first century, the entanglement between eliteness and whiteness produces a particular affective configuration and that elite schooling has become the key mechanism for producing what they call the elite/white subject. Gaztambide‐Fernández and Angod trace the making of the elite/white subject through three processes: the unhinging from time/history; the unhinging from space/land; and the obfuscation of whiteness/eliteness through the production of a particular cosmopolitan affect. They do this by looking specifically at how non‐White subjects are invited into eliteness, always in a paradoxically precarious approximation in which whiteness, and therefore eliteness, can always be revoked. The ongoing collusion between the particular spatial and historical dimensions of the production of eliteness obfuscates the ways in which becoming elite always requires an approximation to whiteness and how both whiteness and eliteness must be constantly produced and secured.