Almost-Invisible White Supremacy: Racism,Silence and Complicity in the Interracial Interaction Order

Abstract

Like all successful hegemonies, white supremacy functions in almost-invisible ways, profoundly shaping society yet remaining unseen. This article positions white silence during explicit interactional racism as a type of racism without racists because it defies scrutiny and conceals its beneficiaries while reproducing white supremacy. It introduces the interracial interaction order, merging Erving Goffman’s iconic but historically illiterate theorising with critical race principles. This epistemological justice-oriented theoretical reparation exposes white supremacy, its beneficiaries and its detrimental impacts on the psycho-social lives of disadvantageously situated individuals in the interactional domain. Reporting on a participatory qualitative study with 32 Muslims aged 16–21, the analysis identifies three insights about white silence during explicit racism: always complicit, it extracts all conceivable benefits towards whiteness; after-the-fact ‘anti-racism’ is often impression management; white speech as anti-racism ephemerally redirects racial privileges towards Muslims. In scrutinising an almost-invisible act in interracial settings this work illuminates fundamental sociological concerns about social (re)creation.

Keywords

critical race theory interracial interaction order Islamophobia participatory methods white supremacy

Introduction

This article contributes to the enduring sociological interest in face-to-face interactions and the extent to which they reproduce and resist social, historical and political systems. It introduces the interracial interaction order, an innovative epistemological-justice-oriented development of Goffman’s (1983) theorising that incorporates critical race theory principles (CRT; Harris, 1993). This theoretical reparation exposes how centuries-old racial systems shape and limit the autonomy of individuals within contemporary everyday encounters. Grounded in the counterstories of young Muslims, this work scrutinises how white supremacy is reproduced in behavioural settings, in ways that perpetrators and beneficiaries remain invisible and often claim racial progressiveness. Bonilla-Silva’s (2006: 4) concept of ‘racism without racists’ encapsulates this paradox and epitomises current race relations. Anti-racism has been reduced to the performance of elevated white subjective consciousness: a ‘sincere fiction’ (Feagin and Vera, 1995: 186) that gives the impression of racial progressiveness and is popular and profitable for white people but does not change the material conditions for those most vulnerable within white supremacy (Meer, 2022). Today, white people reject explicit racism, revile the use of racial slurs, recoil at the idea of racial assault and revere the language of racial justice, yet white supremacy flourishes across all levels and sectors of society (Andrews, 2023; Meer, 2022).

Bonilla-Silva (2006) explains this dissonance by showing how the explicit racism of the past has given way to a white supremacy that operates without fanfare yet is no less efficient in upholding the racial order. ‘The racial contract’ (Mills, 1997: 7), the consensus among white individuals to forever prioritise each other’s interests over those of non-white people, is now resolutely unspoken and unacknowledged. Today, racism manifests in innumerable almost-invisible ways that evade conscious reflection, or when pinpointed, are infinitely justified, deflected or denied. So much so, that white people claim racial progressiveness while behaving in ways that uphold white supremacy. Bonilla-Silva (2011: 173) insists that this invisible racism is as pernicious as explicit forms of the past, and that we must ‘fight its poisonous effects even if, like smog, we cannot see how it works clearly’.

In solidarity, this analysis presents new empirical material that enhances understanding of how almost-invisible racism manifests in everyday life. Specifically, it reveals how it is expressed through white silence in interracial interactions when explicit racism is present. By dissecting the interactional dynamics and consequences of this almost-invisible behaviour, the aim is to penetrate the smog and expose the act itself, its victims, its beneficiaries and the racial structures it perpetuates.

Drawing on data from a qualitative participatory study, this article exposes the almost-invisible social and psychological harms endured by young British Muslims in everyday encounters. Born into the post-9/11 era, British Muslims face a hostile environment where Islamophobia has become so normalised that it is deemed acceptable (Jones and Unsworth, 2022). In the UK, Muslims are not merely seen as another ‘other’; they are considered the cultural antithesis of ‘Britishness’, emblematic racialised folk devils of the 21st century, and an existential threat to the national way of life (Khan, 2022). At the systemic level, governments across the political spectrum have implemented ideologically charged and performatively cruel immigration, counterterrorism and criminal justice policies to regulate and define ‘Britishness’ (Khan, 2022). The Counterterrorism and Security Act 2015 institutionalises cultural profiling, compelling ordinary citizens within civic institutions to monitor and report any perceived failure to uphold ‘British values’ (Spiller et al., 2023). At the grassroots level, young Muslims consistently report that Islamophobia is commonplace (Harris and Karimshah, 2019). Compounding these hostilities, Muslims bear the ‘burden of conviviality’ (Redclift et al., 2022: 1159). Never allowed to express frustration, they are expected to kowtow by performing civility, docility and ease in the face of endless social violence.

The discussion begins by setting the socio-historical scene: being Muslim in contemporary Britain can only be understood in relation to centuries-old white supremacy and colonialism. Then, to sufficiently make sense of the almost-invisible re-making of white supremacy in daily life, I introduce the outstandingly novel interracial interaction order. It repairs the historically illiterate ‘interaction order’ (Goffman, 1983) by merging it with the critical race-rooted ‘whiteness as property’ (Harris, 1993), materialising both racialised selfhood and racial systems in the interactional domain. I assert this as ‘theoretical reparation’, conceptual compensation for the harms inflicted by sociology’s historical inability to adequately acknowledge non-Eurocentric knowledge claims. As such, my concept models the types of theoretical advances the discipline must make to realise its epistemological justice agenda (Bhambra, 2021). Third, I outline the participatory qualitative study and its exceptionally rigorous research design, which meticulously embeds the highest standards for qualitative validity throughout the research process. Finally, I apply the interracial interaction order to young Muslims’ counterstories about the interactional dynamics and consequences of white silence in the presence of racism. This new empirical material advances existing literature on white silence as covert whiteness (Ladson-Billings, 1996; Tripangier, 2006). I position it as archetypal ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4), the efficient reproduction of white supremacy that renders its perpetrators and beneficiaries innocent, even as they gain from racial systems and siphon banal terrors towards Muslims. These findings transcend their research context because they are applicable to non-white people navigating white worlds everywhere. Ultimately, they illuminate core sociological concerns regarding social creation, reproduction and the consequences of social inequalities.

Being Muslim, Islamophobia and White Supremacy

The last 20 years have witnessed the firm positioning of Islam and Muslims as antithetical to, and corrosive for, secular liberal societies. Across the world, media and public discourses amplify so-called Muslim cultural deviance, propelling far-right ideologies from the social fringe to elected governments in ways that valorise taking an anti-Islam stance. In the UK, Labour and Conservative governments have consolidated policy agendas encompassing criminal and youth justice, migration and counterterrorism for the material and symbolic management of race. These policies and their supporting social processes define who and what sufficiently represents ‘Britishness’ while legitimising the hyperregulation of Muslims (Khan, 2022).

Being Muslim in white-majority states means seeking inclusion and belonging in societies that define themselves in opposition to ‘Muslimness’. Hostile epistemological contexts reflect and create hostile institutional and everyday conditions that hinder Muslims’ equal participation in social life. Muslims face stark realities, experiencing considerably higher levels of deprivation than other groups and are trapped in cycles of poverty with limited social mobility. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2021) Census, they have the highest percentage of people living in ‘social rented’ housing (26%); are four times more likely to live in overcrowded housing; have the lowest employment rate aged 16–64 (51% compared with the national average of 70.9%); and are more often in ‘elementary occupations’. Analysis by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB, 2021) found that 39% of Muslims live in the most deprived areas of England and Wales, while The Muslim Census (2022) estimates that 50% live in poverty, compared with 18% of the general population. These harsh social conditions are compounded by the ‘broken social mobility promise’ (The Social Mobility Commission, 2017: 7). Despite the educational success of young Pakistani and Bangladeshi people, particularly girls, their excellence and determination to overcome cascading social deprivations do not translate into favourable market outcomes. Sweida-Metwally’s (2022) statistical analysis demonstrates that Muslims experience the greatest faith penalty relative to other religious groups in the labour market. When Muslims try to establish themselves in professional careers, they encounter severe systemic barriers at every stage, including in hiring practices, workplace exclusion and everyday Islamophobia, earnings differentials and career progression (Savanta-ComRes, 2022).

Social attitudes surveys reveal the extent of anti-Muslim sentiment. Muslims are the UK’s ‘least liked’ religious group, with over 25% of non-Muslims reporting their dislike of Muslims, and 36% agreeing that Islam threatens the British way of life (Jones and Unsworth, 2022). Additionally, 47% would not be willing to accept Muslims as members of their family (MCB, 2021). For Muslims, these attitudes manifest in numerous ways, with hate crimes targeting them the most in England and Wales (ONS, 2022), and 70% experiencing religion-based discrimination in everyday settings (MCB, 2021). Furthermore, Bunglawala and Adriana (2021) demonstrate that persistent and pervasive social injustices have profoundly adverse mental health implications for Muslims.

I portray the harsh realities of being Muslim not as the customary academic fetishisation of racial marginality that reduces rich and heterogeneous lifeworlds to a series of deficits to justify research exploitation. Nor do I present a supposedly neutral account of spontaneously occurring social arrangements. Such approaches position ‘Muslim’ as an ahistorical demographic category and therefore obscure and perpetuate the system that constructs racial categories. Rather, this article upholds CRT (Delgado and Stefancic, 2000), illuminating white supremacy as systematic social extraction so that the beneficiaries of that extraction are seen. These so-called racial disparities are not the result of racial differences; they are the engineered outcomes of racialisation processes and the fundamental relations of extraction between the racialiser and the racialised (Gans, 2017). The proper context for understanding the material conditions of Muslims in white-majority societies is the systems that relationally co-produce ‘white’ and ‘Muslim’: white supremacy and Islamophobia. Islamophobia is a ‘classic racism’ that co-emerged alongside white supremacy from the late 15th century. Epistemologies of self-proclaimed white superiority justify colonisation, resource extraction, travel, tourism, excitement and exotic possibilities for European colonisers and descendants, resulting in genocide, enslavement and degradation for those constructed as their binary opposites (Goldberg, 2006). Modood (2018: 2) defines Islamophobia as ‘the racialising of Muslims based on appearance or descent, attributing cultural or religious characteristics to vilify, marginalise, discriminate, or demand assimilation, thereby treating them as second-class citizens’. Zia-Ebrahimi (2018: 314) argues that this racialisation takes the particularly malignant form of ‘conspiratorial racialisation’, positioning European Muslims not just as another ‘other’, but as the ‘ultimate other’ through the normalised myth of an Islamic conspiracy plotting to turn Europe into Eurabia, where jihad and Sharia rule, and non-Muslims live in subjection. The existential threat implied by conspiratorial racialisation rationalises the systematic suppression of Muslims as the only means of protecting ‘our way of life’. The inequalities described above are the material manifestations of this racialisation and they prevent Muslims from living as equals because all conceivable social goods are siphoned away from them towards those who ‘possess whiteness’ (Harris, 1993: 1724).

Whiteness signifies the privilege of being categorised as white within white supremacy. This privilege extends even to those disadvantaged in relation to other axes of social power, as possessing whiteness within white supremacy brings extensive compensations. In essence, the objective of white supremacy is to extract all conceivable benefits towards whiteness across all levels of society – systemic, institutional, interactional and psychological. Rooted in CRT principles, Harris’s (1993: 1707) concept of ‘whiteness-as-property’ underscores the systemic and structural dimensions of racial inequality. According to this framework, whiteness operates similarly to traditional forms of property, shaping social relations and granting tangible benefits, immunities and social advantages to its possessors. These rights are protected and reinforced through legal and social mechanisms, establishing them as standard privileges for white individuals. Harris (1993: 1731–1736) outlines four key rights encapsulating the property functions of whiteness: rights of disposition; the right to use and enjoy; reputation and status property; and the absolute right to exclude.

While Harris emphasises the systemic and structural nature of whiteness, it is important to remember that white supremacy is psycho-social; individuals experience and emotionally react to their racial categorisation. Du Bois’s (2023: 3) concept of ‘double-consciousness’ in The Souls of Black Folk illustrates the inner conflict African Americans face in reconciling their self-perception with racist stereotypes imposed upon them. Similarly, in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) also asserts racism as a socio-historical system that has psychological impacts. He discusses a poignant encounter where a child gazes at him and refers to him using a racial slur. This moment encapsulates the power dynamics and psychological impact of the white gaze on Black individuals. Fanon reflects on how the white gaze, informed by a racist society, reduces him to a racial-colonial object and denies his humanity upon perception. He argues the psychological impacts of whiteness prevent non-white individuals from asserting a liberated self-identity, and this has implications for the methodology and analysis presented here.

To adequately conceptualise how racial systems manifest in everyday interracial interactions and profoundly shape the social and psychological lives of non-white people, I introduce the concept of the interracial interaction order.

The Interracial Interaction Order

An analysis that focuses on everyday life and micro-analyses of face-to-face interactions to make selfhood and social systems visible implies the theoretical contributions of Erving Goffman. Goffman’s (1983) exploration of the interaction order does not begin, as is customary in social theory, by disentangling the relationship between individual agents and social structures. Rather, the interaction order is deemed ‘sui generis’, existing independently of both structures and individuals, serving as a continuous source of social constraint (Rawls, 1987: 138). Thus, social order and selfhood are not separate entities; they are the joint products of the interaction order. Goffman (1983: 2) champions the analytical viability of the interactional domain through micro-analysis. He examined face-to-face encounters across diverse social settings to discern how behaviour in these settings reflects social norms, rules and procedures that allow orderly interaction. He famously used the metaphor of a theatrical performance, during which the self is realised through performance in face-to-face encounters. Social actors present themselves in ways that align with ‘shared cognitive presuppositions’ (Goffman, 1983: 4) to present a coherent and socially proficient self to maintain social order.

Goffman’s insights provide the framework for this article, to the extent that it also explores the interaction order as a viable analytical domain where self-presentation is influenced by collective white normative consciousness and employs the micro-analysis of young Muslims’ testimonies. However, a fundamental disparity exists between Goffman’s approach and mine. Tyler (2018) points out that Goffman focuses explicitly on ‘shared cognitive presuppositions’ that shape the interaction order, implying collective norms and criteria for judging individual performances. Yet, Goffman avoids delving into the interactive implications of unequal and relational positioning within systems that define ‘normal’. This suggests that micro-analyses of face-to-face encounters must be detached from the broader social, political and historical contexts in which they are embedded. In contrast, my analysis focuses on how the interactional domain is power-laden and how Muslims bear significant psychological and social burdens for existing in settings that are permanently yet invisibly shaped by white supremacy.

Despite writing his most celebrated works in the USA as Black freedom struggles shook the very foundations of all possible everyday settings (Tyler, 2018), Goffman remained silent about white supremacy. While his theoretical whiteness is well documented (see Tyler, 2018), it is not yet well heeded by sociology; thus, its broader significance warrants repetition here. Goffman’s silence epitomises the ‘epistemological injustice’ of social theory (Bhambra, 2021: 76). This refers to the inability of grand narratives, such as sociological theory, to adequately represent different and competing knowledge claims. Since its inception, sociology has limited its epistemological scope to imperialist views of modernity, remaining silent on the role of colonialism. This omission has profoundly influenced social theorising, as colonialism’s symbolic and material entanglements have not been allowed to exist in conceptualisations of contemporary society (Bhambra, 2021). Compounding this, the British Sociological Association notes that many UK undergraduate sociology degrees perpetuate epistemological segregation by separating the study of racialisation and racisms from traditional theoretical canons (Joseph-Salisbury et al., 2020). Consequently, they reproduce the conceptual whiteness of sociology, racially police its theoretical borders and suffocate the ‘sociological imaginations’ (Mills, 2000: 11) of emerging non-white sociologists.

I introduce the interracial interaction order to reveal how the ‘shared cognitive presuppositions’ (Goffman, 1983: 4) of white supremacy are present within and enable the rights of whiteness (Harris, 1993: 1731–1736) in interracial encounters. The interracial interaction order encompasses all conceivable social settings in white-majority worlds ‘in which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s response presence’ (Goffman, 1983: 2) and who are differentially situated in relation to white supremacy because some ‘possess whiteness’ and others do not (Harris, 1993: 1724). This epistemological justice-oriented development models the type of theoretical reparations that are necessary to remake sociology as a racially literate discipline.

The Study

Data were collected using a qualitative participatory approach. Thirty-two young Muslims from Greater Manchester, aged between 16 and 21, took part in four creative qualitative workshops. Participatory methodology enables a critical, racial justice stance by privileging the participation and counterstories of young Muslims to understand the real-world challenges they face. This approach assumes that knowledge is not fixed or objective but socially constructed and subjective. Individuals and communities experience and know society based on their social, historical and cultural positioning, while remaining active agents capable of shaping the world (Freire, 1970), including research processes and outcomes.

In the interests of qualitative and participatory rigour, there was no white involvement or oversight of this work. Whiteness corrodes non-white participants’ ability to convey subjective meaning or to self-narrate. Subjective meaning is methodologically vital for qualitative participatory research. It advances qualitative credibility by ensuring the research reflects the social reality of participants (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) and drives the self-narration necessary for action and resistance (Freire, 1970). The white gaze reduces non-white participants to racialised objects of colonial ideology upon perception (Fanon, 2008), imposing a fraught ‘double-consciousness’ (Du Bois, 2023: 3) or psychological fragmentation that shatters self-narration. Essentially, white involvement in qualitative race research demands non-white participants narrate past experiences of double-consciousness while imposing double-consciousness upon them. Qualitative credibility, and thus methodological rigour, cannot be achieved under such conditions. Vis-a-vis participatory race research, white oversight and involvement corrupts its emancipatory ethics; racial-colonial resistance and liberation cannot occur until non-white self-narration is reclaimed from the white gaze (Du Bois, 2023; Fanon, 2008). Therefore, this work was initiated by a Muslim woman, co-directed by a Youth Research Group (YRG) and facilitated by Muslim colleagues from the British Muslim Heritage Centre (BMHC). The YRG, consisting of eight young Muslims aged 18 to 21, co-directed all aspects of this research, including study design, workshop facilitation and data analysis. Their chosen output was a zine that showcased the findings.

Regarding researcher positionality, the author negotiates similar intersectional oppressions as participants within imperialist, white-supremacist, patriarchal structures. She approaches research and theorising as hooks (1994: 59) did, as a ‘liberatory practice’ to understand the conditions of life that ought not be tolerated. There is no gap between self and collective emancipation and engaging in racial justice-oriented research and theory. In stating this, the author anticipates the tendency of white academics to dismiss race research conducted by scholars of colour as biased ‘me-search’ rather than legitimate research (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). As a pre-emptive rebuttal, she emphasises the rigorous research design drawing on extensive experience with insider–outsider dynamics in qualitative settings (Mythen et al., 2013), employs tools that de-centre the researcher and meticulously embeds the highest standards for assessing qualitative research validity. These standards include privileging subjective meaning (as previously discussed), purposive sampling, responsiveness in data collection and analysis, and theoretical and conceptual adequacy (Popay et al., 1998), all detailed in the following sections.

Purposive sampling ensured participants possessed the requisite knowledge (Popay et al., 1998) to understand the structural context of young Muslim lives. The sample was defined by self-reported characteristics: age, self-identification as Muslim and willingness to engage with the research focus. Attrition resulted in 32 participants from the initial 68 interested young people, comprising 14 men and 18 women born after 9/11, raised in the UK and residing in Greater Manchester. Ethical approval preceded the start of the research; however, in practice, ethics and informed consent were an ongoing process. The participatory workshops, lasting between three-and-a-half and five hours, took place at BMHC premises and were co-facilitated by the YRG, BMHC colleagues and the author, ensuring Muslim youth and community co-direction and responsiveness in both data collection and analysis.

The discussion guide, co-designed with the YRG, encouraged participants to engage in creative activities related to their everyday interracial interactions. Activities included zine-making, collage, drawing and textiles, allowing for a deep exploration of sensitive and complex topics (Vacchelli, 2018). Art-informed methods aim to mitigate inherent power imbalances between researcher and participants. Visual artefacts serve as prompts, evoking memories and emotions that facilitate individual reflection and mutual observation and discussion (Edwards and Holland, 2013).

Co-analysis with the YRG and willing participants ensured responsiveness and data quality (Popay et al., 1998). This process involved thematic categorisation (Braun and Clarke, 2021), followed by theoretical categorisation (Meyer and Ward, 2014). Written and illustrated documentation was photographed, and discussions were audio-recorded, transcribed and de-identified. Foster-Fishman et al. (2005) highlight the importance of such co-analysis in mobilising participant reflections for the co-creation of knowledge.

Guided by the author and amended according to the YRG and participants’ reflections, data co-analysis progressed through Braun and Clarke’s (2021) six-stage thematic analysis. This process was complex and reflected the messy reality of qualitative research – it was non-linear, requiring dialogic review, reflection and negotiation among the participants. Nonetheless, it ensured responsiveness and data quality (Popay et al., 1998).

Almost-invisible racism was a key feature of interracial encounters identified through co-analysis. A significant and recurring example of it was white silence in the presence of racism. For theoretical adequacy (Meyer and Ward, 2014) meetings were held with the YRG and participants to discuss sociological concepts. Goffman’s (1999) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) Racism without Racists resonated with them as sense-making frameworks for patterns identified in the data. Those patterns offer three insights about white silence during explicit racism: always complicit, it aids the extraction of benefits towards whiteness; after-the-fact ‘anti-racism’ is often impression management; white speech as anti-racism ephemerally redirects racial privileges towards Muslims.

Sly, Snide and Sneaky as Fuck: Everyday Silence/Complicity

Racism and the environment that sustains it are tacitly co-produced by silent white witnesses and explicit racists who manifest what Mills (1997: 7) terms ‘the racial contract’. Mills challenges traditional social contract theory, which posits a hypothetical agreement among individuals to establish a just society, by arguing that this contract is racialised. It is an unspoken and unacknowledged consensus among white individuals to forever prioritise each other’s interests over those of non-white people. This interpersonal consensus is reinforced by equally unacknowledged systemic and institutional white advantage.

Silence when bearing witness to racial and colonial oppression is never neutral; it is always on the side of the oppressor. The counterstories below consolidate existing scholarship that argues white silence during racism is linked to and mutually constitutive of white supremacy (Ladson- Billings, 1996; Mills, 1997; Tripangier, 2006). To accurately account for its nature, the compound silence/complicity will be used:

when someone says something racist, your mind starts racing, you hope someone else will speak up. But every time it’s complete silence. Then you’re like, shall I say something? Is it worth it? What if I end up in an argument or they stop being my friend? All in a few seconds. (Ali)

I get it, they don’t want to get involved, get into an argument, feel awkward or lose a friend, so they pretend they didn’t hear anything. Basically, you’re on your own, it’s terrifying. You either you get stuck in and take what’s coming, a fight or whatever, or if you don’t say anything, it’ll needle you forever. You can’t win with this shit. (Hussain)

Whiteness is simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest (Harris, 1993), granting white individuals privileges unavailable to those who do not possess it. These testimonies describe white actors exercising the right to use and enjoy racial comfort during overt racism and the psycho-social impacts this imposes on young Muslims. As noted in the methodology, asking non-white participants to testify about white supremacy requires them to narrate from a past ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (Du Bois, 2023: 3). As such, these accounts are all tales from within double consciousness and illustrate the everyday fragmentation of the Muslim mind and its profound social impacts within and beyond the encounter.

Both young men describe how silence/complicity co-produces explicit racism, forces self-objectification upon them and causes psychological distress: Ali’s mind races while Hussain describes the ‘terrifying’ effects of explicit racism and silent white witnesses. Yet, despite channelling banal terrors towards Muslims, white performances remain unspoiled. They do not breach the ‘shared cognitive presuppositions’ (Goffman, 1983: 5) of white supremacy; interactional orderliness is maintained, and so, ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4) is successfully reproduced.

Despite this, Hussain remains empathetic towards silent witnesses who choose racial comfort. However, King (1963: 13) reminds us that white comfort is a significant driver of white supremacy because white people most often choose ‘the absence of tension for themselves over the presence of racial justice’. Here, white actors choose an unjust interactive orderliness over justice-oriented speech. Enjoying racial comfort, they siphon discomfort towards the young men, who are left isolated and grappling with fight-or-flight calculations. Hussain observes, ‘you can’t win with this shit’, as he makes the bleak choice between interpersonal fractures and retrospective self-recriminations.

The following testimonies illuminate participants’ feelings towards those who choose the right to use and enjoy racial comfort during explicit racism. Nadia recounts the immediate aftermath of a white person making an Islamophobic joke in the presence of her white friend:

My friend had a blank look on her face and she wouldn’t look at me. So, he did a racist, she heard it the same as me and stayed quiet. She’s supposed to be my friend, we’ve talked about how awful racism is for me. I don’t care about the guy, but my friend stood there and literally let it happen . . . We went to the BLM march together, but when it really mattered, she wasn’t there for me. Like it’s a real backstab, do you know what I mean? It’s proper unforgivable type stuff. (Nadia)

If someone says the P-word or the N-word, it’s common racism, we all know where we stand. When people stay quiet when they hear and see racism, that just shows you what you’re really dealing with. For all the talk, when it comes to it, they just don’t care enough to do something. Like that story about your friend, it’s genuinely scary how many times that’s happened to me. You just know in your heart that you’ll never get past that. Pretend to be my friend then do silent racism? It’s just sly, snide and sneaky as fuck. (Mariyah)

Participants note that the harms perpetrated by silence/complicity are worse than those associated with explicit racism. The analysis identified two explanations for this. First, participants employ various terms to characterise white silence as cunning; racism that is not immediately recognisable. In contrast, explicit racism is perceived as sincere because it is identifiable as such, or in Mariyah’s words: ‘it’s common racism, we all know where we stand’. Silence/complicity allows the witness to masquerade as neutral, remain undetected as a perpetrator of racism, evade the stigmatising label ascribed to overt racists and avoid the discomforts of active anti-racism. These evasions were noted, provoked intense censure and were condemned as ‘sly, snide and sneaky’. Second, white silence elicited deep feelings of betrayal, rupturing social relations, particularly if silence/complicity was chosen by people considered among ‘the wise’ (Goffman, 1963: 22). Across the data, ‘the wise’ were those who do not share the structural vulnerabilities of Muslims but who, through developing close social bonds, have an empathetic awareness of them. The interactional insecurity caused by ‘wise’ friends who choose the rights of whiteness over racial justice is clear. Nadia states, ‘it’s a real backstab . . . proper unforgivable type stuff,’ while Mariyah affirms, ‘you just know in your heart that you’ll never get past that’. For participants, the anti-racist identities of mute witnesses are irrevocably spoiled. Silence/complicity is considered a cunning form of racial self-interest; its enduring social and psychological harms are noted, and consequently, it is stigmatised to a greater extent than explicit racism.

‘Basic White People Moves’: Managing Spoiled Anti-Racist Identities

‘Basic White People Move’ (BWPM) is a term used by participants during discussions and identified in the co-analysis to signify two manoeuvres performed by white people in the interracial interaction order. Participants used the term ‘basic’ to indicate that these behaviours are easily identifiable, predictable, even cliched, and are aimed at retrospectively managing spoiled anti-racist identities. BWPM1 is the after-the-fact strategy that allows the extraction of two paradoxical rights of whiteness (Harris, 1993: 1731–1736): the right to use and enjoy racial comfort during racism while claiming the right to reputation and status as anti-racist:

When white people come back for a ‘wasn’t that awful conversation?’ Like we’re on the same side. They want it both ways, peaceful life when someone is being racist and then try to rewrite what happened to get on a level with me afterwards. Proper basic white people move . . . All they want from me is the ‘I’m not a racist’ trophy. (Sara)

Hilarious, basic white people move, love it. I mean it’s always about them. They have their cake and eat it when we are being racially attacked, they put themselves first, they don’t want any trouble. Then afterwards they want us to approve of them. Even racism is all about them. No way, you don’t get away with that. (Hanna)

For Sara and Hanna, BWPM1 is an impression management contortion geared towards resolving the dissonance between previous silence/complicity and idealised anti-racist self-concepts. Cohesiveness of self is sought through the after-the-fact condemnation of racism, described here as the ‘wasn’t that awful conversation?’ Having previously leveraged the right to use and enjoy racial comfort during racism, the actor now seeks to retain their right to reputation and status as anti-racist by performing an impression of it. In doing so, they obscure their previous silence/complicity with racism and evade accountability for it. BWPM1 enables centuries-old relations of racial extraction in the contemporary interracial interaction order. White actors enjoy both racial comfort during racism and reputation and status as anti-racists; conversely, Muslims endure explicit racism, the psychological violence of unacknowledged racial trauma and lack of accountability. Moreover, BWPM1 has parallels with one of Hesse’s (2021) typographies of white personalities: the ‘white confessional’. These individuals speak out against whiteness to people of colour after-the-fact; they do not seek racial justice but rather praise for elevated racial consciousness. Here, Hanna recognises the white gaze that locates her as a racial-colonial object (Fanon, 2008) from whom racial validation can be obtained despite having caused racial harm. Hanna resists the demand to kowtow, refusing to award the ‘“I’m not a racist” trophy’, denying validation, and thus, successful management of an ‘anti-racist’ identity.

Denying validation is racial insubordination and is therefore fragile in the context of an interracial interaction order permanently structured by white supremacy. Participants identified BWPM2 as a set of manoeuvres deployed when BWPM1 fails to generate the desired impression of racial progressiveness. Unlike BWPM1, these manoeuvres do not seek validation: they are aggressive expressions of whiteness that shield perpetrators of racism from race-based discomfort. This is inherently paradoxical and irrational and connects with existing conceptualisations of whiteness as a form of delusion. Andrews (2023) posits ‘whiteness as psychosis’; that whiteness cannot come to terms with the racial injustice at its core, so it conjures up delusions and irrationalities to evade culpability. Miller and Joseph (2009: 93) offer ‘whiteness as pathological narcissism’, arguing that educated white progressives believe they have transcended racism, so when confronted with evidence of their repudiated white supremacy, they routinely respond with denials, deflections and ultimately with counterattacks designed to exterminate the racial resistance they performatively support:

When I said that being silent when racism is happening is bare racism, she literally said these words, ‘what you say doesn’t matter anyway because I’ve been friends with a mixed-race person since school and he says I’m an ally’. (Yasmin)

I’ve got a better one. I told my friend that she’d done racist stuff she said, ‘I think you’re forgetting that I live in an area where there are loads of Black people.’ She tried to shut me up by using the ‘I live near Black people’ defence. (Parveen)

In Yasmin’s account, when confronted about their silence/complicity, the white actor launches an attack that mobilises racial shielding, the irrational idea that proximity to non-white people inoculates white individuals from behaving in racist ways. While Parveen mockingly recounts a conversation in which living near Black people was used to deflect accusations of racism, shielding is a powerful impression management move. It allows white people to evade accountability for racism while performing anti-racism. Denying the realities of those attempting to resist everyday racism is equally successful:

One woman I called out because she didn’t speak up when someone said I only got into Manchester Uni because they had a quota. She said that she only speaks up when there is real racism and that wasn’t racist. That’s just twisted, you’re racist and instead of apologising you accuse me of playing the race card. (Muhammad)

This white actor’s attachment to the idealised anti-racist self epitomises Miller and Joseph’s (2009: 93) ‘whiteness as pathological narcissism’. The demand for accountability is refused; they perform racial progressiveness while simultaneously reasserting the racial status quo. Muhammad identifies that the white gaze has fixed him as a stereotypically racialised object, delegitimised his resistance and undermined his right to self-narrate by using the ‘playing the race card’ trope. While this might be ‘twisted’, interactional justice and moral reparations are unforthcoming. According to Andrews (2023), the harms inherent to ‘white psychosis’ are always borne by the descendants of Black and brown colonised people. These accounts demonstrate that in the ongoing era of ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4), ‘anti-racists’ do not tolerate demands for accountability even when their racism is pinpointed. Rather, and in line with ‘white psychosis’ (Andrews, 2023), they exterminate racial resistance to retain the right to status and reputation as ‘anti-racist’.

Ultimately, BWPM1 and BWPM2 reduce anti-racism to white moral posturing. These manoeuvres are merely a performance of progressiveness that is completely severed from anti-racism as material racial justice. They allow evasion of accountability, thus everyday racial justice and reparations are rare. These testimonies demonstrate that white individuals are mostly cynical performers, not concerned with the moral pursuit of anti-racism, but the immoral task of manufacturing a convincing impression of it.

‘Sharing’ Whiteness: Beyond White Moral Posturing

Having highlighted that white silence in the presence of racism is always silence/complicity, this section demonstrates that while whiteness is an inalienable property (Harris, 1993) that cannot be permanently bestowed upon non-white individuals, the rights associated with it can be temporarily ‘shared’. ‘Sharing’ whiteness occurs when white racial awareness becomes praxis, meaningfully redistributing rights usually limited to whiteness to non-white individuals. It is transient in nature; its lifecycle is limited to the encounter, and it must be infinitely recreated with each instance of racism. While nascent in these data, reflecting the rarity of its occurrence in the lives of participants, it was important to them because it reverses the dynamics of extraction inherent to white supremacy, transcends ‘anti-racism’ as white moral posturing and generates profound positive psychological and social effects within and beyond encounters.

Anti-racist speech shares the rights of whiteness with non-white people, including the right to comfort during moments of racial vulnerability:

When a white person speaks up, it just takes the spotlight off you. It means you don’t have to do that whole ‘do I call it out or not?’ It’s weirdly relaxing, cos you expect to get into an argument and then you don’t have to, you can just chill and ignore it because someone’s got you. (Mustafa)

Mustafa attests that white verbal intervention during instances of explicit racism – whiteness critiqued from within – has the opposite effect of white silence/complicity. It constitutes effective real-time anti-racist action, eliminating the potential for conflict and transforming what could have been a tacitly produced moment of white tyranny into one that is ‘weirdly relaxing’. Essentially, anti-racist white speech redirects racial comfort, typically reserved for whiteness, towards non-white people. Zain expands on this point: ‘It sends a message that racism isn’t welcome here. It makes it so that the racism is the racist’s problem. Normally when someone is racist, it’s my problem and I haven’t even opened my mouth.’ Here, racially stratified access to comfort is reversed; the rare utopia of racial justice prevails momentarily as a victim of racism is protected while the perpetrator is exposed and held accountable. Overall, such occurrences in the data show that anti-racist white speech, when explicit racism is present, violates the very essence of white supremacy by fleetingly reversing the usual flow of racial benefits.

The positive impacts of white anti-racist speech reverberate beyond the encounter. As discussed above, the silence from friends once deemed ‘wise’ was condemned as a deep betrayal, devastating close social bonds. Anti-racist speech not only fosters safety and comfort for young Muslims within the encounter but also generates cascading positive social and psychological effects beyond it:

You never forget it when a white person has your back. You know when they don’t even involve you, and they just get on with it. They just get it that this is about white people cleaning their own crap. (Imran)

Yeah, they’re not looking to you for props, sometimes they even catch strays for doing it, but they still speak up every time. You’re keeping that friend, right? (Haider)

Whereas white silence/complicity causes ruptures and deepens divisions, anti-racist speech strengthens interracial relationships. Described here as white people ‘speaking up’ and ‘having your back’, both testimonies note the value lies in publicly rejecting the privileges of white skin and doing so without expecting ‘props’ – or praise. Further, those who share whiteness ‘catch strays’; they pursue racial justice even though it exposes them to racial discomfort without material benefit. These actions describe actual anti-racism and fleetingly transcend ‘interest convergence’ (Bell, 1992: 19) the CRT concept that racial inequality cannot be achieved because it is only ever pursued when it benefits white interests.

White anti-racist speech reverses the flow of psychological and social benefits away from whiteness and towards young Muslims in the interracial interaction order. Further, Imran and Haider have noted that white speech as direct anti-racist action strengthens interracial bonds. Habib echoes this and offers insight into how it fosters interracial trust beyond the encounter: ‘I always keep my guard up with [white] people apart from those I really trust. With them, I’m easy. I know that if anything happens, they’ll do the right thing.’ If there is a will to justice, white individuals can reorient how they inhabit the world to materialise transient racial justice. I avoid naively optimistic claims that individual occurrences of material anti-racism dissolve centuries-old white supremacy that permanently underpins the contemporary interracial interaction order. Yet, I take a historically literate position: any conscious act that reverses the relations of extraction integral to white supremacy is significant.

Conclusion

This article introduces the interracial interaction order to reveal how the rights of whiteness are extracted in face-to-face settings in almost-invisible ways. This theoretical reparation connects contemporary everyday encounters with the racial-colonial system of white supremacy, advancing the discipline-defining agenda of epistemological justice (Bhambra, 2021). Through a micro-analysis of young Muslims’ narratives, white silence in the presence of overt racism is identified as archetypal ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4). That is, it perpetuates the relations of white supremacy but is resolutely unacknowledged by white people. Such social dynamics conceal perpetrators and beneficiaries of racism, preserving their racial innocence even as they inflict repetitive psychological and social injuries on Muslims.

This is a fundamental paradox and means white people often perform racial progressiveness while refusing to relinquish the unearned privileges conferred by white supremacy. This ‘white psychosis’ (Andrews, 2023) can only be maintained by impression management contortions or ‘Basic White People Moves’. These moves obscure silence/complicity with white supremacy and receipt of its benefits. When obfuscation fails, aggressive manoeuvres including denial, deflection and equivocations are mobilised to dodge accountability and, ultimately, exterminate racial resistance in everyday life.

This analysis of the interracial interaction order has far-reaching implications. It is relevant for non-white people navigating white worlds globally, for interdisciplinary academic and non-academic audiences concerned with racial justice and it offers insights on how how white supremacy remains permanent at institutional and systemic levels. In terms of institutional racial inequalities, I note that whiteness expects its rights under white supremacy even when they are irrational. It is plausible then that ‘white psychosis’ (Andrews, 2023) saturates power-laden institutional relations: self-proclaimed progressives leverage the right to use and enjoy the racially inequitable distribution of institutional benefits while simultaneously expecting the right to reputation and status as anti-racist by performing an impression of it. These performances are the essence of ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4), nothing but ‘sincere fictions’ (Feagin and Vera, 1995: 186) that perpetuate racism as much as explicit support for the racial order.

The findings pose questions regarding the permanence of systemic racism. If white people typically refuse to relinquish relatively minor benefits for everyday racial justice, what hope exists for a public mandate and the political will necessary to redistribute benefits away from white populations for systemic and global racial-colonial justice? Any research and activism claiming to transform the racially stratified issues of our time – including, for example, criminal and youth justice, migration and belonging, climate justice and decolonisation – remains inadequate until it confronts the abundantly evidenced reality (Meer, 2022) that white supremacy is permanent and cyclical because the majority group will support racial justice measures only when they converge with their own interests (Bell, 1992).

Participants’ accounts offer mostly pessimism for future racial justice. Yet, there is cause for extremely cautious optimism. Very rarely white actors ‘share’ whiteness – that is, siphon rights usually reserved for white people towards non-white individuals without seeking personal benefit. Such acts, while exceedingly uncommon, reverse the relations of extraction inherent to white supremacy and fleetingly liberate anti-racism from individualised white impression management.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Fatima Khan

Fatima Khan is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in the study of racisms and anti-racisms, with a particular focus on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Her research adopts a critical race approach, aimed at advancing racial justice or, at a minimum, rigorously exposing and challenging racial conditions that should not be tolerted. Dr Khan has extensive expertise in conducting creative qualitative and participatory research with these communities across Greater Manchester. Her work frequently involves collaboration with grassroots organisations to address and mitigate issues adversely affecting these communities. She has been awarded the Independent Social Research Fund Early Career Fellowship to investigate the impact of white supremacy on the mental health of young Muslims.

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