Racial Gaslighting in Britain: Politics and Power
摘要
Pioneering work on racial gaslighting has developed and linked the concept to the production of narratives which ‘obfuscate the existence’ of racial and racist power structures (Davis and Ernst, 2017: 761). Racial gaslighting, this work has demonstrated, consequently operates in the service of upholding these same structures and further undermining challenges to them. What follows in this chapter examines racial gaslighting in a British context, exploring it as an ideological process informing material realisations of state power. It provides a brief intellectual genesis of the term, foregrounding some of its parameters by those who have developed analyses of it as a concept and linking this to dominant narratives around ‘race’ and racism in Britain. In doing so, this provides a framework against which a series of ‘case studies’ of racial gaslighting are presented and explored analytically, each demonstrating different but inter-related dynamics.