Cultural Competence as Whiteness in Health and Social Care

Critical Whiteness studies seek to understand ways people racialized as White collectively maintain racist systems even whilst professing anti-racism. Key to Whiteness are discursive moves that have the effect of making the benefits of being White invisible for the beneficiaries. In the era of Black Lives Matter and decolonization, it has been noticed that Whiteness is increasingly defensive and disturbed. With its invisibility under threat, hegemonic Whiteness now relies on disavowal of open racists as “too” White (by implication, not really White), as part of a continuous process of protecting its appearance of being position-free and universal. Thus, its “civilizational” reach is underpinned. This chapter argues that in health and social care, the machinery of Whiteness can be seen at work in attempts to instill “cultural competence.” While cultural competence is popular as a tool for redressing racism in institutional contexts, in practice it reflects and re-inscribes social difference. Cultural competence is therefore best understood as a technology of Whiteness, along with other “soft” equality measures like diversity management. The chapter considers the promotion of cultural competence in Scotland and identifies the traces it bears of Scotland’s particular history of race and racism as a former slave-owning wing of British colonialism now seeking to position itself as multicultural and post-colonial. Efforts to foster cultural competence can be seen as Whiteness “in the headlights,” seeking its once cozy invisibility, yet they also create liminal spaces where racial certainties may be unsettled.