The Culture of Whiteness in Private Security

This chapter explores how logics of whiteness are called upon to legitimise claims of authority and power within private security by drawing upon and critiquing the existing scholarship on race and gender located within the larger critical gender scholarship on private security. It presents the implicit whiteness that is established and reproduced in the ways in which security is practised, how it is valued and how as academics write about the industry. Importantly academics and practitioners need to pay attention to the informal, historic and cultural aspects of the industry that sustain inequality and gendered divisions of labour. Postcolonial feminism offers insights into the silenced communities and the obscured power dynamics. Postcolonial feminists believe that the world continues to be demarked through gendered, raced and colonial logics, practices and norms. The chapter presents the normalising whiteness in academic writing' further illustrates how white privilege within the industry is reinforced by how as academics write about the industry.