Throughout my fieldwork in Guadeloupe, I was repeatedly confronted with the ways in which black Guadeloupians commented on my whiteness. From the very outset, I was habitually identified as ‘la blanche’ (the white woman), but in the eyes of many I continued to fall short of the normative rules of white conduct. Children would be the most severe judges of my whiteness, whenever they glanced at my hair and listened to my French, only to conclude their assessment by shaking their heads disapprovingly. Due to their critical remarks, I became acutely aware of the social construction of dominant whiteness in Guadeloupe – a Caribbean island that was colonised by France in 1635, where Africans were enslaved until 1848, and that has remained an overseas territory of France to this day.

Whiteness is not primarily a visual mark says Judith Butler (1993), but an act that needs to be performed to sustain that position. The Martinican psychiatrist of colonial oppression Frantz Fanon dilated upon this topic already in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). In analysing the symbolic violence caused by the forceful instigation of whiteness in the French Antilles, he focussed on the conduct of black Antilleans who had migrated to France and returned to the island as whites. They greeted others with nods, spoke French with rolling r’s, wore French fashion, and behaved superior. I was frequently punished for not displaying these excellent qualities of whiteness. In the following five lessons, I will describe how Guadeloupians drew attention to my anomalous whiteness and taught me to be white.

Lesson 1: Once I went on a daytrip to the Steps of the Slaves in Petit-Canal that was organised by a women's association. I was welcomed by the president, who incited the crowd to applaud for the anthropologist from the Netherlands. When I decided to help the organisation preparing food and distributing the cake, I transgressed the code of white conduct and was punished for it by a light-skinned lady. She cast a deadly glance at me and yelled angrily that I had to hurry up and serve her first, whereupon she snatched the piece of cake out of my hands.