Understanding whiteness Part 1: The power of storytelling

Question:

What would happen if we applied the physics of storytelling to the narrative of race politics? What if we understood whiteness and blackness, dominance and 'otherness’ in the same way that we understand the heroes and villains of our shared stories? Our myths and legends, our blockbusters and box sets? How useful might an exploration of race politics be, leaning on the theory of storytelling as a way into the woods?

I’ve spent a whole career examining stories, plot, narrative structure and characterisation and the insights are illuminating. Teaching English has afforded me an understanding of psychology and identity, offering criticality and distance, but also empathy. I genuinely believe that if we, society at large, are going to make any kind of dent in social injustices and counter tides of racism that go back centuries, we need to develop an understanding of race in the way we instinctively understand any story we share.

The current situation

There presently exists a growing library of books that address race politics, seeking to define and articulate an anti-racist agenda. I should know; having written some of them myself.

But we’re still where we are. For all the conversation, all the books, all the reaction, shock, guilt, shame, anger and resolve, it very much seems that society is staring at a blank page, without a strategy, wondering what to do next.

It strikes me that one of the reasons that this country (and white Western society in general) struggles to know where to go next is that it has yet to fully understand the story that is being written by a white supremacist paradigm – mainly because we are still very much embroiled in that story, unable to see it with the necessary distance and wider perspective.

I’m fast realising that one of the biggest hurdles in tackling racism is the fact that so little time is spent on understanding whiteness. It’s what happens when an ideology becomes dominant: it takes up so much of the frame that you can’t actually see it for its size. Whatever whiteness is, it exists at a scale that doesn’t invite interrogation in the white, western world.

I’ve just got back from four days at the Hay Festival, talking books, presenting, panelling, being interviewed, doing the interviewing, that kind of thing. One event was me on the main stage interviewing the journalist and broadcaster Gary Younge. He’s a bit of a hero of mine, so I was excited. At one point, towards the end of the session, he said something so obvious, yet so profound that it made me stop. He said that he’s never had to come out as straight - for the (obvious) reason that being heterosexual is seen as the default, as normal.

This is how all dominant identities work. They don’t need to be named, defined, referred to or explained. They are constructed as such and perpetuate their dominance precisely by a lack of critical attention. Whiteness is the most glaring example of this phenomenon. And as someone who is deeply concerned with tackling racism and racist ideology, I’ve made it my business to interrogate, explore, define, dismantle and understand whiteness. I’m ready to share these thoughts, long form, in full.

What follows now will a series of Deep Dive posts that seek to do exactly this. My method? Storytelling. I don’t mean telling stories about whiteness but rather seeking to expose the physics of whiteness and white supremacy via the physics of storytelling and narrative itself. We, as a species, really are addicted to stories. Moreover, we understand them profoundly, on fundamental, emotional, psychological levels. Literature, film, television, drama, news cycles, social media… We can’t stop consuming stories and we understand the world – and maybe even ourselves – through the lenses these stories provide. So what better way than to finally understand the myths and realities of racism: one of the biggest stories of all?

We’re addicted to stories

Every book we read, every film we watch, every boxset we binge in endless hours of digital streaming; it’s all evidence of our insatiable desire to start at Once Upon a Time, and end with Happily Ever After. We can’t get enough of tales, no matter how tall or small, that can make us laugh, cry and everything in between.

We also love seeing characters go through the fires of drama. Big archetypes like heroes and villains, good and evil, or all those fascinating grey areas. Stories give us a chance to see conflicts wrestle with each other in real time, where noble quests meet perilous junctures and we hold our breath in tense anticipation.

And it isn’t just in drama, literature, film or television. Every day, we dive thumb first into social media playgrounds to scroll through endless stories, replete with villains (people to boo) and heroes (people to cheer). What is Twitter, for example, if not a place where narratives of right vs wrong are played out on the daily? Where arguments flare up with all the excitement and drama of a public debate, or an after school fight? Where the main objective is to avoid becoming the main character on any given day? Unsurprisingly, we flock in our millions to see, as social media asks of us, what’s happening.

Then there’s the news cycle. As awful as it is, full of unwatchable trauma and outright disaster, we regardless find ourselves locked in, glued, watching. It’s so much more than just finding out what’s going on in the world around us. The news is a parade of deliberately curated stories that excite and terrify, warn and explain, a steady stream of villainy, tragedy, disaster, peril, quests and challenges (with the positioning of goodies and baddies as defined by where your particular moral compass happens to rest).

The universal appeal of the story is a simple one. When opposing forces, like good and evil, or left and right political wings, are thrown together in a melee of confusion, it’s a chance for not only drama, but also the chance for understanding. The story becomes a workout for our feelings and a scaffold for our thoughts. It can be the most mindless Hollywood blockbuster or an ongoing political debate – it won’t take much of a squint to find characters in conflict, moments of crisis and a plot of some description.

We can equally find the shape of stories in the ebb and flow of everyday life. Think about your favourite dinner party anecdote. Or the last time you got annoyed. Or something you saw on the way to somewhere that was worth telling someone about. All of the above will contain characters, situations, an inciting incident along the way, and some kind of resolution. All will be stories. If you go to the small screen, same thing. Every single tweet features a protagonist (ie: the person posting) involves some kind of tension to be resolved and usually includes other characters to either root for or deride, take your pick.

But what is it? What is it about storytelling, in all its forms, that keeps us coming back again and again? To the screen, to the stage, to the page? Why can’t we turn away? Even when the stories are similar, familiar, predictable even, with endings we feel instinctively and patterns that can be identified and articulated, we find ourselves seeking them out, to entertain us. To learn from.

I probably don’t need to tell you that I used to be an English teacher. For fifteen years, I would spend hours of my waking day analysing stories, finding balances, tensions, and seeking meaning. As I went, I found myself increasingly fascinated by the shape of stories and the physics of narrative. I couldn’t understand how stories worked. It filled me with wonder, how stories could be so balanced and complex. I marvelled at how the basic shape of stories were so recognisable and yet their iterations so infinite. I researched the theories behind narrative structure, which took me all the way into the psychological explorations of thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. And I found texts, plural, along the way that would become lifelong guides for my own understanding. The broad conclusion is an unsurprising one: that stories exist everywhere, and humans basically see them wherever our gaze comes to rest.

That stories can be found wherever we choose to find them says a lot about the importance of storytelling for our making sense of the world. And make sense of it we must, because, to me at least, the world appears to be in a state of profound chaos. Since 2021, I’ve embarked upon a mission to change the hearts and minds of organisations and institutions across the country, becoming what might safely be described as an anti-racist educator, a wandering hero seeking to illuminate the truths of racism as a means of hopefully undoing the damage it has caused (and is causing) one visit at a time. It’s an optimistic quest and not the easiest line of work, I won’t lie. It requires stepping into unknown contexts and presenting information that, to be blunt, a lot of people aren’t ready to hear.

One of the biggest revelations has been something that I’ve known all along; that people who don’t consider themselves to be affected by racism often don’t feel compelled to do anything about it. It’s the greatest success of the white supremacy project – how people who have been racialised as ‘white’ have been desensitised from feeling the flames of racist ideology that burn us all. I’ve met whole audiences who had yet felt no compulsion to interrogate the realities of racism writ large across centuries. Standing in front of all those people for all those months, it struck me how comfortable people many are with the status quo. And it was here that a seed of thought that would eventually germinate into these pages, was first planted… If we can understand the story that white supremacy has told, is telling, we might, just maybe, be able to free ourselves from the narrative that we have been born into…

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Back soon.

Jeffrey