So.
When I said in the previous post that dominant whiteness is a ‘pitiful victim’ I wasn’t just being glib. Read this next bit carefully: In positioning whiteness at the very top of a hierarchy that stands on the broken bones of non-whiteness, white supremacy attempted to strip white people of basic humanity. This is truly awful. It’s akin to teaching a baby to be a cannibal, or surgically removing someone’s conscience from their brain. It’s abhorrent. The results are obviously abhorrent too: namely centuries of racialised oppression only ever possible because of the dehumanisation of people racialised as white - people born into a white supremacist world that gave them power and privilege with one hand and forced them away from basic human empathy with the other.
The human touch
One of the things that almost prevented this book from being published was the risk that it would be too academic. The worry, from certain parties, was that I’d alienate the target audience (you) by being too detached, too intellectual, not human enough. I can see the point. Conversations around anti-racism need to be emotive, emotional and human. They need to tap into the heartbeat of the human condition. A book like this, exploring the physics of racism through the mechanics of storytelling, is my attempt to humanise racist ideology, so that we can better understand it.
In his 1667 epic poem, Paradise Lost, John Milton entered a debate about the nature of evil by humanising the villain. In Paradise Lost, Satan, the banished angel, becomes our lens into the story as a whole. Through Satan, Milton offers a perspective that blurs the accepted boundaries of good and evil, inviting ambiguity where moral absolutism usually resides. His version of Satan gives us enigmatic quotable after enigmatic quotable on the true nature of humanity and in doing so, Satan, as a character, is somewhat softened.
(Note: Listen, just to make absolutely clear: in the story of racism, white supremacy is not an enigmatic anti-hero. It’s not Ebeneezer Scrooge in need of a wake-up call. That role is actually best attributed to dominant whiteness, who has been made blind to its own history and, once shown its inevitable tragic fate, will be prime for a moral turnaround. This is why the distinctions I keep making between dominant whiteness, white supremacy and people racialised as ‘white’, are so vital.)
Beyond sympathy?
Perhaps the most difficult question raised by this series so far is: Does dominant whiteness deserve our sympathy? My honest answer? I’m not sure. See, the best of me understands that to forgive is to be truly human, while the rest of me is angry over what dominant whiteness has allowed to happen and what it continues to preside over. But ultimately, whether or not I can forgive dominant whiteness is secondary to the real question: Can dominant whiteness acknowledge its own sins? Can it admit its own participation in the evils of white supremacy?
When I bring these questions into my own life story, I’m left thinking about all the white people I’ve met that I’ve never discussed racism with. They must have been aware of their relationship with white supremacy, surely. Those countless times when I’ve been met with hesitation, or a lingering glance, or nervous flicker of the eyes, when the lessons taught by white supremacy have whispered something into the ears of a white person working out what I am and how I fit into their world. This is a common occurrence for me, as I’m sure it is for any black person navigating a majority-white context. And the big question remains: do white people know how much their racial identity is connected to the story of white supremacy?
The power of delusion
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