Understanding whiteness Part 12: Defeating monsters, 'post-Floyd', and lessons from Karate Kid
‘Showing out’
Often, the monster in a story is mysterious, shadowy and hard to define, but once seen, displays itself in terrifying extroversion. In fact, the etymology of the word ‘monster’ takes us back to the Latin ‘monstrare’, meaning ‘to demonstrate’. Literally, a monster is a force that demonstrates its power and strength, or, as I’ve heard it described: to ‘show out’.
Racism is a lot like this. It’s an invisible force, like gravity, permeating all societal structures. But it also plants itself into anyone born under its shadow. Equally, it can violently demonstrate or show itself in hugely visible acts of inhumanity and abuse. For many people blinded to the true nature of racism by the sheer scale of it, it can only be seen when it becomes violently, shockingly visible hence why the murder of George Floyd became a watershed moment during the first waves of the Covid pandemic. In fact, it was such a visceral moment that many people refer to events after 2021 as ‘post-Floyd’…
In this post, we need to examine the way in which white supremacy dominates even when it isn’t manifested in overtly shocking instances of racist abuse. This is where understanding how monsters operate, in stories, will be useful.
Fiercely protective
One of the most overlooked features of the archetypal monster is potentially the most revealing, in terms of understanding white supremacy. It’s the fact that monsters are fiercely protective of their domains, so much so that they are often only provoked into action when disturbed. The shark in Jaws isn’t a problem until you go into the sea. To give another example, monstrous villains in James Bond movies would be happy enough if everyone just let them get along with taking over the world.
Since the quote unquote Enlightenment (in Europe) white supremacy has claimed the modern world as its domain, asserting dominance wherever opportunity arose. This is the root ideology of colonialism and imperialism, which European superpowers were aggressively seeking in the 18th and 19th centuries. And for all their national and ethnic differences, the shared umbrella of recently defined whiteness was a unifying factor that covered them all, to suffocating, monstrous effect. The monstrous part of European imperialism was the way in which it showed out its power, its whiteness, and became fiercely protective over the racial hierarchy that it had created (through scientific racism), which put white nations at the top.
The fear of white supremacy
The problem with the Jaws analogy for white supremacy is that it implies, wrongly, that white supremacy is a force of nature, inherently destructive rather than malicious by intent. In the story of racism, this is not the case. If white supremacy is indeed a monster, it is a sentient, knowing, deliberate monster, with equal capacity for intelligence and cruelty. It’s Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, or Thomas Harris’ Dr Hannibal Lecter, well aware of its own nature and actively deciding to pursue malicious ends. In a word: evil.
And let’s be clear here, there are multiple generations of people who can be held accountable for what racism has done. And these people aren’t sharks in the ocean or killer robots; they are human beings who made a decision to park their humanity in order to lean into the power given to them by white supremacy.
Inspiring fear
White supremacy is so monstrous that it actually inspires fear. Think about it. Think about how rarely the phrase ‘white supremacy’ actually gets used in everyday conversations and interactions about racism, in your personal life or online. It’s become taboo, treated as so volatile and incendiary that to even call it by name is to risk its wrath. It’s what I once called ‘the Voldemort Effect’, whereby the fictional Dark Lord manages to reign through fear, so much so that his name becomes unutterable. Just like Luke Skywalker is with Darth Vader, dominant whiteness is scared of white supremacy, and the real world result is that people racialised as white can become scared to call white supremacy by name. As a result, they can even end up welcoming the ignorance that white supremacy has built into them, happy to wake up in a world of racism they know little about.
As an anti-racist educator, I’ve seen the damage this can do. The fear of tackling (or even seeing) white supremacy paralyses conversations surrounding racism. And the simple fact remains: You can’t talk about what you’re talking about if you’re too scared to say what it is and too ignorant to know where to start. More than this, the fear of white supremacy is actually linked to a deeper respect - a respect that white supremacy has demanded of itself, much like an unwavering dictator. I recently articulated this to an auditorium full of people at a conference of educators. Giving the closing keynote speech, I heard myself saying that I refuse to be scared of white supremacy because I refuse to respect it. White supremacy has given us nothing good so we owe it nothing back. If the story of racism is really the story of white supremacy then we must be willing, able and ready to cut it down to size, cast off its costume, and banish it as the worthless interloper that it really is. In conclusion: White supremacy is a monster that we don’t need to respect and, in short, a character that we, as humans, don’t need, never needed.
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