Into the woods
There’s a point in every story where the protagonist becomes lost. It’s the part of the story, towards the midpoint, where the main character reaches a crisis; unsure of where to go and what to do with no idea how to progress. It’s a moment that usually comes with some level of peril or jeopardy, whereby the protagonist is forced to face their fears before deciding what to do.
In classic fairytales, the journey into the woods represents a journey into the unknown. The woods are a place of risk and danger, beyond the safety of the village. It’s where the wolves and witches lay in wait. It’s where fears must be overcome and ultimately, the only route to true knowledge of self. Red Riding Hood must confront the wolf in order to mature; Hansel and Gretel need to defeat the witch to provide their own safety.
If we conceive of dominant whiteness as the protagonist of its own fairytale, we can argue that it is somewhere near the beginning of its ‘lost in the woods’ phase. Think about it. For centuries, plural, dominant whiteness has enjoyed the comfort and safety of white supremacy, naïve, ignorant of its own past and more or less unchallenged in the racialised hierarchy it was born into. White empires have unfurled happily across the globe since the 18th and 19th centuries, building racial inequity into the structure of societies and institutions worldwide. In all of this, whiteness has gone relatively untested. Whiteness, as a character, has not been thrown into the heart of the forest where it might be consumed whole. It hasn’t really been threatened.
But ask some white people how they feel right now now and you’ll get the impression that whiteness is under a very real threat indeed. You’ll hear suspicion and mistrust of Black Lives Matter (as a hashtag, political stance, organisation, or ideology). You’ll get ‘All Lives Matter’ as a coded way of saying that Hey Hang On White Lives Matter Too! You’ll get the so-called ‘culture wars’, with ‘wokeness’ vilified as a kind of left-wing moral extremism. You’ll get accusations of trying to rewrite (white) history as opposed to revealing wider, obscured truths. You’ll get the accusations that black people who engage with anti-racism are somehow ‘the real racists’. In short, you’ll get defensiveness, fear and panic.
The politics of fear
October 2020 saw the emergence of Reclaim, a political party led by the actor Laurence Fox. When I originally researched the organisation, taking me to its website, www.reclaimparty.co.uk, this is what I found:
Laurence Fox set up the Reclaim Party in October 2020 after appearing on BBC Question Time in January that year. For challenging the woke orthodoxy of “white privilege” and “systemic racism” he was cancelled from a 21-year acting career.
This experience changed Laurence’s life overnight – and now he is dedicating his life to protect others from being prevented from contributing to the national debate.
Laurence not only realised freedom of speech was under grave peril: it became clear our media hates our country and culture, and we’ve been betrayed by careerist, so called liberal politicians.
Reclaim your country!
Powerful stuff. Elsewhere on the website there is a manifesto that outlines a number of polices and measures, ranging from the practical to the aspirational and everything in-between, by which the UK might position itself as a fully functioning sovereign state. Some of these polices make me tilt my head and think, many more make me recoil. All of them are rooted in the idea that the UK is in need of ‘reclaiming’ – that some essential sense of national stabnility has been lost or compromised and that the country’s very identity is under threat.
You can’t separate any of this this from the UK’s sense of itself as, specifically, a white country. And from this standpoint, it becomes incredibly telling that the anecdote about Fox’s TV appearance (where he reacted to the notion of white privilege) is proudly listed as a big bang moment for the whole Reclaim movement. Ironically (for a party that leads with a spirit of strength and assertion) there is a deep insecurity that sits at the heart of everything the Reclaim party seeks to achieve. Here, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the inextricable intertwining of dominant whiteness to many other socially dominant identities: maleness and ‘masculinity’; able-bodiedness; heteronormativity; Christianity; Capitalism. The construction of dominant whiteness came with the promotion of these ‘norms’ (which goes a long way towards explaining why the many overlaps of anti-liberal sentiments).
The anti-woke kickback is a symptom of dominant whiteness finding itself in the woods. It’s taken a while, but perhaps the tides are (finally? slowly? maybe?) moving in the direction of equity and social justice, towards a world in which a dominant race can simply not exist. For dominant whiteness, this is both disorienting and scary. It leads to a sense of being threatened and cornered, needing to reclaim a position that has been shown to be untenable, fighting an ‘orthodoxy’ (in Reclaim’s words) that is essentially seeking justice.
The wider struggle
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