Understanding whiteness Part 14: Grand quests, healthy distances, and important lessons from GB News
Brave new worlds: The Quest
The Quest is one of the most enduring types of story we have. Characters setting off from the safety of home into the unknown makes for tall tales we love to consume. Stories framed around quest narratives tend to become epic sagas, grand in scale and broad in scope. Whether it’s a band of Hobbits in search of a magic ring to end all evil (Lord of the Rings) or a whip cracking archaeologist in search of the legendary ark of covenant before Nazi soldiers can get hold of it (Raiders of the Lost Ark), there is a undeniable appeal to the idea of questing into the woods and beyond, on some kind of noble adventure.
This spirit of adventure is part of the reason the world has arrived at a dystopia of racialised inequity. European ‘pioneers’ set their sights on fame and fortune by venturing into new worlds, meeting all kinds of danger along the way. These figures have been celebrated for their bravery and pioneering spirit, immortalised as heroes. In 1492 Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ an America that was already populated by native Americans, setting in motion a genocide from which indigenous Americans have not recovered. It’s a story in which European whiteness is clearly identifiable as the aggressor.
European colonialism and imperialism have always been on a grand quest, with rewards that have been at the expense of wider humanity. There is blame to be assigned here, whereby dominant whiteness has been responsible for malicious acts against non-white communities. When Christopher Booker writes ‘A great deal of story-telling is concerned in one way or another with the committing of crimes’, he offers a useful perspective with which to view the story of racism. What crimes have been committed and who is responsible? Then, for us modern individuals who have been born into this story, the question arises over how far we are willing, or able, to distance ourselves from those crimes. It's an experiment that I personally live out every day. I’m British, fully. (As I am black, fully, and Ghanaian, fully, and English, fully, and all sorts of things, fully. Remember: Identity is not cake.) But I can challenge Britishness because I know that to challenge Britishness is not the same as challenging myself. I’ve gifted myself distance from it, meaning that I can hold it to account. Similarly, I can attack masculinity and seek to undo it without fear of undoing myself, because I am not solely a ‘man’. ‘Man’ is a construct that I have adopted, but its parameters do not define me.
Let’s go further. Let me take myself into the woods, as it were.
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