Understanding whiteness Part 16: Victims and heroes... at the same time
Victim narratives
Racism is not black people’s story. In a sense, people who have been racialised as black are collateral damage in the true story of whiteness and its thirst for power. And yet, a large part of the narrative seems to be blackness being a victim of white power. It’s a story we have been shown and told so often that we consume it without question. It’s become a given part of the physics of our modern world. Black people suffer. We get it.
For dominant whiteness, the black victim narrative is an easy sell. It’s remarkable how ready the white mainstream is to accept blackness in a wretched state, be it enslaved, poverty stricken or socioeconomically underprivileged. Dominant whiteness has been conditioned to accept brutality against black bodies. I think back to my childhood and horrific images of the 1980s Ethiopian famine, shown freely across terrestrial television at a time when black people were underrepresented in mainstream media. The story we were being asked to believe was that ‘Africa’ was a place of suffering and poverty, which us westerners (dominant white westerners) had the financial power to assist. I also think back to 2020 and the fact that millions of people across the world chose to watch the video of George Floyd being murdered. I didn’t. I still haven’t seen it. I don’t need to see it.
It's a curious fact of modern media that black trauma is a recurrent theme in the ongoing news cycle. At any given time, there seems to be a scandalous story of racist hue, be it interpersonal, institutional, structural, or some combination of all three. It makes me wonder if (and why) there is an ever-present appetite for black pain. It’s a story that the media always seems ready to tell, or at least show. If course, the sharing of racist realities is important, and vital if racism is going to be tackled at root, but why such a readiness to see, viscerally, black bodies in pain? Is there something of the spectacle of black trauma at work here, in the way that films about black slavery continue to attract mainstream (non-black) audiences.
One of the tensions of Black History Month is the tension between celebrating stories of black success and retreading stories of black trauma. Here, the character of blackness takes on a dual identity, a Gemini, if you like that kind of thing. It exists in two extremes, the ultimate hero/ heroine, invincible and able to withstand unbearable degradation, rising above the odds. But at the same time, wretched and destroyed, beaten, abused and subjugated. A true victim.
I can’t easily think of story examples where the protagonist is the hero and the victim at the exact same time. It’s an impossible conflict. I’m currently watching a documentary called DEAR MAMA, about the life of Tupac Shakur, the rapper who has in many ways become something of a martyr figure for hiphop devotees of successive generations…
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