Understanding whiteness part 23: Don't trust white history

That is not a typo. Part 23. Twenty-three! And still going... It turns out that understanding whiteness is a bigger task than I might have imagined. Listen, if you're new to this Substack, welcome. You've missed a bit, but this post will still be fully accessible, I promise you. I’ve made it free to read in full because it shapes some of the most vital and important ideas I have committed to the page. So read carefully, with an open heart and curious mind. And then, when the pennies start dropping, take a moment to reflect, before carrying on. If, by the end of the next 2,000 or so words you are not illuminated with new insights, then tell me, and I’ll write you a little apology or something. But I’m confident that this essay will affect the trajectory of your thinking. Let’s go.

Rags to riches

Before we get into why you can’t trust ‘white history’, let’s; start with a positive. A feel good opening, if you will. Rags to riches.

It’s one of the oldest stories we have, and I know you know it well: the underdog becomes the winner; the victim gets rewarded. Yay. It’s Cinderella making it to the palace, or Charlie getting the keys to the chocolate factory. Blackness has been destined for failure from its inception in the white supremacist consciousness, but it has navigated every pitfall, snare and bear trap. When we look at history, it’s easy and tempting to see moments of black success in this way.

The negative stories that have been shaped around black identity have become part of a wider story of black degradation. In this context, black success, black survival even, is something to be celebrated, for the simple reason that it feels like an against all odds story of triumph. Every time you see the first black this or the first black that, where a person’s blackness is highlighted as extraordinary, there’s a subtext of surprise and celebration that blackness has actually secured a win in a battle that it has been set up to lose, for centuries on end.

This might explain the general sense of ovation that blackness often receives from progressive white liberalism. There’s an understanding that blackness has suffered, is suffering, and so deserves some level of recognition as a result. How this plays out is often in increased representation: black and brown faces on adverts, in sports punditry, on television and so on, giving liberal well-wishers something to cheer for. I’ve seen it in my own lifetime, a steady shift in celebratory attitudes towards blackness in the mainstream.

The problem with these supposed wins for black identity is that they can be painfully superficial. We enjoy rags to riches narratives because they suggest that justice can prevail and the good can triumph over evil, lifting a wretched protagonist out of the shadows and into the glittering spotlight. But the glamour of the ‘riches’ doesn’t address the root cause of the rags. It’s great to see Cinderella get her man but that does nothing about the system of social injustice that put her in the cellar in the first place. Charlie is indeed Willy Wonka’s true heir, but what would have happened to his impoverished family had a golden ticket not fallen his way? I know that I’m being a bit of a killjoy by asking such serious questions of fluffy tales like these, but in our very real world of racialised inequality it’s dangerous to translate wins for representation as more progressive than they are.

Politics and trust

In 2022, we saw this play out on the grand stage of UK politics. The Conservative Party was busy trying to find a credible leader for itself (and thus the country at large) following the departure of Boris Johnson. Along the way, since 2018, a selection of minority ethnic figures had risen to prominence within Tory ranks, many of whom won key positions of influence within the cabinet itself. Much was said at the time about the progressiveness of these appointments. We even got our first black Chancellor of the Exchequer in Kwesi Kwarteng, making history right at the start of 2022’s Black History Month. Politically, here were people from the ideological margins elevated to the highest positions of power in the country.

After much jostling (and a minor economic meltdown led by Kwarteng and the then Prime Minister, Liz Truss) Rishi Sunak took his place as the UK’s first ever prime minister of Indian heritage. For many, this was a clear win for diversity, a Cinderella’s ball conclusion to generations of racial discrepancy.

But no. In terms of race politics, this was far from happily ever after. The appointment of non-white senior politicians didn’t mean that the status quo of UK politics was being challenged in any profound way. Rishi Sunak represents a world of power and influence built on structural inequality. His chosen Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was happy to promote right wing political agendas that are acutely intolerant of minority groups. Case in point: the controversial (ie: useless) scheme to send asylum seekers for processing in Rwanda, a country known for human rights violations. Irrespective of the ethnicity of its key players, the UK government seemed committed to creating a hostile environment for minority groups.

Trust me, I’m a narrator

History is a story told by the winners. It’s an oft repeated, simple idea: that the version of events as described by socially dominant groups is the version that gets tattooed into the history books. Of course, this means that capital H History becomes a story with questionable verisimilitude. To put it bluntly, we can’t always trust what we’ve been told.

In the story of modern race politics, white supremacy is the self-appointed winner. The white western world is full of stories that speak to this positioning, take your pick. Be it the ‘discovery’ of America by Christopher Columbus, the British Empire as being an unproblematic force for good, the depiction of Jesus as fair-skinned and blue eyed, the presentation as science as a preserve of white, European men, Elvis Presley as the ‘king’ of Rock and Roll, and so on and so forth, history’s grand narratives repeatedly ask us to accept whiteness as heroic, noble, talented and true.

As a teacher of 15 years I’ve seen up close the damage this can do. The curriculum I was invited to teach in 2007 was predicated on, quote, ‘essential knowledge’ and, quote ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Conceived in 1988 under Margaret Thatcher’s presiding Conservative government, this curriculum leant on implicit, unspoken value judgements over what was ‘essential’ and ‘best’, judgements that were of course soaked in generations of white supremacy. It’s no accident the resultant curriculum is so white in hue, almost entirely lacking in varied global perspectives.

Examples from literature…

In the world of literature, the unreliable narrator can be intentionally, maliciously deceptive or unintentionally, naïvely misguided. Handled well, it’s a technique that can add multiple mirrors of illumination to a story, giving the reader profound perspectives from which to draw subtle insights. Equally, the unreliable narrator can expose, and critique, the very context from which they originate. In Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, we see the world through the confused eyes of the second Mrs de Winter, struggling to make sense of what happened to her predecessor. Her misunderstandings mislead the audience too, and we become invested in her personal fate as well as the wider story of her husband’s chilling past. A different kind of unreliability can be found in stories such as The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, in which the narrator’s interpretation of reality is steered hugely by his need to create emotional safety out of deeply traumatic events. By the end of the story, the only thing we can be certain of is that Pi has been emotionally decimated, leaving his tall tale standing as little more than a heartbreaking coping mechanism. And we’ve already talked about the delusional detective in Shutter Island, who doesn’t even know he’s trapped in a psycho-fantasy of his own invention (link below)

You can see from just these three examples alone that reading an unreliable narrator requires a certain level of sophistication, savvy, intelligence, scepticism. When face value becomes hazy, the job of the audience becomes to ascertain where reality sits, in order to find any discernible truth. We are invited to become cynical and curious. Question: how cynical and curious are you about the white supremacy, and the story it has told?

When an unreliable narrator is telling a story about you, one has to go a step further. You have to become vigilant and hypersensitive to omissions, deceptions, misdirections and outright lies. It’s the difference between watching a magic show and suspending disbelief to enjoy the illusion, and watching a magic show with a view to working out how the tricks are being done.

As someone racialised as black, born into the monstrous gravity of white supremacy, I myself have become vigilant, sensitive and cynical in equal measure. I’ve come to learn that the story that dominant white history has told me (primarily through formal education) is deeply unreliable. No black scientists? No mention of Africa beyond ‘mud huts’, slavery, famine and safari park wildlife? The constant assertion that the ‘best that has been thought has said’ has come from white, male, European voices? Really? The narrator is fibbing, clearly. If nothing else, an awareness of this fallibility is what has driven me to learn more, to explore the hidden truths, to challenge the dominant world view and ultimately write essays like the one you’re reading right now. I don’t trust the story I’ve been told, and neither should you.

In March 2021, the UK government attempted to write a closing chapter on racism in British history. It was a report led by a team of ten commissioners who were all POC (as in ‘People of Colour’) bar one, who was a Person not of Colour, or ‘white’. The aim of the report was ‘to investigate race and ethnic disparities in the UK’, but naturally, like any piece of writing, it told a story. And the story had a few twists. I’ll list:

• Stating that racism in the UK can be ‘misunderstood or trivialised’ by the concepts of institutional, structural and systemic racism.

• Suggesting the advent of social media has amplified the toxic messages of ‘a small number of hard core racists’.

• Questioning the credibility of the terms ‘White privilege’ and ‘White fragility’.

• Rejecting the view that being an ethnic minority in the UK is to be treated unfairly by default.

• Stating that ‘poorer White people’ are the largest disadvantaged group and therefore the biggest cause for concern in conversations of social injustice. (‘Despite also stating that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to live in households with persistent low income’.)

• Highlighting the existence of ethnic minorities in ‘top positions’ of politics and government as unproblematic evidence of progress, irrespective of their ideological positionings.

• Reframing transatlantic slavery as ‘the Caribbean experience’, a euphemism that says the slave period was not only about profit and gave African people a chance to transform themselves into a ‘re-modelled African/Britain’.

• Refusing to see Britain as a country ‘where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities’.

In short, downplaying the reality of a racism that is pervasive and insidious (institutional, structural and systemic – despite acknowledging that ‘Outright racism still exists in the UK’.

Forget the ethnicities of this report’s commissioning team, or that the chair of the commission, Dr Tony Sewell, is a black man. Here we have a piece of research that articulates the aims and beliefs of a British government born of an empire that was inextricably bound to a white supremacist paradigm. Of course the report would suggest that racism is not as bad as the victims of racism say it is; it’s trying to tell a story in which Britishness is free from sin.

Fast forward to March 2022. The UK government, partly in response to widespread criticism of the report mentioned above, issues a policy paper authored by the then Minister of State for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch. Kemi Badenoch is, in her own words, ‘a black woman’ and ‘a first generation immigrant’. These details, placed right at the top of the paper’s introduction, are intended to convince us of her credibility in matters of race. We are invited to sit comfortably in the knowledge that a black woman is telling us how it is.

‘Too many people in the progressive and anti-racism movements seem reluctant to acknowledge their own past achievements, and they offer solutions based on the binary divides of the past which often misses the point of today’s world.’

But is Kemi a reliable narrator? As a spokesperson for a government that asked us to believe that structural racism no longer exists in the UK, could her perspectives and conclusions ever be objective enough as to be trustworthy? Is she complicit in deliberate misdirection, or the victim of strings being pulled by malevolent puppet masters? It’s hard to say. But while we can’t easily analyse the nuances of her character, we can very easily examine her context. As a front-line cabinet minister she speaks from a position of ideological power, part of an agenda that spans into the widest horizons of history. Her government, and by proxy Britain as a whole, has every reason to obscure certain truths in order to present itself in a positive light. There’s a narrative that Britain is committed to, and it says that dominant white Britishness is both innocent and good, even while pursuing policies that threaten the well-being and prosperity of racially minoritised groups and vulnerable communities.

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In many ways, perhaps we’re all guilty of narrative unreliability. We’re all biased narrators of the truth as we see it, telling a version of events that chimes with our sympathies, lived experiences and core values. The difference is that the narrators of History, tethered to the ideological forces that win over time, end up controlling the dominant narrative. They have more to lose.

At this point unreliability can actually become useful, when it begins to illuminate the shadows. When you read Rebecca, the story only begins to make full sense when you become aware of the narrator’s fallibility. The end of The Life of Pi is devastating because we realise that the story we have been told is full of manipulations designed to help the protagonist process unspeakable traumas. Taken purely at face value, these stories are lacking. An appreciation of narrative unreliability allows to us appreciate wider truths and we suddenly see the truer story that has been deviated from.

The story of racism is no different. And to understand it fully, we need to question, deeply, what we have been told so far.

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Parts 1 - 22 of the Understanding Whiteness series can be found here. The understanding Whiteness series is available in full via a subscription to this Substack, so if you can spare the price of a cup of coffee, please consider signing up to access the whole thing.

Also, last thing, feel free share with your network, or on social media, or comment below. Always happy to get a conversation going. Stay good.

Jeffrey