Understanding whiteness part 26: The (beginning) of the end, James Bond, and life before racism
‘Synthesis’, noun: the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole
You can feel it coming. You can feel when a story is coming to its natural conclusion when the key players start to realise that they need to change. A key part of this process of rebirth is when characters begin drifting towards each other, forming unions that feel like a happily ever after is on the way.
I would like for to racism to reach this point. It’s genuinely worrying to think that 400 plus years of racial dystopia are just set to continue, indefinitely, with no discernible end in sight. The story has to hit a climax, confusions must be resolved, lessons learned and, ultimately, an end must be reached, for the sanity of our species if nothing else.
The core premise of this series (which, may I add, is indeed coming to an end) is that the component parts of racism can be identified and analysed, like the component parts of a story. The secondary premise is that this saga has continued for so long that we must be reaching its latter stages. And now, I ask a question: are the ‘characters’ of blackness and whiteness able to reach a connected whole?
To be clear: this isn’t about crafting a raceless future or, even worse, pretending that we can simply not see colour. That’s naivety. Head in the sand. That’s like saying the story has ended by simply looking away from the action. We need to see it through. Furthermore, vague aims for ‘Diversity’, ‘Equality’ and ‘Inclusion’ (popular as they are among organisations seeking to improve racial equality) are not actually the end point that people might think they are. Diversity as a concept centres a dominant norm – in this case, dominant whiteness. Inclusion as a concept does the same thing – confirming a white centre into which everything else can either be included, or not. And Equality suggests that if you just treat everyone the same, problems of identity and ideology will simply disappear.
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