Understanding whiteness part 27: No country for white culture
A curious plot twist in the story of dominant whiteness is how it has failed to establish something we can call ‘white culture’. Think about it. Think about the fact that no matter how dominant whiteness has positioned itself to be, it does not hold a selection of cultural norms that fall under the umbrella of whiteness. Ethnicities that are racialised as ‘white’ definitely have their cultural norms, usually attributed to countries of origin. You can point at French culture, or English, or Polish, or Hungarian, or German, or any other country populated by ‘white’ people. But white culture, generically? It doesn’t exist.
(Note: The closest we can get to white culture, and I mean this with no sense of irony or sarcasm, is probably the song ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond. It’s a song that, whenever played in majority white contexts, draws a hugely enthusiastic response and singalong, culminating in a euphoric moment when everyone echoes the lyric ‘good times never felt so good’ with the chant ‘SO GOOD! SO GOOD!’ It’s joyful and unnerving. And I used to think it was a strictly white British phenomenon until I heard white Americans doing the exact same thing in a comedy show by the South African American comedian Trevor Noah. It stopped me in my tracks: the realisation that Sweet Caroline SO GOOD! SO GOOD! Is in fact a transatlantic white phenomenon. Which leads me to the theory that it just might be a white cultural norm that truly transcends geography.)
Black culture, singular, from black places, plural
Black culture is different. Even though blackness encompasses a whole diaspora of nations, countries and cultures that are distinct, there are still cultural norms that can be generally identified as ‘black’. Blackness has achieved something unique. It has become a point of unification for communities (and individuals) who are racialised as black, regardless of their ethnic origin. I can attest to this in my own life. Having grown up in London during the 1980s and 90s, I was immersed in a blackness that drew from multiple rivers. The Caribbean influences of islands including Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. The transatlantic glow from black America, shining bright in music, entertainment and pop culture. The political histories of South Africa, emerging from the shadows on Apartheid on a global stage. And of course the immediate reference points from Ghana, my parents’ country of birth, along with neighbouring Nigeria, from which many of my peers had an ethnic heritage.
As a black person, I feel a profound connection to other black people, under the umbrella of blackness. It’s a proud part of my identity, part of my construction of self. It’s also proof that blackness, for all its diversity, can still operate as a singularity.
But how?
It has everything to do with the marginalised status that black people have been given. White supremacy has made victims out of so many global communities, mainly from countries that have been colonised and exploited by dominant white Europe. From this position, blackness, as a concept, becomes not only a shared identity but an active lifeline too. It becomes something that people racialised as black can reach towards, or find ballast in. As a child, I looked towards black America for media representation of people who looked like me. I consumed black American culture because it showed examples of black success that the British media didn’t have. I learned how to be black in a monolithic sense, and it was empowering. Equally, I threw myself into Caribbean heritages that had nothing to do with my ethnic lineage. The music, the fashion, the food, the history, the stories. The culture. It’s no accident that even now, we still refer to ‘the culture’ as a catch-all term for universal blackness. And then, of course, was the Ghanaian cultural norms that I grew up in at home, and by extension a more general West African identity shaped by friends, family and acquaintances from these backgrounds.
Let’s add it all up.
Rejecting yourself to accept yourself
In any good story, the hero eventually has to reject the part of themselves that initially made them most powerful. The maverick has to learn how to be part of team. The misanthrope has to learn how to love others. Returning to the idea that white supremacy has cast dominant whiteness as the star of the show, it stands to reason that eventually, whiteness will have to start rejecting certain elements of itself, if it’s ever going to evolve. And then it will learn, and then it will change, and then the old version will cease to be.
It comes down to maturity. Western society matured to a point where it could accept that the Earth goes around the Sun, and Gallileo is now revered as a visionary. The modern west has matured to a point where it’s ok to kill off James Bond because the core character needs to evolve into a more believable psychological state. By the same logic, a mature whiteness will eventually see that its power is rooted in malice and exploitation, and subsequently reject white power as an idea. This is how the story needs to end, with the rebirth of whiteness into something better, more knowledgeable, less ignorant, more aware. A ‘woke update’ if you will. And eventually, what seems difficult to imagine (a world in which whiteness is not supreme) will ultimately seem like common sense.
Is whiteness getting close to sacrificing its supremacy in search of a deeper love for humanity? Is it ready to die, in order to truly live? Is that what the kickback against anti-racism is all about? A terrified, panicked rejection of the inevitable fate of a whiteness that is finally being asked to grow up? When I look at how whiteness has conducted itself since the Black Lives Matter uptick of 2020 (aka ‘Black Square Summer’), I see an identity at conflict with itself. At one extreme I see valiant efforts at solidarity and allyship, and at the other, a violent rejection of anything remotely woke. I see desperate white liberalism, frothy mouthed All Lives Matterism, and everything in between.
Truth be told, it’s not even about black people at this point; it’s about white identity wrestling with itself in the closing chapters. This is a struggle that is in the emotional core of every story with a decent protagonist – the rejection of the old in the quest of something new, and the difficulty in accepting necessary moments of change.
What dominant whiteness struggles with
Dominant whiteness finds it hard to redefine itself because white supremacy has spent the best part of 500 years telling it that it is heroic, wonderful, pure and true. Literally any other story is going to fall short of this narrative, so letting go is understandably difficult… until you realise that there is so much more to gain from honesty.
Conversely, blackness has been in a near constant state of redefinition since the very beginning of the racism story. From the moment that humans were first racialised as black, those people have been forced to write their own stories, just to exist. I’m talking about the black Africans who were ripped away from their heritages by the evils of slavery, left bereft of even their names, identities stolen. These people had to reinvent, create and write new narratives that had hitherto not existed. We see this in its sharpest relief in the legacy of ‘African-Americans’, a concentration of black people who are multiple degrees of separation away from their roots but have created new cultures and narratives of black identity that no-one in the 1660s could have predicted.
Then you get people like me, members of the black, post-colonial diaspora. Many of us retain a close proximity to our ethnic heritage (I don’t have the surname of a slaveowner) but we’ve still had to carve an identity in the home of our colonial masters. We’ve had to tell a story that hasn’t been told and, in the process, create a black identity that was never written for us.
The same goes for black people who are still in the cradle of civilisation; all those African nations that are still suffering from the decimation of the continent presided over by European colonial superpowers in the 1880s. When you look at the histories of modern African countries, you see ongoing narratives of struggle, independence, invention and reinvention, to a backdrop of disempowerment that goes back centuries.
The oldest story we (might not) know
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