1.1 Whiteness and Self-Reflection
Many of us white people want to claim some degree of empathy, if not solidarity, with the noble aims of Black Lives Matter, that is, dignity and justice for black people. But before we can claim the virtue that comes with either empathy or solidarity, we first need some humility about what we already know and to engage in some self-reflection about the ways in which whiteness, as a political project, arrests the veracity of our knowledge claims and obscures our vision on the matter. Even the very claim to virtuous empathy or solidarity itself works to conceal its own deficiency. There is a constraint on what white people know about black-led political movements for racial justice, a ceiling to what a white imaginary hears in a black political speech. Given that constraint, it is incumbent upon us to linger for a while not only on the content of our truth claims about movements like BLM but their limits. Coming to terms with the boundaries of those limits, the mechanisms by which their frontiers are drawn and re-drawn, is a process of coming to terms with ourselves as white people. Black political speech is not unintelligible, it is just that our confidence about what we already know halts any deeper process of understanding in its tracks. Whiteness structures many of our assumed worldviews and creates its own acknowledged set of truths, its own world of common sense. When pressed, our comfortable, passive axioms about black-led movements can reveal themselves not self-evident truths but as engines of power and interests that fuel a political project of anti-blackness. In other words, if we want to have a chance at a just engagement, belief, empathy, or solidarity with BLM, we need first to understand the limits of a white epistemology of black political movements and the ways in which whiteness emerges against liberatory movements.
Self-reflection is difficult. The Delphic Oracle’s command “know thyself” is probably more aspirational than feasible, at least for mortals. The worry about self-knowledge’s slim chances still presents itself in modernity. In Shakespeare’s King Lear , for instance, Lear’s daughters lament of their father “he hath ere but slenderly known himself”.1 Lear was never able to face the ravages he enacted upon his family, to face the kind of man he was. He could only ever achieve fleeting moments of self-recognition, not enough to survive or to treat his daughters justly. He rebuffed attempts to show himself, to himself.
There are structural and personal obstacles to self-reflection. I might not want to attempt it, because sometimes when I catch glimpses of myself, I see things I would rather not. In general, I like surrounding myself with people who would not show my failures to me, and I might sacrifice even honest respect for risking that kind of vulnerability. Such is the function of defensiveness. Accurate mirrors are uncomfortable and painful, and I generally prefer sacrificing light for warmth. In many instances, I do not have to live in a kind of culture that would encourage an honest self-accounting, so to cover over un-comfortability, I tend to substitute self-praise for self-appraisal, naval gazing for reckoning.
People of color in the United States do at times try to show white people to ourselves, and they, like Cordelia to Lear, are most often rebuffed. We—from here on, by “we”, I mean white people in the United States, this author included—mostly do not want to hear it, even if we say we do. We do not want to look in that particular mirror, and we must not have our survival tethered to it.
One historical and paradigmatic example: Journalist and activist Ida Wells-Barnett led a Reconstruction-era campaign to uncover the systemic racist and gendered logic that undergirded lynching in the United States. Her campaign was more successful in England than in the States, where the public was not forced to look at itself.2 The reception in the States, as Wells recounts, was at first met with defensiveness and not only defensiveness from where one might expect, i.e., from southern white men. It was northern white women’s temperance leagues who fielded vehement and underhanded resistance to her campaign. These women were what in modern parlance we call might call self-identified “allies” or what Janine Jones might call “goodwill whites”: those who have a self-professed commitment to black civil rights and believe in racial equality.3 In other words, they were the progressives of their time. They supported emancipation. One Mrs. Williard, who called herself a “friend and well-wisher” to Wells’ movement, was upset that Wells implicated white women in the violence of southern white men. Wells herself gave an honest account of white women’s voluntary and consensual relationships with black men, their subsequent denial of these relationships, and their final complicity in the lynching of their love interests at the hands of “chivalrous” white male protectors. In response, New Englander women defended the southerners on the grounds of white virtue and Christian hospitality, yoking their own identities with their southern counterparts, and outsourcing cruelties as exceptional events inflicted by lower-class whites, not the upstanding Christian citizens they themselves knew. There was no recognition that northern women also held and supported the symbolic logic of lynching, in terms of their belief in the stereotypes of the widespread criminalization of black men and the over-sexualizing of black women. These so-called facts about Reconstruction’s former slaves operated with the same intuitive conviction of veracity in the North as in the South. Thus, any honest look at lynching as systemic and not accidental would incur an opportunity for self-reflection, and that was not an opportunity either northern or southern whites—women or men—were willing, for the most part, to take up.
In our current era, what should be called the Black Lives Matter era, the first moment of rebuff comes when we beg off the name that people of color give to us: white. We will not see ourselves in the confines of that specific moniker. What does it mean, we ask ourselves, to be white? It does not sound like anything good. Is it an insult? An ontological status? A neutral descriptor? (unlikely).4 We chafe at being called white because it sounds like we are being called a dirty name, and in truth sometimes we are. But what would it mean to take up that name, as soiled as it reads? To call oneself white sounds like it would mean admitting to a nebulous guilt, everywhere and nowhere, and therefore a guilt that cannot be real. The word “privileged” reads similarly: a politically correct label meant to implicate me in something to which I did not consent. And regardless, I am innocent. I did nothing to you, personally. My own parents were relatively poor and worked hard, I have worked hard for what I have, and slavery has been over for a long time. Besides, some of you have more wealth than me, and those who have less have pathological families, nothing like my own. Admitting to being white sounds like an admission of guilt, and that is unfair.
Besides, people who think that whiteness is a thing, a category with definite meaning, are white supremacists. I share nothing with them, they are the guilty ones, and moreover they are exceptions and not the rule. The intellectual position here is that taking on whiteness as an ontological status gives it too much credence and affirms race’ existence as a real entity. Specifically, this position holds that affirming racial “reality” means standing against Martin Luther King’s understood mandate, widely assumed to be the entire inheritance of the Civil Rights Movement, that one should judge people by the content of their character alone.5 I want to distance myself from the Klan and the [lower-class] southerners, the real racists, because not all white people are the same. There is no “we” here. When black people talk about white people as a group, it irks me, beca...