Month: June 2019

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well-meaning intentions

In the book chapter ‘Beware the Northern Fox: Keeping a Focus on Systematic Racism Post Trump and Brexit’, Kehinde Andrews discusses some of Malcolm X’s thinking:

[X] was also vehemently opposed to seeking white allies for Black movements. One of the reasons he was so critical of the March on Washington was because he questioned ‘who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I Have a Dream’ speeches?’. Malcolm did not distinguish between well-meaning and racist white people. He indicted whiteness as a system that all of those who benefit from it are part of, well-meaning intentions or not.

— Kehinde Andrews

I’m white. My anti-racist intentions are well-meaning. I have benefited from systemic racism throughout my life. I would appear to be the non-American version of a “northern fox”.

Full citation: Andrews, K., 2018. ‘Beware the Northern Fox: Keeping a Focus on Systematic Racism Post Trump and Brexit’, in: Johnson, A., Joseph-Salisbury, R., Kamunge, B. (Eds.), The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship In Times Of Explicit Racial Violence. Zed Books, London, Chapter 11 (e-book, no page number)

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Ruby Sales – “a spiritual crisis in white America”

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s brilliant show Séancers (2017) summons the words of several ‘sacred texts’: the work of Black feminist thinkers, artists and activists with whom Olawale Kosoko performs a political-paranormal communion. One such text is a radio interview with theologian and social activist Ruby Sales, who speaks about whiteness in terms of spiritual crisis.

Ruby Sales, 2016:

And we’ve got a — there’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning. And I don’t hear — we talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that speaks to Appalachia. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them, rather than call upon them — the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European-American; that’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.

And I don’t quite understand that. It must be more sexy to deal with black folk than it is to deal with white folk, if you’re a white person. So as a black person, I want a theology that gives hope and meaning to people who are struggling to have meaning in a world where they no longer are as essential to whiteness as they once were.

You can listen to and a read a transcript of the full interview here.

You can follow Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s work in performance and education here.

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Sisters of Resistance, Left of Brown and Jenny Rodriguez on Whiteness, Self-Accountability and Vulnerability

In their incisive piece of writing ‘Is Decolonizing the New Black?‘ the Sisters of Resistance, Left of Brown and Jenny Rodriguez write: “Decolonising has entered consumers’ imaginations, and with it, a new kind of consumer has emerged: one that is politically astute and critical of Whiteness, but also firmly entrenched in conservative market forces that reproduce value through competitive means.”

If as project members we are to imagine ourselves at this new consumer, endevouring to critique the predominant Whiteness of contemporary dance, we need to be really mindful of our potential to be ‘firmly entrenched in conservative market forces’. How do we ensure that we wield our critique of contemporary dance’s Whiteness without perpetuating the market forces that (re)produce the powers that drive the industry?

The piece warns us of the appropriative and cooptive pitfalls of such projects, by providing clear guidance on the ethics of what needs prioritising in our enquires:

Engaging with Whiteness with a sense of responsibility and self-accountability while acknowledging that for centuries people of colour have been denied their role in producing and shaping intellectual ideas and knowledge, even about themselves. […]

Re-narrating institutional histories so that narratives of racism and imperialism are not forgotten and are instead used in ongoing work that looks to reform universities, in ways that significantly make them anti–racist, anti-imperialist spaces. […]

Developing, applying and regularly reviewing organizing principles as a way of translating anti-racist and decolonizing ethics into applied and measurable methodologies.  […]

Working against intersectional racist structures so young people of colour can step into positions of power.  […]

Organising within their own institutions to challenge racist practices and processes, including stepping back and giving up privileges, earned or unearned, as well as not continuing to hurt, violate or reduce the participation of people of colour in institutional spaces and processes  […]

Making oneself vulnerable in the act of political struggle with White capitalist patriarchy. Decolonising ethics involve a consistent de-centering of the self as well as encountering Whiteness in structures, arrangements and relationships, where personal desire, intentions and underlying assumptions should be brought under sustained scrutiny.  […]

Embracing solidarity as a radical act of self-effacement, where the Other determines the strength and quality of a relation […]

What an enormous responsibility we have taken on! The question that remains for me key to ask constantly of ourselves is : how vulnerable are we willing to make ourselves in this act of political struggle for the field?

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mute institutional racism

In 2008 Angela Davis presented the Vice Chancellor’s Oration on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. The speech was called Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism (published at https://truthout.org/articles/recognizing-racism-in-the-era-of-neoliberalism), and is about the prison-industrial complex as an institution of racism. As part of her thinking she makes a case that “individual eruptions of racism” are “connected to the persistence and further entrenchment of institutional and structural racism that hides behind the curtain of neoliberalism.” Davis says that racist incidents (and she uses the example of how some golf journalists suggested that Tiger Woods was so good that his competitors would have to “lynch him in a back alley”) are loudly “treated as individual and private irregularities” whereas the “contemporary persistence of racisms within institutions and other social structures” are “mute”.

Here are some excerpts:

The path toward the complete elimination of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of “color-blindness” and the assertion that equality can only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race. This approach, however, fails to apprehend the material and ideological work that race continues to do.

While laws have had the effect of privatizing racist attitudes and eliminating the explicitly racist practices of institutions, these laws are unable to apprehend the deep structural life of racism and therefore allow it to continue to thrive.

This invisible work of racism not only influences the life chances of millions of people, it helps to nourish a psychic reservoir of racism that often erupts through the utterances and actions of individuals, as in the cases previously mentioned. The frequent retort made by such individuals who are caught in the act—”I’m not a racist. I don’t even know where that came from”—can only be answered if we are able to recognize this deep structural life of racism.

— Angela Davis, 2008
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knower and known

The three of us (Royona, Arabella and I) have been thinking about how our conditioning as academics constructs the way we know things; that knowing something about, for example, white supremacy is filtered by being bound to academia, and how academia expects ideas to be understood, translated and communicated.

Here’s Azeezat Johnson:

One example of these imperial histories can be seen through the distance assumed between the (majority white and middle-class) academic knower and the (majority non-white and working-class) academic known. Through this distance, the academic ‘knower’ is able to position themselves as separate and above the ‘field’ that is being studied. The academic knower ‘becomes the backdrop of nature itself, the omnipotent position of the gaze’. This objectifies those bodies that are positioned as outside the role of The Academic. This is particularly pernicious given the over-representation of white bodies within academia: there has to be a sustained critique of the way such knowledge is created through the neutrality of whiteness.

— Azeezat Johnson [1]

Such objectification is inevitably going on in this research: I am that academic knower, gazing through the neutrality of whiteness. But the objectification in my case is also complicated by the sense that when it comes to contemporary dance, I associate myself with the field or ‘tribe’ of contemporary dance. It is a collection of people to which I belong. I am on the inside, while at the same time on the outside looking in.

[1]: Johnson, A., 2018. ‘An Academic Witness: White Supremacy Within And Beyond Academia’, in: Johnson, A., Joseph-Salisbury, R., Kamunge, B. (Eds.), The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship In Times Of Explicit Racial Violence. Zed Books, London, Chapter 2 (no page number).