Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

[Protesters at the Open Housing March, Chicago. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum]

By Nino Brown and Derek Ford

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

As teachers, we’re tasked with educating our students, students who are increasingly, like their teachers, becoming politically conscious and called to act. Yet the dominant political theories and forms of action are inadequate for real revolutionary transformation. In other words, the schools and universities in capitalist society are all too ready to accommodate and guide this consciousness and energy into forms it can accommodate. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that’s accelerated since the 1960s in particular.

For example, Charisse Burden-Stelly documents how Black Studies emerged in the 1960s “to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities,” but that it was soon “more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university.”[1] What facilitated this absorption was the erasure of political and economic critique and action with cultural and literary analysis, which “reify the abstraction of Blackness” and divorce it from political struggle, not even questioning its relationship to and basis in the material conditions and struggles of the people.[2] As we wrestle with political pedagogy, then, our guiding orientation has to be one that resists such subsumption within capital.

Yet it’s not only that the “scholastic ideological apparatus” provides its own official pathways for “resistance” and “transformation,” from reading groups to Diversity and Equity Initiatives and intergroup dialogues. Perhaps a more fundamental problem for us--as our students participate in protest movements--are the academic theories and politics that they encounter there and often unconsciously absorb. We regularly hear students say “anti-Blackness” and, when we ask them what it means and what political orientation it comes from and reproduces, they’re not sure. Or we hear students say in regards to protests against particular forms of oppression that we have to “listen to and follow” the people who face that oppression. White and non-white students alike believe they have to “follow and listen to Black leaders” at protests against racist police terror and white supremacy. We’re told to cite Black scholars. In either case, the question of politics is completely effaced, as there’s almost a prohibition against asking: “which Black people?” Yet this is not a defect but a feature of Afropessimism, a feature that opens the arms of white supremacist imperialism.

The happy marriage of capitalism, Afropessimism, and liberal identity politics

We and our students want radical transformation, and so many often jump to the latest and seemingly most radical sounding phrases, slogans, and theories. In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”[3]

There are crucial problems with this framework that make it perfectly acceptable to capitalism and perfectly antithetical to those who want to change the world. For one, they are completely Eurocentric in that Africa and the African diaspora are flattened into “Blackness” as a condition of the “human.” As Greg Thomas notes, this is “the [B]lackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism.”[4] In other words, Afropessimism takes aim at a civil society and takes refuge in a Blackness that are both uniquely American. The U.S. historical and political experience is transformed into a transcendent, static, and universal ontological status or structure. More specifically, the theories of academics in highly prestigious and exclusive institutions in the U.S. are presented as ahistorical and global realities.

As identities, Black and Blackness are, in the U.S., fairly recent developments. The earliest recorded appearances are in Richard Wright’s 1954, Black Power and in 1966 as the first words spoken by Black Panther Stokely Carmichael when he left his jail cell after imprisonment for registering voters. White and whiteness are older but still relatively recent. Theodore Allen writes that he “found no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691, referring to ‘English or other white women.’”[5] The point here, as Eugene Puryear observes, “is that the ideology of white supremacy emerged not because of timeless antagonisms based on phenotype differences, but in a precise historical context related to the development of racial slavery.”[6] This is precisely the historical context that Afropessimism erases and precisely the phenotypes they use to define Blackness.

Afropessimism addresses an apparent radical omission in the primary theory that oppressed people have utilized for liberation: Marxism. Wilderson’s work, however, is based on a fundamental misreading of Marxism, such as his contention that in “Marxist discourse” (whatever that is) “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy.”[7] To be sure, there’s an unfortunate history of some Marxist groupings asserting “class first” politics, but Marx and Engels, and Lenin, together with the history of the international communist movement, always asserted the primacy of race.  Marx’s theory of class was a theory of race and colonialism, as was his communist organizing. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in the U.S. are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by hierarchies of race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other divisions.In an 1894 letter, Engels clarifies yet again the base-superstructure model, what it entails, how it works, and exactly what it’s supposed to do. First, he says that “economic conditions… ultimately determines historical development. But race itself is an economic factor.”[8]

Marx not only supported anti-colonial uprisings in India and China but even said that they might ignite the revolution in Britain. “It may seem a very strange, and very paradoxical assertion,” Marx wrote about the 1850-53 Taiping Rebellion in China, “that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire.”[9]

Marx fought ruthlessly against racism and national chauvinism, particularly as he experienced the deep-seated racism of English workers against the Irish. He “argued that an English workers' party, representing workers from an oppressor nation, had the duty to support an oppressed nation’s self-determination and independence” and that “English workers could never attain liberation as long as the Irish continued to be oppressed.”[10] He recognized that the fate of Black slaves, Black workers, and white workers were bound together when he wrote in Capital that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the [B]lack it is branded.”[11] Marx even organized workers to support the abolitionist struggle by galvanizing them to oppose a British intervention in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the slaveocracy, an intervention that, because the British had the largest Navy in the world, could have altered the war drastically.[12]

Perhaps the real problem is that Marx treats race as a dynamic and contingent social production rather than a fixed and abstract ontological category. Black people face particular forms of oppression in the U.S. and elsewhere, as do other oppressed and exploited peoples. These change over time and are in a dialectical relationship with the overal social totality. Iyko Day got it right by equating economic reductionism to Afro-pessimism, insofar as it “frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure” and “fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism.”[13]

Why the neoliberal university loves Afropessimism

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Capital in these instances are let off the hook. The problem is no longer that the ruling class owns the means of production and thus the means of ideological production that reinforce anti-working class ideologies such as racism. The problem is the “anti-Blackness”--and the often posited “inherent” anti-Blackness--of non-Black communities. It’s a structural feature of society, but apparently one that can’t be changed. As a result, there’s no need to do anything except critique.

No wonder, then, that Afropessimism is so welcome in the neoliberal university and the increasingly corporatized public school system in the U.S. It’s incredibly easy to call something anti-Black, to condemn anti-Blackness, and to play more-radical-than-thou. It’s more than easy, it’s what academia is about. Moreover, and this is related to the Rice protest mentioned earlier, when “Black faces” do appear in “high places,” they’re immunized from any possible critique from any group that isn’t Black (enough). It doesn’t matter if the head of a school, corporation, or any other entity has the same politics as the imperialist and racist power structure, because they’re black and so to critique or challenge them would be an act of anti-Blackness.

This last reason is why white people love Afropessimism so much. The vague calls to “follow Black people'' not only fulfill racist tropes that all Black people are the same (in, for example, their unruliness and “threat” to society) but moreover let white people off the hook for doing any real political investigation and work. The real response to “Follow Black people'' is: “Which Black people?” Should Derek follow his comrade Nino or John McWhorter? Should he go to the police protest organized by the local Black Lives Matter group or the one organized by the local Congress of Racial Equality? Should he get his racial politics from Barack Obama or Glen Ford? He certainly shouldn’t get his politics--or take his lessons in class struggle--from today’s Afropessimists.

None of this is to devalue Black leadership in the Black liberation movement, to be clear. Black people have and will lead the Black struggle and the broader class struggle. Nor is it to claim that random white people should show up to a Black Lives Matter protest and grab the microphone. Then again, how much of a problem is that really? Shouldn’t we forget the myth that we can learn all the proper rules before we struggle and instead just go out and struggle? And as we struggle, be conscientious of our actions and how they could be perceived; know that we’ll make mistakes and own up to them; and most importantly build with those whom this racist society has segregated us from so we can unite against a common enemy. Black people will lead the Black struggle and the class struggle. So too will Asian Americans, Indigenous people, and Latino/a/xs. So too will the child of an African immigrant and a Filipino domestic worker. So too will some white people. The key ingredients are unity, political clarity, and strategic proficiency.

Such a recipe entails a necessary risk in that, first, politics are divisive and draw lines between friends and enemies and that, second, achieving unity and strategic proficiency takes hard work without any guarantees of success. Educators who are or want to be radical, however, have no choice but to accept this risk. We need to be rooted in movements and resist incorporation into neoliberal structures, refusing to allow them to guide our political decisions. Only if we have hope and faith in the power of the masses to change the world does it make sense to struggle at all. We choose to struggle! And we hope our students do too.

Nino Brown is a public school educator and labor activist in Boston. He is also an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, the Jericho Movement and the Boston Liberation Center. He's a member of the Liberation School Collective and is an editor of the forthcoming book on Marxist pedagogy, Revolutionary Education: Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers (2021).

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches at the nexus of pedagogy and political movements. He’s written six books, the latest of which is Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (2021). He’s also the lead editor of Liberation School’s “Reading Capital with Comrades ” podcast series.

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Black studies in the westernized university,” in Unsettling eurocentrism in the westernized university, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel, pp. 73-86 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), 217, 216.

[4] Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)? Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 291.

[5] Theodor Allen, The Invention of the White Race (vol. 2): The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 161-62.

[6] Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,” Liberation School, November 01, 2018. Available at: https://liberationschool.org/the-u-s-state-and-the-u-s-revolution/.

[7] Frank WIlderson III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225.

[8] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, 1894/1965), 441

[9] Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works (vol. 12), 93-100 (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1979), 93.

[10] Gloria La Riva, “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (pp. 75-83) (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 76, 77.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 284.

[12] ​​See Gerald Runkle, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6, no. 2 (1964): 117-141.

[13] Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and settler colonial critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 112.

[14] Frank B. WIlderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. M. Gržinić and A. Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 55.

Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview With Devyn Springer

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

The following interview, facilitated by Derek Ford, took place via e-mail during June and July in preparation for Black August, when progressive organizers and activists deepen our study of and commitment to the Black struggle in the U.S. and the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class struggles worldwide. During this time, we wanted to provide a unique and accessible resource on Walter Rodney, the revolutionary Guyanese organizer, theorist, pedagogue, political economist, and what many call a “guerrilla intellectual.” Liberation School recently republished Rodney’s essay on George Jackson here.

About Devyn Springer

Devyn Springer is a cultural worker and community organizer who works with the Walter Rodney Foundation and ASERE, an extension group of the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente. They’re a popular educator who doesn’t just study Rodney but practices his philosophies. Since 2018, they’ve hosted the Groundings podcast, which is named after Rodney’s revolutionary educational praxis. The podcast, which has addressed an impressive array of topics relevant to the struggle, is available on all major streaming platforms. They’ve written timely and important pieces on politics and education in academic and popular outlets, some of which can be found here. They’ve also produced the documentary Parchman Prison: Pain & Protest, and you can support their work and get access to exclusive content by supporting their Patreon.

Derek Ford: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, Devyn. I always look forward to working and learning with you and I appreciate your work on revolutionary movements and education. I know you’re involved with the Walter Rodney Foundation, which is not just about preserving his legacy but promoting the revolutionary theories, practices, and models he developed. Can you tell me a bit about the Foundation, your role, and why it’s important for the movement broadly in the U.S.?

Devyn Springer: The Walter Rodney Foundation was formed by the Rodney family in 2006, with the goal of sharing Walter Rodney’s life and works with students, scholars, activists, and communities around the world. Because of the example Walter Rodney left in his own personal life and the principles he established in his work, we see supporting grassroots movements, offering public education, and the praxis of advancing social justice in a number of ways as what it really means to share his life with the world; Walter Rodney was as much a fan of doing as he was speaking, after all. We have a number of annual programs, including many political education classes oriented around themes related to Rodney’s body of work—colonialism, underdevelopment, Pan-African struggle, scholar-activism, assassination, Black history, the Caribbean, etc. We also run ongoing projects like the Legacies Project, which is actively seeking and collecting stories and oral histories around the world about Walter Rodney.

I’ve volunteered with the WRF since around 2013. I currently help coordinate the Foundation’s social media, and offer other types of support as needed.

I feel the Foundation is crucial for the movement broadly for a number of reasons. First, the critical analysis of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and underdevelopment Rodney gave in works like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains relevant, and we need organizations dedicated to distilling this knowledge. Second, because our movement must reckon with the lives, works, histories, struggles, and relevance of the elders past and present who we owe so much to, whether it’s the Claudia Jones School For Political Education, the Paul Robeson House & Museum, Habana’s Centro Martin Luther King Jr., or the Walter Rodney Foundation: there needs to be organizations and groups dedicated to maintaining these legacies and continuing their work.

More than just maintaining legacies, in other words, the WRF also makes sure that Walter Rodney’s critical analyses remain critical, and do not get co-opted. Finally, the foundation is important because it is run by the Rodney family, who themselves have extensive decades of organizing, advocacy, and knowledge which is always beneficial. (And I must clarify, whenever I speak of a ‘movement’ broadly as above, I am speaking about the global Black Liberation Movement foremost, in a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist sense).

Those are precisely the reasons we wanted to do this interview, particularly to expose readers (and ourselves) to the broader range and context of his work, and to learn more about the depth of his praxis and why it’s needed today. To start then, can you give our readers a bit of historical and biographical context for Walter Rodney’s life and work? What was happening at the time, who was he working with, agitating against, etc…?

I will try to be brief here and give some basic biographical information, because there’s so much one could say. Walter Rodney was an activist, intellectual, husband, and father, who lived and visited everywhere from Guyana, Jamaica, the USSR, Cuba, and Tanzania, to Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, London, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.S., and Canada. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana in March 1942, where he was raised and resided for much of his life. He graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica in 1963, then received his PhD with honors in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London at the age of 24. His thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, was completed in 1966 and then published in 1970, and I highly recommend it to readers [1].

Rodney was deeply influenced by a number of revolutionary movements and ideologies which had flourished during his lifetime: the multitude of armed African decolonial struggles across the continent, the Black Power Movement in the U.S., Third World revolutionaries like Che, Mao, and Cabral, and Pan-African/Marxist praxis generally. Walter Rodney taught in Jamaica, working to break the bourgeois academy from its ivory tower, where he delivered a number of groundings across the island to the working class, including the Rastafari and other marginalized communities at the time. While at the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada, the Jamaican government banned him from re-entering on the grounds that his ‘associations’ with Cuban, Soviet, and other communist governments posed a threat to Jamaica’s national security. Massive outbursts now known as the “Rodney Riots” subsequently broke out across Kingston. Rodney spent many months writing in Cuba prior to traveling to the University of Dar es Salaam in revolutionary Tanzania in 1969. 

In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the government (under the dictates of President Forbes Burnham) rescinded the appointment. Rodney remained in Guyana and helped form the socialist political party, the Working People’s Alliance, alongside activist-intellectuals like Eusi Kwayana and Andaiye. Between 1974 and 1979 he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly repressive government led by the People’s National Congress, which can be summarized as publicly espousing Pan-African, anti-aparatheid, and socialist talking points while running a despotic, corrupt Western-backed state operation.

He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country, and he stated in his speeches and writing that he believed a people’s revolution was the only way towards true liberation for the Guyanese people. During this period he developed and advocated the WPA’s politics of “People’s Power” that called on the broad masses of people to take political control instead of a tiny clique, and “multiracial democracy” to address the steep obstacles presented by the racial disunity between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese peoples (which is still present today).

On June 13, 1980, shortly after returning from independence celebrations in Zimbabwe, Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana by an explosive device hidden in a walkie-talkie, given to him by Gregory Smith, former sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force. Smith was subsequently given new passports and secretly flown out of the country. Donald Rodney, Walter’s younger brother who was in the car with him when the bomb went off, was falsely accused and convicted of being in possession of explosives; he fought to clear his own name for decades until April of this year, when Guyana’s appellate court exonerated him. A few weeks later the Government of Guyana officially recognized Walter’s death as an assassination. This comes after years of struggle on behalf of the Rodney family, particularly Dr. Patricia Rodney and the WRF. Walter was just 38 years old at the time of his assassination, but his legacy is continued by his wife, three children, and the dozens of incredible speeches, essays, interviews, and books he gave and wrote.

Rodney’s best-known work is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Why do you think that is? What are his main arguments there, and are they still relevant to understanding Western imperialism and African resistance?

That’s a special type of book that, like few others, can completely change or deeply influence one’s politics. Rodney essentially put forth a historical-materialist argument showing that economically, politically, and socially, Europe was in a dialectical relationship with Africa, wherein the wealth of Europe was dependent upon the underdevelopment of Africa. In other words, Rodney shows with painstaking detail how European capitalism (and eventually the global capitalist system) could not have existed without the systematic precolonial exploitation of Africa, the massive amounts of capital generated through the Maafa, later the expansive economic, political, financial, and social domination under direct colonial rule, and the continuing—or perfecting—of these exploitative processes under the current neo-colonial world order. As Rodney puts it:

“Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped” [2].

It remains his most recognized work because it remains incredibly relevant, both in the sense that the current world capitalist structure is built on this historical underdevelopment of the South, and because, under imperialism, the North must still exploit and perpetually underdevelop the South. Its publication marked a significant contribution to theories of underdevelopment and dependency. Alongside revolutionary intellectuals like Samir Amin and Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, it was groundbreaking in that it applied Marxism to the Third World with great precision and depth. Further, Rodney goes into detail about not just underdevelopment but the history of class society and feudalism in Africa, social violence, fascism, agrarian struggles, racism, enslavement, gender, economics, misleadership and African sellouts, and so much more. In some ways, I like to think of it as a foundational text for revolutionaries in the same way that many consider Marx’s Capital or Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto to be.

One example of its relevancy is in thinking about labor and the workforce as it relates to slavery. Rodney uses data to explain that the social violence of the Maafa had a deep impact on African development because it removed millions of young Africans from the labor force, created technological regression, and directed whatever mass energy aimed at productive or technological innovation towards the trade in human captives.

He says, “The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production” [3]. I relate this to the crisis of incarceration in the U.S., wherein millions of Africans are removed from the labor force, removed from their families and communities, and in the same way, are removed even from the very opportunity of innovation and production to instead perform hyper-exploited, forced labor at the hands of the settler-capitalist state. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work has, to an extent, explained how the capitalist state necessitates this incarceration, and in the same way I’d suggest that European capitalism’s violently expansive nature necessitated the multitude of exploitative interactions with Africa, from slavery to neo-colonialism.

What about the influence it’s had, not just academically but in terms of revolutionary struggles?

I get letters, emails, and calls almost on a monthly basis from incarcerated people who are reading not only that book but also The Groundings With My Brothers, an underrated gem of Rodney’s. They’ve formed reading groups and created zines around his work; asked me to further explain concepts he mentions; and even drawn incredible illustrations of Rodney. I find this engagement with Rodney equally valuable (and often more rewarding) as that of academics. Patricia Rodney has told me that over the decades incarcerated people have consistently gravitated towards Rodney’s work and written to her, likely because of the accessible way he’s able to break down complex concepts. I’m actually currently working with the WRF on a project to donate many copies of Walter Rodney’s books to incarcerated people, and hopefully in the coming months we’ll have more info to share on this.

Beyond that, Rodney’s work has globally influenced the left in more ways than I could explain or speculate in this interview. His revolutionary African analysis has corrected Eurocentric views of history and allowed us to better understand the important role decolonization plays in our fight against imperialism. He also offers a great example for young writers, researchers, and organizers on how to write materialist history and analyses. For example, as one reads his work it’s impossible not to note the multitude of ways Rodney directly eviscerates bourgeois historians and apologists.

Please keep us updated on the WRF project, because we’ll definitely want to support it. It seems that Rodney was exemplary at achieving true “praxis,” the merging of theory and practice. One of the ways this shows up most is in his pedagogical work–his theories and practices–which he called “groundings.” It’s not just a pedagogy, but a practice of decolonizing knowledge and empowering oppressed people to organize, at least as I understand it. I know it’s influenced your own work and you’ve written about it, so how would you describe it to someone just joining the struggle, or just learning about imperialism, colonialism, and racism?

Yes, I co-wrote a piece titled “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals” that’s available for free online, and which I plan to re-write/expand soon, and my podcast is named after this pedagogical model as well. Usually, when people refer to Rodney’s “groundings” they are referring to his period as a professor in Jamaica, where he quite literally broke away from the elitist academy and brought his lectures to the people: in the streets, the yards, the slums, wherever workers and others gathered. He gave public lectures on African and Caribbean history, political movements, capitalism, colonialism, Black Power, etc. These groundings were often based on what people expressed interest in learning about, and Rodney found ways to make various topics relevant and important to the lives of those listening. In many regards, Rodney should be placed next to popular educators like Paulo Freire for his contributions and his example of merging theory with practice. The book The Groundings With My Brothers is a collection of speeches, many given at or about these groundings [4].

More than just giving public lectures, groundings entailed democratizing knowledge and the tools of knowledge production, which are traditionally tied up with the capitalist academy. He empowered communities to tap into their own histories, oral and written, to generate knowledge and research amongst themselves based on their interests and needs, to place European history and Eurocentric frameworks as non-normative, and to hold African history as crucially important to the process of African revolution. He brilliantly lays out the importance of African history in Black liberation in “African History in the Service of Black Liberation,” a speech he gave in Montreal, ironically at the conference from which he would not be allowed to return to Jamaica [5].

In the most basic terms, I would explain groundings as the act of coming together in a group, explaining, discussing, and exploring topics relevant to the group’s lives; everyone in the group listens, engages, contributes, reasons, and grounds with one another, and all voices are valued. Groundings can take place inside of jail cells, within classrooms, in parks and workplaces, or anywhere the intentions of Afrocentric group dialogue and learning are maintained.

One of the interesting things about The Groundings With My Brothers is the way it moves from Black Power in the U.S. to Jamaica, to the West Indies, to Africa, and then to groundings. As a final set of questions, can you explain what he meant by Black Power and Blackness, and what they had to do with education?

Well, to understand that book you have to understand a bit about the context in which the book arose. In Groundings we see Rodney’s ability to take seemingly large concepts like neo-colonialism, Black Power, Blackness, etc., and break them down to a level that could engage people. It taught them how to make sense of the fact that the people oppressing them were the same color and nationality as them. In the midst of decolonization and independence movements sweeping the world, there was a crucial Cold War and neo-colonization taking place simultaneously. Facilitating this counter-revolution were several African leaders and activists employed to do the bidding of imperialist powers seeking to regain or retain their power. In Jamaica, this was no different: the Jamaican government in 1968 went so far as to ban any literature printed in the USSR and Cuba, as well as an extensive list of works about Black Power and Black revolution, including those of Black Power activists such as Trinidian-born Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael), Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad.

Placed in this context, we see that Rodney’s work explaining the U.S. Black Power movement’s importance and relevance for the Caribbean and Africans everywhere was quite important in raising the political consciousness of working-class Africans. A key part of this was educating on the role of “indigenous lackeys” or “local lackeys of imperialism” in maintaining the (neo)colonial status quo. In a speech initially published as a pamphlet titled, Yes to Marxism!, he says:

“When I was in Jamaica in 1960, I would say that already my consciousness of West Indian society was not that we needed to fight the British but that we needed to fight the British, the Americans, and their indigenous lackeys. That I see as an anti-neo-colonial consciousness as distinct from a purely anti-colonial consciousness” [6].

His distinct analysis of misleadership and its colonial implications was a searing threat, as Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly wonderfully explains [7].

Rodney defines power as being kept ‘milky white’ through imperialist forces of violence, exploitation, and discrimination, and that Black Power in contrast may be seen as the antithesis to this imperialist, colonial, racial demarcation that structures capitalist society. The following quote is long, but I want to quote it in full because I find it useful. He says:

“The present Black Power movement in the United States is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites. It recognises the absence of Black Power, but is confident of the potential of Black Power on this globe. Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of black consciousness. ‘A race without power and authority is a race without respect,’ wrote Garvey. He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made blacks aware of their strength when united. The USA was his main field of operation, after he had been chased out of Jamaica by the sort of people who today pretend to have made him a hero. All of the black leaders who have advanced the cause in the USA since Garvey’s time have recognised the international nature of the struggle against white power. Malcolm X, our martyred brother, became the greatest threat to white power in the USA because he began to seek a broader basis for his efforts in Africa and Asia, and he was probably the first individual who was prepared to bring the race question in the US up before the UN as an issue of international importance. The Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the important Black Power organisation, developed along the same lines; and at about the same time that the slogan Black Power came into existence a few years ago, SNCC was setting up a foreign affairs department, headed by James Foreman, who afterwards travelled widely in Africa. [Kwame Ture] has held serious discussions in Vietnam, Cuba and the progressive African countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea. These are all steps to tap the vast potential of power among the hundreds of millions of oppressed black peoples” [8].

He defined Black Power in the U.S. context as “when decisions are taken in the normal day-to-day life of the USA, the interests of the blacks must be taken into account out of respect for their power – power that can be used destructively if it is not allowed to express itself constructively. This is what Black Power means in the particular conditions of the USA” [9].

Rodney finds there are three ways in which Black Power applies to the West Indies:

“(1) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (2) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (3) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks” [10].

I’m sure this was a much longer answer than anticipated, but I find it incredibly important to understand that Walter Rodney’s conception of Black Power was revolutionary, and was also fundamentally inspired by his Marxist approach which sought to apply these revolutionary ideals to the specific context of the Caribbean and Africans globally. He also explains, in detail, his notion of ‘Blackness’ as being stretched differently to how we conceive of ‘Blackness’ today to include the entirety of the colonized world. He states, “The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites – the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas;” however he clarifies that “further subdivision can be made with reference to all people of African descent, whose position is clearly more acute than that of most nonwhite groups” [11].

He places Blackness as the most crucial element, stating “Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people,” and later adds that “once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman – these things pale into insignificance” [12]. This understanding stands in relevance to Frantz Fanon’s similar move, where he states: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” [13].

It wasn’t long but incredibly informative and the context you’ve given has helped me grasp his moves throughout that book. I’ve really appreciated your time and energy, and definitely recommend that our readers check out your podcast and other work. I’m looking forward to our next collaboration!

References

[1] Walter, Rodney A. (1966).A history of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, PhD dissertation (University of London). Availablehere.
[2] Rodney, Walter. (1972/1982).How Europe underdeveloped Africa(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 149.
[3] Ibid., 105.
[4] Rodney, Walter. (1969/2019).The groundings with my brothers, ed. J.J. Benjamin and A.T. Rodney (New York: Verso).
[5] Rodney, Walter. (1968). “African history in the service of Black liberation.” Speech delivered at the Congress of Black Writers, referenced fromHistory is a Weapon, undated, availablehere.
[6] Cited in Burden-Stelly, Charisse. (2019). “Between radicalism and repression: Walter Rodney’s revolutionary praxis,”Black Perspectives, 06 May. Availablehere.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Rodney,The groundings with my brothers, 14-15.
[9] Ibid., 18.
[10] Ibid., 24.
[11] Ibid., 10.
[12] Ibid., 9, 10.
[13] Fanon, Frantz. (1961/2005).The wretched of the earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.

From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism

By Too Black

Republished from Hood Communist.

“As word of what some would later call the “Negro uprising” began to spread across the white community, groups of armed whites began to gather at hastily-arranged meeting  places, to discuss what to do next.”

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

“For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.”

- Yannick Giovanni Marshall, Black liberal, your time is up

“Black capitalism is still capitalism.” – Terrell

The Tulsa Massacre began 100 years ago on May 31st, 1921 when an angry white mob accused a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, of raping a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page. Flustered by the perceived “Negro Uprising” of Black men armed to defend and protect Dick Rowland outside the Tulsa courthouse, the inflamed white mob, sanctioned by the state, responded with brute terror — burning down the Black segregated neighborhood of Greenwood destroying 1,256 homes, nearly 191 Black businesses and the death of roughly 300 (likely more) people by the morning of June 1st, 1921.

100 years since these 16 hours of white barbarism occurred, suppressive forces have steadily worked to delete this tragedy from scribing its crimson pages into the books of American history. But, as history shows, bloodstains prove difficult to remove. Recently, decorating over these stains as “blemishes” of an otherwise promising American Dream towards Black capitalism has proven to be a more sufficient means to quell dissent. What has materialized is an emphasis on what was destroyed over who was destroyed. Effectively, redeeming the state — the combined authority of government (elected), the bureaucracies (positions), corporate control, and private interests — in the process.

Decorating a Utopia that never was

As the summer of 2020 was steaming from protests against continued racialized state violence, the attention economy suddenly rediscovered the blood of 1921 by pivoting to what Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Negro Wall Street” or what is now known as Black Wall Street — the historic Black business district of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood destroyed in the massacre. According to Google Trends, the term “Black Wall Street” was googled more in June of 2020 than within the last 5 years.

Posited within 3-4 Blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood, this business district, disparagingly referred to by Tulsa whites as “Little Africa,” was the home to a number of Black-owned enterprises including a fifty-four room hotel, a public library, two newspapers, a seven-hundred, and fifty seat theater, multiple cleaners, and two dozen grocery stores among more. Through these efforts, Black Wall Street produced a prosperous Black business class fancying “some of the city’s more elegant homes” and successful Black businesses in the state.

Faced with only these facts, it’s understandable why one would view Black Wall Street as a wealthy “self-sustaining” utopia violently interrupted by a white vigilante mob as it’s widely reported to have been. However, a much more complicated narrative scrubbed from decorated legend lies underneath the folklore of a Black American Wakanda.

Although Black Wall Street certainly brought pride to the Black residents of Greenwood, that pride failed to translate to a prosperous economic status for most. A report by the American Association of Social Workers on the living conditions of Black folks in Tulsa at the time stated, “95 percent of the Negro residents in the Black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without  conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface.” Furthermore, most Greenwood residents were not only living in substandard housing but were employed outside of Black Wall Street according to the Oklahoma Commission study on the Tulsa Race Riot:

“Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood’s adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers [emphasis added]. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs — the kinds that most whites consider beneath them—as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers, and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers.  Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood,  and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa. [Emphasis added]“

Truthfully, as the report makes clear, Tulsa and Black Wall Street were both consequences of de jure segregation. Segregation operated as a public policy purposely made to suppress Black wages for the benefit of white capital while simultaneously limiting where those suppressed wages could be spent — inadvertently creating a monopoly for a petite Black professional class. Put differently, it was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District. Neither could have existed without the presence of poor Black people. Yet, their presence is rarely acknowledged in the revisionist plot. The suffering of the Black poor typically only matters when it can be used to bolster the class position of the Black Elite — the appointed political, cultural, and social representative and a moneyed class of Black people — and reinforce the state.

Decorating Blackness

As previously indicated, last summer, while police precincts became bonfires illustriously lighting up the night sky, the terms “Black Wall Street” and “Black business” were receiving more Google searches than ever before. The presuppositions of the searches call for questioning: Will a world on fire be resolved by the memory of a business district burnt down by a white mob? What is the correlation between a cop kneecapping a poor Black man’s neck and buying Black? How can I buy my way out of a chokehold? Do corporate pledges to “support Black business” deflect the oncoming bullets of State violence?

All Black people are subject to a degree of state violence but in today’s post-civil rights era, those flung to the bottom of the capitalist ladder  *George Floyd* experience the worst fate — police murders, stop and frisk, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and worse. In essence, LeBron James’ sons could not be Kalief Browder because not only can LeBron afford to bail his sons out of jail but Brentwood, CA is far from the overpoliced neighborhood Browder was originally profiled in. Despite her same race and gender, Oprah is not Breonna Taylor. No knock warrants are unheard of in Montecito, CA, and gentrification does not work in reverse.

The point here is not to diminish the racism experienced by the Black Elite but to challenge the universalizing of Blackness. Universalizing Blackness as a flat experience allows Amazon to proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, create a Black-owned business page but crush the unions organized by its Black workers. It allows the NBA to paint BLM on its hardwoods, highlight Black business during the NBA finals but pay its predominantly Black and temp workers dirt wages. Universalizing Blackness distorts Blackness itself. It is decorating at its worst.

A repercussion of universalizing Blackness is elite capture — what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as “how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or effect—by the well-positioned and resourced.” This begins to explain how a radical demand such as abolishing the police either becomes dismissed or co-opted while the state offers its full cosmetic support behind Black business and representation. The class of Black people most well-positioned to make demands upon the state is better situated to benefit from Black business creation and corporate diversity hires than police abolition or the unionization of Amazon. They are considerably less afflicted by the problems of the people they claim to represent.

Universalizing Blackness collapses the interests of Black people as if we’re all equally invested in the same solutions. It’s precisely how the knees of killer cops on Black necks correlate with buying Black because as Táíwò notes, “When elites run the show, the “group’s” interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” It’s how the poverty of Greenwood ceases to appear in documentaries or presidential speeches when the Black wealth of a few needs attention. Commenting on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s groundbreaking 1954 text The Black Bourgeoisie, Táíwò observes how two seemingly opposing ideas continue to find continuity, “Why did the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive when it was never a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it did because it furthered the class interests of the Black bourgeoisie.” The class interests remain.

Black Capitalism, the Ultimate Decoration

The elite capture of a movement requires a series of decorative myths — ideas that obscure the nature of the problem for the maintenance of the status quo. Last Summer Black capitalism emerged once again as the most decorated myth. The revisionism of Black Wall Street, as an extension of Black capitalism, neatly fits the narrative of universal Blackness. It utilizes the universality of a tragedy suffered by an entire Black population to advocate for a solution (Black capitalism) that has shown to primarily benefit a particular class of Black people.

Black capitalism is a concatenation of propaganda. It relies on complementary myths such as Black buying power and Black dollar circulation that are premised upon shaming Black people, particularly the poor ones, for their alleged frivolous spending. Besides the fact that Black people spend their money no more recklessly than anyone else, Black capitalism feeds on stereotypes of broke Black people foolishly buying Jordans and weaves they cannot afford to justify its existence. The saying typically goes “if we spend with our own then we can have our own” as if Black people’s spending habits are moral barometers.

This decorative myth is exemplified in the creation of the Greenwood banking app. Popularized by rapper Killer Mike and actor Jesse Williams this app is “inspired by the early 1900’s Greenwood District, where recirculation of Black wealth occurred all day, every day, and where Black businesses thrived.” The website, littered with unsubstantiated claims of Black dollar circulation, conveniently fails to discuss the rampant Black poverty in the “1900’s Greenwood District” they claim to want to recreate. To highlight such a contradiction would ruin their business model.

Businesses such as Greenwood use the history of how collective Black wealth has been systematically destroyed by capitalism to leverage (guilt) white investors for funding. In the case of Greenwood, receiving 40 million dollars from banking institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Trust among others. The billions of corporate dollars injected into “racial equity” campaigns this last year were all sparked by the militant response to the blatant murder of a poor Black man who was allegedly arrested for purchasing items with a counterfeit bill. Disturbingly, the death of poor Black people is a lucrative fundraising drive for everybody but the ones experiencing death.

Decorating an Empire

What rests at the heart of these issues is the Black Elite’s general unwillingness to confront the state and all the violence it subsumes. As a class, they are much more invested in collaborating — either for perceived survival and/or personal gain. What tends to go unsaid is that when they collaborate with the state they often lose even on their terms. The police still confuse them for poor “thugs.” They remain underrepresented and underpaid in their respective fields. Laws that sustain their lifestyle are constantly eroded. Yet, historically, they have made the most “progress” in periods where the masses of Black people dissented. Due to their economic instability, they are unable to exist as a class by themselves — hence the need for the symbolic support of the masses analogous to how Black Wall Street needed the paychecks of the Black poor to thrive as a business district.

The state uses these decorators of empire, knowingly or not, to maintain its legitimacy. White supremacy may have obliterated Black Wall Street — 1st through violence, 2nd through policy — nevertheless “if that massacre never happened who knows how that shapes America today.” The bloodshed of the past is decorated by the false promise of “a more perfect union.” Organizing for a world beyond American hegemony is scolded as unrealistic and sophomoric. The most moderate of Black radical demands such as “defund the police” are derided and blamed unfairly for costing congressional seats as if Democratic party success is synonymous with Black liberation.

Decorators of empire must corral dissent. This type of agency reduction has a footprint leaping back to the Cold War and much further. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, thoroughly documents how the Black Elite of the time — Black Cold War liberals, “reduced the collective agency of other African Americans by marginalizing or maligning the panoply of liberation strategies emanating from the Black left.” This was a necessary strategy because the Black Cold War Liberals “formed important relationships with powerful Whites to procure goods and services for the Black community while offering no challenge to exploitative economic and social relations.” Modes of thinking outside of these brokered relationships threatened to bring backlash from the state. Faced with the mounting repression of the anti-communist McCarthy era,

“…Black Cold War liberals began to distinguish themselves from the left by rejecting militant agendas that might align them with those deemed “communist fronts,” including the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the Peace Information Center (PIC), and the National Negro Labor Council. Black Cold War liberals signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anti-communist terms and by constructing Black people as loyal, trustworthy Americans who deserved to be recognized as full citizens.”

Consistent with elite capture, Black Cold War liberals corralled the ideologies of the Black masses. “Seditious” communist ideas and “backward” social behavior would not earn the acceptance of the state. Irrespective of the oppression they faced, Black people of the time were corralled to focus their aspirations on proving to the state they were just as American as everyone else.

Today, building on a similar logic, Black American suffering is promoted as a badge of honor — a “justice claim” made because “we built this country.” Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy.” Again, the bloodshed of the past is used to redeem the present. President Biden, in his speech for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, leveraged this Black American exceptionalism to bolster the empire, “we should know the good, the bad, everything. That is what great nations do. They come to terms. With their dark side. We are a great nation.” Only in America can a nation be “great” for acknowledging a single massacre 100 years later with no reparations to show — decorating at its finest.

Conclusion

Remembering the Tulsa Massacre not as a violent white response to Black self-defense and determination but instead as the destruction of property and mythical Black wealth favorably leaves space for American redemption. It reduces the violence to a tragic interruption of the American dream and Black capitalism while minimizing other race massacres that did not include a well of black business class.

Wall Street is a parasitic model we should not emulate — still, I empathize with Black  people’s desire for Black ownership and self-determination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire. However, positioning slogans like #BuyBlack and #SupportBlackBusinness as the respectable alternative to radical transformative demands is decorating for the state — particularly when these slogans are attached to faulty concepts like trickle-down economics and universal Blackness. Black ownership is elite capture without the correct redistribution and collective ownership of the wealth we create.

Lastly, it need not be stated that the victims of the Tulsa Massacre — as well as their descendants and all African people — deserve their reparations. That is not in question. We should question the state’s legitimacy to define our collective goals. We must be vigilant towards the state’s attempts to use the atrocities committed against us as a means to redeem itself by decorating its crimes. The world we deserve is irreducible to a Black Wall Street and abundantly superior to anything America currently has to offer. It’s on us and those in solidarity to fight for it.

Too Black is a poet, writer, and host of The Black Myths Podcast based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

The Monarchy of Materialism: Understanding White Fragility

[PHOTO CREDIT: WARNER IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES]

By @badgaltranny

In my frustratingly liberal Ivy League classroom, I raised my hand.

My professor, a former editor in the New York Times, had opened class by saying that people are misguided in fearing Trump; most of his anti-immigration orders will be shot down by the courts.

I told her, calmly, that the fear is not misguided. Because of Trump, many immigration officers have become even more unabashed about their inhumane and often illegal practices.

She said I was challenging her knowledge so I relayed the real-life story of an unpunished criminal officer.

She framed it as a debate between her knowledge and mine. I told her, calmly, that she was arguing with facts.

It was this statement that she brought up in our one-on-one meeting a few days after she suggested I leave the classroom. She cited it as an example of why it was impossible to have a conversation with me. But facts are facts, and the story of the criminal officer was just one in a deluge of narratives reported even by her beloved New York Times.

If events like these happened only to me, this would be a boring story. But white people’s hostile emotional response to their knowledge being challenged—often marked by an accelerated heart rate, shortness of breath, and feelings of terror and rage—have become laughably predictable. 

One study calls it cultural anxiety. It’s characterized as “feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment.”

Apart from causing people to call 911 in fear of a hijab? It led 63 million people to vote for Donald Trump. Nationalist religious movements are popping up all across the world, not only in Europe but even in India and the Philippines, expanding wars and militarizing borders, murdering thousands inside their own nations, withdrawing reparations from their former colonies, and even closing borders to millions of climate refugees. If rising sea levels pose the greatest threat to our species, “cultural anxiety” is our greatest enemy.

Another name for this phenomenon is white fragility. When I packed my bags and finally left the East Coast to come home to the Midwest, I realized it’s just called white supremacy. Most people don’t like being called racist, and white liberals get especially triggered.

Someone who has some insight into this emotional phenomenon is Mark. He’s part of an anti-oppression education program on campus and agreed to speak under a pseudonym; he’s facilitated dozens of anti-racism workshops.

How does he help people move through their hostile emotions?

“By not making too much space for it in the workshops,” Mark says. “By acknowledging the emotions, and saying there are many reasons they may feel uncomfortable. Biases in their language, interactions, research, classes, conversations, you name it. I’m asking them to acknowledge that all of us have these implicit biases that have been culminating all our lives. In everything we consume.”

Yes, everything. Even for me.

I’m a transgender Indian-American woman, raised in an upper-class Hindu family in a beautiful American suburb. Since I wanted to find the truth at the root of white fragility, it brought me to an interesting dilemma: how do I escape my own biases?

I quickly realized it was both impossible and unnecessary. I’d say I’m pretty vocal in my low tolerance for bullshit even when it comes from myself. Instead of ignoring my life, how do I use it scientifically to understand cultural anxiety?

I followed three popular ways to find truth. The scientific method led me to the natural sciences. Studying history led me to social sciences. And, in what will probably draw tense laughter from the European-minded: meditation led me to the spiritual sciences.

And I’ll give you three guesses as to which of the three yielded the most reasonable answers. You might need all three.

I also encourage you to call me on any bullshit you find—I have so much to learn and I’d rather us help each other out. This article is long, so I’d section off about twenty minutes if you’re ready to listen.

“What is actually happening to a white person’s mind when they are called racist?”

The Oatmeal, a website for incredibly cute comics, explains it surprisingly well. In fact, if you haven’t already, read the comic quickly then come back when you see the last panel:

Good? Let’s dive in.

“Confusion,” Mark says, describing responses he’s seen from people who were asked to recognize they could be racist. “A lot of times they don’t know what to say. You can hear hints of defensiveness, but my words are granted a little more legitimacy as an educator in those spaces specifically.”

Responses I’ve gotten to notifying white people of their racism? Being called libelous, sensitive, abusive, violent, and manipulative. That I’m hurting them. One professor even threatened to sue me, comparing me to Donald Trump and reporting me as a threat to the university.

We’re seeing different realities. Even when I’m crying, they still view me with terror. There’s a chasm between intellectual understanding and self-reflection, and I’ve seen few people cross it.

In the mid-1900s, Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel ran an experiment where participants would guess the lengths of a few lines. Unsurprisingly, errors in judgement were random. But when longer lines were labelled as ‘A’ and shorter ones, ‘B’, the errors got…less random.

They got uniform.

People thought the shorter ‘A’ sticks were longer than they actually were in reality, and that the taller ‘A’ sticks were shorter. Similarly, they thought the longer ‘B’ sticks were shorter than reality, and the shorter ‘B’ sticks as taller. The very act of categorization made participants see conformity to the category where there was none.

This example helps illustrate what happened. In one study, if uncategorized, Lines C and D were judged to be the same length. But once they were categorized, line C was inaccurately perceived as longer than line D. Source.

Henri Tajfel later became famous for his theories on social identity, saying that people tend to view themselves according to how society views them.

So: societies construct my view of others and myself.

I believe society’s ideas about me because inclusion provides me with assurance. Core beliefs (such as ‘A’ lines being taller than ‘B’ lines) are rarely questioned and always nurture my sense of reality. Members of “out-groups” are discarded.

But what if a social identity you are placed into…is not you?

I’m talking with a white-skinned professor of history at my university, whom I’ve named ‘Jane’. I’m trying to figure out what “white” even means. When I ask her what history has to say about this, she responds: “The meaning of white for whom?”

She points out how, in the nineteenth and twenty centuries, American newspapers—and even the Census—did not grant Whiteness to Jews, the Irish, or Eastern Europeans. And she notes how today, there is no Census category for Arab or Persian. Middle Eastern immigrants are legally white. What does white even mean then?

“I don't think there's a consensus,” Jane says. “So perhaps what has changed is who gets to be white, but what hasn't is the contested nature of that being.”

Even the natural sciences back her up. It is the scientific consensus that racial categories have no basis in biology. But this fact was not always the scientific consensus, and Jane’s words reminded me of something Mark had mentioned during our talk: the skull studies that made a lie scientific.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 'science' of categorization split humanity into five different subspecies, with the Caucasians being the most ‘handsome’. As you can see in the sketch of him below, he was incredibly biased. But you be the judge.

Craniometry, the study of skull measurements, formed the base of European scientific racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European scientists, most notably French scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, categorized the races as distinct species based on cranial circumferences. It is a fascinating case study not only in the psychology of Whiteness, but in the anti-human irrationality that continues to underlie Western sciences to this day.

Let’s put his skull studies in context.

Historically, the concept of race came after European elites began enslaving Africans.

Unable to rely on their own increasingly-poor, increasingly-angry citizens to run their plantations, their eyes fell upon Northern Africans. The Christian Church had already practiced hating North African Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition. This made the job of lazy European elites even easier.

Because North African Muslims rejected Christianity, Europeans convinced themselves that they weren’t human. Gone were the ideas that Africans were industrious, intelligent, and artistic peoples. To the European-minded, they became inhumane, heathens, irrational, backwards, threatening, childlike, animals. This allowed them to enslave the Muslims with little guilt.

But in the eighteenth century (think: French Revolution, American Revolution) plantation owners faced slave uprisings, revolutionary ideas of universal human rights, and the exciting possibility of creating a new nation independent from England’s taxes.

They sought to create a new nation but these lazy people needed trendy, secular, ‘enlightened’ ideas to justify enslaving Africans and murdering Native Americans. Thus: the very same process that Tajfel had noticed in his studies of social identification began—in reverse.

Imagine the sticks in Tajfel’s study. The tall ‘A’ and short ‘B’ ones. Now imagine if only the B’s have labels. The rest have no label. Place yourself in the shoes of one of those unlabeled lines. If Tajfel, who invented the ‘B’ category, told you that “you are a line because B is not a line,” it would be kind of terrifying on an existential level, right? Especially if you believe all lines matter.

The goal of the New England elites was to divide people to make profits for themselves. They feared unity. In one case, Bacon’s Rebellion—an armed rebellion by people of many classes and races against the Doeg tribe in Virginia and Governor William Berkeley—terrified them to their aristocratic core (they responded with the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705). But unable to find any actual cultural unity between the poorer European laborers and themselves, the proslavery rich simply created a ‘B’.

They targeted enslaved Africans. They called them “Black,” and scared the white-skinned poorer colonists about the “Black danger.” The elites then said to these frightened white-skinned immigrants, who were already anxious due to their unfamiliarity with the land, “Your enemy is my enemy, and we are friends. I’ll create a nation where you feel at home.”

It was a master stroke. Now, European elites could feign unity with poorer (and now, terrified) European colonizers despite having no unified culture with them. No ‘A’.

“White” came from this fear, a lowest common denominator between themselves and poorer white-skinned laborers, a manufactured friendship based on fear and greed. This ‘A’ would convince white-skinned settlers of their Manifest Destiny to murder thousands of Native Americans and expand white borders.

"American Progress" John Gast, 1872

The skull studies come from this eighteenth-century period. White-skinned people exaggerated differences in their own bodies to make them seem as opposite as possible from non-‘Caucasians’. Whiteness became a cultureless culture. All it could do was manufacture fear against any “other”.

But maybe “any” is the wrong word. Whiteness means, quite literally, anti-Blackness. Its existence depends upon Black people’s dehumanization. Paired with nationalism, Whiteness means indigenous genocide to this day. (I find it interesting when white-skinned people ask me what my ethnicity is, expect me to say ‘Indian,’ and stumble when I ask them what theirs is. They rarely say ‘British’ or ‘German’ and instead say ‘American’ or ‘White’ as if either of these labels have even a semblance of a unified culture.)

But Black people and Blackness are humane (surprise, surprise). They were the first race to be identified. Blackness can exist and has existed without Whiteness. But Whiteness without Blackness, without an “other”? It does not exist, has not existed, and can never exist.

Yet, in the post-Civil Rights era that we find ourselves in today, where we know we are all the same despite our skin color, where the USA even grants ‘freedom’ to all its uncriminalized citizens, shouldn’t racism be gone?

It should…if racism was about skin color.

But the issue was never about skin. It was always about making Wall Street money off the ‘other’. Whiteness creates an ‘other’, and othering hasn’t vanished and it never will. It simply hides. If you can’t find it, simply praise, unconditionally, the humanity of the “Other” and watch as the entire culture comes out of the shadows to revolt against you.

Whiteness is holding on for dear life to its last hope: to create a white nation where they, ironically, don’t feel like “others”. With tanks and fences, to take back “their” country from “others” whom they’ve leeched off since before July 4th, 1776.

For the Wall Street elites, this is perfect: cultural anxiety makes white-skinned people ignore Wall Street.

But a white nation will never be great or even succeed, if you’re looking for some truth.

When white-skinned people tell me to leave their country if I hate it so much, I feel a little bad for them because they don't know their nation is an illusion. Lies can exist only in the mind and a white culture has always been a rich man's lie. A plantation-era anxiety. As the great Fred Morten said, "Settlers always think they're defending themselves. That's why they build forts on other people's land. And then freak out over the fact that they are surrounded." Identities built upon an "other" eventually cannibalizes itself. Even if they end up murdering me in their anger, I'll pass happily, knowing they'll soon destroy themselves. 

But if Whiteness is a lie, why does critiquing it feel so…real?

Well, because it is.

Whiteness creates horrible living conditions for the “other”. Sapped the “other” of their food, water, shelter, and even their children and their bodies.

On a spiritual level? Plantation owners knew how to convince us that the “other” exists. Millions of us have spent our lives believing Whiteness has the divine power to actually rip our humanities from us if we don’t show them respect.

Exposing Whiteness for its lie traumatizes our sense of reality—how could I have believed in such a demonic white lie?

So was this it? Misery and guilt, the answer at end of the scholarly road?

Not quite.

Of my three initial processes, I still had one path left: meditation guided by my gurus. And suddenly cultural anxiety became almost laughably (if frustratingly) simple.

Touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing.

According to the European sciences, I have these senses which have their sense organs: skin, tongue, nose, eyes, ears.

But how can I sense my humanity? How can I sense my Self?

During the questionably-named Age of Reason, European scientists championed secularity. Things that are touchable, testable, smellable, seeable, and hearable—only those can be evidence for anything. Only those exist.

But it is other people’s tradition is to recognize immaterial thoughts as another sense, with its sense organ: the mind.

And what does the mind sense when it thinks, ‘I’?

There is a basic truth that I had doubted for so long: that the mind senses something. I’ve been calling it ‘humanity’. To observe this, all you need to do is meditate on your mind.

If you can see, close your eyes.

What do you see?

If you answered “nothing,” you are wrong. What you see is the undersides of your eyelids.

Sit with this reality. Try it for ten minutes. If you start feeling anxious, ask yourself: “Who is feeling anxious?” If negative thoughts storm in, simply watch them. Ground yourself in love for your Self.

Did you feel this bliss? If you did, I feel it too. In coming to terms with my transgender identity (a life-long process) I am pulling myself from myself using this precise method.

Other than ‘humanity,’ people have called it Consciousness, the soul, the Self, natural law, the wild, divinity, God, spirit, the universal, Allah, the Brahman, Time, the Buddha, Jehovah, Truth, Jesus, Oneness, the Holy Spirit, science, history, Shiva, I, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, the fourth dimension, the irrational…you get the picture. Truth inspires limitless love.

But Whiteness finishes where Christianity left off: it asserts that this divinity is exclusive.

In a stunning (and for me, foundational) 1980 spoken essay denouncing both capitalism and communism, Russell Means, an indigenous freedom fighter, said, “The European materialist tradition of desacredizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person.”

Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota activist from South Dakota and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement. He passed away in 2012.

I sometimes wonder what Darwin would say if I came up to him and said, “I am fully human.” How would he have convinced me of his materialism against my reason? The reasonableness of his rationality and the irrationality of my reason? Would he have asked for proof and then laughed if I presented myself?

This anxiety will never go away until the idea of an out-group vanishes. That is what we mean by spirituality, by Self-awareness. That I am not my ever-changing body, but the observer through it. It is the anxiety of Self-avoidance that protects the out-group in the first place. This fear gave birth to Whiteness. And it is with this existential anxiety that materialists colonize the world, create its governments and economies.

And when white people realize they are on this path to Self-destruction? There will be anxiety.

Yes. I think, by pledging themselves to the white culture, white-skinned people have come to dehumanize and avoid themselves.

It didn’t start off that way of course.

Prior to the revolutions of the 1700s, the Church answered the “Who am I?” question with divinity and secularity. Divinity is a separate entity: God. You are in God’s image. You are a child of God. You are human. You are human if you follow Jesus Christ the man—you are not if you don’t. The Church and Europe used “othering,” this false separation from the divine, this Hell, to terrorize people into terrorizing other people across the world. People who may have simply called “Jesus Christ” something else, something less material.

White-skinned people’s humanity itself was exploited, taken for granted, trivialized, ignored, and then: self-sabotaged.

“After all,” Russel Means says, “Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.”

The European Enlightenment’s rationality, in Russell Means’ words, “picked up where Christianity ended.” The Church conflated Peter with Jesus and Jesus with Peter. It asserts that the Self, this divinity, is exclusive only to followers of Jesus of Nazareth. The European sciences assert that Truth does not even exist.

Christian versus heathen.

Instead, their sense of humanity came from the material world. Human versus animal. White versus Black. In-group versus out-group. A world where fewer and fewer people get to be fully human.

René Descartes, dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, believed that all living organisms are essentially biological robots - 'automaton' – and that humans alone have immaterial souls.

Why this madness?

For millennia, people in the South Asian peninsula have written thousands of texts and constructed full-blown universities (such as Takshashila) where they studied and continue to study the Self. The mind and the body as one.

(It is interesting to realize that extremely-similar scholarly endeavors happened all across the Americas too, before colonial conquistadores burned or appropriated every text, artefact, and spiritual vessel they could find. I talk about the South Asian peninsula simply because it is closer to my area of knowledge.)

Their fundamental realization? Consciousness is everywhere. Of everything.

A view of a Buddhist stupa in Takshahila, in modern-day Pakistan. Takshahila was founded around 1000 BCE and is considered some of the earliest (if not the earliest) universities in the world. The big caveat is – how do you define ‘university’? Students came to study over 64 disciplines, including grammar, philosophy, ayurveda, yoga, agriculture, surgery, politics, archery, warfare, astronomy, commerce, futurology, music, and dance. Yet, school fees were considered perverse. They had no degrees, examinations were considered superfluous, and the use of knowledge to earn a living was considered sacrilegious. Knowledge was considered sacred.

You would even categorize their fervor for Truth as religious…which would be inaccurate. Religion implies non-religion: secularity. But the secular does not exist. The more accurate term for our fervor would be a way of life. A culture. A mental outlook.

The European sciences are catching up to our ancestors’ eons-old realization.

The human species evolved from ape species, which came from rats, which came from lizards, which came from fish, which came from worms, which came from sponges, which came from small multi-cellular organisms, which came from single-cell organisms, which came from molecular reactions, which came from planets, which all came from the atoms of the Big Bang.

There is no ‘out-group’ in the entire universe, no line between human and non-human, soul and soulless, divine and secular. Exclusivity is the imagination of people who ignore their Selves.

My true identity, my humanity, does not depend upon any human opinion—even my own. I am. I always am.

That is what we mean by Self-awareness. By seeing true divinity when the monarchs of materialism beg us not to. By cutting down their lies. By slowing down (and thinking) when they insist that we speed up (and forgetting). Laughing at our ignorance. Loving our Selves by upending borders wherever people create it. Unity through material difference, not despite it.

In our present era, this means to include Blackness so unconditionally, to uplift indigenous peoples so thoroughly, to free ourselves from women’s silence so completely, that we upend everything that resists our Selves. To realize that seeing undocumented, criminalized, and imprisoned people as fully human is a radical proposition—and the fact that it is radical reveals just how ignorant we have become.

That we begin to heal ourselves and each other from the violence of our ignorance through repentance and reparations. Heal our humanity instead of our bodies which will decay regardless.

Self-doubt is the deceptively simple root of white fragility.

See, this is why this topic of cultural anxiety is so important even for people of color. Whiteness is not limited to the lighter-skinned.

Self-avoidance also gave birth to murderous forces: slavery, colonialization, to both the Hindu-regimented caste system and the famines in the Indian peninsula manufactured by the British. To the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny, to Whiteness, European rationalism, fascism, to the White, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu nationalists.

To borders and fences. Self-doubt gave birth to fears and hatreds eons old. To guilt instead of joyous repentance and reparations. To glorifying military states instead of glorifying welfare states.

Peace and borders are incompatible.

And when we realize we’ve been led to doubt ourselves our entire lives by elites? When we understand that we are living in a terrorist nation? Sure, we’ll be anxious. We feel lost. This anxiety is within us.

 It too shall pass. The climate, and the times, are a-changing

Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

By Jonathan Mathias Lassiter

“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”  (Morrison, 1992, p. 90).

“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this. What you say about somebody else – anybody else – reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me” (James Baldwin, 1963).

Imagine a person. How tall is this person? What is the gender? How does this person dress? How does this person speak? Now, imagine the skin color of this person. As you pictured this person, was it a white person? If it was, you are not alone. For many, person is synonymous with white person. However, too often little attention is given to this fact. White people just are. Their race and embodiment of whiteness is seldom analyzed or is done narrowly. Furthermore, the psychological implications of whiteness for white people remain largely unexamined. This lack of detailed and nuanced study about white people and whiteness uneases me. There is a dearth of discourse about white people as a racial subject and whiteness as a pathological system with psychological consequences for white people. This essay is an attempt to address that (dis)ease and move toward an understanding of white people and whiteness, as racial subjects and a pathological system, respectively, in the field of psychology and beyond.

I begin this essay with a discussion of definitions for terms that will be used throughout. I transition to an overview of the racial origins of psychotherapy and the subsequent erasure of those origins. The remainder of the essay will present a discussion of whiteness in the psychological imagination and its implications, first for people of color and then white people.

Terminology

It is important to have a common understanding of the three critical terms that will be used repeatedly throughout this essay. These terms include psychological imagination, white people, and whiteness.Psychological imagination is used to describe the formulations and definitions of ideas and ideals that pertain to psychology-in the mainstream-as an academic discipline, and to psychological phenomena in general. This imagination influences people who work or study in that discipline as well as those who do not. The term white people refers to people who, regardless of national origin or cultural background, have white skin, consider themselves to be white and/or are treated by the majority of people in society as such, and personally benefit from resources and privileges associated with whiteness. This term is used in this essay to discuss the general populace of white people in America regardless of socioeconomic status. No disclaimer should be needed but to increase the likelihood that the points of my essay are understood and not clouded by defensiveness, this author knows that not all white people embrace and actively collude in whiteness. Furthermore, it should be understood that whiteness can be and is internalized by both white people and people of color. One does not have to have white skin to perpetuate whiteness. However, the perpetuation of whiteness is only beneficial to white people. People of color, no matter their collusion or protest, are still systematically and systemically oppressed by whiteness.

Whiteness is defined as

“a complex, hegemonic, and dynamic set of mainstream socioeconomic processes, and ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting (cultural scripts) that function to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite. Whiteness drives oppressive individual, group, and corporate practices that adversely impacts…the wider U.S. society and, indeed, societies worldwide. At the same time whiteness reproduces inequities, injustices, and inequalities within the…wider society” (Lea & Sims, 2008, pp.2-3).

It should be noted that whiteness is not monolithic or immutable. Its meaning is constantly shifting and being constructed through an array of discourses and practices in various arenas of society (Wray & Newitz, 1997). In this way, white people either directly or indirectly benefit from their positioning at the top of a hierarchy that preferences their ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting above those of others. This positioning of whiteness is held consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously by both people of color and white people. It is enacted in both subtle and overt ways. Too often the white human being is the person who is really being considered when one is discussing or writing about the human being. Yet, the whiteness of the human being is obscured and painted as an every(wo)man.

White-washed Psychology

Psychology, as many understand it, in the western world is grounded in whiteness. Plato’s thoughts, in 387 BCE, on the brain and mental processes and René Decartes’ ideas about dualism of mind and body in the 1600s are taught in most, if not all, History of Psychology courses to be some of the earliest foundational writings about psychological processes. Psychological science is thought to have its beginnings in Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany that opened in 1879. Furthermore, it is commonly taught that the origins of psychotherapy are found in Sigmund Freud’s and his students’ work beginning in 1886.

It should be noted that Freud, himself, was a Jewish person. His approach to conducting psychotherapy with his patients was aligned with many characteristics of Jewish culture. These characteristics included being exceedingly verbal, emotionally expressive, trusting of reputable strangers, and believing in the “expert opinion” of a professional (Langman, 1997). The Jewish traits were the underpinning assumptions of patients’ behaviors in the psychotherapy room. Freud and other early members of the psychotherapy movement, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs taught their students to approach psychotherapy and their patients in this manner (Langman, 1997). In many ways, western psychotherapy in the early 20th century was a secularization of Jewish mysticism (Bakan, 1958).

However, the ethnic foundation of psychotherapy rooted in Jewish culture was eroded with the shift toward an empirical approach ushered in by white Americans John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner with their theories of behaviorism (Langman, 1997). Behaviorism focused on objective and measurable behaviors while rejecting the subjective domains of human experiences such as thoughts and emotions. This shift was a step toward the whitening of psychotherapy in that it centralized many characteristics of white culture including rugged individualism, competition, mastery, and control over nature, a unitary and static conception of time, and a separation of science and religion (Sue et al, 1998). This shift highlights the mutability of whiteness and its tendency to leech the essence from its counterparts. British colonists were once defined by their Christianity and Europeanness but their Christianity and Europeanness became subsumed by their whiteness in the Americas. In a similar way, Jewish cultural contributions to western psychology and psychotherapy were subsumed under the whiteness of American white people.

However, more obscured than the Jewish underpinnings of psychotherapy and psychology, is its earliest ethnic foundation. The African roots of psychology predate all others. In-depth scholarly research reveals that the origins of what is now called psychology can be found in the philosophical, scientific, and mystical practices of the Anunian and Kemetic civilizations dating back to 4,000 BCE (Bynum, 2012). In these traditions, psychology is considered as the study of the human spirit (Nobles, 1986). It is the study of how people understand and define their humanness within the context of a community (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). Anunian and Kemetic psychology preferences a view of the self as primarily a spiritual entity projected into the physical realm (McAllister, 2014). Meyers (1988) proclaimed that the African worldview is an optimal one in which encompasses viewing the spiritual, mental, soulful, and physical aspects of being as one; knowing one’s self through symbolic imagery and rhythm; valuing interpersonal harmony and interconnectedness; embracing self-worth as an intrinsic value that derives from one’s very being; and viewing life as a plane that is unlimited (Karenga, 1993; Meyers, 1998). Life is thought to be trifold operating on three planes that are before-life, earth-life, and after-life (Fu-Kiau, 1993, 2001 as cited by Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). The human spirit is thought to move through “seven moments” which are “before, beginning, belonging, being, becoming, beholding, and beyond” (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010, p. 14). As can be seen, the earliest conceptualizations of psychology were not limited to the physical realm bounded by empiricism with which white-washed psychology has become identified. It was more encompassing of the seen and unseen, the before, now, and beyond. This type of psychology is a more complete assessment of the human experience that acknowledges the knowable and unknowable. (See Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010 for more details.) It is rooted in Africa and predates any other thought on the study of humanness. However, whiteness has recast psychology in its imagination. From this perspective, the image of the purveyors and consumers of psychology are tacitly assumed to be white or, if not white, approached in their relation to whiteness. Psychology is limited by whiteness-informed ideals of quantification, denial of the spiritual, and biomedical preoccupation.

White People and Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

Psychology, much like all fields of human inquiry, often defines white people and whiteness in relationship to what it is not. Guthrie (2004) points out that some of the earliest studies of racial differences related to psychological abilities attempted to define white people as separate, and as members of a “higher” form of human being than people of color. For example, a series of psychological studies from as early as 1881 and 1895, reportedly “proved” that people of color, namely Japanese, American indigenous, and African-American people, had quicker reaction times to sensory stimuli and thus were more “impulsive,” while white people were more “reflective” (Guthrie, 2004). The interpretation of the results of such studies is interesting. These results were interpreted to imbue white people with a presumed desirable quality of reflectivity and people of color with a presumed undesirable quality of impulsivity. Other early studies conducted by white psychologists also found “evidence” of African-Americans’ lack of ability for abstract thought but prowess in sensory and motor skills (Guthrie, 2004). This type of psychological imagining defines white people as mentally adept and physically underdeveloped; implicitly, and sometimes overtly, suggesting that white people’s intellectual skill should be valued over the physical capacities of people of color. And thus, this intellectual value sets white people as the standard in the realm of intellectual functioning. These interpretations of research highlight that scientific findings can be used for the uplift and humanizing of people, or for their pathologizing and dehumanizing of them. Such interpretations by pioneering white scientists in the field of psychology point to an imagining of white people as superior and people of color as inferior.

One may protest that findings of early psychological studies are outdated and do not reflect mainstream contemporary psychology. I agree that such blatant racist interpretations of research findings are almost nonexistent in today’s world. However, it has been replaced with a colorblind mentality that does not address these racist underpinnings and subconsciously positions white people as the default against which all others are measured. One does not have to look far to find evidence of this point. It is common practice for editors of peer-reviewed psychological journals to publish articles with titles such as“Millennials, narcissism, and social networking: What narcissists do on social networking sites and why,”“Finding female fulfillment: Intersecting role-based and morality-based identities of motherhood, feminism, and generativity as predictors of women’s self satisfaction and life satisfaction,” and“Friendship between men across sexual orientation: The importance of (others) being intolerant”(Barrett, 2013; Bergman, Fearrington, Davenport, & Bergman, 2011; Rittenour & Colaner, 2012). The broad language in the titles (i.e. “millennials,” “female,” “women,” “men”) of these articles suggest that the authors of these studies have recruited and conducted research with a sample of diverse participants who represent a microcosm of the diverse human family. These articles’ titles suggest that the findings of the studies are, with a margin of error of course, applicable to all men, women, and millennials. A glance at the Methods sections proves otherwise. Not the least offense, the samples are virtually racially homogenous. These studies included 6.8%, 8.8%, and .08% people of color. While any findings from these studies are an addition to the understanding of psychology, they should be clearly understood as an examination of psychological concepts among white people in America, not as universal concepts or even American concepts. No journal editors required that the authors change their titles to reflect the predominantly white culture of their participants. While some readers might not understand the significance of these titles and the titling practice in psychology, the absence of reference to white people is commonplace and this small sample of studies is unfortunately representative of the type of widespread branding of the psychology of white people as the psychology of people. This type of branding obscures the culture of white people and the interplay of whiteness with psychological phenomena. It makes it hard for one to understand the essence of whiteness because this type of branding erases whiteness and elevates the psychological experiences of white people to be those of the human race. Dyer (1997, p. 2) wrote “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity…whites are people whereas other colours are something else.” In this way, white people implicitly set themselves as the arbiters of humanity and maybe even the only true embodiment of it.

From this point of view, whiteness in the psychological imagination is conflated with humanness in the psychological imagination. Therefore, whiteness is superior and centered in the psychological imagination. It is often obscured yet powerful in its organization of the field of study in a way that revolves around itself and thus maintains its power. It positions itself as the pure, unbiased presentation of scientific phenomena that explains what it means to be human. This imagining of whiteness is erroneous and dangerous.

Whiteness and Its Implications for Psychology Students of Color

Students of color often experience the psychology field as an unwelcoming and dehumanizing space. Research indicates that psychology students of color report experiencing stereotyping, alienation and isolation, cultural bias, prejudice, and challenges to their academic qualifications and merit in their educational programs (Gonzalez, Marin, Figuerosa, Moreno, & Navia, 2002; Johnson-Bailey, 2004; Lewis, Ginsberg, Davies, & Smith, 2004; Vazquez et al., 2006; Williams, 2000; Williams et al., 2005). Psychology students of color do not see themselves or the communities they represent reflected in the image of psychology. Researchers (Maton et al., 2011) found that African Americans were 12.6 times more likely, and Asian American and Latina/o American each 5.1 times more likely to report stereotypical rather than fair and accurate representation compared to white students. In turn, Asian Americans were 49 times more likely, African Americans 23.7 times more likely, and Latina/o Americans 19.9 times more likely to report that their group was not represented at all than to report fair and accurate representation as compared to white students (Maton et al., 2011). Students of color are overwhelmingly presented a curriculum that paints whiteness as humanness. They are deprived of an image of humanity that includes them and are thus dehumanized in their educational process.

Experiences of dehumanization and disempowerment in a system of whiteness leaves students insecure in their academic abilities, unsure of their sense of belonging in academia, emotionally battered by racial insensitivity, and feeling impotent to address these issues. Thus, students engage in self-censorship, assimilation to whiteness-centered academic program norms, and abandonment of scholarly pursuits of interest and use to communities of color (Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011). Whiteness in psychology often leaves students of color feeling isolated and treated unjustly.

My colleagues and I are intimate with the types of experiences that the empirical research on students of color elucidates. One day during my third year in graduate school, I had an African American female, let’s call her “Natasha,” start crying when I asked her how she was feeling. She told me, “I don’t feel like I belong here. These students say some of the most offensive, racist shit and the professors agree with them. Then when I speak up and call them out, I’m told that I should respect everyone’s opinion. It feels like they don’t want me to succeed.” Listening to Natasha, who was a first year student, I remembered my own experience of feeling racially assaulted in academic and clinical training settings. I felt her pain and the confusion that accompanied it. Boiling with empathy, I said “it’s because they don’t want you here.” Natasha looked at me with an expression of astonishment. “Look around,” I continued, “how many professors of color do you see here? Don’t you know that when they created the first programs in psychology, you and I were not the students they had in mind? We were not meant to be here. But we are. And it is up to you to make sure that you stay here, against all odds. The world needs your brilliance. The world needs your intelligence and the perspective that only you can offer. So cry, get mad, but use that to push you forward, to the top.” While, I admit that I might have been emotional when I responded to my friend, the overall message was one of resilience. Scholarly research on the history of psychology support my statement and illuminates the struggles of people of color who were the pioneers in graduate education in psychology (Guthrie, 2004). It has often been the case that in a system of whiteness students of color have had to generate their own power from within and use adversity to propel them forward. It is an uneasy and unjust position to be in but unfortunately, often, the reality. Resilience is the cornerstone of the foundation that students of color must build upon when facing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

Multicultural sensitivity and diversity are popular topics in psychology training programs. While the American Psychological Association and many APA-accredited schools and internship training programs tout diversity on paper, many students of color find there to be little in reality. I often heard at clinical training sites that “there are several different forms of diversity and too often people get hung up on race.” This is a true statement, of course. However, the tone with which it was often spoken and the number of times that it was mentioned whenever someone mentioned diversity or race highlighted an unsettling thought for me. Was this comment an excuse to not discuss race? Was this comment their get-out-of-the-race-question-free-card? In my experience, discussions about race and ethnicity were rarely undertaken in any sustained or formal manner. At one site, there was only one formal discussion of race throughout the whole year. Particularly egregious about that discussion was that an African American psychologist who was unaffiliated with the organization was engaged to conduct it. This was troubling because one of the only two times a psychologist of color presented a didactic was when the topic involved race and ethnic diversity. That psychologist was recruited for this one time only event. An implicit message is that the only topic people of color are qualified to discuss is race. And as evidence of the lack of diversity in the organization, it had to reach beyond its walls to find a qualified speaker on the topic. Furthermore, race and ethnicity was boiled down to one presentation and not discussed in any formal manner during the rest of the year. In addition, the focus of that site’s approach race and ethnicity was limited to African Americans. I am not opposed to people of color’s unique and similar experiences as human beings being highlighted in the study of psychology. It should be a foundational component of psychology education. It is the manner in which the spotlight is shined on people of color that is troublesome. People of color are often discussed in psychology as if they are outside of society and in some cases, outside of the species. People of color are presumed to diverge from the default of whiteness and thus are the special cases. They are often examined and presented in a consumable manner to onlookers who, with scientific and objective perspectives, try to understand them. If people of color are the special cases, then who are the people to whom their exotification is being explained? Who does this type of racial and ethnic diversity training serve and whom does it not serve? Furthermore, white people and their race and ethnicities are rarely included in conversations about race and ethnicity. Their racial and ethnic heritages are erased by whiteness and they are placed outside of the paradigm into a separate and implicitly elevated position. Thus, reinforcing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

“Diversity is more than race” seemed to be code for “let’s not talk about race.” This silence around race often seemed to come up in case presentations. I have often found myself as one of the only psychological trainees of color in organizations that served predominately people of color. Many of my white peers often presented clients of color in similar ways: “she’s so angry;” “he won’t talk to me.” However, many never questioned how their race might be influencing the client’s behavior or their conceptualization of and approach to the client. Or if they did so, it was with a “yeah, but” dismissive quality. Many of my white counterparts have tried to wish away race. During one group supervision session one colleague commented that the only way to decrease racism and fully incorporate men of color into society was to stop treating them with “kid gloves.” I was unsettled by this colleague’s statement and either the sheer ignorance or blatant racism that it demonstrated. I could not help but respond. I commented that men of color most often experience the exact opposite of what she was suggesting and that in fact they are treated with iron fists. “Men of color,” I said, “are often subjected to punishment for behaviors that their white counterparts are not and are punished harsher than their white counterparts when they do commit crimes.” This colleague responded with an expression of discomfort that proved she had no real understanding of the experience of people of color and yet all she wanted was to “help” these young men who came from unfortunate circumstances. While I don’t think this particular colleague had malevolent intentions, inequality and injustice often stem from the blind spots of well meaning people. Students of color in psychology programs often experience a barrage of microaggressions and blatant ignorance that assault their racial and ethnic identities and, sometimes, their humanity.

The Scholarly and Pedagogical Centering of Whiteness in Psychology

Researchers have found that the majority of participants in research studies are citizens of western, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations and most of them are highly educated (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Thus, the knowledge about the psychological experiences is incredibly first-world and neglects the experiences of the majority of people on earth who do not inhabit such WEIRD spaces. Even within these WEIRD spaces, whiteness further constricts psychological knowledge. As in a previous section of this essay, many of the titles of published research papers purport to describe universal psychological phenomena but in actuality only present a white-centered description of it, as most psychological study samples are predominately composed of white people.

Three recent critical reviews of the racial composition of participants of studies published in scholarly psychology journals provide statistical information about the centering of whiteness in psychological research. In 2005, researchers found that among all the studies published in the top three counseling psychology journals from 1990 to 1999, 57% of them reported the races or ethnicities of their samples (Delgado-Romero, Galvan, Maschino, & Rowland, 2005). This means that 43% of the studies failed to present data about race or ethnicity and implied that either 1) race and ethnicity is not important enough to report or 2) that the sample was homogenous in its whiteness. Furthermore, the authors of this study found that when race was reported, it was often in relation to whiteness. For example, many studies referred to their participants’ race as “white” or “other.” Again, this sets whiteness and white people as the default stand-in for humanity and people of color as deviations from the norm. Among studies that did report specific racial and ethnic characteristics, overall samples were composed of 78.2% white people, 5.8% Asian Americans, 6.7% African Americans, 6.6% Latino/as, 0.9% Indigenous people, and 0.1% multiracial people (Delgado-Romero et al., 2005). Compared to the overall population of the United States, whites and Asian Americans were overrepresented and African Americans, Latino/as, and Indigenous people were underrepresented in counseling psychology research. In an analysis of the races and ethnicities of participants in studies that were published in the top six American Psychological Association journals in 2007, authors found that 60-82% of them were white (Arnett, 2008). Furthermore, 7-60% of the studies published in these journals did not report the racial and ethnic composition of their samples (Arnett, 2008). An examination of the race and ethnicity reporting in four social science/psychology journals focused specifically on ethnic and racial minorities found much more inclusion of people of color. Specifically, of participants of studies published in these journals from 1990 to 2007, 38.7% identified as Latino/a, 22.5% identified as Black, 17.8% identified as white, 9.0% identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.6% identified as Indigenous, 0.4% identified as multiracial/biracial; 8.3% were categorized as “nonrespondent” (i.e., the study did not provide information), and 1.7% were categorized as “other” (i.e., individuals did not identify as any of the listed classifications) (Shelton, Delgado-Romero, & Wells, 2009). It seems that people of color are only included in the psychological literature when the topic of study is race or ethnicity. These three critical reviews provide empirical evidence of the frequent exclusion of people of color from the psychological imagination.

When race and ethnicity are included in research studies, these constructs are usually approached in three distinct ways. These include the universalist, culture assimilation, and culture accommodation approaches (Leong & Serafica, 2001). The universalist approach ignores race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are deemed unimportant and not worthy of incorporating in the empirical process. Research studies that use this approach do not even ask participants about race or consider how it may interact with or influence the manifestation or expression of the psychological phenomena under study. The culture assimilation approach relegates people of color to the margins and they are conceptualized as deviations from whiteness and white people. Studies that use this approach are usually comparative in nature; they assess the difference of the racial and ethnic groups on various psychological phenomena with white people positioned as the reference group. People of color are assessed based on whether or not they significantly differ from white people. Conclusions from these types of studies often focus on how people of color can or should adjust to become more assimilated with whiteness to better match the performance of white people in the psychological domains under study. The culture accommodation approach more fully considers the influence of the race and ethnicity (and how race and ethnicity influences the sociological context of people) on the expression of psychological phenomena. Studies that utilize this approach move beyond ignoring and comparing people of color to white people. They seek to understand how race and ethnicity influences how people define, experience, and make sense of psychological phenomena in a culturally specific manner. Beyond culture accommodation approaches, many psychologists of color have developed culture-specific schools of psychological thought. The advent of Asian American Psychology, Latino/a Psychology, Black Psychology, and African-centered Psychology illustrate a move away from an assimilationist stance to an indigenous focus. Specifically, these fields of study center the humanity of people of color and examine all psychological phenomena from a perspective that is inextricably tied to one’s cultural context.

The centering of whiteness is engrained in the academy and those seeking to de-center it often find it difficult. When scholars try to emancipate their scholarship from the confines of whiteness, they are often met with opposition from the gatekeepers of psychology (i.e. journal reviewers and editors, funding agencies, and colleagues). There is empirical evidence of academics of color facing barriers in their universities due to racial discrimination, both at the individual and structural levels. The devaluing of scholarship that does not privilege whiteness is a particularly troubling occurrence. A recent study found that it is hard for the research of scholars of color to be funded (Ginther et al., 2011). Ginther and her colleagues found that Asian Americans and Black applicants were less likely to receive investigator-initiated research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH; the largest governmental funder of scientific research in the United States) compared to their white counterparts. Even after statistically holding constant differences in the applicants’ educational backgrounds, countries of origin, training, previous research awards, publication records, and employer characteristics, Black scholars were still found to be at a disadvantaged in receiving funding from the NIH. If this disadvantage is found at the national level at an institution that has a long history of creating programs to increase diversity (Ginther et al. 2011), the racial disparity in research funding at other organizations (e.g. local, institution-based, or private) is likely to be greater. When scholars of color are able to conduct their research, either with or without funding, they often find that it is not deemed as scholarly legitimate or scientifically rigorous (Harley, 2008; Kameny et al., 2014; Stanley, 2007; Turner, Gonzalez, & Wood, 2008). There are many times when scholars of color find themselves at odds with journal reviewers when they attempt to publish scholarship outside of whiteness. Stanley (2007) wrote about the clash between counter and master narratives in the academy. She explains:

“A master narrative is a script that specifies and controls how some social processes are carried out. Furthermore, there is a master narrative operating in academia that often defines and limits what is valued as scholarship and who is entitled to create scholarship. This is problematic, because the dominant group in academia writes most research and, more often than not, they are White men. Members of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, have had little or no input into the shaping of this master narrative. Therefore, research on marginalized groups by members of marginalized groups that reveals experiences that counter master narratives is often compared against the White norm…” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14).

In contrast, counter narratives: “…act to deconstruct the master narratives, and they offer alternatives to the dominant discourse in educational research. They provide, for example, multiple and conflicting models of understanding social and cultural identities. They also challenge the dominant White and often predominantly male culture that is held to be normative and authoritative” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14). Researching and publishing the research of counter narratives that de-center whiteness and more fully embrace the diversity of humanity often requires assertiveness and perseverance. Presenting a non-pathological, non-comparative, and non-deficit representation of people of color in the scholarly literature is a revolutionary act.

One would think that in a field like psychology where so much lip service and written policy is focused on diversity this would not be the case. Research findings, which have been discussed throughout this essay, prove otherwise. Unfortunately, I have personally experienced the sting of gatekeepers who are invested in perpetuating master narratives. Recently a reviewer had this to say about a manuscript of mine that focused on an all Black sample of men who have sex with men (BMSM): “In this paper, the population of black gay men is treated almost as a universe unto itself…the author seems to make conclusions about how religious BMSM are without making explicit comparisons to white men who have sex with men or to other groups.” These particular remarks from this reviewer are indicative of an investment in the centering of whiteness. When the reviewer comments that I treat the population of BMSM as “a universe unto itself,” it implies that there is something inaccurate about or amiss with the notion that BMSM could possibly be of scholarly (maybe even human) value in and of themselves. He also suggested that I make a comparison between the Black men in my sample and white men and that no conclusions can be made about the religiosity of BMSM without such a comparison. His suggestion is indicative of the assimilationist approach that was explained by Leong & Serafica (2001). In other words, in his opinion, whiteness is the standard. Without whiteness to measure the experiences of people of color against, how can one know what is real? In his critique, this reviewer strips away the legitimacy, worth, and humanity of BMSM. In his imagination, BMSM cannot possibly exist in the absence of whiteness. The reviewer goes on to comment that the “…questions of how and why the relationship between religiosity and sexuality may be different among black men than among white men are indeed fascinating questions.” I question, “fascinating to whom?” Too often, researchers of all races whose scholarship focuses on people of color are subjugated to journal reviewers’ fascination with whiteness. Publishing and presenting research about people of color that is not pathology-focused or comparative, while not impossible, is challenging in mainstream scholarly outlets.

The Psychological Wage

Thus far the research reviewed in this essay has been persuasive in its accounting of the narrowing and repressive effects of whiteness for knowledge production and for the experiences of students and faculty of color in the field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to believe that whiteness in the psychological imagination only has implications for people of color or only for people who work and study in the field of psychology. Taking the widespread influence of whiteness into account, the remainder of this essay seeks to explore two questions. These two questions are related to the quotes that opened this essay. The first quote is taken from Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking work, Playing the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In that book, she undertakes the task of trying to understand the people who have crafted the image of whiteness (and blackness) that she sees abound in American literature. In her view, whiteness in American literature is parasitical, nourishing itself on the imagined oppositeness of blackness. Whiteness is made superior by the supposed inferiority of blackness. It is made great by the degradation of its counterparts. Whiteness has the same function in the psychological imagination. It penetrates the psyches of all people, regardless of race and ethnicity, with white supremacy. White people-whether or not they internalize this cultural domination, actively engage in racism or racial microaggressions, or exploit people of color for economic prosperity-benefit from the image of whiteness in the psychological imagination. However, what does the other side of the coin look like. In other words: “What are the benefits and costs of whiteness in the psychological imagination for white people?”

Whiteness in the psychological imagination offers white people purpose, power, and protection. It offers purpose by making white people’s mental health and lived experiences foundational. White people are constructed as prototypes whose psychological experiences are the starting point from which all other people’s experiences begin to be understood and the desired endpoint, which all other people must reach to be considered healthy or human. This purpose intersects with the power bestowed upon them.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination imparts an authority to and a preferencing of white people’s experiences. Even when the topic of study is pathology, white people’s pathology is still held as the standard for what deviations from “normative” behavior should look like. Therefore, even white people’s unhealthy behaviors are considered more desirable. No matter what they do, prosocial, asocial, or antisocial, it is still considered better. Therefore, there is no way for white people to ever be in any position but at the top of a constructed psychological hierarchy. Psychology has given white people power through its empirical support for the demonization, marginalization, and stigmatization of people of color. It is a shackle for people of color and a throne for white people.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination protects white people from grappling with how their embodiment of whiteness is cancerous. It does not require them to consider the lives of people of color and the deleterious effects of whiteness. Their survival is not dependent on such knowledge. The centering of white people’s experiences allows white people to be blind to the experiences of people of color. They can remain oblivious to, ignore, forget about, erase or render historical-and thus, make irrelevant-the exploitation, domination, and disenfranchisement of people of color. This privilege of ignorance perpetuates their focus on themselves and the marginalization of others. White people have the option to advance in a world delusionally believing there are no consequences for their actions.

The belief that whiteness does not scar the person who embraces it is erroneous and perverted. The costs of the psychological imbuement to whiteness of purpose, power, and protection are a sense of heightened threat/defensiveness, emptiness, and loneliness/disconnection. People at the top of a hierarchy need others to be placed beneath them. Otherwise, their status at the top is meaningless. A surplus of exploited and disenfranchised people is a necessity for whiteness to have any benefit. It is the exploited and disenfranchised people who white people measure their whiteness against. It is these people through whom they can work out their own self-image and put to work for their own financial, psychological, and social benefit. However, this positioning is tenuous and always will be, as human nature is not meant to be exploitatively hierarchal. Imbedded in whiteness is a zero-sum mentality that believes that if one person or group possesses a thing or trait the other person or group cannot also share that possession or trait. Thus, there is a heightened sense of threat that the benefits of whiteness can be taken away at any time. Defensiveness develops to guard those benefits. This defensiveness is seen in the backlash against psychological research that attempts to move away from white-centered discourses and racial comparative research to an indigenous paradigm that preferences narratives of people of color. It is seen in the psychological genocide that is carried out by whiteness in its centering of definitions and policies-in media, educational institutions, financial markets, health services, and governmental agencies-that are diametrically opposite and detrimental to peoples’ of color images and interests (Kambon, 1980). A constant sense of heightened threat and defensiveness-conscious, subconscious, or unconscious-keeps people at arms-length. People with such defensiveness find themselves living a life of paranoia and hypervigilance.

The sense of purpose that whiteness in the psychological imagination provides for white people is empty. It is inextricably tied to the meaning of their whiteness. However, the centrality of whiteness is a distorted mental machination. It is a superficial prize that inflates the ego with a fictitious substance. If a purpose and identity is built upon a distortion that sets it as opposite and superior to others, what happens when whiteness is discovered to be a fraud? Again Toni Morrison’s words come to mind. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1993 she spoke about the hollowness of race and its racist use. She stated,

“But if the racist white person-I don’t mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on-doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and it also has some sort of serviceability. But when you take it away, if I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? You still like yourself?”

White people who embrace whiteness are completely dependent on it and they are seldom aware of their addiction and delusion, and if aware constantly suppressing and denying it. In its attempted cooptation of humanity, whiteness renders white people inhuman. It transforms white people into an ideal of perfection. This ideal is unrealistic and hollow.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination deprives white people of a concept of themselves as interdependent members of a human family with many diverse members. Critical psychological elements of whiteness such as competitiveness, power-dominance drive, assertiveness-aggression, and anxiety avoidance pit them against their human brethren (Kambon, 1992, 1998). These values foster loneliness/disconnection. This is because, often, whiteness erases itself from the psyche of white people and replaces it with a universalism that centers their experiences as the only legitimate experiences. Therefore all they see are reflections or iterations of themselves. When confronted with people of color, they view these folks as people to be ignored, appropriated, or eliminated (Lorde, 1984) and not as human beings with whom to commune as equals. Whiteness in the psychological imagination alleges that people can survive on their own with rugged individualism and materialism, separated from the spiritual and psychological collective.

The second question, to be addressed in this section, is inspired by James Baldwin’s quote at the beginning of this essay. Baldwin’s quote highlights the reflective nature of definitions. The qualities and worth that one confers to someone else is of direct proportion to the qualities and worth one confers to her/himself. If one marginalizes another’s experience, in actuality she/he is forcing something of her/his own experience (own being) out of view and possibly out of consciousness. This is a detrimental thing because it creates fractional, unhealthy human beings that are narrowed and egotistic, cut off from themselves and others. It seems, to me, that this is only remedied when one values her/himself enough to recognize the humanity of another as just as inextricably tied to her/his own and just as significant. So my second question is, “How does one go about freeing her/himself from whiteness in the psychological imagination to live a more whole, integrated life?” While, I have posed this question, I will not answer it. Too often, people of color are as asked to provide the suggestions for how white people can begin to grapple with and overcome their whiteness. I refuse to do the work for people who are afflicted (willingly or otherwise) with whiteness. I will leave that work to them.

If white people knew who they were, they would not need to define themselves in relation to others. They would not feel a need to stifle the breath of others to suck in air. They would let go of their zero-sum mentality and realize that their survival is inextricably related to the survival of all of the colored peoples of the world. White people are a statistical minority. There is no way that they can survive through sheer whiteness alone. Whiteness is a delusion that has created a race of schizophrenics separated from themselves and others. But that is because so many white people do not recognize their inherent worth. Their ideas of supremacy are grounded in the machinations of their whiteness and separateness, not their humanness or connectedness. There is no need for this. If white people can let go of their whiteness, educate themselves-and not rely on or requests that others do so-commune without ulterior motives, they can begin to embody the fullness of humanity that is based in the reality of community and not the illusion of superiority and materialism. When white people can let go of whiteness, they will recognize themselves as human and not need to dehumanize others and co-opt people of color identities, land, and cultural creations to lionize themselves. White people are not dumb; they are not evil. Whiteness, however, is evil. It is an arrogant ignorance. It is a poison that must be rejected in the psychological imagination and in the minds of all people-those with white and melanized skin.

The centering of whiteness in psychology is not only a cancer to society but also a detriment to the field of study. It renders psychology fraudulent in its claims to understand the human psyche. As discussed before, the overwhelming body of psychological research marginalizes people of color who constitute the majority of the human species. Whiteness in the psychological imagination paints an erroneous picture of psychological phenomena, limits the psychological knowledge base, and stifles a more true understanding of the complex, multifaceted experience of the human.

References

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