Waiting for whiteness to un-suture: the prolonged mourning of black bodies

On May 14, about halfway into writing this contribution to this special issue on race and whiteness for the International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education (IJQSE), I caught the breaking news that an 18-year-old white supremacist male (whose name I refuse to dignify) had just murdered 10 Black people, in Buffalo, New York. Those Black precious souls woke up that morning and went shopping in a Tops supermarket, an everyday activity that so many of us do without having to think about at all. The killer, a white supremacist, was cold and calculating, intentional, willful, remorseless, and filled with hatred. He came outfitted in body armor with a semi-automatic rifle, a shotgun, and a hunting rifle. Make no mistake about it, he came to murder Black people, those who look like me. He also livestreamed the murders on Twitch with a helmet video camera. The memory of photographs taken by white people of lynched Black bodies came to mind. The weapon that he used to decimate Black lives had the N-word written on the barrel. We were informed that he underwent a process of “radicalization” through watching white supremacist xenophobic social media echo chambers. As I mourn deeply their horrific deaths, and the pain and sorrow of those family members and friends left to grieve, there is nothing about the terror of anti-Black racism that surprises me. I say this because Black life stands (and has stood) on the precipice of death in a country that is systemically anti-Black. More specifically, Black bodies endure (and have endured) both physical and social death. What happened in Buffalo, New York, is yet another moment of malicious anti-Blackness, another instance of being haunted by the reality that Black life in the US continues not to matter. So, it is with this persistent suffering, this sense of unrelenting Black disposability, that I critically rethink the meaning of “now.”

Why race and whiteness now? The emphasis upon “now” can be misread, placing under erasure, even if unintentionally, the historical longevity of race and whiteness as sites of governmentality, hegemony, and anti-Black violence. Indeed, within the context of the recalcitrant and seemingly never-ending deployment of the socially constructed category of race, and given the enduring and spurious racial Manichean divide that whiteness has both created and uses to legitimate its own “superiority,” the interrogative voice (Why race and whiteness now?) can function as a perk of white privilege. Regarding the insidious structuration of whiteness, forgetfulness can easily function as a form of willful ignorance; obfuscation and mystification can function as forms of attempted disarticulation from white racism’s past; and, bad faith can function as a form of self-deception, where the objective is to re-narrate whiteness as a site of “innocence,” “benevolence,” and “virtue.” Central and important to this special issue, however, is not to forget, but to recall. All the contributors in various ways articulate what is at stake within our twenty-first century context where whiteness continues to survive like a many-headed Hydra. The aim is to come to terms with the contemporary accretion of race and whiteness. I get it and we must do it. Yet, perhaps even as we challenge whiteness, lay bare its entrails, resist its seductive pull, interrogate its embodied habituation, and map its psychic opacity, it can withstand our efforts. Whiteness can suture itself from efficacious attack and from collapse. Even as we deploy critical discourses and praxes against whiteness, institutional and normative sedimentations of whiteness continue to constitute forces of interpellation.

After all, are we not beholden to the neoliberal (white?) values of scholarly productivity, intellectual entrepreneurship, conceptions of what it means to be an “expert,” striving to fulfill norms of “academic excellence,” job stability, tenure, commodification, and the white capitalist market? Are these phenomena completely divorced from the subtle and not so subtle institutional operations of whiteness, and do they not bespeak an investment in the tools, norms, and aims of whiteness? What does it mean to critique whiteness through the medium of playing by the rules of whiteness? Are we still not captives of white racist markets? Within the context of larger social movements, the editors of this special issue ask: “How is capital invading and re-colonizing race-based people’s movements?” The enduring influences and power of white, capitalist market logics remind me of how what we deem “radical” can still be held captive. It can feel like asking the police to give (to allow) permission for demonstrators to protest their violent and panoptic policing practices. There is something defeatist, perhaps even absurd, in the gesture.

To be Black within the context of the US (and within the global Black diaspora), the “now” of race and whiteness is always already durative in its performativity, where the overt and the subtle machinations of whiteness are steadfastly iterative, adaptive, and consumptive. There seems to be no exit from the cruelties of whiteness. Hence, the weight that I personally endure because of anti-Black racism requires that I strive (even as I fail) to avoid any asterisk, any omission of truth, of fact, of material reality, as I contest the toxicity that is whiteness. Parrhesia or courageous speech is necessary. Courageous speech is both an ethical demand and an existential necessity. For me, within the lived space of anti-Black terror, and the sense of daring to speak the truth, there is a wake consciousness that exists. As Christina Sharpe (2016) writes, “Theorizing wake work …requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness” (p. 33). Wake work, as I am using it here, critically tarries with the historical longevity of whiteness/anti-Black racism. After all, embodied as Black, especially within the US, race and whiteness have always signified the urgency and temporal specificity of now, one continuous and recursive dynamic of white brutality, white microaggressions, white epistemic violence, white bloodlust, white gratuitous violence, and white libidinal entanglement and parasitism vis-à-vis the Black body.

There is a profound haunting of abjection that weighs upon Black embodiment, there is the unrelenting reality of pain, suffering, and lamentation that belies the construal of Black misery as sporadic and irregular. Think here of the killing of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin who placed the full weight of his knee on Floyd’s neck for over 9 min. Think here of Eric Garner who screamed 11 times (“I can’t breathe!”) after being put in an illegal chokehold by white police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Garner apparently lost consciousness and was pronounced dead—permanently—at the hospital. Think here of the deadly shooting of Breonna Taylor after her privacy was disregarded through the deployment of a no-knock warrant. Think here of the history of the logics of white policing and Black bodies as targets. Think here of the demonization of the Black body, its hyper-sexualization, and its mythopoetic construction as “monstrous” and “bestial” through the white gaze/imaginary. Think here of lynched Black bodies, broken necks, castrated, and riddled with bullets. Think here of the terror of Jim Crow segregation and its enforcement of neighborhood covenants and redlining. Think here of Black codes that produced forms of neo-slavery that policed/disciplined Black bodies through arbitrary, racial/racist machinations of criminalization. Think here of Black social death and the dread and doom of plantation “life.” Think here of Black bodies displayed naked on auction blocks. They were sites of commodified flesh, measured, assessed, and sold; sites where white gazes surveilled my Black body, the bodies of my Black children, where white hands violated our corporeal integrity, where we were being taught how “to see” ourselves through the disgust of white scopophilia. Think here of molested enslaved Black women’s (and enslaved young Black girl’s) bodies, raped, and viciously violated. Think here of the monetization of the offspring; the legal mandate in 1662: partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”). The violence seems unending.

Through processes of anti-Black interpellation and brute and unconscionable white violence, we were forced into the bottom of slave ships, shackled, and confined. Eric Garner’s voice can be heard as we crossed the Atlantic—“I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” Dark and dank, cries, perhaps faint gasps, can be heard. After all, how does one breathe after being seized and confined to terrifyingly small carceral spaces, spaces where blood, feces, urine, and disease intermingle? On those ships, we were policed, our bodies defined by a white discursive regime that was governed by whiteness as the transcendental norm—a normative structure where whiteness is unraced, unmarked, the site of the human as such, and where Blackness is raced, marked, the site of the sub-person, the sub-human. Indeed, on this score, whiteness is structurally binary; it needs the Black body as ontologically ersatz to bolster its “superiority,” its “supreme” humanity. As a structural binary, whiteness is also structurally hierarchical and hegemonic. Whiteness produces a fiction, a myth, a lie about Black “inferiority” through its mythical self-construction as “superior.” In short, whiteness is a lie that is predicated upon a lie. Whiteness creates its own racialized phantoms (for example, the Black male “brute,” “thug,” “criminal”), externalizes them, and performs as if such phantoms are “real.” Indeed, white people, historically, have created an entire repertoire of affective and embodied responses (racial fear, disgust, trepidation, walking on the other side of the street when seeing a Black person approaching them, white women pulling on their purses on elevators with Black men). In this case, whiteness is enclosed, sutured within its make-believe world, a deadly one for Black people.

Think of this projective process (etymologically, to throw forth) in terms of vomiting. The metaphor used is meant to evoke disgust. Whiteness vomits its putrefied myths onto Black bodies and then complains about the smell of those Black bodies, while conveniently forgetting that it is their white vomit. While the vomit is denied, whites also consume, as it were, the vomit as fodder for the perpetuation and reinforcement of the myth of white “goodness,” “cleanliness.” Joel Kovel (1984) conceptualizes this reality with respect to dirt. He writes, “The fantasy of dirt and purification is the central theme of white racism from a subjective standpoint. It is a quintessential fantasy of Otherness—for the black body from which the white ego flees is [their] own body, lost in the Cartesian split of the cogito, and projected into the dark Otherness of the black” (p. xlv). This psychical dynamic resonates with James Baldwin’s (1962/1995) theorization of the Black body as functioning in the world of whiteness “as a fixed star” (p. 8). Baldwin’s insightful metaphor powerfully communicates the dependency of whiteness upon processes of racially stereotyped and discursively caricatured and dehumanized Black people. This vicious process is at the very core of white coloniality with its white philosophical anthropology and its white axiological logics. As Albert Memmi (1999) writes, “Once a value has been assigned, the coherence of the consequences emerges, and it is apparent that the noxious and inflammatory difference, overwhelming the victim and flattering his accuser, must be made absolute” (p. 174). It is through this process of being made absolute that Memmi insightfully argues, “We go from biology to ethics, from ethics to politics, from politics to metaphysics” (p. 174). On this score, the Black body as a problem body is ontological. White people have problems, but Black people are problems. The ontological emphasis attempts to deceptively extricate the problems that Black people experience from the realm of sociogenesis. By doing so, the aim is to consign Black people to the realm of the “subhuman,” to conceptualize Black people in terms of a (deprecatory) metaphysical essence, as it were, that precedes their social existence and the ways in which whiteness oppresses and traumatizes them. This is how whiteness operates; it obfuscates its sociohistorical origins, and repositions itself as “ahistorical,” or even reads itself back into history as an inevitable and “natural” teleological unfolding. By doing so, whiteness attempts to conceal its contingency and its explicit and implicit maintenance of anti-Blackness. My point here has implications for critical whiteness studies, one that avoids its slippage into insular white concerns and sidestepping the dialectic structure of whiteness as anti-Blackness. Similarly, in this special issue, Cheryl E. Matias specifically reminds readers that critical whiteness studies as a field should not simply concern itself with whiteness, but should focus on whiteness’s relationally hegemonic violent impact on Black bodies.

The more that I attempt to trace the political, psychic, and phenomenological implications of whiteness, the more that I am convinced of the importance that white people must be prepared to die of whiteness as an identity. Baldwin (1962/1995) understood this position where he writes, “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity” (p. 8). I understand this process of loss as the relinquishment of safety. It is a process that will require what I call white un-suturing, which is a process of being vulnerable, of being open to being wounded, especially as un-suturing involves being open to being touched and moved, in this case, by Black people, by those who carry the weight of the toxicity of whiteness. Un-suturing also involves white people actively undoing the supportive white sutures (institutions, assumptions, affects, ideologies, myths, modes of perception, forms of embodied comportment, privileges, historical meta-narrative fictions) that maintain their sense of normativity, their sense that all is fine, that they are simply persons free from oppressing others. That is the hard part—catching a glimpse of how one’s existence as white (simply that) is what needs to dehisce or burst open, break apart, dismantle, crumble. It is a frightening process, because it means letting go of what you are and have been. More frightening is seeing yourself as you are (Baldwin, 1962/1995, p. 9), beyond the veneer of “innocence.” It is so easy to suture. It can be as easy as shoring up one’s white antiracism.

Years ago, I recall being interviewed for a philosophy position at an R1 research university. One of the white philosophy professors “interviewed” me for an hour. I thought that we would discuss my philosophical aims for the future, my extensive publication record, my pedagogy. Well, he spent the entire hour explaining to me how he once courageously fought another white man who was being racist. My time was wasted. He apparently thought that he had something “to prove” to me, that he was different, “knowledgeable” and “fearless” in his white heroics. I was unimpressed, and unhappy that I had to sit through his white confession. Even if what he said was true, the attempt to convince me of his white “goodness” backfired: he remained sutured, both in his daring display of white self-righteousness, and in the fact that he was still white in a systemically white privileged US polity where my existence in Black is valued on the cheap. He is complicit with that system; he is the privileged white male academic who used his privilege, his sense of “white exceptionality,” to bring attention to an identity that failed to un-suture, failed to see itself as it is.

At the core of my pedagogy, which is another significant theme engaged within this special issue, I encourage my white students, especially as I teach at a predominantly white institution, to tarry within a space of “danger” in the form of rethinking their white identities. I attempt to generate a specific form of affective and ethical gravitas within the classroom space. Theory is deployed, but it to can also operate as a site of suturing. As one white male student said to me after we had been reading about and discussing the structure of whiteness: “We’ve been talking about this now for weeks, I think that we’ve got it.” The implication was to move on. As if critically engaging whiteness simply involved the mastery of a complex set of theoretical ideas to be regurgitated on a test. Relatedly, I recall two white male students proudly sharing with the class that they now understood that they possess white privilege. I said to them that to have white privilege negatively implicates those who don’t possess it. I then linked white privilege to processes of unfair gain, and unfair loss, and how these operate within a context where some are oppressors and others are oppressed. The two white students refused the broader implications; they vehemently resisted their positionality as oppressors. In both cases, my white students were looking for safety, a way out, a place where they could distance themselves from the process of facing the truth that their white identities as white are not atomized, but violently haptic (in relationship to Black people) within a white supremacist polity where whiteness is the transcendental norm, binary, hierarchical, and hegemonic. There are times when white students leave my classes in deep silence. It is in and through that silence where the real work is often being done. Tarrying is not meant to be a place of tranquility; it is meant to generate a powerful sense of ethical aporia. The desire to flee, but to remain still in the disquiet of the moment, the unnerving realization that who and what they are—white—has devastating ethical and existential implications for those who are not, especially those who are Black. Tarrying is to remain with the devasting reality that their white humanity, which functions as a tautology, is structurally and phenomenologically underwritten by Back inhumanity.

I desire that my white students help to carry the burden of anti-Black white racism. Tarrying is one way, which is never, by the way, meant to be a form of navel-gazing. My Black students know the score; they carry the weight of anti-Black racism and will do so until their dying days. They know that their white classmates get to decide whether they will take their whiteness seriously, that is, as a structure of violence. My Black students understand what it means to have skin, their Black skin, in the game; they know the history of having Black flesh flayed at the “barbeque” (the actual term used by white people, not by me). I know that many of my white students will forget our critically engaging discussions regarding their whiteness. I know that many will leave at the end of the semester with a feeling of being chastised, and perhaps feeling a problematic sense of moral redemption. Some will leave with a gallant sense of white radicality—white heroes of Black people. I get it. The classroom is limited in time and space. The machinations of the white world will continue unabated, replete with processes of interpellation, hailing the identities of my former white students, solidifying, and securing their identities. White nation building will continue surreptitiously carrying out its power of governmentality. That is my pessimism. Perhaps, more accurately, that is my reality and the reality of Black life in the US.

One can hope, but are white people prepared to un-suture, to undergo processes of metanoia, to have their psychic lives and lived white modes of embodiment and white safety permanently arrested? To do so, we need “an insurrection at the level of [white] ontology” (Butler, 2004, p. 33), one that must be accompanied by an imperiled white self. That insurrectionist and imperiling ontology is a gift (if given by white people) that I would not refuse. As Baldwin (1962/1995) reminds us, “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself” (p. 85). As Black, I demand (we ought to demand) something more than “a simple entry of the excluded into an established [white] ontology” (Butler, 2004, p. 33). In the meantime, we (Black people) will continue to mourn as white people (you, white people!), “cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it” (Baldwin, 1962/1995, p. 9). Why race and whiteness now? This special issue courageously tells us why. That question for some of us, however, might already be too late. But, as Robin D. G. Kelley (Yancy & Kelly, 2022) notes, “There is no guarantee that we will win—whatever that means—but I guarantee that if we don’t fight, we lose.” In our collective effort to fight back, to resist (etymologically, to take a stand), the editors point to the indispensability of “interdisciplinary antiracist alliance-oriented work informed by revitalized criticality and reflexivity.” That is a powerful place to begin.