Looking as white: anti-racism apps, appearance and racialized embodiment

ABSTRACT

Smartphone apps for anti-racism education and intervention are being developed by organisations in various countries. The ubiquity of smartphone use and app methodology, as Grant argues, have the potential to disrupt racial knowledges and facilitate anti-racist action. I use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘zones of appearance and non-appearance’ and Derek Hook’s discussion of ‘racialising embodiment’ to discuss the potential of one such app, Everyday Racism, to challenge and disrupt white supremacy. The Australian-based app uses gamification to encourage users to participate in ‘bystander anti-racism’. However, by failing to question the neutrality of the default white bystander, the app risks reproducing hegemonic constellations of white agency versus racialized inaction. I argue that, in the zone of appearance, it is not enough to make racism apparent. It is necessary to appear. To appear first requires exposing nonappearance including the role even of the well-intentioned in maintaining it.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• appearance
• embodiment
• antiracism apps
• everyday racism
• looking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Son of Baldwin Facebook Page. 15 August 2017.https://www.facebook.com/sonofbaldwinfb/?hc_ref=ARQFRN0oGM1ut_Rzu5HD5JVVXIMK1vcT4cXC0XGsmnwNHJifElp8rEQ1ZtlTzbCJppU&fref=nf. Accessed 17 August 2017.

2. Welcome to Country app. http://welcometocountry.mobi. Accessed 8 September 2017.

3. ‘Copwatch’ app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cop-watch-video-recorder/id757572626?mt=8. ‘Copblock’ app: https://www.copblock.org/apps/. ACLU ‘Stop and Frisk’ app. https://www.aclu.org/blog/mass-incarceration/stop-and-frisk-watch-keep-tabs-nypd-your-smart-phone. Accessed 8 September 2017.

4. LICRA Twitter account. https://twitter.com/_licra_/status/868123586518757376?lang=en. Accessed 7 September 2017.

5. Français de souche website. http://www.fdesouche.com/856259-un-festival-avec-des-espaces-interdits-aux-blancs-organise-cet-ete#. Accessed 7 September 2017.

6. Altogether Now website. http://alltogethernow.org.au/app-for-children/ Accessed 7 September 2017.

7. The simple binary of agentic neutral/white versus agency-less racialized is problematised of course in the Challenging Racism bystander anti-racism videos because the racist perpetrators are always portrayed as being of diverse ethnicities. I am also mindful of Weheliye’s important criticism of agency and resistance as necessary markers of freedom whose Eurocentric frame blind us ‘to the manifold occurrences of freedom in zones of indistinction’ (Weheliye 2014, 2). He asks what freedoms we would be alert to if resistance and agency were not the main lens through which we adjudicate whether groups or individuals are involved in acts, however small, of liberation. He echoes the 1974 Black feminist Combahee River Statement which reminded, ‘if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression’ (Combahee River Collective 1974). In other words, the direction of flow is from the bottom up rather than, as suggested by ‘Everyday Racism’ from top-down.