Liminal relationalities: on collaborative writing with/in and against race in the study of early childhood

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Table

We	Shaddai	Simon	Liminal – becoming and beyond
Although the exact moment that we decided to write together is unclear, we can trace the seeds of our relationship back to a conference in 2019, where we both shared our personal histories on the role of men in early years. Days later, Simon wrote an email to the organiser, copying Shaddai in with a line in bold text: I was really glad to hear the minister's endorsement and … Author 1's inputs – in particular around the concept of gender flexibility. The original motivations for Simon’s reaching out like this are unresolvable. We entertain a generous perspective about it. Networking was present for us both, and it has not dissolved or expanded, but entered a “more than” state. The unsettling point remains though that the possibility of such appropriations always stand to benefit those with the most social capital – invariably the White man.	I wonder why Simon felt the need to write this line in bold text. I am pleased that something I said seems to have resonated. Indeed, it was clear from our first meeting that we were on a similar page and journey… something sparked in my first impressions … something had an affect. Reflecting on Simon’s reflection (right), I am conscious that I was also in an opportunistic networking mode when we met. I was “Critical Early Years”Shaddai, on show as a keynote speaker keen to present myself as a friendly outgoing academic. Outside of this self, I rarely seek centre-stage. We speak about first impressions and consider Jung’s introvert/extrovert dynamics, which carries some utility for revealing aspects of our individual personalities. However, I struggle with the overall reasoning of Jungian thought. How the notion of a primordial “collective unconscious” tethers our identities to already-known and antiquated archetypes (Braidotti, 2002). I refuse to determine myself in such a way. Simon’s reflections on tokenism were not present for me at the time. Being one of few visibly non-white men in a space predominately constituted by white women is more often the norm rather than the exception. I am a “space invader” (Puwar, 2004). Nevertheless, I share with Simon that it feels vulnerable to hear this now – I wonder if we are sidling the limits of our friendship here due the vulnerability I have felt. Yet I wish to stay with this trouble (Haraway, 2016), something keeps me here…	I don’t find it easy to cast back in time. As I hear Shaddai's recollection of my bold email text now, though, I have to wonder: was this simply a tokenistic pushing of allyship? Why didn’t I elucidate what I had appreciated? (Instead my email – copying various others in – goes on to foreground my own concerns about Scotland’s policy direction – though brief conversations with Shaddai at the conference suggested confluence). It’s true that I network opportunistically – self-servingly perhaps – but I did have good reasons for being drawn towards Shaddai: another man working in early years with a strong critical/theoretical lens on its politics and more materially a Bristolian abroad, a city where I locate many warm memories and friendships. Shaddai struck me as thoughtful, smart and kind. At this stage, I don’t think anti-racist allyship – tokenistic or otherwise – had consciously entered my thinking. My focus was very much on gender, and finding “like-minded” folk who were critically engaged. To be nakedly curious though, I must allow the (troubling) possibility that I was subconsciously reaching for a token Black acquaintance in the early years space. I am not naïve about the “social capital” that alliances with men and women of colour represents in this moment, both for white individuals and white majority institutions.	What language do we use to hold the liminal? Questions suggest themselves… fragments… scratchings/markings… not my uncertainty, or your uncertainty, but our becoming… Hmmm… this section might best emerge in conversation and with poetic licence. How important are our beginnings? “Culture” suggests very… but do such linear narratives overplay the hand of (Westernised) sequencing, order, evolution and psychology? In race theory – who wins most from the notion of “origins”? (Akomolafe, 2017, p. 12). As we become, do our histories gain or lose significance…? (Later on, out of a duty of candour, we will interview each other about our “origin” stories, but in this moment they feel less alive than the here and now). We wonder… did masculinity bring us together…were we being ”bro-social”? What overlaps between patriarchy and Whiteness could obscure our research? Do we cut across equalities by amplifying our male voice? By bequeathing the written word? Yet we are also drawn to queer studies… and to questioning our affected masculinities. What does it take to become more-than ourselves? How do we come to notice not what happened but what else happened? Already, we are beginning to feel-out the boundaries of our identities, playing with the thresholds of ourselves…
A month later Simon travels to Glasgow to meet Shaddai for coffee. We pick up threads from our first meeting and speak with congruence and confluence about practical ways we might challenge the Scottish Government’s gender-essentialist push to “level up” the early years profession. Two months later Simon invites Shaddai to speak at a Play Festival he is organising. Then Covid hits, and the murder of George Floyd, and we find ourselves suddenly pulled in different directions. Four months pass. Simon connects Shaddai with a colleague also working on gender. Shaddai tells Simon he is increasingly being called on to speak on anti-racism in early years (“I'm pleased and also frustrated that it's taken this long to be recognised as a salient issue”). In turn Simon relays that he has convened some anti-racist educators & activists, and is “pondering what useful action research might look like in my nearly all-white nursery”. In the weeks that follow Simon shares a plan and eventually a finished essay he has written on “exploring whiteness and colonial legacies in young children’s play” and invites Shaddai to comment on the draft. Shaddai shares some of his writing on the affective experience of race in ELC. This begins a series of iterative encounters between us during which we start to uncover further shared perspectives as well as critical limitations and biases (primarily Simon’s). We each feel drawn in different ways to collaborate on a broader piece of writing on whiteness and early years. We take stock of the risks and vulnerabilities for each of us, but ultimately decide to progress.	I leave our catch-up in high spirits. We further disclose our individual histories and feel open enough to share our political motivations. We note that we are both committed toward social justice in the widest sense and drawn to the early years as vehicle for change. We end by again gesturing toward collaborative futures. Covid hits. Several months pass. Discussions on race and racism come to saturate both my personal and professional selves. The intensity of this forces me to consider the role of whiteness as it im-presses upon me, everywhere (Tembo, 2021). Out of the blue, one of my white friends “checks in” on me. I feel tired. Simon reached out to me at a time where the felt rawness of the preceding months seemed to have simmered down and the public conversation had shifted toward asking “What now? What next?” Questions were being levelled at white people about what they could meaningfully do to challenge racism in their everyday lives. (Non-performative) Allyship is rife (Ahmed, 2004). I was sceptical of Author 2’s use of “progressive” in relation to certain ELC pedagogies and all too aware of the good intentions of white people that can end up reproducing the very issues they seek to challenge. I read Ahmed’s (2004) paper which resonates heavily around the non-performativity of anti-racist claims. I have seen too many performative statements from so-called “progressive” nurseries over the past few months. I still feel tired. I could reject Simon’s offer. Noting my concerns above would be sufficient. I ask myself whether working with white people on anti-racism is ever a fruitful endeavour. Yet what would turning away from this kind of work achieve? Taken to its conclusion, I must believe that white people can never aid the effort toward anti-racism. I pause. I consider the racial fault lines I have built up for myself. How I have come to understand my own Blackness through a framework of knowing which is rooted in coloniality and the white gaze. How I have come to understand my race in the logics akin to a property interest (Harris, 1993; McKittrick, 2021; Osterweil, 2020). I desire liminality, errantry. Modes of knowing-otherwise (Glissant, 1997; Lapoujade, 2017).	When we meet again, I feel energised at the possibility of achieving something practical with Shaddai on gender. I leave Glasgow with a stronger sense of him as an activist as well as academic. Covid intervenes. When George Floyd is murdered – despite my previous career in human rights media – the footage triggers an unprecedented wave of grief and anger. Specifically: towards cynical politicians whose culture wars continue to feed such vile dehumanisations, keeping communities divided and segregated, them in power and their racist policies free from scrutiny. Sadly the conversations I co-initiate with several anti-racist activists in the hope of doing something practical within Scottish ELC soon run onto the rocks of the same culture wars and power struggles. I want to understand what is going on for the collective and refuse to take sides – but become embroiled (and clumsy) in the difficulties of speaking out as the sole white male. At the same time I have started an anti-racist reading group with some of my colleagues in the nursery where I work, and begun to undertake a small research project on how whiteness shows up in colonial traits which children may have inherited and/or be resisting. I begin to see children’s interactions and environment through a new lens, particularly shaped by Jones and Okun’s (2001) Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture. All this runs in parallel to and informs my emerging relationship with Shaddai. Frustrated by my fumbling in other spaces, I hesitate about stepping into collaboration. Yet I am learning so much from our exchanges. Shaddai challenges me, generously and clearly – but above this, he seems genuinely committed to forging something new in the relational sphere between “white” and Black writers/practitioners. I recognise that this is a luxury which not all Black colleagues feel they can afford. Yet I am drawn to stay on the journey with Shaddai and be as honest as I can be about my limitations.	We are weary, spent, digging into precious little reserves. There is no rich embodied memory of post-racial or pre-capitalist experience to embolden us. We must craft our own techniques for survival. Colonial thinking is the sea we have been born into, the fundamental element of our existence… and yet to quote George Floyd’s epitaph we cannot breathe here. We must push out, breathless, into something new… sinewy, tarnished, flailing… demanding – can our companions be trusted? Do we have a choice? Are we one and the same? …something about the shared weariness of antiracism… …something about how we turn to those we trust in moments of vulnerability… How do we write against the constraints of identity without, at the same, replicating the systems of knowledge that created identity in the first place? How do we move beyond critique towards creativity? How do we come to establish the criteria of who gets to speak on oppression? What happens when we don’t police the boundaries of thought? How do we get free of ourselves? What if we valued individuals beyond their corporeal representations? What if our individual selves are always-already more-than our corporeal representations? In this liminal space, we wrestle at the boundaries of our identities, eager to produce spacetimes beyond the limits of the known. We desire the process, not the stasis, inherent in relational identities.
We start to work together. Our “individual” subjectivities begin to unfold and shape-shift in the comments passed back and forth in various documents. We are starting to tune into and define the terms of our emergence as a collaborative unit. Here, liminality starts to surface and become an implicit focus of our engagement, of our “We”. Our questions become more enlivening than our answers. What matters? What are we able to stay silent about, for now, and what might that enable? How might we question, challenge, even relinquish certain reified aspects of our identities – as we co-construct a temporary anti-racist framework – yielding in ways that neither replicate toxic modes of colonial/racist relationality (Black serves white – e.g. Shaddai co-opted to Simon’s virtue signalling and accumulation of “cultural capital”) or merely inverts them (white serves Black – e.g. Shaddai pedestalled; whiteness in hiding)? We proceed, cautiously, each sensing that there is much at stake emotionally, reputationally, ontologically. It is a critical, tentative stepping stone on the way to our current collaboration. We search for intimations of the ground we share – specifically when it comes to our understanding and experiences of racialisation – and the tectonic fractures we straddle or are separated by. The tone, set by Shaddai's comments/questions of Simon's initial research proposal, is one of curiosity and openness, rather than judgement or defence. Key mutual thematic interests emerge such as: the possibility for the co-creation of new forms of knowledge; resistance to inherited categories; an abhorrence of tokenism; and the romanticisation and positivism both conversely associated with early childhood. The same common ground enables critical debates: about the value of consistency in terminology; the “progressive” claims of certain alternative pedagogies; and the limits of humanism. We round off these first exchanges more assured of the fruitfulness of our emerging voice-interplay within a sector whose early forays into anti-racist pedagogy have too often been reductive. Yet we are still far from naïve about the personal risks, particularly for Shaddai.	The sharing of Simon’s prototype research proposal on whiteness in ELC provides an entry point for us to develop the conversations we had started around broader anti-racist commitments. The theoretical nature of this writing excites me, for an emergent affinity is felt in the relation of our commitments towards thinking-otherwise, away from the stasis of critique in certain strands of scholarship on racism (Brown, 2021; McKittrick, 2021). Critique, as I have come to learn and have engaged in myself (Tembo, 2020b, 2020a), is both essential and indispensable for the project of challenging the various modalities of racism. Yet, I also recognize that it might (always) be insufficient. How many times, and in how many ways, do we have to say that “racism exists” and “it is bad” before (white) people decide to listen? With Simon, I feel relief in his desire, which exists and existed outside of my presence (though, is perhaps brought to the surface much more palpably through our intra-relation), to examine difference affirmatively, without overlooking the historically-present, unequal, distributions of power coded upon difference accorded by race. What begins to emerge, then, is an exercise in knowing and be(com)ing differently. Or perhaps an exercise in not knowing. Be(com)ing conscious of the potential of our racial identities to in-form unequal practices (of my voice being tokenised, of Simon’s being centered, or of us both to remain diminished by individualism) and still refusing to let these determine the terms of our relation. There is danger in not knowing the direction that this may take us. The force of our past habits and desires has a way of reterritorializing us back into the realm of the already-known. We have to keep trying, holding open the possibility of futures unthought (Grosz, 1999).	I am aware of the imbalance of power on my side in asking Shaddai to comment on my writing. In sharing my research proposal, I claim the initial voice and potentially the power to set the terms of discourse, debate and reference – on a White footing. Further: I have the power to ignore anything Shaddai might share or ask of me. I have access to the research setting which he does not, and – being “further on” in my career (conventionally speaking) – less to lose, for example, financially, my taking a professional mis-step. I also possess the many advantages of being white in discussing, even appropriating, anti-racism in an economy increasingly built on virtue signalling. (“White man bends over backwards to empathise with Black people’s problems”). Finally, I am, as I enter this collaboration, hyper-aware of these potential dynamics and I know I am capable, despite my best intentions, of centering myself with them. From the outset, Shaddai is gently persistent in resisting being framed as the Black foil for my “white man’s burden”. “I don’t represent Black people”, he insists, and more generously “You aren’t the enemy”. In his comments on my text, he is generous: asking open questions, sharing his reading, speaking with a sense of futurity which, ironically, allows us to stay with the tensions without rushing to answer, alleviate or absolve. For example: he challenges my (intentional, anti-colonial?) fluidity around terminology; while he, like me, seeks a post-racial society, certain precisions of racial identity still matter. At the same time, we begin to unpack these terms adventurously – speaking about “what feels important” rather than “what is”. I do not explicitly name my reservations about academic practice and its relations to colonial modes of thinking and relating. While I know that Shaddai is embarking on an academic career and working within academic conventions I trust in his underlying commitment to queering (or troubling) these, and feel confident that there is a space ahead of us – which we are now perhaps in the foothills of – where we might explore this more fully together.	Our official, carefully negotiated “we” has started to feel not less exacting, but less “bankable”, hard-edged and narratable – and more contingent with our liminality. Uncertainty is decreasingly confined to a footnote or the margins, and embraced as the life-force of our academic and personal relationship. Perhaps one day our footnotes will be where our “facts” go until they are ready to ease off their manacles. The until-now carefully held distinctions between We, Shaddai, Simon, and liminal feel more a sleight of hand. They are all in there, but less distinguishable, less… safe. And again, we wonder: do we define the terms of our engagement… or is our engagement defining these terms? Even so, we sense that while there is a liminality we can name and embrace there will always be a liminality that is still-always beyond us. Children’s expressions continue to discipline us in this. Can we avoid becoming comfortable or complacent in our new-found “voice”? Can we remain radically open to the insurgency of the material world as we move forwards in our research? To what extent do we risk recreating an intellectual melting pot (with echoes of Britain’s failed/racist projects of colour-blind multiculturalism)? Or “will we happen upon colours that we might not yet see?” (Akomolafe, 2017, p. 34).

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