The Unbearable Lightness of Whiteness

‘Whitelash’, ‘white privilege’, ‘white flight’, ‘white supremacy’, ‘white nationalism’, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People about Race — if there’s been a spectre haunting popular sociology, theory, and ‘progressive’ social commentary for the last five years, it’s been the spectre of whiteness. While critical race theorists had been turning their attention to the oft self-abscenting identity, ‘white’, for decades, arguments about whiteness have only recently crept into Western popular commentary – best-selling commentary, commentary by leading politicians and journalists – into all the spaces that had been vacated of any mention of what ‘whiteness’ is or has done. And then George Floyd was murdered.

As I write this, company after company, across industries, across the world, are jumping forward to acknowledge oversights, biases, and declare ‘it’s time to listen’. Actors and other stars are apologising and dropping projects; brands are changing their names; sports teams are abandoning their mascots; and statues are falling. In what seems like an eye-blink, the spectre of whiteness has made itself visible, and what had been a conversation on the fringes, or, when centralised, only ever in that location for a moment, has become the conversation.

The shift has not been without resistance. As whiteness has been foregrounded, an absurd and often painful process of acculturation has become more widely shared. Amongst people of colour, there’s a common moment in origin stories; that moment when, often during schooldays, usually without warning, one is made aware that one’s appearance makes them less. Or, perhaps not them specifically. That moment when one’s told I don’t mean you, but …  or you’re not like a regular [fill in the blank] person …  or is it true that … 

It’s a moment of great weight. For many it’s a weight that never lifts, that drags on and down from that point forward, that can be negotiated but never dropped. For those who migrate to countries where they become minoritised for the first time, that weight can arrive later, but still it arrives: on a bus, with a colleague, in the street, with a partner.

Louis Althusser called the moment of entering into discourse on other people’s terms ‘interpellation’. He described it as a hailing into the orbit of power, like when a police officer shouts ‘Hey you!’ — and you transmute from a citizen-subject into an object (174). You’re interpellated when the doctor or midwife says ‘It’s a boy/girl’ at birth; when someone questions why someone like you would be interested in doing something like that; when your teacher asks ‘What’s the female version of Negro?’ and tells you, in their role as a fount of knowledge, that the offspring of a ‘Negro’ and a ‘Negress’ is a ‘pickaninny’, obviously (Institute of Historical Research 18:10-18:24). For W E B Du Bois, though he didn’t use the same term, to be interpellated as black in the US was to be forever locked into ‘double consciousness’ – to see yourself, always, as others see you – as less – as well as to see yourself as yourself — with the negative perception steadily eating into your understanding of your own value.

Where the process of racialisation – that difficult encounter with interpellation, that feeling of great weight – was once reserved solely for those coded ‘minority’ (read, in the Anglosphere: non-white), it seems now like an experience that’s spreading beyond. Where whiteness has historically been borne lightly, and felt not like an identity at all, but more like a norm from which all other identities diverged, white people are now themselves being interpellated as ‘white’ – through social media, through protest – called out, challenged, forced to confront what had hitherto been taken for granted.

Much of Robin DiAngelo’s now famous White Fragility describes this experience — the resistance, anger, and shame of being assigned a race and its attendant expectations on others’ terms. The process is of course different when you’re forcefully pulled into a scheme of associations by those who have less power than you do, not least because you can effectively reject and lash out; but it seems, still, that the initial confrontation can trigger the same sudden feelings of being distorted, of ‘that’s not me’, well-known to those forced into other identities.

Following the lead of Wasafiri 94, which featured a special section on ‘Windrush Women’, this issue includes several commissioned pieces exploring a single theme. In this case, ‘Writing Whiteness’. Where critical theories of race and racial identity can be sinuous, questioning, and complicating, the movement of arguments and theories about whiteness into the broader public sphere of short takes, quick tweets, and below-the-line commentary can often be painfully simplifying — at worst a presentation of irreconcilable racial blocs that always have been and will be.

In contrast, this issue pursues, in fact invites, complexity. With pieces by Kayo Chingonyi on the insights available through Clare Pollard’s stark depictions of racism in her poetry, by Monique Roffey on Caribbean white identity, and by Emma Parker on colonial-era memoir, placed alongside a reflection on Bruce Nauman’s blackface-recalling body painting by Levi Prombaum, and Claire Hynes’s essay on reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a black woman, this issue grew from invitations to – and offers from – writers to reflect on racial coding, racist discourse, and all things to do with writing (and re-writing) whiteness.

These pieces by no means agree. In fact, between them it’s easy to detect sites of significant friction. To us, that seems appropriate. We are still finding the words to talk about race; and thoughts on whiteness are far from settled. What matters most to us is that nothing here takes a simple or simplifying stance — and all pieces, individually and collectively, engage with the weight on both sides of the white/non-white conceptual divide.

What’s been most surprising in assembling this issue has been the way these pieces have spun and reoriented how we read everything else featured here which wasn’t commissioned on the theme. How do we, for instance, think through Alex Wheatle’s experience of the care system and his reggae-inspired aesthetics with Emma Parker and Claire Hynes’s thoughts on taken-for-granted ideas of race and empire? Does Cathy Park Hong’s work on Asian-Americanness supplement or overthrow Levi Prombaum’s argument about the indexical function of Bruce Nauman’s black body-painting? How do we read Naneh V Hovihannisyan’s memoir-extract on growing up behind the Iron Curtain in the context of whiteness, or Lijia Zhang’s short story, set wholly in a China, about a character who worries about the fact that ‘toasted by too much sun over the summer, her skin was almost as dark as the black eel’? How can and should we read Laure Baudot’s tragicomic short story about two young white girls waiting in an abortion clinic who are paralleled by two black girls, sitting across from them, ‘cut[ting] their eyes’?

This issue also includes work from the three winners of the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize – Ruby D Jones, Alicia Mietus, and Desirée Seebaran – all of which circle ideas of centrality and peripherality, belonging and non-belonging, and the fight to define one’s self on one’s own terms against the pain of interpellation — that only advance the considerations of the other pieces.

When this issue arrives to you we will almost certainly still be in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, with arguments about race and racism still raging. The virus, at its start, had been regularly framed as a great leveller, that wouldn’t discriminate, and after which everything would change. Now, in the centre of it, only some of that seems like it might be the case. Nonetheless, and undeniably, it has created an opening — a rupture through which we’ve had the opportunity to reassess ourselves. What comes as a result of those reassessments, and the extent to which they will shift any real weight, remains to be discovered.

To find further content related to the theme ‘Writing Whiteness’ see our aligned series on Wasafiri.org.