Week 10 Response
The great unanswered question for me from the class is the one that was raised in our conversation about Citizen and White Rage. Throughout our discussions (even the discussions themselves) have been deeply concerned with the Foucauldian notion that the power of whiteness is operating everywhere in American life. Insidious and pervasive, white supremacy has wheedled its ways into our thoughts and speech, into our self-conceptions and our plans. It is like a tumor with long tendrils or a virus that has sickened us cell by cell. As Rankine herself said (I paraphrase) "it's killing you guys too (--->and so, all of us then) you dumb motherfuckers." Citizen is concerned with the ways in which whiteness operates everywhere. The horror of Citizen is it's notion that whiteness is a silent, horribly engrained sickness. Often, its host are unaware of its symptoms. It is nonetheless strangling the hosts themselves and black life indiscriminately and inexorably. Many of the discussions we have had in class (and again, indeed the mode in which we have the discussions themselves) have seemed to me to be efforts to grapple with whiteness and its operation everywhere. As a white person, the moral call that Citizen implicitly makes is to engage in an all out battle with whiteness and white supremacy in all of its hiding places in one's own literal neurophysiology. Citizen is not necessarily optimistic as to the possibility of success in this effort, but what white person, after reading that book could not see that they are possibly participating, potentially unconsciously, in forming the prison of comments, cluelessness, and failure of seeing that Rankine so vividly describes. What thinking white person would not want to commit themselves to rooting out whatever sick part of themselves is operative in those moments so that they may stop participating? I know that this is a worthy endeavor, but I wonder if the singleminded pursuit of this goal is ultimately self-involved one. Because there is another fight going on, the desperate and difficult one of white backlash against any progress for black Americans that Carol Anderson describes in White Rage. I don't know if this is true, but I suspect that the emphasis on rendering oneself un-sick might be time taken away from time spent foot-soldiering in the fight against white supremacy in the courts and on the doors. Of course, both can be done at the same time. But I think it is important to be watchful of the driving force behind trying to rid oneself of white supremacy, which is potentially a selfish (and foolish) hope that one can escape guilt. And look fully in the face the difficulties (and potential reasons for avoidance, perhaps a fear of making a "mistake" that would betray how whiteness operates within you) of putting oneself at the service of black organizers doing the hard, boring work of fighting white supremacy in the legal and political sphere. As a white person, negotiating this balance between the project that Citizen demands of us and the project that White Rage demands of us is to me the biggest takeaway question from the class.
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